The Saboteurs

This is a six-part co-production of Norwegian, Danes and Brits, about the race to develop nuclear weapons in WWII.  The Germans have Werner Heisenberg, Nobel Prize winner for Chemistry in the early 1930s; the Danes have Niels Bohr; the Norwegians have a plucky Professor and the Brits have Anna Friel as one of those clipped gals who knew what was wanted to win a war, by golly.  What the Norwegians also had, and everyone wanted, was heavy water, which you need for a nuclear bomb, so the Nazis invaded Norway.

Does it bear any resemblance to history?  Who knows, beyond the intellectual heft of Heisenberg et al and the invasion.  It's gripping, though.  Think 'Foyle's War' with subtitles and more at stake than a missing ration book or some dodgy tractors.  Only a few of the major players knew the stakes were high, and even they weren't sure what they were creating.  Scary.

Wayward Pines

Wayward Pines is an adaptation of Blake Crouch's novel series 'Pines', and is produced by M Night Shyamalan, with Matt Dillon as the main character Ethan Burke.  It's what we'd class as 'good tosh' - pretty implausible all the way through, but with enough twists and turns to keep us interested.

In format it's a strange mix of Life on Mars (is he imagining it all?), Twin Peaks (strange town with quirky inhabitants), The Truman Show (he's constantly being monitored) and The Prisoner (each episode - so far - he's tried to escape).

Despite the author being an exec producer, there is lots online about the differences between the books and the TV show, and it also seems to turn into a very different sort of show once - spoiler alert - some new characters come to live in Wayward Pines in episode 3, and again in episode 5 where a completely new set of characters are introduced.  

One thing we feel though is that drama shows are now buying up books to adapt based on a high concept format - with this being the mix of LoM, Twin Peaks, Truman and Prisoner - and more coming in in episode 5.  As such it's a pretty flexible format & setting - a bit like Lost was - and we can see it running for several series, just by bringing in new story lines and characters.

Another book currently being adapted for TV, by Amazon, is Philip K Dick's The Man in The High Castle - about an alternate history of the US in the 1950s where the Axis powers won the second World War, with Japan in control of the Western states, and Germany in control of the East coast, with an independent federation of states in between.

Again, if you cover the original book's plot pretty quickly you have a flexible format to create lots of new stories & presumably the rights for these things aren't all that expensive compared to the potential profits from a long-running drama.

Humans

Joe Hawkins (Tom Goodman-Hill) buys a synth in a sale and calls her Anita (Gemma Chan).  Synths are synthetic humans, aka androids, who serve their employers in whatever way they wish.  Sounds great?  It goes without saying that things aren't quite what they seem.  A quick flashback to only a few weeks earlier reveals that 'Anita' was one of a handful of renegade synths who were led by human Leo (Colin Morgan) to freedom, before being recaptured.  These particular products were given 'singularity', i.e. consciousness.  Oops.  Joe's wife Laura (Katherine Parkinson, who won our sympathy in 'The Honourable Woman') is suspicious of the sleekly perfect new presence in their lives, whose responses are just a little too pat for her liking.  Meanwhile Dr. Millican (William Hurt) turns down super-synth Vera (Rebecca Front) in order to hang onto to a malfunctioning model he's possibly become fond of... or who just knows too much, while a policeman (Neil Maskell) is hunting that same older model for causing a disturbance, and a synthetic prostitute is developing very negative feelings indeed. 

So far (one of eight) it's familiar SF ground, well covered by classics like 'Blade Runner' and 'Terminator'... and not-quite-such-classics as 'I, Robot'.  Advance blurb described this as a cross between 'Black Mirror' and a treatise on the nature of consciousness, and that describes it pretty well.  It's good enough to cover the human interest angles well, though, and the story is building nicely.  If the inherent silliness of pretending that the currently impossible is reality deters you, then this probably isn't going to be your bag, but so far this is high-end SF nonsense.

Sunday nights on UK TV this summer are clearly all about jam: ITV serves it up cosily with the trials of the village WI amidst spitfires and sandbags; C4 brings a humanoid who can't stop telling you that your favourite flavour is apricot....

What's Wrong With Jonathan Creek - Spoilers

We've now had 28 episodes over 16 years, but to this reviewer (Dan) it seems like Jonathan Creek is several years away from when it was good.

The format is still good - the idea of a magician's assistant solving baffling crimes as 'howdunnits' rather than 'whodunnits' has lots going for it.

The casting is still good.  Alan Davies is really likeable, and the guests and cameos do a reliably good job.

The chemistry is still good - the interplay with Sheridan Smith is as fun as it was with Caroline Quentin.

The problem is, I think, with the puzzles.  It's probably human nature to reminisce about how much better old plots were, but in this case it's surely true.  The solutions to the older cases were just more elegant and rewarding, for example the (spoilers!) duplicate room in No Trace of Tracy (Series 1) or the church clock that was giving the time as am rather than pm in The Miracle of Crooked Lane (Series 3).  Oh - and that bit where Caroline Quentin showed us how you hack into phones at least ten years before Leveson.

You need to suspend disbelief a bit for Creek, but the most recent episode The Clue of the Savant's Thumb had so many TWNH moments that it just got frustrating.  (Again, Spoilers!)  For example we were expected to believe that someone could cut their own head off with a chainsaw that had been sabotaged, and then his son in law would move the body back to the house and construct a scarecrow in a locked room, to fool his wife (& then put the body in the freezer to preserve it)...  Plus there were so many red herrings (hands gripping through a picture, statue dropping from a great height) that it was natural to want the old Creek back.

I much prefer the British system of TV where one writer writes, but surely this is evidence that David Renwick has run out of ideas.  There must be lots of other writers (or magicians) who can think up puzzles to match those of the earlier series.  Get some of them in to devise the key elements, then hand over to Renwick to write the dialogue and fit it all together.  Make the shows 50 minutes again too - the longer length just leads to them being flabbier with more red herrings, surely.

Accused - spoilers!

This was the first episode in the second series of the 'Accused' strand.  We weren't too impressed by the first series: it was one of the reasons we started this site.  There were too many cases where characters did illogical things - the 'that would never happen' moments that we hate.

This was far better than most of the earlier episodes.  The story concerned Simon, a slightly wimpy teacher, who only really became himself when dressed as Tracie Tremarco.  As Tracie he met Tony, an outwardly geezerish bloke, who was a very repressed gay man.  Both of the leading actors were terrific - Sean Bean was brilliant as both the sharp-tongued Tracie and the English teacher Simon, and Stephen Graham was also very good as the slightly unsure Tony.  Sean Bean has to be up for a BAFTA for his role.  Not to denigrate his achievements in 'Sharpe' and 'Game of Thrones' to name but two, but this is such a departure from those characters and yet after a minute or two we were rooting for Simon/Tracie.  It's probably the best performance he's ever given.

However we did have a few issues with the story.

• Was it likely that Tracie would get dolled up to go out and sit in a confrontational boozer, given that there were gay clubs in the town?  If (s)he wanted to find a nominally straight man, wouldn't she be better off on the internet?

• Was it likely that Tony wouldn't recognise Tracie as Simon when they were in the same pub, given they'd slept together?  Albeit while drunk, as far as Simon was concerned.

• Was it possible that the judge would let Simon appear as Tracie in court (& who bought the new clothes?  The ones he'd been wearing when arrested would have been ruined.)

We don't know enough to comment on Tracy's 'gentleman caller' romantic life, but that seemed a bit TWNH too.

Overall though, we forgave these bits because the performances and the characters were so good.  

One final point about the format.  There are two similar single drama threads on the BBC, this and The Street.  This could probably have worked in both (and in fact Stephen Graham had been a reluctant boyfriend in The Street last year).  Let's hope that they don't give us stories that have a murder shoe-horned in, to make it into the 'Accused' slot.

Thirteen Steps Down

We'd like to say TWNH - that a disturbed young man would never become obsessed by JR Christie to the point where he believes himself haunted and kills a (rather rude) woman which bodes ill for the other object of his obsession, a young model.  We can't of-course pin a TWNH here, however absurd-sounding.  What's less likely is that a young man would have a Cliff Richard record waiting on his stereo, but madness provides any and every excuse on TV.

Ruth Rendell, queen of the 90s murder-mystery and psychodrama, has here penned another nasty and sordid tale of people on the margins who need help but get sex and murder instead.  The problem with adapting her novels into 100-minute teleplays is that she treads a fine line between a familiar world and a fantasy one, even before dead serial killers put in an appearance.  Her anti-hero is called Mix Cellini (Luke Treadaway) and he has a job fixing gym machines that allows him complete autonomy and sex with bored housewives.  He lives in a big, creepy old house with a waspish landlady (Geraldine James) who happens to have had a close brush with Christie in her youth.  Then there's his crush on a supermodel who happens to live nearby, and a girl who sleeps with him on a first date after he's spoken admiringly of a man who killed and then raped a series of women.  Not impossible, then, but unlikely taken altogether, and far more convincing with the time and care of good prose - a slow immersion in a fictional world rather than a hasty onscreen dunking.

So, will Mix kill Nerissa (Elarica Gallacher) before his landlady and her formidable friends (Gemma Jones and Anna Calder-Marshall) find out what he's up to?  It's watchable, but not one of Rendell's best.

White Heat

TV producers, and presumably viewers, have a longstanding preoccupation with the love lives of groups of friends, a la 'Cold Feet' and 'This Life'.  Seemingly we love to see people form deep friendships and betray each other.  'White Heat' takes this format and adds a 'Big Chill' opening (the death of one of the group) and a big dose of social history straight from 'Our Friends in the North'.


First episodes are often awkward, bearing the burden of introducing everyone and generally setting the scene.  The scene looks prop-perfect and the performances are as good as anyone would expect from a classy cast, which provides a gloss over the unsubtleties.  It's an ok ride so far, but a slow one, with only marginally engaging characters.  The six flatmates are very PC for 1965: gender balance; the men a gay Asian, a Caribbean, and a Northener; the women an arty blonde, a brainy brunette and a poor overweight Catholic.  There are three initial attractions pointing to pairings that will of-course rearrange over time.  And just in case you forget which time they're all in, there's plenty of television and radio reminding you of events, and a soundtrack almost as intrusive as that of 'Heartbeat'.  Nothing by The Who and no mention of an ailing Churchill, however, can detract from anachronisms like telling a girl to take out her aggression in the gym.  Boxing gym?  She'd be waiting a long time for a Fitness First.


Comparisons to 'Our Friends...' are inevitable, and not discouraged by the BBC, but this may prove to be a double-edged sword.