Two biggish new series for the main terrestrial channels started this week. I say biggish because lets face it, no-one really starts major series in the summer.
55 Degrees North is set in Newcastle and features a black night-detective who seems to be having a hard time from just about everyone except his family. Actually, I could have done with a little less of the family - I just wanted the main story to crack on. There seems to be quite a degree of murkiness in this Newcastle police force, which brings to mind a favourite series of mine, Between the Lines. In fact everyone is behaving improperly to one extent or another except our protagonist. We'll just have see how it develops.
Making Waves has been kicking around on ITV's shelves for a while it seems. I'm not quite sure why, as it's got to be better than that recent Ross Kemp nonsense, Line in the Sand (which itself was gathering dust at ITV network centre). This must have cost a few quid, and was obviously pitched as Soldier Soldier at sea. I never really watched Soldier Soldier, but I guess that all the soap elements are there alongside the action. Ah, the action. The big problem with this series is going to be giving HMS Sussex something meaningful to do. In this episode we had the usual new crew member to help introduce us - is there any other way to start a series? The action involved rescuing a couple of missing crewman who were stranded on board a rusty freighter with some Albanian refugees. No chance of the ship ending up in the Gulf then? I quite enjoyed it all, although subplots involving the engineer's assistant who was the father of a child with his bosses daughter were just a bit too much for me. The series has been filmed aboard a real Navy ship with full assistance, so I suspect that the scripts will have all been cleared in advance. It may have been the confines of the shooting environment, but I was disappointed with the quality of pictures which were very obviously originated on video cameras. It looked as though the technology used was similar to that used in Rockface and as a result there were too many "jaggies" along the straight lines (ship and sea etc) that made the thing look like it was a badly compressed mpeg. You can't beat film - not yet anyway (George Lucas take note). The special effects were a bit disappointing too. The sequence at the start involving a ship-to-ship transfer that went tragically wrong, looked to my eyes like a mirror image of one ship. And a sequence where the rusty trawler was nearly rammed by a freighter in a shipping lane was shot in very close up with no wide angle detailing what was supposedly going on (too expensive and dangerous for an ITV drama one suspects). Sadly, the resulting footage looked all too much like a camera panning along the side of a boat that was safely moored in dock, but cropped a bit.
Will I give either series another try? Probably.
Posted by adambowie at July 8, 2004 08:19 PM