Henry VIII was the big weekend TV event, and I'd love to say that I'd watched and enjoyed every minute of it, but that's not the case. Ray Winstone is a fine actor, but I'm just not sure.
A bit like Boadica a few weeks ago, the budget really does show on these things, and all sorts of devices are employed to hide the productions' limitations.
As always, I pay attention to the likes of Nancy Banks-Smith in The Guardian. Yes the co-production elements do show through - couldn't they re-edit it a little for British sensitivies? "When you remember the kind of film Granada used to make, you could weep."
A Very British UFO Hoax was not really all it should have been. Largely speaking it was going out at the wrong time, with kids who'd have loved it safely tucked up in bed and a few spurious "fucks" to signify it's being adult.
Effectively it's a slightly upmarket reworking of Scrapheap Challenge and those historical rebuild shows. A group of "experts" gather together to build a realistic looking UFO. In case we should ever forget that they worked on movies building miniatures and special effects, they sported a permament collection of James Bond crew T-shirts (although I wouldn't be seen dead in a Die Another Day shirt in case anyone thought I had something to do with the atrocious water-skiing CGI farce).
For something that was supposed to be kept secret, an awful lot of people got involved, and we had the usual "things going wrong" issues as the big day arrived. And there's another problem, the deadline is always a TV budget issue, not a real deadline. If you're trying to scare people in Avebury, you can do it any day of the week.
Come the big day, and they gather in some fields nearby with a chain of remote controllers ready to guide the balloon affair around. It didn't look entirely convincing if you ask me, and was nobody suspicious of the number of camcorder equipped people wandering around the vicinity and interviewing pub clientale after the event?
Footage duly appeared on Sky News and ITV News, although we didn't learn how it reached the TV channels. Did the producers place it, or did members of the public forward it themselves? We should have been told.
There weren't any real technical obsticles to overcome, as the thing was effectively a somewhat larger version of those hobby radio-controlled airships you can buy. Disappointing overall.
I've been downloading a few episodes of new season American stuff, and have watched a couple of episodes of Las Vegas, a fairly fluffy but immensely stylish soapy series set in a Las Vegas casino, presided over by James Caan. They producers (who I believe worked on the Fast and the Furious) have used every camera trick in the book, and the largely female cast is not unattractive on the eye.
Meanwhile BBC Four has just started a JG Ballard season, and last night aired a new drama called Home which I missed, and an old play from the sixties entitled Thirteen to Centaurus of which I saw the first half before dropping off last night (but it's safely saved to video). It's from a sci-fi anthology series called Out of the Unknown and it's seemingly quite a serious series. What a shame sci-fi is so "populist" these days.
Well I ended up watching The Deal on Channel 4 which I quite enjoyed. I still have to catch up with most of Boudica (although one of the opening scenes I have watched demonstrates the tight budget it must have been made under). Byron part 2 still sits on the video as well. I did manage to catch an absolutely superb Panorama about the situation in Iraq just now. The interviews with US soldiers were particularly revealing, as they were very honest in their views on camera.
I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to The West Wing last night as I was busy on the PC, so I recorded the late night (an advert-light) repeat later on. Then, when I saw a very good Discovery Channel documentary entitled The Story of Computer Games. I missed the start, but it seemed to be UK produced (I didn't catch a production company credit) since it concentrated on the number of bedroom coders in the days of the ZX Spectrum and C64. Then it went on examine Nintendo and Miyamoto, before looking at Tetris. Not really that up to date although it did have a 2003 production date on it.
When I went channel hopping later on I discovered that E4 had slipped out the first part of Kingpin. This aired on NBC last summer and is a mini-series set amongst Mexican/American drug barons. Since I'd missed most of it, I again set the video to record the late repeat of that as well. It's typical that E4 get something that's been well received, but are far too busy plugging garbage like Joe Millionaire. I fail to understand why E4 persist in buying these US "reality" shows when the British public really fail to empaphise with the contestants. And the real problem with Joe Millionaire is that they've already blown the surprise. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the surprise wasn't broken early in the States.