Based on the Radio 4 series of the same name, which shamefully I haven't heard, this is an entertaining look at the world of PR. Last night's considered PR for a new ABC (Archbishop of Canterbury), and getting a Welsh footballer accepted as English (surely no real challenge).
An interesting thing about this series is that different episodes are written by different people, with last night's written by Mark Lawson. He also managed to get himself a cameo part in it.
It can be a little hit or miss, but Stephen Fry is masterful, never phased about taking on a footballer despite it being painfully clear that he doesn't know the slightest thing about it.
I really wasn't too sure whether or not I was going to enjoy Charles II, but it was great stuff. Rufus Sewell as the eponymous king who comes out of exile to take over his throne.
There seem to have been plenty of mistresses thrown into the mix as well, with all and sundry involved. To begin with, I couldn't help doing my normal thing, and noticing the lack of budget meant that grand scenes had to be filmed very closely - to avoid incurring the costs of hundreds of extras. But the romp-along story got the better of me and I was sucked in.
I think last night's episode of Hunting Chris Ryan was the last in the seris, but I must admit that it was quite entertaining. The premise is that Chris Ryan is given a special-ops type mission, with a squad of hunters chasing him down the whole way. He has to avoid capture and they have to find him. Simple premise. Last night was in Botswana, and the "hunters" are backed up by local military to help with tracking and the like.
There are a couple of problems with the format. The first is that we know he's not going to get captured immediately, because if he is, there's no show (and they have an hour to fill). We are also told that Ryan is primarily filming himself as he goes, but we get lots of cut aways of him. Now maybe many of these are pick-ups, but if they're not, then there are a lot of camera crews hanging around the place, surely putting the hunters onto Ryan. Unless the camera crews are ex-SAS too! Failings aside, I thoroughly enjoyed the programme, even if both the ex-US special forces seemed to have to chomp on big cigars the whole time. And even if far too much was staged.
Although they've been shown on BBC4 a few times now, I only caught my first episode of Holidays in the Danger Zone: The Stans last night on BBC2. This was in Kyrgistan, and it was immediately followed by Uzbekistan on BBC4, but I fell asleep...
The Kyrgistan episode was highly entertaining with a witty and amusing translator guiding presenter Simon Reeve around the country - the only one with both US and Russian air bases on their soil.
It's quite horrific how much junk the Russians seem to have left around the place - particularly of a hazardous radioactive nature.
It strikes me that I haven't talked about QI (no apparent website). It's a panel game presented by Stephen Fry in which there are no points for correct answers (and in any case most questions are impossible); instead they're awarded for being Quite Interesting. Alan Davies is the regular on the panel along with a handful of other comedians.
I believe that the programme's produced by John Lloyd in his first return to TV for years and years. There's some kind of company that owns the format - I assume Lloyd's.
Most puzzling though, is the "voting system" which is referred to in the end credits. A company is credited for supplying it, yet there's no voting system in operation in the show. And since the questions are effectively genereal knowledge, there's no reason to employ one outside the bounds of the show. Very strange and perhaps someone can enlighten me?
I'm not too sure about the latest series of Scrapheap Challenge. Are they running out of good ideas now? Yesterday's one about building speedboats was not the best by a long shot, and frankly it was amazing that they took as long as ten hours to come up with what they did. I suppose that it's annoying when you know that the crew have deliberately hidden parts that the teams want around the scrapheap, and then "hint" at where they might be found (this goes on off-camera I believe). I suppose it'd make dull television otherwise. We also get the same science being reiterated from week to week. Oh, I expect that I'm just getting cynical in my old age...