The good and the bad on TV in the same evening.
Let's start with the good, and Arrested Development, the US sitcom that I'd heard so much about, but hadn't previously seen. It's set amongst the Bluth family - a well to do Californian tribe, most of whom are leeching off the family property development business. The pilot episode sees the family have a large gathering on a boat, as we're introduced to them all. There's the hapless wouldbe magician, the moneyed sister and her mother, the slighly backward brother and also the father, who ends up in prison.
The humour is very dry, and there's no laughter track. The production values are high, and it's a miracle that it's made its mark on US TV. Despite winning a hatful of awards, it was likely to be cancelled at any moment. Just one black mark on it - and that's the BBC's fault. They decided it was necessary to tell us about the follow up episode being previewed on BBC4, 30 seconds before the BBC2 episode finished. Then we got into the credits and the continuity announcer repeated this information. I hate these pointless graphical intrusions while the programme's still running. It's one thing to shrink the credits and run a trail about the next episode. But don't interrupt the programme itself. I'll be complaining tomorrow.
Earlier in the evening, BBC2 had shown Talking to the Dead which is actually three part series under the Everyman banner. Now it might be too early in the series to be too negative about this series, but to my mind there wasn't enough scepticism shown in this first episode. Is it wrong to go out and expect proof? Well yes. I know that Spiritualism is considered a proper religion, but considering that there are well known techniques such as cold reading which can explain many of the things shown, I'd expect a decent look at this. If a conjourer or illusionist ("they're not tricks. Whores turn tricks" - Arrested Development) can do it, then it's not so spectacular to see a "Medium" do it.
Dirty War is the most recent in that very limited list of films that try to examine "What Ifs" in a serious manner. In the past, we've had The War Game (which was banned for many years), and much later Threads. And there was also, The Day After.
Dirty War is in that tradition, with a dramatised examination of the build up to the detonation of a dirty bomb in central London (in this instance Liverpool Street Station in the City). I've got to say that I found it quite engrossing and well dramatised. I think the one part of the system that it didn't answer, was the accessibility of the radioactive elements inside the bomb - in particular, the gamma radiation. In this instance, the radioactive parts were transported in via oil drums from Turkey via Bulgaria. But where did the parts originate?
It's interesting that the authorities were shown as having very limited resources, and the government minister dramatised did get quite a bad rap. I'd guess that this aspect of things was quite carefully researched.
I'm not sure that the death toll given at the end of the film was quite high enough. Surely it'd be fair to say that the cumulative impact of the what happened would mean eventual casualties would easily reach into the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
There's no really good reason that this series is still called Messiah, but this series is definitely getting sillier. I really like Ken Stott (have I missed his performance as Hitler yet? It got was talked about on Newsnight Review nearly a month ago!), although it seems that his policemen are always slightly frail and are too personally involved in the case. In this instance, the killer really got to work in a hospital where all sorts of fabulously complicated murders were committed. I don't know if it deliberately went OTT this time around since previous series as well as being trademark grisly, also stepped quite close to the mark of real incidents. This was more of a fairy tale. Still, when all's said and done, I hope they keep making them.