So finally it's arrived. And despite having already seen it I had to watch it again.
First things first, if there were any differences between the leaked version, and that which aired on Saturday, they were beyond me. Maybe a bit of post-processing, that's all.
Secondly, it's pretty poor that we managed to get brief excerpts of Graham Norton and the Strictly Dance Fever programme leaking through to the tense opening of this massively hyped new series (if you don't live in the UK then you won't realise that this series has been promoted seemingly after every programme this week, with poster sites, a Radio Times front cover, and both main stars showing up on Jonathan Ross and Parkinson).
As I said before, both leads are great, and the dialogue's very knowing coming as it does from Russel T Davies. Sorry if all of this sounds like every other review you've read of Dr Who over the last weekend, but it's true. I was a big fan of Dr Who, and own one or two DVDs to prove it. So it's good to report that it's actually really rather impressive what they've managed to pull off. This is a drama series that's not a soap and that goes out before 9pm. Think about it. There aren't any others apart from children's programming.
So it has a light touch, and I'm sure will confront some of the issues that good episodes of Dr Who have done in the past. As always, the opening episode is one of the toughest to write since you've got the problem of half the audience knowing exactly where we are (basically the over 30s), and the other half needing a primer to get up to speed. You don't want to alienate either of these groups.
The fact that this first episode reportedly got around 10 million viewers would suggest that they've done so very successfully, although let's be cautionary given the monumental hype it's received so far.
But overall a great start to a new future of science fiction on British television. And we've got live Quatermass to look forward to this weekend!
The big Easter offering on ITV was Colditz. The BBC showed a famous version of Colditz in the seventies which featured many big name actors like David McCallum and Robert Wagner. It also featured a wonderful theme tune. So along come ITV with this new version with a new story. It starred Damian Lewis, of Band of Brothers fame, playing McGrade, a Scottish PoW escapee who makes it back to Britain, while his colleagues end up in Colditz castle. Cue lots of escape attempts, while the dastardly McGrade who's returned a hero, starts to fall in love with the girlfriend of one of his now interred colleagues. When it becomes obvious that she's not going to give him up, he tells her that her beau is dead. How nasty can you get?
The production has obviously had a bit of cash spent on it, and if some of the exteriors weren't actually filmed at the real castle, then it was a good stand in. Unfortunately, Lewis's character is just too dastardly and one-dimensional. There were some good characters in small roles including Timothy West's boffin, and the ever-stiff-upper-lipped James Fox. It'd have been nice if we saw more escapes since the majority seemed to fail, and yet we're told that others were getting out. And the Germans seemed to be terrible shots with a couple of sequences in which you can't believe they wouldn't have managed a hit - if a character must escape, then let him without have a sten gun from fifty yards miss him. but hit every tree within the vicinity.
Fairly mediocre overall then. The DVD might sell a few, but why they felt the need to release the soundtrack is beyond me.
As a side question, who are Power, the co-producers, with Granada, of this programme? They've also produced the recent TV version of Archangel based on Robert Harris's novel, and were also part of the group that made Russell T Davies' Casanova. Their website isn't very revealing.
Russell T Davies is a very busy man. He had Mine All Mine on ITV just before Christmas (which I missed), and Dr Who is due to start in a couple of weeks. To take us up to that we've got his take on Casanova.
It's told from the point of view of an elderly Casanova played by Peter O'Toole regailing a young maid (Rose Byrne) with his tales of infidelity. The programme has rightly been compared with the bawdy romp that was Tom Jones. The whole enterprise is great fun. There's a hint of the post-modernism of Plunkett & Macleane, but not as over the top as that production was.
David Tennant plays the young Casanova who's basically a young man on the make in Venice. And Laura Fraser plays Henriette, Casanova's muse and bete noire.
Thoroughly enjoyable, and that's my next three Sundays lined up (apart from Easter Sunday since my parents don't get BBC3 - so video it is).
There's a volcano coming - and it's a super one. This drama-documentary is based around something that's true, but "just hasn't happened yet". This won't come as news to anyone who's read the Bill Bryson book or the Horizon documentary from a few years ago.
So we get a motley cast of characters who work around Yellowstone National Park, including a few Brits since this is a BBC co-production. There are the cynics and the believers, and of course, by the end of the episode a massive volcano is indeed underway...
Over on BBC2 a sister documentary highlighted the fact that although it could happen, it wasn't all that likely. The fact that it's been 640,000 years since the last one, and on the basis of the previous three, they come around every 600,000 or so years, doesn't add up to a great deal. So there might be one in 10,000 years!
Rob Brydon starred is this wonderfully put together dramatisation of a part of the acclaimed critic's life when he was being ousted from the National Theatre and was trying to put on his "erotic review" Oh Calcutta!
I can't say that I knew a great deal about Tynan before I saw this programme - I think I had it in my mind that he was gay. He wasn't, but he did have certain S&M tendencies which he quite openly talked about - perhaps too openly. He seems to have been a character who wore his heart on his sleeve and said what he thought, politics be damned.
Brydon was great as part of a smallish cast, as you might expect from a BBC Four production. Julian Sands played Olivier in a very uptight manner. He certainly wasn't as he'd appear on screen around that time, and although he seemed to like Tynan, you could tell that he disapproved of him. Catherine McCormack played Tynan's wife Kathleen, who seemed long suffering in her acceptance of his ways and manners.
After the play, we had a documentary about Tynan's life, and it became obvious that the dramatisation had contracted several years into a shorter period, with Tynan's illness.