If there’s one thing clear in recent times, it’s that ITV really needs to up its drama quotient. So I watched Demons at the weekend – effectively ITV’s sister programme to Primeval, and competing with the BBC’s Doctor Who, Merlin and Robin Hood. I don’t know when that latter programme is due to return, but the early evening scheduling of Demons means that it has the family-friendly Saturday night drama slot to itself at the moment.
But this was a mess. First of all, Philip (Gene Hunt) Glenister has an abysmal American accent that seems to serve no purpose at all. Aside from the haughty air that he carries which could be symptomatic of being an American (at least in the eyes of a hackneyed scriptwriter), his character could have originated anywhere. If, for international sales purposes, there had to be an American in the cast, then get an American actor – we’ve lent them enough of ours.
At Christmas, I was given a DVD set of Neverwhere, the 1996 Neil Gaiman penned series. Now while I wouldn’t say that this was a rip-off of that programme (and subsequent novelisations and comics), there was certainly inspiration coming from it. That’s not necessarily bad (I’d probably say that the fine BBC Radio 7 drama, Undone, also shares more than a little with Neverwhere), and there are also aspects of the BBC adaptation of Gormenghast in the make-up and style of the programmes humanesque beasts. But mostly, the show’s creators have been watching Buffy. And Primeval. I heard a recent radio interview with Glenister promoting a book he’d helped with (I hesitate to say “written” since it sounded like a Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes unofficial cash-in), and he managed to barely mention this series at all. I suspect that unless things improve, we won’t be seeing series 2. I quite liked Zoe Tapper in the recent Survivors, itself a little hit and miss, and she’s obviously going places, but here she plays a blind concert pianist. Well – we know that there’s no other profession for blind people than music don’t we?
Neither of these two are the main character or his girlfriend. But they were perfunctory, yet otherwise forgettable. I can’t remember their characters’ names, and I can’t be bothered to look them up.
The best character was Mackenzie Crook’s who had a nice air of menace. Unless he reincarnates next week, they seem to have killed him off in the first episode though. I’m really not at all sure I’ll bother with episode two.
Over on BBC1 we got an overlong monstrosity called Total Wipeout. A complete rip-off of Takeshi’s Castle (as seen on Challenge TV), this programme saw twenty or so over-hyped contestants attempting an obstacle course, with a high likelihood of falling into mud, water or both. For reasons completely unexplained, the Endemol production is taped in Argentina, in an area with over-green turfed area making it look not dissimilar to the sets of Teletubbies or In The Night Garden. Indeed, the key three to six-years old audience is likely to find this funniest.
The main presenter is Top Gear’s Richard Hammond, but he’s sat by himself in front of a large screen reading scripting sarcastic ad-libs over the action unfurling in far away Argentina. Indeed, it’s not clear whether he was brought in late in the day, because the show has flown out its own presenter in Amanda Byram, who also takes a fairly sarcastic attitude to precedings. That’s probably not helped by the fact that each contestant was evidently forced to drink five litres of espresso before being asked to get over-excited on camera. In any case, Craig Charles was much better making stuff up for Takeshi’s Castle when you knew that he little to no idea what was going on. Hammond is just snidish, and that’s unfair given that this is a BBC commission. Laughing at funny foreigners can just about work, but laughing at people you’ve asked to do something for you doesn’t.
The overall effect is that, all of a sudden, you’re looking forward to series two of Hole in the Wall.
There’s perhaps a half hour show in here, but instead, the limited obstacle course is seen again and again with all the contestants going through. Then we get slow motion replays and so on ad nauseum. By the time we get to the final where there’s lots of fire in the background of the set for no good reason, and enormous towers of scaffolding that similarly take no part in the proceedings, we’re worn down. The three finalists compete against the clock, but since the editing is all over the place with HD super-slomos abounding, the clock is on screen for an arbitrary length of time. Thus, the final competitor has no clock at all in-vision, so that some kind of false tension is built up. In the end the last contestant finishes something like 30 seconds after slower than the previous contestant, so leaving the clock on screen would have removed “suspense” in the result.
Still, I’m sure all the contestants had a lovely time in sunny Argentina. I don’t suppose that there’s any chance of having a new gameshow that – you know – asked questions or something?
[In fairness, I should point out that ITV brought back The Krypton Factor this week, and aside from replacing Gordon Burns with the anodyne Ben Shepherd who wasn’t seemingly even able to ask his own questions, it was reasonable. At least there was a certain level of skill involved.]