House Season 1

We've just finished watching the first season of House. After seeing a couple of episodes from a later season on Sky 2, I thought we should start from the beginning and so got hold of a copy of the Season 1 box set which contains 26 episodes of the show.

The show follows a team of diagnostic doctors led by the enigmatic Dr. House (Hugh Lawrie). House hates patients and often takes a line of treatment which is morally ambiguous but he always gets results. Each episode the team get an interesting case and after about 5 diagnoses, eventually get to the root of the problem.

While it can be a bit repetitive with each episode following a similar template, the drama and character elements make for interesting viewing and even after 26 episodes, I think I'm ready to start of Season 2.

3.5/5

Rome Season 1

HBO's Rome is, like many other HBO shows, produced to almost feature film like quality. The show follows Gaius Julius Caesar during a period in which he returned from Gaul and set about overthrowing the Senate and becoming the supreme ruler of Rome.

The overall plot arc stems from history, and the events are shown to the viewer as witnessed by two Roman soldiers, Lucias Verenus and Tito Pullo. This makes for a plot which is both interesting and informative.

The sets are vast and detailed and looks amazing and the plot is interspersed with enough action to keep things moving. The acting is reasonable and the setting of ancient Rome believable.

Overall, well worth watching, for both entertainment and to learn a brief overview of Roman history.

Score: 4.5/5

Red Dwarf - Just the Shows

I got the Red Dwarf - Just the shows boxset for my birthday back in March. It contains, all 52 episodes from seasons 1-8. We've just finished watching them all, as a big Red Dwarf fan back in the day, it was great to watch them all again. Watching them in order and in such a short space of time made me realise how things developed as the show went on. In the first couple of series, the entire show focuses on Rimmer and Lister with the cat as a comedy joke rather than a real character. But when series 3 starts, Kryten comes back and the Cat becomes more of a member of the crew, bringing the show into the classic set up of the main 4.

Another problem with watching them all so close together is that it becomes obvious that there are only about 4 different templates for an episode, especially in Seasons 2-6, these usual revolve around the crew finding something which causes them to think they are somewhere else. This plot device does allow the show to get out of the simple setting of 4 men alone in a spaceship, but can get a bit repetitive if you watch a lot.

Overall, this is a great boxset, even if Season 8 is a bit rubbish.

Score: 5/5

Band of Brothers

I got Band of Brothers on Blu-Ray for my Christmas, I had never seen it before but had heard good things and after recently finishing the series, I'm pleased to say it lived up to expectations.

The 10 1 hour episodes follow a paratroop regiment during the Second World War from their landing behind enemy lines on D-Day through to the end of the War. It plays out much like a 10 hour Saving Private Ryan, with movie quality production values, sets and action sequences.

The Blu-Ray presentation is pretty good, a lot of the scenes shot in lower light are visibly grainy, but some of the action sequences looks stunning in Hi-Def.

Overall, well worth watching on either DVD or Blu-Ray.

5/5

Life - Blu Ray

I got Rosie Life on Blu-Ray for Christmas and we've just finished watching it. Some of the photography is pretty amazing and there is a lot of cool, interesting information about strange animals which inhabit our planet. I'm not usually one for too much natural history documentaries, but Life was thoroughly enjoyable.

4.5/5

The Wire Season 5

Shortly before New Year, we finished the fifth and final season of The Wire. At only 10 episodes, it's much shorter than the previous seasons, but contains some good drama as the show makes its way to the finale.

The story follows the Baltimore Homocide department as they finalise their attempt to bring down drug kingpin Marlo despite increasing pressures from those above in terms of reduced budget. These pressures force McNulty to take extreme action to get the case solved.

The alternative viewpoint in this series comes from the journalists at the Baltimore Sun. Again, series 5 isn't as good as the excellent first two seasons, but is still worth watching and a fine end to the show.

4/5

The Wire Season 4

Just finished season 4 of the Wire and by this point there isn't much to say. Season 4 is good, but nowhere near as good as the first 2 seasons and feels more like filler between 3 and 5. Not all that much happens plotwise, although a lot of the characters are fleshed out more. Overall, worth watching if you've seen the first three, but nothing amazing.

3.5/5

FM

I caught a couple of episodes of this on ITV a while back, and thought it looked interesting, so sought out the full series. It's only 6 episodes, so I'd actually seen about half of it.

FM is a sitcom revolving around 2 radio DJs Lindsay (Chris O'Dowd from the IT Crowd) and Dom and their Producer Jane (Nina Sosanya from Teachers). O'Dowd plays a similar character to that of his IT Crowd persona Roy, Lindsay is a bit of an awkward character who constantly gets himself into trouble. The trio work well together and there are some hilarious situations that they get into. Cameos from bands/celebrities occur each episode but are subtley woven into the plot rather than to overtly thrown in there.

Overall, worth watching. 3.5/5

Time Trumpet

Originally shown on the BBC in 2006, I had never heard of this series from Thick of It creator Armando Iannucci until Amazon recommended it to me. It sounded pretty good so I took a punt and it payed off.

Set in 2031, it's basically a satire of these horrible TV shows you get where a group of celebrities talk about the top 50 movies or the top 50 events of the noughties etc. It consists of people ostensibly from 2031 looking back at events in the years shortly following 2006 and talking about things that happened then. These events include both current affairs based things like winning the war on terror and the time Tesco invaded Denmark as well as celebrity based things like the time Charlotte Church vomited herself inside out.

The talking heads are interspersed with fake footage and interviews from "fake" versions of our celebrities (e.g. old versions of Ant and Dec). The setup is quite good and there is a lot of really funny material in there. Some of it misses the mark and the 5th episode seemed a bit weak, but there are some comedy gems to be found in there.

Overall, really worth watching and probably something which will make less sense as time goes on, so watch it soon.

4/5

The Wire Season 3

Just finished another season of the Wire, Season 3 sees McNulty and the special investigations team back investigating big drug players in the area. When the Major of the Western district creates an unofficial and unsanctioned drug amnesty provided dealers stick to one of 3 areas, the ripples are felt across Baltimore.

Season 3 isn't as focused as the first 2 and lacks a solid single case at its heart which provided the intrigue in the other seasons. Having said that, the end does feel less disappointing and more wrapped up than in previous seasons.

Overall, great characters, some interesting plots, but could have done with a better driving force for the plot.

3.5/5

The Wire Season 2

Season 2 of the Wire follows up where Season 1 left off. McNulty has been sent to work in the marine unit and the rest of the detail involved in trying to bring down Avon Barksdale are spread out the Baltimore police department.

When 13 dead girls turn up in a shipping container at the docks, Bunk and Freeman are tasked with clearing the case, but they soon realise they can pool their resources when Lt. Daniels is given a detail to investigate the head of the dockworkers union.

As they get deeper into the case, everyone involved begins to realise that things go further than they could have imagined and the usual management bullshit starts to hinder their investigation.

Season 2 starts of even better than the first season, the number of sub-plots and characters make for interesting viewing without getting overly complicated. It's a setup which wouldn't have worked without the first season laying the groundwork in terms of introduction of many of the characters.

The change of scenery from the streets of Baltimore to the docks keeps things fresh but still familiar.

Like Season 1, Season 2 is well shot, written and has some great perfomances from the lead actors (of which there are now a fair few). My only critiscm is that like Season 1, the end is a little bit disappointing, setting itself up for Season 3 without bringing about a satisfying conclusion to all the events of Season 2.

I've already got the Season 3 DVDs ready to watch, so hopefully 3 is as good as the first two.

4.5/5

Derren Brown : Part 2

Derren Brown's show tonight was as disappointing as last week. He claimed he'd use the power of suggestion to glue us to our seats. Well it didn't work for me and the sceptical side of my nature doesn't believe it worked for anyone else. This entire season seems to be a bit of a disappointment.

South Park Season 4

Well I've worked my way through another South Park box set and I have to say, Season 4 has to be the best season yet. The introduction of Timmy, some great episodes like the South Park one, the Terminator/Akira/2001 spoof episode and the Great Expectations re-telling were all pretty good and even the token Mr. Hankey Christmas episode wasn't too bad.

From what I remember things only get more ridiculous from here on in, so here's looking forward to Season 5.

Score 4/5

Tonight's TV: Derren Brown The Events

Saw a thing on Boing Boing about Derren Brown's new TV show. I missed it on Wednesday, but apparently he did a thing where he "predicted" all 6 of the numbers in the national lottery. There was a show on Channel 4 tonight purporting to explain how he did it. Boing Boing had an interesting video from someone with an idea of how it could be done and I thought I'd tune in to see if the guy who made the video was right or not, seemed plausible and quite clever.

Big mistake, the show was the biggest waste of an hour of my life ever. It was just lots of crap full of bad maths explained under the mumbo jumbo "Deep Maths" label with a touch more crap about people being able as a group to guess lottery numbers by clearing their mind and writing on bits of paper.

His claim of how he did it was to get 24 people in a room, have them write numbers from their subconscience on a bit of paper and then he created an average of each number and then used them as his results. The whole thing sounds like a load of bollocks and even ignoring my scepticism about the logical improbability of people being able to write lottery numbers via their subconscience; one of his numbers was 2, to get the average for that number to be 2, so many of the members of the group would have to have written a very low numbers.

To me this is just implausible. It didn't help that for the final version, he collected the papers and totalled the numbers and then put them in a sealed tube and no-one saw it until he revealed it live at the end of the lottery show, so there isn't even a semblance of proof that the numbers the group chose averaged out to the numbers he revealed.

To me, this totally ruined the show, half way through I thought it could go one of two ways and either way would be massively disappointing. Way number 1 (which was the case) is that he tries to pass it off with some sort of pseudo-scientific explanation. Way number 2 would have been to fool the audience for 50 minutes and then reveal a camera trick at the end (which would have made any further episodes pretty much unwatchable if he was going to stick to that formula).

I was under the impression that Derren Brown was the kind of guy who spoke out against so called psychics etc. but from this episode of his show, it seems like if he can make money from bombarding people with nonsense then he'll be happy. My only guess is that he might reveal everything at the end of the series, but I doubt I'll tune in to watch that.

The Wire Season 1

We're quite big fans of bug budget American TV, ever since the Sopranos, I've enjoyed watching shows such as 24, Lost, Heroes, The Shield on DVD. The quality of the production is like a film (which lasts for 20hours) and watching them on DVD means I can waste lots of time watching episodes back to back with no adverts and not having to wait a week to see the outcome of the cliffhanger.

But, despite it getting pretty good reviews from pretty much everywhere, we hadn't really seen any of the Wire. We picked up the season 1 box set in Sainsbury's last weekend and a week later we've just watched the last of 13 1 hour episodes.

The show follows Homicide and Narcotics detectives within the city of Baltimore Police. When wise-ass detective McNulty starts investigating a drug dealer responsible for a crime wave including several murders, he talks to a Judge who puts pressure on McNulty's superiors to do something about the case. This doesn't do any favours for McNulty, but a team is assembled to investigate the drug dealer involved.

The Wire is very well produced with a great plot, some excellent characters and is well written with some classic lines thrown about by the main characters. It's like a cop movie which lasts for 13 hours. Highly recommended.

4.5/5

South Park Season 3

With no new Lost, the end of The Shield and having watched all the Scrubs available, I've been catching up on South Park, going back to the start and watching them in sequence.

I've just finished Season 3, which is probably the best I've watched so far, the 17 episodes contain some classics such as Chinpokomon where the kids become obsessed with the latest craze in toys "Gotta buy them all"; Korn's Groovy Pirate Ghost mystery sees a cameo appearance from Korn in a Scooby Doo influenced episode and Starvin' Marvin in Space sees the foursome travel to an alien planet where the sentient life forms that inhabit it have only one word for all people, places and things - Marklar.

All in all, South Park Season 3 is pretty stupid and has some weird stuff, but it is still relatively sane compared to the later seasons.

Overall - 4/5

The Thick of It

I hadn't heard of this BBC comedy until I saw In the Loop in the cinema. In the Loop is pretty much The Thick of It: The Film.

I picked up the first series on DVD, typically for British comedies, it only runs to 6 episodes. The series follows Hugh Abbot, a minister at the department of Social Affairs. He is bewildered and out of his depth, trying to do the best job he can in his position. The series follows him and his aides as he deals with one PR disaster after another, constantly having run-ins with Malcom Tucker, the angry, swearing, Scot whose job it is to ensure that members of the cabinet don't gather bad press coverage.

Overall, I didn't find it quite as funny as In the Loop, but it was still hilarious in places. The documentary style camera work is a little off-putting, but does add to the effect.

All in all, a series worth watching if you haven't seen it already.