nixsight

This Christmas, I have, of course, been watching lots of TV. The most important thing about the TV I have been watching is, of course, that Rachel Stevens was robbed.

Girl One was away for a few days, so I blitzed through a bunch of shows that she doesn’t watch, or at least, doesn’t want to watch all that much.

Doctor Who Christmas Special – The Next Doctor

For the first time since the franchise reboot, I actually managed to catch the “Doctor Who Christmas Special” actually during the Christmas period.

I don’t know if that’s why I actually enjoyed the special this year. Generally, these episodes have been a bit of an RTD Wowfest – raggedy stunt-plots upon which a few epic visuals are draped like so much tinsel.

So either this year’s outing was actually really good, or the general feelgood factor of a nice Christmas day made this one go down smoother.

Admittedly, the story does allow for quite a few ditzy and mischevious moments that obviously made herr Davies chuckle to himself with ingrained geeky joy, but it’s such a comparatively tight episode and simple story by new-Who standards that those moments are easy to forgive.

Ah, bullshit on that: the story moves on quickly and competently enough – and I was feeling perky enough – that those cute flashes, when they come, are full-on fun.

Despite the overworked scuttlebutt, David Morrissey was obviously never a contender for the next Doctor – I still think Alan Davies would be the best bet for that, but nobody’s asking  me – but he has an awful lot of fun playing a character who thinks he’s the Doctor. And as always, David Tennant is great value for money, totally selling his character’s sense of curiosity and wonder when encountering his peculiar double.

There’s a great Cybermen story weaved through the catalogue of fun Who reinterpretations here, with some particularly creepy lookin’ Cyberwraith thingies, and a great villain performance from Dervla Kirwan, who I’ve always been fond of. And there’s a quite lovely showreel sequence of Doctor Who history that gave me a frisson of cheer. They even included the Mcgann Doctor!

There’s a lot of nice touches, actually. The fake Doctor’s TARDIS is fun, but his plucky assistant is cool, with her perfect name Rosita – she’s an amalgam of all three of Tennant’s companions thus far. And there are some lovely poignant scenes that discuss the nature of the Doctor/companion relationship – a running theme at the end of the last season.

Whether it was a Christmas infused miracle that an RTD episode entertained me so much or not, I’m now quite excited for the coming year of Who – and sad again that Tennant is leaving.

Torchwood 0212-0213

I finally got around to finishing ,off this year’s season of “Torchwood”. It was, over all, a massive improvement on the first season, though this was largely down to the solid work done with Owen throughout it.

The first of the two episodes 0212 – Fragments, is a bit of a gimmick episode, fitting the “My Life Flashed Before My Eyes” TV trope – well documented here at TV Tropes – and not bothering to give itself much of a reason for doing so.

It starts out simply enough, trapping the three members of the team that we didn’t already know everything about under rubble so that they can have extended flashback sequences that establish their history with Torchwood and their value and place in the series.

It’s pretty well written stuff, and both Burn Gorman and Naoko Mori do nice work with the revelations about their character’s pasts and motives – surprisingly nice, actually. Neither of them impressed me very much in the first season of the show, but I’ve liked watching them this time out.

There’s a good reason why this episode comes at this point in the run, but it’s a shame, really, that it didn’t come a little sooner. It would have been good for the structure and overall emotional content of the whole show if we had been given these insights earlier on, maybe toward the end of the first year of it’s run.

Course, the real reason for this overdue grounding of the characters is that the season finale – 0212 – Exit Wounds – requires that the audience has a sense of how important the characters are.

Because, as everyone else has known for ages, Tosh and Owen don’t make it out of this episode alive.

There’s a lot going on in this one, and the production team, writers and actors do a great job of coping with the scale of the story they’ve come up with. James Marsters reprises the role of Captain John Hart across these two episodes, but they’ve done a lot more with the character in this episode than they did in his appearance at the beginning of the season. Actually, in that first one, he was pretty annoying, but here he’s great.

The last few episodes of this season show a willingness to embrace the inventiveness of the chosen genre of the show that was sadly mostly lacking in earlier outings, with supernatural concepts like Jack’s immortality and Owen’s living death used in integral and thoughtful ways, rather than the usual “Oh, no, he’s been shot! Wait! Blimey, he’s getting up!”. It’s a welcome change.

There are also some great scenes of carnage across Cardiff, with solid effects and realistic responses from the cast and their support that really sell the gravity of the situation.

If the next year of “Torchwood” measures up to the best of this year, it should be a lot of fun.

The Sarah Jane Adventures Pilot & 0101-0102

I’d heard good things about the kid-targeted arm of the Doctor Who franchise, and I recently saw a bit of an episode of it and thought it had promise. After finishing off the remaining episodes of “Torchwood”, I needed a bit of a Whoniverse fix, so I picked up the first season of Sarah Jane.

The interesting thing about this show is that, though it’s the branch of the Who triumvirate that is specifically aimed at the young, it’s the only one that never really talks down to it’s audience or misstep into overly juvenile territory. As such, that makes it the one that most consistently hits it’s mark of the three.

The pilot, Invasion Of The Bane, introduces all of the key characters in the show to each other, with young Maria – the character through whose eyes we will experience everything – finding herself thrust into a world of paranormal and alien adventure. The pilot also introduces the adequately acted but annoying mandatory gobby teenaged friend, and also a staple of child-targeted science-fiction, the blank-slate character – in this case, a young lad that they name Luke. All of the child roles are performed well – in fact, the acting is pretty good throughout, with typical scene-chewing British sci-fi villains, but ultimately likeable and relatable protagonists and support.

Actually, Luke is probably the most complicated science fiction invention in the show, and works remarkably well. Having said that, the alien plots, and the way the stories unfold, don’t feel any less logical, unbelievable or simplified than a normal Who storyline.

The first story proper of the series is called “Revenge Of The Slitheen“, and as is obvious from the title features the memorable villains from the first season of new Who. However, in their appearances there, the characters feel like an awkward fit – a ridiculous-looking cartoon race with a penchant for flatulence and some serious spoof-science to explain how their massive bulk fits inside the human suits that they use as disguises.

What makes them daft in a family show makes them a perfect fit for a kid’s show, though – and the scenes of them menacing kids in a school setting are often effective.

Elisabeth Sladen is the only actor playing a human in the show who doesn’t have a quite natural touch, and her Sarah Jane is often melodramatic, favouring the old British genre TV method of staring fearfully at things and delivering lines in short, clipped sentences to connote urgency, but it works here, and she’s a strong presence at the center of the show. There’s a lot of warmth in the grudging maternal role she takes with the show’s younger characters that is nice to watch.

Overall, these first few examples of the show work because of their consistent approach and scripts, and because the show takes itself seriously, in a way that it’s siblings frankly often don’t to an annoying degree. With both “Doctor Who” and “Torchwood”, there is often the feeling that, as the most prominent British genre shows in a small market, they can take the piss a little bit, but that isn’t something that happens with “The Sarah Jane Adventures” at all.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles 0211-0213

One thing I love about a lot of the cool TV out there at the moment is that so much of it refuses to let itself drop into a formula, or impose any kind of stability or rigidity to it’s episodes.

Take these three episodes: none of them is a “typical” TTSCC episode, and in fact there’s no real effort to force any trademark series moments into it at all, with none of these episodes bringing all of the key players together through most of their driving narrative.

0211 – Self Made Man, centers on Cameron’s investigation of what appears to be a Terminator unit that jumped too far back in time, and accidentally altered events to such an extent that it subsequently had to live an almost ordinary human life to get things back on track enough that it can carry out it’s mission.

It’s a fascinating episode, for all of the ideas that it throws at you without even commenting on them.

For a start, there is the fact that Cameron has apparently been going to a local library after hours, and has befriended the librarian who works the graveyard shift. Though it’s a completely new behaviour for the character, the quality of the writing and acting is such that it never occurs to you that it is anything other than a perfectly real plot development.

Then there’s the lengths to which we discover a terminator unit can reinterpret and adapt it’s mission, even adjusting to almost benevolent and non-violent means if it is the most effective way to get the mission done. This is something we’ve seen little hints of, but never to this extent.

There’s a truly cool-as-fuck – if short – terminator battle thrown in for good measure.

The John Connor/Riley relationship is further explored here, and while Leven Rambin does good work with the more-unbalanced-by-the-minute Riley, it isn’t the interesting portion of this episode. The Riley-as-time-traveller subplot might end up interesting, but for me it’s built on a dodgy foundation from the off, and needs to do a lot of work to pull me in.

0212 – Alpine Fields is another episode that plays with form in unusual ways. Admittedly it’s not completely original for a show to use non-linear storytelling and flashbacks, especially not since “Reservoir Dogs”, but thanks to the time-travelling nature of this show, the writers get to play a lot with the structure.

The primary narrative takes place in the present, and focusses on Derek Reese – which hasn’t happened a lot this season. The flashbacks deal with how the situation that Reese is dealing with started, six months earlier, with a mission carried out by Sarah and Cameron. At the same time, something about this situation reminds him of something that happened to him in his past, which of course is our future.

What we get with Reese episodes is an interesting twist on the episodic TV trope, often used in shows based around immortals, of having almost every present day story triggering off a period-piece flashback. Though this happens with Reese, the period is the future.

A few episodes back, Sarah Connor became obsessed with the three dots that she saw on the wall in the basement room, and despite apparently realising at the tail end of one of those episodes that the reason she was dreaming about these dots was that she had three small moles in the same pattern on her face – a signifier of her Cameron-predicted cancer – she continues to obsess that they have some deeper meaning.

It seems, in the pre-hiatus episode 0213 – Earthlings Welcome Here, that she may be on to something. After some faffing around with alien abduction survivor expos and a cross-gendered/transexual researcher, she finds herself in the shadow of a huge UFO, which mimics the shape of the three dots in it’s design, but also evokes the now-familiar hunter/seeker flying machines from the terminator future.

It’s an interesting moment, because until now, the relatively cognitively attainable concept of the humanoid robots from the future are the only thing we have seen manifested from that future into the present of the show. Odd as it sounds, the distinction between the future of the terminator universe and it’s present has always been clear and defined by one solid principle – the present belongs to us, the future belongs to them.

The principle is represented in the franchise by the fact that to exist in the present, the robots need to be disguised as humans, and for the most part, they by necessity retain that quite mundane and familiar limitation. The post-Judgement Day future we see in this universe is different because in that future, as well as the superficial battle-scarring that the environment has, the robots no longer have to protect themselves from discovery, and are no longer restrained in their design.

True, pieces of terminator technology that can’t pass for normal do turn up, but there is a hell of  a difference between a mechanical hand, or even a metal skull, making it’s way into our everyday, and a zero-gravity asymmetrical flying doodad. This is the first overt sign of that future seeping into our present – or of course, properly developing in our present – that we’ve been shown, and that is important.

I’ve thought about this a lot when watching the show this season – the title “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” almost suggests that, given the chance, it may move on from Sarah Connor’s story at some point. More to the point, thus far every outing in this franchise aside from “T2″ has worked on the principle that the dark and gleaming robotic future is going to happen, and all of the conflict and missions in the world are only going to help the resistance in that future, not change it altogether.

These are interesting philosophical flourishes in a movie or self-contained story, but a continuous narrative such as a TV show finds itself slowly drawing toward a point where it has to – or gets to, depending on your point of view – examine that causal determinism – causal preterminism?

It’s interesting that Sarah Connor has to be the one who sees this first physical sign of the future starting to happen – this season, she has started along a path alien to the old Sarah, where her primary driving force has shifted from protecting John in preparation for the inevitable, and actually trying to stop Judgement Day from ever happen.

The show continues to be fascinating. The long narrative of a TV series is giving them a chance to build a cast of characters whose motives and motivations are all very different to each other, and through them they’re getting to explore the complex philosophy and consequence of issues and questions that are raised by the franchise’s key concepts, but haven’t been looked at this closely within it before.

Criminal Minds 0213-0302

You’ll have noticed that Girl One and I have been a bit obsessed with this show. We’ve watched an awful lot of them.

This batch 0f episodes are actually c0nnected, or at least enclosed, by a theme or story thread of sorts: they begin with the introduction of a character who is, in Gideon’s words, the most prolific serial killer ever recorded, and end with the final aftermath of the team’s encounter with the man.

0213 – No Way Out sees the introduction of the killer, whose name is simply Frank. The episode uses an interesting narrative framing structure, and Frank is played with seething menace by Keith Carradine – the brother who wasn’t Bill.

Though the episode doesn’t end particularly well for the team, it’s a great piece of TV, and it sets a grim tone for the rest of the season.

It’s immediately followed by an incredibly harsh two-parter, in which James Van Der Beek guests, cast against type as a tragic character – a young man with multiple personalities, two of which are murderous, the third a heroin addict. He does an awesome job.

The first episode, 0214 – The Big Game, is chilling enough, with heavy religious themes and a disturbing technical wrinkle to the murderer’s MO that provokes an even more worrying insight into society. But when Reid and JJ accidentally stumble across the killer, things take a turn for the worse.

The second part of the story, 0215 – Revelations, is a little more intimate, and if anything bleaker, with Reid in captivity, being tortured, drugged, and forced into making decisions that will end with people murdered.

The whole thing is played to perfection by the regular cast, and Van Der Beek pulls off his role brilliantly – it’s a character that at times you’re supposed to be disgusted by, while at other times he horrifies you, and still others you’re expected to sympathise with him, and it actually works.

The problem is that this story leaves Reid broken for the remainder of the series, with an addiction to the heroin that the merciful personality injected him with by way of painkiller.

It’s a thread that on occassion threatens to get annoying. Reid’s addiction is largely suggested rather than shown, and to be honest you’re never entirely certain whether what you’re seeing in his behaviour even is addiction or just his emotional response to the stress of his captivity. Because of this ambiguity and innuendo, his behaviour sometimes seems little more than just plain obnoxious, and it’s such a shift in character from his usual deferent and sweet attitude, you find yourself wishing someone in the show would notice and say something, rather than constantly skirting around it.

But in the end, it’s the fear that this won’t happen that causes anxiety, rather than any actual drop in the quality of the show. Though Reid – and his colleagues – don’t suddenly forget what he went through or how he continues to deal with it, the uncomfortable hump of his condition going unacknowledged lasts just about the right length of time.

Other standout episodes in this batch:
0217 – Distress: Murders which seem to have totally random victimology are discovered to be the unwitting actions of a veteran suffering from a post-traumatic psychotic break – a story which ends in tragedy.
0218 – Jones: The mandatory post-Katrina story that actually doesn’t end up using the setting as a way of issue-pushing. In fact, the potent part of this story is the idea of the killer-as-victim, with a motivation for the unsub that is reminiscent of the movie “The Accused”.
0221 – Open Season: Because I love me any set-up that involves humans hunting humans – even though it’s one of those episodes where the BAU only have a very peripheral impact on the outcome, with a potential victim largely sorting it all out for herself.
There is also the quite awesome fact that the murder weapon is a compound bow. Which is about the coolest weapon known to man.
0222 – Legacy: A story more reminiscent of “Saw” – Girl One says “Hostel”, but I haven’t seen it so couldn’t comment – than a normal procedural show, though the story of the police detective trying to convince the BAU and his superiors that there are abductions – of homeless people and prostitutes – happening when there is no evidence to support it adds a lot of intrigue.
As he attempts to give his apparently non-existent case some traction, we see one of the abductees as she fights for her life across a torturous obstacle course set up by the killer.
There’s a particularly nice moment when Morgan, trying to provoke co-operation from an untrusting old homeless woman, flirts with her – it’s a perfectly in-character moment, and the woman’s reaction is a very cute and touching thing to see.

There’s a misfire with the episode 0216 – Fear And Loathing, which clearly seems to think it has something potent to say about race or social politics, and attempts to throw every heart-twanging trick in the book at the audience, but falls strangely flat. It doesn’t help that the score to the episode is weighty and cinematic, which adds to the sense that the producers thought they were saying something worthwhile, while drawing attention to the fact that really, they aren’t.

Worse, the awkward lecturing tone throughout actually distracts from the murders and investigation, which is absolutely the last thing you want in a show like this.

The second season closes out with the return of Frank, in 0223 – No Way Out, Part II: The Evilution Of Frank. Despite the quite appalling and twee subtitle of the episode, it’s a strong episode, and though the motivation for Frank’s return is believable enough, and the conclusion to the episode works, the real focus of it, and it’s strength, are the methods that he uses to try and attain his goal, and the effect these methods have on Gideon and the viewer.

Frank starts his mission off by killing an old and beloved friend of Gideon’s, in Gideon’s own apartment, and the scenes in which he goads the investigator with the murder over the phone are very powerful. Then, using the page of one of Gideon’s notebooks, Frank starts to hunt down the people that Gideon and the BAU have saved – using their murders as a way of trying to force the team into giving him what he needs.

This has a dual effect. First, it works to push Gideon into a guilt, self-doubt and anguish spiral that will last into the next season, and that at the point we’re at – 0202 – seems to have provoked him to leave the BAU on a voyage of self-rediscovery.

But second, and obviously more important to this discussion of the episode, it also raises the stakes for the viewer. The first of Frank’s victims is the girl rescued in the first episode of this season, and the girl he subsequently abducts is Dakota’s little sister Elle Fanning, who survived another earlier memorable story.

Though the show – which already does a good job of getting the audience to care about it’s victims – gets a boost from the relationship the viewers already have with these characters, there’s a deeper, more intellectual effect that their peril has on us:

When a victim from an earlier episode is brutally killed now, it retroactively cancels out the emotional payoff that we felt from the previous outcome. It has been suggested that much of what appeals about our reaction to horror narratives is the relief of surviving, and “Criminal Minds”, more than any other crime procedural at the moment, taps in to that relief by almost always giving us one last victim who escapes each episode’s particular mode of death. In some ways, we get to survive because they get to survive.

So Frank’s murder of one of them, and the anticipation that he might murder more, hits us at the same existential level that it hits Gideon – actually, now that I think about it, the same deep level that the “Final Destination” movies probe – making us feel like death is so inevitable that even when you escape it, you can’t really escape it.

It’s a smart trick.

The second season has started strong, though it’s hard not to feel for Gideon. Mandy Patinkin has always played him almost too smart and arrogant, and here he does a great job of turning that on it’s head, and having him adrift and just too darn sad.

The rest of the team are also in turmoil at the beginning, with Hotchner’s place at the head of the team being threatened by internal FBI politics, and Prentiss dragged in for the ride. It will be interesting to see how this season plays out – we already know that Patinkin isn’t in it any more, but we don’t know how much that has to do with his “littlest hobo” at the end of these episodes.

Life 0207-0211

This show continues to be consistently ace, but difficult to describe if you’re not watching it already.

The long arc starts to get interesting again, though it’s starting to stretch out a little interminably. As I’ve mentioned before, this is one of the few shows with an ongoing conspiracy that is easily strong enough in each episode’s “A” story to survive without that conspiracy.

Charlie is just weird enough to be endlessly interesting, without being so dysfunctional that his gimmicks start to seem like gimmicks, and as time progresses, his supporting characters are starting to have experiences and get lives that enrich their parts in the show, rather than pushing too far along the soap-opera route.

My favourite episode in this batch is 0210 – Evil… And His Brother Ziggy. Set on a native American reservation, and with enough soft twists and turns to keep viewers on their toes, it also features a cool hard-metaphysical moment, when Charlie is told something in a dream that turns out to be a fact that he couldn’t know in the real world. It’s only a tiny thing, about deer stew, but it’s a nice touch!

I’m also surprised to find that I’m quite enjoying the ongoing relationship between Reese and the wonderfully oily Captain Tidwell. Donal Logue does a great job of keeping his character appealing despite his obvious flaws, and it’s nice to see Reese, always nicely underplayed relative to the other characters by the gorgeous Sarah Shahi, given new and interesting character stuff to do.

The Office 0414-0504

Ah, it’s “The Office”. These were all new episodes for me – we finally caught up to what I’d already seen last week, so the first fresh episode for me was the finale of the short season 4, 0414 – Goodbye, Toby.

Despite the title, the episode isn’t so much about the wonderfully saggy-mannered Toby as it is about the introduction of the new HR rep, Holly – a tough gig played beautifully by talented “The Wire” veteran Amy Ryan- who after a prejudiced negative first impression wins Michael over, by both being a bit cute, and being – as Jim later puts it – “kind of a dork”.

This is too late to stop Dwight from going on the Scott-provoked mission to haze her – this in turn creates my favourite piece of comedy from this and the next few episodes, when Dwight convinces her that Kevin is part of an outreach programme, and is retarded. This is funny because the beautifully scripted scenes between Holly and Kevin afterwards work to two ends – we realise that actually, Kevin is a bit retarded, and also that his conviction that Holly is coming on to him is a perfectly rational conclusion to come to from her behaviour, too.

There’s a tough moment when Jim’s perfect moment to propose to Pam – hard-bought by his financial contribution to Toby’s leaving party – is usurped by Andy’s proposal to Angela, who claims that the moment was just too perfect for a proposal. There’s something quite endearing about Andy Bernard’s assumption that this all came together through serendipity – the character has been fleshed out a lot since his appearance, and it’s tough to dislike him that much any more. Though you want to try when, in contrast to Jim’s statement earlier in the season that he has been carrying an engagement ring around with him since a few days after he and Pam started dating, he says that he has been carrying one around for the last several years, because you never know when you might meet the woman that you want to marry.

This season has seen the chasm between Michael Scott’s bizarre behaviour and the behaviour and beliefs of those around him start to shrink a little, from Andy Bernard’s immature romanticism in that confession – which mirrors many of Michael’s relationships with women – to Jim’s realisation a few times that Scott actions and ideas are sometimes easy to come across for him, quite without intention. It’s funny to see that it happens not because Michael is becoming more sensible, but because the other characters are revealed to be a bit more nuts.

So far, season 5 has been pretty good, though as with earlier season openers, it’s easy to note points where the format and conceit of the documentary approach creaks more and more under the requirements of story. It’s a tough issue – without that particular writing and filming style, the show isn’t the show, but the longer the show runs, the more the story will require inventive interpretation of how that format should work.

And of course, there’s still the question that nobody seems to ever ask: When the fuck is this documentary show supposed to be broadcast? One gets the feeling that it isn’t being shown as it’s filmed, or even shortly after it’s filmed, because there isn’t any passing reference to it, but, y’know, documentary series don’t get filmed indefinitely before airing – I’m almost certain of it.

Man, it’s New Year’s Eve as I type this. You’d think I’d be a bit less facetious, in the face of a brand new year!

Anyway, other points about these episodes:

Jim and Pam trying to cope with a distance relationship is sad to watch – and we’re hoping that as with the fraught season we just had expecting the show-writers to roll out the horrid conflict-generating cliches that sitcoms are infected with once they finally break the “will-they-won’t-they” paradigm, we’ll be pleasantly surprised when they get through it with only the sort of low-key drama you’d expect from these two characters.

Things we are dreading: Pam gets too big an ego about being in education and starts to find Jim boring. Jim gets disproportionately jealous about a misunderstanding involving another guy. Pam has an accidental – or not accidental – fling with another student. Or an academic.

There’s plenty of quiet drama to be had out of the fact that these two who have always been so close are now forced apart for a time – though that time already seems to be stretching out somewhat. But in one of these episodes, both get a little non-plussed that they are out of synch with each other – th0ugh by episode’s end it turns out that they actually aren’t – and that seems like it’d be enough to keep things interesting for the viewers without pulling out any of the big stupid showy relationship storylines.

Besides, there’s already the perhaps predictable affair that Angela is having with Dwight, behind Andy’s back. And that Phyllis knows about it – in 0504 – Crime Aid, Phyllis actually tries to help Dwight with his problems, and there’s a really sweet payoff to the episode, when Dwight shows his appreciation in a roundabout sort of way.

Michael and Holly start to date each other, and if, as I noted before, his relationship with Jan made Michael more human, this one makes us instead see the way he always behaved as being a little more human. It doesn’t always go swimmingly, though.

Especially because of Jan’s return. Jan Levinson has transformed from being a perfectly observed satire of the powerful but neurotic woman to being a perfectly played villain of the kind that most people would think was unrealistic, had they not actually known someone just like her. I’d go as far as to say that she is one of the best screen monsters ever created. I feel my sphincters – yes, all of them – tighten when she comes on screen.

This is good stuff. In the New Year, I’ll try to do slightly more together dedicated reviews of these episodes again.

No Heroics 0106

Tut.

Not much to say about this, beyond the fact that I finally got round to watching it, and I’m still a bit annoyed at the missed opportunities that it represented.

This episode was a pretty good one, but it just served to highlight the fact that in a six episode series, they only really had three episodes worth of jokes, and they only spread them across the last four episodes.

I liked the incidental stuff throughout the series, the characters were spot on, and performed convincingly, but it just lacked the jokes or flash to keep people interested – it feels a lot like the show creators were only really interested in keeping themselves amused, and it fell flat for anyone else.

There was a lot of talent in front of the camera in this series, and they managed to get some lovely guests in – in this episode, the ever cute and appealing Adam Buxton – but if they get another series, which seems doubtful, they really need to get a few more objective eyes on the output.

The IT Crowd 0305-0306

Look, we’re going to be going to a friend’s house in a couple of hours, and I need to wrap this up, so can we just agree that this season of “The IT Crowd” has, after a shaky first episode, gone on to be at least as awesome as the previous two?

If we’re dragging it out a little, can we admit that, while MySpace and Facebook might be easy targets for satire, nobody has got it quite as spot on as Graham Linehan did in 0305 – Friendface?

And that that episode also featured another one of his beautifully over-telegraphed, over-delivered gag set-pieces in Jen’s plot to use Moss as her husband-decoy at her school reunion?

That while Moss owned that particular episode for his performance as said husband, there was something hilarious about Roy’s Joker ex, and his disastrous decision to do everything that Jen told him to do in dealing with the girl?

And that, though we acknowledge that the final episode of the series, 0306 – Calendar Geeks, was hilarious, the only joke we really remember from it is the repeated and brilliantly infectious affliction of the boss-eyed, which may eclipse being leg-disabled as my new favourite disability?

Because all we’ve really taken away from it was that the girls on nine are really, really bloody gorgeous?

And that Graham Linehan should be knighted, or at least lauded, for services to comedy?

Can we agree on all that?

A friend of mine said yesterday that if he could have one superpower, it would be Matt Berry’s voice. Which was just a perfect statement that can’t be argued with, really.

Outnumbered 0207?

I’ve only caught a few odd bits of this series, and obviously have only noticed it quite late in the day, because this is the first full episode I’ve ever managed to watch.

I’m still processing it, really – it’s an odd series, in that it’s a fairly straightforward family sitcom that doesn’t make any claims to being edgy or groundbreaking, except that a lot of it seems to be created with the willingness improvise with the dialogue.

This is only really apparent in the discussions between the parents and their children – most especially the wonderfully precocious youngest child Karen. The parents themselves have fairly normal sitcom-marrieds lives, with some fairly typical and almost stereotypical problems, and if there’s one thing I’m not yet sure about with the show, it’s that the contrast between the scripted bits between them and the unscripted bits with the kids don’t always quite gel for me, and I find it a bit distracting.

It doesn’t help that the husband is played with charm but a close eye on sitcom tradition by Hugh Dennis – the most ordinary comedy actor in the world, who hasn’t ever quite parlayed his ability to impersonate into his ability to create empathic comedy the way Steve Coogan or Rob Brydon have. It’s at odds with the rest of the show, but to his credit, this never seems blatantly apparent – it just niggles at the back of my mind.

Still, I could happily watch Claire Skinner all day – as the hassled and bedraggled mum Sue, she’s totally understated and believable, but she’s also still pixie-like and attractive and yum.

Um.