Merlin – the whole series reviewed

On Den of Geek I’ve been reviewing Merlin for my sins. Here is the complete list of my Merlin Reviews.

Episode 1 review Episode 2 review Episode 3 review Episode 4 review Episode 5 review Episode 6 review Episode 7 review Episode 8 review Episode 9 review Episode 10 review Episode 11 review Episode 12 review Episode 13 review

Ssssh....Merlin is pants

Spooks: Code 9

I’d love to tell you that when Spooks: Code 9 finished last night I penned a missive to the BBC demanding it return. But I didn’t.

Here’s my reviews of all six epsiodes:

Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Episode 5
Episode 6

It’s on DVD from today, amazingly!

BBC super-sizes Marcello Lippi

While surfing the BBC website yesterday I came across this muck-up! I’m not a big fan of their revamp, but it shows that they’re big Lippi fans, and aren’t sure what the word ‘resolution’ means. Twits. Click through for the full picture…it’s BIG!

Be afraid! The Singing Ringing Tree…

A chance conversation unlocked childhood terror for me, which I put to some use in an article on Den of Geek here.

If you’re feeling especially brave here is some of the bladder weakening TV event for children from YouTube.

Blue Peter in cat naming scandal

This is a great story, and one I had to comment on. The Media Guardian is running a story here that could signal heads to roll at the BBC children’s stalwart Blue Peter. Having been caught telling lies to their viewers about the winners of competitions, and fined £50,000, it looks like they’ve been up to their tricks yet again!
This time it was the time honoured Blue Peter tradition of pet naming, where the most popular one submitted by the viewers is chosen. In January of 2006 Blue Peter got a cat, which was duly named ‘Socks’. But it’s now being reported that that wasn’t the name that won! What the Media Guardian hasn’t got is the name that was rejected, for being ‘unsuitable’, but according to them it wasn’t ‘Socks’.
Oh dear. If true it seems that Blue Peter has an issue with lying, specifically to it’s main audience children. I’m now concerned that my entire childhood is based on falsehoods, where smiling presenters told my lots that wasn’t actually true. Tell me it’s not true Blue Peter? Or at least tell me what the cat should of been called, so I can have a good laugh!

Update: The BBC has fessed up to this any more stupid lying about competitions on radio! Apparently the real name of the cat should have been Cookie, as in the Sesame Street monster. Apparently the grown-ups who run Blue Peter decided they didn’t like that or any of the other children’s ideas, and so made ‘Socks’ up themselves. That’s not having much consideration for your viewers, in my book. More pathetic apologies will be issued on the show when they get a new kitten, which we’ve been reliably old will be called ‘Cookie’, as in the common name in American for a biscuit. Funny isn’t it? We tell children not to tell lies because ‘they’ll catch up with you’ and then when we become adults we tell porkies about stupid stuff! I think all involved should have to return their Blue Peter badges, and then be kicked where it hurts by Valerie Singleton.

Customer Service – some get it, others don’t

I’ve had one of those experiences this morning that entirely lifts your day, which is curious because it started with a very expensive piece of my kit going wrong.
Back in November I bought a 42 inch Toshiba Regza TFT TV, which is amazing. Yes Sky looks like the best of Enid Blyton sent through a wood chipper, but that’s Sky’s fault not the Tosh. But shortly after Christmas is developed a minor fault where a thin black line appeared down the centre of the screen. At first we tried to ignore it, but eventually I decided to get it sorted out, as the TV came from John Lewis is a five year warranty.
This is doing Customer Services Right:

Rang with the problem, told that the TV engineering company would ring me tomorrow.
Engineers rang as promised and said they’d be here on Thursday.
8.30am Thursday they rang to give me a two hour windows (9-11) that the engineer would call
9.20am Engineer arrived, assessed problem
9.30am Engineer called John Lewis arranged replacement screen for Friday and collection of broken screen, with same early call and two hour window promised.
9.35am He left, leaving me with complete confidence that I’m going to get my screen fixed, and that I’m not going to be without a TV in the meanwhile. Result!

And now to bring balance to the universe, how to do Customer Services wrong!

Saw a wardrobe in Homebase that I wanted, tried to buy it, couldn’t…it was the last one.
Homebase sales staff said I could buy it online and get it delivered, so went home.
Went online and found item, £25 more…but thought what the hell and ordered it.
After the order was taken the web page told me that I would be rung and a delivery date arranged.
A month later no phone call received, so I sent an email asking the situation.
Automated response, no reply
Two weeks later I sent an email to customer services at Homebase asking why they didn’t reply to emails.
I got another automated response it read…
Thank you for your enquiry. Your email has been given a reference …
We aim to answer all emails within 2 days.
That was 27 days ago. No reply.
Rang Homebase two weeks ago and asked where the item was.
Promised on the phone that the item would be with me on the 1st of September, at the very latest.
On the 1st of September received a letter explaining the item was out of stock and that it would take longer, no delivery date provided.

If anyone from Homebase is reading this, YOU ARE CRAP! (and no, I’m not expecting a reply)

But they’re not alone.

I noticed that the pieces I wrote on the BBC Series Jekyll, so I thought it might be of interest to my readers to review the DVD boxset.
So I contacted the BBC on that basis.
The BBC press office replied,’If you are a journalist, we are considering your inquiry and will respond as soon as we can.’
Well I am a journalist, and they haven’t after 3 weeks.
I think what galls me more here is that I’m indirectly paying for them to be rubbish!

And last but not least, Pipex

I’ve posted a number of times about my fun with their ADSL service, which after years of being excellent went pair shaped about two months ago.
I’m not going to repeat the entire sordid tale here again, but I’ve now had at least two Pipex representatives promise to ring me back but never did. My ADSL still doesn’t function like it once did, and they’ve ignored at least two emails I’ve sent.
When I get cable in, and then tell them I’m terminating my contract I’m sure they’ll have plenty to say, but when I’ve got a problem they’re less interested it seems. Customer service is something that they’re heard about, but not really understood it seems.

iPlayer – it doesn’t get better

I’ve been trying to use iPlayer for a while now, and instead of getting better it’s actually getting worse. Last week was a horrible mess where content appeared, then disappeared, the reappeared and still didn’t work. For example; Doctor Who on the 16th was on the lists but you couldn’t download it, and that was true an entire week later when it was removed after it’s 7 day slot. In 7 days they couldn’t get a single file and put it in the right place! I wouldn’t mind but the amount of material their currently releasing is very small, if given the source data I could output the conversions needed for each day alone with a couple of computers. I presume the BBC has more that two computers…
But there are other issues. I noticed today that they’d listened to their critics a little, and upped the bit rate/resolution of the shows! Hooray! Oh, hang on…the person who converted them didn’t realise they weren’t normal aspect ratio, but widescreen, and so they won’t play correctly in full screen! Doh! And they’ve also started to put links in for shows that are being released tomorrow, but when you click on them nothing happens, so it’s entirely pointless as you can’t order a show to download in advance.
I tried to mention some of these issues on the BBC forum, but it won’t accept my password, and tells me that my birth date is incorrect when I try to change it, something I’m unlikely to get wrong.
I’m sure the BBC will eventually stop making amateurish mistakes with iPlayer, but I’m wondering if anyone will be using it by then.

iPlayer is messed up again!

The BBC iPlayer is messed up again. Today I wanted to download Mock the Week, which was on while I was drinking vino and watching Bourne Ultimatum courtesy of ASUS in London last night. But no, it’s not there, is neither is most of the content for the 16th. If people start expecting this to work, and it does this rubbish they won’t be very keen on the BBC spending their license money on it, will they? I know it’s a beta, but some of the underlying technology just doesn’t appear to be reliable, from a technical standpoint. BBC sort it out, now!

Empathy – BBC Drama

Coming hot on the heals of Jekyll, the BBC has now released Empathy, which they describe as a ‘Supernatural Thriller’. I watched the first episode last night, and it wasn’t bad. It features the excellent, if a little typecast, Stephen Moyer as ex-convict, but actually-a-nice-person Jimmy Collins. Who at the start of this story is released from prison to an uncertain future. What he didn’t expect was to start experiencing visions when he touches people, or objects, which he does from the moment he walks out the gate.
This leads him to become a suspect in a murder investigation, when his brushes past a person connected indirectly to the death of a young women. Assuming his knowledge of the crime is first hand, the Police lock him up again, before a second murder proves he’s not responsible. Best acting performances go to Mr Moyer and the excellent Amber Beattie as his estranged daughter Amy. My only concern is that so far this appears to be a complete conceptual lift of the classic Stephen King novel, movie and TV show ‘The Dead Zone’.
This looks very like a pitch for an entire series, but I see only one 90 minute production so far. Perhaps if it comes back we’ll get him shaking the hand of Gordon Brown yet.
Overall, entertaining enough if not massively original so far.

BBC Click – the Gates Interview

It’s become a ritual thing for me these days, watching ‘Click’. It reminds me of my childhood, when I peeked from behind the sofa at the monstrous creations the BBC costume department could fashion for a couple of quid on Dr. Who. Although entirely horrified, I had to watch. And for me, a technical person, Click is exactly that. It’s also something of a journalistic litmus, where I can check that in the past week my output hasn’t dumbed down to Click’s level, or became as mired in mediocrity.
To show what a glutton for punishment I can be, I downloaded the latest instalment using BBC’s iPlayer Beta, which managed to crash IE 6 twice before it would allow me to select the show to download. It took a while after selection to arrive, so I had plenty of time to get comfy and arm myself with a cushion for the worst excesses.
And it wasn’t long before I reached for that cushion. This episode is practically a wall-to-wall advert for Microsoft, who I’ve noticed have become big chums with the BBC recently. The opening story is about a Microsoft project in the US to completely take over school and run it as an IT project. In it we where informed that due to the cashless cafeteria system the individual calorific content of each child could be monitored! Hey, why stop there why not just chip the kids?
But better was to come when the later half of the show was taken up with a Bill Gates interview. So given that this is one of the most powerful men in the world, and that Microsoft is the most influential companies you’d expect a least a few interesting questions. But alas, this was a PR junket for how Microsoft wants to be seen as nice to kids across the world, and make a better future for everyone. Then seemingly at random the interviewer threw in a question about Moore’s Law, which Gates brushed off as stupid, which is strangely where he and I would actually agree. And, after a few more ‘you’re so disgustingly rich, it must be cool’ questions they where done! Well actually they talked for longer, which is available online…I rushed to watch that, hoping at least one challenging question might surface. Sadly the extended version doesn’t. Where was the questions about Vista, and how it’s not making the inroads they expected? About Open Source, and how Microsoft is positioning itself? About the EU and being fined? About how we in the UK get to bay 70% more for the same software as the Americans? About the millions Microsoft spends lobbying the American political system, and who they’ll back for the next President?
And, a zillion other things many people who like to hear Bill talk about.
So once again the BBC let a genuine chance to actually get a real story go west, while the Microsoft PR machine called the shots and presented it’s promotional material. ‘Click’ I guess, is the sound made when you switch something off…if I could only do that!

BBC iPlayer – not impressed so far

Like an idiot I signed up for the BBC iPlayer Beta, and today they sent me an email inviting me to take part. So far I can’t say I’m overly impressed. Given the build up that the BBC has given this service, the reality appears to be a complete mess. First when you try to use it you find that the BBC is joined, Dubya style, to the hip with Microsoft. And as a result insists that your using Windows XP, Media Player and Internet explorer. I have all those things but I still got a red cross because I had the audacity to use Firefox to go the the iPlayer website. Then after putting my iPlayer account and password in at least four different time I was told that they where ‘experiencing  technical difficulties’, before I eventually got the download install files. After I’d done that I was asked for my name and password again, except these weren’t the first ones but some new BBC account ones, so I had to register again. After that exercise I select a show, one of the BBC’s output in the last 7 days, and watched while it downloaded at a snails pace. 10 minutes later it’s done 22mb of 350Mb  total, by the time this arrives the presenters might have retired or died.
If they can’t allow more than 7 days to watch something, or do it in a manner that doesn’t require the patience of Job to get working, I can’t see there is much future in this. It needs to be much slicker, faster and less reliant on being a fan of Microsoft. But then you’d think they’d know that.

Jekyll Episode 6 – revelations

Gosh, what a twisted mind Steven Moffat has! And, I say that in the nicest possible way. The ultimate episode of Jekyll aired just 11 hours ago, and I’m still trying to digest everything he managed to pack into an explosive 60 minutes.

So many unexpected outcomes, developments and plot pirouettes, where to begin? First I’d like to say that despite my misgivings about Episode 4, overall this was a taught exercise that griped the viewer with it’s clever conundrums and sleek performances. Top of the acting accolades must go to James Nesbitt, who moves transformation unhindered between Dr. Jackman and Mr. Hyde with consummate ease. On a least a half dozen occasions, he had a least one leg in ‘Jekyll the Panto’, but managed to stop himself sliding into utterly wild farce. I can’t wait for any Hyde out-takes, I bet they’re hilarious. The other solid performance came from Gina Belman, who’s character obviously revelled in the idea of no-consequence adultery as a side order to the mayhem. Denis Lawson did a sterling job as the duplicitous Syme’s, especially where prior to his demise he tried to justify his actions to Jackman/Hyde.

So back to Episode 6, was it the finale we’d wanted? To a degree yes, but it slightly took it’s foot off the accelerator in the final stretch. The opening was a masterpiece of genre manipulation, where we go back a year in time and see the organisation that pursued Jekyll finding the toughest mercenary they can find, and installing him and his highly tuned troops in their top secret location. He’s built up as a complete psychopath, killing his own men in training. We then flip forward to the main time line to see Hyde dispatch him like he’s nothing, 4 minute intro – 2 second death. At this point I was already chuckling, Hyde like, at what other film conventions Moffat potentially might mutilate.
It wasn’t a long wait. I don’t think Moffat likes child actors, perhaps he finds creating their dialogue tiresome, or something. Cue two matching miniature metal caskets, like the one they placed Jackman in, and that’s them and their sticky fingers sorted for the majority of the proceedings. Mrs Jackman wasn’t too happy about this, as you might imagine, and reminded anyone who’d listed then her husband was coming, and he wouldn’t be happy either. No shit, Mrs Jackman!
Normally in these dramas unless it serves the plot the revelations are held for the penultimate, or final scenes, but their where so many in this piece they soon came thick and fast. The nice grey haired old lady re-appeared and helped Mrs Jackman escape, guiding her to the secret 7th basement floor, where bad things have been happening. Here she see the failed genetic attempts to make Hyde, using DNA they’ll collected years before. So was Jackman another successful clone? Err…amazingly no. He was an throwback, a direct descendent of Jekyll, from a line fathered by Hyde. But, and this was really the unexpected bit, they’d realised early on that the Hyde effect was something of a binary weapon. It required Jekyll’s DNA, and Mrs Jackman’s presence to work. So realising they had a ‘Jekyll’ they got hold of poor housemaid Alice’s DNA, and made themselves a clone catalyst – Mrs Jackman.
That tied up so many loose ends in one fell swoop, and less than 30 minutes in, it then let you wondering what Mr Moffat was holding back, and it was a doozie.
But by now I was missing Hyde, and his return wasn’t far away. His first manifestation is to invade the minds of everyone in the building, sending them an unusually polite message inviting them to run away, or die. Unsurprisingly really, some did run.
Syme’s is the first to die, and in a somewhat fitting manner, leaving only the horrible American women, the cancer riddled head of security and a handful of mercenaries to dispatch. They all meet on the 7th floor for a final confrontation. Before this we’ve given one crucial piece of the puzzle about Hyde and Jackman, where it’s explained that it’s possible for one of them to be injured, which the other doesn’t experience, conveniently. I’d of been more comfortable with this information had it been revealed earlier in the series, rather than jack-in-the-box’d on us now.
Unexpectedly only one other then person dies, and it’s Hyde perforated with machine gun bullets, everyone else lives, including Jackman bizarrely!
Again expectations where built up, paraded, and then slaughtered in entirely unexpected ways. This tangent had me more than slightly suspicious, that Moffat’s original intention was to have a much darker and disturbing ending. But that senior BBC production, having seen the completed episodes held out the carrot of a second series, if he could keep Jackman alive. This may, or may not be the case, but enough hints where packed into the last ten minutes to suggest it’s at least a possibility, if not an absolute certainty.
Anyway, Moffat has one last flourish in his magic hat to pull out, which involves the old lady and the American women, which I won’t spoil. But it ends the series on more of a cliffhanger than a resolution, encouraging me further to think Jekyll 2 is on the cards.
Overall, not as weird and twisted as Episode 5, but jolly entertaining all the same. Somehow I doubt this is the last we’ll see of Jackman, Hyde or Nesbitt. But I must stop writing now, their seems to be something wrong with the electrics today, the lights just flickered…

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Jekyll Episode 5 – crazy stuff!!!!

After the unnatural dip that episode 4 represented, Jekyll returned this week with a real attention grabber, the full impact of which I’m still coming to terms with. I’m tempted to work through this one blow by blow, but don’t want to bore anyone. So I’ll take the plot main points and flesh a few out scenes. In retrospect, this entire episode is a homage, with minor and major nods to a few classic films along the way. What it does is emulate the Taranatino flip in From Dusk Till Dawn, building the tension in dramatic fashion before flourishing into high camp and comedy.

In the first two thirds is built about a whole new revelation about the origins of Hyde, when the cask is opened to reveal him and not the good Dr. Not that this was a surprise, as we’re told his incarceration would ‘fix’ him in one personality.

Hyde emerges and then undergoes a series of visions, presented almost as VR, where he can experience Jackman’s life in small but rewindable chunks. ‘We’ve got Sky+ in here!’, he announces and later,’I’ve found the Adult Channel’, when he discovers an intimate moment from the Jackman’s past. The explanation for this I found massively unsatisfactory, the resident science geek explains that now that Jackman’s personality is ‘dead’, Hyde is now reclaiming the brain real-estate occupied by those memories. It’s a common modern analogy, but the brain isn’t a hard drive waiting to be wiped and reclaimed, as suggested. Perhaps ‘Click’ advised on this part.

But when the techno-geek in me was about to blast writer Steve Moffat, he made me forget this mumbo jumbo by doing something totally unexpected. Hyde encounters a memory from the original Jackman, or rather the original Jekyll in the Victorian era. What? How does that work? In it we see him meet Robert Louis Stevenson, author of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, to discuss the publication and it’s yet to be defined ending. Stevenson is ably played by Moffat pal and also another Dr. Who writer, Matt Gatiss, who presumably walked off his Dr. Who production onto this one.

In this scene Stevenson pushes Jekyll on the exact nature of the potion that transforms him, writing down its parts on a note so that they can be confirmed.
The note is burned…but Hyde has VR memory, rewinds observes the plot twist, and what a twist it is! Stevenson’s premise is that there is no ‘potion’, and the true source of the transformation is ‘the girl’, which as you’ve already guessed is the previous version of Mrs Jackman. At this point I was having a significant WTF moment, because as strong a reaction I’ve had to sexy women, I yet to experience extreme personality modifications and psychopathic tendencies. Perhaps I’m just not meeting the right types.

The problem is that this doesn’t actually explain why Jackman and Jekyll look the same, or Jekyll’s housemaid Alice and Mrs Jackman, other than for the audience to follow what’s going on, which frankly might be a push at this point. We go on then to see the Victorian Hyde killing ‘Alice’, who he sees as his only real threat. This is a complete setup for the flip sequence, where we’re lead to believe modern Hyde will kill Claire Jackman, and her kids are brought into the lab for good jeopardy measure.

At this point the tension had been cranked up, although it was slightly blown by a the preceding sequence which referenced the sorts of horror movies that rely on supposedly intelligent people being in a room with something they know that’s dangerous, but decide to totally ignore.

And then…the flip…Suddenly Hyde’s a nice reasonable person who wants to escape and help the Jackman’s to do so too. Claire doesn’t buy this, and I’m with her. It also requires that the TV monitoring is intentionally turned off by the organisation holding them in a Dr. Evil, ‘No no no, I’m going to leave them alone and not actually witness them dying, I’m just gonna assume it all went to plan’, moment.

Then the proceeds descend into high farce with a very obvious nod to Terminator 2, where Claire lays down the ‘no killing’ rules to Hyde, who then follows them in his own inimitable way. It’s quite funny, but all the tension that Moffat created earlier on is vented into space, and it’s never entirely reclaimed. I’m not even going to mention what happens to the now superfluous-to-the-plot women held in the basement, because it’s downright silly. But the Claire and kids are ultimately separated from Hyde, and he is left shouting ‘Why am I not Superman’ on the roof of the building in frustration, as they’re whisked away by the power dressing American in a helicopter.

This was the point where I came back onside, as the idea that without Jackman the Hyde character isn’t the real deal was great. As was the return of Jackman’s personality, “Daddy’s Back’, and the merging of the egos into one superhuman but rational being. It could have been me, but it looked at this time like one of his eye’s was normal while the other was ‘Hyde’.

Having had the episode redeemed at the end, Moffat then had all his hard worked trashed by the BBC, who blipverted at least four big plot points from the final chapter in their trailer. Twits.

Overall, the episode was massively uneven if plenty of fun, possibly the most entertaining so far, if totally unbelievable in places. It got so camp at one point I thought it was degenerating into a pilot for a 1970s American TV show, where superhuman Hyde uses his powers for good, fighting crime for a well funded but secret foundation. It never quite got there, but it was on that greasy slope on a few occasions.

Can’t wait for episode 6 though, even if the idiots at BBC promotions tried to spoil it so effectively for us.

Teflon Tony does it again!

It was entirely predictable outcome to the Cash-for-honours enquiry. The Police wanted to prosecute, but the Crown Prosecution Service didn’t. Perhaps we should rename them The Crown None-Prosecution service? What is really annoying is the number of MP, Ministers and Lords appearing on TV brandishing words like ‘exonerated’, and suggesting the Police damaged the political system by doing their jobs!
They’ve quickly forgotten that a significant number of peerages magically transpired after donations to political parties (LAB and CON), for which no explanation has been presented than ‘coincidence’. That the Labour created legislation making the giving of money ‘transparent’ and then all parties circumvented them by using loans instead. The fact it was the same people getting around the rules as made them leaves an unpleasant taste in my mouth. But that’s now been conveniently forgotten.

I makes me wonder if Mr Blair planned this mess all along, for others to use as ammunition for the public funding of political parties. So they’re not ‘tainted’ by dealing with fund raising and honours.

Lord Levy’s picture says it all, really. We broke the rules, closed ranks, lied and got away with it, again!
Politics in the UK wasn’t damaged by the investigation, it was damaged by the political system that isn’t accountable, doesn’t know where the line is, and want to be cosy with the rich and famous for all the fringe benefits.
I just hope ‘Inspector incensed of the Yard’, leaks all they did find out and puts a few people in the sticky stuff, where they deserve to be!