THAT WAS THE BOX – December 2015 (Week Three) | TV Reviews

 

‘PEEP SHOW‘ (CHANNEL 4 – ALL 4)
 

For me, the ninth series of ‘Peep Show‘ has proven why, unlike our Transatlantic cousins, we don’t have many sitcoms that run and run and run. Some of my favourites (and I won’t include ‘Fawlty Towers‘ – was never much of a fan) ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme‘, ‘The Inbetweeners‘, ‘Phone Shop‘, they all only had three series. One of my all time favourites, and I suspect is probably long forgotten, is ‘Help!‘ An 80s sitcom about three Liverpool scallies. I loved it as a teenager and because it only ran for two series, it didn’t get stale and it has remained in my memory. I think maybe ‘Peep Show‘ should have given up the ghost at the end of series eight. The parting shot was how pathetic Jez and Mark are, bickering over Dobby and pushing each other into an electric fence. Series nine ended in pretty much the same way. Mark had burnt his bridges with April, by allowing Jez and Super Hans to kidnap her husband, Angus.
 

Jez had lied and said to boyfriend Joe that he was actually turning thirty-nine and not forty, and when he revealed that he no longer had the energy for constant sex and partying, Joe dumped him and went back to Megan, his girlfriend. Super Hans went off to Macedonia after being dumped by his wife for….well, being Super Hans.
 

And so, with the guys now reached middle age, we find ourselves exactly where we were back at series one. Mark and Jez stuck together in their eternal hell, and Super Hans being a waste of space. Albeit this time in Eastern Europe. The difference being now is that Mark has no job, after being fired and replaced by Geoff (who Sophie ran off with) and he also has his son, Ian, who he doesn’t seem to care about very much. Maybe Olivia Coleman was only available for a couple of episodes, but for me it would have been funnier if Mark had been sacked and replaced by a slightly sozzled Sophie.
 

There’s no doubting that ‘Peep Show‘ was one of the funniest and most innovative sitcoms of the last twenty years. The beauty lie not in the way it’s filmed from a POV perspective, but rather the voice overs, revealing the dark, inner thoughts of the two main characters. Without this, Mark would have seemed like a loveable bumbler who was unlucky in love, and Jez just a bit of a playful rogue who never grew up. But hearing their internal dialogue we saw how Mark was actually a nasty piece of work who would do practically anything to get his own way, and Jez spent his life clinging onto whatever situation he was in, by wriggling his way out of trouble with lies and charm.
 

I sort of wished it had ended on a positive note, with the lads finding happiness, but that was never what ‘Peep Show‘ was about. Mark and Jez were always going to be the odd couple. That staple of British comedy, the two people stuck together who actually dislike a lot of things about each other. But series nine was so lacklustre that I feel as though I won’t miss them because they had gone as far as they could go. Mark’s infatuation with April was just a repeat of how he’d been with Sophie and Dobby, and Jez’s romance with Joe felt a little out-of-place, because I’d always got the feeling Jez’s heart lay with women, while his dabbles with guys had been more out of curiosity, so when Joe captured his heart, I thought it would have been the real thing. But at the end of the day, Jez was a lying, selfish shit like he’d always been.
 

I hope there isn’t a series ten or a Christmas special or a film or anything like that. A lot of us have grown into middle-age along with the El Dude Brothers. We know it isn’t any fun and that we will spend the next twenty years hankering after our youth, after which we will spend twenty years wishing we were middle-aged again, and we don’t need these two to remind us. Let’s remember the high points of ‘Peep Show‘ and the great supporting characters like Johnson, Big Suze, Sophie and Dobby and let’s keep it there. Maybe they should revive the ‘Inbetweeners‘ and all us middle-aged ‘Peep Show‘ viewers can watch and wish we were at university again.

 

 

‘THE BEST OF BAD TV – THE 70s‘ (CHANNEL 5 – DEMAND 5)
 

Channel Four did something very similar to this recently, and I have to say theirs was a more honest, if not as much fun approach. They had a mixture of people who were not born at the time, openly watching dreadful things from the not so distant past, and commenting with the expected horror, and people who were there at the time. This show had the usual vox pops of people clearly born in the 1980s commenting on things that were on TV in 1973 that even I don’t remember and I was born in the decade! Even so, it was more enjoyable and less po-faced than C4’s version, with a quirky year by year look at what was popular in the decade style forgot.
 

I had no knowledge about British sci-fi drama UFO, except that Benedict Cumberbatch’s mum was in it. What I didn’t know was that it looked like ‘Star Trek‘ made with a budget of six shillings and five pence. Although, ‘Blake’s 7‘, which came at the end of the decade didn’t look much better. I wasn’t allowed to watch ‘Blake’s 7‘ because my mum felt Sci-Fi programmes were a waste of space (except ‘Dr Who‘) and I remember being gutted because I thought Avon was hot, in that way you think people are hot when you’re only eight. And how gutted I am that I was born in 1971 and got to miss ‘Boomph with Becker‘, an exercise programme for people over sixty, hosted by a women who is clearly pissed and almost as scary as Fanny Craddock (no one is as scary as Fanny Craddock).
 

It was reassuring to hear that, like me, Shappi Khosadi never trusted Jemima on ‘Play School‘. I always thought there was something rather maleficent about that rag doll. Naturally, anyone reading this article under the age of thirty-five will have no idea what I’m talking about. I swear it’s a miracle us 40-50 year-olds aren’t mentally damaged by the TV we had to watch as kids. The original Bungle from ‘Rainbow‘ looked like the sort of creature that would jump out of the woods and murder you, in a cheap horror film from 1982. Topov the Monkey from ‘Pipkins‘ seemed to have some sort of skin disorder. There was this weird thing called ‘The Feathered Serpent‘ which I don’t recall at all, but was all about the Aztecs and how they tortured people, and scariest of all was ‘Jigsaw‘ with Nosy Bonk. I can remember being terrified of him, and even now that horrific face looks like the sort of mask serial killers wear (google it if you don’t rememeber).
 

Naturally, seeing as ‘Churchill’s People‘ was on in 1975, I don’t remember that either, but even though it was a serious history of the British Isles, it looked more like ‘Blackadder‘. ‘I Claudius‘ had a scene where John Hurt cut out his sister’s unborn child and ate it (it was also his child) and Christopher Biggins played Nero and bonked his mother. And people think ‘Game of Thrones‘ is innovative. BBC2 was doing it 40 years ago!
 

Also shocking was the sort of things people were allowed to get away with on prime time TV. Tony Curtis having a rather unfortunate wardrobe malfunction in the shorts area in ‘The Persuaders‘. Marc Bolan clearly just back from indulging in a little bit of marching powder on his kids show. Noel Gordon from ‘Crossroads‘ breaking the fourth wall in the Christmas edition of the show, singing to the audience and forever dismissing anyone’s ideas that the thing was real (although no one would be that deluded). The ‘Two Ronnies‘ blacking up, and Jason King telling a woman that he uses rape as a way of getting women to comply with him. These were crazy times folks and the craziest show of all was 321. Even now, as a forty-four year-old woman, I have no real idea what that programme was about, and the funniest line of the whole programme came from Joe Pasquale who reckons the questions to 321 must have been written by Alan Turing.

 

 

‘LUTHER‘ (BBC1 – BBC IPLAYER)
 

To my dismay I missed most of the third series, for various reasons, so I was a little unsure where it left off. Luckily, we had a recap last night, whereby ‘Luther‘ was framed for the murder of his colleague, Ripley, and Alice Morgan his nemesis/soulmate helped clear his name. Well, that’s what I gathered anyway.
 

Series four picked up where Luther has become a recluse, living by the sea, wearing a Parka (more of that later) and standing on the edge of cliffs, just like back in London he would like to stand on top of buildings, like a superhero (more of that too) surveying his metropolis. When two former colleagues, Bloom and Lane, turn up and inform him that Alice has drowned in Belgium, Luther is a broken man. He needs something to help him get his mojo back, and lo and behold that comes in the form of a deranged serial killer who eats people’s hearts and leaves wallets belong to the next victim, at the scene. Poor old Bloom goes to investigate the grisly murder of a cannibal fetishist, who has been decapitated and left in lye, and when he approaches the fridge, thinking it contains the missing head and hands; the fridge blows up and kills him. The scene where Bloom walked towards the fridge was as suspenseful as any Hollywood thriller and it came as a surprise when it blew up, because we were all expecting him to open it and find grisly things in there.
 

The death of a former colleague prompts Luther to go to one of his hideaways where he keeps a rack of the famous coats (like Sherlock, he has a lot of coats), grey shirts and red ties. The Parka is discarded and he emerges looking like a superhero, striding through The Factory (the police station) ready to tackle the case. We wonder if there is going to be a bit of sexual tension between him and DI Lane, a petite, attractive, rather posh girl. But it soon transpires she’s gay so we know Luther’s love interest isn’t going to be her. At the end he was approached by a woman who claimed to have a message from Alice, and seeing as she is played by the very pretty although unfortunately named Laura Haddock, I suspect she will be the one to catch Luther’s eye.
 

‘Luther‘ is pretty dark, there’s no doubt about that. If you like TV detective shows like ‘Midsommer Murders‘, you will hate ‘Luther‘. Whilst ‘Midsommer‘ can be gruesome, it is always quite stupid and light-hearted and the crimes are usually motivated by greed or jealousy or revenge. Luther deals with the real head-cases. In this series, a geeky computer guy who has fitted spyware in hundreds of homes, giving him access to lots of potential victims. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that ‘Luther‘ could be turned into a film, just like that. It’s suspenseful, the beautiful Idris Elba is now a household name and the Americans love him. I would actually love to see Luther tackle some derange red-neck serial killer from a trailer park in the Deep South. Let’s face it, John Luther is a superhero. He could fight crime anywhere he wanted.

 

And so, with a review rather too filled with mentions of serial killers, I bid you adieu to 2015. Thanks for reading my witterings each week and I’m sure 2016 will bring just as much weird and rubbish TV as this year has.
 

Have a wonderful Christmas and New Year and I will be back on 3rd January to dish out my awards!!

 

Merry Christmas!