THAT WAS THE BOX – July 2015 (Week One) | TV Reviews

 

‘THE ONLY WAY IS ESSEX‘ (ITVBE – ITV PLAYER)
 

Another under-par week in Essex, where not a lot happened. This series really needs to pull something spectacular out of the bag in order to be memorable, because at the moment it’s like watching paint dry. For example;
 

• Wooo! Vaz died his hair blue! Wooo!

• Lauren and Jessica facing off over the equally dull Dan Edgar was like watching two tins of beige paint having a clash in Homebase. Lauren and Jessica are far too classy to reduce themselves to fishwives, and Dan Edgar, really? Every time I see him, I need the name thing that comes up on-screen, to remember who he is.

• Lockie’s therapy sessions are obviously fake. For one, the therapist looks like a fortune teller and should be in some sort of seaside show with Pirate Pete; and two, things like therapy are confidential and no therapist worth their salt would allow a session to be filmed.

• And pleaaaasssee stop focusing on Jockey Jake and Comatose Chloe. They are so boring, and no one is interested in them. They argue about nothing, and Chloe seems to have moved into Lucy Mecklenburgh’s old bedroom. Anyone would think it was a studio set…

 

But there were a few funny bits;
 

• Gemma is killing off ‘The GC’. Apparently it was her alter-ego who was a brash, loud bitch and not Gemma herself. So she burnt clothes belonging to The GC and also a doll type thing. I give it a week.

• Chloe Sims has now joined Ferne in becoming a feminist, and apparently this involves going out with no make up on (I believe Emmeline Pankhurst had the same ethos) and I have to say, the tattooed make up certainly stood out on some of them. But Fern and Danielle looked fantastic. Especially Ferne who looked about sixteen without the slap.

• Lockie’s new bar looks like a public toilet from the 1950s.

• Lydia with a sore throat sounds like Danielle Armstrong. She only got the sore throat after attending Arg’s barbecue, so I shudder to think what bacteria he was putting on his bangers.

 

 

‘HUMANS‘ (CHANNEL 4 – ALL 4)
 

Here we are at episode three, and Anita was narrowly saved from being returned to her manufacturer, by Toby being knocked off his bike in an attempt to stop his mother driving off with his synthetic crush. Poor Anita got a bit broken, and a full inspection was required. Toby liked the thought of this, but as the main owner, it was dad, Joe who got the job of checking a naked Anita over. All the while, Joe was conflicted and had to keep reminding himself that the beautiful girl was not real. But is she? I still fear a sinister backstory will emerge where the sentient synths like Anita, Max, Leo, Fred and Niska were actually once human and their bodies were stolen.
 

I suspect the programme is sponsored by Apple, seeing as every device is by them. I also had to laugh when Niska stole a random woman’s clothes and they happened to fit her. Let’s be honest girls, we’re not the same dress size in two different shops, let alone stealing somebody else’s gear. But of course we have to suspend reality. Niska is a bit rogue. She killed the pervy punter last week, and this week was ready to plunge a knife into the hot guy she picked up in a bar, and only stopped when she realized the girly belongings in his house actually belonged to his little daughter.
 

Loving Rebecca Front. She sounds like a sat nav and moves like a Dalek. You could actually replace Davros with her, and no one would complain (there are a lot of Doctor Who references in this review). I’m also wondering if the female DI is a synth. She shows human emotions, but she moves in a really odd way. That’s the fun of ‘Humans‘, you start becoming suspicious of everyone and trusting no one and feeling you are being sucked into the Dystopia the characters inhabit. Now we’re left wondering who the mysterious Tom is that Laura wants no one knowing about, and will Leo and Max find Anita, seeing as stupid Matty stole Anita’s data and uploaded it to the net. I’m sure it will almost be all revealed next week.

 

 

‘BRITAIN BENEATH OUR FEET‘ (BBC ONE – BBC IPLAYER)
 

Dallas Campbell is such a cool name. I pictured, for some reason, a crusty, old Scottish man who looked like the actor Brian Cox. Instead, Dallas is young and foxy in a sort of physicist Brian Cox ‘isn’t this amazing’ way. This new series of his looks at the world beneath our feet, the infrastructure of Britain that keeps us going. We learnt that The Shard – Britain’s tallest building (and a building I take for granted because I see it every single flipping day) is built on a 100 metal piles, 53m into the ground. The reason for this is that London’s ground is made of clay, which means we can’t have the sort of skyscrapers America has, because the ground simply couldn’t support them. The programme uses clever CGI effects, showing the world as if the ground were glass and we were looking up at the trains and buses, and in a bit of a pervy way, up women’s skirts! (they did not show this). From The Shard, Dallas then took us to Gaping Gill (sounds like a porn star) in Yorkshire, which is a scarily deep waterfall that goes into hundreds of metres into the ground. Dallas, like the intrepid hero he is, descended into it, and it was quite easy to see why people once thought it was the gateway to hell.
 

Highlight of the programme for me was when Dallas went down into the London sewers and at first was just greeted with the sight of the old river Fleet running along, but further on, he came face to face with a ‘Fatberg’, an horrific mass of cooking fat*, excrement, worms and goodness knows what else. He wretched at the stink, vomited and pulled hilarious faces, and it was one of those times I was really glad that we don’t have Smell-O-Vision, and I wasn’t eating my tea when I was watching it.
 

I was unnerved when he went down a coal mine. I have an irrational fear of coal mines (I suspect I was a miner in a previous life who probably suffered a horrible death) and when Dallas tried his hand at coal mining, I had to watch with one eye covered. He then took part in a far more pleasant task in helping a woman do a radar survey of an old oak tree to create a 3D image of its roots. Seen from underneath, the roots of a tree really do like a monster from ‘Doctor Who‘.
 

I tailed off a bit at the end, when he visited a pot ash mine underneath the North Sea. That was quite interesting in itself, as it was like a city hundreds of metres under ground, but when they started wittering on about looking for dark matter and what it’s made of, I lost interest. But over all the show was interesting, but I feel it was Dallas’s enthusiasm that was keeping the programme going as opposed to the subject.
 

*don’t pour your cooking fat down the sink!