What I've Been Watching: 18th November

Without a show so devoid of intelligence as Doctor Who on the box to get me riled, I tend not to be able to find the passion to write frequent reviews. I have a tendency to be able to find a lot more to say about the negative aspects of a programme than the positives. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that.

Nevertheless, for the sake of giving this blog a point outside of complaining about what I still claim is the greatest TV show of all time, let me take you through the shows I’ve been watching recently.

·         Never Mind the Buzzcocks (BBC Two). Buzzcocks is a strange old beast. Ever since Simon Amstell vacated the host’s chair about four years ago, it’s been stumbling around somewhat awkwardly in search of a point. Having been watching old episodes of the show under Amstell and his predecessor, Mark Lamarr, it’s fairly clear what the show is supposed to be: a vehicle to rip into Z-List celebrity culture, and to take the unpleasant wannabe megastars of the world down a peg or two. However, after four series of increasingly unsuitable guest hosts in a fairly transparent attempt to ape Have I Got News For You, there’s the distinct feeling in the air that Buzzcocks has become the very thing it set out to bring down, with a whole load of irritating gimmicks and far too much airtime given to brain-meltingly irritating musicians. They’re clearly scraping the bottom of the barrel with this series, with a heavy reliance on rappers with silly names such as Example, Ne-Yo and Wretch 32.
(I’d like to point out that I’m not making a judgement on the quality of their music- this isn’t a judgement on whether they’re a valid guest because they’re legitimate artists, this is about whether one can be a valid guest when one seems to have no idea what the actual show is about.)
The gimmicks are now wildly out of control, with the actual quiz elements apparently completely disconnected from reality: the identity parade is literally now “spot the ordinary person who once met a famous person,” while each episode has a round based entirely on one of the guest host’s personality traits (fuelling the ego trip even more). This reached its nadir with this week’s badly misjudged trick of having Richard Ayoade be absurdly nice to everyone on the panel. An interesting idea to invert the most famous aspect of the show, but on a programme already suffering a severe identity crisis, the episode was left to flounder around helplessly, which only worsened when supreme total plank Ed Sheeran decided to open his mouth.

The thing with Buzzcocks is that you can't always tell what Noel is thinking, the better to contrast with the blunt honesty of Phill and the host. But I'd like to think he was as irritated by the misogynistic little weasel as I was. (Again, not a judgement on his talents as a musician; I've never heard any of his songs. And I don't want to.)

All in all, the episode became a complete car-wreck as, unable to tell Sheeran to shut the hell up, Ayoade could only watch as the musician made a series of completely unnecessary comments, the point of which seemed to be to boast to the audience about how much sex he gets, culminating in a deeply unpleasant and derogatory comment to Caroline Flack which proved that no amount of money can stop you being a pillock if you put your mind to it. Which is, of course, what I claimed was the entire point of Buzzcocks, it’s just in a better era of the show, Sheeran would have got called out for it.

·         Young Dracula (CBBC) The greatest children’s show of all time has returned for its fourth series, having undergone a second, subtler retool since last year. Right from the start of the first episode, we’re plunged into a world that has moved significantly on: suddenly protagonist Vlad Dracula and minor antagonist Jonno Van Helsing are working together to establish a peace between vampires and humans, and, aided by Vlad’s girlfriend Erin and sworn protector Bertrand, are working on a way to wean the highly uncooperative feral vampires off blood. While this is going on, Vlad and Jonno have to try and defend their schemes to the deeply unconvinced Vampire and Slayer high councils respectively.
There are other changes to the status quo as well: Vlad, Erin and Vlad’s sister Ingrid are no longer school age, putting the focus of their characters entirely on their attempts to maintain the peace, while also giving a slight air of pointlessness to the fact that the show is set in a school.
There’s little time to dwell on this, though, as, at almost every turn, something rears its head to remind the viewer that this is no ordinary kids’ show. As well as all this talk of peace treaties, plotlines also involve arranged marriage (Vlad is betrothed to the daughter of a member of the high council) and addiction (to blood). There’s also the massive amount of death in the show: we’re now at the point where several extras kick the bucket every episode, usually vampires, as their death scenes consist of a puff of smoke, but with numerous mentions of humans being bitten and drained offscreen. Not only this, but there’s also the very odd structure of the show- Young Dracula has now moved almost completely from episodic to serialised storytelling, with most episodes no longer having a  real three act structure or climax to them, instead just coming to an occasionally jarring full stop at the end of each half-hour, and then picking straight up again the following week, giving the impression we’re watching one long, slightly meandering, six and a half hour epic.

Not your average children's show. Not your average show, for that matter.

It’s really a kids drama in name only now, as the shows somewhat twisted sense of humour proves: the first episode ended with, as an attempt to preserve the peace, a football match between a team of vampires and a team of slayers, in a scene straight out of The M.I.High Guide to Cheesy and Twee Plot Devices. However, within seconds of this ludicrous scene beginning, the game degenerates into an all-out brawl between the two teams, which, as we find out in episode two, results in numerous deaths. Oh, yeah, and the episode ends with the fight beginning, but by the start of the next episode, it’s all over, with no word as to how it was resolved.
And it’s that that keeps me coming back to this show (well, that and the watertight plot, brilliant acting and superb effects): a willingness to throw the rulebook out of the window. Young Dracula is a show that I’m never quite sure what it’s going to do next, but I know it’s going to be brilliant. Long may it reign.

·         Wizards vs Aliens (CBBC): I’ve only seen the first episode of Russell T Davies’ replacement show for Sarah Jane Adventures, and all I can say is… read the title. Three words. That’s the entire plot of this show. Nevertheless, it’s not entirely awful. It’s certainly not good, but it’s not entirely awful. I’m prepared to concede, the entire point of the main character may well be that he gradually stops being the irritating whining lazy bullying idiot he is in episode one, but, well, I remember hoping pretty much the same things for Rose Tyler (Doctor Who), Gwen Cooper (Torchwood) and Maria Jackson (The Sarah Jane Adventures), and look how they all turned out. The other main character barely deserves talking about: he’s the sort of teen mega-genius who pretty much lives in the science lab carrying out his own unsupervised experiments that anyone with a quarter of a brain knows doesn’t exist in the real world.

The sidekick, Benny, also at no point pulls that ridiculously goofy grin he has in every single promo pic.

It’s a show that purports to be about the clash between science and magic, but, given that RTD’s approach to science across the Who franchise has been to portray it as a kind of magic that his audience are too stupid to comprehend, the whole conflict is pretty pointless, as it just amounts to the two sides firing identical bolts of CGI gubbins at each other, with no real regard to how the tactics and powers of the different sides would vary. Not as insultingly bad as its predecessor, I’ll nevertheless be giving this one a miss from now on.

·         Have I Got News For You (BBC One): Not a lot to say on this one. For a twenty-two year old panel show, it’s still going incredibly strong, with a consistently higher calibre of guests than its fellows. However, here’s hoping nothing really happens in the next week or so: Sir Roger Moore is the next guest host. A fine actor, but, if William Shatner and Tom Baker are anything to go by, about a third of the episode will be awkward gimmicks we have to slog through to get to the satire. See my thoughts on Buzzcocks for how I feel about this sort of thing. Still, Merton and Hislop are as brilliant as ever, and the format is too simple to age.

·         QI (BBC Two): Again, not much to say about a show that remains this good after all these years. I’m intrigued, though, by the very heavy emphasis on getting at least one brand new panellist into almost every episode, after years of relying on variations of the same dozen or so guests for their panel. Risky to bring in so much new blood at once, but it seems to be paying off. Still nothing to match the hilarity of the “Rodney Bewes is immortal” discussion from a few years back, but still an amusing programme.

·         The Killing (BBC Four): Finally, we come to my weekend viewing, and a treat I’ve been looking forward to for some time, as Danish crime drama The Killing comes back for its third and final cavalcade of corpses and knitwear. I absolutely love British crime drama, and yet there’s nothing that this country has to offer the genre that gets me as excited as this definitive series, with its superb use of building tension, its incredible soundtrack, its ambitiously far reaching plots, its involving mysteries, and, of course, a female lead so proactive and independent that nothing on British TV at the moment, perhaps ever, can come close to. The solution to a strong female character is, of course, that 95% of the time, her gender is irrelevant. Now, why is that so hard for writers and producers to grasp?

Yes, the major hype about this series is the pattern of her jumper. As an avid follower of TV costuming who geeked out over Rimmer's uniform in the Red Dwarf revival, I approve.

I’ve only seen the first episode of this series so far, and The Killing wouldn’t be The Killing if I had the faintest idea what was happening at this stage in proceedings. Nevertheless, I’m very excited. The show has a habit of taking things up to the next level with every successive series. Take, for example, the political aspect. In series one, a candidate to be Mayor of Copenhagen was implicated in the murder. In series two, the Minister for Justice found his office drawn into the case via secret cover-ups regarding the behaviour of soldiers in Afghanistan ordered by his predecessor. In series three, it’s the prime minister himself. Generally, though, these characters tend to have nothing at all to do with the crime, it’s just an excuse for the writers to write a political thriller alongside the murder mystery A-plot. We’ll see if they buck the trend this time around.
Likewise, the crime itself: series one, a single murder. Series two, the planned serial killing of an entire squad of soldiers. Who knows how big series three will get, but we’ve already had three brutal murders and the kidnapping of a young girl. Strap in, folks, because this looks like it could be huge.

So, there we have it. My excuse for not having posted in about two months is: there’s only so many hours in the week, and that means only watching the shows I enjoy watching. A shame, as Hunted looks spectacularly awful, and I wish I had the chance to review it properly. But there we go. Those are my recommendations; make of them what you will.