Fra TV

I meant to write my review of Ashes to Ashes, BBC1’s follow-up to Life on Mars, after its first episode two weeks ago, but by the time I found time to do it, I’d forgotten exactly what happened. Then I meant to write about episode two last Friday, when watching it was fresh in my mind, but I forgot, so this is a slightly woolly version.

I enjoyed Life on Mars. John Simm is always watchable and it goes without saying that Philip Glenister’s DCI Gene Hunt is one of the most entertaining characters created in recent years. I wasn’t around in 1973 so I didn’t get all the period details, but I certainly remember the test card girl and was able to appreciate the genius Camberwick Green pastiche. However, I always found the time travel/coma thing frustrating. The first episode of the series had Sam working on a case in the 70s with the same suspect to the one he had been on in 2006, and I thought the link between the past and the present would be stronger throughout the whole series. This didn’t happen, and in the other episodes the interjections from the present were usually directly related to Sam’s psyche, not the criminal cases. There would be a straightforward crime to solve, with visits from the test card girl and voices in the hospital on the side. I guess the writers didn’t want to answer the question that always started the episode – ‘am I mad, in a coma or back in time?’ – explicitly. Being a literal soul, I always assumed he was back in time, and thought each episode would involve banging up a toe rag in the past to prevent a crime in the future – the kind of thing Doctor Who disapproves of so heartily.

It looks as though Ashes to Ashes might be more satisfying in this respect. In the first two episodes, DI Alex Drake, this series’ Sam Tyler, has arrested the man who shot her in 2008 and realised that she might be able to save her parents from being blown up in 1981. She’s also a psychologist familiar with Sam Tyler’s case and refers to her colleagues as ‘imaginary constructs’. She doesn’t believe that Sam went back in time, but that Hunt and co were hallucinations he had as part of his coma – now she’s hanging between life and death too, having been shot in the head. If the cases she works in the past will have a bearing on her returning to the present, I think the drama will be more improved.

But it isn’t this hokey subject matter, nor indeed Keeley Hawes’ slightly hysterical performance as Alex Drake that makes Ashes to Ashes. First, it’s Philip Glenister, who has upped the camp level in his portrayal of Gene Hunt to indecent levels. In 1981, he’s channelling Hannibal Smith as well as Jack Regan, zooming around Docklands in a speedboat, Uzi akimbo, and growling ‘Let’s fire up the Quatro’ (a car, apparently, not the fruit drink). Hunt isn’t quite as comfortable in the Met in 1981 as he was in Manchester in 1973, but he’s still able to get away with firing snooker balls into people’s testicles and dragging OAPs down the stairs. And he’s as unreconstructed as ever – a classic moment in last week’s episode was seeing him dancing the conga to Chas and Dave’s Gertcha whilst groping the breasts of the woman in front of him in a none-too-subtle manner.

Second, I was alive in 1981 so this time I’m loving the 80s touches. I’d forgotten how I’d longed for my parents to trade our boring brown kitchen in for a red and white one in the 80s, or how I thought that diagonal stripes were the last word in home furnishings. I hadn’t thought about phone cards for years, but their mentioned reminded me how I used to think they were the epitome of sophistication. The fashion seems accurate too, although I don’t know why DI Drake always dresses like she’s off to a disco. Life on Mars was renowned for its 70s soundtrack, and Ashes to Ashes follows suit. The airy-fairy obscurity of New Romantic music suits the show’s left-field tendencies, and has featured heavily from the moment Alex woke up on a canal barge to the climax of Vienna.

Overall I’m enjoying Ashes to Ashes, but I hope that when the nostalgia value wears off, the drama will sustain the series.

One of my guilty TV pleasures (one of many) has to be the family of programmes about tattoo artists on Discovery Realtime: Miami Ink, London Ink and L.A. Ink.

London Ink has only had one series so far and, in true British style, is less glitzy and more downbeat than its American cousins. It’s set in a tattoo parlour run by Louis Malloy, who is famous for doing David Beckham’s many tattoos, and is a pretty miserable chap by all accounts. The first series mostly entailed using editing to manufacture conflict between him and his young apprentice Dan which probably doesn’t exist in real life. They did do quite a lot of good tattoos, though, and, mercifully, weren’t always dedicated to a loved on and therefore accompanied by a depressing sob-story, unlike…

Miami Ink, the most well-established of the three. It gets most of its stories from flying in people from all over America who want to get tattoos to commemorate a traumatic event or to pay tribute to a loved-one who died in a horrible manner. For example, they had a young man who had a design tattooed on him that his girlfriend had drawn, just before she was shot in the Virginia Tech shootings. Cheerful, no? The rest of the show is taken up with arguments between the shop’s owner, Ami, and his crew of artists. Ami has a short fuse which is probably why half the artists seem to want to leave at the moment. When they’re not tattooing, the guys are filmed doing other staged activities such as drag racing and skateboarding so the show isn’t wall to wall arguments and people tearing up about lost loves.

My favourite of the three is L.A. Ink, where the tattoo shop is run by the star-faced Kat von D. Kat used to work at Miami Ink, but left after falling out with Ami and now runs her own shop in Hollywood (even though she’s sickeningly young – 25 or something). Kat seems to be friends with lots of famous people, and they all want to be tattooed by her – she’s had Jenna Jameson, Sebastian Bach, the singer from Eagles of Death Metal and someone from My Chemical Romance. You know, the cream of Hollywood. This gives her the edge over Ami and the gang in the glamour stakes. Not that there isn’t a fair smattering of people who’ve had near-death experiences or dead parents/children/friends. The reason I prefer L.A. Ink is because Kat seems a lot nicer than Ami, and three of the artists in the shop are women, so it’s not as testosterone-y as in Miami. And that means that a lot of the tattoos they do are of pretty flowers and stuff.

I don’t know what got me so interested in these programmes. I’ve never been a big fan of tattoos, and haven’t ever been tempted to get one myself. In fact, I often look down on other people with tattoos, and think ‘will you really still want that when you’re 60?’ when I see them. However, watching these shows has made me see that some tattoos can be really beautiful, if they’re done by a good artist. Perhaps it’s the Rolf Harris thing of seeing how the idea translates to the skin that’s so fascinating. Whatever, if there’s a five hour L.A. Ink marathon Real Time, I’m there.

I thought it was about time I got back in to writing this blog. After all, I’ve watched plenty of TV since my last update. A whole series of Strictly Come Dancing has gone by without comment (although I did get obsessed again – Alesha was my favourite), and about ten cycles of America’s Next Top Model have taken to the airwaves with so much as a whisper (Natasha was robbed!). I haven’t even commented on water-cooler TV like Heroes (verdict: fun but worthy, with too many ‘heroes’ to keep track of – the finale did make me cry, though).

I thought I would start off again by writing about the end of a TV era, and one that is actually worth marking. Monday night saw the start of the final series in David Attenborough’s ‘Life…’ programmes: Life in Cold Blood. Along the way he’s covered mammals, birds, plants and insects (proving that the wasp is verily a satanic being). Unlike series such as Blue Planet or Planet Earth, which Attenborough narrates, the great man takes a more active role in the ‘Life…’ programmes; Monday’s debut saw him relaxing on the beach with leatherback turtles and harassing chameleons in Madagascar. He leaves filming crocodiles mating and other hazardous assignments to his more gung-ho colleagues, but his enthusiasm in the location segments is such that I am sure that he would be as ready to meet a group of mountain gorillas now at the age of 81 as he was in 1979 in the first in the chronicles, Life on Earth.

You probably won’t know that much more about amphibians and reptiles at the end of an episode of Life in Cold Blood, than you did at the start, but you’ll certainly goggle at the amazing footage of turtles encased in ice and spiky iguanas. And it’s a real shame to think that there won’t be any more chances to enjoy David Attenborough’s dulcet tones and enthusiasm for nature when the series ends in five weeks’ time.

On Monday I had my first driving lesson in what must be at least 13 years. I’ve been thinking for ages that I ought to take up learning again and try to get a licence at last – until now, driving has been another on a long list of skills I don’t possess, like whistling, clicking my fingers and raising my eyebrows. I learned when I was 19 and living in rural south Devon, where if you can’t drive, you’re stuck in whichever one horse town you live in, relying on the once-a-week bus services to take you to the bright lights of Torquay or Exeter. Unfortunately, as I never passed my test (after two attempts), so I was stuck with the buses, or more often, my long-suffering parents.

Then I moved to the brighter lights of London, where there’s no necessity to have a car whatsoever, and married a man who can’t drive either, and settled into life happily getting round on tubes, buses, cabs and cadged lifts.

However, the nagging inadequacy was always there. Nearly everyone I know except me (and my husband) can drive. They can go on holiday and hire a car, and drive round places without having to rely on taxis. They can see friends who live in awkward places without having to get the train. They can go to the supermarket and not have to carry all the shopping they’ve just bought home on the bus. Okay, they may be irresponsible polluters, but they’re free from timetables, free from signal failures, free from dodgy cabs, free as birds in the wilderness! I want that freedom too, and I’ve finally decided now’s the time!

Driving seems to be a bit of a different kettle of fish these days, though. Firstly, I don’t have the fearlessness of youth I did when I was 19. Secondly, I’m driving in the east end of London instead of deepest Devon. I keep expecting a barrow boy on the Roman Road to attack me for cutting him up, or to be responsible for killing a motorbike courier or cyclist. When my instructor suggested I drive on to the main road near my home after about five minutes of driving, I was white with fear, and remained that way for the rest of the lesson. I was hoping to be driven to a nice empty car park where I could drive around in a circle for an hour and maybe do the odd u-turn. My next lesson is tomorrow and I’m already nervous. I wonder if I will ever have the courage to get up into third gear?

I don’t know what it is about me; maybe it’s my face, or the fact that I think formal wear involves changing my jeans for a cleaner pair, but I nearly always get the worst tables in restaurants. It’s as if the maitre’d looks at me and thinks, ‘she’s not obviously drunk, she’s fully clothed and doesn’t stink of piss: I can’t refuse her entry, but she’d better not think she’s getting a decent table either!’, and I’m ushered into the basement and into a damp cranny next to the broom cupboard.

In my experience, the worst tables in restaurants are either next to the kitchen, which is likely to be hot, noisy and puts the patron in danger of having a tureen of soup tipped down their neck, or next to the toilets, which can be smelly and means that you may be constantly having to move your chair in to let people past so they can relieve themselves. If you’re really unlucky your table might be next to both the toilet and the kitchen, in which case you should really start worrying.

I’ve had a few experiences of this recently. A particular favourite was a tapas restaurant in central London last week where we got a cracking table in the basement right next to the toilet, where the low-lit ambience of the place was interrupted every so often by someone opening the door and blinding us with the strip-lighting, and the smell of meatballs and patatas bravas being overwhelmed by the odour of Zoflora (although I concede it could have been worse). I think they were annoyed with us because there were only two people in our party instead of the three we’d promised them when we booked, but there were plenty of tables they could have seated us at which weren’t quite so near the WC. Being sat next to a woman who was talking about her fiancé’s kidney stone didn’t help, although I can’t blame the restaurant for that.

I think the only think for it is to book restaurants in the name of Hilton or Beckham, or Windsor if we’re trying for a really posh place, and hope it’s too late for the waiter to change the allocation once we’ve arrived. I’ll have to start practising my Babs Windsor voice now…

I’ve been to three concerts since Christmas. That’s not that many – I know someone who has probably been to three concerts since Monday, but quite a few for me. I don’t think I had been to a gig all year before I saw the Pipettes at the Roundhouse last December, so I’m not exactly Steve Lamacq, and my recent experiences have reminded me why.

I’ve decided I’m just too much of a misanthrope to enjoy pop concerts. I love music, and I used to love the experience of seeing a band in the flesh, but these days I’m just too grumpy to enjoy a gig. I can’t decide if concert-goers these days are less courteous, or if I’m more irritable (probably the latter, if I’m honest), but there a few things that get right up my nose in modern music venues:

1. People who talk throughout the gig. Why didn’t they just stay in the pub? It’s so much cheaper than spending £15 to have to shout your conversation over a thumping bass. It might be bad acoustics, but Fyfe Dangerfield’s solo acoustic interlude at the Guillemots’ recent gig at Brixton Academy was ruined by the loud rumbling of conversation which was going on throughout it.

2. People who take pictures/videos on their mobile phones every five minutes. I really object to being blinded by little squares of light being held up all over concert halls so that people can take a picture Ben Folds (or someone) which will be so small you would need a super-magnifying CSI-style computer to be able to tell who it is, or record ten seconds of wobbly, blurry, tinny-sounding video that no one will want to watch on YouTube.

3. A combination of the two above, really: people who text throughout a gig. You get this in the cinema too, but I do get irritated by people who go to a gig and then spend the whole time with their faces glued to their screens, texting away as if they are on the bus. Also, why do people have to call their friends during gigs, go, ‘ooh, listen to this’, and then hold their phones in the air – your friend can’t hear it, you idiot!

Basically I would be a lot happier if people couldn’t take mobiles in to concerts, and refrained from discussing the gig (or their day at work, or their love lives) until after it’s finished. That’s not too much to ask, surely?

I haven’t been watching a lot of television lately (well, not as much as usual). However, I have been spending a lot of time in front of the TV. My usual diet of America’s Next Top Model (although I have been watching the new series) and CSI has been replaced by hours of computer gaming, thanks to the release of the latest Zelda game, Twilight Princess.

I’ve been addicted to Zelda games since Ocarina of Time came out on the N64 in 1998. There’s something about a green-clad, wide-eyed, blond-haired boy running through fields slicing down blades of grass with a sword that appeals to me. The Zelda games always have good stories, nice characters, and (most importantly) splendid cut scenes. I love a good cut scene. Whenever I play a beat-’em-up video game I always set the difficulty level to easy and rush through with all the characters just so I can see the ending cut scene (Dead or Alive on the X-Box is particularly good for endings).

Initially I was put off playing Zelda games because of the name. Apparently Mr Miyamoto chose to call the Princess Zelda after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, thinking the name was ‘pleasant and significant’, but to me, it will always be the name of the scary sister in Pet Semetary who crawls around going ‘I’ll twist your back like you did mine’. I used to be teased about the character at school because I had a similar dress to the one she wears, so I’ve never been able to accept the name as belonging to a benign character.

Twilight Princess, which I played on the Game Cube, must be the biggest, most ambitious Zelda game yet. It has nine dungeons, more involved side-quests, and a new development which means you can play as a human or a wolf. This time, the land of Hyrule, (where Zelda is nearly always set) has been overtaken a twilight world, and you have to battle loads of nasty black beasts to save it. It’s quite dark compared to some of the earlier games, what with people getting abducted by horrible shadow creatures and everyone being afraid of you. However, by far the worst part is the spiders. I hate the spiders (of skulltulas, as they are properly known) in Zelda, ever since one jumped down on me the first time I played Ocarina of Time and frightened me to death. In this game, the spiders are much bigger, run along the floor at you instead of just moving up and down their silk, and are much more realistically animated. One of the dungeon bosses is even a giant spider – it’s disgusting! Fortunately you don’t see them that often, but just thinking about them is putting me off playing the game again.

Twilight Princess took me nearly seventy hours to finish. I don’t know if that’s longer than the time it took me to finish Ocarina of Time or Majora’s Mask (with its mega-annoying three-day time sequence), but it felt like it. I couldn’t face replaying it again, so I’ve been inspired to start my favourite Zelda game, The Wind Waker. This was the first Zelda game for the Game Cube, and is done in a controversial cel-shaded style (which I actually prefer to the more naturalistic style of the other games). It’s quite a bit more straightforward than the other games, and has one major plus point – no spiders!

I have written before about how I am obsessed with Strictly Come Dancing. I just can’t resist the combination of sequins, show tunes and scatter sashays (well, I couldn’t if I knew what that last thing meant). The new series started a few weeks ago, so I am in heaven again. Not only do I spend all week gearing up for Saturday night’s live show, but I also get to watch It Takes Two with Claudia Winkleman (who I once co-starred in a ballet recital with, aged five – we were forest elves, as I recall) every weeknight. Even more excitingly, my sister has got a job working with Ms Winkleman which means one thing for me – tickets to the Saturday show!

A few weeks ago she got us some tickets for the second show in the series, and so at 4.30 on a Saturday afternoon my husband and I found ourselves queuing at the audience reception of TV centre with several dozen other totally overexcited dance fans and their stoical husbands. After one of the most expensive gin and tonics I’ve ever had in the Audience Foyer we were ushered in to Studio 1 for the live recording. The week we went the ladies were competing with a quickstep or rumba, with just a group performance from the men.

We had very good seats in the second row opposite the band. Bizarrely the dancing looks a bit better in the flesh than it does on television, possibly because we couldn’t see anyone’s feet so couldn’t see so many of the mistakes they made. My favourite on the night was Carol Smilie, perhaps more because she was dancing to Dolly Parton and wearing a nice dress than for her spectacular dancing. That week was the first time that the true horror of Georgina Bouzova’s dancing was unleashed onto the world, although her footwork was only slightly less alarming than her partner’s red mesh shirt.

As the show is filmed live everything moved pretty quickly and the only moment anyone got to relax was during Tess Daly’s dreadful behind the scenes interviews. It’s then that an army of make-up artists run on to de-shine the judges before they give their scores; it was funny to see the judges laughing and chatting when the camera was off them – they almost seemed human. Now I always look out on television in case they don’t straighten their faces in time to give their scores.

Once the main show was over we were all farmed back into the Audience Foyer for free orange juice and crisps and a half an hour break, before being led back into the studio for rehearsals for the results show. This was when the boring bit began. First the musical performance (by Simon Webbe that week) was recorded twice, then there’s a dress rehearsal of the results show, before the real thing. This would all be very well but for a warm-up man who insists on making you clap and cheer so many times that by the time you have to do it for real you’re exhausted and fed up and can’t be bothered to cheer anymore. Still, I was still able to gasp genuinely when Mica Paris was voted out instead of Georgina, who was ten times worse. You can always count on the public to vote for the underdog.

Well, the second series of Lost finished in the UK on Tuesday.

It’s a naughty little tease, isn’t it? Just when you’re losing interest and have resolved to spend the hour it takes up of your time each week doing something useful like practising Spanish or playing Freecell, it flutters its eyelashes and hooks you back in.

I had just about had enough of earnest Jack, smug Locke and whiney Claire; I was frustrated by the fact that they are obviously never going to get off the island. But then what do the producers do? They get Jack, Kate and Sawyer kidnapped by the Others, blow up the hatch, suddenly introduce Jim Robinson and leave you so desperate to find out what the hell is going on that there’s no way you’re not going to watch the next series.

I’ve been following Lost in a sporadic fashion since it started, but my experience of it has been vastly improved since we got Sky+ at home. This means that I can fast-forward not just through the ads, but also through the annoying flashbacks which really don’t add anything. I mean, what was that business with Ana-Lucia and Jack’s dad all about? Will every character have come into contact with Jack’s dad in a flashback before the series is cancelled? (I think he’s related to the producer and they keep asking him back to do cameos when he’s run out of acting work). The other night I had the three final episodes to catch up on, and I was able to fast forward through all the guff; this makes it a slightly less frustrating experience, but only just.

Still, now Lost is finished, I will have nothing to watch while I’m doing the ironing, meaning my husband will have creased shirts until Channel 4 starts showing the next series. Or he can do it himself.

Recently MTV celebrated it’s 25th birthday. Well, not that recently, but obviously I have been too busy watching TV to be bothered to write about it until now.

I don’t really consider myself a part of the MTV generation, mostly because we didn’t have it at home while I was growing up so it didn’t have any influence on my teen years. However, as a 32-year-old, in broad demographic terms I suppose I am. Certainly a lot of the groups I liked as a tween and teenager owe their careers to a certain extent to MTV (Duran Duran, U2, a-ha, Madonna), and once I did get cable and was able to watch MTV for prolonged periods once I was in my early twenties , I became quite a fan of sitting on the sofa for hours on end waiting to see what the next video would be (actually The Box is better for that these days, but anyway).

Being described as a member of the MTV generation has always seemed like a bad thing to me. It suggests you have a short attention span which is only stimulated buy the quick cutting and loud music of pop videos; it suggests laziness and TV-addiction; how can MTV-geners be anything other than selfish and materialistic when all they see all day is spoilt popstars and bling? They’re epitomised by characters in a show of the channel’s own creation: Beavis and Butt-head.

How ever I don’t like to admit it, I can’t deny that I am an MTV-gener. (I don’t know if that’s a proper term – probably not.) My main evidence for this is my attention span. Before I had MTV I could read books at home – and not just to pass the time on public transport when there are no free papers available, I could watch a whole film on TV without getting bored after five minutes and turning over, I’d read the whole of a newspaper article, not just the first paragraph. I think it’s partly MTV’s fault that I no longer do these things. I even just got bored of writing this article and played a few games of Freecell because I can’t focus on one thing for any period. Where MTV is concerned, though, my attention span is as long as the queue to get into TRL. I can sit for hours in front of a My Super Sweet Sixteen or Newlyweds marathon without complaint, even though I despise the people I’m watching as much as I despise myself for watching it. I get completely hypnotised.

I think it’s a narcotic. Class C, perhaps, but still bad for you.

My only point in writing all this down is that I am furious with myself because I wasted hours watching TV yesterday so didn’t write an application for a job I was really interested in, and now I’ve missed the deadline, all because I was watching a Newlyweds I’d already seen.

What is it they say about addicts being self-destructive?