Articles in “Television”

Since the final episode of Robin Hood has just aired, it seems an appropriate time for a final post about the things that irritate me.

(Prior to that, though, I need to ask an important question: am I the only person who thinks the Children’s Nurofen advertisement with the winged babies is intensely creepy? I really hope not.)

But back to Robin Hood, and yet another list of improbabilities.

1. Kudos, Robin Hood, to bringing Alan a-Dale back into the fold. But wasn’t that storyline a little improbable? Come on, you know it was. I’ve never seen anyone change their core beliefs so rapidly in my life.

(Whoops, the Max-Walker-cons-the-Third-World advertisement is back on. It’s even creepier this time around.)

2. Speaking of Alan a-Dale, do you remember, Robin Hood creators, when I suggested that he was actually a really important person in the Robin Hood mythos?

Well, that goes double for Maid Marian.

Maybe triple.

I mean, I’m not an expert on the subject, but I don’t actually remember the source that you must be using here, the one where Marian exits the narrative in a shallow grave in the Holy Land. I’d be interested in reading that one, actually.

3. As a slightly connected point, I realise that I’ve been enthusiastic in a couple of posts about my strong desire for characters with whom I sympathise to get married, live happily ever after, and produce lovely babies.

But that desire for weddings? It’s somewhat ameliorated when the characters are hanging by their arm in the middle of a desert, and there isn’t a clergyman in sight.

4. Oh, and on that note? If you’d thought to add Friar Tuck to the cast earlier—as Nick and I have been complaining for two years—perhaps that wedding would have been legal.

Nick and I have been debating this issue since the episode aired, but we’re not sure whether Richard’s presence would have made the wedding legal—I know nothing about the religious climate of England in this period, but I assume it was Catholic, so would the king have had any ecclesiastical standing?

It doesn’t matter, because the show isn’t known for its historical accuracy and Richard didn’t take a role in the second ineffectual wedding, anyway—but it’s been intriguing us.

5. Almost all these points have related to the movement of characters, so here’s another one: Harry Lloyd is one of the shining lights of that programme, and if he isn’t in season three, I’ll be very irritated.

6. Taking my lack of knowledge about the period into account, I’m not a big fan of Richard the Lionheart—he seems, even for the times, as an overly masculine warmonger who paid little attention to his civic responsibilities.

But I never imagined he was as big a prat as this episode made him out to be. Perhaps he was rather too prone to taking long walks in the desert in the middle of the day? Mad dogs and Englishmen, they say.

Nick was also deeply annoyed by the “King Richard as a man of peace” angle.

7. I might be doing a disservice here to Richard’s equal-opportunity employment practices, but I’m also strongly suspicious that his right-hand man is called “Carter.” I realise that they introduced the character so that they could have an episode called “Get Carter,” but it just seems that “Carter” is too working class a name for the period.

8. I’ve just asked Nick what else annoyed us about the episode, and he reminded me of the fact that the Sheriff got away scot-free at the end, giving the entire episode an “I’ll get that wascally wabbit” vibe.

9. I strongly suspect that King Richard saying “We are Robin Hood” would actually represent a radical alteration to the English constitution.

But, really, it’s starting to feel like shooting fish in a barrel, if I can be excused the odd cliche. There is fun to be had out of the programme, if you can suspend your disbelief: maybe I should pour my energy into that from now on.

Nick and I were watching an episode of Veronica Mars during dinner, and we came across Veronica musing that the downside to keeping a diary was that anyone could find it and learn your darkest secrets.

“Well, yes,” I said to Nick. “That’s why you should just keep a blog.”

This must be about the fifth entry I’ve written on television advertising, but I never cease to be amazed by what they actually think is suitable for advertising.

On the one hand, I’ve just seen an advertisement for the Trading Post that suggests the best way to deal with your uncontrollable son and his tendency to violently shove his sister is to buy a swing-set.

True, I suppose it channels that strong desire to experiment with the potentialities of kinetic energy.

But what happens when the child ends up in an environment with no swing-set?

But the strangest advertisement I’ve seen all night is one for APIA, with Max Walker—at least, I’m fairly certain it was Max Walker—talking about being duped in the purchase of a diamond while on an African tour.

I think, from what I can remember, that the whole point was the idea that age brings wisdom.

But I saw it and said to Nick, “Did they really just build an entire advertising campaign around Max Walker attempting to buy an unregistered African diamond? A blood diamond?”

Honestly, I thought the Pepsi Max advertisement where they suggested that drinking that particular soft drink would make random businesswomen rip off half their clothes and wrestle in a spilled consignment of jelly was the oddest thing I’d ever seen on television.

I’ve been meaning to say something about this since the second season ended, now that the Sam Tyler story arc has been wound up—so, yes, this is spoileriffic. But, frankly, I’m not sure how I feel about the resolution.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first season, despite the fact that we were watching Life on Mars when the second car (in a series of three, so far) drove through the fence, completely destroying my car and much of the surrounding property—it wasn’t Life on Mars‘s fault, but the programme did tend to trigger jumpiness for a few weeks after that.

But the first season was fantastic: the concept was clever, Philip Glenister was a joy to behold in every scene, and John Simm’s appearance as Sam—despite the fact that the character was not at all evil—made me very keen to see what he could do as The Master. And the answer to that turned out to be more a case of what couldn’t he do? I’d been looking forward to the return of The Master since the new series started; I kept saying to Nick that there was no chance that The Master returned to fight and die for Gallifrey, no chance. And I was right.

(On a slightly disconnected note, Nick and I also have an ongoing debate about his preference for the wonderful Roger Delgado and mine for The Master of my times, Anthony Ainley, who I’ve only just realised died four years ago. Vale, Anthony Ainley. So I was pleased that we both enjoyed John Simm’s version of the character.)

To get back to my main point, I was a little uncertain about the return of the show for a second season.

I am—as will come to no surprise to a readership comprised at the stage almost entirely of people who already know me—a media tart, capable of becoming strongly attached to particular programmes. I respond badly to my favourite shows being cut off in their prime, although I am flexible about what constitutes “prime”: for example, Firefly was cut off in its prime, while Angel, which I would happily have kept watching, doesn’t qualify, not after a run of five seasons.

And I’d enjoyed Life on Mars enough to want to keep watching it. What worried me was the fact that the concept might end up too thinly stretched. Some shows, no matter how good, need to end before the concept can become stale: Joe Ahearne’s wonderful Ultraviolet might still be one of the best instances of this. I would have watched more of that, but perhaps it is better that it ended at six superb episodes.

And it did seem at first as though the concept might have staled a little: the show wasn’t quite as funny nor quite as creepy as it had once been, although the episode where Gene Hunt was suspected of murder brightened things up a little.

Then we got to the final episode and, as the credits rolled, I turned to Nick to say, “Did what I think just happened actually just happen?”

Basically, my feelings about the show became thoroughly confused the minute Sam jumped off the roof.

But perhaps this is best encapsulated in a conversation that I ended up having with my mother (which I may not, after a period of some weeks, have reproduced verbatim):

MUM: What did you think of the end of Life on Mars?
ME: He killed himself!
MUM: I thought it was lovely; it brought back all the humour, which had been a bit missing from the episode.
ME: But he killed himself!
MUM: Because he was happier in the ’70s.
ME: But he wasn’t in the ’70s—he jumped off a roof.
MUM: But he was happier.
ME: But why did I spend twelve weeks of my life watching a character struggle to get back to his real life only to have him jump off a roof?

And I think that’s my main problem; it was out of character. I don’t want to characterise suicide as essentially a defeatist action, but in this case it was: after a brief period of isolation, the man who we’d seen struggling against all odds to return to his normal life gave up spectacularly and threw himself off a roof.

It didn’t seem in keeping with what we’d seen of Sam’s character up to that point.

(It also didn’t say much for the Metropolitan Police’s counselling of recuperative officers, but that’s a different matter.)

Nick tells me that the suicide reading—that Sam was genuinely hallucinating the 1970s’ episodes and managed to recover from the accident, only to kill himself—is writer and co-creator Matthew Graham’s preferred reading. (Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Graham is also, apparently, the writer of Doctor Who‘s “Fear Her,” which I frankly loathed.)

But there are alternative options. The main one, it seems to me, is the option offered by the surgeon in his alternative role as the high-ranking policeman from Hyde: that Sam, deep undercover, suffered a breakdown as the result of an accident in the 1970s, and that it is the modern life that is the hallucination. In this reading, the blue-tinted return to modern life at the end of the last episode would be the result of a psychotic break that Sam suffered in the tunnel, under the pressure of the shoot-out.

This would answer one small, but perhaps significant, question that the final episode raised for me, which was why, when Sam awoke in hospital after apparently undergoing brain surgery, was his head not shaved?

But perhaps I am grasping at straws here, to explain what was to me an unsatisfying conclusion.

Perhaps I should accept instead that sometimes, when we die, we go to the 1970s. It might be an improvement on dying and going to Devon.

When did iced coffee suddenly become macho?

All the iced coffee ads these days seem to emphasise that this is an inherently blokey drink.

I remember that there was a macho emphasis on some brand of milk-based drinks a few years ago—I can’t remember the name, now—but it seems to be endemic, these days.

I personally blame the Ice Break ads that suggested you weren’t worthy of incredibly sugary iced coffee made with skim milk unless you were also proficient at such extreme physical activities as jumping out of a plane in order to land on and enter another plane, or driving backwards very fast down a freeway and then clambering onto a semi-trailer with the help of some Dalek eye stalks. (Or, possibly, plungers.)

True, the last one did, I believe, have a woman in it. But the overwhelming emphasis is on hyper-masculine men drinking cold coffee from bottles, and I find this slightly odd.

I don’t have any answers, mind.

And they’re still a vast improvement over Lynx ads.

I was an enormous fan of Steven Moffat’s Press Gang as a lass. I was the right age and the right kind of academically focused girl to enjoy that programme.

(I’ve mentioned this before, I know: I may be either repetitive or narrow in my interests. I leave it to posterity to judge.)

But one effect of this interest is my delight in the current renaissance of Lee Ross, or Linda’s long-suffering best friend, Kenny (at least until he moved to Australia late in the show’s run.)

Kenny was a lovely character: he was clever, sweet, and efficient. He put up with Linda because he really loved her, despite her abrasive personality. He managed to woo a young Sadie Frost, albeit via the ghost of her drug-addicted brother. And then he sang in one episode, and all the fans who had a soft spot for a musician were smitten all over again.

So I’ve been really thrilled to see Kenny in a number of things, recently. According to imdb.com, he’s been working regularly since Press Gang, but I’ve not seen him in anything.

But over the last year or so, I’ve seen him in The Catherine Tate Show, in Life on Mars, in Hustle—admittedly, four-year-old episodes of Hustle, but I’ve come to that show fairly late—and in Robin Hood.

Admittedly, he was a fairly unpleasant character in Life on Mars, who quite rightly got punched in the mouth by both Gene Hunt and Sam Tyler. And his Sir Jasper in Robin Hood wasn’t a pleasant man, either. The sketches he took part in for The Catherine Tate Show were simply bizarre. About the only redeeming character was Hustle: sure, he was a conman, but then so are the protagonists, and we sympathise with them.

But then, I don’t really mind that the characters are so far removed from sweet, hen-pecked Kenny.

I just like seeing Kenny back on the screen.