I can't believe I haven't talked about True Blood on my blog before. It's a dire omission that requires rectifying with me giving a brief taste of my impressions of one of my favourite programmes at the moment. As a fan of genre television, it warms the cockles of my…
I absolutely love Community: it very quickly became my new favourite sitcom (because I don't have legal access to 30 Rock at the moment), and we get double episodes of it each week on Viva – no, it's not a channel with which I am very familiar either (it's owned…
This is going to sound like an old person complaining about how new stuff is rubbish and old stuff was better, but I hope to make it sound more rational and reasoned than all that. First, I'll talk about my interaction with the old thing before talking about the new…
One of productive things I did while I was ill was watch pretty much the entirety of the first season of Mad Men that I had on the PVR from the BBC2 repeats on Sunday nights. As usual, I'm late to the party, but I have to admit that it…
Just over 2 years ago, I wrote about the meagre offering of regular animated superhero series on free-to-view television in this country. With the recent the school summer holiday, where cartoons are used to pacify the kids for a while in the morning, I thought it was time for a…
I have loved the Sherlock Holmes stories since my youth – the Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce films on BBC2 on a Friday evening, the definitive television Sherlock Holmes of Jeremy Brett, the original stories themselves, the inspired by/homages/parodies (my favourite 'new' version being Zero Effect, by Jake Kasdan). I…
I’ve mentioned before that, although I had enjoyed the Russell T Davies-led revival of Doctor Who, I thought it could be rather self-indulgent and seemed to rely on a lot of people dying for the Doctor, which isn’t the happiest note to strike in a family-friendly programme. I've also said…
Being a collection of quick thoughts concerning some programmes I’ve watched using legal means and without paid-for cable/satellite channels. Warehouse 13 Virgin recently showed the (appropriately) 13 episodes of the first season of this fun little series, which can be seen as The X-Files with humour: a male Secret Service…
I can’t remember the last time there was such a disconnect between the material in the first episode and the time and location at which it was aired – Veronica Mars was shown on E4 last summer (around July 2009) at about 8am every week day, as part of the…
True Blood is one of the most all-round entertaining shows I’ve seen in a while. It has everything – sex, death, humour, horror, the supernatural, a serial killer, prejudice, telepathy, violence, shocking moments and tension. It’s an impressive achievement, especially when you consider it’s about vampires; Alan Ball (the creator…