Television Can Blow Me

by James Donaghy

  I guarantee you the finale will be a confectionery of fudges, a holding cell of cheats and a haunted house of deux ex machinas. No good will come of it.

  The verdict on FlashForward midseason report: Already strongly making the case for its own extinction.

  Marks out of 10: 5

  Paradox

  Yes, because we need another GashForward. I don’t know if BBC and ABC held hands 18 months ago and vowed to make a dual assault on our senses with clairvoyant detective horseshit but just a couple of months after FlashBoreward premiered we witness the birth of Paradox, BBC’s “high-octane, investigative drama” starring Mel from Eastenders as Detective Inspector Rebecca Flint, a woman on a mission to do the stupid thing in a series of challenging stop-the-future-before-it-happens situations. This? My riveted face.

  Nobody knows (or cares) why but astrophysicist Dr Christian King (Emun Elliott) receives images from the future on his computer thing that come FROM SPACE. And in keeping with the rest of the so-called “news” we see these days it’s never good. Take the opening salvo: a dead girl, a frisbee, a wrecked train, a shattered mobile phone - it’s like an exploded Argos catalogue. What can it all mean?

  Dr Space is being all Scottish and enigmatic and teases Rebecca and her bozo colleagues DS Ben Holt (Mark Bonnar) and DC Callum Gada (Chiké Okonkwo) with what might be occurring the noo. This makes no sense at all. Why wouldn’t you just tell them “look I don’t know what’s going on either - kind of weird though. Makes you think doesn’t it?” Instead, shit for brains starts hinting that he may be a terrorist or a Time Lord. Nice work, smart arse.

  We all know that in real life the moment he even mentioned his future bomb photos they’d have a cloth over his face and have him waterboarded into oblivion. So there’d be none of that Sphinxy riddle-me-this shit once he started sicking up his own lungs.

  Once the biographical detail in the images check out, the police start to believe that they really have glimpsed a future disaster - much like I did when I saw the previews. They deduce that there’s going to be an oil tanker colliding with a train on a bridge - they even know which train but they don’t employ the emergency anti-terrorist powers we have in this country that allow them to stop and search GOD to, say, stop the train from travelling. No, they just talk to a man on the train on the phone. That’ll do the trick.

  Oh this is such a lot of nonsense. Horrible dialogue, gaping plot holes and annoying characters - the shitbird trifecta. Everything is on the nose, nothing is left to your imagination, people say exactly what they are thinking in every situation. Tamzin Outhwaite is the same as she is in everything else, adequately hacking her way through a flailing script. It is difficult to avoid parallels with its recent American forebear and Paradox does feel like FlashForward on dialysis. It shares many of that show’s vices but expresses them in a skanky low-budget manner. Both shows are so implausibly pleased with themselves that their characters have seen the future.

  Well, I’ve seen the future. This gets cancelled.

  The verdict on Paradox: No future for you.

  Marks out of 10: 4

  Doctor Who Series 5 premiere

  We’re always telling children not to walk off with strange men yet Doctor Who hightails in with his schizoid time goon routine, offers his hands to a nine-year-old Scottish girl and off they wonder to her bedroom to see some puppies. He’s, like, a thousand years old but that doesn’t matter to Amelia Pond, oddball infant Jock with a “crack” in her “wall” (that’ll be a tear in the very fabric of space-time, my guess). And as strange men go the man who steps out of the crash landed police box in her garden is one of the stranger ones. Suffering from post-regeneration traumatic syndrome, he’s twitching, babbling and jerking like Judy Finnigan in a hairshirt. He flirts with Amelia for a while before leaping into the Tardis and telling her he’ll be back in five. Turns out, he’s back in 12. Years. And he calls himself a timelord?

  Amelia Pond is now Amy Pieond (Karen Gillan), sexy flame haired kissogram with a fiery yet vulnerable heart in La Senza police uniform. Together, they are menaced by a shit monster that looks like the Curious Alien from This Morning with Richard Not Judy. Curious Alien’s alien captors decide to destroy planet Earth for harbouring a multi dimensional criminal. Doctor Poo starts quoting intergalactic bylaws and all of a sudden we’re in Hitchhiker’s Guide.

  As the doctor gurns, leaps and gambols, Amy spends most of her time pulling her microskirt down and looking surprised. She’ll catch some flak for being sexually attractive but her ginger ostrich chasing around in hen night fancy dress shtick was the only entertaining thing about this opener. Take out the da-daa-da-da-da-daa-daa incidental music and you’re left with a seriously dull plot, depressingly derivative baddies and a palpable phone-this-in-they’ll-give-us-rave-reviews-anyway attitude that infects everything. It’s all quirk and no substance.

  How anyone thinks Matt Smith is some kind of fresh take on the Doctor is beyond my ken. There is not a mannerism, character point or idiosyncrasy that hasn’t been done by Tennant or Ecclestone. It’s not like he does it particularly badly. Few actors do a bad Doctor Who because it’s a showy role requiring little nuance or range, just a willingness to show off. How hard is it a find an actor who likes to do that?

  Babble about the breathless pace all you like, Doctor Who stopped being good television some time ago and is now sci-fi by numbers hackwork. There is no subversion, no ingenuity and the deux ex machina employed to defeat the CGI Eyeball of Doom clunked like the Lee “Scratch” Perry dub remix of a chain being dropped down a 500 foot toilet in the centre of the Grand Canyon.

  Sparky overwritten dialogue that advances neither character nor story abounds. This was smoke and mirrors to deflect attention away from a dying leader. Brezhnev is comatose. And Doctor Who is done. Remember where you were when you first heard it. Aerial Telly called it.

  Welcome return? Get the fuck out of here.

  The verdict on Doctor Who Series 5 premiere: Doctor Poo.

  Marks out of 10: 5

  Doctor Who - Vincent and The Doctor

  “This world was never made for one as beautiful as you” Don MacLean - Vincent

  “There’s a stake in your fat black heart and the villagers never liked you,” Sylvia Plath - Daddy

  “The sky is falling!” Chicken Licken

  The worst thing about time travel drama is when it turns into historical starfucking - slutting around the famous dead and giving them exactly what’s coming to them (closure, humiliation, heads up on their assassination). On Saturday, not for the first time in its run, Doctor Who turned into Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure as they went back to the summer of 1890 to screw with the destitute and mentally ill Vincent van Gogh. It was scripted by Richard Curtis and as such was technically astute, shamelessly manipulative and saturated with life-threatening levels of mawk.

  It started with Amy and Doc visiting Musee d’Orsay (trans: The Parisien Gallery of That Art) where Dr Black, (Bill Nighy, who you’ll remember stinking out the repulsively cynical Christmas cash-in Love, Actually) bombshells that this Van Gogh could paint a bit. But they’re all ‘whatevs’ because the Doctor has noticed that there’s an evil face in the window of Van Gogh’s painting of a Church. So he and his redhead escort hightail it to the Auvers-sur-Oise countryside of June 1890. The fun, she has just begun.

  They hook up with Vincent in a cafe. This Van Gogh is Scottish - a people thought to possess the appropriate level of soulful angry depression necessary for any depiction of futile tormented genius. Curtis probably requested John Hannah but he was too busy purging himself of endless Four Weddings reruns of him reading Auden at the funeral and being THAT NAUSEY CUNT from Sliding Doors by cathartically shouting “BY ACHILLES RINGPIECE!” and the like in Spartacus every week.

  Vincent van Jock wants to put his van Cock in Amy not, as you may imagine, because she wears tiny, tiny skirts and is stunningly beautiful but because of a deep spiritual affinity they share. He tells Flamy
that he sees her sadness - the unspoken connection between depressed gingers is palpable. With that terracotta scarf, citric orangey hair and peppermint pale skin Amy would be a good subject for a Van Gogh masterpiece if only they had the time.

  But that’s not the issue at hand. Remember evil window face in the painting? It’s a giant invisible birdlike lizard called the Krafayis only van Jock can see. Part-chicken, part-dinosaur it’s tearing up the villagers and they are naturally blaming van Jock as it is a functional necessity of the script because said script will be making a terrible, moronic and emotionally incontinent parallel between chickenosaurus rex and van Jock a little later on.

  When the time comes to defeat the chicken lizard it’s through a combination of the Doctor realising it’s blind, a sonic rearview mirror and stabbing it through the tits with an easel. As the chicken expires, the Doctor translates its dying words. It’s “afraid”. Van Jock quickly realises that chickenosaurus is just like the frightened villagers who call him a wanker for never paying for his drinks and the children who throw stones at him. OK. There’s your terrible, moronic and emotionally incontinent parallel. Blind, misunderstood and a clumsy representation of human isolation and mental illness? Oh Richard, you spoil us.

  But he’s not done yet - far from it. Curtis has them drag Van Jock into the Tardis, back to 2010 and to Musée d’Orsay to show him exactly how celebrated he is in 2010 (to the power chords of Athlete! “La tristesse durera toujours” indeed.) Vincent’s eyes fill with tears. Not enough slush? Here comes more.

  Doctor makes Bill Nighy explain just how great Van Gogh is as Van Jock eavesdrops and masturbates furiously over Amy’s spindly legs. Here comes the money shot. “Not only the greatest artist” says Bill “But ONE OF THE GREATEST MEN who ever lived”. And he says it right as Vincent spaffs over Amy’s tights. She is overcome. Aren’t we all?

  Curtis never uses a pipette where he can use a trowel. I’d like to set the record straight. Vincent van Gogh never travelled forward in time to see his genius realised. He sat around the final few months of his life drinking, wanking over prostitutes, self-harming and sleeping in hollow logs before dying like a turd at his own hand, stinking of failure and cat’s piss. I can handle that truth. Can you?

  Is this where Doctor Who goes now? Will he travel through cultural history preventing calamity? Who wouldn’t want to do that? I’d go back in time and save Fiona Apple from being raped; maybe make sure Nancy Spungen never meets that no-talent shit John Simon Ritchie; see to it Ocean Colour Scene never form. But writing a show about it? Not so much. The kind of people who were impressed by this are the same people who wet themselves when Shannon and Sayid met up and made out in Lost’s finale. This is Van Gogh fan-fic deftly and intelligently written by possibly the most cynical screenwriter we’ve ever produced.

  Richturd Curtis is a writer out of control. There is nothing he won’t cheapen with sentiment - a pathological need exists within him to chocolate box everything. He is on a mission to debase every authentic emotion ever felt by a human. He needs reining in.

  And at no point does Van Gogh put his cock in Amy. That is his tragedy. Watching this is ours alone.

  The verdict on Doctor Who - Vincent and The Doctor: Overbearing yet underwhelming.

  Marks out of 10: 5

  ...and finally

  “Ah fuck it - the cunt bit me” - a Steve Irwin tribute

  It was an unfitting end for a man who had wrestled crocodiles and eyeballed the world’s most venomous snakes. It seemed somehow tawdry, out of place. When the news came it felt like a barb through the heart. TV crocodile man Steve Irwin tragically died on Monday after an attack from a stingray, a venomous yet placid sea creature.

  Famous for his catchphrase “crikey” and saying things like “he’s getting awfully cranky” at a venom spitting snake, Irwin brought edge-of-the-seat wildlife baiting to the masses with his unique eye-popping presenting style. A committed conservationist, he founded several conservation projects putting money where his sizable mouth was and bought habitat to save it from developers.

  It is a measure of how deeply he was loved that the public forgave him for his horribly misjudged feeding-crocodiles-with-his-baby incident. He seemed unable to understand the public outcry but gave private assurances that he would never pull a stunt like that again.

  His death has been greeted with unparalleled levels of grief in Australia. It’s hard to overestimate how fully he expressed something deep within the Australian psyche. A nation descended from convicts and screws, they’ve made a virtue of no-nonsense from the gut straight-talking and an unyielding can-do attitude that he personified. And yet, a more sophisticated metropolitan Australian audience groaned every time this walking caricature came on the screen. Rather like the ambivalent attitude we in England have towards Hugh Grant’s good-natured foppishness, Irwin was a blessing and curse for the perception of Australians abroad.

  Irwin wore khaki shorts so tight even Stuart Pearce himself would wince. He bounded, he pranced and shamelessly mugged to the camera. Many, including Germaine Greer, took his death as an opportunity to sneer at his legacy. But David Bellamy described him as “one of the great showmen and conservationists” and wept as he heard the news. He is survived by his hot wife Terri who is back on the market again so it’s not all bad news.

  In an industry where bland careerist scum are as plentiful as fruit on the vine it was refreshing to see someone so instantly recognisable, committed and passionate about something other than getting their face on the box.

  Aerial Telly salutes The Steve Irwin. He took incredible risks with pissed off snakes and crocodiles. He took the wildlife show into new territory. He bravely sported eye-wateringly tight shorts. We will miss you Steve, you stupid bastard.

  The verdict on The Steve Irwin: An authentic TV original. R.I.P.

  Marks out of 10: 8

  To the reader

  Thanks so much for reading Television Can Blow Me. If you like it, please take time to leave a review on Amazon. Your support is always appreciated.

  The sequel, Television Can Blow Me II: “This time it's Persil”, is currently in production and features 100% original never-seen-before material. Sources indicate it's going to be large.

  Aerial Telly forever. Hopeless heathen groupie media scum never.