Paper Watch: David Tennant, Top Gear and more.
In my never ending quest to simplify and improve this blog, Outside the Box has decided to create this new feature, ‘Paper Watch’.
Each week my crack team will scour the newspapers to bring you the televison stories that matter.
Doctor Who star David Tennant aims to crack America in new drama - The Telegraph
Tennant has been cast as the lead character in Rex Is Not Your Lawyer, a new hour-long pilot for NBC. He will play Rex Alexander, a top Chicago lawyer who suffers from panic attacks and has to coach his clients to represent themselves in court.
NBC has high hopes for the pilot, which could be made into a series if it goes down well with audiences.
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Top Gear to plan silent show – The Telegraph
The controversial presenter said that the only way to ensure the show couldn’t cause offence would be if no one spoke.
Mr Clarkson said: “One day we’ll do an episode of Top Gear in which none of us speak.
“It’s the only way they will have nothing to complain about. I don’t think I’ve done anything naughty this year, though, have I?”
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With Cast Offs Channel 4 has turned disability into a comedy drama – The Times
The caption at the start seems to promise the most exploitative reality television show yet made: “Eighteen months ago Channel 4 marooned six disabled people on a remote island . . .” Two months after the station finally killed off Big Brother, has it really come to this?
Not exactly. The reality TV show is fictitious, but Cast Offs, a comedy drama about the making of a disabled take on Survivor, is about to become one of the most talked about programmes of the year when it begins this month.
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The brilliance of Larry David and Curb Your Enthusiasm – The Times
The other day, my friend Martin brought round an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm — the American comedy series written by and starring the Seinfeld-creator Larry David — on DVD. It’s called The Ski Lift. In The Ski Lift, Larry, a Jew, wants to avoid having to donate a kidney to his dying friend Richard Lewis, a Jew, and so fabricates a friendship with the head of the “Kidney Consortium”, Ben Heineman, a Jew, but in this case an orthodox Jew: a frummer. In order to butter up Ben, Larry pretends to be an orthodox Jew himself, and because Cheryl, his regular wife, is blonde and clearly not Jewish, he gets his agent Jeff’s wife, a Jew, to pretend to be his wife, and wear a sheitel (a wig that orthodox Jewish married women wear). He then invites Ben and his very frum daughter, Rachel (who is suspicious of Larry’s motives), to a ski weekend. While at the lodge, Ben says of Larry/Jeff’s wife, “Ah, you remind me of my dear wife, Alav ha-shalom.” Larry says: “Really? I’d love to meet her.” Rachel looks askance at Larry.
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Spooks: A drama that sees the future – The Independent
Call it sixth sense. The makers of Spooks, BBC1’s hit MI5 drama, which begins its eighth series on Wednesday, seem to have an uncanny knack of knowing what’s about to happen in the news.
“The obvious example is 7/7,” says Spooks regular Peter Firth. “In June 2005, we filmed a train station being bombed by terrorists – a month before the same terrible event happened in real life. At one point, the episode wasn’t going to be shown because it was too near the mark. In the end, the episode went out in a very heavily edited version.”
Disturbing as the parallels may be between fact and fiction, they only serve to underline the extent to which the creators of Spooks have their fingers on the current-affairs pulse. They have also written episodes about the threat posed by a recrudescent Russia, the global financial crisis and London being locked down for a state visit by a US President before those events took place in real life.
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Spooks: overblown nonsense or top TV? – Guardian TV & Radio Blog
With perhaps a little less fanfare than usual, but no less crash-bang-wallop once the titles roll, Spooks returns to BBC1 tonight, allowing viewers a glimpse of the impossibly good-looking MI5 officers who are apparently single-handedly keeping the country safe from the clutches of evil terrorists.
It’s ridiculous stuff of course – the designer clothes, massive bomb plots every week, distinct lack of boring paperwork, and the glossy grid itself (at least I presume Thames House doesn’t look like that in real-life, although my invitation to inspect the premises has strangely got lost in the post). Most ludicrous of all, of course, is idea that MI5 has only five members of staff available to counteract the combined forces of world evil. Well, I say five. But they might be down to four given that Harry Pearce has apparently spent the last year wrapped in a bodybag in the boot of a car, while the writers waited for the next series to kick off.
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Another new weekly feature here on the blog. A look at all the weeks biggest shows and their reviews from sites around the web. This week we begin with a look at the return of two shows which have seen better days, Gordon Ramsay’s cooking show The F-Word and BBC1’s spy thriller Spooks.
In my house it has now become part of the fun of watching the show; trying to guess who will make it to the end of the series. Last week we saw two casualties; Connie was arrested for being a spy, and Ben was killed, for guessing Connie was a spy. Both of them just ended up as victims of the writer’s need to keep us on our toes, and keep us guessing… but does this make Spooks a better show? Or will viewers abandon the show knowing that their favourite character could be killed at any moment?
Television has brought us our fair share of sexy spies over the years. First there was Diana Rigg as Emma Peel on the Avengers. Then along came Jennifer Garner as a CIA operative in Alias. Yet for men of a certain age, the sexiest of the lot would have to be Hermione Norris’s character Ros Myers in BBC1’s wonderful spy drama Spooks.
