The finale has had to wait until next week and I wonder if it will include Clarkson's heart valve by-pass that he underwent shortly after his pub opening. The penultimate episode at least spent some time back on the farm and started to show Jezza looking old, fat and unwell. There were genuine moments of tension between him and Kaleb, mainly because the thick farm manager decided to do things he knew would piss off his boss - my belief that Kaleb is becoming hoisted by his own petard seems to be coming true, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the two part company in the fifth season.
I still can't quite work out why this show is only 20 minutes of original content per episode. I could understand it if
was an out-and-out comedy or if it just told one 'story' inside those 20 minutes, but this is an ongoing show with some serious undertones, for all the quirkiness and fish out of water antics the bunch of scientists Murderbot (or Sec Unit as they call him) is assigned to protect. This week continued where last left off, with the Sec Unit being dragged through the other group of scientists lab space by a far more advanced version of Sec Unit which is obviously working to an agenda we're not privy to. Yes, this is corny, some of the Sec Unit 'daydreams' are inspired and crazy, but there's a serious story hammering at the fourth wall trying to get out. The most recent episode at least moved the narrative forward, but the limited time makes it difficult. We're halfway through and I suppose I shouldn't be disappointed about where we are in the story because ordinarily we wouldn't be this far even if this just spent its time explaining to us what has been happening so far... However, I threw a theory at the wife after watching Friday night's fifth episode. This feels like it was originally made as a feature film, but was slashed into 10 parts instead and made into a TV series.
Channing Tatum is the latest Hollywood superstar to drop into North Wales. The 45-year-old actor and friend of Ryan Reynolds was one of the focal points of last week's
, which spent some time on Tatum making an advert with the team; some time looking at how the youth academy and the women's team need investment in and then on the 37-year-old goal machine super-sub the team has in Steven Fletcher. He's the man with the dodgy haircut who comes on with 15 minutes to go and wins the game for the Championship-bound football club. This was an episode laden with subtitles, presumably because Americans might struggle with a subtle Scottish accent or even a vaguely Scouse one. It's like when TV shows subtitle the Asian appearing despite him/her speaking better, clearer English than people who aren't subtitled. Like
you realise these fiscal discussions are not scripted. This Friday's most recent episode was all about departures and people moving away from their positions they once held. What was really lovely about this episode was the way Rob and Ryan paid tribute to one of the fans who recently died - the 100 year old fan who was honoured by the club last season and was now honoured again in the TV show. This was also about the likes of Olly Palmer and Paul Mullins no longer being the first names on the team sheet and about the emergence of new heroes. Yes, it's about football, but as a football fan, I watch this and keep an eye on Wrexham and it brings back that feeling I had in the 1970s, when football meant a lot more to me...
A Racist Paradise
Scandinavia boats some of the happiest places on the planet. They have socialist or semi-socialist politicians and they embrace nationalism. To say they are Nationalist Socialists would be an insult to them, but they have essentially shunned migration and do not view asylum seekers or refugees as being anything other than temporary. Which begs the question - does Sweden have such a high crime rate because of this policy or is there another reason? Because during the third and final part of
Simon Reeve: Scandinavia we saw two sides to Sweden and Denmark. We saw these rich, happy countries with free health and child care, high taxes but even higher disposable incomes, yet Sweden in particular is blighted by one of the highest murder rates
in the world! The problem it seems are all the foreigners; 90% of all crimes in Sweden are committed by non-Swedish nationals and despite this rich and welcoming country doing everything it can for its own people, migrants are treated badly (and have become a scapegoat).
It's not so bad in Denmark, but that's because Denmark has already made non-Danish people second class citizens. They literally outlaw places from becoming migrant ghettoes; they forcibly move, mainly Muslim, families into areas with a higher concentration of Danish people in the hope that Danish values and principles will rub off on these people and make them 'better' people. It smacks of racism, yet the figures unfortunately back up what a lot of right wing politicians claim - it's the foreigners what did it, Guv. It's difficult to say whether this is a chicken or an egg situation, but in Sweden particularly there's this fabulous country blighted by crime and the crime is being committed mainly by migrants. It is the same all over most of the Nordic countries; the reason you don't hear about it in Norway is because Norway only takes a fraction compared to Sweden and Denmark. It's a situation that fuels the far right over here, yet over there it is political parties left of our current Labour party enforcing these policies and looking like they're taking notes from Mein Kampf.
An absolutely eye-opening but scary mini-series, you should watch it on iPlayer, but it raises so many questions, especially about migration. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a tolerant, inclusive person (despite my general dislike of right wing idiots), but recently I had a tradesman in the house, originally from Middlesbrough, and during a conversation with him over a coffee, he wheeled out anti-immigrant, anti-asylum seeker rhetoric like he was calling bingo numbers. "Too many foreigners." "Too many black people." "Asylum seekers stealing our jobs." And the most scary: "Maybe when Reform get into power we can take our country back?" However, he also claimed the weather was being controlled by the government... We should laugh, but deep down I knew I was staring at the future of the UK...
The Song & Dance Vampires
There is so much wrong with Ryan Coogler's new movie
Sinners, the good news is that there is actually a great film trying hard to escape. My favourite expression in this blog is 'the problem is' and with
Sinners there's a bunch of them. From the mumbling, southern dialects that make a third of the film difficult to understand to the extensive song and dance routines and the weirdly time-twisting scenes where different eras all merge into one. There are some great things about it; the 21st century take on
From Dusk Till Dawn plays out extremely well, with the main antagonists being vampires rather than the KKK - this is the deep south and the year is 1932 - but... and there are copious amounts of buts...
Apparently being turned into a vampire also gives you musical and music hall powers - you can sing and dance, play instruments and hold a tune. You also get turned faster than a rabbit bolts down a hole and you become part of a sort of collective hive mind. Michael B Jordan mumbles his way through this as twin brothers - Stack and Smoke - back from working with Al Capone after spending four years in the trenches before that. These are hardened criminals but they're home and they want to open a bar for blacks that keeps them away from the violence and racism of the white folk. Unfortunately, a trio of vampires arrive at their speakeasy and cause all kinds of bloody havoc, leaving a handful of human survivors. Parts of this film were excellent, other parts left me slightly bewildered and wondering what Coogler was trying to convey and maybe it had something to do with the ending, which given the final stand off between the head vampire - Jack O'Connell - made little or no sense; but there were many such moments in a film that at times felt like it was being made up as they went along. It was still entertaining, but the inconsistencies mean I can only give it a 6/10.
An Idea (Possibly Several)
Doctor Who. I actually carried out my intention and stopped watching it. For the first time since 2005, I simply forgot it was on, only being reminded it had been on by posts or stuff in The Guardian. So, on Saturday night, while the wife was sorting out a couple of bowls of strawberries, I happened to flip over and catch the last ten minutes and obviously absolutely none of it made any sense and then he was back in the Tardis having left his companion with a child (!?), off into space where he regenerates into Billie Piper. Spark immense amounts of internet traffic about something that's been a huge disappointment since Matt Smith left and Peter Capaldi's writers lost the plot. The feel of the programme changed. It stopped being fun and sinister, puzzling and somehow omnipotent...
Davies created a Get Out of Jail card before Ncuti Gatwa came on board. By bringing back David Tennant and managing to keep him to allow the show to soft reboot (badly). We all know it's not the last we'll see of that particular Doctor and now there's Billie Piper. A lot of critics and Who fans seem to crave for something different and when they finally did something different it really was quite awful in comparison to the past. Disney likes the past. Disney still has the rights to five more episodes and may well decide to renew their option, despite poor ratings. Doctor Who has always nodded to its past. From The Three Doctors to the most recent episode. It's a time travel show, first and foremost. Timey-wimey.
What this show has been missing is the Daleks, the Cybermen, The Master, Jack Harkness, the Weeping Angels, stories of peril, jeopardy and fun. If I was Davies, I'd be bringing 'Rose Tyler' back. She has a connection to the Tardis that no other companion has, she's in a different dimension that will never be her home and she's littered throughout the entire history of the modern show. By bringing Rose back instead of The Doctor, in some concocted reason why he/she looks like a past companion you can do something very different. Have a Doctor Who series with Rose trying to work out what the hell just happened and where the 'other' Doctor is - he did expunge all that Time Travel goodness into the universe rather than into a transformation. Rose coming back closes a loop that is now needed to find and save the Doctor. They can literally have an entire season without the present day Doctor and have a relatively simple, but potentially exciting quest to find him; plus you can have David Tennant drop in and give us that extra blast of nostalgic goodness. If I was Disney, I'd be seeing how many other past characters I can bring back for cameos. It allows the series to regain some standing, giving it an opportunity to do something radical when the time is right. It just needs strong writers with solid ideas, rather than the namby-pamby sci-fi RTD serves us up.
BBQ of the Titans
There are a number of awful things about the 2010 remake of
Clash of the Titans, but Sam Worthington's Aussie accent was probably the most jarring. This Greek son of Zeus was distinctly fair dinkum and g'day mate. In fact watching him reminded me of a young Ange Postecoglou biting the heads off of chickens and feeding them to his goats. This really was melodramatic style over substance with a dodgy story and a plot that jerked around like a schizophrenic on a wood lathe. The thing was this was 2010 and CGI was having something of a heyday and this was absolutely piss poor considering what we were getting by this time. We've lined up the sequel, which we also haven't seen. Sequels are usually much worse than the originals, so I might just take a big shit on the carpet and we can watch that instead. 3/10
Shitty SHOTY
The house we wanted to win
Scotland's Home of the Year 2025 ended up second to a house that looked like it had been built by committee and was lived in by office workers who were into 22 hour shifts. The house/home we liked was local-ish and looked and felt like a home, the winner from the North-East and Northern Isles was all steel, wood cladding and the kind of place that Kevin MacLeod would disappear behind a shed to have a quick wank about. The more relevant point was this used to be eight regions - now six - and the final was an hour long with a little more oomph than the three close pegs who now present this show. I've been warming to Banjo Beale a little; he has a good line in off the cuff remarks and slightly pinky blue innuendo, but in this final he looked like he'd thrown together a new pair of pyjamas out of some old quilt covers and a blue biro. Anna Campbell-Jones is just fucking annoying and the irrelevant Danny Campbell had an interesting kilt and a pair of fucking crocs - he, yet again, looked like a prize cunt.
SHOTY is an object of ridicule, nothing more.
Wrath of the Shite-Ans
In the two years [real time] that pass between the first film and its sequel, Sam Worthington manages to grow a head full of curly locks, lose his wife (Gemma Arterton obviously baulked at the idea of being in the sequel) have a 12-year-old son and reconcile with his father, who is the God called Zeus and all that happens in the opening 60 seconds of
Wrath of the Titans. The interesting thing about this film is it's probably a wee bet better than
Clash but it does seem to forget that it's set in Ancient Greece as the dialogue could have come from a hip coffee shop in Shoreditch and because you're more likely to meet an Aussie there than you are in Greece. Yes, Worthington has not lost his Aussie accent, it's just a) a little disguised and b) he doesn't seem to have as much to say in this second film as he did in the first. This is a bit of a mish-mash as far as the plot is concerned. Ralph Fiennes is back as Hades, Liam Neeson as Zeus and they're fighting each other again, this time with the help of Ares, a proper God, who hates his father and wants him dead. Zeus comes across as a really half decent and benign kind of... er... God in these films, so he was either a complete cunt when he was younger or his brothers and offspring are obviously entitled anti-woke bastards with several axes to grind about their errant father. But it's all all right in the end because they all team up to help beat Cronos and everyone lives happily ever after apart from Zeus (and Cronos and Ares). Utterly bonkers hokum, which, as I said, was actually a bit better than
Clash of the Titans. 4/10
Morck and Mingey
The excellent Netflix mini-series
Dept. Q is one of the best crime dramas you will watch this year and I say that having only watched half of the episodes so far. It is based on a Scandi Noir set of books and films, about an irascible police detective being side lined by a department increasingly dominated by outside politics. Morck takes on the new Cold Case unit and decides to go looking for a barrister who went missing four years earlier and was believed to have thrown herself into the Minch (an area of sea between mainland and Hebridean Scotland), but because she was a prominent lawyer the case wasn't as such closed just marginalised and forgotten about. There is a certain amount of contrived plotting here, but that might be down to trying to translate the Scandinavian to a more British setting. Anyhow, Morck assembles a team of misfits, including a Syrian refugee - Alexej Manelov - who is his civilian aid and Leah Byrne, a detective constable who, like Morck, has been marginalised because of a health issue. He's also roped in his former partner, who is helping the investigation from his hospital bed. Morck - Matthew Goode - is a cantankerous and angry man, but it doesn't stop him from being excellent at what he does. He doesn't think Merrit Lingard (not really a Scottish name) is dead and he might be right. This story flashes back and forth, making you wonder when and where some of it is taking place; it's violent, funny and very complicated. It is well worth your attention.
Family Day Out
Every so often I do an IMDB search for something I've never seen, but I figured I'd exhausted just about every search I could, so in an act of desperation I typed "great films I've never seen" into Bing and it gave me a column with 60 films you've probably never heard of but are worth seeing. To be fair, there were about 15 on the list that I've watched and most of these were pretty good, so I took this list as a positive thing. One of the films on it was the 1996 Greg Mottola debut movie
The Daytrippers, which reminded me a little of a Billy Wilder film, the way it lingered on dialogue and the humour of a situation. Starring Hope Davis and Stanley Tucci as a married couple living on the outskirts of New York, where she's a teacher and he works in publishing. Also involved is Parker Posey as her sister, Liev Schreiber as her boring boyfriend and Anne Meara as the sisters' overbearing mother - a typical New York mom. Davis's Eliza has a fantastic night out with her husband, they go to a show, come home and make love, everything is fabulous. The next morning he goes off to work in the city, says he might be late home from a work's book launch party and everything is rosy in the world. Then Eliza finds a letter - a love letter - signed Sandy and it sets her off on a quest to find out if her husband is having an affair. This is essentially one set piece after another, introducing unconnected characters and finding clues all the time. Let's just say these things never have the outcomes anyone expects. It did feel like it was 30 years old, but it was a reasonably enjoyable film. I can only really give it 6/10 and that feels a little generous, but there was nothing wrong with it.
Caddy Shed
I like golf. I don't play it any more and I rarely watch it on TV (because it isn't really on terrestrial any longer). Golf movies tend to either be crap comedies or earnest racially historical biopics. Golf TV shows are as common as me getting a hole-in-one, except now there is one and is stars Owen Wilson as a washed-up has-been golfer who had a shot at the big time but blew it in a catastrophic meltdown.
Stick is about a man reduced to giving golf lessons and selling clubs to overweight club members. Pryce Cahill is drifting towards middle age with nothing in his life until he sees Santi hitting balls at his club and realises this might be a kid as good as Tiger Woods. All he has to do is persuade the kid, the kid's mother, his own ex-wife and his former caddy to support him and help turn Santi into the Next Big Thing. I'm going to echo other reviews by suggesting this is Ted Lasso for golf, but really it's not that at all. Lasso was about a man out of his comfort zone in a strange place; this is about redemption and being able to look the world in the eye again and say 'I did okay.' It's not really about golf either, it's about a group of people all searching for something - with added golfing metaphors to keep it on message.
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