John Walker's Electronic House

I adore French & Saunders. And I have no measure of whether that’s incredibly uncool, or enormously out of date, or something. But I adore them.

I love them because when working together, they’re incredibly funny. And because they’re astonishingly cruel. And cleverer than me. And I’m a bit in love with Jennifer Saunders.

Everything is meta. Layer on layer on layer. No sketch sits still, or stays in its place. They stay in character while stepping out of character. There is no defined position between sketch and sketch show, everything blurred, everything a television programme eating itself.

To understand their majesty, all you need to see is the Silence of the Lambs sketch.

Whether being Madonna and Britney, the stars of Alien, or a making-of documentary of the Harry Potter movies, they remain Dawn and Jennifer. Their accents may have changed, and indeed will likely change throughout the sketch, but it’s never about that which they’re spoofing. The Lambs sketch is purely about their being back for a new series, dressed in the lavishly complex clothing of a movie spoof.

These blurs nicely include Dawn’s size, somehow never impinging on her playing someone as thin as Britney Spears (well – back before Britney went saggy), but yet always being relevant. Not, “Ha ha! There’s a fat lady!”, but something smarter than that. Or as idiotic as French declaring, “That’s my big fat wobbly belly.”

Anyway, so they’ve got a full series of clip shows to celebrate 20 years on the BBC, with new material scattered throughout that’s just as great as they’ve always been. Seeing their awesome Silent Witness spoof, Witless Silence, again is such a joy. And best of all, it reminds you quite how silly they are. Astonishingly silly. Silly enough that a sketch can just be the two of them dancing stupidly, or shouting like children. But still smart.

And no, I didn’t think Ab Fab was very good, and the Vicar Of Dibley is like a tramp vomiting his liver in your face.

And Jennifer’s mother is a biology teacher in Cheshire.

It’s Dexter’s 1st birthday today.

Say happy birthday to Dexter everyone.

So, what did you get him?

What television needs is another show about vampires. Goodness knows there haven’t been enough yet, and goodness knows it’s important that they all be made with a budget of 10p and a cast of people you recognise from films you once saw on TV late at night.

Moonlight – the latest attempt to wring another drop of blood from the poor undead bastards – embraces everything at its very worst. Episode one is a cavalcade of awkward exposition. The episode begins with the central character, vampire private detective Mick St. John (played by Alex O’Loughlin, who peculiarly looks like a young Jon Stewart), explaining to an unseen television interviewer all about himself. Here he’s asked about all the various vampire details, and blithely dismisses various vampire rules so we know the score here. Crosses, holy water, garlic, and stakes through the heart can’t hurt him, and sunlight makes him feel ill. Turns out you can kill a vampire by setting him on fire, or chopping his head off. And then, oh the surprise, the interview is his own fantasy, and he tells us about his average day.

But the laboured exposition doesn’t end there. We have to see him injecting blood with a syringe, because he’s a good vampire, and therefore doesn’t drink the stuff like every other vampire in the universe. And we get to hear about how his life is about to change, because he saw a reporter on an internet site reporting on a murder.

Sophia Miles (cursed with small parts in vampire nonsense, from the BBC’s recent dreadful Dracula, to the abysmal Underworld sequel) plays Beth, said reporter, who decides the attacker of the murder victim must be a vampire due to the puncture marks on her neck. But she’s not a reporter for a TV channel! Oh no! This is the Noughties. She’s a reporter for an online news site called Buzz Wire, that looks like it was designed by MTV in 1987. In fact, it looks like that pizza commercial Winona Ryder’s film gets made into at the end of Reality Bytes. Her boss exclaims to her,

“200,000 unique visitors on your vampire story, and we posted less than 24 hours ago! The vampire angle was genius.”

Vampires, you say?

Buzz Wire has its own open-plan office filled with nu-media lovelies who get scoops over the television channels, because it’s all about the internet nowadays, someone once told the writers.

And so we are forced to accept that St. John and Beth will become teamed up and fight mysterious crime together. And that friendly vampires are everywhere. And people are interested in vampires but don’t know about them. And goths, called “emos” by the moronic writers, want to murder each other and become like vampires. And vampires. Vampires I tell you. Vampires.

Everything you’d assume a minimal-budget, yet primetime show would do wrong is here. Green-screened driving sequences, tacky beyond belief. Filmed like a soap opera. Incredibly claustrophobic small-set shots. And lots of sweeping, sped-up helicopter shots of cities, because Angel did that so then we’ll look like Angel.

Worst is the miserable attempt to include Whedon-esque banter. It’s just horrible. Everyone comes off sounding deeply smug, rather than witty, ensuring you hate everybody involved. And naturally it’s vital that we see Beth stripped down to her bra twice in the episode, and then drugged by evil men, and rescued by the good man.

Somehow it manages to be worse than cable attrocity Blood Ties, by failing to at least have the decent fight scenes. So naturally it will run for fifteen seasons, despite including narrative dialogue such as,

“Relationships are complicated. Vampire or mortal, that’s one thing we have in common.”

And it finishes with fucking Evanescence.

Anti-Americanism in the UK is as rife now as it has ever been. People here talk about “Americans” in a way they would find abhorrent if supplanted by any other nation. It’s vulgar. And it’s not exactly helped by Fox.

Kitchen Nightmares – the Channel 4 series in which Gordon Ramsey visits failing restaurants, shouts at them for being idiots, changes their menu, hugs everyone when they make some money the next week, and then gets sued – has followed Hell’s Kitchen across the Atlantic and onto Fox’s main network channel. But, as is often the case, it’s gone under something of a transformation.

The UK’s Kitchen Nightmares is an oddly quaint programme. The restaurants he visits tend to be small, village projects, and supporting them seems almost philanthropic. (Obviously it isn’t – it’s to sell advertising – but the impression is nice). Also, you get to see morons shouted at by a frightening man, which is fun. At first this appears to have been kept intact. The first restaurant is a small Italian family business in a small town, the second a peculiar Indian-cum-American-cum-deathtrap in New York. The temptation to tackle big businesses was avoided, and mercifully.

But as you watch the first episode, the differences become quickly apparent. First of all, the US Hell’s Kitchen melodramatic narrator is back to talk us through what we can see in front of us, rather than the more congenial babbling of Ramsey explaining what he’s up to. (Of course, the narrator is a massive boon to Fox’s Hell’s Kitchen, replacing the vile snarking of Angus Deayton). Then there’s the score. Like so many US shows, each 45 minutes is given a unique score to reflect the action – something that can be absolutely fantastic. However, here it’s trying so hard it ends up sounding like a horror movie. Shrieking violins accompany the revealing of cockroaches in the kitchen, and Hell’s Kitchen’s dun-dun-duhhh strings invade every busy scene. It all ends up becoming rather ridiculous, with the fear that at any moment there’s going to be a wacky trombone as someone falls over.

And then it all goes insane. Halfway through the first episode the staff come back to their own restaurant to find their rotting kitchen completely refitted with state of the art equipment. Huh? They were appalling at their jobs, and had let their business fall apart. And the response was to reward them. It made no sense, and it doesn’t fit in with Ramsey’s approach to breaking people down before they can be built up. It made the whole programme feel false, and the results unlikely to survive. Traditionally Ramsey would have made them sell property to afford new equipment, make sacrifices in order to improve. Receiving a gameshow prize left these people where they were, and even endorsed their failure.

Episode two repeats the moment, this time completely refitting the restaurant itself, as well as paying for professional cleaners to clean the kitchens (although thank goodness, because they were infested), and then paying for a double-decker bus to be driven around New York promoting the business. However, thankfully episode two brings back two vital ingredients that make the show worthwhile. Firstly, we get to see Gordon topless – a feature of the UK version that appeared in every episode for unknowable reasons, but was always hilarious. And secondly, he harrasses one dreadful idiot to the point where he quits, and gives the restaurant a chance. It was interesting to see the comparison with episode one, where he pushed the large Italian American brute to his very limit, looking likely to get flattened at any moment, but instead having him back down and admit that he was the problem, and changing his ways. In episode two, it’s a slimey Brit who can’t take someone standing up to him, and he eventually slithers away. It gives the results more authenticity, rather than seeing the stupid get rewarded.

But everything that Fox adds, adds nothing. The narration, the score, the ridiculous gameshow prizes, and then on top the treacly eulogies from staff declaring how Saviour Gordon has saved their lives, all create the impression that the programme was too difficult without them. It implies that the audience must be too stupid to manage without someone holding both their hands and pointing everything out for them. And when the British version managed fine without any of this, and the US version implies its audience needs it, it empowers those who believe “Americans” are whichever sweeping generalisation they wish to impose. It would have been so great to have seen Fox try and keep the import in its original format, and see if it succeeds. I believe it is the assumption of a moronic audience that makes the programming so lowbrow, rather than the reality of one. It just seems incredibly unlikely that anyone on a free-to-air network is ever going to take the chance to find out.

While they may be slow to admit it, there’s no sociologist in the world who isn’t delighted to find out about a human being having been kept in the most peculiar or traumatic conditions for many years. Not delighted for that person, of course. But here’s an opportunity to study human beings in a way our societal moral codes would prevent. So you’ll hear stories about the girl who was kept in a chicken coop all her childhood and despair at her plight. But we learn an awful lot from her. On a cold, scientific level, if only we could put a thousand children into chicken coops and have them grow up there. But, you know, that would be abhorrent.

Which makes Kid Nation all the more surprising. Whatever you’ve heard about it, it’s not as disturbing as the reality of watching an episode.

Good luck kids!

The concept is this: Forty children from the age of 8 to 15 are bused to an abandoned mining town in Mexico, and left there, on their own, for a month.

Just left as that alone, it’s already bordering on a chicken coop experiment. It’s a shocking sentence to read, let alone to think it’s actually been filmed, and is now airing. And because of that: fantastic. What an incredible opportunity for sociological study!

Of course, the whole concept is immediately broken by being filmed, and thus being a town full of adult cameramen, boom mic operators, directors, etc. Then it’s further broken by being hundreds of hours of events edited down to 13 hour-long episodes. So, well, it’s probably scientifically useless already. But hey, this is television, so this already ludicrous concept isn’t enough. Let’s mess with those kids’ heads.

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Sorry it’s been so quiet around here recently. Extraordinarily busy, and building up to Very Exciting Things to happen soon, elsewhere.

Meanwhile, here’s what kept me from writing anything over the weekend – mad, rambling Super Paper Mario review on EG.

The question has to be: Is there finally another must-have game for the Wii? But then of course it could be: Have Nintendo lived up to the reputation of the Paper Mario series? Or perhaps it’s: Is it as funny as the GBA’s Superstar Saga. Worry not, we’ll address them all.

Let’s begin by trying to explain exactly what Super Paper Mario is. Which is no mean feat. It’s not quite an RPG. It’s not quite a platform game. It’s not quite an adventure. Draw the three points on a piece of paper, creating a genre triangle. Then plot a mark for SPM… somewhere on the wall behind you. Glance at it, and you’d think it was a standard platform game. Look at the menus and you’d think it an RPG with as many fiddly options as Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door. Play it for a few moments, and you’ll discover how the 2D levels can be “flipped” into 3D, completely changing all the rules for how to approach a level. Let’s accept it doesn’t really fit into any category, and be rather delighted by that.

New Phoenix Wright review on EG! Woo-hoo!

“A ‘computer virus’? What does one of those do?”

It is, of course, a conversation between the best lawyer in the history of the universe, Phoenix Wright, and the erstwhile Judge presiding over yet another of his cases. He’s back, and he’s back for the last time. And so, once more, I find myself with the opportunity to convince you to buy one of the funniest games you’ll ever play.

Warning: contains satire.

Missing Girl Probably Raped

“It was some Puerto-Rican guy.”

Pretty much the only TV blog I read is TiFaux. The afternoon news headlines by Dan are an excellent way of keeping up to date, then the whole team post regular articles on what they’re watching, and being madly wrong about Studio 60 and thinking Top Chef is better than Hell’s Kitchen. Every now and then I’ve left a comment, which excitingly qualifies me as one of their regulars, whom they’re currently profiling.

So this is all about me, which is obviously a great thing.