John Walker's Electronic House

I’m reposting this piece about Psych written about a year and a half ago as it’s no longer online elsewhere. Giant Realm briefly had me writing about TV (one day, somewhere, I’ll get a regular gig writing about TV for a magazine or website that won’t immediately close down) before they pulled their entire blog. This is the unedited version, because the edited was so comprehensively translated into American that it often didn’t read like me.

And I should add in the interests of balance, this week’s episode of Psych was awful. Fortunately, last week’s was one of the best ever.

At the mention of its name, the reaction people give to Psych tends to be, “That show? Really? I saw maybe one episode – it seemed alright.” I want to put that right. I want to convince you that Psych is the most entertaining show on TV this summer. I will use a collection of silly names, and a pineapple.

The show’s conceit, to put it mildly, is contrived. Shawn Spencer (James Roday, Miss Match) is the son of a retired cop, who spent his childhood having observational skills drummed into him by his forbidding father. As an adult he’s kept his hyper-observant talents, but no job for longer than three months. That’s until his habit for solving crimes by watching the local evening news caused the police to become suspicious. Needing a way out to prevent his being arrested, he invented the story that he was a psychic, convincing the officers and detectives by throwing out a few ‘hot reads’ based on all the stuff his eagle eyes had spotted. Well, convincing all of them but one, the surly Detective Lassiter (Timothy Omundson) remaining heavily sceptical.

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In an unprecedented eighteenth episode of Rum Doings we don’t discuss what we will do on Earth about potholes. However, we do quite brilliantly demonstrate how to drink. And then immediately return to our favourite topic of recent times: ketchup. Via some quite astonishing observation comedy, of course. But we promise the ketchup talk is confined to only the beginning.

Then there’s happy stories of service experiences, which leads us to what will be remembered by history as the greatest series of “time” themed puns mankind has ever heard. And welcome to the new job title: the shorekeeper. Then there’s Nick’s racist t-shirt and his mule child.

Then it’s time for part two of The Rules, which those who didn’t want us to do any more will be pleased to learn completes the collection. Where we learn that all our listeners should all embrace death, because they can’t be bothered to promote us or write to us.

There’s a few things we ask for in return for this present. Could you retweet about it, or find a way to tell new people to listen? And writing a review on iTunes helps us a great deal. We’d appreciate it.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

I missed out so many the last time I did this, and with The Amazing Race having started, I feel like I should start from A again. But really this is F-H, with a few extras beforehand. I’ve decided to implement a code. If there’s spoilers in the piece I’ll have * at the start of stuff you shouldn’t read. Assume that it will spoil anything that’s happened in that show up to the current (US) episode. There are also some bad swears in there, delicate-eared readers. Oh, and let me know if I’ve missed anything. I know there’s still stuff from A-E that I’ve forgotten a second time.

The Amazing Race – CBS

Well, what’s to say. Eleven teams of two in a race around the world. It’s such a huge idea, and it’s still working sixteen seasons in. Perhaps what I like best about the global scale racing nonsense is that the best teams tend to win. Stupid people go out first, unpleasant people then follow, and generally it’s the nice lot left to win at the end. And if you don’t love Phil, there’s something wrong with your DNA.

Burn Notice – USA

Season one of this programme was confused. After a horrible pilot it quickly ditched a few ideas, found a groove, but didn’t really know whether to take itself seriously. By season three it really knows what it wants to be. Light-hearted, while dealing with life or death situations. The gimmick – that burned spy Michael Weston narrates giving advice to the audience for how to be a spy in various situations – still works. And it seems to trust Bruce Campbell to be Bruce Campbell a lot more. The most recent episode featured Campbell doing the most fantastic spoof of CSI, openly playing for laughs, as is more frequently the case. The theme now is for Weston to have a long-running nemesis whom he must work for/against in the hope it will get him closer to learning who burned him, while taking on weekly cases for the seemingly infinite number of friends of friends in trouble. This means we get to see him trying juggle both situations, and inevitably his chain smoking mother, while teaching us how to bug a car or break into a guarded office. It’s so silly, and thankfully it now knows it.

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Family Guy enjoys being offensive. It does it with glee. As creator Seth McFarlane likes to say, they’re an “equal opportunity offender”. I’m struggling to think of a subject they haven’t made wildly inappropriate jokes about. Racial stereotypes, paedophilia, infanticide, rape, degenerative disorders, disabilities, the Holocaust… A large part of the point of watching the programme is gasping in shock with your hands clasped to your mouth, unsure if you’re stifling a cry of horror or a laugh.

There have been other programmes that have taken this “no taboos” rule to more effective and more shocking places, such as the astonishing Wonder Showzen, and Drawn Together. But these were on cable. Family Guy is on at primetime on Sunday nights on Fox. Having been cancelled twice by the network, it’s proven itself fairly invincible, and with McFarlane’s new contract breaking all records they know they’re not going anywhere. And to embrace this the most recent episodes having been pushing things further and further, including as many digs at Fox as they can cram in. Last Sunday’s was particularly shocking. At least, I thought so at first.

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In our seventeenth episode of Rum Doings we don’t ask the question: Who will diffuse Britain’s ticking immigration time-bomb? Instead we focus on more pressing matters: plum jam and ketchup.

Before we start, just to say, last week only one person bothered to retweet the Rum Doings new episode announcement. It’s all we ask listeners to do – just help us promote it. It’s pretty bloody sad when people can’t be bothered to do just that. So please, help out. Onto the episode…

We briefly recognise how awful the Simpsons is, before tucking into a glass of plum sake, and moving on to the dominant subject of the episode: Britain’s miserly distribution of tomato ketchup. This episode, recorded on Monday, refers to the harrowing events of the preceding Valentine’s Day. Along the way we explore the options for entertainment available at Cheddar Gorge for a remarkable bargain price!

When we finally get to the restaurant story you can enjoy Nick’s precise use of the word “niggardly“, and then join us in our celebration of British service culture.

This then moves on to the distribution of crisps on aeroplanes, volumes of tea, and a mysterious newspaper clipping from 1997.

There’s a few things we ask for in return for this present. Could you retweet about it, or find a way to tell new people to listen? And writing a review on iTunes helps us a great deal. We’d appreciate it.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

I’ve had a couple of pieces appear on Eurogamer in the last 24 hours.

First is a retrospective of Aliens Vs. Predator Classic 2000, which manages to even be a little bit Valentine’sy. It opens like this, for instance:

So I’ve got myself in something of a situation. I find that I’m spending an increasing amount of time in the company of another who is not a gamer. In a world where everyone’s something of a gamer, even if it’s just a game of Farmville at lunchtime, or some Bejeweled on the mobile phone, this new friend plays none at all. We do not have this in common. This means a front room that houses no tangle of game controllers protruding from the television. There’s no room in the whole house possessing a heaving black box of hard drives and whirring fans. This person does not own a USB mouse. This is unfamiliar territory. I am scared.

But I can nonchalantly carry in a netbook. I’m writing this on it right now. It’s an innocent-looking Trojan laptop, a small work machine. It’s no use for gaming. It’s sneered at by the likes of Steve Jobs for its inability to have its screen touched. It is, in fairness, a glorified typewriter. But just maybe…

It continues here.

Second is a review of the new Ace Attorney game, Investigations: Miles Edgeworth. I’ve been fortunate enough to review all five of this series for Eurogamer, and while they’ve astonishingly never managed to improve a single fault with each iteration, each is still a ludicrous joy to play. They’re happiness distilled down to its purest form, then moulded into gaming form. The infectious glee is overwhelming, and it works just as well once more without even mentioning the series’ former protagonist, Phoenix Wright. That starts like this:

I can’t decide which quote to open with. It’s one of these three:

“No one gets away with committing murder in my office! No one!”

“It’s gonna r0x0rz so many b0x0rz.”

“All you have to do is arrest suspicious person after suspicious person. That’s how you eliminate crime from the streets.”

Things might be different as Edgeworth takes the helm, but this is unmistakably an Ace Attorney game. It bubbles with joy, a simmering pot of gleeful happiness. The ridiculous world of outlandish characters, crazed enthusiasm and peculiar passion continues, despite this latest game being even more heavily focused on the topic of murder.

And you can read the rest here.

A few decades back something went horribly wrong in the UK. At a certain point, as a nation, we reversed the order of priority between customer and service provider. And nothing reveals this contempt demonstrated to consumers better than the provision of ketchup.

Now we all know that the way things should work is the volume of ketchup available being inversely proportional to the poshness of the establishment. Cheap and cheerful cafes should have a big bottle of the stuff available on the table. Then as you get more posh the amount drops down. A reasonably nice pub chain will, for instance, give you a ramekin dish filled with red sauce. Go from chain to restaurant and now the ramekin is only leant to you momentarily, for you to teaspoon as much onto your plate as you feel you can get away with. (I’ve declared no shame at this point, and will gladly empty it out – they’ve got more.) Next rung is they maintain complete control of the ketchup distribution, titrating a single millilitre of it onto your plate for you. Then above that requesting ketchup results in your being asked to leave.

That’s all how we expect it to be in the lunatic version of society we should concede to accept. This is not something the UK is capable of adhering to. Because in the UK ketchup is a rare commodity, brought in by vast merchant ships from distant lands, traded for gold and precious jewels. It is an exotic elixir so rare and unusual that it must be reserved as an offering to the gods, or for visiting kings of neighbouring empires. We must preserve our precious ketchup resources, and we must ensure that no customer is able to dip their chips in more than half a teaspoon’s worth, distributed in tiny plastic sachets that can only be opened using teeth.

Which is strange, because when you go into supermarkets they seem to sell enormous containers of it for insignificant amounts of money. This is indeed quite a mystery.

It is with all this in mind that I say: bring your own ketchup to the Hillside Cottage in Cheddar Gorge.

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I wrote this piece about Yo Gabba Gabba a few months ago as a spec for something else that didn’t happen. So if you are a super-high-powered editor/publisher who wants writing about TV like the below, do get in touch. That would be nice.

The cruellest thing that can happen to any children’s television programme is its ironic adoption by the student classes. Teens and twenty-somethings oh-so-knowingly put up posters of popular pre-school characters, but, wait for it, here they’re smoking a spliff, or taking a dump! How astonishingly clever and, let’s just say it, satirical. The system, the Man, is truly smashed to bits like someone took a bulldozer to a Sylvanian Families collection.

These wretched people misunderstand any magical programme they touch, ruining the gentle, repetitive loveliness of everything from The Magic Roundabout to the Teletubbies, Bagpuss to Bob The Builder. But this isn’t to say that adults shouldn’t be able to sit and enjoy the output of channels like CBeebies or Nick Jr. If capable of watching them without becoming enraged by the numbers of arms a presenter may possess, there’s much to be appreciated on exactly the level the creators intended. But sadly any programme that doesn’t treat its child audience as plankton, bothering to work hard at being thoughtful and involved, seems to be subsumed by the weed-addled idiots.

There is, however, one programme that knows exactly what the ironic pissants will do to it before they let loose their first nasally snort. One that has them beat from the start. Yo Gabba Gabba is the creation of indie hipsters Christian Jacobs and Scott Schultz, and is quite possibly the most perfect under-five’s television programme if you don’t count Sesame Street.

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Hello. This would be episode 16 of Rum Doings. We’re not afraid to not discuss the subjects that aren’t topical, and such it is that we’re not discussing the true meaning of Christmas.

Instead we begin with a celebration of oat milk, whatever on Earth it might be. First the carton is dissected, and then the insides are consumed. Will we like it? Will we paw at our tongues?

Fond memories of the daily porridge man arise, before we knuckle down to this week’s theme: a discussion of The Rules. This causes conversation about how to pronounce clip-art, pause buttons at the cinema, cats drinking from toilets, boobies, the pleasure of being rained on, hole digging, Dick and Dom In Da Bungalow jokes, and John’s rather heartwarming rules for bravery.

Could you help out? There’s a few things we ask for in return for this present. Could you retweet about it, or find a way to tell new people to listen? And writing a review on iTunes helps us a great deal. We’d appreciate it.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

It’s the fifteenth episode. They said it would never last this long. This “they” being the people who knew we were going to try to drink Tesco Value W-hite Rum.

This week not under discussion is the matter: has the iPad lived up to the media hype? So instead we talk about John’s loss of nomenclature, and then almost kill ourselves with a frighteningly awful liquid.

This week’s episode is mostly dictated by the commands of one “Royston”, who left a comment on episode 13 in which he listed subjects he would like to hear discussed. Somehow missing his opening entry, “Wales”, we otherwise followed his instructions. Which were:

St Wilgefortis
Battlestar Galactica Action Figures
Sufjan Stevens
Favoured Condiments

Which pretty much sees us through. It leads us toward discussions of decaffeinated horrors and fishfingers, and that’s us done.

We’d love it if you passed this link on, told friends, recommended us in forum threads, pre-loaded it on mp3 players and then handed them out to all your family, and so on. Also, if you would, write us a review on horrible, horrible iTunes. That would be splendid.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.