The Almighty Johnsons

The Johnsons: Anders, Mike, Axl, Ty & Grandpa

Who knew that the best show  currently on broadcast TV would be from New Zealand?

Funny, smart and hip, it’s the story of Norse gods whose ancestors were exiled to the southern hemisphere by the rampant fundamentalist Christianity of late 19th century Europe. What makes it all work, though, isn’t the “God stuff”, as they call it on the show, but the family dynamic.

Emmett Skilton (Axl Johnson) plays the perfect awkward young man trying to find his place in the world, and his brothers (played by Tim Balme, Dean O’Gorman, and Jared Turner) are, well, brothers…you want to kill them one minute and…kill them again the next.

It’s shown in Canada on Space on Monday nights, where they are currently about 2/3 of the way through the second season. However, if you haven’t watched it at all, I recommend watching the whole series from scratch. Although each episode hangs together nicely as a unique story, the character development is very much serialized, as you would expect from people learning to cope with their godly powers.

Season three is currently shooting in NZ.

Absolutely F**king Brilliant

Oil City Confidential is the gritty story of the greatest band to ever come out of Canvey Island in Essex. If you’re a regular around here, I don’t have to tell you that that band is Dr. Feelgood.

Even better, it’s a product of the all-too fertile imagination of Julien Temple, the man behind the Sex Pistols’ movie, “The Filth and the Fury“.

A clip –

  

If that doesn’t look like an entertaining way to spend 90 minutes, I don’t know what is.

UK TV V – Mock the Week

Russell, Dara, Hugh & Andy

I ended off my summary of UK TV shows last April with the shows I watched that are broadcast in Canada. I’d now like to move on to a few that are available only on the web.

First is Mock the Week, a current events panel show that pokes fun at current news stories from around the globe. Hosted by Dara O’Briain, with regular panelists Hugh Dennis, Andy Parsons and Russell Howard (who are joined by an assortment of guest panelists throughout the season), it is funny, funny stuff.

While your typical Canadian may find some of the European references obscure, it doesn’t take you long to get up to speed – Gordon Brown is a dour old git, Nicolas Sarkozy is an old git with a hot wife, Silvio Berlusconi is a relentless womanizer & Boris Johnson is…well…Boris Johnson. The world news and Royal Family stuff will all be as familiar to you as anything Rick Mercer does.

Longtime fans mourned the departure at the end of last season of Frankie Boyle, the hysterically funny Scot who’d been around from the beginning. However, his obsessive need to get the last laugh could get tiresome after a time, and the panel does seem more balanced now. Frankie’s autobiography, “My Shit Life So Far”, has just been released.

Anyway, the good news is that MTW is in current production, and that, for now, the BBC isn’t hauling the new episodes off Youtube the minute they’re posted. Here’s this week’s episode, aired Feb. 11.

 

UK TV IV – Ashes to Ashes

Nominally the sequel to the two Life on Mars series (it’s another Bowie tune…geddit?), Ashes to Ashes  could be subbed “Helen Thorpe’s idea of an ideal TV show” (well, maybe if it was set in Newcastle…)

Just like Sam Tyler in “Mars”, “Ashes” stars Keeley Hawes as Alex Drake, this time a police psychologist injured in the line of duty and transported back in time to 1981. It’s been reset in London ths time around, but DCI Gene Hunt (Philip Gleneister) along with his faithful sidekicks DS Ray Carling and DC Chris Skelton (Dean Andrews and Marshall Lancaster, respectively) have come to the big city from Manchester to clean up all the “southern nancy” crime. Talk about suffering for your art – Dean Andrews has had to have a bad disco perm to transform him into an early 80’s DS.

Other than that, it is pretty much “Mars” eight years on – instead of Thin Lizzy’s “Whiskey in the Jar”, you get Madness’ “One Step Beyond” during a foot chase. A second series of Ashes is in production, set in 1983, to coincide with the Falklands war.

Oh, and I’ve figured out Showcase’s current scheduling – Jekyll is on 11:00 AM Saturdays, Life on Mars 11:00 AM Sundays, and Ashes to Ashes is on at noon on Sundays.

UK TV III

Next up is Life on Mars , again a BBC product broadcast over the air in Canada by Showcase, now in reruns in the same sort of time slot as Jekyll. This one doesn’t require much explanation, as ABC has “cloned” an American version. Basically, Sam Tyler (John Simm) is a detective inspector for the modern-day Manchester police force. Receiving  a head Injury in the line of duty, he is somehow subsequently transported back in time to become a DI in the same city in 1973. Actually my favourite part of the show is the brilliant Philip Glenister as the hard-bitten Chief Inspector; he seems to be able to channel John Thaw’s portrayal of Jack Regan in The Sweeney.

UK TV II – Jekyll

Carrying on with programs that are actually broadcast in Canada, we arrive at the excellent Jekyll , a modern retelling of the classic Stevenson tale, arranged into a six-part miniseries produced by Hartswood films for BBC One. Starring James Nesbitt and Gina Bellman (the airheaded “Jane” from the BBC series Coupling) as Mr. & Mrs. Tom Jackman (aka Jekyll), the really remarkable thing is that Nesbitt manages the transformation from Jekyll to Hyde without any obvious  makeup, prosthetics, or CGI (well, OK, he DOES wear black contacts) – he justs plays the two as completely different characters, which is much more unsettling than the usually “Boo, Scarrrry” portrayal of Hyde. Originally aired in 2007 in the UK, it’s in reruns on Showcase (usually weekend afternoons) right now in Canada.

UK TV 1 – Time Team

Phil, Tony, MIck & Helen Geake

As I’ve mentioned previously, about the only TV I watch is produced in the UK. As a public service, I thought I’d throw together a quick and dirty UK Viewing Guide. I may expand it as a semi-regular feature as I discover more programming.

First, there’s Time Team, Channel 4’s Sunday night archaelogical staple. Hosted by Tony Robinson (probably best remembered as “Baldrick” from the Blackadder series), the premise is simple; show up at a site where interesting finds have been reported, do a three-day archaeological dig, and compress the finds into an hour’s worth of television. Along with archaeologists Mick Aston, Phil Harding, Carenza Lewis, geophyicsist John Gater and historical geographer Stewart Ainsworth (and a host of others – you’re not gonna dig much up in three days with six people!), it’s lively, entertaining (especially if you’re into interdisciplinary ribbing) and enlightening. It also gives an insight into how much archaeology actually goes on “down t’pub” afterwards.

It’s remarkable to me that a weekly TV show about field archaeology is now in its seventh season of production – that just wouldn’t happen in North America. We’re lucky here in the Toronto area – Time Team is aired Monday nights at 19:00 on TVO.

Here’s something to be thankful for….

As Thanksgiving approaches, we should all be thankful that “The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization Part II, The Metal Years” is now available on Google Video. Oh, no, not more fog!!!

The really, really badly dated parts of this gem are the interview segments with the LA County social worker who is working to “de-metal” teens. From this perspective, it really is bewildering wondering what the fuss was about. It all looks so tame now.

A couple of the bands in this movie maintained that the context in which they were shown ruined their careers. That must’ve been it – it couldn’t be anything like the fact that the world didn’t need another anonymous glam-metal band whose singer couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. If there’s one good thing about ProTools, it’s that at least you can now cover that up!

The real biggest cause of their decline was lying in wait for them up in Seattle -guys like Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder. Once kids had a dose of real angst, LA metal seemed very shallow by comparison.

Your 15 minutes is calling…

My lovely sister has submitted a video to the W Network‘s “Experts Search Contest”, in hopes of becoming a finalist on a reality show where the ultimate prize is your own TV series.

The deal with this preliminary round is that you submit a video to the network, they upload it to their website and the voting public decides who gets to move on. You can see Laurel’s video here. I still haven’t figured out how you actually vote, but when I do, I’ll update this post.

On a lighter note…

Who knew?? This week, Christopher Lee (of all people) provides the lighter note. To whit:

 

OK, Mr. Thorpe.  A case of that cheap beer you’n’I drink rides on this question – can you name the author of this tune without doing any actual research?

Oh, yeah. And for the rest of you, I added a doohickey down in the bottom righthand corner so that you can pause the music playing on the site. It defaults to whatever the Media Player settings on your computer are, so you may get one of those groovy fizzedelic graphics from Media Player along with the control. I figured it’d help out when you wanna watch one of the Youtube clips I’ve posted without listening to all those Deacons tracks first.