What We Watched
James Simpson tries to forget the horrors of lolshock.com
Given that we have months of freedom in which one could watch anything one wanted to on TV, I thought that I might bring back a brilliant and unique series from the depths of Dave and Dave-ja-vu.
Blackadder – which stars the hilarious Rowan Atkinson in its title role – is a fantastic sitcom based around Edmund Blackadder (a butler) and his Dogsbody, Baldrick - played by Time Team’s very own Tony Robinson. Considering the abundance of rarely-bettered one-liners such as “AM I GLAD TO SEE YOU OR DID SOMEONE JUST PUT A CANOE IN MY POCKET?” I’d be surprised if you hadn’t heard of it before now.
Throughout the latter three series (I’m discounting the first one because it’s generally accepted that it isn’t very good) Edmund and Baldrick are surrounded by a variety of other characters, played by such big names as Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Rik Mayall (right) as Lord Flashheart (Series 2, Episode 1). My mother fancies him.
I don’t think I could possibly ever reccommend any series more. Seriously, watch it!
Currently on BBC1 is the second series of the award-winning detective drama Luther. Starring Idris Elba of The Wire fame and written by Neil Cross of Spooks, Luther is one of the coolest and slickest cop dramas around.
The plot is aligned around the fact that the viewer knows the guilty party from the beginning, which can be quite frustrating at times, especially when I don’t have any fingernails left afterwards. John Luther is an angry and agressive man, and it seems that he is only kept on by the Force because of his brilliant intuition.
This quite typical layout would with an average cast become rather banal, but Elba is exceptional and this is what makes this series stand out from the crowd.
Finally, don’t get me started on the bloody Apprentice. Sixteen twatty people vie for the role of Lord Sugar’s ‘Apprentice’ which, he says, carries a six-figure salary (he probably includes a couple of decimal places, the stingy bastard). Most of the candidates claim to be good at ‘business’, whatever that is, and all of them seem to have egos to match Sugar’s ill-deserved self-love. Watching it makes me angry.
