ALL ABOUT EVE

Waking up screaming…

Being part of that easy-to-please schedulers’ demographic – TV fan with a pronounced crime bent – I’m normally fond of the BBC’s long-running Waking The Dead. Not a rabid follower by any means; I could happily skip an episode, even a whole series, without feeling any bracing urge to shell out on a DVD box set or submit myself to its charms on iPlayer. Yet on those nights of the week when boring old common sense suggests taking it a bit easy and wins (Sunday, Monday), a good crime or cop drama can suitably divert from the more mundane tasks real life throws up.

However, judging by last Sunday/Monday’s Magdalene 28 – the first two-parter of its eighth series – this flimsy loyalty looks set to be tested to the limit.

PLOT SPOILER

Here is its torturously implausible plot (roughly, so bear with me): An Irish girl brutally scarred by OTT psycho nun, Sister Margaret, escapes with lover, has unromantic tryst with keen young priest, leaves and decamps to Soho nightclub with lover. He is embroiled with Turkish gangster club owners, fight ensues, prime Turk and lover both die. Priest happens to wander past, rearranges critical evidence and saves girl’s skin. And that’s just the back-story! In the present a woman (the same girl?) is now a successful entrepreneur (and incidentally Mrs Trevor Eve, Sharon Maughan, formerly the Gold Blend lady) running naked down a country road. She has amnesia, after being apparently raped by three Turks (da!); her husband seemingly gutted halal style in their luxury abode. But there’s more… Much more. And it culminates in the girl not actually being the girl at all but her twin sister (identical in all ways except she doesn’t smoke). This confuses the viewer. It also confuses the priest, who’s back again, and not least the Turks who, through not fault of their own, re-kidnap the wrong twin and…

…And that’s just the half of it. It’s a plot with more ridiculous twists than Tanita Tikaram’s sobriety and with more gaping holes than Goliath’s colander, wasted on an episode that should clearly have been throttled to death before it left writer Declan Croghan’s computer. Which is a shame as in the face of its implacable odds the cast of WTD do a fine job.

WE ARE THE DEAD

Detective Spencer Jordan (Wil Johnson) is the most grounded, picking up the pieces from his cohorts and increasingly shouting abuse at suspects in the manner of his boss. Grace Foley (Shelia Grant – oops! – a recently remodelled Sue Johnston) is always decent if a little marginalised as the crew’s psychological profiler. Mind you it’s hard to come to the fore when you’re battling against Eve (Tara Fitzgerald), a one-woman pathologist colossus, who solves more forensic conundrums in the space of a manicured blink than real ones can do in a fortnight, and is the show’s resident tasty bit of posh to boot. Just to leaven the balance, a bit, we also learn she keeps a pet rat and is ergo a complete nutter.

But not as complete a nutter as Head of the Cold Case Unit, DSI Peter Boyd (Trevor Eve). Boyd is the angriest, rudest, mostly insanely aggressive TV cop of all time – a man so livid with everyone but himself you half expect him to self-combust at any moment. A man who lost his only son to hard drugs and hasn’t forgiven himself? Possibly. Or just a man who blames everyone single being and every inanimate object he comes into contact with for all his worldly woes in an unstoppable torrent of spittle-flecked rage. In short, he’s magnificent.

STEADY EDDIE

Like many my age, I can’t help but retain a great affection for Eve. This is undoubtedly to do with his first TV turn as Shoestring back in 1979/80. It may have only lasted for only two (fairly lengthy) series, but as the nervous computer expert turned laidback Bristol radio jock and full-on amateur sleuth Eve was implacable, the coolest cucumber on the televisual block.

If you can track down just one episode featuring Radio West’s ‘private ear’, make sure it’s the first series’ Find The Lady. This contained one-hour drama has a cast that not includes Christopher Biggins, Lynda Bellingham and the late, great Gary Holton, but also a star turn from a flame-haired Toyah Wilcox, post puppyfat prancing in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee and in full Sheep Farming In Barnet performance mode. It rules.

Sadly, Eve gave up playing Eddie Shoestring in his prime to pursue a range of theatre roles and the show’s production team adapted the format to create the infinitely inferior Bergerac on the smug-a-bug’s tax-free haven of Jersey (an island with much deeper problems in real life). John Nettles couldn’t hold a candle to Eve in his prime – or right now, come to that – so it’s a crying shame an actor of Eve’s immense ability and stature was so badly short-changed at the start of this run of Waking The Dead. The only way, one prays to Sister Margaret, is up.

OH BROTHER

You have been evicted…

As Big Brother 10 limps towards its unseemly denouement on Friday it would be fashionable, even timely, to join the procession putting the boot-in. Yet while the ailing patriarch of all reality TV formats has undoubtedly spawned some hateful mutant offspring – and let’s not dwell too long here on the likes of The Farm, Celebrity Love Island, Totally Jodie Marsh or any of the Jade Goody vehicles – it’s still cooked up some rich entertainment for those ardent but diminishing minions still prepared to trough gamely through the dross.

A couple of years back, a small cabal of friends decided to enhance our Big Brother viewing by filling in a simple questionnaire during the launch show. Nothing particularly demanding to this: some gut reactions/first impressions on housemates as they walked in: Winner, Potential Couple, First Evictee, Worst and Best Hair – and for this series at least – the inaugural Big Brother’s Biggest Twat. Since that night these scrawled and crisp-greased musings have been stored in a dark recess of the magazine rack. But with the final imminent let’s see what they reveal – if anything – about our six potential winners…

CHARLIE

Rather succinctly dubbed ‘northern queen’ by one correspondent, the suede-headed Geordie inevitably elicited some abuse from our Mackem correspondent (‘Shearer’s secret cock buddy’), others suggesting that despite having ‘no neck… I don’t mind him’ and ‘won’t be lonely in BB10’. There was also speculation – right, sort of – that he would make a firm BB couple with Rodrigo, and also with Cairon (a contestant whose impact was so negligible it’s a wonder his mother remembers him. Hold on, isn’t that his first single coming out with BB9’s albino soul boy Darnell any moment now? Doh!)

LISA

‘Male chicken!’ is our first dispatch here, a rib-tickling satirical reference to the Brum girl’s fetching red Mohican on entry, while others thought she was ‘severe’, ‘too macho… but may calm down’ and a ‘female Napoleon – bound to be trouble’ and had a ‘fat arse’.  Lisa also figured in some other categories (winner of Best Hair, nominated for Worst Hair and as a Potential Couple with Angel). And yet despite some early gobbiness and a spot of class war with Freddie, Lisa could well be the dark horse come Friday.

RODRIGO 

Who couldn’t simply adore the chubby-cheeked, Royal-loving Brazilian? Well, us lot, it seems. A small measure of censorship prevents me posting one frankly offensive comment from my unreconstructed next door neighbour, while others seemed apathetically unsure what to make of him with notes ranging from ‘pretty, vacant’ to ‘possibly most genuine and nice’. Who knows? Even now. 

SOPHIE

After Siavash – and a smidgen behind early evictees Sophia and Beinazar – the erstwhile Dogface was given severely short shrift by our correspondents. ‘All body no brain!’ went one, others opining ‘dislike… empty… fool…’,  ‘clichéd dumb blonde’ and ‘Jordan junior’. Yet despite a revealing first night outfit no great amorous predictions were made, only odd ones like the enigmatic ‘I liked her puppy’. What does this mean?

SIAVASH

In two years of predictions no-one has attracted such unbridled opprobrium and even seething dislike as Siavash. It may just be that he was last in, dressed very ostentatiously and we’d all had more than enough by then, but the inaugural Biggest Twat champ was on the wrong end of comments like ‘up his own arse’, ‘self-obsessed spawn of the stupid dead’ and ‘fucking horrible’, the only olive branch being ‘intrigued if he can live up to his self-image’. Odds-on favourite then.

DAVID

Sheffield’s charity shop Vivienne Westwood enthusiast was mercifully spared our poison pens – the sole survivor of the second batch of BB10 contestants – so it would be unfair to speculate what hackles might have been raised. On the other hand it would be a minor travesty if he’s not shown the door during tonight’s first eviction.

AND THE WINNER IS…

As it stands it’s a three-horse race between Siavash, Sophie and Lisa – though it’s never wise to second-guess the public here. No-one of sane mind could have chosen Ulrika to triumph in this year’s Celebrity fest, and you’d be hard pushed to find anyone who’d confess to voting for Rachel Rice, last year’s anonymous champ. As for our predictions? With a whopping 75% of us plumping for Basingstoke’s self-styled dark horse – potty-mouthed comic geek Marcus – all votes were off at the last hurdle.

VICTORY LAP

With Channel 4 finally set to put Big Brother out of its misery in 2010, here’s a trio of quick suggestions to spice up its final season…

1. Get random!

Since the genie was let out of the bottle in series one, Big Brother has attracted the most deluded and insufferable wannabes on the block. A fact compounded by the powers that be at Endemol seemingly trawling this human flotsam for the wackiest and most outwardly outrageous, often cramming too many faux naive egotists in the same cage. Don’t bother. Let’s return to fundamentals and pick the contestants as randomly as possible.

2. Drop the all-singing/dancing tasks

This is not the Italia Conti Academy or a televised panto audition, so let’s do-away with these increasingly desperate, tedious tasks and tired dressing-up routines. Let the housemates get supremely bored. Make them suffer for their art. Bring out the worst in them. Breed arguments. Create conflict. Engender lust. Make great telly.

3. Just give ’em whiskey!

How are we ever to get the real measure of the housemates when their alcohol rations are so miniscule? This is Britain, for better or worse the binge-drinking capital of the world, so give them unlimited booze at all times. It would make a far more worthy ‘social experiment’ and reveal much more about our national character than plundering the genius of Lewis Carroll for cheap thrills.