Diamond fails to sparkle

It should have been one of the great telly moments. Del Boy and Arfur Daley on screen together at last! It was a happening eighties telly execs would have given the world for. I was all set for cracking banter and witty badinage. Sadly it never really materialised. What we got instead was a caper by numbers, a show filled with clichés and lacking any sort of surprise you couldn’t see a mile off. As an excuse for David Jason to raid the costume hamper and dust off some of his Danger Mouse comedy accents it worked fine. As an engaging piece of comedy drama, I’m not so sure.

Part of the problem is Jason’s character Des, who is such a smart cookie and a career criminal to boot that it’s difficult to have any sympathy for him when things seem to be going awry and he always seems so cocksure of himself that even if you think he’s getting into difficulty, you just know he’ll have a clever ruse to get out of it. He’s just not flawed enough to be a likeable rogue.

Supporting characters didn’t help. Jenny Agutter’s role in things was blatantly obvious, David Troughton’s arts and antiques cop unconvincing and it was glaringly apparent that the dodgy villain from the pilot wasn’t dead, Gary Whelan’s name in the opening credits giving away that particular twist.

Diamond Geezer could have a lot going for it, but what’s required here is a bit of genuine surprise, some far snappier dialogue and some reason to get on the same side as the sharp as a tack leading character. At the moment he just comes across as a Smart Alec and it’s hard to get behind one of those, even if they are being portrayed by a national treasure.

Funk to Funky

The final Life on Mars turned out to be a real rollercoaster of a ride for both Sam and us expectant viewers and it was clever that in various parts of the episode, most theories of what the thing was really all about seemed to have been verified. As to what was actually going on, I’m glad that although there was a conclusion, the ending itself was left open to interpretation and Sam’s decision to jump tied nicely in with his choice not to at the end of the very first episode.

What is clear is that Gene Hunt has been a marvellous creation even if there were times in the second series when he seemed to drift a little too far into parody. He certainly got all the best lines and it’ll be interesting to see how the character develops in the planned sequel set in an era when political correctness began to emerge.

For all the plaudits Philip Glenister has rightly received, for me it’s been John Simm that made the show so compelling, taking what on the face of it was a ridiculous concept and managing to get to the humanity of a totally surreal set of circumstances and making them wholly believable. As an exercise in studying one man’s struggle against mental instability, whatever the cause, it was truly gripping and to pull that off while still managing to be most entertaining cop show for decades is something of a feat.

Some people were disappointed by the conclusion, though anyone who has had to spend any time sitting in a conference room listening to a load of management speak will easily identify with Sam’s urge to escape.

I can understand some people feeling aggrieved that things weren’t as neatly put to bed as we may have been led to believe but frankly I think the ending was well in keeping with the tone of the series. Did for example the test card girl switching off at the end signify the end of the series or the end of Sam? I’m kind of glad we weren’t told. The main sadness for me was not the way it ended, though The Wizard of Oz references were a tad cheesy, but the fact that it had ended at all.

Soap watch

It was nice to see John Bardon given a storyline he could really his teeth into in EastEnders as Dot’s act of mercy over a mother and child caused a serious rift between her and Jim. I suppose it’s been easy to use Jim as comic relief over the years but when given meaty material like this he really comes up trumps and never more so than here when the character's oft ignored racist background was for once put to excellent use in some wonderful, thought provoking scenes.

It was certainly far more intelligent than the scenes in Coronation Street recently featuring the baiting of Polish workers in the knicker factory.

Ruddy Hell

I used to love some of Harry Enfield’s stuff but he hasn’t been around for some time and the last time he’d surfaced in a sketch show, over on Sky One, the results was less than gratifying.

I approached his return to the BBC in Ruddy Hell, It’s Harry and Paul without much expectation. Certainly the ad infinitum trails for the new show hadn’t really inspired me to view. At least then I wouldn’t be disappointed if it turned out to be a bit of a flop.

I managed to wade through the entire first half hour without raising a giggle, though I’m not entirely sure why for me it didn’t work. There were some interesting new characters and both Harry and co-conspirator Paul Whitehouse remain at the top of the tree when it comes to inhabiting grotesque creations but there was something missing.

Too many sketches limped to a finish without a strong tag line and the timing seemed somewhat awry, something I really wasn’t expecting, though many scenes seemed to have be filmed on location and therefore the lack of audience may not have helped in weighing up what worked and what didn’t.

I was all for sticking with it but the Laurel and Hardy take on Brokeback Mountain was particularly irritating. I felt like they were dancing on the grave of two of my all time comedy heroes and I might have been able to forgive that had the sketch not been so calamitously unfunny.

All in the Mind

People are always telling me that they can’t stand Derren Brown and yet for some reason they keep watching his shows. Perhaps the pompous psychological illusionist is more powerful than we thought.

He must be a confident bloke though. I’m not sure that I was locked in a room with the warped minds that came up with The League of Gentlemen, I’d be too inclined to equip them with them with a razor blade.

The big stunt on Trick or Treat was to hypnotise some bloke who was in a photo booth, fly him and the booth to Marrakech and then wake him up again and await results as he bewilderedly came out and wondered just what had happened.

Sadly, the guy looked just as befuddled to me before they played the trick as afterwards and there was no real pay off as the subject looked about as phased by the experience as Dylan from The Magic Roundabout would have.

I think I’d take to Derren far more if he didn’t look so pleased with himself all the time. Is he actually smug or is it all part of the mind game?

What on earth…

With a title as puntastic as Roman’s Empire, I was expecting a lame old-fashioned sitcom to sit uncomfortably in BBC Two’s Thursday night comedy zone. I probably could have coped with that but wasn’t quite prepared for the frankly weird show this turned out to be.

This was the tale of self made millionaire Roman Pretty, broadly played by Neil Dudgeon, a man who rules the family of a wife and three daughters he is disturbingly close to, dominating their lives and that of their boyfriends and as it turns out in the frankly weird opener, their ex-boyfriends.

Central to the plot of the opener was that daughter Nikki dumps dependable Leo (Mathew Horne) in favour of chinless wonder Seb. Leo has the dirt on Seb though; it turns out that Seb secretly likes to be spanked while wearing a nappy. This is not your average sofa based comedy. When Leo tries to reveal Seb’s secret things go badly awry, with “hilarious” consequences.

As if that and Roman’s unhealthy interest with Nikki weren’t enough to cope with, we also have to deal with the fact that Roman’s holiday business is based around persuading punters to take their holidays in the world trouble spots while another boyfriend Jase is thwarted in his attempts to escape by the fact that his new born baby has started talking to him in a demonic voice.

This has got to be the strangest sitcom since Soap but I’m not sure if stays either on the right side of being funny and even less sure whether it drifts onto the wrong side of being tasteful.

I actually watched it twice because I didn’t quite believe it the first time.

This is either really bad or really brilliant but I haven’t quite made up my mind which yet. If it does flop, at least it’s had a stab at being different and all praise to it for that.

Cones hotline

It was a moment of inspiration to set an entire episode of One Foot in The Grave in a traffic jam. To do the same with Doctor Who? Not so good. Watford’s lack of resistance in the FA Cup meant that at least we got to see it.

At least the Macra got to celebrate their fortieth birthday with another outing, I wasn’t expecting that. As for Face of Boe’s final message, “You’re not alone”, that was entirely expected. So much so that people here at Hogan Towers were shouting it out before old big head got round to it

I’ve not been bowled over by the new series yet but the Daleks turn up next week so there are reasons to be cheerful.