Yes, Spooks

Davie (or Davy) is totally correct with his opinion of last night's Spooks.

I can honestly say that this series of Spooks has been the best British made drama series I have ever seen. Yes. I liked it better than Doctor Who. That's how good it was.

(I'll explain myself here. The last series of Doctor Who was magnificent in places, containing some brilliant episodes, but it also had some really crap ones - notably the ones with the Daleks in New York. This series of Spooks was consistently brilliant. There were no bad episodes. Every one was an absolute classic.)

I haven't watched earlier series, so I bought the first series on DVD tonight. I found it in Tesco for £15. I've heard it's not as good as this series, but I feel it's the least I can do considering how much enjoyment this series gave me.

The other thing I watched last night was the special feature length Battlestar Galactica episode, Razor.

I was a bit dubious when I heard about this - an all new episode, but set a few years ago - what's the point? I know none of the major cast members will die. I know that whatever happens, it won't affect anything.

And after I'd watched Spooks I was even more dubious. Nothing would reach the dramatic heights of the final scenes. I was going to be disappointed.

How wrong I was. I absolutely love Battlestar Galactica, and this episode was one of the best. Just because it's set in space it's easy to dismiss it as sci-fi rubbish, but it's so much more than that. It bears as much resemblance to Star Trek and the like as The Shield does to Jake and the Fatman.

And it had some really good scenes with old style cylons (you know like off of the old series with Face off of the A Team).

If this US writers' strike means that the final series doesn't get finished I shall never watch television again.

What I watched on television last night

• Spooks - it was okay. Kept me entertained, I suppose.
• Battlestar Galactica Razor. The usual scifi rubbish I normally talk about.

What I've just done there is the same joke I did here. Well done me.

Spooks

Spooks - absolutely brilliant. I had some doubts that the move away from the self contained episode would work but I need not have feared. The series finished tonight and it was a great ending. Poor old Adam has no luck. I hope they are going to do another series like this.

Did not watch Dragons Den last night - never fear readers, I do have it on Sky Plus but last night I was listening to Sir Ranulph Fiennes talking. He was telling us about his trips to the Antarctic. A very good speaker but a little bit mental - why would you put yourself through that kind of pain.

Apologies for the shorter blog tonight - need to take our new four legged friend out for a walk now.

December and he is still investing

Apologies to regular readers who will have noted a lack of activity on this blog in recent times. Mickey and I have been very busy and have even appeared in print. We have now got over the shock and are going to make a concerted effort to bring you, the readers, some hard hitting views on TV.

Now given my last sentence I must apologise for harping back to Dragons Den. It is Monday and I have just watched the latest episode. I was very excited when the BBC2 announcer started suggesting that Duncan may consider investing this week. And to be fair to big Dunc as I like to call him, he did invest £75k this week along with his good pal James "look at my chest hair" Caan. There was a catch though. That inventor who he invested in had offered to give Duncan a written guarantee that he would have his money back in 3 years. So really apart from missing out on a little bit of interest he is not actually risking anything. They may as well have a bank manager from Barclays on asking for money to deposit in a high interest current account. James seemed very excited to be able to throw more money at yet another investor. In the background you could see Peter and Theo sniggering at the hapless duo.

Before investing Duncan did give us a moment of pure drama though. An inventor had demonstrated his magnetic light bulb. The Dragon's seemed mildly interested. Duncan however quite rightly pointed out that if a Force 8 Hurricane blew through his house in Darlington, the light bulbs may fall to ground and smash and his children would have their feet shredded as they ran over the shards of glass. A very valid point Duncan - keep this up and you will soon get the Watchdog gig.

Worst. Show. Ever.

Once again I have gone weeks without a post (apologies to our hundreds of readers), but today I saw a programme that demanded my scrutiny and needle sharp criticism.

Today a programme arrived on my screen that makes one of Britain's best known entrepreneurs, Peter Jones' ill-fated vanity project Tycoon look like The Sopranos.

Britain Sings Christmas is an epic show in which a choir of top celebrities, including Diarmuid Gavin (sp?), ABC's Martin Fry and Janine from EastEnders sing the top ten Christmas songs according to a poll, and the British public get the privilege to vote as to which one of the tunes is the best. And Kate Thornton presents it! She's still working!

It is everything I hate - a Christmas special celebrating Christmas songs. Celebrities being cheerful about these godawful mawkish travesties of music. The title. Britain Sings Christmas. What does that mean? Can a country sing Christmas? The website even has a clip of James Blunt (James Blunt!) talking about why he thinks some Christmas carol should be the best one (I'd have looked at the clip to find out which one, but my PC is so bad now I can't play videos). One of the songs is that Carey squawkfest All I Want For Christmas Is You. And did I mention that it's presented by Kate Thornton?

Yes, yes, I know it's for charity, but really. Just because it's for charity doesn't necessarily mean it's good. How about Britain Vomits, where a selection of top celebrities such as Katie Hopkins from the Apprentice, Midge Ure from Ultravox and Anton du Bek (sp?) off of Structly Come Dancing eat a selection of raw diseased meats and month old dairy products (as chosen by the British public). The first to fill a ten litre container with their sick wins £10,000 for the charity of their choice. Would that be okay?

What I've been watching recently:

• I'm still persevering with Charlie Jade, on FX. I'm only eight episodes in though and it's getting increasingly difficult to watch. Things happen in it and the plot is progressing, but it's just really really dull. I wish I didn't have this strange compulsion to finish watching a series once I've started.
• The Riches. This has really grown on me. At first it was all a bit "yeah okay, it passes the time" sort of thing, but I'm really enjoying it. I have nothing further to say, other than Minnie Driver was in the worst film ever made, Hope Springs.
• Spooks. I've come into Spooks very late. I'm going to have to buy the DVDs of earlier series, as I absolutely love it. It's so good that it cancels out the badness of Robin Hood, and still leaves enough positive to counteract Bobby Davro in EastEnders.

I must confess that I only watched the first two minutes of Britain Sings Christmas. I tried watching more but as soon as I saw Simon Bates was in the choir I had to turn off. Bates is dead to me and I won't have him on my television. There. I've said it.

November and finally he has invested

It is indeed November Michael and last night finally saw the great entrepreneur Duncan Bannatyne finally invest on Dragons Den. Regular viewers of the BBC programme will be aware that Duncan last invested in an idea presented on the programme back in the early 1980's and has since seemed to make it his personal mission to be the first Dragon to say he has no interest in the idea or the person in front of him. In some ways I guess he had to go down this route as Peter Jones has already grabbed the mantle of "dragon with the great one line put downs". So it was really dramatic TV to see that he finally invested in someone last night. Now don't worry he has not gone completely mad and and he made sure he went 50:50 with new boy James Caan. James was desperate to invest in something and I think Duncan felt a bit sorry for him. The only problem was they have invested in one of the worst ideas ever to appear on the show(a website to order you takeaway from - you know rather than pick up the phone and actually talk) which was presented by an Aussie who is clearly going to do a runner with the cash leaving his very sweaty and very nervous partner to deal with the two irate dragons. I think Duncan will have the last laugh however. The money he has in front of him on his little table has been there for so long it may no longer be legal tender.

IT'S NOVEMBER!!!

I really really need to do this more often. It's not as though television isn't annoying at the moment. Christmas is coming and all the Christmas themed adverts have started. These have always annoyed me and they always will.

It's not just the fact that these godawful Christmas songs that you can't avoid in shops, in pubs, in parties and that, are also being played in my house over pictures of new settees and electrical equipment. It's the fact that the bandwagon-jumping idiots will be getting more royalties for it. If I buy a product from the advertiser, I'm rewarding the artist for writing a Christmas song. When I buy a sofa, I'm effectively going up to Mariah Carey, shaking her by the hand, giving her some money and saying "Have some money for writing All I Want For Xmas Is You".

You see, I'm no fan of Carey. I like rock music, and her soul/hip-hop/rnb type thing she does is everything I despise about music. Yet I do know that of her many works "All I Want For Christmas Is You" (maybe it's called "All I Want for Christmas (Is You)" or something like that) is one of the worst. And yet it keeps getting played and she keeps getting paid because it's a Christmas song.

And that hateful hateful Roy Wood. Even when supposedly Argos make a joke about it, it's still hateful. This ninety year old man getting hauled out every November to mime to a song that would have been forgotten thirty years ago had it not had Christmas in the title and those damned choir singing in the middle of it. Hateful.

At least that McCartney song hasn't been used in an advert that I've seen. I think the bit where the angelic children's choir start singing in "Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time" might be the worst moment in pop music. (What possessed him to write those lyrics and what possessed people to buy it? In what sense is multi-billionaire McCartney describing in intricate detail how he is thoroughly enjoying a traditional Christmas something you want to hear about every November?)

And don't try to say "Eeh, though, that Fairytale of New York is a good song" because it's not. It's as bad as all the rest. I'd do a top ten of my most hated Christmas songs, but it's a television review blog and I've sort of overstepped the remit already.

What I watched on the television last night:

• Top Gear. I hate Clarkson and all he stands for. I still like Top Gear though. I like to see the cars and that.
• Charlie Jade. This is a strange sci-fi type thing on FX. Parallel worlds and that. I think it's a co-production between Canada and South Africa. I sort of like it, as it has that strange unpredictable quality that you get with non-US science fiction (cf Farscape and Lexx), but I think the actual story itself might be really dull. I'm not sure yet. I'm giving it time.

So far I have managed to go through ten and a half months of the year without hearing Noddy Holder shouting "It's Xmas". Please, for the love of God, advertisers and television producers, make this the first year in the last thirty where I can go the whole twelve months.

Come dancing ? Dead to me

For some strange reason I have found myself drawn to the current series of Come Dancing on BBC1. This is particularly strange when you consider that I don't dance. Never have. Never will. But it seems quite good entertainment. You get to laugh at Bruce Forsyth - not because he is funny but just seeing how he manages to make a hash of every link. Tess his assistant is easy on the eye. There are some very attractive contestants - for both me and Mrs Davie to ogle. And finally there are the judges who you can imagine have been created especially for the show. The old doddery fool who has an eye for the talent, the two camp ones who bicker constantly and the female with the acerbic wit and botox lips. All good so far. Where the show falls down is with its elimination procedure. The judges give a score to each celebrity after they have danced. But then it is left to the great British public to vote by phone or text for who they liked the best. The two celebs with the lowest votes have to dance off and then the judges choose who stays. Where this plan fails is that the viewing public who watch this programme are clearly thick. For 4 weeks in a row they have voted to keep plucky Kate Garraway. Plucky ? Yes plucky because she hurt her ankle at the beginning of week 1 but has bravely continued. Well bravely continued or realised that this could be a nice little earner and give her numerous magazine front covers. I have nothing against this woman but she has limped around the dance floor like an injured elephant and been possibly the worst dancer I have ever seen (and I have seen Curiosity Killed the Cat live in concert). Yet each week they wheel out some ITV colleague to stress how brave she is and how if she gets another week she might be able to pull together a series of coherent movements that may just may vaguely resemble a dance movement. So vote for Kate. And people do. And a as a result the ones who are competent are put up for elimination. And as a result the celeb who was one of the best 3 has now been evicted. And as a result of that Gabby Logan and her lovely legs are out. Here endeth the sermon and also my interest in this sham of a programme. I knew there was a reason I was not interested in dancing.