| Sunday, October 17, 2004 |
 | I don't watch all that much television - certainly not enough - but I do find it endlessly fascinating.
1) John Lewis has found my weak spot. Dormice. They have dormice in their new adverts. The bastards. Now I must buy everything they sell. On the plus side, this does at least sort out whether or not I should get an XBox.
2) One for my American chums - is it actually the case the Charisma Carpenter is now acting in Charmed? I realise that it is famously hard for those with long histories in cult television to get proper jobs, but for the love of Heaven...
3) And one for my Sky-possessing chums - is it truly the case, as I suspect it may be, that Hex has actually managed to steal the aforementioned show's crown as the most hideous, embarrassing and insulting attempt to half-inch the magic Buffy beans (note: no, there was no episode involving magic beans; it's a metaphor. There was almost certainly an episode of Charmed involving magic beans, which is precisely the level Hex is going to have to limbo under) yet? I think, on an emotional level, I need it to be ground-breakingly awful.
4 Comments:
It's not quite at that level yet... It's basically a cross between Channel 4's As If..., racier episodes of Hollyoaks and The Craft, as far as I can tell from the first episode. Almost the entire first half was devoted to sex: a Porkys-style peeking at classmates having showers in co-ed live-in sixth-form college (only with the genders reversed and lots of clever edits so that you see Everything But The Boy, as it were); a bizarrely-edited shot of our heroine in the shower in which the clouded shower door, open a crack, hides everything but her chest and face; and constant references to sex, body parts, etc to the extent that this was all they talked about for the first forty-five minutes, including the teachers, and especially the headmaster, the attractively Roland Giftesque Colin Salmon (whose early conversations with other characters are nothing but lewd references to our heroine's shaggability, and whose later conversations with other characters are almost entirely expositionary Gilesisms about the demon that haunts the college while playing some shoot 'em up on his laptop).
The good bits were less Buffy and more Gaiman. This can be seen to be fortunate or unfortunate, depending on your point of view. Oh, and the demon geezer looks the spitting image of Carl McCoy, a fact that myself and spooks both remarked upon. When exposition-Salmon leafs through a convenient 'ancient text' (with suspiciously Reader's Digest binding) and informs our heroine that the demon geezer is Azazeal, leader of the Nephilim, we pissed ourselves for the rest of the year, and had to be pulled down from the ceiling with sticks.
And there's teasingly teasingtons of college lesbianism in the shape of our heroine's complicated relationship with her best friend and roomie, who is sacrificed to the demon McCoy at the end of the first episode, only to turn up all, like, ironically mocking, at her own funeral for (no doubt) future college lesbian eruptions of college lesbianism from beyond the grave. And she's got now eyebrows, but a nice line in Lip Service trousers.
2) Yes, Charisma Carpenter did a guest whatsit on Charmed - as a mystical seer who has visions, I believe... No idea if she's a regular or not though.
Es.
Life is too short to watch Hex.
Hex is to watch short life too...
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