Turn Left

A little later than planned, here’s the Doctor Who review! So on Saturday night, it was the now-annual Doctor-light episode, this time spotlighting Donna (hoo-ray…) along a parallel universe. Well, mostly Donna, anyway.

While I appreciate the intention, the last thing I wanted to see was Donna Noble circa The Runaway Bride. Yes, it showed us how far she’s come (and she is a lot better than she was then), but if I never hear that shout again it will be too soon. Luckily, Tate did a pretty damn good job with the rest of the episode, despite Bernard Cribbins nearly stealing the show as cuddly old Wilf.

Of course, there was only one woman I was looking out for – Billie Piper! Woohoo. Can’t help wondering why she was talking a bit funny, though – I hope that’s some weird universe-hopping side effect and will go away next week – but she radiated awesomeness as Rose throughout, despite us learning absolutely nothing about what the heck’s happening to her (“all the universes are being pulled together” isn’t as expositionary a piece of dialogue as it thinks it is). Looking forward to seeing more of her next week.

I do have to wonder if they couldn’t have done the back-bug (as it will surely become known) in a slightly more convincing fashion. I’ve been impressed with a lot of the monster work in this series but the obviously plastic creature was one of the worst I’ve seen and really undermined the danger of the situation. Budget-saving for the finale? Probably.

I loved all the little nods to other episodes and the spin-offs, of which more in the finale – brilliant news. According to those evil media types who got to see the episode already, the entire of episode 12 (titled “The Stolen Earth”) is a massive ’squee’ moment. I cannot wait. I cannot wait at all.

Talk is Cheap

After a clash with the football last night I was able to watch Doctor Who this afternoon, and – wow. I wasn’t expecting much from Midnight, mainly because of the clever way that the producers disguised the episode as a fun romp in the vein of Voyage of the Damned – last week’s trailer showed us none of the chilling tension that we saw throughout the full episode. All of my attention had been on the next three episodes anyway. Yet still – wow.

Midnight turned out to be the scariest episode of the series so far, easily surpassing the creepy Silence in the Library, and though it was a different type of fright than Blink, I think it was right up there with my much-trumpeted favourite ever episode for the scare factor. Lesley Sharp was mesmerising as the woman possessed by the voice-stealing monster without a name. As commented on by the (pretty good) supporting cast, her eyes were what really did it. I was expecting some hideous face contortion when she turned around to face us after that build-up, but the simple reveal of the same face but different aura was excellent.

The best bit was how scary we humans were made to look. The mob mentality kicked in subtly, and though as a viewer you knew the Doctor was right, you empathised totally with the passengers and genuinely feared for his life. It was sickening, but utterly compelling.

And I have to say, while she’s been getting a bit better recently – wasn’t it lovely to have an episode almost entirely sans Donna? I didn’t notice until she came back at the end just how much I really wasn’t missing her in the slightest. Luckily for me, next week’s ep is the Doctor-light one with much more of her, but it doesn’t matter, because ROSE IS BACK! YES!

I’m excited.

Doctor Who etcetera.

Firstly, apologies (again) for later-than-promised updates. Keeping up with all of Euro 2008 for the CDB Pod means about five hours of my day have to be devoted to that (it’s such a hard life, eh?), which has cut into time for the CDB Desk. Fear not, however, as I’m here to cover some things I’d been wanting to, but for the rest of the championships I’ll probably only have time to review Doctor Who each week. So, in about two and a half weeks, I should be able to settle in to a decent steady rhythm on both blogs. Go me.

So, better start with the Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead two-parter that aired over the last two Saturdays. And wasn’t it bloody brilliant! Coming just after the news that writer Steven Moffat is replacing Russell T. Davies as showrunner from season five onwards was released couldn’t have been a better time – we’ve been reassured completely with these two episodes that the show is in safe hands.

Where to start? The shadow monsters, the Vashta Nerada, were genius, playing tricks with lighting rather than huge special effects for maximum scare value. That throwaway line about being able to see the Vashta Nerada as the specks in sunlight was typical Moffat, finding little ways to terrify small children, like he did with statues in last season’s stunning Blink.

I guess we’ve also been successfully hoodwinked, myself included, by the line in Planet of the Ood warning that “the Doctor’s song must end soon”. Originally, as documented here, I’d thought that meant imminent regeneration for the Doctor, but no – clearly, the word song had a capital S, and I’m hugely looking forward to seeing River Song’s next (or technically first?) appearance sometime in the future. Is she a future companion, or, seemingly more likely, a future wife? Brilliantly played by Alex Kingston, her death scene in particular was heart-wrenching.

My favourite episode of the relaunched series ever? Probably.

A quick word on the Britain’s Got Talent and Pushing Daisies finales – I might have done more if I’d had time closer to their broadcasting, but such is life – rather good. I’d been rooting for dance group Signature in BGT since their audition (if you haven’t seen their first audition, YouTube it. It’s hilarious), but considering some of the dross that was in the final (Cheeky Monkeys anyone?), George Sampson was a worthy winner. I may now tune in for 2 minutes of the Royal Variety Show later this year (OK, no I won’t). Pushing Daisies has flown by, though, and I will be tuning in to season two (that’s assuming ITV don’t drop even more episodes). I’d like to see them pushing the format as much as they can, though, as I suspect more of the same may grow tiresome very quickly – mind you, I said that about the series as a whole after watching the pilot, so…we’ll see. I’m still, of course, in love with Anna Friel.

Oh, Christie!

I thought it appropriate that the title of this episode’s entry should be probably the worst joke I’ve done yet, as all I’ve heard in the build-up to The Unicorn and the Wasp seems to be the mind-numbingly poor joke “there’s a sting in the tale”. For crying out loud, is that really the only pun anybody could come up with? Alas, sometimes I worry about the state of our collective state of humour.

So, I suppose I should mention the episode itself. I have to say I enjoyed it a lot, somehow with a greater sense of freedom to do so than in some others this season, mainly because there were considerably less political overtones about the whole thing – Who got back to a plain old romp, and it’s good to see, especially considering that the trailer for the next episode, Stephen Moffat’s two-parter, looks as scary as his season 3 highlight Blink.

I revelled in the constant shoehorning of Christie’s titles into the dialogue, and of course the extension of that homage into the revelatory scene with everyone gathered in the lounge – I thought it was a cheeky, but not too over-the-top, way to send up Poirot and the like. Fenella Woolgar (what a great name) was absolutely superb as Agatha Christie, portraying her strengths and doubts with real conviction, and made an excellent spearhead for the episode in general.

Time for an update, then, on the continued ups and downs of Donna. I thought this was a bit of a mixed bag for Tate, personally, with some scenes that I loved (trying to cure the Doctor’s poisoning, her part in the exposition scene) and others I…didn’t, mostly when she wasn’t around the Doctor, like when she was investigating the locked room. Somehow her comedy abuse of power just didn’t come off for me like some similar jokes in the episode did. Perhaps Tate is best suited to making asides and having attitude while allowing the Doctor centre stage, but when she’s left to carry the scene on her own, she’s not quite able to grab it completely. (Borderline case is her excellent scene in the Sontaran two-parter, but the Doctor was around that time.)

I felt the ending got to be a tad much, what with the “she’s the best-selling author of all time” shpiel and all, but I’m willing to forgive it because I think overall I had more fun with this episode than any other this season. I do have to ask now, though, if the next “historical celebrity” we meet isn’t an author of some kind? We’ve had Dickens, Shakespeare and now Christie. I rather fancy meeting Genghis Khan or somebody else suitably un-Western, for a change of pace.

Oh, one other thing – that Doctor-Donna kiss was painfully gratuitous. A slap would have made much more sense.

Goodnight.

The Haths and Hath-nots

So. The Doctor’s Daughter. I concernedly hinted last week that shark-jumping might be imminent, and thankfully I was completely wrong. That’s not to say, however, that it was a great episode tonight. Chief among the problems was the amount of material that was trying to be fit into the timeframe – most of it pretty decent in its own right but the 45 minute slot meant that it all had to be condensed to the bare bones in order to get it all in, meaning that there was very little opportunity to really develop any of the ideas.

The Hath immediately had me intrigued – I think they’re the best of the new alien races introduced in the relaunched series, in terms of visual style. They had the ‘aww’ factor while still remaining mysterious and threatening in a different way. So I was disappointed that we didn’t get more exposition regarding what they are, where they came from, how they came to be working with humans – with whom they apparently can’t communicate – and so on and so forth. I suspect and hope that they will be getting the same treatment as the Ood, who after appearing in the Impossible Planet two-parter in season two were given a more revelationary episode this season.

Georgia Moffett, playing Jenny, the titular machine-baby, was very watchable (in more ways than one, I’ll admit), and did her best despite the really quite limited time she had to teach us to care about her character. Unfortunately that restriction was a little bit too much for me, so in a way I’m glad she’ll be back (which she very clearly will be). My question is when. It’s already been confirmed that this season’s finale will feature Donna, Rose, Martha, Captain Jack AND Sarah-Jane, so they can’t possibly be meaning to bring Jenny into the mix as well, can they? I’m convinced that not all of the above will be getting anything like the screen time they deserve when the finale comes anyway, so one more would only exacerbate the issues. Later this season is surely too early to pay off the set-up, so that must mean in the Christmas special at the very least…

…which leads me on to a very juicy theory that’s just now occurred to me. This is almost certainly not going to happen, but as soon as it came to me I fell in love with the idea, not necessarily because I think it would be the best thing for the show, because I’m not sold on that by any means, but because I think it’s just the sort of left-field idea that Russell T. Davies would love too. It’s been made pretty obvious so far this season that David Tennant will be leaving the building, so to speak, pretty soon, but reports confirm him filming the Christmas special. What if – wait for it – that’s when he’s replaced by Georgia Moffett?

Yes, I know, it’s completely mad. Because that would mean writing the Doctor out of his own show, right? Well, yes it would. But I can sort of see it happening for a little while, perhaps in the four specials rather than the full season the year after, before the Doctor comes back, just as a little interlude. Perhaps he’s lost at the end of the special and Jenny is off to find him, or some such. It would be a really bold, daring move that might just liven up the show a lot after the slight dip in quality this season.

But I digress – back to tonight’s episode. As I said earlier, time was an issue and this made a lot of things seem very heavy-handed. For example, if everyone’s dying so fast, why was Cobb an old man? Then there was the cut from Jenny’s semi-regeneration straight to her being chased to the shuttle, which disoriented me for a moment and I’m sure affected others similarly.

It is, of course, a lot easier to nitpick than to dwell on the good, and this episode was good. It just wasn’t great. I thought David Tennant was on top form, Donna less so – Tate back to her usual shouty antics again, which was a shame after a good day last week.

One last thing before I leave it for the evening – we’re starting to see a lot of stray camera shots on the Doctor’s old disembodied-hand-in-a-tank this season. Plot importance later, anyone? Next week – Agatha Christie. Awesome.

——————————————-

In admin news, I am officially free from the restraints of school forever, so you can look forward to a lot more of the CDB Desk in weeks to come. Lucky you.

Spuds Up

So. The Poison Sky. I said I wasn’t prepared to completely judge last week’s Sontaran Stratagem until I’d seen this week, and you know what? I’m still not completely sure. While there were some very good moments during the two-parter, there were also some disappointments and inconsistencies, and I can’t decide if either outweighs the other.

Let’s start with the good – Ross’ death. No, I don’t mean it like that – I was sorry to see him go, he made a good impression in the first episode – I say this because the manner it was played was brilliant. As the Sontarans basically kicked UNIT’s ass, his demise was a reminder of what a terrible price to pay every single human life is. I’ll miss him, and that’s a credit to Christian Cooke, who played him, for the energy he injected into someone who in truth we saw very little of.

While we’re on the subject of the Sontarans owning UNIT, though, I must say that the sudden turnaround after the Valiant turned up and Colonel Mace gave his mildly inspiring speech was stretching believability. For a race that had been established as pretty much invincible apart from the probic vent on the back of their necks, I found it hard to suspend my disbelief as suddenly the Sontarans were slaughtered left, right and centre by being shot in the front.  I don’t care how good that speech was, if the enemy has supercool armour that’s built up to help make fighting Sontarans complete idiocy, then you can’t kill them that easily. Frustrating, but I guess I can live with it, I thought at the time.

However, that wasn’t the only glaring mistake. The big Earth-save method, cleansing the atmosphere of the poison gas by igniting the atmosphere and therefore burning it off, should have not only incinerated the gas, but also used up essentially the world’s entire oxygen supply, razed buildings and destroyed planes, including the Valiant, and probably instantly killed billions of people. Now, that’s a pretty big thing to overlook. I often give Doctor Who some leeway when it comes to stretching the bounds of plausibility but that was just ridiculous.

Anyway, I seem to have abandoned covering the good, but there certainly was plenty, so I should pick up on it again. Again, I have to give Catherine Tate some credit for Donna in this episode. The SFX magazine review of the episode that went up immediately after the episode aired made an excellent point that though we’d seen previous companions do similar things, when Donna knocked out that Sontaran it was the first time that we really felt it was a hugely courageous thing to do. I wholeheartedly agree, in fact that was probably my favourite scene of the episode, so credit where it’s due.

That said, despite the good work of the companion this episode, the one thing that excited me most about the Poison Sky was that blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment when the transmission from the Doctor to the Sontaran vessel was intercepted on the TARDIS monitor – for less than a second, an image of Rose screaming interrupted the communication. Woo! I’m less patient than ever waiting for her return.

In all, I guess I liked it – it was dramatic, thoughtful and exciting in spades – but I can’t love it. There were too many silly things that made no sense (I haven’t even covered them all), but I can just about put up with it and look ahead to next week, which looks…intriguing. I have confidence that the writing team will do it well, but I can’t escape the worry that the idea of the Doctor having a daughter smells faintly of shark-jumping. There, I said it. Now I know karma will ensure that episode 6 will be the best of the season…

———————————

In other news, apologies for not getting a midweek blog up as I’d hoped. I’ll be posting again tomorrow with discussion on Pushing Daisies, and probably the London mayoral election too as a way to get away from television for a bit. Next week will be my last five days of school (ever, quite worryingly) so I’ll have time after then for a lot more of the CDB Desk.

I do want to say a quick thank you to those of you who’ve followed links on Facebook or the SFX forums, or even if you found this blog on Google (by the way, hands up – who the hell is searching for “is Catherine Tate alive”? For Pete’s sake!). I hugely appreciate the readership, and special thanks to those who take the time to comment and feedback as well.

Potato Head

I’m not sure it’s entirely fair to judge the Sontaran Stratagem, tonight’s Doctor Who episode, before having seen its conclusion next week. But hell, let’s do it anyway, starting with the titular villains. Not having seen the Sontarans before, I learned to like them very quickly. I think a lot of that was down to the voice – General Staal (or however we’re supposed to spell his name) in particular sounded like a grumpy 19th-century Duke stuck in a cramped space whilst trying to maintain his dignity and authority, and it worked perfectly. Thinking about it, such a sound should have undermined him and his race as threatening villains but I thought they pulled that particular aspect off very well. The scene in which the UNIT grunt got the height jokes out of the way was brilliantly played, both for the comedy and for the reaction of the Sontaran.

I do feel obliged to say that I liked Donna more this week. Her introduction to Colonel Mace was great – Tate delivered “I’ll ‘ave a salute, thanks” to much more laughter than any of her sketches have ever gotten out of me. She and her screen grandfather Wilfred have an excellent chemistry and that made her family scenes a great improvement on Martha’s frankly dull family last season. (The mum was a bit annoying though, you can see where Donna gets it from.)

Speaking of Martha, I was really interested early on in finding out how and why she’d become more of a soldier, and I was disappointed that more wasn’t made of it. For me, the scene in which she and the Doctor discussed it came too early to feel satisfying – there really needed to be more detail in between her intro and that resolutionary scene, so that we could see how exactly Martha works inside the organisation, what’s she like on giving orders and maybe actually fighting (though we might see that next episode, I suppose).

The cliffhanger felt very, very similar to those from the first parts of the seasons one and two finales, in which first the Daleks and then the Cybermen as well amassed their armies and started the invasion of Earth. “The army is coming!” is a powerful dramatic device but it’s starting to get a little worn – however different your enemies are they at least need to do it at different points in the episode rather than just the end of part one each time. Hopefully the fact that they’ve done this now rather than in the finale means that we’ll see something more original and small-scale at the end of the season, though considering how many companions we’re rumoured to be seeing again then I’m guessing that’s unlikely.

All in all, a flawed episode but a fun enough set up for part two, meaning that this is the first season so far since the relaunch of the show that I haven’t felt there was a real gem in the first four episodes. Shame, but RTD and the team have done enough over previous years to convince me to stick by them. After all, slightly disappointing by Who’s standards is pretty damn good by most others’.

It ain’t over ’til the Ood sings

So that’s it – David Tennant’s time as the Doctor is coming to an end. Or, at least, that’s what we were just given a huge, very unsubtle hint towards at the end of tonight’s episode, which I just finished watching not 5 minutes ago. It does seem something of a shame to start with something that really had very little to do with the episode, which by the way was excellent, but this is clearly the biggest news to come out of it. If the Ood’s statement that the Doctor’s song (in context of the episode, a metaphor for his life) will soon end is to be taken as truth, that surely means that the regeneration into the Eleventh Doctor will occur at the end of this season rather than after the four specials that will be shown next year, meaning that whoever takes on the mantle next will have a much more difficult task stamping their name on the role as quickly as Eccleston or Tennant have done.

By not giving Eleven a weekly season next year, I suspect that it’ll take much longer for the audience to get used to the new actor (or actress, but that’s 95% certain not to happen) – a job made even harder by the fact that following Tennant is going to be an unenviable task (well, not that unenviable – you’re playing the Doctor, for crying out loud). As fascinating as Christopher Eccleston’s one-year stint in the part was, it’s Tennant who has really defined the role for the new audience, particularly the younger generation who won’t have seen much, if any, of the original show (myself included). Of course, now the inevitable avalanche of guesses as to who will be the next to play the Doctor will now begin, and we’ll have to endure it for seven or eight weeks before somebody will leak the news despite Russell T. Davies’ best efforts. (I’m sure he’s got it sorted out already, he did much the same thing when Eccleston decided to leave and he’ll have been aware if Tennant was considering packing it in.)

So, naturally, I’ll start by venturing a couple of guesses of my own. Well, not really actual guesses – I’m pretty certain these won’t happen – but, for example, I think it would be so quirky and fantastic if John Simm took over. Aside from the obvious acting talent and energy he’d bring to the role, it would just be so ironic if the Doctor regenerated into the spitting image of his nemesis (though that would possibly rule out a future comeback of the Master in his most recent form, and I loved Simm in that role too much).  Alternatively, I’m sure that after the London mayoral elections, Boris Johnson will be looking for a new job.

I do think it’s a shame, though, that for the second week running much of the individual episodes has been overshadowed by a couple of lines of premonition and foreshadowing for later in the series. Once I can handle, but to do this sort of thing so overtly I feel undermines somewhat the early episodes. Today’s, as I said, was a very good one with a good twist that it’s actually us humans who are the baddies – I enjoyed the political subtext in this one, and Tim McInnerny was delightfully nasty as the token baddie, though this fate at the end was…a bit weird. Catherine Tate was, unfortunately, still very annoying. I shan’t miss her when she’s gone.

On the bright side – next week it’s Martha! Hooray! Also, UNIT and the Sontarans! Hooray! I wonder what part of the finale they’ll spoil then?

——————

Some housekeeping now – a heavier work schedule leading up to the start of my A-level exam period has already started constraining my ability to write as often as I’d like and will probably continue for a good month or so. I’ll certainly be updating weekly and will do more than that when I can, but bear with me.

A Saturday night in

Okay, so by one day I meant over a week. These things happen. Now, I was planning to do a blog reviewing the first episode of the fourth season of Doctor Who a week ago, but circumstances conspired against me – however, I don’t think that’s been such a big problem. I feel a lot better being able to write about the first two episodes than the one on its own, and that’s because, like last season, the season opened with a slightly more comedic first episode before getting down to a serious drama in the second.

I came into the first episode, Partners in Crime, trying to shed my mind as much as I could of the preconceptions I had of Catherine Bloody Tate (as you can see, I was not entirely successful). I was really disappointed upon learning that she was returning after her less-than-stellar Christmas special in 2006, and Partners in Crime didn’t really do anything to change my perception. She’s still shouty and annoying, especially as there is a constant fear while watching her that she may say “am I bovvered?” as a little writers’ joke, although she was good for the minute or so where she didn’t have to speak – her through-a-window conversation with the Doctor was great. Other than that, I wasn’t so keen on the episode as a whole, mainly because as Who is primarily a kids’ show, the humour is a little underdeveloped for my tastes, so I much prefer the hard drama and action episodes that make up the bulk of the 21st-century series. The whole thing was made worth watching, mind you, purely on the basis of that 5-second surprise cameo for Rose Tyler. Hooray! Billie’s back! I realised in those five seconds just how much I’ve missed her.

The second episode, The Fires of Pompeii, which aired yesterday, started an evening of TV which I am on the whole pleased to have watched, although the jury is still out on some of it (more on that later). I certainly preferred this episode to Partners in Crime – even Donna was slightly more watchable this week, Tate did a decent job with her reaction to the Doctor’s refusal to warn the people of Pompeii. I’m pretty sure neither Rose nor Martha would have made such a fuss about it (I shudder to think what Captain Jack would have tried if he’d told everyone they only had 24 hours to live) so that was a nice change. Some points of interest; that’s two for two so far in terms of episodes in which they’ve mentioned the Shadow Proclamation – to do with this season’s story arc maybe?; the excellent CGI throughout the episode, really impressive work on the fiery alien rock monsters in particular; and the warning that Donna “has something on her back”. I know there are rumours of her character’s story arc taking a turn for the sinister this season (it’s a comfort to think that Catherine Tate is the villain of the piece), and I’m looking forward to seeing how it’ll pan out.

Now, on to the rest of my Saturday night in. Unfortunately, my family, particularly the women in the house, are prone to falling into watching all of the inane talent shows like the X-Factor and (god help us) I’d Do Anything, or whatever Andrew Lloyd Webber’s latest PR scam is, but occasionally this works in my favour. Having been around while they watched the week-long festival that was last year’s Britain’s Got Talent, I have to say that it was a good laugh, if only because it deviated from the singers-only format that weighs down the entire genre. Obviously, it was won by a singer, but Paul Potts was at least not singing in English, and he was awesome. So this year I decided I’d put my dignity to the side and indulge myself again, starting yesterday with the first bunch of auditions. And while so far I’ve yet so see anything both really different and really good (such as my favourites from last year, the drink-juggling Bar Wizards), it was worth the time I put into watching it, and the 13-year-old at the end of the programme is surely Paul Potts’ test-tube baby. It’s totally uncanny their resemblence, and I’m quite sure he’ll be there in the final live show. As usual, there was a lot of cringe-worthy rubbish on the show, but that’s quite enough talk about Piers Morgan.

My evening concluded with the show that followed Britain’s Got Talent on ITV, the award-winning American import Pushing Daisies. My interest in the show was only slight, and I only really thought about watching it when I realised that it was about to come on next. I’d heard of it in various SF and TV magazines and knew it was winning awards for being slightly quirky, but I really was unprepared for quite how quirky it is.

If you’re unfamiliar with the show, and I wouldn’t blame you, the premise is as follows: pie-maker Ned (Lee Pace) has the ability to bring dead things back to life with a touch, as he discovers at the age of 9 when his mother bursts a blood vessel in her brain and he resurrects her. Unfortunately, as evidenced when she kisses him goodnight that evening, if he touches those things again they die for good. What’s more, if he keeps that thing alive for more than a minute, something else will die instead to keep the balance – in this case, his neighbour, whose daughter “Chuck” (Anna Friel) he is in love with, drops dead instead. In the present day, a private investigator called Emerson (the excellent Chi McBride, last seen being excellent on House) finds out about Ned’s power when a man he’s chasing falls from a roof to his death only to touch Ned on the bounce and return to life. They start a business claiming rewards from murder cases by talking to the deceased and solving the crime. Eventually they cover the case of a woman who was murdered on a cruise ship – it turns out to be long-time-no-see soulmate Chuck who’s kicked it this time, and as he speaks to her in her coffin, Ned can’t bring himself to kill her for good, so some fat funeral director takes the bullet instead (metaphorically). Much romantic awkwardness ensues as the pair can not touch each other lest she keel over like the cadaver she really should be.

The thing about Pushing Daisies is that it’s the brightest thing on television. Immediately you are assaulted by full-power yellows and blues in corn fields that I’m pretty sure can not physically be that colourful, and from then on the tone stays exactly the same. Everything is sweet and sugary and happy, including a faintly nauseating narration by former Carry On regular Jim Dale, who if he keeps referring to Ned as “the pie-maker” may cause me to break my TV in frustration by episode three. It may well be that as the season goes on the continuous sweetness may eventually stop me watching but I was intrigued enough to decide to watch the next episode in a week’s time. Much of this is down to the overwhelmingly-cute Anna Friel (yes, that Anna Friel, who will, to her great frustration, probably always be known as the 16-year-old on Brookside who participated in the first-ever-in-Britain screen lesbian kiss), who is just totally compelling as the born-again village girl who muscles her way into Ned and Emerson’s enterprise. It’s great to see another English import do well overseas.

The big worry for me with Pushing Daisies is whether it can continue being interesting over more than one season (Friel is contracted for six-and-a-half years!) as the central premise loses its novelty. But I think I’m looking forward to finding out.