Terra Nova (TV Review)

I've just watched almost two hours of nonsense masquerading as science fiction. Incompetent and wooden acting coupled with much wincing from the audience. Found myself rooting for dinosaurs against whiny teenagers, and authoritarians against unlikeable rebels. Great pain. Will not go there again.

This is my review. It was painful writing it too.

Blue Ocean Tragedy

I first heard this song in a wonderful, slightly insane TV comedy called Gilligan's Island. It was a sort of crazy American version of the standard marooned-on-a-distant-island plot, back in the days before GPS and all kinds of high-powered communications devices. I think it went something like this:

The Ballad of Gilligan's Isle

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale
A tale of a fateful trip
That started from this tropic port
Aboard this tiny ship

The mate was a slightly flighty type,
The Skipper brave and sure
Five other people sailed that day
Upon the ocean blue, upon the ocean blue

The weather started getting rough
The tiny ship was tossed
If not for the courage of the fearless crew
The Minnow would be lost, the Minnow would be lost

The ship set ground on the shore of this
Uncharted desert isle
And here's a list of all that ditched
On this deserted isle, on this deserted isle

[I'm sure I've got the list wrong, they can't all be women.]

So this is the tale of our castaways
They're here for a long, long time
They'll have to make the best of things
It's an uphill climb

The first mate and the Skipper, too
Will do their very best
To make the others comfortable
From their tropic eagle's nest

So join us here each week, my friends
You're sure to get a smile
From seven stranded castaways
Here on Gilligan's Isle

Do forgive me if I've got any of the lyrics wrong. It's been a long time, and sometimes, your neural net makes the wrong connections, influenced by the many other events that have impinged upon it during the intervening years.

The Prisoner

Today, for some reason, I felt a sudden urge to go even further back in time than usual, to a time just before the Beatles. It was the time of that great Patrick McGoohan series, The Prisoner.

One of the quotes that kept yammering at me was this one: "Unlike me, many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment and will die here like rotten cabbages." It was a dark time, the late 60s — but it was also a fantastic time of baroque invention around the theme of Orwell's 1984.

I have a sudden sense of loss for those early TV shows — The Prisoner, Ultraman, Space: 1999, The Man from UNCLE, Mission: Impossible, The Wild, Wild West, Sapphire and Steel, The Avengers, and of course, the early Doctor Who. There are at least a dozen more I could mention. Somehow, the sheer quantity of interesting TV programmes seems larger than it is today, even in the days of cable TV.

Sigh.