The ever-amiable Mr Papaya

I like 'Fringe' a lot. OK, so it's can be a little formulaic, and the actor playing Broyles is really just playing the same character he played in 'The Wire', and maybe the show's open to accusations of being an 'X-Files' ripoff - a similarity I noticed immediately, as someone who never missed an episode of the show at the time. I prefer to think of it as a post-millennial take on paranormal investigation, with J.J. Abrams bringing in the kind of things that make 'Lost' such damn good TV.

I particularly like the way that Dunham possesses fragments of Agent Scott's memories and the way that this is used - emails, phonecalls, meetings with the dead(?) man that only actually happen in her head, her mind's way of translating the shreds of his consciousness. I really like the isolation-tank sequences as well, where Dunham finds herself present within scenes of Scott's memories but can't actually hear everything that is said, for instance, because he wasn't within earshot himself at the time. Great stuff.

This aspect of the show is particularly relevant to me because memory and our relationship to the past are pretty central themes in my own writing. It's nice that I can actually engage with a mainstream US TV show in that way, it restores a little of my faith in big broadcasters.

When looked at in an overview maybe 'Fringe' doesn't seem that impressive, but it's the little things like that, or Walter Bishop's hilarious utterances (every time I watch an episode I end up talking in a "Walter Bishop voice" for a while afterwards - sad, yes, and annoying for others) that keep me watching.

Charlie Brooker on 'Heston Blumenthal's Victorian Feast'

"This really is one of the most creative shows I've seen in quite a while; not in the construction of the programme itself (which takes the familiar "mission" format to provide a fairly spurious narrative), but in Blumenthal's inventive craziness. It's basically a bloke deliberately dicking around to extreme effect for an hour, dabbling in a weird form of art, seeing how far he can go. Halfway through, I realised why this was so refreshing: you very rarely see such genuinely ingenious and imaginative processes being followed this clearly on TV. Each course Blumenthal serves is like an edible Python sketch: meticulously constructed and very, very silly."

The full article from The Guardian can be found here.

Brooker's great - always funny, frequently (and deservedly) scathing, and absolutely one hundred percent on the money most of the time. For all the apparent grumpiness he seems like One Of The Good Guys.

I watched the programme last night and I have to say I agree. It was good fun. I'm looking forward to the next installment which I fervently hope is called 'Heston's Jurassic Feast' and in which he clones a velociraptor and uses it to make a very fine consomme.

Things that have made me LOL today

* I love internet memes. I like to think that within the dog's yoyo is a smaller you, and that you also has an even smaller yoyo with a dog inside that... Would Borges approve? No, he'd say it was silly.

* This South Park clip always has me in stitches. "Artemis Clyde Frog" is great. I now can't take 'Wild Wild West' at all seriously when it's repeated on TV - although whether I took it particularly seriously in the first place is another matter...

* Earlier in Paddington I witnessed a two tourists trying to pay for their KFC with Euros. The man at the til looked at them like they'd just turned up with wheelbarrowfull of Zimbabwean Dollars.

* We've noticed that 'Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares' seems to have fallen back on an utter reliance upon it's conventions. Now we've got to the stage where we can predict, with a high degree of accuracy, what'll happen: he'll turn up, call the waitress 'my darling', completely diss the crap out of all the food he's given, argue constantly with the boisterous owner/chef (who will likely be Italian-American and live somewhere on the East Coast - usually New Jersey) - then he'll say that they've "lost their passion". He'll bang on about 'fresh local produce', revamp and slash the menu, make the portions smaller (this is, after all, America), then his team will "work through the night" and completely reinvent the restaurant's interior - which the staff and by now abashed and humbled owner will love, especially the photos of their family which he's had put up around the place in a schmaltzy appeal to sentimentality. There'll be one highly problematic night to show how much of a mess the place is, then a successful one after Ramsay's changes. He always comes up with a signiture dish for the place (Italian cuisine? Meatballs then!) which debuts in a P.R. event for the local community. By the end of the show Ramsay has mended both the restaurant and the relationships between the people working in it and their families - hugs and learning all round. Then he disappears in his black coat like David Carradine in 'Kung Fu' or Banner at the end of an episode of 'The Incredible Hulk' - his work is never done and he must move on. In so many ways it's a perfect example of how shockingly bad US TV can be, but we're addicted. It's just too easy to take the mick.

* I find a lot of humour in the idea that Emilio Estevez bears a secret jealousy of Charlie Sheen and spends his days watching 'Mighty Ducks' on repeat, muttering "I could have been the big star with the sitcom, I wouldn't have become a f*cking sex addict..." I also like the idea of him as a Gormenghast/Farseer-Trilogyesque black-sheep of the Sheen dynasty, unable to bear the family name (although Estevez actually is the family name) and working clandestine plots to regain his rightful throne. Yep, that's a bit of a weird one.

* I've also been deriving much amusement from pissing Sara off with my Jackie Mason impressions. What, you want I should stop?

BBC One - 'The Victorians' presented by Jeremy Paxman

"Victorian paintings have long been derided by the art world as sentimental rubbish, but what do they tell us about the world the artists inhabited?

In a four-part series for BBC One, broadcaster Jeremy Paxman delves into the "goldmine" of information the paintings provide about Victorian life.

Using the paintings as a tool to explore Victorian society, Paxman looks at how the middle-classes, mill-owners, working people, and those on the bottom rung of society's ladder lived in those buttoned-up times.

The Victorians airs on BBC One on Sundays at 2100 GMT"

-Taken from BBC News

I saw the first episode 'Painting The Town' last night (available on BBC iPlayer) and was pleasantly surprised. It's no secret that I like Victoriana and that it looms large over my reading & writing preferences. The programme succeeded on two counts really: the Victorian history side appealed to me, and the art side to my other half. Believe me, it's rare that we find something on television by chance that ticks boxes for both of us.

I discovered two artists over the course of the program that I immediately ran off and Googled afterwards: John Atkinson Grimshaw and Gustave Doré.

- Grimshaw, Humber Dockside, Hull, Dated 1882

I've always liked landscapes, city scenes, sunsets - I'm quite a philistine and a sentimentalist I suppose, in art terms, but they please me. I was struck by how much Grimshaw's paintings remind me of some of the kind of book cover artwork that I find myself most drawn to, the kind of thing I'd like to put on the covers of my own works one day (touch wood).

- Doré, Warehousing in the City, London: A Pilgrimage (1872)

Doré on the other hand dealt primarily with engravings. He lends London a look of permanent night, in a way (as Paxman points out in the programme) - a dirty, overcrowded, gritty, stinking, vibrant, beautiful, baroque, organised mess of a place. This is precisely the way I like to look at the place both in terms of others' depiction of it in fiction and in their cities based in some way upon it and also my own.

Behold: the ultimate archvillain

A bizarre combination of 'the most evil man in history' and arguably one of the most harmless lifeforms on the planet.

Ross Kemp hits those mean streets

Bare lolz