James reviews An Emma Fielding Mystery on Great! Movies, Andrew Marr’s Paperback Heroes on BBC4 and Discount Dragon on Shop On TV.

Hello, I’m James Brook, and welcome to the twenty-fifth episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’ 

This is where I review upcoming Freeview programs. Go to IReviewFreeview.com to search, listen, or indeed read and/or comment on all my reviews. And if you want to see what I’ll be reviewing next time, visit the page ‘What’s up next.’ That’s IReviewFreeview - all one word - dot com.

In this episode, I will review: 

More Bitter Than Death: An Emma Fielding Mystery (2018) on Great! Movies, 

Sleuths, Spies & Sorcerers: Andrew Marr’s Paperback Heroes on BBC4 and 

Discount Dragon on Shop On TV. (Channel 89)

This time, I’m exploring various stages of my comfort zone: one so far out it’s as if I’m going to the moon; another where I could be in a pair of slippers by a cosy warm fire and the third midway between the two, in the same way a hippo is roughly halfway between a turkey and an elephant.

By the way, the image for this episode was generated by a free AI image generator with the prompt:

in silhouette, a woman is peering through a magnifying glass at a writer banging away on a typewriter in front of a backdrop of a giant TV screen showing a shopping arcade.

Umm …I have to admit, I’m surprised the image is not too shabby. However, I sometimes wonder if anyone, working entirely from one of my episode images, could ever work out which programs are being reviewed. Even given the channel names, I suspect most people would remain mystified. But having established this tradition, one is compelled to continue.

So: here we go … 

More Bitter Than Death: An Emma Fielding Mystery (2018) on Great! Movies, Tues July 2nd at 7:05pm

Even deciding to watch this program was a triumph of hope over expectation. And seeing it consigned hope to the dustbin. God, it was awful, but - and here I take a deep breath - it probably fulfilled its brief.

Which is? I hear no-one shout. Well, the short answer is: create something so bland Midsomer Murders looks violent and Death in Paradise an intellectual tour-de-force.

It’s basically a bland, boring soap opera with a completely unconvincing murder quietly inserted into the mix like a single small drop of cheap brandy into a large Christmas pudding. You know it’s there: you might even smell it, but it can’t be tasted and it certainly won’t make your carol singing any more tuneful.

It starts with a truck driver going into a wayside diner. He’s giving his order when the server gasps and her eyes widen. He spins round. His truck is ablaze. All contents destroyed.

Having thumpingly established the burnt truck as ‘something that will become important later,’ we switch to the titular professor Emma Fielding taking an archeology class, handing out cotton buds and gloves to her university students.

Emma, by the way, is annoyingly smiley. All sugar, little spice, entirely constructed of things that are nice.

Carefully, the ongoing sub-plots are assembled. The handsome FBI agent who possibly has a thing for Emma. A visiting hunky professor who had a thing with Emma. Some academics angling for a prestigious appointment. Two students wanting to join a secret society. A security chief with a dead brother, a …. 

Oh, I tried to make notes, but that all seemed far too much effort for what is basically yet another do-it-by-numbers murder mystery, written by someone with a few hours to spare and a willingness to bung in any old cliche to fill it out to a couple of hours. 

But I see it’s dated 2018 which is now, basically, in the distant past. Pre covid and, more importantly here, before AI. I think now, they’d just ask AI to write the script. Yep folks, it’s going to happen: another slice of 1984 - where Orwell predicted cheap and mindless literature would be produced by machines - is arriving on our doorsteps any time now. 

If you feed the masses substandard dross, then don’t be surprised if - to produce it - the machines take over. 

(Ha!)

Back to the review!

Some months ago, I wrote about: ‘Garage Sale Mystery: The Pandora’s Box Murders.’ which should have warned me off easy watching don’t upset grandma dramaless dramas with a series title featuring the word ‘Mystery.’

Maybe in the back of my mind I thought it can’t be as bad, can it? Well, it was.

The subplots trundle slowly along, and eventually the main narrative drive is launched with a small splash when a much loved and respected professor is murdered by a poison produced only by a rare frog. 

No-one seems unduly upset or bothered because - of course - that might upset or bother the supposed viewing demographic. Which I am assuming is old people with poor hearing and deficient eyesight, the family cat and drunk youngsters asleep on the sofa.

The local police chief is unimpressed. The hunky FBI chap and the hunky professor have to get along somehow. The competing academics could be suspects, a student remembers the smell of violets and not to mention a secret underground passageway and an inner sanctum stuffed with stolen artifacts.

Oh, will the excitement ever start?

Emma is thumped on the head!

(Bonk)

About time too, but there’s only 5 or so minutes left and even the family cat has fallen asleep.

She wakes up in hospital, and told to stay there, but of course she has another bright idea and toddles off to investigate, promptly getting locked in a room and tied to a chair by the villain who then - as is in the nature of such fictions - gives a nice little speech, telling why it was done and how it was done etc and boring etc. 

But just as a sword is being waved around, the good guys burst in and Emma is saved! Hurrah! Yawn! Vomit!

The direction is tepid. The actors struggle heroically with a dull script. Even the locations are second rate: I mean the ‘secret passageway’ is so obviously a brightly lit service corridor you expected a mechanic in blue overalls to appear at any minute.

Time filling TV, existing only to separate commercials from each other. The very stuff of which dreams are not made. 

And, just to wrap this up, remember the truck at the start? The one that caught fire? Well, that was done by the baddie as well, to make it seem as if an old vase had been destroyed, for reasons so beige they’ve slipped out of my mind like yoghurt down a drainpipe.

In fact, thinking about it, ‘yoghurt down a drainpipe’ is all that needs to be said. 

So: onwards, but I don’t think upwards, as we go into the outer reaches of my comfort zone with:

Discount Dragon on Shop On TV (channel 89), Friday July 5th, 4:00pm. 

Arrgghhhh! A shopping channel! A species of TV I’ve always avoided. Mainly, I suspect, because I’d end up buying something. After all, a bargain’s a bargain, even when it’s something you don’t need.

I don’t have a lawn, but I’ve always wanted one of those sit on mowers. I don’t have zits, but who knows when a zit removal tool would come in handy?

I don’t want to be exposed to things I might start thinking I want.

And I know I’m quite susceptible to a slick sales pitch. The first car I ever wanted to buy was a Jowett Javelin, but my Dad gave a wheel a kick and a mud guard on the other side of the car fell off. It must have been held in place with a combination of chewing gum and hope.

So, it is with some small trepidation I watch discount dragon on the shopping channel ‘shop on TV.’ Will I end up buying a zit removal tool?

At first glance it seems odd: Shop on TV is a discount shopping channel on TV. Discount Dragon is a discount shopping website. One would think there must be an element of competition and therefore it’s odd one is promoting the other. A bit like ITV showing BBC trailers.

Maybe there’s not much of a product or customer overlap. Or - more likely - I don’t understand how the market actually works. 

At this point I’d better warn you, there’s dialogue, and I try different voices. You have been warned.

Whatever, there it is, on the screen, Discount Dragon!

It starts with our two presenters, Shaun and Haley, appearing like Punch and Judy at the top of a large display of branded products. Heinz! Cadburys! Other brands!

Relentlessly, for an hour, smiling away and constantly verging on the edge of middle-aged orgasm, they big up Discount Dragon.

Well, when I say an hour, it’s actually more like a fifteen minute sales pitch repeated - with variations - 3 or 4 times. I suppose they don’t really expect their viewers to pay much attention and/or watch the whole thing. So what they say becomes somewhat repetitive.

But you really have to admire the skill with which this is done. After all, there’s not that many selling points, but boy, do they plug them, extracting minutes of excited chat over the most mundane features.

They tell you it’s a super-easy website, with … (gasp) a search bar! Amazingly, you can put in the brand you’re interested in - say, for instance, Cadburys - and all the currently available Cadbury products are seductively displayed. Quick! Pop them in your basket! Mmmmmm! Minimum £30 spend to get free post and packaging. Royal Mail tracked delivery. Here’s what customers have said on trust pilot. Over 20,000 5 star reviews!

Already, I’m thinking, gosh, this sounds great!

Shaun and Haley, now sitting on a sofa, continue the hype: here’s a spend we did earlier, and look, we saved £59.17! Up to 60% discount. Minimum £30 to get free P&P. But the stock is highly variable, and once it’s gone it’s gone. It might even go when you’ve got one in your basket, because they don’t reserve.

‘I made the mistake,’ says Shaun confidingly, ‘of ordering Cadbury’s chocolate - I love chocolate - but I didn’t pay and d’you know what? The next day it had gone!‘ (‘Oh No!’ Interjects Haley) ‘Yes! But I didn’t know they’d run out until I clicked ‘buy’’

‘So remember,’ says Haley: ‘hit that buy button as fast as you can!’ 

But the prices seem incredible. How do they do it?  

Here’s Suzanna, a Discount Dragon brand ambassador! Camera draws back to reveal Suzanna sat cosily on another sofa in true talk show fashion.

“Hello Suzanna!” 

“Hi!”

God, they’re so incredibly nice and smily and middle-aged and smily and nice.

“How do you get these incredibly low prices, Suzanna?”

“Well, think about supermarkets: what do they do when for some reason they need to take a product off their shelves: maybe an ingredient has changed, or the packaging is seasonal. They don’t have any spare storage capacity, but they need to get rid of them, as cheaply as possible. Or manufacturers: did you know it’s cheaper to keep their machines going 24 7 rather than turning them off for a few hours? Again: surplus goods they want to sell on, and fast. So that’s where we come in. Otherwise it might go to landfill.”

‘Landfill!’ Says Shaun. ‘Landfill!’ says Haley.

“Yes! It happens. So shopping with us is environmentally friendly.”

‘Environmentally friendly!’ Says Haley. ‘Environmentally friendly!’ says Shaun.

“That’s how we‘re able to offer incredible products at these wonderful prices!” Suzanna’s voice drops. “It all started in a founder’s bedroom” She adds, smoothly going down the green ski slope labelled ‘Discount Dragon history.’

‘Gosh!’ Says Haley. ‘Golly’ says Shaun.

There are endless slow panning shots over products on offer. They talk you through the simple registration process ‘and remember to sign up for those daily email bargains!’ They read aloud a complementary trust pilot review or two - or three. 

Never have so many big brand name products been displayed for such low prices. 

A Kilo bag of M&Ms for just 99p! A whole quality pan set for £27.99.

They even wheel in one of the founders - a nice young chap - to give the origin story, and he doesn’t disappoint. You want to buy stuff from him.

Haley and Shaun keep going. Now they are talking about payment options, smoothly looping back to how they saved £59.17 from one shop! 60% discount and sometimes there are freebees but you must register, and click here and here for the daily emails, or who knows what you might miss. The website is brilliant: it has a search bar!

And if you’re wondering how they get their fantastic low prices, here’s Suzanna, a Discount Dragon brand ambassador.

Hello Suzana!

Hello again!

Ha!

Oh, it’s easy to think it’d be easy to make fun of an hour filled with repetitive short pitches for a website stuffed with stuff I don’t want. But it isn’t. Because one feels it’s true. The logic behind discount shops, be it Discount Dragon or B&M or Home bargains or BUYology, makes sense. Surplus goods have to go somewhere. And better to be resold than landfill.

And always I have to remember I’m in the privileged position of needing very little. My requirements are small, change infrequently and my storage capacity nil. If I ordered a 6 pack of beer - which I don’t drink - I’m not sure where I’d put it. I’m probably as far from their target audience as it is possible to be.

But even so, Haley and Shaun’s relentless enthusiasm - manufactured or not - is infectious. So I’ve had a look at the site, and it’s as they say: easy to navigate with reasonably good prices. The much tooted search bar - surprise surprise - functions as it should.

So if I were in charge of a big noisy household with floors that needed cleaning, children to be bribed with chocolate and - oh, I don’t know - a yearning for smelly stuff, I’d probably sign up. But I’d check prices vs (say) Tesco before clicking ‘buy.’

Ha! I’ve just complimented a shopping channel. Who would have thought?

Moving on:

Sleuths, Spies & Sorcerers: Andrew Marr’s Paperback Heroes on BBC4 on Thursday July 4, at 2:45am

Oh, I loved this program. An erudite presenter talking intelligently about stuff I know a little about, albeit as a consumer rather than a creator. Not that I haven’t tried. When I was writing full time, I banged off a few murder mystery stories centred around a character called John Law, as I thought ‘Law of the Law’ would be a good title.

But on reading them with a critical eye (always a good thing to do) I decided they were crap and never sent them off.

Anyway.

Andrew Marr starts with a phone call: a body has been discovered! But he contemptuously dismisses it in favour of being driven in a Rolls Royce to a 1920s country mansion, complete with starchy butler, furtive maids, bright young things and a secretary pouring dubious liquid into a glass.

You can tell where Marr’s detective heart truly lies. He quotes W H Auden, who said a detective novel is as addictive as tobacco or alcohol. He finds a set of rules, which pop up from time to time like silent screen dialogue texts. ‘the murderer must be introduced early’, or ‘the writer must play fair.’ 

It is noticeable these ‘rules’ change somewhat as the stories mutate and alter over more than a hundred years, so I rather suspect Marr has made most of them up.

After his segway into Agathaland, he gives a brief nod to Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Murders of the rue Morgue’ before settling on - of course - Sherlock Holmes as the first detective.

He’s a busy bee, Andrew Marr. He has a chat about detective sidekicks, misdirection and murder motives with Anthony Horowitz (writer of 2 new Holmes novels) before swiftly returning to the ‘golden age of detective fiction.’

He examines one of Christie’s ideas folders, stuffed full of cuttings and notes about poisons before having a word with writer Sophie Hannah (Christie novels to date: 4.) He confesses he doesn’t like Christie much as the characters are two dimensional.

(ha!)

You could have fooled me.

Hannah puts him straight, saying all the suspects are 2D as that’s what they’re showing the detective: you have to get to the end to see the whole picture.

But I’m not sure it sticks, as Marr is off to a seedy bar and a somewhat dubious American accent to introduce Raymond Chandler, Dashel Hammet and the hard-boiled sleuth, which is not a new line of jawbreakers from Cadburys but a private investigator wearing a hat. Also, chuck in slinky ladies and Humphrey Bogart knocking someone out with a single punch.

But over here, in the UK, we have no tradition of private investigators, so Marr postulates somewhere over the Atlantic they morphed into something we are already familiar with from TV: the detective inspector, while the sidekick turned into the detective sergeant.

Instead of neon lit streets and a moody saxophone, we got Fabian of the Yard being driven around in a Wolseley police car. Instead of the lone wolf detective searching out crime and corruption, there are police regulations and uniformed officers wearing helmets originally designed to deflect cudgels.

Of necessity, the plot structure changed. Now, stories often start with the discovery of a dead body.

Remember the opening, when Marr took a phone call and scornfully rejected it, to go back a 100 years to be driven to a country house in a Rolls? Ha! Who said documentary makers need to be consistent?

Anyway, having established the D.I. as the instrument of justice, enter Ruth Rendell with her tough but fair D.I. Wexford, investigating murky murders in the Sussex town of Kingsmarkham. Over a shelf load of books, she developed the psychology of her characters and delved deep into social aspects of crime. To my mind, she forced the whole genre from the flatness of 2 dimensions into the roundness of 3.

Sadly, Marr did not interview her, but I imagine it wasn’t for the lack of trying.

He moved on to the engaging Mike Phillips and his fictional black journalist Sam Dean, who was always getting into racial scraps and tense moments. We are shown videos of his beaten up face and his despair at concealed racism.

Marr moves on.

With the somewhat lazy statement that crime fiction can be the canary in the coalmine, he interviews the remarkably sane writer Val Mcdirmid in a mock interrogation room. Why? don’t ask me: probably just a fun stab at authenticity.

They talk about her book ‘The wire in the blood’ where a lightly disguised Jimmy Saville appears as a TV celebrity with a secret lust for torture, murder and underage girls. McDirmid said she was surprised she wasn’t sued, but no-one made the connection. They concluded that when someone becomes ultra famous, it seems almost impossible for them to be thought of as monsters.

Then Marr toddles off to Scotland, where Ian Rankin talked about the necessity of violence, and how his beat-up detective Rebus would just resolutely keep going after everyone else had given up. Marr notes that what started as a game between writer and reader has now evolved into the detective taking the kicks. 

He finishes with a look at Nordic noir. The dark and murky underbelly of a placid, calm society. He rightly focuses on ‘The girl with the dragon tattoo’: a puzzle of considerable darkness and grit.

As mentioned: I really enjoyed this, and put it on series record. I didn’t agree with everything he said, and sometimes the journalistic sleight of hand was a bit too obvious, but it was well put together, informative and entertaining. 

To sum up: someone’s got to go down those sinister leafy lanes who is not himself sinister.

And that dubious misquote from Raymond Chandler concludes the reviews for this episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’

Don’t forget, contact me via email to contact@ireviewfreeview.com or through the website Ireviewfreeview.com where you can also click on the page ‘What’s up next.’ to see what programs I’ll be reviewing next time.

Thank you for listening, and goodbye for now.