James reviews 'Coma' on Channel 5 and 'Dr. No' on ITV 4

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

There is a short intro podcast, which you can listen to if you like. But really it’s straightforward: you suggest upcoming programs on Freeview and I review them. If no-one suggests anything, then I have a look and choose something myself.

Remember: send suggestions and comments to contact@ireviewfreeview.com or go to IReviewFreeview dot com.

In this episode I will be reviewing:

1. Coma on Channel 5 and

2. Dr. No on ITV4.

That’s a new 4 parter on Channel 5, advertising itself as a tense drama, and the very first Bond Movie, advertising itself as the very first Bond Movie.

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

a Roy Lichtenstein painting of a secret agent asleep on a hospital bed.

Not what I was expecting! Ha! Oh well, you can’t win them all.

So, here we go.

Coma (series 1, episode 1) on Channel 5, Monday March 18, 9:00pm

Starting with a jittery, unsettling credit sequence, this is an excellent, pulsating drama. The menace is palpable and the tension somewhere in the stratosphere.

Mild, 56 year old bespectacled Simon, with a nice house, a family car, a sympathetic nurse for a wife and a young daughter, is under considerable strain and getting behind with the mortgage.

And then he loses his job, let go by a ballsy young chap he’d once mentored. It was called restructuring, but - looking at all his colleagues - it seems far more likely he’s just too old.

He’s humiliated and his life is unravelling. On top of all this, he has a run in with and an aggressive, in your face seventeen-year-old thug, who follows him home, taunts him and threatens his child.

And Simon throws the punch that changed his world. The boy falls back like a log onto the hard surface of the road. Blood pools out from under his inert head. Aghast, Simon performs CPR, the police arrive, and the boy ends up in hospital, in a coma.

And Simon, under duress, having to make his mind up quickly, lies to the police about what happened, telling them he found the boy already lying down and bleeding, with a momentary glimpse of someone running away.

And this lie, as lies do, spreads like a dark, malignant cobweb, drawing in more people, more violence and increasing menace. He finds he has to make other lies, which also spread.

Simon is such an ordinary, unassuming chap, you feel for him. It’s so easy to imagine yourself doing precisely what he does, making the same decisions and disappearing into the same quicksand.

From his security camera, Simon has video evidence of the assault: proof he was just responding to intimidation and aggression. It’s not exactly a get out of jail free card, but it is a way out.

He looks at the video and we all know what he’s going to do. We’re all screaming ‘no, don’t do it!’ but of course, he deletes the video, and becomes further sucked in.

Because of the CPR, the boy didn’t die, and Simon is praised as a hero. The boy’s dad, a mercurial, threatening presence, quite capable of extreme violence, befriends him, wanting to know more. It’s like watching a crocodile making nice to a terrified and tethered goat.

The investigating police officer, is, you suspect, beginning to doubt Simon’s story, and his wife knows something dodgy is going on.

Even before the end of the first episode you start noticing the holes in Simon’s hastily constructed narrative. What if the police check if Simon’s wife was really working when he said she was, and why did he really go to the hospital and … and ….. and ….? (chuckle)

A fine start to what I’m sure will be a jolting, unsettling and nervous story.

Brilliant.

I’ve certainly put it on series record, but will I watch it? To be honest, I’m not sure: it’s all rather too real, too much ‘there but for the grace of God, go I’ and anyway, I have to be in the right mood to let any form of reality burst out of my TV screen.

Huh. (Poof)

All of which means I turn to my next review with something like relief.

Dr. No on ITV4 Thursday March 21, 9:00pm

Well now, ha-ha: Dr. No, the very first James Bond film, from 1962. That’s 62 years ago. 62 years! Or to put it biblically, 3 score years and 10 minus 8.

Then, I was a grotty teenager wrestling with testosterone, A-Level maths and life in general. I saw Dr. No at the local Odeon, dashing off before the closing credits to catch the last bus home.

James Bond quickly became my hero. Oh, how I longed to be so insouciantly, arrogantly confident! To be able to just jet off to the Caribbean and to be at ease in hotels and drive around in an open-topped Sunbeam Alpine sports car, seducing beautiful exotic women and telling a minion to ‘fetch my shoes!’ In short, living the life.

Did Bond ever worry about differential calculus? Nope. Was he ever tongue-tied at parties? Nope. He could even take a taxi without staring at the clunking meter racking up the fare while at the same time agonising over the tip.

James Bond was the adult you wanted to be. You knew he’d never had acne or lit a fart.

He was a hero for all seasons.

But, what does my pimply years seminal movie look like now?

It’s difficult to say and awkward to judge, as comparisons with all the other Bond films are not easily set aside. There’s been so many Bonds, played by so many actors. And while I’ve grown from naïve teenager who nearly won the school shot put, to cynical old crinkly who needs to take a breath after one flight of stairs, Bond has remained the same.

I have grown old, but Bond has not.

My brother, in 1962, had said ‘go and see it, it’s great!’ so I had toddled along, seen it and agreed: it was great! Much more fun than A-Level maths.

And seeing it now, on my big TV in my little Grandpa annex, I still agree: it’s great!

Right from the opening credits and that inspired theme tune, Dr. No rocks along. It starts with a murder in Jamaica, introduces Bond in a swanky casino wooing a beautiful woman and swiftly shifts back to the Caribbean for more intrigue and action.

True, some aspects of the film do, now, jar: for instance, the interplay with Moneypenny looks forced and when he gets to Jamaica, Bond acts for a while like a detective from Midsomer murders, going around, interviewing people and asking questions. And sometimes the fights and car chases are noticeably sped up.

All things that would be tightened up or discarded in subsequent movies. And I don’t think he ever sings again, dubbed or not. (chuckle)

On the upside, it was very refreshing to see a Bond film with no over extended and hence tedious action sequences. And yes, I am thinking of both ‘Spectre’ and ‘Skyfall’, each of which could do with losing at least 30 minutes of a self-indulgent director spinning things out for the sake of it.

Ha! When I started writing this review I swore I wouldn’t get into the twin debates or who was the best Bond and which is the best Bond movie. For the record, the worst mainstream Bond is tied between Roger Moore and George Lazenby while the worst movie was ‘A view to a kill’ which should have been renamed ‘a crinkly runs about a bit.’

But I digress. Back to Jamaica.

Bond escapes a dastardly spider (he kills it by hitting it 5 or 6 times with a leather bedroom slipper: is his aim that bad?) and seduces an exotic woman before casually shooting dead a chap with useful inside knowledge. It’s a good thing he does, or the film would have been over in five minutes.

But who cares? The pace is picking up. Off he goes to Crab Key, a private island owned by the sinister Dr. No. He and his sidekick arrive stealthily in the night.

In the morning he wakes to the sound of singing, and there she is: what all the adolescent boys in the audience has been waiting for: Ursula Andress, in that iconic bikini, sashaying her way out of the ocean, a knife on her hip. I seem to remember a collective groan of recently broken teenage voices, but that’s probably more what I think I should remember than fact. Or perhaps the groan came from me.

But no time for romance, as they’re being hunted again, and Bond’s sidekick is incinerated and conveniently drops out of the story, never to be mentioned again.

They get captured and meet the chief baddie, the eponymous Dr. No, who establishes another fixed point in the standard Bond plot, by carefully telling him what his plans are.

But Bond escapes, disguises himself in a hazmat suit, sabotages the whole operation by turning a wheel so an arrow points at ‘DANGER!’ and ends up with the girl in a boat while behind them the whole island blows up. And so the world is saved.

I lapped it up as a teenager, and lapped it up yesterday as a granddad.

‘Nuff said! (hums the Bond theme, chuckles)

And that concludes the reviews in this episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’

Don’t forget, contact me through the website Ireviewfreeview.com or email contact@ireviewfreeview.com.

Thank you for listening, and goodbye for now.