James reviews Cowboys & Aliens (2011) on Film4, Tony Robinson’s History of Britain on 5SELECT, and The Great Erection Deception: The Stiff Nights Story on ITV1.

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

This is where I review Freeview programs. Go to IReviewFreeview.com to search, listen, or indeed read and/or comment on all my reviews, past and present. And it should be available in the usual places where you get your podcasts. If you’re curious about the future, see the ‘What’s up next’ section at the end, or look for the ‘what’s up next’ page. That’s IReviewFreeview - all one word - dot com.

In this episode, I will review:

Cowboys & Aliens (2011) on Film4,

Tony Robinson’s History of Britain on 5SELECT, and

The Great Erection Deception: The Stiff Nights Story on ITV1.

I was a bit late getting the previous episode out. Blame events dear boy, events. So these were picked rapidly, primarily because the titles caught my eye. There’s a Viagra scam, cowboys fighting creatures from another planet and Baldrick from Blackadder being a history buff. (Ha!) Themed episodes, who needs them?

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

In front of a smokey image of a Victorian factory, a cowboy is shooting at an alien holding a blister pack of red pills.

Yeah, I’ll go with the result. Oddly, when I added ‘torpedo shaped’ to make the pills look like a willie, the alien scarpered off somewhere, never to be seen again. (Ha!) If we find unreliable prompts are the only way we can talk to our future robot overlords, then our prospects are indeed bleak.

And on that cheerful, non life-affirming note, let’s get going:

Cowboys & Aliens (2011) on Film4, Monday 21 October, 6:45pm

For my new listeners:

A warning: this review contains spoilers. and

I very much doubt if your enjoyment - or otherwise - will be compromised by knowing what happens, because it’s the sort of film that, from the start, you know how it ends. The only thing in question is how they get there.

So, having got that out of the way, let’s start:

‘Cowboys & Aliens,’ resolutely buys into every tired cowboy cliche you can imagine. Except for those dratted aliens, which are cliched from a different dimension, if you know what I mean.

It starts with a sweeping shot of archetypical cowboy country: scrubby small trees, mountains in the distance, relentless sun. I was waiting for a lone figure on a horse, outlined against the sky, riding remorselessly towards trouble.

But no: it’s Daniel Craig, waking up in a sweaty vest, looking confused. There’s no horse, he’s got a bleeding wound in his side and there’s a strange metallic bracelet wrapped around his wrist. He tries to get it off, but can’t.

Three strangers ride up. Their leader has a big moustache and starts to jab at Craig with his gun. Bad move, as Craig kills all three. Even injured, he’s mighty fast.

Now, he’s the lone figure riding towards his destiny, which starts in a small town. I didn’t catch the name, but it’s probably something like Desolation, or Rattlesnake gulch. Soon - as is the way of such things - he gets up the noses of both the local big bad boss, Dollarhyde (Harrison Ford) and the sheriff.

On the plus side, a helpful poster identifies him as Jake Lonergan, notorious outlaw so now he at least knows who he is, but on the downside, They chain him up ready for trial and execution. But his bracelet beeps like an egg timer and aliens attack, kidnapping people and racing off with them through the air.

The bracelet, it turns out, is a weapon, although he doesn’t really know how it works. But anyway, he uses it to escape and rides off, followed by a strange girl, Ella. The sheriff and Dollarhyde gather a posse and set off in pursuit.

About 25 minutes have now passed and the action has been pretty relentless and cowboyish - except for the alien attack.

Somewhere along the line, Jake and Ella meet up with his gang, the posse makes an entrance, and - to complete the set of usual suspects in a cowboy film - some red Indians wearing warpaint get into the mix.

I’m slightly surprised they didn’t go nap and have a gang of sombrero wearing Mexicans in there as well. But hey ho, you can’t have everything.

Of course it’s all getting very tense what with shouting and stand offs and guns waving, but then the aliens attack again, and in the ensuing mayhem, Ella gets killed.

In the calm after the attack, they decide they have to join forces. The indians build a large pyre and Ella is cremated. But she’s made of sterner stuff than merely dying and being reduced to ashes, and regenerates instead. This is jolly useful because - being an alien herself - she had lots of alien knowledge. She tells them they have to destroy their spaceship, before they wipe out all humans on earth, and Jake’s bracelet can do it. Also, she helpfully adds, Jake must know where the ship is.

So Jake drinks a potent Indian concoction and remembers everything. We even get unnecessary flashbacks of him and his beautiful wife. More importantly, he now knows where the ship is, so off they all go. Yee Ha!

Now, even in the most frivolous of films, I subconsciously look for a deeper meaning. I’m sure I’m not the first to have discovered the hidden hand of Mr Kipling in ‘American pie’. So with ‘Cowboys & Aliens’ I’m thinking maybe they intended it to be an analogue about how wars of empire and conquest can be stopped with the help of a renegade, pinched technology and heroism. The whole of the Star warsverse reduced to a man wearing chaps with a six shooter to hand.

But then I think, nah: I really am chasing shadows there. ‘Cowboys & Aliens’, although seriously made, has a script that seldom elevates it higher than spaghetti. There’s no hint of any intention of making it greater than the sum of its often tedious parts.

The simple truth is, the invented money man at the start with (Voice C) ‘Use the cowboy cliches, won’t yah? So the drive through folks know what they’re getting.’ is absolutely spot on. When you mix genres, one of them needs to be firmly rooted on solid, recognisable ground, or it degenerates into a mess. ‘2001 a space odyssey’, for example, is perhaps the most boring film ever made. (Ha!) I just shoved that in there, to see if there’s a reaction.

But I did watch ‘Cowboys & Aliens’ to the end, in spite of all the wider-than-Christmas plot holes - for instance, why did the Aliens abduct people? Who knows? Probably so they could be implausibly rescued at the climax, which involved a lot of shooting, a few arrows (don’t forget, the Indians took part) and heroics all round.

Or, again, why did they attack in the first place? Surely their motives would be best served by being undiscovered for as long as possible.

Oh, God, I keep forgetting, this is a film, not real life.

So, anyway: did the spaceship escape? (Chuckles) Really?! That would be a spoiler too far, although I will say, if you’re posing that question, you’ve not been paying attention.

To wrap up: I - sort of - enjoyed it. And if you want to see James Bond on a horse, looking thin, mean and wearing a stetson, be my guest.

And - very probably, in a year or so - I’d join you again - unless something else crops up.

Moving on:

Tony Robinson’s History of Britain on 5SELECT, Monday 21 October, 8:00pm

The thing about history is, it’s a giant, fascinating story, never fully told. It might be stuffed with kings and queens and wars, but what about the little people? People like me? I have a history - I’m living it now. But when I’ve gone, only my close family and the tortoise will remember me. And when they’ve gone? No one. A few dusty photos, my name scrawled inside some books and a lingering, ghostly presence on the web, if that.

Which, of course, is the fate of practically everyone in history. Even kings and queens get forgotten in time.

But, here comes Tony Robinson, striding like a druid into that space, to present his illustrated history of Britain!

And by illustrated, I do mean illustrated. They throw their little cotton socks at it. If a word could be given a picture, it was.

(haha!)

OK, now one for the crinklies amongst us. Who else remembers, 60 plus years ago, ‘That Was The Week That Was’? Well, they did a spoof illustrated news, culminating - if memory serves - with a mention of the Lord Privy Seal, illustrated with pictures of a long wig, an outside toilet and a seal sitting on a rock. (Ha!) Maybe you had to see it to find it funny.

Anyway, our Tony almost goes one better. For instance, to illustrate the enormous breakfast a navvy would eat, the script would be something like:

‘Early each morning (quick clip of a crowing cockerel) our navvy would get up (bearded man in long johns gets out of bed) go downstairs (feet on steps) and have breakfast (Man sits at table) of a loaf of bread (loaf) 6 eggs (eggs being fried) a bowl of porridge (bowl of porridge) a pint of beer (pint of beer) and read (man picks up paper) Queen victoria has named another ship (drawing of queen Victoria, with her chin going up and down, animating her mouth, saying ‘I name this ship after me’, followed by a grainy black and white clip of a ship being launched.)

You might think it’s a bit over the top, but once you’ve got used to this tsunami of visual input, it does remove - for me, at any rate - any tendency to nod off. So it’s a good thing.

His intention is to concentrate on the lives of the little people. Those lower down in the hierarchy. Really, one thinks the series should be titled ‘Tony Robinson’s Social History of Britain.’ But, hey: maybe he wants you to think, this is a new thing?

The inherent problem with social history, of course, is the further you descend down the scale and back in time, the less likely it is they have left any trace at all. History is made of things you can touch and feel and read and - in some cases - verbal stories passed down through the generations. Additionally, all information from the past suffers from time’s Chinese whispers, and becomes distorted.

You can’t tell the story of someone who simply does not exist any more.

So I was surprised he didn’t mention Henry Mayhew, or George Crabbe or William Cobbett who documented the lives of the poor of the time.

But I’ll save my caveats for later.

In this episode, Tony is dealing with the Victorians. He’s a relaxed, informative and empathetic presence, not averse to having a go when he can: he drives a handsome cab and then crawls along a sloping, narrow mine shaft.

He tells the stories of 6 of the common people, ranging from a matchgirl to a disenchanted secretary.

Most of them lived fairly grotty lives, fraught with danger, smells and disease. If you want to know all the details, watch the program. But here’s a quick look at a couple of the lowlights anyway.

Sarah Chapman, matchgirl, worked in a sulphur ladened match factory. She was lucky not to get a condition called phossy jaw - caused by the sulphur - that rots the bones of the jaw away.

Betty Harris, miner, spent 14 hours a day breathing in coal dust while crawling on hands and knees through low tunnels, hauling trucks of coal. When the upper classes found out about it, they were scandalised as some of the women stripped to the waist.

And to balance this, a couple of common people who escaped.

John Cockram, cabbie, was T-total and able to save. He ended up with nearly 30 people working for him. At 68 he sold up and retired.

And Esther Brown, shop girl, had the good fortune to work in Micheal Mark’s Penny Bazaar, AKA the very first Marks and Spencer. She worked a 90 hour week and ended up as one of the first female shop managers.

And, somewhere in the middle, is Edwin Waugh, a clerk. He had the sense to keep a diary. He hated his job writing letters, didn’t think much of his wife or the world in general, come to that. But then he goes by train to Blackpool and has a great day out, which gives Robinson the chance to talk about the railways which - you rather suspect - he finds far more interesting than poor old Edwin, who immediately sinks back into obscurity.

With all the visuals, it’s an easy watch, and by concentrating on the individual, you get a flavour of the whole. Robinson does a good job of sketching out the wider political and economic landscape, but none of the stories he tells are concluded. We never hear, for example, how long they actually lived.

Take our pal Edwin. He’s having a sad, depressed little life, but then has a most tremendous day in Blackpool. But what happened afterwards? Did he live to a ripe old age? Did he get eaten by an antelope? Is there a gravestone?

We are never told. We’re left hanging, while on the screen are pictures of trains chuffing along.

Viewers of documentaries like these know solid information about individuals is sparse. There will be gaps and - very often - historical records can just peter out with no explanation.

All we need is a sentence or two to tidy things up. ‘Unfortunately, a year after his day out in Blackpool, Edwin’s diary stops, and without it, we know nothing more.’ That sort of thing.

But these are fairly minor gripes. Tony Robinson is a beguiling narrator. He has the knack of making the commonplace interesting, and sprinkles a sense of genuine joy at unearthing the past. So, keep it up.

Series record? Yep, definitely.

Keep it up!? Hang onto your hats, for we’re now looking at:

The Great Erection Deception: The Stiff Nights Story on ITV1, Monday 21 October, 10:45pm

Well, I don’t know. Another documentary! As I said, I was hurried in the choosing. And if I thought the previous one (Tony Robinson looking at grubby life in the Victorian period) was illustrated enough, I hadn’t seen anything yet!

For ‘The Great Erection Deception: The Stiff Nights Story’ made Tony seem an amateur in the unnecessary pictures department. And if you add a puerile, innuendo soaked commentary and an inept structure, you end up with a mess.

Which is what this is.

The basic story is simple. A couple of chancers, Kelly Harvey - a smiling Mormon family man - and a more shifty character with the suspicious name of Erb Avore, decide to cash in on the growing (snarf snarf) market for erectile disfunction pills. The leader at the time was Viagra, developed and marketed as a medicine.

Taking advantage of fairly loose regulations around naturally sourced, homeopathic products, Tom and Erb made a pill which - they claimed - contained nothing but natural ingredients.

In a moment of marketing genius, they called their product ‘Stiff Nights,’ shaped it vaguely like an upright willy and blister-packed it in ones and twos. So you could afford to have your fun, one stiff night at a time.

They made a lot of money. Kelly took his wife and four kids to exotic places. But he and Erb (who, you suspected, already knew) were being duped. The Chinese pill makers had been adding an extra, secret ingredient, which wasn’t on the packaging and almost certainly not naturally sourced.

So when they found out, they could have pleaded innocence and withdrawn the product, perhaps suing the Chinese guys, and receiving a slap on the wrist for failing due diligence. But they didn’t. They kept quiet about it and just kept going. But the law caught up with them. Kelly did a plea deal and spent 3 years in prison, while Erb Avore was never caught.

And that’s about it. That’s the story.

Oh - and one other thing - the added ingredient? (Ha!) it was the chemical that made Viagra, Viagra.

So there might be some scope for an examination of why a sanctimonious, pretentiously religious person thought it OK to rip people off in the name of profit, but the program wasn’t overly interested in that.

In an example of style over content, it meandered all over the place, jauntily cutting from one thing to another, one illustration to the next, to a honking soundtrack of only vaguely connected songs.

It really was extremely irritating. 

At one point, they even swerved from a sex historian with a pin through her nose listing past efforts to make saggy members stand up to soaring pictures of the white cliffs of Dover with stirring music, finishing on the small seaside town of Sandwich. Various Sandwich residents say what Sandwich is famous for. After a while the narrator prompts them: did you know Viagra was invented here?

Resident: Oh. Yeah. Out at Pfizer.

So now we’re presented with a couple of chemists talking about Viagra, and how it quickly became famous and if they’d used it. The program had turned itself into a marketing puff for Viagra.

And then we switch back to Salt Lake City and Kelly and Erb. But it’s after a commercial break, so - tediously - we’re introduced to them again.

And so it dribbled on. I suppose, to be honest, and having just had another look, maybe the program was not quite as bad as I’ve been saying. It could be my overall reaction was coloured by Kelly, who is centre stage and obnoxious with it, trying to justify believing in God and being a good person with also being a thief and greedily taking people’s money by fraud.

“My religion means everything to me,” he toots in voice over as we see him leading his family in prayer.

They set up a factory, pumping pills out by the million.

‘Those,’ said Kelly ‘were the good times.’

A friend of the elusive Erb-the-vegan said Erb invested in real estate and once bought an airport.

In 2009 Kelly went for a business meeting with his Chinese suppliers. They told him that, for the previous two years, they’d been spiking the pills to make them work.

Kelly, taken aback, says ‘ummm..’

But at this dramatic moment, the program cuts to a clinical herbalist called 7Song, complete with beard and skeleton in the hallway. He’s handed the list of Stiff Nights ingredients, and he pronounces it ‘a kitchen sink formula.’ 

We’re just absorbing this when - abruptly - we’re back with Kelly, settling down with some ‘Herbalism for beginners’ books.

For a while, we switch between the two, 7Song pottering about opening drawers and so forth, Kelly trying to understand the concept of ‘natural ingredients.’

‘Calcium’ - he honks at one point - ‘is not natural. It’s a rock.’

This sequence culminates - confusingly - with a clip of a corpse standing behind some curtains, before falling forward. I suppose it’s meant to lead us seamlessly back to the main narrative, but it just looks really odd. In fact, the more the program progresses, the more off-kilter both the narrative and illustrations become. And I’m starting to think, when I dissed the program at the start, that was the right thing to do.

Eventually, we get to the reason Kelly and Erb carried on.

Kelly said, and here I paraphrase: ‘the decision I made, to continue on trying to fix our problem, in hindsight, was a terrible decision.’

What a sanctimonious git. If he’d ruefully said, ‘the money was too tempting.’ then I might have understood, but of course he couldn’t say that. He’d retreated too far up his own arsehole of religious rectitude.

At this point, we’re not even halfway thru this awful program, which is when it starts really going off the rails. We’ve reached 2010, so we see soldiers packing machine guns hunting for public enemy number 1, Osama Bin Laden.

But - we are informed - there is now a new public enemy number 2. Cut to a picture of Kelly, walking in slow motion.

Yep, they’re calling Kelly - basically a smalltime businessman with dubious morality - the second most important threat to national security.

Frankly, it’s ridiculous. And even writing about it fills me with tired despair.

I can’t take it any more. I’ve reached my limit. I watched it once and got confused and bored, and I can’t face that again.

So - and sorry about this - I’m bailing out.

Apologies for this somewhat rambling, incoherent and now abruptly terminated review. I think my brain has been contaminated by what I’ve been watching.

I was beguiled by the title, but you don’t have to be. My advice is simple: don’t watch: after all, not everything is necessarily informative, educational and entertaining. Some programs are just crap.

And that slight misquote of Lord Reith concludes the reviews for this episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’

Next time, I will review:

Nightmare Tenants, Slum Landlords (S 2 E 1) on 5*, Sunday 27 October, 5:00pm

For the Love of Dogs with Alison Hammond (S 12 E 6) on ITV1, Sunday 27 October, 5:00pm and

Time Bandits (1981) on Film4, Sunday 27 October, 6:00pm

OK, so ‘Time Bandits’ has been one of my top ten films for many years now, so maybe it’s time to look at it with a more critical eye. And as for the other two, I was wanting a contrast with the film and each other. So one is probably going to be light and fluffy with wagging tails and enthusiastic walks, while in the other I’m expecting surly people doing unneighbourly things.

We’ll see.

As ever, you can contact me via email to contact@IReviewFreeview.com or through the website IReviewFreeview.com, or from where you normally get your podcasts. Let me know what you think and - of course - if you want me to cast my beady eye on a particular program: film, documentary, whatever, then tell me.

And if you want to know what I’ll be reviewing next time, click on the page ‘What’s up next.’

Thank you for listening, and goodbye for now.