James reviews iTales, on Channel 4, Yes, Minister(s) on That’s TV. and It Came From Outer Space II on Legend.

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

This is where I review suggested Freeview programs, or something I’ve picked myself. Go to IReviewFreeview.com to search, or 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: 

iTales, on Channel 4,

Yes, Minister(s) on That’s TV. and

It Came From Outer Space II on Legend.

I’m feeling eclectic, so we have an interesting compilation of short, smartphone-shot stories from India, a bunch of classic parliamentary comedies and a sequel to a clunky sci-fi film of the 1950s.

Something for everyone, you might say. Or more likely, something for no-one.

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

a giant spaceship is approaching big ben while an Indian woman wearing a sari is using a smartphone to photograph it pixel art.

Yeah … not too bad. It took me a while though, flitting from one free resource to the next. The interest quotient in the activity decreases pretty rapidly. Oh well. 

Before we start: a new, sometimes there, sometimes not section! Wow! Blow the trumpet!

I’ve provisionally called it ‘series record? Maybe not any more.’

It’s because of Dr. Who. 

In the last Podcast I was full of praise for this program. So I watched last Saturday, and have now taken it off series record. It was pretty dire: way too wordy and seemingly too long and too short at the same time, with a disjointed narrative full of unexpected and unnecessary reveals subverting what should have been a tense little drama into a failed attempt to add depth.

(poof)

So now I no longer record Dr. Who. The question is, will it survive longer than me? Probably: after all, he is a time lord, and I’ve got ten years left, tops: but then I’ve been saying that for years. Who knows.

Anyway, here we go:

iTales, on Channel 4, Monday 9th June, 3:35am 

This lasts 30 minutes and is an anthology of 5 five minute films made by Indian film students using iphones.

5 Minutes? A film’d have to work very hard to be boring in 5 minutes. After all, it’s barely long enough to eat a stick of celery. But as for telling a story? Not sure. Also, they’re by students, and  - if I remember right - when you’re a student everything matters more: it’s a time for getting on your high horse, wearing a hairshirt and disagreeing about everything with everyone.

But in these films, there are no iconoclastic bombastic rants. No politics and little religion. The focus is focused. Simple stories about life. Set in India, but recognisable to all. 

To go through them:

Mulberry:

It is hot. A poor man is walking, carrying his small son along roads and paths. He is obviously going somewhere, but where and for what, we don’t know. Perhaps to find work. They stop for the night in a town and the man - after much hesitation - steals a bike. He pedals away with his son on the crossbar. He leaves a letter for the bike’s owner, expressing regret at the theft, saying he has no other option as his son is disabled and cannot walk. He ends by giving his name, but it might have been a religious salutation, I’m not sure.

Why? Maa!

A writer - or possibly a mathematician, maybe both - cannot write. He sits staring at the typewriter, or making calculations on a blackboard. At night he dreams of his deceased mother, who was killed by rioters. She tells him a story of a man who repeatedly saves a snake, which repeatedly bites him. When asked why, the man replies ‘it is in my nature to save. It is in the snake’s to bite.’ In the morning the writer stares at the typewriter. Maybe he can write now. Maybe not. We don’t know.

Distorted Mirrors.

A short, somewhat conventional documentary about a dance troupe. The girls dance and tell their (mostly sad) stories. A man - who is possibly a manager - tells how hard it is for the girls to make better lives, as they are seen as only one step above prostitutes.

The Inner Face.

A girl (maybe 20?) and an old woman live in a house. The girl never goes out. She wanders around the house. A young man turns up, claiming to be old woman’s nephew, and starts painting a wall. The girl goes out and gives him a hug.

Spaces.

A middle aged woman is very house-proud and tidy. Her husband announces he’s now retired and stays in doing messy thing, like cooking but not washing the pans. He knocks things over and has the annoying habit of fiddling with a dangling plant when watching TV. The woman spends her whole time repairing his damage and mess. She places a heavy pot containing a dangling plant on the edge of the shelf over his TV chair. He pulls the pot down onto his head and is incapacitated. The woman happily resumes her former ways.

As I said: no ranting and raging against fate, or experimental imagery. Just well put together, very short films, and I’m not going to judge one against the other.

Of them all, however, I liked ‘Spaces’ - the last one - the best, for a clear and understandable narrative line, the small touches of humour and that universal middle-class feeling that I’ve met these people.

It was a half hour well spent, and I’m glad I watched. I’ve never been to India, and I have no desire to do so; but these films remind me that humans are the same all over the world. And many apologies if that sounds smug: it’s not meant to be.

Good stuff!

And moving on to more good stuff:

Yes, Minister(s) on That’s TV. Sunday 9th June, 9:30am thru 1:10pm

The thing about FreeView is there’s always - like life - good things to be had. Nuggets of pure delight tucked away in the endless dross of boring cooking programs, asinine gameshows and intelligent celebrities acting stupid.

You just have to keep your eyes open!

One such delight is ‘Yes Minister.’ Last Sunday ‘That’s TV’ - a rather splendid channel for boring old farts looking to relive their mid-life television - put out the entire first series, one after the other in a 7 program, 4 hour binge watch.

Hurrah! So I watched them, one after the other - bing bing bang bong, delighting in the clever plots, the well-drawn characters, the pinpoint accuracy of the acting and - above all - the wordplay.

OK, so the plots usually revolve around new minister Jim Hacker (Paul Eddington at his dithering, cunning best) trying to get round blocking manoeuvres smoothly put in place by mandarin Sir Humphrey Appleby (Nigel Hawthorne, perhaps the most expert word saladist on Brit TV) with a few random non-pearls of wisdom chucked in by civil servant Bernard Woolley (Derek Fowlds: God, he’s come a long way since being Basil Brush’s sidekick).

A quick reflective thought here: in the last paragraph I used the present tense, for when you watch good TV, the outside world shrinks, and what is on the screen assumes a veneer of reality. The three principals in ‘Yes Minister’ are there, in front of you, believably jockeying for position and authority: they are very much alive.

But, sadly, in this harsh real world of 2024, all three have been dead for some years.

‘Yes Minister’ was first broadcast in 1980. If a week is a long time in politics, 44 years is a near eternity. 

So much has happened since then: climate change, wars, starvation, the internet, COVID, the rise of stupid and running out of Shake ‘N Vac.

I’ve been thinking: if they made ‘Yes Minister’ now, what would they change? And the answer I’ve come up with is: not a lot.

The characters are so totally of a type, it’s credible Og the caveman would have known them: Jim Hacker: on the surface well meaning and open, but slice a little deeper and you uncover a sly, devious and somewhat cunning individual, constantly nervous about his position and always willing to justify putting himself first; Sir Humphrey Appleby: smoothly disdainful of everyone not of his class or outlook and horrified at the idea the unwashed masses - AKA - anyone without a top degree from Oxbridge - could possibly have the intellectual chops to run a whelk stall, let alone the country; and Bernard Woolley, a nearly clone of Appleby but still with a residual conscience, which enables him to ask the questions we all want to ask.

For example, in ‘open government’ he asks ‘Why shouldn’t ‘they’ - meaning anyone not in the top echelons of the civil service - why shouldn’t they know what we are doing?’ To which the reply is ‘my dear boy, if they don’t know what we are doing, they don’t know what we are doing wrong.’

Another factor that makes this comedy so timeless, is the astoundingly well judged non-verbal reactions. Hacker’s bewildered face when Appleby goes off on an extended word salad of monumental proportions, with clauses, disclaimers and logical bypasses relentlessly tracked down and annihilated in an Everest of mystification, well, Hacker becomes one of us: an astounded lesser mortal resentfully taking instruction from a God.

It seems that at least once in any given episode, he asks Sir Humpfrey in so many words to give a yes or no answer. And gets the reply ‘Yes …… and no.’

When the three of them are together, reacting and countering each other in an extended verbal ballet, it’s hard to think this is not real, that these are just skilled actors following a well-written script.

I am - as must be apparent - a great fan of ‘Yes Minister.’ The follow-up ‘Yes Prime Minister’ is less successful. Maybe there is a limit to the comic potential of even the most well rounded characters in finely conceived and executed plots.

But here, in the real world, where roads are more pothole than surface, the health service creaks like an old arthritic man with 20 more flights of stairs to climb, rivers are full of shit and politics has long deserted the concept of ‘making ordinary people’s lives better’ well, in this world, it’s hard not to imagine that, safe in the secluded, quiet confines of Westminster, a svelte civil servant, capon-lined and smoothly arrogant, is not devoted to arranging the world as he sees fit. 

God, how things haven’t changed!

(sigh)

Onwards. Downwards! Sideways?

It Came From Outer Space II on Legend, Monday June 10, 11:00am

When I was a child, my Granny - a game old bird - took me to see ‘Forbidden planet.’ Robbie the robot! Ray guns! Space ships! And an invisible monster that terrified me. I had nightmares about it for weeks afterwards.

And ever since then, I’ve been a huge fan of science fiction.

As an aside, ‘Forbidden Planet’ had a plot based on ‘the Tempest,’ but Shakespear was never this exciting. As an aside in an aside, Shakespear never is.

Over the years I suppose I’ve watched more sci-fi films than any other genre, ranging from the excellent (‘The Fifth Element’, ‘Alien’ ‘Arrival’) thru the good (‘The Martian’, ’Annihilation’) and down to the downright boringly terrible (‘2001 a space odyssey’).  

(Ha!)

I’ve been saying for years that much lauded film is a waste of time and celluloid. It’s a lonely furrow to plough, I must admit, but there y’go: I know I’m right.

Anyway, to the side, within shouting distance of the ‘so bad it’s good’ sub category of monster mashups and highly enjoyable entirely daft cheap crap (‘Sharkanado’ anyone?) there is the sub class of: ‘Oh God, why did they bother?’

‘It Came From Outer Space II’ belongs firmly in this category. Within five minutes you can sense everyone from the director down to the gofer making the tea has lost faith in it being anything other than rubbish.

The actors phone in perfunctory performances of a tedious script and the ‘special effects’ have been done on an underpowered laptop running Windows 95.

The original, 1953 ‘It Came From Outer Space’ was OK for its time, with enough narrative drive to keep you watching mixed with a plodding, Hayes coded, do good sincerity. The sort of film you now watch when you want to think of something else.

‘It Came From Outer Space II’ could well drop the ‘II’ and just be titled ‘It Came From Outer Space the crap remake,’ for that’s what it is: an inferior second go at a so-so film in the first place.

But I suppose once the money had been allocated, it had to be spent. And you never know - such are the vicissitudes of the industry - it might take off. An accidental hit, with memes and a second, shadowy life on the web.

Ha! As if.

It begins with the central character (a photographer) and a boy he’s befriended witnessing something mysterious crashing in an out of the way spot near a small desert township.

Things start to get strange. It gets very hot. The water dries up. Blue rocks with strange properties are discovered. People go missing and when found are like Zombies: some get violent. The boy manages to get himself into a sort of goey place, where he is cloned.

His Mum - a toothsome young lady - links up with the photographer to look for him.

He is convinced everything is connected to a strange mound - getting bigger by the minute - out where the mysterious something crashed. He tries to convince the townsfolk of this, but they shout at him.

The boy - well, his clone - is found and his Mum puts him to bed.  

By now, the plot is an incomprehensible mess, but they plough on regardless. 

Some hot heads decide to blow up the strange mound, so they grab some dynamite and set off. 

The boy has become skeletal and his Mum is now acting strangely: Oh No! She’s been got at as well!

But - unconvincingly - she quickly convinces the photographer that the aliens are not a threat and all the abducted people are safe.

So the race is on to get back to the alien ship before it is blown up.

They just make it: cue some more action in the goeyverse - but the dynamite is exploded anyway.

But - hurrah! - the aliens are now able to take off! A flappy, jelly-fishy thing emerges and vanishes into the sky, leaving behind - safe and sound - all the missing townsfolk. The photographer and the boy’s Mum embrace and kiss and the credits roll so hastily you know they’re all legging it to the nearest ice cream van as fast as possible.

It is absolutely no wonder the film was buried in the mid-morning graveyard slot; after all, any sufficiently crap film is indistinguishable at 11 am.

And that ridiculously tortured misquote from Arthur C. Clarke 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.