James reviews Patricia Cornwell’s At Risk (2010) on Great! Movies, Gunpowder on U&Drama and (not) LEGO Masters: Australia on E4.

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

This is where I review Freeview programs. Go to IReviewFreeView - all one word - dot 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.

In this episode, I will review:

Patricia Cornwell’s At Risk (2010) on Great! Movies,

Gunpowder on U&Drama and

LEGO Masters: Australia on E4.

So, we’re back to eclectic mixes (again) with the seasonally appropriate ‘Gunpowder’ which I missed last year and as it probably won’t be shown again for another 12 months, I’m catching it while on. Now I really rate Patricia Cornwall as a writer, but will ‘At Risk’ be yet another vapid, run-of-the-mill snooze-fest churned out for the dosh? Listen and find out! And as for LEGO masters? Well, as a kid all I had was Meccano, with a tiny spanner and nuts and bolts that got lost and ruined the vacuum. So I shall be watching with interest.

Spoiler alert: maybe I won’t.

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

on the left is a small lego tower, with differently coloured blocks. In the middle is a small derringer gun with a wisp of smoke coming out of the muzzle and to the right is a barrel with ‘GUNPOWDER’ written on it.

Considering I’ve been doing this podcast only since about March, it’s astonishing - no, frightening - how more responsive and accurate the images have become. I’m not sure if we should be celebrating this. Who else remembers a 1950s film called ‘The Blob,’ with Steve McQueen? An alien spaceship crashes, and the first person on the scene sees a small blob of slime on the ground. He pokes it with a stick, and it climbs up the stick and engulfs his hand, and before you know it, there’s this big blob of jelly rolling around absorbing people.

Well, with AI, are we like that man with the stick? He probably thought it was harmless fun, until it ate him.

And with that cheery thought, here’s the first review!

Patricia Cornwell’s At Risk (2010) on Great! Movies, Saturday 2 November, 6:55pm

As I said in the intro, Patricia Cornwall is a good writer. I’ve read a few of her books. I can’t remember any titles now, but the fact I read more than one speaks volumes. So when this program caught my eye, I stupidly thought, oh let’s give it a go, although my inner voice was saying ‘It’ll just be another crap, generic, cardboard cut-out do it by numbers pile of poo.

(Ha!)

I should have listened to my inner voice, for the program was lazily written, uninspiring in direction and with enough filler to dam the Amazon. Even the cityscapes looked bored. You can’t always make an uninteresting scene - of, say, a man walking across a car park - interesting with the addition of an urgent sound track.

The plot dutifully served up a potpourri of cliché, well-used tropes and bog-standard action sequences while at the same time being difficult to follow. Or - to be honest - that might just have been my fault, as - from the start - I felt an increasing lack of engagement. And if you don’t care, you stop paying attention, and any plot more convoluted than Janet and John clean the carpet becomes impossible to follow.

Anyway, as far as I could make out, there’s an aspiring politician who’s name I can’t remember who’s high up in the police force. Her favourite hotshot detective has the nickname of Geronimo. He’s young, attractive, virile, wears a leather jacket and rides an Italian motorcycle. All women desire him and all men want to be him. Yep, he’s the James Bond of the police department.

Before the opening credits, there’s a long flashback of him as a young boy rescuing dogs with his grandmother, who had a reputation as a bit of a witch. Handfuls of coins, for no discernable reason, are flung into the air. And then we had the credits,which took quite a while.

I was already losing interest by the time adult Geronimo - looking at maggots - was introduced, which was a pity as - thinking back - I expect that was when the plot was explained. This is not helped by everyone talking rapidly - usually into a phone while striding quickly along a corridor - and only ever saying things once.

A typical conversation might be:

Man A (on phone while coming out of a building) Ted wants to meet.

Man B (in a car) Yeah?

Man A: Yeah.

Man B (slightly menacingly): Tell him to bring Olive.

Man A: I gotta go. (pockets phone, flags down a cab gets in and is driven off)

Now unless you’ve paid close attention, Man A and Man B are unknowns and God knows who Olive is. But I expect in due course one of them will be shot while waiting in a disused deserted factory.

In your normal murder mystery, there’s usually a recap at some point, with perhaps a helpful whiteboard, with pictures of the suspects and useful arrows making links.

(Poof!)

No such namby-pandy nonsense here. The underlying assumption seems to be, if you can’t keep up with our Uber-macho hero, tough! I only kept watching because I thought I should. I’ve bailed out of a couple of things recently, and always feel it shortchanges people, although as an act of criticism, walking out - or switching off - is about as strong as you can get.

So, heroically, I stuck it out to the end, which was a very long time coming.

Anyway, Geronimo has a side-kick, or a sergeant or whatever, who scurries around digging out old reports from dusty boxes stored in attics. She gets attacked and tied to a bed and sprinkled with petrol and is about to be flambéed when - but of course - Geronimo bursts in and rescues her.

And then I see it wasn’t her - the sidekick - at all, but Geronimo’s boss (remember her, the aspiring politician?) I mistook one for the other. Well, they’re a similar build, same sort of hair and oh, I dunno - they’ve both got noses. I didn’t care then, and don’t care now. It’s only actors acting away, following a script knocked up in an afternoon by a writer eating spaghetti and farting.

The plot seems to be about a murder 20 years ago and a murder now, linked by a regular supply of victims getting killed or bashed on the head and dying later. Geronimo and his sidekick search for clues and talk to people, but nothing is sustained long enough for you to form any judgments on anyone. As far as I recall, there’s only one real clue uncovered, which linked things together so right at the end Geronimo goes racing off to the final confrontation.

One consequence of having stabby, brief conversations and no recaps, with everyone on fast forward, is the program is hard put to fill the allotted time. So there are egregious quantities of filler. Geronimo’s sidekick who has - like all the women - the hots for him, well, she has a little daydream, a long montage of clips of him smiling and getting out of cars etc etc, all to the sort of soppy soundtrack you normally only hear on Valentine’s day at a Berni inn. And, not content with showing it once, they repeat the whole sorry thing - à propos nothing I can remember - about 10 minutes later.

And of course, they also shoehorn another repeat - of the whole of the pre-credit sequence, complete with the shower of coins and rescued dogs.

Look, maybe you think this review is a bit harsh. After all, the program isn’t meant to be thought provoking or high concept: basically, it’s just the same as a billboard beside a road: something to display adverts. So, you think, it’s all very easy for me, sat here in my little grandpa annex, throwing bile at my large TV.

And you’re right. It is easy. I’ve written numerous playscripts in the past, and I know how difficult it is, staring at a blank sheet of electronic paper, trying to come up with something new. It’s easier to write reviews: you’re reacting, rather than originating. And, in turn, negative reviews are easier than positive ones; after all, the vocabulary of insult is larger than that of praise. Put simply, you’ve just got more words to play with. And if you find that difficult to handle, well tough: just because something is easier to do, it doesn’t mean it’s less valid. I recognise a crap program when I see it.

(Sigh)

OK now, let’s sum up.

Watching Patricia Cornwell’s At Risk was a dismal experience, showing how difficult it is to fill 2 hours of screen time if you’re afraid of relaxing the pace and probably don’t have the budget for a decent script, better sets and more actors. And talking of sets, there is one character - a political rival to Geronimo’s boss - who is always seen in a car. We get an establishing view of a stretch limo, then see him in what is probably a studio mockup of the inside. People get in and out to talk to him, or he’s on the ‘phone. I expect the exterior shots of the car were stock footage, and the actor hired for one day only, to save on cost.

Cheap cheap cheap.

Or maybe it’s so badly conceived and put together one automatically assumes it is cheap. Either way, it’s a dumpster fire, with little idea of dramatic rhythm, no sense of humour and the overall impression they’re just going through the motions rather than trying to create good TV.

Series record? (Ha!) No, no: a thousand times no!

Uh-oo…what’s up next? (Ha!) a histo docodram! This should go with a bang!

Gunpowder (S 1 E 1) on U&Drama, Saturday 2 November, 10:10pm

This an absorbing, meaty, dark, compelling drama, with plenty of plotting, threats and magnificent hats.

Dark? Well, it starts with queen Elizabeth the first’s corpse, and that’s probably about as cheerful as it gets.

God, I found it difficult. Not to understand what was going on, but to understand why it was going on.

It’s all to do with religion. Catholics vs Protestants. In a word, faith. People were prepared to die for it, murder for it, and risk torture and terrible execution. To me, living my little life in a beige suburban estate - it all seems completely bonkers. I stopped believing in God many years ago, and now the idea of doing anything even faintly religious appears somehow hypocritical, even - in a strange way - blasphemous.

And to hurt people, even kill them, over religious differences which appear as slight as preferring Bird’s custard over Angle Delight, seems absolutely insane.

But - unless they’ve taken a hacksaw to historical accuracy - ‘Gunpowder’ is based on actual events.

When Elizabeth died, James six of Scotland came trundling down Ermine street to reach London and become James one of England. He was a protestant, which made the Catholics very, very twitchy. Mass, we are informed, was banned and - to emphasise this - we see a hanging corpse, presumably of a catholic priest.

Just to make sure we know what we are getting, we’ve now been treated to a dead queen and a dangling churchman, all before billowing smoke - as if from an explosion - forms the backdrop to the opening credits.

These eventually dissolve into the face of catholic Robert Catesby, eyes closed in devotion as he hears mass in a grand country house.

Then a troup of armed soldiers thump on the door!

‘We are well prepared!’ says Catesby’s cousin, the formidable lady Dorothy Dibdale. Rapidly, two priests are hidden behind a false wall while the third dives into a chest as big as a coffin. The vestments are cleared away and mattresses turned. The chief soldier has a hat with a brim wide enough to keep his shoulders dry. He stalks around, knocking on walls.

The priest in the chest is discovered and carted away, along with Lady Dorothy.

Catesby complains: ‘It has never been the practice to take the women.’

To which the reply is: ‘well, practice no longer fits the times in which we live.’

For a moment, let’s examine this. If we rewrite this exchange in more modern speak, so to speak,

‘It has never been the practice to take the women.’ becomes ‘You’ve never taken a woman before.’

While: ‘practice no longer fits the times in which we live.’ becomes ‘times have changed.’

These differences might seem negligible. One is a bit more formal than the other, and that’s about it. 

But, accumulatively, every time someone speaks, we are subtly reminded these people do not live in our world and, by extension, their worries and concerns are not ours. By slightly changing the normal, everyday sentence structures, the authenticity of the whole is reinforced. Leaving aside the costumes, the settings and - of course, the hats.

(ha!) I’m not sure why I went off on that tangent. Anyway …

Catesby is played by the dashing Kit Harington, and this first episode does a good job of telling us why, in the end, he plots to blow up the king. His cousin - Lady Dorothy - is found guilty of allowing mass in her house and hiding a catholic priest. She is publicly stripped naked and crushed to death. The priest is hung, drawn and quartered. These executions were shown in enough realistic detail to stop me eating my toast. Well for a while, anyway.

They were indeed brutal times, full of suspicion and fear, with everyone looking over their shoulders for danger.

James’s chief minister, Robert Cecil, has a permanently tilted head, a nice line in smiling menace and is obviously addicted to intrigue and plotting. He’s trying to make the king aware of the threats against him, but the king is sensibly more inclined to let people live how they want.

Cecil starts whispering in the ear of the king’s favourite, eventually persuading him to persuade the king to wear the 17th century equivalent of a bullet-proof vest. The king complains that it’s very heavy.

Cecil recruits the convicted murderer Captain Turner as a spy and sends him to the Netherlands, seemingly just to facilitate Guy Fawkes’s dramatic introduction to this drama. But more of that later. Perhaps.

Catesby and John Wright - a close friend - are fined and sent to prison for not attending church and this, we feel, is possibly what sends them over the edge.

As I said, it’s all to do with faith. And I probably implied, early on in this review, that I don’t put much store by it. Well, that faith in no faith, so to speak, has been severely tested in the last couple of days. I have discovered I used to have an unacknowledged faith in the innate good sense of mankind. But then Trump won the US presidential election and that faith was discovered and destroyed in the same instant.

A large percentage of the population on the other side of the Atlantic seem to have gone stupid, and I am at a loss to understand it. But I’m not going to turn this review into another diatribe about that appalling man. However, regular listeners will know one of my recurring fears is of climate change.

Trump thinks climate change is a hoax. He will do nothing to stop it. He wants to allow drilling for oil in the artic. 

I’ve long thought that global warming will severely impact the lives of my grandchildren. Since yesterday, I now think it will severely affect my children, who are now in their thirties. Potentially, I’m thinking my generation - people who were alive when the 2nd world war finished - will be the last people on earth not to have their lives downgraded by us humans pumping shit into the atmosphere for year after year after year. You can’t continually foul your own nest for decade after decade and expect to get away with it.

These thoughts are so traumatic, depressing and energy-sapping I’m basically bailing out of podcasting for a while, until I find some kind of equilibrium.

I can’t face the prospect of reviewing ‘LEGO masters,’ and I’ll cut short this current review of ‘Gunpowder.’ But keep an eye open: I’ll hope to be back in a couple of weeks, once I’ve managed to convince myself - against all the evidence - that mankind’s existence won’t be like the three comedy villains I once thought to have in a panto I never wrote. That is to say: Nasty, Brutal and Short. 

(Sigh!)

Now, where was I? Oh yes: ‘Gunpowder’ is an entirely satisfactory, well-written drama. And with two more parts to go, that’s my Saturday evenings sorted.

Series record? Most definitely.

And as for Guy Fawkes? Wait until the end. Don’t blink, or you’ll miss him.

But - for reasons explained, I’m not reviewing:

LEGO Masters: Australia (S 5 E 7: T Minus Ten / All In) on E4, Sunday 3 November, 4:30pm,

because of events, dear boy, events.

And that direct quote from Harold Macmillan concludes the reviews for this episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’

And now - again for reasons explained - I’m taking a short holiday.

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. I’ll try to get round to it, eventually.

And I’ll update the ‘What’s up next’ page when I have something to report.

Thank you for listening, and goodbye for now.