Geek Overture

Any show that’s been around as long as How I Met Your Mother is bound to cover the same sort of ground a couple of times. Less excusable when you start using the same jokes again. Barney claims to have Enormous Penis Syndrome, which you’ll remember from the episode called The Playbook, where it appeared in [...]

Romance is heating up this week on the mid-season finale of Pan Am. Captain Dean and Collette play hooky from their flight to London after Dean promises Collette he’ll teach her how to fly a single-engine crop duster out in the countryside. Oops, forgot to tell her that it’s at your parents’ farm, didn’t you [...]

What kind of a year has it been, Boardwalk Empire? At the start of the year Nucky had just been charged with electoral fraud, Paz de la Huerta was still hanging out with her wang out, the Commodore was recovering from poisoning via trident-workouts, and Margaret was still wearing fur and visiting a French lingerie [...]

After last week’s gruelling battle with our own senses of decency, this week’s episode of Black Mirror presented itself as a much more palatable affair, and for a considerable portion was. How sharp an edge could a parody of The X-Factor have? It’s even written in tandem by Brooker and Kanak Huq. It could be positively slushy. [...]

I’d like to keep this one brief, as there’s very little to change my opinion from last time. This week, Warwick spends six minutes talking to a spiritualist who talks like Ricky Gervais. The joke is that he doesn’t really talk to ghosts! RUMBLED, spiritualists! There’s no particular reason why Warwick Davis would go to this [...]

By now, as the show itself predicted, the key details of Black Mirror‘s deeply disquieting first episode have been discussed at length and publicised in the most base and unsubtle way imaginable by Channel 4. The upside is that gives us a free pass to acknowledge the programme as partly shock tactics (how many people [...]

Time is running out on season two of Boardwalk Empire, and my goodness things are getting batpoop crazy all up in here. Perhaps more so than usual, it’s ALL SPOILERS, ALL THE TIME. So most of the episode is a flashback to Jimmy’s time at Princeton, where he was Leonardo DiCaprio. The episode jumps from the [...]

That’s a shame. After the engaging emotional strength from last week we’re scaling the top board, adjusting our goggles and swandiving into the swirling tortured maestrom of bizarre decision-making and ludicrous plot twists and not enough Sue that has plagued Glee this year. I even resorted to IMDB to find out who or what was responsible for [...]

We’re heading round the curve into the home stretch of Boardwalk Empire and the threads that had been dragging somewhat in the past couple episodes have switched gear all of a sudden, so much so I find it impossible not to mix metaphors. By the way **ALL THE SPOILERS OH MY GOODNESS** So it’s an unfortunate [...]

It has to be said that like (I’m sure) many other viewers, Ricky Gervais has forced me into a love-hate relationship with his work. He’s a genuinely funny chap. The quality of The Office from top to bottom should not be forgotten as a turning point in British television, and for all its failings Extras ended with [...]