Mount Pleasant - Like A Daz Advert... But Not As Good

We all have shows we just don't get. I don't get Flight of the Conchords, whizzes right past me. And then there is The Mighty Boosh which nobody gets, or likes, outside of a Student Union bar. Now I can add to that list Sky's new 'comedy drama' (their words not mine) Mount Pleasant.

Set in a Northern suburb and purporting to be a tale of day to day life, I just didn't get it. What it most resembled was those Daz adverts with all the old soap stars in, only not as good. Everything seemed day-glo, over the top and stuck in a time-warp, a bit like The Archers on acid. And just when you thought it couldn't get much worse, or more time-warpy, Bobby Ball appeared as, well, Bobby Ball really. The facial expressions and movements were all there, only missing was a 'rock on Tommy' to drag us all back to dull Saturday nights of the late 70's and early 80's.

I kept waiting for Mount Pleasant to kick into action. Will it turn weird like Twin Peaks, or get a little dark like Desperate Housewives? Neither was the answer. In fact, comparing this to Desperate Housewives is like comparing Bobby Ball to Bobby De Nero. The show lurched on for an hour with nothing much happening, just cardboard characters spouting the F word in place of anything remotely resembling witty, or humorous, dialogue. Safe to say I won't be tuning in again.

Sky's 'homegrown' programming is really floundering. We can now add Mount Pleasant to Thorne and Mad Dogs as lemons of the highest order.

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The Hour - Was the name meant to be ironic?

What is it about BBC dramas that they have to be so slow? It's like they haven't cottoned on that snail pace doesn't equal quality. Those days have long gone but by watching The Hour you wouldn't know it.

Now there's an irony calling a show The Hour when sitting through it, feels like six. This is the BBC's latest attempt to ape HBO/Showtime /FX and AMC. A couple of months ago we had The Shadow Line (which was touted by some idiot somewhere) as like The Wire in its complexity but where The Wire gripped for five seasons, The Shadow Line couldn't keep its audience for five episodes. Now we have The Hour, a show where everything seems tacked on. A murder mystery is tacked onto a 50's television newsroom drama, that is tacked onto a period piece. And to cap it all it moves like the M25 at rush hour.

So what does it want to be? Your guess is as good as mine. The words Mad Men have been bandied about probably by the same idiot that bigged up The Shadow Line but comparing this to Mad Men is like comparing Danny Dyer's Deadliest Men to The Sopranos. Mad Men made the advertising industry of the early 60's immediately assessable, while only people who worked in a 50's newsroom probably nodded and felt included with The Hour.

If the BBC want anymore ideas for these vague American knock offs, I've got a couple. How about Dick and Dom as brothers running a family undertakers in Dudley? Or Alex Jones as a widow forced to sell weed in Chipping Norton? I can't wait.

Over