‘The Shadow Line’ DVD review
BBC Two’s recent The Shadow Line is a serial sodden with blood: seven hours of claret-splattered, frequently flamboyant, occasionally preposterous and completely compulsive television.
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BBC Two’s recent The Shadow Line is a serial sodden with blood: seven hours of claret-splattered, frequently flamboyant, occasionally preposterous and completely compulsive television.
Battlestar Galactica spin-off Caprica was never going to have an easy start in life. Born in the shadow of its towering parent, it had to do justice to the elegant and complex universe of BSG while exploring the artificial-intelligence theme from a new angle that would benefit from a more earth-bound setting.
For the third time in four years, the Robot Chicken team have produced a special extended episode dedicated to Star Wars.
Based on three novels by Kate Atkinson, this recent BBC One series features the adventures of former soldier, onetime policeman and permanently good-natured private investigator Jackson Brodie, played by Harry Potter villain Jason Isaacs.
Irwin Allen, the cult producer of various fanciful sixties TV sci-fi shows including Lost In Space, The Time Tunnel and Land Of The Giants, was best known as a purveyor of factually incorrect, faintly ridiculous camp classics.
It’s difficult to imagine how a Doctor Who story inspired by Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and J.G. Ballard’s High Rise could possibly work in the over-lit, under-financed confines of the BBC during the 1980s. It should come as no surprise, then, that it doesn’t.
With a spooky alien menace in a modern day English setting, ‘The Awakening’ is a two-part adventure featuring a feisty female companion, a slightly cowardly, wryly amusing male counterpart and an energetic, good-humoured Time Lord who conveys an incredible sense of age and wisdom in spite of his youthful appearance.
The Doctor (William Hartnell) and his companions Steven Taylor and Dodo Chaplet turn up in Tombstone, Arizona, 1881, just in time for the legendary gunfight at the OK Corral.
When one half of comedy horror series The League Of Gentlemen’s acting and writing quartet, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, were commissioned by the BBC to write the first series of this superficially similar oddball production, the assumption was that it may be a lesser variant on the Royston Vasey mould.
So, the second and final season of science fiction TV and disaster movie producer Irwin Allen’s camp 1960s classic finally arrives on DVD.