Kevin's Watch

watched the first episode tonight - it seemed REALLY good!

Set in the Forest of Dean which is only about 20 miles from me so it caught my interest!

It's seems to be a dinosaur (we all like dinosaurs don't we?) sort of thriller real life thing. Looking forward to next week!

Really? I thought it was bloody awful.

Having held a little-boy-like dino keenness since being, well, a little boy, I decided to give Primeval a try. I had some reservations about Hannah Spearritt as an actress, but that would be a very minor reason to avoid a programme.

As it turned out, she was the least of my concerns. Not a particularly good actress, but could have been a lot worse. The same cannot be said of other aspects.

The first thing to really leap out at me and make me think "You've got to be having a laugh" was the big, carnivorous dino hunting that kid. It tracked the boy all the way home, and burst into his bedroom. Past a load of other houses with equally appealing targets inside. And at roughly sunset, when it was still going to be pretty visible - yet no-one noticed it. No-one noticed a dinosaur walking through a housing estate.

And it got worse. It then tracked the kid to school, waited til all the other kids left, then attacked again. This time in broad daylight. Again, without being spotted. What the hell?!

Then, of course, we come to Super-Stephen, the lab assistant. The lab assistant who is an expert tracker, completely unfazed by facing down a dinosaur alone with nothing but the shirt on his back as defence, and who is also a better-than-military marksman with a fully automatic weapon (the little group of soldiers had no impact whatsoever on the dino, but Super-Stephen downed it pretty quickly with just the one gun). I've never met or heard of a lab assistant who had SAS-grade survival / combat training.

Oh, and also: I forget which character it was, but one of the male ones was being attacked by the dino and lost consciousness, at which point the carnivorous dino ran off for no reason. Yes, when the predator disables the prey, it leaves. Perfectly sensible.

All in all, I thought it was balls. Too much time spent on effects, not enough on actually writing a script.

Ach CJ! Suspend your unbelief and just join in with the fun halfway through like i did!

Dinosaurs are good!

CJ seems to have the same problems I had with King Kong. The premise is not a problem, but the horribly illogical way things work out is another matter.

Anyway, I never heard of this show. Before he discovered Nintendo DS and Game Cube, my son would have been interested.

Fist and Faith wrote:CJ seems to have the same problems I had with King Kong. The premise is not a problem, but the horribly illogical way things work out is another matter.

Precisely. I can suspend my disbelief easily enough, but things still have to make sense within their suspended-disbelief framework. It's like Lord Foul calling off the Illearth War so he can bake scones. That would be a completely illogical "What the hell?" moment, and there were many examples in Primeval.

And it doesn't surprise me that you haven't heard of Primeval, Mr Fist, since it's a British series. On the whole, we get your TV and you don't get ours.

It's on now. So far, it conforms to the recent trend in UK television of subpar writing, acting, and effects.

I'll give it until next week, then I'll either watch it all, or ditch it to the realm of unwatchable crap.


It's never going to be a rival for Dr Who or Torchwood though.

Funny--those two were part of my justification for calling it a "recent trend".

Murrin wrote:Funny--those two were part of my justification for calling it a "recent trend".

Likewise.

(Robin Hood was the third.)

Fortunately I've managed to avoid Robin Hood, but I've read some dreadful opinions of it.

I've seen a couple of episodes. A lot of TV these days it seems like they're happy as long as the actors remember their lines, and no effort is taken to get the delivery right.

All the more reason for me to stick to my DVDs of The Prisoner

(Can someone please make me a rampaging dinosaur emoticon? )