Chatting up a storm

Here's me on the Blackwell's podcast, doing a bit of shouting at the telly

Four Times Knightly

I was a bit surprised they were stringing out Emma over four episodes. Unlike the rumbustious plot of Pride and Prejudice the story of Emma is so slight. But the adaptation was wonderfully written, and has opened up the book rather than simplifying it as the terrible film version with Gwynnie did, which turned this nasty black comedy into a sunny bonnets and punnets romp.

Romola Garai was utterly beguiling as Emma Woodhouse, and brought a new interpretation to the role, making her motivation much more complex than I'd considered before – we see how lonely she is once her best friend is married off, and that means that her subsequent busy-bodying behaviour (which she transfers on to poor chattering self-confessed dullster Miss Bates, heartbreakingly performed by Tamsin Greig, especially in the famous picnic scene) all makes rather more sense. The production had a more melancholy undertone than previous ones. All to the good.

Some of it worked less well, though. Mr Elton wasn't anywhere near as much of a creep as required. And Mr Knightly, as portrayed by Jonny Lee Miller, was unrecognisable from the novel. Gone was the mysterious, shadowy, emotionally remote figure, barely described until Emma realises he is the object of her affection at the close of novel. Instead we have a wet weekend: a cuddly, ineffectual wimp whining and simpering around Emma like a fool. And this is a shame, as it unbalanced the adaptation, meaning that all of the feelings were blatant right from the off, which spoils the fun.

Clueless remains my favourite adaptation of Emma, coming closest to the outrageous spirit of the novel, but this has been a lovely, cosy Sunday night drama and I'll miss it now it's over, acting as it does as a perfect detox for the excesses of the X-Factor. Of course, I cried at the end (Michael Gambon having much the same effect on me as Bernard Cribbins had in Doctor Who), but then these days I well up if someone holds a door open for me.

The Crying Game

The X-Factor isn't really my cup of tea. I'm more of a Strictly man, mainly because SCD reminds me of celebs lumping around the Morecambe and Wise set and XF has all of the amateur charmlessness of Opportunity Knocks. I hate 'human interest' – I don't want to see 17 year olds weeping because Simon Cowell has said they aren't Celine Dion.

This series of XF is a two horse race (and I'm not talking about creepy John and Edward, and their incest-tastic version of Britney's Oops, I Did It Again) - Jamie, the cute guy with the highly rufflable afro and super-flexible voice, and Stacie, who is Catherine Tate doing an exaggerated impression of Peggy from Hi-De-Hi! when she talks, and is Jennifer Rush when she sings. The others are a bunch of feeble-voiced twits we have to slowly eliminate week on week, and patiently sit through them butchering Sinatra and ABBA. Poor Rachel, in the sing-off for the last two weeks isn't the weakest singer by any stretch, but she looks odd. uncomfortable up there – last week dressed as post-assault Rhianna, this week as Denise from Five Star.

It has completely put me off Cheryl Cole. Last series made her career as the woman that middle-class ladies the country over could claim was their 'girl crush' (a fucking annoying sentiment that inevitably leads to the let's-treat-gays-as-exotic-tourism of Katy Perry's truly appalling I Kissed a Girl and I Liked It). This series has undone it at a stroke. The papers might be out for Minogue after her Danyl that-came-out-wrong moment, but Cole's waterworks have been as tedious and stage-managed as Brendan Cole's insincere attempt at indignation on Strictly for his ancing partner Jo Wood being rightly criticised as shit.

Last week Robbie shouted his way through his new single and did his Freddie Starr dance. This week the newly-scary Whitney spent most of her song doing her dress back up and not singing. I've not properly adjusted from seeing her as the dull Cliff Richard of R&B, but these days she looks like a woman who could do anything, apart from behave well...

Micro wave

The BBC4 computer season's flagship comedy drama Micro Men was the latest in a long line of biopics of British cultural figures from Tony Hancock to Barbara Cartland that they've produced. Some have been terrible (the Mary Whitehouse one in particular was shameful, patronising it's odious subject matter as if no-one had learned anything from her reign of terror, and Lindsay Duncan's miscasting as Thatcher successfully scuppered that one) and others brilliant (Anne Reid was superb and unexpectedly moving as Barbara Cartland and Andrea Riseborough made a much better stab at Thatcher in The Long Walk to Finchley).

This one was a slightly odd comedy drama - odd in that it wasn't actually funny apart from a couple of scenes (the mafia-style oxtail soup in a transport caff scene being particularly hilarious) or all that dramatic. Alexander Armstrong was amusing but never very convincing as Clive Sinclair, his lousy rubber scalp and stick-on hair made him look like a bad comedy sketch character rather than the central figure in a film-length drama. Martin Freeman had the much easier job of being a bit Martin Freemanish. Rather as with the Whitehouse one I did wonder why this had to be a comedy - Sinclair is famously odd and the C5 is a great disaster, but I'm sure there was more going on with him than shouting and mispronouncing the word 'logo'. It was as if they had gone with the most superficial version of him and hadn't bothered burrowing beneath that.

That said, it was enjoyable and interesting, very funny in a couple of places and another successful BBC4 drama made on 50p. I hope they keep on making these, they'll never run out of subjects, and hit-or-miss as they are, they are always worth watching. I'd love to see one about Coe and Ovett next, but I'm guessing it's hard to re-stage two Olympics on a shoestring.

Modern love

EastEnders is on a roll at the moment in its ongoing project to make every conceivable disastrous permutation of modern love as unattractive as the next.

Being the fiancee of a single parent is tough. But when innuendos start flying amongst your own kids that you have killed your husband's ex-wife, that's just not going to help. Especially when he was the (acciental) killer all along.

And new relationships are tough. Your family seem jealous because you've found the perfect man, but then you have a big secret (your secret daughter was mowed down by the Square's resident angel of death a few months ago) that you can't bring yourself to tell him, but which they might blurt out to your perfect/dodgy fella at any moment.

And being the comedy support character having a mystery baby is tough. Especially because the whole storyline is a bizarre homage to Michelle's predicament when the show first started.

And being a gay muslim who's engaged to a woman while secretly being in love with the local stud is tough. But then what do you fucking expect?

Stacey's got the hardest acting job in the world at the moment, and she's managing her mental breakdown a whole lot more convincingly than Claire did on Corrie. I am, of course, totally in love with Syed, but then who wouldn't be with the mixed-up muppet. And the whole thing is still worth watching for Nina Wadia, who brings the kind of inspired comic timing to the show that it so often lacks with its reliance on medodrama.