Waking the Deaf

No, we don't understand us, either

Talking of Radio Times in this week's "Dylan cover" issue, TV Editor Alison Graham has some pertinent words to say about the BBC's prime-time high-profile drama Waking the Dead.

As she correctly states, the overall effect of a double episode (most of the stories take two hours, Sunday and Monday night) is that you switch off the telly with the remote control, thinking, "Well, I just wasted 2 hours of my life."

It is hard to express just how CRAP Waking the Dead is. It's not just that it's so bad; it's that it thinks its so good. It was bad enough before, with that blonde bird from Casualty in it (the one with the nice balls), who had absolutely nothing to do except sit there and look... blonde. So they killed her off, you're thinking, because after French and Saunders took the piss out of it, they couldn't continue with it the way it was. So now they've replaced The Blonde One with The Brunette One, who also has nothing to do.

And the forensic woman, who does the autopsies (and does scene of crime, and makes the tea); the previous one wisely left the series, so they've replaced her with a complete clone who is exactly the same character, but with a different Equity card.

Sue Johnston, who seems to get more respec' than she absolutely deserves in life, is totally wooden and rubbish in it, too, clearly not understanding a word of any of the scripts. To be fair to her, this is probably because not a word of any of the scripts makes sense, so she flounders about quite a bit.

And Trevor Eve. Please. Can you spell "chewing the furniture"? What a load of old bollocks. Over-acting, clearly improvising a lot, he tries to steal every scene he's in.

And because he does so much over-acting and improvising, scenes tail off into silence, as all concerned realise they've lost their place in the script, and gone past the moment when they could have said the lines that would get them out of there. So then they have to cut out (I'm assuming) huge chunks of the story, which is why you can never tell what's going on.

But the thing I really really hate about these 2-hour consecutive night things (and the same is true of that crap about the paranormal that's set in Scotland - Sea of Souls), is that they tend to put anything good they have into the first part, and the second part is just padded-out crapola.

So this first episode of the new season of Waking the Dead had this huge build-up concerning people admitting to crimes they didn't do out of fear, and bodies being left in aeroplanes and on water towers, and the fear of some hugely evil, demonic, person/organisation. Who just turned out to be a little man who was fabricating fake pharmaceuticals. Hello? All that build up? For this? Where's the payoff? Where's the beef?

The other thing was the elaborate set-up at the beginning of the first episode, with Trevor Eve buying a load of model aeroplanes to act something out. They spend so much time setting this up, that you think, well, it must pay off in a big way later on, otherwise it's just bilge.

And you know what? It was just bilge.

So, in case you're wondering: children, don't do what I have done. Don't waste 2 hours of your life on this crap.