A couple of wisdom teeth were forcibly removed from my upper jaw a couple of weeks back, which meant lying glassy-eyed on the couch in a drug-induced haze starring at a flickering screen. Not much different from usual then. If the Nurofen/Panadol combo didn’t work, then the Olympics coverage did the trick. Apart from the Kiwis, it got reasonably boring towards the end. You know it’s time to go to bed when you’re watching the sixth and seventh place games for handball.
But now that normal service has been resumed on the goggle box, it’s back to enjoying quality American programming, although it’s too early to make a judgment on Six Feet Under. It was certainly a very sombre start, but I must confess to enjoying Las Vegas, which is a perfect Friday night, don’t-bother-thinking, we’ll-do-the-explaining-for-you kind of show. It’s got those whizzy moments a la CSI, and James Caan, despite being shorter than the eye candy lead guy, has presence.
In fact, Las Vegas was named a guilty pleasure in a recent Entertainment Weekly – or, rather, Nikki Cox’s boobs were named the guilty pleasure. It’s true. Never in history have so many bosoms been on display for the commercial gain of so few. Boob jobs must be practically written into hopeful starlet’s contracts these days, although I suppose half the viewing audience isn’t complaining. Still, I’d rather have boobs than Bush. No, wait, that didn’t come out right.
Interesting little tiff that’s been reported about the NZ On Air money that went into NZ Idol. I was under the mistaken impression that NZ On Air had got its money back, simply because NZ Idol was so successful. I mean, if that didn’t make money, what does? I do think it was a legitimate programme to fund, though; thousands of people watched it, it’s spawned a genuine pop idol of our own with the possibility of going further, and it’s given Paul Ellis something to do.
It’s also very easy to say with the benefit of hindsight that it shouldn’t have been funded; but before it went to air, no-one knew how well it would do. After the True Bliss experience, success wasn’t a given, although the New Zealand music industry is a much changed beast since then. Speaking of that, did anyone see Cameron Bennett’s story. On. Sunday. About. The. Datsuns? Could he have overemphasised every word more? I think not. Quite rightly, Christian Datsun told him where to go as well when it came to questions about the money and their mums. Fair enough.
The Fall season is nearly upon US screens. Zap2it’s TV Gal gives a rundown here.
Marton Csokas and Karl Urban may be doing well in The Bourne Supremacy, but our other big local star, Beautiful Scenery, gets a good review in Without a Paddle, the Seth Green/Burt Reynolds movie that shot here recently (boy they pumped that out quick). Warning: even trailers come with ads nowadays. If you watch the trailer, there’s an ad first for Guess Who’s Coming to Decorate.
Here’s something interesting from Lindsay Vette, who find that when he tried to record overnight on Sky Digital, he got spam:
I found I had for the second time fallen victim to Sky's version of spam when wanting to record cycling. The first time was during the Tour de France. What is with Sky and my cycling?
Sky's spam consists of remotely switching your channel at midnight to the mosaic, with an advertising banner for some new and expensive service in the main window. That was what I recorded three hours of last night.
The first time this happened I complained to Sky only to be told it must have been a power surge that caused my decoder to reset to the mosaic. But no, an experiment shows that the decoder doesn't power back on at all after an outage.
IT'S SPAM!! And I am paying for it. I await their response to my latest complaint.
I didn’t know that. I did know that if you mute on Sky Digital and then record something, it gets recorded without sound. Yes. And when that something is Buffy, well. You might be forced to say a rude word.