Living In A Box!

Poor Nick! There he was doing his job and before he could say ‘I haven’t checked the blood splatter patterns yet...’ he found himself interred in a perspex box with only a limited amount of time before his air ran out and his buddies could save him.

I am latecomer to Five’s US crime drama series CSI and, ironically, I also only caught the second half of last night’s double-bill directed by Quentin Tarantino. The missus and the boy have been long-time fans but I’ve only really started getting to grips with it in the last few months and it’s bloody good stuff.

Five, of course, used to be the channel of the three ‘f’s (football, films and fucking) but it’s had a major rebranding over the past three years and it now has three of the best shows on TV in CSI and its various offshoots in Miami and New York, The Shield (which returns on Saturday) and Law And Order.

There was a time, of course, when Channel 4 would have immediately snapped up quality shows like these to add to The Sopranos and Desperate Housewives but these days they’re too busy providing wall-to-wall coverage of Big Brother to bother about anything so trite as gripping drama. So it’s left to Five to carry the flag and thank god it does.

Nick made it in the end thanks to Grisham and an ant thus foiling the revenge of a loony former gardener whose dad was none too happy that his daughter was jailed on dodgy evidence. But you have to wonder what British drama series would make a big name like Tarantino want to direct or write a few episodes. Midsomer Murders, Frost, Murder In Suburbia, Casualty, Holby?

Dr Who was great and Shameless pretty entertaining but it’s pretty bleak in tellyland at the moment really. And you have have to wonder where the next big homegrown drama series is coming from and where, if your name is not Paul Abbott or Russell T Davies (both fine writers I hasten to add), it will actually get shown in a sea of reality TV and makeover shows.

As a jobbing journalist and writer I learnt early on that the amount of titles who will quite happily buy the same-old lowest-common-denominator shit from you are many while the ones who want to print interesting and well thought-through features are few. I think TV is pretty much the same and I worry about these things because it’s an industry I have ambitions to work in but so much of it is utter shite too...

So thank god The Mighty Boosh is back next week on BBC3. It will hopefully give me something to laugh about and I’ll forget my fears that like Nick we’re all trapped in a doomed box with no hope of escape.

On a separate note me and the missus are heading to Austria on a three-day press beano tomorrow. If anyone cares I’ll report back next week...