‘Good Omens’ – Amazon

It’s no secret that it’s hard work to adapt a beloved book for the screen. Hard. Frickin. Work. And quite often a totally thankless task. Everyone has a uniquely personal idea about what a character looks like and sounds like – that’s the beauty and the curse of reading. You’re never, ever going to please everyone as a quick search on Twitter about any film/ TV show/ book/ art exhibition/ literally insert anything here. You’ve just got to be content with your version of the story and give it your all. As Ms T Swift put it so eloquently, haters are invariably going to hate.

Things that certainly will help please the masses are oodles of lovely money to make your production look lush and expensive (thanks Amazon), legendary casting, and having one of the original writer on your team. So the omens for Good Omens are… good. Neil Gaiman and the much missed Terry Pratchett wanted to adapt their much loved novel for the big screen for many years. Neil wasn’t willing to go ahead after Terry died but in classic authorial style received a letter with Terry’s blessing post mortem. with the project. And with him at the helm it’s got to be a tempting prospect for any actor. The cast list is enviable – Nick Offerman, Jack Whitehall, Miranda Richardson, Jon Hamm, all the League of Gentlemen, Frances McDormand and Benedict Cumberbatch to name but a few.

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'The City and the City'

“Nowhere else works like the cities”. This is the first line of BBC1’s new drama based on the 2009 ‘weird fiction’ novel by British author China Miéville, an exotically named man actually born in Norwich. His book has been adapted for TV by screen writer Tony Grisoni.
The cities in the title are Besźel, which looks like the Eastern Bloc of 30 plus years ago mixed with cafes and people from 1970s Istanbul and Ul Qoma which is glimpsed only briefly in the first episode. These streets look brighter, cleaner, and more advanced. The colour pallets are quite different in each city; dingy yellows for Besźel and clean blues for Ul Qoma. Like the inhabitants, the viewer always knows where they’re looking.
The two cities actually occupy much of the same geographical space, but the inhabitants wilfully ‘unsee’ the areas they’re not allowed to view. Early on Commissar Gadlem (Ron Cook) gets out his overhead projector, and lays two acetate maps on top of each other. That’s a good way to get your head around it.
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'Britannia' – Sky Atlantic

Britannia is the much discussed and much trumpeted new Sky Atlantic drama. It’s also the first co-production between Sky and Amazon. It’s written by Jez Butterworth, who seems to have theater and screenwriting experience in spades, but not much on the CV for telly. Not like our collective expectations are set too high, but it’s been bandied about that Sky are in desperate need of something substantial in the swords and bloodlust category as the wait for Game of Thrones will be glacial. But the people who have seen it already are split into two camps – either it’s brilliantly bat-shit or terribly confusing. Well, which is it then?
Set in 43 AD this is about the Roman conquest of Britain. This is the second time around, as Julius Cesar went home with his tail between his legs in 54 BC, and boy, despite the man being long dead, do we hear a lot about that. We meet General Aulus Plautius, played by David Morrissey, not worrying in the slightest about his accent or where in the Roman Empire he hails from. To misquote Doctor Who, a lot of countries have a north. Aye up legionnaires!
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'Ronja the Robber's Daughter'

A Studio Ghibli tv series on Amazon?! Yes please, says I! Most people who love the silver screen are familiar with the masterful Japanese animation house, behind such beloved international classics as My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. 
Film School Rejects say “The studio is respected the world over for its lush animation, attention to detail, and the way its movies can soak its audiences in a mood without any effort at all”. So it’s easy to see that expectations were set high for their first ever tv series, which debuted in Japan in 2014. I won’t drag out the suspense – Ronja the Robber’s Daughter is a huge disappointment.
Ronja is a cute little girl, born to a robber king and his wife. They lead a band of ne’er-do-wells who patrol the forest paths robbing from the rich who travel through in their horse-drawn carriages. The merry band live in a secluded castle surrounded by a forest full of enormous creepy birds with women’s faces.
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'The Grand Tour'

So this is it. The moment we’ve all been waiting for. Amazon picked up the wayward Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond and threw a considerable sum of money at The Grand Tour aka Top Gear on the road. Episode one starts with Jeremy leaving the BBC and rainy grey old England behind in a made-up back story to romanticise the end of the old show. No he wasn’t sacked!, they’re desperate to remind us, it was just his contract wasn’t renewed! Haha! Because Jeremy Clarkson hit someone who worked for him. He got wound up for an incredibly pathetic reason and took it out on an underling. Haha! Because bullying in the workplace is fine. Hahaha he’s such a lad! Top bantz.
Anyway, with the past glossed over, his co-presenters appearing from nowhere and an insipid version of ‘I Can See Clearly Now’ playing in the background we arrive in the Californian high desert at Burning Man Festival. They then spend a few minutes making the whole festival look and sound utterly boring. It seems to be chock full of podgy pasty white people, who no doubt leave a violent shade of lobster red. On stage we can swiftly tell that these guys are many things, but they are not rock stars or even stand-up comics. They’re at great pains to introduce each other as motoring journalists. So why do they have to do it so awkwardly on a big stage?
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'Hooten and The Lady' – On the Box

Sky’s new action adventure series has been hyped to the max as good old-fashioned fun. It’s an eight part series co-created by EastEnders’ Tony Jordan of all people. But we know he’s keen to branch out since Dickensian enraged/ amused fans of Charles Dickens at Christmas. This is no soap opera, but the characters are familiar and you may feel you’ve seen it before.
Meet maverick rogue thief Hooten (just one name, because he’s cool, like Coolio) and clever posh totty Lady Alexandra Hyphenated-Surname. They team up in extremely unlikely circumstances to rescue treasures for the British Museum and earn pots of cash and flirt with each other in exotic locations. Sounds familiar?
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The Great British Sell Off

Alarming news for the legions of Great British Bake Off fans as the BBC have lost the contract to broadcast the baking behemoth. The series now on tv will be the last to be broadcast on BBC1.
Channel 4 announced last night that it has signed a three-year deal with Love Productions. The first programme, a celebrity version for the charity Stand Up To Cancer, will come in 2017.
Love Productions said negotiations with the BBC had been prolonged to say the least – taking place for a year! When talks with the Beeb fell through they signed a deal with Channel 4 the same evening. They don’t hang about.
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'Outlander' – On the Box

Outlander has been winning fans on Amazon since March 2015, but it’s all new to me, so allow me a recap. This is a historical romance with sci-fi time travel elements based on novels by Diana Gabaldon and set in the highlands of Scotland in 1743. Safe to say this is absolutely not my usual fare. I tend to run a mile at the word ‘romance’ but I’d heard great things about this show, and props to them; they’re clearly not afraid to chart their own course. Mr H reminds me frequently that I’d do a better job of blogging about telly if I nudge myself out of my comfort zone more often. So I don my silky negligee, pink fluffy kitten-heel slippers – which I understand is the uniform for all women who love romance – and armed only with a padded box of soft-center chocolates (the customary accessory) here I go.
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'Top Gear' – On the Box

Peer pressure. It’s peer pressure plain and simple.
The Top Gear reboot was going to be such a big event it was unavoidable. Everyone was going to have a loud and aggressive opinion about it so last night I found myself putting it on at 8pm sharp, telling Mr H not to get too used to it. Neither of us drive, so it’s pretty difficult to be entertained by what is essentially a car review show.
As far as I can tell, Top Gear has always been awful. Either too serious, too factual and too boring in its initial inception and then after the 2002 relaunch too stupid, too loud and too macho. The presenters were men old enough to know better running around growling politically incorrect nonsense and shouting their surnames at each other like retarded public school boys.
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Not on the box – Viewpoint

Ladies and gentlemen of the internet. Come on a journey with me to the dark side – a cavernous living room where there’s no focal point, where sofas sit facing each other… a world in which all of the pixels are dead! Witness the insufferable smugness!

We know them, we come across them in all walks of life – the uber-poseurs (the ones who know it really should be written über). They lean in to you over their flat white, and bristle your arm slightly with their elegantly tailored Belstaff coat as they smirk and say “Oh no, I haven’t got a television” BEFORE THEY’VE EVEN BEEN ASKED. You swear you didn’t ask the question, or even think it, but they’re desperate to tell you about it. They’re like the vegans of the entertainment world.
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