What’s Occurring?

It’s oh so quiet, as Bjork famously sang. What’s going on with Dead Pixel Test? Trust me, going silent absolutely doesn’t relate to watching less TV.

I’ve been busy with a new project and writing over at WhyNow, a culture website with a decidedly British twist. So, for the time being, find me there instead, writing TV features and lists of shows you might have missed. Basically Dead Pixel Test but flashier.

Good stuff already waiting for you includes:

A deep-dive into Squid Game‘s enormous success despite the UK’s complicated and divisive relationship with subtitled dramas.

A list of the shows you missed in October while you were speed-learning Korean because of Squid Game, including the masterful Midnight Mass which has gone right to the top of my Shows of 2021 list. Hey, Fleabag, this is how you write a sexy priest.

A list of shows you might have missed in November including Doctor Who, Cowboy Bebop and omg you guys Games Master is back! Pop them on your personal telly list to catch-up with over the Christmas break.

Thank you for all your support over the years. I love writing here and will continue to do so in the New Year when I can. Wishing you a cosy Christmas with plenty of time to kick-back and catch-up on quality TV. Remember; there are no guilty pleasures, especially given the long, slow, boring apocalypse we’re collectively living through. There are only pleasure. Go, enjoy yourselves.

‘Bridgerton’ – Netflix

Welcome to the much anticipated Christmas treat from Netflix that is Bridgerton, and a warning. This is a technicolour version of 1813, the like of which you’ve never seen before. Careful with the contrast on the TV or your retinas could be fundamentally damaged by these outrageous costumes. A regulation Jane Austen style show this is not. Personally, I absolutely can’t get excited about anything else from the Shondaland production company – the trials and tribulations of hot doctors (bonking), hot defence attorneys (bonking), or hot political aides (most likely bonking), does not do it for me. Maybe I’m a cold fish with a heart that’s two sizes too small, but there you have it. But stick your soap opera in a bonnet and an empire-line dress and I’m there. I say my good fellow, fetch me a tub of your finest popped-corn and let’s commence these entertainments!

We’re in Regency London at the start of the social season. The debutants are girls from fine and wealthy families who are paraded and presented to the royal court like show ponies. These fillies are at the starting gate – it’s a race to the finish line and the prize is an eligible and wealthy husband. Queen Charlotte’s approval is enormously important to these girls and their families, but this season there’s another woman passing judgement on any and all affairs – the mysterious Lady Whistledown – the author of the hottest scandal sheet in town and our narrator, who refers to herself as “a bitch with teeth”. With lines like that Julie Andrews is clearly having the best time.

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The Crown on The Custard TV Podcast

It’s the most wonderful time of the year – podcast time!

It was a pleasure to be invited to discuss the all-conquering Netflix smash-hit The Crown on The Custard TV Podcast. The episode is a treat, whether you watch the show or not. We had a blast discussing fancy weddings, unhappy marriages, and ridiculous hats, which, let’s be honest is a good 85% of the entire series.

It’s also a timely discussion with comments in certain quarters of the press this week about whether viewers can and do separate the fictional behind-closed-doors-stuff from the established fact. Personally, I find The Crown a really interesting jumping-off point for the British history they forgot to teach you at school. My history teachers were great, but the curriculum in the 80’s and 90’s was only really satisfied if the lesson involved ruffs, togas or ration coupons. I know I’m not alone in watching an episode on the Suez crisis, the death of Lord Moutbatten, or Princess Margaret visiting President Kennedy then going straight to Google to ask “Did it really happen like that?”.

Ultimately, The Crown is a very fancy soap opera. It’s The Kardashians with a perfect pedigree and much better acting. It’s lush, lavish, over-the-top, and a really pleasant distraction from the insurmountable problems of daily life. So, exactly like the real Royal Family then.

Anyway, don’t read this – listen to this! Will Matt, Mo and I convince Luke that The Crown worth his time? And will I be able to space the new episodes out like an advent calendar or scarf them all down in one go… like an advent calendar? There’s only one way to find out!

The Custard TV Podcast is available on The Custard TV blog, or on whichever platform you get your fresh podcasts.

The Top 50 Shows of the Decade

As an early Christmas treat Luke and his pals at The Custard TV have put together a thorough and thoughtful list of the most fantastic TV shows we’ve enjoyed over the past 10 years. I was delighted to be asked to contribute. As you’d expect my name is linked to a lot of the Scandi Noir stuff, but there’s one on the list that I love that might surprise you – check out number 29!

As you’d expect from a collective of TV loving geeks the rules are super strict and only the very best will make the cut. Number 3 is particularly controversial and cuts a vicious swathe through great TV that just wasn’t great enough. The arguments have already begun on Twitter.

But the joy and passion of the writers, who are all fans before all else, cannot be overstated. Their enthusiasm is infectious. This list is a great thing to keep by your side over the Christmas break – when you’ve had your fill of repeats and flimsy Christmas specials held together with nothing more than good will, glitter and goose fat, you might easily find your new favourite happens to be someone else’s old favourite.

The Top 50 Countdown: 50-20

The Top 50 Countdown: 20-11

The Top 50 Countdown: 10-5

The countdown concludes on Saturday 21 December when the top five will be revealed! I can’t wait to find out what’s number one.

Christmas Telly Round-Up 2018

It’s New Years Day and I’m feeling charitable so this blog is brought to you in a whisper, with a cold flannel (for your forehead) and a bacon sandwich (for your mouth… if you need instructions on how to eat a sandwich, maybe don’t get out of bed yet). Read my round-up of the best Christmas telly and figure out what you want to watch on catch-up to keep the festive feelings flowing, and I’ll pop to the shops for paracetamol. Alright?

Click and Collect – BBC 1

Dev and Andy off to save Christmas

A classic tale of mismatched neighbours Andrew (Stephen Merchant, playing exactly the sort of person he always does) and Dev (Asim Chaudhry) from Bedford on a 9 hour mission to save Christmas and buy the must-have toy (Sparklehoof the Unicorn Princess) for Andrew’s daughter. Dev is the lonely chubby one, separated from his family at Christmas, and Andrew is the awkward angry intellectual, successful but bad tempered with a family who loves him for some unseen qualities. Dev teaches Andrew to be a happier man and a better father, and despite themselves they’ll be best buddies for life. Basically it’s Planes, Trains and Automobiles or Jingle All The Way for the small screen. It looks lovely with cosy camera angles suited to our suburban action heros. There’s great pacing throughout with real tension and subversive moments of mischief. Neither lead performance is all that over-the-top and their situation, while silly, seems entirely probable. An unexpected gem.

Click through for more shows

'Watership Down' – BBC1 /Netflix

Christmas is a time for giving and receiving, and spending a lot of money on presents that may not be exactly what the recipient really wanted. Do you have friends and relations who give great gifts or have you been in training for weeks to perfect your thank-you face? Shining eyes under a paper cracker crown, broad grin, scrabbling around in the box hoping they’ve included the receipt? “Thanks very much for the 6 pack of pan scourers Nana!” Does that sound familiar at all?

The new Watership Down adaptation showing on BBC1 and Netflix made me think they should have kept the receipt. This was one of the early festive highlights with a rumoured budget of £20 million for state-of-the-art CG animation and seems to have put the flop in Flopsy Bunny with very mixed reviews across the board. And it’s not just the ‘we should never do remakes’ crowd feeling grinchy towards these cottontails.

Read more…

'The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell' – Netflix

Sometimes TV shows come along and they’re more than one blogger can handle. Welcome to this original collaborative effort between yours truly at Dead Pixel Test and Birmingham food blogger extraordinaire Laura who writes over at Full to the Brum. Your usual Dead Pixel Test fare is above, seasoned with Laura’s unique take on this singular show, and her thoughts in full on each episode is your delicious dessert buffet below.
In the week where TV fans are lamenting the silencing of an animatronic cat, I might have just the thing to cheer you up. The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell is a strange box of delights, released on Netflix in the build-up to Halloween, which is of course goth Christmas.
This out-there show is based around wholesome pastimes of baking, crafting and sewing but Christine specialises in some shocking creations. And she sets out her stall early. The first thing we see is Christine painting what seems to be an actual human skull and then absentmindedly biting off a spiders leg. Our host is a totally glamorous 1950s housewife with a sort of romantic Snow White look about her. Her set is a gorgeous pastel coloured kitchen with gothic hints in the spiderweb patterned kitchen cabinets. It’s as if the Stepford Wives weren’t obliging robots at all but had their own secret coven.
Odd enough right? Well, lets meet her team. Christine’s rag-tag adopted family are all incredible puppets made by the Jim Henson Company. The stand-out star here is resurrected roadkill Rose who leaks partially digested food out of her seams. Not letting a little thing like that hold her back she’s a insatiably horny murderous scene-stealer, with hobbies including eating herself into a diabetic coma, torturing neighbours and humping gnomes. Rankle is the sarcastic talking mummified cat from ancient Egypt (a descendant or ancient ancestor of Salem, depending on how you see it) who still expects to be worshiped. Big cuddly Edgar looks to be part Bigfoot, part werewolf, there’s a giant one-eyed fuzz ball in the basement and huge but useful tentacles that live in the fridge. The creatures, especially Rose and Rankle, definitely get the best lines. These Henson creations are certainly not kid-friendly and the show would be hideously saccharine without them.
For a program ostensibly about baking, it’s astounding that zero cakes actually get made. It’s like joining an episode of the Great Transylvanian Bake Off mid-way through a showstopper challenge when the dull and messy jobs are done. Christine’s specialities are sculpting, painting, and decorating with enviable precision. Everything she produces is extremely obsessively beautiful, everything is a masterpiece. Piped royal icing teeth and claws seem to be her trademark, which looks like the fiddliest job ever. If Marilyn Mason ever gets married again he knows who to get in to do the buffet.
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'Ordeal by Innocence' – BBC1

Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries are an international literary language; translated, loved and understood the world over. You know there’s going to be a big stately home, a cast of shifty upper-class characters, a few red herrings and a satisfyingly complicated conclusion. It’ll all hinge on the silver sugar tongs, a classified advert in the Times or the colour of the front door which you knew from the start but discounted as an inconsequential detail. It’s clever, gratifying and reassuring all in one shot. For a real-life example, please see me and Mr H on holiday in Turkey in 2014. We were, I’m ashamed to admit, battered out of our skulls on local raki and dealing with a day-long hangover in a hotel room easily as hot as the surface of the sun. What could be more soothing to the addled brain than finding Poirot dubbed into Turkish with English subtitles? In no small part thanks to Hercule we consoled the little grey cells that hadn’t been murdered by alcohol.
Ordeal by Innocence, the Easter Sunday BBC1 drama, is not your Turkish holiday Agatha Christie adaptation. There’s nothing soothing about this production. From the off it’s clear we’re in a nightmarish gothic horror. Producer and writer Sarah Phelps brings us a sharper, nastier, distilled version of And Then There Were None, her tremendous Christie adaptation from 2016. “Nine elaborate murders based on an extremely dodgy nursery rhyme that drive a young woman to suicide in a mansion on a deserted island is not really terrifying enough. Let’s kick it up a notch guys!”
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'Requiem' – BBC1

Warning! Spoilers for Episode 1 lie beneath!
Even before the first shadow crosses the screen Requiem is creeping me out. It’s so obviously a Sunday night drama and should have been on over Christmas for full wintery effect. But for some unknown reason it’s on BBC1 on Friday nights in February. Never mind all that though, that’s an old-fashioned way of thinking about scheduling. Who cares what day it broadcasts when it’s all up on iPlayer to watch straight away.
I’d clocked the adverts but decided it wasn’t for me. Ghosts just don’t frighten me at all. I’d much rather Scooby don’t than Scooby Doo. The genre is so well-trodden and cliche-riddled that the only gasp you’ll get from me is a sigh as I find the remote and click the button. That whole haunted house brand has termites and it’s falling to pieces. But such a high quality cast turned my head and I watched it with a ‘may as well’ shrug as a chaser after yet another disappointing Euro drama (oh Modus, what’s happened to you?).
Requiem looks gorgeous and sounds fantastic. The opening credits are a Royal Blood album cover and the music is part classical emotions, part jarring shuddering electronics, as if the Terminator was in a string quartet. This isn’t just an interesting score; this is fundamental to the story. Matilda (Lydia Wilson) is a successful cellist, riding high with her pianist Hal (Joel Fry, wonderful in everything, recognisable from Game of Thrones where he’s got a similar complicated relationship with a powerful blonde) in hipster London, her haircut, flat and career fitting in nicely to that group of people who hate fitting in. Her lovely Mum Janice (the exceptional Joanna Scanlon, last seen as fearless matriarch Viv Deering in No Offence) is sad they’re spending more time apart, but delighted for her success. Matilda seems restless, her one-night stands interrupted by nightmares of an imprisoned girl.
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'Rich House, Poor House'

There’s no getting around it – Channel 5 has a reputation. It’s a scuzzy low-class broadcaster renowned for poverty porn. Let’s all point and laugh at the disadvantaged people in society. It’s their fault they’re poor, unemployed, stupid, ill, struggling with debt – delete as required. There are very few reasons to watch the channel at all. But the tone of the adverts for Rich House, Poor House was quite different. This programme was billed as an experiment in happiness. Would it be repellant Victorian slum tourism, or something more worthy?
In episode one we meet the Caddy and Williams families, both big families by the UK standard. The premise is that they swap homes, budgets and lives for a typical week. Each family is selected from the richest and poorest 10% of the UK.
The Williams are at the poor end of the spectrum. Mum Kayleigh and Dad Antony have 6 kids, a product of a blended family. They rent a house in a council estate in Weston Super Mare and proudly they announce they are not on benefits. They survive on just £110 per week after rent and bills. Only 22 miles away from them in frighfully middle-class Clifton live James and Claire Caddy with their 5 kids. The family is older than the Williams with some children at university. Their spending money is a frankly staggering £1700 per week, mainly I think thanks to young and hip looking Dad James with floppy Brian Cox hair who is semi-retired after selling his software company.
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