Rating:

There’s been a terrific amount of hype about this new show, “Britannia High”.  They spent weeks advertising it at every available opportunity, but apparently it’s not doing anywhere near as well as they had hoped.  The thing that says it all, at least to me, is the amount of money and time they have spent on advertising and hype, yet the main discussion on-line seems to be regarding the new hairstyle sported by Mitch Hewer, one of the lead cast members…

The show is set in a Performing Arts School (called Britannia High, shockingly), so there’s lots of singing and dancing, so it’s a bit like Fame of the Noughties… Which can’t be a bad thing, Fame was incredibly popular back when it came out.

I think this is where the problem lies…

It appears that they want it to be totally different to Fame and High School Musical, but it seems to fall somewhere between the two.  The writing is more High School Musical, but the overall feel and concept is more Fame… But of course, Fame did it first, did it bigger, and ultimately did it better, which seems to be the crux of the problem.

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I’ve been slightly addicted to American Idol this year.

Normally I watch record it and watch it back at high speed, cutting out the judges mindless garbage (do they really think anyone cares what they think?) and usually scuttling though half the contestants whining too. All in all the show, plus results can normally be watched in this manor in about 15-30 minutes (depending on the theme that week).

This year it’s been taking me a lot longer. Finally they seem to have some lively contestants, just about all of them can sing pretty well, most of them seem to have some great personalities…

All in all, the show is finally worth watching… It sometimes even takes me a whole hour to watch the entire thing

It’s still a shame some of the good singers went out in earlier rounds, leaving some of the weaker singers to get into the final stage. Had some of the earlier evictee’s still been around it could have been a whole different top 16.

Since I was watching it last night (yes I know we’re a bit slow to get it over here in England) I thought I’d do a little fraggle review of the whole thing.
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I’ve been watching a fascinating programme on television the past couple of days called “The Verdict”.

They’ve set up a mock trial, a rape case, with the defendant, witnesses and accuser played by actors and actresses. All the court staff and experts are real though, and I’m assuming the evidence is real, just collected from other actual cases.

The jury is then made up of various celebrities; although I have a feeling that’s more to do with them being used to cameras and the media rather than a forum to build/rebuild their careers.
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Being sickly this week, I’ve been doing a fair bit of channel hopping, and found that Sky Three have been showing Tarzan for the past couple of weeks (The 2003 version with Travis Fimmel), and I felt it was worth a mention.

Naturally practically every episode was covered with writing advertising other shows due out on Sky One (why we care is beyond me, but that’s a whole other journal entry)

I remember hearing about them making this show (is it really three years already?) and wondering how they were going to pull it off with someone like Travis Fimmel in the lead role. For one thing he’s too young, and too short, and, well he’s a model not an actor…

So needless to say I sat down to watch this with little intentions of actually enjoying it and quite expecting to loath every minute of it.
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It’s always quite a culture shock when they remake an old classic that you grew up with, and the difficulty is that, as many of the remakes seem to go wrong as go right.

I’m still in two minds about this one. I can’t decide how much is just that it’s going to take some getting used to, and how much they’ve damaged by changing.

For example, Starbuck and Boomer are now women. Boomer I can accept, although it’s going to take a bit of getting used to, since I whenever they referred to someone, I was still expecting to see the original cast member appearing, not the new one.
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