The first recording today opens with the end of Landmarks – Portraits of Europe.
There’s a trail for It’s Not Easy Being Green and one for The Underdog Show.
Then, another repeat of Star Trek: The Next Generation – Peak Performance. It’s another one I looked at on my tapes. A very annoying alien strategist arrives to run a wargame simulation for the Enterprise crew.
But at least Data manages to beat him at a very strange game which is played by wiggling your fingers.
This ensign looked vaguely familiar but I couldn’t place him until the end credits – it’s Glenn Morshower, who plays Aaron Pierce in 24 and Mike Chysler in The West Wing.
Media Centre Description: Sci-fi drama series about the crew of the USS Enterprise. A war game turns deadly earnest when the Enterprise is ambushed by a Ferengi battleship.
Recorded from BBC TWO on Tuesday 20th March 2007 11:08
BBC Genome: BBC TWO Tuesday 20th March 2007 11:10
There’s another trail for The Underdog Show and for Hairy Bikers Ride Again.
There’s also a trail for Any Dream Will Do. I should do Full Disclosure here – this isn’t exactly that trailer, it’s from a later recording, because the one I made from today’s recording had a bit of glitching, so I’ve substituted the later one that wasn’t glitchy.
Then, another short episode in the series The Witness – Dawn of the Internet. Paul Baran talks about how his work on figuring out how to make the US telephone system resilient to nuclear attack led to some of the key innovations of the Internet. My key takeaway is that the very first distributed network was called “The Fishnet”.
there’s trails for The Underdog Show and It’s Not Easy Being Green.
There’s also a trail for a new Adam Curtis documentary series, The Trap.
Then the recording stops after five minutes of The Daily Politics.
The next recording is episode 5 of series 2 of Life on Mars. It opens with the full version of that wonderful Gordon Murray-style stop motion version of Sam.
Sam’s sick in bed when he gets a call from Chris asking for his help with a kidnapping. Sam can see him on the TV. As he heads to the station, he’s hearing a voice saying he’s been given the wrong medication, and he starts to see things.
He gets to the station to find a man threatening to hang himself unless someone is released from prison. He doesn’t manage it, but is still distraught. He’s Simon Lamb, played by Reece Dinsdale, whose wife and daughter have been kidnapped. He’s received a note demanding the release of a young man called Graham Bathurst.
This all relates to a case they had a year ago. A young girl called Charley Witham had been found murdered. Graham Bathurst, only a couple of years older than Charley was arrested, confessed to the crime and was put away. Then, yesterday when Sam was sick in bed, Simon Lamb had come to the station with the note that he’d been sent, saying his wife and daughter had been kidnapped and they would die if Bathurst wasn’t released. Lamb had been speaking to them on the phone when it happened.
Hunt speaks to Bathurst’s mother, but she doesn’t know anything, and just berates them. “You lied about my Graham! Everything you told the courts was lies. You got no shame.”
They also speak to the parents of Charley Witham. They don’t know anything. The father asks “But, if someone out there thinks Bathurst is innocent, does that mean you’re not so sure that he did it?”
Sam interviews Lamb about the night Charley died. He’s the PE Teacher at her school, and she was a promising young runner he was training. “I was cleaning down the gym gear as she was leaving.” “She left with her boyfriend, Graham Bathurst?” “I didn’t see him, but apparently he collected her.” “So you didn’t give the police Graham’s name?” “No, I didn’t know anything about Charley’s family and friends. She was a girl who came to the club.”
A lot of this story is told through flashback, with Sam asking the team what they remember about the case, and whether there’s anything they might have missed. They find out Charley was seeing Graham Bathurst, so they go to see him, and he runs. He grabs his nan as they surround him. Later, in the interrogation, he’s very leery when talking about Charley. “Ripe as a summer apple, that one. All that exercise. Best bit of skirt in town.” Definitely acting like a bad person.
The rag that was stuffed in Charley’s mouth is found to have traces of oil. “Graham Bathurst likes to work on bike engines.” The evidence is mounting up. Hunt offers Graham a deal. “You plead guilty to manslaughter, you’re looking at a 12 stretch. Be out in ten. But if you challenge me, I’ll push for premeditated murder, and that’s life. 40 years.”
Sam wants to know who told them about Charley going out with Graham. It was a girl in Charley’s class. Chris took the statement but he couldn’t remember who it was, so Sam gets him to remember. He’s rather overwhelmed by all the girls, but eventually he remembers who gave him Bathurst’s name. It was Stella Lamb, daughter of Simon, who’s now been kidnapped.
They learn that Graham’s cousin Mitch is home from serving on a naval ship, so he’s their prime suspect. But he says he doesn’t know anything. Sam realises that he was only spooked when they picked him up because he thought they were from his ship, as he’s gone AWOL.
Simon Lamb does a radio appeal to whoever took his family. They get a call from his daughter. “He won’t release us unless you do what he wants.” “I can’t, my darling, I don’t have the power.” “Keep away from me. I’m telling him what you told me to say. Dad, do what he wants He warned you before, Dad. He sent you a warning.” Lamb is distraught and desperate. He tells Sam “I did it.” “What?” “I did it. Yes, Charley, she… she had a crush on me. Yes, that’s it. Yes. I walked her home and, er, we sat down and she started kissing me.” “No, no. Come on, Simon.” “I tried to stop her but she…” “No, Simon, please don’t do this.” “She, she got scared and well she, she struggled. Yes, that’s it. She… I tried to stop her struggling and I killed her, I did it. So now you can arrest me and you can free Graham Bathurst. Why can’t I do this? If I confess, he’ll let them go. Wouldn’t you happily go to prison to save the ones you loved?”
Annie wonders whether they might have made mistakes in the original investigation. She talks to Sam about what she remembers. Like Ray doing a perfunctory sweep of the scene where the body was found, while Charley’s parents look on.
The arrest of Graham looks different from her point of view. Rather than violently resisting, and taking his own gran as a hostage, “He was begging his gran to protect him really. But in the heat of the moment, it all sounded so much more violent.” And her recollection of the interrogation was very different to the one we saw earlier. This episode is definitely doing the whole Rashomon thing where different flashbacks have very different implications.
Sam gets a phone call that’s actually from the future. “We’ve made a slight error. There was a breakdown in communication and you were given the wrong dose of a neuro-transmitter which stimulates the body. Anyway, we’re trying to counter the effects with a heavy dose of Nor-Adrenalin, but I must warn you, you may for a time go into a deeper state of coma.” At which point all the lights in the office start going dark.
He wakes up on a couch, with a TV playing. On the TV he can see the incident room, as the investigation is carrying on without him. This really is having fun with the narrative.
Lamb’s daughter, when she called, said that he had “been warned”. But he didn’t know what that was talking about. They search Lamb’s house and Chris finds a photo of Lamb and his wife. They show it to him and he recognised it from daughter Stella’s 16th birthday a couple of weeks ago. “It’s odd though, isn’t it, the way your hand is sort of hovering in the air? You see it looks like there should be somebody else in this photo with you, but they’ve vanished.” “They were. It was Stella. She was beside me. I had my hand on her arm. The photographer, he sent these pictures through afterwards and in that one she was missing.” “Who was the photographer?” “Well, I assumed Bea had arranged him, but when I asked her, she didn’t know who he was either. She thought I’d hired him.”
Annie talks to Charley’s mother, about a letter she sent to the police shortly after the investigation, accusing the police of “Institutionalised slackness”. She learns that Charley’s father wrote the letter, and she signed it. Annie asks about the father. “He’s in the shed. It’s where he has his dark room.” So the father is a photographer.
Annie phones the team, telling them that the father is a photographer, then goes to the shed where she finds the two women. Charley’s father, Don, is also there. He asks Annie if they’ve arrested Lamb yet. “My Charley worshipped him. He had power over her and he abused that power. He was with her that night.” “No, Don.” She tells him “You’re twisting this to blame Simon because really you want to blame yourself.” Hunt arrives with the team, and arrest Witham for the kidnap.
Back at the station, Lamb is reunited with his family.
Sam and Gene discuss the successful conclusion of the case. “Concrete evidence, Tyler. Forensics. Tung oil on Graham Bathurst’s rag.” “Tung oil? Is that used on engines? I thought that was for wood. It’s a lacquer. It’s for tables, floors.” “And wooden gym equipment.” “Didn’t Lamb’s statement say he was cleaning gym gear as Charley was leaving that night?” It’s a dawning realisation. A young girl goes past on a bike, and Lamb’s eyes follow her. The episode ends as Sam and Gene walk over to talk to Lamb.
I really liked this episode. The narrative devices they used turned what could have been a stodgy flashback filled story into something interesting, and even though I did assume Lamb was guilty as soon as they said he was a gym teacher, they defused that nicely with his “fake” confession. This was one of the best episode of the series so far.
Media Centre Description: Drama series about Sam Tyler, a Manchester detective who suffers a near-fatal car crash and wakes up in what seems to be 1973. When a man’s wife and daughter are kidnapped and held hostage, Sam is determined to shake the demons from his head and focus on the investigation. He starts by interviewing all of A-Division, gaining a privileged insight into their perspectives. But when a worse-for-wear Sam isn’t at hand, Annie is left exposed as she deduces for herself the identity of the kidnapper.
Recorded from BBC ONE on Tuesday 20th March 2007 21:00
BBC Genome: BBC ONE Tuesday 20th March 2007 21:00
As I was putting this entry together, something happened to my app that I use to take screenshots, so that it was including subtitles. Which I thought was impossible, as I wrote it. So I had to do the screenshots again, meaning you miss such bon mots as this.
After this, there’s a trail for a new drama featuring Jessie Wallace, A Class Apart.
There’s also an ad for Stephen Merchant’s radio show.
Then there’s the start of the news, with Huw Edwards is Iraq, on the 4 year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.
The next recording starts with the end of The League of Gentlemen.
There’s a trail for The Avengers.
There’s also a trail for The Waiting Room – Prison.
Then, a repeat of episode 4 of Life on Mars.
Media Centre Description: Drama series about Sam Tyler, a Manchester detective who suffers a near-fatal car crash and wakes up in what seems to be 1973. When the body of a beautiful young woman is found in wasteland, DCI Gene Hunt fears a serial killer he thought he’d sent down in the late 1960s may still be at large. For Sam, the victim, a Beauvoir beauty rep like his own Aunt Heather, triggers vivid recollections of childhood. Sam and Annie are led into a world of suburban swingers’ parties to solve the case.
Recorded from BBC FOUR on Tuesday 20th March 2007 21:58
BBC Genome: BBC FOUR Tuesday 20th March 2007 22:00
After this there a trail for another episode of Tight Spot – Stuck.
There’s another trail for The Avengers and for Stephen Merchant’s radio show.
Then the recording ends after a few minutes of The Lost World of Red Robbo about the union leader who led the strikes at British Leyland.
VHiStory 