Sacre bleu!

"WHAT," the nation bellowed last night, "IS THIS ON MY TELLYBOX? THERE ARE WORDS ON THE SCREEN!"

And so Channel 4 finally give Great Britain some credit and screen excellent French drama The Returned in prime time positioning, 9pm on a Sunday. None of this shove-it-onto-BBC4-and-hope-for-The-Killing-Mark-2 timidity. No siree - conversely, not only has a major commercial network taken the risk at their audience aren't too spangled from their weekend's frivolities to reach for the spectacles, they've hijacked an ad break and shown all commercials in French. Mais non? Mais oui, indeed.

It seems odd that anything subtitled generally lives in the relegation zone of Saturday night on a freeview channel. The success of The Killing, which pulled in some of the highest ratings BBC4 had ever seen, should have really given the telly execs a bit of food for thought, but no - other European successes which followed still cropped up in the slot that BBC4 schedulers must have named "Saturday night foreign intelli-cop procedural time".

However, did the risk pay off? 1.5 million  tuned into The Returned last night - it might sound like a lot, but percentage wise it had 7% audience share, whereas Poirot took home nearly 22% with 4.8 million. And anyone who watched it will be able to say that it's not going to be a program you can jump into halfway through. I watched the entire hour-and-a-quarter opener last night, in silence, only to turn around at the end and say, "well, I haven't got a fucking clue what's going on, but I'm enjoying it". Is that kind of heavy, delineated drama going to attract audiences on a Sunday night; traditionally the enclave of the easy-on-the-rain brain mush, such as Call The Midwife, or, indeed, Poirot? Do people want to be deciphering why loads of dead French people are reappearing in a small town and scaring the living crap out of them the night before they have to go back to work and present the annual figures to Gary From Accounts?

It's definitely going to be an interesting experiment for Channel 4. I for one hope it is a success, as there are all too many excellent pieces of television being made around the world that this country is missing out on, because of the belief that "people don't want subtitles". Well, as one of "the people", I'm fine with it, so please, bring it on.

NB: If anyone has a clue about what the hell is actually going on in The Returned, I'd greatly appreciate any tips.

20 Things I Wish I Could Tell My Teenage Self

1. This is the worst your hair will ever look. Take some small comfort in the fact that it can now only get better.
2. That is still absolutely no excuse to cut your own hair, because you saw how to do layers on an episode of Ricki Lake.
3. Although you love Britpop, perhaps dressing like one of the Gallagher brothers for three entire years was not the best decision, sartorially speaking.
4. The show This Life is not a documentary.
5. It is also not a reason to deliberate doing a law degree.
6. The Truth Is Not Out There, so you may wish to remove that poster of the UFO from your bedroom wall.
7. Chasing the drummer from that band you love down Bourke St to ask him if he really is that drummer from that band you love is not very dignified, and is also a traffic hazard.
8. Don’t ever go on a date to McDonald’s with that boy you met at the school social doing the Macarena. It will result in being on the receiving end of some truly horrifying poetry.
9. Bargaining with other students to get the absence slips out of their school diary is advisable and should begin as close to the beginning of the school year as possible, as you will have forged your parents signature on your whole allotment by the middle of the first term.
10. Crawling on your hands and knees past the door of the class you’re supposed to be in order to sack off school early and bother the staff in HMV is a valid career choice.
11. Wearing a copy of Geri Halliwell’s Union Jack dress to the final year formal dance may be a decision that, in the future, you look back on slightly less favourably.
12. Wearing trainers with said dress, however, was and still is a great idea.
13. Despite what your teachers say, you can actually annoy your way into a job just by hanging around the shop long enough. You will go on to do this successfully twice, and are trying for a hat-trick.
14. Keeping all your videos of music filmclips that you carefully recorded, labelled and filed was probably one big waste of time as VHS is now an outdated format.
15. Keeping all the videos of the X Files that you carefully recorded, labelled and filed was definitely just one big waste of time as now you want to die of embarrassment when you even think about it.
16. Everyone telling you that school is the “best time of your life” WAS wrong. It was fucking horrific – you knew it then, and you still agree now.
17. University is not a whole lot better. In fact, in many ways, it’s worse.
18. That person who made your life a living hell for 12 years will have the balls to apologise for their behaviour three years after leaving school.
19. You’re still going to be pissed that they introduced you to everyone on the first day of high school as “stupid, fat, ugly Courtney Allardyce” though.
20. You have to forgive yourself for the dead goldfish. How were you to know they couldn’t survive in 38 degree heat?

Magnets, bitch!

PLEASE NOTE: This post contains Breaking Bad spoilers. If you've not seen the first half of season 5, and don't want to choke out a stifled scream halfway through the post, you should probably wait to read this when you're up to date. Yo.

So I've wanted to write something about Breaking Bad for the last couple of months, but it is truly the insurmountable task. I could write a book about it (any publishers out there who would be willing to sub me an advance, I'm very reasonably priced and just desperate enough to be mildly taken advantage of) but it's not something that you could really jot down in a blog post. So I'm just going to go through a couple of reasons why BREAKING BAD IS THE SINGLE GREATEST SHOW OF ALL TIME AND YES I'M LOOKING AT YOU THE WIRE/THE SOPRANOS/NEIGHBOURS.

1. Every single character is, essentially, a total arsehole. Completely hideous in nature, but drawn in a way that isn't the usual clumsy cartoonish depictions we're so used to seeing.  Walter White is slowly morphing into a meglomaniacal psychopath with every episode. Jesse, although arguably the conscience of the show, is a petty thug - a drug dealer, who puts his friends at risk of being jailed or shot on street corners. Skylar is a money-laundering, deceptive, deceitful (and complicit) fraud. Marie is a freaking kleptomaniac. And Hank is the biggest prick of them all - waving his gun around at a family party (although it is set in America, so that might just be what goes on), pressuring his innocent (ahem), terminally ill brother-in-law to ferry him round on stakeouts - he seems to be completely at ease about being a selfish douche. And yet somehow, Vince Gilligan has managed to make every one of these characters a real, rounded human being; they all have the motivation and their reasons for their behaviour. Very little of the protagonists behaviour is borne out of a sense of entitlement, or a sense of greed. It's utter desperation, and terror that drive them forward; the inability to drag themselves out of the rabbit hole they've somehow fallen into. An audience can empathise with that desperation and that humanity. This is where I couldn't watch The Wire; I found every character revolting but had no empathy for any of them. (Disclaimer: I only made it through 45 minutes of episode one. Don't judge me, okay?)

2. The writing is completely immense. How in this day and age can you get an entire audience of viewers to start shouting "Science, bitch!"? It's such a lovely change to have a program where the creators don't treat their audience as completely inept thickos. So much of the detail comes back to pay off later - sometimes much later - in the series, and manages to do so without the imagery and the detail being unnecessary. The small details of the program - the pan over to the Lily Of The Valley plant in Walt's garden, the pink bear in the pool after the plane crash - it's all there so that the creators DON'T have to sacrifice the quality of the writing to allow the main characters to break the fourth wall and explain, "Oh, so you see, the whole thing there was that Walter saw Jane die, and could have saved her, but chose not to as she was blackmailing him, and therefore is indirectly responsible for her death, unbeknownst to Jesse! Mmmkay?" to the audience like it was story time on CeeBeeBeebies. Hurrah for brain activity! It's been quite a while.

3.  IT HAS AN END. I rarely watch any US television because, quite frankly, I don't have the time or energy to expend on a program that is going to suck up 22 hours of my life a year, for 8 years, and either gets cancelled and leaves you high and dry without an ending, or resolves itself in the manner of Lost, which, I think we can all agree, was reason enough to throw your TV's into the nearest skip and live a life from that point forward where the high point of your electronic entertainment of an evening was tuning into the shipping forecast. How that show was allowed to a) rip off their viewers like that and b) let a pretty good opening storyline turn into such utter crap is beyond me. If I cared enough, I would be more than happy to launch a class action against the producers for compensation for the 8 years of our lives we can never get back. Knowing that Vince Gilligan has the ending allows the scripts to be tighter, sharper, and even though I will be utterly bereft for months after it finishes, I would prefer 5 incredible seasons to 14 mediocre ones.

4. Jesse Pinkman is fit. Well, he is now that he seems to have slightly better dress sense than in the first season. Those trousers, man. Seriously. Hats off to you, wardrobe department, because I certainly haven't seen a leg width like that since Kriss Kross. They looked like a child's bedsheet that had been sewn down the middle.

5. Finally, Gus Fring. The most unlikely villain you will ever see. Sure, there are some question marks about how he would actually be able to get away with what he's doing - do none of his employees ever go into his office? How does he have time to go home and make dinner for Jesse when he's working 26 hours a day running a successful international meth operation as well as eleven outposts of Los Pollos' delicious fried chicken outlets? What exactly is in the secret Los Pollos recipe? Is it as good as KFC? But (and anyone who hasn't seen the final episode of S4, you have a treat coming your way) any villain - however meek or mild or businesslike - will struggle to match up to the end of Mr Fring's reign where, for a few split seconds, you turn to the person next to you and breathe in quietly, "Oh my God. Gus Fring is a REAL-LIFE FREAKING ROBOT."