WICKED WEDGES!
THE LOST THING
Sun Apr 3, ABC- 4:45pm
Shaun Tan’s brilliant little 12 minute short about a boy in a strange, cluttered suburbia who happens upon a strange, biomechanical creature that has lost its way won the Best Short Animation Oscar this year. Now you can see why.
LAKE MUNGO
Wed Apr 6, SBS- 10pm
Brilliant 2008 Australian ghost story, shot as a documentary, kind of like an episode of Australian Story, only with more ghosts, and less depressing. Sixteen year old Alice Palmer (Talia Zucker) drowns in her family’s dam- and then keeps coming back at night. The family employ a psychic and state of the art video cameras to find out what Alice’s restless spirit wants.
TOUCH OF EVIL
Sat Apr 9, ABC2- 8:30pm
Near flawless 1958 film from Orson Welles about a small-town Mexican sheriff (Charlton Heston) who is already in some people’s bad books for marrying a white woman (Janet Leigh). The sheriff gets in over his head when he takes on a corrupt Police Chief (Welles). Tense, clever, crackling dialogue, brilliantly acted and breathtakingly shot.
STALE CHIPS
IN GORDON STREET TONIGHT
Wed Apr 6, ABC-8:30pm
As much as I love sweet and very funny comedian Adam Hills, he’s really much better suited to comedy tours and the comedic music trivia show Spicks and Specks. This mix of talk-show and variety show just doesn’t gel, and whilst Adam tries his best, the guests and the live studio audience look bored.
JUICY JACKETS!
JONATHAN CREEK
Mon Apr 25, 7TWO- 8:30pm
Before he became known for trading homoerotic barbs with Stephen Fry on Q.I, Alan Davies made something of a name of himself in this cult detective series. The show contains unsuspected moments of comedy thanks to both Davies’ timing and the script by David Renwick, writer of the comedy series One Foot in the Grave.
Davies plays a magician’s assistant whom, when he’s not getting sawed in half nor pulling large-eared rodents out of millinery, has a Holmesian talent for solving heinous, baffling and darkly funny murders.
The show is interesting in that whilst it is a Whodunit, it is also a How-done-it. Creek specializes in both unmasking the murderer and working out exactly how they went about committing it.
For the first few series, Caroline Quentin was Creek’s mystery writer assistant, and there was some ‘will they or won’t they’ speculation, until Renwick must have realized that Davies and Quentin had absolutely no sexual chemistry whatsoever and she was replaced with Julia Sawalha from Absolutely Fabulous. This is a fun, engaging series that doesn’t take itself too seriously, often involves magic tricks, and features Davies looking like a cute, six-foot puppy.
