A sub-standard adventure

TV REVIEW: The Deep, BBC1, Tuesday; Jack Taylor, TV3, Monday; Newlyweds: The One Year Itch, Channel 4, Wednesday; The Secret Tourist, BBC1, Wednesday; New Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? UTV, Tuesday

A FIVE-PART, mega-budget thriller with a Hollywood-tinged cast including hunky ex-ER doc Goran Visnjic, in August – truly it’s such a rare gift from the telly gods that there has to be a catch. And there is.

The Deep

is wojious. The new BBC underwater drama is so ploddingly bad it’s difficult to know where to begin, though in fairness its start – the first five minutes of screentime – was very promising, thrilling even.

It opened with oceanographer Catherine Donnelly (Orla Brady) bobbing around in a mini-submarine on the spooky arctic ocean floor – the computer generated imagery is excellent. Her communication system with the mothership slowly starts to fail and we’re left with the chilling image of the woman adrift alone in the dark depths of the ocean with her oxygen running out. Happily for the plot she had time to tell us that there was a giant, gasp, thing hovering over her head, about to swallow her up. Cut to six months later, when a new team of scientists venture 2,000ft underwater to someplace called the Elysian Vent Field to complete their missing colleagues’ exploration mission. The clunky dialogue was clogged with portentous-sounding guff (“what we suspect might be down there is a game-changer for the whole world”) and the script signposted every plot twist and turn way in advance as if we viewers might be so dazzled by the slick CGI and the star cast we mightn’t be able to keep up. When his boss describes James Nesbitt’s character’s job as being “in charge of breathing, but also in charge of suffocating”, you just knew that eventually somebody was going to turn an airless shade of blue.

In something this glossy no one is expecting Das Boot-style claustrophobia, but the submarine, the Orpheus(heading for the underworld, geddit?) is enormous, a bit like a mod version of the starship Enterprisebut without the swishing doors or someone shouting about Klingons on the starboard bow. The lead scientist and the sub's commander, an almost hilariously miscast Minnie Driver, is more interested in hiding her affair with team mate Visnjic than bothering her pretty head looking at sonar screens or pushing buttons. While a submarine commander probably doesn't have to have an anchor tattoo or an impressive pair of epaulettes, Driver's fashionable fur-lined waistcoat and artfully off-the-shoulder top didn't exactly enhance her credibility. The other "top scientists" on board – two giddy young ones who behaved as though they were on a school trip, and a jargon spouting boy boffin – were so incidental that when one of them is killed at the end of the first episode, you'd be hard pushed to remember her name. Also on board is a chap from the admiralty who joined the mission at the last minute and who we know is up to no good because he looks shifty and is posh.

The episode ended with the Orpheushovering perilously under the thing – not that Minnie was too bothered, being busy trying to snog Visnjic and complaining that she was cold. You wouldn't get that in Das Bootor in a decent, well-scripted thriller for that matter.

AS A FAN of Ken Bruen's crime novels I was disappointed to see how ill-served the Galway-based writer was by Jack Taylor, the screen adaption of his book The Guards. As a washed-up Garda turned small-time private eye, Jack Taylor (Iain Glen) did at least emerge as a strong character, although Glen's accent was distractingly all over the place, ricocheting from the US to the actor's native Scotland without ever touching down in Ireland. Set in Galway, it's a straightforward detective yarn. Taylor is hired to find a missing daughter and his search takes him underneath the jolly bohemian veneer of the city to uncover a serial killer.

The problem was that the screenwriters, Anne Mc Cabe, Tom Collins and Ralph Christians, appeared determined to include every line and character in the book and there were far too many extraneous scenes. Did we really need that scene with Taylor’s landlady or the pointless plot diversion of the murdered barman? Characters emerged and disappeared, relationships began and ended for no apparent reason and key characters were given no motivation for their actions – a major flaw in this type of drama. The biggest crime was that the identity of the baddie was obvious from the start – and that’s not the case in Bruen’s novels.

It looked good, though. Stylishly filmed by director of photography John Conroy, its cool, contemporary atmosphere was spoiled by the corny device of periodically giving Taylor a voiceover, improbably turning the ex-guard in Galway with a drink problem into an old-style gumshoe in a film noir. Perhaps if it had been just an hour long instead of feature-length, director Stuart Orme would have insisted on a tighter script, been sharper with his edits and made a better drama. The book deserved it and grizzly Jack Taylor is a strong enough character to hang it – or for that matter, a series – on.

A DOCUMENTARY which first meets 50 couples at their dream wedding and then catches up with them one year later to see how it was all going sounded promising, so I dipped into Newlyweds: The One Year Itch, but got so depressed by the relentless misery of it all that I didn't last too long – pretty much the theme of the film. The turn-off point came with poor, defeated looking Sue and her memories about her special day. "I wasn't expecting fairies," she said, recalling how plastered her husband was on the day, "but I was expecting him to be a little bit more aware of what was going on."

The BBC's seasonal new consumer series The Secret Touristseemed a better option. These sort of programmes are fraught with expensive danger in the shape of litigation from the dodgy types targeted, but the BBC has the heft to take on that risk and, presented by Watchdog's Matt Allwright, this was a fairly predictable mix of holiday horror stories. There was a slight whiff of "nice, unsuspecting us versus rip-off Johnny foreigner" in some of the items, such as the one where the woman complained of being charged extra for her drinks because she was sitting at tables outside the bar. Oh, for heaven's sake, get a guidebook or stay at home.

Genuinely horrifying was the undercover visit by the programme’s hygiene consultant to a popular family holiday resort in Turkey. Like a member of CSI, she swabbed and collected samples for testing back in the lab. She found stratospheric levels of e.coli everywhere from the swimming pool to the drinking water and the icecubes. “Well, I wouldn’t like to be drinking poo,” she said briskly. Not quite wish you were here.

tvreview@irishtimes.com

Final answer? Tired quiz show gets a tweak

"I've started so I'll finish", "stop the lights" and even the great Larry Gogan's "ah, sure, they didn't suit you" – there's something about the catchphrases of truly popular game shows that spin out from the studio and have a life outside the game show that spawned them. Who Wants to Be a Millionaireis the daddy of them all with its three lifelines: fifty-fifty, phone a friend and ask the audience. But after 12 years it's gotten more than a little tired and this week the ITV show, hosted by Chris Tarrant, began a new series with several tweaks to the format.

The main change is that it’s faster, with contestants playing against the clock. A timer counts down the seconds so there’s no dithering for ages in the early rounds, which was very boring. And there’s a new lifeline. Once contestants reach the £50,000 mark they can switch a question for another.

Other tweaks include on-screen pictures of the three phone-a-friends and there’s more personal chat between the contestants and Tarrant. In this speedier version he still looked a bit bored, though he didn’t torture the contestants with “is that your final answer” as much as he used to. Somehow, though, the changes didn’t inject more life in to the format. They just emphasised how tired it’s become and that maybe its time is up.