Earlier this year, ITV brought us Red Eye, a six-part drama set mainly on an overnight plane from London to Beijing. Displaying a heroic indifference to plausibility, the show was an increasingly deranged mash-up of every thriller convention known to man – while still posing (when it remembered to) as a thoughtful exploration of realpolitik.
By the end, it was all so daft that the biggest influence no longer seemed to be Speed, but Airplane!
Funnily enough, this week’s Nightsleeper was much the same thing – only this time on an overnight train from Glasgow to London. The first sign that the passengers wouldn’t get a restful sleep before Euston came when a mysterious beeping device with lots of wires was discovered in the guardroom floor. Luckily, the man who discovered it was Joe Roag (Joe Cole), a Met detective who happened to know the switchboard number of the National Security Cyber Centre. He was then put straight through to the acting technical director Abby Aysgarth (Alexandra Roach) who, naturally, was at the airport about to go on a much-needed holiday. Even so, she immediately returned to the office to stare up at a giant computer screen covered with flashing symbols.
From this, and the information supplied by Joe, Abby deduced that the train had been ‘hackjacked’ and was now under the control of that bleeping device. Having helpfully stopped at Motherwell to release most of the passengers and crew (thereby reducing the on-board cast to a more manageable 12), the now driverless sleeper set off again with the apparent aim of crashing into London.
Meanwhile, we’d met Abby’s colleagues, who duly included an awkwardly recent ex-lover, a computer nerd who looked about 14 and a stern female boss whose catchphrase was ‘Abby! Incident room! Now!’. By this stage all that was missing was the mad scientist who’d long predicted the disaster – and he soon showed up in the scenery-chewing form of a spectacularly bearded David Threlfall.
As in Red Eye, the programme’s shamelessness presented the viewer with a choice. Either you could adopt a haughty sneer at the improbability of it all or you could turn off your mind, relax and admit that the thrills were piling up nicely. The trouble was that, as in Red Eye too, the second and more appealing of these options – undeniable fun to begin with – became ever harder to sustain.
For the first three episodes or so, you could certainly argue that Nightsleeper did an exciting job of showing us Abby and her team desperately improvising a series of unavailing solutions for Joe to try. The longer this went on, though, the more it felt as if the programme itself was desperately improvising as well: randomly throwing in one instantly resolved cliffhanger after another, while Abby’s facial expression changed from aghast to relieved and back again.
By the end, the whole thing had become not just repetitive but so daft that the biggest influence at work no longer seemed to be 24, Speed or a James Bond film – but Airplane!.
It’s been a good few years since I watched Strictly Come Dancing, back when the children were younger and it was a much-loved feature of our family Saturday nights. So it was with a sense of both nostalgia and reassurance that I returned this week to find that nothing has really changed.
Needless to say, there’s no Brucie – and if anything, the series may be even more camp. Yet, despite the gleefully publicised recent troubles about alleged bullying (unmentioned this weekend), the launch show was much as I remember previous launch shows being – which is to say a bit odd. The chief purpose of them is to match up each of the celebrities with their professional dancer: a process that everybody concerned does their best to invest with enormous jeopardy. Except, of course, that it doesn’t actually matter. Every celeb knows they’ll get a good-looking, talented and wildly effusive partner who’ll profess deep joy at the idea of working together and promise them that they’re in for loads of fun.
Then again, even if they did feel any disappointment, we’d never be allowed to glimpse it. All the female celebs (presumably under instruction) greet the appearance of their collaborator with loud screams; all the male ones (ditto) with a more manly chuckle of delight.
And from there, all they have to do is use the phrase ‘out of my comfort zone’ a few times and answer some fairly easy questions such as ‘How excited are you?’ from hosts Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman (who, incidentally, make live television look a lot easier than it is).
As for this year’s crop of celebs, they’re also much as I remember: a promising, personable mix of grizzled former sportsmen, game old female troupers, self-deprecating fat blokes and, most pleasing of all, reality-show ‘stars’ that parents can take a weird combination of middle-aged pride and indignation in not having heard of.
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