chuffnobbler

Appalling. Completely unfunny. Poirot terribly miscast. Quirky for the sake of it. Insensible. It feels as if it just happened, rather than being scripted and directed. Charmless. Joyless. The only bit worth watching is the little moment with Miss Marple and Mr Stringer, and that's just for the sake of cuteness and completion with those lovely Miss Marple films. This film must have happened as some sort of contractual obligation as there is no way it can have happened on purpose. It muddles the plot of the novel and makes no sense. At least the Miss Marple films are, for the most part, fun. This is for completists only, which is how I came to track it down. As a lifelong Agatha fan, I feel I have pushed myself to the limit with this rubbish. Agatha must have been furious when she saw it.

A laugh-out-loud parody of overwraught and serious historical drama, a carbon copy of daytime soap, BRASS is full of laughs, wordplay, one-liners and silliness. Totally straightfaced and never letting its mask slip, it destroys the pompous self-importance of DH Lawrence and so many other classics.

Timothy West and Caroline Blakiston as the Hardacres, Barbara Ewing and Geoffrey Hinsliff and the Fairchilds: all perfectly cast. These four lead from the front, with perfect characterisation and totally deadpan delivery of ludicrous dialogue and wildly overblown plots. Red Agnes Fairchild, so proud that she irons her clothes before washing them, sits at her kitchen table with bosom heaving as she sombrely inflates balloons and puts peas into pods for a few pennies a day. Lady Patience Hardacre, confined to her wheelchair since that horrible tambourine accident, genteelly applies spoons of gin to her breakfast, with her hair immaculately coiffeured on one side and totally flat on the other. Humble, cap-wringing George Fairchild worships the ground that hardhearted Bradley Hardacre tramples him into.

Silent But Deadly explosives; plots to destroy the cottage hospital (the former village workhouse, as well you know); a horse called Brass Beauty; patented Truss Flanges; Matt the beautiful-but-dim poet; Isobel with her raging libido; Morris with his teddybear and varsity friends ... every cliché is grabbed, turned around and recycled. It's all so wildly over the top, and played with utter straightness. Agnes's hysterical outbursts of Biblical melodrama never fail to amuse.

There was no need for a third series, though. Returning after more than five years and appearing on a different TV station, with a couple of changes in the cast (Geoffrey Hutchings is a poor replacement for Geoffrey Hinsliff and is actually quite badly miscast), series three is a let down. It feels as if the producers really didn't know what to do with the characters. The spontaneity and oomph has gone, and there are several scenes that have no laughs at all. The joke is beginning to wear a little thin towards the end of series two: series three is quite poor, and there isn't even a proper ending.

BRASS is so gloriously daft, it still remains fresh after thirty years. Definitely worth getting the DVDs.

... as you well know.

A weird series on so many levels, CATS Eyes changes its format frequently and never seems to know what it wants to do.

Jill Gascoine is wasted and is capable of so much better than this. While it's a fantastic idea to bring back Maggie Forbes from the superb police series The Gentle Touch, Jill Gascoine is forced to do the best she can with some very weak and ordinary material.

Series one sees impossibly posh Pru (Rosalyn Landor) and gobby Cockernee Fred (Leslie Ash) joined by Maggie in the Eyes Agency, an undercover detective agency. Some good stuff in series one, with a tense relationship between Maggie and Fred, and Pru taking charge. Standard detective stories, and it's quite watchable. There's a spooky episode where Fred gets her drink spiked and hallucinates while trapped in the office, and there's a really good episode about people smuggling. The Kent locations look bleak, miserable and cold; there is frequently snow on the ground; the car chases look especially dangerous, with all that black ice on the roads.

It goes a bit wrong with series two. Pru, Eyes Agency and their office are never mentioned again. I like to think Pru is still doing detectiving from that little office. In comes Tessa, a character written in invisible ink. Tracy Louise Ward has very little to do in the role, and it is notable that Fred and Tessa utterly fail the Bechdel Test on every level: whenever they are alone together, they talk about boyfriends. While the series has now been retooled as an action adventure show, with everyone carrying guns and there being KGB double agents all over the place, so Fred and Tessa are now just standard dollybirds. Maggie is in charge and her awkward relationship with Fred is forgotten. Each episode ends on a not-funny laugh.

Series two is surprisingly violent. Barely five minutes goes past without the rattle of machine gun fire. Doors are regularly boobytrapped to explode. It all feels very ordinary and same-old-same-old. People are held hostage in large country houses and get terrorised by people in balaclavas. There's a really nasty episode where Maggie is locked in a cellar and the baddies produce a bag of scapels etc and threaten to carry out surgery on her. I am amazed that the recording I watched came from the Family Channel, as some of the material included is not family-friendly. It feels vicious and unpleasant. It's a bit dull and ordinary, stuffed with KGB spies and double-agents.

The high point of series two is one about white South Africans attempting to assassinate a black African leader: an episode so completely ludicrous that its final conclusion with Maggie coming to the rescue is the most laughable thing I have seen for some time.

Series three tones down the violence and has a notably shorter run of just seven episodes, as if the producers felt enough was enough. Other than that, series three is as ordinary as series two: Russian spies; Fred and Tessa talking about blokes; people being held hostage in mansions.

I think the biggest failing of the show is that it pretends to be different by having three female leads, but having all-male producers, writers and directors means we just get a standard action adventure series that thinks it needs to water itself down to become a bit girly, but actually doesn't know what it wants to do.

Jill Gascoine is totally wasted and, on the whole, it's a load of rubbish. The Gentle Touch is much better.