stevenmckinstry

I was interested to see what Noel Edmonds is up to now, and at first things were promising. The New Zealand scenery is amazing, and anyone starting up a new venture like his deserves admiration.

But then Noel mistakenly made a reference to Jeremy Clarkson, and it started to feel more and more like a poor imitation of Clarkson's Farm, complete with the blonde leggy wife, the idiosyncratic Caleb-type estate worker, and the gruff manager. There was even an early very staged scene with Noel at the controls of a tractor. A contrived "business meeting" was even more stagey.

The final straw for me was when he and his wife and colleagues began making increasing reference to his well-known pseudo-scientific claims about "the energy matrix", "spirituality", that plants grow better when music is played to them, etc etc. The "energy garden" he was attempting to build with "crystal rocks" was just daft. At least Jeremy Clarkson is trying to run a real farm to produce real things.

So whilst I remain impressed by his energy and dedication to his project, I am finding the whole thing a bit tiresome. I will persist with the next episode, but it would need to improve.

This should really have been a 90 minute film made for TV. That would have allowed faster pacing and a tighter storyline, and also would have allowed viewers to gloss over the inevitable plot holes in all these "whodunnit" stories.

Unfortunately, stretching it to 8 episodes means that the viewer increasingly notices the incoherences, the ambiguities and the pointless side stories. It also begins to feel like a lot of the material has been created to fill time, rather than contribute to the story. And towards the end, even the cast are beginning to look and sound a bit tired of the whole thing.

Uzo Aduba as Cordelia Cupp does her best to keep it together, but in the final episode she really struggles to sound interested as she repeats the story elements and the revelatory clues over and over. Randall Park as the FBI agent is one of the few who held this viewer's attention.

My wife and I did manage to get nearly to the end, but we finally switched off towards the end of the final episode, having totally lost interest in "whodunnit". It's a shame, as it could have been a good show.

I had only ever watched the first Mission:Impossible film in 1996, and enjoyed it. Making Jim Phelps a baddie in that film, and also my slight aversion to Tom Cruise, put me off watching any more in the series. But given its longevity and obvious success, I decided to give the franchise another chance.

Starting with M:I 2 seemed a logical place to commence my catch-up. But how disappointing. The film starts with an impressive but pointless series of climbing stunts, followed by an equally pointless car chase, interjected with some sort of introduction to a plot which seems to concern a virus and its antidote. Where the female lead character fits in is shrouded in mystery.

It's all very confusing, and poor Anthony Hopkins seems as confused as the rest of us. Then the female lead is transported for some reason to Australia, there is some jiggery-pokery at a racecourse and at that point I ran out of patience.

As an aside, the business of characters being able to look like other characters by means of a mask and a little electronic patch on the throat, just undermines the credibility of what story there is. In each scene, I found myself wondering if one of the characters was going to suddenly peel off his hi-tech mask to reveal his real self underneath.

It strikes me as a great example of where these action films went wrong. The same happened to the Bond franchise. A belief that lots of stunts, car chases and technology could stand in for a proper story and believable characters. Needless to say, I won't be watching any more Mission:Impossible films.