southdavid

.I'll be quite honest with you, I'm trying to write this review over a month after I watched "Terror of the Tongs" and, perhaps as much of a review as anything else, I can barely remember anything about it.

Mr Ming (Burt Kwouk) hides evidence about Red Dragon, a criminal agency (a tong) that operates in mainland China, in a gift to Captain Sale (Geoffrey Toone). Red Dragon kill Ming, and ransack Sale's house whilst he's out, looking for the information and murdering his daughter Helena (Barbara Brown). Sale begins his own investigation and discovers that there are already those fed up with the Tong's reach.

So, it borrows quite heavily from other recent Hammer films here. The plot comes from "The Strangers of Bombay" - a English hero (you might even say White Saviour) comes to fight a secretive but all powerful foreign organisation on their own turf. The location comes from "Visa to Canton". As with both of those film, the most memorable aspect is the one that has become the most unfortunate, with time certainly. That of British actors using make up to appear to be from a different race. This time it's Christopher Lee, who plays Chung King, the leader of Red Dragon but also pretty much every other named Chinese character - given that Burt Kwouk has a role in which he des in the opening few scenes. It's unsavoury now but is it fair to judge the film by today's standards?

What is also is though, and this is fair to judge it on, is quite dull. It's not bad, exactly, that's too strong a term for a film that is just unremarkable.

I watched "Fresh Meat" as it aired and enjoyed it. I decided on a rewatch as it appeared on a Guardian's best of TV list a few years back, and it has been nearly ten years since it finished so perhaps it was due. I enjoyed the first season, even if nearly everything I could remember about the show seems to have happened in this run.

Six students, Kingsley (Joe Thomas), Josie (Kimberly Nixon), Vod (Zawe Ashton), Oregon (Charlotte Ritchie), JP (Jack Whitehall) and Howard (Greg McHugh) find themselves lodged together in an off-campus house in their first year of university. Though quite different people, they find themselves bonded together in and against all aspects of the experience.

In my recollection, Josie and Kingsley took a lot longer to get together, VOD was much more exploitative of Oregon, Oregon's relationship with her tutor took much longer to get too and they all hated JP for much longer. Instead, all that happens in this run. Along with the protest trips to London, Kingsley's diversion to Drama and JP's father's funeral. We're quite soon after the end of Armstrong and Bain's "Peep Show" but I wasn't aware just how much Robert Webb was in the series; I remember him being in it but he's credited as the seventh lead! There are also recurring roles for Gemma Chan and for Jack Fox in this first run.

It's Armstrong and Bain writing so, as you might imagine it's quite funny. It's not a university experience particularly in keeping with mine, there's not quite so many nights in playing "F-Zero X" on the N64 - but it's at least recognisable, messy kitchens, bad food, bottles of lager around the house.

I enjoyed the run and am looking forward to cracking on with season two.

I'm going to review this as season one even if, at the time of writing, no second season has been confirmed. I rewatched "Dexter" over lockdown ahead of the new appendix series that was due. Little did I know at the conclusion of that, that not one, but two spin off series would continue to the Dexter storylines.

Dexter Morgan (Patrick Gibson) is a young man whose murderous urges, stemming from childhood trauma, are being managed by his father Harry (Christian Slater). Dexter's obsessions come in handy though, when he joins his father at Miami P. D as an intern in the forensics team. From that position he can select targets for elimination based on those who deserve it.

I thought it was impressive how well many of these actors do solid impressions of the actors who had the roles in the future, or the past, depending on your point of view. Gibson and Molly Brown, who plays Debra in particularly are spot on. Other than that, the show settles into the same sort of storytelling that that original series did. There's weekly monsters that Dexter must dispose of, but also there's a much larger case, involving kidnapped children that he tries to get to the bottom of. There are origins for a lot of his motus operando, including the blood cells and the disposal techniques. We resee a version of the story of Harry and Dexter's biological mother, which we know has an horrific ending already. We also see a young Brian Moster in and around the cases, ahead of his role in the first season of the show proper.

Essentially it works like one of the better seasons of the original series and, whilst get we've only got limited capacity for stories before the show catches up with itself, I'd certainly like some more of this before we're done.