The Couch Potato Chronicles 2020: Volume 1

Welcome to the

spanking new iteration of the Couch Potato Chronicles, or CPC, which is primarily a movie/TV/Book/Sports review column that I have been writing, on and off for more than 20 years.

CPC has always one of the truest sources of joy and fun I have as a writer, so after taking a couple years off I have decided to crank it up again. I will be publishing it once a week or more, depending on what I’ve come across. So if you like it, please feel free to forward it to anyone you feel might be interested.

The Graham Norton Show...Definitely the Most Fun Chat Show Around

Our TV comes to us courtesy of Bell Fibe. And of course, being the behemoth that it is, Bell never really bothers to inform you when they have added, moved or deleted a channel.

So once every month or so, I have to sit down and plow through the thousand strong channel guide to see what’s new from these assholes.

On my last go round with this process, I discovered that we now have something called HIFI TV. Mostly they show crappy movies and a good deal of second rate junk that nobody else wants to show, but as I was cruising though their programming I was delighted to find that they were carrying The Graham Norton Show, a British talk, or as they say, chat show that we used to watch back in the day on BBC TV.

The Graham Norton Show is, hands down, the best talk/chat show on TV at the moment. And there are a couple of reasons why this is the case.

First of all, there is Graham Norton who is an extremely quick and witty host and a very funny guy.

Secondly is that the guests don’t parade out one at at time, but instead almost always come out in bunches. What this does is create a fascinating dynamic as Mr Norton moves around and talks to each one in turn and the others feel perfectly free to chime in at any time. And often do.

This show is all about fun. Yeah the people who come on, and there’s nobody who isn’t pretty famous for something, are usually doing it as a part of some promotional junket they are on, and that gets taken care of too.

But the interaction between Mr Norton and his guests and his guests with each other is pretty amazing as this kind of TV goes. The hour flies by. You laugh a lot. Everybody has a good time and a drink. And you get to hear some great stories from some pretty incredible personalities, all guided almost effortlessly by Mr Norton, whose philosophy is obviously find the best people available and let them talk.

This is quite a refreshing change from the highly structured US talk shows. But then again, we really have come to see the Brits as having a different approach to a lot of things, entertainment wise.

The Graham Norton shows we are seeing on HIFI TV appear to be about a year old, but that ’s cool because most of the movies and series the guests are promoting are probably available through one streaming service or another.

Acorn TV....Lots of Good Brit Shows Too.

There are two main streaming services out of Britain besides the BBC. There’s something called BritBox, and the one we have, which is called Acorn TV.

Heather (my wife), chose Acorn so that she could re-watch all of the Martin Clunes series called Doc Martin, which we used to watch on PBS, but it went somewhere else, like these things do.

I wasn’t interested because I’m not a ‘watch-againer’ like she is, and I already saw four whole seasons and was never all that crazy about it.

Since then she has watched several other series that hold zero interest for me. But a couple weeks ago, with winter comin’ on, she started looking for things we both might like, and so far she has found two.

The Heart Guy: This is actually an Aussie series which stars a guy named Roger Corser, who looks a bit like a young Mel Gibson, hopefully sans the craziness.

It’s essentially about a Sydney heart surgeon who screws up and is sent back to his home town, a place called Whyhope, which is somewhere about an hour by plane from Sydney where he has been sentenced to serve a probationary year as a resident general practitioner in the local hospital.

The Heart Guy is a really well done dramady, with lots of great characters, a crazy family, and a tight knit hospital crew. Plus it’s very much a fish out of water story at the same time.

I just fell in love with this, because the writing is superb and the characters are all really interesting. And this sort of stuff is a nice relief from all the heavy handed cop, lawyer and spy stuff which populates the networks.

There are 4 seasons of The Heart Guy, and we are just starting season two, and it has not lost any steam at all.

800 Words: This is a semi-serious family drama from New Zealand about an Aussie newspaper columnist, whose column is entitled 800 Words, because that’s exactly how many words are in every piece he writes.

The story is about his decision to relocate himself and his two teenage kids to a town called Weld in southern New Zealand, as a kind of fresh start after the death of his wife.

There’s nothing really sad about this though. In fact it’s kind of interesting how his vision of what life would be like is blown all to smithereens by things like an exploding septic tank and the sinking of the freighter that was carrying all his stuff from Australia and the difficulties the family has in adapting to life in a small town and another country.

We’re only a couple of episodes into 800 Words but I really like this and so, evidently do a lot of people, because there are three full seasons on Acorn TV so far.

So our TV evenings these days are spent going back and forth, between these two shows with an occasional episode of Mrs Maisel, (on Prime) thrown in for good measure.

There are worse ways to get through the winter. And being as Heather is very resourceful, I’m sure I won’t won’t run out of good stuff to report on for quite some time.

The reason that streaming services like Acorn, Prime & Netflix are so important these days is that I have noticed that network programming we tend to watch is starting to feel more and more formulaic, and after a while that can get kind of boring, even if you like the characters and the stories.

jim out

Jim Murray is a writer, a reader, a sports fan and a TV watcher who has been writing about the sports & entertainment worlds since1998, which is when he created the Couch Potato Chronicles.

Jim is also a former ad agency writer and art director and has run his own creative consultancy, Onwords & Upwords, since 1989. He lives with his wife at the top of the Niagara Peninsula and works with companies that are trying to make a difference in the world.

All volumes of the Couch Potato Chronicles will be published on beBee.com
https://www.bebee.com/bee/jim-murray

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