Afloat in a sea of boredom

Some shows are dead easy to review. If I love a programme, the review practically writes itself. If I hate something ... well, to be honest, that's far more fun to write about. Coming up with fresh and inventive ways of telling you a show sucks is entertaining. The toughest reviews to write are for the shows that are neither good nor flat-out awful. They are inoffensive in every way, but also fail to entertain or enlighten much. They just kind of hang there on the screen while I periodically check my watch and try to come up with a fresh and inventive way of telling you that a show is kind of nothing-ish. The Simpsons coined the best word to describe shows like this: "meh".

Such a show is Sea Of Souls (Prime, 8.35pm, Saturday). The two-hour mystery series is a peculiarly British beast episodes of an American drama running for that length are usually confined to the odd "a very special edition of". It takes a lot to keep a viewer's interest for that long, but classics like Poirot or Inspector Morse managed to pull it off with well-drawn characters and tightly wound plots. Sea Of Souls boasts little of the former and none of the latter. The only thing which came close to holding my attention was the fact that most of the characters had Scottish accents (the best accent ever, bar none). Our main characters work in the parapsychology department of the fictional Clyde University in Glasgow. They occasionally investigate possible supernatural phenomena. Douglas Monahan (Bill Paterson) is the old hand whose head always looks for the simplest explanation while his heart pulls him towards the supernatural. Justine McManus (Dawn Steele) is the newbie, a single mum who tends to go with the paranormal explanation automatically (she's young, she'll learn). Craig Stevenson (Iain Robertson) is the mandatory cynic. Unfortunately, there was precious little of Craig in the first episode. A few Bill-Murray-in-Ghostbusters-type wisecracks might have livened up proceedings.

At the opening, a child is woken up by ominous bumps in the night. A shed door ominously slams. In the garage, nails holding up a hammer drop ominously from the wall, making the hammer ominously drop, coincidentally (and ominously) on to a family portrait. The team well, Justine and Douglas are asked by the girl's father (James Fleet, a difficult man to take seriously after playing the wally in Four Weddings and a Funeral) to check out the goings on. Mysteriously (and, quite possibly, ominously), he has some cuts on his arm that he doesn't remember happening.

Then comes the bit where Douglas looks around the family's house without bothering to turn the lights on. The bathroom seems particularly fascinating to him, which the director underlines by trying to make a bog-standard shower look super-creepy. The point-of-view shots from the inside of a clothes-dryer in the garage were probably supposed to suggest something creepy too, but it wasn't working on me. Then the family is shocked and appalled when they pull their roast chicken out of the oven and find cigarette butts stubbed out all over it, thus indicating to us that if there is indeed a ghost at work it's probably incredibly evil, as only really demonic types seem to smoke on TV these days.

By the time the team was finding mysterious numbers drawn into the steam on the shower, the show was barely half over. But I'd had more than enough already. If I'd genuinely hated Sea Of Souls, I probably would've kept watching to get more ammo to annihilate it with. Yet I didn't care enough to even do that. I find it so difficult to muster up any kind of feeling for the show other than a mild sense of boredom that by the time you read my next review I'll probably have forgotten I even wrote this one.

- © Fairfax NZ News