So what is the show with the highest ratings for all the satellite channels? In the UK, we all know that brand new episodes of 'The Simpsons' get the hugest ratings for Sky. Even if you include the Premiership football (though, granted, the fact that most people watch the footy down the pub does skew the figures).
Although over 6.5 million homes have a Sky satellite dish, the average rating for a brand new 'Simpsons' is around 600,000 viewers. Which isn't bad, considering those 6.5 million homes have a choice of around 200 channels, 24-hour blockbuster movies, shitloads of news channels and tonnes of pay-per-view porn.
The Sunday before last (20th July), threw up an interesting surprise. Sky One broadcast a brand-new 'Simpsons', which got 637,000 viewers. The same night, BBC3 had the first UK showing of '24', episode 22 (5AM - 6AM). This achieved 603,500 viewers, which is fantastic when you consider they're tuning in to see the next week's episode.
'24' is the second most-watched programme broadcast on UK satellite telly. Phew, eh?
Even 'Big Brother's Little Brother' could only manage 500,000 viewers. Just so you know, I stole all the numbers from Guerillascope. It's not like I'm lying, or anything.
After 22 episodes, I'm tired. And in a literal interpretation of '24', I'm posting this at 5AM. Just what I'm playing at, I have no idea. My head is spinning worse than the valves in Jack Bauer's dodgy ticker.
The key part of this show was Palmer's phone call to Jack and Sherry. Notice how Palmer spoke to Jack first. It's the writers' way of showing the 'chain of command' here. Palmer has more trust in Jack than anyone - even his wife - but the ex-President still needs her, which is why he asks Jack to give the phone to her. It's also telling that Sherry honestly doesn't know that Palmer is no longer President - she has no idea who is really pulling the strings. As far as I can tell, it's just a bonus for Peter Kingsley's gang that Jim Prescott has invoked the whatever amendment and taken away Palmer's presidency.
Palmer's chat to Agent Pierce - the whole 'you have a son in the navy, he should serve a righteous cause' thing - was just a lame duck. Terrible, sloppy pandering to the masses. That scene would have been cut right out of the first series. For a start, no sexual tension, and the first series was all about that.
My favourite - though not particularly high brow - moment of the episode was when Alex Hewitt ran off down his handy escape tunnel. After all, we all have handy holes in our walls for easy access in and out of our apartments. It's like the bloody Shawshank Remdemption, or something.
Seeing Kate Warner in the bath was also a bonus. Probably the most unexpected scene of the whole hour.
Sherry Palmer 'reveals' to Jack that the war is a sham that's been engineered by Peter Kingsley. He's the head of an evil global megacorporation who's planning to start a war in the middle east because of his oil interests there. Well, real life events have made this plot line fall flat on it's face. All we've heard about is war and oil in the news for the past six months - frankly, I'm sick of it. I turn to '24' for entertainment, not for a watered down version of reality. But anyway. As long as Jack Bauer doesn't spend the next series tracking down Saddam Hussein and his sons, I'll be happy.
Thing is, this is the episode where everything gets broken.
The trust between Mike Novick and David Palmer is broken once more.
Alex Hewitt's computer is broken - him and Jack spend the hour fixing it.
Jack Bauer's heart gives him a twinge of pain... it's broken.
The chain of command at CTU is broken when Ryan Chappelle relieves Tony Almeida of his command.
Kim Bauer's civilian innocence is broken when he father tells her to kill Gary Matheson.
Kate Warner's relaxation and recuperation is broken when Jack asks her to find Kim.
Sherry Palmer is literally broken when Alex Hewitt stabs her in the final minute.
It's an obvious motif, but one I feel that needs pointing out. And if all this is broken, can the next two hours repair anything - just one piece - of it? There's one thing that we know for certain - the next two hours will be a rollercoaster ride.
I'm sorry that this hasn't been more entertaining to read, but I'm kind of too caught up in the series to care. It's sucked all the humour out of me. Feel free to complain if you like.
07.22 | Kiefer Sutherland hates the give-away promos, too
"If you're annoyed by those TV promos at the end of each 24 that give away too much of the following week's plot, you're not alone. Kiefer Sutherland, the show's star, has a bone to pick as well. "I hate them," he said in an interview at Astra West, atop the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood."
But, Kiefer, without them your ratings will fall and therefore your salary goes down. Go tell that to the Vancouver Sun, eh?
Also, your deceased screen missus is starring in a new film. Yes - Leslie Hope and Daryl Hannah - together at last! The actress who played Terri Bauer will be appearing in a film about a woman who witnesses a terrorist bombing and is pursued by the men who want her dead. Sounds familiar, but not too familiar. Here's hoping she doesn't get amnesia.
'Pure 24' was pretty decent last night. Comedian Paul Tonkinson appeared as a guest for what must be his third time. Which, of course, means that my favourite TV writer - Charlie Brooker - is set to be on the final show of the series after the last episode. At least, I'm hoping that he's been booked - otherwise there'll be moider, I tells you.
In other news, 'Pure 24' revealed the secret that hardly anyone knew about. In season three, Jack's going to have a sidekick, and his name is Chase Exen.
Chase will be played by actor James Badge Dale - that's him above. If you ask me, he'll end up as Kim Bauer's new love interest. For a start, he's the right age. For a second, the writers are apparently turning Kim into a trainee CTU agent. Which could be one of the worst '24' plot lines ever, but we'll give them the benefit of the doubt, eh?
07.21 | The final hours of discontent
"Episode 21 of 24 and like the viewers, the scriptwriters are flagging. Worse than that they are flagrantly playing for time, crawling to the finish line."
Writing in today's Daily Mirror, Jim Shelley didn't enjoy last night's '24'. The big buffoon. It was great. Apart from Mike Novick's powerpoint-style 'vote out Palmer' bit, of course.
07.21 | Shock around the clock
The sharpest pleasure in 24 has always been to awaken the scenarist in us all. It was evident early in the first series that hooked viewers were not simply asking story questions like, "Do you trust Senator Palmer's wife?" Or, "Are Jack and Nina over?" No, we were identifying with the team behind the show, and their self-imposed dilemma. We wanted to know, "How are they going to spin this out through the middle sections without losing us?" Or, "It's not just who is the traitor, but is anyone telling the truth?" Or, "The secret is, it's all about cell phones."
Stuart, who writes the excellent Feeling Listless site emailed me a link to a great piece about '24' from Sight & Sound magazine.
07.21 | Nuttfy journalist goes all gooey over Jack Bauer
"I have fallen in love with another man. For the past five months we have been meeting in a dark room every Sunday night, while the children are tucked up in bed and my husband snores upstairs. It is crazy because I know he would love him too, but he lacks the stamina that this relationship requires. So it's just me ... and Jack Bauer."
There's an interesting article about Jack Bauer in The Guardian today. Note: it's in the newspaper's 'women' section, so it's bound to be all soppy and weird.
Well, that cliffhanger was resolved swiftly. The two rednecks start fighting, Jack breaks down the door, recovers the chip and gets Kate to tie them up.
The question is... does the chip still work? Or does anyone - Chappelle, Prescott, Novick - actually care? Are these three all tied up with Peter Kingsley? I guess that is what the next three episodes will uncover.
I'm also guessing that Kim Bauer will encounter Gary Matheson. Anyone can see that coming a mile off. However, don't trust me. It was nineteen episodes ago that I predicted Ron Wieland "isn't long for this world". He seems to have lasted the pace for longer than George Mason, Syed Ali, Reza Naiyeer and a whole host of others. Well, I was wrong - so sue me. Any chance of Eric Raeburn doing a come back whilst we're still here? Only three more hours...
Palmer and Prescott go head to head in a face-off. Or do they go face to face in a head off? I have no idea. Anyway, Prescott wins (natch) and gets sworn in as the new President. Palmer gets locked up. And after all this time, the Secretary of State, the guy with the deciding vote, is still sitting on his plane. I don't know, but if I was President of the United States, I'd want Mike Novick to be my Chief of Staff - his Powerpoint skills are sweet! That funky vote presentation that he knocked up in around an hour or two was great. For some reason it reminded me of the bonus round at the end of The Weakest Link. I half expected Anne Robinson to boo Palmer out of the room.
The chip with the Cypress audio files is, of course, duff. There's no time for Jack to take it back to PC World, so he hotfoots it over to the coder's flat. I'm sure Mike Novick could have fixed it with his l337 computar sk1llz. Tony Almeida tells Jack that the coder - Hewitt - has no connection to our main bad guy, Peter Kingsley. Which means that there must be someone else who links him into the storyline. And in steps Sherry Palmer.
What a farce, eh? Thing is, does Mrs Palmer know that her ex-husband is no longer the President? Is she in league with Prescott or Peter Kingsley? Will we ever find out?
07.20 | Jack Bauer is going to the movies
"What is it going to take for you to stop giving away major plot twists in the '24' promos?" groused one critic. "It was really out of control this past season." Gail Berman, the network's entertainment president, acknowledged that she'd heard the complaint before, especially about a crucial scene in which hero Jack Bauer, was clinically dead and then came back to life.
Scroll down the page and you can find out information about the forthcoming season three marketing tactics. These include:
a CD-ROM insert in Entertainment Weekly and People magazines
a four-minute trailer during Fox's broadcast of 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'
a two-minute version of the trailer to be shown in 2,400 movie theatres in October
And if anyone can get a hold of any of those CD-ROMs, I'd really like one. I'm worried about the four minute trailer idea, though - surely a four minute chunk of a 45 minute episode could spoil all the good bits. Unless the idea of the trailer's to wrap up all the plotlines from series two to try to tempt new viewers into watching...
07.16 | Fox's breakout espionage thriller - the Emmy nominations
"The Fox drama '24', starring Kiefer Sutherland, is tipped by some critics to emerge as this year's Emmy nominations darling, much the way 'Six Feet Under' was in 2002."
Reuters reckon that '24' could be up to sweep the board at the Emmy Awards. Well, I wouldn't be surprised, as a) '24' is the most fantastic show on TV, and b) the Emmys is broadcast on Fox.
Another brave move by the writers of '24'. Not only did Jack Bauer actually die last week, Stark, the man who killed him, is killed himself within the first five minutes of this episode. The shock here was that it wasn't Jack who got to exact his revenge.
Stark was a great character with plenty of potential. Think of him like Hans Gruber, Alan Rickman's money-obsessed terrorist in Die Hard. A cold, calculating son of a bitch who nearly got the better of our hero. Only that you couldn't confuse Stark with the camp guy from 'Allo Allo' who drove the little tank.
Completely predictably, the red necks who beat up Kate Warner and Yusef Auda take the microchip. Well, blow me down. As if that hasn't been done before. I remember it being used as a plot device in Grange Hill when Gripper nicked Zammo's lunch money and his heroin.
In fact, I'm being to think that the '24' writers aren't geniuses; they're just redeveloping long-forgotten plot lines from '80s BBC television series. Next they'll be rerunning Jack and Kate as hippy-ish 'The Good Life' drop-outs. Where is Richard Briers when you need him, eh?
And how come every time that someone gets locked in a store room on TV, there's always a blow torch, some flammable material and a smoke detector to set the alarms off? And why when the guard runs in does he always get knocked out first time?
Ryan Chappelle appears to be back, properly - taking on the George Mason role, no doubt. I can't see him wise cracking his way through series three, though. Chappelle looks like he's even meaner than he was in the first season.
Peter Kingsley is our new 'head honcho' bad guy. He's the dude who was flying around in the helicopter last week. I'm guessing that he runs some evil global megacorporation, since a) he's got a helicopter, b) his office is in a skyscraper, and c) he's blatently engineering the forthcoming war in conjunction with Vice President Jim Robinson Prescott.
The heart stopping moment of the episode was when Jack and the doctor tried making their escape from Stark's men. It was pretty obvious that the big hairy O'Hara dude would get stabbed in the back with a syringe of the Beroglide poison. Jack showing O'Hara his mercy by killing him quickly was the best bit in the whole show. More of this, please.
I'm not sure that Mike Novick is completely bad. It wouldn't surprise me if he turns around to President Palmer and tells him that he was only keeping the treason plot a secret from him to protect him. I'm sure that it's for the best if Prescott thinks that he can trust Novick, and that... oh, who am I kidding? Novick is badder than most of the baddies that we've seen so far. We've seen him and Palmer develop a beautiful friendship over the past two years - how could he jeapordise the relationship? He seemed like such a nice guy, too. Looks like Novick's sold out the President in return for a cushy job with Prescott and a share of the spoils of war.
The cliff hanger sucked, though. As if the red neck will smash the chip. As if the White House cabinet members will stand by 'looney' President Palmer. The good thing is that it leaves you with no idea how Jack gets the chip - does he kill the two red necks? Do they hand it over? Does the wimpy one chicken out and shoot his convict mate? Or are we in for a tense stand off?
Tune in next time, folks...
It's a busy day over in Los Angeles today. No, there's no nuclear bomb, but 14th July 2003 is the first day of filming on the third series of '24'. Which, of course, means that there's gossip to be had - the script is finished and the characters are finalised.
Let's hope that we're not in for another year of Kim Bauer being kidnapped and rescued, kidnapped and rescued, kidnapped and rescued, kidnapped and rescued, kidnapped and rescued, kidnapped and rescued, kidnapped and rescued...
Anyone who watching 'Pure 24' last night will already know that Kate Adie is completely insane. The Badly Dubbed Boy backs me up on his weblog.
In today's The Sun newspaper, there's a report that the fourth series (ie the one after the next one) will be set in London. However, the story isn't on their website. It's still worth visiting, though, because there's a transcript of a web chat with Penny Johnson Jerald who plays Sherry Palmer.
UPDATE: '24' producer Howard Gordon has been quoted in The Times as saying "We have talked specifically about bringing '24' to Britain and setting it in London. There could even be simultaneous storylines running in London and America. It's a wonderful way to keep the format fresh and bring in that UK audience which seems to have embraced the show."
07.11 | "'24' was a tad bit disappointing this week"
"The episode was still bad ass because I didn't see Kim once during the entire show and because Jack Bauer is the motherfucking man. His torture sequence made that one "torture" scene ordered by the president look like a blowjob."
Fair enough. Good point, well made.
Us Brits aren't the only ones to see the similarities between 'Spooks' and '24'. This Oz newspaper has noticed it too:
In fact, it wouldn't surprise to see Jack Bauer turn up among our Portobello trendies. There are interesting parallels with these American counterparts. Tom Quinn, like Jack, has had his troublesome family members, his version of Kim. And that cufflinks technology, though perhaps more of James Bonds' Q than of Matrix wizardry, is certainly CTU impressive.
There's also some bother about some Serbian war lords as well, apparently. I wonder where the 'Spooks' writers got that idea from, eh?
I'd link to it on the Daily Mirror's site, but they don't appear to archive stuff they publish. So here's Jim Shelley (AKA Tapehead)'s report on last Sunday's '24':
Faced with the prospect of Bernice from Emmerdale copping off with PC Quinnan from The Bill in Where The Heart Is (ITV), there seemed little choice but to turn, yet again, to 24 (BBC2).
Episode 19, hour 19. Only five hours to go, thank God.
It's 2AM and you have to say that things are not going well for Jack Bauer and the boys and girls at the criminally useless CTU.
Jack, for example, is winched up naked, and, having been tortured, dangerously close to death.
Yusef and Kate Warner, while in possession of the micro-chip "proving" that the "Cyprus audios" were fake, have been carjacked and are getting the crap kicked out of them.
President Palmer's most loyal ally, Lynne Kresge, has been (wait for it) locked in a storage cupboard.
Yes, the nasty boys in the military are basically staging a military coup under the direction of the unfortunately named Vice President Prescott.
Only Jack can stop them (of course). Jack is otherwise engaged, though, having been caught by the baddies (again).
Under the instruction of an evil bald guy in a helicopter, a Richard E Grant lookalike tortured Jack with a scalpel, a stun gun and what looks like a soldering iron. Ouch! Jack's nipples may never be the same again. You have to wonder why the torturers went round the houses and didn't just get to the point (as it were).
Back at CTU, meanwhile, Michelle finally got it on with Smouldering Tony Almeida. We discovered that Michelle's foxy rival in the office broke up the marriage of Michelle's brother, Danny, and then dumped him, leaving him suicidal and deranged, a fact he proved by turning up at CTU and attacking her.
No wonder they can't concentrate on saving LA. They make the screw-ups and nymphomaniacs that run Sun Hill look like the Untouchables.
As I could have sworn I heard Michelle tell Danny on the phone: "Stop the madness."
Jack Bauer dead? There's not a lot else to discuss, really.
There are two ways to look at this; one is that the writers of '24' are mavericks who aren't afraid to kill off any character - even their heroes; the second is that this is a plot twist on a par with Teri Bauer's amnesia, or with Fonzie jumping the shark.
Of course, Jack Bauer isn't dead. This whole act of him being killed is merely a cheap stunt - a cliff hanger to keep American viewers on their toes all through a Superbowl fortnight that lacked any episode of '24'.
There's no way Jack Bauer could be dead. Kiefer Sutherland's signed up for six more years of the show. The series couldn't continue without him - it's not about stopping the nuclear bomb and saving us from a war, it's about Jack Bauer stopping the nuclear bomb and saving us from a war. The whole dynamic of the show is based around him; it's his 24 hours, a disguised allegory that shows us that taking care of the world, of those around us and the families that we love is a full time job. It's a 24 hour job.
Of course, what this series is beginning to show on a more basic level is that everything around Jack Bauer is dead. Viewers of the first series will know that, alongside his wife literally being dead, his love for Nina - his former mistress - is dead; his respect for authority is dead; his trust for his colleagues is dead; his hope and dream for his daughter, Kim, is dead; his enemies are dead. The second series brought us the fact that his career and life are both dead; his co-workers and accomplices die by the dozen. His former boss, George Mason, dies, whilst any chance that Jack has of coming to peace dies when he parachutes out of that plane and away from the nuclear explosion. Now Jack Bauer himself is dead, and with him any chance of stopping the oncoming war.
Or so you'd think, eh? It's not hard to predict that '24' will soon be ripping off one of the oldest stories that the world has. Jack Bauer will be resurrected much like Jesus Christ himself was in the Bible's New Testament. And that should be where any respect I have for the series dies. The writers have pushed the boundaries of reality just that little bit too far. Even so, every new episode brings a situation which has been cribbed from previous scripts, presented in the same manner, and changed at the last minute to turn the on-screen action to a different direction. There are many examples of this; the death of Johnathan Wallace in last week's episode was taken from the situation in season one where Richard Walsh, who Jack similarly depended on, was shot and killed, and died - whilst also trying to pass Jack information on a computer chip. Each new episode brings about a rewrite of what has gone before. It's on this level that you must know that there's no way Jack Bauer could be dead. Jesus Christ died and rose again, therefore it must come to pass that Jack Bauer must do the same. After all, there are only so many heroes to tell stories about.
Even the writers themselves recognise that Jack Bauer is a hero, that the show could not exist without him in it. That's why they save the juiciest plotlines for him, and leave Kim running around the forest, David Palmer stuck in an office somewhere, and Tony Almeida gets to spend time making gooey eyes at every woman he meets.
It's reasons like the above that make me love '24' like no other hour of my week.
That said, and speaking of Terri Bauer's amnesia, tonight's episode provided us with some great, but terrible, scenes to match the nonsense that brought season one to shame; the aforementioned death scenes of Jack Bauer, for one, but also Lynne Kresge being locked in a closet, Michelle Dessler and Tony Almeida's kiss. Yusef Auda being called a 'towelhead' also ranked as one of '24' all time lows - not even the dumbest of rednecks would confuse Auda with yer stereotypical 'towelhead' (they call him another name, surely - you get the feeling the writer included that particular phrasing for shock value), let alone if he was driving past them in a car. At night. In the dark.
So, yes. Episode nineteen, 2AM - 3AM, had some terrible moments - examples of the very worst that the show has so far given us. But it has also given us hope, because if Jack Bauer can die and come back to life, if Mike Novick can truly turn into a bad guy, then there is hope for the whole world. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, and I figure that we'll reach it in less than five hours - or weeks, depending if you're a fictional government agent, or not.
07.07 | Win Jack Bauer's balls!
'24' fans who want to own a piece of their favourite show can log onto the Major League Baseball site to bid on a baseball base signed by series stars Kiefer Sutherland (Jack Bauer) and Carlos Bernard (Tony Almeida).
The New York Post reports that the proceeds from the auction will benefit 'Mervyn's Bases to Benefit', which promotes youth interest in baseball.
I'm sorry that I haven't updated the site all week. I've been too busy. For example, last night I watched BBC2's four hours of '24' re-runs, and this afternoon I rented 'Beat' on DVD. It's a film that Kiefer Sutherland made just before the end of his pre-'24' bleak period. He stars as William S Burroughs, and Courtney Love is also in it as Burroughs' missus. It's kinda nothing like '24' at all. In fact, it's so un-'24'-like that there's no edge-of-the-seat tension at all. More of a slump, really.
