WITHOUT sounding like I'm harking bark for a bygone era of British television, wasn't there a time when Spooks on the schedules made you plan your evening around being in front of the box for when it started?
The reason I ask this rather long question is because, when the new series of Spooks started, I feared I'd end up mentioning it every Tuesday because is so eclipses everything else that it is up against.
How wrong was I. The decision to change the format of Spooks, moving it from a series of enclosed dramas with several plots running through them all, to a serial with one defined enemy throughout (Iran) has killed it, in my opinion.
The premise of Spooks was always built around the fact that no matter how close it came to the crunch, the spooks from MI5 always won. And so the world was safe. Admittedly, achieving such ends meant the cast cull was fast, frequent and often brutal, but it worked. Partly because they replaced good characters with new good characters.
Only this series, the characters don't seem so strong. They don't seem so convincing. Take the case of Roz, would an MI5 agent really have her head turned to work for a random anti-America organisation without someone else n MI5 getting wind of it? And instead of just winning, they're just losing each week - of course, winning in week one would kill off the serial format.
Maybe I'm being picky, but Spooks just doesn't seem to have that edge about it now. Maybe it's run its course, or maybe the plots are just a little too real.
Or maybe it is because the real drama is over on Channel 4 as Gordon's Kitchen Nightmares (C4, 9pm) just gets better.
Putting aside the fact you must be made to even contemplate asking Gordon Ramsay to sort out your kitchen (here's a hint, you're in real trouble if the producers take you up on the offer), it remains compelling viewing.
And tonight, Gordon could have met his match. He takes on an ex-boxer and his feisty wife whose barroom brawls are scaring away customers.
Gordon might be famed for his aggression in the kitchen but he meets his match this week as Kitchen Nightmares heads to rural Wales
The Fish & Anchor restaurant and bar near Lampeter is run by a couple of bruisers, ex-boxer Mike and his mouthy wife Caron.
A self taught cook, Mike is a one-man pressure cooker in the kitchen as he struggles to cope with a menu too vast and wide ranging for his skills.
While Mike gets steamed up in the kitchen, Carol's getting hot under the collar in the restaurant. Her unique front-of-house management style includes abusing the
customers and her husband in equal measure. Every night they go twelve rounds with the local clientele who are fast deserting them to the tune of a £1,000 per week loss.
Enter Gordon, who finds himself cast as marriage counsellor in a culinary battlefield. It’s a last-ditch attempt to reverse the restaurant’s disastrous reputation and put some
love back into the kitchen as well as on plates. Will Mike take on board a last-minute reality check in the fight of his life, or stay on the ropes and sink?
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