FOR the first time in I don't know how long, ITV 1 had my individed attention from about 7.30pm until 10pm last night - a Saturday night.
The return of Britain's Got Talent (now running weekly rather than on consecutive nights) played a large part in that admittedly. As I said yesterday, it's possibly the one talent show where anyone with a bit of a trick has a chance to shine.
That was proved with last night's mix of real talent - the freestyle dancing dog, the bullied 13-year-old male chorister who had the audience in tears - along with the utterly appalling acts - the London lad who thought he could sing Whitney Houston, and the dreadful cricus freak show - which when combined, may for compulsive TV.
Piers Morgan, I think, makes the difference on the judging panel. Where as Amanda Holden and Simon Cowell hit their reject buzzers as soon as they don't like the act, Piers still has the old newspaper editor in him - he knows the viewers want car crash acts to get as great a chance as possible to humiliate themselves in public. It's harsh, but true.
But that don't accounted for about 90 minutes of Saturday night. Bringing back a successful format isn't exactly risky scheduling. Plonking an off-beat American drama on prime-time Saturday night TV is. And that is exactly what ITV did with Pushing Daisies.
I've never really understood where the snobbery towards American dramas in the UK has come from. Why, for example, does BBC 1 repeat New Tricks in its treasured 9pm slot but then dumps gripping US legal drama Damages - which won critical acclaim in America and has Glenn Close and Ted Danson among its star-studded cast into the post 10pm-news slot?
ITV has been just as bad in the past. Gossip Girl is shaping up to be a fun drama but out on ITV 2, whereas Entourage has built up a real cult following on ITV2, and is rewarded with an even later slot on the minority digital channel. Yet in the meantime, ITV continues to make the schedule on its main channel look over-reliant on its core soaps and cheap and quick to turnaround documentaries such as Tonight.
But at least it has taken a risk with Pushing Daisies, which despite taking a bit of getting used to, was highly amusing. Pushing Daisies feels a bit like The Simpsons, lots of primary colours and a sense of humour which, at first, you feel you should be appalled by but which, in the end, you secretly love.
With a wonderful narrator guiding us through the episode, the opening sequence showed a young boy called Ned who, while running through a field with his dog, watched his dog be knocked down and killed by a truck. He walks up to the dog, touches it, and hey presto, dog comes back to life.
And so Ned discovers he has the power to bring things back to life. But when his mum drops down dead, he brings her back to life and discovers that if he keeps them alive for more than a minute, someone else dies instead - in the case of his mother, it was the next door neighbour who went off instead.
That night, when Ned is put to bed by his mum, she kisses him, and drops down dead. He learns a second rule of his power - he can never touch the person or thing he brings back to life again or else they die - for good.
Snap forward 20 years or so and Ned is running a pie shop - he makes his money by buying in rotten fruit and then touching it, bringing it back to life, and then cooking it in pies. The sets are as though they were designed by Tim Burton when he was having a rare happy day in the office.
His talent has been spotted by a private detective, and whenever a reward is put up for information about a murder, Ned and Chi McBride, the private eye, head down to the morgue, give the dead person a minute back in life to tell them who is the murderer. You get the picture.
Then comes the twist. The man who died in place of Ned's mum was the dad of Chuck, Ned's childhood sweetheart. She then turns up dead on a cruise ship. When Ned goes to see Chuck (played by Anna Friel, her offa Brookside) in the funeral home, he brings her back to life but can't bear to kill her, nor can he kiss her, much as he wants to.
They set out to solve the mystery of Chuck's murder, but get beaten to the post by Chuck's batty aunts, world-famous synchronised swimmers who had become recluses after one lost an eye in an incident with bad cat litter (I told you, think Simpsons).
All in all, it's cued up nicely to be a cracking series, a welcome addition to the spring schedules. For once, a channel has taken a real punt on something really different. Who knows, if this works, great dramas like Lost and 24 may no longer be the sole preserve of Channel 4 and Sky One.
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