TV with Dianne Butler

DIANNE Butler reviews your weekly evening television.

Dianne Butler

DIANNE Butler reviews your weekly evening television.

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Wednesday 14th
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Selling Houses Australia,
Lifestyle Channel, 7.30pm
Rating: 3.5 Stars.

WHAT happens to all the perfectly good rubbish after they've done the work on Selling Houses Australia? I'm specifically wondering about the three mattresses in the front yard of Spencer and Claudia's house in Kogarah. The trampoline ends up in the backyard, replaced by a magnolia and several gardenias. No word on those mattresses though.

Pretty cute house, despite Andrew Winter's histrionics. He's the host, and he appears to have that unfettered honest streak I also like in Kevin McCloud from Grand Designs. Andrew's a real estate agent. I'd forgotten about that, until he later suggests touching up the unsightly yellow grass with green paint. Genius.

On the face of it, Spencer and Claudia could do all right here. They bought this place in 2006 for $440,000, in an area of southern Sydney that isn't totally hot but resilient to the real estate slump. It's also got an ensuite, and a big backyard, and a deck. ("Is it safe?" Andrew asks as he walks down the steps. Spencer: "I built this with my own hands." Andrew: "As I say, is it safe?")

But as Andrew points out, a few years ago you may have been able to get a good price on a house like this, but not now. They've had it on the market since 2008, with a crazy price and a hand-written For Sale sign out the front. And there are additional problems inside - big, maybe costly problems.

To help grind Spencer and Claudia's expectations into the ground, Andrew takes them to other properties in the area and asks them what they think they sold for.

Then it's time to get in Charlie the landscaper and Shaynna the interior designer.

(Charlie's reaction on seeing the deck: "I didn't know you built decks Andrew.")

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Thursday 15th
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Desperate Housewives
Channel 7, 9.30pm
Rating: 3 Stars.

POOR Carlos, stuck at home watching television and not being able to drink to get through it. "Daytime TV sucks," he whines to Gaby when she gets in. "Just a bunch of women sitting around talking about menopause and things they don't eat anymore." Gaby: "You did record that, right?"

She gets all the best lines, always has. And the best wardrobe. Lynette (Felicity Huffman), on the other hand, is always in checked shirts. Then, if they do put her in a pretty dress, there's such a song and dance about it.

Tonight it's her and Tom's wedding anniversary. Twenty-two years. I don't know if you're allowed to count anniversaries if you're not still together and/or if one of you has a new girlfriend, but anyway. The date dawns on Lynette as she and Renee are about to sign a new client to their decorating business.

Yes, apparently they're now interior designers. You can't turn your back on this show for one minute. She's prompted to put on a frock following some advice from the client, a giddy woman named Cindy.

Renee (Vanessa Williams, an under-utilised delight) urges caution, based on the soft-furnishing choices Cindy's made. I'm with Renee on this.

But gee, Felix Bergman (Will & Grace) also has some cracker one-liners as well. He owns a big important art gallery and tonight comes by the class Susan's been taking, trawling for work he can show. He's excoriating, which kills the students but is good for us.

Less hilarious: Bree's lunatic ex-boyfriend the cop. Chuck Vance. He's going to be a problem, if he isn't already.

This show better not end with them all jailed as accessories to murder or whatever. That would be very bad.

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Friday 16th
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Luther
ABC 1, 9.30pm
Rating: 3 Stars.

THERE are a lot of myths about hotel key cards. All they contain is a check-in and check-out date. Not even the name of the hotel it came from. And this is according to an actor playing a TV cop, so I believe him.

The killer left his at the scene of tonight's stabbing, and like the dude said it tells them nothing. Looks like they might have to do some old-fashioned police work. Very annoying. This man could take as long as 52 minutes to apprehend.

And where's Luther, DS Gray would like to know. Well, he's in the middle of covering up an altogether different murder. One his young friend Jenny did last week, when that grub Toby tried to rape her. Luther tells her to clean up the crime scene, dump the car and then he's out the door to be an upstanding DCI.

With this latest death - not the one in Luther's flat, the other one - they're edging towards serial killer territory. Except so far the guy's only used hammers and knives and acid. Luther - reliably brilliant - comes up with a wild theory about these low-grade weapons.
 
Turns out to be right on the money. At one point Jenny (now on the run from Frank the thug) turns to Luther and wonders why he's single. "You're so nice, why aren't you married and happy and everything?" "No one'll have me," he tells her, using his eyes to full effect. Plus they bring the mournful piano up, it's like a funeral ad. I'm waiting for Jenny to offer him a free ride, but Luther is the stereotypical lone wolf.

Idris Elba is good as John Luther (unrelated: he won a Golden Globe for "best" actor this year) and it's gripping enough, for a Friday night cop show, but there are gaps in the plot that you're either going to have to fill in using the crayons in your brain, or ignore.

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Saturday 17th
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Spooks
ABC 1, 8.30pm
Rating: 2.5 Stars.

IMAGINE someone's kept a count of how many times London's been in grave danger of being blown up by a nuclear bomb on Spooks. It'd be in the range of a lot.

Tonight I, and indeed you, might've thought last week's murder of Tariq was going to be the focus of this episode, but in fact the "unstable radioactive material" which is picked up via a random airport screening is the major plot. The key word here is random: it's all over by the end of the show and doesn't drive anything forward. And I was on the side of the criminals.
 
Only Calum, one of the new agents, gets to follow up what happened with Tariq - the laptop, what he was looking at on the CCTV cameras when he died - naturally this is where the story is.

But you're going to have to pretend to care about the radium 226, or you're not going to be able to get through this episode. There is some tension at this stage of things, though, because we're not sure who's going to get out the other end alive.
 
You'd have to guess Harry (Peter Firth) will make it through the series and then die. But some of those younger ones, such as the fake boss Erin ... Who is tonight again exposed as fairly limited. But not as limited as Dimitri (Max Brown.) He's a terrible agent. All he has to do is go out with the internet-dating sister of the bomb organiser, which also means go out with the bomb organiser. And he mucks it up.

I'm just wondering how big the subset of people would be who remember Sookie's godmother on True Blood and who are also watching this final season of Spooks - three? Would it be three people? Erin is played by the same woman, Lara Pulver. She was also in a couple of those Sherlocks on Nine the other week, probably a better one to mention.

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Sunday 18th
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Castle
Channel 7, 8.30pm
Rating: 2.5 Stars.

INITIALLY, I am looking at Chris for the murder, the one who said the botanical gardens were too expensive for a wedding venue. I have seen Four Weddings, getting married can make you do unexpected things. Such as stand on top of a building in Manhattan and shoot your fiscally irresponsible girlfriend.

But then Rick Castle (not an actual homicide detective) comes up with this incredible theory that saves the police hours of fruitless legwork: what if she was shot at random?

And then Kate Beckett demonstrates how she got to be a detective: "Castle, we need to find that paper doll," and the case practically solves itself. Or almost: the shooter began the episode as a marksman capable of killing a person walking along a street almost half a kilometre away, but lost that skill as the show went on. The cops should have put out an APB on that.

The last time I watched Castle, Stana Katic, who plays Beckett, did not really look like the person I am seeing in this episode. Also, she has taken to wearing more false eyelashes than Amber Dempsey, Lisa Simpson's rival in the Little Miss Springfield pageant.

Of course, Beckett is still traumatised by herself being shot at from a distance. Clearly she survived, but at what cost? Hefty; she is still seeing a therapist, and he is of the softly spoken type that sound expensive. So the last thing she needs is a sniper going around picking off people.

Because a sniper, Detective Esposito explains to Castle, is smart and patient. "It's part of his DNA." Rick's so rattled he puts his mother and daughter under house arrest. His daughter is the one who really breaks the case tonight, but I don't hear him telling anyone down at the precinct.

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Monday 19th
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Revenge
Channel 7, 8.30pm
Rating: 3.5 Stars.

NOLAN and Emily should've got rid of Frank when I said. Now he's a major problem. And as Nolan points out, he's better at this than they are. Nolan's right about a lot of things.

Emily may have done time in a state-run facility but Nolan's the billionaire, she should listen to him more often. She ignores his advice tonight and it gets her into a world of hurt. It's called hubris. She's been walking around taking these rich and powerful people down, and so far it's been the easiest thing in the world. Tiny bit boring for us though, no? This is where the show had to go.

They've also mixed it up, as much as they vary from the formula at all, by controversially not having a charity gala tonight. It's the Fourth of July weekend, and the Graysons, despite the hard times, are throwing their usual too-lavish party. Event planner Ashley gamely suggests to Victoria (Madeleine Stowe) perhaps an empty chair as a show of support for Lydia?
 
I thought Victoria was going to slap her, but she instead says a supportive bunch of flowers will do. Poor Lydia. At least she didn't land face down on that cab. That would've been just unnecessarily cruel.
 
As it was, going backwards off the railing was a wonderful Hitchcock blonde moment, a lovely homage you'd imagine Amber Valletta would've been thrilled to do. Or maybe not. Given the choice she probably would've preferred to be in the full 22 episodes of a hit series.

And now tonight, Emily gets to see the Socialite's Suicidal Swan Dive (headline courtesy of the newspaper Conrad Grayson's reading over breakfast) when Nolan shows her the surveillance footage he recovered, at some personal risk, from inside Lydia's apartment last week, moments after she and Frank tussled.

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Tuesday 20th
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NCIS
Channel 10, 8.30pm
Rating: 3 Stars.

TWENTY point eight two million. That's how many people watched this episode of NCIS when it was on in the US. Seems like a lot. Too many, really. I can't say if it's even accurate, but what I know of things that are popular, I'd say it is.

This is the 200th episode, which doesn't mean anything, least of all that it's a good show, but wouldn't the taste for an earnest, military-flavoured procedural be wearing off just a little bit by now? I've never liked this show, so don't ask me. I don't like the uniforms, the seriousness of it, the acting.

But I'm not the audience here. This episode is like a reward to the dedicated NCIS viewer, as well as a love letter to the nominal star of the show, Mark Harmon. If he wasn't one of the producers here you'd think Gibbs was being written out of the series.

He's in his apparently regular breakfast place having coffee when, tediously, he finds he has to draw his gun and announce, perhaps a fraction too late, he's a federal agent. And then, just to keep you all fake guessing, it flashes back to the day before, when Ziva and DiNozzo are standing around the office discussing what an unusual day it is.

Based, it would appear, on the fact that McGee has changed the angle of the computer monitors on his desk. They'd like to examine this further, clearly, but Gibbs bursts in with news of a dead petty officer on the USS Gentry. The Gentry? But it's out of commission, it's in dry dock, there's no crew, McGee says, confused.

Meanwhile, over at the diner, Gibbs is in an episode of This Is Your Life: Gibbs in Mexico as a problem drinker with a beard. It's time to stop thinking about yourself having revisionist conversations with dead people, really there's a link with the Gentry.