Fresh Eggs proves to be a hard shell
Fresh Eggs (TV2, Tuesdays) isn’t going to win the Pulitzer Prize. Or any other kind of award inspired by a chook. It’s dark comedy, more dark than comedy. But, before you dismiss it entirely, it has some good points. An Auckland couple, on their way to a friend’s wedding, stop off in a zombie town for an icecream.
Suddenly, Wade and Penny have an epiphany. Why drive for hours and work for two demanding bosses? Their insight isn’t original. About half a million have had that thought before them. But they enjoy the icecreams and buy Rose Cottage in the fictitious town of Alberton.
It’s not a cottage and there are no roses, but it has a hen that lays and a bumper crop of cannabis. They meet the locals, who seem mostly like caricatures from TV out-takes. One of them, Elsbeth Brady, visits them and drops dead among the sultana scones.
The plot quickly moves from comedy to farce as the wacky-baccy owner threatens them. They run outside, leap into their ute and back over him several times, like they were spinning their wheels in the Countdown car park.
When an inept cop arrives from Bingo, they kill him too and decide to dispose the evidence in Mrs Brady’s grave. It’s a plot that thickens.
The story has its moments, but the acting and scripting lets it down. The jokes are one crack short of a leak and the acting is so painful, it needs anaesthetising. The old Music Hall expression, ‘‘there’s nothing like a good comedy and that was nothing like a good comedy’’, comes to mind.
Penny (Claire Chitham) and Wade (Cohen Holloway) are solid, and together they may be able to give free range to Fresh Eggs. It’s the only hope.
Lord Palmerston, like John Cleese, is giving Palmerston North a bad name. He’s foreign secretary in the British Government of the 1840s and his brazen behaviour is annoying Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
He was known as Lord ‘‘Pumice Stone’’ because he rubbed people up the wrong way. In the third series of Victoria (TV One, Sundays), Palmerston is using gunboat diplomacy to make him the darling of the people, but the scourge of the Royals.
Although Victoria is a sanitised version of the monarch’s reign, it rings true with Palmerston. Why the North Island city was named after him is a mystery when there were other names to choose from. Stanley, the American journalist, who strode into an African clearing and uttered ‘‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’’ in 1871 was said to be another.
But our forebears got it wrong. When most cities were named after politicians and battles, we should’ve been called Livingstone. He was a physician, missionary, explorer and anti-slave crusader. Now that’s a name.
Victoria is accessible history in easy digestible, comic form. It appeals to everyone who has an interest in the past that’s a mile wide and an inch thick.
I’m not sure if London is a safer place with Luther patrolling the streets. He’s single-minded as he hunts a serial killer. He’s prepared to ignore other crime. In this 2019 series, Luther (UKTV, Mondays) is back hunting his most devious criminal yet.
Luther is written by Wellington author Neil Cross, the man who put sin into sincere and vile into villainy. While Luther (Idris Elba) may have caught the perp, he’s unsure, as is DS Catherine Halliday. He’s the dinosaur while she’s the meteor. Out in the shadows is devious psychologist Dr Vivien Lake, while in total blackout underworld boss George Cornelius is out for revenge.
When their paths cross I’m going to be there. After a four-year gap, it’s worth viewing.
Andy and Amber Cleverley were trapped in the Grand Chancellor Hotel during the Christchurch earthquake with Jeremy, who worked for the US Antarctic Service. In the years that followed they never forgot the hours they spent together. Andy and Amber couldn’t settle until they found him.
Finding Jeremy (Prime, Tuesday) was their story, which took them from New Zealand to Australia to Charleston in the US.
It became our story as well as they took us with them, all the way to the reunion. It was great.