Red flight spells danger
SHOULD you happen to fancy a trip to Mars, you’d need to clear your diary for more than a year. And that’s assuming it was a simple there-and-back arrangement – for example, you’d arrive, immediately realise the whole place looked like hell and fly straight back home again.
If you actually planned to stick around a bit longer, maybe to conduct some nice experiments and what-have-you, like the astronauts heading there in tonight’s fine new drama THE FIRST (C4, 9pm), then you’d be looking at maybe two-and-a-half years.
With that in mind, you might imagine that Sean Penn’s character in this story, a guy called Tom Hagerty, would be thrilled to bits that he’s been taken off the mission. For one thing, he gets to stay at home with his dog. Tom’s dog looks lovely.
But he’s not thrilled in the least, of course. He’s a proper serious astronaut so he’s really miffed about not going.
Tom, we soon discover, had actually been due to command this historic mission, the very first human excursion to the Red Planet, but for some reason was then replaced. And why was that?
This opening episode (of eight) offers us very few clues. But the suggestion is he’s clashed at some point with Laz Ingram, the CEO of Vista.
Vista is the commercial company to whom Nasa awarded this Mars contract some years back, not to be confused with Vesta, the commercial company who used to do a really good chow mein in a box with crispy noodles.
I think we’re meant to assume this Laz Ingram woman is not very nice. In fact, I’m convinced of it.
Not only does she seem rather cold and detached but, far more significantly, the writers have made her English (she’s played by Surrey-born Natascha McElhone, right). In American dramas, as we’ve seen many a time, making a character English is tantamount to tattooing “I’m the baddie, folks” across their forehead.
But who knows? Maybe I’ve got this all wrong. Guess I’ll have to keep tuning in to find out. And on the evidence of episode one, that won’t be a hardship.
Dramas about space exploration, I must confess, rarely top my must-see list but this one promises to be as much about human frailties and foibles as it is about human endeavour.
Elsewhere tonight, perhaps even more dramatically, we have SHOP SMART, SAVE MONEY FOR CHRISTMAS (Channel 5, 8pm), with Gaby Roslin and Fiona Phillips. Yes, to kick off series two of this consumer show of theirs, our hosts have put together a Yuletide special, even though it’s only November 1... and I’d rather they hadn’t. Their point, to be fair, is that if we start planning our spending now, when Christmas is still eight whole weeks ago, then it might make our lives at least a tiny bit less stressful. Hence there’s a report, for example, on the best current deals on this year’s must-have children’s toys. I could do you a good price on a punctured space hopper if that’s of any interest.