They're coming to get you Barbara...

Just finished watching Dead Set, which a pretty good gig forced me to miss last night and after downloading at least 5 different plugin's as well as the new version of Windows Media Player I finally sat down this morning to watch it. The show show's definite promise, it has the potential to be really great, though I don't see it quite yet. The scale is pretty large, at least for the first episode, lots of extras like a real Big Brother eviction, lots of ex-housemates, Davina McCall in zombie makeup and lots of pretty decent gore and screaming. While i don't claim to be a so called 'Gore-hound', I do like a bit of on-screen violence from time to time, my only worry is that they may have put most of their best ideas into the first episode, that's what it certainly seems like, everything i expected from the show happened in those first 45 minutes.

It also seems, that maybe there are too many 'subtle' comments on society thrown in, the zombies watching the housemates on TV, the zombies watching the housemates directly behind the glass and the studio staff who have very little personality and are only concerned with being on-air and how they look. Oh and nice little Ofcom reference, it's good to see things we've learned used in practice.


The idea seems pretty great on paper and whether the show becomes really bad in it's second episode or not, I'll be making a point of catching it every night this week, though a Wednesday clash with Heroes is on the cards, at last there may be enough good programs on TV to keep me interested for close to three hours.

For those remotely interested in zombie lore, here are a few things to think about:

• The zombies are not 'Romero' zombies.

Romero zombies walk, not run though 'slow moving death' probably isn't as scary in this time period, youngsters could flip the channel forward and back by the time a Romero zombie attacks.

• The zombies are not 28 Days Later zombies.

In 28 Days Later, while the (arguably) zombies run, as little as a drop of blood transferred to the body causes infection. So far this is definetly not the case, since the female character with the scissors who breaks into the Big Brother house, would have been infected when her 'boyfriend' attacked her.

It will be quite interesting to see if they give an explanation like 28 Days Later, or leave it more ambiguous like Romero's classics (Diary Of The Dead was made by a man who simply has the same name as George A. Romero, no other explanation for it).

----GEEK MODE END----

On a side note, nice to see some smaller British actor's given possibly interesting characters, namely the character 'Space', who i remember seeing in Wilderness a while back, as well as 'Joplin', who most will remember from Hot Fuzz, he's one of the policemen at the small town station.

So what if the character's are badly named and the production values are unlikely to reach the heights of 28 Days Later's classic 'empty London' sequence, one things for sure, it's definetly the best use of the Big Brother licence.


More soon.