Tv Previews

Sydney Morning Herald

Monday February 18, 2008

Keith Austin

All Saints

Seven, 9.30pm

It's a pity there's not a tradition of Christmas pantomime in Australia because actor John Howard, with his ruddy little cheeks and a waistline that seems disproportionately large for his head, would be a shoo-in for Widow Twanky. This makes it hard to take him seriously as the geezer in charge of a frenetic emergency department.

Sadly, after all the previous mayhem - explosions, gunfire - everything's back to normal at All Saints. Or is it? Could it be that some of the staff are still trying to come to terms with what happened? Is denial affecting their work? What will they do when the gunman is shot by police and brought in for treatment? In an effort to make financial ends meet, did the architects of the US writers' strike sell all their cliches to Seven?

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Nine, 8.30pm

This is a very cautious thumbs-up for the TV Terminator franchise. Nine were very big on telling us that 18 million people watched the premiere in the US but expect that to drop off sharply if it doesn't lift its game. For if a sci-fi fan like me can find this second episode curiously unengaging what chance the general viewer?

Summer Glau, so watchable as River in Joss Whedon's excellent and much-missed Firefly (what idiot canned that?), does oddball action hero well, and Lena Headey makes a decent stab at the driven mother of mankind's future saviour. So what's the problem?

Perhaps episode two feels like a bit of a letdown because the first was so good - lots of explosions and cool CG and stuff - and this is mere exposition before the plot picks up again. If not, unlike the cyborgs, I won't be back.

Foreign Correspondent

ABC1, 9.30pm

Often, when we preview TV shows, the programs haven't been topped and tailed - that is, the opening titles and/or the closing credits haven't been added. So when this interesting report about taipans and anti-venom in PNG faded to black, I thought it was an ad break. But, hang on, it's the ABC - there are no ad breaks.

So what happened about the corruption that keeps stocks of anti-venom so low that 600 people die from treatable snake bites every year? What did the country's grandstanding health minister actually do after being shown evidence of an illegal trade in useless, and potentially lethal, anti-venom? Did anyone talk to the companies that supply the stuff on enormous mark-ups?

It's a half-baked piece of journalism that's only redeemed by the fact that it's a good story that needs to be investigated properly. Oh, and the fact that the local Papuan taipan expert, an Australian scientist called David Williams, manages to get himself bitten on camera and has to be rushed, near-death, to hospital where he gets the last phial of anti-venom. Let's not even ask why blokes who are going out capturing deadly snakes with a stick and a bag didn't have their own supply of the stuff.

Indonesia: A Reporter's Journey

SBS, 8.30pm

Those who use the Sydney rail network will no doubt have seen the freebie MX paper handed out at stations. It's a piece of fluff concerned mainly with showbiz and glitz and gossip but it includes a column of hard news dubbed "Boring But Important". This is the third instalment of Mike Carlton's look back at his career in Indonesia. I rest my case.

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

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