Easter winge

This article first appeared in the Age on March 26, 2005

When I was young the easter break was a 4 or 5 day Christian holiday that broke up the first term of school. Good Friday was a very serious day, the day on which Christ had died and the newspaper wasn't delivered. Easter Sunday was a day of excitement and chocolate eggs and, I had some dim understanding, a resurrection. (Those viewers wanting to know more about such things should watch Compass: Where Easter Began, Sunday, ABC, 10.05 p.m.). These days it seems to be a holiday of many weeks, in which the ratings die a week or so before the Death of Christ, not to be resurrected for several weeks after his miracle was achieved.

It is for reasons like this that I try not to think of my television as an entertainment unit. I try to think of it as a content provider for the space between ads. The screen is also very useful for playing Nintendo and the watching of DVDs. On which subject may I commend to you the DVD set of Deadwood, a brilliant HBO offering about a real town in America's Wild West. It has been created by the David Milch, co-creator of NYPD Blues and will be shown by Showtime here, presumably because the language is so incredibly, realistically foul, that any of the networks who ran it would have to run it as a series of bleeps.

But I digress. It is tiresome to write about how disrespectful stations are being to their viewers. I know you will have read it before and I know that the TV stations really don't give a [insert word from Deadwood here] what TV reviewers says. Which brings me to my problem this week. I have nothing to say because most of what I've sat down to review has been unwatchable and most of the shows that I do enjoy - Without a Trace, Lost, Desperate Housewives, Medium and countless others I'm sure - have been pulled off for the Easter break.

There are a few hidden treasures listed in the highlights below. Those who are interested in military history will enjoy the well-produced Battlefield Detectives (Sunday, ABC, 7.30 p.m.). There is the final episode of Miss Marple (Sunday, ABC, 8.30 p.m.) which is a pleasure. Oz (also HBO) returns to SBS (Monday, 10.00 p.m.) Fans of Stargate will enjoy Stargate Atlantis (Sunday, Channel 7, 8.30 p.m.) which is fun, but doesn't really translate outside its fan-base.

West Wing, the show Channel 9 pulled mid-season and replaced with Real Crime (Tuesday, Channel 9, 10.30 pm), has come to symbolize how well and truly [insert that word again] over audiences have been. As long as they hold onto it, we can't get the DVD's. We're a year and a half behind the series in the States and Channel 9 seems to have no intention of bringing it back. There is little point in asking them what they intend because the response is always in a kind of double speak in which one tangles over the meaning of phrases like 'Season Finale'. This is a phrase I take to mean 'final episode', but apparently I'm wrong. Similarly we are meant to get excited when we are shown 'All New' episodes, as we will be after Easter. So, in this time of giving thanks and other gentle and religious thoughts let me say thank-you for those occasions in which we are allowed to watch all new episodes of a series in a regular and consecutive fashion.

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