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| TV,
Jerry Carpenter,
20 January 1999 |
Rating: F1
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The best thing about late, late, late night tv watching is that more often than not, it’s a battle of wills between you and the person in charge of scheduling. In the red corner is you, desperately trying to keep awake – because at that time of night on a Saturday there’s nothing to be gained from going to sleep, because you can sleep in on Sundays. In the blue corner is Schedule Boy ( be he/she ITV, C5, BBC2,C4 ), and his main purpose in life is to slip you low-grade soporific shows that’ll dull the living shit out of you and cause you to wake up slumped in front of the box still wearing your clothes, with dribble down your shirt. Well he cocked up royally this Saturday, because he showed ‘Airwolf’.
This isn’t the old show you remember from your kiddie days, this is ‘all-new Airwolf’. What with Jan-Micheal Vincent in jail for playing punch and judy with his wife, and Ernest Borgnine six feet under, it’d be hard to get the new show together with the old squad. The solution ? – hell, get a bunch of good old-fashioned BAD actors together to play out some dumb scenes on cheap video stock. Then get them to run out the room wearing crash helmets, and ‘skillfully’ cut in some stock scenes from the old show with the fabulous eponymous chopper zipping through the sky. Occasionally cut to the dumb leads sitting in a cardboard cockpit to make it look the real deal, and BAM ! – you’ve got yourself a cool new extension of a classic TV franchise.
Just ten minutes of this was enough to send me into a frenzy – I really haven’t come across TV this eye poppingly cheap for years. At one point in the plot, the main characters are at an airshow. Not content with just using old footage of Airwolf, the producers of this fabulous abomination decided to edit in some really bad hand-held non-colour balanced home video of spectators at the airshow. So one minute this guy is getting shot point blank in the head, the next we see some parent spoon-feeding a miserable looking baby in a rain sodden field - Brilliant. I didn’t think things could get much better when the climax hit – a scene where the original Airwolf ( hovering in the Californian desert ) machine guns to pieces a dreary looking farmhouse in the middle of the French countryside, next to a motorway – now that’s accurate shooting !.
I didn’t quite catch who was responsible for this bizarre slice of entertainment (my money says it’s some kind of Israel/Canadian co-production ), but I did clock that the main character was supposed to be Jan-Micheal Vincent’s brother who was stranded in Vietnam. The same guy than our Jan spent the original series trying in vain to find. I can only hope this new guy returns the favour and busts Jan out of San-Quentin jail sometime soon.
TV 4.00am Saurday night (Sun am)
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