SunnyO TV. Sensing Murder. Medium viewing.

We don't watch much TV at SunnyO. This is despite having approximately 90 TV channels at our beck & call. It's just that there never seems to be much on. I tape movies in the middle of the night to watch later. In fact, a freshly minted recording of Bad Santa should be sitting in the machine right now waitng for me to get home. Come to poppa....

Mrs Llew is a New Year's Resolution sort of gal. I won't bore inspire you with all her current resolutions, but one of the more notable is that this year, she intends to get "into" more TV. The crappier the better. Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy, um... can't think what else is on the list, although she was very interested to hear that a programme called Lost is very popular in some circles. I'm guessing the BattleStar Galactica is exempt. But who knows really. Actually, I quite like the look of Criminal Minds, that IS Mandy Patinkin isn't it? "Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father: prepare to die." He's in the SunnyO hall of fame because he partook in the very best swordfight (along with Cary Elwes as the Dread Pirate Roberts) ever committed to film. The best. Ever. Run out now & rent or buy the Princess Bride.

And oooh... I notice flipping through what's on TV2 that Duck Dodgers is screening... Cool!

Anyway... Sensing Murder. We started our New year's viewing badly by arriving 20 minutes into the show. For a while there I was convinced it was the TV3 weather woman hosting, but noted later that it is Rebecca Gibney, swaying eerily before the usual "supernatural" backlighting visuals. I can't remember, but if the soundtrack wasn't produced by a theremin, the spirit of theremin was certainly present.

The gimmick is that a little known murder case is exhumed, and a couple of mediums (media?) are put on the job to uncover new leads, and if possible, solve the crime.

Last night, there was this woman, and I guess, bearing in mind that we're seeing edited highlights, what she managed to channel from the spirit world was pretty impressive. From nothing but a photo of the victim (25 year old Luana Williams, who disappeared in 1986), she divined the victim's surname, where she lived, where she once worked (previously unknown to the police), an ex-boyfriend (never a suspect), and possibly, where she died & is buried.

The other medium was a little less impressive (in the bits we saw anyway), and when they fed him some of the new leads thrown up by the first medium, he claimed his spirit world broadcasts were being crossed with another, more recent (and more recently reported) murder that took place in the same place. Seemed like an easy out for him.

But then I've always been skeptical of this sort of thing since I took a message for a flatmate from a clairvoyant moaning that my flatmate had not turned up for her appointment. I mean... shouldn't the clairvoyant have known in advance? In fact, I've said this before, why do you even have to make an appointment with a clairvoyant? Can't you just decide when you're going & they can call you if it doesn't suit them?

I digress. The show then cheated, and brought in a third medium... who apparently quite independently led them to a spot in the middle of a 170 hectare park in the middle of nowhere, just 5 metres away from where the first woman had led them earlier, and stated "She's here!"

This guy even dug a big hole & got quite upset that he didn't find her.

And fair play, they brought in a truckload of people & equipment & dug a lot of holes. And still didn't find her. Although I was a bit underwhelmed by the guy with a machine who said "there's definitely something solid like a box down here. This IS a burial site". Then when they dug about 2 metres down & came across a quite insignificant root, backtracked with "Well, this could be what the machine picked up". Burial site my arse.

But still, at this point I was rooting for them to bring a big digging machine in & really take the place apart. Native trees and all. Because while I'm not entirely convinced that we weren't shown a lot of mis-steps & red herrings, what they did show us was really interesting, and let's face it, if they'd found her, it would have been fantastic.

BTW: I'm "sensing" that someone from TVNZ came here recently looking for Alasdair Kincaid... look, if this leads to some sort of Frank Flash or Friday Night revival, I want a finders' fee.