Last night we bade a fond farewell to Rufus Hound and the Grime Scene Investigation crew. The GSI swansong featured three mucky girls who liked a spot of rugby. Little did they know what grubby horrors the GSI team would find! Rufus (as always) takes far too much pleasure in announcing the various potentially very nasty diseases that could afflict the girls (“It’s t-t-t-tetanus! Yes it can be FATAL! ‘Ave it!“) and rejects scientists Ant and John’s reasonable ‘electronmicroscopizing’ explanations in favour of exaggerated Shock Tactics. For example, the mere fact that one of the girls wears contact lenses is the cue for Hound to joyfully cry “an infection there could cause PERMANENT BLINDNESS!” Marvellous. Best of all, Hound loudly declares that science is to bow down in favour of CREATIVE THINKING to solve the mysterious cause of the girls’ asthma. “I’m going to swap the scientific method for method acting!” Rufus then dons a rather tight t-shirt and retraces the girls’ steps giving him an excuse to poke around in their drawers. Class.
Miraculously the girls appear to be free of scrum pox, although a definite moral to this particular story is to avoid washing one’s gumshield with one’s toothbrush. Good advice there. We shall miss you and your contributions to trashy science, GSI!
A quick flick over to E4 saw another ending – the final episode in the series of Ghost Whisperer. Last week’s installment (the first of this two-parter) made me really rather cross. The series closer was slightly less turgid as Jenny managed to perk up at least one mourning relative through the power of her cleavage. Meanwhile, the victims of a plane crash (done on minimum budget of course) refuse to ‘go into the light’ and instead team up with the sinister looking man in a trenchcoat that has been giving Jenny bovver for the last couple of weeks. The usual clumsy secular representation of the afterlife is chucked in the bin as we see nasty Dick Spanner-a-like suck the tempted souls down into the GROUND whilst the meek get drawn to the epileptically bright light shining from ABOVE do you see.
An attempt at a ER-style dramatic season finale might keep some punters hungry for more, however this viewer has the attention span of a lobotomised goldfish and my apathy has finally superseded my curiosity. The problem with a programme about dead people is that there can really only be one ending, and that is ending #3. Seeya later, Jenny.