Is ANNA Friel, the star of Pushing Daisies, contractually obliged to re-apply her makeup every five minutes? You couldn’t help wondering: this new rom-com isn’t so much shiny as set in lacquer.
It has a good premise: Ned (Lee Pace), a pie-maker who has the power to bring the dead back to life with a single touch, resurrects his childhood sweetheart, Chuck (Friel), who’s been murdered on a cruise liner. Problem is, if he touches her again, she’ll die permanently. Along with a private investigator, Emmerson (Chi McBride), they embark on a money-making gig, waking the dead for a minute to find out who killed them, then collecting the reward.
In episode one, the whole back-story was deftly explained in a neat flashback that set the zany comic tone. We saw the nine-year-old Ned bring his mother back to life just after she’d had a cerebral haemorrhage (while holding a pie, hence his later obsession), only for her to drop stone dead later after giving him a goodnight kiss (the second touch, you see). From there, we moved without pause through the resurrection of Chuck and the discovery of the man who murdered her, the smile never faltering, the dialogue always light and jokey.
Glossy fun like this is all very well - but, as a prospect for a long-running series, it has some profound drawbacks. For one, the self-consciously knowing sense of unreality that pervades Pushing Daisies, not to mention the unvarying emotional register set permanently at cheerful, is liable to get just a teensy bit irritating. What’s more, the pat dialogue (for example, from the perma-grinning Friel soon after her resurrection: “I suppose dying is as good a reason as ever to start living”) is not actually very engaging. This sort of approach doesn’t leave much scope for the audience to connect emotionally with the characters. All in all, Pushing Daisies is entertaining enough, but a less demanding time slot might suit it better.
Talking of emotions, or lack of them, was it against the law to shed tears during the war? It appeared so watching Foyle’s War. It wasn’t just the unflappable Foyle who was limiting his emotional range to a lip twitch; the entire Hastings population appeared to have been the victim of some dastardly Nazi plot involving a Botox syringe. Returning soldier Fred Dawson (Joseph Mawle) could only dilate his pupils and grunt in consternation when he found a PoW called Johann helping his wife Rose (Natasha Little) around the farm. Rose herself expressed her unbridled joy at Fred’s return in an emotionless “hello”, as if greeting the postman. Admittedly, her opening gambit that first night over dinner - “What was it like?” - was a big ‘un, and when Fred responded by vomiting his rations into the sink, it rather closed the subject down.
Things weren’t much better over at the psychiatric clinic, where the discovery of one Dr Julian Worth, with a paper knife in his chest, was the only indication that someone, somewhere in East Sussex was still emoting. Clearly it had to be stopped, which was where Foyle (Michael Kitchen) and the robotic Sergeant Milner (Anthony Howell) came in. Jewish refugee Dr Josef Novak (Nicholas Woodeson) quickly claimed responsibility, but Foyle was not convinced - and, sure enough, it proved to be the clinic director Dr Campbell who’d tried to fillet Worth. But Novak, heavy with survivor’s guilt after escaping Poland while his wife and daughter remained, still got himself banged up for murdering Johann the PoW in a moment of madness.
“A sad case,” as Milner magisterially summed it up, just before his battery went dead. Foyle’s lip positively jumped at that
