Injection of whimsy
Watch your screens carefully tonight, viewers, and see whether you can name the film that brought together the actors who play the victim of a mugging, an unscrupulous corporate animal and a psychotic housewife 11 years ago. A small clue: all of them acted star Tom Cruise off the big screen.
I am trying to inject a touch of whimsy into tonight's schedules because there isn't much to watch that is going to make you chuckle tonight, not even the comedy. The mood is set by a particularly brutal episode of ER (Pearl, 8.30pm).
Of course ER is always bloody. Where would hospital drama be without at least one scene involving a surgeon with his or her hands buried in some poor sod's internal organs? But this week - apart from the good news (or is it? Wait and see) that Jeanie Boulet is back with Al, the husband who made her HIV-positive, and a gag about who wrote the draft of the raunchy novel found under the admissions desk - there is more than the usual senseless violence. No, not another episode wasted showing how to perform do-it-yourself emergency treatment for gunshot wounds in a convenience store, but something closer to home and much nastier.
The movie, My Boyfriend's Back (Pearl, 9.30pm), should be light relief but who can find much to laugh about in a film that not only uses an idea already employed in Ghost and Truly Madly Deeply, but uses it rather ineptly. The idea, of course, is that for the love of a good woman some men will literally go to hell and back.
At least in Truly, Madly, Deeply and Ghost, despite a few gags from Whoopi Goldberg and a musical interlude with Alan Rickman, the demise of a loved one was treated with some decorum.
In this one, death is played for laughs, but not very successfully. I, for one, prefer Demi Moore gulping back the tears as she mourns for Patrick Swayze, and since Demi Moore is number one on my list of overrated American actresses, and Patrick Swayze is a worthy challenger for the male title, you can see that My Boyfriend's Back did not impress this viewer.