Johnny and the Bomb; Lewis

Now that I've finally finished watching all seven seasons of Buffy, I've been catching up with my other viewing, and today I watched the TV adaption of Terry Pratchett's excellent book Johnny and the Bomb - the third in the excellent Johnny Maxwell series. The show stars Zoe Wannamaker (Madame Hooch in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone) as the eccentric Mrs Tachyon, whose bags of Time send Johnny and his friends Kirsty, Big Mac, Wobbler and Yo-less back in time to the night of the Blackburry Blitz. One thing about this adaption which annoyed me (aside from Kirsty's insistence of doing Judo throws on nearly everyone !) was that in the book, the Blitz kills the people of Paradise Street, but in the TV version, everyone initially escapes until Johnny and his friends change history. I didn't feel this adaption was as well done as the earlier Johnny and the Dead.

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I also watched the Granada follow up to the much loved and greatly missed Inspector Morse. Called simply Lewis, I thought it was a brilliant comeback for Morse's former sergeant and now an Inspector himself, Robbie Lewis (played as marvellously as ever by Kevin Whately). The little references to Morse himself were nicely done from the Jaguar that nearly runs him down outside the airport at the start of the film, to the various characters who knew him, and the "Endeavour" music scholarship that was created as the result of an anonymous bequest (Morse's first name having been revealed to be Endeavour). The plot was very Hamlet-esque and typical of the convoluted nature of Inspector Morse, including a number of bodies which turned up in various places ! (I'm so glad that Oxford isn't really littered with so many dead bodies - I might not venture out otherwise !)