Niche Watches: Dave Gorman Undressed

Ok, maybe the title could do with a comma... but where's the fun in that?

Dave Gorman's Modern Life is Goodish

Series four starts  Tuesday 8th November and I've steadily been making my way through the third series but I'm enjoying it enough I had to share. (Check out Dave or the UKTV on demand service.)
It might not strike you as particular geeky but once you find out the show is built around a PowerPoint presentation you might see where I am going with this.

This is quite possibly the nerdiest comedy I've seen and I love that. It's the kind of humour that my brain picks up on, amusing lapses in grammar and odd uses of the English language that only the internet can supply. There's ponderings on our reliance on market research and the surprising right wing politics of Little Mix fans, what happens when you buy Twitter followers for a friend and an episode that results in a beehive being sent to Christine Hamilton . There's even a weekly segment where Dave creates a poem out of the comment sections of news articles, which sounds odd but is quite a highlight. It's clever and fun and I get to see the results of some experiments I'd love to try myself but never get past the planning stage.

The best way to see if this is for you is to go and watch it, if it clicks with your sense of humour then you'll love it!

Undressed

Ok an odd choice maybe, so a bit of background; I've been watching this accidentally for a while... honest. My wife goes to bed before me (ok that doesn't sound much better, bear with me) so that means I get left with the TV turned on while i'm using my mobile or laptop but with the TV remote at the other end of the room. Late night me would rather have some TV trash on in the background than cross the living room, and what I've been subjected too is actually surprisingly not trashy.
The concept might be designed to hook in viewers with "everything's better when people are naked" and "they're naked, alone and in bed; what will happen? *wink wink*" but the show has some brains and respect to it. I don't buy the social experiment line, I'm pretty sure that's how Big Brother started and look at it now! It seems to be that being in your underwear works as a kind of icebreaker or social leveller and the program doesn't focus on sexual tension or attraction, so I'm kind of warming to the concept.

Anyways, singletons take part in blind dates in just their underwear, with a large screen giving conversation prompts. At the end the couple have to decide if they want to see each other again.
I've picked this series partly because episode 5 features cosplayer and gamer girl "Nicole" (Nikōru Cosplay), it also happens to be the one episode my wife might not have wanted me to watch, but I'm professional, "For Journalism!!". I thought the show worth mentioning as the geeky topics are handled pretty nicely and I figure this deserves some recognition. This is in part due to the care that seems to have been taken matching up the couples, I guess with all the compatibility tests used in online dating this is to be expected. There are other programs that would have played cosplay as a shock/weird revelation, but Undressed mostly picks people that respond positively to these things. The episode featuring a transgender woman had me paying much more attention than just having something on in the background. In fact the program features a whole range of ages, genders, ethnicities, sexual orientations, body types, careers and hobbies.

I'm not one for dating shows, I'm not even one for gratuitous nudity and somehow I'm enjoying the show, there's some actually genuine and likeable characters. Undressed should not be confused with Dating Naked, which I have also seen advertised, as it appears to have a completely different ethos.

Marvel's Doctor Strange

I'm considering a full review but in the mean time I can let you know that I was not disappointed, it was a little slow paced and may be hard to follow for the younger crowd but I even grew to like Benedict Cumberbatch's "House" impression (the TV Doctor, not the building). The special effects were some of the most creative I've ever seen and put Inception's city bending to shame. There's the usual Marvel niggle of an underdeveloped villain but at this point I'm starting to wonder if that even matters so much. I'll need to see it again (possibly even in 3D) before I rank it among its Cinematic Universe brethren, but it certainly isn't the fail of a movie that some feared.