TV review: Fishing for originality

Robson Green is the piscatorial equivalent of Jeremy Clarkson. Photo / Supplied

It's Saturday night and, Good Lord, is no creature safe? As if it weren't enough to have Jeremy Wells molesting local twitterers and twitchers on Birdland, along comes British actor Robson Green to torment the denizens of the deep.

I've always thought Green, usually to be found steaming up the small screen as a Sunday Theatre sexpot and the like, bears an uncanny resemblance to, if not a marauding Great White exactly, then a dogfish at least, or some other poor unfortunate you might see on a slab down at SeaMart.

So somehow, even though he's a Geordie, brought up fly-fishing on gentle English waterways, Green seems in his element tussling with the sharp-beaked game fish on the high seas.

TV One's Extreme Fishing with Robson Green is not for the faint-hearted. Green is as keen a hunter and consumer ("This was alive three minutes ago!" he crows over a piece of tuna sashimi) as they come. Not all fish were fatally harmed in the making of this programme - the magnificent sailfish he tussles with is let go, for example - but a fair few of them are dead meat.

His exploits in Costa Rica revealed Green as gunning to become the Jeremy Clarkson of the underwater world, hooning it up with the best of them. Fishing, he claims, brings out his inner 7-year-old and the results are not, well, articulate.

"Wow! Wooo! What a fish! Wooo hoo! Oh my God!" he yells, thus proving that actors, while adept at putting the spit and polish on other people's lines, seldom come up with anything very startling of their own. Those who hold piscine welfare dear to their hearts could look on this as their Saturday night horror. Occasionally the animal world gets its own back, however, such as the land crab that got Green a juicy one on the finger.

As a travelogue, it has its fascinations as our celebrity's desire for a novel angle leads him well off the beaten track to places your B-list intrepid traveller wouldn't penetrate.

We meet fish with strange habits, such as jungle river baby who eats fruit - a relative of the piranhas. Well the scourge of the Amazon had kept that family secret - vegetarian cousins - in the closet.

The show no doubt will keep Peta busy as well, as when on land Green is not adverse to a bit hunting and tucking into a tasty armadillo.

Jeremy Wells, with his ever more tired attempts to provoke gentle conservationists - "Does the [insert name of endangered species] make good eating?" he asks for the umpteenth time - looks terribly tame in comparison.

Meanwhile, on Friday Fluff night on TV3, high school musical comedy Glee is a welcome respite from the relentless grinding of Tyra Banks' dark satanic mills.

At least this fictional account of the industrial fame age is nicely satirical and the only things being tormented are fine Broadway tunes. This show follows the tradition set by the Idol franchise, that belting out some overwrought number is the only way to sing.

Still, the show takes the usual high school genre cliches and gives them its own twist, delivering such fun lines as, "last month they [the football jocks] held down one of their own team-mates and shaved his eyebrows just because he watched Grey's Anatomy".

However, for audiences Downunder, some of this might be rather old hat: the kid in the wheelchair on stage, the ousted Glee Club teacher with the pastel jersey swathed round his shoulders, the surprise choice of Amy Winehouse's Rehab.

All so reminiscent of "she's a naughty girl with a bad habit" and Summer Heights' High's Mr G.