TV Eye: Watching events conspire

Blair Underwood plays US president Elias Martinez in <i>The Event</i>. Photo / Supplied

The Event (Tuesdays, TV3) is supposed to be the big TV event of the season which means it feels like the big TV events of previous seasons: the hype, the flashbacks, the interviews with actors who say they don't know what's going to happen to their characters, or to the other characters either.

The new Lost then? If it is, I'm out. If I want mysterious brain-teasers for entertainment I do the cryptic. I don't need telly to make me feel I'm too thick to be able to spot the clues.

The Event is, possibly, still about to happen, or has happened a long time ago and is somehow linked to the (mysterious, of course) characters held in a detention centre until a meddling new president, Martinez, (Blair Underwood) who still believes that truth and justice is the American way comes along and sets the nutters free. I think.

The Pres is a Cuban. He's a good man. The leader of the nutters has certainly been let out. She may or may not be a weapon of mass destruction.

This is the very mysterious Sophia. You can tell she knows some top secret stuff because she has that mysterious look. Of course this could just be because she doesn't yet know what her character knows, because the writers are still making this stuff up.

There is a plane, because the really scary stuff, the stuff of our modern nightmares, happens on planes. Jason Ritter is on the plane, he has a gun but so does another guy. The pilot may also be a lunatic; he locks himself in the cabin and aims the plane at the president. Then the plane ... disappears.

Jason was, earlier, a nice young chap, about to propose to his girlfriend, on a cruise. Then she ... disappears. There is another couple in the young couple's cabin. The cruise staff have no record of them ever having been on board.

This is mystifying and demands that Jason looks mystified. This may be because he doesn't yet know what his character knows, etc.

What we do know is that some of the people are up to No Good.

Sunday Theatre's Spies and Lies was about a shady character, Syd Ross (Antony Starr), who was most certainly up to No Good.

He was a former con who, on his release from the clink, rang the Minister for National Service and spun a yarn: The Nazis were planning to invade.

That got him an audience with then PM, Peter Fraser. It was 1942. Major Kenneth Folkes, an import from the British Army, whose mind was weighty matters, such as giving, ahem, "dictation" to his pretty young secretary, was - as we New Zealanders might say - royally sucked in.

He added his own embellishments to Syd's already bonkers story, the con part of which is true.

Spies and Lies was a rollicking good yarn, told with deadpan wit and flair, and more than a nod and a wink to Dad's Army.

The impending Nazi invasion was depicted by way of black and white cartoons, perfectly evocative of the time. A speech bubble: "Achtung! Achtung! First we will take New Plymouth then Taumarunui will be ours!"

What fun. It might even have been what passes for a real telly event.

-TimeOut