Here’s a tip for all you Canal-subscribing blokes out there. Starting on Sunday 4 April Canal+ will be showing the new miniseries from Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, The Pacific. I say blokes because I’ve yet to meet a woman who is as interested in war as any man. I don’t know what it is – some kind of primeval urge to shoot guns and the bizarre fetishistic wish to see your ‘enemy’ blown to bits possibly – but it’s been successfully tapped pretty much ever since moving images were invented. I don’t know what the statistics say, but I’m willing to bet that only about five percent tops of the audience of any war movie/TV show is female. This might even be more the case over the last decade or so, as movies like Saving Private Ryan, Brotherhood of War and 9th Company have upped the ante in terms of realism and brutality in an attempt to accurately depict combat in the latter half of the twentieth century.

The Pacific is unsurprisingly most easily compared to its predecessor, Band of Brothers. Whereas the latter concentrated on a platoon of WWII paratroopers dropped into Europe, the former tells the story of the United States Marine Corp in the Pacific Theatre, a tale possessed of as much violence and ferocity as any of last century’s unhappy conflicts. The first part of the ten-part series shows the arrival of the U.S. 1st Marines on Guadalcanal after a particularly effective briefing from the USMC Staff Sergeant. Something along the lines “get in there and kill every last ones o’ those Jap-anese sumsab*****,” if I remember correctly. When their landing craft roll up to the beach they find nothing initially, but soon enough the few troops we come to learn by name are up to their necks in spent bullet casings and corpses.

Initially Pacific isn’t as, shall we say, personable as Band of Brothers. There’s no Damian Lewis and his Major Winters character yet who is easy to be sympathetic to, although the likeliest so far seems to be Joseph Mazzello’s Eugene B. Sledge. Almost all the marines seem to be young, immature men who have no idea what they are getting themselves into and face war with the flippancy and the carefree sadism of youth. It’ll be interesting to see how the story progresses as technology ensures that we’ll be kept in the front line of televisual bloodshed, but whether or not the characters are deep enough to hold dramatic interest we’ll have to wait and see. Although with a budget of 150 million USD we’d better be treated to the best show EVA! If you don’t have Canal+ you’ll be able to catch the series on YLE but only in the autumn – the HBO deal is good but it’s not that good.

If you don’t have cable telly then you’re a bit out of luck this Easter. The only show of note – if only for its awfulness – starting n the next couple of weeks on regular channels seems to be British Gladiators, a show seemingly designed to remind British ex-pats why they left Britain in the first place. The folk in this show take themselves way too seriously I’m telling you. Starring such impressive characters as Cyclone, Enigma and Tempest (women) and Atlas, Destroyer and Oblivion (men), this show is non-stop action for idiots every Saturday at 19:00 starting 27 March. Family entertainment at its finest, this show is hard to beat in terms of pointlessness and vapidity. Happy Easter.

NICK BARLOW