FlashForward

Five

Flashforward six months or so (to, say, April 29, 2010) and I predict a box set coming into my life, and maybe yours. FlashForward, a sci-fi import that we are spookily seeing only days after its American debut, may not be The Sopranos but it has the glossy, intelligent, moreish qualities of Lost, before Lost got lost in its own flashforwards. If you are not prepared to stick with it now, it is the sort of show worth pulling a sickie for and gorging on once that box set is released.

Its premise is nuts but then they always are. It's just an ordinary day when suddenly everyone, everywhere, blacks out for two minutes and 17 seconds, during which time they see with visual and emotional clarity what they will be up to at 10pm (Pacific time) on April 29 the following year. Having finished mopping up the mess caused by car drivers, aircraft pilots and surgeons falling down on the tasks in hand, the authorities realise that what really matters is not the blackouts but the visions and what concerns the FBI is that while the rest of the world blanked, CCTV has caught a sinister bloke wandering around during a Detroit baseball game.

I say “the rest of the world” but, save for a brief London flash-sideways (hello there, Alex Kingston!), Los Angeles as usual serves for the world. Once again, what a glossy and unrepresentative microcosm it is! Yet for once the chiselled and high-cheek-boned actors have something to act with and dialogue worth delivering. A mother, told by another that she is lucky to have a daughter, replies: “You are kidding. You've only got to worry about one penis. I've got to worry about them all.” An FBI boss, inundated by useless theories, asks: “What about the Vatican? Has the Pope chimed in yet?” A father, whose vision has shown him his dead daughter apparently alive, mournfully confesses: “I'm confused. I'm hopeful. And I am angry that I am hopeful. You're worried your future will come true. I am worried mine won't.”

He is talking to Mark, the FBI agent and recovering alcoholic at the heart of the tale, played with statuesque fatalism by Joseph Fiennes. His vision has shown him back on the bottle. His wife, the surgeon Olivia (Sonya Wager, who also stars in Lost), has seen herself in love with another man (played by another posh Englishman, Jack Davenport).

Mark's partner Demetrio (John Cho) went one step worse and saw only the oblivion of his own death. These are surprisingly sombre and emotional moments for a fantasy drama and recall for me the intensity of The Time Traveler's Wife whose heroine's tragedy, like her husband's, was to know when he would die. Mark and Olivia tell each other, as that couple did, that the future can be changed, but as last night's pilot wound up, Mark's daughter presented her father with the friendship bracelet he had seen himself still wearing in April. He slipped it on as if it were a manacle.

As the witches never got round to telling Macbeth, the problem with precognition is that it implies the fallacy of predestination. The paradox is old, but FlashForward speaks to the way we watch television now, fast-forwarding and back, geekishly looking for clues in frozen frames. The bad news is that the writers, who include Robert J. Sawyer on whose novel it is based, have, oh dear, a five-year plan. If one needed evidence they admire Lost a little too much, note the kangaroo bouncing through LA during its mini-apocalypse: it's a homage to the polar bear racing through the jungle in the very first Lost. My hope, however, is that in this case the soap opera will remain in equilibrium with the sci-fi. So far it does. As Mark's boss said yesterday, quashing the objections to Mark's plan of action, it works for me, it works for me.

While Fiennes and co were flashing into the future, Ross Noble was roaring by motorbike into the 1950s. That, at least, was his take on the politely dull town of Mildura in Australia, home not only to oranges and orange pickers but the Orange World theme park.

Ross Noble's Australian Road Trip

Five

Australia, where the gifted improvisational comedian Ross Noble is performing 80 gigs and travelling to them on motorbike in order to get a TV series out of it, should suit his surrealist imagination. Like him, Australia gets high on the absurdities of scale. Last night Noble not only sat between two humanoid citrus fruits at Orange World but passed a restaurant adorned by a gigantic prawn and did an interview at a radio station housed in a building shaped like a radio.

Somehow, however, the magic of his stand-up did not translate beyond his immediate audience to the camera and in the travelogue sections, he failed to quite suppress the colossal yawn Australia was invoking in him. I did enjoy, however, his riposte to a beardy-weirdy who assured him that God was looking after him during his trip. “Does that mean,” asked Noble, “I get a discount on my insurance?”

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