Do you like the Mentalist? Hands are goin' up - okay, hands are not going up

One of my earliest experiences of Tokusatsu was the opening moments of Tokusou Sentai Dekaranger, where the main character drives a giant toy across an alien planet's surface and crashes through a wall into a church where dozens of cats are having what is clearly a Christian wedding ceremony, so obviously there's some kind of cultural osmosis going on, most likely fueled by Christianity(1) being the dominant theological orthodoxy of the Western media that permeates the vast majority of popular culture, making it utterly amazing that in the year 2015, someone who lives and works in the West knows absolutely nothing about Christianity beyond the words "God, "Devil", and that angels have wings - although they somehow also do not know that angels are called angels.  Like I say, it's pretty amazing - but "amazing" does not in this instance translate to "good television."
Don't get me wrong, though, The Messengers is not embarrassingly terrible all of the time, most of the time it is competently made and doesn't draw attention to itself or the mountain of cliches it heaps upon your screen, but every five minutes or so there's something so cliched or thick-headed happening that a little voice starts going "holy cats, you are actually sitting here watching this."
The voice continues: "what if someone came in and saw you?  What if that bit was the first thing they saw of this show, and they thought it was like this all the time, and that you choose to watch a show like this?"  I am not saying that you would be less embarrassed if someone came into the room and found you watching pornography, but it's a close thing.  I would probably grab my phone quickly and pretend that I didn't notice what was on my tv because I was busy masturbating to animal-based pornography videos I had saved to my flash card and no you can't see them but they definately exist and I was whacking it hard to them and not watching The Messengers - if that's even what that show is called because I wouldn't know.
That's basically the quality of The Messengers - as long as you are completely alone and no-one knows you're watching it, you could probably sit through an episode, but you would be in no doubt that what you were watching was not very good.  I made it all the way through episode 2, but didn't make it to the end of the recap at the start of episode 3.  I suppose that here in the last paragraph I should thematically link back to the first paragraph's subject matter of Christianity in the media and maybe make some kind of point about the makers of The Messengers not drawing upon Christianity but instead the villainous interpretation of its mythology presented in post-millennial efforts such as Constantine, Supernatural, and Spawn comic books, if for no other reason than that I can also link back to my past posts about tv writing feeding upon itself like a human centipede and the viewer being the person at the back, so that is what I have just done.



(1) And by "Christianity" I of course mean "Protestantism", as Catholicism is only featured in media if they need to do something about guilt, forgiveness, or pedophiles.

I really want to slap you right now but I wouldn't know how to stop

Well, that escalated quickly.
I rather expected tracking down comics printed on thirty year-old toilet paper would take a little longer than it has and that I would get bored after a week or two, but beginning with a couple of non-sequential copies I found tucked between old Warrior issues, an eBay trawl and selling off a small mountain of manga digests has yielded me an unbroken run of The Eagle from 27th March 1982 to 29th April 1989, so I expect I shall now read them while I track down the last hundred or so and then inevitably move onto collecting Tiger and - blimey - Roy of the Rovers because I am totes for real about being all over Johnny Cougar.
The pile I have trails off around the time the book was melded with some sort of Star Trek knock-off called Wildcat that took up a third of the pages, and there also seems to be an effort underway to remove creator credits from the strips - possibly because a talent drain to America was underway at the time and they didn't want to go advertising the names of Vanyo, Jose Ortiz, Eric Bradbury and Mike Dorey when they were more or less keeping the book afloat (NOTE TO SELF: insert contextually-relevant Robert Maxwell joke here).  I suppose it survived the MASK merger a few months beforehand, so it'll survive this one (for a year or two).
I am actually looking forward to reading it all, mainly as I once - to fill a blog post - reviewed a random single issue I found in a shoebox in what I felt to be an appropriate manner, but if anything, that issue was pretty tame.
Flicking through even the earliest po-faced photostrip issues reveals hilariously deadpan stuff like an episode of Doomlord where you don't even notice it's got to the very end of the story and there hasn't been a cliffhanger set up, so Doomlord is chilling out at dinner in his alien form - having hypnotically blocked everyone in the room from seeing him as he truly is - and a new person just walks into the room and sees him and goes "JESUS CHRIST!" and then the Next Week banner reads "Guess who's not coming back to dinner?" and I am sorry, but it is quite clear to me that I am not imagining it and they were clearly taking the piss, a conclusion I am helped towards by Alan Grant on many occasions admitting that he and John Wagner can't remember who wrote what in a period between the late 1970s and mid-80s because they did their writing in the pub and the official credit/paycheque was given to whoever of the two typed up the notes from their trying to trump each other's daft ideas for scenarios and cruelties to inflict on their characters.  Realistically that scenario should be a recipe for disaster, yet they more or less pissed out classics at this stage and I'm looking forward to reading them.