As I had my computer backing up my entire hard drive this weekend, I sat down and managed to get from halfway through series 2 of Bugs to halfway through series 3. Somewhere early on in there were two more Bill guest stars. Clara Salaman (Claire Stanton) was a good guy with shorter hair. George Rossi (Duncan Lennox) I was amused to see was a bad guy with a beard. I think he was supposed to be Scandanavian, but obviously in the Sean Connery style (ie with a Scottish accent).

I'm really enjoying series 3, now they're letting the characters have lives in between foiling bad guys. Not that series 1 and 2 weren't bad, but they do get a bit samey, and making them semi-official (with an office that's not Ros's flat), introducing two new characters and giving them lives was a good way to do it. I think that now he's got something interesting to do, Jesse Birdsall's acting has improved. Either that or I've just watching so many I've got immune to it.

There's nothing quite like watching ~10 episodes in a weekend to show how samey a lot of it is, though. For Our Heroes(TM) the plan is:
1) bug it
2) blow it up

The bad guys have obviously never read the Evil Overlord handbook, so explain their evil plans to Get Rich Quick(TM) before trapping the good guys with a bomb of some description that they can either stop within 1 second of it blowing up, or manage to get just far enough away that they're thrown to the ground but not blown up. It's not surprising it got taken off when the Real IRA set bombs off.

I reckon that so far the Stephen Gallagher episodes are the best. Interestingly, the guys who created Smallville (Alfred Gough and Miles Millar) have written at least two episodes.

The technology has definitely moved on fast. In the first series everything was on floppy disks. By the second we're on the gold writeable CDs. Although no matter how far we get, their monitors still look ancient. The first episode of the third they all have mobiles, although they refer to them as cellphones - which is slightly less annoying than it was in The Avengers because Bugs is done in an American style: 50 mins long and opening credits five minutes in. It's quite cool to see those big mobiles - I wish they were still that size, I hate that they're small. And only partly because they don't fit into my rabbit.

I can tell winter 96/97 was a cold winter because not only have we seen snow in the third series, but not even their makeup has been enough to tell that they're really cold at times. I'm not surprised Craig McLachlan wanted to leave after that!

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