The Longest Day

‘THE TV series 24 was a good idea – but unfortunately, like so many good ideas, that is all it was.

But is one of them really Osama Bin Laden in disguise?

The longest day in Jack Bauer’s life proved to be the longest day in many of its viewers’ lives as well, as one absurd plot twist followed another.

We surely cannot have been alone in hoping that by tea-time the terrorists would have managed to blow up the whole goddamn lot of them and we could all go home for our beans on toast.

But sadly not – and not only was a second series of 24 immediately commissioned but a third series as well, which starts on British TV this week.

The plot may have had more holes in it than the clothes in a moth’s wardrobe and the characterisation may make Footballers’ Wives look sophisticated, but it has been unaccountably popular on both sides of the Atlantic.

However, there was one sub-plot to the first two series that viewers might have missed – the real-life love affair between Nina Myers and George Mason (or Sarah Clarke and Xander Berkeley).

Not so Hello!, which has a sixth sense for these things, and it catches up with the couple in their home in the Hollywood Hills.

Xander, anyone who endured the second series will know, is no longer in the show, his character (already dying of exposure to plutonium) having saved LA by crashing a plane carrying a nuclear bomb into the Mojave desert. Of course.

But the skills he and Sarah learned on the show allowed them to keep their romance secret – well, at least until they blabbed to co-star Carlos Bernard (fellow agent Tony Almeida) that they both spent their summer holidays on the east coast and then in Portugal.

[With intelligence skills like that, it is just as well that Xander and Sarah aren’t really working for the CIA although, on recent evidence, they would have no problems getting in.]

But this is Hollywood, the town where dreams really do come true, and it really was love at first sight when the pair met during, er, a power black-out in the make-up trailer in February 2001.

‘It was like there was no possibility of escape for either of us,’ explains Xander, ‘and no desire to either.’

They could, of course, have just tried opening the trailer door, but that would of course have been too easy.

And so instead the pair got married…and lived happily ever after. At least, until now.’

Posted: 11th, February 2004 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink