Something for the Weekend – Waking Ned

By Steve Pratt

Pushing Daisies (tonight, ITV1, 9pm)

HIS first touch brings the corpse to life. A second touch and it’s dead again forever. The giver and the taker is Ned (Lee Pace) in ITV1′s new American import, Pushing Daisies, which emerges as an original comedy drama series you’ll either love or hate.

The bright colours may cause you to reach for your sunglasses as Ned, having discovered his lifeand-death ability as a child, grows up and becomes a piemaker.

His pies are exceedingly good because the “dead” fruit with which he fills them will have everlasting flavour as long as he only touches it once.

But any series not only needs a fresh idea – and who can deny that Pushing Daises has that? – but also has to be able to develop it into something to keep us interested week after week.

So there’s a detective element introduced. What better way to solve murders than to wake up the victim temporarily and ask them who killed them?

As private eye Emerson Cod (Chi McBride) discovers the secret of Ned’s touch, he decides to utilise it and enlist Ned’s help in bringing killers to justice.

Which leads us to Charlotte (Anna Friel, the former Brookside star and latest Brit to join a US series) or Chuck as she’s known.

She’s strangled to death with a plastic sheet and, as Ned reveals when asked to revive her as part of Cod’s investigation, she’s his old childhood sweetheart.

This gives Pushing Daisies an interesting variation on the familiar TV series theme of will they, won’t they? as viewers are kept in suspense as to whether the leading male and female characters will end up in bed together.

Here, even a kiss is out of the question. After reviving Chuck, Ned knows that a second touch will kill her. Bodily contact with the woman he adores would be dangerous, fatal even, to her health.

The pair face an eternity of never being able to kiss and cuddle or take their relationship to the next stage.

Chuck manages to look on the bright side. “Dying’s as good an excuse as any to start living, ” she says.

With visuals so bright and colourful they might have been plucked from a children’s storybook, Pushing Daisies looks unlike anything else on TV.

The balance of quirky comedy and crime drama is neatly done, certainly in this opening episode directed by Barry Sonnenfield, who made Men In Black and The Addams Family.

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