I remember a BBC series back in the Seventies called "Warship", and despite being made on a low budget and suffering from some theatrical over-acting, the stories were pretty gripping. You really got a sense of what serving on board a warship must be like.
So when I tuned in for "Making Waves" I was hoping for similar excitement - but what a disappointment. The first problem was that I could hardly understand what the characters were saying. Most of them had very strong geordie, scots or scouse accents, and while this may well be true-to-life it didn't aid communication with anyone not born in those parts. Added to this was a lot of music thumping away while people were talking. And if you can't understand what characters are saying, how can you care what happens to them? I got the distinct impression that the first episode was in fact two episodes that had been knitted together, so frantic and ill-explained was the action. I simply couldn't follow what the characters were doing or why, or why anything happened.
The series was performing so poorly for ITV that it was yanked after three episodes.
