Are you, like me, a fan of Avenue 5? This show imagines a cruise ship in space sometime in the next few hundred years. But it’s not Love Boat in space. It’s about a bunch of people stranded on a space cruiser, where the cruise length has accidently changed from 6 months to three years. The main star is Hugh Laurie, as the ‘Captain,’ though he like other officers and vessel staff are all actors, recruited from acting databases. Laurie as Captain speaks with an American accent, but he is a Brit and switches between the two, especially when he’s under stress. The main cast is as follows:
Hugh Laurie as Ryan Clark, the captain of Avenue 5.
Josh Gad as Herman Judd, billionaire owner of Avenue 5.
Zach Woods as Matt Spencer, Head of Customer Relations for Avenue 5.
Rebecca Front as Karen Kelly, a passenger aboard Avenue 5.
Suzy Nakamura as Iris Kimura, an associate owner of Avenue 5.
Lenora Crichlow as Billie McEvoy, second engineer on Avenue 5.
Nikki Amuka-Bird as Rav Mulcair, head of Mission Control for Avenue 5.
Ethan Phillips as Spike Martin, a former astronaut who is now a womanizing alcoholic on Avenue 5.
It was created Armando Iannucci who developed a fly on the wall satirical sitcom, The Thick Of It, and In the Loop, a critically acclaimed feature film featuring characters from The Thick of It.
Sometimes satires like Avenue 5 are more likely to predict the future than some po-faced mega production which usually has some message to deliver.
My new book, He might be still on Mars, is set nearly 700 years in the future. But I contend, it’s not really a science fiction movie, but a thriller and love story. I’ll blog more on this when the book is finally out. For now, My wife and I are just plodding through the year of the plague. Look out for a tsunami of books and films on the plague when we are out of this threat. The mosaic of infections and mortality seem to be so different. Even the British prime minister Boris Johnson was hovering on the brink between life and death. My fervent hope is that many of the jobless and out of work, gravitate back to work and reverse the dreadful social and economic impacts. Anyway, Happy Easter to my readers, a very select band who I doubt amount to more than single figures.