Of the media at the moment, I am really enjoying on TV 'Hustle and at the cinema 'Slumdog Millionaire'. The appeal of 'Hustle' is trying to guess how they set up the scam, plus the acting skills of those involved. I can't believe it's been going five series now and yet still seems so fresh. Adrian Lester oozes charm (only once in the last episode going on autopilot), with Philip Glenister slipping effortlessly into character as a diamond-in-the-rough fella and it's always good to see Robert Vaughan in legitimate employment (even if his latest persona is not). The newcomers of Kelly Adams and ex-Strictly Come Dancing finalist Matt di Angelo add sparkle, but given that they are suppoosed to have worked their way up from the streets, Adams' normal accent is quite bizarrely cut-glass, even if di Angelo's ingenue naivety was recently explained.
One thing I don't get is that, unlike The Sting, they quite brazenly at times show their faces and walk away with the lolly, without any hint that they pretend they are killed off. You might imagine this would create a rich list of victims who would be desperate to get their revenge and this indeed provided the plot line for the last episode, but it is rather cavalier.
In the second episode I was quite pleased to work out their thought processes. Like a magician's sleight of hand, it is always about creating the illusion by distracting the audience (and the greedy bastards in the show). The macguffin was that a picture could not be moved because of a new security system. Well, if you can't move it, then what do you do - you cover it up. That was gratifying. Being an employee of Telegraph Announcements, I spotted something that would never happen. One of the villains placed a notice in the Daily Telegraph saying "Have you been conned" with their name and telephone number. Now I know for a fact, that we would have to pass such an announcement to the legal department, who from my previous experience in dealing with them, would be highly unlikely to allow such a contentious ad to be printed.

As for 'Slumdog Millionaire' it is a brilliant film, bouncing from the vibrancy of Mumbai with plenty of characterisation intermingled with the action and the sights of northern India. Based around the format of India's Who Wants to be a Millionaire (and given the shadiness surrounding it, I will never quite look at the British version in the saem way again), it tells how a boy from the slums with next to no formal education knows the answers to the questions, from which we hear how he grew up. Setting the film in 2006 seems oddly superfluous - I can only presume it was because one of the questions involved contemporary cricketers regarding scoring centuries, one of whom might have gone on to have recorded a glut of 100 runs in the future. Given that the hero can explain the questions using chapters of his own hard life (I particularly liked his extrapolation of an Eastenders storyline while working as a teaserver in a callcentre class - something recognisable for the British market), I guessed correctly that he would not have a clue about the last answer - ironically, what with the clues the film had provided along the way. But I didn't know what the outcome would be. Just because of the title, there's no guarantee that he would become a millionaire (the Indian version has no safety points - it's all or nothing), merely that he appeared on the show. Drama, however, courses through the veins of this film from start to finish, with even a sop to Bollywood at the end, with a dance routine. The film was onto a winner by being mainstream yet opening our eyes to the oridnary (and extraordinary) side of a city most of us have never visited.