The Hilarity of Sea Patrol

US viewers may have to resort to YouTube for clips, but I have truly come to enjoy the campiness that is Sea Patrol.

Imagine if NCIS was invited over to Baywatch Nights' place for cocktails, found a mickey (or a Kerry, given that it does air on Nine) in its drink and woke up the next night to do the walk of shame down to Australia.

The resulting offspring would be Sea Patrol, at least in its current incarnation.

The previous three episodes that I have seen so far have involved:

• Deranged eco-terrorists with satellite phones and explosives.
• A radioactive seemingly uninhabited island with and a film crew hellbent on filming it (with an unnecessary subplot shoved in about a woman looking for the place where her grandfather's RAAF plane crashed back in 1940s)*.
• A ship practically deserted save for the psychotic killer who escaped from the sanitarium and proceeded to slaughter most of the crew (and the pretty boy actor who magically appeared to join the Hammersley at the beginning of the episode, if only to have an extended homoerotic mock fighting scene).

* Yet did we learn anything about the non-English speaking man who was trapped on that radioactive island for a long enough time to booby trap it? No. This isn't sodding Lost or even Doctor Who wrap up your plotlines!

Not to mention the fact that the show features characters called "Buffer" and "Bomber," as well as "RO" and "XO," and expects us to keep track of who is who. (Gender differences don't help as the cast is rife full of interchangable brunettes, save for 2 blondes...of which Lisa McCune is one, the actor playing the mysteriously nick-named "2 Dads" is the other.)

Given the current scandal that the Australian Navy is going through, a weekly Scooby Doo at Sea is probably welcome at this time. (According to the producers they have skilled naval advisors working with them, although Law & Order: SVU has advisors and they've been in self-parody mode for ages.)

Perhaps going for a point/counterpoint type of schedule, Nine has also been airing Underbelly Uncut (their name for the first season of Underbelly with extra sex, violence, and swearing) the same night, an hour after Sea Patrol wraps up. Some would say that it would be a case of putting your best attackers out together, I would say it's a case of hoping that the overpaid star would learn something from the hard-working rookie.**

** For an extra point/counterpoint feel to the night, I watched Lisa McClune (XO on Sea Patrol) and Damien Walshe-Howling (Benji Veniaman on Underbelly) on Blue Heelers, Seven's country cop show now in reruns on the Hallmark Channel (Hallmark has more bite here...seriously, it does, even if it is owned by NBC Universal). Tonight's double bill of episodes dealt with a drug ring, and proved that McCune is better than the scripts which she is presently given, and that Walshe-Howling is better than the scripts which he used to be given.