The Game Continues.

As I've mentioned the UK's BBC1 is currently broadcasting a mini-series called "The Night Manager" on Sunday evenings at 9pm.

Based on a John le Carre novel of the same name it centres on the efforts of an almost accidental spy - played by Tom Hiddleston - to infiltrate the operation of illegal arms dealer Richard Roper - played by Hugh Laurie. The first time the two meet Hiddleston's character - who goes by various names - is working as the night manager of a luxury hotel in Switzerland.

This six episode mini-series has a budget of around USD35 million. With roughly $100,000 being spent every single minute it almost goes without saying that the production has a very grand cinematic style to it. In fact you get the impression everyone involved thinks they're making the next James Bond movie.

The problem is that in my house at least it is being broadcast on a 50 inch TV screen rather than a 50 foot cinema screen. As a result a lot of the action ends up feeling squashed with you rarely getting the full effect of what the director was trying to do.

This problem is made much worse for me because I end watching it with my father who is deaf. As such he needs to use onscreen subtitles to understand what is going on. These two thick black bars end up covering roughly the bottom third of the entire picture. They are the bane of my life particularly during live sport.

The subtitles had already begun to irritate me in the first two episodes of The Night Manager. However they really got on my nerves in last night's third episode.

In that episode there's a scene where Hiddleston's character walks into the bedroom of Roper's girlfriend "Jed" played by Elizabeth Debicki while she's sitting nude on the bed crying. As she glances over her shoulder to look at him I think her left nipple is very briefly shown on screen. I say I think because with the subtitles covering that section of the screen it was hard to tell.

Normally this wouldn't bother me but since the start of 2016 the 9pm on a Sunday slot seems to have become a forum to discuss UK TV's attitudes to sex and nudity that due to the US influence seem to have become more prudish of late. The two main shows involved in this were the BBC's "War & Peace" and a German show called "Deutschland 83" that was broadcast against it on Channel 4.

A notable contribution to this discussion came from Deutschland 83. With the Germans having a much more liberal attitude to nudity in particular this featured a scene in which a nude woman who was being filmed from behind at a distance ran into a lake to go swimming. In the top right hand corner her underwear is shown inexplicably hanging from the branch of a tree.

This is an area of the screen traditionally reserved for warnings that either the reel of film is going to run out or a commercial break is about to be cut to. Therefore this shot seemed to be the Germans having a little joke about the British needing to warned about the possibility of upcoming nudity.

In last night's episode of The Night Manager there is a very similar scene. The Jed character seductively strips of her dress in front of Hiddleston's character before going to swim in the sea. However it then cuts away to a far away shot in which Jed stops and very awkwardly removes her underwear and places it on top of her other clothes on the beach. I think that artistically it probably would have been better to just infer that Jed is not the sort of woman who wears underwear.

This struck me as the director of The Night Manager looking at the director of Deutschland 83 and going;

"Oh, mocking us are you?"

Demonstrating that perhaps we've found the nation's level even the subtitlers seem to be getting in on the joke.

I like to think that The Night Manager was scheduled so the hashtag #TheNightManager would trend on Twitter in the run-up to the Oscars. This would serve to remind people of British actress Charlotte Rampling's role in the similarly titled 1974 movie "The Night Porter."

In last night's episode whenever the characters were outside and you could hear birds chirruping in the background the subtitles would needlessly caption this as; "(BIRDS TWEET)."

To me that seemed to be more of an instruction then a description.

15:40 on 7/3/16 (UK date).