2ACV18: The Honking First UK airing: Sky One, 8:30pm, 7-1-01 "I can't keep running people over -- I'm not famous enough to get away with it!" With a bare minimum of fanfare (I saw exactly one trailer and a brief write-up in the Grauniad), Futurama returns to England -- oddly enough, in the same week that Frasier, Buffy and Angel had their season premieres as well. Only a couple of months behind the States -- quite a change from even a few years ago, when the gap could be... well, a few years. Since (hopefully, fingers crossed, wood touched, etc) Sky doesn't pre-empt shows -- no such thing as 'sweeps weeks' over here, thank God -- but runs them in a continuous block, this season should finish in the UK within a week or so of the US. Who knows, maybe we'll even have a Babylon 5/Andromeda situation where the UK gets them first. Now that would be nice! 'The Honking' got an instant rating increase of one pellet of Dark Matter from me when I saw what Bender turned into when he was possessed -- the car from, er, The Car, one of my guilty favourite cheesy films of all time. Like Firefox, The Black Hole and Airport 80: The Concorde, it's one of those films that as a professional film critic (well, DVD critic) I really shouldn't admit to liking if I want to keep any credibility as a journalist, but on the other hand we all have our little secrets. The Knight Rider reference helped as well. Uh-oh, credibility now well and truly circling the toilet bowl! As for the story, it was obvious that this was a Halloween episode (so nice work by Sky for putting it on in January), but it still worked pretty well. I loved the hover-coach being pulled to the castle by horses -- brilliant touch. As for Bender's haunting, anyone would be terrified by the appearance of a Windows icon! On a sidenote, I also liked the way Amy stole Zoidberg's Mary Kay sample case while everyone was talking to Bender -- another understated disaster for our chitinous chum. Having watched the episode twice, I thought the only odd point was the lack of explanation for why Project Satan looked so unhappy when the gang found him. It's almost like someone forgot to insert a punchline -- either that, or Sky went and chopped out a chunk of episode without me noticing. (See comment on running time below.) BTW: Some technical weirdness for you. Previous episodes of Futurama usually ran for over 22 minutes, but this one only lasted 21:30. Why do I bring up this trivia? Because the theme music sounded 'wrong', that's why, as though it was running at the wrong speed. Some weird PAL/NTSC conversion goof? New Fox system? Sky cocking things up again? Whatever. On the other hand, since the return to an 8:30 timeslot should (hopefully) mean that the show will go out uncut, I'm not going to complain too loudly. Anyway, only a week into the new year and Futurama's back on telly -- and it's been renewed for a fourth season. Now that's good news! Rating: