The Lounge Singer Who Knew Too Much

Chris is mistakenly sent a mysterious video tape, which he believes contains Top Secret Government Information and is life is in danger because if it. Meanwhile the school is holding a video contest and Reggie, Ian and Dusty battle it out to see who will win.    

Michael Hoey's book tells us that MGM executives questioned the quality of this script but when they were told the show would have to be shut down for two weeks so it could be re-written they quickly stopped questioning it and allowed the production to go ahead! Firstly, I'm shocked it took them until this episode to even question anything. To me things had been pretty bad for awhile and there are worse episodes than this. Secondly there are only 4 episodes left after this one and the executives already knew the show was ending so it seems a little too late to be questioning anything at this point.

Anyway this episode is mostly played for laughs. Chris questions how he should be seen as a superhero just as he accidentally gets caught up a mystery surrounding top level Government secrets or so he thinks until it turns out to be the development of a new Cola drink! It's all a little over the top for my liking and I do struggle to take it seriously with it's one dimensional bad guys and quite frankly ridiculous set up. Jillian who is doing some work experience at a big company (for some reason Dyrenforth thinks it's good for them to do this) and is left unsupervised with access to the companies top secret files on the computer system, accidently spills a drink on the computer and rather than stop it working it accidently sends a secret tape to Chris because his address is the last thing input to the computer. When my computer stops working for some reason, it simply stops it doesn't continue working doing random things on it's own!

To me it's amazing that Chris even received the video tape in the first place. We clearly see his address on the computer is 437 East 85th Street New York. However his apartment door says 502. Now I'm not an expert on American addresses so presumably the 437 is the building number but if that's right how does the delivery guy and the bad guys come to that know which apartment he actually lives in?

Also at the start of the episode the bad guy doesn't know the pass code to access the computer (maybe he just needs to do some work experience at the company and he'll get all the access he needs!) so how do they find out where the computer has sent the video tape?

The B Story is the Schools video contest which is far more interesting and I really like the story with Paul and Lydia recreating stars for Reggie's video besides Eric looks really hot in the sailors outfit!

The music is good with Billy singing Billy Ocean's "When the Going gets Tough" and Debbie getting to perform wonderfully on 2 Gershwin songs.

Original  air date in U.S.A.  20th  April 1987

Original air date  in the U.K.  The Children's Channel  Broadcast Early 1993  

Original air date  in France 28th March 1996