Love and Liberty

How are you with Photoshop, flags and Batman?

Last night’s LBC debate between Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage saw one of the most telling clashes about crime. Nick said we were better off IN to fight crime and get better justice. Nigel said he was so hell-bent against any form of European co-operation that he’d rather see cross-border criminals go free on killing sprees and British tourists locked up without help.

So where is the Photoshopped poster of Nick Clegg as Batman (in half-EU stars, half-Union Jack Batsuit) vs Nigel Farage, the Joker, saying ‘Together, We Fight Crime’? Your turn! Can you take this opportunity to turn them into a colourful graphic before next week’s rematch?

The Lib Dems have turned part of Nick’s attack into a poster, but a ridiculous picture is worth a thousand words. And I should know – I like a thousand words.

Here’s the Cast of Characters I’m Looking For

Nick Clegg IS Batman

In half-EU stars, half-Union Jack Batsuit, with ears (armoured nipples optional), and dynamic pro-European Arrest Warrant slogan, ‘Together, We Fight Crime!’

He won’t thank you, but I will.

Nigel Farage IS the Joker

UKIP’s colours already run to the purple suit, so that’s most of the work done already. Just change the sickly green highlights to sickly yellow, and you’re away. With an exaggerated downturned grimace of hatred for immigrants instead of a grin!

Yes, I know that the real Mr Farage’s face goes frothing-mad beetroot rather than deathly pale, but no fictional character could be as ludicrous as the real thing.


And if you’re up to a few minor supporting characters, even though they were too scared to appear in the story and bottled it…

David Cameron IS Two-Face

Hinting at ‘OUT’ to his Conservative Party members, reassuring he’s ‘IN’ to the public at large!

Ed Miliband IS the Riddler

What will his policy be? Search for Labour’s deviously concealed and indecipherable off-the-record briefing clues to see if you can work it out!


Riddle me this: is Mr Miliband already regretting running away from the debate and leaving the leadership of the whole progressive side of British politics to Nick Clegg because Ed was terrified of losing the racist vote? This morning’s off-the-record Riddler clue says that next year, anyway, he’d be happy to debate Nigel Farage as well as Nick Clegg, and accuses Two-Face of being cowardly. Which makes cowardly Mr Miliband pretty two-faced himself.

But riddle me that: if all the other three Leaders are willing to debate each other before the 2015 General Election, and Mr Cameron tries to run away, will that any longer be enough to stop the debates happening? As of this week, the broadcasters – LBC, Sky and BBC all helping stage the two European debates – have accepted the precedent that if a Party Leader, even the Prime Minister, is invited to a debate but too frit to show up, they can go ahead anyway and just leave him looking like the cowardly bottler he is.

So if Mr Cameron thinks he’s got a veto on the Leaders’ Debates… Toss a coin. (Two-)Heads, it’s an empty chair for the frit PM.

Labels: Batman, British Politics, Conservatives, European Politics, Labour, Leaders' Debate, Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, Pictures, UKIP

What to do on not blogging much for a few months? Follow the practice of so many worn-out artists and put together a ‘greatest hits’ package! So, below, you can find links to my best six (ish) articles of the last year on politics, Doctor Who and several other subjects. You can scroll straight down to that – but if you’re interested in Liberal Democrat blogs, I’ve also followed Jonathan Calder in developing a few ideas on how to revive the Lib Dem Blog of the Year Awards after this year’s moribund turn. I’ve even, perhaps unwisely, made a pledge…

Brighton and the BOTYs 2012

Cast your mind back, if you were there, to Lib Dem Conference in Brighton this September; if you weren’t, imagine a fluffy Liberal habitat suddenly turned into a big scary security theatre with all the unintended consequences of giving in to police accreditation. No, not all the civil liberties implications or the threat to trans people – we’d all expected those – but exactly what happened to the happy-go-lucky relaxed atmosphere and boosts to the town. Like drunken late-night walkers trying to go their usual way home encountering a wall of steel and machine-gun-wielding police officers barking at them to cross the road, pronto. Or the way that, as the main Conference Hotel was within the secure zone alongside the Conference Centre, suddenly none of the Lib Dem or media bigwigs could bring in their usual outside shags move to insert and renumber by building community relations and stimulating the local economy. For me, I found myself having to hold my tongue as Twitter joke trial-style comments ran through my head on seeing a Famous Media Git being held by armed police ahead of me. Then my shoes – with orthotic soles to help my malfunctioning feet – setting off the alarms and trying not to squeak, ‘I’m not Rosa Klebb!’

But there remained at least one little oasis of fluffitude. Bloggers and blog-readers were to be found attending this year’s Liberal Democrat Blog of the Year Awards, always a highlight of Conference. Well-deserved (if delayed) congratulations to Liberal Youth’s The Libertine and their Bears for Belarus campaign, to Lanson Boy Alex Folkes and to Mark Thompson (and commiserations, particularly, to Caron Lindsay). And a good evening was had by all that were there… It’s just that, in other aspects, this year’s evening felt rather diminished.

It wasn’t those excellent winners, nor the other excellent shortlistees, that gave me pause for thought. The element of disappointment was largely created in advance, and as a result turnout was very low by comparison to other years – not terrible, and worth having, sure, but it looked like less than half the size of previous crowds. The BOTYs have almost always been packed out before, and often in rather larger rooms, while this year the room was more empty than full. There were surely many reasons, but high among them must be the air of ill-preparedness: the late opening of nominations; the near-non-publication of shortlists; the speakers giving the awards giving the impression that they were being asked in the room itself. From the organisers out into the blogosphere and the wider Lib Dems, it was as if everyone was tired of the awards and had simply lost interest. This just isn’t sustainable. Fortunately, there are ways to get them going again.

Jonathan Calder’s Plan For Fresher BOTYs

Lib Dem blogfather Jonathan Calder, of course, beat me to writing about the problem with the BOTYs by a long stretch with his call Time to freshen up the Blog of the Year awards, although he was with the crowd in not being one of the very small crowd at this year’s BOTYs. I don’t agree with every single word – I’m not quite so worried by the declining number of active blogs as a metric, as it’s by a rather smaller share than the party’s membership – but his main thrust is persuasive.

Jonathan argues that there should be awards for Facebook and Twitter use, to reflect changing online activity. Perhaps perversely, I’m not on Facebook (being notoriously rubbish at keeping up with writing or messages, and finding my existing social networking quite enough to fall behind with) but strongly agree with him on a regular Lib Dem Facebook award category, whereas I am on Twitter (short flurries of high activity, long weeks of occasional glances) but suspect that’s not a good idea. Or, rather, that it’s a good idea but a bad practicality. In concept, Twitter use should be recognised, but in practice I don’t see how it could work, even if BOTY judges were involved for a much longer and more active period than they ever have been before.

For me, though, Jonathan’s crucial point is on the “Best Posting of the Year” Award, and what its absence this year meant for entrants. With most categories limited to particular types of blogger, as Jonathan pointed out, “then the Blog of the Year award itself is your only hope”. Like Jonathan, I’ve been nominated for that award a few times but never won it; like Jonathan, I much preferred the award for the best individual post (which I was also nominated for several times, and won last year). As far as I’m concerned, a blog should have to be bloody good to win the Blog of the Year, and it would be daunting to put yourself forward for it. In my own case, the only time I thought my blog worthy of a nomination I wasn’t shortlisted (and on one occasion that I was, I was simply embarrassed, having felt I’d had a weaker year and that much better blogs had been overlooked). But while my blog is inconsistent and often largely inactive for a month or two, I do feel proud of the odd post, and am very happy to put some of them up for consideration. And Jonathan is right that a lot of people feel the same way – not ‘Help! I have to have produced twelve months of reliable production and brilliance!’ but, ‘Phew, I may not always have kept it up, but this one was really good’. This isn’t just an award for ‘lazy’ bloggers – it’s the one everyone could have a shot at (or that critics might argue that’s most obviously about quality rather than ‘my mate’).

And it’s bizarre that, in the week that the Government announced the scrapping of GCSEs and putting every pupil’s eggs in one basket with single exams alone, the BOTYs shifted to nothing but continuous assessment with no room for one-offs. If nothing else, isn’t it easier for judges to read single nominated posts than to study a full year’s output?

I’ve also written this piece because Jonathan names and shames me:

“…the award for the best posting of the year has disappeared. This was, in many ways, this was the best category of all – in particular because every blogger had some hope of winning it. And also because, until a couple of years ago (which appears to be a developing theme in this post), Alex Wilcock encouraged members of an email [list] to which most prominent Lib Dem bloggers were subscribed to nominate their best posts of the year.

“I urge the Lib Dem Voice editors to bring this category back and use their site to encourage all of our bloggers to nominate their favourite posts. This would allow even the newest bloggers to have some involvement with the awards and make it closer to what it should be – a carnival of Liberal Democrat blogging.”

Jonathan does indeed have me bang to rights. I will, however, accept my share of the blame on condition that I can protest that some of the blame lies in the organisation. The Blog of the Year Awards are held in mid-September; in previous years, the shortlists were opened in mid-July. That’s crept later and later, until this summer the awards were thrown open on August 29th. That’s simply too late – and, for me, the biggest single reason why this year’s BOTYs were a comparative flop. Very little time for discussion amid the wider blogosphere; very short deadlines, and very little time for the judges to confer; and then no time at all for the shortlistees to have their moment in the sun.

In previous years, nominations closed at the end of August and shortlists were published in early September, giving weeks for many different blogs to get attention and celebration and, as the BOTYs are intended, to give “a fun way to celebrate the talent in the Lib Dem blogosphere, whilst introducing you to some blogs you might not have read before”. This year the shortlists were published on September 22nd – just two hours before the awards were given out. They may as well have skipped straight to the winners, for all the attention the shortlistees could get. No wonder so few people turned up. Then, after the awards, though this surely isn’t down to LDV, in previous years all the shortlistees for the main award – not just one “Blogger of the Year” – got to interview the Leader. Nick might be happier with a one-to-one, but that’s not the point; that was to engage more people, more styles, more perspectives.

My BOTYs Pledge: Start Early and I’ll Help

I’m not pointing my finger at anyone bar myself for any one particular failure this year. The whole thing looks more like a classic example of organisational inertia, probably coupled with individual exhaustion, in that I’m certain it wasn’t the fault of any one person – though some share of fault may lie with some of the LDV team leaving it to just one busy person to organise everything. Please, all of you at Lib Dem Voice, do a better, wider, earlier job next year. If none of you are going to be able to spare the time, don’t leave it ’til the last minute and produce another disappointment. What’s the point? If you need to, publish an appeal in June for people to help with the organisation and be allocated tasks come July (reader, please make a note in your diary and volunteer).

Another change I’d recommend to Lib Dem Voice is to use your extra time and extra organisers to make much better use of your BOTY judges. In his article, Jonathan explains that, having been a judge, in his year the judges were given no idea how the shortlisting process worked, agreed no criteria and, indeed, had no contact with each other, let alone discussion. Other former judges have told me that their contribution consisted only of firing numbers into the ether by way of voting, which seems to have been an uninvolving and unsatisfying experience. Surely there can be a happy medium between that and having to meet up for a banquet with wigs. If nominations go back to opening earlier, they can close earlier and give the judges at least, say, a week to have a few email exchanges on what they think of different nominations. Perhaps the Lib Dem Voice editors might each month also ask Ryan of Lib Dem Blogs Aggregated to give them a list of the latest people added to the Bloggregator so that a list of eligible “new blogs” can be published when nominations are opened, as that’s the award for which it’s most difficult to spot the potential nominees (and how about giving that category a thirteen-month span each year, from August to August, as people who start their blog while nominations are open tend to get missed out).

I’m notoriously disorganised and unable to meet deadlines, so you might think I’m calling for volunteers in the sure and certain hope that I shouldn’t be one of them. But I will make one pledge by way of help.

If Lib Dem Voice gets its act together and opens nominations at least a week before the end of July, and if they reinstate the award for the best individual post, then I will write a piece for them publicising it in the first week of August. I will pick at least a dozen articles from at least a dozen different blogs from across the year that I think are among the best and plug them in the style that I pick my own below. I will include an appeal for everyone else to come up with their own suggestions, both in the comments and by email to me. And a week before nominations are due to close, I will write another article for LDV, this time rounding up everyone else’s suggestions. Though obviously it would mean I’d be less likely to be shortlisted – gasp – it would be one way to celebrate the talent in the Lib Dem blogosphere and introduce people to more blogs.

In the last month so far, though several posts have stuck with me, the one that I’ll definitely put up for an award is, ironically, one that I’d recommend not in the best individual post category but The Andrew Reeves Award for Best use of social media/campaigning by a Liberal Democrat: Jennie Rigg’s outstanding effort in putting questions to over a hundred candidates for this year’s Liberal Democrat Federal elections. Even if LDV ignores everything I’ve written, I will be nominating Jennie.


Now on to my own choices for my own best posts from September 2011 to September 2012 – which the eagle-eyed reader will realise are all ineligible for next year’s BOTYs even if they take my advice and bring back the individual post award, so read them for fun, or for thought, but not for any awards…

Six of the Best 2011-12: Politics

Happy Birthday to the Libera-Tory Coalition?

Last week we hit the half-way point of this Parliament (fixing that was at least one piece of constitutional reform); back in May, I looked back at the first two years of the LiberaTory Coalition, and how even at its founding we expected to have a terrible time of it. I called it “the worst possible time to take power”; Vince said “It’s going to be bloody awful.” So it’s not been fun, but it’s not been a surprise.

“I am a Liberal and I am against this sort of thing” – Time To Remember What We Stand For

Rising up against Labour-style cyber-snooping powers from the Coalition – otherwise, what’s the point? There’s a big difference between having to choose painful cuts because Labour destroyed the economy, and choosing authoritarianism (which is more expensive, too). With some necessary reminders of our Liberal history.

Government Porn Filter Collapses In Security Nightmare

Few things make me more likely to despair of the Coalition than when they come up with authoritarian bollocks like Labour never lost. This summer they proved why they shouldn’t be trusted with controlling the internet: even the consultation was a disaster.

A New Purpose for Politics? Is It Bollocks

A revolt against Lib Dems who think our big idea should be Blairite micro-managing people’s lives for their own good. No, no, and no.

Never Mention “STV” Again

After the disaster of the AV referendum, to prepare for the fight on the real thing, why not champion “British Proportional Representation” and make a broad appeal beyond Lib Dem wonks?

Things To Remember About Labour

I remember so many things to dislike about the last Labour Government that it comes as a surprise how many people imagine it as some noble fantasy. Ever eager to help, I wrote five mostly short pieces on Things To Remember About Labour. I might even return to the series at some point… After all, I’ve not even written about their destroying the economy yet. Or their obeying every order from Rupert Murdoch. Or Iraq.

• Anything new the Labour Party claims they’d do if only they were in government now? It’s a great big lie. They had a booming economy and absolute power for thirteen years – so if they gave a flying fuck about it, they’d have done it.

• In thirteen years of authoritarian government, the Labour Party inflicted 4,400 new laws on the UK – more than any other government in British history.

• Labour opposed every single move towards Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender equality before they were for it.

• Labour sucked up to the super-rich, took bribes from the super-rich, and slashed taxes for the super-rich – while doubling tax on the lowest-paid.

• The Labour Government promised Lords reform, but delivered a House of Cronies stuffed with Labour appointments, and ignored House of Commons votes for an elected Upper Chamber.
  

Since then: while Lib Dems are in Coalition with the more moderate part of the Conservative Party, Labour went into coalition with the frothing far right of the Tories to be anti-Europe, just as they did over Maastricht twenty years ago, just as they did over Hong Kong, just as they did over Lords reform, and so on, and so on, shameless opportunist knee-jerk authoritarians that they are; John Kampfner, too, has noticed how Labour is to the far right of the Coalition; and Mark Pack has pointed out the biggest difference between the Coalition and the Labour Party – when the USA asked the UK’s help in arming up for a potential war on another Middle Eastern country, this government said no.

Six of the Best 2011-12: Doctor Who

DVD Detail – Doctor Who: UNIT Files Box Set

I’ve not written many DVD reviews in the last year, but this one’s a doozy. Taking on Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen in two very flawed but strangely moreish stories, complete with the deepest political analysis they’ve ever been subjected to and my own exclusive, ambitious (and absurd) photos at the original locations. KKLAK!

DVD Detail: Doctor Who – The Trial of a Time Lord: The Mysterious Planet

Now that Colin Baker’s a TV star all over again, take another look at one of his finest performances as the Doctor. It may have seemed like a trial up against Michael Jayston, but it could have been worse – it could have been Nadine Dorries…

DVD Detail: Doctor Who – Paradise Towers

Traditional Doctor Who often includes fascistic guards, killer robots and ancient evil struggling to awaken, but the brilliance of this 1987 Sylvester McCoy tale was to combine these elements not on a shiny spaceship or in a stylised English village but within an insane sit-com run by Richard Briers, clashing youth gangs against Mary Whitehouse types and bureaucracy gone mad in a run-down tower block. Result!

DVD Detail: Doctor Who – Kamelion Tales

Peter Davison’s Doctor battles Anthony Ainley’s Master in this DVD box set of two Doctor Who stories set in the gorgeous locations of a medieval castle and the island of Lanzarote. Which of the Doctor’s companions will remove the most clothes? Which of them will announce that he’s not a naughty boy, but the messiah? And will Magna Carta die in vain?

Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons

Celebrating Doctor Who novelist supreme Terrance Dicks with one of his earliest and best-loved books, introducing the Master and bringing back the Autons. And deadly daffodils.

Doctor Who and the Dæmons and Barry Letts

More Master, more Pertwee better on the page, and this time looking at Terrance’s partner in crime, the late Barry Letts and his gorgeous novelisation of the Doctor versus the Devil (or is it?). Complete with an argument about science. No, religion. No, science!

Six of the Best 2011-12: Other Reviews

The Avengers – My Wildest Dream

Marking the passing of marvellous actor Philip Madoc and brilliant director Robert Fuest, I took a look at their work together in this outstanding Avengers episode of mind-bending murder for The Manchurian Capitalist (also featuring Peter Vaughan, Edward Fox and John Savident). Not the comic-strip, billion-dollar movie The Avengers, by the way, though my next two choices are – sort of – movie crossovers…

Judge Dredd – The Complete Case Files 01

Celebrating 2000AD’s thirty-fifth birthday by going back to the start with this chunky 300+ page reprint volume, taking in the whole first year of the grim future law officer who’s still their star, Judge Dredd. I thought the movie worked, too. If you feel like picking up one of these volumes, Judge Dredd The Complete Case Files 02 and 05 are probably the best, though biased towards ‘epic’ stories.

Wholly Unavailable On DVD Batman!

Batman going all fascist at the box office this year may be true to the character, but I prefer Adam West’s camp mid-’60s TV version. Shame you can’t get it on DVD, but I took a look at its high and low points in ITV4’s constant repeat rotation. Try it today!

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen

On the publication of Boneland, Alan Garner’s return half a century later to his writing on Alderley Edge, I looked back at what his first book meant to me. Since then, I’ve been inspired to read many more books touching on the legend of King Arthur, and might even write about some of them…

Sherlock Holmes – Murder By Decree

Who couldn’t love a Sherlock Holmes–Jack the Ripper conspiracy theory mash-up? Well, that would be me. Going into just why this still critically acclaimed movie doesn’t do it for me (give me the schlockier A Study In Terror any day).

Why The Avengers Matters

Celebrating fifty years of the most Sixties show of the Sixties, not just because it was fun but because, unexpectedly, it mattered – from the day it introduced viewers to Honor Blackman as an intelligent, independent woman who flung men over her shoulders. And proving that not all the best ones are big ones.



I hope you enjoyed all of those (or at least some of them). I’d also like to thank Stephen Tall for doing a better job plugging my writing than I did. Not only did he label my Happy Birthday to the Libera-Tory Coalition? a “must-read” post, but he turned one of my comments on Lib Dem Voice into a post of his own:

The Alex Wilcock Realpolitik argument for Nick Clegg staying as Lib Dem Leader





Richard also follows on with a plea for well–thought-out blogging in Don't Dumb Down Our BOTYs!



NB Blogger, frustratingly, converted my line breaks past a certain point into simple spaces. If the formatting looks a bit dodgy, I edited the html by hand several times and it wasn’t having it. Even splitting the post in two didn’t help. Pasting in break commands everywhere, and multiples between sections, eventually stopped the last third being one giant splat of text – and though the gaps don’t look regular, though they should, now I don’t dare touch it again.

Labels: Batman, Best of Love and Liberty, Blogs, Coalition, Colin Baker, Doctor Who, Judge Dredd, Liberal Democrat Conferences, Personal, Reviews, The Avengers, The Golden Dozen, Things To Remember About Labour

A US political thriller from the early ’60s with Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton and Burgess Meredith, if you were watching BBC2 this time last week you’d have caught Otto Preminger’s Advise and Consent. It’s a gripping film, but always blurs in my mind with Franklin Schaffner’s The Best Man from two years later (either side of the far more famous The Manchurian Candidate). While one was written by a conservative and the other by a liberal, they’re remarkably similar in outline: Henry Fonda wants to get a high position; a secret from his past; a dying President; and gay blackmail. Both are strong films, if not stunning – the former more interesting, more complex and shaded in its characters, the second more black and white (though they’re both, in fact, monochrome) but more coherent and driven. They were both unusual in their inclusion of homosexuality at the time – though as a shameful secret, of course – and in their political corruption, though both are more ‘moral’, more hopeful about the system, than the ’70s glum, paranoid conspiracy movies that Frankenheimer’s ’60s thrillers heralded.

Advise and Consent

“Fortunately, our country always manages to survive patriots like you.”

This is a tragedy of history; a dying President wants to secure his legacy by appointing a liberal intellectual Secretary of State who can negotiate for détente (before the term was in use) with the Soviets, but time is catching up with him and the history of everyone involved is creeping up on them. This one’s taken from a 1959 bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winner by Allen Drury, its title a reference to the US Senate’s role in confirming Presidential nominations, and the crucial candidate is Fonda’s Robert Leffingwell. The film’s key players, though, are really two wily old Senate hands, both from the same party (clearly the Democrats in both films, though unnamed in either, from the days when both parties were much broader churches though, as one old President confesses, still required to ‘talk Church’) but old opponents, the Majority Leader Walter Pidgeon and the cantankerous old conservative Charles Laughton, here in his final screen role, both of whom are willing to do rather more than make speeches to get their own way. Laughton’s Seab Cooley is a virulent anti-communist who sees Leffingwell as a fifth columnist and goes all-out to stop his appointment, both in fiery speeches and in far more dangerous gimlet-eyed observation and plotting. Pidgeon’s Majority Leader is an urbane fixer for his President with a more charming manner but no less ruthless an instinct. And the twin hand grenades tossing between them are the secrets that suddenly near exposure about Leffingwell and the idealistic junior Senator Brig Anderson, hand-picked to see the nomination go through but doing his job rather too conscientiously.

Burgess Meredith, always a terrifically watchable actor, later to find enduring fame as the ’60s Batman series’ Penguin, and aiding the film in muddying the novel’s more strident conservatism by his history as a leftist actor not long since Blacklisted, shows up at the nomination hearing here to explode Leffingwell’s past – testifying that, as young men, both were part of the same Communist cell. It’s a small but vital performance, jittery, passionate, lost; part sneak, part victim. And Leffingwell calmly blows him apart by proving each of his details wrong… Before confessing to the President that while the man may have misremembered names and places, his accusation was true. The President, though, is determined to wave this aside and keep pushing him, just as Cooley is now more determined than ever to push back. And, while from that point Fonda (in theory the focal point of the movie) fades curiously into the background, it’s after this that both push Senator Anderson too far.


Don Murray is excellent as Brig Anderson, a young, handsome, upright Mormon who has details of Leffingwell’s Communist past thrust on him… And is then blackmailed in turn for his love affair with another man back when he was in the army. There are some implications, perhaps to make him more favourable to the audience or the censor, that he was only ‘situationally homosexual’ – but it seems to me that there are more than enough hints about his “unexciting marriage” to suggest that he was merely doing what so many gay men did then, and some still do, particularly if seeking political office. This was the first US film to show a gay bar – seedy and shameful, of course, and his literally tossing his ex-lover into the gutter where he belongs! is hardly pro-gay, not to mention then following the traditional plotline for all fictional gays of the time, and yet Brig is handsome, honest and more moral than anyone else in the film, none of which are attributes commonly associated with the Hollywood homosexual (even today, if you can find any). He’s a remarkable contrast with the film’s boo-hiss character – not the Alger Hiss character, that’s Fonda’s – the slimy, blackmailing Left-McCarthy Senator Van Ackerman, who in an interesting choice comes over much more as the cowardly thin streak of nothing that characters coded as gay were portrayed as, while it’s sexy, hairy-chested gay Brig who’s the butch one (the poster, above, bizarrely airbrushes him into a plucked chicken).

Part of the appeal of this film is that it doesn’t pull its punches – but also that it’s more complicated than the headlines allow. The only really despicable character is Van Ackerman, and I suspect he’s the closest to Allen Drury’s original conception: on the one hand, he’s there to scream that people who want to do business with the commies are nasty, unprincipled, untrustworthy and probably misled; on the other, it’s not difficult to see the evil McCarthy figure being one of the far left as Drury protesting too much, while through Twenty-First Century eyes the liberal being the extreme gay-baiter brings a wry smile against a Republican field for which the entry fee is strident homophobia. Perhaps the film’s intriguing balance and layers of character and politics are down to director Preminger’s occasionally deflecting the original text, whether through casting or slight plot changes – and the gay character being a Mormon, too, suggests for US politics today a less black and white approach than many would want to believe (the real-life model, incidentally, was the blackmailing by his fellow Senators of Lester Hunt of Wyoming over his gay son). And if you want a few entertaining incidental details, watch out for the minor Senators – not least an ancient old man who was a real five-term Senator, and a sparkling young woman who, yes, really is Betty White…

The Best Man

“It’s not that I mind you being a bastard. It’s that you’re a stupid bastard.”

Franklin Schaffner’s film has less complicated morals, a much more clean-cut ending and the disadvantage of coming second to Advise and Consent, both on the big screen and in Gore Vidal’s original play coming a year after the former’s book; it’s difficult not to think that it must, at least, have been aware of the crossovers with its predecessor. And yet it still manages to play for bigger stakes – not a Secretary of State, but a potential President – and by choosing Henry Fonda again, it has the confidence to face its critics right down, just as it has more balls-out models in American politics of the day. The central question here is who would make the best President between two candidates, and rather as if caught in Captain Kirk’s infamous transporter accident, one is liberal, moral, but vacillating, the other sexy, confident and a sociopath. But, the film and its aged President say, you need both intelligence and the killer instinct, so could the worst man be, politically, the best? And is this really more about who is the worst?

Henry Fonda’s William Russell here is a far less compromised character than his Robert Leffingwell – and far more his own man than a counter to be moved around between bigger players. Notably, rather than having literally vanished by the end of the movie as an illustration of his powerlessness, here he’s called on to make the crucial decisions and, eventually, makes one. And he’s no ex-Communist – instead, his opponent has got wind of a long-ago nervous breakdown, in some ways still more of a taboo for a political figure today than being gay is (and one that would explode in two Presidential elections’ time after the film was made). And, like the charming Senate Majority Leader in the first film, he’s having an affair – several of them, it seems – though, of course, as long as it’s a woman not your wife you’re involved with the club doesn’t seem to mind in either film, while even the suggestion of a man not your husband (or, worse, that is your husband) would be guaranteed to send voters screaming for the hills. Not that either film has many women, nor any who make an impact on the central plots – I’d wonder if there’s a deliberate subtext about the similarly homosocial environments of politics and the army, but I suspect it’s merely that in the early ’60s no-one in Hollywood or Washington bothered to think that women might make the decisions. At least Russell’s wife has some clout to her, though the ‘What women don’t like in a First Lady’ nagging activist is there only for stereotype and comic relief (when a similarly themed film was made in 2000, with Joan Allen as The Contender, note that the ‘slut-shaming’ is still directed against women, as with gays, and never at straight men who shag around, and whether she did or not). But it’s all the men who do the real machinations, from the jumpy public relations chief to the sharply observed “progressive liberal” Southern governor.


The most mesmerising figure here, though, is Cliff Robertson’s Joe Cantwell, Russell’s rival for the nomination. Apparently Vidal based Russell largely on Adlai Stevenson and Cantwell on Nixon, but while the Russell’s ‘philandering’ suggests a subtext of Kennedy for him, Robertson’s looks and charisma (and hawkishness) suggest a subtext of Kennedy for him, too, throwing sparks into what is plainly a Democratic Party in-fight. You may have seen him in later years as Spiderman’s Fonda-role-alike Uncle Ben (as well as another Batman villain in between); here, he’s terrifying, and when old President Art Hockstader pretty much tells him that with great power comes great responsibility, you can tell that the younger Robertson role doesn’t believe a word of it. It’s ironic that it’s Russell who has the documented mental health issues, as the one with the evident problem here is confident, blazing-eyed, even, Joe Cantwell, whose sociopathic inability to listen to other people extends even to not noticing Lee Tracy’s star turn old President telling him he’s dying.

And the gay plot? Again, this film chooses a simpler path, though the one that might have been expected to turn some of the audience to Joe Cantwell’s side then would ironically turn more stomachs four decades later – again, there’s the ammunition to blackmail him with stories of men shagging together when deprived of women in the army. Can Russell use this against him? Not because it’s anti-gay, you understand, but that blackmail even of that sort of thing makes him wring his hands. Try it, says the terrifying Cantwell in a twist; I have an alibi. Yes, I was named in the investigation into all those gays at that army base… But I wasn’t one of them. I was the one who accused them all. Back then, perhaps Gore Vidal was both ducking the censor by not having any actual ho-mo-sexuals and subtly trying to position the most strident homophobe as the villain; today, the first makes me think the film’s not as confident as it thinks it is, but the second explodes into making you think, this man’s really repellent. What a piece of Santorum.

Labels: American Politics, Batman, Bigotry, Film, Gay, Pictures, Reviews

Of all many incarnations of Batman, one of the best-known, best-loved, but most impossible to buy is the camp mid-’60s TV series starring Adam West and Burt Ward. While the spin-off movie’s available on DVD, you can’t buy any of the 120 episodes of the series itself (legal tangles? Embarrassment? Who knows). So if you ever want to get hold of it, right now’s the time to start. ITV4 is showing the whole lot daily, two episodes at a time, at 4ish in the afternoon and again at 10ish the next morning, from today. And some of it’s pretty good…

In the way of mostly-repeat TV stations, ITV4 finished showing the lot this morning with the rather fabulous penultimate episode and a slightly inadequate finale, so without any particular fanfare they’ve wound straight back to the beginning this afternoon. Last time they started the series, though, I was paying attention and have to admit that I’ve watched almost the full set, from the inspired to the drably repetitive. And to get you in the mood, their trailer makes me laugh.

The Dark Knight Re-Runs!

Now, I’m not a massive Batman fan, much less expert, though the character’s always been intriguing – from Adam West’s deadpan do-gooder to the near-psychotic, neo-fascist vigilante of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (well, at least he knows he’s a fascist; Superman just thinks he’s God). If you want detailed facts about comics and graphic novels, try Wikipedia and its references; if you want in-depth analysis, ask the brilliant Andrew Hickey (or, as my beloved suggests, try both at Hickeypedia! He’s auditioning to be the new Bat-Announcer). But this was one of the two Batman series I loved as a boy in late ’70s repeats, and though almost every iteration of Batman since then has been trying to get away from it and back to dark psychology, I still have a soft spot for it, and mainly, of course, the performances. Well, some of the performances…

Batman – The TV Series

Batman ran from 1966 to 1968 as an amazingly camp Pop Art comedy, and though it was so expensive that it was rapidly cancelled when it stopped being a hit, it was such a hit that it was remembered for decades, and spoofed in its turn (from The Avengers’ genius postmodern The Winged Avenger to The High Life’s Dunk, though Jon Pertwee’s Doctor inexplicably lacked the big exclamation billboards for his fight scenes).

Its incredibly formulaic nature was surely behind both its memorability and people getting tired of it: a teaser scene with helpless Commissioner Gordon ringing the Batphone, butler Alfred answering at Stately Wayne Manor and our heroes diving for the Batpoles; that horribly irresistible theme tune; the Caped Crusaders zooming to Police Headquarters from the Batmobile’s hidden entrance and instantly working out the clues that had stumped Gordon and improbably dense Oirish-utterancing Chief O’Hara; tracking the villains to their lair (usually a very large space with very big props and not much detail, getting increasingly Expressionist – or cheap – as the series went on); indulging in a fist-fight thrillingly punctuated by musical stings and impact-words only to be overcome by trickery and finish the episode hanging above the giant meat grinder, at which point the hysterical Bat-Announcer would tell us that “The worst is yet to come!” and to tune in again,

“Same Bat-Time! Same Bat-Channel!”

The second episode would follow much the same format, only starting with Batman brilliantly escaping certain doom (usually with the aid of a suspiciously relevant Grinder-Neutralising-Bat-Pellet from his Utility Belt) and closing with a fist-fight that isn’t overcome by trickery and a return to Stately Wayne Manor by the unfrocked Bruce and Dick to explain to Aunt Harriet exactly where they’ve been. Occasional triple-episode stories and the third season’s single episodes (closing not in an explicit “Next Time…” trailer but with one contained in the narrative, such as ‘Well, the Penguin will no doubt serve many years in gaol and the citizens of Gotham are safe once more… But look out of the window! Isn’t that the Joker crossing the street with a giant inflatable marmoset?’) followed much the same pattern at only varying length.

And, yes, when you put it like that, it could be said to lack diversity. But two things save it. A lot of it is very funny, aided by many of the lines, Alan Napier’s endearing Alfred (it’s always better when he suddenly gets a bigger role, not least impersonating Batman), and particularly Adam West, whose utter deadpan playing of the utter nonsense he gets to say is… Utterly sublime. He remains amazingly watchable. And while his grey bodystocking was much mocked, these days I find the benippled rubber queens of the later movies far more difficult to take seriously: comic-book costumes always look so much more stylish in comic books.

The other thing that saves the series is, of course, the villains, who supply almost all of its variety. There’s an almost total absence of character development: the third and final series introduces Batgirl, who’s at times a brilliant feminist move and at times, er, not, especially when listening to her special signature tune:

“Are you a chick who fell in from Outer Space?
“Or are you real, with a tender warm embrace?
“Yeah, whose baby are you, Batgirl, Batgirl?”

Somebody shoot them. But, as far as progress goes, that’s it. Ironically, the very first story stretches the format as far as it ever goes – hilariously for a series crammed with deadpan exposition, there’s no introduction nor concessions to anyone who’s never heard of Batman (save a brief mention by Bruce Wayne of his dead parents), and it dives straight in with everything established even down to Chief O’Hara’s endlessly repeatable:

“What idiots we are! Now, why couldn’t we have worked that out?”

The main business of this opening episode, Hey Diddle Riddle (concluded in Smack in the Middle, with most of the titles being inadequately punning rhyming couplets), is not a crime or heist of the sort that drives most of them, but a plot against Batman himself such as you’d have expected to find much later in the series: the Riddler tricks our hero into an unjustified attack; this Batman is so utterly square and law-abiding it hurts; these two elements crash together in a putative court case that Bruce Wayne will feel compelled to attend and blow his secret identity, lampshading the impossibility of uptight, upright vigilantism so that the subject need never come up again. “How I’ve waited for this,” the Riddler even gloats implausibly, knowing the audience will be as familiar with Batman as he is. And the episode goes straight to the nearest the series will get to a ‘bad’ Batman, as his drink is spiked and he dances the Batusi with naughty Jill St John before staggering towards the Batmobile and being prevented from driving after poor, kidnapped Robin by police officers who pronounce him “In no condition to drive” and don’t mention the Bat-Signal beaming from the roof of City Hall – “In his shape? Kinder not to tell him.” Even the Superman movies waited until Superman III, but by going as far as this on the first time out, the Batman series is telling us that it’s never going to go any further.

Who To Catch?

Frank Gorshin’s the Riddler gets the series off to a terrific start with his puzzles, manic giggle and eel-like physicality, and all the others pretty much have to match up to him. Many don’t. So if you’re only tuning in for random episodes, his are among the ones to look out for – he comes back several times in the first season, then briefly in the third (substituted once in between by The Addams Family’s John Astin; great Gomez, lousy Riddler).

Now, I’ve read very few Batman comics or graphic novels, and I know which villain obviously stood out in those – but in this TV series, the Batvillain’s crown goes to someone else. For me, you just can’t beat Burgess Meredith as the Penguin. Charm, humour, viciousness, that fabulously imitable squawk, his brilliant schemes to sail just within the law (The Penguin Goes Straight / Not Yet, He Ain’t)… Penguin is far and away the best Batvillain of the ’60s series. And though sometimes, as always, his material’s not up to it – his sudden murderous grudge against Batgirl leaves a nasty taste in the mouth – the story that strikes me as a particular favourite is the second season’s political parody Hizzonner the Penguin / Dizzoner the Penguin, in which he runs for Mayor. Not only did this clearly inspire the second of the ’80s / ’90s Batman movies (however much they tried to get away from the TV series, they kept coming back to it: Penguin for Mayor in Batman Returns; the Batman-Theme-themed Batdance in Batman; the sheer campery of two blatant gay couples with opposing fetishes of Batman Forever… You can keep Batman and Robin in the ’90s, though), but Penguin’s political chicanery is mercilessly funny, and he’s a much better campaigner than Mayor Linseed, Governor Stonefellow or relentlessly stiff Batman, to say nothing of poor Harry Goldwinner down at 2%. And that’s without the inspired mudslinging – ask yourself: who do you always see Penguin pictured with? Our fine, upstanding police officers. And Batman? Always with criminals! The multiple telephone offers in the tag scene always make me laugh, too. You might also look out for Penguin’s splendidly ridiculous extended intrigue involving a fake film, Batman’s kiss-in with Carolyn Jones’ Marsha, Queen of Diamonds (not to mention her ludicrous witch mother) and a tank made out of solid gold.

No-one tops Burgess Meredith; Frank Gorshin’s brilliant; but there are at least two strong runners-up. Victor Buono as King Tut is a huge performance in every sense, a mild-mannered Professor of Egyptology at Yale who becomes a megalomaniac Pharaoh every time he’s hit on the head, and deserves a special award as the only Batvillain to twice discover Batman’s secret identity (the scene in Commissioner Gordon’s office after the first time, when no-one believes Tut as he rolls his eyes and postmodernly says all the things the viewers do about how obvious it is, is priceless). The other is Catwoman, unquestionably the strongest of many strong female opponents, though slightly hampered by being the most prominent recasting among the Batvillains: mostly Julie Newmar; Lee Meriwether in the movie; Eartha Kitt at the end. All are fabulous, but Julie Newmar seems both genuinely dangerous and the most feline – well, excluding Eartha Kitt’s irresistible purr – with a compelling capriciousness and an erotic charge with Adam West that racist ’60s sponsors were not going to allow with Eartha Kitt (despite Batman slipping in a few under-the-Bat-Radar mentions to Robin of how attractive she is, in her absence).

Others to look out for include Joan Collins’ Siren, much of whose episodes appear to have been left on the cutting-room floor, and Vincent Price’s delightful, mercurial Egghead, as well as the lead villain from the penultimate episode, the eponymous The Entrancing Dr Cassandra. Ida Lupino’s Cassandra Spellcraft has a brilliant alchemical scheme to mount a mass escape from the “Arch Criminals Only” wing of Gotham State Penitentiary (warning: may not contain real Batvillains). The extras pretending to be the big villains and trying to avoid us seeing their faces are a scream, especially the one who really gets into playing Victor Buono. It’s a far more appropriate finale than the rather limp actual last episode of mind-reading at a health spa, despite that story’s guest villain Zsa Zsa Gabor. You get the feeling she’d have been better-employed as a “Batclimb” cameo in the previous year, sticking her head out of her hotel window to see the Dynamic Duo scaling the wall as the likes of Lurch, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Edward G. Robinson had done.

Who To Leave In the Care of Liberal Warden Crichton of Gotham State Penitentiary?

Cesar Romero as the Joker. Now, I know he’s the iconic Batvillain, and some of his episodes are very entertaining (if others are frightful), and Cesar Romero isn’t that bad, but… He’s just never good enough. The few Batman comics I’ve read – or Heath Ledger on film, or Mark Hamill in the more prestigious animated series – capture a seriously deranged, compelling match for Batman; this isn’t it. I mentioned two Batman series I loved as a boy, and the other reunited Adam West and Burt Ward in the animated The New Adventures of Batman (usually paired with the equally exciting Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle). A hasty viewing of a few YouTube clips tell me I should leave the series to my cheating memory (though I have to admit I’d still like to get hold of Tarzan), but its Joker firmly grabbed my attention as a cackling spectre in vivid white and green and with unnaturally pointed features. A, ah, mature man with a rather full face upon which – unforgivably, when I was a boy and still spotted it a mile off – he’s applied an acre of make-up to inadequately conceal his moustache, scampering around with nothing of the threat of Penguin or Catwoman… No. Heretical, I know, but simply not up to the job.

One particular low point for Cesar Romero’s Joker sticks in my mind (and throat) because it perfectly illustrates something the series tried several times and each time got toe-curlingly wrong – ’60s youth culture. Surf’s Up! Joker’s Under! features the Joker’s attempt to become surfing champion of Gotham City and so control all the young people. Words fail me (and effects fail them), though there’s a little fun to be had with Joker talking into his hotdog and Batman straight-facedly inviting him into the locker room. But it’s terrible, and though my learned friend Andrew will (as with everything in this article) know better, wasn’t it a little late to be trying to cash in on the Beach Boys? Milton Berle’s Louie the Lilac, too, was an OK performance and had a memorably grisly end (…or is it?), but another middle-aged (to be generous) man attempting to become the pin-up for Gotham’s youth, this time to dominate the flower people, was a major misjudgement. The only remotely plausible counterculture idol is Catwoman rabble-rousing the student population in Catwoman Goes to College (but absolutely not when she kit-naps the voices of a popular beat combo and has a kitty apprentice who sings, played by the producer’s niece in hope of a pop career. Oh, dear me, no). You can’t help thinking that, while studio executives wanted to cash in on the youth happening, they both misunderstood and feared it, always portraying rebellious or even remotely unconventional young people as wannabe patsies to some evil but more intelligent adult in repeated and wearisome exposés of the frightening commie truth behind hippies. See also Star Trek’s The Way to Eden, in which the young space hippies (communists) are manipulated by an evil intellectual (communist) and wind up dying (after rightly being warned off by the clean-cut, caring military) on the planet they imagine to be Eden because, subtly, the grass is acid (and fruits are deadly) – or, embarrassingly, the UK’s very own Carry On Camping, in which the team inexplicably stop cocking a snook at authority and become the grumpy old establishment killing off anyone’s fun. At least at the same time Doctor Who’s The Krotons may have said that student rebellion doesn’t work, but that they had much to rebel against, and the Doctor saves the day by dropping acid.

Getting one ’60s movement badly wrong brings me inexorably to Nora Clavicle and the Ladies’ Crime Club, in which Barbara Rush’s Nora Clavicle uses her push for women’s rights to remove all male crime-fighters and replace them with women police – who will spend all their time talking about lipstick and be terrified of her mechanical mice, leaving the city open. No, it wasn’t a horrible dream. Oh, the number of times Doctor Who nearly did the ‘Imagine how frightful it would be if the girlies were in charge?’ story and managed to pull back at the last minute… It seems almost every ’60s series somehow thought ‘The frightening truth behind women’s liberation’ would be hilarious (or terrifying). Even The Avengers succumbed, once. Don’t go there.

Two unimpressive Batvillains it’s easier to forgive are the simply dull Colonel Gumm and his fake stamp factory, even if he is played by Roger C. Carmel; he was probably designed not to take attention from heroic guest stars the Green Hornet and Kato (Bruce Lee!). At least, that’s a halfway plausible excuse. Similarly, with Frank Gorshin having left the series and before they tried (and failed) to recast the Riddler, Maurice Evans starred as the Puzzler (no relation, I’m legally obliged to say). A fine actor whether disturbing as Dr. Zaius in Planet of the Apes, camping it up in Bewitched or not-Winston-Churchill-honestly in my favourite The Man From U.N.C.L.E. film (I wish they’d release that on DVD, too; I don’t have a copy of One of Our Spies is Missing), he’s lost here as producers try to camouflage his Riddler-clone status by rolling dice on their table of villainous attributes and adding to his love of riddles puzzles the bonus character traits of ‘obsession with Shakespeare’ and with, er, ‘airplanes’. Which go together so well.

I won’t forgive Lord Marmaduke Ffogg of the three-part story visibly set in South California The Londinium Larcenies, The Foggiest Notion and Isn’t It Bloody Finished The Bloody Tower. Swinging London? The only swinging to hope for here is at Tyburn, as Dick Van Dyke runs past holding a Batsign reading, ‘See? I wasn’t so bad after all’. Though I’ll grant you that renaming “Fleet Street” as “Bleat Street” raised a momentary and unwilling smile. At least Art Carney’s execrable Archer was an affectation. Even Murder She Wrote in the pea-souper was better than this. With so many British actors on the show, what were they thinking in getting Rudy Vallee to mutilate his accent? Still less in inexplicably casting urbane George Sanders, of one of the most gorgeous voices in the world, as heavily Mittel-European Mr Freeze. No wonder he didn’t come back – Freeze was the only villain recast twice on the TV series, and never worked, whether a misused Sanders, Otto Preminger, or Eli Wallach (who at least looked like he was having fun. Maybe it was the cheque). And I’ve not even sneered at David Wayne, whose Mad Hatter and worse accent turned Batman’s cowl pink.


But I’m telling you the plot. Why not tune in, Bat-Channel ITV4, Bat-Time 4ish in the afternoon or 10ish in the morning on weekdays to enjoy them for yourself, and discover all the other villains I’ve not even mentioned? It’s just a shame it’ll take you three months to record your own home-made equivalent of a DVD box set.

Labels: American Politics, Batman, Bigotry, Carry On, Comedy, Comics, Patrick Troughton, Reviews, Star Trek, The Avengers

Tonight’s Avengers episode on BBC4 at 11.40 is one of the most memorable; perhaps not quite one of the best, but if you see it, you’ll remember it. Dark and threatening, knowing and colourful, and all enormous fun, this borrows both sides of Batman – the grim avenger of the comics, the caped campery of the TV series – and turns them into something that could only be The Avengers. It looks great, though to say that it doesn’t look entirely realistic… Well, even for this series, here is an incredibly stylised story that repeatedly bursts through the fourth wall.

Steed goes bird watching – Emma does a comic strip..

A couple of weeks ago, I was a little grudging towards the previous Avengers episode, the curiously lacklustre The Bird Who Knew Too Much. If you want an Avengers take on sinister birds, try this one instead; it’s far more creative and distinctive, and though also far more violent, the violence is of such a stylised nature that it’s far less unpleasant than an ordinary-looking man with a gun. I rather enjoy comic art, but even if you’ve never touched a graphic novel, you’ll recognise Batman here; you might also recognise such guest actors as Nigel Green, an impeccably British authority figure in many films of the time, or a young Colin Jeavons, later the oily whip Stamper in House of Cards. What really stands out about it, though, is the way it keeps reminding you that it’s a television programme – did you see the latest Life On Mars on Tuesday (if not, it’s the fifth episode of the second series, repeated next Tuesday on BBC4 just after the sixth one)? It was a brilliant piece of television, and more like The Winged Avenger than pretty much anything else in the forty years in between, from the stupendous opening Camberwick Green scene to the climax as Sam, in a coma within a coma (probably), watches the other officers in danger against the villain on a TV set inside his head. When the grainy shot that’s on Sam’s TV melts into exactly the same shot in ‘reality’, it echoes the most extraordinary sequence in tonight’s Avengers as, about forty minutes in, the episode switches from the relatively normal ‘mysterious killer’ plot to showing exquisitely drawn pieces of comic artwork fading into exactly the same frame of film of what’s happening for ‘real’…

The rest of this is hurriedly being written before 11.40, but really, if the above doesn’t make you want to watch it, what will?

…OK, finished off now (a couple of hours and a tasty dinner later), so back to the start as the episode opens with a sinister, cloaked figure in rather outré silver boots approaching the office block headquarters of a major publishing firm, within which the ruthless owner is giving his son lessons in how to be a cold-hearted grasper. Before long, a faithful employee has been sacked, and the ruthless businessman torn to pieces by the grotesque claws of a bird-masked thing that has climbed up the side of his offices, to music that’s first ominous and then, in the Winged Avenger’s special four-note theme, positively strident. It’s an arresting opening, though perhaps seeing the man in the bird mask at the first murder isn’t the best strategic decision; much of the first half of the story makes valiant efforts to establish red herrings, or rather herons, but though regular viewers know that the early leads are frequently false ones, having already seen what’s doing the killing is a bit of a giveaway. ‘Mysterious’ news of other murdered businessmen in high places! Books of killer birds studied! Sir Lexius Cray and his falconer’s glove! All wasted, I’m afraid, but watch out for the moment about twenty minutes in when Mrs Peel finds out how this enigmatic killer has managed to scale the outer walls (spoiler coming up in a couple of paragraphs) and breaks the news to Steed, who’s been trying to puzzle it out with the aid of lovingly made models covered in flags and trajectory lines:

“Does it ruin your theories?”
“I have two possible alternatives. The murderer inflates a small balloon – he rises up the nearest building, he fires a rocket line across to the penthouse, he drops a trampoline, he bounces on it, in through the window. Possibility number one.”
“And possibility number two?”
“He bribes the doorman.”

I don’t want you to think the first half of the story isn’t enjoyable; it just has a few structural problems that undermine the tension. Still, along the way the scratches left by the huge claws are rather more graphic than you usually find in the series, and (though bloodless) the various deaths are pretty raw. With the Avengers a little ambiguous but definitely in some way working for law and order, such message as there is in the fairly basic what-or-who-dunnit plot is that they have little sympathy with either the killer or his victims. You’ll have spotted the story’s very broad critique of superheroes as scary vigilantes, but our heroes aren’t fans of the people they’re rushing to save either – at one point they work out who the next victim is going to be by looking in the paper for the day’s rapacious hate-figure and pretty much say, ‘He looks like the sort of complete bastard likely to be knocked off’. Meanwhile, the audience is even more in on the joke than usual, beginning with the ‘Avenger’ title and the first victims; they’re publishers who rip writers off and are mauled to death. Just a little bit of a wink, there. One of the first and best ‘fourth wall’ gags goes to Nigel Green, despite not having much to do as Sir Lexius. A mountaineer first seen with Mrs Peel on a rock face in howling wind and snow, looking as convincing as any ’60s studio set, the camera pulls back to show it’s built in his library and he just likes to keep in practice at home. All his acting ‘suspicious’ goes rather to waste, though at least he’s not as suspicious as his distracting manservant Tay-Ling. This is the least convincing ‘Oriental’ character outside of Benny Hill, with no make-up or any other facial resemblance to an actual Chinese actor; his presumed ethnic background is communicated entirely by the music, a set of false teeth and a feeble cod accent, of which the music isn’t too bad. I suppose a genuine Chinese actor wouldn’t have looked all that Tibetan or Nepalese either – it’s implied he’s from somewhere around the Himalayas – but at least they might have looked less like Nosferatu.

Steed and Emma’s look is rather better than Tay-ling’s – even the butler’s jacket-and-t-shirt ensemble is unflattering – and this week Mrs Peel definitely has the best time of it. She gets a couple of catsuits, a mustard-yellow and maroon one that doesn’t quite work but a vivid blue one with pink highlights that’s very striking, as well as a rich green jacket over a black top. Even the pink frock looks good. Steed has a more variable time; quite a nice navy pinstripe, and of course that grey suit with gold tie, but he spends altogether too much of the episode in a pond-slime-brown checked jacket that he really shouldn’t. But back to an outfit that’s important to the plot… In the absence of a giant killer bird, the murders turn out – gasp! – to be being committed by a man in a stylised bird costume, climbing walls with the aid of special magnetic boots, as invented by the eccentric (boy, does he try to be eccentric) Professor Poole. The Professor lives in a huge gothic pile at the top of a rather fabulously vertiginous set of stairs, and has a serious case of bird envy: he tries to do the calls; he tries to fly; he hangs upside-down from the ceiling. Yes, I know, they’ve forgotten that this is Batman ‘Birdman’ for a moment, haven’t they? He’s made the mistake of flogging his boots to someone ever-so-slightly unstable from the offices of Winged Avenger Enterprises, Britain’s premier judge, jury and executioner superhero until Judge Dredd came along ten years later (and he’s got an eagle on his shoulder, you know, so think on). Our heroes have also found copies of Winged Avenger comics at the scenes of the crimes, and noticed some of the splash frames of bodies ‘executed’ by the Avenger bear an uncanny similarity to the real dead businessmen. Could it be a coincidence? Of course not. Check your watch: ‘red herring time’ expired five minutes ago, along with the bloke on the duck shoot.

Ee-urp! The Secret Identity Revealed

The remainder of the story appears to be shaping up as ‘which of the Winged Avenger staff has gone bonkers in the nut’, and that’s not too tricky to spot. There’s Julian, who dresses in the costume and poses for the drawings (note: this is not, in fact, how comic artists work outside of The Avengers), but he’s too dull and has too few lines to be the villain; there’s Stanton the writer, who’s prissy, highly strung and on the edge of losing it – yes, the one with the ‘I’m so obvious it can’t be me’ sign from the Agatha Christie job lot hung round his neck; or there’s Arnie the artist, who seems completely in control but wants to abandon the successful partnership and take over in his own right. Almost as if he needs to decide everything in the world himself, from the story to life and death! Well, all right, the plot’s not a complex one even by Avengers standards, but here’s where the style really starts delivering. Not just the enormously entertaining variations on the word “Ee-urp!” (which like “KKLAK!” must be experienced rather than explained), but the gorgeous panels of artwork that suddenly become the stars of the show. They’re beautifully inked and coloured panels by the extraordinary Frank Bellamy, but it’s the way that among pictures of all the victims we suddenly see Professor Poole on the ’phone to Emma, then see him ‘really’ do just that, then his double-take at the claw coming into shot, which reverts back to artwork again… That’s what has a touch of genius about it. Forty minutes in and it’s suddenly hit creative overdrive with the way that, abandoning even the most meagre pretence of realism, Steed and Stanton start following the story by using impossible artwork as if it was CCTV. It looks absolutely fantastic, even if the drawn Emma going up the enormous stairs has a much bigger bum than Diana Rigg, or even her ‘double’ on location (though to be fair, the Winged Avenger outfit looks a lot more stylish in comic strip form than in fluffy costume).

“I am the eradicator of all evils. I deal out justice and vengeance to those whom the law cannot touch. And to those who stand between me and my purpose!”

Of course, much of this sounds like the job description of the Avengers themselves, and the title is a subtle clue to that line of commentary, but you can spot the difference: Arnie really only gets one scene to speak ‘in character’, and he’s rather less ‘diabolical mastermind’ than just maaaad. He does, however, threaten Mrs Peel in an upside-down fight after he’s finally revealed, and who can save her now? Well, usually she would herself, but those claws are jolly mean, so after a story of implying ‘that grim vigilante chap who hangs about dressed as a Bat; he may not be entirely stable’, and as it’s the mid-1960s, where else could it go for the grand finale than Adam Ward’s camp TV Batman? In dashes Steed, still holding those artwork panels, and uses them to batter Arnie before he can strike out. You’ll never guess what the boards have on them here, either. Oh! It turns out you have. Being hit by “POW!” “SPLAT!” and “BAM!” distract him sufficiently for Mrs Peel to be able to kick his legs away, and he plummets through the window to a music you might also be able to recognise (and it’s amazing the lawyers didn’t object to). All that remains is for Steed to draw a meal at Emma’s flat and convert it into reality, serving it with a “PING!” as she pops the champagne with a giggle. It’s a very satisfying end to a very stylish story, one that started well, fumbled several times as it went along, but teetered on the edge of genius as it veered unsteadily to its climax. Very funny, very silly and very good fun, this is a fitfully brilliant fusion of comic strip art and ’60s pop art. Just watch out for the day when Gordon Brown starts dressing up as a giant buzzard.

Labels: Batman, Comics, Reviews, Style, The Avengers, The Avengers Season 5