Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Doctor Who 45th Anniversary – Why Was 1990 Brilliant?
It’s the end of an era. With every year’s-worth of these nuggets I’ve aimed to say only positive things, but this year makes that difficult to manage: the BBC have cancelled the series and, though they aren’t admitting it, we know. In the books, Target are approaching their final novelisations too, but this year’s are not only of superb quality but, against all hope, herald something new. Survival is crisply written and evocative; Ghost Light intense and densely packed with detail; and in…
If there’s one second-hand Doctor Who novelisation to trace, it’s probably this one. Let’s hope the New Year brings a CD talking book of this, too. The DVD of the TV story is probably best-bought in the comprehensive Davros box set, where it boasts many impressive extras (and special effects) not seen on the original release.
It’s 11.59pm on the last day of the ‘real’ year, and that, of course, means that I’ve posted this through the magic of cheating several hours ago. With luck, Richard and I will now be in Cambridge, though probably not this time watching The Curse of Fenric. You never know, though. But if you think 1989-90’s end of an era means the end of Doctor Who…
Doctor Who – Remembrance of the Daleks
“For one vertiginous moment the Dalek Supreme wanted to skip.”Like one of the first Targets, this one of the last novelises an all-out action story and effortlessly beats it. Ben Aaronovitch’s stunning novel goes at a relentless pace (like its supercharged Daleks), but there’s still room for compelling emotion and extracts from never-written books.
If there’s one second-hand Doctor Who novelisation to trace, it’s probably this one. Let’s hope the New Year brings a CD talking book of this, too. The DVD of the TV story is probably best-bought in the comprehensive Davros box set, where it boasts many impressive extras (and special effects) not seen on the original release.
It’s 11.59pm on the last day of the ‘real’ year, and that, of course, means that I’ve posted this through the magic of cheating several hours ago. With luck, Richard and I will now be in Cambridge, though probably not this time watching The Curse of Fenric. You never know, though. But if you think 1989-90’s end of an era means the end of Doctor Who…
Labels: BBC, Books, Cambridge, Doctor Who, Reviews, Sylvester McCoy, The Master, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Arc of Infinity
From the sublime to… Oh, dear. Much of ’80s Who uses the past intelligently or fashions its own myths, often with considerable style. This, though, fails on almost every level. The Doctor returns again to his home planet but the ideas, the plot, the actors and design each seem drained of all life. The ancient founder of the Time Lords, who turned up in a story ten years earlier, comes back as the villain purely to have a villain come back, and wants to take over the Doctor’s body so he can live again. The plot doesn’t sound altogether bad, possibly because you can probably think of several better stories it’s already turned up in, but it’s done in such a lifeless way you wonder why they bothered.
Almost everything in the story has been done before, with conscious attempts to echo The Deadly Assassin – with the Time Lords’ planet no longer a techno-medieval cathedral but an airport lounge, and all the wit, satire and bitchiness replaced by actors taking it terribly, terribly seriously, never moving, never looking at each other and boring the pants off you. There’s a council chamber evidently based on the House of Commons but with only one side – because the other side’s where the cameras are – which means that people address the ‘Speaker’ at stiff right angles to him for no reason at all. When it’s not in a sci-fi café corridor, other bits take place in Amsterdam, for no very engaging reason. Even the music, often beautiful in early ’80s Who, is dreadful.
The story desperately tries a bit of The Quatermass Experiment / An American Werewolf in London-style horror, but has a fatal lack of atmosphere (and, assisted by the Amsterdam setting, in its early parts more resembles a gay porn film. No, do your own Googling to find out where I’ve explained that in detail). There’s barely a single good line in it, with everyone speaking sonorous clichés or spouting acres of tedious made-up science (Richard points out that some of the science is actually real, but would take half an hour to explain so it was any use, rather than throwing it away in a sentence and expecting anyone without a degree in theoretical physics to spot the difference from the other bits). Perhaps the most infamous moment is the man who, when the mysterious killer points a gun at him, looks faintly curious and tells the audience what kind of gun it is before being shot down, rather than any even faintly natural response – such as, say, screaming or ducking. The audience knows it’s a gun, and giving it a made-up name tells them nothing else of any use; you’d think even the most flat-footed whodunit might contrive to have the victim say something along the lines of “What are you doing here?” to unsubtly convey that the killer is, gasp, known to him. Having the victim recognise the made-up make of gun instead somehow lacks the same dramatic impact. As the type of gun is never mentioned again, it's not even relevant to the plot, unlike a dreadfully improbable ‘clue’ that turns up later on. The script confuses ‘ideas’ with ‘jargon’ and ‘complex’ with ‘pointlessly complicated’ (to the extent that even the hardened fans watching it last week wondered what was going on), and the way it’s presented on screen does nothing to save it. Despite ornate costumes – though the ‘monster’ is cruelly but not unfairly known as the ‘anti-matter chicken’ – and rare shooting abroad, it somehow also contrives to look especially cheap, when it's aiming to be epic.
It’s one of the few times when Doctor Who displays no imagination at all, and merely tries to ‘do Doctor Who’. That’s a fatal mistake, and fortunately one the series didn’t make very often; you’re far more likely to have Doctor Who make the ordinary world seem strange and unsettling than an alien world seem like the blandest of wine bars. If there’s an underlying theme, it’s that you can’t go back – but that would be so ironic for a story that gorges so much on nostalgia that no room’s left for anything else that it has to be accidental. It would certainly display greater wit than is available in the script.
It does have three saving graces, though, in its guest cast. While several good actors (and other bad ones) vanish almost entirely under the disposability of their dialogue – in theory, Leonard Sachs is playing the same politician left in charge at the end of Assassin, but the character’s so forgettably inoffensive here that it’s impossible to recognise him as a proto-Urquhart – at least Michael Gough is always diverting, even when he’s ‘in disguise’, his voice treated to sound like Perky and doing most of his acting with a pen. Ian Collier’s villain has a gruff rumble and some charisma, even genuine pathos towards the end, though his mostly rather stylish costume is undermined by its tendency to light up; when he gyrates, a light flashing above his groin, “Danger, danger, high voltage!” was the most printable of the comments made in Cambridge. And finally there’s Colin Baker, later cast as the Sixth Doctor, in the sort of ‘unfeasibly comic opera guard’ that’s forgettable in so many stories. Not here. When Colin was the Doctor, he was sometimes the only watchable thing on screen, and never more so than here, as he camps it up outstandingly in a scarlet uniform with an enormous plume. With most of the lines and most of the cast seemingly made of wood, it’s as if he’s acting for two, or perhaps twenty-two, and at least he doesn’t bore you.
Watching these two together showed Doctor Who at its most stunningly original, then at its most dully derivative. Unsurprisingly, one of these stories is strongly rumoured to be released on DVD soon. Considerably more surprisingly, it’s Arc of Infinity. Sigh.
If you’re a Lib Dem reader and have got this far, first, well done, have a chocolate button, and second, if you want to know what all the fuss is about for me and Doctor Who, look here. Conversely, if you like Doctor Who and want to get inside my head about Liberalism, click here. They’re nearly the same. But not quite.
Almost everything in the story has been done before, with conscious attempts to echo The Deadly Assassin – with the Time Lords’ planet no longer a techno-medieval cathedral but an airport lounge, and all the wit, satire and bitchiness replaced by actors taking it terribly, terribly seriously, never moving, never looking at each other and boring the pants off you. There’s a council chamber evidently based on the House of Commons but with only one side – because the other side’s where the cameras are – which means that people address the ‘Speaker’ at stiff right angles to him for no reason at all. When it’s not in a sci-fi café corridor, other bits take place in Amsterdam, for no very engaging reason. Even the music, often beautiful in early ’80s Who, is dreadful.
The story desperately tries a bit of The Quatermass Experiment / An American Werewolf in London-style horror, but has a fatal lack of atmosphere (and, assisted by the Amsterdam setting, in its early parts more resembles a gay porn film. No, do your own Googling to find out where I’ve explained that in detail). There’s barely a single good line in it, with everyone speaking sonorous clichés or spouting acres of tedious made-up science (Richard points out that some of the science is actually real, but would take half an hour to explain so it was any use, rather than throwing it away in a sentence and expecting anyone without a degree in theoretical physics to spot the difference from the other bits). Perhaps the most infamous moment is the man who, when the mysterious killer points a gun at him, looks faintly curious and tells the audience what kind of gun it is before being shot down, rather than any even faintly natural response – such as, say, screaming or ducking. The audience knows it’s a gun, and giving it a made-up name tells them nothing else of any use; you’d think even the most flat-footed whodunit might contrive to have the victim say something along the lines of “What are you doing here?” to unsubtly convey that the killer is, gasp, known to him. Having the victim recognise the made-up make of gun instead somehow lacks the same dramatic impact. As the type of gun is never mentioned again, it's not even relevant to the plot, unlike a dreadfully improbable ‘clue’ that turns up later on. The script confuses ‘ideas’ with ‘jargon’ and ‘complex’ with ‘pointlessly complicated’ (to the extent that even the hardened fans watching it last week wondered what was going on), and the way it’s presented on screen does nothing to save it. Despite ornate costumes – though the ‘monster’ is cruelly but not unfairly known as the ‘anti-matter chicken’ – and rare shooting abroad, it somehow also contrives to look especially cheap, when it's aiming to be epic.
It’s one of the few times when Doctor Who displays no imagination at all, and merely tries to ‘do Doctor Who’. That’s a fatal mistake, and fortunately one the series didn’t make very often; you’re far more likely to have Doctor Who make the ordinary world seem strange and unsettling than an alien world seem like the blandest of wine bars. If there’s an underlying theme, it’s that you can’t go back – but that would be so ironic for a story that gorges so much on nostalgia that no room’s left for anything else that it has to be accidental. It would certainly display greater wit than is available in the script.
It does have three saving graces, though, in its guest cast. While several good actors (and other bad ones) vanish almost entirely under the disposability of their dialogue – in theory, Leonard Sachs is playing the same politician left in charge at the end of Assassin, but the character’s so forgettably inoffensive here that it’s impossible to recognise him as a proto-Urquhart – at least Michael Gough is always diverting, even when he’s ‘in disguise’, his voice treated to sound like Perky and doing most of his acting with a pen. Ian Collier’s villain has a gruff rumble and some charisma, even genuine pathos towards the end, though his mostly rather stylish costume is undermined by its tendency to light up; when he gyrates, a light flashing above his groin, “Danger, danger, high voltage!” was the most printable of the comments made in Cambridge. And finally there’s Colin Baker, later cast as the Sixth Doctor, in the sort of ‘unfeasibly comic opera guard’ that’s forgettable in so many stories. Not here. When Colin was the Doctor, he was sometimes the only watchable thing on screen, and never more so than here, as he camps it up outstandingly in a scarlet uniform with an enormous plume. With most of the lines and most of the cast seemingly made of wood, it’s as if he’s acting for two, or perhaps twenty-two, and at least he doesn’t bore you.
Watching these two together showed Doctor Who at its most stunningly original, then at its most dully derivative. Unsurprisingly, one of these stories is strongly rumoured to be released on DVD soon. Considerably more surprisingly, it’s Arc of Infinity. Sigh.
If you’re a Lib Dem reader and have got this far, first, well done, have a chocolate button, and second, if you want to know what all the fuss is about for me and Doctor Who, look here. Conversely, if you like Doctor Who and want to get inside my head about Liberalism, click here. They’re nearly the same. But not quite.
Labels: Cambridge, Colin Baker, Doctor Who, Liberalism, Peter Davison, Reviews
The Deadly Assassin
Nothing to do with the Lib Dem Leadership, OK? This is Doctor Who’s nearest stab at film noir, a political thriller that keeps you guessing not about who the villain’s going to turn out to be (he’s pretty obvious), but about where it’s going to go next. The Doctor returns to his home planet after many years away, only to become a hunted fugitive when fellow exile the Master frames him for the President’s death. The disturbing themes are that everything’s corrupt and nothing is real, and I can’t think of another Who story with so many surprises, brilliantly employing visual style to illustrate the twisted narrative.
This one’s my favourite story, broadcast in 1976 as Tom Baker’s Doctor was getting into his stride, though you might be surprised at how seriously he takes it; like Bride of Frankenstein, much of it’s a black comedy about death, but the lead is unusually sober. I suspect it’s stayed special for me because of its variety, from political thriller to action adventure, with mythology, satire, murder mystery, surrealism, horror, and the image that most upset Mary Whitehouse. The Doctor’s home is a mixture of the Vatican, Westminster and Oxbridge – appropriately enough for where we watched it this time – but with a feeling of the American big city, too, adding more than an touch of noir with its cynical police, innocent man framed and driven to the edge, sleazy city underbelly, literally nightmare images and a corrupt authority figure to blame (though if you want Doctor Who’s spin on the femme fatale, you’ll have to pick up the stunning and equally noirish novel The Also People). There’s homage to The Manchurian Candidate, before it suddenly flips over into The Most Dangerous Game as the Doctor goes from rejoining the aristocracy to being hunted like an animal; but if it sounds like just a melting pot of sources, it also seems to invent cyberpunk years before Neuromancer, eerily predicts (or is borrowed by) The Matrix and even news channels before CNN, and perhaps dozens of other Doctor Who stories have reused ideas created here.
The Doctor’s people had previously been introduced as ‘Time Lords’, terribly po-faced guardians of established history who never interfere except, er, covertly, and are accountable to no-one, which from an early age filled me with mistrust. This story gets a lot of stick for ‘changing’ them, but as I once wrote an article quoting Locke and classical Liberalism against them with the fair and balanced title ‘The Time Lords Are Gits, and Always Have Been’, you won’t be surprised that I don’t share that view. The Time Lords see themselves as gods who can live forever, and this story brings them down to earth – something many fans never forgave it for. It exposes their Olympian image as simply media manipulation, and the concept of death is reintroduced to them not just by the inevitable murders but by the once-suave Master returning as a rotting corpse held together by sheer willpower. In a period where the series used much darkly religious imagery, The Deadly Assassin is steeped in the myths of a people so old they’ve made legends of their own technology, and much of the story takes place in the dream world of ‘The Matrix’ where the Time Lords go when they die; the Master wants to sacrifice it all for his own life, blasphemously renouncing electronic heaven for physical immortality.
The story’s even more radical in its storytelling than in its approach to the Doctor’s people. It starts with much sleight of hand and things rarely being what they seem, echoed in plotting that turns things upside-down; initially a satirical horror story in dark, opulent studio sets and driven by non-stop dialogue, there are already terrible hallucinations prefiguring the series’ most strikingly ‘What’s going on?’ cliffhanger. When such a confined, conspiratorial story opens into being first trippy and then violently physical, suddenly in the open air with just two actors and almost no dialogue, the viewer is thrown daringly off-balance. With the Time Lords so studio-bound and witty, the shock and dislocation the audience feels at this gritty surrealism is a metaphor for the shock and dislocation the Time Lords feel at murder. The best fiction is where nobody knows what’s coming next but it fits perfectly when it does, and as the Master’s collaborator turns out to be the Chancellor, who – impossible to believe of a Chancellor, I know – got tired of waiting for his leader to hand over power and assassinated him, the point of the grubby violence is not just to show the Doctor when he can’t use technology or wise-cracks to get out of a situation, but also to show the scheming politician literally get his hands dirty. At the climax, another brutal fight takes place, this time between the Doctor and the Master… Not in the Matrix, but bringing that nightmare of mortality into the ‘reality’ of the Time Lords’ effete world.
The Time Lord who takes charge at the end prefigures Francis Urquhart as a political antihero; grandly camp, cynical and hugely entertaining, he wants to set up the dead Chancellor as a hero and banish the Doctor, the better for public morale:
Many people think this period of Doctor Who is its high point, and for once I’m with the crowd in praising producer Philip Hinchcliffe and writer Robert Holmes, the creative forces behind it. There’s a story called The Talons of Weng-Chiang set in the Victoriana of fog and music hall that delights in the most enjoyable stereotypes of British fiction, rolling rich language round the tongue of every guest artiste. For me it’s one of the most thoroughly entertaining pieces of television ever made, and it’s often said to be the culmination of Hinchcliffe and Holmes’ work. I’d say that’s half-right; Talons is the embodiment of what you’d expect from them, but here is the culmination of their creativity. It’s not a typical or always comfortable story to watch. It wakes you up and makes you pay attention and ask questions (no wonder some people don’t like it). For me, it’s the greatest Who story of them all, not least because it tells so many stories and fires off so many ideas… Some of them are even original. It tells us all to grow up, as we see behind the propaganda of the Doctor’s god-like people. It has huge energy, and even huger self-belief. When you’re younger, gods and grown-ups look all-fair and all-powerful, but now the Doctor comes home and finds they’re no better than the rest of us. When he leaves this time, he leaves on his own terms.
For more on how The Deadly Assassin is the centrepiece of the brilliant Season 14…
This one’s my favourite story, broadcast in 1976 as Tom Baker’s Doctor was getting into his stride, though you might be surprised at how seriously he takes it; like Bride of Frankenstein, much of it’s a black comedy about death, but the lead is unusually sober. I suspect it’s stayed special for me because of its variety, from political thriller to action adventure, with mythology, satire, murder mystery, surrealism, horror, and the image that most upset Mary Whitehouse. The Doctor’s home is a mixture of the Vatican, Westminster and Oxbridge – appropriately enough for where we watched it this time – but with a feeling of the American big city, too, adding more than an touch of noir with its cynical police, innocent man framed and driven to the edge, sleazy city underbelly, literally nightmare images and a corrupt authority figure to blame (though if you want Doctor Who’s spin on the femme fatale, you’ll have to pick up the stunning and equally noirish novel The Also People). There’s homage to The Manchurian Candidate, before it suddenly flips over into The Most Dangerous Game as the Doctor goes from rejoining the aristocracy to being hunted like an animal; but if it sounds like just a melting pot of sources, it also seems to invent cyberpunk years before Neuromancer, eerily predicts (or is borrowed by) The Matrix and even news channels before CNN, and perhaps dozens of other Doctor Who stories have reused ideas created here.
The Doctor’s people had previously been introduced as ‘Time Lords’, terribly po-faced guardians of established history who never interfere except, er, covertly, and are accountable to no-one, which from an early age filled me with mistrust. This story gets a lot of stick for ‘changing’ them, but as I once wrote an article quoting Locke and classical Liberalism against them with the fair and balanced title ‘The Time Lords Are Gits, and Always Have Been’, you won’t be surprised that I don’t share that view. The Time Lords see themselves as gods who can live forever, and this story brings them down to earth – something many fans never forgave it for. It exposes their Olympian image as simply media manipulation, and the concept of death is reintroduced to them not just by the inevitable murders but by the once-suave Master returning as a rotting corpse held together by sheer willpower. In a period where the series used much darkly religious imagery, The Deadly Assassin is steeped in the myths of a people so old they’ve made legends of their own technology, and much of the story takes place in the dream world of ‘The Matrix’ where the Time Lords go when they die; the Master wants to sacrifice it all for his own life, blasphemously renouncing electronic heaven for physical immortality.
The story’s even more radical in its storytelling than in its approach to the Doctor’s people. It starts with much sleight of hand and things rarely being what they seem, echoed in plotting that turns things upside-down; initially a satirical horror story in dark, opulent studio sets and driven by non-stop dialogue, there are already terrible hallucinations prefiguring the series’ most strikingly ‘What’s going on?’ cliffhanger. When such a confined, conspiratorial story opens into being first trippy and then violently physical, suddenly in the open air with just two actors and almost no dialogue, the viewer is thrown daringly off-balance. With the Time Lords so studio-bound and witty, the shock and dislocation the audience feels at this gritty surrealism is a metaphor for the shock and dislocation the Time Lords feel at murder. The best fiction is where nobody knows what’s coming next but it fits perfectly when it does, and as the Master’s collaborator turns out to be the Chancellor, who – impossible to believe of a Chancellor, I know – got tired of waiting for his leader to hand over power and assassinated him, the point of the grubby violence is not just to show the Doctor when he can’t use technology or wise-cracks to get out of a situation, but also to show the scheming politician literally get his hands dirty. At the climax, another brutal fight takes place, this time between the Doctor and the Master… Not in the Matrix, but bringing that nightmare of mortality into the ‘reality’ of the Time Lords’ effete world.
The Time Lord who takes charge at the end prefigures Francis Urquhart as a political antihero; grandly camp, cynical and hugely entertaining, he wants to set up the dead Chancellor as a hero and banish the Doctor, the better for public morale:
“Now that’s much better. I can believe that.”Perhaps I just don’t like journalists, but he also has the most magisterial put-down I’ve ever seen to a reporter (it might help if you think of Kenneth Williams at his most superior snubbing Charles Hawtrey at his most querulous). Images and media illustrate the fluidity of truth; the guardians of history turn out to change history by any means necessary, from intervention to propaganda and cover-ups, and there are unsubtle references to the CIA or, amongst many lines that I enjoyed as a boy and enjoy quite differently today, that
“Vaporisation without representation is against the constitution!”Much of it still looks great, from the fast-moving nightmare images to gloomy, cavernous buildings of faded grandeur and stunning ceremonial costumes from a future Oscar winner, with none of the clichéd sci-fi silver lamé that aims for pomp but end up preposterous. I can even excuse the unfortunate use of an Action Man doll – well, nothing’s perfect, and though there are three absolutely superb cliffhanger endings to the episodes, there’s a definite tendency towards instant gratification on its dramatic threats when each of those is resolved just seconds into ‘next week’. And no, it’s not the best title in the world, either.
Many people think this period of Doctor Who is its high point, and for once I’m with the crowd in praising producer Philip Hinchcliffe and writer Robert Holmes, the creative forces behind it. There’s a story called The Talons of Weng-Chiang set in the Victoriana of fog and music hall that delights in the most enjoyable stereotypes of British fiction, rolling rich language round the tongue of every guest artiste. For me it’s one of the most thoroughly entertaining pieces of television ever made, and it’s often said to be the culmination of Hinchcliffe and Holmes’ work. I’d say that’s half-right; Talons is the embodiment of what you’d expect from them, but here is the culmination of their creativity. It’s not a typical or always comfortable story to watch. It wakes you up and makes you pay attention and ask questions (no wonder some people don’t like it). For me, it’s the greatest Who story of them all, not least because it tells so many stories and fires off so many ideas… Some of them are even original. It tells us all to grow up, as we see behind the propaganda of the Doctor’s god-like people. It has huge energy, and even huger self-belief. When you’re younger, gods and grown-ups look all-fair and all-powerful, but now the Doctor comes home and finds they’re no better than the rest of us. When he leaves this time, he leaves on his own terms.
For more on how The Deadly Assassin is the centrepiece of the brilliant Season 14…
Labels: Cambridge, Doctor Who, Film Noir, In-Depth Doctor Who, Reviews, The Master, Tom Baker
Monday, February 20, 2006
The Curse of Fenric (Special Edition)
An even more intelligent tale from 1989, this complex and political horror story moves very quickly and definitely needs your brain in gear. It too has underlying themes, though they’re less obviously spelt out than in The Ice Warriors; religion, sex, environmental catastrophes and evolution jostle with masses of film references and the idea that no side is right in war, though – in a Cold War thriller before the Cold War – some Liberals may raise an eyebrow at its apparent friendliness to Stalinism, or at least Leninism. This one’s set during the Second World War (without Nazis, who would probably have derailed its moral equivalence), where… Well, there's a lot going on, but let’s just say that the British are trying to trap the Russians while the Doctor and an ancient, evil intelligence are trying to trap each other, the latter with the aid of some rubbery blue vampires from the future. But they’re not important right now. It’s Richard’s favourite story and one of mine, and the most striking prototype on screen for what to us is the only continuation of the series in print that really compels, the 1990s Virgin ‘New Adventures’ range that now reads like the missing link between the old series’ end and the hugely successful relaunch last year.
This was the only one of the stories we watched that’s out on DVD, and it’s a superb release. Added to impressive extras of the ‘documentary’ sort, there’s a ‘Special Edition’ cut, which isn’t quite the perfect version that exists in our heads but is well on the way there. A goodly number of new scenes significantly improve a story we loved to begin with, and most of the new effects and reworked score are successful, meaning it looks and sounds better than it's done before, but rather misses having cliffhangers in it. The trouble with editing together a feature-length version of something that was written and made to be episodic is that the pace is shot to hell, but you can’t have everything.
So what’s so good about it? Well, the multi-layered story intermixes the grimness of World War Two with Norse mythology, Dracula and a touch of The Arabian Nights, and makes clever use of the difference between a 1940s and 1980s mindset through the Doctor’s then-modern-day companion. There’s a lot on the good and bad sides of faith (it never really comes down on one side or the other), including a superb moment where a hammer and sickle badge wards off vampires when a Bible has failed, as it’s not the symbol but the belief that repels them; it’s probably fortunate that this went out a few weeks before the Berlin Wall fell. Several of the guest actors are rather good, too, especially Nicholas Parsons – yes, Nicholas Parsons – in his first ‘straight’ role for about 30 years, and Dinsdale Landen, who switches from waspish Turing-inspired scientist to being possessed by charismatic evil incarnate.
Now, there’s a reason why I skipped ahead to The Curse of Fenric here. It and The Deadly Assassin have a lot in common: both top-notch stories; both treating Doctor Who not just as sci-fi but as an attempt to fashion modern mythology; both highly intelligent; both borrowing from multiple sources but fizzing with ideas of their own; both inspiring huge numbers of other Who stories in either their themes or their detail; both highly controversial among fans, who tended either to love them or hate them. Unfortunately, there's a quite different variety of link between The Deadly Assassin and Arc of Infinity, so I’ll look at those now...
This was the only one of the stories we watched that’s out on DVD, and it’s a superb release. Added to impressive extras of the ‘documentary’ sort, there’s a ‘Special Edition’ cut, which isn’t quite the perfect version that exists in our heads but is well on the way there. A goodly number of new scenes significantly improve a story we loved to begin with, and most of the new effects and reworked score are successful, meaning it looks and sounds better than it's done before, but rather misses having cliffhangers in it. The trouble with editing together a feature-length version of something that was written and made to be episodic is that the pace is shot to hell, but you can’t have everything.
So what’s so good about it? Well, the multi-layered story intermixes the grimness of World War Two with Norse mythology, Dracula and a touch of The Arabian Nights, and makes clever use of the difference between a 1940s and 1980s mindset through the Doctor’s then-modern-day companion. There’s a lot on the good and bad sides of faith (it never really comes down on one side or the other), including a superb moment where a hammer and sickle badge wards off vampires when a Bible has failed, as it’s not the symbol but the belief that repels them; it’s probably fortunate that this went out a few weeks before the Berlin Wall fell. Several of the guest actors are rather good, too, especially Nicholas Parsons – yes, Nicholas Parsons – in his first ‘straight’ role for about 30 years, and Dinsdale Landen, who switches from waspish Turing-inspired scientist to being possessed by charismatic evil incarnate.
Now, there’s a reason why I skipped ahead to The Curse of Fenric here. It and The Deadly Assassin have a lot in common: both top-notch stories; both treating Doctor Who not just as sci-fi but as an attempt to fashion modern mythology; both highly intelligent; both borrowing from multiple sources but fizzing with ideas of their own; both inspiring huge numbers of other Who stories in either their themes or their detail; both highly controversial among fans, who tended either to love them or hate them. Unfortunately, there's a quite different variety of link between The Deadly Assassin and Arc of Infinity, so I’ll look at those now...
Labels: Cambridge, Doctor Who, DVD, New Adventures, Reviews, Sylvester McCoy
The Ice Warriors
Broadcast – and some episodes burnt – by the BBC before we were born, I got to know this from the novelisation, which I was fond of particularly for the cover painting of the killer reptile-monster with lightning crackling round its clamp-like claws. These days I can make a slightly more grown-up appraisal, but the killer reptile-monsters are still a major part of its appeal. Set a thousand years in the future, there’s a new Ice Age (the ’60s scientific fear before evidence of global warming, with a scene setting out the ecological fable that’s still great despite four decades of hindsight proving the science is rubbish) and the plucky British fighting the ice are menaced by the discovery of an alien spacecraft, frozen long ago and swept along by the advancing glaciers. Obviously, the aliens inside are labelled ‘Ice Warriors’. They turn up several times in later Who, and it’s easy to see why; despite being obviously men in suits, they’re very big men in very big suits, and have real screen presence. For me, a successful monster needs to break up the human form – these have something of the crocodile and the turtle about them – and an interesting voice, and these have a very distinctive hiss.
Aside from the monsters, the two things that stand out are the actors and the themes. It’s got a particularly endearing Doctor and friends – Troughton has a comic edge and a terribly reassuring voice, along with Jamie the refugee from Culloden and Victoria the imaginatively-named Victorian lady – as well as guest stars Peter Barkworth, Peter Sallis and (in the green reptile plating) Bernard Bresslaw. I’ve always thought Bresslaw had just about the widest range of the Carry On actors, and he’s great here, but just as important to the story are the parts played by Barkworth and Sallis, both very well-characterised and who sum up the writer’s intended clash: a highly-strung bureaucrat versus a free-thinking scientist with a disdain for authority. It couches different freedoms against each other – Barkworth’s character is very New Labour. The ‘ooh, computers will order us about’ message is dated in the way it’s told, rather than all its implications (now we’re scared of databases rather than having to be slaves to logic, dressed in circuit-pattern outfits). In the end, a bit slow but with the unusual combination of great monsters and considerable intelligence.
Aside from the monsters, the two things that stand out are the actors and the themes. It’s got a particularly endearing Doctor and friends – Troughton has a comic edge and a terribly reassuring voice, along with Jamie the refugee from Culloden and Victoria the imaginatively-named Victorian lady – as well as guest stars Peter Barkworth, Peter Sallis and (in the green reptile plating) Bernard Bresslaw. I’ve always thought Bresslaw had just about the widest range of the Carry On actors, and he’s great here, but just as important to the story are the parts played by Barkworth and Sallis, both very well-characterised and who sum up the writer’s intended clash: a highly-strung bureaucrat versus a free-thinking scientist with a disdain for authority. It couches different freedoms against each other – Barkworth’s character is very New Labour. The ‘ooh, computers will order us about’ message is dated in the way it’s told, rather than all its implications (now we’re scared of databases rather than having to be slaves to logic, dressed in circuit-pattern outfits). In the end, a bit slow but with the unusual combination of great monsters and considerable intelligence.
Labels: Cambridge, Doctor Who, Patrick Troughton, Reviews
Doctor Who Fun in Cambridge
My back’s gradually getting better and I’m feeling less grumpy, so I’m getting up to date here; I’ve added an index to my posts so you don’t have to scroll through the lot, I’ve replied to a few more comments and, having had a go at one of last week’s big political events, I’d like to turn to something much more entertaining. A week ago visited friends in Cambridge (seat of the splendid David Howarth), watching a selection of Doctor Who stories – The Ice Warriors, The Deadly Assassin, Arc of Infinity and The Curse of Fenric – and eating lots of snack-sized Scotch eggs. Quite one of the best ways you can spend a Sunday, in other words.
It was the lovely Simon and Barry’s intention to fit in something from each Doctor – a bit tricky in a day, as there are ten of them – and so we arrived during something from the Second, and saw the Fourth, Fifth (and sort of the Sixth) and Seventh before we had to set off home. On the off-chance you don’t know, the Doctor’s an alien, a traveller in time and space who prefers to see the Universe and fight oppression than stay at home with his stodgy, dodgy people, the Time Lords. When fatally wounded, his body explodes into a new life, and a new actor. You might know these ones as Patrick Troughton, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy, or the small one, the one with the scarf, the blond one, the shouty one and the other small one. Anyway, I’m very fond of them all, and fond of several of the stories we watched too, so for anyone tuning into this blog for more Doctor Who than politics – though still with a bit of politics – you’re about to get your wish…
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It was the lovely Simon and Barry’s intention to fit in something from each Doctor – a bit tricky in a day, as there are ten of them – and so we arrived during something from the Second, and saw the Fourth, Fifth (and sort of the Sixth) and Seventh before we had to set off home. On the off-chance you don’t know, the Doctor’s an alien, a traveller in time and space who prefers to see the Universe and fight oppression than stay at home with his stodgy, dodgy people, the Time Lords. When fatally wounded, his body explodes into a new life, and a new actor. You might know these ones as Patrick Troughton, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy, or the small one, the one with the scarf, the blond one, the shouty one and the other small one. Anyway, I’m very fond of them all, and fond of several of the stories we watched too, so for anyone tuning into this blog for more Doctor Who than politics – though still with a bit of politics – you’re about to get your wish…
Labels: Cambridge, Doctor Who
