Love and Liberty

More monsters, still more vivid villains and rich themes: cannibalism, transformation and television feasting on itself. Vengeance on Varos anticipates reality TV with an irresistible new villain; Colin Baker’s passionate Doctor is interested in everything, soaring when paired with Patrick Troughton against a chef fancying best end of Jamie in The Two Doctors (also, with The Myth Makers, an outstanding novelisation). In the comics, the Doctor’s having more hallucinatory adventures with an occasional penguin. And the postmodernism hits a stylish climax in…

Revelation of the Daleks

“Bring that woman to me. And while you are there, destroy that prattling DJ!”

Hobbies at the funeral parlour: sex, bitching, voyeurism and building armies of whited sepulchre Daleks. Hugely influential, this blazes with pitch-black humour, pop culture and the utter horror of ‘immortality’. Of many fabulous guest stars, Davros’ cackling and tempting steals the show (and your relatives).


Though this was one of the very few Twentieth Century Who TV stories never novelised, it’s been released twice on VHS and twice on DVD (complete with extras like documentaries and new effects), each second time in a Davros box set. The DVD Davros box set’s particularly worth buying, as it includes a mass of audio stories too, and several places are selling it for half price or less right now… Audio Who giant Big Finish is the best bargain as I write, offering it at £40 instead of £100.

Labels: Colin Baker, Comedy, Daleks, Doctor Who, DVD, Jacqueline Pearce, Patrick Troughton, Reviews, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?

I waved goodbye (well, actually, I kissed her hand and called her “ma’am”) to one of my icons on Saturday. This was fairly unexpected: until a few days before, I hadn’t even known Jacqueline Pearce – famous as Servalan from Blake’s 7 and in Hammer horrors – was moving to South Africa to work with endangered monkeys, but thanks to a fab little shop in Edinburgh, I got a chance to see her. So, if you feel like wishing Jackie luck, drop by her blog, and if you visit Edinburgh, saunter all the way down Lothian Road to visit Voga. It’s small but packed full of exciting Doctor Who and similar bits, and they’re very friendly… And, as it’s four hundred miles from my favourite shop, East London’s Tenth Planet, I reckon that’s far enough for them not to be competing too directly with each other (both shops are named after worlds from Doctor Who stories involving the Cybermen, you know).

Jacqueline Pearce and Servalan

Jacqueline Pearce has been one of my favourite actresses for almost as long as I can remember. Servalan was certainly always the character that most grabbed my attention in Blake’s 7. Like Livia in I, Claudius, she was both brilliantly played and an outstanding political anti-hero. I thought she was fantastic growing up, and though it’s fashionable to knock strong woman characters like those two for being bad for women because they were villains, I have to say that’s rubbish. I can’t think of a stronger female role model on TV at the time, and that she was charismatic and three-dimensional enough to win me over despite being, ah, essentially appalling, tells you how impressive she was. Well, I always loved a great villain, and like Francis Urquhart, her mixture of stunning camp and intense emotional drama meant there were points where I definitely rooted for her scheming to pay off, perhaps indulging the side of me that doesn’t want to be so nice, open and constructive about politics. You might also have seen her in Doctor Who’s The Two Doctors (another striking villain, but with a dreadful wig and bacofoil frock), a fanatical nazi in Dark Season (Russell T Davies’ tryout for Doctor Who), The Avengers’ A Sense of History, Hammer’s The Plague of the Zombies and The Reptile, among many others. In recent years, she’s also been much in demand for audio plays, with perhaps the most outstanding being Big Finish’s terrific Doctor Who drama The Fearmonger, in which to no-one’s surprise Jackie played a far-right political leader. She was also great fun as a starry-eyed fanatic and recurring villain in their second Sarah Jane Smith series, though – as Millennium observed on reviewing it – she’s not as multi-layered a character as she seemed to be building up to be. But I digress, so back to Jackie, and scroll to the bottom of this piece instead if you want spoilers for the climax, or anti-climax, of Big Finish’s Sarah Jane Smith stories…

Blake’s 7 started off in concept as something like Robin Hood in space, but while Servalan occupied the Sheriff of Nottingham role, she got far more character development than any Sheriff. She starts off as Supreme Commander of the military wing of the Federation, a vicious totalitarian dictatorship, but after a couple of years takes advantage of a galaxy-wide crisis to mount a military coup against the civil administration. That never happened to Bad King John. Before long, there’s a counter-coup, and the show’s final season sees her gradually climbing back to power, with considerably more resolve and success than our heroes’ fight against the Federation managed. It’s no surprise, then, that my favourite episodes of the series remain Star One, in which she declares herself President and has her civilian predecessor arrested, and Rumours of Death, in which an abortive coup against her tangles with a personal vendetta and a love affair gone wrong (yes, it’s all film noir again) to overthrow the usual pro-rebellion course of the series. Sand is another episode to look out for, exploring Servalan’s early life and with her seducing one of our heroes. It’s fascinating to watch the change in Jacqueline Pearce’s performance after assuming the Presidency: is it because the script now calls for a charismatic figurehead rather than a ‘harder’ military commander, or, as Jackie said in one memorable interview, “Because that’s when I discovered sex”? It’s always amused me, too, that I became President of my university students’ union on the anniversary of Rumours of Death being shown, though the coup that removed my predecessor was less bloody and my title wasn’t quite as impressive as ‘President of the Terran Federation, Ruler of the High Council, Lord of the Inner and Outer Worlds, High Admiral of the Galactic Fleets, Lord General of the Six Armies, and Defender of the Earth’ (no, not even when I was Vice-Chair of the FPC). Often described as striding across a quarry in heels and a cocktail frock – because she often was – she looked terrific and, I suspect, may have had something to do with my taste for monochrome, with close-cropped black hair and outfits nearly always in stark white or black. Of course, I wasn’t the only one to notice her looks, nor the most passionately: Jackie gives great interviews, in one of which (for BBC2’s I Love 1978, I seem to remember) she proclaimed with pride, “I was a masturbatory icon to an entire generation!” before throwing her head back and cackling at the thought of it.

Jacqueline Pearce in Edinburgh

Jacqueline still looks very striking now, though her long hair is streaked with grey: well, I think of it as ‘long hair’, but that’s merely because the picture of her in my head has such very short hair and in fact It’s only just long enough to have a bit of flow to it. Knowing she’s recovered from cancer in the last couple of years, it was great to see her looking so healthy as she prepared to set out on a great adventure that’s clearly making her very happy. And, with Voga being a friendly little shop – particularly Brian, on discovering that, almost on the spur of the moment (well, two days’ notice), I’d come up from London specially – and not a huge crowd there, she was happy to sign quite a lot of different things. Yes, I’d lugged several items with me, though I wasn’t the most extravagant, and of course I bought a couple of glossy photos for her to sign to help raise money for her monkeys. Glossy photos aren’t usually my thing, but just this once…

We all had a great afternoon, too. She’s a great attention-grabber, and all the wine helped (what a very nice man Martin at Voga is); I think it helped Jackie, too, though she did claim that she’d never tried any before. Well, all right, she subsequently modified that to saying that she’d not previously had any that day. I’m sure you’ll know the myth that the Eskimos have dozens of different words for snow; well, in a reversal of that idea, Jackie has her own language that consists entirely of the dozens of meanings with which she can imbue the word “Darling”. Indulgent, ecstatic, interrogative, flirtatious, warning; it’s uncanny, but more repeatable than the line from White Mischief she declaimed after hooting with laughter on seeing a large print of her from that film which someone had brought along, exposing her breasts to, well, critical attention. I think the three and a half-month-old baby in attendance had to have his or her ears stoppered. I suspect I can’t print most of the stories she came out with about people she’s worked with, either, though she agreed that the cover of Hammer’s stylish The Plague of the Zombies (in which an eerily zombified Jackie quite loses her head) was peculiarly unattractive – the male lead, not much of a looker, being goosed by a zombie, even less of a looker – and could have done with her name in larger letters. And spelt correctly. I enjoyed her dazzling smile, too, as I produced a booklet from Dark Season for her to sign and declare, “I did enjoy making it. For all the wrong reasons!”

I think the second biggest cheer of the afternoon was the moment when the sound was turned up on the Blake’s 7 DVD that had been playing in the background so we could hear her ordering a sinister nurse about with huge aplomb (it was Powerplay, if you want to watch it). For most of the afternoon, the picture was Blake’s 7 but the soundtrack was an assortment of Carry On themes, which was faintly disturbing, and I notice they didn’t dare put on the Carry On in which Jackie actually appears, either. However, the biggest cheer was for a startling cameo. Jackie had finished signing all the memorabilia brought by the group who’d been waiting for her, some had moved on, and the rest of us were standing around with drinks in our hands while Ms Pearce held court when a familiar white-haired figure appeared at the door. It was Gareth Thomas, an actor best known as the eponymous Blake, come simply to pop in, thank his opponent for 29 years of knowing her, hope that she would one day return, and wish her luck in working with real monkeys. Then he blew her a kiss and was gone while we were still gawping.

So, I had rather a lovely Saturday afternoon, though I couldn’t do it every week (physically or financially). “You’re insane,” was the view of one familiar face who I often see at Tenth Planet, and indeed of Richard a little before six that morning as I left to get my train. But I’d not been to Edinburgh for years and I’d been tempted just the previous week while watching BBC4’s new drama (surely some mistake) Reichenbach Falls, so when I saw that Jacqueline Pearce would be making probably her final public appearance in Britain there… Well, it was worth it, despite the long rail journeys being completely exhausting and packed with noisy, drunken rugby fans particularly between Edinburgh and Newcastle (“That was the longest hour and a half of my life,” breathed one woman to me as she fought her way out at Waverley, evidently spotting I wasn’t a scarf-wearing fan). Besides, I had time to stroll around for a bit, even taking a little while to sit and relax half-way up the Mound on the same rock I always used to sit on and read when getting away from family holidays there. With only seventeen hours between leaving my front door and staggering back in, though, there was no time for any Lib Dem canvassing. Shucks.

And getting excited about meeting someone so fabulous has even inspired me to get back to my poor old long-neglected Occasional Livejournal, so not only am I putting this piece there, I’ve written a bit about another recent signing as well.

13 March update: The Voga blog has linked to me today, complete with a lovely picture of Jacqueline Pearce and I (and my chins). You can also find a link to other photos from the day, including a few of me and many of Jackie. Look out for an especially great photo of a laughing Gareth Thomas. In another post, they have a video clip of Jacqueline in the shop.


SPOILERS for the climax, or anti-climax, of Big Finish’s Sarah Jane Smith stories:

The second Sarah Jane Smith audio series was, for the most part, pretty gripping, and all a huge improvement on the first (the five stories in which were, respectively: tediously uninspired; tediously uninspired, idiotic, and homophobic; a bit crude but rather exciting; tediously uninspired again; and not bad. Best to start with the second season, then, or at least miss out 1.2 and 1.4, which add nothing). The real problem with it was that the only ‘episode’ that didn’t deliver was the final one, and not just because by the time that CD spins, Jacqueline Pearce’s character has just died. No, it’s the story: all the wheels suddenly come off. It’s always irritating when you think you’ve worked out a plot and your version is better than the one the author goes on to reveal, but, with two rival secret societies plotting around the return of an evil alien entity that Sarah had previously fought with the Doctor, I’d worked out that Jackie’s ‘nasty’ lot believed the entity was an evil conqueror and were therefore ruthless in killing all who might help it, while the new-agey, hippie-shit cultists protecting Sarah were of course deluded in welcoming their astral tyrant. So I reckoned the final episode would see Sarah working out what the alien force behind it all was, and being forced to ‘switch sides’ because the ‘villains’, while murderous, had the right idea. Instead, she works it all out but, er, seems to be so desperate to relive her outer space days that she goes along with the hippies to welcome their alien overlord anyway, rather than trying to stop it. Then the ambiguous ending implies that they were all so deluded anyway that they just expire while waiting and it didn’t bother showing up, if indeed it was ever planning to. In both ways, this seemed dramatically unrewarding.

Labels: Blake’s 7, Fandom, Jacqueline Pearce, Sarah Jane Smith

The Trial of Tony Blair comes to Channel 4 tonight. It’s worth a look but doesn’t quite meet its promise, much like the repeat afterwards of The 30 Greatest Political Comedies… In which Michael Howard gives the world’s worst impersonation of relaxed bonhomie and co-host Charles Kennedy patently can’t bear the sight of him. The Avengers: A Sense of History is also on tonight, boasting outstanding guest actors (Nigel Stock, Patrick Mower and Jacqueline Pearce, Servalan herself) but with the script a rather limp political thriller. Alistair Beaton’s political comedy-drama has a more lively script but much less engaging leads.

I’m not disparaging Robert Lindsay, who gives a fine performance as a twitchy, haunted, but still sanctimonious Tony Blair. Tune in at 10 tonight and you won’t see an impersonation, but a character sharing a name and many attributes with our Prime Minister. In many ways, though, he’s more sympathetic than I suspect the real man is, borrowing much from Mr Lindsay’s earlier character of Michael Murray in GBH, ranting Derek-Hatton-a-like turned MI5 stooge turned nervous breakdown. For me the most convincing acting performance as ‘the real’ Tony Blair remains Tony Keetch back in a dramatisation of the Hutton Inquiry, but I suspect I find it easier to watch an obviously fictional version without throwing things at the screen. Paradoxically, he’s both a more rounded character – making it easy for the viewer to get involved with him – and more of a caricature. There is no cheap shot missed about how we expect these people to behave, with Tony obsessed with shredding details of Camp David meetings and Labour donors (there seem to be peerage jokes every few minutes), Gordon obsessed with hating Tony but feeling impotent to do anything about it, and Cherie hating Gordon right back, torn between distancing herself from Tony and wanting to be supportive, but mainly obsessed with money. Admittedly, her nicking the light bulbs from Downing Street and the huge piles of bags of shredded evidence are funny, but they don’t tell us anything we don’t already know from such informed sources as Steve Bell cartoons and Dead Ringers.

With the jokes such obvious targets, I suspect we laughed rather more at it on Monday night – its first outing, on More4 – than it deserved. We’d had a bit of a comedy warm-up that had put us in the mood to be entertained, recasting the white dreadlocked twins from The Matrix Reloaded with twin Robert Robinsons (hmm… Hysterical to us, but perhaps you had to be there) and just having watched the climactic episode of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin in which Reggie finally breaks and, before faking his own death, stages the world’s first loganberry slick in attempt to give his boss CJ heart failure with ‘rivers of blood’. Come to think of it, CJ is of course played by John Barron, and if you tune in to BBC4 at 7.10, he’s in The Avengers tonight as well. But back to the silly programme…

While Tony Blair is naturally the focus, and a slippery reptile he is too, The Trial of Tony Blair is even harsher to other three leaders: Gordon Brown can barely get himself elected even as Labour Leader, lacks all charm and is so indecisive that, asked where his killer instinct is, confesses he doesn’t think he has one (he eventually drops Tony in it only via his aide, who gets the British Ambassador to the UN to abstain in the shiftiest, least courageous way possible); David Cameron is a vacuous idiot sick of his bike and trying to rap; and Ming Campbell, er, doesn’t even get a namecheck. It’s difficult not to despise everyone involved, and I’m a little tired of political dramas like that. It doesn’t help that the actor playing Mr Brown looks like a cross between Christopher Plummer in a Hitler haircut and Droopy, or that even I can do a better impression of Mr Balloon than Alexander Armstrong manages.

This uncertain hour and a half offers two different openings, both involving Tony Blair giving an important announcement. It’s 2010, and in one he’s finally addressing the nation to step down as Prime Minister, the act that kicks off the rest of the drama; but while he has no problem with delivering this mealy-mouthed, self-serving flannel, the very first scene we see is taken from the end, a few months later. Mr Blair is in the confessional, desperate for absolution before he’s driven off, but even with his escort to The Hague waiting outside and a priest sworn never to reveal what he says he’s unable to admit out loud that his mortal sins were wrong. And that, of course, is the thread of the drama: the wish-fulfilment fantasy that the Security Council will set up a UN Special Tribunal on Iraq and that there’ll finally be a legal examination of Mr Blair that he can’t fix.

The outgoing Prime Minister plans his exit in exactly the terms any stand-up satirist would offer us, trying to work out what would look best for the cameras. “Can I cry?” he wonders. But then there’s the first spot-on moment, as he leaves Downing Street in a pitch-perfect evocation of his entrance thirteen years before, with broad smiles to fast camera shots of an excited (but this time, entirely hired) crowd as Walking on Sunshine plays. Then the parody turns cruel, as he spots among the actors a man holding a sign condemning 800,000 dead in Iraq. If that sounds like Banquo’s Ghost, there are similar suggestions that perhaps only Mr Blair can see him – he’s certainly given to ever-more intrusive visions of protestors, suicide bombers and, finally, his victims – and he’s seen obsessively scrubbing his hands, then with a splendid use of Mirror in the Bathroom as he slips into delusion, unable to bear every news broadcast announcing more dead in Baghdad.

It’s now that Mr Blair finally takes the plunge to become a Catholic convert (there’s an acerbic little scene where a venal priest gives way to his wish to cut a few corners), because while of course he always did the right thing, in a very Blairite piece of doublethink he’s now also seeking forgiveness for his sins. That selfish desire comes across as his only genuine religious motive in this, despite the overly religious tone that puts his publisher off his autobiography. The publisher (the impressive Tom Burke, who you may remember as Casanova’s son) complains that Mr Blair felt the hand of history on his shoulder 29 times: “Actually, I think it was probably more than that.” Working on an early draft with an aide, Mr Blair declaims, “My guiding principles were… What would you say they were?” in an echo of his inability to answer Alan Beith’s similar question a few years ago, before being prodded into settling for the grandiose but meaningless “Doing the right thing, and standing up to evil.” But however often he repeats this mantra, his quest for forgiveness underscores that he doesn’t believe it, as does his constant snapping that “Iraq is not my legacy”. Yet in seeming more shifty than messianic, Robert Lindsay’s Tony Blair has a more sympathetic and human madness than the real one; I’d like to believe that our Prime Minister has doubts, and really is haunted by the idea that he might have got Iraq appallingly wrong… But I think he really does have scarily messianic self-belief, and the reason he refuses to tolerate all opposing views is not the terrified defensiveness of many of his underlings, but sheer inability to comprehend that anyone could fail to agree with him without such rejection of self-evident truth being deliberately evil. The fictional Tony Blair is terrified; the real one is merely terrifying.

Though some of the gags are quite amusing and the examination of a troubled soul gives us occasional drama, the political detail is very uncertain. I can believe that, with Labour boosted in the opinion polls by nationwide relief that Tony Blair has finally gone, he’d leak a damaging e-mail purely out of worry that Gordon would get a bigger majority. But, of course, Mr Blair appears to be the most public proof ever displayed that it’s not the size that matters, but what you do with it. Again, this Tony Blair keeps insisting that Iraq is not his legacy, but is obviously unable to provide any alternative answer; what else has the real one done? Been an incompetently Orwellian minor Tory Prime Minister whose protracted period of absolute power has left nothing but the most mean-spirited of marks.

Mr Blair is shown throughout as a lonely, isolated figure: the Labour Party regards him as electoral poison; the US has hung him out to dry (their Ambassador telling him that Hillary, with an eye to re-election, will be saying unpleasant things about him in public but doesn’t really mean them is possibly the funniest scene in the whole thing); he’s left with just two aides in a huge, empty office space looking out over the Tower of London (where traitors used to await execution). It’s a shame, then, that new Prime Minister Mr Brown appears to have just one aide, vaguely implied to be Tommy Sheridan for no particular reason, making Mr Blair seem busy and popular by comparison. Much is made of the Blairs’ money worries, but even with affected religious mania putting off a British publisher, surely he’d still appeal to the religious right in America, and if John Major can coin so much, I don’t doubt that Tony Blair would be rolling in it from US lecture tours (even if George is in rehab and unable to do much directly – well, what else is new).

However uncertain and contradictory the tone may be, it would take a heart of stone not to take a little pleasure in some of the jabs inflicted on the ex-Prime Minister. Brian Haw and his stand follow him to become his megaphone-bellowing ‘neighbour’ outside his house in Connaught Square; arrested for war crimes and escorted to the nearest police station, Mr Blair complains that it’s humiliating when the desk officer demands to swab his mouth for DNA. He refuses, and is told he can’t: “Who brought that in?” he shouts. An obvious point, but well made, and well-deserved. In the New Labour Bible, of course, his outrage is perfectly justified: such an indignity could never be forced on a nice person, as only bad people would ever be subject to any police powers and, being subject to police powers, by definition you are bad and deserve anything coming to you. His expression says it all: ‘I didn’t mean me!’ It’s very satisfying to see Mr Blair told to shut up at his own extradition hearing, too, with the presiding judge the ever-authoritative John Woodvine. As it happens, he played the remarkably similar but rather deeper role of Prior Mordrin in 1987’s post-Thatcherism, post-new civil war drama Knights of God. He starts out as a dominating, charismatic leader with terrifying religious fervour, but by the end of the series has descended into messianic lunacy, with his number two leading a revolt against him and the whole thing falling apart (and, goodness, Nigel Stock’s in it too, as well as The Avengers tonight. It’s like some huge TV conspiracy). His gradual disintegration over 13 weeks is one of the most towering performances I’ve ever seen on TV, though whether he more presciently resembles Mrs Thatcher or Mr Blair is difficult to judge.

There’s a certain amount of pathos at the end, when Mr Blair suffers from heart trouble the night before he’s due to be taken to The Hague (on recovering, he at last comes full circle to that rejected confessional booth we saw at the start), and pleads with Cherie not to call an ambulance: a final admission that he knows no-one believes a word he says, and he’ll just be seen as the boy who cried wolf. Naturally, his snobbish reaction to NHS casualty is calculated to keep us from empathising with him for more than a minute or two, but there’s one last blackly comic scene when, like a gangster visiting someone not long for this world – whether from their medical condition or other means – Mr Brown brings Mr Blair lilies on his hospital visit and tells him that, of course, no-one believes his “Pinochet stunt”.

Perhaps the most damning criticism of Mr Blair presented here is the implicit one. There have been complaints that it ends with him being driven in a mobile prison cell under heavy escort towards The Hague, and we never get to see the actual ‘trial’… But surely the point is that the whole process is not about the trial itself, but about how desperate he’d be to avoid it ever coming to that because the result is a foregone conclusion. Just look at the way Robert Lindsay acts guilty throughout. The clear message is that if Mr Blair were ever put on trial for war crimes, not just Mr Blair and everyone else in the drama but every viewer already knows what the verdict would be.


Millennium’s verdict, on the other hand, is less predictable…

Labels: British Politics, Corruption, Iraq, Jacqueline Pearce, Knights of God, Labour, The Avengers Season 4