Love and Liberty

My two favourite TV series, both starring a surprisingly un-macho hero and fabulous women, both kicked off in the early Sixties by Sydney Newman, both among the most iconic and most successful British TV ever made – both exciting, witty, weird and fun.

TL;DR—

If there’s one Avengers episode that’s influenced Doctor Who more than any other, it’s The Cybernauts

Of all the Doctor Who crossover actors, watch out for From Venus With Love and Stay Tuned

Of all the Doctor Who crossover plots, marvel at The Morning After and Man-Eater of Surrey Green

And as I publish this right now, try Look – (Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One) But There Were These Two Fellers… and Dressed to Kill.

But keep reading for why, and for many more!

To Begin With… Introducing Doctor Who and The Avengers

The Avengers – A man with a bowler hat and a woman who throws men over her shoulder

Now you can skip to the selections below and start watching, really, but if you want more about one or the other, you could say that both series revolve around a mysterious, flamboyant figure who tempts you from our world into a strange one off to one side, and that neither carry guns or take themselves as seriously as their mission…

Who is the Doctor?

When the current Doctor, Jodie Whittaker, fell to Earth to play the role for the first time, I wrote So Who is The Doctor Anyway? All You Need To Know About Doctor Who, but, again, the TL;DR—

The Doctor is a traveller in time and space who goes anywhere, from Earth’s past, present and future to alien worlds and stranger places still. The Doctor obeys no authority but their own moral sense, uses intelligence rather than violence, and takes joy in taking friends to explore the wonders of the Universe. 

Doctor Who began in 1963 and has run ever since in one medium or another, but most prominently on TV through the following three decades and then again ever since 2005 – and back this very Saturday for New Year.

Who are The Avengers?

“The Avengers is about a man in a bowler hat and a woman who flings men over her shoulders.”

…said Patrick Macnee, Steed, and I can’t say better than that, can I? Or as a famous American trailer told us, that extraordinary crimes have to be avenged by agents extraordinary – John Steed, top professional, and his talented amateur partners – The Avengers. Together, they fight diabolical masterminds. Steed is a shady arm’s-length government agent whose gorgeous old-fashioned suits and bowler are almost as wilfully anachronistic as the Doctor, while The Avengers’ own version of time travel is to pair this seemingly conservative continuing lead with a series of intelligent, capable, confident, experienced and physically combative women that broke the TV mould and created the future (and several excellent men, but none so memorable as Steed or The Avengers’ women). Steed is more casually ruthless than the Doctor but just as playful – winning as often as not through outrageous cheating, while the only rule his partners break is gender. A brilliant balance of suspense and silliness, bizarre mysteries, and more than any other crime-fighting / spy-busting duo, they do it for fun. The Avengers is a secret agent series, a comedy-thriller, occasionally sci-fi, riding old-fashioned Britishness and Swinging modernity with equal excitement, its greatest genius to make all the women ahead of their time and the man from a bygone age, a fantasy of Britain with Steed playing on the swings at the heart of Avengerland.

The Avengers began in 1961 and ran through to 1969, along the way becoming the biggest ever hit British show on primetime US TV just as Doctor Who became a hit in dozens of countries, then returned as The New Avengers in the mid-’70s and, like Doctor Who, still lives on in Big Finish productions. 

Both much more strange and interesting than almost any other TV series, both sometimes very funny, sometimes sinister, it’s no surprise that The Avengers is the closest show to my heart than any but Doctor Who. Several writers worked on both – and several plots found their way from one series to the other, with cross-fertilisation apparent as early as Sara Kingdom, the Doctor’s high-action, leather-suited companion in The Daleks’ Master Plan – but it’s the actors who really stand out. Avengers Honor Blackman, Diana Rigg, Gareth Hunt, Patrick Newell and Joanna Lumley all had Doctor Who roles too. The Third Doctor, Jon Pertwee, wasn’t just the most Earthbound but had his own The Avengers part, as did the Master, the Rani, and no fewer than three First Doctors (yet not the original). The guest artists appearing across both series are too many to list, but you can find actors from The Avengers and The New Avengers even well into this century’s New Who – most notably Bernard Cribbins and Diana Rigg, but also the likes of Christopher Benjamin, Lindsay Duncan, Roy Marsden and Stephen Moore (and more).

If you’re a Doctor Who fan looking for an excuse to be enticed into The Avengers, here are a few recommendations that stand out. Not necessarily the best, nor all my favourites, nor the most quintessentially The Avengers, but a selection box of flavours you might just recognise…

Doctor Who Stars in The Avengers

From Venus With L💘ve (Mrs Peel – IN COLOR)

The Brigadier, but not the one you’re expecting: he’s Jon Pertwee!
Plus other Doctor Who guest stars from as early as the very first story in 1963 (Derek Newark) to The Eleventh Hour in 2010 (Arthur Cox), and of course The Crimson Horror’s Diana Rigg as Mrs Emma Peel.
This was the first colour episode of The Avengers to be transmitted, and like Doctor Who’s first colour story, Spearhead From Space (itself packed with Avengers crossover actors), this is shot gorgeously all on film, goes down to Earth but not quite the world as we know it as our heroes – the eccentric dandy in the vintage car and the fantastically overqualified, caustically sharp-witted scientifically accomplished woman working for a mysterious secret agency – investigate an alien invasion…

Labels: Doctor Who, Honor Blackman, Jago & Litefoot, Joanna Lumley, Julian Glover, Peter Jeffrey, Philip Madoc, The Avengers, The New Avengers

The most fabulously Sixties of all Sixties TV shows, The Avengers, is fifty years old this year – and twenty-seven years ago today, I was hooked by a repeat on Channel 4. It starred Linda Thorson as Tara King, and for me she’s always been as terrific an Avengers woman as any other. Her series of The Avengers was the last and perhaps the best, mixing colourful camp with the more sinister atmosphere of the earlier years. Where better to start than with Game, the larger-than-life postmodernism (and larger-and-deadlier-than-life Snakes and Ladders) that really opened her time on the show?

My introduction to The Avengers was the episode Who Was That Man I Saw You With? and though I’d thoroughly recommend it, Game was both chosen to launch Tara King at the time and is one of her stories that even her detractors praise. You can watch both, beautifully restored for DVD, in The Avengers Complete Series 6 box set, or in The Avengers Complete 50th Anniversary Collection. Way back in 1999, I was commissioned to write a piece on Game for Cult Times, and that forms much of the article below, originally published in Cult Times Issue 45 as File Under… Cheat! Cheat! Cheat! I’d love to encourage you to buy their magazines, but sadly Visual Imagination went under a couple of years ago; they produced some wonderful stuff while they lasted (and were among the very few houses that’s ever paid me for writing).

Game was the first Avengers story broadcast with Tara King as Steed’s main partner (after the season opened with a more muted handover episode), and starts the new era off in great style. Enjoyable, surreal and intense, this is one of the most visually striking episodes the series ever produced. And even for The Avengers, it plays games with the audience – confident that everyone’s enjoying it all enough to laugh along with the joke that both it and the audience know it’s a TV programme.

Breaking Out of the Screen

The Avengers itself is a great big cheat that encourages everyone to play along with a fantasy of Britain that never really existed, rather than a ‘real’ thriller show. Usually it’s Steed’s playful attitude that gives the game away. Game is different and as postmodern as even this consistently fourth-wall-breaking series gets, with persistent nods to the audience that it’s not only an exciting piece of action-adventure television – which it is, very much – but also a work of artifice.

“Take me, for example. Did I create myself… Or did others create me?”

The story has two directors: vividly in-your-face first-time director Robert Fuest, delighting in thrilling Op-Art style; and, within the story itself, villain “Monty Bristow,” who’s just as in-your-face for the characters, moves all the pieces and first appears watching his plans unfold on TV… But is as unreal as an Avengers villain gets. Officially dead, he’s taken making a new life to extremes – it’s not his real face, it’s not his real name, and he’s not really as good a sport as he pretends. At dinner with an expert on fiction, he all but asks, ‘Who wrote me?’ Technically that was Richard Harris, whose script is a story all about how these stories go, with Bristow almost a killer Avengers fan. He knows the series to a tee, describing his killer game based on Steed’s lifestyle as requiring courage, strategy, cunning, and a damsel in distress, while the inside of his mansion is filled with giant games that are as blatant studio sets as any in the series. Steed wins through at the end despite odds of six to one against, yet earlier fails when Bristow offers him odds of only one in six of failure – because the underdog always wins in fiction, and Bristow knows from The Avengers ‘formula’ that means Steed will make the wrong choice.

“Evens, Brigadier. That’s very fair… Much fairer than – say – six to one against. That’s what you gave me!”

Bristow wants revenge on the six army officers who court-martialled him in Germany twenty years earlier. All are to be killed in giant games based on their current jobs – and to make certain of that, Bristow cheats whenever any of them looks like ‘winning’. A Brigadier, for example, is a natural games player and treats life as a game anyway, as befits the man with the most ‘serious’ job. Watch him win – and watch how our villain loves people trying, but only if they fail. Bristow is such a control freak he doesn’t even let people roll their own dice (you could see him working for the Labour Party). As the final victim, Steed is given the most challenging “Super Secret Agent” game in many parts, but keeps subverting the way it works, as if he’s overwriting his own ‘director’s cut’ over Bristow’s version of the plot. Bristow’s face twists even on their first meeting, when Steed’s read the script and knows who he really is; when Steed, not just a better gamesman but a better cheat, goes on to dodge facing a symbolic six assailants alone, Bristow stamps to his feet in disbelieving anger like a child facing defeat.

“Cheat! You cheated. You cheated! Cheat! Cheat! Cheat!”

Steed and Tara

Patrick Macnee’s Steed becomes more understated the more that Peter Jeffrey’s Bristow loses control, but never stepping out of line of the episode’s blatant postmodernism – his marvellously inappropriate look of mild surprise on being told, “The safe contains a bomb” is perfect, just as Steed is perfect to foil Bristow. On one level, it’s simply about class; gentlemen are ‘allowed’ to cheat, as long as they treat the cheating as a game too, and Bristow can’t even cheat with good grace, let alone lose. On another, notice that while Steed is more than capable of killing, he more often chooses not to – and that while Bristow cheats in order to kill, Steed’s bit of cheating that most infuriates him (and most breaks the rules of TV thrillers) is using a gun not to kill, but to give life.

So while many action heroes are honest and upright, but kill with abandon, Steed is the reverse. Being a secret agent is always less important to Steed than having fun, and if he can have more fun by cheating… Ever since he was the shadowy partner to respectable Dr David Keel, each of the ‘other’ Avengers played it straight while Steed never fought fair, whether beating Tara in an outrageous game of “Steedopoly” in her first principal story here, or cheating his way to a fencing victory over Mrs Peel in hers. That was the biggest mistake in the movie version released a few months before I wrote this originally: while nowhere near as bad as it was cracked up to be, it did get the central character badly wrong by having their Steed claim always to play by the rules while his partner breaks them, when it’s quite the opposite. The only ‘rule’ the other Avengers break is their gender.

Tara and Steed make a splendid team throughout. She’s confident and determined, but with a refreshing innocence, giving the impression of working harder than her invulnerable predecessors. She earns her successes in moments like the cat-like spring to the ground that slashes the odds for the super closing fight, where the Avengers thump opponents in sync. Game was a flying start for her with viewers, rarely bettered until such fabulous stories as Pandora and Requiem, right at the end of her run. She has a good clothes day here in red-based outfits with waistcoats, though a bad one in green; Steed excels in rather a stylish navy suit and dark maroon tie and looks good in grey as always, but sinks to a dreadful patterned shirt in the otherwise diverting tag scene. Together they look terrific approaching a long swing like pall-bearers, with Tara in mourning colours of pale lilac blouse with black waistcoat and culottes and Steed in brown, but in step; but that same suit comes a cropper when partnered with Tara’s lime-green outfit, making them together look like mint choc chip.

Watch out for Tara’s confrontation with a remarkably queeny manager in a monocle at “Jig Creations” – “Royalty has walked through that door,” he tells her. Of course it has, dear.

“Tell me, what do you do on long winter nights?”
“I ride a bicycle.”
“What else?”

…breathes Linda Thorson, and sweeps out, leaving the wicked butler to pop up from behind a giant pink jigsaw piece. Sublime!

The Substance of Style

Much of Game’s superb eye for colour comes from former designer Robert Fuest, establishing him instantly as one of the great Avengers directors (the first story he filmed was the stunning My Wildest Dream, with this his first to be broadcast; he went on to direct Dr Phibes and other films). Giddy cuts between scenes grab your attention right from the opening teaser, where a game of Scalectrix contrasts with a driver on an indoor racing track, who crashes and is thrown from his car but hits the ground outside – his racing goggles full of jigsaw pieces… Avengers have found dead bodies in playgrounds before, but Fuest makes them uncanny, just as Bristow makes these invitations to a killing a mockery of the usual process of discovering clues.

Robert Jones’ set design splendidly realises the games, while the best of the well-chosen locations is Bristow’s big old house, in reality the Grim’s Dyke Hotel at Old Redding, Harrow (my heart gives a little skip, as I used to play near there on childhood holidays with my Nana and Grandad). You might also recognise it as the mad investor Maxtible’s house in top Doctor Who story The Evil of the Daleks. There’s fab music, too, from forgotten Avengers composer Howard Blake, at times strangely reminiscent of Inspector Gadget or – more appropriately – Batman.

Most of Game is so enjoyable that you barely notice any weak points (but you’ll notice a spoiler in a moment). True, friends of Steed being bumped off becomes a repetitive New Avengers trope later, but it’s not boring yet; there’s a moment where the ashtray with which Steed has been knocked out suddenly vanishes in the next shot, but perhaps the wicked manservant is just very tidy. The main irritation is the end – Sir! Madam! Please avert your gaze if you don’t want to know! – where Bristow dies by his own weapon, which is the most overused, least diverting of all Avengers clichés. But at least it was a razor-edged playing card rather than a gun, and in this story about Avengers stories, it had to be a cliché, didn’t it?

No description of such a feast for the senses can do it justice. The Avengers is a show to be seen for its fabulous surface style, and rarely more so than with Game. Sit back and let Steed and Tara’s duel with a diabolical mastermind enthral and amuse you – you won’t believe your eyes.

Five Reasons To Watch Game

• Scary Life-size Games
  You knew children were violent, didn’t you? The villain kills people with giant games: acting out Snakes and Ladders on a huge ladder into nowhere is pretty scary for acrophobics; you’ll never feel so crushed by word games as you do here; but the best is Super Secret Agent, where Steed has to pass a mini-Avengers episode to win. Naturally he wins, and isn’t it time they marketed it?

• Tea in the Trenches
  Weary soldiers trudge across a battlefield as Tara strides out in a gorgeous navy and deep rose outfit, looking butcher than the lot of them. She’s there to take tea with a Brigadier in his dug-out: “They’re all dead.” “Oh dear. One lump or two?”

• Clock-Fight
  Calamity! Tara’s anti-magnetic, shockproof, waterproof, chronometer-time watch has stopped! Only Steed’s Aunt Emily’s battered, brassy, ancient alarm clock with one hand missing can tell them that dawn approaches – and prompt Steed to give Tara a quick spank, if you’re into the kinky stuff (don’t mention the gymslip)…

• Tara the Bodyguard
  Discovering Steed is to be the next victim, Tara seizes a gun, piles a barricade of chairs around him and promises Steed he’ll be “very well looked after.” Bless her.

• The Butler Did It
  Later famous for The Sweeney, Garfield Morgan makes a wonderful manservant – he’s so violent! He actually beats each Avenger in fights, his lurking around corners is a treat, and his genuine playfulness makes him a better sport than his boss, the ever-suave and villainous Peter Jeffrey.

And Guest-Starring…

The Avengers excelled in featuring top British actors in perfect guest roles. Five in particular stand out as their ‘Old Reliables’, each appearing at least four times, giving scene-stealing star turns with curiously consistent character traits. You know you’re onto a winner with ‘Villainous Peter Bowles’, ‘Loveable Roy Kinnear’, ‘Villainous Julian Glover’ or ‘Demented John Laurie’ – and if you’re lucky enough to see Pandora, two turn up at once! Game stars ‘Old Reliable’ number five, ‘Villainous Peter Jeffrey’, who you may know from many movies and as the wicked Count Grendel in The Androids of Tara – no, not a plot to replace our favourite Avenger with robots, but a just as camp Doctor Who story (as well as the less well-known but equally brilliant The Macra Terror). His first Avengers appearance is in the black and white Emma Peel episode Room Without a View as a mildly comic ministry official, but his villainous credentials are assured by a strange trilogy of stories as lead villain. Each of these characters is bent on revenge against an Avenger; each uses a playing card motif; each has a dubious continental connection. Oh, yes – and each is dead! Game was the middle story in this trilogy; for the first, Peter Jeffrey gives a performance of barely controlled hysteria as German smuggler Max Prendergast in The Joker, a sinister episode from the colour Emma season. A thoroughly disturbing psychotic who uses cards as interior decorations, he cuts up pictures of Mrs Peel and is revealed on screen in similar ‘slices’ of close-up. Chillingly, he tells her: “I’m dead, Emma. You can’t kill me twice.” Following Game, Jeffrey turns up again as wily spymaster Perov in The New Avengers’ House of Cards. After Steed humiliates him, Perov fakes suicide and launches a set of sleeper agents, the “House of Cards,” against our heroes. His dastardly plan even calculates that the first sleeper, David Miller, will betray him to Steed – then Perov makes the mistake of fighting Purdey…

Labels: DVD, Personal, Peter Jeffrey, Reviews, Style, The Avengers, The Avengers Season 6

The deaths have been announced of two men with enormous track records in entertainment: Peter Rogers, who fabulously produced every single Carry On film; then celebrity cook, glacially slow Just A Minute speaker and contributor to the gaiety of the nation through Parliamentary Liberalism Clement Freud. Both of them and their work have been presences through my whole life, and I’m sorry that I never met either of them. I did, however, meet John Cater, an actor whose death was also announced recently, and I’d like to celebrate that genuinely nice chap as well as the two more famous men.

Intellectually, I’ve known for many years that Clement Freud was a Liberal MP, but as he lost his seat and largely disappeared from politics at around the time I started getting interested, it’s always been difficult to feel that political presence in the man who I’ve always known as a lugubrious regular alongside Nicholas Parsons (the only time I can remember hearing a Lib Dem conversation about him was scurrilous rumours that he and Roy Jenkins used to compete to see who could go for longest without visiting their seats). So as well as lauding Stephen Glenn’s very appropriate tribute, I’d like to direct you to Paul Walter, whose Clement Freud’s Vital 12.5% puts in perspective just how important Clement was to the Liberal Party during his time in Parliament – first elected on a day when, astonishingly, we won two by-elections on one day (26th July 1973) and, in those days long before being able to get 63 MPs elected, at a stroke increased our Commons representation by a third on top of what we’d had a few hours before. And, of course, I was always a great fan of Band On the Run, too (Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five is still one of the most stirring rock anthems). But, for all those people who talk about how off-message he was, you can read via Jonathan Calder how sharp his instinct was for getting a political point in at the most unlikely moment.

John Cater – Intense, Reliable, and A Disturbing Sort of Spear-Carrier

You probably knew of Clement Freud, and you’ve almost certainly watched some of Peter Rogers’ films, but you may not be able to place the name of John Cater. He was an actor with a hugely impressive list of screen credits across fifty years – from Saturday Night Theatre in 1958, via the Dr Phibes movies, Dad’s Army and a regular role in The Duchess of Duke Street to, oh, never mind, Bonekickers last year – but taking in along the way an enormous number of roles. I particularly remember him for his appearances in arguably my three favourite series of all, Doctor Who, I, Claudius, and the one I’ll always associate him with, The Avengers.

He was quite slight, and often bearded, with an inquisitive look to him; though usually found in moderately-sized rather than leading roles, he was a very reliable character actor, and managed to combine a light touch for comedy with an extraordinary intensity. He was always terribly watchable. In Doctor Who – The War Machines, the 1966 story that warns that the Internet is coming and it will TAKE OVER THE WORLD! he’s Professor Krimpton, one of the developers of the deadly computer system who, on seeing his boss become a starry-eyed zombie, first laughs and just thinks he’s flipped, as you would, then fights against the Machine’s hypnotic control in a very disturbing scene, then eventually succumbs. A decade later, he was one of the Emperor Claudius’ two trusted Greek administrators towards the end of the serial, the one who saw what was coming and didn’t betray him.

Back in the mid-’80s, however, it was John Cater’s death in an episode of The Avengers that made him unforgettable for me. During a Channel 4 repeat run, I got hooked on the series first through some of the Tara King episodes and then on catching some of the black and white Mrs Peel outings. It was in one of the latter, Death At Bargain Prices, that he plays a store detective who befriends Mrs Peel – sent there to investigate strange goings-on – and comes to a particularly nasty end. Though he’s also an entertainingly diffident foreign spy in the later episode The Living Dead and “Disco” (not who you imagine) in the Cathy Gale story The Nutshell, for me he’ll always be Jarvis, creeping around Pinter’s Department Store. But what harm could come to you in a big store? Well, when there’s a large jungle set up in the middle of it – to show off camping equipment, of course – where better to find yourself winding up with a spear through your chest, for one of the most haunting images of my teens?

In the last couple of years, I met John twice at different Doctor Who events, and had the chance to chat to him (and to get him to autograph my Avengers DVDs). Spry, animated and a great conversationalist, he came across as a genuinely lovely guy, with a wicked twinkle. Discussing I, Claudius, he talked about how Derek Jacobi would always learn his lines at least one episode in advance, so he could sit doing the Times crossword as other actors got it right, and how another actor he worked with, Ronald Culver (father of Michael), would do the same. From the inside, he too was very impressed by I, Claudius, but unimpressed by the industry not giving any work to its director, “the great Herbie Wise,” because “directors over forty are past it” – recalling Herbie’s being asked “What have you done?” when going for a job on The Bill, “whereas actors can get away with it, because there’ll always be old fart parts for old farts like me.” He remembered, in The Avengers’ The Living Dead, “being a rather silly second lieutenant to Julian Glover,” but enjoying playing the piano badly and being asked by a gruff shop steward, “Are you in the Musicians’ Union?” And as he’d always been a bit of a muso, he joined on the spot and still kept it up to that day, which gave him the odd free entry to concerts and things. He found that episode’s director John Krish a real gentleman – he got him a car home despite the unions making a fuss, and did him a copy of The Living Dead when he couldn’t find one (he recalled that John also did a film, Decline and Fall, which John regrets was ruined by the editors forced on him).

I mentioned, of course, my memory of that gloriously surreal Avengers image of him lying dead with a spear in his chest, in a jungle, in a department store, one of the moments that so captivated me about the series when I was new to it. He told me about the filming, and the “mechanism” he was fitted with:

“Yes, I remember that shot. The props man passed by as I was being set up for it and shouted, ‘Stick it up his Jacksie’. And I thought, how rude! ‘You wouldn’t say that if I was Laurence Olivier,’ I said. ‘But you’re not, are you?’ he said. ‘Stick it up his Jacksie!’”

Peter Rogers, Carry On Up the Khyber, and The Worst DVD Commentary in the World, Ever!

Peter Rogers was a brilliant producer. To have made so many Carry On films, and for so many of them to be brilliant – as well as some that were all right, some mediocre and one or two downright dreadful – means he deserves to be remembered for giving people an awful lot of pleasure and, for someone who clearly had a sharp focus on the bottom line, for being responsible for the one of the most successful British film series ever made. I think only James Bond can touch it.

The best way to celebrate him, then, is to bung on one of his films and simply enjoy it. If you need a tip, try going for Carry On Cleo, or Carry On Screaming, or Carry On, Don’t Lose Your Head – yesterday, Film Four showed Leslie Howard’s version of The Scarlet Pimpernel, and though that’s much-lauded, Don’t Lose Your Head is not only (naturally) a much funnier film, but a far more exciting one. The 1934 adaptation may have a strong plot and some good lines (if none to match “The Duc de Pommes Frittes has had his chips!”), but the action in the comedy version beats it hands down, and you can’t beat Sid James’ joyous foppery. For years, every time Leslie Howard’s Pimpernel came round, The Guardian’s film review would praise its swordplay as “exhilarating”. And every time, I’d raise an eyebrow, because that film contains no swordplay at all, still less any to compete with the genuinely exhilarating swordplay at the climax of Peter Rogers’ Don’t Lose Your Head. Or, of course, you could simply watch the finest of all his films, set in part in the aforementioned town of Jacksie, Carry On Up the Khyber.

Ah, yes, Carry On Up the Khyber. It may be an inappropriate way to remember him, but I didn’t hear all that many interviews with Peter Rogers, and the one that sticks in my head with fascinated horror was his DVD commentary for that movie, an experience so dreadful that – years before I started blogging – I was moved to send an e-mail round relating it. So here, from the 24th of May 2003, is my reaction to his reaction. I hope you’ll find it entertaining, if a cautionary tale in why being brilliant behind the camera doesn’t necessarily mean entertainment in front of it…

The Worst DVD Commentary in the World, Ever!

OK, I admit that (paraphrasing Donald Cotton on Helen of Troy) it’s impossible to know this without the most extensive surveys, but yesterday evening I listened to such a mind-boggling train-wreck of a commentary that I had to share it with you. Or give you a warning.

The DVD in question is one just bought for me by my beloved, the Special Edition of Carry On Up the Khyber (or “Carry On the Regiment” as a team of censors unfunnily tried to persuade them was a better title). Now, for the most part this is a terrific DVD, with added subtitles, a nice little booklet with Doctor Who references, rather good extras – even the bonus Carry On Laughing show (usually unimpressive), The Sobbing Cavalier, is quite a fun Civil War piece – and the film itself is fantastic, which is why we went for the Special Edition even after getting the original DVD release. But the commentary is astoundingly painful.

The Carry On Special Edition commentaries I’ve heard so far have mostly been Jim Dale on his own, which are only so-so, or a team of the more minor actors, which are rather more entertaining, each moderated by Carry On reference book author Robert Ross (Barbara Windsor doesn’t seem to be doing any). For Khyber, sadly, almost all the actors are now dead, and presumably they didn’t think Angela Douglas, say, was a big enough draw on her own. You can imagine Mr Ross thinking, ‘Hey, this is the best Carry On, so for something really special, let’s bring in Peter Rogers, the producer of all the films. That’ll work.’

It doesn't.

By half-way through, I was actually wondering if they’d get to the end of the recording; if this was a marriage, it’d be at the stage of acrimonious divorce due to irreconcilable differences. Ross has gone into it with a trayful of fascinating facts and a set of questions to prompt heart-warming anecdotes; Rogers is under the impression that he’s being paid to sit and watch a film – with gritted teeth – and regards any attempt to engage him in conversation as the utmost impertinence.

Before this, my most grumpy commentary was with Nigel Kneale on the laserdisc of the Quatermass II film, being prodded every few minutes by his moderator and either staying silent or snapping viciously at the stick that’s prodding him. At least, though, Kneale is a brilliantly evil old curmudgeon who hates directors, actors, and above all every single young person in the world, and can be relied on to say something waspish and indiscreet (notably taking a fiendish delight in Brian Donlevy’s flying hairpiece) that makes the long periods of silence bearable. Rogers’ lofty hostility beats this hands down as a grim listening experience.

Peter Rogers appears to have entered a bet with someone that he can take profound personal offense at any remark, even if it’s actually praising him, rather like the “I Couldn't Disagree With You More” round on the much-missed ’90s panel game If I Ruled the World. “So, this film is often thought of as one of the best British films ever made – do you feel proud of it?” asks Ross hopefully, for example. “Proud? No, certainly not. What a thing to say,” is just one of the affronted retorts I remember from last night.

Rogers’ other tactic is silence. Getting any reply at all out of him is like pulling teeth. You get the feeling that Ross was considering shooting himself after the 433rd complicated question which had been greeted with “… (pause) … (more pause) …No.” Admittedly, he asks for trouble a couple of times, trying persistently to correct Rogers on facts which the other man clearly isn’t going to give way on (tip: never mention Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in his presence), but you can’t blame him. I’d probably have strangled the rude old git.

He’s hypersensitive about money; he puts down Ross’ attempts to infodump to give the listener something for their money (“You sound like a football commentator”); he says, in the tone of a headmaster cleaning urine out of the drinking fountain with his hands, “As long as I make people laugh, I’m happy.” At one point, he has the cheek to remark, “You’ve not asked me any questions for a while,” immediately qualifying it with “Not that I want to answer them.” Most of all, he just doesn’t want to speak. I suspect he’s never heard a DVD commentary. Except as a lesson in how not to do one, you shouldn’t try to hear this one, either.

Oh, and it closes with Ross somehow forcing himself to say, “Thank you, Peter Rogers. It’s been a pleasure.” “I wish I could say the same,” he stiffly replies. Straight up!

Finally, though you won’t see John Cater in either of them, tonight BBC4 spoil us with two episodes of The Avengers. At 7.40 you can see Obsession, a reasonable story notable for Purdey’s ballet career and sad love affair, asides about Middle East politics and being the first time Lewis Collins and Martin Shaw (later to be a memorable Citizen Camembert himself) worked together, and that’s on again tomorrow night at 12.25. Steed’s pretty damned terrific at the end, too. If you’re seriously sleepless, they’re also showing a signed repeat tonight of the very much better House of Cards, the last of Peter Jeffrey’s strange trilogy of villains spread across a decade, each time a different old foe bent on revenge against an Avenger, where each uses a playing card motif, each has a dubious continental connection, and each one is dead… But that episode’s not on until 2.30am, so I hope not to be watching it this time.

Labels: Carry On, Fandom, Film, Liberal Democrats, Obituary, Peter Jeffrey, Reviews, The Avengers Season 3, The Avengers Season 4, The Avengers Season 5, The New Avengers, William Hartnell

On TV over the next few days there’s a feast of wonderful things with one feature in common: a ’70s revival. Tonight’s highlight may hail from 1966 – one of The Avengers’ greatest episodes, The House That Jack Built, at 1am on BBC4 – but it’s preceded by House of Cards, a striking episode of 1976 Avengers revival The New Avengers. Appropriately for Doctor Who’s anniversary weekend, there’s also a new sequel to a 1975 Doctor Who, fine storytelling from The Sarah Jane Adventures (she debuted in 1973) and a remake of Dalek author Terry Nation’s 1975 apocalyptic drama Survivors. And you thought it was just decaying Labour Governments, nationalisations and economic disasters that were back in fashion!

House of Cards at five past midnight tonight on BBC4 is a splendidly double-crossing piece of cold war fun featuring a high-kicking bishop and an outrageous shaggy dog scene about the past Avengers women, and starring the always enjoyable Peter Jeffrey. One of The Avengers’ top recurring guest stars, this is the last of a strange trilogy of episodes spread across a decade, in each of which he plays a different old foe bent on revenge against an Avenger. Each uses a playing card motif; each has a dubious continental connection; and each one is dead…

On Sunday night at six and again at midnight, Doctor Who’s 45th anniversary, brings a radio sequel on BBC7 to a rather fabulous 1975 TV adventure. Terror of the Zygons was the last big hurrah for UNIT, brought in the Loch Ness Monster (seriously), and perhaps best deserves to be remembered for the Zygons, undoubtedly for me the greatest of one-off Who monsters (sorry Reapers, werewolf and Quarks). Despite a slight disadvantage to seeing these aliens with your wireless sets, this sequel with Paul McGann and Sheridan Smith is very different in tone, but fun – guest stars include Tim Brooke-Taylor and Steven Pacey. And though it’ll be introduced as The Zygon Who Fell To Earth, it’ll always be Trevor of the Zygons to me.

The Doctor Who-related highlight, though, despite strong competition from Einstein and Eddington on Saturday night (damn! It clashes with The Devil’s Whore! But still, the Doctor and Terry Nation on the front of the Radio Times, and not even for Doctor Who; how brilliant is that?), is Monday’s The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith. The first half’s on BBC1 at 4.35, and the conclusion follows on CBBC at 5.15; having seen Part One on CBBC last week, I can’t wait to find out what happens after the fantastic Pyramids of Marsesque cliffhanger. Don’t let it being a ‘children’s programme’ put you off; it’s a great series, not only far better than Torchwood but – heretical thought – possibly better than this year’s Doctor Who, too (and how many other kids’ shows quote The Wicker Man?). This story by the very talented Gareth Roberts is the highlight of this year’s Sarahs so far, in which she’s led into a trap by a sinister figure known as the Trickster, who to fans of Doctor Who’s 1978-9 Key to Time season may bear an uncanny resemblance to the Black Guardian (but, as Gareth said to me of something completely different when I jumped him in Borders last week, “We’re not allowed to call it that”).

The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith is also, of course, the sequel to the very best of last year’s The Sarah Jane Adventures, the positively uncanny Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? BBC1 handily repeated that last Sunday, so if you missed it, tune your IPlayer to the 16th and watch the sufferings of Lis Sladen and Jane Asher – but be quick, before it’s gone (or just buy the boxed set of the complete first series, which came out on DVD last week).

And finally, of course, I’m on edge wondering just what the remake of Survivors will be like, coming up on Sunday night at nine. The original series varied from gripping post-apocalyptic drama to, er, The Archers, and was never the same after the producer sacked the terrific actress playing the strong, independent female lead because she was, er, a strong and independent woman. I’m hoping the new Survivors is good; there’ve been some intriguing teasers shown and it’s got quite a few good actors in it, but they’ve given the central part to that woman from Bonekickers. Let’s hope it was the series and not her, eh?

Tom Baker’s Explosion of Desire

Having had a rough couple of weeks and not got out much or been in any way sociable, this morning I spent a couple of hours queuing outside the Stamp Centre on the Strand and getting very, very cold. In keeping with the ’70s mood, it was one of those rare opportunities to see ’70s Doctor Who icon Tom Baker, and indeed fellow ’70s Doctor Who icon Nicholas Courtney, the Brigadier, who’s a very funny man in his own right but usually plays Tom’s straight man at such events. As Tom has a rather mercurial temperament, I thought it best to bring along a little sweetener. You never know if he’s going to go into an extended anecdote and profess his love for you, or eye up what you want signing and mutter “You can see I was in 180 episodes…”

Reckoning he was sick of jelly babies (“Yeerrhh,” he growled), but remembering that he’d given me a bag of them, along with half the kids in Britain, when I met him at the age of about nine, I gave him a pack of Hotel Chocolat’s Fruity Selection. “Fruity seemed appropriate,” I suggested. Those brilliant blue eyes fixed me. “Am I fruity, then?” Fortunately, Nick came to my rescue and told him that indeed he was. On my recommendation, he tried the lemon truffle first: it’s got a centre of lemon and white chocolate, but the outer shell is incredibly tart. Fortunately, he loved it. “That’s kept me from death!” rang this great cry down the shop. “What an explosion of… Desire!” He turned to Nick. “Try the pink one. You’ve played a bishop” (I didn’t enquire whether or not he was high-kicking or not, though I suspect not). Nick agreed that they were, indeed, very good. Tom tried a pink one too, and slowly swooned into Nick for a kiss. Then, upright and bellowing again, “Aren’t these marvellous? We could do the adverts, if they’ll have us!” So there you are, Hotel Chocolat. Get in touch with his agent at once.

The morning’s guests also included the rather brilliant and slightly terrifying David Troughton, who’s appeared in Doctor Who in the ’60s, ’70s and Noughties, with the distinction of turning up in the best story of the year each time. I love him, though, for an ’80s series, A Very Peculiar Practice (like all four of the doctor stars, he’d have made a terrific Doctor). Though the first series is out on DVD, the second’s never even been repeated, so I’ve not seen it in twenty years. He’s of the view, it turns out, that Mrs Thatcher was so offended by it and hated the BBC so much that she stopped it being reshown (and I probably can’t repeat some of his comments; suffice to say that, unlike poor David Davis crying this morning into his Puccini on Desert Island Discs over her resignation, Mr Troughton is more likely to play Elvis Costello). Who’d have thought the man who played uber-Thatcherite Bob Buzzard would be so vehemently anti-Thatcher in person? Well, everybody, admittedly.

Labels: A Very Peculiar Practice, Big Finish, Chocolate, Doctor Who, Fandom, Food, Paul McGann, Peter Jeffrey, Sarah Jane Smith, The Avengers, The Brigadier, The New Avengers, Tom Baker

On Richard and my thirteenth anniversary, I feel like writing something fun – nothing serious, nothing political (though Lib Dems may need cheering up anyway), so I’m looking at 2007’s surge of Doctor Who DVDs. Released last month, the highpoint is The Key To Time box set, an extra-packed complete season of Tom Baker that’s the largest and probably the most thoroughly enjoyable Doctor Who package so far. The box doesn’t even boast ‘written by Douglas Adams’ or ‘starring K9,’ but it’s still already sold out in most places, so order it online or grab it if you see it!

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that The Key To Time has been selling so fast, though even people working for the BBC’s commercial arm have admitted they underestimated the demand. The release rate of DVDs from the old series has shot up this year from about seven or eight stories to seventeen, several of them bundled together; partly because they’ve decided they’d like to get them all out ready for repackaging in the 50th anniversary of the show (2013), and partly because they’ve been selling so much better since the new series has been on TV and a big hit. Oh, and there are plenty of new series releases out this year, too, but I can’t review everything at once. And then there are a pile of repackaged and reissued stories as well, which’ll have to wait for another post, if at all! The biggest change this year, though, has been in the number of stories you can buy for Tom Baker, the longest-running Doctor with over forty adventures broadcast. In seven years of Who DVD releases to the end of last year, ten of his stories had become available – by the end of this year, there’ll be twenty-one of them on the shelves (possibly with a gap of six where The Key To Time’s out of stock). Having rather scarily not written a Doctor Who piece on here for half the year, I thought it was more than time that I caught up…

So, by way of updating my last year’s ‘Choosing Doctor Who DVDs Made Easy’, here are all the Doctor Who DVD releases of 2007 – in a very vague order of merit:

The Key to Time Boxed Set

A compelling Doctor and companion having masses of fun, witty scripts, emotion, magic, a ‘story arc’ (in those days less portentously called an ‘umbrella theme’), vivid women characters and even filming in Wales… This 1978-9 set of six stories making up the show’s Sixteenth Season could almost be the new series – well, all right, without the pace, budget or all the old enemies. How much you enjoy this may depend on how much you like The Tom Baker Show, but if you see a sparkly pinky-blue box on sale, I’d recommend it. Tom is accompanied by Mary Tamm’s Romana (surely his most beautiful companion) and the tin dog… And I’d say this is the one year where K9 really worked, so you’ll see him at his best. It’s surprisingly short of monsters, and towards the end noticeably short of cash, but it has wit, character and imagination in abundance, as well as a fabulous set of villains. Striking out into science fantasy with castles and royals and the Doctor as a wizard on a quest, this is the series at its most fairy-tale, but with a darker undertone that gods aren’t to be trusted. The stories are by some of the best writers ever to work on Doctor Who: famous Douglas Adams; Robert Holmes, who Russell T Davies says wrote “the best dialogue ever written”; David Fisher, who for my money gets the best balance of character and wit, and quite grown-up about sex; and Bob Baker and Dave Martin, never as highly rated, but then, Bob’s the only Who writer with an Oscar, so don’t knock him…

I was aged six and seven when this lot was first broadcast – when it took six months to watch, rather than eleven hours (excluding the commentaries, text notes, documentaries, deleted scenes…) – so perhaps it’s unsurprising that I love it so. It was the first Doctor Who season I saw in colour; my Mum tells me that I’d pleaded for us to get a colour TV on the grounds that “having to watch the Multi-coloured Swap Shop in black and white is the mark of a deprived childhood.” So rather than just gush, I’ve written a paragraph on what’s to like in each of the six stories. Before then, on the first disc you’ll find an in-depth documentary covering the 1977-1980 years of Doctor Who produced by Graham Williams, when the series moved from horror and movies towards wit and books – it’s the heart of the extras, and has some great contributions, including actors, writers, directors, new series writer Gareth Roberts and archive footage of the late Graham Williams and Douglas Adams. Even three decades later, it’s still a period that divides fans: for those who didn’t like it, this does a good job of explaining the curses it was under… Such as Mary Whitehouse, runaway inflation destroying the budget, and Tom Baker eating directors for breakfast. My only complaints are that it gives away one of the best gags in The Power of Kroll, and that for fear of shocking parents it doesn’t include the most famous out-take of the time, when Tom Baker snaps at K9 that

“Yeah, you never fucking know the answer when it’s important.”

If that hasn’t convinced you to read on, try this smashing trailer for the DVD, which sums up all the stories and even includes an explosion that BBC health and safety said was too dangerous for the studio – so they filmed it in a nuclear power station instead. Halcyon days!



The Ribos Operation

The Doctor is rather unwillingly sent on a mission to find the scattered parts of the all-powerful ‘Key to Time’, by someone who may or may not be God but is pretty scary either way… So off he goes to a brilliantly conceived world in its medieval times, surrounded by such vivid characters as a conman, a brutal old general and a psychotic deposed prince, though for many the story’s stolen by this world’s version of Gallileo, tortured for saying the stars are suns and not ice crystals in the sky. It’s funny, intelligent, has impressive music and a lovely Russian-esque design – though new viewers might find it lacks action and that the monster’s a bit rubbish, the season starts with a winner, and the commentary by Tom Baker and Mary Tamm is delightfully bitchy. I’ve written an in-depth review of this one, by the way, but as it refers to the final story, too, you might not want to read it until you’ve watched the lot; the same applies for Millennium’s contrary and rather brilliant theory of who Tom Baker thinks is god.

The Pirate Planet

Douglas Adams’ first TV script, and K9 as a hero… What could possibly go wrong? Well, surprisingly little. This is a brilliantly structured story, with a great mystery that moves gradually and seamlessly from being very silly to being very serious, and Tom Baker is terrific. On the downside, it starts a little slowly, and it’s evident that the budget’s not been spent on the crowd scenes or the video effects. There are two commentaries here, one rather dry one a few years old from the US release (which had little restoration work and very few extras, while this one is packed with them from deleted scenes, to a charming ‘making of’, to a rather overlong and unwise comedy feature that really can’t compete with Mr Adams) and a new commentary in which Tom Baker tests the limits of what he can say for a PG-rated release. Of all these stories, this is the one where the old film and video stock has been polished up most impressively, though some fans are up in arms about an effect that’s been microscopically changed (actually, I spotted a more blatant one that’s been replaced altogether, wrongly, but I’d better not mention it for fear of starting another flame war). The cyborg Pirate Captain looks terrific, too; the local population are quite happy with their murderous dictator because he makes them rich; despite looking very ‘sci-fi,’ it’s still at heart a fairy tale with a wicked old witch and a giant in a castle. And you might notice that the mysterious Mentiads are all male, appear to live in a rave club, and a suburban conservative says he’s glad his son was shot rather than become “one of those – those…” Yes, they’re the Daily Mail’s worst nightmare: young people today who are gay hoodies.

The Stones of Blood

There’s rather a good little documentary about Hammer movies as an influence on Doctor Who here, appropriately enough when this is the story that combines Celtic mythology with two direct steals from Hammer (watch closely: they’re The Mummy and The Hound of the Baskervilles). It’s even got that very horror film but very rare for Doctor Who ‘have sex and die’ attitude, in the scene Russell T Davies thinks is the scariest ever. So, is this a return to the Doctor Who horror movie? Well… No. It starts off that way, but twists around into something quite different, and both approaches partly work. Rather than just gothic horror, this is definitely female gothic, with very strong parts for women and (after the gay Mentiads) blatant lesbians. What’s brilliant about it is its wit and cleverness, its actors, and that it beats off several other stories this season to be the campest Doctor Who of the lot. What’s less brilliant is that the first half is plagued by erratic and obviously fake ‘night’ shots that suggest the sun’s bungee-jumping, while the second half is less inconsistent in look but lets itself down with some terribly inconsistent trial ‘rules’. Still, it has some occasionally scary living rocks, a deleted scene that inspired a League of Gentlemen sketch, and proof in another extra that Blue Peter was telling untruths to the nation’s youth as long ago as 1978…

The Androids of Tara

My favourite story of the season is wonderfully light and engaging, like a summer holiday week off from more serious things, running around the countryside, and having the most extraordinary fun for a show that’s never short of fun in the first place. Peter Jeffrey makes a fantastic moustache-twirling villain for an adventure that has a lot in common with The Prisoner of Zenda, but (for people who can only make lists of similarities rather than pay attention to the characters) has almost none of the same themes. Many fans hate this because it’s just light-hearted swashbuckling fluff, while I love it for much the same reason. Oh, and there’s a rubbish monster, but that’s polished off in five minutes for a joke. Among the extras, the ‘making of’ feature is stolen by one very animated, funny actor and another who’s a stylish old gentleman sort, and there’s a rather basic but jolly feature on doubles in Who that’s like an incomplete list illustrated by clips – probably to appeal to younger viewers. But the whole thing’s great fun. Sit back, enjoy K9 playing chess, Romana being disdainful, and a wicked Count exclaiming “Next time, I shall not be so lenient!” on his inevitable defeat. And there’s swordfighting with electric swords, too. Cool (says the seven-year-old me).

The Power of Kroll

New series viewers who were disappointed when the BBC refused to show Captain Jack’s buttocks may be surprised just how much rear flesh is on display here – albeit covered in green paint, and really not very attractive. On a water world, the oppressed ‘Swampies’ are fighting some human exploiters, while their giant squid god that occasionally looks rather exciting and occasionally rather absurd takes them in turns to eat. There’s a lot of King Kong here, and we can never resist singing along to ‘The Kroll Song’ (there aren’t many words), but though there’s some good location filming and some amusing moments in the script, the plot, sets and many of the actors are a bit flat. The most enjoyable person to watch if you know the gossip is Philip Madoc (who gets a little documentary to himself), who was originally offered the main villain part, couldn’t do it, suddenly became free, took the job… And found out too late that part had been cast, so he was now just the sidekick. His character’s visible winces at much of the villain’s acting give a perfect performance of a man who knows he can do a better job than his rubbish boss because he knows he could give a better performance as the boss.

The Armageddon Factor

This double-disc release includes the longer final story and a host of extras, of which the most intriguing are a set of short horror stories read by Tom Baker (one of them, Saki’s Sredni Vashtar, which was never broadcast… Because of a strike, rather than because it was too terrifying. As far as I know). There’s also a pdf of The Dr Who Annual 1979, which has some rather striking pictures of Tom Baker but obviously didn’t have any pictures of ‘Leela’, and is a bit thin; still, I remember finding The Planet of Dust and Terror on Tantalogus suitably eerie. Anyway, there’s a lot that’s brilliant in The Armageddon Factor, with a planet grimly at war, a superbly played character who echoes Churchill and Hitler at the same time, and another who eerily anticipates Princess Diana. Even K9 is great, by turns bitchy, sinister or disturbingly chummy with a talking WMD. Unfortunately, there’s a lot that’s far from brilliant, too; one of the actors is so unconvincing he could be a Tory MP, and the plot structure’s a mess, starting well and recovering by the end but meandering tediously in some beige corridors for a fortnight in the middle. It doesn’t help that all the serious bits are at the start, after which it gets less rather than more doom-laden, and that the ‘comic relief’ appears too late, not in the middle episodes that desperately needed a diversion but towards the end when it’s starving for some drama. But the Doctor does make entirely the Doctorish decision at the very end, and that’s what matters…

If you think you could do better, of course, you can assemble your very own Key to Time here.

New Beginnings Boxed Set

Way back at the beginning of the year, a boxed set of three stories re-introduced the Master, saw out Tom Baker and introduced Peter Davison, all in considerable style. This is another terrific release – with The Key To Time and last year’s The Beginning Box Set, the boxed sets have been strong contenders for the best in the range. Again, there are some superb documentaries, some lovely music that you can play separately, and you also get a pdf of The Doctor Who Annual 1982, which was clearly done in a hurry and without a lot of Peter Davison photos… Most of it’s not up to much, but the poorly-drawn comic strip satirising the publishers is quite amusing, as is the speculative feature inviting you to “Imagine… some hundred years from now” that everyone in the world might have their own private computer and something like GPS. Shame the giant hovercraft didn’t come about, though. I always rather liked hovercraft.

The Keeper of Traken

A marvellous rationalist fairy story in Shakespearean dress and Art Nouveau sets, with a creepy walking statue. It’s a spellbinding tale of evil in Eden, with a sense of impending doom that’s only let down by the actress at the heart of the tragic love story being hammier than you can possibly believe. I wrote an extended review of it earlier in the year, so I’ll skip to the extras: several rather intriguing documentaries, with evil Geoffrey Beevers very watchable; a lumbering trailer from the time; the writer trying to remember which bits he wrote and which he didn’t on the commentary…

Logopolis

Tom Baker’s final story is thoroughly laden with doom and captivating – I wrote most of an in-depth review earlier in the year, but became slightly terrified when the writer found and commented on it! A threat to the Doctor unfolds into a threat to the Universe in a story informed by these new-fangled computers that manages to do three very unlikely things: make the TARDIS scary; make the Master scary; and make Maths interesting. It’s slow, packed with ideas and compelling. There’s another great documentary, particularly with Tom admitting what a monster he was, and the commentary is striking – with Tom Baker, Janet Fielding (Tegan) and writer Jesus H Bidmead, Richard exclaimed “When Egos Collide!” as they introduced themselves. And they’re all pretty… forthright (though Mr Bidmead has a tendency to say ‘That bit’s very clever. But that bit’s rubbish, and it was someone else’s fault’). The best extra for me, surprisingly, is the score: you can press a button to play just the music, and it’s gorgeous.

Castrovalva

I should say up front that the music for this is extraordinarily lovely too, so have a listen; there are even some deleted scenes to watch, too. With this one, I was feeling slightly intimidated and never quite got round to the in-depth review, as it’s a beautiful and character-driven tale with an air of wonder that reflects both the innocence and the darkness of a fairy story, but it’s not quite up to the standard of the other two. There are interesting games with gender and with identity, with one ‘he must be the villain’ character seeming harsh and sinister but turning out to be the crucial ‘inside man’ (these days we’d call him ‘Snape’). Peter Davison is at his best here, giving us a Doctor that turns from reverie to sudden fierceness – he’s very revealing on the commentary, seeming both proud and embarrassed.

Planet of Evil

This earlier, much scarier Tom Baker story came out just last week – it’s from 1975 and the show’s Thirteenth Season, so it would be an ideal thirteenth anniversary present… Except that I think it’s great, and Richard doesn’t. Oh well. Anyway, it’s another science-as-fairy-tale story, borrowing from Shakespeare, Jekyll and Hyde, Forbidden Planet and werewolf legends, though it was so terrifying to kids at the time – I was one of them, and I still remember the ‘sci-fi burial alive’ nightmares – that viewers of the new series may find it eerily familiar, having evidently inspired the writers of The Impossible Planet and 42. Sarah Jane Smith’s in it, too. What most people talk about, though, is the alien jungle, and it looks absolutely awesome… Except in the scenes recorded on video rather than film, which look surprisingly flat. Not looking good at any point are the guest actors’ costumes; people say this season’s all Hammer films, but the only time we get people with seriously plunging necklines, they’re all men. And they’re really not worth it, either. Extras include behind-the-scenes footage, an impressive line-up on the commentary, a ‘making of’ and a slightly odd feature on the actors… If you want to see more, there’s a brilliant (if sometimes amusing for its over-the-topness) trailer on The Key to Time DVDs.

Robot

Tom Baker’s first story, and the first I ever saw; a middle-range story, but well worth seeing (and not unlike a sort of ‘Junior Avengers’ story). Sarah Jane Smith and the Brigadier are lovely, and fascist villain Miss Winters is fabulous, but this has two stars: Tom Baker, instantly seizing the show with hugely energetic performance; and the robot, which is huge and still looks terrific today. Until the last episode, that is, when several things go a little bit wrong (the script fizzles a bit, the characters get dafter, the special effects… Well, let’s say it’s unwise to move from Frankenstein to King Kong, and that we can sing along the ad jingle of a well-known toy of the time that’s used in a model shot). But on the whole, I’m very fond of it: it’s got such heart, humour and energy, it got me hooked, and it’s cleverer than Isaac Asimov, complete with a critique of utopianism. Again, Tom gives a good DVD commentary, there’s an informative mini-documentary on the definitive Doctor Who title sequence and a great one on the making of the story and how Tom started off as the Doctor.

Survival

From a first to the last; this double-disc release contains the final story of the original series, starring Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor in 1989. It’s good, solid, average Who: story-driven, with something familiar, a few surprises, mostly rather well done drama and the odd let-down. Londoners are being abducted by giant cat people on horseback, a strikingly effective sight, and carried off to their stormy home world… Where the Master waits. The modern setting prefigures the new series, though the council estate is rather less well done – and the little cat ‘familiars’ badly betray the budget (it’s easier to suspend your disbelief with an alien cat-person than with a stuffed moggie that everyone can look at and know doesn’t look right). The alien world casts a strange spell in this allegorical tale which shows no love for machismo and ’80s values… It’s difficult to tell if the score is mocking or overdoing screaming ’80s guitars, too. The Master is underplayed and threatening, though, and one of the extras features him being really rather good for a computer game, as well as cut scenes from this story. As for the other extras… Well, there are a lot of them, and the making of and story of what might have happened next if the series hadn’t been cancelled are interesting (though the ‘fan commentary’ is a disappointment), but – despite the presence of Lisa Bowerman, Professor Bernice Summerfield herself – it leaves a sour taste that there’s nothing about the New Adventures, the magnificent book series that carried Doctor Who on through the ’90s. So, in the end, the DVD is a disappointment, though the story ends with a beautiful, elegiac speech from the Doctor that still echoes today…

The Time Warrior

Jon Pertwee stars in the story that introduces both Sarah Jane Smith and moderately well-known monsters the Sontarans – both new arrivals are great from the start, and Pertwee’s not bad either (terribly sexist at times, but also occasionally charming). Like Survival, this is a ‘kidnap’ story, though here the alien is dragging people into the past rather than to another planet, and it’s a lot funnier. There’s even a gag about the Doctor finding “a young girl” (the first time someone says what everyone thinks about him) and a marvellous line from Sarah about the Middle Ages. Oh, and it’s got Dot Cotton and Boba Fett in it! On the downside, and despite some rather fab location shooting at a real castle (well, a real folly), the direction is very flat and dull, and it’s very poorly edited, so the story doesn’t always flow too well. You won’t be impressed by the robot knight, either. As well as a commentary, interesting but badly proofread text notes and another so-so Annual, the extras include rather a fine ‘making of’ – despite producer Barry Letts getting some ratings facts entirely wrong – and new CGI effects, which are all good bar, unfortunately, the climax in which a dragon apparently sneezes through some slightly singed gates. I suspect The Invasion of Time may get a DVD release next year, so that they can flog it in a ‘Sontaran box set’ with this, The Sontaran Experiment, The Two Doctors and Horror of Fang Rock (featuring their arch-enemies)…

Destiny of the Daleks

Due out a month from today, the last of this year’s old series releases stars Tom Baker in the sequel to the smashing Genesis of the Daleks, and it doesn’t compare all that well. It follows directly from The Key To Time, and like The Armageddon Factor is a mixture of great bits and rather feeble bits. Romana regenerates into a new body (rather unsteadily), and she and the Doctor have amusing dialogue and instant chemistry; there’s some superb hand-held camerawork and an intriguing ‘planet of the dead’ feel that doesn’t quite come off. More original but more flawed is the logical impasse of the latter half of the story, which is a good idea but requires the Daleks and their beautiful disco opponents to be a bit thick. And Davros… Well, the actor, the script and the mask all suffer by comparison to his first story: he’s a ranting maniac rather than a brilliantly persuasive fascist. I’m looking forward to the commentary (not reuniting Tom Baker and his ex-wife for a chat, sadly), the documentary about dependable Dalek writer Terry Nation and, of course, the thrilling new CGI effects. Still, I like it in the right mood, and if you watch the Coming Soon Trailer for it on the Planet of Evil DVD (and not yet added to YouTube, apparently), it looks fantastic.


There are still the two poorest releases to do, and the exciting new series, but it's late, I'm feeling very ill, and my lovely Richard wants to look after me!

…And at long last I’ve come back to it, after a month of illness, procrastination, doing other things, more illness and more procrastination. Why wasn’t I filled with enthusiasm for the next two releases? Read on.

Time-Flight and Arc of Infinity Box

Ah well. The straight run of really impressive stories making up the boxed set releases had to end somewhere, and it ended with a small box of two adjoining stories starring Peter Davison as the Doctor and Janet Fielding as Tegan (and Sarah Sutton as Nyssa, but she’s less gobby). There’s quite a nice picture of Tegan on the front, but the covers for the individual stories inside are far poorer designs than usual. And the stories?

Time-Flight

Written by an impressive director, directed by a… less impressive one, you really want to know what it looked like in the writer’s head, with an intriguingly weird Arabian Nights-flavoured fantasy. The dialogue and ‘climax’ by lots of made-up technical gubbins would still be terrible, though. It’s another kidnap through time story, and this time the Master (cementing his image as ‘the camp one’ and with a truly barking plan) is taking Concordes to prehistory to try and rip off an alien ‘super-race’. The Doctor behaves like a credulous idiot, too, and sides with one half of the self-styled super-race to crush individuality and freedom of choice for the other half. Uh huh? Even the music’s terrible (though it’s still a shame it’s not included as a separate track). The commentary is mean-spirited in the extreme, too, though there are some deleted scenes to let you know how much more it could have gone on. Um… The aircraft crew actors are quite jolly, as is some of the Concorde promo filming, but this is the one that even Peter Davison has described (protesting misquotes, but I’ve watched him say it) as “crap”.

Arc of Infinity

This story follows straight on, and while it’s not very good, it is at least a lot better, though the director makes no better use of Amsterdam than he did Concorde. It’s got an impressive set of extras, led by glowy new CGI, two excellent documentaries – I particularly like the one on Omega, linking to the Big Finish audio play – and boasts an amusing commentary by two Doctors, as this is the Peter Davison story with a bit part made ever so much larger by Colin Baker (plus, though the music’s not great, at least you can listen to it separately on this one). In its favour, the villain’s got a great gravelly voice and is nicely designed, though most of the other design is a bit naff: a monster like a man-sized chicken; Time Lords with little horns; Gallifrey not as the stately citadel glimpsed in the new series but more of a bland wine bar. Meanwhile, the similarity of some of it to a porn flick is emphasised by the typo-packed text notes quoting extensively from Freudian slip-packed original script. And you can be inappropriately amused by the ‘murder mystery’ with a High Councillor creeping about in a huge ceremonial collar, which is rather like a Peer of the Realm committing a stealthy murder while wearing a coronet and a long robe trimmed with real cat with a signed donation to the Labour Party pinned to the back of it.

Timelash

As you know, I love Doctor Who. All Doctor Who. And I would of course encourage you to purchase every Doctor Who DVD release, as we do. It’s just that there are some I might encourage you to buy… Once you’ve already bought all the others. Well, you might consider getting 180 or so other stories before you pick up this one but, oh, I’m beyond redemption and can still find things to enjoy about it. Colin Baker is always entertaining, though this is one of his least sympathetic scripts as the Doctor, with rather too much squabbling; Paul Darrow, Avon from Blake’s 7, gives one of the most over-the-top performances ever allowed to be broadcast; and both are fun on the commentary and ‘making of’ (few extras, and again the music is omitted), one trying to look on the bright side, the other mercilessly up-front about how bad it was. The budget is non-existent, the alien Bandrils are hilarious Grant Shapps-like creations and the script is packed with characters telling each other things they must know in such a clumsy way that only the most wooden of actors could deliver them. And they do. Featuring a young HG Wells, these days it would be called a ‘celebrity historical’, but makes a shocking mess of it: not only is he depicted as a prat; not only is it ludicrous to claim his great stories were inspired by this; but the writer of Timelash makes the Calvinist / atheist Mr Wells into a Catholic spiritualist. The only explanation for which is that he mixed HG Wells up with Arthur Conan Doyle. Sigh. Our lovely friend Simon has a moderately more generous review here.

Labels: Colin Baker, Doctor Who, DVD, Jon Pertwee, New Beginnings, Peter Davison, Peter Jeffrey, Philip Madoc, Professor Bernice Summerfield, Reviews, Richard, Sylvester McCoy, The Key To Time, Tom Baker