Love and Liberty

Rush to Big Finish, makers of Doctor Who and other quality audio dramas! Today only, they’re doing 10% off everything, and some of it’s very good indeed. My personal top recommendation is Rob Shearman’s Jubilee, the best bit of Doctor Who in the show’s Fortieth Anniversary and a big influence on the 2005 TV series. Also from 2003, I’ve been listening again to Jonathan Clements’ brilliant Sympathy For the Devil, starring David Warner as a grumpy alternative Doctor, David Tennant, Nicholas Courtney and Sam Kisgart. Order it today, and don’t read anything about it first (here’s the trailer). Spoilers follow…

“Oh, very good, Doctor. Your powers of deduction are, as usual, adequate.”

This is a less in-depth review than usual, so you’ve got time to get an order in – but it’s well worth while. You can hear a remarkable number of voices from Doctor Who’s Twenty-first Century TV series in this story, from David Tennant himself to two people involved in this year’s Cold War. And where Jubilee inspired Dalek, something here may just have influenced Rise of the Cybermen… Back in 2003, Big Finish celebrated the series’ last big anniversary by casting six alternative Doctors for one-off dramas, asking What If…? What if, in this one, David Warner were the Third Doctor, exiled to Earth by the Time Lords but arriving nearly twenty years late? That means he was never UNIT’s Scientific Adviser, and a bitter old Brigadier (and Surrey) has had a terrible time of it. The Doctor makes things better – having no Doctor makes things worse. It’s the best of their Doctor Who Unbound series, and so much misanthropic fun that they were paired together for a splendid sequel, Masters of War, which adds another fine old actor to the brilliant team of David Warner and Nick Courtney (and makes it even more like The Scarifiers). And if you fancy more David Warner from Big Finish, they do some excellent Sapphire and Steel, too.

On a personal level, this story’s about both a Doctor and a Brigadier disenchanted by losing out on fuller lives rediscovering themselves. On a story level, it’s both love-letter to and critique of the Pertwee era, with an added local reflection of the Time Lords. UNIT had to get harder and nastier, and David Tennant’s Colonel Brimmicombe-Wood is a nasty hard bastard with a scene-stealingly sweary tongue, a tendency to make mistakes and a shocking contempt for our old friend Lethbridge-Stewart… And then there’s the other character who flies in for a skewed sequel to what is right now a uniquely little-known story of the period. And from now on, the spoilers get thicker and faster, so you might consider stopping reading now. Though most of the fun’s still to come…

“The proof is that the world isn’t overrun by bloody lizards!”

This time David Warner’s tangling with a different Cold War power. It’s Hong Kong; it’s 1997; and a sinister figure is prompting tensions between Britain and China on the eve of the Handover – General Ke Le of the People’s Liberation Army, escaping with the aid of, er, foreign stealth technology. It’s Beltane today, so which character have I been writing about, an embarrassing month after I last posted one of my Fifty Great Scenes entries? As this is another take on the Third Doctor, there’s only one person he could possibly be. He had previously defected to the East as Emil Keller, and brought his ability to turn criminals into mindless soldiers with him… Yes, it’s Sam Kisgart, in truth Mark Gatiss, as General Ke Le, in truth the Master. And rather a good giggling fiend he makes, too.

My favourite play on names, though, comes between the Doctor and the local Abbot in Chapter 10 of the CD (also available in download) – puns in Chinese dialects, and I stake a fiver all of them wittier than Mr Moffat is likely to deliver in a fortnight’s time.

One of the Pertwee era’s most stylish and exciting story is Doctor Who – The Mind of Evil, at present the sole TV story featuring Jon Pertwee as the Doctor yet to be released on DVD. It’s due out a month on Friday, though, and painstakingly recoloured after the BBC carelessly burnt the original tapes and left only black and white export copies. It’s striking for showing UNIT as an impressive, extensive – and expensive, the biggest-budget Doctor Who story to that time – military force, and for giving Roger Delgado a fabulously louche Bond-villain role as the Master, as well as showing his biggest fear. Sympathy For the Devil is a very different story to The Mind of Evil, but takes several elements and themes from it as its starting point, expanding the sole mind parasite of the earlier story into a threat to the world – as well as making the end of a chant almost as dangerous as it was in Logopolis (the Master, again). All making a drama that’s both sinister and sometimes very funny, especially if you can spot your Doctor Who (or Rolling Stones) in-jokes… There’s even a reference to a Satanically-titled New Adventure. Add in musing on the nature of evil and Twentieth-Century atrocities, and you have something rather special.

Both the drama and the distinctly dark humour come together brilliantly for a rather bleak ending, as both the Doctor and the Master find things spiralling out of control and we find even the Master has missed the Doctor – frustrated at having been stuck on Earth in his enemy’s place.

“Pol Pot killed every doctor he could find – and none of them was you!”

Give this one a go – for today, it’s less than a fiver. Give some of the others a go, too. And listen right to the end for a Doctor strangely more endearing than the one who’d just been on telly around the time the story’s set, and strangely both more and less competent than the other version of the Third Doctor.


Or you could just watch Wizard – it stars David Warner, it’s written by Big Finish’s finest Simon Guerrier, it’s short, it’s funny, and it’s not just 10% off but free. How can you say no?

Labels: Big Finish, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Jon Pertwee, Obscure Doctor Who Jokes, Sapphire and Steel, The Brigadier, The Master

We’re home from Conference, and utterly knackered, especially poor Richard who did the driving. Among the things we learned today: there’s apparently a standard point at which Liberal Democrat bladders hit the danger mark. At least, that’s what we assumed when we drove into a particular service station off the M3 and saw two prominent Lib Dem bloggers in front of us. And an MP to one side. And a member of party staff to the other. And some Liberal Youth in the café. And… You get the picture. It was like the conference reconvening to dash for the loos.

While driving back to London, we caught up with one of Big Finish’s intriguing Sapphire & Steel series, Perfect Day. Not bad, though not the best of them, but worth it for the eerie sense of people away at the sea, caught in a time bubble of 14th September where every day’s the same. Anyone would think we’d been caught in some time bubble by the sea for the last few days that blurred into each other and probably involved the 14th of September…

We’ve watched the news coverage of Nick’s excellent speech, with a microscope, then turned to watch some of the exquisite misery of Bleak House instead. Despite getting improbably teary-eyed for the Dedlocks, it was cheerier than watching the BBC pretend we didn’t exist or – in the case of PM – giving us a fraction the coverage of the dodgy pips this morning. I might write more about the speech when I’m more awake but, in short, it was brilliantly delivered and clearly addressed more to the country than the audience. That means that while I enjoyed the Andrex Puppy, for any ordinary voters lucky enough to have channel-hopped onto Nick by accident, his passion about helping his and other children will probably have won them over. Daft idea to robo-call a quarter of a million voters tonight, though. Even if it’s a good idea, which I find unlikely, why announce it today and dilute your rare – very rare, looking at the smidgeon of coverage – bite of publicity? Why not announce it and do it tomorrow, and get an extra day’s worth (for what that’s worth) rather than overwrite your speech news with ‘Clegg’s cold call cock-up’? Sigh.

Meanwhile, as I type Robert Peston is saying it’s good news that two big banks are amalgamating into an even bigger one. Brilliant, BBC Economics guru; because big banks are completely safe and, should they go under, in no way imperil the economy or suck up squillions in public money to keep them upright, which is what’s known as the discipline of the free market. Well done, Mr Peston, for taking that infallible lesson from this week in particular and the last year in general. Pillock. It would be madness, of course, to suggest that the solution might lie in lots of little banks that help the consumer with competition and are much more difficult for big-money privateers to circle like sharks, rather than dumping competition laws and rigging the system to create more gigantic targets with ‘kick me’ on their share prices.

Random observations from the week include the excellent pair of bloggers whom I now can’t think of as anything other than Jay and Silent Bob, so many lovely people being cheery, upbeat and huggy, and that the plush Bournemouth Conference Hotel we were staying in looked terribly posh in some bits, but in the strange extension perched on top where we were found, the floors were uneven – not inspiring confidence, though suggesting several houses taken over, knocked together and an extra floor stuck across the roofs – and the narrow, snaking yellow-wallpapered corridor looked like a set from a 1970s sit-com. Specially fond memories: the facecloths that kept mysteriously vanishing from our room when the hotel pixie cleaned it; the pricey but very tasty dinner last night; the hotel internet connection hosted in Germany that gave us Blogger and Google in Deutsch and wouldn’t let us listen to BBC7 on the iPlayer; the fabulous breakfasts that saw me given no knife three days running, raising the worry that Mr Brown might have intervened to prevent a surge of cutlery crime among Lib Dems or that they’d been stolen by members of his own party and were to be found in Mr Brown’s back. Still, I had a knife this morning, and to celebrate piled my plate with Legotastic construction skill in order to make full use of it. The Blessed Leader greeted me over the breakfast selection with “Blimey, have you got enough there? I’ve never seen that much on a plate.” Sorry, Nick, but while I may be several years and about as many stone past being a Liberal youth, old buffet habits die hard.

Besides, they were really good sausages.




…Which goes to show that sausages are more popular than speeches, taxes and analysis. Or, alternatively, that this was one of the top five links that Lib Dem Blogs Aggregated got stuck on for a week ;-)

Labels: BBC, Charles Dickens, Food, Liberal Democrat Conferences, Nick Clegg, Sapphire and Steel, Speeches, The Golden Dozen

It’s the end of August, and deep inside me a boyish instinct says it’s time to go back to school. One of the most terrifying things I ever saw as a boy was an episode of the weird Joanna Lumley and David McCallum supernatural / science fiction / horror investigation series Sapphire & Steel, a series that came to a premature and pitiless end 24 years ago today. Now it’s being made again as a series of audio dramas and, appropriately, the latest one out is The School. It won’t make you keen to rush back to the classroom.

This is the point in a review where I’d usually explain what the series is about, but there’s a problem with this one. Sapphire & Steel is almost wilfully incomprehensible; if anyone ever came up with a complete explanation, all it could do is spoil it. Sapphire and Steel are two agents from some strange dimension; their opponent is time, not just a process but an almost malevolent force that can break through into our reality using old and often beloved items or ideas. They stop those breakthroughs, ruthlessly, and Joanna Lumley and David McCallum – both hot properties as blond, beautiful secret agent stars – carried out six assignments on ITV between 1979 and 1982. Starting life as a show for children, it became a scary series that messed with your head and turned nursery rhymes into tea-time terror for tots, along with such elements as a railway station haunted by ghostly soldiers, a man without a face coming out of a photograph and a surreal re-enactment of 1930s murder mysteries.

The most popular – and in many ways the most horrific – stories seem to be the second and fourth assignments, featuring the railway station and the man without a face. It’s the last two that do the most for me; the final one raises the stakes, concluding the series in an almost uniquely downbeat way (think of Blake’s 7, A Very Peculiar Practice and very few others). It’s the most terrifying for me because, after five stories where the investigators can outmatch anything, their opponents are suddenly on an altogether different level. What petrified me as a boy, though, was an episode of the fifth story, climaxing as a man in a 1930s dinner suit topples over, his face a mass of hideous diseases (five years after Doctor Who on TV really terrified me). Just to add to the effect, we were at my grandparents’ and in a different ITV region which showed the serial on a different schedule, so I didn’t get to see the rest of it the following week and instead remembered the cliffhanger for years to come…

It was a decade later that it finally came out on video, and I bought it a little nervously. I’d only ever seen that one episode, and would the series match up to years of fancied horrors? I watched my first full story while at university, with my housemates scornful. Then they watched it with me, in the early hours of the morning; to my lasting satisfaction, it scared the pants off them. For some reason, the VHS was hardly released when it was deleted, and the DVDs they brought out a few years ago have gone the same way – and it’s one of the few ITC series that isn’t getting an outing on a digital channel. Fortunately, it’s still making something of a comeback. It’s another series that Big Finish has licensed for audio drama, and though its talented creator hasn’t written any of those scripts, he’s writing for this Autumn’s scary new Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood. Hurrah.

Big Finish started their Sapphire & Steel series last year, with a certain degree of success. The biggest problem was that, unlike their Doctor Who dramas, they don’t have the original cast. David McCallum said “too busy,” and Joanna Lumley simply said “no”. Their replacements are actors of similar standing, though – huge movie actor David Warner, and star of House of Cards and Ultraviolet Susannah Harker. They’re good, but very different in style; even from his voice you can tell David Warner is much older than she is, and the authority he brings to the role tends to unbalance a previously more equal partnership. Another problem I had with last year’s stories was that I found them a little familiar; for a series where you’re meant to wonder ‘what’s going on?’ with several of them I kept being able to spot the twists coming. Fortunately, the first of their ‘new season’ this summer kept me guessing.

The School is a great place to start listening to Sapphire & Steel, but I should first let you know that I know the author, Simon Guerrier. Not only is he a very nice chap, but he reads this blog (and there’s a suspicious child’s name which, like Richard and one in the League of Gentlemen, I’ve thought it best not to ask about). However, if I didn’t like his story I wouldn’t urge you to listen to it – though I probably wouldn’t write him a bad review, either (I’d be more likely just not to mention it, and find a slippery form of words to dodge the question if he asked me what I thought, as usual with some authors). No, this one’s actually rather good, and the reason I particularly like it is that I started off thinking it wasn’t. Bear with me; initially, I thought the cast was too small, the teachers were stereotypes and they accepted the investigators far too easily, but I love having the rug pulled from under me, and this deftly tripped me up on each of my early assumptions.

Like the school-set Doctor Who story this Spring, The School has surprisingly few distinct children, though, given that, a surprising number of children’s lines are spoken. Instead, it focuses on a small group of teachers, the friendly – perhaps far too friendly – headteacher marvellously voiced by Keith Drinkel, a young teacher who doesn’t quite have the grip you’d expect on his subject and another who’s perhaps taking her moralistic attitude to discipline a little far. What are they planning for the school’s hundredth anniversary? Just how much do school pupils think about cruelty, violence and sex? And why can’t anyone remember seeing the headteacher’s wife? As new questions kept cropping up throughout I experienced the enormous pleasure of getting my answer to almost all of them wrong as I went along. There are plenty of shocks along the way, with moments of our heroes behaving just as you’d expect – Steel’s ruthlessness memorably emerging as the head blusters,

“Now, Mr Steel, I don’t think it’s really your job to surrender my teachers to whatever this – thing is…”
“It worked, didn’t it?”

– and others when they very much don’t, giving way to possession by the feelings of pupils past. That sometimes gives an uneven feel, partly as Steel slapping Sapphire to bring her out of being ‘a little girl’ makes their relationship seem less balanced than ever, and partly because gravel-voiced David Warner’s little boy acting is suddenly not a patch on Susannah Harker’s girlishness. There are points, too, where I feel it falls out of creepy and becomes gratuitously gruesome, though they’re probably the bits I’d have loved most if this had been the ten-year-old me’s introduction to the series.

Simon suggests in the notes on the cover inlay that he was inspired by a teacher humiliating him at the age of ten for being right when she was wrong, and the play makes much of the sense of injustice felt by children against bad teachers. Simon’s experience comes to life here in a particularly educational way; you too can be taught the difference between tapinosis and meiosis, which little Steel isn’t completely comfortable picking up. When the disciplinarian with the problem keeping discipline takes over another teacher’s class, I was vividly reminded of the way supply teachers would be torn to pieces when I was at school. And there’s the best, definitively teacherly, put-down of the operatives’ habit of talking to each other telepathically. Add to that a throwaway line from The Deadly Assassin, more than a dash of The Stone Tape and a moral about the importance of asking questions, and I found it satisfying right through to the appropriately unhappy end.

Should you listen to it, however, you may wish to use your fast forward buttons to adjust the CDs at a couple of points. I love a good trailer, and you’ll find one for the next story at the end, but I find Big Finish’s recent habit of sticking one at the start too (and for a different series) distinctly irritating; this isn’t the cinema, and we don’t even get the Pearl & Dean music. More offputting is the end of the first disc; at the half-way point of the story, suddenly there are a bundle of extra features for one of last year’s stories, Daisy Chain. I hasten to add that it was probably the strongest and certainly the least ‘traditional’ Sapphire & Steel story they’ve done so far, but it really breaks the mood; stop your disc, listen to the second one, then go back, but only if you’ve listened to Daisy Chain; if not, it rather spoils the end. There’s an informative interview with author Joe Lidster that tackles head-on why that story was controversial; with his strong grip on character and relationships, I found myself agreeing on almost every particular, and especially on his treatment of Sapphire. Hearing him saying how it had to end without the title music to show how serious the subject matter was, though… No, sorry, Joe, but most of these stories have unhappy endings, and different types of death aren’t graded by point scores; it just came across to me at the time as “my story’s more serious than yours!” and pretty much saying that outright in your interview merely sounds pseudy. Probably best not to follow the interview with some ‘hilarious’ out-takes, then?

Speaking of which, if you’re familiar with the doomy monologue spoken over the opening credits, Richard and I once came up with our own version on holiday. Not to be read by those sensitive about their scares, or stomachs…

All ingestionalities will be ladled by the flavours controlling each confection.

Transmarzipanic heavy fondants may not be used where there is life.

Medium calorific weights are available:
Garibaldi
Shortbread
Cracker
Jammy Dodger
Digestive
Bourbon
Custard, Cookies and Cream.

CUSTARD AND CREAM have been assigned

Labels: Big Finish, Radio, Reviews, Sapphire and Steel