Love and Liberty

Someone in the office you want to kill? Aggresso-therapist Dr Jaeger offers a harmless way to relieve your frustrations. What could possibly go wrong? The Avengers – My Wildest Dream gives you The Manchurian Capitalist, a disorientating, violent thriller of board members killing each other in dreams, all witnessed by Steed and Tara. Guest stars include Peter Vaughan, Edward Fox, John Savident and the mighty Philip Madoc, who sadly died last month, as did stylish director Robert Fuest, who gives the episode real (or is it hallucinatory?) punch: dizzyingly shifting points of view; stunning fight sequences; showing off striking sets…

“It’s a – dream! It’s all a dream!”

My Wildest Dream was one of the episodes that first got me into The Avengers when I discovered the series in the middle of Channel 4’s mid-’80s repeats (even taping the thrilling fight and car chase after Vengeance On Varos and The Mark of the Rani to fill up one of my precious Betamax tapes), and for me it’s still a favourite. You can find it on Disc 3 of The Avengers – The Complete Series 6 DVD Box Set, or Disc 32 in The Avengers Complete 50th Anniversary Collection – I’ve previously offered tips on which The Avengers DVDs to buy – while original viewers in 1969 had a slightly harder job: because of concerns about the violence having too much oomph, it was shown on a different day than usual and much later in the evening. Even though there’s only one tiny spot of blood (the BBFC now classifies it a PG). Surprisingly, this was made quite early in Tara King’s season of The Avengers but held back until close to the end, despite being one of her best – Linda Thorson is at her most mature and confident, looks cool, has great timing and gets a fantastic fight, so this fits right in with her later episodes, generally her best and a fabulously strong run.

Though he remained as consultant for a while longer, My Wildest Dream was the final script by Philip Levene, one of The Avengers’ most prolific and defining writers, his scripts known for their humour, teasingly science fiction elements and general outrageousness. This, however, while witty in places, is uncharacteristically down to Earth and tense – while for me Tara King’s season of The Avengers is one of the two that best balance the silly and the sinister, this threatening psychodrama weighs heavily at the sinister end and is easily Levene’s darkest, revisiting his Death’s Door drugs and dreams but with considerably more palpable danger (plus a dash of Brian Clemens’ Honey For the Prince). And that’s greatly boosted both by Robert Fuest’s vividly in-your-face direction and Philip Madoc’s unsettlingly bipolar performance…

Robert Fuest and Philip Madoc

Artist, designer and director Robert Fuest started off on The Avengers as a set designer right in the early days, on Ian Hendry episodes that no longer exist – though you can see his designs in the surviving episode The Frighteners, and pictures of some of his work in the photo galleries for the Season 1 and 2 DVDs – and came back with a bang at the other end of the ’60s as a director in his own right, instantly becoming the best of the Series 6 helmsmen across the seven Tara King stories he directed. He returned for The New Avengers’ The Midas Touch and The Tale of the Big Why, though he’s probably most famous for the two Dr Phibes films he directed in between. Yes – they were his idea. Marvellous!

My Wildest Dream was actually Fuest’s first Avengers episode in the director’s chair, though the first of his to be broadcast was Game, a story so highly regarded it was chosen to launch Tara King, and which I’ve previously raved about for its Op-Art inventiveness and superb eye for colour. My Wildest Dream is less quintessentially Avengers, not having the same immediately joyous wacky appeal, but for me it’s even better. The cinematography is simply outstanding, with lessons learned from those 1961 Avengers taped in poky sets – watch for those inventive camera angles that liven up, say, Nurse Owen talking by showing her in her own desk mirror, or his instinctive affinity for shadows – but getting every advantage from the bigger budget, whether it’s roving cameras inside cars on location or the rapid cross-cutting stabbings that still make you jump even if what you see is rarely what you think you see. That other most prolific, defining Avengers writer Brian Clemens clearly loved Hitchcock as an influence on his scripts, but if ever there were a Hitchcockian Avengers director in his pace and energy, his inventiveness, and his gleeful black humour that nearly but not quite goes too far, it was Robert Fuest.


While Bob Fuest has always been one of the most outstanding contributors to The Avengers for me and here hits his stride so perfectly that it’s difficult to believe it was his first time, on the other side of the camera there’s the final Avengers performance from another of my favourite irregulars in the series, Philip Madoc of the gorgeous voice and predatory grin. While in his five Doctor Who screen roles he was usually the guest-starring villain, in his five Avengers episodes he was usually a little lower down the cast list, but still making a memorable impact. I love his understated Dutch banker who quietly realises when the game is up in Death of a Batman and his scene-stealing Soviet agent in The Correct Way to Kill (for which, when I reviewed it, I was for very personal reasons particularly sad that fellow actor Peter Barkworth had just died; since then, tragically, all that episode’s male guest stars have passed away), but it’s his first and his last appearances in The Avengers that are his most striking for me. Startlingly young and smooth in 1962’s The Decapod, he unleashes that fabulously wolfish grin as an ambassador who may or may not be the villain – while in 1969, his uncanny, unhinged business executive Slater persistently steals the show (and is framed on probably my favourite Avengers set just to make sure you can’t ignore him).

For my other favourite series, in Doctor Who it’s strangely Philip Madoc’s first and last TV roles that are his least impressive, while in between this great actor created two utterly terrific but unrecognisably different villains (as Jack Graham suggests in his tribute on Shabogan Graffiti). Both The War Games with Patrick Troughton and The Brain of Morbius with Tom Baker are outstanding stories, with Time Lords the ultimate villains in each but Madoc’s roles more memorable still: the War Lord, the cold alien conqueror who comes in after his junior villains have been fighting to outdo each other and dominates with underplayed, deadly, quiet wit; and egotistical surgeon Mehendri Solon, determined both to bring his master back from the dead and to establish himself definitively as the maddest scientist in history greatest doctor in history, enjoying every word as he declaims, sneers and insults his way through a horrible but very funny Frankenstein pastiche.

“Your name will also go on ze list! What is it?”
“Don’t tell him, Pike!”

I’d provide an overview of Philip Madoc’s career, but he’s been in everything. A champion of and the definitive portrayal of The Life and Times of David Lloyd George; DCI Noel Bain in his own detective series, A Mind to Kill; a long-running lead role as Cadfael on the radio (and, like his TV counterpart, the Master – or is he?); probably most famously for an actor famous for his guest roles, the U-Boat Captain in The Deadly Attachment, Dad’s Army’s finest episode, who visibly almost corpses as he rejects the idea of nasty, soggy chips, wanting them “Crisp – unt light brown.” I wish Channel 4 would show again or release 2003’s eerie Y Mabinogi, for which he provided a (Welsh) voice of legend and which I’ve only seen once, in the middle of the night. And it’s telling that, on the joyous news last month that Alan Garner was at last to return to his Alderley Edge tales – the first two being such a major part of our childhoods – the first thought for both Richard and I was that, sadly, Mr Madoc would not be around to record Boneland for CD in the gorgeous way he’s read The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, each of which we’ve recently listened to together.

I think there was only one event I knew of at which I might have met Robert Fuest, and I wasn’t well enough to go; there were a handful at which I could have met Philip Madoc, and though I was too ill to make most of them, I’m so glad I made it to a shonky pool hall in Barking in 2008 on the DVD release of The Brain of Morbius. Though he was pleased to recall praise from other actors for his sinister War Lord, he was very clear that Dr Solon was his favourite Who character, for the script, for how much he had to do, and for how much fun it all was (miming dropping and picking up an evil brain). I remember him being presented with his own copy of the DVD, and saying sotto voce to fellow guest Cynthia Grenville as she passed him hers,

“Now, Cynthia, if I sign that, it’ll rub straight off.”
“Oh? Why?”
“Because you haven’t taken the wrapping off.”

Asking which one it was when presenting him with an earlier DVD release of My Wildest Dream, I told him:

“You go a bit mad in this one. Peter Vaughan had been injecting you with new drugs.”
“Ah, yes. He was always doing that.”

But what I most remember was when I apologetically passed him our DVD of Doctor Who – The Power of Kroll to sign, knowing his opinion of it, and all the backstory why (and why he was much happier that his real final Doctor Who roles, many years later, included classier audio dramas like Master and Faction Paradox). Philip bared his teeth at it and asked, carefully enunciating each word, “Is this the one by the sea-side?” as if not quite actually saying ‘Why do you wish me to autograph a turd?’ Though he perked up mildly at the feature about him, A Villain For All Seasons, I felt I had to justify myself:

“I know you don’t think much of this one, but I always find your performance very entertaining. It’s the way you look permanently pissed off – you seem to be playing someone who’s looking at his boss and thinking he could do a much better job of it.”

I was rewarded with that full, dazzling, dangerous, wolfish grin.

“Just very good acting.”

That Golden Moment

“I feel so much better, Doctor. I feel so much better.”

From the disturbing, disorientating teaser to the charming, funny tag scene, My Wildest Dream brims with superb moments, taking in Tara’s most breathtaking fight sequence and probably my favourite – and one of the most barking – of all Avengers sets along the way. But the scene that sums up this episode for me may just help explain why some censors and schedulers took fright. It’s less a golden moment than a crimson one, with two brilliant guest stars and stunning direction that both surprises and shocks.

Boardroom tensions have been just a little edgier than usual at Acme Precision Combine Ltd; undergoing unconventional treatment from the sinister Dr Jaeger, one board member has already stabbed a rival then fallen to his own death while apparently believing himself to be in a dream, and now Philip Madoc’s Slater seems to be going down much the same path to conclude his own clashes with Henry Winthrop. And, as they did the first time, Steed and Tara have had a mysterious tip-off and dashed to the scene in Steed’s Great Gatsby yellow Rolls (ahead of being incredibly fashionable in the ’70s, and tipped to be so again this year). Winthrop’s home, The Lodge, is a great find – like a giant witch’s hat, it’s very distinctive, a memorable setting for a murder. We hear Howard Blake’s swirling music and sinister bass beat, as we did the first time, as Madoc explains in gleeful voiceover how Winthrop lives alone, the camera cutting from him in Jaeger’s surgery, reflected in his own knife, to his legs striding up to the house, to viciously guillotining Winthrop’s picture in his red-lit darkroom – an inspired piece of substitute violence – before he stabs, Winthrop dies, our heroes burst in —! Only for Winthrop to turn, developing film in hand, surprised but very much alive, Slater’s attack being just another drug-induced fantasy acted out with his aggresso-therapist. Or is it?

Of all the five members of the Acme Board, Slater and Winthrop are by far the most entertaining, thanks to Philip Madoc’s superb turn as a man who, doped out of his head, is the one who most enjoys it all and then is most miserable in withdrawal (only in being separated from his dreams and his doctor, of course – what do you mean, ’60s drug metaphors? It’s not a metaphor, he’s just drugged to the eyeballs) and, as his main rival for direction of the company, the marvellous John Savident. Another man of many memorable guest parts, he’s probably best-known for Coronation Street – never mind – and here he grabs the camera in just one scene, surprised by the intruders, shocked by news of deaths in the company, but preeningly confident that it’s just a false alarm and, if not, he can handle anyone with the gun he keeps to hand.

But outside, in another car among the daffodils, Jaeger’s cool, calm orderly Dyson is losing his cool and his schedule as he frustratedly tries to bring the lurching, incoherent Slater round just enough to prod him out of the car and into the Lodge. Tara sees him go, just too late, and the hallucination plays out all over again, Winthrop gasping horribly and lurching right into our faces like – sorry, I’m quite fat, too, but it’s an irresistible simile – a harpooned whale just as our handily unimpeachable witnesses burst in once more and, satisfied at acting out his fantasy again, Slater thanks his doctor, smiles, and offers his knife to them to put away for his next go…

The Avengers has always shown death, and frequently great violence, often of a fantastic nature, which the directors imply rather than present in gory horror – people shredded, bloodlessly, in The Hidden Tiger (with which this has a twist or two in common) or The Winged Avenger spring to mind – but while those make you fill in the blood, the sheer speed and savagery of the stabbings in this episode, the way the camera plunges around, even when most of the time it’s only dummies that the knives are plunging into, makes this far more startlingly visceral than earlier stories that should, in theory, have been more gruesome. And of all the scenes, this one’s the most striking, in part because all four actors are compelling, but also because in the darkroom everything already looks like it’s drenched in blood – and it’s the only moment when Fuest really pushes it as we see a splash of proper blood on Winthrop’s beached front and Slater, fascinated, pokes his finger in it for a moment to look at it before turning to Steed and Tara. He’s going to have a hell of a comedown…

Steed and Tara

I love The Avengers and, unlike some, in particular the sixth series with Tara King – that glorious fanfare opening with knights, roses, running along the bridge in sunshine and colour to open every episode, and with mysteries solved by Patrick Macnee at his most urbane and authoritative and Linda Thorson wide-eyed but winning through. Both lead actors are on top form in My Wildest Dream, with Linda Thorson especially giving one of her best performances: here, Tara is resourceful, witty, stunning in one of the series’ most physical fights and puts off an unwelcome admirer with considerable style (and a cheer from me when she throws him flying). She even gets to do such effective detective work in following leads that Steed gives her twelve out of ten.


It’s a great day for Steed and Tara’s outfits, too. Tara’s given two looks with culottes, which really suit her, a pleasant pale blue and white ensemble and a terrifically cool one with a leather jacket that she looks far more comfortable in than if she was forced into one of Cathy Gale’s old catsuits (something Diana Rigg never liked). That’s what she wears when checking out Slater’s optical workshop at Acme, when Fuest’s direction really lets rip in a massive Pop-Art punch-up between her and Dyson, as both hurl each other across an enormous room filled with blue, red and yellow glass, framed through jagged broken glass and targets and then finally leaping out through the door and into an almost as kinetic car chase, all to the accompaniment of some of Howard Blake’s most exciting music and then Laurie Johnson’s (which I remember from the likes of Something Nasty in the Nursery). Outstanding. The follow-up fight’s briskness is a bit of a let-down, not to mention showcasing unsafe taste in decoration, but you can almost hear her saying, ‘Well, haven’t we done this?’

Steed, too, looks good – particularly in grey with a striking copper tie, but also in his dark blue suit, blue shirt and maroon tie or rich chocolate-brown suit with trademark deeper brown collar and matching tie. He can even get away with a yellow shirt and olive-brown suit, just as she manages to look businesslike in a bright kimono, though both of them have brief bad moments (ironically, the only outfit she’s complimented on on screen is a green tartan best left to a Scottie dog, while it’s a good job that the closing tag scene has such wit and warmth to distract you from his hideous brown striped trousers and roll-neck). His best scene here, on the other hand, is far more laid-back than Tara’s physicality – once she’s tracked down Dr Jaeger, he goes in for the kill. Or, far worse, the piss-take…

Bad Therapy

“You’re not in my dream. Go away.”

Madoc is outstanding as he’s pulled from one reality to another, always told what to think by forceful medical figures, confused but sullen and resisting – and never more memorable than once he’s been whisked away after killing Winthrop, to be discussed by Steed and Tara with pompous Dr Reece, who believes everything in the world can be dealt with by “New drugs, you know,” and who keeps confronting him with the nasty reality. It’s a good scene in itself, as everyone simply insists on their own point of view and has no interest in listening to the people they’re talking to, but it’s elevated to brilliance by Fuest’s direction and Robert Jones’s hilariously untherapeutic set design. Yes, rather than being put in a comfy bed on a friendly ward with flowers round a little window, Slater has been put in the Observation Room. And I can never help but hoot as Reece stalks away from Slater, both of them still talking across each other, and the massive white space with a threatening red stripe down the middle, pointing to the patient, is revealed, the word “OBSERVATION” picked out in large, unfriendly letters along the whole back wall. Just to perfect it, it doesn’t have a door, but another wall, which simply glides in front to snap shut and leave poor Slater stranded. Walls just shouldn’t move like that. And Reece’s moving phone mounted on it does strange things to your head, too.

“A catharsis! A release of all repressions and hatreds! A man lives out his dream – his wildest dream!”

Peter Vaughan is another of my favourite actors, another I’d love to meet, and another with a list of roles as long as your arm. Probably best-known as Porridge kingpin Genial Harry Grout, today (like top Avengers guest star Julian Glover) he’s reaching a whole new audience in Game of Thrones, though not so far in its sexposition scenes, high fantasy’s answer to the Topless News Channel. And his Jaeger here is utterly compelling, a self-confessed quack who genuinely believes that he’s ahead of his time, a pioneer. He is a real doctor, too – but of what (perhaps Valeyard is a German title)? Intense, mesmerising, vaguely Germanic, he’s My Wildest Dream’s other outstanding performance, in a role that has much in common with Ronnie Barker’s Mr Cheshire in fellow Avengers classic The Hidden Tiger – an obsessed, focused, brilliant technocrat (and a bit round-faced and in Porridge)!

While Laurie Johnson does a splendid job taking over the music for The Avengers once it goes into film from Series 4 onwards – not least in providing the main title them with that perfect fanfare – for some of Series 6 he was busy with a musical and recommended new composer Howard Blake, later of Flash Gordon and The Snowman fame; this was the first of ten episodes for which Blake provided much of the score in a similar but sharper style, and arguably his best (up with Who Was That Man I Saw You With, which provides the opposite bookend to his Avengers soundtrack CD release).

Between them, it’s Peter Vaughan, Howard Blake and of course Robert Fuest who seize our attention from the first here in a gripping teaser sequence as the first member of the Acme Board narrates his stalking his ideal victim to a harsh jazz beat, up the fire escape, into his room, a vertiginous spin and plunging his poniard in to stabbing brass – then reeling out into reality, disorientatingly now set to floating, dreamlike music, where it’s only a dummy with the man’s face that he’s knifed, egged on by Jaeger’s shouting and injections. After which he’s picked up for work by none other than the man he’s just ‘killed’… Dr Jaeger believes so passionately in himself that he’s the centre of the episode for most of the way through, dominating members of the Board and the voice that keeps urging, compelling. Madoc’s scenes with Vaughan crackle with conviction as two superb actors spur each other on – one sweating, sullen, in denial, then finding release; the other lashing out with sheer charisma to force Slater into accepting his point of view, revealing his innermost fears and hatreds, then delighted as he makes a breakthrough:

“Excellent! That’s really excellent, Mr Slater! ‘Kill’… ‘Destroy’… And ‘erase’! I particularly like ‘erase’!”

And as his ‘patients’ stab and stab again the dummies with the faces of their tormentors, though you know it’s only a dummy, though you know no-one’s really being murdered – this time – you can’t help feeling queasy at the violence with which sawdust gouts out onto the glass table through which we’re seeing Jaeger’s rapt face.


Of course, it all falls apart. That’s what happens when Steed walks in.

From the moment Steed charmingly praises Jaeger’s receptionist, Janet Owen – “What a nice voice you have. Soothing” – and she’s one of the least charmed respondents in TV history, and Jaeger makes the mistake of letting this relaxed, charming man who claims to think he’s a horse into his consulting room, Jaeger’s galloping downhill faster than you can say ‘woo’. Suddenly, the Doctor is in need of some aggresso-therapy of his own. And the other big guest star you’re likely to recognise might just help…

Not Liking Steed, and Simply Not Like Tara

“Who is it you hate?”
“Steed.”
“Who is it you hate?”
“Steed.”
“Who is it you hate?”
“Steed!”

Oh, poor Teddy. No, scratch that – the Hon Teddy Chilcott is an utter git, a self-obsessed upper-class twit who’s clearly met Tara at one of the parties she hates and just will not leave her alone. It’s rare that any of the Avengers get a love interest, and here she’s very plainly not interested – even in Edward Fox. Handsome but querulous, he disapproves of her “cloak and dagger nonsense” and even more so of Steed. The impression is that he just doesn’t want a woman to work, but it is perhaps possible that he’s particularly pissed off by secret agents – might he afterwards be so scarred by this experience that he applies himself to the secret service in order to control them, and winds up M? Never! But, sexist git as he is, the way Tara simply keeps ignoring him is very funny, from her replying to his fishing for a compliment (“Persistent,” she suggests), to her priming Steed with excuses to get away, to the marvellous moment when he lies in wait to surprise her with flowers… And his despicable follow-up, where his sexism is notably only sustained by false advantage, the swine, and exactly how he gets his comeuppance. Then, satisfyingly, he’s beaten up for a third time, now by Jaeger’s nurse / receptionist, and deployed as a sinister pawn in which, at last, you can see Fox as the Jackal to be.

Nurse Owen is, though, the only element of My Wildest Dream that doesn’t entirely come off for me – and not just because I never warm to a sinister medic called Owen. She starts off as the intriguing voice on the phone that keeps propelling Steed into the plot, giving him tip-offs that are just too late to save the murder victims, and when called on to be cold and enigmatic, Susan Travers is perfectly decent. My problem with her comes when she gets to do the action scenes – also rather well – and also gets many costume changes: striking in dark blue with red stripes at collar and cuffs; all right in pale orange frock; nasty in pale mud; sofa-like in brown stripes. Paired with an older, authoritative man (ignore Dyson, who in his sharp suit and shades just wants to be Alfie), too, it suddenly becomes obvious who she’s meant to be – who else gets all those outfits, intelligence, and to knock men out? She and her partner are evil reflections of Tara and Steed. And though they’re both quite serviceable, they just don’t have an ounce of the charisma needed for those parts. He even has a fat, ugly car. Our heroes agree, too, as at the climax Tara wallops one villain in passing and the other’s easily carpeted. But that does make the ending a little unsatisfying; I like to imagine them recast with actors a little less dull and, once all is revealed, being something more of a challenge.


The tag scene as Tara psychoanalyses Steed is, of course, light, frothy, bubbly – in a word, champagne. As a boy, little John confesses, he would creep to his father’s study for a splash of soda water. He really wanted lemonade, but his father wouldn’t have the palate-rotting stuff in the house. This tickled me when I saw it as a boy, because I remember similarly stealing into the kitchen by night to make some Andrews’ Liver Salts, not because I liked the taste, but because at least it fizzed! So, wonders therapist Tara, does that explain his liking for…?

“No, the insatiable craving, the perpetual desire, the uncontrollable urge to lay my hands on a bottle of champagne, that’s a very very different reason…”
“Dare I ask?”
The bottle pops.
“Because… I happen to like it.”
They drink, and cue the music!

Labels: Books, Comedy, Doctor Who, DVD, Faction Paradox, Music, Obituary, Patrick Troughton, Personal, Philip Madoc, Pictures, Quackery, Reviews, Style, The Avengers, The Avengers Season 2, The Avengers Season 6

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

If you’ve not yet recovered from Christmas, you know the best cure – chocolate. So after posting this at the weekend, I’ve added plenty more, particularly about Thorntons. You can still catch up with Radio Four’s Doctor Who weekend on iPlayer, too: The Lost Episodes, On the Outside It Looked Like an Old-Fashioned Police Box and David Tennant’s Desert Island Discs. And if you saw the new Day of the Triffids, with beefed-up sauntering Eddie Izzard villainy and off-the-peg unresolved father-son tension and mysticism, why not see for free the closer-to-the-book 1981 adaptation, with a sexier lead and scarier plants? Both of them are more fun than Survivors, anyway, which is just the same story with nowhere near enough killer vegetation.

So, for a couple of days, this has travelled through time to midnight on the last day of the year before returning it to its original time and place. It’s Doctor Who, after all!


Having a replete Boxing Day? It’s a day for the most important things in life – TV and chocolate (and my beloved Richard). Richard’s chewed over last night’s Doctor Who, as have the lovely Jennie and Andy, and I’ve… scoffed many chocolates. So I’m sitting to watch Shakespeare, thinking of Christmas boxes. What are the best boxes from Thorntons? What’s the box set to buy for Doctor Who? What’s the most Christmassy box the BBC ever presented for us to wolf down? And are you looking out for Radio Four’s three Doctor Who programmes in the next day, starting tonight?

Of all this year’s Doctor Who DVD releases, look out in the sales for The Deadly Assassin (the greatest story of the lot, with the Master, Time Lords and Russell T Davies bigging it up on Confidential last night, as well he should), The War Games (another terrific story, also featured on the last Confidential, with the Time Lords – who are gits, and always have been – turning up at the end as the big bads to kill off the Doctor) and, especially if you can find the price knocked down a bit, The Key To Time boxed set. In Christmassy fashion, it’s a collection of six different stories, some of which may be more to your taste than others but which all form a delightful variety and I find quite delicious. In daytime TV style, as I’ve raved about The Key to Time before, I’ll turn to boxes of Thorntons later.

The Box of Delights

“If you will, there is something no other soul can do for me but you alone…”

Here’s an odd thing. The Key To Time boxed set was first released a couple of years ago as a limited edition, sold out fast and was deleted. At last re-released last month, perhaps because its semi-sequel The Black Guardian Trilogy came out this Summer, it’s one of the two best BBC DVD boxes I can think of to wrap for a Christmas present. So, obviously, the BBC’s now deleted the other ideal Christmas present – just in time for it’s twenty-fifth anniversary, The Box of Delights has been taken off the shelves. No, I don’t understand it either.

A quarter of a century ago this Christmas, the BBC made an adaptation of John Masefield’s children’s classic that was simply magical. Despite seven Doctor Who Christmas specials (most of them marvellous, and most of them made for Christmas), it’s delightfully old-fashioned and comforting, and still the most glorious piece of Christmas TV there’s ever been. In the 1930s, an old wandering magician entrusts a boy with his magical box to keep it safe against the wolfish minions of evil magic, and everyone makes the journeys along the way something very special.

At the time, it was the most expensive children’s TV the BBC had ever made, full of great actors, animation and special effects – a little symbolic in the penultimate episode, but only to save up for explosions, a salmon-leaping boat and demons at the last – and a fabulous score by Roger Limb (arranging Victor Hely-Hutchinson for the gorgeous theme music). Devin Stanfield grounds it as the surprisingly together young hero, James Grout is an entertaining police inspector, and Patricia Quinn is astounding as the campest thing on screen, teacher, witch, and utter ruin for her lover (“My golden idol. My graven image!”), the brilliantly named Sylvia Daisy Pouncer.

It’s most worth watching, though, for the wise old magician and Punch and Judy man (and sometime pagan and medieval philosopher), Cole Hawlings, and his deadly opponent, ambitious, evil warlock and posing clergyman Abner Brown. They’re the two best roles, with the two most compelling actors – former Doctor Patrick Troughton in one of his last great roles, and Robert Stephens promising

“One last… Great wickedness before I go!”

As at the moment it’s bizarrely not available to buy, have a look at it on YouTube. All six episodes are available, under a slightly disguised name (presumably to prevent seizure by copyright lawyers, even though if you want the DVD you can’t get it) and broken up into lots of little chunks. Just half a dozen minutes into the first episode, Patrick gives one of his most husky-voiced and mesmerising performances – while the part five’s stolen outrageously by Mr Stephens with the most scenery-chewing piece of acting I’ve ever seen that still absolutely grips you. To get you started, here’s the opening episode, in three parts.

Doctor Who On Radio Four (and David Tennant – and John Simm, of course – everywhere)

If you’ve had a Merry Christmas at home, perhaps you’re now sitting down with David Tennant’s jolly Hamlet. John Barrowman must be wondering what’s gone wrong, when it’s the other Doctor Who star who’s omnipresent this Christmas (and John Simm’s gone to rather extreme lengths to beat him). On top of Doctor Who, Hamlet, Never Mind the Moroks (wasn’t Bernard Cribbins genius?), QI and others on TV, he’s doing quite a few radio shows, among them one of Radio 4’s three – yes, it’s his turn for Desert Island Discs tomorrow at 11.15am.

The two to really look forward to, though, are on tonight at eight (tune in 3pm, Monday, for an edited repeat), exploring the “lost” Doctor Who stories the BBC made in the ’60s and then junked, and a welcome repeat for their celebration of the Target books of the ’70s and ’80s at 1.30 tomorrow. Radio 4’s top Who fan Shaun Ley investigates Archive on 4: Doctor Who – The Lost Episodes tonight, including interviews I saw him making at a convention a month or two back, while Mark Gatiss hosts tomorrow’s On the Outside It Looked Like an Old Fashioned Police Box, which intriguingly features readings from Doctor Who novelisations that BBC Audio has released on CD – but read by different actors to the CD versions. That’s the BBC internal market for you.

That last bit was quite wrong, of course; I was mixing up having heard the original broadcast in the Summer with the fabulous Target Books special feature on The War Games DVD at about the same time. That On Target – Malcolm Hulke focused on perhaps the most revered of Target adaptors, so it was a BBC DVD rather than a radio programme that had to use different actors doing the readings to those BBC Audio produce – Peter Miles ironically offering the reptile people’s point of view from Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, for example, rather than Caroline John in the CDs. The radio programme, made with just as much love, does indeed use BBC Audio’s versions, albeit adding sound effects and music from the TV series that (confusingly) the DVDs use but BBC Audio appears not to lack the rights for. These tend to be from ’70s stories, and though the Target books ran right through the ’80s as well, the vast majority of Mr Gatiss’ attention is on the ’70s, back when he was a boy. His love for Jon Pertwee’s Doctor in particular shines through; I have my reservations about him, but his Target books, at least, are smashing. One of the top moments to listen out for, appropriately, is marvellous artist Chris Achilleos relating how Pertwee asked Target to get him to portray his nose as less of a double-barrelled shotgun than it was in life – another is fab companion and now reader Anneke Wills asking of the BBC’s trashing her old stories (yes, tying in with the Shaun Ley programme):

“You have to wonder if there was anybody intelligent in charge!”

Top marks for selecting several excerpts from Tom Baker’s reading of Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars, probably the best of the CDs for me, and bringing to life one of Terrance Dicks’ most thoroughly fleshed-out novels. Terrance himself provides entertaining, informative and often self-deprecating commentary on the novel series for which he wrote almost as many books as everyone else put together, while current Who script editor Gary Russell pays praise to Malcolm Hulke, the author who most got inside the characters’ heads. Mark Gatiss, though, should pay more attention to the ’80s: aside from his Sarah Jane Adventures novelisation, Invasion of the Bane, the most recently made Who story Terrance novelised was 1986’s The Trial of a Time Lord: The Mysterious Planet. And that, of course, is the one that begins with the line he loves but can’t place:

“It was a graveyard in space.”

Four Thorntons Boxes For Christmas…

Last week I wrote about pies and sandwiches. Tonight it’s time for the hard stuff.

With so many boxes of chocolates about – and Hotel Chocolat’s too numerous and expensive for me to sample them all (I’m not wild about their pralines, but their fruit creations are uniquely tart and rather fantastic) – I thought I’d zoom in on Thorntons’ selections.

If you’ve happened to saunter past a Thorntons on the high street and just popped in for a moment – and if you’re reading this, you probably have – you’ll know that they have quite a selection of, er, selection boxes. Their most famous, justifiably, is the Continental: it’s been around for decades, with occasional changes, and is still a fabulous mix of creations, mixing milk, white and dark, truffle, mousse and praline. For me, the Viennese Truffle wins every time with its buttery filling and delicately sugared light casing. You might try the Continental White Collection for variety, which is a particularly good relatively recent variation – the Continental Dark Collection’s good, too.

Heretically, though many of their individual milk chocolates are marvellous, their milk chocolate mix itself is a little bland and sickly for me – not a patch on Dairy Milk (unbeatable for pigging in large quantities). So I wouldn’t bother with a bar of it, but confections covered in it are fine. Other hardy perennials include the Mint Collection, which is fine, but with a smaller number of choices and some rather bitter (the ribbed diamonds always taste of nettles to me), there are never enough of the delicious long minty batons or the delightfully knobbly Luxury Double Cream Mints, my favourites. The box I wouldn’t buy for myself from Thorntons is the Classics – although it sells well and is marketed as “The familiar flavours you remember from childhood,” when you find the same shape and taste of fudge, strawberry, coffee creams and so on as in every other chocolate selection, it’s apparent that they started making this box because people were coming in saying, ‘all these creative flavours are all very well, but can’t you be the same as everyone else?’ So it’s not bad, as such, but not in any way interesting. Not that I wouldn’t eat them, mind…

However, there are four fairly new boxes you might not have sampled yet, and – purely in a spirit of selfless experiment – I’ve given each of them a try.

Winter Dessert Gallery

Just happening to pop into Thorntons one day last year – it was raining, and I wanted somewhere I could wipe my glasses – I came across this box, which unlike the others I’m reviewing isn’t new this season, but which I’ve tried again. A choice of seven chocolates, all modelled after well-known desserts, all looking very attractive in their (mostly milk chocolate) little cups. It’s a newer variation of their standard Dessert Gallery that’s been around for a few years; I have to admit, that’s the one I prefer. Some of the selection appear in both, but for the differences, the earlier box tends towards sharper flavours which are more to my taste (barring one that just isn’t me at all). It also has a stylish Art Deco box in white, while the Winter Dessert Gallery has a warm burgundy cover with no definite identity that’s appropriate to the comforting but slightly more forgettable chocolates within.

The Double Chocolate Mousse is the most intense, with a rich chocolate centre and plenty of little curls on top of a dark cup; at the other end of the scale, the Christmas Pudding is clearly the special Winter centrepiece, but tastes only vaguely of Christmas pudding, faintly of rum and brandy, though noticeably of raisin, and the white chocolate on top’s quite nice. Other survivors from the main Desert Gallery are worth tasting – the Tiramisu does taste a bit of tiramisu, with a whiff of coffee and brandy, while the Lemon Meringue’s my favourite, with the nearest you’ll find here to a bit of tartness in a deep well of lemon, with crunchy sweet meringue on top in a white cup – while the other new ones are all right, but not to the same standard. The Sherry Trifle is pretty good, with a custardy fondant, sticky jelly and tiny strips of chocolate on top that look pretty but are too small to taste; the Sticky Toffee Pudding sounds promising, but (small and sweet) simply doesn’t have enough toffee; and the Rhubarb Crumble… Well, I’m not a big rhubarb fan, but this is so vague you don’t taste it, or anything much bar the milk chocolate cup. None of these are unpleasant, but it’s difficult to overcome the impression that winter desserts are popular because they’re hot and comforting, so making them small and cold misses the point a bit.

Continental Paris Milk Collection

A new collection I noticed in Thorntons a month ago while taking a shortcut through it into a shopping centre, this starts off with the disadvantage that their milk chocolate’s a little bland, and the selection never really gets past that. As the name implies, they’re all French-inspired, mostly new, and quite delicate. It’s nice enough, though, and it has rather a pleasing look to the box – round, dusty blue, with a chocolate-brown lower half, rather like a hatbox.

You’ll not be altogether amazed to find that I loved the Mousse au Chocolat; it’s a light and rich mousse, exactly what it promises, and the best of them. The Caramel du Café’s pretty good, too – the coffee and caramel melt together very sweetly, both distinct, though (even if I don’t like coffee much) it could do with a bit more coffee to make it tart. The Praline Feuilletine, on the other hand, is very much the sort of confection that Hotel Chocolat often come up with. The praline’s so-so, but there are lovely crunchy feuilletine waffle pieces, and it’s an attractive design, long and large with dark patterning. The Hazelnut Croquant has another good crunch, but tastes basically just sweet and a bit chocolatey; the Ganache au Marc de Champagne is something all the top chocolatiers have been doing different versions of in the last few years, and it’s not tremendously distinctive – heavy milk chocolate, an aftertaste of champagne… I’d have said white chocolate would set the flavour off better. The most interesting of them is the Pain d’Épices, which doesn’t entirely work but gets your attention more than any of the others – there’s plenty of ginger overcoming the caramelised hazelnut pieces (though they have a good crunch). That leaves two that I suspect are intended as showpieces: the Parisian Truffle is rather good, a touch of brandy making it very Christmassy; Amour, on the other hand… A heart-shaped chocolate always looks promising, but this really depends on whether you like marzipan and orange liqueur – if you do, this is probably very nice. If not, it’s disgusting.

Continental Milan Dark Collection

The other new collection which I just happened to notice, accidentally buy and promptly consume purely to get out of the way when I nipped through a Thorntons last month has altogether more go to it. Based on Italian recipes, also mostly new, this set of eight are all in a much richer dark chocolate (far superior to their milk), again in a rather nice hatbox, this time with the top half in deep red. It looks great.

Now, I’ll confess that I really like a proper tart lemon, and the Lemon Mousse is easily the best here. Thorntons used to do a very similar chocolate in whole bags of them – sharp dark chocolate setting off a great tang of lemon in a light mousse. The Espresso is another strong flavour; again, I don’t even much like coffee, but this is dark and strong and very rich. The Amaretti, on the other hand, is a bit bland; I don’t care for amaretti, but if you do you’ll only get a hint of it here, and rather more honey. Similarly, the Milanese Truffle has a bit of liqueur, a bit of hazelnut and interesting textures, but you mainly just taste the chocolate. Fortunately, the others are more distinctive. The Tiramisu is excellent, with a soft filling and white chocolate top, beating the Dessert Collection’s recipe, the red-wrapped Crunchy Nougat Praline is rather fine (the tastiest bit of nougat I’ve had for years), and the Cannella is interesting, individual but not really a successful mix – another mousse, offering first a taste of lemon, lightly, then plunging into cinnamon, which is rather strange. It rounds off with a mild and creamy Panna Cotta that has quite a strong taste of vanilla, set off perfectly afterwards by the dark chocolate. Ironically, after both the dessert collections, this is the one that most instantly captures a childhood afters – it tastes remarkably like an old-style choc ice.

Metropolitan by Thorntons

I just popped into a Thorntons to ask the time a couple of weeks ago (you know that old saying: if you want to know the time, ask a chocolatier), and to make polite conversation chatted to the manager about chocolate. He said this was the best selection they’ve ever produced, and it’s rather fabulous, you know; it may not be quite their best ever, but it pips the Continental Milan Dark Collection for me as the best of this set. It’s got a lovely Art Nouveau box design, and – fond as I am of white chocolate – this works in just dark or milk. Better still, it’s a much fuller-flavoured milk than their standard mix, here taken from Ecuador, the dark from the Dominican Republic, building on their Single Origin collections. These come in multiples of squares, batons and swirled shells, with one exception…

Vanilla Heights is a square vanilla ganache, with almost a caramel flavour rather than vanilla; Cloudberry Hill is sweet but intriguing and faintly fruity, like the other square chocolate, the delightfully patterned Q Couture, another ganache with quince. The quince is slightly strange, but the dark chocolate stops it being too sweet (I’ll admit to not being too familiar with either quince or cloudberry, but they’re both worth trying). The Orange Garden baton may be based on a better-known fruit, but – flavoured with orange blossom – again it’s very sweet, more perfumy than ordinary orange, set off with quite a good sharp aftertaste. I prefer the other long chocolate, the crispy Praline Piazza, another light praline (a taste that rarely impresses me), but with a great texture of crunchy feuilletine waffle pieces. The two shells are both surprisingly solid: the Manhattan Melt is (rather good) milk chocolate through and through with a subtle aftertaste; Midnight Melt is rich and fruity and slightly bitter in its sweetness, an outstanding dark chocolate. Perhaps my favourite (though Richard didn’t care for it) is the odd one out, the Soho Caramel – sadly the smallest, with slight salt caramel in a thick dark chocolate sphere, it’s like a chocolate berry, oozing with flavour.

Bars, Baubles and Bags

Thorntons has also produced two new bars for Christmas, both milk chocolate and neither especially vibrant. Their Crème Brulee Bar is sugar-studded and coolly creamy (well, more milky) inside – nice, but you realise that it’s the crunch of hot, brittle caramel that makes a crème brulee, and the little strip of caramel-ish underlining isn’t good enough. I quite liked it, but you’re best off peeling off the wrapper and storing it somewhere so you forget the name: it’s absolutely not a patch on the proper dessert. The Winter Fruit Crumble Bar is less disappointing, but only because I expected less of it; the crumble pieces in the chocolate coating work, but the blackberry and blackcurrant (both fruits that really appeal to me) filling is very insipid. Despite proper bits of fruit, it’s more sickly than sharp. If you’re after their Continental-style bars, stick to the Sicilian Lemon and the Viennese Truffle, both of which are gorgeous.

They’ve probably sold out of their baubles to hang on the tree by now (like anyone’s going to wait… Oh, yeah, parents), but all three are rich and large enough to take a proper bite into. The Chocolate Truffle Bauble has a near-perfect filling, rich and sweet and strongly chocolatey, though it’s back to that rather bland milk chocolate outside. The Champagne Truffle Bauble works surprisingly well – you can feel the champagne at the back of your mouth. Then there’s the Praline Bauble, which is essentially their long-established Continental the Alpini, in a ball. It’s one of the few pralines I really rather like, with little crunchy pieces to it, too.

And so as not to miss out Hotel Chocolat altogether, one of their new chocolates that I’d recommend is the Eton Mess – soft strawberry mousse that would even get Peter Butterworth’s attention, bedded in milk chocolate and crunchy meringue, covered in thick white chocolate and topped with dried strawberry; a stunning mix of tastes and textures. You can get them in their own selector packs now: eat them by the bag.


So make that your New Year’s resolution. Pile up the chocolates, pile them into your mouth – er, I mean, offer them round your loved ones – and stick Doctor Who on the iPlayer, with a side order of Triffids (eat up your veg, or it will eat you!) and The Box of Delights for sweet. For a little nibble, though, there’s always the poor old Pet Shop Boys with their new EP: the ‘be careful what you wish for’ Christmas ghost-of-a-chance-of-getting-a-hit It Doesn’t Often Snow At Christmas. Not the best year to release that one, but give the other songs a listen – borrowing Madness, Tchiakovsky and Coldplay, each one of them sounds more like a single. Or there’s always fabulous Katie and December Will Be Mad As a Bucket of Frogs Again or, if you’re not a big fan of sparkly commercial Christmas, Timbuk 3 offer a first verse that’s got one of the best awful puns I’ve ever heard (needing an American accent, and with more than a bit of politics). You’ll have to buy Tom Robinson’s hilariously gloomy North By Northwest CD to get his Christmassy nuclear war epic Merrily Up On High, but I always stick mine on…


Update: and finally, the prize for most unlikely review of the year: Lawrence Miles. Given what he predicted for it (now vanished) before transmission – get it while it’s hot, as like most of his blog, it’s seasonal and goes off quickly!

Labels: BBC, Books, Chocolate, Christmas, David Tennant, Doctor Who, DVD, Fantasy, Food, Music, Patrick Troughton, Radio, Reviews, Style, The Key To Time, Top Tips, Triffids

Monsters are back in a big way – old ones like Silurians and Daleks, new ones burrowing under the earth in Frontios, some as big as (actually, rather bigger than) your head in The Awakening, while in print there’s a renaissance starting for the Target books, too. Vivid style and colour collide in a more dangerous Universe, which does nice Doctor Peter a power of good: he steadily gains more edge, eventually getting mad as hell and exploding into Colin Baker in…

The Caves of Androzani

“Your sense of humour will be the death of you, Doctor. Probably quite soon.”

Peter’s best story unites ‘arthouse’ and ‘macho’, with a terrific script, dazzling direction, rattlesnake-eerie music and compelling actors. A cynical desert war, noirishly twisted love and graveyard humour meet for a revenge drama where everyone’s destroyed in a chain reaction from picking on an innocent.


You can read the book, but it’s such an extraordinary visual and aural experience that you should get hold of the old VHS or, better, buy the DVD, complete with an isolated score that it’s a pleasure to chill out to. The director’s so good he’s doing the new Doctor Who stories these days, too.

Labels: Colin Baker, Doctor Who, DVD, Film Noir, Music, Peter Davison, Pictures, Reviews, Style, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?

A new regime begins with massive changes to the series’ visual and musical style and script editor Christopher H Bidmead’s vision of scientific fairy tales. The Leisure Hive’s stunning look and score introduces it with a boom, while the more sombre feel finds an echo in sting-in-the-tail comic strips like The Star Beast or Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s Business As Usual. But for sheer passion…

Full Circle

“Why can’t people be nice to one other? Just for a change? I mean, I’m an alien and you don’t want to drag me into a swamp, do you? [Pause] You do.”

A fiercely intelligent evolutionary fable where elders decide everything by revealed truth, only for the Doctor to ask all the awkward questions and take a moral stand. Great filming, design and monsters (some looking like us), an intriguing mystery – and swimmers in skimpy trunks! Ahem.


This story is the first in The E-Space Trilogy, and that’s due out in a DVD box set in the New Year; as the music is rather wonderful, I’m particularly looking forward to the isolated scores. In the meantime, you may be able to find second hand copies of the VHS or of the novel. Or even the View-Master slides.

Today, incidentally, is the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the BBC’s greatest ever evolutionary fable, one which terrified a generation, inspired more science fiction than you can name and is still, today, one of the most astonishingly brilliant pieces of television ever made. Happy birthday, Quatermass and the Pit, and if you haven’t seen it, go out and buy The Quatermass Collection on DVD right this instant.

Labels: BBC, Comics, Doctor Who, DVD, Ideas, Music, Quatermass, Religion, Reviews, Style, Tom Baker, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?

Twisted religion and black comedy suffuse a stunning year, transforming body horror into battles for the mind and rich colours into darkness as writer Robert Holmes and producer Philip Hinchcliffe (masters of kiddie-scaring) reach their peak, while Terrance Dicks’ new The Making of Doctor Who inspires every guidebook written since. From The Brain of Morbius’ funny fascist Frankenstein to The Hand of Fear’s crawling eeriness, all the stories are marvellous, and the greatest of them all begets not just Time Lord mythology but even The Matrix movies…

The Deadly Assassin

“I am the creator here, Doctor. This is my world.”

Exploding with ideas for both story and storytelling, this starts as film noir political satire, then swerves into virtual reality and gritty surrealism. Superb cliffhangers, visuals, dialogue; the Master stripped to his essentials… It’s my favourite story, and Mary Whitehouse’s biggest complaint. An unbeatable recommendation!

“The Master’s consumed with hatred. It’s his one great weakness.”
“Weakness, Doctor? Hate is strength.”
“Not in your case. You’d delay an execution to pull the wings off a fly.”

There’s no DVD yet, though you may have seen clips from and discussion of it on Doctor Who Confidential 4.10, the one after Midnight. In the meantime you should look for second-hand copies of the novel or the VHS: if you can track down WH Smith’s The Time Lord Collection, that includes videos of not only this story, but also The War Games and The Three Doctors; on the other hand, the original VHS release has the most gorgeous cover painting in the range… And back on its original transmission, the Radio Times trailed the story with one of its most shiver-down-the-spine lines:

“Death strikes in the dark cloisters of the Time Lord Capitol. The Doctor, alone now, is a hunted fugitive in a city that was once his home…”

Labels: American Politics, Books, British Politics, Doctor Who, Film Noir, Ideas, Mary Whitehouse, Personal, Philip Madoc, Religion, Reviews, Style, The Master, Tom Baker, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?

Have you noticed The Avengers is back on, late on Friday nights on BBC4? If not, consider this a Christmas present. A Christmas present? Well, it’s September, so what could be more natural than shops stuffed with Advent Calendars and stockings full of chocolate, and The Avengers’ Christmas special showing at 12.40 in the morning? And it’s (forgive me) a cracker, too, plunging Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg into a Dickensian nightmare that’s one of the very best of the series. What’s in Steed’s Christmas stocking? Is he really losing his mind? Is telepathy real? Tune in and find out.

Steed hangs up his stocking – Emma asks for more

Richard’s inordinately fond of the BBC’s 2005 adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, with Gillian Anderson riddled with accidie and pitted against Charles Dance’s extraordinarily monstrous Mr Tulkinghorn. We’ve just finished watching it again on DVD, and were so impressed that not only have I started reading the novel (three hundred pages in, only seven hundred to go, and a note to the editors: if you’re going to stick 46 footnotes in a 7-page chapter, how about sticking them at the foot of the page rather than a thousand pages to the back so your reader has to flick so often they go quite mad?), but we’ve made a start on the 1985 adaptation with, goodness me, Diana Rigg. So far it’s being stolen by Denholm Elliott as Mr Jarndyce, but however good Diana’s Lady Dedlock turns out, it’ll be very difficult for her to beat her outstanding turn in The Avengers’ exploration of Dickensiana. And it’s not just Diana Rigg’s Dickens role coming a couple of decades ahead that gives Too Many Christmas Trees that special boost: A Christmas Carol is, of course, one of many stories that get a sly reference in the script, but if you’ve seen the Alastair Sim film from a couple of decades earlier, why, there’s young Patrick Macnee, and also Mervyn Johns, who’s cast as this story’s version of the friendly, effusive typical Dickens benefactor…

Before the details and the spoilers, why’s Too Many Christmas Trees especially worth watching? Three things stand out for this eerie corrective to Christmas. The two leads are really on top form, with Diana Rigg fabulously determined as Mrs Peel carries much of the story while Steed is cracking up; Patrick Macnee ranges from light, to madly jolly, to positively haunted in a superb performance. It’s one of darkest, most atmospheric Avengers stories, tensely directed and – in the Hall of Great Expectations – giving one of the most sinister moments of the whole series. But though a ghostly midnight tale, it’s not a downbeat story; it’s also very funny, with the tension often arising from the humour and particularly thanks to Steed and Emma’s relationship here being at its wittiest, warmest and strongest. Oh, and right from the opening moments, it boasts some smashingly stylised hallucinations that you really shouldn’t show to anyone who still believes in Santa.

More to follow next week. Harrumble!

Labels: Charles Dickens, Reviews, Style, The Avengers, The Avengers Season 4

When I think of villains, I think of Kevin Stoney. By all accounts, he was a lovely man, but among the dozens of characters he played – in TV series as diverse as I, Claudius, The Avengers, All Creatures Great and Small and Bergerac – I treasure two charismatic would-be dictators in Doctor Who. He was even voted the Daily Mail’s 1965 “Villain of the year” (presumably handing over to Roy Jenkins for the rest of the ’60s). He was a marvellous actor, and after two decades of false reports of his death, sadly the news that broke on Monday is true.



Doctor Who fans will always remember him as Mavic Chen in The Daleks’ Master Plan, the first human villain striking enough to steal a scene from a Dalek, then as Tobias Vaughn in The Invasion, a business tycoon of such Bond-villain cool that he very much made the Cybermen just secondary villains in their own story. In one of the first Who stories I ever saw, Revenge of the Cybermen, he returns to play an avuncular bearded alien – though unfortunately that’s not a story from which anyone emerges with much credit. You may also have seen him as the perpetually upbeat astrologer Thrasyllus in I, Claudius (I must get round to watching him play the same man in The Caesars), Tiberius’ sidekick in exile who has to laugh off the threat of being thrown down a mountain. He was just about the only thing worth watching in two of the weakest episodes of Blake’s 7, first as a scheming councillor and then as a blind archivist who knows too much. And you can see him as a doomed Treasury inspector and then a bitter old bird expert in The Avengers, a dodgy Colonel in The Prisoner, the Prime Minister in the final Quatermass and in dozens of roles in TV series from The Adventures of Robin Hood in the 1950s to Inspector Morse in the 1990s.

Mavic Chen (The Daleks’ Master Plan)

The Daleks’ Master Plan was the series’ early epic, a mixture of war story, political thriller, horror story and space opera, and perhaps because the Daleks are best when they have someone to play against, they’re accompanied throughout by Kevin Stoney’s Mavic Chen. Though the Daleks plot to take over Earth’s galaxy with the help of several ambitious leaders, it’s Mavic Chen, traitorous Guardian of the Solar System, who’s the real star. Named and made up to evoke a mix of as many human ethnicities as possible to accentuate his betrayal of the whole human race, he has something of the commanding camp of the Emperor Ming about him – but across twelve episodes, he has the time to develop as a character and in performance, with his overweening self-confidence (to the point of megalomania) making him increasingly blind to the Daleks’ real view of him and the fate he has coming. Competing for attention with another villain who has real charisma, the Daleks are at their height; for me, they were never better than pitched against the original Doctor, and in this story they get to be the devious galaxy-spanning conquerors of the TV21 comic strips. It’s enormous fun to see Mavic Chen winding them up to fury; because they need him – temporarily – he gets away with talking back to them and even swatting a Dalek’s eye-stalk with a long-fingernailed hand well past the point that they’d exterminate anyone else. And he still doesn’t see the danger when he’s told that

“One Dalek… is capable of exterminating all!”

While they allow him to live, his theatrics are immensely entertaining, and he’s great teasing and outwitting other of the Daleks’ allies in the second episode, Mr Stoney making great use of bars to peer through, lit by flames. Unfortunately, only three episodes still survive from the story, but the whole thing’s available on BBC CD, complete with narration to make it easier to follow. Once you have the CD, you might also consider picking up the Reconstruction, as the part-stills, part-computer-animated version of this story is by far the best Recon I’ve seen. You get a charming interview with Mr Stoney on the Recons for both The Daleks’ Master Plan and for The Invasion, too. But perhaps the most accessible way to view the story – well, a quarter of it, anyway – is to pick up the Doctor Who DVD set Lost In Time, which collects together eighteen ‘orphaned’ episodes, and where the survivors of The Daleks’ Master Plan are among the undoubted highlights (along with The Crusade and The Evil of the Daleks).

Tobias Vaughn (The Invasion)

When I was just four, I saw a Doctor Who villain that petrified me so much I’ve loved him ever since. Gabriel Woolf’s Sutekh the Destroyer (from Pyramids of Mars) was a performance of such quietly terrifying evil that the same actor was brought in to supply the voice of the Beast in The Impossible Planet two years ago. I still enjoy a great villain today, and Doctor Who has seen a great many – but only one’s ever captivated me as much as Sutekh did, and I didn’t see that until I was 21 and The Invasion was released on video (though, for all sorts of reasons, you’re much better off now with the DVD). My other favourite is, of course, Kevin Stoney as Tobias Vaughn. Kevin Stoney’s second appearance in Doctor Who is frequently said to be a retread of his first: an extra-long story; elements of a spy thriller; an invasion of Earth by one of the most famous two Doctor Who monsters; a human using his power and prestige first to betray Earth to the monsters, then planning to double-cross them (and, naturally, being double-crossed first). Despite all that, the 1968 story has a very different feel to the 1965-66 epic – the Daleks leapt from planet to planet to attack a far-future Earth, while the Cybermen are in effect invading a Bond movie on a BBC budget, with Tobias Vaughn very much a Bond villain in a sharp suit rather than a grand piece of Flash Gordon camp. On the other hand, if you’ve seen 2006’s Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel, you’ll recognise an awful lot of that double-length story lifted from The Invasion…

Tobias Vaughn is the head of International Electromatics, a global business empire that dominates the electronics market through its unique ‘micromonolithic circuit’ (yes, you may very well think this is where Intel started). And, unwilling to settle for mere market domination, he plots to take over the world. One of the reasons Vaughn is so striking is that he’s just like how we imagine heads of major corporations to be – after all, the James Bond films are documentaries, aren’t they? And this story has much of the style of the ’60s, with Vaughn’s dark suit and lovely high-collared shirt making him one of the best-dressed men in Doctor Who, but set just a little bit in the future, with videophones and private armies. And that look, the script and Kevin Stoney’s performance come together into the ideal villain for the story: he’s authoritative, he’s witty, he’s in control… At least until the Doctor gets in the way. In The Invasion, the Cybermen are at their most inhuman – faceless, mostly voiceless, wholly emotionless, and so Vaughn makes the perfect contrast. His journey from urbane sophistication through anger to broken depression isn’t just a demonstration of the kind of emotions that his allies can’t have, but a tour de force by a brilliant actor.

When we first encounter Vaughn, he’s not just calm but amused; when some of the Doctor’s friends wreck his irritating computer answering service – as many of us wish to on a daily basis – he thinks it’s very funny, and only his thuggish head of security wants to maltreat them. His urbanity persists while he’s still utterly in control, with orders and threats of “encouragement” for someone he wants to talk given as smiling asides that make them all the more effective. But his self-image as someone who’s both laid-back and in control is threatened when his ambition is threatened – he flares into temper for a moment when the Cybermen won’t share information, and again lets out a sudden whiplash of anger when his head of security warns him not to disobey the Cybermen:

“I don’t take orders, Packer, I give them!”

Increasingly, the story becomes about Vaughn’s state of denial when he stops having it easy. There’s a priceless scene when the hapless Packer finds the Doctor and friend inexplicably missing from a lift, while Vaughn – face like thunder – has clearly spotted the open panel in the ceiling and is losing his patience with an underling too stupid to notice. He manages an icy impression of his previous calm when Packer promises to find them:

“Call me when you do, Packer. I’ll be in my office. And don’t fail this time, there’s a good fellow.”

When Packer inevitably misses their exit by fire escape, Vaughn’s already strained quiet façade breaks into screaming fury. He’s one of those villains who purrs

“Much as I detest violence…”

then clearly distracts himself from things going pear-shaped by bullying sadism. Desperate to find a weapon he can use against the Cybermen, clearly terrified he’s left it too late, he has one wired up to an emotion-inducing machine that drives it mad with artificial fear, but the scene cuts two ways. It’s disturbing, because we’ve never seen a villain so powerful he can make a monster suffer before, but Vaughn’s evident hunger to make a Cybermen feel fear is a reminder that their natural state is that he’s afraid of them, not the other way round. He torments an inoffensive little scientist into shooting him in a superbly played scene, just so he can show off that he has a partly-cybernetic body that’s impervious to bullets – but again, underlying that is his desperation not to be fully converted by the Cybermen, because he doesn’t want to lose his individual human mind. Perhaps it was a real gamble, assuming he’d be shot in the chest rather than the head, but his whole invasion plan has been a gamble, and the more he realises the odds are against him the more he refuses to cut his losses, insisting

“Nothing has been overlooked.”

and

“I must go on, I must…”

One of the most memorable aspects of Kevin Stoney’s acting here is the way he keeps his left eye lazily half-closed throughout most of the story, while Vaughn is in control, then – when everything finally, undeniably falls apart around him – suddenly switches to having his eyes race around as if looking for a way out while he virtually has a nervous breakdown, then sinks into despair. He only drags himself out of it, after a last burst of fiery energy as he tries to justify himself and his need for power, with a desire to revenge himself on the Cybermen who destroyed his dreams. It’s a compelling turnaround, and you can’t help noticing that he never goes back to that lazy half-closed lid – because on being forced to admit his real situation, he’s finally opened his eyes.

You can watch this extraordinary character study on a beautifully cleaned-up DVD, and I thoroughly recommend it (with lots of bangs and flashes as well as acting, if you like that sort of thing). Though this is another story for which the BBC carelessly destroyed some episodes, this one’s the reverse of The Daleks’ Master Plan – three-quarters of it are present, rather than missing, and, even better, it’s the only one so far where you can see the ‘missing’ episodes on DVD. The BBC stumped up the cash a couple of years ago to have two full episodes recreated through animation and paired to the soundtrack, so it now starts with a rather marvellous film noir cartoon that completes the story. It’s the best way to remember a magnificent actor bringing a character to life. I remember reading the novelisation of The Invasion in the mid-’80s, and being so thrilled by the story that I acted out scenes from it in Drama class at school. I didn’t play the Doctor; I played Vaughn. Quite often, my imagination would conjure up something more impressive from the book than what Doctor Who had actually produced on screen, and I’d find myself a little disappointed on eventually seeing the video. When, years later, I was able to watch Kevin Stoney’s Tobias Vaughn, I saw everything I’d imagined and much more besides. He was simply brilliant. Ten years ago, I was inspired to draw a set of ‘Doctor and Villain’ portraits, and – as I draw very much more slowly even than I write – I only managed to complete the one. The first I chose, though, was of course a picture featuring Kevin Stoney as Tobias Vaughn (with Patrick Troughton as the second Doctor). You can see it above.

My condolences to Mr Stoney’s friends and family, and he’ll be missed by many people who, like me, never met him but had their imaginations captured by his work.

Labels: Blake’s 7, Daleks, Doctor Who, DVD, In-Depth Doctor Who, Obituary, Patrick Troughton, Pictures, Quatermass, Recons, Reviews, Style, The Avengers, The Brigadier, William Hartnell