Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Spearhead From Space on DVD
A review from the days when there were just three Doctor Who DVDs available rather than sixty-odd…
It’s a strange experience, reading back through a DVD review I originally wrote in 2001. Looking at How Doctor Who Made Me A Liberal yesterday, I could write almost the same thing today, but while my politics haven’t changed, my expectations of DVDs certainly have. Though I allude above to my dislike of completely bare-bones, no extras, crummy-pictured DVDs – I’d just bought a very disappointing copy of Quatermass and the Pit released by Revelation at the time, which has since been issued as part of the BBC’s The Quatermass Collection with the other stories, fantastic picture restoration and documentaries – if a Doctor Who DVD were to be released with so few extras as that early edition of Spearhead today I’d be just as irate. The standard has climbed since to a remarkable degree.
It’s strange on other levels, too. Now that my Summer holiday repeat season from Outpost Gallifrey reaches a proper story, I thought it would need very little thought in reprinting before this link disappears forever. I was quite wrong. Obviously, my attitude to DVDs has become much more discriminating, as I’m comparing them now with the very best of DVD rather than just VHS. But I was also surprised to find that the version of this review that I wrote in 2001 isn’t the one I sent in to Outpost Gallifrey. The original draft I have on file went to a Doctor Who e-group when the DVD first came out; the one I’ve reprinted above is cut-and-pasted from OG (aside from minor ‘house style’ changes), which I clearly must have amended and submitted a year or two later, as I’d added a couple of lines and a new paragraph in the middle as well as trimming one bit, clearly having seen a few other Who DVDs in the meantime. And, perhaps most significantly, it’s now difficult to talk about this story without looking at its influence on the series’ return in 2005, as I’ll come to in a moment.
Despite all that, I still rather like that old review. It was written in a rush of enthusiasm (I can clearly spot some of the more critical lines I inserted a year or two later), and it was the only piece of my writing that the late Craig Hinton ever praised… Though that’s not quite as proud a memory as the only speech of mine that Paddy Ashdown ever congratulated me over, in which I had been bold, radical and risky, outlining our principles to move party policy forward, but also – summing up in a debate in front of a couple of thousand people – as then Chair of what-Liberal-Youth-was-then-called, a speech in which I brutally swatted down an executive member who’d spoken out of line. I never had the nerve to ask Paddy if he more agreed with the principles involved or the ‘leader tersely nuking a pesky colleague’ aspect of the speech… But back to Doctor Who.
I mentioned the series coming back in that review far more in hope than expectation but, when it did return in 2005, they did indeed give the first story a memorable image like dummies coming to life and going on a killing spree on the high street – by the simple expedient of bringing the Autons back, so that dummies came to life and went on a killing spree on the high street. Good choice, though other elements of the relaunch were more original (and it rapidly found its own image that everyone remembered: ‘did you see the one where the spaceship crashed into Big Ben?’).
Looking at Spearhead From Space with Twenty-first Century Who on TV eyes, it’s striking how familiar it is. 1970 saw a massive overhaul of Doctor Who, for the first time in colour, with an entirely new regular cast and a new writing and visual style. It was the biggest reformatting the series had ever had until the still bigger 2005 relaunch – and even that was in some ways a less radical change to the series’ ethos, with 1970’s stories the ones in which the rootless, anti-establishment wanderer starts working with the military, and still the series’ only season in which a lead character defined by his travels in time and space is so Earthbound that he never once gets into his TARDIS and flies off.
So it’s no wonder that Russell T Davies chose to borrow much of this story for his own relaunch. Of course Rose restaged that Auton invasion, as did Love and Monsters (rather more stylishly), as well as at least three pop videos and even a Pringles ad, but there are other touches, too. The story starts off with a woman from ‘our world’ gradually introduced to strange happenings, only meeting the Doctor and aliens bit by bit to get used to them with the audience, luring you in with normality as a pilot for the new series. There’s a shifty character part who’s almost the first ‘ordinary’ person to appear in the series and certainly the first to do the vacuuming or sell his story to the tabloids, making him uncannily like a piece of Russell T Davies in the countryside. And in what we’re told is Essex, he’s Welsh, too. It’s a sign! Going right up to last week’s Torchwood story Children of Earth, the UNIT set-up here is not merely the seed of modern-day UNIT stories, but – in making the Doctor Earth-based and working for a secret alien-fighting organisation – plainly of Torchwood, including some form of government conspiracy that gets in our heroes’ way, a small alien incursion in the past that returns here on a much larger scale, an alien encounter threatening a man’s sanity and a half-seen alien roaring and spitting against a glass tank. Even that scene I mentioned that scares kids off camping, though Russell hasn’t borrowed it, got a grislier echo in the later story The Stones of Blood – which Russell’s described as his favourite “hopeless” death in the series. And, coming full circle from 1953 to 1970 to 2005, the week after Rose was first broadcast the BBC remade The Quatermass Experiment live, which had a strange look of Spearhead From Space by shooting many of its scenes on location in exactly the same sort of echoing warehouse as the inappropriately enormous UNIT lab.
Though it may be worth waiting for the rumoured ‘Special Edition’ reissue of this story in perhaps a year or so (if you want to see it with an improved picture transfer and what’s now the usual host of extras, as well as probably restoring a piece of music omitted from Episode 2 for copyright reasons which have since been resolved; the other early DVD I mentioned in the review, Remembrance of the Daleks, is actually getting a ‘Special Edition’ re-release next Monday!), right now you can probably find this DVD for a third of the price it was released at in 2001, and, as I say above, it’s a very impressive story to enjoy. Most of it looks like a rather well-shot film from the end of the ’60s – given that it’s very well-shot, on film, and made in 1969 – and has great style about it, but having to shoot the story on location rather than in studio corridors gives a lot of it a very modern-seeming immediacy. I praised the Brigadier’s jostling impromptu press conference above for looking like a real news report, while scenes of the Brigadier and Munro pedeconferencing, brisk and businesslike with the camera walking back in front of them, would probably be shot just the same way today (and decades before The West Wing). Though Mr and Mrs Seeley are outrageous stereotypes, they’ve got some great character touches, too; there’s Russell-style gossip, and she’s as real worrying about her dog and facing off against an Auton as she is when, in a brilliant moment, she suspiciously re-opens Sam’s shed door a moment after he ‘disproves’ her suspicions to try and catch him at it (whatever ‘it’ may be), and her husband’s still ready for her! And though Jon Pertwee’s Doctor is far more likeable here than he becomes later, his sneering to the Brigadier at the end that he has no use for a salary is worth scoffing at. As my lovely Richard put it last time we watched the story:
“Rather amusing, don’t you think?”Spearhead From Space has a lot of baggage. Surely one of the best-known stories, it was the first novel created for the Target range, one of the first videos released, one of the first re-released, one of the few recent terrestrial analogue repeats, and now one of the first DVDs. It’s highly entertaining, but still something of an oddity – one of the series’ most significant relaunches, it’s both highly derivative and a taste of things to come.
The first colour story, it looks better than BBC colour did for years afterwards, through the happy accident of all-film, all-location filming denying us the soon-to-be-usual harshly videotaped studios. The first story of the Doctor’s new exile to Earth, it’s also startlingly similar to Quatermass II, or any number of episodes of The Avengers, or even a pared-down version of the previous season’s The Invasion, with the same factory and all the trimmings. Regarded now as a typical, reliable Bob Holmes ‘film homage with witty dialogue and exaggerated character parts’, it was actually his first of these, following on from two little-regarded late Troughtons. It’s the first story for Pertwee’s more ‘serious’, haughty Doctor after Troughton’s ‘clown’, yet Pertwee spends much of his time clowning instead. It’s even a four-part story before such economy became fashionable, set in a season of seven-part epics, and perhaps because of that, perhaps because it was Pertwee’s first story, perhaps because of that terrific high street invasion scene, or perhaps just because the book was so good, it was remembered and talked about for years, alone from the ‘forgotten’ Season 7. Even Doctor Who and the Silurians tended to get overshadowed by its flashier, emptier sequel, but somehow Spearhead From Space never did.
So, is it any good? Familiarity has bred a little contempt for some fans, but although suffering from the usual Pertwee problem of much better books than TV, in this case it’s because the book is fantastic, not through any deficiency in the production. This is really good, if perhaps only on the edge of my top twenty. It’s a cracking action tale, basically, with dabs of horror to scare the kiddies, and loads of comic bits to say that it’s all right really – and only one horror bit that’s unintentionally funny. So, a pretty good recipe for Who.
People often say how “grittily realistic” this is. It isn’t. While generally more ‘realistic’ than the previous season, it’s far less ‘gritty’ than the rest of the famously dark (for Who) Season 7. Had it been made on video, some of it might have looked much sillier; as it is, the convincing visuals really help make the funny bits entertaining rather than seem mistakes. Much of its reputation must lie with the Autons themselves, which are fantastically creepy monsters, and of course Hugh Burden’s eerie boggling eyes. Even so, it’s not such a big change – horror stories a couple of years earlier like The Web of Fear and Fury From the Deep had far less in the way of comforting comedy to defuse the tension.
This being such a collection of firsts, the regulars are decidedly irregular. Pertwee is generally comic and – with the aid of some rubber tentacles – renders the climax rather silly, but has a fresh appeal in many scenes. Caroline John’s Liz Shaw is a bit too mannered to begin with, but shows huge promise that was to blossom into probably the best TV companion after Barbara. The real star here is Nick Courtney’s Brigadier, a relatively familiar face and an assured performance that is constantly delightful. It’s almost a shame when the Doctor gradually evolves as ‘the star’, with Nick playing the lead so well in the early episodes. By the end of the story, the three are working together awfully well, and while there is a fair bit of scientist-soldier tension, they all get on well from the start.
Liz, in fact, has a lot more problems with the Brig than the Doctor does, largely because he’s just kidnapped her. The Doctor getting her on side with a great piece of eyebrow acting actually brings her into the UNIT fold. That’s not the only exciting thing about this new character – she wears such a stunning array of plastic coats and dresses that you’re surprised the Nestenes don’t seize control of them and strangle her with them. Oh, well, maybe in the X-rated version. Have you noticed, the ’70s begin with a woman in charge (of the tracking station, in the first scene), and probably the strongest woman companion so far… You’d hardly know what was coming next, would you? The new Doctor also betrays some of his more unpleasant character traits early; his ‘escape attempt’ shows he’s a ruthless git. Let’s face it, he uses Liz, and as he can’t fly the TARDIS straight (The Green Death, still years in the future, is the first time in the show’s history he manages that unaided!), we know he’d be leaving the Earth in the lurch here and never be able to get back to sort out the Autons. And is there a little touch of the famous Pertwee Moral Message? You heard it here, kids – automation is evil! People who sack their workers are aliens!
It all looks like it cost about a hundred times more than The War Games. And even though that had loads of soldiers, here they seem like the main characters. It’s a different series! Despite The Invasion the previous year, it’s a bit of a shock to have the serial open with some modern soldiers. It used to be an eccentric traveller in time and space, and suddenly it’s gone all macho. You’d think with the advent of colour, they could find a more exciting one to start with than beige… On the other hand, the horror elements are distinctly anti-beige in their excitement; the shocking splash of red for the soldier in the car crash, the Auton tearing its way into a tent to kill Ransome and terrify the kiddies off camping, and Ransome becoming a gibbering wreck. We should get that more often – in the following story, too, people see things and lose their minds. Shame the series had so few such Lovecraft and Quatermass and the Pit-style reactions, but perhaps they would have caused too many nightmares. There’s more for parents and teachers to disapprove of when it comes to the Nestene energy unit, too. Either the Doctor’s or the designer’s maths is terrible, as the Nestene energy unit is much bigger than his guesswork. And who’s the woman with the world’s largest eyepatch in the hospital waiting room? What’s she waiting for? A head transplant?
On the production side, the Bob Holmes script is well-paced to slowly introduce the new Doctor (though attempts by the director to hide his face after he’s already toppled out of the TARDIS just, er, fall flat), then pick up with the scary Autons, and leavened with some great dialogue and, of course, those splendid stereotypes Mr and Mrs Seeley. As well as the obvious Quatermass borrowings, Holmes seems to have lifted much of the early set-up from Invasion, a rather poor sci-fi film he co-scripted in the mid-’60s (though the hospital scenes are also reminiscent of Adam Adamant Lives: A Vintage Year for Scoundrels and The Avengers: The Forget-Me-Knot). The crude-faced, unstoppable, homing killers are very like The Avengers’ Cybernauts, but no less impressive for that, and it’s a nice twist that they’re more interesting than just another robot. Dudley Simpson’s incidental music – particularly for the ‘Auton invasion’ – is awfully good, as we’ve fortunately come in just before he goes quite dreadfully mad with a synthesiser for a few years. Derek Martinus turns in some great pieces of direction, with super zooms in on and out from hunting Autons, and even for the episode titles. Two dazzling scenes in particular stand out – first, the Brigadier’s impromptu press conference at the hospital. I defy you to watch Nick Courtney calmly insisting, “I know nothing about a man from space” while pursued by a camera, and not have a little part of your brain think it’s real. The other scene, of course, is in Episode 4, and involves the most aggressive January sales windows you could imagine…
Anyone who brings Doctor Who back to the TV really must give a thought to some great visual set-piece. Get people talking afterwards about ‘The one with the dummies coming to life / The one with the Dalek in the Thames / The one with the Daleks climbing the stairs / The one with the maggots, or spiders, or monsters walking out of the sea’; high-quality pretty images aren’t enough. Everyone does pretty these days. It’s got to be a memorable image, with any luck rising out of a memorable plot.
This being a DVD, though, it’s not just the show itself that’s there to be excited by (well, it would be if it were issued by Revelation, but fortunately the BBC have learnt better). The extras are very jolly; for example, a UNIT recruitment film, sadly missing the phone number at the end it used to display (they could have updated it!), some terribly hammy Pertwee publicity stills, and the BBC2 ads from 1999 – the second of which sadly has different music after copyright problems, is way too loud and doesn’t work nearly so well. At least they’re much better than the ad for Genesis of the Daleks… Which reminds me, shame there’s no BBC2 Dalek on here. Oh well.
That’s not the only boon on DVD, however. For my money, the best thing about it is what else you can have playing while the show’s on. First, there’s the option to display little text factoids on the screen in random scenes. It sounds terribly dull, and admittedly it tries very hard to be written that way, but actually they’re so surreal, we fell about laughing (this effect does wear off as they become more and more boring with later releases). Some are appropriate to the scene in question; many just pop up out of left field. There’s one long set of items about Jon Pertwee’s career that appears mid-way through Episode 2 for no reason at all. We just sat and imagined Richard Molesworth strapped to a chair, being hit with electric shocks every 2 minutes 37 seconds to come up with something (very faintly) interesting, and tapping out all this foolishness.
But that’s not all! The best is yet to come. While the earlier release The Robots of Death boasted an interesting, informative and serious commentary by the producer and writer, Spearhead does none of this. Its commentary is gloriously irrelevant, but pricelessly entertaining. Actors Nicholas Courtney and Caroline John appear to have been locked in the sound booth for a few hours with nothing but a microphone, a video and a tanker of gin. It’s clear that there is a break in recording before Episode 4; by the end of the marvellous Episode 3 track, they’re talking such enchanting gibberish I’d swear they’re paralytic.
Courtney is a fabulous old pro, reproducing every tiny detail and no doubt sending fanboys wild by talking about how the Brigadier’s wife Fiona left him (in spin-off Downtime). Ooh! If it wasn’t canon before, is it now that it’s been released as part of Spearhead From Space? I don’t know. I don’t care. But it’s lovely to hear! He announces that Zygons were “very funny,” complains that the uniform “Doesn’t flatter my bottom at all!” and steals the show. So, how can Caroline challenge him? By knowing nothing at all! Ah, it’s bliss. She knows that there were no loos and it was cold, but spends the rest of the time regaling us in her Mrs Doyle Oirish accent and saying she’s a nauddy nauddy girl for telling us the plot (which she doesn’t actually remember anyway – in fact, her recollections give away a whole different plot!). It’s as if they’ve decided to play it in gender-reversed character to the old song, I Remember it Well. Bless her, she promises “I shall spend my dotage watching every episode,” and draws our sympathy as she recalls, “I never got to go in the TARDIS. So sad,” or “Nobody ever said I was any good.” Oh, Caroline, Caroline, you were fabulous! I almost wrote my first ever fan letter to an actor on the spot. Still, she gives the game away in the end; “You were never averse to being in a pub a bit, were you?” she tells Nick, and finally proves she knows the world of Who far better than she pretends with her response to Nick’s “Now there’s a useless piece of information”: “Not at all! I should think some people are really thrilled!” Yes, Caroline. We were.
Spearhead From Space is a highly enjoyable slice of Doctor Who, and this DVD makes it better than ever – nine out of ten. So, even if you’ve got this on tape already, it’s a real treasure – not just for a far, far superior picture quality, but for the enchanting uselessness and sheer entertainment of the Caroline and Nick show. My only niggle is that it doesn’t give a proper time counter display, but with a package this good, I’ll live.
Lastly, it’s odd that both the early 2001 DVDs (this and Remembrance of the Daleks, if you can’t cast your mind back that far) have a solid claim to contain the series’ best-staged fight sequences ever, and are famous for looking terrific – yet both are thoroughly upstaged by their novelisations, for me the best two books Target ever did. Who says action scenes don’t work on paper?
It’s a strange experience, reading back through a DVD review I originally wrote in 2001. Looking at How Doctor Who Made Me A Liberal yesterday, I could write almost the same thing today, but while my politics haven’t changed, my expectations of DVDs certainly have. Though I allude above to my dislike of completely bare-bones, no extras, crummy-pictured DVDs – I’d just bought a very disappointing copy of Quatermass and the Pit released by Revelation at the time, which has since been issued as part of the BBC’s The Quatermass Collection with the other stories, fantastic picture restoration and documentaries – if a Doctor Who DVD were to be released with so few extras as that early edition of Spearhead today I’d be just as irate. The standard has climbed since to a remarkable degree.
It’s strange on other levels, too. Now that my Summer holiday repeat season from Outpost Gallifrey reaches a proper story, I thought it would need very little thought in reprinting before this link disappears forever. I was quite wrong. Obviously, my attitude to DVDs has become much more discriminating, as I’m comparing them now with the very best of DVD rather than just VHS. But I was also surprised to find that the version of this review that I wrote in 2001 isn’t the one I sent in to Outpost Gallifrey. The original draft I have on file went to a Doctor Who e-group when the DVD first came out; the one I’ve reprinted above is cut-and-pasted from OG (aside from minor ‘house style’ changes), which I clearly must have amended and submitted a year or two later, as I’d added a couple of lines and a new paragraph in the middle as well as trimming one bit, clearly having seen a few other Who DVDs in the meantime. And, perhaps most significantly, it’s now difficult to talk about this story without looking at its influence on the series’ return in 2005, as I’ll come to in a moment.
Despite all that, I still rather like that old review. It was written in a rush of enthusiasm (I can clearly spot some of the more critical lines I inserted a year or two later), and it was the only piece of my writing that the late Craig Hinton ever praised… Though that’s not quite as proud a memory as the only speech of mine that Paddy Ashdown ever congratulated me over, in which I had been bold, radical and risky, outlining our principles to move party policy forward, but also – summing up in a debate in front of a couple of thousand people – as then Chair of what-Liberal-Youth-was-then-called, a speech in which I brutally swatted down an executive member who’d spoken out of line. I never had the nerve to ask Paddy if he more agreed with the principles involved or the ‘leader tersely nuking a pesky colleague’ aspect of the speech… But back to Doctor Who.
Spearhead From Space and Russell T Davies
I mentioned the series coming back in that review far more in hope than expectation but, when it did return in 2005, they did indeed give the first story a memorable image like dummies coming to life and going on a killing spree on the high street – by the simple expedient of bringing the Autons back, so that dummies came to life and went on a killing spree on the high street. Good choice, though other elements of the relaunch were more original (and it rapidly found its own image that everyone remembered: ‘did you see the one where the spaceship crashed into Big Ben?’).
Looking at Spearhead From Space with Twenty-first Century Who on TV eyes, it’s striking how familiar it is. 1970 saw a massive overhaul of Doctor Who, for the first time in colour, with an entirely new regular cast and a new writing and visual style. It was the biggest reformatting the series had ever had until the still bigger 2005 relaunch – and even that was in some ways a less radical change to the series’ ethos, with 1970’s stories the ones in which the rootless, anti-establishment wanderer starts working with the military, and still the series’ only season in which a lead character defined by his travels in time and space is so Earthbound that he never once gets into his TARDIS and flies off.
So it’s no wonder that Russell T Davies chose to borrow much of this story for his own relaunch. Of course Rose restaged that Auton invasion, as did Love and Monsters (rather more stylishly), as well as at least three pop videos and even a Pringles ad, but there are other touches, too. The story starts off with a woman from ‘our world’ gradually introduced to strange happenings, only meeting the Doctor and aliens bit by bit to get used to them with the audience, luring you in with normality as a pilot for the new series. There’s a shifty character part who’s almost the first ‘ordinary’ person to appear in the series and certainly the first to do the vacuuming or sell his story to the tabloids, making him uncannily like a piece of Russell T Davies in the countryside. And in what we’re told is Essex, he’s Welsh, too. It’s a sign! Going right up to last week’s Torchwood story Children of Earth, the UNIT set-up here is not merely the seed of modern-day UNIT stories, but – in making the Doctor Earth-based and working for a secret alien-fighting organisation – plainly of Torchwood, including some form of government conspiracy that gets in our heroes’ way, a small alien incursion in the past that returns here on a much larger scale, an alien encounter threatening a man’s sanity and a half-seen alien roaring and spitting against a glass tank. Even that scene I mentioned that scares kids off camping, though Russell hasn’t borrowed it, got a grislier echo in the later story The Stones of Blood – which Russell’s described as his favourite “hopeless” death in the series. And, coming full circle from 1953 to 1970 to 2005, the week after Rose was first broadcast the BBC remade The Quatermass Experiment live, which had a strange look of Spearhead From Space by shooting many of its scenes on location in exactly the same sort of echoing warehouse as the inappropriately enormous UNIT lab.
Though it may be worth waiting for the rumoured ‘Special Edition’ reissue of this story in perhaps a year or so (if you want to see it with an improved picture transfer and what’s now the usual host of extras, as well as probably restoring a piece of music omitted from Episode 2 for copyright reasons which have since been resolved; the other early DVD I mentioned in the review, Remembrance of the Daleks, is actually getting a ‘Special Edition’ re-release next Monday!), right now you can probably find this DVD for a third of the price it was released at in 2001, and, as I say above, it’s a very impressive story to enjoy. Most of it looks like a rather well-shot film from the end of the ’60s – given that it’s very well-shot, on film, and made in 1969 – and has great style about it, but having to shoot the story on location rather than in studio corridors gives a lot of it a very modern-seeming immediacy. I praised the Brigadier’s jostling impromptu press conference above for looking like a real news report, while scenes of the Brigadier and Munro pedeconferencing, brisk and businesslike with the camera walking back in front of them, would probably be shot just the same way today (and decades before The West Wing). Though Mr and Mrs Seeley are outrageous stereotypes, they’ve got some great character touches, too; there’s Russell-style gossip, and she’s as real worrying about her dog and facing off against an Auton as she is when, in a brilliant moment, she suspiciously re-opens Sam’s shed door a moment after he ‘disproves’ her suspicions to try and catch him at it (whatever ‘it’ may be), and her husband’s still ready for her! And though Jon Pertwee’s Doctor is far more likeable here than he becomes later, his sneering to the Brigadier at the end that he has no use for a salary is worth scoffing at. As my lovely Richard put it last time we watched the story:
“Of course he doesn’t need money… Merely a car, and clothes, and equipment, and a building, and an assistant, which of course money could play no part in obtaining.”
Labels: Christopher Eccleston, Doctor Who, DVD, In-Depth Doctor Who, Jon Pertwee, Outpost Gallifrey Reprints, Paddy Ashdown, Personal, Quatermass, Reviews, The Brigadier, Torchwood
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Doctor Who 45th Anniversary – Why Was 2008 Brilliant?
There’s more excitement from The Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood (Joe Lidster writes interesting stories for both), and more surprises from Big Finish: The Haunting of Thomas Brewster; Brave New Town; The Bride of Peladon; old stage plays reimagined; and Home Truths just kills us. TV Doctor Who offers sheer entertainment in Partners In Crime and The Unicorn and the Wasp, a giant ‘robot’ and countless “Who” gags in The Next Doctor, and two simply outstanding dramas – Midnight’s claustrophobic, terrifying inventiveness, and…
This has three DVD releases: a vanilla disc along with Partners in Crime and Planet of the Ood; in a box set of the whole 2008 season, complete with extras; and in Autumn 2009, paired again with Partners in Crime, accompanied by a magazine as part of the newly-launched Doctor Who DVD Files. You can also buy a double-pack with a toy ‘Pyrovile Magma Creature’ and ‘Roman soldier’.
The Fires of Pompeii
“You fought her off – with a water pistol! I bloody love you.”Awesome. Filming in Rome, an exploding volcano, flaming great monsters – and a moral argument that recalls Billy’s stories. With tragedy, mystery, modern art, fabulous frocks (and nice legs), shouty villains and a superb ‘duelling soothsayers’ scene, you can almost forget how funny it is, too.
“Because that’s how I see the Universe. Every waking second I can see what is, what was, what could be, what must not. That’s the burden of a Time Lord, Donna. I’m the only one left.”
This has three DVD releases: a vanilla disc along with Partners in Crime and Planet of the Ood; in a box set of the whole 2008 season, complete with extras; and in Autumn 2009, paired again with Partners in Crime, accompanied by a magazine as part of the newly-launched Doctor Who DVD Files. You can also buy a double-pack with a toy ‘Pyrovile Magma Creature’ and ‘Roman soldier’.
Labels: Big Finish, David Tennant, Doctor Who, DVD, History, Reviews, Sarah Jane Smith, Torchwood, Toys, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?, William Hartnell
Friday, January 23, 2009
Doctor Who 45th Anniversary – Why Was 2006 Brilliant?
Fairy-tale monsters abound: under the bed in The Girl in the Fireplace; devilish on The Impossible Planet; Love and Monsters’ all-consuming fan; Tooth and Claw’s scary werewolf (and Queen Victoria); inspiring many wonderful toys. Children’s magazine show Totally Doctor Who launches, then spin-off drama Torchwood makes it four Who-related series, peaking with They Keep Killing Suzie. The Invasion’s lost episodes are reanimated for DVD; Bernice has a Summer of Love; gods battle on The Ship of a Billion Years… And who will win? Daleks or Cybermen?
Two forty-five-minute episodes, making one story, out on four DVD releases: a vanilla DVD along with Fear Her; in a box set of the whole 2006 season, complete with extras (including cut-down versions of Doctor Who Confidential); each on their own, once, as tabloid freebies; and in Summer 2009, paired respectively with Fear Her and The Runaway Bride, each with magazines as part of the newly-launched Doctor Who DVD Files.
Army of Ghosts / Doomsday
“I’m – the Doctor…”Edge-of-the-seat viewing as Torchwood rises under a fabulous villain, then falls to the Cybermen – thrilling music, tense build-up, electrifying cliffhanger and an action-packed climax to an epic season finale. Then the haunting last three scenes… Oh, and five million Cybermen against four Daleks? Easy. “Exterminate!”
“Oh, I should say! Hooray!”
Two forty-five-minute episodes, making one story, out on four DVD releases: a vanilla DVD along with Fear Her; in a box set of the whole 2006 season, complete with extras (including cut-down versions of Doctor Who Confidential); each on their own, once, as tabloid freebies; and in Summer 2009, paired respectively with Fear Her and The Runaway Bride, each with magazines as part of the newly-launched Doctor Who DVD Files.
Labels: Big Finish, Daleks, David Tennant, Doctor Who, DVD, Faction Paradox, Fandom, Music, Patrick Troughton, Professor Bernice Summerfield, Recons, Reviews, Torchwood, Toys, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
TV Delivery Good; Cyclists Bad
Not, perhaps, my greenest headline, but a reflection of my day. I’m sitting here watching the television. Well, not the television, technically, but the box it’s lurking in. Or rather looming in, as it’s quite a large TV set, with even the box for its stand pretty humungous. Having rented a big telly for years, we finally decided it’s much cheaper to buy and so I recently accompanied Richard to John Lewis for ninety minutes of merriment with a man from Grace Brothers as we decided on a set and he pretended to know how to operate their order system. Having gone in firmly determined on one size, naturally we ended up getting one slightly bigger, and since then Richard has been worrying that he’s gone mad (don’t worry, he’s as sane as ever). It’s that perennial problem; in the shop, they’re all enormous, so you think you’ve chosen one that’s quite reasonable, but get it home and suddenly you wonder how you’re ever going to manage it. Anyway, in preparation last night, we unplugged all the many attachments to our big old set and it’s now stuck behind a chair, blocking off all access to Richard’s computer. This means I have two televisions in front of me, but neither presently able to display moving pictures, and I feel strangely bereft.
On the other hand, both the guys who delivered the new TV were very friendly, and both were very admiring of our slightly extravagant DVD collection. Much as people who enter the TARDIS invariably exclaim, ‘It’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside!’ our visitors tend to marvel at how such a small flat can have so many DVDs and videos crammed into it. These guys were not only friendly, helpful and quite good-looking, but picked out four TV shows in particular to enthuse over – as it happens, two of my favourites and two of Richard’s, so if we’d met them socially, we’d have got on very well. Unfortunately, when their van drew up outside and I bounded down the stairs to direct them up to our flat, one of them asked if I could manage the stand (it taking two of them to carry the TV). It’s rare that I succumb to the temptation to act macho, but I’m afraid I did earlier. I’m not exactly Mr Muscle, but I said I could carry it, and when each time I put the box down I was asked “Are you sure you’re OK with that?” I naturally said “Oh, yes, fine.” So both my wrists and my back are now rather painful and I’m thinking it’ll be a while before I pretend to be He-Man again.
In the absence of a working TV, and with Millennium lying on top of the crate and dreaming of Casino Royale, I’ve been looking at a few alternative sources of entertainment on the computer (no, no, missus). Good find: thanks to Mr Whyte for pointing me to a bittersweet Torchwood / Narnia crossover story, which amazingly makes me feel more positive towards both franchises. Bad find: my favourite home-made Doctor Who trailer has been removed from YouTube. Bah! So, dear reader, if at any stage you happen to have nefariously downloaded, recorded or otherwise ripped off a trailer for The Deadly Assassin cut in the style of The Matrix trailer, could you let me have a copy, please?
In more significant Doctor Who news, the series’ two nominations for this year’s Hugo Awards have come first and second respectively. Hooray! Steven Moffat’s Blink won the award, with Paul Cornell’s Human Nature the runner-up. I have to admit, I’d have far rather had them the other way round, and not just for Buggins’ Turn (Steven now having swept the awards for three years running) – for me, Human Nature was truly outstanding, even better than the book, and one of the best stories in forty-five years of Doctor Who, let alone last year. Blink was good enough and much better than the Annual story it was based on but, though I know very many people rave about it, for me it wasn’t a patch on Steven’s previous winners The Empty Child and The Fire In the Girlyplace, let alone Human Nature.
Getting out of the flat for a break after the delivery arrived, I walked under to Greenwich to get my hair cut – long overdue, and tomorrow we’re seeing my Mum and Dad for dinner, which means family photos. Tragically, while waiting I saw a picture in a paper of the most fantastic sarnie, after which tomorrow’s dinner will struggle to compete (a trip to Staffordshire seems very tempting). Now, I like walking through the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, but I have to admit to one pet hate. There’s not a lot of space there, there’s a curve to it that doesn’t aid visibility, and there are great big signs everywhere forbidding cycling. So what do cyclists do? They glide at great speed, a menace to all around and in front of them, either clinging to one side of their bike with one foot perched on a pedal or sitting astride but with their feet dangling away from the pedals. I think this is what’s called honouring the letter rather than the spirit of the law, but as far as I’m concerned, some maniac speeding towards me on a machine over which they have less control than usual doesn’t make me feel indulgent. I don’t usually carry a brolly, but I always feel the need for a particularly indestructible one on these occasions, just right for jamming into spokes. That, or carrying a supply of small, adhesive explosive devices. Grr. Oh yes, and then they cart their bikes into the lifts at the far ends and take up all the space. Gits.
Richard has now got in and is looking for a screwdriver. Wish us (mainly him, as I’m unlikely to do blokey stuff twice in one day) luck.
Special points on the coincidentatron for the friend who rang this morning to tell me that he’d just had a TV delivered from John Lewis…
On the other hand, both the guys who delivered the new TV were very friendly, and both were very admiring of our slightly extravagant DVD collection. Much as people who enter the TARDIS invariably exclaim, ‘It’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside!’ our visitors tend to marvel at how such a small flat can have so many DVDs and videos crammed into it. These guys were not only friendly, helpful and quite good-looking, but picked out four TV shows in particular to enthuse over – as it happens, two of my favourites and two of Richard’s, so if we’d met them socially, we’d have got on very well. Unfortunately, when their van drew up outside and I bounded down the stairs to direct them up to our flat, one of them asked if I could manage the stand (it taking two of them to carry the TV). It’s rare that I succumb to the temptation to act macho, but I’m afraid I did earlier. I’m not exactly Mr Muscle, but I said I could carry it, and when each time I put the box down I was asked “Are you sure you’re OK with that?” I naturally said “Oh, yes, fine.” So both my wrists and my back are now rather painful and I’m thinking it’ll be a while before I pretend to be He-Man again.
In the absence of a working TV, and with Millennium lying on top of the crate and dreaming of Casino Royale, I’ve been looking at a few alternative sources of entertainment on the computer (no, no, missus). Good find: thanks to Mr Whyte for pointing me to a bittersweet Torchwood / Narnia crossover story, which amazingly makes me feel more positive towards both franchises. Bad find: my favourite home-made Doctor Who trailer has been removed from YouTube. Bah! So, dear reader, if at any stage you happen to have nefariously downloaded, recorded or otherwise ripped off a trailer for The Deadly Assassin cut in the style of The Matrix trailer, could you let me have a copy, please?
In more significant Doctor Who news, the series’ two nominations for this year’s Hugo Awards have come first and second respectively. Hooray! Steven Moffat’s Blink won the award, with Paul Cornell’s Human Nature the runner-up. I have to admit, I’d have far rather had them the other way round, and not just for Buggins’ Turn (Steven now having swept the awards for three years running) – for me, Human Nature was truly outstanding, even better than the book, and one of the best stories in forty-five years of Doctor Who, let alone last year. Blink was good enough and much better than the Annual story it was based on but, though I know very many people rave about it, for me it wasn’t a patch on Steven’s previous winners The Empty Child and The Fire In the Girlyplace, let alone Human Nature.
Getting out of the flat for a break after the delivery arrived, I walked under to Greenwich to get my hair cut – long overdue, and tomorrow we’re seeing my Mum and Dad for dinner, which means family photos. Tragically, while waiting I saw a picture in a paper of the most fantastic sarnie, after which tomorrow’s dinner will struggle to compete (a trip to Staffordshire seems very tempting). Now, I like walking through the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, but I have to admit to one pet hate. There’s not a lot of space there, there’s a curve to it that doesn’t aid visibility, and there are great big signs everywhere forbidding cycling. So what do cyclists do? They glide at great speed, a menace to all around and in front of them, either clinging to one side of their bike with one foot perched on a pedal or sitting astride but with their feet dangling away from the pedals. I think this is what’s called honouring the letter rather than the spirit of the law, but as far as I’m concerned, some maniac speeding towards me on a machine over which they have less control than usual doesn’t make me feel indulgent. I don’t usually carry a brolly, but I always feel the need for a particularly indestructible one on these occasions, just right for jamming into spokes. That, or carrying a supply of small, adhesive explosive devices. Grr. Oh yes, and then they cart their bikes into the lifts at the far ends and take up all the space. Gits.
Richard has now got in and is looking for a screwdriver. Wish us (mainly him, as I’m unlikely to do blokey stuff twice in one day) luck.
Special points on the coincidentatron for the friend who rang this morning to tell me that he’d just had a TV delivered from John Lewis…
Labels: Doctor Who, DVD, New Adventures, Personal, Technology, Torchwood
Sunday, April 08, 2007
The Most Perfect Eating Machine Ever Devised
A Happy Easter to all of you at home! Richard and I are just off for dinner with family, but he’s already given me something edible this morning – yes, after last year’s rival Dalek and TARDIS eggs, M&S have this year produced a larger black Dalek Sec Easter Egg, as well as one of the two competing Dalek double-egg-cups this season (strange idea, I know). It’s the big one that’s impressive, though. Not just the photo-illustrated sloping shape, but that it’s a Dalek casing with something “Organic” within: surely that makes it the most accurate Dalek model yet released? And, if you press the little button at the bottom, it shrieks “Exterminate!” Or, indeed, if you have it in a shopping bag and jolt it the merest smidgeon, causing all your fellow train passengers to jump…
Meanwhile, Millennium has permitted Richard to review the first Doctor Who episode to feature the words “Elephant” and “Millennium”.
Incidentally, as well as enjoying Doctor Who, we recorded Doctor Who Confidential and watched something else while it was on last night – blasphemy, I know, but we were strangely intrigued by Any Dream Will Do. All that back-to-back trailering with the Doctor Who Theme, and with John Barrowman, had clearly wormed its evil way into my psyche.
Three things struck me about it. One is that the scene where, of all the judges, John Barrowman is chosen to walk among the poor young men singing their hearts out and tap them on the shoulder to announce their doom. Aside from the torture all the lads were going through, John’s nobly suffering expression as he carried out their executions – ‘I have to be the Angel of Death because I know It Must Be Done, and I must stand above mere mortal emotion to do my terrible but necessary duty’ – was so exactly that of Captain Jack in Torchwood that I wondered if he’d been given that task purely because his other famous role would add subliminal extra weight to it. Then there’s the young man who, while as handsome as most of them, seemed so preternaturally pale that, with his black hair and dark eyes, it may have been unwise for him to dress in black with a ghostly white shirt like grave clothes adding to his vampiric appearance (well, we had just seen the second vampiric alien in two weeks in the preceding Doctor Who episode). When he swapped this for one with thick red and purple stripes, it was very difficult not to think ‘Blood!’ He needs building up. I recommend a chocolate Dalek. My last observation is that the oldest judge (a heavy grey-haired man with an evil smile) reminds of Anthony Zerbe, so I expect him to be revealed as the villain in the last episode. Possibly by Columbo.
Meanwhile, Millennium has permitted Richard to review the first Doctor Who episode to feature the words “Elephant” and “Millennium”.
Incidentally, as well as enjoying Doctor Who, we recorded Doctor Who Confidential and watched something else while it was on last night – blasphemy, I know, but we were strangely intrigued by Any Dream Will Do. All that back-to-back trailering with the Doctor Who Theme, and with John Barrowman, had clearly wormed its evil way into my psyche.
Three things struck me about it. One is that the scene where, of all the judges, John Barrowman is chosen to walk among the poor young men singing their hearts out and tap them on the shoulder to announce their doom. Aside from the torture all the lads were going through, John’s nobly suffering expression as he carried out their executions – ‘I have to be the Angel of Death because I know It Must Be Done, and I must stand above mere mortal emotion to do my terrible but necessary duty’ – was so exactly that of Captain Jack in Torchwood that I wondered if he’d been given that task purely because his other famous role would add subliminal extra weight to it. Then there’s the young man who, while as handsome as most of them, seemed so preternaturally pale that, with his black hair and dark eyes, it may have been unwise for him to dress in black with a ghostly white shirt like grave clothes adding to his vampiric appearance (well, we had just seen the second vampiric alien in two weeks in the preceding Doctor Who episode). When he swapped this for one with thick red and purple stripes, it was very difficult not to think ‘Blood!’ He needs building up. I recommend a chocolate Dalek. My last observation is that the oldest judge (a heavy grey-haired man with an evil smile) reminds of Anthony Zerbe, so I expect him to be revealed as the villain in the last episode. Possibly by Columbo.
Labels: Daleks, Doctor Who, Food, Torchwood
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Torchwood Series One
To limber up for the new series of Doctor Who, Richard’s reviewed three recent books on Millennium’s Diary. I’ve been meaning to review the first three Torchwood novels, but – with all those heavy hints that Captain Jack will be back in Doctor Who soon – I decide to think about his series first. Earlier today, I resuscitated my (even more) Who-themed blog to take a look at what makes Doctor Who special. It’s given me a few ideas about the reasons Torchwood didn’t seem as special as it should, and, to my surprise, one of them was Captain Jack…
Torchwood was the first Doctor Who spin-off to make it as a TV series, so naturally Richard and I watched it. It starred John Barrowman as the immensely shaggable Captain Jack Harkness, the time-agent-turned-conman-turned-hero who’d been so successful playing opposite Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor, and he was running a branch of Torchwood, the fabulous secret alienbusters shown in the style of Dynasty in the terrific climax to last year’s season of Doctor Who. What could possibly go wrong? Well, it turns out, not quite everything, but the giveaway may be that, though we’ve bought the DVDs, they remain in their wrapping, even though I’d quite like to see the deleted scenes. I’m pretty sure I’ve only watched most of the episodes when they were first broadcast, and that’s unheard-of for something Whoish. As I’m typing, The Sarah Jane Adventures: Invasion of the Bane is being repeated on CBBC. It’s bright, colourful, witty and has a relishable villain and terrific monsters.
Torchwood has a leading man with real star quality, and Eve Myles’ Gwen is a great second lead. I was looking forward to it; I loved the trailers (“One man who can’t die / Four people who can”) and the music. And it was sold as “The X-Files meets This Life,” which put it right up to the minute for, er, ten years ago (perhaps they should have aimed for Spooks with googly monsters). But though it may be in the same universe as Doctor Who, it doesn’t share the same ‘worldview’. That isn’t because it’s ‘adult’. Doctor Who’s had times when it’s been aimed at all sorts of ages, and with any ‘family’ show there’ve been times when it’s fallen too heavily at one end of the range. I’ve equally enjoyed Doctor Who picture-books and Doctor Who novels that were only stocked in the children’s section until I took them to the counter and pointed out the lines that would have irate parents screaming the place down. What they shared was the Doctor. A traveller in time and space who can go to any planet in the past, present or future, who respects life rather than authority, and obeys no-one else’s rules. He takes joy in the wonders of the Universe, and would rather use his intelligence than carry a gun. Sometimes the series is dark and horrific, or light and frothy, or grim, or eccentric. It’s the perfect show to change mood if you didn’t take to the last story; you might like the next one, because it’ll literally be another world. Torchwood, on the other hand, is set in a sewer, and its depressed personnel only seem to go out in the dark, either to investigate depressingly horrible things or to have depressing sex with the people who make them depressed. But they have big guns.
I’m not sure I’d have watched this at all if it hadn’t been Whoish.
There have been some very incisive Torchwood reviews in the last few months. Richard reviewed every episode on Millennium’s Diary, and was probably a little too kindly. I’ve just re-read them all, and I can see how that happened. Reviewing each story in turn and wanting the best out of each of them, he gave each in turn the benefit of the doubt. After he finally excoriated one, he struck an apologetic tone in subsequent weeks. I remember that, after each episode, we’d talk about it (he sometimes quotes me), and we’d look for what was good about each – as if it was a weaker episode of a stronger series. It’s only in retrospect that we can see it’s more in the series than the episodes that the problem lies. James Graham, on the other hand, wrote a damning indictment of the whole lot that was probably a little too harsh. Still, it was bang to rights on a lot of points: he too thought The Sarah Jane Adventures much better; he identified the weakest link as writer / show-runner / co-producer Chris Chibnall; and he noticed that, while it was aiming to be a British Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it had foolishly modelled itself on Buffy Season Six, the one where no-one has any fun (they barely survived that mistake, and that was after building up five years of goodwill). There’s a lot of good in individual Torchwood episodes, as Richard identified. There’s a lot wrong in the structure of the series, as James recognised. But for me, the central problem was what should have been its main selling point: Captain Jack.
I suspect the producers of Torchwood had exactly the wrong idea about Captain Jack Harkness. He was created almost as a send-up of a Hollywood version of the Doctor – traveller in time and space, but a uniformed secret agent, impossibly handsome and with sex – but though he keeps the uniform, the looks and (it’s implied) the sex in Torchwood, and is now in charge of his own bunch of blatantly obvious agents, something vital’s missing. People went for Captain Jack because he looked like he was having as much fun as a human could have. It took the Doctor to make him heroic, but even before then he blazed with charm and confidence, and he absolutely loved what he did. And a lot of what he did was to have sex with anything alive, so long as it was gorgeous enough. He was the embodiment of exuberant sexual liberation. The Captain Jack we see in Torchwood might not have aged to look at, but he’s at least a hundred years older, lost, abandoned and hopeless, but bizarrely in charge and serious rather than a cheeky charmer. He’s at the heart of James’ ‘Buffy Season Six’ analogy: though he’s not been snatched out of Heaven, he’s been restored to life but life has lost its savour for him. He may do the same sort of things, but it’s just going through the motions, and even the sex is because he just wants to feel alive. In Doctor Who, the Doctor inspires people; in Torchwood, a human has been crushed by the responsibility of trying to be like the Doctor. This Captain Jack is suicidal, and even more depressed because, as he’s now indestructible, killing himself doesn’t work. Now, where’s the fun in that? And which Jack will be back in Doctor Who?
The flipside of this is that he provides the series’ themes. There are two that regularly spring out of the episodes, one about something fun that it makes gloomy, the other about something gloomy that it makes intriguing. The first? ‘Sex is bad’. It’s nasty, and shameful, and addictive, and the only reason to do it is to distract yourself from the things in life that are even more depressing. Well, gee; I knew Torchwood had been set up by Queen Victoria, but there’s no need to make it so obvious! The second theme is, thankfully, the best thing about the structure of the series. As Richard spotted in his reviews, it’s ‘the life after death show’. The start of that, clearly, is Captain Jack, returned to life and really not enjoying it (though Richard has a great theory in his first review on how coming back to life made him impossible to kill), but episode after episode looks at people or things surviving beyond death, and it tests from every angle whether there’s anything there at all. And those two themes tie into the feeling that there are two quite different series here, made for completely different audiences. One thinks ‘adult’ means a monster of the week, violence, swearing and cheap sex, and ‘story’ only gets in the way. The episodes of this series are aimed at heterosexual males of around fourteen, and are most strikingly written by Chris Chibnall. The other series thinks ‘adult’ stories should have stories to them, and tells sad, elegiac stories of people (human or not) and very human emotions. I’m not sure that that series has such a clearly defined demographic, but it’s the one that appealed to me.
1.08 They Keep Killing Suzie
By a long way the best of the first series, and the only really great episode. It opens with “Torchwood” daubed on a wall in blood over a pair of gruesome corpses; I remember thinking that it looked like, if you’ll excuse the pun, a bloody Chibnall. Except I was completely wrong, and it’s saying ‘Look at me!’ to Torchwood as a trap, not to the audience as all there is. Richard and I were surprised to get a brilliant story at this point, and it was just in time – after six weeks in, I think we’d finally stopped giving it the benefit of the doubt. This was a tragic, twisted noir (you know I like noir), the most nihilistic life after death story, but it showed that darkness could be intelligent and affecting, not merely offputting. At last, it made something of what we already knew about Torchwood, rather than just getting to a slow bit and thinking ‘time to bung in a Weevil’. It centres on an insane, inspired bit of planning, and Indira Varma is stunning. It’s such a pity she had to die; she’s so much better than anything they have left.
1.05 Small Worlds
The earlier episodes were the shakiest, so thank goodness for this tale of wicked fairies from Sapphire and Steel’s creator. All right, I wasn’t all that impressed by the design of the monster of the week, but the fearful concept behind them was something else, as was the bitter ending. The touching story of lost love is the series’ best stab at seeing Jack as someone human and flawed, in the Doctor’s place but unable to deal with it.
1.03 Ghost Machine
The first story to be really good, with more than a smattering of Nigel Kneale and Sapphire and Steel, it’s an emotional Halloween ghost story with great performances all round – even a good part for Owen, and someone who could be him long down the road, played with grubby despair by Gareth Thomas. Despite the serious themes, though, there’s a moment we just can’t take seriously. Neither lead actor is given enough good material, but both work when given the chance. Eve Myles, however, has one element to her acting that makes us laugh at inappropriate moments: her upper register. There’s something about her emoting that just appealed to us both back when she was in Doctor Who, wailing “It’s ungodly!” Here, she wails that she couldn’t stop the killing, covered in blood, and I’m ashamed to say we fall about. And there’s another bit of her upper register later in the series…
1.12 Captain Jack Harkness
A beautiful, unsettling story with another touch of Sapphire and Steel. Looking at which episodes work, perhaps Mr Chibnall should be sat down in front of PJ Hammond’s opus before being allowed to strike his keyboard again. Switching between now and the 1940s, this introduces the real Captain Jack – gay, heroic and lovely – and the fabulously sinister Bilis Manger, who may or may not be an anagram but ought to be. Top marks for the moment when Gwen looks behind her and dancers pass in front of her as the time zones blur, and for the way that the story of the original Jack is, appropriately, just about the only one in the series who seems to embody Jack’s original mission that sex is good and life-affirming.
1.10 Out of Time
The 1950s rather than the 1940s this time, but here’s an anthology within an anthology series, as three short stories of culture shock interweave. Owen improbably falls for Diane, played by an actress who seems to be cornering the market in ‘incredibly glamorous mid-20th Century sexually liberated women’, judging by this and The Chatterley Affair. We get to see Rhys’ bum, which is nice, though sadly not Jack’s; our leading man is in the story about suicide, and wishes he could join in…
1.09 Random Shoes
This is the cuddly ‘life after death’ story, with lots of great little observations in a Torchwood take on Love and Monsters. Eugene’s endearing, though curiously not very Welsh, and though the end could be taken as heart-warming or nauseating, “Happy Cock” still tickles me.
1.07 Greeks Bearing Gifts
Well, it’s a great whacking cliché of a title, and I made the mistake of watching Buffy’s Earshot soon afterwards, which has immensely more style. Oh, and there’s yet another addiction metaphor! A good relationship between Tosh and the alien, though, and it’s great to have a proper femme fatale.
1.01 Everything Changes
The first episode of the series is impressive in many ways, though the pleasingly noirish set-up is wrapped up in a far too much of a hurry. That anti-climax is its second-biggest problem; the biggest is that it seems like the first episode of a completely different series. Fun, fantasy things like the pterodactyl, Suzie and the glove, even the Weevils, or characters on more than one note like Owen’s implied date rape… The creator sets up mildly interesting ideas, and the lead writer drops them on the floor. What’s kept is a feeling that’s more broody than quippy, more Angel than Buffy, and where everyone’s addicted to something to escape from humdrum life. Even when their lives are vital. And, from the first, it’s utterly absurd that – after the huge Torchwood Tower, full of thrusting young things – this Torchwood doesn’t even have any support staff. I just don’t believe for a moment that five of them can hack it, which rather undermines the show from the start.
1.11 Combat
Yes, it’s Fight Club and macho, but far more thoughtful than most ‘fight’ episodes (just look at Babylon 5’s TKO, and wince). Writer Noel Clarke is lovely, of course, and bless him for all his protestations of how straight he is, when he writes the most eyebrow-raising homoeroticism in the series. For once, they don’t even forget the Weevils, and it’s interesting that Tosh tells Jack – using a Weevil as live bait for nasty humans – that he’d never do the same with a person. Of course, he did exactly that, baiting a Weevil with a human, way back in the first episode. On the down side, “In the darkness, something is coming” is so shoehorned you can’t help wincing. But masses of points for Gwen’s selfish doping of Rhys to “Say you forgive meee!” Yes, I’m afraid it’s another of her ‘suffering’ lines that we enjoy for all the wrong reasons. It’s now used every time one of us does anything mildly wrong.
1.13 End of Days
Roman centurions and stomping beasties, a sinister villain and a spectacular-looking season finale. The trouble is, it all adds up to something merely all right, and for the climax, that in no way cuts it; so, while not a bad episode in itself, for me it undermines the series by being an inadequate conclusion. Still, it’s by far the best of Chris Chibnall’s scripts. Yes, that’s right – we’ve got so far down the list we’ve reached his four stories, the rest from here down. Now, I don’t want you to think he has no talent as a writer. Just watch his episodes of Life On Mars; did you see the one with the ‘corrupt cop… or is he?’ as both Sam and Gene’s mentors are put to the test? Logic, character, a story… So it appears that it’s only in Torchwood that all he can create is empty spectacle. Rhys dies – then, with nowhere else for his character to go, has that undone by the big reset switch, making it utterly pointless (in drama, actions should have consequences; perhaps the biggest problem with this story). Jack goes all messianic, coming back to life after three days then being taken up, along the way forgiving doubting Owen. Sigh. With his own bit of ‘doubter’ nicked from Babylon 5. And the villain who’s evil because he’s evil, like the tackier outings for the Master. And, as the shape of it demands a Buffy-style ‘Big Bad’, the Rift tediously becomes a hellmouth, with a demon coming out and being – who’d have guessed? – easily overcome. Why exactly was it a brainless, lumbering beastie? In Doctor Who last year, The Beast had no mind because its thoughts had escaped elsewhere. Predictably, Mr Chibnall appears to have seen this, but thought no further than ‘Cool!’ at the way it looks. Richard’s review quotes me: “Alex suggests this is Torchwood all over – all the spectacle of Doctor Who but with its brain extracted!” I’ll stick with that.
Still, it’s better than the Robin Hood finale, which – after an uncertainly-toned series of occasionally interesting but more often laddishly brainless entertainment – was just shit, though at least its clumsy strokes at political parallels stayed on the side of the oppressed against the oppressor. …Unlike some forthcoming wingnut Hollywood excrescences I could mention. Yes, I know I shouldn’t slag off a movie without watching it, but really, have you heard about Nottingham?
1.04 Cyberwoman
First, I have to say that at least the Cyber-brassiere and Cyber-heels are hilarious, like something from a Chris Achilleos rock album cover painting, even though you have to suspend your brain to forget that Cybermen slice off sexual characteristics rather than exaggerating them. And that’s this episode – looks impressive, but no brain at all. They even kill off that pterosaur I liked, and without properly saying so. Bah. John Barrowman and Eve Myles remain solid leads, but this is where it’s most obvious that it’s being aimed at the horny straight fourteen-year-old, the most monster-of-the-week, and the first time of many that one of the dysfunctional Torchwood team cries out to be sacked. And no, I didn’t even mean Mr Chibnall, at that point.
1.02 Day One
With a lost, lonely young woman desperate for contact that means something, it sounds like it could be one of those meaningful, elegiac episodes. It isn’t. It’s the story where YOU SHAG UNTIL YOU EXPLODE! It’s an Angel-ish sexfest with a very slight plot, and not even a patch on Lonely Heart. I only gave it the benefit of the doubt because it was on opening night.
1.06 Countrycide
Richard’s great at spotting whodunnit. Stick on a murder mystery, and he’ll wrap it up far faster than the detective. Aside from the really, really obvious ones (spotting the victim and murder long before the first death in one of Chris Bulis’ Bernice Summerfield books; what is it with writers named Chris?), I’m rubbish at it. So when I tell you that I guessed the ‘twist’ in the pre-titles sequence, with the only surprise in how absurdly useless the team were and how risible Jack is as a strategic leader, you might understand how I wearied of it long before it was over. For the first five weeks, I’d given the series the benefit of the doubt, with stories ranging from poor to pretty good, but no absolute cracker nor absolute stinker to ‘decide’ which side I’d come down on. Sadly, this came along before They Keep Killing Suzie did, and I’d probably have a much more positive view of the series without it. It’s a feeble, derivative slasher movie in which things happen for effect, not for logic. I wouldn’t choose to watch a story with one lone, bloody, cannibal psychopath, but you could believe in lonely madness. A community of cannibal psychopaths with no rationale (Richard’s review suggests several), just because they are, and seeming normal to everyone else… Sorry, this is just bollocks.
Still, this inspired an amusing argument with a writer about the worst Torchwood episode – I argued for this, he was passionate about Cyberwoman – and the Torchwood Declassified drinking game for every time they talk about “going to a very dark place”…
Since Torchwood finished, ITV1 has shown its own version, intended as competitor to Doctor Who but far more like the spin-off. With Charlie Brooker comparing Torchwood to Scooby Doo, this really fits the bill much more; suitable for children, monsters of the week that disappear in a flash, and if Cutter wasn’t Freddie and geeky Connor Shaggy… But, like Torchwood, an improbable team loosely affiliated to the government chase monsters that no-one’s supposed to know about and that pop out of a rift in time, though at least Torchwood left incessant playing of “What’s that coming over the hill, is it a monster?” to its documentary shows rather than over actual scenes. Astoundingly, its characters – very ITV1 – were even more cardboard than Torchwood’s, though much less quirkily dysfunctional. The actors were more wooden, with the exception of the woman from S Club 7: yep, her part largely consisted of ‘get your kit off, luv’, but she developed a character without any help from the script. Even Connor the regular geek of the world’s least convincing set of young-people-conceived-by-the-middle-aged grew on me a little, though the ‘handsome’ men were so dull it was untrue, and the woman excitingly written out of history at the season finale – fair dos, it was well done – was erased so perfectly that neither Richard nor I can remember anything about her. Her rival for Cutter’s affections, the estranged ‘I’m a psycho bitch callous scientist’ wife, may have been a cliché but was worth watching for her joyful nastiness.
Yes, it was monster-of-the-week and ITV-drab, but from less promising material it did better than I expected, while Torchwood under-performed. Torchwood probably still came out ahead, but there should have been no probably about it. Primeval was much dumber, but it had a better idea of what it was about: a recurring villain you love to hate, and cool monsters. You can hardly go wrong with dinosaurs, after all. Well, actually, they did, especially the one with comedy teeth loping about the school, but the sea monster in the swimming pool looked great. So does Torchwood need more monsters? The little boy in my brain who thinks monsters are cool says yes, but the older me who saw what a mess they made of their monster-of-the-week episodes thinks that the more emotional, human stories were what the series did best. Either way, what Torchwood really needs for its second series is to make up its mind.
Torchwood was the first Doctor Who spin-off to make it as a TV series, so naturally Richard and I watched it. It starred John Barrowman as the immensely shaggable Captain Jack Harkness, the time-agent-turned-conman-turned-hero who’d been so successful playing opposite Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor, and he was running a branch of Torchwood, the fabulous secret alienbusters shown in the style of Dynasty in the terrific climax to last year’s season of Doctor Who. What could possibly go wrong? Well, it turns out, not quite everything, but the giveaway may be that, though we’ve bought the DVDs, they remain in their wrapping, even though I’d quite like to see the deleted scenes. I’m pretty sure I’ve only watched most of the episodes when they were first broadcast, and that’s unheard-of for something Whoish. As I’m typing, The Sarah Jane Adventures: Invasion of the Bane is being repeated on CBBC. It’s bright, colourful, witty and has a relishable villain and terrific monsters.
“They tend to go in, guns blazing. I just think there’s a better way of doing it.”Gosh, it seems Sarah doesn’t think much of Torchwood either. I’ve watched her pilot story several times since it was originally broadcast, the same day the final episode of Torchwood went out. Like a lot of Doctor Who, it’s something entertaining I can sit back and enjoy. I’ve not rushed to pop a single episode of ‘rival’ Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood on since.
Torchwood has a leading man with real star quality, and Eve Myles’ Gwen is a great second lead. I was looking forward to it; I loved the trailers (“One man who can’t die / Four people who can”) and the music. And it was sold as “The X-Files meets This Life,” which put it right up to the minute for, er, ten years ago (perhaps they should have aimed for Spooks with googly monsters). But though it may be in the same universe as Doctor Who, it doesn’t share the same ‘worldview’. That isn’t because it’s ‘adult’. Doctor Who’s had times when it’s been aimed at all sorts of ages, and with any ‘family’ show there’ve been times when it’s fallen too heavily at one end of the range. I’ve equally enjoyed Doctor Who picture-books and Doctor Who novels that were only stocked in the children’s section until I took them to the counter and pointed out the lines that would have irate parents screaming the place down. What they shared was the Doctor. A traveller in time and space who can go to any planet in the past, present or future, who respects life rather than authority, and obeys no-one else’s rules. He takes joy in the wonders of the Universe, and would rather use his intelligence than carry a gun. Sometimes the series is dark and horrific, or light and frothy, or grim, or eccentric. It’s the perfect show to change mood if you didn’t take to the last story; you might like the next one, because it’ll literally be another world. Torchwood, on the other hand, is set in a sewer, and its depressed personnel only seem to go out in the dark, either to investigate depressingly horrible things or to have depressing sex with the people who make them depressed. But they have big guns.
I’m not sure I’d have watched this at all if it hadn’t been Whoish.
There have been some very incisive Torchwood reviews in the last few months. Richard reviewed every episode on Millennium’s Diary, and was probably a little too kindly. I’ve just re-read them all, and I can see how that happened. Reviewing each story in turn and wanting the best out of each of them, he gave each in turn the benefit of the doubt. After he finally excoriated one, he struck an apologetic tone in subsequent weeks. I remember that, after each episode, we’d talk about it (he sometimes quotes me), and we’d look for what was good about each – as if it was a weaker episode of a stronger series. It’s only in retrospect that we can see it’s more in the series than the episodes that the problem lies. James Graham, on the other hand, wrote a damning indictment of the whole lot that was probably a little too harsh. Still, it was bang to rights on a lot of points: he too thought The Sarah Jane Adventures much better; he identified the weakest link as writer / show-runner / co-producer Chris Chibnall; and he noticed that, while it was aiming to be a British Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it had foolishly modelled itself on Buffy Season Six, the one where no-one has any fun (they barely survived that mistake, and that was after building up five years of goodwill). There’s a lot of good in individual Torchwood episodes, as Richard identified. There’s a lot wrong in the structure of the series, as James recognised. But for me, the central problem was what should have been its main selling point: Captain Jack.
I suspect the producers of Torchwood had exactly the wrong idea about Captain Jack Harkness. He was created almost as a send-up of a Hollywood version of the Doctor – traveller in time and space, but a uniformed secret agent, impossibly handsome and with sex – but though he keeps the uniform, the looks and (it’s implied) the sex in Torchwood, and is now in charge of his own bunch of blatantly obvious agents, something vital’s missing. People went for Captain Jack because he looked like he was having as much fun as a human could have. It took the Doctor to make him heroic, but even before then he blazed with charm and confidence, and he absolutely loved what he did. And a lot of what he did was to have sex with anything alive, so long as it was gorgeous enough. He was the embodiment of exuberant sexual liberation. The Captain Jack we see in Torchwood might not have aged to look at, but he’s at least a hundred years older, lost, abandoned and hopeless, but bizarrely in charge and serious rather than a cheeky charmer. He’s at the heart of James’ ‘Buffy Season Six’ analogy: though he’s not been snatched out of Heaven, he’s been restored to life but life has lost its savour for him. He may do the same sort of things, but it’s just going through the motions, and even the sex is because he just wants to feel alive. In Doctor Who, the Doctor inspires people; in Torchwood, a human has been crushed by the responsibility of trying to be like the Doctor. This Captain Jack is suicidal, and even more depressed because, as he’s now indestructible, killing himself doesn’t work. Now, where’s the fun in that? And which Jack will be back in Doctor Who?
The flipside of this is that he provides the series’ themes. There are two that regularly spring out of the episodes, one about something fun that it makes gloomy, the other about something gloomy that it makes intriguing. The first? ‘Sex is bad’. It’s nasty, and shameful, and addictive, and the only reason to do it is to distract yourself from the things in life that are even more depressing. Well, gee; I knew Torchwood had been set up by Queen Victoria, but there’s no need to make it so obvious! The second theme is, thankfully, the best thing about the structure of the series. As Richard spotted in his reviews, it’s ‘the life after death show’. The start of that, clearly, is Captain Jack, returned to life and really not enjoying it (though Richard has a great theory in his first review on how coming back to life made him impossible to kill), but episode after episode looks at people or things surviving beyond death, and it tests from every angle whether there’s anything there at all. And those two themes tie into the feeling that there are two quite different series here, made for completely different audiences. One thinks ‘adult’ means a monster of the week, violence, swearing and cheap sex, and ‘story’ only gets in the way. The episodes of this series are aimed at heterosexual males of around fourteen, and are most strikingly written by Chris Chibnall. The other series thinks ‘adult’ stories should have stories to them, and tells sad, elegiac stories of people (human or not) and very human emotions. I’m not sure that that series has such a clearly defined demographic, but it’s the one that appealed to me.
The Episodes That Make You Think, ‘Actually, This Was Rather a Good Series…’
1.08 They Keep Killing Suzie
By a long way the best of the first series, and the only really great episode. It opens with “Torchwood” daubed on a wall in blood over a pair of gruesome corpses; I remember thinking that it looked like, if you’ll excuse the pun, a bloody Chibnall. Except I was completely wrong, and it’s saying ‘Look at me!’ to Torchwood as a trap, not to the audience as all there is. Richard and I were surprised to get a brilliant story at this point, and it was just in time – after six weeks in, I think we’d finally stopped giving it the benefit of the doubt. This was a tragic, twisted noir (you know I like noir), the most nihilistic life after death story, but it showed that darkness could be intelligent and affecting, not merely offputting. At last, it made something of what we already knew about Torchwood, rather than just getting to a slow bit and thinking ‘time to bung in a Weevil’. It centres on an insane, inspired bit of planning, and Indira Varma is stunning. It’s such a pity she had to die; she’s so much better than anything they have left.
1.05 Small Worlds
The earlier episodes were the shakiest, so thank goodness for this tale of wicked fairies from Sapphire and Steel’s creator. All right, I wasn’t all that impressed by the design of the monster of the week, but the fearful concept behind them was something else, as was the bitter ending. The touching story of lost love is the series’ best stab at seeing Jack as someone human and flawed, in the Doctor’s place but unable to deal with it.
1.03 Ghost Machine
The first story to be really good, with more than a smattering of Nigel Kneale and Sapphire and Steel, it’s an emotional Halloween ghost story with great performances all round – even a good part for Owen, and someone who could be him long down the road, played with grubby despair by Gareth Thomas. Despite the serious themes, though, there’s a moment we just can’t take seriously. Neither lead actor is given enough good material, but both work when given the chance. Eve Myles, however, has one element to her acting that makes us laugh at inappropriate moments: her upper register. There’s something about her emoting that just appealed to us both back when she was in Doctor Who, wailing “It’s ungodly!” Here, she wails that she couldn’t stop the killing, covered in blood, and I’m ashamed to say we fall about. And there’s another bit of her upper register later in the series…
1.12 Captain Jack Harkness
A beautiful, unsettling story with another touch of Sapphire and Steel. Looking at which episodes work, perhaps Mr Chibnall should be sat down in front of PJ Hammond’s opus before being allowed to strike his keyboard again. Switching between now and the 1940s, this introduces the real Captain Jack – gay, heroic and lovely – and the fabulously sinister Bilis Manger, who may or may not be an anagram but ought to be. Top marks for the moment when Gwen looks behind her and dancers pass in front of her as the time zones blur, and for the way that the story of the original Jack is, appropriately, just about the only one in the series who seems to embody Jack’s original mission that sex is good and life-affirming.
1.10 Out of Time
The 1950s rather than the 1940s this time, but here’s an anthology within an anthology series, as three short stories of culture shock interweave. Owen improbably falls for Diane, played by an actress who seems to be cornering the market in ‘incredibly glamorous mid-20th Century sexually liberated women’, judging by this and The Chatterley Affair. We get to see Rhys’ bum, which is nice, though sadly not Jack’s; our leading man is in the story about suicide, and wishes he could join in…
The Episodes That Make You Think, ‘Well, It’s All Right…’
1.09 Random Shoes
This is the cuddly ‘life after death’ story, with lots of great little observations in a Torchwood take on Love and Monsters. Eugene’s endearing, though curiously not very Welsh, and though the end could be taken as heart-warming or nauseating, “Happy Cock” still tickles me.
1.07 Greeks Bearing Gifts
Well, it’s a great whacking cliché of a title, and I made the mistake of watching Buffy’s Earshot soon afterwards, which has immensely more style. Oh, and there’s yet another addiction metaphor! A good relationship between Tosh and the alien, though, and it’s great to have a proper femme fatale.
1.01 Everything Changes
The first episode of the series is impressive in many ways, though the pleasingly noirish set-up is wrapped up in a far too much of a hurry. That anti-climax is its second-biggest problem; the biggest is that it seems like the first episode of a completely different series. Fun, fantasy things like the pterodactyl, Suzie and the glove, even the Weevils, or characters on more than one note like Owen’s implied date rape… The creator sets up mildly interesting ideas, and the lead writer drops them on the floor. What’s kept is a feeling that’s more broody than quippy, more Angel than Buffy, and where everyone’s addicted to something to escape from humdrum life. Even when their lives are vital. And, from the first, it’s utterly absurd that – after the huge Torchwood Tower, full of thrusting young things – this Torchwood doesn’t even have any support staff. I just don’t believe for a moment that five of them can hack it, which rather undermines the show from the start.
1.11 Combat
Yes, it’s Fight Club and macho, but far more thoughtful than most ‘fight’ episodes (just look at Babylon 5’s TKO, and wince). Writer Noel Clarke is lovely, of course, and bless him for all his protestations of how straight he is, when he writes the most eyebrow-raising homoeroticism in the series. For once, they don’t even forget the Weevils, and it’s interesting that Tosh tells Jack – using a Weevil as live bait for nasty humans – that he’d never do the same with a person. Of course, he did exactly that, baiting a Weevil with a human, way back in the first episode. On the down side, “In the darkness, something is coming” is so shoehorned you can’t help wincing. But masses of points for Gwen’s selfish doping of Rhys to “Say you forgive meee!” Yes, I’m afraid it’s another of her ‘suffering’ lines that we enjoy for all the wrong reasons. It’s now used every time one of us does anything mildly wrong.
1.13 End of Days
Roman centurions and stomping beasties, a sinister villain and a spectacular-looking season finale. The trouble is, it all adds up to something merely all right, and for the climax, that in no way cuts it; so, while not a bad episode in itself, for me it undermines the series by being an inadequate conclusion. Still, it’s by far the best of Chris Chibnall’s scripts. Yes, that’s right – we’ve got so far down the list we’ve reached his four stories, the rest from here down. Now, I don’t want you to think he has no talent as a writer. Just watch his episodes of Life On Mars; did you see the one with the ‘corrupt cop… or is he?’ as both Sam and Gene’s mentors are put to the test? Logic, character, a story… So it appears that it’s only in Torchwood that all he can create is empty spectacle. Rhys dies – then, with nowhere else for his character to go, has that undone by the big reset switch, making it utterly pointless (in drama, actions should have consequences; perhaps the biggest problem with this story). Jack goes all messianic, coming back to life after three days then being taken up, along the way forgiving doubting Owen. Sigh. With his own bit of ‘doubter’ nicked from Babylon 5. And the villain who’s evil because he’s evil, like the tackier outings for the Master. And, as the shape of it demands a Buffy-style ‘Big Bad’, the Rift tediously becomes a hellmouth, with a demon coming out and being – who’d have guessed? – easily overcome. Why exactly was it a brainless, lumbering beastie? In Doctor Who last year, The Beast had no mind because its thoughts had escaped elsewhere. Predictably, Mr Chibnall appears to have seen this, but thought no further than ‘Cool!’ at the way it looks. Richard’s review quotes me: “Alex suggests this is Torchwood all over – all the spectacle of Doctor Who but with its brain extracted!” I’ll stick with that.
Still, it’s better than the Robin Hood finale, which – after an uncertainly-toned series of occasionally interesting but more often laddishly brainless entertainment – was just shit, though at least its clumsy strokes at political parallels stayed on the side of the oppressed against the oppressor. …Unlike some forthcoming wingnut Hollywood excrescences I could mention. Yes, I know I shouldn’t slag off a movie without watching it, but really, have you heard about Nottingham?
The Episodes That Make You Lose the Will to Live
1.04 Cyberwoman
First, I have to say that at least the Cyber-brassiere and Cyber-heels are hilarious, like something from a Chris Achilleos rock album cover painting, even though you have to suspend your brain to forget that Cybermen slice off sexual characteristics rather than exaggerating them. And that’s this episode – looks impressive, but no brain at all. They even kill off that pterosaur I liked, and without properly saying so. Bah. John Barrowman and Eve Myles remain solid leads, but this is where it’s most obvious that it’s being aimed at the horny straight fourteen-year-old, the most monster-of-the-week, and the first time of many that one of the dysfunctional Torchwood team cries out to be sacked. And no, I didn’t even mean Mr Chibnall, at that point.
1.02 Day One
With a lost, lonely young woman desperate for contact that means something, it sounds like it could be one of those meaningful, elegiac episodes. It isn’t. It’s the story where YOU SHAG UNTIL YOU EXPLODE! It’s an Angel-ish sexfest with a very slight plot, and not even a patch on Lonely Heart. I only gave it the benefit of the doubt because it was on opening night.
1.06 Countrycide
Richard’s great at spotting whodunnit. Stick on a murder mystery, and he’ll wrap it up far faster than the detective. Aside from the really, really obvious ones (spotting the victim and murder long before the first death in one of Chris Bulis’ Bernice Summerfield books; what is it with writers named Chris?), I’m rubbish at it. So when I tell you that I guessed the ‘twist’ in the pre-titles sequence, with the only surprise in how absurdly useless the team were and how risible Jack is as a strategic leader, you might understand how I wearied of it long before it was over. For the first five weeks, I’d given the series the benefit of the doubt, with stories ranging from poor to pretty good, but no absolute cracker nor absolute stinker to ‘decide’ which side I’d come down on. Sadly, this came along before They Keep Killing Suzie did, and I’d probably have a much more positive view of the series without it. It’s a feeble, derivative slasher movie in which things happen for effect, not for logic. I wouldn’t choose to watch a story with one lone, bloody, cannibal psychopath, but you could believe in lonely madness. A community of cannibal psychopaths with no rationale (Richard’s review suggests several), just because they are, and seeming normal to everyone else… Sorry, this is just bollocks.
Still, this inspired an amusing argument with a writer about the worst Torchwood episode – I argued for this, he was passionate about Cyberwoman – and the Torchwood Declassified drinking game for every time they talk about “going to a very dark place”…
Primeval
Since Torchwood finished, ITV1 has shown its own version, intended as competitor to Doctor Who but far more like the spin-off. With Charlie Brooker comparing Torchwood to Scooby Doo, this really fits the bill much more; suitable for children, monsters of the week that disappear in a flash, and if Cutter wasn’t Freddie and geeky Connor Shaggy… But, like Torchwood, an improbable team loosely affiliated to the government chase monsters that no-one’s supposed to know about and that pop out of a rift in time, though at least Torchwood left incessant playing of “What’s that coming over the hill, is it a monster?” to its documentary shows rather than over actual scenes. Astoundingly, its characters – very ITV1 – were even more cardboard than Torchwood’s, though much less quirkily dysfunctional. The actors were more wooden, with the exception of the woman from S Club 7: yep, her part largely consisted of ‘get your kit off, luv’, but she developed a character without any help from the script. Even Connor the regular geek of the world’s least convincing set of young-people-conceived-by-the-middle-aged grew on me a little, though the ‘handsome’ men were so dull it was untrue, and the woman excitingly written out of history at the season finale – fair dos, it was well done – was erased so perfectly that neither Richard nor I can remember anything about her. Her rival for Cutter’s affections, the estranged ‘I’m a psycho bitch callous scientist’ wife, may have been a cliché but was worth watching for her joyful nastiness.
Yes, it was monster-of-the-week and ITV-drab, but from less promising material it did better than I expected, while Torchwood under-performed. Torchwood probably still came out ahead, but there should have been no probably about it. Primeval was much dumber, but it had a better idea of what it was about: a recurring villain you love to hate, and cool monsters. You can hardly go wrong with dinosaurs, after all. Well, actually, they did, especially the one with comedy teeth loping about the school, but the sea monster in the swimming pool looked great. So does Torchwood need more monsters? The little boy in my brain who thinks monsters are cool says yes, but the older me who saw what a mess they made of their monster-of-the-week episodes thinks that the more emotional, human stories were what the series did best. Either way, what Torchwood really needs for its second series is to make up its mind.
Labels: Doctor Who, Primeval, Reviews, Robin Hood, Torchwood
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Future: Torchwood
People have accused my last post of triskaidekaphobia, but, no, I’m not even paraskavedekatriaphobic; I was just a bit weary of having a bad day, and found the timing ironic. I do, however, have a bit of a thing about some days – I like a bit of history, and enjoy bringing up anniversaries. Russell T Davies’ first Doctor Who story (the stunning New Adventures novel Damaged Goods) was published ten years ago today, and I bet he wouldn’t have thought that ten years later his Doctor Who spin-off series would be on the cover of the new Radio Times. Torchwood looks set to be closer in tone to that very adult novel than any of his Doctor Who scripts so far, sold as “The X-Files meets This Life” and featuring rather more horror than Doctor Who TV has had since the mid-1970s, and certainly a lot more sex.
You’ve probably seen the dark, glossy trailers, with that eerily echoing bit of theme and promoting the glamorous leads, out-of-her-depth policewoman Gwen and hunky action man Captain Jack (we’ve only caught the minute-long trailer once, incidentally, but I reckon it’s much better cut together than the thirty-second one that’s on constant rotation). You might even have caught them on a bus. And after all the anticipation, it finally starts with a double episode on Sunday night at 9 on BBC3, with what appears to be a regular repeat slot for the digitally challenged on BBC2 on Wednesdays.
So what’s it all about? Well, we’ve been trying to avoid most of the details, but the basics have already been established in Doctor Who. It’s a hi-tech modern-day group hunting aliens through the mean streets (and having sex with each other) for the good of dear of old Blighty, basically like Spooks with more googly monsters. Torchwood is a secret paramilitary organisation, founded by Queen Victoria, to defend and expand Britain’s borders against (and by exploiting) extraterrestrials. If you want to see what happened to the Torchwood base in Canary Wharf, tune in to BBC3 at 7 tomorrow night for another showing of the outstanding Doctor Who season finale, but evidently there were more of them out there. The Torchwood group for this new show is, to no-one’s great surprise, based in Cardiff and all unfeasibly good-looking. I don’t yet know how they come to be led by the Doctor’s erstwhile companion from the future, the immensely shaggable Captain Jack. I’m fairly certain, though, that there’ll soon be a Jack-based drinking game: so much for when he has sex with a woman; so much for sex with a man; so much for sex with several men and / or women at the same time; so much for sex with an alien from another world… So, I suspect sex may be the series’ extra selling point on top of Doctor Who (as it were), and what brings it closer to This Life or Buffy. I’m also particularly looking forward to scripts from Doctor Who’s Mickey Smith, actor / author Noel Clarke, and thrilling Sapphire and Steel creator PJ Hammond.
Despite his American accent, John Barrowman was of course born in Scotland before moving to the States – meaning that although they’re both made by BBC Wales, both Who-ish series now have Scottish leads who play their characters without Scottish accents. Perhaps I find that more amusing than most because I’m half-Scottish and half-American and sound remarkably English… Like Torchwood and Doctor Who, I feel very British. Oh, and if you can’t be bothered looking up ‘triskaidekaphobia’, it’s fear of the number 13 – just the sort of hokey superstition you might expect a sci-fi explanation for from the British X-Files, but in fact Doctor Who’s beaten Torchwood to it; you’ll find the ‘terrifying truth’ behind our horror of thirteen in the series’ very finest Halloween ghost story, Image of the Fendahl, but it’s still hokum to me.
Roll on Torchwood!
Also…
Past: History Matters
Present: One Small Blog For Me, One Giant Blog With Everyone Else
You’ve probably seen the dark, glossy trailers, with that eerily echoing bit of theme and promoting the glamorous leads, out-of-her-depth policewoman Gwen and hunky action man Captain Jack (we’ve only caught the minute-long trailer once, incidentally, but I reckon it’s much better cut together than the thirty-second one that’s on constant rotation). You might even have caught them on a bus. And after all the anticipation, it finally starts with a double episode on Sunday night at 9 on BBC3, with what appears to be a regular repeat slot for the digitally challenged on BBC2 on Wednesdays.
So what’s it all about? Well, we’ve been trying to avoid most of the details, but the basics have already been established in Doctor Who. It’s a hi-tech modern-day group hunting aliens through the mean streets (and having sex with each other) for the good of dear of old Blighty, basically like Spooks with more googly monsters. Torchwood is a secret paramilitary organisation, founded by Queen Victoria, to defend and expand Britain’s borders against (and by exploiting) extraterrestrials. If you want to see what happened to the Torchwood base in Canary Wharf, tune in to BBC3 at 7 tomorrow night for another showing of the outstanding Doctor Who season finale, but evidently there were more of them out there. The Torchwood group for this new show is, to no-one’s great surprise, based in Cardiff and all unfeasibly good-looking. I don’t yet know how they come to be led by the Doctor’s erstwhile companion from the future, the immensely shaggable Captain Jack. I’m fairly certain, though, that there’ll soon be a Jack-based drinking game: so much for when he has sex with a woman; so much for sex with a man; so much for sex with several men and / or women at the same time; so much for sex with an alien from another world… So, I suspect sex may be the series’ extra selling point on top of Doctor Who (as it were), and what brings it closer to This Life or Buffy. I’m also particularly looking forward to scripts from Doctor Who’s Mickey Smith, actor / author Noel Clarke, and thrilling Sapphire and Steel creator PJ Hammond.
Despite his American accent, John Barrowman was of course born in Scotland before moving to the States – meaning that although they’re both made by BBC Wales, both Who-ish series now have Scottish leads who play their characters without Scottish accents. Perhaps I find that more amusing than most because I’m half-Scottish and half-American and sound remarkably English… Like Torchwood and Doctor Who, I feel very British. Oh, and if you can’t be bothered looking up ‘triskaidekaphobia’, it’s fear of the number 13 – just the sort of hokey superstition you might expect a sci-fi explanation for from the British X-Files, but in fact Doctor Who’s beaten Torchwood to it; you’ll find the ‘terrifying truth’ behind our horror of thirteen in the series’ very finest Halloween ghost story, Image of the Fendahl, but it’s still hokum to me.
Roll on Torchwood!
Also…
Past: History Matters
Present: One Small Blog For Me, One Giant Blog With Everyone Else
Labels: History, New Adventures, Torchwood
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
The Empire Strikes Jack
Suffering Doctor Who withdrawal symptoms on Sunday, Richard claimed spin-off series Torchwood (starring Captain Jack) was available in movie form, and dragged me out of the flat to see it. Imagine my disappointment when Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest featured the wrong Captain Jack*! All right, that’s a fib – I enjoyed it enormously. And in deference to the rest of Keira Knightley’s ouvre, it is a truth universally acknowledged, that every boy in possession of a rip-roaring aquatic adventure, must be in want of a giant squid. This one had tentacles to spare for the main villain. Hurrah!
It’s a great Kraken, and worth the price of entry (if not the inflated price of popcorn and pop), but I loved the gently stirring facial fronds of Bill Nighy’s Davey Jones still more. A splendid performance, matched by a splendid look. I didn’t quite think the same of his ship and monstrous crew; rather less mobile, rather more barnacle-encrusted, and when everything in sight is covered in the same slimy growths they’re rather less visually distinguishable and interesting than the hard-working make up and computer effects crew might have hoped. If anything, I’d have lost much of the CGI and made it more of a straightforward swashbuckler; much as I love Star Wars, it was Richard who spotted most of the similarities to that, while I wanted more The Adventures of Robin Hood / Treasure Island. It’ll be no surprise, then, that my favourite scenes are towards the end, as a brilliantly choreographed three-way swordfight provides the most exhilarating swashbuckling I’ve seen in many a long year. That much of it takes place inside a turning wheel whirling across the scenery suggests that one of the best uses of CGI is not in creating improbable monsters but in making stunts go just that bit further than anyone but some of the giant-leaping loonies who’ve worked on Bond films can ever go.
A lot of the plot is a bit much, too. There’s so much effort in throwing thrills at you – cannibals! Sea monsters! Voodoo Lady (black magic child)! – that it wanders for a while and consequently goes on a bit. I’d have been tempted to lose the whole cannibal section, though I can see why they didn’t; it provides several of the funniest moments, including the gag after the end credits and the best giant kebab joke you’ll ever see, but I can’t help thinking it needed a sterner editor to keep to the plot.
But it’s churlish to complain when it was simply so enjoyable. The movie is, of course, stolen completely by Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow, whose lurches across the screen make it impossible to watch anyone else. This is a shame for Orlando Bloom, who gets the nominal leading role but is much too strait-laced to be very watchable. He is, of course, very pretty, accounting I suspect for the remarkably high level of heterosexual coupledom in the cinema, but that just doesn’t do a thing for me. A friend of ours who looks rather like him beats Mr Bloom hands down in the sexiness stakes, because our friend is much more enormously… disreputable. A normally strait-laced actor who benefits from growing more disreputable here is Jack Davenport, who plays one of the wicked British (hey ho) but has fallen off the wagon and done himself a power of good. As pretty much everyone else in the cast comes with ‘disreputable’ fitted as standard, this makes for a lot of fun for a film. I think it may even be one of those sequels better than the original.
Add to that a MacGuffin taken from one of the oldest and most potent myths of how evil sorcerers protect their lives, and a very splendidly rousing theme that we’re still humming a couple of days later, and I can thoroughly recommend it. It’s very undemanding except of your time, and for that I fear you should part with a few pennies – and many pounds – to get some fizzy pop to go in with, or you’ll be hallucinating from dehydration in this heat by the time you’re released.
And, yes, there was one Star Wars reference so blatant even I got it – that the second movie ends on a cliffhanger (I won’t spoil it and say quite what), though it’s slightly less shocking about the fathers that appear. There’s even a striking last-minute cameo, though it mildly surprised me by not being Keith Richards (if his absence isn’t a spoiler!).
*I wonder if there’s any Captain Jack / Captain Jack slash fiction out on the internet? Er, I only ask in order that I can condemn it if it’s there, because it would of course be very, very bad. I hope that’s clear.
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It’s a great Kraken, and worth the price of entry (if not the inflated price of popcorn and pop), but I loved the gently stirring facial fronds of Bill Nighy’s Davey Jones still more. A splendid performance, matched by a splendid look. I didn’t quite think the same of his ship and monstrous crew; rather less mobile, rather more barnacle-encrusted, and when everything in sight is covered in the same slimy growths they’re rather less visually distinguishable and interesting than the hard-working make up and computer effects crew might have hoped. If anything, I’d have lost much of the CGI and made it more of a straightforward swashbuckler; much as I love Star Wars, it was Richard who spotted most of the similarities to that, while I wanted more The Adventures of Robin Hood / Treasure Island. It’ll be no surprise, then, that my favourite scenes are towards the end, as a brilliantly choreographed three-way swordfight provides the most exhilarating swashbuckling I’ve seen in many a long year. That much of it takes place inside a turning wheel whirling across the scenery suggests that one of the best uses of CGI is not in creating improbable monsters but in making stunts go just that bit further than anyone but some of the giant-leaping loonies who’ve worked on Bond films can ever go.
A lot of the plot is a bit much, too. There’s so much effort in throwing thrills at you – cannibals! Sea monsters! Voodoo Lady (black magic child)! – that it wanders for a while and consequently goes on a bit. I’d have been tempted to lose the whole cannibal section, though I can see why they didn’t; it provides several of the funniest moments, including the gag after the end credits and the best giant kebab joke you’ll ever see, but I can’t help thinking it needed a sterner editor to keep to the plot.
But it’s churlish to complain when it was simply so enjoyable. The movie is, of course, stolen completely by Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow, whose lurches across the screen make it impossible to watch anyone else. This is a shame for Orlando Bloom, who gets the nominal leading role but is much too strait-laced to be very watchable. He is, of course, very pretty, accounting I suspect for the remarkably high level of heterosexual coupledom in the cinema, but that just doesn’t do a thing for me. A friend of ours who looks rather like him beats Mr Bloom hands down in the sexiness stakes, because our friend is much more enormously… disreputable. A normally strait-laced actor who benefits from growing more disreputable here is Jack Davenport, who plays one of the wicked British (hey ho) but has fallen off the wagon and done himself a power of good. As pretty much everyone else in the cast comes with ‘disreputable’ fitted as standard, this makes for a lot of fun for a film. I think it may even be one of those sequels better than the original.
Add to that a MacGuffin taken from one of the oldest and most potent myths of how evil sorcerers protect their lives, and a very splendidly rousing theme that we’re still humming a couple of days later, and I can thoroughly recommend it. It’s very undemanding except of your time, and for that I fear you should part with a few pennies – and many pounds – to get some fizzy pop to go in with, or you’ll be hallucinating from dehydration in this heat by the time you’re released.
And, yes, there was one Star Wars reference so blatant even I got it – that the second movie ends on a cliffhanger (I won’t spoil it and say quite what), though it’s slightly less shocking about the fathers that appear. There’s even a striking last-minute cameo, though it mildly surprised me by not being Keith Richards (if his absence isn’t a spoiler!).
*I wonder if there’s any Captain Jack / Captain Jack slash fiction out on the internet? Er, I only ask in order that I can condemn it if it’s there, because it would of course be very, very bad. I hope that’s clear.
Labels: Film, Reviews, Star Wars, Torchwood
