Friday, August 10, 2012
London Seethes With Olympic Business – Exclusive Photos!
Yesterday afternoon our router decided it would compete with me for conking out in the heat, so aside from a few minutes this morning this is my first internet access for 24 hours (it’s like a desert, honestly). So here’s a piece of quick news I hope I can get up in time before it rolls over with its tongue in the air again…
Exclusive photos of the bonus shopping frenzy that the Olympics has brought to Central London!
You can tune in to the radio version of the documentary from which these pictures originate at 6.30 and 12.30 each evening on Radio 4 Extra.
In other news, while I don’t do sport, and I don’t do jingoism, long-term readers will know there’s one team I do root for – and another I cheer every time they get smashed. So go Team Beeb, and hurrah for the Olympics giving ITV their worst day ever!
Labels: John Wyndham, London, Olympics, Pictures, Triffids
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Boxes of Delights (Repost With Added Chocolate)
If you’ve not yet recovered from Christmas, you know the best cure – chocolate. So after posting this at the weekend, I’ve added plenty more, particularly about Thorntons. You can still catch up with Radio Four’s Doctor Who weekend on iPlayer, too: The Lost Episodes, On the Outside It Looked Like an Old-Fashioned Police Box and David Tennant’s Desert Island Discs. And if you saw the new Day of the Triffids, with beefed-up sauntering Eddie Izzard villainy and off-the-peg unresolved father-son tension and mysticism, why not see for free the closer-to-the-book 1981 adaptation, with a sexier lead and scarier plants? Both of them are more fun than Survivors, anyway, which is just the same story with nowhere near enough killer vegetation.
So, for a couple of days, this has travelled through time to midnight on the last day of the year before returning it to its original time and place. It’s Doctor Who, after all!
Having a replete Boxing Day? It’s a day for the most important things in life – TV and chocolate (and my beloved Richard). Richard’s chewed over last night’s Doctor Who, as have the lovely Jennie and Andy, and I’ve… scoffed many chocolates. So I’m sitting to watch Shakespeare, thinking of Christmas boxes. What are the best boxes from Thorntons? What’s the box set to buy for Doctor Who? What’s the most Christmassy box the BBC ever presented for us to wolf down? And are you looking out for Radio Four’s three Doctor Who programmes in the next day, starting tonight?
Of all this year’s Doctor Who DVD releases, look out in the sales for The Deadly Assassin (the greatest story of the lot, with the Master, Time Lords and Russell T Davies bigging it up on Confidential last night, as well he should), The War Games (another terrific story, also featured on the last Confidential, with the Time Lords – who are gits, and always have been – turning up at the end as the big bads to kill off the Doctor) and, especially if you can find the price knocked down a bit, The Key To Time boxed set. In Christmassy fashion, it’s a collection of six different stories, some of which may be more to your taste than others but which all form a delightful variety and I find quite delicious. In daytime TV style, as I’ve raved about The Key to Time before, I’ll turn to boxes of Thorntons later.
A quarter of a century ago this Christmas, the BBC made an adaptation of John Masefield’s children’s classic that was simply magical. Despite seven Doctor Who Christmas specials (most of them marvellous, and most of them made for Christmas), it’s delightfully old-fashioned and comforting, and still the most glorious piece of Christmas TV there’s ever been. In the 1930s, an old wandering magician entrusts a boy with his magical box to keep it safe against the wolfish minions of evil magic, and everyone makes the journeys along the way something very special.
At the time, it was the most expensive children’s TV the BBC had ever made, full of great actors, animation and special effects – a little symbolic in the penultimate episode, but only to save up for explosions, a salmon-leaping boat and demons at the last – and a fabulous score by Roger Limb (arranging Victor Hely-Hutchinson for the gorgeous theme music). Devin Stanfield grounds it as the surprisingly together young hero, James Grout is an entertaining police inspector, and Patricia Quinn is astounding as the campest thing on screen, teacher, witch, and utter ruin for her lover (“My golden idol. My graven image!”), the brilliantly named Sylvia Daisy Pouncer.
It’s most worth watching, though, for the wise old magician and Punch and Judy man (and sometime pagan and medieval philosopher), Cole Hawlings, and his deadly opponent, ambitious, evil warlock and posing clergyman Abner Brown. They’re the two best roles, with the two most compelling actors – former Doctor Patrick Troughton in one of his last great roles, and Robert Stephens promising
If you’ve had a Merry Christmas at home, perhaps you’re now sitting down with David Tennant’s jolly Hamlet. John Barrowman must be wondering what’s gone wrong, when it’s the other Doctor Who star who’s omnipresent this Christmas (and John Simm’s gone to rather extreme lengths to beat him). On top of Doctor Who, Hamlet, Never Mind the Moroks (wasn’t Bernard Cribbins genius?), QI and others on TV, he’s doing quite a few radio shows, among them one of Radio 4’s three – yes, it’s his turn for Desert Island Discs tomorrow at 11.15am.
The two to really look forward to, though, are on tonight at eight (tune in 3pm, Monday, for an edited repeat), exploring the “lost” Doctor Who stories the BBC made in the ’60s and then junked, and a welcome repeat for their celebration of the Target books of the ’70s and ’80s at 1.30 tomorrow. Radio 4’s top Who fan Shaun Ley investigates Archive on 4: Doctor Who – The Lost Episodes tonight, including interviews I saw him making at a convention a month or two back, while Mark Gatiss hosts tomorrow’s On the Outside It Looked Like an Old Fashioned Police Box,which intriguingly features readings from Doctor Who novelisations that BBC Audio has released on CD – but read by different actors to the CD versions. That’s the BBC internal market for you.
That last bit was quite wrong, of course; I was mixing up having heard the original broadcast in the Summer with the fabulous Target Books special feature on The War Games DVD at about the same time. That On Target – Malcolm Hulke focused on perhaps the most revered of Target adaptors, so it was a BBC DVD rather than a radio programme that had to use different actors doing the readings to those BBC Audio produce – Peter Miles ironically offering the reptile people’s point of view from Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, for example, rather than Caroline John in the CDs. The radio programme, made with just as much love, does indeed use BBC Audio’s versions, albeit adding sound effects and music from the TV series that (confusingly) the DVDs use but BBC Audio appears not to lack the rights for. These tend to be from ’70s stories, and though the Target books ran right through the ’80s as well, the vast majority of Mr Gatiss’ attention is on the ’70s, back when he was a boy. His love for Jon Pertwee’s Doctor in particular shines through; I have my reservations about him, but his Target books, at least, are smashing. One of the top moments to listen out for, appropriately, is marvellous artist Chris Achilleos relating how Pertwee asked Target to get him to portray his nose as less of a double-barrelled shotgun than it was in life – another is fab companion and now reader Anneke Wills asking of the BBC’s trashing her old stories (yes, tying in with the Shaun Ley programme):
Last week I wrote about pies and sandwiches. Tonight it’s time for the hard stuff.
With so many boxes of chocolates about – and Hotel Chocolat’s too numerous and expensive for me to sample them all (I’m not wild about their pralines, but their fruit creations are uniquely tart and rather fantastic) – I thought I’d zoom in on Thorntons’ selections.
If you’ve happened to saunter past a Thorntons on the high street and just popped in for a moment – and if you’re reading this, you probably have – you’ll know that they have quite a selection of, er, selection boxes. Their most famous, justifiably, is the Continental: it’s been around for decades, with occasional changes, and is still a fabulous mix of creations, mixing milk, white and dark, truffle, mousse and praline. For me, the Viennese Truffle wins every time with its buttery filling and delicately sugared light casing. You might try the Continental White Collection for variety, which is a particularly good relatively recent variation – the Continental Dark Collection’s good, too.
Heretically, though many of their individual milk chocolates are marvellous, their milk chocolate mix itself is a little bland and sickly for me – not a patch on Dairy Milk (unbeatable for pigging in large quantities). So I wouldn’t bother with a bar of it, but confections covered in it are fine. Other hardy perennials include the Mint Collection, which is fine, but with a smaller number of choices and some rather bitter (the ribbed diamonds always taste of nettles to me), there are never enough of the delicious long minty batons or the delightfully knobbly Luxury Double Cream Mints, my favourites. The box I wouldn’t buy for myself from Thorntons is the Classics – although it sells well and is marketed as “The familiar flavours you remember from childhood,” when you find the same shape and taste of fudge, strawberry, coffee creams and so on as in every other chocolate selection, it’s apparent that they started making this box because people were coming in saying, ‘all these creative flavours are all very well, but can’t you be the same as everyone else?’ So it’s not bad, as such, but not in any way interesting. Not that I wouldn’t eat them, mind…
However, there are four fairly new boxes you might not have sampled yet, and – purely in a spirit of selfless experiment – I’ve given each of them a try.
Just happening to pop into Thorntons one day last year – it was raining, and I wanted somewhere I could wipe my glasses – I came across this box, which unlike the others I’m reviewing isn’t new this season, but which I’ve tried again. A choice of seven chocolates, all modelled after well-known desserts, all looking very attractive in their (mostly milk chocolate) little cups. It’s a newer variation of their standard Dessert Gallery that’s been around for a few years; I have to admit, that’s the one I prefer. Some of the selection appear in both, but for the differences, the earlier box tends towards sharper flavours which are more to my taste (barring one that just isn’t me at all). It also has a stylish Art Deco box in white, while the Winter Dessert Gallery has a warm burgundy cover with no definite identity that’s appropriate to the comforting but slightly more forgettable chocolates within.
The Double Chocolate Mousse is the most intense, with a rich chocolate centre and plenty of little curls on top of a dark cup; at the other end of the scale, the Christmas Pudding is clearly the special Winter centrepiece, but tastes only vaguely of Christmas pudding, faintly of rum and brandy, though noticeably of raisin, and the white chocolate on top’s quite nice. Other survivors from the main Desert Gallery are worth tasting – the Tiramisu does taste a bit of tiramisu, with a whiff of coffee and brandy, while the Lemon Meringue’s my favourite, with the nearest you’ll find here to a bit of tartness in a deep well of lemon, with crunchy sweet meringue on top in a white cup – while the other new ones are all right, but not to the same standard. The Sherry Trifle is pretty good, with a custardy fondant, sticky jelly and tiny strips of chocolate on top that look pretty but are too small to taste; the Sticky Toffee Pudding sounds promising, but (small and sweet) simply doesn’t have enough toffee; and the Rhubarb Crumble… Well, I’m not a big rhubarb fan, but this is so vague you don’t taste it, or anything much bar the milk chocolate cup. None of these are unpleasant, but it’s difficult to overcome the impression that winter desserts are popular because they’re hot and comforting, so making them small and cold misses the point a bit.
A new collection I noticed in Thorntons a month ago while taking a shortcut through it into a shopping centre, this starts off with the disadvantage that their milk chocolate’s a little bland, and the selection never really gets past that. As the name implies, they’re all French-inspired, mostly new, and quite delicate. It’s nice enough, though, and it has rather a pleasing look to the box – round, dusty blue, with a chocolate-brown lower half, rather like a hatbox.
You’ll not be altogether amazed to find that I loved the Mousse au Chocolat; it’s a light and rich mousse, exactly what it promises, and the best of them. The Caramel du Café’s pretty good, too – the coffee and caramel melt together very sweetly, both distinct, though (even if I don’t like coffee much) it could do with a bit more coffee to make it tart. The Praline Feuilletine, on the other hand, is very much the sort of confection that Hotel Chocolat often come up with. The praline’s so-so, but there are lovely crunchy feuilletine waffle pieces, and it’s an attractive design, long and large with dark patterning. The Hazelnut Croquant has another good crunch, but tastes basically just sweet and a bit chocolatey; the Ganache au Marc de Champagne is something all the top chocolatiers have been doing different versions of in the last few years, and it’s not tremendously distinctive – heavy milk chocolate, an aftertaste of champagne… I’d have said white chocolate would set the flavour off better. The most interesting of them is the Pain d’Épices, which doesn’t entirely work but gets your attention more than any of the others – there’s plenty of ginger overcoming the caramelised hazelnut pieces (though they have a good crunch). That leaves two that I suspect are intended as showpieces: the Parisian Truffle is rather good, a touch of brandy making it very Christmassy; Amour, on the other hand… A heart-shaped chocolate always looks promising, but this really depends on whether you like marzipan and orange liqueur – if you do, this is probably very nice. If not, it’s disgusting.
The other new collection which I just happened to notice, accidentally buy and promptly consume purely to get out of the way when I nipped through a Thorntons last month has altogether more go to it. Based on Italian recipes, also mostly new, this set of eight are all in a much richer dark chocolate (far superior to their milk), again in a rather nice hatbox, this time with the top half in deep red. It looks great.
Now, I’ll confess that I really like a proper tart lemon, and the Lemon Mousse is easily the best here. Thorntons used to do a very similar chocolate in whole bags of them – sharp dark chocolate setting off a great tang of lemon in a light mousse. The Espresso is another strong flavour; again, I don’t even much like coffee, but this is dark and strong and very rich. The Amaretti, on the other hand, is a bit bland; I don’t care for amaretti, but if you do you’ll only get a hint of it here, and rather more honey. Similarly, the Milanese Truffle has a bit of liqueur, a bit of hazelnut and interesting textures, but you mainly just taste the chocolate. Fortunately, the others are more distinctive. The Tiramisu is excellent, with a soft filling and white chocolate top, beating the Dessert Collection’s recipe, the red-wrapped Crunchy Nougat Praline is rather fine (the tastiest bit of nougat I’ve had for years), and the Cannella is interesting, individual but not really a successful mix – another mousse, offering first a taste of lemon, lightly, then plunging into cinnamon, which is rather strange. It rounds off with a mild and creamy Panna Cotta that has quite a strong taste of vanilla, set off perfectly afterwards by the dark chocolate. Ironically, after both the dessert collections, this is the one that most instantly captures a childhood afters – it tastes remarkably like an old-style choc ice.
I just popped into a Thorntons to ask the time a couple of weeks ago (you know that old saying: if you want to know the time, ask a chocolatier), and to make polite conversation chatted to the manager about chocolate. He said this was the best selection they’ve ever produced, and it’s rather fabulous, you know; it may not be quite their best ever, but it pips the Continental Milan Dark Collection for me as the best of this set. It’s got a lovely Art Nouveau box design, and – fond as I am of white chocolate – this works in just dark or milk. Better still, it’s a much fuller-flavoured milk than their standard mix, here taken from Ecuador, the dark from the Dominican Republic, building on their Single Origin collections. These come in multiples of squares, batons and swirled shells, with one exception…
Vanilla Heights is a square vanilla ganache, with almost a caramel flavour rather than vanilla; Cloudberry Hill is sweet but intriguing and faintly fruity, like the other square chocolate, the delightfully patterned Q Couture, another ganache with quince. The quince is slightly strange, but the dark chocolate stops it being too sweet (I’ll admit to not being too familiar with either quince or cloudberry, but they’re both worth trying). The Orange Garden baton may be based on a better-known fruit, but – flavoured with orange blossom – again it’s very sweet, more perfumy than ordinary orange, set off with quite a good sharp aftertaste. I prefer the other long chocolate, the crispy Praline Piazza, another light praline (a taste that rarely impresses me), but with a great texture of crunchy feuilletine waffle pieces. The two shells are both surprisingly solid: the Manhattan Melt is (rather good) milk chocolate through and through with a subtle aftertaste; Midnight Melt is rich and fruity and slightly bitter in its sweetness, an outstanding dark chocolate. Perhaps my favourite (though Richard didn’t care for it) is the odd one out, the Soho Caramel – sadly the smallest, with slight salt caramel in a thick dark chocolate sphere, it’s like a chocolate berry, oozing with flavour.
Thorntons has also produced two new bars for Christmas, both milk chocolate and neither especially vibrant. Their Crème Brulee Bar is sugar-studded and coolly creamy (well, more milky) inside – nice, but you realise that it’s the crunch of hot, brittle caramel that makes a crème brulee, and the little strip of caramel-ish underlining isn’t good enough. I quite liked it, but you’re best off peeling off the wrapper and storing it somewhere so you forget the name: it’s absolutely not a patch on the proper dessert. The Winter Fruit Crumble Bar is less disappointing, but only because I expected less of it; the crumble pieces in the chocolate coating work, but the blackberry and blackcurrant (both fruits that really appeal to me) filling is very insipid. Despite proper bits of fruit, it’s more sickly than sharp. If you’re after their Continental-style bars, stick to the Sicilian Lemon and the Viennese Truffle, both of which are gorgeous.
They’ve probably sold out of their baubles to hang on the tree by now (like anyone’s going to wait… Oh, yeah, parents), but all three are rich and large enough to take a proper bite into. The Chocolate Truffle Bauble has a near-perfect filling, rich and sweet and strongly chocolatey, though it’s back to that rather bland milk chocolate outside. The Champagne Truffle Bauble works surprisingly well – you can feel the champagne at the back of your mouth. Then there’s the Praline Bauble, which is essentially their long-established Continental the Alpini, in a ball. It’s one of the few pralines I really rather like, with little crunchy pieces to it, too.
And so as not to miss out Hotel Chocolat altogether, one of their new chocolates that I’d recommend is the Eton Mess – soft strawberry mousse that would even get Peter Butterworth’s attention, bedded in milk chocolate and crunchy meringue, covered in thick white chocolate and topped with dried strawberry; a stunning mix of tastes and textures. You can get them in their own selector packs now: eat them by the bag.
So make that your New Year’s resolution. Pile up the chocolates, pile them into your mouth – er, I mean, offer them round your loved ones – and stick Doctor Who on the iPlayer, with a side order of Triffids (eat up your veg, or it will eat you!) and The Box of Delights for sweet. For a little nibble, though, there’s always the poor old Pet Shop Boys with their new EP: the ‘be careful what you wish for’ Christmas ghost-of-a-chance-of-getting-a-hit It Doesn’t Often Snow At Christmas. Not the best year to release that one, but give the other songs a listen – borrowing Madness, Tchiakovsky and Coldplay, each one of them sounds more like a single. Or there’s always fabulous Katie and December Will Be Mad As a Bucket of Frogs Again or, if you’re not a big fan of sparkly commercial Christmas, Timbuk 3 offer a first verse that’s got one of the best awful puns I’ve ever heard (needing an American accent, and with more than a bit of politics). You’ll have to buy Tom Robinson’s hilariously gloomy North By Northwest CD to get his Christmassy nuclear war epic Merrily Up On High, but I always stick mine on…
Update: and finally, the prize for most unlikely review of the year: Lawrence Miles. Given what he predicted for it (now vanished) before transmission – get it while it’s hot, as like most of his blog, it’s seasonal and goes off quickly!
So, for a couple of days, this has travelled through time to midnight on the last day of the year before returning it to its original time and place. It’s Doctor Who, after all!
Having a replete Boxing Day? It’s a day for the most important things in life – TV and chocolate (and my beloved Richard). Richard’s chewed over last night’s Doctor Who, as have the lovely Jennie and Andy, and I’ve… scoffed many chocolates. So I’m sitting to watch Shakespeare, thinking of Christmas boxes. What are the best boxes from Thorntons? What’s the box set to buy for Doctor Who? What’s the most Christmassy box the BBC ever presented for us to wolf down? And are you looking out for Radio Four’s three Doctor Who programmes in the next day, starting tonight?
Of all this year’s Doctor Who DVD releases, look out in the sales for The Deadly Assassin (the greatest story of the lot, with the Master, Time Lords and Russell T Davies bigging it up on Confidential last night, as well he should), The War Games (another terrific story, also featured on the last Confidential, with the Time Lords – who are gits, and always have been – turning up at the end as the big bads to kill off the Doctor) and, especially if you can find the price knocked down a bit, The Key To Time boxed set. In Christmassy fashion, it’s a collection of six different stories, some of which may be more to your taste than others but which all form a delightful variety and I find quite delicious. In daytime TV style, as I’ve raved about The Key to Time before, I’ll turn to boxes of Thorntons later.
The Box of Delights
“If you will, there is something no other soul can do for me but you alone…”Here’s an odd thing. The Key To Time boxed set was first released a couple of years ago as a limited edition, sold out fast and was deleted. At last re-released last month, perhaps because its semi-sequel The Black Guardian Trilogy came out this Summer, it’s one of the two best BBC DVD boxes I can think of to wrap for a Christmas present. So, obviously, the BBC’s now deleted the other ideal Christmas present – just in time for it’s twenty-fifth anniversary, The Box of Delights has been taken off the shelves. No, I don’t understand it either.
A quarter of a century ago this Christmas, the BBC made an adaptation of John Masefield’s children’s classic that was simply magical. Despite seven Doctor Who Christmas specials (most of them marvellous, and most of them made for Christmas), it’s delightfully old-fashioned and comforting, and still the most glorious piece of Christmas TV there’s ever been. In the 1930s, an old wandering magician entrusts a boy with his magical box to keep it safe against the wolfish minions of evil magic, and everyone makes the journeys along the way something very special.
At the time, it was the most expensive children’s TV the BBC had ever made, full of great actors, animation and special effects – a little symbolic in the penultimate episode, but only to save up for explosions, a salmon-leaping boat and demons at the last – and a fabulous score by Roger Limb (arranging Victor Hely-Hutchinson for the gorgeous theme music). Devin Stanfield grounds it as the surprisingly together young hero, James Grout is an entertaining police inspector, and Patricia Quinn is astounding as the campest thing on screen, teacher, witch, and utter ruin for her lover (“My golden idol. My graven image!”), the brilliantly named Sylvia Daisy Pouncer.
It’s most worth watching, though, for the wise old magician and Punch and Judy man (and sometime pagan and medieval philosopher), Cole Hawlings, and his deadly opponent, ambitious, evil warlock and posing clergyman Abner Brown. They’re the two best roles, with the two most compelling actors – former Doctor Patrick Troughton in one of his last great roles, and Robert Stephens promising
“One last… Great wickedness before I go!”As at the moment it’s bizarrely not available to buy, have a look at it on YouTube. All six episodes are available, under a slightly disguised name (presumably to prevent seizure by copyright lawyers, even though if you want the DVD you can’t get it) and broken up into lots of little chunks. Just half a dozen minutes into the first episode, Patrick gives one of his most husky-voiced and mesmerising performances – while the part five’s stolen outrageously by Mr Stephens with the most scenery-chewing piece of acting I’ve ever seen that still absolutely grips you. To get you started, here’s the opening episode, in three parts.
Doctor Who On Radio Four (and David Tennant – and John Simm, of course – everywhere)
If you’ve had a Merry Christmas at home, perhaps you’re now sitting down with David Tennant’s jolly Hamlet. John Barrowman must be wondering what’s gone wrong, when it’s the other Doctor Who star who’s omnipresent this Christmas (and John Simm’s gone to rather extreme lengths to beat him). On top of Doctor Who, Hamlet, Never Mind the Moroks (wasn’t Bernard Cribbins genius?), QI and others on TV, he’s doing quite a few radio shows, among them one of Radio 4’s three – yes, it’s his turn for Desert Island Discs tomorrow at 11.15am.
The two to really look forward to, though, are on tonight at eight (tune in 3pm, Monday, for an edited repeat), exploring the “lost” Doctor Who stories the BBC made in the ’60s and then junked, and a welcome repeat for their celebration of the Target books of the ’70s and ’80s at 1.30 tomorrow. Radio 4’s top Who fan Shaun Ley investigates Archive on 4: Doctor Who – The Lost Episodes tonight, including interviews I saw him making at a convention a month or two back, while Mark Gatiss hosts tomorrow’s On the Outside It Looked Like an Old Fashioned Police Box,
That last bit was quite wrong, of course; I was mixing up having heard the original broadcast in the Summer with the fabulous Target Books special feature on The War Games DVD at about the same time. That On Target – Malcolm Hulke focused on perhaps the most revered of Target adaptors, so it was a BBC DVD rather than a radio programme that had to use different actors doing the readings to those BBC Audio produce – Peter Miles ironically offering the reptile people’s point of view from Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, for example, rather than Caroline John in the CDs. The radio programme, made with just as much love, does indeed use BBC Audio’s versions, albeit adding sound effects and music from the TV series that (confusingly) the DVDs use but BBC Audio appears not to lack the rights for. These tend to be from ’70s stories, and though the Target books ran right through the ’80s as well, the vast majority of Mr Gatiss’ attention is on the ’70s, back when he was a boy. His love for Jon Pertwee’s Doctor in particular shines through; I have my reservations about him, but his Target books, at least, are smashing. One of the top moments to listen out for, appropriately, is marvellous artist Chris Achilleos relating how Pertwee asked Target to get him to portray his nose as less of a double-barrelled shotgun than it was in life – another is fab companion and now reader Anneke Wills asking of the BBC’s trashing her old stories (yes, tying in with the Shaun Ley programme):
“You have to wonder if there was anybody intelligent in charge!”Top marks for selecting several excerpts from Tom Baker’s reading of Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars, probably the best of the CDs for me, and bringing to life one of Terrance Dicks’ most thoroughly fleshed-out novels. Terrance himself provides entertaining, informative and often self-deprecating commentary on the novel series for which he wrote almost as many books as everyone else put together, while current Who script editor Gary Russell pays praise to Malcolm Hulke, the author who most got inside the characters’ heads. Mark Gatiss, though, should pay more attention to the ’80s: aside from his Sarah Jane Adventures novelisation, Invasion of the Bane, the most recently made Who story Terrance novelised was 1986’s The Trial of a Time Lord: The Mysterious Planet. And that, of course, is the one that begins with the line he loves but can’t place:
“It was a graveyard in space.”
Four Thorntons Boxes For Christmas…
Last week I wrote about pies and sandwiches. Tonight it’s time for the hard stuff.
With so many boxes of chocolates about – and Hotel Chocolat’s too numerous and expensive for me to sample them all (I’m not wild about their pralines, but their fruit creations are uniquely tart and rather fantastic) – I thought I’d zoom in on Thorntons’ selections.
If you’ve happened to saunter past a Thorntons on the high street and just popped in for a moment – and if you’re reading this, you probably have – you’ll know that they have quite a selection of, er, selection boxes. Their most famous, justifiably, is the Continental: it’s been around for decades, with occasional changes, and is still a fabulous mix of creations, mixing milk, white and dark, truffle, mousse and praline. For me, the Viennese Truffle wins every time with its buttery filling and delicately sugared light casing. You might try the Continental White Collection for variety, which is a particularly good relatively recent variation – the Continental Dark Collection’s good, too.
Heretically, though many of their individual milk chocolates are marvellous, their milk chocolate mix itself is a little bland and sickly for me – not a patch on Dairy Milk (unbeatable for pigging in large quantities). So I wouldn’t bother with a bar of it, but confections covered in it are fine. Other hardy perennials include the Mint Collection, which is fine, but with a smaller number of choices and some rather bitter (the ribbed diamonds always taste of nettles to me), there are never enough of the delicious long minty batons or the delightfully knobbly Luxury Double Cream Mints, my favourites. The box I wouldn’t buy for myself from Thorntons is the Classics – although it sells well and is marketed as “The familiar flavours you remember from childhood,” when you find the same shape and taste of fudge, strawberry, coffee creams and so on as in every other chocolate selection, it’s apparent that they started making this box because people were coming in saying, ‘all these creative flavours are all very well, but can’t you be the same as everyone else?’ So it’s not bad, as such, but not in any way interesting. Not that I wouldn’t eat them, mind…
However, there are four fairly new boxes you might not have sampled yet, and – purely in a spirit of selfless experiment – I’ve given each of them a try.
Winter Dessert Gallery
Just happening to pop into Thorntons one day last year – it was raining, and I wanted somewhere I could wipe my glasses – I came across this box, which unlike the others I’m reviewing isn’t new this season, but which I’ve tried again. A choice of seven chocolates, all modelled after well-known desserts, all looking very attractive in their (mostly milk chocolate) little cups. It’s a newer variation of their standard Dessert Gallery that’s been around for a few years; I have to admit, that’s the one I prefer. Some of the selection appear in both, but for the differences, the earlier box tends towards sharper flavours which are more to my taste (barring one that just isn’t me at all). It also has a stylish Art Deco box in white, while the Winter Dessert Gallery has a warm burgundy cover with no definite identity that’s appropriate to the comforting but slightly more forgettable chocolates within.
The Double Chocolate Mousse is the most intense, with a rich chocolate centre and plenty of little curls on top of a dark cup; at the other end of the scale, the Christmas Pudding is clearly the special Winter centrepiece, but tastes only vaguely of Christmas pudding, faintly of rum and brandy, though noticeably of raisin, and the white chocolate on top’s quite nice. Other survivors from the main Desert Gallery are worth tasting – the Tiramisu does taste a bit of tiramisu, with a whiff of coffee and brandy, while the Lemon Meringue’s my favourite, with the nearest you’ll find here to a bit of tartness in a deep well of lemon, with crunchy sweet meringue on top in a white cup – while the other new ones are all right, but not to the same standard. The Sherry Trifle is pretty good, with a custardy fondant, sticky jelly and tiny strips of chocolate on top that look pretty but are too small to taste; the Sticky Toffee Pudding sounds promising, but (small and sweet) simply doesn’t have enough toffee; and the Rhubarb Crumble… Well, I’m not a big rhubarb fan, but this is so vague you don’t taste it, or anything much bar the milk chocolate cup. None of these are unpleasant, but it’s difficult to overcome the impression that winter desserts are popular because they’re hot and comforting, so making them small and cold misses the point a bit.
Continental Paris Milk Collection
A new collection I noticed in Thorntons a month ago while taking a shortcut through it into a shopping centre, this starts off with the disadvantage that their milk chocolate’s a little bland, and the selection never really gets past that. As the name implies, they’re all French-inspired, mostly new, and quite delicate. It’s nice enough, though, and it has rather a pleasing look to the box – round, dusty blue, with a chocolate-brown lower half, rather like a hatbox.
You’ll not be altogether amazed to find that I loved the Mousse au Chocolat; it’s a light and rich mousse, exactly what it promises, and the best of them. The Caramel du Café’s pretty good, too – the coffee and caramel melt together very sweetly, both distinct, though (even if I don’t like coffee much) it could do with a bit more coffee to make it tart. The Praline Feuilletine, on the other hand, is very much the sort of confection that Hotel Chocolat often come up with. The praline’s so-so, but there are lovely crunchy feuilletine waffle pieces, and it’s an attractive design, long and large with dark patterning. The Hazelnut Croquant has another good crunch, but tastes basically just sweet and a bit chocolatey; the Ganache au Marc de Champagne is something all the top chocolatiers have been doing different versions of in the last few years, and it’s not tremendously distinctive – heavy milk chocolate, an aftertaste of champagne… I’d have said white chocolate would set the flavour off better. The most interesting of them is the Pain d’Épices, which doesn’t entirely work but gets your attention more than any of the others – there’s plenty of ginger overcoming the caramelised hazelnut pieces (though they have a good crunch). That leaves two that I suspect are intended as showpieces: the Parisian Truffle is rather good, a touch of brandy making it very Christmassy; Amour, on the other hand… A heart-shaped chocolate always looks promising, but this really depends on whether you like marzipan and orange liqueur – if you do, this is probably very nice. If not, it’s disgusting.
Continental Milan Dark Collection
The other new collection which I just happened to notice, accidentally buy and promptly consume purely to get out of the way when I nipped through a Thorntons last month has altogether more go to it. Based on Italian recipes, also mostly new, this set of eight are all in a much richer dark chocolate (far superior to their milk), again in a rather nice hatbox, this time with the top half in deep red. It looks great.
Now, I’ll confess that I really like a proper tart lemon, and the Lemon Mousse is easily the best here. Thorntons used to do a very similar chocolate in whole bags of them – sharp dark chocolate setting off a great tang of lemon in a light mousse. The Espresso is another strong flavour; again, I don’t even much like coffee, but this is dark and strong and very rich. The Amaretti, on the other hand, is a bit bland; I don’t care for amaretti, but if you do you’ll only get a hint of it here, and rather more honey. Similarly, the Milanese Truffle has a bit of liqueur, a bit of hazelnut and interesting textures, but you mainly just taste the chocolate. Fortunately, the others are more distinctive. The Tiramisu is excellent, with a soft filling and white chocolate top, beating the Dessert Collection’s recipe, the red-wrapped Crunchy Nougat Praline is rather fine (the tastiest bit of nougat I’ve had for years), and the Cannella is interesting, individual but not really a successful mix – another mousse, offering first a taste of lemon, lightly, then plunging into cinnamon, which is rather strange. It rounds off with a mild and creamy Panna Cotta that has quite a strong taste of vanilla, set off perfectly afterwards by the dark chocolate. Ironically, after both the dessert collections, this is the one that most instantly captures a childhood afters – it tastes remarkably like an old-style choc ice.
Metropolitan by Thorntons
I just popped into a Thorntons to ask the time a couple of weeks ago (you know that old saying: if you want to know the time, ask a chocolatier), and to make polite conversation chatted to the manager about chocolate. He said this was the best selection they’ve ever produced, and it’s rather fabulous, you know; it may not be quite their best ever, but it pips the Continental Milan Dark Collection for me as the best of this set. It’s got a lovely Art Nouveau box design, and – fond as I am of white chocolate – this works in just dark or milk. Better still, it’s a much fuller-flavoured milk than their standard mix, here taken from Ecuador, the dark from the Dominican Republic, building on their Single Origin collections. These come in multiples of squares, batons and swirled shells, with one exception…
Vanilla Heights is a square vanilla ganache, with almost a caramel flavour rather than vanilla; Cloudberry Hill is sweet but intriguing and faintly fruity, like the other square chocolate, the delightfully patterned Q Couture, another ganache with quince. The quince is slightly strange, but the dark chocolate stops it being too sweet (I’ll admit to not being too familiar with either quince or cloudberry, but they’re both worth trying). The Orange Garden baton may be based on a better-known fruit, but – flavoured with orange blossom – again it’s very sweet, more perfumy than ordinary orange, set off with quite a good sharp aftertaste. I prefer the other long chocolate, the crispy Praline Piazza, another light praline (a taste that rarely impresses me), but with a great texture of crunchy feuilletine waffle pieces. The two shells are both surprisingly solid: the Manhattan Melt is (rather good) milk chocolate through and through with a subtle aftertaste; Midnight Melt is rich and fruity and slightly bitter in its sweetness, an outstanding dark chocolate. Perhaps my favourite (though Richard didn’t care for it) is the odd one out, the Soho Caramel – sadly the smallest, with slight salt caramel in a thick dark chocolate sphere, it’s like a chocolate berry, oozing with flavour.
Bars, Baubles and Bags
Thorntons has also produced two new bars for Christmas, both milk chocolate and neither especially vibrant. Their Crème Brulee Bar is sugar-studded and coolly creamy (well, more milky) inside – nice, but you realise that it’s the crunch of hot, brittle caramel that makes a crème brulee, and the little strip of caramel-ish underlining isn’t good enough. I quite liked it, but you’re best off peeling off the wrapper and storing it somewhere so you forget the name: it’s absolutely not a patch on the proper dessert. The Winter Fruit Crumble Bar is less disappointing, but only because I expected less of it; the crumble pieces in the chocolate coating work, but the blackberry and blackcurrant (both fruits that really appeal to me) filling is very insipid. Despite proper bits of fruit, it’s more sickly than sharp. If you’re after their Continental-style bars, stick to the Sicilian Lemon and the Viennese Truffle, both of which are gorgeous.
They’ve probably sold out of their baubles to hang on the tree by now (like anyone’s going to wait… Oh, yeah, parents), but all three are rich and large enough to take a proper bite into. The Chocolate Truffle Bauble has a near-perfect filling, rich and sweet and strongly chocolatey, though it’s back to that rather bland milk chocolate outside. The Champagne Truffle Bauble works surprisingly well – you can feel the champagne at the back of your mouth. Then there’s the Praline Bauble, which is essentially their long-established Continental the Alpini, in a ball. It’s one of the few pralines I really rather like, with little crunchy pieces to it, too.
And so as not to miss out Hotel Chocolat altogether, one of their new chocolates that I’d recommend is the Eton Mess – soft strawberry mousse that would even get Peter Butterworth’s attention, bedded in milk chocolate and crunchy meringue, covered in thick white chocolate and topped with dried strawberry; a stunning mix of tastes and textures. You can get them in their own selector packs now: eat them by the bag.
So make that your New Year’s resolution. Pile up the chocolates, pile them into your mouth – er, I mean, offer them round your loved ones – and stick Doctor Who on the iPlayer, with a side order of Triffids (eat up your veg, or it will eat you!) and The Box of Delights for sweet. For a little nibble, though, there’s always the poor old Pet Shop Boys with their new EP: the ‘be careful what you wish for’ Christmas ghost-of-a-chance-of-getting-a-hit It Doesn’t Often Snow At Christmas. Not the best year to release that one, but give the other songs a listen – borrowing Madness, Tchiakovsky and Coldplay, each one of them sounds more like a single. Or there’s always fabulous Katie and December Will Be Mad As a Bucket of Frogs Again or, if you’re not a big fan of sparkly commercial Christmas, Timbuk 3 offer a first verse that’s got one of the best awful puns I’ve ever heard (needing an American accent, and with more than a bit of politics). You’ll have to buy Tom Robinson’s hilariously gloomy North By Northwest CD to get his Christmassy nuclear war epic Merrily Up On High, but I always stick mine on…
Update: and finally, the prize for most unlikely review of the year: Lawrence Miles. Given what he predicted for it (now vanished) before transmission – get it while it’s hot, as like most of his blog, it’s seasonal and goes off quickly!
Labels: BBC, Books, Chocolate, Christmas, David Tennant, Doctor Who, DVD, Fantasy, Food, Music, Patrick Troughton, Radio, Reviews, Style, The Key To Time, Top Tips, Triffids
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
The Reign of Television
Today is 25 Messidor, or Bastille Day in the old calendar, and one of the week’s most gripping pieces of TV was Saturday’s part-documentary, part-drama on the Reign of Terror. Spend your evening watching Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution on BBC iPlayer, but have lots of chocolate to hand. Or, if you want a bit of politics but the lessons to learn for today from mass-murdering tyrannies are a bit heavy for a weekday evening, why not explode homeopathy with Mitchell and Webb? Or just have some nourishing Triffids with the Supersizers. I may have mixed two dishes there.
As you may have guessed, this programme (available through the week on iPlayer, and repeated tomorrow night at 1.30 am, signed on BBC1) focused on the end of the Eighteenth Century but cast a long shadow, particularly into totalitarians of the Twentieth. Simon Schama was there to be aghast at the moral horror of those who’d sacrifice so many for the sake of “higher truth”; for balance, a communist historian vividly put the case for the Terror. Disturbing, but important – because it’s much easier to ignore people who believe that you can do anything to anyone, as long as things will be fine in the future, “when humanity is perfected,” when they’re safely a couple of hundred years in the past than when they think it’s a good idea to do it to you. I knew a fair bit about the French Revolution (the historical instruction of Doctor Who), but realised watching this that I was mainly familiar with what happened in Paris; accounts of the near-razing of Lyons shocked me. As did the revelation from Robespierre’s private correspondence that even he realised it would never end: the man who almost personified the idea that the ends justify the means told himself and his inner circle of the time when all would be perfect and they could stop. The time will be “never”. Then why did you carry on, you obsessive butcher?!
And, once again, the reason why Liberals don’t believe in utopias is that every individual is important; if you see them only as means to some future perfection, you can discard anyone you like. If you see any system as necessarily imperfect, but doing its best along the way because everyone matters, you realise that the ends and the means are inseparable. It was finding out that Robespierre, the ultimate in starry-eyed fanatics, didn’t even believe the ends were attainable that really appalled. Then what’s it for?
Fortunately, Mitchell and Webb are on hand, the best in rather a good recent line-up of Thursday night comedy. Yes, I’m quite enjoying Psychoville (though last week’s seemed very like a tribute night to both Alfred Hitchcock and the League of Gentlemen, to the extent that it was mildly surprising to find the corpse wasn’t played by Jeremy Dyson), and even laughed at Krod Mandoon. Last week’s was all right, with a pointed attack on self-styled ‘dieticians’ (“I’m going to go online now and get you another doctorate”), another on Billie Piper’s main post-Who vehicle and an interview with Brian Paddick about police community support officers, but they don’t seem to be spacing out those deliberate “hits” and “misses” as well as they might. The previous week’s outing, the fourth in the series, was far better. I laughed at a deconstruction of online kissing – hmm, doesn’t seem so good when I type it – and celebrity cookery that was almost exactly like my old boss’ way of computer training (a bunch of trainees he’d bludgeoned at high speed once gave me a box of chocolates when I taught them half as much in twice the time but so they could actually learn the skills, because I was “much nicer than that scary man”).
The real highlights, though, were the sketches inspired by last year’s season of Doctor Who – the unfortunate Hennimore (a one-joke series of sketches which I quite enjoy, though they’re not a patch on last year’s bawdy 1970s hospital) facing off against the same giant bee CGI, or not, and a Pompeii soothsayer with a great punchline – and those laying into the credulous on all sides. Trying to lay off the chocolate at the moment, the advert for crisps made out of cress was dead-on:
But back to Mitchell and Webb. A very testy vicar trying to pass off an atheist revelation was quite sharp, almost as if irrational one-offs shouldn’t be entirely convincing, but the best of it was undoubtedly the serious, high-energy drama set in Homeopathic A&E. Stephen Fry’s brilliant one-liner slashed homeopathy a couple of weeks ago, but, sorry Stephen, this was even better. And, gosh, who’d have thought treating homeopathy as if it was proper medicine would make it look like an expensive dangerous lunatic absurdity?
Speaking of which (and three quick daytime TV links coming up in a rush here), BBC4 is currently repeating perhaps the best of these, The Day of the Triffids, on Sunday nights. Survivors is impressive in each of its incarnations, but I can’t help feeling that it’s lacking something when it omits the poison-slapping killer vegetation and sticks a bit of The Archers into the monsterless void. This 1981 adaptation, easily the best among the various TV, radio and film versions of John Wyndham’s novel, has Triffids which are an extraordinary piece of design: not just scarily plausible rooted, rattling or striking, but even when they’re chopped in half – you see that sort of stringy vegetable breakage you get when you bite a piece of celery. Those strands that get caught in your teeth. How do they do that? And John Duttine was one of the first guys on TV I didn’t admit to myself but knew at several levels was rather hot.
In other news, I discovered an inspired Radio 4 comedy, Newfangle, too late into its run to get round to recommending it, but its prehistoric sit-com covered evolution, war and religion superbly from what I heard of it, and should it be repeated or released on CD, look out for it; it’s stolen by Maureen Lipman and, particularly, the incredibly talented Russell Tovey as the early hominid with all the ideas but not necessarily the wisdom to implement them to his best advantage. With soon-to-disappear Doctor Who website Outpost Gallifrey (current subject of my Summer holiday repeat season) usually known as “OG,” the meaning the series gives to the word “og” is particularly entertaining for Who fans. And so appropriate, as the site is shortly to og off.
And finally, though that poking of the credulous from one end of the human story is no longer available to listen to, you can still read Ministry of Truth’s attack on the ludicrous superstitious rubbish infesting our education system that the Conservative education spokesperson is lauding and that the Labour Government is paying our money towards to inflict on children. Good grief.
“Men who loved humanity so much, they felt entitled to exterminate the human beings who stood in its way.”Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution followed Robespierre’s time directing the Committee of Public Safety – and yes, that English translation of the French is very reminiscent of the English translation of the Russian Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or the English translation of whatever the Home Secretary’s coming out with this week about having to sacrifice our liberties, our justice system, huge wads of our cash and the odd few people that we know are baddies for some undefined element of security. Unless the government doesn’t like you, or you don’t pay enough, or there’s a mistake in the system, or all your personal details are accidentally left on a train, in any of which cases you had it coming to you and don’t deserve to feel secure.
As you may have guessed, this programme (available through the week on iPlayer, and repeated tomorrow night at 1.30 am, signed on BBC1) focused on the end of the Eighteenth Century but cast a long shadow, particularly into totalitarians of the Twentieth. Simon Schama was there to be aghast at the moral horror of those who’d sacrifice so many for the sake of “higher truth”; for balance, a communist historian vividly put the case for the Terror. Disturbing, but important – because it’s much easier to ignore people who believe that you can do anything to anyone, as long as things will be fine in the future, “when humanity is perfected,” when they’re safely a couple of hundred years in the past than when they think it’s a good idea to do it to you. I knew a fair bit about the French Revolution (the historical instruction of Doctor Who), but realised watching this that I was mainly familiar with what happened in Paris; accounts of the near-razing of Lyons shocked me. As did the revelation from Robespierre’s private correspondence that even he realised it would never end: the man who almost personified the idea that the ends justify the means told himself and his inner circle of the time when all would be perfect and they could stop. The time will be “never”. Then why did you carry on, you obsessive butcher?!
And, once again, the reason why Liberals don’t believe in utopias is that every individual is important; if you see them only as means to some future perfection, you can discard anyone you like. If you see any system as necessarily imperfect, but doing its best along the way because everyone matters, you realise that the ends and the means are inseparable. It was finding out that Robespierre, the ultimate in starry-eyed fanatics, didn’t even believe the ends were attainable that really appalled. Then what’s it for?
Mitchell and Webb and the Homeopathic Quacks
Fortunately, Mitchell and Webb are on hand, the best in rather a good recent line-up of Thursday night comedy. Yes, I’m quite enjoying Psychoville (though last week’s seemed very like a tribute night to both Alfred Hitchcock and the League of Gentlemen, to the extent that it was mildly surprising to find the corpse wasn’t played by Jeremy Dyson), and even laughed at Krod Mandoon. Last week’s was all right, with a pointed attack on self-styled ‘dieticians’ (“I’m going to go online now and get you another doctorate”), another on Billie Piper’s main post-Who vehicle and an interview with Brian Paddick about police community support officers, but they don’t seem to be spacing out those deliberate “hits” and “misses” as well as they might. The previous week’s outing, the fourth in the series, was far better. I laughed at a deconstruction of online kissing – hmm, doesn’t seem so good when I type it – and celebrity cookery that was almost exactly like my old boss’ way of computer training (a bunch of trainees he’d bludgeoned at high speed once gave me a box of chocolates when I taught them half as much in twice the time but so they could actually learn the skills, because I was “much nicer than that scary man”).
The real highlights, though, were the sketches inspired by last year’s season of Doctor Who – the unfortunate Hennimore (a one-joke series of sketches which I quite enjoy, though they’re not a patch on last year’s bawdy 1970s hospital) facing off against the same giant bee CGI, or not, and a Pompeii soothsayer with a great punchline – and those laying into the credulous on all sides. Trying to lay off the chocolate at the moment, the advert for crisps made out of cress was dead-on:
“Cressps. Once you cressp, you just can’t splesp.”Did you see last night’s Supersizers, by the way? The Supersizers Eat… The 1920s seemed to miss the point for the first time, with fabulous music, fabulous lesbians… Really, almost everything about their depiction of the ’20s was fabulous: Sue’s fabulous fringe, fabulous frocks, fabulous fonts, even, but just not much fabulous food. Instead, fads. Far too many diets. I mentioned last week’s on the French Revolution yesterday, which – before the guillotine came down on the cooking – looked far tastier. If I hadn’t already given in to chocolate cravings and crashed out of my diet in spectacular fashion yesterday, I’d have plunged my head into that already empty box of chocs on principle. I wish they’d repeat BBC4’s original Edwardian Supersize Me, in effect the pilot for it all where almost everything bar the pressed duck looked rather enticing, as it’s the only one we didn’t record…
“…Oh, Christ, they’re horrid!”
But back to Mitchell and Webb. A very testy vicar trying to pass off an atheist revelation was quite sharp, almost as if irrational one-offs shouldn’t be entirely convincing, but the best of it was undoubtedly the serious, high-energy drama set in Homeopathic A&E. Stephen Fry’s brilliant one-liner slashed homeopathy a couple of weeks ago, but, sorry Stephen, this was even better. And, gosh, who’d have thought treating homeopathy as if it was proper medicine would make it look like an expensive dangerous lunatic absurdity?
“I just can’t stand losing them. I don’t know… Sometimes I think that a trace solution of deadly nightshade or a statistically negligible amount of arsenic just – isn’t enough.”Stephen Tall picks out that outstanding sketch, though the whole programme’s still available on the iPlayer until the end of the series. Go for the whole thing, and that one’s also got another round of the post-apocalyptic game show, which I’m afraid I’m finding far too funny. Perhaps I’ve just watched too many horrible dystopian dramas of plague, nuclear armageddon, hideous rampaging giant plants… Some of them even written by people other than Terry Nation.
“That’s crazy talk, Simon. OK, so you kill the odd patient with cancer or heart disease, or bronchitis, flu, chicken pox or measles, but – when someone comes in with a vague sense of unease, or a touch of the nerves, or even just more money than sense, you’ll be there for them with a bottle of basically just water in one hand and a huge invoice in the other.”
Triffids, Newfangle and Quack Schools
Speaking of which (and three quick daytime TV links coming up in a rush here), BBC4 is currently repeating perhaps the best of these, The Day of the Triffids, on Sunday nights. Survivors is impressive in each of its incarnations, but I can’t help feeling that it’s lacking something when it omits the poison-slapping killer vegetation and sticks a bit of The Archers into the monsterless void. This 1981 adaptation, easily the best among the various TV, radio and film versions of John Wyndham’s novel, has Triffids which are an extraordinary piece of design: not just scarily plausible rooted, rattling or striking, but even when they’re chopped in half – you see that sort of stringy vegetable breakage you get when you bite a piece of celery. Those strands that get caught in your teeth. How do they do that? And John Duttine was one of the first guys on TV I didn’t admit to myself but knew at several levels was rather hot.
In other news, I discovered an inspired Radio 4 comedy, Newfangle, too late into its run to get round to recommending it, but its prehistoric sit-com covered evolution, war and religion superbly from what I heard of it, and should it be repeated or released on CD, look out for it; it’s stolen by Maureen Lipman and, particularly, the incredibly talented Russell Tovey as the early hominid with all the ideas but not necessarily the wisdom to implement them to his best advantage. With soon-to-disappear Doctor Who website Outpost Gallifrey (current subject of my Summer holiday repeat season) usually known as “OG,” the meaning the series gives to the word “og” is particularly entertaining for Who fans. And so appropriate, as the site is shortly to og off.
And finally, though that poking of the credulous from one end of the human story is no longer available to listen to, you can still read Ministry of Truth’s attack on the ludicrous superstitious rubbish infesting our education system that the Conservative education spokesperson is lauding and that the Labour Government is paying our money towards to inflict on children. Good grief.
Labels: Comedy, Education, European Politics, Food, History, Quackery, Reviews, Stupid Ideas, The Golden Dozen, Triffids, Utopia
Thursday, October 05, 2006
The Avengers – Man-Eater of Surrey Green
At last Steed and Emma return to BBC4 – tonight at 7.10, or tomorrow at 11.30. It’s an unusually science-fiction-styled episode, as they face off against a carnivorous alien plant that’s growing to giant size, and controlling the minds of the local horticulturalists to accomplish this fiendish design. If you think it sounds like the later Doctor Who story The Seeds of Doom ripped it off shamelessly, you won’t be far wrong. It’s not stunning but not bad, with Athene Seyler’s batty plant expert particularly worth the money and Steed winning extra-special beastliness points for how he beats the plant… magic scientific properties of a transistor stuck in your ear. Hmm. I suspect this is the only Avengers episode to feature three people who just happen to wear hearing aids, and it does rather stand out that they’re only there because the plot requires it – you know when one appears before the title that it’s going to be ‘Chekhov’s hearing aid’. It only reminded me of a deaf friend who’s very fond of The Avengers, and how cross he was when this particular series was released on DVD without subtitles (so, should you ever be writing to a DVD manufacturer, do remind them to put the things on).
The other unusual element that’s usually overlooked here is how romantic a lot of it is, and how little protection romance affords against hideous death. It’s surprisingly rare to have people gently ‘courting’ (rather than ostentatiously flirting) in The Avengers, but the first people we see are young lovebird horticulturalists Laura and Alan, set amongst their flowers, but they have just one scene where everything’s rosy together. Though much of the plot is driven by Alan’s desperation to get Laura back when she mysteriously wanders off (despite, it must be said, neither of the actors really setting the world alight) and in most fiction you’d expect them to be joyfully reunited at the end, both in fact die in peculiarly pitiless ways, one of them ‘off’. It’s a bit grim. On the other hand, there’s a particularly good characterisation of Steed and Emma, with more than a few romantic overtones there. He’s first seen looking surprisingly good in a polo-neck, offering her a rose he’s grown, Morning Sunrise. She’s cutting.
The 1976 Doctor Who story The Seeds of Doom is often said to draw heavily on this, and… Well, obviously, it does. It’s written by Robert Banks Stewart, who also wrote a couple of Avengers episodes in this very same black and white Mrs Peel period, and in it, too, a seed pod from space grows to giant size over a leading horticulturalist’s mansion, our heroes are helped by the military and an eccentric older lady, and the chauffeur doesn’t doff his cap politely. The Doctor and Sarah are even said to be more like Steed and Emma than usual, written as more tough, hard-quipping and even amoral. Despite all that, don’t take people’s word for it when they say ‘…and therefore The Seeds of Doom is like an episode of The Avengers’. The feel of it is quite different, thanks to both the script and the director: it’s far more grim in tone, with a far more macho style than you’d get in The Avengers (or in any other Doctor Who), built on emotion and horror that goes back not to Surrey Green, but the original Quatermass.
Some Avengers fans are put off it by the science fiction elements, and though I don’t think they’re pulled off particularly well – the inadequate special effects of thrusting vines, Mrs Peel spouting so much scientific hokum here that she’s undermined by you starting to wonder if every time she seems so assured and expert she’s really just making it all up (vegetation on the Moon, indeed) – it’s the way the whole thing’s done that lets it down for me. Pretty much all the guest actors are rather dull, in particular the world’s most boring RAF man, though the exception is Athene Seyler’s marvellously batty plant expert Dr Sheldon, who’s an absolute scream:
On the bright side, the climax is otherwise very satisfying, with a splendid if slightly overextended fight between Steed and a possessed Emma; he even gets to throw her over his shoulder, and it’s appropriate that neither ‘win’ but that it’s finished by accident, as their heads knock together and she’s knocked out. And before Steed’s aforementioned shocking solution, there’s some less comic mayhem in the form of his chopping at vines with a machete, and possibly the most violent moment in The Avengers, when the chauffeur is blown away by a shotgun. In the end, though, it’s really rather a mundane episode. I know that sounds a little strange, but very little of the story on screen really grabs your attention: it’s much more memorable for ‘being a bit sci-fi’ than for its actual content. Still, the lead characters are much more interesting than The Outsiders…
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Steed kills a climber – Emma becomes a vegetableOn the face of it this isn’t quite a usual episode of The Avengers, if there can be such a thing, and, yes, the giant plant from outer space has a lot to do with it. With that, the way it’s brought back to Earth by a doomed astronaut and so many humans falling under its spell at a secret establishment that kills observers, it’s difficult not to suspect this is attempting to spoof The Quatermass Experiment. The trouble is, once they’d come up with that idea they plainly didn’t know where to go with it; it’s rather less amusing than most other Avengers, with the killer cactus on Steed’s car seat the only bit that made me smile – well, at least before Steed comes up with his caddish way to defeat the plant, of which Cornelltoppingday’s The Avengers Dossier says, “Bastard!” I just hope, for his sake, that Emma doesn’t hear how he did it. Quatermass rather implies something intelligent and challenging, but this ends up rather more B-Movie. So is the way to resist the alien’s telepathic control; we hear a strange oscillating note as it exerts its influence, and initially it seems that deafness is the answer. Later, though, it appears that deaf people can still ‘hear’ the control signal, and that to resist you actually need the
The other unusual element that’s usually overlooked here is how romantic a lot of it is, and how little protection romance affords against hideous death. It’s surprisingly rare to have people gently ‘courting’ (rather than ostentatiously flirting) in The Avengers, but the first people we see are young lovebird horticulturalists Laura and Alan, set amongst their flowers, but they have just one scene where everything’s rosy together. Though much of the plot is driven by Alan’s desperation to get Laura back when she mysteriously wanders off (despite, it must be said, neither of the actors really setting the world alight) and in most fiction you’d expect them to be joyfully reunited at the end, both in fact die in peculiarly pitiless ways, one of them ‘off’. It’s a bit grim. On the other hand, there’s a particularly good characterisation of Steed and Emma, with more than a few romantic overtones there. He’s first seen looking surprisingly good in a polo-neck, offering her a rose he’s grown, Morning Sunrise. She’s cutting.
“I sense a bribe… What nasty situation have you got me into this time? …Ah! The missing horticulturalists.”There’s an awfully sweet closing scene, too, as they exit in a very blissed-out way on the back of a haycart.
The 1976 Doctor Who story The Seeds of Doom is often said to draw heavily on this, and… Well, obviously, it does. It’s written by Robert Banks Stewart, who also wrote a couple of Avengers episodes in this very same black and white Mrs Peel period, and in it, too, a seed pod from space grows to giant size over a leading horticulturalist’s mansion, our heroes are helped by the military and an eccentric older lady, and the chauffeur doesn’t doff his cap politely. The Doctor and Sarah are even said to be more like Steed and Emma than usual, written as more tough, hard-quipping and even amoral. Despite all that, don’t take people’s word for it when they say ‘…and therefore The Seeds of Doom is like an episode of The Avengers’. The feel of it is quite different, thanks to both the script and the director: it’s far more grim in tone, with a far more macho style than you’d get in The Avengers (or in any other Doctor Who), built on emotion and horror that goes back not to Surrey Green, but the original Quatermass.
Some Avengers fans are put off it by the science fiction elements, and though I don’t think they’re pulled off particularly well – the inadequate special effects of thrusting vines, Mrs Peel spouting so much scientific hokum here that she’s undermined by you starting to wonder if every time she seems so assured and expert she’s really just making it all up (vegetation on the Moon, indeed) – it’s the way the whole thing’s done that lets it down for me. Pretty much all the guest actors are rather dull, in particular the world’s most boring RAF man, though the exception is Athene Seyler’s marvellously batty plant expert Dr Sheldon, who’s an absolute scream:
“And think of the tendrils!”This isn’t a bad episode, but rather too much just isn’t quite good enough. There are some splendid moments of direction, such as the high shots from the plant’s-eye-view or the sudden darkness as the mansion is covered by vines, but too much of it is rather pedestrian. Much of the music is recycled from other episodes, with most of it that’s new being an ill-advised tuba motif that sounds organic but in a more risible than sinister way; it’s never re-used. The quips are sparse and generally below par (a “herbicidal maniac.” Please). Emma keeps being put in rather frumpy outfits that don’t succeed in making her look businesslike, though her leather dungarees for the climax look a lot better than they sound (Steed, I should say, has that rather natty Edwardian huntsman look again). And suspicious horticulturalist Sir Lyle Peterson initially appears behind the disappearances, and might as well wear a sign saying ‘I’m a maniac’ through his trying-too-hard-to-be-strange mansion with its ivy-covered dollybird mannequins (albeit leading to one of Steed’s few funny quips in this one) with their ‘pretty hair’ – “Yes, real, too,” at which even Steed looks slightly ill. By mid-way, though, he’s established to be under the plant’s control, and while we hear that all the innocent horticulturalists he’s brought under its spell are gruesomely consumed by it, he survives and avoids any comeuppance, despite having evidently been a rather unpleasant character even before the plant got its roots into him.
On the bright side, the climax is otherwise very satisfying, with a splendid if slightly overextended fight between Steed and a possessed Emma; he even gets to throw her over his shoulder, and it’s appropriate that neither ‘win’ but that it’s finished by accident, as their heads knock together and she’s knocked out. And before Steed’s aforementioned shocking solution, there’s some less comic mayhem in the form of his chopping at vines with a machete, and possibly the most violent moment in The Avengers, when the chauffeur is blown away by a shotgun. In the end, though, it’s really rather a mundane episode. I know that sounds a little strange, but very little of the story on screen really grabs your attention: it’s much more memorable for ‘being a bit sci-fi’ than for its actual content. Still, the lead characters are much more interesting than The Outsiders…
Labels: Doctor Who, Quatermass, Reviews, The Avengers, The Avengers Season 4, Tom Baker, Triffids
