Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Labour Delusion Max
The Prime Minister, on this morning’s Today Programme:
Of course, he might be claiming today that he’s rebelling against the evil Murdoch Empire. But he’s left it very, very late after kowtowing to their every demand for a dozen years – and he knows The Sun’s only deserted him because the voters already have, and the evil Empire doesn’t dare be on the losing side. That’s the only reason they switched sides from the other Tories in the first place.
“We’re the insurgents, not the incumbents.”No, Mr Brown. Just because you’ve been in power for so long, been so incompetent and ground so many people down that no-one in the country can stand the sight of you any more does not suddenly make you the heroic Rebel Alliance. You are the incumbents, and that’s why people hate you. What are you rebelling against? That two other parties are ahead of you in the opinion polls? So that’s you, the Government, ‘rebelling’ against us, the people. Yeah. See how that works out.
Of course, he might be claiming today that he’s rebelling against the evil Murdoch Empire. But he’s left it very, very late after kowtowing to their every demand for a dozen years – and he knows The Sun’s only deserted him because the voters already have, and the evil Empire doesn’t dare be on the losing side. That’s the only reason they switched sides from the other Tories in the first place.
Labels: Labour, Newspapers, The Today Programme
Saturday, September 19, 2009
DVD Taster: The Keys of Marinus
A sea of acid; faltering speeches; bizarre rules; glassy-eyed pretty young things; aggressive men in rubber; realising that designing utopia may not be such a good idea after all… But if you’re not going to Liberal Democrat Conference in Bournemouth (or if you need to get away from it in your hotel room), Monday sees Doctor Who: The Keys of Marinus released on DVD. An early black and white tale starring top Doctor William Hartnell and the alien Voord, it’s the only Who story with an actor from Citizen Kane. Just don’t expect Citizen Kane (more very cheap Flash Gordon).
Then, six minutes into the episode, and after a fortnight away, the Doctor unexpectedly reappears.
There’s instantly a babble of happy voices and smiles as the friends mob him (“I’m just glad we’re together again,” gushes his granddaughter), and I always feel that reactions in living rooms around the land must have been the same. Certainly, mine’s always like that. For the first time in the series, the lead has taken a fortnight off – necessary, not just with ailing health but with making over forty episodes a year at the time – and, though I love the team of Ian and Barbara, the middle episodes sag noticeably without William Hartnell to spice them up. The relief for the viewer at the star coming back is given beautiful mutual reinforcement among the characters, as just as they reach the darkest point of the story, the man with the brilliant brain is back, and instantly striking a pose, hands on lapels, to take charge of Ian’s defence.
Despite hanging on a locked room mystery with such an obvious alternative solution that Susan almost hangs a lamp on it without anyone ever quite mentioning it (see if you can spot what I mean), much of the following courtroom drama is fun, from the non-speaking judge who nods so enthusiastically you fear his fabulous hat will fall off, to the Doctor’s first arranging a stay of execution while he divides his friends into library forces and detectives, to his bluffing flourish that flushes out one of the conspirators – hollow-cheeked, shifty young Martin Cort* – into an ill-fated confession at the side of his wife, the magnificently slinky and dubious Fiona Walker. Our elephant ought to be very keen on the city in which this takes place, except that the scripts suggest they can’t spell “Millenium”… But, above all, this is a golden moment because the Doctor’s back, and everyone – on both sides of the TV screen – suddenly knows things are going to be all right.
Doctor Who started with a run of superb stories. An Unearthly Child, The Daleks and The Edge of Destruction are all extraordinary television – all available in The Beginning DVD boxed set – with Marco Polo something of an epic to follow. The show’s sixth story, The Aztecs, is one of the best in the programme’s forty-six years, a stunning historical tragedy. But the fifth Doctor Who story, The Keys of Marinus, is the first that feels merely ordinary (if you can call an attempt to produce a series of alien globe-trotting spectacles on 2 and 6 ‘ordinary’). As if the money and the energy have run out, and the early pressure to strive for greatness has worn off. It’s not actually bad, but whereas every previous story had had high ambitions, whether or not you agreed with them or thought them fulfilled, the ambition here is… To churn out six weeks of telly.
After a smash success writing The Daleks, Terry Nation here settles into a comfortable formula of plot devices he’ll use for ever after, a Flash Gordon serial-inspired travelogue ‘narrative’ that substitutes movement for twists or characterisation, and suspiciously familiar names (“Marinus” for a planet of seas, “Arbitan” for an ultimate judge, and, of course, “Just a minute – what’s your name – Tarron?” the first of many characters named after himself). Yet despite all that, this is a hugely important story, introducing many ideas to Doctor Who that will become mainstays of the series (and be done much better) later: the superior second episode has the series’ first signs of the Gothic; it also introduces mind control and possession, like a cheesy prototype of The Macra Terror’s delusional utopia; and the series’ first out-and-out ‘quest’, to find the eponymous Keys, is also the first to suggest that, like The Key to Time, you may not be all that keen on the object of your quest and that, like The Keeper of Traken, taking away people’s free will ‘for their own good’ may not have the best of consequences, though that moral’s rather shoehorned in at the end.
William Hartnell as the Doctor, teamed with granddaughter Susan and teachers Ian and Barbara, may well be my favourite of all the TARDIS crews, but they’re not seen entirely at their best here. Babs and Susan take it in turns to be typecast as ‘hysterical females’ (Barbara, in particular, is usually far stronger than this – though, in an otherwise insipid episode, she’s subjected to a deeply disturbing threat), while the writing out of the Doctor for two weeks is done in an especially clumsy way, his skipping ahead to find the final Key logically splitting their forces into equal teams of, er, five and one, as well as volunteering to be separated from Susan, usually the one thing he would never do. Still, Billy’s visibly refreshed on his return, having been so fagged out in the first episode that he fluffs his lines in several entertaining ways, most famously
Many people know this story for its monsters, the Voord (immortalised in the phrase “Yartek, Leader of the alien Voord,” part of what passes for the Nicene Creed of fans of a certain age), yet we know surprisingly little about them. In theory after the same eponymous Keys as our questing heroes, they only appear in the first and last episodes, and we never find out so much as whether a Voord is a “man” “wearing a suit” (in early dialogue) or alien “creatures” (later), or even whether their name should or shouldn’t have an “s” on the end in plural. You’d think, though, if their fearsome appearance – remarkably similar to that of 2000AD’s Nemesis the Warlock, making me wonder if Kevin O’Neill was terrified at the age of 10 or 11 by a dark, horned creature with a curving bit of ‘spine’ – really was just a form of wetsuit that the one that hilariously ‘disguises’ itself would take its helmet off… Despite being promoted as ‘the next Daleks’, though (with the B-Movie disembodied brains in one episode actually much closer in concept), they never really took off. You can, at least, find them in The Fishmen of Kandalinga, an infamous story in The Dr Who Annual 1966 – sadly, unlike his splendid recording of The Lair of Zarbi Supremo on The Web Planet DVD, there’s no reading of this one by William Russell (Ian). As to why not, I suspect budget cutbacks, but you might also try reading the title out loud. In other exciting comic-related goodness, one of the legendary Grant Morrison’s early works was Colin Baker Doctor Who strip The World Shapers, now available as a graphic novel. It saw the return of the Voord in one of the barmiest Who stories ever drawn.
The Keys of Marinus is released on DVD on Monday 21st September. YouTube has the official BBC DVD trailer, and an unofficial one in the style of the Twenty-first Century “Next Time…” teasers, both rather jolly. A friend has just reminded me that a few seconds of the story were missing from the VHS release but have now been restored for DVD, so I’m particularly looking forward to seeing those for the first time. If I can spot them.
*Martin Cort in fact plays three different roles in The Keys of Marinus, but this one’s the most memorable – acting, rather than just menacing from inside a mask.
Martin is currently directing The Unimportant History of Britain at the Lion and Unicorn Theatre, Kentish Town, London, without being dressed as a Voord. It runs there until October 11th.
That Golden Moment
“They’re treating me well enough. Have you found the Doctor yet?”With each of the six episodes of this 1964 story very different to each other, easily the best sequence for me comes about eight minutes into easily the best episode – part two, The Velvet Web – with an unusual amount of video editing and Kafkaesque psychological horror for the time… But Barbara’s waking nightmare has already been chosen as this story’s “Golden Moment” by Jonathan Morris in DWM, so I thought I’d pick something completely different. Fortunately, one sprung instantly to mind that never fails to make me smile. Sentence of Death, part five of the story, opens in a different nightmare – being accused of something you didn’t do, with no way to prove your innocence and all the rules changed. Accused of murder, even unflappable Ian blurts out that “this business is beginning to run away from me!” When Barbara, Susan and two friends arrive to see him – threatened with a year in the desert glass factories if they disturb the court – he’s visibly depressed, shaking his head from side to side as if punch-drunk. Who can save him now?
“No – there isn’t a sight or sound of him anywhere.”
“We must find him, Barbara, we must. The laws in this country are a mockery.”
“I quite agree with you, my boy!”
Then, six minutes into the episode, and after a fortnight away, the Doctor unexpectedly reappears.
There’s instantly a babble of happy voices and smiles as the friends mob him (“I’m just glad we’re together again,” gushes his granddaughter), and I always feel that reactions in living rooms around the land must have been the same. Certainly, mine’s always like that. For the first time in the series, the lead has taken a fortnight off – necessary, not just with ailing health but with making over forty episodes a year at the time – and, though I love the team of Ian and Barbara, the middle episodes sag noticeably without William Hartnell to spice them up. The relief for the viewer at the star coming back is given beautiful mutual reinforcement among the characters, as just as they reach the darkest point of the story, the man with the brilliant brain is back, and instantly striking a pose, hands on lapels, to take charge of Ian’s defence.
Despite hanging on a locked room mystery with such an obvious alternative solution that Susan almost hangs a lamp on it without anyone ever quite mentioning it (see if you can spot what I mean), much of the following courtroom drama is fun, from the non-speaking judge who nods so enthusiastically you fear his fabulous hat will fall off, to the Doctor’s first arranging a stay of execution while he divides his friends into library forces and detectives, to his bluffing flourish that flushes out one of the conspirators – hollow-cheeked, shifty young Martin Cort* – into an ill-fated confession at the side of his wife, the magnificently slinky and dubious Fiona Walker. Our elephant ought to be very keen on the city in which this takes place, except that the scripts suggest they can’t spell “Millenium”… But, above all, this is a golden moment because the Doctor’s back, and everyone – on both sides of the TV screen – suddenly knows things are going to be all right.
DVD Tasting
Something Else To Look Out For
Doctor Who started with a run of superb stories. An Unearthly Child, The Daleks and The Edge of Destruction are all extraordinary television – all available in The Beginning DVD boxed set – with Marco Polo something of an epic to follow. The show’s sixth story, The Aztecs, is one of the best in the programme’s forty-six years, a stunning historical tragedy. But the fifth Doctor Who story, The Keys of Marinus, is the first that feels merely ordinary (if you can call an attempt to produce a series of alien globe-trotting spectacles on 2 and 6 ‘ordinary’). As if the money and the energy have run out, and the early pressure to strive for greatness has worn off. It’s not actually bad, but whereas every previous story had had high ambitions, whether or not you agreed with them or thought them fulfilled, the ambition here is… To churn out six weeks of telly.
After a smash success writing The Daleks, Terry Nation here settles into a comfortable formula of plot devices he’ll use for ever after, a Flash Gordon serial-inspired travelogue ‘narrative’ that substitutes movement for twists or characterisation, and suspiciously familiar names (“Marinus” for a planet of seas, “Arbitan” for an ultimate judge, and, of course, “Just a minute – what’s your name – Tarron?” the first of many characters named after himself). Yet despite all that, this is a hugely important story, introducing many ideas to Doctor Who that will become mainstays of the series (and be done much better) later: the superior second episode has the series’ first signs of the Gothic; it also introduces mind control and possession, like a cheesy prototype of The Macra Terror’s delusional utopia; and the series’ first out-and-out ‘quest’, to find the eponymous Keys, is also the first to suggest that, like The Key to Time, you may not be all that keen on the object of your quest and that, like The Keeper of Traken, taking away people’s free will ‘for their own good’ may not have the best of consequences, though that moral’s rather shoehorned in at the end.
William Hartnell as the Doctor, teamed with granddaughter Susan and teachers Ian and Barbara, may well be my favourite of all the TARDIS crews, but they’re not seen entirely at their best here. Babs and Susan take it in turns to be typecast as ‘hysterical females’ (Barbara, in particular, is usually far stronger than this – though, in an otherwise insipid episode, she’s subjected to a deeply disturbing threat), while the writing out of the Doctor for two weeks is done in an especially clumsy way, his skipping ahead to find the final Key logically splitting their forces into equal teams of, er, five and one, as well as volunteering to be separated from Susan, usually the one thing he would never do. Still, Billy’s visibly refreshed on his return, having been so fagged out in the first episode that he fluffs his lines in several entertaining ways, most famously
“If you were wearing your shoes, you could have given her hers. Hmm!”The direction is more listless than the script, but the sets at least try gamely. The one substantial extra – that is, on top of the usual full commentary and text notes – is on the sets, with the highly talented (if famously grumpy) designer explaining why writing a script with an entirely new country in every episode on no money may not have been Terry Nation’s most practical idea. He still did wonders on occasion, ranging from an amusingly cost-cutting idol through some rather intriguingly expressionist crags to the Key machine “the Conscience of Marinus” itself, which looks stunning. And, as I’ve suggested, the whole thing might be better off without its two shoddy middle episodes, the look included: The Screaming Jungle in particular is Doctor Who’s first unmistakably dumb and disappointing episode, where plot, incident and design all falter, without even the Doctor to distract us.
Many people know this story for its monsters, the Voord (immortalised in the phrase “Yartek, Leader of the alien Voord,” part of what passes for the Nicene Creed of fans of a certain age), yet we know surprisingly little about them. In theory after the same eponymous Keys as our questing heroes, they only appear in the first and last episodes, and we never find out so much as whether a Voord is a “man” “wearing a suit” (in early dialogue) or alien “creatures” (later), or even whether their name should or shouldn’t have an “s” on the end in plural. You’d think, though, if their fearsome appearance – remarkably similar to that of 2000AD’s Nemesis the Warlock, making me wonder if Kevin O’Neill was terrified at the age of 10 or 11 by a dark, horned creature with a curving bit of ‘spine’ – really was just a form of wetsuit that the one that hilariously ‘disguises’ itself would take its helmet off… Despite being promoted as ‘the next Daleks’, though (with the B-Movie disembodied brains in one episode actually much closer in concept), they never really took off. You can, at least, find them in The Fishmen of Kandalinga, an infamous story in The Dr Who Annual 1966 – sadly, unlike his splendid recording of The Lair of Zarbi Supremo on The Web Planet DVD, there’s no reading of this one by William Russell (Ian). As to why not, I suspect budget cutbacks, but you might also try reading the title out loud. In other exciting comic-related goodness, one of the legendary Grant Morrison’s early works was Colin Baker Doctor Who strip The World Shapers, now available as a graphic novel. It saw the return of the Voord in one of the barmiest Who stories ever drawn.
The Keys of Marinus is released on DVD on Monday 21st September. YouTube has the official BBC DVD trailer, and an unofficial one in the style of the Twenty-first Century “Next Time…” teasers, both rather jolly. A friend has just reminded me that a few seconds of the story were missing from the VHS release but have now been restored for DVD, so I’m particularly looking forward to seeing those for the first time. If I can spot them.
*Martin Cort in fact plays three different roles in The Keys of Marinus, but this one’s the most memorable – acting, rather than just menacing from inside a mask.
Martin is currently directing The Unimportant History of Britain at the Lion and Unicorn Theatre, Kentish Town, London, without being dressed as a Voord. It runs there until October 11th.
Labels: Comics, Doctor Who, DVD, DVD Tasters, Liberal Democrat Conferences, Reviews, Utopia, William Hartnell
Friday, September 18, 2009
Big Government Vs Big Unions… Fiiiight!
A small part of my brain still thinks ‘back to school’ in September, and it’s not the only reminder of my childhood* around: this week seems stuck in the 1970s, though sadly the unconvincing stop-motion dinosaurs aren’t in Doug McClure movies but ‘live’ from the TUC Conference. Thrillingly, the big unions are threatening to savage a dying Labour Government this Winter. Because that always worked out so well for them. And if seeing Peter (hiss) Mandelson exchange blows with Brendan (yawn) Barber isn’t enough to excite you, there’s the threat of postal strikes and Harriet Harman’s career-best daft, petty foot-shooting…
You never quite know with the TUC Conference whether to glower that the Labour Party in effect gets two weeks of conference publicity while the rest of us are lucky to get one, or grin that it’s more like fly on the wall footage of a family row. This week’s given Lord Mandelson and Gordon Brown an enormous amount of free pluggage, but the family row’s been even more bitter than usual.
Everybody knows that Labour’s principal, increasingly shrill and desperate message has for years been ‘We’re shit, and we know we are, but, oooooh! The Tories! Scary!’ but it’s rarely been so blatant. After so long claiming that the Tories were evil for considering “cuts,” Labour this week were forced to admit that they would also have to make “cuts.” Except that, look, the Tories are evil! Oddly enough, this hasn’t been a wild success.
So while Gordon Brown’s been pretending that he’s been promising cuts all along to weary jeers around the country, it’s been left to Peter Mandelson to make a coherent argument. It’s coming up to a year since he was brought back into the Labour Government, and I still have the same equivocal feeling I did then: he’s one of their most effective ministers, but as a party politician, he’s pure poison. His much-quoted line this week was that they were going to be “Wise but not big spenders” – an approach cribbed from years of unreported Lib Dem soundbites on taxation, and simply not believable after a dozen years in power doing exactly the reverse. I could say, ‘It is big, but it’s not clever’, or ‘not little enough, and too late’, but it’s simpler just to point out that no-one believes him, and that they don’t have the time left to start now.
Compared to TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber’s Powellite rhetoric of “riots on the streets” if there are any public sector job cuts, however, Peter Mandelson seems positively plausible. It can’t just have been me who woke up to news of their competing speeches earlier in the week and imagined them animated by Ray Harryhausen: Lord Mandelson’s Labour Government a huge, coiling, venomous snake, darting and biting; Mr Barber’s TUC a vast, heavy, lumbering dinosaur, powerful but uncoordinated, hampered by only having several very tiny brains each wanting to move its limbs in different directions.
Voters hadn’t been treated to such a grisly display since those of us in London witnessed prehistoric relics Bob Crow and Arthur Scargill duking it out for rival far left fantasists on our ballot papers in June, their giant rubber bodies flickering in the cameras. Now, if you could explicitly vote against someone, surely Mr ‘I’d like to sit in my mansion and ruin your travel’ Crow would have topped the poll – and surely the only people voting for that self-indulgent old self-destructor Mr Scargill were extreme Thatcherites wishing the man who single-handedly destroyed the union movement was a power in the land again, rather than just The Man That Time Forgot.
My favourite bellowing union demand of the week, however, was blundering triceratops the GMB. They shouted to the Labour Government that there are ten thousand jobs in Barrow-in-Furness dependent on Trident, so that has to stay. Ten thousand? Goodness. If that’s the prime consideration, even senior bankers must be envious – these are some of the most expensive jobs in Britain. How about dropping Trident, and giving each of the workers there a million quid? It’d still save ninety billion.
At least, if you’re as fed up as I am with things being lost in the post even more than usual right now, and with random local strikes every few days (where’s my new Doctor Who Magazine, then? Eh? Eh?), there was a breath of relief this week.
You may have read that
Thanks to Sara Bedford for highlighting a truly hilarious story. Gordon Brown’s Very Important Deputy (for Paperclips and Pissing People Off) Harriet Harman has spent years arguing for absolute, inflexible, dogmatic discrimination in favour of women, because neither any other social divisions nor political views matter. Earlier this Summer, Ms Harman provoked rows by stating that Labour should always have one woman and one man as Leader and Deputy Leader – even if, say, women got 80% of the vote in each contest and one was forced to stand down in favour of an unpopular misogynist as a result. Uncharitable people suggested she was rather hoping that when Mr Brown goes, entirely of his own free will and certainly not in any sort of putsch, as long as it’s within the fortnight, she would stand for Leader rather than Deputy and hope that no women stood for the latter position, thereby electing her on almost as democratic a technicality as Mr Brown’s coronation.
However, it appears that Ms Harman’s much-repeated argument that gender is all and political choice doesn’t matter is, er, self-serving hypocritical guff that she doesn’t actually mean a word of. Who knew? This week her “Equality Office” produced “Women in Power: Milestones,” listing the twenty-eight most significant events of the last century for female politicians.
Which mentioned all sorts of Labour hacks, but refused to name Margaret Thatcher. Oops.
Once again, people will struggle to be charitable to Ms Harman. Perhaps she used to watch a lot of Spitting Image, and on seeing Mrs Thatcher portrayed as a man, she was just dim enough to think everything on television was true…
If you’re tired of all the silliness and crashing dinosaurs, why not try a serious politician?
You won’t have seen much about it on the news, but Lib Dem Treasury Spokesperson Vince Cable this week launched Tackling the Fiscal Crisis: A Recovery Plan for the UK, which rather than just using rhetoric of undefined ‘good cuts’ versus undefined ‘bad cuts’ actually took voters seriously, and set out nine specific areas to start on saving (including a public sector pay freeze and pay cuts for top civil servants, tightening salaries to protect jobs). Now that even the Labour Government’s admitted they can’t afford the bills any more, isn’t it time the other political parties told us all what their actual proposals are rather than just calling each other names?
*I realise I may not entirely be flattering myself in bringing up my childhood at the same time as Jurassic metaphors.
Clash of the Turgid
You never quite know with the TUC Conference whether to glower that the Labour Party in effect gets two weeks of conference publicity while the rest of us are lucky to get one, or grin that it’s more like fly on the wall footage of a family row. This week’s given Lord Mandelson and Gordon Brown an enormous amount of free pluggage, but the family row’s been even more bitter than usual.
Everybody knows that Labour’s principal, increasingly shrill and desperate message has for years been ‘We’re shit, and we know we are, but, oooooh! The Tories! Scary!’ but it’s rarely been so blatant. After so long claiming that the Tories were evil for considering “cuts,” Labour this week were forced to admit that they would also have to make “cuts.” Except that, look, the Tories are evil! Oddly enough, this hasn’t been a wild success.
So while Gordon Brown’s been pretending that he’s been promising cuts all along to weary jeers around the country, it’s been left to Peter Mandelson to make a coherent argument. It’s coming up to a year since he was brought back into the Labour Government, and I still have the same equivocal feeling I did then: he’s one of their most effective ministers, but as a party politician, he’s pure poison. His much-quoted line this week was that they were going to be “Wise but not big spenders” – an approach cribbed from years of unreported Lib Dem soundbites on taxation, and simply not believable after a dozen years in power doing exactly the reverse. I could say, ‘It is big, but it’s not clever’, or ‘not little enough, and too late’, but it’s simpler just to point out that no-one believes him, and that they don’t have the time left to start now.
Compared to TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber’s Powellite rhetoric of “riots on the streets” if there are any public sector job cuts, however, Peter Mandelson seems positively plausible. It can’t just have been me who woke up to news of their competing speeches earlier in the week and imagined them animated by Ray Harryhausen: Lord Mandelson’s Labour Government a huge, coiling, venomous snake, darting and biting; Mr Barber’s TUC a vast, heavy, lumbering dinosaur, powerful but uncoordinated, hampered by only having several very tiny brains each wanting to move its limbs in different directions.
Voters hadn’t been treated to such a grisly display since those of us in London witnessed prehistoric relics Bob Crow and Arthur Scargill duking it out for rival far left fantasists on our ballot papers in June, their giant rubber bodies flickering in the cameras. Now, if you could explicitly vote against someone, surely Mr ‘I’d like to sit in my mansion and ruin your travel’ Crow would have topped the poll – and surely the only people voting for that self-indulgent old self-destructor Mr Scargill were extreme Thatcherites wishing the man who single-handedly destroyed the union movement was a power in the land again, rather than just The Man That Time Forgot.
My favourite bellowing union demand of the week, however, was blundering triceratops the GMB. They shouted to the Labour Government that there are ten thousand jobs in Barrow-in-Furness dependent on Trident, so that has to stay. Ten thousand? Goodness. If that’s the prime consideration, even senior bankers must be envious – these are some of the most expensive jobs in Britain. How about dropping Trident, and giving each of the workers there a million quid? It’d still save ninety billion.
Good News – No Post Strike!
At least, if you’re as fed up as I am with things being lost in the post even more than usual right now, and with random local strikes every few days (where’s my new Doctor Who Magazine, then? Eh? Eh?), there was a breath of relief this week.
You may have read that
“Ballot papers proposing a national strike at the Royal Mail over pay and job cuts are being sent out to members of the main postal union.”“Sent out”? By post? Phew! Well, no chance of a national strike before Christmas, then.
Did Harriet Think Spitting Image Was A Documentary?
Thanks to Sara Bedford for highlighting a truly hilarious story. Gordon Brown’s Very Important Deputy (for Paperclips and Pissing People Off) Harriet Harman has spent years arguing for absolute, inflexible, dogmatic discrimination in favour of women, because neither any other social divisions nor political views matter. Earlier this Summer, Ms Harman provoked rows by stating that Labour should always have one woman and one man as Leader and Deputy Leader – even if, say, women got 80% of the vote in each contest and one was forced to stand down in favour of an unpopular misogynist as a result. Uncharitable people suggested she was rather hoping that when Mr Brown goes, entirely of his own free will and certainly not in any sort of putsch, as long as it’s within the fortnight, she would stand for Leader rather than Deputy and hope that no women stood for the latter position, thereby electing her on almost as democratic a technicality as Mr Brown’s coronation.
However, it appears that Ms Harman’s much-repeated argument that gender is all and political choice doesn’t matter is, er, self-serving hypocritical guff that she doesn’t actually mean a word of. Who knew? This week her “Equality Office” produced “Women in Power: Milestones,” listing the twenty-eight most significant events of the last century for female politicians.
Which mentioned all sorts of Labour hacks, but refused to name Margaret Thatcher. Oops.
Once again, people will struggle to be charitable to Ms Harman. Perhaps she used to watch a lot of Spitting Image, and on seeing Mrs Thatcher portrayed as a man, she was just dim enough to think everything on television was true…
Vince Tackles the Fiscal Crisis
If you’re tired of all the silliness and crashing dinosaurs, why not try a serious politician?
You won’t have seen much about it on the news, but Lib Dem Treasury Spokesperson Vince Cable this week launched Tackling the Fiscal Crisis: A Recovery Plan for the UK, which rather than just using rhetoric of undefined ‘good cuts’ versus undefined ‘bad cuts’ actually took voters seriously, and set out nine specific areas to start on saving (including a public sector pay freeze and pay cuts for top civil servants, tightening salaries to protect jobs). Now that even the Labour Government’s admitted they can’t afford the bills any more, isn’t it time the other political parties told us all what their actual proposals are rather than just calling each other names?
*I realise I may not entirely be flattering myself in bringing up my childhood at the same time as Jurassic metaphors.
Labels: Bigotry, British Politics, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Stupid Ideas, The Golden Dozen
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Let’s Not Book A Room In Brigadoon
Have you caught any of BBC Four’s “This is Scotland” season? Because some of it makes you think, ‘No, it really isn’t’. A rare showing of Culloden was impressive, only a few weeks after I praised it, but as for last weekend’s outing for Brigadoon… It’s a textbook example of a story which, when someone tells it to you in a few lines, really captures your imagination – but which, when you actually sit through it, makes a terrible movie. An enchanted old village appearing from the mist just once a century… What could possibly go wrong? Go on, guess.
Perhaps it’s that I lack patience with musical theatre – I know, dock my gay points – except in rare cases, and that though Almost Like Being In Love is a good tune, the rest of the songs here are syrupy and go on for ever. Perhaps it’s the distracting accents. Now, every American producer knows that there are only three ‘English’ accents: upper class (evil, which permits intelligence, or inbred and very dim); Cockerney (lovable, poor and stupid); and Scotch / Oirish, which are of course the same (rustic, poor, quaint and stupid). In this quaint little story set in the quaint little Scottish Highlands, this realistic range of accents is on full display – while the heroes are, of course, American (think of it like An American Werewolf In London, except that they start singing instead of getting bitten. It’s horrific).
My main problem with the film, though, is that a mythic return to the Eighteenth Century is very much more attractive as a dimly imagined myth, and that when you’re invited to step into the past, you’d much rather it stayed in the past. While the village is supposed to have made a deal with God, it seems more like hell on Earth.
It goes like this. Back in 1754 – two centuries to the day before the story is set – Brigadoon was put under attack by witches, and prayed for deliverance. So they were snatched out of time to escape destruction, and the village now drifts back into reality for just one day every hundred years. So far, so intriguing. Unfortunately, in the film producers’ quest to expand an intriguing one-line idea to as long and turgid a movie as possible, they then strip as much magic as possible out of the story: audiences will swallow an enchanted village that lives one day a century without batting an eyelid, they reckon, but we couldn’t possibly ask them to believe in witches.
But if the big threat in the movie isn’t the return of the witches in a new sorcerous assault, or if it’s implied God didn’t save Brigadoon from an attack by real witches at all, what could the God-fearing people of the village have yanked themselves out of history’s progress to save themselves from?
Ah.
Well, there’s a clue in tourist Jeff’s line on witches, “Oh, we have ’em; we just pronounce it differently,” but the village’s raison d’être is made quite explicit by the schoolteacher: “Oh, I know there’s no such thing,” he says of witches – just women they didn’t approve of. Yes, Brigadoon is social conservatism gone mad. The terrifying ‘attack’ and threat of ‘destruction’ was not physical but their unelected leaders’ view of moral, and the religious maniacs cried out in their surety that they couldn’t win by persuasion, ‘Stop the world – we want to get off!’
The biggest surprise to modern audiences, more even than the jawdropping misogyny and wandering accents, is that the tourists are American and the scary intolerant control freaks living in another century British. Nowadays, surely the film would have to have visitors from this side of the Atlantic discovering a mysterious village in some landlocked part of the United States that vanished from reality for fear the gays are getting married.
Clearly, some of the filmmakers realised that this was a monstrously scary form of social conservatism even for 1954, because it’s deeply schizophrenic about its sympathies. It’s a huge romance, with one of our modern American souls falling in love with the place and one of its people – and who couldn’t fall for Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse dancing around each other, and hope that love conquers all?
Well, his friend Jeff, for one, who as played by Van Johnson is a breath of urban, cynical sanity, with lines like “I’m a strange man, and you’re a mighty strange woman,” and “Is it formal, or shall I wear my Napoleon hat?” And then you discover that – jerking against the chain of the romance, the script and the enchanted hellhole – some of the young people are desperate to escape (and no, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have people forgetting / missing the outside world so much after two nights for them, but I’ll let that pass), and it turns out that no-one can ever leave, or the whole spell will collapse. You can’t even do an ‘exchange’. Gee, thanks. How much more repressive can this set-up get? I’m glad you asked, because of course one of the poor desperate prisoners makes a break for it, and there’s a hunt. Which, inevitably, requires a killing, even if it’s accidental (and again, I sense the scriptwriter who’s in love with this conservative utopia wresting the script back from the one who isn’t for a moment to stop the village dictators being so blatantly the villains by deliberate murder).
The idea at the heart of Brigadoon is a powerful one, borrowed from a German folk tale and borrowed by many other stories in turn, even a secret location protected by a “Brigadoon Circuit” in one of the finest Doctor Who novels – though in Robin of Sherwood’s Cromm Cruac and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) : A Man of Substance, both splendid pieces of television, each village has more blatantly made a deal with a devil – but not only is the film dreadfully dull, its social and sexual politics are diabolical.
On the other hand, this is just the film you want to watch to make you appreciate the go-ahead, all mod cons, funky charms of Bournemouth, should anyone be heading there soon.
Perhaps it’s that I lack patience with musical theatre – I know, dock my gay points – except in rare cases, and that though Almost Like Being In Love is a good tune, the rest of the songs here are syrupy and go on for ever. Perhaps it’s the distracting accents. Now, every American producer knows that there are only three ‘English’ accents: upper class (evil, which permits intelligence, or inbred and very dim); Cockerney (lovable, poor and stupid); and Scotch / Oirish, which are of course the same (rustic, poor, quaint and stupid). In this quaint little story set in the quaint little Scottish Highlands, this realistic range of accents is on full display – while the heroes are, of course, American (think of it like An American Werewolf In London, except that they start singing instead of getting bitten. It’s horrific).
Welcome To Brigadoon – You’ll Never Leave
My main problem with the film, though, is that a mythic return to the Eighteenth Century is very much more attractive as a dimly imagined myth, and that when you’re invited to step into the past, you’d much rather it stayed in the past. While the village is supposed to have made a deal with God, it seems more like hell on Earth.
It goes like this. Back in 1754 – two centuries to the day before the story is set – Brigadoon was put under attack by witches, and prayed for deliverance. So they were snatched out of time to escape destruction, and the village now drifts back into reality for just one day every hundred years. So far, so intriguing. Unfortunately, in the film producers’ quest to expand an intriguing one-line idea to as long and turgid a movie as possible, they then strip as much magic as possible out of the story: audiences will swallow an enchanted village that lives one day a century without batting an eyelid, they reckon, but we couldn’t possibly ask them to believe in witches.
But if the big threat in the movie isn’t the return of the witches in a new sorcerous assault, or if it’s implied God didn’t save Brigadoon from an attack by real witches at all, what could the God-fearing people of the village have yanked themselves out of history’s progress to save themselves from?
Ah.
Well, there’s a clue in tourist Jeff’s line on witches, “Oh, we have ’em; we just pronounce it differently,” but the village’s raison d’être is made quite explicit by the schoolteacher: “Oh, I know there’s no such thing,” he says of witches – just women they didn’t approve of. Yes, Brigadoon is social conservatism gone mad. The terrifying ‘attack’ and threat of ‘destruction’ was not physical but their unelected leaders’ view of moral, and the religious maniacs cried out in their surety that they couldn’t win by persuasion, ‘Stop the world – we want to get off!’
The biggest surprise to modern audiences, more even than the jawdropping misogyny and wandering accents, is that the tourists are American and the scary intolerant control freaks living in another century British. Nowadays, surely the film would have to have visitors from this side of the Atlantic discovering a mysterious village in some landlocked part of the United States that vanished from reality for fear the gays are getting married.
Clearly, some of the filmmakers realised that this was a monstrously scary form of social conservatism even for 1954, because it’s deeply schizophrenic about its sympathies. It’s a huge romance, with one of our modern American souls falling in love with the place and one of its people – and who couldn’t fall for Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse dancing around each other, and hope that love conquers all?
Well, his friend Jeff, for one, who as played by Van Johnson is a breath of urban, cynical sanity, with lines like “I’m a strange man, and you’re a mighty strange woman,” and “Is it formal, or shall I wear my Napoleon hat?” And then you discover that – jerking against the chain of the romance, the script and the enchanted hellhole – some of the young people are desperate to escape (and no, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have people forgetting / missing the outside world so much after two nights for them, but I’ll let that pass), and it turns out that no-one can ever leave, or the whole spell will collapse. You can’t even do an ‘exchange’. Gee, thanks. How much more repressive can this set-up get? I’m glad you asked, because of course one of the poor desperate prisoners makes a break for it, and there’s a hunt. Which, inevitably, requires a killing, even if it’s accidental (and again, I sense the scriptwriter who’s in love with this conservative utopia wresting the script back from the one who isn’t for a moment to stop the village dictators being so blatantly the villains by deliberate murder).
The idea at the heart of Brigadoon is a powerful one, borrowed from a German folk tale and borrowed by many other stories in turn, even a secret location protected by a “Brigadoon Circuit” in one of the finest Doctor Who novels – though in Robin of Sherwood’s Cromm Cruac and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) : A Man of Substance, both splendid pieces of television, each village has more blatantly made a deal with a devil – but not only is the film dreadfully dull, its social and sexual politics are diabolical.
On the other hand, this is just the film you want to watch to make you appreciate the go-ahead, all mod cons, funky charms of Bournemouth, should anyone be heading there soon.
Labels: Bigotry, Film, Liberal Democrat Conferences, Music, Religion, Reviews, Robin Hood, Scotland, Utopia
Sunday, September 06, 2009
DVD Taster: The Twin Dilemma
Tomorrow, a new Doctor Who DVD goes on sale. The Twin Dilemma is Colin Baker’s first story as the Doctor, and he’s terrific in it. As for everything else – well, its reputation is less terrific. When, in a week and a half, DWM reveals the results of their vote on “all 200” Doctor Who television stories, I confidently expect this to be near the bottom of the poll. Can neither Maurice Denham, Kevin R McNally nor a villain that’s a cheap Jabba the Hut knock-off save this 1984 B-Movie adventure? In a word, no. But it isn’t all bad…
This has always been my favourite scene from The Twin Dilemma. After the deliberately off-key and off-putting Doctor essentially emerging straight from a regeneration into a nervous breakdown the previous week, this was the scene where I knew I was going to love Colin Baker. His evident joy in cutting a dash and reciting at the top of his voice may not be infectious for Peri – scripted to say she’s tired, but with the mini-skirted Nicola Bryant visibly frozen too and clearly not having to act being pissed off – but it worked for me. Colin looks like he’s having the time of his life (and rather good-looking here, too), with his infamously multicoloured coat for once working a treat, standing out brilliantly against the bleak grey landscape and evidently keeping the actor much warmer than his companion. There’s a lovely bit of music underscoring it all, the Doctor gets to work out and seek out a clever way in, there’s a probably deliberately funny exaggeration of the traditional roles of the Doctor as wide-eyed explorer and companion as feebly fed up, but most of all it taught me that, if you’re frozen to death in some depressing wilderness and still have miles to walk, you’re best off being very loud to keep your spirits up. As the South Wales police officers who once picked me up in the middle of the night, yomping the last few miles to a particularly unpromising by-election after many hours of hitch-hiking and singing Shirley Bassey Bond themes with everything I could must muster against a hailstorm, would no doubt testify.
Colin Baker’s verve and enthusiasm is by a long way the most entertaining thing about this story. Unfortunately, the dreadful and unwisely protracted regeneration crisis writing means the Doctor is also often the worst thing about it. The concept of Colin’s Doctor was a cold ‘Mr Darcy’ figure that could be gradually unwrapped, but despite the actor working wonders with rotten material, the script editor was utterly hopeless at writing that overarching story. Randomly making him a bully, a coward and a loon doesn’t conceal a deeper layer; it’s just wrong all the way down. He runs from endearing and stirring to deeply unlikeable, without any natural dramatic progression, while Peri even lectures him on compassion, flabbergasting after the previous Doctor has literally just given his life for her (it’s difficult not to conclude that she fancied the old him and is now grumpy at not getting a shag before he ‘died’). And showing this story at the end of a season blighted poor Colin’s Doctor: writers and fans alike got stuck on the idea that his post-regeneration trauma was ‘what he’s like’, despite almost every other Doctor’s opening story being very different to how they settled.
I’m fond of many elements of this story, but I don’t rush to watch it. While Colin is striking, almost anything else that can go wrong, does. Save for an intriguing frieze and the odd model shot, the design is shocking, and it’s a thoroughly rotten B-Movie cliché of a script, full of appalling science and worse characterisation. The guest actors range from rather good to awful, but even the good ones can only work with what they’re given. Future Pirates of the Caribbean star Kevin R McNally has a thoroughly unlikeable character in worse outfits than the Doctor’s; Edwin Richfield is wasted as a monster (in theory one of the most powerful enemies the Doctor’s ever faced, but largely ignored in lists of gods and demons because it’s a bit rubbish); and Maurice Denham, emerging with some dignity, perhaps tellingly does best when acting ‘weary’. But if you want one reason to watch this – and there’s not much more – it’s always Colin. Making you believe that a bit of turned earth was once a beautiful grove on an alien world by words alone, making “Thou craggy knob!” entertaining or exploding “Villain! Murderer! A thousand currants on your head!” (perhaps the DVD will tell me what the real line is, but from past subtitling fiascos I doubt it), his vocal style’s what I remember, but today it’s his physicality that strikes me: closing in menacingly on Peri, deranged; leaning on the console; just walking round a gun; pointing a dramatic finger of doom; sprawling across a lab; striding up that hill. He’s endlessly watchable.
Extras include a piece on fashion and the Doctors – I suspect Colin will not be kind about his coat – along with the usual commentary, text notes and Photo Gallery, with contemporary items from Breakfast Time and Blue Peter. I remember the latter, even down to the sound effect when Colin, in full costume as the Doctor, does some ‘Time Lord magic’ to make the cat disappear. I suspect David Tennant, only a few months older than I am, saw the same edition and that’s why he vowed never to do interviews ‘in character’, but only as ‘David Tennant’. There’s also, I’m told, a trailer for whole Doctor Who DVD range (have they finally dug out those commissioned-then-dropped ‘also available’ trailers?), though apparently Colin doesn’t come out of it well. The extra I’m most looking forward to is Stripped For Action – The Sixth Doctor, a look at one of the most vibrant and memorable periods for Doctor Who comics (not least for the character of Frobisher, an occasional penguin). The one I’m most grinding my teeth over is that, yet again, there’s no isolated music provided. It’s not Malcolm Clarke’s best score, with rather too many unsubtle clangs, but I enjoy listening to them and – noting no ‘making of’ feature this time, either – it’s hard not to conclude that, increasingly, they’re doing this once award-winning, standard-setting range on the cheap.
On the bright side, The Twin Dilemma’s release means Colin is the first Doctor to have every one of his stories available on DVD, and with this and Delta and the Bannermen out of the way this year, the only way is up.
Colin these days is immensely pleased that he now has more action figures than any of the other Twentieth Century Doctors, with “Old Sixie” available in his infamous coat of many colours, in a sober blue version and in the mud-covered Peter Davison outfit he’s still wearing at the start of this story. You might be able to track down the novelisation by script editor Eric Saward, who may have made a total pig’s ear of the original script but whose book, as I’ve written before, at least does something interesting with it. Far more interesting, though, is Paul Cornell’s Circular Time, a set of short Doctor Who audio dramas with one a re-imagined prequel to The Twin Dilemma. It’s almost worth putting up with the original to get that. Astoundingly, one of the worst guidebooks available on the series – John Kenneth Muir’s obvious, overpriced and often idiotic A Critical History of Doctor Who On Television – not only likes this story but makes some interesting observations for once, arguing that it borrows from cop drama with a crime boss, getaway vehicle with false number plates, and the Doctor and Hugo each fit the idea of flawed cops (fallen cop trying to atone and revenge-ridden vigilante cop). It’s not worth shelling out for that entry alone, though. Besides, a list of “50 Reasons To Love The Twin Dilemma” I once found online was far more enjoyable to read, and I even agreed with twelve of them…
Final (leading) question: if, for some baffling reason, you were dead-set on calling a story “The Twin Dilemma,” and if, for some utterly inexplicable reason, your script were only to feature one of those two key words, which would you pick? Would you supply endless scenes of terrible teen actors who happen to be twins, or remember to include some sort of dilemma? Consider your answer more carefully than the script editor did.
That Golden Moment
“The shades of night were falling fastTen minutes into Part Two, the new Doctor appears to have settled down – if only temporarily – and, ironically, this brings one of the most extrovert scenes in a far from hesitant performance. Leaving the TARDIS for the cold, gritty wilderness of Titan III, the Doctor goes striding up a rocky hill, exuberantly decrying lines from Longfellow in an hilariously misguided attempt to ‘cheer Peri up’. She’s tagging along behind, complaining and unimpressed (“Who cares!”) until he finds a metallic outcrop and, searching the surface, presents her with a door into an underground passage…
As through an Alpine village passed
A youth, who bore, ’mid snow and ice,
A banner with a strange device:
Excelsior!”
This has always been my favourite scene from The Twin Dilemma. After the deliberately off-key and off-putting Doctor essentially emerging straight from a regeneration into a nervous breakdown the previous week, this was the scene where I knew I was going to love Colin Baker. His evident joy in cutting a dash and reciting at the top of his voice may not be infectious for Peri – scripted to say she’s tired, but with the mini-skirted Nicola Bryant visibly frozen too and clearly not having to act being pissed off – but it worked for me. Colin looks like he’s having the time of his life (and rather good-looking here, too), with his infamously multicoloured coat for once working a treat, standing out brilliantly against the bleak grey landscape and evidently keeping the actor much warmer than his companion. There’s a lovely bit of music underscoring it all, the Doctor gets to work out and seek out a clever way in, there’s a probably deliberately funny exaggeration of the traditional roles of the Doctor as wide-eyed explorer and companion as feebly fed up, but most of all it taught me that, if you’re frozen to death in some depressing wilderness and still have miles to walk, you’re best off being very loud to keep your spirits up. As the South Wales police officers who once picked me up in the middle of the night, yomping the last few miles to a particularly unpromising by-election after many hours of hitch-hiking and singing Shirley Bassey Bond themes with everything I could must muster against a hailstorm, would no doubt testify.
Something Else To Look Out For
Colin Baker’s verve and enthusiasm is by a long way the most entertaining thing about this story. Unfortunately, the dreadful and unwisely protracted regeneration crisis writing means the Doctor is also often the worst thing about it. The concept of Colin’s Doctor was a cold ‘Mr Darcy’ figure that could be gradually unwrapped, but despite the actor working wonders with rotten material, the script editor was utterly hopeless at writing that overarching story. Randomly making him a bully, a coward and a loon doesn’t conceal a deeper layer; it’s just wrong all the way down. He runs from endearing and stirring to deeply unlikeable, without any natural dramatic progression, while Peri even lectures him on compassion, flabbergasting after the previous Doctor has literally just given his life for her (it’s difficult not to conclude that she fancied the old him and is now grumpy at not getting a shag before he ‘died’). And showing this story at the end of a season blighted poor Colin’s Doctor: writers and fans alike got stuck on the idea that his post-regeneration trauma was ‘what he’s like’, despite almost every other Doctor’s opening story being very different to how they settled.
I’m fond of many elements of this story, but I don’t rush to watch it. While Colin is striking, almost anything else that can go wrong, does. Save for an intriguing frieze and the odd model shot, the design is shocking, and it’s a thoroughly rotten B-Movie cliché of a script, full of appalling science and worse characterisation. The guest actors range from rather good to awful, but even the good ones can only work with what they’re given. Future Pirates of the Caribbean star Kevin R McNally has a thoroughly unlikeable character in worse outfits than the Doctor’s; Edwin Richfield is wasted as a monster (in theory one of the most powerful enemies the Doctor’s ever faced, but largely ignored in lists of gods and demons because it’s a bit rubbish); and Maurice Denham, emerging with some dignity, perhaps tellingly does best when acting ‘weary’. But if you want one reason to watch this – and there’s not much more – it’s always Colin. Making you believe that a bit of turned earth was once a beautiful grove on an alien world by words alone, making “Thou craggy knob!” entertaining or exploding “Villain! Murderer! A thousand currants on your head!” (perhaps the DVD will tell me what the real line is, but from past subtitling fiascos I doubt it), his vocal style’s what I remember, but today it’s his physicality that strikes me: closing in menacingly on Peri, deranged; leaning on the console; just walking round a gun; pointing a dramatic finger of doom; sprawling across a lab; striding up that hill. He’s endlessly watchable.
Extras include a piece on fashion and the Doctors – I suspect Colin will not be kind about his coat – along with the usual commentary, text notes and Photo Gallery, with contemporary items from Breakfast Time and Blue Peter. I remember the latter, even down to the sound effect when Colin, in full costume as the Doctor, does some ‘Time Lord magic’ to make the cat disappear. I suspect David Tennant, only a few months older than I am, saw the same edition and that’s why he vowed never to do interviews ‘in character’, but only as ‘David Tennant’. There’s also, I’m told, a trailer for whole Doctor Who DVD range (have they finally dug out those commissioned-then-dropped ‘also available’ trailers?), though apparently Colin doesn’t come out of it well. The extra I’m most looking forward to is Stripped For Action – The Sixth Doctor, a look at one of the most vibrant and memorable periods for Doctor Who comics (not least for the character of Frobisher, an occasional penguin). The one I’m most grinding my teeth over is that, yet again, there’s no isolated music provided. It’s not Malcolm Clarke’s best score, with rather too many unsubtle clangs, but I enjoy listening to them and – noting no ‘making of’ feature this time, either – it’s hard not to conclude that, increasingly, they’re doing this once award-winning, standard-setting range on the cheap.
On the bright side, The Twin Dilemma’s release means Colin is the first Doctor to have every one of his stories available on DVD, and with this and Delta and the Bannermen out of the way this year, the only way is up.
Colin these days is immensely pleased that he now has more action figures than any of the other Twentieth Century Doctors, with “Old Sixie” available in his infamous coat of many colours, in a sober blue version and in the mud-covered Peter Davison outfit he’s still wearing at the start of this story. You might be able to track down the novelisation by script editor Eric Saward, who may have made a total pig’s ear of the original script but whose book, as I’ve written before, at least does something interesting with it. Far more interesting, though, is Paul Cornell’s Circular Time, a set of short Doctor Who audio dramas with one a re-imagined prequel to The Twin Dilemma. It’s almost worth putting up with the original to get that. Astoundingly, one of the worst guidebooks available on the series – John Kenneth Muir’s obvious, overpriced and often idiotic A Critical History of Doctor Who On Television – not only likes this story but makes some interesting observations for once, arguing that it borrows from cop drama with a crime boss, getaway vehicle with false number plates, and the Doctor and Hugo each fit the idea of flawed cops (fallen cop trying to atone and revenge-ridden vigilante cop). It’s not worth shelling out for that entry alone, though. Besides, a list of “50 Reasons To Love The Twin Dilemma” I once found online was far more enjoyable to read, and I even agreed with twelve of them…
Final (leading) question: if, for some baffling reason, you were dead-set on calling a story “The Twin Dilemma,” and if, for some utterly inexplicable reason, your script were only to feature one of those two key words, which would you pick? Would you supply endless scenes of terrible teen actors who happen to be twins, or remember to include some sort of dilemma? Consider your answer more carefully than the script editor did.
Labels: Big Finish, Colin Baker, Doctor Who, Doctor Who Magazine, DVD, DVD Tasters, Reviews
Monday, August 31, 2009
Daniel Hannan – A Reckoning?
I made a flippant aside on MEP Daniel Hannan last week, then spotted fellow Lib Dem blogger Mark Thompson taking a diametrically opposite view. I did the Liberal thing and chipped in to argue; forced to think harder about what I was writing, I came up with something more thorough and rather better in his comments thread.
Mr Hannan can have his opinions (contradictorily, if he likes). So what? I can have mine, too. Free speech doesn’t mean he should be immune from criticism. And if a politician implies different things about immigration to different audiences, gosh, colour me stunned. It would hardly be the first time an ambitious Tory made libertarian noises to one crowd, and sent out a Powellite dog-whistle to others. Did he say, ‘Enoch Powell is my hero, but I would also like to point out that I have a substantially different view on immigration and race’? Of course not. Confronting both audiences with a single message spoils the whole effect for an ambitious politician, whatever their party and whatever the two messages they’re carefully keeping apart, and perhaps most of all in pandering to racism to make yourself look like a right-wing tough guy contrast to that anaemic Mr Cameron.
So imagine my surprise when I got back home a couple of days later to find that I’d grievously offended the Dan Hannan fan club, to the extent that they’ve plastered the thread with outrage at me! Tee hee :D
I’ve ploughed my way through it all, and it’s not terribly edifying. I reckon I’ve made my case, so there’s not a lot of point in replying forty places down to say the same thing again. If you’ve got half an hour to spare, though, you can read it yourself and make up your own mind. There’s a piece by Nick Barlow that links to us both, too.
Unfortunately, I think my problem with what’s there – not repeating my original points – is rather less with the criticism of me than with how Mark seems to react to criticism of him. He exploded onto the Lib Dem blogosphere and national media with an unusual blog piece that combined dogged hard analysis and inspiration. It’s a shame that to ‘prove’ his point about Mr Hannan, Mark’s commitment to linguistic accuracy is so much less rigorous than his statistical accuracy. When both Asquith and Duncan Stott take issue with Mark’s ‘quoting’ of Tony Blair, first putting it in context and then providing what Mr Blair actually said… Well, Mark’s been caught out being very misleading to make a point. But, bizarrely, Mark still sticks to it. I loathed Mr Blair, and argued many times that he was pure poison to British politics. But I didn’t have to change what he said to make my case – it was quite bad enough.
So, Mark, it’s cheap and stupid to state that a Conservative explicitly choosing to pick and praise Enoch Powell as his sole example of a British political hero is exactly equivalent to a Prime Minister expressing a politely mealy-mouthed tribute with caveats when faced with the death of a formerly important political figure. What’s cheaper and more stupid is that Mark pretends political statements never have a context… And that, to prove it (as Asquith and Duncan demonstrate) he has to ignore all context to Mr Hannan’s comments, then deliberately hack away the context to Mr Blair’s. Ignore the things Mr Hannan didn’t say, and hide the things Mr Blair did? That’s not an honest argument. And neither is Mark constantly protesting that free speech means that a politician can say whatever he likes – which he can – but that then somehow wrong for anyone to exercise their own free speech in criticising him (I would never say he doesn’t have the right to say what he did; but if people then disagree with something you’ve said, you don’t bleat ‘Not fair – they must shut up’!). I thought what I had to say about Mr Hannan was sharpened and improved by engaging with Mark in debate about it; it’s a shame his idea of engagement appears to be both one-sided and misleading.
I say the above because I’m disappointed by a Lib Dem blogger who I’ve read being logical, thought-provoking and – though I frequently disagree with him – fair by his own lights. This twisting words and arguments to fake up a point… He’s better than that. All Mr Hannan’s supporters flocking about to spit at anyone who has the temerity to argue with him are just funny, though.
I write a reasoned, evidence-based argument about political context; anonymous Hannan supporters first deny that any politics has any context at all, then make up a context for me (hypocrisy? What hypocrisy?) as a smear, that I’m “left” and Downing Street’s my favourite. Heh! Who knew? It’s almost as if they were utterly unable to answer a single one of my arguments, and had to sling abuse in exactly the same way I didn’t. I can’t remember the last time ‘criticism’ of me’s made me smile so much. I believe the word is ‘pwned’.
The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that this was originally the middle of my previous post, Wuthering, Wuthering, Wuthering… I’d intended to write a quick little compilation post, putting together a paragraph or two on each of three or so things I was thinking about this evening. Being me, they grew. I posted it, then Richard pointed out that ‘light-hearted but lengthy piece about a book / lashings of hard politics / light-hearted but lengthy piece about another book’ didn’t really go together. Ironically given the subject of this post, in woozily writing more and more, I’d lost sight of the context. So here it is, plucked out on its own and probably looking harsher than I’d intended as a result (Richard did suggest the alternative of leaving this where it was and pruning it down to just two key paragraphs, but being me…).
Mr Hannan can have his opinions (contradictorily, if he likes). So what? I can have mine, too. Free speech doesn’t mean he should be immune from criticism. And if a politician implies different things about immigration to different audiences, gosh, colour me stunned. It would hardly be the first time an ambitious Tory made libertarian noises to one crowd, and sent out a Powellite dog-whistle to others. Did he say, ‘Enoch Powell is my hero, but I would also like to point out that I have a substantially different view on immigration and race’? Of course not. Confronting both audiences with a single message spoils the whole effect for an ambitious politician, whatever their party and whatever the two messages they’re carefully keeping apart, and perhaps most of all in pandering to racism to make yourself look like a right-wing tough guy contrast to that anaemic Mr Cameron.
So imagine my surprise when I got back home a couple of days later to find that I’d grievously offended the Dan Hannan fan club, to the extent that they’ve plastered the thread with outrage at me! Tee hee :D
I’ve ploughed my way through it all, and it’s not terribly edifying. I reckon I’ve made my case, so there’s not a lot of point in replying forty places down to say the same thing again. If you’ve got half an hour to spare, though, you can read it yourself and make up your own mind. There’s a piece by Nick Barlow that links to us both, too.
Unfortunately, I think my problem with what’s there – not repeating my original points – is rather less with the criticism of me than with how Mark seems to react to criticism of him. He exploded onto the Lib Dem blogosphere and national media with an unusual blog piece that combined dogged hard analysis and inspiration. It’s a shame that to ‘prove’ his point about Mr Hannan, Mark’s commitment to linguistic accuracy is so much less rigorous than his statistical accuracy. When both Asquith and Duncan Stott take issue with Mark’s ‘quoting’ of Tony Blair, first putting it in context and then providing what Mr Blair actually said… Well, Mark’s been caught out being very misleading to make a point. But, bizarrely, Mark still sticks to it. I loathed Mr Blair, and argued many times that he was pure poison to British politics. But I didn’t have to change what he said to make my case – it was quite bad enough.
So, Mark, it’s cheap and stupid to state that a Conservative explicitly choosing to pick and praise Enoch Powell as his sole example of a British political hero is exactly equivalent to a Prime Minister expressing a politely mealy-mouthed tribute with caveats when faced with the death of a formerly important political figure. What’s cheaper and more stupid is that Mark pretends political statements never have a context… And that, to prove it (as Asquith and Duncan demonstrate) he has to ignore all context to Mr Hannan’s comments, then deliberately hack away the context to Mr Blair’s. Ignore the things Mr Hannan didn’t say, and hide the things Mr Blair did? That’s not an honest argument. And neither is Mark constantly protesting that free speech means that a politician can say whatever he likes – which he can – but that then somehow wrong for anyone to exercise their own free speech in criticising him (I would never say he doesn’t have the right to say what he did; but if people then disagree with something you’ve said, you don’t bleat ‘Not fair – they must shut up’!). I thought what I had to say about Mr Hannan was sharpened and improved by engaging with Mark in debate about it; it’s a shame his idea of engagement appears to be both one-sided and misleading.
I say the above because I’m disappointed by a Lib Dem blogger who I’ve read being logical, thought-provoking and – though I frequently disagree with him – fair by his own lights. This twisting words and arguments to fake up a point… He’s better than that. All Mr Hannan’s supporters flocking about to spit at anyone who has the temerity to argue with him are just funny, though.
I write a reasoned, evidence-based argument about political context; anonymous Hannan supporters first deny that any politics has any context at all, then make up a context for me (hypocrisy? What hypocrisy?) as a smear, that I’m “left” and Downing Street’s my favourite. Heh! Who knew? It’s almost as if they were utterly unable to answer a single one of my arguments, and had to sling abuse in exactly the same way I didn’t. I can’t remember the last time ‘criticism’ of me’s made me smile so much. I believe the word is ‘pwned’.
The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that this was originally the middle of my previous post, Wuthering, Wuthering, Wuthering… I’d intended to write a quick little compilation post, putting together a paragraph or two on each of three or so things I was thinking about this evening. Being me, they grew. I posted it, then Richard pointed out that ‘light-hearted but lengthy piece about a book / lashings of hard politics / light-hearted but lengthy piece about another book’ didn’t really go together. Ironically given the subject of this post, in woozily writing more and more, I’d lost sight of the context. So here it is, plucked out on its own and probably looking harsher than I’d intended as a result (Richard did suggest the alternative of leaving this where it was and pruning it down to just two key paragraphs, but being me…).
Labels: Bigotry, Blogs, Conservatives, The Golden Dozen
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Wuthering, Wuthering, Wuthering…
Tonight’s big TV event is ITV1’s new version of Wuthering Heights, for which I have an especially nerdy anecdote and a couple of fabulous YouTubes. It’s the great romantic story where the ‘hero’ is a brooding psychopath… Gordon Brown brilliantly took the man as his role model without looking at the context – what today’s called a “Daniel Hannan” (on which note, I Reckon Mark Thompson’s not covered himself in glory). In other news, Richard and I have been away visiting our parents, though I swapped groovy Manchester Pride for the dentist and re-read Professor Bernice Summerfield’s The Joy Device…
It’s many years since I’ve been to Manchester Pride – perhaps even before that was its name. And tempting as it was to pop along yesterday while we were in town, we drove back home instead; it was a lovely couple of days with parents, and friends, and sister, and brother, and nephew, and niece, but unfortunately set off with a dental visit involving lots of drilling, infection, and having to make three follow-up appointments. So with the pain, the painkillers and the antibiotics, Richard sensed I was a little woozy and not up to much. Don’t be too surprised, then, if I only write little nibbles this evening.
On a special Pride note, though, I refer you to John Abrams, who I’m certain was there and who wrote three excellent pieces at the end of last week: on gay people’s progress; celebrating the life of Alan Turing; and, yay for John, winning an apology and a correction from Auntie Beeb when they talked provable rubbish!
I know what you’re thinking. ‘Alex is going to do a 4000-word review of a 162-year-old book. I can’t wait!’ Well… No, sorry. It’s, oh dear, about twenty years since I read it, which means that my main memory of the book is just about the only exam in my life I’ve really enjoyed. It was largely because it was my final A-Level exam (yikes, nineteen years ago! And congratulations to our sixteen-year-old nephew, who we saw this week after doing rather well on his GCSEs), the second General Studies paper, but also because it gave me a chance to camp it up with a bit of creative writing (must have gone down well, too: they gave me an A). I answered all the questions bar one, then entertained myself with all the time I had left writing an essay which asked for an assessment of works of art in different media – so I compared the Emily Brontë book, the Laurence Olivier film and the Kate Bush song. Happy days!
You’ll probably remember, as I do, the famous video of shimmering white Kate dancing against black for her first and biggest hit. You may not be so familiar, though, with the alternative video of our Kate weirding it up in red, in the forest.
And I’m willing to bet that you haven’t seen Robert and Alistair Lock’s rather fabulous, tasteless home-made version, Mothering Swines. You should.
In the meantime, the big question for tonight and tomorrow’s new adaptation is – will they do the whole book, or just the bits people usually remember? The key thing I remember from reading the novel is being surprised that half of the book is Wuthering Heights: The Next Generation. Oops! Is that a spoiler? Depends if they put it in…
…So I’d better not write anything about A Pocket Full of Rye, the first Agatha Christie I’ve ever read – on an impulse from our local library, picking up the first Miss Marple for which I couldn’t remember the story from the TV – as, though the differences between the book and the Joan Hickson adaptation are fascinating, ITV1 are mounting a new version of that next week. Even though they rudely name the series after a place I used to walk to all the time in my teens, rather than Miss Marple the character. All I’ll say is that: surprisingly, Mrs Christie’s novel is very funny in parts (and far less abbreviated); that for a couple of years, I used to live in the same Essex village that Joan Hickson did, and she wasn’t as loveable as the hard-eyed angel of vengeance that she played; that the person behind the murders was indeed one of the three I mentally shortlisted, though (again surprisingly) one of them didn’t make it to the 1985 TV at all; and that the probable reason I didn’t remember their identity from TV is that, though they have the same name and basic place in the narrative, their character is hugely different.
…Er, has been moved!
If you can track down this novel – which wasn’t so much released as escaped – it’s one of Benny’s most entertaining adventures, despite expectations. By all accounts, Justin Richards was writing half the books at enormous speed (though I’m waiting to get hold of Simon Guerrier’s big book of Benny to find out The Inside Story), and most of his, ah, passed the time adequately, usually with walking corpses. But you wouldn’t rave about them. But then came The Joy Device, the penultimate book of the range, which I read while having a joyless time staying at a god-awful hotel in New Brighton for the job I was in at the time. And it cheered me up enormously. Put simply, Benny decides that being an academic who spends her life sorting through an art collection doesn’t sound thrilling, and goes off on a trip to the Rim of known space for excitement, adventure and really wild things, with her own pet Indiana Jones as a tour guide (yes, he is a male version of Benny). What could possibly go wrong?
Well, of course there are muggers, murderers and a Maltese Falcon-like collection of gangsters hunting a mysterious artefact, but Benny pretty much misses all of that. Because the thing I really enjoyed about this book, and have just enjoyed all over again on grabbing a book to comfort myself with when off to the dentist, is that her friends worry that she’ll either get herself killed or like it too much back on the edge, and set off after her to get there before her and, essentially, spoil all her fun. And, yes, that in itself is a spoiler, but it’s not the biggest challenge to work out: every peril’s defused, every threat moved out of the way, all to make sure that before she gets into a thrilling situation it’s been made as boring as possible. And it’s very funny. Particularly the very literal angel (though don’t look at the pretty cover too closely).
The bit I always remember is – unsurprisingly to anyone who’s followed Benny’s adventures – in a bar, though coffee’s a bigger threat. There’s a lot of fun here. Boredom is, of course, by definition not that exciting, but having to stretch every sinew to set up boredom is very entertaining indeed. Yes, it’s full of appalling clichés (mainly from self-buffing adventurer Harper Dent), but only to send them all up mercilessly, and there’s an inspired idea at the heart of it all, too. Dorpfeld’s Prism, the MacGuffin everyone’s chasing, has the effect of blinding you to reality and making everything seem so much rosier than it really is – which is exactly what Benny’s friends are arranging to happen to her. It’s just that while the gangsters and wheeler-dealers want it as an escape from their vicious existences, it’s boring Bernice senseless.
Pretty much every contemporary review I remember reading of this said how dreadfully clichéd it was. I suspect by that time too many of the books had spiralled into such a grim ordeal that everyone had forgotten they were meant to be amusing. If you read it, don’t make the same mistake. If you want grim and horrid, grab a Brontë.
It’s many years since I’ve been to Manchester Pride – perhaps even before that was its name. And tempting as it was to pop along yesterday while we were in town, we drove back home instead; it was a lovely couple of days with parents, and friends, and sister, and brother, and nephew, and niece, but unfortunately set off with a dental visit involving lots of drilling, infection, and having to make three follow-up appointments. So with the pain, the painkillers and the antibiotics, Richard sensed I was a little woozy and not up to much. Don’t be too surprised, then, if I only write little nibbles this evening.
On a special Pride note, though, I refer you to John Abrams, who I’m certain was there and who wrote three excellent pieces at the end of last week: on gay people’s progress; celebrating the life of Alan Turing; and, yay for John, winning an apology and a correction from Auntie Beeb when they talked provable rubbish!
Wuthering Heights
I know what you’re thinking. ‘Alex is going to do a 4000-word review of a 162-year-old book. I can’t wait!’ Well… No, sorry. It’s, oh dear, about twenty years since I read it, which means that my main memory of the book is just about the only exam in my life I’ve really enjoyed. It was largely because it was my final A-Level exam (yikes, nineteen years ago! And congratulations to our sixteen-year-old nephew, who we saw this week after doing rather well on his GCSEs), the second General Studies paper, but also because it gave me a chance to camp it up with a bit of creative writing (must have gone down well, too: they gave me an A). I answered all the questions bar one, then entertained myself with all the time I had left writing an essay which asked for an assessment of works of art in different media – so I compared the Emily Brontë book, the Laurence Olivier film and the Kate Bush song. Happy days!
You’ll probably remember, as I do, the famous video of shimmering white Kate dancing against black for her first and biggest hit. You may not be so familiar, though, with the alternative video of our Kate weirding it up in red, in the forest.
And I’m willing to bet that you haven’t seen Robert and Alistair Lock’s rather fabulous, tasteless home-made version, Mothering Swines. You should.
In the meantime, the big question for tonight and tomorrow’s new adaptation is – will they do the whole book, or just the bits people usually remember? The key thing I remember from reading the novel is being surprised that half of the book is Wuthering Heights: The Next Generation. Oops! Is that a spoiler? Depends if they put it in…
…So I’d better not write anything about A Pocket Full of Rye, the first Agatha Christie I’ve ever read – on an impulse from our local library, picking up the first Miss Marple for which I couldn’t remember the story from the TV – as, though the differences between the book and the Joan Hickson adaptation are fascinating, ITV1 are mounting a new version of that next week. Even though they rudely name the series after a place I used to walk to all the time in my teens, rather than Miss Marple the character. All I’ll say is that: surprisingly, Mrs Christie’s novel is very funny in parts (and far less abbreviated); that for a couple of years, I used to live in the same Essex village that Joan Hickson did, and she wasn’t as loveable as the hard-eyed angel of vengeance that she played; that the person behind the murders was indeed one of the three I mentally shortlisted, though (again surprisingly) one of them didn’t make it to the 1985 TV at all; and that the probable reason I didn’t remember their identity from TV is that, though they have the same name and basic place in the narrative, their character is hugely different.
A Reckoning?
…Er, has been moved!
Professor Bernice Summerfield’s The Joy Device
“I want to be happy.”Ten years ago, Doctor Who was looking a bit shaky. The series had been dropped by the BBC, and the 1996 TV Movie (Time Waits For No Man) hadn’t been picked up for more. The most brilliant, influential and coherent continuation of Doctor Who between 1989 and 2005 – Virgin’s New Adventures novels – had lost their licence, too, and nothing else had really taken off instead. The BBC’s own series of novels was producing flashes of inspiration and long stretches of dreck, and Big Finish’s Doctor Who audio dramas had only just started, not yet hitting their heights. One of the saddest competing shards of Doctor Who were the Doctorless continuing New Adventures novels with the fabulous companion Professor Bernice Summerfield – unloved by the publishing house, constantly on the brink of cancellation, and reading like a grudge war between the two incompatible authors handling most of what was left of the range. Now Benny’s got a large and successful range of Big Finish audios that are still fun and still carrying on, but back in 1999 her book series apparently died with a whimper. And yet just before the end there was a return to fun and quality, entirely unexpectedly, in Justin Richards’ The Joy Device.
If you can track down this novel – which wasn’t so much released as escaped – it’s one of Benny’s most entertaining adventures, despite expectations. By all accounts, Justin Richards was writing half the books at enormous speed (though I’m waiting to get hold of Simon Guerrier’s big book of Benny to find out The Inside Story), and most of his, ah, passed the time adequately, usually with walking corpses. But you wouldn’t rave about them. But then came The Joy Device, the penultimate book of the range, which I read while having a joyless time staying at a god-awful hotel in New Brighton for the job I was in at the time. And it cheered me up enormously. Put simply, Benny decides that being an academic who spends her life sorting through an art collection doesn’t sound thrilling, and goes off on a trip to the Rim of known space for excitement, adventure and really wild things, with her own pet Indiana Jones as a tour guide (yes, he is a male version of Benny). What could possibly go wrong?
Well, of course there are muggers, murderers and a Maltese Falcon-like collection of gangsters hunting a mysterious artefact, but Benny pretty much misses all of that. Because the thing I really enjoyed about this book, and have just enjoyed all over again on grabbing a book to comfort myself with when off to the dentist, is that her friends worry that she’ll either get herself killed or like it too much back on the edge, and set off after her to get there before her and, essentially, spoil all her fun. And, yes, that in itself is a spoiler, but it’s not the biggest challenge to work out: every peril’s defused, every threat moved out of the way, all to make sure that before she gets into a thrilling situation it’s been made as boring as possible. And it’s very funny. Particularly the very literal angel (though don’t look at the pretty cover too closely).
The bit I always remember is – unsurprisingly to anyone who’s followed Benny’s adventures – in a bar, though coffee’s a bigger threat. There’s a lot of fun here. Boredom is, of course, by definition not that exciting, but having to stretch every sinew to set up boredom is very entertaining indeed. Yes, it’s full of appalling clichés (mainly from self-buffing adventurer Harper Dent), but only to send them all up mercilessly, and there’s an inspired idea at the heart of it all, too. Dorpfeld’s Prism, the MacGuffin everyone’s chasing, has the effect of blinding you to reality and making everything seem so much rosier than it really is – which is exactly what Benny’s friends are arranging to happen to her. It’s just that while the gangsters and wheeler-dealers want it as an escape from their vicious existences, it’s boring Bernice senseless.
Pretty much every contemporary review I remember reading of this said how dreadfully clichéd it was. I suspect by that time too many of the books had spiralled into such a grim ordeal that everyone had forgotten they were meant to be amusing. If you read it, don’t make the same mistake. If you want grim and horrid, grab a Brontë.
Labels: Bigotry, Blogs, Books, Conservatives, Gay, Music, New Adventures, Personal, Professor Bernice Summerfield
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Beating Up Bankers Is Good For Them – Regulator
Or, when homophones attack!
I woke up this morning to find The Today Programme announcing that Lord Turner, Chair of the Financial Services Authority, wanted attacks on bankers with excessive bonuses. Woozily, I heard that because people like Fred Goodwin were “socially useless,” it would be fine to vandalise his Edinburgh home, as happened a few months ago, or perhaps give the man a good going-over with a baseball bat. If the FSA Chair – who’s worked with these scum for so many years – has now concluded this is the only language they understand, who was I to disagree?
Clearly, lots of other people had heard the rather more radical than intended proposal that I did, so by the end of the programme, the headlines had carefully split up the words. Lord Turner said there should be a… new… bankers’… tax. Ah. Attacks. A tax.
Oh well.
Look, after a month of being more ill than usual, I’ve been having raging toothache this week and am zombied out on lack of sleep and surplus of painkillers. It was an easy mistake to make.
In other news, a health warning. If, like me, you’re a bit out of it today, don’t look into the scary boggling eyes of Daniel Hannan. Still less listen to his latest coded message to supporters that, ‘it’s fine, under all the “liberal progressive oxymoronic Conservative” veneer, don’t lose heart, we’re still evil and hate poor people (let them die!) and black people (send them away!)’. You might have nightmares.
Update: Mark is more generous to Mr Hannan. I disagree.
I woke up this morning to find The Today Programme announcing that Lord Turner, Chair of the Financial Services Authority, wanted attacks on bankers with excessive bonuses. Woozily, I heard that because people like Fred Goodwin were “socially useless,” it would be fine to vandalise his Edinburgh home, as happened a few months ago, or perhaps give the man a good going-over with a baseball bat. If the FSA Chair – who’s worked with these scum for so many years – has now concluded this is the only language they understand, who was I to disagree?
Clearly, lots of other people had heard the rather more radical than intended proposal that I did, so by the end of the programme, the headlines had carefully split up the words. Lord Turner said there should be a… new… bankers’… tax. Ah. Attacks. A tax.
Oh well.
Look, after a month of being more ill than usual, I’ve been having raging toothache this week and am zombied out on lack of sleep and surplus of painkillers. It was an easy mistake to make.
In other news, a health warning. If, like me, you’re a bit out of it today, don’t look into the scary boggling eyes of Daniel Hannan. Still less listen to his latest coded message to supporters that, ‘it’s fine, under all the “
Update: Mark is more generous to Mr Hannan. I disagree.
Labels: Bigotry, Conservatives, Health, The Golden Dozen, The Today Programme
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Silly Season Stories – We Have A Winner!
We may be barely mid-way through August, but I’m going to stick my neck out and say we’ve already had the winner of this year’s “Silly Season” news stories. If you were listening to Radio 4 at about a quarter to eight yesterday morning, the Today Programme had a feature on the epidemiology of zombie movies, revealing that a zombie infestation would lead to the collapse of civilisation unless terminated with extreme prejudice. You can still hear it on iPlayer, but be careful – it’s followed by Anne Atkins on Thought For the Day, and she will eat your brains.
Apparently, research carried out at two universities in Ottawa using mathematical models of epidemiology warned that the only language zombies understand is tocut their goolies off chop their heads off at once, rather than pussyfoot around looking for a cure or containing the infectees. Although one of the UK’s leading swine flu advisers purported to dismiss the findings as “a little over-pessimistic,” expect our panicking Labour Government to issue swine flu warnings shortly involving guillotines, though with the saving grace of too long a waiting list to give many people the chop.
Of course, there is an ultra-violent alternative to this nasty ultraviolence. As any fule kno, sending that wet liberal Judge Dredd off in an armoured killer-truck to deliver a vaccine to the infected will work just as well, provided he can avoid such deadly perils as US Army vampire robots – of which more later, in case you thought they weren’t real – and the even more terrifying copyright lawyers for McDonalds, Burger King and the Jolly Green Giant (I have those issues, though if you own any of the graphic novel reprints, you’ll find four episodes curiously missing).
You’ll no doubt be aware that news programmes are infamous for sexing up their reports and distorting perfectly sensible and serious scientific works, so here’s a link to the full report, the sober and respectable When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infestation. One of the authors is Professor Robert Smith? – question mark included – which may help explain the erratic punctuation of the otherwise dull and unobjectionable title.
This morning’s Today Programme was much less interesting; I switched on shortly after half-six to hear Evan Davis exclaim “-anker,” and cheerily assumed he’d finally taken his mission as Today’s sole interviewer who tells it as it is to its logical conclusion. But instead of telling a Labour minister what he thought of them, it turned out to be an item about tragedies in Sri Lanka, meaning I started my morning with the burden of guilt over inappropriate levity.
Naturally, zombie research is far from the only “Silly Season” news story calling out for attention, but having precipitately offered the award, I should explain why I’ve ruled out two other obvious front-runners.
You might think that the clear favourite “Silly Season” story over the past few weeks is the thought that Peter Mandelson might become Prime Minster, but while in itself it’s absurd – OK, so he’s just about the only Labour minister who’s not a/ incompetent and b/ terrified right now, but he’s in the Lords until at the very least the General Election, probably for ever, he’s sufficiently hated in enough of the Labour Party that he could never win a Leadership election, and even Labour MPs aren’t stupid enough to inflict another unelected Leader on their party after how the current one’s turned out – many would object that the Government, while certainly stupid, are too dangerous to be labelled “Silly”. With the zombie infestation “New Labour” still pushing us very close to “the collapse of civilisation,” comparing so vile a condition to something as harmless as a world-threatening undead epidemic is in poor taste.
My favourite story of the “Silly Season” also has to be ruled out of contention for the “Silly” prize by virtue of being truly quite scary. In answer to the twin conundrums of soldiers’ body bags and climate change, the US Army has commissioned a battlefield robot. You know that episode of The Simpsons in which Lisa encourages a bankrupt Mr Burns to discover the effectiveness of recycling, with lucrative but horrific results? Well, imagine something probably less lucrative – except for the weapons manufacturers, natch – but far more horrific.
Yes, the US Army is looking to bring into service an “Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot,” or “EATR,” which can trundle around the battlefield killing people but, replacing soldiers, can’t be killed itself. And, to avoid wasteful fossil fuel use, it will run itself off organic matter that it finds lying about the battlefield.
Now, hands up at the back of the class anyone who can tell me a/ how likely it is to be able to distinguish civilians from combatants and b/ what the most prominent, juicily fuel-filled organic matter lying around any given battlefield will be? A clue to the latter: headlines like “Darpa’s Self-Feeding Sentry Robot Is Not A Man-Eater, Company Protests,” reminding me of nothing so much as Good King Yulfric the Wise the Third’s expostulation “The Evil Flesh-Eating Lord of Kraan is not a cannibal! I don’t know why everyone thinks he is!” from Hordes of the Things. The Guardian helpfully reported:
If you want a break from all this real-world undead horror, tonight at 11pm BBC4 is broadcasting Gods and Monsters, a rather lovely and barbedly witty film about the last days of James Whale, one of Hollywood’s foremost filmmakers and homosexualists. Ian McKellen stars as Mr Whale, with the lovely Brendan Fraser as his incredibly buff gardener. Both actors are superb, in a film that covers 1950s mores, Hollywood hypocrisy, being out as gay fifty years before your time, the trenches of the First World War and the making of probably the finest film of the Twentieth Century, Bride of Frankenstein. While perhaps the key scene is the tragic revelation of the stroke-reduced limits of Mr Whale’s talents, and what they mean for the characters, I still fondly remember the way we hooted with laughter at the death scene, and how everyone else in the cinema looked round and glared at us. That’s the peril of going to an arthouse cinema to see what, despite the po-faced patrons, is – like Bride of Frankenstein – a comedy about death.
Zombies On The Today Programme: How Could They Tell?
Apparently, research carried out at two universities in Ottawa using mathematical models of epidemiology warned that the only language zombies understand is to
Of course, there is an ultra-violent alternative to this nasty ultraviolence. As any fule kno, sending that wet liberal Judge Dredd off in an armoured killer-truck to deliver a vaccine to the infected will work just as well, provided he can avoid such deadly perils as US Army vampire robots – of which more later, in case you thought they weren’t real – and the even more terrifying copyright lawyers for McDonalds, Burger King and the Jolly Green Giant (I have those issues, though if you own any of the graphic novel reprints, you’ll find four episodes curiously missing).
You’ll no doubt be aware that news programmes are infamous for sexing up their reports and distorting perfectly sensible and serious scientific works, so here’s a link to the full report, the sober and respectable When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infestation. One of the authors is Professor Robert Smith? – question mark included – which may help explain the erratic punctuation of the otherwise dull and unobjectionable title.
This morning’s Today Programme was much less interesting; I switched on shortly after half-six to hear Evan Davis exclaim “-anker,” and cheerily assumed he’d finally taken his mission as Today’s sole interviewer who tells it as it is to its logical conclusion. But instead of telling a Labour minister what he thought of them, it turned out to be an item about tragedies in Sri Lanka, meaning I started my morning with the burden of guilt over inappropriate levity.
US Army Discovers Sustainability At Cyber’s Diner
Naturally, zombie research is far from the only “Silly Season” news story calling out for attention, but having precipitately offered the award, I should explain why I’ve ruled out two other obvious front-runners.
You might think that the clear favourite “Silly Season” story over the past few weeks is the thought that Peter Mandelson might become Prime Minster, but while in itself it’s absurd – OK, so he’s just about the only Labour minister who’s not a/ incompetent and b/ terrified right now, but he’s in the Lords until at the very least the General Election, probably for ever, he’s sufficiently hated in enough of the Labour Party that he could never win a Leadership election, and even Labour MPs aren’t stupid enough to inflict another unelected Leader on their party after how the current one’s turned out – many would object that the Government, while certainly stupid, are too dangerous to be labelled “Silly”. With the zombie infestation “New Labour” still pushing us very close to “the collapse of civilisation,” comparing so vile a condition to something as harmless as a world-threatening undead epidemic is in poor taste.
My favourite story of the “Silly Season” also has to be ruled out of contention for the “Silly” prize by virtue of being truly quite scary. In answer to the twin conundrums of soldiers’ body bags and climate change, the US Army has commissioned a battlefield robot. You know that episode of The Simpsons in which Lisa encourages a bankrupt Mr Burns to discover the effectiveness of recycling, with lucrative but horrific results? Well, imagine something probably less lucrative – except for the weapons manufacturers, natch – but far more horrific.
Yes, the US Army is looking to bring into service an “Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot,” or “EATR,” which can trundle around the battlefield killing people but, replacing soldiers, can’t be killed itself. And, to avoid wasteful fossil fuel use, it will run itself off organic matter that it finds lying about the battlefield.
Now, hands up at the back of the class anyone who can tell me a/ how likely it is to be able to distinguish civilians from combatants and b/ what the most prominent, juicily fuel-filled organic matter lying around any given battlefield will be? A clue to the latter: headlines like “Darpa’s Self-Feeding Sentry Robot Is Not A Man-Eater, Company Protests,” reminding me of nothing so much as Good King Yulfric the Wise the Third’s expostulation “The Evil Flesh-Eating Lord of Kraan is not a cannibal! I don’t know why everyone thinks he is!” from Hordes of the Things. The Guardian helpfully reported:
“‘We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission,’ said Harry Schoell, the chief executive of Cyberdyne Power Technologies, one of the companies behind the machine.”“That is not our mission”?! And, apparently, the EATR can be programmed not to recognise human flesh as a top source of nutrients. Well, I’m reassured.
If you want a break from all this real-world undead horror, tonight at 11pm BBC4 is broadcasting Gods and Monsters, a rather lovely and barbedly witty film about the last days of James Whale, one of Hollywood’s foremost filmmakers and homosexualists. Ian McKellen stars as Mr Whale, with the lovely Brendan Fraser as his incredibly buff gardener. Both actors are superb, in a film that covers 1950s mores, Hollywood hypocrisy, being out as gay fifty years before your time, the trenches of the First World War and the making of probably the finest film of the Twentieth Century, Bride of Frankenstein. While perhaps the key scene is the tragic revelation of the stroke-reduced limits of Mr Whale’s talents, and what they mean for the characters, I still fondly remember the way we hooted with laughter at the death scene, and how everyone else in the cinema looked round and glared at us. That’s the peril of going to an arthouse cinema to see what, despite the po-faced patrons, is – like Bride of Frankenstein – a comedy about death.
Labels: Comics, Frankenstein, Health, Labour, Radio, Stupid Ideas, Technology, The Today Programme
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Please Come To Our Wedding, And Deny Your Own (FOSVP)
Astoundingly, our identikit Labour machine politician local MP Jim Fitzpatrick (aka Fitzpanic) has been in the national news after years of anonymity. He and his wife went to a wedding the other day, apparently, but they walked out on being told they had to be segregated to separate rooms. To see who was being rude to whom, though, there are two questions that need answering. Obviously, given that I’ve been getting my news from journalists, none of them have answered those key questions – instead just framing everything in inane ‘pro-or-anti-Muslim’ political arguments to whip up bad feeling all round (and that, ironically, they’ve all reported the decision as if it was his alone, and his wife silently obeyed his commands).
The two questions are:
So all the resultant media explosion about ‘rude MP’ and ‘all Muslims are the same’ is just so much eyewash. If Mr Fitzpanic and his wife didn’t know what was going to happen in advance, just decided to leave on finding out, and then found themselves exploded all over the press, then well done them. They did the right thing and shouldn’t be pilloried for it. If he went along with a plan in mind, tipping off the press he was making a stunt, then he’s a git. And much as I hate to defend my local Labour MP, the fact that this has all exploded after the fact rather than showing photos of him storming out does rather suggest the former.
Well, in a similar situation, I’d ask Richard, of course, or he’d ask me, and I hope Mr Fitzpanic asked his wife.
Then we’d tell our hosts to fuck off.
I can think of nothing more absurd, nothing more wrong, and nothing more calculatedly anti-marriage at a wedding than telling couples they have to split up. I mean, really. ‘Celebrate our wedding by denying that you’re together?’ I don’t think so. Even if you don’t share my own moral conviction that being together means you’re both equal.
What does telling a couple they have to be segregated into separate rooms at a wedding tell them:
If I were invited to a wedding but told not to bring Richard because people might be offended, not only would I decline, but I doubt I would speak to the people inviting me again (not without a lot of swearing, anyway). If we turned up and were told we had to sit apart, not dance together, not kiss or hold hands like most couples do at the key moments, because – not that the bride and groom were prejudiced at all, but you know, the families were very religious… Depending on how generous I was feeling, I’d ask them if they were joking, or tell them to grow a spine, or we’d just leave. What a thing to ask a couple.
It’s your choice how you stage your wedding, but if you choose to hold it at Bigots-R-Us, don’t act all offended if some of the people you invite won’t give up their choice not to like it.
The bottom line, surely, is that a wedding is a celebration of people getting together, and that nothing can be ruder and more bizarre than insisting that people do that by being forced apart.
We have, though, been to a wedding where the bride and groom have encouraged us to be as couply as we like and be tactile with the ostracized gay cousin just to make sure that the disapproving religious side of the family knew that the happy couple didn’t approve of them.
And all right, there was that one wedding where our presence was a bit of an issue and we were sat some way apart, but that was complicated and we laugh about it now… And even then, we knew in advance what it would be like. And no-one called the papers.
I notice sadly that yet another council are prudishly forbidding people from being naked on a naturist beach (“warning: video contains tiny-minded locals”). Top marks to reporter Paul MacInnes, and he’s not “horribly ugly” at all – though rolled eyes to the Carry On-style music, and the predictably homophobic interviewees. Shame on Waveney District Council; there are few enough places you can get nude in public, and petty-minded so-and-sos are always trying to chip away at them. Not only should they get themselves lives and stop ordering people around, but it’s at times like these that I almost wish I was a Star Trek fan. Then I could turn up nude at weddings and bellow that traditional Betazoid dress was my ‘cultural tradition’.
The two questions are:
- Did the invitation make it clear – or even give any indication – that couples attending the wedding were, ironically, to be forcibly broken up for the event?
- Who told the press about this?
So all the resultant media explosion about ‘rude MP’ and ‘all Muslims are the same’ is just so much eyewash. If Mr Fitzpanic and his wife didn’t know what was going to happen in advance, just decided to leave on finding out, and then found themselves exploded all over the press, then well done them. They did the right thing and shouldn’t be pilloried for it. If he went along with a plan in mind, tipping off the press he was making a stunt, then he’s a git. And much as I hate to defend my local Labour MP, the fact that this has all exploded after the fact rather than showing photos of him storming out does rather suggest the former.
What Would I Do?
Well, in a similar situation, I’d ask Richard, of course, or he’d ask me, and I hope Mr Fitzpanic asked his wife.
Then we’d tell our hosts to fuck off.
I can think of nothing more absurd, nothing more wrong, and nothing more calculatedly anti-marriage at a wedding than telling couples they have to split up. I mean, really. ‘Celebrate our wedding by denying that you’re together?’ I don’t think so. Even if you don’t share my own moral conviction that being together means you’re both equal.
What does telling a couple they have to be segregated into separate rooms at a wedding tell them:
- Our marriage is the only important one – yours isn’t?
- One of you is important – the other isn’t?
- We assume you’re so sexually insatiable that you’ll rip each others’ clothes off and frighten the horses during the ceremony?
If I were invited to a wedding but told not to bring Richard because people might be offended, not only would I decline, but I doubt I would speak to the people inviting me again (not without a lot of swearing, anyway). If we turned up and were told we had to sit apart, not dance together, not kiss or hold hands like most couples do at the key moments, because – not that the bride and groom were prejudiced at all, but you know, the families were very religious… Depending on how generous I was feeling, I’d ask them if they were joking, or tell them to grow a spine, or we’d just leave. What a thing to ask a couple.
It’s your choice how you stage your wedding, but if you choose to hold it at Bigots-R-Us, don’t act all offended if some of the people you invite won’t give up their choice not to like it.
The bottom line, surely, is that a wedding is a celebration of people getting together, and that nothing can be ruder and more bizarre than insisting that people do that by being forced apart.
We have, though, been to a wedding where the bride and groom have encouraged us to be as couply as we like and be tactile with the ostracized gay cousin just to make sure that the disapproving religious side of the family knew that the happy couple didn’t approve of them.
And all right, there was that one wedding where our presence was a bit of an issue and we were sat some way apart, but that was complicated and we laugh about it now… And even then, we knew in advance what it would be like. And no-one called the papers.
Nude Is Not Rude
I notice sadly that yet another council are prudishly forbidding people from being naked on a naturist beach (“warning: video contains tiny-minded locals”). Top marks to reporter Paul MacInnes, and he’s not “horribly ugly” at all – though rolled eyes to the Carry On-style music, and the predictably homophobic interviewees. Shame on Waveney District Council; there are few enough places you can get nude in public, and petty-minded so-and-sos are always trying to chip away at them. Not only should they get themselves lives and stop ordering people around, but it’s at times like these that I almost wish I was a Star Trek fan. Then I could turn up nude at weddings and bellow that traditional Betazoid dress was my ‘cultural tradition’.
Labels: Bigotry, British Politics, Gay, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Naturism, Personal, Religion, Richard, Stupid Ideas, The Golden Dozen
Friday, August 14, 2009
DVD Taster: The Black Guardian Trilogy
I’m rather late with this week’s Doctor Who DVD release, but there’s plenty of it: The Black Guardian Trilogy Box Set from 1983 (and how very 1983) stars Peter Davison as the Doctor across three stories and a new ‘Special Edition’ of the finale. It’s an intriguing set, though not an upbeat one – all three stories evoke the Flying Dutchman and hint at vampirism, though they do so in very different styles. Mawdryn Undead opens the set as rock opera, elegiac, flawed but compelling; the closing Enlightenment is captivating, inspired and beautiful; but Terminus in the middle is… Drab.
Back in 1978-9, the series was given over to the rather fabulous quest for the Key To Time, six linked stories which ended with the Doctor apparently turning his back on both the White Guardian (God – or is he?) and the Black Guardian (the Devil – or is he?), with the latter – if, indeed, there was ever any difference between them – vowing vengeance on him. In 1983, the Black Guardian returned for three linked stories (four episodes to each) in which he enlisted a young man, Turlough, to kill the Doctor. Turlough, then, becomes a rather refreshing change to most of the Doctor’s companions, having something of an ulterior motive when he joins the TARDIS crew. These three stories are rather more Turlough’s than the Black Guardian’s, though both are pictured with the Doctor on the rather nice DVD box set cover, and despite being a sequel to The Key To Time, you don’t need to have watched it first. In fact, this Trilogy’s probably best not watched back-to-back with the ’70s stories. Despite both storylines sailing as close to fantasy and magic as Doctor Who ever does, the ’80s set has a very different feel, not least in that the Guardians are no longer mysterious presences each scary in their own right, and possibly both the same person – subtlety has left the production office and strict Manichean dualism is in, with the Black Guardian now very definitely evil and having enormous fun cackling to prove it, while the once cold and frightening White Guardian eventually appears as now a rather ineffectual but nice old gent whom the Doctor regards as thoroughly trustworthy rather than a bullying sky git. Remarkably, while the overarching characters are comparatively crass, the scripts themselves are rather subtle, leading to an intriguing mix of moods in which the Black Guardian himself often stands out like a sore duck, though his ostentatious villainy’s always hugely entertaining.
If you want more of the Guardians, incidentally, Big Finish this year released The Key 2 Time, another set of three linked stories (plus prequel The Prisoner’s Dilemma), also rather good, which as the name implies follow on not only from The Black Guardian Trilogy but from the events of The Key To Time – and for these CDs, you are better off watching the TV stories first. The Judgement of Isskar, The Destroyer of Delights and The Chaos Pool all again star Peter Davison, with some rather fine work by actors such as David Troughton, Lalla Ward and Being Human’s Jason Watkins in some occasionally surprising roles…
Given any set of stories, usually the one I’d pick as ‘the best’ and ‘my favourite’ would be the same. Occasionally, though, while one story appeals to my head as clearly of superior quality, another will win my heart even when it fails. In this set, Enlightenment is clearly the best story, but there’s something fascinating about Mawdryn Undead, even though other bits are curiously disappointing (and I’ll cross Terminus when I come to it). I love the mournful intelligence of this story, but it’s not exactly all pulling in the same direction: a gently haunting morality tale with the overblown look and sound of a rock opera, scripted so every fifth line is incomprehensible jargon. But many of the other four lines are gorgeous.
If you’ve followed The Sarah Jane Adventures, you may find some of this story eerily familiar (or, to a lesser extent, if you’ve seen Doctor Who: School Reunion, while the Doctor and Turlough’s eyes meeting across the TARDIS console is very Time Crash). The Sarah Jane Adventures’ finest moment so far was the gripping, heartbreaking story Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane, and it’s safe to assume that author Gareth Roberts is more than familiar with Mawdryn Undead. The Trickster, a black-robed figure with mysterious powers who glories in chaos and destruction, not only looks and acts like a cross between the Black Guardian and his one-time servant the Shadow, but offers a remarkably similar bargain here (then last year, Gareth’s Secrets of the Stars shimmied around the copyright lawyers of The Masque of Mandragora in similarly stylish fashion). In a story set across two different time zones that feature younger and older aspects of our hero, someone is reckless with a schoolfriend and has a nasty accident – at which point, hanging between life and death, the mysterious black-clad figure appears and offers them a way out at the cost of someone else’s life. They’re given a squarish carved object which, when held in their hand, allows them to communicate with their dark ‘saviour’, who tells them that – yes, in the same words in both stories – “Waking or sleeping, I will be always with you…”
Half-way through Part Two, which involves the odd spoiler, and Turlough is gripped by a moral dilemma. It’s one thing to agree – while apparently injured and hallucinating, and under a lot of pressure – to kill someone who you’re assured is utterly evil, but he’s now met the Doctor and suspects he might actually be quite nice after all. Added to that, he’s not been given the ticket off Earth he was promised, and the Doctor looks as good a prospect for that as the mysterious man in black anyway. So with conscience, squeamishness and self-interest all pointing in a roughly similar direction, he no longer feels like going along with his bargain, and confides in his headmaster, a kindly figure in black robes looming over him. This may, in retrospect, be a clue (and, in keeping with the story’s theme of old glories going sour, the same actor once played in effect the Doctor’s headmaster in The Deadly Assassin).
More open-minded than many headmasters, he observes that “I must say, it’s a most remarkable story,” but takes everything Turlough tells him as the truth, making him the perfect sounding-board. It’s a superbly crafted argument over morality, Turlough asking “Haven’t I done enough?” and the other sympathising, “I can see, you’re in a most invidious position” but each time gently pointing Turlough towards the flaws in his trying to weasel out of it and towards making a final choice for himself. Initially, he seems just an inhumanly perfect arbiter, helping Turlough make up his own mind as if imagined by the young man to argue out his inner conflict – until the headmaster prompts him, “Are you absolutely sure?” and Turlough decides that, yes, he is going to abandon his deal… At which the headmaster turns on him, suddenly the Black Guardian. Turlough leaps from his sickbay bed in fright and tries to escape – but finds he’s left his body behind. That inhumanly perfect headmaster was indeed all inside his head, but not a figment of his own imagination, and there’s no getting away from the other guy who’s in there with him… In a story brimming with memorable moments, the confessor turned Devil is the most striking piece of imagery.
Whenever Mawdryn Undead dwells on character, it’s an extraordinary success. Turlough’s inner demons, the Brigadier’s beautifully played double life and moment of revelation when confronted by the Doctor, Mawdryn’s torment and, especially, his final line – all of these are brilliant moments. I love the musical score, too, despite opinions being shall we say mixed; Tat Wood excoriates it in About Time 5 as the worst in the entire series, but though the opening scene’s relentlessly perky ‘driving’ music is a bit much, the eerie electric guitar chords for Mawdryn and his people add urgency to a thoughtful story – imagine how po-faced it would be with a portentous choir on the soundtrack – and Turlough’s ‘crystal’ theme perfectly suits his increasing hysteria. One of the story’s most gripping sequences is in Part One, as that theme rises slowly on Turlough, recovering from a car crash to realise his bargain wasn’t a dream, then power chords interrupt the Doctor’s wittering to signal that a ship is about to crash into them, before returning to Turlough as he becomes more desperate.
When Mawdryn Undead turns to plotting or explanations, it’s rather more uneven. There are intriguing mysteries and cleverly overlapping times and scenes, but an oddly thoughtful script has sudden grossly horrific moments thrown in as if at random to liven it up and a distracting flood of references to the series’ past, of which only the affecting portrayal of the Brigadier and the twist of someone using knowledge of regeneration as a bluff really work. The strong emotion, characterisation and moral dilemmas of the script keep being hamstrung by references only fans get and jargon nobody gets: how else could we be given the assertion that the Doctor will no longer be a Time Lord at the cliffhanger to Part Three, but only have explained how and why that’s a threat in the following episode? The design, too, is a mix. Mawdryn’s ship has a sinisterly funereal opulence, mixing luxury with death masks. There’s a richness to the design that’s also bloated and rotten – but then you get a control room that’s less stylish Art Deco than tacky games console, and what appears to be high drama with an exploding toaster. Twice.
Thank goodness for Turlough. Like an alternative Doctor as a reedy, amoral cowardly exile who needs the real Doctor to bring out the good in him, he not only livens up the TARDIS crew, but is interesting enough to save a trilogy where the Guardian/s’ former ambiguity becomes pedantic Manichean dualism. Even where Turlough’s concerned, though, the story has problems with consequences – here’s where he starts a running theme until the end of Enlightenment of repeatedly apparently breaking free of the Black Guardian’s bargain and apparently being utterly consumed by his purpose, only each time to revert to being somewhere in the middle without explanation. The other key figures in the story are not the Guardian but the Doctor’s old friend Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, with what we were all told at the time were the ‘glory days’ of UNIT held up in a distorting mirror – he’s a broken shell of himself, and can’t abide the alien exile he’s stuck with, one who’s a cowardly liar prepared to commit murder in order to escape – and Mawdryn, who’s also desperate to escape but turns the vampire legend upside-down, as the tormented undead who wants to drain the Doctor’s life in order to die, not to ‘live’.
To many Doctor Who fans, all of this ‘story’ and ‘character’ nonsense doesn’t matter – the important thing about Mawdryn Undead is what it suggests for the years in which the Doctor’s previous adventures with the Brigadier were set. Production teams at the time regarded them as in the near future, but that meant variously one year, five years or ten years ahead, or as little as ‘the day after tomorrow’, sometimes all in the same story. As Mawdryn Undead clashes with much of that, implying Lethbridge-Stewart retired before he was promoted to Brigadier, my advice is to ignore the dates and just enjoy the story (anyway, the absurdly old-fashioned public school ambience clearly dates UNIT to the 1920s). So, if someone ever mentions “UNIT dating” to you with a gleam in their eye, back swiftly away – this will not involve sex (unless it’s Richard Franklin, in which case don’t back away, run).
This isn’t an actively bad story, more a disappointing one. Almost anything you can imagine going wrong does, from its gnawingly depressing design to a script that has many good ideas but finds them at odds with the direction and actors – and, unfortunately, needing a few more drafts to close up the gaping nonsenses in it. At the core of Terminus’ problems is that it raises an epic threat, but posed in such a tediously mundane way we don’t believe any of it – it’s not as if Doctor Who can’t pull off that sort of mix, but with irony, not this painfully earnest dullness. There’s an operatic ambition to the concepts, but (bubble-helmets and bubble-perms aside) everything’s played in such a drearily flat-lining way you’re just not interested, as if Wagner had written everything on one note for a Stylophone. The Black Guardian could have fitted in perfectly as the devil at the base of this medieval Hell, but instead is inserted jarringly to perk things up with a bit of shouty melodrama whenever the viewers are in danger of keeling over from sheer misery.
Meanwhile, this story’s Twenty-first Century Doctor Who connection is that Tegan and Turlough seem to be stuck in a dismal version of The Girl in the Fireplace: the new companion on his first TARDIS trip is left with the old one in a sinister ship with nasty robots, while the Doctor ignores them for a glamorous other woman. Thank goodness the 2006 story used colours more vibrant than grey and beige!
Half-way into Part Three, the Doctor comes across one of Terminus’ sinister armoured guards in the radiation-soaked Forbidden Zone. This one’s neither butch nor threatening, instead waiflike and both physically and mentally scarred by radiation poisoning. Similarly, he meanders both literally and conversationally, humming to himself and dragging oddments about in his cloak in an attempt to find something to block the leaks with. His mistakes have actually made things worse, but he’s also the one person who knows what’s really happening – and just how big a threat Terminus could be if it carries on going so catastrophically wrong. In a story where everyone’s depressed and depressing, being nasty to each other on badly designed sets in a badly assembled narrative, the wounded Bor is the unexpected heart of the story – both structurally, in that he’s escalated the problem but can explain it, and emotionally, in that amid all the grating macho clunkiness Peter Benson seizes the chance to make his character genuinely endearing. Endearing’s the last thing you expect in this story, and he wins you over at once.
Kathy Burke. No, seriously, apparently she’s a leprous extra somewhere in here, and with DVD picture-sharpness I might at last be able to see where. Other than that, enjoy Mark Strickson as Turlough enlivening dull moments by deciding he may as well do some ‘acting’ even if it’s not written down. He starts fey, gets flirty, then patronising, then hopeful – and that’s all in just his first scene. With him trying so many different performances, did he still think he was auditioning? Mark, love, you’ve got the part, you can stop now!
Between the very ’80s British Empire stiff-upper-lip flavoured private school and sailing ship adventures either side, this could have been the story that went to the other very ’80s British filmmaking extreme and nailed social realism. The usual ‘sinister armoured guards’ are actually near-slaves not to an excitingly megalomaniac villain, but a faceless company, kept working by petty rivalries and drug addiction, doing a horrible job ‘looking after’ the sickest people in the galaxy, those who nobody cares about. But any thought that this is to be Doctor Who’s Boys From the Blackstuff was lost before even the designer and director stepped in, with the script editor at the time simply not ready to embrace naturalistic dialogue, as his infamous line change from “Do they think we’re stupid or something?” to the must-be-declaimed “They must think us fools!” demonstrates. And though the mixture of Norse mythology, NHS waiting lists and oppressed workers seems interesting on paper, the script still has a pile of problems – why does the radiation only affect the Lazars and Bor, rather than the Doctor and his friends? Why would an explosion in a void have exactly the same effect as one in a huge, expanded Universe? When it comes to the end of the story, avoiding spoilers, aren’t there some resource implications no-one’s thought through, or can you make anything you like from pseudo-lepers’ rags and a small aubergine?
We’re clearly meant to be scared by the guards’ ‘walking skeleton monster’ look, but not only does it look like a Halloween costume (even with a blanket knotted on its head for a cloak), the director doesn’t believe it either and blows the effect within seconds, as one opens his helmet. Add to that that they’re so huge, clanking and ‘symbolic’ that, taken with the ‘practical scaffolding’, you expect a spotlight to blaze down at any moment and Eirak to start singing an Andrew Lloyd-Webber knock-off while his underlings dance around on roller skates. Again, this isn’t Mike Leigh. Then the ‘real’ monster finally ambles up, and it’s a bored Muppet that’s one of the series’ naffest: again, the contrast with the monsterless stories either side makes you realise what a missed opportunity Terminus is (and these stories, surprisingly, are just about the least monster-packed since the series went into colour). Within this story, the contrast is with the OTT Black Guardian and the camp bubble-headed space raiders, but while they look like they’ve come to the wrong party, wouldn’t you rather go to their party than have such a relentlessly dismal time here?
As in Mawdryn Undead, there’s a Flying Dutchman / vampire vibe, this time where the oppressed workers trudge round in Hell lording it over the ghastly pale everyone-treats-as-dead people and live off a special fluid they appear to take directly into their hearts. It’s far more half-hearted, though, like the designer’s apparent decision to compensate for a ‘skull’ motif that might be ‘too scary’ by making every other set the dreariest possible ‘municipal offices in Dudley’ sort of corridors and ducts. Despite the presence of a fight arranger, you have to assume that some of the scenes were seriously short of rehearsal and filming time; Mark Pack writes today that, much as he enjoyed The War Games, the fight scenes were terrible, so perhaps he should avert his eyes from Olvir’s ‘ballet’ with Valgard while the monster picks up Nyssa, as well as its aftermath – the young man trying to help her can’t hear her scream from a couple of metres away, then on finally noticing she’s gone can’t spot her and the monster even though they’re still in the same shot as he is on screen. It’s impossible not to shout ‘Behind you!’
Finally, this story writes out Nyssa, one of the Doctor’s most innocent, suffering and (I’m afraid) unbearably priggish companions. I’ll not spoil how she goes but, famously, the ‘innocent fairy princess’ character spends most of the story shedding her clothes, at one point jumping on another character’s crotch in her underthings. As if to admonish any fans who obey the apparent on-screen direction to fancy Sarah Sutton, the cover of this DVD (each has its own separate packaging within the main box) appears to depict her breasts… Merging into a skull. Tasteful.
Ah, my friend, Enlightenment is not so easily found. You must meditate upon it.
Or, alternatively, I’m feeling really ill now and have stopped for a Lemsip and a lie-down, and will fill it in later.
Hmm, catching up again, I realise that one of the problems with writing this on and off for a few days while not being well is that I put a flurry of activity into one part at a time, rather than looking at the whole thing. So this has ended up a lot longer than my usual “DVD Tasters”. I may offer less detail on Enlightenment, then – which suits the story, as if you haven’t seen it, you’re very much better off knowing as little as possible about it before you start watching. Don’t watch the “Coming Soon” trailer on The War Games (which ruins a perfectly decent special effect by ‘ramping’ it anyway); don’t read the back blurb; don’t even read my “Golden Moment” below; skip the menus – just press play, and let it surprise and delight you.
The Doctor is charged with intervening in a race that no-one must win, and the threats to him and his friends are far more complicated and dangerous than facing the barrel of a gun. Finding out what’s going on, for a start – and a disturbingly askew take on a love story. These are subtle and emotional challenges, set amid extraordinary visual invention; you might like to know that it’s the first Doctor Who story from both a woman writer and a woman director. But what does it all mean?
There’s a breathless sequence as the end of Part Two approaches, by which time both Tegan and Turlough have been seriously weirded out in quite different ways, and want off creepy Captain Striker’s racing yacht as fast as possible. The Doctor agrees to take them back to the TARDIS – only for the camera to cut away to Striker silently, sinisterly toasting himself, his complacent air justified when the Doctor and his friends discover the TARDIS missing. Confronting Striker, the Doctor – someone whose strength of will hardly ever breaks, and then only with a fight – is told that his very fear of losing the TARDIS made his mind easy to read not just without a fight, but from a distance. Striker’s coldness, his utter certainty, and his evident, underplayed power freak out Turlough as much as they do the audience, and he tries to bargain with a stolen key given to him in confidence – but even his betrayal’s of no use to him, as of course the officer knows about that, too. The only effect Turlough ratting his friend Jackson out has is to make the Doctor even less keen on him: “There’s no need to look at me like that,” says Turlough miserably, his cowardice breeding self-loathing that’ll be horribly evident by the end of the episode. The Doctor attempts to intervene with Striker:
I can’t help but reveal spoilers here, for a beautiful but disquieting story that restores much-needed ambiguity and fascination to the series, so watch out. This is as much a fable as any Doctor Who, and – like Kinda – a remarkable example of the ‘arthouse’ style of storytelling for Peter Davison’s Doctor. It’s a lot of fun, too. The obvious “Golden Moment” would have been the end of Part One… But if you don’t already know what that is, I’m not going to spoil it for you. In fact, all three cliffhangers are cracking: a fantastic ‘what’s going on?’ moment; a companion’s very character threatening himself; and who can resist Lynda Barron enjoying herself so very much? Rather marvellous music throughout, too, from eerie tones to vibrant sailing tunes to a gorgeous South American dance rhythm.
Another tale of travellers doomed to wander in an “echoing voyage,” the climax of The Black Guardian Trilogy underscores the ‘Flying Dutchman’ feel with wandering spirits, powerful but empty, with yet another dose of subtle vampirism from the parasitic aristocrats. The ships’ officers are the stars of this show, unsettling and soulless – and even the one who’s sold her soul to the devil is less disturbing than the one who appears to have no soul at all. Enticingly, the two principal lords-of-outside-time who look down on the Doctor are played by actors called Barron and Baron, sit-com stars Keith Barron and Lynda Baron each creating terrific performances entirely against the type of roles they’re usually known for – one dead-eyed and utterly cold, the other rejoicing in every variety of excess (Richard points out to me that, as embodiments of order and chaos, they’re rather better concepts of the White and Black Guardians than the Guardians themselves).
And yet the real one to look out for is cold Captain Striker’s first officer Mr Marriner, played by Christopher Brown with a disconcerting mix of blandness and hunger as Tegan’s upper-class, manipulative stalker. He seems genuinely otherwordly, and that old sci-fi cliché “What is love?” goes in quite a different direction to the one you usually find… Though his end is still more chilling than the rest of his scenes (the one bit of cold, hard light that recalls the original White Guardian), watch out particularly for Tegan’s moment of revenge on him, leaving him by claiming she has to see the Doctor, then just sitting down instead. It’s a calculated little piece of cruelty: she knows he reads her mind, so a deliberate and blatant lie is as good as a slap in the face.
Uniquely so far for a multi-story set, all three of the Black Guardian Trilogy stories feature new CGI effects as an option on their DVDs, but Enlightenment boasts the most prominent set of changes. While you can go into the Special Features menus (as ever on Doctor Who menus, if you’ve not seen the story before, go through them very quickly for fear of spoilers) and set Mawdryn Undead and Terminus to play as normal with the occasional substituted effect, Enlightenment gets a second disc with a whole new edit of the tale on offer. Unlike the three previous Doctor Who stories released as DVD Special Editions, each of which added new footage as well as new effects, the re-edited Enlightenment is actually a lot shorter than the original – apparently, Peter Davison wanted one of his stories to have the same sort of pace and effects as one of the Twenty-first Century series, and this is the experiment (trimming about a quarter of it away in the process). Just how this new rapid pace will work on one of the series’ most dreamily arthouse stories will be interesting to find out. I had a go the other week at my own re-edit, using my own ultra-modern editing suite of some highly advanced wires connecting the old VHS to our DVD recorder and stabbing my thumb on the remote’s pause button until I got bored (about ten minutes), and found that while was surprisingly easy to find bits to cut out, it was a lot more difficult to ensure the narrative still flowed when scenes jump abruptly. Still, with a little judicious pruning the opening TARDIS scene as far as the Black Guardian’s cackling threat made quite an effective David Tennant-style pre-credits sequence. I wonder if they’ll do the same? And what they’ll pick for the new CGI in each? More exciting spaceship shots in Terminus, I suspect, and if the usual Doctor Who DVD house style holds, lots of pretty glowy effects that look exactly like all the other pretty glowy effects…
Of course, as this was released on Monday, you may well have a better idea of what the extras are like than I do, given that Richard has the DVDs delivered to his office and, being ill for much of the week, wasn’t at work to collect them. We’ve only just got our copy, and haven’t had a chance to watch any of it yet. I can add, though, that in addition to new effects each story has a full commentary, text notes, ‘Making of’ documentary, set of pdfs and photo gallery, as well as – hurrah! – the full isolated musical scores for each. I’m particularly looking forward to listening to two of them, though even here, Terminus sadly draws the short straw. There are plenty of other documentaries, too, ranging from writers to actors to astronomy, and even extended and deleted scenes for Mawdryn Undead. Wonder what we’ll be doing this weekend…?
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Back in 1978-9, the series was given over to the rather fabulous quest for the Key To Time, six linked stories which ended with the Doctor apparently turning his back on both the White Guardian (God – or is he?) and the Black Guardian (the Devil – or is he?), with the latter – if, indeed, there was ever any difference between them – vowing vengeance on him. In 1983, the Black Guardian returned for three linked stories (four episodes to each) in which he enlisted a young man, Turlough, to kill the Doctor. Turlough, then, becomes a rather refreshing change to most of the Doctor’s companions, having something of an ulterior motive when he joins the TARDIS crew. These three stories are rather more Turlough’s than the Black Guardian’s, though both are pictured with the Doctor on the rather nice DVD box set cover, and despite being a sequel to The Key To Time, you don’t need to have watched it first. In fact, this Trilogy’s probably best not watched back-to-back with the ’70s stories. Despite both storylines sailing as close to fantasy and magic as Doctor Who ever does, the ’80s set has a very different feel, not least in that the Guardians are no longer mysterious presences each scary in their own right, and possibly both the same person – subtlety has left the production office and strict Manichean dualism is in, with the Black Guardian now very definitely evil and having enormous fun cackling to prove it, while the once cold and frightening White Guardian eventually appears as now a rather ineffectual but nice old gent whom the Doctor regards as thoroughly trustworthy rather than a bullying sky git. Remarkably, while the overarching characters are comparatively crass, the scripts themselves are rather subtle, leading to an intriguing mix of moods in which the Black Guardian himself often stands out like a sore duck, though his ostentatious villainy’s always hugely entertaining.
If you want more of the Guardians, incidentally, Big Finish this year released The Key 2 Time, another set of three linked stories (plus prequel The Prisoner’s Dilemma), also rather good, which as the name implies follow on not only from The Black Guardian Trilogy but from the events of The Key To Time – and for these CDs, you are better off watching the TV stories first. The Judgement of Isskar, The Destroyer of Delights and The Chaos Pool all again star Peter Davison, with some rather fine work by actors such as David Troughton, Lalla Ward and Being Human’s Jason Watkins in some occasionally surprising roles…
Mawdryn Undead
Given any set of stories, usually the one I’d pick as ‘the best’ and ‘my favourite’ would be the same. Occasionally, though, while one story appeals to my head as clearly of superior quality, another will win my heart even when it fails. In this set, Enlightenment is clearly the best story, but there’s something fascinating about Mawdryn Undead, even though other bits are curiously disappointing (and I’ll cross Terminus when I come to it). I love the mournful intelligence of this story, but it’s not exactly all pulling in the same direction: a gently haunting morality tale with the overblown look and sound of a rock opera, scripted so every fifth line is incomprehensible jargon. But many of the other four lines are gorgeous.
If you’ve followed The Sarah Jane Adventures, you may find some of this story eerily familiar (or, to a lesser extent, if you’ve seen Doctor Who: School Reunion, while the Doctor and Turlough’s eyes meeting across the TARDIS console is very Time Crash). The Sarah Jane Adventures’ finest moment so far was the gripping, heartbreaking story Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane, and it’s safe to assume that author Gareth Roberts is more than familiar with Mawdryn Undead. The Trickster, a black-robed figure with mysterious powers who glories in chaos and destruction, not only looks and acts like a cross between the Black Guardian and his one-time servant the Shadow, but offers a remarkably similar bargain here (then last year, Gareth’s Secrets of the Stars shimmied around the copyright lawyers of The Masque of Mandragora in similarly stylish fashion). In a story set across two different time zones that feature younger and older aspects of our hero, someone is reckless with a schoolfriend and has a nasty accident – at which point, hanging between life and death, the mysterious black-clad figure appears and offers them a way out at the cost of someone else’s life. They’re given a squarish carved object which, when held in their hand, allows them to communicate with their dark ‘saviour’, who tells them that – yes, in the same words in both stories – “Waking or sleeping, I will be always with you…”
“Waking or sleeping, you can never escape me, Turlough.”
That Golden Moment
Half-way through Part Two, which involves the odd spoiler, and Turlough is gripped by a moral dilemma. It’s one thing to agree – while apparently injured and hallucinating, and under a lot of pressure – to kill someone who you’re assured is utterly evil, but he’s now met the Doctor and suspects he might actually be quite nice after all. Added to that, he’s not been given the ticket off Earth he was promised, and the Doctor looks as good a prospect for that as the mysterious man in black anyway. So with conscience, squeamishness and self-interest all pointing in a roughly similar direction, he no longer feels like going along with his bargain, and confides in his headmaster, a kindly figure in black robes looming over him. This may, in retrospect, be a clue (and, in keeping with the story’s theme of old glories going sour, the same actor once played in effect the Doctor’s headmaster in The Deadly Assassin).
More open-minded than many headmasters, he observes that “I must say, it’s a most remarkable story,” but takes everything Turlough tells him as the truth, making him the perfect sounding-board. It’s a superbly crafted argument over morality, Turlough asking “Haven’t I done enough?” and the other sympathising, “I can see, you’re in a most invidious position” but each time gently pointing Turlough towards the flaws in his trying to weasel out of it and towards making a final choice for himself. Initially, he seems just an inhumanly perfect arbiter, helping Turlough make up his own mind as if imagined by the young man to argue out his inner conflict – until the headmaster prompts him, “Are you absolutely sure?” and Turlough decides that, yes, he is going to abandon his deal… At which the headmaster turns on him, suddenly the Black Guardian. Turlough leaps from his sickbay bed in fright and tries to escape – but finds he’s left his body behind. That inhumanly perfect headmaster was indeed all inside his head, but not a figment of his own imagination, and there’s no getting away from the other guy who’s in there with him… In a story brimming with memorable moments, the confessor turned Devil is the most striking piece of imagery.
Something Else To Look Out For
Whenever Mawdryn Undead dwells on character, it’s an extraordinary success. Turlough’s inner demons, the Brigadier’s beautifully played double life and moment of revelation when confronted by the Doctor, Mawdryn’s torment and, especially, his final line – all of these are brilliant moments. I love the musical score, too, despite opinions being shall we say mixed; Tat Wood excoriates it in About Time 5 as the worst in the entire series, but though the opening scene’s relentlessly perky ‘driving’ music is a bit much, the eerie electric guitar chords for Mawdryn and his people add urgency to a thoughtful story – imagine how po-faced it would be with a portentous choir on the soundtrack – and Turlough’s ‘crystal’ theme perfectly suits his increasing hysteria. One of the story’s most gripping sequences is in Part One, as that theme rises slowly on Turlough, recovering from a car crash to realise his bargain wasn’t a dream, then power chords interrupt the Doctor’s wittering to signal that a ship is about to crash into them, before returning to Turlough as he becomes more desperate.
When Mawdryn Undead turns to plotting or explanations, it’s rather more uneven. There are intriguing mysteries and cleverly overlapping times and scenes, but an oddly thoughtful script has sudden grossly horrific moments thrown in as if at random to liven it up and a distracting flood of references to the series’ past, of which only the affecting portrayal of the Brigadier and the twist of someone using knowledge of regeneration as a bluff really work. The strong emotion, characterisation and moral dilemmas of the script keep being hamstrung by references only fans get and jargon nobody gets: how else could we be given the assertion that the Doctor will no longer be a Time Lord at the cliffhanger to Part Three, but only have explained how and why that’s a threat in the following episode? The design, too, is a mix. Mawdryn’s ship has a sinisterly funereal opulence, mixing luxury with death masks. There’s a richness to the design that’s also bloated and rotten – but then you get a control room that’s less stylish Art Deco than tacky games console, and what appears to be high drama with an exploding toaster. Twice.
Thank goodness for Turlough. Like an alternative Doctor as a reedy, amoral cowardly exile who needs the real Doctor to bring out the good in him, he not only livens up the TARDIS crew, but is interesting enough to save a trilogy where the Guardian/s’ former ambiguity becomes pedantic Manichean dualism. Even where Turlough’s concerned, though, the story has problems with consequences – here’s where he starts a running theme until the end of Enlightenment of repeatedly apparently breaking free of the Black Guardian’s bargain and apparently being utterly consumed by his purpose, only each time to revert to being somewhere in the middle without explanation. The other key figures in the story are not the Guardian but the Doctor’s old friend Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, with what we were all told at the time were the ‘glory days’ of UNIT held up in a distorting mirror – he’s a broken shell of himself, and can’t abide the alien exile he’s stuck with, one who’s a cowardly liar prepared to commit murder in order to escape – and Mawdryn, who’s also desperate to escape but turns the vampire legend upside-down, as the tormented undead who wants to drain the Doctor’s life in order to die, not to ‘live’.
To many Doctor Who fans, all of this ‘story’ and ‘character’ nonsense doesn’t matter – the important thing about Mawdryn Undead is what it suggests for the years in which the Doctor’s previous adventures with the Brigadier were set. Production teams at the time regarded them as in the near future, but that meant variously one year, five years or ten years ahead, or as little as ‘the day after tomorrow’, sometimes all in the same story. As Mawdryn Undead clashes with much of that, implying Lethbridge-Stewart retired before he was promoted to Brigadier, my advice is to ignore the dates and just enjoy the story (anyway, the absurdly old-fashioned public school ambience clearly dates UNIT to the 1920s). So, if someone ever mentions “UNIT dating” to you with a gleam in their eye, back swiftly away – this will not involve sex (unless it’s Richard Franklin, in which case don’t back away, run).
Terminus
This isn’t an actively bad story, more a disappointing one. Almost anything you can imagine going wrong does, from its gnawingly depressing design to a script that has many good ideas but finds them at odds with the direction and actors – and, unfortunately, needing a few more drafts to close up the gaping nonsenses in it. At the core of Terminus’ problems is that it raises an epic threat, but posed in such a tediously mundane way we don’t believe any of it – it’s not as if Doctor Who can’t pull off that sort of mix, but with irony, not this painfully earnest dullness. There’s an operatic ambition to the concepts, but (bubble-helmets and bubble-perms aside) everything’s played in such a drearily flat-lining way you’re just not interested, as if Wagner had written everything on one note for a Stylophone. The Black Guardian could have fitted in perfectly as the devil at the base of this medieval Hell, but instead is inserted jarringly to perk things up with a bit of shouty melodrama whenever the viewers are in danger of keeling over from sheer misery.
Meanwhile, this story’s Twenty-first Century Doctor Who connection is that Tegan and Turlough seem to be stuck in a dismal version of The Girl in the Fireplace: the new companion on his first TARDIS trip is left with the old one in a sinister ship with nasty robots, while the Doctor ignores them for a glamorous other woman. Thank goodness the 2006 story used colours more vibrant than grey and beige!
“Short-term memory’s the first to go…”
That Golden Moment
Half-way into Part Three, the Doctor comes across one of Terminus’ sinister armoured guards in the radiation-soaked Forbidden Zone. This one’s neither butch nor threatening, instead waiflike and both physically and mentally scarred by radiation poisoning. Similarly, he meanders both literally and conversationally, humming to himself and dragging oddments about in his cloak in an attempt to find something to block the leaks with. His mistakes have actually made things worse, but he’s also the one person who knows what’s really happening – and just how big a threat Terminus could be if it carries on going so catastrophically wrong. In a story where everyone’s depressed and depressing, being nasty to each other on badly designed sets in a badly assembled narrative, the wounded Bor is the unexpected heart of the story – both structurally, in that he’s escalated the problem but can explain it, and emotionally, in that amid all the grating macho clunkiness Peter Benson seizes the chance to make his character genuinely endearing. Endearing’s the last thing you expect in this story, and he wins you over at once.
Something Else To Look Out For
Kathy Burke. No, seriously, apparently she’s a leprous extra somewhere in here, and with DVD picture-sharpness I might at last be able to see where. Other than that, enjoy Mark Strickson as Turlough enlivening dull moments by deciding he may as well do some ‘acting’ even if it’s not written down. He starts fey, gets flirty, then patronising, then hopeful – and that’s all in just his first scene. With him trying so many different performances, did he still think he was auditioning? Mark, love, you’ve got the part, you can stop now!
Between the very ’80s British Empire stiff-upper-lip flavoured private school and sailing ship adventures either side, this could have been the story that went to the other very ’80s British filmmaking extreme and nailed social realism. The usual ‘sinister armoured guards’ are actually near-slaves not to an excitingly megalomaniac villain, but a faceless company, kept working by petty rivalries and drug addiction, doing a horrible job ‘looking after’ the sickest people in the galaxy, those who nobody cares about. But any thought that this is to be Doctor Who’s Boys From the Blackstuff was lost before even the designer and director stepped in, with the script editor at the time simply not ready to embrace naturalistic dialogue, as his infamous line change from “Do they think we’re stupid or something?” to the must-be-declaimed “They must think us fools!” demonstrates. And though the mixture of Norse mythology, NHS waiting lists and oppressed workers seems interesting on paper, the script still has a pile of problems – why does the radiation only affect the Lazars and Bor, rather than the Doctor and his friends? Why would an explosion in a void have exactly the same effect as one in a huge, expanded Universe? When it comes to the end of the story, avoiding spoilers, aren’t there some resource implications no-one’s thought through, or can you make anything you like from pseudo-lepers’ rags and a small aubergine?
We’re clearly meant to be scared by the guards’ ‘walking skeleton monster’ look, but not only does it look like a Halloween costume (even with a blanket knotted on its head for a cloak), the director doesn’t believe it either and blows the effect within seconds, as one opens his helmet. Add to that that they’re so huge, clanking and ‘symbolic’ that, taken with the ‘practical scaffolding’, you expect a spotlight to blaze down at any moment and Eirak to start singing an Andrew Lloyd-Webber knock-off while his underlings dance around on roller skates. Again, this isn’t Mike Leigh. Then the ‘real’ monster finally ambles up, and it’s a bored Muppet that’s one of the series’ naffest: again, the contrast with the monsterless stories either side makes you realise what a missed opportunity Terminus is (and these stories, surprisingly, are just about the least monster-packed since the series went into colour). Within this story, the contrast is with the OTT Black Guardian and the camp bubble-headed space raiders, but while they look like they’ve come to the wrong party, wouldn’t you rather go to their party than have such a relentlessly dismal time here?
As in Mawdryn Undead, there’s a Flying Dutchman / vampire vibe, this time where the oppressed workers trudge round in Hell lording it over the ghastly pale everyone-treats-as-dead people and live off a special fluid they appear to take directly into their hearts. It’s far more half-hearted, though, like the designer’s apparent decision to compensate for a ‘skull’ motif that might be ‘too scary’ by making every other set the dreariest possible ‘municipal offices in Dudley’ sort of corridors and ducts. Despite the presence of a fight arranger, you have to assume that some of the scenes were seriously short of rehearsal and filming time; Mark Pack writes today that, much as he enjoyed The War Games, the fight scenes were terrible, so perhaps he should avert his eyes from Olvir’s ‘ballet’ with Valgard while the monster picks up Nyssa, as well as its aftermath – the young man trying to help her can’t hear her scream from a couple of metres away, then on finally noticing she’s gone can’t spot her and the monster even though they’re still in the same shot as he is on screen. It’s impossible not to shout ‘Behind you!’
Finally, this story writes out Nyssa, one of the Doctor’s most innocent, suffering and (I’m afraid) unbearably priggish companions. I’ll not spoil how she goes but, famously, the ‘innocent fairy princess’ character spends most of the story shedding her clothes, at one point jumping on another character’s crotch in her underthings. As if to admonish any fans who obey the apparent on-screen direction to fancy Sarah Sutton, the cover of this DVD (each has its own separate packaging within the main box) appears to depict her breasts… Merging into a skull. Tasteful.
Enlightenment
Ah, my friend, Enlightenment is not so easily found. You must meditate upon it.
Or, alternatively, I’m feeling really ill now and have stopped for a Lemsip and a lie-down, and will fill it in later.
Hmm, catching up again, I realise that one of the problems with writing this on and off for a few days while not being well is that I put a flurry of activity into one part at a time, rather than looking at the whole thing. So this has ended up a lot longer than my usual “DVD Tasters”. I may offer less detail on Enlightenment, then – which suits the story, as if you haven’t seen it, you’re very much better off knowing as little as possible about it before you start watching. Don’t watch the “Coming Soon” trailer on The War Games (which ruins a perfectly decent special effect by ‘ramping’ it anyway); don’t read the back blurb; don’t even read my “Golden Moment” below; skip the menus – just press play, and let it surprise and delight you.
The Doctor is charged with intervening in a race that no-one must win, and the threats to him and his friends are far more complicated and dangerous than facing the barrel of a gun. Finding out what’s going on, for a start – and a disturbingly askew take on a love story. These are subtle and emotional challenges, set amid extraordinary visual invention; you might like to know that it’s the first Doctor Who story from both a woman writer and a woman director. But what does it all mean?
“Do not ask what it is. I will not tell you.”
That Golden Moment
There’s a breathless sequence as the end of Part Two approaches, by which time both Tegan and Turlough have been seriously weirded out in quite different ways, and want off creepy Captain Striker’s racing yacht as fast as possible. The Doctor agrees to take them back to the TARDIS – only for the camera to cut away to Striker silently, sinisterly toasting himself, his complacent air justified when the Doctor and his friends discover the TARDIS missing. Confronting Striker, the Doctor – someone whose strength of will hardly ever breaks, and then only with a fight – is told that his very fear of losing the TARDIS made his mind easy to read not just without a fight, but from a distance. Striker’s coldness, his utter certainty, and his evident, underplayed power freak out Turlough as much as they do the audience, and he tries to bargain with a stolen key given to him in confidence – but even his betrayal’s of no use to him, as of course the officer knows about that, too. The only effect Turlough ratting his friend Jackson out has is to make the Doctor even less keen on him: “There’s no need to look at me like that,” says Turlough miserably, his cowardice breeding self-loathing that’ll be horribly evident by the end of the episode. The Doctor attempts to intervene with Striker:
“Will Jackson be punished?”As Tegan’s taken up on deck to see the night, Striker finds a use for his “inferior” the Doctor in assessing his competitors in the race, and gives the merest taste of what the prize involves, languid as ever then with sudden ferocity as he forestalls a question:
“For entertaining us? Superior beings do not punish inferiors. We use them. Kindly.”
“Enlightenment. The wisdom which knows all things, and which will enable me to achieve what I desire most. Do not ask what it is. I will not tell you.”
Something Else To Look Out For
I can’t help but reveal spoilers here, for a beautiful but disquieting story that restores much-needed ambiguity and fascination to the series, so watch out. This is as much a fable as any Doctor Who, and – like Kinda – a remarkable example of the ‘arthouse’ style of storytelling for Peter Davison’s Doctor. It’s a lot of fun, too. The obvious “Golden Moment” would have been the end of Part One… But if you don’t already know what that is, I’m not going to spoil it for you. In fact, all three cliffhangers are cracking: a fantastic ‘what’s going on?’ moment; a companion’s very character threatening himself; and who can resist Lynda Barron enjoying herself so very much? Rather marvellous music throughout, too, from eerie tones to vibrant sailing tunes to a gorgeous South American dance rhythm.
Another tale of travellers doomed to wander in an “echoing voyage,” the climax of The Black Guardian Trilogy underscores the ‘Flying Dutchman’ feel with wandering spirits, powerful but empty, with yet another dose of subtle vampirism from the parasitic aristocrats. The ships’ officers are the stars of this show, unsettling and soulless – and even the one who’s sold her soul to the devil is less disturbing than the one who appears to have no soul at all. Enticingly, the two principal lords-of-outside-time who look down on the Doctor are played by actors called Barron and Baron, sit-com stars Keith Barron and Lynda Baron each creating terrific performances entirely against the type of roles they’re usually known for – one dead-eyed and utterly cold, the other rejoicing in every variety of excess (Richard points out to me that, as embodiments of order and chaos, they’re rather better concepts of the White and Black Guardians than the Guardians themselves).
And yet the real one to look out for is cold Captain Striker’s first officer Mr Marriner, played by Christopher Brown with a disconcerting mix of blandness and hunger as Tegan’s upper-class, manipulative stalker. He seems genuinely otherwordly, and that old sci-fi cliché “What is love?” goes in quite a different direction to the one you usually find… Though his end is still more chilling than the rest of his scenes (the one bit of cold, hard light that recalls the original White Guardian), watch out particularly for Tegan’s moment of revenge on him, leaving him by claiming she has to see the Doctor, then just sitting down instead. It’s a calculated little piece of cruelty: she knows he reads her mind, so a deliberate and blatant lie is as good as a slap in the face.
Special Features
Uniquely so far for a multi-story set, all three of the Black Guardian Trilogy stories feature new CGI effects as an option on their DVDs, but Enlightenment boasts the most prominent set of changes. While you can go into the Special Features menus (as ever on Doctor Who menus, if you’ve not seen the story before, go through them very quickly for fear of spoilers) and set Mawdryn Undead and Terminus to play as normal with the occasional substituted effect, Enlightenment gets a second disc with a whole new edit of the tale on offer. Unlike the three previous Doctor Who stories released as DVD Special Editions, each of which added new footage as well as new effects, the re-edited Enlightenment is actually a lot shorter than the original – apparently, Peter Davison wanted one of his stories to have the same sort of pace and effects as one of the Twenty-first Century series, and this is the experiment (trimming about a quarter of it away in the process). Just how this new rapid pace will work on one of the series’ most dreamily arthouse stories will be interesting to find out. I had a go the other week at my own re-edit, using my own ultra-modern editing suite of some highly advanced wires connecting the old VHS to our DVD recorder and stabbing my thumb on the remote’s pause button until I got bored (about ten minutes), and found that while was surprisingly easy to find bits to cut out, it was a lot more difficult to ensure the narrative still flowed when scenes jump abruptly. Still, with a little judicious pruning the opening TARDIS scene as far as the Black Guardian’s cackling threat made quite an effective David Tennant-style pre-credits sequence. I wonder if they’ll do the same? And what they’ll pick for the new CGI in each? More exciting spaceship shots in Terminus, I suspect, and if the usual Doctor Who DVD house style holds, lots of pretty glowy effects that look exactly like all the other pretty glowy effects…
Of course, as this was released on Monday, you may well have a better idea of what the extras are like than I do, given that Richard has the DVDs delivered to his office and, being ill for much of the week, wasn’t at work to collect them. We’ve only just got our copy, and haven’t had a chance to watch any of it yet. I can add, though, that in addition to new effects each story has a full commentary, text notes, ‘Making of’ documentary, set of pdfs and photo gallery, as well as – hurrah! – the full isolated musical scores for each. I’m particularly looking forward to listening to two of them, though even here, Terminus sadly draws the short straw. There are plenty of other documentaries, too, ranging from writers to actors to astronomy, and even extended and deleted scenes for Mawdryn Undead. Wonder what we’ll be doing this weekend…?
Labels: Big Finish, Doctor Who, DVD, DVD Tasters, Obscure Doctor Who Jokes, Peter Davison, Sarah Jane Smith, The Brigadier, The Key To Time
