Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Education, Education, Cancellation
The Labour Government has always acted as if announcements change the real world while tawdry things like money and delivery are left to those of us who live in it. We’ve had twelve years of Labour Ministers announcing fixes and pouring scorn on anyone with the temerity to ask where the actual results are. But this last week has shown more urgently than most the appalling gap between Labour’s words and actions, with rhetoric about education and a “Green New Deal” collapsing into Labour’s cancelling funding for 144 colleges in mid-building work and closing schools funding for solar photovoltaic energy.
Cast your minds back to last Thursday, when the news abruptly broke that 144 further education college building projects had suddenly seen their funding pulled, costing them a minimum of £170 million. When colleges were asked what extra costs they would incur if their projects were delayed or staged over five years, the lowest estimated total came to a staggering £241 million. So, even if the Labour Government just put back these programmes until after the General Election (translation: they hope someone else will have to deal with it), it’ll waste a quarter of a billion pounds of badly-needed college funds.
Further Education colleges have been underfunded for many years, yet demand for them is bound to skyrocket during a recession. It’s not a difficult sum to do; more people are out of work, so they enrol on college courses to get new skills, both ones they’d always wanted to but had never had the time, and ones that will help them find a new job. And, good for Labour, over the past few years they’d actually committed money for FE college buildings: to repair the ones that are falling down, and expand into new buildings for the ones with many more students.
So whatever possessed them to suddenly pull the funding?
In the tiny minds of Labour ministers, because all they need do is say magic words to the media and tap three times on a despatch box with a white paper for everything to be perfect, withdrawing the magic words means things can ‘unhappen’ just as quickly and easily. In the real world, colleges have already paid for architects, made contracts with builders, and in many cases knocked down buildings that were too old or too small to make way for the planned expansion. Even if they hadn’t yet started the actual building, things take longer and cost very much more than a wave of a ministerial magic wand. Many colleges have already spent so much money, having been told they’d be paid in full, that they face bankruptcy. That’s why saying magic words to promise money, then pulling it away again, may seem to the Labour Government like it put the world to rights for a while, but to real colleges and real students in the real world, it’s far worse than if they’d never announced the mirage money at all.
Labour Government minister Siôn Simon, of course, had an answer. The answer from the Labour Government that’s been in power for a dozen years, with enormous Parliamentary majorities to push their agenda through and the most centralised massive state power in British peacetime history… Was that it was all someone else’s fault. He told the BBC that all the blame lay with the Learning and Skills Council. The Learning and Skills Council said that colleges were to blame, for taking all the various stages of approval – including a promise that ‘final’ approval would come, with the money, on the day that building would start, once architects had been paid for all their designs, builders contracted and old buildings demolished – as if they were some sort of approval after the LSC had encouraged colleges to take up funding, rather than vague airy-fairy possibilities that irresponsible principals had put an unwise punt on.
You’ll probably have noticed that the head of the Learning and Skills Council, Mark Haysom, then resigned on Monday. No doubt he was partly to blame. But did he jump, or was he pushed by panicking Labour Government spin-doctors looking for a bureaucrat to pin everything on? And when was the last time a Labour Minister resigned because they’d made a mess of their job, rather than just being an embarrassment by breaking the law / having their fingers in the till / not being able to keep it in their trousers (which, as usual, is the one Labour cock-up I don’t think is anyone else’s business and which no-one should resign for).
Call me an old cynic, but that still leaves one or two tiny questions:
Siôn Simon also claimed that no college would go bust – without committing a single penny to make sure of that. Another magic word to the media, and he thinks the world’s righted itself. How does that square with his statement, presumably out of the other side of his mouth, that:
By coincidence, on Monday – the same day as Mr Haysom resigned – the Labour Government announced a new white paper giving a ‘boost’ to adult learning. Real money and real buildings bad; magic words to the media and paper buildings good. This alleged boost to adult learning has the advantages of being pushed well into the future (translation: they hope someone else will have to deal with it) and only promising £20 million even then, a tiny fraction of the vast sums they’ve backed out of giving to colleges. Those are advantages for Labour, of course – not for anyone actually wanting to learn anything.
Hilariously, having let colleges down so damningly, this future promised £20 million would go not to the colleges, but to community groups like the Labour Government’s old friends, the churches, so that they can host classes instead. Even I’m not cynical enough to think this was planned so that the Labour Government could continue with their sectarian, ideological ‘faith agenda’ at the expense of colleges – I’m fairly sure they just didn’t have a fucking clue and made a total mess of it – but it does look like Labour’s saying, ‘The college has fallen down, so go to church instead,’ doesn’t it? Mind you, if I were a church making decisions on the basis of money promised by the Labour Government, rather than planning to repair the church hall, I’d keep a careful watch on the roof in case the local Labour MP pops by to nick the lead. And did you notice that, just yesterday, the Labour Government and the Church of England have banded together to create government subsidies for Post Offices and other outlets in churches? Special bungs to religion so they can have moneychangers in the temple… You couldn’t make it up.
On the same day as the massive cuts to colleges, last Thursday, the Labour Government announced an extra £50 poll tax on students from outside the EU. Yet another bit of populist immigrant-bashing, and for what purpose? It’s not going to raise a massive amount of money; it’s not going to raise it fairly; and, for overseas students who already pay vastly higher fees than even UK students do, announcements that the Labour Government wants to dip into their wallets at will may just put more of them off studying here – and lose our universities their lucrative custom.
Oh, and talking of UK students, it was last week, too, that Labour and their Welsh Assembly manifesto-breaking-mini-mes Plaid Cymru announced that, just like the Labour Government at Westminster and completely against every election promise Plaid have ever made, they’re scrapping the Welsh tuition fee grant, slashing student funding by around 40%. Labour broke manifesto promises to bring in tuition fees in the first place; now tuition fees will run rampant in Wales because telling-election-lie-itis has spread from them to Plaid Cymru in government in a particularly virulent form.
And the nightmare continues. Although the BBC still haven’t put up anything about it on their website, if you go to iPlayer and listen to this morning’s Today Programme at about ten to seven for the full details – or any of their news headlines for the short version – you’ll find that, despite touting a “Green New Deal,” one of the Labour Government’s biggest green technology initiatives has abruptly been closed.
Again, not all of the Labour Government’s ideas are bad. It’s just their delivery that’s an absolute disaster. Offering money to schools for green technology was a thoroughly good thing, both for encouraging green businesses and for getting the message over to kids and their local communities. It was such a good idea that I remember it being in quite a few Liberal Democrat manifestos before Labour picked it up, but at least they did pick it up. But today… All of a sudden, the money’s run out for installing solar photovoltaic energy panels on schools, and the Labour Government’s refusing any more. There’s even some more in their tiny green technology kitty, but it was aimed for other, less popular technologies that no-one’s put in bids for… So the Labour Government’s refusing even to release that for more PV panels that are actually successful, and instead wants to claw back even a measly £8 million.
I despair. And if you have kids, want to go to college, or just want Britain’s future to look brighter through better education and a wider range of skills improving people’s lives and the country’s economy, and through green technology leading through example, you’ll probably despair of the Labour Government too.
Now, no doubt a Labour minister confronted with all of this would scoff. A Liberal Democrat going on about education and the environment – they always do! But in a recession, there are tough choices to be made. Well, that’s true. Education and the environment have headed the Liberal Democrat agenda for two decades, whether or not they’ve been flavour of the month for other parties, and tough choices do indeed need to be made; even with the Labour Government nearly doubling public spending over the last ten years, there’s still not enough money to pay for everything, particularly when they’re putting the country in hock with the largest British borrowing in history to try and spend their way out of recession, some of it spent wisely, some of it wasted.
But how do you go about making those tough choices on what to spend and what to cut? And why have the Liberal Democrats been banging on about education and the environment for so many years? Well, the answers to both are related. Education and the environment are investments for the future – and surely investments for the future are exactly what you shouldn’t cut back on in a recession.
When people have lost their jobs, it makes sense to invest in new skills; when the old economy’s crumbling, it makes sense to invest in something more sustainable, rather than grit your teeth and just pump money into things as they were in the hope that everything will return to ‘normal’. I don’t want things back just the way they were. I want them better. And if you pair education and the environment as priorities, that’s surely at the heart of that “Green New Deal” that the Labour Government waves its magic words at, but won’t deliver – new skills for new jobs in new technologies that will not just help us out of recession, but cut down on pollution and resource use, slowing climate change and tackling all the ill-health caused by runaway pollutants.
The Labour Government has a different priority. Where do they still shower our money like there’s no tomorrow?
Snooping.
Massive databases. Bossing people about. ID cards. Bits of paper; IT projects gone out of control; magic words they pretend will make people safer, or healthier, or whatever else their buzzword of the day is.
Today’s specialities: spending billions of pounds monitoring who you talk to on Facebook. I mean, really. And for schools… Yet another set of regulations about school meals, bossing even the dinner ladies about, when all the evidence is that schools are now producing plenty of good, healthy meals, but if the Labour Government compels them to meet every possible health target at once all they’ll do is drive kids out of the school gates and into the chippies. But Labour Government targets will have been ticked, and another wave of the magic wand satisfied. Better hope none of those healthychoices directives are vegetarian, eh? And, guess what? Yes – another massive computer database that every school dinner has to be entered into to make sure the Labour Government knows exactly what’s in every kid’s stomach in the land. Except all the ones who get fed up of being force-fed and go down the chippie, obviously.
Wouldn’t you rather money went on more teachers and college buildings rather than an army of Labour Government snoopers and more giant databases?
A Nightmare Week of Labour Education Cuts…
Cast your minds back to last Thursday, when the news abruptly broke that 144 further education college building projects had suddenly seen their funding pulled, costing them a minimum of £170 million. When colleges were asked what extra costs they would incur if their projects were delayed or staged over five years, the lowest estimated total came to a staggering £241 million. So, even if the Labour Government just put back these programmes until after the General Election (translation: they hope someone else will have to deal with it), it’ll waste a quarter of a billion pounds of badly-needed college funds.
Further Education colleges have been underfunded for many years, yet demand for them is bound to skyrocket during a recession. It’s not a difficult sum to do; more people are out of work, so they enrol on college courses to get new skills, both ones they’d always wanted to but had never had the time, and ones that will help them find a new job. And, good for Labour, over the past few years they’d actually committed money for FE college buildings: to repair the ones that are falling down, and expand into new buildings for the ones with many more students.
So whatever possessed them to suddenly pull the funding?
In the tiny minds of Labour ministers, because all they need do is say magic words to the media and tap three times on a despatch box with a white paper for everything to be perfect, withdrawing the magic words means things can ‘unhappen’ just as quickly and easily. In the real world, colleges have already paid for architects, made contracts with builders, and in many cases knocked down buildings that were too old or too small to make way for the planned expansion. Even if they hadn’t yet started the actual building, things take longer and cost very much more than a wave of a ministerial magic wand. Many colleges have already spent so much money, having been told they’d be paid in full, that they face bankruptcy. That’s why saying magic words to promise money, then pulling it away again, may seem to the Labour Government like it put the world to rights for a while, but to real colleges and real students in the real world, it’s far worse than if they’d never announced the mirage money at all.
Labour Government minister Siôn Simon, of course, had an answer. The answer from the Labour Government that’s been in power for a dozen years, with enormous Parliamentary majorities to push their agenda through and the most centralised massive state power in British peacetime history… Was that it was all someone else’s fault. He told the BBC that all the blame lay with the Learning and Skills Council. The Learning and Skills Council said that colleges were to blame, for taking all the various stages of approval – including a promise that ‘final’ approval would come, with the money, on the day that building would start, once architects had been paid for all their designs, builders contracted and old buildings demolished – as if they were some sort of approval after the LSC had encouraged colleges to take up funding, rather than vague airy-fairy possibilities that irresponsible principals had put an unwise punt on.
You’ll probably have noticed that the head of the Learning and Skills Council, Mark Haysom, then resigned on Monday. No doubt he was partly to blame. But did he jump, or was he pushed by panicking Labour Government spin-doctors looking for a bureaucrat to pin everything on? And when was the last time a Labour Minister resigned because they’d made a mess of their job, rather than just being an embarrassment by breaking the law / having their fingers in the till / not being able to keep it in their trousers (which, as usual, is the one Labour cock-up I don’t think is anyone else’s business and which no-one should resign for).
Call me an old cynic, but that still leaves one or two tiny questions:
- Who created the Learning and Skills Council?
- Who, if it’s all the fault of the LSC, let Britain’s largest quango make such a mess of things without any democratic checks?
- Who refused to decentralise any power and funding, so if a mistake was made it was going to be a massive one?
- Whose departmental civil servants were in meetings with the LSC six months ago when the funding problems first (we’re told, though that may be an underestimate) became apparent, but did nothing about it?
- And who told the LSC that they could have all the money that they then got colleges to spend?
Siôn Simon also claimed that no college would go bust – without committing a single penny to make sure of that. Another magic word to the media, and he thinks the world’s righted itself. How does that square with his statement, presumably out of the other side of his mouth, that:
“It is right to say that the LSC has given in principle approval to 79 colleges which would total nearly £3bn of government money and it is clear that that level of expenditure cannot be funded in the current spending round.”The Labour Government announced a big building programme; they told the LSC to get on with it; and now they’re cutting all that money. Whose fault is it, again?
By coincidence, on Monday – the same day as Mr Haysom resigned – the Labour Government announced a new white paper giving a ‘boost’ to adult learning. Real money and real buildings bad; magic words to the media and paper buildings good. This alleged boost to adult learning has the advantages of being pushed well into the future (translation: they hope someone else will have to deal with it) and only promising £20 million even then, a tiny fraction of the vast sums they’ve backed out of giving to colleges. Those are advantages for Labour, of course – not for anyone actually wanting to learn anything.
Hilariously, having let colleges down so damningly, this future promised £20 million would go not to the colleges, but to community groups like the Labour Government’s old friends, the churches, so that they can host classes instead. Even I’m not cynical enough to think this was planned so that the Labour Government could continue with their sectarian, ideological ‘faith agenda’ at the expense of colleges – I’m fairly sure they just didn’t have a fucking clue and made a total mess of it – but it does look like Labour’s saying, ‘The college has fallen down, so go to church instead,’ doesn’t it? Mind you, if I were a church making decisions on the basis of money promised by the Labour Government, rather than planning to repair the church hall, I’d keep a careful watch on the roof in case the local Labour MP pops by to nick the lead. And did you notice that, just yesterday, the Labour Government and the Church of England have banded together to create government subsidies for Post Offices and other outlets in churches? Special bungs to religion so they can have moneychangers in the temple… You couldn’t make it up.
On the same day as the massive cuts to colleges, last Thursday, the Labour Government announced an extra £50 poll tax on students from outside the EU. Yet another bit of populist immigrant-bashing, and for what purpose? It’s not going to raise a massive amount of money; it’s not going to raise it fairly; and, for overseas students who already pay vastly higher fees than even UK students do, announcements that the Labour Government wants to dip into their wallets at will may just put more of them off studying here – and lose our universities their lucrative custom.
Oh, and talking of UK students, it was last week, too, that Labour and their Welsh Assembly manifesto-breaking-mini-mes Plaid Cymru announced that, just like the Labour Government at Westminster and completely against every election promise Plaid have ever made, they’re scrapping the Welsh tuition fee grant, slashing student funding by around 40%. Labour broke manifesto promises to bring in tuition fees in the first place; now tuition fees will run rampant in Wales because telling-election-lie-itis has spread from them to Plaid Cymru in government in a particularly virulent form.
And the nightmare continues. Although the BBC still haven’t put up anything about it on their website, if you go to iPlayer and listen to this morning’s Today Programme at about ten to seven for the full details – or any of their news headlines for the short version – you’ll find that, despite touting a “Green New Deal,” one of the Labour Government’s biggest green technology initiatives has abruptly been closed.
Again, not all of the Labour Government’s ideas are bad. It’s just their delivery that’s an absolute disaster. Offering money to schools for green technology was a thoroughly good thing, both for encouraging green businesses and for getting the message over to kids and their local communities. It was such a good idea that I remember it being in quite a few Liberal Democrat manifestos before Labour picked it up, but at least they did pick it up. But today… All of a sudden, the money’s run out for installing solar photovoltaic energy panels on schools, and the Labour Government’s refusing any more. There’s even some more in their tiny green technology kitty, but it was aimed for other, less popular technologies that no-one’s put in bids for… So the Labour Government’s refusing even to release that for more PV panels that are actually successful, and instead wants to claw back even a measly £8 million.
I despair. And if you have kids, want to go to college, or just want Britain’s future to look brighter through better education and a wider range of skills improving people’s lives and the country’s economy, and through green technology leading through example, you’ll probably despair of the Labour Government too.
…But Labour Still Shower Cash on Snooping
Now, no doubt a Labour minister confronted with all of this would scoff. A Liberal Democrat going on about education and the environment – they always do! But in a recession, there are tough choices to be made. Well, that’s true. Education and the environment have headed the Liberal Democrat agenda for two decades, whether or not they’ve been flavour of the month for other parties, and tough choices do indeed need to be made; even with the Labour Government nearly doubling public spending over the last ten years, there’s still not enough money to pay for everything, particularly when they’re putting the country in hock with the largest British borrowing in history to try and spend their way out of recession, some of it spent wisely, some of it wasted.
But how do you go about making those tough choices on what to spend and what to cut? And why have the Liberal Democrats been banging on about education and the environment for so many years? Well, the answers to both are related. Education and the environment are investments for the future – and surely investments for the future are exactly what you shouldn’t cut back on in a recession.
When people have lost their jobs, it makes sense to invest in new skills; when the old economy’s crumbling, it makes sense to invest in something more sustainable, rather than grit your teeth and just pump money into things as they were in the hope that everything will return to ‘normal’. I don’t want things back just the way they were. I want them better. And if you pair education and the environment as priorities, that’s surely at the heart of that “Green New Deal” that the Labour Government waves its magic words at, but won’t deliver – new skills for new jobs in new technologies that will not just help us out of recession, but cut down on pollution and resource use, slowing climate change and tackling all the ill-health caused by runaway pollutants.
The Labour Government has a different priority. Where do they still shower our money like there’s no tomorrow?
Snooping.
Massive databases. Bossing people about. ID cards. Bits of paper; IT projects gone out of control; magic words they pretend will make people safer, or healthier, or whatever else their buzzword of the day is.
Today’s specialities: spending billions of pounds monitoring who you talk to on Facebook. I mean, really. And for schools… Yet another set of regulations about school meals, bossing even the dinner ladies about, when all the evidence is that schools are now producing plenty of good, healthy meals, but if the Labour Government compels them to meet every possible health target at once all they’ll do is drive kids out of the school gates and into the chippies. But Labour Government targets will have been ticked, and another wave of the magic wand satisfied. Better hope none of those healthy
Wouldn’t you rather money went on more teachers and college buildings rather than an army of Labour Government snoopers and more giant databases?
Labels: British Politics, Education, Environment, Labour, Religion, Stupid Ideas, Wales
Friday, February 27, 2009
The New Avengers – Dead Men Are Dangerous
12.30, tonight, BBC4 – stay up, set your DVD recorder or set your alarm! There’s been much to enjoy in BBC4’s repeats of The New Avengers, but tonight’s haunting Dead Men Are Dangerous is the one I enjoy the most. A beautiful, tragic character piece, with a disturbing opening sequence and a nail-biting conclusion, it’s the best episode by a long way. The series’ strangely friendly Cold War rivalries give way to the bitter, deadly rivalry of a friend. This is simply magnificent television.
Less off-beat – unless you count the distracting ‘Ooh, which Tory MP is that weirdly made-up actor of a cast of thousands meant to be? And why, with all the people they got right (Geoffrey Howe was uncanny), did they mess up John Sergeant so badly?’ effect – was last night’s Margaret, which I found rather gripping and even made me feel a twinge of sympathy for her. I can still remember exactly where I was when I heard the news of her fall, and who I was with; a Green who I’ve not seen for many years and a hard right Tory who shed a tear, then had a brief moment of rejoicing when news broke that John Major was to stand as the continuity Thatchianity candidate (within months he was snarlingly calling him a “bloody social democrat”). That second chap’s a Lib Dem these days… Still, looking back at that time, House of Cards still knocks spots off Margaret.
For me, though, the really stunning shows this week have been in the repeats. On Tuesday, ITV4 showed The Prisoner’s finest hour, Dance of the Dead, with its intricate plotting, insane ending and commanding Number 2 (though they mucked up the transmission); on Wednesday, ITV3 showed Robin of Sherwood’s greatest episode, The Greatest Enemy. The last half of that is still one of the most compelling and moving TV experiences I’ve ever had, and like Dance of the Dead – and unlike most ‘action’ shows where death is common but disposable – it’s an intelligent meditation on death. So, too, is The New Avengers’ Dead Men Are Dangerous with its lingering death and killer nostalgia, beating Dance of the Dead for twisty foreboding and vying with The Greatest Enemy for elegiac tragedy, all making three very fine series which have each had their very finest stories repeated within a few days of each other, remarkably. Next Friday (concluding the Monday after), as it happens, BBC3 is repeating the best story since Doctor Who returned to the screen in 2005. Human Nature is more about love than death, though death and, particularly, war still come through.
But back to tonight, and the main thing that comes to mind is that Patrick Macnee is simply outstanding in this story; funny, gentle, wounded, authoritative, even athletic – he’s lost some weight between seasons and looks really good on it, and he’s extraordinary whether standing mourning his destroyed memories to sombre brass or dashing desperately through the woods to trace a chilling loudspeakered message. His old friend turned jealous enemy Mark Crayford is an equally brilliant performance by Clive Revill, though Mark’s bitterness offers fewer layers for his character. The episode hinges around their two gripping face-offs, beginning and ending the story, each stolen by Steed’s heartbreaking reply to Mark’s challenge.
After so many New Avengers episodes in which an old friend of Steed’s lurches in and dies on the carpet, to be avenged by our heroes through the rest of the story, Dead Men Are Dangerous both gives that recurring theme its finest ever treatment and turns it on its head: while for once you can genuinely believe that Mark was Steed’s oldest and best friend, this time the old friend is dying because Steed shot him (reluctantly but efficiently, as you’ll see in the opening scene), and his death is to be avenged not by the Avengers but on them. It’s an especially fine use of the top Avengers cliché ‘a dead man who isn’t dead’, too, with a twist to that as well…
I love Dead Men Are Dangerous so much that I would love to spend hours on my usual sort of long, discursive review to tease out every subtle moment. And the ones with Gambit. But I’m having a bit of a time today – though not as much as Steed, obviously – so I’m having to write rather more quickly. Were I writing a longer review, there are all sorts of issues that I’d be discussing in detail. Instead, I’ll mention some of them to whet your appetite and see what they prompt you to come up with when you watch it:
Instead, I’ll finish with a word from someone else. I usually enjoy Cornelltoppingday’s The Avengers Dossier (originally published and pulped as The Avengers Programme Guide), but I very often disagree with them, not least on my favourite episodes. Just this once, though, our tastes converge, and their review puts it beautifully. If you ever chance across a copy of the book, do pick it up, but if you can’t find it, here’s a sharply edited extract:
“The only thing that can’t be replaced is the love and life of an old friend.”It’s been an interesting week for slightly or very off-beat programmes on TV, whether you call them comedy-thriller, sci-fi, fantasy, horror… I can never quite warm to the artificial umbrella of “telefantasy,” can you? Anyway, last Sunday we had the gripping penultimate episode of Being Human – a striking series that defies categorisation, and which I’m pleased to say has this week been recommissioned. Demons, on the other hand, had just one episode that hit the mark (the one with Mina’s vampire son) but several that were just rubbish, and after nosediving ratings ITV have this week cancelled the series. It should have been better, but the right series will be back.
Less off-beat – unless you count the distracting ‘Ooh, which Tory MP is that weirdly made-up actor of a cast of thousands meant to be? And why, with all the people they got right (Geoffrey Howe was uncanny), did they mess up John Sergeant so badly?’ effect – was last night’s Margaret, which I found rather gripping and even made me feel a twinge of sympathy for her. I can still remember exactly where I was when I heard the news of her fall, and who I was with; a Green who I’ve not seen for many years and a hard right Tory who shed a tear, then had a brief moment of rejoicing when news broke that John Major was to stand as the continuity Thatchianity candidate (within months he was snarlingly calling him a “bloody social democrat”). That second chap’s a Lib Dem these days… Still, looking back at that time, House of Cards still knocks spots off Margaret.
For me, though, the really stunning shows this week have been in the repeats. On Tuesday, ITV4 showed The Prisoner’s finest hour, Dance of the Dead, with its intricate plotting, insane ending and commanding Number 2 (though they mucked up the transmission); on Wednesday, ITV3 showed Robin of Sherwood’s greatest episode, The Greatest Enemy. The last half of that is still one of the most compelling and moving TV experiences I’ve ever had, and like Dance of the Dead – and unlike most ‘action’ shows where death is common but disposable – it’s an intelligent meditation on death. So, too, is The New Avengers’ Dead Men Are Dangerous with its lingering death and killer nostalgia, beating Dance of the Dead for twisty foreboding and vying with The Greatest Enemy for elegiac tragedy, all making three very fine series which have each had their very finest stories repeated within a few days of each other, remarkably. Next Friday (concluding the Monday after), as it happens, BBC3 is repeating the best story since Doctor Who returned to the screen in 2005. Human Nature is more about love than death, though death and, particularly, war still come through.
But back to tonight, and the main thing that comes to mind is that Patrick Macnee is simply outstanding in this story; funny, gentle, wounded, authoritative, even athletic – he’s lost some weight between seasons and looks really good on it, and he’s extraordinary whether standing mourning his destroyed memories to sombre brass or dashing desperately through the woods to trace a chilling loudspeakered message. His old friend turned jealous enemy Mark Crayford is an equally brilliant performance by Clive Revill, though Mark’s bitterness offers fewer layers for his character. The episode hinges around their two gripping face-offs, beginning and ending the story, each stolen by Steed’s heartbreaking reply to Mark’s challenge.
After so many New Avengers episodes in which an old friend of Steed’s lurches in and dies on the carpet, to be avenged by our heroes through the rest of the story, Dead Men Are Dangerous both gives that recurring theme its finest ever treatment and turns it on its head: while for once you can genuinely believe that Mark was Steed’s oldest and best friend, this time the old friend is dying because Steed shot him (reluctantly but efficiently, as you’ll see in the opening scene), and his death is to be avenged not by the Avengers but on them. It’s an especially fine use of the top Avengers cliché ‘a dead man who isn’t dead’, too, with a twist to that as well…
I love Dead Men Are Dangerous so much that I would love to spend hours on my usual sort of long, discursive review to tease out every subtle moment. And the ones with Gambit. But I’m having a bit of a time today – though not as much as Steed, obviously – so I’m having to write rather more quickly. Were I writing a longer review, there are all sorts of issues that I’d be discussing in detail. Instead, I’ll mention some of them to whet your appetite and see what they prompt you to come up with when you watch it:
- Several of what I regard as absolutely the finest Avengers stories feature an Avenger under some horrendous pressure targeted at them in particular; a strong element of this story, however, is that Steed has his friends around him, so he’s less isolated than Mrs Peel in The House That Jack Built or Tara King in Pandora.
- After getting hooked on The Avengers through intermittently catching Channel 4’s 1984 repeats, a couple of years later I spotted a few New Avengers slipping through the schedules (probably on ITV, as late-night schedule-fillers). Back then, I was still at school and could afford very few video tapes – usually just enough for Doctor Who – and so I only ever recorded two episodes of The New Avengers, both of which I watched repeatedly. Fortunately, this was one of them.
- This builds on and perfects various elements and themes seen in several previous New Avengers stories; I could, for example, make a list of incidental similarities as long as your arm with the rather fine House of Cards (how many can you spot? And, no, it’s not the Ian Richardson one I mention above), while thematically and plotwise it’s very similar – though far superior – to the rather disappointing To Catch A Rat.
- This was the first episode of the second series of The New Avengers, and despite building on what came before it has a very different tone; you’d expect the second series to feel very different from the first. In fact, it does, but not in a good way. Unfortunately, as well as being strikingly better than any episode from the first thirteen, it makes the remaining twelve from the second year look even worse than they are – a few are serviceable (next week’s is OK) but, on a steep decline from here to the end, some of them get pretty bad.
- There are some splendid guest stars, including Gabrielle Drake (that woman in the purple wig from UFO), Trevor Adams (that great bloke from The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and Fawlty Towers, with my old name) and, of course, the extraordinary Clive Revill as the villain – who you may remember as one of the earliest Babylon 5 villains (sadly not in the one where a main character’s dying old enemy devotes his last days to getting even) and as the man who played Emperor Palpatine before Ian McDiarmid did, despite Mr Lucas later airbrushing his performance from The Empire Strikes Back.
- Steed, Gambit and Purdey are all superbly characterised and in each case we learn something new about them; each also reveals something about their tastes in alcohol. Steed’s is as refined as ever, but poor Mike evidently stretches no further than lager and the occasional stout, given that he thinks Purdey’s vodka and lemonade is a new invention. In fact it is, but neither because of the lemonade nor the vodka, but thanks to Purdey being rather more creative than that.
- Though I often wince at the sexual politics in The New Avengers, this has rather a mature and lovely three-cornered relationship between the leads, despite one of Gambit’s more unconvincing ‘conquests’ (at least the situation’s so absurdly improbable you may laugh)… But it also, unusually, has a touch of a very ’70s sort of homophobia – like the otherwise entertaining Carry On Abroad, it’s from a time when they could now feature a minor character who the audience will recognise as gay, but only because ‘they’ are swishy, weak, dishonest and generally unreliable (I once wrote a psychology paper about that). Here, improbably, there’s a fey gay thug. On the other hand, he isn’t too distracting, it could be more in the actor’s and dresser’s interpretation than in the script, and it may be there to distract you from the more subtle but far more powerful homoerotic undercurrent between the villain and Steed. As a hint to Mr Crayford’s character, listen to the James Bond theme Goldeneye.
- And Purdey offers a suggestion for Steed’s one and only failing, though in the villain’s eyes his one and only failing is in fact…
Instead, I’ll finish with a word from someone else. I usually enjoy Cornelltoppingday’s The Avengers Dossier (originally published and pulped as The Avengers Programme Guide), but I very often disagree with them, not least on my favourite episodes. Just this once, though, our tastes converge, and their review puts it beautifully. If you ever chance across a copy of the book, do pick it up, but if you can’t find it, here’s a sharply edited extract:
“This is by far the best episode of The New Avengers. The difference is in the fondness with which it’s written… Steed and Purdey have a bittersweet relationship with real heart. But mainly this is Steed’s story. The damage done to his property is horrifying, but he doesn’t care a jot as long as the people he cares for are safe. It’s all rather wonderful, and is written with a nostalgia and grace that could have got the show another season if this had been the new format. Very special.”
Labels: Being Human, Conservatives, Joanna Lumley, Reviews, Robin Hood, Star Wars, The Avengers, The Avengers Season 4, The Avengers Season 6, The New Avengers
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Oh, Lord Mandelson, Give Us Post Office Privatisation – Or Not – But Not Yet
The Labour Party is in revolt this morning over proposed part-privatisation of the Post Office, complicated by news that the pension fund is apparently in crisis, and by signals that, if Labour MPs don’t vote for the Labour Government’s proposals, Tories and Lib Dems will. Now, I’ve written before that I’m agnostic on Post Office privatisation; I’ve always been economically pragmatic rather than ideological, looking at what works. Where there is privatisation, I instinctively favour increased competition and decentralisation, which it strikes me would make a bigger difference than painting the words ‘under new ownership’ onto a big state monolith.
All this means I find myself sceptical of the Labour Government’s sudden headlong rush into another privatisation. On first hearing the way this was reported, it sounded like a partial sell-off. Well, I thought, show me why that would work, but for goodness’ sake don’t do it now. We all know of several privatisations in the past that have got a very bad deal for the taxpayer – rail, in particular, was both grossly undervalued at sell-off and has consumed even more state subsidy since, a Tory tax double-whammy at one remove – and it seemed crazy that you’d think of floating part of another big state-owned outfit when the market’s in a ditch.
But no, I discovered as I listened to more of the story, this won’t be a matter of shares being available to the public, but of one private ‘partner’ being invited to take partial ownership. Uh huh? I thought. This doesn’t sound like a massive increase in competition to me. What sort of competitive bidding will there be, at least, to see who offers the best deal? Ah. Apparently, the Labour Government really hasn’t got the hang of this competition thingy. When they say they’re interested in one private sector partner, they really do mean one. They’re planning to just bring in TNT. So, an effective reduction in competition; no decentralisation; everything decided at the most top-down level; no searching around to find the best deal for the taxpayer; and no private company is going to be asked to underwrite the pension fund anyway, so that threat’s pure spin (either way, if it crashes, we taxpayers foot the bill).
So, remind me – what exactly is this part-privatisation supposed to achieve? Because it sounds precisely like that sort of stitch-up where a big state corporation and a big part-private company are indistinguishable, except that some of the profit can be siphoned off by a private company no doubt grateful for the gift in an economic downturn. How does this work better, and how does it make a difference to either the taxpayer or the customer? Because it sounds like the very definition of just painting a different name on the door. And if so, why support it?
All this means I find myself sceptical of the Labour Government’s sudden headlong rush into another privatisation. On first hearing the way this was reported, it sounded like a partial sell-off. Well, I thought, show me why that would work, but for goodness’ sake don’t do it now. We all know of several privatisations in the past that have got a very bad deal for the taxpayer – rail, in particular, was both grossly undervalued at sell-off and has consumed even more state subsidy since, a Tory tax double-whammy at one remove – and it seemed crazy that you’d think of floating part of another big state-owned outfit when the market’s in a ditch.
But no, I discovered as I listened to more of the story, this won’t be a matter of shares being available to the public, but of one private ‘partner’ being invited to take partial ownership. Uh huh? I thought. This doesn’t sound like a massive increase in competition to me. What sort of competitive bidding will there be, at least, to see who offers the best deal? Ah. Apparently, the Labour Government really hasn’t got the hang of this competition thingy. When they say they’re interested in one private sector partner, they really do mean one. They’re planning to just bring in TNT. So, an effective reduction in competition; no decentralisation; everything decided at the most top-down level; no searching around to find the best deal for the taxpayer; and no private company is going to be asked to underwrite the pension fund anyway, so that threat’s pure spin (either way, if it crashes, we taxpayers foot the bill).
So, remind me – what exactly is this part-privatisation supposed to achieve? Because it sounds precisely like that sort of stitch-up where a big state corporation and a big part-private company are indistinguishable, except that some of the profit can be siphoned off by a private company no doubt grateful for the gift in an economic downturn. How does this work better, and how does it make a difference to either the taxpayer or the customer? Because it sounds like the very definition of just painting a different name on the door. And if so, why support it?
Labels: British Politics, Labour, The Golden Dozen
Friday, February 20, 2009
‘Cut Their Goolies Off’ – Balls
Though I’ve not blogged for a bit before today, bulletins from round the world have still been catching my eye – there may well be a flurry of late news at some point, but as a quickie from Valentine’s weekend, did you hear “Children’s Secretary” Ed Balls’ particularly fine example of politicians’ Daily Mail-friendly hyperbole without actually engaging his brain? In all the outcry over a thirteen-year-old dad, Mr Balls sonorously pronounced that it was “awful” and “unusual,” and that
Obviously, led by the press, most politicians have been falling over themselves to say how appalling, reprehensible and unique / universal [delete as applicable] this is, despite Britain’s teenage pregnancy rate actually falling. There was a sign of hope on last night’s Question Time, though. One-of-the-most-loathsome-men-in-the-media Piers Stefan Puke-Morgan spewed out a stream of repellent authoritarian drivel, only to find that as usual he was taking the ‘popular’ out of ‘populist’ when the audience clapped less the further he raced from reality. Mr Morgan’s attempt to get on the David Cameron “Broken Britain” bandwagon was shot down in flames by Sarah Teather, who challenged the idea that Britain was in any way broken and said that she’d rather live today than in any previous time, in a more tolerant age than ever before, and got a storm of applause for it.
If you didn’t catch last week’s Any Questions on Radio Four, grab it in the few hours remaining on the iPlayer; the debate there was even more enlightening. Jonathan Dimbleby, made a prat of himself as usual, saying it was a “sombre” issue – it’s not a funeral, it’s a birth, you pompous idiot. Denis MacShane, to no-one’s surprise, couldn’t open his mouth without blaming everyone in the world except the Labour Party, having somehow missed who’s been in government for the last dozen years. Janet Street-Porter went breathtakingly off her rocker, saying that the real problem was “all these disgusting men in their sixties” having children with women in their twenties (also far from a new phenomenon). Imagine! Yes, this Morgan-a-like newspaper editor wants to almost literally infantilise women – if they fall in love with or are otherwise enamoured of older men (the famous interview line “So, what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?” springs to mind), she thinks that’s a terrible social problem and Something Should Be Done. Well, Ms Street-Porter, grown-ups should be treated like grown-ups and allowed to make their own decisions, so it’s none of your business, you ludicrously authoritarian busybody. David Davis gave the lie to anyone who doubts “liberal Conservative” is an oxymoron, by blaming it all on sex education – despite the fact that the better-educated a country is, and particularly the better the education about sex and relationships, the later young people are likely to start having sex, and the more protected they tend to be when doing it. But the show was stolen throughout by the brilliant Jo Swinson, talking sensibly about education, contraception, confidence, self-respect and there being no standard “ideal age” to have a baby.
But despite all of those thousands of words frothing around the subject, I keep coming back to the first time I heard the story. It was on the Today Programme a week ago, and I still can’t get over my first impression of Mr Balls’
Earlier this afternoon I wrote how the Labour Government bear an uncanny resemblance to a famous moment from Dad’s Army. On hearing Mr Balls’ promise to do anything and everything, though, I couldn’t help thinking of a famous panel discussion on Not The Nine O’Clock News, which sadly isn’t available on YouTube. But cast your mind back, and you may remember a serious examination of a difficult and controversial topic by Professor Duff of Cambridge University and Sally Barnes, community worker from the Borough of Lambeth, looking into the problem over the last few weeks. Professor Duff’s team had concerned themselves fundamentally with a statistical analysis of the problem as a whole, in tandem with and related to a psychochemical and behavioural analysis of over a thousand individual teenagers:
Update: Hurrah! That sketch has since become available on YouTube. Try it now (it may disappear).
“I want us to do everything we can as a society to make sure we keep teenage pregnancies coming down.”Having children so early in life is no doubt a bad thing for the bodies, emotions and finances of all concerned, but while young teens should certainly be discouraged from having sex through much better information on the consequences (and at the very least on how to make it safer if they do it), some of them are always going to find a way. It’s not like it’s a new idea, is it? All that’s new is that nowadays the press are allowed to print it, and then get in a tizzy because the one example they’ve found and showered money over is proof that the entire country is breaking down (sex! It’s awful! Turn to Page 3 for more!). It isn’t. It’s just evidence that one pair of kids had more hormones than sense, which is not exactly news. Mr Balls’ pledge to “do everything we can” is as daft and out of proportion as the Labour Government’s knee-jerk overkill when they “DECLARE WAR!” on anything the Daily Hate Mail goes on about: drugs; binge; dog-fouling…
Obviously, led by the press, most politicians have been falling over themselves to say how appalling, reprehensible and unique / universal [delete as applicable] this is, despite Britain’s teenage pregnancy rate actually falling. There was a sign of hope on last night’s Question Time, though. One-of-the-most-loathsome-men-in-the-media Piers Stefan Puke-Morgan spewed out a stream of repellent authoritarian drivel, only to find that as usual he was taking the ‘popular’ out of ‘populist’ when the audience clapped less the further he raced from reality. Mr Morgan’s attempt to get on the David Cameron “Broken Britain” bandwagon was shot down in flames by Sarah Teather, who challenged the idea that Britain was in any way broken and said that she’d rather live today than in any previous time, in a more tolerant age than ever before, and got a storm of applause for it.
If you didn’t catch last week’s Any Questions on Radio Four, grab it in the few hours remaining on the iPlayer; the debate there was even more enlightening. Jonathan Dimbleby, made a prat of himself as usual, saying it was a “sombre” issue – it’s not a funeral, it’s a birth, you pompous idiot. Denis MacShane, to no-one’s surprise, couldn’t open his mouth without blaming everyone in the world except the Labour Party, having somehow missed who’s been in government for the last dozen years. Janet Street-Porter went breathtakingly off her rocker, saying that the real problem was “all these disgusting men in their sixties” having children with women in their twenties (also far from a new phenomenon). Imagine! Yes, this Morgan-a-like newspaper editor wants to almost literally infantilise women – if they fall in love with or are otherwise enamoured of older men (the famous interview line “So, what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?” springs to mind), she thinks that’s a terrible social problem and Something Should Be Done. Well, Ms Street-Porter, grown-ups should be treated like grown-ups and allowed to make their own decisions, so it’s none of your business, you ludicrously authoritarian busybody. David Davis gave the lie to anyone who doubts “liberal Conservative” is an oxymoron, by blaming it all on sex education – despite the fact that the better-educated a country is, and particularly the better the education about sex and relationships, the later young people are likely to start having sex, and the more protected they tend to be when doing it. But the show was stolen throughout by the brilliant Jo Swinson, talking sensibly about education, contraception, confidence, self-respect and there being no standard “ideal age” to have a baby.
But despite all of those thousands of words frothing around the subject, I keep coming back to the first time I heard the story. It was on the Today Programme a week ago, and I still can’t get over my first impression of Mr Balls’
“I want us to do everything we can as a society to make sure we keep teenage pregnancies coming down,”which I couldn’t help but instantly translate as
‘Cut their goolies off!’
A Difficult and Controversial Topic
Earlier this afternoon I wrote how the Labour Government bear an uncanny resemblance to a famous moment from Dad’s Army. On hearing Mr Balls’ promise to do anything and everything, though, I couldn’t help thinking of a famous panel discussion on Not The Nine O’Clock News, which sadly isn’t available on YouTube. But cast your mind back, and you may remember a serious examination of a difficult and controversial topic by Professor Duff of Cambridge University and Sally Barnes, community worker from the Borough of Lambeth, looking into the problem over the last few weeks. Professor Duff’s team had concerned themselves fundamentally with a statistical analysis of the problem as a whole, in tandem with and related to a psychochemical and behavioural analysis of over a thousand individual teenagers:
“And we came to the inevitable conclusion that the one course of action the authorities must take is… To cut off their goolies. Cut their goolies off!”And Sally Barnes?
“Look, I know these kids, I’ve worked in the areas we’re talking about – round Lambeth, Lewisham – I know their problems, I know their frustrations – lack of community facilities – I know their parents… And in my opinion, Professor Duff’s suggestion that we should cut off their goolies is the only solution.”Place your bets for the next Labour Manifesto now.
“Absolutely. I mean, cut the goolies off! Cut them off!”
“True! Whip off the goolies.”
“Well, there we have it. Expert opinion seems to be in favour of –”
“Cutting off their goolies!”
Update: Hurrah! That sketch has since become available on YouTube. Try it now (it may disappear).
Labels: BBC, British Politics, Comedy, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Stupid Ideas
If They’ve Nothing To Hide, They’ve Got Nothing To Fear
The arrogant, self-important, holier-than-thou, über-bossy bullying Labour Government famously has no sense of irony (the last two words may be superfluous there), but today’s news brings joy for taxpayers, friends of freedom and ironists alike. Labour’s position is very clear: only criminals and terrorists have anything to fear from their humongously expensive ID cards and databases holding every scrap of personal information on every citizen (all the better for thieves, blackmailers and newspapers to get hold of it); but only criminals and terrorists could possibly have any interest in exposing what the Labour Government is up to in our name. And they see no contradiction in that.
The Labour Government’s fervour in poking into, preaching at and misplacing our every personal detail is only matched by their religious fervour in preventing any of us finding out how badly they’re doing it. They’ve entirely forgotten that the Government is employed by the people, rather than the other way round. And so the Labour Government mounted stitch-up after stitch-up to try to stop anyone being able to find what MPs’ expenses were, while coincidentally the Cabinet member with responsibility for bossing the police about and inventing stupid new crimes was thieving from the taxpayer; they still refuse to hold an independent enquiry into the Iraq War; they put pressure on the courts to cover up torture evidence; they block court cases altogether to cover up bribery over BAE; they refuse to tell us how much money they’ve wasted on horrendous messes of private sector contracts because of “commercial confidentiality”; trying to change the law so they can bar the public from coroners’ inquests, sack independent coroners and bribe their appointed placepeople to make sure they give the ‘right’ result; they make it a serious crime to photograph a police officer so no-one can supply evidence of the effects of the Labour Government’s appalling new laws…
Today, however, exposes the most hilariously ironic of all the Labour Government’s irony-bypass operations – despite threatening every member of the public (starting with ‘foreigners’ and, er, Mancunians) with prosecution and bankrupting fines if we don’t regularly disclose every detail of our lives to their insanely huge ID cards database, they’ve been fighting for four years to prevent any member of the public seeing the two independent reviews the Labour Government themselves commissioned… Into how the ID cards scheme was working.
The Information Tribunal has at last ruled today that the Labour Government’s attempts to say Freedom of Information doesn’t apply to them are wrong, and that the results of both reviews into the ID cards process must be published within 28 days. So, to have spent so much taxpayers’ money on four years of lawyers’ fees to try and stop us finding all this out, how bad will the decision-making process have been? How many practical errors have been uncovered? How much money has been wasted? And how many Labour Government Ministers will be revealed to have lied to Parliament about how well, and how cheaply, it’s all been going? Meg Hillier, for one, must be eyeing her smoking undergarments apprehensively.
Don’t hold your breath, though. These reviews were carried out way back in 2003 and 2004, so the vast bulk of the billions upon billions of pounds wasted and the amazing extent of the Labour Government’s ineptitude will barely have been scratched. And if you think this ruling means that we can see the results of any other in-depth examinations of the Labour Government’s in-depth examinations of our lives, again, I wouldn’t get your hopes up. A Labour Government spokesrobot announced after the ruling:
Let’s just say no to ID cards now.
Update: despite me being the Dad’s Army fan in the household, my beloved reminds me that one of the nation’s favourite comedy moments features the awesome Philip Madoc issuing a demand for personal information – which is definitely regarded as not very British. There is, however, a very British precedent for the pompous buffoon in charge to be careless with our personal details.
The Labour Government’s fervour in poking into, preaching at and misplacing our every personal detail is only matched by their religious fervour in preventing any of us finding out how badly they’re doing it. They’ve entirely forgotten that the Government is employed by the people, rather than the other way round. And so the Labour Government mounted stitch-up after stitch-up to try to stop anyone being able to find what MPs’ expenses were, while coincidentally the Cabinet member with responsibility for bossing the police about and inventing stupid new crimes was thieving from the taxpayer; they still refuse to hold an independent enquiry into the Iraq War; they put pressure on the courts to cover up torture evidence; they block court cases altogether to cover up bribery over BAE; they refuse to tell us how much money they’ve wasted on horrendous messes of private sector contracts because of “commercial confidentiality”; trying to change the law so they can bar the public from coroners’ inquests, sack independent coroners and bribe their appointed placepeople to make sure they give the ‘right’ result; they make it a serious crime to photograph a police officer so no-one can supply evidence of the effects of the Labour Government’s appalling new laws…
Today, however, exposes the most hilariously ironic of all the Labour Government’s irony-bypass operations – despite threatening every member of the public (starting with ‘foreigners’ and, er, Mancunians) with prosecution and bankrupting fines if we don’t regularly disclose every detail of our lives to their insanely huge ID cards database, they’ve been fighting for four years to prevent any member of the public seeing the two independent reviews the Labour Government themselves commissioned… Into how the ID cards scheme was working.
The Information Tribunal has at last ruled today that the Labour Government’s attempts to say Freedom of Information doesn’t apply to them are wrong, and that the results of both reviews into the ID cards process must be published within 28 days. So, to have spent so much taxpayers’ money on four years of lawyers’ fees to try and stop us finding all this out, how bad will the decision-making process have been? How many practical errors have been uncovered? How much money has been wasted? And how many Labour Government Ministers will be revealed to have lied to Parliament about how well, and how cheaply, it’s all been going? Meg Hillier, for one, must be eyeing her smoking undergarments apprehensively.
Don’t hold your breath, though. These reviews were carried out way back in 2003 and 2004, so the vast bulk of the billions upon billions of pounds wasted and the amazing extent of the Labour Government’s ineptitude will barely have been scratched. And if you think this ruling means that we can see the results of any other in-depth examinations of the Labour Government’s in-depth examinations of our lives, again, I wouldn’t get your hopes up. A Labour Government spokesrobot announced after the ruling:
“It has made clear that its decision refers only to this specific request and does not set any precedent. We are currently assessing the detail of the Information Tribunal's decision and will respond in full in due course.”But, surely, if they’ve done nothing wrong, they’ve got nothing to fear? The rest of us can only conclude that the Labour Government’s got plenty of wrongdoing to hide from its employers – all of us – or that they were lying when they repeated that mantra to stop us objecting to their prying and bossing. The answer is ‘probably both’.
Let’s just say no to ID cards now.
Update: despite me being the Dad’s Army fan in the household, my beloved reminds me that one of the nation’s favourite comedy moments features the awesome Philip Madoc issuing a demand for personal information – which is definitely regarded as not very British. There is, however, a very British precedent for the pompous buffoon in charge to be careless with our personal details.
Labels: British Politics, Corruption, Crooked Coroners Corruption, Labour, Liberalism, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Philip Madoc, The Golden Dozen
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
The High Life #1
Yesterday, Caron revealed the horror of Alex Salmond’s attempt a Scottish independent Eurovision entry. Tonight, instead, you can see the proper Scottish entry on BBC4 at 9pm (well, probably more like 9.25, as it’s the climax of the show). And unlike Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s postmodern ‘Please let me win’ song, Pif Paf Pof is a proper Eurovision song about shagging. The High Life was perhaps the Nineties’ finest sit-com, and tonight it’s Dug, one of the finest episodes – Alan Cumming shooting to stardom, Forbes Masson somehow not, Siobhan Redmond and Patrick Ryecart showing just how very funny they can be.
Alan Cumming is Air Scotia trolley dolly Sebastian Flight with Forbes Masson Steve, his partner in crime and Siobhan Redmond their ferocious chief stewardess, Shona Spurtle. They’re all brilliant, though for me the show’s persistently stolen by Patrick Ryecart as posh but probably still Sixties drug-addled pilot Captain Hilary Duff (no, really. You’ve no idea how difficult I find it to listen to the later one). Tonight mixes pop fame, giant dog costumes and Shona’s unhappy love life to spectacular effect. Being a sit-com, albeit a more than slightly off-the-wall one in which (for example) Captain Duff’s occasional Star Trek delusions give him the ability to teleport, of course everyone is unhappy in love. Shona, Steve, Captain Duff… But, in one of the few aspects that dates the series, not Sebastian. Yes, the flamboyant and blatantly gay lead character is said to be “celibate”. As if. Still, though he may sympathise with Steve’s doomed attempts at female companionship, we all know they’re shagging.
There are only two episodes to go in the BBC4 repeat season, so do yourself a favour and pick up the DVD to see Winch, the third of the six episodes made; probably my favourite, and probably the cheapest. With hardly any speaking cast barring the four regulars, it has the time to let them all let rip. There’s an obvious secret just waiting to explode; an unreliable narrator supplying a memorable version of Love Is the Drug; and Shona finally – she thinks – getting the ammunition to take Sebastian down:
Alan Cumming is Air Scotia trolley dolly Sebastian Flight with Forbes Masson Steve, his partner in crime and Siobhan Redmond their ferocious chief stewardess, Shona Spurtle. They’re all brilliant, though for me the show’s persistently stolen by Patrick Ryecart as posh but probably still Sixties drug-addled pilot Captain Hilary Duff (no, really. You’ve no idea how difficult I find it to listen to the later one). Tonight mixes pop fame, giant dog costumes and Shona’s unhappy love life to spectacular effect. Being a sit-com, albeit a more than slightly off-the-wall one in which (for example) Captain Duff’s occasional Star Trek delusions give him the ability to teleport, of course everyone is unhappy in love. Shona, Steve, Captain Duff… But, in one of the few aspects that dates the series, not Sebastian. Yes, the flamboyant and blatantly gay lead character is said to be “celibate”. As if. Still, though he may sympathise with Steve’s doomed attempts at female companionship, we all know they’re shagging.
There are only two episodes to go in the BBC4 repeat season, so do yourself a favour and pick up the DVD to see Winch, the third of the six episodes made; probably my favourite, and probably the cheapest. With hardly any speaking cast barring the four regulars, it has the time to let them all let rip. There’s an obvious secret just waiting to explode; an unreliable narrator supplying a memorable version of Love Is the Drug; and Shona finally – she thinks – getting the ammunition to take Sebastian down:
“Themed breakfasts, my Auntie Arse. I will have you over a barrel!”It’s so unfair, then, that the show’s stolen in the final seconds of the episode and the flight by Captain Duff emerging from the in-flight loo with his usual affable, slightly disorientated beneficence and the inspired closing line:
“You will have to chloroform me first.”
“Silence, you insolent toe-rag. You are a waster, Sebastian. You are a lying cheat. You are a fibster, a fabulist, an equivocating shim-shammer, a cozening card sharp, a pathological mythomaniac, a yarner, a poulterer – who perjures – a whited sepulchre, a cantering serpent, a rat!”
“Have we landed yet? [Pause] Oh bugger!”There’s still the most surreal of the lot to come next week, as Molly Weir, Batman, an Avengers villain and delicious tablet combine in Dunk. Oh, dearie me! In the meantime, here is tonight’s main event – Pif Paf Pof…
Labels: Comedy, Music, Reviews, Scotland
Friday, January 30, 2009
The New Avengers – Sleeper
Tonight at 12.10, BBC4 is showing The New Avengers: Sleeper, one of the series’ most memorable (if not best) episodes as our heroes stand alone against gun-toting villains in a deserted London. And Purdey’s trousers fall down. Though other Avengers stories feature Cold War ‘sleeper agents’ (House of Cards, To Catch A Rat…), the sleep here is more prosaic. In the pre-titles sequence we’re introduced to: an astoundingly powerful new sleeping gas; the antidote; and the villain who’s replaced one of the observers at the top-secret test. Then the title comes up… “Sleeper”. Coo, wonder what it might be about?
Given that the story’s so slight, it’s mostly made up not of complex plotting but of moments of character, humour and style. Fortunately, the director’s got quite a lot of style, and so has Joanna Lumley – Purdey is today’s featured Avenger, starting off by ineptly locking herself out of her flat but then becoming the lead character for most of the episode. And she’s terrific. Look out in particular (or listen out, I suppose) for all the scenes with the radio on, like Steed and Gambit rushing to the rescue of a radio drama and, even better, Purdey in an exciting car chase as she swerves around town in a stolen mini, the sleeping owner flopping about next to her, crooks with machine guns roaring after her, while she’s coolly doing the exercises to an absurdly posh wireless-wake-up-with-torture woman. Superb. Then once she’s out of the car… Boy, can she run.
Others, of course, will mainly remember an unarmed (but ready to high-kick) Purdey hiding from her pursuers as a shop window dummy, at which point her pyjama pants fall down. Still, Joanna manages to carry it off without losing her cool, her blue pyjamas are hugely more stylish than her nasty floral frock of the day before, and her fighting her way out of the shop afterwards showcases her brilliantly. And if you think that element of sexuality’s a bit off, this is also the episode where you can catch a bizarre level of homoeroticism among men who you really wouldn’t want to. Not only does Steed inviting himself for a nightcap at Gambit’s flat frequently seem like he’s trying to chat Gambit up, but the villain’s apparently chatted up by Dr Graham early on, too (and do note that, while he and his group of hilariously over-tooled-up machine gun and bazooka-wielding macho thugs have no compunction about murder, he doesn’t kill the doctor to preserve his secret, but merely knocks him out… And throws him a single rose). At least, when a scene turns up where Gambit’s pyjamas feature, it’s both mildly amusing and gives him points for not wearing any.
Update: Richard, on watching late tonight, is struck (right between the eyes) by the full day-glo glory of Gambit’s décor: “I kept a man here for three weeks. At the end of it, he could never look at a lime again.”
The story’s other main stylistic touch is in all the eerie views of a deserted London. Almost the whole story’s shot on location, and in the grimy ’70s it does sometimes seem like a cross between The Sweeney and Survivors, with urban shooting meeting the feel of apocalyptic disaster stories. It looks great, though, with only a few exceptions – notably, the unbelievable night-time scenes shot in full day, without even a half-hearted filter on the camera, for lines such as “It’ll be light at four forty-five” (you scream, it’s light now!), intercut with scenes of genuine night supposedly taking place at the same time. And then back again. Such little details can really sabotage a production, just as – living in London – I find it difficult to believe in just one police car crossing the ‘border’ to find out what’s happening in the nation’s silent capital, or the mind-boggling take on London geography that, for example, places the Post Office Tower in Tower Hamlets.
Unfortunately, it’s not just the few miffed details and skimpy plot that let down a generally quite well-mounted story. My big problem is that The Avengers has already done the same story, and done it very much better. Eight years earlier, our heroes are knocked out by sleeping gas, coming round a day later to find the small town they’re in mysteriously deserted. Setting out to explore, they find the army gunning down “looters” and a plot involving nuclear blackmail… Yes, I’m afraid The Avengers – The Morning After does indeed have more thought, mystery, layers, tension, twists and does just about everything better than Sleeper does – despite being written by the same author. Though the scale is bigger in 1976, the ambition is much, much smaller, both of the story and the villains’ plans, our heroes (and the viewers) know from the start what’s happened, there’s no murderous betrayal by authority and consequent threat from all sides… While in The Morning After, too, from The Avengers’ much less ‘realistic’ days, sealing off a small town took several truckloads of soldiers and a huge public information campaign, here sealing off a large portion of London can be done with a group of people from just one coach. In the intervening years, even Doctor Who had done the same story, with lots of soldiers again and added dinosaurs, in 1974’s Invasion of the Dinosaurs (over which one might draw a discreet veil for many of the visuals, though it has some thought put into it). So it’s a bit of a shame for it to be so familiar, but to have so much less in it. It’s not bad, you understand, but frustrating when it’s mundanely recycling one of The Avengers’ strongest episodes.
Though it’s quite a shallow tale, you’ll also find Sleeper has quite a few ’70s concerns that are still live today, not that it treats them in any great detail: the S-95 ‘gas’ has been developed to knock out terrorists instantaneously (and magically, as one helicopter pass can put a densely populated city to sleep without a single exception, regardless of volume, wind currents or closed windows); after that mention, we’re primed to think that the looters look very much like terrorists of the time, act like terrorists in their brutal machine-gunning lack of concern for life, have a bit of a Baader-Meinhof vibe in the youngish mixed-sex couple who run the outfit… But only rob enough banks to take a helicopter’s-worth, as if Brian Clemens decided to write hard-hitting ‘real world’ villains but then copped out and came up with a plot so sanitised it could crop up in a children’s book, as is the thought that a bunch of savage killers would be entirely trusting about their bosses flying off to Rio with all the spoils. In one of the funnier moments there’s another topical touch, too; when Steed and Gambit are working out what the looters’ targets are, Steed suggests no-one would bother robbing the Bank of England when the economy’s in such a state. One of the minor actors also has a later political theme: Gavin Campbell, to be of That’s Life and career-killing anti-Europe loonyism fame. And there’s CCTV, as the main villain warns his minions to keep their faces covered because the cameras won’t sleep. Obviously, he shows his face all over the place anyway, because, well, he’s the villain.
Oh, and Steed has yet another closest ever, ever, ever friend get caught up in the plot and die a short way into the episode. I know this happened from time to time in the ’60s series, but The New Avengers takes it to absurd lengths in an attempt to drive home the ‘Avenging’ narrative; actor Neil Hallett, who played the best friend who died in last week’s episode, was Steed’s bestest and most doomed chum in an episode at the end of the ’60s, too, so he’s really unlucky. If you want to fit The Avengers into a coherent, ongoing story, best of luck (it makes Doctor Who seem seamless), but there are two possible explanations. Either Steed had a best friend who was killed in an early episode and then, with fine attention to detail but absolutely rotten luck, he worked out who the next-best was and ‘promoted’ him – and so on, and so on, down the line – and each time he works out who’s the best out of what’s left the swines happen to choose that week to kill the very chap, or Steed, always having had an eye to technological innovation (carphone in 1967, the first answering device on British television, mind-swap machine, and so on), invented Facebook forty years early and he takes it really seriously when all these people friend him. He’s a very polite chap (except with a ’phone); even when technically looting a pub because he and Gambit need a drink, he’s adamant that they leave a tip.
If I sound like I’m in two minds about this story, I suspect I am – because how much I enjoy it really depends on the mood I’m in. It’s fun but uninspired; nice to look at, but you really need to switch your brain off. And the move towards greater ‘realism’ rather than outlandish plots and villains means, ironically, that stories like this are less believable – outrageous details are easier to swallow than mundane ones that simply don’t fit with our everyday experience. Next week: spies live and spies die, but the dance goes on. Plus, for Blake’s 7 fans, the first of two appearances by Travis in as many weeks, and for Gambit fans (there must be one, surely?), after Purdey drops her trousers in tonight’s, next week Mike gets his kit off.
“We have made exhaustive tests.”Anyway, the plot is, Steed, Gambit and Purdey all happen to be staying in London overnight – even Steed, who in this iteration of the series has a stud out in the country to which he normally repairs – and it turns out they’re all in the very part of London seeded by sleeping gas (well, apparently it’s really a fine powder, but the effect’s much the same) S-95, which gives every single person in the area a longer than usual Sunday morning lie-in. Everyone, that is, save our three stars and the coachload of gun-toting gangsters who’re running around the city looting all the banks (or, mostly, wandering aimlessly). That’s pretty much it, save for our heroes – wait for it, spoilers – foiling the dastardly plan.
“Exhaustive tests on rabbits. People aren’t like rabbits.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Uncle of mine sired nineteen children. He was a keen bicyclist.”
Given that the story’s so slight, it’s mostly made up not of complex plotting but of moments of character, humour and style. Fortunately, the director’s got quite a lot of style, and so has Joanna Lumley – Purdey is today’s featured Avenger, starting off by ineptly locking herself out of her flat but then becoming the lead character for most of the episode. And she’s terrific. Look out in particular (or listen out, I suppose) for all the scenes with the radio on, like Steed and Gambit rushing to the rescue of a radio drama and, even better, Purdey in an exciting car chase as she swerves around town in a stolen mini, the sleeping owner flopping about next to her, crooks with machine guns roaring after her, while she’s coolly doing the exercises to an absurdly posh wireless-wake-up-with-torture woman. Superb. Then once she’s out of the car… Boy, can she run.
The Eroticism of Pyjamas
Others, of course, will mainly remember an unarmed (but ready to high-kick) Purdey hiding from her pursuers as a shop window dummy, at which point her pyjama pants fall down. Still, Joanna manages to carry it off without losing her cool, her blue pyjamas are hugely more stylish than her nasty floral frock of the day before, and her fighting her way out of the shop afterwards showcases her brilliantly. And if you think that element of sexuality’s a bit off, this is also the episode where you can catch a bizarre level of homoeroticism among men who you really wouldn’t want to. Not only does Steed inviting himself for a nightcap at Gambit’s flat frequently seem like he’s trying to chat Gambit up, but the villain’s apparently chatted up by Dr Graham early on, too (and do note that, while he and his group of hilariously over-tooled-up machine gun and bazooka-wielding macho thugs have no compunction about murder, he doesn’t kill the doctor to preserve his secret, but merely knocks him out… And throws him a single rose). At least, when a scene turns up where Gambit’s pyjamas feature, it’s both mildly amusing and gives him points for not wearing any.
Update: Richard, on watching late tonight, is struck (right between the eyes) by the full day-glo glory of Gambit’s décor: “I kept a man here for three weeks. At the end of it, he could never look at a lime again.”
The story’s other main stylistic touch is in all the eerie views of a deserted London. Almost the whole story’s shot on location, and in the grimy ’70s it does sometimes seem like a cross between The Sweeney and Survivors, with urban shooting meeting the feel of apocalyptic disaster stories. It looks great, though, with only a few exceptions – notably, the unbelievable night-time scenes shot in full day, without even a half-hearted filter on the camera, for lines such as “It’ll be light at four forty-five” (you scream, it’s light now!), intercut with scenes of genuine night supposedly taking place at the same time. And then back again. Such little details can really sabotage a production, just as – living in London – I find it difficult to believe in just one police car crossing the ‘border’ to find out what’s happening in the nation’s silent capital, or the mind-boggling take on London geography that, for example, places the Post Office Tower in Tower Hamlets.
The Morning After That Came Before
Unfortunately, it’s not just the few miffed details and skimpy plot that let down a generally quite well-mounted story. My big problem is that The Avengers has already done the same story, and done it very much better. Eight years earlier, our heroes are knocked out by sleeping gas, coming round a day later to find the small town they’re in mysteriously deserted. Setting out to explore, they find the army gunning down “looters” and a plot involving nuclear blackmail… Yes, I’m afraid The Avengers – The Morning After does indeed have more thought, mystery, layers, tension, twists and does just about everything better than Sleeper does – despite being written by the same author. Though the scale is bigger in 1976, the ambition is much, much smaller, both of the story and the villains’ plans, our heroes (and the viewers) know from the start what’s happened, there’s no murderous betrayal by authority and consequent threat from all sides… While in The Morning After, too, from The Avengers’ much less ‘realistic’ days, sealing off a small town took several truckloads of soldiers and a huge public information campaign, here sealing off a large portion of London can be done with a group of people from just one coach. In the intervening years, even Doctor Who had done the same story, with lots of soldiers again and added dinosaurs, in 1974’s Invasion of the Dinosaurs (over which one might draw a discreet veil for many of the visuals, though it has some thought put into it). So it’s a bit of a shame for it to be so familiar, but to have so much less in it. It’s not bad, you understand, but frustrating when it’s mundanely recycling one of The Avengers’ strongest episodes.
Though it’s quite a shallow tale, you’ll also find Sleeper has quite a few ’70s concerns that are still live today, not that it treats them in any great detail: the S-95 ‘gas’ has been developed to knock out terrorists instantaneously (and magically, as one helicopter pass can put a densely populated city to sleep without a single exception, regardless of volume, wind currents or closed windows); after that mention, we’re primed to think that the looters look very much like terrorists of the time, act like terrorists in their brutal machine-gunning lack of concern for life, have a bit of a Baader-Meinhof vibe in the youngish mixed-sex couple who run the outfit… But only rob enough banks to take a helicopter’s-worth, as if Brian Clemens decided to write hard-hitting ‘real world’ villains but then copped out and came up with a plot so sanitised it could crop up in a children’s book, as is the thought that a bunch of savage killers would be entirely trusting about their bosses flying off to Rio with all the spoils. In one of the funnier moments there’s another topical touch, too; when Steed and Gambit are working out what the looters’ targets are, Steed suggests no-one would bother robbing the Bank of England when the economy’s in such a state. One of the minor actors also has a later political theme: Gavin Campbell, to be of That’s Life and career-killing anti-Europe loonyism fame. And there’s CCTV, as the main villain warns his minions to keep their faces covered because the cameras won’t sleep. Obviously, he shows his face all over the place anyway, because, well, he’s the villain.
If You Value Your Life, Don’t Befriend Steed
Oh, and Steed has yet another closest ever, ever, ever friend get caught up in the plot and die a short way into the episode. I know this happened from time to time in the ’60s series, but The New Avengers takes it to absurd lengths in an attempt to drive home the ‘Avenging’ narrative; actor Neil Hallett, who played the best friend who died in last week’s episode, was Steed’s bestest and most doomed chum in an episode at the end of the ’60s, too, so he’s really unlucky. If you want to fit The Avengers into a coherent, ongoing story, best of luck (it makes Doctor Who seem seamless), but there are two possible explanations. Either Steed had a best friend who was killed in an early episode and then, with fine attention to detail but absolutely rotten luck, he worked out who the next-best was and ‘promoted’ him – and so on, and so on, down the line – and each time he works out who’s the best out of what’s left the swines happen to choose that week to kill the very chap, or Steed, always having had an eye to technological innovation (carphone in 1967, the first answering device on British television, mind-swap machine, and so on), invented Facebook forty years early and he takes it really seriously when all these people friend him. He’s a very polite chap (except with a ’phone); even when technically looting a pub because he and Gambit need a drink, he’s adamant that they leave a tip.
If I sound like I’m in two minds about this story, I suspect I am – because how much I enjoy it really depends on the mood I’m in. It’s fun but uninspired; nice to look at, but you really need to switch your brain off. And the move towards greater ‘realism’ rather than outlandish plots and villains means, ironically, that stories like this are less believable – outrageous details are easier to swallow than mundane ones that simply don’t fit with our everyday experience. Next week: spies live and spies die, but the dance goes on. Plus, for Blake’s 7 fans, the first of two appearances by Travis in as many weeks, and for Gambit fans (there must be one, surely?), after Purdey drops her trousers in tonight’s, next week Mike gets his kit off.
Labels: Joanna Lumley, Jon Pertwee, London, Reviews, The Avengers Season 6, The New Avengers
Monday, January 26, 2009
Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?
The best television programme ever made, and one that’s become much more than just a television programme… Last November, Doctor Who was forty-five years old, and I began a series of posts looking at each year and picking out the most brilliant thing about it. I published 2008’s post twelve hours ago, so here’s a round-up of what I aimed for, which years most enthused me and just how to find them all.
Some Doctor Who stories are adored. So are some whole periods of the show. Others get less attention, or nothing but criticism. I love it all – even the bits I’m less keen on than other bits. So my aim was to pick something that I could enthuse about for every single year since the show started, from the overlooked and the frowned at eras as well as those which are universally feted. It’s easy to get caught up in criticism, and slagging something off is often more fun to write than praise. I wanted, then, simply to say why Doctor Who was brilliant.
I also knew I have a tendency to go on a bit, and (partly as a result) to start things but not finish them. So, to guard against writing far too much for one year and never getting on to the next, I set myself several little rules as challenges. I won’t list them all, but the opening paragraph would set the scene, rounding up as many good things from that year as I had room to mention; then I’d name the story I’d chosen as the pick of the year, with a quotation from it and a paragraph about it; and finally I’d say how to get hold of a copy. I set one word limit for the introduction, title and quote – which I occasionally ended up breaking or, towards the end, just putting in more than one quotation – and another, 45 words (for 45 years), to write about the chosen story itself. As other forms of Doctor Who (the Target novels and the New Adventures in particular, but also comic strips, other books, audio plays and more) have always been as ‘real’ and thrilling to me as the TV series, I treated any Who I liked, in whatever medium, on the same basis. I also decided that I’d only name a story or its author in the introduction as a particular recommendation, and (most difficult of the lot) that I’d only write positive things. I can find something to pick holes in for every story, from the top of the lot to the fair-to-middling (and much more for those below that), but I set out not to mention anything that I didn’t like. Although I’d only say things I believed, just for once even the tiniest criticism could wait at the door. And I pretty much managed it, though a couple may have snuck in at the back…
Some stories were easier to be glowing about than others, and so were some years. I found that, having set out in part to take a fresh look at years I didn’t think much of, I could be genuinely enthusiastic about at least a part of them all – though two or three were a bit of a struggle, I managed it. There were plenty of years, on the other hand, where I wanted to praise much more than I could fit inside my self-imposed word limits (and a good dozen where a brilliant runner-up story was very close to being my ‘pick’ for the year). Of the last few entries where the drafting’s still fresh in my mind, for example, 2003, 2005, 2006 and 2007 all had stories that I’d have loved to have raved about cut for space. There was something about the fives, as well – I said when writing about it that 1975 might just be Doctor Who’s most brilliant year for me, in part because it was when I discovered the series, but 1995 and 2005 were extraordinarily exciting, too. My favourite eras of the show have long been Billy Hartnell’s, Robert Holmes and Philip Hinchcliffe’s, and the New Adventures, so I’d happily point anyone towards the mid-’60s, or 1975-78 (well, 1975-81, quite easily), 1989, 1994-96, 2005, 2007… And while I loved writing about each of those, the others were a joy, too. So if you’ve been reading them, I hope you’ve found something to be enthused about.
I’ve not really answered the question in my late-at-night-administrative meanderings above, have I, and I fear I won’t come up with any great insight at this hour. To make up for that, here’s a shorter, pithier piece on the essentials of Doctor Who that I prepared earlier, which has a crack at answering the question. And is readable.
Along the way, I’ve been cheered by quite a few other people’s Who enthusiasms – among my favourites were the lovely Nick, who sent me his own complete 46 years of picks; the Doctor Who author who told me he was enjoying them; and Neil and Millennium, who each picked a year to join in on. I came across Calapine’s list of favourite bits – and “Worsts,” which I’ll resist temptation on – which had quite a few that had me nodding. One of her changes to the list she was working from is something I heartily disagree with, but as I’m being fluffy and positive for one more night I’ll merely point you to a hint.
Stuart, impressively, has been inspired by the fabulous 1981 repeat season that kept those of us around at the time going when we were agog for Peter Davison to appear, and has begun work on an update of The Five Faces of Doctor Who entitled (roll of drums) The Ten Faces of Doctor Who. He’s come up with some persuasive reasoning for the first five stories he’s picked, as well as some terrific clips, so I’m fascinated to see what his next five will be. I’d love to see the BBC remind everyone what’s brilliant about William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Paul McGann, Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant.
Stuart’s so far chosen The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Tomb of the Cybermen, Spearhead From Space, The Ark In Space and Frontios, all rather good and a couple of which I’d probably have picked myself. Having just done 46 individual picks, rather than being fagged out I’m actually feeling quite upbeat about the whole series in all its many forms, so I was tempted to do my pick right now. But, partly because I don’t want to gazump him – he still has five more Doctors to go – and partly because making another big list already might be a bit much, I thought I’d do something else instead.
Picking a full set of 46 stories might be a bit much for you, but if you enjoyed reading my selections, why not pick what ten stories – there you go, that’s a more manageable number – that you’d show if you were in charge of a repeat season? To help you get your thinking cap on, what sort of ‘repeat season’ would you want, and where would you want to show it? I reckon if I were in charge of BBC1 or BBC2, I’d go for ten stories edited into feature-length ‘movies’ (probably with the new DVD special effects, where they have them) and show them on ten Saturday afternoons or evenings, but if I was Mr BBC4, I’d show them in their original episodes, probably one story a week stripped across weeknights, and be more relaxed about showing talky historicals. What do you think? And would you pick the best story from each Doctor? The best individual performance by each Doctor? The best representation of each Doctor’s era (easiest for Pat’s monsters and Pertwee’s UNIT; trickiest for Tom, with his massive variety, and Peter, with his split between ‘arthouse’ and ‘macho’)? Do you balance your ten to reflect the series’ diversity, with comedy, action, drama / past, present, future, or pick them to appeal to people who’ve come to the series in the Twenty-first Century, with Daleks, Cybermen, the Master and Sarah Jane? Go on, have a rummage.Ten Eleven Faces of Doctor Who sets. Almost at The Eleventh Hour, you might say (groan).
At last, the point of this post. I’ve written about why Doctor Who was brilliant for 46 separate years, so here they all are for you to click on and open – which I thought I’d bettter do on discovering that the less-useful-than-they-look labels at the bottom of each post only find you the last twenty. If there are any you’d like to read, here’s the easy way to do it. Because the only real answer to ‘Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?’ isn’t to be found in someone telling you, but in you watching or reading or listening to it for yourself, and that’s why I kept my recommendations short (if numerous!). Here are some of the best stories to dip into:
1963 – An Unearthly Child
1964 – The Aztecs
1965 – The Crusade
1966 – The Daleks’ Master Plan
1967 – The Evil of the Daleks
1968 – The Mind Robber
1969 – The War Games
1970 – Doctor Who and the Silurians
1971 – The Mind of Evil
1972 – The Curse of Peladon
1973 – Carnival of Monsters
1974 – Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion
1975 – Genesis of the Daleks
1976 – The Deadly Assassin
1977 – The Talons of Weng-Chiang
1978 – The Androids of Tara
1979 – The Iron Legion
1980 – Full Circle
1981 – The Master’s Doctor Plan (The Keeper of Traken / Logopolis / Castrovalva)
1982 – The Tides of Time
1983 – Snakedance
1984 – The Caves of Androzani
1985 – Revelation of the Daleks
1986 – The Trial of a Time Lord: The Mysterious Planet
1987 – Paradise Towers
1988 – The Happiness Patrol
1989 – The Curse of Fenric
1990 – Doctor Who – Remembrance of the Daleks
1991 – Doctor Who: The New Adventures – Timewyrm: Revelation
1992 – Doctor Who: The New Adventures – Nightshade
1993 – Doctor Who: The New Adventures – Lucifer Rising
1994 – Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures – Venusian Lullaby
1995 – Doctor Who: The New Adventures – The Also People
1996 – Doctor Who: The New Adventures – Damaged Goods
1997 – Doctor Who – Alien Bodies
1998 – Doctor Who – The Witch Hunters
1999 – The Curse of Fatal Death
2000 – Doctor Who – The Shadows of Avalon
2001 – The Stones of Venice
2002 – Faction Paradox – The Book of the War
2003 – Jubilee
2004 – Death and the Daleks
2005 – Rose
2006 – Doomsday
2007 – Human Nature
2008 – The Fires of Pompeii
And it doesn’t stop there…
Update 1: DWM gets in on the ‘Why is this brilliant?’ concept, gloriously.
There will, eventually, be more updates, as the comments below make clear that I didn’t quite answer the main question. I will, one day, though I still think ‘just go and watch it’ will provide a better answer than any article ever could.
“If you could touch the alien sand and hear the cries of strange birds – and watch them wheel, in another sky – would that satisfy you?”And hasn’t it all been brilliant? Or, at least, good (go on, click – it’s a fab clip).
Some Doctor Who stories are adored. So are some whole periods of the show. Others get less attention, or nothing but criticism. I love it all – even the bits I’m less keen on than other bits. So my aim was to pick something that I could enthuse about for every single year since the show started, from the overlooked and the frowned at eras as well as those which are universally feted. It’s easy to get caught up in criticism, and slagging something off is often more fun to write than praise. I wanted, then, simply to say why Doctor Who was brilliant.
I also knew I have a tendency to go on a bit, and (partly as a result) to start things but not finish them. So, to guard against writing far too much for one year and never getting on to the next, I set myself several little rules as challenges. I won’t list them all, but the opening paragraph would set the scene, rounding up as many good things from that year as I had room to mention; then I’d name the story I’d chosen as the pick of the year, with a quotation from it and a paragraph about it; and finally I’d say how to get hold of a copy. I set one word limit for the introduction, title and quote – which I occasionally ended up breaking or, towards the end, just putting in more than one quotation – and another, 45 words (for 45 years), to write about the chosen story itself. As other forms of Doctor Who (the Target novels and the New Adventures in particular, but also comic strips, other books, audio plays and more) have always been as ‘real’ and thrilling to me as the TV series, I treated any Who I liked, in whatever medium, on the same basis. I also decided that I’d only name a story or its author in the introduction as a particular recommendation, and (most difficult of the lot) that I’d only write positive things. I can find something to pick holes in for every story, from the top of the lot to the fair-to-middling (and much more for those below that), but I set out not to mention anything that I didn’t like. Although I’d only say things I believed, just for once even the tiniest criticism could wait at the door. And I pretty much managed it, though a couple may have snuck in at the back…
Some stories were easier to be glowing about than others, and so were some years. I found that, having set out in part to take a fresh look at years I didn’t think much of, I could be genuinely enthusiastic about at least a part of them all – though two or three were a bit of a struggle, I managed it. There were plenty of years, on the other hand, where I wanted to praise much more than I could fit inside my self-imposed word limits (and a good dozen where a brilliant runner-up story was very close to being my ‘pick’ for the year). Of the last few entries where the drafting’s still fresh in my mind, for example, 2003, 2005, 2006 and 2007 all had stories that I’d have loved to have raved about cut for space. There was something about the fives, as well – I said when writing about it that 1975 might just be Doctor Who’s most brilliant year for me, in part because it was when I discovered the series, but 1995 and 2005 were extraordinarily exciting, too. My favourite eras of the show have long been Billy Hartnell’s, Robert Holmes and Philip Hinchcliffe’s, and the New Adventures, so I’d happily point anyone towards the mid-’60s, or 1975-78 (well, 1975-81, quite easily), 1989, 1994-96, 2005, 2007… And while I loved writing about each of those, the others were a joy, too. So if you’ve been reading them, I hope you’ve found something to be enthused about.
The Ten Faces of Doctor Who
I’ve not really answered the question in my late-at-night-administrative meanderings above, have I, and I fear I won’t come up with any great insight at this hour. To make up for that, here’s a shorter, pithier piece on the essentials of Doctor Who that I prepared earlier, which has a crack at answering the question. And is readable.
Along the way, I’ve been cheered by quite a few other people’s Who enthusiasms – among my favourites were the lovely Nick, who sent me his own complete 46 years of picks; the Doctor Who author who told me he was enjoying them; and Neil and Millennium, who each picked a year to join in on. I came across Calapine’s list of favourite bits – and “Worsts,” which I’ll resist temptation on – which had quite a few that had me nodding. One of her changes to the list she was working from is something I heartily disagree with, but as I’m being fluffy and positive for one more night I’ll merely point you to a hint.
Stuart, impressively, has been inspired by the fabulous 1981 repeat season that kept those of us around at the time going when we were agog for Peter Davison to appear, and has begun work on an update of The Five Faces of Doctor Who entitled (roll of drums) The Ten Faces of Doctor Who. He’s come up with some persuasive reasoning for the first five stories he’s picked, as well as some terrific clips, so I’m fascinated to see what his next five will be. I’d love to see the BBC remind everyone what’s brilliant about William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Paul McGann, Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant.
Stuart’s so far chosen The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Tomb of the Cybermen, Spearhead From Space, The Ark In Space and Frontios, all rather good and a couple of which I’d probably have picked myself. Having just done 46 individual picks, rather than being fagged out I’m actually feeling quite upbeat about the whole series in all its many forms, so I was tempted to do my pick right now. But, partly because I don’t want to gazump him – he still has five more Doctors to go – and partly because making another big list already might be a bit much, I thought I’d do something else instead.
Picking a full set of 46 stories might be a bit much for you, but if you enjoyed reading my selections, why not pick what ten stories – there you go, that’s a more manageable number – that you’d show if you were in charge of a repeat season? To help you get your thinking cap on, what sort of ‘repeat season’ would you want, and where would you want to show it? I reckon if I were in charge of BBC1 or BBC2, I’d go for ten stories edited into feature-length ‘movies’ (probably with the new DVD special effects, where they have them) and show them on ten Saturday afternoons or evenings, but if I was Mr BBC4, I’d show them in their original episodes, probably one story a week stripped across weeknights, and be more relaxed about showing talky historicals. What do you think? And would you pick the best story from each Doctor? The best individual performance by each Doctor? The best representation of each Doctor’s era (easiest for Pat’s monsters and Pertwee’s UNIT; trickiest for Tom, with his massive variety, and Peter, with his split between ‘arthouse’ and ‘macho’)? Do you balance your ten to reflect the series’ diversity, with comedy, action, drama / past, present, future, or pick them to appeal to people who’ve come to the series in the Twenty-first Century, with Daleks, Cybermen, the Master and Sarah Jane? Go on, have a rummage.
“’Pon my Sam. I may have had a bang on the head, but this is a dashed queer story.”Update: rather belatedly, I did devise my own ‘BBC2’ and ‘BBC4’ The
Why Doctor Who Was Brilliant – Year By Year
At last, the point of this post. I’ve written about why Doctor Who was brilliant for 46 separate years, so here they all are for you to click on and open – which I thought I’d bettter do on discovering that the less-useful-than-they-look labels at the bottom of each post only find you the last twenty. If there are any you’d like to read, here’s the easy way to do it. Because the only real answer to ‘Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?’ isn’t to be found in someone telling you, but in you watching or reading or listening to it for yourself, and that’s why I kept my recommendations short (if numerous!). Here are some of the best stories to dip into:
1963 – An Unearthly Child
1964 – The Aztecs
1965 – The Crusade
1966 – The Daleks’ Master Plan
1967 – The Evil of the Daleks
1968 – The Mind Robber
1969 – The War Games
1970 – Doctor Who and the Silurians
1971 – The Mind of Evil
1972 – The Curse of Peladon
1973 – Carnival of Monsters
1974 – Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion
1975 – Genesis of the Daleks
1976 – The Deadly Assassin
1977 – The Talons of Weng-Chiang
1978 – The Androids of Tara
1979 – The Iron Legion
1980 – Full Circle
1981 – The Master’s Doctor Plan (The Keeper of Traken / Logopolis / Castrovalva)
1982 – The Tides of Time
1983 – Snakedance
1984 – The Caves of Androzani
1985 – Revelation of the Daleks
1986 – The Trial of a Time Lord: The Mysterious Planet
1987 – Paradise Towers
1988 – The Happiness Patrol
1989 – The Curse of Fenric
1990 – Doctor Who – Remembrance of the Daleks
1991 – Doctor Who: The New Adventures – Timewyrm: Revelation
1992 – Doctor Who: The New Adventures – Nightshade
1993 – Doctor Who: The New Adventures – Lucifer Rising
1994 – Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures – Venusian Lullaby
1995 – Doctor Who: The New Adventures – The Also People
1996 – Doctor Who: The New Adventures – Damaged Goods
1997 – Doctor Who – Alien Bodies
1998 – Doctor Who – The Witch Hunters
1999 – The Curse of Fatal Death
2000 – Doctor Who – The Shadows of Avalon
2001 – The Stones of Venice
2002 – Faction Paradox – The Book of the War
2003 – Jubilee
2004 – Death and the Daleks
2005 – Rose
2006 – Doomsday
2007 – Human Nature
2008 – The Fires of Pompeii
And it doesn’t stop there…
“No. No. Don’t tell me how it happened. Although – hope I don’t just trip over a brick. That’d be embarrassing. Then again – painless. Worse ways to go. Depends on the brick…”This year will see a few more stories for David Tennant, and a great deal of speculation and anticipation about Matt Smith. I’m looking forward to it – and, while I’m waiting, delving into so much of the past inspired me at last to wake up my long-neglected Doctor Who blog, and I’ve gone right back to the very beginning.
Update 1: DWM gets in on the ‘Why is this brilliant?’ concept, gloriously.
There will, eventually, be more updates, as the comments below make clear that I didn’t quite answer the main question. I will, one day, though I still think ‘just go and watch it’ will provide a better answer than any article ever could.
Labels: Blogs, David Tennant, Doctor Who, History, Matt Smith, Top Tips, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?, William Hartnell
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Doctor Who 45th Anniversary – Why Was 2008 Brilliant?
There’s more excitement from The Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood (Joe Lidster writes interesting stories for both), and more surprises from Big Finish: The Haunting of Thomas Brewster; Brave New Town; The Bride of Peladon; old stage plays reimagined; and Home Truths just kills us. TV Doctor Who offers sheer entertainment in Partners In Crime and The Unicorn and the Wasp, a giant ‘robot’ and countless “Who” gags in The Next Doctor, and two simply outstanding dramas – Midnight’s claustrophobic, terrifying inventiveness, and…
This has three DVD releases: a vanilla disc along with Partners in Crime and Planet of the Ood; in a box set of the whole 2008 season, complete with extras; and in Autumn 2009, paired again with Partners in Crime, accompanied by a magazine as part of the newly-launched Doctor Who DVD Files. You can also buy a double-pack with a toy ‘Pyrovile Magma Creature’ and ‘Roman soldier’.
The Fires of Pompeii
“You fought her off – with a water pistol! I bloody love you.”Awesome. Filming in Rome, an exploding volcano, flaming great monsters – and a moral argument that recalls Billy’s stories. With tragedy, mystery, modern art, fabulous frocks (and nice legs), shouty villains and a superb ‘duelling soothsayers’ scene, you can almost forget how funny it is, too.
“Because that’s how I see the Universe. Every waking second I can see what is, what was, what could be, what must not. That’s the burden of a Time Lord, Donna. I’m the only one left.”
This has three DVD releases: a vanilla disc along with Partners in Crime and Planet of the Ood; in a box set of the whole 2008 season, complete with extras; and in Autumn 2009, paired again with Partners in Crime, accompanied by a magazine as part of the newly-launched Doctor Who DVD Files. You can also buy a double-pack with a toy ‘Pyrovile Magma Creature’ and ‘Roman soldier’.
Labels: Big Finish, David Tennant, Doctor Who, DVD, History, Reviews, Sarah Jane Smith, Torchwood, Toys, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?, William Hartnell
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Doctor Who 45th Anniversary – Why Was 2007 Brilliant?
Gosh. The Sarah Jane Smith Adventures’ opening Invasion of the Bane and Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane… Big Finish’s Circular Time, 100 and Immortal Beloved… The Pirate Loop’s enthralling read… And marvellously interweaved TV Doctor Who: vampirism; transformations; bad, bad angels; David Tennant suffering brilliantly; Gridlock’s Dance of the Macra*; Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (the Master’s awakening making the year’s most gripping quarter-hour); and Paul Cornell’s beautiful, small-scale, essential story…
Two forty-five-minute episodes make one story to get teary over, and – it’s wonderful. There are three DVD releases: a vanilla DVD along with Blink; in a box set of the whole 2007 season, complete with extras (though still mysteriously without John Smith’s anguished “I am not the Doctor” that was in all the trailers); and in Autumn 2009, paired respectively with 42 and Blink, each with magazines as part of the newly-launched Doctor Who DVD Files. You can buy the Doctor’s watch and toy scarecrows, too, while the original 1995 book on which the TV story was based is available for free as an eBook with notes from Paul Cornell.
*The piece of music most associated with this year is the terrific theme first used on the season’s trailer, its first appearance in a story for the blissful Gridlock. It opens 2007’s Original Television Soundtrack CD under the official title of All the Strange, Strange Creatures, but to us it’ll always be ‘Dance of the Macra’.
Human Nature / The Family of Blood
“But we need the Doctor.”Can 1913’s attitudes, institutions and individuals deal with love and war? The Doctor’s human self doesn’t want his other life; wild-eyed Son-of-Mine wants to steal it and the show for super, super fun; and while Daleks now have no problem with stairs, John Smith does.
“And what am I, then? Nothing? I’m just a story.”
“Have you enjoyed it, Doctor? Being human? Has it taught you wonderful things? Are you better, richer, wiser, hmm? Then let’s see you answer this – which one of them do you want us to kill? Maid or matron? Your friend, or your lover… Your choice!”
Two forty-five-minute episodes make one story to get teary over, and – it’s wonderful. There are three DVD releases: a vanilla DVD along with Blink; in a box set of the whole 2007 season, complete with extras (though still mysteriously without John Smith’s anguished “I am not the Doctor” that was in all the trailers); and in Autumn 2009, paired respectively with 42 and Blink, each with magazines as part of the newly-launched Doctor Who DVD Files. You can buy the Doctor’s watch and toy scarecrows, too, while the original 1995 book on which the TV story was based is available for free as an eBook with notes from Paul Cornell.
*The piece of music most associated with this year is the terrific theme first used on the season’s trailer, its first appearance in a story for the blissful Gridlock. It opens 2007’s Original Television Soundtrack CD under the official title of All the Strange, Strange Creatures, but to us it’ll always be ‘Dance of the Macra’.
Labels: Big Finish, Books, David Tennant, Doctor Who, DVD, History, Music, Reviews, Sarah Jane Smith, The Master, Toys, Utopia, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?
Friday, January 23, 2009
The Psychedelic Spy and The New Avengers – Faces
At 11.55 tonight it’s BBC4’s latest episode of The New Avengers: Faces, an impressive adventure that reels you in slowly and really grabs you by the end. It’s the fourth and perhaps the best of The Avengers’ ‘doubles’ stories, going for broke with Steed, Gambit and Purdey all replaced by doppelgängers – or are they? Patrick Macnee and Joanna Lumley in particular are brilliant, and you can also catch Joanna on the iPlayer in The Psychedelic Spy, a drug-soaked, disturbing ’60s-set thriller that’s been playing on BBC7 all week (watch out for spoilers about both if you read on).
I’ll fill in the rest later, having given you a taste; my beloved came in late from work after a hellish journey, so I’ve been ministering to his needs and cooking a big meal in an attempt to revive him. Now I’m a little sleepy on it, so I’ll finish once I’ve had a while to digest. Possibly Monday!
And finally, a word on Andrew Rissik’s radio thriller, made in 1990, set very firmly in 1968, and broadcast in five parts this week on BBC7. If you missed it, it’s well worth tuning in on the BBC iPlayer; James Aubrey’s rather good as the lead, but ’60s legends Gerald Harper, Charles Gray and of course Joanna Lumley completely steal it.
I’ve been trying to work out in my head something to say about The Prisoner since Patrick McGoohan died last week – I fear it’s still in a bit of a tangle, but if you want to try unpicking the series yourself, it is of course being repeated twice every Tuesday on ITV4. It’ll only be four episodes in this week (depending on how you count them, which is trickier than it sounds), so the next one up’s as good a place as any to pick it up: Free For All is a relatively early episode, which means it explains some of the set-up, but it’s also the first to go utterly barking mad, so that gives you a flavour of what it can all turn into. This isn’t quite as much of a detour as it reads, as BBC7 has been repeating two of The Prisoner’s cousins. Each weekday morning at 9.30 they’re currently broadcasting Michael Jayston’s superb reading of Rogue Male, a 1930s thriller novel that’s a clear antecedent of Patrick McGoohan’s masterwork – it, too, has a magnificently egocentric lead character, a lone wolf at the top of his brutal profession, who’s trapped, repeatedly trying to escape, and persecuted physically and psychologically by anonymous servants of a mysterious service who want to find the purpose of his attention-grabbing opening action. And, of course, the starting point of The Psychedelic Spy is a top agent who resigns – only for his old bosses to try to bring him back in, sent against his will to a mysterious environment where no-one’s loyalties are entirely clear. With a lot of drugs.
The story is both an effective thriller in itself and a meditation on where the ’60s went sour, aided by a soundtrack including Jimi Hendrix, the Byrds and, most tellingly, the Who; the performances are uniformly excellent, the mood alternately grumpy and despairing, and the twists – all right. Look away to avoid spoilers, remember, as I turn to the outstanding actors. Robert Eddison, Michael Cochrane and Ed Bishop are all excellent as minor characters (particularly, I think, Mr Eddison’s fading old master of secret information), and James Aubrey’s rather good as Billy Hindle, the British secret assassin who wants out because he fears he’s turning into a psychopath. The first episode stars Gerald Harper, formerly Adam Adamant, as his manipulative boss Sir Richard Snark; no, with a name like that he’s not very nice, but he’s awfully good at it. The whole thing really gets going, however, when Hindle flies out to Temptation Island, run by dying charismatic genius Charles Gray and his glamorous wife Joanna Lumley. They are, in short, fantastic.
It feels very much like a ’60s thriller, not just for the stars but its mix of acid music, James Bond, The Prisoner, Callan and le Carré (with a dash of Apocalypse Now), but despite its quality, one aspect disappointed me. I think of women in thrillers being the ’40s and ’50s femmes fatale of film noir, or the powerful figures of the ’80s, or simply being treated much the same as the men since; the fact that my favourite series from the ’60s that can very roughly be described as a spy thriller is The Avengers has, I fear, rather spoiled me for a story like this that, in setting itself firmly in the feel of the time, pushes its women firmly into the background. So I admit I was disappointed as The Psychedelic Spy’s three significant women were one by one revealed to be much less interesting than I’d anticipated. In a very ’60s way, they are essentially pliant victims, and it’s notable that Hindle shags each of them. His rather drippy girlfriend whom he picks up after resigning, Marianne, was so utterly convenient that I assumed she was an enemy (or perhaps British) agent right until she was shot in his arms; I then instantly assumed, correctly, that she’d been the target rather than him, and probably at the order of either his ruthless employer or Joanna Lumley’s Tara (another Avengers name). Joanna’s performance is so magnetic – and, as she gives as good as she gets with Charles Gray and claims to be a very bad person – I assumed that she was an agent in her own right, probably responsible for the dodgy activities her husband’s implicated in. Again, I assumed that right up until the last minute… At which point it became dispiritingly clear that she was only there as unfaithful wife and then widow after all. The third woman in the story is Hindle’s ex, who’s disappeared while investigating Charles Gray’s character – our anti-hero characterises her as an evil, manipulative bitch, so I had high hopes that she’d have survived and be secretly engineering the whole thing. No such luck. It turns out, eventually, that she’s dead after all, leaving her undoubted abilities both of no use to the story and entirely framed by men who didn’t like her. I’d have liked us to meet her, instead.
The close is a little too neat – not happy, you understand, but missing a dash of ambiguity, as if what we hear in the final episode is the truth rather than leaving it likely to be another layer of lies – but still, despite being occasionally predictable and a let-down on some of the non-existent twists involving female characters I’d predicted in hope, it works on the whole. Oh, I’m underselling it now; I liked it. But you might want to listen when you’re on an upper.
“Irreplaceable.”Doppelgängers were a staple of ’60s and ’70s series whose feet left the ground, especially science fiction or the more outré spy thrillers – and with The Avengers crossing the boundaries between both of those, with comedy, fantasy and more besides, it’s no surprise that the series had a go at the subject more than once. Two’s a Crowd did it as cod le Carré for Mrs Peel (and there’s a touch of it in her Who’s Who??? and Never, Never Say Die, too), while Tara King’s They Keep Killing Steed may just give you a hint as to which character is copied multiple times. The two that try for the most ‘realistic’ approach, however, are the best of them. Back in 1963, Man With Two Shadows pitted Cathy Gale against Steed, both when one of his associates tips her off that he’s a fake and when he’s shown at his most ruthless with the real doubles. More incredibly, Faces relies much further on coincidence, recovering slightly with talk of plastic surgery and a story spread over a five-year time period, but really succeeds in its intercourse between the regulars. There’s also arresting direction, and among three well-characterised villains you’ll find Edward Petherbridge, later to find fame as Lord Peter Wimsey. Oh, and before I go on with my usual spoilertastic analysis, have you got this week’s Radio Times? Ignore what it says. It’s not a spoiler, just almost completely wrong.
“I’d better have a word with him. Pull him back into line.”Like several New Avengers episodes, the opening scene’s set some years – five, it turns out – before most of the rest of the story. Unusually, this is without clearly identifying it as such, and the strong implication’s that the main part of the episode takes place over a period of weeks, if not months. Though neither script nor direction express that as well as they might, it gives the story added weight and credibility, and the director gives it real force. Two tramps see an obviously wealthy man drive past, the spitting image of one of them; after what we infer is a period of studying him, the pre-credits sequence ends with one of the series’ most striking freeze-frames, as the rabbit-poaching tramp shoots an arrow into the wealthy double who’s diving into his own private pool. It may not be a subtle way of killing, but it gets your attention.
“And if he doesn’t?”
“Hmm. He’ll just have to be replaced, won’t he?”
I’ll fill in the rest later, having given you a taste; my beloved came in late from work after a hellish journey, so I’ve been ministering to his needs and cooking a big meal in an attempt to revive him. Now I’m a little sleepy on it, so I’ll finish once I’ve had a while to digest. Possibly Monday!
The Psychedelic Spy
And finally, a word on Andrew Rissik’s radio thriller, made in 1990, set very firmly in 1968, and broadcast in five parts this week on BBC7. If you missed it, it’s well worth tuning in on the BBC iPlayer; James Aubrey’s rather good as the lead, but ’60s legends Gerald Harper, Charles Gray and of course Joanna Lumley completely steal it.
I’ve been trying to work out in my head something to say about The Prisoner since Patrick McGoohan died last week – I fear it’s still in a bit of a tangle, but if you want to try unpicking the series yourself, it is of course being repeated twice every Tuesday on ITV4. It’ll only be four episodes in this week (depending on how you count them, which is trickier than it sounds), so the next one up’s as good a place as any to pick it up: Free For All is a relatively early episode, which means it explains some of the set-up, but it’s also the first to go utterly barking mad, so that gives you a flavour of what it can all turn into. This isn’t quite as much of a detour as it reads, as BBC7 has been repeating two of The Prisoner’s cousins. Each weekday morning at 9.30 they’re currently broadcasting Michael Jayston’s superb reading of Rogue Male, a 1930s thriller novel that’s a clear antecedent of Patrick McGoohan’s masterwork – it, too, has a magnificently egocentric lead character, a lone wolf at the top of his brutal profession, who’s trapped, repeatedly trying to escape, and persecuted physically and psychologically by anonymous servants of a mysterious service who want to find the purpose of his attention-grabbing opening action. And, of course, the starting point of The Psychedelic Spy is a top agent who resigns – only for his old bosses to try to bring him back in, sent against his will to a mysterious environment where no-one’s loyalties are entirely clear. With a lot of drugs.
The story is both an effective thriller in itself and a meditation on where the ’60s went sour, aided by a soundtrack including Jimi Hendrix, the Byrds and, most tellingly, the Who; the performances are uniformly excellent, the mood alternately grumpy and despairing, and the twists – all right. Look away to avoid spoilers, remember, as I turn to the outstanding actors. Robert Eddison, Michael Cochrane and Ed Bishop are all excellent as minor characters (particularly, I think, Mr Eddison’s fading old master of secret information), and James Aubrey’s rather good as Billy Hindle, the British secret assassin who wants out because he fears he’s turning into a psychopath. The first episode stars Gerald Harper, formerly Adam Adamant, as his manipulative boss Sir Richard Snark; no, with a name like that he’s not very nice, but he’s awfully good at it. The whole thing really gets going, however, when Hindle flies out to Temptation Island, run by dying charismatic genius Charles Gray and his glamorous wife Joanna Lumley. They are, in short, fantastic.
It feels very much like a ’60s thriller, not just for the stars but its mix of acid music, James Bond, The Prisoner, Callan and le Carré (with a dash of Apocalypse Now), but despite its quality, one aspect disappointed me. I think of women in thrillers being the ’40s and ’50s femmes fatale of film noir, or the powerful figures of the ’80s, or simply being treated much the same as the men since; the fact that my favourite series from the ’60s that can very roughly be described as a spy thriller is The Avengers has, I fear, rather spoiled me for a story like this that, in setting itself firmly in the feel of the time, pushes its women firmly into the background. So I admit I was disappointed as The Psychedelic Spy’s three significant women were one by one revealed to be much less interesting than I’d anticipated. In a very ’60s way, they are essentially pliant victims, and it’s notable that Hindle shags each of them. His rather drippy girlfriend whom he picks up after resigning, Marianne, was so utterly convenient that I assumed she was an enemy (or perhaps British) agent right until she was shot in his arms; I then instantly assumed, correctly, that she’d been the target rather than him, and probably at the order of either his ruthless employer or Joanna Lumley’s Tara (another Avengers name). Joanna’s performance is so magnetic – and, as she gives as good as she gets with Charles Gray and claims to be a very bad person – I assumed that she was an agent in her own right, probably responsible for the dodgy activities her husband’s implicated in. Again, I assumed that right up until the last minute… At which point it became dispiritingly clear that she was only there as unfaithful wife and then widow after all. The third woman in the story is Hindle’s ex, who’s disappeared while investigating Charles Gray’s character – our anti-hero characterises her as an evil, manipulative bitch, so I had high hopes that she’d have survived and be secretly engineering the whole thing. No such luck. It turns out, eventually, that she’s dead after all, leaving her undoubted abilities both of no use to the story and entirely framed by men who didn’t like her. I’d have liked us to meet her, instead.
The close is a little too neat – not happy, you understand, but missing a dash of ambiguity, as if what we hear in the final episode is the truth rather than leaving it likely to be another layer of lies – but still, despite being occasionally predictable and a let-down on some of the non-existent twists involving female characters I’d predicted in hope, it works on the whole. Oh, I’m underselling it now; I liked it. But you might want to listen when you’re on an upper.
Labels: Joanna Lumley, Michael Jayston, Radio, Reviews, Spies, The New Avengers, The Prisoner
Doctor Who 45th Anniversary – Why Was 2006 Brilliant?
Fairy-tale monsters abound: under the bed in The Girl in the Fireplace; devilish on The Impossible Planet; Love and Monsters’ all-consuming fan; Tooth and Claw’s scary werewolf (and Queen Victoria); inspiring many wonderful toys. Children’s magazine show Totally Doctor Who launches, then spin-off drama Torchwood makes it four Who-related series, peaking with They Keep Killing Suzie. The Invasion’s lost episodes are reanimated for DVD; Bernice has a Summer of Love; gods battle on The Ship of a Billion Years… And who will win? Daleks or Cybermen?
Two forty-five-minute episodes, making one story, out on four DVD releases: a vanilla DVD along with Fear Her; in a box set of the whole 2006 season, complete with extras (including cut-down versions of Doctor Who Confidential); each on their own, once, as tabloid freebies; and in Summer 2009, paired respectively with Fear Her and The Runaway Bride, each with magazines as part of the newly-launched Doctor Who DVD Files.
Army of Ghosts / Doomsday
“I’m – the Doctor…”Edge-of-the-seat viewing as Torchwood rises under a fabulous villain, then falls to the Cybermen – thrilling music, tense build-up, electrifying cliffhanger and an action-packed climax to an epic season finale. Then the haunting last three scenes… Oh, and five million Cybermen against four Daleks? Easy. “Exterminate!”
“Oh, I should say! Hooray!”
Two forty-five-minute episodes, making one story, out on four DVD releases: a vanilla DVD along with Fear Her; in a box set of the whole 2006 season, complete with extras (including cut-down versions of Doctor Who Confidential); each on their own, once, as tabloid freebies; and in Summer 2009, paired respectively with Fear Her and The Runaway Bride, each with magazines as part of the newly-launched Doctor Who DVD Files.
Labels: Big Finish, Daleks, David Tennant, Doctor Who, DVD, Faction Paradox, Fandom, Music, Patrick Troughton, Professor Bernice Summerfield, Recons, Reviews, Torchwood, Toys, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Doctor Who 45th Anniversary – Why Was 2005 Brilliant?
He’s back, he’s Christopher Eccleston then David Tennant, and he’s showered with BAFTAs. There’s behind-the-scenes series Doctor Who Confidential, Big Finish on BBC7 and Simon Guerrier’s Billy book The Time Travellers… And the trip of a lifetime begins with the world’s most fantastic trailer. The Doctor and Rose’s story involves The End of the World, The Unquiet Dead, The Empty Child, Dalek fleets and a Christmas Invasion; dining-with-monsters Boom Town and Paul Cornell’s heartbreaking Father’s Day stand out, though my heart’s with the first one we ever saw a tiny part of filmed. On Easter Saturday, Doctor Who…
The first fully existing TV Doctor Who story not to be released on VHS – but you can get it on DVD many times over: in a vanilla release with amazing-looking The End of the World and gorgeous gaslit The Unquiet Dead; in a box set of the whole 2005 season, complete with extras (and where you can see Twenty-First Century Who’s most thrilling monsters, the Reapers, in Father’s Day and the fabulous Margaret Slitheen in Boom Town); on its own, once, as a tabloid freebie; and now with The End of the World and a magazine as part of the newly-launched Doctor Who DVD Files. Ooh, and you can buy The Shooting Scripts for this season, too.
If you enjoyed all that, incidentally, you might like to check out a series of Doctor Who from thirty years earlier that informs many of its concepts in exploring the future of humanity…
Rose
“Run!”An ordinary life meets the Doctor’s, finding explosions, rapid-fire wit, the pain of lost worlds, window-smashing Autons, that lots of planets have Norths, and the perfect introduction to the TARDIS. Treasure Rose nodding at something that’s not completely invisible, and the closing moment’s pure joy.
“By the way, did I mention? It also travels in time.”
The first fully existing TV Doctor Who story not to be released on VHS – but you can get it on DVD many times over: in a vanilla release with amazing-looking The End of the World and gorgeous gaslit The Unquiet Dead; in a box set of the whole 2005 season, complete with extras (and where you can see Twenty-First Century Who’s most thrilling monsters, the Reapers, in Father’s Day and the fabulous Margaret Slitheen in Boom Town); on its own, once, as a tabloid freebie; and now with The End of the World and a magazine as part of the newly-launched Doctor Who DVD Files. Ooh, and you can buy The Shooting Scripts for this season, too.
If you enjoyed all that, incidentally, you might like to check out a series of Doctor Who from thirty years earlier that informs many of its concepts in exploring the future of humanity…
Labels: Big Finish, Books, Charles Dickens, Christopher Eccleston, Daleks, David Tennant, Doctor Who, DVD, Reviews, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?, William Hartnell
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Doctor Who 45th Anniversary – Why Was 2004 Brilliant?
Christopher Eccleston will be the Doctor; the brilliant, provoking About Time handbooks begin; Of the City of the Saved… looks askew at Heaven; Sylv’s The Harvest renews an old monster; there are splendid Short Trips anthologies Past Tense – featuring the fabulous Thief of Sherwood – New Adventuresish 2040, and joyful A Christmas Treasury. And there are Daleks. Billy’s Day of Armageddon is found; little-known actor David Tennant chooses Dalek Empire III over the National Theatre; and Paul Cornell has Bernice face at last…
This Big Finish drama, like all the others, is available on CD. As well as completing Life During Wartime and drawing together all of Benny’s life since her very first meeting with the Doctor (and before), this forms a very direct climax to Big Finish’s monster-heavy Series 4 of the Professor Bernice Summerfield Adventures. To keep the ultimate enemy a secret until the story was released, it was originally advertised not as Death and the Daleks but as “The Axis of Evil” – but, of course, there was no such thing. The rediscovered Day of Armageddon, incidentally, was the last Twentieth Century Doctor Who I got to see ‘new’ before the 2005 series began, as it was swiftly released as one of the three surviving (and beautifully restored) TV episodes of The Daleks’ Master Plan you can see on the Lost In Time DVD set.
Oh, and Lib Dem readers of a certain age may understand that, while the wonderful Lisa Bowerman is now absolutely the definitive Professor Bernice Summerfield, in my head Benny always used to look and sound like Helen Bailey.
Death and the Daleks
“Why were you in the Secure Zone?”Resolving the cliffhanger to 2003’s Secret Army-toned anthology-novel Life During Wartime, Benny discovers the secret behind the suspiciously advanced, history-changing occupation of her home. The Daleks have overshadowed her whole history from childhood through the New Adventures; now it’s about family. With gratuitous nudity. Yay!
“Bit of a misnomer, actually…”
“Is it too late to say I don’t agree with anything she says? I like Daleks – the design sense; spot on. That noise you keep going in here? Actually very calming. Ambient.”
This Big Finish drama, like all the others, is available on CD. As well as completing Life During Wartime and drawing together all of Benny’s life since her very first meeting with the Doctor (and before), this forms a very direct climax to Big Finish’s monster-heavy Series 4 of the Professor Bernice Summerfield Adventures. To keep the ultimate enemy a secret until the story was released, it was originally advertised not as Death and the Daleks but as “The Axis of Evil” – but, of course, there was no such thing. The rediscovered Day of Armageddon, incidentally, was the last Twentieth Century Doctor Who I got to see ‘new’ before the 2005 series began, as it was swiftly released as one of the three surviving (and beautifully restored) TV episodes of The Daleks’ Master Plan you can see on the Lost In Time DVD set.
Oh, and Lib Dem readers of a certain age may understand that, while the wonderful Lisa Bowerman is now absolutely the definitive Professor Bernice Summerfield, in my head Benny always used to look and sound like Helen Bailey.
Labels: Big Finish, Books, Christopher Eccleston, Daleks, David Tennant, Doctor Who, DVD, Faction Paradox, Professor Bernice Summerfield, Reviews, Secret Army, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?, William Hartnell
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Doctor Who 45th Anniversary – Why Was 2003 Brilliant?
Alternative Doctors appear in novella The Cabinet of Light and Big Finish’s Unbound: Michael Jayston; David Warner’s Sympathy For the Devil (with Nick Courtney and David Tennant); Derek Jacobi first someone who’s seemingly the Doctor but isn’t, then the Master in an animated adventure. There’s Peter’s Creatures of Beauty, Colin and Sylv’s Project: Lazarus, villains like Davros, and fantastic DVD extras. The year ends with the brilliant news that Russell T Davies will bring Doctor Who back to telly. It starts with a Dalek…
Rob Shearman’s and Big Finish’s best* The best of Rob Shearman and Big Finish. Great speeches for Colin, extraordinary dialogues, bitterly black comedy, Martin Jarvis, evocative sound design, a striking cover and disturbing questions… Who is the prisoner, who the monsters, what happens without orders, and what if the Daleks won?
As with all the Big Finish dramas, this is available on CD and download. There are several related pieces, too, from a Big Finish ‘magazine’ CD including such deleted scenes as an English Empire Blue Peter and adverts reinforcing the message about merchandising and trivialising evil to, rather more famously, two later TV stories borrowing significant elements from the plot. The best of these is Rob’s own Dalek from 2005, with a very similar central core of a single Dalek alone set in a much less funny (though no less grim) story. Which seems an opportune moment to mention that, ironically, Jubilee was first devised for broadcast on the BBC website, but back then Rob decided that he couldn’t squeeze it down to under an hour.
*Richard tells me this is such an obscure Doctor Who in-joke that, unlike the other ones here, it really needs a footnote. In an English Empire that takes its concept of strength from the Daleks, contractions are outlawed. They don’t go the whole hog and speak through ring modulators at state occasions, though. Millennium, on the other fluffy foot, has his own reasons for the brilliance of 2003, and who am I to disagree?
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Jubilee
“History isn’t the past, Evelyn. It’s a version of the past we choose to remember.”
“More action! More excitement! More Daleks getting killed in very loud explosions! And introducing Plenty O’Toole as Evelyn ‘Hot Lips’ Smythe…!
“Daleks – The Ultimate Adventure. Coming to a cinema near you, soon. Your supervisor will inform you of the cinema to which you have been assigned. Attendance is compulsory by order of the Historical Instruction Act. All praise the glorious English Empire.”
As with all the Big Finish dramas, this is available on CD and download. There are several related pieces, too, from a Big Finish ‘magazine’ CD including such deleted scenes as an English Empire Blue Peter and adverts reinforcing the message about merchandising and trivialising evil to, rather more famously, two later TV stories borrowing significant elements from the plot. The best of these is Rob’s own Dalek from 2005, with a very similar central core of a single Dalek alone set in a much less funny (though no less grim) story. Which seems an opportune moment to mention that, ironically, Jubilee was first devised for broadcast on the BBC website, but back then Rob decided that he couldn’t squeeze it down to under an hour.
“You told me it would be a bloodless revolution!”
“It will be. Dalek guns do not puncture the skin.”
“There will be a lot of dead bodies, though.”
*Richard tells me this is such an obscure Doctor Who in-joke that, unlike the other ones here, it really needs a footnote. In an English Empire that takes its concept of strength from the Daleks, contractions are outlawed. They don’t go the whole hog and speak through ring modulators at state occasions, though. Millennium, on the other fluffy foot, has his own reasons for the brilliance of 2003, and who am I to disagree?
Labels: Big Finish, Books, Colin Baker, Daleks, David Tennant, Doctor Who, DVD, Michael Jayston, Obscure Doctor Who Jokes, Peter Davison, Reviews, The Brigadier, The Master, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?
