So, Dr Who is off with a swing. It took its time, though. It's good to be thrown into the middle of the action ... but it helps to know why we're meant to care first. Last week's episode wasn't really the start to a series; it should have been about three quarters of the way through, having previously introduced Amy + Rory + River to any new viewers. It's nice to have my intelligence respected by a TV producer who expects me to work it out, but if I was a new viewer starting from scratch, I expect I'd have got about halfway through "The impossible astronaut" before turning off out of irritation. Hey look, they're all upset that their friend's dead. But he's not! Oh, he's a younger version. So why not tell him what happened anyway? Since when did this guy, of all guys, pay close attention to the sacrosanctity of the timelines?
But that was a blip. Last week was worth persevering with and this week we strike gold, with creepy tensions and some laugh-out-loud moments, the first of which was River's means of not dying by falling from the fiftieth floor of a building. And the mystery of finding out who the little girl is will keep me more hooked than the weird crack in the wall from last year.
The Moff does have a few leitmotifs up his sleeve that he likes to reuse, doesn't he? Decaying, creepy locations, possibly with cryptic messages scrawled on the wall. Inscrutable aliens who are nasty because they're scary and inscrutable but not very good at explaining their motives. Small children in danger. The inability of two people to have a simple conversation going: "look, please can you explain what's going on?" / "Why, certainly. As you can see, I'm in this spacesuit ..." He's good at juggling them but he doesn't have that many opportunities to use them left before they start being boring ...
So, as the late Nicholas Courtney's most famous character would have said, onwards!
On Saturday I amazed myself by watching Are You Being Served for the first time in about 30 years, and amazed myself still further by actually quite enjoying it. It was followed by a Making of documentary. Hey, I was ironing and it was a good diversion. It was also interesting to compare what I knew then with what I realise now.
(I often do this. I enjoyed Dad's Army when I was young but I appreciate whole new levels to it now. Like: the Home Guard are inept but no one for a second doubts their courage. Like: the class difference between Wilson and Mainwaring, which the socially superior Wilson doesn't care about at all but the technically superior Mainwaring cares about intensely.)
I think, even when I was young, I understood that Mr Humphries was Not the Marrying Kind. I'm impressed now that although this opened up all kinds of possibilities for innuendo, he could also play the part with dignity and be accepted by all the other characters as an equal. I also hadn't realised he is also one of the two most intelligent, switched-on characters in the show – the other, surprisingly, being Young Mr Grace. (I also got the joke that Young Mr Grace was extremely old and doddery and constantly staring down his nurse's cleavage; I didn't get the fact that he was played with a pronounced nasal London/Yiddish accent and displayed a ruthless business mind beneath the geriatric vagueness.)
I hadn't realised the humour of the firmly defined pecking order in Menswear that went Mr Grainger -> Mr Humphries -> Mr Lucas. Captain Peacock would intercept gentleman customers as they arrived on the floor, then aim them at the appropriate sales assistant based on their perceived spending power. Thus lines like: "Mr Humphries, are you available for a clip-on bowtie?" / "I have never been available for a clip-on bowtie ..."
Strangely there wasn't anything about Mrs Slocombe's feline companion. Maybe it wasn't such a running joke as I remember.
In this episode the staff had been disciplined by Young Mr Grace for some reason – I didn't quite catch the beginning – and made to spend the day in the Toy department instead of Clothing. This not only led to jokes about Mr Humphries' Wibbly-Wobblys but was a fantastic nostalgiafest for 1970s non-electronic, pre-computing kids' games. It ended with all being forgiven and even Young Mr Grace joining in with playing with the railway set. It was really quite sweet.
I was pleasantly surprised but I don't think I'll be buying any DVD sets to catch up. As I say, first time in 30 years, and once every three decades is probably about right.
If it happens two years running then it's annual, right? Thus the now annual Mostly Bookbrains Literary Quiz, held last night at the Manor School in aid of Friends of Abingdon Museum. I maintain that coming 5= out of 12 teams is a perfectly respectable position. I mean, anyone could mistake a picture of Stieg Larsson for Mark Haddon or forget that the hero of C.J. Sansom's series of Reformation crime novels is Matthew Shardlake, not Shadwell.
I take no pride in knowing who wrote the Wheel of Time series - though perhaps a small shred of it in not having read any - but I felt quietly smug for knowing that 2001: A Space Odyssey was based on "The Sentinel". In that particular round, a bit of music commonly associated with a movie was played and we had to name the literary original that the movie came from. Thus for the theme from Schindler's List, the correct answer was Schindler's Ark, geddit?
For 2001, though there is a novel of the same name, it was written concurrent with the film and I thought it worth mentioning that technically "The Sentinel" would be the right answer. And got a bonus point.
Which was lost later on in the same round by what some might call the strange confusion of Henry V (modern version) and Porterhouse Blue. The confusion is that both feature quite a catchy earwormy Latin number. From Branagh's Henry V:
(Look closely and you might see Inspector Wallander carrying a dead teenage Batman across the battlefield, in a single 4-minute take: cudos to Christian Bale for not sneezing.)
And from Porterhouse Blue:
See? Easy mistake to make.
For the completists, the Henry V words are: Non nobis domine, sed nomini tuo da gloriam, i.e. "Not to us O Lord but to your name give glory."
The Porterhouse Blue words are too long to put here but are translated here, and despite being made up were well in keeping with the spirit of the series. That's one of the things that made it such a good show to watch: that, and Ian Richardson, and David Jason, and the college exploding under a load of gas-filled condoms.
Rev is, by all accounts, quite good. The pre-publicity was promising. Post-performance reviews were upbeat. I would have liked to have seen it.
I have not yet been able to see it.
I didn't watch it when broadcast, because 10pm is a silly time for people who have to get up at 5.45 the next morning. No matter, I thought, I would wait to watch it on Virgin TV catch-up.
Except that the next day it wasn't available on catch-up. And when it finally did get there ... it's in HD.
It's in frakkin' HD.
H bloody D.
Why??
This is a 30 minute sitcom, you morons. What sad obsessives watch a sitcom for the effing HD?
No one, is the answer. No - one. At all. Ever. In the history of the world. Has watched a sitcom and thought: "you know, this would look better in HD."
But I think I have the answer. A sneaking suspicion. It's those TV people again - you know, the ones who work for the greatest public service broadcaster in the world and have no conception of what TV programmes actually are, so doing silly things like ruining the end of Dr Who with a plug for Graham Norton is quite acceptable. Programmes are televisual product, that is all: no finesse or understanding is required. HD is the new technology: it is policy to push the new technology. Rev is a new series: it is policy to push new serieses. Therefore, Rev must be pushed in HD. Stands to reason, doesn't it?
These are the same people who about ten years ago were assaulting our screens with those endless stupid adverts for Comedy Monday, where police pursue some comedian who has made the mistake of being funny on a day that isn't Monday, because the BBC has decreed Monday is Comedy Monday. The logic, in their tiny brains, is impeccable. Two Pints is (allegedly) comedy; Goodness Gracious Me is (very definitely) comedy; therefore we'll put all our comedy shows on Monday evening so that they can all be watched by people who like comedy. "There's a time and place for comedy. Save it for Mondays." It still makes me wake up in cold sweats.
Morons.
Rev is available on iPlayer, so all is not lost. I would have liked to have been able to watch it with my wife but apparently it's not to be. I suppose she could watch it at the same time on the PC in the living room and after we could compare notes. Technology, eh?
I asked some friends if any had seen the remade series of The Prisoner. One replied: "The new series of The Prisoner is based around a deep, central mystery: how did Ian McKellen get involved in this load of ####?"
That may be a little unfair. Possibly only a little.
The premise of the original, as surely any fule kno: a high-ranking security agent resigns from his job without explanation; is abducted abruptly by parties unknown; and wakes up in the Village, a mysterious community where everyone is known by a number, ruled over by the no-sniggering-please No. 2.
("Who is No. 1?" / "You are No. 6" - an exchange in the opening credits of each episode that may or may not answer the question.)
They want to know why he resigned. He wants to escape. He passes his time with various escape attempts, being frightfully British and driving the current No. 2 (usually a new face each week) insane, all with different degrees of success.
I missed the first of the new series, watched the second, and thought, yeah, they've got it in a typical non-linear post-Lost sort of way. Then I watched the first of the original series, for the first time in ages, and realised how immensely superior it is and always will be in almost every way.
Things the new series does well:
Ian McKellen as No. 2, now a permanent fixture in each episode.
A bigger and better Village that looks like it could indeed support a sizeable community like this. Some of the denizens have four-figure numbers, broken into convenient couplets like 11-12 rather having to address someone as One Thousand One Hundred and Twelve every time you meet. The original Village was bigged up by clever camera angles, but in the first episode we get to see it from the air and realise how tiny it is. I like the way the new Village even has its own holiday resort, a short bus ride away through the desert.
Things it does less well ... (Note that I don't say badly because that would be unfair.)
Old No. 6, played by Patrick McGoohan, is rude, cynical, abrasive, thinks nothing of hurting the feelings of other people, and so of course is an excellent hero for a TV series. New No. 6, played by Jim Caz-Cav- him what was Jesus in The Passion of the Christ tries for the Clive Owen blokey vibe but really is quite forgettable.
Fatally, we are getting flashbacks that actually show Nu-6's life before the Village: we might even be getting the story of why he resigned. Eek! No! The whole point is that we never did find out. The Prisoner was about the telling and not the finding out, because that way everyone could form their own theories, and if McGoohan had gone and told us - assuming he actually knew, which is debatable - then 99% of the audience would have ended up disappointed and it would almost certianly not have become the cult it did. The entire story of 6's life, or rather, all we needed to know, was told in the opening credits, and that includes the first episode. Everything else that 6 had to say to the world came out through his various adventures. The opening credits took 2 mins 58 seconds, which is probably way too long for today's ADD generation: but, it means that from the 179th second of the series, 6 was trying to escape. Nu-6 took until about halfway through episode 2 to make vague gestures in that direction. Oh, come on.
No. 2 has a wife and son, or at least, a tender-faced smileless young man (the aforesaid 11-12) who is believed to be his son. Again, no. Just ... no.
For all its strengths, life in the new Village is also just too down-to-earth. Inhabitants actually ask fatal premise-puncturing questions like "do you think this man and woman had children and raised a family just so they could confuse you?" The answer to original 6 would have been a resounding "yes!" The series was all about Patrick McGoohan, so, yes, why not? Fact is: it was colourful, surreal and sixties and it can't be recreated in any other time period.
And finally, though some might call it nit-picking: there's no tune. Oh, there are closing credits and some kind of music plays over them but, like most such things nowadays, they are designed to be shunted over to one side of the screen so the next programme can be advertised, or an announcer can chat over them, or ... look, they're a contractual obligation for the actors and production crew, that's all. Whereas in the olden days no episode was over until McGoohan's face had flown at the camera, away from the Village, blocked at the last minute by bars that clanged shut, and then you'd sat through the credits too, watching a surreal penny-farthing bicycle assemble itself for no readily apparent reason while Ron Grainer's infuriating tune plays at you with no instrument playing a bar for quite long enough.* Without that level of understanding of the original, any remake is fundamentally flawed and doomed.
D is a cut-back kitchen designer, by which I mean he designs kitchens for a living but his firm has cut him back to a three-day week. So he has time on his hands but not a lot of money. He's also an avid quiz-goer. All these factors mean that when he heard about Pointless, a quiz show that requires pairs to enter, he was up for it and he persuaded me I would enjoy it too.
That was back in the summer, and after sending in the applications we heard no more about it. I assumed that was the end of it. Apparently they had the first series - 4.30pm, BBC2, weekday afternoons, Alexander Armstrong hosting - and it was good enough for a second to be commissioned. So, they trawled the files and got in touch with the also-rans from the first time round. I got a call on my mobile and, having completely forgotten about it, almost told them to take a hike, assuming it was some kind of cold sales call. Oops.
Anyway, long story short, we went for our audition in Shepherds Bush on Friday. Three other pairs were there too so we had: two bubbly sisters in their 20s; two elder Essex lads, veterans of other quiz shows with plenty of entertaining anecdotes and not a nice word to say about Anne Robinson or Martyn Lewis; a mother and son, who was the spitting image of a young Mike Oldfield; and a kitchen designer and technical editor from Abingdon.
No studios or Alexander Armstrong for the audition, of course; this was all in a boardroom at Endemol HQ. For an ice breaker we did Mexican waves around the table and whoever had their hands in the air when we were told to stop had to say a fact about themselves. Mine was that I've been to Buckingham Palace twice. D was kicking himself after: "I forgot to say my grandfather was a bigamist!" (I did ask which wife he was descended from. Apparently his grandfather cunningly married two women with the same name, which is why it took so long for his descendants to work it out.)
Then a couple of rounds of the game itself. It's Family Fortunes in reverse. The organisers previously asked a panel of 100 volunteers to name as many items in a given category as they can. You then get asked to name one item, and you get the same number of points as the number of volunteers who also said that. BUT you want to get as few points as possible. I can use this example because this is the one they use publicly: if you're asked to name a Tom Cruise film and say "Top Gun", 60 or 70 of the panel also said that and so you get 60 or 70 points. If you say "Tropic Thunder", which none of the panel guessed, you get zero points. The winner is the one with as few points as possible.
If, though, you said something like "Gone with the Wind" which is just a plain wrong answer, you get 100 points. Simple.
I won't say the questions they asked. I'll just say we came second, and could have come first if we'd had the courage of our convictions and gone for an answer that we only thought might be the right one. Pah. But it was a lot more fun than I thought it would be; there was a really nice atmosphere between the eight of us, and I think we all genuinely hope the others make it even if we don't. D has been forewarned that, unlike the winners in the clip I saw, if we win I will not throw myself into his arms and he will not do likewise with me. We may go so far as a discreet Anglican handshake, maybe a "jolly good show" or two. No more.
Filming will happen during January: if we're to be on it, we'll hear in the next few weeks. I'll let you know.
- is my manager's unkind assessment of the titles to Barrier Reef.
Reader, I cannot speak highly enough of this show. It captured my imagination in the early 70s and still has it to this day. It was an Australian series about a marine science unit based on an old sailing ship that had been significantly upgraded into a high-tech floating laboratory. It must have been pretty high-budget for a kids' show. The extensive underwater scenes really were shot underwater, and the two jet boats that come thundering towards the viewer in the opening bars of the title sequence really are thundering towards the viewer. Most of it was shot on location - the scenes on board ship, even below decks, were shot on board ship. The title music is just as stirring as the Thunderbirds march and I've been able to hum it ever since.
I enjoy, or at least am interested in, old ships, computers, scuba diving, science and the sea. I can probably trace all those back to this show.
Barrier Reef was produced by the same company that made Skippy. It seems grossly unfair that that stupid wallaby gets the lasting fame and Barrier Reef has faded beyond even the reach of DVD re-releases. How hard would it be? I'll do without the usual cast interviews, value added features and easter eggs. Just stick the eps on disk and I'll watch them end to end. And pay for it. Who could ask more?
Two things I learn as an adult watching the closing titles that evaded me as a child. Three things. Among the things I learn are: (1) without the music it would be pretty dull. (2) I bet that boat's under power. (3) There's a key change I'd forgotten. For the opening titles, Bonusbarn comments that that's the most useless submarine he's ever seen.
I'm pleased to see the Survivors have picked somewhere with an Aga. That will be handy when the cold sets in (assuming they have a continued supply of gas or oil) but is also a subconscious link to the original series. That one was flawed by the fratefully naice middle classness of it all. Our Survivors for a new generation are mixed in race, colour and class ... but they still end up in a house with an Aga.
Anyway.
I vaguely remember the original 70s series, though I didn't see much as it was on after my bedtime. Possibly the main attraction for 10-year-old me was that it was devised by Terry Nation and he invented the Daleks. I finally got to see the first series on video about ten years ago and found it pretty superior fare. The first episode remained the best, starting as the remake did with the virus already in full sway but few realising the danger they were in. The remake pinched the scene of Abby staggering through her home town, finding nothing but dead bodies and pleading, "please God, don’t let me be the only one!"
Then, as now, groups of survivors band together; some get it, some don't. Anyone clinging to the old ways, or claiming authority based on who they were before the plague, doesn't get it. Abby does, mostly thanks to a lecture from a surviving teacher at her son's prep school (who here has transformed into an instructor at an outward-bound adventure school; a nice way of keeping a theme of the original plot, Abby searching for her son, in a way a modern audience can relate to). She says she can find an axe in a hardware store. Yes, but what happens when the last axe head breaks? Could you repair it? Could you smelt the ore to make a new one? Because that's how long things are going to take to get better.
Eventually Abby's group settle down somewhere nice and secluded with large grounds (specifically, this place) for growing crops, keeping animals, accreting more survivors, and dealing with ethical issues like how do you deal with a sex offender in a world without courts (especially when you realise you've got it wrong – bummer).
Our new group has already found somewhere nice and large, though not very secluded – it seems to be a mansion in the suburbs of Manchester, which can't be very pleasant on a hot sunny day when the heat gets to the bodies. Some flaws of the original series seem to have been dealt with, others not. The original class homogeneity has been diversified into a precisely calculated group of mixed men and women. They seem to be dressed a bit more practically, but who knows – maybe their outfits will be as laughable in 30 years time as the costumes sported with pride by our original heroes. The one exception to the original niceness was the almost offensively stereotyped cowardly rat-faced Welshman who was of course the villain, Tom Price; Tom now seems to have a lot more going for him. On the down side, our survivors still manage to keep amazingly clean and there are very few hints indeed that they are surrounded by millions of decaying corpses. I was hoping for something grittier.
Almost 100% of the first episode matched its original series equivalent. Last night borrowed about 50% (see? and this one ...) To judge by the trailers, next week will use about 25%. Zeno's Paradox suggests that the series will never be entirely original but the last few minutes of the last episode will come pretty close.
The definitive post-virus text is of course George Stewart’s Earth Abides which doesn't pull any punches as to the likely consequences of a worldwide plague. Think rats, think insects, populations exploding overnight and then collapsing Malthus-style as their, ahem, food supply gets used up. Significantly, the book doesn't have a happy ending in terms of civilisation restarting, but at least we no longer worry for the future of the human race. By the end of it the children of the survivors have grown up, unfettered by memories of what once was, and they can start a new hunter-gatherer society with the instinctive ease of kids picking up any new talent.
Knowledge of the original Survivors affected me more than I might have realised. Ever since, I've thought – just every now and then, you understand – in terms of what would happen if a worldwide plague came. Frankly, I'd be quite happy with option A which would be dying and making the surviving someone else's problem. But if by some perversity I survived ...
Well, it would be very convenient if the plague could strike while we're on holiday at my father in law's farm in Sweden. Failing that, there is at a specific location in our fair land a house that I know of that was originally designed to be kept warm without central heating, and which contains a gun locker with a hunting rifle and (I think) a shot gun, and I know where the keys are kept. I think I would go there. Bonusbarn points out that if I just want weaponry, RAF Benson is a lot closer and Dalton Barracks practically on the doorstep; well, yes, true, but other plus points may not apply. Salisbury Plain is on the doorstep of the house I'm thinking of. Neolithic man thrived there once; we can do it again. My bible would probably be Bear Grylls: Born Survivor. And the house I'm thinking of has an Aga.
Does what it says on the tin. While it starts from a basic state of being quite amusing, enjoyment increases proportionate to your familiarity with (a) who Servalan was and (b) the music of Pink Floyd. If you're reasonably familiar with Blake's 7 (there's a clue to (a)) then an extra gag kicks in at 48 seconds.
In researching that - thanks to the latest issue of SFX for the pointer - I also came across this little gem which, I dunno, spoke to me somehow. Again, enjoyment increases proportionate to familiarity with the key players.
I know that kinda misses the point, but they don't do Dragons' Den on the radio. I could listen but I couldn't bear to watch.
Normally I don't even tune in to Dragons' Den or any form of reality TV. It's just not my thing. There's the occasional success story, yes, but most of it is deliberately designed to "entertain", i.e. to humiliate the participants. Either the producers set these up to be appalling from the beginning - cf. Big Brother - or they just point the cameras at a clueless no-hoper and sit back, letting them self-destruct for all to see. Not much fun either way.
But occasionally my buttons are pressed, and an easy way to do that is to be clueless about publishing. I know how fiercely the publishing flame burns within an author's breast; but I also know how easy it is to be clued up about the business before dipping your toe in the water. In the absence of certifiable mental illness or other similar unavoidable circumstances, those who have one without managing the other are fair game.
Last night's Dragons' Den on BBC3 was a repeat of a programme first shown last year in which one Denise Channing, a.k.a. self-published author Jaq D. Hawkins tries to get investment in her film company that is producing a movie of her self-published fantasy novel Dance of the Goblins. (Actually not technically self-published; it's the second book of a total of two in the publisher's catalogue. The first is the publisher's own book.)
The total budget for the movie is £1.5m, of which £1m is the associate director fee for her big name - whom Denise can't actually name, or she's in trouble. He was apparently in both Pirates of the Caribbean and Phantom of the Opera, so a little elementary searching narrows him down to Kevin McNally. Whether Mr McNally knows he's associated with the movie and can command million-pound fees is unknown at this time. His IMDB entry says he has mostly acted with a little singing and some writing. No producing, associate or otherwise.
Denise's director of photography has been in the business for 18 years. What's he done? "I can't tell you what features he's done - he hasn't told me that." It was obviously an in-depth interview that signed him up, then. Or she hasn't mastered the IMDB herself.
A little mathematical wizardry shows that if you subtract Mr McNally's putative fee, the total budget for the movie is "considered in film terms, very low" ... half a million. Well, yes, it can be made cheaply, says Denise. And how.
Has Denise any experience of moving making at all? No.
How has the book sold? 2000 copies since 2005. By Big Engine standards it's a bestseller, but then, I never went on Dragons' Den.
Here's the Dragons' Den page, including a link to the actual presentation and grilling. Watch it if only for the reaction of Theo Paphitis:
"You need to go home. You need to go home, go to your bedroom, turn out the lights, get under the quilt and get some sleep. When you wake up in the morning if you really think this is a really good idea, may I suggest you turn the lights back off again and go back to sleep ..."
That was my eloquent silence on the subject of tonight's Dr Who. To expand: oh, my. I know Russell T. Davies is the golden boy of the BBC but is there no-one there who thinks to check/is capable of checking his scripts? Oy! Ten seconds of foreshadowing intrigue towards the end, but as for the rest of it ... Cute. Smug. Unscary. Everything that killed it originally.
Anyway. And then The West Wing. Channel 4 showed the first four series of this on terrestrial TV. Then, come the nail-biting finale to the fourth series, they stopped.
For the last couple of years More4 has been re-running the shows they originally broadcast. This has been fun but I was intrigued to see if they would carry on past the point where Channel 4 left out, which was tonight ...
The good news is, they are going to. The bad news is, they're moving to a new timeslot of 11.45. What is it about quality shows like this that makes Channel 4 treat them with such contempt? Is it jealousy that they'll never make one as good? Is it because it's not The Sopranos? If President Bartlet swore a lot, whacked some guys occasionally and cheated on his wife, then would they show it at a decent time?
Screw this, I'm getting the DVDs.
And as for Dr Who ... Okay, later in the season we get the returns of the Sontarans and what looked in the trailers suspiciously like the Sisterhood of Karn, so all may not be lost.
I only watched Ashes to Ashes out of a sense of duty, really. It had some nice moments but came across as just too conveniently contrived: Gene moved to London, maybe, but Chris + Ray too? And, oh! Look! An 80s icon being unexpectedly encountered. Time after time.
But what an ending! Hilariously funny in places. A twist I really didn't see coming. And Gene, having been crucified by Lord Scarman, still manages to justify his entire existence with a snappy little sentence and the closing song* could not have been more appropriate as Alex realises she isn't just going to snap back to the future.
Still don't know if I'll watch the second series, though.
[* "Take the long way home" by Supertramp, of course.]
Saw the first episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles on Virgin 1 over the weekend, and have to admit I was pleasantly surprised. As far as I can tell it carries on from the second Terminator film and quietly pretends the third didn’t happen, which is probably best for all concerned. Well, it worked for Highlander. Also, like the second film, it quietly pretends Reese never said that line in the first about the time machine being destroyed after he came through so there won’t be any more time travellers, ever.
At about the 25 minute mark a fly on the wall in our living room would have heard the following:
TV: bang, boom, smash, screech of tyres Ben (live): "Come with me if you want to live." Good Terminator (on screen): "Come with me if you want to live." Ben: "Yes!" Boy: [sigh]
Summer Glau beating up bad guys (which fans may remember from Firefly / Serenity she does quite well)
Summer Glau (briefly and tastefully) with no clothes on (ditto)
Pause for thought: the first Terminator movie came out in 1984. The lad playing John Connor is, by my reckoning, the fourth to hold the role, if you count the non-speaking adult John seen briefly in T2 – and the first to be younger than the series.
Countdown was my reading of choice as a child and it quite possibily influenced me more than any other reading matter before or since. I think I picked up my first copy simply because it had Jon Pertwee on the front – or rather an artist's rendition of the man in his most famous role. Countdown published cartoon adventures based on TV shows, mostly science fiction. Some were original, like Dr Who; most were reprinted Gerry Anderson adventures from TV21, whose existence overlapped with my lifespan but entirely passed me by. Either way, with the unlimited effects budget of pictures they easily surpassed their TV counterparts for sheer excitement.
And there was the titular comic strip, "Countdown" itself. This was brand new, unique to the comic, and even I could tell it was edgier and darker than the ever-optimistic, technophile Anderson strips. All the spaceships were modelled on designs taken from 2001 (the Countdown itself was essentially the Discovery) which automatically gave it an ’arder feel and the artist, John Burns, used much more modern comic techniques (images bursting out of their frames, use of light and shadow to hide or reveal) than the hand-drawn photoframes of the others. The Countdown is a deep space exploration ship which returns to Earth after many years to find the planet in the grip of an evil dictatorship, with resistance led by the lunar colony. Our heroes are helped by the fact that on their voyage they picked up a friendly alien (called Bill) who helps them out with his advanced technology, not least a teleport and nifty little devices called whisperwheels which enable telepathic communication between wearers.
Thus, seven years before Blake's 7, we have the crew of an alien-enhanced starship fighting an evil dictatorship. Hmm.
A few years ago I started gathering old editions of Countdown off eBay. I now even have the very first issue. Wow. The first "Countdown" strip has hardly any dialogue – just a series of pictures that take the reader through the dark, cold corridors of the ship, closing in on the crew in suspended animation. Seven years before Blake's 7 and eight years before Alien.
I was also struck by the way the evil dictator strongly resembled the late Robin Cook, but I'm prepared to put it down to coincidence.
As well as all the above, Countdown also ran factual stuff full of a sense of wonder: a lot on the then current Apollo landings; what I would now call an unhealthy obsession with UFOs and matters related; full page, full colour photos of giant hydroelectric turbines, nuclear reactors, anything big and techie. It made me what I am.
Countdown metamorphosed into TV Action, expanding its remit beyond science fiction to TV adventures generally. It wasn't as good and it folded in summer 1973.
It was in TV Action that I first learnt the name of the Time Lords' home world – Gallifrey! And therein lies a puzzle that bothered me for years. It is part of Dr Who lore – of which, okay, I know a little – that Gallifrey was first named in the Pertwee-era adventure The Time Warrior, broadcast December 73-January 74. But hang on, I hear you cry, you said TV Action folded in summer 73? Well, quite.
But now the puzzle is solved, thanks to getting The Time Warrior on DVD for Christmas. (DVD! A marvellous invention! Was there really a time when it took four whole weeks to watch a four-episode adventure? When you simply had to remember what had happened up to a month previously? When if parents or fate decreed you would be out at Saturday teatime, you missed the episode with no hope of ever seeing it again? Answer to all of the above: yes.)
The Time Warrior was indeed first broadcast in December 73 – but it was filmed in May of that year, and producer Barry Letts had a guest slot in TV Action to answer readers' questions about the show. And that was when Gallifrey was first named publicly. A world exclusive, breaking news. Nothing would ever be the same again. I had no idea.
Pay attention, children. You never know when the world will change.
1. Patrick Stewart - -is pretty well perfect as Ebenezer Scrooge, but the production as a whole still can't quite approach the sheer joie de vivre of Michael Caine taking the role in A Muppet Christmas Carol.
2. Russell T. Davies - - given a choice between crowd-pleasing emotion and something that makes sense in terms of plot logic, will generally plump for the former.
Now, he can do plot logic. He has to pilot entire seasons of a TV show and make them all string together. But the man simply can't be trusted with a one-off - like the Christmas Dr Who special.
It had much going for it and the occasional screeching clunk to remind us whose hands we are in. There are some people who can see Kylie reduced to a dispersed cloud of atoms fated forever to drift throughout the universe and think, aaahh!! And there's some people who think 'Gawd, I'd rather just be dead.' I'm one of the latter, and I think so would anyone be who actually got to experience it for more than a second or two. But because this is the Christmas special, and he's playing to an audience that likes to watch Celebrity Chef X Idol and all the other mind-numbing pap that traditionally clogs our airwaves, and he has to keep them happy, Mr Davies goes for the emotion.
I wish he wouldn't. I know, he's a showman, he has to appeal to a wide audience, and he's enough of a fan of the original series to know what happens when the series only reaches out to the fans. But there's a middle ground. Surely.
3. Talking heads- - (not the group) are the veriest spawn of Satan and I fell into their trap twice over the break. That's my eternal unquenchable optimism for you. Once was a programme revealing to a breathlessly waiting nation the no. 1 Morecambe & Wise sketch of all time. It turned out to be the breakfast sketch, for what it's worth, because they didn't actually show the thing in its entirety - they showed snatches interspersed with various prannies telling us exactly why it was all so clever.
Soon after that there was a programme billed as containing a whole load of seasonal clippings from various classic shows - Are You being Served, Only Fools and Horses and so on. I have fond memories of many of those and it would have been enjoyable, undemanding viewing. But I turned off the moment the first person popped up to explain why what I was about to see was so funny.
WHY??
Is there, breathes there a producer, anywhere out there in TVland, who has the sheer guts to make a compilation show and broadcast it without any kind of commentary, simply trusting the audience to make up their own minds based upon the content and nothing else? Or do young producers nowadays dream of going to producer school to learn to spoil people's enjoyment with little homilies just in case they've missed the point?
A little over a year ago, Google paid nearly $2 billion for YouTube. Would it have even a fraction of that value if every video it offers was interspersed with talking heads telling you what a great time you were having by not watching the video they were interrupting? I somehow think not. YouTube points the viewer at the content and stands back. That's the way it used to be done and that's still the only way to do it properly.
So here is the Morecambe & Wise breakfast sketch, courtesy of YouTube, with absolutely no talking heads.
I have nothing against her. I was pleasantly surprised – and I wasn't alone – to learn that all my prejudices were wrong and she's a pretty good actress. Billie and Rose between them were exactly what the show needed to kickstart it in the twenty first century. When she felt it was time to move on with her career, she couldn't just leave. The producers rightly put Rose in a situation where she had to go, had to stay away and could not come back. Ever.
Except that apparently, she can. Thereby making that heart rending farewell on a beach in Gower Norway ... utterly meaningless.
But – shows rely on ratings, ratings rely on actors, and as long as the actor is actually alive in the real world (and even then not always) there is always the possibility of their character returning. Producers should be made to hand over their firstborn child as a deposit against yielding to the temptation. It cheapens all that has gone before; it devalues any kind of tension.
Trek did it with their mirror universe. In the original series, in a one-off episode, a transporter accident sends our heroes into a parallel universe where they are evil (and their evil counterparts end up in ours). You can tell they’re evil because Spock has a beard, though fortunately for all he’s just as logical as usual and is key to the plan to get everyone home. And they really have to put their thinking hats on to make it work. It was a conundrum and a pretty good episode.
By the end of DS9, however, people started popping over into the parallel universe every time they put the wrong fuse in a plug. And then they started doing it at will. It had its compensations (evil Major Kira = woof!) but it was still cheap and lazy and diverted resources from doing something really creative.
One more reason why books will always be better ...
It’s no secret that I don’t see eye to eye with Richard Dawkins on a number of issues. Well, we may be on opposite sides of the fence but we are at least at the same end of it.
Enough with the metaphors, on with ‘Enemies of Reason’. Part 1 on Channel 4 last night, part 2 next Monday. Sadly, according to the TV guides (so much more reliable than the spirit ones), we won’t be seeing a scene that was withdrawn on legal advice. A medium tells RD that his late father is sorry they parted on bad terms; he replies that his father is alive and well and the last time they saw each other they parted very nicely; and she declares ‘stop the cameras, the interview’s over’. We do however see a group of dowsers getting no more than a statistically expected score in a double blind test. We see Derren Brown explaining basic cold reading techniques, followed by a practical demonstration spiritualist church meeting. (Why do the alleged messages always come from ‘someone ... I think ... a name beginning with F? Something about ... a ... key? A dog? A car?’ Why can’t the spirits just say ‘Hi, it’s Fred, the key to the car is inside the dog?’) We see the Observer’s astrologer claim that the clockwork-predictable positions of the planets are signifiers as to what is happening on the spiritual plane in people’s lives.
Next week – faith healing and, apparently, the lady who believes she can restore the missing ten (ten!) strands of our DNA that separate us from the ancient Atlanteans.
You may reasonably point out that I, a man who believes an unemployed itinerant carpenter rose from the dead, am in no position to mock. Well, leaving aside the items that are just plain wrong (like ten missing strands of DNA), or hugely susceptible to a little logic (planet and star motions are predictable for millions of years ahead, so why not just write down a million-year horoscope now?) or down to active conspiracy to defraud, there isn’t a single positive ‘proof’ of astrology, spiritualism etc. that can’t be explained by statistical clutter, just as likely to happen to believers as non-believers. And to this I will candidly add much of outward organised Christianity.
But it’s not about the miracles. It’s not about following rules. Yes, with a little puff of science and logic, 90% of everything Dawkins hates will just blow away. It’s the residue that’s important.
For me the Trinity isn’t just a point of theological dogma, though that’s certainly how it started out, back in the days when I believed it was all about following the rules or else. It’s the base state of the universe, and the more you fixate on the clothes you wear or the shape of the building you worship in or what Biblical precepts you can shoehorn into your own out-of-context cultural milieu, the more you miss out on that basic fact. Use science to sift away the nonsense and you end up with a view of a universe - and a relationship with its creator - that is full of wonder and awe, so much bigger and better than any tidy pocket cosmology.
‘Science,’ Dawkins declares, ‘is the poetry of the universe.’ To which the Boy, who was watching with me, responded: ‘science is the HTML code, poetry is the web page that it creates.’ Amen.
