TV Though they’ve never scared me, I can understand why other people might have a problem with clowns. It’s the 'temporary' mask – the make up hiding the emotions of the man underneath, the painted on smile (or in some cases frown) forcing them to use their whole body to communicate whatever comic business is in hand rather than their faces. We hate not knowing what these performer’s motives are, whether they’re up to something even if that something is for us to let them entertain us and particularly in this stupid day and age when any bloke who wants to spend their time making children laugh is treated with suspicion.
That’s why they’re a familiar horror beastie; we can look them in the face and even as they’re laughing back at us we’re not sure if they’re going to squirt water at us or a bullet, and its often as in tonight’s episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures, the camera angles, the rapid push-in to the big red schnozzle which makes them threatening, the dislocation of psycho-manic and apparently delightful behaviour into something quite sinister. That’s probably why non-horror stories about clowns usually portray them as being morose and suicidal, if they’re laughing at us, or just plain happy, we’re spending most of our time wondering why.
And the real success of the first half of Day of the Clown is that it gave even a coulrosceptic like me the heebie-jeebies, though to be fair if Bradley Walsh did ever come up to me in the street dressed like that and offer me a big red balloon like a demented fan of Albert Lamorisse, Fritz Lang or Stephen King and probably shit my pants then seek out the wikipedia to confirm I was indeed experiencing a metatextual reference to The Red Balloon, M and It. Like the ringmaster in the otherwise unsuccessful Torchwood episode From Out of the Rain , seeing something not quite alien in a domestic street is actually scarier than seeing an alien, simply because as we've already discussed you’re less inclined to understand what his motive might be (other than having to walk home from a kids party in costume because someone nicked the works van).
The twist in Phil Ford’s best script to date, was to add an extra layer of menace by revealing that this being really was using his clown mask to hide something – that he was the original Pied Piper, the traditionally unimpeached figure of the first horror story most kids hear, the boogey-biped who led the kids of some horrid villagers into the nowhere place with the power of his pipe. Revealing a unit like Spellman to be the manifestation of a literary character isn’t that new (hello, The Mind Robber) but here it was an extra level of creepy, and certainly far more horrifying than what we’ve been presented with in the average episode of Torchwood, feeding into the ultimate parental fear of having our kids snatched to who knows where (the plot of what was indeed a very average episode of Torchwood).
If there’s a possible criticism, it’s that this material couldn’t be tied more closely into the other main event of the episode, the introduction of the Rani, sorry Rani, Sarah-Jane’s new neighbour and narrative replacement for Maria, presumably chasing aliens around Washington, though it’s probably a sci-fi series cliché that new characters have something to do with the plot of the week, so perhaps we should instead congratulate Ford on not succumbing to the temptation of revealing her Dad to be the clown or some such. Instead, she’s been chucked into an adventure which would be happening anyway and seeing how this new character reacts to it. And the results were brilliant.
Admittedly there were shades of Brookside to the appearance of this new family in the road, moving into the vacant property opposite Sarah-Jane’s fox hole, and a certain amount of coincidence involved in getting the new girl to talk to Clyde and Luke early in the episode. But unlike Maria, who was initially created to fulfil the traditional companion role of our eyes and ears in this strange Whoniverse, Rani is already genre curious, with a certain awareness of something queer going on in the universe. Like Donna who had similar ability to blunder into the next bit of plot when required, she’s far less cautious than even our regulars in terms of wanting to discover what’s gone wrong.
But quite simply what makes Rani so instantly accessible is Anjili Mohindra’s mature performance as she inquisitively picked her way through the material, instantly developing good chemistry with both Daniel and Tommy, who seemed to up their game from the opening story. I’m trying to be too gushing with my comments based on this single episode, but Mohindra does both terror and comedy very well and it’s amazing to consider that before now all she’s had are a day here in there on the likes of Coronation Street or Doctors. There were pre-broadcast rumours that she was a find, but I didn’t think she’d be this good. She’s the new Freema, and regular readers will know I think that’s a compliment.
As is the way in modern television when no child can go orphaned, Rani (and you can’t imagine how difficult it is after all these years not to be writing a definite article in front of that name) drifts through with some parental guidance. It’s tempting to thing wonder if Gita was so named for the senseless murder of her Eastenders namesake during The Stolen Earth, and fairly surprising to see the familiar face like Mina Anwar in the role, given the franchise’s propensity for hiring near unknowns as regulars in its spin-offs. I mean what has Ace Bhatti been up to since Cardiac Arrest? Checks imdb. Oh quite a lot as it turns out and he’s a welcome addition here as simultaneously the headmaster and neighbour from hell. But notice that writer Phil Ford is desperate to give him some light and shade, not transferring the one dimensional figure from school into the home.
This was a busy half an hour really; with all of this plot and character introduction its important to also notice that this was the strongest episode for Clyde and Luke so far, with the former breaking out in dimensions as the writer wrote his spec script for early Buffy giving the teenager all the of authority confrontations which would be parcelled off to the slayer and it's gratifying to see Sarah-Jane admonishing him in much the same way we did over all the wise-cracks that have been inappropriately freezing the action now and then. As ever Sarah (Sarah-Jane) received some good speeches and wisecracks and burst into tears at just the moment when us kids needed to be scared too. I’ve seen jibes about that but I think we’re just used to a main character with a certain amount of arrogant posturing; we’re just not used to seeing some who’s seen thing we people wouldn’t believe give a realistic reaction because she knows what they’re capable of.
Next week: “Scared to come to the Psychic Circus?”
No comments:
Post a Comment