TV Despite having joined the human race a year or two before the end of the US involvement in the war in Vietnam, my knowledge of the period and of the conflict has inevitably been through pop culture, music, film and television. The first time I probably heard some of the key strategic locations was through the authentically non-PC Robin Williams improv that made it into Good Morning Vietnam or more significantly its soundtrack album which I listened to enough that I can still quote my way through the snatches of routines running between Martha and the Vandellas and The Searchers (which is certainly the first time I heard the "slut" word but that's by the by). Along with the titles you might expect, it's an entirely one-sided, Westernised "education", of madness piled upon madness, of tens of thousands dying to promote ideologies and defend geography.
Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's The Vietnam War doesn't disprove that point but seeks to make it in a much more even handed way, including voices "from the ground up" of witnesses to the conflict from all side, from veterans not just of the US army but the Viet Cong and the North and South Vietnamese forces. Civilians are here too, from the streets of Hanoi and Saigon, the families of those in combat and anti-war protesters in the US. Oh and the politicians: as Burns says gleefully in the making of documentary included on the dvd, "We have tapes!" with both Presidents Johnson and Nixon represented by phone calls and infamously by meetings in the Oval Office. Although there have been criticisms from those more knowledgeable than me that some voices are muted or ignored, others over amplified, this certainly feels like the richest televisual exploration of the war we've seen so far.
Crucially what many of us might assume to be the start of the war, when US troops first set foot on Vietnamese soil doesn't happen until a few hours in. The series begins methodically with the initial occupation of the country by the French and how their colonial stifling of the country's natural development (even during and after the occupation of their country by the Nazis) led to emergence of the people who would eventually cause the splitting of the country in two and the conquest for re-unification. From there, the series follows a hard chronological pathway, pausing now and then to magnify the key moments in the conflict (from Hamburger Hill to Hanoi Jane) in both countries while grasping the whole sweep of history, with the voices of witnesses as the connecting tissue, some skirmishes even described from either side of the line both in Vietnam and Washington.
Notably, although some historians were consulted through preview screenings in relation to how facts are portrayed none of them appear on screen. A BBC version of this documentary would probably have included a couple of Phds as talking heads but the material instead is connected together through Peter Coyote's sober reading of Geoffrey C. Ward's script. Somehow The Vietnam War manages to have a point of view - that the conflict was a disastrous mess with heroism and horror on all sides -- without significant editorialising in the voice over. Again that's the difference from the BBC approach; we tend to favour a presenter led format which just sometimes can be a distraction from the narrative being reviewed.
From an outsider perspective, despite the comprehensive aims of the series there do seem to be omissions. Although there's some talk of how Vietnam's economy became reliant on the US forces for providing resources and entertainment, with the exception of a single medic who became famous for criticising the war while she was on active duty, there's nothing of the voices of those outside the combat zone, who worked in ordinance and the effort of supplying the army and the fringes, those working for the US army but didn't pick up a weapon, the Adrian Cronauers. Largely ignored too is how pop culture reacted to the war and the effect that had on public opinion before and since. Often we're told that the public were turning against the war with the suggestion this was purely caused by the nightly news. The reality is always more complex than that.
But most damagingly, despite the aim to bring voices from all sides to the screen, the bias is still expositionally in favour of those from the US. American witnesses are given extensive back story, from birthplaces and family details to why they signed up either through volunteering or conscription. Vietnamese participants on the other hand are barely provided with an historic footprint, no sense of where they came from, what led them to fight. There are fragments, of a family split across factional lines and having to choose whether to stay in Saigon know a sibling is about to return home as part of the invading army. But the emotional weight overall is definitely with the programme's country of origin.
The use of archive material is exhilarating but often confusing. The section about the massacre at Kent State University benefits from footage unseen since it was shot during the protest, the bloodbath and the aftermath and we're absolutely clear of the timeline and what we're watching. But during Vietnam skirmishes, which mix colour and monochrome footage, we're often unsure if the material we're seeing represents the military action being described or illustrative examples of the kinds of things which happened. The credits also include a disclaimer indicating that some of the footage may be been restaged after the fact and it's often distracting to hear the description of an event and not knowing if the images are of that same event.
None of which should draw away from what is an impressive achievement. As with similar exercises, The World at War springs to mind, it's impossible that I can now look at the film and television about the conflict without a new perspective and an appreciation for how authentic or not those filmmakers have been in presenting the conflict. If nothing else, it demonstrates just how narrow in subject films about Vietnam have been, focusing on the military at the expense of civilians. Now that we live again in a time when a pointless war in East Asia feels inevitable to promote ideologies and defend geography, this is the kind of document feels very relevant even if those involved are unlikely to ever watch it.
TV One of my abiding memories of The Pacific (which just completed its run on Sky Movies HD) will be a shot from episode five which deals with the storming of the beach at Peleliu. For just a fraction of a second, a severed arm is seen flying through the air in the middle distance from a source unknown, as yet again one of the many messy battles starts to purposefully resemble a Picasso or Bacon portrait rather than a coherent action sequence.
Like similar orphaned limbs throughout the series, which have been thrown about by the exemplary production designers or digital effects animators to demonstrate yet another aspect of the horror of war, the fictional source is unknown. In real theatre of battle they’d still become a vital way in which the identity of a dead marine, blasted to pieces, might be discovered.
Except as we learn throughout the back eight episodes (I've previewed the first two previously) the rest of this absolutely superb series is as much about the search for identity in the living as well, about how these marines cope with the transformation that is wrought upon them in the aftermath of Guadalcanal and then in the hellish conditions of Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
Still scarred by these skirmishes the 1st Marine Division take their leave in Australia, which is a well earned breather for the viewer too. The pacing of the series is such so that grim war stories aren’t piled on top of one another. Branded a hero, Basilone is shipped home to sell war bonds throughout the country (a thread which will continue through the next few episodes to contrast with the hell in the pacific) as Leckie enters focus. His war story, as far as the series portrays, is one of much waiting, with bursts of action before being shipped home.
Episode three sees him fall for a local girl in Melbourne, becoming part of the family. It’s an episode which allows us, in fairly broad strokes, to see the effect the war is having on cultures outside of the war zones. Over lunch, the father reads out the names of dead sons from the newspaper, underscoring the loss of their Greek heritage. As Leckie becomes more important to the family so his girlfriend becomes less inclined to marrying him – she doesn’t believe he’ll live and doesn’t want to inflict another tragedy on her loved ones.
Leckie discovers, and this is achingly etched in actor James Badge Dale face, that once he put on the uniform he was marked for death. The effects of this revelation are played out in the next episode, were after the division is stationed at Cape Gloucester, he’s slowly stripped of his dignity, demoted to the kitchen for standing up to his commanding officer, contracts a urinary disease and sent to a mental hospital. Though his fellow marines are unusually sympathetic, he’s unable to even countenance their existence.
Again he becomes an avatar for the audience in a part of the war the audience rarely sees, the pure psychological effects, as we see men who fought at Guadalcanal and broken by the experience locked away (neatly foreshadowing later episodes when in the midst of battle that isn’t possible). Leckie discovers that death won’t necessarily become him, but as he chooses to return to the regiment early we’re left to wonder if that choice makes him crazier than they are.
Meanwhile in episode four, Eugene Sledge leaves basic training. Sledge’s journey is the strongest as we see the young man as I predicted previously experiencing “the gap between the dream of fighting for one’s country and the horrific reality”. The fresh faced youngster dealing with petty injustices of the gremlin-like Snafu and his other brigade colleagues is initially shown (in a beautifully poised key scene) as having great religious fortitude.
In the following episode the newly nicknamed Sledgehammer clutches his bible unable to comprehend Lackie’s Dawkins-like explanation for why he doesn’t believe in God, which is, to paraphrase, if God created everything why does he sadistically allow war? There’s a subliminal religious undercurrent to the whole series though as Sledge’s faith is shaken it has to be said the series sides more with Lackie’s point of view.
That’s no more obvious in the next battle set piece, that storming of the beach at Pelilu, which in employing the same increased shutter speed technique and high speed cutting, directly references the Omaha landings from Saving Private Ryan underscoring that though the geographic locations were diverse the experiences for soldiers on the ground were just as appalling.
We begin to understand why Sledge’s colleagues are so harsh on him – like their Japanese opponents they subliminally have to dehumanise their social group so that their death means less, so that the rapid mortality of those they’re fighting with doesn’t stop them being able to carry out their orders, divesting themselves of their individuality.
Which is the change Sledge undergoes. Firstly his bible becomes little more than a place to keep a tally of the days this brigade has spent in action. Then he takes up smoking after some initial reticence. He even becomes a bully. Finally, he loses his ability to see his opponents as human beings, even when they’ve become prisoners of war, attempting to remove the gold teeth of the fallen for sale on the black market.
It’s at this instant we realise why the series has, with the exception of a few brief shots of behind enemy lines and a moment when Lackie regards the severed hand of a Japanese soldier, offered a one-dimensional view of the war. This is the experience of Sledge and soldiers just like him. It makes killing easier too. And so the process of war continues.
Episode six shows the group’s desperation for water creating twin reasons for fighting to take the airport at Pelilu, for territory but more importantly to survive. As with many of the incidental manoeuvres, the destruction of a Japanese tank is expertly directed as we see heroism born out of anxiety, hundreds of men running directly into gunfire often unable to see just feet in front of them as there vision is blocked by blood and tears.
The strategies developed at headquarters are modified from moment to moment to fit the present circumstances (not too much though – now and then action halts because an officer requires new order on one occasion at the cost of their own life). The actors all went to boot camp in the jungles of Australia and it pays dividends in aiding their ability to give an authentic impression of the difficult choices they’re being asked to make, all too easily scrutinised and criticised by academics and others in retrospect.
The production design becomes more artificial as the series continues, as the scenery changes gradually from verdant green forest to barren dust bowls to unapproachable mud fields. Even if this is a budgetary limitation, it has the added consequence that when Sledge and the 5th Marines reach Peleliu's Bloody Nose Ridge, its as though their whole world has been reduced to some dusty ground from which they’ll never escape with the unreal quality of a nightmare.
When, in one of the series’ most disturbing scenes, Sledge seeks the origin of a plopping noise and finds Snafu tossing stones into the sodden open cranium of a dead Japanese soldier like tossing cards into a hat, the two realities, sub-conscious and otherwise have finally intermingled. It’s in that moment Sledge divests himself of humanity to become a killing machine and we almost can’t blame him given the grotesque stimulus that have bashed his senses for the many weeks he’s spent outside of civilisation.
At which point the series shifts the spotlight again and completes the story of John Basilone, and his bewildered inability to square the reaction of his fellow Americans to his bravery with the reality of what he experienced. Time and again the series portrays moments of gallantry as impressive if not more so than his, but Basilone seems to have been plucked for veneration almost at random, implicit in actor Jon Seda’s demeanour when he’s told about the Medal of Honor.
His story up until this point is much the same as that of the soldiers portrayed in Eastwood’s Flags of our Fathers, shipped in luxury across the country to sell war-bonds as their survivor-guilt sweats through their pores along with the residue of alcohol they turn to, the original events mythologised and rewritten to a point of meaninglessness, as though they happened to someone else. At one point, he even finds himself reading a scripted version of his own experience over the radio.
Your reaction to this episode will be different depending upon your knowledge of the history which I’m about to spoil so I’d skip the next three paragraphs if you’re yet to watch the series and don’t know Basilone’s fate. For much of its emotional duration it’s the story of man who’s caught between survival, public persona and duty but the result of his actions are some of the most emotionally wrenching moments the series has to offer. He's simply not the kind of person who can deal with having ships and buildings named after him.
In asking to train “fresh meat” (as enlistees were described in Starship Troopers) he’s perhaps hoping that he’ll be able to prepare them better than he was when he first entered the danger zone and fairly quickly he shifts from being a grunt to SargeAnt, despite not being certain of his abilities. When camp cook Riggi enters his life, her love for the forces and his love for her saps away his uncertainly and sends him on the road from supposed hero to legend.
Personally, I viewed this with admiration and surprise and not without some doubt as to Basilone’s motives. In retrospect, knowing that he would ultimately die in battle, the wedding night scenes aren’t just tinged with the sadness of a perfect moment snatched during wartime, they’re a portent of certain doom. Though in reality he lived for seven more months, Riggi gives him a look that suggests it’ll be for the last time and she wants to remember the moment.
I would imagine that knowledgeable viewers would note the inevitability of his demise as surely as if he’d deliberately stepped out into a bullet as he runs himself ragged amid Iwo Jima not living long enough to sense the flag being raised. Not knowing about his death, I audibly gasped as the bullets hit because I’d genuinely believed that he would be allowed to prove his worth to himself in battle and live to tell the tale.
The average viewer watching week to week will certainly have a different experience with the series than me. Sky were good enough to send this episodes for review and I watched them back to back over a few days (just as many you will do once the box set is released) which by this point, despite the pauses underscored to me that some series are designed to be watched on a weekly basis if only so that the viewer can calm down.
Unless you have a strong constitution, I would recommend you take a break at this point, because after the sands of Iwo Jima, we’re immediately flung back into Sledge’s harrowing story as the 1st Marine Division land at Okinawa and the moments when the morality of the soldiers finally comes into question as their ability to distinguish between civilians and enemy combatants. Despite what is ultimately a hopeful message, the transition is a big ask.
Thematically redolent of other more recent war zones, it’s also the story of Sledge’s psychological redemption. When he and Snafu (who by now has become a firm friend) stand apparently ready to murder a baby, because of the bleakness of the everything else in the series, not least those moments when soldiers have ended the lives of their fellows for the good of the regiment, for a few tense moments we’re convinced they’re going to do it and indeed it takes the intervention of another to snaps them back into focus.
But it requires an act of real humanity, clutching the body of a dying mother as the life saps out of her, before his real identity begins to return and he’s presented as the more enlightened figure he began as, unable to shoot an unarmed soldier. He’s been changed by war – he still smokes – but with a pipe which marks him out as an individual again. Snafu sharing a sunny outcrop Sledge in the closing moments, in contrast seems roughly the same, his attitude to generally keeping his fellow fighters at arms length having been confirmed when one such figure randomly lost their life.
Much of the series is played out in close-up. Partly that’s a result of the medium, its somewhat budgetary, but it also means that like these soldiers we’re in a constant state of surprise, information visual as well as tactical is a precious commodity. We discover a well liked commanding officers has died when his stretcher is carried into shot so that we empathise with the reaction of his troops. When Enola Gay goes about its business, its destructive power is reduced to just few words of reported speech miles away in the war zone at the close of episode nine, abstract and lacking emotion weight in comparison to the slaughter which has just been witnessed.
Other war stories may have (and have) ended there. The Pacific, a series which concerns itself with the interior of the characters follows the “boys” home. Neither Lackie or Sledge are quite able to comprehend their change in lifestyle however gradual it is (the war may be over but their tours of duty continue into the following year). When Lackie returns to his previous employer, the newspaper, to demand his job back he’s full of Carry Grant’s His Girl Friday bravado though later we can see that he’s pretending to be his old self, the cracks developing when faced with the teenage object of his desire, who thankfully is understanding of his state.
Sledge is similarly numb with guilt, perhaps because, unlike his brother and friends, because of his initially high moral code he lost the most. When he says he’ll never wear a uniform again, he means it. He can’t comprehend even using it to attract women let alone to impress the induction clerk of a Polytechnic. Its in the final moments of the episode that Joe Mazzello’s exemplary performance comes full circle as, in the blaze of a different sun, his character finally seems at rest.
Having seen a fair amount of everything including war films, I’ve become rather cynical so my barometer of quality is the depth of my emotion. But the poise with which the Basilone story is unexpectedly resolved with Riggi visiting his parents to return his medal of honour is breathtaking, the wariness, signalled by his brother continuously asking her if she’d like something, and accentuated by the blackness of the house (in comparison to the cosiness of previous dinner table scenes) evaporating as she produces the presentation box and they’re united in grief. Oh how I cried.
The series closes with a final set of caption cards in which the actors faces are replaced with the real marines and short biographical information revealing what happened to them in later decades. As well as emphasising the detailed research of the casting directors in finding actors who time and again bear an uncanny resemblance to their real life counterparts, we’re also reminded that though many of them have died since the second world war, they all, in the main, went on to have long, full lives.
They didn’t die then and mores to the point some of them still live on, as we discover that the veterans who’ve been speaking of their experiences in short documentary prologues at the top of each episode have been portrayed in these very episodes. All too often in war films, even in these kinds of drama documentaries, the audience is divorced from the action somehow, even with the best of performers. Seeing the reality in eyes of the real veterans, some of whom have been rendered speechless during their interview when they attempt to describe what they’ve seen, makes The Pacific all the more impressive because it so vividly speaks for them.
Television And so the finale of Ashes to Ashes was broadcast tonight bringing to a close five years worth of drama begun in Life on Mars. As expected it was a brave, exciting piece of storytelling and if I was slightly disappointed because it didn’t go for the genuinely life affirming happy ending of Alex awakening and being reunited with her daughter (why do so many dramas always have to be so bittersweet?), it did manage to resolve the story in interesting and surprising ways and provide a satisfying conclusion to Gene Hunt’s story too even if closing on a close-up of his face rather than Alex's seemed to be a shade too much like the Star Trek: Enterprise approach (I'll leave that reference hanging).
Across this series, the actors have been gifted a near impossible task by the writers, charting the development of their characters growing self-awareness whilst simultaneously indicating the seeping in of the attitudes of their respective times with Ray in particular reverting to his more racist and sexist earlier state. With this final episode, Dean Andrews, Marshall Lancaster and Montserrat Lombard were finally able to shed their stereotypical characters and give them real depth with Shaz's breakdown in particular a heart stopping moment. Arguably it's been more of an ensemble piece than before, with Shaz especially gaining in strength as Alex broke down though it's to Keeley Hawes's credit that Drake still went into that good night/smoke filled pub with dignity.
Matthew Graham has given an interview to The Guardian explaing the symbolism of that pub and much more besides (the Metro has an even more succinct version). You probably won't believe this, because I didn't bother to post it here so can't quote it as proof, but the explanation of the world and Gene Hunt's place within it was exactly as I guessed it would be at the close of the first/third series. The differences were that I thought Hunt was just as metaphysical a figure as Jim Keats turned out to be and that the only copper that was being helped along was Sam and then Alex with everyone else a construct or indeed a "figment" as she described them for much of the first season. That would explain why it seemed to continue to exist when Sam wasn't there at the close of series two.
Some questions were still left dangling. Are all of the police officers in this world like Ray, Chris and Shaz including the crazy perm guy who looks like a stereotypical 80s copper? The new Skip's blank reaction to Ray's new gun suggests that they're not, just key figures like Viv (who it seems was sent to hell by Keats). In which case why are some of them like Sam, Alex and the iPhone guy aware of the change in location and time but not others, including for all those years, Gene? Was Gene's story about were he sent Sam (and Annie?) during his date with Alex his sub-subconscious's way of rationalising the real truth of them going to the pub? Is their heaven an eternal lock-in were the final round is never called? What if you don't drink?
TV Having annunciated the European theatre of World War II in the mini-series Band of Brothers, producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks turn their attention to the opposite end of the Earth with The Pacific, based on the memoirs of two soldiers, Eugene Sledge and Robert Leckie.
It’s the story of their war and that of legendary US marine John Basilone and the first two episodes, which I was able to watch on preview disc tonight, describe (although frankly that’s an understatement) the Battles of the Tenaru and Henderson Field in which US forces defended a tiny speck of an island from Japanese assault.
Despite being the most expensive television series ever produced according to the publicity materials (around $230 million or the entire year's drama budget for the BBC), The Pacific is still fairly generic, invoking decades of screen mythology from Hell In The Pacific right through to John Woo's underrated The Windtalkers and the Eastwood Iwo-Jima duology.
War film enthusiasts are unlikely to find much that will surprise them and in adapting the material, Bruce McKenna doesn’t offer a revisionist approach; readers of Commando comics will be well served by the heroism on display and at this early stage, the Japanese (with the exception of one poignant scene) are largely the faceless enemy they must have seemed from a rank and file soldier's POV.
All of which said, it’s still bloody exciting and excitingly bloody. Most of the giant mechanical elements of the campaign, the opposing navies attempting to sink each other’s ships happen off screen or in the very distant view of the soldiers we’re embedded with allowing us to understand the hierarchy of war, its parallel fronts and how the big campaign picture was inevitably obscured for those on the found.
We’re witnessing the fragility of these men’s lives and how walking to the left or right could lead to a random fatality. As in the Omaha beachhead opening of Saving Private Ryan, characters die with such rapidity that like the marines we're almost afraid to make friends or have favourites in case they don’t make it through to the next skirmish or scene.
The mechanisms of war are also exposed in a detail I’ve not seen before. We’re shown how one section of the US force was better supplied by another, not just with food but equipment leading to inter-departmental looting, demonstrating that the narrative shortcuts presented in too many films of well stocked battalions were a fallacy even then.
We’re also very aware that weapons these men carried were cumbersome and designed for use in the kind of optimal situations that simply didn’t exist on the ground. Most often they dwarf their carriers and when a machine gun has to be repositioned, it’s still hot from firing and lifting it in the desperation of conflict in order to provide cover elsewhere will lead to third degree burns.
Judging by these first two episodes, the rest of the series should also demonstrate the repetition of these soldiers lives, the relentless shift from one horrible situation to the next and in the Sledge character (played by Joe Mazzello who was the boy in Jurassic Park grown up) who is just signing up at the close of these episodes the gap between the dream of fighting for one’s country and the horrific reality.
The Pacific is on Sky Movies from 9pm on Easter Monday (and hopefully dvd, blu-ray and free to air television some time after).
TV It’s a shame that after getting a reference to Twitter so correct early in tonight's uk episode of Flash Forward (the second), the writers blew their terminology mojo at the end by suggesting a posting to the Mosaic website is a ‘blog’. If it is indeed a blog, I’d hate to think what the RSS feed looks like with that many posts flying through in such a small time frame. Like Post Secret on ritalin. The episode did generally fall into the trap of generalising the internet and technology on the assumption that the great unwashed wouldn’t be able to cope with something that looked too technical, even though its core audience is the kind of group who would know exactly what a mouse would look like.
Hello. Don’t expect this to be a weekly post match meeting for Flash Forward. It’s rare that I’ll watch every episode of a television series “live” and the show hasn’t yet become must see television. But second episodes of any high concept series is always interesting because it sets the stall for whatever the formula will be for the rest of the series. Flash Forward looks like it’s going to fall into a similar pattern to the late lamented Odyssey 5, whose protagonists were also wrestling with their knowledge of the future, by having a “clue” of the week to be dealt with surrounded by the soapier elements caused by the predicament.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Some series fail because they try desperately not to be formulaic leading to tone and character confusion, but on the other hand, keep too rigidly to a structure and your audience can become bored. To repeat what I said last week, Flash Forward will probably end up being a deeply mechanical programme masking a very wild premise and the devil will be in trying to make it interesting enough that the less trad audience won’t simply dismiss it as rubbish. In other more judgemental words, if this was about the supernatural, it’s trying to hook the kinds of people who liked Charmed and the rest of us who liked Buffy.
One of the elements is an odd skein of quirky humour. This is the second episode and already a vital clue is presented through a flash whose witness which looked she'd walked in from an episode of Pushing Daisies. The agents are merrily taking the piss out of their boss who in a nicely played scene gives all the appearance of haemorrhoidal problems, hours spent on the toilet, wishing, hoping and preying. Unlike the oh so serious 24, these agents take the piss out of one another; Torchwood did this all the time and like Torchwood it could become a problem when the show then has to do something properly dramatic.
The performances and direction continue to be good though the editing and pacing of the episode seemed a little off (though that could partly be the fault of Five and their laissez faire attitude to ad breaks). The episode just didn’t seem to know when to end. The perfect cut off point would have been the revelation about John Cho, but then there was yet another scene with yet another revelation. The writers need to sparing with their clues and secrets otherwise the audience will begin to spot when they’re coming up, particularly if all of the episodes have the same duration. If this keeps happening at about minute fifty-five (or thirty-five on dvd) it could get very tired.
Other random notes:
-- I still think John Cho’s character could be lying. At one point in this episode he says he hasn’t talked to his fiancé about his lack of a flash forward – and he didn’t mention what his fiance’s flash might be and whether he was in it. That’s either odd writing or he’s deliberately keeping something back. Similarly when the lady rings him having magically spotted his “blog” amongst nearly a million and gives him his incept date, the reaction could mean “Oh shit, hold on, I thought I was alive…” (and yes, I know Cho has contradicted this theory in interviews, but he’s hardly going to throw about spoilers, is he?)
-- Jack Davenport’s good isn’t he? The scene in which his character breaks the news of his wife’s death to his autistic son could have been a saccharine mess but Davenport’s playing gave it a sheen of dignity. Note too that this was the first scene told from his point of view in which we weren’t seeing him through another character’s eyes, confirming that he’s a proper regular, rather than a guest star. Unless the writers are playing games with the language of television but I don’t think so.
-- In an interview in this month’s SFX magazine, creator David S Goyer says that the characters will catch up with their flash forward at the close of this season AND that for the scenario to play out he needs at least three seasons and that he has it all planned out.* In this episode there’s a hint that the agents believe it’s possible that the phenomena could be repeated which suggests (as I did last week) that indeed at the close of the series or the beginning of the next there will be another flash, that it is cyclical, whoever’s causing it (aliens? angels? The Dhama Collective?)
-- Where was the babysitter? She seemed very important in the pilot, but here she was referred to without a name. One of those occasions when a character doesn’t make it past the first episode?
-- The flashbacks are irritating. On the assumption that people have memory of a goldfish, the show includes moments from previous scenes (including flash forwards) to explain the context of a given conversation and sometimes from just minutes before. If it's not to careful it could become the first series in which every episode becomes a clip show. It reminds me of the second episode of Clerks: The Animated Series that parodied such things by flashing back to the first episode and then incidents far more random and interesting. Sound familiar?
(real Gwyneth Paltrow by the way. From when she was still going with Ben Affleck).
* Planning ahead is always dangerous. J Michael Strazinski went into Babylon 5 with a five year story mapped out then had to tell it in four years when it looked like the show was going to be cancelled. Then the ratings picked up in that forth year and he had to cast about for material for the fifth year which understandably ended up being a bit inferior since he'd already said what he wanted to say, just a bit quicker. Odyssey 5 similarly had such plans but was canned after about ten or so episodes.
TVFlash Forward (which began in the UK last night) is a teasy-tease-tease-tease. Like Lost and Heroes and any number of similar shows, it’s retrofitted to draw the viewer in which questions and crypticism even though it will take weeks, months even years worth of episodes before anything is explained and even then it’ll inevitably be less interesting than what we have floating about our imaginations. But we fall for it (nearly) every time because these days it’s simply not enough to have a straightforward story, there has to be a twist and not everything can be revealed before the close of the episode.
It’s a good premise: everyone on earth somehow blacks out and sees what appears to be a vision of themselves six months in the future for just over two minutes. They’re then left to clean up a disaster stricken planet whilst trying to come to terms with this possible glimpse of their fate. One of the ongoing elements of the series will be each character’s revelation of what they saw in that future and how often they’re telling the truth (and I expect that even if the viewer if offered a glimpse of what they’re saying, it might not always be reliable).
The main criticism so far seems to be that the characters are fairly bland group of individuals though I think there’s method in that. I think that the producers, conscious of their far out premise are weaving an example of what I think William Goldman calls 'smuggling' -- it's doing something fairly complex but giving it all of the attributes of something simplistic. Lost began similarly with what seemed like a simply case of a plane wreck then slowly weaved in the time travel elements over time.
In other words, this looks like Grey's Anatomy crossed with 24, and everyone talks about the big concept like characters from those programmes, so that the big concept can work for a mainstream audience, following some fairly standard storytelling tropes to make the premise abundantly clear, something Dollhouse failed to do at the very beginning and paid for later. Plus Lost’s pilot was double the length of this and had more time to introduce the characters.
If Flash Foward indeed a show about time travel (though I don’t yet think that’s clear – see below), so far it looks like a pre-destination paradox -- the future events unspooling having been set in motion because the people are now aware of that future. It's co-created by Brannan Braga who was the go-to man for time travel stories in Star Trek from The Next Generation onwards. He wrote all kinds of flavours of time travel episodes including pre-destination paradoxes -- though more often than not whatever it was ended up being resolved via technobabble.
Taking all those issues and elements into account, I very much enjoyed it. It does have a sense of humour, especially in relation to the flashes and though I think it was hurt by having to cram so much plot into its opening forty-minutes left some of the character material a bit soapy and chiched, there was enough to suggest that there was more going on with that than meets the eye. It’s good cast too – pulling in Jack Davenport and Alex Kingston suggests the casting people are looking to be a bit imaginative than usual.
Some other theories that assume you’ve watched the thing and know what the hell I’m talking about:
- Sonya Walgar character we're led to believe is having an affair with Jack Davenport in the future. She played Sally in the US version of Coupling. Davenport was of course Steve in the UK version.
- There was a billboard for Oceanic, the airline in Lost on one of the billboards. Expect wild speculation that this is somehow a secret spin-off.
- There's scope for John Cho's FBI character to be lying. Though in this show, as I said, there’s scope for anybody to be lying, especially since some of the casting in the flashes is predetermined by the availability of actors. It's brave to have someone like Kingston since it assumes she'll not be busy when the story catches up. See also Amy Acker in Dollhouse who was weaved into the big storyline only to find work elsewhere when it looked like the show wasn’t going to be renewed and … oh dear.
- Given Braga's involvement there's nothing to stop alien involvement. Though the ghostly figure in the sports stadium brought to mind the angels in Wings of Desire/City of Angels. I wouldn’t rule out the metaphysical at this point.
- My assumption was that though they flashed forward and saw their future they couldn't impact upon it -- their mind sort of hung in there a bit like John Cusack at the end of Being John Malkovich. If they’re looking for a late season twist, it’s that some people could become lucid in those moments, then forgot.
- What if they didn't see their future? What if the bad guys triggered a mass, wildly consistent hallucination of a fictional future (something in the order of The Matrix) in order to make people's lives head off in a different direction towards a version of the future they want, so that certain of the population would be in positions and taking decisions they wouldn't have been otherwise (like having three FBI agents investigating this fictional future and not working on other cases) which the bad guys could then take advantage of the results for some nefarious reason.
- Assuming we did see the future, a gigantic twist would be if in just the first season the characters all caught up with it, the cliffhanger being, “What now?” or another flash to another six months in the future and that it’s a cyclical phenomena which can then be accounted for by the populace.
Life If you happen to be watching the Autumn season of the BBC’s long-running quiz Mastermind keep an eye on the famous black chair. And then shift that eye just upwards in the long shots to the audience and at to one end of the back row and if you can see someone who looks like their hair recently lost an argument with a barber, wearing a black jumper that could possibly be a size too small for them, then I completely failed in my attempt to not appear on screen during yesterday afternoon’s taping in Manchester, at the old Granada Studios.
Actually, given how often the studio went dark, that the audience were generally wearing black and the show didn’t seem to be shooting on HD yet, you probably won’t be able to see me. You don’t need to – the presence of a studio audience is just part of the artifice, someone to provide a backdrop to the verbal conflict between John Humphries, the question setter and contestant and to clap admirably in the right places, more like supporting artists than spectators (though we were still that too).
I was keen see if the show looked as impressive in the flesh and MDF as on screen, the interrogatory lights beating down on the computer engineer/quantitative surveyor/estate agent from East Sussex/Derby/Shrewsbury answering questions on The East India Company/Life and Work of DH Lawrence/Clouds as Humphries fired off question upon question. As I expected the chair just looks like an expensive office chair – I think the one I’m sitting as I write this is more intimidating. One or two of the contestants dwarfed it. But it was clear, even before the close of the first taping that it’s not the chair its self that’s important – it’s what it represents.
I’ve always liked Mastermind, though I have to admit to not having watched it much in the past few years. I like that it offers the common man (or woman), some more common than others, the chance to demonstrate that it isn’t simply in academia that one can build up a body of knowledge. There is an element of simply learning a collection of random facts and hoping that they're the right topics and yet I think there’s a real achievement in being able to make connections within this information, being able to distinguish between the various choices that might spring to mind at the close of a question, snapping it out and being able to do that over and over again within two minutes.
As an audience, generally we were hearded – from the street through the lobby – the lobby to the basement café – café to studio – or rather studio built onto a soundstage. This at least offered the chance to see some of the studio which was covered with fading publicity photos for the kinds of drama ITV aren't making any more and not in Manchester and not for the network. Those people who’d ignored the instruction to wear dark colour were separated out into an area behind the cameras. The rest of us were put into the main audience area, ringing the set like theatre in the round. My seat luckily gave good view of question master and question answerer and meant I could still see the sweat on brow, the disappointment of missed questions, the crushing defeat of simply not knowing anything about anything.
The crew, runners and researchers, were young and friendly – all seemed pleased to be there, none betraying signs of what must be quite long and punishing working days in which they have to be nice all of the time. These are probably the future presenters and producers, literally the face of television in about ten years. The floor manager, Sarah, looked to be in her late twenties. I regarded them all with envious eyes wondering what I’d have to be in their shoes – it seemed like so much fun for all the running (these people wear trainers).
The warm-up man was of course Mr. Ted Robbins. In my imagination he’s the warm-up man on all programmes. They probably clone him. For people who don’t know, he had a bloom of televisual fame with his sister Kate on an ITV sketch show in the eighties thaving worked the clubs as a comic for years and now he’s known as the audience entertainer in the business. Here is a younger version of him introducing his own gameshow:
We weren’t his best audience – as he kept reminding us. Sometimes filthy, generally un-PC he filled the uncomfortable silences between recording breaks, joshing with the crew. He could be very funny, though he clearly wasn't sure how to judge the crowd here so just kept going, jokes, audience interaction, general sarcasm. Often his desperation was funnier than the material but he kept slogging onward. He was particularly good when he noticed that two women had spotted each other across the studio, two women who it transpired had gone to school together and hadn't seen each other for twenty years. As he noted it was like something from Surprise Surprise ...
And there were plenty of recording breaks. We watched three episodes being recorded and far from the as-live straight through impression given by the television show, there were lengthy gaps between rounds and pick-ups throughout. Sometimes this entails having the contestant doing their walk up to the chair over and over, even once the main body of the programme had finished – though virtually none of them seem to demoralised by this even having done rather badly. We were all sharing in the artificiality; it has been described as a kind of drama and so the fact that close-ups need to be reshot and parts of the script are repeated only underscores that.
John Humphry’s was as I expected. Someone I’ve admired for years, he’s a genial host – well about as genial as he can be within the strict structure of an episode – yet erasable when it comes to shooting the extras including a new opening in which he has to talk directly into the camera standing alongside the contestants like Anne Robinson at the opening of The Weakest Link, an attempt he said ironically to make the thing more dynamic, sex things up a bit (actually he might not have said the latter but I imagine he did). His best moments were when he'd catch something Ted had said and collapsed with laughter showing that comedy travels (and how odd to see Ted and John, celebrities from totally different worlds, sharing the stage together, one oh so ITV the other very, very BBC).
Another “innovation” is that, from what we could gather, the contestants are going to be introduced in specially filmed bit at the opening of the episode removing the chatter in the middle were John asks them why they chose 'the design of the coke bottle in the 20th century' as a topic or whatever. That might look quite good on screen but it meant that in the studio we didn’t really get to know the contestants, couldn’t choose who to get behind. Some will hate this, though it seems to be a production decision made to increase the speed of the recording process – not that it decreased the length of the session – we began at 1pm and didn’t leave until 5:45.
It would be wrong to say too much about what happened in the actual quizzes, except to say that they were all close run things, and that one contestant had a complete brain collapse during his specialist subject round of the kind which should be mentioned in the papers on the day after transmission. Those subjects ranged from football managers, periods in British history, composers and mountain ranges. One contestant, we were informed, would be answering questions about a Star Trek spin-off and inevitably it was Voyager. I was horrified to discover that I knew more about the programme than she did and I haven’t watched it in ten years and not to the end. That episode will be worth watching just to hear Humphrey’s trying to get his voice around a range of technobabble not having the slightest clue what any of it means.
The trick on Mastermind seems to be to select a relatively narrow subject and learn it inside out. Another contestant selected Bill Hicks and knew his stuff whereas 17th century British history was far too broad, though it has to be said there were inconsistencies. The Voyager questions generally kept themselves within the fiction of the series – in other words made up fictional story details – whereas the man handling Handel had to deal with biographical details as well as the content of the music and dates of composition which doesn’t seem like quite the same thing. Knowing the key that one of the movements in the Water Music is written seems somewhat different to know which actress played Captain Janeway or what seven of nine’s real name is.
We were told often and repeatedly beforehand not to shout out the answers. Not that it didn’t stop me mouthing them, usually with my hand covering my mouth so that the contestant couldn’t see, which was stupid since the last place they were looking was in our direction. I did remarkably well with the general knowledge questions; the problem is speed. Most of the time the contestants knew the answers, but there’s no time to send an expedition to the tip of their tongue to get confirmation, so it’s stupid answer or pass. Usually pass. Not that it didn’t stop me from feeling a bit smug when I got their first.
Then, three and a half hours after it began, it was time to leave. Unlike a theatrical performance there’s no sense of closure; even at the close of the final ‘contest’ there were pick-ups – so the process it a bit anti-climactic. The best way to experience Mastermind must be as a contestant, led out to the stage, the glare of the lights, a couple of hundred eyes watching you, John Humphries’s chisled face, four of the worst minutes of your life and then its all over, unless you’ve won the heat and then you’ll be going through the whole process a few more times. Where do I apply?
Shakespeare Last night, the BBC broadcast one of its best pieces of arts television this year, though most people are unlikely to have heard it was on, let alone seen it. As part of Radio 3’s Mendelssohn weekend, the digital red button service simulcast a semi-staged production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream featuring the composer’s music, specially recorded in the lush environments of the Middle Temple Hall in London and featuring the Ladies' Choir of the Enlightenment, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and a fantastic cast who’ve been touring the show for years, including Australia.
Lucky for you, the BBC have put the performance up on their website and it’s a couple of hours well spent, helpfully chopped up into acts, in case you don't have the time to see it all at once. If you are thinking about watching it, I’d stop reading here, because it’s one of those experiences which is best visited unaware with all of the surprises intact. This is the good version of radio on television, and an absolute treat, just the thing to cheer me up after the rotten week I’ve had full of cold (the reason I’ve not been around these parts apart from the pre-prepared regulars).
I was weary. ‘Semi-staged’ suggests that like opera, we’d simply get a reading of the play from some actors sitting at front of the stage with copy books, filling in the text between the music. Sure enough, just before the orchestra begins, Martin Turner and Melanie Jessop stroll on and as the opening overture ends, they stand and begin to read opening scene between Theseus and Hippolyta with little sense of the meaning of what’s being said, bit of mugging. I’m disappointed and thinking about simply recording the rest of it so that I can skip to the music. But I know Egeus is due to make his entrance and I’m interested to see how they handle it.
The way the handle it is the reason I was still watching two and half hours later. When his moment arrives, at the back of the stage, behind the orchestra, another actor pops up and he’s playing Egeus, there’s an audible sigh of relief from the audience. Turner continues from his copybook for a bit then, when he finds himself emphasising a point, irascibly puts it down and continues with the business of acting and soon a full scale production is in flow, with the performers appearing from within the orchestra which then provides the backdrop for the show, the wood near Athens, with the musicians and joining in with the action, with Charles Hazlewood Charles Hazlewood (sporting the beard he presumably grows when it’s the Proms off season) even getting a line.
The rest of the performance is like that, constantly subverting expectations, and part of the fun is watching them cope with the some of the requirements of the play in a venue that should be relatively hostile in terms of environment to this kind of work. I can’t help marvelling at the way that some of the actors are able to double or even triple up as nobles, players and fairies and have us emotionally invest in all of the characters. At one point, I even thought I saw Elena Pavli who plays Hermia, Peter Quince and the First Fairy appearing as two of them in the same scene. It’s great too to see a piece of drama that relies on the audience’s imagination, to be able to tell when an actor has gone from noble to supernatural figure when they’ve turned on the fairy light they have stuck to their dinner jacket.
Hearing Mendelssohn's themes in context is a revelatory experience which as it fades almost seems to bring with it the night and the magical setting of the play, the final pulse of the flutes. The bit that everyone knows, the wedding march, is extraordinary in this full orchestral version, as potent at the Ode To Joy and about as celebratory as music can be. I love the way it’s employed here too, as the moment when Bottom comes out of his reverie, a fully formed human again, perhaps remembering his night with the fairy queen wondering if it was a dream. John Paul Connolly’s bedecked in a Domino’s Pizza uniform seems to be genuinely enjoying himself which means that we do to.
TV As you might have gathered, I'm currently in the process of rewatching FRIENDS. I'm about four episodes shy of the end of the third season and it's going fairly well, though just as I remember the quality of the writing is varying wildly between utter genius and utter crap as are some of the performances. I'm going to write something much longer about this when I'm done, but for now here's a list of cameos the cast made in other sitcoms and such, when their collective network NBC became very interested in that kind of thing (The One with the Blackout from the first season was part of night were the lights went out on a range of different sitcoms):
Chandler in Caroline In The City:
Caroline was broadcast in a double with FRIENDS for a while and Channel 4 made a big thing about this cameo at the time; it's good though it feels more like a scene from FRIENDS than the other way around despite the painting. And music. You can certainly tell which of these shows was in ascendency. Perry has a tendency to overplay things how and then on his own show, but this works well for what it is.
Ross on The Single Guy
The Single Guy didn't make it to the UK (as far as I can tell) so this is a rare treat. It's embedded later in this video at 2.25, after the aforementioned Caroline In The City related scenes. Hilarious stuff even if it hangs on one of contemporary sitcom's more frequent stand-by plotlines (we've all been there -- haven't we!?!). Rather more than a cameo, this sees Ross essentially taking over, with (even allowing for some edits) the lead character disappearing for long stretches. There are some classic Schwimmer expressions in here, particular when he spots the photograph.
Phoebe in Hope & Gloria:
No clip that I can find, just this 'synopsis'. Hope & Gloria was a two season wonder which the BBC picked up and ran in daytime in the mid-nineties. Jessica Lundy & Cynthia Stevenson played friends worked on a local tv talk show. It was a good if slightly middle of the road show, mostly carried by Lundy and Stevenson's performances, and in one episode they decided to visit New York for no particular reason other than needing a holiday and happened upon Central Perk and Pheobe who assailed them with some random weirdness, related to counting. I have no idea. Saw it once, mostly through a fog of looking for blank video, but it was gone before I could do anything about it.
Chandler and Rachel discover Windows 95.:
Or Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston want us to hate them. Their names might be on this video but their essentially playing variants of their FRIENDS characters, and unfunny annoyingly shot didactic versions at that. "So this is where the magic happens, huh, ground zero of personal computing?" Yes, a data apocalypse just waiting to happen. And the Wenus and Anus are clearly out of control.
Finally, here's Kramer from Seinfeld appearing in Mad About You which has nothing to do with FRIENDS but is funny nonetheless.
TV It’s not often I even want to attempt to out geek someone, but when faced with Shaun’s list of reasons the Doctor (as in Who) is a terrible timelord, I can’t help myself. I tend to love Topless Robot, but like any of these sites, when I find something I unfortunately know a bit about I tend to get a bit precious, no matter how funny the material. So, since I’ve no review to post to Behind The Sofa this week (first time in just under a year would you believe), I thought I’d offer a few comments on this here instead. Click here to open his post up in a new tab on your browser and here we go, click, click, click.
9) Fails to Use his All-Powerful Sonic Screwdriver In Every Goddamn Situation
That’s a contentious issue – some argue that he uses it far too much in nu-Who anyway though that is somewhat a necessity given the length of an episode these days. It’s a narrative device and one which was dumped during the Davison era because it was becoming too much of a God wand. But there have to be some limits, otherwise the jeopardy leaks out of the story all over the carpet. The likes of un-unlockable dead lock seals are the Who equivalent of Star Trek characters not being able to transport through shield when the Klingons are on the warpath.
8) Only Hangs Out In the 20th and 21st Centuries on Earth
Again, narrative and budgetary device; he doesn’t have to spend so much time within these decades but a certain story shorthand can be used when he does materialise here, and it’s certainly cheaper, even these days. But if you treat Doctor Who as far more than a television franchise, this couple of decades is only vaguely on his radar. He tends to land here for the same reason that others become regulars at the local pub; the beer’s cheap and the food’s ok and you fancy the barmaid or in his case he likes the culture and the girls aren’t so clever that he can’t enjoy explaining everything to them. There’s a further discussion as to why the timelords decided to strand his third incarnation at the beginning of the seventies, but that would also bring up the UNIT dating controversy and I haven’t the time.
7) Often Has a Difficult Time Fighting Semi-Mobile Trash Cans
Notice how Shaun doesn’t specifically mention stairs, so the world really has changed. The Doctor’s deadliest foe is technically a bit pants, but it’s all in the movement and the voice and the catchphrase and their ability to kill everything in sight (assuming their vision isn't impaired and they can see). Why kids love these guys more than any other is one of those weird examples of how something just works for reasons that are difficult to comprehend, like why ice cream and coca-cola both remain tasty even when you dunk one into the other. But he’s right about the Cybermen – they’re terrible and even worse in the new series because they’re not even the proper ones. Hopefully Moffat will resurrect the Mondas version, the ones with a bit of personality.
6) Is A Death Magnet, Yet Still Travels to Highly Populated Areas
It’s the Jessica Fletcher syndrome, though unlike Murder She Wrote (as far as I know), Doctor Who has discussed this over and over, and the timelord himself is confronted with it in The Family of Blood, where he’s become human and walks the Earth so that he can avoid giving some aliens the wrong end of his gothic nature. People die because the meanies follow him to the 1920s. But it’s relatively easy to rationalise; it’s not the Doctor’s presence which brings death and misery, it would have happened anyway. It’s his presence which means that less people die than might have otherwise (with a few exceptions, Warriors of the Deep). Incidentally, on the subject of Jessica Fletcher, I have a theory that she’s actually the murderer in every case but implicates other people. After all, who’s not going to believe this kindly old author?
5) Is Totally Sexist Regarding His Traveling Companions
River Song. Romana (it’s rumoured). Madam de Pompadour. The Doctor loves women and has often danced with them. But he’s usually the lone hero who tragically can’t get too close to his companions because eventually as he says in The Next Doctor, they always leave and it break his hearts. See also the spin-off love affair with Charley Pollard, the first companion he owned up to loving way back in 2002. Plus this has only really become an issue for some people in recent decades when he’s been a dashing lad. In the 60s, no one questioned the fact that neither Billy or Pat cosied up to Vicki, Zoe or Victoria, because it would be wrong.
4) His TARDIS Is Literally Made of Trash
The TARDIS interior is not a literal expression of its space; almost everything in there is a product of the Doctor’s imagination (I think) which lately has decided that some part of the complex business of shifting through the time vortex can best be accomplished with a bicycle pump. Next it could be a big silver button or another hammer. It’s not made out of trash, it’s made out of the suggestion of trash. The console room and time rotor have changed a few times over the years and my absolute favourite is the steampunk cathedral in a box styling of the TV movie. If your living space is dimensionally transcendental, you might as well make the most of it.
3) He Refuses to Do Laundry
During the 80s, the producers did have it in their heads to put the Doctor and his companions in very definite costumes as though cricket whites and air stewardess uniforms were at all practical in the forests of Deva Loka, decorative vegetable included. But though it seems like the Doctor always wears the same suit, it often varies in colour and probably like me with my white t-shirt and jeans he has many, judging by his wardrobe, several hundred. He also mixes shirts and t-shirts quite a lot too. For further discussion of costume changes and button placement listen to the audio commentary for The Silence In The Library.
2) Turns Into An Attention Whore Every Time He Regenerates
Fair enough, though he was stealthy in the TV movie and simply had a good sleep in The Christmas Invasion. Most of his antics are as a result of his companion’s reactions at having watched their friend entirely change shape and personality, which I know most of us have seen happen to old school friends on Facebook, but this takes place much more quickly than that. The question Shaun should really be asking is why Romana didn’t experience any trauma at all when she simply chose a new body in Destiny of the Daleks (though the Gallifrey audio spin-offs rationalise this as the time lady cleansing her system of some kind of digital tapeworm).
1) Has Not Checked Up On His Granddaughter for Centuries
Why would he need to when five of his incarnations bumped into her during The Five Doctors and clearly had some off screen conversation about it. Plus it’s implied in The Empty Child that she died during the time war. If that sounds unlikely given that she’s stranded on Earth, during the novel Legacy of the Daleks, the Eighth Doctor bumps into her on 22nd century Earth whilst looking for a lost companion in a story which eventually concludes with her causing the Master to experience the disfigurement we see in The Deadly Assassin and then nipping off back into the universe in his TARDIS – so she’s completely free to buy it at the hands of the Daleks. Confusingly, Big Finish are due to release an audio called The Earthly Child in which the Eighth Doctor bumps into her on 22nd century Earth and has a completely unrelated adventure, though I'll leave it someone else to rationalise that inconsistency. Assuming none of this counts, to be fair to the Doctor, when he dropped her off he couldn’t control the TARDIS, and it was only in the mid-seventies that he finally managed to repair the thing.
TV Much as I love the kinds of period dramas Andrew Davies is renowned for, and how much I like to think of myself as a feminist, isn’t it a tad boring that ninety-nine percent are of them are of, well, a girly vintage? They might well be insanely popular, but surely there are only so many times you can watch girls and boys in corsets and cummerbunds leisurely fall in love over six episodes as such impediments as the class system and cash keep them apart? Do we really need the version of Wuthering Heights ITV are bringing us in the new year?
What about the dozens of adventure novels written around the period and since, most of which haven’t seen the screen for decades? Thank the BBC, then, for their new adaptation of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (which was on last week), precisely the kind of much needed ripping yarn, in which romance though not entirely forgotten didn’t get in the way of a fugitive with vital information about a German invasion being chased through London streets by spies or a picturesque Scottish moor by dozens of police dogs and their master’s whistles.
Loosely based on Buchan’s novel about espionage in the run up to the First World War and borrowing some elements from Hitchcock’s 1935 film version, Lizzie Mickery’s script offered precisely the kind of adventure which seems like a lost art for television, taking advantage of the period’s antiquated phone and transport systems and demonstrating that with the modern world ringed by satellites and saturated with surveillance, the most exciting way to make a thriller is to set it in the past. There’s no better sight than a wanted man fleeing a train from one of the doors and out onto the tracks under a rail bridge. You can’t do that on a Virgin Pendolino.
In rewriting Buchan, Mickery offered some useful historical perspective, wrapping Richard Hannay’s unlikely mission directly with the reasons for the outbreak of the Great War, drawing extraordinary pathos from the inevitability of conflict, and refreshingly didn’t give in to the recent tendency to somehow make the Germans into sympathetic figures, understanding that this kind of story doesn’t work unless the hero is fighting an insurmountable, one dimensional evil -- though it’s a pity that as the face of evil, Patrick Malahide, couldn’t have been given a bit more to do.
But perhaps that would have detracted from Rupert Penry-Jones’s storming turn as Hannay. RP-J is the BBC’s go to man for upper middle class, buttoned up, establishment educated spies. As well as spending three years leading the Spooks, he played real life agent Donald Maclean alongside the rest of the posher members of the Brit pack in Cambridge Spies, and he was absolutely perfect as this man on the run, realistically charming even as he’s chauvinistic, but bringing the required gravitas when outlining the dangers to the country he’s risking his life to combat. An able comedian too -- I don’t think there are many actors of his breed who could have carried off the scene with the ventriloquist's dummy (and yes, I do realise how surreal that sentence looks if you didn’t manage to watch this).
He’s also especially good with the elements of screwball humour Mickery threw in as part of biggest deviation from the book to evoke some of the sexual politics of the era probably in an attempt to balance out the testosterone at the heart of the novel. It was Hitchcock’s invention to give Hannay a female foil to spar with on his journey, and Mickery’s version, suffragette Victoria Sinclair (perhaps inspired by Mary, Hannay’s wife in Buchan’s later novel The Three Hostages) is just mouthy enough to make our hero question his values, but not so shrill as to become the typical stereotype of a women’s libber.
It helps that Sinclair’s played by the film’s real find, the luminous Lydia Leonard, the kind of actress who seems like she’s been doing this kind of thing years but in reality this is probably her big break (assuming enough people were watching). Previously seen in The Line of Beauty, her sardonic delivery reminded me of the leading ladies of classic Hollywood, the likes of Jean Arthur or Claudette Colbert, giving the midsection of the film the feel of one of those old road comedies like It Happened One Night, especially in the bedroom scene, though we never saw Colbert and Clarke Gable get quite that close.
As the film sped credibly to its conclusion, aided by Doctor Who veteran James Hawes’s sprightly direction, Mickery cleverly tied up this apparently extraneous relationship with the main plot, turning the reveal of the mystery of the thirty-nine steps (surprisingly close to Buchan) into an interesting piece of character drama rather than a simple case of spy versus spy. If the final shock seemed a bit gratuitous, at least it offered the chance to finally tie-up the story with the impending conflict suggesting that the BBC isn’t quite yet ready to leave Hannay and Sinclair to their fates. Buchan wrote four more books about Hannay. Perhaps we’ll be seeing those too.
2008 was the year when I finally realised that I was online more than watching television live. Most of anything useful drama and comedy wise is being released on dvd, and with a Lovefilm subscription I’ve been managing to catch up on a range of programmes. About the only appointment tv for me has been the odd panel game plus Doctor Who and its variants; even Heroes or Merlin have found their way to prerecord first. It’s also been a year where I’ve only seen one ITV1 series – Lost In Austen – and strayed away from Channel 4. The BBC is a treasure that has to be protected, but they need to return to reminding the audience the glories that they offer rather than threatening to prosecute them for not paying their license and giving reasons for the Daily Mail and its readership to ostracise them.
Some of the best live camera work of the year happened during the BBC’s broadcast of Prom 5, which began with an organ solo of Messian’s L'Ascension and Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, perhaps the longest example of one of these things outside of Christmas. It began with a long, slow zoom in from the outer edge of the hall to the organist's box which is exactly the kind of arresting, leisurely shot there’s simply not enough of on television these days. It’s just a man sitting at an organ which should be even less televisual than a piano solo, but this still managed to be a visual feast due to the director's willingness to show off the architecture of the pipes, organist Olivier Latry's fingering and the acoustic adjusters in the ceiling.
Ashes To Ashes was a frustrating experience. It wasn’t such a bad idea to spin-off Life on Mars, even if it had that offered one of television’s best ever conclusions and though Keeley Hawes was unpopular with some I thought she was more than a match for John Simm, and it was great to see Gene Hunt back on the beat. No, the problem was that the tension which existed between its core genres, cop show and fantasy failed to cohere with too many appearances from the clown and less clarity in the detective work, often keeping the types of story separate in each episode making it an irritating watch as your attention was cast hither and thither. By the end, I wasn’t sure if Alex Drake was in a coma – in which case was Sam Tyler?
Dawn Goes Lesbian (pictured) was something of a guilty pleasure. Journalist Dawn Porter made a series of documentaries for the constantly struggling BBC Three in which she tried out selection of alternative lifestyles. This was essentially Bruce Parry's Tribe for the Hampstead set, with London’s gay scene instead of the Babongo. Over the course of an hour we watched Porter become the very bestests of friends with a Fenella Woolgar lookalike who she ultimately spent the night with though she was keen to stress that they kept their pyjamas on. Much of the programme was issues led (there's abuse in lesbian relationships too etc). Porter was refreshingly naive but not in with Louis Theroux's irony -- she seemed genuinely honest and natural and confused.
BBC Four’s Pop, What Is It Good For? was one of the best music documentaries of the year. Paul Morley offering a list of his favourite songs of all time, explaining why and interviewing the people who made them. Morley often comes across elsewhere as a rather cynical figure. But here, faced with his heroes, you really saw his passion and the esteem in which he holds their music, even the Sugababes who he attempted to have a serious conversation with during the hub-bub back stage at last year’s Children In Need with Keisha desperate to make him believe that they have a modicum of creative control over their work. This was a musical education for those of us who might have flirted with Smash Hits but ended up with Norah Jones.
TV An outside choice who gained some currency this morning because someone put a suspiciously large stake on at one of the betting websites and low and behold there he was sitting in the weird lighting on tonight’s Doctor Who Confidential – during which I notice Paul McGann got more of a mention that Sylv and Col put together. But conspiracy theories about future episodes aside …
What a brilliant, brilliant choice.
For a start he’s an almost unknown, which means, and I know this is an unfortunate comparison, like Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin, everyone is scrabbling to find out who he is, which means that Doctor Who will stay in the public eye even during a year when the show’s hardly on the telly box. I hope he’s prepared for the onslaught of tabloid scrutiny in which any embarrassing photos will be published on page seven (they’re probably scouring Facebook as we speak and good luck to them – there are over five hundred Matt Smiths listed).
Plus, he’s young. At 26, he’s the youngest official actor to take the role. Though it’s odd that the Doctor is now physically eight years younger than me, he’s closer in age to the kids watching, which means that for once it’ll be lead not the companion which they’ll be identifying with. I suspect he’ll bring a kind of studentiness to the thing which is different again to anything which has gone before.
Story wise, it throws up all kinds of interesting possibilities. If any of the old companions like Ian Chesterton put in an appearance the dynamic will be really interesting now that the roles have almost been reversed and someone else is the grandfather. And also, since he does look so young, when he enters a situation he might not be able to engender the usual authority straight away – though if he somehow does it adds a bit of magic as we wonder why and how.
As the interview segments began my first thought was how much he reminded me of Tom Baker, the run on sentences suddenly ramming into a pause, the slightly manic look in his eye, the gesticulations, the indescribable hair, basically, mad as a bag of spanners. Unlike some actors, he’s not trying to intellectualise the role and since he doesn’t seem to be a fan he might bring something even fresher to the thing.
Plus, if he was the second person Steven Moffat and new executive producer Piers Wenger saw and then spent the next three weeks basically looking at actors who weren't quite as impressive, it must have been a bloody good audition. They're both fans and wouldn't simply cast someone for the sake of it. They understand the legacy and if they didn't think Matt was right, they simply wouldn't have cast him and I'm willing to trust their judgement. I know that sounds defensive, but lets give him a chance, naysayers. And his chin isn't that big.
Also, and most importantly, he’s a great actor. I’ll hold my hands up and say that unlike Tennant during Casanova, I didn’t detect Smith’s Doctorishness during Party Animals (back copies available here). In fact, when I reviewed the first and last episodes on this very blog, the most I could find to cheekily say about him was that he looked a bit like Adric. But on reflection, in his corduroy jacket, as those carefully selected clips tonight demonstrated, it was a multi-faceted performance and exactly the kind of thing you’d want from a Doctor (Who).
TV As you can see, the cover of this month’s Doctor Who Magazine features a shot of David Tennant being shoved aside by David Morrissey, all Edwardian frock coat and enigmatic smile as a caption explains that he ‘is The Next Doctor!’. Inside, as you’d expect, there’s little in the way of an explanation as to how he can be the next Doctor and for once, the plot of the episode hasn’t been spoiled by a tabloid (yet). In other words, we don’t know exactly who this next/new Doctor is or how. Nevertheless, it's an amazing idea and I thought it was worth exploring in more detail than is probably necessary and with the impression that I can't tell what's real and what's fiction. Here then, are some fan rumours and a couple of my own ideas.
[I should say there might be some spoilers ahead for anyone who hasn’t read anything about the new special anywhere. So if you want to stay completely in the dark, look away now].
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps …
He’s a conman
Precedent: The One Doctor, a Big Finish audio in which a flimflam man played by Christopher Biggins was flying around the universe grabbing some of Colin Baker’s Doctor’s thunder.
Background: My first hunch, and something I saw immediately being talked about online when the opening of the episode was revealed in these excepts from Russell T Davies’s book The Writer’s Tale in The Times. It didn’t seem that unlikely given that the series isn’t averse to remaking/reimagining old spin-off stories (Dalek, Human Nature) and the habit it has of suggesting one thing in the title (The Doctor’s Daughter) and revealing that it’s something else entirely (cloned from biodata, not Susan’s mother).
Potential: None at all. Page five of DWM, Russell T Davies says: “The new Doctor is absolutely not a conman.” So that’s that.
He’s human.
Precedent: Minuet in Hell, another Big Finish audio starring Paul McGann.
Background: The premise of the Doctor’s story in the above is that his mental energy has been passed to a random human (played by voice of the Daleks Nick Briggs) who is then convinced that he’s human. Some of the regeneration energy at the close of The Stolen Earth (where you remember Tennant cheated the process by throwing the energy into his severed hand in a jar creating a human clone and spreading some of his essence into Donna as a result) could have seeped into someone in the population. Nothing to do with a fob watch, then.
Potential: Not bad. It’s not unknown for one character or story to be sparked by something which happened earlier. The only problem is that during these two minutes which appeared in Children in Need …
… a Tardis is mentioned so you’d have to wonder where that came from. That said, Morrissey also uses the word ‘alonse-y’ which is a very Tenth Doctor affectation and precisely the kind of thing which could be passed on through the above process and there’s a lot of story potential in seeing a man dealing with the responsibility of being the Doctor and is understanding of the universe.
He is the next Doctor or one after that
Precedent: Time Crash, The Two Doctors, The Three Doctors, The Five Doctors, The Eight Doctors (a novel) and range of audio adventures.
Background: It’s not unknown for different incarnations of the Doctor to bump into one another at a time of greatest need, so it’s conceivable that this is a future incarnation and quite like the idea of him actually being the Eleventh Doctor and we’re going to spend the next twelve months waiting for Tenth to regenerate into him – in other words – for once – the announcement as to who will be the next Doctor actually happens within the show. But that doesn’t explain this slip of the tongue …
I’ve a feeling, assuming this is a future version, that his exact number will be kept deliberately vague and I’ve always like the idea of there being a range of potential future incarnations that we can only imagine what they’re like (see also Merlin).
Potential: Pretty high. Though in the above clip, Morrissey doesn’t recognise him but the actor has said in an interview that he’s suffering from memory loss. In Radio Times last week, RTD hinted that “regeneration is a complicated process” which could be a reference to the post regenerative amnesia – could this Doctor have only just turned into David Morrissey?
He’s a past Doctor.
Precedent: In The Brain of Morbius, when the Doctor is battling the titular timelord using the power of his mind, he's apparently using the combined strength of his earlier incarnations and we see a bunch of faces that the production team inserted of themselves to suggest that the character has lived far longer than the four versions we’d seen on screen by that point. But I’m not talking about that.
Background: We didn’t ever see Paul McGann regenerate into Chris Eccleston and nothing on screen has confirmed that they were concurrent. What if somewhere in between, the Morrissey Doctor exists, the real ninth Doctor? If he has amnesia, this could be as a result because of the time war – in the novels, when the Eighth Doctor destroyed Gallifrey, he spent a century wondering around Earth not having a clue who he is.
Potential: Medium. It would be a fantastic twist, though judging by how the Ninth Doctor appears in the first season of nu-Who he’s still getting over the tragedy which destroyed his home world, it’s difficult to rationalise. Plus Tenth doesn’t recognise him, unless he too is afflicted by amnesia at some point.
He’s a version from an alternative reality.
Precedents: Unbound, a series of ‘What-If” style audio adventures from Big Finish
Background: The discussion of a multiverse in the franchise is vague at best. There have been stories featuring other realities – that’s where Rose and the human Doctor were left at the close of the last series and there have been others in the likes of Inferno and Turn Left (though the latter was a rewriting of new series history due to outside interference or more specifically someone interfering with Donna). But we’ve never met an alternative version of the Doctor, though some authors, notably current series script editor Gary Russell rationalised that the different versions which have appeared in various spin-offs all occur in different realities and so are different (Spiral Scratch). I think it’s all still one long story and unseen adventures fill in the gaps but I’m rambling. Anyway, either there’s one Gallifrey watching over the whole multiverse favouring the main Whoniverse like the Doctor favours Earth or each universe has its own Gallifrey and a potential Doctor and Morrissey is one of those – not necessarily evil, just one of those.
Potential: Good, especially since the Cybermen who appear on the episode are the ones from the alternative reality not ‘our’ Whoniverse.
He’s the real Doctor
Precedents: None that I can remember.
Background: Wild speculation here. What if, due to the time war, there have been two Doctor’s buzzing around the universe and the Morrissey edition is the real one and our Doctor, unknowingly, is the impostor? Of course it could be the other way around but it would certainly put a new spin on the Face of Boe’s suggestion that ‘You are not alone’.
Potential: Slim. After all, Ninth in Dalek says that he can sense that there aren’t any others, but if they’re the same man, perhaps their brainwave patterns are the same and he can’t tell that Morrissey is buzzing around for the same reason that he can’t feel the other versions of himself in time.
I think that’s about the right time to stop, don't you?
