Blowing My Thought Wad

While I was “away” there was a whole lot of work to do that had faltered somewhat, to the extent that there came a day where I actually sat down and wondered whether it was worth carrying on. But then so much research had already been done, together with what was already written, that it seemed silly not to keep going. And anyway, when progress was being made it was actually good fun especially when, based on my browsing and buying history, Amazon would recommend DVDs like the double-bill of Gorilla at Large & Mystery on Monster Island. I still can’t figure out what that’s about.

At the end of last week, having seen an unexpected curio at the BFI Southbank that turned out to be a real benefit, I received a phone call that confirmed we were on for “next Thursday”. At that point I had to ask, on for what? Then early yesterday afternoon I was bundled into a cab that sped off towards Holland Park. Inside the house, the housekeeper led us to the day room. I sat down on the sofa, admiring the sculptures of King Kong grappling with the Tyrannosaurus Rex, Sinbad sword fighting with the statue of Kali, checking out the row of awards that included a BAFTA mask and Academy Award statuette. We heard the voice first, coming down the stairs. Then into the room, leaning on his cane, walked Ray Harryhausen.

He settled into his chair, his daughter brought coffee and some of her excellent home—made mince pies and we chatted and I listened to his amazing stories. For a while, when it was the two of us, somehow we went well off topic. I think it was around the time he mentioned meeting Hal Roach. The subject of Laurel and Hardy came up and I remarked that my favourite scene of theirs was the pair trying to shift a piano: Not up the flights of steps in The Music Box, but across the rope bridge in Swiss Miss where they tangle with an escaped gorilla. He chuckled at the memory then after we threw out a few more titles and memories, I looked across and Mr Harryhausen was doing Stan Laurel’s thumb trick from The Bohemian Girl. And as I started to crack up he tipped his head back and roared with laughter.

When did dinosaurs stop being exciting? This was the query that started rattling around my head in the early hours, the week before last, during the tail end of an egregious bout of insomnia. I should add that it wasn’t just a purely random thought that had popped up while I paced around, fretting over whether the lack of sleep would leave me too insensible to get any decent work done during the few daylight hours we now have each day. Instead I’d been sat at the computer, whiling away the time watching The Land That Time Forgot – Animus Productions’ cheap and cheerful adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel – in its entirety on YouTube.

It was a shame that I was catching it out of kilter because it would have made a perfectly good Sunday afternoon matinee. Co—written by Michael Moorcock, the film sticks reasonably close to the source material as the crew of a U—boat and the survivors of a recently torpedoed merchant ship – led by that big slab of heroic 1970s beefcake, Doug McClure – face the twin perils of aggressive, barely—evolved humans and carnivorous dinosaurs when, dangerously low on fuel and rations, they chance upon the lost sub—continent of Caprona. Watching it I wondered if the film would now only entertain young kiddies who haven’t seen better or people of a certain age who remember being enthralled by The Land That Time Forgot upon its release back in 1975.


Shown to a generation of slightly older children used to things being slick and shiny, would they complain about the back—projection, the scenes that looked like they had been shot in a local park, and – more importantly – the puppet dinosaurs? Would the gliding pterodactyls bring howls of protest, especially since the wires on the full–scale models and the harness on the actor that ends up in one of the creature’s mouth are clearly visible on screen. Or wouldn’t that matter to them? Would they just enjoy the film for what it was? All these years later The Land That Time Forgot is still great fun. After all, this is a film in which a Triceratops takes a round from the U–boat’s deck gun in the face. What’s not to like?

The next night, still awake, and knowing that watching movies wasn’t going to help, I decided to find a book to read that would help get me to sleep. Rooting around in a box in the bedroom cupboard, filled with the paperbacks there wasn’t room for in the bookcase shelves, I happened across Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. I’d read it just the once when it was first published in 1991 and with dinosaurs still on my mind decided to give it another go. And it did the trick! A couple of chapters and I had nodded right off. Having hidden this book away for the better part of twenty years, I’d forgotten how absolutely rotten Crichton was at writing fiction. The characters are perfunctory at best and show no emotion throughout what is supposed to be quite an ordeal. Instead of conversations between individuals they just give lectures on their field of expertise.

Although one character on the page gets so scared they wet themselves, the rest blithely blather on with their oral dissertations on genetics or paleontology or chaos theory even in the face of what any normal person would consider the most appalling danger. It’s like Westworld only the visitors are the robots. If Crichton couldn’t write female characters – sidelining the paleobotanist through most of the book – he sure as shit couldn’t write credible children. The kids in the book were so clueless and irritating that every time they appeared I wished someone would hurl them into the gaping jaws of the nearest predatory beast. When the only ticking—clock drama was that the supply boat had to be stopped from docking at the mainland because, for the whole voyage, the crew were obviously too stupid to notice there were escaped dinosaurs on board, I wished I had some Burroughs in my hands. But that would have defeated the exercise and kept me awake. Instead, night after night, Crichton’s novel helped put me to sleep.


Although I honestly can’t remember what I thought of the book when it first came out, rereading it I’ve newfound respect for the screenwriter David Koepp. Credited with the scripts for the first Mission Impossible movie and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I’ve never been a big fan of his work, but you have to hand it to him for having managed to fashion a half decent script for the film adaptation of Jurassic Park. I can remember the night I saw the movie in the West End. Everyone had to see the movie, simply because it had dinosaurs in it. But after seeing the dinosaurs there really wasn’t much else. For me the saving grace was the casting of the still much—missed Bob Peck as the game warden, Robert Muldoon, livening up every scene he was in. And I laughed heartily when the Velociraptor peered through the circular glass in the kitchen door, mirroring the scene where the no—nonsense Nurse Murch looks in on Gordo Cooper during one of the more bizarre tests at the Lovelace Clinic in The Right Stuff. Although nobody else in the audience seemed to get the joke.

For all the pixel power involved in rendering the computer—generated dinosaurs, the more satisfying scenes involved a hefty dose of animatronics from Stan Winston Studios. And even then, the best part of the set piece involving the Tyrannosaurus attacking the cars on the park tour was the ripples in the glass of water, foreshadowing the arrival of the weighty T—Rex. Although the fact that it would later tippy-toe into the visitor centre, much to everyone’s surprise, to chew up the raptors made nonsense of that earlier sequence. But by then I guess nobody cared. Dinosaurs were the new big thing. By the end of the decade, because there was an audience for it, we had the six—part quasi—natural history documentary Walking with Dinosaurs. That led to a whole number of Walking with... documentary series, which, all combined, covered life on Earth from the Early Precambrian period up to the Late Pleistocene.

Just as I mentioned in the previous post how the Mariner 4 flyby of Mars robbed the planet of its mystery once it began sending back images of the surface, the problem I found with this sort of “factual” programming was it made dinosaurs ordinary. Built in a computer, no doubt with any number of drab scientific advisors peering over the shoulders of the animators and digital artists explaining every last little boring detail, the creatures created for these series may have been anatomically correct and attributed the behavioural patterns best surmised by the experts in the field, but this surfeit of data reduced them to carnivores and herbivores of that era, no different than the beasts that roam the planet today. Where’s the fun in that?

A couple months back I had the pleasure of spending the afternoon with Julie Harris who had been the costume designer on the likes of A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, Carry on Cleo, the 1960’s spoof of Casino Royale, Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Darling – for which she won the Academy Award – and The Land That Time Forgot. Utterly charming and still sharp as a tack, during our chat she mentioned that when it came to working on period dramas, although she would diligently research the clothing of the time, for the costume designs she would create a fashion for the era because historical accuracy would only go so far and audiences expect a lot more.


Though computer animators can now feel very proud for being able to create the perfect Tyrannosaurus, the end results still sadly lack the imagination of the dinosaurs that dazzled audiences in the original King Kong or The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, One Million Years B.C. or The Valley of Gwangi. There stop motion animators like Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen – the absolute masters of their profession – not just brought those creatures to life but, more importantly, imbued them with some personality traits that went towards defining their character. And that’s what seems to have been lost amongst the vast numbers of pixels and hours of render—time, when animators only get their hands on a keyboard and Wacom tablet and not the dinosaur itself.

Even if the animation is done well it still requires lighting and shading to integrate it into the scenes and if one of those stages isn’t up to snuff the whole thing looks utterly phoney when it is composited into the live action footage. A couple of months ago I caught the first couple episodes of Terra Nova. Remember that dreadful BBC drama Outcasts? It’s like that, but worse. Because instead of useless colonists sent to a distant planet, the bozos in Terra Nova are sent back in time to the late Cretaceous period, which means dinosaurs. And not just any dinosaurs but badly animated and horrendously composited dinosaurs that looked utterly out of place in every scene they appeared in.

At the moment critics are falling over themselves to praise The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius’s silent film shot in black and white. Hopefully sometime soon stop motion animation will make a comeback. Because in recent years the only computer generated dinosaur I can think of that has come close to recapturing the true character of that wonderful earlier work is Rex, the over—excited plastic T—Rex with an inferiority complex from the three Toy Story films. Everything else I’ve seen of late just makes my heart sink as I yearn for those simpler, yet more exciting, days. And that’s not right.

The story goes that back in the mid–1980s, at some point between the end of post—production and eventual theatrical release of Michael Mann’s adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon, producer Dino De Laurentiis decided to ditch the title and replace it with the uninspiring Manhunter in the grounds that the original shared a word with Year of the Dragon, one of his earlier movies that had come out the previous year and tanked at the box—office. Now, while it’s abundantly clear that there’s no exact science when it comes to a business where financial success depends wholly on the general public, who can be a fickle bunch of bastards at the best of times, surely basing that sort of decision—making on such superstitious tomfoolery can only best be described as pure idiocy.

I can understand Year of the Dragon being rejected by audiences and going straight into the crapper. I’d caught it when the film first opened here, going along because I’d found The Deer Hunter tedious, really loved the original 219—minute cut of Heaven’s Gate, and wondered what director Michael Cimino would do next. As it turned out, he’d made a crime drama, co—written by Oliver Stone during his cocaine years, featuring a self—righteous fascistic bully steamrollering his way through a retched miasma of overt racism, sexism and xenophobia. By the time I saw Michael Mann’s film, in which Brian Cox’s understated portrayal of Hannibal Lecter was far more chilling than Anthony Hopkins’ pantomime psycho turn, Year of the Dragon was just a distant ugly memory. With the original title would it have been more successful? Or would folk have pitched up at their local cinema expecting some Russian kung—fu flick?


Was De Laurentiis’ meddling down to his inability to recognize, let alone concede, that the previous content was at fault or his own personal messed—up Hollywood hoodoo to ward off failure? This was, after all, the showman who still ballyhooed the elaborate and expensive animatronics used in his remake of King Kong even though they’d had to resort to a man in a monkey suit during filming because the mechanics didn’t work. Though when he decided to ditch the “Red Dragon” title it’s a shame there hadn’t been somebody on hand to throw De Laurentiis into a quandary by reminding him that just a few years before John Milius had made an absolute killing with Red Dawn, in which Colorado high school students fought a guerrilla war against invading Soviet paratroopers. Torn between the one word brimming with success and the other tainted with the stain of wretched failure he probably would have had a seizure on the spot.

A quarter century on, it would be good to think this sort of corporate witchcraft had been laid to rest, but apparently old habits still die hard. Maybe it’s just another unexplained side effect of the Santa Ana winds, periodically turning the suits in the San Fernando Valley and over the hills in the Los Angeles basin into bigger arses than usual. Except this time its “Red” that’s leaving executives off—colour, or more precisely, the Red Planet. For Hollywood, Mars has always been troublesome. Although to begin with the fact that it was bad was good for the studios as invaders from Mars (and any other hostile planet for that matter) made for good metaphors of the pervading Communist threat in the great science fiction films of the 1950s, in much the same way that those pesky Martians, first landing on Horsell Common, in HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds were seen as an allegory of British Imperialism.

Much like the seemingly unstoppable three—legged fighting machines that emerged from the cylinders, laying waste to England before being routed by common bacteria, the end of the Cold War meant that Hollywood had no need to use the red planet as a threat to hang over us, and the collapse of the Berlin Wall was a cough in the face of forthcoming alien invaders. But anyway, by then science fiction had already been infantilized in distant galaxies. When the Martians tried their luck to take over our world again it was in Mars Attacks!, which, typical of a Tim Burton film, looked pretty in places, had a rambling plot that went nowhere, and failed to recoup its budget. While in the recent War of the Worlds – Spielberg’s definite article—less take on HG Wells – Martians weren’t even mentioned and the agonizing clarion call of the tripods, sounding before they unleashed their vaporizing heat–rays, was a welcome relief from the continual screaming and yelling from Dakota Fanning’s brattish character.


When Hollywood looked to Mars as the setting for dramas, the results were as successful as most NASA missions to the planet. Though Total Recall made money by taking Philip K Dick’s story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale and beefing it up with brutish, cartoon violence, John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars was a pallid retread of the director’s Assault on Precinct 13, while Doom – quite possibly the nadir of the video game–to–movie adaptations – was so sickeningly awful it shouldn’t ever be brought up in conversation again. Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars aimed for some kind of 2001 profundity but missed the target. Nobbled by characters that had the bland stuff, shortly after their mission began I wished Joseph Cavor was in charge to liven things up. The only thing noteworthy about Red Planet was it was even more scientifically inaccurate than the old George Pal movies with those wonderful Chesley Bonstell matte paintings. When NASA – who opened their doors to the makers of Armageddon – refused to get involved, they pretty much declared it was a film to stay well downwind of.

So the only logical way forward would be to go back to the pre-Mariner 4 days when Mars still remained an enigma, allowing writers to conjure up tales set on a planet filled with mystique and exoticism. Back then we could have The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury’s utterly astonishing collection of linked short stories that begins with Rocket Summer, set in 1999, where the heat from the take–off of the first rocket to Mars has startling effects on the surrounding Ohio landscape, and carries on through the next quarter century and more to finish with The Million-Year Picnic – oddly enough one of the first of the stories to be published in the pulp magazines of the time – that brought the narrative to a remarkably poetic close. But The Martian Chronicles had already come to television in the form of a three part miniseries, broadcast thirty years after the book’s publication. Written by Richard Matheson, it tried its best but, like much all screen adaptations of Ray Bradbury’s work, it lost the beautiful lyricism of his prose in the translation from page to screen.


Before Bradbury there was Burroughs, the grandfather of Mars–based fiction, whose own series of Martian chronicles, set on the world the native multi–coloured oviparous races call Barsoom, feature John Carter, a one–time Confederate Captain in the American Civil War transported to Mars via astral projection, the Martian princess Dejah Thoris, and their eventual descendents. Though the English–born author Edwin Lester Arnold may have got there first with Lieutenant Gulliver Jones: His Vacation, published in 1905 and later known as Gulliver of Mars, it’s Burroughs the readers of fantasy fiction remember. A Chicago native and the son of a Major who fought in the American Civil War, Edgar Rice Burroughs served with the 7th Cavalry before being invalided out on medical grounds. Eventually working as a pencil sharpener salesman, he first started writing to see if he could come up with better stories than the ones appearing in the pulp magazines he was advertising his business in.

Yet if Burroughs is familiar to cinema audiences it’s as the creator of Tarzan instead. Although Tarzan of the Apes was published months after the first John Carter adventure appeared in the pulp fiction magazine All—Story – spread over six instalments under the title Under the Moons of Mars before eventually being published as A Princess of Mars – Hollywood obviously found it easier to bring his Lord of the Jungle to the screen than the many wonders of Barsoom, where studio—shot scenes could simply be intercut with stock footage of animals in the wild, omitting the need to venture out on location. Although of course any jungle adventures would still involve a far larger wardrobe budget than what would be required for Mars. While Tarzan went through numerous incarnations in film and on television, played by a succession of actors that included the great Johnny Weissmüller, Buster Crabbe, Lex Barker, Gordon Scott and Ron Ely, John Carter languished in print.

For a long time the closest John Carter came to the screen was in the early 1930s when Bob Clampett, the legendary Warner Bros. animator, drew up test scenes for an animated adventure. In the end all we got out of it was Marvin the Martian joining the Looney Tunes roster of characters. Twenty years later Ray Harryhausen’s interest in the property came to naught. In the 1970s, Amicus brought out adaptations of a trio of Burroughs’ novels, with At the Earth’s Core, the first book in the Pellucidar series, sandwiched between The Land That Time Forgot and The People That Time Forgot from Burroughs’ Caspak trilogy, but still there was no interest in Barsoom until a decade on when Walt Disney Pictures were looking to go ahead with a film written by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, the screenwriting stalwarts who would later bring all four Pirates of the Caribbean films to the masses, then rewritten by Bob Gale. But again, the project fizzled out and it looked like we were only going to see Barsoom in pictures from fantasy artists like Frank Frazetta (up above) or, more recently, Frank Cho (below).


Luckily, come the turn of the century, interest in John Carter renewed. Maybe after the three stinky Star Wars prequels some studio executives decided to treat the audience to some spectacle that had a decent story for a change. Although for a while the film rights were in the hands of Paramount Pictures who were happy to put Robert Rodriguez, another purveyor of piss—poor movies, behind the camera with a script that began with Carter as the captain of an elite special forces unit, taking out unsavoury rebels in Central Africa before being transported to Barsoom from inside a cave adorned with red fire-gem crystals. After a switch in directors the studio lost interest, allowing Disney to regain the rights and finally go ahead with the project. Obviously this was a cause for celebration. Michael Chabon was brought in to work on the script. Andrew Stanton, director of Finding Nemo and Wall–E and one of the original members of the Pixar Brain Trust, was on board to direct. The film, based on the first novel would be released on the centenary of the publication of A Princess of Mars. At last everything was looking up!

If there was a downside it was that in the hundred years since the book saw print it, and the further novels in the series, had influenced or inspired countless science fiction or fantasy films, from the early film serials from Universal Pictures featuring Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, down the line to Star Wars and Avatar, where to say that Lucas and James Cameron were “influenced” by the Barsoom novels is actually an incredibly polite way of putting it. So there’s always the danger that some illiterate little twerp watching the movie will see a Thoat, one of the eight–legged Martian horses, and think the filmmakers have ripped off Avatar, not knowing that when Cameron wasn’t basing his designs on 1970s prog–rock album covers he was shamelessly plundering from Burroughs. Of course if that was the only downside, I guess it could be considered a win because what Stanton and everyone else involved didn’t know when they started production at the end of 2009 and how spectacularly Robert Zemekis would shaft them.

There was a time when Bob Zemekis made pretty decent movies. But then he became captivated by performance capture, which would have been no bad thing if only the end results hadn’t looked so bloody awful. Ranging from the odd to the downright disturbing, the characters in his first outing, The Polar Express, looked like something out of a kiddie’s worst nightmare with their lifeless eyes and strange facial movements. Carrying on the process through Beowulf and his take on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol there was little sign of improvement as the staff working at his company ImageMovers, by then acquired by Disney, seemed to be caught up in the details rather than understanding that the basic principle of animation was to bring something to life. They still hadn’t figured it out by the time Mars Needs Moms, based on the children’s book by the cartoonist Berkeley Breathed rolled around, which was a shame because Mars Needs Moms was pretty much the Beagle 2 of Mars movies.

Released earlier this year, it hit the ground with a dull thud and just lay there, making less than $7m on its opening weekend from a $150m budget. By the time Mars Needs Moms was sluiced out of cinemas and the air freshener was pumped in, the film had the distinction of already being the fifth biggest box–office flop in cinema history. There was even talk that its failure would bring the fad of showing every damned thing in 3D to an abrupt end, which might not have been a bad thing. What did happen though was that two months after Zemekis sent his torrent of shit flooding through uncanny valley, John Carter of Mars had suddenly become John Carter. How about that?! Of course Disney strenuously denied that the stinking great turd Zemekis had recently dropped had absolutely nothing to do with the suddenly truncated title but it still felt as if the spirit of Dino De Laurentiis was merrily roaming the corridors was Burbank.



When the first teaser trailer for John Carter came out in mid-July the most puzzling, and disappointing aspect was that it lacked any of the “wow factor” Burroughs fans expected. Frankly it was dull. With the London FX houses Double negative, Cinesite and nvisible knuckling down to get the film finished, luckily nobody blamed the omission of some expected eye—popping spectacular down to those scenes being incomplete. Nearly twenty—five years ago, when I was working on Who Framed Roger Rabbit departments were advised well in advance which scenes had to be fast—tracked for inclusion in the trailer, and that was long before kit like Pre—Viz made it easier to sort and select the requisite material. So the creeping suspicion that followed in the wake of this remarkably bland teaser was that it had been slapped together (perhaps having been taken apart beforehand) by a perturbed marketing department that suddenly had no confidence in knowing how to sell the movie.

For a while everyone laid low, hoping any controversy over the truncated title would die down, but then in the following months excuses for the title started coming out. Mark Strong, who plays Matai Shang, leader of the Holy Therns, took a stab at it back in the summer by explaining:

“The reason is that he has to earn that title. Again, it’s a franchise or a number of books; a series of books that people may or may not know, but if you call him John Carter of Mars, I think at the very beginning, all the work’s been done and what Andrew wants to do, I think, is introduce people to this first film, and by the end of it, he becomes John Carter of Mars, but not at the beginning. In the beginning he’s John Carter, but by the end of the first film, he’s John Carter of Mars; so he’s earned that title to take it off should it want to go to further storytelling.”

I suppose that’s one way of looking at it, especially with a franchise in mind, but then they could have made the point even clearer by checking back through the opening pages of A Princess of Mars and calling the film Captain Jack Carter of Virginia. That would hammer home the fact that he was an Earthman and everyone else wasn’t. Then finally the time came for Andrew Stanton, who obviously knew that he had a responsibility to the studio that had invested north of $250 million in his latest movie, to step up and just recently announce:

“Here’s the real truth of it. I’d already changed it from A Princess Of Mars to John Carter Of Mars. I don’t like to get fixated on it, but I changed Princess Of Mars because not a single boy would go. And then the other truth is, no girl would go to see John Carter Of Mars. So I said, “I don’t won’t to do anything out of fear, I hate doing things out of fear, but I can’t ignore that truth.

“All the time we were making this big character story which just so happens to be in this big, spectacular new environment. But it’s not about the spectacle, it’s about the investment. I thought, I’ve really worked hard to make all of this an origin story. It’s about a guy becoming John Carter. So I’m not misrepresenting what this movie is, it’s John Carter. ‘Mars’ is going to stick on any other film in the series. But by then, it won’t have a stigma to it.”

To begin with it sounds like the sort of mealy—mouthed misdirection that tumbles from the lips of some weaselly politico eager to hold on to his job, where starting off by saying, “Here’s the real truth,” immediately sends up warning signals because everyone has come to expect that whatever comes next is a whole world away from the real truth. Since his words came on the heels of the first proper trailer, released at the beginning of this month, it didn’t exactly chime with the new on—screen content that suddenly seems to be all about the spectacle. So it was disappointing that someone of Stanton’s standing was playing the game he was obliged to play. But I guess we should have known that someone who had enjoyed the years of freedom up in Emeryville wasn’t going to be completely held in check by the machinations of Hollywood. When he wrapped up his statement by acknowledging that ‘Mars’ did have a stigma attached to it, I wonder how well that went down in Burbank?



Or maybe Mars wasn’t as big an issue any more. Show the audience something big and shiny and they’ll soon forget what stunk up the place a day, a week, or a month ago. With the trailer the publicity department had got back on their feet by showing the goods but not naming any names. If you watch the teaser again, have a look and see what’s missing from the new trailer. Here’s a clue: Back in the summer Universal released a very expensive movie called Cowboys & Aliens. I didn’t see it. I don’t feel any real urgency to see it when it comes out on shiny disc in a week or so. But I do know it cost $163 million and only made just shy of $175 million worldwide, which in anyone’s book labels it a flop. Is it a coincidence that all the footage set in the Old West from the John Carter teaser hasn’t made it to the trailer?


So Mars is bad, a combination of the Old West and aliens are bad, and the first poster is just lousy. Difficult circumstances dictate that it’ll be an uphill struggle to give this film the recognition it deserves. It’s one of the few films that I’m actually looking forward to seeing next year. Hopefully Disney doesn’t bottle it, John Carter finds an audience and there are more films in the series to come. If they have some backbone and believe in the movie all the studio really has to worry about are the fans of medical dramas thinking it’s a film about that nice student doctor from e.r. But if it doesn’t work out I can always go back to Burroughs’ text. All I have to do is remember the words:

‘With my back against a golden throne, I fought once again for Dejah Thoris’

and I’m in another world...


For those who haven’t read the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, which I hope is just a simple oversight, Sterling Publishing in New York have begun reprinting the Barsoom and Tarzan series, with stories from the Pellucidar and Caspak series coming out next year. All titles can be obtained through Amazon and if you place your right order now they should arrive in time for Christmas. Having seen the double–issue Radio Times, there’s pretty much fuck all on as usual. Rather than getting stuck in the company of annoying relatives, find a comfy chair, grab a nearby box of chocolates, and get stuck in to some Burroughs. You’ll thank me later.

So, I’m back. Thank Stephen Gallagher, or blame Stephen Gallagher, which ever you see fit. I bumped into him the weekend before last and during the all too brief time we had to chat he urged me to resurrect this blog. Oddly enough, the following day a delightful and enchanting actress who I had been keeping entertained during her first time back in England since a shattering family bereavement, told me I was a wonderful teller of tales – and no, she hadn’t been drinking! Having already found myself toying with the idea of coming back for another go around. So those encounters were, I suppose, the final impetus I needed.

Truth be told, after the way things had turned out last year I really did need the time away to get things back in order. Taking these online ramblings out of the equation also allowed me to focus on the work currently at hand. As it happened, a short while after having the apartment to myself again, boxes were brought out of storage and transferred here so I could sort through an accumulation of annotated scripts, contracts, call sheets, newspaper and magazine clippings, photographs, and publicity material. We may not be fully up to speed because time management is proving to be an alien concept to the person I’m partnered with – which occasionally infuriates me because we should have gotten much further ahead by now – but we’ve certainly made progress.

Those concerns aside, through the changing seasons I’ve rooted through files in the British Library, scoured the British Library’s Newspaper Library, and got to talk to the director Robert Fuest, the writer Brian Clemens (either side of a new Blu-Ray commentary he was participating in), the remarkably forthright Academy Award–winning costumer designer Julie Harris, and John Humphreys, the designer/sculptor who created Max Headroom. Hopefully the momentum will build, but for the time being I’m managing to push the project forward, discovering numerous truths that will eventually dispel the long–held legends that have previously seen print.

With all that on my plate, returning to the blog may seem like an utterly insane thing to do because I doubt I’ll be able to post as regularly as before. But when there are days when I come back from Colindale Newspaper Library – thankfully only a short bus ride away – having spun through reels of microfilm or leafed through bound volumes of periodicals looking to find the information that will fill some of the numerous gaps in the narrative and returned home with little or nothing of value, it’s good to have something to write at the end of the day.

They may not run to the same length as previous entries – some of which clocked in at over 6,000 words – but rest assured that short doesn’t always mean sweet. Having been on my best behaviour and seen where that got me... Well, if you’ve been here before you’ll know just what to expect.

So that’s that. “Say what you’re gonna say or prepare for eternal fucking silence,” declared Al Swearengen, and I think I’ve pretty much said all there is to say, at least for the time being. I’ve been posting for a couple months shy of five years now and that’s a decent enough run. Most times it has been fun, although there have been occasions where I’ve slipped up and written some quite thoughtless remarks, which I sincerely regret.

Unlike many ex–bloggers I’m not quitting simply to concentrate on facebook or twitter. Although I have a presence on the former I pretty much gave up on that over a month back and not before time. Anyone who knows me knows I’m not enamoured being amongst big crowds of people I don’t really know, trading idle remarks either in person or as part of a digital gathering, preferring instead to trade more substantial messages with actual friends online when there isn’t the opportunity to sit and have a conversation in person, in the same way that I now only comment – and will continue to comment on occasion – on particular blogs.

I suppose there are reasons for knocking it all on the head now but I can’t say that I particularly want to share them. So instead I guess I’ll end with a song. I was thinking of something from Elsie Carlisle or Jack Hylton and His Orchestra, but in the end I think this will suffice...

On the few occasions I’ve bothered turning on the television during the past week or so I’ve been constantly assailed by the trailer trumpeting the upcoming ORIGINAL BRITISH DRAMA on the BBC. It even appeared after an edition of the utterly brilliant Petworth House: The Big Spring Clean on BBC4, unless I had mistakenly flipped over once the credits were rolling and had mixed up whatever channel I was watching. Either way it seemed to be bloody everywhere.



By promoting the fact that this was BRITISH DRAMA, it may have been a riposte to the remarkably irritating Sky Atlantic trails featuring the remarkably irritating Dustin Hoffman. Trumpeting the new British Sky Broadcasting channel launched back in February after the company snapped up the exclusive TV broadcasting rights to the HBO archive, the spots heralded the arrival of the rather disappointing Boardwalk Empire, the rather disappointing Treme, and the thoroughly nasty swords and misogyny nonsense that is Game of Thrones.

Then again, this big push may be a consequence of the BBC Trust’s annual review from July of 2009, in which it told the BBC to basically get their act together and produce better drama. And, of course, a couple of days before that report was made public there was the email from the distinguished producer Tony Garnett in which he voiced his concerns over the Corporation for stifling creativity and it’s continuing failure to commission any quality drama. If the Trust had fired a warning shot across the bow of Television Centre, Garnett unleashed a long deserved salvo right into the empty heart of the BBC’s drama department. In a wishy–washy response Ben Stephenson, the Corporation’s drama commissioning controller, invited anyone who shared Garnett’s unease to pop round to his place for a coffee and a chat while he hid behind the testimonials of his best mates.

Whether the bins regularly put out on Wood Lane overflowed with empty Nescafe jars or someone from the top floor threatened to tear little Ben a new arsehole if he didn’t get his shit together, who knows. Either way, two years on, some of the dramas at least look intriguing. Of course any trailer, especially when it’s just clips put to music, is essentially a greatest bits package, held out to attract us like moths to a flame. I suppose some could quibble that since The Night Watch is an adaptation of Sarah Waters’ bestseller, and the six–part Case Histories is based on Kate Atkinson’s detective novels, they’re not exactly “original”, but at least it shows that someone, somewhere in Television Centre has decided to lay off having yet another go at an Austen or Bronte, so things are looking up.


That said audiences still had to endure the recent version of Women In Love, once again indubitably confirming that DH Lawrence is best confined to the classrooms so children can learn to loathe him at an early age, but at least it was quickly swept aside by The Crimson Petal and the White. Featuring great turns by Romola Garai and Gillian Anderson, a revelatory performance by Chris O’Dowd, and Mark Gattis on fire as his brother, it was like experiencing Michael Faber’s doorstop of a novel while in the throes of an all–consuming fever dream. It continued to prove that the BBC does the past better than the future, even if it involves marvellously unsavoury Victorian grime, insomuch that it made me completely forget that we had only recently been callously inflicted with the deplorable Outcasts.

As the trailer continues to play on the first of the offerings have already begun to appear. Doctor Who got off to a cracking start. If this weekend’s pirate episode wasn’t particularly up to snuff you have to feel sorry for writer Stephen Thompson whose episodes for both Doctor Who and last year’s Sherlock had the unenviable task of following immediately after a spectacular opening story from Steven Moffat. But as I said about the previous series, even if I’m not enamoured by the self–contained story within every episode there’s always something intriguing going on with the overall story arc. The woolly liberals over at The Guardian have already started a debate as to whether this new series is too scary for the kiddies. Granted most of the scenes in the abandoned orphanage were creepy, and the brief glimpse of The Silents suspended from the ceiling even made me recoil, but it looks like Moffat is out to introduce children to one of the scariest things they can experience in the whole wide world, which is heartbreak.


Over the May Day Bank Holiday Weekend, which began with a wedding I managed to avoid and ended with a well–deserved funeral, the BBC served up Exile. While it may have gotten some good write–ups I can’t say that I was overly impressed, and by the end it felt like I had missed an episode somewhere. Then on Thursday we got our first sight of The Shadow Line, which has nothing to do with the Joseph Conrad novella of the same name. Depending on which newspaper you peruse this is supposed to be either Britain’s answer to Forbrydelsen or The Wire. In interviews the writer–producer–director Hugo Blick has name–checked Edge of Darkness and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. After getting through the somewhat tortuous opening scene that seemed to drag on interminably, the stylization started to remind me more of The Avengers, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Unfortunately that wasn’t particularly a good thing.

Perhaps it didn’t help that the BBC had decided to schedule it on the exact same night as the imported conspiracy drama Rubicon, a clear descendant of the likes of Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View and All The President’s Men, which placed intrigue ahead of smugness and wasn’t filled with characters who appeared to have accidentally stumbled out of a Pinter play. Even in the context of home grown drama, any new conspiracy drama will, whether unfairly or not, find itself compared to the all time television great, Troy Kennedy–Martin’s Edge of Darkness, which, a quarter century after its original transmission has still never been bettered.


While both Edge of Darkness and The Shadow Line began with policemen holding torches but whereas the former briefly introduces the freight train carrying the nuclear waste of IIF – a visual clue that will eventually lead to Northmoor – before effortlessly establishing the character of Bob Peck’s resolute Yorkshire detective Ronnie Craven, the latter spent far too long letting David Schofield’s police sergeant come across like one of the three witches at the beginning of Macbeth, muttering his oblique prophecy to his bored–looking protégé. Although I’ll no doubt see The Shadow Line through to the end, well before the end of the first episode I knew which of the two dramas I would much prefer to be watching.

As for the rest, both Luther and Torchwood are shows I couldn’t give a hoot about, so when they pitch up I neither know nor care. The Hour, following the lives and careers of a trio of television journalists working for a nascent topical news programme, looks intriguing even if some elements of the press are implying the 1950s setting suggests it was commissioned by the BBC to replace Mad Men, which has now been purloined by the evil Murdoch empire. Although the one I’m waiting for is Page Eight, David Hare’s contemporary spy thriller coming to BBC2 later in the year, which I doubt will disappoint.

Between now and then, who knows what else there will be. Next week BBC4 starts its Wonders of Iceland series and now that the channel has introduced us to the Swedish Wallander, the Danish Forbrydelsen and the French Engrenages, whose third series ended last night, there may even be some Icelandic crime drama heading this way if we’re very lucky. I guess we have to wait and see.

Over the last five or sixth months either Film4, one of the ITV channels, or perhaps even a combination of the two, peppered their schedules with films like Avalanche Express, Bear Island, and The Cassandra Crossing. As films go they aren’t particularly remarkable and certainly won’t ever be inducted into some movie pantheon or other. Made by journeyman directors who weren’t out to make any kind of artistic statement, they had some big names in the cast and were pretty decent stripped down thrillers, which makes a change from a lot of the bloated nonsense we get nowadays.

Watching these films again reminded me of seeing them on their initial release, back at the tail–end of the 1970s when audiences didn’t give a damn about budgets or box–office takings and certainly weren’t subjected to all this current day hullabaloo and tiresome hype. Instead they simply pitched up at one of the local cinemas with precious little fanfare and proved to be just the sort of movies that helped while away a Saturday afternoon. Even if they would be amongst the many titles destined to fall between the cracks of memory, when it came to providing some decent entertainment for a couple of hours, those films did all right, then and now.

Being reacquainted with them for the first time in more than thirty years, it reminded me of the challenge set last year by Stephen Gallagher to list the films that I’ll happily watch from beginning to end any number of times. Back then I came up with 31 titles most, as I said, weren’t all award winners overflowing with artistic merit but were the movies that I enjoy watching again and again, whether late at night or on a rainy weekend afternoon, with or without a shallow tub of vanilla ice cream and a clear plastic container of warm orange squash to add to the viewing pleasure.

I knew there were always more. And since New Year another 30 titles that have seen me through the years proved to be indispensable during the particularly crippling bouts of insomnia or the many empty hours of a Sunday when there was nothing to catch up with on iPlayer. One film in particular (which is eighteenth on this new list if you’re interested) stayed in or close to the DVD player and I watched it three nights in a row as part of the triple bills when sleep steadfastly refused to beckon.

Once again the titles are in alphabetical order. For one movie, because I vastly prefer the director’s cut, I’ve listed it under that extended version’s title, which puts it at the end rather than near the beginning. This time around the images have simply been numbered so there’s no chance of reading the file names in the browser window, which means you either know them or you don’t. Or you could make an educated guess. Either way, they are:

Back at the beginning of January, when I’d posted a few curt observations about the movies seen last year, I’d come to the conclusion that it was best to stick with what you know and have some of the old classics to fall back on when the current crop of rather abysmal films fail to impress. Until Forbrydelsen appeared on the screen (with the third series of the French crime drama Engrenages hot on its heels) I was beginning to think that I’d have to do something similar when it came to watching television this year.

It got off to a cracking start on New Year’s Day with the wonderful single drama Eric and Ernie, about Morecambe and Wise’s early years, originated by Victoria Wood, but was immediately followed by the detective drama Zen. I’m sure I’ve read one of Michael Dibdin’s novels featuring his Rome–based police detective sometime in the past, either picking it up on holiday or maybe taking it out of the library, and the plot of the first episode certainly felt vaguely familiar, but while it looked very nice with high production values the drama left me cold so that by the end it felt like absently flicking through a glossy magazine in a doctor’s waiting room.


I had the same feeling with Boardwalk Empire, even though a shitload of money had been thrown at it, not even getting all the way through the first episode, directed by Martin Scorsese. Maybe I’ll give it another go sometime in the future because it could just be that I’m all tuckered out when it comes to gangsters. Great as its final episode was, I felt The Sopranos went at least two seasons beyond its sell–by date. Probably when I come back to Terence Winter’s prohibition drama will be around the same time I give David Simon’s Treme a proper shot because at the moment I’m finding myself strangely ambivalent to that as well. Maybe it’s just a phase I’m going through, much as I love the great city of New Orleans.

By the time the abhorrently clownish Outcasts appeared I was already lining up the box sets of the BBC adaptations of John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People, starring Alec Guinness as George Smiley; Troy Kennedy Martin’s Edge of Darkness and Reilly – Ace of Spies; a selection of Poliakoff and Potter, and a few choice cuts from Alan Bennett; Secret Army, Das Boot, Angels in America and An Ungentlemanly Act, thinking that if I wanted to catch some exceptional drama I’d have to look to the past and just stick to the current television schedules for Top Gear, University Challenge and a fine number of natural history and science documentaries. And pretty much the whole of BBC4.

How did Outcasts end, by the way? It doesn’t matter if you don’t know. I don’t really care. The last episode I caught, just to see if it had improved just a scintilla was the one before it was booted out of its weeknight primetime slot where it turned out the planet was riddled with radioactive hotspots within walking distance of the settlement, flawless cut diamonds were available if you knew where to look for them, and alien remains could lie partially buried on a beach and not be affected by tidal erosion. Still, it was nice to see Vincent padding about again, even if Rose and Bernard weren’t there to look after him, and to note that as well as Forthaven being a piss–poor, unimaginative version of New Caprica, Carpathia might actually be a piss–poor unimaginative version of Solaris.

As the characters appeared clueless at every turn it simply reinforced the fact that the writers simply didn’t have one fucking clue either it became apparent that if Outcasts had been taken just that little step further from being ludicrous and ill thought out to becoming absolute bonkers it might actually have been mildly amusing. And God knows we could have done with a decent comedy as the New Year began to stretch out in front of us. Instead we got the utterly dull and wretchedly unfunny Episodes. Coming from one of the creators of Friends and a writer from Mad About You I wouldn’t have expected much, but certainly something far better than this.


There’s certainly a lot of mileage to be had satirizing the foibles of Hollywoodland but to get anywhere near the target means following in the footsteps of Billy Wilder and making a solid play at biting the hand that feeds you rather than aimlessly stumbling around and giving it the odd nuzzle every now and again. Everyone who goes there has some strange tale to tell about their experience in that crazy town, so rather than put money into such tame nonsense wouldn’t it have been far more entertaining to make a documentary filled with the war stories of the Brit professionals who went abroad?

Episodes was pretty much dead for me from the outset simply because the creative couple at the heart of the show were so preposterously naïve it was it was amazing they had made it here let alone over there. Putting Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan together in something not very good made me hanker to go back and watch Green Wing in much the same way that if I wanted to see American actors play extreme versions of themselves, or simply act like complete arseholes, I’d spin up some episodes of The Larry Sanders Show or Curb Your Enthusiasm. I suppose when people talk about writing about what you know the edict should be amended to: write about what you know but for the love of God add some real zing to it otherwise it’s all just a waste of breath! And if the BBC wants to save money they should have simply repeated the first series of Rev starring Tom Hollander as the embattled inner city priest.

Then again, I suppose it’s still early days for 2011. Last year didn’t start out spectacularly well but things soon changed for the better once the sublime documentary and Around The World By Zepplin, chronicling Lady Grace Drummond–Hay’s journey aboard the Graf Zepplin as it circumnavigated the globe in August 1929, arrived on screen, accompanied by the BBC Natural History Unit’s simply astonishing Great Rift: Africa's Wild Heart. In the following months BBC4 came up with Andrew Graham–Dixon on European art history, the latest series of Timeshift, and Runnin’ Down a Dream, Peter Bogdanovich’s four–hour history of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers.

Dan Snow’s outstanding Empire of the Seas: How the Navy Forged the Modern World, benefited from having a presenter who was an accomplished sailor and historian rather than having a familiar face parachuted in to flap their mouth simply to attract an audience. The same was true of the equally entertaining and informative three–part A History of Horror with Mark Gatiss, which pretty much rounded off the year with an exploration of the Universal horror films of the 1930s and 40s; the British horror movies of the 1950s onwards, dominated by Hammer Films; and the gorier American horror films of the 1970s.


A genuinely enthusiastic fan of the genre, Gatiss’ very personal journey branched off into Cold War–era science fiction, Roger Corman’s colourful adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories, the English “folk horror” sub–genre, and the legacy of those early slasher movies to give a remarkably detailed exploration of the history of horror films in such a relatively short space of time. Amongst the wealth of information on screen perhaps the most surprising revelation was Halloween director John Carpenter outrageously dismissing the celebrated swimming pool scene in Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People after declaring that producer Val Lewton was “overrated”, which might go some way to explain his rapidly declining career.

In terms of drama there were any number of really wonderful surprises. Lost ended brilliantly, which wasn’t really a surprise to many but I thought was worth mentioning again. As I’d said before, anyone who started watching it but gave up should seriously think about giving it another go, especially now there isn’t a week’s wait or more to catch the next episode. If you go for character–oriented drama you’ll be justly rewarded, especially after being affronted by so many ill–conceived and short–lived Lost–inspired series, cobbled together by people who simply ignored how the island drama had taken the time to first established characters and situations before drawing them into its intriguingly labyrinthine story.

Not so much a surprise but more a complete shock was that ITV actually came up with a really exceptional drama in Downton Abbey. A lot of industry types have said, over the past years, that British television drama should look to the best of the US drama for inspiration. Whereas many commentators suggested that Julian Fellowes’ period drama was simply an extension of his Academy Award–winning Gosford Park, I saw the roots of the period drama partially in The West Wing more than anything. Perverse as that may seem, certainly one of the opening shots of the first episode, when the camera prowls around the country house as the servants make ready for the new day, suggested Thomas Schlamme’s long tracking shot as Leo McGarry makes his way through the corridors of the White House in the pilot of Aaron Sorkin’s lauded political drama. And Downton Abbey’s title sequence was equal to the best of anything devised for an HBO drama, bringing to it a refinement and attention to detail reflected in the show as a whole.



At the same time audiences were served up this new historical drama, there was an old historical drama on offer as well with the Yesterday channel showing all 28 episodes of the BBC POW drama Colditz. This was a real godsend for me because it came from that distant era when the average household had two choices when it came to viewing a television programme: You either watched it on the day of transmission or you didn’t. Those were the only options available. Although I was very well aware of the show when it was first broadcast toward the end of 1972, and would soon possess an edition of Major Pat Reid’s book – although if memory serves it was The Latter Days at Colditz rather than The Colditz Story – as well as the eventual Escape from Colditz board game, I was at an age when the series’ time of transmission was considered by my parents to be well past my bedtime.

Having to content myself with watching the old 1955 film, The Colditz Story, directed by Guy Hamilton, which was probably shown one rainy weekend as part of BBC2’s afternoon matinees as a consolation, I only ever managed to see one episode of Colditz during its original run – the penultimate episode of the second series – simply because it was shown during my parents’ annual skiing holiday. Somehow I managed to convince my grandparents, who were looking after me for that week, that it was quite all right for me to stay up and watch it, even though by then the drama had moved from the mid–evening slot and was broadcast directly after the Nine O’Clock News.


Was the almost forty year wait worth it? Absolutely! And I suspect I appreciated it more watching now as an adult than if I had back then as a child because it wasn’t overdramatic or “sexed–up” as so much material can be nowadays, instead sticking to the facts. Of course I wouldn’t have expected anything less from producer Gerry Glaister who, in almost all his television endeavours, brought in technical advisors to bring a real sense of verisimilitude to the proceedings. For Colditz he naturally employed Pat Reid. Watching the two series back to back, there is a very subtle shift in tone between the pair, which could be due to the fact that by the time the events of the second year began Reid had, along with Major Ronald Littledale, Lieutenant–Commander William Stephens and Canadian Flight Lieutenant Howard Wardle, scored a “home run” and left Oflag IVC prison camp for Switzerland.

When I interviewed Gerry Glaister shortly before his death in 2005 he touched on Colditz even though we were primarily talking about Secret Army and he was still rightly very proud of the show, in particular episodes like the John Brason–scripted Tweedledum in which Michael Bryant’s Wing Commander Marsh feigns madness for months on end as a ploy to getting repatriated on medical grounds. As startling as the episode is, especially given the horrifying denouement, what had me seriously on the edge of my seat was the final scene of the first series’ penultimate episode when the quartet of prisoners, including Edward Hardwicke’s Captain Pat Grant as the fictionalised version of Reid, begin the escape attempt that would see them venture through the POW’s kitchens, across the outer courtyard to the cellars of the German Kommandantur and then out across the dry moat.

First they had to get out of the castle’s inner courtyard without being noticed by the guards on duty, and not only did their sheer ingenuity deserve a round of applause but the on–screen re–enactment, with only the sound of a German guard’s footsteps on the cobblestones adding to the tension, proved to be an incredibly nerve shredding piece of television. It’s a shame the producers of that godawful 2005 ITV miniseries, which was, staggeringly, written by Peter Morgan, hadn’t paid close attention and realized the wealth of material and succession of ingenious escape attempts meant that they didn’t need a load of made–up, melodramatic bollocks that included the most clichéd of love triangles.


Then there was Mark Gatiss again with his adaptation of HG Wells’ The First Men In the Moon. It may not have equalled the Charles H. Schneer–produced 1964 film featuring Lionel Jeffries’ “absolutely imperial” turn as Professor Joseph Cavor, but it was a worthy and enjoyable attempt. When it came to the moon–dwelling Selenites, the drama proved that computer–generated imagery, albeit produced on a BBC budget, still can’t hold a candle to Ray Harryhausen’s proven stop–motion animation. Of course Gatiss had also been responsible, in tandem with Steven Moffat, for Sherlock, the BBC’s update of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary creation. Back in 2009 I’d stupidly wondered how the characters would work in contemporary times now that the police had much more advanced methods in detection. Suitably abashed, the answer was: simply brilliantly. And that’s all that needs to be said.

Thinking back to Episodes, it soon became clear that the sitcom was based on Moffat’s misadventures in LA, adapting his UK sitcom Coupling for the American market. A shame then that he hadn’t been hired to write a comic roman à clef, but then he had far bigger and better fish to fry. Mid–June of last year, giving the BAFTA Annual Television Lecture, Stephen Fry was quick to point out:

I am fully and furiously and timorously aware that over the course of the next forty minutes or so I might say a thousand harmless, possibly even true, things and yet make one hasty or ill–considered remark and it will dog me for weeks to come for I am to talk about television, and if there is one thing that the newspapers of this country like to pounce upon, it is any breath of criticism directed from an insider at broadcasting networks and their executives. It’s one of the media’s favourite indoor sports.

Though he got through the lecture unscathed, it was during the conversation with producer John Lloyd that followed where things came a little unstuck, declaring:

The only drama the BBC will boast about are Merlin and Doctor Who, which are fine but they're children's programmes. They're not for adults.

If he had said this a year earlier I would have wholeheartedly agreed with him. But something very strange happened around Easter of 2010. I watched the new series of Doctor Who. And I bloody loved it! This of course may come as a surprise – or even a complete shock – to anyone who has read my posts for any length of time. In fact just over a week after starting the blog, back in 2006, I was already writing about how I felt like Miles Bennell, frantically running from a blank–faced populace that had succumbed to the collective madness and unconditionally fallen under the spell of Doctor Who, while I couldn’t see why such a ratty piece of tat deserved so much hysterical jubilation and congratulatory circle-jerking.


I’d watched the show as a kiddie, from the end of Patrick Troughton’s run through to some time before Tom Baker decided to call it a day, because that’s what you did but didn’t see the need to go back to it, 30–odd years on, with the same fervour of my contemporaries the same way I didn’t feel any real need to revisit the Ladybird books I’d read so many years ago as a child. Out of curiosity I’d caught the first episode with Christopher Eccleston, was puzzled that the BBC had made a really inferior genre–swapped rip–off of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and was happy to leave it there. The only problem was the whole damned country seemed to have happily gulped down the Kool–Aid and just wouldn’t shut up about it.

My circle of drinking buddies were all lapping every episode up with gusto, as if it was the television equivalent of Linus’ comfort blanket, which made some evenings out decidedly tricky, but I could avoid them. What wasn’t as easy to avoid was the all–consuming promotion and Russell T Davies’ endless self–promotion that made it frankly unbearable. If the Fat Controller had simply stuck to the small market of genre magazines written by fans eager to toady to a programme made by fans he would stayed out of my line of sight. Unfortunately he managed to worm his way into what used to be called the quality press and wouldn’t stop banging on about how brilliant the show was and how brilliant he was. For all the money the BBC threw at the series in the beginning to ensure success, it’s a shame a few quid hadn’t been allocated to pay someone to stand behind RTD and whisper in his ear the warning that all glory is fleeting.

If I caught the odd episode it was only to revel in the sheer ridiculousness of the stories that would unfold, marvelling at the sheer lack of internal logic and trying to guess what the eventual deus ex machina would be, and knowing that when I’d bring these criticisms up to the drinking buddies their default response would be, “Well, it’s science fiction, it doesn’t have to make sense!”, which would usually infuriate me even more than the previous 40 minutes of daftness. If they countered by stating it was a children’s show I’d ask why they were watching it. If that was then revised to calling it a “family show” instead, I’d tell them the mix of adult drama with utter childishness didn’t gel. Topped up on a couple of pints, they’d take on board what I had to say and then ignore it.

The Fat Controller didn’t seem to be able to take on board any criticism and dismiss it as easily. Not having the article around anymore, I can’t remember who hadn’t been willing to deify him but in The Times’ cultural guide The Knowledge in October of 2006, he wrote:

...I’m not a hack, I’m not a new boy, I’m a very, very experienced and successful TV writer and there’s no way I could have got there without understanding character.

There’s no denying he could write wonderful little character moments, but constructing a coherent plot seemed to be beyond his grasp. Years later there was an edition of Have I Got News For You where Paul Merton observed that the real tragedy of Gordon Brown was that he always wanted to be Prime Minister yet when the opportunity arose he couldn’t do the job. When I heard that it seemed the perfect way to describe RTD’s tenure overseeing Doctor Who, because there were times when I wondered if he had been watching the same programme that I had when I was a kid. In that very same article, discussing his approach to Doctor Who, he explained:

I always wanted there to be some ordinariness in there; some mundanity with the extraordinary. These days there are 500 shows, good and bad, which have fleets of spaceships and monsters all creeping on what used to be Doctor Who’s preserve. So, in looking for scripts, you have to think, well, Battlestar Galactica’s got the big spaceships and Buffy’s got the fantasy and the vampires, what have we got that’s unique? And it’s the real world.

Really? I seem to recall a number of Gerry & Sylvia Anderson shows from my childhood that had spaceships, and monsters. Irwin Allen made a few as well. And I think there’s a little bit more to Battlestar Galactica than just big spaceships, the same way that Buffy the Vampire Slayer isn’t really just about vampires, but who needs really subtext and allegory when there’s a lot of whiz–bang and shiny–shiny to soften the brain and glaze the eyes. But what about that last line? I found the extended “real world” sequences that went beyond establishing the time and place incongruously intruded on the stories and ate up precious minutes that could have been better served on plot. Or, as English Dave commented when I first ran the quote: “I beg to differ with RTD here. What you have that is unique is Time Travel.”


From then it went from bad to worse. Over the odd pint I’d voice an increasing concern about the amount of direct references to other material in the episodes. Briefly paying homage to previous works or being influenced by them is one thing – and the great Canadian animator Richard Williams once mentioned to me when I spotted a brief sight gag from the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup in the workprint of The Thief and the Cobbler, that you should never copy anything unless you can vastly improve upon the original, which he did – but it was becoming clear that Doctor Who had incessant “magpie tendencies”. But rather than drawing inspiration from earlier sources it was directing lifting elements and dropping them into the episodes, unchanged, to fill the lack of hard-earned original thought in the stories.

It may not seem a particularly big deal to some but I remember an interview with Terry Gilliam, conducted not that long after the release of Brazil, where he was rather incensed that a UK–based agency had produced a commercial for a computer company (which might, or might not, have been Hewlett Packard) that unashamedly ripped off the scene where Robert De Niro’s Harry Tuttle disappears in a blizzard of newspaper to push this idea of PCs creating a paperless work environment. Although there were people who had already seen the film and knew the spot had nicked the idea from him, Gilliam’s beef was that there was still a potential audience out there who had seen the commercial first and, when they got to watching Brazil, would think he was the one who had lazily swiped the concept.

At least for Gilliam TV commercials are, on the whole, ephemeral, with only the most celebrated campaigns ever lingering in the memory. Watching the two–part series two finale of Doctor Who, I wondered how Philip Pullman will feel at some future book signing when some kid is going to hold up a copy of The Amber Spyglass and accuse him of ripping off these episodes, which they saw as a tot. I was utterly astonished how blatantly Davies stole from Pullman’s award-winning His Dark Materials trilogy. Did the Fat Controller care about stealing other people’s ideas? Did he fuck! In an interview in The Independent, in which such thefts were brought up – in particular the first episode of Torchwood stealing from The Silence of the Lambs and Men in Black (although the journalist forgot to mention the Somebody Else’s Problem Field from Douglas Adams’ Life, the Universe and Everything) – his defence was it was “simple storytelling”, explaining:

“It’s all there for the taking, I do it gladly. The ending of Doctor Who, where we had to separate the Doctor and Rose, that was unashamedly taken from the Phillip Pullman novels. They’re brilliant, and every child reads them. So that creates a resonance, when they’ve got a story in one part of their minds and they see Doctor Who and think, ‘Oh right! You can change stories!’ If you want to get pretentious about it, it’s exactly what Shakespeare did. As long as you put yourself into it I think it’s all there for the grabbing.”

Really?! In the end I suppose it’s all about conduct and how one deports themself, whether they want to be a person of principle, working hard to come up with something new, or not, lazily stealing ideas and imagery directly from other, more celebrated sources. After a while it turned out to be best not to bother watching any episode written by RTD, although that didn’t always guarantee success. While James Moran turned in a particularly good episode with The Fires of Pompeii, there was an especially idiotic story set in Depression–era New York where humans subjugated by Daleks were turned into pig–men for no apparent reason, before another sap, tossed into a metal pepper pot, emerged with monocular vision – which is always good for impairing hand-eye co-ordination, and causing loss of manipulation and balance – and his brain outside of the cranium just for good measure. So that’s evolution is it? Somehow I don’t think so.


Even though Doctor Who comes from a long line of science fiction programmes that only had a very tenuous grasp of any science at best, a little common sense in the story development stage might not have gone amiss, even if they can’t be bothered with the usual internal logic, simply because we expect more now than we did back then. This is why I could never understand by audiences were so wowed by the Fat Controller’s episode Midnight. Forget for a moment that the actual story itself was straight out of The Twilight Zone (or maybe The Outer Limits), the set–up simply didn’t make sense.

It was set on an oxygen–free planet made of diamonds “poisoned by the sun” where the “exotonic” light from the sun will “destroy any living thing in a split second”. Borrowing a line of dialogue from Armageddon, this appears to be, if I’m not mistaken, “the scariest environment imaginable”. Since the precious gems are worthless, and direct sunlight will vaporise you, it seems to be a place to avoid. Except in the Doctor Who universe where it becomes home to a holiday resort. So the first questions that come to mind are, how did it get Health & Safety certified? And who in their right fucking minds would go there?

Even if the owners did get customers for what looked like a reasonably upscale–looking resort, why, for excursions to see a “sapphire waterfall” at the less than appealing sounding Cliffs of Oblivion, is the caterpillar–tracked transport so utterly low–rent? If the windows have to be shielded – meaning there’s no view out – why are they travelling by land in the first place, especially when the round trip takes eight hours? I know, it’s science fiction so it doesn’t have to many any sense, but I’m sure if I’d seen a similar scenario as a kiddie I’d be raising my hand and calling it out as a steaming pile of bullshit.

In the end the only episodes worth watching were the ones scripted by Steven Moffat. I still haven’t seen his first episode, The Empty Child, simply because I’d caught the trailer, saw Billie Piper dressed as Jenny Sparks, the Spirit of the 20th century from Warren Ellis’ The Authority, and decided to give it a wide berth. Cajoled into checking out the second part of the story, I can’t say I was particularly impressed given that the plot hinged on the hoary old chestnut of aliens fixing injured humans without understanding their physiology and royally fucking it up. Still, The Girl in the Fireplace, his next offering, was certainly an improvement, but it was with the third series episode Blink, with the Weeping Angels, that he really nailed it and then came the two–parter that introduced the character who may, or may not, be this particular time traveller’s wife.

That was the story that really highlighted the differences between Moffat and the Fat Controller for me. Much like the differences between the Pixar and Dreamworks Animation films, Moffat created wholly organic family stories while Davies’ took childish elements, teen elements, and the odd adult piece, and loosely stitched them together with obvious pop cultural references. Whereas Davies’ incessant “magpie tendancies” lazily shored up his threadbare central narratives, Moffat took the existing genre tropes, doffed his cap to familiar conceits and spun them in a whole new direction.


So while Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead had nods to both Kurd Lasswitz’s The Universal Library and Borges’ The Library of Babel, along with Audrey Niffenegger’s bestseller, they just provided a starting point rather than the means to an end, and, in River Song, he introduced a character infinitely more intriguing that RTD’s Captain Twat Scarlet. By the time the episodes were transmitted it had already been announced that the Fat Controller was stepping down and Moffat would be taking his place as head writer and EP, which had to be cause for much celebration, and fancy cakes. A fan of Doctor Who but evidently not a fanboy, Moffat didn’t come across as the sort of cock who would breezily compare Robert Holmes’ The Talons of Weng Chiang to the works of Dennis Potter, and his lack of appearance in the press – or at least the newspapers I read – suggested he was more interested in the work at hand than perpetual self–promotion.

Of course Moffat didn’t take over immediately, with the series pushed back a year while a smattering of decidedly un–special specials were irregularly crowbarred into the television schedules, including The Waters of Mars, which was so monumentally dire that it made Outcasts look sensible. Oddly enough, when it came to the Fat Controller and his boggle–eyed puppet making their exit it was quite a decent swan song, although it seems having an immortal ruminate over his mortality probably wasn’t what the expectant audience quite expected on Christmas Day. Still, the overriding sense of melancholia that permeated the narrative meant that the actors dialled down on the usual overacting, giving far more considered and affecting performances.

Really, it was about time, even if it was too little too late. Having previously seen David Tennant actually act in Peter Bowker’s Blackpool and John Simm give sterling performances in The Lakes and State Of Play, it had been quite depressing to witness their witless pantomime gurning over the past couple years. And I guess that was why I was looking forward to seeing what the new guy would do under Moffat’s tutelage, having only seen Matt Smith before in Moses Jones where he had a handful of scenes. Quite frankly he had me at: “Beans are evil. Bad, bad beans!”, and I knew I was on for the long haul once he hurled the plate of bread and butter into the garden, shouting, “And stay out!”

What I found most intriguing was how those die–hard fans amongst the drinking circle, who raved about the earlier, nonsensical series hadn’t been all that impressed with Tennent’s last bow, nor Moffat’s first year on the job for that matter. The latter opinions I found intriguing, though didn’t really spend enough time with them over the summer to get to the root of their dislike. I wasn’t enamoured by every episode but I did watch every episode. Because even if the self–contained story wasn’t up to much there was always something intriguing going on with the overall story arc, expertly woven into the plots in a way the previous year’s had consistently and spectacularly failed to achieve. So while, in the Vincent Van Gogh episode, I wasn’t exactly taken by the frankly bizarre ready–to–roast alien chicken used as a physical manifestation of manic depression (however brave it was to put an issue like mental illness in the show), the artist’s presence was necessary for the inclusion of Starry Night as part of the on–going narrative.


More importantly, Moffat made the companion integral to the story arc. Back when Sydney Newman first conceived of the series, the human companion acted as the eyes and ears of the audience at home, reflecting their fears and desires as the onscreen exploits unfolded. But as actors came and went, and incoming producers put their stamp own on the show, however different they tried to make the characters, I just remember the companions being there simply to be a plot contrivance, acting as the traditional damsel in distress, whether male or female. This time it was personal, which made Amy Pond far more relevant than say Billie Piper, starting off as some kind of Albert Square Buffy Summers before turning all doe–eyed; the pointless second girl; or Catherine Tate being her usual annoying, braying self.

When Rose was wheeled back in for the final, final time at the end of the fourth series, Moffat summed the character up best during an appearance at the 2008 San Diego Comic Con, observing: “You have to hand it to the Doctor for dumping a slightly needy girlfriend by palming her off on a copy of himself.” Introducing Amy’s fiancé and bringing him along for the ride, Moffat erased the tedious “real world” soap opera that had been gumming up the works and leavened the story with the relationship humour that had made Coupling a success. That meant the best laughs came at the expense of the characters rather than the inappropriate childish japery previously shoehorned into the stories.

Making it personal meant that Moffat could built up to a big event – the erasure of everything in the universe – but play it out on a small scale, which is what the old show used to be about, concentrating on the main characters rather than strain the budget with unconvincing shots of extras panicking in the streets and all the associated nonsense that came with them. Instead the money seemed to have been used wisely, certainly when it came to hiring far better directors and cinematographers who brought a much more filmic quality to the last series, especially when it came to the contrasting colour palettes Stephan Pehrsson employed on the final two episodes.


It was a shame that a few desks couldn’t have been reassigned in the BBC’s graphics departments as well. The Waters of Mars had featured an astonishingly bad cutaway to an onscreen news report that included the supplementary headline: THE WORLD GRIEVE FOR HEROS OF SPACE TRAVEL. In The Big Bang, the museum’s AV presentation of the Pandorica through the ages included an image of bombers in flight when it reached the time of the London Blitz. Instead of German Heinkel He-111s, whoever had sourced the image had decided that a photo of American B-17 Flying Fortresses flying a daylight raid would do. Of course maybe it was another of the very sly nods to the alternate history that had taken place.

Either way, like the subtle Lost homage at the end of The Pandorica Opens it brought a smile to my face rather than raising my gorge, just as his eventual escape from that ultimate prison – while making absolutely no real sense at all – still made sense in terms of the mechanics of the storytelling. If the odd mistake creeps in at least Moffat seems confident enough to laugh at them without beating his chest and running to the nearest soapbox to rail against his critics, demonstrated earlier this year when someone passed on one of his tweets:

“Dad, the Treeborgs in Angels? Like Cyborgs but trees? Cyborg is Cyberorganism, Treeborg is tree–organism. That’s a TREE.” ”GO TO YOUR ROOM!”

Minor quibbles aside, amazingly Doctor Who is finally standing head and shoulders above other recent BBC dramas, especially on a night when they seem to have turned Carry on Cabby into a series. If there’s one thing Steven Moffat should be congratulated for is that in his first year on the job he seems to have subtly rewritten the timeline to omit all of Davies’ overblown melodramatics. Amazingly, I’m actually looking forward to the new series.