Very sad to learn last night that Paul Makin, the writer of the incredible sitcom Nightingales died last week. Paul wrote a lot for Alomo and I was gushing in my praise of him to Allan McKeown just a few months ago while researching my telly book. Get hold of the series if you're a fan of cerebral comedy that's funny peculiar as well as ha ha.
It stars David Threlfall, Robin Lindsay and James Ellis, TV royalty all, and was produced by Esta Charkham who I found utterly charming and very smart at my first and only paid SF convention visit (I've sneaked in the bar of a couple since) Fan Aid North. It's got Brendan from Moreton Harwood in it too.
In further it must be the time of year Radio 4 depresses half the sociopathic and virtually autistic middle-aged men in Britain news, I've heard back about my Afternoon Play.
They've bought it!
Like you should buy Nightingales.
Monday, 14 July 2008
Friday, 11 July 2008
Votretalgia**
How are your memories of 1979? If you're old enough to have any I'd suggest- wonky. They're over-detailed in some areas, vague and hazy in others. Without a briefing from an assistant director and a quick look at the clip you're due to recall on the monitor you may struggle.
My memories of 1979, aren't so much about the rise of Thatcher or the specific crapness of being 10 to 11, which is what I was mainly being that year, so much as how brilliant Doctor Who was, which of course with the exception of the 'one brief shining moment'* of City of Death it really wasn't that year.
The other important thing you simply *must* remember from 1979 is the sheer magisterial genius of Amii Stewart's cover of 'Knock on Wood', particularly in conjunction with that video (or promo film as they called them then, even when, like this one, they were soooo totally video), with the fractal howlround cloak and head-dress. It is spectacular. Go to YouTube now, leave a data trail that the Man will use to get at you, go now, do it! I'm ever so grateful to the assistant director for reminding me of it and playing that clip just now.
Oddly, in my messy memories of Doctor Who back then it was a serious drama in which all the science made sense.
Do you see where we're going now, children? I found the conclusion of Doctor Who over the last three weeks to be probably the most satisfying of the recent run.
Now, I know this is heresy, I know the job of a fan is to hate more deeply and more perversely than any untrained casual viewer ever could... and yet, and yet- I really liked it.
I cheered, I laughed, I was moved. Now, I agree the big old planet moving, multiverse mushing plot didn't really hold together too well, but oh, the human stories, the little touches, for some people these things (along with peculiarly lumpen speeches about well-prepared meals) are what Doctor Who is all about. It may have been over-detailed in some areas, vague and hazy in others but it was memorable for me and for all the right reasons... I think.
You see, I reckon we've had Doctor Who with worse science and plotting than this many times, but we've rarely had a series that has touched our little bubbling lumps of heart before.
Hang onto the feeling, it was good, really- it'll never be quite your ideal series I know, because it never was quite that show, really- you're a fan, you've spent decades misremembering it, but hey grab the good and enjoy it now, unbelievably it was the most popular chunk of Who since that shining moment in 1979 when ITV was just light classical music.
I don't mind if you don't like it obviously, with luck you'll have a chance to reappraise it radically in 19 years time, just don't be cross that I did.
Meanwhile, in 1979 nostalgia news, Radio 4 have commissioned my documentary about Bill Mitchell- the gravelly voice over man of choice of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
I'm delighted, I like to have at least one job of work to stick on the CV a year.
I'd quite like to call it The Man Who Wrestled Pumas... Probably, I doubt we will though. Touch wood, eh? Tukka ta tukka ta tukka ta tukka- better knock knock knock on wood... (repeat 'til "earworm'ed)
Radio 4 is now officially allowed to the 1970s now, you know? They're doing plays about punk now everyone involved is elderly and jaundiced like proper Radio 4 folk. There's probably an utterly ghastly ITV1 studio sitcom in doing something about old punks actually, it'd probably have to pilot on Radio 2 first, mind.
*Camelot, as nearly quoted by Doctor 10nent last week.
** Obviously, in retrospect, I should have had the foresight to name this posting after Nostalgia by the Buzzcocks, that would have been loads better. Everything's better in retrospect- even foresight.
My memories of 1979, aren't so much about the rise of Thatcher or the specific crapness of being 10 to 11, which is what I was mainly being that year, so much as how brilliant Doctor Who was, which of course with the exception of the 'one brief shining moment'* of City of Death it really wasn't that year.
The other important thing you simply *must* remember from 1979 is the sheer magisterial genius of Amii Stewart's cover of 'Knock on Wood', particularly in conjunction with that video (or promo film as they called them then, even when, like this one, they were soooo totally video), with the fractal howlround cloak and head-dress. It is spectacular. Go to YouTube now, leave a data trail that the Man will use to get at you, go now, do it! I'm ever so grateful to the assistant director for reminding me of it and playing that clip just now.
Oddly, in my messy memories of Doctor Who back then it was a serious drama in which all the science made sense.
Do you see where we're going now, children? I found the conclusion of Doctor Who over the last three weeks to be probably the most satisfying of the recent run.
Now, I know this is heresy, I know the job of a fan is to hate more deeply and more perversely than any untrained casual viewer ever could... and yet, and yet- I really liked it.
I cheered, I laughed, I was moved. Now, I agree the big old planet moving, multiverse mushing plot didn't really hold together too well, but oh, the human stories, the little touches, for some people these things (along with peculiarly lumpen speeches about well-prepared meals) are what Doctor Who is all about. It may have been over-detailed in some areas, vague and hazy in others but it was memorable for me and for all the right reasons... I think.
You see, I reckon we've had Doctor Who with worse science and plotting than this many times, but we've rarely had a series that has touched our little bubbling lumps of heart before.
Hang onto the feeling, it was good, really- it'll never be quite your ideal series I know, because it never was quite that show, really- you're a fan, you've spent decades misremembering it, but hey grab the good and enjoy it now, unbelievably it was the most popular chunk of Who since that shining moment in 1979 when ITV was just light classical music.
I don't mind if you don't like it obviously, with luck you'll have a chance to reappraise it radically in 19 years time, just don't be cross that I did.
Meanwhile, in 1979 nostalgia news, Radio 4 have commissioned my documentary about Bill Mitchell- the gravelly voice over man of choice of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
I'm delighted, I like to have at least one job of work to stick on the CV a year.
I'd quite like to call it The Man Who Wrestled Pumas... Probably, I doubt we will though. Touch wood, eh? Tukka ta tukka ta tukka ta tukka- better knock knock knock on wood... (repeat 'til "earworm'ed)
Radio 4 is now officially allowed to the 1970s now, you know? They're doing plays about punk now everyone involved is elderly and jaundiced like proper Radio 4 folk. There's probably an utterly ghastly ITV1 studio sitcom in doing something about old punks actually, it'd probably have to pilot on Radio 2 first, mind.
*Camelot, as nearly quoted by Doctor 10nent last week.
** Obviously, in retrospect, I should have had the foresight to name this posting after Nostalgia by the Buzzcocks, that would have been loads better. Everything's better in retrospect- even foresight.
Saturday, 21 June 2008
Dull Thoughts from a Fan
One of my legion, well phalanxes, well tiny little patrols of legionaries like in Asterix, of readers has just commented on my recent lack of posting here. This is because I don't have a humorous cat, and am currently mainly concentrating on writing stuff about big media corporations it is quite important to do adequately, so I can get both paid and not sued.
However, there is time now as I sit on a railway platform (well a bench thereon) to prattle about Doctor Who which is my inner comedy feline. Yes, it's partway through review of the year time again.
Partners in Crime I seriously adored, apart from a sequence with the Doctor trying to counter the baddies' plan by messing about with their computer, his sonic screwdriver and two beacon devices. This sequence lost me because the desire to fudge through the technological bit as quickly as possible meant while the stakes were clear the actual logic of what was going on was just one magic wand stroke too many for me, your mileage may vary. This was compounded by an annoying Hitchcock zoom in the same scene, which we get again in The Unicorn and the Wasp. I think it's a device that's become a little cheapened by repetition in adverts and sitcoms etc., and is so anti-naturalistic that I think it should really be saved for really earth shattering moments of revelation. It is of course best employed by Scorsese very very slowly in that diner scene in Goodfellas.
Fires of Pompeii was good too but marred by the fact that I found myself preferring the audio story Fires of Vulcan with Bonnie Langford and Sylvester McCoy and no monsters, which looks frankly absurd written down but is true all the same. I also wish it hadn't had the line about the people of Pompeii turning to stone too early. Seems a shame that Doctor Who Confidential now has to be the source of more accurate factual info about what happened to the Pompeiians rather than the parent show, and I couldn't help feeling there was something poor taste about populating this genuine disaster with alien fire beasties, this is almost certainly just me. Nice twist that to save the world, you kill the city though.
Planet of the Ood, I enjoyed a lot, apart from the singing, which I wish had been, if not more alien at least less Western. Poor old Ood with their wireless broadband networked brains, lucky they'd evolved somewhere without natural predators, really.
The Sontaran Stratagem/The Burning Sky were largely inoffensive, except for the frankly rubbish use of last minute noble self sacrifice sequence 71a, which actually worked better with Pex in a fumbled long shot on tuppence happenny twenty years ago (then, it was merely ghastly), and the implausible hundred mile an hour winds of flame, which sadly resulted in no incinerated birds (good job the bees had already vanished eh, kids?). Didn't hate it and liked Christopher Ryan a lot, but a bit so what? All just a bit predictable and probably only really enjoyable for me while Donna wanders about the Sontaran ship (well maybe until she hides in the convenient alcove, why do alien ship designers insist on including these?).
The Unicorn and the Wasp, was enjoyable enough while not really emotionally involving, as in Christie you never quite believed any of the characters were real people whose passing you should mourn, but I did like the nesting flashbacks (how I wish they'd been old optical film ripples rather than video though) and the handling of the Colonel's big reveal moment. The big mystery unanswered of course is why Christie appears to have vanished in the Summer in Doctor Who land (answer- so we can have tea on the lawn and wasps).
The Doctor's Daughter, strikes me as a basically sound script, apart from one slightly overwrought speech, in which the Doctor blatantly lies about whether he'd use weapons or not, which is let down by editorial decisions- I think the planet's situation can only begin to make sense on screen if the guns used are seen to either vapourise or turn bodies to dust or skeletons, and we see explicitly the replicator turning people out at different ages.
Real shame, missed opportunity, and a real letdown to find we're not getting an actual proper daughter either. Liked the Martha and the bubble dialogue sequences a lot though, even if I'm puzzled at how easily a water breathing fish man drowns.
Silence in the Library/ Forest of the Dead are a pair of interesting and ambitious episodes, but with possibly one plot strand too many and which are slightly undermined by the solution to much of the mystery being a bit too obviously seeded in episode one, even more so than in The Empty Child. The slightly lame bit where the unstoppable baddies are talked down, is a bit of a swizz too and it doesn't help that the Doctor spends a bit too much time being thicker than the viewers either, but there's a lot here to make one very excited about the show's future. Loved Donna's dream life, particularly the jump cut and the self aware fake kids, and liked Miss Evangelista's death a great deal as well, even if was just a tad too long drawn out for me to accept the crew saw this as a normal part of life in their time.
Midnight, was very enjoyable too, and it was great to have both a proper RTD story again, and a no monsters episode at last. I really hope this rule can be further loosened in years to come, they are the biggest limitation on the show's format at present.
Obviously, the whole thing makes no real sense other than mythically, and the self sacrifice resolution is as annoying as ever, but it's so nicely done and well acted, and technically the sound work is brilliant. I once had to synch up two actors speaking at once at hideous length, and it's damn hard work (particularly because half the time they weren't in proper synch, were misreading the lines, skipping bits, or pronouncing them differently, but that's another story. Unsurprisingly it was hard for people to tell how long I'd laboured to get anything approaching the desired effect!)
I think if it had been me writing this, I might have attempted to resolve the climax with a 'phone call from Donna- the outer world breaking in with something that couldn't be repeated and controlled, and maybe even climax with Sky forced to lip synch along to 'Do It Again' forever. However, if it was me it would all have been even more rubbish than that getting there, so be thankful.
So, this year so far I think only once truly short of competent, when The Doctor's Daughter is undermined by its presentation, some genuinely spooky, funny, exciting, and moving bits, but not, Partners in Crime excepted, getting me up and cheering yet. So not as good as the best of last year's yet (the Cornell Moffat three in a row) or as unsatisfactory as its worst (hello 42).
If only there was to be some kind of epic, bombastic finale, with lots of crying, and fan pleasing nonsense and general public pleasing bonkersness to give the season a final dramatic push.
I'm so pleased we all know so little about what's to come. I might be exploding with excitement if there were lots of intriguing rumours flying around and press releases talking about Davros etc.
However, there is time now as I sit on a railway platform (well a bench thereon) to prattle about Doctor Who which is my inner comedy feline. Yes, it's partway through review of the year time again.
Partners in Crime I seriously adored, apart from a sequence with the Doctor trying to counter the baddies' plan by messing about with their computer, his sonic screwdriver and two beacon devices. This sequence lost me because the desire to fudge through the technological bit as quickly as possible meant while the stakes were clear the actual logic of what was going on was just one magic wand stroke too many for me, your mileage may vary. This was compounded by an annoying Hitchcock zoom in the same scene, which we get again in The Unicorn and the Wasp. I think it's a device that's become a little cheapened by repetition in adverts and sitcoms etc., and is so anti-naturalistic that I think it should really be saved for really earth shattering moments of revelation. It is of course best employed by Scorsese very very slowly in that diner scene in Goodfellas.
Fires of Pompeii was good too but marred by the fact that I found myself preferring the audio story Fires of Vulcan with Bonnie Langford and Sylvester McCoy and no monsters, which looks frankly absurd written down but is true all the same. I also wish it hadn't had the line about the people of Pompeii turning to stone too early. Seems a shame that Doctor Who Confidential now has to be the source of more accurate factual info about what happened to the Pompeiians rather than the parent show, and I couldn't help feeling there was something poor taste about populating this genuine disaster with alien fire beasties, this is almost certainly just me. Nice twist that to save the world, you kill the city though.
Planet of the Ood, I enjoyed a lot, apart from the singing, which I wish had been, if not more alien at least less Western. Poor old Ood with their wireless broadband networked brains, lucky they'd evolved somewhere without natural predators, really.
The Sontaran Stratagem/The Burning Sky were largely inoffensive, except for the frankly rubbish use of last minute noble self sacrifice sequence 71a, which actually worked better with Pex in a fumbled long shot on tuppence happenny twenty years ago (then, it was merely ghastly), and the implausible hundred mile an hour winds of flame, which sadly resulted in no incinerated birds (good job the bees had already vanished eh, kids?). Didn't hate it and liked Christopher Ryan a lot, but a bit so what? All just a bit predictable and probably only really enjoyable for me while Donna wanders about the Sontaran ship (well maybe until she hides in the convenient alcove, why do alien ship designers insist on including these?).
The Unicorn and the Wasp, was enjoyable enough while not really emotionally involving, as in Christie you never quite believed any of the characters were real people whose passing you should mourn, but I did like the nesting flashbacks (how I wish they'd been old optical film ripples rather than video though) and the handling of the Colonel's big reveal moment. The big mystery unanswered of course is why Christie appears to have vanished in the Summer in Doctor Who land (answer- so we can have tea on the lawn and wasps).
The Doctor's Daughter, strikes me as a basically sound script, apart from one slightly overwrought speech, in which the Doctor blatantly lies about whether he'd use weapons or not, which is let down by editorial decisions- I think the planet's situation can only begin to make sense on screen if the guns used are seen to either vapourise or turn bodies to dust or skeletons, and we see explicitly the replicator turning people out at different ages.
Real shame, missed opportunity, and a real letdown to find we're not getting an actual proper daughter either. Liked the Martha and the bubble dialogue sequences a lot though, even if I'm puzzled at how easily a water breathing fish man drowns.
Silence in the Library/ Forest of the Dead are a pair of interesting and ambitious episodes, but with possibly one plot strand too many and which are slightly undermined by the solution to much of the mystery being a bit too obviously seeded in episode one, even more so than in The Empty Child. The slightly lame bit where the unstoppable baddies are talked down, is a bit of a swizz too and it doesn't help that the Doctor spends a bit too much time being thicker than the viewers either, but there's a lot here to make one very excited about the show's future. Loved Donna's dream life, particularly the jump cut and the self aware fake kids, and liked Miss Evangelista's death a great deal as well, even if was just a tad too long drawn out for me to accept the crew saw this as a normal part of life in their time.
Midnight, was very enjoyable too, and it was great to have both a proper RTD story again, and a no monsters episode at last. I really hope this rule can be further loosened in years to come, they are the biggest limitation on the show's format at present.
Obviously, the whole thing makes no real sense other than mythically, and the self sacrifice resolution is as annoying as ever, but it's so nicely done and well acted, and technically the sound work is brilliant. I once had to synch up two actors speaking at once at hideous length, and it's damn hard work (particularly because half the time they weren't in proper synch, were misreading the lines, skipping bits, or pronouncing them differently, but that's another story. Unsurprisingly it was hard for people to tell how long I'd laboured to get anything approaching the desired effect!)
I think if it had been me writing this, I might have attempted to resolve the climax with a 'phone call from Donna- the outer world breaking in with something that couldn't be repeated and controlled, and maybe even climax with Sky forced to lip synch along to 'Do It Again' forever. However, if it was me it would all have been even more rubbish than that getting there, so be thankful.
So, this year so far I think only once truly short of competent, when The Doctor's Daughter is undermined by its presentation, some genuinely spooky, funny, exciting, and moving bits, but not, Partners in Crime excepted, getting me up and cheering yet. So not as good as the best of last year's yet (the Cornell Moffat three in a row) or as unsatisfactory as its worst (hello 42).
If only there was to be some kind of epic, bombastic finale, with lots of crying, and fan pleasing nonsense and general public pleasing bonkersness to give the season a final dramatic push.
I'm so pleased we all know so little about what's to come. I might be exploding with excitement if there were lots of intriguing rumours flying around and press releases talking about Davros etc.
Saturday, 26 April 2008
Humph and George
I’ve been lucky enough in my medium-sized life to see two surprisingly long-lived Jazz men perform, Humphrey Lyttelton and George Melly.
Humph was presenting I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue and building his increasing frailty and stumbling delivery into the act just as another of my radio comedy heroes Peter Jones had in his latter years on Just A Minute.
Harry Hill sang ‘The Ugly Duckling’ to the tune of ‘I Can’t Live if Living is Without You’ that night. It was one of the happiest of my life.
Nice one, Humph.
Melly, I adored too, particularly for the delicious omnisexual geriatric flirtation he and Maggi Hambling used to indulge in on a fairly snobby Channel 4 quiz show on the arts. Only a pair of surrealists with a shared passion for Max Wall and less genuine sexual attraction than Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis could have produced such screen magic.
When I saw Melly live he was incoherent, slurring, incompetent, but then the band started and he sang- note, pause, word perfect, sublime.
He told one great joke about getting old that night, if rather badly.
Now he was getting on he found he was having to come down to the loo more often in the night, sometimes several times, and thus, in one such middle of the night trip, had been delighted to discover his wife had set up a system in the downstairs toilet whereby the light came on as soon as he opened the door.
‘Excellent,’ he thought, and was rather happily relieving himself until his wife came up behind him and said ‘George, did you know you’re pissing in the fridge?’
I think Humph would have liked that one,
Humph was presenting I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue and building his increasing frailty and stumbling delivery into the act just as another of my radio comedy heroes Peter Jones had in his latter years on Just A Minute.
Harry Hill sang ‘The Ugly Duckling’ to the tune of ‘I Can’t Live if Living is Without You’ that night. It was one of the happiest of my life.
Nice one, Humph.
Melly, I adored too, particularly for the delicious omnisexual geriatric flirtation he and Maggi Hambling used to indulge in on a fairly snobby Channel 4 quiz show on the arts. Only a pair of surrealists with a shared passion for Max Wall and less genuine sexual attraction than Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis could have produced such screen magic.
When I saw Melly live he was incoherent, slurring, incompetent, but then the band started and he sang- note, pause, word perfect, sublime.
He told one great joke about getting old that night, if rather badly.
Now he was getting on he found he was having to come down to the loo more often in the night, sometimes several times, and thus, in one such middle of the night trip, had been delighted to discover his wife had set up a system in the downstairs toilet whereby the light came on as soon as he opened the door.
‘Excellent,’ he thought, and was rather happily relieving himself until his wife came up behind him and said ‘George, did you know you’re pissing in the fridge?’
I think Humph would have liked that one,
Monday, 21 April 2008
One down, three in contention, with one left to go
Well No Tomatoes seems to have fallen at the 'presumably, just not liked enough by the commissioner' hurdle, now, so that looks fairly categorically that.
Maybe, one day it'll come back. Yes. One day. Probably not. Until then just go forward making vague promises only ever followed up on in unpopular tie-in novels and prove to me a paraphrase is as close to a correct line reading as will makes no mends by the end of an episode, when you can't go back and re-edit of course, yes, yes, my boy. Hmm?
Meanwhile, my hurdle clipping play has reached the final Radio 4 commissioning barrier, unexpectedly accompanied by two documentary ideas I threw in a bit back to a colleague pitching for freelance factual work.
One of them is about an actor with a very particular talent and another is about a piece of slightly scatological 17th century literature. The usual stuff, you know.
Now read on. From here on in, it's either getting paid or not getting paid.
Maybe, one day it'll come back. Yes. One day. Probably not. Until then just go forward making vague promises only ever followed up on in unpopular tie-in novels and prove to me a paraphrase is as close to a correct line reading as will makes no mends by the end of an episode, when you can't go back and re-edit of course, yes, yes, my boy. Hmm?
Meanwhile, my hurdle clipping play has reached the final Radio 4 commissioning barrier, unexpectedly accompanied by two documentary ideas I threw in a bit back to a colleague pitching for freelance factual work.
One of them is about an actor with a very particular talent and another is about a piece of slightly scatological 17th century literature. The usual stuff, you know.
Now read on. From here on in, it's either getting paid or not getting paid.
Thursday, 17 April 2008
4, 5 & 6
Such is the state of Wednesday evening telly that the best that was on offer for the likes of me yesterday was probably Five employing Paul McGann (and his curiously placed vocal stresses that make it sound like he's constantly being surprised or losing his short term memory) to talk about The Real Indiana Jones.
The amazing revelation here was there wasn't one, he's pretend. However this populist hook did give Five the opportunity to talk about Nazis, Cathars and the Grail which are all core Five documentary topics, and show a surprisingly stirring trailer for the new film, featuring an old man doing amazing feats, right at the end. Job done.
I do find McGann's voice-over delivery oddly hypnotic, because idiosyncratic as it is (like Australian Questioning Intonation breaking out at random all over the place) it does sometimes make you imagine he's genuinely intrigued and marvelling about the subject he's talking about, rather than making you wonder when exactly he first saw the script.
Sometimes the line readings on science documentaries do rather give away that he doesn't know what the script is about and is just clinging to a word in the sentence he can emphasise to give coherence, but this is understandable; he's an actor not an astrophysicist, damn it! It does, however, mean script writers really should be careful with their use of 'actually's and 'in fact's because they'll tend to be heavily overlayed with wonder to the detriment of the sense of surrounding sentences.
Anyway, what a guy, what a voice.
Given that was my analogue terrestrial highlight (though I watched it digitally obviously- I wouldn't want to miss the edges of the film clips) I went looking for a bit of entertainment on Freeview too, which led me to The Prisoner.
Now, I like The Prisoner a lot, it's gripping, intriguing, only occasionally dreadfully silly, looks gorgeous and has a really riveting lead- MacGoohan's intensity just demands attention, but I last saw it properly when the VHS releases came out at the back end of the 1980s on the Channel 5 label (not to be confused with Five which used to be a different Channel 5, keep up).
The only episode I've seen with any regularity since has been a mp2 copy of a Beta SP copy of a low band u-matic copy of a rather grubby ITC library sales print of the first episode 'Arrival'.
So imagine my amazement at how colourful the newly mastered film print ITV4 was showing was. It was a riot of colour, hammy stage fights, reused footage and music cues and more exciting clashes of 1960s Edwardian revivalist and Modernist stylings than you're ever likely to meet outside Brighton Beach on a Bank Holiday Monday.
Just one thing though, given I'd only ever seen the series before on VHS, a multi-generation copy of a poor film print and snowy Channel 4 re-runs (we always had quite a soft fizzy looking Channel 4 signal in the 80s, so much so I thought this was part of its remit to challenge viewers), I'd never really noticed Number 6 wore a dark navy jersey under his black blazer.
Now I knew he did from photos in magazines about TV shows with spandex and spaceships in them, but the full horror had never quite hit me. It doesn't go! It looks horrid, and it never used to.
In poor light I've been known to accidentally put on dark navy and black myself, but Number 6's dimensionally transcendent house is so well lit I can't believe he'd make this kind of error. Certainly not every week. Not when he's so cool.
My suspicion is that the creators of The Prisoner didn't really want the jarring contrast we can now see between navy and black to be so obvious. I suspect they were after a broadly black upper body, and used the dark navy to subtly stop McGoohan's torso becoming an undifferentiated block of black, knowing full well that our telly screens would never reveal the actual difference in colour. Whoops, they do now.
Black and Navy? Brr. No wonder he wanted to escape, they might as well have put him in double denim.
Be seeing you? Not in that you won't.
The amazing revelation here was there wasn't one, he's pretend. However this populist hook did give Five the opportunity to talk about Nazis, Cathars and the Grail which are all core Five documentary topics, and show a surprisingly stirring trailer for the new film, featuring an old man doing amazing feats, right at the end. Job done.
I do find McGann's voice-over delivery oddly hypnotic, because idiosyncratic as it is (like Australian Questioning Intonation breaking out at random all over the place) it does sometimes make you imagine he's genuinely intrigued and marvelling about the subject he's talking about, rather than making you wonder when exactly he first saw the script.
Sometimes the line readings on science documentaries do rather give away that he doesn't know what the script is about and is just clinging to a word in the sentence he can emphasise to give coherence, but this is understandable; he's an actor not an astrophysicist, damn it! It does, however, mean script writers really should be careful with their use of 'actually's and 'in fact's because they'll tend to be heavily overlayed with wonder to the detriment of the sense of surrounding sentences.
Anyway, what a guy, what a voice.
Given that was my analogue terrestrial highlight (though I watched it digitally obviously- I wouldn't want to miss the edges of the film clips) I went looking for a bit of entertainment on Freeview too, which led me to The Prisoner.
Now, I like The Prisoner a lot, it's gripping, intriguing, only occasionally dreadfully silly, looks gorgeous and has a really riveting lead- MacGoohan's intensity just demands attention, but I last saw it properly when the VHS releases came out at the back end of the 1980s on the Channel 5 label (not to be confused with Five which used to be a different Channel 5, keep up).
The only episode I've seen with any regularity since has been a mp2 copy of a Beta SP copy of a low band u-matic copy of a rather grubby ITC library sales print of the first episode 'Arrival'.
So imagine my amazement at how colourful the newly mastered film print ITV4 was showing was. It was a riot of colour, hammy stage fights, reused footage and music cues and more exciting clashes of 1960s Edwardian revivalist and Modernist stylings than you're ever likely to meet outside Brighton Beach on a Bank Holiday Monday.
Just one thing though, given I'd only ever seen the series before on VHS, a multi-generation copy of a poor film print and snowy Channel 4 re-runs (we always had quite a soft fizzy looking Channel 4 signal in the 80s, so much so I thought this was part of its remit to challenge viewers), I'd never really noticed Number 6 wore a dark navy jersey under his black blazer.
Now I knew he did from photos in magazines about TV shows with spandex and spaceships in them, but the full horror had never quite hit me. It doesn't go! It looks horrid, and it never used to.
In poor light I've been known to accidentally put on dark navy and black myself, but Number 6's dimensionally transcendent house is so well lit I can't believe he'd make this kind of error. Certainly not every week. Not when he's so cool.
My suspicion is that the creators of The Prisoner didn't really want the jarring contrast we can now see between navy and black to be so obvious. I suspect they were after a broadly black upper body, and used the dark navy to subtly stop McGoohan's torso becoming an undifferentiated block of black, knowing full well that our telly screens would never reveal the actual difference in colour. Whoops, they do now.
Black and Navy? Brr. No wonder he wanted to escape, they might as well have put him in double denim.
Be seeing you? Not in that you won't.
Thursday, 3 April 2008
Ignorance is Strength
Even in the rarefied climes I inhabit, halfway up Rather Liking British Television Mountain, there are still noises that waft to me from the valley below now and again that tend to annoy me.
Quality American Television
This one’s one of the biggies. At some point it was decided in TV criticism circles that Quality Television is a phenomenon that was created at some point in the 80s and 90s when HBO started making dramas outside the US network system that were glossily produced, cinematic in scope and intelligently written. This gets my goat because this is then alleged to have influenced things in UK TV that happened before it- a move from studio to OB and often filmed production, changes in cutting style etc.
Not only does this rewrite history, it also overplays the influence of US TV on the UK, and assumes an automatic superiority of film over TV. '16:9 ratio good, 4:3 bad.' It is forgotten that UK TV once had a form of its own between theatre and radio- intimate and character driven (which suited the domestic setting in which it was consumed just fine). More like film is not necessarily better, and an obsession with filmic concerns leads to a devaluing of what TV did when it simply wasn’t film and simply couldn’t be either.
It’s Just Television
I’m sure you’ve heard people dismiss the output which comes into almost every home in the country and fills our evenings with news, sport, comedy, drama, discussion and music in this way. Sadly, I’ve even heard people who work in television say the same. It’s just television.
That’s right, damn a work by the means of its delivery. The rather sniffy attitude is that none of the background to our lives is worthy of consideration. The worry is, is that when TV is made and consumed with that outlook, no attempt to challenge or be challenged is made, and of course, all that old stuff, some of which isn’t even in colour, or speedily edited and doesn’t even fill the whole of your modern set properly is somehow inferior, because it isn’t quick and easy enough anymore.
It’s just old books. It’s just some old drawings. That isn’t an attitude you normally get.
One of the reasons I think TV suffered until lately in critical analysis is that TV studies arose as a subset of film studies, at a point when film studies was rather wedded to the idea of film as an auteur’s medium in which the director was (rather like the creator of those old books and drawings) a single artist using a tool to create art, which as a bonus critics could also use as a kind of parlour game to explore his or her (but usually his) drives, obsessions and interests.
TV on the other hand was production line stuff, which had insufficient thought and time involved to allow the director this role, particularly as his (not hers often) role in the creative process tended to be much more limited than a cinema director’s. The TV director was a mere hired hand.
Thankfully, as film studies has grown up, going through its rather solipsistic stroppy teen era in which it assumed everything you looked at was merely a series of ambiguous symbols you could use to analyse the way you yourself looked at the world, the idea that film is a collaborative medium in which different authors worked either together or against each other (and even writers were in someway involved) has slowly become more prominent. This has given TV a chance to be taken, sort of, seriously at last, but the damage will be slow to undo. We have a whole generation of arts graduates running the country who have been conditioned to be as snotty about the medium and its history as the general public and jaded industry professionals.
It’s not a patch on the (insert other medium) version
I suspect this is the reason the BBC’s DVD release of the 1954 version of Nineteen Eighty-Four continues to be blocked by the Orwell estate. The estate doesn’t respect the television medium, and so judge the TV show against the novel and find it wanting.
Firstly, the play (remember when it was TV plays not films?) explicitly imposes a then topical post-nuclear framework on the future it depicts which is ambiguous at best in the book, in which the alleged nuclear war is referred to in a piece of faked anti-state propaganda, that most readers (and all film versions) tend to skim through.
I can’t help imagining that the keepers of the Orwell flame sat around expectantly on initial transmission and immediately despaired at the opening narration, seeming to turn the serious art of Orwell into nothing but cheap science fiction (see the previous Clarke post for more about this), possibly even mumbling “Dear Lord, it's a travesty, I'm surprised it even did the title in words rather than in numbers!” to themselves.
Closeness to the text, would seem to be a serious consideration (because we know ‘books- good, adaptations of books to work in other terms- double-plus ungood’).
This appears to be why the 1956 cinema version of Nineteen Eighty-Four has also been suppressed by the estate. It takes serious liberties with the book, and you can’t have liberties being taken with Big Brother, can you? The estate had similar concerns with the ending of the Halas and Batchelor Animal Farm apparently, which tried to make a satisfying cinematic climax out of that undeniably superb prose ending, which really just wouldn’t have translated so well into pictures.
Secondly, the drama is undeniably creaky in parts if you go in expecting your TV drama to be like a trip to the pictures, and what seems to have particularly caused problems for any release over the years is that there is a very close adaptation of the book available in colour, a film too. This was for years the preferred version- it’s even got John Hurt and Richard Burton in it, who are proper actors.
There’s now reportedly another film version on the way to become the definitive adaptation, and it seems a DVD of some such scratchy old telly version coming out any time near that would confuse, and perhaps weaken, the Nineteen Eighty-Four brand.
Of course we, we band of brothers, we happy few, obsessed with telly, probably mainly as a result of the cheap fantasy and vaudeville turns it brought into our parlours when we were too young to know any better, know the BBC’s 1984 to be important.
Questions in the House, comments from the Palace, sleepy rats covered in cocoa, live presentations and the fact we only have take two, wind up gramophones, the lost paperweight, Peter Cushing being undervalued as a telly actor before he was undervalued as a film one, Donald Pleasence (also in the suppressed film version, fact fans), Nigel Kneale, Rudolf Cartier, Wilfrid flipping Brambell... it’s all here!
This is a cultural document, a work of art in a lost form, and almost entirely composed of a whole string of our favourite anecdotes. We could Christopher Frayling our way through this whole piece like it was a culturally important Italian made Western or something (I love him by the way, he’s top) if necessary.
British telly matters, Orwell estate! It’s part of our history, don't try to rewrite it, it isn’t all your tacky rubbish for the proles like Big Brother and Room 101 you know. Oh hang on…
Mind, Diamond Dogs is probably better Bowie for your non-collaboration so thanks for that, I guess.
This entry is to be passed to the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, for revision.
Quality American Television
This one’s one of the biggies. At some point it was decided in TV criticism circles that Quality Television is a phenomenon that was created at some point in the 80s and 90s when HBO started making dramas outside the US network system that were glossily produced, cinematic in scope and intelligently written. This gets my goat because this is then alleged to have influenced things in UK TV that happened before it- a move from studio to OB and often filmed production, changes in cutting style etc.
Not only does this rewrite history, it also overplays the influence of US TV on the UK, and assumes an automatic superiority of film over TV. '16:9 ratio good, 4:3 bad.' It is forgotten that UK TV once had a form of its own between theatre and radio- intimate and character driven (which suited the domestic setting in which it was consumed just fine). More like film is not necessarily better, and an obsession with filmic concerns leads to a devaluing of what TV did when it simply wasn’t film and simply couldn’t be either.
It’s Just Television
I’m sure you’ve heard people dismiss the output which comes into almost every home in the country and fills our evenings with news, sport, comedy, drama, discussion and music in this way. Sadly, I’ve even heard people who work in television say the same. It’s just television.
That’s right, damn a work by the means of its delivery. The rather sniffy attitude is that none of the background to our lives is worthy of consideration. The worry is, is that when TV is made and consumed with that outlook, no attempt to challenge or be challenged is made, and of course, all that old stuff, some of which isn’t even in colour, or speedily edited and doesn’t even fill the whole of your modern set properly is somehow inferior, because it isn’t quick and easy enough anymore.
It’s just old books. It’s just some old drawings. That isn’t an attitude you normally get.
One of the reasons I think TV suffered until lately in critical analysis is that TV studies arose as a subset of film studies, at a point when film studies was rather wedded to the idea of film as an auteur’s medium in which the director was (rather like the creator of those old books and drawings) a single artist using a tool to create art, which as a bonus critics could also use as a kind of parlour game to explore his or her (but usually his) drives, obsessions and interests.
TV on the other hand was production line stuff, which had insufficient thought and time involved to allow the director this role, particularly as his (not hers often) role in the creative process tended to be much more limited than a cinema director’s. The TV director was a mere hired hand.
Thankfully, as film studies has grown up, going through its rather solipsistic stroppy teen era in which it assumed everything you looked at was merely a series of ambiguous symbols you could use to analyse the way you yourself looked at the world, the idea that film is a collaborative medium in which different authors worked either together or against each other (and even writers were in someway involved) has slowly become more prominent. This has given TV a chance to be taken, sort of, seriously at last, but the damage will be slow to undo. We have a whole generation of arts graduates running the country who have been conditioned to be as snotty about the medium and its history as the general public and jaded industry professionals.
It’s not a patch on the (insert other medium) version
I suspect this is the reason the BBC’s DVD release of the 1954 version of Nineteen Eighty-Four continues to be blocked by the Orwell estate. The estate doesn’t respect the television medium, and so judge the TV show against the novel and find it wanting.
Firstly, the play (remember when it was TV plays not films?) explicitly imposes a then topical post-nuclear framework on the future it depicts which is ambiguous at best in the book, in which the alleged nuclear war is referred to in a piece of faked anti-state propaganda, that most readers (and all film versions) tend to skim through.
I can’t help imagining that the keepers of the Orwell flame sat around expectantly on initial transmission and immediately despaired at the opening narration, seeming to turn the serious art of Orwell into nothing but cheap science fiction (see the previous Clarke post for more about this), possibly even mumbling “Dear Lord, it's a travesty, I'm surprised it even did the title in words rather than in numbers!” to themselves.
Closeness to the text, would seem to be a serious consideration (because we know ‘books- good, adaptations of books to work in other terms- double-plus ungood’).
This appears to be why the 1956 cinema version of Nineteen Eighty-Four has also been suppressed by the estate. It takes serious liberties with the book, and you can’t have liberties being taken with Big Brother, can you? The estate had similar concerns with the ending of the Halas and Batchelor Animal Farm apparently, which tried to make a satisfying cinematic climax out of that undeniably superb prose ending, which really just wouldn’t have translated so well into pictures.
Secondly, the drama is undeniably creaky in parts if you go in expecting your TV drama to be like a trip to the pictures, and what seems to have particularly caused problems for any release over the years is that there is a very close adaptation of the book available in colour, a film too. This was for years the preferred version- it’s even got John Hurt and Richard Burton in it, who are proper actors.
There’s now reportedly another film version on the way to become the definitive adaptation, and it seems a DVD of some such scratchy old telly version coming out any time near that would confuse, and perhaps weaken, the Nineteen Eighty-Four brand.
Of course we, we band of brothers, we happy few, obsessed with telly, probably mainly as a result of the cheap fantasy and vaudeville turns it brought into our parlours when we were too young to know any better, know the BBC’s 1984 to be important.
Questions in the House, comments from the Palace, sleepy rats covered in cocoa, live presentations and the fact we only have take two, wind up gramophones, the lost paperweight, Peter Cushing being undervalued as a telly actor before he was undervalued as a film one, Donald Pleasence (also in the suppressed film version, fact fans), Nigel Kneale, Rudolf Cartier, Wilfrid flipping Brambell... it’s all here!
This is a cultural document, a work of art in a lost form, and almost entirely composed of a whole string of our favourite anecdotes. We could Christopher Frayling our way through this whole piece like it was a culturally important Italian made Western or something (I love him by the way, he’s top) if necessary.
British telly matters, Orwell estate! It’s part of our history, don't try to rewrite it, it isn’t all your tacky rubbish for the proles like Big Brother and Room 101 you know. Oh hang on…
Mind, Diamond Dogs is probably better Bowie for your non-collaboration so thanks for that, I guess.
This entry is to be passed to the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, for revision.
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