Dead of Night: Exorcism

 "Just my husband frightening the life out of me- it's quite normal">

You may be wondering what is this new series I've started to blog, because it's somewhat obscure. Dead of Night was a horrow anthology series broadcast on BBC 2 in late 1972. This being British television of the early 1970s, only three episodes exist of the seven which were made. I'm going to blog all three of them. Let's just say that all three may just be possible on a certain online medium known for pronouns and tubing...

Anyway, this is simply a superb piece of horror and social commentary, once you get over the shoch of seeing Clive Swift looking so young, with a full head of ginger hair. It's Christmas, it's a remote thatched cottage which is rather charming, if renovated with all mod cons such as, er, a rotary telephone, a big wooden television that needs to warm up, and (gasp) a stereo. And two rather posh couples in their mid-thirties are looking forwards to a slap up Christmas dinner with lashings and lashings of booze.

It's the most early '70s dinner party of all time, with talk of the mind's hidden potential, the recent three days week and the recent miner's strike, as well as lapsed Marxist views, something which will become relevant later. These couples are privileges, and know they are.

I won't spoil things, but lets say that odd things increasingly happen, and the bleak and brutal conclusion has a very pointed subtext about rich, poor and the evils of living in luxury as others starve. It's all so very astoundingly political, yet as horror it's no less effective. Superb.

Inspector Morse: The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn

 "There's always a fifty-fifty chance that the man who found the body did the deed..."

This second episode is better than the first: a complex yet logical series of events that furnishes us with the clues quite fairly, with well-rounded characters portrayed by an extraordinary cast of some of this country's finest character actors. Even better, there are a couple of fiendishly clever twists at the end- and the traditional Morse conceit of having our Wagnerian detective make a couple of wrong turns only makes the whole thing more effective.

It's been decades, plural, since I last read the novel, but this seemed like a fairly straight adaptation to me, although with a few extra visual clues slotted in at the start, as would sometimes happen in Granada's Sherlock Holmes. No doubt it's an '80s thing for the ITV franchises which were, of course, still largely in their pre-1991 heyday.

It's also notable how much of Morse's character is by now shaping up- the crosswords are prominent here- and, of course, relevant- as is the Wagner. Morse's attitude to real ale is, of course, eminently civilised. It's good too, and surprising, to see pathologist Max fleshed out a bit. Peter Woodthorpe maks him quite the memorable character.

There's more Oxford architectural porn here, of course, no doubt for the last time. But there's some interestingly dated attitudes here, in a 1987 adaptation of a 1977 novel. Personally, I've never seen Last Tango in Paris, but certainly not out of any prudery; I haven't got around to it, plus I understand the actual making of the film was a bit #MeToo. It's a proper film by a reputable director and I would not, personally, think of it as porn, just a serious film with sex in it.

On the other hand, I hate butter...

Excalibur (1981)

“The one God comes to drive out the many gods. The spirits of wood and stream grow silent.”

There’s just so much to talk about with this film. Just so much juicy subtext. I love it when that happens.

The whole Arthurian legend is a bit of an odd one, isn’t it? Everybody tends to think of it as the quintessentially English body of myths, yet it isn’t really English at all. The earliest texts tend to indicate that Arthur, if he existed at all, was a native Briton who fought the invading Anglo-Saxons whose culture would become English culture. And once those rather unpleasant Norman chaps invade England then we get Normans like Geoffrey of Monmouth (part-Welsh, part-Norman) using the Arthurian legends as a sort of propaganda vehicle, to remind the English that they’re invaders too. Personally, I’m just Cornish enough to be on the fence when it comes to all that stuff.

But come the 12^th century we get the Troubadours, Chrétien de Troyes and all that stuff, including a rather large amount of new stuff (the Grail, Lancelot, etc) and removing the rather awkward Celt vs. Saxon ethnic conflict, to the point that the stories which form this film belong more to French literature than to English or Welsh.

This film is loosely based on the Morte d’Arthur, a selection of certain Arthurian myths by Sir Thomas Mallory in the 1470’s. How loosely I can’t say; I’ve not read the book since uni and that was a good while ago. But it’s interesting that the armour and general look of the thing seems to reflect the time of the book rather than the actual 5^th or 6^th century setting of the original legends. Then again, the historical basis of Arthurian myth is so vague that there’s no point in attempting anything like historical accuracy. It’s also interesting to note that Mallory was a highly dodgy sort and a convicted rapist. It’s interesting to bear this in mind when we consider how the film deals with sex, which we’ll come to in a bit.  

This movie is so postmodern and metatextual that I had a massive grin on my face through most of it. The characters aren’t one-dimensional by any means (the whole Guinevere / Lancelot adultery subplot proves that) but they’re very much characters from myth, larger-than-life people who belong in epics, and necessarily so. Otherwise it wouldn’t be possible to have such a fast pace and cram so much in. There’s a bit of fun to be had within this, though. Uther, for example, is as thick as two planks in exactly the way that many characters from myths would be if fleshed out. He makes a great contrast with Merlin, who is the only character with a modern sensibility and clearly an audience identification figure, right up to the point that he's conspiring with the audience in seeing these mediseval  personalities as a little absurd. Nicol Williamson portrays his wit, cynicism and delicious irony perfectly. He’s a slippery, postmodern individual who seems completely out of place in this genre and this, of course, makes him perfect as a wizard.

The nature of his “magic” is interesting, too, quite aside from the fact that he’s shown to be a druid-like figure, one of the last of an older, pagan age. All this talk of “The Dragon” seems very similar to the Force, and that strange dream sequence with Arthur and Merlin in the forest glade seems suspiciously like a slight mickey take of the similar scene with Luke and Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back. In fact, the whole take on mythology here seems to owe quite a lot to Star Wars, although always with a slight hint of the tongue-in-cheek.

Everything looks great, with lots of fog, stone circles, Cornish landscapes, and an interesting mix between Mediaeval grottiness and a more romantic take, with the knights all having very shiny armour indeed until it symbolically all seems to dull after the funny business starts between Lancelot and Guinevere. There are some nice scene juxtapositions, too. Uther rapes Ygraine at the exact moment that her husband dies (by being impaled by a massive phallic symbol!), and we constantly switch between scenes. Both events are extremely violent, and the Duke dies at the exact moment that Uther orgasms, and Arthur is conceived.

Different Arthurian tales almost trip over each other in this bizarre portmanteau of a film, so fast is the pace, but things take a turn for the dark once Lancelot and Guinevere get naked and Merlin is trapped by Morgana (Helen Mirren looks disturbingly young). Without Merlin, things start getting very, very surreal, and the Holy Grail stuff is extraordinarily weird. Percival’s being asked questions about the grail, and his temptation in the castle, have got to be a deliberate nod to the then-recent Monty Python and the Holy Grail, while the sight of a knight surrounded by peasants with plague can only be a nod to The Seventh Seal. This film may play it straight on the surface, but you don’t have to probe deep to find lots of metatextual fun.

Of course, the main point of all the subtext at this point is to demonstrate that Mordred is a right little shit.

Oh, and we were talking about sex earlier. Well, it’s rather interesting to look at the character of Morgana from a feminist perspective. We first encounter her as a little girl, watching her own mother being raped. Merlin is clearly an accomplice to the rape- in fact, arranging it seems to be the biggest and most draining act of magic he’s ever performed! Oh, and Uther (with Merlin’s help) has arranged a civil war in which loads of people die purely so that this can happen. All in all, it’s rather difficult not to see Morgana’s character as the revenge of the feminine against all this male violence. She entraps Merlin by asserting her feminine sexuality. She shuns the male world of fighting and turns to magic. She symbolically deceives Arthur and has sex with him to produce Mordred a rather symbolic act of revenge of Arthur who, as king, is the ultimate symbol of patriarchy. Oh, and if magic is feminine, what does this say about Merlin? He certainly seems to show no interest in women! I’d better stop there. I do have a y chromosome, after all. I wonder how much of this, if any, is intended as a commentary on Mallory’s own history as a rapist?

Oh, and all this stuff with the lady of the lake is fascinating. It seems to hark back to old Iron Age habits of leaving bits of treasure in lakes and rivers as offerings to the gods, something which possibly continues in Britain today with coins and fountains. Is this “lady” a goddess, part of Merlin’s world, and soon to vanish, just as Arthur vanishes, across the sea to the west just like the end of Lord of the Rings?

Doctor Who: Time Crash / Voyage of the Damned

Time Crash

“You mostly went hands-free, didn't you? ‘I'm the Doctor! I can save the universe with a kettle and some string. And look at me; I'm wearing a vegetable…’”

Hooray! At last I get to watch this with subtitles and catch all of Tennant’s dialogue! Not to be churlish, though; this is fantastic, and his performance is too.

Peter Davison’s appearance is a powerful and wonderful moment, and all the more so in the context of the Marathon. Although I can’t help wondering why he’s wearing a hat, what with it being indoors and all…

It’s interesting how different Davison’s performance is here. Partly it’s the fact that he’s older, more authoritative and, well, more authoritative. But there’s also the obvious point that this is the version of the Doctor he plays in Big Finish these days.

But just as good as Davison himself is this fantastically witty script from the Moffmeister General, in which Tennant’s Doctor gets to make some great quips about his predecessor. I love the digs at the celery, and the revelation that both of the Doctors wear glasses for purely cosmetic reasons. Davison gets the best line, though. (“You’ve changed the desktop theme, haven’t you?”)

It’s hard to believe, as the Fifth Doctor heads back to times of “Nyssa and Tegan, Cybermen and the Mara, Time Lords in funny hats and the Mara”, that this has been just eight minutes long. It’s pure joy. 5/5, no contest. Oh, and I do believe this is only our second every “wibbly wobbly, timey wimey”.



Voyage of the Damned



“Any day now they start boxing!”

Ah… there’s nothing so surreal as reviewing a Christmas special in late May as the Spring blossoms are behind us and the hay fever drugs are starting to kick in…

It’s the Christmas Day blockbuster: time for something light in mood yet exciting and action-packed for the post-Christmas Dinner hours, and easy to follow for the benefit of those of us who had a little bit of wine earlier cos it’s the one day of the year you can start drinking in the early afternoon. And this delivers splendidly; before the credits roll we’ve already established that this is indeed the Titanic, there are apparently aliens on board, Kylie Minogue is on board, and, oh, said ship is flying through space. How very Enlightenment. Not only that, but those angel robots look suspiciously Robots of Death to me. That’s two conscious homages in the space of a minute!

The first third of the running time, before the peril kicks in, are devoted to introducing us to the situation and to the characters who are soon going to be struggling for their lives. The script sparkles here, giving exactly the sort of humour the festive circumstances demand. The highlight of all this is of course the dodgy history lesson given by Clive Swift’s Mr Copper, along with the brief trip to earth which helps the Doctor to bond with Kylie’s Astrid Peth- and her joy at what we would think mundane is wonderful. We also meet a newspaper vendor (it’s London, innit?) played by Bernard Cribbins, but there’s no need to dwell on him as he’s probably just a one-off cameo.

Incidentally, we’re told again that Earth is indeed a “Level 5” planet. That settles it; there is indeed a consistent system.

Oh, and Geoffrey Palmer’s in it, too, as the Captain, and Russell Tovey’s in it, too! But here’s when things start to turn serious as the Captain deliberately allows the ship to be hit by meteors, and the Heavenly Host turn nasty. Not only that, but they have haloes of death! It’s now, in true disaster movie style, that every character has a secret and all the nice characters die, mostly nobly (I love our sweet competition-winning couple, but knowing RTD’s scripting I feared for their life expectancy the minute they opened their mouths…). Unfortunate that the black guy dies first, but probably not a deliberate use of the trope…

The Doctor’s big speech, in response to Rickston Slade’s sneering, seemed a bit over the top at the time, but in the context of what’s to come (I know that’s not really in the spirit of the Marathon!) it now looks far more like a part of a character arc with, in hindsight, a defined direction, than it ever did at the time. I also love his Christmas quip soon after (“I was there. I got the last room”).

Things are going well with Astrid until she agrees to be the Doctor’s companion; at that point you know she’s doomed, just like Lynda with a “y” in a similar scene. This is where it starts, though: RTD, awesomely great writer though he is, has been writing the series for three years ago, and from this point onwards we’re bound to get little bits like this where he repeats his earlier tricks. It can’t be helped, and it in no way undermines RTD’s stature as a genius, but it’s there.

Still, RTD is often criticised for his climaxes but there’s nothing to criticise here. The doctor’s plan to get himself to the bridge is genuinely clever, Max Capricorn is a great villain, superbly played by George Costigan (yes, I know his performance is a tad broad, but so it should be- that’s the character, and it’s appropriate villainy for a Christmas special). The final revelations tie things up nicely- and were even foreshadowed earlier. Unfortunately, Astrid has to die at this point. Even more unfortunately, the Doctor ascends to the heavens with two angels. Now, I’ve been quite tolerant of this pretentious Christ imagery, but this is the point where, for me personally, the screaming starts. Please let there be no more…

Again, it’s interesting in the light of later events (not strictly in the spirit of the Marathon, again!) to see the Doctor trying so hard to bring Astrid back, insisting that “I can do anything!” Importantly, though, he fails. Not yet is he the Time Lord triumphant, but he’s travelling alone, and certain tendencies are going unchecked…

The last scenes with Mr Copper are splendid. I love the metatextuality of Mr Copper's comment, after Rickston Slade again shows himself to be an obnoxious git, that “Of all the people to survive. He’s not the one you would have chosen, is he?” But anyone making such a choice (ie, the writer) would be “a monster”. Is this RTD commenting on his own rather more than usually homicidal tendencies as a writer?

Good to see the recently departed Verity Lambert get an acknowledgement, too. Casts me back to the early days of the Marathon, that does.

Brilliant. Not quite up there with the 5/5, but one of the very top 4/5’s.

Doctor Who: Revelation of the Daleks

Part One

“You forgot I’m a doctor. When they slice me open I’ll know the name and function of each organ that plops out.”

It’s quite alarming to see Eric Saward’s name in block capitals at the start. Is this the first time the writer’s name has been displayed like this or have I not been paying attention?

Aside from this piece of apparent self-aggrandisement on the part of our glorious script editor, it’s a promising start. The snowy landscape looks great and, uniquely for this season, the TARDIS lands immediately with no faffing about.

This is Necros, and for some reason the Doctor has decided that he and Peri are to attend the funeral of some bloke called Arthur Stengos, which is an odd thing for a time traveller to do; what particular connection does he have to the particular time period where Stengos has just died? Anyway, he and Peri are still keeping up their veggie lifestyle with the Doctor rustling up some nut roll, and Saward mentions his Speelsnapes for the first time.

We meet the embalmers- chiefly Jobel, a git with a toupee, and poor Tasambeker, who bewilderingly has unrequited feelings for this total arse, brilliantly portrayed by Clive Swift. There’s an agreeably realistic undercurrent of gallows humour which helps to carry along the exposition- Glen McCoy could learn a thing or two from this sort of thing.

More groups of characters appear: a couple of infiltrators skulking about; Alexei Sayle being quite brilliant as a DJ and almost making you forget the utter pointlessness of the character, who doesn’t really cut it as Greek chorus material; and Davros (well, above the net) with some white Daleks. Pleasingly we get the traditional Dalek hum which as Deadly Lampshade pointed out (and I unaccountably failed to notice having obsessed about it for every Dalek story thus far) was absent from Resurrection of the Daleks.

The whole thing looks great, and is as brilliantly shot as one would expect from Graeme Harper- the shot where the camera pans down through several floors is magnificent. Admittedly the Dalek voices are a bit crap but I’m sure this is counterbalanced on the sound front by a top drawer rock n’ roll sound track which we’re unable to hear on DVD for sodding copyright reasons.

Eleanor Bron is a delight as Kara, with the mutually insincere conversation between her and Davros being great fun. Thing is, though, with all these different groups of characters it’s noticeable that the Doctor and Peri are being sidelined somewhat, not actually having entered the building where all the stuff is happening by the end of the episode. Still, we learn that the Doctor is now 900 years old. He’s aged a bit since he last mentioned how old he was then- he was 760 when he was Tom Baker, I recall. It seems we can only fit in those extra 140 years by assuming it happened while he was travelling with Romana.

I don’t like the Doctor / Peri relationship here- not only is there too much bickering and, yet again, no indication that they’re friends, but Peri actually seems afraid of his disapproval in a way which makes this feel far too much like an abusive relationship for comfort. For all that this story is very well made and cleverly scripted, it’s entirely lacking in charm or a sense of fun.

The glass Dalek scene is a case in point. Conceptually, yes, it’s great. But Stengos begging his daughter to kill him is not the sort of thing we should be seeing in a teatime adventure serial. Oh, and it’s odd to hear the Stengos Dalek speak of “racial purity” where that’s precisely what isn’t involved in the whole idea of turning humans into Daleks.

I like William Gaunt’s Orcini, a blackly humorous character with a dodgy artificial leg whose prattling on about “honour” does nothing to dissipate the obvious fact he’s going to turn out to be an utter buffoon. The fact that he almost leaves before Kara gives him the sequence for the bomb is highly revealing and a nice touch. Still, this is rather a lot of characters for a story this length, and it’s clear Saward is not going to involve the Doctor any more than he has to.

Isn’t it nice of Davros to cheaply sell his source of protein throughout the galaxy, thereby eliminating famine? I’m sure there’ll be no downside to this at all…

We end with the Doctor and Peri still outside the bloody building, with the Doctor disturbed to discover his own tombstone “as I am now”, meaning he will “never again regenerate”. I’m getting a bit tired with all these frequent and unnecessary references to regeneration we’ve been getting ever since Colin Baker took over- they do real harm in that by reminding us of other Doctors all the bleeding time they give his Doctor a real sense of impermanency which threatens to undermine the character.

Part Two

“But did you ever tell anyone that they might be eating their own relatives?”

“Certainly not! That would have created what I believe is termed ‘consumer resistance’”.

Again we start with some nice touches; Clive Swift quite brilliantly portrays the creepiness of Jobel’s attentions towards Peri, while the computer’s sexy female voice as it speaks to Takis is a nice little detail, and the Doctor’s reaction to the DJ reminds us that this story was made back in the midst of the Dark Ages of Radio One.

But mainly this episode consists of characters double crossing each other and the complex of betrayals untangling itself. It’s all very clever and well plotted, but we get moments of character along the way, such as Eleanor Bron’s brilliant reaction to the extermination of Kara’s secretary, telling us everything we need to know about their relationship. And the conclusion of Davros’s manipulation of Tasambeker and Jobel is horrifyingly predictable, but that doesn’t make it any less gripping as we watch it happen. The way Jobel’s toupee falls off as he dies is an inspired directorial touch.

Orcini and Bostock seem to kill Davros, but it seems that what they killed was only a fake, put there to divert the bullets of potential assassins from their real target- did he and the Borad go to baddie school together? He seems to have survived more or less intact since we last saw him, and is now able to hover in the air and shoot blue lightning from his fingertips like Emperor Palpatine did at the end of Return of the Jedi. It seems he survived by means of an escape pod; the small matter of the Movellan virus is, naturally, glossed over.

It seems that Davros takes the “best” bodies from the Tranquil Repose to become Daleks and uses the rest to feed the galaxy, to let them know it’s Christmas time. Must be an awful lot of bodies then.

It’s a great twist that Takis has invited Daleks from Skaro to arrest Davros, and for the first time since Evil of the Daleks we see a sort of mini-Dalek civil war. Delightfully, this bit gives us some Dalek poetry as the lines “My vision is impaired / I cannot see / My vision is impaired / Emergency” are delivered in perfect iambic pentameter by one of the Daleks.

Echoing the ending of Genesis of the Daleks, the Dalek incubators are finally destroyed by a great big bomb, and the Doctor makes it out by the skin of his teeth. Peri then demands to be taken somewhere fun, and the Doctor resolves to take her to somewhere which may or may not be Blackpool.

This is very well made- Graeme Harper has done an excellent job. The performances are universally great, too, and the script is very cleverly constructed. But the tone is getting quite seriously worrying by this point- this is one story about cannibalism too many; the Doctor is sidelined, appearing far too infrequently and affecting the plot hardly at all; and the Doctor / Peri relationship is by now looking very, very wrong. I can’t give this any more than a 3/5.

As for Season 22- well, with a relatively poor score of 2.571/5 it’s my least favourite so far, and I seem to be making a habit of saying that!