Satan's Slave (1976)

 "Don't forget- tomorrow is your special day!"

This film has such a lurid title, and an equally lurd opening scene and sequence. There's a fair bit of female nudity in it. Indeed, there's even a flashback to the witch hunting days of the 17th Century as a naked woman is branded, whipped and then immolated. Er, lovely.

Shame the film is so slow, dull and talky, then. Even with a scene of Mochael Craze being nebulously enchanted in a lift, causing him to die by suicide. Even with Michael Gough starring- he's phoning it in here, but he's incpable of not dazzling the audience with his charisma.

Candace Glendenning and Martin Potter are ok, but they can't phone it in as well as Michael Gough can. And, let's face it, they are playing cousins who have incestuous sex with each other. That's disgusting, and one wonders what they thoiught they were playing at.

The film drags terribly, consisting of mediocre actors and Michael Gough chatting nonchalantly in a country house while the direction fails to establish any kind of horror atmosphere. Even the twist at the end, with a little light gaslighting of Catherine and James Bree delivering a much less mannered performance than usual, underwhelms. The whole film reeks with the air of "that'll do". If you want a good horror film about Devil worshipping cultists, watch The Devil Rides Out. If you watch this, the only possible reason could be because of an actotr within it (for me, Michael Craze, seen sleeping in the most awful bedding in history) and no other reason. This film is pants.

The Return of Sherlock Holmes: Series 1- The Empty House

 "Thank you.... Doctor... Watson..."

Well, that was a wholly enjoyable, and somewhat faithful adaptation of The Empty House. It helps, of course, that Edward Hardwicke makes a much more charismatic and believable Watson than the rather flat David Burke. But Jeremy Brett is spellbinding as ever, and the script and production sparkle.

It's an interesting cast, too, featuring a cameo by James Bree giving an extraordinarily mannered performance as the coroner which calls to mind his role as The War Chief in Doctor Who. And Colonel Moran is played superbly by the magnificently voiced Patrick Allen- known to his enemies, and The Black Adder fans, as "The Hawk".

The episode nicely fits in a proper whodunit with Watson- now assisting Lestrade as a police surgeon and making endearing but not always correct attempts at Holmesian deductions: the coroner is, as it happens, correct to chide him for his assumptions. Yet the moment of Holmes' return is wonderful- arsehole though he is for teasing Watson and making hin faint. The explanation of Holmes'survival is both plausible (it contradicts the final shot of The Final Problem but we can, I suppose, see that as Watson's imaginings) and givs a decent reason for why Holmes should have played dead for three years.

This is an extremely strong opener. Yet I'm looking forward to more straight whodunits crammed with character actors.

The Prisoner: Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling

"For once I am dictating!"

Well, I can’t like them all. I know nothing of Prisoner fandom; is this episode disliked?

This episode stretches the format to breaking point. There’s no dialogue at the start, the Village appears only at the beginning and end, and Number Six is played by Nigel Stock in what must be a claim to fame; Patrick McGoohan hardly appears. Even more strikingly, the episode is centred around Number Six’s life in London, where his flat is suddenly his again, and he meets his fiancée and his boss/prospective father-in-law. Number Six is “wearing” a different body, yes, and disbelieved, but revealing so much about his life at home removes much of the mystery and would have been best left alone.

The conceit, of course, is the decidedly fantastic one of swapping minds between bodies, and there’s a nice twist at the end. It’s fascinating that Professor Seltzmann is played by eighty-one year old Hugo Schuster, who was born in Aachen in 1886, in Bismarck’s Germany and a subject of Wilhelm I, first kaiser of a united Germany. This sort of thing reminds you that the seemingly distant past was perhaps not so very long ago.

The episode lacks sparkle, though, and feels like filler to get them up to seventeen episodes. The format, outside the village without being based on a cruel twist, simply doesn’t work for the programme. And it’s McGoohan-lite. An eminently skippable episode. Please let there be no more like this

I, Clavdivs: Poison Is Queen

"Don't touch the figs..."

Well, even by the high standards of this rightly praised drama, that was exceptional. And this, more than anything, proves that the great Brian Blessed was an actor of incredible depth and subtlety, if not necessarily softly spoken while doing so, and it's such a great shame that he very shortly after became typecast as shouty barbarians.

So Germanicus returns to a warm and brotherly reunion with an unhappily married Claudius, and at last hears and believes the news about Postumus' framing for rape and Livia's misdeeds- although, I'm glad to see, not without a very #MeToo nod to the fact that actual rapists use such excuses all the time.

In the very next scene Augustus clearly knows everything, and is very cagey about Livia. Rightly so; his eyes may now be open, but will soon be closed forever. His secret reunion with Postumus is deeply emotional for both men, yes, although Augustus' tears are self-indulgent as ever, but they must tread with care and it is, in truth, far too late. Livia is running rings round them throughout, whether secretly getting access to Augustus' altered will, ensuring the despairing Tiberius is not far away, or finally managing to poison the rightfully paranoid Augustus to death. Too late. poison is queen, and Postumus is doomed, although in the process we meet the ruthless Sejanus, played with icy steel by a young and only very slightly balding Patrick Stewart. It's all moving towards an inevitable conclusion, but you can't take your eyes off it even if the whole thing looks absurdly studio-bound at times.

But Livia, blinded by her cruel dismissal of Claudius. never suspects his part in revealing the truth, and she constantly humiliates him throughout, culminating in that final scene where a somewhat pissed Livia, having achieved what she wanted, mocks Claudius while telling him too much. Sian Phillips is one of the great villains of television history. And what an episode.What writing. What acting. 

Doctor Who: Trial of a Time Lord Parts Thirteen and Fourteen: The Ultimate Foe

Part Thirteen

“I’m as truthful, honest, and about as boring as they come.”

The court is back from recess, and who should turn up but James Bree! There’s little time to wallow in nostalgia, though; the main trial plot has stopped treading water and started swimming again, and the Doctor’s in trouble. He’s run out of tricks for his defence, he’s accused of genocide and he’s a hair’s breadth away from being convicted and condemned. So now, of course, is the dramatically appropriate moment for Mel and Glitz to mysteriously turn up to testify in his favour. Glitz, necessarily, has softened from the thug of earlier.

It’s also the dramatically appropriate moment to reveal they’ve been sent by the Master, who is a most suitable means of extracting maximum dramatic potential out of the revelations that follow. Particularly as he turns up from inside the Matrix. Glitz was working for the Master back in parts one to four, and that mysterious box was full of “stuff the secrets had been nicking from the Matrix for years”. And, of course, this being a script by Robert Holmes, a dirty Time Lord cover-up then ensued, involving Earth being naughtily moved across the galaxy to become Ravolox, with enormous collateral damage caused by solar flares. The Doctor gets a great speech after this revelation, describing his own people as “decadent, degenerate and rotten to the core,” although unfortunately this is one of those moments where Colin’s performance suffers a bit of a wobble.

And then the Master casually refers to the Valeyard as “the Doctor” while explaining that he’s been adjusting evidence on behalf of the High Council to ensure the Doctor’s conviction. The Doctor is told that he’s “an amalgamation of the darker sides of your nature, somewhere between your twelfth and final regeneration.” Interesting- this wording, together with the fact he seems to be working for the High Council as some sort of expendable stooge, seems to indicate he’s not so much a future incarnation of the Doctor as a distillation of certain of the Doctor’s qualities, and to some extent an artificial creation of these shadowy Time Lord politicians. This is the Robert Holmes script about corrupt Time Lords to end all Robert Holmes scripts about corrupt Time Lords. Literally.

Oh, and it all seems to make sense, incidentally. The only bits so far that haven’t made sense at all have been in the Pip and Jane Baker episodes, where the workings of the trial seemed to be all over the place and the consequences of the evidence being from the future hadn’t been though through. But the whole business with the sleepers, Ravolox, and the Doctor’s apparent actions on Thoros Beta seem to have been resolved pretty much satisfactorily to me. I don’t think we need to have it spelled out exactly which scenes happened as shown and which didn’t.

Oh, and I haven’t any complaints about Peri’s fate, either. It makes sense, more or less, given her earlier relationship with Yrcanos.

Anyway, Holmes recalls his own script for The Deadly Assassin as the Doctor and Glitz spend the rest of the episode inside the Matrix. Among other things they encounter a number of Mr Popplewicks, all played by Onslow from Keeping Up Appearances, a wonderfully Holmesian satirical dig at bureaucracy.

Part Fourteen

“You are elevating futility to a high art. There’s nothing you can do to prevent the catharsis of spurious morality.”

…So, after a sublime swansong from Holmes, we move to the ridiculous in the shape of this script by Pip and Jane Baker. Sadly, the comparison with their lamented predecessor hardly shows them in a good light.

We get to see the familiar sight of the inside of the Master’s TARDIS. It’s only by doing this marathon that I’ve come to realise just how consistent was its appearance during the ‘80s. We also get an exploding quill pen, by far the coolest thing in this episode. Unfortunately, there’s an awful lot of utter poo here. The Doctor states that “I would trust Mel with my life,” but he’s not even met her yet! I know he’s only pretending to go along with the fake trial, but still. At least I got a cheap laugh out of “Never mind the Sydney Carton heroics,” mind.

This is so poor compared to the previous episode, though. There’s not actually much wrong with the plot, but the dialogue is awful and the characters keep explaining the plot to us in a condescending manner which rubs me up the wrong way. Plus, we get loads of no doubt accurate scientific gobbledygook which reminds me of all the things I didn’t like about the Bidmead scripts. And then the Master, hearing that the High Council has been deposed and insurrection has ensued, actually makes a speech to the Time Lords in the courtroom offering to take control which bears uncanny similarities to a certain speech in Logopolis. Unbelievable.
As a final indignity, the Doctor actually suggests the Inquisitor as a candidate for the presidency. Why? She’s spent the whole season being nothing but an incompetent buffoon.

So, it’s a tale of two episodes. The first part, a worthy swansong from Robert Holmes which fortunately doesn’t leave the plot for Pip n’ Jane to explain, gets 5/5, while the Pip n’ Jane monstrosity gets 2/5. I’m not too bothered about what Eric Saward’s version would have been like, but I’d have loved to have seen Robert Holmes’. I was going to give it a 1/5 but I suppose giving one episode 5/5 and the other 1/5 would have been a bit much.

The last episode aside, though, it’s actually been a damn fine season. I wasn’t actually expecting that I’d be rating this particularly highly until I got to it, but it’s a relief to give a season a good score for once- at 4/5 it’s a creditable joint sixth, which comes as a genuine surprise to me. Who’d have thunk it? Not only is this much-maligned season a triumphant return to form after a poor few years, but it’s the best season of the ‘80s so far by a long way. I suspect the famously diminished presence of Saward may have something to do with it…

Doctor Who: Full Circle

Part One

“Well, of course I’m better than you. I’m an elite.”

Romana’s been summoned back to Gallifrey, which gives us an excuse for some references to Leela and Andred and the like. But Romana’s upset by this, and goes to her previously unseen room to be alone, the Doctor seemingly oblivious to how depressing the prospect must be. The Doctor’s attitude is that you can’t fight Time Lords and Romana will have to do as she’s told, and however much this may echo the end of The War Games it just feels wrong and out of character. Still, it’s in keeping with the Doctor’s subdued and sombre mood.

Gallifrey is not to be, though, as something odd happens to the TARDIS and, although they’re in the right coordinates and the scanner is showing images of Gallifrey, as soon as the Doctor and Romana leave the TARDIS they’re somewhere else, an alien planet much more blatantly like southern England than the usual quarry landscape. This is very good indeed, a uniquely mysterious situation as well as lots of character stuff. Oh, and the music is quite peculiar in the context of what’s gone before, but I like it. It sounds very much of it’s time now and unfortunately dated, but then things from twenty of thirty years ago always do. In another ten years’ time it’ll have receded too far into the past to be dated, much as the Sixties have, and instead become simply period.

The society and situation of this planet is sketched out with admirable economy in this episode, telling us everything we need to know while also holding back a lot of stuff to be revealed later on. We’re introduced to the Outlers, the Deciders, the concept of Mistfall, and the Starliner. Oh, and Adric, who from the start is quite badly portrayed by Matthew Waterhouse. Still, we get George Cole and James Bree (putting in a much less mannered performance than he did in The War Games) to make up for this.


Part Two

“How odd. I usually get on terribly well with children”

The Marshmen look quite good- yes, they’re obviously in rubber suits, but this is Doctor Who- but they look as though they’ve come from the Black Lagoon.

This episode keeps up the quality and increasingly makes it clear how well-plotted this is. Characterisation is good, too; I love the moment where Romana hands the knife back to an Outler- very Doctorish.

Revelations trickle out at an appropriate place; this is Alzarius, but the crew of the starliner supposedly come from Terradon. But there’s a great and terrible secret, known only to the First Decider.

K9 is once again beheaded (grr!) but Romana gets a fourth wall-busting line bemoaning his fate this season: “In fact, we always seem to be repairing him”.


Part Three

“These short trips don’t usually work.”

Nice cliffhanger- shame that this results in Romana being pretty much written out of the rest of the story, though.

We get some real bombshells this episode: the maintenance being carried out on the ship is completely unnecessarily as the ship has been ready to fly for centuries, but no one knows how to pilot it. It’s a nice reversal of a trope of the show to see the Doctor lambasting the Deciders for their duplicity and to see them implicitly accepting his criticisms. It’s becoming clear just how good this story is- when a third episode successfully manages to unfold more bits of the backstory at an appropriate pace you know you’ve got something unusually good.


Part Four

“We’ve come full circle.”

It’s unusual in Doctor Who for the final episode to be the best of a story, but for once this is the case. In a couple of nicely done early scenes we first see the Doctor holding back the Marshmen by exploiting their apparent religious reverence for K9’s head (pre-empting Return of the Jedi there?) and then we get an excellent scene between the Deciders in the library. There are Marshmen clamouring to get in and presumably kill everyone, yet Nefred prefers to spout management speak (“a holistic approach”) instead of doing anything, to Login’s disbelief.

The final big revelation, from Nefred’d dying words, is a corker; the ship’s crew are not descended from the original Terradonian crew at all, but from Marshmen (themselves descendents of spiders) who got in and killed them all, eventually evolving to their present form, reading the manuals and eventually coming to believe themselves to be from Terradon. Of course, even someone like myself with a pathetically arty education knows this isn’t how evolution really works, but there actually seems to be enough of the right kind of somehow sciencey dialogue to get away with it.

There’s a great moment where the two Deciders are about to press the button for the ship to take off but Garif can’t resist the temptation to procrastinate: “But you will agree, it does require some thought.”
Meanwhile, the Doctor and Romana now realise they’re trapped in E-Space, unless they can find a Charged Vacuum Emboitment™. And unbeknown to them, they have a stowaway…


Absolutely brilliant, which comes as something of a relief after the first two stories of the season. 5/5, in fact. At last we have a script that doesn’t feel like a script from the previous regime with all the humour taken out but instead does something new, and in that context the new seriousness starts to make a lot of sense. This is the sort of “proper” sci-fi that Doctor Who doesn’t actually do that often (it’s the first story since The Mutants that I can imagine being adapted as a “straight” sci-fi short story) and so it feels very fresh and new. And Andrew Smith seems quite a find, coming up with a great central premise and handling structure and characterisation very well indeed, albeit possibly with help from Bidmead. Perhaps the show might want to consider more scripts by fans in, say, 25 years time?

Doctor Who: The War Games

Part One


"It is rather worrying not being able to remember things."



I saw this via the original video release, so the picture quality started out as absolutely the worst yet and it's going to get much worse. Still, this is a cracker of an opening episode. All the supporting characters are great, not just the likes of Carstairs and Lady Jennifer but even relatively minor characters such as the put-upon Major Barrington are nicely sketched out.

For the most part this could almost be a pure historical, but there are two indications of something bigger going on- why is the mysterious General Smythe able to hypnotise people with those specs of his, and what's that screen behind the portrait of King George V? No one can quite remember how long they've been here either, which is another hint of something much bigger about to be gradually revealed. Things are going to get epic, but not before a magnificent cliffhanger...




Part Two



"Did I hear you say that someone had escaped?"



...Which is rather predictably resolved. I don't care, though- I'm loving this. And the true state of affairs is gradually revealing itself- General Smythe has a TARDIS type thing materialise in his room, and it's doors sound as if they were made on Skaro! And of course there's the shock reveal of the Roman Zone behind the mist at the end.

But all that's by the by, cos this episode contains my absolute favourite Troughton moment, his impersonation of a VIP from the ministry. Troughton plays it quite wonderfully. It's all filler, of course, but it's top entertainment all the same. And, of course, not only does the Doctor's penchant for disguise (of a sort) hark back to Troughton's early stories, but he's masquerading as an "examiner" in his last story, just like his first. Brilliant. And it's nice to see the Doctor's recorder being used as a telescope too.


Part Three



"Everything seems to be difficult for you to explain!"


Once again, mostly filler, but this episode is great! So many great moments- Carstairs shows great bravery and character in believing the Doctor, and he reminds me very much of the Brigadier. And Jamie makes an allusion to The Space Pirates which I never picked up in previous versions of this story: "Aye, with a tuning fork?" We also get our second ever "Doctor John Smith" and our first proper look at the Sonic Screwdriver. One slight problem, mind- Jamie's from 1745? 1746, more like.

Best of all though is the German general with the monocle and the duelling scar (stereotype much?) and his screen behind the portrait of Kaiser Bill. Or possibly the Doctor's escape from the Germans, which harks back to The Highlanders: "Oh, we've got lots of tricks like that. Let me show you. Catch, Jamie!" This is a great send-off for my new favourite Doctor.

And then we get to see the real baddies, and their fab looking base, and their groovy 3D glasses. And the War Chief. Whose thoughts we hear, for the first time ever in Doctor Who: "Time travellers? I wonder..."




Part Four



"But who else would have space / time machines like the TARDIS?"



Interesting how the American Confederate general is the same bloke as the German general, complete with duelling scar- an early sign that the baddies' plan is being done on the cheap! Also interesting that Jamie keeps saying "How long are we going to be kept here?" rather a lot.

The character of Harper is played by Rudolph Walker, a black actor, and the script makes clear that the character was written as a black man as one of the Confederate soldiers calls him "boy", a racist epithet in parts of America. Not much is made of this, but it's pleasing that the first character shown to be free-willed enough to shake off the mind control is a black character from the 1860s American South. He's also shown as a senior and respected figure in the resistance. We've come a long way since Toberman.

The Doctor deprocesses Carstairs- fitting that the final story of this Doctor, who's shown himself to detest mind control above all things, should see him pitted against the biggest mind control threat yet.

And the Doctor and the War Chief clearly recognise each other! We know at this point that Big Things are going to happen...




Part Five



"Better leave him on simmer."



Zoe gets interrogated in a room of more than sufficient grooviness to be worthy of Austin Powers, and by my favourite silly character in all of Doctor Who- the Security Chief. I don't know why James Bree decided to play him in such a peculiar fashion, but for some reason it not only works but is in fact genius.

Also great is the way the Doctor runs rings around the Chief Scientist. But best of all is the wonderfully arch bickering between the War Chief and the Security Chief. Loads more episodes of this to go- wonderful. And I mean that!



Part Six



"Send. The prisoner. To me. FOR. QUESTIONING!"



I'm loving the sound effects for this story, as well as the occasionally Stockhausen-esque soundtrack.

More of the same this episode, but the Chief Scientist gets a line which is arguably a bit significant: "Are you suggesting he's bringing in his own people- the Time Lords?" Watching all of this in sequence means that line really sent a shiver up my spine...




Part Seven



"Now, I am tired of this eternal bickering!"



We add Philip Madoc's splendid War Lord to Edward Brayshaw's splendid war Chief and James Bree's splendid security Chief. Now we get three baddies to bicker in an arch manner. Splendid!

Once more we get loads of filler, but if it's as fun as this, who cares if the Roman Zone is blatantly reusing the same footage? And it's fun to see the 1917 zone again, this time in a completely different context. I love the way Smythe wants to shoot the Doctor for no other reason than he's being a git! Although admittedly the Doctor being saved from the firing squad in exactly the same way as before is a bit much. But I'll forgive this story anything.

It seems to be implied that the Doctor can't speak French. This never happened when he was William Hartnell...




Part Eight



"Don't worry- I'm not going to hurt you!"



It's a really nice character moment for Jamie as he gets put in temporary charge of the resistance movement, and that's a real strength of this story- yes, it's ten episodes long and blatantly padded out, but even when nothing's happening we're being entertained, and all the regulars get loads of great character moments. I love the scenes with Jamie, Zoe and Arturo Villa, for instance.

The conversation with the Doctor and the War Chief is also a charged and powerful moment, all the more so for watching the series in sequence. The revelations come thick and fast: "You may have changed your appearance, but I know who you are"; "We are both Time Lords. We both chose to leave our race." This story changes everything about Doctor Who. It can never be the same programme again.

I love the Resistance montage too. And what a cliffhanger!



Part Nine



"What. A stupid. Fool. YOU. Are."


Crikey! the Doctor's a traitor! the Security Chief recorded the war Chief plotting with the Doctor, the sneaky devil! It's all kicking off!

This is a satisfying ending to the main story. The baddies may be rather easily defeated at the end, but we've known along that they clearly come from the Planet Of The Jobsworths. But more important is the imminent arrival of the Time Lords, something we're set up to dread in no uncertain terms...




Part Ten


"I was bored!"



Wow. I've seen this many times before, but in context this really knocks your socks off. So many first, so many lasts, so many revelations. And it manages this in spite of the fact that this is mainly comprised of running around, some of it featuring clips from some of this Doctor's greatest hits, The Web of Fear and Fury From the Deep.

The scariness of the Time Lords is built up early on, and the scene in which they inflict pain on the War Lord is uber-scary, as is the way they erase him and his mates from existence. Admittedly, they're a bit underwhelming in appearance, but we're left in no doubt that their powers are pretty much godlike. And there's much more; the Doctor leaving his home planet out of sheer boredom, the specially filmed clips of all the best monsters (plus the Quarks), the Dalek even appearing to that throbbing sound. But the last few minutes pack the biggest punch of all.

Jamie and Zoe having their memories wiped is horrible, easily as emotional as for Donna more recently. The goodbye scene is poignant, but most upsettingly even as Jamie tells the Doctor that "I won't forget you, you know", the Doctor knows he will. still, it's a little jarring to see the Doctor chuckling as Jamie runs to his certain death, if not now then very soon! Why isn't he on that ship with all his mates, anyway?

Finally, the Doctor is exiled to Earth and has his appearance changed. Blimey.



Well, that's a 5/5 and no mistake. I'll make no bones about the fact that I've always loved this story, and it doesn't get any worse even when you've seen it so many times I can almost guess the next line. And in context there are even newer things to enjoy. Brilliant, second only to The Massacre, and I won't hear a word said against it.



I liked this season as a whole a lot more than I thought I would. It's pretty much on a par with the rest, apart from Season 5, which is way out in front...