A Christmas Carol: Part Two

"This is not reason versus fancy, Ebenezer."

Two thirds in and I think I can say that this daring, dark and devilishly clever version of the story is really rather brilliant- give or take a certain two things which I'll come to in the next paragraph. It was all about the Ghost of Christmas Past, though- the last episode will have a lot to squeeze in.

There are a certain two bits of this episode that are particularly edgy, though. It's been a long while since I read the novella, probably more than twenty years ago, but I'm fairly sure that the sexual abuse of Scrooge at boarding school was not remotely hinted at. Nor was his sexual exploitation of Mary Cratchitt for Tiny Tim's operation. These two elements both make Scrooge initially more sympathetic by showing us his "old pain" from his early childhood, but then go on to make us hate him as a sexual abuser. That's brave, and will make it harder to end this satisfactorily- how can such a monster be redeemed? Of course, his shockingly brutal and immoral business practices are shown in greater detail too, so there's a wider picture here. And it's notable that the multiple plot threads of the first episode (Marley's angle, Mary's source of money) all feed like tributaries into one here.

What we have here, I think, is a very modern deconstruction of Victorian Britain and its literature, not limited to the fairly foregrounded references to Hard Times as seen in the quote. Of course sexual abuse was never mentioned- but it was rife, as it has been throughout history. And so, of course, was the sexual exploitation of desperate women by powerful men. Both evils are still with us today, but in Victorian times there was the added evil of a woman always being judged harshly for any sexual act  not with a husband, circumstances be damned. In any Victorian novel, any woman such as Mary, however blameless, would die- I'm thinking of The Odd Women and Tess of the d'Urbervilles but the tendency was, I think, universal, How will this series deal with Mary?

There's an awful lot that the third episode needs to do. But this episode has been masterfully done, with some brave decisions, certainly, but handled with skill.

Doctor Who: The Time of the Doctor

"Why are you naked?"

"Because I'm going to church!"

Yes, I know. I'm very, very late. But I spent Christmas away in an ITV household and only saw The Time of the Doctor late at night and on iPlayer, and when we finally got home after the New Year we discovered that Youview hasn't recorded it. Grr. We're switching to Sky.

But now I've finally seen it again, thanks to Netflix, and been able to take notes so I can blog it at long last, and there is soooooo much to talk about, old news or no. I'm aware that there is a very vocal group of online Moffat-haters, but I'm not one if them, I'm afraid. There will be gushing. If you don't want to read a gloriously positive meditation on the perfect conclusion to the Matt Smith era, look away now.

One thing I've often wondered about Steven Moffat, what with his near-Douglas Adams approach to deadlines, is to what extent his intricate plot lines are charted in advance and to what extent they're made on the hoof (an equally valid approach). Personally, I suspect the answer lies at neither extreme, but it matters not: however he's done it, the Moff has triumphantly tied up all the ongoing plot lines of his era so far as far as I can determine. So let's get all the arc stuff out of the way first so we can move on to talk about the episode, shall we?

The cracks in Amy's wall? The Time Lords trying to get through to our reality via the original crack, so to speak, at Trenzalore. The question that must never be asked, "Doctor who?" Required by the Time Lords so they can come through. Who is behind those religious, military types who have been a theme of the Matt Smith era? The Papal Mainframe, headed by the Doctor's friend and fellow exchanger of flirts, Tasha Yem (whose name reminds me of Tasha Yar from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

There's more. The Time Lords cannot come through, whether they're nice now or not: their reputation precedes them, and a new Time War would erupt. Tasha Yem's lot go through an "unscheduled faith change" (delightful dig at religious hierarchies there!) to ensure that Trenzalore is protected, the question is never asked and that "silence will fall": the Silence, it transpires, are actually goodies, and we see them fighting alongside the Doctor.

There's even more. The Doctor is, in fact, on his thirteenth incarnation ("Are we forgetting Captain Grumpy?"): this is it, although we should perhaps not think too much about what looked like an aborted regeneration in The Impossible Astronaut. The Kovarian chapter broke away from the Papal Mainframe to blow up the TARDIS and send River to kill the Doctor ("Totally married her!"). And I do believe that's all the loose ends.

Anyway... we all love Handles, who is cool, cute and useful to the plot, but he is also a useful metaphor for that old Christopher Bidmead theme of entropy, essentially that things fall apart, and as with Logopolis this functions nicely as a metaphor for the Doctor's regeneration. But- and this is important- the fact that everything is going to fall apart and degenerate until the eventual heat death of the universe ("Can't get the parts") is no reason to despair. The Doctor knows that the siege of Christmas will eventually break through and destroy everything, but that's not the point; generations of people will live and love laugh there in the meantime, and these people matter. They matter so much that the Doctor, with his notorious wanderlust, is content to spend his last few centuries of life staying in the one place, defending the citizens of Christmas for as long as he can. This kind of cheerful defiance of entropy is the most Doctor Who thing ever.

The funny scenes of Christmas dinner with Clara's family are important, as they anchor these weighty themes to everyday reality. There's a definite parallel, in the Doctor sending Clara home to protect her, in what he did to Rise in The Parting of the Ways. We remember this as another regeneration story, so the stakes are raised. Still, it says a lot about Clara that she is a lot more resourceful and clever in getting back than Rose was.

Christmas is under attack, so we get nice set pieces with Daleks, Sontarans, cool wooden Cybermen and Weeping Angels, although the latter are a little under-utilised. There's a scene which nicely exploits the fact that Matt Smith has a shaven head during filming. There is the delightful concept of a town where lying isn't possible. But better than any if this is seeing the Doctor embedding himself into a real community, slowly growing old (this is an acting your de force from Matt Smith), yet holding out against all comers... except old age. By the end of the episode he's at least 1,400, and dying. The clock is striking twelve.

But there's Clara, as ever, to save him, in this case by having a chat to the Time Lords on the other side of the crack. Yes, entropy, everything dies, blah blah blah, but why not kick the can down the road for a bit more and give the Doctor a brand new regeneration cycle? We may all be doomed in the end, but the Doctor will now live to save a load more people along the way.

The regeneration itself has its cake and eats it in being both enormous (the explosion) and low key (Clara and the Doctor in the TARDIS). The short cameo from Karen Gillan, "the first face this face saw", is far more effective than Tennant's over-indulgent "reward" in The End of Time. And the underplayed regeneration is brilliant; it would have been so easy, as with last time, to be self-indulgent. Instead we have an exciting and unknown future lying ahead.

Four Lions (2010)

"Waj, why are you doing this?"

"Rubber dinghy rapids!"

I've resisted reviewing any outright comedy for this blog so far, film or TV, for the obvious reasons: trying to analyse humour is about the most po-faced thing I can possibly imagine. I don't really hold to the oft-repeated belief that you ruin a joke by looking at how it works, but it's still hard to do it without appearing to have no sense of humour and, as John Cleese once said, an Englishman would rather be accused of having a really small penis than that.

Still, I've reviewed quite a few films now, and I can't keep ignoring a whole genre. I have to find some way of talking about it. And it isn't that I haven't found humorous things to discuss before (Flash Gordon, for example. Actually, that's a comedy, innit?). So I've deliberately decided to have a go. Originally I was going to review Kind Hearts and Coronets, but I had to give up five minutes in as there are no subtitles on my DVD and the dialogue just isn't clear enough to compensate. I'm a bit pissed off about that, really; a DVD release without subtitles is not acceptable.

So, Four Lions. It's a brilliant film. But the first thing I have to say is: DO NOT BUY THE DVD. Just record it off the telly or something. The DVD forces you to watch about ten minutes' worth of trailers that can't be skipped. Any DVD that does this has to be boycotted, otherwise they'll just keep on doing it.

Crikey. Got out of the bed the wrong side this morning, didn't I? Anyway… I picked Kind Hearts and Coronets so that I'd be able to talk about the class subtext instead of trying to analyse jokes. This was my second choice, obviously, because there's a political subtext to talk about. Thing is, though, there's not an awful lot to say about it, cleverly done though it is. All sorts of taboos are cheerfully ploughed though, as you'd expect from Chris Morris, but it's funny for rather old fashioned reasons. The format is basically that old classic, thick bloke and thicker bloke. The three thicker blokes (the Stan Laurels / Buttheads / Garths / Syd Littles, depending on your cultural reference point) are Waj, Faisal and Hassan, and the two thick blokes (the Hardys / Beavises / Waynes / Eddie Larges) are Omar and Barry. There's a bit of an added level of this between these two, jostling for the spot of alpha male, but it's Omar who's ultimately the least thick, and the leader. Of course, though, the humour lies in the fact that they're all wazzocks. This is co-written by the creators of Peep Show, and feels like it.

It's Omar and Barry who are fleshed out more as characters. Omar has a loving wife and young son, and the family relationships are quite heartwarming. Yet his wife is enthusiastic for Omar's plans to blow himself up, and their son is being brought up to idolise jihad and martyrdom. His brother Ahmed, a far more observant and pious Muslim than Omar, who is forever referring to Western pop culture, is appalled at all this, yet we can't quite side with him as he's such a zealot that he locks his wife up in a "little room"! So many contradictions.

Barry, although charismatic, is a little semi-detached because of his white ethnicity, his convert status and his lack of Urdu. I suspect this, rather than anything else is the real reason why he refuses to attend the mosques (he wants to blow then up!) and prefers only to associate with other Muslims who accept him as one of them, not an outsider, which pushes him towards extremism. He doesn't quite belong anywhere, precisely because of his stubborn adherence to a particularly narrow version of "Islam". So many contradictions.

And it's the contradictions that make this film so funny. Barry accuses Omar at the end of killing his thick brother by dragging him into this, but he did the same himself with Hassan. Waj ends up about to blow himself up inside a kebab shop full of Muslims. Omar and Waj go to train with Al Qaeda and end up blowing up Bin Laden. And Omar blows up a branch of Boots, something which he's mocked earlier.

There's something almost Monty Python about the explosions, too. All of them, from Faisal's crow to Faisal himself to Barry's choking demise are very, very funny. It goes to show that the subject matter, being fundamentally absurd, is ripe for humour. I'm glad that a film like this exists, and that it's good.