Knights of God: Episode 13

" The king had to be found within yourself.”

Sigh. This has been a pretty good series, but this final episode is profoundly disappointing.

I mean, it all falls into place so conveniently. The civil war, with Mordrin finally killing Hugo, is so convenient for the royalist rebels to take over. All the messy stuff of reestablishing power and democracy is just handwaved. And Mordrin is literally shot while crowning himself. Still, thd cliffhanger resolution, with Gervase and Julia both saved by their mutual love, is cute.

Not cute enough to save the episode, though. And there’s definitely a whiff of un-British flag shagging here. The national anthem is sung. The closing titles are changed to the Union Flag. None of these things are inherently bad, of course- national symbols do not and should not belong to the far right- but, within the world this series has so carefully built, this is just not realistic. Better to end with the Knights still in charge but with a sense of hope.

The episode is also rushed, leaving it all to the end, so it’s all plot with no focus on character. It’s sad that a series I was enjoying should end like this.

Knights of God: Episode 11

 "Not toys now. Real."

There's a distinct feeling, and an odd one, as this often briliant and very '80s dark dystopian thriller draws to a close. In many ways it feels radical- yet the tools of revolution are the monarchy and the established church. We even have the Archbishop's seat of Canterbury as a Vatican-style independent state. It's decidedly odd, and small-c conservative, but the overall feel is not reactionary.

There are contrasts. Mordrin is losing his grip on reality, a Cromwell or Caesar who decides to take the crown, an act which coincides with the Knights, spurred by Hugo, turning against him. Meanwhile, Owen Edwards' rebels are proving both successful and hubristic... to the fury of Edwards himself, who stops the killing of prisoners and is full of self-doubt... a clearly intentional contrast to Mordrin.

Suddenly there are lots of things happening and nothing feels stable. Julia's unsuspecting father is to be sentenced to death. Hogo sends assassins after Julia and Gervase, who are about to be told by the archbishop where the king is until the assassins throw all into chaos. All the ryal stuff is a little neat, perhaps, but the plotting here is admirable.

I have no idea where this is going. But I'm impressed.

Knights of God: Episode 10

"To Canterbury!"

A lot happens this episode. At the outset, Gervase and Julia are outlawed and outcast; Hugo is disgraced and imprisoned; and Mordrin may wish to be crowned king, confirmed at the cliffhanger.

The whole direction of travel changes here. Arthur, it seems, has not forsaken the couple, and suddenly mentions a rumout that the king is alive... and the Archbishop of Canterbury, obviously no friend of the new Fascist religion, would possibly know. To Canterbury, then. It's a little deflating, however, that the only hope against Fascism is the monarchy and the established Church.

Things don't look good for Hugo, despite his refusal to sign the confession waved in front of him; he is to be tried and then hanged the following morning. But Gervase and Julia are in peril too, betrayed once more by the treasonous leader of the "Wastelands". Yet, with the help of Julia's father, they are able to reach Canterbury...

Exciting and intriguing. Not long now...

Knights of God: Episode 9

 "Let him be a fisherman..."

The plot gets thicker and thicker in this pivotal episode which, presumably, thrusts us into the final narrative. The cliffhanger is unexpected: Arthur is not the fated enemy of Mordrin whom Gervase is programmed to kill, despite his name, for there are hints that this person is the "rightful king", as per Arthurian myth. We learn that Hugo slaughtered all the royals for the Knights... yet is some rightful king alive? Perhaps someone we have unknowingly met?

It is interesting that Mordrin may be seeking to crown himself... is he a Cromwell or a Julius Caesar in that respect? The parallel plotting between him and Hugo is utterly gripping... and ends the only possible way it could have, with Hugo in a cell, stripped of all status.

Yet Gervase and Julia are no better off. All faith is lost; with the programming, Gervase is seemingly of no use for his long-planned purpose, although Julia has faith. And then, another bombshell: a kangaroo court is demanded by the militia of the South Yorkshire "Wastelands", and realpolitik forces Arthur to outlaw them both, perhaps fortunate to escape hanging, although of course capital punishment is the recourse of the tyrant, a practice that does not behoove those who claim to believe in freedom.

The status quo is changed. This episode is eventful, fast-paced and deeply shocking. I'm genuinely clueless as to what will happen next.

Knights of God: Episode 4

 "All hail the knights of God!"

This episode isn't quite as intensely totalitarian as the last one, and that's sauying something, as the main focus is on Gervase's brainwashing, done through typical fascist techniques alongside a little light experimental use of drugs, courtest of Michael Sheard as a very British Dr Mengele.

The drectorial style, wisely, avoids trippiness here: it would not suit the bleak, fascist aesthetic as Gervase is initiated, via a creepy ceremony, into the Knights of God. His brainwashing is oddly believable, even to the point of subjugating Wales, pursuing the rebels' mysterious leader... and betraying his own father. But I suspect his loyalty would be tested were he to discover that Julia has escaped... and been shot while doing so. Is she dead?

Meanwhile we're intruducted to Nigel Stock as Brother Simon, Mordrin's right hand man, while Hugo continues to archly plot and be performatively resentful. This is certainly leading to conflict.

An eventful episode, then, for a mere twenty-fice minutes. This continues to be very, very good.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Return to the Circus

"I shall become an oak of my own generation..."

This is, of course, a justly renowned piece of telly and, as I saw it before many years ago, I’ll not be departing from the general view. I must confess that, to my mother’s disapproval, I’ve yet to read any John Le Carre, so I’m unfamiliar with any greater levels of depth and detail which no longer exist deep within the novel and, indeed, series of novels on which this is based. I comment only on what I see. But I see much.

The slow pace is truly extraordinary from the perspective of 2019, forty years later the pre-credits scene consists simply of the four mole suspects- Bill Haydon, Toby Esterhase, Roy Bland and Percy Alleline- slowly entering a room. but this allows for much subtle physical acting by the character actors portraying them. Similarly, very little really happens- we learn of the existence of the mile, Jim’s Czech mission goes south, the retired George Smiley is accosted by the gossipy and somewhat camp Roddy Martindale and endures am interrogatory lunch which gives us much exposition about the Circus, Smiley’s forced retirement, the uneasy atmosphere, and his hinted at marital problems. He is then summoned by Peter Guilin to meet Oliver Lacon and hear an apparently shocking tale from one Ricki Tarr. That’s it. That’s all that happens in fifty minutes.

And it happens slowly. There’s loads of tension in the scenes with Jim in Brno. We get to see Alec Guinness’ extraordinary acting mannerisms and use of cleaning his glasses to evoke a deep interiority. It’s fascinating to see the master at work here; no method actor he. It’s all about the exterior mannerisms, as he says in his autobiography, and that’s what makes him so bloody good.

We also get time to get an impression of the Circus as a downbeat, very male (there are no speaking female parts in the whole 50 minutes!), very public school and Oxbridge little club not trusted by the Americans. We get to breathe. And it’s wonderful.

I’m looking forward to the rest. I can’t help noticing, though, that Ian Richardson looks scarily Old at 45, and that’s me in three years...

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

Cromwell (1970)

"An England without a king is unthinkable!"

I watched this film principally because I wanted to see two great actors- Richard Harris and Alec Guinness- play two iconic roles from history; Oliver Cromwell and Charles I. And they are, indeed, magnificent. Their performances- Harris as a principled sociopath slowly descending into a dictatorial sociopath and Guinness as a politely arrogant congenital liar- are superlative and alone enough to make the film worth watching. The film succeeds brilliantly if seen as a character piece based on its broadly valid idea of Cromwell- a man who can honestly give everything for the supremacy of Parliament and then simply dismiss it when it does not live up to his expectations. For this reason the film succeeds as drama in spite of being so incredibly rush and in spite of its ending so suddenly.

And yet... no film set in the past can be historically accurate in full. I accept this. Events must be compressed into a shorter period of time and simplified to fit the medium of cinema. And yet... here we have Cromwell as one of those MPs whom Charles tries to arrest in January 1642. We have Cromwell present at Edgehill. We have the Earls of Essex and Manchester making speeches in the Commons. We even have arch-republican Henry Ireton (a shockingly young Michael Jayson) trying to persuade Cromwell to take the crown, in spite of having died during the (glossed over) Irish campaign in 1651. All this is a little much to swallow; these are not small things.

I'm also uncertain about the dialogue; a film set in the mid-seventeenth century should either use modern dialogue or contrive to use contemporary speech but contrive to favour those sentence constructions and that vocabulary that would be understood today, preferably the second. Instead we get a bizarre mish-mash of speech which mixes archaisms such as "withal" with modern coinings such as "international". The effect is clumsy and distracting.

Still, it all looks magnificent and, in the final analysis, it's all about the acting. And, judged by this criterion, the film is superb.

The Dam Busters (1955)

"Every time one of these Lancasters flies over, my chickens lay premature eggs!"

There's something about a British war film of this era, a decade or two after the war. There's the stuff-upper-lip mood; the straightforward, linear storytelling and the slow, steady pace. This is a typical example of the best of such films, I suppose.

It's a shame, of course, that the film has been somewhat overshadowed by the name of Guy Gibson's dog, a name that I have no intention of repeating. It isn't ok now and, with due acceptance of the different context of 1955 and, indeed, 1943, when the concept of racism was rarely thought of, it wasn't exactly ok then. But the past was what it was.

It's a pity, really; this is a bit of a barrier between us and the original context of the film, as the narrative point of the dog is to humanise Gibson, otherwise a rather flat, straightforward hero type, the kind of figure whom it's easy to admire but hard to empathise with. A shockingly young looking Richard Todd nevertheless does a good job playing a square-jawed hero, a man who, in reality, died for his country in 1944 aged 26. No wonder these men get so bladdered so often.

Michael Redgrave portrays Barnes Wallis with rather more depth, but then this is a part which allows him to do so. Wallis is humanised by his like ability, his long-suffering wife, his easy relationship with his children, and his easy categorisation as the traditional British boffin. The British boffin is an iconic figure, the lone, eccentric individual in his shed, fighting the narrow minds of bureaucrats. But that such a figure can, albeit with difficulty, find himself listened to (appropriately by an equally eccentric prime minister) shows that a muddle-through democracy is both superior to and more efficient than a totalitarian, goose-stepping tyranny.

Wallis, incidentally, lived to be 92. He seems to be the only male non-smoker in the film, something implied to be an eccentricity.

The film uses suspension and tension well, particularly in the final scenes as the squadron's sorties are juxtaposed with Wallis and co at Bomber Command, barely able to cope with the tension; the film is long, but doesn't feel so. The climax is satisfying, with some great model work and what I can only assume is stock footage of the damage done to the industry of the Ruhr. One has to raise an eyebrow here at the total indifference shown to any German civilians killed as a result, but that would not have been much of a consideration in 1955. But it's fitting that we end, not with scenes of triumph, but mourning for the fifty-six men who did not return. 

Best film I've seen in 2015 so far; a film that pointedly equates the inventor in his shed (in modern parlance, the geek) with the square-jawed pilot hero. Brilliant.

Doctor Who: Time-Flight

Part One

“Are you responsible for this box, sir?”

“Well, I try to be.”

Ah, a Concorde, that technological marvel! That dates this story immediately- this is set back in the days before the future became considered passé. Although the décor inside, and especially the glimpse of newspaper, date this story in quite another way. But oops- where’s it gone?

Inside the TARDIS we have a perfunctory discussion about going back in time to save Adric, but within what feels like thirty seconds all of this is over and they’re all off to the Great Exhibition. This is most awkward, and although it’s probably true to say there can’t be more than a certain amount of character stuff in a format where you’re never more than 25 minutes from a cliffhanger or story climax (something which doesn’t apply to the “new series”, where although the stories are shorter the episodes have time to breathe), it could have been better handled than this. I’m noticing more and more how much poorer the treatment of the current large TARDIS crew compares to the original lot. It’s not as though Ian or Babs got all that much character stuff either, just the amount that was required by the constraints of the genre, but it worked. For this crew, it doesn’t.

The TARDIS lands on a runway- please don’t let this be another Faceless Ones! It’s interesting to look for Tegan’s reaction here to finally being at Heathrow- will she stay or will she go, to paraphrase Joe Strummer at around this time? 

Thankfully, lots of tiresome scenes of the TARDISeers falling under suspicion from the authorities are curtailed by mentions of the good old Brig and some chap called Sir John Sudbury from “C19”, with some UNIT bloke at the end of the phone going so far as to insist the Doctor be briefed on the missing plane. On the other hand, it’s all a bit too continuity heavy. Perhaps they could streamline all this into, I don’t know, perhaps the Doctor carrying some paper that’s, I dunno, psychic?

So a second Concorde takes off, with the TARDIS, on its side, on board. And our heroes plus pilots end up in some illusory other world which turns out to be the Jurassic. We get a surprisingly highbrow reference to Berkeleyan philosophy for such a silly story (“That is why this tree / doth continue to be…”) and there’s some bloke in weird make up speaking an odd language in a funny voice. It seems he’s played by someone called Leon Ny Taiy. I wonder who he is?

Part Two

“Magic? Arabia?”

Sop, there are some squidgy, semi-corporeal things that control people and do other things required by the plot, except that some annoying professor bloke is able to resist its control. He thinks he’s in Siberia. Ho hum. Still, as time goes on he’ll become gradually less annoying until he morphs into an almost exact clone of Dr Tyler off The Three Doctors. Oh, and the Plasmatons are a bit like Gell Guards, I suppose.

Nyssa and Tegan have to pass through the obligatory illusory version of Adric, on account of he just snuffed it, and then they get a Melkur and a Terileptil, just to remind them of some of the more mildly disappointing of their recent adventures.

We get a decent retro-looking Ray Harryhausen monster conjured up by Kalid, but rather suddenly he’s defeated. And then turns out to have been the Master in disguise all along. Naturally, he had to disguise himself as a bizarre Aladdin style conjurer and speak in some weird made-up language, even when no one else was around, because, er, um, er…

Part Three

“The Xeraphin is calling us.”

We begin what will become a tradition of full frontal refusal to explain how the Master escaped from his last sticky situation with the obligatory “So you escaped from Castrovalva”. Then the plot starts all over again, this time with the baddie being the Master instead of some weird conjurer type. At least our villain, stranded here, now has a motive.

Two pilots muck about in the TARDIS for a bit, while the Doctor discovers the entire Xeraphin race is locked up in some column thing. The Prof sacrifices himself (yay!) and then we get a battle of wills between two random Xeraphins. Don’t get me wrong, it all makes a sort of sense, but it’s all a bit random, innit?

Part Four

“I’ll explain later.”

I don’t at all like the Doctor’s brief admission that the Master has finally defeated him, it’s unDoctorishly defeatist. I realise this Doctor is supposed to be less charismatic and less assertive- fair enough- but more and more I’m seeing something beyond the character of Davison’s excellent Doctor- a lack of respect for the character from the scripts. The Doctor should always be the hero- this is his show, after all.

It all ends with a bargain between the Doctor and the Master, manipulated by the Doctor to strand the Master on Xeraphas- it’s all strangely reminiscent of the conclusion to The Mind of Evil. It’s a nice touch, and at the same time a bit embarrassing, to see Tegan actually acting as an air hostess.

The story does tend to stretch credulity somewhat, even given the necessary conventions of the genre, with how easily the Concorde pilots adapt to the fantastic events they’ve witnessed, with their insistence on joking about it even when faced with scepticism from their superiors really pushing it.

Tegan gets wistful while wandering the terminal (Terminal 3 was new then, right?) but it’s a huge shock when the Doctor and Nyssa just take of without her without warning.

This is an odd story. For the first time in ages it’s obviously been written and performed as though purely a kids’ show- see the bloke playing the captain of the second Concorde- not a bad performance but one clearly tailored for a kids’ show. It’s a throwaway load of nonsense, of course, more like T-Bag or Emu’s Pink Windmill than Doctor Who, but actually on those terms it’s sort of ok. 2/5.

As for Season 19, at 3.429/5 it rather surprisingly ties exactly with its predecessor. But neither season has exactly scored well. This comes as a genuine surprise to me- I thought I actually liked this season quite a lot!