(Gratuitous Jamie Bamber image!)

SkyHD - 27th May 2008 - 9.00pm

Gosh, we got this four days ahead of the U.S. Now, what do I say to those American viewers chomping at the bit waiting to see this? Oh, you've probably caught it on a streaming site somewhere by now!

If you're looking to torrent the episode: Pirate Bay

(Spoilers ahoy if you haven't seen it)

Roslin, Baltar and half the pilots are gone. Immediately, the power vacuum gets the sharks circling and Tom Zerek has his eye on the Presidency. There ensues a bit of a power struggle between him, Lee and Adama. Adama can't cope with the thought of Zerek being President and him having to work alongside the man. Bad day at the office. To settle the issue Lee approaches Romo, the strange little lawyer he worked with at Baltar's trial. Romo will sort it out, apparently.

The playing between Jamie Bamber and Mark Sheppard is again, excellent, and their on-screen chemistry keeps some of the very long-winded scenes moving. But then there's a load of flummery about dead cats and Romo pulling a gun on Lee after a dragged out sub-plot of drawing up a list of potential Presidential candidates. Look, we all know it'll be Lee who takes the chair and it's very obvious from the outset but this episode spends rather too much time avoiding having to actually come out and say it. Thus we get the somewhat tedious back and forths between Romo, Lee, Zerek and Adama. Brilliantly acted but I have to admit I really didn't give a toss in the end as much of the drama practically crawled along at a snail's pace.

Adama's pining for Roslin and the prospect of working with someone like Zerek prompts him to resign and put Saul Tigh in charge. Is that wise, Mr. Adama? Yes, he cocked it up last time when he left him in control but the added complication now is that he's a ruddy Cylon! So Adama flounces off in a Raptor, much to the concern of Lee, Starbuck and crew, waiting for Roslin to reappear as the rest of the fleet jumps away to find Earth. He's left sitting reading a rather burnt looking book! Awwwww!

Beyond the turgidness of the Lee/Romo/Zerek tussle for the Presidency, with dead cats and whiteboards, the real meat of the episode lies in the revelation that Tigh has impregnated the captured Six. Now this is what we want...shocking revelations. Poor old Tigh, so bewitched by that naughty Six he's done the dirty with her, and now put in charge of the ship. Will that good eye finally pop out of its socket under all this strain? The punch up between him and Adama is the stand out moment in the episode and they go at each other like brawling sailors. As a symbol of their disintegrating friendship even the lovely Airfix model ship that Adama has been patiently building gets flattened in the melee. It's sudden, brutal and leaves both men shaken and more importantly perhaps, changed, despite the scuffle being offset by a humourous coda.

There's also the spooky exploration of a devastated Raptor and the remains of a base star to keep us happy as the crew painfully try and locate the vanished Roslin. The consequences of Athena's shooting of Natalie are followed up with Athena thrown in jail. Adama, the old softy, later relents and send little Hera to go and share the cell. I bet they never had family visiting rights in Guantanamo Bay!

The slow pace and the often baffling dialogue do hamper this one and it's a bit of a disappointment after such a cracking episode last week. I have no problems with the overall quality of the show - the direction, acting, design are all superb - but this season's constant navel gazing and sluggish pace have contributed to a feeling that this season has never really got going. The chin stroking through endless scenes has become rather off-putting and the writers need to get the whole thing moving. I'm almost hankering after the episodes set on the Demetrius. Oh, that reminds me, where was Gaeta? We didn't hear one of his lovely songs this week. It might have done well in Eurovision along with all the other crap.

Previous reviews:
Guess What's Coming To Dinner?
Faith
The Road Less Traveled
Escape Velocity
The Ties That Bind
He That Believeth In Me & Six Of One

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BBC2 - 28th May 2008 - 9.00pm

"Hey you Whitehouse, ha ha, charade you are
You house proud town mouse, ha ha, charade you are
You're trying to keep our feelings off the street
You're nearly a real treat
All tight lips and cold feet
And do you feel abused?"

- Pink Floyd, Pigs (Three Different Ones), Animals, 1977

Andy DeEmmony's film is a curious beast. On the one hand it has two very sympathetic, central performances from Alun Armstrong and Julie Walters as Ernest and Mary Whitehouse; and Walters is particularly excellent; and on the other there's a sort of nudge, nudge, wink-wink, schoolboyish, ridicule running throughout the drama that fatally undermines any attempt at seriously examining why Whitehouse allowed her life to be dominated by her convictions. In the opening titles she's shown riding her bicycle through the village, grinning at her neighbours, who are quite obviously getting on with the permissive society that she eventually rails at, and then rides her bike through a lump of dog shit. All to a sort of farting. comedy music soundtrack from Nick Green and Tristin Norwell. The music is repeated endlessly throughout as a signifier that Whitehouse is some dotty old fruitcake who is best humoured for her antics. Her nemesis, Hugh Carleton Greene, the Director General of the BBC, played with great irritation by Hugh Bonneville, comes over as an utter buffoon and their on-going battle almost seems too bizarre to be considered as real even though the opening title card insists these are true events. Carleton Greene seems such a hideously, blinkered figure here that you're almost persuaded to see Whitehouse's point.

As Whitehouse journeys from God fearing school teacher to 'disgusted' of Tunbridge Wells the film is littered with an assortment of visual and verbal gags, half of which are genuinely funny and half of which seemed to have wandered in from a particularly bad Carry On script - phallic artworks produced by her pupils, the Clean Up National TV campaign acronym, the 'I'm the finger in the dyke' comment - that don't quite work as ironic references to the kind of stuff she would have been appalled at. It culminates in a very odd dream sequence where the sleazy Greene seduces Whitehouse, fondling her twin set and pearls avidly. Walters makes the TV clean up campaigner so appealingly funny that half the time you need to force yourself to remember that she was actually a religious, homophobic zealot who objected to Doctor Who, Pinky And Perky and counted the number of times 'bloody' was used in an episode of Till Death Us Do Part.

However, Alun Armstrong, as put upon Ernest, is the real emotional centre of the drama. When he drives over a suicide in the middle of the road, the sensitive core of the drama is opened up and you do genuinely feel for the plight of the man as he plunges into depression. You equally feel for the sanity of Whitehouse's children, well brought up young lads, who can't even begin to interact with the opposite sex as not just an effect of Mary's own rigid morals but also out of fear of letting the side down to the prowling media hounds. You feel none of this empathy for Carleton Greene, who's too busy sweatily lusting after his various secretaries, and to a degree for Whitehouse herself, who, as the film goes on, becomes more and more radicalised and fervent in her attempt to shut down the permissive society of the 1960s.

The problem of the film is that it skates light-heartedly over her arguments and the counter-arguments of her detractors. It would have been interesting to take the story into the 1970s and her infamous blasphemy case against Gay News and the later gross indecency case against Howard Brenton's play The Romans In Britain which she never actually saw and where the case failed because her one witness was watching the play from the back row of the theatre. There were many instances where she protested against films and programmes that she'd actually never seen. She was a canny media manipulator and yet despite her shortcomings she was instrumental in the creation of the Broadcasting Standards Council which provides the essential watershed ruling we have today in broadcasting. Yet, you wouldn't know this by watching this film.

Filth does indicate how narrow minded she was but it refuses to engage with the real debate about television and violence. Many argue whether she was indeed ultimately proved right wherein the so called broken society we see today is as a result partly of lax morals in the media. It is more content to depict her as a busy body oblivious to two men having sex in the park she walks through rather than get to the core of her arguments. This is briefly alluded to in one of the most impressive scenes as she and her friend organise the mass meeting at Birmingham Town Hall that would launch her campaign.

It's impressively acted and directed, is full of lovely period detail and some smashing archive television material, but it has a sniggering tone towards its central figure which is a natural trap that writer Amanda Coe should have avoided in favour of uncovering the 'real' Mary Whitehouse as opposed to the media version of her. Instead we're just given a Carry On version with some tantalising concessions to her real personna.

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Eeee....by gum. Do you remember the good old Public Information Films in the 1960s and 1970s? I've a moment to spare so here's a couple I've dredged up from You Tube.

Clunk-click. Every Trip

From The National Archives:

"The 'clunk-click' films, about the importance of wearing seatbelts, star Jimmy Savile, then a well-known Radio 1 DJ and Top of the Pops presenter. It uses shock tactics to show the public the potential danger they are in every day. The ‘Clunk click, every trip’ slogan became very well-known in the 1970s, and featured in further campaigns to persuade people to wear a seatbelt. It was 10 years after this film, however, that the law was changed to make the wearing of seat belts in the front seat compulsory. The slogan, was used until 1993."



Road Test Pedestrian

From Andrew Wiseman's 625 site:

"Frank Thornton, best known for his role as Captain Peacock in the BBC's "Are You Being Served?", with a cap on his head and a microphone in his hand, follows a hapless chap, played by Larry Martyn, around all day as if he were road-testing a car."



Enjoy!

Season 15

Horror Of Fang Rock

September 1977

‘That’s the empty rhetoric of a defeated dictator. And I don’t like your face, either.’

The first story transmitted under the producership of Graham Williams, Fang Rock is really atypical as an example of what he would end up doing with the format of the show. Strangely it’s a slight throwback to Hinchcliffe and it’s only as we progress through the rest of this season that we’ll get a feel for how he’s going to handle things from now on.

For me personally, at this point the show stopped being what is now called ‘appointment viewing’. I vaguely recall this story on transmission and the many that followed it but from 1977 through to 1980 I actually only watched the programme intermittently. I do recall feeling that ‘something’ had changed both in my attitude towards the programme and in the direction the show seemed to be going in. I had just turned 15 when this went out and perhaps it was that awkward teenage phase that both the series and me were going through that shifted my opinions at the time. However, some of the opinions still hold true so be prepared for a much bumpier ride during the Williams era.

So it’s almost business as usual here. A fog bound Edwardian setting, a ‘base under siege’ storyline and both the regulars still in place and more or less still at their peak. A Rutan scout crash lands in the sea and decides to terrorise the staff of the local lighthouse and the survivors of a shipwreck.

The production values are very good, despite received wisdom that Williams’ tenure as producer saw a rapid decline in an ability to get money up on screen. The interiors of the lighthouse are full of superb detail and are complimented with excellent period costumes and a sympathetic use of studio lighting. Basically, it’s the BBC doing what they do best with this sort of thing and this would be one of the last times we would get a period setting in a story until much later in the series history.

Performances across the board are pretty good, although there’s perhaps an element of exaggeration creeping into the acting that gives us a sign of what’s to come later with the Williams era where it’s clear that actors determined to take it seriously and deliver their roles with conviction are reduced to actors who go right over the top and back round the other side again cos it’s only a kiddies show and it’s meant to be a bit like panto, isn’t it? The worst offence here is to have a character like Adelaide just react to all the surrounding events by screaming and carrying on in a very unconvincing manner and letting the side down somewhat. It gets tiresome. There’s a gulf there between the character and how the actor is playing the role and they don’t quite meet in the middle.

One of the most noticeable things is the music. Dudley seems to be doing this on auto-pilot and it’s notable that the role of the music in supporting the drama changes over the next few years – less specific themes and more sketchy aural wallpaper - with only a few exceptions e.g. ‘City Of Death’. I don’t know if it’s me but I get the feeling that even here Williams seems to have started a slow process of leeching out the dramatic tension from the series. And the way music colours the drama seems to be the first of many casualties.

Like ‘The Thing From Another World’ the story is primarily about fear of possession and identity theft. It encompasses the typical tropes associated with possession such as hysteria, mania, psychosis, or dissociative identity disorder. You could also address the manner in which the human characters attempt to double-cross each other and their panic about this creeping possession as a collective hysteria where the true nature of the characters is revealed as the contagion of the Rutan spreads through the lighthouse.

There is also the tension between ‘the old ways’ and ‘modernism’ in the form of Reuben’s paen to the oil-fired lighthouses instead of new fangled electricity and the mythological resonance of the hidden depths of the surrounding ocean. The impact of industrialism on society is one of the themes of the story and it can’t quite decide if progress is a necessary evil or a blind alley. The boiler takes on an odd significance all the way through the narrative – is it symbolic of the price of progress as well as being an engine of possession and destruction that the Rutan cleverly exploits?

Again Leela’s character is continuing to be developed and Jameson still seems to be finding further mileage in her performance, particularly in the way she illustrates Leela’s lack of social etiquette and mangling of language - ‘Teshnician’. She is also a good counterpoint to the alleged refinement of the continually screaming and fainting Adelaide. Tom is on good form and his encounter with the Rutan on the staircase is the highlight here.

Overall then, it’s an exercise in minimalism and efficiency that strips away some of the Hinchcliffe excess even if the body count still remains high. As a season opener it’s modest and has perhaps been overlooked – at the time perhaps it was a case of audiences simply accepting the programme was still there, as reliable as ever. Turn the lights down, close the curtains and settle down with this now and you’ll find it’s a bit of a gem.

Notes on the DVD version: There's a rather good audio commentary with Louise Jameson, Terrance Dicks and John Abbott. This accompanies a tribute to Terrance Dicks, the writer, and short piece on director Paddy Russell. Both are fascinating tributes. Finally, one of the vignettes made for the 30th Anniversary transmission of 'Planet Of The Daleks' - The Antique Doctor Who Show' - is also included. Hats off again to those clever chaps at the Restoration Team for sprucing up the pictures and sound on the four episodes.

HORROR OF FANG ROCK Region 2 DVD (BBCDVD1356 Cert U)

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Manchester Library Theatre - 21st May 2008 - 7.30pm

'Rock' is about the creation of an icon. In the 1950s, Rock Hudson was top box office and had worked with legendary directors Douglas Sirk and George Stevens. But he lived a lie right up until his death from AIDS in 1985. It must be difficult to comprehend, in a way, how frustrated and frightened gay actors were in such conservative times. If the tabloids got hold of your story you were, essentially, finished. It's ironic that even in our media saturated culture today there are big box office names living their gay lives behind a veil of security for fear of losing their careers. Hollywood homophobia still exists and big box office names still lead double lives despite a liberal Western culture where same-sex marriage is now legal, even as recently in good ol' California.

In Tim Fountain's play we are shown how, at the hands of agent Henry Willson, plain old, sqeaky voiced, slightly effeminate Roy Fitzgerald, is transformed into that bastion of male heterosexuality, Rock Hudson. It's an interesting process, with Fountain suggesting an inheritance of enacted masculinity either from a troubled and abusive relationship with his stepfather or the Depression era abandonment by his natural father. And I thought it was over sensitive mothers that turned fragile little boys into great big pooftahs. Fountain's script is superb, full of witty one-liners and knowing asides to Rock's eventual place in gay cultural history. When Henry first takes Rock out into Hollywood nightlife the reaction is electric. The phone is ringing off the hook and as Willson paraphrases "that's the sound of middle aged homosexuals busting their balls, and middle aged women will be right behind them" on the effect the big hunk, with the bassoon-like voice, has, and will eventually, have on an audience.

The play charts the way Willson then busts his own balls making Hudson into a Hollywood mega-star whilst also frantically covering up all traces of Hudson's homosexuality by making him date Vera Ellen and various other actresses. This eventually leads to a disastrous marriage to Willson's secretary, Phyllis Gates. This strain on Hudson's personal life takes its toll and in the second half of the play we see Willson spiral into drunken oblivion as his own personal life interferes with his business as an agent and Rock walks out on him.

The play is a two hander between Bette ('National Treasure') Bourne, as Willson, and Michael Xavier as Hudson. The drama is confined to Willson's office, from Roy Fitzgerald's original meeting through to Willson's self destruction in the 1970s. Whilst the script is tight and economic, the performances, although good, perhaps were rather uneven. Bourne, a consumate player, seemed to struggle with his lines and I did wonder where Willson's own ill health began and Bourne's finished? If he wasn't poorly then Bette was giving a supreme demonstration of how to act it! That aside, Bourne and Xavier were very credible. One highlight is the bizarre sight of Bourne spraying Xavier with gold paint to turn him into an Oscar - a stunt that Willson made Hudson undertake for an Oscar party. Bourne was affecting in his portrayal of the irascible agent, especially as the character spiralled into drunken bitterness. Xavier pretty much pulled off an impossible task - how to even begin to portray such a recognisable figure as Hudson - and subtly showed the transformation from nervous, geeky boy into confident, but frustratingly closeted, Hollywood icon.

The play does throw up a plethora of questions. A comment overheard in the interval, "Bette Bourne? But there aren't any women in it?", seemed to sum up, for me, the 'hot potato' questions of our times - what is gay culture, who is it for and is it relevant any more? In this age of media saturation, a quick Google, by any gay cultural ingenue proposing to see the play, will tell you all you need to know, to an extent, about Bette and Rock. Fine, but if you can't even be bothered to do that then what is the appeal of a play about Rock Hudson to your average shopping, fucking, clubbing 18 year old gay boi. It did amuse me that even the cultural reference to 'McMillan And Wife' might simply go over the heads of the...er...younger members of the audience where for us sad old gits it's the ultimate symbol of Hudson's further capitulation to the closet. Is it just a question, today, of 'Rock Hudson was this really famous actor, who, like, y'know died of AIDS and it was really tragic, yeah?" Or perhaps it says more about me? I've no idea what goes on in the mind of a gay 18 year old male these days. What are his cultural touchstones? Would I understand them? Is there any need for them? Would any 18 year old listen to me droning on about the gay sub-texts of Sirk's 'Magnificent Obsession' (the storyline of which is hilariously lampooned by Henry Willson in the play) or my personal favourite, 'All That Heaven Allows'. Probably not and it's sad to think that this play may suffer because of this limitation wherein Britney Spears latest fuck-up and having an STD as a badge of pride is perhaps all that matters.

Rant over. It's a play with potential and I hope it finds an appreciative audience because, beyond its themes of Hollywood gay repression, it does touch on relevant issues in the 21st Century - what is gay identity and how is it constructed - that will surely find some sympathy with those who have struggled, and are still struggling, to come out of the closet, whatever their age.

'Rock' is just one of the many exciting events in Queer Up North , Europe’s most ambitious queer festival.

And here's Bette talking about his career, courtesy of Homotopia:


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(That's the last time I go for a Galactica beauty treatment!)


SkyHD - 20th May 2008 - 9.00pm

Probably the best episode so far this season with a healthy mix of full-on CGI space action, character development, twists and turns and a stonkingly good cliffhanger. It's building nicely to a big pay-off.

The 'captured' base star jumps on top of the fleet, Adama and Tigh virtually crap themselves and go to battle alert. The fleet starts to jump, Vipers are launched...it's all getting tense with frantic cross-cutting between stern faces and dazzling visual effects sequences. Then Tigh goes all mystical with a far away look in his good eye. If that eye gets any wider it'll pop out of its socket! He persuades Adama not to fire and then the Demetrius jumps in...just in the proverbial, if slightly predictable, nick of time.

As an uneasy truce develops, Natalie is brought before the head of the fleet and Roslin to explain herself and her rebels. The alliance rests now on a plan to blow up the resurrection hub, unbox D'Anna (told you they'd go back for her and all), reveal the Final Five and find Earth. So far so good. But then both sides get very twitchy and if you can keep abreast of all the double-crosses each side plans against each other without your head hurting...well...you're a better man than I. Still, it's all hushed conversations in little rooms, raising the tension to breaking point as the episode rumbles on.

Meanwhile, Gaeta breaks into song after having that leg off. I told you he would lose his leg, didn't I? But does he have to break into a range of miserable show tunes as a result? There's a scene where Roslin, undergoing her chemo, is trying to talk to Lee Apollo about the shared dreams, and all you can hear is bloody Gaeta moaning on in the background! For half a mo, I thought Roslin was about to shout, 'Shut yer fuckin' Gaeta!'. Well, it was either her or me. But, if you can bear to listen to the songs, doesn't the melody sound familiar? Is it the same tune that switched on four of the Final Five? Is Gaeta the 'Jake The Peg' of the Final Five? Something's up.

Roslin is on super form this week. She bitch-slaps Tory good and proper in a brilliant exchange of oneup(wo)manship were she sucker punches the nasty Cylon slut by revealing that she knows she's been shagging Baltar and gossing to him about her 'visions'. Tory's gonna getcha Roslin, and a stand-off in an airlock can't be that far away now. And the Roslin wig and scarf quotient goes up again this week as she sports several variations of head gear to support her 'bulldog chewing a wasp' expression. She finally calls the shots on both Baltar and cocky Apollo by addressing the quorum and telling them the plan to cooperate with the Cylons and then, later, getting Baltar in a Viper and dragging him to the base star. She's been having visions again - the opera house, Hera, Caprica Six and...dun...dun...der...Baltar.

As this lean, powerfully directed episode, races to its conclusion we have a double whammy in store for us. As Roslin, Athena and Six share a dream in which they see the opera house where Six and Baltar take Hera away, Hera wakes her mummy up and says 'Goodbye'. Well, that's enough to freak out Athena, especially after discovering that Hera, Jack Torrance like, has been drawing Six over and over again in her colouring book. All work and no play makes Hera a dull girl. Suffice it to say, Athena has to run after Hera, bumps into Natalie who is craddling her in the corridor...'goodbye' Natalie. Oh, dear.

Meanwhile, Roslin hauls Baltar to the base star to go and wake up the hybrid (or Bathing Beauty as we know and love her) to finally get some answers! Baltar is shocked by Roslin's awareness of his role in the dreams because, afterall, he'd only just accused her of the sharing visions with the Cylons malarkey based on Tory's gossip. Anyway, the Bathing Beauty, wearing another shower cap (bought from the same shop that Roslin must buy her wigs and scarves), is plugged in. And she screams 'Jump'. Oh, dear. The base star vanishes. Dun...den...der! One of those great 'Battlestar' conclusions that leave you screaming at the screen for more. Great fun.

Previous reviews:
Faith
The Road Less Traveled
Escape Velocity
The Ties That Bind
He That Believeth In Me & Six Of One

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From the writer Amanda Coe, this forthcoming BBC drama deals with the clash of swords between progressive BBC Director General, Hugh Carleton-Greene and that embodiment of the moral majority, Mary Whitehouse. Julie ('National Treasure') Walters stars as Mrs. Whitehouse and the brilliant Hugh Bonneville takes on the role of Greene. Tune your telly boxes to BBC2 Wednesday 28th May, 9.00pm for this treat. It's a Wall To Wall production for the BBC.

Link to Wall To Wall website here, where you can see a clip (it even features the titles to Doctor Who!): Wall To Wall

CRT has managed to dredge up this preview clip from the Tube Of You, thanks to GMoney10111.



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For those who enjoyed the country house romp of 'The Unicorn And The Wasp' and perhaps fancied a much gayer version of those riotous detective fiction conventions then please grab yourself a copy of James Lear's witty, and rather filthy, take on the class divide in an isolated country pile. The punning title says it all as it is not only a nod to the kind of sexual activity you'll find some of the characters indulging in but also the labyrinth of secret doors and tunnels that run through the Eagle's Norfolk residence and their part to play in Bostonian Mitch Mitchell's detecting of the crime.

It gets off to a saucy start with a game of sardines in Sir James Eagle's Drekeham Manor and whilst Mitch gets down and dirty with his best friend Harry 'Boy' Morgan as they hide in a cupboard there is murder, blackmail and conspiracy afoot. It clearly signals the claustrophobic, feverish nature of the sexual encounters to come whilst also subverting the detective fiction tropes. The sex, whilst graphic, is integrated well into the overall plot and it occurs whilst Mitch is trying his best to solve the mystery of Reg Walworth's death. Mitch has long been coveting Boy Morgan and it's as much a book about his developing crime fighting, and sexual, partnership with the younger man as it is about the seedy underbelly of English upper class foibles. It's also a first person narrative so you often get some very hilarious thoughts of the main character in response to some of the things other characters are saying and doing to him and to each other.

As Mitch investigates, his encounters take in Sir James’s gay brother, a local reporter, a police constable, the servants and Sir James’s secretary. The seduction of PC Shipton in the local constabulary's toilets is probably one of the most effective pieces of erotic gay fiction I've read. It combines uniform fetish, a hint of watersports, as well as, in Lear's succinct prose, the two characters recognising 'we had crossed the Rubicon between 'fooling around' and 'having sex''. There's an equally lascivious bit of voyeurism described later in the book where Mitch and Morgan observe the gardener and the stable boy 'in flagrante delicto'. His description of the gardener is really rather lovely. Lear uses words like 'nacreous' and 'glabrous' so whilst you thrill to the hotness of the sexual congress in his tale you can at least confirm you're getting an English education. Mitch also observes the servants own same-sex indulgencies and he comes into contact with a very brutish policeman with a penchant for some dubious S&M fantasies. All in all, it peels back a layer of 1920s English reserve and describes an alternate, gay-themed, reality.

What is great about the book is that the male to male sexual relationships are played out without guilt and they are depicted as natural events of male day to day existence and often with great wit and imagination. It's a fantasy of course and character development is not at the top of the agenda here even though Mitch and Morgan are very likeable detectives. It does transplant much of our 21st Century mores into a 1925 setting so there is a great deal of licence taken and with Lear's tongue firmly in cheek (whose cheek?). Despite the graphic sex, you do care about the plot and solving the mystery which makes the reading of this that much more enjoyable. The epilogue suggests that the dream team of Mitch and Morgan does not continue beyond this book which I found a bit of an anti-climax. I'm glad a sequel is on the way but will it include the lovely 'Boy' Morgan?

The Back Passage - James Lear (Cleis Press, May 2006, ISBN-13: 9781573442435)

There's a nice piece (pardon the pun) about James Lear/Rupert Smith here: The Independent

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BBC1 - 17th May 2008 - 7.00pm

Most people get quite uncomfortable when you ask to talk to them about class. After all, isn't class something you don't dare mention any more for fear of disturbing those long dissipated distinctions, the superiority and inferiority, between different social stratas? One of the strongest aspects of the parodic nature of The Unicorn And The Wasp is the way it subverts, in that wonderfully Doctor Who/British way, the cliched image of the English country house bourgeoisie and their proletariat neighbours and servants. Donna's 'flapper or slapper?' enquiry pretty much indicates that this is Gosford Park with jokes.

Some rather laboured and interminable Agatha Christie in-jokes aside, Gareth Roberts layered script has allusions to, not only Felicity Kendall's own Indian upbringing and early career, but also to taboo-busting, inter-species sexual trysts between a big alien wasp and a young English woman, vicars who happen to be hybrids born out of wedlock admonishing punishment to church vandals, gay sons blatantly knocking off the younger male servants, and a Mockney jewel thief jumping the class divide by strangling her received pronunciation. Posh people's repression and umpteen skeletons in a vast country house, full of closets, with knobs on, then, as each of the Christie inspired characters turns on the victim/murderer and posh/commoner axes to avoid being revealed for what they essentially are. The gay couple who are closeted, the deb who can't reveal she's a vowel crunching jewel thief, the chair bound Colonel who can really walk and enjoys a bit of porn, Lady Eddison who had a child out of wedlock and finally Agatha Christie herself, running away from the fact that her husband is having an affair with another woman. It is ironic that at the conclusion of the episode the Doctor is sure that the events at the dinner party will never come to light because no one will actually want their true misdemeanours revealed.

A quick word about the gay characters (stereotypes would be more appropriate, even?) as their inclusion will obviously get steam issuing out of the ears of certain fans. Look, it's a series executive produced by a gay man and written, in the main, by gay men. This sort of thing is bound to happen. And besides, it's a further, observational in-joke about the modern media's response to Christie's works, as they are endlessly reinterpreted by cinema and television. The film version of Evil Under The Sun is one of the gayest film experiences I can think of and the recent ITV Miss Marple plays the same game of shifting the Christie conventions. You could even interpret the story as anti-gay, if you so desired, as it kills off one gay character and then denies his lover the right to mourn, in much the same way so many films and television programmes have done so in the past and continue to do so in the present. No doubt some moaning minnie will say that it's not an accurate portrayal of gay men of the time and they wouldn't have openly flirted in such a way. The 1920s were actually very liberal times and gay night clubs and openly homosexual actors were part and parcel of urbanised society, so the Colonel's acknowledgement of his son's sexuality isn't as far fetched as it seems. Suffice it to say, the 'gay agenda' (as it is commonly known) does pale beside a vicar turning into a fucking great wasp from the result of a union between a woman and insect. It makes the sexual innuendo between two male characters seem charmingly normal, even more so in Roger Curbishley's flashback which does flag up the closeted nature of the affair whilst also cleverly celebrating it as perhaps the most normal relationship in the entire episode. And, yeah, I'm capable of laughing at the 'ginger beer' joke too, which more than indicates this is supposed to be fun rather than a dreary social commentary on gay repression in the 1920s.

Gareth Roberts script plugs into all the wit and satire of his previous novels, particularly The English Way Of Death , and almost succeeds for the first half an hour to poke enormous fun at the detective fiction genre, fulfilling most of our expectations whilst turning some of those genre cliches inside out. An episode that's an homage to Christie gets very meta-textual when it posits the alien threat to the landed gentry, in carrying out its machinations, as its own homage to Christie's novels. It's a neat, funny idea, as is the sublime use of flashbacks where recollections, especially those of the Colonel, have sub-recollections of their own. He recounts his movements of the day, in the obligatory 'detective questions suspects' scene, but he then hilariously wanders off into a wet dream about can-can girls. Even the Doctor succumbs to a little reminiscence about an encounter with Charlemagne and a computer. Complete with wobbly dissolves and ubiquitous harp glissando, these flashbacks, the spinning newspapers, the nods to Cluedo (“Professor Peach? In the library? With the lead piping?”), are all part of the genre dressing and dissing that accompanies this kind of period drama done Doctor Who style.

Where it goes somewhat astray is in the obvious recycling of certain elements from The Shakespeare Code and Tooth And Claw where we have the shameless but irritating naming of as many Christie books as possible and Donna inspiring the creation of Miss Marple and Murder On The Orient Express. These are simply a re-hash of the equally self-indulgent throwaway Shakespeare quotes from last year. The Doctor's wonderment at the Vespiform is also too similar to his reaction to the werewolf but I'm prepared to forgive Roberts that one over the re-use of the Doctor's admonishments to Donna's embarassing attempt to go all 'received pronunciation' on the lawn.

After half an hour of parody and pastiche, expertly played and delivered it has to be said, it all comes crashing to a halt with the lightning flooded dinner scene, which resembles something out of Neil Simon's Murder By Death (perhaps more influential on this episode than even Gosford Park). The unveiling of the vicar as the culprit goes on rather too long, despite the lovely joke of the 'innocent' Colonel standing up to be counted when he should be sitting. It does unravel further with the then rushed conclusion, complete with a huge info dump, as Lady Eddison is reunited with her long lost son who then promptly turns into a wasp and chases after Christie who has in the meantime sussed out his link with the firestone gem. Donna spends the entire scene as if she's playing Cluedo very badly and the script rather overplays her supposedly funny interruptions as each suspect is interrogated. The rather clunky explanation for the Vespiform's obsession with the Christie books is a bit wince inducing at this point and the motorcar chase, going all of 10 miles per hour, isn't exactly The Sweeney and doesn't quite come off. It's then all rather hurriedly and again, clumsily, resolved by Christie chucking the gem into a lake, drowning the Vespiform and then conveniently losing her memory so that the episode can tie in with her real-life disappearance. It does strain the episode to breaking point to try and use all those elements and properly resolve the mystery. The best that can be said is that as a whole it is all very self-contained and therefore the plot isn't actually a great deal of importance here. It is simply an exercise to provide a Doctor Who explanation for Agatha's amnesia whilst, for the most part, successfully taking the piss out of the conventions of the genre.

Fenella Woolgar pretty much steals the episode with her fragile little turn as Agatha and she's got a great supporting cast too, especially in Felicity Kendall and the slightly underused Christopher Benjamin. Catherine Tate, Tom Goodman-Hill and Felicity Jones are perhaps the only ones here who get a bit of finger wagging for their off kilter performances. Goodman-Hill threatens to break into a a full rendition of Wire's I Am The Fly in his transformation sequences (or is that an homage to Timothy West in Anglia's low-rent version of Dahl's Royal Jelly ?) whilst Jones' Mockney 'it's a fair cop' moment probably means she couldn't be Nancy if she tried. Tate, meanwhile, is for the most part extremely funny and clearly shows what an asset to the show she is, but as this is one of the first episodes to be made she does tend to veer off into sounding too much like her comedy characters in some scenes. Her performance is over-heated at times but I'd put that pretty much down to enthusiasm and finding her feet. However, her leading man is both irritating - the long drawn out meeting with Agatha on the lawn punctuated by those now over-familiar, and continual, withdrawals of 'well...' after each faux compliment is dragged out again - and yet wonderful - the Give Us A Clue double act between him and Tate as she tries to help counteract the poisoning is another superb example of the comic repartee between the two actors that was established so well in Partners In Crime.

The Mill's box of tricks embellishes the proceedings with a smashingly effective CGI giant wasp and we have a lovely matte painting to support Lady Eddison's reverie about India that is simply the visual icing on the cake. Graeme Harper is right on the game until that last ten minutes where his editing and directing doesn't help to oil the grinding wheels of so much endless exposition and so little action. The car chase, as indicated earlier, is a bit perfunctory and not up to the strengths he obviously displays in the first 30 minutes where his Robert Altman meets English farce notion display his control of the actors and his panache with visuals and camera moves. In fact, I'd go as far to say that as a 'celebrity historical' this really didn't need the conventional Doctor Who alien thrills and spills to dovetail the delightfully, riotous mix of Christie's life and fiction with the upending of detective genre tropes. The Doctor Who bits tend to get in the way and it would be satisfying if just once this kind of story was simply about the historical events and the people affected by them without recourse to SF conceits like giant wasps, Carrionites and Gelth.

Now, excuse me. After such an entertaining episode, I'm off to the Ambassador's reception.

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Previous reviews:
The Doctor's Daughter
The Poison Sky
The Sontaran Stratagem
The Planet Of The Ood
The Fires Of Pompeii
Partners In Crime

This has just appeared on You Tube (thanks, YT) and is probably our first look at the long gestating US version of the iconic Matthew Graham, Ashley Pharoah, Tony Jordan creation, 'Life On Mars'. I have a feeling that it will be quite different in style when it gets going - the 1970s were a bit more extreme in the States than they were here, for starters - and it'll be interesting to see how this spins out. ABC will broadcast the show and it's a co-production with original UK producers, Kudos. Irish actor Jason O’Mara is playing Sam Tyler, whilst Colm Meaney takes on that edifice of 70s masculinity that is Gene Hunt.

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The Talons Of Weng Chiang

February – April 1977

‘Oooohhh, you wouldn’t serve ‘at wiv onions. Make an ‘orse sick ‘at would’

Patsy Smart, credited as The Ghoul, sans false teeth, with wide eyes and hair wild is one stereotype amongst a huge swathe of the buggers that populate ‘Talons’. It is Hinchcliffe and Holmes ‘Victoriana on Acid’ and the kitchen sink all thrown in at once and stirred very adroitly.

Let’s just get one thing out of the way before I start. You know what I’m going to say, don’t you. It’s a fan cliché. But it needs to be said.

That rat.

It’s seriously crap, isn’t it? To our jaded 21st century eyes it’s supposedly the one element that slightly lets the story down. A collective groan echoed round the room when I last watched this with the other half because we both knew ‘it’ was about to appear. Back in 1977, I wasn’t convinced either so I’m not going to use the excuse that audiences watched things differently in 1977 and therefore overcame problems like this with ease. They didn’t. I was there. I remember. It was crap then.

So, rat not withstanding, what have we got here? A kaleidoscopic magical mystery tour through the Victorian London of our dreams. And our survey said…eee-uuurr…fog…music halls…'Phantom Of The Opera'…'Fu Manchu'…'Jack The Ripper'…'Sherlock'…It’s not meant to be an accurate period drama rather it’s our mind’s eye version of fog-enshrouded London and criticisms ranging from problems about various ethnic stereotypes or that Holmes (Sherlock not Bob...Bob may have worn one!) never wore a deerstalker and such like can be dampened by pointing out that the whole package is one huge stereotype of Gothic Victoriana with knobs on. Yes, I agree that the Chinese stereotyping would just never happen now and is often wincingly thrown into the mix but then you’ve got a 51st century war criminal kidnapping young girls and er…draining them…of their essences. The Butcher Of Bribane has come to town. Serial killers at 6.30 on a Saturday night.

It’s a bit long and awfully padded in the last two episodes but there are so many little moments, almost a greatest hits package that could be used as an accusation the series was being lazy, but this bowls along in such a fun way that you can compensate with that. It looks ravishing, with gorgeous studio interiors and atmospheric location filming, and the OB work at an actual theatre lends a wonderful verisimilitude to the proceedings. All with lovely Expressionist shadow and light. Really, it’s too much and shouldn’t work but David Maloney manages to marshal it all and holds it together with verve. A template for how to make a perfect Doctor Who serial? No, I wouldn't go as far as that as it isn't a terribly original plot and only gets by on sheer chutzpah.

Thematically, let's have a dig around. Greel is the ultimate victim of both physical and psychosomatic illness. His emotional needs are rigourously expressed through his crumbling body and disfigurement. His body image is a symbol of the self-awareness of a damaged Ego. He is the epitome of a failed being trying desperately to un-make himself. He is obsessed by the Zigma experiments and thinks they succeeded and the frustration of knowing that they didn’t really work is what he is all about. His corrupted body also renders him impotent and his kidnapping of sexually available women is subconsciously compensating for this frustration as well his attempt to get to the source, or womb, of creation to cure his condition..

He is also a trickster figure, a supposed former God, representing older and darker layers of the mind and his acolyte Chang is literally a trickster/magician who deals with illusions. Chang is a figure in flux, worshipful and honourable to his master Greel because he has been given power, but also full of his own illusions at the end and again with this delusion comes actual physical disintegration from the rat attack

One can also see the plot as a series of thresholds that open onto both the conscious and unconscious realms and the inner and outer worlds. There is the threshold of time – Victorian England and the 51st Century – symbolised by the time cabinet where the unconscious future has poured into the conscious present. There is the front door of Litefoot's house and the outside world - cosy, civilised Victoriana contrasting with the 'savage' Tong Of The Black Scorpion. There is the threshold between the front of house of the theatre and Greel’s lair – one is about make-belief and play and the other is the repressed, dark underworld of Greel’s mind. Greel could also be akin to Janus, the double headed God, a gatekeeper looking forward and back into time and into the conscious and unconscious realms.

Mr. Sin, with the cerebral cortex of a pig, aka the Peking Homonculus, represents the nadir/threshold of future science. This is a science which is more like alchemy where again we see the repeated pattern of Greel’s desire for transformation, to force the essence of life to appear. Science flying too high and too far ahead and then collapsing to form the damaged creatures we see in Sin and Greel. You could also link these thresholds to each of the double acts in the story.

The whole thing is populated by sweet character portraits, ranging from Patsy’s Ghoul and Sgt. Kyle at the station through to the major double acts: the Doctor and Leela, Litefoot and Jago, Greel and Chang. And the double acts drive the whole thing as they interchange throughout the story. John Bennett is very good as Chang and his downfall and subsequent death in the opium den has a strange dignity to it that actually makes you reconsider the character and his morals. Greel really is a product of the 51st Century and you get a vivid sense of what happened at Rekyavik and with the Zigma experiments. Again more of that crucial world building that characterises this season. Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter seem to be utterly in their element and it is a shame that the once rumoured spin-off never materialised as they both nail the Holmesian (in both senses) quintessence of the script. Actually Benjamin is more Dickensian really – ‘I can see it now…come and see the phantom’s lair. Bob a nob.’

Finally, Tom and Louise really hit the heights here. Louise is particularly good, probably the best ever, as Leela. The Eliza Doolittle connection comes to its fruition here and she is actively part of the plot, trading insults with Greel (‘bent face’) as she goes. We have seen her grow as a character and the series is made so much more gratifying for that attention to this development

The season ends here as does Hinchcliffe’s tenure on the show. It’s a remarkable tenure too with many landmark stories to his credit with a push to make the programme more adult and to put as much of the money up on screen that caused more trouble than it was worth. The repercussions were felt for many years. One wonders just how much further he would have gone with the series had he stayed on.

So let’s at least toast the end of this era with a hot buttered muffin from the muffin man.

A quick word about the DVD edition: An essential purchase as it contains loads of extras including a commentary by Louise Jameson, Philip Hinchcliffe, David Maloney, John Bennett And Christopher Benjamin (sadly, Maloney and Bennett have since passed away), an archive 1977 documentary "Whose Doctor Who", Blue Peter clips, Behind The Scenes/Studio Footage, Philip Hinchcliffe interview from a 1977 edition of Pebble Mill, trailers and continuity plus all the episodes restored by the Restoration Team.

THE TALONS OF WENG CHIANG Region 2 DVD (BBCDVD1152 Cert PG)

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(Warning: This woman is crazy!)

SkyHD - 13th May 2008 - 9.00pm

At last! A decent episode that moves the plot along. We jump straight back into the tense face-off to last week's conclusion. Helo tries to arrest Kara (and if his square jaw juts out any further he'll have someone's eye out)and Anders shoots Gaeta in the leg to stop him from jumping back to the fleet. Poor old Gaeta. He's become the Galactica punch bag of late. He doesn't look in particularly good shape and I'll beastonished if he gets back to Galactica alive and even if he does that leg's coming off! Perhaps it's a sign that the writers had run out of things to do with him and then decided he should lose a limb!

After the storm, a bit of calm. Kara, Athena, Anders and some woman we haven't seen very much of (thus indicating her impending demise) toddle off in a Raptor to find the base star as indicated by Leoben. Helo gets a bit teary eyed, bless him, as he stays behind with Demetrius to await their return and waves Athena off. Some superb effects of demolished base stars greet us as Kara and Co. end their search. There's a creepy scene where Athena is greeted by multiple Sharon models who then ask her to mutiny against the Sixes. I love the fact that she basically tells them to grow up and make a choice - to stick with the Cylon rebels or to piss off back to Cavill. I bet that'll come back and bite her in the bum.

Before long, the Cylons and the Raptor crew are bitching at each other tooth and nail. It's a superb scene that demonstrates the fragile trust between them now that they find that they're actually on the same side. One of the Sixes goes for our woman crew member (Barolay I think she's called) and kills her in a fit of revenge for killing an earlier model on Caprica. These Cylons have got bloody good memories because I can't recall if we even saw that on screen. Anders holds a gun to the Six model and her duplicate, Natalie knows that she can't allow revenge to jeopardise the fragile alliance and basically forces Anders to shoot. It's a very tense scene, brilliantly played and superbly shot and edited. And the big woman-on-woman snog between Six and Natalie will no doubt keep the male fans happy (and probably some female fans too, I should think) and inspire much slash fiction.

Kara has in the meantime had a little orgasm over the fact that one of her paintings has come true (and there's a quick dissolve between the painting and the view outside the Raptor just to remind us. Pay attention at the back!) and honestly believes that she's on the right track. She eventually meets the Hybrid but can't get any sense out of the babbling bathing beauty and petulantly orders her disconnection much to the chagrin of a Cylon Centurion. However, as the Hybrid powers down, she does spill the beans about opera houses, the missing three who will identify the Final Five and bitch-slap Kara with the whole 'you're going to lead them to their end' stuff that's been rattling around in the series since 'Razor'.

So, with the 'missing three' getting a mention will we get some more lovely cameos from Lucy Lawless as D'Anna? I hope so. She's a great character. Whilst all this is going on there are some subtle little moments from Anders who tries to test his Cylon abilities by dipping into the organic computer interfaces on the ship. Poor old Anders - he doesn't know how to feel about being aboard the Cylon ship. And then there's that later bit, after one of the Sharon models gets shot by the Centurion, where he sympathetically holds her hand as she dies. It moves the character along subtly and one wonders how he will react when all is finally revealed. Will he react as harshly as some of the Final Five or will he go into denial?

And just in the cliched nick of time the Raptor makes the rendezvous with the Demetrius. It was a bit of a foregone conclusion that, wasn't it? Nice homage to that similar visual effects triumph of the Klingon battleship decloaking in 'Wrath Of Khan' with the base star jumping right on top of the Demetrius.

Back on Galactica, Roslin, undergoing treatment for her cancer and wearing, first a fetching bald cap, and then a swish line in head scarves, meets a dying cancer patient in the same ward. It is good that they contrasted the 'sturm and drang' of the events on the base star with this quieter, more reflective sub-plot. Essentially, it's all about Roslin confronting her mortality, her impending death and realising she isn't quite ready to succumb to it just yet. Mary McDonnell and Nana Visitor play out these scenes superbly and McDonnell wrings every last acting ounce out of the recollections of Roslin's mother. The coda to these scenes, with the death of Visitor's character, indicated that Roslin was beginning to understand the Baltar radio broadcasts and had a new understanding of the afterlife. Her last scene with Adama confirmed this and his own belief that because of her they'll find Earth. A heart-warming note to finish on.

Previous reviews:
The Road Less Traveled
Escape Velocity
The Ties That Bind
He That Believeth In Me & Six Of One

BBC1 - 10th May 2008 - 6.45pm

Mischief, I tell you, mischief. The Doctor’s Daughter is nothing more than an exercise in audience manipulation. Since the title of the episode was announced many of us have been getting our knickers in a twist over the how, why and wherefore of said relative's relationship to the Doctor. Extravagant theories about her being Susan’s mother through to aliens extracting DNA from the bubbling hand have littered cyberspace over the last few weeks. Much hand-wringing later, about whether this really would be the canon buster it threatened to be, and writer Greenhorn cheekily, but timidly, avoids this can of worms even before the titles start to roll.

I don’t know whether to applaud him and Rusty for their flippancy or whether to damn them both for climbing down from actually dealing with such a potentially divisive idea. It’s certainly a naughty con calculated to extract the maximum response from an audience without actually putting in the necessary graft to achieve it. And if you are going to pull a trick like this then you'd better have something magnificent waiting in the wings to satisfy audience expectation. Jenny Who emerges from a giant photocopier, swathed in dry ice, fully clothed, with immaculate make up, and one half of fandom sighs with relief that she’s only a ‘clone’ after all, whilst the other half smashes its television sets in a fit of peak because Susan doesn't get a look in and the idea is simply a moribund conceit adorned with a very big set of inverted commas.

I have to admit that I’m teetering into the latter camp and, as any fully paid up ming-mong secretly wishes, had hoped that Greenhorn would go all out and twist the received wisdom of the series out of shape, as far as the Doctor’s family is concerned, and give us something genuinely surprising to get our teeth into. The only surprise, and disappointment for me, is that he didn’t. In the end, he simply road-tested that other canon-strangling concept – the female Doctor – but could only manage to set that up that with a series of rather predictable plot turns and the words ‘spin off series’ or ‘Jenny Who will return to CBBC’ written all over them.

Post titles, post missed opportunity then, the tendency here would be to disinherit Jenny as just another feisty, blonde, Buffy-esque poppet who sommersaults Mission Impossible style through laser beams, and on the surface you could be forgiven for easily assuming that position. However, Georgia Moffett’s rather likeable performance, full of naive charm, does make much out of, what appears to be, a pretty thankless task on paper. The obvious problem here is that there simply isn’t enough time to develop Jenny’s character and I felt that, despite best efforts, I didn’t know or care about her well enough to justify blubbing over the cynical and manipulative inevitability of her ‘death’. As soon as there is mention of her joining the TARDIS crew you know full well that she’s a marked woman and will serve out the rest of the episode with an early death accompanied with much, equally inevitable, wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Doctor. But this episode also wants to have its cake and eat it and thus the double cheat then comes with her post-death Wrath Of Khan revival (‘Hello boys’ she purrs, in a way that would befit a bra commercial), and her strapping herself, butchly, into a spaceship and careering (in indeed as a ‘career’) off into space as the embodiment of the female Doctor concept that’s been gnawing away at the balls of the series since John Nathan-Turner’s own bit of bluffing in the early 1980s. Like father, like parthenogenic offspring, then. God, it’s that obvious even her bloody spaceship has roundels on the walls.

What saves this from being the disowned child that it rightly deserves to be are the three central performances from Tennant, Tate and Agyeman that make up the filling in this predictable sandwich. Tennant is actually given an opportunity to offer a decent performance, seemingly going through the emotions rather than just the motions, even though it is by default of Jenny’s existence in the episode, and he’s truly great in his scenes with Tate mournfully discussing the Time War and the loss of his family. He’s tender and hurting, in a rare glimpse into the Doctor’s inner turmoil, and he makes a virtue out of the Doctor and Jenny’s innocence and experience parable. Tate is also the perfect foil, with Donna questioning the Doctor’s denial of his offspring, and she manages to get him to see that he truly is a reflection of Jenny, that he should be an example to her of his morals and beliefs, that he is, and she potentially could be, both pacifist and warrior. An utterly contrived riff on Pinocchio, of course, with Tennant as Geppeto, Tate as Jiminy Cricket and Moffett as said poppet/puppet but at least it's redeemed by the good performances and characterisation.

Meanwhile, by separating Martha from the central plot, and using her as parallel variation on the theme of being the Doctor, as well as a Doctor, complete with Hath companion, the episode at least gets to the point about why Martha has given up traveling with the Doctor. She can’t stand the pain anymore judging by the primal screams she utters as her Hath buddy drowns on the desolate surface of the planet. Agyeman at last gets to demonstrate why she’s been brought back to the series and delivers a raw, emotional performance which more than makes up for the disappointment of the last two weeks. Yet, I still don’t understand why a gilled, fish creature would actually drown but it is perhaps better to let it serve the emotional power of the scene rather than suggest it be a slave to logic.

Again, the episode looks good even if it clearly hasn’t had the biggest budget of the series with the surface of Messaline deftly sketched in with some moody looking CGI as the icing on the cake. There is a lot of running around in corridors but then the script charmingly takes a witty pot shot at this aspect of the series’ limitations anyway. The supporting players are rather bland and forgettable and why is the usually marvellous Nigel Terry playing Cobb with a Devonshire accent? He seems to think he’s still in Excalibur by the sound of it. Strangely, it is very distracting and undermines Cobb's gravitas as a character. Joe Dempsie does his best with the character of Cline but I’ve no sympathy for anyone who falls for the ‘seduction of the guard’ cliché. The Hath are interesting creatures, eventually portrayed as victims rather than out and out monsters, but the prosthetics aren't as convincing as they should be and there is little time to explore their origins or motivations.

Despite the prick-teasing of the episode title and Moffett’s charms, and whilst the rolling plot is gathering no moss, there is a discussion nagging on at the edges of the episode about fundamentalist creationism versus evolutionary science where the Source, a piece of hi-tech terraforming equipment, has become a mythical God like symbol, and where possession of it has, to both the humans and the Hath, become just an opportunity to prove that might is right. The Doctor, as a literal father figure, in probably the best scene in the episode, underlines his, and the series own moral stance, in the ‘I never would’ remonstration with Cobb. The development of Jenny and the interesting debate about the potential costs of the Doctor being both warrior and pacifist would have benefited from the room that a two-parter could afford them. More than just the lip service paid here is required in this debate where, though the Doctor has sometimes resorted to violence as a last possible alternative, he would not kill out of anger or revenge even though he understands the desire to do so.

So, despite some interesting ideas about nature and nurture, the use of violence and the mythologising of technology, it’s all a sly con just to get us to the big scene where the Doctor can emote over his dead daughter as if she's a long lost relative but, where in actual fact, he has only known her for about half an hour. The series now seems content to constantly rehearse the ‘Last of the Time Lords’ scenario in any which way it can – the departure of companions, the death of the Master - to wring out our emotions but without actually daring to follow through from this timid approach and to properly seize hold of the Time War scenario and give it the pay off it now seriously deserves. If the Song of Ten is coming to an end then can we at least get this ‘wounded soldier of the Time War’ emotional schtick out of the way once and for all? Four years is long enough.


Previous reviews:
The Poison Sky
The Sontaran Stratagem
The Planet Of The Ood
The Fires Of Pompeii
Partners In Crime

(Gratuitous shot of Tamoh Penikett for all us gaylords...hurrah!)


SkyHD - 6th May 2008 - 9.00pm

Somewhat worthy and mediocre, this week's episode spent rather a looooonnnnnnnnggggggg time gazing at various navels. Obviously, the sub-plots are going to pay off eventually but why are they taking so damn long doing it. Don't they know this is the last season, for frak's sake. Get moving!

The really frustrating thing about this season is that whilst it's pacing is almost stationary (someone's removed the Galactica's spark plugs, I'm convinced) the actors are getting their teeth into some very dramatic stuff. I'm pleased for them because many of them are extremely good at this existential sort of thing.

'The Road Less Traveled' focuses mainly on the Shit Ship (no other way to describe the Demetrius), an extremely strung out Kara Thrace (she'll definitely need two bottles when she gets in the shower with her mucky hair) and her grumpy crew. There is mutiny in the sweaty air as no signs of Earth have yet shown up. Kara's getting incredibly frenzied in her painting and decorating and is determined to be proved right. Whilst out scouting, the wreck of a Cylon raider pops up and inside is that wonderful psychopath Leoben. The game this week is to try and work out if Leoben is telling the truth about his vision of a convergence of Cylons and humans or whether he's leading them all into a trap. One of the crew is wasted whilst exploring the wreck of the raider and Thrace becomes even more paranoid as the crew decide enough is enough. Katee Sackhoff is excellent at this wits end performance, and her interplay with Callum Keith Rennie is suitably creepy and violent. But when it comes down to jumping to meet the crippled Cylon base stars, the crew bail out and refuse to go. And we are also left wondering if Leoben recognises Anders as one of the Final Five...

Once more the series explores the inadequacies of Kara actually measuring up to the iconic figure that people think she is. She finds it hard to think of herself as any good at all with this searching for Earth business and obviously is getting quite upset about it. Another one who is crying into his dinner is poor old Chief Tyrol. He just can't take being a Cylon and a further sign of his deterioration is a trip to the barbers and a number zero with the clippers. As Baltar preaches his monotheism schtik over the airwaves, Tyrol reaches the bottom when it looks like he's prepared to shoot himself after an abortive attempt to strangle Baltar. I know, I know, Baltar could at least put a few records on in between babbling about the one true God. Never had this problem with Tony Blackburn.

Aaron Douglas is again terrific and so intense in that scene where he throttles Baltar. He's really superb with his eyes too and conveys a great deal of the meaning of the scene with very small movements of his face. It was however a bit predictable that as soon as Baltar held out his hand to Tyrol, only for it to be rejected initially, that the conclusion of the episode would lead to a reconciliation of sorts and a gentlemanly handshake between the two.

And that sanctimonious old Baltar, wheedling his way into Tyrol's mind like that. All in a day's brainwashing for the one-god movement. He's got Tyrol on board and that naughty Tory too, so his little fringe meetings are starting to become quite influential. And you get a decent bit of grub too. Again, James Callis really makes these scenes fly. Tory has turned into this horrid Cylon tart with a murderous agenda and no sensitivity at all. She massages Tyrol's ego in the very spot that she sent his wife spacewards. And Tyrol will find out about that, I'm very sure. You could see he felt something was odd about Tory. And God help us when he does discover the truth.

Back on the Demetrius, as the mutiny progresses, the episode does at least show us the road that some characters have fully traveled down. Gaeta, for example, has turned into an officer who really doesn't give a toss and would quite happily mutiny over Kara's strung out theories. And he was such a nice man back in Season One. Poor old Anders doesn't know if he's coming or going and Leoben's presence certainly starts him thinking about his own destiny and the meaning of his life. Helo is perhaps the one you think Kara will be able to depend upon but even he, in the end, gets a bit fed up and decides to refuse orders. And Leoben perfectly sums up the Cylon and human situation, both on the base stars and on Galactica: “Battle lines have been drawn between those who embrace their nature and those who fear it.” The four hidden away in the fleet are going through rapid changes - some for the good and some for the bad - and the fate of all is now the centre of the series. It's a battle for free will.

It's filmed beautifully, played superbly and the effects and music are nothing short of wondrous. But...it plods. Oh, my. It plods like a plodding thing from the planet Plodding. Sure, the philosophical and religious questions are very interesting but this episode is quietly drowning us in them. There is absolutely no light and shade here (and no sign at all of Roslin, Six, Adama and Apollo who more often than not provide it) and that can make for very off-putting viewing. The Demetrious sub-plot must be drawn to a close soon or it will get very irritating indeed and Baltar's careerist drive needs to move up a few gears too.


Previous reviews:
Escape Velocity
The Ties That Bind
He That Believeth In Me & Six Of One

BBC1 - 3rd May 2008 - 6.20pm

As we picked up from last week's conclusion, I suspect Sylvia’s handiwork with the axe was probably a result of several frustrating attempts to get her car repaired at the local Qwik-Fit. The Doctor, flat out like one of their 'quicker than a Qwik-Fit fitter' grease monkeys, and buggering up her exhaust with the sonic screwdriver, obviously does nothing to appease the woman. As she wielded Helen Raynor’s blindingly obvious pay-off to the longeurs of last week’s cliffhanger, I pondered on whether The Poison Sky was on course to crash and burn in the similarly catastrophic fashion of Evolution Of The Daleks. Well, it possibly crashed and it most definitely burned.

As Dolly the sheep…sorry, the evil Martha clone, logged into NATO's mainframe and seized control of every country’s missile launch protocols, I knew we were in trouble. Why would a medical officer be given such sensitive security information? Do UNIT’s cleaners have a direct line to the Valiant on their mobile phones? With her finger on the trigger, Martha’s clone was all narrowing, suspicious eyes and stony-faced looks (so that, yes, we were in no doubt this was the sheep even if we hadn’t spotted the pupils and receeding hairline garbage the Doctor later spouts) and Freema’s best 'clone acting' couldn’t rid me of the feeling that Martha has so far been reduced to nothing more than the ‘tin dog’ this season. Raynor frittered away an opportunity to create some real tension with the audience but instead made the clone boringly traipse around UNIT for a while before trying to redeem a rather useless sub-plot with the more affecting scene of Martha watching her doppleganger bite the dust. It would have been all the more poignant if the clone had actually been more than a throw away plot device that the audience could be bothered about. I think Freema’s been treated worse here than she was in Torchwood and I’m now at a loss as to why Martha was brought back into the series.

Kirsty Wark stood in for Andrew Marr on News 24 and Lachele Carl was trotted out yet again as the AMNN news anchor to provide the now rather dull pieces of verisimilitude that pop up in every Earth based adventure. Once upon a time these were fun, playful winks at the audience but now they’re a sad indication that The Poison Sky is simply going to run through all the ‘events on a global scale’ tropes of the new series again and this familiarity is, like the Earth becoming a Sontaran clone world, beginning to breed contempt.

Even the amusing scenes of Donna alone in the TARDIS in the heart of enemy territory had a whiff of Rose’s antics in Army Of Ghosts and reprised the coded message via video link to Mickey in The Age Of Steel but they succeed by the fact that they show Donna initially rather out of her depth and unsure of herself for a change and then triumphantly trusting in the Doctor’s confidence in her by belting a Sontaran (the ‘back of the neck!’ line being a real highlight of the episode) and fiddling with the teleport to save the day. Catherine Tate continues to shine and for me she makes this weak little exercise all the more bearable.

Luke Rattigan, conversely, was the unbearable git that predictably a sulky child genius aspires to become and, by the time London was fog bound, his little academy of red garbed minions realised he was several sandwiches short of a picnic. And as I surmised, he does have a Robert Klark Graham complex after all by announcing his plan to get all the bright kids to interbreed. So, I’ll give Raynor a couple of points for at least acknowledging that. But Ryan Sampson played him as if he’d overdosed on Smarties and was riding a sugar rush so that when it all went wrong and his Academy cared more about the real world than they did about him all we got was some drippy little tantrum. It’s not effective enough to make us genuinely get any satisfaction out of his eventual, clichéd self-sacrifice and redemption. It’s painfully obvious from the start that Rattigan would come to a noble end but no one liked him and therefore no one gave a shit when he topped himself and saved the day. The Doctor instructs him to do "something intelligent" with his life but then through his own act of sacrifice perhaps he inspires Rattigan to follow his lead. I wasn’t sure whether I liked the Doctor’s methodology there even if Rattigan was a complete pain in the arse.

There were some nice bits of referencing in the middle of this expensive looking, if empty, spectacle. The brief flash of Rose on the TARDIS scanner screen ensured that the impending return of the character was kept simmering away on the back burner; the mention of the 50,000 year war between the Sontarans and the Rutans was welcome and an update on Sir Alistair Lethbridge Stewart (stranded in Peru, apparently) calmed those of us who were desperate for news. His replacement is certainly not very promising. And I’m still trying to decide if the Doctor’s ‘Are you my mummy?’ gag was genuinely funny or just a cheap shot.

Christopher Ryan was another good reason to cut this episode a bit of slack. Staal was a superb character and Ryan did a great job of bringing the pompous little war-monger to life, managing to use the prosthetics and costumes to the benefit of the performance. He’s particularly nasty when he pulls the rug from under an already deflated Rattigan and reduces him to a weeping ninny. Unfortunately, Dan Starkey, as Skorr, wasn’t in the same league and his gap-toothed, child-like ebullience (‘this isn’t war, this is sport!') just didn’t have the gravitas of Ryan’s creation. The battle between UNIT and the Sontaran troops was done well, even if the death of Ross was completely expected (nice bloke and eye candy as ‘casualty of war’ cliché) and rather a waste of a sympathetic character. It did all get a bit gratuitously ‘war porn’ with UNIT finally going in guns blazing and casually mowing down Sontar’s not so finest. Colonel Mace even seemed to get a stiffy with the arrival of that whopping great piece of machine fetish, the Valiant, and even the Doctor got a bit carried away, despite his anti-gun policy, in the midst of such overwhelming machismo. The fetishism of weapons of war ultimately resolved itself into the worryingly phallic looking atmospheric converter that the Doctor rigged up to stick it to the Sontarans. The fact that Rattigan finally got to press the button must say something rather Freudian about the wimp finally getting his mojo back. The climax to all this was, of course, the necessary big bang that polished off the Sontaran ship courtesy of some satisfying effects work.

The Doctor fried the gas in the atmosphere in another piece of effects ecstacy and Raynor thinks we’ll happily accept both the rather dreadful blue skies and birds twittering coda to this reckless act and her troweled on anti-car message as Sylvia skips down the road with her shopping. This was as painfully realised as the terror of the sat-nav which she’d rather conveniently ditched at the start of this episode. Give me a break, but that conclusion to a supposed global disaster lacked any kind of integrity.

We’ve seen an awful lot of The Poison Sky before and frankly the majority comes across as lazy recycling of much of the Earth based stories of both the new and old series even if, structurally, Raynor is pretty adept at keeping all the sub-plots going at once and can obviously write witty dialogue and handle characters like Staal. Rather like Murray Gold’s ubiquitously looping music cues, it’s like a greatest hits package where a band has nipped into the studio to record one or two additional tracks just to flog the same old flannel. Actually, I'd like an entirely new album next time please.

Previous reviews:
The Sontaran Stratagem
The Planet Of The Ood
The Fires Of Pompeii
Partners In Crime

Kubrick's 'The Shining' always seemed to be the black sheep of the family. It seemed to get mixed reviews on its release in 1980 and is often regarded as the poor relative to his other films. Personally, it's one of my favourites. It features two powerhouse performances - Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall playing Jack and Wendy Torrance - and some breathtaking Steadicam photography. Again, it's a supreme example of Kubrick's pure cinema - he tells a great deal of the story in visual terms and uses very little dialogue to explain what exactly happens at the Overlook Hotel.



The film is all about spaces and silences being punctuated by random, surreal images and by discordant, arresting music cues. There are so many stunning sequences here that are not only triumphant moments of cinema but are also witty subversions of the horror genre itself. The standout moments are the low slung Steadicam tracking after Danny as he rides his trike through the hotel, the wheels running noisily on the bare floors and then truncating into silence on the carpet; the later remounting of this in the snow covered maze as Jack chases Danny; Wendy leafing through Jack's 'novel'; Jack in the Gold Room and later with Grady in the stark red and white restroom...

The soundtrack is equally intriguing. From the Wendy Carlos synthesiser sweep over the helicopter shots in the opening to the abundant use of Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta for the creepier moments such as Danny's fear of room 237.



The film is here presented in its longer form - including additional scenes not in the European cut - and, at last, in an anamorphic 1.78 ratio. Quite simply, the 1080p image here is pretty stunning, extremely well detailed especially in close ups of faces and clothing. It also shows off the production design to its best and the interiors of the Overlook, a staggeringly lovely set, looks beautiful with superb colour, contrast and definition. Coupled with the heavy use of Steadicam the image has a superb depth that HD clearly exploits here. I was also impressed with the sound too and the placing of stereo elements, the use of the Bartok, Penderecki and Lygeti music cues and dialogue is sensitively done whilst impressively cranking up the atmosphere.



With these new Blu-ray releases of the Kubrick catalogue we're also being spoiled with a collection of extra features too. There's a fascinating commentary with Steadicam inventor/operator Garrett Brown and Kubrick biographer John Baxter. “View from the Overlook: Crafting The Shining” is a half hour “making of” featurette featuring interviews from the crew, writer, designers and Nicholson. “The Visions of Stanley Kubrick” is a short introduction to Kubrick’s early career as a still photographer. “Wendy Carlos, Composer” is a short interview with the film's composer which also delves into some of the cues for A Clockwork Orange, some of which didn‘t make it to the final films. The BBC documentary 'The Making Of The Shining', directed by Kubrick's daughter, Vivian, also makes it onto the disc and with a commentary from her to accompany it.

This is probably the best this film has ever looked and despite its age it looks remarkable in HD and demonstrates that back catalogue material can hold its own with newer releases. Definitely worth the upgrade.

The Shining (Warner Blu-Ray HD 1080p - B65166) On release now

(DVD screen caps courtesy of High Definition Media Mouseover Comparisons/ AVS Forums http://www.mbmg.de)