Star Trek has been so very lucky with its composers. Back in the day, we had that soaring Alexander Courage theme and incidentals to the original series and the stunning incidental music by the likes of Sol Kaplan, Fred Steiner and Gerald Fried. Jerry Goldsmith's superb work on Star Trek-The Motion Picture was as important a benchmark as Courage's own themes, going on to influence Star Trek - The Next Generation and the films it bequeathed to the franchise, the highlight there for Goldsmith fans being the music for First Contact.

But there is another, equally important composer who left the franchise with a fine musical legacy and that's James Horner. The scores for Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search For Spock were the calling cards for a relatively unknown composer and certainly the thrilling score for The Wrath Of Khan can rightly be seen as his major Hollywood breakthrough.

It is now such a delight to see that the entire score has finally been re-released through Screen Archives Entertainment and Film Score Monthly, extending the original album release of 1982 which only covered 45 minutes of the 75 minute score and finally offering up many longed for cues. This is one of those rare soundtracks where the music is emotionally bonded to the film. You listen to the music and you are re-experiencing the film itself and here with the music chronologically presented it acquires an added power. It's a wonderful, vivid score to a highly entertaining and much cherished film and now we have it complete on CD.



The additional 30 minutes comprises of several previously unreleased cues: 'Surprise on Ceti Alpha V' (0:45), 'Khan's Pets' (4:19), 'The Eels of Ceti Alpha V/Kirk in Space Shuttle' (3:53), 'Chekov Lies' (0:40), 'Kirk Takes Command/He Tasks Me' (2:07) 'Genesis Project' (3:16) - Craig Huxley's unearthly electronica that accompanied the Genesis demo tape - 'Inside Regula I' (1:35) 'Brainwashed' (1:24), 'Captain Terrell's Death' (1:58), 'Buried Alive' (0:57), 'The Genesis Cave' (1:09) 'Enterprise Attacks Reliant' (1:29), 'Spock (Dies)' (1:53), 'Amazing Grace' (1:26). And they are all in the order in which they appear in the film which provides the new album with real coherence as a listening experience.

The ingenue Horner (he was only 28 when he composed this score and was little known) certainly provides a rich and captivating set of themes, with predominant motifs for Kirk and the Enterprise, Spock and villain Khan weaving and overlapping throughout. There really is a sense of the battle of wills between Kirk and Khan here and it echoes Erich Korngold's stirring scores for Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk, conjuring images of full sailed galleons in frenzied battle and perfectly underlining the film's allusions to Moby Dick. His use of the Blaster Beam, an electronic instrument constructed by Craig Huxley, and brought to prominence in the Goldsmith soundtrack for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, provides that heavy 'thwong' sound under the bass notes, nodding back to Goldsmith's equally wonderful score and providing continuity as well as beautifully augmenting the battle scenes in the Mutara Nebula.



The score is also characterised by Horner's then predilection for escalating brass motifs and he powerfully uses this not only to energise the action but also to accompany stunning string sections to provide a romantic flavour to cues such as 'Enterprise Clears Moorings'. The romantic flavour is also carried by the themes for Spock, especially the terrifically moving 'Spock (Dies)' and the beautiful 'Genesis Cave' cue. Its ultimate expression is in 'Amazing Grace', a cue that Horner originally didn't want the bagpipes on but which he turns to his advantage when the music swells into a rich, overwhelmingly moving rendition of the old standard.

Lovingly remastered and restored by the team at Film Score Monthly, this is an essential purchase because it's that rare beast; an original film soundtrack that triumphantly recreates the entire film in the listener's head whilst remaining simply stunning music in its own right. And of course, it's music for what remains as the best entry in the Star Trek film franchise. The CD comes with a great booklet, sporting the iconic Bob Peak poster art, with comments from Horner and director Nicholas Meyer, full of interesting anecdotes and a wealth of stills from the film.

STAR TREK II: The Wrath Of Khan - Original Soundtrack, Newly Expanded Edition (Film Score Monthly / Retrograde - FSM-80128-2 - Released 9th July 2009)

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Warriors’ Gate

January 1981

'I want a landing that wouldn't ripple the surface of a custard'

Many fans find this a difficult story to comprehend. Certainly, back in 1981, it left me scratching my head in puzzlement. However, it’s a story that improves over time and perhaps needs the benefit of age and wisdom to understand it. How many kids really appreciated this at the time, I wonder? It seemed willfully obscure to me as a 17 year old and received wisdom often continues to trot out this line. As a story it’s actually very linear and easy to understand. It’s the telling of the story that’s so very different here. It’s book-ended by two very traditional Doctor Who productions and it stands out like a sore thumb.

But what a sore thumb.

It’s amazing that this got to our screens in this form as even for 1981 it defied expectations and conventions. It’s atypical and joins a number of the oddest serials under the Doctor Who banner – odd perhaps for their surreal vision or their puzzlebox narratives – and mimics some of the visual and narrative games that film directors such as Nicolas Roeg employed on films like Don’t Look Now or writers such as David Rudkin had attempted with Penda’s Fen or even more pertinently in 1981’s Artemis ‘81. Oh, and chuck in some Rosencrantz And Guildenstern too for good measure.



Warriors’ Gate isn’t deliberately obscure and the story is presented quite clearly – The Doctor, Romana, Adric and K9 arrive at the Gateway, an intersection between E-Space and N-Space, where the time-lines converge. They are not alone in this slowly shrinking void. The Privateer and its crew, led by Rorvik, are also trapped here with their cargo of time-sensitive Tharils. Slave traders, they use the Tharils and their powers to navigate through space. The Tharils were once the rulers of a vast empire and were slave traders themselves until their slaves revolted using the Gundan robots to hunt them down. Now, seeing the error of their ways, one of the Tharils uses the Doctor to help free the remaining slaves. As the void diminishes, a race against time begins to prevent the Privateer and its crew from destroying the Gateway, helping the Tharils to escape enslavement and get the TARDIS back into E-Space.

There. That’s fairly straight forward. However, how this information reaches you isn’t all plain-sailing. Warriors’ Gate must be one of the most televisual and tele-literate serials in the canon. It takes Nathan-Turner’s remit to modernise the show using new technologies and new ways of telling the narrative and runs with it. It’s a cross between Play For Today, Jean Cocteau’s Orphee, a number of highly stylised pop videos of the era (everything from ‘Ashes To Ashes’ ‘Stand And Deliver’ to ‘Fade To Grey’) and Last Year At Marienbad. Willfully eclectic visually, then. Only the minimum is imparted through dialogue and direct exposition and when a dramatic point is made visually it’s done with a real appreciation of what can be achieved by 625 line cameras in TC1 at Television Centre and thoroughly disassembles the ‘television as theatre’ thinking that was the way television was made up until the 1980s. This is television being television. 100%.

Arguably much of the sense of Warriors’ Gate is visual and symbolic and a lot of it doesn’t necessarily point you in any right direction or give you clues. Images are used to inform the whole in an exercise similar to trying to build sandcastles whilst the tide is coming in. The overwhelming sense of the visuals in Warriors’ Gate underpin the themes of chance, random actions and indeed, no action at all. ‘Do nothing’ but ‘ the right kind of nothing’ sums up the feeling of inevitability in the story. The many strands of the plot converge, must converge, despite the actions and in-actions of the characters trying to change this course, and cause, of the discourse. The still point of the climax of the story is our destination and will always be there. With a pragmatic fatalism, the Doctor understands finally that the inevitable will be the destruction of the Gateway and the Privateer, will be Romana’s decision to remain behind with the Tharils.

All this is funnelled through various forms of divination in the story, whether it be the I Ching, the tossing of coins, card games or the use of mirrors as scrying glasses to foretell the future and see the past in order to get us to a determined rather than random end point. Fate and determinism are scrambled through the prism of Zen-like lateral thought where stillness is the very thing that’ll bring about an outcome. Contrast this with Rorvik’s insane mantra, ‘…finally, I’m getting something done!’ and you can see where struggling against the tide will get you. All this is visually communicated as well through the wonderfully realised characters. The crew of the Privateer are well sketched. A scruffy bunch of indolents who’d rather do that ‘nothing’ as the outcome really requires but are bullied by the prickly Rorvik, superbly played by Clifford Rose, a man who is hell bent on doing anything, something…



And the stillness is there all around us, from the brilliant slow tracking shot around the Privateer in the opening of episode one, to the white void outside and then the frozen gardens of the Tharils' palace. The Tharils come over as repentant nobles maintaining a very faded empire and there’s that sense of inevitability in Biroc’s evocation of times past, a frozen empire awaiting re-emergence. Biroc and the Doctor are pretty much the two sides of the coin that’s featured here – Biroc foresees the events of the story and manipulates the other characters towards the events of the final episode. No randomness, no chance involved. The Doctor here is very much the instigator of random action – hence his allusion to the I Ching - and finds it wanting and is left to ineffectual bewilderment. And Biroc can also see that if the Doctor interferes randomly with actions then the whole ‘do nothing’ approach will be for nothing! The whole point of the story is Romana’s decision to remain with Biroc and free the other enslaved Tharils across the Universe and all the narrative and visual turns are the gears that move us to this conclusion.

It’s superbly directed by Joyce and certainly has some very memorable cliffhangers to episode one and two, all well edited and constructed - the Gundan robots about to slice off the Doctor’s head and the escaped Tharil creeping up on a trapped Romana. The complex switch between the past and the present in the Gateway is handled well and boasts some good production values. The casual knocking over of the goblet of wine is a superb visual motif that transports us between worlds and times and leads into the double-take conclusion of episode three. It’s meticulously planned, supported by great design from Graeme Story and a memorable score from Peter Howell who has now learned not to smother the visuals with squealing synthesisers. Visual effects are very good here with the model work some of the best the series has offered, contributing to the whole atmosphere.

Baker and Ward are on exceptional form. Ward in particular gets a good swansong and her farewell, though brief, is sympathetic and heartfelt and very appropriate. Baker manages to get across the Doctor’s incapacity to deal with the events at the Gateway – a mixture of bewilderment, frustration and resignation. Adric and K9 are less intrinsic to the plot here and are rather overshadowed by the leads and the guest cast. That K9 ceases to function in the void and can only be restored the other side of the mirrors is perhaps an apt conclusion to the character’s usefulness in the series. He heroically lives on despite no longer being in the series, something that has been of increasing significance since the start of the season.

So it’s goodbye to Romana and K9 – another door closing on the Baker era – and it’s the concluding story of the E-Space trilogy. It’s a literate piece of SF, thoroughly embracing the way television worked at the time, feeling part of the zeitgeist and bringing to the fore Bidmead’s desire for a harder edged quality to the series. An undoubted highlight of the season, visually impressive and intelligently constructed.

DVD features:

• Commentary with actors Lalla Ward and John Leeson, director Paul Joyce, script editor Christopher H Bidmead and visual effects designer Mat Irvine.
• The Dreaming – cast and crew look back at the troubled making of this story.
• The Boy with the Golden Star – actor Matthew Waterhouse looks back on his time on the show.
• Lalla's Wardrobe – a trip through Romana's time on the show via the medium of the many costumes actress Lalla Ward wore along the way. It’s a one-off Frockumentary like you’ve never seen before.
• Extended and Deleted Scenes – missing scenes from an earlier edit of ep. two.
• Continuity – BBC1 continuity announcements from the original transmission.
• Photo Gallery, Isolated Score, Easter Egg – Mat Irvine talks about the Gundan axes and his own on-screen role in Warriors' Gate, Coming Soon Trailer, PDF Material, Programme Subtitles, Production Notes.

State Of Decay

November to December 1980

'Then die, that is the purpose of guards'

Take one teaspoon of Hinchcliffe, one teaspoon of Williams, a sprinkle of Nathan-Turner and then throw it all in to a slowly marinading pot of Terry Dicks and...your taste buds are in for a treat.

Dicks' script was put on the backburner back in 1977 (the BBC getting in a tizzy about it being too similar to their prestige production Count Dracula) so you can't get more steeped in tradition than that. It keeps its Gothic trappings for this revived version so it's often accused of being a bit of a throwback. I find that rather a load of nonsense. For me, it's an indication of the production team's confidence that they feel they can go for the traditional whilst still pushing their 'modernising' agenda.

Still in E-Space, the Doctor, Romana and stowaway Adric find themselves on a planet where the local inhabitants are held in thrall by the 'Three Who Rule' - astronauts turned vampire by an ancient Gallifreyan enemy.



With the story in 'Hammer' mode - a hyper Gothic production dripping in atmosphere with superb production design (Christine Ruscoe take a bow), costumes, make up, lighting etc - it's the script that cleverly understands how to undercut the stifling ambience with a great deal of wit and insight into the genre itself. Bidmead, being his usual self, then throws in some of his 'science-mysticism' obsessions to remind us that this is Season 18 not Season 14. Some of the ideas have seen the light of day before - namely The Face Of Evil - where an almost medieval society has grown out of science and technology and transposed it into a quasi religion/magic. But it works well because everything else in the production has such a commitment behind it.

It's probably the best work director Peter Moffat has ever done on the series with some truly wonderful visual flourishes - a highlight being the mixing of the slow motion bat footage over the face of Aukon still remains a potent image and is redolent of Herzog's similar approach to his 1979 Nosferatu - and he seems to rally the actors into giving some rather gorgeous performances which is an achievement considering he had two leading actors who couldn't bear to be in the same room as one another at the time. He seems to tune into the prevailing mood and is sensitive enough to heighten it.

Emrys James as Aukon totally steals the show and manages a knife-edge balancing act between outright camp and deadly seriousness with a flirtatious, full blooded (pardon the pun) performance. He projects menace and danger and makes it clear that Aukon is truly the power behind the other two, Zargo and Camilla. Rachel Davies is also exceptional as Camilla, all bestial and erotic menace. And William Lindsay is good as the ruthless Zargo with a stillness in his performance that counters the exuberance of the others. They are all sensual creatures, giving the relationships between them and characters such as Adric and Romana a curious sexual frisson, from Camilla's interest in draining Romana of her blood to a very redolent scene where Aukon whispers sweet nothings into Adric's ear! Matthew Waterhouse again is fine as Adric, despite the dreadful 'console room walk' in one of the TARDIS interior scenes. I certainly get the impression he's not a confident physical actor from this and later stories. But as a pawn in the machinations of the Three Who Rule, as a victim of the predatious Aukon, he does sublimated innocence well. Adric's out of his depth and that's how it's played. The Doctor and Romana are pissed off that they have to rescue him and that's how it's played.



This frisson also carries through to the two leads, Baker and Ward, especially in the scene in the cell which bounces from an erotic romanticism, mutual admiration and a sense that this is the last time we'll see Romana and the Doctor this close as friends. Lots of undercurrents run through State Of Decay and the performances and direction seize on this to truly advance the notion that big changes are on the way and things will never be the same again.

The one element that does irritate me is that K9 is trundled out yet again and is just a handy weapon to shoot down opponents. There's an equal sense that this is as far as you can take the original Williams era Doctor/Romana/K9 triumvirate and it's their last outing and this fits neatly alongside the faded potential of the three crew members of the Hydrax. 'Abandon hope all ye who enter here' seems a rather significant epithet. The visual effects are a little disappointing with the tower-ship model not really convincing enough to provide the grand climax. It's all been building so well to the unveiling of the Great Vampire (a lovely bit of Gallifreyan mythology from Uncle Terrance) and his demise. We get a rather wobbly rocket and a crudely made up hand from the effects team poking up through a scale model to provide a climax. A bit ho-hum. However, the Three Who Rule disintegration sequence is a triumph and betters the similar effects in countless Hammer films and more significantly is more satisfying than the death of Dracula in the BBC's own production in 1977. Two fingers up to the Head of BBC Drama there, I think.

Paddy Kingsland's score is memorable and isn't intrusive and is a further evolution of the approach that Nathan-Turner opted for. It suits the production well and is subtle and moody in most of the right places. Overall then, a dark and moody tale that often takes the hard science approach of earlier stories and twists it out of shape into techno Gothic science-mysticism more concerned with the nature of legends, myths and magic than CVEs, E-Space and block transfer computation. It contains some of the best performances of Season 18, certainly gives the later The Keeper Of Traken a run for its money on the use of production design and is gloriously traditional within the context of the modernising approaches being taken. It's truly the last hurrah for the series as we knew it circa 1977-79 and for me, on recent viewing, came across as a rather under-rated little gem.

DVD features:

• Commentary with actor Matthew Waterhouse, director Peter Moffatt and writer Terrance Dicks.
• The Vampire Lovers – cast and crew look back at the making of this story.
• Film Trims – mute 35mm film trims from the model effects filming for the story, featuring alternative takes of the Tower and the scout ship staking the Great Vampire.
• Leaves of Blood – a history of Vampires in literary fiction featuring authors Ramsey Campbell, Stephen Gallagher, Kim Newman, Pete Crowther, Simon Clark, Alison L R Davies, Chris Fowler and vampire specialist Dr Tina Rath.
• The Blood Show – a fascinating insight into the use and meaning of blood in society and culture.
• The Frayling Reading – cultural historian Sir Christopher Frayling looks at State of Decay with reference to the vampire stories of film and literature.
• Continuity – BBC continuity announcements from the original transmission, Photo Gallery, Isolated Score, Coming Soon Trailer, PDF Material, Programme Subtitles, Subtitle Production Notes.

Full Circle

October – November 1980

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

After the confusing new wave of The Leisure Hive and the neo-traditionalism of Meglos we finally arrive at a point where most things fall into place and we’re given a traditional story with a new wave spin. Thus begins the so called ‘E Space’ trilogy and more importantly the departure of Romana and K9 as by the end of Meglos we know she’s been summoned back to Gallifrey. Poor old K9 has so far been drowned and kicked and here gets his head knocked off. We get the message, Nathan-Turner. And just for good measure, Nathan-Turner insists on getting the continuity right by mentioning the co-ordinates from galactic zero centre. Just for all those little fan boys out there in 1980. This is one of the first examples of many where there is an active attempt to get as much continuity into the show and this sort of thing has an important bearing on the shape of the series in the next decade.



On their way to Gallifrey, the TARDIS falls through a CVE (Bidmead’s roll off the tongue Charged Vacuum Emboitment) or a wormhole to you and me these days. The Doctor and Romana enter E-Space (another universe with negative co-ordinates to our own) and find themselves pitched up on Alzarius at Mist Fall when Marshmen will walk and the Deciders of the human colony based there can’t…well…decide, really.

Fan Andrew Smith constructed a neat story with little flab on its bones and it has real pace with an intriguing central mystery. A reverse evolution pandora’s box with an emotional centre that draws upon a great many of the core values and themes from past Doctor Who triumphs as well as nods to SF classics of the 60s – think Planet Of The Apes written by Mac Hulke. The generational themes of the story are also echoed by how the programme itself is attempting to nail its colours to the mast of perhaps a younger audience too with an overt emphasis on young rebellious characters in the narrative including the introduction of a young boy as a companion. Young fan boys…your time is now. And the moral dilemmas surrounding vivisection are also an important part of the themes of conservative scientific exploration. You can't imagine the same themes getting quite the same treatment in Season 17 let's say.

It’s engagingly translated to the screen by director Peter Grimwade who eschews much of Lovett Bickford’s visual pyrotechnics in Hive and goes for iconic visuals to get the story told. The location work for the surface of Alzarius is exemplary with the use of coloured gels on the lighting to suggest an alien sun lighting the surface and for Mist Fall and the rise of the Marshmen a superb drenching of atmosphere and use of slow motion work that justifiably makes the sequence of the creatures rising from the lake one of the series’ best remembered. It’s still got a real charge, a proper sense of threat about it and it’s done with absolute conviction despite the rather obvious rubber nature of the creatures, especially in the studio sequences.

There’s a sense of place, of community and tradition evoked that hasn’t been seen in the series for some time. Extras are used well to show the Alzarians swimming and collecting food on the surface and then servicing their ship. The Deciders are stick in the mud conservatives, privileged to information that the rest of their people aren’t. Perhaps Smith's pot shot at the incumbent goverment of the day. The Outlers are naïve revolutionaries who can only manage to steal the odd bit of river fruit now and again until the real crisis arrives and self-sacrifice is the order of the day. It’s not just biological conflict that’s going on here – it’s also a potent view of the generation gap and government secrecy.

The Marshmen themselves succeed in being more than actors in rubber suits with an obvious attention to detail in the performances and sound effects that erase the painful memories of the Mandrells of just a year since. The death of the Marshchild is in itself a valid dramatic punch, engaging our concerns about these creatures, the emotional underpinning of the supposed bestial threat. We are both scared for the child and ourselves. Doctor Who hasn’t taken this approach for some time and Grimwade’s televisual grasp of the story’s strengths finally make us take the Nathan-Turner re-vamp seriously here. And the music’s calmed down to the point where it isn’t smothering the visuals and is more effectively used to build the mood. This is particularly evident in the rise of the Marshmen sequence.



The only disappointment is perhaps some of the acting of the younger members of the cast – Matthew Waterhouse actually equits himself better than some of his colleagues here – and the rather cod spider attack that forms the cliffhanger of episode two. It’s dreadful. Lalla can’t make it work, Grimwade can’t make it work and visual effects can’t either. It should have been so much better. Rather a hamfisted sequence that sits oddly with the rest of the programme.

There are some very grounded and much needed character acting turns from the likes of George Baker and James Bree too and Baker himself nimbly strides through the narrative with, at last, a sense of moral outrage and genuine concern as events play out. The evil here isn’t some galactic dictator cracking gags – it’s conservative attitudes, moral panics and scientific stagnation. And what of Matthew Waterhouse? Has there ever been a actor in the programme that continues to be so vilified? (OK, Bonnie's a prime target too). Sure, he isn’t the world’s greatest actor but he initially handles the character of Adric well here and provides the focus for younger members of the audience. It’s only later that when the character’s moral choices become very suspect that he’ll begin to irritate. He works better as a character in direct relation to the Doctor rather than just one of what will be three companions. However, it's Waterhouse's arrogance and rudeness in the commentary on the DVD that is unlikely to endear him to pretty much anyone even now some 29 years later.

Full Circle demonstrates that Nathan-Turner and the team have finally got a handle on this ‘making of Doctor Who lark’, and certainly, in no small measure here, it’s down to Grimwade marshaling good acting and design, keeping the pace up and serving the story well. It's hardly an original narrative but the team manage to give it a freshness within the Doctor Who format.

DVD features:

• Commentary – with actor Matthew Waterhouse, writer Andrew Smith and script editor Christopher H. Bidmead.
• All Aboard the Starliner – cast and crew look back at the making of this story.
• K-9 in E-Space – a look at the robot dog's role in the E-Space arc. With actors Lalla Ward, John Leeson, script editor Christopher H Bidmead, writers Andrew Smith and Terrance Dicks.
• Swap Shop – Noel Edmonds chats to Matthew Waterhouse and takes calls from viewers of the Saturday morning entertainment show after Waterhouse's first appearance as Adric.
• E-Space – Fact or Fiction? - Could E-Space really exist? A look at the science behind the concept of Exo-Space featuring script editor Christopher H Bidmead, visual effects designer (and Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society) Mat Irvine, authors Stephen Baxter and Paul Parsons, planetary scientist Dr Andrew Ball and astronomer and television presenter Sir Patrick Moore.
• Continuity – BBC continuity announcements from the original transmission, Photo Gallery, Isolated Score, Coming Soon Trailer, PDF Material, Programme Subtitles, Subtitle Production Notes.

Okay. Just forget the Doctor Who bits. Well, no. Don't forget them but just bear in mind that as you start to read these two volumes of autobiography that it's an intimate, revealing, often upsetting and fascinating account of a life lived thus far and that Doctor Who is just one fragment, important as it is, that makes up the complex identity of Anneke Wills.

Brought up by her Dutch mother Anna, after her absent father Alaric, weighed down by gambling debts disappeared to South Africa, Anneke's childhood evocatively comes off the page in Self Portrait, the first volume. Her mother Anna has to take variety of jobs to support both Anneke and her brother Robin - gardening for two lesbians who run Robin's boarding school and then running her own domestic agency are indicative of her often wayward, entrepreneurial flair. The repercussions of the Second World War cast a shadow over the early chapters in Self Portrait - her mother's sister Tilly's pregnancy by a German officer, her then miscarriage and internment in a POW camp; Anna's mother and older sister dying of starvation. But the darkest shadow is cast by an abusive house agent, Roy, and his violent relationship with her mother which extends to Anneke and clearly scars her for decades and the legacy of which, coupled with a rootless childhood, inform much of her early adult life.

Her acting career took off with a small part in Child's Play, she enrolled at the Cone Ripman Stage School and various television roles followed, including the part of Roberta in the 1957 BBC adaptation of The Railway Children. It's at this point that she meets other actors - Angela Douglas, Sarah Miles and shares her life with the Craxton family by becoming their lodger, temporarily. Even at this stage, Anneke's lively writing style, combined with a very special knack of addressing you as an individual reading her books, suggests that she's destined to a nomadic life, seeking out that part of her that her mother, Roy, her estranged father, her schooling perhaps didn't nuture: the love of a father figure, a positive male role model, self-esteem or self-respect as a woman. Whatever it is or was, it's a missing fragment of her soul and both books essentially chronicle her troubled search for this element.

As part of this yearning to complete herself, Self-Portrait essays two particular male figures that would weave their positive and negative influences through her life: Anthony Newley and Michael Gough.



Inexperienced in relationships, at 17 she had an affair with Newley after working with him on The Strange World Of Gurney Slade, then became pregnant and went through a traumatic abortion when he decided to bugger off with Joan Collins instead. There's a callous side to Newley (the note she discovers that coldly says 'Get Wills aborted'), and Wills acknowledges this, and yet it seems the darker side of the male ego is something she finds strangely attractive. As she commented in a Daily Mail interview in July 2006: 'My heart has been broken several times. I have always been attracted to men who are extremely talented, beautiful and absolute b******s.' The abortion leaves mental scars that only years later does she confront and seek to heal. As she whirls through a Chelsea-set 1960s life, with parts in The Avengers and Strange Report and a social life filled with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Sammy Davis Jnr, the Establishment, the Troubadour Coffee Shop, you get a real sense of how the 1960s shook up the strict social mores of the 1950s but also how ill equipped emotionally people were when confronted by the relaxing of social morals.

In the midst of this breathless, almost wide-eyed, absorption of the cultural and social revolution, she does spend a little time talking about her role as Polly on Doctor Who. It's obvious she has great affection for Michael Craze, who played Ben, and for Patrick Troughton. The impression here is that she had an absolute ball making the series and it offered her the potential to develop her television career. However, that's not the route she actually chooses.



Just as she's buried the fallout from Newley's relationship with Collins and the abortion, she moves in with British character actor Michael Gough. Pregnant with her daughter Polly by Newley, there is a lot of tut-tutting from those outside her inner circle about how he's 28 years older than her. The relationship with Gough is odd, both of them acknowledging their affairs outside of the marriage but with Gough it's one rule for him and a very different one for Anneke. Clearly not getting enough love from Gough she has a number of dalliances, and one with a decorator sends Gough ballistic. In fact, his fits of jealousy, if that's what you could call them, lead to domestic violence and the marriage faltering on the rocks. It's this incident that probably destroys any sense of trust between the two of them and Self Portrait concludes with Anneke deciding to stop her acting career, move the entire family to Norfolk and attempt to rescue her wreck of a marriage. The death of her brother Robin is also a huge shock and also must have affected her decision. His death is shrouded in mystery, a veil that Anneke briefly parts towards the end of Naked.

Naked, the second volume, picks up straight away in 1970. She still has a difficult marriage but living in Norfolk gives her hope that the bonds between her and Michael Gough will be repaired. The best thing about Naked is that it signals that Anneke's story is far, far from over and is in fact only just beginning. Anneke's sense of dislocation intensifies in the second volume and her impulsiveness sends her off on a tragi-comic journey from Norfolk to India, then to North America and Canada. Her love for her two children, Polly and Jasper, shines through the book as does an increasing sense of her wish to connect with 'something' or 'someone' spiritual. She is a woman in search of her roots but always seems to be thwarted by bad relationships. At the centre of this book is the tragic death of her lovely daughter Polly. The strength of Wills' present tense narrative is so strong that as a reader you are drawn in completely and the death of her daughter is an extremely sad moment and casts a further shadow over Anneke's search for some kind of inner peace. You'll certainly have to pause for thought and probably wipe away a few tears.



The spiritual connection comes with her time spent in India at the ashram of the controversial Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. She obviously finds the meditations and therapies of great benefit and the work is hard, often harsh, but it gives her an opportunity to address the gnawing anger, guilt and anxiety about her often traumatic encounters with men that's been building since her childhood. There's a huge sense of relief when it seems she finally gets to grasp with these issues. Many raised their eyebrows when she, her son and daughter all took off for India to mediate at the ashram of the alleged 'sex guru' but there are certainly no descriptions of hippy debauchery in the book. Yes, she has sexual encounters but it's also clear that being at the ashram helps her develop into a very generous spirit, a woman unafraid of hard work who can more or less turn her hand to most labours.

Whilst reading the book and looking in from the outside at the activities of the Bhagwan, it's clear that his move from India, where he was allegedly under increasing criticism for his activities and threatened action by the Indian authorities, to Oregon in the North West of America was the thin end of the wedge. Various factions seemed to be vying for control of the community which led to its collapse in 1985. Anneke's text gives us a sense of her own concern about what mental and physical state Rajneesh was in. It also signals her own distancing from the movement, perhaps as part of the general come down from the optimism of the late 1960s and 1970s, and her re-location to California, getting work as a gardener and interior designer and finally finding another spiritual home in an artists' colony in Hornby, Canada. Hornby and its inhabitants offer her a salve and a boost to her confidence when she's offered an opportunity to direct plays for the Horny Island Theatre Trust. Creative people need each other and as an artist, I can connect both with Anneke's creative thinking and how she finds peer support in a such a place as Hornby.

In 1991, at the age of 50, she reconnects with the world of Doctor Who and is invited to a convention in Manchester, England. It's when the Paul McGann TV movie is filming in Vancouver that further connections with Doctor Who develop and she blags her way into the wrap party. She also is reunited with her father, now living in South Africa, and she records her thoughts on the death of Diana Spencer and 9/11. A letter from Coral Atkins casts a new light on the death of her brother and Anneke yet again holds you transfixed by her intimate and heartfelt observations of the machinations her brother was at the centre of. By the end of the book she returns to England, living in Devon, and there is a great sense that many demons have been exorcised and that she has taken a very long journey to arrive at state of being where she is actually comfortable just being Anneke Wills.



Two excellent volumes, written with great honesty and passion and revealing a woman of immense charm, who lives life with great intensity of feeling. What more could you want but someone telling you truthfully exactly how it is? And in the telling, producing a life story that is, as cliched as it might sound, a real page turner and one that is genuinely tragic and comic and often both at the same time. Each book is also a feast of Anneke's personal collection of photographs and her precious drawings and paintings.

SELF PORTRAIT - My Journey as an actress, wife and mother in the swinging sixties: Anneke Wills (Published by Hirst Books, 2007 ISBN 978 0 955714900)

NAKED - Tragedies, comedies and discoveries. The journey continues...: Anneke Wills
(Published by Hirst Books, 2009 ISBN 978 0 955714917)

Anneke Wills Official Website

Hirst Books

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Some fans may not like it but I think Ben Foster's music for the five part Torchwood: Children Of Earth truly allows him to step from out the shadow of his mentor Murray Gold. It demonstrates he can deliver music that's as strong as anything that could be considered Gold's best for Doctor Who. There. And I've been saying it since reviewing the first Torchwood soundtrack album.

The album opens with The First Sacrifice, lushly romantic music that suddenly plunges into tense high strings. It's a compositional arrangement that will crop up through all five episodes as a musical motif for Jack's original exchange of the children in 1965. Onto business as usual with What's Occurring, with its lovely driving strings and percussion punctuated by those big, fat blasts of brass as Gwen clacks into work and the team start poring over their Hub monitors. The gorgeous piano motif for Jack's Daughter is supplemented by lush strings, a hint of tragedy already embedded into the theme. Quite lovely and sad.



Diplomatic Cars is that unforgettable cue from Day One. Pumping brass sections, skittering percussion and that Bondian feel, explored in similar fashion by David Arnold, that's later developed into a terrific piece of music in Thames House that pulls in much of the feel of Murray Gold's UNIT theme from the parent series, throws in subtle electronic tonalities, stunning brass parts, and an overall string motif to make it the signature music for this series. Foster takes many of the threads from these themes - the brass and strings in particular - and uses them as the key parts of the more frenetic cues like Double Crossed and Countdown To Destruction. Very stirring themes, they develop out of much of the work he put in on the previous two series, underscoring the action elements of the story beautifully, especially that really climactic clatter of strings, brass, guitar and percussion that signals the destruction of the Hub. Torchwood Hunted equally has squally guitar and percussion driving along with some wonderfully accelerating strings. He takes all of these ideas and then throws in more brass and some choral emphasis for The World Looks To The Skies. The scoring for brass is especially stunning. Foster certainly ups the ante on the action stuff and if he was asked to score a Bond movie tomorrow I'm sure he'd be up to the job.



He's also at home underlining the hideous threat of the 456 with his cues We Are Coming and Something's Coming. He captures their creeping unearthliness in slow strings, plucked sections and that repeated use of a discordant set of arpeggios. There are also some very sensitive cues that are purely used as character defining motifs - the gorgeous music for Clem in Clement MacDonald and Clem Remembers - high strings symbolising the man's terror followed by warm and romantic strings and piano that echo the tragedy of his connection to the 456. The latter also has a beautiful vocal section with harps. Vocals are also very much to the fore in Judgement Day and Annalise Whittlesea and Lewis Cullen provide very memorable choral work, interspersed with some twangy guitar sections and soaring strings, those repeated brass parts, that are reworked later in the score during Jack's ultimate sacrifice. It's lush and powerful and definitely one of the highlights of the score.

If Requiem For The Fallen and The Ballad Of Ianto Jones don't have you wiping away a tear then quite frankly you've no soul. Vocalist Annalise Whittlesea returns with a very moving performance on both tracks. Ianto's theme is given due prominence here and built upon with said vocals, mournful twangy guitar and pulsing treated keyboards. It finally bursts into full rock mode and the guitars and swirling strings and piano sections all hurtle towards a fabulous crescendo. Think Donna's music from Turn Left cranked up to 11! Full of lost possibilities and mournfulness, it's gorgeous music and for me is a fitting tribute to the character.



All the cues are arranged as they appeared in each episode and for Day Five, there's the lovely Calm Before The Storm, full of sadness; the gritty determination of Phase Two has Begun, again echoing Foster's overall theme as the music turns to the threat and fear of a government using troops to round up the children. Requisition 31 is as uncomfortable as the scene it scores, namely Frobisher's decision to murder his own family. High, tense strings, staccato piano and then sad, Mahler like strings augmented by percussion and a brief section of Foster's main themes. Again, some very sensitive scoring is accomplished for He Was A Good Man, that unforgettable exchange between Lois and Bridget Spears.

The Children Of Earth is stunning, aided by a soaringly beautiful Lewis Cullen vocal, soft romantic strings covering a slower articulation of those characteristic arpeggios. Breaking The Connection and Fighting Back take the album towards the shocking conclusion of the series and define the way that Jack and Gwen turn around the dire situation. Connection is wonderfully atmospheric with drawn out atonal brass and high strings. Fighting Back, jittery percussion and lush strings dotted with those lovely brass sequences, dares to suggest hope momentarily and overlaps into Run For Your Life as Gwen attempts to smuggle children away from the authorities, with a grand and sweeping use of the orchestra. Both tracks then form a linked suite with Sacrifice And Salvation as Jack uses his grandson to destroy the 456. Again, soaring and powerful.



Finally, Redemption and I Can Run Forever sensitively explore Jack's mindset after all that has happened. Great string composition, subtly exploring the emotions of the hero who has had to make personal sacrifices and unpleasant moral choices in order for the Earth to survive, with breathtakingly beautiful vocals from chorister Lewis Cullen. I Can Run Forever is another outstanding piece, using the established Captain Jack themes and hints of fallen Torchwood comrades with brief nods from the Tosh, Owen and Ianto themes. To end the album, a little treat with Here Comes Torchwood, firing on all cylinders with staccato brass, scratchy guitars, electronic percussion, chugging strings, and Next Time On Torchwood, a rising musical motif that ends with crashing drums that was used as the tag for each episode.

Superb. No other word will do. Essential purchase.

Tracklisting -

Day One
1. “The First Sacrifice” (1:25)
2. “What’s Occurring?” (2:10)
3. “Jack’s Daughter” (1:28)
4. “Diplomatic Cars” (1:20)
5. “We Are Coming” (1:12)
6. “Thames House” (1:53)
7. “Double Crossed” (1:26)
8. “Countdown To Destruction” (1:52)

Day Two
9. “The Crater” (1:00)
10. “Torchwood Hunted” (1:42)
11. “Gwen’s Baby” (1:03)
12. “On The Run” (1:13)
13. “Jack In A Box” (1:34)
15. “Tractor Attack” (2:21)
16. “Resurrection” (1:11)

Day Three
17. “Clement Macdonald” (2:05)
18. “Something’s Coming” (2:35)
19. “Eye Spy” (1:20)
20. “Trust Nobody” (1:46)
21. “The World Looks To The Skies” (2:10)

Day Four
22. “Jack’s Secret” (1:36)
23. “Clem Remembers” (1:34)
24. “Judgement Day” (4:05)
25. “Requiem For The Fallen” (1:23)
26. “The Ballad Of Ianto Jones” (4:36)

Day Five
27. “The Final Day” (0:40)
28. “Calm Before The Storm” (3:22)
29. “Phase Two Has Begun” (1:50)
30. “Requisition 31″ (2:38)
31. “He Was A Good Man” (1:39)
32. “The Children Of Earth” (3:27)
33. “Breaking The Connection” (2:25)
34. “Fighting Back” (2:02)
35. “Run For Your Lives” (1:13)
36. “Sacrifice And Salvation” (1:39)
37. “Redemption” (3:13)
38. “I Can Run Forever” (3:28)
………
39. “Here Comes Torchwood” (2:24)
40. “Next Time On Torchwood” (0:31)

TORCHWOOD Children Of Earth - Original Television Soundtrack: Ben Foster & BBC National Orchestra of Wales (SILCD1290 Released 11th August 2009)

Ever since the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey science fiction cinema has stockpiled ever more sophisticated visions of mankind's physical relationship with the environment of space. These views, perpetuated through the late 1970s and early 1980s in such classics as Silent Running, Alien and Outland have depicted man caught in the contradiction of attempting to survive hostile encounters with aliens, machines or his fellow creatures whilst also dealing with the consequences of technology and how it is both civilisation's saviour and destroyer. The hero is seen as isolated figure, often with his own moral code, and rather situate him in the pristine, anti-septic idealised future of Star Trek, those great films have shown us life in space for our hero can be dirty, messy and have profound psychological and physical effects on the mind and body.

Moon, a low budget UK film directed by Duncan Jones, shares these familiar tropes, almost concentrates them down, in fact, to pay wonderful homage to the visual language of the back catalogue and to put the issues of identity - of humans, machines and artificial men - centre stage with an astounding performance from Sam Rockwell as the main character Sam Bell.



Sam Bell is employed by Lunar Industries (those of us familiar with this genre will instantly be suspicious of corporations because they inevitably have blood on their hands and are up to no good) to supervise the mining of the surface of the moon for cheap, free energy. He is about to complete his three year tour of duty and is looking forward to returning to Earth to his wife and child. The problem is, he is hallucinating - seeing a young girl in the base and then on the surface - and beginning to notice that the messages from his wife on Earth are being manipulated. There is an accident. Next thing we know, Sam appears to have been recovered from his crashed vehicle and is being tended by his robot companion GERTY. As a rescue mission from Earth is launched to return him home and repair the mining vehicle, Sam overhears a live conversation between GERTY and Earth, even though there has been a communications failure on the base for some time, and becomes suspicious.

He eventually fakes a meteorite strike in order to get out of the base and returns to the scene of the accident, discovering that, in fact, his damaged vehicle is still occupied...



...by himself. The two Sams then have to unravel the company's conspiracy to use clones of the original Sam Bell to keep the mining operation going. Worse still, it is also the fact that they have given the cloned Sams the memories of the original, including a life with a wife and daughter back on Earth.

The film, whilst glorying in the production design that epitomises this branch of science fiction cinema, with loving pastiches of Harry Lange's work on 2001 and the Les Dilley, Roger Christian and Ron Cobb design and set decoration for Alien as well as emulating their signature graphics and typography, is at its heart about what it is to be human. This is often a preoccupation in the 'dirty futures' of space based SF films and Duncan Jones and his writer Nathan Parker quite rightly concentrate on Sam Bell's increasing paranoia, loneliness and depression within the wider context of the construction of his identity and personality.



So, it's a film with great thought attached to some impressive visuals. Fortunately, they hired Sam Rockwell to play the cloned versions of Sam and as well as handling the technical demands of the film he also, by virtue of his considered performance, holds the film together. It could quite easily have slipped into being a bore fest without Rockwell's commitment to the role. He is often very moving, especially in the understated climax where one of the Sam clones must sacrifice his life to allow the other to escape to Earth and blow the lid of the company's machinations. He's also superb in that very moving scene when he drives the moon rover out beyond the company's jamming frequencies and 'phones home, only to find that Sam's wife, of which all the clones would presumably have implanted memories, has actually died and his daughter Eve is now a teenager and the real Sam appears to be back on Earth.

There's also that very dry performance from Kevin Spacey as GERTY and Jones manages to manipulate the audience into a growing insecurity about Sam's robot pal only to completely turn it round towards the end by defying our expectations with GERTY helping Sam rather than getting all HAL-9000 on his ass. The robot ironically suggests Sam wipes its memory to help cover his tracks from the impending arrival of the rescue team.



Made at Shepperton (where they filmed Alien in 1977) director Jones also foresook the overuse of digital effects and hired model effects legend Bill Pearson to design and build the vehicles and mining stations. It all looks great on the visual effects side and it's clear that Jones is very capable of producing high quality images on a relatively low budget. It's also embellished by Clint Mansell's sympathetically eerie minimalist score that mixes aching strings and delicate piano with electronic bleats and rhythms. It too captures the conflict of emotions and paranoid confusion of the main character, adding further to the film's humanist outlook and its critique of corporate slavery in the high frontier of space.



A fine little film that appears to have sneaked out under the radar in the summer blockbuster season and one which I hope gets a good audience who appreciate an interesting concept with thought provoking ideas about our own identities in an increasingly industrialised and exploitative society. And our attitudes towards those beings that one day we might create and foolishly end up exploiting. Don't expect action and explosions but instead treat yourself to something with a bit more brains.

MOON (Cert 15. Released July 17th 2009. Directed by Duncan Jones)

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Firstly, at least Momentum didn't use the dreadful set of sub-titles that marred the US release back in March. No worries here as we get the original theatrical release sub-titles. Does it matter, you may ask? Well, it does when much of the stuff you read at the bottom of the screen actually conveys a lot of character nuances. And in a deeply atmospheric and character driven story like this, it's a vital element that should be preserved.



A low budget Swedish film based on John Ajvide Lindqvist's book (and he wrote the screenplay too) and beautifully directed by Tomas Alfredson, it's one of those rare horror films that is able to articulate far more sensitive and absorbing material beyond the standard slasher/gore tropes. Yes, on the surface it is about a vampire but the entire film is about going below the surface, into an ambiguous netherworld where your preconceived ideas of horror are challenged. Not only does it concern us with a fragile, young adolescent boy, Oskar, beginning his journey into adulthood, and forming a relationship with what we assume is a young girl, but it also deals with politics, parental roles, fight or flight choices and bullying at school - the victimisation that Western society seems hell bent on perpetuating through sex, violence, drink and drugs.

The beautiful cleverness of this film is that it takes the now rather camp and redundant (and predominantly male) vampire/blood letting sexual symbolism and reinvests it in the naive proto-sexuality of adolescents, enriched particularly within the perpetual girl/androgynous boy character of Eli ("I'm not a girl" she/he demands and there is also a very brief shot of Eli's scarred crotch suggestive of the castration that the book is more explicit about). Whilst she/he is a feral creature, attacking adults for blood (and, note, miles away from the anodyne creatures of the Twilight saga. Drinking the blood of animals, what's that all about!) and scuttling up trees and the sides of buildings, Eli is also an object of growing affection for Oskar. It also takes vampire lore and adds a few twists. We are actually shown why vampires require us to invite them in when Eli demonstrates a bloody form of rejection to Oskar, suggestive of haemophilia and menstruation. There is also an undercurrent of greater threat in the film, set as it is in 1982, with the Soviets on the doorstep potentially aggravating their Swedish neighbours and the arrival of Eli and Hakan as symbolic immigrant refugees.

Many will argue that it has lost some of the power of the book but the paedophile storyline wasn't the one that Alfredson wanted to tell. But the sense that Eli is 'grooming' Oskar to replace Hakan still tentatively hovers in the background. The bullying material remains powerful even if some have argued that the depiction of Oskar as a photogenic blonde waif doesn't work in that context. I'd disagree, the character is still sensitive and introverted and that's probably enough to get anyone bullied these days.



Beyond this central repositioning, which in itself throws up a lot of moral questions about the pair of children who decide to 'go steady' half way through the film and who cannot possibly maintain their Peter Pan status as Oskar will grow into an adult whilst Eli remains forever a 12 year old, the film explores the family structure and parental responsibility. Oskar is being brought up by his mother and there is a very strange moment in the film when he goes to visit his estranged father and their bonding is interrupted by the arrival of a male friend. There is an uncomfortable silence and Alfredson suggests to me that the visitor is more than just a friend and is actually the father's lover. They obviously enjoy a drink which also fits in with the original book's view that the father is an alcoholic. This view of broken parental, adult, relationships is also mirrored in Eli's dependence on the odd old man Hakan. In Lindqvist's book Hakan is actually a teacher who has been dismissed after being discovered as a paedophile. In the film, it's never suggested and Hakan remains an ambiguous character who might or might not be Eli's father. He's also pretty inept at trying to slaughter various people in order for Eli to feed and this leads to his grisly undoing and one of many horrific scenes in the film.



The film concentrates on the growing relationship between Oskar and Eli, a brittle affair that's akin to the immaculate snowscapes that Alfredson and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema capture. They suggest the universal aspect of adolescent relationships, that may be frozen in time briefly but evaporate as Oskar leaves his Scandanavian suburban bubble at the film's conclusion. The suburbia he leaves is populated by sadistic schoolboys, as feral as Eli in some respects, but with whom Oskar learns to deal with his/her assistance. There are also the drunken locals Ginia, her boyfriend, Lacke, and his best friend Jocke, who all fall victim to Eli and Hakan. Ginia begins to transform into a vampire and there's a very disturbing sequence of events where she's attacked by the cats in Lacke's flat and later, understanding her fate whilst hospitalised, gets a nurse to open her curtains which results in her prompt combustion as the sunlight floods onto her bed.



It's a deliberately paced film, building a somnambulistic, mesmeric, fragile quality, with a painterly eye to the visions of cityscapes and landscapes frozen in the Scandanavian winter. The film is augmented by a blue, silver and white colour palette for the exteriors and grey and browns for the interiors with lighting very diffused. Red blood looks almost black in most scenes. The brilliant central performances by Kåre Hedebrant as Oskar and Lina Leandersson as Eli are tender and evocative, understated and sensitive. The score from Johan Söderqvist is superb, at once melancholic and romantic, hopeful and scary.

The Blu Ray transfer is lovely but not one you would offer particularly as a demonstration of what exactly the format can do for high definition images. The detail and contrast is excellent and it perfectly captures the colour and lighting schemes employed by Alfredson. The transfer is spotless, handles the majority of the night scenes exceptionally well and is crisp and brilliant for the daylight snowscapes. The DTS-HD audio in Swedish is on the whole very good, quite low key but bursting into life during the more frenetic sequences adding the necessary jolt to some of the jumpier moments in the film. It handles the dialogue and music without any fuss and is exceptionally clear.

The UK edition boasts a lively commentary track from Alfredson and Lindqvist, some deleted scenes and a very unrepresentative theatrical trailer which seems to market the film as a dull slasher flick. As a footnote, the rights to remake the film are with the relaunched Hammer production team and Cloverfield director Matt Reeves is attached to the project.

Screenshots courtesy of Blu-Ray.com and Cinemasquid

Let The Right One In (Momentum: Blu-Ray - Region B - 1 Disc - Cert 15 - MP 879 BR - Released 3rd August 2009)

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The award winning drama from AMC, Mad Men, is back on August 16th. This stunning series, set in the world of the New York 1960s advertising industry, boasts superlative writing and exceptional acting. This moody, introspective drama, beautifully designed and shot, is highly recommended to those of you who enjoy character driven, ensemble work. The promotional frenzy has started, with gorgeous spreads in Vanity Fair, and a number of New York based events, as well as the marketing push from AMC.

Here's the Annie Leibowitz shot of Jon Hamm and January Jones (Don and Betty Draper to you and me) from Vanity Fair.



Beautiful images from the Mad Men gallery by Frank Ockenfels 3 on the AMC website. Pop over and have a look at the full gallery of 15 images.







Here's a video covering the shoot for the key ad art, showing Don underwater in his office!



And here's AMC's 'Utterly Seductive' promo:



Join me every week from August 17th for episodic reviews! Thanks to Vanity Fair, AMC and Frank Ockenfels for the images and promos.

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The Leisure Hive

August - September 1980

'His scarf killed Stimson!'

'Arrest the scarf then!'

Bit of a pre-amble first. Season 18 emerged, blinking into the harsh light of the 80s, into a changing world. Firstly, it has to be acknowledged that popular culture, with an emphasis on 'pop', had moved on. Going to the pictures was different, especially in the aftermath of that film in 1977 - and I'm not just talking about visual effects here. Films were being made in a very different way - faster editing, shorter scenes, an attention to sound design etc. It was all so much more kinetic. Technology was having a huge impact and this would filter down to the small screen too...



In music, the same was equally true. Production was slicker and faster, there was all that discussion about traditional musicians being replaced with banks of sythesisers and drum machines. Marketing the sounds of the future took a quantum leap with the advent of the pop video. Artists were trying to out-do each other with the flashiest looking video they could make. The aesthetics seeped into the minds of the public. Popular science, manifesting itself in the way of everything from the first personal computers through to the launch of the Rubik's cube, was fun. Yes, mathematics and logic puzzles were sexy. We were cooing over Mandelbrot's book on fractals in '82 and the first home video games like 'Pong' had gone mass market by '83.

And let's not forget, Doctor Who Weekly became a monthly. The fan archetype was emerging and the series was the subject of an escalating scrutiny. And a new producer arrived...

The future was here...

So let's look at Hive and consider the obvious changes first in light of the above. John Nathan-Turner certainly changed how the series looked by ditching the original slit-scan titles that had been in service since '74 and going for a rushing star-field look. And with the titles came Peter Howell's reworking of the theme. Was he right to do this? At the time, he was.



It was fresh and vibrant and the new arrangement worked. Nathan-Turner was obviously keen to tap into new music technology, after all...it was 'the future'. And therein lies the problem...it was 'the future' according to the '80s man in the street but 'the future' had a horrible knack of becoming obsolete very, very quickly and kept getting replaced by a series of 'futures' every six months! (Hello, Clive Sinclair...) It may have made economic sense at the time too but with the new theme and the incidentals all being handled by the stalwarts of the Radiophonic Workshop there is certainly more of a built in obsolescence in that glorious 1980s idea of the 'now'. Somehow, Delia's original maintained its unearthliness despite the odd tweak here and there along the way, but Howell stripped that away for me. And we were left with just the nice tune.

And the odd thing was...the big blockbusters of the day were all scrambling to get the LSO to do sweeping symphonies. Not a synthesiser in sight. Never mind, the kids on Top Of The Pops noodled away on their analogues for a time, so it sounded right for about eighteen months. Farewell, Dud Simpson. You were marvellous while it lasted. However, I do think, he'd lost his enthusiasm by Season 17. As a parting shot, City Of Death was great.

Briefly, a word about the new 'neon bar' logo. Even then it looked rather passe. It has pretensions to be futuristic with its joined up letters but resembles something from the pages of a 1970s issue of Look-In or the font Timeslip used to denote 'futuristic'. Yes, they needed a new logo but that one never really appealed to me.



And so Hive opens with the infamous tracking shot along Brighton beach. It's a tad indulgent, isn't it, and just as indulgent as those dreadful question marks the Doctor's sporting on his shirt. Nathan-Turner had a habit of putting aspects of the show into ruddy great quotation marks. Just in case you missed the significance. I blame popular cultural theory, myself, but I just think he's treating the show as a way of channeling his 'light entertainment' aspirations even here. Hence the Doctor's new 'uniform' - the idea of which will become more and more significant in the next ten years. But it's a lovely burgundy ensemble that Tom is modeling for us and, I have to say, it is an improvement on the 'I've just rushed in from rehearsals and popped the Doc's coat over me dirty shirt' look that Baker was giving us in the last season. He's a got a waistcoat and everything that matches here. Nice.

OK, so we've got change of music, titles, logo, the Doctor's look...new TARDIS prop...er...er...another annoying habit of the incumbent producer at this time was his 'shopping list' approach to the script-editor of the day. It's needed here because he has to change a number of the outward, cosmetic aspects of the show but it becomes an approach to making the show that really screws things up later. It's almost as if he's sitting in front of that gameshow's infamous conveyor-belt...'stay tuned!'...'stay tuned!' 'Didn't he do well?'



Sort of.

Talking of script-editors, Christopher Bidmead also starts his job at this point and he immediately homes in on the 'popular science' angle. His obsessions with Pythagorean mathematics and logic start here. And, to me, it's not entirely a bad thing. The philosophical and poetical nature of his obsessions do invest this season with running themes - the nature of change and decay, closed environments and systems, intellectual puzzles. He conjures dream-like landscapes into the series that weren't there before. Unfortunately, he gives the characters an awful lot of gobbledegook to say in the process. And it's not your normal faux gobbledegook. He's trying to put the science of the day in there and make it all sound 'consumer friendly'.

Hive is a very simple story. Reptile gangsters want to take over the planet Argolis and scupper the Argolins plans for a happy future. The Doctor and Romana turn up. It's not much to go on. There's a richer David Fisher story trying to get out but it's wedged in between the story Bidmead wants to tell and the story Lovett Bickford thinks he's directing. Plenty of visual fireworks going off, lots of mind-boggling babble about 'tachyonics' and a couple of reptiles disguised as humans inadvertently providing the Argolins with a solution to their demise. All fighting for a bit of your attention. You don't know which way to turn. It's confusing and, most of all, it's really different. I remember watching on first transmission and not quite knowing how to react.



Granted, it looks marvelous. After the longeurs of the Brighton beach scene, we're in the fast cutting, whip panning, hand-held environs of Argolis. But it looks unfinished and rushed and it isn't easy to keep up with. It does beguile you, though. There are lovely flourishes throughout, from the POV shots of the docking spaceships to the tracking shot with the materialisng TARDIS, a moodier lighting palette and a confidence with the effects. Yes, some of the scenes are unnecessary and don't add anything to the plot but it's the casualness of using these as a palette for background detail that makes a marked difference here. This is a million miles away from The Horns Of Nimon and so it should be.

And then Peter Howell goes a bit mad with his synthesisers. He's obviously so cock-a-hoop to be doing the incidentals that he just gets carried away and puts music over every scene. Annoying music that has a habit of telling you which scene has which kind of mood but it's also a rich synthesiser driven palette in its own right. But, put it down to experience. Hive is definitely all about trying things and screwing up. Unfortunately, the reptile villains of the piece, the Foamasi, are quite forgettable and aren't really villains after all. The close up shots of the creatures are good but the final reveal just doesn't convince. No better or worse than the Mandrells of the previous season. Another bit of a cock up.



In the middle of all this visual and aural bombardment, Baker, not only gets a new coat but gets aged- up in the make up chair and Lalla gets all the interesting 'sciencey' bits to do. They're both good, with Baker at his cantankerous, broody best as the aged Doctor. There's a physical melancholy here that echoes right through the season. Adrienne Corri and Laurence Payne each manage to get a respectable performance across but David Haig steals the show as the politicised Pangol. Love the camp Top Of The Pops video effects as he replicates himself in the Generator. Very 'Devo' meets 'Talking Heads'. Bickford ransacks the 'pop-video' aesthetic and manages to give this a visual tone all of its own. There's nothing else quite like Hive - despite its faults and incoherence - and clearly the series is trying to run before it can walk here as ambition gets the better of everyone involved. But its impact is important. There are more things here that they get right, just from a production view, than they get wrong. It's just a matter of confidence at this point.

It would be easy to say it's all style over substance but I think that's not the case. There are substantial efforts going on here and a determination to steer a different course and though it may not be a likeable story there are many aspects to admire as the series dons its 'futuristic' new clothes.

Are they the Emperor's new clothes, you may ask?

Nah, only the shirt with stupid question marks would qualify for that assignment.

DVD features include:

• Commentary - A very candid track from Christopher Bidmead, Lalla Ward and Lovett Bickford
• A New Beginning - Great 30 minute documentary looking at all the changes JNT made to the series. Essential.
• From Avalon to Argolis - Interviews with writer David Fisher and Bidmead
• Synthesizing Starfields - Little featurette about the making of the new title sequence for Season Eighteen. Interesting insight into Sid Sutton and Peter Howell's contributions
• Leisure Wear - June Hudson on costume design, including her take on the new cossie for Tom.
• Blue Peter - Coverage of the Longleat exhibition in early 1980.
• And Production Notes, Music Only Option (a superb Howell score), Photo Gallery