The Fog - AMC - 13th September 2009 - 10.00pm

S P O I L E R S for non-US viewers!

An extremely impressive piece of television, The Fog completely inhabits the haiku tone poem structure and style that Mad Men has successfully created for itself. Here it shifts rather surrealistically into a dream-like territory that only the likes of Twin Peaks has previously mapped out on television. The Fog is primarily focused on the birth of Betty and Don's baby. For Don, this pregnancy began at the end of his mid-life crisis fling in Los Angeles and it's clearly both a nightmare he desperately wishes he could escape and a painful duty he must endure to maintain the primary coloured but hollow American Dream.

STOP PRESS: If you nip over to the excellent Television Heaven website you can be in with a chance to win one of these great Avengers DVD sets from Optimum! Thanks to Laurence Marcus for asking me to review the set and for posting the review over on his site.



In 1960, Sydney Newman, ABC’s Head Of Drama, suddenly canceled a half-hour crime series called Police Surgeon. After a run of only thirteen episodes he felt the series wasn’t working, was too mundane, and he demanded a new starring vehicle for its lead actor Ian Hendry. Hendry, he felt, was the right person to lead what would eventually become The Avengers and he cast him in the role of Dr. David Keel. Joining him on the series were a number of Police Surgeon cast and crew, including producer Leonard White, director Don Leaver and actress Ingrid Hafner. Finally, actor Patrick Macnee was cast in the role of John Steed, a shadowy figure, an undercover spy, to whom Keel turns for help in seeking revenge for the murder of his fiancée by a gang of heroin smugglers. And thus television history was made. Well, nearly.

Optimum Releasing have now put together a handsome DVD box set of the remaining first series episodes and the entire run of second series episodes of The Avengers. All of the episodes receive their UK DVD debut with this release, have been restored and are accompanied by a very comprehensive package of special features. Most importantly, it offers us an opportunity to see how The Avengers originally developed between 1961 and 1963 under the producership of Leonard White.

BBC1 - 19th September 2009 - 6.40pm

Merlin is back and judging from the first episode not much has changed: Bradley James gets his chest out (several times, tonight!), Angel Coulby and Katie McGrath get about three lines between them, Anthony Head repeats his commitment to wiping every last sorceror from the sky, Colin Morgan looks pretty and has a new hair-do and...the threat to Camelot is averted and there's a big reset button at the end.

I'm being disingenuous. The Curse Of Cornelius Sigan wasn't all bad and had enough interesting action to keep me entertained but anyone expecting huge improvements will be somewhat disappointed. The series does seem more certain about itself, especially with the slick photography and production design, even if it's still relying on formulaic use of the characters. Dishy Arthur still thinks Merlin is a lazy and incompetent serf and Merlin's still the butt of his jokes. Uther Pendragon is still rabidly anti-magic and Morgana still has nightmares despite Gaius maintaining her Nurofen habit. Gwen still doesn't really exist.

Castrovalva

January 1982

A little preamble before I get into the story proper.

When the first episode of Castrovalva went out on the 4th January 1982, the Doctor Who landscape had shifted. Not only did we have a younger actor taking on the role, in the form of Peter Davison, but the programme itself had been uprooted from the traditional Saturday tea time slot and was now sitting in a twice weekday position in the schedules. Whether this was something that Nathan-Turner had planned or whether it was foisted upon him from the upper echelons of the BBC, the effect on viewing figures was dramatic and it introduced a wider audience to the show.

Consequently, from this point on we start to see the programme begin a further transformation into, some would argue, a 'soap' format. Personally, I think it took on the flavour of 'Morecambe And Wise With Monsters', to paraphrase a recent debate, but I'll talk about that much later. Just keep an eye on the guest casting from here on as it's certainly Nathan-Turner wearing his 'light entertainment' and 'variety' hats in earnest.

Oh, and Eric Saward took on the job of script-editor. More of him later.

Logopolis

February – March 1981

‘You revolting man!’

Logopolis is still a very divisive story. It’s not the swan song that many fans were expecting for the Tom Baker era and it was probably not the one Baker himself was expecting at the time either. However, I would argue that the conclusion of the era was more than appropriate. Not only does the story articulate our sorrow at the departure of the Fourth Doctor, arguably an incarnation with nowhere else to go within the ‘modernising’ notions of Nathan-Turner’s first season as producer, but also it’s a statement in itself of where the series has been and where it is about to go. The story and the characters are held within a past-future tension and appropriately within the context of the story, and as the Monitor states, the Universe (and the series) has gone beyond the point of heat death. The series itself, uncannily, falls into its own loop of recursion in order to stave off entropy and continue on. Therefore, Bidmead’s treatise on entropy, recursion and change is in itself also a statement on Doctor Who.

The Keeper Of Traken

February 1981

'A whole empire held together... by people just being terribly nice to each other.'

‘A new body at last…’

The Doctor and Adric are invited to Traken at the request of the ailing Keeper. Something evil is flourishing on this Eden like planet and the Keeper is concerned that it will overwhelm the union and threaten the mystical Source that harmoniously holds together the planets in the system. However, the ancient evil of the Melkur creature hides an old enemy…

Troy Kennedy Martin, who died today, was one of the old school television writers, of the same generation that produced his brother Ian and other writers who saw television as a visual medium, like Potter for example, rather than one driven by dialogue alone. It was this viewpoint, a frustration with the limitations of live television production in the early 1960s, that he put forward in Nats Go Home: First Statement of a New Drama For Television, an article published in Encore in 1964. Troy more or less foresaw and embraced the transition that television drama made from studio based video taped productions of the 1960s and early 1970s to the breakthrough of all film, on location dramas of which The Sweeney was perhaps the iconic example. But even on film, he felt television should still embrace the experimental, the ambiguous and the cerebral.



He started writing for the BBC in 1958 and five plays followed over three years as well as the six-part anthology series Storyboard. It was his determination to show the gritty realism of police work, as opposed to the cosy view of it in Dixon Of Dock Green, that led him to create the iconic drama series Z-Cars which, whilst limited very much to studio production with filmed inserts, introduced a realism into police stories, depicting policemen as flawed human beings. He stayed with the programme for the first two years.



He also made his mark in cinema, writing the script for what is now seen as the ultimate British caper movie, The Italian Job. The film has since become something of a national institution in Britain. He also wrote the screenplays for Kelly's Heroes and a spin-off of his brother Ian's series with Sweeney 2. In the 1980s he returned to television with a remarkable adaptation of Angus Wilson's The Old Men At The Zoo in 1983 and in the same year Euston Film's epic First World War spy drama Reilly-Ace Of Spies.



Arguably, his lasting legacy will be Edge Of Darkness, a nuclear thriller that mirrored the turbulent politics of the mid-1980s and that mixed conspiracy thriller, science fiction and crime drama to stunning effect. It analysed the reactionary tendencies of the Thatcher administration, attempted to lift the lid on the secrecy surrounding the nuclear industry and incorporated environmentalist James Lovelock's Gaia theory. It mixed realism with mysticism. It met with such acclaim that within days of its transmission on BBC2 it was repeated on BBC1. It's one of the most highly regarded British television dramas ever made.

He did not completely repeat this success with later film and television projects, writing the screenplay for Walter Hill's Red Heat, then only returning to television in 1997 with Hostile Waters for BBC2 and in 1999 with an adaptation of Andy McNab's Bravo Two Zero for BBC1.

But he leaves us with exceptional pieces of television: Z-Cars, episodes of Redcap, a couple of Wednesday Plays, an Out Of The Unknown, episodes of Colditz and The Sweeney; Reilly-Ace Of Spies, The Old Men At The Zoo and Edge Of Darkness. And he'll always be remembered by film fans for The Italian Job and Kelly's Heroes. Thanks Troy.

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My Old Kentucky Home - AMC - 30th August 2009 - 10.00pm

S P O I L E R S for non-US viewers!

A slightly uneven episode but one that picks up a number of story threads and develops them. One of those focuses on Peggy's attempts to transform herself, emerging from her stultifying chrysalis, to finally seize her independence as a woman and as a creative force within the agency. Here, the need for the creative team to work over the weekend on a Bacardi campaign gives Peggy the opportunity to once again let her hair down. She's at first excluded from the boy's own club of Paul and Smitty but when the boys buy some pot from an old college friend of Paul's (the rather vacuous Jeffrey played by the lovely Miles Fisher) she determines to join in.

In the series Peggy is either advised to use her femininity to get what she wants or is frowned upon by an older woman for her social improprieties, often her mother. Here, she's advised not to get involved in the drug taking by her new, and for the agency, more mature secretary Olive. Olive genuinely worries what will happen to Peggy if she takes the boys on at their own game but Peggy triumphantly challenges them and to a certain extent, even though she gets high as a kite, does the very thing the boys so completely fail to do - develop the campaign. Whilst they are reduced to a giddy bunch of children she gets inspired and attacks the campaign with gusto. Her departing words to Olive are, "I am going to get to do everything you want from me." Elisabeth Moss is just superb in this series and clearly has a handle on Peggy and uncannily inhabits this nervous, shy woman.



Elsewhere, we have three subplots running about male/female relationships. Joan Holloway, that iconic Sterling Cooper employee, played so wonderfully by Christina Hendricks is having a party. I've been worried, as has everyone else, about her engagement to Doctor Greg. He's got a very dark side as we've witnessed, and his temper flares over Joan's seating arrangements. Joan is, by now, getting to know how to dampen his fire and deftly compromises. Their dinner party becomes a not so subtle clash of class attitudes, some woman on woman bitching ("The fact that Greg can get a woman like you makes me feel good about his future no matter what happens"), and a highly revealing moment when colleagues tells us that Doctor Greg isn't the Kildare-like figure he's made out to be. Before it goes further, Greg changes the subject of the conversation by getting Joan to play her accordion and sing C'est Magnifique. That's right. Joan plays the accordion! A tense scene is completely turned on its head by one of the campest, funniest moments I've ever seen in Mad Men. It actually leaves you sympathising with Joan, one of the fiercest women in the office, someone who takes no prisoners, who is now caught up in a weird sado-masochistic relationship with Greg.



There is also a clash of wills between Gene, now living with Betty and Don, and Betty's daughter Sally. I love the way the writers are now developing Sally's character and I feel sure they are going to do the same for Bobby too. Sally steals $5 from Gene's wallet and has the house in uproar trying to find the missing money, even to the point that Betty's maid is accused of theft by Gene. However, when Sally pretends to have found the money, Gene immediately understands what's going on and Sally realises what she's done is wrong. Ryan Cutrona is fabulous as Gene in this episode, oozing threat, blood and thunder and who scares Sally to a point where at the end of the episode she treads down a darkened hallway to his room expecting to be punished when in fact he makes her read to him from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Now, there's a subtle metaphor!



Roger and Jane are also throwing a country club party at which Don, Betty, Ken and Pete attend. There are two moments here that quite literally make you gasp. First is Roger, blacked up, and singing My Old Kentucky Home, to Jane before all their guests. Remember, this is in the early days of the Civil Rights movement so this kind of casual racism would have been the norm. This is one of the things Mad Men can do - really prod you with a mode of behaviour or a character that reminds you just how different things were. Often, a central character acts as a filter for us and here it's Don's obvious distaste for Roger's performance that connects with our own rejection of such attitudes. Secondly, there's Jane. At the top of the episode she's even bossing Joan about and yet when she was employed at Sterling Cooper she was a lowly secretary beneath Joan. At the party she gets horribly drunk and blurts about the problems in Don and Betty's marriage. January Jones is again great as Betty, here looking quite happy to get on and murder Jane for her indiscretion. Don and Roger have a face off and there's that wonderful scene where Roger questions Don why he's not happy for him. "No one thinks you're happy," Don replies. "They think you're foolish." Bravo, Don!



Like I said, it's a fragmented episode and is pretty much the sum of its parts. I often see Mad Men episodes as compact little haiku poems with a series of inter-related scenes all intersecting about a common theme. The tone of the series also lends itself to this idea. With this episode, I just felt they hadn't quite joined the verses together well enough. Still very engrossing and beautifully performed.

The Arrangements - AMC - 6th September 2009 - 10.00pm

S P O I L E R S for non-US viewers!

A week later and the series is firmly back on course, continuing with Peggy's story, with further developments in the relationship between Don and Gene, Sal getting a short-lived boost to his career, a classic Joan moment and the agency dining on fatted calf.

First of all, Gene. I was really expecting them to take the character a lot further than tonight's sad conclusion. After an upsetting talk with Betty about his funeral arrangements, Gene continues to bond with her children Sally and Bobby. Sally especially treasures Gene and goes out in the car with him, she steering the wheel whilst he operates the peddles. It's a poignant moment when he tells Sally "You can really do something. Don't let your mother tell you otherwise." which signals his disappointment in Betty and her marriage to Don.



He also pisses Don off by giving Bobby a war memento, a Prussian helmet, and describing how he shot the soldier in the war. Don is incensed and there is a great whiff of testosterone as the two men argue about the differences between an enemy and a fellow human being. Again, it tells us that Gene's views are no longer seen as particularly patriotic in the 1960s. He's already out of time. When he fails to pick the kids up from school and goes missing, a police officer arrives and informs Betty that he's dead. At the wake, Sally gets very upset with the adults because they no longer see him as a person - "Nobody cares that he's really, really, really gone." Symbolically, she falls asleep that night clutching Gene's copy of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gene's Empire may well have fallen but Sally's generation may see it decline even further.



The fatted calf at Sterling Cooper arrives in the form of rich kid Horace Cook who wants the agency to market a sport no one's ever heard of: jai alai, which his father later dismisses as "Polish handball". After much wringing of hands, Don talks to Bertram and Horace's father about this waste of money. His father basically admits that Horace's scheme is just his latest fad and he'll just take it to another agency if Sterling Cooper don't spend his money. It's like taking money off a child and that's reflected in the later scene where the boys are fooling about with Horace's racquets and break Bertram Cooper's zen-like ant-farm. The broken objet is heavily symbolic of a now much changed and deeply amoral agency perhaps?



There is also much comedy value out of Peggy's ad for a room-mate and the boys mercilessly take the piss out of her with a crank call using Lois to impersonate 'Elaine' who is apparently badly disfigured and packs meat. In steps Joan in one of her wonderful scenes as she advises Peggy on what to do. Listen to your Auntie Joan, Peggy! She tries to tell Peggy that the plan to move into Manhattan and share an apartment is an adventure and not a chore. It's about being women with freedom, something which Peggy has a hard time dealing with. She eventually interviews Karen Ericson as a prospective roomy and bluffs her way around her own awkwardness. Christina Hendricks is again quite brilliant as Joan and what can one say about the already stunning Elisabeth Moss as Peggy that already hasn't been said. She really makes Mad Men such a pleasure.



Sal is offered the opportunity to direct the Patio commercial - the pastiche on the Ann-Margaret rendition of Bye Bye Birdie for a diet drink - and at their apartment, his wife Kitty, after failing to rouse him with her fluffy negligee declares he isn't himself these days. Of course, the audience is in on the game and knows that he's a closeted gay guy and is rarely 'himself', but Sal deflects this by saying he's anxious about the commercial. For me what follows is just a supreme example of the programme's tiny little moments that reveal the characters to each other. Sal proceeds to enact the commercial to show Kitty what he intends to do. He minces about doing an Ann-Margaret impression and if you watch Kitty's face you can see her slide from joyfulness to absolute horror as she realises that her husband is a screaming queen. It's so painful to watch. Toe curling. And you feel so sorry for Kitty as this major revelation bursts open in front of her. Later, we learn that the commercial is judged a flop because, ironically, the girl they use, as Roger points out, "isn't Ann-Margaret". Clearly, Kitty now thinks Sal is!



Finally, Peggy reaches a crisis with her mother, now living with her sister. After buying her mother a new TV she reveals that she's moving into the city. "You'll get raped. You know that," she snaps and decides to disown her, rejecting the gift of the TV, claiming there's obviously a man involved. Perhaps this move will ultimately be the making of Peggy because it's clear her mother has already decided, as her sister remarked earlier in the episode, that Peggy is "...going to be one of those girls". Despite her mother's hostility, it's ironic that as Peggy leaves that we hear her mother turn the TV on.

A sublime episode with a narrative that subtly shifts gears, some genuinely funny moments, major developments for some characters and great ensemble playing.

Thanks as ever to the marvelous Mad Men official site and blog.

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District 9, Neill Blomkamp's 'sleeper' science fiction film produced by Peter Jackson's Wingnut production comapny, is very much about 'the Others' as signified by the immigrant aliens at the centre of the story, in a film made in South Africa. Audiences have been exposed, through decades of science fiction cinema, to various responses to imagined invasions and the dominant trope remains that the correct form of response is to immediately kill, attack or go to war with these invading Others. Here, the Others take on other dimensions and the film allegorically responds to how a white society treated the indigenous black population in the South African apartheid as well offering a contemporary view of 9/11 and the war of terror against the Other, the ghettos forming some kind of visual representation of Guantanamo Bay.

Director Blomkamp's film is also quite unapologetically about the enforced removal of 60,000 mainly black inhabitants from an area of Cape Town, called District Six, during the 1970s. The history of District Six points to an apartheid government that basically smeared the cosmopolitan inhabitants of the area with stories of vice dens, prostitution, gambling in order to declare the area a slum, clear it and grab the land and declare it for whites only.



Blomkamp's film takes this unfortunate chapter in South Africa's apartheid history and layers it into a story about 1.8 million displaced aliens, stranded on Earth for 20 years on the outskirts of Johannesburg, forced out of their own makeshift township by a government dominated by a private military contractor MNU. The story not only refers to the District Six events but it also reflects similar events in new surburban ghettos in post-apartheid South Africa. Where the film was shot, Chiawelo in Soweto, was, with little irony I presume, also the site of similar attempted evictions. Blomkamp focuses on a number of issues on the back of this, everything from extreme xenophobia, racism, arms trading, genetic experimentation, government cover-ups, and the risk is that the film may have become a dry, left wing polemic. The film is already accused of being a retroactive, out of date civil rights story. However, it's really not quite all or any of these and the moral messages are wrapped up in a bundle of hyper violence, body horror, big spaceships and CGI creatures. It's a good tale, well told and it gets you thinking. And that counts in a summer full of dull, anodyne blockbusters that would even struggle to articulate a view on the price of carrots.



It's complex and contradictory. The population that had settled in District Six weren't aliens. They were the indigenous inhabitants of a cosmopolitan area of Cape Town and the land was theirs and it was forcibly taken away from them. The aliens in District 9 simply turn up and become rather heavy handed, cat food munching metaphors. They just want to go home because they don't belong on the planet and they have no claims to lands because the government put them in District 9 in the first place and now wants them to be evicted to District 10. It doesn't use its racism metaphor card in a particularly articulate way and the story is far more effective if it's seen as a treatise on xenophobia and the complex notions of 'the other'.

The central, everyman character Wikus van de Merwe, at the heart of the Blomkamp film, is especially well played by Sharlto Copley. Wikus goes on a journey where he eventually becomes the very thing he dislikes, the alien that the authorities seek to marginalise and deny any rights to whatsoever. A misguided man, rather than a thoroughly evil one, he's a bureaucrat charged with evicting the aliens and actually delights in their misery. A particularly disturbing scene is where he finds great amusement in the sound of exploding alien eggs as they burn in a building torched by the private security company. He doesn't initially endear himself to the audience and the trick here is that he is also signified as the film's hero. The audience is therefore asked to invest a lot of faith in the character but the character switches his morals as rapidly as he'd probably change his underwear so it is hard to get some sympathetic bearing on him.



The man undergoes a hideous transformation, akin to something from The Fly in terms of the gross out quality but also very much working at the metaphorical level of the man/insect duality of Kafka's Metamorphosis and whilst you feel sorry for him you can't help feeling he somehow deserved his fate. His status comes across as a not so subtle Christ metaphor. All that self sacrifice to get a cross shaped space ship to fly and free the aliens? There are moments in the film where he's shrouded in a grey blanket that are just too coincidental to shrug off the feeling that Blomkamp is chucking in some sort of religious parable too.



As the government strips away his rights as a human and in fact hunts for him as a useful alien/human genetic hybrid, he falls in with the alien Christopher Johnson (very much like the human names attributed to aliens in the movie and series Alien Nation) and his son. They demonstrate that the aliens aren't all worker bees and are in fact intelligent creatures capable of spending 20 years preparing a shuttle to return to the mothership hovering above Johannesburg. The film flip-flops between human-alien buddy bonding, the relentless hunt by the 'white men' of the government and the black mercenaries who all want a piece of Wikus to get control of the alien arms trade. Wikus trades passage on the shuttle for a medical procedure that will return him to human status but then snatches the ship from Christopher, abandoning him, attempts to fly the vehicle and ends up crashing it. It's at this point that the plot does resort to cliche when suddenly the alien son saves the day by miraculously getting the mothership to tractor beam the shuttle from the surface. Very convenient.



All this is told through the prism of the media so it's as much a critique of media saturation and manipulation as it is an allegory about apartheid (there is an ironic smear campaign suggesting Wikus has been caught shagging aliens) and the film is bolted together through faux news footage, to camera interviews and security camera coverage. Taking a leaf from Cloverfield's book, this approach works well, adding a verisimilitude to the events evolving on screen but Blomkamp struggles to maintain this and by the final half there is less and less of this approach and more of a standard action film construction. The finale belts along at a fair pace, is full of action and gore and the token bad guy Colonel Koobus Venter, relentlessly hunting Wikus down, does get his comeuppance. But the coda rather blatantly sets up the sequel by mentioning the aliens are resettled in District 10, Christopher's flying back in three years time with the mothership and possibly an army to free the slaves and Wikus might get his opportunity to return to human form. Wikus' wife is still alive, his father in law and corporate terrorist Piet Smit and the MNU (the subtly monnikered Multi National United) still control the government so it's a sure bet they'll all be back for the sequel.



It's a great B movie and Blomkamp invests a lot of his ingenue energy into it and awkward as it might be at times it is at least attempting to address pertinent issues in a post-apartheid South Africa. Visually it looks impressive considering the relatively modest budget, capturing the look of the shanty towns and layering on the CGI vistas of spaceships and the put upon aliens. It'll be interesting to see how Blomkamp finds a balance between polemic and fantasy in the sequel.

DISTRICT 9 (Cert 15. Released September 4th 2009. Directed by Neill Blomkamp)

Official Site

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John Foxx is having a very busy 2009 and Cathode Ray Tube can't keep up with him! Between February and May of this year, he's released three albums. Yes, three.

There is a very special quality to these three recordings that can be best described as sacred music for the modern age. This carries through from My Lost City to the stunning collaboration with Robin Guthrie on Mirrorball and much of the content of the three albums overall seem to me to relate to 12th and 13th Century plainsong, choral music and hymnals right through to Tallis and Byrd where Foxx layers on his own vocals and sings in an indefinable but beautiful language.

My Lost City, released back in February, is a collection of instrumental works that John has been tinkering away at for a number of years including sound experiments going back as far back as the 1980s when Foxx was recording at The Garden studios in Shoreditch. The music reflects his passionate feelings about places. He's always struck me as a musician who is particularly sensitive to his surroundings and the areas in which he has lived.

His vocal dexterity is matched to electronic washes, riffs and atmospheres that conjure up the Brian Eno of Music For Films. All in all they all seem to be a form of electronic Mass that sound as if they should be played in the splendid architecture of churches and cathedrals or dubbed onto the soundtrack of films that form a snapshot of the changing urban landscape that can equally epitomise the spiritually modern. Holywell Lane is a series of rising synth riffs that float on and up into a beautiful sound poem to a place and time. Barbican Brackage is probably the purest form of this attitude on the album and as the title suggests it is perhaps a hymn to film making and modernist architecture. Hawksmoor Orbital is a mass of reverberating Foxx vocal chanting, fluttering electronics and strident organs. There's even a delicious little prayer to that oft discussed and derided piece of architecture, Trellick Tower in the closing track.

His obsessions with Ballardian hyper-reality are still intact too as the music and his intimate sense of place, an urban sense of place most definitely, leak out of the music and offer a liturgy to the layers and layers of history that can be fleetingly glimpsed in John Foxx's version of London. Precious, almost fragile, compositions set contemplatively together in miniature suites and well worth your consideration.

For further background to this album I would highly recommend John Foxx's own essay on The Quiet Man website

John Foxx: My Lost City (META21CD - Released 23 February 2009)


John's collaboration on A Secret Life with Japan's Steve Jansen goes back to their meeting during a performance with Harold Budd in May 2005. Foxx invited Jansen to record tam tams (gongs to you and me, love) for a potential collaborative release. After a long period of gestation and some additional work with Steve D'Agostino, whose efforts brought about the album's completion, what emerges is a fascinating soundscape of vibrations and oscillations merging with treated piano and percussion. This has the fragile beauty of Harold Budd piano pieces coalescing with Desmond Briscoe style radiophonics (check out his eerie soundscapes for the BBC's Quatermass And The Pit) and the edgier compositions of Simon Fisher Turner.

The sound, at once cavernous and yet punctuated by delicate keyboards, shimmers, shakes and drones. The nine minute A Secret Life (Part 2) oozes atmosphere and as in most Foxx instrumental works would be an appropriate soundtrack to some experimental film that depicts hidden worlds beneath the mundane surface of the everyday. It also is highly reminiscent of Brian Eno's series of Ambient albums where the textures and sounds in a shifting audio environment are free of traditional melodies or song structures. It's delicate, elusive music, hardly there. Beautiful and mysterious. Listen to it late at night with headphones on to get the best effect.

John Foxx, Steven Jansen & Steve D'Agostino: A Secret Life (META22CD - Released 23rd March 2009)


Of the three albums released in this period, Mirrorball is perhaps the most satisfying and engaging. If one was being somewhat disingenuous then it would be very cliched to say this is the Cocteau Twins album we never got. It's full of Guthrie's beautiful, filigree layers of guitar and Foxx's vocals are very impressive as they soar away over the layers of piano, guitar and electronics. This again touches on his interest in vocal harmonies and resonances, particularly the way sound behaves in cavernous spaces such as the architectural perfection of cathedrals and churches. It's an effect that he's been interested in since The Garden and the initial sessions for Cathedral Oceans.

It again reminds me of the Brian Eno music that featured heavily in Derek Jarman's film Sebastiane and Foxx's vocals are seemingly just improvised, used as an instrument to compliment the swathes of sound, and only the odd word can be comprehended. It all adds to the overwhelming sense of mystery and hidden secrets that the album conjures up. I hate to use the word but it's all very 'pretty' with lullaby-like melodies, particularly on My Life As An Echo, which conjures up a meandering walk through gardens bursting with flowers and fountains. Foxx's keyboards dance and pirouette, glittering like jewels in the echoing layers of guitar and percussion. Quite lovely. The Perfect Line picks up on the sacred music of the other releases and is beautiful, his lush vocals and Guthrie's trademark guitar work being a heavenly match.

My personal favourite is Estrellita as it condenses and amplifies all the sound experiments into one gorgeous track that waltzes across the soundstage. A sonic jewel. Yeah, pretentious, but when something's this lovely you just need to put your 'ambient music, ugh' prejudices on hold. And Foxx's vocals just soar and it gets really quite emotional. Luminous deserves to be performed in a vast cathedral and aches to fill massive spaces. It's just so big. Sunshower is probably the closest comparison you could make to the melodic and vocal structure of better known music of The Cocteau Twins and Foxx makes a very impressive stab at improvising those iconic Lis Fraser vocal skips.

Mercurial, full of longing, soaring melodies, this is reflective, summer afternoon listening, perfect for wandering through those cool colonnades, and indeed 'down all the English lanes'.



John Foxx & Robin Guthrie: Mirrorball (META23CD - Released 4th May 2009)

And coming up: The reissues of The Garden, The Golden Section and In Mysterious Ways and the forthcoming reissues of Shifting City and The Pleasures Of Electricity. Will this pleasure never end...

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Grumpy of Mayfair here! We are 2! Yes, 2. Damn it.

Cathode Ray Tube celebrates its 2nd birthday today. Now don't get all unnecessary. Richard Curtis is writing an episode of Doctor Who and that's enough unnecessariness for now.

It's been two years since this blog stumbled into existence and I suppose I'll have to be all jolly about that. Mmm. Not sure about that. Anyway, I raise my mug of cold tea to another year of blogging. I might, just might I say, even celebrate with a cake. Plus I could mention this is post 501 and 115,000 visitors have popped in. Many of them just borrow a cup of sugar or look for Mad Men torrents I hasten to add. And then there's that Japanese porn spammer. But some of you actually read and comment. Here's to you.

I suppose you'll want me to tell you what's forthcoming? Oh, go on then. As long as you promise to read this bloody rubbish then I'll try and carry on. In the next few weeks you'll get more reviews of the superb Mad Men and I'll finish off the Derek Jarman reviews and try and do a bit more on archive television, attempt a Hammer Films/horror films 101, do more Blu Ray reviews. Classic Doctor Who, the new specials, The Waters Of Mars, Nightmares Reign and The End Of Time will all no doubt bother these pages. And I really will do an update on library music.

Unfortunately this will have to be done without the aid of cloning. It might take a while. You might want to make a cuppa, dig the allotment or visit that massage parlour.



But I should not be too surly. My thanks go to you, dearest reader, and to the many friends who have along the way supported this blog or just simply pointed and said 'You can't say that!' and I simply will not be able to provide a roll call of you all but special thanks to Him Indoors ('you're not on the bloody laptop again!'), Tony Jordan and DWAS, the Three Who Rule over at Behind The Sofa, Laurence at Television Heaven, the Seadevils, Lucy, Graymalkin, Doc Occupant, Patrick, Rich, Barnaby, the lovely Camino Real and all friends over at Outpost Wrinkly and Gallifrey Base. They are legion. And they are ming-mong.

Much thanks to all the folk on Twitter who share, especially @andrewtibbs @kasterborous @faceofboe @kazters @ahremsee @dougggie @iainmhepburn @Grindrod @robstickler @MichaelBarley @capricorn_one @loveandgarbage @Fazzinchi @jenidh and many, many others!!!

Thanks to my mother, my dead pet cat Fluffy and that rugby player with whom...well, we won't go there.

To quote Lazz Grayson, 'Thanks for looking in. And I love you all.'

Ah, Grey Gardens.

How to explain the phenomenon to those of you who have never heard of it. I think first we must mention the Maylses brothers, Albert and David. It's their documentary film of 1975 that introduced the world properly to Big Edie and Little Edie. That's the two Edith Beales, a reclusive socialite mother and daughter of the same name who lived at Grey Gardens, a decrepit mansion at 3 West End Road in the wealthy Georgica Pond neighborhood of East Hampton, New York. That's Edith "Big Edie" Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale - the aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.

Previous to the 1975 documentary, it was an article in the National Enquirer and a cover story in New York Magazine in 1971 and 1972 about their living conditions—their crumbling house was populated by cats, raccoons, fleas, didn't have running water and was full of rubbish and had failed a Suffolk County Health Department inspection - that alerted the world to the two eccentric recluses. The two women were about to be evicted when Jackie and her sister stepped in and funded the repair of the hovel so that it would pass the inspection.



Behind the withdrawl of the two women from modern society is a tale that symbolises the death of the American dream, particularly that promoted by the Kennedy administration, and the high society in which they circulated. It's a story about a daughter's insecurity and her mother's overbearing manipulation. Hopes, expectations, dreams as an actress and performer were all that Little Edie had and her family frowned upon those desires. Big Edie just wanted life to be one long party but the divorce by her husband put a stop to that and the money supply. Both women retired into a charming, frightening, illogical but fascinating eccentricity - Big Edie trenchantly refusing to leave Grey Gardens and retreating to a past where she was convinced she was a great signer and Little Edie conjuring up an alternative lifestyle with its own philosophy and outrageously surreal sense of fashion.

That's Grey Gardens.



Albert and John Maysles were fascinated by this fin de siecle American story and filmed a documentary about the Beales women, allowing them to tell their own story. The documentary became a highly acclaimed work in the Maysles long career as film documentarians. From it flowered a huge cult following for the Beales, particularly Little Edie, that has now fed into numerous books, audio recordings, a successful musical, festivals, conventions and now a dramatisation from HBO. Fans of Grey Gardens, and I count myself amongst them, really didn't know what to think when it was announced that Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange would play the pivotal roles of the two Edie Beales. Barrymore, in particular, would have to pull out the stops to match the sublime Christine Ebersole's performance as Little Edie in the Grey Gardens musical which I had the immense pleasure of seeing in New York in April 2007.

Transmitted on April 18th, 2009, Michael Sucsy's film has already been nominated for 17 Primetime Emmys. And it's very clear why. It doesn't dishonour the Beales story and attempts to expand, much as the musical did, on the lives of the two women prior to the decline of their fortunes and it's driven by two very accomplished performances from Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange.



The film does start with a very episodic structure, flashing between 1973 and the Maysles arrival at Grey Gardens and the shooting of the documentary and back to the house in all its glory in 1936. It provides a satisfying contrast between the squalor the two Edies had been reduced to and the very chic, full on glamour of the late 1930s, despite the Depression. The period detail is lovingly recreated by costume designer Catherine Marie Thomas and production designer Kalina Ivanov and it's fascinating to see how Little Edie didn't quite fit in with high society, her spirit already defined and how Big Edie kicked against the dour conservatism of her husband Phelan by hosting budget busting parties and shacking up with a gay composer, Gould Strong (the 'damn Ganymede' as Phelan refers to him). Even here both women are engaged in a power struggle to see who can carve out a career in the world of entertainment.



Flash forward to 1973 and Drew Barrymore is pretty much channeling the Little Edie you may have seen in the documentary. And it's not an easy game to pull off. Both ladies have vocal cadences that are hard to maintain, a weird mix of British received pronounciation and New York twang that's very difficult to get a grip on but is beguiling to hear. Barrymore nails it and it is very spooky because the lines between dramatic recreation and the Maysles documentary blur and overlap, particularly when Sucsy layers on grain and damage to the footage to represent what the Maysles shot.



Her fashion advice is also lovingly recreated and Barrymore disappears into the performance whilst demonstrating, "This is the best thing to wear for the day. You understand. Because I don’t like women in skirts, and the best thing is to wear pantyhose or some pants under a short skirt, I think. Then you have the pants under the skirt, and then you pull the stockings up over the pants underneath the skirt. And you can always take the skirt off and use it as a cape, so I think this is the best costume for the day. I have to think these things up, you know? " As Drew addresses the camera and huskily whispers to the filmmakers, "Mother wanted me to come out in a kimono, so we had quite a fight," you know she's made damn sure that Little Edie lives!

As Little Edie's ambitions are crushed by her interfering mother and father (they put a stop to her fling with the married Julian Krug and her musical ambitions) she seems to retreat into her own fantasy. Big Edie loses Gould and simply retreats into Grey Gardens. Lange is also rather stunning, catching the woman's flightiness in youth and then remarkably transforming into the cantankerous, withdrawn older Edie, catching her physicality brilliantly whether she's combing out her hair or peering at her beloved cats through retro, pebble like spectacles.



She captures the abandonment, the loneliness, the frustration and the wheedling, domineering influence over her brittle daughter. Both women are, as the film helpfully observes, 'an acquired taste'. Barrymore and Lange are great, often superb, but they have smoothed off the edges of the two women who appeared in the Maysles film, ranting and screeching at each other. Dare I say it, but they actually make the Beales endearing when in reality it was their baroque repulsiveness that was the source of fascination.

Sucsy gets the trash aesthetic spot on for the delapidated mansion which comes across as a peculiar haunted house and once the flashbacks to the 1930s dwindle the narrative settles into a linear progression that recounts Phelan's death, the Kennedy assassination and Jackie's visit to her relatives, having been alerted to their plight. Jeanne Tripplehorn is regal as Jackie and there's a laugh out loud moment when Little Edie starts bitching at her, claiming it should have been her that married into the Kennedy clan and snapping, 'Is it true that Jack Kennedy gave you gonorrhea?'



The coda of the film is placed in a sequence where the Maysles screen the documentary for the two women, Little Edie declaring, 'It's an artistic smash!' and believing it akin to the French New Wave, even though she's never seen any of the films of the Nouvelle Vague. It's here that we leave the Maysles documentary behind and move into melodrama. Mother and daughter fight over Little Edie's desire to attend the premiere and accusations come to a boiling point that cause Little Edie to run off to the beach but then have a change of heart as she spots Big Edie's missing favourite cat. All is forgiven. Little Edie goes to the premiere and gets her time in the spotlight. And if you're a great big soft nelly like me, you'll be sitting there with tears streaming down your face. I watched the film twice within a space of three or four days and still ended up blubbing. It may be melodrama and schmaltz but Barrymore and Lange provide such strong performances that it would seem churlish not to lap it up.



Hilariously, the film ends with a credit roll over a recreation of Little Edie's cabaret act as she murders 'Tea For Two', forgets half the lyrics and throws in her own bizarre choreography whilst wearing a suitably camp silky red outfit. Let the credits roll and you'll get a sweet little treat at the end as Little Edie bellows out 'No animals were harmed in the making of this film!' in her characteristic New England drawl. That takes care of the cats and the racoons then. If you are a Grey Gardens obsessive then you might feel this film takes too many liberties but as someone who does appreciate the original Maysles films and understands the cult appeal of Little Edie in particular I would say it is worthy of your attention despite the undefined emotional core of the story and the manner in which Sucsy wraps it up. Enjoy the Lange and Barrymore performances, the production design and the gorgeous music by Rachel Portman.

GREY GARDENS (HBO DVD 100211 - Region 1 - Released July 14th 2009 - Unrated)
Special features:
• Audio Commentary by Michael Sucsy, Lucy Barzun Donnelly and Rachael Horovitz
• Grey Gardens: Then and Now

Official Site

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The Lowry, Salford - 4th September 2009 - 7.30pm

You might be forgiven for thinking that there isn't much more to say about the bitter relationship between iconic 1960s playwright Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell. John Lahr's biography Prick Up Your Ears and Stephen Frear's similarly titled film have, you would feel, covered that ground rather thoroughly. But the reason why Halliwell murdered Orton on the 9th August 1967 has been the cause of much debate ever since and Halliwell has predominantly been viewed as the bete noir of the couple, reduced to taking such action because of his jealousy of Orton's fame and sexual self-acceptance.

Simon Bent's play, which opened in Richmond and is touring to Manchester and Brighton before a limited season in the West End, does put Halliwell at the heart of the story, espousing the very Orton centric Frears film and redressing the balance and the somewhat dismissive, perhaps almost homophobic, undercurrents of Lahr's biography. In essence, the new play is a journey into Halliwell's mind, how he reacts to the changes in the relationship between him and Joe and ultimately begins to close down.

The casting of Matt Lucas as Halliwell was a risky inspiration. We freely associate him with a parade of funny looking and sounding characters from Little Britain so an audience coming to this are going to pick up on various nuances in the performance. Lucas is actually a bit of a revelation here and his physical and vocal comedy stands him in good stead for the first half of the play where Halliwell starts out as Joe's mentor and lover. He's extremely funny and captures Halliwell's neurotic tics and barbed one-liners brilliantly.

There's a great scene where he and Joe improvise their own version of radio show Mrs. Dales' Diary that's achingly funny and deftly illustrates that they were a very closely bonded couple, sharing the same irreverent, dangerous humour and attitudes to stuffy post-war British mores. We also get the notorious episode of the defaced library books for which the pair of them got six month prison sentences, a rather harsh sentence even then and, as Halliwell himself remarked, was probably dealt out to them 'because we were queers'.

Even now their defacing of the the jacket for Dorothy Sayers' Clouds Of Witness can make an audience roar with laughter..."This is one of the most enthralling stories ever written by Miss Sayers. Read this behind closed doors...And have a good shit while you are reading." What the prison sentence and the defaced books also illustrate, and the play does this very well, is the difference in class between the two men - Halliwell's style is more refined whereas Orton's starts out slightly cruder - and how prison changes all of this, turns Orton into the leader. As actor Chris New, playing Orton, recently remarked in an interview with The Daily Telegraph “So Joe going to prison was a confirmation of his understanding of the world,” adds New, “whereas Ken going to prison was a betrayal of his understanding of the world.”

The triumph in Lucas' casting lies in the second half of the play. Here, Halliwell is addicted to barbiturates, is completely neurotic, agoraphobic and verging on suicide. Lucas transforms himself into a man who sees his partner about to become something that they both originally abhorred and directed most of their barbed writing at - the establishment. Drugged, shambling about in his underwear, Halliwell is constantly fearful of the contents of Joe's very honest diaries and Lucas successfully shows how the man desperately needed psychiatric help and craved the physical attentions of a lover who had already surpassed him in talent and success and was finding sexual satisfaction elsewhere.

When it comes, the murder, and despite the audience's recognition of its inevitability, is very violent and, overall, numbing. It abruptly follows a nerve jangling, late night argument between Halliwell and Orton and is the appropriate, if not bloody, full stop on the relationship. The play suggests that, yes, as we knew, Halliwell was jealous of Orton's success and felt he was being left behind but also that his motive may have been to protect Orton from himself, from becoming enamoured of the world that they had both set out to destroy. It's also clear that Orton would not have have been the brilliant writer he was without Halliwell who not only educated him but also mentored him in the ways of sex and society.

Chris New is equally good as Orton, slipping very comfortably into the Orton uniform of white T shirt, turned up jeans, leather jacket and cap. He provides a perfect contrast to Lucas' very physical approach, only allowing brief moments of camp to punctuate a deliberately controlled performance that essays Joe's growing confidence and maturity (the name change from John to Joe is also a significant turning point in the play and in Orton's own prospects) as well as his frustration and worry for Kenneth. Chris emphatically reveals Joe's love for Kenneth, even if in the latter days of their partnership it wasn't cemented through the sexual act. Orton could certainly be accused of insensitivity but he had plenty of opportunities to leave Halliwell but didn't take them. Perhaps because there was a bond them that neither of them could break despite themselves.

The trials and tribulations of Orton and Halliwell are lifted by a superbly funny turn from Gwen Taylor as their landlady Mrs. Corden. She is the synthesis of various Orton characters, the epitome of the Orton-esque in the way she represents a knowing British eccentricity and sexual repression. Mrs. Corden is perhaps a barometer of the public's reaction to Orton's work, reveling in Joe's rapid rise to stardom and then sympathising when, for example, the initial run of Loot is savaged by the critics. She's British to the core and in the play she feeds Joe's muse with her malapropisms and non sequiturs, little nuggets that she's blissfully unaware of producing.

Production designer Peter Mackintosh and lighting designer Peter Mumford clearly understand Simon Bent's focus on Halliwell and Mackintosh uses the set, the cramped environs of their Noel Road flat in Islington, as a visual metaphor for the breakdown that Halliwell endures. Halliwell's infamous collages thus become a symbol for the man's state of mind and the set slowly begins to fill up with them, until at the end the entire room has become a dark cell cluttered with cut up images of works of art. Mumford's lighting also alters the mood of the piece, gradually moving from golden hues to dark blues and purples as Halliwell's grip on the world shrinks and shrinks.

'City Life' in the Manchester Evening News rather cold shouldered this production, giving it a measly three stars and complaining that Lucas wasn't focused enough in the first act. The first and second acts are the opposite sides of the same coin and Lucas effectively handles the flip between the confident Hallliwell and the manic Halliwell. He really is impressive in the second act, completely transforming himself and is very convincing in the scenes where Halliwell descends into the abyss. Go see it.

It continues at The Lowry, Salford tonight (5th September) and then is at the Theatre Royal, Brighton from the 7th to 12th September before the London run at the Comedy Theatre from 17th September to 6th December. See All Gigs for tickets.

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A new Pedro Almodovar film is always welcome but I have to admit I was filled with some trepidation after reading some rather mixed reviews about Broken Embraces. Needn't have worried, the Spanish auteur has not lost his touch and this is a thoroughly absorbing and mesmerising film with a neat post-modernist twist on the director's own back catalogue. It isn't the best of recent Almodovar films but it is still well worth indulging in.

The film at once attempts a dissection of the creative process - why the central character, blind former director Mateo (a stunning performance from Lluis Homar) writes and wants to make films - and what happens when that impulse is forcibly taken away from you by other people, in this case by the jealous husband Ernesto (José Luis Gomez) of Lena (a spectacular Penelope Cruz), one time prostitute and secretary and now the star of Mateo's film. The story of how Mateo's film, starring Lena, was taken out of his control by Ernesto and how he ended up blind from an 'accident', unfolds in multiple flashbacks between the Madrid of the present day, of 1992 and 1994, and through various films within the film.

For example, the gay son of Ernesto, at the behest of his father, proceeds to document the making of Mateo's film Girls And Suitcases on video and much of the developing love story between Mateo and Lena is told through the rushes played back to an ever angrier Ernesto. Almodovar also wears his film references well. In a climactic confrontation between the son and Lena, there's a wonderful homage to Peeping Tom as she grabs the tripod and threatens him with it. Girls And Suitcases is more or less a revisioning and recreation of Almodovar's breakthrough hit Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown and comes complete with spiked gazpacho, ripped out telephones and burnt beds as well as two gorgeous little cameos from Rossy De Palma and Chus Lampreave, members of Almodovar's original rep company and stars of Women.

It's a rhapsodic treatise on love, the relationship between Mateo and Lena is told with all the melodramatic power found in Douglas Sirk films (and his Magnificent Obsession gets a name check) and uses spectacular landscapes in Lanzarote as a backdrop to their windswept love affair; it's also about the self-destruction of relationships, the very Broken Embraces of the titl

This includes visual metaphors such as Mateo's torn up photo collection which Almodovar gradually tracks in on as Diego (a ravishing Tamar Novas), the son of his equally jealous production manager Judit (Bianca Portillo), starts to piece them back together; the devastating car crash that happens just as Mateo and Lena are embracing; the domestic violence used as punishment on Lena by Ernesto which is eerily reflected in the filming of Girls And Suitcases as De Palma pushes Cruz down a flight of stairs so that the film can continue filming as Lena has suffered a broken leg as a result of Ernesto's actions.

This is again neatly summed up visually by a series of dissolves of x-rays that again show how love is so fragile and life is composed of a collision of actions and consequences. Broken embraces, broken bones. Mateo's prime function in the film, as an author and director, is to pick up the pieces of a failed career and stop blaming himself for Lena's death in the car crash.

His recovery is epitomised by the way Diego helps him articulate much of this back story whist they spend several days together alone and by the later confession of his production manager Judit that she helped Ernesto scupper the release of Girls And Suitcases and re-edit it so that it would be a flop. Mateo recovers the original takes from the film and sets about re-editing and restoring the film as he would have wanted it. A very apt metaphor for the entire narrative in the way that lives and creativity are bound together and their loss can be recovered from by re-engaging in the creative act. There is also a great deal in the film about identity and the slippage between Lena's life as Ernesto's mistress, a former prostitute and secretary and the various constructed identities on the film set are highlighted in her audition with Mateo where she is augmented with various wigs to look like Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn.

There is also a major theme of how fathers relate to their sons; with Ernesto manipulating his own gay son, whom he pretty much loathes, into spying on and betraying his own mother; with Mateo and Diego's relationship, at first simply a male friendship, then later revealed to be yet another parent and child bond. This is neatly summarised in the film's opening when Mateo relates the story of author Arthur Miller's estrangement from his own autistic son and their eventual rehabilitation. Almodovar pretty much sets the stall out for that part of the narrative in the story that Mateo relates.

As with many of Almodovar's successes this is beautifully constructed, visually immaculate and delves further into his recent admiration of Hitchcock. The scoring from Alberto Iglesias is a heightened homage to Herrmann's beautiful score for Vertigo and many of the noirish elements from Vertigo inform the film's melodramatic tensions. It only stumbles at the very end when Judit drags Mateo and Diego to a local bar, downs a bottle of gin, and spends quarter of an hour more or less telling the audience where all the pieces of the narrative fit together. The audience deserves a slightly better constructed ending after making their way through the weave of complex sub-plots and flash backs. And in Girls And Suitcases Almodovar does somewhat send the film into perhaps an overindulgent homage to himself whereas most of the film is his own homage to Powell, Hitchcock, Ray, Minnelli and Sirk amongst others.

Still, it's an absorbing, delicious film with two central performances from Lluis Homar and Penelope Cruz that will keep you hooked right through to the end and it's a visual treat, with the director's customary attention to detail in costumes and production design. Recommended.

BROKEN EMBRACES (Cert 15. Released August 28th 2009. Directed by Pedro Almodovar)

Official Site

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