BBC1 - 29th May 2010 - 7.00pm

As writer Chris Chibnall revealed in this month's Doctor Who magazine, he went back to Malcolm Hulke's Doctor Who And The Silurians as his inspiration for this two parter. With Cold Blood it's clear he doesn't know quite what to do with the Silurians once he's woken them up and rather like Hulke's original story, once you've shown that both races simply have too many differences to be able to get along, you either have to blow one of them up or send them back to sleep. Hulke used the internal conflicts of both the humans and the Silurians to represent the Cold War and post-colonial politics of the early 1970s and used the drama to show the wider consequences of the battle for the planet before...well...the Brigadier blows the Silurians up. I suspect the Eldane voice over was Chibnall's attempt to place this story into a broader context but it sits uneasily as historical commentary to a rather weak episode that is concentrated solely in an isolated mining village.

Cold Blood at its worst presented the complex problems of racial hatred, colonialist entitlements and apartheid between the humans and the Silurians in very simple 'Janet And John' terms. The scene showing Amy, Nasreen and Eldane thrashing out their negotiations and reaching a compromise had its heart in the right place, but was truly awful when it had Nasreen turning to question Amy about the terms of Silurian immigration and settlement, devolving into just one of those interminable Star Trek Picard/Sisko/Janeway foreign policy board meetings with the rubber faced 'Aliens Of The Week'.

Whereas it took the ANC and the National Party at least six years to establish a peaceful resolution to apartheid and a new constitution in South Africa, it took the three of them precisely five minutes to establish a legal framework for sharing the entire planet never mind a single country. The BA cabin crew strikes would be nipped in the bud with this team working at ACAS.


The big problem here is, of course, a sense of scale. These negotiations take place in a bubble that's divorced from the rest of the planet. At least, in previous Silurian stories the uneasy dialogue between the Silurians and the humans was given either a national or global scale with the mutual lack of trust being shown to have far bigger consequences on the wider populace of Earth. Still, the script tries its best to show that all sides are culpable here and more or less treads the same ground as Hulke's Doctor Who And The Silurians. However, instead of the Brigadier blowing the reptiles up, we've got their leader realising that enforced hibernation for another 1000 years seems to be the only solution to the war that's brewing that will allow both sides some time to reflect on and potentially evolve in their attitudes.

To that end, Chibnall quickly tries to tie it up by having Nasreen and Tony stay behind as ambassadors in situ and the Doctor offering a sermon on the Welsh hills to spread the words of peace. Whereas in Hulke's script the xenophobic Major Baker succumbs to the Silurian plague as his just desserts for inflaming the conflict between the two races, the parallel character of Ambrose does at least have the consequences of her prejudices and mistakes presented to her. Ambrose and Tony are by far the most interesting characters in the story in that they do have a clear learning curve through the story, which is more than can be said for some. Ambrose is at least full of remorse in the end (a decent performance from Nia Roberts here) and agrees to take what she's learned about herself to bring up Elliot with the proper attitude.


However, morally, there are some mind-bogglingly strange notes in the script. Malohkeh, the Silurian Dr. Mengele, has happily been dissecting human beings for years and the Doctor doesn't even question it and actually allies himself to the scientist, who fifteen minutes in is upbraiding the military commander Restac for her methods in subjugating the humans. Better than plunging a scalpel into them, eh, Malohkeh? Presumably, he's the one who's been body snatching out of the local graveyard and planting the blue grass then? The Doctor merrily slaps the lizard on the back for reviving Elliot and conveniently forgets to mention the years of cruel scientific experiments he's carried out. I'm sure Mo will be proudly showing off that dissection scar down the pub next week too and like Elliot's kidnap it's all too casually brushed aside.

The Doctor also seems to get on his high horse a little too often here with the humans, blaming them for much of what has happened when in fact Malohkeh and Alaya had actually taken it upon themselves to attack the humans. He's quite happy tearing strips off Ambrose for what she's done, looking down his nose at her and the others for not being the shining exemplar he pompously expected them to be, but he's hardly been a reliable moral compass in this story. Eldane isn't exactly leadership material either and seems a rather pallid and ineffectual creature in the face of the military might of Restac. And just why was there a vast army of Silurians hidden away underground? When did their culture become so militarised?


I was willing to give the Silurian re-design some time last week but looking at them again this week just proved to me how utterly wrong the thinking was here from the design team. To take away their one memorable characteristic - the pulsating third eye - and then deck them out in skirts and fish nets, give them masks that make them look like toothless old hags and big clunky ray-guns just reduces them to the very thing fanboy Chibnall moaned about back in the 1980s. Worse still, they smother national treasure Stephen Moore in a horrid kaftan and the Star Trek make up to play Eldane, a sort of Silurian Nelson Mandela.

He looks less than dignified, alas, just when the script needed as much dignity as it could get and whereas Neve McIntosh really inhabits the make up and adds little physical ticks to breathe life into both Alaya and Restac, Moore doesn't quite seem to make the prosthetics work for him, almost afraid to work his facial muscles to bring life to the role, looking a little like he's just left the dentist with an anaesthetised face. A shame really because the rest of the episode actually looks rather good. There is an attempt to give a sense of visual scale to the episode with a lovely Gaudi inspired flavour to the production design which for the most part is highly attractive but sadly can't quite stretch to completely disguise the familiarity of Cardiff's Temple Of Peace location shoot. The lighting is particularly good and the brief use of Plantasia in Swansea as a location is effective too.


After all the thumpingly obvious signalling in The Hungry Earth, it was only a matter of time before we got to what I assumed was supposed to be a shocking ending with the death of Rory. Again, the script, direction and acting can't quite decide how this needs to be pitched and the biggest stumbling block is that the emotional edge has been worn off this laboriously signposted conclusion by the equally similar 'death of Rory' scene in Amy's Choice. I am sad that Rory has seemingly been killed off but there really isn't any emotional value in that scene and if, as I also suspect, that Rory will be restored then what exactly was the point in killing him off. Equally, now that Amy has forgotten him completely, then it just makes all the business in Vampires Of Venice and Amy's Choice rather inconsequential and redundant.

The series, in trying to build the moral and emotional dimensions of its characters and the consequences of the stories, when its subtext has been about remembering and forgetting, ironically seems to either forget that they exist or remove them completely just after they've been introduced. Amy and the Doctor have an adventure, something terrible and emotional happens, and then they go on a trip to Venice, or Rio or Wales and forget about it. Whether this is a consequence of related scenes being dropped from episodes isn't clear but both The Hungry Earth and Cold Blood feel like they've been victims of some very judicious editing. I can perhaps understand the Doctor's attitude because he's alien and has lived a long time but Amy trots through each story without the character palpably growing in stature. Even with Rory's death, she's robbed of her grief by the very 'crack in time' story device that Moffat's using across the series. That's either a very clever or a very stupid thing and I'm not sure we'll know which until the bloody Pandorica finally opens.


I'm not proposing a return to RTD's use of the domestic drama to ground the stories and develop the emotional range of the characters but just an acknowledgment that if you are going to make a series-wide arc so prominent in the stories, to the point of using it to actually kill off characters, then the consequences need to be seen to affect the other characters and story developments in significant ways across the episodes. There's a problem for me as, by not caring about Amy, then I don't really care if she can remember Rory or not. I'm not emotionally invested in the character enough for the death of Rory to really matter to me.

And if the Doctor knows how terrible the crack in time is then why has he spent nine episodes not doing anything about it? Unlike, say 'Bad Wolf', 'Saxon' or any of the other series-wide memes that have threaded each series together and led towards a two or three part finale, the 'crack in time' sub-plot is actually more front and centre than any of those memes and we, both the audience and the characters, know what it does and see the obvious threat again and again. The urgency it signals is ignored and the attempt to build a mystery into the series is constantly interrupted by the blatant moving of gears within certain stories to underline but not challenge the threat.

Cold Blood is pretty to look at (apart from that poor CGI explosion of the drill head) but never really gets its hands dirty with the wider political, moral, environmental and global consequences of waking the Silurians up. There was a chance here, suggested by the Eldane voice over, to do a big story that would deal with many of the wider implications of the Doctor Who and Torchwood universes, of dealing with another species face to face in a world that has already seen alien invasions and where government agencies already know about the existence of the Silurians. Instead, we simply got a lot of species-ist agit-prop in an isolated Welsh village with a population of about a dozen, the destruction of a multi-million pound drill head (won't the government investigate the explosion and the disappearance of Tony and Nasreen?) and the contrived death of a supporting character.

A completely revised and much fuller version of this review is now available in my book Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens - Exploring the Worlds of the Eleventh Doctor published by Classic TV Press and also available on Amazon.  

As the fight for gay rights escalates in Eastern Europe and in Africa, with the mayor of Moscow Yury Luzhkov banning the city's Gay Pride march at the end of May 2010 and with the 14 year jail sentence dealt out to a gay couple, Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga, in Malawi earlier in the month, it seems timely that Suddenly, Last Winter should remind us that, whilst we tend to rest on our laurels here in Western Europe, the battle for equal rights continues in the rest of the world and surprisingly in countries we've always thought were our more enlightened neighbours.


Gustav and Luca's soundings about the Italian population's opinion of homosexuality in Suddenly, Last Winter were further illustrated by the reportage I watched on ITV's Tonight: Afraid To Be Gay the same week I saw the film. The bile and intolerance that shocked me in Italy was it seemed bubbling away under the surface here in the UK too. Despite all the legislation here, homophobic attacks are escalating and 'out' rugby star Gareth Thomas and the Tonight team uncovered real prejudice out on the streets. Both the ITV documentary and Gustav and Luca's film are journeys into the heart of darkness, into countries that we thought we knew but that we find we hardly recognise at all beyond the comfort of our 'ghettos'. LGBT communities, whilst both secure that legislation has made their lives easier in the UK and that they are supported by their peer groups, forget that outside the 'ghetto' a very different narrative is still playing out.


Suddenly, Last Winter (Network DVD 7953316 - Region 2 - Exempt - Released 7th June 2010)



Variety were a bit sniffy about this new film from director Simon Chung and although End Of Love does have its faults and is slightly hampered by its 'gay friendly' marketing, it is a fascinating rites of passage story about one young man's struggle with drug addiction and prostitution in the Hong Kong gay community. Fascinating too that, although it is set in that world, the gay characters are not trapped in the closet and this story isn't about coming terms with their sexuality. It is more about coming to terms with their frailties as human beings, the cycle of addiction that vulnerable young men can fall into and has a universal message about love, faithfulness, morality and friendship.


Ming (Lee Chi Kin), a young gay man, aged 22 and living in Hong Kong, is arrested for drug addiction and possession and is sent to a Christian rehab camp where he is strictly monitored by the camp's leader and mentored by a fellow addict Keung (Guthrie Yip). As Keung helps Ming come to terms with what has happened to him and to pass the time in the camp productively, the narrative moves into a series of flashbacks that show Ming's life in Hong Kong, falling in with the wrong group of friends, sharing a house with pimp Cyrus and sinking into drink and drug abuse with Cyrus setting Ming up with a number of male clients. At the same time he strikes up a relationship with Yan (Ben Yeung) whilst working in a clothes shop.

Yan desperately tries to drag Ming away from the drugs, drink and sex, desperately yearning for a stable relationship with Ming. But as Yan puts more and more pressure on Ming, he withdraws from his lover and drifts into further drug abuse. Ming puts aside physical intimacy and love for a twilight world of fleeting sexual encounters and addiction, becoming disconnected and soulless. When Yan tries to visit Ming in rehab it is clear that the relationship is broken and there's a very powerful scene where Ming has to be held back forcibly from attacking Yan.


Back at rehab, Ming soon develops an affection for Keung. Keung is straight and remains unaware of the crush that Ming has for him. But the young man also finds calm and clarity whilst in rehab and things look up as Keung invites him to come and stay with him as soon as he is released. He is however rather annoyed to find that Keung has a live-in girlfriend Jackie (Joman Chiang) and she resents Ming's presence in the flat. She is entirely manipulative and possessive and as soon as she finds out that Ming is gay she once again drags him into wild, drug fueled parties and, in a disturbing twist, practically rapes him. This action sends Keung's world crashing down and, tragically, he too spirals back into heroin addiction.

As the flashbacks continue a final, horrifying twist is revealed in Ming's story that underpins his conflicted attitude and behaviour that we see in the film. The non-linear narrative does pay off with this twist despite some of the story elements being rather predictable. The central performances between Kin and Yip are convincing and enthralling, articulating the loneliness and yearning that both characters possess. Ming is not self-loathing and full of angst, which is a trap that most gay Asian dramas fall into when depicting gay characters, and it is more a study of emotional disconnection between a series of men he encounters - Keung, Yan and Cyrus. It's best represented visually by the erotic yet distant scene between Ming and Yan on the beach.


Jackie sits at the heart of the last part of the film like a big selfish spider and it is to Chiang's credit that she makes the woman so unlikeable and so destructive. She's another element of the film that ensures it isn't sentimental at all about how vulnerable people can be easily seduced by sex, drugs and prostitution and she propels the film to its bleak and tragic ending. The film has a hardness and realism but the relationships between Yan, Keung and Ming do offer a tragic romantic counterpoint to the narrative.

The sex scenes are frank, often erotic, and are again a barometer of Ming's slow withdrawal from the joy of such experiences, the later scenes becoming brutal and mechanical in contrast to the scenes on the beach for instance. Chung fills the frame with memorable images, shooting a drug overdose and a sex scene through the prism of a cocktail glass, capturing the urban decay of Hong Kong as well as the summery glow of the natural world in the beach and countryside. It's a bleak and morally complex tale that shows a director of great promise in Simon Chung.

Special features:

• Interview with director Simon Chung
• Interviews with Guthrie Yip, Clifton Kwan, Chi-Kin Lee and Ben Yeung
• Deleted scenes

End Of Love (Network DVD 7953315 - Region 2 - Cert 18 - Released 7th June 2010)

BBC1 - 22nd May 2010 - 6.15pm

As far as fairy tale allusions go then The Gruffalo is I suppose an interesting allegorical choice for this week's Doctor Who. Julia Donaldson's story about the mouse that exploits fear of a mythical beast to scare away predators is pretty much at the heart of The Hungry Earth as father and son read it together and later the father sits and reads it whilst on night duty at the drilling complex. It conjures up a number of ideas and themes. It is traditionally a book that parents and children read together, often amongst the first books used to teach a child to read. With Chris Chibnall's overtly Pertwee-a-thon of a script, bolting together an array of 1970s classic Doctor Who tropes, we could almost be getting the same experience.

A very child friendly, mildly scary Doctor Who that can be digested by children and parents in the same company and about as non-threatening a version of Doctor Who they're ever likely to share as viewers. It once again skews the series to the more child friendly end of the audience spectrum and again, like many of the episodes this year, throws in familiar childhood fears that evoke in adults their own memories of such anxieties. Hence, we get a central child character whose father has been swallowed up by the earth and is then allowed to go wandering about unchaperoned in the dark (by a Doctor who is as much a child himself when it comes to facing dangers) just as the monsters have started skulking round the graveyard. The fears of parental abandonment by children loom large in this episode and the central figure of over-protected Elliot is separated from both his mother and father in the story.


It also evokes some very Gruffalo-esque qualities in the Doctor. Surely, the Doctor is the mouse who, like a Zen master uses his antagonists' aggression against them, here reassures the child that he has met monsters before and they're usually the ones afraid of him. By his very nature, the Doctor is the tallest of all tall stories (especially now that he's played by the gangly Matt Smith) but the current series is in danger of over playing the whole fairy tale motif until it becomes obvious and dull.

This Zen like approach to confronting one's enemies, where The Gruffalo is a story of a mouse and a monster that shows no matter how gruesome the monsters children can create in their own minds, they are never as bad as they imagine them to be, is given strength by the Doctor's encounter with Alaya where he at first removes the mask from her face and, like the liberal Englishman he is, pulls up a fold away chair, crosses his legs and calmly gets behind her defensive bullshit. It's certainly one of the best scenes in a well paced slow burn of an introduction, and suggests that the morality of their relative positions might be further built upon in the concluding half of the story.


What's less intriguing is the all surface and no substance Pertwee love-in. Welsh mines and infected green-veined miners (he should have been called Bert) straight out of The Green Death, a drilling project that Sir Keith Gold would have fretted about only if the boss was Stahlman not Chaudhry and they were looking for a new form of energy (and just where are the hand wringing politicians in Doctor Who these days?), a village and its church surrounded by a force barrier and Silurians that appear to have a wardrobe designed by Paco Rabanne. Writer Chris Chibnall clearly has great affection for the Pertwee years but it's a pity that none of the real vitality of those halcyon days was present here.

They're drilling for the sake of it and no none seems remotely bothered about the effects on the environment (quite serendipitous that this was transmitted in the aftermath the appalling oil drilling disaster in the Mexican Gulf) and the encounter with the Silurians has barely explored the politics of the indigenous species versus the rampant colonial invader, a very British theme that Doctor Who used to tackle with gusto in the 1970s and which has lost its resonance since most of our colonies desperately demanded independence from us years ago. There is potential here to see further analogies to the 'Britain for the British' tub-thumping albeit reversed here with the Silurians spitting blood about us pesky apes. No, for the moment this is all window dressing until hopefully we get some serious sub-text in the second half.


There are some oddly unexplained moments here too. Why are the bodies of the dead being removed from their graves? It's a nice little way to split Rory off from the Doctor and Amy and have him doing his own bit of investigating but after standing in one of the graves pondering on what exactly to do the idea sort of fizzles out. What was the point of the Silurians blocking out the daylight when they surrounded the village with the energy barrier? Just so the Doctor could swan about with a pair of clever heat vision Ray-Bans?

There are enough rewards to be had though. I rather enjoyed that the supporting characters were actually fleshed out, given the extra time afforded by a two-parter. The relationship between Nasreen and Tony blooming as disaster strikes; Nasreen's reaction to the trip in the TARDIS and her growing admiration of the Doctor, with its 'old school' charm momentarily bringing Amy's cynicism and bitching into very sharp relief; and the Doctor's empathy with dyslexic Elliot ('Oh that's all right. I can't make a decent meringue') were all decent moments. The chase in the graveyard and Elliot's kidnap was also very atmospheric and tense as was Amy's rather horrified reaction to a potential dissection by Silurian (a neat parallel with the Doctor's criticism of Tony's willingness to dissect their attackers earlier in the episode).


I don't know about you but to me it's a bit obvious that Rory's days in the TARDIS are numbered. There is the heavy telegraphing of that opening scene between him and Amy where he takes her engagement ring off and puts it in the TARDIS for safe keeping. I can already see a distraught Amy finding that ring and wishing there had been another way. To really emphasise it, Chibnall plonks Rory in the middle of a graveyard and stands him in an empty grave. Subtle! And just what on earth was going on in the scene where the Doctor, Amy and Rory spot another Amy and Rory waving to them from a hillside? The Doctor brushes it off as a future version of them coming to relieve past glories but that just sounds either like obvious misdirection or some serious over-indulgence. Or are they on that hill trying to warn themselves of the danger they are about to face?

Shall we also take bets on who is going to start the war with the Silurians and fulfill Alaya's martyrdom complex? Will it be Tony, going all green veined on us or will it be Ambrose and her anger management issues symbolised by the huge pile of blunt instruments and guns that she's piled into her van? Again, the big speech from the Doctor about how they must be the best humans they can be in the impending crisis and how they have the potential to be brilliant just sounds like he's making excuses for what will be a regrettable blood-bath in next week's episode. It was hardly surprising that Nasreen was the only one clapping after that pompous twaddle.


One of the big problems with The Hungry Earth is the re-design of the Silurians. I can understand that it must be easier for an actor to give a better performance if the special effects make up allows you a wide range of expressions but here the Silurians we know and love, with their big ears, circular mouth/nose and that wonderful third eye have been replaced by a close cousin of  the Jem'Hadar. It's a very good make up but it's hardly a radical re-design and why have they suddenly got into the habit of popping on a mask? It's a good performance from Neve McIntosh but, old fashioned as I am, I want Radiophonic strangeness over my dodgy and not so dodgy accents and that pulsating third eye. For an episode completely driven by the return and reveal of a classic monster and their vast underground city, the new Silurians still need to go some distance to differentiate themselves from their Star Trek: Deep Space Nine cousins.

It's not a bad episode and is certainly an improvement on Chibnall's previous efforts on both Doctor Who and Torchwood but it perhaps suffers from the stuffing in of all the familiar Doctor Who tropes  as pure set-up for the second part of the story. Some good performances, some tense and scary moments but it didn't quite make the earth move for me.

A completely revised and much fuller version of this review is now available in my book Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens - Exploring the Worlds of the Eleventh Doctor published by Classic TV Press and also available on Amazon.  

Chris: 'Why do you think they put schwartz in their gobs?
Ray: 'It's quartz. How the bloody 'ell would I know. I'm not a geographist'

Gene: 'This place is mine. You lot belong to me. Not Drake, not Keats. Me'

Shaz: (about Alex and Gene) 'Those two should either get a room or kill each other.'

Alex: 'These pieces of quartz were placed in their mouths to make an ironic point.'
Gene: 'Well you'd better get on the blower to the Ironic Crimes Division Squad, hadn't yer?'

Alex: (to Keats) 'You're not D&C, are you?'

Gene: 'They're not exactly Antiques Roadshow material? They're gangsters. They don't go round slicing each other up over a bloody Welsh dresser.'

Gene: (to Keats) 'Intel, there's posh. Tell you what, you get reconnoitre into a sentence and I might buy you a fish supper'

Gene: 'Get on to Europlod. Main switchboard's in Lions.'
Shaz: 'Lyon'
Gene: 'Yes, thank you Mrs. Alan Whicker. Let's get our garlic munching friends to put their 'orse burgers down and puts tabs on who's active.'

Chris: 'Very Lewis Collins, don't ya think?'
Shaz: 'More like Joan Collins'

Alex: 'Then go to hell.'
Keats: 'All right.'


BBC1 - 22nd May 2010 - 9.00pm

'It's A Knockout! And Alex is off!' chortles Stuart Hall (yes, it is the very Mr. Hall who used to piss himself each week commentating on the eponymous programme) and briefly we glimpse Molly imploring her mum to get up. After all, she's been knocked out by that bullet for the last three years. Hilarious and freakish and full of the game symbolism that's been a thread through the last three or four episodes it also includes the red balloon that young Alex had with her on the day her parents were killed in the car bomb; a forest of weather vanes and that shadowy figure of Sam Tyler knocking insistently on the office window. Just a normal episode of Ashes, then?

Let's face it, the diamond heist sub-plot isn't the reason we all tuned in for this and the grisly end of the Hardiman gang is a mere detail ('Alex, meet Ginger and Nobby') isn't it? Well, no, this final case is the really important one because it's the last test for Shaz, Ray and Chris as their 'guv' lies stripped of his powers and his identity on the floor of the squad room. It's their redemption before they enter Heaven. The deaths of the Hardimans (the hanged man symbolism of 'ending the struggle' so conclusive here and foreshadowing what we discover about Ray) and the subsequent heist do afford us some wonderfully funny lines and classic Huntisms. It wouldn't be an Ashes episode without those and we do get some corkers here.

The operation also clearly shows that each of the officers in Gene's care can and do emerge from under his influence and confidently organise themselves ('Bloody, hell. He can do the Generation Game all on his own' remarks Gene of Chris's work). When Gene takes off after Alex the rest of the team pull together, Ray taking charge, 'Yeah, who needs the guv, eh?' he states. You need him more than you know, Raymondo.


You can cut the tension between Gene and Alex with a knife after Alex disappeared from their little evening liaison ('some people just don't know a good thing' he snaps). He's wounded and vulnerable and takes it out on Chris and Shaz in the office after discovering one of the Hardiman victims briefly regains consciousness at the crime scene, his officers failing to see that the man was alive. Again, a nod to the semi-conscious states that Gene's world induces. Further to this, Chris relates a dream of Viv, 'all hunched up amongst this fire', which of course indicates that Viv has gone to his fiery demise in Keat's own circle of hell, unable to benefit from Gene's guidance.

Gene has a real go at Alex for humiliating him ('you made a fool of me last night'). Pointedly, he says that they've both lost sight of who they are. Alex reassures him. ('I take you very seriously, Gene.') It's that whole 'forgetting who you are' business that Thordy clearly warned Alex about three weeks ago. When we get to the core of the episode, Thordy is absolutely right. It's a story about damaged people who forget their past sins and, once reminded of them, see the walls of their 'reality' vanish. This also ties in with the particular triggers that are layered into the narrative - the police whistle that Chris hears again that we later see the significance of in the video he watches; the military march that Ray hears and the old soldier saluting him in the corridor and the screwdriver that Shaz finds on her chair. Symbols that go on to remind them of who they are and what happened to them.


Keats is still the demon on Alex's shoulder. Look at that scene in Keats' office where they discuss the death of Sam Tyler. Keats removes his glasses (so he can directly seduce her with his stare?) and then literally climbs onto her shoulder to whisper entreatments in her ear, telling her that she and Sam were 'Different. You both challenge this world that Gene's carefully built for himself. You're dangerous to him'. It's a downright creepy moment and Alex herself challenges Keats own origins in D&C at this point.

At the heart of the episode are the major revelations about Gene and the team. When Alex heads North to Farringfield Green, I think it's clear we're going to find the body of the young copper buried there. Gene wouldn't murder Sam and Annie and much of the misdirection that this series has been throwing at us is finally halted, putting the mystery of Sam's 'death' to rest. Similarly, when Keats finally unveils his 'report' to Gene it gives him purpose to follow Alex and to try and stop her.


When Alex digs up that corpse there's really only one person it could have been. It's a stunning, doom laden sequence that starts at the top of the hill, under the protective symbol of the scarecrow, where she unearths the warrant card buried there in 1953 (a little clue from last week emphasised by the Coronation footage on Keats' television set and further suggesting that this moment in 1953 was another 'coronation' of sorts as Gene died and established his kingdom, his realm in Purgatory).

Frozen to the spot, as immobile as the scarecrow over his own grave, Gene remembers who he was and the scene continues in the abandoned farmhouse, still decorated for that Coronation it seems. Gene falteringly recalls his demise. The young Gene ('Skinny. Yeah, he was...erm...a skinny lad that needed fattening up.') left alone to deal with armed burglars and whose death is covered up by Morrison, his mentor. It's a tale of 1950s policing, with a senior officer 'compromised' by an on-duty drink and leaving an inexperienced, immature young lad to cope (foreshadowed by Alex and Gene's earlier counter-accusations 'You are the most immature man I've ever met.' 'I'm not'. 'Yes, you are'. 'I'm not'). It's perhaps symbolic too of how policing would change over the decades as much as the patterns in violent criminal behaviour. Gene reinforces the idea that he's the sheriff, like 'John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart' and that, inside his head, he isn't 'some snotty kid in a uniform. He's Gary Cooper in High Noon. He's the law.' It's a theme that's been there since Life On Mars and it's a beautiful and fragile idea, conveyed in a mesmerising performance from Philip Glenister. Matthew Graham confirms this with the reply from Alex to Gene's insistent, 'Didn't deserve a shallow grave, did he, did he Alex?' 'No, you didn't,' she says softly confirming his after-life status.

'I forgot everything', Gene says as Alex asks why he didn't tell her. That fits in with Alex's own struggle to remember her daughter and her home and with Thordy's similar observation of what happens to you in this realm. It's clear that remembering has weakened Gene, disoriented him and this is something Keats takes advantage of by attacking Gene's outward bravado ('Ego, an immature relationship with alcohol, a curious uncertainty about the opposite sex'). We get that final revelation forced out of Gene. This is a coppers' Purgatory ('somewhere where we go to sort ourselves...coppers') and Gene is their guardian it seems ('gradually they came to you. Those with issues in their passing.')

Alex also realises here that we're dealing with restless souls of the dead too. The realities of 1973 and 1983 are also Gene's fantasy if we are to believe Keats. If he is Purgatory's guardian and he's there to redeem the troubled then his 'policing' only works when there is a Sam or an Alex to help him with those lost souls and give them the 'courage of their convictions' because as Keats tells us 'the one thing they don't know is that unlike you (Sam or Alex), they don't know they're compromised'.


Alex is torn, of course, because once she finds out that Gene has helped Sam and Annie on their way, she wants to know why she isn't as important to him as they are and why he hasn't helped her get back to Molly. Keats suggests that it's because Gene wants her to stay in his world but as we discover in the final scenes that's not the reason at all. It's simply because Alex is already dead and like Sam, when he jumped off the rooftop at the end of Life On Mars, she has only a certain amount of time to spend there in her post-mortem state helping him. She ultimately redeems Gene and sets him back on his purpose, accepting her death and taking one last drink in the saloon bar. It's incredibly sad for Alex but she makes the mistake of listening to Keats who isn't telling the entire truth. Alex may have been 'compromised' during Series 1 and 2 but when that clock stuck at 9.06 in this year's first episode her struggle to get back to 2008 was over. Keeley is brilliant conveying this disillusionment with Gene and Gene's world and she, Glenister and Daniel Mays turn it into an electrifying scene.

After these disclosures about Gene comes the other punch to the guts. Those horrifying, deeply upsetting video tapes that Keats has prepared. All three officers witness their own final route to being 'compromised'. Ray's shame at not following his family into the army and disappointing his dad; Chris' blind and tragic obedience to authority figures; Shaz's anger and frustration at a career truncated too soon. Full marks to Montserrat here because she puts in an amazing performance with Shaz's reaction to her own fatal stabbing with that screwdriver that's been prefigured since Episode One. It really feels like the world has caved in and the sky is falling down as she screams 'I'm not even alive' after watching the tape. Equally gut wrenching is Ray's demise. A drunken wreck of a man hanging himself because he's failed to impress his father powerfully adds a further dimension to the character's flaws. Poor Chris, at the behest of a police whistle and following orders, gunned down. Amazing sequences that move from the point of view of the characters, through and into the images of the video offering more of the series' 'interior fourth wall' moments as we watch them watching themselves. Very moving and disturbing, with a recap of their Life On Mars epiphanies to accompany them at the end of the scene.

So, to the momentary downfall of Gene Hunt. Keats beats the man up and briefly we get that quick shot of Gene lying on the floor as the young, immature lad that lay buried up in Bolton. It is Keats playing his final card, sowing doubt into the souls waiting in that mist enshrouded squad room. 'Look at your 'guv'!' he observes and then proceeds to smash up the office. As he goads them and Gene and the ceiling vanishes to be replaced by the firmament of stars above, he stops and asks them, 'Oh come on? What, you didn't like think this was a real police station did you?' once more suggesting that Fenchurch East was purely a Gene Hunt construct, his game (yes, another mention of games). Keats' assertion that he lied to them doesn't impress Alex and she finally decides who to believe, who to support because she realises Gene had 'just forgotten'.


As she does, symbolically order is temporarily restored, the ceiling reappears and the lights and the 'world' snaps back into focus. 'Don't you make him into a liar,' she retorts to Keats as she tries to snap the others out of their confusion. As Keats herds them off to his 'whole new department', Alex pointedly rejects it, as Sam rejected his own life back in the future and returned to '1973', and urges the others to do likewise and not be seduced by what sounds like a 'living Hell' to her. It's here that Ray explains how his own DCI covered up his killing of a young lad just as Morrison covered up Gene's death. And, of course, as Keats takes the three confused officers away, symbolically traveling down a fire exit, it's time to dance to the Devil's tune as 'Holiday' bounces on the soundtrack and the seduction begins. Like the use of 'Club Tropicana' in that silent car journey back from the North, it's a music tinged with hollow promise and perfectly suits an express lift going down to a Hell full of screaming sinners.


Fortunately, Alex manages to get Gene back on his game, slowly encouraging him to help her with Ray's operation to arrest the diamond smugglers. It's a lovely scene as she recalls their first meeting and goads him with 'You know, you're the most difficult, stubborn, obnoxious, misogynistic and reckless human being I've ever met.' It is key to understanding the reason why she redeems him here because when she adds in 'And yet, somehow you make us all feel safe' that's the moment that makes sense of that Dixon Of Dock Green clip. He might be all of the things Alex describes, he might be corrupt and bent but in the end he's doing it for us, despite his unorthodox ways, he's doing it to protect us. 

Throughout the episode we've also had 'the pub' and 'drinking' mentioned. 'The last thing Sam told me, was that he was gagging for a pint. I said get one in for me an' all. No threats. No shouting. No violence. Just two mates talking about the boozer' was Gene's directive to Alex earlier in the episode. Drinking seems to foreshadow Ray's journey to the end in the episode and there's also the diamonds hidden (behind an angel/cupid figure) in the drinking fountain in Victoria Park where the clock is stuck at 9.06. As Shaz joins them (accepting her new DC status with that gorgeous line 'About wearing a dead woman's clothes? Seems appropriate ma'am') and the operation swings into action at 12.00, High Noon, the Gene Genie is restored.

He pulls the team back together again ('what is a sheriff without his finest deputies? Nothing. I don't like being nothing.') with that moving appeal to Shaz, Chris and Ray over the walkie talkie and signs off, 'See you in the field'. Indeed, that's precisely where we did see the real Gene Hunt and where he ended up, Farringfield Green. Always in the field. And of course, it's the Elysian fields in Elysium which is the final resting place of the souls of the heroic and the virtuous. Takes us right back to Dante's The Divine Comedy where in Canto IV souls stagnate at the cusp of hell in Dante's Purgatory, the place where one is purged of sin before being received by Heaven. As Alex finally says to Gene in his office, 'You're Gene Hunt. You're their 'guv'. That's what I'm here for. Nothing else.' and that affirmation is really what this has been all about.


Finally, after the job is done and Ray and Chris join their 'guv' on one final case with a burst of Vangelis on the soundtrack, the poor old Quattro is blown to bits ('Oy! I'm arresting you for murdering my car you dyke digging toss-pots!) and the only thing left to do is: 'pub'. And as Gene implied on the walkie talkie to his team, it's 'our boozer'. The end to a day's work and the end of the story. What better end than to see The Railway Arms on the corner with Nelson at the door as a lovely link back to Life On Mars and Sam's own ultimate destination after Gene faked his death. Each of our friends makes their peace and says goodbye to their 'guv'. A sad, funny but euphoric departure for them all. Chris reunited with Shaz, Ray's 'you are and always will be, the 'guv' just perfect ('Danger of getting puffy, Raymondo'). All three arguing as they depart from Gene's world with Bowie's 'Life On Mars' on the jukebox.

It's a bittersweet ending as Gene stares into Alex's eyes to confirm that she can't stay, that she's already dead. Perhaps Alex could have stayed with Gene but then how could she, knowing the truth about him? It's the 'way of the world' as Gene says, which suggests that once you know the secret then you must move on and prepare the way for others. It's a happy ending because Alex, Sam, Annie, Ray, Chris and Shaz are all at peace, untroubled at last and Gene is 'immortal' it seems despite the best efforts of the devil Keats.

And so Gene becomes the tragic hero, the tormented soul destined to keep the faith, to help those who doubt themselves, to be redeemed and to move on. After all, The Railway Arms is waiting, Nelson's got a fresh barrel on and the saloon bar's open. The sheriff and his saloon on the frontier between heaven and hell. Gene's got work to do, there's a new Mercedes to break in and a new partner whose iPhone seems to have gone missing. Life (on Mars) goes on in 'coppers Purgatory'. After five years of Life On Mars and Ashes To Ashes, how perfect that Matthew Graham turns this nostalgic fantasy into a beautiful and moving tribute, complete with Bowie's Heroes blazing away on the soundtrack, to those real heroes out there, those dedicated coppers. Because in the end, that's what they do despite their troubles and no one like Jim Keats can take the courage of their convictions from them.


Watch this more than once! You'll get much more out of it each time you see it - if you can stop crying. Opening with one final homage to the television of yesteryear - appropriately describing this very episode as It's A Knockout - this extraordinary swansong for Gene Hunt also achieves closure in that loving, nostalgic excerpt of Dixon Of Dock Green. The 'evenin' all' coda with its slow pan up to that iconic police station lamp is a wonderful, redemptive image to finish on. 'Gene Hunt' was, has been and will always be there on our television screens it says and he might not always look like Philip Glenister but he or she still has the heart of a lion whether he or she be George Dixon, Fabian Of The Yard, Barlow, Jack Regan, Jean Darblay, Morse or Jane Tennison. Our protector, our guardian angel, our heroes. Just for one day

Privilege is a neglected but rather special film. It sits somewhere between A Hard Day's Night and A Clockwork Orange in the time line for progressive British cinema but unfortunately didn't find favour with the critics of the day. It also precedes by decades the likes of Starsuckers own recent attack on the media manipulation at the heart of capitalist monoculture, with a searing critique of how mass media cultural brainwashing is used to create diversions from what really is happening in the world. Director Peter Watkins is one of those few film makers who has directly engaged with mass media in order to deconstruct and undermine its pervasiveness but such a conflict with the very institutions that might have supported him has all but obscured most of his work post 1970.


Watkins is rightly lauded for his early work at the BBC. The stunning Culloden in 1964, pioneering a form of docu-drama to present the Battle Of Culloden of 1746 almost as a live news bulletin was very innovative but Watkins was somewhat disappointed that more viewers didn't make the connection between Culloden's depiction of ethnic cleansing with the Vietnam War that raged daily on millions of television sets. The War Game followed in 1965, a sobering and disturbing docu-drama that examined the effects of a nuclear strike on the UK and it fell foul of the BBC, under pressure from the Wilson government. BBC DG Hugh Carlton-Greene 'decided' it was too harsh for broadcast and shelved it. When it acquired a cinema release in 1966, it triumphantly went on to win an Oscar for best documentary feature. It didn't get shown on television until 1985 in an After The Bomb season of programmes.

When he emerged from the controversy with the BBC, effectively walking out of the BBC's documentary department, he found himself in the middle of a British film boom and with £700,000 from Universal he made Privilege. The film, based on a play by Johnny Speight, uses his highly effective docu-drama style, and is a mixture of direct to camera interviews, newsreel and fly on the wall observations that blurs the boundaries between scripted drama and news reporting. It is Britain - 'the near future' -  and the film introduces us to Steven Shorter, (Manfred Mann singer Paul Jones) one of the biggest pop stars of the day adored by millions, returning to a ticker tape welcome in the UK after a US tour. Shorter, a mass media brand, is being used by his government sponsored management to influence rebellious youth culture into accepting conformity.


Shorter's act is a violently staged, musical melodrama of self-harm performed in front of legions of screaming, mainly female fans (evoking the same hysterical response seen at the time to every Beatles appearance) providing them with a release "from the nervous tension caused by the state of the world outside." As Shorter spirals into numbed acceptance of his abuse, endorsing apples in a nightmarishly accurate commercial ("think apples, be apples and ultimately become apples" purrs the director), the church approaches his management with the idea that Shorter could be used to bring the disaffected back into the bosom of Christianity. They want Shorter to perform at a mass rally and 'repent', encouraging his audience to 'conform'.

However, Shorter has found empathy with a young painter, Vanessa Ritchie (iconic 1960s supermodel Jean Shrimpton), who seems to have penetrated the blanket media manipulation beneath which he is suffocating and has falteringly made him question the morality of what is happening to him. After the 'event', a frightening blend of the Nuremberg Rally and Mary Whitehouse's Festival Of Light but staged by the Church Of England and a crudely nationalist media, Shorter cracks under the pressure and questions the very forces that have elevated him to this iconic status. Immediately, his career is over. The bandwagon moves on and he disappears into obscurity. 'It's going to be a happy year this year in the near future', the narrator (Watkins himself) intones. Yes, whether you like it or not says the film.


It is steeped in 1960s aesthetics and it's vision of the near future is more 1968 than say 2008 and where everyone seems to be wearing the 'futuristic' fashions of the era and commercialism is dressed in the pop-art of the day.  The idea of media conglomerates using pop music and rock stars as endorsers of their products isn't new and you only need to look at the deals that 'celebrities' now do with mass consumerist media companies to see that Watkins was on the button in 1967.

He basically posits that we will become steeped in media, the consumers and the consumed, distracted and blinded by our unconscious participation in mass media. It doesn't matter that visually Privilege all looks vaguely nostalgic because the messages are still so strong and many of the images still have a satirical, often hilarious but unsettling power, with a pop group dressed as monks belting out a rock version of 'Onward Christian Soldiers' and bishops blessing nationalist fervor in a huge stadium of crowds all chanting 'I will conform' in a heady collision of religion and showbiz. And all under the auspices of a coalition government.


And as Watkins rightly observes, anyone given the privilege of youth spokesman won't win hearts and minds if they start to abuse that public trust and 'disturb the public peace of mind'. It shares the same obsessions with rejecting conformity with that other 1960s satire about state control, The Prisoner and clearly went on to influence A Clockwork Orange. Watkins near equivalent today must be Adam Curtis wherein at least he's dealing with same 'mass media' subject matter. The film's view of protest via pop media, glamourised in that youthful agit-prop of the Summer Of Love, where dissent is, as Tom Sutpen argues, "systematically co-opted and undermined by the same media entities that were busily marketing it" is writ large today via the likes of talent and opinion squashing media behemoths like The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent.

It's ironic then that the mythologising of the 1960s didn't sustain Shrimpton or Jones' careers either. Shrimpton, an ethereal presence in the film, was an icon of the 1960s but by the decade's conclusion she had retreated into privacy. Jones never really become the pop superstar that he portrayed in Privilege and swapped his avowed atheism for evangelical Christianity in the 1980s under the influence of Christianity PLC's greatest A&R man, Cliff Richard. In a bizarre way this is their story and it's also Watkins own story too - feted by the BBC and then disowned when he offered some rather unpalatable truths to the masses.


In the end the film itself met with hostility and sadly vanished. It's achievement, watching it now through, and beyond, the tint of nostalgia, is that we must treat the romanticising of the period with some suspicion. We love the 1960s for its reshaping of our capitalist society via the actions of the then new generation but watching Privilege makes you think that even that idea is a construction, something that Tom Sutpen suggests has been 'skillfully sold to us'. It proposes that we are the media and the media is us and today's ash clouds, BA strikes, the 'War On Terror', coalition governments, Britain's Got Talent are all market stock to be bought and sold to us like a new brand of toothpaste. The film remains as prescient a message about all consuming media power as Nigel Kneale's Year Of The Sex Olympics warned us about the public and private space that television would eventually occupy.

The 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer to high definition seemed to hit some problems and this release was delayed from January but the delay has been worth it. The picture here is rock solid and detailed, with bold and saturated colours, with excellent flesh tones and contrast. There is a little bit of damage here and there and evidence of lightly applied edge enhancement. A very handsome transfer and lovely to have it presented at its best here. The mono soundtrack is excellent and reproduces the film's music very clearly and powerfully.

Special Features

• Original Privilege trailer
• The Diary of an Unknown Soldier (Peter Watkins, 1969, 17 mins): a young solider in the trenches of the First World War, preparing for combat, shares his innermost feelings in this compelling short
• The Forgotten Faces (Peter Watkins, 1961, 19 mins): a gripping newsreel-style account of the peoples’ uprising in Hungary, 1956, given forceful authenticity by Watkins’ unique approach
• Extensive illustrated booklet with new essays by film historian Robert Murphy and Watkins specialist John Cook 

Privilege (BFI Blu-Ray Flipside Collection - Region B - Cert 15 - BFIB1025 - Released 17th May 2010)
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Guy Hamilton. James Bond. Those are the immediate associations you make. But Hamilton had been directing some very interesting British films before he was swallowed up by the Bond franchise in 1964 with Goldfinger. He made some modestly budgeted fare in the 1950s, with The Intruder (1953), an effective drama looking at how soldiers adjusted to post-war civilian life, and POW drama The Colditz Story (1955), his most successful film of the period, offered a subtle exploration of male camaraderie beneath the action heroics. He attempted a somewhat torrid bit of eroticism with Manuela (1957) but it never really had much success. He started making bigger budget action films, including The Devil's Disciple (1959) and the Italian war comedy The Best of Enemies (US/Italy, 1961).


He turned down the director's job on Dr. No (1962), for personal reasons, and instead made The Party's Over (1963, released 1965).  It's an atypical film from Hamilton and is often lumped in with the 'swinging London' genre of the period. It certainly isn't the kind of 'swinging London' that's usually served up in British films and instead offers a bleak, pessimistic view of a youth movement ('beatniks') who want to break or destroy the rules by which society operates but have nothing to offer in replacing or rejecting them. It ran into censorship problems, with the BBFC's John Trevelyan noting that film's themes of 'beatnik philosophy, sexual relationships and scenes of drunkeness and nudity' needed to have a clear moral point to be acceptable. The BBFC clearly wanted the film to underline more how awful the beatnik way of life was.

By the time the film was submitted in March 1963, a horrified BBFC requested a number of cuts to remove some of the shots of the character of Melina being undressed, kissed and caressed by the beatnik gang and, critically, any suggestion of necrophilia in the scenes between Phil and the either unconscious or dead Melina. After much cutting and changing, Hamilton removed his name from the credits and the film went out with an X certificate in January 1964.


The version presented here is a never-before-scene pre-release version of The Party's Over as submitted to the BBFC in the early stages of the censorship battle. It's a very striking film with a serious anti-authoritarian streak running through the film and only one real authority figure caught in the middle of the beatnik gang's antics willing to call them to book. Oliver Reed, looking utterly gorgeous here in only his third film (he'd completed Hammer's Curse Of The Werewolf and The Damned, a film that shares some of anti-establishment themes of The Party's Over) plays the 'leader', Moise, of a disparate group of youngsters who drift across a still war-scarred London of the early 1960s.

Moise is clearly educated, as are most of the group, and that makes for an interesting reversal of the way some youth cults are depicted as brain addled morons in 60s British cinema. Their cultural hedonism is typical of the era but it's uncontrolled, unfocused and even Moise seems to back away from some of their activities, both fearing their excess and subtly encouraging it at the same time. The opening shot, of his desperate, partied-out band drifting across a bridge into a deserted London visually sums up the rather barren philosophy by which they live and, in fact, die.


Into this ragged group of Chelsea miscreants comes Melina (Louise Sorel), an enigmatic young American girl. When she disappears, her fiance Carson starts to investigate and discovers the heavy price you pay for wild partying. At the centre of the film is a series of flashbacks to the party at which Melina allegedly disappears, told from various view points. It is only until the rooftop suicide of one of the gang, Phil (a wonderful Jonathan Burn) that Carson really gets to the truth about Melina's disappearance. Yet, even Carson is sucked into their lifestyle, his American middle class morality rejected when he gives up on the search for Melina and it's only really held to account when the truth about her death emerges.

Whilst Moise rejects and approves a triangle of women in Libby, Nina and Melina herself, his guilt about what happened to Melina is also gradually exposed by the film's conclusion and his status as 'leader' is continually re-evaluated. By the end of the film, when the full confession has been revealed to Melina's father, Ben (Eddie Albert) Moise is clearly feeling rather soiled by the way he allowed Melina to die at the party and then be subjected to a sexual assault that they were all, apart from him, complicit in. The hint of necrophilia, where Phil kisses and, it is implied, makes love to Melina, is still rather disturbing in the film, giving it a unique dynamic for a film from this period. The gang's attempt to dispose of her body adds further to the degradation that the scene has already generated.

In the end, Moise turns his back on the 'cult' group of followers, clearly uncomfortable with both his role as neither the controlled nor the controller and the consequences of their wild debauchery. He tentatively looks towards the uncertain future with Libby.


As Hamilton himself said of the film: 'The 'message' was that they should by all means opt out but society would have to be replaced by something. It wasn't my function to tell them what that should be, but just opting out is insufficient.' Reed's brooding, simmering unrest as Moise is the heart of the film and his palpable regret a fine coda to finish on. He's ably supported by Ann Lynn as Libby, a rather idiosyncratic turn (with a terrible American accent) from Mike Pratt as Geronimo - a speed addicted drummer/sculptor, and some notable appearances from Roddy Maude-Roxby and Eddie Albert. It is a melancholic film and suggests that the drug fueled counterculture of the 1960s, where everything was questioned, social structures were abandoned and materialism was rejected, wasn't always going to lead to the great panacea it claimed to offer.

The film is presented in 1.66:1 anamorphic and branches the 18 minutes of alternative theatrical sequences to present the full pre-release cut of the film newly uncovered by the BFI. This results in some drop in quality in some scenes but the majority of the black and white transfer is lovely. Good contrast and blacks, crisp detail and definition to faces and other textures.  The audio is excellent and shows off the John Barry score, which is very close to his classic Bond themes in some parts, to great effect.


Special Features

• Presented in both High Definition and Standard Definition
• Alternative theatrical release cut (Blu-ray only, 92 mins)
• Alternative theatrical release sequences (DVD only, 18 mins)
• The Party (R A Ostwald, 1962, 16 mins): a time-capsule short about an art school get-together, with drinking, dancing and romance
• Emma (Anthony Perry, 1964, 12 mins): an expressive meditation on the loss of innocence and the certainty of death, from the producer of The Party’s Over
• Illustrated booklet featuring contributions by Guy Hamilton, Andrew Roberts, William Fowler and Vic Pratt

The Party's Over (BFI Blu-Ray Flipside Collection - Region B - Cert 12 - BFIB1057 - Released 17th May 2010)