Another trawl through the archive by the BFI this month has brought us Tony Garnett's directorial debut Prostitute from 1980. Garnett has been a forthright voice in British television and cinema since his celebrated partnership with Ken Loach and Jeremy Sandford produced The Wednesday Play: Cathy Come Home in 1966.

Over at the BBC, The Wednesday Play was ushered in as a replacement for the existing drama strands Festival and First Night. Under the influence of producer James McTaggart (who had presented new plays under the First Night strand), Garnett worked with the likes of Roger Smith (McTaggart's script-editing cohort) and Ken Trodd (later producer of Dennis Potter's major works for the BBC) to put together approximately thirty plays for the first run of The Wednesday Play.

The eight that eventually made it to the screen between October and December of 1964 were more or less the remnants of plays commissioned for the Festival strand and some Canadian imports, but the run that commenced in 1965 and continued through to 1970 featured the provocative, social realist, left of consensus dramas that made it such an influential antholology in 1960s British television.

With the return of the series to our television screens this weekend, it felt appropriate to take a look at BBC Books latest Doctor Who novels, with all three published this week on the 28 April.

First up is James Goss's Dead of Winter. James has worked extensively in theatre, radio and television and is best known to Doctor Who fans for the audio dramas Dead Air and The Hounds of Artemis, his Torchwood play Golden Age for BBC Radio 4, for producing Scream of the Shalka and Shada for BBCi. He also oversaw the development of the BBC's Doctor Who website and produced the Cosgrove Hall animated missing episodes of Troughton story The Invasion that were eventually released on DVD. Among his published books are original Torchwood and Being Human novels.

Of all three books, Goss attempts something very different here in terms of structure and narrative with Dead of Winter, perhaps in tune with the Gothic nature of the plot itself. Here, he mixes diaries, letters and journals with interior monologues of all the main characters, including the Doctor, Amy and Rory. The story emerges out of a mesh of observations from different points of view, conversations, thoughts, the tension between them and the variations in vernacular.

A pastiche on the polylogic epistolary novel - a narrative created by the multiple authors/characters in the book - it reminded me very much of Stoker's use of the form in Dracula (there's even a dog called Stoker) and Shelley's use of letters in Frankenstein, both rather appropriate cultural references given that the book comes across as a mixture of these and the heightened European atmosphere of Ann Radcliffe's The Italian, Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and the more contemporary chilliness of Lovecraft's tales of Innsmouth and John Carpenter's The Fog.

BBCHD - 23 April 2011 - 6.00pm

"It's like he's being deliberately ridiculous, trying to attract our attention" suggests Amy as she reads from a history book and the pre-titles of The Impossible Astronaut bounce from the Doctor's encounter with Charles II, where he hides (in a state of undress) under a woman's skirts, then to his escape attempt from a German POW camp and back again to the domesticity of the Pond residence. Amy could also be refering to Steven Moffat, with the episode's author gleefully mocking himself, as he throws the Doctor into increasingly absurd sequences to usher in the first episode of Series 6. However, it seems that the Doctor has been doing a bit of temporal stalking (even managing to haunt Rory's Laurel and Hardy movie without him even noticing) in order to gather together his erstwhile companions. We see mysterious invitations arriving in the post (even River's Stormcage Facility can't defeat the Royal Mail), their TARDIS blue envelopes evoking the "something borrowed, something blue" epiphany of The Pandorica Opens. With River packing for "some planet called America" director Toby Haynes magnificently ramps up the scope of the series with his widescreen, cinematic panoramas of Utah, following a bus as it travels down a highway and drops Rory and Amy onto a stunning vista of blue skies and burning desert.

This week Network DVD release a compilation of the work of Alan Plater, including a number of single plays and contributions to on-going drama series for ITV that spans the 1970s and 1980s. Alan should always be mentioned in the same breath as luminaries Dennis Potter, Jack Rosenthal, John Hopkins, David Mercer, and Troy Kennedy Martin -  they were all there in the early days of 'live' television, shifting the very foundations of television drama from dull replications of proscenium arch telecasts into breathtaking manipulations of sound and vision that captured British contemporary lives that everyone could recognise and connect with.

Whether it was witty depictions of working class culture or vivid explorations of the inner complexes of the aristocracy, Plater ranged across the medium with an incredible television CV that took in sit-com, period drama and political satire. One of a handful of British dramatist-polymaths, he expanded this work into radio, theatre and cinema. Shot through with his own customary self-deprecation, much of his work reflected his Jarrow origins and his Yorkshire upbringing and as Lez Cooke notes in his BFI Screenonline biography he understood, "that in everyday speech there is a richness and music that makes the voice the most powerful and sensitive instrument for human emotion: and that this exists as a tool for the dramatist at its most useful when the voice speaks with a local accent or dialect."

"The Doctor showed me such a remarkable life and when he went it just took me a long while to get over it."

The same can be said for the lovely Elisabeth Sladen who passed away yesterday after a battle with cancer. It really saddens me to join with many, many Doctor Who fans across the world now paying tribute to the late Elisabeth Sladen. For young and old, she will always remain Sarah Jane Smith, the character that perhaps, more than many, epitomises the incredible reach that Doctor Who had and continues to have across the generations. Not many characters, never mind actors, have had the opportunity to bridge eras during the classic Doctor Who, then get the chance to inspire a spin-off, return to the new series and then get their own series. Lis was clearly very special indeed. 

Born in Liverpool, her early acting career began in rep at Liverpool Playhouse. Apparently her first stage appearance was as a corpse. And yes, she corpsed, thanks to future husband Brian Miller, playing a doctor, whispering "Respiration nil, Aston Villa two" in her ear. After marrying Miller, she moved with him to Manchester, still in rep, and in 1970 appeared as a bar maid in six episodes of Coronation Street. She slowly accumulated a number of small television roles in Z Cars, Doomwatch, Public Eye and Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em.

It was Z Cars producer Ron Craddock that recommended her to Barry Letts, producer of Doctor Who, when he was casting for Jo Grant's replacement, Sarah Jane Smith, after Katy Manning had left the series at the end of The Green Death in June 1973. During her audition, whenever she wasn't looking at either Letts or lead actor Jon Pertwee, each would give the thumbs up to the other.

She was introduced to audiences in The Time Warrior in December 1973 and was an instant success, eventually staying on the series for the next three years overseeing Tom Baker's replacement of Pertwee from December 1974. The attractive investigative journalist Sarah Jane Smith blossomed as she travelled with the Fourth Doctor, Baker and Sladen arguably producing the series's most effective and fondly remembered Doctor and companion combination. In 1976, she bowed out of the series in The Hand of Fear, bringing to an end one of the most successful on-screen and off-screen partnerships the series had ever seen.

John Nathan-Turner attempted to woo her back to Doctor Who in 1981 and asked her to return as Sarah Jane Smith to smooth the changeover between the departing Tom Baker and his replacement Peter Davison. Although she declined, Lis did agree to return as Sarah in a 50 minute pilot K-9 & Company broadcast in December 1981. It was unsuccessful in making it to a full series but Lis returned to Doctor Who for the 20th Anniversary special, The Five Doctors in 1983. She also appeared as Sarah in the 1993 Children in Need special Dimensions in Time, returned in two BBC Radio plays, The Paradise of Death in 1993 and The Ghosts of N-Space in 1996 with her original Doctor, Jon Pertwee and in the Doctor Who spin-off, Downtime in 1995. Sarah's audio incarnation continued to live on in a series of Big Finish adventures released between 2002 and 2006.

In the late 1970s, she and her husband returned to Liverpool, primarily to theatre, and she also continued with television work, including (as presenter) Stepping Stones for two years, Play for Today, Take My Wife, Send in the Girls. Barry Letts, then producer of the Sunday classic serials on BBC1, also cast her in his productions of Alice in Wonderland and Gulliver in Lilliput.

Lis concentrated on family life after the birth of her daughter Sadie in 1985 but made occasional television appearances in Peak Practice and Faith in the Future during the 1990s. In 2006, it seemed that Lis Sladen may have temporarily left Sarah behind but Sarah herself would never be too far away and Russell T Davies, producer of the new series, triumphantly presented Lis and Sarah, including a returning K-9 voiced by John Leeson, to an adoring public in the Doctor Who story School Reunion during David Tennant's first full year as the Doctor.

For New Year 2007, she starred in the hour-long pilot for the spin-off series The Sarah Jane Adventures for CBBC, introducing Sarah to a whole new generation of fans in Invasion of the Bane. This new series ran for four years, last transmitted in October 2010 and with a further six completed episodes still unshown. Both David Tennant and Matt Smith made appearances as the Doctor during the series's run. She also returned briefly to Doctor Who for the 2008 finale The Stolen Earth / Journey's End and for David Tennant's last episode, The End of Time Part 2.

Sarah Jane Smith will live on, whether tomorrow you decide to watch her debut in The Time Warrior or her return in School Reunion, forever preserved on DVD, and remember Lis Sladen's generosity of spirit. I can think of no better way to say goodbye than with this quote from Russell T Davies: "I absolutely loved Lis. She was funny and cheeky and clever and just simply wonderful. The universe was lucky to have Sarah Jane Smith, the world was lucky to have Lis."

Condolences to her family and friends at this very sad time. 

Joining Joanna (1968) in this month's BFI Flipside releases is Lunch Hour (1962) an intimate two-hander starring Robert Stephens and Shirley Ann Field. The film was distributed by Bryanston, a consortium of filmmakers formed in 1959 by Maxwell Setton, John Bryan, Tony Richardson, Ronald Neame and led by Michael Balcon. An independent production company, they were backed by British Lion and Twickenham Studios. In 1961, Seven Arts Productions, founded in 1957 by Ray Stark and Eliot Hyman, independent producers who had made The Misfits (1961) for United Artists, joined them as producing partners and investors. Seven Arts are probably better known for their partnership with Hammer Film Productions in the mid 1960s. They later went on to acquire the controlling interest in Warner Brothers.

Bryanston had already had enormous success with a number of British New Wave films, particularly the Woodfall productions overseen by Tony Richardson, such as The Entertainer (1960), Saturday Night, Sunday Morning (1960) and A Taste of Honey (1961). As a subsidiary of British Lion they also distributed a number of independent productions and Eyeline Films' Lunch Hour fell into that bracket. Eyeline were a small outfit backed by the likes of Alfred Shaughnessy, Kenneth More and John Mortimer and usually specialised in short features, advertising and documentaries. James Hill, the director, also had a successful background in documentary and advertising, as seen in his extraordinary work with BP in the 1950s and highlighted in the three colour Trade Test Transmission films that are included in this BFI release. Hill, like many of his Eyeline partners, had a realist approach to his material and this naturally reflected the agenda adopted by distributors Woodfall and Bryanston.

This month BFI's Flipside label offers Michael Sarne's Joanna (1968), depicting the titular 17 year-old's odyssey of self-discovery in late 1960s London, a quintessential slice of brash surrealism and self-expression that certainly fits the profile for a Swinging Sixties film.

British cinema of the period seemed to consist of two movements, one overlapping the other, the cycles of British New Wave and Swinging Sixties cinema. The New Wave, 'kitchen sink' or 'Angry Young Men' dramas, typified by Saturday Night, Sunday Morning (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961), A Kind of Loving (1962), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and Billy Liar (1963) eventually gave way to more quixotic material such as Darling (1965), The Knack …and How to Get It (1965), Blowup (1966), Alfie (1966), Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966), Georgy Girl (1966) and Smashing Time (1967).

The latter cycle certainly reflects the success of the former wherein major Hollywood studios, sensing there was money to be made in British films after the New Wave had made its critical and financial success at home and abroad, established their bases in London and proceeded to finance the output of UK and international directors and writers. Joanna is an example of this attitude, with Sarne picked up fresh from the success of his 'anti-travelogue' Road to Saint Tropez (1966) which had been acquired by Twentieth Century Fox to run as part of a double bill with their James Coburn Bond pastiche In Like Flint (1967).

SPOILERS AHEAD

Arrow Academy bring us another classic of international cinema this month with their release of a high-definition transfer of Henri-Georges Clouzot's stunning thriller, Les Diaboliques (1955) in a dual-format Blu-ray/DVD edition.

Regarded as a masterpiece of suspence, the film developed from Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac's 1952 novel Celle qui n'était plus (She Who Was No More), a thriller spotted by his wife Véra Clouzot as a potential source for adaptation on the back of his international success with Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la peur) in 1953. As Susan Hayward expands further in her superb book on the film, Véra then persuaded Clouzot to grab the rights and, having succeeded, he hung on to them for a year, thus blocking Alfred Hitchcock from getting access to the story.

Hitchock would eventually secure the rights to Boileau-Narcejac's third novel, D'entre les morts and turned this into his own masterpiece, Vertigo in 1958. In many ways, Les Diaboliques went on to influence Hitchcock's landmark Psycho (1960) with similarities in plotting, especially the murder, how the murder victim's body is disposed of, the inclusion of a private detective Fichet (also allegedly inspiring Columbo's creators according to Roger Ebert), and the celebrated twist towards the end of the film.

Not content to thrill us just with their much admired high-definition Italian horror film releases, including key Dario Argento and Mario Bava titles, Arrow Films embark on a very welcome reissue of some of the great post-war classics of international cinema this month.

Their first batch of releases, in dual DVD/BD format, cover Italian neo-realism in De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948), Jules Dassin's French 'New Wave' thriller Rififi (1955) and the masterful suspense of Clouzot's Les Diaboliques (1955). Arrow's new Academy label is an opportunity for those that love European cinema to upgrade to high-definition and delight in these classics anew or for world cinema novices to take the plunge and experience three outstanding examples of foreign cinema for the first time.

There is no better place to begin than Vittorio De Sica's affecting Bicycle Thieves. Regarded as the pinnacle of the neorealist cinema that emerged in post-war Italy, the film went on to win an Oscar in 1949 and top various polls as one of the greatest films ever made. It is regarded by many directors, including Ken Loach and Satyajit Ray, as one of the most influential on their own work. Ray saw the film on a visit to London in 1949 and De Sica's shooting of the film entirely on location and the use of non-actors Lamberto Maggiorani and Enzo Staiola as the father and son characters had an impact on the direction he took with Pather Panchali (1955). In a May 2010 Guardian profile, Loach claimed of the film, "It made me realise that cinema could be about ordinary people and their dilemmas. It wasn't a film about stars, or riches or absurd adventures. I was able to see cinema in another light, outside the Hollywood nonsense."

Network kindly release the second series of thirteen episodes of Man at the Top this month just as, with a timely sense of irony, BBC4 show a new adaptation of the John Braine source novel Room at the Top (note: now sadly postponed due to rights issues). Both are clearly period pieces, as BBC4 retain the 1950s setting of the original for their version and the 1972 series of Man at the Top literally screams its era's cultural credentials from the rooftops.

Braine however has little more than a creator's credit on this second series and it is very much an authored piece at the behest of that prolific drama and comedy writing team, Tom Brennand and Roy Bottomley who emerged from the Oldham press agency of the early 1960s and started their television career with a chat show for ABC in 1962.

With an impressive television CV that covers drama and comedy over a number decades, they originally cut their teeth on comedies for Granada, such as Nearest and Dearest (1968 - 1973), contributed scripts to the early videotaped series of Special Branch (1969 - 1974) and were the creative consultants on the long running This is Your Life (1969 -1993).

Another DVD collection of Doctor Who stories that 2 | entertain see fit to revise, freshly polish and produce additional extras for, Revisitations 2 is perhaps not as 'must-have' as the first set simply because the stories are not solid, bona fide classics and you could argue that the original DVD editions weren't that bad.

Here, the argument for making a purchase of stories you already own is going to be based on the quality of the extra material. Again, some of it is great and some of it is clearly material that didn't have a home elsewhere. On with the DVD reviews then...
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The Seeds of Death
January - March 1969

Brian Hayles's The Seeds of Death is a very typical example of late 1960s Doctor Who. While it has pretensions to be regarded as a close relative to many of the more superior stories in the previous 'Monster' themed Season 5, including its predecessor The Ice Warriors, it doesn't quite achieve this. This is probably by dint of its six episode length and some rather contrived plotting which may well have been the result of Terrance Dicks salvaging the last half of the story with his rewrites and, by the end, a descent into foam machine frolics. The welcome return of the Ice Warriors can't disguise the shortccomings of a serial that would clearly work better as a four parter. A couple of episodes of treading water in terms of advancing the plot slow the pace here despite Michael Ferguson's rather impressive direction.

"You can't kill me...I'm a genius!"

The regular cast of Troughton, Hines and Padbury are good value and at this stage, prior to the end of the Troughton era, demonstrate on screen their well-developed camaraderie as actors. With the extended chase between the Doctor and the Ice Warriors, Troughton comes across as a child bunking off from school, his version of the Doctor having evolved within a perceived comedic subtext. His incarnation has often been codified as ‘Chaplinesque’ or described by the makers of the show as a ‘cosmic hobo’.