BBCHD - 28th May 2011 - 6.45pm

"I've reversed the jelly baby of the neutron flow"

An interesting conclusion to Matthew Graham's two part story, The Almost People certainly opens up much of the debate about biogengineering ethics and identity that last week's episode introduced in the form of the flesh gangers and their increasing sentience. To spark much of this debate, and to raise our awareness that the narrative here is actually a significant part of the series arc of which the Doctor has a greater awareness than we first thought, Graham uses a series of ganger/human parallels embodied in the back stories of his characters.

Primarily, he takes the initial idea of Jimmy's role as father, which his duplicate has awareness and memories of, and uses this to, pardon the pun, flesh out the exploration of sentience, consciousness and will at the heart of the story. He then adds further to this with what we discover about Miranda Cleaves. When the Doctor scans her he diagnoses an inoperable blood clot, the symptoms of which both her human and ganger form share.

What Graham seems to be saying with these two sub-plots is that for the gangers to truly become sentient they must accept the burdens of human emotions, specifically their weaknesses as well as their strengths, and the body's physical frailty. With sentience comes responsibility for the self and others and an acceptance of mortality, as we see both in Cleaves's challenge to her duplicate with, "Of all the humans in all of the world you had to pick the one with the clot. But, hey, them's the brakes. Welcome to the human race" and Jimmy's death by acid where the flesh-Doctor hands over the symbol of patriarchal rebirth, the ring, to the ganger version and confirms, "Jimmy Wicks... you're a dad."

Frontios
January - February 1984

"As an invasion weapon, you'd have to agree that it's about as offensive as a chicken vol-au-vent."

When this aired in 1984, it felt like those making the series had suddenly remembered and understood its late 1970s roots, particularly its penchant for Gothic tinged horror. In a season that had just started with the fairly decent Cold War analogy of Warriors of the Deep buggered up by Ingrid Pitt drop-kicking a green pantomime horse, Frontios momentarily reminded us that Doctor Who could still be scary, witty and a little bit grim in the early 1980s.

It's certainly the strongest story of the season alongside The Caves Of Androzani. Overall, it works because it simply plugs into those elements that Doctor Who always seems to do well - namely scripts that attempt to build a credible world and characters and also gleefully bring the 'terror in the dark' atmosphere to the fore. Pull this together with some good design elements, a very decent stab at good studio lighting (a rarity in the days of the BBC light entertainment floodlighting that was the default for the series), witty dialogue, atmospheric music and a central reaffirmation of the Fifth Doctor's character, then I'd say you're in reasonably good shape.

Apocalypse Now is back in cinemas this month and Coppola's own restoration and re-release of the film opens in the UK on May 27th. Hot on its heels is Optimum's Blu-ray release in June.

By the time of Apocalypse Now's original release in 1979, Vietnam as a subject matter in Hollywood cinema had only been explored in a handful of films, some contemporaneous to the ongoing war, including the pro-war The Green Berets (1968) with John Wayne and the anti-war documentary Hearts and Minds (1974) then with others such as Coming Home (1978) and The Deer Hunter (1978) both telling stories of veterans attempting to adjust to the return to civilian life in a post-war America.

Apocalypse Now is not just a war movie about the experience of Vietnam. In fact, the Vietnam War is practically the backdrop to a much deeper, symbolic battle between the primordial, animalistic and rationalist, civilising forces that form the dichotomy within our human nature. Vietnam is the stage for this psychological exploration, the war ravaging across its landscape providing its own commentary on the fine line between sanity and madness, between order and chaos. But because of this stance it's also an ambiguous film, politically speaking, and offers both an anti-war and pro-war discourse within its odyssey.

"I, like Captain Willard, was moving up river in a faraway jungle, looking for answers and hoping for some kind of catharsis."

On the one hand it clearly depicts the American involvement in the conflict as blundering hypermilitarism taken to absurdist levels, where one symptom of this imperialism creates rogue officers who take matters into their own hands, and highlights the chaotic ineffectiveness of the policy of the war as directed by the brass and the White House. The post colonial, anti-war message is also supported by the source novel, Conrad's Heart of Darkness and here its transposition of 19th century anti-colonialism to the exploration of good and evil - between Willard and Kurtz - within the context of the dangers inherent in a technologically aggressive power 'civilising' a primitive society.

Meanwhile, on the other hand the film showcases a gung-ho, aggressive and visually stimulating arena of conflict, epitomised in the helicopter attack on the Vietcong village soundtracked to Wagner. It places the film within the notion of the epic, depicting the all-conquering Western power usurping the weaker indigenous culture. It is shot and edited with hyperkinetic exhilaration, aestheticising violence to the degree that Frank Tomasulo, in From Hanoi to Hollywood, believes "the use of wide screen, low angle shots of helicopters in tight formation flying up from the horizon into the rising sun creates a grandiose, romanticised and even heavenly aura of battle that changes destruction and death from acts of horror into Armageddon-like sights of awe-inspiring beauty."

This debate is one that even the director Francis Ford Coppola was faced with when the film gradually spiraled out of his control on location in the Philippines and he found himself entangled in a personal journey every bit as ambiguous as that endured by the central character Captain Willard (Martin Sheen). In a press release before the first screenings of the film, he summarised this as, "I found many of the images and ideas with which I was working as a film director began to coincide with the realities of my own life, and that I, like Captain Willard, was moving up river in a faraway jungle, looking for answers and hoping for some kind of catharsis." This also evokes some further comments from Baudrillard, who saw Coppola's film as "inspired irony" and that the hallucinatory qualities of the making of the film, the content of the film itself and the reality of the Vietnam war "are cut from the same cloth, that nothing separates them."

BBCHD - 21 May 2011 - 6.45pm

"I've got to get to that cockerel before all hell breaks loose."

Let's face it, Matthew Graham's Fear Her didn't exactly set the world on fire back in June 2006. So, while it is great that he gets another chance to write for the series I'm sure a number of fans were holding their collective breaths about the The Rebel Flesh, the first installment of his latest two part story for Doctor Who, and hoping for something bolder and better. Fortunately, Graham really gets his teeth into this script, perhaps to such a degree that this really does feel like a base-under-siege 'trad' Who story more than any of the episodes in the last two years, especially with Matt Smith in glorious Troughton mode. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and it makes a very welcome change from the rest of the episodes transmitted so far. As his sophomore engagement with the series, The Rebel Flesh certainly turns out to be a far better Doctor Who story than Graham's 2006 effort, perhaps by dint of its association with a number of classic Who tropes and is certainly one of the most explicit explorations of that central theme in the series: otherness.

This high-definition dual format edition, of perhaps two of the most well-known film experiments of the 20th century, sees the BFI return to surrealism again after their recent release of Jan Švankmajer's Alice this month. L'Age d'Or (1930) was Luis Buñuel's first feature film, condemned upon release by, amongst others, the League of Patriots, banned by the Parisian Board of Censors and it is released here with the equally notorious 16 minute short Un Chien Andalou (1929).

Both films were a collaboration between Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. Buñuel, born in Calanda, is highly regarded as one of Spanish cinema's great iconoclasts. Gaining his early reputation in France in the 1920s and 1930s, he then directed a remarkable run of films in Mexico (after gaining Mexican citizenship) during the 1950s with Los Olvidados (1950) winning him the Best Director prize at Cannes and securing his reputation, and both Subida al cielo (1952) and Él (1953) entered in the Official Selection for the Festival.

Having left Spain in 1936, knowing that the Spanish Civil War and Franco's rise to power would not provide him with the requisite freedoms to make films the way he wanted to make them, he was later invited to return to Spain by Franco in 1960 purely as a propaganda exercise. However, the film that resulted from this reunion, Viridiana (1961) in which a tableaux of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper is created by drunken beggars, was banned after Franco's regime who, believing in Buñuel's integrity and sending the film to Cannes sight unseen, reacted to the outrage it caused. Franco attempted to have it withdrawn, destroying any copies his authorities located. Seen at Cannes, it eventually went on to win the Palme d'Or. It was sixteen years before it was finally shown in Spain. Buñuel's status was further elevated by the films he then made in France with his screenwriting and producing partnership of Jean-Claude Carrière and Serge Silberman, including Belle de Jour (1967), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), The Phantom of Liberty (1974) and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977).

BBCHD - 14 May 2011 - 6.30pm

"I'm a madman with a box, without a box!"

"She's a woman. And she's the TARDIS."
"Did you wish really hard?"

An eagerly anticipated episode, The Doctor's Wife manages something pretty extraordinary. It breathes new life into the origins of the mythology at the heart of the series, particularly the Doctor's long relationship with his ultimate of companions, the TARDIS. It very carefully enhances and enriches the accepted folklore of the Doctor stealing the TARDIS and his erratic ability to control it while delivering the results with a heartbreakingly emotional sophistication. Oh, and Neil Gaiman's a very wicked man. The episode's title was clearly enough to get some fans in a bit of a dither but in hindsight it effectively combines the artistry of misdirection coupled with the episode's specific allusion to that eternal partnership between Time Lord and time machine. For indeed, the Doctor and the TARDIS are like an old married couple. She always was "the old girl" who took him to the trouble spots of the universe and in Gaiman's lovely script we find out why when the Doctor meets her in the flesh and has a bit of barney with her.

The long understood personal bond between the Doctor and the TARDIS - the madman and his box - forms the singular framework of the story here as the Doctor receives a psychic message from a fellow Time Lord and goes in search of the messenger.  There was much teasing prior to the episode that we would see something that we hadn't seen since The War Games in 1969. Naturally, fans went into overdrive and convinced themselves that Gaiman's script was about to feature the return of the War Lord. While being true to his word, Gaiman clearly was being less obvious than that. It was therefore delightful that, as such a fan, he would reintroduce the idea of the Time Lord's ability to send for help telepathically in boxes that could travel through time and space.

It's highly likely that most of us came into contact with the surreal world of Jan Švankmajer courtesy of Channel 4 and the Keith Griffiths documentary The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer: Prague's Alchemist of Film that was screened as part of its late night Visions series in 1984. Ah, the good old days of Channel 4 when Czech surrealism rubbed shoulders with Brookside and The Tube.

As Michael Brooke explains in his Screenonline notes about the documentary: "Though prior familiarity with Švankmajer's work helps, even a complete newcomer (which would have described most of the original audience) will be able to glean that he's based in Prague, that he's fascinated by the era of the sixteenth-century Bohemian emperor Rudolf II, especially his court painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo (creator of portraits of human faces made up of fruit, vegetables, fish and other assorted objects), and that he has a peculiar addiction both to the hidden power of inanimate objects in general and, more specifically, their texture and feel." 

Jan Švankmajer, born in Prague in 1934, is one of cinema's greatest surrealist poets and now his first full-length film, Alice, arrives on the blu-ray high-definition format this month courtesy of the BFI. By the time he made Alice in 1988, he had already carved out a significant career as an artist, writer, animator and film maker. Švankmajer's arrival into the world coincided with the formation of the Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia, one that included writers Vítězlav Nezval, Karel Teige and Jindřich Heisler, poet Konstantin Biebl, director Jindřich Honzl, composer Jaroslav Ježek, painters Jindřich Štyrský and Marie Čermínová, sculptor Vincenc Makovský and the psychologist Bohuslav Brouk.

BBCHD - 7th May 2011 - 6.15pm

"Yo, ho ho! Or does nobody actually say that?"

It seemed rather inevitable that Doctor Who would return to the action-adventure of the pirate genre at some point in the course of its revival since 2005. Naturally, it is no stranger to this type of action-adventure, having dabbled with this staple of adventure fiction in the past.

Most notably this takes us back to 1966 with The Smugglers, one of the last straightforward period adventures (or 'historicals' as we fans like to regard them) produced for the series, and then the mash-up of pirate and science fiction genres in the likes of The Pirate Planet and, more recently, The Infinite Quest. Pirates are of course still flavour of the month because of Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, the latest of which Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, is just a week away from release as I write and so this episode arrives with uncanny timing.

With Doctor Who now firmly repositioned as family viewing on Saturday night, it's no coincidence that Moffat and his team, building on the popular success of the series engineered by Russell T Davies, would continue to look at successful cinema franchises and classic adventure texts to ensure that the series kept its finger on the pulse. In the past year alone we've had fairy tale allusion aplenty tapping into a myriad of classic texts and mythology in the series.

Director Jules Dassin, who picked up the award for best director for Rififi (also known as Du rififi chez les hommes) at Cannes, was an American in exile from Hollywood when he made the film. Prior to his success with Rififi, Connecticut born Dassin had made a number of highly acclaimed noir films during the 1940s but then by the end of the decade found himself on the Hollywood blacklist of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), set up by McCarthy to weed out communist propagandists and their sympathisers in the entertainment industry. Dassin struggled to find projects even in exile, with pressure from HUAC via the American Embassy often directed upon the non-European actors he cast, forcing them not to work with him on films he tried to set up in France and in Italy.

Rififi (1955) represented his first film for five years, the last being Fox's Night and the City made in the UK in 1950 before he moved to France, and the project was realised on the back of the French success of his film The Naked City, a classic noir thriller shot in New York and released in 1948. He was approached to direct by producer Henri Bérard who had secured the rights to the crime novel Du Rififi chez les hommes by Auguste le Breton. Having written the script for the adaptation in about six days, Dassin restructured much of the plot and characters as he felt the original novel contained some disagreeable racist elements where the rival gangsters in conflict with the European criminals in the story were depicted as Arab or North African stereotypes.

"What are you a doctor of, by the way?"
"Practically everything, my dear."

How wonderful that after last month's release of Planet of the Spiders, Jon Pertwee's swansong to the series, 2 entertain should take us right back to the beginning of his era of Doctor Who with his debut story, Spearhead from Space. I vividly remember watching it in black and white because we couldn't afford the new colour sets in the shops, and wondering why Danny Kaye was now playing 'Doctor Who'.

They also, quite cleverly I think, box this together with the opening story of Season 8 and the direct sequel Terror of the Autons. Clever? Because it gives you a side by side comparison of the two serials that essentially relaunched Doctor Who. It's fascinating to compare the Derrick Sherwin and Terrance Dicks opener to Season 7 and the reformat undertaken by Barry Letts and Dicks for Season 8.

Both stories offer a vision of Doctor Who for the 1970s. With Sherwin and Bryant's imprint all over Season 7 we are presented with an intriguing alternate version of the series that posits Doctor Who as a realistic, more adult-oriented drama. It is only until Sherwin and Bryant depart, midway into production on Spearhead from Space, to rescue the Paul Temple series, a BBC co-production with German TV, that producer Barry Letts enters the scene. Terror of the Autons, which started location filming in September of 1970 and was then transmitted in January 1971, is Letts's ambition writ large and it makes some significant modifications to the format, putting the emphasis on a vibrant, comic-strip approach to the series.

BBCHD - 30th April 2011 - 6.00pm

It's fascinating that Steven Moffat chose the end of the 1960s as his setting and President Nixon as one of the key figures in Day of the Moon. One of the strongest themes here is about indoctrination and brainwashing, where the Silence control human society and its development through post-hypnotic suggestion. This suggests an exploration of the politics of the period, where the Silence represent the continuing paranoia about anti-democratic forces seeking to undermine US foreign policy and the dominant hegemony of the military-industrial complex, already battling for hearts and minds in Vietnam.

"there's always a bit left over" 

Not only taking his cue from such films as The Manchurian Candidate, where American POWs were indoctrinated by other regimes and brainwashed to carry out political assassinations, Moffat also seems to be influenced by a number of Cold War espionage thrillers where the American government is taken over by a new enemy within, the state-sponsored security agencies. Naturally, this finds its apotheosis in the Watergate scandal depicted in All the President's Men and where Moffat shows the Doctor demanding Nixon record everything to effect checks and balances on his own sanity when faced with an enemy like the Silence.