Simon Fernandes

Falling Out?

Thinking of Fall Out Boy (who despite being the most sold-out, mainstream band on the emo scene are, irritatingly, quite good) makes me reflect yet again on the shallowness of marketing.

Now, everyone knows that the public face of Fall Out Boy is Pete Wentz. Pete is genuinely good looking, very sexy, and thanks to the miracle of the information superhighway and his own carelessness, all his fans have the opportunity to see his dick in scinitillating phonecam closeup. Like all good emo boys, he flirts with bisexuality – he once commented that he thinks of himself as bisexual “above the waist”. So a blowjob’s not out of the question, then, Pete?

But here’s the thing. Pete’s not the singer, the frontman, or even the main songwriter – he’s the bass player. Not a role traditionally seen as the most glamourous (sorry, bass players that I know). In fact these functions are fulfilled by the far less photogenic Patrick Stump, whose name even seems less sexy than Pete’s. Pity poor Patrick, a genuinely talented man relegated to the status of background in his own band because he’s not the sexiest one.

Oh, the shallow, fickle face of music marketing. And yet here’s the thing – I’m still not going to go trawling the web for pictures of Patrick Stump’s genitalia. Yup, I’m shallow too. Sometimes I make myself sick…

He Ain’t Legend (Spoiler alert)

So yesterday I hared off down to the local fleapit to see shiny new Will Smith vehicle I Am Legend. Those who know me know that I’m not averse to big, dumb Hollywood blockbusters. But this time I had a more concrete reason – this particular big budget epic is based on one of my favourite books of all time.

I Am Legend is a 1954 novel by the great horror author Richard Matheson. For those unfamiliar with his work, Matheson’s the guy who wrote most of the best Twilight Zone episodes (as distinct from the sickly schmaltzfests written by Rod Serling) and also wrote the Spielberg classic Duel, in which a man pursued by a psycho in a diesel truck becomes the stuff of archetypal legend. He also wrote my favourite haunted house novel Hell House, filmed to great effect in 1973 as The Legend of Hell House.

I Am Legend is probably his most famous work, and is a must-read for any horror fan, especially those into zombies. The plot goes like this: Robert Neville is the lone human survivor of a plague that has killed most of humanity. The only other survivors have become honest to goodness vampires who roam the night in search of blood. By night, Neville cowers in his besieged house as the vampires try to get in and drink his blood. By day, he researches the germ that caused the vampirism, and roams the deserted Los Angeles, staking and burning any vampires he finds.

The key to the novel, and indeed its title, is this: some of the vampires have evolved beyond being slavering predators and have started to form a new society. From their point of view, Neville is a terrifying monster, a shadowy figure who kills them in their sleep, leaving only the dead bodies of their loved ones as evidence of his existence. In a world of vampires, it’s the vampire hunter who’s the monster that frightens children, as Neville realises in the book’s final, chilling scene: “he saw on their faces awe, fear, shrinking horror – and he knew that they were afraid of him… a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend.”

George Romero acknowledges that the book was his primary inspiration for writing Night of the Living Dead, and by association is responsible for the entire zombie genre. The evolution of the zombies in Romero’s Dead series directly parallels the evolution of the vampires in I Am Legend, as they become ultimately more human than those left alive.

So with an entire genre of horror cinema indebted to this book for its very existence, surely Hollywood should be able to make a decent film of it? I Am Legend has been filmed three times, firstly in 1964 as The Last Man on Earth, then in 1971 as The Omega Man, and now in 2007 under its own title. Both of the first two efforts were lacking something compared to the book, but with the new one having the proper title and everything, it could be good, surely? Well, it’s not. It sucks. And it sucks big time.

But why does it suck? Who can we blame? OK then, let’s start with the director. Francis Lawrence is an ex-music video auteur, and the man responsible for turning Hellblazer‘s John Constantine (a shifty, blond, Scouse magician) into Keanu Reeves, and then putting him into an incomprehensible plot seemingly comprised of set pieces from different stories in the comic glued together with little regard for logic. Like Constantine, I Am Legend displays Lawrence’s penchant for big, flashy visuals in place of anything resembling drama.

To be fair, the opening sequences of Neville roaming the deserted New York are very good, possibly the most realistic depiction of such scenes yet committed to celluloid. But even here, any fan of The Omega Man will recognise that half of the shots are just nicked wholesale, particularly the iconic zoom into the deserted streets from above onto Neville’s car. Plus, impressive though the post-apocalyptic vistas undoubtedly are, Lawrence has succumbed to the temptation of any shallow hack given a huge CG budget and packed every shot with so much detail that the eye is still trying to take it in while the brain should be following the drama. Sometimes, less is more; The Stand achieved a similar effect with just a traffic jam full of corpses going into the Lincoln Tunnel.

So what about the vampires? In The Last Man on Earth, the vampires are moaning, barely coherent bloodsuckers with all of the traditional traits of such creatures – they don’t care for crucifixes, garlic, or stakes through the heart, and there’s a scientific explanation for all of this, just as Matheson intended. Plus, any Romero fan will recognise the genesis of Night of the Living Dead‘s shuffling ghouls here, a full four years before Night hit the screens of a horrified America.

Fast forward seven years, and The Omega Man‘s vampires are merely light-phobic albinos with a Luddite agenda, intent on destroying the knowledge that they see as having led mankind to its extinction. Yet even this has its plus points; their leader Matthias (a fantastic turn from prolific character actor Anthony Zerbe) is urbane, civilized and erudite, and able to acerbically debate the finer points of ideology with his nemesis Neville. He’s also a screaming loon, but the civility only adds to his menace.

This time around, in one of the director’s better decisions, we hear the vampires before we see them, snarling and roaring through the empty city while Neville cowers in his fortified apartment. Sounds promising, you think – but then you actually see them. As Neville rather foolishly follows his dog into a darkened building, they descend on him en masse, and you realise that they’re yet another version of the athletic, superfast zombies we saw in 28 Days Later and the 2004 version of Dawn of the Dead.

That’s not too bad per se- though what’s wrong with proper vampires? – but the crowning irritant is that the “darkseekers”, as they’re referred to, aren’t even real. They’re yet more bloody CG, and they look it. As they attack, you’re reminded of nothing so much as an advanced game of Resident Evil, and their cartoonlike nature robs them of any real sense of menace because they’re just another special effect. At least 28 Days and Dawn had real, tangible ghouls.

Even then, you think, the movie could work well if it had a decent screenplay. But it doesn’t. This version was in development hell for years, and it shows, with the script bearing the unmistakeable feel of many different drafts lumped together with insufficient erasing in between. For one thing, it’s not just “based on the novel by Richard Matheson”. Oh no. It’s “by Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman based on the screenplay by John William and Joyce H Corrington based on the novel by Richard Matheson”. If that sounds like a jumbled mess, it looks like one onscreen too.

The Corringtons’ screenplay in question is in fact the one for The Omega Man, and this new version has many obvious lifts from it. As in that version, Robert Neville is a military doctor who discovered the cure for the plague too late for it to have any effect, rather than having immunity conferred by Matheson’s admittedly specious device of being bitten by a vampire bat. There are plenty of minor lifts too; in one scene Will Smith’s Neville quotes along with the DVD of Shrek, obviously knowing every line of dialogue, echoing the scene where Charlton Heston’s Neville quotes along with Woodstock in an empty cinema. The difference being that the quote from Woodstock was profound and relevant, and funny though Shrek is, it doesn’t really have anything to say about the possible extinction of humanity.

Also nicked from The Omega Man is Neville’s attempt to populate his haunts with shop mannequins, which expands on the original where Heston looks longingly at a female dummy in a posh clothes shop. Even the inexplicably clean and shiny Shelby Mustang that Neville drives at the beginning of the movie echoes the ’71 Mustang that Heston memorably drove through a showroom window in the earlier version.

Just nicking from a previous version wouldn’t be too bad – we call those remakes, fellas – but it doesn’t sit too well with yet another attempt to film the actual book. Changing the location from LA to New York doesn’t rob anything from the premise, and the rotting Christmas trees that indicate the epidemic started in late December are a nice touch. But the new script also attempts to utilise the book’s structure of revealing what happened to Neville’s family in a series of interspersed flashbacks, and unwisely tries to improve on it. The book dispenses with this device halfway through, the story told, but this screenplay tries to eke out the tension by not revealing the end of the flashbacks till very near the end of the movie. What’s the bloody point? We know Neville’s family is dead, there’s not really much suspense to be gleaned by eking out the information of how it occurred.

Plus, the way they die turns out to be disappointingly mundane. In Matheson’s novel, first Neville’s daughter then his wife die of the plague itself. Horrified by the military’s burning of his daughter’s body, Neville chooses to bury his wife himself, leading to one of the most chilling scenes in the novel as he opens the door later that night to find her standing outside as a vampire, rasping his name. This scene is faithfully and superbly recreated in The Last Man on Earth as Vincent Price (playing Robert Morgan – the name was changed for this version) opens the door to a shadow of a woman, gravedirt clinging to her tattered nightdress, and readies himself with a stake.

In this one, they die in a helicopter crash trying to get off Manhattan before the military seal it off. Simple as that. No real drama compared to the original, and they eke the revelation out through the whole length of the movie so that ultimately all you’re left with is a sense of anticlimax.

Also taken from the book then irritatingly altered is the plot device of Neville having a dog. In the book, he gradually gains the trust of a stray mongrel only for it to die of the plague not too long after. In the movie, the stray mongrel is transformed into some kind of superdog, as Neville’s faithful hunting companion Sam, a German Shepherd apparently capable of understanding Will Smith’s every utterance. Now, the dog does well – it’s one of the better cast members – but having Neville accompanied by a sidekick, even a canine one, robs the character of the sense of loneliness he should have. To be fair, they don’t chicken out of having the dog die, but his time she dies as a result of heroically fighting off a pair of CG vampire dogs(!) intent on tearing out her master’s throat. The best aspect of this is the look on Neville’s face as he realises she’s infected and has to strangle her offscreen while the camera holds on a closeup.

Which brings us to Will Smith. Of necessity, any lead actor in this role has to pretty much carry the movie, since for the most part there are no other characters in it. And Smith, an actor who I genuinely admire, is probably the best casting as Robert Neville in any version. Richard Matheson disowned The Last Man on Earth even though it’s the most faithful adaptation of the book, purely because he thought Vincent Price terribly miscast as the hero. He had a point; Price tries hard, but he’s too associated with eye-rolling Roger Corman schlockfests to give the role the impact it should have.

Matheson preferred Charlton Heston in The Omega Man, and indeed the ultra-conservative former Ben-Hur makes quite a good job of it. But still, he’s really playing Charlton Heston, the screen hero who since Planet of the Apes had become the go-to guy for any big budget sci-fi epic. The screenplay’s attempts to equate the character with Christ don’t help, since it just makes one remember all those Biblical epics Heston was in back in the 50s. “Are you God?” a little girl asks him at one point. Of course he is; the movie rams that point home as he dies in a cruciform pose, but not before saving humanity with his blood.

Will Smith possibly carries the same sort of star baggage as Heston, but as anyone who’s seen Six Degrees of Separation will know, is capable of real, emotional acting. His portrayal of Neville as a doomed, possibly mad hero still trying desperately to end a plague that’s already over carries real weight, and it’s a great shame that it’s wasted in a movie that’s a pile of steaming poo.

Carried over from The Omega Man is the notion of Neville as a modern Messiah, saving humanity with a vial of blood. As if to finally underline the way the screenplay totally misses the point of the novel, offscreen narration explains that this is why he is a “legend”; his cure will provide safety for an extremely unlikely colony of survivors walled off in Vermont, obviously a tenth draft variant of the vampire colony that sentence him to death in the novel. Even the woman he befriends, who turns out to be an evolved vampire in the book, is a heroic emissary from said colony, and accompanied for reasons that defy any kind of sense by a small boy.

I Am Legend 2007 then, a wasted, missed opportunity from a hack director who’d be more at home making the latest Fall Out Boy video. It’s telling that an adaptation of the classic novel that kickstarted the zombie genre has ended up being little more than a pale imitation of recent, better zombie movies like the Dawn of the Dead remake. If you’re a fan of the novel, and if you can find it on DVD, you’d do far better to seek out The Last Man on Earth, which, Vincent Price aside, is a genuinely good version of the story. “They were afraid of me,” Price gasps as he dies. Now that screenplay got the point.

2007 Christmas Special: Voyage of the Damned

“Let the Christmas inferno commence!”

There are some very gay things in the world. The Pet Shop Boys cover of Village People’s Go West. Rufus Wainwright recreating Judy Garland’s classic Carnegie Hall concert. Anything at all involving John Barrowman. And then there’s Doctor Who. A show whose most rabid fanbase seems to consist primarily of gay men (I should know, I’m one of them) currently being run by the bloke who wrote Queer as Folk and featuring numerous appearances by the aforementioned John Barrowman. Straight fans often bemoan the show’s supposed “gay agenda” (which seems to consist of occasional lines suggesting that being gay might, actually, be OK).

The challenge, then, facing Russell T Davies and his team must have been – how do we make this show even more gay? One can imagine much brainstorming at BBC Wales until someone came up with the obvious answer – put Kylie Minogue in it! After all, short of getting David Tennant to dress in drag and fellating a Dalek, she’s about as gay-friendly as it gets.

So it was with some trepidation that I approached this year’s Christmas special. Was this just a gimmicky piece of stunt casting? Kylie’s guest appearance has been trumpeted so much for so long, you’d be forgiven for thinking it wasn’t a drama after all. Perhaps she was going to spend the whole thing performing her greatest hits. She was so ubiquitous that even the normally objective (and very pretty) Ben Cook of Doctor Who Magazine had a photo of her standing next to him as his Facebook avatar.

But I needn’t have worried. Lest we forget, before she became a loveable diva, Kylie Minogue was actually an actress. Well, insofar as being in Neighbours constitutes acting. Voyage of the Damned gave her a chance to demonstrate this with more aplomb than the Erinsbrough suburbs ever did, in another surprisingly good script from Russell T himself.

Russell seems to be on a genuine learning curve as a Who writer. Already a skilled dramatist, his previous efforts for the programme have shown an occasional lack of logic obviously borne of him being such a fan of the show. I’ve had genuine, and I believe justified criticisms of his scripts in varous ways since the series returned. But lo and behold, every time he turns out another script, it’s as if he’s been listening to me! (Be still, my giant ego). It’s just that he seems to avoid every pitfall I’ve previously had a go about and produce a script that’s a real improvement.

Take Voyage of the Damned. I was distinctly unimpressed by last year’s Christmas effort The Runaway Bride for various reasons – the plot lacked logic, the robot Santas were in it for no good reason, and most importantly, the story lacked a sense of jeopardy as no-one appeared to be in real danger and no-one died. This year, Russell redressed the balance with a script that had a higher body count than Rambo. And it was more than just a retread of last year’s show, being almost entirely not set on contemporary Earth.

Not that its roots weren’t showing. The most obvious source of inspiration was 1970’s disaster epic The Poseidon Adventure, about a luxury liner which comes to grief – at Christmas. The ensemble cast of survivors were true disaster movie archetypes as well, right down to the snivelling Richard Chamberlain-style weasel Rickston Slade and Shelley Winters-alike Foon Van Hoff. I was only surprised that there wasn’t a small child and a dog. Yet even here, Russell confounded expectations. In a classic disaster movie, it would be a given that Slade would die, and yet he was one of the few survivors at the end.

Russell’s other occasional weakness – a fondness for action/emotion set pieces jammed in with little regard for logic – was also not in evidence. There were some great set pieces, to be sure – the sequence of our heroes trying to make it over that rickety bridge while being besieged by the Host was a humdinger. But each of them arose naturally from the plot, rather than seeming shoehorned in because they looked good but had no place in the drama.

Of course, the other obvious “homage” here was classic Who story The Robots of Death. From the moment the Doctor first encountered the placidly polite Host and it started to twitch, it was obvious that they’d be wandering around the ship slaughtering everyone soon enough. And so it was, their “Information: you are all going to die” catchphrase not too dissimilar to SV7’s calm declaration “You have to die. All of you. That is the order.” The moment when Midshipman Frame slammed the door on them only to trap and detach one of their hands was also a straight nick from the scene where Pamela Salem is menaced in her Sandminer cabin by one of the robots.

But Doctor Who has always nicked from other sources, often with excellent results. After all, The Brain of Morbius is simply Frankenstein, while Pyramids of Mars is nothing more than an old Peter Cushing Mummy film. And the Host were very effective, their angelic design an excellent counterpart to their murderous intentions. It’s got to be the first time a halo’s been used as a murder weapon.

David Tennant was on fine form, expressing the Doctor’s loneliness with none of the irritating smugness he displayed in his debut season. The relationship he built up with Astrid was genuinely touching, and paid off nicely with his desperation to save her after her noble sacrifice (though, to be fair, she could easily have jumped off that slow-moving forklift before it plunged into the abyss).

And it was scenes like that which allowed Kylie to really show off her acting chops. From her first appearance, she was charming and likeable as a girl who still saw the wonder in the universe. The scene of her expressing delight at the “alien” shops and streets of Cardiff… er, London was enchanting, and her final scene as a half-there teleport phantom was heartbreaking. It’s a testament to Russell’s skill as a dramatist that he didn’t go for the easy happy ending of letting the Doctor save her, but at least she didn’t, technically, “die”. As well as being a touching scene, it served as a welcome reminder that the Doctor’s just as fallible as everyone else, and sometimes he can’t save everyone.

With these two at the centre of attention, it would have been easy for Russell to reduce the rest of the characters to two-dimensional disaster movie cyphers. But all the characters were nicely rounded, and played to perfection by a splendid guest cast. It’s always a delight to see old hand Geoffrey Palmer popping up, and here as Captain Hardaker he used his jowly, hangdog face to real advantage. He really made you feel for the guy even though he was about to be responsible for a mass murder and you then saw him shoot that nice young Midshipman. It actually seemed rather a shame that he died so early on, as I’d like to have seen more of his character’s haunted, guilty personality.

There were plenty of characters blessed with that earthy humour Russell likes too. The most obvious were the Van Hoffs, a likeable pair of proles who’d rather unfortunately won passage on the ship in a competition. The scene of the Doctor immediately siding with them over the snobs who were the rest of the passengers was great, and the characters went on to display real depth. It was more believable than in your averager disaster movie that Foon really went to pieces after her husband was killed, but she still pulled it together enough to make the heroic self-sacrifice demanded of likeable characters in disaster movies. The shot of her plunging to her death in slo-mo was genuinely moving, though it has to be said that the almost identical shot of Astrid plunging into the abyss might have had more impact if we hadn’t already seen this one.

Clive Swift, another old hand, was on fine form as Mr Copper, the loveable old codger of the piece. He got some of Russell’s best lines as the “academic” who didn’t quite get what 21st century Earth was really like. The coda, with him happily running off to spend all his money, was sweetly joyful, though I had to wonder why the Doctor didn’t warn him off marrying that awful Hyacinth woman…

And then there was Bannakafalatta. At first glance just an action figure opportunity made flesh, Jimmy Vee made him a loveable but believable figure. It was nice to see him getting a real character to play for once, after the last few years of incarnating any alien that happens to be a bit on the short side. And it was his secret cyborg status that cleverly held the key to the whole mystery, neatly setting up the concept that here was a society that treated cyborgs as underdogs who couldn’t even get married. The gay agenda? Possibly. I’m sure certain fans will take it that way…

Cyborgs brings us neatly to the villlain of the piece, Max Capricorn. the revelation of him as the force behind events didn’t entirely come as a surprise, since I was doubtful they’d hire an actor of the stature of George Costigan and confine him to a few shipboard commercials. Costigan was as good as ever in a role, which, let’s face it, was the standard villainous businessman. His scheme to ruin his betrayers on the board was a little reminiscent of Morgus’ business manipulations in The Caves of Androzani, but was nonetheless a clever motivation. I had to wonder whether some of the younger viewers would grasp the idea of share price manipulations, mind.

So what else was there? Well, it was a joy to see Bernard Cribbins, who by the looks of the trailer will be back next year. It was also a nice touch to have London deserted after the repeated alien incursions of the last two Christmasses. The set piece of the Titanic plunging down towards Buckingham Palace was genuinely heart in mouth – you wondered whether Mike Tucker and his crew were going to blow up another London landmark. Though I’m not so sure about the from-behind appearance of Her Majesty, in a pink dressing gown and curlers! And her cry of “Thank you, Doctor!” was pretty toe-curling, too. I guess she just knows that whenever anything like that happens, the Doctor’s bound to be involved somewhere.

On a final note, I’m likely to be in the minority of saying that I rather liked Murray Gold’s beefed up new arrangement of the theme tune. But I definitely didn’t like the new, hyper fast end credits, which sped by so quickly I could barely read any of them. Apparently this is due to a new BBC rule that credits can only be thirty seconds long, lest the viewer’s tiny mind and attention span be distracted by thoughts of turning to the other channel. Whatever, it made the end of the show seem unpleasantly American.

So another Christmas gone, and a huge improvement from Russell and crew this year. Kudos to the bloke for apparently learning from previous pitfalls and producing a fun and thrilling piece of family entertainment. And how gay was it, really? Actually not much. John Barrowman was nowhere to be seen….

The Superior Spin Off

The most surreal line of the week award continues to be won by Robin Hood. Last week, after an encounter with an ingratiating underling, Keith Allen’s Sheriff harrumphed, “Why do you never kiss my ring, Gisburne?” This week, pursuing a troublesome carrier bird, he was heard to loudly declare, “We have to catch the pigeon. Catch the pigeon!” Which presumably means the ever-cheery Gisburne is Muttley.

Those aware of my TV tastes are presumably baffled by my lack of comment on Doctor Who spinoff The Sarah Jane Adventures. Well, don’t worry, I did watch it! After all, being on Children’s BBC, it was a sight more adult than Torchwood.

With ten episodes comprising five two-part stories, it was the inevitable mixed bag, but some good stuff was to be found within. I was somewhat downhearted to see the return of Russell T Davies’ uninspiring blobby aliens in Revenge of the Slitheen, but pleasantly surprised to find them in an actually rather well-written story. Gareth Roberts, who is shaping up as a rather good TV writer, followed up his pilot script Invasion of the Bane with a sort of reboot of the show. Gone is annoying teenage girl Kelsey, replaced by somewhat less annoying teenage boy Clyde. Otherwise the format remains the same, but Gareth’s script deftly re-introduced the characters and situations for those who might have missed the pilot.

In a nutshell, ex-companion Sarah Jane Smith has adopted alien-created teenager Luke, hangs out with him and neighbour Maria, who’s really the show’s main character. Appealing though Sarah Jane us to us old fanboys, a children’s drama can’t really have a woman in her fifties as the star of the show. So Sarah acts as a sort of Gandalf/Doctor figure to the kids, involving them in the alien mysteries she solves with her convenient super computer Mr Smith (K9 being busy sealing off a black hole until his copyright owners see sense).

Of the stories, inevitably Gareth’s were the standouts. Revenge of the Slitheen had the alien Del-boys hanging around in a school, and they seemed to fit better in a children’s show than in Doctor Who itself. By far the standout of the entire series was Gareth’s Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?, which was a well-written time paradox story that addressed some complex, adult themes far better than any amount of gratuitous swearing in Torchwood. The story dealt sensitively with issues like death, guilt and divorce in a sensitive way that didn’t talk down to its audience of children, without alienating them.

True, Maria’s awful mum does seem rather like a cartoon character and her dad is just too good to be true, but the show didn’t shy away from showing the devastating effects divorce can have on kids. It also confronted the issue of whether you would sacrifice your best friend to survive yourself, as a time paradox enabled Sarah’s friend Andrea to cheat her own death at thirteen years old by switching places with the teenage Sarah. As Andrea, the too-little seen Jane Asher gave a knockout performance as a woman haunted by the realization of what she’s done but still unwilling to undo it.

Indeed, the show had a remarkable quality of guest stars in some surprisingly challenging roles. Old stalwart Phyllida Law popped up in Phil Ford’s alien nun epic Eyes of the Gorgon, playing a woman adventurer deliberately reminiscent of an older Sarah Jane, now afflicted with Alzheimer’s. Children’s TV campaigner Floella Benjamin turned up herself in season finale The Lost Boy, instantly recalling Play School for those of us of a certain age.

Probably the weakest story was Philip Gladwin’s Warriors of Kudlak, in which a laser tag franchise was actually a recruiting ground for soldiers in an alien war. It had a couple of neat twists, such as the alien computer hiding the fact that the war had been over for years, but overall was reminiscent of nothing so much as The Tomorrow People. And I’m pretty sure the basic plot was filched from 1984 movie The Last Starfighter…

The show had a pretty good regular cast, headed of course by the reliable Elisabeth Sladen. Lis played Sarah Jane exactly as she had from the 70s onward, but therein was a bit of a problem. The character has never really been too complex, so Lis’s range of emotions seemed rather… well, limited. It was revealing that in Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?, Jane Asher gave a far more subtle performance as a character who was in many ways an analog of Sarah. Still, with this new show casting Sarah pretty much in the role of the Doctor, range is necessarily going to be limited.

The kids were good, though. Yasmin Paige as Maria had the lion’s share of character development and gave a good performance as a girl struggling to deal with a broken home while concealing her involvement with all sorts of alien shenanigans with her neighbour. Tommy Knight, as Sarah’s adopted son Luke, was basically the Spock/Data of the piece, constantly puzzled by the everyday banalities of life. His wide-eyed innocence was rather sweet, and very much in keeping with the tone of the character. Heaven help him when puberty finally hits him… Lastly, new boy Daniel Anthony gave a charismatic turn as the cocky, streetwise Clyde, though his character was too often used as comic relief to be truly convincing.

The final story, The Lost Boy, brought the series to a satisfying conclusion with the revelation that Sarah’s oh-so-convenient supercomputer Mr Smith was actually an alien entity bent on the destruction of Earth to free his people from its core. It’s a brave move to introduce a sympathetic alien computer, then reveal that it was the bad guy all along; rather as if Tomorrow People computer Tim had suddenly revealed himself to be Hannibal Lecter. Still, Mr Smith was easily despatched by a few blasts from K9, conveniently reappearing as if copyright were never a problem. It was great to see him again, with the ever-excellent John Leeson again providing the voice.

It’s been a fun series, and if Torchwood can get a second run, surely this can. The quality of writing and directing parallels Doctor Who easily, with many of the same people involved. True, there are quibbles; Sarah may not be as magnetic a character as the Doctor, and that sonic lipstick’s just plain silly. But it satisfyingly recalls the glory days of children’s drama when it was producing some of the most imaginative fantasy shows on British television. The only real puzzler is with the Doctor, Torchwood and Sarah Jane all preventing the destruction of the planet on a weekly basis, how come they don’t bump into each other more often?
“Oh, I’m sorry, Captain Jack, I thought I was preventing the alien meteor destroying the Earth.”
“No, Miss Smith, it’s an alien sex meteor. That’s Torchwood’s remit.”

Perhaps that’s why…

Tudor coup -eh?

So, historical shagathon The Tudors continues to drag on, like Hollyoaks in doublet and hose. Indeed, much like the venerated Chester soap, all the main characters seem to be portrayed by actors of improbable levels of attractiveness. Still, series writer Michael Hirst claims the show is “85% historically accurate”, and I don’t know a great deal about this period, so who am I to judge? Maybe the young Henry VIII really was as sexy as Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

I’m betting he wasn’t as wooden though. While certainly easy on the eye, Rhys Meyers portrays our most bombastic monarch with all the range and subtlety of Keanu Reeves. It probably doesn’t help that they’ve surrounded him with people who really can act, like Jeremy Northam and Sam Neill. As Henry, he is driven mainly by lust. This provides the directors with an excuse to show him naked as often as possible, and the sex scenes are certainly a relief from watching him attempt to act as he falls disastrously (and unconvincingly) in love with Anne Boleyn.

Everyone else is shagging too. Henry’s friend Charles Brandon is busy knocking off the Duke of Buckingham’s daughter, then later the King’s own sister. Henry Cavill as Brandon is pretty enough himself, and seems to top Mr Rhys Meyers in the acting stakes. Elsewhere, Sir William Compton takes a break from looking remarkably like Chris Martin to woo court composer Thomas Tallis. “You are a lord of the court,” protests the pretty young Tallis. “What am I?” “A genius!” comes the cheesy response. That’s all right then, Sir William only wants him for his mind.

But it can’t all be shagging, this is historical drama! So away from the pretty young things, international intrigue is brewing. Henry allies with the French (signified by a semi-nude wrestling match with his cousin King Francis!), but they betray him. So it’s off to an alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor, with his comically enhanced chin and even more comical accent. But he betrays the English too, forcing Henry back into an alliance with the French. Meanwhile, Henry’s stuck trying to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon so he can shag Anne Boleyn, but the Pope’s not keen. Luckily there’s this feller Martin Luther who’s proposing a new, non-Catholic church…

Being historical drama, The Tudors feels the need to educate its audience. There is, therefore, a ridiculous amount of clumsy expository dialogue, in which characters tell each other things they must logically already know, such as their own names. “And now my daughters shall meet the king,” declares Sir Thomas Boleyn. “Mary… and Anne Boleyn.” Perhaps they had forgotten their names.

Another problem with being based on real people is that many characters share the same name. In particular, there are a lot of Thomases. Thomases are pretty much oozing out of the woodwork at Hampton Court. Thomas More, Thomas Boleyn, Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Tallis… Thankfully, the characters’ habit of referring to each other by surname avoids any problem in this regard. Still, the introductions lead to some spectacularly clumsy dialogue. “Thomas… Tallis. And what do you do?” “I compose… a little.”

Of the more mature cast, Maria Doyle Kennedy is a standout as the wronged Catherine of Aragon, obviously desperately in love with Henry but unable to compete with his lust for just about anything in a skirt. She has, by seven episodes in, developed a trademark wounded look that’s surprisingly effective. Elsewhere, Sam Neill is marvellously slimy as the power-hungry Cardinal Wolsey (another Thomas), hamming it up as the melodramatic scripts demand. Jeremy Northam’s not half bad as Thomas More either, though hampered by some excruciating dialogue evidently designed to educate the audience as to who Thomas More actually was. “I read Machiavelli’s The Prince,” declares Henry to More. “Not as… utopian as your book Utopia.” In most other exchanges, everyone keeps reminding More that he’s a Humanist, just in case any of us forgot.

I may not know much about this period, but I do know More and Wolsey are both bound for nasty ends. Henry, of course, is just going to get fat, and something tells me the story will end long before he becomes that unphotogenic. Now that Sir William Compton’s died of “sweating sickness” (a real, mysterious epidemic, apparently), Thomas Tallis appears to have turned to the ladies. Unfortunately his first choice of groupie also dies of the sweats, leaving him with only her identical twin. It’s a hard life. The extremely pretty Joe Van Moyland is great as the introverted Tallis, though his inclusion has so far had sod all to do with any of the main storylines. Still, he’s nice to look at.

It’s obvious that The Tudors is attempting to emulate the success of the similarly glossy historical drama Rome. The thing is, Rome was quite well-written, whereas the writing in The Tudors is the pits. Also, Rome had the clever trick of weaving two fictional everymen through its historical events, thereby giving the audience an identification point and simultaneously contriving to show Ancient Rome from all class perspectives. All we get to see in The Tudors is Henry’s court, which hardly seems any less comfortable than modern life generally – although they’ve curiously omitted the little detail that Henry and his lords and ladies would presumably still have to crap out the window. It’s probably not sexy enough.

Rome also scored over The Tudors in not talking down to its audience. It was several episodes in before I realised that David Bamber was playing Cicero, primarily because no-one was given the clunky line “Marcus Tallius Cicero… How’s it going, mate?” The Tudors, in its constant stream of expository dialogue, is an example of historical drama writing at its worst.

And yet I keep watching. Why? Not sure really. There’s some pretty young men, and I am intrigued to see how the minutiae of history turns out. It’s worth checking out for some of the older cast too; especially Maria Doyle Kennedy, Sam Neill and Jeremy Northam. I just hope it gets as far as the Reformation (I suspect it will, just so we can see Henry finally get to shag Anne Boleyn). If nothing else, I’m looking forward to seeing just how wooden Jonathan Rhys Meyers can be while condemning Cardinal Wolsey to be executed…

Telethon Crash

Well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?

Yes, the joys of redundancy and indefinite unemployment have kept me busy with a variety of exciting/geeky projects, such as ripping the isolated scores off the Doctor Who DVDs for my iPod and archiving the 25-odd VHS tapes of music videos I recorded in the mid-90s. Oh, and the rather important task of trying to find another job…

And now finally, back to the blog. I’ve been meaning to write on here for a while, but nothing quite moved me enough to stimulate the old muse. Particularly with the recurring hangover problem. But now, TV has finally offered up another slice of good old-fashioned Doctor Who!

Yes, in the name of charity (Children in Need, anyway), the reliably talented Steve Moffat served up another slice of genius last Friday. OK, there was only seven minutes of it, but just feel the quality! First, though, we had to sit the usual telethon tat, hosted by the impressively endowed Terry Wogan. Far from flashing the goods this time, he merely exhorted the viewers to give, give, give! Backstage, Fearne Cotton was chatting to a troupe of idiots from Strictly Come Dancing. “Tell me about the atmosphere,” she trilled, moronically. A shame Patrick Moore wasn’t on hand. Back to Terry, who announced a rare TV appearance by the ever-reclusive John Barrowman. Belting out Elton John standard Your Song, John, accompanied by Hearsay hasbeen Myleene Klass, strove to provide the gayest few minutes of the evening.

Thankfully, we didn’t have to sit through much of this before Terry and John announced the item we’d actually wanted to see. Flashing back to the penultimate bit of season three, we once again saw Martha promise to see the Doctor again. But what’s this? Rather than cutting to the Titanic inexplicably crashing into the console room, a few minutes of TARDIS shaking provided the surprising reappearance of Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor! Cue the titles, and I got all emotional seeing David Tennant’s name followed by Peter’s (thankfully spelled correctly, as Totally Doctor Who seem unable to do).

The so-called “plot” of this little scene was something to do with Doctor Ten having failed to put up the TARDIS shields, thus accidentally crashing into Doctor Five’s TARDIS and causing a potential time embolism “the exact size of Belgium… that’s not very dramatic, is it?” Hence the title, Time Crash. As Steve Moffat put it in this month’s Doctor Who Magazine, “because it’s about a crash. In time. Do you see?” But plot wasn’t what this was about, not really. With only one scene to play with, Mr Moffat used this McGuffin to give us a sparkling clash between Doctors past and present, giving them a chemistry instantly reminiscent of that between Troughton and Pertwee in their multi-Doctor stories. The dialogue, as usual, was peppered with acid wit, and laugh out loud moments. “I’m really rather busy,” fumed the Fifth Doctor, “and the last thing I need is some skinny idiot ranting in my face about every little thing in front of him!” Hit the nail on the head there, I thought, Tennant really was on “annoying mode” for this one. “Oh yes, the celery,” Doctor Ten riposted. “Fair play, it’s not every man who can carry off a decorative vegetable.”

The jokes were somewhat fan-heavy. Frying the TARDIS Zeiton crystals, talking about Tegan and the Mara, LINDA (“You’re not one of them, are you?” asked the Fifth Doctor in a thinly veiled “gay fan” reference). But I didn’t care. I am a fan, and I absolutely loved it. True, Peter didn’t seem quite the way he used to be as the Fifth Doctor, probably due to age changing his mannerisms. Perhaps it had something to do with the time differential that greyed his hair and widened his midriff.

That age-old fan argument about multi-Doctor stories – how is it that the newer Doctors don’t just remember all the events from the memories of their older selves? – is certain to rear its head again as Doctor Ten fixed the problem based on Doctor Five’s memory of having seen him do it! And the perennial “gay agenda” debate will get a shot in the arm from the aforementioned LINDA gag, not to mention the clever gag about the Master -“No beard this time. Well, a wife.” (“Beard” in this sense referring to the old gay slang about a poof using a wife to make himself seem more masculine). Still, as Mr Moffat once reminded us, “I’m the straight one. There has to be one.”

Even Murray Gold got in on the fanboy nostalgia act. His usual semi-orchestral music cues were this time peppered with deliberate retro synth sounds, as though he worked for the Radiophonic Workshop. It was like having good old Paddy Kingsland back again! Or maybe Gary Numan…

Still, David Tennant changed mood in an instant to be a channel for the inner fanboy of himself and Steve Moffat. Gazing at Peter Davison with something akin to love, he gushed, “I love being you… You were my Doctor.” And geeky though it is, a little tear welled up in my eye…

I believe there was more Children in Need following this, but I really didn’t need to see any more. It’s not the telethon it used to be. Thank goodness. Anyway, as per usual, I promise to write on here a bit more often. There’s other stuff to talk about, you know. The Sarah Jane Adventures, new Top Gear, historical shagfest The Tudors… I’ll try to cover them all. But for now, I’m just wondering if Peter Davison can be persuaded to come back for this year’s Tennant-lite episode!

Robbin’ the Hood

“Deep in the heart of England,” proclaimed the opening titles, “lives a legend!” Yes, Robin Hood is back, swashbuckling theme tune now accompanied by an MTV fast cut montage of blink and you’ll miss ’em scenes from the show. This year, the show’s producers seem to have abandoned even the faintest pretence at historical veracity, but have lightened the tone and (thankfully) stopped constantly equating the Crusades with the Iraq war and the Sheriff with George W Bush. So far, anyway.

The season opener sees the beginning of what’s obviously some kind of plot arc, as the Sheriff forms a sinister conclave of “Black Knights” to assassinate the King and divide up the kingdom. Keith Allen has progressed to new levels of ham this year, his eye-rolling Sheriff making Alan Rickman’s turn in the role look understated by comparison. At one point he pulled a tooth out of a human skull and grinningly inserted it in his own gap-toothed mouth. That’s a triumph of CG to rival those on Doctor Who!

Richard Armitage’s Guy of Gisburne, meanwhile, is more broody than last year. Wearing the 12th century’s darkest eye-liner, he stalks around Nottingham Castle like a reject from My Chemical Romance. “Beg me”, he snarls at Marian as he threatens to burn down her home. Kinky! And him wearing all that leather too.

Still, plainly, an effort has been made to make the bad guys more bad than last year, and remove those annoying shades of grey in the show’s morality. So are the heroes more heroic? Well, not really. Though Robin, at least, is more incongruously Scouse than before, the director letting Jonas Armstrong’s native accent shine through so that you expect him to rob from the rich and keep it. In point of fact, a bit of thought has gone into the old robbing policy. “We’ll take a tenth of what you have,” demands Robin of an ambushee, “unless you resist, then we’ll take all of it!” Unfortunately, all I could think of was Monty Python‘s highwayman Dennis Moore, scratching his head and saying, “Blimey, this redistribution of wealth is more complicated than I thought.”

Lurking in their new Batcave-like lair, knocked up by Will Scarlett between seasons, the outlaws have disunity within their ranks. Alan A Dale isn’t as rich as he’d like to be, so off he goes to con the denizens of the local bar. Unfortunately he runs into Sir Guy, presumably on his way back from a Fall Out Boy gig, and gets arrested. This leads to a scene of astonishing betrayal as Alan agrees to spy on the outlaws for Guy, a scene whose drama was rather lost on me as I kept being distracted by actor Joe Armstrong’s impressively toned, sweaty body as he hung around in the dungeon. As Guy stalked sound him, black leather glistening, you could have cut the homoeroticism with a knife.

Meanwhile, Robin has to contend with the Sheriff’s equally evil sister, who’s roaming around with a box of deadly snakes that can somehow survive the English climate. The Sheriff wants to drop Robin into a pit full of them, but by the usual quirks of fate, his sister falls in instead. Now, apparently, the Sheriff just wants Robin dead. This would be as opposed to his previous policy of wanting him slightly bruised.

The dialogue has kept its amusing anachronicity to keep up with the other historical errors on the show, though presumably this is intentional. “Get up to speed, Guy,” sneers the Sheriff, employing an expression that’s barely been in use in England for more than twenty years. Later, bizarrely, Little John and Will swing to the rescue while quoting The Two Ronnies. “It’s goodnight from me.” Thunk. “And it’s goodnight from him.” Perhaps future episodes will feature lines like “Don’t have a cow, Marian.”

Still, it’s fun, with an attractive young cast and an obvious effort to be more of a laugh this year. With the writers avoiding belaboured efforts to make the show somehow politically relevant, it has every chance of being a decent, if rather forgettable interpretation of the legend. Though it’s never going to be as good as Robin of Sherwood, it’s miles better than Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

Soap, Ice and Metal

“Why is everything mad around here?” cried Sarah in Hollyoaks as her deranged mother absconded with her little sister’s baby. “Why is nothing ever normal?” Because you live in Hollyoaks, dear. While it might not have reached the bizarre heights of The Colbys’ UFO abduction storyline (yet), things are certainly weird just outside Chester.

Craig and John Paul continue their mad, passionate and presumably doomed affair. Guy Burnet and James Sutton, two young and not unattractive actors, work well to convey the characters’ doomed passion for each other, hampered somewhat by their inability to remove their clothes when in bed together. All right, it’s a pre-watershed show, but would it destroy the nation’s morals to show that people normally take off their vests while having sex? It’s not just for my own gratification I’d like to see this, honest it’s not.

Going even further north than Chester this week were the Top Gear team, who took it into their heads to attempt to drive to the North Pole. Well, Jeremy Clarkson and James May did, while condemning the ever-unlucky Richard Hammond to racing them with a sled pulled by dogs. This was actually rather a thrilling show, as the presenters gradually realised that their usual larking about was rather inappropriate when faced with the danger of getting frostbite of the penis.

Clarkson and May, attempting to cruise effortlessly through the Arctic in a Toyota Hi-Lux pick-up, initially had a lot of fun, drinking gin and tonic as they drove. “Don’t write to us about drinking and driving,” snorted Jeremy, “we’re actually sailing!” And so they were, as they proved when their Toyota almost plunged through the ice to the frozen depths of the Arctic Ocean. Fortunately, they had a back up team of Icelandic mechanics and a BBC camera crew to help drag them out.

Hammond, on the other hand, had only a relentlessly cheerful dog trainer and a constant shower of dog excrement. Still, I found myself rather hoping that old would triumph over new and the dog sled would beat the Toyota to the Pole. No such luck, though, as after negotiating some genuinely terrifying thin ice and bergs the size of cathedrals, Clarkson and May beat him to it. The real winner, when the snow settled, was Toyota, who will never get such great publicity for their flagship pickup. And to think, the licence payer actually paid for that!

Channel-surfing later that night, I happened on Metal Hammer magazine’s annual award show, Golden Gods 2007, on MTV2. Once again, I was staggered by quite how seriously metal fans take their milieu. Presumably this was some edited highlights version of the show, unless the artists really can get on and off stage and do an interview in the time it takes for a Napalm Death song to be over. Napalm Death themselves put in an appearance, winning some sort of lifetime achievement award. “Fucking great!”, they enthused later, Brummie accents undimmed by the passing of time.

Meanwhile, suitable “we’re not worthy” respect was granted as Tony Iommi took the stage, accompanied by the increasingly freakish looking Ronnie Dio. Of an uncertain but presumably great age, Dio is beginning to resemble the kind of zombie that Send More Paramedics aspire to be. “Let’s fucking rock!” he exhorted the crowd, who responded with feverish enthusiasm. Later, as frenzied hordes headbanged in blurred slo-mo to Dimmu Borgir’s “Progenies of the Apocalypse” I found myself wishing that metal would lighten up a bit. Blimey, I must be getting old.

Footnote: OK, it’s been a while since I posted here. I could flabble about how I was so dazzled by the season finale of Doctor Who that I was left creatively stunned for several weeks, but the truth’s rather more prosaic. After being told I was being made redundant from my job, I had a bike accident, gave myself concussion and then wrote off my beloved Triumph Herald convertible in an accident (not of my making). After absorbing all this, I reckon it’s time I got back to writing. If only to take my mind off it! Keep watching this space…

Episode 13: Last of the Time Lords

“You’ve saved the world, Martha Jones!”

In a week when we got a new Prime Minister, when cities across Britain were terrorised by car bombs, it was obvious what the most important thing was – the season finale of Doctor Who. (Why is it always a “season finale” now? What happened to “the last in the present series”?)

Last of the Time Lords was an ambitious script from Russell T Davies, and there was a lot wrong with it, which I’ll go into in some detail. But from the very start, I should say that I actually really enjoyed it. For a start, after the initial shock I really got John Simm’s interpretation of the Master. He was almost like a spoiled child, really relishing his cruelty on a scale we’d never seen before, and having fun with it. I’ll say it again – no-one consciously chooses to be evil. He was doing what he was doing because he was nuttier than a peanut factory. And with the Saxon persona stripped away, what was left was pure Master. He was charismatic, he was evil, and his gleeful good humour only intensified the chill of his evil.

It was still, nonetheless, a typically camp Russell script, building on the tone of last week’s. As soon as the Master swanned into the bridge of the Valiant dancing to the Scissor Sisters, I knew that a lot of old-school fans would probably hate this. By rights, I would have expected to myself, but I actually loved that sequence. Apart from the kinetic choreography and editing, it neatly told the viewer in a couple of minutes how things were in the Master’s new order. The Doctor, beaten and humiliated, Francine Jones and Lucy Saxon cringing in terror and hatred of their overlord, and his relish at his power over them. It has to be said, though, that after last week’s interlude with the Rogue Traders and now the Scissor Sisters, it seems that this new Master has a very gay taste in music!

The decision to set the episode a year after last week’s was a good one (if nicked from Battlestar Galactica‘s second season climax), allowing us to see just what a year under the Master’s reign would do to Earth. The results were varyingly realised; the huge statue of John Simm was a nice touch, but the Master’s war rockets were less convincing, and really the best impression of this nightmarish alternative future was conveyed in the script itself, as Martha described what she had seen of the world in the last year. Of course, all this was slightly undermined by the knowledge that any story set on contemporary Earth can’t diverge from reality too much, so there had to be a great big reset button somewhere to return everything to normal. The Paradox Machine was obvious from the moment its name was mentioned, and knowing Russell, I fully expected there to be a god in it.

Fair’s fair, though, it served a real purpose in allowing the humans of the future to exterminate their ancestors without erasing their own existence. What the Toclafane and the Master actually wanted was less clear, though. It seemed to be some enormous vista of universal conquest without any specific goal. That actually seemed not dissimilar to the rather vague plans Adolf Hitler had in the event of his ultimate global domination; and he, like the Master, was more barking than Battersea dog’s home.

The state of humanity was also a little unclear. We saw slave workers packed into houses a la Dalek Invasion of Earth, but Dr Tom Milligan mentioned a medical service – nice to know Mr Saxon didn’t neglect the NHS! I also had to wonder what Professor Docherty’s official standing was; enough, plainly, to get her computer access, power, and television. And given that television did seem to be a luxury the oppressed masses had no access to, just who did the Master think he was broadcasting to anyway?

With the Doctor a ravaged shell of himself confined to a wheelchair, this was plainly Martha’s story from the outset. As she arrived from the sea in the opening scene, a confident resistance fighter, we could see how much the character had grown in the year since The Sound of Drums. Freema Agyeman rose to the challenge admirably after some variable acting earlier in the season, plainly getting her teeth into some real action for a change. As our nominal hero for the episode, it was clear that her function was to rescue the Doctor from where he was going through the mill. It’s so reminiscent of the old Virgin New Adventures as to be positively fanwanky; indeed I found myself reminded of how Bernice carried the second half of The Dying Days with the Eighth Doctor missing, presumed dead. The Master harping on about Axons and Sea Devils did nothing to dispel the fanwank either.

Of course any story bringin back a historic character like the Master is bound to be fanwanky, and I didn’t mind that a bit. What I wasn’t so sure of was why the fanwank had to include things other than Doctor Who. It’s a testament to Russell’s taste in sci fi that we got in quick succession, Darth Vader’s funeral pyre from Return of the Jedi (recreated almost shot for shot, with similar swelling music) then the “picking up the villain’s power ring” bit from the end of Flash Gordon. These were so similar that they must have been intentional; still, while I was mulling that over, all young Barry could do next to me was snigger at the thought of Anthony Ainley popping up saying “Yes, I escaped from the funeral pyre…”

The true identity of the Toclafane was a genuine surprise; I’d been so wrapped up in fanwank that I’d really expected them to be the Time Lords! Actually, making them humans is a perfect development of the way the Master uses the Doctor’s own strengths against him in this story. The species he constantly goes around bigging up to the skies have turned into brutal, power-crazed cyborgs with the voices of horribly malicious children. The Master’s line “Human beings… greatest monsters of them all” perfectly emphasised this, neatly contrasting with the Doctor’s “indomitable” speech as repeated in Utopia.

I was right about them coming from Utopia, though. It was a skilful bit of misdirection in the script to make that seem a forgotten plotline, only to return to it in such a devastating way. It occurred to me that it was the unlikeliest of coincidences for Martha to bring down the very sphere containing the little boy she bonded with two episodes previously; but wasn’t there some throwaway line about the Tocalafane having a group mind? For a man so obviously fond of expository dialogue, Russell does seem to put such explanations in in a rather “blink and you’ll miss it” kind of way.

David Tennant had less to do than usual in what was sort of a “Doctor-lite” episode. Mostly he was just sitting in that chair looking like he was waiting for his cocoa. Which was fine, but I thought the Gollum/ Dobby the House Elf Doctor was just ridiculous. I know old age makes you shrink, but surely there’s a point at which that stops, even if you are nine hundred? Besides, putting him in a birdcage only emphasised his resemblance to Tweety Pie, and the big cute eyes were a bit much. Nice of the Master to run him up a miniature pinstripe suit, though. Actually I thought the CG itself was pretty good (though not a patch on old Gollum). It’s the very concept I have trouble with. I suppose it depends on your tolerance of seeing the Doctor’s dignity stripped away, but for me it went too far.

And his recovery? Ever been to the panto Peter Pan? Yes, it was the old “clap your hands if you believe in fairies and Tinkerbell will be OK” plan. Written yourself into a corner again, Russell? Still, everyone thinking “Doctor” at the same time (how did they synchronise that without phones or TV?) brought our hero back in a messianic blaze of light not dissimilar to Ky in the Pertwee story The Mutants. But even here, the script wrongfooted me. I fully expected an angry, vengeful Doctor in keeping with the darkness we saw in The Runaway Bride and The Family of Blood. And unexpectedly, the words he’d been trying to get out all episode were “I forgive you”. Compassion being the one thing the Master absolutely cannot handle. He still had to say “I’m so sorry” though, which is obviously now his official catchphrase. Yuk.

Actually, the final confrontation of the Doctor and the Master, both on Earth and aboard the Valiant, was genuinely gripping stuff, both actors giving it their all to show us two former friends who became enemies and don’t know how to fix it. I actually really hoped the Master would survive, as by the end you actually, like the Doctor, wanted to help him. Clearly he was very, very ill in the head, but he was the only one who could alleviate the Doctor’s unbearable loneliness. And it was typical of the Master that, in a final act of spite, he chose to die rather than do that. Simm was unrepentant to the end, but Tennant’s anguish at the death of his old rival was actually rather moving. As was his attempt to cover it up with false jollity as Martha joined him in the TARDIS at the end. His performance as the Doctor has made a quantum leap in quality this season, and I look forward to having him back next year.

But not Martha, apparently. This episode made it clear that the whole season had really been her story, and it’s a shame to see her go. Still, the Doctor has her phone, so I think we’ll be seeing her again. Her departure was also a little moving, though overly drawn out, I felt. Going back into the TARDIS after saying goodbye to explain her crush on the Doctor wasn’t really necessary; we knew that, and I suspect, so did he. It didn’t need to be spelled out.

The pacing of the script, indeed, was a bit of a problem. It had more endings than Return of the King; though like that film it’s the last in a trilogy that may seem better paced when viewed as a whole. I’ll have to try that soon. Still, with Martha gone we need a new companion. After all, someone has to say “what is it, Doctor?” so he can explain to the audience. After a full on lovefest with Rose and unrequited feelings from Martha, I’m rather hoping for a purely platonic relationship with the next one. Perhaps a male companion, like Mickey? Or at the very least an ugly lesbian that the Doctor couldn’t possibly fancy!

Speaking of male companions, the return of Captain Jack never really did pay off. In the event, the only use his much-vaunted immortality had was to get past a couple of Toclafane guarding the TARDIS, and that could have just been written differently. But it was fun to have him around, with his old joie de vivre back after moping around Cardiff all through Torchwood. And while it did make me laugh out loud, having him revealed as the Face of Boe was just a little too neat. That was a plot hole that didn’t need resolving, Russell! For that matter, if he was the Face of Boe, couldn’t he have been a little less cryptic than “you are not alone”? Perhaps a million years have some effect on his memory, and all he could think of was “what could Yana be a good acronym for?”

So an enjoyable if not brilliant conclusion to the series, the problem being that the stuff that went before was so strong it was hard to live up to. But full marks for doing something different to the first two years, which were in danger of becoming formulaic. Loved John Simm (eventually) and I’m glad it looks like the Master could be back. Was that Lucy Saxon’s hand grabbing his ring? Funny, after being apparently beaten up by him and then shooting him, you wouldn’t think she’d want a memento. I even ended up liking Martha’s family, who, thank God, didn’t become another soap opera clan like the Tylers (though what did happen to her brother in Brighton?). But does every season finale now have to end with something bursting into the TARDIS so that the Doctor says “what?”

One final thought; the Paradox Machine set time back to just after the Master killed the President. Leaving aside the troublesome aspect that this was after the Toclafane had already appeared (they killed him), it still means that a worldwide TV audience just saw the British Prime Minister order the death of the President of the United States. Perhaps the Doctor will have to cope with another war when he next visits the contemporary earth of the Whoniverse…

A Broken Family Band for Today!

Slightly surreal to wake up yesterday and hear Cambridge’s finest, the Broken Family Band on the Today programme. Apparently they sent roving reporter Caroline Quinn to Glastonbury, where she encountered the band who might be “the next big thing”. The surrealism only increased when we were informed that singer Steve Adams is a huge fan of Today, and then treated to an impromptu song by the man himself eulogising the delights of John Humphrys and Edward Sturton. I vote they make it a B-side for their next single!