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My murky former employers are in trouble again! It seems that HMV Kettering have landed themselves in a spot of bureaucratic bother:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/beds/bucks/herts/8377024.stm

Apparently they were having a signing by Britain’s Got Talent ‘star’ Faryl Johnson (presumably that’s pronounced ‘for-real’ – ugh!), when she unexpectedly sang one of her own songs. Kettering council responded with outrage, as the store don’t have a performance licence. HMV refused to pay for one retrospectively (brave manager!), pledging to fight this one in court.

Now, normally, I’d be dead against Kettering council on this, and would have to call them a bunch of killjoy jobsworths. But then I reflected on HMV’s redundancy payment to me. I’d been working for them for 9 years and 11 months when they made me redundant. “Pretty please,” I asked on bended knee (metaphorically), “could I have ten years worth of redundancy payments instead of the statutory minimum of 9 complete years’ service?”

Now for those unfamiliar with UK redundancy law, the statutory minimum is one week’s wages per complete year’s service. And I’m sure it’ll come as no surprise to anyone who’s worked for HMV that the letter of the law was what they stuck to, giving me 9 years’ worth (ie 9 weeks worth) of wages despite my being only three weeks away from ten years’ service. Well, they were having enough financial woes without losing another couple of hundred quid, weren’t they?

So in the same spirit of honouring the law completely, I’m bound to say – “Go get ‘em Kettering Council, you joyless bunch of automata!”

A little behind the times on this one I know, but I’ve been following with interest the comical spat between the Home Office and the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. It’s been like a pot-fuelled episode of Yes, Minister.

After Professor David Nutt submitted a well-researched scientific report stating that cannabis might actually be less harmful than legal drugs like alcohol or tobacco (both of which net the Treasury a tidy profit every year), he was promptly sacked from directorship of the ACMD, with several members resigning in protest afterwards.

Our esteemed Home Secretary Alan Johnson commented at the time that he couldn’t have science contradicting government policy. As Sir Humphrey Appleby once said, “I don’t think we need to bring the truth in at this stage…”

“Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo!”

So I read on the BBC News website that a City banker has been harassing one of his female employees: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8375511.stm . Not least by trying to kill her, but also sending her obscene emails in Latin! Yes, a naughty message included the above quotation from Roman poet Catullus, a contemporary of Julius Caesar.

Banker Mark Lowe claims the quote is “light hearted”. Wikipedia offers the following translation:

I will bugger you and face-fuck you.

Hard to see how anyone might take that in a spirit of jest. But what mightily intrigues me about the whole thing is whether the company had an email filter sophisticated enough to screen out obscenities in a dead language? Perhaps I’ll try sending them a mail threatening to do naughty things to Mr Lowe written in Old Church Slavonic, Glagolitic alphabet…

Ah, autumn. “The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” as Keats put it. The season of “where the hell are my ratings?!” as American TV executives would doubtless say.

Yes, the fall schedules are on us again. A time of renewal (or not), maturation and the birth of hopeful new shows, their shoots emerging tentatively into a cold, unsympathetic field of Nielsen ratings.

Already growing strong is ABC’s FlashForward, being vaguely touted as some kind of spiritual successor to Lost. With that show coming close to its end, ABC have sown the seeds of a thematic cousin, hoping to harvest ripe ratings.

Actually, FlashForward has sod all to do with Lost. True, it stars Sonya Walger (out of Lost), Dominic Monaghan (out of Lost) and John Cho (out of, er, Harold and Kumar). Oh, and one episode featured an ad hoarding for Oceanic Airlines. But none of this can disguise the fact that it’s not Lost you’re watching.

It’s got a similarly tricksy structure though, a puzzle that will obviously be unravelled over time. Which will become more convoluted if it’s successful and the network want to extend its lifespan.

The premise is simple but interesting: everyone in the world blacks out simultaneously for a bit over two minutes,  experiencing, in that time, a ‘flashforward’ to what they’ll be doing for a bit over two minutes in exactly six months time.

This gives plenty of scope for drama. FBI hero Mark Benford (Britain’s own Joseph Fiennes with a surprisingly good American accent) knows that he will be hot on the trail of what caused it all, but people will be trying to kill him while he battles his recurring alcoholism. His wife Olivia (Sonya Walger out of Lost) knows she’ll be involved with another man. His partner Demetri (John Cho) won’t be doing anything at all. Because he’ll be dead. Oh, and their boss will be reading the paper while having a dump. I’m not making that last one up, honestly.

The usual philosophical questions surrounding this kind of time paradox are already rearing theit heads. can the future be changed? One character chooses the most direct way to find out by killing himself, ensuring that his flashforward will never happen. That’s that one answered then. But for me, the most obvious question is – how come everyone’s flashforward didn’t consist of them all saying “hang on, this is what I saw during that blackout six months ago”?

FlashForward shows promise, but, tenuous Lost connections aside, is a totally new show and therefore a risk. Network execs don’t like risks. Much safer to take something you know used to be a success and ‘re-imagine’ it. It worked for Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica, didn’t it? Let’s just try to forget the attempted revivals of Knight Rider, The Night Stalker, Flash Gordon etc, etc.

With this in mind, a brace of remakes (sorry, ‘re-imaginings’) have landed on our screens. Literally, in the case of ABC’s V. Yep, those water-stealing, flesh-eating alien fascists from the early 80s are back.

And the results are not too bad. In common with other ‘re-imaginings’, the show’s been cleverly retooled for a new era. Gone are the overt allusions to Nazi Germany, replaced by an intriguing plot thread that many of the Visitors have been here for years, infiltrating – like terror cells, geddit? And the admittedly implausible idea of their human disguises being flimsy rubber masks has been supplanted by a covering of synthetic mammal flesh to hide their scaly features. Joan Collins-alike alien commander/super bitch Diana has been replaced by the more reasonable seeming alien demagogue Anna, whose dress sense extends beyond New Romantic style orange fascist uniforms. But the central thread remains the same – they’re only pretending to be our friends, and by the time we realise that, it’s going to be too late…

Again, though, we can’t be trusted to know we’re watching a cult sci fi show without a little guidance. So the casting gives us a helping hand. It stars Elizabeth Mitchell (out of Lost, again), Joel Gretsch (out of The 4400), Rekha Sharma (out of Battlestar Galactica), Laura Vandervoort (out of Smallville), Morena Baccarin and Alan Tudyk (both out of Firefly). Safe to assume it’s a sci fi show, then.

Still, it looks like an intriguing update, and already commentators (Republican ones) are interpreting it as a damning indictment of the Obama presidency. The Visitors keep using words like ‘hope’ and ‘change’ and offering universal healthcare. No wonder they’re a threat to humanity.

The other big remake isn’t a network show at all, being offered by cable guys AMC. And it should be far more political than it is, but somehow it’s not. Yes, disturbingly someone has decided to remake The Prisoner.

The original Prisoner is very much a product of its time and location. There’s something quintessentially British, and inescapably late 60s about it, to the extent that one expects any re-imagining of it to be doomed to failure like that mind warpingly awful film of The Avengers in 1992. And yet, this doesn’t do as badly as you’d think. It’s flawed, sure, in the way that it can’t quite decide whether to be entirely new or nick wholesale from the original, but it’s getting the themes and the atmosphere right.

Jim Caviezel, an actor surprisingly devoid of charisma considering his previous big role as Jesus Christ, is our hero, 6. Note, not ‘Number 6’; the denizens of the new Village are referred to by number alone. And at least as of part 1, no-one’s asked him anything about resigning. In this sense, the new version seems to be deliberately even more obscure than the original. Going into it with memories of the original might be a red herring, because as of part 1, we don’t know who 6 was or what he did. Maybe he was some kind of a spy, but it’s not been stated. All we know of his backstory is that he used to live in New York City and he resigned from something (by spraying ‘RESIGN’ on his office window – letters must be too subtle these days). And as yet, no-one in the Village has mentioned it to him; in fact we have even less idea than the original why he’s there or what ‘they’ want with him.

‘They’ is personified by Ian McKellen as 2, who seems avuncular enough, what with his bedridden wife, gorgeous teenage son and genial manner. That’s another weird change in this new Village – the inhabitants have families. There’s also plainly a lot more of them than in the original show – 2’s son has the number 1112, while none of the inhabitants of McGoohan’s Village had numbers higher than double digits. The most curious thing of all is the new twist that no-one in the Village is aware that anything exists beyond it or before it. They just look blank at the very idea.

The new Village – shot in Namibia – is distinctly different than the 1960s Portmeirion setting, but seems determined to retain the eccentric, off-kilter feeling as a location. The houses all seem to be identical wooden triangles, while 2’s grand palace is plainly some kind of old British colonial building. In keeping with the automotive theme from the original, the cars are rather peculiar, though they’ve gone a bit over the top with that one. Rather than the original’s ubiquitous Mini Mokes, we’re presented with a panoply of 1960s European classics. The taxis are all Renault Dauphines, and a Morris Minor with incongruous alloy wheels endlessly circles the Village to make it look like there’s more odd cars than there actually are. For an American audience, these small, odd-looking autos are presumably very freaky.

So far, then, no idea what’s going on. In that respect, it’s like and unlike the original. A mysterious explosion rips through the Village cafe. “These things just happen. Then it all goes back to normal” comments one character. 6 sees things that either aren’t there or invisible to everyone else – very Life on Mars. And mysterious twin towers glitter glassily in the distance, looking unmistakably like the ones that used to grace the New York skyline. Just when you thought it couldn’t get more peculiar, old faithful watchdog/weather balloon Rover turns up. Only in this version, he’s fifty feet wide.

So it’s like they ignored the early, spy themed episodes of the original series and went straight for the abstract, “what the bloody hell is this about?” later ones. A nice idea, but unlikely to win it many new fans. Still, I’ll be interested to see where it goes in its short, six episode run. (Six of one…)

It’ll be interesting to see how these new crops develop in the harvest of Nielsen ratings that is the fall schedules. All are worthy of further growth, but which will end up as compost and which shrinkwrapped in the veg section of HMV?

(NB – Yes, I know I took the ‘autumn crops’ metaphor too far.)

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…

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.

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…