The Official Doctor Who Fan Club Volume One by Keith Miller

Some things are almost too lovely to be written about. On the face of it, The Official Doctor Who Fan Club Volume 1 is a rather pricey book full of facsimiles of BBC correspondence and photocopies of badly printed newsletters that were unreadable then and now look older than the ancient scrolls of Gallifrey. In fact, not only is it fascinating at a factual level, full of contemporary insights into how the series was made and received, but it’s also a remarkably funny and warm book that tells Keith Miller’s story as he moved between his life as a teenager in a poor part of Edinburgh, and the self-imposed role of co-ordinator of the official fan club which involved at one point almost daily contact with the Doctor Who production office.

Fandom and its relationship with Doctor Who is already a burgeoning academic field and books by Matt Hills and Miles Booy are surely only the first of many more to come. The series has been running so long now that the reputational waxing and waning of eras and the corresponding revisionism of different generations of fans is worthy of examination, especially as natural milestones such as the 50th anniversary and the final DVD release of the original series approach. It’s all very interesting stuff, but necessarily takes you away from the reason people became fans in the first place, which was the emotional pull of both the series itself and the need to share your enthusiasm with like-minded others.

Miller’s book takes you to a time before DWAS, before arsey pieces about The Deadly Assassin, before fandom had a “view”, even before the word “classic” had taken its dread hold on fan vocabulary. In the beginning, as demonstrated in the reprinted newsletters, it was just Keith retelling the old stories in his inimitable fashion, alongside Doctor Who quizzes, crosswords and competitions.

It’s certainly true that even in this prelapsarian era the serpent was out and about. As far as Keith is concerned (and of course this is his story – not an impartial view) the forces of darkness are represented by, rather wonderfully, a young Peter Capaldi and another devout Pertwee fan called Stuart Mooney. Both try to wrest the fan club from Keith, and it’s hard not to think of them as Malcolm Tucker and his underling Jamie from The Thick of It, scheming deviously only to be confounded by the mild-mannered Miller who has the ear of the production office.

And it’s this aspect of the book that I particularly loved. Once Barry Letts had decided to put his trust in Keith, he remained steadfast, an unswerving loyalty conveyed by the other star of this book, Sarah Newman, Letts’ production secretary. The relationship that blossoms between Newman and Miller is terrific, and her conscientiousness does her so much credit, particularly in the way she encourages Keith about his O Levels, consoles him after his father’s death and protects him from Capaldi and Mooney’s frequent power plays. My favourite moment though is when she responds to Keith’s wonderfully fannish query “Are you related to Sydney Newman?” with a heartfelt “No I’m not – thank God!”

There are many other great things about the book including a touching newsletter message from Roger Delgado; a lovely cameo in the BBC canteen from John “Last of the Summer Wine” Comer; Keith’s long-savoured revenge on a Polystyle editor; and the unexpected attraction of Keith’s mum to Barry Letts. For those seeking information about the show itself there are descriptions of Keith’s set visits to Carnival of Monsters, The Three Doctors and Planet of the Spiders as they appeared in the fan club newsletter, alongside the slightly franker versions as he recollects them now. These are all fascinating for the glimpses they provide of the productions and well-known characters such as Letts, Dicks, Manning and Sladen. Jon Pertwee obviously looms large, although sadly his reputation for overweening self-absorption is only further expanded here when it’s revealed that he even intervened on the production of screen-printed fan newsletters when he thought he wasn’t featured prominently enough.

Students of Who fandom will find enough in this book to keep them going for ages, and when it is read alongside the features on organised fandom in issues 9-12 of that excellent fanzine The Frame it helps to provide as full a history of the pre-DWAS era as anyone could have reasonably expected. As such Keith Miller has performed a valuable service to future Who scholars, but this is only the first volume, and the soon-to-be-published second promises more insights as the production team changes and the Philip Hinchcliffe era begins.

My only caveat about the book is that some tantalising threads are left dangling that will not be picked up in the second volume. This is particularly true of Sarah Newman, who is such an important and likeable character throughout that an update on her whereabouts and subsequent life seems an important omission. Fortunately, I understand that Newman has been tracked down by enterprising Who sleuths and that someone is talking to her about her time on the series including the correspondence with Keith. If that’s the case, then it’s just one of the many positive aspects of the publication of this highly enjoyable and touching volume.

The Official Doctor Who Fan Club Volume One is available from here.

Solo: The Complete Series on DVD

By the end of its fourth and final season in 1978, The Good Life had firmly established itself as one of the nation’s most loved and popular sitcoms, so it was hardly the brainwave of the century when Head of Comedy, John Howard Davies, commissioned star vehicles for the cast who’d all been catapulted to the A-list of household names overnight. Jerry and Margo’s real-life selves, Paul Eddington and Penelope Keith, began the 1980s relocating from Surbiton to the landed gentry and the corridors of Whitehall with the kind of social mobility that would have made the uber-aspirational Margo green with envy, while a few years later Briers found himself back in suburbia, with an even more tolerant spouse, in Ever Decreasing Circles, a deceptively subversive take on the genre that anticipated One Foot In The Grave’s portrayal of the suburbs as one of the inner circles of Hell.

All three vehicles gave their stars prolonged success and established themselves as comedy classics in their own right, in the case of To The Manor Born and Yes Minister and its successor Yes Prime Minister almost eclipsing that of The Good Life, with record viewing figures. On the other hand Felicity ‘Treacle’ Kendal’s first centre-stage role, the appropriately titled Solo, racked up respectable viewing figures at the time but hasn’t found itself in the pantheon of well-remembered sitcoms of yesteryear, more of a vague recollection, a mild curiosity only recalled should one happen upon a random repeat on UK Gold one hungover Saturday morning.

Reissued on DVD this month by Acorn Media, the opportunity to revisit Solo provides several reasons why this is so. Her peers’ star vehicles had more sitcom-friendly themes to mine for big laughs, such as social aspiration, satirical commentary and suburbacom farce; Solo owes more to its writer Carla Lane’s previous success, Butterflies. Both shows feature as their central character a woman at a crossroads in life, struggling to define her own identity outside of the ones prescribed by social convention in a male-dominated world. Kendal plays Gemma Palmer, a newly single woman just turned thirty, having left her boyfriend Danny (Stephen Moore) to the uncomprehending consternation of her mother (Elspet Gret) – “A woman without a man is like a bird of prey with a squint”, she informs her daughter.

Solo must have confunded many viewers’ expectations – not least from the more sweaty-palmed members of the male audience – Kendal having become the nation’s sweetheart and a kind of fantasy spouse as the cute, devoted, tomboyish Barbara. For all that, Barbara had a steely resolve that made her no pushover, and it’s this side of her most iconic role that Kendal channels here as Gemma, more likely to be found with a frustrated frown than a perky smile. Although the stigma of being a single, thirtysomething woman is arguably not as it was thirty years ago, Gemma’s insecurities are still understandable – put into the programme’s proper context, a lot of women of Gemma’s generation found themselves in their thirties, with the feminist revolution having ground to a halt, wondering, ‘What next?’ – but the character herself often comes across as merely self-absorbed.

The fault here is not so much in the writing as the fact that, not being an ensemble piece with equally strong supporting characters to provide light and shade, a programme presented from a singular perspective can be mightily wearying. Lane and Butterflies director Gareth Gwenlan employ a lot of familiar tropes from that show – arch, waspish voicover monologues (“Shouldn’t I be plodding round the shop with an assortment of kids and a basket on walls, boiling cabbage in the kitchen and doing interesting things with cheese?”) and moody shots of our angst-ridden heroine wandering wistfully around parks and fields accompanied by reflective classical music. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

The first series is principally the story of Gemma trying to find a role in life – leaving her secretarial job to become a social worker, which features enjoyable appearances by Roger Brierley and John Abineri – and her on-off relationship with Danny, which plays like a home counties version of Annie Hall, as they separate, get together one last ill-fated time before realising that when something’s finished, it should stay finished. You can’t not love Stephen Moore – even though Danny foolishly lost Gemma after a one night stand with her best friend Josie, his earnest attempts at reconciliation and Moore’s defeated, weary countenance evoke the same hangdog pathos as in his memorable roles in The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy as Marvin and George in The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole.

Series One attempts to provide some light relief from the couple’s uncouplings, not only with the one-dimensional stereotypes Gemma encounters as a social worker, but with dispensable cutaways to a pair of ditzy, slightly common medical students in the flat above Gemma’s. What these two sets of subplots reveal are issues that have always troubled me about Carla Lane’s writing – for a working class girl from Liverpool made good, her portrayals of teenagers (her ear for teenage dialogue has always been half a decade behind period her sitcoms are set in), the economically inactive and working class characters with aspirations are piss-taking caricatures; which is why the phenomenal success of Bread in its heyday baffled me utterly.

Thankfully, the medical students are ditched in the second series, which sees a shift in quality, with certain episodes capturing the bittersweet, melancholic humour of Butterflies at its finest. A particular highlight is the first episode, involving a brief, unconsummated fling with nineteen year old student Rafe, played by a young Peter Howitt, several years before briefly acquiring TV pinup status as Joey Boswell in Bread. The ever-dependable Milton Johns makes a characteristic appearance in one episode at his world-weary, morose best. Elspet Grey’s own character arc is given more room to breathe, as she continues to pursue a relationship with the unseen Howard, a man thirty years her junior, which provides a different perspective on the dating game from a woman facing thirty from the wrong side. This is worth dwelling upon – a relationship between a senior citizen and a younger man would be grist to the mill in most sitcom fare, but it’s handled sensitively and beautifully.

The second series also moves away from the strictly singular perspective of series one when Gemma has a mostly platonic relationship with the lodger upstairs, Sebastian (Michael Howe), a ‘player’ in modern terms; unbeknown to Gemma, Sebastian has a one-night stand with a gorgeous blonde, Rosie (Belinda Mayne), for whom he develops more serious feelings, despite it going against his vain self-image as a commitment-free lone wolf. Sebastian gets his own soliloquies – characters in Carla Lane sitcoms always get soliloquies, it’s in the rules – that, to be fair to Lane, are pretty representative of a certain stripe of manhood in all its ego and insecurity.

Solo ran for two seasons, an optimum time for a sitcom to bow out gracefully before its potential is exhausted and the inevitable ennui sets in. A sitcom focusing on relationship issues outside of stable relationships can never reach a satisfactory resolve, other than marrying off the two leads in clichéd fashion, and Solo ends on a more realistic but somewhat cynical note, with footloose Sebastian having succumbed to commitment with the weary nobility of a man facing the gallows’ pole and Gemma’s own current relationship, with the sketchily-portrayed Rex (David Rintoul), left on an ambiguous note, with Gemma clearly pondering if she’s left with any more answers than when she started.

As such, Solo is a sitcom of some integrity, albeit not many big laughs; a mature and thoughtful slow-burner before Lane’s sitcoms became a miasma of battle-of-the-sexes bitterness and hysterical caricatures, and an interesting addition to the specifically English, middle class genre of the ‘sadcom’ where the mass of men – and women – lead lives of quiet desperation…

Solo: The Complete Series is released on DVD by Acorn.

Ace Adventures on DVD

There’s a famous story that tells how Samuel Beckett was walking with a friend on a glorious sunny afternoon in London. The friend was moved to say, just as Helen A, the leader of Terra Alpha says towards the end of The Happiness Patrol, that it was the kind of day that makes one happy to be alive. Beckett paused and frowned before eventually replying “I wouldn’t go that far.” Having watched the Ace Adventures boxset which brings together two stories from the Sylvester McCoy era – Dragonfire and The Happiness Patrol – I know just how he felt. There are great things in this release, both in terms of extras and occasionally the stories themselves, but there’s a nagging sense of gloom about the proceedings, although as happiness is nothing unless it exists side by side with sadness, I suppose that’s just life.

The critical response to these stories has also fluctuated over the years, possibly reflecting the rather febrile state of the emotions of fans during the time of the series’ original transmission. Coming at the end of the less than well received Season Twenty Four, Dragonfire was greeted with some relief as a traditional story and for a time was generally regarded as the best of that year. The Happiness Patrol on the other hand, thanks to its highly stylised approach and the startling appearance of The Kandy Man was roundly dismissed and came at the bottom of fan polls which considering it was in the same season as Silver Nemesis was no mean feat. Years later, The Happiness Patrol has been somewhat rehabilitated, whereas Dragonfire is mentioned in the same breath as some of the all-time worst stories.

This reversal is down to the changed context in which these stories are now viewed. Back in 1987/88 things were desperate and the show was fighting for its survival. Dark forces lurked everywhere: previously friendly shows like Did You See…? ran hostile features while viewer feedback show Open Air might as well have been called Doctor Who – What a Load of Shit. Fans had watched Doctor Who slip inexorably from its mainstream position as a popular show into a death-slot backwater and any stories that were quirkier than normal exacerbated fan paranoia/embarrassment.

If any of your friends/family happened to be in the room when the Kangs were talking, or when some of the riper parts of Delta and the Bannermen were on screen it was mortifying, but when the Kandy Man appeared it was like being caught masturbating. It’s no wonder a relatively straightforward tale like Dragonfire – evil mastermind plots revenge on enemies while an Aggedor-equivalent monster roams around – was seized upon with relief even though, on viewing it all these years later, it’s a shambolic piece of work, on a par with Time and the Rani as the worst of the season.

The story, of course, includes one of the most infamous cliffhangers in the show’s history where the Doctor inexplicably clambers over a railing in order to hang desperately in mid-air while clutching on to his umbrella. There have been bad cliffhangers before, but this one stands out, mainly because it’s so acutely emblematic of the story itself: sloppily conceived and slapdash in execution. It’s hard to know where to start, but while we all know the dangers of criticising a Doctor Who story for making no sense the plot of Dragonfire is so crazy – and not in a good way – that it just can’t be ignored.

Apparently the villainous, imprisoned Kane has been on Svartos running his vast trading post for something in the region of 3,000 years, and in all that time, with all those vast numbers of people passing through, has only now decided to send someone to look for the treasure he’s so keen to get his hands on. Even if he only recently found the map, he’s also desperate for the power source to his ship, and the fact a giant monster is roaming around easily accessible ice tunnels would surely have attracted his attention before now especially as it turns out to be a trivial matter to have the monster killed. Are we meant to assume that Kane was otherwise occupied for all these years? I know that the retail trade is a tough business that leaves little time for anything else but this is stretching the point too far. Even Philip Green takes a holiday occasionally.

When faced with a story that Rory from Animal Kwackers would have rejected for being too far-fetched, the only hope is that the visuals or performances will compensate. Writer Ian Briggs certainly thinks that the sets are terrific, and opines somewhere on the release that the ice caverns look “magical and beautiful”. I suppose that’s true if you find loads of tightly-stretched shower curtains and non-PVC wrap beautiful, but it’s a fairly specialised taste.

Much better than the sets are the performances, with Edward Peel as Kane, Tony Selby as Glitz and Daphne Oxenford as the Archivist putting in solid work amidst the chaos. Patricia Quinn is rather highly-strung as Kane’s former lover Belazs, but perhaps that’s because she’s conveying the inner heartache and severe frostbite that Kane’s amorous advances inflicted upon her character. Of the regulars, Bonnie Langford in her final story seems to calm down when she has Sophie Aldred to play against, and although I’m not a fan of Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor I think he also does a pretty good job considering how much they are all hampered by Chris Clough’s poor direction.

The story’s problems in this respect are many but are epitomised by a couple of instances. No-one has told the actors whether the ice floor in the ice cavern is supposed to be slippy or not. So some act as if it is – McCoy keeps going heroically while Selby gives up after a few attempts – but the others just stroll around. This looks terrible. The Tomorrow People terrible. Similarly, the former members of Glitz’s crew are left to decide if they should act zombified or not. A few go the Romero route, but the majority look as if they’re nipping out for a pint of milk. In this sense, Clough is reminiscent of Ken Grieve, a director who also suffered badly from performance blindness.

That’s not to say Dragonfire is completely terrible, particularly when it veers into jarringly grim areas such as Bazin and McLuhan decapitating the monster, the mass murder of the shoppers and, of course, Kane’s gruesome death. It’s also notable for the introduction of Ace who became a favourite companion of many which was understandable in some ways as the recent incumbents either hadn’t been that successful or, in the case of Peri, were used badly after a promising start. However, the character is written so oddly that a cringe is never far away, and that’s not just because of the embarrassment factor caused by her occasional shouts of “Bilgebag!” The charitable view of Ace is that she represents an out-of-touch attempt by older men to create a realistic 16-year-old female character. Less charitably, especially considering both Briggs and Cartmel were keen on the idea that Ace had slept with Glitz, the character is a dodgy fantasy figure concocted by the kind of blokes who used to hang around their younger sister’s party hoping to cop off with one of her mates.

After all that nonsense, it’s a relief to turn to The Happiness Patrol. It may have been ridiculed and reviled by most viewers originally, but aside from some misjudged moments (the go-kart escape is an early version of the milk float chase in Father Ted), a cheap-looking set and general staginess, you could see the story fitting into the current series quite happily. It doesn’t have the verve and imagination of something like Russell T Davies’ Gridlock – a story with a rightfully growing reputation – but it’s cut from the same cloth. Both are clearly influenced by 2000 AD, but more generally they are high concept stories set in stylised and artificial societies that act as a prism through which we can see our own world. It also helps that The Happiness Patrol has an exceptional cast of wonderful old professionals who keep things going even when the script occasionally falters. Unlike some other stories from this era there’s no stunt casting, apart from one exception, and you don’t get a much bigger stunt than Britain’s Greatest Asset, Bertie Bassett.

The first appearance of the Kandy Man in his Kandy Kitchen has to be, regardless of what you think of him, one of the weirdest moments in the original run of Doctor Who. For Bertie Bassett to turn up was very odd then and is striking today, but as we’re now in an era of Doctor Who where Big Brother was brilliantly used as the basis of a key episode complete with a guest appearance from Anne Robinson, sudden insertions of contemporary popular culture are a bit easier to handle. The Kandy Man’s oddly abrupt first appearance is down to Andrew Cartmel’s haphazard script-editing as a couple of earlier scenes featuring the character were removed because the episode was overrunning. For once this actually worked in the show’s favour rather than undermining it, but sadly the rest of the story didn’t fare so well.

This release comes with nearly 25 minutes of deleted or extended sequences, and they go some way to helping understand why the standard version of The Happiness Patrol is so disjointed. Loads of scenes that don’t make much sense in the transmitted version: Susan Q and Ace’s sudden friendship; Earl Sigma’s unconscious state in the Kandy Kitchen; some comments by Ace and the Doctor; all of these become clear when you see the missing scenes. One of the on-screen production notes succinctly sums up the nonsense caused by many of these cuts : “Editing has rendered his comment meaningless.”

The inability to get a script down to time, or to at least allow for the possibility of scenes being cut without damaging the narrative is a real fault with Andrew Cartmel. He undoubtedly brought a great deal to the series, but stories such as The Happiness Patrol, Ghostlight and The Curse of Fenric were horribly compromised by this problem, leading to those terrible cop-out answers employed so often on the DVD extras: “It was clear in the original script”; “That was explained in one of the cut scenes”; or “We tried to get it made as a five-parter.”

Aside from this infuriating aspect of the production, The Happiness Patrol is an enjoyable mix of bizarre gags and unsubtle political stylings. It’s easy to mock the political pretentions of the story (and I will a bit later) but out of all of the McCoy stories it’s the one that has stuck in the public consciousness either as an object of ridicule in TV’s Most Embarrassing Moments, the subject of political debate on Newsnight or as the starting point in a recent sermon by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It seems that Happiness really will prevail.

Extras:

Both stories have accompanying ‘Making Of’ features produced by Ed Stradling. Fire and Ice stars all the key personnel from Dragonfire alongside archive contributions from McCoy. After having slagged his directorial skills earlier, I’m pleased to say that Chris Clough comes across tremendously well not just here but on all the commentaries and features on this release. While the others scramble desperately to give (often contradictory) explanations for the infamous cliffhanger, Clough just groans, says “Oh God!” and admits it was probably late in the day when they were filming and was simply a terrible cock-up.

Ian Briggs on the other hand, while I wouldn’t expect him to be the harshest critic of his own work, seems to be under the impression that Dragonfire is something of a lost classic. I’m not sure if it was ever put to him that the story has a poor reputation, and maybe that would be unfair, but the general tenor of his and Cartmel’s contributions seem a bit unreal at times. There are though, some nice contributions both from Edward Peel and the lovely star of the release Sophie Aldred, who in honour of the occasion had just been in a fight with a wool shop and lived to tell the tale.

Happiness Will Prevail takes a similar approach towards The Happiness Patrol, and trots briskly through all of the important stuff, particularly Chris Clough’s foiled attempt to direct the story a la Carol Reed’s The Third Man, and Aldred’s dislike of those rather feeble go-karts. Sadly there’s no Sheila Hancock, but David John Pope talks about his experience playing the Kandy Man and how he was cast when Gary Downie grabbed him in the corridor. What’s missing from the piece is much comment about the political content that makes the story famous, but there’s a very good reason for that.

When Worlds Collide is Nicholas Pegg and Ed Stradling’s excellent film about the role of politics in Doctor Who. Inspired by Andrew Cartmel’s bizarre appearance on Newsnight, Pegg’s script (presented by Shaun Ley of Radio 4′s The World This Weekend and The World at One) develops a kind of political map of the series by analysing both the political content of selected stories and the political context within which they were produced. This could easily have been a simplistic or knockabout piece featuring various political factions staking their claim as the true representatives of the politics of Who. It’s far from that, and as well as Pegg’s intelligent and nuanced script, there are cogent and illuminating contributions from Steve O’Brien and Gareth Roberts. Ed Stradling also deserves credit for bringing the script to screen in such a crisp and unfussy manner. When Worlds Collide is easily one of the best features in the range.

After that, the rest of the extras are rather overshadowed. I’ve already mentioned that extensive deleted scenes from The Happiness Patrol are included, but Dragonfire also gets in on the act, only in this case the sequences were not essential to the plot, or indeed to the well-being of humanity. There’s a particularly terrible scene with Glitz, the Doctor and an unconvincing block of ice that goes on forever, and, if it had been shown, would probably have had the BBC closed down for a week.

On the Dragonfire disc there’s another instalment of The Doctor’s Strange Love which is marginally better than the last effort, but is still searching in vain for a reason to exist. Alongside it is The Big Bang Theory in which current series Special Effects Tsar Danny Hargreaves looks at explosions throughout the history of the series. Additional goodies include isolated scores for both stories as well as the usual lovely photo galleries produced by Paul Shields. I was particularly taken by the last photo on The Happiness Patrol gallery which looks like a group of sewage workers standing around a hospital waste pipe after a terrible outbreak of dysentery.

Both stories also feature the usual commentaries which are on this occasion spiced up by some questions lobbed in from Twitter. Dragonfire is moderated by Mark Ayres with a ‘revolving door’ of guests including Sophie Aldred, Ian Briggs, Edward Peel, Andrew Cartmel, Dominic Glynn and Chris Clough. There are some nice anecdotes. Apparently when asked to play a role in the show Daphne Oxenford commented “If Lord Olivier can be hologrammed, why not me?”. The details about Bonnie Langford’s departure are mentioned, including the late insertion of the ‘farewell scene’, and there’s much more of a contrite Chris Clough, who bellows “Oh God!” so often you get uncomfortably close to knowing what he sounds like during sex.

The Happiness Patrol takes us back to the familiar handling skills of Toby Hadoke whose guests at various points include Dominic Glynn, Sophie Aldred, Graeme Curry, Andrew Cartmel and Chris Clough. Again this is an entertaining listen, although Cartmel and Curry do occasionally get just the tiniest bit self-regarding. I’m genuinely not joking that in the space of just a few minutes they relate The Happiness Patrol not only to the work of Jonathan Swift, but also to the Chilean disappeared, the Argentinian disappeared, the Arab Spring, the Syrian Uprising and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Fortunately it was around this time that Hadoke brought up the fact that The Happiness Patrol had been featured on TV’s Most Embarrassing Moments, which at least stopped Cartmel and Curry polishing their metaphorical Nobel Peace Prizes, and engendered some slightly less feverish conversation. Of the other contributors, Chris Clough again came across very well because although he’s very blunt about people (“The size of Colin…didn’t help him”) he’s equally unsparing on himself.

Last but not least are the production notes which on Dragonfire were written by the redoubtable Paul Scoones, and on The Happiness Patrol by Charles Norton. I particularly enjoyed discovering on the latter that novelist PD James apparently visited the set and spoke to the Kandy Man. Having met her once myself I only hope that the swivel-eyed, batshit-crazy loon didn’t scare the Kandy Man too much.

Ace Adventures is released on Monday 7th May in the UK.

Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place Season 1 on DVD

I have fond memories of Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place which date back to when the series was first shown in the late, not particularly lamented, cable channel Trouble around the turn of the millennium. One decade on, it’s rare that I find anyone able to recall the series as anything other than that show Ryan Reynolds was in before he was famous. Indeed, Two Guys and a Girl (as it was later renamed) spawned not one but two future film and television stars; the aforementioned Reynolds and Firefly and Castle’s Nathan Fillion. Even Traylor Howard, although not a household name, would go on to greater success as Tony Shalhoub’s sidekick in Monk. My own memories of the series are patchy, but surely a show I watched from start to finish offered something more than this. Can it really be confined to the Before They Were Famous clips-fest graveyard, or does it hold any value in and of itself?

This release collects all thirteen episodes from Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place’s first season. Premiering in 1998 on ABC and created by Kenny Scwartz and Danny Jacobson, the show told the story of errr… two guys, a girl and a pizza place. The two titular guys are flat-mates Pete (Richard Ruccolo) and Berg (Reynolds), who at the onset of the series are unsure about what directions their careers are heading. Pete, inclined towards neurosis, has embarked upon work as an architect, while Berg works his way through medical school. Their friend Sharon (Traylor Howard), who lives in the same apartment building, appears to have her career in order, but is morally torn up over the fact she works for an unquestionably evil corporation. The trio’s lives (and the plots of many of these early episodes) revolve around Beacon Street Pizza. Owned by Bill (Julius Carry, an actor whose name I am sorry to discover is now prefaced with “the late”) and patronised by the insane Mr Bauer (M*A*S*H’s David Ogden Stiers), this is the restaurant in which both Pete and Berg work.

Despite a fantastic performance from Ogden Stiers, the character of Mr Bauer is symptomatic of what I have come to view as the series’ problems. A deluded washout who substitutes the plots of movies for his own experiences whose appearances should have had the potential to be regular highlights, but we are unfortunately never invited to learn anything but the bare minimum about the character. What has happened in the Mr Bauer’s life to bring him to this point? Why does he choose to hang around a low-rent Pizza restaurant? Does he have a life outside the confined of those four walls? The writers don’t seem interested in making him any more than a one-note character and, disappointingly, both he and Bill were soon axed in favour of new characters who could better serve the soap-opera direction the series took.

The plotlines featured during this first run are standard sitcom fare, with one character or other roping the others into some sort of wacky shenanigans. The jokes are plenty and the writing is fair enough, but if one was to pick a single adjective with which to describe the show then that word would have to be bland. There is simply nothing remarkable or intriguing about the show’s format or it’s characters. The one exception to this rule may be Reynold’s performance. Even at this early stage in his career, there was clearly something about the actor that would lead him on to bigger things. Note that I didn’t say better things; watch his scenes as Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine and you’ll get where I’m coming from.

Far more of a problem is the series’ woeful canned laughter dub. I do hesitate to apply that term as it is so often misused, but if the audio track featured during these episodes represents an un-tampered with audience, that audience must have been lobotomized. At the very least a live studio audience has been “sweetened” in post-production. Every line, regardless of merit, is met with waves of guffaws that do nothing to endear the series’ slight scripts to the viewer at home. The episodes are fine and fitfully funny, but this attempt at plastering over the cracks is akin to being told to have fun at gunpoint.

My hazy memories of the series latter seasons frame it as an off-beat show which took the kind of storytelling risks that How I Met Your Mother and even the venerated Community are taking today, but based upon this first season sampling I can only conclude that Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place is simply harmless and occasionally funny. I came to this release keen to rediscover a series I had greatly enjoyed upon its initial run, but rather than discovering gourmet Calzone, I am left with the sad conclusion it is nothing more than a reheated Dominoes.

Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place Season 1 is released by Revelation.

Animal Kwackers: The Complete Series on DVD

When confronted by Animal Kwackers, an experience more like being dragged from wakefulness into a land of nightmares than a mere programme, I was reminded of a critic whose opinion of Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia was that “the only analysis it deserves is psychoanalysis.” This seems a reasonable reaction to a programme that features a band of large animals with oversized heads playing hit pop tunes and customised nursery rhymes, especially as the creatures all seem to have some kind of injury over and above their unfortunate swollen noggins.

Boots the tiger has an eyepatch (the loss of his eye is never explained although I suspect slavish worship at the altar of Dr Hook may be the cause), Rory the lion has the slack jaw symptom familiar in stroke victims; Twang the monkey has clearly had a head injury at some point, and Bongo the dog…well I’ll come back to Bongo. One thing they also have in common are wide staring eyes (or eye) that burn through the camera into the viewers’ darkest fears.

As you might expect, the sight of these creatures performing is odd and sets the tone for the programme’s unique atmosphere. If you’ve seen the end of the nuclear war film Threads, where mute humans sit watching an old video of Words and Pictures, then you’ll get the idea. It’s not too much of a stretch to think that just off camera in Threads the hideously mutated Animal Kwackers band are performing Brand New Key to the last of humanity before turning on them savagely.

There’s something about the show that lends itself to fanciful reveries like this, but usually I’m not fan of the “weird shows for kids, the people making them must have been on drugs” form of nostalgia. It’s worth remembering that while some children did find the Kwackers terrifying, the majority loved the show, enabling the band to tour successfully live for ten years, indeed long after the show itself had gone off the air. There was a spin-off album, and they even ended up performing in front of Princess Anne although apparently she was more traumatised by that experience than the kidnap attempt.

Much of the weirdness of the show is in the retrospective eye of the present-day viewer. If we’re rational about it, I’m sure we all realise that Animal Kwackers is a fairly straightforward implementation of Piaget’s ideas about educating children through their preoperational stage of magical thinking as represented in his book The Moral Judgment of the Child. Bongo, Rory, Twang and Boots are textbook tools of cognitive development, helping to ‘build’ the child’s knowledge and moral ideas through observation of the helpful, altruistic actions of the Kwackers. Unfortunately, in the neo-Piagetian landscape we now inhabit, the Kwackers leave us, technically speaking, fucked up and fearful.

There are 37 episodes of Animal Kwackers on this release as two are missing from the archive. This is a shame as one of the missing episodes features the Kwackers doing covers of The Pink Floyd’s Astronomy Domine and Gong’s Radio Gnome Invisible, but aside from this 37 episodes should certainly be enough for most sane viewers as they all follow a rigid format. The opening credits feature the band flying into Popland on their spaceship Discovery and introducing themselves before performing an opening number. Rory then acquiesces to his bandmates desire for him to tell them a story which is interrupted midway by another song before a final track at the end after which they reboard the Discovery and presumably fly off to a post-gig party populated by giant-headed groupies.

The stories invariably feature the Kwackers doing good deeds – they continually state that “Animal Kwackers always know how to help” – but still contrive to be unsettling. One fairly typical example involves the Kwackers stepping in to help another band whose glitter suits have shrunk after being caught in the rain. Twang uses his magic guitar to find the end of the rainbow where they encounter a group of spiders who weave the band a new set of outfits. All this is accompanied by a series of hallucinatory static pictures enlivened by the most energetic rostrum camera work ever witnessed until Ken Morse came on the scene. It’s almost a relief when this phantasmagoria is interrupted by a song, but this relief is usually short-lived especially if Bongo is to the fore.

Bongo epitomises the difference between Animal Kwackers and the superficially similar The Banana Splits Show. He resembles Drooper (even though Drooper was supposed to be a lion), but where Drooper was a blissed out hipster in a psychedelic universe, Bongo has the whispering menace of an escaped serial killer. If Drooper is Woodstock, then Bongo is most definitely Altamont. It seems somehow typically English that a programme that espouses helping your fellow human beings perversely contains truly terrifying moments such as Bongo (in the episode ‘Summer Time’) singing Gotta Keep Working in a voice and style that prefigures Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs by nearly ten years.

The songs are an interesting mix – the early series seem to have a greater number of pop tracks alongside the customised nursery rhymes and original material, but as late as the final series pop hits are still included, one weird instance (in ‘Monkeys’) being when the Kwackers take on The Goodies’ Funky Gibbon. It’s in the same episode where the band hit their musical low point with the didactic and trite Stop You Must Not Steal, which is the Kwacker’s equivalent of McCartney’s Give Ireland Back to the Irish, or Culture Club’s The War Song. On the whole though, the music isn’t bad, especially when the ska and reggae-inflected tracks come to the fore. Unfortunately, it’s never quite good enough to distract you from the visuals, which remain bizarre throughout.

Animal Kwackers is a show that’s always been appropriated by people other than its intended audience. It was a pre-school show that held a lot of attraction for people like me who were at infant school when it started and therefore usually didn’t get to see it. In subsequent years it has been top of the list of “weird” old children’s programmes that archive television enthusiasts were desperate to see. In many ways then, it’s a tribute to the show that even after all that anticipation, it manages not to disappoint. Watching Animal Kwackers is like being in Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who episode Blink – whatever you do when you’re watching it, don’t blink. Or Bongo will get you.

Animal Kwackers: The Complete Series is released by Network

Parkin’s Patch: The Complete Series on DVD

There’s a moment in the episode ‘Lock, Stock and…’ when a character starts an alibi with “I took the whippet out”. This made me think two things: “until it has a Yorkshire edition, the CSI franchise is merely treading water” and “Parkin’s Patch is pretty much what I expected.” So, should you expect 26 half-hours of charming yet undemanding early evening telly with a local bobby investigating quirky and/or spiky Yorkshire folk? ‘Appen. And ‘appen not. There are some predictable, even ramshackle, moments, but there are also some lovely surprises that make Parkin’s Patch a bit of a treat.

The whole premise mixes the new with the familiar. It’s one of new-fangled Yorkshire Television’s earliest drama series, and it reflects the ‘Unit Beat System’ of policing that had been accelerating since 1967. The series’ credited police advisor, Detective Chief Superintendent Arnold Robinson, was Head of the combined Sheffield and Rotherham Force which had been involved in the discussions from which that system emerged. Moss Parkin (John Flanagan) is typical of that system: he’s integral to the local community, working from his combined office-and-home, helped by his wife Beth (Heather Page).

The tone of benevolent coppering inevitably borders on Dixon of Dock Green (ITV London scheduled it immediately before Dixon’s BBC1 slot). Parkin patrols Fickley (only a criticism if given Estuary pronounciation). This is his “patch”: sad to relate, but the series isn’t a harrowing insight into an ITN newsreader’s battle with nicotine addiction. Two other regulars help Moss. Beth’s character development covers the whole spectrum, from cooking Moss’s tea while wearing a dress to cooking Moss’s tea while wearing trousers. (Rare exceptions include ‘Nothing Personal’, about an attack on the Moss home.) The visiting results-hungry cynical detective Ron Radley (Gareth Thomas) regularly attends upon Moss’s neglected wife, inviting expectations of sexual tension which, sadly for Ron, are never quite fulfilled. His tragedy is perhaps best expressed by Beth’s comment to Moss in ‘Fame of a Kind’, that “I’ve an apple fool Ron Radley didn’t get a whiff of”.

But, like Dixon (which ran into the Sweeney period with its own CID world of blags and shooters), the series isn’t always as fluffy as its reputation. Moss is suspended for alleged malpractice (‘Regulation 17’), is capable of righteous anger – ‘Wise Men’ concludes with a towering one-word snarl – and a passing villain in ‘The Spider’s Web’ gives his verdict on the format: “Lovely sight, int it. Copper being nice and helpful to little ‘uns. Shall I run over him?” Indeed, the series uses several Z Cars and Softly Softly alumni: it was devised by Elwyn Jones and its writers include Robert Barr (who had devised the earlier Yorkshire series Gazette, which spawned Hadleigh), Allan Prior, James Doran and Troy Kennedy Martin, writing under the pseudonym ‘Tony Marsh’ as on the seemingly tonally similar Weavers Green.

Despite Ian Kennedy Martin’s presence it doesn’t quite bridge Dixon and The Sweeney, though Radley sometimes clashes with Moss’s seeming leniency. Gareth Thomas has the look of a man prepared to roll over a bonnet and fetch an errant child a livener up the bracket. Struggling with promotion exams, he favours gut instinct over new-fangled methods (in ‘The Spider’s Web’ his old-fangled ways are challenged by that representative of modernity, David Daker), is not averse to taking down a female witness’s particulars and has the vital ability to drink pints while wearing outdoor coats indoors. But Thomas’s twinkling eye belies Radley’s occasional zealousness and breaks through Moss’s earnestness (a self-effacing lead performance by John Flanagan, whose capacity for winning charm can be seen in Alan Plater’s Land of Green Ginger).

The episodes vary in quality and ambition. There are early wobbles, as in the fluffs and visible movement behind the set that suggest that ‘Dead? Or Alive?’ may not come top of Mike Newell’s CV. The BBFC’s 12 certificate is partly because of “discriminatory references”, most of which can be found in ‘Fame of a Kind’, although the offending character’s attempt to attribute racist opinions to his dog might have presented procedural problems for Radley’s desire to “report him to the Race Relations Board”. The character is challenged by Beth, although anyone expecting her tolerance to remain a consistent character trait should avoid holding breakables during ‘Low Noon’.

However, just when you think you’ve got the series sussed, the series throws a curve ball or, more accurately, a spurt of vomit after Moss discovers a dismembered body (I won’t spoiler the episode title). There are more surprises to come such as ‘The Way Home’, which starts like a Yorkshire Harold Pinter take on Big Breadwinner Hog with Michael Apted directing Ronald Lacey and David Leland, as well as two superb episodes directed by Stephen/‘Steven’ Frears: ‘The Deserter’, which pits Moss’s policing against army discipline, and ‘Boys’, in which movie-obsessed boys go on the run. This enchanting combination of Northern reality and noir quotation inspired Frears and writer-actor pal Neville Smith (who appears in ‘Hoof Nor Horn’) to devise the film Gumshoe.

Sadly these episodes are the only three that are presented here in black and white because the colour versions did not survive: that’s all the more frustrating given that they are stylistically different from the rest of the series, with more film (the series is mostly studio with some location filming) and even incidental music. (The brief glimpse of a magazine in ‘Boys’ also explains where the BBFC found their “brief sexualised nudity”. It transpires that Kirkby Overblow is actually a filming location and not an act.) Although not in the same league as those three episodes, ‘Low Noon’ (Who fans note, Bill Hays directing Dick Sharples) is another example of a fun gear change, the only use of location video and a playfully overt homage to High Noon.

‘Tony Marsh’ wrote ‘The Deserter’, and Ian Kennedy Martin wrote ‘Boys’, and sure enough these writers provide the series’ standout, format-breaking episodes. There’s the Christmas special ‘The Manchester Passenger’, which I will now avoid spoilering in order to avoid impairing your inevitable cheering at the telly, and ‘The Journey’, largely a two-hander in a train carriage, in which Moss transports a villain played superbly by Tony Beckley, with his “sparkling badinage”, criticisms of the police and a conceit that should put you in mind of one of the 1990s’ most celebrated movie twists.

There’s also the unusual ‘Vickory’, when the area most closely resembles Royston Vasey in response to the arrival of a hip young rock star. The series ends with the delightful ‘Two Gentlemen Standing’, with Peter Sallis’s fruity visiting Special Branch cop Bob Mitchum (“there’s no connection”) and the legendary Roger Livesey’s vague aristocrat, with his Boat Race-oriented filing system. Sallis’s witty deconstruction of Moss/the show gives way to the value of local knowledge, and Sallis is won over by the strengths of the series just as we all are. These episodes illustrate script editor Nick McCarty’s statement to The Stage and Television Today during production: “It is an exciting idea compressing a story into 30 minutes; it is basically short story writing, and this is one of the most difficult forms of writing.” The Kennedy Martins embrace it superbly.

Beckley, Sallis and Livesey aren’t the only acting talent likely to draw Tachyon TV regulars. There’s Michael Robbins (twice), Ray Smith (a vulnerable performance in ‘Bonus’), Warren Clarke, Michael Elphick, James Grout, Harry Towb, Mona Washbourne, Hilda Braid, Alan Rothwell, Glynn Edwards, Norman Jones, Del Henney and vital turns by Bill Fraser (reunited with Flanagan on, er, Meglos), Pauline Collins and David Lodge. Fans of shouting-while-operating-a-decanter acting will derive their usual pleasure from Glyn Owen’s appearance in ‘The Link’, while there’s a cameo appearance by a Steve Pemberton Psychoville character in ‘Nothing Personal’ (okay, there isn’t, but you’ll want proof). When someone returning from agricultural college describes an ill person as a “cabbage”, at least you know they’re on the right course. Doctor Who fans should buy asap for William Russell’s one-scene masterclass in range and pacing (‘No Friendship for Coppers’), and Kevin Stoney’s triumphant oozing of predatory charm while running a handbag masterplan (‘Fox Among the Chickens’). Trivia fans who get out even less than I do may enjoy noting the episode in which Moss tangles with a pairing drawn from Classic Who’s first and last recorded stories.

Of course, Parkin’s Patch begat Spooner’s Patch (what kind of crazy allotment is that?), and, you might think, Heartbeat, many episodes of which were co-written by John Flanagan. However, Heartbeat was actually one of the most market-tested creations in television history. Whether this consisted of focus groups saying “you should remake Parkin’s Patch… ‘appen”, we can only speculate.

Parkin’s Patch: The Complete Series is released by Network

The Paul Temple Black and White Collection on DVD

A common game played by fans of old British TV drama is identifying rival copycat productions in the eternal competition between the BBC and ITV. So, for example, Target shall forever be known as “BBC’s version of The Sweeney”, while few conversations about Enemy at the Door take very long before someone describes it as “the ITV Secret Army”. Sometimes these comparisons can be a bit unfair, but more usually they are uncomfortably accurate. So I can’t think of a better way to easily explain the intentions behind the strange case of Paul Temple than to describe it as “the BBC Saint”

The similarities in the formats of the two shows are striking; both series derived from long-running popular sources in other media, and presented the adventures of a globetrotting gentleman amateur detective, righting wrongs and solving crimes for no reason of reward beyond the hero’s own inherent chivalry. Before reaching British television screens in 1969, Frances Durbridge’s creation had already been heard on the radio and read about in novels since the thirties, been made into films in the forties, and then been adapted into an immensely popular radio series in Germany.

This German success was crucial to the form that the inevitable television version of Paul Temple eventually took. With the stories being as popular abroad as at home, a Paul Temple series was likely to gather strong sales overseas. After a conventionally produced first series (none of which survives) a canny BBC Enterprises took advantage of German interest, and from then on Paul Temple became the BBC’s first international drama co-production, financed and filmed in association with Taurus Films GMBH of Munich.

The resulting shows displayed their higher budget by incorporating extensive filming in exotic and glamorous European locations such as beaches and ski resorts, shot on cinematic 35mm film, before returning back to Television Centre to record the interiors on videotape. The series might have only run for two years, but had a very high turnover of production, churning out 64 episodes, with the BBC transferring producer Derrick Sherwin away from Doctor Who to oversee the demanding show at short notice – the effect on the other programme being the major reason that Paul Temple is remembered these days.

Three years ago, Acorn released the eleven surviving colour episodes of Paul Temple on DVD, and a rum and disconcertingly unfamiliar type of programme it turned out to be when watched. The sense of disconnection between film and studio that viewers too young to have grown up with the convention often feel when watching old television is felt even by TV swots such as myself when Paul Temple switches back and forth between attempted James Bond-style glamour in Istanbul bazaars and Wood Green interiors.

Perhaps a series with a stronger sense of character and reason for existing might have been able to overcome this handicap of an oddly juxtaposed style, but Paul Temple’s major flaw lay in its insipid generic hero. Paul Temple turned out to be a man who it was very hard to care about or find interesting. He’s a successful thriller writer – as demonstrated by his complaining about his publisher and deadlines at the beginning of each episode – whose emotional involvement with the alarming situations that he faces varies between mild amusement and mild exasperation. Francis Matthews’ performance as Temple tried to convey this as a suave and admirable sang-froid, but the thinness of the material that he had to work with meant that he really came over as a detective who’s bored with his adventures.

Ros Drinkwater, as his wife and partner in crime-solving, Steve, fared only slightly better, as at least the plots often required her to flirt with villains and dash about the place in a different natty designer trouser suit in each episode. The intention behind this couple was that the husband and wife shared brittle and ironic sparring dialogue with each other, a purpose generally sunk by this dialogue never quite managing to be funny.

The original Acorn box set missed out the five episodes that only survive on monochrome 16mm prints, an omission rectified by this second collection. Seeing these particular shows in black and white doesn’t make as much difference as you might expect, as they happen to be the final five episodes of Paul Temple when resources for overseas locations had run out, and the closest thing we get to international glamour is confined to some stock footage of an Irish race meeting, so you’re not left feeling deprived of any diverting colourfulness that you might be missing out on.

Seeing these episodes is an instructive lesson in the sort of things that reach the screen when a programme ends its run, limping exhaustedly towards completion. In one edition Francis Matthews is clearly indisposed and George Sewell steps in to do the necessary legwork to solve the crime, aided by three brief appearances of Paul Temple in filmed inserts. A couple of rather risky scripts reach production, the sort of stories that would have stayed in the filing cabinet if there was other material left to work with.

These two stories aren’t necessarily the best of Paul Temple, but they do attempt to do something more interesting than the usual whodunit fare. John Wiles’ ‘Long Ride to Red Gap’ concerns a Surrey approved school, where a Lord of the Flies-style tribe of delinquent boys run riot around their drunken headmaster (Kevin Stoney) and terrorise the outskirts of Guildford, stealing dynamite and causing cars to crash while dressed as Native Americans.

Another attempt at social commentary can be found in the final episode, ‘Critics, Yes! But this is Ridiculous!’ in which a Scottish holiday for Paul and Steve is disrupted by murderous goings on at a hippy commune. The suspicious locals – who perhaps inevitably include Angus Lennie – are appalled by the scandalous goings-on on their doorstep (“They’re dope fiends an’ layabouts! Aye, she used to be a nice girl until she went awa’ to that university”), while Temple’s attempts to intervene are met with hostility by the hippies (“You have bad vibrations, man”). A young Maurice Roeves plays the thankless part of the charismatic cult leader, less Charles Manson than George Best in a kaftan.

Even an unexceptional drama series made by the BBC in the early seventies could call upon a raft of very talented and original directors to add mobility and intelligence to matters, seen here in the contributions of such familiar Doctor Who names as Michael Ferguson and George Spenton-Foster. This is most apparent in ‘The Guilty Must Die’, an episode directed by Douglas Camfield, whose audacious style (dramatic close ups, starting a scene by cutting into a detail, making rooms feel like unfamiliar and dangerous spaces) could always be relied upon to make the most routine scripts look as close to Hitchcock thrillers as television could achieve. He also knew how to cast a production in depth, seen here in the presence of Joe Melia and Sylvia Simms, and from the early moment that Michael Sheard appears in a minor role as a lovelorn accountant, you know that this is going to be an enjoyable fifty minutes. That said, you do also have the alarming sight of Patrick Mower as a swinging gold-digging seducer, chatting up Mrs. Temple in a swanky restaurant (“For a married woman, you’re very forward. Your place?”)

Although a general blandness of characterization and vagueness of purpose don’t make Paul Temple an especially satisfying programme to watch, period BBC strengths of production and acting do mean that these episodes give genuine surface pleasure for the viewer. But the greatest promise that this release holds is in demonstrating the willingness of non-BBC companies to release black and white BBC programmes. Since 2Entertain have a horror of releasing any black and white drama that isn’t telefantasy then it would be great if the likes of Acorn could do the same thing for the BBC that Network do for ITV. Just imagine the sets that we could be enjoying: Maigret, Z-Cars, Doctor Finlay…

The Paul Temple Black and White Collection is released by Acorn Media

If you’ve ever been to an ‘old school’ Doctor Who convention you will have noticed that besides yourself (obviously a well-balanced individual) the attendees are an odd mix. There are sharply dressed media types who take a post-modern ironic approach to the proceedings brushing up against the Cosplay contingent who intensely discuss latex and the problems of crocheting Foamasi outfits – all shepherded around by harried organisers reeking of last night’s gin. But set apart from these cliques are an assortment of others. They are not so much a group as a type and they work alone like contract killers or piano tuners. Paul McGann was once at a convention and when asked if he watched Doctor Who as a child he replied that he was a casual viewer but “you know I wasn’t a specialist.” These fans are the specialists.

Their uniform usually consists of functional clothing and an ever present carrier bag held at arm’s length as if it contains something precious like a packed lunch or the severed head of Peter Davison. Most of them can talk, but there is not much in the way of casual chit chat to be had, although you might be lucky and favoured with an intense diatribe on the weaknesses of Gerry Davis’s original script for Revenge of the Cybermen. The specialists are at their most animated during Doctor Who interview panels when they submit actors to either excessively detailed questions about the life and motivations of a fictional character they played 40 years ago, or aggressive interrogation about subjects the actor could know nothing about such as the salary of the Production Unit Manager or the type of biscuits favoured by the director’s sister.

Andy X. Cable (the X is for Xoanon) is very much a specialist. He lives with his mother and thinks about Doctor Who an awful lot, and although he loves it he is also very exercised by bits of the programme that he doesn’t like such as the Graham Williams’ era and the excessive amount of kissing in the new series. Andy also gets himself into trouble because he lacks social skills and recently caused a bit of a rumpus with a website that detailed his collection of intimate items associated with Doctor Who companions. In Turn Left, he has turned to safer ground and created a list of genuine British road signs that remind him of Doctor Who. It’s safe to say that Andy makes some connections that would be missed by others.

So for Andy, Spider Lane has a vivid impact: “I was once helping mum with her shopping in Tesco and I picked up a cantaloupe which was heavier than I thought and I dropped it and it broke open on the floor. Do you know what crawled out? I don’t because I ran away screaming as the memory of the Fourth Doctor story written by fan policeman Andrew Smith was still ringing in my brain when spiders crawled out of fruit when it got foggy.” Lavinia Close on the other hand has a more succinct entry: “Sarah Jane Smith has an Aunt Lavinia. I have nothing else to say about this.”

Andy ploughs on through a vast collection of signs, dispensing much wisdom on the way “To be really popular in Doctor Who you must be metal and you’re not allowed to have any legs” as well as bracing views on favourite stories: “The Bok! He was really cross all the time and I’m not surprised, he only did one story and it was rubbish” and revealing moments when he took the show’s lessons a little too literally: “If you drill down far enough into the earth you can get some green stuff which will turn you into a really hot werewolf. I tried this once when I was at school.”

Fascinating and plentiful though Andy’s views are, we get to learn a lot more about him than he probably intended. His awkward relationship with his mum looms large, as do his even more problematic interactions with the local community who on occasion chase him like an angry mob. As Andy thinks about Doctor Who all the time he finds it difficult to concentrate on things like lunch hours which leads to inevitable trouble with Karen his evil boss, but he also gradually starts to make friends and even develops something approaching a relationship despite all of his obvious problems.

In addition, the book demonstrates Andy’s consummate skill at drawing with biros and Turn Left is beautifully illustrated by many examples of his insane art. The renderings of Dudley Simpson “Getting Livid As He Thinks About Computers” and Eric Saward “Crying Because His Job Is Too Much Like Hard Work” were my particular favourites, although the one on page 145 drawn with his mum’s favorite pen is genuinely touching.

Turn Left is a wonderful read – it’s funny, sad and sensitively written and if Andy X. Cable weren’t real (he must be, the book has a Facebook page and everything) then he’d go down as one of the great comedy characters of recent years. The best tribute I can pay is that the stream of consciousness style is reminiscent of Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha – the reader gets right inside Andy’s mind to the point where he becomes not an object of ridicule, but a sympathetic figure who you can’t help but care about. This is due not only to good writing, but to the fact that most of us Doctor Who fans have a touch of the specialist in them somewhere.

Miwk Publishing is a relatively new company who are worth keeping an eye on. As well as Turn Left they have already released the spoof Blake’s 7 guide Maximum Power, Andy Davidson’s incredibly comprehensive Carry on Confidential and the forthcoming Doomwatch tome by Michael Seely also looks very tasty. I should declare an interest and say that I know the people behind the company, and yet despite that am still willing to recommend their output. But I do feel honour bound to point out that other independent publishing houses that publish Doctor Who books are available, and it just so happens that a very informative piece about some of them is available courtesy of Starburst Magazine.

Turn Left is published by Miwk Publishing Ltd.

Win Complete DVD Box Sets of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Land of the Giants

Thanks to Revelation Films we’re pleased to offer you the chance to win these complete series.

We have one copy of the complete Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and one copy of the complete Land of the Giants to give away on DVD. All you have to do is answer the following questions correctly and we’ll enter you into a draw for each respective DVD.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea originated as a film for the cinema. Who played Admiral Nelson in the film version?

Land of the Giants featured a canine as part of its regular cast. What was the dog’s name in the series?

This competition is now closed.

Well done to Andrew Picken (Voyage) and Nigel Herwin (Land of the Giants) who were the lucky winners.

Murder by Decree on DVD

Three copies of Murder By Decree to be won. See the competition at the end of this review.

This review contains spoilers.

Sherlock Holmes first appeared in print during 1887 in A Study in Scarlet, part of Beeton’s Christmas Annual. A year later, the body of Mary Ann Nichols, the first victim of the killer later known as Jack the Ripper, was found dead in Buck’s Row, Whitechapel. The obvious conclusion, that Sherlock Holmes could very easily have investigated the Ripper murders, formed the basis of the 1965 film A Study in Terror, and an eccentric Michael Dibdin novel, The Last Sherlock Holmes Story. But the Holmes vs the Ripper story which most people have taken to their hearts is Bob Clark’s 1979 film Murder By Decree which draws on the same sources as Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s highly acclaimed 1990s graphic novel From Hell.

The premise of the film is that a group of political radicals posing as a citizen’s committee hire Sherlock Holmes to investigate the Whitechapel Murders on the grounds that they are damaging trade in the district. In reality, they want Holmes to reveal a scandal which threatens both the Royal Family and the political establishment. This is based around a conspiracy theory first proposed by Stephen Knight in his book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution which, broadly speaking, states that the murders were committed to hide the revelation of the birth of the illegitimate child of the Duke of Clarence. The book was hugely popular when it was published in 1976 but has now been largely discredited as a hoax perpetrated by a Joseph Gorman, a man who claimed to be the illegitimate son of the painter Walter Sickert. It’s a great story however – and the book is recommended as just that, regardless of its factual credentials – and has influenced many subsequent works inspired by the murders.

Murder By Decree is a co-production between the UK and Canada. Bob Clark found his biggest popular success with the Porky’s films but deserves to be remembered more for two excellent horror films from the mid-1970s – Black Christmas and Dead of Night– both of which exhibit the same flair for horror that he demonstrates in parts of Murder By Decree. His direction here is energetic, even during passages of verbose dialogue, although rather poor backdrops mar some of the studio scenes, especially those at the dockside, and there are particularly dire representations of the Houses of Parliament and St Paul’s. Come to think of it, what is Tower Bridge doing in the background of one scene? Why does Catherine Eddowes get such a grand funeral? And why do Holmes and Watson go to see Annie Crook by a carriage but return by train? Yet these flaws are forgivable because much of the film is highly atmospheric, shrouded in mist and blackest night which lends the murder scenes a thoroughly nightmarish feel, particularly the climactic killing of Mary Kelly.

Actors familiar to TV viewers of the time such as Ann Mitchell, Iris Fry, Ken Jones and Ron Pember turn up, the latter getting an unusually decent role as the head of the citizens’ committee before he meets a watery end in the River Thames. More famous faces also pop up in variously effective roles ranging from a very touching Genevieve Bujold as the benighted Annie Crook to Donald Sutherland who provides us with a thick slice of ham as the psychic Robert Lees. Anthony Quayle’s moustache does valuable work on the face of Sir Charles Warren although its owner is typically loud and unsubtle whereas, in contrast, David Hemmings underplays nicely as Inspector Foxborough who is patently a red herring and doesn’t get much to do. Meanwhile, Frank Finlay is a perfect Inspector Lestrade, much as he was in A Study in Terror.

Any Holmes movie, however, stands or falls on the portrayal of the two central characters and on this score Murder By Decree is a qualified success. In many ways, Christopher Plummer and James Mason are quite delightful as Holmes and Watson, effortlessly delineating a warm, humorous relationship which is completely convincing. One scene, in which Mason’s fussy and thoroughly decent Watson chases a last pea around his dinner plate, is already a classic in the annals of Holmesian cinema, and there are numerous other examples where Watson’s upstanding simplicity of belief – in crown and country as well as in his best friend – is contrasted with Holmes’ pragmatic understanding of the forces of chaos and, ultimately, change. James Mason never makes Watson a fool or a fuddy-duddy, finding humour and bravery within the character rather than imposing comedy upon him.

As Holmes, Christopher Plummer radiates charismatic intelligence and occasionally gets the pomposity and black humour of the character completely right. My reservation is that this is a Holmes who is a little too sentimental, lacking the cold, cruel intellect of the character in the stories. The moment at the end of The Six Napoleons when Watson remarks on how Holmes “was more nearly moved by the softer human emotions than I had ever seen him” seems to be the mainspring of Plummer’s performance. But in the context of the film, this softer interpretation works well enough. The final scenes, where an enraged Holmes takes on the massed ranks of the Victorian political and Masonic establishment, strike me as unlikely in the context of the literary character – and Conan Doyle’s own political views – but provide a memorable conclusion to the film.

Murder By Decree was not particularly successful on its first release but it has gained a considerable cult reputation both as a Holmes film and a Ripper story. It deserves to be seen for many reasons – the excellent performances, John Hopkins’ witty screenplay, the scary murder sequences – and it’s good to see it re-released on DVD by Studiocanal. The picture quality is acceptable, although afflicted by blocky artifacting in places, and my review check disc was affected by some minor sound problems during certain scene changes – for instance at 58’20” – but this may be characteristic of the original film. There are no extra features at all, unlike the US edition from Lions Gate which features an audio commentary, a trailer and a couple of stills galleries.

Win Murder By Decree on DVD

Thanks to StudioCanal we’re pleased to offer you the chance to win this fondly remembered film.

We have three copies of Murder by Decree to give away on DVD. All you have to do is answer the following question correctly and we’ll enter you into a draw.

John Hopkins, who wrote Murder by Decree, also wrote Sidney Lumet’s terrific film The Offence. What was the name of Hopkins’ original stage play upon which The Offence was based?

This competition is now closed.

Congratulations to the three winners Simon Coward, David K. Barnes and Trevor Ewles. The answer to the question was This Story of Yours. Here’s a photo from the original production courtesy of David Brunt.

Nightmare of Eden on DVD

Nightmare of Eden is often seen as the embodiment of all that’s bad about the seventeenth season of Doctor Who and, by extension, the whole of producer Graham Williams’ era. There’s no doubt that elements of the production are not just average but actively shambolic and characteristic of the era’s weak points. Some of the acting is so bad that you want to hunt down the performers and their families in order to exact fitting retribution. The monsters, in this case the Mandrels, look like a portly Animal Kwackers tribute band, while the sets manage to be both drab and overlit simultaneously. Maybe part of the problem with the Williams’ era is that the title sequence from the Hinchcliffe period wasn’t changed and so it’s still there lulling you into the expectation of a quality product only to startle you with pervasive cheapness, rather like wandering through the doors of a Marks and Spencer’s Foodhall and finding yourself in Lidl.

But unless you’re an incorrigible snob, you’ll know that just as Lidl sells excellent fruit, so there are many things to enjoy about Nightmare of Eden. Most of the success of the story is down to the newly solo Bob Baker’s script which probably included some embellishments by his script editor Douglas Adams. I say probably, because there’s a prevalent and annoying tendency for people simply to assume that anything good about Season Seventeen scripts is down to Adams and that writers like Terry Nation and David Fisher were just making up the numbers. In the case of Nightmare of Eden there are some elements that have clear echoes in Adams’ later work but it’s hard to say who originated them.

There are obvious similarities for instance, between the delayed passengers on the Empress and those unfortunates left on a ship for 900 years (while waiting for lemon-soaked paper napkins) that are featured in the climactic episode of the second radio series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This comic situation with an edge – in Nightmare of Eden the passengers are slaughtered by Mandrels while watched by a laughing Captain Rigg whereas in HHGTTG the passengers awake screaming in terror – is typical Adams but whether he was rewriting himself or Baker in the later work is anyone’s guess.

There are lots of other surprisingly dark elements in the script. Both of the on-screen victims of the deadly drug vraxoin are dealt with harshly. Decker doesn’t play much of a role but his death at the claws of a Mandrel is made all the more horrible because he doesn’t die immediately. Instead, and unusually for Doctor Who, we get to see the medical crew of the Empress struggling to resuscitate him in the background while Rigg engages in conversation with Della. At least with Secker it’s unclear if he’s involved with the drug smuggling or not, but in Rigg’s case there is no doubt – he’s a grimly unfortunate victim of circumstance.

Rigg – played by David Daker who was surely the busiest television actor of the 1970s – is an honest man who’s willing to stick to his instincts and trust the Doctor despite seeing through his Galactic Salvage cover immediately. They form an effective team, but then, within a few minutes of the start of Episode Two he’s been turned into a hopeless junky who eventually attacks Romana (in one of the best scenes of the story) before being shot dead by a jumped-up fascistic excise man. There can’t have been many more depressing character arcs than this.

In keeping with the grimness of the script and not the gaudiness of the production, Tom Baker, although he’s not often given credit for it, puts in a restrained and rather serious performance for the majority of the story. He famously goes way over the top towards the end of Episode Four, but for much of the time he behaves more like the Fifth Doctor than his usual persona. After arriving on the Empress following the collision with the Hecate he quietly goes about his business trying to disentangle the ships. When he first encounters a Mandrel, he responds to Rigg’s “What was that?” not with a toothy smile but with a thoughtful “I don’t know”. He broods about not only the vraxoin and the ethics of Tryst’s animal collection, but also the death of a Mandrel. This is a tremendously useful performance for him to give when everything else in the production is a hair’s breadth away from Galloping Galaxies. It’s only those brief moments when Baker stops playing to the script and starts rehearsing for Widow Twanky that Nightmare of Eden becomes an unwatchable mess.

Quite why Baker is generally so restrained here is hard to tell. Perhaps his infamous falling out with director Alan Bromly (extensively covered in the extras, commentary, production notes and the latest issue of Heat) had irritated him so much that he was just concentrating hard on getting to his first round of drinks at the BBC Club. Alternatively it’s possible he saw the performance of Lewis Fiander, and realised that there was room for only one out-of-control actor.

Fiander is, even by ropey Doctor Who guest performance standards, a total disgrace. If he could simply stick to a silly German accent then that would be something, but at some points he sounds more like Joe Dolce. It’s not just the accent that grates but the facial tics, the jumping eyebrows and the perpetually pained expression reminiscent of a man attempting to shit an anglepoise lamp. Bad as it is though, Fiander’s performance doesn’t disguise the fact that Fisk and Costa aren’t exactly triumphs for Geoffrey Hinsliff and Peter Craze, and the best you can say for Barry Andrews and Jennifer Lonsdale is that unlike some of the others they’re too boring to make you go on a killing spree.

Despite all of this madness, there are other incidental pleasures. Even if like me you find the voice of David Brierley as K9 an act against nature, there are loads of nice character moments for the troublesome hound, perhaps as a result of his co-creator writing the script. I like the fact he’s so reluctant to go through the interface between ships and even when he goes on his crucial mission at the end of Episode Three he again hesitates just for a moment which is a nice touch.

All the cliffhangers are good, especially the Doctor vanishing as the ships separate and the earlier, oddly effective climax, when he and Romana leap through the screen into the CET. The resolution of the final cliffhanger is also fun as it features the Doctor waking groggily in the back of a strange vehicle, an experience with which Tom Baker was no doubt very familiar. Best of all is Rigg’s description of the Doctor as “the Enigmatic All-Mighty Mr Fix-it” which certainly sounds like the title they should use if they ever remake Doctor Who in Japan.

Considering that Nightmare of Eden, and the series generally at the time was made on a budget diminishing in value more quickly than a Deutschmark in the Weimar Republic, it’s a miracle it was made at all. When you then throw director Alan Bromly into the mix, and factor in his eventual dismissal/resignation, it’s hardly surprising that only the script – safely written long before the chaos started – manages to pull everyone through a gruelling production to the Doctor’s climactic, memorable dismissal of Tryst with a whispered “Go away”. Nightmare of Eden may not be great but it’s still a better story than those either side of it, and as it was made under much more stressful conditions that’s a tiny triumph in itself.

Extras:

The accompanying extras are short and pithy starting with Ed Stradling’s The Nightmare of Television Centre. Rather than leaping straight into the woes of Alan Bromly, the film starts with two engaging figures: Colin Mapson (Visual Effects Designer) and A J “Mitch” Mitchell (Video Effects Designer). It was the latter than coined the titular phrase and it’s clear that even before Bromly had time to cause problems the feeble budget for the show was forcing the production team into methods of working with models and effects that had rarely been tried before.

Most significantly, videotape rather than film was used for the model shots, and without spoiling the details let’s just say that Mapson is far more vituperative about the results here than he is in the commentary that accompanies the main feature. The best moment is when Mapson responds incredulously to an old memo, written by Graham Williams, that heaps praise upon the model work for the show.

It’s only in the last five minutes of the piece that Mapson and Mitchell go on to describe the wider problems on set, and they’re helped in this via some older interview footage of Assistant Floor Manager Val McCrimmon which is both amusing and informative. Although the film seems a bit short for such a troubled story, it’s hard to see how it could have been more fruitfully extended other than to list more examples of why Alan Bromly was a hopeless director. On this evidence, he’d be hard-pushed to win a popularity contest with Keith Boak.

The best way to tell the full story of this ramshackle production is through the accumulation of detail, something that the combination of this release’s commentary and production notes provides admirably. Nicholas Pegg’s notes are as good as ever, and as well as every gory detail of the Bromly v Baker/whole crew slamdown there are loads of other gems, including the explanation of why the TARDIS is covered in chalk, details of Jennifer Lonsdale’s Mollie Sugden obsession and a description of a Mandrel that most men can sympathise with “The Mandrel has a clobbered claw and a crumbling crotch”. The commentary enlarges upon this wealth of detail, and is guided by the steady hand of Toby Hadoke, who on this occasion moderates another revolving door of contributors including Lalla Ward, Peter Craze, Bob Baker, Colin Mapson and make-up artist Joan Stribling.

I’ve not always been very keen on Lalla Ward’s contribution to the commentaries in the past, wounded perhaps by her relentlessly self-regarding effort on The Creature from the Pit, but in this instance she’s good value and it’s to her credit that she at least makes a serious attempt to analyse what’s going on in the story. She also gives a succinct summary of the production problems “Bromly was out of his element” although Peter Craze very vividly adds that “when the director loses his cast it’s like a Roman Circus”. Craze makes some other interesting contributions, including some touching comments about his brother Michael that gradually reveal his discomfort about some aspects of Doctor Who which he feels took over his brother’s life.

There are a few more short extras of varying interest on this release. Going Solo is another Ed Stradling short, this time about writer Bob Baker and his work on Nightmare of Eden with specific reference to the breakup of his writing partnership with Dave Martin. Bob is a likeable chap, and despite recounting how he’d raised an eyebrow when he first saw Lewis Fiander’s antics as Tryst, you get the impression that then, as now, he isn’t the type to kick up much of a fuss. Far less laid back is Lalla Ward’s appearance on Ask Aspel, which is included here in edited form especially for the masochists in the audience. For such an elegant woman, Ward is occasionally prone, both when acting and appearing as herself, to stiffen up alarmingly in front of the camera. Here she’s so unnatural that she makes Su Pollard look like Grace Kelly. The repartee with Aspel is such that it makes you look back fondly to the famous chemistry displayed between Colin Baker and Selina Scott on Breakfast Time, and the whole thing should be approached with caution.

Speaking of which the final extra (not including Paul Shield’s excellent photo gallery) is The Doctor’s Strange Love directed by James Goss. Apparently I missed the first one of these (it was on the Revisitations version of The TV Movie) so I hadn’t a clue what to expect. It’s basically an opportunity to hear Simon Guerrier, Joseph Lidster and Josie Long having a chat about Nightmare of Eden while sitting on the set of The Sarah Jane Adventures. Sadly it’s a very thin piece, and it’s one of the few in the range that looks purely like an extra for the sake of it. All the people involved are talented and funny, but little of that comes across, and not much interesting is said about Nightmare of Eden. The whole thing is not a million miles away from filming your mates down the pub, and in fact that would have almost certainly have been more entertaining. Maybe if Alan Bromly had tried that approach as well, he’d have won Tom over and things would have been very different.

Nightmare of Eden is released on Monday 2nd April in the UK.