reviews

Stand By Your Fan

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.

Life? Don't Talk to Me About Life

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.

Two Stars, a Sitcom and a DVD Release

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.

Do You Believe in Rock and Roll?

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.

The ‘Appening

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