The Ood Cast

This post was supposed to be sticking up for a Who that I wasn’t at all sure about the first time round, or have acquired a reputation for being a bit, well, rubbish.  But having got hold of Silver Nemesis over the weekend, I’m on a bit of a 7^th Doctor fest, so I’ll write about “Love & Monsters” next time.

So this one is about a story that I hadn’t seen since 1989.  One that used to make me cringe and bristle with irritation.  Not because I didn’t like it, but because it was the end.  I mean, of course, Survival.

A bit like Bjork, it’s a curiously beguiling little package, this.  Mysterious disappearances in Perivale, an abundance of stray cats (that can only snarl at people under remote control), a mouthy Scottish chap giving self defence classes, Cheetah People, and the Master…  It’s all rather spooky.

I remember feeling really rather uneasy about it when I saw it – but watching it again, I’m not sure why.  Maybe because it was pretty sinister.  It certainly wasn’t about the special effects particularly: although the Cheetah People’s costumes were alright, actually.  And the cats eyes effect on the humans – Midge and Ace particularly – were really good touches.  The robotic cat is a little obvious, though, and I can’t imagine even a 10 year-old me not noticing that.

The Doctor in this is an altogether darker being too – which I suppose is well known as the way the character was going.  Much more brooding that the clown-like Doctor that had graced our screens in season 24 (“Delta and the Bannermen”, anyone?).  Ace is great in it, confused to be back in her old haunt, and the story makes good use of her youth and energy.  She gets to do a lot of running in this – and its proper running, not the totter-away-from-the-strange-latex-shape-as-fast-as-my-high-heels-will-let-me kind of running that Tegan seemed particularly suited to.  There’s more development here for her too, even at the end of the series, with the bond she makes with Karra.  It all holds up pretty well after so long.

And I love the last speech.  It’s a bit obviously dubbed over after the shoot, and Sylv delivers it a little fast for my liking, but it’s lovely.  And a bit sad.  The last two seasons of the classic Who are still wonderful to me.  I know the shortcomings, and the failures of it, but I love the ambition, the restoration of the mystery when the character had started to become either a grumpy, grumpy sod or a fool.  And best of all, it is fun to watch.

But the extras on the DVD are brilliant too.  For a start, the continuity announcements from the original broadcast are on there, which helped me recreate an evening as a 10 year-old (Doctor Who at 7.35 followed by Bergerac at 8 – marvellous…).  Then on disc 2 there is a documentary about Ace (the first companion I followed from start to finish) and “Endgame” – a longer documentary about the cancellation of the series and what was planned for season 27 (The Ice Warriors would have been back!  Ace would have been trained as a Time Lord!)…

It all fills me with nostalgic intrigue – and a bit of regret at not having read more of the Virgin New Adventures when I had the chance…

I hated my memories of Survival.  But I’m glad I returned to it 20 years later – it’s not half bad, and certainly an exception to the reputation of 80s Who.  If Hale and Pace couldn’t spoil it, then it had to be quite good, after all.

Here’s one I like. Fear Her. The one with the girl possessed by the Isolus who got lost and just wants some friends and can make reality out of drawings, including a great big doodle-y scribble that hides in a garage - the scene where Rose finds it is geniunely wierd and creepy. C’mon – it’s genius! A monster that can be rubbed out! Pictures that come to life! The Doctor getting trapped in a picture-dimension-er-thing. An entire Olympic crowd disappearing live on-air while Huw Edwards gets lost for words. A joke about the TARDIS materialisation. A global threat. It’s perfect Doctor Who – the extraordinary in an ordinary street. Awesome imagination. It has some pretty thoughtful stuff about love and friendship. It even has the Doctor eating straight from a marmalade jar, much to Rose’s horror. It’s a creepy, thoughtful, moving classic.

When I was at school, Doctor Who was cancelled.  I tried to replace it for a while – I desperately wanted something to plug that gap.  Several things nearly did – cricket only lasted through the summer months though, and “Escape To Victory” was only ever on at Easter.  It was hopeless.

For a while, the discovery that my local library stocked a small clutch of Target novelisations and a couple of battered Make-Your-Own-Adventure books with Colin Baker’s permed noodle on the front cover had kept me going.  But they soon ran out.  I did read the Target novel of The Awakening four or five times though.  Each time, absolutely transfixed.

Then, one afternoon, I walked into a tiny (and otherwise pretty rubbish) bookshop near where I was living then, and I spotted the words Doctor Who printed on a thin-ish navy blue spine of a book on the top shelf.  I pulled over the little steps that were in the shop for customers, and clambered up to reach it.  It was, apparently, the first in a new series of Classic Script books.  The Talons of Weng Chiang.

I’d seen Talons before – one summer, my best friend at the time had broken his leg playing football, and spent the summer holidays inside with his leg up, watching endless videos of Doctor Who.  Partly to keep him company, and partly to see a lot of Who I’d never seen, I spent a lot of my time there.  That’s when I saw Talons.  And Pyramids of Mars.  And The Hand of Fear.  Three of my favourite stories to this day.

Anyway, back to the bookshop.  I bought the script and took it home, thinking it would keep me going for a couple of weeks.  Maybe by then the BBC would have resurrected the show.  Well, they didn’t… and I finished the book in less than two days.  By the end of those two weeks, I’d read it three times in all.  Not very long after that, I found myself sketching out small scenes from the start of my own story in script form.  That’s where it all started for me.

But Talons is still a story I go back to time and again.  Reading the script definitely helped me through the first viewing, although like Andy’s view of the audio taped episodes, reading the script left the worlds completely to my imagination without limitations of budget or film cameras.  So nothing prepared me for the close-up footage of a rat…

The story fed my other interests too, which helps.  Sherlock Holmes was one of the things that did manage to fill the gap between Who stopping and returning (and if you’re interested, you can find my views on Moffatt and Gatiss’ “Sherlock” over on my own personal blog here).  London and its history (and mysteries) has always been a place that fills me with wonder.

This period (I think) is the zenith of Robert Holmes’ time as script editor.  Don’t forget, this story came hot on the heels of the absolutely brilliant Robots of Death, and was followed by the wonderful Horror of Fang Rock.  I sort of think of them as a mini detective trilogy, although it doesn’t take too much of stretch to make a case for most Who adventures to be thought of as detective stories, at least on a very basic level.

And this starts a bit like a faithful reassembling of the elements to be found in many a Holmes story, I think – enigmatic foreign hypnotist showmen, Chinese heavies murdering strangers in back streets, horrific giant rodents stalking the sewers…  And then, Robert Holmes throws in a 51^st Century despot, who arrived on earth in a Time Cabinet that was then taken away by the Chinese Imperial Army who is draining the life-force from people to keep alive.  If that isn’t genius…

There are a number of Sherlock Holmes connections, aside from the deerstalker that the Doctor wears.  The Giant Rat of Sumatra is one of those cases that Watson famously mentions but never expands on, like The Abergavenny Murder and the Camberwell Poisoning.  Even Leela is a sort-of connection… (was going to say semi, but that would have led to all sorts of unintended embarrassment) – “savages” aren’t all that rare in Conan Doyle’s originals… in The Sign of the Four, for example.

The characters in Talons are full, rounded and colourful – it’s a masterclass in character writing.  Henry Gordon Jago and Professor Litefoot are lovely (and gloriously brought back to life by Big Finish this year) – but Li’Hsen Chang is creepy and Magnus Greel himself is hideous…  and a distant ancestor to the Moff’s stories, maybe, Mr Sin is absolutely terrifying.

There are lots of longer stories in the classic series which drag their feet and look obviously spun out to fill more screen time, but in my opinion this one doesn’t.  It’s marvellous, and not just to the sentimental fool in me.  Go back and watch it again, you’ll not be disappointed.

Anyone go to the Doctor Who prom? We didn’t unfortunately but have caught up with it on BBC iPlayer. It was great, eh, and wasn’t Matt Smith brilliant in that sketch?!

I particularly enjoyed Mathew Sweet’s piece in the interval regarding the history of incidental music in Doctor Who. Back in the early 80s I bought the cassette Doctor Who: The Music. In those days this was as near as it got to BBC video releases. . .  Goodness, how things have changed. The cassette consisted of two sides (hang on, remember those? You actually had to turn the tape over halfway to hear the whole thing and spool through using guesswork to get to a particular track. Life was clunky in those days) of Doctor Who incidental music from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. To my ears it was the sound of other worlds, strange situations, terrible events, awesome resolutions.

At about the same time some schoolmates started lending me audio copies of actual stories. Anyone else remember that? This was a pre-video age, unless you lived in the posh part of town or went to the grammar school (note for non-UK readers - it really was like that here in the early 80s). Listening to Doctor Who adventures on audio was good and bad. It was bad that you couldn’t see Tom Baker’s grin, or Lalla Ward. It was good that the sense of scale was left unrestrained. When there was incidental music all sorts of visual possibilities appeared before you, all with the most astonishing production values.

So the incidental music was key to the audio experience. Dudley Simpson. Ahhh, Deadly Dudley (as he was quite unaccountably called). His music was part of the soundscape of my teenage years – mock me, I shan’t care … If for some reason you need reminding of the man’s genius, I need only mention this entirely random selection: the original Master theme, the Wirrn theme in The Ark in Space, the jungle scenes and the Sorensen transformation in Planet of Evil, the mummies chasing Ernie Clements in Pyramids of Mars, The Deadly Assassin part three, and all of City of Death. Rather like Matthew Sweet I still hum the City of Death Paris theme, generally whenever I arrive somewhere on holiday (including on the Paris metro, haha), it’s so joyous. Dudley Simpson’s sense of drama and humour and his endless inventiveness with a piano, a cello and some carsprings gave the endless variety of Doctor Who a coherence and identity.

Malcolm Clarke, though. Unsung hero. His Sea Devils music was the first track on Doctor Who: The Music and I played it over and over. It’s amazing and beautiful. Apparently some people don’t like it and I can’t work out why might that be. It’s an astonishing example of a genius at their creative best. A soundscape, which often consists of recognisable tunes but is also often pure sound. That and his Earthshock music, his eerie cybermen theme seemingly emerging out of the sounds of a dripping cave, building in structure until it reaches a corporeal form marching along with the metal meanies themselves.

Try this. Play a Doctor Who DVD and nip to another room and listen to it.

In the last few months, we’ve seen not just the new series of Who, but plenty of views expressed about the series.  I talked about Stephen Fry’s comments in my last post, but there was also Sir Terry Pratchett, saying that the show wasn’t so much as science fiction, but fantasy.  To be honest, I’m sort of with him there.  Neil Gaiman, for what it’s worth, pointed out (quite rightly) that the show has never pretended to be hard sci-fi – and I’m rather proud that it’s not.

When other shows like Star Trek have a writing team dedicated to making up mumbo-jumbo fake science language, it’s nice to have a traditionally British kind of show.  One that cannot be bothered to get up and switch the TV over, it’ll just wait on the sofa till someone else comes in.

But it’s not as if it matters a great deal – it’s still all wonderful escapism, right?

Or is it?  I’m not sure there’s ever been a time when this “children’s show” has ever reflected society so astutely and with such brilliant timing.  I mean, this year, we’ve had riffs on elections and decision-making the weekend before a general election.  And spitfires – albeit in space – the same year as the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain.  And a football connection on the opening weekend of the world cup.  A finale planned and shot using specific dates.

That’s pretty impressive planning on behalf of Mr Moffatt, I would say.  It’s almost unbelievable to think that he’s been doing that while also teaching

Guy Ritchie how you update Sherlock Holmes without including Jude Law…

When RTD ran the show, I always got the feeling it just sort of, you know, rambled on – like it didn’t really belong in the same world.  Nothing real was allowed in and nothing out.  But I love the little connections.

I love watching things like Survival and remembering that Hale and Pace were once famous in this country.  I love seeing Stephen and Jamie on the screen and remembering that one was a Blue Peter presenter, the other spent years as a farmer on Emmerdale Farm (because it was still a farm then.  Oh how the reality hurts these days…).

But these days, we’re in the hands of someone taking us away from the soap opera in space style and back towards the show’s roots, finding writers who are able to grasp this, no matter how far removed they normally seem.  If Richard Curtis’ episode proved anything, it’s that the unexpected source is often the richest.  And if Chibnall’s proves anything, it’s that we should really try and avoid that again…

But I’m thrilled…  THRILLED that filming on Neil Gaiman’s episode is starting filming next month.  Gaiman’s writing has always been consistently great, he has an amazing ability to draw spectacle from something normal, unobtrusive  as well as the unknown and fantastical (very Who), and I think he’s always been counted as the dream writer fans would like to see working on the series.

I was convinced it was a cruel joke when it was announced he’d be writing for the next series, but it’s real, and there was apparently a photo on his twitter feed last week showing him, the Moff and Richard Curtis at a read-through.  I can’t find it on there, but then asking me to find something on Twitter is a bit like putting someone in a round room and telling them to stand in the corner…

(To one side, what was Curtis doing there?  Is he writing more?  I’ll be delighted if he is.)

But what excites me more than anything, is that Gaiman GETS Who.  Properly.  And this proves it beyond even the most unreasonable doubts:

“At best Doctor Who is a fairytale, with fairytale logic about this wonderful man in this big blue box who at the beginning of every story lands somewhere where there is a problem…”

Roll on next April!

Pocket explanations

If you’ve ever wondered why we’re almost always universally positive about whatever Who throws at us, I think I have a shortened way of explaining it.

Last week, I watched the 1982 story, Time Flight.

How can you complain about the effects or storyline of the new series when you’ve seen things like that?

Incidentally, despite its obvious (and brightly coloured) flaws, I really enjoyed watching it…  I know I have a natural bias towards the vegetable-wearing Edwardian cricketer, but I expected it to be awful.  And it was, I suppose, but nowhere near as bad as I was expecting.  I’ll be more than happy to watch it again.  Anyone else?

Why I don’t hate what Stephen Fry said

We didn’t talk about this on the podcast at the time, so I want to just have a go at tackling this.

Not very long after my birthday (it was very nice, thank you), the hulking great genius Mr Fry said this:

“The only drama the BBC will boast about are Merlin and Doctor Who, which are fine, but they’re children’s programmes. They’re not for adults.  And they’re very good children’s programmes, don’t get me wrong, they’re wonderfully written … but they are not for adults.”

I think he’s kind of right, although I think his comments are slightly tongue-in-cheek and pointing to a completely separate issue which then got almost lost behind the overblown storm that followed him mentioning Doctor Who…

If it is a proper complaint, however, it doesn’t quite follow.  I say that for 2 reasons.

First, Doctor Who and Merlin are not children’s programmes – these days the term for it is “family entertainment” – there’d never be children’s stuff on BBC One that time of day…they have their own channels, and so on that basis I disagree with him respectfully.

But I also think what he’s saying is not a terrible thing.  If it means I’m a fan of a children’s programme, I can live with that.  Especially seeing as how “adult drama” appears to mean Eastenders, Casualty and the like.

Second, his speech complained about two things – too much family entertainment, and also that scheduling is too polarised into specialist areas.  Which is a bit too much of a contradiction to make sense to me…  You want something with more general appeal, but you’re also convinced that we already have too much of that?  Head.  Hurts.

And even besides all that, he’s complaining while desperately ignoring “Kingdom” – the nice, but marvellously mediocre series he starred in on Sunday nights.  Hardly your obvious example of a “grown-up” drama which is made to “…surprise us, to outrage us.”

People in glass houses, Stephen, people in glass houses…

Ever since we recorded the review of The Big Bang, slightly influenced by fermented grape juice, I’ve been thinking about the finale. Not in an obsessive way, you understand… I do have a job, and a small dependant-type person. But it sort of comes with the territory that as my friends know me as a fan, I get into conversations with people who can watch the show with other people talking throughout, or while they nip in and out of the room being busy with real life things.

The thing is, I can’t do that. It annoys me intensely if someone talks through something I’ve been waiting to see, and when Doctor Who is on, the only thing I do is watch it. There isn’t much that can’t wait 45 minutes, after all.

But neither do I sit there and drink in every detail and process every misplaced shoelace or wrongly-positioned object. I get caught up in the story and I’m far from ashamed to admit that.

So when it comes to a Steven Moffatt finale… I got lost in it. I don’t mean that I didn’t understand it, just that I went into the world and didn’t come out again until the end theme music started. Having watched it again, yes, I think it was a bit over-complex and could possibly have been stretched over 3 episodes to make the little arc work (let’s face it, amusing as it was, I’d not miss “The Lodger”). But, frankly, I don’t care.

There were holes in the plot – I know. I see them too. But the Doctor is a Timelord. They’re as real as Daleks… it really doesn’t matter that there’s a couple of confusing paradoxes in there.

There are things unresolved – I know. Have you never watched a Steven Moffatt story before? That’s par for the course… Unresolved probably means it will be part of the next season. This is, after all, the chap who brought us River Song 2 YEARS AGO and we still don’t know who the chuffing whatsit she is.

Inconsistencies and contradictions? Hmm. I don’t know. The Moff seems to write scripts where you’re left thinking these are inconsistent or blatant contradictions, but a while down the line, we’re shown the significance. I don’t really see that grumbling about them is of any use. But then, I grew up in the 80s, so this is Doctor Who’s Golden Age of Hollywood compared with some of my childhood memories of bubble perms and talking green slugs. When things contradicted then, it was because they cut the episode together wrong – like that time when the 3rd, 4th, 5th 6th and 7th Doctors all appeared in Albert Square…

What do you mean, that wasn’t a continuity error?   Well, it was definitely some kind of error…

All in all, I don’t care about the problems. I don’t even care that Amy is a character that seems unnaturally cold and unemotional and that nothing has made me really like her except that she’s funny.

I think the sketch we did in Episood 16 (“Childish Things”) highlighted the one that actually bothered me – that the Pandorica plan hatched by the Big Book of Doctor Who Baddies was absolutely rubbish. But then, so is every evil plan hatched by balding master criminals in every James Bond film, and it’s still very easy to enjoy them without worrying about it. Which is exactly what I did.

My point being that is doesn’t really matter in any significant way…  I know we on the Ood Cast are usually ridiculously enthusiastic about the show, and it doesn’t matter whether the episodes are top-notch or middling rubbish – we still love it.  But being a bit more level-headed about it here – the episodes that people will undoubtedly judge the Moff’s first season on – it did what everyone wanted: it surprised, entertained, scared (the stone dalek was brilliant – finally there seems to be an end to the ridiculous flying swarms of them) and tied a few things up.  Not everything, but that’s a reason to keep watching rather than whine about it, surely?

And apart from anything else…  Egyptian godesses?  Orient Express?  In Space?  Anyone fancy opening a book on whether we’re about to see “Pyramids of Mars II: Mastaba and Commander”?! (*FULL credit and huge thanks to Mr Ian Smith for that title*)

As long as the time tunnels in this one aren’t London Underground tunnels, sounds like it’ll be great!

Oh, and did we mention I predicted the Fez….?  OK, OK, I’ll stop now.

While the Ood Cast takes a summer break, we are getting back to our roots.

In other words, I’m going to blog… and I hope the others will find the time to as well… which is how this all started.

I’m not going to bore you with all sorts of rubbish about why this all started though. If you really want a history, you’ll have to meet us and buy us dinner. This post is just a plea… We’re not podcasting for a while, but it’ll seem like just a few weeks, I promise. So PLEASE stick around. Check the site every few days. Keep talking to us and commenting on what goes on here.

After all, you want to hear how the Littlest Doctor gets on at school, right?! And I’ll be announcing a competition for the summer break in the next few days, so keep coming back!

The Littlest Doctor has been playing “City of the Daleks” so much, he now thinks this is how Matt Smith runs …

Basically I’ve got too much time on my hands. So after we’d recorded the winner of the Underground song contest – “Going Underground” by The Jam which was obviously a very worthy winner (and can be heard at the end of Episode 12) – I somehow found myself writing lyrics for the second most popular tune “Sound of the Underground”.

Didn’t I have more important work to do? Shouldn’t I have been writing my Edinburgh show? Did the thought of calling this post Girls Alood make me giggle like a schoolgirl? The answer to all these questions is a resounding YES! Nevertheless, Laura has graciously recorded it and we present it here now as a sort of bonus feature.

And FYI, the song she’s come up with for Episode 13 is pure, unadulterated beautiful brilliance. See you on Wednesday.

Sound of the Underground