Quatermass II (BBC)

I watched the original The Quatermass Experiment a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it because it was the birth of populist television in the making. The Quatermass phenomenon became one of the BBC's greatest post-war triumphs and to watch these old, scratchy prints (although they have been cleaned up as much as possible for DVD) is like watching magic in motion!

So I came to Quatermass II with some excitement. I love these old B-movie type productions (whether they are TV or films) because I love to see what achievements they made with small budgets and technical expertise. And also, of course, they're often rollicking good yarns too.

Not so with Quatermass II. It starts well, building tension and gradually (and I mean gradually) unravelling the truth of what is going on at the mysterious synthetic food plant at Winnerdon Flats. It is slow, but I can accept that because the atmosphere is developed well by the director, and there's some nice location filming (especially when Quatermass goes to the factory, which I think was actually a Shell plant in Essex).

Episode 5 is called The Frenzy, and despite the expectation that this is when the action picks up and all hell breaks loose, it's quite the opposite. As soon as the villagers revolt and try to destroy the alien menace, the pace slows right down to a crawl, it gets horrifically talky and the direction takes a nosedive. It's almost as if the actors were left to their own devices for the final two weeks while Rudolph Cartier was off on holiday or something. It's a shambles.

The acting throughout is stilted at best. I'm not a fan of John Robinson's portrayal of Quatermass, and he plays the part as if he's only just read his lines for the first time. Sometimes that shows, as he falters over his words and often looks completely lost. I guess this might be because he was a very late replacement for Reginald Tate, who played Quatermass in the first serial in 1954 but who died of a heart attack while filming the location scenes for Quatermass II. Robinson must have come to this project very late, and it shows.

Elsewhere, we have the wet Monica Grey as Quatermass's daughter Paula (who looks desperately into camera to deliver her lines at any opportunity), and the bushy-browed Hugh Griffith as Dr Pugh, a man I wouldn't trust to make the tea, never mind go up in a space rocket to save the world.

The best performance of the entire six episodes is undoubtedly from Roger Delgado (who 16 years later would became the Master in Doctor Who), who plays a Fleet Street journalist chasing the secret of Winnerdon Flats alongside Quatermass. But when he gets possessed by the alien gas, Delgado puts in a fantastic performance which puts his colleagues to shame, and as he desperately tries to relate his story to his editor over the phone, the possession takes hold and he eventually succumbs. Delgado proves that not everyone acting for the BBC in the 1950s was doing so with a plumb in their mouth and a broom up their backside. Episode 4 (The Coming) is probably the best episode because of his sole contribution.

All in all, it's a disappointing serial. I think Quatermass is sorely miscast, and while Nigel Kneale's story is essentially good, it is adapted in quite a workmanlike way, particularly in light of the previous year's wonderful first serial. I think Cartier really drops the ball toward the end, resulting in a very dull episode 5 and a chaotic and confused finale.

Quatermass II, originally transmitted October 22nd - November 26th 1955.
Written by Nigel Kneale; directed by Rudolph Cartier.

Casting the Runes (1979) & Ghostwatch

Last night was Hallowe'en (I'm a stickler for that apostrophe!) and time for the traditional spooky evening of DVD watching in my household. We watched two cult items, and here are my thoughts on them.

ITV Playhouse: Casting the Runes

This 50 minute adaptation of an M R James ghost story was first shown as part of ITV Playhouse's eleventh season, and was recently released (inexplicably) on its own DVD by Network.

I've never read any of James's original stories, but am a great fan of TV and film adaptations of his work, so when I read that Ghost Story for Christmas aficionado Lawrence Gordon Clark was behind this, I had high expectations.

Sadly, it's not up to the same standard as Clark's finest work with the BBC. The story starts with an extremely atmospheric and well shot prelude where we see a man and his dog pursued by a strange something across a beautiful snowy field. The man is John Harrington, and his death seems to be down to the fact he wrote a scathing review of the latest supernatural book by author Julian ("big man") Karswell. Harrington ends up dead in a field, and his dog is never seen again (dogs never do well out of stories like this).

Some time later TV journalist Prudence Dunning mentions something derogatory about Karswell in one of her programmes, and soon enough she too has been cursed by the vengeful author. My advice is never become a writer if you can't take criticism.

But there's too much inconsistency and not enough brooding spookyness in this piece. Harrington's demise was thick with atmosphere, with a feeling of being watched and pursued, whereas all Dunning really gets is a giant rubber spider in her bed. Her efforts to break the curse by surreptitiously handing back to Karswell his runic slip of paper are half-hearted (donning a blonde wig and frilly blouse wouldn't even convince Stevie Wonder) and when she does finally manage to turn the tables, it's by impersonating a customs official at an airport, something I find so unconvincing (even for the pre-9/11 1970s) that it left me feeling disappointed and cheated.

I don't know if that's the same ending James originally wrote but it just feels like an all-too-easy attempt to be Tales of the Unexpected to me. The cast does a good job, but nothing that stands out, but it's Clark's location filming that makes the best impression - snowbound streets and countryside, and bonfires and fireworks, perfect viewing for a Hallowe'en night. It's just a shame the story's so unconvincing.

ITV Playhouse: Casting the Runes, originally transmitted April 24th 1979.

Written by Clive Exton from the M R James story; directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark.

Ghostwatch

Ghostwatch is infamous in the canon of cult British TV because of the almost hysterical reaction it got on its first (and only) broadcast. Produced and transmitted as part of BBC1's Screen One strand of one-off feature-length dramas, Ghostwatch attracted unprecedented media and public outcry because people thought it was real.

The problem was that it was made to look as if it was a live broadcast investigating hauntings at a house owned by a middle-aged mum and her two children. These days we're sick to death of this type of broadcast - Hospitalwatch, Springwatch, Crimewatch - but back then they were more popular, and more notice was taken of them.

Despite being billed as a drama, many were convinced it was real, happening live as they watched. There were strange cat noises behind the walls, scratches to the possessed teenager's face, "live" phone-ins, banging on the ceiling, quick glimpses of "something" lurking in the shadows and reflections of the house, and finally a full-on national seance, resulting in presenter Sarah Greene being sucked into a cupboard under the stairs, and Michael Parkinson being possessed in the studio.

It sounds silly, and some of it is. But back in 1992 so many people were convinced this was a real live broadcast, and that these girls were being possessed by a ghost, that switchboards were jammed, outraged leader articles filled the next day's papers and there was even one report of a young man killing himself because of watching Ghostwatch.

There's no denying that parts of it are effectively done. The scenes set in the studio, with a cynical Michael Parkinson interviewing the almost obsessive parapychologist Dr Lin Pascoe, are the most convincing, principally because of the trust the British public has in Parky. He was, and remains, a dependable figure, and provided an added layer of validity to the piece. This is also the case with Sarah Greene, a much-loved personality who had hosted children's TV through the 1980s and couldn't possibly be pulling the wool over viewers' eyes now...

Not so convincing is the use of cheeky chappy Craig Charles for the Outside Broadcast scenes (Charles was brought into this world simply to annoy, I think) and although the actress playing Pamela Earley was good, those playing her children were less skilled at pitching the reality right.

All in all, Ghostwatch is an effective and interesting piece of drama, a good experiment in distorting the narrative of both traditional TV drama and the up-and-coming reality TV. The quick glimpses keen-eyed viewers get of murderous disfigured paedophile Pipes are chilling, and the presence of Parkinson and Greene adds protracted weight until things really start getting silly toward the end.

Ghostwatch is much more convincing than some of the blatantly staged, desperate tripe today's Most Haunted trots out as entertainment.

Ghostwatch, originally transmitted October 31st 1992.

Written by Stephen Volk; directed by Lesley Manning.

I Love Lucy

I first saw Lucille Ball while holidaying in North America a few years ago. She seemed to be on at something like 6pm every evening, and when I actually sat down to watch it, I found it really funny, especially for its age.

Years later I saw an I Love Lucy box set going extremely cheaply in my local bookshop, so snapped it up and hoped I'd like it. I've been watching the series from the first episode, way back in 1951, and have to say it really has stood the test of time considerably.
Lucille Ball was a bit of a pioneer, both in terms of television comedy/ situation comedy and in the way she opened doors for female comedians, and made TV execs and viewers alike realise that a woman could carry a show herself, and be funny and successful too.

Lucy was a very talented and naturally funny lady. Although she didn't write these early I Love Lucy shows, it is her performance which turns amusing scripts into laugh out loud funny comedy more often than not. It is the physical comedy which impresses most - before Ball's rise to fame on US TV, most people had only really seen physical comedy and slapstick performed by men, such as Laurel and Hardy, Keaton and Abbot and Costello. But here was a woman who was confident in her ability to be funny and make people laugh, unbound by the usual need to maintain a respectable femininity for the public.

Those huge, innocent wide eyes, the pursed lips, the daft mop of curly hair, the slightly ungainly way she held herself. In Lucille Ball circa 1952 you can trace forward a direct link to Grace Adler from Will and Grace, devised 47 years later. Lucy was the obvious template for Grace, and while Debra Messing does the job well, it's very been there, done that. Lucille Ball was getting herself into ridiculous but hilarious scrapes four decades before Grace shacked up with a dysfunctional gay lawyer in New York.

I also like spotting what have subsequently become comedy cliches being invented. Like with Laurel and Hardy and their contemporaries, many of what we class as film cliches today were invented in the 1920s and 30s, and looking at them today you can see convention being created, before people knew what to expect. I Love Lucy's backbone is the now tried and trusted sit-com standard of misunderstanding - in the 1950s it was funny because it was new, in the 21st century it's only funny if you're putting a new spin on it. Or indeed, not doing it at all. Comedy runs out of ideas very quickly, but back in the 1950s there was no such danger because Lucille Ball was doing this for the first time.

I also have a box set of episodes from Lucille's later The Lucy Show series, in colour (1962-68), and look forward to charting the differences between these two series, and how comedy was performed then and now.

I Love Lucy, originally transmitted October 15th 1951 - May 6th 1957.

The Monster Walks

The IMDb synopsis says that this 60 minute feature is about "people in an old dark house on a stormy night being menaced by a killer ape", which suggests to me that whoever wrote that has never seen it. You'd be mistaken for thinking this is the case by looking at the video sleeve pictured, or even having seen the first half of the film.

But the truth is that while there is indeed a rather violent-looking chimp locked in a cage in the cellar, at no point does the chimp get out of the cage and menace people.

And that is, by and large, the twist of the film - throughout we are led to believe that the killer is the chimp, but in actual fact it's a 7ft tall manservant with a hairy monkey glove! So, in essence, at the end of the day, when it comes down to it, the monster doesn't walk, unless you label the killer manservant a monster. It's a classic case of narrative misdirection, and although told in a rather simplistic way, remember that this is 1932, before many filmmaking cliches and stereotypes had been invented.

The acting is expectedly stilted, but special mention must go to Martha Mattox (who, incidentally, died the following year, aged 55) as the truly unnerving Mrs Krug, while her son Hanns (Mischa Auer) has an indomitable presence too. There are some nice twists in this film, from Hanns strangling his own mother by accident, to the revelation that Hanns is Robert Earlton's illegitimate son, and all he really wants is for his father to acknowledge him. Of course, the fact Mr Earlton has been having it away with his late brother's ghoulish housekeeper obviously prevents him from admitting paternity!

It's a creaky old Thirties spookathon. It moves slowly, but the twists make it more enjoyable than most of its ilk. Just don't expect any walking monsters... !

The Monster Walks, released February 1932.
Written by Robert Ellis; directed by Frank R Strayer.

Lost in Space (US TV)

I have a separate blog for the American sci-fi series Lost in Space - see the link in my profile, or click here - http://lostinspacereviews.blogspot.com/. The blog will be updated as and when I reach the end of each of the three seasons.

Chimera (ITV)

Archive transfer - originally posted December 19th 2005 (contains spoilers)

When this four-part ITV thriller was first shown in 1991, I was a 15-year-old boy who really shouldn't have been as scared as I was!
Strapping 15-year-olds should be able to handle things like this, but there was something about the brutality of the creature Chad, and the way it was directed by Ghost Story for Christmas veteran Lawrence Gordon Clark that affected me.
Chimera was based on the Stephen Gallagher book of the same name and tells the tale of a journalist investigating the brutal murder of his ex-girlfriend while she was working at a fertility clinic. The clinic is actually the cover for a much more disturbing project involving cross-breeding the DNA of human and ape foetuses, resulting in the horrific chimera that is Chad in the story.
The story revolves around the journalist's quest to uncover the truth, and the authorities' quest to recapture and ultimately destroy the escaped creature.
Chad is a scary thing. Half man, half monkey, and wearing a Freddie Krueger style stripey jumper and Michael Myers dungarees, it escapes from the clinic in spectacularly bloody fashion, killing everyone he comes across and leaving the clinic ablaze and buried in bodies.
Episode one of the drama is a masterpiece of deception. We are introduced to lots of new characters, some sympathetic, others not, and then see them all ruthlessly hacked to bits by the episode's close at the hands of Chad and his kitchen knife. The massacre scenes are shocking and disturbingly directed, and I really don't think we would get some of the in-yer-face shots of stabbings these days. However, it manages to convey the confusion and anger the creature feels, and as the episode ends you really do fear for the lives of others out on the Yorkshire moors as the chimera is let loose.
Episodes 2-4 do not live up to the strong opening, and concentrate too much on the aftermath of Chad's outbreak, and not enough on Chad himself. Perhaps it works better for our focus to shift to the humans left behind, and let the escaped creature take a backseat for a while, but for me it slows the pace down enormously.
Horror fans will love episode one and creature fans will love episodes three and four, but the bits inbetween really do drag, as interesting as the premise is of a journalist on the run from the authorities and the uncovering of a hideous scientific cover-up.
John Lynch is suitably vulnerable and edgy as Peter Carson and Christine Kavanagh gives a great performance as the scientist whose conscience gets the better of her - but who is ultimately the reason so many innocent people die. Kenneth Cranham's character is there to represent the heartless mystery of the suits behind the cover-up, but Hennessey is ultimately a pointless, wasted character who does precisely nothing except leer over his half-moon specs. In episode four he has a scene where he talks to his daughter, whose stage play he has to miss, and you then assume he's going to end up dead and oh what a tragedy it all is. But no. That's pretty much the last you see of him.
The ending is a bit of a damp squib, the potential face-off between the Army and the creature at the centre of the rural community failing to capture any element of danger. Chad is shot, through a car window, and that's it.
All in all it's hard to see why I was so scared of this aged 15. It still has its eerie moments - including the bloody first episode and the cliffhanger to episode two - but the director does not make as much of the Chad creature as he could. I've seen "monster holed up in a barn" done much more effectively in Doctor Who's Terror of the Zygons and The Silurians.
Oh, and who the hell cast that kid as Peter Gaskell, the farmer's son who looks after Chad with his sister? It's his only IMDb entry, and thank god for that!

Chimera, originally transmitted July 7th-28th 1991.
Written by Stephen Gallagher; directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark.

The Naked Civil Servant

Archive transfer - originally posted September 22nd 2005

Quentin Crisp was - and in many ways still is - an enigma to me, certainly before I watched this DVD. I knew who he was, what he was known for, but next to nothing about how and why he became famous.
So when I watched his life story, made by ITV in 1975 and starring John Hurt in the title role, it was a real revelation. Before seeing it I assumed Crisp was just an eccentric homosexual who came to prominence for being overtly gay in the 60s, and thought little of why.
Now I know he was one of the earliest "victims" of reality TV, taking part in a ghoulish profile in World in Action which led to him being spotlighted, quizzed, cross-examined and generally hailed as Britain's latest weirdo.
Crisp was very eccentric, strange even. But he is arguably one of the greatest social heroes the UK has ever produced, and his legacy is a powerful and unattributed one. The fact he stood up to prejudice in his younger years and went about a one-man campaign to raise the profile of homosexuality was a very brave and pioneering thing to do.
Unashamed of his sexuality, he paraded himself before his peers and enemies as a proud, gay man - by sacrificing his own privacy and dignity, he made a stand for the pink cause and became one of our modern heroes.
The violence and ridicule he endured in the name of justice is astounding. He was a martyr to his cause, to the cause of all gay men in Britain, and his life was sacrificed to it, albeit through choice. By raising the physical awareness of homosexuals he made people face up to and reason with their prejudices, and inevitably enabled people to develop their own thoughts and opinions about homosexuality without having a homophobic standard foisted upon them.
Of course, many may argue that Crisp was the wrong person to do this. His overt effeminacy and sexual escapades (as documented in TNCS) probably did more to turn people against homosexuality than in favour of it, but I argue that if you're going to make somebody face up to homosexuality, you may as well do it properly. How can anyone form a proper opinion about how they feel about homosexuality if they are faced with the straightest acting poof this side of 'Frisco? Straight acting gay men (of which I am one) blend in too well (which is, I'd have thought, a good thing), but campness and effeminacy bring homosexuality to the surface. And if you can accept that, or are willing to accept that, then you're near as dammit a "convert". For convert, read "non-bigoted open-minded liberal".
The scene in TNCS in which Crisp is up before the judge for allegedly approaching men for sex is my favourite in the film. Hurt is stunning, and the script is written beautifully. I don't know whether this was a fictionalised episode of his life, but it was certainly done well.
I ended this film believing Quentin Crisp, the original Englishman in New York, to be one of the 20th century's greatest heroes. He was a martyr, and in return for all of the prejudice and violence he endured in the name of Being Himself, I hold him up as one of my own personal heroes, someone with courage, conviction and vision who did so much groundwork for the campaigners that came after him.
Quentin Crisp, I salute you.

The Naked Civil Servant, originally transmitted December 17th 1975
Written by Philip Mackie from the Quentin Crisp autobiography; directed by Jack Gold.

Neverwhere (BBC)

Archive transfer - originally posted September 8th 2005 (contains spoilers)

When this six-part series first went out on BBC2 in 1996, it was hailed as the best fantasy drama the Beeb had produced for a long while (mainly because it might be argued it was the only fantasy drama it had produced in a long while!).
It was also seen by some as a way of filling the gap left by Doctor Who and shutting up the fans who demanded genre TV from their licence fee.
Based on a book by Neil Gaiman (a man continually in need of a haircut), Neverwhere just doesn't work for me. It was presented as an adult dramatisation of a book written for adults in mind, but the end result is a rather limp series that has all the hallmarks of what Doctor Who might have become if it had lasted until the late 90s.
There's nothing lasting about the series. The production values are dated, the acting is, in parts, abysmal, and the plot as adapted for the screen simply does not warrant three hours of TV. I haven't read the book, and I assume there was more in it than what we get on screen, but what we did get could easily have fitted into four half hour slots - your average Doctor Who serial.
It's not all bad. The scenes in the floating market on HMS Belfast are wonderful, and the series as a whole is well directed by Dewi Humphries. There's some great set design from James Dillon (especially the Angel Islington's lair) and Brian Eno's music, although devoid of passion or power, kind of fits well with the lazy pace of the story.
My favourite aspects of the TV adaptation are the cameo performances of the wonderfully imagined undergrounders. I love Trevor Peacock's Old Bailey and Tanya Moodie's Hunter, and there are some juicy performances from Hywel Bennett as Mr Croup, Tamsin Greig as Velvet Lamia, Timothy Bateson as Halvard, and Paterson Joseph as the sublime Marquis de Carabas. In fact, if there's anyone who deserves particular praise it's Joseph, who gives the Marquis a wonderful presence and character pretty much missing elsewhere.
That's what's wrong, you see. The story and setting are both rich tapestries, almost pretentiously so. But without strong performances to bring these larger than life characters into three dimensions - so that you care when Hunter dies, or you care when the Marquis dies, or you care when Richard has his finger broken - you're not making the essential link between screen and viewer. You start watching it as spectacle rather than as engrossing entertainment.
Some of the blandest performances come from Laura Fraser as Door, Gary Bakewell as Richard Mayhew and Peter Capaldi as the Angel Islington - arguably three of the most centrally important characters. Bakewell tries, but fails to provoke any sympathy in his wimpy Scot; Fraser fails magnificently in giving Door any kind of believable emotions; and Capaldi's evil villain simply does not convince, although that's less his fault and more the casting directors'.
Neverwhere would have been much more successful if more attention was paid to characterisation and tighter plotting. It fails almost every time to provide a gripping, or even vaguely interesting, cliff-hanger, and as rich and enjoyable as the set and costume design is, nothing can hide the fact that from beginning to end, Neverwhere is a largely uninvolving series.
Only the death of Hunter, one of my favourite characters, managed to engage me in the way human drama should. Other than that, I cared little about whether Richard and Door got it together, I was less than bothered whether the Angel succeeded in his evil plot or not, and despite Joseph's creditable performance, I wasn't all that fussed that he was bumped off half way through the story (and just as unfussed by his miraculous return).
Neverwhere was the BBC trying to do something half-heartedly. It could have been great, landmark. It could have been the Gormenghast of the 1990s, but in the end it was just another foil-wrapped genre runaround, consigned to the swampy archives of the BBC, remembered perhaps as what Doctor Who's Paradise Towers could have been like if the production team stuck to the writer's original ideas... but that's another story!

Neverwhere, originally transmitted September 12th - October 17th 1996
Written by Neil Gaiman, devised by Neil Gaiman and Lenny Henry; directed by Dewi Humphreys

Queer As Folk (UK)

Archive transfer - originally posted August 30th 2005

When this controversial series hit Channel 4's screens back in 1999, the right-wing conservative press were spitting feathers (maybe even feather boas!). The controversy surrounding the broadcast of a major British drama that blew the lid on the real lives of young gay men at the turn of the millennium was out of all proportion. Granted, scenes of rimming, ejaculation, three-way sex sessions, drug taking and oodles of swearing was pushing the envelope, but then someone had to do it, and why not Channel 4 as '99 turned to a new century?
Five years after the second series aired, it's hard to see what all the fuss was about, so much further back have the boundaries been pushed by QAF. The gay sex aspects are still quite in-your-face, but then if you're not the type to want to see such scenes, you're hardly going to be tuning into a series such as this anyway.
QAF was made for gay men and open-minded liberals, and no amount of moaning from the blue rinse brigade or right-wing middle Englanders was ever going to alter the fact that they had nothing to do with it. This wasn't for them, it wasn't meant to be watched by a populist majority audience. It was TV for the Y2K youth, not the WW2 grey perspectives.
But what of the series itself? Well, the acting is a bit touch and go, particularly Craig Kelly as Vince, who is likeable enough but fails to act in any natural or convincing way, and simply comes over as if he's saying his lines, rather than performing them.
Aiden Gillen is the undoubted star turn of the series, as unlikeable as his character Stuart may be. Everything about Gillen's performance as the predatory 29-year-old Casanova is studied, from the cheeky Irish grin to the slicked back hair, from the gravity-defying walk to the outbursts of anger and frustration. Stuart Alan Jones is a monstrous creation, but one I am sure is based in some form on concentrated reality, which in itself is scary.
Charlie Hunnam does well as the schoolboy whose coming out through the course of the serial is well played, and to compare the Nathan of series 1 episode 1 (in which this GCSE gayer is seduced and thrown asunder by the sexual velociraptor that is Stuart) to series 2 episode 2 (in which Nathan has outgrown his dependency on Stuart, and has learnt to play the field) is remarkable.
Russell T Davies really did produce gold with this series, and unearthed some top talent in the process. Many of the associations Davies made on QAF he has taken on and developed throughout his subsequent career, taking people such as musician Murray Gold and casting director Andy Prior on through his career right up to the current Doctor Who revival.
Five years after QAF made the straight world aware of the existence of Canal Street and what nuggets of socio-cultural gold it held for the like-minded and dispossessed, it might be argued that by making gay culture out to be so great, so cool and attractive, the Canal Street we see in QAF no longer exists.
It has become a Saturday night haven for gaggles of straight girls who feel safe away from the prying eyes of young straight males after a bit of skirt. Straight males who don't mind the camper side of life go there to sniff out the gaggles of girls hiding from their charms. Married couples go there too, most probably to reassure themselves that their humdrum straight married 2.4 life together is normal, that they can't possibly be as unhappy as they think they are. Canal Street has become a freak show for the wider world, whereas before it was a niche for gay and lesbian people who felt uncomfortable being themselves amid the prejudices of everyday life.
The world that attracted people to QAF has gone. But just like Stuart and Vince when they sped off to the United States at the end of the series, there will always be the memories. There will never be anything quite as queer as folk.

Queer As Folk, originally transmitted February 23rd 1999 - April 13th 1999 (series 1); February 15th-22nd 2000 (series 2)
Written by Russell T Davies; directed by Sarah Harding and Charles McDougall

Jamie and the Magic Torch

Archive transfer - originally posted August 9th 2005

I was born the same year that this well-loved Cosgrove Hall animation debuted in 1976, but it was repeated at lunchtimes right through until the late 1980s, when I was at secondary school. And it never lost its lustre.
I got the whole of series one on DVD for a fiver the other week and finally got round to sitting and watching the first episode, Mr Boo Loses a Mountain (careless chap!), last night. It only lasts 10 minutes, and about a fifth of that is taken up with the memorable opening and closing credits which see Jamie tucked up in bed by his mum.
But the episode itself is completely bonkers! The characters that live in Cuckoo Land are surely the products of the most drug-addled imaginations possible. They say The Magic Roundabout was dreamt up by hash-smoking animators, but this is another dimension!
Mr Boo, the moustachioed, bespectacled mad professor who flies around in a floating submarine is just about within my grasp, but then we have a policeman with a wheel for legs, an orange creature who uses his nose as a flute, a talking Old English Sheepdog, and a yellow and black cat with a broad Scottish accent.
And they don't half talk some flob. I know it's for kids, and kids loved it (indeed, I loved it!), but there's never much of a cohesive story. Maybe that was the point - this is Cuckoo Land after all, and there aren't many sane destinations at the foot of a helter skelter under your bed. Or any, in fact.
It seems like I'm dissing Jamie and the Magic Torch, but I'm not. I think it has aged quite badly, with its 1970s groovyness and psychedelic colour schemes, but it remains a compellingly cheerful show that pushes the imagination further than many kids' shows, certainly these days.
What these characters are doing or saying might make little sense, but that is made up for in the imagination of the viewing child. A child will make sense of it, will impress upon it their own idea of what is going on. This art of creative imagining is largely lost when we grow up and become boring adults, more interested in food and sex and TV and paying the bills than imagining what it's like to have a magic torch and disappear to a fantasy world beneath our beds.
The loss of imagination and creative depth when we grow up is a sad fact of life. Of course, not all adults lose their creative streak - if they did, things such as Jamie and the Magic Torch wouldn't exist - but it is important to remember we were all children once, and we all thought as children do, with enthusiasm, daring and absolutely no limitations.
Those who remain creative into adulthood are lucky. Those who have lost it should perhaps try and rekindle that innocent magic by revisiting their childhoods, and digging out old series like Jamie and the Magic Torch.

Jamie and the Magic Torch, originally transmitted 1976-79 (three series).
Written and narrated by Brian Trueman, animation directed by Keith Scoble.

The Day of the Triffids (BBC)

Archive transfer - originally posted June 23rd 2005

I loved this six-part series so much. Having never read the book by John Wyndham, all I really knew about the story was from my sparse memories of the series being shown on TV originally in the 1980s. I remember it was creepy, it was scary and the Triffids were ace.
The Day of the Triffids was made in the era of tight budgets on similar genre programmes such as Doctor Who and Blake's 7, but that financial restraint really doesn't show here. Granted, there isn't much need for a huge budget to pay for ever-changing sets or special effects (there is a sumptuous amount of location filming), but the series is produced so professionally that there are no wobbly sets or clumsy acting (although for some obscure reason the usually brilliant Maurice Colbourne puts in a real clunker of a performance in episode six).
The Triffids themselves are realised surprisingly well. They're obviously BBC Visual Effects models, but they're never rubbish, and the way by which they move - and the eerie knocking against their bases in communication - is very effective. The sting effect is well done too, so top marks for the realisation of the one aspect of the story that could have turned a solid drama into a hammy mess.
The star of the show is undoubtedly John Duttine who puts in a superb, dependable performance throughout (and cheered me up no end when he stripped to the waist in episode six to reveal a forest of chest hair! Pity about the beard though).
I love the fact the story focuses much more on the human situation, and leaves the monsters in the background. How humanity would react to an apocalyptic set of events such as the Triffid invasion is depicted wonderfully by showing one-on-one human interaction, and also demonstrating the different ways factions might form and decide to take the future of civilisation in different ways - sometimes feudal, sometimes equal, sometimes fascistic. This focus on the humans puts the Triffids out of focus, which is a little disappointing in that over six episodes we learn almost nothing about them, why this has happened, how this has happened and where they came from. No doubt this is intentional, to shroud the enemy in mystery, but after three hours I would have liked a few ideas as to why I was watching the series!
All in all a brilliant series - adult, professional, thoughtful and realistic. Only Gary Olsen's sideburns detract from what was a formidable adaptation of a great story. So good, in fact, that you get the feeling they never need remake or adapt the book again. It's been done once, it's been done well, and if you have ever seen the 1962 Steve Sekely version, you'll agree with me!*

* Doctor Who fans might be interested to learn that this film version has an early appearance from actress Carole Ann Ford as Bettina.

The Day of the Triffids, originally transmitted September 10th - October 15th 1981.
Written by Douglas Livingstone from the John Wyndham novel; directed by Ken Hannam.

The Nightmare Man

Archive transfer - originally posted June 6th & June 15th 2005 (contains spoilers)

Just started to watch this classic BBC drama from the 1980s which was released on DVD earlier this year and am really enjoying it. Have only seen two of the four episodes so far, but it's intriguing and slightly scary, which is only to be expected as it is dramatised by classic Doctor Who stalwart Robert Holmes. He knew how to turn on the chills, as did director Douglas Camfield, who directed some of the better 1970s Who stories too.
I have to admit to being wholly unconvinced by Celia Imrie in any serious dramatic role these days; ever since she did Acorn Antiques with Victoria Wood, I can't take her seriously, it completely ruined her image as a serious actress for me. And her Scottish accent's a bit pants too.
But the series is still enjoyably entertaining, although I can't quite work out whether it's aimed at adults or children. It has some very gruesome imagery in the dialogue, but the treatment is reminiscent of 70s Who. I shall wait and see how it pans out and report back after episode four...

Well, I completed episodes three and four and thoroughly enjoyed the whole series, although it was rather disappointing when it emerged that the Creature was actually a mutant Russian marine and not a slavering monster from another world.
Having said that, I suppose you could still argue that the Nightmare Man and his Vodyanoi pod were alien, and the human-looking recovery team supposedly from the other side of the Iron Curtain were just aliens in disguise. There is never any evidence of Russian origin.
The story was well directed by Camfield, but the standard of acting has visibly come on in leaps and bounds since this series went out over 20 years ago. There's nothing essentially wrong with the acting, but like most of the classic series of Doctor Who, you can just tell that these actors are over-rehearsed and sometimes just quoting their scripts rather than performing them.
These days, acting is a much finer art and comes across as quite a natural process on the screen. That naturalness cannot be easy to get right first time, never mind on Take No. 61, so all credit to today's more successful actors. I definitely think British standards have risen.

The Nightmare Man, originally transmitted May 1st-22nd 1981.
Written by Robert Holmes from the David Wiltshire novel; directed by Douglas Camfield.