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