Sunday 28 October 2018

Arachnids in the UK

I love Dinosaurs on a Spaceship. I love the crassest of Chris Chibnall’s Torchwood episodes: I’m an absolute sucker for Cyberwoman. That probably makes me the worst person in the world to review Arachnids In the UK but… I bloody loved it.

After three episodes of a series which seems to have been desperately trying to ape Russell T Davies’s simpler template for Doctor Who without quite generating the same energy and swag, here is the first episode which feels truly like a vision from Chris Chibnall and it’s all the better for it. For the first time, the companions really do click. There is a place for each of them in the narrative. It’s easy to see why they should be working. Graham’s grieving for Grace has been a surface spattering of character up to now but here it defines him and the scenes in his house, with Grace out of focus, are the restrained highlights in an episode all about the monstrous visual spectacle. Ryan is funny in the face of adversity and along with last week’s “Thanks, Ryan. Nice one, Ryan” after his blasting away of Krasko and this week’s headbanging scene, he is fast becoming the comic relief we can relate to, the unexpected revelation of his reading his father’s letter coming at a vitally tense moment. For the first time too, we get to know Yaz and she’s quite lovely. Four weeks in, this is too little, too late, but as of now, we have a TARDIS team that have very clear motivations to travel and for the first time in a long time, the series feels freer, more open to the universe, with fewer reasons than ever to return home. The last TARDIS scene, despite some traditionally trite dialogue (“The thing with grief is it takes time.”) is the most spirited, hopeful and promising the show has been in years. That’s a lot of firsts for this series.

Special mention this week must go to Chris Noth as the loathsome Robertson. He is the very embodiment of a Doctor Who villain and along with the Stenza, Ilin and Krasko is forming a long line of Chibnall adversaries unafraid to be simply and unapologetically unpleasant. Evil bastards were notably absent from much of the Moffat era and despite my deep love of the Sherlock-writer’s years with our favourite Time Lord, it’s so lovely to have them back. Noth gives a perfectly pitched performance, snarling and ugly, terrifically funny and totally lacking in self-awareness, like the best pantomime villains. If he doesn’t hit the Number One spot of Favourite Male Guest Star in this year’s DWM poll, there must be ludicrously brilliant performances to come in the next six weeks. He is sensational.

I am terrified of spiders. They make my skin crawl and I spent much of the episode feeling a bit sick between belly laughs. Like Chibnall’s best work in the Doctor Who universe, he balances scares and laughs with aplomb. Perhaps it’s that Arachnids in the UK sets itself up as an archetypal B-Movie that his dialogue decisions really work this week. Yes, there are some very obvious, let’s say cheesy, choices, and the amount of times that someone declared that Sheffield/Yorkshire/this city had a problem with spiders was almost uncountable. But that heightened dialogue chimed with this world of Info-Dump Extraordinaire Dr Jade McIntyre and a man with a Personal Panic Room in every hotel across the world. When dealing with gigantic spiders and gigantic egos, who cares if the dialogue is similarly gigantic? And while I’m on the subject, this is the first time, despite a few flirtations, that Doctor Who has actually managed to make those gigantic spiders properly scary. They look convincing and gut-wrenching and I can’t quite believe I actually cared for one by the story’s conclusion.

Directorially, Sallie Aprahamian is the best we’ve had so far. She may not have the cinematic vistas of The Ghost Monument or Rosa to play with but she has a better sense of pace and spectacle, proving an ace at capturing a moment. The first few POV shots of scuttlings across the floor, the entire bathroom sequence and the explorations of the coal mine are stand-out achievements, and as classic, traditional Doctor Who as it’s possible to get. (Shades of The Green Death and Barry Letts’s Economist column, Hinchcliffe-era horror and RTD character drama all rolled into one.) Such scenes are the very essence of the show and it’s relieving and promising to know that Chris Chibnall seems suddenly to know exactly what he’s doing on this account.

Overall, this is the most unashamed Doctor Who episode in a long time. It’s shameless hokum, full of incident, thrills, laughs and scares. There’s nothing deep about it – although the environmental messages strangely manage to hit home in the middle of this operatic horror – but it has a very definite agenda: to entertain. This is perfect Saturday night entertainment broadcast on Sundays. Even Segun Akinola’s back on form. For the first time this season, I’m “with” Doctor Who again. And it feels bloody terrific.

8/10

JH

Rosa

Rosa represents the sort of material which makes it very, very difficult to review without wondering what sort of reaction you might get from the very vocal, paradoxically right-on left brigade. I am as liberal and lefty as they come, believing everything the Doctor believes in, but I endured a humiliating defeat when arguing with my – staggeringly intelligent – younger cousin when she spat the words, “You would say that because you’re a straight white male” at me. Onlookers may have seen me manually retrieve my jaw from the floor and force my opinions back inside my mind where they so obviously belonged. Now, I am neither a man of colour, nor a female, so I fear that whatever I have to say about Rosa may be rendered worthless by people who seem to think that straight white males are incapable of empathy with anyone other than straight white males. A straight white male wrote half this story alongside renowned author Malorie Blackman, and it’s only by the standards of his last few writerly efforts that I can judge Rosa.

To be fair, the first scene on the bus is pretty magnificent. Although the dialogue is as on-the-nose as dialogue is ever likely to be, it’s directed with furious intent. Trevor White plays the loathsome character of bus driver James Blake without fear of looking ugly and a truthful, hateful abomination of a man lives and breathes vividly on the screen. Vinette Robinson as the eponymous Rosa Parks is, by contrast, remarkably and powerfully understated, the strength of her performance in her quiet resilience and stoicism. 
Moments of brilliance abound over the next ten minutes. It’s a real thrill to see the TARDIS materialise in the alleyway of a truly all-American-looking 50s Montgomery and doesn’t the new exterior look completely delicious? There is the strongest sense of place here, wiping the floor with the likes of Daleks in Manhattan which made do with a few plate shots to simulate the USA. The scene in the street in which Ryan picks up the lady’s handkerchief and is slapped by her husband for being black is extraordinarily powerful in its illustration of the banality of such everyday racism. It’s almost impossible to believe that the mindset of the population of this town was as such a mere 63 years ago. Such contemptuous behaviour is unthinkable to the rational, modern even humane mind and it’s almost impossible to imagine why people decided to treat each other this way in the first place. The brief interchange here illustrates the issues faced by people of colour economically and with a hard-hitting, almost literal punch. The only problem with this scene is that it’s the most powerful one in the episode, saying everything this episode has to say in thirty seconds without feeling the need to explain itself.
The biggest issue with the show on the whole right now is the clunky dialogue. I worried about Chris Chibnall’s propensity for graceless, sledgehammer tactics and here, the lines could all be screamed at us and we wouldn’t notice the difference so aggressively unsubtle and expositional are so many of the passages. The worst offending scenes are Ryan and Yaz’s disclosure on racism behind the bins and that last TARDIS lecture, impotently importantly delivered by Jodie Whittaker. To see the events take place in themselves is enough to persuade any remotely empathetic human being that these acts are despicable. The running commentary is unnecessary and not a little patronising. Awkward dialogue elsewhere that isn’t making points at us feels amateurish too: signposting the means of Ryan’s defeat of Krasko in the hotel room so blatantly is toe-curlingly poor writing.
Aside from the very funny Banksy joke, there’s so little humour here that the subject matter starts to feel po-faced and over-reverential rather than important, thought-provoking and above all real. It is as if the writing team have made a list of What We Can’t Possibly Do Because It Might Offend Someone ideas and stymied their own creative flow. For instance, monsters would render the ideas on offer laughable, so we can’t have any of those. Imagine the headlines. (Worked for Vincent Van Gogh but he was only insane, not a person of colour.) We can’t have any of the characters from the future talk to Rosa about her decision because (even though that’s exactly what a person from the future might do and would make for extremely interesting conversations) it would render Rosa without agency. We have to have a person of colour aboard the TARDIS so that the team’s commentary isn’t from a white-only perspective. It feels like any other TARDIS team couldn’t have had this adventure without some corner of the internet feeling offended. It’s a sad reflection of society that every aspect of this production feels artificially constructed because it feels the need to tread as carefully around subjects as the TARDIS team do when stepping into history. The story is so busy telling us how obviously wrong racism is that it forgets to explore its roots and complexities and essentially its drama.
What’s more, we’re stuck with a villain lacking any kind of presence. He can’t possibly match Vinette Robinson’s stoic Rosa nor even Jodie Whittaker’s more affirmative Doctor. Granted, in a rather neat conceit, he can’t harm or kill anyone thanks to a nice nod back to Stormcage Prison and the intricacies of his scheming – the damaging of the bus and the mocked-up timetables – make for exciting, unusually small-scale problems to solve. However, Joshua Bowman looks like a Strictly dancer as opposed to a white, racist, criminal time-travelling supremacist. Surely casting someone as cranny, tortured and frightening looking as Ken Bones or Ian Hanmore would have made more sense than America’s next Top Model? The point might be that racism is invisible and that sexy young bucks can be racists too but Bowman isn’t remotely scary despite Segun Akinola’s valiant attempts to flag up the threat level with some discordant strings every time Bowman walks flaccidly into shot.
In fact, Akinola is suffering his first off-day. Last week’s Ghost Monument score was thrillingly industrial and other-worldly. Here, he provides a story about the evils of America with a saccharine cavalcade of We Love America horns. He’s even replaced in the last few minutes by Andra Day singing the embarrassingly over-produced Rise Up (probably from Chris Chibnall’s Spotify playlist along with that bloody awful Glorious song from the adverts), which criminally overwrites the closing theme tune, at the last minute making the powerful events of the climax seem distastefully mawkish. 
That final bus scene, however, has moments of supreme tension. (Doctor Who definitely has a history of brilliant bus scenes, even in this episode alone!) Jodie Whittaker makes her best performance choices so far here, unnerved that the bus is noticeably emptier than planned. The realisation that she and her companions must stand by and watch the most unjust prejudice unfold is gut-wrenching and were it not for the overblown musical choices, the sequence might have really hit home.
There’s no denying Rosa’s heart is in the right place. It’s exciting that Doctor Who wants to tackle the issues that matter. (The Sylvester McCoy era is my spiritual Doctor Who home and a part of that is down to its obsession with becoming socially relevant and dare I say it, trendily on-message.) But Rosa goes about its exploration of 1955 Montgomery in as blatant and unadventurous a way as possible. It’s striking that it dares to say Paki but it can’t bring itself to say the less anachronistic, more controversial Nigger. It’s walking so carefully on a tightrope that it never gets to say anything truly hard-hitting, other than the least controversial message conceivable: Racism is Still Bad. For a show as optimistic as Doctor Who, which in the past has relished the idea that racism in the future is all but defunct, Captain Jack for example refusing to notice species let alone skin colour, the bad guy here is disappointingly just another racist from the future. 
As is only proper, it is Vinette Robinson who perhaps leaves the drama with the most dignity intact. She brings heart, poise and reality to some hokey lines and says so much with facial expressions alone. In fact, she wipes the floor with the regular cast, bringing us to the show’s second biggest issue at the minute: the cast aren’t strong enough to sustain the clunky dialogue. They all of them, even the more experienced Bradley Walsh make the most obvious, “first-reading” choices and flag up the cliched, hackneyed nature of the ham-fisted lines they are dealt. Next week, we can be sure of three things: the title sequence will still look utterly gorgeous, the TARDIS set will still look utterly wretched and we’ll still be in the company of perhaps the most uncharismatic set of regulars we’ve ever had. Hopefully, Vinette Robinson has taught everyone, from writers to actors to directors, that less is so obviously more.
4/10
JH

Friday 19 October 2018

The Delian Mode: The Radiophonic Music of Doctor Who


Before I ever had a CD player, I had two Doctor Who CDs: The Five Doctors and Earthshock, soundtrack CDs from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. It seemed like an eternity before a small Sharp ghetto-blaster arrived in my bedroom and oh, what sounds greeted me!
Despite the infuriating lack of Paddy Kingsland (Hello, Logopolis soundtrack! Where are you?), the likes of Malcolm Clarke, Peter Howell and Roger Limb were plenty for a young mind to immerse themselves in. Favourites included the Janissary Band from Snakedance, that Five Doctors Gallifreyan horn, Warriors of the Deep (the music of which is easily the best aspect of the whole production) and those exotic howls of the desert Planet of Fire. Earthshock’s March of the Cybermen was also an oft-repeated track in that little attic bedroom. My early Doctor Who experience is steeped in the aura of these two CDs. When I think of the time spent reading the books, magazines and comics of my youth, they’re entrenched in electronica. I even came to like Exploring the Lab from Four to Doomsday
My Dad was a private gardener when I was young and would often come home with nick-nacks gifted to him by his usually well-off clients. One day, he brought home a tape recorder. No mic was needed to record one’s voice, just some empty C90s and the ability to press two buttons at once. It was probably more of an early Dictaphone. But the recorder, along with the music and the issues of Classic Comics I’d been collecting meant for one thing: my brothers and I could record our own Doctor Who Audio Adventures! When I think back, this being well before the days of Big Finish and with only The Pescatons, The Paradise of Death and The Ghosts of N-Space to epitomise the auditory landscape, we must have been veritable pioneers.
I was always the Doctor because I was the eldest and most selfish. James, second eldest but with a ridiculously high voice, played the main villains: his Extortioner was to die for.  The youngest brothers, the twins, played the minor parts but usually one of them quit halfway through production after repeated failed attempts at the same couple of lines. Favourite scripts included Death Flower, The Urgrakks and the Troughton epic with the big spiders: “Die hideous creature, die!” Always, we used those two CDs as soundtracks to our adventures. Meglos, with its rattling screech, we had a particular fondness towards so it was nice to see a similar approach to music adopted by Steven Moffat and Richard Curtis’s team on The Curse of Fatal Death.
Sound effects was the major area in which we were decidedly inefficient although the feminists would have had a problem with our all-male casts despite there being only one female in the house (and Mum was not remotely interested). We tried desperately in the recording of Death Flower to make the sound of a twig snapping. We broke pencils in half over and over again, but the mic simply didn’t pick them up. In the end, we resorted to one of us actually saying, “Snap!” We joke squirmingly about this over dinner parties to this day.
My personal favourite production was a script I’d written myself: The Game Show of Death in which the Doctor, Jo Grant and the Brigadier were invited onto a panel show whose losers were killed. The cliff-hanger to my young ears sounded amazing. One of us screamed, “No Brigadier!” then we used the sound of Viner getting shot in The Tomb of the Cybermen and the music cut in, Spearhead from Space-style, without sting, all of a sudden. It was a ludicrously satisfying moment of childhood creativity. I do still love those Spearhead cliff-hangers just as much as I love a sting. And remain irrationally irritated when the sting criminally fades in. It’s nice to have a couple of shots over the top. The Robots of Death Part Two or even The Woman Who Fell to Earth are classic examples of how to do the sting well.
Being fascinated by the electronic music of Doctor Who - as close as humankind is likely to get to the music of the spheres - I am currently thrilling at composer Segun Akinola’s move towards incidental atmospherics as opposed to recognisable tunes. Look at his Ghost Monument score: the first seven minutes of the episode take a good while to form into solidly recognisable music, industrial clanging and an electronic bassline building and building to generate tension almost unnoticeably. By the time the spaceship is crashing, those alien drums are pounding. I so hope this is indicative of the rest of this season. Weird, synthetic musical confusion has been missing from the show since its return, apart from a few moments in Forest of the Dead and Heaven Sent, which remain orchestral for the most part. I must give a passing mention to Into the Dalek too here: that was a strikingly different score with plenty of 1980s electronic overtones. 
Someone noted recently that electronic scores are what a programme is granted before it has the money to find an orchestra. Doctor Who did things the other way round. Twice. JNT’s introduction of the Radiophonic Workshop mirrors Chris Chibnall’s appointment of Segun Akinola at the musical helm of our favourite show. I hope one day, somewhere in another little attic bedroom, some other children are finding their own ways to adapt the music of Doctor Who: to create new worlds and times, to act and imagine and live inside the rapture of the show, to make the show their own through the electronic majesty of its wondrous music. 
JH

Sunday 14 October 2018

The Ghost Monument

This week’s instalment of the brand-new, spruced up version of that show we used to know as Doctor Who starts with ten minutes of the most visually arresting material the series has ever put on screen. The new title sequence itself is beautiful, new and old at the same time, with a great underwater backwards dive a few seconds in before the ubiquitous musical howl kicks us into space. Its only problem as far as I can see is its brevity. Then we’re plunged headlong into a world of starships and planets.

Quite wonderfully, we witness the arrival of our heroes in the spaceships from the perspectives of our characters. We see more of the inside than the out of these craft – which look magnificent in all their CG glory – and the colour palette within is rich and deep and otherworldly.  Then we’re on an alien planet which feels genuine in a way that matte shots and CG vistas simply cannot emulate. Here we have a desert, a sea, a mountain range and an empty city, each location as convincing and bold as the one before, all real places. The money shot though is that furiously crashing spaceship. Graham, Ryan and Angstrom run desperately through the sand as the ship plummets through the sky towards them. Never has a spaceship felt so very present in a Doctor Who story and this is just the sort of visual flamboyance the show has perhaps missed over the last three years. It feels like a long time since Big Ben being destroyed or a hospital on the moon or even a giant dinosaur in London, but the opening of The Ghost Monument, together with last week’s crane stunts, suggests Chris Chibnall has an eye for a punctuating visual. 

The plot itself is intriguing but slight: a race to the other side of Desolation. For the most part the action is pacey though the stretch across the ocean threatens to knock the wind of its sails, for wont of a better term. Chibnall uses these quieter moments to look at his characters but the writing is a little on the nose and lacks grace. I found myself finishing Epzo’s predictable story for him and the scenes between Graham and Ryan are a little unpolished and lack truth. Chibnall writes with a lot of heart but he hasn’t got a great ear for dialogue. Still, better to have heart than pure purple prose. 

We also get to see our new Doctor in action, perhaps more stabilised than last week. To be frank, I still have major misgivings about Jodie Whittaker as Doctor Who. Her breathy, forced delivery feels patronising, as if she needs to explain her performance choices to us as she makes them. The technobabble doesn’t sound at all natural and she plays the cliched reading of her more dramatic lines every single time. I’m sincerely hoping I’ll either get used to her or she’ll get better. She simply needs to relax; treat the lines as if she says this kind of every day. At the minute, she is ploughing every ounce of energy into even the most mundane line and becoming grating. This is a woman who I thought was outstanding in Broadchurch so I’m struggling to see what’s gone so wrong. Perhaps Ms Whittaker is just very limited.

Tragically, after all the imaginative panoramas, beautiful landscapes and design innovation, the new TARDIS set is awful, isn’t it? For a kick-off, it’s far too small: the ceiling is too low and the room feels claustrophobic. It’s the only room in the show so far to have felt like a set. The over-sized, orange, crystalline plinths mean there’s no space for a four shot by the console. It almost looks as if it’s been shot against black drapes, so dark and seemingly non-existent are the walls. And the custard cream maker is neither funny nor kooky. When everything else this series is so wondrous to look at, it’s a shame the TARDIS doesn’t seem to stand for anything: it isn’t homely, atmospheric, sterile, magical or sensory. It’s just black and orange.

I must make mention of Susan Lynch and Shaun Dooley who bring a re-assuring and welcome earthiness to an entirely outlandish adventure, their regional accents routing the drama in reality. I’m still not convinced by our main cast, although Bradley Walsh stole all the glory this week after an unsure start in The Woman Who Fell to Earth. All in all though, for a story taking in so many alien environments, this was an easy-to-follow, linear adventure, full of exciting set-pieces and stunning visuals. It wasn’t a story that was actually about very much though and the set-pieces sometimes felt like the skeleton of a story that wasn’t really there. Hopefully, next week, we’ll have something just as beautiful but a little meatier to digest.
6/10
JH

Guest Stars #1: Philip Madoc

One of the greatnesses of both Classic and Nu-Who is the vast theatre of actors it employs in its guest spots. As Philip Hinchcliffe once ruminated: actors could rock up and “do a turn” as usually, Doctor Who afforded them a part slightly bigger than in other shows. Of course, there are several types of guest actor: the professional corker (Julian Glover; William Gaunt; Derek Jacobi), the ham-fisted joy (Michael Cochrane; Ian Cuthbertson; Mark Costigan), the would-be-extra (Prentis Hancock; Terry Walsh; Jimmy Vee) and the purely dreadful (Rick James; Jenny Laird; Mark Oliver). Best is the moment when a guest performer turns up purely for shits and giggles. For some bewildering actors, Doctor Who is quite clearly below them and they are required to turn up, lark about and get back to the pub where the next pint is already waiting. I love how John Savident has clearly failed to learn his lines well enough for his brief appearance in The Visitation. Regardless, he ploughs on confidently, coughing elaborately to give himself more thinking time. It’s the most beautiful, grandest folly: “Eeeeurgh eeeeuuuur, I don’t like the sound of it.” Some of my favourite actors make the universe of Doctor Who so much richer and funnier a place to live. In the first of an ongoing series, I’m going to celebrate a particular guest star’s performance or performances in the show to hopeful amusement and to give them the column inches they deserve.

This month: Philip Madoc
Philip Madoc was one of the great champions of Doctor Who in our house, growing up. Right now, one of my brothers is loving him in The Life and Times of David Lloyd George. Another brother is loving him in Last of the Mohicans. Another, along with me, is loving him in Doctor Who. Yes, we happy four, we band of brothers form a small but vocal Philip Madoc fan club. I am even the proud owner of a BBC poetry CD in which Madoc recites the great works of Chaucer in Medieval English. Oh, what a treat that it.
He cheers up Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150AD no end just as it’s in danger of becoming stale. The camera loves him: it lingers on him as he smiles cheekily before dragging on his spitty little fag, teeth pearly white, hair brill-creamed back and dressed like Columbo. His resolute lack of emotion - be that joy, callousness, envy, hatred (take your pick from the entire gamut) - as he kicks over Peter Cushing’s potential breakfast is priceless. Like his character, Madoc is one on his own here, seemingly refusing to integrate with the rest of the cast. When that shed explodes with him in it, so does a little part of that film’s beauty. 
In The Krotons, he is a portly, little thing, angry and taut. Truncated by a costume that would leave Daniel Craig looking awkward, it’s amazing that Madoc gets to the end of The Krotons with any dignity at all. Nobody else does, apart from perhaps Patrick Troughton and even he suffers a fish-eye close up of his elaborate chin. Madoc begins proceedings like a pantomime page boy, one foot jauntily angled towards the irritatingly bad James Copeland, presumably to put him off his dull speech. Madoc waits for Copeland to carry on about his “companyons of the Krotons,” lets him to finish, then gives a tiny, embarrassed, knowing nod before administering some gowns. It’s as if he’s aware how bad Copeland is and he’s on our side. He knows we’re finding it just as excruciating as he is. Madoc decides to duck Episode Two but returns in full force in Episode Three, delivering banal speeches about “a little more time” as if he’s giving us his Hamlet or even his Magua, dressed as he is, tomahawk by his waist. Here is a man whose slings and fireballs are in no doubt.
Quite miraculously, by the time The War Games comes along only a few months later, Madoc has completely transformed his physical frame. He is slimmer, shorter, lizard-like and alert, like a meerkat wearing googly eyes. He moves very little, only twitches of his head and widening eyes conveying his threat, which dazzlingly is tangible and felt (especially compared to the louder, more brash, less effective menace of the War and Security Chiefs). He seems to be doing so little and yet here is a fully-formed instantly believable and deeply sinister villain. When Madoc enters the fray in Episode Seven, The War Games gets a hell of a lot more interesting. His terror when looking to the heavens at the close of Episode Nine and muttering, “They are coming” is terrifically unsettling.
A few regenerations later, Madoc is back for The Brain of Morbius, perhaps his tour de force. Madoc plays Professor Solon archly, a definite twinkle spicing up his more banal lines. “Noooooo, that won’t do,” he whines early on before tersely snapping, “That is an insect!” His ability to bring life into the most melodramatic, sometimes clumsy line is incredible. “You’ve been looking for that arm again, haven’t you?” he murmurs at his one-armed bandit, Condo. The delightfulness of this ridiculously clunky moment is that Madoc carries it off with aplomb. Water off a duck’s back to him is this kind of awkward scripting blunder. As the Doctor arrives, Madoc breezes through his “What a magnificent head,” with an unusually ordinary and sharp relish. He never seems to realise, despite the Doctor and Sarah’s bemused looks, that he comes across as completely barking. It’s Madoc’s knowing ignorance that is the adorable charm of Professor Solon. 
His final appearance in The Power of Kroll may be the poorest part bestowed to this paragon of the acting world but his obvious disdain for the job shines through blissfully. “God, Philip looks bored, doesn’t he?” says Tom Baker on the DVD commentary and it’s true. Madoc’s face is a picture of bulldog apathy, his jowls forever curled downwards, his lines mumbled and without energy. “You know, I don’t particularly like the Swampies, but I can’t say I really hate them,” he snarks with all the commitment of a disaffected music teacher. It’s Fenner’s best line.
Now, you might be forgiven for thinking that the end of Philip Madoc’s Who career but it was to continue into the DVD range as well as a couple of Big Finish Productions. Notably though, his hour came in: Philip Madoc: A Villain for All Seasons. Orange faced and sporting a white beard, he appears to have regenerated again into a short Tom Jones with better teeth. A one-man interview show, Madoc is given his opportunity to shine once more and shine he does. He greets us with pearls of wisdom. “Peter Cushing was a true gentleman, one of the nicest human beings I have ever known.” His wilful glee when promoting the idea of the return of the War Lord is hilarious. “I wasn’t killed. I was dematerialised.” Long pause. “I like that idea,” and he smiles hugely. Of Fenner he states contemptuously, “He wasn’t coming from anywhere and he wasn’t going anywhere.” But in the end, for a man with a rich and varied career, he is charm incarnate: “I can’t say I hate you for only remembering me in these three or four shows.” He then reminds us of what we already knew. “They’re not bad shows. In fact, there are some very, very good shows.” Thanks Philip.
JH

Monday 8 October 2018

The Woman Who Fell to Earth

So… the elephant in the room: a female Doctor Who? I’ll admit, I was extremely dubious. It looked to me like either a gimmick to get bums back on seats (which has clearly worked) or a shamelessly political move to feed a left-wing contingent who like to celebrate victories in places where no-one was fighting. However, Chris Chibnall does indeed prove that the Doctor can be anyone. The gender really isn’t an issue here. It doesn’t matter one jot and makes us worriers feel like we’ve undergone 18 months of angst for absolutely no reason. As Tom Baker famously noted, the part is “actor-proof” so long as the Doctor is well-written which she resolutely is here. No, I have no problem with a female Doctor; but I do have a problem with a Jodie Whittaker Doctor.

Whittaker’s performance reminds me of the secondary school children I used to be in drama classes with. Every line is given equal weight, hammered home aggressively to the point of sterility due to the fact that they don’t really understand what they are saying. Whittaker doesn’t make sense of her lines, finds no nuance, no invention. It’s all delivered at the same urgent frequency. Just look at her reactions when she’s asked about her family: There’s nothing there. No decisions have been made. She’s all at sea. Resultantly, one starts to switch off when she opens her mouth. My 14-year-old step-daughter guiltily looked up half-way through the story and said, “I’m sorry but I’m finding her kind of really annoying.” So was I. So was my wife. I inwardly cringed when Whittaker raised her hand proudly and boasted, “I would of!” It was almost as bad as Eccleston’s similarly mis-remembered, “Four most safest walls.” Now, I love a Northern accent; I’ve got a broad Oldham drawl myself. But within that accent there are all sorts of cadences, intricacies and details to play out. There’s none of that here. Whittaker’s performance is poor. And Tosin Cole, this episode’s leading companion Ryan, seems to be taking tips from her, as he’s equally flat and stilted. Resultantly, the show feels very grounded in its Sheffield landscape but populated by actors with accents which sap any drama out of proceedings and make stretches of the show boring to listen to.
Aside from our lead performer then, what else did The Woman Who Fell to Earth have to offer? Firstly, and most obviously, the show feels truly cinematic. The grading, the breadth and depth of the landscapes, the effects from new-boys DNEG: all shine. There’s an epic shot which starts over the football ground (Forgive me, footie fans, but I’m not sure if it was Wednesday or United.) and pans across to a van we’re following. Those open Sheffield vistas at the start of the story are impressive in their grandeur and the crane business at the climax of the show looks to rival Casino Royale in terms of scale. Directorially then, Jamie Childs does a splendid job, although there are some moments which don’t land: The Doctor’s entrance through the train roof is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot, the death of Grace falls whackingly flat (if you’ll forgive the pun) and there’s a money-shot missing of Whittaker leaping from one crane to another. On the whole, however, this looks like properly modern, 21st century Doctor Who, feeling new, exciting and larger than ever before. There are creepy, lingering moments which have been strikingly missing from the show for a while too: the ball of energy creeping along the train carriages; the assassin “icing” his victims to death. These are scenes which feel like the very pulse of Doctor Who and if there’s more to come then the future feels very bright.
Most importantly of all though is the quality of what we all know to be the real star of the show: the script from new-boy showrunner Chris Chibnall. Bluntly, it’s a mixed bag. The episode was a refreshingly straightforward, linear narrative, easy to follow without continuity references, perfect for newcomers. Funny, little clevernesses like the DNA bombs and the microwave, which could easily have sprung from Chibnall’s better Torchwood episodes, pushed the show’s playful tone to the fore but it’s a shame there were fewer laughs. For the most part, there was a bleakness to this script: the difficulties of disabilities, terminal diseases, warehouse work and unfulfilled ambition providing a cynical skeleton to the character work. Even the smaller parts were everyday losers, rather than Russell T Davies’s everyday working class: a drunk throwing kebab around the place, a crane driver who listens to an app telling him how important he is, a nutcase obsessed with finding his dead sister. These archetypes may have brought the show down to Earth but they’ve made the world of Doctor Who a grim place to be. 
As for our three companions, I’m still not sure I believe any of them and I’m not quite sure why. There are some clunky dialogue choices from Chibnall (“Yaz to my friends,” indeed!) and he hasn’t quite got the skill to sketch them in with as much adroit alacrity as Russell T or even Steven Moffat. Compare Bill Potts’s first speech with Ryan’s dreary YouTube video for proof. Bradley Walsh looks and plays Graham like a kindly uncle but he’s written as a difficult-to-love Grandad. Ryan has dyspraxia and is full of angst. Yaz wants early promotion. And that’s about it. There’s not much charm radiating from these guys. In fact, the only keeper, I’d say, was Grace who was “really loving” the alien bit. The fact that I wasn’t remotely moved by her death and funeral perhaps says more about Chibnall’s workmanlike writing than the performances. I’m not sure I even like the companions let them alone fully believe in them. In fact, many things don’t stand up to scrutiny: Whose couch did the Doctor kip on while the funeral was being arranged and why are the team still allowed to use someone else’s garage?
Perhaps one of Chibnall’s key strengths though was in the originality and vividness of his monsters. Tim Shaw the Blue Tooth man was a properly evil badass and looked fittingly gross beneath his frightening armour, shot so well by Jamie Childs. The removal of his victims’ teeth and their subsequent implantation in his face was a macabre idea the like of which has perhaps not been seen since Deep Breath. The ball of energy was frightening too in its indistinct, aggressive nature. Chibnall hasn’t forgotten that Doctor Who is remembered for being scary and there were scenes here to really unsettle the children: always a great thing!
Our showrunner also has an eye for spectacle too: this was an hour of television which included a train crash, a climb across two cranes and an alien pod shaped like an onion hatching to reveal a cyborg. The pulling together of these elements might not quite have been as seamless as say, the set-pieces of Partners in Crime or The Eleventh Hour but there was still structural ingenuity to be had: that the DNA bombs had already been removed was a welcome surprise, showcasing the Doctor’s invention and forward-planning. The missing sister subplot looks to be the route the story is taking and then is abandoned after the shocking death of her brother, another opportunity for our villain to be thoroughly evil rather than a misunderstood robot. It makes for an even stronger tete-a-tete atop a tower crane with Jodie Whittaker in her best scene by a mile, although the “sorting out fair play across the universe” line was a little mawkish.
All in all, it’s a very difficult episode to review. There’s a freshness to the show, that’s for sure but the new world seems to adopt a cynical, sometimes dour, tone. The villains are tremendous and worthy of the Doctor’s mettle and Chris Chibnall delights in a set-piece. There’s a cinematic scope to the “alien vistas” of Sheffield and it must be said, a bloody cracking cliff-hanger. I’m unbelievably and disproportionately excited by the fact that the sting was played out in full over a couple of shots of our heroes in space, and I’m chuffed that the theme’s playing over the Next Time trailers for the first time in ages. (I wrote to DWM about this nitty-gritty issue a while back and I’m going to take full responsibility for its rectification!) The companions need more exploration and I hope Chibnall’s playing a long game in terms of their characterisation. The only great, glaring irritation for me was, sadly, Jodie Whittaker who I honestly feel doesn’t have the chops for this. I’m sure there’ll be millions who disagree but as my dad said last year, “If they were going to cast a woman from Broadchurch, why didn’t they cast the good one?” 

6/10

JH