The sun is rising over the roof of the flats opposite mine, though I first glimpsed it from another window half an hour ago, through the trees which screen my street from the factory behind, and it had been light for some time before then. The spring hums at the edge of perception, and coos and chirrups and sometimes shrieks with the voices of birds.

Insomnia has its beneficial points.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/513124.html.

A report on Doctor Who set designer Michael Pickwoad's talk to the Friends of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, on location filming in historic buildings. Doctor Who was mentioned briefly - but the man should write a book, or have a camera following him, as he has a lot to say.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/510152.html.

Primed as I have been by Patrick Mulkern's Radio Times entry, it's obvious why Planet of Fire has gained a reputation as the Doctor Who eye candy story for al persuasions. Noteworthy, though, is Nicola Bryant's performance, all method - which just makes the unattractiveness of Peri's character more apparent. I'm not sure why the programme was addicted to saddling the Doctor withe Doctor with selfish companions, and it's not as if they had redeeming character arcs. Peter Davison, meanwhile. chooses to quietly play the Doctor as someone ahead of the action, but unable to shape events - much as some actors must feel. Anthony Ainley's Master is badly served; though Dallas Adams's Brian Epstein-like appearance as the Kamelion-Howard-Master is a hint of what might have been, had John Nathan-Turner been able to channel his obsession with the entertainment industry more creatively.

The set of the Temple of Logar interior looks unhappily like a giant pizza oven. Perhaps the set designer was pining for the tourist restaurants of Lanzarote. Design is generally a problem, with the series not for the first time being too ambitious; the contrast between Lanzarote and Television Centre is very apparent.

Back in 1984, in DWB, a thirteen-year-old correspondent denounced Planet of Fire as 'a typical Peter Grimwade story'. I'd say that was only true now in that Grimwade was consistently let down by his interpreters. There's a story here, but it's lost, just as the pathos of Kamelion's plight is lost beneath the apparent cruelty of successive characters of all motivations.

ETA: I was a little harsh to Peri - while she loses points by joining in the Kamelion-kicking, she gains some just by offering her hand to the Doctor and helping him to the top of the mountain. That's a touching framing from the film cameraman, and perhaps redeems Fiona Cumming's workmanlike conceptualisation.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/508292.html.

I'm just watching this for the first time in years. It's livelier than I expected, with explicit allusion to The Quatermass Experiment and strong, simple visuals.
It's tempting to view Crayford's eyepatch as a false trail, given he is introduced as a Brigadier-imposter, sitting apparently in Alistair's office, eyepatched like Inferno's Brigade-Leader; more tenuous is the possibility that the shopkeepers A.V. & N.G. Kirby is a reference to The Avengers and its penchant for mock Tudor 'Avengerland' in its latter years. The Kraals sent the five-year-old me retreating to my parents' bedroom for three weeks in 1975, butwhile their first appearance is still startling, afterwards they appear like determined pugs.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/506726.html.

So, farewell then (again) Upstairs Downstairs, after an erratic second season which failed to satisfactorily build on the strenghts of the 2010 miniseries. There are petitioning groups set up on Facebook and Twitter in an attempt to reverse the BBC's decision, but any extension would have to see the direction of the series rethought. From her utterances on Twitter (where she was extremely courteous to my expression of regret), Heidi Thomas appears too exhausted by the job of running UpDown and the much more lauded Call the Midwife to be showrunner for two series at the same time, a reminder that British television series drama seems to rely too heavily on a small pool of talent. UpDown probably lost a valued champion when Piers Wenger left BBC Wales, and the absence of Eileen Atkins and Jean Marsh from this series left a void: though there was much to enjoy, something died with Solomon the monkey.

ETA: Now also at The St James's Evening Post, slightly revised.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/503818.html.

"Schoolgirl novelist writes into nights" - the paper walks a line between 'girl genius' and 'unhealthy obsession'.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/499863.html.

( Thoughts on Mali )

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/499474.html.

You might think that the holders of commercial rights in The Hobbit would be more flexible with long-established businesses whose cultural, social and economic context is not that of the film and whose presence attests to the influence of Tolkien's work on the people of this and other countries; but no...

BBC News: Hobbit pub in Southampton threatened with legal action

Southampton Daily Echo: Southampton pub The Hobbit in battle with Hollywood studio

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/495773.html.

I can't keep away from the archive, and have scanned and uploaded issue 27 of Tides of Time, published by the Oxford University Doctor Who Society in October 2001. This is another good one from the years after the McGann TV Movie and demonstrates the society's wide focus at the time, with reflections on the similarities between Robin of Sherwood and Blake's 7, a study of Blake's 7's Travis, a look at the obsession with the rural in British telefantasy, ponderings on possible interpretations of The Daemons, The Professionals fiction, an exchange of views on why Doctor Who was taken off air in 1989, and the usual much more.

The PDF is over here - it's just under 27Mb so right-clicking is recommended.

ETA: A fuller listing of the contents is available here, with another link to the PDF.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/495343.html.

( The latest exploits of the vampires and werewolves of Barry. Proceed at own risk. )

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/494924.html.

Despite living fifteen miles from the place for eleven years, I'd never got round to exploring Banbury at all; it had been somewhere one drove through on the way to the M40. An hour late on a Saturday afternoon doesn't do the place justice, though I appreciated the crumbling majesty of St Mary's, and it's a pity it has to have so many security signs around it.

The great discovery was Books and Ink in White Lion Walk, combining new books - some hardbacks benefiting from extra plastic dustjackets from the shop to add value - with a well-curated secondhand section. There was a sizeable science fiction section and several 1960s Pelicans on such topics as the monetary system and the failure of British industry to reform. Wary of adding too much to my 'to read' pile, I instead made off with the 1967 Dragon paperback of Doctor Who and the Crusaders by David Whitaker.

Of the three Doctor Who novelisations published in the 1960s by Frederick Muller, Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks was first paperbacked in 1966 by Armada, then the children's imprint of May Fair Books; Doctor Who and the Zarbi had to wait until Target came along in 1973; Doctor Who and the Crusaders was paperbacked in 1967, Dragon being at the time the children's imprint of Atlantic Book Publishing of 11 New Fetter Lane, an address I more recently associate with academic publisher Routledge before they were uprooted to Milton Park in Oxfordshire. (Both Armada and Dragon imprints were still around in the late 1970s and early 1980s when I was in their target audience, but Armada had become part of Collins while Dragon ended up with Granada.)

I'd seen this book before but never I think held it. Like the Armada edition of with the Daleks, the text was reset rather than reproduced from the Muller hardback as was Universal-Tandem/Target's practice in 1973. Henry Fox's illustrations from the hardback were also replaced, though the new artist, whose work owed a lot to Fox's, was not credited. The front cover illustration wasn't particularly enticing, and while I've seen it reproduced before I'd not realised that there was a back cover illustration as well, presumably showing Barbara being carried off to the mercies of El Akir. The great loser in this edition is Vicki, whose existence is forgotten by the blurb writer.

( The cover art is behind this cut )

As with Armada before, there was no impetus to create a series of Doctor Who paperbacks from Dragon. No new books from Muller were forthcoming, and one wonders whether Terry Nation's plans for the Dalek television series, which stopped Dalek stories from being sold abroad, also prohibited Dalek exploitation in book form when associated with Doctor Who; as David Whitaker had written two of the three Muller books, one wonders whether he might have proposed more, with The Power of the Daleks being the obvious next step. One for Nothing at the End of the Lane, perhaps.

ETA: Armada's origins corrected. See this Hardy Boys website for the story of May Fair Books and Atlantic Publishing. In a sense, the Doctor Who paperbacks didn't change publisher at all...

ETA2: ...and Diana Cornwell's Wikipedia article on her father Gordon Landsborough is worth reading.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/494680.html.

At Valiant 3 this weekend I picked up two books: From Byfleet to the Bush, the memoir of Jacqueline Pearce, and Patrick Troughton by his son Michael Troughton. Both are published by small presses whose main audience can be found among Doctor Who and telefantasy fandom, but they are very different books.

Jacqueline Pearce - Jack or Jackson to her friends - has written a demanding but compelling account of a troubled life in which her ambitions were sabotaged by her own complex psychological self-defence mechanisms, leading to often profound depression and battles with poverty, love false and true, and continued assaults by mental illness. Those looking for anecdotes about Blake's 7 and her portrayal of Servalan might be disappointed given Pearce's insistence that she recalls little of it thanks to her mental state for most of the time, but we do learn that the change from predominantly white to predominantly black outfits was of personal significance and that when arrested for possession of cannabis the officers concerned were greatly pleased that they had Servalan in custody.

Much of what Jacqueline Pearce relates in this book will be familiar to those who have suffered from depression: the self-destructive thoughts and actions, the interpretations of the world which turn out to delude more than they help, the sometimes bewildering advice from therapists. This is more of a depression memoir set in the acting world than a strictly theatrical one. There are times when self-criticism wins and one wants to tell the author that she is not the only person to blame for her misfortune: that it was reasonable for her to trust someone who made off with her money given her past experience of them, for example. There are well-known names among the friends and acquaintances who people the narrative - Sammy Davis Jr, Alan Bates, John Hurt, Jerry Lewis, Rupert Penry-Jones and Dervla Kirwan, among others - but they take their places among the non-celebrities who have buffeted their way through their lives with Pearce. The final chapters find Pearce in South Africa, where she now lives, comparing her own young self with the worldlywise young people who volunteered alongside her at an animal sanctuary, and finding a kind of serenity among the monkeys for which she cares. The author is charming throughout; her struggles to come to terms with her psychological make-up are evident and there are certainly periods when one feels she is looking for reassurance, but so, often, do most of us.

Michael Troughton's life of his father Patrick is a different animal. Unlike From Byfleet to the Bush, its production standards are questionable, with erratic paragraph spacing and inconsistent spelling, which neither author, subject nor reader deserve. Jacqueline Pearce was abandoned by her mother when very young; Michael Troughton's father likewise left the family home not long after Michael's birth but remained a regular visitor, performing the charade of the devoted husband to Michael's mother for the benefit of the outside world while quietly living elsewhere with his second family. Michael Troughton has access to his father's diaries and also his father's own correspondence with him, but many of the recollections are secondhand from other acting colleagues, and not particularly enlightening. The section on Doctor Who unbalances the book, much of it relying on Doctor Who Magazine interviews and familiar anecdotage. An insight into Patrick Troughton's character is difficult to establish and what we do learn is often unflattering. The impression one is left with is that as Patrick Troughton remains as elusive as he ever was to audiences, his conduct left him an enigma to his family.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/493353.html.

Richard Carpenter, creator of Robin of Sherwood, died at the weekend. I first encountered him on BBC schools television as the host and writer of the Look and Read serial Cloudburst; aimed at slow-reading eight-year-olds this series was essential viewing for the literate pre-schooler in the 1970s. His credits as a writer of family television series for ITV were long - Catweazle, The Ghosts of Motley Hall, Dick Turpin and of course Robin of Sherwood. He also wrote the first series of The Scarlet Pimpernel for the BBC in the late 1990s, but while he started work on the second, the transmitted series was credited to other hands. I remember Mark Ryan, Nasir in Robin, praising 'Kip''s imagination when he visited the Oxford Arthurian Society in 1995. A few years later I went to a National Film Theatre retrospective of Carpenter's work. He deserves more attention than he receives.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/492282.html.

ETA 5 March 2012: Year of birth changed from 1933 as it appears Carpenter was four years older than previously assumed, according to the obituary by Anthony Hayward in The Guardian.

Another dip into the Oxford Doctor Who Society back catalogue:

Tides of Time, issue 28 - blog post introducing it, and link to the PDF.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/491627.html.

One of my rare experiments in Doctor Who fan fiction has now been republished at AO3. So back to 2008 and...

Rose Cottage

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/491254.html.

The composer, scriptwriter and artist Ted Dicks died last weekend. He was a principal collaborator with Hazel Adair and Peter Ling on Compact for the BBC and then Crossroads for ATV in the 1960s, but seems best remembered for his music, including several chart hits for Bernard Cribbins and one for Ronnie Hilton. Here's Bernard Cribbins with 'Right Said Fred', and then the first part of the first episode of Catweazle (London Weekend, 1970), music by Ted Dicks.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/486024.html.

A magazine shop on eBay has most of the run (still ongoing) of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society's newsletter, later magazine, Celestial Toyroom for sale. Many issues placed on eBay go unsold, so with most priced at £6 - with the first, from 1976, priced at £29.99, and some other early ones in the run at £19.99 - I don't expect these to be disappearing any time soon. The front pages/front covers can be seen starting here. They are not in date order, but still give a window onto the changing priorities of the society and the sections of mainly British fandom it has targeted.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/485096.html.

The buzz around the release of The Sensorites on DVD has surrounded its special features, and this is largely justified. Looking for Peter brings the Who Do You Think You Are? approach of personal history documentary making to the DVD range, but with the difference that the personality concerned, writer Peter R. Newman, died in either 1969 or 1975. Presenter Toby Hadoke, aided by Nothing at the End of the Lane's Richard Bignell and with a contribution from former DWM co-editor/Reynolds and Hearn publisher Marcus Hearn, establishes that 1975 is the required date, looks at Newman's controversial 1959 screenplay Yesterday's Enemy, and discusses his life before and after Doctor Who with his sister Vera and niece Helen, with portraits and family photographs and in a "final twist", a voice recording which shows Peter Newman to have been a gifted orator as well. The overall impression is of a man who was unable to wear his considerable abilities sufficiently lightly to make a success of them for long.

Clive Doig was a name burned on my childhood memories of television-watching, as producer at the close of Vision On and of Take Hart and Eureka among others. In the 1960s he was a vision mixer at the BBC, working on the majority of Doctor Who episodes in William Hartnell's proprietorship of the TARDIS, and in two extras first explains what a vision mixer does and how important that role was in the days of multi-camera television drama, and then identifies the 'Secret Voice' which can be heard on the soundtrack of the sixth episode of the story. Doig is lively and endowed with great powers of recall, and it's good that the Doctor Who world has discovered him.

The Sensorites has long been unjustly maligned - a species who can only tell the difference between each other by wearing sashes are a prompt to the imagination, not lazy writing - and being able to enjoy it in the crisp immediacy of VidFIREd DVD always removed much of the distance between the present day and the environment in which these early Doctor Who stories were produced and watched. The glimpses in the 'Coming Soon' section of The Tomb of the Cybermen re-release (as part of Revisitations 3) suggest that some of the lost force of that story's imagery will be recovered too. More when I've been able to watch the story again.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/482888.html.

I was an advocate of the theory that the initial replacement for Katy Manning on her departure from the role of Jo Grant in Doctor Who was Fiona Gaunt. I am happy to be intrigued by the revelation that the actress concerned was someone else entirely. When (for reasons explained on the other side of the link) this actress was doomed to depart before production on The Time Warrior had got very far, she was of course replaced by the late and much-missed Elisabeth Sladen; and my childhood and all that followed would have been very different.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/478953.html.

Intensive deduction by ITV, guided by the need to extend further a successful franchise, has established that Inspector Morse was once Detective Constable Morse; and so audiences have been transported to 1965 to meet him (in the person of Shaun Evans) investigate his first Oxford case. Morse is one of many coppers transferred from a new town police force to help with the murder of an Oxford teenager, but his doggedness wins him the notice of Inspector Fred Thursday (a lugubrious Roger Allam) and together, as the saying goes, they fight crime. Russell Lewis's script was unadventurous, with Morse and Thursday embroiled among police corruption, the sex industry, the secret service and compromised government ministers; if council housing had been involved this would have been clearly Our Friends in the North Oxford. Even Our Friends's Danny Webb was cast as a police bad apple; but dialogue made the other familiar connection, with Cliveden and the Profumo affair, explicit.

There were a few obvious anachronisms; a street seen through a window displayed what looked like 1990s architecture (specifically, the Lincoln College buildings on Bear Lane) and following up an address in Jericho does not take you to the corner of King Edward Street and Oriel Square, with Oriel College in plain sight if soft focus. I'd have wanted to use the present-day New Theatre as an exterior, with added CGI for the sake of faux-authenticity, but instead a different theatre was used. The Lamb and Flag seemed very much its modern self, complete with pub sign, rather than the more run-down edifice which I first entered in 1988 or whatever it looked like in 1965. A plainer pub sign at least would have helped. In-jokes abounded - Morse's radio is a Zenith, which was the name of the independent production company which made the original Inspector Morse series for the old Midlands ITV contractor Central. The first bus we see is heading to Woodstock (as in Last Bus to...) though that was given an in-story justification. John Thaw's daughter Abigail was cast as an Oxford Mail staffer. Shaun Evans's eyes get to morph into John Thaw's at the end too, which was a bit obvious. As in all latterday instalments of the Morse franchise, the character of the university was simplified to make a tale of elite disdain for the lower orders easier to tell, though I was no doubt not the only viewer who felt flattered by the line that Morse was 'too decent' to thrive at Oxford. I expect this pilot to go to series, though its ending, looking forward twenty years, suggests it would be content with an honourable afterlife prefacing Inspector Morse on download and disc packages.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/476511.html.

Happy 2012 from the sociable surroundings of Milton Keynes. We are watching London fireworks on television here, as others drink port or Shloer and I drink grape juice. If you celebrate, I hope you have celebrated, are celebrating or will celebrate well.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/475868.html.

( In appreciation of wooden acting: instant reaction )

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/474473.html.

I'm insufficiently awake to wonder what such a website would be like... but have managed to add something to the St James's Evening Post on the Dennis Potter play Emergency - Ward 9 shown last week at Missing Believed Wiped.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/472263.html.

(Typed on the coach - apologies for poor formatting and spelling mistakes.)
So, there I was at Missing Believed Wiped, having sat through a good Dennis Potter play, listened to Kenith Trodd be surprised the audience wasn't as visibly shocked by the 1966 racism, enjoyed Frank Mumford's puppets advertising VP wines and cigarettes (Empire) and singing Burl Ives songs, and watched a lightweight docudrama about a Norwegian agent in the Second World War who impersonates an SS officer, but kills his girlfriend's brother. (This was called The Man Who Changed Faces. It's as if they were trying to tell us something.)

Then followed a brief Pete and Dud sketch from 1978 - great timing, an obsessipn with Anna Raeburn, and the comparison of a Cosmopolitan diagram of a woman's erogenous zones to the London Underground map - and then the mystery 'BBC SciFi Footage'. Why were there so many big name Doctor Who fans in the audience?

Of course, I knew by then (though had been misled earlier in the day.) Mark Gatiss came down from the back and introduced Ralph Montagu of the Doctor Who Restoration Team and Terry Burnett, a former TVS staffer from whose film collection these episodes were recovered. There was a brief chat and Mark Gatiss gave the run DVD order. The Hartnell titles began...

We started with Galaxy 4: Airlock, of which we saw about ten minutes asthe timelot had been arranged with one episode only in mind. Design seems non-naturalistic; the Rill ship seems to involve a lot of ltticework (of thesame pattern as seen on walls in several later Docotr Who stories). Stephanie Bidmead has an impressive speech as the put-upon, exasperated but self-disciplined Maaga, whop knows the flws in her own people's system: how can you run an invasion in space when only the commanding officer is able to think? Until now, I did not know that the Chumblies sparkled. They also lead Vicki off in body-cuffs, and burble along merrily like less dementd Quarks.

The Underwater Menace 2 is... better than one might expect. It's a better opportunity than ep 3 is to see the regulars in action. Troughton's performance is more raw than it will later become, with more physical comedy (he punches his head and pulls a face to illustrate how mad Zaroff is, anticipating his more restrained dismissal of Klieg in Tomb) ; for the first time since the mass junkings we have footage of Jamie in his original Highlanders costume, and Frazer is already eclipsing poor Michael Craze. Anneke Wills doesn't have much to do except run around in a surgical gown and hide. This episode makes explicit that th plot is a school science project taken to extremes; the Doctor even demonstrates the effects of the raising of Atlantis to Ramo in a practical. Troughton's hat countin this part is two - a plastic souwester early on, and then full anemone-like Atlantean priestly headwear for his audience with Thous. Quite mad as a premise, and it flounders a bit, but Menace's reputation is enhanced by this recovery.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/470382.html.

I finally got round to seeing the Play for Today adaptation of Alan Garner's novel Red Shift last night, adapted by Garner himself, and directed by John Mackenzie. Pointedly describing itself as 'A Film by...' the writer and director, the production is nonetheless highly televisual in a 1970s sense, made up of tight screen-friendly portrait shots and (albeit on location) confined spaces which identify the psychological and psychical pressure its protagonists endure with the television itself. These make the sudden vistas of the rugged Cheshire/Staffordshire borderlands more surprising and more provocative, the uncertainties of time, place, self and other folded into a near-forgotten marcher land. I hope to write more about the play elsewhere, but in the meantime I have begun to re-read the novel.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/468821.html.