This week:
1. There is much consternation on Twitter when the Gallifrey Party posts this image of a Time Lord who was supposedly forced to lie down in the aisle because there were no unreserved seats on the shuttle.
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2. In soaps: I didn’t really like Jemma Redgrave’s Holby Trauma Unit badge, so I have made her a new one.
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3. In sports: new stills emerge from Mo Farah’s Olympic run.
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4. And finally: here’s a deleted scene from Saturday night’s X-Factor.
Happy Sundays!
Oy vey.
Just a matter of days after I wrote about David Tennant’s appearance in The Goblet of Fire, this turns up on Facebook.
I mean, it’s shit, isn’t it? The stupid Rose thing is neither here nor there. It’s just the utter stupidity of the crossover – either it’s a simple joke, which is neither clever nor funny, or it’s some fan’s idea of wish fulfillment, which is…
Well, words fail me.
Look, if you’re going to do this, you might as well go the whole hog – which is exactly what I’ve done, because I can imagine the rest of the conversation going like this…
“But why are you posing as John Lumic’s son?”
“I needed to keep an eye on Brian Williams, Kazran. It’s a big undercover operation. I’m not on my own. I’ve got an art expert waiting in the wings to pose as the next Minister of Magic, and I ran into the caretaker when he was smuggling dinosaurs. The games mistress is a reformed sheet of skin, and Ursula Blake is doing a spot of research in the toilets.”
“You’re not the only Doctor here, either.”
“What?”
“That wandmaker. Knew he looked familiar.”
“What??”
“He’s even got his own sonic wand.”
“WHAT?!?”
Whereupon both universes simultaneously implode from crap fan fiction overload. There, that’s a better ending, don’t you think?
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I’m a little ambivalent about series two. On the one hand, it has ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’. On the other hand, it also has ‘Tooth and Claw’. It has ‘The Impossible Planet’, one of the most frightening episodes in the canon, let down by its dreary successor. Tennant is brilliant. The scripts are not. The Doctor / Rose thing is mind-numbingly tedious, its eventual denouement embarrassingly overwrought even before its stark finality was undone just a couple of years later.
On the other hand, they brought back the Cybermen. Yes, it was all wrong. The new Cybermen act and feel like robots, divorcing them from the humanity that made them so utterly chilling. They have an unnecessary new catchphrase. The reworked origin story is dull. But it’s the Cybermen. The monsters who killed Adric. The ones who haunted my childhood sleep, rendered flesh (all right, metal) and crashing through the walls of a stately home to threaten the Doctor and his friends. As tedious as I find its resolution, that ‘Rise of the Cybermen’ cliffhanger is a belter.
Then there’s Roger Lloyd-Pack, whose role is to sit in a chair and gloat. Lloyd-Pack delivers his entire performance as John Lumic in the manner of someone who’s trying to pass a kidney stone. It’s bland, although not unnecessarily so: Lumic is a power-hungry despot and he delivers what is expected of the role. It is not as interesting as watching Davros, because Lumic is not as interesting as Davros, irrespective of the similarities between their backstories (and physical appearances). This story is all about Rose and Mickey, which is as it should be. Lumic is just the man pushing the buttons.
It’s a shame, because Lloyd-Pack himself was a talented actor, remembered for his comedic supporting characters but equally at home in serious roles; a theatrical master who did his best stuff with Harold Pinter (Michael Billington – or at least his sub-editor – describes him as ‘the perfect Pinter peformer‘). Nonetheless, his iconic role will always be that of Trigger, the petty criminal with a penchant for sharp suits and apparently possessing a vacuum between his ears (his condition is, thanks to a bit of exposition, blamed on a couple of childhood accidents). It is Trigger who plays the straight man in what is Only Fools and Horses’ most memorable moment – in which Del casually leans against a bar, not realising it’s no longer there – but he was given plenty of other stuff to do. Typically, Trigger is the last person in the room to get a joke and even then doesn’t know why he’s laughing, but it’s his bad boy image that sets him apart from many other dim-witted comic foils; you always get the feeling that he could smash you in the face any time he wanted, and this is precisely what makes him so interesting.
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As any Harry Potter fan will tell you, the Cybermen two-parter isn’t the first time Tennant and Lloyd-Pack appeared on screen together, with Tennant playing Barty Crouch Jr. to Lloyd-Pack’s Sr. in a flashback halfway through Goblet of Fire. (Barty Jr. is then not seen again until the climax of the film, in which Brendan Gleeson morphs onscreen into him; I’m always slightly disappointed that Tennant’s first line isn’t “Hmm. New teeth. That’s weird.”) Production aficionados will be aware, of course, that Lloyd-Pack doesn’t actually meet Tennant in the flesh at all, conversions or not: that’s Paul Kasey in the suit, miming to Lumic’s (presumably pre-recorded) dialogue.
This video had its inception in January 2014 when Lloyd-Pack died at the age of sixty-nine (thus forming a club whose ranks would later be swelled by Harold Ramis, David Bowie and Alan Rickman; sixty-nine, it seems, is the new twenty-seven). For whatever reason it took me two and a half years and a sudden, burning need to create something to actually get it done. Part of my procrastination stems from the fact that there’s actually far less usable material than you’d think – besides the obvious ‘Dave’ jokes, Trigger doesn’t really say very much, often letting his incredulous silence do the talking. There were a few gags that I dearly wanted to use – “You got a hat now, Dave?” springs to mind – but had to abandon on the cutting room floor because they simply didn’t fit. Less is more.
Anyway, it hangs together, just about. I did think about using the broom handles bit – a scene which takes its cue from a similar exchange in Open All Hours and which is referenced, bizarrely, in ‘Deep Breath’ – but what I had was quite long enough. It took two and a half years, but we got there in the end. Or as Trigger would say ‘Triffic…’
Here’s today’s media round-up. In television, it’s discovered that the Master spent the years following ‘Frontier in Space’ on a remote Scottish island catching up with some old friends.
Wallace and Gromit’s new musical direction is unveiled.
And finally, in the wake of new rules, it’s revealed that the BBC are prepared to take drastic steps in order to ensure you pay your license fee.
I’m off to Wales. See you in a week.
This blog’s been comparatively quiet over the last week because I’ve been holidaying: fifteen days of travelling around Yorkshire, Cumbria and Northumberland (with a couple of brief trips north of the border sandwiched in between). We stayed in youth hostels, which varied in breakfast quality / facilities / WiFi strength, and saw more castles, museums and ruined priories than I care to count. I drove the van; the kids in turn drove me mad. Emily planned the whole thing and was generally fantastic.
But you don’t want to hear about the bridges at Hartlepool, or the red squirrels outside the dining room at Alston, or the time Josh got stuck in a revolving door on the way out of the Scottish Parliament building. You want the Who-themed stuff, don’t you? This is Brian of Morbius, after all, and finding tenuous Doctor Who-related connections in more or less everything is kind of what we do here. Very well, let’s get on with it.
1. Observed in an Edinburgh museum (and pinched from another website as the photo I took wasn’t much good), a rare sighting of Jon Pertwee and Patrick Troughton.
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2. So I’m wandering through the middle of Carlisle, and…
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3. Lindisfarne Priory, Holy Island: there’s a grave marker for a woman named Osgyth, a seventh century English saint from Buckinghamshire. There are all sorts of stories about arranged marriages and the pursuit of holy vows, but personally I can’t help thinking it’s another Clara fragment.
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4. Hang on, when did the War Doctor visit Cragside?
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5. Random charity shop purchases. My bag weighed a ton by the time we drove home.
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6. That is a chair with a panda on it.
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7. Observed in a York museum. It’s not just me, is it? Tell me it’s not just me.
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8. KFC Dalek, courtesy of Thomas.
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9. Don’t blink.
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10. Finally, something non-Who related, but worth sharing: this burger – consumed in a pub in Edinburgh – is 8 oz of Angus beef, topped with haggis. They call it the Highlander. Concordantly, I have removed its head.
Gareth wanted to know if I had seconds, but of course, there can be only one…
Brian of Morbius 