The Smallerpictures Video Dump (2020, part four)

This morning, I’m treading through the archives. There are a fair few videos that haven’t been written up yet: here are the first of them. I hope they are as enjoyable for you to watch as they were frustrating for me to assemble, although that’s possibly overestimating the fun factor.

Still. Lead on, Macduff…

1. Think About Things: The Doctor Who Performance (May 2020)

I write this during our second, not-exactly lockdown – but I want to take you back. Back to May, when we were still cloistered in our homes, and relying on Facebook live streams, Zoom webinars and specially recorded entertainment to keep us from going insane. Did it work? Well, I’m still here, although some days I think I’m dangerously close to fractured.

I’d rather hoped that this year’s Eurovision would be a respite from that – a couple of hours of silly entertainment where we could forget, just for a while, about the situation in which we found ourselves. Instead the show’s producers opted to show lots of videos of people stuck in their homes earnestly reminding us that “We are strong and WE WILL GET THROUGH THIS”, while scarcely featuring the songs at all. I still don’t know what Latvia were planning, because I went to the toilet at the start of that segment and when I came back it was done. Oh I know they meant well, but even so. It was all thoroughly miserable, and more than a little frustrating.

But there was one clear winner, and that was Iceland. The deep, distinct voice of Daði Freyr Pétursson is perhaps the best aspect of ‘Think About Things’, but really, as a package you can’t fault it. The the sharp, Jamiroquai-esque hooks, the eighties synths, the catchy melody, the close part harmonies…and, of course, the video, in which Pétursson and his gang interrupt a family recital in order to frighten assorted aunts and grandparents. Why not intersperse with reactions from Doctor Who characters, I thought? So I did. Well, anything to keep Jackie Tyler away from the drinks cabinet. You know how she gets after she’s had a few.

—

2. Everybody’s Been At The Helium (May 2020)

If there’s one thing we love doing here at Brian of Morbius, it’s ruining classic scenes. You know, the ones that make people cry. I did it earlier this year by adding a laugh track to the end of ‘Doomsday’. I reimagined the Eleventh Doctor as a creepy stalker. Oh, and I’ve made Clara fart. So taking classic scenes and cranking up the pitch so they all have squeaky voices? Why didn’t I do this years ago?

Largely because I didn’t really know how to do it. The process basically refined itself during lockdown, through other projects. It was simply a matter of finding appropriate footage (which exists in abundance; I was spoilt for choice) and sequencing it. There will inevitably a be a follow-up, probably starring Capaldi, but while you’re waiting for that you can enjoy the sight of River Song losing her rag like a prodigious eight-year-old in a year school production. Meanwhile somebody on YouTube pointed out that it sounded like those Haribo commercials where they overdub sweet-munching adults with the voices of children – and that’s exactly what I was trying to emulate, so job done.

—

3. Sesame Street’s Wegman Dogs Do David Lynch (June 2020)

I loved Sesame Street. Particularly as a teenager. The catchy songs, the bright and colourful direction, the unexpected celebrity cameos, and perhaps more than anything the sheer variety of what was on offer. I can still remember the moment in my grandmother’s house when we watched the full length version of ‘Put Down The Duckie’ – a song I’m still able to quote, almost word for word, nearly thirty years after I first heard it – and marvelled at the presence of John Candy, Ellen De Generes and Jeremy Sodding Irons.

But variety can be a double-edged sword, and there was one element of Sesame Street I always felt was tonally off. I’m talking about the dogs. You remember. The Weimeraners. They’d appear in regular situations – or rather their heads would appear, superimposed onto human bodies by William Wegman, who also owned the dogs he filmed. And hence we would watch the ‘dogs’ bake cakes and paint houses and do god knows what else, accompanied by cheesy musak and some absurd narration – thanks in no small part to Wegman’s deadpan, borderline creepy delivery.

If you still don’t know what I’m talking about and would like to watch an untainted clip before moving on to the below, then here is a good place to start. Anyway, something about this series always sat uncomfortably with me, and it wasn’t until years later that I figured out what it was. Because this is essentially David Lynch’s Rabbits, years before its time. And so I set about Lynchifying some of the Wegman scenes, as best I could. The results are mixed, but I think the laugh track probably helps. If nothing else you will now get to experience this Children’s Television Workshop staple the same way it was always playing in my head, so I suppose we can call that a win. Oh, and the skipping children? That’s a nod to Lynch as well. If you’re familiar with his early work, you’ll know why.

—

4. The Thirteenth Doctor Reveal: Revisited (July 2020)

We’ve been here before, haven’t we? Oh, I don’t mean the reveal. You know, the one that broke the internet during the Wimbledon final and had many fans leap for joy while others cried into their strawberries. Suffice it to say that the nation’s collective jaw well and truly dropped: when, some months later, I married up the promo clip with footage from series 8, jaws dropped rather less, but people were at least amused, and it became one of my most popular videos, at least on Facebook.

Fast forward to July this year, and in need of another video to post, I opted to do it again, only this time…well, you’ll see. And don’t panic – the Doctor has been here before, and there’s usually another TARDIS hanging around somewhere.

The Smallerpictures Video Dump (2020, part three)

I wish I could tell you that I’d got on with that novel while we’ve been stuck at home. Or that I’d learned to sew, or reached a sense of inner peace, or at least slowed down a bit. But my life was already fairly slow and empty, and I rather liked it that way. My world now, instead, is a world of hastily improvised routines of family breakfasts and Zoom webinars and P.E. with Joe; of virtual meetings with my church housegroup; of listening, every Thursday, to the sound of no one in our street clapping for the NHS; of refusing out of principle to partake in those watchalongs because if there’s one thing DW fans know how to do it’s take a good idea and flog it to death, or at least until all the novelty has well and truly worn off. We’re fortunate, where we are, but oh dear God this road is long – and there are no winding turns, simply a series of erratic curves.

Anyway, how are the Doctors spending lockdown? Today, we catch up with just three of them. But they’re the three everyone likes, so that’s a good start.

 

1. Public Safety Announcement (April 2020)

You know we never stoop to cliche here at Brian of Morbius, but if we did, this would be the point at which I told you this will all be over by Christmas. That’s actually based on scientific insight, correct (at least theoretically) as we go to press, which dictates that under an idealised plan of social distancing and appropriate quarantine the virus could be squashed by 4 December. Now, you and I both know that this is unlikely, but I do at least hope we’ll be allowed out by then – and not stuck in Caerphilly Castle with Peter Capaldi, who’s been wandering its dimly-lit corridors for the better part of four billion years.

This was a lot of fun to put together, largely because it was simply a question of going through the episode and finding appropriate (yes, all right, inappropriate) clips to match up with the government advice. Sometimes that’s a long, hard slog – unless you know exactly what you’re looking for, and generally I don’t, then you have to rely on memory and association and transcript searches. But sticking with a single episode restricts you, which makes that endless scrubbing back and forth all the easier to endure. Every one of this clips is taken from ‘Heaven Sent’ – with one exception. Can you spot it?

 

2. The Ninth Doctor channel hops (April 2020)

The Twelfth Doctor’s been dive-bombing a lake and getting his skull melted by a Dickens reject. Three regenerations back, one of his predecessors is stuck in a flat with Jackie Tyler. I know where my sympathies lie. Sorry, Peter; you’re on your own.

Eccleston is notoriously catty about some of his former roles. Thor 2, for example, was “like having a gun in your mouth”. He’s not much happier about G.I. Joe. I also read that he hated to be asked about Raymond Calitri, which is why it’s in here – but supposedly he’s cooled off about that over the years, so perhaps a reconciliation with the MCU may be on the cards. Although somehow I doubt it; he’s not exactly in a hurry to go back to Doctor Who.

But everyone has a breaking point. What would it take for Eccleston to relive those hours in the makeup chair? Watch it, and you’ll see.

 

3. The Tenth Doctor in Lockdown (May 2020)

Now, this was a departure. Not because it’s particularly different in tone or approach – awkward enjambment of two contrasting sources is something I’ve been doing since year dot – but because I managed, after some trial and error, to get a picture-in-picture effect when the Doctor’s watching the screen. It lasts for approximately three seconds and it’s by no means perfect (look closely and you can see Tennant’s head walking through the bottom of the image) but it’s vital, because it establishes that he’s looking at it there and then in the heart of the Crucible. You nail that, and everything else follows.

Oh, and I make no apologies for anyone I might offend with this, because I think the only person who’s likely to be offended is Ian Levine. And Ian Levine is, for want of a better word, a complete cockwomble.

The Smallerpictures Video Dump (2020, part two)

The clock ticks, the politicians dither, and you’re still all stuck inside. But fear not, constant reader: we’re here to entertain you, probably by throwing on a gingham dress and clucking like a chicken. (This will either make sense or it won’t; if it doesn’t I’m not about to explain it.)

There’s a musical theme to today’s collection. That was an accident, a coincidence of scheduling. But I’m not complaining: these are usually arranged solely in the order in which I did them, so it’s nice when they actually have something in common for a change.

Shall we?

 

1. REMASTERED: The Rings of Akhaten, new score (March 2020)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but Ulysses 31 was a big part of my childhood. It didn’t matter that the first time I was encountering the monsters and sailors of the Odyssey was in a futuristic space setting. It didn’t matter that the episode with Chronos terrified the pants off me. It didn’t matter that the robot was annoying. The whole story was so epic in scale and ambition, visiting new universes, weaving complicated narrative threads of morality and free will, and telling a complete tale with a beginning and an ending. I even managed my own mashup of Doctor Who footage to accompany the theme song. It’s the sort of tale that really is ripe for some sort of revisit – I’d originally envisaged a trilogy of films but I now think that a limited run Netflix series would be better. Inevitably, of course, it would have to be updated, presumably by bringing in some sort of Freudian conflict between Ulysses and Telamachus (who was, in the original series, cloyingly loyal), as well as implementing a more contemporary score. Which is a shame, because the original (composed by Ike Egan, Denny Crockett, Haim Saban and Shuki Levy) really is a piece of work, encompassing disco, Focus-esque distorted rock and a full orchestra. Even on its own, it’s worth a listen.

Veteran readers here may remember that, way way back in the day, I had the idea of marrying up some of this music with the Doctor’s speech from ‘The Rings of Akhaten’. It was 2013, and I’d just discovered unscored audio, which exists in abundance if you know where to look – those lovely people who’ve isolated the dialogue and sound effects from Doctor Who stories so you can do what you want with them, chopping and changing bits without having to worry about background music. It made the editing process exponentially more satisfying, but it only works if you have an audio track that matches up with the video file you’re using, and thanks to differering frame rates and quirks of encoding, this isn’t always the case.

So the version I made years ago was, while well-intentioned, a complete mess. Seriously, it was all over the shop. I was chopping and changing and shifting and rearranging and still I could never get it quite right – there are moments where the Doctor’s tongue is somewhere and his voice is somewhere else, like a lagging Zoom call, and then – and then, after I’d torn out most of my hair trying to make it work, the bloody thing wouldn’t sit on YouTube because copyright. So I stuck it on Vimeo where no one ever goes, and consigned it to the bin of Things That Didn’t Quite Work and then tried to learn from the experience.

Years down the line, I had a go at remastering it, and this time I’m happy with it. And more to the point, both Facebook and YouTube are happy to host it. So that’s a win.

 

2. The Goats of Llandudno (March 2020)

We have kites nesting in the trees next to our garden. You can see them all over this part of Oxfordshire, but we see them a lot. Last weekend I was emptying the bins of an evening when I observed two of them, soaring and swooping in a dazzling aerobatic display, as they squabbled and scrapped over a piece of meat that one of them had collected and the other one wanted. For about a minute and a half. It was hypnotic, and of the moment, and I’m glad I didn’t try to film it.

Anyway, that set me thinking: just what, exactly, do our animals and birds make of this? They must be aware that something is different: that there are fewer people around (or that, at least, certain public areas are now quieter), that they can perhaps be a little bolder, that the air is a little less filled with carbon. That the planes are grounded. What does my cat think, for example, of the fact that we’re now all at home, every day? Certainly she must know something, even if she is happy to keep her opinions to herself – unlike my mother-in-law’s border collie, for example, who has had to adjust to the fact that she now only gets one walk a day.

Not long after they implemented the lockdown, a story broke about a goat infestation in the suddenly deserted streets of Llandudno (that’s in Wales, if you were wondering). I think I’ve been to Llandudno, or at least through it: it is a pretty place, if now a little less safe if you value your garden plants. There they were, hordes of horned beasts, chewing the hedges and kicking at the walls trampling manicured lawns underfoot (I was going to do the “This town is comin’ like a goats town”, but the Guardian got there first).

The Guardian got some great footage, but it was mostly silent, save the ambience. I had the idea of dropping in some of Murray Gold’s Doctor Who score – several things didn’t quite work, but the one that did was the music from ‘Heaven Sent’, notably the discordant, menacing rumble that fills Caerphilly Castle as the Veil casually stalks the Doctor. Matched with images of goats overrunning a village, it loses some of its potency. Still, it works.

 

3. Twin Peaks characters dancing to the Doctor Who theme (April 2020)

Oh, this is just a bit of fun. And the idiot on Facebook who said “Can’t you make something better?” can piss off. Seriously, piss off.

The Smallerpictures Video Dump (2020, part one)

Population 51,201. Possibly not for much longer.

One good thing about a lockdown: I’ve had a chance to amalagamate all the leftover copy I’d not got round to filing these last few months. Which means we’re in for a busy few weeks here at BoM, as we go through series retrospectives, how-to guides, and even a bit of myth debunking along with all the meme roundups and general idiocy. But we’ve also got a few videos to get through, so let’s rewind to the beginning of the year, when we were all still allowed out.

 

1. The Name of the Master (January 2020)

Don’t get me wrong. ‘Spyfall Part 2’ was quite fun, but this whole thing really was a bit dom / sub, wasn’t it? Never mind that the relationship between the Master and the Doctor is already tapping a wealth of unresolved sexual tension, long before either of them swapped genders: a scene like the Master’s ‘Kneel before Zodd’ moment took it to the next level, and it really is like handing a silver platter to the fan fiction writers along with a note reading “Go on then, you win”.

It was Pip Madeley who turned this into a Fifty Shades of Gallifrey type thing – he may even have called it that; the Tweet is proving elusive so we may never know. My own version is a good deal less suggestive and not terribly funny, relying as it does on the conceit of the Doctor forgetting (either deliberately or through sheer scattiness; you pick) exactly whom she’s supposed to be addressing. The tricky part was dropping in names that weren’t saturated in background noise (something I’m not particularly adept at removing), which meant several otherwise viable candidates had to be removed. Still, there were enough left, and the end result hangs together. Just.

 

2. Twice Upon A Time: The Deleted Scene (January 2020)

This seemed like an obvious joke, so I ran with it. It was a crazy week: everyone was busy arguing whether Jo Martin’s Doctor was pre-Hartnell or pre-Pertwee (the consensus: it had to be the latter, because she had a police box and otherwise EVERYTHING HARTNELL DID IS RUINED). Then ‘The Timeless Children’ came out and all hell broke loose, given that it essentially validated just about every tinpot headcanon theory in existence. In the meantime, I’d been making this: having promised the others he’ll be quite some time David Bradley takes a walk into the snow, and then pops back to his TARDIS, only it’s not his TARDIS. Nor is it Capaldi’s. You see where we’re going, don’t you?

 

3. The Angels Take Manhatten, Rescored (March 2020)

Wrestling. That was it. There was content to show and plot lines to advance (and, one suspects, a series of expensive contracts to fulfil) and so the WWE, in their infinite wisdom, elected to broadcast Wrestlemania 36 within the confines of a studio instead of an arena. There were no queues, no gigantic foam fingers or homemade banners, no jubilant teenagers fired up on coffee and Red Bull giving their predictions. Just a lot of thirty-year-old men, pumped with steroids and rehearsing their lines in a mirror. Yes, I know you could hear the trash talk. I don’t want to hear the trash talk; I just want them to work the crowd. If there’s no crowd, it’s all rather flat.

The fans seemed to know this as well, which is why a Twitter user who goes by the name of SideEye elected to overdub a heartfelt confrontation between Brad Wyatt and John Cena with, of all things, the Laura Palmer theme from Twin Peaks. It was mad, but it worked (and it was, as you’ll see in the article I’ve referenced, not the first time someone had paired professional wrestling with Angelo Badalamenti). There is something about that music that is both emotionally overwrought and just a little bit artificial, which is the entire point of Twin Peaks and one reason why it’s so brilliantly unsettling. And while I concede they’re very different shows, it really ought to work with Doctor Who as well, surely?

It does. If you can time it so that final, climactic change from minor to major happens at the precise moment Amy vanishes, everything else just sort of slots into place. Who knew?

The Smallerpictures video dump (2019, part eight)

Hello, folks. Anyone got cabin fever yet? I’ve heard there’s an app for that…

We’re still ploughing through the videos, folks, but – joy of joys! – we’ve finally reached the very last of the 2019 content. So while you’re all under house arrest you can listen to a bit of incoherent rambling about political smear campaigns and school sickness policies. Oh, and there are quite a few Daleks. Don’t worry, you can thank me later.

 

1. The Doctor Has No Plan (November 2019)

We’re not going to talk about the election, because it’s four months on and it still depresses me. But we are going to talk about something that happened in the buildup: notably when the Conservative Party’s media crew released a doctored clip of Keir Starmer appearing to experience a rabbit-in-headlights moment during an interview on Good Morning Britain, captioning it with the words ‘Labour has no plan for Brexit’. Sharp-eyed viewers – or rather those who were actually watching the thing when it was aired – were quick to point out that during the live session Starmer had answered the question without pause or hesitation and that this was nothing but a dirty tricks campaign. It was, of course, but they still won, because people didn’t care, and everyone knew that on a different day Labour would have done the same thing.

In any case, it set me thinking: what defining moment of decision and assertion could I rejig in order to suggest that the Doctor was clueless? In other words, how could I seize on something topical and give it a vaguely Doctor Who-related flavour so I could share it in the few groups that allow political content? There was an obvious answer, and it was this one. I do think it more or less works, although I’m not about to start editing political press footage for a living. Even I have some integrity.

 

2. A-NI-MATE! (November 2019)

I can still remember the conversation: the deputy headteacher at Edward’s school, insistent that we should keep him off for forty-eight hours despite the fact that he wasn’t actually ill. It’s a district guideline, he said. I explained that he’d been sick at his birthday party and that we didn’t want to send him on a trip the next morning but that it wasn’t an infection, just a bit of over-tiredness. It’s just what they’re told to do, he said. No it isn’t, I said, because it’s inconsistently applied. He’ll look into that, he said. Why doesn’t it apply with colds? I said. He doesn’t know, he’s not a doctor, he said. I can see that, I said.

Anyway: after I’d ranted about over-caution and general managerial incompetence, Edward and I spent the day together, and I suggested we have a bit of fun with the Doctor Who figures, going so far as to create a rudimentary animation, in which…well, watch and you’ll see what happens. Then he helped me pick music and effects and we strung the whole thing together and uploaded it. It performed unexpectedly well on Tumblr (26,000 reactions, which is something of a record for me) although I can’t help thinking some people thought Edward did this single handed, thus giving it more credit than it’s actually due. Perhaps I should tell them. Either way we had fun, which is the only thing that actually counts.

 

3. Spyfall: Alternate Ending (January 2020)

“I’m thinking,” I told a particular Doctor Who group, way back in January, “of mashing up the ending of [Spyfall Part 2] so that when the Doctor exits her TARDIS, she’s not looking out at you-know-where, she’s somewhere else. I just need something that’ll fit. Any advance on Teletubbyland?”

It was Richey who suggested it. He initially thought about the binary sunset on Tattooine, before having a rather better idea. I won’t spoilt it for you. Perhaps the best thing about this is the lighting, which – just for a change – matched almost scene for scene. “And I don’t believe in miracles…”

The Smallerpictures video dump (2019, part seven)

After several months of catch-up, we are – almost – at the point where the videos are being blogged in the same season (if not quite the same month) that they were originally produced. That probably means you’ll see fewer of them on here for a bit, which is not a bad thing as we’re all a bit thick with series 12 stuff at the moment – although if you’re tired of reading about heavy-handed social commentary and politics then this may come as a welcome relief. Except one of today’s batch features the Prime Minister, so maybe not.

Shall we crack on, then?

 

1. Hulk Boris (September 2019)

September seems an age ago now, so let me play the magic harp sting that signals the beginnings of a flashback: it was one of those things that was trending, briefly, for no reason other than it was a Sunday and we were bored. “Banner might be bound in manacles,” Boris told the Mail, “but when provoked he would explode out of them. Hulk always escaped, no matter how tightly bound in he seemed to be – and that is the case for this country.”

He’s missed the point, but I’m not interested in deconstructing his argument; I will leave that to the likes of Mark Ruffalo, who had plenty to say. I just thought it would be fun to take some footage of Boris and score it to the Lonely Man theme from the 1970s Incredible Hulk TV series – you know, the moment at the end of every episode where Bill Bixby hoisted a small knapsack over his shoulder (presumably he’d just buy a new shirt in the next town) and then walk off down a tree-lined road, thumbing for a lift that never came, while the world’s most miserable piano music tinkled away in the background. That’s Boris, here. It doesn’t quite come off, but it was fun to throw together.

 

2. The Churchill Dog Does Back To The Future (October 2019)

Here’s something I’ve never told anybody: if you watch our wedding video, when I’m saying my vows, I am nodding my head up and down like a dog in the back of a car. I can’t remember why I was doing it; it was just the heady mix of nerves and passion and the maelstrom of chemicals that surge through you when you get married to someone you love. Emily calls it my Churchill performance, and it has become one of those running jokes that is amusing to you and you alone. I don’t even know why I’m writing about it.

Anyway. October last year – a few days before our anniversary, as it happens – and Churchill Car Insurance unveil a new advertising campaign, in which their iconic bulldog – now given a fresh lick of paint – is seen skateboarding along through a bustling urban locale while some pleasant ambient muzak drifts along in the background. It’s all very nice and calm and done rather well, but I really felt like they missed a trick by not using ‘The Power of Love’. So I stuck it in, and I can’t help thinking it’s an improvement.

 

 

3. Yellow: The Jodie Whittaker Version (October 2019)

OK, this one sort of exploded a bit.

Back in early autumn – it may have even been the dying embers of summer, depending on your geographical perspective – we got wind of an upcoming charity compilation for Children In Need, with various stars of stage and screen set to lend their vocal talents to a covers album. Said list included Adrian Lester, Jim Broadbent and Olivia Coleman, who is in everything. But the biggest news was Jodie Whittaker, who was covering ‘Yellow’. You can say what you like about Coldplay, who disappeared completely up their own arses after they became the backing music for just about every entertainment montage or charity video that TV could throw at us, but Parachutes is a great album, and ‘Yellow’ is a wonderful three minutes of unpretentious pop. Noticable from the preview footage was that Whittaker was opting to perform in her native accent, leading to various remarks (including one or two from me) suggesting that she’d actually be singing “…and it were all yeller”.

The album itself is quite good – Helena Bohnham Carter smashes ‘Both Sides Now’, Tennant supplies a servicable ‘Sunshine on Leith’ (although is there ever any point to a Proclaimers song that isn’t sung by the Proclaimers?) and the whole cast unites for a chirpy cover of ‘It Must Be Love’. But it’s Whittaker we want to focus on here, if only because setting her rather heartfelt vocal (delivered, as it turned out, while she was looking at a picture of her deceased nephew, to whom the song is silently dedicated) to a sequence of series 11 images really was a bit of a no-brainer. Why would you not?

I wasn’t the first. But publishing it on the anniversary of ‘The Woman Who Fell To Earth’ turned out to be a helpful move; people were, I think, a little more kind as a result. You inevitably get a bit of trolling when you launch something like this – I had to block several people from my YouTube channel (hello Michael McGrath, are you still out there waving your toxic micropenis?), but I left as many negative comments up there as possible, which annoyed me less than it usually does given that the vast majority of them seemed to be focussing on the song, with ‘autotuned’ being the prevailing sentiment among her critics. Other people liked it. “You may have single-handedly revived the fortunes of Doctor Who” read one bit of feedback that landed on my timeline. Well, I really wouldn’t go that far. But I do know that Mandip Gill liked it, and that’s good enough.

The Smallerpictures video dump (2019, part six)

Midnight. Not a sound from the pavement. Until the unmistakeable noise of boots on concrete, a plaintive, distant roar, and the cry of “DOCTOOOOOOORRR!”

There are cats in today’s video roundup; of such things you may be sure. But we’ll get to that. First, the Doctor’s off to Norway.

 

1. Doomsday: The Sitcom Version (July 2019)

It’s no great secret that I’ve long found the ending of ‘Doomsday’ unintentionally amusing. Oh, I know it tugs at the heartstrings. I know there is a great tragedy in the story of Rose’s death and eternal separation from the Doctor, where ‘death’ means ‘dropped off a stack of papers at the council registry office’ and ‘eternal separation’ means ‘off screen for a year so Billie Piper can get her teeth done’. At the time, it was like the end of the world. For some of us. I was sitting there wondering if Davies would be able to outdo his “I think you need a Doctor” line from ‘Parting of the Ways’. I was not disappointed. The Doctor flits in and out of vision on a beach in Glamorgan and bottles out of the conversation in the middle of a sentence when the signal drops. He even burns up a star, for pity’s sake. The TARDIS carbon footprint must be astronomical.

So here’s a thought: if it’s funny by accident, what if we made it funny on purpose? What if I stuck in a laugh track? And the theme from Me and My Girl? How many Tennant fangirls and humourless puritans could I annoy? As it turns out the answer is ‘quite a lot’, although doing a quick headcount I do think I made more friends than enemies. It works reasonably well, given that this was a first attempt, and I know what I need to change for next time. “It would work better,” someone said, “if you had less general tittering and stuck to some belly laughs. As it stands, it becomes a lot of white noise.” Which is a perfectly valid criticism. “OH MY GOD YOU SICK UNFEELING BASTARD HOW COULD YOU MAKE THIS?”, I’m afraid, is not.

 

2. The Cats Trailer, Doctor Who style (July 2019)

The Cats motion picture is the new Class. It’s a film nobody asked for and nobody really wanted. It exploded onto the internet in a nightmarish display of peculiarity: a half-lit freakshow, filled with pawing and acrobatics and bizarre, decontextualised choreography. James Corden bounces and Taylor Swift sits in a hammock and Judi Dench plays Judi Dench, only in a wig. It was horrible. “And besides,” said hundreds of Doctor Who fans everywhere, “we had cats in Doctor Who and they looked much better than this lot”. Which is true, of course, although it’s not exactly fair: we’re talking about two largely separate mediums, and the requirements for the two types of role are completely different. It doesn’t help that I actually can’t stand Cats, although I do love a bit of Lloyd Webber: it is a disjointed melee of stories and ‘character’ songs, some of which work, some of which do not, and a tedious, oversung finale.

Within a day of the first trailer drop, someone had uploaded their own version, which married the footage with the music used in the trailer to Us, with alarmingly good results. And however misguided the complaints about makeup and CGI, there was – I realised, just in the nick of time – a definite market for a Who-themed remake. And so I took footage from ‘Gridlock’ and ‘The Shakespeare Code’ and stuck in a couple of carefully chosen soundbites and then put the whole thing together on one fevered, insomnia-drenched evening back in the summer. To answer a frequently asked question, the cats from Doctor Who aren’t in here because they simply wouldn’t have worked next to this lot: you’d just have a weird and confusing juxtaposition of different styles of feline and sometimes it’s best to just keep these things simple. As it is it hangs together, much like Tabitha is currently hanging from the edge of my tablecloth. For heaven’s sake, I’ll feed you in a minute.

 

3. Flatulent Clara (August 2019)

Fart jokes are brilliant, aren’t they? I make no apology for loving them to bits. Russell T Davies built an entire recurring villain around them. Dropping in a fart gag, in any capacity, is a good way to sort the wheat from the chaff, because supposedly sophisticated people are always very quick to tell you how juvenile you’re being and how toilet humour is the lowest form of humour. Sod the lot of you, I say. Fart jokes are funny, just like a pie in the face is funny. I love a bit of Oscar Wilde as much as the next man, but who can honestly say that The Importance of Being Earnest wouldn’t have been improved if Lady Bracknell had tripped over the handbag and landed flat on her arse?

There are plenty of brilliant fart redubs on YouTube – a Star Trek one and a quite spectacular reimagining of the restaurant sequence from ‘Deep Breath’ are just two of the mashups I’ve seen comparatively recently – but when I was dipping a toe into the murky waters of flatulence gags, it was Clara, of all people, who stood out. I think it’s the eyes. Jenna Coleman does most of her acting with her eyes, whether she’s gazing fearfully at a rampaging monster or staring incredulously at the Doctor, waiting for him to finish monologuing. There are lots of moments like that, and it struck me that – as good as her acting was – many of them would have been improved with a couple of gas bombs in the background.

This originally started life as a single scene – the notorious console room ballet that opens ‘The Rings of Akhaten’, in which Clara and the Doctor are seen cavorting round the TARDIS interior like a couple of tryouts for Swan Lake. Try as I might, I was unable to get it to gel, but it then occurred to me that Clara’s penchant for meaningful pauses and penetrating stares extends far beyond that one story, so I widened the scope to encompass the whole of series 7B. Akhaten still has a reasonable part to play, but you’ll also see shots from ‘Hide’, ‘Cold War’ and ‘The Crimson Horror’, among others. I tried to do something similar the other week with Jodie Whittaker, with only limited success – despite the scrunching she really doesn’t lend herself to that sort of humour. I might have another look. In the meantime, Clara’s done three series. Keep the clothes pegs on standby.

The Smallerpictures video dump (2019, part five)

I seem to have a backlog of videos to embed, so what better way to spend a Saturday morning than writing about some of them? Today, we’re looking at political Cybermen, irritating mathematical geniuses and fudged Italian opera, so without further ado, let’s delve into the ridiculous world of tenuous connections and ridiculous mashups that is my head. Bring that slab of Kendal; at least one of us is liable to get hungry.

 

1. Doomsday: Strong and Stable Edition (June 2019)

There is something about Yvonne Hartman’s final words that resonates with me. We’re supposed to be moved as she stands on a staircase moping about queen and country and leaking oil (something I never want to see again, ever). In truth she sounds like a politician falling back on soundbites to get out of a quandary. It is a silly scene in a dreadful episode and thus when it comes to potential redubbing opportunities it is very much top of the list.

If you remember Theresa May’s farewell speech, all the way back in June, you will recall the moment her voice cracked as she spoke of serving the country she loved, before walking back into Downing Street for what we were supposed to believe was the last time (the likely truth is she had to go back in later when she forgot her purse). Meanwhile I was making notes, ripping out highlights and then running her voice through a couple of filters so that she sounded reasonably Cyberish (is that a word? I’m making it a word). The end result is something I confess I quite like. It is one of those transient videos, which stopped being funny as soon as the internet had moved on to the next thing (which took all of a week), but for a moment there, people were laughing.

 

2. Earthshock Redux (June 2019)

This is absolutely ridiculous, and I still don’t think it quite works, but it’s the best episode I could find of making the joke I’m not about to give away here. If you’re familiar with the ads, you’ll see what I was trying to do. If you’re not, then it will fly over your head like Concorde. That was a reference to Time Flight, by the way, in case anyone had failed to realise. At least you get to see Adric explode, which is no bad thing.

 

3. Jon Pertwee sings (July 2019)

How did I mark the Pertwee centenary? With this. Pertwee is easily the most musical of the Doctors, at least on screen – forever breaking into song as he’s driving or tinkering, and on more than one occasion a musical interlude proves to be a lifesaver. (Unfortunately it’s exactly the same monster and exactly the same song, two years down the line, which does rather cheapen the effect.)

Speaking of effects, wouldn’t it be far more fun if Pertwee’s voice was contaminated with helium? In recent weeks I’d finally worked out how to adjust vocal tracks so that the pitch is adjusted without the speed being compromised. At some point I’ll be applying it to River’s wedding scene, which will probably make it bearable. In the meantime, I tagged Pip Madeley in the Twitter upload, and he gave it his seal of approval, which is extremely gratifying. Anyone else fancy a bit of John Denver?

The Smallerpictures video dump (2019, part four)

I’m not always making videos. But when I am, they invariably end up in here, sooner or later.

 

1. Doctor Who: The Blockbusters Edition (April 2019)

The Twitter conversation is still pretty clear in my head. It was the trailer from Pale Rider – that 1970s Clint Eastwood vehicle where he may or may not be a ghost – and what strikes you about it, if you’re British, is that it uses the Channel 4 News Theme. Or, to be precise, it uses a piece of stock music titled ‘Best Endeavours’ (composed for the library by Alan Hawkshaw, who also wrote the Countdown theme) that’s turned up all over the place, as stock music is wont to do. Anyway, there then followed a conversation about whether Jon Snow was actually a cowboy, and then somebody else quipped that in the original version of the Star Wars cantina sequences, the band was playing the music from Blockbusters.

Bang. There it is. Why has nobody done this before? Blockbusters is the eighties quiz show personified: all drum machines and synths and overly dramatic stings that made you feel the stakes were much higher than they were. It was staple viewing in our house – watching those incredibly grown-up looking sixth formers with Italian style shirts and mullets flounder over what ‘R’ defines an unsophisticated and rural person (Rustic, in case you were wondering). You tried to plot their pattern across the board, working out which spaces would be likely targets for the battling contestants, and you cheered when they won a Thailand holiday at the end of the Gold Run.

Plus the music was awesome, particularly when they were doing the hand jive on Friday evenings (and, unless my memory is playing tricks on me, singing some sort of lyric during a special anniversary show). It’s taken years – and a Wikipedia entry – for me to notice that it actually contains snatches of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which is the sort of thing you can never unhear once you’ve noticed, and (as a consequence of this) something that’s been stuck in my head for the last three months. Make no mistake: the Blockbusters theme is infectious.

And it works perfectly with Series 11. Don’t ask me why. Perhaps there was an inherent cheese factor in that as well – some people loved it, some didn’t, but no one can deny its presence. Making this was simplicity itself: it was simply a question of delving into the episodes for appropriate footage. Cole and Gill really do deserve their own title cards, but the whole thing’s only about forty seconds long and I had a lot to get through, so there had to be sacrifices. And the synchronised shoulder pat at the end turned out to be a happy accident, but the sort I’m always anxious to repeat. I don’t always feel pleased with my work, but this was one time I did. And it made The Poke, of all things, so it was a good day.

 

 

2. Bungle from Rainbow dances to the Doctor Who theme (April 2019)

Let me conjure a picture. It’s the very next morning after the Blockbusters video went live, and I’m wandering home from the school run in the fresh heights of an Oxfordshire spring, and of course I’m ignoring everything around me because I’m on my phone. And then a video pops onto the feed of Bungle doing a dance to…something. I can’t remember. It might have been Soft Cell. But it was the sort of thing that happened a lot on Rainbow, which is the price you pay for creating an inherently musical show featuring only one non-human character with legs. Bungle got the lion’s share of the soft shoe numbers (well, you can’t exactly do ballet in a furry onesie) and usually it was to some sort of Rod, Jane and Freddy throwaway they hadn’t used for a while, but my mind started wandering and  there was something about his turn in ‘The Show Offs’ (a 1986 story in which the entire cast get to act like dickheads) that struck a chord. In the story he’s dancing to an instrumental version of ‘We’re Singing A Little Song’, but…

This took me thirty-eight minutes. You can tell. It’s not quite in sync, which is something I probably could have fixed if I could be bothered. As it stands, I think the rough-and-ready nature probably works in its favour. And Peter Howell’s version of the Doctor Who theme is the one from my childhood and probably the best version of them all. Although I’m guessing Bungle was probably more of a Pertwee fan. Call it a hunch.

 

3. Tim Shaw the Enchanter (May 2019)

Yeah, this doesn’t quite work. But I’d been putting it off for months, and I really needed to confirm that it didn’t quite work. And now I have. And bits of it are good. Probably. Maybe. Anyone fancy rabbit stew?

The Smallerpictures video dump (2019, part three)

Videos. You know the drill by now. And I’ve got a Holby I haven’t watched yet, so what say we dive straight in?

 

1. Things the Thirteenth Doctor loves (February 2019)

It was Emily who noticed. We were tidying the lounge one Monday morning, the day after ‘The Witchfinders’ (unless you had Amazon, in which case you’d probably already seen it), and talking about Series 11 and the way it was written. And Emily picked up on something about the new Doctor that I’d missed. “She doesn’t have a catchphrase as such,” she said, “but she does tell us about stuff she likes, doesn’t she? ‘Oh, a conspiracy. I love a conspiracy.'”

I looked through the transcripts, and it’s all over the place. I think almost every episode is referenced in the video below – ‘Rosa’ is missing, as is ‘Resolution’ and ‘The Woman Who Fell To Earth’, although in fairness the Doctor spent half of that one lying on a sofa. But everything else has at least one, and some have several. It’s the sort of thing that’s easy to criticise, if you’re not a fan of Chibnall, although this is somewhat pointless as Moffat did much the same thing with Smith, who had a tendency to say “And then you did that. Why did you do that?”. It became something of a trope, although it’s trickier to actually source the dialogue. I’m of the conviction that Doctor Who does not need catchphrases, and that (Baker aside) the fandom’s attempts at finding them are scrappy at best, but if we must have one these days I’m not sorry that it’s manifested as it has here. I know we’re giggling about it, but at least there’s a bit of variety.

I had a lot of fun making this one. Whatever you think of the writing, Whittaker has a sense of fun about her that I hope comes across. There is something particularly endearing about the way she bellows “APPLE BOBBING!”. Oh, and in reference to number 7, it was explained to me (via a YouTube comment) that the they’re talking about Hamilton, the Broadway musical dedicated to the life of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, which opened a couple of years ago and which, according to the Doctor, is destined to have more revivals than Cher’s musical career. You learn something new every day, don’t you?

 

2. The Bohemian Rhapsody edit (March 2019)

Quantum of Solace is a big pile of shit, isn’t it? Well, perhaps that’s a little harsh. It’s better than View To A Kill, at least, although I confess I’ve undergone tooth extractions which were less arduous than having to watch that one. But Solace – which has an interesting premise – is completely massacred by Marc Foster’s fondness for jump cuts. There are sometimes two or three a second, usually in the action sequences (the boat chase springs to mind), pummelling the viewer with shots of flying fists and the chains and the fizz of surf, as Bond and some random guy whose name I can never be bothered to remember duke it out in an exotic locale that we can’t even see anyway because the bloody camera won’t stay still. It is impossible to follow. I have no idea what’s going on and I refuse to put this down to old age: it’s just incomprehensible garbage.

Compare this to the fight scene in Atomic Blonde. You know, the one in the stairwell? Or John Woo’s 2 minutes, 42 seconds in the frenetic final act of Hard Boiled. Or, if we’re thinking about 007, the beautiful, single tracking shot that opens Spectre, where Bond wanders in and out of hotel rooms and across roofs as the dizzying spectacle that is the Day of the Dead unfolds below him. That, film students, is how you open a blockbuster. It’s all studio trickery, of course – so is Atomic Blonde, come to that – but it doesn’t matter: the only real difference between the two of them is that Atomic Blonde has an outstanding fight sequence couched in a generally wonderful movie, whereas Spectre is graced with a mesmerising opening and then it’s downhill all the way.

Anyway, I thought we were done with frantic jump cuts, until I heard about Bohemian Rhapsody. It’s a film I got to see quite recently and, as a word of reassurance, most of it’s fairly straight-laced, perhaps too much so. There is a press conference which mines every cliche in the book and there is a dramatic climax outside, at night, in the rain. Because obviously. On the plus side, the band look and sound the part (even if certain songs are dropped in earlier or later than they should have been) and the Live Aid set is so well done you can forgive the liberties they take with history. Besides, it’s kind of hard to concentrate on the anachronisms given that you spend about fifty per cent of the running time staring at cats.

Still. There’s one scene. You remember. It’s the one at the pub. The one that has more edits than the ITV version of Robocop. There are 52 in all, making the average shot around 1.57 seconds long (someone else’s homework, not mine). I’m told there are reasons for this; that narrative shifts after the scene was shot meant it no longer made sense and they had to go back and re-sequence it, but that doesn’t stop it inducing migraines. The film was Oscar-nominated for best editing; go figure. Interesting times at the Academy.

How to translate this into Doctor Who? It had to be something dialogue heavy, something featuring a number of people who could form different focus points, something where everyone stayed roughly stationary to keep the continuity fluid, and something I knew reasonably well. This one was an obvious choice: it is my favourite scene in an otherwise patchy episode and I do find it rather sweet, so I thought it might be fun to chop it up a little. The results speak for themselves, and not necessarily in a good way.

 

3. Doctor Who and the Vow of Silence (November 2018)

Yeah, I dunno. Thirteen years since ‘Rose’, and the Doctor still doesn’t have a clue.

 

Allons-y!