Have I Got Whos For You (Summer Special)

Hello lovely people. And how are we doing?

Things have calmed down here a bit now that I’ve got a two week camping trip in Wales under my belt – along with a children’s holiday club and the first of two festivals. We’re in the eye of the storm just before the second one kicks off, and I’m using a couple of days’ respite to catch up on things I’ve not yet posted – beginning with Sooty, who recently celebrated his seventieth birthday.

“What’s that? You want to play your xylophone?”

For the uninitiated: Sooty is a mute glove puppet who speaks only in inaudible whispers. He’s fond of magic, pranks and general mayhem, and had he been created within the last ten years he’d have his own YouTube channel and be the subject of a dozen tabloid scandals: a picture of a soaking, pie-covered Boris Johnson accompanied by the words “HAS SOOTY GONE TOO FAR?”. Sooty is joined on his adventures by a squeaky-voiced dog and a talking panda, as well as whatever hapless human being happens to be looking after him – for years this was creator Harry Corbett, before his son Matthew took over the role, being responsible for the welfare of the exuberant trio and their cousin Scampy during my childhood. Matthew eventually handed the reins to Richard Cadell, and the titular bear is currently residing at Brean Park in Somerset. (Yes, I’ve been.)

Sooty’s been shown in a variety of situations and a variety of formats – the classic sitcom-in-a-house setup is perhaps the most famous, but Sooty’s also run a junk shop, a holiday camp and a hotel (in which Arthur Darvill once stayed). There was also a dreadful animated series, which failed principally because it gave Sweep the voice he’d always been denied, making him more or less unwatchable, but also because it gave the characters legs. I mean, honestly. It’s not the bloody Muppets. There’s a time and a place for these things. There are certain puppet characters who are doomed to be permanently legless.

—

Do you know who else is having a birthday this year? WALL-E. He turns ten. And he’s probably trundling around the repopulated Earth somewhere, tidying up the rubbish and watching old movies with EVA. They’re probably still trying to grow that pizza plant. When you think about it, WALL-E is basically a film about a binman who falls in love with a gardener, except they go into space and hang out with a bunch of fat people. Still, there’s something to be said for an animated feature where the villain is a wheel and the hero is a box.

I first saw WALL-E a few months after its release, when it came to the Saturday morning £1 bargain presentations at our local Cineworld. I took Josh, who (at the age of four) probably didn’t have a clue what was going on, although he didn’t say anything. He saved that for Megamind, in which he leaned over to me half an hour from the end and said “Daddy, I don’t understand any of this”. I defy any of you with children to adequately explain the plot of Megamind, with its duplicitous characters and twists and endless use of hologramatic disguises, to a six-year-old in a crowded cinema in a whisper. Go on. Try it. And then come back and tell me exactly what you said so that I can save it for when I eventually watch it with Edward.

Anyway. Let’s move on, shall we? To this, to be exact.

I mean, I don’t know. I thought doing a Civil War re-enactment (you see what I did there) would be fun. I know it makes no sense, but it’s just fun. And people seemed to like it – with one exception, who will be anonymised in the transcript that follows. It’s a closed group (of which she’s no longer a member) and I do have standards, so let’s call her, I don’t know, Haylee. She reminded me of a Haylee for some reason. Oh, and I’ve corrected all her typos, because I’m not totally without mercy.

Haylee: Why is Capaldi on the same side as the master? Is it because of his affection for his frenemy it something else I’m missing? (I didn’t get to see the whole season with Bill).

Me: He came like that, and I just couldn’t be bothered to move him over.

Haylee: Then what’s the point of making the image at all if you’re not going to make it properly representative?

Me: It’s not representative of anything. I just did it for a laugh.

Haylee: if there is no reason for Capaldi to be on the same side as the Masters, you have failed to capture a parody of Avengers Civil War. Parodies include juxtaposed meaning, not just similar imagery.

Me: Strewth. And I thought Star Wars fans overthought things.

Haylee: My comments come from being in the graphic design and theatre world where you need to have reasoning behind visual action. We overthink which shade of blue to use.

Me: Then I suspect you need to switch off a bit.

Haylee: Or you can deal with the true definition of parody and accept someone asking for the reasoning for your artistic choices. Simon [who chipped in with a couple of other semi-helpful interpretations about ‘sides’ that I haven’t bothered to include] did a great job of answering my initial question, giving reason to your art, when you ‘couldn’t be bothered.’ Bye Felicia.

Me: It’s not a parody of anything. I just had the idea for the image and picked the first caption that came into my head. If you want to get all authoritarian about the ‘true meaning’ of parody then that’s entirely up to you. I mean, seriously, you sound like the way I used to be. I have found this whole conversation greatly amusing, in an alarming sort of way, because it confirms just about every stereotype in the Joyless Overthinking Fan Handbook, right down to the ‘Bye Felicia’. I shall bring you a nice cup of tea to perk you up during your gatekeeping.

Haylee:  I give no shits from a fan perspective. I give shits from a visual communication perspective. I asked for clarification of the meaning of your image, and you straight up just said you were too lazy to care about creating a piece that was a good parody. You could have just answered “I didn’t think about that- it was just for fun” and that would have been fine. Instead what I heard in your answer was “I did a half ass job and wanted praise for my delicate male ego- how dare you critique my work.”

Our wonderful friend Simon created a wonderful bit of meaning that I thought the image may have been hinting at, adding greater depth to your image.

We can always do better in our craft and our communication. Being unwilling to hear how we can make a craft better is to nurse a weak ego. Creating images that we say hold a specific meaning or goal (in this case, a parody to Avengers Civil War) and then not putting in enough thought to complete the task encourages further mediocrity. It’s fine to say it’s just for fun. It’s fine to say you didn’t think about it. But to be “hey now, get your panty out of your butt – no one gets to give me critiques” is why I say bye Felicia. Again, thanks Justin for being a deep thinker who sees the multiplicities in the charters of this particular fandom. James, Keep making fun images. Keep making connections. Keep improving, even if it’s just a hobby and just for fun. Be willing to listen to people that aren’t me about how you can make your images have clearer and stronger meaning. It’s the creators that make things fun. It’s the collaborators that bring depth.

Me: I’m always up for constructive criticism where I think it improves things. Give me technical info. How could I sort out the interlacing? How could the structure of this piece be changed so it doesn’t drag? What should that caption actually say as it doesn’t read quite right? And how can I fix that annoying pop on the MP3 samples?

Don’t assume, merely because I scoffed at you, that I’m a rampant egomaniac who hates criticism of his work. I’ve been doing this shit since you were in elementary and I got reasonably competent (for an enthusiastic, part-time amateur) at it largely through listening to others. Or what, you think I’m going to tell you one of those hard graft stories where I take all the credit?

I just felt that in this instance you missed the mark. You wax lyrical about this supposedly definitive concept of ‘true parody’ (which has given my friends quite a titter, by the way) but you miss the point that this is purposely ambiguous, silly and – well, itself bereft of a point. This was never meant to be about Civil War. The image came first – or the idea of it – and the caption was something I tagged on because it sort of looked a bit like it, but I don’t really think it does and I don’t think anyone else does either. You’re trying to bring meaning where there is none, which is something fans do a lot, whether they’ve got a background in graphic design or they flip burgers at McDonald’s.

So please don’t assume that I don’t listen to criticism or take constructive comments on board. I just have a filter. A filter is necessary because otherwise you listen to everyone, which leads to the eradication of ego and the death of creativity. You may object to the criteria under which that filter operates, specifically because in this instance it excluded you, but them’s the breaks, and just because you’ve interpreted it in a particular way it does not mean you know me.

TL:DR – Don’t try and give things more significance than they deserve. I don’t get paid for this. Know when to critique and when not to. That’s a lesson I had to learn myself, and my life is richer for the experience.

—

Strewth. I don’t know why I bother.

Yes. Yes I do.

The Rainbow Connection

Today, boys and girls, you have a choice. You can read this through, or you can skip to the bottom. That’s where the video is. I will not hold it against you, and I’ll never know you did it. Your time is precious. But do, at least, spare five minutes to watch the Thing At The End, because that’s the whole point.

Somewhere in the home counties – I’m thinking Surrey, although it’s never clear – in a cheerfully painted house, a fluffy gay hippo is carefully stacking blocks. To his left, there is a weird orange thing that may or may not be extraterrestrial, doing a puzzle. There is a piece missing: in his frustration, he chucks the box in the direction of the hippo, upsetting his tower. “Ooh, Zippy!” complains the hippo, rife with melodrama. “Zat’s very naughty! Now I’ve got to start again!”

“Oh, well, never mind George,” says the alien. “You can always make another one.”

Stage right, there is a large brown bear reading a comic. “Oh, Zippy,” he sighs. “You are careless.”

“Yes, well, it’s not my fault!” says the alien. “He shouldn’t have been building right next to my jigsaw!”

Their greying foster carer – all sensible shirts and white trainers – walks in, carrying a basket of washing that is inexplicably full given that he’s the only person in the house who wears any clothes. Scenes like this no longer astound or surprise him the way they once did: he’s watched every episode of The Dumping Ground and accepts most of his job is firefighting the squabbles and arguments his young charges have daily. He suspects the alien may have ADHD. He has caught the bear rewiring the electrics once or twice and has asked him not to. The hippo is constantly put upon by his would-be siblings, and the people down the road are always holding impromptu glee clubs in his front room. This, he reflects, was not how he saw his life going when he signed up for this gig.

When we were children, Rainbow was a part of the furniture. It had been around so long that no one gave its murky origins a second thought. There were all manner of questions about the setup in the house – who were these strange anthropomorphic characters and why were they living with this middle-aged storyteller? What did they do for money? And are the frequent fourth wall breaks some sort of indication that they’re in some sort of kids’ version of Big Brother, mercifully without the sex? But no one really asked. It was just something we accepted. It was, like Doctor Who, more about the situation, and the hijinks that ensued, than anything that might have led to them.

It’s strange when you reflect upon how much things have changed. I often read comments on the CBeebies Facebook page about The Tweenies, usually complaining about something obnoxious that Bella is doing. It is inconceivable that a show like that would be made today. Everyone spends all their time arguing. The characters are real, but they’re not a good influence, and even though their behaviour usually results in consequences and discipline, that’s lost on today’s thou-shalt-parent-my-children-for-me audience. While it’s hard to pinpoint precisely where it happened, somewhere along the line we lost the concept of dramatic irony.

There was – I swear I’m not making this up – an episode of Rainbow where Rod, Jane and Freddy sang a song that went “A flying saucer / In our garden / It must have come from outer space…”. Whereupon Zippy poked his head out of the window and offered them a trip to the stars, which they gleefully accepted, finishing the song along the way. It was, to my mind, the best origin story for Zippy that we’ve ever had. There is no other explanation for a creature with a zip sewn into its mouth, other than one that evolved on a planet where it’s an essential survival feature. Perhaps he was expelled from his home world for being thoroughly obnoxious – it would explain why ‘cousin’ Zippo is so mind-numbingly placid, at least until that later episode where he develops a bad American accent and starts talking about crisps.

Little moments like this are integral to our understanding of Rainbow. There are episodes where Geoffrey randomly ‘has to go out’. We never know where he goes (unless he returns with something plot-related) or why. Sessions at the dole office immediately spring to mind. So too do images of Geoffrey attending a drug deal or hiring himself out as a gigolo. It all depends on the mood I’m in. So you can understand why I’d latch onto the image of Zippy emerging from a wrecked spacecraft and setting up home with a bear and a hippo, which is to all intents and purposes what the song implies. (It also implies, of course, that Rod, Jane and Freddy were actually housed together in some sort of communal living situation, which corroborates many 1980s tabloid rumours.)

Then there’s…um. Rainbow cosplay.

I mean, seriously. What the hell is that? It’s like Zippy ate him. At least he can still breathe, which is presumably a situation that can be quickly altered with the swipe of a zip at the top. Come to think of it why does this have a working zip anyway, given that its sudden closure by an external party is likely to render the occupant airless and blind in an instant? Is this some sort of gimp outfit you use for fetish games? Does Christian Grey have one? It is only marginally less disturbing than the Rainbow comics which hit the stands back in the 1990s, in which every character looks basically normal except for George, who bears the haunted, blank-eyed stare of a hippo possessed.

(If you enjoy exploring the seedy underbelly of the animals in the house, you would be well-advised to check out World of Crap, who have devoted pages and pages to rewritten Rainbow comics with amusing captions.)

I’ve dabbled with Rainbow before, of course, in a video that I still quite like, some six years after its creation (not to mention Roy Skelton’s death, which upped the hit count considerably). But Zippy’s only one part of the trio – and while he’s the obvious candidate for voice transposition, that doesn’t mean the others don’t have potential. Except that George is timid and often stumbles over his words, of course, which makes placing him difficult. That left Bungle, who is usually well-spoken, as well as prone to bouts of pomposity. When it came to finding a Doctor Who character for him to replace, there really was only one choice, and that was Omega.

It’s not that I don’t like ‘The Three Doctors’. I think it’s overrated, not to mention structurally problematic – one of those stories that is beloved because it was the first multi-Doctor fusion (and even then, it fails to deliver on its title’s promise). The bickering between Pertwee and Troughton is about the best part of the story – although an unexpected highlight occurs when Benton walks into the TARDIS for the first time, and refuses to state the obvious. The Gel guards are quite fun, but this one is perhaps the epitome of the ‘Stupid Brigadier’ phase, in which U.N.I.T.’s finest devolves into a reactionary simpleton who refuses to accept the evidence of his own eyes.

Then there’s Omega, a villain so melodramatic it’s impossible to see him as a serious threat. Omega’s role in ‘The Three Doctors’ is to shout. In ‘Arc of Infinity’, it’s to shout some more, and then decompose at the edge of a river, just after bonding with a small child over the sight of an organ grinder. In ‘Omega’, the 2003 Big Finish audio drama, his role is to convince you that he’s the Doctor, which he manages with aplomb. But for the most part it’s just a lot of shouting. There must be a reason for all that anger. You almost want Tennant to lean round the door of his chamber, survey Omega’s colossally oversized mask and mutter “Compensating for something?”

Still, masks are handy. I use masks a lot, simply because it makes the dubbing much easier. And there’s something fun about having a supposedly sinister character rendered ridiculous. In the case of Omega, it only half works. You can make him ridiculous all right; he just isn’t very sinister.

When it came to putting this together, I wanted it to feel as close to an actual episode of Rainbow as possible, so I started with the animations. There are two of them, built up in that slow, frame-by-frame style (the sound effects, by the way, are all ripped directly from the show). Originally it was just going to be K-9, but I put the other one in just for the heck of it – the same might be said for the Rod, Jane and Freddy song that shows up later, although that’s partly the silliness of Pertwee’s slow motion fight with Omega.

The biggest problem was Bungle’s voice, which is less consistent than you imagine (unlike Zippy, who always sounds like Zippy). It’s perhaps most obvious in the opening scene, in which the changes are obvious. This being a Classic episode, I didn’t have the luxury of score-free dialogue, which meant dealing with ambience and the occasional sting from Dudley Simpson (who recently turned 95, if you want another entry to your list of Entertainment Veterans You Hadn’t Realised Weren’t Dead Yet). As a result it’s rather rough around the edges, and I almost like it that way.

Oh, and make sure you watch to the end…

Dalek Zippy

I always iron in front of the TV. This is because ironing is a therapeutic but monotonous task and I need some sort of stimulus. We don’t watch much of the tube (I really should stop calling it that; it seems hideously out of date, even though we still own a CRT TV) in our household, at least not in terms of collapsing in front of it of an evening; we’re more likely to play a game or chat over a takeaway. Exceptions are made for 24, The X-Files (or any other boxed serial we happen to be watching) and Doctor Who – and, for a few horrifying years, The X-Factor.

One evening last spring I was working my way through the extras for ‘Genesis of the Daleks’. The DVD bonus features for the 2 Entertain sets are generally great – whimsical, nostalgic and insightful, lacking the self-congratulatory air of the more recent stuff and pulling relatively few punches about the sort of problems the team would routinely encounter when producing episodes, whether it was Hinchcliffe coming under fire from Mary Whitehouse or Baker upstaging Louise Jameson. They’re fun and snappy and clever. (I recommend, in particular, the in-character interview with Sutekh the Destroyer in ‘Pyramids of Mars’, which someone has thoughtfully uploaded to YouTube.)

One of the extras in ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ is a potted history of the eponymous monstrosities, from design to execution to evolution, along with occasional dialogue masterclasses led by Roy Skelton. Skelton became synonymous with the Nation’s finest (you see what I did there?) in the 1970s and 80s, but anyone who watched children’s TV during this time will also recognise his name from the credit crawl for Rainbow, a show which catalogued the adventures of three anthropomorphic animals (a hippo, a bear, and a…whatever) who seemed to have taken on the role of foster children with obviously troubled backgrounds, now living with a patient father substitute with ridiculous dress sense. Throughout Rainbow‘s long and memorable run, Skelton managed to voice both George and Zippy, often more or less at the same time, in a staggering feat of almost schizophrenic voicing, by turns making himself sound wet and effeminate, and then immediately brash and boastful depending on who he was doing at the time.

The funny thing about the ‘Genesis’ interviews is that when Skelton is doing his Dalek voice, minus the filters and the sound effects and the omnipresent hum that seems to pervade the ships and lunar bases that housed them in the TV series, he really does sound exactly like Zippy. Specifically Zippy when he’s playing a character in some fanciful game he may have invented – like the memorable episode where he dressed up as Zipman (with George playing Bobbin, the Boy Blunder), fighting against the evil Joker Geoffrey. (Watch it after you’ve watched this one, though, otherwise it’ll spoil one of the punch lines.) The Dalek voice is tinged with monotone, lacking some of Zippy’s rising and falling cadences – nonetheless, the raspy extrovert is there for all to hear and it’s quite apparent that he modelled the Zippy voice on the Dalek voice, or perhaps the other way around; we may never know.

So this set me thinking: what would the Daleks sound like if we took out their voices and dubbed them over with Zippy’s dialogue? Fortunately I had a lot of it. I will make no apology for the fact that the purchase of every single one of our numerous Rainbow DVDs pre-dates the birth of all three of my children. I got very nostalgic for old TV just after the millennium turned and all the shows that I watched in the afternoons after school or on lunch breaks during the holidays started coming out on DVD. Sometimes when you delve into these things again you find they’re not as good as they are in your head (as I recently experienced when I picked up a copy of The Family Ness in our local 99p shop, and found it a bit of a disappointment), but Rainbow – trust me on this – was every bit as good as I remembered it, with a formulaic approach that left plenty of breathing space for occasional variation.

There was only one obvious candidate for the Zippy re-dub, and that was ‘Destiny of the Daleks’. As Dalek stories go, it’s distinctly sub-par. Lalla Ward is as watchable as she ever was, particularly as it was her first story in the Romana role, and Tim Barlow lends decent support as Tyssan, but the Movellan robots are laughably camp, the story is inconsequential and the revived Davros is a huge let-down. The bad taste in the mouth was perhaps almost inevitable when you consider that the last time we saw Daleks was ‘Genesis’, which is arguably the finest Doctor Who story of them all, and certainly the best Dalek one – but really, Terry had five years to come up with something new, and you’d really think he could have done better than this (even if Douglas Adams, script editor at the time, rewrote most of it and may arguably have been more responsible for the mess we saw on screen). For all that, there are a couple of memorable moments – Romana’s interrogation at the hands of the Daleks in the second episode is chilling (despite the fact that all they actually say when they capture her is “DO NOT MOVE”, repeated for about a minute and a half) and despite all its flaws, the serial is arguably worth watching in its entirety purely for the scene in which the Doctor hoists himself up into a vent and mocks the approaching Dalek with the words “If you’re supposed to be the superior race of the universe, why don’t you try climbing after us?”.

The longest job I had was going through every single Rainbow episode to lift appropriate soundbites. Zippy is forever spouting obnoxious boasts and singing ridiculous songs and there was an abundance of suitable material, but chopping out the .wav files took ages (although I did manage to rip out the Rod, Jane and Freddy songs at the same time for an iPod playlist). After that, I dumped them all in over some appropriate moments in ‘Destiny’, added a little ambient noise where it was needed, re-edited the thing (there’s no narrative progression, it was just a question of sequencing for pace and variety) and threw together a patchy reproduction of the Rainbow credit sequence to finish it off. I basically threw the whole thing together in an evening, although it was rather a late one. I uploaded in May 2011, and that was that.

Then Roy Skelton died.

I wouldn’t say it went viral. ‘Going viral’ is one of those terms that gets bounded about far too often and in the wrong contexts, much like iconic (which I’ve whined about before). But the hit counter went from a couple of hundred to over five thousand more or less overnight, and I got all manner of positive comments and a brief mention in the August WhoTube listings in Doctor Who Magazine. And then things settled down again, although it remains one of my most viewed concoctions, and perhaps rightly so – I really am quite proud of it. Someone even added a ring mod filter to make Zippy sound more Dalek-like (something I’d experimented with, but without much success), and it’s quite clever, but I suppose I’m always going to prefer the original – it’s the juxtaposition of Zippy and the Daleks that makes it work, I think, and I do think they sound even more frightening now. I’d never intended this to be a tribute to Skelton but that’s basically what it’s become, and perhaps it’s better that way – the man was a genius and we really ought to recognise that. I don’t expect for a moment that he saw this before his death, but I hope he would have approved.