I’ve held off talking about the latest Doctor Who special for a while. In fact I wasn’t planning to mention it at all. Like a bad dream, I thought it might just fade away and be forgotten. Whilst my enthusiasm for the show is legendary, Ive never been too enamoured with the annual Christmas specials. I’ve found that they reveal the worst side of Russel T. Davies’ writing, and tend to drop the imaginative and subtle aspects of the programme in favour of something simplistic and far too overblown. I’ve never come away from a Doctor Who Christmas special without a headache.
So I was a touch disappointed when it was announced that there would be no 2009 series. In its place would be a series of specials. The dreaded word fills me with horror. It’s more scary than a basement full of Weeping Angels. 2009 would be a year without a decent story arc, no chance for The Doctor to build a rapport with his companion and, most disturbingly, no Steven Moffat episodes. Just Russel T. Davies chucking the BBC’s money around and producing not particularly sophisticated TV.
There’s a really good review of Planet of the Dead by Jack that sums up a lot of what was wrong about it. For me, the episode is just the worst example of what I’m calling special syndrome. The main premise of the story was The Doctor and Michelle Ryan (from Eastenders) on a number 200 London bus that ends up on a sort of desert planet. The number 200 was significant because it marked the 200th Who story. Hardly worth the effort and I’m sure many viewers, even those that cared, wouldn’t have been that bothered. I would have personally preferred them to have waited another 20 adventures so they could pay tribute to the 220 that I used to catch from White City to Tooting Broadway (or do it 11 earlier and salute the 189 from Earlsfield to Wimbledon). No matter.
I found Planet of the Dead doomed from the start. As uninspiring, perhaps, as a desert world. The idea of The Doctor being stranded with a group of fellow passsengers was brilliantly explored in last year’s Midnight. As well as featuring hardly any special effects at all, the episode posed the interesting question about what would happen if the Doctor’s authority was questioned in a crisis situation. If, rather than saving the day as always, he was perceived as a threat. Unfortunately Davies has closed this chapter on the Doctor’s vulnerability and Planet of the Dead had him saving the day again, with Lee Evans and Michelle Ryan (from Eastenders) helping him.
The effects were certainly impressive, but I don’t find that enough if – and this was the case – the story is lazy and David Tennant is on autopilot. I’m also finding the reintroduction of UNIT slightly uncomfortable. Maybe it gives me weird flashbacks of being a small child, where soldiers were always on the news as well as following The Doctor around. Soldiers were just everywhere in those days. The new theme, where the modern Doctor is also uncomfortable with the military presence, hasn’t been handled as well as it could. Like his 70s predecessors, when Davies wants the military to fire at some aliens he just calls in UNIT.
Probably the worst aspect of the specials is the lack of continuity that works well in Doctor Who. Ryan played the latest in a stream of one off companions, that have included Kylie Minogue, that we don’t really get to know enough to care about. And neither, I suspect, does The Doc – which leaves the drama of the series somewhat lacking.
Davies and Tennant have two (or three?) more chances to get this right before they hand over to Moffat and Smith. Planet of the Dead hinted at a revival of the your song must end soon prophecy, something that may link to the demise of the 10th Doc. Let’s just hope they make it good…
Tales That Witness Madness
In 1973 the horror anthology was all the rage. This was mainly thanks to the efforts of Amicus, the main rival to Hammer Films in the 60s and 70s, who churned out their series of portmanteau horrors. With titles like Dr Terrors House of Horrors, From Beyond the Grave and Vault of Horror, the films would each typically contain four of five different chilling tales and feature a host of familiar faces including horror stalwarts Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. The stories would usually be linked together with an often very loose framing device.
In Dr Terrors House of Horrors a fortune teller (Cushing) reveals the fate of fellow travellers on a train (who include, in a bizarre casting experiment, the late disc jockey Alan Freeman). Torture Garden does something similar in a funfair, while Vault of Horror has its subjects recount their disturbing dreams. There’s a great sequence with Terry-Thomas as an over fastidious husband who gets a rather nasty comeuppance. The creepy Asylum visits the tortured worlds of inmates in an institution, while The House That Dripped Blood suitably haunts all of its occupants. All deserve articles in their own right. And I promise that they will come.
Tales That Witness Madness is often mistakenly credited as an Amicus film, although it was actually made by the Rank Organisation. It’s an easy mistake to make. The director is Freddie Francis, who made many films for both Hammer and Amicus, and the cast includes Donald Pleasence, Jack Hawkins and Joan Collins, who were no strangers to this sort of thing. Like Asylum, it uses the framing device of the secure hospital, where a white-coated, bearded and manic eyed Pleasence is running the show. Jack Hawkins, rather foolishly, turns up for a tour of the cells.
Much of Tales That Witness Madness is poor quality. Hawkins, very ill at the time, has his voice dubbed awkwardly by another actor, Charles Gray. The final story is far too long, but there is a moody and memorable opening title sequence and Pleasence is as excellent as you would expect. And, like every British film made in the early 70s, there’s something that makes this essential viewing. Two of the stories, for different reasons, are very good indeed. Mr Tiger concerns a small boy, isolated from the world by his parents who choose to have him educated at home by a private tutor. He invents a furry imaginary friend – or does he? There’s no points for guessing how wrong things go here, and it helps that Rank stretches the budget to employ a real tiger.
The other memorable sequence features Michael Jayston and Joan Collins. Beginning with the eerily memorable line “does anyone here love me?”, this is the most bizarre thing Collins has ever appeared in. This in itself is an achievement from the actress who starred in the insane I Don’t Want to be Born and featured in the Tales From the Crypt segment as a murderous housewife pursued by a maniacal Santa Claus.
Jayston plays a man who, and I can find no better words for this, falls in love with a tree. He names it Mel and moves it into the house, much to – and you can’t forgive her for this – the chagrin of his wife Ms Collins. This being a horror film in the Amicus tradition, things eventually work out better for Mel than they do for Joan. And you can kind of justify why Jayston has ended up in a padded cell, although it’s unfortunate that he only has Donald Pleasence to look after him. From my point of view, the softly spoken voice and intense glare would only make me madder…
Last year I was very impressed with Tom Rob Smith’s Soviet thriller Child 44. The novel reached the Booker longlist, much to the horror of many critics who thought a commercial crime thriller far too lowbrow. I found this view somewhat sniffy; Child 44 is generally a well written and intriguing crime novel. My only criticism was in how Smith all too eagerly set things up at the end for a sequel. Now the sequel has come.
And oh dear oh dear. Whilst I defended Child 44 against those who accused Smith of being a Dan Brown in the waiting, I have no defence whatsoever for The Secret Speech. This is a book clumsily written and so preposterous that you’ll want to throw it across the room (or in my case out of the hotel room window). Where Child 44 ended with the whispers of a follow up, Smith must have sat around doing very little until his publishers started banging in his door and demanding it. It stinks of a book written in great haste, and one that is little more that a hastily sketched out screenplay in the guise of a hardback.
I don’t normally write bad reviews, but Smith has annoyed me greatly because I’m convinced that he does have talent, and there are parts of The Secret Speech that show what a better book it might have been (albeit only one character convincingly portrayed: the captain of the prison ship that features was very well written for example, which made me question what went wrong with the rest of the book). Otherwise there are too many big scenes that cry out for the attention of the cinema; the detonation of a church, a storm and a revolt at sea, a chase through the sewers.
The Secret Speech catches up with Leo Demidov from Child 44, now heading a unique homicide division (unique because Stalinist Russia had previously denied the existence of anything like murder in their regime where murder was the privilege of the state). Leo and his wife are also coping with adoption (the two girls they took care of after their parents were murdered in the first book). A series of murders surround both publication of Khrushchev’s “secret speech” denouncing Stalin and the incarceration of a former priest arrested years before by a younger Leo. One of Leo’s daughters is subsequently kidnapped and the ransom involves Leo posing as a prisoner in the Gulags in order to help the priest escape.
I can’t really go on as the plot becomes sillier and sillier. In prison Leo meets a crazy governor who reminds of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. There’s a tough female villain who heads up a Russian gang of cardboard criminals and a twist that looks like it’s going to save the novel but then fails; it all ends stupidly. So unfortunately, and it pains me to say this, The Secret Speech really does to prove that Tom Rob Smith is a Dan Brown in the waiting. And that might even be an insult to Dan Brown; The Da Vinci Code is a much better book.
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