The Saturday night TV series Primeval has been billed as ITV’s answer to Doctor Who. It’s taken them long enough to think of something – or has it? Charlie Brooker, in his entertaining Screenwipes on BBC4, sees Sapphire and Steel as ITV’s original rival to Doctor Who. There’s also The Tomorrow People, which ran for a few years in the 70s, and let’s not forget Space 1999, Gerry Anderson’s short lived effort also from the same period. But let’s face it, ITV’s competition to Doctor Who has always been a bit thin on the ground.
So how does Primeval fare? Pretty good, at least in my house. It’s better than Torchwood, and after watching the final episode on Saturday I’m going to suggest that it might be better than Doctor Who. Primeval is about Professor Nick Cutter, played by Douglas Henshall, and his small team of young and attractive people who are investigating an outbreak of anomalies. This is a word that crops up quite frequently in the series, and an anomaly in this context is a hole in time (or something like that) which gives the excuse for Primeval‘s main premise – all sorts of dangerous prehistoric monsters sneaking through the anomalies and rampaging around in modern settings.
Scenarios so far have included:
- A dinosaur rampaging through some woods and deliberately terrorising a small boy
- Huge scorpions loose on the London Underground
- A prehistoric crocodile at large
- Dodos. Okay – not very frightening – but these ones carry a rather nasty parasite
- A homage to Hitchcock’s The Birds with the skies full of prehistoric winged creatures
- Just as we’re becoming over familiar with prehistoric monsters, a dangerous predator from the future
Primeval also has a subplot involving Cutter’s wife Helen, missing and presumed dead until she is discovered living in and out of the anomalies. She knows a lot about what’s going on, much more than she’s prepared to let on. She’s also one of the most headstrong female characters I’ve ever seen in a British TV series, somebody for who the term doesn’t suffer fools glady is most apt. She won’t take any shit, and when it’s Helen materialising from an anomaly instead of a 20 foot dinosaur I’m more afraid.
Character-wise, there’s a lot for the viewer to get their teeth into, with several interlocking love triangles being revealed as the series progressed. Apparently Hannah Spearitt has caused quite a stir by skipping around in her panties, and if you search for Primeval on YouTube these are the scenes that you are most likely to find. All of the actors make a good job of making the preposterous premise believable, and Ben Miller provides a comic turn as a disbelieving top civil servant.
The series manages to pull off all of the ridiculous situations it throws at us, there’s some outstanding special effects (are we supposed to say “CGI” these days?), and – unlike Torchwood – all of the supporting team are quite likeable. Primeval also had one of the best cliffhanger endings for its final episode that I’ve ever seen, throwing the gauntlet down at Doctor Who‘s feet and shouting “touché!”
Hot Fuzz is the new British comedy film starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, last seen together in Shaun of the Dead. I was particularly interested in seeing Hot Fuzz because it was filmed on location in Wells, very near to where I work in Somerset. I like to play the spot the location game when watching British films, as well as playing:
The spot Bill Nighy and Jim Broadbent game
How long before Bill Nighy turns up on screen in a British comedy? In Hot Fuzz it’s exactly four minutes. A little longer for Jim to make an appearance, but he’s there within half an hour.
The spot the obviously themed soundtrack game
Wells is doubling for a fictional country village, with the usual fetes and village greens. The soundtrack includes Village Green Preservation Society and Village Green by The Kinks. Hmmm, not very original.
The quickly decide on the type of plot we’re in for game
Hot Fuzz explores the fish out of water scenario. An outstanding London policeman is promoted to Sergeant but relocated to work in the country. There he must adjust to the quieter pace of life and the eccentric ways of the locals. In many ways it is similar to the TV series Life on Mars, with the strange country life being just as alien to the hero as being stuck in 1973.
My games aside, I enjoyed Hot Fuzz very much until about half an hour from the end when the film decides to dance through as many film genres as it can. It’s a very funny comedy, but it just goes mad. There’s horror suddenly thrown into the mix, with violent murders taking place, and for a moment I thought it was going to descend into either The Wicker Man (there’s even a cameo from Edward Woodward) or The Hills Have Eyes. Eventually it settles for being a buddy-buddy cop film with cartoon gun battles. Not bad, but I would have preferred more of the gentle comedy and more use made of the excellent supporting cast who include Paddy Considine, Kenneth Cranham and Billie Whitelaw.
Apparently the team who brought us Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz are working on a third film already. They haven’t revealed what genre they’ll be tackling, although I’ll still be playing my games when I go to see it.
‘It’s a book,’ I said. ‘It’s a book what you are writing.’ I made the old goloss very coarse. ‘I have always had the strongest admiration for them as can write books.’ Then I looked at its top sheet, and there was the name – A CLOCKWORK ORANGE – and I said: ‘That’s a fair gloopy title. Who ever heard of a clockwork orange?’ Then I read the malenky bit out loud in a sort of a very high type preaching glooss: ‘- The attempt to impose upon man, a creaure of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my swordpen – ‘ Dim made the old lip-music at that and I had to smeck myself. Then I started to tear up the sheets and scatter the bits over the floor…
Alex is fifteen. He lives with his parents, goes to school and has a fondness for Beethoven. He’s also the leader of a violent gang, partaking in mugging, housebreaking and assault. A Clockwork Orange is set in an unnamed city in the future (probably London, but also possibly East European) where Alex and his Droogs prowl the streets, drink milk spiked with drugs and talk in their own unique slang. Alex’s thuggish exploits are thankfully shortlived; he is arrested, sent to prison and eventually subjected to some revolutionary, and extreme, techniques to cure his evil and make him good. Drugged and physically restrained, he is forced to watch violent films which make any form of physical violence sickening to him. Two years after his arrest he is released back into society as an apparent model citizen. He is promptly beaten up by two of his old associates (now policemen), set upon by various former victims and attempts suicide. Whilst in hospital he discovers that the curing techniques have been reversed, and leaves ‘cured again’ to form another street gang. His heart isn’t in it this time however as, now aged 18, he feels he has grown out of it all.
I’ve rewritten this post several times as I’ve tried to make sense of A Clockwork Orange. I still haven’t – the novel is entertaining, disturbing and thought provoking as Anthony Burgess intended, but it’s also repetitive, unconvincing and tiresome. My problem was that I didn’t care what happened to Alex, and I failed to respond to the danger to society he posed, or that posed by his own tormentors. Reading it I kept thinking of Malcolm McDowell and Stanley Kubrick. The film, although not one of the director’s best, does outshine the book.
Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film version provoked some apparent copycat behaviour of the violence in the novel and this prompted the director to withdraw the film from circulation. It didn’t resurface in the UK until after his death in 1999. Until then, I had only seen A Clockwork Orange on a very well worn VHS sometime in the 1980s. Going to see the film in London when it was reissued, I was so excited that I accidently bought four tickets instead of two (excited as a Kubrick obsessive rather than a Burgess fan I confess). I also recall a group of teenage boys hanging around outside, plotting ways to bunk into the cinema in the spirit of Alex and his Droogs. I can’t remember whether they made it inside or not.
Ultimately, both book and film have been too overshadowed by controversy to deliver a punch any more; ironically a controversy that Kubrick sought to avoid. Going to see the film all those years ago was a disappointment because I’d heard so much and expected so much, now I’ve finally got round to reading the book I have the same deflated feeling – only more so. Crime and punishment in a futuristic although strangely familiar future? I’m sticking with Orwell.
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