The Turner Prize 2004, Channel 4

What to say if you liked it
A reverential genuflection to the profound tidal forces who shape the art world and, through logical extension, the world around us.
What to say if you didn’t like it
An incoherent shambles that had equal value in modern culture to a pack of unkempt tramps competing in a who can do the funniest shaped shit competition.

What was good about it?
• The clip of winner Jeremy Deller’s Memory Bucket film, where thousands of bats flew across the screen, was very striking.
• Jon Snow made a welcome and understated appearance when he presented Jeremy Deller with the prize.

What was bad about it?
• Matthew Collins’ awful presentation that was reminiscent of Avid Merrion’s Davina McCall, in which he constantly held the microphone away from his mouth while interviewing that meant we couldn’t hear his questions.
• Matthew Collins’ interview technique, when we could actually hear the questions he asked. He concluded a chat with last year’s Turner Prize winner, pottery artist Grayson Perry, by referring to him as “Hairy Potter”. And, worse still, he greeted winner Jeremy
Deller with: “You must be feeling a weird mixture of weird and very good.” Cat Deeley would have asked more taxing posers.
• The high toll of words you usually only ever find in shows about art: kitsch; ambiguous; poetic; one level and the other level; theatrically; abstracted; context; profundity; catalyst; aesthetic; subtext.
• The level of analysis by Channel 4’s “shadow” jury was very superficial and didn’t communicate why the four nominated artists were deserving of the prize.
• The corporate ambience of the whole affair from the glistening champagne glasses that were herded on a table like high class Eastern European prostitutes waiting to be picked up in a hotel lobby by fat Western businessmen to Tate Gallery chairman Nicholas Serota thanking sponsors Gordon’s Gin to confirm Turner’s place suckling in the bosom of commercial thrall.
• The very brief review of the arts year contained nothing about the creation of new art but instead concentrated on the theft or destruction of old art, the gimmick of chimpanzees painting and works fetching record prices at auction.
• When Matthew Collins was deliberating who the winner might be he brought up the bookies’ predictions. It’s bad enough that bookies’ guesswork is brought up in football, but it’s now spreading to other areas that will ultimately lead to a neo-religious conflict where factions based on the avaricious, pseudo-prophetic scripture of Paddy Power, Ladbrokes and William Hill will engage in bloody warfare the length and breadth of high streets across the land.
• Nicholas Serota’s absurd analogy between the tabloid press gloating over the fire at Saatchi’s warehouse that destroyed some British art and the Nazis burning books in the 30s. If artists are ever forbidden to work and forced to wear a derogatory symbol on their clothes to mark them out as pariahs he may have a point, however until that time, his remark appears disgraceful.
• We were never told in clear terms why the film of the trial of Afghan warlord was pulled from the exhibition at the last minute except for nebulous murmurings of “legal reasons” and it being “prejudicial”.

Picture This, Channel 4

Did we like it?
It’s a shame that amateur photography has to be clumsily shoehorned into the rudimentary, misshapen format of a talent contest as, from what we could gather, the process is quite interesting. It would have been more interesting if the contestants weren’t such hopeless amateurs – evidently so we could share their ‘journey’ – and the experts/judges didn’t settle on proceedings like a fog of pretentious pompousness.

What was good about it?
• The best of the six contestants, at least in this first episode, was Lizz a recovering alcoholic who started off a seeming novice but who became accustomed to the complexities – though not the deluded pretensions – of photography at exactly the same pace as our interest was stoked. She also clearly explained her thinking behind her portrait of fellow contestant Ed, before confessing her admiration in his confidence as he blithely asked passers-by to assist him as he in turn took her photograph.
• Following the novices as they tackled the simplest forms of photography with as little experience as the viewer in some cases helped lower you into the world gently. Whether they were taking portraits in the park, soothing the genial cantankerousness of Germaine Greer or navigating some apathetic Brighton residents on to the sodden beach for a shot to encapsulate the seaside, it was all quite engaging.
• Of the contestants, Lucinda’s juvenile giggling and art school fervour are by contrast irritating and admirable; Ed is the Javier Mascherano of the programme, dutiful, functional and efficient but he will never provoke people to throw rip their hearts from their chest and toss them into the air in rapturous, impetuous celebration; Aron approaches each challenge like he was a novelist whose books are hamstrung by delusions of being the next Dostoyevsky; Carolyn was eliminated after she was punished for committing the photographers’ cardinal sin of using Photoshop to sharpen up her work; and Jay, also eliminated, was seen to be too inexperienced to keep pace with the remainder of the challenges.

What was bad about it?
• Instances where instead of illuminating the viewer by shining a torchlight into the murkier nuances of photography there was a redoubtable determination to alienate the viewer with an esoteric cipher common to the fashion industry that reeks of an insecurity that this proud pursuit will be exposed as a superficial dalliance rather than a journey to the depths of the soul.
• It probably falls between the two stools, as none of the images really struck us as heart-piercingly beautiful or original – Lizz’s shot of Germaine Greer made up as if she were cryogenically frozen was perhaps the best – but on the other hand, the keen endeavour of each of the contestants to instil some imagination lifted it away from the shark-infested bitchy indulgence of fashion, celebrity and pop/classical music crossbreeds.
• The three judges didn’t really help. Martin Parr is “one of the world’s most influential photographers”. It wasn’t made apparent whether he was “influential” in the inspirational sense or in the Genesis (the band) sense of “this is rubbish, I can do better.” But judging from his photos of Brighton the contestants aspire to emulate – unremarkable garish monstrosities – it was probably the latter, although we won’t slander him by claiming his craft and technique rubs buboes-ridden shoulders with Phil Collins.
• But while we weren’t that impressed by Parr’s photographs, we don’t think he is a bad photographer, we put our lack of appreciation down to our ignorance of photography. And it’s this which makes us, oddly, adhere more closely to the opinions of the judges than our own instincts – in turn annihilating any joy we may get from our perceptions as the first thought on seeing a photo by one of the contestants was never “this is brilliant/terrible” but instead “what will Martin/ Brett Ragers/ Alex Proud think of it?”
• And thus any pleasure derived from the photos of the contestants won’t be from impressions of the photos themselves, but more if we managed to second-guess the opinion of the judges, and so simultaneously become more educated as to established criticism of photography while eradicating every last atom of individual perception from our minds.

Barry Humphries: The Man Inside Dame Edna, Channel 4

Did we like it?

Channel 4 tries to get to the heart of the enigma that is Barry Humphries, by following him to his hometown of Melbourne and interviewing childhood friends, adult contempories and the man himself. And despite learning a fair amount about his past, like a good boxer, Humphries dances away whenever things start getting too in depth. An enjoyable, mildly illuminating documentary? Yes. But an in-depth study? Not a chance.

What was good about it?
The documentary makers were refreshingly upfront about how much they’d be revealing about Humphries with the man himself’s opening lines: “While I’m always flattered when people want to make documentaries about me, I do take a certain delight in revealing as little as possible.”
The genuine affection that the locals (of all ages) have for Edna, when she returned to Moonee Ponds, the Melbourne suburb that she is alleged to have grown up in.
Even at the age of 73, Humphries seems like a man decades younger. The mind is razor-sharp, the zinging one-liners show no sign of slowing up, and to say that he still has an eye for the ladies would be a severe understatement, as he charms the attractive young archivist at the Melbourne museum. Ironic, then that his Melbourne Grammar School headmaster, unable to fathom the flamboyant Barry, had apparently said to him, “I do hope you’re not going to turn out to be some sort of poofter!”
When a small child, Humphries was clearly indulged by his wealthy builder father but the seeds of Edna could be seen when describing an incident from the more complex relationship with his mother. As they came back from tea at one of her friends houses, young Barry remarks how much he enjoyed the cake they’d been served. His mother’s one-word response sums up much of the class snobbery of Edna – “Bought!”
Clearly a gifted child, Humphries revealed that his mother and father had told him that “they didn’t know where he had come from” as they clearly had no idea about how to deal with their polymath son. And it was this ‘fish out of water’ feeling that drove Barry’s desire to escape the mundanity of the suburbs.
Sir Les Patterson – he’s sexist, racist and crude. Yet absolutely hilarious. And like Edna, seems to exist separately from Humphries, as both are happy to criticise their creator with lines that have a definite ring of truth about them. Sir Les: “I’ve met Humphries twice, and I don’t like him. He’s up himself!”
The clips from the stage show, where Edna and Sir Les play the audience like Menuhin played the violin, and where a momentary pause can reduce the audience to tears of mirth as much as a caustic one-liner.
The revelation that Humphries has had to re-purchase his favourite works of art two or three times after having to give them up as part of his (numerous) divorce settlements.

What was bad about it?
Humphries seemed to have so much control over the documentary that there was absolutely no chance of a soul-bearing moment. As the Toby Jones voiceover intoned that “we took Humphries back to the house in Christowel Street where he grew up” Humphries cut across it in a voice dripping with sarcasm, “Now what a novel, innovative idea!” And when the voiceover asked if Edna was based on his mother, Humphries leans back in his chair with a satisfied smile on his face – “Now this is where the documentary goes ‘in-depth’!”
Humphries jet-black hair. Surely Edna would have had a field day with a 73-year-old man who was still dyeing his hair?
The conceit of having Humphries and Edna fast-forwarding the parts of the documentary concerned with each other was a distraction that didn’t work.

The Culture Show, BBC2

What to say if you liked it
It tears open the ignorant breast of primetime television to expose the vibrant, beating heart of culture to a wider audience.

What to say if you didn't like it
A thick, corrosive tar blighting the lungs of BBC schedules with its selfish, indulgent agenda designed to serve the elite few and exile the many.

What was good about it?
• The enlightening feature on artist David Hockney, in which he illuminated the secret of his inspiration with an anecdote about how he had seen great beauty in a road full of puddles and he drove home to paint the vista while it remained in his memory.
• The plight of the Macclesfield Psalter, a little book of psalms written in the 14th century and beautifully illustrated, often with mischievous pictures, that will be exported to the Getty Museum in California unless the money can be raised to keep it in this country.
• David Hockney distinguishing the difference between classical paintings and the relatively modern technique of photography using Velasquez's Pope as the template, of which Hockney claimed a photo "couldn't get the layers.".
• There was plenty of striking imagery: the examples of animation, David Hockney's art, the views from the peak of the Divis Mountain outside Belfast, that will soon be open again the public.

What was bad about it?
• Architect Will Allsopp, who has designed an arts centre in West Bromwich, was described in the narrative as "highly rated.", which is Mediaspeak for: "You haven't heard of him, so you'll have to trust our subjective view.."
• The remarks of the residents of West Bromwich often seemed ignorant of the artistic vision of Allsopp. Those against bemoaned the cost, or its perceived ugliness, while even those in favour stated that it merely "put West Bromwich on the map.", or that "it's
got people talking.".
• The theme throughout the show seemed to be more about traditional artistic methods coming under threat from contemporary technology (rather than the art itself) which many commentators deemed to be soulless such as the increase in CGI over drawing in animated films, photos over painting in the Hockney piece, and the Macclesfield Psalter's removal from it's home in Britain to California.
• The article on the five books on the Whitbread Prize shortlist didn't actually give much information on the books other than a brief synopsis.
• The lack of a human angle in many of the pieces made them uninteresting. It was difficult to care about the opening up of the Divis Mountain without a coherent human narrative.

The Perfect Scary Movie, Channel 4

Saturday 30 October 2005
What to say if you liked it
The perfect Halloween TV treat – an exploration of the formulae behind the world’s most successfully scary movies.
What to say if you didn’t like it
In methodically revealing the tricks and psychological ploys that ensure the perfect horror film, this programme inadvertently rids them of their power to fright.

What was good about it?
• The programme was certainly comprehensive in detailing the legacy of horror: it guaranteed all genres were dealt with by encompassing old-school vampires in Nosferatu to killer ants in Them!, zombies in The Evil Dead to cannibals in Texas Chainsaw Massacre
• Camp as knickers Richard O’Brien doing an unnecessary but gloriously over the top introduction, only to then have his throat cut.
• The rather original and bizarre premise behind 8190s hit Shivers, which saw helpless victims turn into sex-crazed monsters and kill through fatal copulation.
• John Carpenter’s seminal Halloween, arguably the finest and most enjoyable scary movie of all time, with a brilliant performance from Jamie Lee-Curtis and enough jumps and tension to last a hundred viewings.
• The 1950s American government film Duck And Cover, a supposedly educational programme preparing the nation for a nuclear attack and probably one of the scariest things ever released due to its roots in terrifying reality. See also Britain’s When The Wind Blows and Threads.
• That final scene in The Wicker Man, still shocking and disturbing even after repeat viewings.
• Robert Englund AKA Freddy Krueger - as charismatic and energetic as his horror alter ego.

What was bad about it?
• The truly disgusting Cannibal Holocaust, the perfect example of horror trying too hard and putting everyone off in the process.
• The programme forgot to mention that some of the finest horror movies are also masterpieces in black comedy – eg Halloween’s feisty heroines, Scream’s postmodern references and Romero’s satirical Living Dead series.
• Although the unexpected tongue-in-cheek bumper sections – where our talking heads met grisly deaths or became horror monsters – began as rather amusing (Hammer Horror siren Ingrid Pitt being shot in the head was particularly funny), they soon grated and became predictable.
• There was rather too much reliving of certain scenes but a lack of exclusive behind the scenes info. It would have been great to learn more about these movies’ inspirations and filming process.
• Why was there no inclusion of Scream or The Ring, two recent examples of effective and influential horror?

Imagine, BBC1

Imagine - Damon and Jamie's Excellent Adventure, BBC1, Wednesday 4 July 2007
Did we like it?
A fulfilling if slightly disjointed amble through the chronicle of Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s trial of staging an opera based on a Chinese fable.

What was good about it?
• The original inspiration for both Albarn and Hewlett, aside from the awfulness of MTV, was the late-70s TV show Monkey, which is based on the fable, which enraptured boys all over the country despite the fact that it resembled a school play.
• Hewlett’s book of ideas for characters that was brimming with garish grotesques and multi-coloured monsters.
• The show explored how scrupulous both Albarn and Hewlett were in ensuring the perfection of their opera. In order to overcome his “prejudiced” Western perspective of Chinese music, Albarn had musicians play every single note from Chinese instruments, which he then programmed into his keyboard. He also insisted that the lyrics be in Mandarin, although that didn’t seem to impair his talent for mellifluous melodies.
• Hewlett, meanwhile, was busy mentally constructing vast set designs in his head such as one that was essentially just a giant icon of a blue Buddha.
• Albarn’s mathematical method of composing which was based on the five points of the Chinese star, which resulted in sumptuous, serene and celestial songs.
• Albarn’s visit to the home of Thomas Bloch, who owns the weirdest instruments in the world, such as the glass harmonica, that Albarn wanted to use in the opera.
• Jamie Hewlett’s credo that “If you want to do something new you have to take giant leaps of faith”. A generation into the future with Tesco the biggest seller of CDs in the UK and Simon Cowell prime minister, the phrase ‘giant leap of faith’ may well have been evacuated from these shores, or indeed this planet, for its own preservation.

What was bad about it?
• As presenter Alan Yentob sat on some anonymous steps outside an equally anonymous London building, the camera zoomed back and forth as he enunciated a list; such vainglorious techniques are employed to make a TV show appear important when all it does is inject it with a riverful of pomposity.
• Yentob and Albarn’s puerile game of cultural one-upmanship. As Albarn recounted his trip to China during which he visited the “Dong and Miaow people”, Yentob quipped that they “could have come out of Monkey itself”. Albarn, paused, pondered and then pontificated: “Or an Edward Lear poem.”
• Hewlett and Albarn both perpetuating that snivelling delusion of the famous of wearing sunglasses when they’re not required. It is the contemporary equivalent of some medieval noble poking the serfs away with a big stick fearful he will contract some disease which only afflicts the unwashed rabble.
• The X-Factorisation of the auditions where Hewlett visited Beijing to try out for the lead roles but was greeted by a bunch of hopeless misfits, while Yentob affected his best Kate Thornton impression after a miserable ‘morning’ in Manchester, “Everyone leaves pretty fed up.” But brightens up with: “It’s a new day and after a ropey start to the auditions Jamie wants to cast the lead role.” The only difference was these auditions too were futile and it was eventually left up to director Chen Shi-Zheng to sort it all out by himself.
• The Britain’s Got Talent-erisation of the moment when the cast first perform live in front of Albarn and Hewlett. Instead of simply focussing on the marvellous acrobatics of the circus troupe, there were incessant interruptions and close-ups of Albarn and Hewlett’s impressed little faces that, as with BGT, was a craven effort to direct the viewer how to think rather than to make their own independent appraisal of what they were watching.
• Jamie Hewlett loathed the comically haphazardly dragon that was to form the centrepiece of an early scene, lambasting it as looking like it had come from Sesame Street. During the clips of the live performance in Manchester we weren’t shown if this problem had been resolved.

Imagine: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Studio, BBC1, Wednesday 2 February 2006
Did we like it?
The fact that Alan 'You're So Vain' Yentob grasped the opportunity to show off a bit was off-putting, but there were interesting glimpses into the world of sitcom-making

What was good about it?
• Peep Show pairing David Mitchell and Robert Webb being funny as they talked about their show – and the look at the behind-the-scenes complications of making it
• It was a much more thoughtful programme than the similar Channel 4 enterprise fronted by the ghostly David Liddiment
• Armando Iannucci on his genius satire The Thick Of It
• Tamsin Grieg revealing how she thinks of old aunts to stop her giggling at Stephen Mangan's improvisations on The Green Wing

What was bad about it?
• Ricky Gervais and, to a lesser extent, Stephen Merchant are obviously better at writing comedy than talking about it
• People being forced to say nice things about My Family and Yentob hailing it as one of today’s great comedies
• Paul Whitehouse was a little self-aggrandising as he spoke about BBC2's brilliant Help

12 Books That Changed The World, ITV1

Sunday 16 April 2006
Did we like it?
In an act of near-Biblical bravery Melvyn Bragg attempts to hold back the inexorable force of ITV1 sewage with his own authored series about how brilliant books are, and how they have shaped the modern world far more profoundly than TV ever could – in a TV series.

What was good about it?
• The passion Melvyn had for this series was apparent from the introduction in which he breathlessly listed the reasons why the books profiled are so important both in a historical and modern-day sense.
• The outlining of how Isaac Newton’s Principa detailed huge chunks of physics, most of which Newton established himself through exhaustive experimentation. And also how much of what Newton discovered still holds true today and has aided and pioneered the development of space travel and satellite navigation.
• Newton set out his theories in a language that was both uncompromising and dense in content and today reads as an inadvertent inversion of Heat which is all style and no content, unless you happen to be fascinated by the lives of a human vacuum with blonde hair and the singer with a once-promising Indie band who could now teach even Faust a thing or two about selling your soul for superficial gain.
• But Melvyn clarified one of Newton’s most famous discoveries – gravity – by explaining how both the apple and the Earth were pulling towards one another, but because of its much superior mass, the apple does almost all of the movement.
• How the pressure-cooker of Britain’s repressed sexuality had its lid finally blown off by Marie Stopes’ Married Love, which was a kind of Lovers’ Guide for the post-World War One woman who, because of her husbands selfish needs, viewed sex with them as something as alluring as any woman today imagines a day with Chris Evans, sex or no sex.
• In the section on the Football Association Rulebook, the pre-history of football was an enlightenment of what it was like before the Football Association formed. We learned how games were played between villages were the brutality resulted in “broken necks, arms and backs”, making it only slightly less violent than the Argentine league where murder only usually results in a yellow card, and that only if the offender is a player on the away team.
• Football evolved in the public schools across the country, with individual schools adapting the basic rules to suit their own environments so, for instance, one school played indoors around tables and thus their players became adept at dribbling, while another school might prefer to launch the long ball across their huge playing fields.
• But when the schools played against one another, the disparate interpretations of the rules made it necessary to divide the game into halves where the first is played under one set of rules and the second under the other (this is why half-time exists). And it was because Rugby’s version was so distinct from the rest with the allowance of handball, they splintered off to develop rugby.
• The mock up of a football match under pre-FA rules was a delight as Melvyn explained the rules that have now disappeared from our national game as though mournfully detailing extinct species of dinosaur. For instance, when the ball goes out of play, the throw in goes to the first player to reach it; passing forward was illegal (and was only brought in with the offside rule) but dribbling was allowed; and players could catch a ball in the air and call a ‘mark’ – a rule that still exists in rugby today.
• The production inserting, probably surreptitiously knowing Melvyn’s an ardent Gunner, Nayim’s winning goal in the 1995 Cup Winners’ Cup.
• Melvyn crystallising the absurdity of football by noting that, for more than 100 years, incidents in matches all over the world have been scrutinised with much greater intensity and length than ethical decisions in every other sphere of human endeavour.

What was bad about it?
• For all his revolutionary advances in the field of physics, Newton left behind an excruciatingly painful legacy – calculus. We already know that not everything Newton has facilitated is welcome as for every spacecraft that soars through the celestial heavens there is a smug stockbroker who finds a shortcut through the winding streets of the West End on his way to a champagne-tasting session followed by a lapdance by some weeping, enslaved Albanians because of his SatNav. But there are also a thousand school pupils slumped over their desks confounded down to the marrow of their souls by some indecipherable mathematical equation that will be of no use to them once they set foot in to the real world.
• How the scared moral guardians used disinformation over STDs as a form of social control and how they castigated Marie Stopes’ Married Love when it became a threat to that engineered status quo.

Banned in the UK, Channel 4

What to say if you liked it
An intelligent, even nostalgic, introduction to the censorship issues that came to prominence in the 1980s, with a welcome mix of expert and eye witness talking heads to help explain the story.
What to say if you didn't like it
Channel 4 has been producing this documentary on censorship in the 1980s in various forms on and off for more than a decade now in its tiresome ongoing attempts to appear 'controversial', or, worse, 'zeitgeisty'.

What was good about it?
• It appeared at first that the narration was going to be predictably sarcastic for the entire show, but for the most part it settled down, provided good information and did not intrude too much on the programme.
• The highlighting of how wrong-headed the rabid censorship often was–- Evil Dead was banned but as a result became the country's biggest selling video.
• The extended focus on how the media was suppressed during the Falklands War. The programme-makers secured excellent talking heads in Tony Benn and war correspondents Max Hastings and Michael Nicholson, and their stories of how their reports had to be approved by at least five different gatekeepers was shocking. Margaret Thatcher's control over the press at this time was so complete she was able to insist upon these two reporters waiting to file their story about the end of the war until she'd announced it to the House.
• Some classic Derek & Clive clips.
• The archive footage of a spluttering Tory claiming that video nasties could not only affect young people adversely, but also dogs. What the programme didn't tell you was that this is quite true, and fox hunters actually show the most gruesome horror movies they can find to their hounds for four days non-stop before a hunt to ensure they're as evil and blood thirsty as possible.
• The section on the BBC banning Spasticus Autisticus by Ian Dury & The Blockheads 'until after dark'. At the time, this led Dury to wonder whether the BBC thought disabled people only ventured out of their homes after nightfall.
• Michael Bogdanov explaining the story of how Mary Whitehouse took him to court over the play he directed, Romans In Britain, which featured (simulated) buggery as a metaphor for what the Romans did to Britain and in turn what Britain was doing to Northern Ireland. The case was thrown out after the judge, who hadn't seen the play, was given a demonstration in chambers by the QCs as to how the scene looked on the stage.

What was bad about it?
• While some of the talking heads were interesting and relevant, there were too many people just remembering what it was like in the 1980s rather than providing some proper analysis of the issues. Iain Lee, for example, simply repeated dull platitudes about censorship that most people could have learnt in their first week of GCSE Media Studies.
• Journalist Sheryl Garrett saying: "All great comedy pushes against taboos" was a very "Channel 4" comment. Claiming comedy is only great if it shocks is palpable balderdash. Garrett then claimed Derek & Clive's comedy of swearing doesn't seem shocking now and has dated badly. This in fact unwittingly dated the documentary itself, as she must have been speaking before the (admittedly baffling) furore over BBC2's screening of Jerry Springer – The Musical.
• After the piece about Spasticus Autisticus, there followed a section concerning Joey Deacon's famous appearance on Blue Peter. The point here was to show that while Ian Dury's song was hushed up and effectively banned, this interview that was supposed to educate children backfired badly as "Joey" became an insult to be used by generations of kids. Fair enough, but there seemed to be as much detail focusing on Joey (including Iain Lee's impression of him), than the section on video nasties, which seemed odd when you consider Joey wasn't banned or censored in any way while the argument over video nasties rumbled on and on for well over a decade.
• We're as anti-Thatcher and anti-Mary Whitehouse as the next person. But all good documentaries should try to present both sides of an argument and in this respect the programme failed dismally. At the very least it needed someone to defend the decisions or try to explain them rather than, as happened in many cases on this show, simply ridicule to ridicule everything without a right of reply.

British Film Forever, BBC2

Saturday 28 July 2007
Did we like it?
Such an exhaustive probe into the seedy underworld of the British thriller that our lungs feel like an Amazonian tributary razed to the ground to clear land for logging companies.

What was good about it?
• The plunging back to the very origins of British thrillers with the quaint but oddly prophetic Rescued By Rover from 1905 in which a forbear of Lassie saves a kidnapped baby from the stereotypically soiled hands of a drunken gypsy woman; a simple plot that wound its way along to one of Alfred Hitchcock’s first notable films Blackmail.
• The clever trick here was to illustrate how such themes endure in filmmaking no matter to what era they belong. Yet Hitchcock’s films would also be shocking in any era as shown in Sabotage when a young boy unwittingly carries a ticking time bomb to a destination but his bus gets caught up in traffic. The boy, along with the cute dog in the next seat and everyone else on the bus, gets blown up. Hitchcock stated that he was wrong to blow the bus up as “it’s what the audience expected”; yet a modern audience, mentally dissolving in a gluepot of sentimentality and loathsome 12A certificates would expect quite the opposite to occur – the dog to be imbued with the spirit of a demolitions expert who could defuse the bomb.
• The still disturbing performance of Richard Attenborough as Pinkie Brown in the adaptation of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. The callous grimace of unrelenting malice Attenborough wears for the whole of this classic was such that even though here the film was broken into flotsam and jetsam the ending was still utterly absorbing as you willed the heroine, Brown’s wife, to resist his demand that she commit suicide.
• Attenborough played a similarly psychotic role as John Reginald Christie, a real life killer who fitted up his lodger Timothy Evans (John Hurt) for the murder of his wife. Evans was hanged for the crime, a fate Christie also suffered when the right man was caught.
• The behind the scenes anecdotes from the set of The Third Man, during the filming of which star Orson Welles had a proclivity to disappear forcing the director to concoct ever more ingenious ways of masking his absence. One of Welles’ pirouettes of pomposity saw him refuse to film the climactic chase in Vienna’s sewer system, meaning a whole new set had to be built at Shepperton.
• Michael Caine’s dour Harry Palmer who offered a dreary domestic inversion of the burnished faux glamour of Bond with his trips to the supermarket, his worries over pay and dab handedness in the kitchen, of which Caine reminisced: “Note from executives – ‘We can’t do cooking, it’s homosexual.’”
• Bob Hoskins: “Before Michael Caine you had to have been in the RAF to be an actor.”
• The theme of featuring lesser known films continued into the modern era with a profile of London To Brighton that was rightly identified as exemplifying the distinctive British thriller in the new millennium.

What was bad about it?
• Yes, James Bond is an integral part of British cinema but has been covered over and over again to the point where we know about Sean Connery’s former life as Mr Scotland and how Roger Moore played the role as a sardonic spoof of Connery’s officious thug. Stepping from the fascinating arena of 50s thrillers into Bond was like emerging from the awe inspiring bowels of an Aztec pyramid blinking in disbelief as you troop into the outskirts of Disneyworld; it would have been far better to focus on other British obscurities that are now regarded as definitive celluloid visions such as Peeping Tom.
• The chummy narration by Jessica Hynes (nee Stevenson) was mostly economic, unobtrusive and content to let the marvellous films do much of the talking, with a few exceptions. The Italian Job was termed “This is the ultimate in Cool Britannia-dom”. ‘Cool Britannia’ is Britain’s very own ‘manifest destiny’ now a shaming phrase sullied by the despair of how the brave new world of New Labour genuflected before artifice, tyranny and corruption while all those celebrities who exploited the phrase for their own ends are have dissolved into an oily choking morass of desperate iniquity skulking in the water supply in a vain effort to enter the throats of their once adoring public to get close to the hearts they once filled. The Italian Job is quite a good film; it does not embody the sneering coquettish grin of our glorious ex-premier.
• Of The Krays film made in 1990 it was claimed that stars Martin and Gary Kemp “were rock royalty as members of Spandau Ballet”. Spandau Ballet, like most of the New Romantics, had long fallen by the wayside and they were no more “rock royalty” in 1990 as Michael Barrymore is ‘entertainment elite’ today.
• The baffling reverence of East End gangsters as heard when the Kemp brothers “were granted an audience with Ronnie Kray” as if were the Pope. Although, that said, Kray probably was in possession of far more altruism than the Catholic Church so perhaps he is more worthy of the description.
• “Get Carter suited the nihilistic 70s”, Punk aside this is just one more instance in which documentaries rewrite history to adhere to their inflexible narrative. Rainbow was broadcast in the 70s, there has not been anything in the history of humanity that is less nihilistic than Rainbow (if you take out Zippy).
Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels may have been a British institution a decade ago, but such is Guy Ritchie’s Lucifer-esuqe fall into celluloid damnation that all the clips resemble the very worst grotesque excesses of his recent films, littered with indulgent stunt casting.

Arena, BBC4

Arena At 30, BBC4, Saturday 3 September 2005
What to say if you liked it
A panoramic chronicle of the most adventurous and innovative arts documentary strand to ever be broadcast on British television.
What to say if you didn’t like it
A pompous rewriting of the cautionary tale of what happens when a bunch of pretentious art-school graduates are given too much money and air time to pontificate on irrelevant subjects in a pseudo-intellectual way.

What was good about it?
• The impressively wide spectrum of topics and icons Arena has covered in its 30 year history – from Quentin Crisp to Jean Genet, and interpretations of Tyger Tyger to My Way.
• A Brummie schoolboy’s down-to-earth musings on William Blake’s Tyger Tyger. “Do you go to church?” “Naah, I’m an atheist.”
• Quentin Crisp’s observations at the bustling New York below his hotel room window, as the populace “scurries towards the ‘Big Time’.”
• Paul McCartney being asked genuinely interesting questions during his appearance on Desert Island Discs. “How well could you endure loneliness?”
• Alan Yentob’s interview with the notoriously obtuse Orson Welles. After three questions, Welles muttered, “This is going to be OK,” and proceeded to garrulously chatter for eight hours.
• French author Jean Genet demanding that the film crew are asked for their opinions on how his interview is being handled.
• An infirm vicar left exasperated at why God has created a world “full of suffering”, before adding: “And it’s the first question I’ll ask him if I get the chance.”

What was bad about it?
• The celebratory documentary about Bob Dylan who “perfectly represents” what Arena has tried to do. Bob Dylan is perhaps the most overrated musician of the 20th century, and if he did represent Arena over the past 30 years then Arena’s ambitions spread no further than the imagination of Simon Cowell.
• Mel Brooks’ tiresome obstruction of Alan Yentob’s efforts to interview him. “You’re from the BBC? The Bengali Broadcasting Company?”

Arena – Little Platform, Big Stage, BBC4, Saturday 10 December 2005
Did we like it?
Zimena Percival's film – a celebration of the London bus conductor – was a seamless mix of archive footage, well-chosen music, comedy clips and anecdotes that added up to a journey we were really pleased to take.

What was good about it?
• The gay love story involving conductor Andrew Johnstone (played as a youngster by a blond beauty) who fell in love at 18 with his driver Frank. "For the first few months, every shift was special. It was like going out," he recalled. But a four-minute encounter with a handsome businessman on the backseat while an oblivious pensioner sat upfront ended the relationship – although the pair remained friends.
• Barbadian Ruel Moseley recalling: "All the posh ones would travel downstairs with a rolled-up umbrella, briefcase and bowler hat – snooty." But he was happy to carry young female customers. "For the sexual promiscuous male, working on the buses would be ideal."
• Betty Gallacher – now lonely as a driver – recalling happier times among the passengers. "You take a child to school, they grow up and have babies and you take those children to school."
• The singing conductor Baysee Rowe whose mournful harmonica accompanied some of the nostalgic footage. He's been featured in TV news reports around the world; he's even had a number one single in South Africa; and he does a delightful Catch The Last Bus With Me based on a hit by The Drifters. But he wasn't always the cheery soul who entertains his passengers. "Taking fares was like begging to me. It was embarrassing."
• The archive footage showing London before it was Starbuckfucked
• The best of the comedy clips, taken from Sykes, with Hattie Jacques playing a clippie who welcomes passengers on board as if she's an air hostess ("The weather in Cotts Wood is fine"), even offering a translation into French.
• Clips of clippies being trained to wind out tickets on those marvellous old machines

What was bad about it?
• Helen and John Meager bickering as they talked about the days when she drove the buses and he was a conductor.
• It wasn't all light-hearted so we learned about terrible incidents of racial abuse assaults
• The clip of Nitwit Natasha Kaplinsky announcing the end of the road for the Routemasters
• The horrible realisation that it'll be bendy bus or bust from now on.


Arena: The Secret Policeman’s Ball, BBC4
What was it all about?
A look back at the history and contemporary impact of the Secret Policeman’s Ball, a comedy performance to raise funds for Amnesty International.
What to say if you liked it
An hilarious retrospective classic comedy from the 70s and 80s, that had the bonus of raising money for a good cause.
What to say if you didn’t like it
A Band Aid for the chattering classes which sought to class a performance of regurgitated, redundant comedy as an epochal watershed in British entertainment,
shooting dissenters down with its oh so pious cause.

What was good about it?
• Forcing the comedians, who were all at least now settling into graceful middle age, to watch their younger selves perform at the Balls. The best was Stephen Fry, who with comedy partner Hugh Laurie mocked the career of a penitent John Cleese.
• The very clear line of British comedy heritage was revealed. Cleese and the rest of the Pythons were in awe of the Beyond The Fringe gang of Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore, while the 80s alternative comedians owed a similar debt to the Pythons.
• The sketch set in a bookshop with irascible vendor Cleese and fastidious customer Connie Booth, which had a distinct resemblance to Little Britain’s Mr Mann sketches.
• The Parrott Sketch which had “even become a cliché by 1976”, yet was given novel impetus by Cleese, who acted it in a grotesque overblown manner, and Michael Palin, who couldn’t help but corpse.
• Lenny Henry, pulling off that most difficult comedic trick of a witty song, and Rowan Atkinson, as a sarcastic schoolmaster, reminded us how they earned their reputations with very funny performances.
• The timely look at why Amnesty’s role in world affairs was so important in the mid-70s, which was ridden with oppressive South American dictatorships, most notably in Chile, that crushed public dissent with violence.

What was bad about it?
• About half of the comedy has dated very badly, even when allowing for topical licence. The Lumberjack Song was barely amusing the first time round, while Alexei Sayle wasn’t funny even in a stand up routine that was meant to be a career peak.
• The introduction reeled through the stellar cast list of those who participated in the events like the fawning red carpet clips outside the National Television Awards.
• While the comedy hit the spot frequently the same couldn’t be said for the music. Even though the Balls apparently inspired Bob Geldof to do Band Aid, nothing could disguise his dismal discordant dalliance, which he blamed on singing all day in the studio. Still, we’d rather listen to a croaking Geldof slowly being boiled in a vat of Mr Creosote’s fat than endure Phil Collins at his zenith.

Stephen Fry: 50 Not Out, BBC4

Friday 17 August 2007
Did we like it?
A hollow tribute without any words from Fry himself (he only appeared in archive clips), which gave it the impression of an obituary rather than a celebration. (Much better was Fry’s one-on-one interview with Mark Lawson.)

What was good about it?
• Stephen Fry is one of the most intelligent, witty and likeable ‘celebrities’ in the country, but such was the unending torrent of gushing praise for every atom of his career that you ended up feeling slightly resentful towards him. However, the excerpts from Blackadder Goes Forth and QI showed why he is such an icon far more so than the words of his peers.
• The clips of A Bit Of Fry And Laurie were as amusing as ever as were the radio clips of Saturday Night Fry in which he used his exquisite control of the English language to humorous effect.
• The best contributors were those who just said things that the viewer could identify with that didn’t seem over-rehearsed to the point of agony such as Jo Brand (“It’s great that Stephen gets on telly and says long sentences no one understands”) and Alan Davies.

What was bad about it?
• While some of the tributes, notably from Hugh Laurie, were heartfelt tributes to a truly talented individual, many of the others seemed to be jostling to genuflect before Fry’s legend like fawning courtiers in a king’s throne room.
• And speaking of ‘grovellers’ (TM Spike Milligan), Prince Charles was amongst the most sycophantic and inappropriate of the legion of idolaters. He’s the very inversion of Fry, who has scaled the lofty peaks of fame through his own talent, while Charles has done so through an accident of birth which makes his views and opinions as valid as someone as equally artistically bereft such as Jodie Marsh.
• Phill Jupitus’s belief that A Bit Of Fry And Laurie is “missed out” when “they talk of great comedy” exemplifies the flaw with such tribute shows. Each and every action of the subject is elevated to a spurious zenith. Sure Fry & Laurie was a funny show with plenty of ideas but never grabbed the popular consciousness nor became a cult hit, yet thanks to this re-writing of history the viewer is supposed to swallow the conceit that the show was cruelly disdained in its bid to enter the pantheon of “great comedy”.
• Ben Elton has fallen so far from his perch as the godfather of alternative comedy that his nauseating eulogies about Fry make you question your appreciation of Fry in much the same way Wagner’s reputation took a battering after it was revealed Adolf Hitler was a great fan. Elton claimed that “Stephen is a great lover of language, like me.”
• Richard Curtis also stretched his praise beyond the orbit of credibility, spouting such obsequious nonsense as claiming Fry’s “performance in Blackadder Goes Forth was the definitive attack on the officer class”, when something more subtle such as Alec Guinness in Bridge On The River Kwai is infinitely more powerful. Blackadder was a bloody good comedy and Fry was great in it, but it wasn’t a state-of-the-art coruscation of the British class system.
• Also annoying was the way in which Curtis used thespian melodrama to enunciate an opinion on The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive. “It’s one of those... great bits of television.” He’s right. It was a great bit of television, but in order to distinguish this tritely-expressed observation he consciously and extraneously paused.
• A number of contributors also used that loathsome narrative device that has been popularised by fraudulent shows such as X-Factor and Big Brother where specious doubt is expressed about the person’s ability to accomplish something in order to make the accomplishment seem all that more impressive when it is achieved. Michael Sheen noted about Fry in Wilde: “I wasn’t sure he was going to be able to do it.” Before following it with an avalanche of unverifiable rapture.
• While Sanjeev Bhaskar claimed to be “depressed” at the conclusion of the Harry Potter novels as it would mean that he wouldn’t be able to look forward to listening to Fry’s narration any longer.
• Whenever Jonathan Ross uses the word ‘genuinely’ we don’t believe him. This is because this is the word he uses to American actors when pleading how much he adores their dreadful celluloid atrocity in order to extort a decent interview out of them. At least here he pronounced it correctly rather than saying ‘jen-u-wine’ as if auditioning for a role in the follow-up to The Sopranos.
• The Cellmates episode when Fry fled to Europe was skated over with no comment from his co-star Rik Mayall.

Howard Goodall’s 20th Century Greats, Channel 4

What’s it all about?
Composer Howard Goodall looks at the (in his lofty opinion) the best musicians of the 20th century, beginning with the Beatles.

What to say if you liked it
A definitive analysis of why, where other bands in the history of popular music were happy to be able to keep afloat in the turbulent waters of musical genius, the
Beatles walked gracefully over it.

What to say if you didn’t like it
An indulgent exercise in which Howard Goodall seeks to find the impossible empirical proof that the Beatles, and any other stuffy, unlistenable composer he chose to namedrop, are so much better than your favourite band through questionable, impenetrable evidence.

What was good about it?
• The concentrated examination of the Beatles’ music, in which Howard showed exactly why the genius of Lennon or McCartney made Strawberry Fields, Penny Lane or Eleanor Rigby are classics as opposed to merely hummable tunes through an analysis of their key sequences, modes and harmonies.
• How music is not often the work of a flash of inspiration, but more a drawn out manipulation of an accepted set of chords, modes and harmonies that has remained the same since the classical era.
• We learned how the Beatles were inspired more by the technical excellence of Mozart than their popular contemporaries.
• The experimental Tomorrow Never Knows that used looped vocals and other odd sound effects that showed how the Beatles weren’t content to be a simple pop band.
• Howard recreating the Beatles songs sat behind his little accordion in the most ludicrous of locations such as at the end of a pier.
What was bad about it?
• Howard objectifying music through a pseudo-scientific approach during which he seemed as intent on despoiling the achievements of all pop bands in history as beatifying the Beatles.
• During his scrutiny of I Am The Walrus Howard remarked on the 16 chord changes which made you listen to the chord changes rather than the record itself – although this was a merciful release in itself from the auditory torture of that awful record.
• Howard’s tyrannical objectification of music, which is the most ultra-personal of all the arts. On Tchaikovsky’s Romeo And Juliet: “Everyone who listens to the climatic surge feels a lurch in their stomach.” On Eleanor Rigby: “It is without doubt one of the most brilliant and poignant songs ever written.” On Penny Lane: “The new verse greets us like a day full of optimism and youth.”
• Despite being highly innovative Tomorrow Never Knows is an incredibly dull song.

X Rated: The TV They Tried To Ban, Channel 4

The top 5 things that should actually have been banned
1 – Garry Bushell. Granted he wasn’t actually one of the clips being discussed, but we’re referring to his contribution to this show that should have been banned. His assertion that “like most heterosexual blokes, I’m quite repulsed by gay sex” about Queer As Folk might be true for “most heterosexual blokes” who live in a cave and fly into an uncontrollable, destructive rage the moment they feel the symptoms of an emotion; but most other “heterosexual blokes” can applaud the necessity of such scenes in innovative drama. Also crippled his own argument with his take on the perplexing trait of “most heterosexual blokes” to lasciviously fawn over lesbian sex like that in Touching The Velvet.
2 – Caprice saying “cunt” on This Morning. Perhaps she can swear on every other show in television and get herself banned from them, too.
3 – Channel 4’s Red Triangle season of obscure yet pornographic films that was less a prohibitive warning as an alluring invite like a queen bee flying from the nest pursued by millions of drones all set solely on ejaculating.
4 – The Hopefuls on the Word who abased themselves with such activities as snogging grannies. The logical extension today can be observed in contestants on Celebrity Big Brother.
5 – Shaun Ryder’s foul mouthed antics on TFI Friday. Ryder was obviously invited on simply to create an atmosphere of risk in a pseudo-rebellious show that was in reality more sterile than the Moon. Plus, when Ryder swore the second time during a performance of a Sex Pistols song, it wasn’t mentioned that the song (Pretty Vacant) was Johnny Rotten’s sneaky schoolboy exercise in “secret” swearing (“We’re vaaaaay-cunt”).

The top 5 items they should never have dreamed of banning.
1 – The BrassEye paedophilia special. Even today its critics cannot fathom that it was about the hysterical media treatment of paedophiles. And the clip of how the plan to exile paedophile Sidney Cook in isolationist orbit around the earth was ruined when an eight-year old boy was “accidentally” put on the vessel with him was still very funny. 2 – The Singing Detective, which was the peak of Dennis Potter’s illustrious career and was boosted by the inclusion of a graphic sex scene in an overgrown field between a woman and her lover while her son watched from a tree.
3 – The sex scenes in Queer As Folk that unfortunately seem to this day to still define the show, when really they were integral character-building elements in an excellent drama about the gay community in Manchester.
4 – Derren Brown’s hoax séance, which some of the complainers still cannot accept was just a complex ruse that illuminated how easy it was for a skilled illusionist like Derren to trick people into believing something.
5 – The Sex Pistols on Bill Grundy’s show that catapulted them to national notoriety. Imagine if it hadn’t happened and the country had been left with an injurious diet of Yes and Genesis, where we’d be now. Phil Collins is enjoying his seventh term of office as a benevolent dictator; children must sing hymns of adoration to Rick Wakeman before each morning assembly to the tune of an indulgent keyboard solo; and everyone is required to worship at statues of Cliff Richard which adorn town squares all over Britain. The Pistols weren’t great (Lydon’s best work was in PiL) but their legacy is.

Dawn French's Girls Who Do Comedy, BBC1

Sunday 13 August 2006
Did we like it?
This series of interviews with Dawn French's favourite female comedians and comic actors was an entertaining half hour of television, with some pleasingly innovative ideas that helped raise it above the average talking-head series.

What was good about it?
• Dawn French herself rarely fails to please and here she did an excellent job as an interviewer. Her subjects were clearly at ease with her and consequently they spoke openly, with passion and with great humour.
• This wasn't simply a show thrown together with Dawn and her mates as the shockingly excellent booking of Whoopi Goldberg proved. Cunningly, however, the programme-makers followed Goldberg's first comments by possibly the only woman alive who could trump her: Miss Piggy.
• Whoopi Goldberg admitting she didn't perform comedy for her family, just Oscar acceptance speeches where she would just stand there thanking everyone.
• Tracey Ullman describing herself as a spin-off of her sister.
• Phillis Diller expressing grateful surprise that her parents didn't "drown (her) along with the cats".
• The wonderfully wild-haired Miriam Margolyes; the gorgeous Jessica Stevenson; the exciteable Julie Walters; the brilliant Kathy Burke.
• The brief clip of the superb Beryl Reid.
• Miriam Margolyes' hilarious impression of her convent teacher asking her to bring in old newspapers to pack her sanitary towels in as they didn't have the correct facilities on offer at the school.
• Helen Lederer's recollection of starting the Anti Golf Association when she was 10, which involved her and her friends singing Nelly the Elephant at golfers while they teed off.
• When asked to reminisce and talk about themselves, many male comedians tend to become morose, depressed and introspective. Some might even say dull. But this was the exact opposite. The women on view clearly loved being involved in comedy.
• Watching Dawn French cry with laughter.
• The original style employed by the programme-makers. There was no formal introduction; no irritating, wise-cracking narration; and no countdowns. There weren't even any captions (these were saved for the end credits). The interviewees were frequently allowed to talk for more then the three seconds usually allotted to people in talking head shows made by producers and commissioners who believe the whole country has an attention span of 0.5 seconds. And because French was presenting, we were allowed to hear her questions, negating the need for the interviewees to reply by incorporating an unheard question into their answer. Encouragingly, BBC4 will be screening some of the interviews in full, which should be fascinating.

What was bad about it?
• We can but nit-pick. Of course, some funny women will be left out, but we would have loved to have seen the regal Penelope Keith in the programme.
• For some reason, Jennifer Saunders seemed slightly ill-at-ease being interviewed by French. Hopefully her contributions will be more telling in the future episodes

Cast And Crew: The Long Good Friday, BBC4

Highlights
1 – The ultraviolent scene when gangster Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) kills his best friend and major-domo Jeff (Derek Thompson) in a fit of rage by stabbing a broken wine bottle into his throat causing his aorta to rupture and spurt blood everywhere. It was also unusual not to see Thompson assume his later role of Charlie Fairhead and stem the bleeding and sew up the wound in a trice.
2 – The problems director John Mackenzie ran into when the film’s financiers watched it and were repelled by the ostensible sympathy towards the IRA who were portrayed as possessing sounder morals and a superior ideology to a capitalist Thatcherite gangster. The film was recut and Hoskins’ voice was redubbed “in a Wolverhampton accent” which outraged the actor so much he threatened to sue.
3 – After Hoskins threatened to sue, John Mackenzie recruited the help of esteemed thespians such as Alec Guinness to persuade the distributors to sell to a more understanding film company. That company was George Harrison’s Hand Made Films, but the former Beatle was a little shocked by his purchase complaining to Mackenzie: “If I’d seen this film, I’d have never have bought it; it’s all violence.”
4 – When John Mackenzie approached local landlords to use their pubs for filming, they were very accommodating – until they discovered the pub was to be blown up. The crew had to build their own mock pub, which strangely still attracted a number of boozers who didn’t believe it was a fake hostelry.
5 – John Mackenzie explaining how during the opening celebrated scene, in which Harold Shand delivers a stirring speech on the virtues of being British on a boat sailing down the Thames against a backdrop of Tower Bridge, the boat crashed into the famous landmark as they about-turned to film another take.

Paul Merton’s Silent Clowns, BBC4

Thursday 25 May 2006
Did we like it?
A revelatory expedition into the very origins of physical comedy with Paul Merton as the passionate, erudite guide.

What was good about it?
• Paul Merton’s cherished enthusiasm for silent comedies that was apparent every time he eulogised about Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin.
• The incredible live stunts that included a locomotive plunging from a collapsing bridge into a river. Or in Seven Chances, in which Keaton is seemingly pursued down a mountainside by an ever growing mob of vengeful boulders. And of course, the scene where a house front falls on the apparently oblivious Keaton and he is only saved as he is standing below the gap for a window.
• The classic vignettes of Buster Keaton’s celluloid genius that Merton introduced with such deserved relish. The best were when Keaton and his ‘wife’ have their house stranded on a train track as a steam engine hurtles towards it. Despite their frantic efforts they can only save themselves and embrace as they anticipate the collision, only for the train to pass harmlessly along an adjacent track. But as they celebrate a train from the opposite direction demolishes their home.
• The astounding innovation that Keaton and his ilk pioneered. In fact, the lack of dialogue seemed to spur them on to greater feats of imagination as exemplified in Sherlock Jr in which Keaton plays a cinema projectionist who ‘enters’ the film screen. So, at one moment he might be peering nervously over a precipitous cliff only for the scene to ‘cut’ around him placing him at the next moment amid a pride of lazing lions.
• Merton’s frothing disgust at the stereotypical view of silent films, as they are reduced to “large men in false beards kicking each other up the arse in a monotonous fashion”.
• The Keaton film The Goat that followed afterwards.

What was bad about it?
• When ex-Python Terry Jones got a minor detail of a Keaton film wrong, Merton, like all fastidious dilettantes, felt the need to correct the mistake.
• The slightly muddled order of the biography of Keaton that concluded by Merton revealing how he began on stage at an early age where he would ‘battle’ with his father as part of his parents’ popular act.
• As he surveyed an audience who had come to view his appraisal and adulation of Keaton, Merton’s optimism that he “may have passed the comic baton on to a new generation” may have been slightly misplaced among the children looking on as for every little, cherubic face ablaze with laughter, there was another wearing a youthful scowl with arms crossed in juvenile boredom.

Science Fiction season, BBC4

The Martians And Us, BBC4, Monday 13 November 2006
Did we like it?
A sober chronicle of British science-fiction that mined behind the imagination of its innovators to discover their inspirations, rather than gauchely dazzle the viewer with tiresome celluloid icons.
What was good about it?
* An impressive gallery of talking heads including Arthur C Clarke, whose West Country burr is still detectable in his collapsed-tunnel tones, Kim Newman, the British encyclopaedia of British sci-fi in the shape of one dandyish man with a silly beard, and other numerous academics and authors, many of whom seem benignly envious of the influence of HG Wells, John Wydnham et al.
* The illustrations of HG Wells’ novels, rather than just recycle clips from the film versions of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, to accompany the readings. We appreciated the simple, but evocative imagery such as bleak desert sands to illustrate Wells’ pessimistic view of humanity’s future, or epileptic cityscapes and sun shining through the trees. And when the readings were coloured in with dramatic reconstructions, they were mostly arranged so that most of the potency remained in the narration from the books, with only a few concessions to Hollywood.
* In such a well-trodden subject, an original perspective was required; and this was achieved by examining what provoked the authors’ imaginations. For HG Wells, we learnt that The Time Machine’s vision of a future human society split asunder between a bestial subterranean sub-species and a cultured but weak-willed, wan sub-species had its roots in the Victorian class system. While War of the Worlds came about after Wells mused, after reading about how European colonists had “exterminated” Tasmanian natives, that no matter how high up the evolutionary ladder you were, there would always be someone, or something, one rung higher
* It exhumed into popular culture (or BBC4 at least) the memory of Olaf Stapleton, the principle British sci-fi author between the wars. And if you didn’t believe them, you were immediately presented with the glowing testimony of both Arthur C Clarke and Doris Lessing.
* Peter Capaldi’s sparse, economical narration.
* Firemaidens From Outer Space, a dreadful British B-movie that sought to ape the flood of American sci-fi films flooding into Britain.
* Arthur C Clarke discussing 2001: A Space Odyssey, both in context to the Stanley Kubrick film and also its allusions to the age-old conflict of evolution vs. religion.

What was bad about it?
* The incongruous inserts of the BBC’s current cash-cow Doctor Who seemed so forced and out of step with the rest of the philosophy of the programme. Granted Doctor Who certainly purloined ideas from HG Wells, but the inclusion of clips from the show appeared to have been crowbarred-in in the same way that a studio producer insists on a gratuitous sex scene midway through an impenetrable thriller to maintain the interest of the dumb masses.
* Perhaps it was because of the concentration on literature, but Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass trilogy seemed to have been rather disdainfully skimmed over. And while not strictly sci-fi, George Orwell’s 1984 has been the foundation for countless books, films and comics globally for the past half-century yet wasn’t even mentioned.

How To Be Science Fiction, BBC4, Sunday 3 December 2006
Did we like it?
We wanted to but this one-off gentle satire (part of BBC4’s current British sci-fi season) looking at how to studiously convey aspects of science fiction was a five-minute sketch dragged out over one laborious hour.

What was good about it?
• The ‘taking a pause’ technique: one particularly amusing aspect of sci-fi acting identified by our guide Nigel Planer as his thespy alter ego Nicholas Craig. Used most efficiently when the plausibility of the script appears to be going wholly AWOL, it was revealed just how frequently programming of yesteryear relied on this skill so it could pretend it really knew what was going on.
• The retro footage containing classic and (sometimes justifiably) long-forgotten sci-fi programming was thoroughly enjoyable to watch. Although the tone of the show was ultimately affectionate in its mocking, our actual pleasure was in laughing at the awful set designs, camp costumes and horrific implausibility of it all.
• The ridiculous phrases and terminology used in the shows included. “You wouldn’t happen to have a grenade with a percussion destruction instrument to hand would you?” was one of many howlers.
• Brian Blessed.

What was bad about it?
• The length. The content of the show in no way justified the running time of 60 minutes – this was essentially only a slightly amusing idea which would have resulted in a few smirks from those watching at home but no-one suffering from their sides being split.
• A repetitive structure (ironic narrator identifies a trend, montage of BBC programming follows) meant our attention span quickly became strained.
• It was really annoying that none of the programming shown was referenced.
• We still haven’t forgotten Nigel Planer for his part in Queen-horrorfest We Will Rock You.

Timewatch: Parallel Worlds – A User’s Guide, BBC4, Tuesday 28 November 2006
Did we like it?
Aside from a few sporadic acute observations, this was a long-winded, repetitive rehash of science-fiction lore that anyone who has ever been entranced by a single episode of Star Trek or been beguiled by the literature of Michael Moorcock would be utterly au fait with. A better sub-title would have been A Novice’s Guide.

What was good about it?
• David Bradley, editor of SFX magazine and a thoroughly nice chap, who explained some of the more complex issues of multi-dimensional theory with clarity and insight.
• As with every single programme in BBC4’s sci-fi season there was the obligatory appearance by critic Kim Newman.
• Stuart Maconie added some much-needed levity to a show that dealt with a subject so dry it could be ground up and laid on icy roads to prevent cars from skidding.
• The theory of CM Jones that parallel worlds in fiction have to be as nightmarish as possible in order that we can ensure the same things don’t happen in ‘our’ dimension.
• The clips of Red Dwarf, even if the original ideas of that show seemed to be ignored and instead treated as a comical interlude to lighten the pseudo-profundity of the admirable, but intellectual gossamer of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Sliders.

What was bad about it?
• Many of the theories of parallel worlds are already virtually mainstream knowledge, yet much time was wasted by the talking heads monotonously going over the various clauses and sub-clauses of their existence. And each explanation would then be followed by a clip from a sci-fi film or TV show in which one of the characters gave an exposition on the very same theories the talking head had just laboured over.
• The segment on doppelgangers – the equivalents of dimension-hopping sci-fi characters in the parallel worlds – was ridden with psychobabble, and not made any more erudite through the use of such phrases as “moral contingency”.
• An over-analysis of the Star Trek episode Mirror Mirror, in which Kirk, McCoy and a few other Enterprise crew members were accidentally beamed back aboard a parallel version of their vessel. In this universe, the Federation was an empire and had adopted an according fascist doctrine evidenced by such things as a quasi-Nazi salute, brutal punishments and most bizarrely Spock sporting a goatee beard. From what was shown of the episode, the interesting premise was spoilt by the usually solid Chekhov and Sulu overacting in their evil guises; but the talking heads nevertheless senselessly salivated over the rudimentary plotline.
• The arduous slog through the quicksand swamp of multi-dimensional theory, in which every single decision made by every single person, every single animal, and even every single atom creates a new offshoot universe. See, we’ve explained it in one sentence, but Timewatch saw fit to get each talking head to wade out into its murky waters until they got out of their depth, and then asked another one to repeat what they said. And when that was done, clips from sci-fi shows were used.
• Despite most of the theories on multi-universes being originated in literature, there was a sole concentration on TV and film. This meant, for example, when the talking heads mused on the possibility that a dream was the brain venturing into a new dimension there was no mention of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, which dealt imaginatively on just such a concept.

Random Quest, BBC4, Monday 27 November 2006
Did we like it?
A superb, intelligent drama that went well beyond the horizons of conventional science-fiction, and mused on the profundity of every day choices and fate.

What was good about it?
• As with so many other dramas produced by BBC4, such as last year’s A View From A Hill, obvious restraints in budget are dispelled through a combination of a minimal but excellent cast, innovative filming and locations and brilliant writing.
• Samuel West starred as dull, contented nuclear physicist Colin Trafford who is blasted into a parallel universe after an experiment goes wrong to discover he is still Colin Trafford, but this Colin is a successful author of pulp sci-fi and is in an unhappy marriage, unhappy largely because of his drinking and philandering.
• The tension between Colin and his ‘wife’ Ottilie (Kate Ashfield) as he is uncomfortable seeing a woman he doesn’t know undress, while the man he has replaced makes her skin crawl. But as Colin falls in love with her, their relationship gradually thaws until he is catapulted back to his own universe.
• Once he gets back, the once meek scientist seems to have contracted some of the other Colin’s determination as he tracks down his own universe’s version of Ottilie, eventually finding and marrying her.
• But it was a clever twist that at his wedding Colin encounters a waitress whom he recognises as his mistress in the other universe and there is an obvious attraction, suggesting that while Colin may seem far more likeable than his counterpart they will ultimately succumb to the same weaknesses.
• Even though the concept of a parallel world has been flogged more often than pseudo-nasty judges on talent contests, the script was written in such a way that Colin believed he was the first person to ever conceive of such a possibility. And given that this short story by John Wyndham was written in the relatively naïve 1950s, and transposed to the modern day for this adaptation, this was entirely apt.
• The odd locations such as the parallel Colin’s house that had a totally white bedroom, while the downstairs was only occasionally punctuated with dashes and spots of vivid primary and secondary colours. And even places like the professor’s office resounded with a stirring realism such as Colin’s loud footsteps on the wooden floor or a clock ticking over a conversation; simple things that somehow made everything a little bit eerier.
• The economical use of dialogue as the plot and characters are propelled almost as often by an expression as by what is said. This is observed most keenly when Ottilie looks affectionately puzzled when the husband whom she had grown to despise suddenly starts to show her fondness once more.

What was bad about it?
• Hot Chip’s excellent Over And Over to soundtrack Colin getting up in the morning was an inappropriate theme, as Colin was evidently downtrodden, lethargic and conventional; something blander such as Snow Patrol would have fitted in better.
• While Colin and Ottilie progressively became closer, the sight of them at first turning away from one another in bed before embracing some days or weeks later was clumsy and unnecessary. Other instances of their growing trust and love were far more potent such as at a dinner party when Colin is distracted from talking about the sale of the film rights to his latest book by his wife’s smile from across the room.
• After Colin is transported back to his own universe, he exchanges places with the other Colin who has been in a coma for some weeks. But we don’t get to find out what happens in the other universe and does the poor Ottilie have her dreams of happiness dashed after the brutish Colin returns?

The Cult Of… The Tripods, BBC4, Tuesday 19 December 2006
Did we like it?
A retrospective that looked lovingly back at an innovative though cruelly abandoned entry in the history of British sci-fi, but which was tempered by some acute acknowledgments of its glaring flaws.

What was good about it?
• Archduke of British sci-fi Kim Newman was there once more as he has been throughout the whole of the Cult Of… series. And while we never get tired of hearing his expert views, his enduring jolliness suggests he never tires of giving his views. On the Tripods he remarked that the central characters “seemed to do a bit too much getting away from the Tripods”.
• While by modern standards the special effects look dismal, if you regress your brain to a mid-80s perspective full of blocky ZX Spectrum games, then you can appreciate them as pretty astounding.
• For the second series, a 1,200 square foot model of the Tripods’ city was made, and it looked very impressive with its glassy, alien architecture.
• The quite chilling sequence at the start of the very first episode where a caption read: “A village in England 2089AD” before a horse and cart slowly ambled into view followed by an impression of the world in the grip of Dark Ages feudalism. And soon afterwards a huge Tripod bestrode the landscape where a youth of 16 was taken into the Tripod as part of a coming-of-age ritual before being returned with a ‘cap’ that made the human population compliant and docile.
• The notion of a ‘cap’ was of course a metaphor for children growing up and needing to act as responsible adults, but the creepiness of the metal shard implanted on the crown of the skull and the vacant leer of the youth when he was returned still remain striking to this day.
• The humorous contrast between star Jim Baker’s naïve awe at the first appearance of the Tripod and the production team’s more cynical perspective was nicely arranged. No full size Tripod was ever made; the nearest they got were two huge legs that kept floating away when placed in the lake for the Tripod’s first scene.
• Special effects man Mat Irvine remembering with relish how the crew had got their hands on a Quantel Paintbox. This machine that greatly aided the production of TV graphics and meant the production crew could merge images to make it seem as though the Alps were only a stone’s throw away from a Kentish quarry, or enabled Tripods to stalk the heroic Henry and Will through the forest. But again the reality was much more mundane, as the crew had to “beg, borrow and steal” the contraption from the BBC weather department as they owned the only two models in the country.
• An appearance from Simon Groom on Blue Peter; a man who defined the 80s for a young generation as much as Boy George, perms and Margaret Thatcher.
• The way the script was re-written to accommodate the axing of the Tripods so that when Will and Beanpole returned from their mission to the Tripod city they found the base of their rebel friends had been destroyed by the Tripods. Will wailed: “Has it all been for nothing?”, which was also a subtle lament from the production team who saw that all their hard work over two years would be unfulfilled. Still, you could always read the book to find out what happened.
• SFX’s Steve O’Brien offering a sober analysis of the Tripods, applauding its “ambition”, but also being quite scathing about how it was “dull” and “worthy”.

What was bad about it?
• That not more of the original cast were interviewed. For Blake’s 7 last week, they were practically queuing up, but here only Jim Baker (Henry) appeared.
• The ‘caps’ affixed to anyone over 16 didn’t just seem to make them lose all sense of imagination; judging by the awful plastic overalls the inhabitants of the Tripod city wore it also stripped away all sense of fashion.
• The fact that the books weren’t long enough to fill a series of 13 episodes resulting in four episodes taking place in a French vineyard that wasn’t in the original tale.
• The BBC suits decided that despite being a groundbreaking show, it was costing too much to produce and therefore the third climactic series was cancelled. A view compounded in their fiscal-obsessed minds by the viewing figures that showed effluent dross like The Krankies Club. Did you also know that in the past few days Leona's A Moment Like This has probably sold more copies than Love Will Tear Us Apart has in 26 years? Dolts.
• Jim Baker’s quite sad outlook on his life after his acting career pretty much ended after the Tripods was axed. He later became a bus driver and is now a delivery driver. He stated that the last 20 years could be summed up “in just one sentence”, while his time working on the Tripods had been so much more.

The Cult of… Blakes 7, BBC4, Tuesday 11 December 2006
Did we like it?
Ah, Blakes 7. This lookback at the wobbly-sets, camp costumes, and ham-acting of the sci-fi Magnificent Seven was pure nostalgia from the moment they showed the opening credits and that superb title music started – and we loved it. Most of the original cast were interviewed, the exceptions being the late David Jackson (Gan) and the curiously absent Jan Chappell (Cally) All acknowledged the huge impact the programme had had on their lives.

What was good about it?
• Blakes 7 took the 7pm weekday slot that had previously been occupied by Z Cars, also inheriting a similar budget. This meant effects on the cheap, but ensured that great scripts, compelling characters and imaginative plots compensated for the inevitable ‘quarry doubling as an alien planet’ filming.
• Mat Irvine, the special effects designer was articulate and entertaining in describing the challenges his team faced on a shoestring budget.
• The first series was actually pretty dark – Blake is framed on child molestation charges; there are torture scenes reminiscent of a Clockwork Orange; the whole scenario is very dystopian. They’d obviously set out to make intelligent sci-fi.
• The excellent cast and well-drawn characters. We still love the witty Michael Keating as the thieving, cowardly Vila; Thomas as the noble Blake; Peter Tuddenham as the voices of the supercomputers Zen and Orac; the huge slice of ham that is Paul Darrow as Avon plus, of course, the clearly barking Jacqueline Pearce as the evil Servalan. Sally Knyvette’s Jenna – a vision in a leather jumpsuit – also kept the Dads and teenage boys interested.
• The design of the 7’s spaceship, Liberator, still looks fantastic after all these years.
• The crop-haired Servalan made a superb villainess. Jacqueline Pearce was genuinely pleased to have been the masturbatory fantasy for a whole generation of young men!
• The fantastic last episode, which brought back Blake, then proceeded to kill off him and the rest of the crew. Or did it…?

What was bad about it?
• Mat Irvine’s mullet, which made him look like an aging Billy Ray Cyrus. Why such a visionary designer was sporting such a passé haircut was beyond us…
• Almost 30 years on, some of the special effects were so shoddy you would have automatically assumed the show was a spoof.
• Chris Boucher’s recollection that the reason Gareth Thomas quit the show was because some of his highbrow actor friends were very sniffy about it. We hoped that Thomas’ version – that the programme had strayed too far from its character and dystopian vision roots into the realm of dodgy monsters on alien planets – was the more accurate reason.
• Series 4, which featured the frankly rubbish replacement for the Liberator – Scorpio - and the Uriah Heep-like ship’s computer, Slave, had clearly ‘jumped the shark’. Too much camp comedy and not enough darkness. Time for Blake’s 7 to disappear into deep space…

The Cult of… Survivors, BBC4, Tuesday 5 December 2006
Did we like it?
It was a fascinating look at one of the most distinct dramas of the 70s, but we weren’t told until about two minutes from the end that really only the first series was worth watching. Subsequent series degenerated from a desperate struggle to survive into a kind of insipid Good Life without Margot and Gerry.

What was good about it?
• The original plotline for Survivors by sci-fi demigod Terry “Daleks” Nation, which imagined a desolate world where almost the entire population has been wiped out by a virus.
• The bleak realisation of this empty world, which was partly assisted by a BBC strike that meant the first series was filmed in gloomy winter rather than luscious summer. And this was evocatively recalled by the stars as they spoke of frozen muddy fields and snow covered roads.
• Oddly for a 1970s show, it was female-orientated with two of the three main characters being women (Lucy Fleming as Jenny Richards and Carolyn Seymour as Abby Grant), while only gruff Greg Fleming (Ian McCulloch) was there to represent male pragmatism.
• The cock-ups that included the survivors being menaced from a pack of rabid hounds; the director mirthfully remembered that they looked like they had been “got from Crufts”, and was accompanied by a clip of a bunch of well-behaved, immaculate dogs sitting calmly outside the survivors’ van.
• Much of the drama in the superior first series centred on the efforts of the survivors to resurrect society after everything that they had taken for granted had been obliterated by the virus. This was most arrestingly portrayed in the episode Law & Order in which a man with learning disabilities was put on trial for the murder of a girl. The council had to decide whether his punishment was to be death or banishment. It was left to the survivors’ leader Abby to make the casting vote, and she chose death – much to the anger of actress Carolyn Seymour.
• And a further dilemma was cast on the survivors when Greg and Carolyn found out that the executed man had not been responsible for the death – should they tell the rest of the community or not?

What was bad about it?
• After creator Terry Nation stopped writing after the first series, the show went into a rapid decline and almost all the clips on this show were from that initial run. Indeed, Ian McCulloch was so fed up with the dreary second series that he volunteered to write his own death that came about after Greg contracted small pox and exiled himself to prevent spreading the infection further.
• We didn’t discover what happened to the character of Abby Grant after Carolyn Seymour was “fired” by producer Terence Dudley after the first series.
• Carolyn Seymour’s incessant pleas that she was a “strong woman” who only ever played roles of “strong women”. Having listened to her we don’t doubt that she is a “strong woman” but we didn’t need to be told this every time she spoke.

The Cult Of… Star Cops, BBC4, Tuesday 28 November 2006
Did we like it?
It’s difficult to say as we cannot remember Star Cops when it was on and so only have this highly subjective appraisal that worshipped what appeared to us as a fair sci-fi/ detective drama as if it was the exhumed remains of some lost god.


What was good about it?
• While proud of Star Cops, actors David Calder and Trevor Cooper recalled the problems of acting in an environment where there was supposed to be no gravity. This meant either hanging around on wires all day long, or as the exasperated Calder eventually formulated acting extremely slowly to simulate the weightlessness.
• As God and the Devil wage constant wars through their minions on Earth using such puppets as revolutionary and tyrant, Kurt Cobain and Celine Dion and John Peel and Simon Cowell, so one of the eternal battlegrounds between brave, visionary writer and oily, conservative producer was fought out on Space Cops. Writer Chris Boucher constantly warred with producer Evgeny Gridneff over the direction of Star Cops over such things as set design and theme tune.
• While it had many faults, one matter most of the talking heads agreed on was the quality of the scripts, which often extrapolated common or garden detective scenarios into the cosmos of 2027 such as a Mafia plot to smuggle uranium back to Earth in rockets that dumped rubbish on the Moon.
• David Calder recounting how after a strike by the BBC electricians had paralysed production when they finally got back on set one of the regular cast members was ill (Erick Ray Evans who played Calder’s deputy), and as writer Chris Boucher was absent Calder himself had to reallocate Evans’ lines amongst the rest of the cast.

What was bad about it?
• The talking heads had to try extra-hard to evoke memories of Star Cops as it had faded so badly from the public consciousness. We’re a little baffled why we can’t remember it as in the year of its broadcast, 1987, were still ravaged by our Star Wars addiction. We even remember Captain Zep Space Detective, and the theme tune (“Captain Zep!/Captain Zep!/ Super space de-tec-tive”), so god only knows why we can’t remember Star Cops.
• This general ignorance also allowed the talking heads to make delusional eulogies to Star Cops, with sci-fi uber critic Kim Newman even musing that it could have been British sci-fi’s greatest ever series. Thankfully, we had enough clips from the show to prove this could never be the case in much the same way as we can predict that Ben X-Factor will not be the new Joe Cocker.
• The utterly dreadful theme tune that sounded as though one of the many unmarked graveyards of South American soaps had been raided and the putrefying theme tunes moulded into one heinous Frankenstein’s Monster of a song. If the MacDonald Brothers sang it, it would be the first time you’d want to shoot the composer rather than the Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee of reality TV.

The Cult of… Doomwatch, BBC4, Tuesday 21 November 2006
Did we like it?
The second part of the series about classic British sci-fi took a fascinating look at the early 1970s drama Doomwatch. The premise behind the programme was taking real scientific advances, and then creating a ‘worst-case scenario’ storyline which the Doomwatch team investigated – what happens when technology goes wrong. All of which served to scare the bejesus out of the British viewing public and press and turn a whole generation into Luddites.
What was good about it?
• The revelation that co-creator Dr Kit Pedler was a real life scientist who deliberately picked plausible storylines to develop.
• The prescience of the programme which covered storylines such as genetic engineering, environmental issues, nuclear proliferation and sinister government offices.
• Robert Powell, the de facto hero, looked about 12 in the clips, but he revealed that the programme turned him into a sex symbol, despite having a face that one critic memorably described as looking like a “haunted parking meter”!
• Simon Oates, who played Dr John Ridge, admitted that not a lot of acting was required as he played a chauvinistic ladies' man with a very dodgy taste in clothes – essentially his real-life persona.
• Doomwatch’s focus on the dangerously high levels of lead in fuel got the real life government’s backs-up and seemed to have a direct influence in the development of unleaded petrol.
• The brave and pioneering decision to kill off the hero (Robert Powell’s Toby Wren) mid-way through the second series prompted the biggest mailbag of correspondence to the Radio Times since the war.
• When a recent planned revival of the show for Channel 5 was pitched, it was discovered that all the new ideas the writers had for storylines had already featured in the original show, proving how far ahead of its time it was. (and also how little research of the original show the new writers had undertaken!)

What was bad about it?
• The clip of the infamous ‘rat invasion’ episode featured some of the most unconvincing stuffed vermin since Basil Brush’s last TV appearance..
• The programme had a very 70s attitude to women – most of them being bimbos and airheads, until a backlash meant a strong female character was brought in.
• The expense of re-shooting scenes meant that there were quite a few fluffed lines remaining in the programme.
• Back-stabbing between the producer Terence Dudley and creators Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis eventually killed the programme – which seemed an oddly pathetic way for such a groundbreaking series to end.

The Cult of… Adam Adamant, BBC4, Tuesday 14 November 2006
Did we like it?
A dashed fine retrospective of one of British sci-fi’s most decent heroes, played by Gerald Harper, but tinged by an indefinable sense of pointlessness.

What was good about it?
• The absurd notion of Adam Adamant – a gentleman crimefighter is encased in a block of ice in the early 1900s by his arch enemy ‘The Face’, assisted in his dastardlyness by Adam’s one true love. Skip forward to 1966 and he's resurrected when workmen discover his tomb. Such foundations seem both imaginative and ridiculous, and as sci-fi almanac Kim Newman reflected: “It’s the sort of series you think you might have dreamed.”
• Dogmatic puritan Mary Whitehouse waterlogged and weighed down by the huge bundles of signatures she had collated from like-minded outraged TV viewers who wanted to bring down the wrath of God on any organisation that dared to suggest that people have sex for pleasure rather than merely to procreate.
• And it was Whitehouse, incidentally, who provoked the BBC’s head of drama to dream up Adam Adamant as an icon of austere probity of whom the white-haired harridan would approve. A noble idea in practice, as Adam Adamant contained no sex or bad language; the violence, however – which included villains being skewered by javelins – raised her hackles.
• Gerald Harper’s dismay at the slapdash nature of the first day’s filming. He had forsaken a role on Broadway to take the part and found himself in a wig, with false eyebrows galloping along a street.
• Another of Gerald’s recollections summed up the sometimes chaotic daily life on the series when he was playing Adam as he staggered out of a hospital and into the 1960s world for the first time since he was defrosted. As Gerald emerged into Piccadilly Circus, he was the target of the ire of taxi drivers as they had to avoid his shambling, disorientated form. The modern day equivalent would be Laurence Olivier exiled in the world of Footballers' Wives.
• The tale of Jack May (who played Adam’s manservant Sims) breaking off rehearsals every 25 minutes to place a bet on the horses.

What was bad about it?
• Adam Adamant was born out of the fertile loins of the Swinging Sixties, when the whole of middle-class Britain, and especially London, deluded itself that they were living in some kind of halcyon utopia where postmen whistled joyfully on their round knowing their place at the fag end of society; where women could feel liberated and wear mini skirts while men obligingly gazed at their unclothed legs; a place where mop-haired bands could compose a number of fine ditties and condemn the rest of history to the futility of trying to match their opuses.
• Adam Adamant may provide some kitsch amusement for people who believe that kitsch is something they can enjoy while pretending not really to like it in order to save their credibility, but it did seem to have been cancelled for being not very good; or at least not as good as The Avengers, which it was put up against in the schedules and lost out dismally.

My Science Fiction Life, BBC4, Friday 29 December 2006
Did we like it?
How fantastical sci-fi has seeped into the lives of ordinary people, and how they are using it to inspire their often quite dreary lives; dreary lives that are often of little interest to the viewer.

What was good about it?
• Star Trek fanatic Ann Thomas having her Klingon ‘name’ as ‘Kickarse’ to show that at least some Trekkers do have a sense of humour. In Klingon it apparently means ‘beautiful warrior’, which was ironic in its own way too.
• The retelling of the Orson Welles radio broadcast of War of the Worlds in 1938 that was so realistic that it had Americans flooding into the streets in a panic.
• Professor Kevin Warwick’s research into cybernetics that has enabled him to implant electrodes into his nervous system and connect himself to a computer.
• BT futurologist Ian Pearson put forth an interesting, though somewhat fantastical, idea about the future of computers. Apparently, the next step beyond the silicone microchip is for bacteria to contain electronic devices so that they can congeal into hyper-computers. And eventually take over the world, obviously.
• Architect Will Alsop’s mission to transform Barnsley into a contemporary vision of Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner.
• Tony Alleyne who has renovated his studio flat to mimic the Enterprise from Star Trek: The Next Generation. “I live here! I eat here! I sleep here!” he mechanically stated. And as far as we could tell he was the only person who slept there.

What was bad about it?
• Nick Pope, a man who for about five minutes in the 90s was in charge of finding UFOs for the government, but who since leaving his post has become a totem for every deluded soul who wishes to believe in the existence of extra-terrestrials. He also seems to relish being viewed as the British Fox Mulder. “I shared Fox’s frustration,” he confided about his colleagues’ scepticism for his alien obsession as they whistled the X-Files theme tune whenever he walked by.
• Jeff Wayne, who composed a musical adaptation of War of the Worlds that reflected the different voices of the humans and Martians as they struggled for survival and supremacy. All very worthy, but sadly aside from its orchestral pomp the songs seemed to be factory processed offal from Mark Knopfler’s soporific slaughterhouse mind.
• The smugness of Professor Kevin Warwick as he linked himself electronically to his wife and claimed it gave him a transcendental experience beyond the reach of the rest of us humans, when in fact it made him appear pitiful and emotionally remote from the rest of humanity that he needed such clumsy and empirical ways of communicating with someone whom he loves.
• The wild guessing by some of the supposedly expert contributors on the advancement of robotics.
• On the topic of British people being the most under surveillance in the world, Nick Pope dragged that old favourite from the lake of paranoia when he claimed: “We are living in 1984; we are living in Big Brother.” You do begin to start to wonder how many of these folk who make blind allusions to Orwell’s classic novel have actually read the book. Yes, suffocating surveillance is certainly one aspect of Oceania’s tyranny; but if some former government worker had spread seditious rumours, such as those Pope was thrusting forward, then he would ultimately end up with a bullet in the back of the neck. Fortunately, such freedoms still exist so we do not “live in 1984” nor are we any way approaching such a totalitarian state, Pope’s suspicion is just scaremongering propagated by people who profit from fear.
• A number of the technological innovations were simply dull. Take contact lenses that enable you to customise and distort your own vision to your heart’s desire, so rather than develop your own perceptions of an object through your own imagination you have some pre-packaged sprite tattooed onto your vision altering it to what someone else wants you to perceive.
• And then there’s the website Second Life. “Life beyond reality,” the advertising jingle coos. “Where imagination has no bounds!” But it does have bounds, very narrow bounds – as the target audience are people who are slaves to materialism. Second Life seems to offer a shortcut to people too poor to go surfing in clear, blue tropical seas, buy expensive cars and coerce young (wo)men to find them attractive by the size of their wallet alone but who can afford a PC and a broadband link – all the while pandering to the desires of people with absolutely no imagination, who are also no loss to the human race if they want to mentally rot in a computer game.
• Star Wars-obsessed Reverend Neil Hook who colours his sermons with references to science-fiction. He didn’t exactly seem to be bursting at the seams with an attentive flock as about his church was scattered a fairly bored-looking bunch of church-goers.
• Right, we’re watching a programme called My Science Fiction Life about science-fiction and exclusively featuring people obsessed with science-fiction – so was it really necessary to deliver a précis of Star Wars?

Super Secret Movie Rules, VH1

Super Secret Movie Rules likes to think it is some definitive tenet on the art of film-making when in fact it's just I Love 1975 for the celluloid clique. The quality of commentator is pretty much equal to the bargain basement celebrities of the I Love… shows, the only difference being a British audience will be largely ignorant of their identity.

This means that instead of recognisable non-entities such as Paul Ross, Paul Tonkinson and Kate Thornton we got anonymous American nonentities such as Michelle Visage and Chris Gore. But, like the British talking heads, their opinions and views are contrived and conceited, proving the breadth of the Atlantic Ocean is no barrier to inanity. As international paragon of insignificance Rita Rudner remarked with accidental wisdom: “The dumbest people often think they’re the smartest.”

This episode featured the “Mega Rules” apparent in “stupid movies”. The commentators either exaggerated or twisted the facts to suit their point. When that failed, they simply lied. Did Pee Wee’s Big Adventure really create a national obsession for the “shoe dance”? Or was it a “seminal movie, an Alice in Wonderland for our generation”? In the States, these platitudes might have been true but to a British audience such statements lacked any kind of authenticity.

The “rules” themselves were merely blithe observations that could be applied to individual films, but certainly didn’t apply to all stupid movies as a “rule”. “It takes an idiot to save the universe” might well be true for Dude, Where’s My Car?, but not to Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure or Wayne’s World.

But it was the clips from those two comedy classics, as well as The Naked Gun and The Jerk, that awarded this programme a semblance of quality. The best scene was from The Naked Gun where Ricardo Montalban’s character is threatening to kill Priscilla Presley unless he is allowed to escape. In response, Leslie Nielsen grabs an innocent bystander from the crowd and says he will shoot her unless Presley is released.

Rapidly running out of steam, the law that “Stupid Characters Are Too Dumb To Die”, virtually repeated the earlier statement“Morons Are Hard To Kill, But Fun To Maim”, while the “awards” at the conclusion were a brief rehash of what had been broadcast before. Ironically, the first rule was “Beware Boneheads Who Have Bright Ideas”. If only the producers had followed their own rules, this trivial trinket would have remained where many of its smug commentators reside – in utter obscurity.

Sex, Lies And Frankie Howerd, Channel 4

For a programme that purported to be about one of Britain’s most unique comedians, this profile did the best it could to dehumanise him.

Stories of his uncontrollable sexuality were recounted by Rory McGrath and Paul Ross, who said that “Ninety per cent of people who worked with Howerd were propositioned by him”. And in propositioning Ross, Frankie made it clear he couldn’t have been very fussy as to whom he approached.

Meanwhile, sanctimoniously smug psychologist Geoffrey Beattie, the most irritating Big Brother expert, clumsily applied Frankie’s complex life to some tedious behavioural patterns, robbing it of any intriguing individuality. Both these salacious tales and ham-fisted analyses impeded the fascinating story of Frankie’s colourful career, particularly as a number of the stories were repeated.

The best parts of Frankie’s history were told mainly by his biographer Graham McCann, who painted a sympathetic picture of the comedian. Growing up in a poor household with an inattentive father Frankie suffered very low self-esteem. Despite this, he found the courage to seek a big break in the entertainment industry and was crushed by rejections from RADA. Even when he failed at auditions, he opened himself up to more pain by asking for advice on how to further his career. The advice was unanimously damning – give it up.

It was while in the army that Frankie discovered his niche through regaling the troops with a hilarious comic routine that gave him his confidence back through achieving what he most desired in his professional life – acceptance from an audience. And it was these areas of Frankie’s life that made the most interesting viewing rather than his private life – to find out why he acted as he did rather than descriptions of the actions themselves.

After leaving the army, Frankie won a role in Variety Bandbox on BBC Radio and quickly became the star of the most popular show in the country. Frankie found that his new won fame also enabled him to pick and choose his sexual partners. Even though homosexuality was still illegal, he couldn’t curb his urges and got involved with a young man.

After surviving a career slump that coincided with the rise of television, Frankie enjoyed a second wind with Up Pompeii where he played the camp Lurcio. Even then he guarded his private life – either by deflecting away probing questions on chat shows with humour or, later in his life, pretending that his lover Dennis was anything but, including his chauffeur or manager. It was clips such as Frankie’s appearance on Parkinson where he quite aggressively disrupted Parkinson’s line of questioning that illustrated his need to keep his private life out of the public gaze.

The programme captured a captivating portrait of Frankie through the evidence of McCann and other friends, but the tabloid ambience – from the title of the profile to the stories of his errant sex life – somewhat spoiled it.

Jackanory Night, BBC4

Tuesday 21 February 2006
Did we like it?
A pleasant skip down memory lane in which the subtle skills of storytellers such as Kenneth Williams and Tony Robinson delighted, but by the end we had remembered why we rarely watched it during our childhood.

What was good about it?
• Kenneth Williams and his supple face. During his tale about a queen and her dribbling teapots he distinctly characterised each role through his voice – where he would elongate vowels, adopt different accents or rolling his consonants – and also his face – which would contort with unique specific elasticity for each individual in the story.
• Judi Dench’s contrasting calmness during which she looked as though her body from the neck down had been paralysed.
• The illustrations of Quentin Boyle that meandered across huge walls.
• Tony Robinson revolutionising the whole of Jackanory with his colloquial versions of the legends of Greek heroes Theseus and Odysseus. The best clip was when Tony was embroiled on a harbour front somewhere and was passionately telling the story while all about him the local Darby and Joan club looked on utterly bemused.
• Rik Mayall’s manic telling of George’s Marvellous Medicine which was indelibly classic children’s TV as it passed the litmus test of provoking parents to complain. Some moaned that the tale was disrespectful to old ladies, while one was aghast when her offspring tossed all the ingredients of the Medicine into a bath, including paint stripper, ruining the bath as a consequence.

What was bad about it?
• The doctored images of the halcyon days of the 60s, in which small children would gather obediently around a television and marvel with good-natured awe at the programmes.
• Jane Asher looking suspiciously younger now than she did when telling a story in 1981.
• Jackanory Playhouse, the Voyager to Star Trek’s Next Generation in that it stretched the fabric a littler too tightly and was let down by poor special effects and ropey storytelling.
• The longer the evening wore on, the more that petulant impatience of yore returned as we found ourselves fidgeting uncomfortably. And we realised that Jackanory is how adults would like children’s stories to be told, but it’s rarely exciting enough for the hyperactive kids themselves.

The Romantics, BBC2

Saturday 21 January 2006
Did we like it?
A documentary that explores the influence of philosophy and poetry on contemporary politics would be worth watching simply for novelty value in the same way that a simple whale can get thousands of Londoners away from Oxford Street even if was a indulgent mish-mash. But thankfully, this was worth watching largely because it was so expertly written and wrought.

What was good about it?
• Peter Ackroyd’s mouth is like forever open wound that gushes knowledge and erudite exposition on the history of literature and its place in modern culture. While he is a little rigid, the antithesis of the windmill arms of Peter Snow, and sometimes appears so stationary as to be a rotund human traffic light, his near-polemic narrative explains how words and ideas indelibly shaped European politics in the 18th century.
• The painstaking, lurid description of Louis XVI’s execution at ‘the machine’, invented by a man called Guillotine, which needed two ‘drops’ to decapitate his fat-necked head. And then further illustrated with the gratuitous blood staining the blade and flooding the cobbles.
• A brilliant cast, surprising only because of the brevity of their roles, which included David Tennant as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Threlfall as William Wordsworth.
• Ackroyd explained that while Rousseau and Denis Diderot’s philosophies contrasted, they both vilified the oppressive rule of the French monarchy that sought to crush both human reason and imagination. And how each ideology laid the foundations for the Revolution 40 years later.
• And how Rousseau’s belief that culture and government placed mankind in a prison that nullified the imagination was extrapolated by Thomas Paine in America, a country which at the time was free of religious and political suppression, and provoked the Declaration of Independence.
• As Ackroyd visited the once-dilapidated former residence of the pioneering, but poverty-stricken poet William Blake he lamented that it was “now a hairdressing salon”.
• The harsh, silvery light that was cast on the faces of all the poets and philosophers as they expounded their words captured every nascent wrinkle in their faces and accentuated every muscle as they spoke.

What was bad about it?
• While the lighting scheme was mostly a triumph, the two occasions when Ackroyd opened a book of poetry only to be consumed in the white light of literary revelation were a little too derivative of Raiders of the Lost Ark when the three baddies peer into the Ark (but Ackroyd’s face didn’t melt).
• Ackroyd’s passion was admirable, but through this rigorous passion he did spread a little disinformation about what caused the seismic alterations in the late 18th century. While literature and ideas played a significant role, so did greed, jealousy and poverty. Although Ackroyd partly conceded the flaws as he outlined how the new rulers in France imposed a regime just as belligerent and intolerant as its predecessors.

Ricky Gervais Meets… Larry David, Channel 4

Thursday 5 January 2006
Did we like it?
First half was disappointing, second half was much better. So, on the whole, yes.

What was good about it?
• The parts where the two of them partook in full conversation without being irritatingly interrupted by clips – most illuminating was Larry’s explanation of how he writes the shows – he has a fairly full treatment that the characters then broadly improvise around – but with perhaps less improvisation than we might have expected.
• It was refreshing to hear Larry saying how much he enjoyed his fame – that he found it liberating. It jarred beautifully with earlier comments on Celebrity Big Brother from Jodie Marsh and Faria Alam saying they ‘hated’ their notoriety (seemingly without noticing the rather obvious contradiction between those statements and them agreeing to go on Big Brother). Instead, Larry insisted it was great that people seemed to like him.
• Ricky’s story about how, once he’d moved into his 30s, he finally managed to be self-confident enough to, for example, walk into a pub and ask for the TV to be turned down or off – but almost as soon as he reached that point, The Office made him famous so once again he didn’t have the confidence to do things like that because he was afraid people would think he was a big shot.
• Larry’s make up artist fussing over him and saying: “You want chapstick? For chapped lips?” It sounded like a line from Curb or Seinfeld in itself.
• Larry discussing sitcoms where people are saying very witty things but the other characters never laugh and how he thought they lacked essential realism. He kept saying “the friend says” and “the friends don’t laugh.” ‘Friend’ being the operative word, it would seem.
• Ricky being very funny talking about lazy observational comedy.
• For perhaps the first time seeing Ricky Gervais as himself, rather than playing up to a Brentian role. He was relaxed, if a little in awe of Larry, and he came across as a modest, intelligent guy.

What was bad about it?
• It started late because we all had to watch various people we’d never heard of and a few we had walking up a catwalk in front of a largely unimpressed audience in the freak show of a programme beforehand.
• The first half was incredibly frustrating because it was so laden with clips – every moment from Curb or Seinfeld they mentioned was shown on screen, interrupting the flow of the chat to a maddening degree. The clips were brilliant, of course, but at one point we had Ricky saying: “And you said…” and the clip of a couple of words interjected, “And she said…” and another few words from the clip. So his one sentence was interrupted twice. It was ludicrous. It was as if C4 and/or the producers had decided that most people wouldn’t know who Larry David was or what Curb Your Enthusiasm was. But if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be watching, would they? It was classic case of dumbing down and the show was all the worse for it. Having said that, once they finally felt the scene had been properly set they allowed us to earwig a proper conversation in the second half of the show, which improved things dramatically.
• C4 also clearly had huge problems clearing clips for Curb – almost everything they showed was B-Roll or a first take, certainly not taken directly from the finished shows. Looked very poor.
• Although it was fun, we’d have preferred to see the full conversation, almost unedited, which would have been fascinating. As it was, the show was ultimately unfulfilling.

Who Killed The British Sitcom? Channel 4

Monday 2 January 2006
Did we like it?
With its half-baked arguments, half-decent clips and half-remembered sourpusses, we'll give it five out of 10.

What was good about it?
• Some good clips
• Some good contributors
• Richard Briers had the good grace to realise that his hating of The Office was simply because he didn't get it. "I found it unfunny and totally depressing, and I spoke to somebody else ancient and they said, 'No, it's us, it's our generation'.'

What was bad about it?
• The ghoulish-looking David Liddiment, the former director of programmes at ITV, wasn't very engaging as a presenter.
• The argument that five people are symbolically to blame for the premature slaughter of the sitcom held little weight.
• The odious Ben Elton being cited because The Young Ones subverted the cosy sitcom. As much as we hate Elton, The Young Ones was a great show and sitcoms lived on healthily long after its four stars had joined Elton as pseudo-establishment figures. He should, of course, have been pilloried for the awful Blessed but he tried to blame the lack of budget for the show's shortfalls rather than the lousy premise and laughably bad writing.
• Ted Danson being cited because his Cheers led to a flood of imports. Surely it is up to British broadcasters to emulate the success of the US shows, rather than raise the white flag and go away?
• We did agree that reality shows have been to blame for squeezing sitcoms out the schedules – but we could have done without seeing TV's Second Most Annoying Jeremy (the jerk Spake from Airport).
• Caroline Aherne should not have been in the dock for The Royle Family. Because it was filmed in real-time and had no studio audience didn't mean every other sitcom had to follow suit.
• Blaming digital TV (and PM John Major who paved the way for the explosion of channels) was a weak argument as digital channels have nurtured some comedy classics in recent years.
• Surely Liddiment himself was very much to blame by upping the amount of soap on ITV1 to ridiculous levels.
• Victoria Wood and Carla Lane whingeing that they'd been sidelined. That only happened, girls, because you were coming up with crap and no longer earned the right to screen time. Wood had the audacity to complain about the size of the cameras.
• Attempts to portray My Family as a decent sitcom.
• The rose-tinted glasses view that sitcoms were always great. For every hit, there have always been three or four duds. And in recent years we've had The Office, Early Doors, Peep Show, Phoenix Nights, Nighty Night, Two Pints, The Thick Of It, The Smoking Room, Black Books – all of them every bit as good as vintage comedy offerings.
• The people who maybe should have been blamed – today's TV executives – got off scott-free.

Animation Nation, BBC4

What to say if you liked it?
A chronicle of great British animation and its achievements in the field of persuasion.

What to say if you didn’t like it?
A boring trek round archaic adverts and propaganda that have no relevance to anything.

What was good about it?
• The showing of the oldest surviving animated film, which happens to be British. It’s an advert for Bryant & May matches from 1899 asking the audience to donate one guinea so that the company can give a free box of matches to every British soldier fighting in the Boer War. It was animated frame by frame using real matches, and despite how scratchy the film looks, the sequence itself has dated surprisingly well.
• Some good points about animation were made throughout: it simplifies ideas into images that are easy to understand in a shorter time than live action can, it can go into realms of fantasy that live action can’t etc.
• The interviews with great British husband and wife animated team John Hallas and Joy Bachelor’s granddaughter Vivien Hallas. She stated that during the war they made more than 70 films even though they had little time to do them, which judging by the high quality of the clips was surprising. “Sometimes your best work happens when you’re under pressure like that”.
• The clips of animated wartime propaganda included a British bulldog eating a German sausage from the World War One, and a World War Two film showed Hitler as Charlie Chaplin, along with other cartoons which showed Nazi vipers, Italian bullfrogs and, believe it or not, friendly, cheerful British tanks.
• Animator Vera Lineka’s extra-long multi-coloured shawl, looking like the female equivalent of Tom Baker’s Doctor Who.
• Salvage With A Smile from World War Two – a live action public information film with all the clichés satirised in Harry Enfield’s Cholmondley-Warner parody in which educated well-spoken chaps patronising stupid, poorly spoken working class people. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t go down well with the public.
• Hallas and Bachelor’s The Dustbin Parade, a quite cheerful little film in which tin cans which have been thrown away “join up” to the war and become shells and army equipment.
• Balance, a film which looked like it was computer animated. It was actually from 1950!
• The surreal early 1950s animated advertisements, featuring marching fish, dancing crabs with medals, chickens riding on pigs, chickens playing the guitar and people riding shoes as cars.
• A strange advert for Barclay’s Bank made for West Africa, featuring a tribal street dance soundtrack and the jingle sang in a local dialect.
• The Archie’s-esque 1960s pop band singing about Spam.
• Revelations that the Homepride Flour Man were created by two Americans who thought all British men wore bowler hats, and that the Cresta Lemonade Polar Bear was based on Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider.
• Apparently Kenny Everett not only did the voice for Charly the cat, but also did the entire soundtrack – music, sound effects etc – except the little boy’s voice which was provided by a child of the animator’s next door neighbour.
• The brief clips of the Aardman Animations with the talking animals.
• Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer video, which was filmed frame by frame with the star, for example, painting his face blue, taking one frame, painting a bit of a white cloud on, taking another frame, then painting the cloud a little further on etc..
• Tim Hope’s rather beautiful video for Coldplay’s Trouble, which was made by scanning photos into a computer.
• Andrew Ruhemann, an executive producer from studio Passion Pictures, had some very concise intelligent comments, saying that anthropomorphism (giving animals human qualities and personalities) works well in animation because it does it literally and we as humans do it to our pets anyway. He also stated that the NSPCC advert with a real life man beating up a cartoon child worked well by using the graphic violence in Tom And Jerry where the cartoon characters just bounce back which contrasted sharply with the effect it would have on a human child.

What was bad about it?
• The programme somehow managed to have the worst of both worlds – the tone was very dull and turgid, but they seemed to whiz through everything and spend little time on anything. It seemed as though they had forgotten they had to cram more than 100 years of animation into an hour. The last 40 years were squeezed into about 10 minutes.
• The rather ridiculous forced nationalism. “Britain leads the world in animation” being one example. It seemed a bit obligatory to mention the fact the animation shown was British every two seconds and ended up sounding like Tom Baker’s Little Britain narration.
• Professor Paul Wells’ generally pretentious praise of some of the cartoons. He overused the word “literally” and his most annoying statements were of the cans in The Dustbin Parade “dying for the war cause – you’ll never see that in American or Disney cartoons, a sense of sacrifice” and that T For Teacher was “at the heart of tea drinking it’s also about the quality of human life”. It all sounded very dubious.
• The two irritating Charlys from government information cartoons– one from the 1940s being a smug, sweaty cycling bloke too stupid to understand the benefits of the NHS, free trade and social security, and the other being a cat from the 1970s squarking out that kids shoudn't play with matches.
• It seemed rather safe and lifeless in places, and a bit of flavour wouldn’t go amiss. Then again, this was probably aimed at animation fanatics rather than a general audience, but even the “jingoistic” and “racist” material that was shown seemed rather mild, when there were definitely more things which look offensive today from the past. It seems as though they animators may not have wanted to show these as it would make them look bad.
• T For Teacher, a wartime film for the Tea Bureau about making the most of the little tea that was available It looked frightening more than anything, with creepy music and sinister twisted corpse-like characters. It was horrible.
• Hallas and Bachelor’s Animal Farm was indeed funded by the CIA who funded the film to show the flaws of Communism, the original George Orwell novel being an allegory of the Russian revolution and Stalin’s rise to power. But it was a little depressing that despite the ending being changed to fit US ideology, that Communism would be overthrown, and for commercial reasons, so that audiences wouldn’t feel depressed at the original bleak ending, it still attracted sensationalist headlines in the US as “Too violent for children!” and “Adult entertainment – cartoon not for kids!”
• The theme of this episode, The Art Of Persuasion, was rather boring. Most people switch off when they see government information films and adverts, so seeing a whole hour devoted to the animated aspect of them did get quite tedious at times. Next week’s subject is how British animation has challenged the status quo, which should at least be more interesting.
• The show ended with that AWFUL whistling “Hate something, change something” advert song.

Top 10 highlights of Animation Nation (episode two), BBC4
1 – The interviews with Monty Python animator Terry Gilliam, and the credit he was given by the programme for contributing one of the best things to the show. He was refreshingly honest about the “joy of being crude and childish”; how a lot of Python stuff was “very juvenile”; and how good it was to undermine hypocritical and pompous authority figures. Of his use of classical works of art such as Botticelli’s The Birth Of Venus and Michaelangelo’s David, he said “just because they're beautiful, classical and done by a great artist it doesn’t mean I can’t fuck it up!”
2 – Gerald Scarfe’s Long Drawn Out Trip, a satire of Americana, featuring a naked woman transforming into suggestively shaped fruit, vegetables, ice creams and bombs dropped by an American Eagle. But best of all was a sequence with Mickey Mouse on drugs! Brilliant. Upon seeing this film, Pink Floyd commissioned Scarfe to animate their now classic Another Brick In The Wall video featuring marching hammers and a school teacher putting kids through a mincer.
3 – Monkey Dust’s producer Harry Thomson, saying the BBC3 show's central idea is rubbishing the idea of Blair’s Britain as being Cool Britannia where everything is shiny and there’s no misery or seedy underbelly. He also wanted the animation to look beautiful even though the content is sombre and shocking. We were also treated to the familiar footage of Clive Pringle The Liar guiltily walking home to the sound of Goldfrapp’s Lovely Head.
4 – David Anderson’s Deadsy, a darkly beautiful animation about nuclear war, featuring lots of dancing skeletons, a sinister metal woman caressing a phallic-shaped nuclear missile and screaming female clowns.
5 – The colourful eye candy – or rather eye LSD – of Yellow Submarine, The Beatles’ psychedelic animated film from 1968. Some of the more describable things in it are flying rainbow fish, lizard canons which fire flowers, a dinosaur in a flowery dress and an elephant-deer-teapot thing. They also showed the highlight of the whole film, the delightful Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds sequence, made by “rota-scoping" – tracing live action images from old movies and painting them all kinds of colours.
6 – Candy Guard, the creator of Pond Life. She was actually very much like her creation Dolly Pond, so it wasn’t surprising to learn that she based it on life experience. “If it makes people laugh, chances are it’s happened to them as well.”
7 – The great clip from 2DTV when The Beckhams tell the Queen they named Beckingham Palace after her Buckingham Palace, and she tells them to “feck off” before announcing Tony and Cherie Blair as “the Kents”.
8 – Susan Young’s lovely colourful film Carnival, from 1985 about the Notting Hill carnival, made mostly with simple brushstrokes.
9 – The clip of soldiers coming out from under Queen Victoria’s dress from The Charge Of The Light Brigade.
10 – Bob Godfrey, one of the animators of Yellow Submarine, on when he was asked by the director of the film if he had ever tried LSD. “No, nothing stronger than an aspirin!”

Bottom 6 lowlights of Animation Nation, BBC4
1 – The interviews with Gillian Lacey, animator of radical feminist cartoon Murder Most Foul. She came across as incredibly smug and pompous, and looked like a young Reverend Timms. She made her praise of Candy Guard into a pat on the back to herself; “A building on what the generation before, MY generation, had to fight for. We fought for a space and Candy’s generation moved into that space”.
2 – Phill Mulloy’s Cowboys, a satire of machismo, ending with men having sex with horses, which lends weight to the argument that a lot of “cutting edge” work is gratuitous, shocking for the sake of shocking rather than actually saying anything.
3 – Robert Hewison on Monty Python’s Flying Circus: “It changed the way people acted, it changed the way people spoke and it changed the way people thought about the previous hierarchical world of deference and authority”. As great as the Pythons were, to credit them solely for entire shifts in cultural and social attitudes is fairly ridiculous.
4 – Bob Godfrey on his Karma Sutra Rides Again cartoon, featuring a couple in various slapstick sexual positions like on an escalator or on a bicycle. “We were kind of satirising the permissive society”. Society of the 1960s in general wasn’t permissive, apart from a few trendy places. This was backed up by the narrator stating immediately after that Karma Sutra was a hit on the adult film circuit but had limited distribution in the cinemas. Terry Gilliam's claim that “it was naughty postcard humour” was the only sensible thing said amid a rather pretentious analysis of the cartoon.
5 – “From the beginning, Yellow Submarine was unusual. An animated film aimed at grown-ups not children”. Last week Animated Nation spelt out that animated films were originally intended for adults, so bang went that argument.
6 – Jonathan Hodgson’s animation about irritating people in Liverpool nightclubs was, unfortunately, quite irritating itself.

Top 10 highlights of Animation Nation (episode three), BBC4
1 – All the weird and wonderful things from The Clangers – mice living on the moon talking in swanee whistle voices, musical notes growing on trees, cyborg chickens, flying boats, frogs jumping into medical bags and soup dragons. But there was one clip that outshone all in absurdity: an astronaut from Earth lands on the moon and puts up a flag that has both the stars and stripes AND the hammer and sickle on it because the animators didn’t know at this stage whether the US or the USSR would be the first to land on the moon. The Clangers didn’t care either way – they used the flag as a tablecloth. That was hilarious!
2 – The Snowman was rightly called “a television classic”. But what was surprising was that two of the most memorable elements – the flying sequence and the snowman party – were entirely an invention of the film and did not appear in the original book. Everything else, right down to it mirroring the illustrations, was very faithful to Raymond Briggs' classic.
3 – The clips of Danger Mouse were all very funny, action packed and still looked well animated even today. This programme revealed it was the first British animated series to be screened in America.
4 – Nick Park, creator of Wallace And Grommit, seemed so sweet, gentle and lovely. We were treated to the familiar clip of that cute breakfast scene from The Wrong Trousers, and got a preview of the forthcoming Wallace And Grommit feature film, The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit. Park described it as “a vegetarian horror movie”.
5 – The story of The Magic Roundabout, or Le Manege Enchante as its original French version was called. The BBC asked Eric Thompson to make the anarchic style of the original more suitable for children and his version was a surreal script filled with cultural references to Turkish Delight and The Chancellor Of The Exchequer. Thompson’s widow Phyllida Law revealed that Thompson ignored the original French scripts and rewrote the whole thing based on ideas he jotted down while watching it on a screen “smaller than a make-up mirror”. She also said that Thompson based the character of Ermintrude the cow on her!
6 – The dark fairytale imagery of The Sandman, a horribly fascinating and fascinatingly horrible animation which brought alive Dave Allen’s observation that we stupidly expect our children to go to sleep when we tell them there’s a lunatic coming into their bedroom ready to put sand in their eyes. It was taken to an, appropriately, nightmarish level here with The Sandman gouging out a little boy’s eyes and feeding them to his bird-like children in a nest.
7 – The Strings Of Crocodiles by The Brothers Quay, a sinister dark twisted but strangely attractive animation featuring tattered children’s dolls.
8 – The early 1950s cartoons of Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin, , who went on to create The Clangers. Their early work was Noggin The Nog and The Pogles/Pogle Wood. They were beautifully drawn even though the animation looks rather primitive by today’s standards. They featured characters such as a depressed dragon and a very entertaining evil witch, who sadly was axed by the BBC as she was deemed too frightening for children. The interviews with Postgate and Firmin themselves were great as well, both were very funny and could do a lot of weird voices.
9 – Ruth Linford’s icy gothic animation of Hans Christian Anderson’s little known fairytale The Child And Her Mother where a mother surrenders her daughter to The Grim Reaper.
10 – The dull, saccharine twee Trumpton/Camberwick Green was dismissed as unsophisticated and parochial, but it went in the programme’s favour that they also said that it served its purpose as it was popular with children even though anyone over five found it boring.

Bottom 9 lowlights of Animation Nation
1 – This episode was filled with even more agonisingly pretentious hyperbolic analysis than in the previous programmes, which is saying something. It’s too annoying to have to retype them all, and it was very tiresome, but the worst culprit was animation historian Brian Sibley.
2 – “The Snowman broke tradition and didn’t have to resort to comedy or dialogue”. What, like comedy and dialogue are bad things?
3 – It implied that Wallace And Grommit saved 1990s British animation because, apparently, by then it was more polarised, either very dark adult stuff or very mainstream commercial children’s programmes. The argument itself was a little dubious, but they used Bob The Builder as an example of what Wallace And Grommit saved UK animation from becoming. The fact that Wallace And Grommit predate Bob The Builder by about 10 years seemed to have escaped them.
4 – Personally we always found those mutated hedgehogs The Wombles irritating. This programme revealed that the merchandising for the series came out long before the show itself ever went on air. They were also “one of the best selling acts of 1974” and we had a clip of their dire Wombling Song. Mike Batt, who was responsible for that atrocity, has gone on to inflict Katie Melua on us as a soundtrack furniture adverts.
5 – The Bolex Brother’s The Secret Adventures Of Tom Thumb, made as part of the 1993 Christmas schedules. While we admired their creativity – Tom Thumb in this version was a foetus which had survived a miscarriage – and their technique, it was pretty horrible to watch. And frankly, why was so much of the programme devoted to this piece of work which has been largely forgotten?
6 – Professor Paul Well’s attempts at singing Walking In The Air. Just wrong.
7 – Paddington, Bagpuss and Postman Pat were all skimmed over in seconds. Sacrilege!
8 – Throughout the series, the lack of consistency in the arguments has been frustrating. In episode one, they said that animated films in pre-television days were aimed at adults rather than children. Last week they stated that Yellow Submarine was groundbreaking in that it was an animated film aimed at adults. This week they stated that the Magic Roundabout was solely responsible for getting adults interested in animation and later in the programme that television animation aimed only at children started in the late 1990s. All these contradictions make it look very unconvincing.
9 – As good as her film was, Ruth Linford herself was a living cliché, an aging Goth chick spouting such nonsense as “you can SMELL that film, it’s visceral!” and “the story was like a virus, I had to pass it onto someone else”. Her most annoying comment was of her own work, “I was convinced if I dared to tell this story, my children would die”.

Forty Years Of F***, BBC3

Sunday 11 September 2005
What to say if you liked it
A good programme about bad language on TV.
What to say if you disliked it
Little more than another list show, comprising TV's greatest shits, fucks and bloodys.

What was good about it?
• The segment on the first fuck on TV, on a 1965 satirical show called BBC3. Theatre critic Kenneth Tynan was the offender, leading to an outcry in the newspapers which would only refer to "that word". BBC3's producer Ned Sherrin came up with a great anecdote about a teacher who was asked what Tynan had said. Reluctantly, she admitted it was 'fuck'. "Oh, we thought it was cunt," came the reply. From one fuck in 1965, its usage has grown to 2234 in 2003.
• Although Till Death Us Do Part has been analysed endlessly, the segment on the BBC sitcom was still interesting, revealing that writer Johnny Speight ignored the six-bloodies-an episode limit and managed to reach a height of 67 in 1972.
• The description of hippy magazine Oz as "a sort of Woman's Own for freaks" as the programme recalled the first use of cunt on TV. Oz's Felix Dennis was the "offender", using the word during The Frost programme on hippies.
• The Sex Pistols, for once, weren't demonised for their swearing on Today in 1976. Instead, host Bill Grundy was blamed for goading the band and was painted as a boozy lout. He lost his job; the Sex Pistols soared. "It changed English culture, oddly enough," claimed John Lydon.
• Shaun Ryder's parody of Winston Churchill's wartime rallying cry: "We will fuck them on the beaches and we'll knock the twats every fucking where."
• The lack of squeamishness about revealing the Top 10 list of offensive words: with Paki at 10, through Arsehole, Bollocks, Prick, Bastard, Nigger, Wanker, Fuck and Motherfucker to the number one word, cunt. Cricketer Phil Tufnell reckoned that word shouldn't be used in front of "the ladies" but Siouxsie Sioux had no such worries. "If someone calls me cunt, I say I'm not just any old cunt, I'm supercunt."
• The look at euphemisms employed by sitcoms such as Porridge (naff off, nerk, scrote) and Red Dwarf (smeg).
• Andrew Collins' campaign against the butchery of movies to remove swearwords. The most ridiculous substitutions have included "eating pineapple" for "eating pussy"; "this town is like a chicken waiting to be plucked" for "this town is like a pussy waiting to be fucked", "flip you, melon farmer" for "fuck you, motherfucker" and "gaucho chiseller" for "greaseball cocksucker".
• The script by David Quantick and Ricky Kelehar, delivered by Max Beesley
• Conveying, and contextualising, the shock of TV swearing was a well-picked bunch of contributors, from Jennie Bond to John Lydon, Esther Rantzen to Ian McShane
• The still lovely Simon O'Brien recalling his Brookside days which had 16 swearwords in episode one (two pissings, two dickheads, one bollocks etc).
• TFI Friday's bad language record: the F for fuck in the title; Ewan McGregor swearing because he was passionate (it came in an anti-Tory rant) and Shaun Ryder swearing because he's an inarticulate oaf
• John Lydon defending his "fucking cunts" outburst on I'm A Celebrity. "I meant it in the nicest possible way." He was mortified that Ant and Dec apologised to viewers. "I apologise to no-one for nothing," Lydon spat.
• Rowers in the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race were exposed as potty-mouthed poshos, proving swearing is not an exclusively working class pastime
• Ian McShane emerging as the king of swearing in his role as Al Swearengen in Deadwood (1930 fucks in series one)
• David Soul revealing that golly, gosh and jeepers were banned when he was a kid

What was bad about it?
• Reminders of Mary Whitehouse's bitter housewife act, although that was somewhat alleviated by the news that every complaint she spat out resulted in viewing figures for her targeted programmes rising.
• The examination of censorship of TV's music shows was a bit rushed, but we were amused to hear that the BBC got pompous bore Simon Bates to record a warning that the sanitised version of Prince's You Sexy Motherfucker aired on Radio 1 wasn't what you'd get in the shops.
• The foul-mouthed footballers segment failed to obtain the rights to Wayne Rooney's anti-ref rant, although it did dig up the crazed former Orient manager John Sitton
• Helen Adams being used as spokesperson for the Big Brother housemates
• The pride shown by Channel 4's executives for reinventing Jamie Oliver. "Swearing made Jamie butch," one claimed.
• The pride shown by ITV executives about employing a Mr Fuck Button to bleep out Gordon Ramsay's Hell's Kitchen cursing
• The censorious Conservative MP berating BBC2 for showing Jerry Springer – The Opera
• The shocking language – it's a fucking disgrace that the BBC puts shit like on TV – on a Sunday of all days!

The Story Of ITV: The People’s Channel, ITV1

What to say if you liked it
A chronicle of the cream of that beacon of British broadcasting – ITV.
What to say if you didn’t like it
If Jamie Oliver was to continue his crusade to make all the nation’s children healthy again by targeting TV, ITV would be the baleful Turkey Twizzlers.

What was good about it?
• Clips from the 1960s, which was either a bastion of innovative television – the
Avengers, Danger Man – or was selectively edited to appear so. But nonetheless, the dynamism of such shows was very impressive as was the eeriness and invention that’s so rarely a feature of ITV1 drama these days.
• Tim Roth in Made In Britain.
• The Sweeney and Minder appearing as rooted in their time as the ZX81, and seeming all the fresher for it.
• The tale of how Upstairs, Downstairs “gathered dust” on ITV’s shelves for a while before it was broadcast as a Sunday filler and achieved astronomical ratings. Perhaps there’s a message for contemporary ITV chiefs who have a number of promising dramas on their shelves, some as old as three years.

What was bad about it?
• Michael Grade saying the bank-busting Adventures of Robin Hood is “still running somewhere”, which is odd because we can’t recall ever seeing it on British TV (obviously after its initial run).
• Very little time was afforded to each show. Melvyn Bragg made it seem like a flick
through a magazine as you wait for a train. And the shows that did feature seemed to have been as much determined by who was available for interview as much as the quality of the drama itself. This meant that, because Roger Moore contributed, both the popular Saint and disastrous Persuaders were shown; but this meant that Cracker and The Prisoner, perhaps the best ITV dramas of the past 40 years, were passed over with a token quarter-screen brief clip.
• Remarking that Inspector Morse recognized the “good” things in life like “opera”, in yet another instance of cultural snobbery that people who like “opera” are somehow more enlightened that those who don’t because such a esoteric appreciation is the result of mental acuity rather than listening to awful, bombastic platitudes bellowed in a foreign language.

The Entertainers, BBC2

We knew Tony Blackburn was an amiable buffoon.

We knew Bernard Manning was a xenophobic slob (mosquitoes and "Spaniards might be spitting in your food and all sorts" are his reasons for never taking holidays).

But we didn't know much about little Leo Sayer. He's famous for his high-pitched hits and big, bubbly hair. Now, thanks to the latest TV docusoap, he's now famous for being as much a loser as David Brent, Alan Partridge and Keith from Marion And Geoff.

What a sorry sight he presented, sitting in his car deluding himself about his failed relationship with sulky girlfriend Donatella. She's also his manager, though, so she hasn't quite wriggled free yet. Her eye rolling, sighs and admission that Leo's an embarrassment suggest it won't be too long before she moves out of "our humble abode" as he describes it.

Leo is enough to drive anyone mad. He never speaks in a proper voice – it's all mimicry or bursts of songs (including a bizarre Bohemian Rhapsody). We left him at the airport, threatening to provide the in-flight entertainment for his fellow passengers.

Footage of Leo on stage appears later in the series. In the opener, we had to make do with Blackburn's medallion-swinging and Manning's miserable humour as they appeared in clubs so appalling that you had to feel distress that they were forced to make a living in such circumstances.

But at least they seem to enjoy themselves. Leo's is a tears-of-a-clown life and the way he grasped at the attention of the camera was like a drowning man clutching at a rubber ring.

Fame Academy 2005, BBC1

If it hadn't been for Naomi's bad throat, the nation would have been deprived of our Latest Pop Sensation. David Sneddon only got into the Fame Academy through the back door (I'm not talking casting couch action, by the way). Naomi got sick, David got picked and he smiled his way to the top.

David looks like Graeme Le Saux (Chelsea defender) and he sounds a bit like Del Amitri (Sheffield Wednesday midfielder – not). He'll have a number one smash, a couple of top fives and an album that spends a couple of weeks on the chart. Then he'll be scrabbling for scraps along with the glut of TV discoveries we've had over the past few years. Good luck to the lad. He seems like a nice boy.

However well he does, the manufacturing process that produced him has been a chugging, steam-age affair, as exciting as watching the production of grey plastic flanges (whatever they are).

Patrick Kielty, renowned for his dangerous humour, was reduced to adopting Davina McCall's style of saying nothing amusing but somehow getting a laugh by shouting at the end of EVERY SENTENCE. Cat Deeley was bland, dance coach Kevin made me shiver with his scary, staring eyes, singing coach Carrie has a shameful hairstyle. No-one ever said anything remotely interesting.

The singing throughout the series was, on the whole, no better than Karaoke Sundays at the Dog & Duck. Even the final was pretty dreary with David's ballads sweet but unexciting, Sinead roaring away while wearing a top she'd rescued from the shredding machine and Lemar being clever while wearing trousers rescued from Gary Glitter's dustbin.

Should there be a Fame Academy 2? Only if there's a complete change of personnel. Sack Pat'n'Cat. Get rid of dull Dick the Head, Carrie, Kevin and company. Then the ratings may just match the hype.

The final
Ten weeks ago I watched the first Fame Academy show and hated it. The contestants seemed untalented, the presenters likewise, and the Academy itself, with its palatial setting and pompous “head teacher”, reeked of old-style paternalism. A few brief viewings after that confirmed the general view of the series as an ill-conceived cross between Pop Idol and Big Brother. I switched to the final expecting the logical outcome, three mediocrities trying to be some middle-aged BBC executive’s idea of a pop star. It didn’t work out that way.

By the time the finalists had finished their first round of performances, it was clear that something unexpected had happened. They were brilliant; it sounded like real music, and they were actually expressing themselves through it, something you normally only see on Jules Holland’s show these days (and then not always). Then they sang their own compositions, and – strewth – the songs were really good, and didn’t sound as if they’d been churned out by a record company computer. Lemar was a surprising first casualty, as he seemed to have the best all-round vocal talent and presence. Of the two survivors, Sinead, outstanding in the first half, faltered in the second, but David just kept getting better, and deserved to win on the night.

All three, however, were in a totally different league to their most obvious competitors, the “stars” of ITV’s Popstars: The Rivals. But then over on ITV they’re not making music; they’re making product, not surprising when you consider that the two band managers, Louis Walsh and Pete Waterman, each bear significant responsibility for reducing the pop industry to its current dire, product-driven state.

The Popstars contestants started out with more visible talent than the Academy ones, but are ending up with less, as they say, do, and probably even think, whatever the system requires of them. The results are appalling. The boys delivered a mind-numbing dirge calculated to tug at the heart and purse strings of lovesick schoolgirls, like the endless ballads released by Walsh’s Westlife. The girls, meanwhile, did a “raunchy” number that looked cheap and exploitative, and sounded like 80s Spice Girls prototypes Bananarama.

On BBC1, David won with a ballad, while Sinead did raunchy. But he made it come alive, and she made it sound like a woman being strong. The Academy had taught them the skills, then to think for themselves when using them. The results were electrifying.