Tarot Guards! Tarot the Diamond Man!

TV graveyards of the 1970s are littered with the discarded remnants of fantasy shows developed in order to grab some of the Doctor Who demographic. From the escapades of Simon and Liz through the fence in Timeslip, via the adventures of Catweazle 900 years into his own future, all the way to the campy awfulness of The Tomorrow People, the various ITV regions tried and failed time and again to usurp Who from its throne as the most popular family sf show of all time.

Sometimes (as with Catweazle) the effort was excellent in its own right but didn't have the legs to become a long-running serial; sometimes (as with Timeslip) a brave idea floundered under the weight of a small budget; and sometimes, as with The Tomorrow People, everything about the show was utter tosh* from start to finish. And on at least one occasion, a decent concept, backed up with good scripts and an intriguing setting, was blown out of the water by the sheer poverty of the acting.

Not that Ace of Wands looks all that promising as you slip the DVD into the player and sit back . For one, it gets off on entirely the wrong foot with the worst title song ever. Against a backdrop of folk psych images, some Rod, Jane and Freddy wannabe burbles out a toe-curling shitty hippy ditty which includes such lyrical gems as "Jet white dove/Snow black snake". Snow black snake, eh? Really? Are you sure about that? Well OK, if you're certain...

Moving swiftly and mercifully on, though, it's reassuring to see that "The Meddlers", the first story in series 3** was written by the mighty P J Hammond, the creator of Sapphire and Steel and writer of one of the very few non-rubbish episodes of Torchwood last year. So, some thoughts...

1. The two lead actors are absolutely dreadful - two of the worst actors I've ever seen in a popular show. In their defence they both seem to have gone onto have better careers than the vast majority of Who companions, so possibly their mannered and stilted performances were the result of directorial fiat but regardless of cause watching them here is a painful experience.

2. This particular story has a fantastic set-up and scenario, largely thrown away by bad acting. The band led by Spoon, the duplicitous prophet of doom, and the almost Report on Probability A-style man in the tower block are all brilliant and, even if the actual realisation is a bit shoddy, the plot makes sense and everything ties together nicely in the end.

3. If you'd stuck McCallum and Lumley in this, it'd be a really good episode of Sapphire and Steel.

Actually that last point does kind of force me to conclude that this is better than I gave it credit for at the time (though it's also faitr to wonder if Hammond had ever read the Campion novel Tiger in the Smoke, which features a very similar creepy band/dodgy lock up) ^. As I say, replace Mackenzie and Markham with McCallum and Lumley and you have something which wouldn't be embarrassed in the highest fantasy company. And if it's that good, then maybe it's not possible for bad acting to blow it out of the water completely.

Hmm, maybe it's time to give the Diamond Man a second chance to shine^^?

* There's a reason Naoko Mori is called Tosh on Torchwood, you know. Originally she was going to be called Crap but Chris Chibnall thought that sounded more German than Japanese.
** the first two series having been lost in the same great television purge of the seventies which destroyed nearly all of Magpie***
*** Oddly, you can download a pretty good dvd cover for the lost first episode, in spite of the fact that it's missing. Someone has gone to a lot of trouble for an essentially useless item.
^ I started writing this about four months but then stopped - this post is the result of remembering about it and then scraping the Drafts barrel on blogger
^^ Really - the crap I write at times :-)

Survivors Reborn?

I love Survivors. Along with Goodnight Sweetheart, it's the only genre show which I might watch instead of Doctor Who. I love the starkness and brutality of Nation's vision for the post-Death future in series 1, I love the often banal but sometimes lyrical farming stories of series 2, and I even love bits of series 3, at a point when Terrance Dudley had tried his ham-fisted best to make the entire series rubbish.

So I should in theory be over-joyed the BBC are bringing it back. But now that the euphoria has worn off, I'm more than a little bit worried.

First cause for concern: the Doctor Who revival experience

Take something which I treasure for its underlying themes and tropes as much as anything else, and drop all of the elements which made it worth watching. Next, wrap it up in brainless bright lights, chuck in a Mary Sue companion and throw it onto prime time.

So I worry that where Rusty dropped the idea of the heroic Doctor as a man of science who made sense out of the nonsensical, and replaced him with an idiot savant who more often than not needs saved by Rusty's prefered heroine, the young feisty female companion, so I'm concerned that the bleakness at the heart of the first two series of Survivors will be buffed up and brightened for modern viewers, and that post-Death Britain will follow the same brain-dead pattern as American series with similar settings.

For an example try watching a few episodes of the perfectly adequate, if fairly brainless, Jeremiah, which is packed to groaning with extras from the first Mad Max film and where every town has a curiously clean and well organised market where they trade for batteries and old transistor radios.

Second cause for concern: The Writer

Survivors is a series for grown-ups, but it's been put in the hands of Adrian Hodges, the brains behind Primeval, a series primarily noted for being full of shiny effects and pretty girls inexplicably in their underwear. Admittedly basing my views entirely on that show, he really doesn't do thoughtful at all well, and I simply can't imagine him doing justice to a series about the adult (note, not teenager or young adult) reaction to an apocalypse. As with Chris Chibnall and Torchwood, adult will be confused with sex obsessed and what we'll get is lots of scenes of hard 'n' nasty nookie because there's nothing else to do after the Death, man.

Third Cause for Concern: The America Perspective

Which in part also informs my belief that New Survivors will again ape New Who and be written with one and a half eyes on the American market. I fully expect guns and explosions and lots of Survivors with great figures and a penchant for walking about in vests looking all sweaty. And if the ratings still aren't great, I predict aliens who need to mate with humans to ensure the survival of their species will land at the start of series 2.

Final Cause for Concern: Happy, Shiny People

TV execs nowadays don't really approve of bleak or downbeat. It doesn't do well in focus groups of stoned students and bored housewives, nor does it sell well to advertisers. So expect every episode to be a self-contained feast of sanitised squalor with a suitably chirpy ending in which everything Turns Out All Right. Certainly don't expect anything like 'Law and Order'.

Actually all those moans basically boil down to the same thing - after New Who I no longer trust the BBC to stay true to the spirit of any show they relaunch. Scrabbling after as broad a demographic as possible as defence in their battle to keep the license fee, combined with a deep desire to make any new series as US-friendly as they can manage, means that quality comes a distant second to saleability. Anything which is different or which could ever be seen as cause for offense to anyone must be jettisoned in favour of the innocuous but glittery.

And Survivors, in its original incarnation, is as different as can be from the BBC's current anodyne fayre.

Viva Las Vegas

I've got the first part of the Blakes 7 new audio adventure lying at home waiting for a listen at home. To be honest, I've heard only bad things about it but it's by Ben Aaronovitch so I'm willing to give it a shot.

So...dum dee dum. Hmm, yes.

OK, the only reason I posted that is so I can post this without sounding too much like an over-excited fanboy- the fantastic Blakes 7 fan film, Blakes Junction 7, has been passed for DVD release by the BBFC.

It stars Martin Freeman as Vila, Mark Heap as Avon, Johnny Vegas as Blake and MacKenzie Crook as Servalan, all set in a motorway service station. If that doesn't have you salivating like Pavlov's dogs in a bell factory then really - why are you reading this blog? What are you even doing on the internet at all? Go on, bugger off back to healthy outdoor activities and your actual genuine social life. We don't want your sort here, thank you.

For everyone still here, though - Johnny Vegas as Blake. Just saying that out loud makes me smile.

Blakes 2007

One of the great pleasures of the new series of Doctor Who is the fact that my seven year old son also loves the show (so long as it's in colour - he refuses to watch Troughton or Hartnell, the young fool). It's not just him, though - all his friends love it too which has the unexpected bonus effect of making me suddenly the street's coolest Dad. I actually heard one of his pals the other day saying "You're *so* lucky - my dad's not got *any* Doctor Who DVDs" which was one of the stranger things I've ever heard anyone say.

Anyhow, I thought that I'd show him some other great TV from my youth and so stuck on the first season of Blakes 7.


And he hated it.

Without someone to identify with, he just wasn't interested and, within twenty minutes of putting it on, he had wandered off to find his Gameboy, leaving me to wonder how they could update Blakes 7 to capture that essential 7-13 age group who buy cheaply made tie-in toys (the other essential age group for that kind of thing is, of course, mid-thirties guys like me).

For a start, there'd have to be some serious recasting. Even at the beginning of the show Gareth Thomas was 33, Paul Darrow 37 and Jacqueline Pearce 35. These are not acceptable ages for series lead nowadays, where mid to late twenties seems to be the norm. Plus they were all...well, a bit ugly and/or Welsh. So first things first - replacements of the three leads with:

John Simm from Life on Mars as Blake

Nathan Fillion from Buffy as Avon

Jaime Murray from Hustle as Servalan.

That gives us a couple of actors from two of the three most popular shows in BBC in recent years, plus an American who genre fans may well recognise. We'd probably need to have at least one black actor (Adrian Lester, possibly, in a more cerebral Gan role) and a minimum of one gay guy (James Dreyfus possibly as Vila - you really can't be too obvious in your casting.) Cally can turn out to be a bit of a lipstick lesbian later, if focus groups think that would boost ratings.

Next, we have the woeful fact that - Blake apart - the entire crew of the Liberator are actually guilty of the crimes they were convicted of. Most of them don't even have extenuating circumstances to aid audience identification. In OZ, Prison Break, or Prisoner: Cell Block H any character with whom the audience is intended to bond will be either (a) innocent or (b) guilty but it's not really their fault. In Blakes 7, only Blake is actually innocent, with Gan guilty but a bit unfortunate. The rest of them revel in their criminal pasts.

So what we need in Blakes 2007 is a series of flashbacks, shot with some kind of hazy filter a little like the scene where Kaiser Soze kills his own family in The Usual Suspects. Each of these flashbacks will last about ten minutes or so (enabling us to show all the back stories in one Special Episode) and in every case will establish either innocence or that it wasn't their fault. So Vila will still be a thief, for instance, but he'll only steal enough to feed some starving street kids he's keeping a fatherly eye on. Jenna will be a smuggler, but the cargo will be contraband medicine she was taking through a Federation blockade in a Firefly stylee. And Gan will be plain innocent.

Which leads us onto the next area needing improvement. As it stands Blakes 7 is about moving the story forward in as exciting and action-packed a manner as possible. Which was all well and good in the 1970s, but nowadays we have to ask ourselves - where's the love?

Let's give Gan a family back home (better make it quite a big family so that we can have one or two of them killed by the Federation over the course of the series). They can be working with a feisty young female lawyer (Billie Piper, naturally) to set Gan free when news of his escape reaches Earth. Having run from the Feds, Gan has - in the eyes of the general populace at least - proven himself guilty and this his family find themselves under growing pressure (probably on a bi-weekly basis at most) to disown him as a terrorist.

But wait there a minute - a terrorist? The 'heroes' of Blakes 2007 can hardly be criminals, (no matter how innocent, plucky or plain unfortunate) fighting against a legitimately positioned central government using violent means, can they?

Because that would make them the baddies and the Federation the good guys. That's just too freakish a reversal for any audience to accept - cheer for the Cylons and boo at Admiral Adama? Sorry, can't be done

Oops, sorry - wandered into another show entirely for a moment there.

But the point still stands - in the modern world it's just not plausiable to make terrorists the heroes of any show. So lets' make them evil. Scrap the nice back-stories and replace them with flashbacks nicked wholesale from the movie The Dirty Dozen. Vila is now a peadophile, Jenna a smuggler of hard drugs to Primary School World and Gan a white slaver. Servalan, on the other hand, is a now a feisty young lawyer, working on a case which will expose those within the Federation who are secretly helping the Blakian Terror Group (I'm presuming this would be some kind of left-wing cabal, led by the Vice President...eh, Deputy Prime Minister...no, that doesn't sound right, best move the entire series to the USA and recast with uglier actors).

Oh, and the ship can't be called the Liberator now, obviously. How about the Benedict Arnold - or is that too subtle?

Right - I think we're ready to go. I'm sure my son would watch this new version - not that I'd let him of course. It sounds far too unpleasant.