On the Blog...

Been meaning to point these out for ages - some my favourite blogs which I haven't mentioned before...

http://thepenguinblog.typepad.com - regular but not too frequently updated blog covering book cover design mainly.

http://goldenmasks.blogspot.com - knowledgable and interesting reviews of OTR. If you're one of the idiots who didn't like The Hornets' Nest and/or think that OTR is 'old-fashioned' or 'crap' then it's probably not for you. But you are clearly thick as three week old mince, so that's no loss to anyone...

http://www.paulmagrs.com/blog/blog.php - Beautiful looking site, this one, with daily updates.

http://www.nickelinthemachine.com - my favourite blog ever and one which I would gladly buy in book format. Informed articles on obscure corners of London and its history. Go and read it now, you'll love it.

Finn's Reviews - not a blog really, more a massive collection of film, tv and book reviews by oen of my favourite reviewers (even when some of his opinions are bonkers!)

And a late entry which is also not a blog - Cav Scott (co-author of one of the fantastic stories in the Celestial Omnibus) has a new website: http://www.cavanscott.co.uk

Feared by the bad, loved by the good, Robin Hood

In 2001, satirical US website The Onion ran an article bemoaning the difficulty American TV execs were having in managing to cater for an increasingly low Lowest Common Denominator amongst their viewership. The intention was humorous, but as with all satire, the joke works best because it's true.

In a TV world where reality shows seem incapable of plumbing a depth beyond their viewers ability to wallow, and where the schedules are packed with presenters in open necked shirts and nice suits whipping up enthusiasm for watching other people move house, put up a conservatory or buy a bloody yoghurt, there's a temptation simply to settle for making whatever crap the public will swallow and allow quality to fall by the wayside.

But this isn't one of those screeds where the author moans his arse off about Celebrity Wanking for Coins. No, this is (yet another) one of those screeds where the author whines like a middle-aged and balding baby about the way TV bastards are stealing all the most fondly-remembered shows from his youth and re-making them in patented and trademarked Chavovision.

Take Robin Hood, for example. Ignoring the black and white version from the 1950s on the grounds that it's both dull and utterly indistinguishable from Ivanhoe, William Tell and that one with Ian Chesterton from Doctor Who, you're left with a choice of three main TV versions.

1. From 1975, starring Avon as the Sheriff of Nottingham, Ford Prefect as Prince John and Diane Keen as Maid Marian. This is the legend of Robin Hood as political thriller and as a result is more often than not set in rooms in castles, rather than Sherwood. Unbelievably to modern eyes, the outlaw gang don't even rob any rich passers-by until more than two thirds of the way through and they're pretty much all dead soon afterwards in any case.

You couldn't mistake this for anything but a big bloody slab of intelligent seventies miserablism, following in the 'faces like well skelped arses' tradition of When the Boat Comes In, Survivors and even supposedly kiddie fare like The Changes. In the Seventies, if the hero wasn't dead in a ditch by the end of the series then they just kept making more series until he was. No pandering to the audience here, just thoughtful drama filled with pointless death against a backdrop of Kings and Princes manoeuvring for position and in the end neither knowing nor caring that the little people get killed.

And they're not even heroic deaths - no-one even gets poignant last words, for Rutger's sake. Will Scarlet dies early on in a fight, Much gets hanged for something he didn't do, Tuck dies of a mysterious plague and Robin gets poisoned and, like Jack Ford, dies alone at the side of the road. Them's proper deaths, them is and that's yer actual realism, that is.

The 1970s - it truly was a Golden Age.

2. Flit forward ten years and enter Robin of Loxley, played with long haired angst by uber-hunk Michael Praed. Flit forward another couple of years and exit Praed, off in a huff and a puff of self-delusion which led him to believe that stardom inevitably lay ahead. How he must lie awake at night now, sobbing into his pillow as he contemplates a future in which the high spots are starring in the dreadful radio revival of Blakes 7 and reading the updates on - I kid you not - Michael Praed's Chest Hair Moments

Praed - and his replacement for a single season, Jason Connery, as the fortuitously named Robin of Huntingdon - is Robin Hood as Beckenham Arts Labs Hippy Mystic. If they'd had turntables in the thirteenth century, the Merry Men would have been sitting round the camp fire smoking joints the size of baby's arms, listening to the latest Nick Drake lp and playing Dungeons and Dragons. Which should make this my natural environment*, but unfortunately it's all so mind-numbingly, spirit crushingly earnest and slow that I've never managed to get past the end of the first season. Adding insult to injury, it has Clannad warbling (I assume) about how really, really fantastic trees are and how bushes are God's little cotton wool buds. Plus it wastes John Abineri (fabulous as Marian's guardian in the 1975 production) as Herne the Hunter, a Care in the Community borderline nutter with a penchant for wearing animal horns on his head like some deranged member of the Flintstones' Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes.

Even so, it at least makes an effort to do something new with an old story and if it's occasionally too slow and feels like a throwback to seventies serials, well that's not necessarily a bad thing.

And in complete fairness, I'm told by fans that the series really takes off in the second season when Carpenter gets to grips with the plotting requirements of 50 minute episodes. But for Christ's sake, I've watched Gridlock twice - how much more of my life do you want me to waste?

3. Which leaves the ASBO-wielding danger monkey antics of Jonas Armstrong as Joe Cole as Robin Hoodie himself. Don't get me wrong, I have loads of time for the latest incarnation of Robin Hood. It's silly and stupid in roughly equal parts, doesn't take itself even slightly seriously and can be damn funny, something never achieved by either of the earlier versions, for all their other virtues.

But there's no denying it's dumb as a Nicole Richie reality tv show. Hmm, there's a thought. Now that I think about it, Nicole and her skank drunk driver pal Paris would fit into Hoodie with barely a ripple. Short on personality and totally, completely, utterly bizarrely dressed, they're popular only because their total cluelessness and maddeningly illogical behaviour appeals to some broken part of people's minds.

Hoodie's the same. It actually aspires to a quality level which for most shows would be viewed as dramatic failure, and then positively revels in its own inanity.

For most TV series, the really eye-gougingly bad writing is reserved for the 100 page kid friendly novelisations** with bright photo covers and relatively complex plots boiled down to three or four straight-forward set pieces. Hoodie starts at that low, low point, so I shudder to think what the wafer thin novelisations actually consist of:

"Parent Hood by Mandy Archer

Chapter 1

Robin tried to kill a bad man but he escaped.

The bad man poisoned Marian with some poison he had that was poisonous. She was dead.

But Robin kissed Marian even though that would be minging because he loved her and she came back to life. They will probably have a baby now.

The End.

PS I kissed my gerbil but it was still dead and a bit smelly and mum said to put it back in the bucket, you stupid girl."

It's as entertaining as anything on television nowadays but Jesus suffering Christ on a big shiny bike, it's a show for the ADD Generation. Compared to the 1975 story it's a whole new world of stupid, and coating that stupidity in a thin layer of wink-wink, nudge-nudge knowingness doesn't make it any less daft. Being me and given that I like it, I've managed to read all sorts of meaning into it (actually, I'm no different in that respect to those who add layers of meaning to New Who, so perhaps I should be more charitable to those sorry souls) and invest it with a depth which almost certainly doesn't exist, but for the casual viewer it's pitched at exactly the right level of pig-brained imbecility.

There's a scene in the first series that perfectly sums the show up. Robin and his anti-social gang are standing about outside a village which has been walled up by the evil Sheriff, who is determined to starve the villagers into giving him the information he wants. Undaunted, the Merry crew push bread and fruit through the points of their arrows and fire them sight unseen over the walls to the unsuspecting but grateful villagers. But what if one of the arrows had thudded not into a handy cart, but into a less handy child's head?

There's an easy fix for the writer and director - have the outlaws stand on a nearby hill and fire downwards so that they can see where the arrows are going, but obviously no-one actually gives a monkey's and we're left with a rain of arrows battering down amongst what should be a terrified populace.

But they're not terrified, as it turns out, because they don't give a monkey's either. You can see it in their eyes, a desperate desire to be somewhere else, far away.

On the set of the 1975 production perhaps, with Robert Banks Stewart's words echoing in their ears and Trevor Griffiths as Little John firing an arrow into the air - "wherever this arrows falls, there shall Robin lie".

Now that's quality.

* Except for the D&D bit. Ridiculous game.
** Doctor Who is generally the exception to this rule.

From Small Screen to Big (and Back Again)

There's something joyous about UK sitcoms from the mid-part of the nineteen seventies. Amateur they may well be, full of missed cues and fluffed lines they certainly are, but they're also unmistakably British: products of the first half of that strangest of periods, when the hippy idealism of London in the 1960s spread out weakly across the provinces, and the counter-culture, ruthlessly diluted until the original sense of revolution had all but disappeared, was invited into suburban living-rooms.

That they were popular with the viewing public is without doubt, even if TV critics scoffed at them (one American critic memorably describing the US version of Man About the House as "quite simply, the worst piece of sitcom trash that's ever been on television"). Viewing figures were high enough to lead to spin-off series (Man About the House alone generated two successful follow-ups in George and Mildred and Robin's Nest plus attendant movies), format exports to the USA* and to make stars of the actors involved.

Interestingly, they were also part of that period in UK television history when the various regional ITV companies were not - as they are now - completely without merit. While the very top layer of sitcoms in the period were predominantly made by the BBC, there were plenty of ITV offerings in an equally vibrant second tier of comedies. For every Porridge occupying the very pinnacle of comedy, there was a lesser - but still entertaining - Please Sir! down amongst the foothills. But what unites each of these shows is that most 1970s of phenomena, the movie adaptation.

To understand the reasoning behind the creation of a wealth of big screen versions of what are in every way small screen endeavours, it's necessary to go a bit historical for a moment. Feel free to skip past this bit if you've got no interest in the behind the scenes stuff. I'll let you know when you're safe to rejoin the masses.

In 1949, Harold Wilson - at that point Head of the Board of Trade - had suggested the imposition of a tax on box office receipts in the United Kingdom, with the proceeds of this new levy being ploughed back into the British film industry. The idea was taken up by a government keen to support a domestic film industry being destroyed by Hollywood and so the levy was introduced in 1950 on a voluntary basis, before becoming a statutory with the introduction of the Cinematograph Film Act in 1957. The most basic consequence of the levy was that a proportion of the ticket price was to be pooled and divided among British films which qualified during the year in question.

[Welcome back to those who chose to miss out that in-depth, detailed and scholarly single paragraph on taxation matters. Take a seat and grab a biscuit from the packet on the table. The rest of this is more interesting, I promise.]

The net effect of the new tax was immediately apparent, as British film makers cast about for opportunities and quickly cast an eye over contemporary TV hits for inspiration. The first of the Eady funded movies was a big-screen version of The Army Game entitled I only Arsked! in which an Arab prince hires the lads from Hut 29 to protect him from revolutionaries back home. Unfortunately, while I do have a copy of the movie, I've never managed to work up the energy to watch it (both because I prefer the sequel series, Bootsie and Snudge, and because the lack of William Hartnell in the movie removes the Doctor Who link which can get me to watch almost anything). In similar vein, both Jimmy Edwards Whacko! and Peggy Mount's The Larkins were given the big-screen treatment soon afterwards, but life's too short, frankly, even if The Larkins at least sounds worth watching.

Instead, let's flit forward about ten years, to the first and a contender for the best of the big sitcom movies - Till Death Us Do Part. The initial thing worth noting about it is that whereas The Army Game upscaled the action by dropping the cast into a succession of harem-related hi-jinks in the Middle East, TDUST did so by the unique method of expanding the timescale and showing Alf Garnett's life from World War II to the present day. It's a very good idea, as the strength of the TV show lay in large part in the combination of Johnny Speight's writing for, and Warren Mitchell's performance as, arch-bigot Garnett. With a running time three times longer than the TV show it is possible to show Alf growing into the racist misanthrope he eventually becomes and so manages to open up the series without losing the very element which made the TV version popular enough to generate a movie. It's also very well directed, with every sign that money has been spent on it (not an accusation you could aim at every sitcom movie). The 1972 follow-up, The Alf Garnett Saga, is a direct sequel but is probably best avoided. Even the inclusion of the majestic John Le Mesurier as Alf's new neighbour can't save a film in which the parts of Rita and Mike are both inadvisedly recast and the high point of the plot is Alf taking an acid trip!

If Till Death was a sixties sitcom given longevity by the (non) appeal of its star, then Man About the House was the epitome of sitcoms in the 1970s. With Richard O'Sullivan's Robin Tripp as the man sharing a flat with two girls, Jo and Chrissie, the TV series revolved around Robin's attempts to talk Chrissie into bed and the trio's interaction with their landlords, the scruffy and lazy George Roper and his fun-loving, sex-starved wife Mildred. Like Till Death the writers choose to dump the core concept of the tv series and instead open things out, but with less clear-cut success.

In common with every other one of these movies, this opening out basically involves moving the action from within one location and out into the wide world (in passing, isn't it odd how every one of these movies uses sets utterly unlike those seen in their TV counter-parts?)

Demonstrating that the more things change, the more they stay the same, the movie version of MatH concerns itself with the problem of urban redevelopment and the lack of affordable housing for young people in London. Arthur Lowe (taking a break from playing the officious but caring Captain Mainwaring) here plays Mr Spiros, the acerbic CEO of a building company who orders the ever dependable upper class twit Peter Cellier to buy all six houses in the Roper's street, so as to knock them down and build offices. Predictably George wants to sell up, whilst Mildred and sitting tenants Robin, Chrissie and Jo are determined to hold out against the redevelopment. Comic misunderstanding and deviousness ensues and for the first hour the film feels exactly like a TV episode with a slightly bigger budget.

In the final section, however, the film kicks up a much-needed gear. The gang follow George to the Thames TV studios where he's trying to hand his house deeds over to Cellier's Morris Pluthero. Once there, Spike Milligan makes a couple of appearances at his most manic self, while Jack Smethurst and Rudolph Walker from execrable racecom Love Thy Neighbour (also adapted for the big screen) meet George in the studio bar and briefly poke fun at their sitcom characters when Smethurst indignantly berates George for directing a 'humorous' racist comment at Walker. As is often the way all returns to the status quo in the end - even Robin's nearly successful attempt to seduce Chrissy is interrupted in the nick of time!

The subject of famous guest stars is one of the few interesting points in the movie adaptation of the Sid James vehicle, Bless This House. For reasons which appear obvious, Robin Stewart who played Sid's son Mike in the TV series was replaced with seventies sex farce staple (and all-round ugly git), Robin Askwith. In fact Stewart simply couldn't do the film as he had another acting job for the period in which filmed took place. The addition of next door neighbours Terry Scott and June Whitfield - essentially reprising the same characters as they always play - is a more obvious attempt to inject some star appeal into proceedings, as is the replacement of Anthony Jackson (in the role of Sid's best friend Trevor) with Carry on regular Peter Butterworth. The fact that the creative team behind the Carry Ons, Peter Rogers and Gerald Thomas, were producer and director of the Bless This House movie is presumably not co-incidental.

In fact these two were themselves interlopers, with series creators Vince Powell and Harry Driver also replaced on scripting duties and, as far as I can see, absent entirely from the film's crew. That this makes little difference to the finished product - a tale of star crossed lovers getting together in the face of parental disapproval, with a side order of home whisky making and an intriguingly modern interest in the environment - does, however, demonstrate the rather routine nature of the source material.

The Bless This House solution of simply dragging a half-hour story out so that it fills 90 minutes is actually quite unusual in the sitcom movies of the period. The approach taken by George and Mildred in 1980 of adding a ludicrous twist to the regular fare - in this case, a hitman trying to kill George in a London hotel - is even more unusual (and that's the least of the problems suffered by this worst of the TV spin-offs, in which all expense seems to have been spared and where Yootha Joyce was quite literally dying on her feet).

More common is the idea of sending the cast away somewhere - a concept which in retrospect is particularly bizarre in a sitcom, where the setting is integral to the comedy, and where it's a cliche of the genre that the characters work best when trapped with one another. Holiday on the Buses, Steptoe and Son Ride Again!, Are You Being Served? and Please Sir! all follow the ill-considered path of sending the cast on holiday, and although both Steptoe and Please Sir! emerge with a reasonable amount of their reputations intact, credit for this goes to the strength of the original premise and the quality of the actors involved more than anything else. Are You Being Served! and Holiday on the Buses, on the other hand, collapse in a welter of jokes about humorous foreigners and middle aged lechers.

Which leaves only the very best sitcom spin-offs to finish.

Porridge could be said also to have tried sending the core cast on holiday, although in this case that holiday involved escaping from prison! The writing is crisp and clever, Barker and Beckinsdale are as wonderful as ever and Dick Clement directs with aplomb. Even if there hadn't been a Porridge television series, this tale of two inmates breaking into prison would be fondly remembered as one of the better British movies of the 1970s. I could waffle on about Porridge for longer, but really - do yourself a favour and get the dvd.

While you're at it, do the same thing with the Dads Army movie. It may have been an unhappy experience for the cast** but little of that shows on screen, even if does flag a little towards the end. Demonstrating the process by which the Home Guard came into existence, the film is obviously helped by the brilliant ensemble cast, but the decision to re-tell the whole of the first TV series was a masterstroke which paid off handsomely. Again, highly recommended to any fan of the television show.

One last thing - lots of character actors turn up in numerous different spin-off movies, to the extent that watched one after another it appears that there were only about a dozen actors available in the seventies. Johnny Briggs (MATH, BTH), Bill Pertwee (MATH, DA), Jack Smethurst (MATH, PS, LTN), Carol Hawkins (BTH, PS), Patsy Rowlands (PS, BTH), Michael Robbins (MATH, OTB, TDUDP) and - showing a willingness to serve above and beyond the call of duty - the mighty Bill Maynard (MATH, BTH, S&S, TDUDP, plus the TV version of Frankie Howerd's Up Pompeii, sundry Carry Ons and Confessions of... movies galore). Without the safety net of these cut-price knock-offs of popular telly you wonder how some of this lot would have paid their mortgages...

Actually, one final last thing - how cool would it be if they were still making these movies? Imagine a big screen version of My Family where dentist Ben and his dysfunctional brood head for the Costa Del Sol, or where Ashley and Elaine from the Two of Us buy a rundown hotel in the countryside, with predictably hilarious results?

Very cool, that's how cool that would be.

* Should anyone have a copy, I would love to see the single pilot episode of the US version of Are You Being Served, Beane's of Boston
**Primarily due to interference from the the studio who wanted to make it more cinematic rather than reflecting the TV series and hence recast Mavis Pike with a bigger name and moved filming to a new location. More specifically, there was a good deal of unrest caused by the fact that the director Norman Cohen was both not terribly good and was being told what to do on a daily basis by studio bosses who weren't even on site, and the manner in which rewrites were taking place outwith Croft and Perry's control.

1066 and all that!

I'm a weak, weak man, it's true.

Having started a vague Dalek marathon the other week and then watched Destiny and Death in the past fortnight, I was all set to start on Planet this week. Then the DVD of The Time Meddler arrived in the post.

The Time Meddler - even the name's great, a proper science fictiony sounding title. It was also the very last Target paperbacks I bought for about ten years. Admittedly, I was 18 by then and I no longer went into a frenzy of excitement at adding a Hartnell story to my book collection (had I been 12 when it came out then it would have been a far different matter, possibly involving joyous hand-clapping), but it does remain a bit of personal landmark.

Interestingly, the novelisation adds a prologue in which Steven makes his way through the jungles of Mechanus and into the TARDIS, which otherwise unseen incident allows me to segue neatly into...

...Vicki and the Doctor in the TARDIS, as yet unaware of their stowaway, discussing whether they will ever return to see Ian and Barbara ('Perhaps', says the Doctor).

Writer Dennis Spooner does this type of character-based vignette very well and this brief scene is no exception. Both the Doctor expressing his surprise and disappointment that the two Earthlings have left the TARDIS to go home and the plaintive fishing for compliments inherent in his asking Vicki whether she is staying merely 'for the sake of an old man' flesh out his character unobtrusively while also suggesting that at this point (the end of season 2), the powers that be were willing to leave the door open for a return of the popular duo of Hill and Russell if they were needed.

Also evident from this first scene is the fact that Maureen O'Brien is a much better actress than either Carole Ann Ford before her or Jackie Lane after. Peter Purves is excellent as Steven Taylor, space pilot, as well and almost immediately hits it off with O'Brien. Blow though it must have been to lose William Russell and Jacqueline Hill, for a short period of time at least their two replacements were more than adequate.

Once Steven officially arrives, the story starts moving along apace and it's soon made plain that this is a historical with a twist - the first pseudo-historical, to use fandom's clunky phrase. It's hard at this remove to get a real feel for the unexpectedness of the discovery of the Monk's wrist-watch in 11th century Northumbria. Even if you're one of the twelve genre tv fans who haven't seen Star Trek's 'City of the Edge of Forever', there's barely a series which hasn't done a variation of the theme (the most recent being the season one finale of Primeval). But in 1965 it was all new and the revelation that the monk on the hill was not all he seemed must have been wholly unexpected. The later reveal at the end of episode 3 that 'The Monk's got a TARDIS!' would have topped even that and must be in the running for best cliffhanger in the history of the show.

But even allowing for the fact that we can't really comprehend the novelty of the concepts on display to the contemporary viewer, we can at least admire the tidiness of the plotting and the logical nature of the puzzle at its core. It's not wilfully experimental in the manner of The Web Planet or played largely for laughs like Spooner's other scripts, for The Gunfighters or The Romans. It does share an interest in character building, but the humour is altogether more subtle and the plot more intelligent and less reliant on famous names from history.

For once in Who, in fact, the plot actually makes reasonable sense, so long as you accept that the Monk wants to help Britain achieve fourteenth century airplanes for some reason. He claims altruism but a simple desire to meddle seems more likely. Either way, everything follows on logically from that point with the Monk and his comedy checklist setting up an atomic cannon, attempting to lure the Vikings to their deaths and then preparing the ground for a victory for King Harold at Hastings. It's not overly complicated but the history is accurate so far as it goes, and the movement of the Doctor on the one hand and Steven and Vicki on the other, as they make their way from the monastery to the Saxon settlement and back again, is sufficiently involved to hold the interest without difficulty. In passing, Peter Butterworth as the Monk is excellent and makes the most of even those scenes in which he has no lines. It's no surprise they had him back in the following year, although it's more surprising that he never appeared again after that.

No review of The Time Meddler would be complete, naturally, without a lengthy section on time lords, TARDISes and the plethora of brand new information in the story about the Doctor's until then wholly mysterious past. So let's quickly skim through what we learn here.

1. Although Vicki exclaims that the Monk has 'a TARDIS', he never refers to it as such, but calls it his 'time machine'. The Doctor does admit that they come from the same place, however.

2. The Monk's time machine looks exactly the same as the Doctor's except that the central console is on a kind of dais. The Monk's TARDIS is a Mark 4 apparently* and, although the Doctor never answers Vicki's question, is seemingly more modern than the Doctor's TARDIS (which we later find out is a Type 40).

3. The Doctor is from 50 years earlier than the Monk - the Discontinuity Guide tries to claim that this merely means that the Doctor left Gallifrey 50 years before the Monk, but a far more reasonable reading of the line is that the Doctor is 50 years older than the Monk.

Not a lot really, but enough to shoot down Gary Russell's utterly dreadful Deca (from Divided Loyalties) which claims the Doctor and the Monk were contemporaries, and to establish that the Doctor was not the only wanderer in the fourth dimension in the Whoniverse.

One incredibly minor and nitpicky complaint to end with. The bedding at the end of episode 2 is different to that seen in the recap section at the start of episode 3. Not a problem when watched weekly, it's a little bit jarring when the scenes are viewed straight after one another.

Oh, and I'd pay good money to own the minituarised version of the Monk's TARDIS which he peers into Michael Bentine style after the Doctor removes a vital circuit.

* Which makes the Monk's ship a Mark 4 Travel Machine, and hence one better than a Dalek :)

And coming next on ITV, Doctor Who...

If ITV had made Doctor Who in the Seventies, then they'd have made something a lot like Destiny of the Daleks.

Think The Tomorrow People or, if you're that little bit older, Ace of Wands. Cheap sets and clapped-out props in an adventure apparently written by the same unimaginative computer which caused the Movellan-Dalek stalemate. Rumour has it that the BBC attempted to save money for the upcoming Paris-based City of Death, and so no big name guest stars were cast, instead leaving Suzanne Danielle and Tony Osoba as the 'big' names over the marquee.

It certainly shows.

Watching Romana in comedy regeneration mode, Daleks with their side panels clearly falling off, and a cut-price Davros with a head which doesn't quite fit, my first thought was Come back Mrs Noah!, the Mollie Sugden vehicle from 1977. Partially this is because I was looking for a copy of the sole series of Mrs Noah the other day, but equally I think I saw a resemblance because a resemblance was there.

Don't get me wrong - I like the single episode I've seen of Mrs Noah but it looks like it cost about seven and six to film and even its most ardent fan couldn't claim it as an example of careful and considered scripting. Instead it's a quick knock-up, utilising a name with a degree of cachet in a genre with equal, if potentially equally transitory, status as the in-thing.

For the BBC combining Mollie Sugden and Star Wars-generated sf fever, read ITV squeezing Doctor Who into a Buck Rogers in the 25th Century shaped hole.

Hence the Movellans' camp as a row of caravans uniforms, complete with silver disco wigs and groin enhancing tight white trousers. Add their fabulously trashy pink guns, the Dalek bombs which look like nothing so much as giant antibiotic tablets and Romana wearing a cerise version of the Doctor's long coat and you have a story which costs sod all, plays up to the campy attraction of a major ITV import success and where story and plot are of far less importance than the aliens looking cool and with it.

Having said all that there are things to like in Destiny even if you ignore the camp.

There's a nice (I suspect scripted) touch where the fluttering of Davros' hand as he first awakens is mirrored by that of a Movellan crushed under rubble, highlighting the similarity between the species before the reveal that the Space Disco Queens are robots.

Suzanne Danielle is quiet lovely as Agella, the fit Movellan.**

The shots of the Daleks gliding about the sand and rubble strewn hills of Skaro are very effective, especially in those scenes where the Doctor hides at the bottom of an escarpment along which the Daleks are hunting.* In fact, the location filming in general is excellent.

It's just a shame that the interior filming is less successful. As with the Dalek scenes in the Pertwee serial, Day of the Daleks, the set designers have obviously decided that evil alien mutants in state of the art travel machines would, for preference, choose to live in a city largely composed of plywood painted black and illuminated by the sort of free standing lamps only otherwise seen in...well, TV studios. There's a definite air of 'good enough I suppose' about the construction of the Dalek city. The fact it has none of the quality of the same city as seen in Genesis of the Daleks isn't terribly surprising given budgetary constraints, but they could at least have tried to make it look the similar.

Now that we're back to complaining, this might be a good time to enquire - what happened to the dangerous radiation? In episode 1 the Doctor warns Romana that the radiation on the planet could be deadly and gives her a beeper to tell her when to take radiation tablets. He then (a) doesn't give her a supply of tablets, rendering the beeper just a cruel, sick joke and (b) never mentions it again, except at one point later in the same episode when his beeper goes off and he scoffs a couple of tablets. Romana feels a little ill in the mines later on, but that too passes as writer Terry Nation entirely forgets what's going on.

Or maybe the radiation continues but shows itself in unexpected manner? How else to explain the stoned looking willingness of various prisoners to be shot by the Daleks in a scene only a little while after those same prisoners were shown actively shifting rocks and trying to protect Romana from herself? Or indeed the exact same prisoners in the exact same scene doing weird mugging and grinning when told they could leave so long as they take their recently murdered friends of theirs with them.

In the end though none of this really matters, nor does David Gooderson's sub-standard Davros or the fact that Nation certainly implies that the Daleks have wholly eradicated their organic element. Having sat down to watch part one on a Monday, intending to watch one part an evening over the week I ended up watching three parts that night and the last part (and the two decent extras - check out how pissed Ken Grieve acts in his interview) the following evening - it may be loosely plotted, dodgily acted and seemingly cast from Saturday's crowd at Fire Island, but it keeps the attention and - as with most Nation scripts - careens along at such a clip that you do always want to know what happened next.

If only ITV's actual science fiction output had been half as good...

* Less so, admittedly, in those scenes where bits of the Daleks keep falling off or where you can clearly see operator feet sticking out from under the Daleks' skirt
** Amusingly, this image of Agella which I nicked off of the BBC website was originally tagged "Ra-Ra-Rasputin. There was a cat who really was gone." :)