Simon Bradshaw

  

About 18 months ago I reviewed James Goss' novelisation of City of Death, Douglas Adams' Fourth Doctor / Romana story set in Paris. It had never featured in the Target Books line of adaptations, because Adams would not consent to anyone else turning it into a novel, and the BBC wasn't prepared to pay him anything like his going rate to do so. In the end, Goss did what I felt was a pretty good job of capturing Adams' style, and the result worked very well as a stand-alone book, even if it did have to try to deal with some of the stranger aspects of the plot.

Douglas Adams wrote two other Who scripts. Shada famously fell victim during production to an industrial dispute, although a cobbled-together version exists (I've not seen it). The Pirate Planet, by contrast, is well-remembered for its audacious central conceit and for Tom Baker and Bruce Purchase (as the Captain) engaging in what TV Tropes refers to as Ham-to-Ham Combat.

Well, Goss evidently did a good enough job with City of Death to get the gig of adapting The Pirate Planet, and as he explains in his afterword he was able to visit the Douglas Adams archive at St John's College, Cambridge, which turned out to hold not just the original draft script but also an earlier story treatment by Adams that much of The Pirate Planet drew upon. Goss' novelisation is based to a substantial extent on these, and so whilst it is very recognisably the story we saw on television it is fleshed out and sometimes unfolds a little differently. In some respects this is because the page doesn't suffer the budget limitations of the 1970s BBC, so for example scenes set in Zanak's main city actually feel as if they're in a crowded metropolis where it periodically rains diamonds rather than one small set with half a dozen extras and a few fake gems scattered on the floor. Another scene extensively rewrites and expands the third-episode cliffhanger to give a very different explanation of how it was resolved that gives far more agency to Romana.

Adams wrote The Pirate Planet shortly after writing The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and even on watching the TV series the similarities come across. Goss turns this up even further for his novelisation, adding point-of-view scenes in which characters - notably the long-suffering Mr Fibuli - reflect on the absurdly comic horror around them in a very HHGTTG style.

Goss' novelisation came out last Friday; I downloaded the Kindle version and started reading. Even though I knew how the story turned out, the combination of Goss' respectful pastiche of Adams' style and the new elements of plot was captivating enough that I finished that evening. I promptly wanted to remind myself of the original series so S and I bought it on iTunes and watched it last night. Even with the constrained budget and limited special effects, it still works very well, and the playoff between Mary Tamm (as keen young - for a Time Lord - graduate Romana) and Tom Baker is delightful. On reflection, that order was probably best, as it meant I read the book with only vague images of the TV episodes in my head and so my imagination was unconstrained by some of the more painfully low-budget aspects of them. (As the BBC's own archive page on the story admits, the Mentiads spend a lot of time marching across fields to get from A to B in a rather Pythonesque manner).

Following on from my Stranger Things review, and a_cubed's comment about the title sequence, there's a detailed deconstruction of it at Art of the Title, complete with a lengthy interview with the creative director of the animation company that produced it.



I'd immediately picked up the visual reference to Stephen King horror novels of the 1980s, but I'm delighted to find out that the animators studied the kind of glitches and compositing defects that might have arisen using 1980s techniques to create such a title and deliberately incorporated them.

The news about Gareth Thomas' death set me thinking about whether or not there ever will be a reboot of Blake's Seven. I'm not sure who would be cast now as Blake, but for Avon you want someone with a vague resemblance to Paul Darrow and, ideally, a track record of playing a well-spoken sociopathic genius.

There's no question really.

Following on from this, we watched episode 3 of Daredevil, after which attimes_bracing opined that it seemed rather repetitive and she was finding the violence wearing. I commented that I could see signs of a plot arc emerging, so we agreed that I'd watch episode 4 and let her know what I felt.

Well, episode 4 ('In the Blood') certainly takes the wider plot forward, and has one of the most interesting and non-stereotypical depictions of a villain I've seen in a comic adaptation. Vincent D'Onofrio portrays Wilson Fisk as intelligent, pensive, socially awkward and bordering on downright shy, whilst also being a monster capable not just of ordering the most horrific violence but of personally dealing it out. And speaking of that, I had to advice S that no, the violence does not let up - indeed, the episode's conclusion is positively Verhoevenesque. I suspect I'll be watching the rest on my own.

From this discussion thread on io9 regarding True Detective - a US crime drama that makes references to [spoiler redacted, but it's widely seen as a Lovecraftian piece of literature] - comes a very handy phrase: 'Genre-curious'.

A genre-curious show would be one that isn't overtly or explicitly sf/fantasy, but which includes references to the genre or makes use of its tropes. Although I've yet to see it, it sounds as if True Detective qualifies in the first of those categories, while Hannibal might fall into the second; it has no supernatural elements*, but draws heavily on favourite genre themes such as psychological alienation and horror.

(*Although that depends how you interpret aspects of S1E05 "Coquilles".)

I'm just wondering what other shows might count? The League of Gentlemen and Sherlock come to mind, although that's hardly surprising given Mark Gatiss' involvement in them. Any others?

...you start to look for subtle references in the final scene end music. I've now reached S4E09, 'Games', in which( SPOILER ), and the end music is an instrumental version of Norman Greenbaum's 'Spirit in the Sky'.

Except, of course, the most famous cover version of that track is arguably the 1986 one by, yes, Doctor and The Medics. Coincidence?