The sitcom of the 90s was very definitely Friends. So it comes as something of a surprise for Adam Chase, one of the show’s producers, to be slumming it on BBC3 with Clone, a sci-fi sitcom about a mad government scientist who tries to create a super-soldier and ends up producing someone a bit ‘special’ instead.
Greater creative freedom and the chance to work out the kinks before pitching it to the US networks is the alleged excuse, and that’s fair enough. If some of the best writers of the US TV scene want to use British TV to experiment with ideas, I say let them.
The only proviso for that is that they’d better produce something funny. And Clone? Well, it’s very…
Time for our regular round-up of tele events at the BFI. January has a bumper collection to pick from – prepare to bankrupt yourself:
11th/15th: Peckinpah on TV: episodes of Route 66 and Noon Wine directed by Sam Peckinpah
16th:Being Human episode one preview + Q&A with Russell Tovey, Toby Whitehouse and Matt Bouch. Woo hoo!
21st: The League of Gentlemen: Ten Years After – features three episodes of the series and the League themselves in conversation
25th: A CITV workshop, followed by screenings of episodes, including a new episode of Horrid Henry
There’s also a David Hare season dedicated to the playwright:
1st/23rd: Play for Today: Brassneck. The first surviving Hare TV play. Also includes a Late ShowFace to Face with Hare
6th/25th: Knuckle. Adaptation for British TV of his stage play
11th/29th: The Absence of War: the third of Hare’s theatre trilogy looking at British institutions
13th: The Guardian interview with David Hare. Preceded by two Play for Today episodes: Licking Hitler and Dreams of Living
17th/21st: Heading Home
25th/27th: The Designated Mourner. A Wallace Shawn play directed by Hare for the BBC Films
Members’ priority postal booking opens 24 November
Members’ online and phone booking opens 1 December
Public booking opens 5 December
Although I don’t normally mention the film side of things, it’s worth noting there’s also a David Fincher season showing Alien3, Se7en, The Game, Fight Club, Panic Room and Zodiac. And February is going to feature a Live TV drama season – although it won’t be live now, of course.
As always, visit the BFI web site for more details
If you’ve watched enough movies and TV shows, the idea of the ‘ticking bomb’ should be familiar to you. You know: there’s a bomb, it’s got to be defused, usually by snipping either a red wire or a blue wire, and there’s only a few minutes or seconds to do it in.
Normally, you’ll find this in a single episode of a TV show or maybe in the final act of a film and it’ll usually be just a regular cop or soldier doing the disarming, rather than a heroic bomb disposal expert – typically they‘re running late. Equally rarely will the ticking bomb scenario last the length of the entire movie or TV show or the bomb be any more complex than just that red-blue question.
In fact, off the top of my head I can only think of Danger UXB and occasionally The Unit really focusing on bomb disposal on TV; in the movies, even Speed didn’t dwell on disarmament, only evasion, and Quatermass and the Pit didn’t have a bomb, only a spaceship everyone thought was a bomb.
Juggernaut (also known as Terror on the Britannic), released in 1974, is perhaps the only instance of a movie that deals exclusively from beginning to end with the defusal of a single bomb and that features a heroic bomb disposal expert at the centre of the action.
Set on board a luxury liner travelling across the Atlantic, the movie sees Richard Harris try to disarm seven identical and highly complicated bombs designed by a man calling himself ‘Juggernaut’. The first film to develop the ‘red wire/blue wire’ dilemma, it’s a tense piece directed by Richard ‘Superman II‘ Lester, with dialogue by Alan ‘Beiderbecke‘ Plater, that while featuring an all-star cast is in reality a mesmerising monologue by Harris and a musing on the nature of death. It’s a movie you should own.
Here’s the very 70s, slightly judgemental trailer narrated by a bored American man.
