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As we all know, the Companion Chronicles is Big Finish’s attempts at filling in the gaps in its Doctor Who range. With Doctors one to three now in the great big TARDIS in the sky, Doctor four fruitier than a wine gum and Doctor nine more likely to toast his manhood on an open fire than have anything to do with Doctor Who again, the chances of getting full cast productions of audio plays starring these particular Doctors is very small. Fortunately, many of the companions of these Doctors are alive and well and ready to get paid a reasonable sum of money for a day’s work reading a short book into a microphone.
The first series of Companion Chronicles featured Vicki, Zoe, Liz Shaw and Romana II, to varying effect. Some were good, some weren’t. Series two isn’t too different and I’ll be looking at some of the others over the next few days (the fourth’s not out until January, unfortunately). The first, though, I’ll be looking at right now. Ooh.
Continue reading “Review: The Companion Chronicles – Mother Russia”
It’s an off-repeated mantra that there are too many repeats at Christmas. Oh look, here’s a Liberal Democrat spokesman doing it now (seriously dude, have you nothing better to do?).
Yet, it’s patently not true any more. Yes you can barp on about how every Christmas, you always get The Wizard of Oz*, The Great Escape**, etc, but if you actually look in the schedules, for the most part, there is a complete lack of the supposedly oft-repeated collection this year. The controllers have listened, and now our cultural Christmas heritage is no longer there to be enjoyed by a new generation.
Now it’s not like British TV ever reached the US’s dizzying levels of shared re-run heritage – we’ll never beat Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which has been airing pretty much every year since 1964 and now gets repeated several times each year over Christmas. But there are films and TV shows that used to come out every Christmas, that we all used to watch because there was nothing else on, but because they’re not on any more, no one over a certain age will have a clue about***.
This is a shame. Whither goes our shared cultural heritage? If there’s a supposed literary canon that everyone must have read to fully understand British culture (Shakespeare, Austen, Milton, the Bible, Burns, the Mabinogion, Dylan Thomas, etc), surely there must be a film and TV canon that must be seen by all literate citizens in order to understand their own cultural history?
Introducing: The Canon
So, my friends, I’m suggesting we start putting together our collective heads to decide this canon – which will henceforth be called The Canon, it’s so important – so that we can petition for their educational repeating every Christmas.
I may – or may not since I’m quite unreliable sometimes – be slowly assembling a list over the coming week of films and TV programmes that are quint-essentially British and that everyone should have watched at some point in their lives.
But – IT’S A MEME EVERYONE – feel free to add your suggestions for additions to The Canon in the comments section below or on your own blog, leaving a link below so we can all read them together. I’m guessing Doctor Who will figure in it somehow.
I’m going to get the ball rolling with something that someone has already sent me for Christmas – Roger Moore in North Sea Hijack.
Continue reading “Where are the repeats we want at Christmas? Introducing “The Canon””
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As we all know, BBC4 is only good for a few things, one of which is its annual ghost story season. Thankfully, this consists of all those MR James and Charles Dickens ghost stories that were filmed in the 70s and then wisely shown on BBC1 by the then much lovelier BBC. God bless you ghosts of Christmases past. The season starts tomorrow, so get your PVRs primed in anticipation.
Although minuscule BBC4 budgets appear to have become so small, they can’t afford to film a new one this year as they have for the last couple of years, we do have more than usual, including one I don’t recall having been in previous seasons.
Here’s the schedule:
Saturday 15 December
THE HAUNTED AIRMAN
11.30pm-12.40pm; 2.10am-3.20am
Dramatisation of Dennis Wheatley’s tale about a recuperating military pilot who sees frightening visions.Sunday 16 December
MR JAMES: A VIEW FROM A HILL
10.40pm-11.20pm; 2.30am-3.10am
Another chance to see this classic ghost story. When Mr Fanshawe borrows his host’s binoculars, he sees an unsettling sight on aptly-named Gallows Hill – or does he?Monday 17 December
MR JAMES: THE STALLS OF BARCHESTER
11.40pm-12.30am
Robert Hardy stars as an ambitious cleric who decides to advance his career by murdering his archdeacon.Tuesday 18 December
MR JAMES: NUMBER 13
10pm-10.40pm; rpt 2.35am-3.20am
Greg Wise stars in this unsettling tale in which a traveller finds that the hotel he’s booked into conceals a supernatural secret.Wednesday 19 December
MR JAMES: THE TREASURE OF ABBOT THOMAS
10pm-10.35pm
Michael Bryant stars as a historian who finds the clue to hidden treasure in an old stained-glass window.MR JAMES: WHISTLE AND I’LL COME TO YOU
11.05pm-11.50am
Jonathan Miller’s chilling adaptation of Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad, starring Michael Horden as a hapless professor who finds a mysterious whistle on the bleak Norfolk coast.Thursday 20 December
MR JAMES: LOST HEARTS
10pm-10.35pm
A powerful drama about Mr Abney, an elderly and excitable black magician, who preys sinisterly upon children.THE SIGNALMAN
11.20pm-midnight
Adaptation of the Charles Dickens story, in which a hooded figure seems to warn a lonely signalman of an unspoken danger.
I would, as always, heartily recommend The Signalman; Lost Hearts is pretty good, as are The Treasure of Abbot Thomas and Whistle and I’ll Come To You. Number 13 has some okay moments but doesn’t quite have the scariness of the other modern one, A View From a Hill. I haven’t seen The Stalls of Barchester so I’ll definitely be tuning in for that one.
I’d recommend that you avoid The Haunted Airman, because it was arse. The question remains though, as always: why aren’t BBC1 and BBC2 showing these or making their own. Or are they and I’ve missed them?
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