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The story of Merlin and King Arthur has been around for centuries, so it’s not surprising that every so often, someone wants to retell it*. Most recently, we’ve had the BBC series Merlin, but there have been numerous other retellings including the Sam Neill mini-series Merlin, the movie Excalibur, the Clive Owen historical, King Arthur, and mild American 70s sitcom Mr Merlin.
Back in the 80s though, there was a more subtle adaptation of the myth set in modern times. Starring Patrick Malahide (Minder et al) as the Merlin-esque ‘Magnus’ and Stephen Dillane (Hamlet, Spy Game, Welcome to Sarajevo) as Nick, the King Arthur of the piece, The One Game posited the question: “What would have happened if Arthur had been made King with Merlin’s help – and then Arthur had kicked him out?”
This being the 80s, however, for the retelling Nick was the MD of a games company and Magnus was the creator of his best-selling game, thrown out and sent to a mental asylum after he couldn’t handle Nick’s rejection of his newest invention. Magnus escapes from the asylum and using his near-magical skills, steals all Nick’s company’s assets and plans his further revenge.
What made The One Game so interesting and worthy of being described as a Lost Gem was its then-unique concept: during the course of the four episodes, set over a Bank Holiday weekend, everyone Nick meets – including friends and loved-ones – and everything he does and comes across may be part of ‘The One Game’, a live-action and possibly deadly game invented by Magnus to teach Nick a lesson.
It was only ever shown once on ITV1, was released on DVD but is no longer available. It’s The One Game and it’s a Lost Gem. Here’s the the opening titles to the second episode, Saturday, complete with theme tune sung in Patagonian Welsh and annoying 80s narrator recapping just enough of the plot for you to know what’s going on.
We’re building up quite a collection of writers and publishers here at the blog, so in what has become a tradition here, it’s time to pimp one of their books.
Stuart Douglas – who hasn’t been around here much of late. Bah! – is publishing a collection of Iris Wildthyme stories by the likes of Paul Magrs, Steve Cole, Mark Wright, Cavan Scott and Mags Haliday next month so why not head on over to Obverse Books and place an order? It’s only £10.99 and it’s a hardback.
In case you don’t know who Iris is, she’s a Time Lady who travels the universe in a TARDIS disguised as a Double Decker bus. According to el Wikipedia:
Her stories are in the New Wave mold, characterised by nonlinear, sometimes stream of consciousness narrative, intertextual references to the rest of Doctor Who and popular culture, and themes of unreliable narration. She has a playful, mischievous personality, delighting in baiting the Doctor and getting into trouble.
Although she started off in the BBC Books Doctor Who novels, she’s gone on to have a range of audio adventures, care of Big Finish, in which she’s played by former Who companion Katy Manning, so you might want to nip over to Amazon to buy them, too.
After a brief mid-week birthday edition, it’s time for our regularly scheduled edition of “hot Scottish actor taking a pew” aka Sitting Tennant.
This week, we have a smorgasbord of pictures, with Sister Chastity giving us a still from People Like Us, in which DT had to go on a great internal journey to play the part of “an actor”; and Jaradel returns to the hellish, barren wasteland conditions of Planet of the Dead; or was it really just Blackpool, as Ms Rullsenberg intimates?
Here’s the new leader board, with unsurprisingly no changes in the running order as our steady rationing of pictures continues:
At witty caption central, Toby sucked on a can of nitrous oxide and extended his lead but nearly lost points for implying that David Tennant had decreased his lead and once again resorting to puns; Ms Rullsenberg came in with some list minute captions that has now drawn her into a captioning slap-down with Jane Henry – who will triumph?; and Rev/Views took a break from cursing the name of BT to rejoin the fray, presumably via semaphore. Witty caption points went to: Marie for picture 1; and Electric Dragon for both picture 2 and picture 3.
As always, captions and new submissions for the gallery, please. Remember, you can submit as many (witty) captions as you like for each and every picture, with topical captions (and pictures of David Tennant in current productions) getting extra marks. The wittiest caption for each picture will get double points. And there’s a bonus point for using Gary Numan lyrics appropriately.
Got a picture of David Tennant sitting, lying down or in some indeterminate state in between? Then leave a link to it below and if it’s judged suitable, it will appear in the “Sitting Tennant” gallery. You can also enter the witting and amusing captions league table by commenting on existing photos in the gallery.
As everyone’s pretty much aware, Heroes turned into rubbish for volumes two and three and the most recent volume – four – has been a vast improvement and general return to season one levels of quality.
The reasons are long and complicated, but many cite the departure of producer Bryan Fuller, writer of Company Man during season one, to create Pushing Daisies as one of the causes of the quality drop.
The fact that Bryan Fuller’s back now – anyone who saw Cold Snap might well agree that our Bryan certainly knows what he’s doing when it comes to Heroes – and the quality’s improved only seems to confirm the linking of Fuller and quality on Heroes.
But I have some worries, the chief of which is that all this praise might be going to his head and all the other writers are going to kill him.
I’ll tell you for why. Our Bryan’s been doing a lot of interviews of late, in which he’s been dissing [spoilers for volumes four and five] the previous volumes. Fair dos, they did go a bit pear-shaped.
But our Bryan – who despite sitting in the writers’ room for a bit during the early part of volume four only rejoined officially for episode 19, Shades of Grey – has been getting braver with every interview and bit of praise aimed at him and now has been dissing bits of the original plans volume four [mad numbers of spoilers but worth it], revealing what was originally going to happen before his second coming.
Then I started reading the Fugitives arc. I thought ‘this is interesting, they’re back in their real lives’, but then it took another tumble down the rabbit hole of getting really dense and characters being angry
The characters’ anger at their situations was such a barrier to entry for me, because I don’t relate to pissed off people. I have to know there’s something in that person that makes me want to root for them and care for them. I thought ‘well, if people are angry, let’s understand why they’re angry so we can sympathise with them.’…
I came back for episode 19, so we started breaking that. When they were breaking that, Sylar’s dad was going to be the ultimate evil, the devil essentially. I was like, ‘didn’t you guys just do that with Arthur Petrelli?’ They agreed, so we took it in a different direction…
I’ll put spoiler tags on this one, because although it’s not really a spoiler (since there were clues on-screen) and Bryan Fuller has been going everywhere, telling everyone about it, even on the episode commentaries on the NBC web site so that people don’t get annoyed when the pay-off is revealed, some people might not want to know yet:
When I came in, they were planning to kill Tracy off. She was gonna get shot in the back of the head! I was like, ‘couldn’t we have her go out in a way that is more dynamic, fun and open?’ I guess I was trying not to have Ali Larter basically die in the same way she did in the second season – ‘I’m a hero!’ Then she dies. It felt redundant to have her go out the same way, so I was like ‘let’s not kill her, let’s see how these events change this character and stay with her on the journey as opposed to just cutting it off…
Yes, basically, volume four was going to be shite as well until Bryan Fuller came back. More worrying, despite the departure of Jesse Alexander and Jeph Loeb from the show, this is how he characterised the writing room:
The good thing for me when I came back is that the pendulum was already swinging back the right way and everybody on the writing staff recognised the problems with the show and how far afield it had gotten from where it was. Often that writers’ room is like alchemy – you have the person with the crazy ideas, the person with the funny ideas, the person who defends the characters at any cost. When I came back, it was a little bit like coming home from college and realising ‘oh, mum and dad don’t talk to each other any more, little sis is a cutter and little bro is hooked on meth’. The room was a completely different room. What was a cohesive group had become divided, so it was a matter of someone coming in and saying ‘let’s work together’.
Yes, Bryan Fuller is in fact Jesus and has brought people together and healed them. So I’m worried that Bryan has been a little less than tactful about his co-writers and they might get a bit mad with him; more than that, I’m worried that if he ends up leaving as a result or to do his own project again, the show will revert to pantsness, because even though the writers do know what they’re doing to a certain extent, judging by the earlier episodes of volume four, they apparently need Bryan Fuller’s leadership and insight to avoid colossal great plotting cock-ups.
What say you?
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