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28 February 2014 at 23:24 #25894
@missshannonkent – remember that this site has a spoilers policy. Speculation is fine – but any information which is definitely a spoiler should be posted in the Spoilers forum, only.
So if your ‘rumours’ are based on information from the set, you should post there.
28 February 2014 at 16:13 #25872Happy Birthday to Murray Gold.
Probably his best known piece is ‘All the Strange, Strange Creatures’, so here’s a performance from the 2009 Proms.
28 February 2014 at 14:06 #25866You’re perfectly safe from the Grammar Dalek. I am only programmed to exterminate those who fail to use capitalisation and punctuation. 😈
Besides, you’re currently wearing the icon of a Doctor, and all Daleks know that trying to exterminate the Doctor never ends well. 😀
28 February 2014 at 14:00 #25865Quite the opposite of his first incarnation!
Well, in some ways. But like a few others here, the DVD of Web of Fear has just plunked through my letterbox, and I’m watching it on a big telly.
And since I’ve also recently been watching William Hartnell in the first three stories, I was very struck by the way Patrick Troughton kept a Hartnell habit. Namely, that when the Doctor faces away from the humans, his face shows his true feelings. He’s got the same slight smile on his face, that slight amusement as he manipulates the humans into doing what he wants.
So – different persona, but very much the same man.
28 February 2014 at 13:51 #25864Jim The Fish gets the bonus – the inverted comma’s around ‘appear’ was meant to hint at John Scott Martin. Edward Burnham is too easy – he’s got such a recognisable face. 🙂
I think the fact that I always feel the Wild Hunt scene is too short is a huge compliment. I want to see more. And yet, it gives us all the information we need; a very frightening impression of chaos and murder and destruction. It certainly starts to connect that tiny one line reference to race riots in Episode 1 with our Martian spacecraft.
27 February 2014 at 14:43 #25825@fatmaninabox – the spelling, grammar and capitalisation Dalek is usually me. 😈
However, I will point out that this is more because I can’t read stuff that is badly spelt, uncapitalised and innocent of punctuation. Posters (I’m looking at you, @monochromedimension) may dangle their participles where they will and split infinitives all day long. They can even misuse the possessive apostrophe – if they really must. 🙂
27 February 2014 at 10:46 #25812I also don’t understand when people say that the Tenth is arrogant, when every Doctor have been so, as far as I can see. It’s a Time Lord thing, me thinks.
I agree entirely; Time Lords tend to be arrogant. The Doctor, consistently, tends to arrogance.
But the reason people say the Tenth is arrogant is that his incarnation was the one where this trait really came out to play; culminating in Waters of Mar and his ‘Time Lord Victorious’ speech.
25 February 2014 at 10:04 #25755@wolfweed – I’m pretty sure Clara outed herself as an English teacher – under the influence of the truth field at Christmas.
25 February 2014 at 09:28 #25753Reservoir Dogs reference, I’d think. There was a reference to RD in Moffat’s Coupling, as well.
If he makes a joke about wishing his name was Mr Purple, we’ll know it’s a Reservoir Dogs joke.
23 February 2014 at 13:10 #25697@faegrl – yup, I agree with @fatmaninabox. My ears!
But if Peter Jackson wants some more goblin-rock for the games, that remix may be in contention. 🙂
22 February 2014 at 23:21 #25683@phaseshift – welcome back, btw, though I’m sorry your absence was due to flood damage assessment.
As Craig says, we’re now onto Episode 5 of Quatermass. Your input would be gratefully received. 😀
22 February 2014 at 22:06 #25682@craig and @jimthefish -so, you managed to salvage victory out of defeat? What went wrong? 😉
Well done, all.
22 February 2014 at 20:12 #25674They’ve switched the spacecraft camera around again (we can officially call it a spacecraft now). With the creatures all in the museum, the camera for the interior has been moved back to facing the front of the craft, allowing the actors to look and act down the whole length.
I love Barbara Judd. She’s just been terrified out of her wits, saw psychokinetic phenomena which must have been even more worldview-destroying to a scientist – and she’s still going to get those bloody notes. They’re important and they’re what she came for. 🙂
“Now I know the sort of thing that Darwin faced” – great line, as Quatermass explains that his idea that human evolution was partly artificial offended the Minister’s dignity. It is a direct comparison; Darwin posited that we were descended from apes. Quatermass is suggesting we were bred, by insects.
Roney the paleontologist knows an alien when he sees one. Unfortunately, the Minister doesn’t. And having investigated the historical outbreaks, Miss Judd comes in with news of the more current one. Notice how everyone seems doubtful that it was Sladden; as if they couldn’t quite see him as human any more.
The ‘science vs religion’ debate is definitely not treated as black and white. Doctor Who comes in the 1960’s, when the ‘Christian country’ idea was starting to break apart and be replaced by a secular culture. In BG Doctor Who the story often tends to be ‘powerful aliens are mistaken for gods’ – supporting and encouraging a more secular, questioning outlook.
In Quatermass, the powerful aliens are remembered in our race memory as demons. Quatermass, the scientist, is thinking of recording an experiment. Gilpin, the religious, has to remind him that doing that will put a man in peril. Religion, in fact, is played throughout as one of the weapons used by humans against the Martians.
Ah, the days before mobile phones, when someone had to physically wait by a land-line.
Yup, Church of England. Someone has problems – offer them a cup of tea or cocoa. Demonic possession? Better make it a pot. With lots of sugar.
Nice performance by Noel Howlett (Rev. Gilpin) and another lovely performance by Richard Shaw. I honestly think Sladden was one of the best performances he ever gave. Noel Howlett was one of the few actors to transfer over to the film version: he played the Abbey Librarian.
It is not possible to get rid of Fullalove. 🙂
Remember that funny machine of Roney’s? Several episodes ago? It was a Chekhov’s gun. Any funny machine shown in Episode one must be used by Episode Six…
This is Quatermass – so we get a scientific explanation of telekinesis. It’s an ability of the Martians. As is clairvoyance (another Chekhov’s gun). We inherited it.
Back at the spacecraft, Rev. Gilpin is joining the list of people who do their jobs, no matter what. I have to point out that Church of England rules strictly state that priests should never attempt an exorcism by themselves, but I think that’s along the same lines as a national newspaper apparently being run by an editor and three staff. 🙂
Quatermass also seems to have taken Gilpin’s hint in the previous scene; he’s going to do the reconstruction, with Sladden only playing an advisory role. Nice acting by Andre Morell – that silent pause and those pressed lips before he says ‘Right, let’s begin’ show us all how scared Quatermass really is.
And once the generator is cut, the hull reacts, just as Quatermass theorised. Sladden also reacts; but Gilpin grabs him.
And we get the pay-off to last week’s set-up. There were two people in the ‘Pit’ when the last outbreak happened; Sladden and Miss Judd. And now we find out why that outbreak was so strong; Barbara Judd is also a conduit. She’s not as ‘taken over’ as Sladden, she can still concentrate on her job. But she can see the Martians.
So the funny machine works, and they get a recording from Barbara – which they show at the War Office. And the Minister refuses to believe it.
Yes, definitely some unconscious 50’s sexism here from Quatermass. “The susceptible brain of a young woman.” Is it the attitude of the writer? Well, that comment is just about to backfire horribly on Quatermass as the Minister promptly picks it up.
The ‘Wild Hunt’ sequence is a classic example of ‘leave the audience wanting more’. I always do feel the sequence is too short. The special effects: the jumping creatures were moved by stick puppetry; mounted on black painted sticks, then shot in front of a black backdrop. For the exploding head they cast a creature head in plaster, then filled it with gunk. When they smashed the plaster head, all the gunk came out. The rest of it is string puppetry.
Quatermass thinks the ‘Wild Hunt’ imagery is stored in the hull. He also thinks the hull awakens the powers bred into us by the Martians. The Minister thinks it’s a hallucination. The fantasies of an overwrought young woman.
So, since the hull reacts to generators, lets get lots of generators in! Really big generators! For a TV and radio outside broadcast! What could go wrong? Oh, and let’s run a cable into the hull for the cameras…
If one of the policemen looks faintly uncomfortable, that’s because they were running out of money for extras by this point and using any of the crew who could fit into a costume. He’s probably thinking that he’s supposed to be putting the costumes on the actors, not wearing them himself. 🙂
Bonus points if you spot the actor who was later to ‘appear’ an awful lot in Doctor Who. Extra bonus points if you can now spot the people in our cast who aren’t affected by the Martians.
Just as the row is hotting up nicely, the technicians inside the hull are electrocuted. Leaving an electric cable inside the hull – which starts to pulse.
We’re the Martians now.
22 February 2014 at 14:51 #25650Um, um… I know! There’s a Doctor Who convention in Minneapolis this year!
Console Room, @faegrl, GOH Sophie Aldred and Victoria Watling.
I was in Dinkytown, btw, and it was one of the years when a tornado actually made a touchdown in the Metropolitan Area. How do I always manage to time these things? 😉
22 February 2014 at 13:30 #25646@faegrl – are you in Minneapolis? Or St Paul? Just guessing; you make it sound like it’s one of the Twin Cities.
I never spent a winter in Minneapolis, though I did come a bit too close to a tornado while I was there. But I heard a lot of stories about their winters. My favourite was someone saying that Minnesotans are generally calm, thoughtful and prudent people. Because the ones that weren’t turned into popsicles…
🙂
22 February 2014 at 00:59 #25632But, but … you’re from the Planet Mongo!
Though I admit the Mongo accent does seem amazingly similar to a Scottish one. But still, if Gallifrey has a North… 😀
22 February 2014 at 00:32 #25629We’ve already done Mark Gatiss’s other guest appearances, as part of the Moffat retrospective. I don’t care how good an actor he is, we’re not doing them twice. 😈
22 February 2014 at 00:21 #25627@whisht and @fatmaninabox – given that this forum is dedicated to a programme currently produced by BBC Cymru Wales, there is a case for the forum having a slight bias towards the Welsh Rugby team.
Except when the said Welsh Rugby team should play Scotland on the 15th March; in deference to the current Scottish Doctor and current Scottish Head Writer, a strict neutrality will then need to be observed.
😉
21 February 2014 at 23:36 #25624@monochromedimension – Dalek was Robert Shearman. To date, his only episode for the TV series, though he’s done quite a few Big Finish plays.
21 February 2014 at 22:50 #25621Slight correction: there are no Doctor Who Smith episodes written by RTD. He did, of course, write for Smith in the Sarah Jane Adventures.
21 February 2014 at 22:34 #25619Okay, figuring out the dates, they are as follows.
– The End of Time: Part Two (2010) Either 16th or 23rd August
– The End of Time: Part One (2009) 16th August
– The Waters of Mars (2009) 9th August
– Planet of the Dead (2009) 2nd August
– The Next Doctor (2008) 26th July
– Journey’s End (2008) 19th July
– The Stolen Earth (2008) 19th July
– Turn Left (2008) 12th July
– Midnight (2008) 5th July
– Partners in Crime (2008) 28th June
– Voyage of the Damned (2007) 21st June
– Last of the Time Lords (2007) 14th June
– The Sound of Drums (2007) 14th June
– Utopia (2007) 7th June
– Gridlock (2007) 31st May
– Smith and Jones (2007) 24th May
– The Runaway Bride (2006) 17th May
– Doomsday (2006) 10th May
– Army of Ghosts (2006) 10th May
– Love & Monsters (2006) 3rd May
– Tooth and Claw (2006) 26th April
– New Earth (2006) 19th April
– The Christmas Invasion (2005) 12th April
– The Parting of the Ways (2005) 5th April
– Bad Wolf (2005) 5th April
– Boom Town (2005) 29th March
– The Long Game (2005) 22nd March
– World War Three (2005) 15th March
– Aliens of London (2005) 15th March
– The End of the World (2005) 8th March
– Rose (2005) 1st MarchSo, yes, technically an RTD retrospective is doable – if we guess that Series 8 isn’t likely to start before the August Bank Holiday weekend and we begin no later than next week…
🙂
21 February 2014 at 22:24 #25618@fatmaninabox – I think the suggestion pre-Quatermass was that we’d move onto a Mark Gatiss retrospective (do we include The Lazarus Experiment? On the grounds that he was the guest star?)
The idea was that Gatiss is one of the writers whose work spans every AG Doctor – he’s done scripts for Eccleston, Tennant and Smith. A Gatiss retrospective would only be about six episodes long.
Pre the 50th, we were running an AG Watch With Mother and a BG W.W.M. – so there’s nothing stopping us doing that again. Quatermass will air Episode 6 on the 1st March, so there’s a BG/Pre-Who SF slot available from the 8th onwards. An AG Who WWM could start on the 1st March. Or even tomorrow if someone was really speedy…
There are two arguments against doing an RTD retrospective. One is logistical – we’ve got thirty one episodes to get through. All the two-parters would need to be done as one viewing to be finished in time for September. I could figure out a timetable – but if we tried an episode a week, we’d still be going in late September, long after Series 8 is supposed to start.
The other is that it will be, very specifically, an Eccleston and Tennant retrospective. Because he wanted a clean break there are no Smith episodes written by RTD.
21 February 2014 at 21:39 #25614@monochromedimension – go for it!
21 February 2014 at 20:30 #25611Yes, the Radiophonic Workshop!
Quatermass is an SF/horror series, not straight horror, so they are more likely to be aliens.
I’ve heard that the bit with one of the creatures suddenly dropping down was originally an accident. It happened during rehearsal, and everyone jumped out of their skins. So they kept it in. 😉
21 February 2014 at 20:21 #25610He will most likely get a forum sooner or later for his serials.
:shudders:
Actually, it’s not invariably the admins who suggest the episode forums – I’ve suggested one or two. But when we were discussing the Sixth Doctor in the Faces of The Doctor thread, it became rather apparent that the vote for not watching a Sixth Doctor story was a little … overwhelming. Most of us had seen the Sixth on first broadcast; we did not remember it as a happy time for Doctor Who.
So we went with The Caves of Androzani. 🙂
That said, if there’s a group of you who do want to have a Watch With Mother session for the Sixth, the place to go to suggest it is Website Comments.
You’ll need a story which is readily available on the web (Daily Motion or YouTube) and at least one person who’s prepared to post each week.
20 February 2014 at 15:00 #25542@monochromedimension – not just the Fifth playing cricket. We also had the Smith Doctor in a football match. Yup, Capaldi for curling!
My favourite ‘of Rassilon’ joke was ‘the clockwork mouse of Rassilon’. It finally made it into a Virgin New Adventures novel by Paul Cornell, Happy Endings. The villain of the piece had stolen the Loom of Rassilon’s Mouse. 😉
20 February 2014 at 14:45 #25539@cedarbranchtardis – they adopted a son. The scene was storyboarded, but never filmed.
20 February 2014 at 14:40 #25537(Though I admit the connection is a bit ‘Six Degrees of Doctor Who’. Still, I confidently expect the Capaldi Doctor to display his stone-sliding prowess at some point during Series 8.)
😀
20 February 2014 at 14:30 #25535@monochromedimension – um, the current Doctor is Peter Capaldi, Peter Capaldi is Scottish, curling is a Scottish sport – no, not off-topic.
😀‘Twasn’t me who turned it into a discussion on hurling, which is mainly an Irish sport. @ScoutTheAiredale and @whisht, I’m looking at you…
20 February 2014 at 13:55 #25532@fandomcarzy – sorry, I’m dyslexic. It would be really helpful if you could include capital letters when you post – they give me a lot of clues about meaning.
Okay, so you meant that in this episode, the Grandfather God feeds off all the ‘might have been’s and never were’s’. And he’s fed an infinity of them, which leads to him choking.
What he’s feeding off, in Rings of Akhaten, is memories which are important to people. That’s seen throughout the episode. What Clara gives him is her memory – but of all the things that never happened, because her mother died young. It’s a memory, it’s important to her – but it’s infinite in scope.
What the Angels feed off is temporal energy – time energy. It’s not the person’s memories, it’s the time energy from the future that they never used up (because they were shoved backwards in time).
So the answer is ‘no’, because the Angels don’t feed off the same kind of energy as the Grandfather God. Bit like the difference between a gas cooker and an electric cooker, really. An infinite supply of electricity really isn’t going to help you with the gas cooker. 🙂
20 February 2014 at 11:49 #25526And the cry goes up throughout the land…
“Does anyone here understand curling?”
I may be totally unaware beyond ‘one of the big stone things has to get closest to the centre of the target, yes?’, but I understand medals. Congratulations to the UK Women’s team for getting a Bronze and the UK Men’s team for getting through to the finals. 😎
I wonder if Peter Capaldi knows anything about curling?
19 February 2014 at 22:19 #25489@fandomcarzy – Hi and welcome, but, wrong thread? There are no Weeping Angels in Rings of Akhaten.
Did you mean to post in the Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone thread or the Angels Take Manhattan thread?
19 February 2014 at 22:07 #25487@nick and JimTheFish
the idea that the Army in the Field was actually run by the SM/RSM was quite prevalent in the 1950s already
It was quite prevalent in Victorian times. Or Georgian times. Probably in Roman times…
The sergeant is the detail person. The officer will either (depending on their branch) be the person with the technical education or the person trained to take a tactical approach.
So in Quatermass, Colonel Breen and Captain Potter will both probably be pretty good at maths, physics and chemistry. In the 1950’s they most likely wouldn’t be graduates like Quatermass – they would have had specialist training in the army. Captain Potter’s job is to stop the bomb exploding; the Sergeant’s job is to organise the squad to do all the technical work required. It gets confusing because most of the time, he won’t really need Captain Potter to get the job done. He needs Captain Potter when there’s a UXB that doesn’t follow the standard pattern.
I think that – by the time you got to UNIT – you still had people who’d done National Service. Thing was, most of the National Service officers would’ve never got beyond 2nd Lieutenant. And part of a sergeant’s job is training the 2nd Lieutenant…
UNIT was supposed to be a very specialist organisation indeed, so it’s probably not surprising that the command structure got a little informal. 😉 Military discipline is designed to create a habit of instant obedience, in situations where the various possible tactics are known in advance but any hesitation once the right tactic is decided on is likely to get people killed.
UNIT, otoh, was invariably in situations where they hadn’t got a clue what was going on, what would work, or what that lunatic in the cape was doing. 🙂 In those circumstances it’s not uncommon for the specialist team to dump normal discipline in favour of everyone throwing in ideas.
@craig – don’t get me onto the ‘intern-isation’ of the arts. 😈
19 February 2014 at 09:59 #25450@faegrl – the melting clock is a ‘special effects failure’. Apparently it looked ever so much better in the studio. 🙂
16 February 2014 at 19:52 #25366I wonder whether Matt’s bow tie would have seemed so important if the writers hadn’t chosen to make it so? “Bow ties are cool” and so on. But I suppose it really depends on your point of view.
Well, yes, because we don’t know if the writers were feeding off Matt Smith. Actors very often find that they need a particular costume item to be ‘in’ the character.
Was the bow tie important because of the ‘bow ties are cool’ running joke? Or was it important because Matt Smith didn’t feel like he ‘was’ the Doctor unless he had his bow tie on? And then the writers started riffing on that… in a way, the whole of The Eleventh Hour was a journey to that bow tie. 😉
Certainly when the Doctor ‘retires’ during The Snowmen, he doesn’t wear a bow tie. And when Matt Smith has his ‘farewell’ scene in The Time of The Doctor he very deliberately takes the tie off. To me, it felt more like the bow tie symbolised something very important to the actor – and the writers and audience picked up on that.
16 February 2014 at 17:52 #25361@faegrl – the fez was supposed to be a silly joke, a one-off to help everyone follow the time-loop.
But as Beth Willis presciently said, once you give Matt Smith a fez, the problem is going to be taking it off him. “It’ll be glued to his head.”
Yup. 🙂
@arbutus – The Third had his velvet jackets, the Seventh his hat, and while I don’t really remember Patrick Troughton, his recorder seems to be referred to quite often. The Fourth was, of course, the scarf. The Fifth was the celery. I don’t think either the Eighth or the Ninth really had an iconic costume icon.
The First didn’t either – but that was because he wasn’t ‘The First’ during his run; there was no other Doctor. His entire costume was emblematic of ‘The Doctor’ – it wasn’t until Troughton that they needed to find some kind of costume motif to start distinguishing the various Doctors from their predecessor.
It could be that they’re keeping Capaldi’s signature item hidden for as long as possible, or he might simply not have one. The thing that’s occurred to me is that we’re going from ‘bow-tie’ to ‘no-tie’. That might be entirely deliberate; something that’ll make a whole lot more sense when we see the first episode. 🙂
16 February 2014 at 08:51 #25351We’ve done rewatches of Before Gap Who on this site – so if you want to check out other people’s opinions about particular stories, they are:
The Talons of Weng-Chiang (Tom Baker) (Mad as a forum full of bonkers theorists)
and Ghost Light (Sylvester McCoy) (Madder than a forum full of bonkers theorists – even the cast didn’t understand what was going on).
🙂15 February 2014 at 21:18 #25330Episode 4: ‘The Enchanted’.
They’ve switched one of the live cameras around for the spaceship interior; it’s now shooting from the ‘control room’, the actors framed by the dead monsters.
Roney is enthralled by the science; he’s a paleontologist – this is as thrilling as discovering a prehistoric body beautifully preserved by a bog. And probably as smelly – everyone else is busy trying not to throw up.
Quatermass helpfully explains the principle behind the preservation. No bacteria, no decomposition. The decomposition only started when our bacteria-laden air got in.
Quatermass and Fullerlove have met before, btw, though in fact both are being played by different actors. Breen, however, makes a terrible mistake. Quatermass knows Fullerlove well enough to keep on his good side; Breen kicks him out.
The horned demons – is this why the horned demon/horned deity appears across human cultures? Did these ‘Martians’ visit Earth in the past, to be remembered by all our ancient cultures?
You can see from John Stratton’s (Captain Potter) acting that he’s increasingly worried about Colonel Breen. That’s the only way we have of knowing that Breen’s acting out of character. Very out of character; he’s a professional soldier and it’s strongly implied (“I know the smell of death and how long it lasts”) that he’s seen front-line active service. But he’s terrified. So terrified that he goes for an obviously false ‘common sense’ explanation.
Quatermass, meanwhile, is following the evidence where it leads. Creatures from another planet, hominids that don’t fit the evolutionary pattern. Were they altered by the Martians? Has our evolution been adapted to suit Martian goals?
The Minister is so upset, he lets slip that Breen was supposed to take over the British Rocket Group. He certainly doesn’t like Quatermass’s ideas about their biological manipulation of our human ancestors. The Hobb’s Lane spaceship is only one of a fleet; one which crashed and killed all on board.
The Minister prefers a plausible common-sense explanation to consulting experts; let’s get things back to normal instead of panicking people with 5 million year old alien invasions. ‘A false alarm’ is a much safer story.
Just to contrast with the ‘hoax’, the squaddies remind us that the spacecraft is a) giving them frostbite and b) the stories predate German bombs. Meanwhile Barbara Judd needs to get some notes: just as Sladden is left alone to clear up his equipment.
As @craig says, the final minutes of this episode (the part that had me wishing for a sofa and a teddy-bear last week) are light-years ahead of 1950’s television. You suddenly realise why the BBC had decided to warn people in the 6pm trailer that Quatermass might not be suitable for those of a nervous disposition.
If you haven’t watched the episode – go watch it now. Unless, of course, you’re of ‘a nervous disposition.’ 🙂
Okay. So how the hell did they manage all this in 1959?
Firstly, the final scenes are all filmed, not ‘live’. It wouldn’t have been possible to do this level of special effects live. This was groundbreaking TV. The spanner effect was achieved by magnets, hidden underneath the planking. The cables are being moved by compressed air jets. The planks are being manipulated using an old stage technique, though – very fine fishing line.
The coffee stall is also partly very fine fishing line, and partly people off-camera (including Nigel Kneale) chucking crockery at Richard Shaw (Sladden). [This is an effect still seen in Doctor Who today – Silence in the Library used the ‘technicians off-camera throwing the books’ method].
The final scene, with the ground moving under Sladden, was achieved by nailing half-round pieces of timber onto webbing, putting a tarpaulin over that, then evenly scattering gravel over that. Pull timber as required. Simple, but unbelievably effective.
Sweet dreams. 😀
12 February 2014 at 12:22 #25231One thing I didn’t get was the hole in the door
It appears all by itself. Sladden states quite firmly that it was nowhere near the place he’d been drilling.
I could have sworn I saw a trick shot where they threw the photos at the newshound. Surely the camera couldn’t swing that fast and true?!?
It was a really good intercut between the two cameras being used. The first camera (focussed on the editor and reporters) swings round as the editor throws the clipboard, and then the director cut to the second camera – which was already focussed on Fullerlove – as the first camera begins to lose the shot.
I agree that this is the episode where we see Breem at his best. He’s just as focussed on solving the problem as Quatermass; we can see the two of them beginning to develop a working relationship.
ScaryB – yes, I paid for being a bad Bluesqueakpip and running ahead. Next week’s episode gets a BSP rating of ‘behind the sofa AND clutching teddy bear’. 😀
11 February 2014 at 23:20 #25222I always liked the writer Helene Hanff’s story about Lord of the Rings. She was, at the time, acting as a book reader for a major movie studio, writing reports on properties that they might bid on for options.
She got handed Lord of the Rings. In fact, she got handed the proofs of Lord of the Rings. Everyone was so convinced that this was a hot property that the studio had paid someone to ‘borrow’ the printer’s proofs over the weekend. Whatever happened, these proofs had to be back early Monday morning.
So she had to not only read all three volumes (plus appendices) between Friday evening and early Monday morning, she had to make notes and write a report on characters (all the main characters), plot (how many sub-plots?), settings (they go where?) and potential-as-a-film. While good at most types of English lit, she wasn’t even a fan of the type of heroic sagas that Tolkien based Rings on.
Did I say she had to do all this by Monday morning?
She said her bill came in at:
Fellowship of the Ring: Double standard charge.
The Two Towers: Double standard charge.
Return of the King: Double standard charge.Mental torture: Quadruple standard charge.
Apparently the studio paid up…
🙂11 February 2014 at 12:41 #25205@adt1957 – yes, using ‘f’ for ‘th’ is very common in some English accents.
The late Barry Jackson played Drax with a pronounced ‘London’ accent, so ‘Feta Sigma’ is exactly how he said it. 😀
Rowan Atkinson’s Doctor can be seen in The Curse of Fatal Death, a Comic Relief spoof written by one Steven Moffat.
I wonder what happened to Mr Moffat? Anyone heard of him since? 😈
11 February 2014 at 11:56 #25202I really enjoyed the extended party scenes
Which are in the flaming book!
It really annoyed me at the time that so many critics were complaining about the songs (and the dwarves sing! twice!) and then went on to mutter darkly about deviations from the book. Make your mind up. Do you want a faithful adaptation (which would include songs) or not? You can’t have it both ways.
My own attitude is that a film isn’t and never can be a truly faithful adaptation of a book; they’re not the same medium. The writer/director has to take the book as their source material – and then work out how to tell their own version of the story.
The extended version of Unexpected Journey has even more songs, btw. 😉 Also a nice little scene of a very young Bilbo whacking Gandalf with a toy sword.
11 February 2014 at 11:27 #25197@adt1957 – Theta Sigma is a nickname. Sorry. It’s two letters from the Greek Alphabet. It’s pretty appropriate – according to Wikipedia, theta was seen in classical times as a warning of possible death and used in voting for the death penalty. Sigma doesn’t have any classical connotations, but it’s used a lot in science to stand for an unknown quantity.
The unknown quantity who’s a warning of possible death/danger. Yup, that’s our Doctor. 🙂
You can see it on the message River sends to the Doctor in The Pandorica Opens; it’s also referenced in The Happiness Patrol.
10 February 2014 at 21:30 #25183@purofilion
‘Chances’ -is that the song or the Band?
Song. The band is called ‘Athlete’ and Chances is from their album ‘Tourist’.
You might also recognise their song ‘Wires’.
10 February 2014 at 15:42 #25173Yes, sad news.
If you have the DVD of ‘The Daleks’, Christopher Barry is one of the contributors to the voice over commentary.
9 February 2014 at 22:54 #25156maybe we should flame people.
Only if you pop a kettle on top of the flame and offer them a cup of tea afterwards. 🙂
Tom Baker a ham, indeed. Tom Baker was no ham. Tom Baker was an entire delicatessen. 😈
9 February 2014 at 00:12 #25125@monochromedimension – We’re partway through Quatermass and the Pit.
Yes, yes, I know it isn’t Doctor Who. But it’s both one of the precursors to Doctor Who and a marvellous slice of television history.
Personally, I’ve just made the mistake of nipping ahead to Episode 4. A mistake because I watched it on my own, at night, with a storm outside. 😮 😯
Yeah. Advice for those watching next Saturday. Don’t watch it on your own, at night, with a storm outside. Episode 4 is, um, seriously creepy. Seriously creepy.
The discussion on Episode 1 is here and the discussion on Episode 2 is here.
8 February 2014 at 21:39 #25115@Monochrome Dimension
there are two Seventh Doctors.
Yes, I noticed that as well.
Clearly the Seventh got lumbered with the trickiest set of calculations – it took him his entire regeneration to work out where the decimal point went!
🙂8 February 2014 at 19:45 #25111Things are indeed getting much spookier. We start with Private West, shaken and horrified. Claustrophobia? Overheard the ‘boffins’ talking about black magic?
It doesn’t seem so. Again, I’m admiring the adventurous direction on this episode; the cameras are set up so that one camera is at the (unseen) end of the ‘UXB’, shooting straight into the interior, facing the front. The others are all on the outside. It allows the action to move quickly between outside and the inside.
Ah, those days when they thought brandy was good for shock… 🙂
A neat bit of undercutting of the sceptical attitude in the script. No one believes Private West – until Barbara Judd starts reading out the 1927 description. West, of course, is too young to know about the 1927 outbreak.
Another way of telling the difference between the filmed inserts and ‘live’ – when the actors are enthusiastically digging up piles of mud, it’s filmed. When they’re trying not to pick-axe the studio floor – it’s studio. 🙂 But the deeply unconvincing digging does its job; Corporal Gibson is able to give the hidden hatch a good whack. But if it unscrewed from the inside – who or what came out?
Ghost stories. Hob’s Lane has a reputation for ghost stories that keep getting earlier and earlier and the ‘UXB’ keeps getting stranger and stranger. The material it’s made of can resist concentrated heat.
And both Quatermass and Breen are getting increasingly worried. Ghost stories. They don’t want these stories going wild; even Captain Potter doesn’t want West talking to the other men. Ghost stories have a habit of spreading. Ghost stories also have a tradition that it’s cold where ghosts appear; “it’s getting perishing cold down here.” Even the birds are freezing to death. Captain Potter and the Sergeant are getting what looks very like frostbite.
I always like Sladden, the drill operator. Richard Shaw was in Doctor Who as well; Underworld, Frontier in Space and an early Hartnell. Equally, by this point, I’m starting to want to smack Colonel Breem.
They’re both lovely performances; Anthony Bushell did generally prefer to be called Major Bushell rather than Mr Bushell, but reports from his extensive work with Lawrence Olivier and as a BBC producer suggest that his talent for playing military martinets was observation-from-experience rather than his real personality. He was invariably described as ‘affable’, ‘fun’ and ‘a great joy to have around’.
Whee! It’s the BBC Radiophonic Workshop! Providing the spooky sound effects for the mysterious ‘echo’. The one that flies all around the Pit. Incidentally, you may notice that the Pit appears to be dug deeper and deeper. It’s not – the floor always has to be the studio floor. What they did instead was raise the walls higher and higher and move the builders hut ever upwards. In episode one it was on the floor of the studio; then it was at the top of a ramp, now it’s up a ramp and a ladder.
One of the very few faults in Nigel Kneale’s script is that he appears to have confused ‘paleontologist’ with ‘anthropologist’ – or maybe it was just that he needed Roney to be expert in both fields. Anyway, the point is that the ghost stories about Hob’s Lane go back centuries. And always end by saying that the place was ‘long notorious’ for weird happenings.
In case you’d forgotten that this is a science-fiction serial and not a horror story, Quatermass posits that ‘ghost stories’ might simply be a description of genuine but badly understood/observed phenomena.
Nice to see that, even in the 1950’s, you couldn’t escape from journalists. 😉
The drill bit didn’t work, but a hole is slowly appearing in the bulkhead. And breaks through by itself – with an inrush of air. Quatermass has worked out, meanwhile, that it’s all about disturbances of the ground. Every time the ground around Hob’s Lane is disturbed, these events occur. And they’re always described as frightening, as evil.
The demons.
That’s the last shot of the episode; a monster that could grace any episode of Doctor Who with pride. I can’t imagine what impact it must have made on a TV audience in 1959. Horned, three legged, vaguely like a giant insect – and dead.
They’ve been dead for a long time.
8 February 2014 at 17:37 #25104Was it in one seamless transition from the outside shot
No. It was actually a very clever (for the day) intercut between the pre-filmed shot of Quatermass walking into the house from the outside and then the ‘live’ shot-from-the-inside entrance into the house itself.
I’m watching on the DVD version, which has been cleaned up and digitally remastered. You can generally tell which is which from the quality; the filmed inserts are clean and crisp, the ‘live’ is – well, as wobbly as befits a very early experiment in TV recording.
They’re often using the pre-filmed parts to take the show away from a collection of filmed interiors. TV in those days was seen as an ‘intimate’ medium, ideally suited to the kitchen sink type of drama.
There’s another nice transition with the final scene of the episode; from the filmed shot of the ‘bomb’ exterior, making much use of mud and wide shots, to the live studio interior with the actor playing Westie giving his best horror-acting in close-up.
[The DVD is ‘The Quatermass Collection’, available from both Amazon and the BBC shop.]
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