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S.P.C.A.

Published 30th November 2023

TV Drama

AUGUSTUS: What a gift you Greeks have. Incidentally, the battle, you know: it wasn’t like that. No, not at all. But you described it poetically, I understand that. It was poetic licence. I’m used to that.

— I, Claudius, Episode 1, “A Touch of Murder”

Watching I, Claudius for the first time recently was a surprising experience.

It wasn’t surprising because it was great. Of course it was great. Of course it was one of the greatest television shows ever made. I’d been told that for years, I just had to get round to watching it. No, the surprise was in how damn funny it was, an aspect of the show I had somehow managed to avoid being informed about. Which I guess is fairly ignorant regardless; even iPlayer describes it as an “acclaimed blackly comic historical drama series”.

LIVIA: These games are being degraded by the increasing use of professional tricks to stay alive, and I won’t have it. So put on a good show, and there will be plenty of money for the living and a decent burial for the dead.

Brilliant though the show is, initial reviews of the series were predictably mixed. And one review in particular has become somewhat notorious. I first became aware of it from Wikipedia:

“The initial reception of the show in the UK was negative, with The Guardian commenting sarcastically in its first review that ‘there should be a society for the prevention of cruelty to actors.'”

This isn’t just an unsourced piece of Wikipedia nonsense; the citation seems reasonable enough. It comes from a November 2012 article in The New York Times, “Imperial Rome Writ Large and Perverse”:

“But looking back wryly weeks ago on the original production, [director] Mr. Wise recalled that it did not seem destined for greatness. In Britain, The Guardian review of “I Claudius,” he said, began, ‘There should be a society for the prevention of cruelty to actors.'”

That article thankfully gives the source for all of its quotes from Herbert Wise: “a documentary that accompanies the 35th-anniversary I, Claudius DVD set”. It isn’t too difficult to work out exactly which documentary: it’s I, Claudius: A Television Epic, which was made for the 2002 DVD release of the series.

Certainly The New York Times is quoting Wise more-or-less correctly; here’s what he says in that documentary verbatim:

HERBERT WISE: I remember The Guardian critic – whose name I remember but I won’t quote it now – starting his criticism by saying: “There ought to be a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Actors.”

This single quote is responsible for all the repeated anecdotes surrounding our supposed Guardian review. The New York Times article itself is syndicated everywhere for a start, but it’s spread well beyond that. For instance, in April 2022, The New European ran a piece called “The show that started a TV toga party”:1

“The show was a modest ratings hit for BBC2 (averaging an audience of around 2.5 million an episode), but reviews were initially dismissive, with The Guardian snottily proclaiming: “There should be a society for the prevention of cruelty to actors.” But I, Claudius was soon re-evaluated and won greater popularity with repeat transmissions, as well as three Baftas.”

The line has also started to make into books; Arthur J. Pomeroy’s A Companion to Ancient Greece and Rome on Screen (Wiley, 2017) directly quotes Wise:

“Herbert Wise remembered the Guardian critic “starting his criticism by saying ‘There ought to be a society for the prevention of cruelty to actors'” (I, Claudius: A Television Epic, 2002).”

And coming right up to date, in August 2023 the Socialist Worker published the article “Roman history made into classic TV viewing”:

“Initially critics tore it apart. “It was so badly received in its first two weeks,” recalled Sian Phillips, who played Livia, “because it was so different.” The Guardian – which now says it is a masterpiece – ­loftily proclaimed, ‘There should be a society for the prevention of cruelty to actors.'”

Here’s the problem: The Guardian said nothing of the damn sort.

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  1. Though the URL seems to indicate it was originally called “How I, Claudius Kickstarted Game of Thrones”. The original headline is better. ↩

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Nightmare of an Archivist

Published 2nd June 2023

Life / TV Comedy / TV Drama

They say moving house is one of the most stressful things you can do in your life. This is, of course, entirely correct. This is the case in triple when you haven’t thrown out enough of your old shit before you move. Finding the Donald Duck tracksuit I wore when I was ten was a low point. Actually packing it away and moving it anyway was even lower.

Also present is boxes and boxes of my schoolwork. Some of which is pretty good, and some of which is utter bullshit. Here’s a good one:

Here’s a bullshit one:

And some, well…

I presume we’re at least a couple of years away from ITV commissioning Masturbate and Shit Yourself.

Anyway, all this rubbish got loaded up into storage years ago. (We’ve been trying to move since the start of the pandemic. It’s finally happened, three years later.) And as I was idly talking to my mother the other night, she revealed that she used to have some of my best schoolwork… and a fair amount of it got chucked out when she moved to London. Not all of it. But some.

In other words: I’ve kept loads of absolute nonsense, and some of my better stuff ended up in the bin. No matter how hard you try, variants of the above will happen. Sometimes, the things you put aside to keep, are the exact things which end up being destroyed.

Including things rather more important than my dumbass schoolwork.

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Wiped.

Published 1st June 2023

TV Comedy / TV Drama

Over the past year, I’ve occasionally indulged in one of those answer anonymous questions things on Twitter. Which is amusing, if only for some of the questions I get through which I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole publicly. Yes, especially that one.

But one rather more harmless recurring question I get is variants of the following:

What programme wiped from the archives do you most wish existed to watch today?

And, of course I have my answers. On a day when I’m feeling particularly culturally switched-on, I might wish to see The Confidence Course (1965), a very early Dennis Potter effort for The Wednesday Play. On a less cultured day, I might be tempted by The Gnomes of Dulwich (1969), a Jimmy Perry sitcom about gnomes. I repeat: a Jimmy Perry sitcom about gnomes.

But I’m always a little wary of answering the question. Perhaps the following will explain why. Yesterday, the brilliant blog Forgotten Television Drama posted their latest entry in their “Rediscovering the Half-Hour Play” series. And one line in particular caught my eye.

“Associated-Rediffusion’s Tales of Mystery (1961-63) anthology was one of the earliest manifestations of the genre, but unfortunately none of the 29 dramas made for the series have survived.”

Tales of Mystery. A programme I had never, ever heard of before. And a programme which doesn’t tend to show up in these kinds of lists about “most-wanted missing TV shows”.

The programme wiped from the archives which I most want to see? It’ll be some piece of incredible work which I’ve never heard of, and probably never will. The lost material isn’t just a few programmes that might catch your eye. It’s huge swathes of television, most of which never ends up on any list. Most of it won’t even be mentioned in a blog post.

Yes, I specialise in making fun questions utterly depressing and faintly infuriating, why do you ask?

BBC100: The Quatermass Experiment (2005)

Published 21st April 2023

TV Drama

For more on this BBC100 series of posts, read this introduction.

BBC100 logo, with Professor Quatermass speaking to camera

Right at the beginning of this series of articles celebrating the BBC’s centenary, we looked at Nineteen Eighty-Four, a drama broadcast live to the nation some seventy years ago. Why was it broadcast live? Because that’s just how things were done. Videotape was still in its infancy, and not in use by the BBC at all back in 1954.

But as television matured, and videotape became standard, making fiction this way slowly fell out of favour. There were still plenty of live programmes, sure – sport, news, entertainment – but drama fell by the wayside. Of course productions wanted more control over what they were making, and once it became easier and cheaper to pre-record everything, that’s exactly what they did. Besides, what did being live add to the experience anyway?

The answer is: rather a lot. And sure enough, slowly but surely, we began to see a revival. Live drama, not made because it was the only possible way to make something, but because it was a fascinating way to make television in its own right. We just needed some distance in order to see it.

The clear catalyst for this revival was the American medical series ER, and their 1997 episode “Ambush”. Charting a day in the life of the unit through the lens of a PBS documentary film crew, this was a stroke of genius for their big experiment: this kind of story meant that the show didn’t need to replicate its traditional look. Instead, the handheld documentary style was the point, and its rough and ready nature could work in the show’s favour.

Three years later, for Coronation Street‘s 40th anniversary, ITV decided to pull a similar trick. After all, its very first episode in 1960 had gone out live – what better way to celebrate than to replicate how the show used to be made? This time, there was no documentary cheat: the show had to look like a normal episode. Still, with Coronation Street still being shot multi-camera as it always had been, rather than in a more cinematic single-camera style, such cheats weren’t necessary. Any given scene was essentially shot the same as it always was: it was doing those scenes one after the other without a recording break which was the real work. And, of course, getting just one chance to get it all right.

The episode was a success, and both sides of the Atlantic seemed eager for more. In the same year, CBS broadcast Fail Safe starring George Clooney; a one-off drama rather than part of a continuing series. It seemed obvious this was where UK television would go next. And yet nobody quite seemed able to take the plunge. ITV aired a live episode of The Bill in 2003, to celebrate 20 years of the police drama. But when would someone in the UK dare to do a standalone live play?

That moment finally came on the 2nd April, 2005. As the continuity announcer intoned:

“Live drama on the BBC for the first time in over 20 years, here and now on BBC Four. Not for the faint-hearted – on the sofa or in the studio – thrills and chills, and some flashing lights, as Jason Fleming, Mark Gatiss, and David Tennant star in The Quatermass Experiment.”

The Quatermass Experiment was the perfect choice. The original serial was broadcast live on the BBC in 1953, and – like the Nineteen Eighty-Four adaptation – was written by Nigel Kneale. It was the first science fiction series specifically written for an adult British television audience, it being neither aimed at kids, or an adaptation of a previous work. And while it’s gone down as a seminal piece of television, and was later adapted into a film, only the first two episodes of the original serial survive. The last four aren’t even lost – they were simply never recorded in the first place, the results of the experimental process of recording the first two being deemed unsatisfactory.

Inevitably, the 2005 version is slightly condensed; the original serial was three hours long, while the 2005 remake is a shade over an hour and a half. But the increased pace of the production means that far less is cut than you might think, and indeed the original scripts were used as the basis for the adaptation. Moreover, the central story of an alien presence travelling to earth via a manned mission to space, and the horrific mutation of the single remaining crew member, remains as chilling as ever. The biggest change from the original production is swapping the original climax at Westminster Abbey for one at the Tate Modern. Ostensibly done for production reasons, it makes a certain amount of thematic sense too; many people in 2005 would find the Tate Modern rather closer to their spiritual centre.

Indeed, the fascinating thing about watching the production, much like Nineteen Eighty-Four, is just how quickly you forget that the programme is live. Oh, it’s there in the back of your mind, sure. But the show isn’t interesting because it was live. It’s interesting and it was live. Watching a production performing a high wire act of keeping a live drama from collapsing around its ears doesn’t keep your interest for an hour and a half. Story and characters do. Same as it ever was.

Instead, the effect is more subtle; the live nature gives the drama a life that is difficult to replicate any other way. Characters speak with an urgency and a reality which is sometimes difficult to achieve when you’ve got a whole day to get it “perfect”. Perfection in drama can be a fool’s errand; if every cut is perfect, sometimes all you can feel is the artifice. Artifice is not always a bad thing in drama, but neither is it a universally good thing either. The trick, surely, is to have a range of approaches to our television.

Inevitably, there was the odd issue with the production. Pope John Paul II had the temerity to die that day; a caption was placed over the programme pointing viewers to the BBC’s news channel. (It’s difficult to imagine similar news warranting such a caption today.) One scene ended with an unscripted off-screen crash. And poor Adrian Bower as journalist James Fullalove forgot his lines during one scene, resulting in a few agonising seconds of the programme going entirely off-piste. But overall, it was an absolute triumph.

And yet, if you buy the programme on DVD today, none of the above issues are present. Sure, the caption about the Pope was put on by BBC presentation rather than the actual production; you wouldn’t expect that to be included. But the crash has mysteriously gone, and the scene where Bower dried has been entirely replaced with a recording from the dress rehearsal. More seriously, the entire programme has been recut; shots changed, removed, or trimmed. It is no longer a representation of how the programme looked on the night. If you watch that DVD, don’t be fooled: despite the caption at the beginning claiming to be a live production, by the time the editors had done their work, that simply isn’t true any more.

Sadly, our fabled revival of live drama in the UK seems to have stalled somewhat as well. In 2015, I had the pleasure of being in BBC presentation for a live episode of EastEnders; the same year, ITV did a beautiful live version of The Sound of Music. But since then, things have tailed off. The BBC’s centenary would have been the perfect chance to put on a production much like the 2005 Quatermass; perhaps an adaptation of its sequels Quatermass II and Quatermass and the Pit? Or perhaps, God forbid, something entirely new? Instead, we got nothing.

Oh, there have been rumours. Casualty was supposed to do a live episode to celebrate its 30th anniversary in 2016; this never happened, and was replaced by a decidedly non-live episode in 2017, albeit done in one take. Over on ITV, there were rumours of a live episode of Emmerdale last year to celebrate the show’s 50th anniversary, after the success of the one for their 40th in 2012; instead, the show’s executive producer Jane Hudson gave interviews to the press specifically explaining that they wouldn’t do another.

Instead, over the past few years, comedy seems to have taken up the space. Mrs Brown’s Boys did live episodes in 2016 and 2021; Not Going Out did a live episode in 2018, as did Inside No. 9. The latter was certainly more of a drama than a comedy, but the other two examples are audience sitcoms; and specifically, the kind of audience sitcoms where, if things go wrong, it doesn’t matter. Both Brendan O’Carroll and Lee Mack are the kind of performers who can make hay out of mistakes. The potential destruction of the show’s reality is a boon for them, not something to fear. In today’s social-media-driven world, where mistakes by actors can easily be amplified, maybe it’s all eminently understandable.

So yet again, TV takes the safe way out, and everyone’s happy. And something like 2005’s Quatermass becomes not part of the new vanguard, but of something that we can happily place in the past. Again.

Until next time?

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BBC100: The Nigel Barton Plays (1965)

Published 18th April 2023

TV Drama

For more on this BBC100 series of posts, read this introduction.

BBC 100 logo, with Nigel Barton walking with the road

Very few things change overnight in television. Sometimes, it takes decades.

We’ve just talked about Nineteen Eighty-Four, a drama broadcast live to the nation in 1954, just because that’s just how things were done. Over the following few years, recording your programmes beforehand began to become a thing you could sensibly do. But it took a very long time for live drama to go away entirely. As late as 1983, BBC Two broadcast a run of five weekly plays, live from Pebble Mill in Birmingham.1

But there became a tipping point where live drama, once the norm, became markedly less common. By the time of The Wednesday Play (1964-70), an anthology series of mostly-original single stories, every episode of the programme was pre-recorded. But live or not, it’s the scripts that matter, and enough scripts were needed to create a valuable opportunity for writers new to television. Stand up, a certain Dennis Potter.

Dennis Potter became that rare breed of television writer: one who a normal person who isn’t obsessed with TV might actually have heard of. The son of a coal miner, he ended up writing some of the most acclaimed drama serials British television has ever produced: Pennies from Heaven (1978), The Singing Detective (1986), and Lipstick on Your Collar (1993). Outside of these, he is perhaps best remembered now for his startling Without Walls interview with Melvyn Bragg in 1994, candidly discussing his work, his childhood, and his terminal cancer.

But his very first scripts for television were for The Wednesday Play in 1965. Alas, as ever with programmes of this vintage, we come up against the spectre of wiping. So much of this era of television simply doesn’t survive; the master tapes were considered simply too valuable not to be reused. Which means that Dennis Potter’s very first television work, The Confidence Course – a satire of Dale Carnegie and his self-improvement mantras – no longer exists. His second play Alice, about Lewis Carroll, luckily survives. But it was with his final two plays of the year, Stand Up, Nigel Barton and Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton, that Potter hit creative paydirt.

Both plays are highly autobiographical, as Potter was wont to do throughout his career; but even by those standards Stand Up, Nigel Barton – broadcast on the 8th December 1965 – is probably most autobiographical thing he ever wrote. The play details the early years of the eponymous Nigel Barton, and directly mirrors Potter’s journey from a working-class kid growing up in the Forest of Dean, to his years at Oxford University. Here was a play which really did get a brand new voice out there to the viewing public, telling a story that really hadn’t been told in this way before. Class is, of course, at the heart of the piece, but not in a way which gives us easy heroes or villains. Potter resolutely refuses to condemn or romanticise his working-class roots; the point he makes is that the pain he felt moving between classes is something worth acknowledging and examining, rather than being something to hide.

Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton, broadcast just a week later, has nearly a completely different cast: the wonderful Keith Barron as Nigel is the only link. Again, the play is autobiographical; this time, under examination is Potter’s experiences the previous year as a parliamentary candidate. What’s striking is that the play’s essential theme – pragmatism versus idealism in politics – isn’t the only part of the play relevant today; so are many of the details. The character of Jack Hay, Barton’s political confidant, is still endlessly seen in political satire decades later. There is surely a direct line between Jack’s brutal pragmatism, and Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It.

In both plays, Potter sets out his stall for the years to come. His obsessions with class and childhood are obvious, but we also have the beginnings of his distrust of pure realism in drama. And if his breaking the fourth wall seems more tame today than at the time, it’s still startling to see Nigel’s childhood portrayed not by using a cast of kids, but with a cast of adults. All sitting in a classroom as though it was the most normal thing in the world.

And then there’s the music. Potter eventually became well-known for his use of pop tunes in his work, with seemingly whole serials built around the idea. Yet somehow, his use of a contemporary song by The Animals to underline Nigel’s despair at his roots is still one of the most powerful examples of all. “We gotta get out of this place / If it’s the last thing we ever do…”

Despite most of his well-known work today being multi-episode serials rather than single plays, Potter wrote further single scripts for Play for Today, the successor to The Wednesday Play. (His most famous was Brimstone and Treacle, made in 1976, but so controversial internally at the BBC that it wasn’t aired until 1987.) But just as live drama slowly disappeared over the decades, so too did the single play, replaced with those limited run serials, or full continuing series. We can point to the odd exception, but that’s precisely the point: they’re an exception. Even the most convincing example – the brilliant Inside No. 9 – is written by the same two people every week, rather than being a way of new writers to make their mark.

We hear a lot about the need for diversity in television, and let’s be clear: that aim is both correct and laudable. But at the same time, television makes it more difficult for those new and diverse voices to make it to the screen. Bringing back the single play on a proper, permanent basis would be a way of increasing the opportunities for new, diverse writers. Do we want to actually bring those new voices to the screen, much like The Wednesday Play did with Dennis Potter?

Or do we just want to talk about it instead, and merely pretend we’re doing something?

  1. These were The Battle of Waterloo, Redundant!, Night Kids, Cargo Kings and Japanese Style, and aired from the 13th February 1983. ↩

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BBC100: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954)

Published 17th April 2023

TV Drama

For more on this BBC100 series of posts, read this introduction.

BBC 100 logo, with Winston and Julia

One of my favourite television programmes has a bit of a problem, you know. It doesn’t actually exist any more. What’s more, it never really did, unless you happened to be watching it at the time.

That kind of thing can easily happen when discussing programmes that are nearly 70 years old, like Nineteen Eighty-Four. Because the original version of this production, broadcast on the BBC on the 12th December 1954, wasn’t even wiped: it was never actually recorded in the first place.1 Down the memory hole, if you will. As per all television drama at the time, it was performed to the nation live, albeit with a few filmed inserts shot on location. And if something wasn’t recorded, it disappeared for good.

Perhaps that sounds puzzling, unless you spend a lot of time deep in the mires of archive television. It’s surely difficult to appreciate the idea that the first episode of Stranger Things might disappear completely. Though maybe not impossible. It’s worth noting exactly how many YouTube videos end up… gone. If television used to be more ephemeral, it’s worth remembering that huge chunks of the internet are exactly that right now. Life changes less than we think over the years.

Still, for our appreciation of this play – a fairly straight adaptation of Orwell’s novel, with a screenplay by Nigel Kneale – we only have its repeat to judge it on, four days later on the 16th December. Well, I say repeat. To do that repeat in 1954, you had to bring back all the cast and crew, and mount the entire production again. Moreover, due to controversy about the initial production’s content, the BBC’s Head of Television Drama Michael Barry ended up having to give a stout defence of the programme… live, on-camera, just before air. I’d like to see them try that these days before a particularly violent EastEnders.

Some people reported at the time that the remount lost a little of the magic of that original broadcast; in 2023, it’s impossible to judge. But enough of the magic was certainly retained to make it a remarkable piece of television. I get the idea that I’m supposed to say that the power of the play has diminished today, with boundaries having been pushed far beyond what was acceptable in 1954. While it’s difficult to imagine politicians being up in arms about it now – they save that for the dangerous and terrifying Joe Lycett on Sunday morning political programmes – Nineteen Eighty-Four really does retain a raw power which makes it unnerving to watch today.

But then, how could it not? Television isn’t purely interesting because of shock value. If that were true, this industry would be a depressing one to work in indeed. There’s far more to the play than that, not least its cast. Peter Cushing is of course excellent as Winston Smith, the man broken by a totalitarian state. But Leonard Sachs as Mr. Charrington, the man who betrays Winston, is possibly my favourite performance: and truly somebody who figured out early that when a television camera gets close, you can afford to underplay things.

For me, the true horror doesn’t come when Winston arrives in Room 101, and faces his greatest fear. It doesn’t even quite come in the dreaded Newspeak, and all the propaganda and revisionism of the Ministry of Truth. It comes in the one, single act of betrayal by Charrington. Just one person not being who you thought they were. And if that isn’t literally the most relatable piece of drama in the world, I don’t know what is.

As well as not having its original performance recorded, Nineteen Eighty-Four suffered from problems at the other end of its life, too. For years, a DVD release was planned and then forbidden, due to rights issues involving Michael Radford’s film version of the novel. There were some TV showings in 1994 and 2003, but you weren’t actually allowed to own it. (The heavy irony here considering the subject matter is almost too much; if you wrote it into your own script, you’d be told off for being too obvious.) Finally, in April 2022, the BBC version got a proper release by the BFI – and on Blu-ray, with the original film sequences rescanned and presented in true HD for the first time.

If you want to dip your toe into archive BBC drama, there is no finer starting point.

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  1. At least, not in its entirety. Internal documentation and contemporary reports suggest a 20 minute excerpt may have been recorded “for technical and archive purposes”. This footage almost certainly no longer exists, if it ever did. Regardless, there is no suggestion that the first broadcast of the play was ever recorded in full. ↩

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Carré On Screaming

Published 29th January 2021

Film / TV Drama

Here’s something touching, from the official Stanley Kubrick Twitter account1:

That message, from le Carré:

“Dear Stanley – Just maybe, this time?”

Kubrick, in his reply:

“Unhappily, the problem is still pretty much as I fumbled and bumbled it out to you on the phone yesterday. Essentially: how do you tell a story it took the author 165,000 (my guess) good and necessary words to tell, with 12,000 words (about the number of words you get to say in a two hour movie, based on 150wpm speaking rate, less 30% silence and action) without flattening everybody into gingerbread men?”

There is a very interesting debate to be had about this. Let’s check out what John Gruber, avowed fan of Kubrick, thinks:

“I am reminded of the fact that Alfred Hitchcock argued that short stories make for better source material for movies than novels. (Stephen King’s oeuvre seems to prove that rule.) But today’s world of prestige TV opens new door to long, deep, mature adaptations.

Le Carré’s The Night Manager, the novel Kubrick so obviously enjoyed but argued couldn’t be made into a good two-hour film, was in fact adapted for the screen in an excellent 2015 series2 - 6 one-hour episodes - directed by Susanne Bier, written by David Farr, starring Hugh Laurie, Tom Hiddleston, Elizabeth Debicki, and Olivia Colman.”

Hmmmm.

Recently, I watched Tinker Tailor Solider Spy. No, not the 2011 film – the extraordinarily well-regarded 1979 BBC serial. Seven episodes, 40-50 minutes each, running a total of a shade over five hours.3 And, if we really care about such things, it was shot entirely on film, and featured yer bona fide film star in the lead role.

Afterwards, I watched 1982’s Smiley’s People. Six episodes, an hour each. Both serials were recently re-released on Blu-ray, and neither serial is obscure in the slightest. And both serials also got an airing in the US.

None of this required us to wait for “today’s world of prestige TV”.

Gruber:

“Anyway, Kubrick’s Napoleon as a 10-hour drama. My god. What could have been.”

I prefer to look at what we’ve actually had. For decades.

  1. I find “the official Stanley Kubrick Twitter account” an odd phrase to write. A bit like J. D. Salinger hosting Salinger Tonight or something. ↩

  2. Actually, 2016. ↩

  3. At least, the UK version does. The US version is re-edited to six episodes, runs a shade under five hours, and apparently reorders some scenes as well as trimming things a little. I’m sadly not aware of any article which discusses the differences between the two versions in detail; I’ll have a crack at writing about this one day if nobody else does. ↩

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I Hate Doing Research.

Published 28th December 2020

Meta / TV Comedy / TV Drama

It’s January 1999, and Ronald D. Moore – writer/producer on Star Trek: Deep Space 9 – is chatting on AOL, answering fan questions about the show.

One particular question catches my eye. You don’t need to know the actual storyline, or have watched any of the episodes – that isn’t the important bit here.

Ron, I read on the boards that there was a scene in “To the Death” in which Weyoun somehow slipped Odo some virus that eventually resulted in his having to return to the Link in “Broken Link.” I read that this ended up on the cutting room floor. Is this true or just a wild rumor?

It’s just a rumor.

Now, one delightful thing about DS9 is that – unlike most TV shows – every single script is available for us to read. Not a boring transcript. The actual script, as used in production, including cut material, and the scene descriptions. Which means we can check and see if Moore is correct in this instance.

So, in the script for “To The Death”, we can read the following1:

Weyoun looks at Odo for a beat, then gives him a good-natured clap on the shoulder. (In case anyone’s interested, when he touches Odo, Weyoun is purposely infecting Odo with the disease that almost kills him in “BROKEN LINK.”)

WEYOUN: Then it’s over. After all, you’re a Founder. I live to serve you.

And with that, Weyoun steps back into his quarters.

True, this scene didn’t end up on the “cutting room floor” – it’s in the episode as broadcast, just without the physical act of Weyoun clapping Odo on the shoulder. But the main thrust of how most people would interpret Moore’s response – that the episode never intended to contain Weyoun infecting Odo – is incorrect.

I very much doubt it was a deliberate lie. There’s certainly no obvious reason to try and hide anything. Moore almost certainly just forgot. That’s what happens when making TV shows; you can’t remember everything, there’s far too much important stuff jostling for position in your head. It’s completely understandable.

Still, the moral is clear. Don’t trust people’s recollections. Always trust the paperwork.

*   *   *

It’s 2020, and I have decided to trace every single piece of music used in The Young Ones, for some godforsaken reason. But not to worry. I have some production paperwork to help me out, which should list every track cleared for use in the show.

So let’s take a look at part of the sheet for the episode “Summer Holiday”:

Summer Holiday PasC sheet

Ah, “Tension Background”. Wonder what that was used for? Let’s take a listen, I’m sure all will become obvious.

Oh. That literally doesn’t appear anywhere in the episode at all. Brilliant.

To cut a long, tedious story short: the paperwork is wrong. Not entirely wrong; a track from the Conroy library album Drama – Tension is actually used in the episode. But the cut used is Track 3, “Chase Sequence”, not Track 15, “Tension Background”.

And that piece of detective work means that we can enjoy the full version of the music used when Neil goes all Incredible Hulk:

So, the moral is clear. Never trust the paperwork.

*   *   *

Have I mentioned that I hate doing research?

  1. Reformatted here for readability. ↩

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Temporal Signatures

Published 6th November 2020

TV Drama

I often wish I’d kept a diary. I never have.

Well, not a proper one. I did write one for a week when I was at secondary school, which went into deeply unfortunate detail about a girl I fancied in my class. This would have been fine, if it was just for my own personal use. Unfortunately it was for homework, and I had to give it in to my English teacher at the end of the week. The details of this incident are far too embarrassing to discuss voluntarily, but let’s just say that when I got the work back, my teacher said that while the diaries were “too personal”, they were very entertaining in an “Adrian Mole” kind of fashion. I took this as a compliment at the time. It was only years later that I realised that when applied to somebody’s real life, rather than a satirical work of fiction, it… really was not a compliment in any way whatsoever.

Regardless, the fact that I’ve never managed to keep a proper diary has really annoyed me over the years. As somebody obsessed with when things actually happened, not being able to pin down key events in my own life is troubling. I’ve just never managed to fit the actual writing of a diary into my day. Finding the energy to do a half-decent write-up of the past 24 hours just before bed has never been something I’ve been able to do.

Instead, to identify the exact date of things that happened years ago, I have to piece things together in other ways. Like, for instance, what was on the telly.

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“You’re in my way.”

Published 21st June 2020

Meta / TV Drama

Thanks to The Hollywood Reporter, for reminding me that back on the 18th June, it was the 30th anniversary of the Next Generation episode “The Best of Both Worlds”.

“From 1987 to 1989, the voyages of Captain Picard and the crew of the Enterprise-D struggled to be anything more than a passable background watch in its creatively-turbulent first and second seasons. (Season two’s “The Measure of a Man” and “Q Who?” being the lone must-watch exceptions.)”

I mean, everyone’s allowed an opinion, even if it is one of the most tedious Trek opinions I’ve seen for quite a while. I’m just going to vaguely point in the direction of “The Big Goodbye”, “11001001”, “Heart of Glory”, “Elementary Dear Data”, “A Matter of Honour”, and “The Emissary”, and fold my arms in annoyance.

“The episode also doesn’t get much credit for how satisfying it wraps up that storyline for Riker. By radically accepting that an extra rank pip on his collar doesn’t determine his status or worth, Riker makes the very emotionally-honest realization that lets him have an arc even though he’s staying put on the Enterprise bridge. (Piller’s script argues that one doesn’t need to move on or change jobs to evolve personally within their profession. Ironically, Piller would stay on the series as well, before leaving to help oversee Star Trek spinoffs Deep Space Nine and Voyager. The former wouldn’t exist without the storyline established by “Best of Both Worlds”, either.)”

How is that ironic? It’s literally the exact opposite. It would be ironic if Piller had written about how you can evolve personally within the same role, and then left the series anyway, but he didn’t.

OK, whatever, I’m bored with picking apart this article. The reason why I’m pleased to be reminded of this little anniversary is because it lets me be massively self-indulgent, yet again. Back in 2018, I wrote a little piece on here called “6 Times Your Favourite TV Shows Jumped the Shark”. A pisstake of clickbait journalism and the entire concept of jumping the shark itself, I have to admit it’s one of my favourite things I’ve ever written.

It was, however, not originally “6 Times”. In the first draft, it was 10. I’m sure you can already hear the joke wearing thin from here; halfway through the article, the idea just died. So acting on advice from someone used to script-editing comedy or something, I kicked four of the sections out the door. Those excised sections were on Blackadder II (“Bells”), Frasier (“The Ski Lodge”), Happy Days (Season 3, when they changed the theme tune), and… Star Trek: The Next Generation. Guess the episode?

And while the article was fifty times better with these sections deleted, I always had a soft spot for that last little section. My favourite parts of the article were the bits where I was teetering on the line between a bad-faith argument, and something that might be, sort of, valid. I think the below definitely manages that.

So, on the 30th anniversary of that famous episode, here’s a deleted scene from an old Dirty Feed article. I told you it was self-indulgent.

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Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Best of Both Worlds

Locutus of Borg

The third season of TNG is often seen as the moment where the show really came into its own. And it’s true: once Michael Piller came on board, the show took enormous strides in almost every single area. Showpiece episodes like Yesterday’s Enterprise and Sins of the Father are the best remembered, but I’m especially fond of shows like The Offspring – quiet, character-based shows that are the lifeblood of the series.

And then, at the end of the season, the show blows it all away.

It’s difficult to count the number of things the Borgfest Best of Both Worlds gets wrong. There’s Borg expert Lieutenant Commander Shelby, forced into the show purely so Riker can worry about his career. Written by Piller, this pathetically reflected his own worries about whether to move on from the show or stay for a fourth season; possibly the most indulgent thing ever written for the whole of Star Trek. This perhaps wouldn’t matter so much if it worked in-universe, but the whole point of TNG was to show that Starfleet officers had moved beyond petty conflict. The famous “You’re in my way” speech is a betrayal of everything Gene Roddenberry stood for.

But I could deal with that, if the resulting show was entertaining. Sadly, it isn’t. The reason Q Who was so scary is that the Borg acted as one hive mind: relentless, unstoppable. To have Picard assimilated, and act as a Queen Bee figure for our crew to talk to kills off everything which is unique about the Borg. It reduces them to stock villans, indistinguishable from the Romulans except for a few tubes sticking out here and there. You can betray Roddenberry’s future, or destroy a great villain: but in doing both, the series doomed itself.

Season 4 started with a perfunctory resolution to the absurd cliffhanger, and then followed it up with the ludicrously self-indulgent Family, a show with no science fiction elements whatsoever, and thus not even remotely within TNG’s remit. I stopped watching, and I can’t imagine I was alone.

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