The announcement last week that Doctors, the long-running BBC daytime drama, was coming to an end after almost twenty five years was a sad moment for anyone interested in television (like me), and from the West Midlands (also like me).
Not that I was an avid watcher of Doctors. I have a job, for one thing. Unlike evening soaps such as Coronation Street or EastEnders, Doctors firmly ticks the daytime box for the elderly, stay at home families or potentially these days, remote workers. Apart from being a rare 21st century BBC staple, however, it also had always been filmed in the Midlands, and set there technically – not that the fictional town of Letherbridge ever really felt like a suburb of Birmingham.
Doctors started life in the old Pebble Mill studios in the south of the city, an absolute institution for anyone who grew up in and around Birmingham in the late 20th century, as I did. Midlands Today, the BBC’s news programme, was based there. It produced Top Gear, The Archers for radio, Gardener’s World, even Telly Addicts with Noel Edmonds (I loved Telly Addicts). Dramas too, such as Howard’s Way, which my Mom adored when I was a kid, and an immeasurable amount more since it was founded in 1971.
You must have heard me talk before about Millennium.
Chris Carter’s second series after The X-Files, retroactively established as a ‘spin-off’ series, though very loosely, Millennium was a quiet masterpiece of pre-millennial anxious gloom in the late-1990s that has often been forgotten in the slipstream of its much more famous big brother. Yet it contains, for all I love The X-Files, my favourite television episode of all time: The Curse of Frank Black.
This episode is my Halloween tradition. I watch it every year without fail. I change my Twitter handle in honour of it every Halloween. I have podcasted in depth about it. I was even lucky enough to host a discussion partly on it with Carl Sweeney and Kurt North at the Midland Arts Centre in Birmingham last year, in which we interviewed Glen Morgan, one of the writers. And now, The Companion have allowed me to dig into its spooky ideas, strange connectives, and beautiful, haunting exploration of Lance Henriksen’s brilliant character, Frank Black.
I loved writing this piece and I have a follow up, on a different Millennium episode, planned for Christmas. Read with a candle flickering, the wind blowing, and immerse yourself in the spirit of Samhain. Link below.
Earlier this year, it was a thrill to be approached by The Companion, an online magazine devoted to genre entertainment content, to help them develop work that covered The X-Files.
When asked to get involved, on the strength of The X-Cast, I pitched a series called The Politics of The X-Files, which I had considered as a possible future book. It works better in this format though, I think – monthly articles which take an episode of Chris Carter’s series and spin it through the lens of a political standpoint. There is a surprising amount to discuss when looking at The X-Files in this manner.
In this latest piece, looking at Season 4’s The Field Where I Died, I’m looking at the charismatic power of the cult leader, connecting the episode back to the inspirations of Jonestown and Waco and how they informed what is actually a haunting romantic tale of past lives.
Grab a link to the piece at the jump and thanks for reading if you do.
Earlier this year, it was a thrill to be approached by The Companion, an online magazine devoted to genre entertainment content, to help them develop work that covered The X-Files.
When asked to get involved, on the strength of The X-Cast, I pitched a series called The Politics of The X-Files, which I had considered as a possible future book. It works better in this format though, I think – monthly articles which take an episode of Chris Carter’s series and spin it through the lens of a political standpoint. There is a surprising amount to discuss when looking at The X-Files in this manner.
Thus far, I’ve covered Season 1’s Deep Throat and the history of Watergate, Season 5’s Travelers and the Red Scare of the 1950s, and Season 1’s Darkness Falls and ecological action & terrorism. In this latest piece, looking at Season 2’s Fearful Symmetry, I’m zeroing in on animal rights activism and how the show intersects that with the broader alien ‘mytharc’.
Grab a link to the piece at the jump and thanks for reading if you do.
“The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art”. So said Marilynne Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize winning author, and while she isn’t referencing Twin Peaks, her medication on perception is key to the experience of watching this unique, mind-bending series.
Many people I know have a long association with Twin Peaks to a degree I never have. They watched it either in subsequent decades since it premiered in 1990 or even perhaps at the time on ABC latterly BBC2 in the U.K., where it ran as a two season cult hit that though failing to be renewed, latched onto the public and cultural consciousness and never quite let go. I was just seven years old when David Lynch & Mark Frost’s series arrived, too young to step into the Black Lodge as a viewer but old enough to feel its existence somehow.
During the 1990s, Twin Peaks became an American import that was discussed in hushed tones as a modern classic, something dark, horrific and deeply strange, almost akin to the boom in schlock horror of the period where VHS tapes were king and satellite broadcasts were just penetrating the mainstream. It was not long afterward, around 1995, that I discovered The X-Files—still a lifelong passion—without truly understanding as a teenager the pervasive effect FBI Agent Dale Cooper’s investigation into the death of teenager Laura Palmer had on the show I rapidly fell in love with.
Years went by. Decades. I watched so many series recognised as American classics, beyond my penchant for science-fiction. Breaking Bad. The Sopranos. Mad Men. The list went on. Twin Peaks lurked, however, at the back of my mind, continuing to latch on. References abounded, references I didn’t get. And when the series came back in 2017 for The Return, a long gestated third season, I missed the boat. Was I afraid of it? Was it just too legendary, too impenetrable? Was I terrified it wouldn’t match the expectations?
Last year, the time came, during the second Covid-19 lockdown. It was time to walk with fire. It was time to order some cherry pie. It was time to let the past dictate the future.
So I have a confession to make about Star Trek: Voyager. I have never sat down and watched, in its entirety, the last two seasons of the show. I didn’t watch them back when they aired around 20 years ago. I haven’t watched them since. I’ve watched some, here and there, but not all.
Technically, as a result, despite being a self-professed Trekkie and fan since I was a child, I’m not a Star Trek completist. This isn’t the case with any other show, either. I’ve seen all of Enterprise, for example. I’m up to date with Discovery. So why Voyager? Those episodes have been around for decades yet I have never felt the urge to revisit them. I think it goes back to my problematic relationship with the third spin-off series to Gene Roddenberry’s initial vision, one I’ve had ever since 1995.
I’m discussing this now as Voyager is, this week, a princely quarter of a century old which a) is fantastic and b) is terrifying for someone who grew up with it. Voyager first debuted when I was 12, almost 13 years old. I had discovered Star Trek on TV probably around a year earlier, having wore out VHS copies of The Search for Spock and The Wrath of Khan while in single digits. I liked The Next Generation. I already lovedDeep Space Nine. Voyager, therefore, I greeted with enormous excitement. This was back in the days when in the UK they would release two episodes of a season in VHS tapes for DS9 & VOY every few weeks (these would cost more than a monthly Netflix subscription does now) and I bought them religiously up until, I would say, probably about the end of Season 4. Then something happened.
Well, two things happened. Firstly, this was around 1998 and as a sixteen year old leaving school, I was beginning to discover that being a Star Trek fan openly wasn’t doing me any good if I ever wanted to cop off with a girl. Secondly, I realised that I didn’t actually likeVoyager all that much, and maybe I never had. Not in comparison to DS9, which aside from The X-Files and Babylon-5 around this point was the show I had lived and breathed during the 90’s. I started to realise that, a few episodes aside, I never found Voyager at all compelling.
Hands up if you were truly excited by Doctor Who Season 12? Nope, me neither.
I can remember the days I used to plan my entire Saturday night around this show, particularly in the era of Steven Moffat, who decrypted and deconstructed the very premise of the BBC’s strangest show, still on air after almost sixty years. Nights out with friends would be regularly predicated on whether new Who was watched or taped or somewhere in between. That started to change, in fairness, before Chris Chibnall’s era arrived. The final season or two of Moffat’s run, with Peter Capaldi’s Doctor, lacked the same kind of narrative or creative impetus than earlier years. The show began, to some degree, to eat its own tail.
Many fans, those who hadn’t been inexorably alienated by Moffat’s eternally divisive, glib and throwaway style of meta-fiction (or in this case meta-science-fiction), saw with Chibnall and the first ever female Doctor, as played by the already strong character actor Jodie Whittaker, a chance to clear the decks and provide something fresh and new. A move away from Moffat’s style of long-form narrative arcs, inverted stories that chewed away at traditional ideas, and the innate cynicism of Capaldi’s slightly curmudgeonly take on the character. Which is, by and large, exactly what we got with Season 11. It was lighter. It was self-contained. It had no real narrative through-line of note. And it was deliberately unburdened by eras past.
It was also, almost universally, rejected by critics and fans alike. Very few people enjoyed Chibnall and Whittaker’s first year. The knives were out. And as Season 12 premiere two-parter Spyfall proves, Chibnall has course-corrected in the most inevitable of ways. He’s turned back.
We are going to look back on the final season of Game of Thrones as one, six-part series finale because, essentially, that’s precisely what it is, riven with concluding arcs and beats for its huge ensemble of characters.
If the third episode, The Long Night, was accused of skimping out on the savagery and brutality meted out to particularly the primary core of lead characters, the fifth episode The Bells proves they were just saving up most of the horror for the battle that, in this incarnation of Game of Thrones, really mattered: the fiery, brutal sack of King’s Landing by Daenerys, now the ‘Mad Queen’, Targaryen. Over a dozen characters of significance saw their journeys end in this terrifying penultimate episode, filled with fire and blood. The reaction has, inevitably, polarised opinion online. Not just at certain deaths at this stage of the show but the narrative direction of one character in particular, which has completely changed the game for the series finale.
This was always going to happen but it displays the significant level of attachment Game of Thrones fans have placed in characters and storylines they have followed for ten years. This is prevalent in many such fandoms today and, to an extent, always has been.
Celebrated 1990’s British sitcom Men Behaving Badly recently returned to UK Netflix, which feels like a good opportunity to explore a show which helped define its decade, series by series. Has it stood the test of time?
Men Behaving Badly, across its final two series, sees the misadventures of Gary Strang and Tony Smart slide out of the laddism culture they propagated and into the earliest vestiges of comfortable middle age. You can feel the show doing the same along with them.
In the year 1996, Men Behaving Badly was at its cultural peak as Series 5 began to dawn, but this coincided with a significant cultural challenger to the New Lad thanks to, just two weeks after the series premiered, the arrival of the Spice Girls. Their debut single ‘Wannabe’ hit the charts in July of that year and launched the single biggest musical sensation in Britain since The Beatles over three decades earlier. Where in the swinging Sixties, Beatlemania sent legions of young people into paroxysms of excitement, the Cool Britannia of the 90’s saw the impact of ‘Girl Power’ and Geri Halliwell dressed in a Union Jack mini-skirt, the impending dawn of New Labour, the most liberal government in decades, and the Austin Powers franchise which threw everything back to a halcyon age of British ‘coolness’, injected this time with a call to female empowerment in a Britain filled with a renewed sense of optimism as it sailed toward a new century and a new millennium.
In retrospect, two men deep into their thirties swigging lager, frequently chanting “wa-hey!”, displaying disrespectful and sexist attitudes to women, indulging in infidelity and becoming almost disturbingly obsessed with sex, feels starkly retrograde in the face of the changing face of British popular culture in the late-1990’s. Men Behaving Badly was still popular, and Series 5 remains enjoyable, but it is clear that the show has passed its Series 4 peak at the true apex of lad culture, and in some respects had said everything it had to say. Writer Simon Nye spends the last few seasons continuing to mellow both Gary and Tony, not to mention their relationships with endlessly patient women in their lives Dorothy and Deborah, beginning the process of moving the show to being about not just two mates ‘and their birds’, but two couples who grow ever closer as friends and, to a degree, a dysfunctional, surrogate family. By the end of Series 6 and Last Orders, the final three concluding specials, Dorothy and Deborah feel as integral to the storytelling as Gary and Tony. Their importance grows as these two men, in their own way, slowly and surely begin to grow up.
By the final episode, Delivery, there is an argument that you could start calling this show People Behaving Responsibly.
In one of the busiest few months in science-fiction and fantasy popular-culture, the beginning of 2019 has seen three major franchises in cinema and on television become embroiled in what could be rapidly becoming a narrative crutch.
Time-travel.
The lacklustre Season 2 of Star Trek: Discovery (I really promise to stop talking about this soon) saw the crew of the Starfleet ship launch themselves almost 1000 into the distant Federation future to prevent a universe-destroying, rampant AI from wiping out all life. The gigantic conclusion to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first era, Avengers: Endgame, saw our superheroes enter the Quantum Realm and zip backwards across time to recover the universe-shattering Infinity Stones before the Mad Titan, Thanos, can snap his fingers again and wipe out half of all sentient life. And just this week, Game of Thrones saw the ultimate battle with the Night King and his army of the dead, coming to wipe out the living, which all hung on the fate of Bran Stark, a time-travelling tree-wizard.
Anyone noticing a pattern here? Three legendary franchises. Three titanic threats to the fabric of the entire universe. And in each case, the resolution of the paradox has the potential to lie in the bending of time.
We’re in danger of death by temporal mechanics if we’re not careful.
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