Torchwood series 1 and 2 revisited...

As it’s free on iPlayer at the moment I’ve been wandering back through all four series of Torchwood.  What a time it was then … when Russell T Davies had three Dr Who franchises on the go at the same time …

It took me a while … Cyberwoman has a strange reputation as its most embarrassing episode although it didn’t seem silly to me.  That said I stopped for about 4 months between watching that episode and the next so maybe there was something wrong with it.

I have to say I always struggled a bit with Eve Myles’s Gwen Cooper character as the audience surrogate.  I think perhaps because she’s police officer.  I don’t know why anyone grows up and thinks they want to join the police.  Perhaps because they want to issue speeding tickets.  Who knows?  Gwen takes on the investigation and interview / interrogation role of the group and therefore gets to ask all the necessary questions for the viewer.

The series is full of references to questions of mortality and atheistic propaganda – even going so far as to have characters come back from the dead and tell us that after death there is literally nothing.  Meanwhile John Barrowman’s immortal Captain Jack Harkness spends a lot of time standing on the edge of tall buildings and sometimes even falling off them and lives his life in a state of permanent annoyance at the fact he can’t die.

The episodic nature of the first series allows for individual stories to be written about different protagonists in the group.  It’s interesting here that we have 5 central characters but none of them feel that they are neglected in the overall narrative.   Naoko Mori’s Toshiko Sato is a plausible geek and Burn Gorman’s Owen Harper is interesting – James Bond if he’d been physically unfit, rather plain, not very witty and had had a doctorate.  It isn’t till the penultimate episode of series two “Exit Wounds” that we discover via flashback how the disparate group came together.  

Toshiko seems to have been blackmailed into giving away government secrets and ended up in a UNIT facility with strong overtones of Guantanamo bay that’s so grim that she has to sleep on the concrete floor of a cell without any central heating until she was rescued by Jack who offered her a job in return for her freedom.  It puts a different angle on previous episodes to consider that all the time she’s actually been effectively a prisoner of Jack.  Owen Harper turns out to have been widowed which has left him a cynical misogynist unable to form relationships.  Ianto Jones played with deadpan humour by Gareth David-Lloyd turns out to be an escapee from Torchwood 1 who Jack has been forced to take on out of a sense of responsibility which explains his role of being allowed to make the tea and have sex with Jack and, erm. very little else... 

One of the best episodes is where Gwen Cooper admits her affair with Owen Harper (don’t ask what she sees in him) to her husband the long suffering truck driver Rhys Williams (Kai Owen) and then when he doesn’t forgive her for her infidelity wipes his memory with the drug retcon.   I bet there’s lots of guilty people in the audience who wish they could sort out their relationship as easily.  It also explores the social issues around people who work in secrecy. 

Kai Owen’s part grows as the series goes on until eventually Jack ends up “retconning” their entire family.  Tom Price also puts in a nice performance as Andy Davidson – the other person who knows Gwen’s secret.  Although the existence of Torchwood seems to be something of an open secret – they have their name embossed on the group SUV, local pensioners are seen remarking “blood Torchwood” and local detectives find it very amusing when Jack rings up the local police to complain that “we’re trapped in our base”.

Martha Jones turns up but doesn’t seem to have much to do except make everyone jealous – particularly Owen Harper as she takes on his role after he is inconveniently shot and then spends the rest of the series as a living corpse.  He and his unrequited love interest Toshiko Sato are disposed of at the end of series 2 in a rather perfunctory way … as no one seems quite to know what to do with the series by this point.  Jack has an evil brother who turns up and a nemesis called Captain Hart who seems to have a similar military clothing fetish.  Anyway it's dated quite well ...apart from the mobile phones and the clothes it doesn't look a decade old and the Torchwood hub set is very well realised.  Still don't understand what the weebles Weevils were about.

 I was going to try and review all four series on one page but that might be too much so for now…

Forward to Children of Earth

Forward to Miracle Day

 

Going Lockerbie...

I was watching the film Buster the other night which strangely featured Phil Collins as a slightly romanticised version of Great Train robber Buster Edwards... Who later committed suicide while being investigated for fraud... But that hadn't happened when the film was made.

Anyway it features the song Going Loco Down in Acapulco written by Collins and sung by Mowtown legends The Four Tops... I googled them and this is them singing it on Top of the Pops... 

... Which is interesting enough but even more interestingly it turns out there were several takes of this. More than the group expected which resulted in them oversleeping and missing their flight the next day - Pan Am 103.

Next week on I overslept so I missed the catastrophe...

Cooperation not Conflict...? Humm...

Writing a load of nonsense on this blog is actually a lot harder than one might think.  I find it very difficult to actually find anything nonsensical to say ...so today I am making an effort by vaguely watching Prime Minister's Questions.

It's very different today... partly becuase of the lack of jeering minions - one of the upsides of minion distancing.  Boris presents himself as Mr Cuddly promising at one point to cuddle the whole of Scotland.  When told by the SNP that a big hug was not all that would be needed he responded that it was a metaphorical cuddle.

Meanwhile Keir Starmer attempts a QC style cross questioning of the Prime Minister which is critical, understanding and understated.  Quietly pointing out the failings in the government's track and trace scheme like a letter in the local paper about the bins not being emptied regularly.  The great grandstanding seems to have gone as the two attempt to undermine each other with politeness and bonhomie.  Under the surface many sharks such as the end-of-the-furlough-scheme shark are circling menacingly.

It's odd with politics more polarised than ever how close the two leaders seem to each other.  The black looks that Kinnock and Thatcher used to give each other came to mind and one has to wonder where the hate has gone.  Perhaps everyone is just emotionally exhausted and confrontational politics is out of fashion as it flies in the face of the "we're all in it together" message.  Cooperation not Conflict...?  Humm...

The goddam plane has crashed into the mountain (again)

At last it seems the BBC is owning up to the fact that the government is not in control of the infection rate anymore...

...the official R rate is now 1.2 ...if that graph is showing a 1.2 replication rate then my knowledge of integer fuctions isn't what it used to be.  

So far the government has been able to pretend that although the graph is shooting through the roof this is the result of a lot of increased testing...

...however the cat was let out of the bag a few days ago that something more is going on when the admissions to hospitals started to rise again.

These run about a week or two behind the infection rate statistics so there'll doubtless be a further rise in those very soon...

... the rise has of course not yet filtered through to the death statistics but that's not surprising given that the death statistics run about three to four weeks behind the hospital admissions.

On top of this there's the problem that the government has also started to run out of testing capacity (again) so the situation that the blue graph is trying to show us is actually much worse than it shows as many people showing symptoms can't get a test.

Very very soon the death statistics are going to start creeping up again.  The questions are : how high will it go...

...and also more fundamentally the purpose of testing outside hospital settings is to control the spread of the virus.  If it's demonstrably failing to slow the spread then is all this mass testing actually a sensible use of money?

At last a version of the much vaunted track and trace app may be available soon but ...

...again unless the test system is working properly the track and trace app is fairly impotent as it wont have a useful dataset to work from.  So...

Things to come...

 

Carry on Molka...

 

Wandering over iplayer I found a strange documentary by a Ms S Dooley on the internet wreckage of BBC3 about Molka… which is the South Korean word for hidden camera porn… Apparently since South Korea outlawed internet pornography there’s been an outbreak of hidden cameras everywhere there.  Some of which live stream.  Indeed, some cameras are hidden in public toilets which gives a whole new meaning to the term live streaming. 

There were some terrible stories about (mostly women) doing themselves in as a result of being spied on by spy cameras.  A molka sexual offender was interviewed about his habit that had landed him down the local police station.  Creepily when the self-confessed virgin was asked if he’d like to have sex with a woman he said he hadn’t seen the point if he was happy with his molka.  One had to wonder if this would have all reached this level without the prohibition on porn.  Although why people want to film other people on the toilet is a strange question that cannot be answered other than it’s a power trip…  

There are so many of these camera now and they’re so small it’s like someone saw the scene in Carry on Camping where Sid looked through the knot hole and thought …I can automate that.  Well, it wasn’t the biggest box office hit of 1969 for nothing… except of course Sid's peeping is at least somewhat opportunistic... when this kind of thing is industrialised it becomes another level of disturbing...

A teenage group giving a street performance was asked how they felt about the people filming them.  They didn’t seem to have a problem with people uploading their dancing to the internet but they did have a problem with people who filmed them and then kept the photos for personal use.  One wonders how they’d have survived in the world before anyone could upload anything…?  One also wondered why they were so happy to give all their performance rights away to Youtube for free but you'll forgive me if I don't call in the person from Equity...

Surely whatever people do with film filmed under freedom of panorama is pretty much their own affair?  Although as anyone who has ever done any photography will tell you much photography is by its nature voyeuristic.  Unless, of course, you ask absolutely everyone if they want to be photographed in advance or like only photograph buildings....  

Some of the world’s most interested photos were taken when people did not know they were observed.  Or so Paparazzo told Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita… Okay, he didn’t but according to Fellini he chose Paparazzo’s name because it sounded like “a buzzing insect, hovering, darting, stinging."   

And suddenly I had my yearly flashback to MCing the Laughing Horse Kingston gig where a new act did a six minute set slagging off his ex then pulled out a huge pile of A4 pictures of her naked then threw them around the room loudly proclaiming her to be a “Whore!” …fortunately for him it wasn’t actually a criminal offence back then.   After that the atmosphere was a tad awkward…

Is the United States Postal Service Rubbish or does Youtube have its letterbox sealed up...?

...one posted a letter snail mail to Youtube on the 8th of July.  Two months later it's still not there.  It stopped off for a holiday in Miami for a bit before moving to San Francisco where it lingers at the sorting office seemingly forever.  

Maybe no one signs for their mail?  

Or maybe the USPS is just completely incompetant ...which will make the Presidential Election interesting....

Please note since this blog was written Youtube have kindly restored my channel although why it was removed in the first place remains a mystery.

https://www.youtube.com/user/PearShapedIraq

Never show a horse falling into the water again...

 

Working my way through all the old films on the shelf I have today been reappraising “Never Say Never Again”.  For those of you who don’t know the plot Ian Fleming wrote a film treatment for Thunderball with Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham before the “official” Bond franchise got going but published a novel based on this anyway sparking a copyright dispute and this led to McClory retaining the rights to Thunderball so he could remake it which he did.  Although the plot is …well, almost identical because well, it is … one could say that about most of the early Bond movies anyway.  The point of Bond films is seldom the plot anyway but... bits of it stand up quite well. 

The best thing about it, of course, is Sean Connery who despite knocking on a bit by this time still has his impressive bodybuilder stature and swagger.  You really feel that if Connery hit you it would hurt …and reading his Wikipedia page it’s interesting to discover that some real life villains who messed with Sean Connery did indeed get more than they bargained for from the ex-also-ran-for-Mr-Universe.  Apparently someone tried to sign Connery as a professional footballer once but he gave it a miss and turned to acting because he reckoned a career that’s often over by your 30s isn’t a great idea in your mid-twenties. 

The other outstanding thing about the film is Barbara Carrera’s turn as the misandrist Spectre agent as Fatima Blush which almost won her a 1984 Golden Globe nomination for "Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture".  It’s a two dimensional character but it seems ahead of its time.  I quite enjoyed Klaus Maria Brandauer’s extremely laid back performance as Maximillian Largo too.  It’s interesting how someone can be so threatening but at the same time never openly show anger until …

Anyway, I was filling my head with this mindless sexist escapism and wondering how well it would hold up today and I thought probably the most offensive scene would be the scene where James Bond in his attempts to escape the bad guys on horseback with Domino makes his horse jump off the battlements of a castle into the sea …

This stuck in my head watching it again because something didn’t make sense.  We see Bond and Domino jump off the battlements on the horse and then there’s a process shot of the horse falling through the air.  And then we see Bond and Domino underwater and then we see them surface but … where’s the horse?  Did it drown?

I was perplexed by this so I googled it to see if anyone complained about it.  Well, they did.  Actually in the original cinema release – see below…

… we do in fact see the actors or their stunt doubles and the stunt horse hit the water and later we see the horse swimming away to the shore.  However, at the time there were no “no animals were hurt in the making of this film” disclaimers so the film was retroactively edited for the European market after criticism from the RSPCA.  The problem is that as well as removing the film of the horse hitting the water they’ve also removed the footage of the horse swimming away giving the impression the horse is dead … which is even worse.  The stunt was actually performed by veteran stuntman Vic Armstrong and I managed to find an old photo online of how it was shot...

Of course being dropped into the water from a height of a high diving board probably wasn’t nice for the horse but they can swim so was it actual cruelty?  Bit of a grey area.   Being old enough to remember when the local swimming baths used to allow one to jump from the high diving board I can confirm that if you jump from that height while it's not fatal it can hurt quite a bit if you do a belly flop... oh well...

After the gun went off the cat refused to ever go near a camera again

Hopefully the horse wasn’t as traumatised as Donald Pleasance’s cat in “You Only Live Twice” which on hearing the loud bang from Donald’s gun was scared to death, bolted and hid its self so well in the recesses of the Volcano set that it took the producers three days to find it.  When the wrangler did finally recover the cat it steadfastly refused to go near a camera ever again which was a bit of a problem as it was booked to do a series of cat food commercials…

And people wonder why cats won’t do any work…

....in the real world the R rate is now 1.7.  The government are testing more people than ever before it seems but ...if it doesn't result in the lowering of the R rate what's the point of that then?  One could examine important issues such as this that but I'd rather...