Big Gay Longcat and Expensive Luxury Cat review James Bond: The Spy Who Loved Me

Made in 1977, The Spy Who Loved Me is the third of seven expensive luxury James Bond film to star Roger Moore, and of those seven this is the one that most resembles an archetypal Bond film, with everything that cats around the world associate with the franchise: chases, explosions, gadgets, masterminds with plans for world domination, secret bases, quips, innuendo, and Jaws.

Every subsequent Bond film can be compared to The Spy Who Loved Me, and almost all of them will be found wanting, because it is almost the purrfect Bond film. Almost, because the one thing it is lacking is an expensive luxury cat.

A submarine on which both DCI Roy Galloway and Boba Fett are both W-wording undercover starts getting into difficulties. Tiberius Caesar (recently returned from his stint as Number Two in the Village) gets a telephone call from somebody to tell him that they have lost one of their nuclear submarines. In Moscow, Chief Constable Cullen has successfully infiltrated the highest echelons of Russian Intelligence only to be given the bad news that they too have lost a submarine.

Not really of course, this is the first appearance of Walter Gotell as General Gogol, who will go on to be M's best frenemy in five further expensive luxury James Bond films after this. He telephones "Agent Triple X" and puts her on the case. She was having kiffs with Colonel Paul Foster (who can blame her, purr) who we were obviously supposed to think was Agent Triple X for a moment as an audience fake-out, but we cats aren't so easily fooled because we have seen this film before.

In a scene that is obviously intended to parallel what we have just seen the Soviets doing, M orders James Bond to be put on the case, telling him to "pull out" of his current mission. Of course Bond is busy having kiffs with a lady, so "pull out" has a double meaning, lol, these films are so smutty! Bond gets dressed, and the lady says

"But James, I need you."

He replies

"So does England."

So as far as he's concerned the rest of the UK can obviously get to fuck.

As soon as he is gone, the lady turns out to be a baddy and telephones her henchmannys to chase after Bond. This is an iconic ski chase, with Bond and his stuntmanny taking on four henchmannys single-pawedly. Bond skis off a cliff to escape, and the incidental music suddenly cuts out, making it seems as though Bond is in deep trouble. But then he deploys the famous Union Jack parachute (though if all he cares about is England, really it should have been a St George's flag, mew) and the music bursts back in with the James Bond theme.

This segues into the "Nobody Does it Better" theme song and title sequence. This is probably the apex of the nude-mannys-in-silhouette titles, which was a trope for the Bond films for quite a while, but always makes me think that the filming of these sequences must have been a really weird experience for all those mannys involved - nude or otherwise.

The lyrics of the theme song are worth examining - it is clar from context that James Bond is the manny that "nobody does it better" than, but what is the "it" that nobody does better than him at? My suspicion is that there is a naughty double-meaning there (or maybe I just need to recalibrate my expectations because the innuendo level in the previous Bond theme, The Manny with the Golden Gun, was so high), with the first meaning being that he is best at spying, but the second that he is best at kiffs. Couple this with the line

# "Though sometimes I wish someone could" #

and I don't think it is a coincidence that, within a year of this film's release, Blakes 7 started on TV.

I must conclude that this song is responsible for wishing Avon into existence!

Post-titles, the first scene is set in Moscow, because in an interesting reversal of the normal briefing scene between Bond and M, we instead see General Gogol briefing Agent Triple X, Major Anya Amasova. This deepens the parallels already established, showing us that she is Bond's Russian counterpart, but it is still very unusual to present a briefing from their point of view first, almost as though Amasova is the protagonist of the film instead of Bond. Gogol also tells her that Agent Sergei Borzov (who Paul Foster was pretending to be) has been killed, although clearly he must have only faked his death to go back to SHADO.

At Bond's briefing is more than just M. Q is there, as is Tiberius, Dev Tarrant representing the Federation, the Minister of Defence (who, like Gogol, is making his first of six appearances in the Bond films), and Future M Admiral Hargreaves. Things must be serious if they need more than one M in the same film! Or maybe it's just inflation - this was the late '70s after all. We see another example of this when the Minister tells Bond the missing submarine had 16 nuclear missiles on board. In Thunderball SECTRE only stole two, and that was serious business enough. Bond is sent to Egypt to look at pyramids for clues.

We get our introduction to the film's baddy, Stromberg (played by Curd "General Vladimir" Jürgens), when he is having noms. He meets with the two henchmannys who have invented the submarine-finding machine for him, one of whom is played by the Shapmeister himself, Professor Cyril Shaps. Stromberg establishes his Bond villain credentials by dropping his assistant into a shark tank for betraying him.

He also has a giant underwater base, although if I didn't know better I might say

When the Shapmeister and his friend leave in a helicopter, Stromberg uses a button to blow it up. Do you think he got this base and all its gadgets second-paw from Blofeld?

As well as sharks and exploding helicopters, he also has unusual henchmannys to do his killing for him, and he sends them to kill anyone trying to discover his plans. His main henchmanny is someone who loved Steven Spielberg's 1975 shark film so much he even changed his name to

Jaws

In Cairo we get a scene that is almost too much a parody of the sort of thing you expect to see in a Bond film that even most send-ups wouldn't play it as straight as this: Bond is having kiffs with a lady who is secretly in league with the baddys, a henchmanny aims his gun at Bond, but the lady switches sides, screams "No!" and gets shot instead of Bond.

The manny Bond is looking for is out by the pyramids, because of course he is. Also there are Amasova and Jaws. They are all watching a strange show that lights up the Sphinx and the pyramids at random intervals and, even more randomly, has narration provided by Blofeld. So what seems to have happened is that, after the events of Diamonds are Forever, he sold his SECTRE world-domination business to Stromberg and then got a job here.

Jaws catches up with the manny and bites his neck like a vampire. I'd make a joke about it being too soon after Christopher Lee played Scaramanga for them to recast him in this as Jaws, but I genuinely don't think that would have stopped them.

Bond and Amasova meet again at a Cairo club, where they are both looking for the next clue. They recognise one another, and order each other's trademark drinks:

"The lady'll have a bacardi on the rocks."

"For the gentleman, vodka martini shaken not stirred."

The film is doing very well so far in giving the impression that this is a crossover event starring two equals, and not the 10th in the film series for one of them, while the other has never been seen before this film and will never be heard from again after the end credits have rolled. It isn't even clear which one of them is "the spy" of the title, and which is the "me."

Bond meets with Vernon Dobtcheff, who was in so many things over the years that it is astonishing that it took this long for him to appear in a Bond film. He was in The Assassination Bureau with Telly Savalas and Diana Rigg in 1969, so he must have been considered for a part in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, surely? It turns out Amasova also wants to meet with Dobtcheff, since they have the same mission to obtain a microfilm from him, but before he can decide which of them he will give it to, Jaws kills him and takes it.

Bond and Amasova both chase after Jaws and hide in his van. They aren't as stealthy as they think, because they can't resist chatting and Jaws hears every word they say. Jaws takes them to a place in the Egyptian desert where they can have a fun game of Cat and Mouse. But who is the Cat?

Bond tricks Jaws into bringing some scaffolding down on his own hed, while Amasova gets the microfilm and runs away. Bond quips

"Egyptian builders, tut."

but this joke doesn't W-word at all, because surely if Egyptian builders are famous for anything it is the pyramids which have stood stable for thousands of years? Although I suppose 'tutting' at anything to do with Ancient Egypt has to W-word on at least some level, so I'll give him that. Mew.

Escaping on a boat at night, Bond and Amasova start having kiffs under the pretext of keeping warm, and then Amasova takes out a trick cigarette and gases Bond with it. When he wakes up she is gone, and has taken the microfilm with her.

Bond goes to a secret underground HQ, equipped with electric doors that sound suspiciously Village-like, where he meets Miss Moneypenny. When he goes in to see M, he is surprised to instead see...

General Gogol. He has teamed up with M so that they can send Bond after the real baddy, Stromberg. Bond has to team up with Major Amasova again, and they are both sent on a train to Sardinia. There's a long, quiet scene of them in two adjacent cabins ignoring one another, which seems like it is just there to build up the Unresolved Sexual Tension between them, but really it is so that it is a surprise when Jaws bursts out of Amasova's wardrobe (he took a shortcut through Narnia?) to attack her.

There's a tense fight (made more tense by the lack of incidental music) that ends when Bond electrics Jaws and then defenestrates him. Jaws survives this, and we see him dust himself down and straighten his tie, which is the sort of thing that Bond himself might do after a fight. Jaws is a superb subversion of the usual tropes of henchmannys we see in other Bond films - it is like instead of a succession of henchmannys who attack Bond one at a time before getting killed by him, instead they have all been replaced by Jaws, who always survives.

There's a scene in which Q delivers a car to Bond, which is necessary so that we aren't surprised when the car turns out to have gadgets in it. But they take a boat out to see Stromberg in his lair, not the car.

Bond meets with Stromberg and introduces himself as

"My name is Stirling, Robert Stirling."

because even when he's in disguise Bond can't help but use the 'surname, firstname surname' format. Stromberg shows Bond his collection of fish (making us cats very hungry) and also his sharks. He pretends not to know who Bond is until he has gone, then he meets with Jaws and tells him to kill Bond and Amasova. Although Jaws was probably going to try and do that anyway, seeing as he has spent the better part of the film so far trying to do just that.

Time for a car chase. A motorbike chases after Bond's car, but when it crashes off a cliff it turns out it was being driven by a really obvious dummy. Jaws and some henchmannys start chasing them in their own car and shooting at them. I love the way Jaws just takes the guns off the other henchmannys instead of reloading his own gun when he runs out of bullets. When their car inevitably crashes, Jaws once again walks away unharmed.

Next a helicopter chases Bond and Amasova, piloted by Naomi, a manny that Bond was perving over back at Stromberg's base, and so confirming that Stromberg must be the baddy (as if we didn't know already). The helicopter chases the car into the water, where it turns into a tiny submarine. Bond then shoots the helicopter with a missile, although it is unclear why he waited until now to do this - presumably he was intending to take the car underwater anyway, so he thought he would troll Amasova by not telling her about it in advance. This backfires when she reveals she knew all about it:

"I stole the blueprints of this car two years ago."

They take the underwater car back to Stromberg's base, and use it to have a look in through some of Stromberg's windows. Then there's an underwater chase... oh noes, these slow-motion underwater chases have become something of a chore in Bond films ever since Thunderball, we cats usually just sleep through them without risking missing much. At least this one has some funky incidental music over it.

When the car drives out of the water onto a beach, we get the first appearance of one of the most insignificant recurring Bond characters, Double-Take Manny. Still a better recurring character than Sheriff J. W. Pepper.

Amasova thinks that Bond killed Paul Foster, based on Bond having a lighter from the place where Colonel Foster was supposed to have died (oh, and Bond claiming that he did kill him), and so says

"When this mission is over, I will kill you."

This means she hates him now, so there is a dramatic possibility that this might interfere with their joint mission to save the world.

They go on an American submarine, where Shane Rimmer, king president of the rentayanks, is in command, and where Jeff Ross from The Sandbaggers is undercover for the CIA. Stromberg's tanker has a front bit that opens up in order to capture the submarine, in a very - one might say suspiciously - similar way to how SECTRE's spaceship captured the American and Russian rockets in You Only Live Twice. Yet more evidence that Stromberg is using a plan that SECTRE just never got around to.

When all the captured submacrewmannys are taken out of the submarine, Bond and Amasova are recognised by Stromberg, which he is happy about because it gives him somebody to explain his plan to. What does he want with all these captured submarines and nuclear missiles?

"At 12 noon they will have reached firing positions. Within minutes, New York and Moscow will cease to exist. Global destruction will follow. A new era will begin."

Bond asks what Stromberg's price "for not firing those nuclear missiles" will be. He's probably thinking it's bound to be higher than Blofeld's price, what with all the inflation since SECTRE's heyday. But here Stromberg's plan differs from Blofeld's Operation Thunderball goal of extortion - he wants to destroy the world, so that he can create "a new and beautiful world beneath the sea."

I don't think he has thought this plan through. But he has clearly given it more thought than Blofeld did that time when he tried to start World War 3, because at least Stromberg has a plan for where he will keep his Blakes 7 DVDs after the world has been blown up.

Stromberg sends the submarines on their way, then leaves for his underwater base, taking Amasova with him. I don't know why, but it could be because, as a Bond villain, he has to take the protagonist with him to his lair to put in a deathtrap, and he has mistaiken her for the protagonist and Bond for her sidekick. He does say to Bond before he leaves:

"'Farewell' Mr Bond. That word has, I must admit, a welcome ring of permanancy about it."

As villainous quips go that one is poor, but then you wouldn't waste your best lines on a sidekick, would you? Stromberg and Amasova leave on a monorail, which is frankly the clincher that this base was designed by the same manny that did SECTRE's bases for them.

Bond quickly escapes and rescues all the friendly submacrewmannys. A big fight breaks out, with both sides shooting submachine guns and throwing grenades at at each other. Fortunately all the baddys are wearing red so we can easily tell the two sides apart. This goes on for quite a while, since it is clearly the film's big action set piece, and it is just like (and I do mean 'just like') the ninja attack on SECTRE's volcano lair in You Only Live Twice.

There is quite a good bit when Bond hitches a ride on top of the thing that used to be a henchrobot for Ming the Merciless. After defeating all the baddys in their control room, Bond sends new orders to the two baddy-controlled submarines so that they blow each other up with all the power of stock footage of nuclear explosions. Bond and his friends then escape in the third submarine.

The sumbarine is ordered to blow up Stromberg's base, with Shane Rimmer saying his orders coming from "the top." He must mean from Ceiling Cat! Bond wants to rescue Amasova, and he has only one hour in which to do it before the submarine will attack. This is an unusual Bond film in which the goodys have essentially already won, and can finish off the rest of the baddys whenever they want, including the main baddy Stromberg. Except that they haven't won completely until Amasova is saved.

Stromberg sees Bond as soon as he gets into his base, and says the classic line

"Good evening Mr Bond, I've been expecting you."

Bond gets into the lift that we saw near the start of the film, which has the secret trapdoor to drop mannys into the shark tank.

"Goodbye Mr Bond."

says Stromberg and presses the button to drop Bond in it. But Bond is too clever for him (or else Bond has by now noticed all the reused SECTRE plans and so knew what to expect) and didn't fall for it. So to speak. Mew.

Stromberg tries to shoot Bond, but Bond dodges out of the way and returns fire. I think it is supposed to be implied that Bond's first shot hits Stromberg in the willy, but he then shoots him a few more times just to make sure that Stromberg goes

Bond isn't safe yet, since he now has to have another fight with Jaws. Bond finds a highly convenient magnet that he uses to capture Jaws.

"How does that grab you?"

he quips, before dropping Jaws into Stromberg's shark tank. Any other baddy would be done for, but this is Jaws so he noms the shark instead.

Bond rescues Amasova just before the submarine blows up the base, so they have to escape through the explosions and, even worse, the base filling up with wets. They find Stromberg's expensive luxury escape pod and do an expensive luxury escape in it.

Amasova looks like she is about to shoot Bond like she said she would earlier on, but instead she shoots the top off the bottle of expensive luxury Dom Perignon '52. She must be a fan of The Avengers.

They are still having kiffs when a ship finds them. What are the chances of it having their bosses on board?

"Bond, what do you think you're doing?"

"Keeping the British end up, sir."

Curtain.

Expensive Luxury Cat's rating: Very Expensive and Luxury

Eurovision 2024

As always, we cats were really looking forward to this year's Eurovision Singing Competition. Despite the attempts of some mannys to spoil it for the rest of us by getting all of their rivals disqualified before the singing even began, it still went ahead in Sweden.

They last hosted it in 2016, and they really know how to put on a show, with a great performance by Swedish disco group Alcazar at the interval. Though sadly no involvement from Måns Zelmerlöw (purr) this year.

If Luxembourg had really wanted to win, they could just have gotten their giant CGI cats to nom all the other competitors. Maybe the cats were just there to guard their singing manny from her rivals?

The first really exciting performance came from Spain, who had Katy Manning singing, scantily clad mannys dancing, and a keytar - now that's Eurovision!

Estonia also had a great entry, with the first komedy song of the night. I have no idea what it was about.

But good as Spain and Estonia were, they were just the warm up for Ireland's entry. It looks like they're finally ready to properly try and win again. They even included a Bucks Fizz style costume rip, it must be literally minutes since we last saw one of those. But the strangest thing about their performance was the 4:3 aspect ratio - was this coming to us from somewhere in the last century?

Greece started off ordinary, but soon became a typically incomprehensible Greek entry with several changes in style across the course of the song.

Finland's silly entry quickly became my favourite, being sung by "Windows95man," a rude manny with no pants on. And then when he was made to put pants on, fireworks came out of them, lol. So stupid but brilliant. Pure Eurovision craziness.

Armenia combined traditional folk costume on the singer with modern crazy dancing and interacting with the swooping camera. In a typical year they might have stood out more, but the standard this year was high - though not for all songs.

Croatia had a cat in their introductory video, but sadly the cat was not the singer of the song, it was the manny in the middle. Mew.

It is a Eurovision tradition that at least one entry has costumes that look like they were provided by the Federation, and this year it was Austria's turn, the very last song to be performed.

Switzerland won. I don't know why. But then we never do. The reasons why mannys vote the way they do is an impenetrable mystery to us cats.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord Part Twelve

It's not often we get the goodys doing a classic slow-cutting through a door, I haven't seen one of those since Ambassadors OF DEATH. By the time they get the door to the bridge opened, the Vervoids have already gassed Bruchner with their "marsh gas" powers that they happen to have. This prevents the Doctor or any of the mannys from going in, but not the aliens.

The aliens get the ship back under control, and then turn out to be baddys in league with Mr Rudge. This twist shows the difference between this section of The Trial of a Time Lord and the earlier two sections, in that while they suffered from being squeezed into their four episodes along with the courtroom scenes, this needed to be padded out with an extra subplot to fill four parts.

An unseen attacker throws something wet in the faces of the aliens on the bridge, and naturally enough this causes them to go

Mel, Doland and Janet find their bodies and then convince Mr Rudge that their hijack has failed (except as a means of making the episode a bit longer). Doland disarms Rudge, who runs away to get killed by the Vervoids. The Doctor takes the pewpewpew gun, which seems out of character for him. Even Mel, who hasn't even met the Doctor yet, is surprised by how out of character this is and she asks him:

Mel: "A phaser? You?"

Doctor: "Exceptional circumstances require exceptional measures."

He hints to her that he is setting a trap for the murderer, and needs the pewpewpew gun for that.

Doland tries to trick the Doctor to get his paws on the pewpewpew gun, but when he does the Doctor has already borked it. The Doctor explains how he knew it was Doland:

Doctor: "It wasn't difficult to pinpoint you. The first murder could only have been carried out by someone with access to this unit. The second needed poison. Even the abortive attempt on Mel's life could only have been committed by someone who could go unchallenged into the isolation room and get the anaesthetic."

Doland: "All this could have applied to Lasky."

Doctor: "No. Not the Mogarians. She was a hostage when they were slaughtered."

Doland reveals his motive to be "avarice." He wants to use the Vervoids as slave labour on Earth instead of robots. Good news for the robots I suppose. Doland gets captured by Tonker Travers when he tries to run away, but he then gets rescued by the Vervoids who kill his guard.

This 'rescue' lasts only a few seconds, because then the Vervoids surround and kill Doland.

The Doctor has deduced why the Vervoids want to kill them all, because they are made from plants while the Doctor, the mannys and the aliens are all "animal-kind." Mel says

"Doctor, if you're right, then coexistence with the Vervoids is an impossibility."

Tonker Travers asks the Doctor for his "undivided commitment" in helping them fight the Vervoids, which causes the Doctor in the courtroom to stop the Matrix to say

"And there you have it: the direct request. I did not meddle; I was presented with an appeal. And not just from anybody, but from the man in whom authority was vested."

This seems a very late stage in the story for the Doctor to make this point in his defence. Why didn't he say something like this when the TARDIS first received the mayday call, or even when Tonker Travers first asked for his help when the mystery started happening?

It doesn't really matter, because the whole basis of the Doctor's defence doesn't make any sense - how can even a Time Lord defend himself against accusations of meddling in the past by saying he won't meddle in the future? Terror of the Vervoids would have made for a perfectly serviceable story (if hardly a classic) outside the confines of the trial story, but these episodes would have been better spent on the Doctor attempting to unravel the mysteries inherent to the trial itself: Why prosecute him in this way, and why now? Who is the Valeyard, and what is his motivation? How was the supposedly infallible Matrix made to lie, and by whom? The Doctor's defence does nothing to answer these questions, nor even make any progress towards answering them. As part of the trial, the whole four episodes are nothing but padding.

Professor Lasky tries to reason with the Vervoids without using the line 'No, stop, I created you,' but they kill her anyway. The Doctor and Mel find the big pile of ded bodies, a perfect visual metaphor for the unnecessarily high body count of this story.

It turns out that exactly the thing the Doctor needs to defeat the Vervoids is on board the ship: "vionesium," which is "a substance similar to magnesium." Tonker Travers lets the Doctor have all the vionesium he wants, which for some reason come in small globes that makes them look suspiciously like grenades.

The Doctor and Mel throw their vionesium bombs at the Vervoids, which go all brown and turn into a big pile of leaves. To be fair to this story, some of the effects in this bit are quite good, with one of the Vervoids changing colour in real time under a lighting effect. Then in the next scene the Doctor and Mel are getting into the TARDIS, after saying goodbye to Tonker Travers and Janet.

This is an incredibly contrived ending which comes out of nowhere, with everything that happens after Lasky was killed coming across as having been written in a hurry, or as an afterthought, as though the writers lost interest after the (quite clever) exposing of the murderer. Or maybe we could put the blame on the laziness of the director, who couldn't give a shit about pacing the story properly if it kept him away from the BBC bar? More likely it's some combination of both, but I fear this is one crime that will remain unsolved.

Anyway, speaking of contrived...

Back in the courtroom, the Inquisitor and Valeyard decide that the Doctor must be charged with killing the Vervoids under "article seven of Gallifreyan law." As established all the way back in part one, they are allowed to do this because article one of Gallifreyan law states that the charges being brought against the accused can be whatever the plot needs them to be at any given moment, especially when a cliffhanger is coming up. The Valeyard puts it this way:

"Article seven permits no exceptions. The Doctor has destroyed a complete species. The charge must now be genocide!"

Crash zoom to the Doctor's face - cliffhanger!

Crash-zoom to face cliffhanger count: 8

Oh, and I've remembered what the Vervoids remind me of:

Campion (1989)

Peter "Davo" Davison stars as Albert Campion in this BBC detective series. Made around the same time as the BBC's Miss Marple series (which Davo made a guest appearance in) and the start of ITV's long-running Poirot, this has a similar feel and production style - helped a lot by this having a similar 1920s-30s period setting. Eight novels were adapated, with each being split across two 50-minute episodes.

Campion as a character is a posho with a shady past, able to pass among the aristocracy and the criminal classes just as easily. He also has a sense of humour, which involves cracking lame jokes at inopportune times, such as when a body has just been discovered. Davo fits the part well, able to give Campion a lightness of touch that sets him apart from other TV detectives of this subgenre, although his voice and mannerisms do occasionally remind me of his time as the Doctor. He also puts me in mind of a similar detective character, Mr Laxworthy, memorably played by Bernard Hepton in the 1970s Rivals of Sherlock Holmes series, with his superior intelligence and habit of using criminals (or ex-criminals) to do his dirty W-word for him.

Foremost of these ex-criminal servants is Campion's mannyservant Magersfontein Lugg, played by Brian "Gaffer" Glover. The third regular character is the ubiquitous friendly rival police Inspector (what private detective would be without one?) Stanislaus Oates, played by Andrew "Jarvik" Burt. Purr. Not as dim as some, Burt has the unenviable task of carving out his own niche in an overcrowded field full of Lestrades, Japps, and Slacks.

If names like "Magersfontein" and "Stanislaus" seem a bit too pointedly unlikely, I am quite sure this is deliberate. The series is played straight (save for Campion's in-character humour), but the events it depicts are at times so OTT that they must come across to viewers as parodies of the genre. That is because they are - something which I think is important to keep in mind as, paradoxically, this makes it easier to take them seriously.

1. Look to the Lady

The first story is a perfect example of what I mean, with an absurd plot about a noble family who keep an ancient chalice in their country house, which they must keep safe or else forfeit all of their wealth and estate. Fake chalices abound, as well as supernatural elements that Campion and Lugg reveal have mundane explanations... or do they? And then at the end it is implied that the chalice is your actual Holy Grail.

On first hearing the theme music you could be forgiven for thinking it was too twee to be real, but the important thing to remember is that it is Peter "Button Moon" Davison that is singing the "Da-da-da-da-de-da-dum" bits himself, and that knowledge suddenly makes it pawesome.

2. Police at the Funeral

A more conventional murder-mystery than the first story, much more approachable for any fan of the genre, though the downside of this is that Campion comes across as more of a conventional, Agatha Christie-style detective in this one than in the first, where he got to make use of a broader selection of his skills.

The guest cast in this is pretty impressive, with Mary "Dance of the Dead" Morris as the stern matriarch of the upper-class family Campion is staying with, and Timothy West as Inspector Oates's prime suspect. West had a run of appearances alongside Davo in the late '80s, this being the third after they were in the same Miss Marple together, and then West made a memorable one-off appearance in Davo's A Very Peculiar Practice.

3. The Case of the Late Pig

Davo is reunited with Michael "Hedin" Gough in the most convoluted case yet. With mysterious cryptic letters, a dead manny turning up only to have been killed again, and bodysnatching, not to mention a substantial cast of suspects to be introduced, there's little time for Campion and Lugg's own eccentricities so it resembles a more generic murder mystery. Since this also happened in Police at the Funeral, it seems the promise of the first story for Campion to be a manny of many skills beyond just being an amateur detective seems to have fallen by the wayside, now he's just an amateur detective with an ex-criminal for a mannyservant sidekick.

That said, the actual murder mystery plot is a good one. The audience is kept guessing throughout part one, and it isn't until after a second murder takes place that things begin to fall into place. John Fortune also appears, and the police presence is provided by Moray "George Frobisher in Rumpole" Watson.

4. Death of a Ghost

This is the first time we hear "Albert" Campion addressed as "Bertie," which made me think that surely somebody somewhere has done a crossover with Jeeves and Wooster? Once again this has little room for Campion to show any of his skills other than his detecting, though there is a larger role for Chief Inspector Oates this time, with Lugg somewhat sidelined and mostly reduced to sniping quips and making impertinent comments about Campion's lack of progress with the case.

A strong first part sets up a nice mystery, and the second part looks to be confounding the typical tropes of the genre when Campion explains who did it and how well before the end of the episode. But Oates needs proof before he will arrest the suspect, which Campion lacks, so the final act is him trying to get the murderer to incriminate themselves.

There are shades of Columbo in this, perhaps (though we viewers don't actually know Campion is right, having not seen them do it like we would have in a Columbo), but few Columbos have a resolution that's as poorly handled as this, with Campion coming out on top only through luck, not through using his brains or skills. This ending lets the story down badly, making this the weakest of the series so far. Davo does get to do some nice "drunk as a lord" acting, though, so it's not terrible.

Milton Johns and Rosalie Crutchley are the main guest actors of note. I daresay there were a few other faces we cats recognised from other TV programmes of the era.

5. Sweet Danger

The second season sees a change to the titles, with Davo no longer being allowed to sing along with the theme tune. To make up for it, we get what is definitely the best story yet, largely thanks to the presence of Iain Cuthbertson as a master criminal. In a welcome change from yet another murder mystery, this is a plot with a treasure hunt and a race against the baddys to get to it first.

Campion even has more allies (or Companions, might we call them?) than just Lugg in this one, with David "Pangol" Haig as an old friend, and Lysette "Krull" Anthony as a love-interest-of-the-week helping him out, while Cuthbertson has on his side reliable old character actors Paul Brooke and Richard Pearson, the latter playing a random satanist.

The twists and turns of the plot get increasingly outlandish, but at least this is the first time since the first episode where the series has fulfilled its promise of being more than just a knock-off Agatha Christie, and Campion more than a generic period detective. The presence of Cuthbertson tips it over into being the best story of the whole series by a comfortable margin.

6. Dancers in Mourning

We return to murder mysteries with a bang. A murder is followed by the killer having to do more murders and murder attempts to try and keep their identity from the first murder covered up, including one done using a bomb that explodes in public, killing several innocent bystanders. This is a spectacular event to end the first episode on, but the spirit of JNT lives on when that's not the cliffhanger - instead there's an additonal scene where Campion is told about the bombing, and then Davo looks into camera while making a sort of "well whaddaya know?" type face as the credits start to roll.

The convoluted tale takes screen time away from the regulars, though Campion still has time to fall for a married woman, the second episode in a row to feature an unsuitable love-interest-of-the-week for him. On the plus side, we see more of Chief Inspector Oates, and while he can't quite keep up with Campion, he is shown to be no fool. The biggest problem with this story is that too many of the characters are ahead of the viewers - knowing things we've not been made privy to, that sort of thing - that we are left playing catchup in a pretty unsatisfactory manner.

The main guest star is Ian "Drusus" Ogilvy, who plays a stage musical actor. Despite the packed plot, the first part takes time to show us a significant amount of his musical number, which I suspect was more fun for the actors than the viewers. And pity the poor choreographer who must have been asked to recreate a deliberatly hideous, cheesy 1930s dance routine.

Oh yes, the series is now confirmed as being set in the mid-1930s. I'm no great expert on the inter-war period, but it feels to me like it could have been set any time in the '20s or '30s due to the lack of any topical events pinning it to a particular year, save that they have started being more specific in the dates they give on screen.

7. Flowers for the Judge

Probably the best of the straight murder-mystery plots, largely thanks to a satisfying twist ending. Part of the story looks as though it may have been shot around the same London docklands environment where Davo would have made Resurrection of the Daleks a few years earlier, needing little changed to make it plausibly the 1930s.

Christopher "Any politics?" Benjamin has a guest appearance as a magistrate, though the main guest characters are played by Robert Lang (most familiar to me as the titular "fascist beast" from the Rumpole episode of the same name) and Barrie Ingham (who I would like to say is best known for playing Sejanus in ITV's The Caesars, but obviously he is really best known for playing the worst Irish stereotype of all time in an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation) as two of the murder suspects.

8. Mystery Mile

The final story has parallels with the earlier Sweet Danger, since in both Campion goes up against a mysterious master criminal and his organisation. While this is undoubtedly one of the better stories of the series, with Campion using his criminal skills and contacts, and assembling his own gang to combat the villain's gang - and to rescue the damsel-in-distress-of-the-week - it is clearly inferior to Sweet Danger, lacking an adversary of Cuthbertson's stature. This time the criminal's identity is unknown, though anyone familiar with the genre may be able to deduce who it is by applying the law of conservation of narrative details to the shortlist of possible suspects.

Spoilers for the identity of the main villain follow: There are really only two possible candidates, and since Miles "House of Cards" Anderson is too obviously playing a wrongun, it can only really be Robert Robinson (not that one, tush and fipsy) and his wandering foreign accent. Was Paul Freeman not available?

Other guest actors of note include Geoffrey Bayldon - who might have been a suspect/red herring if only he had been in it for long enough - and Gary Parker, who was a familiar rentayank on British TV screens in the late '80s and early '90s.

Andrew Burt is missing and much missed from the final two stories, as a result of which neither end up having much involvement from the police. They are both quite packed stories, so it might be that he was cut for time, I am - alas - not at all familiar with the original Campion novels in order to say how much was omitted, added, or changed in adapting them for TV.

Oh, and just as Jon Pertwee got the gratuitous chase sequence included in his swansong, here Davo gets the opportunity to sing.

In many ways this series is worth checking out for Davo alone. Made only five years after he left Doctor Who, he is a leading manny again and playing a heroic character with some traits in common with the Doctor, yet he has matured considerably as an actor. When he is allowed to (some scripts just didn't seem to have the room) he gives Campion an edge which we really only saw him give the Doctor in Caves of Androzani. Perhaps it helped having Brian Glover as his sidekick instead of Janet Fielding?

The three stories in which Campion is allowed to be more than just a generic period TV detective, easily taken for a ripoff of an Agatha Christie, show what could have been done with the series, but even these are - with one exception - hampered by the style of the production. Even when trying to convey to us that people's lives are in danger or other high stakes situations, the feeling you mostly get as a viewer is that this is a comfy pair of slippers; a sleepy Sunday evening drama. Campion's sense of humour, where he cracks barely-witty jokes in the face of adversity, doesn't help, but the tone is set from the outset, with an incredibly lightweight title sequence and theme music.

So it was probably destined to never be considered a classic of the genre - especially with David Suchet's definitive Poirot starting around that same time - but it has a number of positives that make it worthwhile, not least the strong regular cast and interesting guest cast, which I have tried to highlight here.

I have to wonder how easy it would be to edit the series, possibly using clips taken from Black Orchid, to give the impression that Campion was the Doctor all the time? After all, in the first episode it was stated that "Albert Campion" was not his real name, and that he was a minor member of the aristocracy... in other words he is related to lords, or Time Lords..?

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord Part Eleven

Within the confines of the show the Doctor was on trial. At the BBC the show itself was on trial. But on the evening that part eleven of The Trial of a Time Lord was first broadcast on the BBC, the BBC itself was also on trial.

That week a manny had been killed while practising a stunt to perform for The Late, Late Breakfast Show, a programme that shared in the same Saturday-night line-up as Doctor Who. It was immediately cancelled, and in its intended timeslot the BBC showed the film One of Our Dinosuars is Missing - proving that even nine years after The Talons of Weng-Chiang the BBC was still happy for mannys in yellowface to take starring roles in their Saturday night family entertainments.

The manny in the isolation room is another one of Professor Lasky's assistants, who is turning into a plant-based monster by mistaik. Speaking of mistaiks, did the Doctor mean to show the court The Seeds of Doom and put this story on instead?

Mel delivers the first of a number of stagy, even pantomime-level line-readings when she says

"Never mind the Just So stories, that guard looks triggerhappy to me."

There'll be more of this sort of delivery later on in the story and it did Bonnie Langford's reputation no favours with Doctor Who fans.

We get out first proper look at the Vervoids in a scene where we see that they are keeping all the ded mannys in a big pile where they can keep an eye on them. Or whatever the Vervoids have instead of eyes. The design of their costumes remind me of something, but I can't quite think what it is at the moment... never mind, I'm sure it'll come to me.

Mel hears them whispering exposition to each other and, thinking fast, even manages to get a tape recording of their voices - lucky for her the retro technology of the Hyperion Three is exactly like the technology of her home time period. There's just time for Mel to hear

"We must not make animalkind aware of our existence. They still outnumber us. If we are to kill them all, we must hunt them down secretly."

before she gets captured by an unseen manny. The Doctor comes in to find Mel gone, but the tape is still recording so he rewinds it and plays it back.

So for those keeping score that's me watching a recording of the trial where the Doctor is watching a recording of himself listening to a recording of Mel.

From the recording the Doctor deduces where Mel must be, and runs off to "the pulveriser" because it makes perfect sense that the ship would pulverise its dirty towels into fragments and send them floating into space instead of cleaning them in some kind of futuristic washing machine.

A brief scene showing that the Dcotor has smashed up the ship's communications room with an axe is the most unambiguous distortion of the Matrix so far, all attempts at subtlety - both within and without the programme - abandoned at this moment. In the cortroom the Doctor shouts out

"I didn't do that!"

which leads into a reiteration of the points made in part nine that the Doctor must use the Matrix for his defence even though he cannot rely on it to show the truth, and neither the Inquisitor nor (supposedly) the Valeyard believe that the Matrix has been or even can be tampered with. We do at least get a funny line from the Valeyard in response to the Doctor:

"Ridiculous, we all saw you! You're hardly mistakable in that... outfit."

Lol - guilty as charged on that count, Doctor!

Bruchner has decided that to kill the Vervoids and to stop Professor Lasky and Doland making more of them he will have to blow them all up, so he stages a one-manny hijack of the Hyperion Three, going so far as to pew Tonker Travers in the paw to show he means business. He aims the ship at a black hole.

The Doctor tries to come up with plans to recapture the bridge from Bruchner, but Travers says they won't W-word because "it's designed to be hijack proof." I think this is the writers putting in a little joke based on the ironic way certain supposedly "unsinkable" ships inevitably ended up getting sunk.

The ship starts to shake, resulting in the breakage of several coffee cups. I think this is the writers putting in a little reference to the missile attack on the Heart of Gold in The Hitch-Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy.

Professor Lasky doesn't understand what's going on, so the Doctor spells it out to her:

"Your colleague is aiming the Hyperion Three into the eye of the black hole of Tartarus."

Close-up* on the Doctor's face - cliffhanger!

* Lazy director can't even be bothered with a crash-zoom.

The Dog Report

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord Part Ten

Mel has woken up a super-grumpy POV monster, and the first thing it does is POV-attack a manny.

When Professor Lasky's assistants, Bruchner and Doland, go to the hydroponic centre they find all of their secret pods are empty. They obviously know more about what is going on from the way they say

Doland: "Some fool must have introduced high intensity light into the centre."

Bruchner: "We're confronted with a catastrophe and that's your reaction? Don't you realise what's been unleashed?"

A catastrophe? That sounds great! Meanwhile, the security officer Mr Rudge is more concerned about who in the "isolation room" and has been breaking all their plates.

Some aliens chat to the Doctor about their concerns over mannys mining on their planet, with one describing mannys as "going through the universe like a plague of interplanetary locusts." The Valeyard interrupts this conversation to claim it is irrelevant, but the Doctor counters that something important just happened if the Valeyard had been paying attention. The Inquisitor asks

"Gentlemen, is this case to be resolved with a battle of words or to be conducted via the Matrix?"

I mean... surely it's both? Arguments by the prosecution and defendant have to be required in order to contextualise why and how the Matrix evidence supports their case, right? Otherwise none of these interruptions should be permitted... oh. Maybe she has a point after all?

One of the aliens gets poisoned and goes

except when the Doctor removes his helmet it turns out he is really a manny.

The Valeyard demands to know how the Doctor knew he wasn't an alien, and accuses the Doctor of "editing the Matrix" (something he is supposed to believe is impossible, so this is actually a big clue to him being the baddy behind everything). The Doctor demonstrates how he knew by replaying an earlier scene where the real aliens had to use a translator to be understood by mannys, while the fake alien didn't need one.

This is a rare use of the trial setting to do something that an ordinary story couldn't do by having a detective replay the discovery of a clue to show off his own cleverness (though the same effect could have been achieved for the viewers at home by making use of a flashback), which only goes to show that Pip and Jane Baker, writers of this section of The Trial of a Time Lord, understood their brief and made best use of the format out of any of the season's writers.

Professor Lasky, Bruchner and Doland argue about what they should do next, with Bruchner saying:

"Can't you accept we're on the brink of disaster?"

Cla... no, wait, that's a completely different Doctor Who episode he's just dropped the title of. We see a bit more of their differing personalities in this scene, with Bruchner seemingly being the only one with a conscience. (Maybe that's because he used to be a policemanny, in Softly Softly: Task Force?)

They are unaware that they are being observed by the POV monster, although we get our first sight of it - in accordance with tradition, this isn't a full view but rather one where it is in shadow and partially concealed.

The POV monster next goes after the old manny, who is about to have some sleeps. It must still be really grumpy from having been woken up, and sees this as a form of poetic justice.

The Doctor and Mel finally decide to investigate the mysterious isolation room after they see Lasky come out of it. It has been too conspicuously featured during this episode - with multiple (seemingly unrelated) scenes taking place just outside it - for them to ignore it forever. Or, to put it another way, it must have something to do with the plot under the law of conservation of narrative details.

Inside is a secret pod-like chamber in which a manny is having some sleeps. The Doctor and Mel wake her up - oh noes! Have they learned nothing from the end of part nine cliffhanger?

Crash zoom to the Doctor's face - cliffhanger!

Crash-zoom to face cliffhanger count: 7