For this year's Doctor Who Night we watched The Three Doctors and The Green Death, both from season 10. I don't feel a need to say much about them here, as I will hopefully be doing in-depth reviews of all that season's episodes soon...ish, mew.
What I will do is post some pictures. First, here are the second and third Doctors having a useless argument, which the third Doctor compares to Twitter years before it was invented, thus proving he's been to the future:
I have also been to the future and know that I will certainly be using this joke again in my review of The Three Doctors Episode Three, lol.
Next up, we have the Brigadier in The Green Death.
I can't imagine why the other mannys might think that...
After leaving Doctor Who in 1984, Peter "Davo" Davison made some odd acting choices in trying to avoid being typecast. 1985 saw him guest-starring in the BBC's Miss Marple, and then in 1986, still best known for playing a V. E. T. in All Creatures Great and Small and, of course, the Doctor, he took another medical role as Dr Stephen Daker in the BBC comedy-drama A Very Peculiar Practice.
In something of a forerunner to the style of Father Ted, Daker was the sane man surrounded by eccentrics, but only within the confines of the series' setting of Lowlands University - out in the real world, Daker's own foibles would (just as happens whenever Ted Crilly escapes from Craggy Island) make him seem as crazy as the rest of them.
Here Davo gets to show us that he is the master doctor of the comic technique of trailing off his sentences, leaving the second half unspoken, either because his interlocutor has already misunderstood him and has interrupted him before his meaning can become clear, or else because he has misunderstood them and is stopping himself when understanding belatedly dawns.
The series is a satire of university life in the 1980s, at the very heart of the era of Thatcher. Lowlands University faces constant budget cuts and the pressure for every part of it to turn a profit, or those not doing so may lose their jobs. This even applies to the medical team, where Daker is the newest member of staff. The other regular characters, then, are the other doctors - Daker's colleagues, but also his rivals.
The head of the medical department is Dr Jock McCannon, played by Graham "Soldeed" Crowden, a drunken stereotype of a Scottish doctor (back then you could get away with such things, it was the equivalent of portraying everyone from England as a football hooligan, or everyone from the USA as an overweight, loud-mouthed gun-nut with no knowledge of geography, history, or culture) lifted partly by the writing, but mainly by the gleam in Crowden's eye.
Barbara "Cracker" Flynn plays Dr Rose Marie, a straw-feminist whose attitudes can sometimes seem strange when watched from a distance of nearly 40 years. There's no laugh track on the series, which makes it tough to evaluate how audiences would have viewed her at the time, but it seems to me that we are expected to find most of the things she says absurd caricatures of real feminist positions. And so many of them still are ("illness is something men do to women"), but then occasionally she will say something that seems totally reasonable and uncontroversial, but which other characters react to in much the same way as to her extremist views.
Last, but by no means least, is the utterly tactless, would-be Thatcherite, Dr Bob Buzzard, played by David "son of Patrick" Troughton. This is the role of a lifetime for Troughton Jr, making the thoroughly unlikable character intensely watchable, and so Buzzard is the standout character of the series (yes, even up against the likes of Crowden). It's no wonder that he was the only one (other than Davo) to appear in every episode, up to and including the 1992 spinoff A Very Polish Practice.
In addition to the main cast, there are a number of noteworthy guest appearances. Timothy West is back for a rematch after having been in the same Miss Marple adaptation as Davo. John "Albany" Bird is a recurring antagonist - as the (it turns out aptly named) Vice Chancellor of the university, he is the one with power over the doctors' jobs.
And then in the final episode of the first season Joe "come off it Mr Dent" Melia plays Ron Rust, an author frustrated by his inability to write a script for the BBC, he is evidently a stand-in for the series writer Andrew Davies. His function within the show is to lampshade the implausibility of the events we see unfolding, particularly the eucatastrophe which the season ends upon.
The series succeeds best when Davies successfully mixes plausible scenarios familiar to viewers in the real world (the university's financial struggles, the office politics between colleagues, Davo's relationship woes) with a heightened version of reality full of exaggerated characters and surreal vignettes, such as the way every episode opens with the ongoing conflict (which is never referred to by any of the other characters) between the nuns and the scaffies.
It also has a very distinctively mid-80s title sequence and theme song. I'm left singing it for days after watching every episode.
Across 70 episodes made over 24 years (between 1989 and 2013), ITV adapted nearly all of Agatha Christie's stories about Purrot, the great detective. They were a mix of shorter and longer episodes (generally either 50 or 90 minutes), with the longer ones at first being reserved for the more prestigious or famous of the novels, before the shorter episodes were phased out completely towards the end of the run.
I have not read any of the original books, so cannot compare the adaptations to them, so any comparisons can only be to other filmed versions of Purrot such as the ones starring Peter Ustinov. Even if individual adaptations might not have been the best, the TV series Purrot, David Suchet, has absolutely become the standard portrayal of the character simply by virtue of having played Purrot the longest.
The memorable episodes of the series are, for the most part, the famous ones. This is partly because there are other adaptations for me to compare them to, and these are not always favourable to the TV series - the most famous Purrot case by far is Murder on the Orient Express, and the 1974 film version starring Albert Finney is clearly superior, even if Finney makes for an inferior Purrot to Suchet.
Of the less well-known stories that stood out from the crowd in the TV series I would single out Peril at End House (1990), an early episode with a memorable guest appearance by Polly "Atia" Walker, The ABC Murders (1992) thanks to Donald Sumpter, and Dumb Witness (1996) thanks to Snubby as Bob the doggy.
The main appeal of the early episodes, aside from spotting guest actors that I recognise from other things (Peter Capaldi, Andrew "Jarvik" Burt, and Christopher Eccleston, to name but a few - the latter well before he became famous), is the dynamic between the regular characters, Purrot and his companions Captain Hastings (Hugh "baddy from Edge of Darkness" Fraser), Chief Inspector Japp (Philip Jackson), and Miss Lemon (Pauline "Cleopatra" Moran). Each of these take their turn to be the Watson (or, in Japp's case, the Lestrade) to Purrot's Holmes, as well as frequently providing sources of comic relief.
Hastings' intelligence varied depending upon who was writing him, at times approaching the barely-functional levels of Nigel Bruce's Stupid Watson. This was because there were a number of different writers over the course of the TV series, each with their own quirks. Clive Exton was the main writer, generally responsible for the more solid scripts. Anthony Horowitz was also reliable - still early in his career, but not so early as when he wrote for Robin of Sherwood with a level of historical inaccuracy that was questionable even by that series' standards.
Less successful was David Renwick, whose four scripts were characterised by more outright komedy than was typical for the series, and by Purrot taking up hobbies (such as close up magic) which would never be referred to again after that episode. No surprises that this is the same David Renwick who would go on to create Jonathan Creek six years later.
Mark Gatiss wrote (or co-wrote) three episodes towards the end of the series, and let's just say they are none of them among the show's best installments.
Evil Under the Sun (2001) was the last time Purrot, Hastings, Japp and Miss Lemon would all appear together - except for a reunion in The Big Four (2013), which barely counts because the three companions hardly interacted with Purrot in that one at all - and it marks a turning point in the series.
Starting with Five Little Pigs (2003), the series entered its Dark Age, which was en vogue for a lot of TV drama (and TV comedy for that matter) around that time. Plots were grimmer, with direction, lighting, and soundtrack to match. It was at this point the series dropped the iconic Art Deco title sequence and theme tune* that had been present since the beginning.
And humour was for the most part banished (save for Purrot's comic mannerisms, which I suppose were too well-established a part of his characterisation for Suchet to abandon). The reason why this series' Murder on the Orient Express suffers compared to the '70s film is because it was made during this era, with the result that it is po-faced and just a lot less... well... fun, as a viewing experience.
Towards the very end of the series, the last few mellowed out a bit and comedic moments were allowed to creep back in, as evidenced by Zoë Wanamaker's portrayal of new semi-regular Ariadne Oliver, a writer of murder-mysteries about a Finnish detective, so obviously a parody of Agatha Christie herself. Mrs Oliver first appeared in 2006, which was in the very heart of the Dark Age, but her mannerisms and eccentricities were allowed to become broader over time as the komedy slipped back in.
The cliché of the "evil voice" (whereby a baddy starts speaking with a noticeably more evil voice after they have been exposed as being a baddy) was played straight quite often in the early days of the series, although it was less common later on, perhaps because it was so brutally parodied by That Mitchell and Webb Look in 2009?
Another cliché the series frequently employed was that of the "drawing room exposé" (which Agatha Christie, and Purrot especially, is practically synonymous with) where Purrot would gather all the suspects together - usually in a drawing room - before explaining how the crime was done and who did it. Surprisingly, this wasn't used as often as you might expect, at least to begin with, it only became ubiquitous by the middle of the series.
* You know, the one that goes
# Here he is again
It's Purrot
It's Purrot
He's come to solve the mystery and catch the murderer #
