The Transformers: Man of Iron

Man of Iron was the first British Transformers story. After the initial four-part miniseries (that eventually ran to 80 issues) of the American Transformers had been reprinted in the UK comic, they began publishing original stories by British writers and artists.

While writer Simon Furman and artist Geoff Senior would later become synonymous with the series, and would take it in a direction that eschewed the necessity for using mannys as audience identification or POV characters, this was not something in place from the very beginning. Man of Iron was written by Steve Parkhouse, with art by John Ridgway, respectively the writer and artist of the Voyager stories for Doctor Who. As we might expect from such imaginitive creators, they had their own unique perspective on the world of the Transformers...

Very much beginning the story from the POV of mannys, it starts with Decepticon jets dropping bombs on an old English castle. The mannys don't know they're Decepticons, and we readers are only clued in by the blurry presence of the Decepticon insignia on their wings. They all appear as a dull grey, instead of the distinctive colourings of Starscream, Skywarp and Thundercracker.

It's as if they're trying to be "robots in disguise" from the readers as well as the mannys in the story.

Two bombs: one explodes; the other doesn't. This caues the police and the army to cordon off the castle, and send for the curator, Roy Harker.

From Roy, we are introduced to our main character, his son Sammy. Sammy is busy in the woods playing at Cultural Appropriation. His first thoughts that we are privy to:

"Running Wolf says... many moons must come and go until he tastes venison once more in his father's lodge..."

It was a different time. Sammy would be in his 40s now.

Sammy encounters the Autobot Jazz in the wood and runs away. Jazz says nothing (though he does step on and destroy Sammy's bow and arrow - the postmodern toy symbolically replacing the old-fashioned one), and is very much portrayed as the stranger in this scene, with Sammy the POV character. This is going to remain the case for the majority of the story, giving us a greater degree of removal from the Autobots than is usual even for the earliest introductory stories in the American comic - there we were shown the origin of the Transformers and the backstory of how they came to be on Earth before we were introduced to any of the main human characters.

We next see Jazz transformed into his car mode, framed in such a way that a reader with no preknowledge of the Transformers might not connect that this is the same robot. Or that, as he communicates with an "Autobot leader," that it is the car itself doing the talking and not some unseen person within.

Roy Harker, still trying to puzzle out what the mystery jets' intentions were, is summoned home because his son is "in a state of shock." The scene suddenly changes to a flashback to history, with the picture frames changing to a borderless style to clue us in on the transition.

In 1017, a battle between the armies of noblemannys was interrupted when "the ground was seized by a great shaking" and then "a man of iron of great height and girth" (clang!) appeared. And it wasn't just his height and girth that frightened the mannys, lol, because this man of iron also "carried a sword of fire, and a javelin of flame... and thunderbolts came from his hands..."

It is then revealed to us that all this historical exposition is being read out of a book by Roy to Sammy. Roy asks

"Sammy... the, er... robot you saw in the woods today... did it look like this?"

Sammy charitably says "that's more or less what it looked like" and this seems to confirm Roy's suspicions. He tells Sammy

"This is a drawing taken from an illuminated manuscript found in the castle chapel by my predecessor twenty five years ago... it's the man of iron...

The manuscript was completed in 1070, Sammy... it's over nine hundred years old!"

The sense this gives us of the enormity of history is something that wouldn't make sense in an American setting, so here we see the writer making good use of the choice to set it in Britain. Using the passage of centuries in this way reminds me of Dark Towers, where the ancient Tall Knight was so terrifying partly because of his extreme remoteness from life in the present day.

The next five pages are an extended, surreal dream sequence, where Sammy dreams about seeing a spaceship, the Decepticon Thundercracker in his jet mode, and the Autobot Mirage in humanoid robot form. As it goes on it becomes increasingly unclear to us what is real and what is in the dream, as Sammy appears to wake, and yet he and the objects in his bedroom go on to levitate around the room.

The picture of the man of iron flies out of the open window where it is taken up by a robot hand, as Sammy says

"The man of iron! He's flying! He's flying away!"

The dream sequence ends only when Roy breaks into the room to find Sammy is still sleeping, but that "there's a hurricane blowing through here..."

Shutting the window, Roy sees the back of the departing Mirage, as he stalks away into the night. Roy's response to his seeing this is to ask

"What the heck is going on around here?"

In the sort of transition that plays better in a TV show, the next day he asks the same question of an army captain at the castle. The captain tells him

"There's a very large object buried under the hill. Very large indeed."

"How large?"

"Well... ahh... at a rough estimate? About the size of an ocean-going liner."

Sammy, meanwhile, sees Jazz as a car, and doesn't connect him with the robot he saw the previous day.

Examining the car more closely, Sammy spots that it has "no driving mirrors. No wing mirrors, either." So while they may be robots in disguise, that doesn't guarantee that their disguise is perfect. This makes sense even if you know the backstory for why the Transformers turn into Earth vehicles, since the intelligence that repaired them and gave them their alternative forms mistaikenly believed the cars, jets, guns and cassette recorders to be Earth's indigenous lifeforms. It does contradict how the Autobots are often shown in other stories, however, although this is also true of the way John Ridgway draws them very closely to the appearance of their toys, while other artists would go for a more streamlined or stylised approach that made the characters both easier to draw and more individually distinctive.

Sammy is literally speechless when he sees the picture of the man of iron on the car's back seat, which the comic depicts by drawing a speech bubble but not filling it with any speech. Jazz, on the other paw, says

"Get in, Sammy!"

Sammy claims to have been taught by his mum "not to take lifts from strangers" but Jazz tricks Sammy inside with a persuasive, tempting offer:

"Why not just sit for a while in the front seat? Just pretend you're driving..."

Are we quite sure the "Heroic" Autobots are the goodys? If that ploy had failed would Jazz have offered to show Sammy some puppies?

As soon as Sammy's mum appears and calls for him, Jazz slams his door shut and kidnaps Sammy, driving away as Sammy shouts

"Mum! Help meee!"

This is the halfway point in the story, and so far the presence of the Transformers has been kept to a minimum level in their own comic that will scarcely, if ever, be seen again. They are as alien as they will ever be, with the Decepticons having unknowable motives and even the Autobots' motivation appearing sinister for now. Up to this stage they have lurked in the periphery of the story, which has been fantastic in establishing an atmosphere of mystery and suspense. Though this is completely lost upon any reader with too much prior knowledge of the Transformers, who know all about the Autobot-Decepticon conflict, and must therefore be aware that the Autobots are not baddys. Thus this only makes sense as one of the earliest Transformers stories, and could never have been successful if placed any later in the comic's run.

The second half of the story sees an immediate change in direction - with Sammy now in Jazz's hands (there's maybe a joke to be made here if you want it, mew), the Autobots reveal themselves to both him and, through him, to us the readers.

"Sometimes we disguise ourselves [...] so we can move around without being noticed [...] and sometimes we're discovered by accident. Like the day you saw me in the woods!"

"You mean the robot I saw in the woods was you?"

(He's not the sharpest, is our Sammy. Mew.)

"That's right, Sammy. That was the real me. My name is unpronouncable in your language... so just call me Jazz!"

This is the second time in this story when it has been stated that the Autobots' names are not their real names, but rather they are supposed to be "codenames." This contradicts many, many other Transformers stories, where it is generally accepted that their names are their names, but is arguably more 'realistic' than that they all have names that so neatly and precisely match their personality, form or function. Never mind, this is clearly an early attempt at worldbuilding by Parkhouse, just one that wouldn't be taken up by other writers.

Jazz meets up with Mirage and Trailbreaker, and then they are immediately attacked by Decepticon jets. The story is suddenly all action. Trailbreaker, having only joined in the story a page earlier, is attacked and damaged, and for all we know may even be killed since the last we see of him is his reporting to Jazz

"I hear you Jazz... it's no good. Everything's gone... just plain... ruined..."

Trailbreaker? More like Trailborken

Mirage tricks one of the Decepticons into crashing into a bridge, while the other one attacks Jazz. There is some confusion about the identity of the Decepticons involved in this attack, since they are both coloured dark blue like Thundercracker - this is far from the only time the precise number and nature of the Decepticon jets has been left vague, and the Transformers cartoon would be a lot worse than this for having multiple Thundercrackers, Skywarps and even Starscream lookalikes.

Jazz and Sammy are saved by the arrival of another Autobot, Bluestreak, who guns down the remaining Decepticon.

The action sequence comes to and end with the jet taking half a page to crash-land.

After this, the pace changes once again as Sammy is taken to the Autobot's spaceship...

"Gosh! Is that a spaceship? A real spaceship?"

asks Sammy, to which Jazz replies

"Not really. It's a shuttle-craft."

Jazz does not elaborate on this, but as readers we can deduce that this may be a technologically advanced craft, but it is not capable of flying through outer space - not only will this become significant later on in this story, it is key to the overarching story of the Transformers that they do not have access (at least at this early stage in the comics) to interplanetary travel, and are trapped on Earth after their actual spaceship - the Ark - crashed into it.

Out of the shuttle comes...

Optimus Prime!

In some ways the main character of the Transformers, certainly their most iconic figure, Optimus Prime would transcend his creator's intended function as a toy robot that turns into a truck to become one of the most beloved characters of the 20th century. That can be largely attributed to the way he was given a compassionate personality that ought to have acted counter to his purpose as a military leader, but instead allowed him to transcend that role. This made his death in The Transformers: The Movie (1985) all the more painful to viewers, but it also meant his eventual return from death was almost Christ-like to the generation that witnessed it.

There's little of that to be seen here (though there will be hints of it later on in the story), with the Autobot leader's function right now being to give Sammy - and through him, us - the exposition about what's going on:

"We are Autobots, Sammy. We come from the planet Cybertron. We are stranded here on Earth. We came to your country after picking up a signal. We tracked the signal from halfway round the world, all the way to Stansham. The signal is in our language. It has acted like a beacon, beaming out its message for millions of years...

We believe that scientists on our homeworld have sent a rescue craft for us. That craft is somewhere near the castle of Stansham. It may even be underneath it!"

The upshot is that the Autobots have to reach the craft before the Decepticons do. Sammy tells them that the soldiers his dad has been W-wording with are also looking for it, to which Optimus Prime replies that if the mannys get there first, the Decepticons "will destroy the craft, the castle, the village... everything!"

The next day, the soldiers have gotten as far as exposing part of the rescue craft and seen the Autobot symbol. With security efficiency worthy of UNIT, the captain is quite happy to chat with Roy Harker about it:

"We have reason to believe it's a craft, Mr Harker. Possibly extraterrestrial, though we have no proof of that. The signal may be a distress call... or an attempt to contact extraterrestrial beings near to Earth [...] or even here on the surface!"

To me that sounds too suspiciously accurate for speculation, maybe the captain does know more than he's telling Roy?

Roy has worries of his own, as he (and the writer) remembers that his son was last seen being "kidnapped by a driverless car." But he has more immediate problems when the ground shakes and the man of iron appears.

This isn't Jazz, but the man of iron of legend, who emerges from a secret undeground lair. It starts attacking the army, destroying a jeep, but then a Decepticon appears and blasts the man of iron, destroying it.

This is a great twist and subversion of reader expectations - after all the build up and the anticipation of his arrival, the man of iron is killed off only three pages after he made his entrance.

The Autobots arrive on the scene and battle is joined, the Decepticon jets (multiple Thundercrackers again) accompanied by Buzzsaw and Laserbeak (or their lookalikes). The narration draws a parallel between this battle and the historical battles fought over this site, in and around the castle.

This climactic fight is short - really only a page-and-a-half - before the Decepticons retreat (having none of them spoken a word throughout the entire story, leaving them a mysterious and alien presence - a far cry from the ranting, maniacal Megatron of the cartoons), with the Autobots taking possession of the rescue craft.

Sammy is reunited with his father and advises him to leave the area, something that he and the army were, rather sensibly, going to do anyway. The army soldiers are never explicitly identified as being from UNIT, but it would be a perfect fit, especially in an era when Marvel comics were also producing the Doctor Who comic strip.

Optimus Prime and Jazz discuss what to do now that they have the means to leave the Earth, and here we get a sense of the great wisdom and compassion of Optimus Prime as he takes the command decision:

"We cannot leave the Earth now, Jazz. The Decepticons would soon overrun the planet. Only we few stand in their way. We cannot leave. Nor can we leave the rescue ship intact. We have no choice but to destroy it."

The repetition of "we cannot leave" cleverly hints at the internal struggle that Optimus Prime faces over this dilemma, but when he makes his decision it is final - phrased as having been "no choice."

As readers we are made privy to information that would most certainly have altered Optimus Prime's decision had he been aware of it - the craft still has an occupant; a "navigator," for whom the man of iron was only an "attendant." The narration makes it clear that "Jazz could know nothing of this" and so he carries out his leader's order, and destroys the spaceship so that "nothing remained."

With that, the story is all but over. The last few panels are a melancholic epilogue, as the narration explains what happened afterwards in a far more poetic fashion than a story like this honestly deserves:

"Autumn came, leaves fell... Sammy was a year older and a year wiser. He never saw Jazz again...

But on clear, sharp nights, when stars glittered like needles and the night winds rattled his window... then he slept a fitful, fearful sleep...

...and the man of iron walked once more through his dreams."

Man of Iron is one of the all time great Transformers stories for good reason, being an exceptionally tight, self-contained story that a reader needs no prior knowledge of the Transformers to enjoy. Indeed, arguably having too much knowledge of the Transformers might well lessen one's enjoyment of this story, because it runs counter to the more established tropes of the franchise in so many ways.

But if you can set 40 years of Transformers lore aside to experience their world afresh through Sammy's eyes, there's a lot here to enjoy. Though we never did find out what became of Trailbreaker...

The Complete and Utter History of Monty Python's Flying Circus Season Four

Forty: The Golden Age of Ballooning

Well, I had to reach it eventually - the worst episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and it isn't close. Theming an entire programme around a single concept turned out well for them with The Cycling Tour, but here it just seems to be one unfunny vignette after another, or the few funny bits there are are stretched out way longer than they can sustain the concept, and end up just as unfunny as the ones that weren't funny to begin with. The first of these potentially good bits, for example, is Chapman as the Montgolfier butler "O'Toole" being unable to say the name "Bartlett" (he'll have a bad time if he ever wants to watch The West Wing). This goes on for several lines past the point where it stops being funny, and the eventual punchline isn't even worth waiting for.

One bit I do genuinely like is Palin as the Glaswegian King Louis xiv impersonator - the way he combines the accent with the authentic-looking BBC period costume immediately clues in the audience as to what is going on, so it is never needed to be explicitly stated what the 'plot' is.

"You 'ave come from Paris?"

"Where?"

Then we get more business with O'Toole unable to find the decanter of claret, which is another bit that isn't funny to begin with and then gets less funny as it drags on. Jones as Joseph Montgolfier challenges the fake king on the grounds that Louis xiv is dead, and gets the line of the episode from Palin in response:

"Listen to me, smartarse, when you're king of France you've got better things to do than go around all day remembering your bloody number!"

He follows this up with a Glaswegian kiff.

As the plot moves to the court of George iii where the "suspect sovereign" tries to sell the purloined plans to the British king, the sketch descends into lolrandom anarchy when "the Ronettes" are announced and they come in and sing a song to which the only lyrics are "George the third" over and over again.

It doesn't get any better when the scene shifts back to France. O'Toole, having delivered his final line, gets an enormous round of applause and makes several curtain calls, before reprising his last few lines to enormous ovations, laughter and cheers, including from other characters who come in to join in with the adulation, but baffling the other cast members in the scene. I have never quite 'got' this bit, because I can't grasp what this is trying to do or say or why it is even supposed to be funny. (A subtle touch that is easily missed on a single viewing, which I will give it some credit for, is that bouquets of flowers are delivered to Chapman by men.) The credits roll over this scene, with still quite a bit of the episode still to go (mew), because this is the fourth season when they were pushing the envelope on this aspect of the format even more than in the earlier seasons.

The "Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Norwegian Party" is the first and only sketch of the show unconnected with The Golden Age of Ballooning, but after it we go straight back to it for the Zeppelin sketches. As Ferdinand von Zeppelin (Chapman) throws anyone from his "airship" who dares to call it a balloon, they all land on one house, creating the biggest mirth-free zone in all of Monty Python. Brace yourselves.

Palin and Jones play a German couple who are reading from a recipe book and arguing about which of their rooms is the "drawing room" and which is the "sitting room" as Zeppelin's victims crash through their roof off-screen. If that sounds at all funny to you, take it from me that it is not. The accents Palin and Jones have chosen to deploy in the scene combine with the slow pacing to throw off their usual comic timing. I have to wonder if they were directed to pad this out by playing it so tediously slowly or if it just turned out that way? There's a sort of punchline with the lines

"We must ring the government."

"This is the government, Helmut."

but the sketch keeps on going after that, and eventually, mercifully, it just ends with a hard cut to some stock footage of a zeppelin.

The Golden Age of Ballooning gives way to The Golden Age of Colonic Irrigation, complete with mid-70s punked up theme tune and font in place of the classical style used for the Ballooning caption.

Well, that was shit. Thank Hoff it's over.

Forty-one: Michael Ellis

Titles; "THE END" caption; end credits: the purest expression of the joke.

Large portions of this episode were originally written for the first draft of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which intended that the second half of the film be set in the present day with the knights still looking for the Holy Grail - including at a department store, resulting in several scenes later adapted into sketches we see here. I can't tell if the same Pythons would have taken the same roles if these bits had made it into the film, but it seems unlikely that they would have been exactly the same since John Cleese would have been in that, whereas he is absent here - as indeed he is from virtually all of season four.

This is another show with a single plotline running through it. Though it is called "Michael Ellis," we never meet the eponymous character, but instead follow the ant-buying adventures of Eric Idle's character who is repeatedly mistaken for Ellis or just misses out on meeting with him.

Idle apparently owns several other pets aside from his ant, and while we don't see most of them, there is a real tiger (a little one) in a cage in the studio set for his kitchen, where his mum (Terry Jones, playing something akin to a forerunner of Brian's mum) is preparing to give the tiger an injection of "mandies" i.e. methaqualone, a common sedative in the 1970s.

There's a surreal bit of world-building where Idle and his mum have a load of TV sets in their home, which they watch one at a time and then throw away after each viewing session. This leads to the mum asking Idle to

"While you're out get us another couple of tellies would you, here's £180."

As Idle returns to the department store, the whole episode gets even more surreal and dream-like, especially the scene with the poetry recital where Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson and Shelley are all obsessed with ants until Queen Victoria arrives to command them to write poems on other topics.

Chapman is great as the drunken hostess, though hardly taxing to his acting skills. Gilliam as Shelley ("Just a little one, medium dry"), on the other hand, mugs for all he is worth, and here is where the lack of Cleese is most keenly felt, since clearly all the Pythons were required for this scene. Several of the incredibly famous poems featured in this sketch I would have fiirst encountered here, and I can rarely hear them without thinking of their ant-based alternatives.

The toupee hall sketch is a short but funny one where Jones, Palin and Chapman are all wearing terrible, obvious toupees that are different colours from their (characters') real hair, yet are oblivious as to how bad each other's toupees are. It's all part of the strange world of the department store, where the satirical intent of a lot of the skits can only be deduced from context, since shopping at large stores of this sort is no longer an everyday experience - either for cats or mannys - we just don't live in that kind of world any more.

The multiple endings for sale at the "End of Show Department" shatter the fourth wall as Idle is offered his pick of how the show should end, culminating in

"Well, how about a sudden ending?"

Forty-two: Light Entertainment War

This opens on the caption "Up Your Pavement" and a Steptoe and Son type sitcom seems to be commencing, but then the pair of tramps the camera was following get run over by Chapman as the Jason Kingesque "Alex Diamond," and the narration and accompanying theme music starts rapidly switching genres as we follow a succession of different characters, each tenuously linked to the previous one. We get a rare appearance in this season by John Cleese, appearing for a few seconds as a surgeon - almost certainly some film footage they already had to paw. All this rapid chopping and changing isn't that funny to begin with, but it continues long enough to become funny, around the time that Eric Idle appears as "the chairman of Fiat" to say

"Che cosa e lo stucciacatori di polli?" ("What is a hen-teaser?")

When it finally settles down, the first proper sketch of the episode is possibly the most famous sketch from the whole of the fourth season - RAF Banter. Much imitated, the central premise of a bunch of WW2 RAF pilots unable to understand each other's slang terminology is a strong one, so this is rightly a well-regarded sketch.

"Cabbage crates coming over the briny?"

When it turns out that the Germans are literally dropping "cabbage crates" in the place of bombs, this segues into the idea that the Germans are not taking the war seriously, irritiating the British high command. They decide to come down hard on any British soldiers "found trivializing this war," leading to the court martial of Sapper Walters (Idle) for "carrying on the war by other than warlike means." Suffice to say, the court martial soon descends into silliness itself.

"Anything goes in!

Anything goes out!

Fish, bananas, old pyjamas,

Mutton, beef and trout!"

That song, which Palin belts out in such a ridiculous way, isn't even the apex of the silliness, which comes when Jones as the presiding general decides to show them all who's in charge:

"Shut up! I'm in charge of this court. Stand up! Sit down! Go moo! See? Right, now on with the pixie hats! And order in the skating vicar!"

Then they all sing the "Anything Goes" song.

A brief bit about the love triangle between the pilot, navigator and rear gunner of an RAF bomber can only have come from the pen of Chapman, his Biggles obsession (as seen in show 33) coming out - so to speak - once more.

There's a change of direction after the (quite late) titles, with a satirical piece about how television programme planners treat the public like idiots. Mrs Mock Tudor (Chapman) using her TV remote to electrocute Terry Gilliam (browned up, in a nappy and turban, and seemingly with electrodes attached to his head) into turning off the TV gets an enormous laugh and round of applause from the studio audience. I'm not quite sure what it is that they find so amusing, but we should never underestimate a 1970s audience's capacity for laughing at the bits that we in the 21st century find most offensive.

The BBC planners themselves are shown to be even bigger idiots than the public, sat around planning on showing repeats while waiting for the bar to open. Their cunning plan is to "retitle" the repeats and thus fool the public into thinking they're watching original programmes. Their suggestions for these new titles include "Dad's Navy," "Up Your Mother Next Door," "I Married Lucy" and "Doctor At Cake."

One of Gilliam's best animations follows, in which the manny who wishes for "a decent day tomorrow" is then kept up all night by the scenery being changed.

The sketch about "woody" and "tinny" words escalates from silly to extremely silly, and contains some lovely wordplay. Palin arrives towards the end as his RAF Banter character from earlier.

The sketch about showjumping with the horses jumping over musical chorus lines contains a direct reference to The Black & White Minstrel Show as one of the obstacles, reminding us of the '70s TV landscape which this series was a part of.

Newsreader Peter Woods is the latest in the line of real-life newsreaders who have played themselves in Monty Python's Flying Circus, introducing the "sentimental stage" of the war, and leading us in to the final song written and performed by Neil Innes, "When does a dream begin?"

If you only heard this then you could be fooled into thinking it was a straight song, since the gag is purely in the visuals as Innes keeps forcing the woman he is with to look at him every time she turns her head away.

This is a packed episode and is pretty effortlessly the best show of the fourth season, containing most of its best material.

Forty-three: Hamlet

This is the second show to use material originally written for the Monty Python and the Holy Grail script, with the opening sketch where Hamlet visits a sequence of sex-obsessed bogus psychiatrists originally intended for one of the knights of the Round Table.

The next sketch spoofs the One Show of its day, Nationwide. Eric Idle does a passable impression of the presenter, Michael Barratt, who I'm guessing was unable to appear as himself because he was too busy being in The Goodies. I'm joking, of course... he didn't appear as himself in The Goodies until the following year, mew. The awkward pause Idle puts in before the cut to the filmed report is a bit of attention to detail worthy of Look Around You, except it shows that you didn't have to wait until after the year 2000 to see the mocking of the limitations of '70s technology.

The filmed report is a lovely bit of location filming near the Houses of Parliament, with the buildings clearly visible in the background. Palin as a policemanny commits an escalating series of thefts, culminating in stealing beer from - it is implied by the sound of breaking glass - a shop. Or possibly there were Autons coincidentally coming to life at the same time, since the sound effect used is very similar and possibly even the exact same one.

After the titles there's a satirical sketch about the violence of boxing and the exploitation of boxers, with the central conceit being that "the Champ" has been dead for a while already (for at least "six fights" going by the dialogue) but is still being made to fight against "the Killer" by the corrupt fight organisers. Gilliam appears in this sketch fully blacked up for no discernable reason. The follow-up scene shows hospital doctors rooting for the Killer in the return fight, while the patients support the Champ - another example of the doctors vs patients theme that Monty Python's Flying Circus keeps returning to.

For the sports programme "Act Two - A Room in Polonius's House" Palin again brings out his Frank Bough impression (previously seen at the end of season three), and after the "Queen Victoria Handicap" turns out to be a horse race except instead of horses it is run by a load of Queen Victorias, Bough and his fellow sports presenters/pundits are all dressed as Queen Victoria as well. This includes the real Jimmy Hill, the latest in the increasingly long line of '70s TV people appearing as themselves. It's getting to the point where I have to wonder what the likes of Barratt and Bough did to annoy the Pythons so that they got impersonated instead of making cameos.

This isn't a bad show - though it does perhaps miss Cleese more than some of the other season four episodes - but several of the sketches feel a lot like retreads of subjects we have seen the Pythons tackle before: psychiatrists; violent policemannys; corrupt sports; sports TV shows and punditry.

Forty-four: Mr Neutron

The second-worst episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus opens with the titles. The first sketch is the opening ceremony for a post box performed by Michael Palin, in which he always pronounces the word box in a silly voice, except for once when he forgets. He repeats the entire speech in French, and is a couple of sentences into repeating it again in German when it mercifully cuts to something else. By the Hoff, this is unfunny shit. Come back The Golden Age of Ballooning, all is forgiven.

However, the reason this is only the second-worst episode is that it does get better. Chapman arrives as Mr Neutron, and he just looks hilarious - I'm laughing even before he does anything. The contrast between the narration describing him as "the most dangerous and terrifying man in the world" and the dull, ordinary setting he appears in is also very funny, even though it is arguably a partial retread of season one's "science fiction sketch."

The humdrum suburban activities of Mr Neutron are interspersed with scenes of the American military (as represented by characters played by Idle and Palin) which go on for way too long. Idle as "Captain Carpenter" is ordered to find Teddy Salad, and inquires of some fish-obsessed Eskimos who deny being Eskimos. When asked what Teddy Salad does, Carpenter claims he is a hen-teaser, leading to a lovely call back to the chairmanny of Fiat from show 42, who again says

"Che cosa e lo stucciacatori di polli?"

Carpenter finds Salad disguised as one of the doggys on a sled team (very obviously none of the doggys are huskies, as Wolfgang was quick to point out). This joke is another one that is extended way beyond the point where it stops being funny. To make matters worse, for the second part of the sketch the doggy is replaced with a disconcertingly dead-eyed, unnaturally moving, uncanny valley puppet. Mew. Do not want.

Much funnier is the scene where Mr Neutron has fallen in love with a cleaning lady, Mrs S.C.U.M. (a pepperpot played by Terry Jones). Mr Neutron tells her he has "won a Kellogg's Corn Flake Competition" before revealing that he is "the most powerful man in the universe" in the same monotone and with the same level of seriousness.

As the Americans look like they are destroying the world to get to Mr Neutron, the scene changes to show Idle as "a man from the Radio Times"* who describes all the "very expensive" scenes to follow. A subtle joke is that they have been "filmed by the BBC... in conjunction with Time-Life of course" showing how even in the '70s the BBC needed to do co-productions on expensive series (they co-produced The Ascent of Man with Time-Life in 1973). Before the very expensive scenes can be shown, the caption "The End" appears, and the manny from the Radio Times is heard asking for "another minute, Mr Cotton, please," which is a reference to Bill Cotton, then the BBC's Head of Light Entertainment.

The next programme is Conjuring Today, a short sketch in which a conjurer (Palin) with ping-pong eyes holding a bloody saw says:

"Good evening. Last week we learned how to saw a lady in half. This week we're going to learn how to saw a lady into three bits and dispose of the body..."

He is then chased off screen by two policemannys, and in doing so renders all 21st century serial-killer dramas redundant. The last shot of the episode is the manny from the Radio Times being struck on the head with a giant hammer (possibly the same prop that was used back in show 33 to hit the "The Show So Far" manny with?) as he leaves BBC Television Centre.

So there you have it - there's some good stuff in this show, but a lot of interminable rubbish as well.

* The copy of the Radio Times he's holding is the actual Radio Times from 26/10/74, the week season four began broadcast, which would therefore have been available by the time they recorded this episode in November.

Forty-five: Party Political Broadcast

The episode is introduced as though "a Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Liberal Party," which I'm sure would have been a common sight on TV in a year which saw two general elections, but which are now essentially a relic of a bygone age seeing as watching broadcast television is almost as much a thing of the past as the time when there were only three channels to watch in the first place.

This goes straight into a disgusting sketch (most especially Terry Gilliam lying on the sofa messily noming beans) but crammed full of sight gags and wordplay. Idle as the family mother to Chapman as the daughter:

"When are you coming back tonight?"

"3 a.m!"

"I think it's disgusting... you a Member of Parliament."

It is eventually revealed that they are participating in the "Most Awful Family in Britain 1974" contest ("sponsored by Heart-Attacko Margarine"), and are judged by a panel of experts, who are disappointed that this family doesn't have the "sustained" and "really gross awfulness" of the winner. We then see the runners-up, the "Featherstonehaugh-Cholmondeleys of Berkshire," who are a basic send-up of thr aristocracy, of the sort who wouldn't have been out of place participating in the Upper Class Twit of the Year. The competition winners are, of course, much too awful for us to be allowed to see anything of.

Over the course of this show, various sketches are interrupted by a Liberal Party candidate canvassing for votes. The resemblance to the loony who would occasionally interrupt sketches in the third season is, I am sure, coincidental.

A sketch with Chapman as a doctor making his patient (Jones) fill out pointless forms before he will treat his bleeding to death is perhaps the ultimate form of the recurring Python subject of uncaring, money-grubbing doctors. This one is perhaps most notable for the fact that the sketch was written by Chapman in partnership with (in the absence of J Cleese) a certain Douglas Adams.

"Surely you knew number four? It's from The Merchant of Venice, even I knew that!"

The middle of the episode contains a number of shorter sketches, making a change from the more long-form ones that are common through much of season four. The best of these is one that is remarkably recognisable today, because its subject is still making documentaries for the BBC 50 years later, albeit not in the same way he made them in the mid-1970s. In 1974 David Attenborough had only recently gone back into making documentaries, having been the Controller of BBC Two, in which capacity he commissioned Monty Python's Flying Circus. So this could be considered another sketch where the Pythons bit the hand that fed them, albeit in a more roundabout way. But seeing as this was the final episode, maybe this was a bite too far?

Attenborough (Palin) is searching for the "Walking tree of Dahomey, Quercus Nicholas Parsonus" but instead he finds the bum-shaped "Turkish Little Rude Plant" (whcih may or may not have been an inspiration for a certain mid-80s Doctor Who monster), the "legendary Puking Tree of Mozambique" and the long-lost tribe, the "Batsmen of the Kalahari."

This segues into a decidedely un-PC sketch about primitive African tribesmannys playing cricket against a side of Pratts.

The only thing that marks this out as being the last ever episode instead of any other regular episode of the show is that the music played over the end credits is done slightly differently, with the first half played on a single guitar, badly. Mind you, with Monty Python I get the impression that they might very well have done that kind of thing on a regular episode anyhow.

The actual ending gets very strange, with a series of announcers handing off to one another, and the final shot sees Jones replacing Idle in the presenter's chair, but it fades out before he can say anything. Confusing, not funny, but very Python.

The very last bit of all is the same caption as we saw at the start of the episode announcing a "Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Liberal Party" but Palin's voiceover collapses into giggles.

ETH NED

Doctor Who Night 2023: The 60th Anniversary

Since this year is the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who, we had a special extra-looooong Doctor Who Night. Its theme was 'the Bad in the Good and the Good in the Bad.' Even the theme was long!

Caves of Androzani

The Good

Just about everything. I mean. this story is about as close to purrfection that a Doctor Who story can get without having either Paul Darrow or cats in it. Robert Holmes wrote a lot of great stories, but this is his magnum opus in which every character and plot thread come together beautifully. There are three great cliffhangers out of four episodes, culminating in the greatest depiction of the Doctor's regeneration at the end. It's Peter Davison's best story as the Doctor, and Colin Baker's too for that matter.

The Bad

This Magma Beast costume isn't all that great.

Other than that, the only downside to Caves of Androzani is that Doctor Who can't be as good as this all the time. It is Doctor Who written for adults, which is nice to have occasionally. And I mean really written for adults, with grown-up political themes and characterisation, not just putting in gratuitous sex and swearing (like Torchwood, mew). But even though the series could do with being like this more often than it is in reality, the makers mustn't forget the core audience of kittens and little mannys for too long.

If the BBC wanted to make a grown-up sci-fi series they could easily do it, but it wouldn't be Doctor Who. It would be more like... Blakes 7.

Earthshock

The Good

While not in the same league of quality as Caves of Androzani (few Doctor Who stories are), Earthshock is an attempt at making a blockbuster action story on a BBC budget, and it is a pretty good attempt for all that.

A lot of this story's reputation rests on the shock appearance of the Cybermannys at the end of part one, which was a genuine surprise twist for TV audiences in 1982 (it isn't called Earthshock of the Cybermannys for a start), but that doesn't hold up today since it is hard to avoid the presence of the Cybermannys on the DVD box, or the iPlayer episode thumbnails. But even without that it holds up, with the Cybermannys used well as an implacable foe for the Doctor, and we get some classic Cybermanny tropes returning, such as a traitor among the mannys and having Cybermannys bursting out of their cardboard containers to go on a march.

The Bad

This special effect doesn't hold up. They might have got away with it in the era before home video, DVD, iPlayer, etc. but even then it gets used twice because it appears in the cliffhanger to part three and then in the reprise at the start of part four, so twice the opportunity to spot the joins.

You might be surprised that I also consider the death of Adric to be a bad thing. Reducing the number of Companions from three to two was undeniably a benefit of this - almost every story of season 19 showed us proof that three Companions was too many - and choosing the most annoying of the three to get rid of was also to their credit, but the way this was done was... not great.

First, you're never going to convince that Doctor Who is an 'anyone can die' kind of show. It's not The Sandbaggers. Likewise, killing off a Companion to show 'consequences' doesn't W-word when there are dozens of other occasions when the regulars survive similar situations. These general complains aside, the specific way in which Adric was killed off was handled badly because he dies off-screen, and the only confirmation we get in Earthshock that he is definitely ded is that the end credits change to be silent* and over a picture of Adric's destroyed badge on a black background.

Without the meta-confirmation this could simply have been a cliffhanger, with audiences reasonably expecting that Adric would be rescued by the Doctor using his time machine in the next episode. So by having Earthshock end in this way it winds up being a problem for the next story as well...

But before we get to that...

Dimensions in Time

This 30th anniversary story is (for now) the midpoint of Doctor Who's history, so it seems appropriate that it should be the midpoint of our Doctor Who Night celebration.

The Bad

A 15 minute long story that had to juggle all the surviving Doctors, as many Companions as they could get, the Rani and a "menagerie" of monsters, plus a crossover with Eastenders and a requirement that it be shot in 3-D would have been a struggle for even the best of writers. But the way this was written it barely holds together in a coherent manner, with one thing happening after another for reasons that even Sylvester McCoy rattling off technobabble cannot justify.

The only thing that saves this from being utterly terrible is that it isn't long enough to outstay its welcome as a bit of lightweight Children in Need entertainment from the strange days of the 1990s after the cancellation of the original series.

The Good

It's undeniably lovely to see some of the Doctors and Companions on screen together again, regardless of the nonsense they're taking part in. This is also the only time that Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart appeared together with Colin Baker's Doctor, allowing him to complete the set.

The scene where Lalla Ward as Romana meets Grant and Phil Mitchell (Ross Kemp and... the other one) and icily no-sells their cockney hardmanny act is the one genuinely good bit, ending on her delivering the punchline

"Doctor who?"

By the way, Dimensions in Time is canon. All cats know this to be true.

Time-Flight

The Bad

So why can't the Doctor save Adric again?

Tegan: "We can change what happened if we materialise before Adric was killed."

Doctor: "And change your own history?"

Tegan: "Look, the freighter could still crash into Earth. That doesn't have to be changed. Only Adric doesn't have to be on board."

Doctor: "Now listen to me, both of you. There are some rules that cannot be broken even with the TARDIS. Don't ever ask me to do anything like that again. You must accept that Adric is dead."

It's come to something when Tegan is the voice of reason, mew. If we take into consideration some of the stunts the Doctor would later perform with the TARDIS in the new series (especially when it came to saving River Sue) then it seems like he just didn't want to save Adric.

But this isn't even the worst of it. Within a minute the Doctor suggests a "special treat to cheer us all up" and after that Adric is practically forgotten about! This is then followed by a knockabout komedy bit when the Doctor dashes out of the TARDIS in a panic to check the cricket scores in a newspaper.

The story has barely begun, and Time-Flight has started as it means to go on. The Master is the baddy in it, but he spends the first half in disguise as "Kalid" for no reason other than so he can be revealed as the Master at the end of part two (including rigging up some green slime to come out of his face when he is 'killed' as Kalid). The studio sets are poor, and many of the effects rubbish - I have to wonder if most of the budget for this got spent on Earthshock instead. Either that or they spent it on getting that Concorde wheel into the studio!

Having just thinned down the regular cast by disposing of Adric, we now get a number of guest characters acting as additional, temporary Companions - Professor Hayter (played by Nigel "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling" Stock) and the three crewmannys from the Concorde (including among them Michael "Sandbaggers" Cashman). Hayter gets to make a noble sacrifice, while the Concorde pilots act like comic relief in their clumsy attempts to help the Doctor, including trying to fly the TARDIS like their aeroplane.

Therein lies the main problem with Time-Flight - that of its tonal inconsistency. If it had been an outright comedy then it could have succeeded much better on its own terms (save for being inappropriately placed right after the tragic - stop laughing - death of Adric), but the light-hearted bits sit uncomfortably alongside the attempts at serious drama.

The Good

Those comedic elements are the parts of the story that W-word best, from the comedy of errors at Heathrow that leads to the Doctor getting involved in the story in the first place (including the exasperated airport manager and his security manny, the latter played by Sir Frank from Yes Prime Minister), to Anthony Ainley's purposefully melodramatic performance as "Kalid" (though this might have been better if it had avoided certain racial stereotypes that mean it hasn't dated well), to the good-natured Concorde crew's clumsy attempts at assistance, and then culminating in the Doctor leaving Tegan on Earth by mistaik.

The Doctor didn't seem in too much of a hurry to go back for her either...

Arc of Infinity

The Bad

What is the worst thing about Arc of Infinity? Giving us Gallifrey on the cheap so the BBC production team could have a holiday film in Amsterdam? No. Wasting Michael Gough in a nothing part? No. Time Lords called "Damon" and "Talor" (pronounced as "Tailor")? No. The ridiculous-looking Ergon monster costume? No. Besides which, that's barely more silly than the helmet Colin Baker has to wear as Commander Maxil. The fact that they produced a story where the Doctor won by (effectively, to all intents and purposes) gunning down the baddy? Not quite, though that is an unforgivable way to end a Doctor Who story.

The worst thing about Arc of Infinity is that it is boring. The first three episodes are some of the most padded in the show's run - quite an achievement for a four-parter. They certainly wanted to get their money's worth out of the Amsterdam filming, with loads of extraneous shots on location bulking out the runtime. At the same time the events on Gallifrey move at a glacial pace, with Maxil and his guards shuffling the Doctor and Nyssa in and out of different rooms just in the hopes that we don't notice that they're not actually doing anything to progress the plot.

Then, in part four, we get something genuinely interesting and unique in the show's history happening (see "The Good" below) and instead of spending time on this, it instead focuses on an extended chase through Amsterdam, showing off the location as much as possible. This was a story with its priorities in all the wrong places.

The Good

Basically, it's this scene.

Omega (Peter "Davo" Davison, although he's voiced by Ian "Stuart Hyde" Collier) has escaped from the anti-matter universe into the real world, but the "transfer" is unstable so he only has a limited amount of time before he is either sent back or else goes

He spends most of this time running away from the Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan, but gets a momentary respite when he stops and watches a quaint touristy steam organ and listens to it play a tinny version of Tulips from Amsterdam. He smiles at a little manny, and we get the sense that this is Omega enjoying his freedom while he can. The story has been at pains to tell us Omega is "insane" and must be stopped (and, to be fair, he has just recently murdered a manny in order to take his clothes for a disguise), but this is us seeing another side to him - the part that only wants to live and be free.

A metaphor for the brevity of life itself, this moment is all too fleeting.

Coda: The Daleks in Colour

Not strictly part of Doctor Who Night, but I also watched this this week.

The Bad

If you want to bring new mannys into watching the classics of Doctor Who, then colourising them makes sense, since it is well-known that, just as doggys see the world only in black and white, some mannys simply cannot watch TV when it is black & white.

What makes no sense, however, is cutting down a properly long seven-parter to less than half its runtime, and still filling it full of flashbacks to scenes from earlier in the selfsame story! Was the target audience for this not only mannys with no attention span but also no short-term memory? Mew!

The only conclusion I can draw is that this was an attempt to cut down Terry Nation's first masterpiece so that it resembled the sort of episode one might see in the new series of Doctor Who. My suspicions were confirmed by the incidental music - slathered over every second of every scene, and doing its best to drown out the dialogue. The resemblance to a modern television production was uncanny. RTD must be so proud - they've turned something written by El Tel in the 1960s into something that could have been produced by him today.

The Good

This scene has lost none of its power after 60 years. Purr.

* Well, that is if we don't count the alternative version:

Hamlet at Elsinore (1964)

This TV adaptation of Hamlet by the BBC managed to snag a number of rising stars, helping it to feel much grander than it otherwise might: Michael "Charlie Croker" Caine was Horatio, Robert "Donald Grant" Shaw was Claudius, and Christopher "General Chang" Plummer played Hamlet. Plummer obviously liked Shakespeare so much that he was still quoting it years later when he was a Klingon.

In addition there was Steven "General Orlov" Berkoff and Donald Sutherland in small roles. Roy Kinnear played the Gravedigger - a very famous and significant part despite not having much actual screentime - and similarly David "Napoleon" Swift was the Player King.

For all these great actors, the real star of this is the setting, because it was filmed on location at Kronborg castle at Helsingør (Elsinore) in Denmark, the very castle in which the play is set. This makes it stand out among all the many filmed versions of Hamlet, for all that it results in a slight mismatch between the 16th century costumes and some parts of the castle which are evidently post that period. This is a must-see Hamlet for all aficionados of Shakespeare for this reason alone.

But there's more than just the castle that makes this a unique experience of the play, such as some unusual, experimental directing choices. We never see the ghost of the murdered king, and instead he is a POV monster - we see Hamlet through his eyes, only hear him in voiceover, and nobody is credited with playing him. Spooky.

The acting choices are no less individual. Caine and Plummer play Horatio and Hamlet as being maybe closer than friends - it's ambiguous but reading their scenes that way is definitely possible, and makes this a daring move for the mid-60s. And Plummer's intensity as Hamlet, especially during the scenes when he is pretending to be mad, reminds me a lot of Patrick McGoohan as Number Six, equally capable of sudden bursts of energy (or just shouting), to the extent that I wonder if McGoohan was influenced by this performance, or if the two actors were only drawing from the same set of acting traditions?

At a duration of 2 hours 50 minutes this is somewhat abridged, though mainly by the cutting down of speeches and dialogue rather than the removal of entire subplots. It is longer than the 1948 Laurence Olivier version (a mere 2 hours 35 minutes) but significantly shorter than Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film (4 hours) or the BBC's TV version with Derek "Shakespeare denier" Jacobi (3 hours 30 minutes), and marginally shorter than the more recent BBC adaptation with David Tennant (3 hours).

Not this cat. This cat will purr. Purr.

Macbeth (1948)

This version of Shakespeare's The Scottish Play might more fairly called The American Play, being an American production in which most of the American cast put on vaguely Scottish-sounding accents... when they remember to.

Even the director and star, Orson "Unicron" Welles, is not immune from slipping back into his own voice from time to time, nor his co-star Jeanette Nolan as Lady Macbeth. These slips are largely forgivable, partly because this film was made under legendarily tight constraints of time and budget, but mostly because the attempt at historical accuracy is otherwise so lacking that one has to wonder why they even made a token attempt at the accents in the first place.

The landscapes and castle locations we see don't look like any part of Scotland this Scotscat is familiar with, and the costumes look assembled from every land and every period of history they could find except for the 11th century when the historic Macbeth lived... with some tartan thrown over the top in a token nod to what non-Scots think the Scots looked like back then. At one point Macbeth dons a breastplate that is more 16th century than 11th - more accurate to the period the play was written in than set.

That's not what you come to this film for, though, is it? 

Where Welles's Macbeth succeeds is - and this should be no surprise with Charles Foster Kane at the helm - in the vision; the style and feel of the thing. The castles aren't the castles of medieval Scotland; they're like something out of a dream or a nightmare, vast and illogical edifices of stone that trap the protagonists within them. This being a black and white film, they are lit so as to emphasise shadows and darkness, especially in scenes where there's been a murder... of which this has its share. Perhaps that's why they call it The Scottish Play?

Welles suits the action to the words, the words to the action: the murders of Lady Macduff and Macduff's kitten are filmed with fast cuts to mask the fast cuts, and a closeup of the snarling face of the murderer. The murder of Duncan takes place off-screen, of course, but the camera keeps coming back to show the door through which Macbeth has passed to do the deed.

The powerful atmosphere of dread created during this pivotal scene - a combination of the actors, their lines, and the cinematography - makes it one of the film's best, along with the final few scenes once Macbeth sees the prophecies of the witches have all come true in their Tolkien-baiting way. His last lines see him become almost heroic as he learns, in the end, defiance of his fate, too late to avert his doom:

"Though Birnam Wood be come to Dunsinane,

And thou opposed, being of no woman born,

Yet I will try the last. Before my body

I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff,

And damn'd be him that first cries, 'Hold, enough!'"

Alas, poor Orson, he was if anything too reverent with the speeches, and performs them as he might a radio recital. The famous "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" soliloquy suffers in this way, and we don't even get the benefit of seeing Welles's face since he speaks it in voiceover. This robs the adaptation of one avenue of uniqueness, so at least we have the direction, the lighting (or purposeful lack of it), and the magnificent stylized sets to make this stand out from the many other interpretations of A Scottish Play.

Oh, and Roddy McDowall is in it too.