The second expensive luxury James Bond film, made in 1963, introduces the most important character in the whole series, so Expensive Luxury Cat and I thought it would be worth looking at it next.
There is a pre-titles sequence where James Bond gets killed - well, that was a short film. Oh no, it was actually a different manny wearing a Sean Connery mask, predating the likes of Rollin Hand or the Master's use of masks by several years, as well as explaining why neither of them ever tried disguising themselves as Sean Connery - it isn't as if his voice is hard to impersonate, but they didn't want to get themselves strangled by SECTRE agents by mistaik!
Now obviously this means that James Bond doesn't really appear in his own pre-titles sequence. But it does introduce us to the baddy Donald Grant and quickly establishes how dangerous he is - if he can kill a manny disguised as Bond, then maybe he can kill the real Bond too!
The first scene after the title sequence introduces us to Kronsteen (Vladek Sheybal), who must be clever because he is good at chess. He is also the Number Five member of SECTRE, which we see when he goes to meet the most important character in the film - SECTRE's Number One, a.k.a. Blofeld's expensive luxury cat.
Kronsteen explains his masterplan to us and then Number One tucks in to some fishy noms.
Expensive and luxury fishy noms, no less. You can already see why this film series became a worldwide phenomenon, especially in the early 1960s when such glamorous escapism would have been beyond the reach of most cats.
We then see the early stages of the plan play out from SECTRE's point of view without Bond appearing for quite some time. When he does he is obviously in the middle of some typical Bond naughtiness, which gets interrupted by his being called in for his mission.
After the briefing from M (which goes exactly as Kronsteen predicted it would) we are introduced to a character almost as important and iconic as Number One, although sadly he is not a cat. This is Q, played by Desmond Llewelyn, and he gives Bond his gadget for this mission - the briefcase with lots of hidden extras.
Clang!
The action properly begins in Turkey where there are three factions - the Turks who are friendly to Bond, plus two sets of baddys - the Russians and, of course, SECTRE.
Kerim Bey quickly becomes Bond's friend, and he is a great character who walks the line between not taking things seriously and taking them exactly seriously enough. This is demonstrated in the bit where the Russians make an attempt to blow him up and he is joking with Bond about it by the next scene.
The scene where Kerim Bey takes Bond to see the "gypsies" and witness two of them fighting is one of the more iconic scenes from this film, despite being not exactly politically correct. But then, this film was made well over 50 years ago so we can't exactly judge it by today's standards while at the same time acknowledging that it wouldn't and shouldn't be made that way today.
For example, the fight is of a type commonly known to old-fashioned mannys as a 'cat-fight' even though they are mannys involved, not cats. A real cat fight usually goes more like this:
"Blake is the second-best character in Blakes 7."
"You're wrong, Tarrant is obviously the second-best character in Blakes 7."
"Mew!"
"Mew!"
When Bond gets back to his hotel there are a number of noises made before he pays proper attention, which is most unlike him - he must have read the script and know what is coming next.
Tatiana Romanova slips into his bed and steals his sleeps. Bond wants to get on with the mission straight away and he starts asking her questions about the Russian decoding machine, the "Lektor," that she's supposed to be giving him. This is also unlike him - later versions of James Bond would be more interested in giving her one.
Lol.
There are a large number of shots with the Hagia Sophia in the background, it must be the Turkish equivalent of the Eiffel Tower. But the next bit is actually set there as Bond and Tatiana do spy stuff along with Grant - who Bond still doesn't know about - who kills a Russian so Bond doesn't have to.
The middle of the film is perfectly paced, with every scene advancing the plot via a mixture of action and intrigue, and even a short komedy interlude with M and Miss Moneypenny back in London.
The main set-piece takes place on the train, when Bond leaves Istanbul along with Tatiana and Kerim Bey. Also aboard are a Russian agent and Grant. Grant shows up regularly in the background to remind us of his presence, but he still doesn't interact with Bond directly. He even kills Kerim Bey and the Russian without Bond finding out, by making it look as though they killed each other.
The train conductor who tells bond of Kerim Bey's death is played by George Pastell from Tomb of the Cybermannys - a small part but he is very recognisable due to his distinctive voice.
Bond now knows their plan is going wrong, but he does not yet realise that every move he makes has been anticipated by Kronsteen and has been observed by Grant. Grant eventually makes his move when he kills a manny Bond is expecting to meet and takes his place, calling himself "Captain Nash."
He pretends to be Bond's new friend (although he does keep trolling Bond by calling him "old man," which Bond doesn't like), and they even go to the restaurant car together, where "Nash" orders red wine with his fishy noms so that Bond can't swap their glasses after he drugs Tatiana's white wine - now that's what I call thinking ahead.
Bond sees Grant drug her, but Grant is actually able to talk Bond into trusting him again long enough to stun him with the old single-blow-to-the-back-of-the-head move.
"Red wine with fish... now that should have told me shomething."
This is essentially the dramatic climax of the film, as Bond and Grant confront each other with Bond at Grant's mercy. Bond realises Grant w-words for SECTRE, and gets him to spill the entire plan. Grant threatens to kill Bond slowly and painfully by shooting him multiple times, although the plan requires him to make it look like suicide so I'm not sure how he expects to manage that, mew.
Anyway, Bond tricks Grant into opening the gadget briefcase which explodes in his face, stunning Grant so that Bond can start a proper fight with him. Grant tries to kill Bond in the same way as he killed fake-Bond in the pre-titles sequence, but again the gadget briefcase saves him when Bond gets the hidden knife and stabs Grant until he goes
Bond makes sure to call Grant "old man" after he does so.
Bond and Tatiana escape from the train and get chased by a helicopter in a scene that owes quite a lot to North by Northwest (1959) when Bond tries running away for a bit. He shoots the manny in the helicopter just as he was about to drop a grenade, and this blows up the whole helicopter - in lesser films he would probably only have needed to shoot the helicopter to make it blow up.
Another iconic scene follows as the film cuts back to Number One, Klebb (SECTRE Number Three), and Kronsteen, as Number One tells them that
"We do not tolerate failure."
and then has Kronsteen killed, by means of his henchmanny's famous poisoned shoe.
The final scene of the plot then sees Klebb act directly, as she tries to steal the Lektor and kill Bond with her own poisoned shoe, and is only stopped because of Tatiana, who finally proves whose side she is on when she first distracts and then shoots Klebb. Bond's main contribution here is to quip
"She's had her kicksh."
Expensive Luxury Cat's rating: Very Expensive and Very Luxury
The High Life is a sitcom from 1994-95 written by and starring Forbes Masson and Alan Cumming. A pilot and then a single series of six episodes were made, and despite coming from the same era as well-remembered sitcoms such as Knowing Me Knowing You or Father Ted and, like them, made in a style common in that period - with broad, over-the-top characters and situations the order of the day and thoughts of realism nowhere to be seen - The High Life is now comparatively obscure, with seemingly the only Unique Selling Point being the two leads at the dawn of their careers.
As a Scottish cat I have a liking for the Scottish streak that runs deeply embedded through The High Life. Naturally most of the main characters are played by Scottish actors, and there are frequent uses of Scottish colloquialisms - including all the episode titles save from the pilot.
I also love how camp it is!
Pilot
Main characters Steve (Forbes Masson) and Sebastian (Alan Cumming) seem fully formed from the first scene. Both are camp and bitchy airline stewards working for the fictional "Air Scotia" and, as is typical for British sitcom leads, they are two of life's losers.
The two other regular characters are Shona Spurtle (Siobhan Redmond) and Captain Duff (Patrick Ryecart, who played Crozier in Trial of a Time Lord and was also Romeo in the 1978 BBC version of Romeo & Juliet where he was about 10 years older than his Juliet). Shona is the series' main antagonist - she and Sebastian hate each other and exchange insults frequently, although Steve kind of fancies her because his main character trait is that he fancies all women indiscriminately.
Captain Duff, as seen in the pilot, is eccentric but not much more so than the other characters - he is yet to become the completely insane version seen in the series proper.
As the pilot episode there's a lot of quick gags based on the main characters working as cabin crew which help to establish the setting. The main plot begins when Hal (Alex Norton - one of those Scottish actors who has seemingly been in everything ever filmed in Scotland, including his spending about eight years in Taggart) arrives to direct Shona in a "Face of Air Scotia" company video, a part Sebastian is bitter for missing out on.
Hal behaves in a disturbingly misogynistic way towards Shona. Now Sebastian acts pretty sexist towards her by today's standards, so it is fortunate that here we have a much bigger creep to compare him to or else he might not work as a sympathetic character. In truth none of the characters are meant to be truly sympathetic, but we are clearly supposed to side with Steve and Sebastian's point of view throughout.
The secondary plot is that an old girlfriend of Steve's is on the plane. She is a caricature of a rabid Scottish Nationalist, a member of the "Scottish Liberation Front", and she tries to hijack the plane (in a pre-September 11th kind of way, to be clear) while Hal's camera crew is still recording.
The episode then cuts to a Scottish news bulletin reporting on the story. There is a nice touch where the reporter on the scene is introduced as a "disasters and sports correspondent" and then he proceeds to use a bunch of sporting clichés while delivering his report on the hijack. This news show within the show then shows the camera footage of what happens next - Shona hits the hijacker with a fish (this, as well as being delicious cat noms, is a Chekhov's fish, having earlier surprised Shona by falling out of an overhead locker) and then she hits the camera crew with it for good measure.
The disparate subplots are thus all tied together by this scene, making for a satisfying payoff.
1. feart
Here we see the proper title sequence for the first time, a musical number performed by the main cast plus backing dancers over the memorable and catchy theme song. Its choreography can be contrasted with the end credits sequence which has the same song accompanied by Masson and Cumming dancing enthusiastically but with much less coordination.
Captain Duff (now "barking, completely barking!" as Steve and Sebastian quite rightly point out) has been at a "Scottish Star Trek convention" and has become convinced he is Mr Spock. He makes Star Trek references throughout the episode, including calling Steve and Sebastian "Chekov and Uruha" (SIC) and the way he pronounces their destination of "Lon-don" like an alien planet is great. He doesn't have a large part in any given episode, but Ryecart does steal every scene he is in.
The main plot concerns Steve and Sebastian's applying to move from boring Prestwick-Heathrow internal flights to glamorous long-haul flights involving foreign travel. We soon get the first occurrence of their joint catchphrase "oh dearie me!" which is said when they say something amusing to the characters (as opposed to amusing to the viewers at home, though it is often both). Here it follows their response to Shona's
"Can I be blunt?"
"If I can be Philby."
"And if I can be Burgess."
The secondary plot is that Shona's estranged father (played by David Lyon, who had been in the drama series Between the Lines with Siobhan Redmond earlier in the '90s) is on the plane. Shona describes him as "a big-time bigamist and bank robber" who she hasn't seen since she was a child, and who it is revealed is here handcuffed to a plain-clothes police inspector who is accompanying him to prison. The 30-second sepia-tinted flashback to the '70s showing the last time Shona saw her father is a moment full of pathos, one which might have been out of place amongst the comedy but for Redmond and Lyon who have the acting skill to make it work.
Shona arranges for the inspector to become trapped in the toilet cubicle with a dodgy lock so that her father can escape. Meanwhile Steve and Sebastian are under the impression that the police inspector is a different kind of inspector - one there to assess them for suitability for the long haul fight role. It turns out that that inspector is actually pretending to be a passenger with two broken arms, who therefore needs help from the stewards with a variety of tasks. Steve is helpful to him, and so passes the test, while Sebastian is the opposite with predictably opposite results.
The ending is that Steve turns down the job so he can remain working with his best friend Sebastian, for which Sebastian calls him a "stupid mug."
2. birl
Captain Duff has even less screen-time than usual in this one, but it does open with him playing snap against himself and we learn that his first name is "Hilary."
With two-thirds of the series plots being principally set on board an Air Scotia plane during a flight, this is the first one that breaks that formula as the regular cast have to go on a training course weekend thanks to Steve and Sebastian's (off-screen) incompetence, with their jobs on the line if they do not pass the assessment at the end of it.
Steve is on the pull on the minibus before they even get to the hotel, although it turns out his date, Heather, is even more obsessed with sex than he is ("a manny-eater" is the term, I believe).
The ball-busting trainer Gretchen Betjeman forces Steve and Sebastian to sing the Air Scotia corporate song, which turns into a musical number by the second verse and is one of the funniest and best moments of the series so far.
Shona is fiercely competitive and wants to win the £1000 prize for the steward who does best on the course, and she mocks Sebastian expecting he will wind up getting sacked. But Sebastian notices that Ms Betjeman acts differently after they all have lunch, and from this deduces her fondness for alcohol.
At the evening's ceilidh (this series, already pretty much as Scottish as possible, reaches peak Scottishness with this scene) Sebastian plies her with drink until Captain Duff appears suddenly and it turns out that Ms Betjeman and Captain Duff are old flames.
"My wife's gone. She didn't understand me. She's from Sri Lanka."
With Steve out shagging Heather all night, he returns to his hotel room in the morning to find Captain Duff and Ms Betjeman in it, and Sebastian in possession of polaroids proving what they got up to. The exam gets cancelled, saving Sebastian's neck, but to his annoyance Shona gets awarded the £1000 prize anyway. So it seems at the end that everyone is happy, except... Heather dumps Steve in the morning to go to Iceland (the country not the supermarket) to take up a role in her family's fish business. Ooh, fish, I don't blame her. Nom nom nom.
3. winch
Sebastian returns from a holiday in Florida to find Steve has bought an engagement ring and is on the verge of taking his current relationship to the next level - a relationship that hadn't started when Sebastian left for his holiday.
Shona arrives in an even worse mood than usual, and Sebastian quickly provokes her into the "ultimate sanction" - giving him a Chineese Burn (SIC). It is quickly clear to us - but not to Sebastian - that the object of Steve's affections is none other than Shona Spurtle.
"Steve, have you laid your hands on my jugs?"
"Ah, well..."
"Of water!"
Captain Duff is the first to reveal to Sebastian that there was an "Air Scotia rave" the previous night, providing him with his first clues as to what happened in his absence.
The secondary plotline kicks off when it is discovered that Sebastian forgot to arrange for the in-flight meal to be delivered to their plane before takeoff, and so Steve and Sebastian are forced to improvise using the contents of the duty free bags from his holiday. This fools Shona for a while, but when she finds the empty bags she threatens Sebastian with the sack.
This causes Steve and Sebastian to blame each other and they have a shouting match in front of the passengers, during which Steve's secret comes out. Friends again, Steve spills the beans by way of a flashback to the night before - a flashback very heavily tinted to Steve's point of view. And it was not so much a "rave" as a very, very '90s club disco.
Shona heard all of Steve's bean-spilling (because she was in the toilet cubicle right behind the gossiping pair) and this prompts the telling of her side of the story - cue an alternative flashback.
"The only thing you got on last night, Steve, was my tits. Metaphorically speaking!"
Sebastian blackmails Shona into forgetting about the catering mishap in return for his not gossiping about Shona and Steve. Since this is the worst possible moment for it (not that there would have been a good moment), Steve proposes to Shona and is, of course, brutally rejected.
Captain Duff comes in just as Sebastian is passing the ring back to Steve.
"Oh, I see congratulations are in order. I hope you'll both be very happy. Have we landed yet? Oh bugger!"
4. choob
This is to all intents and purposes a remake of the pilot, although there are some noteworthy differences. Captain Duff's role has been expanded to be more in line with his level of madness seen in the rest of the series proper, including mistaiking the crew room for a restaurant and then, later, forgetting his own name.
Some extra gags have been squeezed in, such as Shona's fish phobia brought on by Sam and Ella (say it out loud) - her fishmonger boyfriend who ran off with her sister.
Steve's Nationalist ex is even more exaggerated than before, eating haggis and demanding Steve read her Rabbie Burns's poetry.
Shona fights back far more against Hal the sexist director here (recast from Alex Norton to Ronnie Letham, who wasn't in Taggart nearly as much) and he appears increasingly bruised as the episode goes on. Sebastian's sexist remarks against Shona remain from the pilot and feel somewhat out of character for him when in the context of the main series - yes, he and Shona have an antagonistic relationship, but I don't recall him slapping her arse in any of the other eps.
I can't be absolutely sure, but I think the part with the news report is just straight-up reused footage from the pilot, as it looks exactly the same save for cutting Hal out of the scene, which would have been required to disguise the recasting.
5. dug
For unexplained reasons, Scotland is entering the Eurovision Singing Competition on its own, and so Sebastian has put himself forward for the "Song For Europe" contest. He gets Steve on board by saying "there'll be loads of girls there" but then has to confess that he hasn't written a song yet - only the title "Pif Paf Pof."
Captain Duff enters dressed as a clown, but for a change this is not due to him being mad. The plane has been chartered by Scottish rock star "Guy Wersch" (Peter Blake) to host a party for his 9 year old daughter and her friends. Shona is starstruck but Steve and Sebastian can only think of the nightmare of looking after 30 kids for the duration of the flight.
To make matters even worse, one of them is going to have to wear a "Shuggy McGurk" (the Air Scotia mascot) dog costume. We get a classic instant reversal (of the variety known to the TV Tropes wiki as a Gilligan Cut) when Sebastian says
"What sad old loser wid be thick enough to don thon getup?"
Shona faints as soon as Guy arrives. The daughter "Auroraborealis" is incredibly obnoxious and precocious, and is obsessed with financial matters as if she were an adult accountant - for instance getting Steve to read to her from the Financial Times.
Steve and Sebastian desperately try to come up with lyrics for their Eurovision song while avoiding the pandemonium of the children's party. Even Guy wants to avoid it, and spends time with Shona, who is trying to seduce him in increasingly blatant ways.
Surprisingly, this seems to succeed and Guy asks Shona to come and live with him... but he actually means as a nanny for Auroraborealis. The crushing of her dream causes Shona to flip out and she kicks Guy in the balls so hard that he plants his face into the birthday cake.
This is the end of the main plot, but the best bit is still to come - the performance of Pif Paf Pof by Steve and Sebastian, with Shona and Captain Duff as backing vocalists. Captain Duff gets a bit confused.
"Pof Pif... Oh bugger!"
It then cuts back to the steward's room at the airport where Sebastian is getting drunk after their receiving "nil points" (unlike in the Father Ted Eurovision episode, this happens off-screen). Steve sums it up:
"They hated us, we were crap."
Now this may simply be a cosmic coincidence but it does seem to me that, many years later, The High Life inspired a real-world Eurovision song. The theme and choreography of the UK's 2007 entry, Flying the Flag by Scooch, bears more than a little resemblance to the title sequence, although perhaps not quite as good as that. Still, they did get 19 points (12 of which were from Malta) and that is not only 19 more than Steve and Sebastian achieved but also 14 more than Ireland got that year.
6. dunk
While dug is easily the best-remembered of the series thanks to the Pif Paf Pof song, the best episode is actually this last one.
The first scene is a fairly typical one of another bumpy plane landing courtesy of Captain Duff, but then it cuts to "Stoat's Biscuits" where Professor Agnes Wormit (Molly "Hazel the McWitch" Weir) is being held hostage by English biscuit manufacturer Vincent Stoat (played by Peter "Ballard from Rumpole of the Bailey" Blythe) and interrogated for her "secret formula." Blythe's performance throughout the ep as a biscuit-obsessed megalomaniac is so OTT it is beyond panto, and yet it works perfectly!
Then we are introduced to 1960s Batman-style scene transitions (with a plane instead of the Bat-signal). This isn't just breaking the normal series format, it's shattering it into a thousand pieces.
Back on the plane, Stoat's henchmanny Gordon Ferret reports to his boss (using a primitive '90s mobile telephone) that he has stolen a floppy disc containing the formula from the professor's London laboratory. However it then transpires that he misplaced it during the bumpy landing.
While cleaning the plane, Shona finds the floppy disc and gives it to Steve to hand in to the lost property department (obviously none of our regular characters are aware of its significance yet). Steve thinks the disc might have a computer game on it and intends to keep it. He puts it into their computer and brings up the secret formula, while at the same time Sebastian conveniently gets the required exposition of the kidnap and theft from the newspaper.
A series of events then arranges it so that Shona ends up with both the disc and Ferret's calling card with "lost blank floppy disc" written on it, so she sets out to return the disc to (so she thinks) its rightful owner.
Meanwhile Ferret returns and, convinced they have the disc, he kidnaps Steve and Sebastian and takes them to Stoat's Biscuits. Sebastian immediately recognises Stoat as "the Machiavellian kingpin behind this kidnap caboodle" but he is unsuccessful in talking their way out of danger because he is really just panicking and saying the first things that come into his head.
Shona arrives so Stoat gets Ferret to put Steve and Sebastian with the professor - on the roof of the building. There is a running gag where Steve and Sebastian keep escaping from Ferret's handcuffs really easily - it all adds to the increasing silliness.
Instead of escaping using the ventilation (as is traditional) they, and Professor Wormit, fall into it and wind up back in Stoat's main room where he now has Shona prisoner and the disc in his hands. Just when you think it can't get any sillier, Stoat explains his plan to them, Bond villain stylee, except he does so by giving them a presentation with musical backing and a selection of biscuits on a conveyor belt.
He wants the perfect recipe for making Tablet. This baffles the regular characters (and is not a million miles away from the twist at the end of One of our Dinosaurs is Missing, but who cares because it works), so Professor Wormit gives her own presentation (with slideshow and bagpipe music accompaniment) about why making "flawless Tablet" is so difficult.
Stoat then says they know too much and must die, before leaving Ferret to guard them while he goes for something to eat.
"Never murder on an empty stomach."
Shona talks to Ferret and learns that he only works for Stoat because Stoat controls his supply of Bourbon biscuits, and "nobody takes biscuit addiction seriously in this country."
Stoat returns just as Ferret is on the verge of being turned against him. He has the first batch of the Tablet with him, and a case full of Bourbons to ensure Ferret's loyalty. He orders Ferret to shoot the others but then a man in black crashes through the skylight into the room and duels with Stoat using giant whisks. And why not? Batman-style SFX captions are superimposed over the ensuing brawl.
The fight ends when the police come in and arrest Stoat and Ferret, and the man in black is revealed to be Captain Duff. This is the absolute apex of his character, as in answer to their shocked calling out of his name he says
"Well yes I'm Captain now, but before I joined Air Scotia I was merely Duff, 2629564 of the SAS. And frankly when you've done it once it's like falling off a dog... log... bicycle!"
He gives the disc with the formula back to Professor Wormit, along with a box of Milk Tray.
See you all at the weekend for the best Caturday Night of the year!
I am glad this episode starts by showing Robot disappearing the tank again, since it gives me a chance to see if Gamma Longcat was right when he said it's only a model. I still think it must be a real tank, because a toy tank would be smaller.
The story carries on with obvious baddy Miss Winters wanting to blow up the world to make a new and better one, but Professor Kettlewell isn't sure if that is a good idea or not. He makes up his mind when Harry comes in and knocks out a baddy. Professor Kettlewell stops the countdown.
They go outside and Robot disappears Professor Kettlewell. This makes it go blargh; it says "I have killed the one who created me!" and then falls over. Benton nicks off with Robot's pewpewpew gun.
Miss Winters starts the countdown again, but the Brigadier goes around and arrests her. Seeing as Professor Kettlewell has been disappeared, the Doctor tries to stop the countdown. He says:
"The trouble with computers, of course, is that they're very sophisticated idiots. They do exactly what you tell them at amazing speed, even if you order them to kill you. So if you do happen to change your mind, it's very difficult to stop them obeying the original order..."
"But not impossible!"
The Doctor stops the countdown with 2 seconds to go. The Doctor's quote about "sophisticated idiots" suggests that he has been to the future and seen the internets.
Sarah wanders off and bumps into Robot, then in the next scene the Doctor, the Brigadier and Benton are looking for them. The Brigadier muses on how he will stop Robot when he finds him:
"You know, just once I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets."
Nobody bothers to tell him that Robot isn't an alien. Benton mentions Professor Kettlewell's metal virus from the last episode, and the Doctor rushes off to a chemistry lab to make it. This makes Benton look smug.
Meanwhile, Robot starts the countdown again. Luckily it goes back to 300 instead of starting at 2 where it left off. Maybe the countdown is really like an internets loading bar? This time it gets stopped with 10 seconds left by a "Fail Safe mechanism" which isn't nearly as dramatic as the last time the countdown was stopped (or even the time before that). I like countdowns, but maybe you can have too much of a good thing.
Robot comes out and the Brigadier shoots at it with the pewpewpew gun (holding the gun in an odd way to do so).
But instead of making Robot disappear it makes Robot giant. It becomes so big that it picks up Sarah and puts her on a roof, then goes around standing on mannys and houses and things until the Doctor and Harry drive along and see it. Harry says "Curiouser and curiouser."
"Said Alice," replies the Doctor. Gamma Longcat says this is a literary reference to Alice being big like Robot. Possibly after she got shot by a pewpewpew gun, we're not sure.
Professor Kettlewell's metal virus turns Robot red, then it gets little again and goes
The threat is over, and the next scene is back at UNIT HQ.
"Would you like a jelly baby?"
Sarah is too sad to nom a jelly baby. The Doctor is about to leave in the TARDIS.
"The Brigadier wants me to address the Cabinet, have lunch at Downing Street, dinner at the palace, and write 17 reports in triplicate. Well I won't do it. I won't, I won't, I won't!"
The Doctor hits a brick but it doesn't break, which is a subtle callback to him breaking a brick at the beginning of the story and shows he is a new Doctor - one who can't always break bricks with his hands.
Sarah says "Doctor, you're being childish." To which she gets the wonderful reply:
"Well of course I am! No point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes. Are you coming?"
Sarah noms a jelly baby.
They are about to leave in the TARDIS when Harry comes in and, after also noming a jelly baby, is persuaded to go into the TARDIS. "Oh I say!" he says.
The three of them go off on more adventures...
This is a remarkable story because, although I have seen lots of stories with Tom Baker as the Doctor, on videos and DVDs and in books, this was his first! This makes it very special, but if I had not seen Jon Pertwee turn into him at the very start then I don't think I would have known it because Tom Baker is a perfect fit for the Doctor straight away.
I think Tom Baker is my favourite Doctor now - he has a scarf just like mine!
The story of Robot is quite good - with enough exciting elements to keep me happy and enough countdowns that it could have been written by Terry Nation - but it doesn't stand out. There was a film made a couple of years ago which has a similar story to Robot, it is called Endhiran (which translates as "Robot") and instead of the robot becoming giant at the climax, it makes lots of other robots and they all join together so they become a giant robot made of lots of normal-sized robots.
Other than that, the story is very similar except it doesn't have Tom Baker in it so it is not as good. It is a long film and has lots of silly scenes (such as the song about Kilimanjaro) but some of the best bits have been posted on YouTube so we don't have to watch the whole film if we don't want to.
"Thus it was that Men called King Felagund, whom they first met of all the Eldar, Nom, that is Wisdom, in the language of that people, and after him they named his folk Nomin, the Wise."
