The High Life

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!

What Would Captain Kirk Do?

“Suppose you are in a self-driving car going across a narrow bridge, and a school bus full of children hurtles out of control towards you. There is no room for the vehicles to pass each other. Should the self-driving car take the decision to drive off the bridge and kill you in order to save the children?”

-- Steven Poole, Rethink

Like Captain Kirk, I don’t believe in the no-win situation, so the hypothetical scenario presented here by Steven Poole (and first posed by Professor Gary Marcus in Moral Machines) looks tricky. However by asking ourselves “What would Captain Kirk do?” we can see that there are several possible solutions that don’t involve us or the bus ending up deded. Captain Kirk, after all, has some experience in defeating renegade computers and artificial intelligences.

Perhaps the most obvious way out is to program your self-driving car to not self-drive across narrow bridges, thus avoiding this situation in the first place. If a self-driving car cannot be trusted to go over a narrow bridge without the distinct possibility of it plunging over the side in an unnecessary act of self-driving-sacrifice, then I suggest it should avoid narrow bridges altogether.

It is also worth considering some of the unspoken assumptions behind the scenario. Why should we think that the only two options are to drive off the bridge or to collide with the bus? Why doesn’t the self-driving car simply reverse out of the way of the oncoming bus? Are we supposed to conclude that your self-driving car is going too fast to allow this? As a cat, I have only a limited experience of crossing narrow bridges in cars, but I think that normally you cross them very slowly and carefully precisely because of the possibility of something coming the other way.

And finally, if we examine the exact wording of the problem as Steven Poole presents it, we see that he asks “Should the self-driving car take the decision to drive off the bridge and kill you in order to save the children?” (my emphasis) This makes it sound like these are two separate steps, not causally related. Why can the self-driving car not do the first part without the second – drive off the bridge but not then proceed to kill you? Is killing you an unavoidable consequence of your self-driving car going off the bridge, or is it a calculated action on the part of the self-driving car to prevent you from suing the manufacturers for your ending up wet in a ditch and with a no-longer-self-driving car?

So what would Captain Kirk do? Well judging by his past performance, I think he would hack into the murderous self-driving car’s memory banks and reprogram it to reverse out of the way of the bus, after which the mad genius that programmed it to try to kill Captain Kirk after first driving him off a bridge would say “No, stop, I created you!” before getting run over by his own creation. Meanwhile Captain Kirk would have gotten on board the school bus and wrestled it back under control, saving the day. And then he, Mr Spock and Dr McCoy would all beam back to the Enterprise for a final scene of comic misunderstanding at Mr Spock’s expense.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy Part Four

Mags turning into a weredoge gets Captain Cook a high score from the audience. He tries to give the Doctor some exposition but the incidental music is going as crazy as Mags (maybe it is being performed by another weredoge?) and it is very hard to make out what the Captain is saying.

The little manny in the audience's eyes glow. The Doctor escapes from the ring but Mags chases him (doggys like chases). He goes up to the three audience members and all of their eyes glow now and this somehow causes the Doctor to fall back into the ring. He is only saved when Mags turns upon Captain Cook and the Captain goes

Ace and Kingpin look in the space bus for the missing piece of the medallion. The bus conductor robot tries to kill Ace, but when Kingpin finds the missing piece he gets his memories back. He remembers the robot has a self-destruct button and gets Ace to press it. Instead of simply going "blargh I am ded" the robot goes

Mags scares the clowns so she and the Doctor can get away. The mannys in the audience "want more" so the clowns turn on the Ringmaster and Morgana, making them do a disappearing magic act. Then all of the clowns do the thing with their hands.

I somehow don't think the Ringmaster and Morgana will be coming back. It's like Paul Daniels' 1987 Hallowe'en special all over again!

The mannys in the audience want the Doctor. He goes back so Mags can run away, and the clowns chase her (doggys like chases) in their scary black death car.

When the Doctor goes back into the Circus he goes into a special effect and winds up in a different sort of arena - one that is old and stone and not the Circus from before. The three audience members are still there, but they also look very different - made of stone with sinister faces.

The Doctor recognises them as "the gods of Ragnarok."

It makes sense that there are three gods of Ragnarok because there are three cat gods: Ceiling Cat, who sees all; The Maker of Cats, who made us into cats out of socks; and The Hoff. Nobody knows why The Hoff is the third cat god, but he is. Unlike religious mannys, who worship their gods, we are cats so we merely acknowledge our gods as equals.

The gods of Ragnarok are obviously bad gods because they use their giant eye to watch things from below, like Basement Cat does, while Ceiling Cat watches from above and is a good cat.

"I have fought the gods of Ragnarok all through time."

says the Doctor. While you might think that the Doctor has never met the gods of Ragnarok before now, remember that everything in this story is a metaphor for something else outside the story, including the gods. The gods say

"Entertain us!"
"Entertain us or die! So long as you entertain us you may live."
"When you no longer entertain us you die!"

The Doctor does magic tricks for the gods. They shoot some pewpewpews at him, but they don't kill him yet. They say

"You are nearing the end, Doctor."

and

"You are on the brink of destruction, Doctor. We want something bigger, something better."

This gives us a clue as to who the gods represent in the show but, just as this story has been doing throughout, I'm going to hold back on revealing the answers for now...

Mags meets up with Ace and Kingpin. Ace lures the clowns to where Chekhov's Bellboy's robot from part one is, and because she has the remote control now she can has it turn its pewpewpew eyes upon the clowns.

Five clowns come out of the clown car, which is not that many really but what can we expect on a BBC budget?

Ace, Kingpin and Mags steal the clown car to get back to the Circus quickly. The gods make Captain Cook come back to life as a zombie and he steals the medallion from Kingpin just before he can throw it down the well to where the Doctor is.

Ace and Mags together knock it out of Zombie Captain Cook's hands so it falls into the well, where the Doctor catches it and uses it to reflect the gods' pewpewpews back upon them. The gods and the "Dark Circus" (as Kingpin calls it) collapse, so the gods must have been load-bearing baddys.

The Circus tent explodes behind him as the Doctor walks away, not looking at it.

Kingpin and Mags decide to make a new Circus, one that can't possibly go wrong, mew. They invite the Doctor and Ace to join them but the Doctor declines, and the last line of the story is him saying

"I find circuses a little... sinister."

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy is a flawed classic. It has great and memorable baddys, and a plot which manages to be both an exciting mystery and, at the same time, an allegory for Doctor Who's place in the world at the time when it was 25 years old. It is a fresh and original story, and a fine way to conclude the anniversary season.

It isn't perfect - the mystery is so slow in playing out its hand that the first half of the story can be quite hard to follow at times, and this is not helped by the incidental music intruding on some key lines of dialogue.

There are a lot of characters who get introduced quite quickly - some of them only existing to get killed off or to provide some early exposition - with the result that they end up quite broad and one-dimensional. The character of Whizzkid is an example of this, as well as being an unnecessary and unwelcome caricature of Doctor Who fans.

"It was your show all along, wasn't it?"

Ace asks the Doctor. The gods of Ragnarok are the BBC Management. They can't kill the Doctor while he is still entertaining, not even though they want to, not even though he is their greatest enemy and stands against everything they believe in. They want "something bigger, something better" and yet are prepared to sit there while the Doctor performs his low-budget magic tricks one after another.
And then by the time they try to kill him off, it is too late.

Despite the TV series getting cancelled the following year Doctor Who is, of course, still with us - and by that I don't just mean the new series that came back to BBC TV in 2005. Target novelisations of the TV stories were available before they began to be released on VHS (and later DVD). In the 1990s they would be repeated on the satellite channel UK Gold, allowing cats and mannys who were too young to have seen them on the BBC to watch them and become fans that way. Plus there were many original book stories, comic strips, Doctor Who Magazine and Big Finish... and all that before the internets truly came along!

By its 25th birthday in 1988 Doctor Who had grown to be far more than just another TV programme. It was The Greatest Show in the Galaxy.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy Part Three

Ace is locked in a room with Bellboy where she learns he made the robots, including the random pewpewpew robot from part one. Or maybe it is not so random after all? Maybe it is Chekhov's Pewpewpew Robot? Now past the halfway point, it seems we are beginning to turn the corner in unraveling the mystery as Ace starts to get the backstory of the Circus from Bellboy.

The Doctor makes a break for it and runs away from the clown robots, so they immediately turn on Captain Cook and capture him instead. The Doctor meets Deadbeat and talks to him, then Deadbeat takes the Doctor to where Ace and Bellboy are. Bellboy says Deadbeat's name is really Kingpin.

Morgana, the clown and the Ringmaster all argue about what to do, and we see that they are all scared of failing the secret masters they serve.

Now back in the cage, Whizzkid talks to Captain Cook about the Circus, saying

"Although I never got to see the early days, I know it's not as good as it used to be but I'm still terribly interested."

Because he is a FAN. Do you see what they did there? Whizzkid is a fan of the Circus but he also acts like a stereotypical fan of Doctor Who itself, whom the programme makers have decided to have a go at like Number Two in Fall Out "turning upon and biting the hand that feeds him."

This petty and unwarranted attack continues as Captain Cook tricks Whizzkid into going into the Circus ring before him:

"Oh, yes, of course. I mean, there's no real danger, is there? Really?"
"Only for those without resource or imagination or panache. I'm sure you have all those qualities."

Do you get it? Is the programme making itself blatant enough? It is saying that fans lack all three of these qualities themselves, and so they have to get them vicariously from watching the Circus or Doctor Who. I'm only surprised they did not go the whole distance and have Whizzkid's appearance be that of a stereotypical Doctor Who fan as well. But Whizzkid is a manny, he is not a long cat, nor is he made from socks.

Kingpin and Bellboy both have missing memories so they can't tell the Doctor and Ace everything about what is going on in this story, which is important for the story's pacing because it helps preserve some of the mystery for later.

"It's this place, you see. It does things to you."

says Bellboy, to give an excuse for this laser-guided amnesia.

The Ringmaster does another rap to introduce Whizzkid to the Circus ring. Like Nord he gets nil points and then pewpewpewed, with only his glasses remaining for the Ringmaster to hold up.

The Doctor, Ace and Kingpin escape while Bellboy stays behind, and when the clowns come he makes the robot ones kill him while the real clown does more business with his hand. This buys the others precious time needed for them to escape.

The Doctor, Ace and Kingpin go down to the cave with the eye and they see that Kingpin's medallion has an eye on it so they know it is important and related to the eye in the well. But the medallion is borked and so they have to find the missing bit before they can progress this plot any further. The Doctor gives himself up so that Ace and Kingpin can go look for it, and also so that he can be present in the end-of-part-three cliffhanger scene.

The Ringmaster does yet another rap, but this one is shorter than the ones he did before, subtly suggesting that he is running out of ideas and so hinting that it will not be long before he ceases to be entertaining and the Circus masters will then turn on him.

The Doctor, Captain Cook and Mags all go out into the ring together. Captain Cook makes them create a moonlike lighting effect that causes Mags to transform into a weredoge and the Doctor to make a face. Cliffhanger!

Part three is a really good episode in which all the setup of the first two parts starts to pay off at last, while still keeping much back for the grand finale next time.

However, the scenes with Whizzkid just seem mean-spirited and spiteful on the part of the programme makers. His presence in the story adds very little - only another victim for the Circus - while at the same time he seems out of place in this sci-fi universe and thus it detracts from the show's credibility.

Whizzkid sets a sad and unwelcome precedent for geeky characters in the new series of Doctor Who to be caricatures of Doctor Who fans, such as those we see in Love & Monsters or Day of the Doctor (in these examples they are actual fans of the Doctor, not of a proxy like the Circus is here). I have to wonder why the producers feel the need to do this, what is it that is gained by baiting and insulting your show's fans to their faces?

We will probably never know the answer for certain, but to guess at it we could do worse than considering that, if Whizzkid is a stand-in for fans of Doctor Who (which he is) and the Circus is a stand-in for Doctor Who the show (which it is) then the stand-ins for the producer must be the Ringmaster... a character forced to perform again and again for an insatiable audience, rapidly running out of ideas and secretly longing to escape before their inevitable end at the pewpewpews of their uncaring masters.

Little wonder, then, they are so insecure that they see any criticism, no matter how constructive or well-meaning, as an ad manninem attack upon their person and hence respond in kind. The fans and the producers both have a deep-seated love for the show - it is The Greatest Show in the Galaxy after all - and ought to be on the same side, but they have been divided and set against each other by the secret masters of the Circus.

So just who are these secret masters and what do they represent? We will have to wait to find out in the final part of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy Part Two

The clown waves at the Doctor and Ace to beckon them into the Circus. He is always waving his hands around, perhaps BRIAN BLESSED told him to do it?

They go inside, and Ace almost walks out again straight away after encountering the terrible gypsy stereotype that is Morgana. It just goes to show that if Li H'sen Chang had turned to out to have been John Bennett in yellowface all along within the confines of the programme then they might have gotten away with it.

It is very dark inside the Circus. There are three mannys in the audience besides the Doctor and Ace, so the sounds as though the Circus is packed full of many mannys clapping must be an illusion. Again this is an illusion inside the show itself, and not just the BBC saving money. This is an important distinction, and it is vital that we note that this is deliberate or else the whole show might look to us like a chronically underfunded TV programme on its last leg.

The Circus show begins with some clowns doing acrobatics and then the Ringmaster comes in and does another rap. He wants the Doctor to perform in the Circus and he starts rhyming in response to whatever the Doctor says. Ace has a bad feeling about this, sensibly enough, as do I - the rhyming quickly gets annoying... but then it is supposed to be annoying within the story, to put the other characters off balance mentally so the Ringmaster can assert dominance over them.

The clown notices that Ace has Flowerchild's earring, but she refuses to tell him where she got it. Ace runs away and the clown sends the other clowns, his robot minions, to chase her.

The Doctor is put in a cage with Captain Cook, Mags and Nord. Outside of the cage is Deadbeat, a manny whose "mind's completely gone" according to the Captain. The clowns come to take Nord away.

While escaping, Ace hears Morgana and the Ringmaster talking. Morgana wants to get away like Bellboy and Flowerchild (well, like them only more successfully) but the Ringmaster and the clown are in charge and she is afraid of them... or of someone or something else that we haven't seen yet.

Nord is killed by some sort of pewpewpew when he fails to entertain in the Circus ring, scoring nil points from the audience jury, but we don't see exactly what happens because this story is still letting its mystery out slowly. We only glimpse what happens from the Doctor's point of view in the cage, and then we see the Ringmaster hold up what is left of Nord.

A new character arrives at the Circus. He is called Whizzkid (according to the credits) and he annoys Morgana because he is a fan of the Circus and is enthusiastic about being in it. The Doctor and Mags escape from the cage by clubbing the robot clown guards using juggling pins, but Captain Cook stays behind.

Ace is still trying to escape from the Circus, which seems to be bigger inside than out just like the TARDIS, so this is harder than it first appears and even cutting through the Circus tent only gets her to another part of the Circus. She is caught by Deadbeat and the clown.

The Doctor and Mags are the ones on the loose inside the Circus now, and they find some stones with carvings on them which add another layer of mystery to whatever is going on here. The stones lead into caves and then to a pit where the Doctor sees an eye, suggesting that we may be in for a Lord of the Rings crossover. Captain Cook and some robot clowns turn up to capture them, confirming that Captain Cook is not just useless, he is actively working for the baddys! This revelation is the end of the episode.

A lot happens in this episode, but because there is so much mystery going on it is quite confusing and not much of it makes sense in isolation - we shall have to wait for the as-yet-unrevealed details of the plot to become revealed to us in the remaining episodes before it will all make sense in the end.

I hope. Mew.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, Part One

"Now welcome folks, I'm sure you'd like to know
We're at the start of one big circus show
There are acts that are cool and acts that amaze
Some acts are scary and some acts will daze
Acts of all kinds, and you can count on that
From folks that fly to disappearing acts
There are lots of surprises for the family
At the greatest show in the galaxy!
So many strange surprises, I'm prepared to bet
Whatever you've seen before... you ain't seen nothing yet."

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy is the last story in season 25, and what better way to celebrate the show's 25th birthday than with a self-referential title, a show within a show? It stars Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor and Sophie Aldred as Ace, and begins with a rap performed by the Circus Ringmaster, which concludes with him looking directly into camera and addressing us watching at home, telling us that we "ain't seen nothing yet" in a similar way to how the Doctor occasionally wishes us "Merry Christmas" or lets us know that even the sonic screwdriver won't get him out of this particular situation.

This is a brave opening, considering that we know nothing about the Ringmaster or the Circus at this stage, but it succeeds as a hook because the final line, and the Ringmaster's look, hints at something sinister going to happen.

The next thing that happens is that one of the Space Mouses from Blakes 7's Stardrive shows up with a big space motorbike and an even bigger space helmet, driving around on a planet looking for Avon or, failing that, the Circus.

The Doctor and Ace get involved in the story when an advert for the Circus materialises inside the TARDIS. It plays like something from out of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or maybe it is just that the similar rhythm of this story's title has already made me think of that? The Doctor is keen to go, and Ace is convinced by a simple bit of reverse psychology playing on her fear of clowns.

To demonstrate that, in this instance, Ace's coulrophobia isn't irrational at all, back on the planet we see Bellboy (played by Christopher Guard, who was Marcellus in I Claudius) and Flowerchild running away from the Circus pursued by a scary black death car driven by a clown. I hope that later on we will see lots and lots of clowns come out of it.
The car has electric windows that were futuristic back when this was made.

The TARDIS arrives and the Doctor and Ace meet the Space Mouse, he is called "Nord, Vandal of the Roads" and he decides not to join their group at this time. Meanwhile Flowerchild finds a space bus where she gets killed by a dangerous robot bus conductor.

Then the Doctor and Ace meet Captain Cook (played by the oddly named T P McKenna, who was Ex-President Sarkoff in Blakes 7's Bounty) and Mags. There is a moment of excitement when a robot wakes up and shoots pewpewpew blasts at the Doctor and Mags until Ace hits it with a spade. This scene is largely padding but it does serve to show there is something strange up with Captain Cook when he does nothing to try to help them.
Similarly in the following scene, when they all go aboard the space bus with the robot conductor on it, Captain Cook is useless again until the Doctor makes the robot pewpewpew itself.

Ace finds Flowerchild's earring and keeps it for later, indicating that by this time Ace is familiar with how point-and-click adventure computer games are supposed to function.

Bellboy has been captured by the clowns and taken back to the Circus. Captain Cook and Mags get to the Circus and go inside while Bellboy is being punished for running away. When Mags sees this (we don't, but from the reactions of the other mannys who see it, on top of the earlier desperation of Bellboy and Flowerchild to get away, we can tell it is something bad) she screams.

Ace hears the scream outside the Circus, and it makes her even more hesitant to go inside. This leads to a rather unusual sort of episode ending, as the Doctor and Ace are deciding whether or not to go into the Circus to face the danger that we - but not they - are aware awaits them, with the Doctor keen to enter but Ace unwilling. And so the last line is the Doctor saying

"Well? Are we going in or aren't we?"

Ending with them on the threshold of the Circus, with the peril still lying in wait rather than menacing them directly, means that we are left on an intriguing moment rather than an outright dramatic one.

Part one of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy is almost entirely setting up for the rest of the story. There are a lot of characters to be introduced, and the Doctor and Ace did not even meet all of them by the end of the episode. This makes it especially hard to judge part one in isolation, because it feels like very little has happened so far - a feeling exaggerated, maybe, by this story following immediately after two that were both much faster paced because they were only three-parters.

Quatermass and the Pit

Inside the mind of every Doctor Who writer there is a race memory of Quatermass and the Pit.

The final installment of the 1950s sci-fi series by Nigel Kneale had parts of it taken and used in multiple Doctor Who stories, without any of them quite going so far as to copy the plot outright.

The Daemons is one of the most blatant, including as it does an archaeological dig turning up an ancient spacecraft, whose alien occupants are horned, and who have influenced the development of humanity, and whose technology is sufficiently advanced as to be taken for black magic.

Image of the Fendahl also prominently features ancient aliens, as well as a skull far older than it should be. Also the pentagram on the Fendahl skull is reminiscent of the pentacle marking inside the spacecraft from the pit.

If Robert Holmes took a few ideas from Quatermass ii for his Spearhead From Space, it is not too much more of a stretch to see the influence of Quatermass and the Pit in The Ark in Space, not only in the insect design of the Wirrn being a bit like the aliens from Quatermass and the Pit, but in the way that the Doctor and Harry find one long dead as the ending to an episode. There is also the small matter of the Doctor using a device to see into the dead Wirrn's brain, which resembles the (somewhat convenient) machine that Quatermass uses to see the race memory of the aliens.

Doctor Who and the Silurians (one of the best Doctor Who stories evar, it has Paul Darrow in it!) features a race memory buried in the minds of mannys so they go mad when they see the Silurians. Although in  a clever twist on Quatermass and the Pit, instead of mannys being Martians, it turns out that Silurians are Earthlings.

Considering that Doctor Who and the Silurians is from the same season as Spearhead From Space (influenced by Quatermass ii) and The Ambassadors of Death (influenced by The Quatermass Experiment), that only leaves Inferno out of Jon Pertwee's first season as the Doctor - and while I see it as a bit more of a stretch than the other three, you could consider the mannys digging up an ancient substance that influences their minds and makes them go on destructive rampages as a reflection of the events in Quatermass and the Pit.

Also throughout season seven, the Doctor's relationship with Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and UNIT more closely resembles the dynamic between Professor Quatermass and the military (and in particular Colonel Breen in Quatermass and the Pit), with this never more apparent than when they are actively in conflict with each other in Doctor Who and the Silurians. It can be easy to forget this when you are used to the more comfortable "UNIT family" dynamic seen from season eight onwards.

Beyond the 1970s, where the majority of stories influenced by Quatermass seem to be found, in The Curse of Fenric the "evil from the dawn of time" Fenric has been waiting in his container for mannys to find him and wake him up. And by the time we reach The Satan Pit in 2006 there is a very real question of whether Doctor Who is still being influenced by Quatermass or if it is now simply being influenced by earlier Doctor Who that was influenced by Quatermass.

Quatermass and the Pit is a masterpiece of building up suspense before paying it off. There is very little peril for the characters until near the end of part four (of six), only a long, slow build of mystery as the fantastic premise is established for us. When the peril does arrive, it escalates quickly until the whole of London is threatened at the climax.

The structure is similar to that of The Quatermass Experiment, but with much of that earlier series missing we lose out on being able to experience this effect there - the film version is not long enough to substitute in this respect - and Quatermass ii has a more conventional structure (with hindsight of the direction most TV sci-fi would take) of revealing much of the threat early so we then watch our heroes struggle against it.

"We are the Martians."

With a premise as strong yet fantastic as "mannys are Martians really" it is no wonder that this series proved so memorable, and as an allegory for immigration it remains as topical now as it was 60 years ago. It pulls this premise off by playing it absolutely straight, with total conviction from the actors - a real strength of all of the Quatermass serials.

André Morell is great as Professor Quatermass, although at first I found myself missing John Robinson (who played the part in Quatermass ii) since he doesn't remind me of Tiberius from The Caesars. Morell is ably assisted by a new self-sacrificing Companion, Dr Roney the Canadian archaeologist, proto-Indiana Jones and part-time inventor of convenient plot devices.

While the machine for seeing into mannys' brains is almost one sci-fi contrivance too far, it is used extremely well, with the brief footage of the aliens fighting each other being all the more effective for its brevity. The alien design is great too, and their first reveal makes for a fantastic end-of-episode cliffhanger.

The three Quatermass serials each features an original method of alien invasion that allows every one to stand out in its own way. My favourite of the trilogy (in as much as it is possible to fairly judge between them when so much of the first story is lost) is Quatermass ii, which I thought had the most exciting story, but all three are great and stand the test of time.