tv, page 14 of 17

One of my earliest memories is of Tom Baker’s first appearance as Doctor Who when I was three, which may be why he seemed so perfectly suited to the role — for me, he defined it. As a result, there’s always been the need for a little mental adjustment whenever I see him in anything else, and I find myself thinking of how much this other character he’s playing is like his version of the Doctor. (Of course, Tom Baker is one of those actors who excels in a part precisely to the degree he’s allowed to play the one character he does so well — I’d say himself, only I don’t know the man, so can’t tell whether it is himself or, as is more likely, some fantasy version that’s only allowed to be let loose as part of a performance.) It’s odd to think that his gaining the role of the Doctor was a bit of a departure from the direction his career seemed to have been heading, considering the two major film parts he had before it — Koura in The Golden Voyage of Sindbad, and Rasputin in Nicholas and Alexandra — were both villainous types, something his smouldering glare seemed perfectly fit for. As the Doctor, he occasionally played up this darker side — the side that made up the whole, really, of his sorcerer Koura in The Golden Voyage, a role that was only hampered by Baker not being able to incorporate his other, more humorous side, which was the other essential element he brought to the Doctor.

This may be one reason why, although I hadn’t seem him in 1971’s Nicholas and Alexandra — till last night, that is — I thought Rasputin would be a perfect part for him, encapsulating, as it does, that almost bipolar mix of brooding gloominess and sudden impulsive generosity that characterised his Doctor. Rasputin is (in the film, at least) a peculiar combination of visionary religious fervour and an all-too-human weakness for that old trio of wine, women, and political influence. The character has the potential to become a sort of Falstaff, endlessly and engagingly self-justifying his faults while at the same time promoting a heroicised, fantasy version of himself. Rasputin knows he is a sinner, but also knows God loves sinners, because he made so many of them into saints. This is certainly how a Tom Baker Rasputin could have been, if only he’d had the film to himself. As it is, Nicholas and Alexandra is, of course, mostly about Tsar Nicholas and Tsarina Alexandra, and although Rasputin plays an important part in their story, it’s their far more sober, not to say somber, restrained character that presides. Baker’s Rasputin is a bit like a Dostoyevskian madman straitjacketed into a more urbane Tolstoyan world — and as a result, he never quite manages to take off. If he were allowed to, he’d certainly swallow up the whole film. (Though there are an awful lot of excellent British character actors in the other parts, so this isn’t to detract from them; it’s just that they are mostly playing more well-bred types.) As it is, he’s allowed plenty of opportunities to glare his bulbous eyes hypnotically at whoever he’s talking to — this glaring-from-under-the-brows look was no doubt the thing that landed him the role, as the director makes sure to include one shot of it in each scene where Baker appears — but doesn’t really get a chance to do anything other than smoulder. The burning vitality beneath the glare only comes close to being unleashed in Rasputin’s final scene, where we get a rather muted moment of decadence, a roar of defiance, then a drawn-out death.

Baker was nominated for two Golden Globe awards for his role in Nicholas and Alexandra (one for Best Actor in a Supporting Role and another for Best Newcomer, according to Wikipedia, though Baker’s own site says he was only nominated for one), but to me the film seemed to be straining at the bounds of its genre — it was a late version of the big historical epics of the 50s and 60s, and was perhaps a little too polite for what the actor was really capable of.

How long have I waited for this? A Doctor Who adventure game? At least since my own (entirely unauthorised) efforts many years back, in which all I managed to do was get a 2-character-high Dalek to chase a 2-character-high TARDIS (why the TARDIS was moving, I don’t know) across my TV screen, zapping it as it went, with smooth sprite scrolling (feat enough, for me, in them days), all thanks to an overheated ZX Spectrum.

I can’t think of many fictional worlds I like enough to want to play in a game, but which wouldn’t be ruined by being made into a game. Mythago Wood the adventure game? No! A Fafhrd & Grey Mouser hack’n’slay? No! An Earthsea rpg? Definitely not! Alien, perhaps — I remember being terrified by an Alien patch for DOOM!, something that didn’t quite translate when I got some friends to play it. And Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, definitely, but although it has been adapted into several games, none of them so far has got anywhere near recreating the atmosphere of the stories. But Doctor Who’s format is perfect for gaming. And what’s more, the BBC have released the thing for free! (Or for the price of the license fee, of course.) And for the Mac! And when I’ve got a week off work! How could Heaven and Earth get any closer? (Well, for me, it would be to play a Doctor Who game with Tom Baker as the Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith as the companion, and Robert Holmes as the scriptwriter, but I’m pretty sure I’ll have to wait for the Rapture for that particular beatitude.)

City of the Daleks is the first episode of the Doctor Who Adventure Game. It starts with a trip to 1960s Earth, only to find Trafalgar Square in ruins, and the last surviving member of the human race battling it out against a host of Daleks. From there, we move, in Act Two (the episode has three acts) to Skaro to find out what’s gone wrong with the timestream that has allowed the Daleks to wipe out the human race before Amy has even been born.

I think it’s crucial that any game adaptation sticks to the feel of the original, and the Doctor Who Adventure Game certainly does that. For a start — thankfully — the Doctor isn’t equipped with a Dalek-busting BFG9000, but has to defeat his age-old enemies with only his wits and his trusty, do-anything sonic screwdriver. (And, in keeping with the feel of the current series, a total disregard for narrative believability. It may seem narrow-minded to accuse a show that’s based on the premise of a centuries-old, ten-times regenerated man time-travelling around the universe in a battered old police box of lacking believability, but I think once you’ve believed that many impossible things before breakfast, it helps for the actual plot to be a bit more down-to-earth. Not that I’m saying the Tom Baker era never sinned in this direction — destroying a Rutan spaceship with an improvised laser made with a lighthouse and a ruby isn’t exactly convincing either. But the best stories — Genesis of the Daleks, for instance — got their power from the plot not hanging on the Doctor improvising himself out of some impossible situation, but by having a bloody good story to start with. Now, back to the main programme.)

So, a lot of the action is just the sort I like in a game — sneaking round Daleks (who are all thankfully short-sighted and deaf), solving mini-puzzles (such as Tetris-like code-cracking in the Dalek city), finding objects and putting them together to make other objects, and making decisions. And the controls are very simple, too, which is always a bonus, particularly in a short game like this. (I’m also, at this moment, playing DragonAge: Origins, on the XBox. I’ve been playing it for about three weeks now, and still flounder around manically whenever I enter combat.) And there’s only one time-limited sequence, so while I did do some panicky running right into the path of a Dalek gun, I at least didn’t do it all the way through the game.

This is one thing I’ll say was definitely good about the game — it was well-paced, building up in tension as it moved towards the end. The puzzles got slightly more difficult, and the action slightly more intense as the game went on — not too much, so that cack-handed Sunday gamers like me don’t feel out of their depth, but not too little, either, so it felt like I’d accomplished something in finishing the game.

Also, the game was quite short. It’d probably take a game-savvy player about the same length of time to play as it would to watch one of the current series’ episodes. Me, I took a bit longer, not just because of running into the path of shooting Daleks, but because the damn thing crashed — just hung, in fact — four times, meaning I had to restart my computer to keep playing. More than a little annoying, but fortunately the game’s frequent auto-save meant I was never too far from where I’d left off. (There was one other annoyance, when a video that was supposed to show on a Dalek console just came up as a white band. The Doctor and Amy’s comments were enough to let me know I should have been seeing a wave of Daleks arriving on the planet; all I saw was fuzz.)

But overall, it was fun, and it did the main thing, which was let me feel I was participating in the Doctor Who universe for a little while. I’m certainly going to play the next episode, which looks like it’s going to feature Cybermen.

I wonder how long it’ll be before someone comes up with a Tom Baker patch?

Going since January 1978, The South Bank Show has finally been choked to death by the all-encroaching polystyrenisation of terrestrial TV. In the shopping mall that is weekend broadcasting, it came to resemble a beleaguered secondhand bookshop — quirky, cranky, unapologetically interesting — in the midst of a wasteland of junk food franchises. And now it’s gone.

And with its goes the second-best TV theme tune ever!  And that’s not faint praise. First place goes to the Alice-down-the-rusty-plughole theme to pre-eighties Doctor Who, which is religious music, as far as I’m concerned. (Third goes to Big Ron for Have I Got News For You.)

There were two criticisms people who didn’t like The South Bank Show had about it. One was that it was always about people you’d never heard of. It wasn’t, but when it was, then — duh, dat was duh point. The other was that it was pretentious. “Pretentious” in the sense of “It embarrasses me when people talk about things with any degree of curiosity or intelligence, so I’ll call them pretentious then run giggling for the exit.” So I don’t care about “pretentious” as a criticism either.

My favourite episode was the Clive Barker interview from 1994. I videoed it and watched it till the tape stretched, went snowy, and got tangled in my VCR. Then I transferred it to audio (having no way of getting it onto digital video at the time), and still listen to it on occasion when I need a dose of inspiration. (You can find it on YouTube, though the sound’s not in sync. I’d quite happily pay good money to have a proper DVD of it.) But The South Bank Show didn’t do much fantasy, nor horror. (There was a J G Ballard episode, and the inevitable show on The Lord of the Rings when the Peter Jackson film came out, but that was about it.) In fact, it hardly ever did the writers, musicians or artists I wanted to see on it. But I still watched it without fail. Even when I knew enough about whoever was on it to know I didn’t like them. I either ended up liking them, or spent a good hour arguing with the TV. Now that’s entertainment! Generally, though, it was just the air of books, art, films, or whatever creative pursuit it was — the atmosphere I like to breathe. I usually recorded it and watched it the following Monday evening, as a welcome corrective to the first weekday back at work. Now what am I going to do?

Well, it’s not the end of the world. Melvyn Bragg is still doing In Our Time on Radio 4 (which gets podcasted — thank you BBC!), and because it’s Radio 4, he can be as obscure and pretentious (or interesting and curious, as I prefer to put it) as he wants to be.

And Imagine… But, no, that’s no substitute. It ought to be, but it just isn’t. To my taste, Alan Yentob puts himself that little bit too much in the picture. Melvyn Bragg always began The South Bank Show with a quick, “Hello, tonight’s film is about so-and-so,” and then we were off. Alan Yentob has to make it a personal journey — his personal journey. We have to have interpolated shots of him wandering around with his hands in his baggy trouser pockets, looking thoughtful. The one Imagine episode I should have liked the most — on Haruki Murakami — was in fact about nothing but Alan Yentob, with no Murakami in it at all. And, yes, Melvyn Bragg did appear again to do the interviewing, but he always asked intelligent questions. Alan Yentob does the interviewing too, but, sorry, he just asks naff questions. Maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe it was just the crap theme music which put me off from the start. (I mean, the show’s called Imagine. So why have the least imaginative theme music on TV? Even QI‘s plunky piece of nothing is a step above Imagine‘s. They’ve changed it for the latest series, but I can’t remember what the new music’s like, so it may be an improvement, but it’s still not Variations.)

But there’s BBC4, so that’s alright. It’s not like the demise of The South Bank Show is leaving TV a total cultural wasteland. (There’s the Culture Show, too. A bit magaziney, and it somehow always ends up covering the same subjects as Late Review, but at least it interviewed Alan Moore, which The South Bank Show never did.)

Still, The South Bank Show has always been my favourite, and I’ll miss it. And so, till Melvyn Bragg reincarnates into a younger looking boffin with a redheaded Scottish sidekick… Oh no, that’s the other programme. Oh well, goodbye, South Bank Show!