H2G2 versus (H2G2)2

This afternoon, after running outside in a howling wind, I decided to settle down under my duvet and have the pleasure of watching the original BBC TV production of "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy".

I first remember seeing this when I was a very small boy, thinking it was going to be some sort of boring programme about travelling, like the sort of thing you'd see with Cliff Michelmore or Frank Bough in Holiday 81. But as soon as I heard the music, and saw the opening titles of an astronaut travelling through the letters, I was hooked. My mum was sympathetic to my love of Sci-Fi, and allowed me to watch every episode despite it being on late.

I loved the two headed alien, I loved Marvin - me and a couple of other kids at school were impersonating him saying "I'm just going to stick my head in a bucket of water" for weeks - I loved the space cow that wanted you to eat it, and I loved the Vogon poetry, even though I had no idea what "micturitions" were or why they should be funny.

I got older, and devoured the books. I remembered the TV show but it hardly ever got repeated on TV, much to my disappointment. I got hold of a DVD of the series in about 2001, and loved it all over again.

Sadly Douglas Adams died, and the film he had been working on came out. I'd never seen it all the way through until I bought the DVD for a pound at Cash Converter.

It is, in the main, charmless, and terrible. Hammer and Tongs are fantastic at making Blur videos featuring animated milk cartons, but they evidently realised early on that they were never going to match the TV series, and so altered absolutely everything to put their own stamp on it, as you would expect to be fair. Problem is at no point does it match up to the TV series, except that I'd rather have Zooey Deschanel than Sandra Dickinson as Trillian anyday.

Martin Freeman is boring and bland in entirely the wrong way as Arthur, Mos Def is miscast, the Humma Kavvula sequence is baffling even if Douglas Adams created it specially, supposedly, and none of the design - Marvin, the ships, the Vogons and other aliens and the book - works on 100 times the budget the BBC had.

Worst of all, however, is Zaphod Beeblebrox as played by Sam Rockwell. Setting aside the second head down his neck which is again Hammer and Tongs being different for the sake of it, the idea that Zaphod is some kind of redneck General Custer idiot on speed, rather than the cluelessly louche Mark Wing-Davey properly two-headed interpretation of the character.

The American market was bet on, and the wheel came up red instead of black.

So I will stick with my TV version thank you very much, and hope that Radio 4 Extra broadcasts the radio one at some point at Christmas, as well as repeating Neverwhere. I will never watch the film again, unless I'm somehow desperate for a fix of Zooey Deshanel.

I'm not a Douglas Adams obsessive by any means, but the film is one heck of a crashing disappointment, and frankly, I don't see how it was ever going to be anything else. Such a pity.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 18.12.13

The Television of the Apocalypse

Watching films like "Deep Impact", where humanity is looking directly into the dark abyss of extinction, always makes me wonder.

Aside from solemn Presidential broadcasts telling us to keep our faith in God as humanity prepares to be squashed flat by an asteroid God himself could have stopped if He so chose, what is on television or the radio when the event occurs?

I'm sure plenty of people would just swarm out of their houses and choke the roads heading for the high ground while continuously screaming, but plenty of folk, perhaps the older ones without young familes facing immolation, would stay home. Surely caring, sharing governments (ha) with advance warning of the earth's destruction, would arrange for there to be media to entertain us in humanity's death throes?

No doubt, religious programming would take up a fair amount of scheduling; can you imagine the number of death bed conversions the various deities would be dealing with as firebrand preachers sounded their joy at the last trump being sounded at last?

Other programming would be more contemplative; gentle pastoral sounds on classical radio, scenes of cloud and sea on television, perhaps overlayed with a ticker of dedications to friends and families scrolling along the bottom, a veritable requiem of tweets as the St Matthew Passion gently poured from the speakers.

Perhaps some channels would just think "fuck it" and decide to broadcast the dirtiest pornography imaginable, figuring no-one would be bothered about hairy palmed deviant onanists as the sun set on life itself forever. No doubt ITV2 and BBC3 would broadcast the usual "100 Worst" type clips or rolling film of Del Boy Trotter falling through the bar to give mankind a smile on its face as it met icy cometary death from above.

Or, as is so common in our current age, would people decided to watch rolling news coverage of Armageddon? I'm thinking they would. Even in the darkest hours, there would be plenty of broadcasters willing set their egos above their families and the prospect of death, and see who could get the highest ratings - and who could go on the longest as the oceans boiled and lava sprayed from the fractured crust onto the sweet land of ours. And no doubt, folk would want to see how long they could go on watching. I know I would, if I was watching.

But I wouldn't be. I'd be outside, with a rum and coke and Radio 4, waiting with joy for the hammer blow from space. God bless it, and all it would bring.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 10/08/2013

Knightmare and the Helmet of Truth

A lot of folk are excited that here in the UK the classic adventure game show "Knightmare" is being re-shown on the Challenge TV channel.

Rating as one of the best things ever put out on ITV - yes I am a BBC snob - I never got to see it as much as I would have liked, as initially I never got home from school early enough, and then I was at university for a large chunk of its run.

Various things stick in the memory though. The fact that to conceal the fact that the young adventurer was actually doing his dungeoneering in a bare green screened studio, he was forced to wear "The Helmet of Truth" - essentially a bucket with horns on it, as can be seen here;

The bearded, slightly psychopathic looking chap here is Hugo Myatt as Treguard, the guide, the dungeonmaster, much given to saying things like "Life force is becoming critical" and "But team, where is the trumpet to blow down the Walls of Jericho?". He would sit with the other members of the team, three classroom spods with pencils and paper who would shout "FORWARD! LEFT! LEFT! NO LEFT!" like someone playing a ZX81 text only adventure with a voice recognition system. They also had to cast spells, getting the spelling right, as some kind of educational sop to the "quality television" brigade. The watching kids, of course, thought this was a load of pointless bullshit getting in the way of the action.

And all the while, as the be-bucketed one struggled to get a key in a lock, or dispose of a troll, thumping heartbeat music would sound ominously, and a graphic of a face would appear in the corner of the screen. This would slowly disintegrate into a scary looking skull with bits of meat on it as the lifeforce ran out, always reminding me of the life indicator in the old Spectrum game "Atic Atac".

The show ran its course, as they always do, as even with some location footage mixed in and some updated graphics Knightmare began to look underpowered compared to the latest in Snezzy Megasony home video game technology. However, the charm of this and the earlier BBC2 "The Adventure Game" is unmatchable to any retro low tech lover like me!

Early Thoughts on Blake's 7 Reboot

Lots of chat about possible casting in both SFX and Digital Spy for this new crew of "One Innocent and Six Criminals" the showrunners have released. Obviously mainly about Avon, who I suspect given his unavoidably English anti-hero persona will get the Damian Lewis - Andrew Lincoln - Johnny Lee Miller second-level-brit-actor-in-usa-tv-show-to-give-it-gravitas position. But they won't want him to overshadow whoever they pick to play Blake, who is going to have to a rather tougher character to justify the show being about him. The original show was "Avon's 7" very early on in the piece.

Perhaps the rest of the casting will have the BSG formula of altering race and gender, and note they also have to find an extra character from the beginning to properly make up the 7 who escape en-oute to a penal colony - they are keeping the start of the story the same evidently. Zen could appear as a Bishop style Android perhaps, or an early entrace for Tarrant or more possibly Deyna.

And there is also Servalan to consider as it is unimaginable such an iconic female character should be missing from this reboot, but Morena Baccarin has just essentially played a rather similar looking character in V, so they might have to go in a slightly different direction from Jacqueline Pearce's unforgettable creation. But I hope they don't.

Above all, the show must be kept gritty and dark, but without the seeming self importance that has always put me off BSG. Do we have to ram Post 9:11 and Iraq slash Afghanistan metaphors into everything?

Let the story tell itself, without signposting "ALLEGORY! ALLEGORY! ALLEGORY!" over every damn thing.

The Adventure Game - a Joy of my Childhood

The Adventure Game was always something that filled me with excitement when I was a kid. Along with Blake's 7, which I'm sure it used to share an evening with in the early 80s, it was something I'd wait to see with all the childish excitment my body could muster.

A feeling I never have any more, ever.

Some wonderful person has been putting episodes online! Here's a bit of the first one ever made, with the charming Juilan Bream and John Williams theme tune, and a somewhat familiar looking future newsreader on duty as a shape shifting dragon.

This is obviously the earliest incarnation of the show - the evaporating floor seen in this clip would be replaced with the more familiar "Vortex" challenge of later years. I remember in particular the "Drogna" - the currency the dragon residents, or Argonds, of Arg. Little plastic discs with a coloured shape on, their value was derived from multiplying the number of sides with the colours position in the "Richard of York Gave Battle" mnenomic - hence a red circle was worth 1, and a blue pentagon was worth 25.

I was so obessed with the Drogna it was a mainstay of my internal aspergic head stories for years.

I used to love the computer game sequence, where early on the team's alpha male would sit at the keyboard of an Apple 2 to play a little text only adventure, where the command "SUBTRACT ADDER" sticks in my memory for some reason. Later on came the BBC model B, and the game Dogran Hole, where a little grumpy space dog would go into a hole in the wall, to be guided by the bloke, again, in a 3D Monster Maze type game. Thus the team would be distracted from failing to work out Lesley Judd was the evil mole, as happened every week.

I was thrilled as anything when Paul Darrow, the immortal Avon from Blake's 7, showed up one week, although his beard was offputting and he met a dismal evaporation fate for failing to remember a "PENTAGON-RED" tile sequence or some similar slip up.

I miss this show. Of course, The Crystal Maze was similar in conception, right down to the idea you progressed by winning crystals, but its charm was negated by the fact the contestants were a bunch of dimwitted yuppie cretins in boiler suits, as opposed to clever people like Heinz Wolff and Johnny Ball. Nowaadays, we have Dale Wintin camping it up at dimwits on lottery garbage output.

The joy of childhood can never be returned. Seeking it drives you mad, but watch these clips and be reminded of it for a little while...

As a final treat, here's David "The Chinese Detective" Yip taking on the Vortex in a later series.