Myke Bartlett's Blog, page 141

“There’s an amazing amount of ageism and sexism in the business....

“There’s an amazing amount of ageism and sexism in the business. If you look at a script, there are a lot of places where women could play roles that just by habit and laziness and lack of imagination are cast as men.”

I spoke to Susan Sarandon about Hollywood sexism, ageing gracefully and Thelma & Louise for The Weekly Review.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2Pl...) “One of the...

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2Pl9s-pIE)

“One of the things I’ve always based my career on, and also my life, is not to change for anybody.”

I interviewed John Barrowman about Doctor Who, groping fans for charity and why there won’t be a Torchwood musical.

Loving the (half-human) Alien

The truth is, I love Doctor Who: The Movie (the 1996 half-American TV movie with Paul McGann). It’s an incarnation of the long-running show that, at best, seems to be tolerated by Whovians. 

Given it was an unsuccessful attempt to relaunch the then-dead programme as an American, X-Files-type series, there’s a general air of failure that lurks over it. The kindest words said usually amount to: Great Doctor, lousy story.

Admittedly, I can’t really defend the denouement, if only because I don’t really know what happens. Something about rewinding time and alarm clocks which, if examined too deeply, kind of spoils the potential for drama in every other episode of Who. But the Movie is hardly the first (or last) episode to rely on some last minute technical gobbledygook or sciencey magic to resolve a crisis.

What the Movie has is a genuine joie de vivre. From its opening moments, there’s an energy that earlier episodes never quite mustered. Sure, the voiceover is more mystifying than explanatory and, yes, starting inside your spaceship that is, astonishingly, smaller on the outside is a disastrous move. But the direction has such flair, sweeping through the spectacular TARDIS interior, whooshing us down to Earth, through some clever and startling cuts, that we can’t help but be swept along. 

This is Who at its most cinematic. Witness new companion Grace Holloway sprint down hospital corridors, dressed for the opera. For the first time, the show felt like proper drama, rather than the ephemeral Saturday night entertainment it was originally intended.

That’s not say the tone is note-perfect. Most of the humour works — it had been a long time since Who had actually contained intentional humour — but there are unquestionably moments of thudding joke-crapness. (Although I rather like those moments, for their quaint 90s-ness.)

Key to its success as a drama is, undoubtedly, the casting of a proper actor in the lead role. Following the series’ demise in 1989, newspaper rumours about new Doctors tended to go: Eric Idle, Tim Curry, John Cleese, Paul Daniels and Eric Idle. Always Eric Idle. McGann was not a comedian. McGann was not a lazy caricature of British eccentricism. McGann was a fine, young actor with a great body of dramatic work including The Monocled Mutineer, The Hanging Gale, Nice Town (which really deserves a DVD release) and Withnail & I.

Put simply, McGann makes the best debut of any Doctor to date. This is particularly impressive, given he spends much of his 60 minutes of screen time in an amnesiac state. He is charismatic, enigmatic, hydromatic (No, wait, that’s Greased Lightning) and romantic. 

He is at once the most human and most alien of Doctors. He seems more attuned to the emotional lives of others (to the point of telepathy) than previous incarnations, but keeps himself apart — even the much-criticised snog with Grace lacks any real passion. We’re charmed by him, but we’re not sure how much we trust him. It’s a shame that subsequent attempts (in spin-off fiction) to develop McGann’s Eighth Doctor focused more on the romance and the apparent sweetness than his slipperiness.

Cards on the table — McGann is my favourite Doctor. (Tom Baker aside, obviously. Tom is in a universe of his own.) He treats the part as a proper acting gig, rather than an excuse to flail around and hog the screen. As the recent minisode proved, he brings a welcome emotional weight to the role and despatches the required humour with subtlety. He understands that the funniest things are rarely those moments that are telegraphed as such.

Grace Holloway, his quasi-companion, is no less wonderful. In the hands of Daphne Ashbrook, she is strong, funny, vulnerable and, again, more human than most of the Doc’s sidekicks. She has a dropkick boyfriend, she has a high-powered job, and she has a nice line in sarcastic banter. We know people like her and we like people like her. 

It’s a shame, perhaps, that the story doesn’t wholly belong to her. The structure would make a lot more sense if we began with her being called into hospital, to attend to a mysterious gunshot victim. When the series returned in 2005, writer Russell T Davies understood the drama in letting the mystery of the Doctor unfold, rather than cancelled out by an infodump.

For all of its alleged flaws, The TV Movie is great fun. When it first showed back in 1996, ordinary, sane people were talking about Doctor Who again. People who hadn’t watched the show for more than a decade. Remember, this was before Buffy brought a snappy self-awareness to sci-fi, which made it okay for the mainstream to tune in.

I honestly believe Who is at its best at its least geeky — when it caters to the mainstream by incorporating elements of other things we love. This is something the TV Movie does very well. People who don’t watch sci-fi will recognise elements of ER, The X-Files (okay, technically sci-fi, but more horror-based and massive at the time) and Sherlock Holmes. At the time, I appreciated the lack of bug-eyed monsters. This was Who attempting to ground itself in the proudly cynical 1990s, without losing any of its wit, invention or joy.

In the UK, the episode rated more highly than Who had for 20 years or would again until David Tennant was in full swing. It proved similarly popular in Australia, where it was repeated several times over the next couple of years. In the US, of course, it was killed by Roseanne. 

What’s most frustrating about the Movie, perhaps, is how poorly it does its job as a pilot. As McGann flies off at the end, it’s pretty much impossible to work out what sort of series might have followed. Would Grace return? Would they travel around the US (or Canada), solving spooky crimes a la The X-Files? Would the Doctor set up shop in San Francisco? Would we have seen monsters?

Although a series of radio adventures have plugged the gap, we never really got to see where McGann’s Doctor would have taken us. Still, the recent glimpse suggests it would have been somewhere pretty fantastic.

“Jeremy was a little bit of a chauvinist, maybe.”I interviewed...

“Jeremy was a little bit of a chauvinist, maybe.”

I interviewed Top Gear’s first female host Sabine Schmitz for The Weekly Review.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SkpF...) This week’s...

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SkpFGt9jwA)

This week’s Top 5 picks for your week in Melbourne.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4pPW...) The 5 best...

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4pPWhZHVsk)

The 5 best things to do in Melbourne this week.

“I think it’ll be cool if we win and bring Eurovision to...

“I think it’ll be cool if we win and bring Eurovision to Australia next year. The airlines will be happy.”

Dami Im on her impending Eurovision triumph for The Weekly Review.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWw7Z...) My Top 5...

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWw7ZueixD8)

My Top 5 things to see and do in Melbourne for the week May 4-10, 2016. 

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzI2R...) Olympia...

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzI2Ri9p_Qo)

Olympia performs Smoke Signals at The Weekly Review.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H–u...) “I got...

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H–u9Tw0ht8)

“I got reviewed by NME and it basically said I must have been created in a Disney vat of formaldehyde, with electrodes pumping my foetal arms and legs into poptastic positions. It was the most amazing and decimating review.”

Adam Garcia on his brief pop star career and Singing’ In The Rain