Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

...And where are the clowns? There ought to be clowns. Well, maybe next year.

Sarah Jane Adventures: The Day Of The Clown Part 2

Over to CBBC for Part 2 then (or BBC1 a week a later if you're reading this now) and, alas and alack, it doesn't deliver on the promise of Part 1. The phone signal interference schtick isn’t the greatest of get outs, but never mind the slipshod plotting when Phil Ford gets to develop the Sarah Jane back story itself through flashbacks to her childhood fears of puppets coming to life in a thunderstorm lashed bedroom. It’s that primal anxiety again that most of us have experienced and is part of that catalogue of irrational scares such as discarded clothes assuming unfamiliar shapes, creatures under the bed waiting to grab your legs, tree branches taking on a life of their own as they clatter against the window pane.

This is pure Bruno Bettleheim via The Uses Of Enchantment in that Ford is using the series, particularly here in this story, as fairy tale to inform the youngest of viewers about how to negotiate through life’s toughest times and personal fears. It’s there in how Luke must deal with the absence of Maria and get along with Rani, in how Sarah must conquer those troubling childhood skeletons in the closet, and (nice idea, shame about the realisation) in how Clyde uses his humour to overcome the fear creating, and all devouring, Odd Bob. Whilst this second part isn’t as successful in maintaining the threat from the fantastical situation, and I put that partly down to the way the story is trying to scientifically rationalise the myth of the Pied Piper via the meteorite at the Pharos Institute, it still asks the child and the parent to consider fairy tales as "...suggestions in symbolic form about how he/she may deal with these issues and grow safely into maturity."

...it still asks the child and the parent to consider fairy tales as "...suggestions in symbolic form about how he/she may deal with these issues and grow safely into maturity."

As well as this symbolic playing out we also get Rani’s induction into Team SJA. This is definitely one of the best scenes in the episode and again Anjii Mohindra plays it beautifully and all the signs are that she’s going to work well with Daniel Anthony and Tommy Knight. Via the character’s interest in journalism, a new dynamic is also forming with Sarah Jane and I hope they develop this part of their relationship. Sarah Jane's offer to Rani, either go back to her normal life or go with her, actually makes her sound more like the Doctor than Metropolitan's greatest roving reporter. And as the kids climb to the attic, Luke stares wistfully at a photo of the original gang, including Maria, and Ford's script also acknowledges that life goes on for Luke and he must accept change.

Loved Sarah laying down the ground rules, including not keeping score of how many times they've saved the world and, later, the moonlit conversation between her and Rani which is played so beautifully by Anjii and Lis. And for us continuity whores out there - did you spot the picture of Clara the clown from The Celestial Toymaker on Sarah's laptop gallery as well as the name-check for Aunt Lavinia as Sarah explains her fear of clowns in the flashback? I did wonder at that point whether the kids of today can actually relate to this same fear or if, watching this, they've laughed their heads off and lost all respect for that wuss Sarah Jane Smith. Still, that scary encounter between Odd Bob and Sarah in the Pharos Institute would surely cause mass incontinence amongst young and old.

Which is lovely, but then Ford's script starts to disintegrate. The nice continuity link to the Pharos Institute, with Floella Benjamin popping in again, is just starters orders for a series of plot devices that actually encumber the story. Yep, meteorite containing said force will be used ultimately to imprison it again; yep, mass mobile phone thing just reeks of leftovers from the parent show and is a bit of a ho-hum solution to what was the promising spectacle of balloon obsessed kids biting the dust in a pleasingly nasty fashion. I can just about forgive them. Up to this point it has been a good little story overall with solid performances from the ensemble cast, Bradley Walsh as Spellman/Odd Bob is deliciously entertaining and the far more successful hall of mirrors sequence is such a deliriously surreal homage by director Kerrigan to The Lady From Shanghai,  Enter The Dragon and The Man With The Golden Gun that it makes the unsatisfactory conclusion just about palatable.

I doubt Daniel Anthony will be adding 'light entertainer' to his CV either after blotting his copybook with this irritating performance...

But the mouldy icing on the cake is the groan inducing moment where Clyde's 'laughter is the best medicine' approach is used to deal with the fear munching Odd Bob. Never mind the onslaught of obviously daft jokes, appropriate for a kids show I admit, it's just the fact that the solution was screamingly telegraphed ten minutes before it occurred. It all fizzles out a bit and that's a pity because the central idea's very sound. Clyde's stand up career is well and truly over based on that routine and I doubt Daniel Anthony will be adding 'light entertainer' to his CV either after blotting his copybook with this irritating performance. The trouble is this episode can't make its mind up when to stop and does tend to untidily pile up one conclusion after another in order to tie up narrative lose ends. And when it does, we're given more star-gazing and tweeness that has already been trotted out in the previous story. If someone's trying to underline the 'wonder of the universe' metaphors then there's no need to do it with a big fat black crayon. Message understood, OK?

Next week they seem to have a repeat of Russ Abbot's Madhouse on.

"Hast Du etwas Zeit für mich Dann singe ich ein Lied fuer Dich Von 99 Luftballons Auf ihrem Weg zum Horizont."

Sarah Jane Adventures: Day of the Clown Part 2

What godawful final minute.  One of the great themes in The Sarah Jane Adventures is the underscoring of what a great, fabulous exciting Whoniverse it is, with characters seemingly weekly looking up at the sky enraptured by the possibilities.  Much of the time we viewers wonder too, even though like Sarah Jane we’ve spent all these years seeing what it looks like and trying to pretend that most of it doesn’t look like Studio B.  The last minute of The Day of the Clown was another example of this, but somewhere in the midst of the script, the performances, the direction and the music, I don’t think there’s been a falser moment on British tv this year with the exception of some of Mohinder’s more meandery meanders in the voiceover reality of Heroes.  Some of the scene seemed have been ADRed (Additional Dialogue Recording) which can’t have helped the chemistry, but the poetry just tanked, as did the jokes, and I don’t think I’ve hated Clyde more than in that final shot when he looked backwards and said a line not even David Tennant could get away with.

Which is a shame, because up until that point the episode had passed the high quality control standards set by last week.  In the first half, Bradley Walsh was largely kept mute until the cliffhanger, but in the second he was let out into the circus ring and basically stole the show.  It’s interesting that in times gone by a figure like Walsh being cast at any level of Who would have caused sniggers, but having spent time on Coronation Street he’s become a credible enough actor that his appearance as a villain raised few eyebrows and his turn as the sinister Spellman might well be one of the creepiest performances the franchise has seen.  Some of this had to with the accents, Elijah’s German and Odd Bob’s part-Lector part Michael Keaton’s Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing.  But it was his presence too, the dead eyes, the false geniality, the menace.  His advance on Sarah Jane at the Pharos Institute was properly scary, simply because you weren’t sure what he was capable of.

in times gone by a figure like Walsh being cast at any level of Who would have caused sniggers

This was an episode designed to creep out parents as well as children; as the little-uns clutched their mummy’s breast at the sight of the scary man with the fluffy red sideburns, the idea was presumably that the mummy would clutch their child tighter as the primal parental fear of losing them was enunciated (assuming they’re not out in the kitchen trying to make the tea).  Child catchers aren’t new to children’s fiction ("You have to know where to look; like cockroaches, they get under the floors, in the cracks in the walls, in the woodwork!"),  and Ford’s script was careful to demonstrate that it was the act of kidnapping the school kids in order to create fear which was Odd Bobs aim, but it’s still quite brave to tell this kind of story at 4:35 during Children’s BBC, with the kind of hysteria which surrounds just this kind of crime (though obviously in a more grimly mundane Linda LaPlante style).  It’s that thing which was missing from Sunday's Eighth Doctor adventure, Dead London; you can tell an exciting, slightly horrific, actiony romp, but it feels more relevant if there’s something underneath, however well buried below talk of meteors and aliens and ninety-nine red balloons going by (or however many there were).

If the first half had Lamorisse and Lang getting lost between the hobos and tramps looking for a way out, this week Ford and vetran tv director Michael Kerrigan (remember Knights of God?) must have been dosing on Orson Welles and Bruce Lee; with that fascinatingly abstract scene in the hall of mirrors which must have been a homage to The Lady from Shanghai or The Way of the Dragon.  This was one of those episodes filled with memorable images. The shot of the empty school yard with the three teachers almost colliding with each other at the centre; the phalanx of kids with their balloons marching through the streets, those floating balloons contrasted against a sky so blue it looked like it had been pasted in from the Derek Jarman film.  It’s an example of the show, despite its budget and otherwise quite conventional staging aspiring for something more cinematic.  They’re not scared of a bit of (what I understand to be) Soviet montage either, with the rapid cutting of shots of clowns with Sarah Jane’s face, underscoring Liz Sladen’s superb performance and helping us to understand this personal phobia which seems to be driving her to levels of apoplexy not seen since a Dalek fleet drifted into the sky above London.

A good introductory story for Rani then, what with her predictably finding a way to stop Spellman, apparently having seen a Tim Vine dvd the night before.  I like the way she stands; in that four shot in the attic, everyone else has their pull on hero pose, whereas Ajili’s chose the stork position.  Actually the actress seemed less certain this time around, but again I think that might have been as a result of the weirdly unnatural ADR which was more prevalent than usual.  She can certainly make her eyes sparkle with the best of them, and there’s already a great rapport with the rest of the cast.  Rani’s parents had less to do this week, which is certain to be a phrase I’ll be repeating in the coming weeks as the likes of Clyde’s family come online.  Some nice nods to the classics too, with the clown from The Celestial Toymaker putting in an appearance and lip service to Sarah’s Aunt Lavinia (if only Mary Wimbush was still with us).  Has the early mortality of her parent’s already been established anywhere or is this something new?  Whatever, if you hated the clowns, weren’t too put out by that last minute, and weren’t enamoured by new technology repelling old ‘magic’ at least there was the return of Floella Benjamin’s mesmeric line readings; Liz deserves a Stanislavski award for having to act against that…

Next Week:  What An Atmosphere, I predict a party with a happy atmosphere …

Making my entrance again with my usual flair...

Sarah Jane Adventures: Day Of The Clown Part 1

In general, sports and I did not get on well with each other at school. When I had occasion to stand in goal looking miserable I would have secretly been delighted if an alien clown had turned up and snatched away certain fellow team members. Irritating bullies, particularly. That was back in 1972, mind. These days, any man seen scuttling around in the undergrowth whilst dressed as a clown in the vicinity of vulnerable young people would be arrested, jailed and put on the Sex Offenders list. Perhaps, in its own quirky way, that fear of strangers, instilled in children and parents alike over generations, originally through myth, fairytale and now alas through the present day, all too real, traumas unveiled in saturation media coverage, is what Phil Ford is driving at here.

...harking back to the kind of off-kilter kids dramas that we took for granted back in the 1970s

Not only is the story a paean to the loss of a friend, with Luke pining after Maria, but it's also about how the wonders of the universe throw things at our heroes that disrupt the nature of innocence, heighten fears of the unknown and reactivate long buried childhood traumas. By the time school has beckoned for our erstwhile chaps Luke and Clyde, we've already had a voice-over all the way from Washington from Maria, a new family move in to Bannerman Road and new girl Rani seeing clowns. Michael Kerrigan, last touching base with the Doctor Who universe as director of Battlefield in 1989, gets that sinister, yet comically surreal, nature of clowns down to a tee here. Those delicious flashes of colour and quick pans, brief glimpses of clown figures and their matter of fact juxtapositions in school corridors, domestic settings and urban landscapes assist Ford in harking back to the kind of off-kilter kids dramas that we took for granted back in the 1970s...Ace Of Wands, Catweazle and some of the more sinister moments of The Tomorrow People immediately sprung to mind as I watched this.

A light grey jacket, red button down shirt and blue jeans...just what is he thinking!

And the introduction of the Chandra family is handled very well - each family member is dovetailed into the narrative neatly with Rani Chandra, played with great naturalism by Anjii Mohindra, literally colliding with Clyde and Luke and immediately intrigued by the disappearing kids and visions of clowns; Sarah snooping under the guise of being neighbourly to mum Gita and, finally, dad Haresh amusingly revealed as the rather stern headmaster. 'And it looks like standards around here vanished with him (the last headmaster)' he remarks pointedly whilst glaring at the appallingly dressed teacher stood at the front of the class. Quite right too. A light grey jacket, red button down shirt and blue jeans...just what is he thinking! Call the fashion police.

There's some very understated playing from Lis Sladen in this, in the priceless, amusing banter over coffee with Gita where she balks at Gita's opening remarks on the doorstep about saving the universe and in the emphasis on her name being 'Sarah...Jane'. Likewise the conversation between Luke and Rani in the playground about being different and not 'strange' and her confession about being into 'weird' is a delight too. It's nicely played by Tommy Knight and Anjii. Once we've got the entrances of the new family out of the way, Kerrigan picks the story up and drives ahead with boys going missing in stationery cupboards to the accompaniment of psychotic giggling and flashes of clowns that build up the tension and show off how good Daniel Anthony is as Clyde, tickets to circus museums (very Dahl-like) and the first confrontation with Bradley Walsh as Odd Bob, or the Pied Piper or Spellman...take your pick, and along the way we get that witty little line about Johnny Depp's fear of clowns sourced from Heat and the Chandra family dynamic successfully established in the domestic chaos of their house move.

'Nuzzink in de vorld can schtop me now!'

Considering this is done on a small budget, the production just about gets away with the interior of the museum. It does seem a bit poky and the interactive features are, shall we say, not entirely visitor friendly. Bradley Walsh is both amusingly camp and creepy as Spellman with his clipped Mittel-European accent and I was daring him to go the whole hog with 'Nuzzink in de vorld can schtop me now!' but alas he briefly looked silly in a Pied Piper outfit before making a full transformation into the thoroughly nasty looking Odd Bob. Bravo, Mr. Walsh. And the allusion to the Pied Piper myth is the key here after all, tapping as it does into those parental fears about child stealers, cradle snatchers and night raiders.  It all rushes to the conclusion very well with an attack from animated puppet clowns shot with lots of dutch angles and beefed up with an urgent bit of scoring, and then that heart stopping whispered threat from Odd Bob with slow zooms in on each of the cast intercut in rapid succession. Wonderful stuff to conclude a great first part.

"This won't bring back our children. We, too, should keep a closer watch on our children."

The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Day of the Clown Part 1

Though they’ve never scared me, I can understand why other people might have a problem with clowns.  It’s the 'temporary' mask – the make up hiding the emotions of the man underneath, the painted on smile (or in some cases frown) forcing them to use their whole body to communicate whatever comic business is in hand rather than their faces.  We hate not knowing what these performer’s motives are, whether they’re up to something even if that something is for us to let them entertain us and particularly in this stupid day and age when any bloke who wants to spend their time making children laugh is treated with suspicion.

That’s why they’re a familiar horror beastie; we can look them in the face and even as they’re laughing back at us we’re not sure if they’re going to squirt water at us or a bullet, and its often as in tonight’s episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures, the camera angles, the rapid push-in to the big red schnozzle which makes them threatening, the dislocation of psycho-manic and apparently delightful behaviour into something quite sinister.  That’s probably why non-horror stories about clowns usually portray them as being morose and suicidal, if they’re laughing at us, or just plain happy, we’re spending most of our time wondering why.

the real success of the first half of Day of the Clown is that it gave even a coulrosceptic like me the heebie-jeebies

And the real success of the first half of Day of the Clown is that it gave even a coulrosceptic like me the heebie-jeebies, though to be fair if Bradley Walsh did ever come up to me in the street dressed like that and offer me a big red balloon like a demented fan of Albert Lamorisse, Fritz Lang or Stephen King and probably shit my pants then seek out the wikipedia to confirm I was indeed experiencing a metatextual reference to The Red Balloon, M and It.  Like the ringmaster in the otherwise unsuccessful Torchwood episode From Out of the Rain , seeing something not quite alien in a domestic street is actually scarier than seeing an alien, simply because as we've already discussed you’re less inclined to understand what his motive might be (other than having to walk home from a kids party in costume because someone nicked the works van).

The twist in Phil Ford’s best script to date, was to add an extra layer of menace by revealing that this being really was using his clown mask to hide something – that he was the original Pied Piper, the traditionally unimpeached figure of the first horror story most kids hear, the boogey-biped who led the kids of some horrid villagers into the nowhere place with the power of his pipe.  Revealing a unit like Spellman to be the manifestation of a literary character isn’t that new (hello, The Mind Robber) but here it was an extra level of creepy, and certainly far more horrifying than what we’ve been presented with in the average episode of Torchwood, feeding into the ultimate parental fear of having our kids snatched to who knows where (the plot of what was indeed a very average episode of Torchwood).

If there’s a possible criticism, it’s that this material couldn’t be tied more closely into the other main event of the episode, the introduction of the Rani, sorry Rani, Sarah-Jane’s new neighbour and narrative replacement for Maria, presumably chasing aliens around Washington, though it’s probably a sci-fi series cliché that new characters have something to do with the plot of the week, so perhaps we should instead congratulate Ford on not succumbing to the temptation of revealing her Dad to be the clown or some such.  Instead, she’s been chucked into an adventure which would be happening anyway and seeing how this new character reacts to it.  And the results were brilliant.

Rani is already genre curious

Admittedly there were shades of Brookside to the appearance of this new family in the road, moving into the vacant property opposite Sarah-Jane’s fox hole, and a certain amount of coincidence involved in getting the new girl to talk to Clyde and Luke early in the episode.  But unlike Maria, who was initially created to fulfil the traditional companion role of our eyes and ears in this strange Whoniverse, Rani is already genre curious, with a certain awareness of something queer going on in the universe.  Like Donna who had similar ability to blunder into the next bit of plot when required, she’s far less cautious than even our regulars in terms of wanting to discover what’s gone wrong.

But quite simply what makes Rani so instantly accessible is Anjili Mohindra’s mature performance as she inquisitively picked her way through the material, instantly developing good chemistry with both Daniel and Tommy, who seemed to up their game from the opening story.  I’m trying to be too gushing with my comments based on this single episode, but Mohindra does both terror and comedy very well and it’s amazing to consider that before now all she’s had are a day here in there on the likes of Coronation Street or Doctors.  There were pre-broadcast rumours that she was a find, but I didn’t think she’d be this good.  She’s the new Freema, and regular readers will know I think that’s a compliment.

As is the way in modern television when no child can go orphaned, Rani (and you can’t imagine how difficult it is after all these years not to be writing a definite article in front of that name) drifts through with some parental guidance.  It’s tempting to thing wonder if Gita was so named for the senseless murder of her Eastenders namesake during The Stolen Earth, and fairly surprising to see the familiar face like Mina Anwar in the role, given the franchise’s propensity for hiring near unknowns as regulars in its spin-offs.  I mean what has Ace Bhatti been up to since Cardiac Arrest?  Checks imdb.  Oh quite a lot as it turns out and he’s a welcome addition here as simultaneously the headmaster and neighbour from hell.  But notice that writer Phil Ford is desperate to give him some light and shade, not transferring the one dimensional figure from school into the home.

you can’t imagine how difficult it is after all these years not to be writing a definite article in front of that name

This was a busy half an hour really; with all of this plot and character introduction its important to also notice that this was the strongest episode for Clyde and Luke so far, with the former breaking out in dimensions as the writer wrote his spec script for early Buffy giving the teenager all the of authority confrontations which would be parcelled off to the slayer and it's gratifying to see Sarah-Jane admonishing him in much the same way we did over all the wise-cracks that have been inappropriately freezing the action now and then.  As ever Sarah (Sarah-Jane) received some good speeches and wisecracks and burst into tears at just the moment when us kids needed to be scared too.  I’ve seen jibes about that but I think we’re just used to a main character with a certain amount of arrogant posturing; we’re just not used to seeing some who’s seen thing we people wouldn’t believe give a realistic reaction because she knows what they’re capable of.

Next week:  “Scared to come to the Psychic Circus?”

Teatime and the Rani

The Sarah Jane Adventures: Day of the Clown, part one.

WHO’S in charge of PR for clowns these days? Whoever it is, they need to seriously re-think their strategy, as they’re currently getting a worse press than John Leslie and the Icelandic banking system combined. I mean, when did you last see a clown being funny - you know, like old Charlie Carolie or... well, people like that – as opposed to creeping us out, like The Joker, or Pennywise, or Papa Lazarou or a hundred other ghost-faced killers.

Day of the Clown started breezily enough with a kick-about in the park on a sunny afternoon. If this was Doctor Who, I thought, this scene would be set at night, but they’re probably trying not to scare the peewees too much. Then the circus freak from Hell appeared screaming down the camera lens, and all bets were suddenly off. (I think it’s fair to assume there’ll be no tie-in Happy Meal for this particular story.)

My fanwank antenna was twitching like a Zarbi at the Rentokill Christmas party

And as if that weren’t scary enough, it turned out the clown was actually Bradley Walsh, Nu-Who’s equivalent of Ken Dodd’s Tollmaster – though, when you think about it, he’s actually pretty decent casting, having more than 20 years experience of not being funny under his belt.

By the time the gang had tracked Walshy down to the Museum of the Circus (and how disappointing is that for a kid? "Roll up, roll up, the Museum of the Circus is coming to town! All the thrills of the Big Top – represented by some pictures and explanatory text) my fanwank antenna was twitching like a Zarbi at the Rentokill Christmas party. But no, there appears to be a strange law of Who continuity that decrees you can waste precious time jabbering about the UNIT dating conundrum, but slipping in a sly poster for the Psychic Circus would have been a stretch too far. Pah.

Away from the circus, the hot news is that new arrival Rani is a total fox. Don’t worry, she’s 18 – I checked (“Well that was what she told Digital Spy, your honour”). The fact she’s Asian will no doubt have some OG posters frothing at the mouth about the show’s United Colours of Benetton casting policy - like Doctor Who hasn’t always tried to promote a positive message about mankind - but that’s their problem, frankly.

And with Rani, of course, we also get the latest entry from The RTD Big Book Of Comedy Mums (Mina Anwar this time, though seemingly voiced by Jane Horrocks) and a dad, played by Ace Bhatti (real name Dorothy Bhatti, natch), who was last seen bareback Billie-riding in Secret Diary of A Call Girl. (And for anyone whose filthy little mind is already leaping ahead to the crossover possibilities, let me add that Billie was recently shown pissing all over Love & Monsters’ Mr Skinner – now that’s what I call slash fiction.)

With a giant PC in her attic called Mr Smith, she’s on dodgy ground criticising anyone for their computer dating habits

Despite Rani inviting Luke into her bedroom and telling him she’s “into weird things”, it’s obvious Bubbleshock Boy is still pining for Maria. Sarah Jane disapproves of him conducting a relationship by email but then, with a giant PC in her attic called Mr Smith, she’s on dodgy ground criticising anyone for their computer dating habits. For her part, Rani’s clearly intrigued by the air of mystery surrounding Luke – the biggest conundrum of all being: Since when did the science geek become the class hero, with his own cheerleader chant and everything? At my school he’d have been lucky go get away without getting his head kicked in.

Clyde, meanwhile, continues to be saddled with all the worst excesses of CBBC dialogue, including this week’s gem: “This place doesn’t just take the biscuit, this place takes the whole Christmas cake.” Huh?

Still, at least he didn’t have the dumbest line of the week – that honour fell to Luke, who asked, “Why would an alien be dressed as a clown?”. Has he never seen any of the sixth Doctor’s stories? (Honk honk, cymbal crash, fall over, etc.)