Murder Rooms: The Ultimate Collection

If you were planning to order this DVD set, hold off; there's a problem with it.

Instead of the promised widescreen remastering, the discs contain stretched and distorted 'fullscreen' images of very poor quality.

Even at 4:3 the transfer is pretty awful. My set's going back, pronto.

I've emailed the distributor and I'll pass on whatever I find out.

UPDATE:

It's not looking good. The distributor seems to think that the quality's acceptable and calls it a 'multi-aspect ratio transfer' - which means that it's a 4:3 that'll distort itself to fit whatever TV screen you show it on.

Disappointing, perplexing... I have to say, don't touch it. It looks awful.

Back to the Murder Rooms

Is it Box Set or Boxed Set? One's wrong but sounds right, the other's right but... oh, never mind.

The main thing is that the series of TV-feature length Murder Rooms mysteries produced by BBC Films is finally getting a widescreen DVD release in the UK. Created by David Pirie out of a two-hour special that he'd made a couple of years before, the series features the young Arthur Conan Doyle (Charles Edwards) and his real-life mentor Dr Joseph Bell (Ian Richardson) in what amounted to a new and baggage-free take on the Watson-Holmes relationship. The set comes bundled with a 2002 Holmes documentary fronted by Patrick Macnee.

I imagine that the commercial thinking behind the release involves a gamble on the continuing Richie/Downey/Moffatt/Gatiss movie and TV euphoria... the individual shows have been around on DVD for a while but in a form I've always recommended avoiding. They were soft, muddy 'fullscreen' transfers, released when the 4:3 format was already on its last legs. The target market seemed to be technophobes and pensioners; the discs could be had for a fiver in Past Times shops and at one point were even given away with The Daily Express. The episodes were actually gorgeously lit and shot on crisp Super-16. They'd look great in Hi-Def or on Blu-Ray. I know 'cos I was there.


Let's leap lightly over the fact that my Murder Rooms story and one of my (unrelated) novels share a title - I can explain how that happened some other time. But I loved the show, thought it showed the BBC at its best and had a driving concept that would have sustained it for a number of seasons.

I almost didn't get to join the party. The BBC Films machinery was set up to deal with one-offs, not series, and funding was being released in stop-start increments. First the money for one script, then for another... then a green light to go ahead with the first couple of episodes... it was like the constant opening and shutting of a miser's purse, a few coins reluctantly handed over every time. The original aim was, I believe, to film seven stories. I think mine was fifth in line but it got bumped up in the production order because I got my first draft in quickly, and with most of what it needed already in place. The purse slammed shut on four episodes but by then I was in.

It was a class production, handsomely done. The series producer was Alison Jackson, with Jamie Laurenson as development exec/script editor. My director was Simon Langton - Simon effing Smiley's-People Pride-and-Prejudice Langton. I watched and learned. He shot with graceful, understated, old-school brilliance - terms that could equally describe Ian Richardson's approach to an old-school magisterial role. The editor came on set one day to observe, and confided to me that he wanted to see how it was being done because the footage was pretty much falling together.


And it was a success - the notices were good, and so were the viewing figures. We geared up for second season that would kick off with those three unmade stories. I was asked for another, and put in my pitch. Ian Richardson shared his Joseph Bell research with me. David Pirie got a publishing deal.

The BBC pulled the plug. All plans were cancelled.

I was told some time after the event that this was most likely the outcome of a silent turf war between BBC Drama and BBC Films. The word went around that the show had been "too successful for the wrong department". Co-producers The Television Company offered to take it over and finance it themselves, but were turned down. BBC Drama then announced a Hound of the Baskervilles with Australian actor Richard Roxburgh for screening the following year. My recall is that it was a serviceable retread of the familiar material, but nothing special. A disappointing changeling, for many.


The new set won't be out for a couple of weeks yet, so I can't comment on its quality. Ignore the information on the Amazon sleeve pictures, they're for the old versions; in an email this morning, a representative for distributors IMC told me, "I can confirm the new set with the four episodes will be in a 16:9 re-edited format." Prior to this, if you wanted to get hold of widescreen DVDs you'd have to order from Sweden, the US, or Australia.

Personally, I'd like to see them reshown on the BBC's HD channel. Not least because I might get a couple of bob out of it. But mainly for, you know, cultural reasons.

UPDATE: The 'Ultimate Collection' DVD set is unwatchable. Avoid.

Sergeant Cork

After losing stock and technical assets in the Sony warehouse fire during the Enfield riots, it's good to see Network DVD up and running again. And also happy to see the release of a second season of the Victorian CID detective drama Sergeant Cork, currently offered as a 'web exclusive' title.

If you're interested, don't hang about. For reasons not explained on the Network site, "This title will only be available until 9 March 2012."

Rights expiry? Making way for a two-season boxed set? If I find out, I'll let you know.

Though 16mm telerecordings give us a relatively low-res record of classic studio TV, it's the tight, character-driven writing and classy, nuanced performances that make Sergeant Cork worth the present-day viewer's time. The odd, rare mistake on the studio floor (remembering a character's mid-scene moustache failure in season one!) makes you appreciate the high level of theatrical and technical craft that went into a weekly hour of live TV drama.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to go back; and live TV certainly isn't a medium I'd care to write for. It was a theatrical form that imitated the form of film, without access to most of its grammar. Those who pushed the medium most also went furthest in exposing its limitations.

Btw, opportunist dealers on Amazon will offer to sell you the second season for fifty quid. Network will sell it to you for fifteen.

Chiller

Thanks to friend-of-the-blog Stan for the news that Network DVD will release the complete Chiller anthology series on February 28th.

Produced and in part directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, we kicked off the series with an adaptation of Peter James' Prophecy and pulled in, as I recall, somewhere in excess of 11 million viewers. A number that ITV went on to squander by pre-empting later shows for sports fixtures.

Some of the stories were available on VHS back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, but as far as I'm aware this is a first UK DVD release. A couple of years ago I got hold of a copy of an Australian set, and that's the only DVD version I was aware of until now. I'm not sure if I checked out the transfer quality on that one - the shrinkwrap's off the box but I can be funny about viewing my old stuff. All I ever seem to see are things I want to fix.

The one that puzzles me by its absence from the shelves is Murder Rooms, which was shot in lovely widescreen Super 16 and released in the UK as individual shows in a piss-poor 4X3 transfer that mostly seemed to sell in Past Times shops, between the Celtic teatowels and candlestick holders. In case you didn't see it, Murder Rooms featured period mysteries involving the young Arthur Conan Doyle and his real-life mentor Joseph Bell, in stories that interwove fictional sleuthing, biographical points, and echoes of the Holmesian canon. Made to a high standard by BBC Films, it was a fresh take on a popular subject and the episode I contributed is one of my favourite pieces of work. A second season was planned, but cancelled before the commissions went through. I found it an inexplicable decision until I read that the word around the BBC was that it had been 'too successful for the wrong department'. In its place, BBC Drama made yet another Hound of the Baskervilles.

The US Murder Rooms complete set is widescreen but still not looking as good as it ought to; Amazon has a Swedish 'complete season' issue listed but at 65 quid, I'll stifle my curiosity over how that one looks.

Mr Laurel and Mr Hardy (2)

UPDATE: Check out Andy Greenwood's contribution to the comments section on the original post. Apparently the Laurel and Hardy collection exists in two forms, and Amazon withdrew the set from sale for a while due to a customer complaint about the goods as described.

As far as I can see it's a packaging issue and not a disc quality issue; the first boxed set had better cases and booklet inserts, while the second set (which this is) has the same material with bare-bones packaging and no booklets.

If that's a problem for you, apologies if I've steered you wrong. Personally I still think it's a great buy.

Amazon has now revised the sales info and the set's available again, still bouncing around under the £30 mark. For my part, I feel that packaging rarely adds value to a DVD; I'd say never, but there will always be the glaring exception of my beloved King Kong in a tin. Which I note can currently be picked up in the US from Amazon sellers for around five dollars plus shipping.

Which low price suggests that the added value is personal to me, and hardly a market enhancement. The difference between, say, a vinyl LP in a well-designed sleeve, and a CD in an all-purpose jewel case with a disposable insert, mirrors a change in our perceptions. In making the packaging more generic and more convenient to themselves, distributors have hastened our changing attitude along. LPs were kinda lovely. But now when I buy movies or music, I don't particularly want them taking up space in my house.

Mr Laurel and Mr Hardy

I don't often do this, but there's an insane price for the complete Laurel and Hardy collection on Amazon right now; the boxed set originally retailed around two hundred quid. It includes foreign-language versions of some of the shorts made for export, with different supporting casts and, in some cases, extra routines and material.

Plus, these are the decently-mastered DVDs; there's plenty of L&H material out there, but with little guide to the quality of what you'll get.

Super Duper 8

I spent last Friday morning in the BBC's number 4 grading suite at the Television Centre in London. For a while I'd been looking for some way of digitising the Super 8 that I shot in the late '70s and '80s, but there was always a problem.

For all its reputation as a 'bootlace gauge', the image quality of a well-exposed piece of Super 8 film can be pretty good. I'm talking now about camera original, reversal-processed film; start making prints or copies and the quality quickly deteriorates. Before domestic video came along there was a small but healthy market in Super 8 features for home screening, where the picture quality ranged from 'not unwatchable' to 'OK I suppose'. But first-generation Super 8 is sharp and stable and has an aesthetic all of its own. That's why it hasn't completely died away.

The problem was that when I investigated those ads that promise 'your home movies transferred to DVD', what I found was never too encouraging. Bear in mind that I once worked in this part of the industry, so I know how a transfer ought to look. I was seeking broadcast quality, not a 'film chain' setup where a projector throws the image for a camera to record, nor the 'domestic quality' promised by AV houses with desktop scanning machines.

Back when I'd worked in Granada Presentation the state-of-the-art was the 'flying spot' telecine machine, and apparently it still is. Such machines don't project the image but scan each frame of the film with a moving spot of light to give the sharpest, most detailed line-by-line rendering possible. The machines are the size of a double wardrobe and cost about 250 grand. But I was only planning to do this once, so I wanted to do it right.

I thought I'd reached my journey's end when I tracked down a guy in West London who owned an ex-broadcast Bosch telecine machine with a Super 8 gate. Unfortunately the person who'd sold him the business had made off with the sound heads and he could only offer mute transfers. It was friend-of-the-blog Stan who finally steered me to the last place I'd have thought to enquire... taking your home movies to the BBC feels rather like getting Rembrandt over to paint your kitchen. But you can! Hire the BBC's facilities, I mean. Rembrandt's dead.

The department in question is BBC Studios and Post Production and it's the arm of the BBC that sells the Corporation's services to the independent sector. Remember the days when neither ITV nor the BBC would acknowledge each other's existence on air, but everyone would refer coyly to 'the other channel'? No? Trust me, they did, and it was as stupid as it sounds. Now Granada makes University Challenge for the BBC, and there's a fair chance that any ITV show you're watching may have been shot in a Television Centre studio with a BBC crew (the night before my transfer booking, we watched a recording of Harry Hill's TV Burp in the same building).

Those services include the digitisation of Super 8 and even 9.5mm film to the standard seen in the BBC 2 Home Movie Roadshow. You don't have to run a production company, the service is available to all. The drawback? It's only for material you really, really care about because it doesn't come cheap. In my case this was edited footage that had been sitting in its cans for thirty years. It's both personal record and professional training. It's fragile. But for the price of a weekend in Brighton, it lives on.

For more work by the same department have a look at the Grading/Restoration/Archive page of the BBC site. If you click through to the 'case histories' you can read about how authentic colour was restored to a black-and-white Dad's Army episode using coded information hidden within the monochrome 16mm image. The account of the painstaking reconstruction of Space: 1999 for a pristine Blu-Ray release makes me wish I liked the show more - apparently the quality is staggering.

UPDATE: There's a featurette on the Dad's Army colour restoration here. Apparently it's not something that can be done with every monochrome telerecording - it depends on someone having forgotten to throw a certain switch that should have removed the colour information at the time.

This Island Rod

A recommendation - while googling for something else (I've forgotten what) I came across this film blog written by Roderick Heath, who describes himself somewhere as a film school dropout (I've forgotten where I saw that, too) and is based in Lithgow, New South Wales.

It's only been up for a couple of years but it's quite a body of work - I'm enjoying browsing through all the past entries and I thought you might, too. Heath's prose is entertaining and readable and he'll cover anything, no distinctions between high and low culture. Carnival of Souls is in there ("Herk Harvey’s solitary but celebrated midnight matinee masterpiece is an indelibly creepy no-budget work that could be called the film Ed Wood might have made if he'd had talent"), and his review of Jason and the Argonauts is one of the most insightful I've read. He basically writes about movies he likes, so the pieces tend to be snark-free and appreciative. I reckon you'd go a long way to find a more sympathetic analysis of The Abominable Doctor Phibes.

(Some of the links in his sidebar are worth following too - he also contributes to Ferdy on Films, where you'll find his appreciation of The Prisoner.)

Bitch-slapped Bimbos and Silent Engineers (2)

Monday's Chimera screening had a satisfying turnout and the evening ran smoothly, with great atmosphere. There was an audience flyer which included the entirety of a long Time Out review from 1991 that I hadn't seen before (Fliss Coombes and Naomi Phillipson, handling publicity for Zenith and Anglia respectively, had sent me all the cuttings at the time, and to this day I've never looked at any of them). Dick Fiddy set the scene and then I did a very brief intro, probably recycling the same joke from nineteen years ago, and then off we went. Projection was excellent and the show looked and sounded better than I've ever seen it.

The source must have been a transmission master tape - it carried electronic cue dots, those tiny squares in the top right-hand corner of the image that give the Transmission Controller a minute's warning of an impending commercial break. It was a call to action for everyone involved in the next three and a half minutes - network engineers, telecine operators, VTR department, continuity announcer. I started my career in the Presentation suite, and the sight of a cue dot takes me right back.

After the first couple of episodes, there was a short interval. I went up to the green room where Lawrence Gordon Clark had just arrived and was signing DVD sleeves. He hasn't changed at all! And he was delighted with the evening, as was I. Especially since they gave us loads of beer and we were able to take it into the theatre for the second half.


During the Q&A at the end, it emerged that 50% of the audience were seeing the show for the first time. Others in the course of the evening spoke up about its impact on them at an impressionable age. The consensus seemed to be that the show still holds its own, and that Nigel Hess's melancholic score added a dimension of emotional complexity that was enhanced by theatrical presentation.

For my part, I think I actually appreciated it for the first time ever. Details I was unhappy with at the time kinda faded back into their proper places. It's like some big public sculpture where I finally got far enough away to turn back and see it as others experienced it, as a whole. I was taken aback by the degree to which it reflected and challenged the ethos of the late 80s, that greed-driven, ruthless, and anti-society era, far more so than if we'd set out with an actual agenda to engage with 'Thatcher's Britain'.

I met up for the first time with Good Dog, blogger extraordinaire whose true identity I've now taken a blood oath to protect, lest it interfere with his ability to fight crime. Malcolm Brown, friend and co-worker from my old Granada Presentation days, had come into town to be there, as had my daughter and one of her pals, and with Lawrence we went into the bar afterwards and stayed until they chucked us out.

Bitch-slapped Bimbos and Silent Engineers

Read on and all will be explained. After a fashion. I promise.

But first a reminder that this coming Monday (July 5th, 2010) they're screening all four episodes of Chimera at the BFI Southbank, formerly the National Film Theatre, followed by a Q&A with director Lawrence Gordon Clark and me.

The same day also sees the release of the Region 2 DVD. Sad news for the guy who's been selling pirated copies on eBay for the past few years, good for anyone who's been waiting for the real thing. And apparently some people have, which brightened my day when I heard it. When you work on a piece of TV drama you feel all revved-up and committed, like you're carving a monument for the ages; a few weeks after it's been on the air, it's more like you wrote it on water.

And if you're like me, you can't look at your own stuff with any objectivity. All you can see are the flaws and lapses, the things that you wish you'd handled better or could go back and fix. The same things that many critics take for their raw material. Critics have a remit to entertain, like everyone else who writes for money, and if you rush to them looking for affirmation you're looking in the wrong place.

So a writing career is a weird rollercoaster of elation and depression; the sheer joy of making a show, and the sense of gloom as it retreats into the past and the world's population doesn't line up to shake your hand and tearfully swear that what you wrote means more to them than the Bible. Followed by all the anxiety and ego involved in trying to set up another.

The fact is - and it's taken me a long time to find this out - your real audience is a silent one. A great, shy beast that rarely breaks cover, and is largely unaware of your existence. Indifferent to it, even. Yours is a name that just passes in the credits like everyone else's. What they care about is this moment in their lives where they were struck by what they saw and that they've remembered ever since.

To be the silent engineer of such a moment has a satisfaction to it. It's something apart from fame. Especially since fame used to be the consequence of doing something remarkable, but now it's not. It just means that some reality producer thinks that enough people will dislike you on sight to stick around to see you getting slapped.

I can remember a time before the VHS recorder when almost anything written for British TV had no afterlife at all. Repeats were despised by viewers and everything instantly became archive material, where the archive was seen as a wastebin of little value. That's why so much stuff got wiped or junked, prints burned, negatives recycled for their silver. Copies might be made for export but they were usually of crappy quality, converted to local standards or scanned (badly) to 16mm. Only Lew Grade's ITC shows and - perversely - some long-forgotten half-hour series of the 1950s still look good because they were shot on 35mm, in the way that Mathew Brady's full-plate civil war photographs are sharper and contain more rich detail than your last-year's holiday snaps.

Even when home recording had taken off, it was a while before TV's back catalogue became commercial. Distributors assumed that retail and rental were only going to work for movies. Chimera had a brief VHS existence in an over-truncated 'feature' version edited for export and retitled by its American distributors as (God help us) Monkey Boy. Other than that and the pirate versions, it's been unseen for most of the past couple of decades. At the time I shelled out for a couple of high-end tapes to make my own off-air copy, but it stayed on the shelf. I'm not in the habit of replaying my old stuff like some latter-day Norma Desmond.

But I got an advance copy of the two-disc set a couple of days ago, and I can give you a report. The transfer's sharp and clean and looks great. 'Contains moderate gore'. And as for the extras - far from being the silent engineer, I'm all over the DVD set like a clingy drunk.

There's a reason for this. It was my first big show and I was all over the production like a clingy drunk, too. Lawrence and everyone on the team made me welcome, and I took full advantage. I showed up everywhere with my video camera and when production wrapped, I made off with all the stills, slides and presskits I could carry. Add the script of the novel's 1985 radio adaptation and an on-camera interview that I did for a prescient Revelation Films around the time they were mastering their full-length Oktober release, and it's no surprise if I keep bobbing up in the extras like the world's biggest attention whore.

'Tain't so, honest. I'm more one for backing shyly into the limelight, protesting faintly as I go.

Chimera at the BFI

Here's some news... on Monday July 5th as part of the Future Human season, my 1990 miniseries Chimera is getting a screening at the BFI South Bank. A while back I was asked if I'd say a few words before it, but that's now expanded to become a Q&A with me and director Lawrence Gordon Clark.

Which feels weirdly symmetrical because back when the BFI South Bank was the National Film Theatre, they screened Chimera before it was broadcast. It was part of a season of new TV drama, and we did something similar then. I could probably dig out my twenty-year-old notes, if I made any, and give the same answers. Last I heard, they were planning to show the first two parts at about 6:30pm followed by a 30 minute break, and then the final two at 8.30pm.

The day of the screening coincides with the release of the Region 2 DVD. I have some details of those DVD extra features now. There are sleeve notes from me, Lawrence, and Executive Producer Archie Tait. There's an image gallery, and the original press kit for the show, and the script of an earlier radio adaptation of the source novel. There's also an on-camera interview that I did for Revelation a couple of years back when they first started pursuing the DVD rights.

In addition to that I've recorded some commentary for behind-the-scenes footage shot during the production. It's been tricky to juggle, with me being here and the editor working on the footage at the authoring house in London, and I haven't yet seen the results. But there's a look inside the workshop of effects house Image Animation, designers and creators of the hybrid prosthetic, along with coverage of the shooting of the episode one finale and stuff from the Yorkshire locations.

Future Human runs through July and August and there's a listing of the screenings and events here. Just take a look at some of the stuff they're presenting. 2001, Chris Marker's La Jetee, BBC 2's seminal series of sf adaptations Out of the Unknown, Silent Running, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Tarkovsky's Solaris... and also in July, a programme running in parallel, Brian Clemens, Auteur of the Avengers. Seeing my little show in there makes me feel like I crashed the A-list party of my dreams.

It just struck me that I was twenty-five when I wrote the book.

I need to sit here quietly for a while and think about that.

Crusoe Region 2

This one sneaked by without my hearing about it... the full season is now available on a Region 2 3-disc set, presumably replicating the content of the Region 1 release.

Which will mean no DVD extras, which is a pity. NBC had a behind-the-scenes crew covering just about every aspect of the show's making, and their material generated a healthy number of featurettes for the Crusoe section of the NBC website. Almost none of which I got to see, because the video streams would only play for US users.

Apart from an initial week of meetings where all of the writers got together with the producers in Power's London office, nearly all my work on the show was done from my study in England by phone, email and internet feed. I was in constant and regular touch with producer Jeff Hayes on the island sets (actually a stretch of the Nature's Valley coastline in South Africa), with the Power team in London, and with the NBC and Universal execs in Los Angeles. I saw auditions via video link and we conferenced for notes calls with sometimes as many as eight or nine people on the line.

I never even got close to visiting our South African locations, which could have been useful. I'd have taken a more practical approach to the way I structured the treehouse scenes had I realised that the base and the platform were separated by a number of miles, and a simple dialogue between Friday on the ground and Crusoe on the deck required a complete crew move!

I did get to be a part of UK location scouting in and around York, in a unique approach that was mostly born of necessity. They'd had a couple of Canadian guys working on scripts and a bible, and that hadn't worked out as hoped. Their take on it was close to the book and not the balls-out, gung-ho adventure show that NBC had been promised. Time was now short but then along came the WGA strike, halting all progress; as an outsourced production Crusoe wasn't actually a struck project, but I didn't want to spend the rest of my career explaining as much and so I only came on board when the strike had ended.

Now the clock was really ticking. All we had was Defoe's novel, Power's pitch to NBC, and some brilliant visual concept work from production designer Jonathan Lee. So here's what I proposed, and how it worked out; firstly, before anything else was written, I'd write the full hour's worth of flashback scenes for the whole season. We'd shoot those and then, as the crew was relocating to the South African base, I'd complete and deliver the pilot. Somewhere along the way, the pilot specification grew to a double episode; by then I was well into it and could see that my script was going to be way over. So I was blase about the challenge, and didn't let on that the extra length was actually the solution to a problem.

But the York production date was looming, and preproduction had to begin before the material was actually written. So armed with only an outline and a rough idea of what I was going to do with it, I went out with the team and we looked for places to match the story. In the bar of the Royal York Hotel each evening, we'd go over what we'd seen and I'd improvise and elaborate on the outline, so the team could take away specifics and start doing their jobs. Exploiting the best of what we'd seen, shaping the unwritten script to avoid pitfalls, getting the best out of that fantastic city and some wonderful old houses in the surrounding countryside. As they set to work, I went home and did the same. I have to tell you, it was one of my best writing experiences ever.

As I recall, we pretty much took over York for the May Bank Holiday. They closed down York Minster for us, cleared out all the seating, and let us bring in an enormous crane. We closed the Shambles for a morning. We filled the streets with extras, horses, dogs, goats, and cables. Miles of cables. Not to mention large numbers of Women of a Certain Age craning for a glimpse of Sean Bean.

(There are more pictures from the York shoot in this earlier post.)

Then everyone headed for the sunshine and I stayed behind. Except... heading to the Southern hemisphere meant heading into the South African winter. During those first weeks of shooting, I'd see the uncut rushes coming up the line with our shirtless heroes framed against the sunset on some glorious beach... with the last few seconds of the shot revealing a crew in thermals and puffer jackets, their breath misting in the cold air.

So maybe I didn't miss out too much. And frankly, with the pressure of shooting, there was no time for me to make the journey. It was an experience, all right; my first time working with an American network.

It was a bumpy ride. But so's the Indiana Jones jeep adventure in Disneyland, and people queue up for that.

The Future is Then

From the day that I saw Kenneth Kendall reading the BBC news on one in Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey, I wanted widescreen TV. Up until then, I'd no idea that the industry had domestic widescreen in its sights. But given the meticulousness of Kubrick's research, I imagine that the notion was there on some technology giant's wish-list, even if at the time it had to be faked with back-projection.

When the first sets came out, I wasn't impressed. Looking at a zoomed-in letterboxed VHS of Star Wars on a demo TV in the basement of the Virgin Megastore, I remember thinking that the quality was significantly less than that of Super 8 anamorphic Cinemascope (yes, it does exist).

But I was at the head of the line for the first wave of integrated digital widescreen televisions, and then one of the first to bitch and moan about continuing DVD releases in the cropped 4X3 format called 'fullscreen'. From this you may conclude I have more money than sense and I'd probably agree, on the basis that it wouldn't take very much money to make it true.

The first time I saw a plasma screen - I think that was in HMV on Oxford Street. It was displaying a DVD of Alice in Wonderland. An indifferent made-for-TV version, but I was bowled over by the depth of detail and the warmth of the image. I waited until plasma sets became affordable and then spent three times as much as I needed to, just so I could go that extra mile and get hi-def.

High definition proved a bit of a damp squib. The increase in quality isn't that great. Sometimes it's barely even noticeable. But if HD acts as a brake on the efforts of broadcasters to lower their picture quality in order to cram in more channels, I'm still for it.

But 3D... this early adopter's heart doesn't beat any faster at the idea of 3D television at all. Despite an absence of product to display, and a lot of consumer ignorance over when and how they'll get a 3D signal, 3D-ready sets are coming onto the market now. The launch is accompanied by this grim list of health warnings on Samsung's Australian website.

Health issues aside - even shaky 2D camerawork makes me queasy, so God help me if Paul Greengrass ever gets his hands on 3D - I fear a Betamax moment coming for the industry. 3D will be great for gaming and that's the angle they should push, with the occasional bonus of a sit-down-for, no-interruptions, phone-off-the-hook blockbuster. By pushing 3D as 'the future of TV', when we all know that for much of the time TV is a casual, on-in-the-room, passing-parade part of our lives, they're pretty much sealing its doom.

And everyone looks like a twat in those glasses. I'm sorry, but it's true.

A couple of posts back I mentioned that there were design changes in store for the blog. Well, notice anything? Thanks and credit for the supercharged overhaul with all its hidden wonders (it's even iPad-friendly) go to Paul Drummond, whose web design services can be further investigated here. And a special thanks to Dave Young, whose HTML skills produced the site that served me so well for a number of years.

Now I'm told I have to go get my head around Twitter.

It never ends.

Evolution of an Idea

I've been organising my files and came across this short piece that I wrote about Eleventh Hour for some purpose or other.

With Chimera's impending DVD appearance (news on those features soon, I promise) I thought I'd put it out here. It offers a kind of join-the-dots demonstration of how my thinking went over the sixteen years that separated the two projects.

At the beginning of my career I wrote a miniseries called Chimera, a variant on the Frankenstein story with a cold-hearted scientist as its villain. It made some waves, and through various debates and public events brought me into contact with a lot of real-world science professionals.

I found that these scientists were, almost without exception, sharp, cultured, funny, and great late-night company. They were well-read, they listened to opera, they played musical instruments. Future Nobel prizewinner Paul Nurse was a motorbike nut (and was the guy who first encouraged me to dream up a real-science drama). Biologist Jack Cohen advised sf writers on alien-building and had a daughter who was a dancer. All were genuinely excited to be doing the work they did.

As much as these real scientists shaped my picture of Hood, they also shaped my attitude to science villains. The ruthless, 'playing God' stereotype, arguing that harm can be justified in the name of progress, is a cartoon.

Science's villains are the same recognisably human people as those regular scientists. But they become villains through regular human flaws, not by Nazi logic. They sell out, or screw up. They can bend the truth to suit their paymasters or the policymakers, and call it 'being realistic'. They can be reckless, they can underestimate danger, they can lie to cover their mistakes, they can take desperate measures to cover their lies. But science's villains are characterised by their human failings, not by single-minded immoral intent.

And often they won't even be scientists, but people who co-opt science to their own purposes. CEOs, charlatans, toxic waste dumpers, politicians, lobbyists, thieves, counterfeiters, scammers, conspiracy theorists, drug lords, mobsters.

People like the international hustler and would-be breakthrough human cloner who provided the model for the bad guy in my very first story.

Bootleg Corner

One of the bootleg Eleventh Hour boxed sets has come my way. I won’t say how – it’s not a trade I’m here to encourage – but it wasn’t difficult to get hold of. At first glance the Chinese DVD packaging is way more attractive than the 'official' version, though on closer inspection it's hilarious. There are logos for CBS, Paramount Studios and the Showtime cable network, a long rambling blurb than conflates the stories from three different episodes, small print in Engrish, and a copyright notice that reads DEXTER (TM). They just cut and paste this stuff so it looks right from a distance, the way that the aliens put together Dave Bowman’s apartment in Arthur C Clarke’s 2001 novel.

(In the novel, Bowman takes down a book from the shelf and the pages are all slightly out of focus. Brilliant detail.)

When I put any one of the discs in my player, it rattles like a saucepan lid. Still works, though. After two separate copyright theft warnings, from Interpol and the FBI (nice touch!), up comes... the Twentieth Century Fox movie logo and fanfare.

Which means that one way or another they seem to name-check almost every random studio except for Warner Bros, the studio that actually made the show.

The box, which has a nice matt finish with classy part-laminated images, also promises Dolby sound (no) and a Spanish language track (there isn’t). The menus on the discs have a home-made look, but they’re kind of pleasing.

And what of the episodes? I assumed that they’d be ripped and stolen from the Warner Archive release, but they aren’t. All the shows are recorded straight from TV.

In fact they’re probably the torrented versions that appeared online within hours of the original broadcasts. They’re widescreen but they’re heavily compressed and nowhere near Hi Def. When you play an episode, it has the CBS ‘eye’ logo in the corner of the screen – the ad breaks have been cut out but midway through you get flashed-up promos for other shows. Someone’s added switchable subtitle tracks in English and two forms of Chinese.

Worth having? Nah. Keep your money and stay legal. It’s barely a step up from a movie stolen by camcorder and if you’re stupid enough to sit through one of those, consider yourself banned from the blog. You probably think that date-expired seafood is a great bargain. I inadvertently bought something like this once before, when I bid on the first season of Carnivale on eBay, thinking it was the real thing. All it did was persuade me to go to Amazon and pay all over again.

But that box, though – love that box.

Tarzan's Greatest Adventure

My first movie Tarzan was stuntman and former Range Rider Jock Mahoney in Tarzan Goes to India, so maybe it was TV that introduced me to Gordon Scott's take on the ape man. All due respect to Mahoney, but he didn't look right and he was on the wrong frickin' continent. He looked like he'd slipped out of a sports bar and into the loincloth.

By contrast Scott - a walking brick sh*thouse of a hero - showed just enough culture to evoke the character as Burroughs wrote him, while retaining a sense of the primitive under the skin. And Tarzan's Greatest Adventure wasn't just set in Africa, it was shot there as well.

This was the movie that had always lingered in my mind as a Tarzan for grownups, and once I was grown up I waited in vain for it to come around again. Meanwhile there was Greystoke - a Tarzan movie with barely any Tarzanning in it, and not much of anything else to compensate. Disney's animated Tarzan was surprisingly faithful to the source but... well, two words. Phil Collins. I genuinely can't enjoy the movie with all that weary whiny stuff going on. Casper Van Dien's Tarzan and the Lost City featured a return to African locations and handsome production design, but was let down by story, script, and performances.

When Tarzan's Greatest Adventure finally made it to DVD, it sneaked out so quietly that it had been around for quite a while before I even got to know about it. Like the Eleventh Hour boxed set it's sold on DVD-R as part of the Warner Archive Collection - a home-burn, basically, at the price of an undiscounted commercial release.

You can only get it from the WBShop website, nowhere else. As you can probably tell, I have mixed feelings about this marketing approach. While it's great to have the titles available, this method of marketing and production is almost a guarantee against wide circulation. They won't even let Amazon offer the titles; you can find them on there, but only from dealers who've added their own hefty markup.

Here's the site's plot summary:

The mighty Lord of the Apes (Gordon Scott) is on a deadly trail. He’s determined to find the diamond hunters (including Anthony Quayle and Sean Connery) who brought terror and death to a peaceful village. But as much as Tarzan is a tracker and avenger, he’s also a protector. An irresponsible gadfly from the so-called civilized world intrudes on his quest and Tarzan knows he cannot leave her to fend for herself. Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure is widely applauded as one of the best and most grownup films in the entire film annals of the jungle lord’s exploits.

The disc arrived today and I ran it tonight. Pressed play, and nothing happened. Bit of a panic and I thought I had a dud copy, but I'd inadvertently hit something that changed the setup on the DVD player. When I worked out which button I'd mis-pressed, I was away.

'Tis great. Not digital restoration quality, just a good transfer of a relatively decent print, nice and bright and sharp. The stock footage sticks out and the matte shots look a bit poo, but then my recall is that they always did. Something about the grain and the colour values says, "British film of the 50s". Somewhere between Genevieve and Zulu.

The screenplay is credited to director John Guillermin and Berne Giler, whose solid background in classic TV Westerns shows in the clean lines of the narrative and the mythic sense behind the central good guy/bad guy conflict. I marvelled again at how pure and spare the storytelling is. All deft strokes and no scene dragged out one word longer than it needs to be. Sara Shane's 'irresponsible gadfly' is actually a capable female bush pilot, neither love interest nor rescue-object but (for its time) a rounded and properly-written character.

I'd heard that the movie exists in more than one version, the original and one trimmed for violence; I wasn't aware of any cuts but then I wouldn't be sure what to look for - the various scenes of mortality seem to get full value, as does the brutal clifftop fight to the death between Scott and Quayle at the end. Even the business with the Quayle's deadly wire snare doesn't look to have been trimmed.

Chimera on DVD

From Revelation Films with a launch date of May 24th, if you're interested... Chimera wasn't my first TV work but it was the one that upshifted my career and spoiled me for anything less than big-budget 'event' TV.

Few official details yet but the product description reads, First broadcast on British TV in 1991, Chimera is a controversial story about a plot to create a new breed of human, based on crossing the genetics of a man and an ape, and the attempts by the government to cover up their secret plans.

Revelation have been negotiating for the rights even since their launch of the Oktober DVD, when I recorded an interview for inclusion in the extras. They've had access to a lot of background material and it promises to make an interesting package. I'll write more about it and my memories of making the show as the launch gets nearer but for now, here's the Amazon link.

WTF?

No, don't get excited. That isn't the cover of a genuine Eleventh Hour mass-market edition. It's the Chinese bootleg - at least, I'm assuming it's a bootleg, unless fractured English and a Showtime logo on the back of the sleeve are the mark of an official release.

A couple of days ago I got an email from Amazon to tell me that the Eleventh Hour DVD set - the official set, the Warner Bros one - was now available. Fine, I thought, a couple of months late, but better than never. I clicked on the link, and... "This item has been discontinued by the manufacturer".

You'd think I'd be in the loop on all this stuff, but I'm not. So I don't know why Amazon advertised and then pulled the product (it's still available from the Warner Bros online store), or why they've deleted about 20 five-star reviews.

Maybe Warners couldn't cope with the demand - the discs are DVD-R, and they burn them to order.

But the Chinese are having no such problem; wholesalers are stacking them high and shifting them for about ten US dollars a set, all regions.

I'm not recommending them - these are pirated copies, and along with the ethical issues you run the risk of getting poor goods. But I've always held that the most effective way to beat piracy is to outmarket the pirates.

By the look of it, we've some catching up to do.

Callan on DVD

In the UK there's a boxed set that calls itself season one but is actually season three. Who on earth thought that was a good idea?

In the US there's 'set one' and now 'set two' while from Australia 'season four' includes two episode commentaries from Woodward.

Last night I hopped all over the web trying to work out what I already had and what would merely be duplicated by which other release.

In the end my brain imploded and I went to bed.

A DVD Competition and a Trailer

Over at the Are You Screening blog, reviewer Marc Eastman writes about the Eleventh Hour DVDs and offers the chance for readers in the US and Canada to win a set simply by adding to the comments section.

"Starring Rufus Sewell, on the short list of most underrated actors, as one of the world’s leading scientists who works for the government tracking down criminals who abuse science in ways few other people would understand, Eleventh Hour is an order of magnitude beyond your typical crime show. There’s investigating using science, and then there’s investigating using science, and this show is simply off in another world. Whether it’s cloning, bizarre viruses, or people with two hearts, if Dr. Hood gets sent in, we’ve moved into realms no one else wants to be involved with."

Read the entry in full here.

Meanwhile Warner Bros has (have?) put out an online trailer for the release. I saw this on the Spike TV website, where the clip was preceded by a condom ad.

See, I told you it was a sexy show.



Don't worry if you happen to get the condom ad, it's quite tasteful. Although if you ask me, the mime has a rather exaggerated opinion of himself.