Oh dear. I wasn’t going to watch THE DAY OF THE DOCTOR at a cinema because the thought of my enjoyment of the 50th anniversary being subject to what passes for considerate social behaviour among 21st century cinema goers appalled me. Also, the fact that it’s in 3D doesn’t inspire as that means wearing 3D specs over my own specs for no other reason than that they’ve probably inserted one gratuitous shot of the Doctor pointing his sonic screwdriver out of the screen.
However, the flesh is weak and I’ve just booked it for nostalgia’s sake. When I were nobbut a little lad in the 1970s, cinemas used to put on special screenings for kids during the school holidays lasting the full afternoon to give parents a respite from their offspring. My local cinema went through a period of devoting whole afternoons to running a full Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon series followed (after an intermission) by both Dalekmania movies back to back. And this was in the days when cinemas hadn’t yet been broken up into 3 or 4 smaller screens but were still their full, enormous, several thousand seater size (plus a full circle upstairs). So we’re talking about a full size screen when full size really meant full size. Nine or ten times I must have spent an afternoon in the front row of the stalls, revelling in proper Daleks (don’t believe anyone who tells you the the paradigm daleks look really like the movie daleks – they don’t) in full Technicolour and Techniscope.
I couldn’t turn down possibly the only opportunity of seeing Doctor Who that visually huge again. So, if any of this blog’s select (that’s blogging code for tiny) readership is planning on visiting the cinema on 23rd November, please please please avoid the following:
- Eating anything with your mouth open
- Juggling your bucket of popcorn to toss the larger pieces up from the bottom
- Making infantile slurping noises with your drink straw
- Buying nachos smothered in smelly cheese sauce
- Waiting until the film starts and there are no spare seats left before producing a tube of Pringles and eating them throughout the film by placing a whole Pringle vertically in your mouth and cracking it in two to get a really good echo
- Providing a running commentary on the film to your neighbour
- Sticking your feet between the seat and the back of the seat in front
- Checking your text messages every five minutes
- Answering an incoming call on your phone in the middle of the film
- And, if you plan on fetching more food or visiting the toilet 3 or 4 times during the film, please sit at the end of a row rather than in the middle.
I’ve suffered all of the above in my time and anyone ruining my enjoyment of the 50th anniversary (to quote a great man) will be “erased from Doctor Who”.
In what sounds in parts like a delicious two fingers (one finger to Americans) held up to the kind of people who believe that, when he signed up for one year as Doctor Who, he signed away all rights to a life and career of his own, this interview with Christopher Eccleston plugging his new “Thor” film is sure to piss off all the right sort of people.
‘I primarily do these films for the money,’ declares Thor: The Dark World star Christopher Eccleston cheerily, much to the amusing alarm of his publicist, who is sitting in on our chat.
‘But I seem to remember you were a fan of Marvel Comics when you were a kid…?’ she prompts brightly. ‘As a kid, I was not particularly drawn to comics,’ Eccleston persists. ‘I wasn’t much of a reader, I was always playing out on the street.’
Marvel certainly made him earn his cash. As new Thor baddie Malekith, a pointy-eared Dark Elf entirely bald but for a long, thick white plait, Eccleston had to endure ten hours of physical preparation each day before he’d even start shooting.
‘I would get up at 2.15am, be picked up at 3am and sit down in the make-up chair at 4am,’ he says. ‘At about 10am, I would leave the chair and it would be another 20 minutes getting me into costume. Then there would be two make-up artists and two special effects people around me all day. I was a special effect. It was a challenge keeping your patience and focus.’
I suggest all that prep must have been frustrating, particularly when he had so little dialogue. ‘I didn’t know the length of the make-up,’ he admits. ‘I wish I had. They always say acting with prosthetics is like washing your feet with your socks on. But the make-up was very organic.
‘I always felt that Malekith’s face was my face, I am recognisable: my big hooter and cheekbones are there. And having done two big Hollywood films before [GI Joe: Rise Of The Cobra and Gone In 60 Seconds], I knew the emphasis would not particularly be on the dialogue. It is a visual party you are going to.’
At this point, I’d expect to throw our conversation back to his spell as a certain Time Lord. However, a condition of my interview is that ‘Christopher Eccleston will not answer any questions on Doctor Who’.
One presumes he’s fed up with the ongoing ‘Who’-ha over why he – the ninth Doctor, who reinvented the character and helped refashion the show into one of the most successful series on 21st-century British TV – has refused to participate in the 50th anniversary special.
Instead, I ask if he’s excited about seeing his own Thor action figurine. ‘I’ve experienced that a number of times,’ he says. ‘I’m a bit jaded.’
If Eccleston comes across as at all narky or ungracious in print, in person he’s warm, affable, fully engaged and charmingly free of media bulls***.
‘I don’t have any memorabilia,’ he continues. ‘I have always thought it was a bit vain to be surrounded by that kind of stuff. All the awards I’ve got I gave to my mum but I don’t think she likes them because, as you know, most awards are pretty ugly.’
For a ‘serious’ actor who built his career on meaty roles such as Thomas Hardy’s Jude The Obscure (on film) and Hamlet (on stage), isn’t a superhero flick a bit of a sellout?
‘The straight answer is that I am an actor,’ answers the working-class Lancashire lad, ‘and 90 per cent of actors have regular periods of unemployment. I didn’t work for seven months after Thor. I am open to any kind of work so I can pay the mortgage.’
It’s a natural ‘provider’ instinct for the 49-year-old, who became a father last year. ‘But I don’t feel I have particularly sold out working with a director such as Alan Taylor [The Sopranos, Game Of Thrones],’ he continues. ‘I think it was very clever of Marvel to choose a director of that calibre to do a film of this scale.’
Eccleston prefers a more intimate stage. ‘My goal was always to be in Britain, doing brilliant British television. I think sometimes there can be a bit of a snobbish attitude among film people towards television. I don’t share it.
‘All our great film talents came out of British TV: Mike Leigh, Albert Finney. British theatre is the most important to me but I’ve dedicated most of my career to British TV.’
That said, he’s just signed to HBO series The Leftovers. Set in post-Rapture America, where Eccleston plays an evangelical who has been left behind, it’s adapted by Damon Lindelof, who wrote the screenplay for Star Trek: Into Darkness.
‘As a kid, I hated Star Wars but I loved Star Trek,’ says Eccleston. ‘And I’ve since realised the reason I love Star Trek is because it is entirely about character. You have villains and some space but it’s basically a brilliantly written love triangle between Kirk, Spock and Bones – lieutenant Uhura being the “beard” from what I could see.’
So is it his ambition to star in a Star Trek movie? Eccleston pauses, ruminating intently. ‘Never say never?’ the publicist butts in helpfully.
‘The original Star Trek series was important to me,’ Eccleston concludes. ‘But I wouldn’t whore for it’.
If you’ve ever seen the interview (included, I think, on the Series One DVD box set) where CE pretended to have tuned into DW as a boy for the bits where you saw the inside of a Dalek, then the parts where he shrugs off his spin doctor trying to get him to fake a childhood interest in Marvel comics is a wonderful contrast to all those tooth-pulling 2005 promo interviews he had to do.
I’ve always found CE’s refusal to pander to DW fans a cheering contrast to the sort of prospect which was presented to us this week. A whole season of Matt Smith and David Tennant starring alongside each other as the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors. Just the thought of that car crash waiting to happen, as any mystique in the character of the Doctor is sacrificed on the altar of damp fan underwear, makes me all the more proud that CE won’t pander. Anyone willing to pander deserves two black eyes.
How often does a thought niggle at the back of your mind for ages without your being able to quite put it into words until one day you experience a punch-the-air moment when you hear someone manage to crystallise the thought in one sentence? That happened for me this week on the admirable Aussie podcast Splendid Chaps when someone said about that annoyingly smug Series Two relationship between Rose and the Tenth Doctor that “it was like they both knew they were on television.” That’s exactly how I imagine a series-long pairing up of Smith and Tennant. The show would have become all about not those two Doctors but those two actors. It would have been the apotheosis of the neurotic behavioural tic. The thought of the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors trying to outdo each other as one stuck his lower teeth out as far as possible while burping mid-sentence and the other pranced around like the Childcatcher on hot bricks going “ooh that’s cool” doesn’t bear thinking about.
Leave us with our memories, please, Doctors. Leave us wanting more, not just wanting closure.
The stand-out character of THE ENEMY OF THE WORLD for me was not the twin roles played by Patrick Troughton nor even the full revealed horror that is Victoria Waterfield. It’s the character of Fariah (Salamander’s food taster) and the performance by the wonderful Carmen Munroe.
If this story hadn’t been missing for 45 years then maybe, whenever the subject of black characters/actors in Doctor Who came up, we wouldn’t automatically have thought of Cotton and Toberman. We would always have had Carmen Munroe’s Fariah as our template.
Everything conspired to make this a memorable performance. David Whittaker paid attention to giving her some depth which is surprising given that Fariah is far from a pivotal character in the story. He wrote her intelligent lines of real subtlety. She wasn’t landed with a corny accent as many of her co-stars in ENEMY were. And they cast a fine and striking actress to play her.
Fabulous as George Pravda is in his every role in Doctor Who, we feel little empathy for him when he dies. But Fariah’s death really tugs at the heart strings because time and effort has been put into even her minor character.
Jesus H Bidmead! We thought that the junking of old Doctor Who episodes was harsh on the fans. We had no idea how much harsher it was on Nicola Bryant (a.k.a. Peri). For years, Nicola has suffered under the mantle of the whiniest companion ever. If only we’d known the full horror that was Victoria Waterfield.
Even Susan, whose repertoire as a companion ran the entire histrionic gamut from “Grandfather, I’m so cold” to “Barbara, I’ve got a headache” via “Ian, I’ve hurt my ankle” would have been more use in an emergency than the Victoria who is now emerging from forty years of obscurity.
She provides us with the opposite of the punch the air moment. The punch the screen moment.
Not that Deborah Watling is in any way to blame. The writers give her zero to say and even less to do. The easy answer would be that the writers in the Sixties wrote female characters as mere ciphers. But that doesn’t seem supported by the discovery of “Enemy of the World” and “Web of Fear” which feature both Anne Travers, who is almost written as a precursor to Liz Shaw, and the eye-opening performance of Fariah (Salamander’s food taster), who is given lines and motivations of real subtlety. So, if the writers of the time could write half-decent female roles, what on Earth happened with Victoria?
Could this be why the Troughton era suffered so disproportionately from the wiping of tapes? Perhaps the woman whom Ian Levine notoriously found in a BBC vault junking old tapes was actually not a cultural vandal at all but some kind of feminist activist determined to rid British culture of Miss Waterfield? I think we should be told.
DOCTOR WHOM 