From Russia with Love

I dipped into the James Bond season currently running at the Phoenix in Oxford today, and joined a thronged screen 2 for the remastered From Russia with Love. I'd not actually seen this one, though discussion a few nights ago had revealed the secret of the opening tag scene, which asserts and promotes Sean Connery's Bond as a cinematic icon as well as demonstrating how well Connery can act.

The Bondian world of From Russia with Love is less self-consciously fantastical than it would become in later films, but there's already a joy in the expression of dialogue such as the assessment of Grant as a "homicidal paranoid" and thus perfect agent material for SPECTRE. The regular cast are at ease with one another, and Desmond Llewelyn delivers his reactions to Connery's blithely cocksure Bond with such imperceptible effort that it's no surprise that his brief walk-on and off here as the officer from 'Q division' becomes a regular role.

The film is also a lesson in 1960s attitudes to sexuality. It's implied that the training establishment at SPECTRE Island caters to all of Grant's physical needs, underlining the argument that compared to Bond (himself deeply flawed as a role model in the eyes of his deskbound colleagues in London and his girlfriend in what is presumably Cambridge, but in Istanbul able to negotiate peace between the two fighting Gypsy women by charming them into states of submission) he's emotionally stunted, dependent as he is on institutions for sex. Rosa Klebb is presented as dually deviant, both as an older woman with a sexual appetite, and also demonstrating attraction both to Grant and to Tatiana (Tania) Romanova; but this again is presented as guaranteeing her position in SPECTRE, at least making her less expendable than the coldly boastful chess grand master Kronsteen. Tania's seemingly relaxed attitude to the impermanence of her liaison with Bond at the end of the film is an obvious male fantasy; when we first encounter him Bond, in a punt with his girlfriend Eunice who makes her disapproval of his lifestyle plain, is as close to the henpecked husband stereotype as we see him. There is perhaps not that great a distance between Connery's Bond and Sidney James's Carry On characters as might first be assumed.

From Russia with Love is at times an exuberant travelogue and recalls the days of credit controls and limited foreign travel well; Hagia Sophia is rarely out of shot in Istanbul, and when the camera actually enters its walls it lingers over its architecture as much as it does on other occasions on the contours of leading lady Daniela Bianchi. The scenes in the Byzantine underwater reservoir (not Pinewood as I'd told myself and readers when I first published this review, but a location in Istanbul) are just as exotic; the audience in Britain or America is taken from one layer of an unfamiliar but familiar world, to another, stranger one. We are offered juxtapositions of confinement with open spaces throughout, whether on location in Turkey, Switzerland or Argyll (the latter doubling as the Istrian peninsula), within railway carriages or sheltering within rock chambers or the back of a florist's wagon. This language is starkly derived from Buchan via Hitchcock and eloquent in itself about the multiple worlds inhabited by the many personae of the Bondian secret agent.

An enjoyable game was spotting the Doctor Who actors in the cast. The porter on the Orient Express whose wages are regularly subsidized by Bond's Turkish ally Ali Kerim Bey is played by George Pastell, The Tomb of the Cybermen's master logician Klieg; it was only when watching the credits, after struggling to place him, that I learned that Kerim Bey's chauffeur son was Neville Jason, much later Prince Reynart and his android double in The Androids of Tara. Francis de Wolff from The Myth Makers is the Gypsy leader.

The soundtrack is memorable too, and I'd heard much of it in other contexts. One piece which has been a favourite at the National Film Theatre before screenings is, I now know thanks to the presence of the soundtrack on Spotify, '007 Takes the Lektor', by John Barry.

Reggie Perrin

Reggie Perrin, BBC 1's reinvention of the fondly-remembered 1970s sitcom The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, seems sadly on the basis of tonight's premiere largely a misfire. It needn't have been, because the seeds of something sufficiently distinct from the original were present. 'Kisses to the past' grated because they were unnecessary and invited comparison with the old series when the new Reggie Perrin needed to stand on its own two feet - being Reggie passing Sunshine Desserts on his way to Groomtech, and the nostalgic applause-seeking, and winning, "I didn't get where I am today..." from Chris.

I found it difficult to believe that Reggie's workplace adequately represents the modern office. The boss who ignores his underlings' carefully planned schedule is probably universal, but I suspect that the practices of different sectors of the economy have diverged more since the 1970s, making it more difficult for Groomtech to be representative of the middle-managerial workplace. There was indeed something oddly retro about the whole thing, when utter contemporaneity - agitational, even, in the best Sydney Newman tradition - was needed. I'd have put the Perrins in a more modern house; and I'd not have mentioned Carshalton Beeches in the script when Reggie clearly rides a Chiltern train... A Radio 4 preview in the last few days pointed to the Women's Social Action Committee as thirty years out of date, and I'd agree.

This is a second signature project commissoned by Jay Hunt which has not quite captured the spirit she was presumably seeking, as the revival of Minder was initiated by her at Five, and Reggie Perrin was her first public commission at BBC 1 (though it may have been on the books before). Martin Clunes is good enough to be about watchable, but too often comes across merely as a needlessly cruel manager rather than someone suffering in despair at the world in the manner of Leonard Rossiter. If Jay Hunt hoped to use Reggie Perrin to revive the British sitcom in the way that Doctor Who has revived family drama, I fear that she has instead only pointed to its weaknesses, revering a golden age of the 1970s without understanding why the hits of that era worked.

The Complete Richard Hannay

The first thing to say about John Buchan's Richard Hannay is that he is probably not the man you think you know; at least, if you are anything like me. My impression, formed from fragments of film adaptations and a deep suspicion of the traditional boys' adventure story (whatever that was) inculcated (probably) in earliest childhood, was of an English gentleman, an adventurer in the service of the British Empire, an insider. Richard Hannay is perhaps all these things; but he is not simply the sum of these qualities, and none of them are automatic.

Hannay is an outsider several times over. When introduced in The Thirty-Nine Steps he is in London because that's what men who have made their 'pile' out in the Empire do. He's a successful mining engineer spending his fortune gained in the mines of southern Africa. Although born in Scotland, Hannay has lived in Africa since boyhood, but feels that he has exhausted its possibilities. A life of renting rooms in London and drifting through clubland without introductions leaves him frustrated. His career as an engineer has made his fortune and it is the part of his past which he introduces to us first; but he has also been a soldier and emerges from the first book as someone who takes for granted that the Second Matabele War, in the post-imperial era more easily understood as a war of colonial subjugation and expropriation, was a conflict of moral improvement both for the victors and the defeated. After the success of The Thirty-Nine Steps (initially serialized in Blackwood's under a pseudonym) Buchan extended Hannay's world into one he was already developing in his other contemporary novels and short stories, and added a circle of characters including Sandy Arbuthnot, later Lord Clanroyden, a Scottish aristocrat, traveller in the east and master of disguise; John S. Blenkiron, an American engineer and millionaire investor who acts in the British interest during the Great War; Peter Pienaar, mentioned in The Thirty-Nine Steps as "the best scout I ever knew"; Mary Lamington, nineteen-year-old intelligence operative who takes Hannay by surprise in such a way that he marries her; Geordie Hamilton, patriotic brawling Scots soldier who becomes first Hannay's batman then a loyal retainer of Sandy's; and Scots laird and baronet, enthusiastic and skilled pilot, Sir Archie Roylance. All are the stronger for being relayed through Hannay; when in The Courts of the Morning (not included in the combined volume) Hannay chooses not to join Sandy and Blenkiron in their South American adventure, the bulk of the novel feels emptier for its third person narration.

Hannay's opinions and prejudices are continually foregrounded by Buchan; Hannay emerges as a character through the gap between the limited outlook expected by those seeking to manipulate him, and Hannay's own broader view. In The Thirty-Nine Steps, Scudder intrigues Hannay with his tale of Jewish conspiracy, but never entirely convinces him. His African experience is crucial. Later, in The Three Hostages, Dominick Medina entirely misreads Hannay's character, fatally for Medina's ambitions. Medina's roots in England are deeper than Hannay's, and though he is descended from Iberian exiles and is influenced by an Irish mother who holds England in disgust, it is his Englishness which is emphasised and which may lead him to consider Hannay dull and an ideal pawn. Much or most of the overseas experience with which Medina is widely credited turns out to be fraudulent, and what he has learned, he lacks the understanding to interpret beyond narrow self-interest. Frequently throughout the Hannay books, the reader is implicitly asked to contemplate how little those know of England who only England know.

The great charm of The Thirty-Nine Steps arises from its combination of travelogue and adventure story. For a substantial section of the book it appears that the events which leave Hannay a wanted man are a red herring to allow Buchan to present a series of vignettes depicting Scottish types. For Hannay Lowland Scotland is an ancestral home which he has never really known; though he returns to it in a series of crises, in The Thirty-Nine Steps, in Mr Standfast, in the second climax to The Three Hostages, and the Laverlaw section of The Island of Sheep. In The Thirty-Nine Steps Hannay finds an innocence in Scotland with which he is sometimes impatient - the audience for the radical candidate he finds deluded - but those who are happy with their traditional social roles are largely trustworthy and in some cases models of charity. Characters of this type appear in some form or other throughout the books. They are appropriate for a land which in Buchan's scheme for Hannay's world is a kind of Elysium, often disturbed from the outside, but which when properly maintained - as on Sandy Clanroyden's estate where Hannay and Haraldsen retreat in The Island of Sheep - can strengthen one against those who wish harm. However, to do the work one is called to do one has to leave the sanctuary of the Lowlands. England is the principal theatre of industry and the head office for the rest of the world. Disorder comes when that head office is subverted (as in The Thirty-Nine Steps) or loses sight of a clear aim (as in The Three Hostages).

The Hannay books aren't straightforwardly simplistic adventure stories either. The Thirty-Nine Steps was famously written while Buchan was confined to bed as an experiment in writing a 'shocker' - a "romance where the incidents defy the probabilities and march just inside the borders of the possible" (quoted Lownie, John Buchan, 119). There's something self-consciously genre-challenging about it - Scudder presents the plot to assassinate the Greek prime minister, Karolides, in terms of a conspiracy of cliches: anarchists, capitalists and especially Jews - but Hannay finds the truth more prosaic and more dangerous, a foreign power determined to provoke a European war at its own convenience and whose agents in Britain are long-established and skilled at hiding in plain sight within the Imperial establishment. This scenario is presented as a more realistic depiction of European power politics, helped by the anonymity of the German agents who if having something of the diabolical masterminds of pulp fiction about them seem less prone to caricature, and more threatening, because we never learn their names - at least, not in this book.

The Three Hostages also draws attention to the artifices of the thriller. The character of Dr Greenslade recalls Scudder, and prompts in Hannay a discussion of the way a thriller is constructed; it seems a neat joke when we learn that following the Great War Hannay's secret service contact Sir Walter Bullivant is now Lord Artinswell, and thus in terms of his signature has moved from 'B' to 'A'. The confrontation across the wild landscape of Machray, while awkward in the context of the main narrative, is called for because Buchan, through the revulsion of Hannay, has built Dominick Medina into such a fiend (if one brought down by his own arrogance) that the convention of the exercise demands that Medina seek swift personal vengeance.

Both The Three Hostages and The Island of Sheep are disappointments after Mr Standfast, presented as the centrepiece of the Hannay novels in the five-book Penguin combined edition, and with some justification. Both it and the second instalment, Greenmantle, read like the work of a government propagandist, which they were; but there has been a decided shift in tone and content. Greenmantle, like The Thirty-Nine Steps, takes place in a world where women are distant and mysterious - Hilda von Einem is a threat to Hannay because he has little experience of women, and she almost destroys the world-travelled but ascetic Sandy Arbuthnot. The German commander, Von Stumm, plays up to the stereotype of the physically heavy, privately effeminate officer. The book fulfils the role of reminding its readers of the importance of the Ottoman Empire as a theatre of war, and the contribution of the Russians, whose commander at Erzerum turns out to be a Russian grand duke who had once hunted with Peter Pienaar in South Africa in 1898; the Russians are thus marked as familiar and knowable.

Mr Standfast was written at the close of the war, and while Greenmantle was set in a war where combat was still thought of in terms of cavalry charges, Mr Standfast was completed once the war was over, and shows how Hannay, who is largely having a good war, deals with the deleterious effects it has on the home and western fronts. For John Buchan, successful people are adaptable ones who find something to do in changed circumstances and excel through that adaptability; Peter Pienaar is such, having trained as a pilot at an advanced age and emerged as one of the best fighters in the air, only to be shot down over Germany and one leg ruined. He is later allowed to move to Switzerland which further marks him as a non-combatant; his turn of phrase has become more elliptical and philosophical. He is one of two Fisher King figures, the other being Lancelot Wake, the conscientious objector whom Hannay first meets among the pacifist colony in "the garden city of Biggleswick" (itself a mocking of over-idealistic town planning) and whom he again encounters on Skye, and who gradually earns from Hannay a slightly uncomprehending respect. Wake eventually joins Hannay and his party on the western front as a messenger, and is killed from a shrapnel wound to his groin. Hannay's self-satisfied consignment of Wake to perpetual virginity, after Hannay has won the hand of the teenage spy Mary Lamington, comes to signify his silent recognition of Wake's status as a Grail prince, though he does not know it. There is a contrast between the honest conflict of the men on the front line, and the corrupting nature of the world of espionage; Graf von Schwabing, the chameleon-like survivor of the Black Stone defeated by Hannay in The Thirty-Nine Steps, once captured, is not handed over to the authorities but instead offered the chance of redemption by taking his place on the front line alongside British and French troops, where the extreme circumstances would not allow him to reinvent himself one more and disappear. Redemption as a theme emerges through the books; Medina turns away from the possibility in The Three Hostages, but hard work and a morally uplifting goal transform Haraldsen and to some extent restore both Hannay and Lombard in The Island of Sheep.

Much as The Three Hostages and The Island of Sheep fail to live up to the promise of Mr Standfast, they do express an aimlessness felt in Britain and Europe after 1918 which affects certainties Hannay felt in the first two books. While Greenmantle treats the Turks and Arabs with cultural condescension, the Britain of the later novels has similar vulnerabilities to Buchan's portrayal of the Ottoman Empire; the Imperialist assumptions have been swept away; even the metropolitan territory is fragmented, with the independence of the Irish Free State, and new leisure activities have sprung up, incomprehensible to Hannay, as barriers of rank and race are eroded. While an adventurer who respects risk-takers - the 'sportsmen' of the earlier novels - Hannay also takes for granted heredity, that peoples and classes have distinct characters shaped across generations. The Island of Sheep sees Haraldsen's thirteen-year-old daughter Anna assuming a natural and unchallenged leadership over the people of the Norlands, over whom her maternal ancestors had exercised lordship for centuries. She is also female and in the later novels the married Hannay is obviously less familiar with women, though he does not know his wife well enough to realise that she will have her own plans independent of his instructions and look for the eponymous three hostages herself.

The Island of Sheep concerns a grudge from Hannay's youth in South Africa coming back to haunt him and his old comrade Lombard; it is perhaps the difficulty of finding things for Hannay plausibly to do in South America that excludes him from The Courts of the Morning. The Island of Sheep is concerned only tangentially with the politics of the 1930s, as Haraldsen's father's dream of a society invigorated by a return to Nordic values could be a comment upon Nazi Germany. It's a regret that Buchan didn't live to write a Hannay novel set in the Second World War - the transformations which that conflict would have wrought on Hannay (who, like his creator, might have moved from an Imperial to an internationalist perspective, and would probably be more sensitive about the casual use of derogatory nicknames for ethnic groups) and his friends would have been entertaining.

Press Gang - first thoughts

I've recently started watching Press Gang, the first television series written by Steven Moffat, which ran on ITV between 1989 and 1993. As I've written elsewhere, when the first series began the location was too close to home, as I'd just spent a year as one of the editors of a school newspaper initially affiliated with a local weekly. I would have loved the staffing levels and the collective enthusiasm displayed by Lynda Day's team.

Press Gang has a format built on shifting sands at the frontiers of the plausible, but which is kept alive by the cutting wit of Steven Moffat's writing and the energetic belief of the cast in what they are doing. Matt Kerr, an important character seen only occasionally, is a well-known journalist who has made the unexpected career move of moving to a local paper, where he spins off a weekly Junior Gazette produced by students from the local secondary school. The Junior Gazette's staff are initially extracted from the school's cleverest and most motivated pupils, but by the time the first edition approaches Matt Kerr is complaining that all the problem kids have been thrust in his direction too, such as Spike, American and therefore uninhibited by British reserve and also the perpetrator of an unmentionable act at the school disco. Dexter Fletcher's Spike becomes the romantic interest for Julia Sawalha's Lynda, however much she refuses to acknowledge it. The large workspace used by the Junior Gazette looked, plausibly, like an abandoned compositor's room; while early episodes of the first series look back to classic early twentieth-century depictions of the newsroom, where even the telephone is exotic (the Junior Gazette shouldn't have one, by agreement with Matt Kerr - an odd prohibition but the absence of the phone helps an episode or two along) later ones acknowledge the arrival of networked computers, as used by tetraplegic contributor Billy Homer.

Discovering Press Gang now is to look into as vanished a world as my long-ago late-1980s sixth form. ITV original children's production has long disappeared, and it's difficult to imagine the demographic-strangled CBBC commissioning this now. Too quirky for a Five commission, its entrenchment in the heightened reality of children's television makes Press Gang unlikely Channel Four material, post-Hollyoaks. The large cast alone dates it. There is an absence of toilet humour, but a sprinkling of cheery sexual innuendo every so often which marks Press Gang's attitude to growing up as an experience where enjoyment can be found amidst the anguish; unlike the by-the-numbers earnestness in what I've seen of Tracy Beaker or the hand-holding of The Sarah Jane Adventures, there is little need to heavily signpost the lessons learned by the characters.

As well as providing invaluable support for a young writer and a young cast to show how good they were, Press Gang is about teenagers coming to grips with adult responsibilities, and how the road to self-knowledge is a dangerous one, sometimes fatal. At eighteen or nineteen, I saw Lynda as repellently self-assured; two decades on, she seems very vulnerable. The self-assurance is a veneer, used for comic effect - as in her repeated insistence that she has no particular interest, romantic or otherwise, in Spike - and for tragic, such as her failure to realise how serious David Jefford's alienation actually is, prompting the harangue which leads to David's suicide in Monday-Tuesday. Lynda sustains it by her capacity for self-protecting tunnel vision, which propels the narrative of Breakfast at Czar's as she ignores the evidence which would confirm that the Junior Gazette has been misled by head of the council planning committee. How far her decision to shut the team in the office all night, so they can produce a new edition in a few hours, is consciously motivated by the fact it prevents Spike going on a date with the 'obvious' Charlotte is something Lynda could not and would not answer.

Lynda stands for integrity; opposite her is Colin, the Junior Gazette's head of sales and briefly (in Shouldn't I Be Taller?) her successor as editor. Colin's principal role is comedic - he is the class clown, his outfits get louder, and his schemes more grandiose across the season and a half. Where Lynda stresses the Junior Gazette as a responsible, campaigning 'Voice of Today's Youth', Colin learns the lessons of the red-tops and for one horrible issue has the team produce the sensationalist Gaz. A later episode has Colin build up his stooge Fraz into a chess prodigy so he can stage a chess match against local chess phenomenon Suzi Newton, played by Abigail Docherty whose general physical resemblance to teenage mathematician Ruth Lawrence, a semi-regular fixture in the media in the mid- to late-1980s, is exploited by her performance and her costuming.

The regular cast of Press Gang were all on cusps of careers at this point. Some had become established television faces as children, but would move away from regular exposure after Press Gang, like Mmoloki Christie or Kelda Holmes. Lee Ross and Charlie Creed-Miles are among those who have established solid working careers; Lucy Benjamin was in EastEnders for a while, Dexter Fletcher is rarely without period costume these days, and Gabrielle Anwar has emerged from Hollywood startletdom into leading roles on American television. Julia Sawalha is rarely off British television screens.

I'm currently a few episodes in to season two, and so have yet to see the Junior Gazette cut its ties with school and become a fully commercial enterprise in the later seasons. More when I have done so.

Tony Hart 1925-2009

It's been a week where people who influenced the popular culture of the world in which I was born and grew up have been dying - 'head Dalek' John Scott Martin, Patrick McGoohan, Angela Morley (composer of the ATV logo music, and much, much else), John Mortimer, David Vine, Ricardo Montalban. Now, Tony Hart has gone. I first remember him as a largely silent presence on Vision On, where only presenter Pat Keysell spoke for any length of time and with her microphone turned on, and where Tony Hart was the most respectable-looking of the anarchic forces of communication which Pat kept under the barest level of control. Later on, there were Take Hart and Hartbeat - Smart Hart was after my time and I hadn't realised that it had existed, though I knew that Smart continued the BBC children's television art tradition, including the Gallery. His contribution to Blue Peter as designer of the ship logo is well-known, but he was a guest presenter in that programme's early years as well.

Tony Hart visited the Oxford Union in early 1991, and kept a packed debating chamber of students absolutely rapt. We were the end of the Vision On generation, the first to know Morph, and listened to tales of his move from the army into television graphics - "Every few mornings I wake up thinking 'You're an officer, man! Is this any way to spend your life?' " (Yes! his listeners cried telepathically) - with recollections of how nice a person Colin Bennett was to work with, and carefully making sure that Peter Lord and David Sproxton received credit and praise as creators of Morph, often misattributed to Hart, including by the BBC today until Hart's former producer Christopher Pilkington corrected them on air. At one point, before telling an anecdote with post-watershed content, he asked "Are there any children in the audience?" and of course we all laughed self-consciously, because when he was there we were children again. A great communicator, who will be missed.

Quantum of Solace

I've never been to see a James Bond film in the cinema before, but grew up with them flickering in and out of my awareness on television. I think the first one I saw might have been You Only Live Twice, or perhaps Live and Let Die. I haven't seen Casino Royale either, so this was my introduction to Daniel Craig's Bond.

I was left with the impression that the Bond franchise is suffering an identity crisis, though there were signs that it is working on resolving it. I watched most of the Pierce Brosnan films on television, and while there is the superficial connection of M still being played by Judi Dench, otherwise this doesn't seem to be the universe that Brosnan's Bond inhabited. Where Brosnan's Bond fought larger-than-life megalomaniacs, Craig fights less tangible threats. The high technology now belongs to MI6 with their giant touch-sensitive display screens; the enemy in the field deals in the material world, water, oil, guns, bullets, blood and bone, and these need to be Bond's weapons too.

The audience is played with, of course. Gemma Arterton's Fields appears to be the unexpected introduction of a more traditional Bond girl, but she is a play-acting minor foreign office staffer, seduced by Bond almost before they meet, and she provides another layer for Bond's guilt. I don't know the books at all, but Olga Kurylenko's Camille, with her scarred back, echoed what I think of as a Fleming trope, the beautiful woman with the physical imperfection caused by a man when she was very young, though I don't know whether it occurs outside Dr No.

Doctor Who: The Talons of Weng-Chiang. The state of opinion in 2001.

Time to bring out one of my old Doctor Who fanzine articles, lately rediscovered. This was published in Faze issue 23, in 2001.


Nearly five years since the last new Doctor Who production for television was broadcast, and eleven years since the last series, it's becoming more and more difficult to say anything new about the programme. Stories that through the 1990s, especially, were closely scrutinised, deconstructed, reconstructed and pastiched in Virgin or BBC novels are receding into the past. There's a danger that a critical consensus could emerge by default, as fandom's intellectual wing finds it has nothing more to chew and moves on, leaving newcomers with sets of statements that become final and definitive by neglect.

This situation affects 'classics' as much as it does the less-regarded adventures of the Doctor, and one of these is 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang', one of those stories that almost everyone still rates highly. It came second in the DWM awards in 1998, at 89.21%. In this article I intend to question some of the recently-printed statements about Talons, and try to reanimate the spirit of debate!

"It's pulp adventure, and not profound - there's no message, no clunking allegory to be found at its core..." Alan Barnes, DWM 295, 3 June 1998

It's certainly pulp adventure, and I wouldn't claim that it sets out to moralise, but like all good drama, 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang' is concerned with the relationships between people and how individuals live with the compromises that they make in everyday life. In doing so it delves a little further than most Doctor Who stories do. 'Talons' concentrates on physical appearance and how this affects how people see each other as human beings. The viewer is alerted to this by the Doctor's failure to recognise what marks out the features of Li H'sen Chang from those of the police sergeant in episode one, ethnicity being all-important to the Doctor's Victorian British hosts. The first exchange between Jago and Litefoot is also remarkable as Jago comments that he should have recognised Litefoot's intellectual ability from his physiognomy - a fashionable notion throughout the nineteenth century, allied to the skull-exploring science of phrenology, with deeply obstructive effects for those deemed, 'scientifically', to be physically second-rate.

The story plays with Victorian theory - and modern prejudice - by presenting the central villain as a man in a mask, who has become deformed through his own experiments and is failing to restore his physical form. His speeches often are self-congratulatory, but Magnus Greel cannot bear to look at his own face, nor does he wish anyone else to see it. It is almost as if Greel's experiment has revealed his own inner nature. The Zygma experiment is another picture of Dorian Gray, but Greel has become his own canvas.

"Goofs: Why does Greel need girls rather than young people in general?" Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping, Doctor Who: The Discontinuity Guide, 1995

The most obvious explanation for Greel's obsession with young women is a sexual one; his draining of their life essence analogous to the way that Dracula (indirectly alluded to both in the script's dialogue and its execution - Greel seems most active during the hours of darkness) principally sought young women as his prey, or to the sexual assaults of 'Jolly Jack', mentioned by Casey as part of the scene-setting in the first episode.  Alternatively, as the script suggests that his DNA is breaking down following his failure to enter the correct levels before making his journey through the zygma beam; perhaps all the damage was to his X chromosome, and he can only be guaranteed repair by taking genetic information from young women, unravelling their bodies as he does so. This is probably bad pseudo-science, but it should not obscure the fact that Greel is as foul a rapist as the Ripper from whom he is drawn.

The difference between Greel and the Ripper is that he needs a procurer, someone who will drag his victims from the streets, and his participation in this business shows how far Li H'sen Chang is prepared to go in the service of his benefactor. Chang shows occasional signs of wanting independence from Greel. John Bennett rolls his eyes in exasperation as Greel outlines his demands during their scenes together in the carriage, and we learn just before Chang's death that he was anticipating a performance before Queen Victoria. The logic of Chang's ongoing season at Jago's establishment is that he remains there to protect Greel; how many times, one wonders, has he had to hypnotise Jago to keep him from becoming suspicious? Yet in other scenes Chang appears to be genuinely subservient to his master; it's difficult to be certain whether the production had a clear line on how far Chang is independent of Greel. The focus of the story, after all, is first on the disappearances, and then on the who and what of Weng-Chiang, not on the detail of the criminal network that Chang runs to service Greel's needs. As a beaten Chang escapes the Doctor to offer himself as a dinner guest of the giant rats, with himself as the entrée, the Doctor muses that 'it was a good act'. This simple, but multi-layered sentence, refers not only to Chang's stage performance, but to his benevolence in taking in the failing Greel in the first place, and perhaps also pays tribute to his ability to convince Greel that he was his devoted servant for so long, well after his experiences had taught him that Greel was not the god he had once appeared. Terrance Dicks, perhaps feeling that he would be unable to explain this ambiguity to the Target audience, omitted this line from the novelisation and portrayed Chang as a religious fanatic at the (almost) last; a pity, as the part is written and portrayed with more sensitivity, and Dicks's novelisations had a great influence on the way that fans remembered the broadcast serials.

"Even as late as 1977's 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang', a white actor was employed to play a Chinese villain under heavy eye make-up. Strangely, many fans of this popular serial are surprised that it hasn't had a recent terrestrial repeat." Gary Gillatt, Doctor Who From A to Z, 1998

Having cited Terrance Dicks's approach to the novelisations as one reason why the sophistication of Chang's characterisation has been overlooked, I'll now quote Dicks again to explain the racist casting puzzle which has dogged 'Talons' ever since it was broadcast. I remember reading in the article 'Overseas Overview' in DWM late in 1982 of how the Canadian broadcaster TV Ontario ended up not showing 'Talons' in their province at all following concern from representatives of the Chinese community. David Howe and Stephen James Walker write in Doctor Who: The Television Companion that Bennett's "performance and make-up are so convincing that it is difficult to believe that he is not actually Chinese". Bennett's performance is strong, yes, but his features can't be disguised by prosthetic eyelids, and the result could even be seen as grotesque.

It's possible, though, that this effect was sought by the production team. To quote Terrance's interpretation of the story again:

"...the magician had appeared from nowhere. Perhaps he really was from China as he claimed. After all he really was Chinese, unlike most Oriental magicians who were usually English enough once the make-up was off." Terrance Dicks, Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang, 1977

Most commentators have agreed that the success of 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang' stems from its sense of fictional period; the Doctor and Leela do not step out of the TARDIS into Victorian London as such, but in a particular Victorian London that was already well-established in the popular imagination. I don't know about the contributions of Sherlock Holmes, Sexton Blake or Fu Manchu to Talons, but those who do agree that their influence is all there. It's appropriate therefore that instead of facing a villain who appears to be a native of China, the Doctor has as his foe someone whose image evokes a late-nineteenth-century idea of how a hostile, "inscrutable" Chinaman might look - a European in exaggerated eye make-up and elaborate moustache. This argument does not refute the charge of racism but shows how the casting of John Bennett was a calculated manoeuvre rather than an act of laziness on the part of a production team reluctant to give a leading role to a non-white actor. 

I've dealt with the main criticisms that I can remember, and my remaining observations are somewhat random. London's geography in 'Talons' owes little to reality; there is no doubt that the Fleet runs near Limehouse in the televised story, whereas in reality it enters the Thames under Blackfriars Bridge, having followed the course of New Bridge Street, Farringdon Street and Farringdon Road. A friend of mine once insisted that I had assured him the Venerable Bede really did like fish, although I have no recollection of anything of the sort. Does anyone know if Bede mentions a taste for seafood in his writings? Counterfactualists might like to speculate on the companion we might have had, if Leela had not been carried over from 'The Face of Evil', as the Victorian setting would have been the obvious point to introduce Philip Hinchcliffe's Eliza Doolittle character, although this story shows very well how Leela ended up fulfilling that role. I'm an admirer of Jago and Litefoot as characters in the context of this story, but have difficulty seeing how their partnership would have continued in any proposed series. Their characters would have needed to be fleshed out considerably, and at the very least Litefoot would have needed to find a laboratory without masking tape on the walls! I mean to get round to digging out the magazine he is seen reading at one point, issue 917 of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine; considering the care taken with the Doctor Who of this period the choice of periodical could well have been deliberate. Finally, after a couple of viewings of the story with frenzied note-taking, I'm realising how much easier DVDs will make the reviewing process!