A Survey of Television, by Stuart Hood

I mentioned Stuart Hood in my last post because I recently saw him in an episode of the BBC's Talkback from 7 November 1967, with six members of the public - including Mary Whitehouse - responding to this passage from his then recently published book:

"If one works in television one most reconcile oneself to the fact that the bulk of audience reaction is from cranks, from the unstable, the hysterical and sick." (p. 38)

For all the caustic tone, Hood's point was that those making television for a mass popular audience really need a sense of that audience's responses, but the means of gauging a reaction are limited. Viewing figures, audience surveys and correspondence can rarely explain the success or otherwise of a programme, let alone offer practical advice on how to improve. Programme makers are more often led by instinct. Committees of public opinion only resulted in bland television no one wanted to watch.

"Committees are uncreative." (p. 49)

Hood was Controller of BBC Television between 1961 and 1964, then moved to the ITV franchise Rediffusion. His survey of the medium is full of fascinating detail and more of that caustic wit. 

"Scottish Television serves the 4 million people of the Scottish industrial belt, which contains - to judge by the programmes they watch - the most uncritical body of viewers in the British Isles." (p. 25).

On the facts, it's interesting to read that there were, he thought in 1967, 

"some one hundred and ten countries with television service (p. 4),

up from four in 1946. He details how these were, at the time of writing, organised in groups: the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) with associate members from the American networks, Australia and South Africa plus new nations such as Malawi, Chad and Congo; its mirror opposite International Radio and Television Organisation (OIRT) comprising East European countries, Cuba, the Republic of Mali, the Korean People's Republic, China, the United Arab Emirates and the People's Democratic Republic of Vietnam; the Asian Broadcasting Union (ABU); the African Radio and Television Organisation (URNTA). Seeing the members helped me understand why, for example, Doctor Who sold to particular countries and not to others.

Sales could also be affected by cultural differences.

"Maigret was judged unacceptable by the [American] networks not because of the English accents (although they are a stumbling block) nor because of the foreign setting, but because of little incidents which betrayed a different set of television mores. Thus when Maigret had occasion to cross-examine a girl in a maison de passe it was found surprising that no moral attitude was taken towards the little tart. Nymphomania, lesbianism, drug addiction were touched on and accepted as facts of life, neither swept under the carpet nor magnified out of proportion in the context of the plot. Added to all these was the incident in which Maigret and Lucas stood in a courtyard, saw a light come on in a window, watched and waited to be rewarded by hearing the cistern of a lavatory flush." (p. 139)

Hood is even more withering of programmes that do sell to the US: he thought The Saint and The Avengers "anodyne" mid-Atlantic fare, the "triumph" of selling to the American networks,

“only slightly tarnished by the fact that these series have usually been used as cheap summer replacements.” (p. 140)

He's even less impressed by programmes coming the other way: Batman is "subliterate" (p. 160).

For all he is withering about shows he clearly doesn't like, he's good on the way that the structure, tone and content of programmes is set by the structures imposed on television by technology, politics and other forces. He begins with the physics of television itself and the varying methods of producing a moving picture at a distance, and how that dictated form. During the General Strike of 1926, the Government wished to "commandeer the BBC as an instrument of propaganda", which John Reith fiercely opposed.

"His victory was one of the crucial moments in the history of British broadcasting. Both BBC and ITV benefit from his stand to this day." (p. 168)

Then, of Hood's own time at the BBC, there's the way subtle differences between the Royal Charter and the Television Act 1954 dictated the output of the BBC and ITV respectively. Under the Act, the Independent Television Authority - overseeing ITV - had to ensure that,

"nothing is included in the programmes [of an ITV franchise] which offends against good taste or decency (a question-begging phrase) or is likely to encourage or incite crime or lead to disorder or to be offensive to public feeling or which contains any offensive representation of or reference to a living person." (p. 20)

The last part effectively meant that ITV could not engage in the satire craze of the early 1960s: the BBC could screen That Was The Week That Was; on ITV, "it would have been a breach of the Act."

Hood mentions TW3 eight times in the book, suggesting his own reckoning of its significance. There are multiple entries for police series Maigret and business drama The Plane Makers, and for sitcoms Steptoe and Son and Till Death Us Do Part. Surprisingly, there is no mention of other innovative and successful programmes created in Hood's time as Controller: Doctor Who, Top of the Pops and Play School. Perhaps he didn't think much of them; perhaps their significance only became clear when they'd been running for decades.

Hood has plenty to say about sitcoms. In his view, 

"the medium [of television] is a voracious consumer of talent and turns. A comic who might in the [music or variety] halls hope to maintain himself with a polished routine changing little over the years, embellished a little, spiced with topicality, finds that his material is used up in the course of a couple of television appearances. The comic requires a team of writers to supply him with gags, and invention" (p. 152)

The sitcom is a vehicle to enable this: effectively providing the comic performer with a structure for new material based on a familiar form. But whereas drama is innovative, sometimes uncomfortable or shocking, sitcom is part of a type of television altogether more safe. 

"Light entertainment is the most conservative department of television.” (p. 151)

He defines light entertainment as, 

“comedy, quiz games, light musical productions, pop programmes, outside broadcasts from night clubs and variety theatres. Its traditions are mainly drawn from the halls or from radio. They have been adopted television presentation but fundamentally the sequence of song, dance, spot comedian is unchanged.” (ibid)

Perhaps that's why he doesn't think Top of the Pops worthy of a mention. But I also think it's to do with his politics. He had been a member of the Communist Party and was later a member of the Workers Revolutionary Party, and Hood reviewed Asa Briggs' history of the BBC of this period for International Socialism. At the beginning of his Survey of Television, he suggests why a country such as apartheid South Africa may have been slow to embrace TV:

“Television is a great educator. Besides who knows what remarks the coloured citizens of the Republic might feel free to make in the privacy of their homes about the white people on the screen?”  (p. 5)

He's interested, then, in television as progressives, a medium of necessary change. And light entertainment,

“is a non-political tradition. Political satire has been traditionally avoided… It is more likely to be dictated by a determined political neutrality. Much of TV variety is of this inoffensive, traditional nature. It is popular and professionally presented and fundamentally unintellectual.” (p. 152)

This, I think, is why Hood devotes a lot to the advances in news and educational programming - the role of television in explaining politics and shaping the world. It's not that light entertainment couldn't be technically sophisticated - even groundbreaking. I've always heard The Black and White Minstrel Show spoken of in terms of embarrassment, a show that should have been cancelled long before 1978. It's odd to think of it as having been innovative and exciting.

"When The Black and White Minstrel Show won the Golden Rose of Montreux in 1959 there were some European representatives who doubted whether their audiences could follow the speedy cutting and rhythm of the camera work. Such sophistication is now general." (p. 169)

Compare that to the reactionary culture of the news:

"On one point only it seems unlikely that the BBC or ITN will take a step forward - by employing a woman to read the news. For one short period the BBC did employ a woman announcer who was at once intelligent and good looking; but the weight of masculine prejudice among her colleagues was too powerful and the experiment had to be discontinued. So too was ITN's experiment in the use of newscasters in the sense of men who write their own copy and then read it in front of the camera." (p. 108)

This all makes it sound like Hood's survey is of where television has been, but much of this is about where it is going next. He's concerned about TV schedules programmed not by humans but by "crystal clock and computer" (p. 84). There's stuff about the practicalities of 625-line television, brought in by the BBC the year Hood was writing, and the impact of more channels, of colour TV, of satellite broadcasting. The striking thing, in retrospect, and the irony given Hood's politics and predilections, is how conservative he was about the future we've seen come to pass.

Think of the BBC's new promo to mark its centenary this year, #ThisIsOurBBC: the rich variety of programming showcased, the social contract with the audience and nation, news and light entertainment mixed in with the drama, the whole thing posited as direct engagement with the audience, a two-way conversation. I think, from working on our documentary about Mary Whitehouse, that she had a media savvy understanding of the power of television. Ironically, Stuart Hood lacked the same faith.

Stan Lee - How Marvel Changed the World, by Adrian Mackinder

"Somehow, Stan always managed to present himself as a modest egomaniac - an art in itself." (p. 168)

These words, from ex-Marvel writer John Tomlinson, come at the end of my friend Adrian Mackinder's fun, breezy and yet authoritative new biography of the great Stan Lee, writer and editor synonymous with Marvel superheroes in comics and more recently on screen.

It's an extraordinary story and there's a lot to pack in given Stan's long and busy life, but - like the best of the superhero movies - it never drags. Adrian's tone is friendly and direct, peppered with Stan-isms, addressing us as "True Believer" and concluding "Nuff Said", and there's a lot of direct quotation from Stan himself, even where his own accounts conflict.

We begin with the relatively humble early life of Stanley Martin Lieber, the son of Romanian Jewish immigrants in New York. A voracious reader, at 17 Stan got an entry-level job in the publishing company run by his cousin's husband Martin Goodman (Stan's uncle also worked there, and soon, too, would his own brother), which among its various titles had only recently begun publishing a superhero one, Marvel Comics. We're not sure exactly what lowly jobs he did, but within a year he'd published a first, text story in Captain America Comics (issue 3, cover date May 1941), and a year after that when Goodman fired star talents Joe Simon and Jack Kirby for skipping hours to work on other publishers' titles, Stan ended up as editor-in-chief, aged just 19. Yet, within months of that, he handed over responsibility to someone else and enlisted in the army.

Adrian's good on sifting the different accounts of how Kirby and Simon lost their jobs - their prior disagreements with Goodman over unpaid royalties, and the never-proven suspicion that Stan may have been involved in how they came to be fired. But it's the non-comics business that made my jaw drop: among the handful of writers Stan worked with in the USASC Army Pictorial Service during the war (Stan claimed there were "eight other men"), were director Frank Capra and artists Charles Addams - later to create The Addams Family - and Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr Seuss. Make a film out of that!

After the war, Stan returned to comics, doggedly working in the industry for more than a decade before hitting it big with the superheroes that made him famous. That success came when he was in his 40s, which I must admit is a comfort to this jaded old hack. Adrian's good at placing that success in the context of teenage baby boomers and the counterculture, so you understand why these costumed freaks caught on, and what made Marvel hold its own against or even outsell its competitors.

He's also good on the struggles to push Marvel beyond the printed page, the failed efforts to replicate the success of the Batman TV series of the 60s, Superman movie of the 70s and then Batman in the 80s. As all this was going on, Lee would go for dinner with his old schoolmate Bob Kane - a friendly rivalry between the creators of Batman and Spider-Man. The comics were making a lot of money, but the sense is one of frustration, creative spats, unfulfilled ambition. It's all very male-dominated and embittered, increasingly more so as the profits rise. Stan seems to have stayed largely out of it, or to have forced that steely grin.

I was never much of a Marvel Comics reader and much of the story is new to me, but I was surprised how much Stan and Marvel had a hand in things I did get into - the comic strip version of Star Wars, the TV series Dungeons and Dragons, even My Little Pony of which my daughter is now a devotee. There's a lot on the wider context of publishing and popular culture, even politics where it is relevant. Adrian nicely uses his own childhood experience of reading and collecting comics to explain the bursting bubble in the industry during the mid-90s - and in doing so made me understand why some of my older colleagues lost their jobs at that time. There's a warning here about saturating markets aimed solely at "collectors". It chimes, too, with the recent scandal in football, and the widening split between management and fans.

It all looks pretty gloomy at this point in the story but, like any superhero movie, there's then last-minute salvation with the success of some movies based on Marvel properties (Blade, X-men and Spider-Man) then leading to Marvel producing its own films - to extraordinary success in the last decade. I'm not sure I needed to know which ones Adrian does and doesn't like (he is wrong about Black Panther being "rather overrated"), but he's shrewd on what made the movies work when so many other superhero films didn't, what lessons might be learned from them, and also in not losing perspective.

"The truth is, only a handful of the MCU films are exceptional. Most of them are solid and a few are so-so. But none are objectively terrible." (p.163)

There's a final twist in the closing pages where Adrian addresses the scandals in Stan's closing years with those close to him accused of elder abuse and exploitation. Adrian then digs in to try and make more sense of the real Stanley Lieber rather than the "legend" Stan Lee. He cites a few examples where we get a sense of the man behind the showbiz mask - the "teeth" displayed in a contract negotiation, the sense he could sometimes be rude or have an off day. My clever old boss Ned Hartley is quoted, suggesting that "alienation" and "anxiety" evident in the comics "give a window into Stan's soul" (p. 167). 

All in all, it's an engrossing, insightful book, full of boggling detail and wise analysis. The feeling at the end, I think, is that for all Stan was in the limelight and for all he gave the world in terms of popular culture, he always held something back - and so remains a tantalising mystery.

• I used to make short films with Adrian Mackinder, including The Plotters and Wizard

Doctor Who: 1984

Episode 614: Resurrection of the Daleks, part two
First broadcast: 6.50 pm, Wednesday 15 February 1984
<< back to 1983

The Doctor and Tegan part company
Resurrection of the Daleks, part two

When Tegan - one of the longest-serving companions in Doctor Who - finally leaves the TARDIS, she says it's because something's changed.

TEGAN:
A lot of good people have died today. I think I'm sick of it.

DOCTOR:
You think I wanted it this way?

TEGAN:
No. It's just that I don't think I can go on.

DOCTOR:
You want to stay on Earth.

TEGAN:
My Aunt Vanessa said, when I became an air stewardess, if you stop enjoying it, give it up.

DOCTOR:
Tegan

TEGAN:
It's stopped being fun, Doctor.

Two things strike me about this. First, something was changing in Doctor Who at the time. After the fun of The Five Doctors, the new season began with Warriors from the Deep, where the Doctor is unable to stop a massacre. The next story, The Awakening, is fun but there's something unusually bleak about the human colony in Frontios, the last of humanity dwindling away on some distant backwater. And then there's the bloodbath of Resurrection - by some margin the highest bodycount of any Doctor Who story.

I've read quite a few theories about what's going on: that the Fifth Doctor was a feminised version of our hero, or it's the influence of Blake's 7, or the production team (and audience) were more keen on grislier stories (perhaps after the perceived success of Earthshock). The trend certainly continues after the Fifth Doctor's gone; the Sixth Doctor sometimes seen peripheral to the grotesque events on screen.

But the Doctor wasn't alone. In 1986, Alan Moore wrote an introduction to a grisly version of another children's hero:

"Whatever changes may have been wrought in the comics themselves, the image of Batman most permanently fixed in the mind of the of the general populace is that of Adam West delivering outrageously straight-faced camp dialogue while walking up a wall thanks to the benefit of stupendous special effects and a camera turned on its side."

Alan Moore, "The Mark of Batman", introduction to Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, p. ii.

Moore doesn't mention Doctor Who, but cites criticism of other men - Tarzan, Alan Quartermain and James Bond - whose simplistic heroism no longer seemed quite to satisfy. He makes his own case for why that might be:

"The world about us has changed at and ever-accelerating pace. So have we. With the increase in media coverage and information technology, we see more of the world, comprehend its workings a little more clearly, and as a result our perception of ourselves and the society surrounding us has been modified. Consequently, we begin to make different demands upon the art and culture that is meant to reflect the constantly shifting landscape we find ourselves in. We demand new themes, new insights, new dramatic situations.
We demand new heroes."

Ibid., pp. i-ii.

I don't think that's right. Quartermain first appeared in 1885, so why should he suddenly be found wanting 100 years later? Yes, I know, there'd been criticism of figures like this before then, but in the mid 80s there seems to have been a major shift in how we related to heroes.

I wonder how much it was history: how much did Vietnam and Watergate create anxieties about the traditional hero? (I'm thinking less of Rambo here as The A-Team). And how much was there also a crisis going on in the grand ideological narratives of the 20th Century once the East started cosying up to the West? The James Bond films were well ahead of the game in dealing with detente, but for all Bond is recast and redefined with a harder edge in The Living Daylights (1987), there's a sense that real-world politics are leaving him behind...

But there's another possible reason. Note that all these heroes are white men. So is this discomfort with traditional heroism the result of decades of agitation about sexual and racial politics slowing filtering through into the mainstream?

Adam West isn't necessarily the public's fixed image of Batman. We're now used to - indeed, expect - a psychologically complex Bond and Batman and Doctor, tortured by self-doubt and age and the loss of loved ones.

And if that's the case, how much was Bond and the Doctor both losing their broad appeal in the late 1980s less the fault of particular production decisions as a sign of the times?

Secondly, hang on: Tegan, of all the companions, who spent three years in Doctor Who complaining, is the one to say it's stopped being fun?

Next episode: 1985

Operation Thunderball

As I've read my way through Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, it's been fun comparing the films that were made out of them. Some books are faithfully transposed from page to screen, others bear almost no resemblance. Plots and characters from one book might be used in the film of another.

Thunderball is different. It was adapted into more than one movie – Thunderball (1965) and Never Say Never Again (1983), with plans for a third called Warhead 2000 AD. But the book is itself a novelisation of a screenplay: it was meant to be the first James Bond film, the script written by Fleming himself and a gang of pals. Does that make it different from the other novels?

First, is the plot any more cinematic than previous Bond books? A new super-team of villains nicking atomic bombs and holding the US and UK to ransom does seem a movie sort of plot. Compare it to some Bond books and it’s a lot bigger and more visual. Casino Royale is all about a card game, From Russia With Love is mostly taken up with the bureaucracy of the Russian secret service and Moonraker is set in rainy Dover. But Thunderball isn’t bigger or bolder than Doctor No (so no wonder that was chosen to be the first movie when rights over Thunderball got tricky).

What's more, the structure of Thunderball is really odd. It starts with Bond being sent to a health farm by an evangelical M, who's on a health kick himself. I wasn’t exactly thrilled at the prospect of Bond eating yoghurt. The films concur and both tack on a more exciting opening sequence before Bond goes to the farm.

The farm is still a big problem. While there, Bond just so happens to stumble into a chap with a crucial part to play in the bomb conspiracy. As I said a hundred years ago:

“It's a whopping great coincidence in Thunderball that Bond happens to be in the same health farm as the baddies. That is, unless either a) it being right next to a NATO base means the Secret Service can get a discount, or b) M has had a tip-off.

Though the latter seems not to play when Bond phones in his suspicions about Count Lippi's tattoo: Moneypenny reminds him how he's on leave.”

Me, Oddfelt, 23 August 2006.

It’s a pity that Bond is suspicious of Lippi based on little more than that he's of mixed race but drives a nice car. He’s not the greatest of villains either, his uncontrollable temper almost ruining SPECTRE’s plan. Fleming himself seems a bit unsure about,

“this rather childish trial of strength between two extremely tough and ruthless men, in the bizarre surroundings of a health clinic in Sussex”.

Ian Fleming, Thunderball, p. 43.

Later, when Felix Leiter helpfully guesses how the man Bond fought at the health farm might be connected to the conspiracy, Bond says it’s the sort of nonsense one might dream up on mescaline (p. 122). This is not the only time Fleming undermines his own plotting.

Perhaps, I thought, the health farm is there to inject new life into the old Bond – who must be a bit battered and scarred after so many wild adventures (he, er, died at the end of From Russia With Love). Or it’s a canny way of excusing any changes in the character on screen – his being younger, less grumpy, more fun.

Except that Bond’s new-found good health only lasts a few pages before he’s back to his hard-drinking habits. What’s more, he and M being healthy horrifies the women around them. In Chapter 7, Bond's housekeeper and secretary are both appalled by him eating yoghurt and looking good. But Miss Moneypenny promises that, like M, he'll soon be on the “champagne cure” again, so hungover and difficult once more. She says:

“‘It's really the best for men. It makes them awful, but at least they're human like that. It's when they're godlike one can’t stand them’”.

Ibid., p. 65.

Bond’s record of health, as spelled out by M, is not so far from the author’s: too much smoking, boozing and good food, too little due care and attention. So perhaps this is an acknowledgement of Fleming’s own inability to change his unhealthy lifestyle.

There’s also something different about Moneypenny. When we first met her in Casino Royale, she was cool and sure, and almost seemed to run the secret service:

"What do you think, Penny?' The Chief of Staff turned to M's private secretary who shared the room with him.

Miss Moneypenny would have been desirable but for eyes which were cool and direct and quizzical.

‘Should be all right. He won a victory at the FO this morning and he's not got anyone for the next half an hour.' She smiled encouragingly at the Head of S whom she liked for himself and the importance of his section.'"

Ian Fleming, Casino Royale, p. 23.

She’s always kept her distance from Bond and the other 00s – knowing they don’t survive long. But in Thunderball, we’re told she “often dreamed hopelessly about Bond” and there’s perhaps a hint of girlish fussiness in her having a beloved poodle (p. 14). Whereas before she seemed unattainable (and therefore strong), now she flirts openly with Bond – although I’m not sure “flirts” is quite the right word. For example, Bond tells Moneypenny that he smokes because,

“it's really only that I don't know what to do with my hands”.

Moneypenny responds,

“that's not what I've heard”.

Ian Fleming, Thunderball, p. 15.

I think that’s meant to suggest he knows his way around a lady, but it made me think at first that she'd called him a wanker. He then threatens her with a spanking, and though she gets the last word she’d also have a case for workplace harassment.

Is the change in Moneypenny a result of this being written for the screen – it’s cinema not prose that demands her subservience? Or is it the result of Fleming working on the original screenplay with a bunch of other (male) writers, so that something of his original character got lost? Or would she have been diluted anyway, a slow erosion book-by-book of her original character?

The books’ attitude to women is as fascinating as it is odd. Fleming (or Bond) often compliments women by likening them to men: the best Bond girls have boyish buttocks and masculine attitudes. In introducing new Bond girl Domino in Thunderball, we’re told that she drives like a man. And just in case we don’t fully understand this compliment:

“Women are often meticulous and safe drivers, but they are very seldom first-class. In general Bond regarded them as a mild hazard and he always gave them plenty of road and was ready for the unpredictable. Four women in a car he regarded as the highest potential danger, and two women nearly as lethal. Women together cannot keep silent in a car, and women talk they have to look into each other's faces. An exchange of words is not enough. They have to see the other person's expression, perhaps in order to read behind the other's words or to analyse the reaction to their own. So two women in the front seat of a car constantly distract each other's attention from the road ahead and four women are more than doubly dangerous, for the driver not only has to hear, and see, what her companion is saying, but also, for women are like that, what the two behind are talking about.”

Ibid., pp. 109-10.

My pet theory is that Fleming worked this stuff into his books for his own entertainment and perhaps to annoy his wife, who looked down on the trashy adventures that financed their expensive lifestyle. But there’s plenty of evidence that he’s also just (to use a line from a later film) a sexist, misogynist dinosaur.

We can see how out of touch he is early on, when Bond chats to the young taxidriver taking him to the health farm. This kid, feels Bond (who served in the war), doesn’t know how lucky he is.

“He was born into the buyers' market of the Welfare State and into the age of atomic bombs and space flight. For him life was easy and meaningless.”

Ibid., p. 16.

I love the idea of Bond thinking life is easy for the young folks because they could be blown up at any moment. And yet, by page 17, Bond and this kid are equals – and can discuss the important matters of the day. It reminds me of the end of David Niven’s The Moon’s a Balloon, where the old man goes to a young people’s party. It’s a desperate attempt to suggest that the old guy is still relevant, still hip. But the more effort put into convince us, the more plainly it doesn’t hold true.

A page later, the taxidriver tells Bond about a local prostitute who’s done well out of the healthfarm’s rich clients. It’s an unusual bit of social realism from Bond – a sense of the strange and dirty goings on every day beneath the respectable veneer of austerity Britain. With its reference to Brighton gangs, it's a little like something by Graham Greene.

References to Rosemary Clooney (p. 19) and North by Northwest (p. 85) add a touch of realism and set the book firmly in it’s time. Bond also gets a fashionable shag in a bubble-car. And we get a hint of an as-yet untold Bond adventure, when he jumped for the Arlberg Express to escape someone called Heinkel in 1956 – during the uprising in Hungary.

The events of Thunderball occur in May and June of 1959 (p. 70) – two years before the book’s publication. May 1959 seems to be when Fleming met with the other collaborators to work on the screenplay, long before it became a novel. (The screenplay was written by Fleming, Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham, Ivar Bryce and Ernest Cuneo – the book is dedicated to the latter.) So for all its efforts at relevance, it’s set explicitly in the recent past. Bond films seem to be set just a little in the future, where technology is more advanced. Fleming seems to be taking a leaf from the Sherlock Holmes stories – telling us a ‘true’ story once it’s safe to do so.

Except that it isn’t safe. The nuclear bombs are recovered but the big, new villain gets away – indeed, he’s barely seen after he’s been introduced.

We learn on page 47 that Ernst Stavro Blofeld was born on 28 May 1908. That’s Fleming's own date of birth, but the likeness to Fleming quickly ends there. We're told, straight away, that Blofeld was born in Gdynia to a Polish father and Greek mother – another villain of mixed heritage. There then follows pages of description: his life and looks (he has feminine eyelashes), that he doesn't drink, smoke or have sex. He’s the opposite of Anglo-Saxon Bond (we’ve not yet learnt about Bond’s parents not being entirely English). References to Mussolini, Hitler and Rommell mixed in with the description help suggest Blofeld's in the same league.

Like From Russia With Love, there's lots on the villains planning their diabolical crime and the pains they've taken, to make it seem all the more impossible for Bond to beat. Chapter 5, which introduces Blofeld and SPECTRE, is full of authoritative detail: names of people and organisations that make it seem real and researched. I almost felt I ought to recognise some of these references. Fleming is almost saying to the reader, “As you know...”, making you complicit, making you agree.

The film Thunderball uses the same telling moment when Blofeld kills one of his underlings in the midst of a meeting. But in the book version, the underling’s mistake is that his team “violated” a girl they had kidnapped and ransomed. Blofeld insists that:

“SPECTRE shall conduct itself in a superior fashion”.

Ibid., p. 56.

As well as killing the underling, he apologises to the girl’s family and send back half of the ransom - I’m sure that would make them feel better. But this odd, fussy detail is just a more extreme example of Bond’s views on Windsor knots and the correct way to make omelettes. It's meant to show he's exacting, precise but edges – or leaps – into camp. Or is Blofeld bothered because he finds all that sex business beastly?

In the films, we learn of SPECTRE and Blofeld piece-by-piece. The film of Doctor No mentions the organisation over dinner, and SPECTRE then seeks to avenge his death in From Russia With Love. Goldfinger doesn't mention either SPECTRE or Blofeld, but when we get to Thunderball we already know what they're capable of. That killing of an underling is perhaps less shocking because we've already seen what they're capable of.

Having been introduced to Blofeld in the book, we then leave him behind. The theft will be handled by his second-in-command, Largo – a pirate complete with an eye-patch. Largo’s clever scheme is based on the Olterra,

“that merchant ship off Gibraltar during the war? The Italian frogmen used it as a base. Big sort of trap door affair cut in the hull below the waterline … One of the blackest marks against intelligence.”

Ibid., p. 133.

Fleming again seems keen to play it real. We’re told at some length about the kind of boat Largo uses and exactly where it was built. Later, Bond wants Domino to signal to him from her ship by turning the lights on in her cabin. She responds:

“‘That is a silly plan. It is the sort of melodramatic nonsense people write about in thrillers. In real life people don't go into their cabins and switch on their lights in daylight.’”

Ibid., p. 189.

Unfortunately, she's not such a natural secret agent, getting caught by Largo when she takes photos with the lens cap still on her “camera”.

We learn that Domino is the sister of Giuseppe Petacchi – the pilot who steals the bombs for Largo and is murdered for his efforts. In both films that's part of Largo's plan – he's manipulated Domino and her relationship with her brother cynically. Yet in the book it's a coincidence that her brother is mixed up in the plot.

“Probably even Largo, if Largo was in fact involved in the plot, didn't know this”.

Ibid., p.158.

Bond uses the death of Giuseppe to turn Domino against Largo. But, as I said, she gets caught and is tortured – and is left all tied up. So it's again a lucky coincidence that she escapes just in time to save Bond at the crucial moment and avenge her brother by killing Largo. All plots are contrivances, but this feels too much like cheating – and it undermines all the excitement Fleming has brewed up so far. If the resolution all hinges on coincidence and good fortune, then the ending is down to destiny rather than the skill of James Bond. He – and Sherlock Holmes and the Doctor – are at their best when they win by being smart and brave, not absurdly jammy.

Bond calls in the big guns for the chase at the end – he and Felix pursue Largo's yacht in a nuclear submarine. Captain Peter Pedersen rails against the madness of the nuclear arsenal in his charge – enough of them to wipe out England. He's meant to be the voice of ordinary common sense, offering Bond tea and tales of his idyllic wife and kids. That's reasonableness is not helped by him repeatedly using the word “niggerheads” to describe a type of coral (from p. 199). And when he tells us (on p. 212) that the interior of the nuclear submarine is multicoloured and optically interesting to stop the crew going mad, it's not exactly reassuring. Perhaps there's something of Neville Shute's On The Beach about it - published four years before.

Bond likes Pedersen – we can tell because he doesn't find petty ways to undermine him, as he sometimes does with those in authority. When they're first establishing their credentials, Bond admits,

“I was in intelligence – RNVR Special Branch. Strictly a chocolate sailor”.

Ibid., p. 195.

Which is not, in turns out, another way of saying “sea bent”. When Bond leaves the sub to swim after Largo, he has a big number one painted on his wet suit – which would surely make him quite a target. In the book, he's in a standard black wetsuit, but the film puts the villains in black and the goodies in friendlier orange. Bond doesn't even wear the leggings – and the more naked he is as he goes into battle, the cooler he seems.

I said of Casino Royale that it's the villains who have the gadgets – and, effectively, cheat. But Thunderball is most like the films in giving Bond a lot of cool toys and vehicles to call on when he needs them. Again, I think Bond's at his best when being smart against the odds, without this Batman-like gadgetry.

On the whole, the films follow Fleming's book. Both films split Domino in two. Domino is a nice, demure girl who'd never drive dangerously. And then there's Fiona Volpe and Fatima Blush – bad girls who die not long after Bond's shagged them.

But a lot of the cool sense of humour and innuendo in the films is Fleming's. Some of it edges of the filthy, as when Domino treads on a poisonous spine and Bond offers to help eat out the poison.

“This is the first time I've eaten a woman. They're rather good”.

Ibid., p. 184.

The film has Bond and Domina make love underwater rather than in a beach hut, which I'm informed by a diving chum isn't possible (cos man bits shrivel up in cold water).

The other big change is that Blofeld doesn't have a cat in the book – when we don't see the man's face in From Russia With Love and Thunderball, the cat makes him much more identifiable.

Blofeld's a great and intriguing character, introduced as a big deal at the start of the book, then vanishing halfway through (except for a couple of phonecalls to update him on progress). That's nicely done – creating a sense of scale that reaches wider than book and promising a rematch. Looking forward to the next adventure is something new to the series (where From Russia With Love killed off Bond. It's what the films will do, but here with a slight twist:

The end of Thunderball, but Blofeld will return...

Film Focus: Batman Begins

Between 2005 and 2006 I wrote seven reviews and one interview for the website Film Focus, which sadly has gone to the great Internet Archive in the sky. Thanks to Joe Utichi for employing me in the first place and letting me re-post the stuff here, which I’ll be doing over the next week.

Batman Begins - Revolver - The Constant Gardener - King Kong - Kidulthood - Mirrormask - Interview with director Dave McKean - The Great Escape

Batman Begins
Reviewed 14 June 2005

[In brief]
Bruce Wayne has messed it up big time. He’s dropped out of college, fallen out with his girl, run off from home, even started thieving… Now he’s ended up in some miserable little prison thousands of miles from anywhere, and the inmates all want him dead. And why? Well, when he was little he had a nightmare, and it got his mummy and daddy killed. If only someone could help him face his fear, to control it, use it… That way he could get back home and sort stuff out. And not just his inheritance and that nice girl he liked. He could probably clean up the whole city...

Even in fancy dress.

[In full]
To a large extent, superhero movies – like Bond flicks, or romantic comedies – are about reshuffling standard, generic elements. They promise something familiar yet new. Batman Begins is no exception. A lot of the ground – Bruce Wayne’s efforts to be better than those he battles, to face his parents’ killers and choose justice over revenge – were well-covered in both Batman and Batman Forever. There are overlaps with Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2, and not just in how he (literally) learns the ropes, wins over the authorities and keep his girlfriend sweet. Batman Begins boasts a remarkably reminiscent fistfight aboard an inner-city train, and the final one-on-one with the baddie is similarly emblematic of the bigger battle for the city itself.

So it’s all very well being well-written and directed and acted, and exciting and funny and cool… What’s actually makes this one different?

For one thing it’s far bleaker than Spider-Man, perhaps more so than even Tim Burton’s arch-goth vision of the Dark Knight. It’s not ‘magical’, not ‘comic-book’, less Batman + Robin as it like Christopher Nolan’s previous, bleak movies, Memento and Insomnia.

In that, it owes a lot to the comic book Batman: Year One, by David Mazzucchelli and Frank Miller – prior to his creating Sin City. Wayne and Jim Gordon seem the only men left in the city with scruples, the only men willing to make a stand against the endemic corruption of everyone – judges, policemen, everyone. Gotham City, like Wayne himself, needs to recover its soul.

The villains of Batman Begins aren’t costumed freaks, even if their plans are a bit whacky. Dr Jonathan Crane still has his work clothes on as Scarecrow; he just pulls on a mask, like any other hoodlum. Wayne’s parents aren’t gunned down by the Joker (this time), but by a down-on-his-luck crook called Joe Chill.

But what makes the film especially ‘realistic’ (compared to other superhero movies) is the muted use of CGI. Oh, it’s still spectacular: watching it at IMAX, the car chase, with the cops in hot pursuit of the Batmobile, is eye-popping! Yet, while Spider-Man’s web-slinging though New York had a comic-book gloss, here the effects are rarely ostentatious. The car chase looks like they really are chasing about in cars. Real ones. Scarecrow’s nightmarish mask is probably the worst CG offender, but we only ever see it sparingly. That’s the secret. Batman, likewise, appears onscreen only fleetingly for his first few appearances, which just makes him that much more powerful. The shadows and sound effects do all the work for him. As they should.

The film is keen to deal with the actual mechanics of being Batman. As well as seeing the military labs from where all his crime-fighting gear comes, as well as seeing his suit and his car and his weapons as military hardware, we’re even told how the invoicing is done, and why he’s always got spare bits of Batsuit when he needs them. The biggest explanation of all, though, and the one that really grounds the film in ‘reality’, is just why a bloke dressed up as a flying rodent might not be such a silly idea.

Yes, it’s stuff we’ve had before in previous Batman movies, but Batman Begins really tries to make it credible. Fear is the motivation of both goodies and baddies alike; overcoming their own and exploiting that of others. We see tough guys rendered imbecile by too much of a nasty scare, while a room full of ninjas is nothing to Bruce, so long as he’s conquered his nightmares. They’ve even changed his parents’ last night out to fit in with the theme – they’ve not taken their already traumatised son to a cheesy old Zorro film, but instead to some weird, scary opera.

It’s good, though, that the Jedi-like stuff where Bruce learns his tricks is dispensed with early on. Montage of ninjas, and training out in the wilderness, and hard-won zen wisdom usually comes in the middle of rights-of-passage films, and it’s always rather humourless, dour and macho. Batman Begins is done with them in the first half hour, and when Alfred (Michael Caine) turns up to collect Master Bruce, a much better movie kicks off.

Alfred’s straight-forward, keep-buggering-on attitude is the film’s real heart. He shares the best gags with the other careworn older men – Morgan Freeman’s Fox and Gary Oldman’s Gordon. And yes, Oldman is easily in the same class as the other two. Still, for all it’s grounded in this good-naturedness, the film is still extremely male. There are strong supporting roles for Liam Neeson, Linus Roache, Cillian Murphy, Tom Wilkinson and Rutger Hauer – enough to keep you guessing about which of them might get most of the plot – but there’s only really one woman in the whole thing.

Katie Holmes is fine as the stubbornly-moral district attorney, disappointed by Bruce’s wild lifestyle. The mix of love and anger and despair she feels for Bruce works very well. But Bruce’s mother gets less to say than his blink-and-miss-her nanny. And then there are only the window dressing ladies Bruce chats up or takes to dinner… women who are playthings, not people.

It also loses points for misjudged schmaltz. Batman stops to give one of his gizmos to a wide-eyed little boy (worried his friends won’t believe who he saw), and the boy then turns up again later (conveniently), to be saved from the midst of a riot. Yeah, the child actor is okay, does the wide-eyed thing well, and manages to act his lines rather than just repeat them. But it feels too much of a sop. Yes, we can believe that the streetkids would love Batman, but not that he’d stop for them, or – much worse – volunteer his top-secret toys.

Bale, however, is excellent. He does looks a bit podgy and uncomfortable in the Batman mask, but this is the first film where the Bruce Wayne persona doesn’t seem as tortured and messed-up as the Dark Knight. It’s a delight to see him work just as hard, to think just as quickly, in maintaining his playboy persona as he does when beating the crap out of villains.

The film nicely dovetails the gains made to the city by Wayne as businessman with Wayne dressed up in rubber, hitting bad guys. It ties it in with his family history – his father helping ease the city’s troubles (even, it seems, with his death), and his ancestors helping freed slaves during the Civil War. That sense of public duty offers a more realistic solution to urban decay than we might have gathered from just the fighting. On first appearance, Batman saves the day by… well, despite everything the film seems to have been saying, it’s all solved by someone firing a gun.

But the fight isn’t over. As Gordon says, Batman making a stand as he has will only escalate the problem. We’re left with the promise of bigger fights to come, with crazy villains. And in costumes. Maybe there’ll even be some women, as well.

Gotta be larger than life

As well as jamming lasagne and booze down my head-hole, Psychonomy leant me comics on Saturday. The collected edition of DC: The New Frontier comes in two volumes – a bit odd considering it's just a six-issue run. Both volumes together aren't nearly as thick as DC's famous Watchmen.

In other ways, it's very reminiscent of Watchmen. It plays on twee nostalgia for the golden age of comics – all beefcake heroes and gee-golly earnest dialogue. The wheeze here – as with Watchmen – is that, as well as super villains, our heroes get entangled in real historical events. That makes the familiar archetypes problematic. The civil rights movement and the Cold War muddy up simple gradations of “good” and “bad”. Our heroes are faced with – and commit - “necessary” evils, the moments of bloody violence all the more shocking for being side-by-side with the cheesy clichés.

Like Watchmen, we reappraise the characters as we go, learning about them, seeing them change – getting the kind of development that's still pretty rare in the medium. Like Watchmen, the heroes must unite to stop the world being destroyed by a vast monster from hell, an End of Level Baddie that doesn't talk back and they have just have to Kill.

What this ostensibly has over Watchmen, though, is that it's not specially invented heroes here. It's Superman fighting in Korea, Batman being charged of UnAmerican Activities, Wonder Woman stitched up by Nixon. New Frontiers is a radical new origins story for the Justice League – that is, the gang of space heroes comprising Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and a whole bunch of their less-famous friends.

And that's where I found it difficult. There are a hell of a lot of less-famous friends crammed in here, and it's kind of assumed you know who they all are. One whole plotline revolves around a guy whose dad flew with Chuck Yeager but who keeps being cut out of the action. Only late on – when he gains super powers – did it occur to me that all the stalling would seem more clever had I recognised his name. He introduces himself early on as Hal Jordan – real name of Superman's less-famous friend, Green Lantern.

The comic is playing, probably cleverly, on the expectation of readers who already know Hal's name. But I didn't, so it kind of whooshed me by. Likewise, I assume the hero John Henry is some other DC character I'd just never heard of, or he’s related to one or somehow cleverly mirroring someone else... No, I didn't need anyone to explain.

This is something that Neil Gaiman's 1602 could have floundered on. The wheeze there is packing all Marvel’s famous characters into Elizabethan England – so the X-Men are hunted as witches, and so on. Gaiman wisely chose to focus on the more famous Marvel heroes. A gag of a spider not biting Peter Parker works because even relative comic-book dunces know the basic premise of Spider-Man.

New Frontiers works well at mixing the complex comic continuity with real and complex history. The bizarre clash of black and white heroism with murky politics gives the story real frisson. But often the clashes are just too bizarre. When the vicious thug Batman suddenly reveals that he didn't fall out with Superman, it works as a nice character thing. But when that about-turn also shows him teamed up with a mad-keen, cart-wheeling Boy Wonder, even Superman boggles:

Superman: “Bruce, you're such a cynic. Which begs the question, what's with the new look and the sidekick?”

Batman: “I set out to scare criminals, not children. As for the boy... Well, I guess we're just two lost souls who found each other.”

Darwyn Cooke, DC: The New Frontier, Volume II, chapter 11.

Okay, so he didn’t beat up on Superman, but we’ve seen him terrorising criminals and breaking a guy’s wrists. Having bedded the story in complex history, Robin feels a glibly, awkwardly shoehorned in.

I suspect my problem is that I'm less impressed by this squeezing in of so much continuity, though I can see it would reward more DC's faithful readers. New Frontiers is reminiscent of Watchmen, but it's not quite as smart and lacks the moments of meekness and humour that counterpoint all the muscular hero stuff. More than that, by creating its own superheroes and history, Watchmen need only refer to continuity when it suits the story.

New Frontiers is great in places and a very involving read. But its very selling point – that it uses DC’s own canon of heroes – is what makes it not quite work.

I have a name for my pain

M. rather marvellously smuggled me into the IMAX last night for a press screening of The Dark Knight. It's a huge, 2.5 hour epic full of thrill and excitement, and six whole scenes of especially IMAX-tastic hugeness. Golly.

Long-toothed readers of this blog may recall my review of Batman Begins for Film Focus, where I dared suggest the general cool marvellousness was a little dulled by the lack of good roles for women. Rachel, now played by Maggie Gyllenhaal rather than Mrs Tom Cruise, seems to agree. She's now shacking up with Harvey Dent, the cool district attorney and white knight to the city – a man who's everything Bruce/Bats can't be.

But Harvey doesn't just want Bruce's girl, he also wants in on Batman's crusade to bring down the Gotham mob. The mob, led by my old mate Eric Roberts (well, I met him once), is a bit cheesed off by all this and then find themselves being made an offer they can't refuse by a kray-zee new kid called the Joker.

The late Heath Ledger's performance has been the focus for a lot of reviews so far, and it's an eye-popping, compelling and terrifying thing. Yes, Ledger should get an Oscar nomination, but then Nicholson should have had one for the same role 19 years ago. To my delight, there's no (single) explanation for where the Joker comes from here or what unhinged him. He's all the more appalling for not being explained. While Bats and Bruce and all their good-guy pals wrangle over how and when they can bend their own rules, Joker's an anarchic live-wire just in it for the explosions. The violence comes without warning; it's a shocking, brutal film and not all the regulars will be back for the third one.

As I argued with the first one, comic-book movies are all about reshuffling the established genre rules and conventions so that they come out looking new. The Dark Knight is a lot more complex, rich and full of strange moral ideas than it has really any need to be, which give the huge-scale set pieces and fast-cut fighting that much more of an edge.

It's still relentlessly male. There's really only two women in it besides Rachel: Jim Gordon's colleague Ramirez and his wife Barbara. And, I'd argue, both are there because of what they add to Jim, rather than having roles and motives of their own.

Yet it's notable that our regulars are faced with these reflections; their motives and behaviour is constantly being questioned by all sides. This doesn't bolster one particular viewpoint that comes with all the answers (as in Socratic dialogue) as to continually muddy the water. The film has plenty to say about vigilantes and civil liberties, but from lots of different voices. Batman and the goodies give their best to the cause, but the question hanging over them through it whether that best is good enough.

Batman Begins seemed to be riffing of stuff in old comics Year One and The Long Halloween. This nicks elements from The Dark Knight Returns and, I'd argue, The Killing Joke. Spider-Man has already done the hero as emblematic of the city at large, an inspiration to ever more kray-zee super-villains and yet also to the noble instincts of the city's people. There's a nice prisoner's dilemma late on in this (which I won't spoil here) that hangs on how Joker – and Batman – expect people to behave.

It reminded me of Midnight in that it's not just the predicament that's so horrifying but how characters react to it. The result, though, felt a bit too plot convenient rather than earned: two characters respond in way that's surprising because it's not consistent with what little we know about them...

That makes it sound like a criticism, but it's less a niggle as it having been swimming round my feeble brain all day. While I'm meant to be writing my own set-piece action adventure I'm tonguing the sore-tooth of the film's “message”. I'm not sure it has one. Does Batman win at the end? Are things any better for his having been involved? How thrilling, innovative and bold that such a mainstream movie doesn't seem to know...