I would rather my ghosts were Victorian scary strangers than modern-day, cheery mates to hang around with at the pub. I like Turn of the Screw-type supernatural - dark and dangerous like that chocolate which is nearly all cocoa, as mysterious as a bat flit in a graveyard, with all the cunning of a dispatch of demons. Such spirits, out to destroy a world they can no longer inhabit, have me hiding behind the curtains, screaming for my garlic tablets.
But the ghost, werewolf and vampire trio of flatmates in the return of Being Human (BBC3), are twenty-somethings, trying to live normal lives, despite struggling with their unusual afflictions. Their worries are about the next full moon, walking in parks after dark and just being dead, especially as they appear larger than life. They could be three NQTs realising what schools are like, exchanging notes on difficult classes.
Yet even off-the-wall classes seem desirable when the alternative is waking up naked in the woods with a half-eaten stag for company. Werewolf George (Russell Tovey) had a stag night to remember and he wasn't even getting married. Dancing with deer spiced up his day job as a hospital porter and there was plenty to eat. He also got to have "weresex" with a ghost, giving new meaning to the term transsexual. In today's supernatural society, even the boundaries of acceptable inhuman behaviour are shifting.
The ghost mocked George for keeping his bits covered. But George had no such modesty about revealing a fine set of werewolf teeth. I reckon he would need to get those gnashers fixed on the NHS though, as it would cost a mint to go private.
George's girlfriend, Nina, blamed him for turning her into a werewolf, too. He scratched her. That's all it took. She didn't even believe in homeopathy before her transformation. Suddenly she is bursting, more hog than wolf-like from her clothes, ready to tear out someone's throat. And she no longer wants to have sex with him. That's why the lady is a vamp.
If these were the good guys, the baddies were evangelical Christians, those clean-shaven, Sunday-suited enthusiasts that normally do door-to-door spiritual sales. Professor Jaggat and his sidekick, the cold-hearted Kemp, were determined to destroy all supernatural creatures. They engaged in violent experiments, using something that looked like the Large Hadron Collider to squeeze the blood out of their victims. I prefer the garlic cure.
As all this sounds like pantomime, I was expecting a sprinkling of vampire jokes. You know the kind of thing: "Don't let your soup get cold or it will clot." It didn't sink so low, but I rather wish it had. Where were the poltergeist punch lines, quick quips, with the sharpness of a bat bite to surprise? Supposedly a comedy drama with lots of fans, this may be "cult occult", but I found it not so much panto as pants
Ray Tarleton
Monday, 25 January 2010
Tuesday, 19 January 2010
Tune in, switch off - Wrap up with Wallander
There is something rather appealing about watching others battling snowy wastes when you have just been scraping ice off the car. So, safely warmed by a log fire, I shut out the weather by watching Wallander (BBC One), a gripping adaptation of Henning Mankell's novels.
The crumpled detective, played by Kenneth Branagh, spends most of his time crossing the flat, seemingly endless, Swedish landscape as if in a Volvo advert. Shot on location in Ystad, this gloom-filled morass is miles of tarmac and acres of sky - like Norfolk and the Fens. All that snow and not even a decent ski resort in sight.
But in truth, this new series is set in what passes there for summer. So that sky came with corn-filled fields, a real but symbolically slaughtered white horse and a sense of evil that oozed out of the TV set, almost extinguishing my fire.
Branagh, stubble-chinned and double-chinned, admits to feeling and looking a changed man at the end of filming, as the ghosts of the country get into his blood. If Wallander was one of your pupils, you would whisk him off for counselling at first sight of those large pleading eyes and that furrowed, burrowed grimace.
But once fixed - fixated even - on a crime, Wallander stays with his prey. "This is mine. It started with me. This is where it will end," he declaimed, with a determination matched only by his inner doubt. There was plenty of anguished questioning and slow exploration as he moved at the speed of the Eurostar in the wrong kind of snow. But when the shots were called, he fired them.
Perhaps there is something in the furniture varnish in this land of self-assembly flatpacks; or maybe it's having to repeatedly rescue his delusional dad (David Warner), who was dancing around a bonfire in his pyjamas. I reckon Wallander's special subjects on Mastermind would be misery and beating yourself up.
The double murder he was investigating was no health cure either. An elderly couple were attacked in their own home in a scene that could have been a Crimewatch reconstruction. Wallander was there in time to catch the old woman's denunciation of the culprits as "fs". He wondered if she had said "foreigners". I would have guessed differently. It sounded like the kind of language I would exclude for.
Disapproving of his daughter dating a Syrian (another f), he inadvertently triggered a racist media story that had the right-wing xenophobes reaching for their guns. Several murders later, including a dramatic killing by Wallander himself, the criminals were revealed as both foreigners and fairground workers. Did that make Wallander a racist or just good at crosswords?
This is what we might have to get used to if there is a change of government, as shadow education secretary Michael Gove plans to introduce elements of the Swedish education system here. We would soon know how easy his Ikea, do-it-yourself version of schools would be to assemble. But given the quality of the writing in Wallander, I think I would just stick to putting a Mankell novel on the literature syllabus.
Ray Tarleton
The crumpled detective, played by Kenneth Branagh, spends most of his time crossing the flat, seemingly endless, Swedish landscape as if in a Volvo advert. Shot on location in Ystad, this gloom-filled morass is miles of tarmac and acres of sky - like Norfolk and the Fens. All that snow and not even a decent ski resort in sight.
But in truth, this new series is set in what passes there for summer. So that sky came with corn-filled fields, a real but symbolically slaughtered white horse and a sense of evil that oozed out of the TV set, almost extinguishing my fire.
Branagh, stubble-chinned and double-chinned, admits to feeling and looking a changed man at the end of filming, as the ghosts of the country get into his blood. If Wallander was one of your pupils, you would whisk him off for counselling at first sight of those large pleading eyes and that furrowed, burrowed grimace.
But once fixed - fixated even - on a crime, Wallander stays with his prey. "This is mine. It started with me. This is where it will end," he declaimed, with a determination matched only by his inner doubt. There was plenty of anguished questioning and slow exploration as he moved at the speed of the Eurostar in the wrong kind of snow. But when the shots were called, he fired them.
Perhaps there is something in the furniture varnish in this land of self-assembly flatpacks; or maybe it's having to repeatedly rescue his delusional dad (David Warner), who was dancing around a bonfire in his pyjamas. I reckon Wallander's special subjects on Mastermind would be misery and beating yourself up.
The double murder he was investigating was no health cure either. An elderly couple were attacked in their own home in a scene that could have been a Crimewatch reconstruction. Wallander was there in time to catch the old woman's denunciation of the culprits as "fs". He wondered if she had said "foreigners". I would have guessed differently. It sounded like the kind of language I would exclude for.
Disapproving of his daughter dating a Syrian (another f), he inadvertently triggered a racist media story that had the right-wing xenophobes reaching for their guns. Several murders later, including a dramatic killing by Wallander himself, the criminals were revealed as both foreigners and fairground workers. Did that make Wallander a racist or just good at crosswords?
This is what we might have to get used to if there is a change of government, as shadow education secretary Michael Gove plans to introduce elements of the Swedish education system here. We would soon know how easy his Ikea, do-it-yourself version of schools would be to assemble. But given the quality of the writing in Wallander, I think I would just stick to putting a Mankell novel on the literature syllabus.
Ray Tarleton
Friday, 8 January 2010
Tune in, switch off - The doctor will see you
The nation was transfixed by the promise of a virgin birth this Christmas. How we rejoiced in wondrous anticipation of a defining moment in history. Then, on New Year's Day, it came to pass just as foretold in the Radio Times: a new Dr Who was born. And he was called Matt Smith.
If William Hartnell, the first Dr Who, had stuck around, he would be 102 by now. Though I reckon that's still far too young to play a 900-year-old time lord. Half a human century has passed which, in Tardis time, is 10 galaxy-gallivanting Doctors.
Some things don't change though and his old enemy, the Master, was regenerated specially for the holiday double bill, The End of Time (BBC One). Disguised as a hoody, he had a raging hunger, devouring chicken and burgers at a rate that made those of us in Christmas dinner recovery position feel nauseous. But he burned the calories leaping over buildings as an expert free runner.
The Master transformed himself into everyone on the planet. "I'm everyone and everyone is me," he cackled, sounding like Lord Mandelson during a Cabinet reshuffle. Cloned, he was inside everyone's head.
Ironically, David Tennant was equally ubiquitous. There was no escaping him: in programme trailers riding reindeers, Tardis in tow; playing Hamlet; revealing limited musical taste on Desert Island Discs; appearing on Alan Carr: Chatty Man (Channel 4) and then on the Big Fat Quiz of the Year. Was he battling Simon Cowell for world domination?
By the new year finale, as well as thrilling space chases, we had a Darker Who, a melancholy figure, feeling the creep of death. He railed against unfairness, confessing to companion, Wilf (Bernard Cribbins), that his regeneration would mean: "A new man will go sauntering away".
The regally robed, pedantically plodding time lords turned up, like characters from a Royal Shakespeare Company history play, complete with the feared drumbeat of time. But the White Point Star Diamond they threw to Earth looked like a bargain from the new year sales.
And the Doctor's moral dilemma: would he murder the Master and re-make time or shoot the president of the time lords? He couldn't kill either - a "geekbump" moment for true Who fans.
Old friends and monsters made guest appearances in a 20-minute epilogue where the Doctor greeted his old sidekick Rose (Billie Piper), for example, in January 2005. She didn't recognise him. Either he had not yet met her for real, or perhaps he was Christopher Eccleston then. Finally, in the Tardis, Tennant was vapourised in a burst of flames. A coolly crazy but promising new Doctor was born. It was poignant for me, as I'll get my Dr Who moment in the summer when I rip off the mask and a new master takes over my school. But no virgin re-birth for me: I plan to be the one who saunters away.
Ray Tarleton is principal of South Dartmoor Community College in Ashburton, Devon.
If William Hartnell, the first Dr Who, had stuck around, he would be 102 by now. Though I reckon that's still far too young to play a 900-year-old time lord. Half a human century has passed which, in Tardis time, is 10 galaxy-gallivanting Doctors.
Some things don't change though and his old enemy, the Master, was regenerated specially for the holiday double bill, The End of Time (BBC One). Disguised as a hoody, he had a raging hunger, devouring chicken and burgers at a rate that made those of us in Christmas dinner recovery position feel nauseous. But he burned the calories leaping over buildings as an expert free runner.
The Master transformed himself into everyone on the planet. "I'm everyone and everyone is me," he cackled, sounding like Lord Mandelson during a Cabinet reshuffle. Cloned, he was inside everyone's head.
Ironically, David Tennant was equally ubiquitous. There was no escaping him: in programme trailers riding reindeers, Tardis in tow; playing Hamlet; revealing limited musical taste on Desert Island Discs; appearing on Alan Carr: Chatty Man (Channel 4) and then on the Big Fat Quiz of the Year. Was he battling Simon Cowell for world domination?
By the new year finale, as well as thrilling space chases, we had a Darker Who, a melancholy figure, feeling the creep of death. He railed against unfairness, confessing to companion, Wilf (Bernard Cribbins), that his regeneration would mean: "A new man will go sauntering away".
The regally robed, pedantically plodding time lords turned up, like characters from a Royal Shakespeare Company history play, complete with the feared drumbeat of time. But the White Point Star Diamond they threw to Earth looked like a bargain from the new year sales.
And the Doctor's moral dilemma: would he murder the Master and re-make time or shoot the president of the time lords? He couldn't kill either - a "geekbump" moment for true Who fans.
Old friends and monsters made guest appearances in a 20-minute epilogue where the Doctor greeted his old sidekick Rose (Billie Piper), for example, in January 2005. She didn't recognise him. Either he had not yet met her for real, or perhaps he was Christopher Eccleston then. Finally, in the Tardis, Tennant was vapourised in a burst of flames. A coolly crazy but promising new Doctor was born. It was poignant for me, as I'll get my Dr Who moment in the summer when I rip off the mask and a new master takes over my school. But no virgin re-birth for me: I plan to be the one who saunters away.
Ray Tarleton is principal of South Dartmoor Community College in Ashburton, Devon.
Monday, 4 January 2010
Tune in, switch off - Shows are snow joke
During my end-of-term clear out, I skimmed through a year of "Tune in" columns to find my favourites.
My drama pick would be The Street (ITV 1). Jimmy McGovern's ground-breaking series about the social problems in a single postcode made me worry about the catchment school. If the adults had troubling coping with handicaps, disfigurement, alcoholism and poverty, what about the children? For, as we know, there are no problem pupils, only problem parents.
The solution for youngsters in postcodes such as this is not to change their school, but, sadly, to find new homes. There is even a science to prove it, though it's called sociology.
Occupation (BBC One) was another of my highlights, conveying the horrors of the Iraq invasion and its aftermath-wrecked lives and broken bodies. Damnation for the politicians responsible might be to spend eternity watching it. And weeping.
Rap ringing, a kind of verbal skateboarding, took off in our school last term, based on Smithy's affectionate messages to his bosom friend in Gavin and Stacey (BBC One, pictured), one of my comedy highlights. But if I had Smithy stalking me, I would change my phone. The programme came back for a final series with Wales playing Essex at home and that contradiction in fiction, the credible stereotype. The two leads in love may be as boring as a bridal boutique during the new year sales, but the other characters were foible-filled and fallible.
Another comedy masterpiece, The Thick of It (BBC Two) kept me howling at insults that always seemed to involve surgical amputation and the re-stitching of organs in unsuitable places. That's if they had not been turned into decorative objects. Tucker may have lost it advising a collapsing Government, but he might yet find a post turning around failing schools. Imagine the scene in the staffroom next week if he turned up. Actually, he would never pass a safeguarding test.
My comedy favourite of 2009 was The Big Bang Theory (Channel 4). Super-geek Sheldon made even the aliens from Dr Who seem normal. He is such a phenomenal physicist, he would scoop all the points on University Challenge. In one episode he provided the scientific explanation for my anxiety at Christmas, explaining that presents were just obligations to be re-paid. Well I'm doing mine tomorrow at the exchange counter in M&S.
The best information programme last year was The Sex Education Show vs Pornography (Channel 4). I watched it every night for a week to write about it and so could even pretend I was working. Seriously, we need more bold campaigns like this to help us with health drives.
The Apprentice (BBC One) gets my vote for best TV reality show. Sir Alan looks soft compared with Tucker, especially now he is in Government. Still, my new year prediction is that the elevation of TV hosts won't catch on so Ant and Dec, Simon Cowell and the rest needn't hold their breath. Happy new season's viewing
Ray Tarleton
My drama pick would be The Street (ITV 1). Jimmy McGovern's ground-breaking series about the social problems in a single postcode made me worry about the catchment school. If the adults had troubling coping with handicaps, disfigurement, alcoholism and poverty, what about the children? For, as we know, there are no problem pupils, only problem parents.
The solution for youngsters in postcodes such as this is not to change their school, but, sadly, to find new homes. There is even a science to prove it, though it's called sociology.
Occupation (BBC One) was another of my highlights, conveying the horrors of the Iraq invasion and its aftermath-wrecked lives and broken bodies. Damnation for the politicians responsible might be to spend eternity watching it. And weeping.
Rap ringing, a kind of verbal skateboarding, took off in our school last term, based on Smithy's affectionate messages to his bosom friend in Gavin and Stacey (BBC One, pictured), one of my comedy highlights. But if I had Smithy stalking me, I would change my phone. The programme came back for a final series with Wales playing Essex at home and that contradiction in fiction, the credible stereotype. The two leads in love may be as boring as a bridal boutique during the new year sales, but the other characters were foible-filled and fallible.
Another comedy masterpiece, The Thick of It (BBC Two) kept me howling at insults that always seemed to involve surgical amputation and the re-stitching of organs in unsuitable places. That's if they had not been turned into decorative objects. Tucker may have lost it advising a collapsing Government, but he might yet find a post turning around failing schools. Imagine the scene in the staffroom next week if he turned up. Actually, he would never pass a safeguarding test.
My comedy favourite of 2009 was The Big Bang Theory (Channel 4). Super-geek Sheldon made even the aliens from Dr Who seem normal. He is such a phenomenal physicist, he would scoop all the points on University Challenge. In one episode he provided the scientific explanation for my anxiety at Christmas, explaining that presents were just obligations to be re-paid. Well I'm doing mine tomorrow at the exchange counter in M&S.
The best information programme last year was The Sex Education Show vs Pornography (Channel 4). I watched it every night for a week to write about it and so could even pretend I was working. Seriously, we need more bold campaigns like this to help us with health drives.
The Apprentice (BBC One) gets my vote for best TV reality show. Sir Alan looks soft compared with Tucker, especially now he is in Government. Still, my new year prediction is that the elevation of TV hosts won't catch on so Ant and Dec, Simon Cowell and the rest needn't hold their breath. Happy new season's viewing
Ray Tarleton
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