television

BondPotterWho

Quite a long time ago, I noticed that quite a lot of actors in the Harry Potter movies have also been in Doctor Who, and there are also several actors in Harry Potter that have also been in one of the more recent Bond movies. This led to a conversation with some like-minded friends, during which we decided that, like a Bacon number, british actors should have a ranking system based on how many of the UK's national institutions in which they have appeared, and that we should use Harry Potter, James Bond and Doctor Who as our three. We also decided that John Cleese is the only one we could think of who's been in all three.

In fact, there are four. The obvious one, John Cleese, had a cameo role as an art critic in the Doctor Who episode "City of Death", a slightly larger role as Nearly Headless Nick in Harry Potter, and a role as Q's replacement in two Bond movies.

Julian Glover has also been in all three. He's one of those actors who has been in practically everything but nobody really notices him. He's been in Star Wars and Indiana Jones, and two roles in Doctor Who, most memorably Scaroth in "City of Death". He played the villan Kristatos in For Your Eyes Only, and voiced Aragog the spider in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Yes, we are counting voice roles.

Helen McCrory is best known as Narcissa Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies, but has appeared in Doctor Who as head vampire Rosanna in "Vampires of Venice", and as the MP Clair Dowar in Skyfall.

Last, but by no means least, we have Greg Bennett. Judging from his IMDB profile he's a background actor for hire, he's been in pretty much everything. He's had multiple roles in Doctor Who, and has also appeared in the other two, albeit in uncredited minor roles.

Interestingly, only three lead actors have "crossed over" as it were. Two Doctors have appeared in Harry Potter; David Tennant and John Hurt (because he counts as a Doctor in my book.) and only one Bond, Timothy Dalton, has appeared in Doctor Who, as the corrupt Time Lord leader, Rassilon.

A few other honourable mentions before the complete list. BBC News presenter Huw Edwards has managed to play himself in both Doctor Who and James Bond. He appears on the television in the Doctor Who episode "Fear Her", and also in Skyfall. BAFTA and Golden Globe winner Bill Nighy has had walk-on roles in both the Doctor Who episode "Vincent and the Doctor", and in the first part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and was rumoured to be in the running to play the ninth Doctor back in 2005. Finally, veteran actor Warwick Davis has yet to appear in a Bond movie, but that's not to say he won't one day, seeing as he's been in pretty much everything else!

On the subject of people who have been in virtually everything, Martin Freeman doesn't appear to have been in Doctor Who, James Bond or Harry Potter. I'm sure this will be rectified soon, especially as he clearly knows Steven Moffat.

I'm sure this list will be revised in the future, especially as Downton Abbey and Coronation Street both seem to be melting pots of well-known actors these days. In the meantime, here's a complete list of everyone who's been in more than one of Doctor Who, James Bond and Harry Potter, plus links to IMDB so you can see who they played. Enjoy, stats fans.

Dispelling the Fear of Crime, One Bad TV Show at a Time

It's been a while since I've blogged, so I'm going to do a TV review. Last night I watched a show on BBC1 called Caught Red Handed. I'm not a big fan of police hidden camera shows in general, I was simply killing time until something else came on, but this show was refreshingly positive, albeit probably unintentionally so. It was also hilarious for reasons I will explain.

Most hidden camera shows have badly shot CCTV or camera car footage overdubbed with smart-arse comments from some B-list celeb. They require no effort or budget at all to make, and the most creative part of the show is how they manage to edit it to make it look like the cops are always in the right, despite following that asian driver "on a hunch". Caught Red Handed was more like a documentary than a reality show. Yes, it had lots of hidden camera footage of cars jumping red lights at railway crossings, but the main part of the show followed an undercover police officer who was essentially trying, usually unsuccessfully, to set up a honeypot. He had a laptop that he seemed desperate to get rid of. He left it on a park bench in a "crime hot spot", and returned later to discover, to his dismay, that it was still there. Later he left the laptop outside a cafe, again in an area described by the narrator as having a rise in the number of recent thefts, and was disappointed when he discovered that someone had handed it in to the cafe owner. Leaving it near a pub had a similar result, someone picked it up and handed it in as lost property. In the interspersed footage, we see the police officer lamenting the fact that nobody has stolen his laptop, and describing the whole thing as "a little bit frustrating". Eventually he did manage to convince someone to take it and arrest them on suspicion of theft, but the guy they caught turned out to be known to them and on the run anyway. Cue more negative comments from the undercover officer who was hoping to catch someone who had sold it on, rather than someone they knew was dodgy anyway.

So what did we learn from this show? Basically, if you leave a laptop in a so-called 'crime hotspot', it will probably still be there when you get back, and if not, someone's probably handed it in. The police, on the other hand, are openly frustrated that there just isn't enough crime for them.

Still, nice to see a slightly more realistic police camera show for a change, rather than the "be afraid, be very afraid" nonsense that seems to be commonplace on the less popular Freeview channels that only really serves to scare the elderly into thinking they can't leave their houses for fear of being mugged.

Previously on Madhouse Beyond

It's about time I did another rant. Oh yes it is. Tough, I'm doing one anyway.

Things change over time, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Television is no different - it's changed. For better because budgets are higher, special effects are better, picture quality is better and so on. But for worse because ad breaks are longer, originality is harder, and, it seems, people are getting forgetful. At least the TV shows seem to think this is the case.

Back in the 60s we had Doctor Who. It was a time when long-running radio dramas were commonplace and Doctor Who took the same path. It was on every week and each episode was part of a longer story. The first story lasted four weeks and the second, the first appearance of the infamous Daleks, lasted seven. The cool thing is that if you play each episode back-to-back, very little is repeated. Each episode ends on a cliffhanger and the next episode picks up pretty much where it left off with little to no overlap. There was no 'next time' trailer at the end, and no pre-credits 'story so far' to waste valuable storytelling time. This was commonplace.

In the 80s and 90s our TVs were bombarded with US shows, some of which were serials. Occasionally these would begin with "Previously on [name of show]" and have a really quick (ie 10 seconds) reminder of the previous episode just as a memory jogger. This was, I believe, unnecessary, but not really a problem.

Fast forward to the present. We still have Doctor Who, although the pacing has changed considerably since the early days. I recall the final episode of series 32 had quite a long 'previously...' section which, due to the series-long story arc, recapped several episodes. Part of this recap was a scene or two from a seemingly unrelated episode, and that recap basically spoiled a very carefully concealed Chekhov's Gun, effectively giving away the ending for those paying attention. Not good.

Another show I quite like watching is The Apprentice. But I don't usually turn it on until 5-10 minutes after the published start time because every episode begins with the same thing - a long intro explaining the format of the show (is this really needed after eight series?!) followed by the opening credits and then another five minutes explaining in meticulous detail what happened last week. I actually have theorised that you can just watch every other episode of the show and still follow it just as if you had watched them all. But even this complete disregard for the viewer's memory was not as far as the TV companies could push it. After all, the Apprentice and Doctor Who are both BBC1 which has no commercial breaks...

Last night, I was watching Derren Brown's Apocalypse. I'd recorded it when it was shown on Channel 4 quite a long time ago, and I finally got round to watching it last night. Of course, as I'd recorded it, I could skip the commercial breaks, but this only emphasised the problem. Not only did the second part of the two-part series do exactly what the Apprentice does, spending far too long going over what the viewer already knows, but after every commercial break there was a cutaway scene with Brown explaining what the show was about - you know, as if in the five minutes since the adverts began, the viewer had completely forgotten everything that had happened up until now. I've not got any actual science on the matter but the two hour-long episodes get cut down to 45 minutes each if you remove the adverts and I'm sure you could knock at least another 20 minutes off the total running time if you remove the scenes that are repeated as 'memory joggers'. Basically, Channel 4 have taken a one-hour show and spread it over two hours.

OK, TV companies, we're not stupid. Well... I'm not stupid. I can follow a plot even if it's broken into bits. I don't read books all in one sitting and the same is true of TV shows. I understand you need to break things up, sometimes for scheduling reasons and sometimes for commercial reasons, but stop being so bloody patronising about it. And frankly if there are people who can't remember a plot because of a five-minute break in the narrative, then either they're morons, or the plot was so shit that it probably wasn't worth spending money on making the show in the first place. So please, enough with the recaps and previews, they're just wasting valuable plot and/or advertising time.

The Apprentice

Last night while watching The Apprentice, I was trying to think of some tasks that Alan Sugar won't set the contestants, but probably should do in the interests of good telly...

• Today's task is to film and sell some hard core pornography.
• This week you'll be selling crack on the streets of Gosport. (credit to Crow for this one!)
• Today you're going to design a new kind of tree.
• This week's task is to form a religious or political extremist group and recruit followers, using threats if necessary.
• You're here at Gatwick. In a minute you'll all be boarding a flight to the arctic circle, where you'll be met by a representative for a global refrigerator distributon chain, a sled and a pack of huskies. Your task is to sell fridges to eskimos.
• For this task I'll be providing you with a theatre and a western lowland gorilla. Your task is to teach him how to tapdance.
• Your task is to buy as many Amstrad eM@ilers as you can afford. You won't win anything, I just need someone to buy these bloody things.

Heir Hunters

So this is interesting...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/tv/features/heirhunters/emails.shtml

According to the BBC, scam artists are now posing as researchers from BBC's "Heir Hunters" TV show in an attempt to pull of what basically amounts to advance fee fraud (aka a '419 scam'). I've been meaning to moan about Heir Hunters for a while, so this kinda gives me the perfect opportunity.

Heir Hunters, for those who don't know, is a reality TV show that follows various teams of lawyers and geneologists who make their living by finding the relatives of people who have died without leaving a will and assisting them in claiming their inheritance in return for a percentage of the payout. They point out various times throughout the show that if claims to a recently deceased person's estate aren't made within a certain amount of time the full value becomes the property of the treasury.

My first point: personally, had I never seen Heir Hunters and I got an email or other form of communication informing me that someone I'd never heard of has died and I'm in for a payout, I'd have simply ignored it, assuming it's a scam. It's odd to think that this is a genuine business practice in today's relatively security-concious world. But the thing that annoys me most about Heir Hunters is my second point: like the ambulance-chasing personal injury lawyers who frequently advertise on daytime TV, Heir Hunters are basically encouraging selfish people to screw over the majority.

Don't get me wrong - if a parent dies and leaves his or her children a fortune I have no problem with that. Direct descendents and relatives are generally very close and although nothing can replace a lost parent, the inheritance will always be welcome. But this doesn't need a team of researchers to accomplish, it's an open and shut case that if a parent dies without leaving a will it goes to the spouse or children. The people on Heir Hunters are basically looking for people who are so loosely related to the deceased as to have never heard of them. Why do these people deserve any kind of payout? Call me a communist if you like, but I'd much rather that money goes to the treasury than to some one lucky individual. That's what the lottery is for. In a time when the government is claiming (dubiously, but that's another argument) that there's not enough cash in the kitty to fund essential services like hospitals and schools, surely any extra cash the treasury gets is a good thing?

So basically, what I'm saying is: if I get any communication from someone claiming to be an heir hunter, I will always ignore them. If they're lying, I'll end up being scammed. If they're genuine, I'll end up shafting the country's economy. I'd rather neither of those things happen thank you very much.

Shakespeare and Language

There are a lot of classic authors, and lots of books and lots of movies of books. Some of these books are written by Shakespeare and some aren't. Yet for some reason every time an adaptation of a Shakespeare play is released, it has to remain faithful to the original in terms of dialogue, and no other author is extended this courtesy.

Some examples are quite extreme. Baz Luhrman's film version of Romeo and Juliet and Geoffrey Wright's adaptation of Macbeth are both modernised versions of their respective plays, changing many concepts to their modern day equivalent (eg Macbeth becomes a gang leader instead of king, and the Montagues and Capulets are rival business empires rather than feuding families). Despite this, the dialogue is taken directly from the original, which sounds more than a little odd, having people in familiar modern day settings talking like shakespearean characters.

Done, I think, much better is Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss' Sherlock, a modern re-telling of Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, interspersed with the odd original story. The first episode of the last series was a faithful modern adaptation of A Study in Scarlet, and the first two episodes of the upcoming series are based on A Scandal in Bohemia and The Hound of the Baskervilles. All are set in modern day England but the dialogue has been modernised with the setting. Yet the adaptation is very faithful to the original in terms of plot.

I'm on the fence in the usual book/movie adaptation argument - I appreciate that you sometimes need to change elements from books to make them work on screen. For example, I support Peter Jackson's decision to omit the entire 'Cleansing of the Shire' section from Return of the King because it would have spoiled the pacing of the movie. That said, sometimes things go a bit too far - many of movie adaptations of Roald Dahl books change things for no good reason and ruin the spirit of the original story (eg The Witches). I guess this is all a matter of opinion though, and therefore a slight digression from the point.

Basically: why is it that Shakespeare's language is immune from any kind of Hollywood meddling, even in a supposedly modernised adaptation, and that of other equally skilled wordsmiths (ie Tolkien) isn't? Shakespeare was indeed a literary genius, but he's hardly a special case and we need to stop treating him like one.

Faking it on TV

Seems like my blog's becoming more and more like the telly these days - full of repeats. I will remind you of this post from 2007 which illustrates my complete inability to give a shit that what we see on telly isn't 100% factually accurate.

Now there's this little incident. For those who don't follow things like this, there was a segment in one episode of the recent documentary series Frozen Planet in which a scene of a polar bear in the wild cut to a scene showing some cubs being born, before cutting to a scene of some cubs leaving the nest for the first time. The BBC was very clear on their website that the scene of the cubs being born was filmed in a zoo, and gave good reasons for doing so - it would be impossible to get such a shot in the wild because the polar bears don't build their dens, they simply lay in a snowstorm and let nature do the work for them. Any attempt to put a camera in the den after it's formed will prompt the polar bear to eat either the cubs or the cameraman. So basically the BBC made the decision, rather than to omit a large chunk of video, to show a short scene of some cubs being born in captivity. Many of the non-BBC media evidently consider this cheating.

It's worth noting that these things happen all the time in nature documentaries. Just looking at Frozen Planet, there are scenes early on in the series that show ice melting, filmed as time lapses. You could argue that this is 'fake' because it's not showing the ice melting at the speed it really does. But ask yourself - would you really want to watch hours of video of ice melting? No, didn't think so. The point is that it doesn't matter if the shots are edited, it's damn good telly.

It's also worth mentioning David Attenborough's previous series, Life. There was a whole episode about plants and the best shot of the entire series, in my opinion, was completely 'faked'. There's a wonderful 30-second scene of a woodland 'coming to life' as plants grow in speeded-up motion. Obviously they couldn't do a time lapse in a genuine wild wood, so they painstakingly recreated the wood in a studio and filmed the scene twice - once in real time on location and then again over the course of an entire year in a studio against a green screen. They then later blended the two shots together to get the finished scene. In the behind-the-scenes footage it shows how they had to ensure that the path of the camera was identical in both instances, how they had to time the plants to grow at just the right times while the camera was on them, and how they had to make sure that the studio scene was identical to the location shot to the centimetre. The shot lasted 30 seconds and took two entire years to plan, set up and film. The end result was a completely 'fake' scene which looked absolutely beautiful and was far harder to produce than any genuine footage could ever be. Is this also 'cheating'? Or would you prefer to see just a 30-second real-time shot of a wood sitting there and doing not very much?

The fact is that TV isn't supposed to be real, it's supposed to entertain. And, my views on polar bears being kept in captivity aside, I personally was very entertained by seeing a little baby polar bear cub in a den with its mother. The experience would have been lessened if the shot had been missed out, or if they'd flashed up a warning on screen to say "by the way, this shot is filmed in a zoo".

So why is this series getting so much stick in the first place, I wonder? Could it be something to do with the fact that the final episode of the series is the first bullshit-free documentary on the effects of climate change that I've ever seen, and that certain people want to discredit it? Hmm.

Television Editing In Defence of Fool Us

I notice a lot of talk on Twitter around the time Penn and Teller: Fool Us is on ITV, pretty much every week. Quite a lot of it centres around the discussion of miking up audience members. The usual accusation is that everyone randomly selected from the audience is actually a stooge, and the fact that they're all wearing microphones proves this.

As I was at a recording a few months back, I think it's only fair to set the record straight - there is an awful lot of TV editing during the show but the actual magic is real and live. I think I remember commenting at the time that it's ironic that the magic isn't rigged but everything else is! Basically, if a magician selects a volunteer from the audience they get their applause and walk up on stage. The cameras are cut, and the volunteer is fitted with a radio microphone by one of the techies. They then sit back down and the whole selection sequence is filmed again, and this time it goes straight into the trick. The miking up process is then edited out in post production.

This isn't the only television editing that goes on - ever notice that Jonathan Ross wears the same tie in every episode? The reason is that it's not chronological. For example, the filming I went to had Graham Jolley and Damien O'Brien performing, but both were shown in different episodes when the show was broadcast, presumably so the 'winners' are spread over the series. This of course means that there's about three, maybe four episodes that have me in the audience, even though I only went to one recording. There was also quite a bit of dialogue cut out, one particularly memorable joke during Graham Jolley's act that didn't make TV was Jonathan Ross making fun of Penn's pronounciation of the word 'snooker', only for Penn to jump straight in with "the last person I need lecturing me on pronounciation is Jonathan Ross!". Additionally Penn and Teller get quite a bit longer to discuss each trick than is made apparent on TV.

Yet, I cannot stress enough that despite all these TV edits, every magic trick is shown live, uncut and as performed on the night. So please, while watching Fool Us, don't think it's rigged because it isn't. If you want a show that's rigged, watch The X-Factor : )