Brian Blessed – Blood and Porridge

September 22, 2025

Nostalgic wallows 5: Gerry Anderson

From gerryanderson.com / © Anderson Entertainment

This entry in my Nostalgic Wallows series of blogposts was inspired by something I learned recently. Earlier this month, on September 4^th, 50 years exactly had passed since the first broadcast of the first episode of the science-fiction TV series Space: 1999 (1975-77).

Practically every week now, anniversaries of something or other pop up that serve as depressing reminders of how long ago my youth was and how long-in-the-tooth I’m getting. But being reminded that the first time I watched Space: 1999 – and heard the opening chords of its urgent theme tune by composer Barry Gray, which went: “DUH…! DUH…! DUH-DUH…!” – was a whole half-century ago seemed to hit particularly hard. Anyway, I guess this is an appropriate time to pay tribute to Gerry Anderson, who was responsible for Space: 1999 and was also, perhaps, the greatest producer of children’s shows in British TV history.

Gerry Anderson is, of course, remembered as ‘the puppet man’. He and his wife Sylvia began making kids’ puppet TV shows such as The Adventures of Twizzle (1957-59) and Torchy the Battery Boy (1959) in the monochrome, still-austerity-affected 1950s. Back then, every second children’s programme on British TV seemed to feature cheap-looking wooden figures jerking around in a jungle of marionette strings: Muffin the Mule (1946-55), Flower Pot Men (1952-53), The Woodentops (1955-56) and Pinky and Perky (1957). What set the Andersons apart from their competitors, however, was their ambition. Their audiences might have been children and their characters might have been puppets, but that didn’t mean their shows weren’t allowed to be spectacular. Within a decade, the Andersons refined their puppetry to an art-form – they called their techniques ‘supermarionation’ and began each show with the proud declaration, Filmed in Supermarionation – and the result was Thunderbirds (1965-66).

The cast of Thunderbirds might’ve been marionettes, but in all other respects this show – about the adventures of International Rescue, a late-21^st century organisation run by the heroic Tracy family who used their fabulous and futuristic vehicles and gadgets to save people from crashing airliners and burning skyscrapers – was like the James Bond movies tailored for children. As well as gadgetry, explosions and skin-of-the-teeth escapes, it had a secret island hideaway (Tracy Island), an exotic villain (The Hood), a glamorous heroine (Lady Penelope) and a brash 1960s swagger, epitomised in Barry Gray’s strident theme music. Children’s television had never seen the likes of this before. No wonder Anderson’s boss at ITC Entertainment, the cigar-loving impresario Lord Lew Grade, informed Anderson after seeing the first rushes of Thunderbirds that he wasn’t making TV anymore, but feature films. Grade knew showmanship when he saw it.

© Century 21 Television / Associated Television / United Artists

Another feature that Thunderbirds shared with the best Bond movies was that while it gave international audiences the spectacle they wanted, it retained a certain wry British-ness. The Tracy family might’ve been Americans – indeed, voicing Anderson’s shows surely kept Britain’s small community of North American actors, like Ed Bishop and Shane Rimmer, in employment for years – but for British audiences the real stars of Thunderbirds were Lady Penelope and Parker, her butler and chauffeur of her pink Rolls Royce.

Lady Penelope and Parker represented opposite tiers of Britain’s class system. She was a posh glamour-puss, he was a working-class Cockney and ex-convict. Parker was loyal but sometimes downtrodden, though at least his employer tolerated his less socially acceptable talents, which included being light-fingered and knowing how to crack a safe. Indeed, on occasion, Parker’s talents helped her to escape from a tight corner. Lady Penelope was famously voiced by Sylvia Anderson and it’s significant that, following their divorce in the mid-1970s, Gerry Anderson claimed that among all his puppet characters Parker (“Yes, m’ lady”) was the one he identified with most.

Sure, Thunderbirds looks creaky when viewed today – what film or TV show from the 1960s doesn’t? The special effects seem slightly dinky, the puppets’ heads are too big for them to be comfortably lifelike, and their manner of walking always elicits amusement. Any drunkard having difficulty getting from the bar to the toilets in a British pub is invariably likened to a ‘Thunderbirds puppet’. I can only testify that, as a kid, once each episode began with that famous countdown (“Five… Four… Three… Two… One!”), that famous catchphrase (“Thunderbirds are go!”) and that pulse-quickening theme music, even a real-life crashing airliner or burning skyscraper wouldn’t have diverted my attention from the television set.

Anderson also knew the value of merchandising tie-ins. It wasn’t uncommon to find myself standing with my nose pressed against a toyshop window, wishing my pocket money was lavish enough to buy all the miniature Anderson spacecraft and air-and-land vehicles displayed in front of me – Thunderbirds 1, 2 and 3, plus items from other Anderson shows like the SPV vehicle, the Interceptors, the Mobiles, Skydiver and the Eagles. The technicians who operated the models of those spacecraft and vehicles and brought them to life in Anderson’s shows, men like Derek Meddings and Brian Johnson, later became the backbone of Britain’s movie special-effects industry. It was thanks to Anderson’s protégés that even after the indigenous British film industry died on its arse in the late 1970s, international studios at least kept coming to Britain to make movies like the Star Wars and Alien ones because of the technical expertise there.

From wikipedia.org / © AP Films / ATV / ITC Entertainment

Along the way from The Adventures of Twizzle to Thunderbirds, the Andersons had made Supercar (1961-62), Fireball XL-5 (1962-63) and underwater extravaganza Stingray (1964-65). Stingray is probably the second-best remembered of Anderson’s shows, partly because it was the first British children’s programme to be filmed in colour and partly because of its camp value. It was never more camp than at the close of each episode, when the ballad Aqua Marina was sung in honour of the mute and enigmatic mermaid Marina, who helped out the Stingray crew in their battles against the despicable Aquaphibians, and on whom hero Captain Troy Tempest obviously had something of a crush. However, it’s Anderson’s post-Thunderbirds show that I like best.

Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-68) also served up spaceships, gadgets, explosions and general spectacle. The tone was darker, however. It had a high body-count – well, a high puppet body-count – and the Mars-based Mysterons whom Captain Scarlet and his gang fought off in every episode were, basically, terrorists. Spookily, their habit of taunting the ‘Earthmen’ with messages threatening death and destruction seemed to prefigure Osama Bin Laden’s mode of operation decades later. I suspect little Osama owned all the Gerry Anderson toys when he was a kid in Riyadh in the 1960s.

On the other hand, Joe 90 (1968-69) was a charming kids’ espionage show with a likeable juvenile hero. It was just unfortunate that, on account of Joe’s oversized glasses, ‘Joe 90’ became the nickname of every bespectacled child in a British playground during the next few decades.

From wikipedia.org / © Century 21 Productions

In Captain Scarlet and Joe 90, the puppets had exact human proportions – Anderson’s puppet work had achieved perfection. Accordingly, with nowhere else to go with puppetry, Anderson moved into live action. His 1970 show UFO was basically a remake of Captain Scarlet with human actors. Although UFO is fondly remembered for its kitsch notions of what future fashions would look like, such as Gabrielle Drake’s silver mini-skirt and outrageous purple bob, and although it tapped into every frustrated middle manager’s secret fantasy – Commander Straker (Ed Bishop) pretended to be a film producer, but at the touch of a button his office would descend a giant lift shaft into the huge underground headquarters of anti-alien defence force SHADO, of which he was the secret boss – the show was, like Captain Scarlet, pretty bleak.

The aliens who attacked the earth in UFO only did so because they wanted to harvest human organs, and there was frequently a high death-toll among the guest cast. One episode, The Psychobombs, even had the aliens brainwashing a handful of ordinary human beings and turning them into superhuman suicide bombers to take out SHADO. Elsewhere, the harrowing episode A Question of Priorities showed how Straker’s devotion to duty indirectly caused the death of his son.

For a little kid like me, the show was very scary at times. For example, an episode called The Sound of Silence had a UFO concealed in the waters of a lake amid the bucolic English countryside and an alien stalking the surrounding woodland like a serial killer. Even the whirring, pulsing sound that emanated from the UFOs while they were in flight was sinister. Hilariously, Independent Television (ITV), which broadcast Anderson’s shows in the UK, assumed from his past record that UFO was a children’s series and broadcast repeats of it on weekday afternoons, when kids were arriving home from primary school. That’s how I first saw UFO – I’d come home, switch on the TV and be traumatised by it.

From gerryanderson.com / © ITV Studios

By the mid-1970s Anderson was putting together Space: 1999, which at the time was the most expensive show in TV history. It should have given him a franchise of Star Trek proportions and made him a fortune. It didn’t, alas, and the show’s problems were mostly self-inflicted. Though its special effects were the best yet – some compared them to the space scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – its scripts often strayed into the metaphysical and ended up muddled and impossible-to-understand.

Another issue was that its leads, Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, were unaccountably doleful and uninteresting. That said, the supporting cast, consisting of Nick Tate, Prentis Hancock, Clifton Jones, Ziena Merton, Anton Philips and the excellent veteran character actor Barry Morse, were amiable. (Sadly, Hancock and Jones died within a week of each other earlier this year.) And the guest cast – which included Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Judy Geeson, Joan Collins, Julian Glover, Anthony Valentine, Richard Johnson, Roy Dotrice, Ian McShane, Leo McKern and the loudest man on the planet, if not in the universe, Brian Blessed – was among the best ever featured in a TV series.

But Space: 1999’s worst problem was that, scientifically, it was rubbish. Its premise was that a massive explosion on the moon’s surface in 1999 caused it to be blown out of the earth’s orbit, along with a moonbase and its 300-strong crew. From there, the runaway satellite and its reluctant passengers careered across the galaxy, managing to encounter a new solar system, and an earth-like planet, and a usually unfriendly alien civilisation, in nearly every episode. The scientist and science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov condemned the show for being preposterous, but even at ten years old I didn’t need Dr Asimov to tell me that. I knew already that outer space was rather bigger than a fairground ride and a hurtling moon wasn’t going to encounter star-systems with habitable planets as frequently as dodgem cars bumping into one another.

Despite its faults – the pretentious claptrap, the dour leads, the scientific nonsensicality underpinning everything – there was something weirdly compelling about the first season of Space: 1999. Daft and pompous though much of it was, it was at least unrepentantly so and it deserved kudos for serving up, occasionally, some of the trippiest moments ever seen on British TV. And it sometimes scared the shit out of me, even more than UFO had. See the episodes Force of Life, where, near the end, Ian McShane was gruesomely frazzled by a laser beam before coming back to life as a blackened, tattered zombie; or Death’s Other Dominion, which climaxed with Brian Blessed suddenly decaying into a revoltingly putrefied corpse. Most terrifying, though, was Dragon’s Domain, where the moon blundered into a graveyard of derelict spaceships. The graveyard was really a giant web, inhabited by a nightmarish spider – a shrieking, tentacled thing that swallowed its victims, drained them and spat them out again as lifeless, desiccated husks.

Unwisely, Anderson hired American producer Fred Freiberger to oversee Space: 1999’s second series. Freiberger, who was known in American TV circles as ‘the Series Killer’ thanks to his habit of taking over shows shortly before they got cancelled – he produced the last and worst season of the original Star Trek (1966-69) – dumped the things that were good about Space 1999’s first season, including Barry Gray’s theme tune and poor old Barry Morse. It turned into a tacky, embarrassing piece of juvenilia and was duly cancelled in 1977.

From wikipedia.org / © Group Three Productions

After that, Anderson continued working but never quite captured the zeitgeist as he had in the 1960s. Into Infinity was a 1976 special that was meant to launch another live-action science fiction series. It had Brian Blessed, Nick Tate and Ed Bishop on board and was supposed to be based on proper astronomical knowledge of the universe – maybe Anderson was atoning for the scientific absurdities of Space 1999 – but it never got beyond the pilot stage. In the 1980s he returned to making puppet shows and the result, Terrahawks (1983-86), was a fun but unoriginal rehash of his past glories. Inevitably, ‘Zelda’, the intensely wrinkled villainess of Terrahawks, became another nickname in Britain, this time for ladies of a certain age who’d crumpled their skins by smoking too many cigarettes and spending too long on the sunbed. In the 1990s he made the underwhelming live-action show Space Precinct (1994-95), while in 2005 a computer-generated version of Captain Scarlet failed to generate much interest, possibly because, at the time, it was lost amid the fuss made over the rebooting of another classic British science-fiction TV show, Doctor Who (1963-89, 2005-25).

During this period Anderson was financially as well as creatively unlucky. He no longer held the rights to Thunderbirds when the BBC got around to rescreening it in the early 1990s. Presumably, when yet another generation of British children went Thunderbirds-daft, and the country’s toyshops filled up again with Thunderbirds merchandising, he didn’t profit as much from it as he should have. Similarly, Anderson was denied any participation when a live-action film version of Thunderbirds was made in 2004. The resulting film was directed by an American (Jonathan Frakes) and was aimed only at young children – as opposed to older children and nostalgic adults. It was, predictably, dreadful.

Hopefully, before his death in 2012, Anderson was at least aware of the great affection the British public had for him and his TV shows and of how his work was stamped on the DNA of modern popular culture. For instance, you knew immediately what Nick Park was referencing in the opening scene of Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) when, accompanied by some rousing Barry Gray-type music, his titular heroes got to the seats of their pest-control van via a series of chutes, pulleys and lifts, just as the Tracy brothers had been transported to the cockpits of the International Rescue vehicles. Even Wallace and Gromit’s garden gnomes parted before their van’s path like the palm trees on Tracy Island used to do when Thunderbird 2 rumbled into view.

And Team America – World Police, the scabrous 2004 puppet movie from Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the men behind South Park (1998-present), might have had as its heroes a bunch of gung-ho terrorist-blasting commandoes rather than the benign and upstanding Tracy family, and as its villain Kim Jong-Il rather than the Hood, but it was basically a grown-up version of Thunderbirds. I just hope Gerry Anderson was able to see beyond the blood, vomit, swearing and graphic puppet-copulation scenes, get the joke and appreciate the love Parker and Stone obviously had for his work.

And I’ve just heard some news that also makes this post timely. To mark the 60^th anniversary of Thunderbirds, two of its 1965 episodes, Trapped in the Sky and Terror in New York City, have been remastered and released as a double-bill in British cinemas. The Guardian review of them is here.

From wikipedia.org / © AP Films / Associated Television

June 30, 2024July 7, 2024

One Donald I’m sad to see go

© Avala Film / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

It’s often said you don’t appreciate the value of something until after it’s gone. I felt like that last week on hearing of the death of the great Canadian actor Donald Sutherland. If someone had asked me to list my all-time favourite actors, I wouldn’t have thought of including Sutherland. Yet when he passed away at the age of 88 – having kept working in film and TV until last year – it suddenly struck me how much I was going to miss him.

Sutherland was an actor who could inhabit a range of personalities and project many different moods and emotions, yet whom you always recognised as, basically, himself. His characters might be heroic, dignified, fatherly, tragic, eccentric, sinister, venal, slow-witted, juvenile, gormless or demented – yet you always knew you were watching Donald Sutherland. Whoever he played, he retained that unique quality of Donald Sutherland-ness.

Born in St John, New Brunswick, Sutherland graduated from Victoria University with an interesting-sounding degree in Engineering and Drama, then relocated to Britain in 1957 and studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. A few years later, he found his way into Europe’s then-flourishing horror-movie industry. He appeared in the monochrome Italian-French chiller Castle of the Living Dead (1964), starring Christopher Lee, directed by Warren Kiefer, and with a 20-year-old Michael Reeves, who four years later would make 1968’s masterly Witchfinder General, working as assistant director. No doubt for budgetary reasons, Sutherland was cast in three roles, most amusingly in drag, as a witch. He played a good-natured simpleton in Hammer Films’ Fanatic (1965), a blend of the low-key psychological thrillers the studio made when it wasn’t cranking out full-blooded gothic-horror melodramas and the fashionable 1960s sub-genre of ‘hagsploitation’ – the hag here being a dangerous religious nutcase played by Tallulah Bankhead. If the cast wasn’t interesting enough with Sutherland and Bankhead, it also included Stephanie Powers, Yootha Joyce and Peter Vaughan, future stars of TV shows Hart to Hart (1979-84), George and Mildred (1976-79) and Porridge (1974-77) respectively.

© Amicus Productions / Paramount Pictures

The best remembered of Sutherland’s early horror films is Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), directed by Freddie Francis and produced by Milton Subotsky and Max J. Rosenberg – the first of seven anthology horror movies that Subotsky and Rosenberg’s British-based Amicus Productions would specialise in. To be honest, I don’t think the film’s five stories are up to much, but the framing device, wherein five night-time travellers find themselves sharing a train compartment with the mysterious Dr Shreck (Peter Cushing), who uses Tarot cards to foretell each man’s future, is wonderfully atmospheric. Dr Terror also has a fascinating cast. In addition to Sutherland and Cushing, there’s Christopher Lee (again) and another horror-movie veteran, Michael Gough; trumpeter, tap-dancer and TV presenter Roy Castle; disc jockey Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman; and the original M from the James Bond films, Bernard Lee. Sutherland’s segment even has a fleeting appearance by his fellow Canadian Al Mulock, who along with Woody Strode and Jack Elam was gunned down by Charles Bronson in the astonishing opening sequence of Sergio Leone’s masterpiece Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).

Sutherland also featured in 1960s British TV, most memorably in 1967 when he played a villain in an episode of the surreal and stylish espionage series The Avengers (1961-69) called The Superlative Seven. This has Patrick Macnee’s debonair John Steed being invited to a bizarre fancy-dress party on board a private jet plane, which, after it takes off, is discovered to be remote-controlled. Eventually, the plane lands Steed and the other, equally-baffled guests on a seemingly deserted island. There, the party start to be murdered one by one. As well as riffing on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (1939), the episode has a science-fictional sub-plot where Sutherland attempts to create a race of super-soldiers. And the guest cast includes Charlotte Rampling and Brian Blessed before they became famous too.

That same year, Sutherland turned up in Robert Aldrich’s loud, raucous and violent war movie The Dirty Dozen, about 12 convicts trained by the US Army and sent to France on a suicide mission against the Wehrmacht prior to the D-Day Landings The movie contained so many famous actors playing characters who weren’t among the 12 convicts – Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Richard Jaeckel, George Kennedy, Ralph Meeker and Robert Ryan – that, over the years, folk have become confused about who actually played the Dirty Dozen. I’ve even heard a few people declare that, with Sutherland dead, that’s all the Dozen gone. Well, no – because actors Stuart Cooper and Colin Maitland, who played two more of the Dozen, are still on the go.

© Kenneth Hyman Productions / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

The Dirty Dozen’s success led to Sutherland being cast in more World War II movies. Most notable of these was 1970’s Kelly’s Heroes, in which Clint Eastwood’s Private Kelly, a soldier in an American platoon in 1944 France, learns there’s a fortune in Nazi gold stashed in a bank behind enemy lines and persuades his fellow soldiers, including Sutherland and Telly Savalas, to help him steal it. Sutherland’s character is a loopy tank commander called Oddball who, with a blatant disregard for historical authenticity, was added to the script to satirise the then-ubiquitous hippy movement. He says spaced-out things like, “Don’t hit me with those negative waves so early in the morning!” or, “Woof, woof, woof! That’s my other dog imitation.” I suspect that for people my age – well, males my age – in the UK, Oddball is the character we’ll remember Sutherland best as, because British TV seemed to show Kelly’s Heroes every other week when we were kids.

Sutherland was also in 1976’s The Eagle Has Landed, playing an IRA man who aids some German commandoes, headed by that well-known German, Michael Caine, on a mission in England to assassinate Winston Churchill. Of Sutherland’s performance, the best that can said is that there are non-Irish actors who’ve played Irishmen with worse Irish accents.

Another war movie was M*A*S*H (1970), Robert Altman’s scabrous black comedy set during the 1950s conflict in Korea, in which Sutherland played insolent and rebellious US Army surgeon Hawkeye Pierce. The film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, was the third-most popular movie of its year and gave Sutherland iconic status. I have to say that, though I like Robert Altman’s movies generally, M*A*S*H has not aged well. Today, much of its humour feels juvenile and mean-spirited, especially when directed towards Sally Kellerman’s Major Houlihan character, rather than ‘anti-establishment’, which it was hailed as at the time. Altman famously loathed the M*A*S*H TV show that was spun off from his movie and ran from 1972 to 1983, but I suspect time has been kinder to its gentler brand of humour.

© Casey Productions / Eldorado Productions / British Lion Films

Afterwards, Sutherland was in prestigious films like Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971), Fellini’s Casanova (1975) and Bernard Bertolucci’s 1900 (1975) – none of which I’ve seen. But it’s in Nicolas Roeg’s masterly horror film Don’t Look Now (1973) that, of his movies I have seen, I believe he does his best work. Don’t Look Now is an adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier story in which a grief-stricken couple try to get over the death of their daughter by immersing themselves in a restoration project in Venice – only to be haunted by sightings of a small figure in a red coat who at least resembles their deceased daughter. The film has two set-pieces at its beginning and end whose emotional impact has rarely been matched in the horror genre – Sutherland features heavily in both. Films about the supernatural, despite focusing on death, memories of the departed and the possibility of an afterlife, don’t usually capture the feeling of grief that well. But the pained, brittle performances by Sutherland and his co-star Julie Christie convey it with extreme poignancy. With their performances augmented by Nicolas Roeg’s camerawork, visual imagery and memorably-elliptical approach to storytelling, Don’t Look Now is a film for the ages.

Though for me Don’t Look Now gives Sutherland his best role, it’s Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) that gives him his best image. This is Hollywood’s second adaptation of Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers (1955), wherein a low-key invasion of earth is staged by alien pod-people who gradually replace all the real people. The image in question, now a popular meme, comes in the final moments when Sutherland, the film’s hero, reacts to another character by pointing at her, adopting a grotesque, gawking expression and emitting an inhuman squeal. This tells us the pod-people have now replaced him too. The original Body Snatchers movie, made by Don Siegel in 1956, was set in small-town America, but Kaufman’s version audaciously shifts the action to San Francisco, and the result is just as good. Actually, I was going to say filmmakers have treated Finney’s novel well, for in 1993 Abel Ferrara directed another version that was decent too. But then I remembered there was a fourth version made in 2007 with Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, and it was rubbish.

© Solofilm / United Artists

As he grew older, Sutherland’s work in films and television inevitably saw him shift from being a leading man to being a grizzled character actor and then an esteemed ‘elder-statesman’ guest-star. His movies included star-laden Oscar-bait (1980’s Ordinary People), daft Alistair Maclean adaptations (1979’s Bear Island), slightly less daft Ken Follett adaptations (1981’s Eye of the Needle), overripe John Grisham adaptations (1996’s A Time to Kill), overstuffed British flops (1985’s Revolution), Sylvester Stallone movies (1989’s Lock Up), Clint Eastwood movies (2000’s Space Cowboys), paranoid Oliver Stone conspiracy thrillers (1991’s JFK), preposterous Roland Emmerich disaster movies (2022’s Moonfall) and Emma Thompson-scripted Jane Austen costume-dramas (2005’s Pride and Prejudice).

He made three films with his son Kiefer – who, when I first saw him onscreen in the 1980s, made me think, “Wow, he looks just like his dad!” – the afore-mentioned A Time to Kill, plus 1983’s Max Dugan Returns and 2015’s Forsaken. And he featured in four Hunger Games movies (2012-15), playing Snow, the despot running the future North American territory of Panem. I haven’t seen any of the Hunger Games series, but a future dystopian America ruled by a president called Donald sounds terrifyingly prescient.

Ironically, in the 1990s, Sutherland returned to his 1960s roots and started making horror movies again. He was in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), a clodhopping film that a few years later led to a sublime TV show; 1994’s The Puppet Masters, based on a short story by Robert Heinlein, which was a low-budget but not unenjoyable retread of Invasion of the Body Snatchers; 1998’s police-occult thriller Fallen, in which he rubbed shoulders with Denzel Washington and John Goodman; and 1999’s Virus, an Alien rip-off set on board a ship, in which Sutherland’s over-the-top villain is one of the few redeeming features – his old seadog is so sea-doggish he only lacks a pegleg and a parrot on his shoulder. Horror-adjacent is his role as Ronald Bartel in Ron Howard’s Backdraft (1991). He’s an incarcerated pyromaniac whom William Baldwin and Robert De Niro’s firemen-investigators turn to for help when they’re trying to catch the person responsible for a series of deadly, fiery arson attacks. Thus, he’s the Hannibal Lector of the fire-raising world.

However, while I write this, the Donald Sutherland performance that keeps coming to mind – accompanied by the lovely, plaintive song that accompanies it – is the one he essayed in the video for Kate Bush’s single Cloudbusting (1985). He’s a kindly inventor who creates a rainmaking machine, only to be taken away by some sinister men in suits, who obviously believe there are things man was not meant to know. This rather vitiates the song’s optimistic lyric, “Ooh, I just know that something good is gonna happen…” It’s left for Sutherland’s son, played by Bush, to complete his work. I visited the video on YouTube the other day and was touched to discover how the comments below were packed with people paying tribute to Sutherland.

© EMI

August 14, 2020August 17, 2020

Flash… Ah, feck off

Not for the first time, I find myself wondering if I’m the only person who’s still sane in a world that’s gone mad. And this time what makes me feel that everyone else has lost their marbles is the amount of praise and adulation being heaped on Mike Hodges’ sci-fi / comic-book movie Flash Gordon at the moment – this being both the 40^th anniversary of its original release in 1980 and the occasion of its re-release on modern-day streaming platforms.

In the Guardian recently Peter Bradshaw awarded it four out five stars, hailed it for its supposed expressionism (its ‘operatic theme’, its ‘bizarre 2D studio sets’ and its ‘eyeball-frazzling colour scheme’) and made a somewhat dubious claim that it’d inspired ‘every 21^st-century Marvel movie’. Meanwhile, the Standard’s Charlotte O’Sullivan also gave it four out of five stars and described it as a ‘marvellously terrible romp’ – well, in my opinion, you could argue that she was half right there. And the venerable sci-fi / fantasy media magazine Starburst recently published a list of the best 80 sci-fi / fantasy movies of the 1980s, in which Flash Gordon was placed ahead of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead (1986), Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984) and Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1980) and Brazil (1985).

The sound you hear is the sound of my teeth grinding.

I’ll be blunt. I thought Flash Gordon was rubbish when it came out in 1980 and 40 years later, despite what often happens when you have both the benefit of hindsight and the rose-tinted spectacles of nostalgia, I still think it’s rubbish. The beef I have with the film is that it makes a joke of its two sources of inspiration, the Flash Gordon comic strip created by Alex Raymond in 1934 and the three movie serials based on the strip and starring Larry ‘Buster’ Crabbe that were made in 1936, 1938 and 1940. Tasked with putting Flash Gordon onto the big screen in 1980, the filmmakers took the easy route of playing the character for laughs.

This is regrettable because during the same period other filmmakers took their inspiration from similar old comic strips and movie serials but made an effort to adapt them into films that, while poking some knowing fun at their subject matter, did so in an affectionate and proportionate way and were still mightily entertaining at the end of the day. I’m thinking here of the first two Superman films (1978 and 80) with Christopher Reeve and Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1980). In fact, those films remind me of something Mark Gatiss once said about Billy Wilder’s mildly tongue-in-cheek 1970 movie The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes: that it gently takes ‘the mickey out of Sherlock Holmes in the way you can only do with something that you really adore.’

There wasn’t much evidence that Flash Gordon’s producer, the old-school Italian movie mogul Dino De Laurentiis, adored or, indeed, knew anything about the original comic strip and movie serials. However, Flash‘s fate was sealed when old Dino – who, thanks to a CV that included Death Wish (1974), King Kong (1976), Orca: Killer Whale (1977), Amityville II and 3-D (1982 and 83), Dune (1984) and Maximum Overdrive (1985), was known in some quarters as ‘Dino Di Horrendous’ – signed scriptwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr onto the project. Semple Jr was responsible for the 1966-68 TV version of Batman, which had sent up the Caped Crusader in an extremely camp fashion. Incidentally, I’m not using ‘camp’ here in the 1909 Oxford English Dictionary definition of it, as meaning ‘ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical, effeminate or homosexual’. No, I’m using ‘camp’ in its simpler meaning of ‘so bad it’s good’.

This camp approach meant that the Batman TV show was ridiculous, but with the intention that kids wouldn’t recognise the ridiculousness and would merely enjoy the derring-do, while adults would recognise it and would have a good time laughing at it. Hence, ‘so bad it’s good’.

(Ironically, most films that are regarded as classic entries in the ‘so bad they’re good’ category, from Ed Wood’s oeuvre in the 1950’s to Tommy Wiseau’s epic 2003 clunker The Room, were actually intended to be proper, serious movies. They were never meant to be bad, but ended up so because of their makers’ entertaining incompetence.)

I assume it’s largely because of Lorenzo Semple Jr that Flash Gordon turned out the way it did. Mind you, Dino already had form in the camp stakes for in 1968 he’d produced sci-fi / fantasy movie Barbarella, directed by Roger Vadim and based on the comic strip by Jean-Claude Forest. With its baroque sets, garish costumes and lurid skyscapes, it’s obviously a visual influence on the later Flash Gordon, but it also blazes a trail by being intentionally and supposedly-hilariously silly. I have to say I find Barbarella excruciating. It’s painfully unfunny in nearly all its parts and also grotesquely sexist, with Vadim’s camera leering over the naked and near-naked flesh of its star (and Vadim’s then wife) Jane Fonda. Plus it’s imbued with an irritating swinging-sixties smugness that makes me want to punch a hole in the wall.

I don’t think Flash Gordon is as bad as Barbarella, but when I saw it as a teenager, and any time I saw bits of it on TV afterwards, I always found it a grim experience. It’s depressing how scenes that were meant to have the viewer chuckling at the glorious silliness of everything just left me cringing. The worst moment is when Flash (Sam Jones) takes on a squad of red-armoured goons employed by the villainous Emperor Ming (Max Von Sydow) in a brawl in Ming’s throne-room that morphs into an American football match. Flash and Professor Zarkov (Topol) pass a ball-sized metal orb between them, Flash charges into the goons and scatters them like ninepins, and Dale Arden (Melody Anderson) does a cheerleading routine (“Go, Flash, go!”) on the side. Oh, and any time a goon gets too close to the delegation of Hawkmen led by Prince Vultan (Brian Blessed), Vultan goes, “Ho-ho-ho!” and bonks the goon on the head with his metal staff. Funny, eh? Well…

I’m not blaming the director Mike Hodges, who was responsible for the gritty British crime classic Get Carter (1970). I assume that with Flash Gordon, for reasons of his own sanity, Hodges just pointed his cameras in the right direction and didn’t think too much about what was ending up in the can. However, I wonder what might have happened if the visionary director Nicolas Roeg, who’d originally been signed to make Flash Gordon and had spent a year working on its pre-production, had actually been given a chance to direct it. The results might have been astonishing… But on the other hand, considering how another big sci-fi collaboration between Dino De Laurentiis and a visionary director, David Lynch, created the turgid shambles that was Dune (1984), I suppose the Dino-produced, Roeg-directed Flash Gordon could have been shite too.

I’ll stop the Dino-bashing for a moment to point out that he did subsequently produce Lynch’s excellent Blue Velvet. Credit where it’s due and all that.

To be fair, Flash Gordon does have a few good scenes, for example, when Prince Barin (Timothy Dalton) forces Flash to stick his arm into a hollow tree-stump that’s infested with poisonous alien creepy-crawlies, or when Vultan forces Flash and Barin to fight each other on a platform that has lethal spikes popping out of it at random places and at random moments. The latter scene was choreographed by the late, legendary fight arranger William Hobbs. it’s telling, though, that these good bits are ones that are played straight rather than for laughs.

And although I can’t say the central performances of Sam Jones, Melody Anderson and Topol made much impression on me, I’ll happily praise the efforts of the supporting cast – Von Sydow, Dalton, Omella Muti as Princess Aura, the splendidly silky Peter Wyngarde as Ming’s sidekick Klytus. Also, a number of familiar faces make welcome appearances in smaller roles, such as playwright and occasional actor John Osborne (who played the key villain in Get Carter), sinewy character actor John Hallam (who wasn’t in Get Carter but was in a lot of other British crime movies at the time, like 1971’s Villain, 1973’s The Offence and 1975’s Hennessey), and Richard O’Brien, who co-created The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1976).

Of course, one performance in Flash Gordon that’s memorable, if not exactly noted for its subtlety, is that of Brian Blessed as the Hawkmen’s leader Prince Vultan. As portrayed by Blessed, Vultan is half-Viking, half-turkey, and 100% pure ham. I wonder if Blessed regrets attacking the role with such exuberance. He must get fed up nowadays, 40 years after the event, when people still approach him and ask him to recite, or more accurately bellow, his most famous line in the film: “GORDON’S ALIVE!” Indeed, if you’re to believe Blessed, no less a personage than Queen Elizabeth II once asked him to shout the line for her royal pleasure.

While I marvel at the unfathomable love people feel for this dire film, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by another thing that Blessed has claimed about the Queen. Apparently, she’s told him that Flash Gordon is her favourite movie and she makes a point of watching it with her grandchildren every Christmas. In other words, in Britain at least, the Flash Gordon rot extends right to the top.