The Spirit of the Stairwell

“Perhaps it’s time. This is only the furthest edge of the Time War. But at its heart, millions die every second. Lost in bloodlust and insanity. With Time itself then resurrecting them, to find new ways of dying, over and over again. We have become a travesty of life. Isn’t it better to end it? At last?”

The end of an era, the passing of a baton. Another man saunters off.

This week, the intrepid crew of the Ood Cast tackle the final episode of the Tenth Doctor’s reign.

We took advice from Tom Baker’s final words as the Doctor (“It is the end. But the moment has been prepared for”) and made sure we all had drinks and snacks to take our minds off the upsetting events that unfolded on the screen.

It was the end. And we had certainly prepared for it. So well, in fact, that we were able to record a podcast afterwards.

So, listen in to see which of us was teary-eyed, which was just a bit ticked off that he took so long to actually shuffle off his tenth mortal coil, and just how much of that last sentence I invented…

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:46 — 28.2MB)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:28 — 29.8MB)

I don’t let my day job entrude on the pages of this blog very often but this is such a well put together film, the performance is brilliant and the impact it could have on the lives of the world’s poorest people so immense, I couldn’t resist it.

Please take the time to watch it, it’s more than entertaining enough to fill three minutes of your life and it offers a concrete and very real way you can take a small action that could change the world.

Tap tap tap tap.

Tap tap tap tap.

Do you remember the old days of “Classic Who”? You know, the days when budgets were the size of your mum’s weekly housekeeping allowance which meant that stories were claustrophobic and terrifying, even when the monsters occasionally seemed to be constructed from items you saw her making a cake with the week before?

No? Well, it doesn’t matter… Not all of us do either. But we’ve seen a lot of it on VHS…

But Who and isolated bases on the surface of a foreign planet is a marriage made in heaven, right?

Download the newest episood to find out what happened after we watched The Waters of Mars in a darkened room, complete with a few glasses of liquid handy, which members of our happy band then refused to touch a drink for considerable time afterwards.

Oh, and to find out what exactly caused an argument that might yet cause the premature end of the podcast …

Save your tissues though, because we’ve almost got to the final of the 5 death rattles Mssrs Tennant and Davies served up for our viewing pleasure. And those were where the real tear-jerking moments were… (well, that’s what it said in the Radio Times…)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:57 — 33.9MB)

A baleful sun rose over the grey streets of New Malden as I hauled my tenderised carcass up from beneath the sheets. It seemed like a low life bar and a bottle of gin were a match made in hell and my throbbing head and half-closed right eye testified to this fact as my teeth rattled in my head and my jaw squeaked like a rusty gate.

Film club.

I poured myself a hair of the dog what gnawed my head off as my gut lurched unpleasantly beneath the starched cotton of my second best shirt. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to take this but the time was bearing down on me like a runaway engine that had jumped the tracks at Clapham Junction and was barrelling down on me spitting sparks and tearing metal with all the demons in hell tumbling after. And stuck in the back of my head was a thought, the ultimate itch I couldn’t hope to scratch – I had arranged this, I had brought this event down upon myself as surely as if I had put my .45 in my mouth, hooked the trigger and made a fist.

And so they came. The dregs of society, the poor and the hopeless, the chancers, the misfits, the bums. The drunks and the floozies, the dirty cops and the wild-eyed crooks. They sat in my apartment, they smiled smiles that never reached their eyes and licked their cracked lips as the whole caper played out before them in a succession of high-contrast, staccato images full of betrayal and depravity.

I sat in my faded leather chair and waited for trouble.

But that’s the thing about trouble, it strolls round the corner when you’re thinking about better days, never when you’re expecting it. The whole shebang past without a hitch, they even seemed to enjoy themselves the shmoes.

I got out alive. I made it.

And now as I look at the future through the bottom of a dirty hi-ball I can feel its icy fingers enclose me.

I am a damned man and I’m playing with borrowed time. I’m going to do it again. Damn me.

I’m going to do it again.

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Film and literature are very different media. Even the laziest of observers will confirm that yes, books tend to be small, oblong and papery whereas cinemas are larger, less portable and serve popcorn. But those are just the surface differences, each art form has its own strengths and weaknesses, especially when it comes to the messy enterprise of story telling.

Books, in direct contrast to their compact size, can tell sprawling stories of emotional depth and complexity. Films require a certain economy of narrative but handle the grand sweep of action and spectacle with natural aplomb. Arguably, books unlock the reader’s imagination, challenging them to fill in the details of a fictional world, while cinema is more prescriptive, locking down those infinite possibilities to a consistent, artistic vision. Neither is the ultimate expression, each merely offers a different aperture to view the story.

And so we turn to John Hillcoat’s The Road, a grim, intimate and mostly successful attempt to bring Cormac McCarthy’s novel to the screen, or as script writer Joe Penhall puts it, ‘transmute the state from ice to water, or water to gas’ while leaving the audience in no doubt it’s the same base element. Penhall asserts that the novel is ‘delivered directly to the blood stream’ and the film attempts the same trick. It can’t rely on McCarthy’s stripped down, bleakly evocative prose but it can offer breathtaking vistas of rotting cityscapes and a dying world, broken and bowed by an unspecified apocalypse.

Viggo Mortesson’s perfectly calibrated performance draws us into this world, wielding sparse, fractured dialogue to devastating effect. Life on the road is sketched out in visceral detail in a series of scenes that unfold as slowly and deliberately as a storm front. By playing to the medium’s strengths in this way, concentrating on visual storytelling and well paced narrative beats, the celluloid Road captures the essence of its literary cousin and delivers a wounding yet strangely uplifting cinematic experience.

It’s episode three of The Ood Cast and this week we’re talking about the first installment in the ‘He will knock 4 times’ saga that ends the Tenth Doctor’s life – the aptly named Planet of the Dead.

Flies in boiler suits, dodgy CGI, a wrecked double decker bus, Lara Croft and fires of iniquity all feature in our rambling review of the story. Allies are made, old enemies revealed and friendships tested – and that’s just during the podcast. The story itself is even more exciting.

Join us as we discuss cinematography, production logistics, morality, travel cards and Laura’s huge crush on David Tennant.

Next week: The Waters of Mars and one almighty bust up that threatens to destroy the Ood Cast.

Forever.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:43 — 27.3MB)