Sun, sand, and suffering—an unlikely trio for a surfing film starring Nicolas Cage, yet The Surfer fearlessly blends these elements into a gripping psychodrama. Directed by Lorcan Finnegan, this genre-bending thriller follows a middle-aged man who returns to his childhood beach in Australia, only to find it ruled by territorial locals. What begins as a nostalgic trip spirals into a hallucinatory battle over power, pride, and the very concept of home. The result is a film that tackles profound political and philosophical themes under the guise of a wild B-movie adventure—an intersection of the mythic and the absurd, a space Cage’s career often thrives in.
A Man Against the Waves
Michael (Cage) arrives at Lunar Bay with his teenage son, eager to relive the blue-green waves of his youth and gaze up at his childhood home perched on the cliffs. However, the beach is no longer the welcoming paradise he remembers. A gang of hostile surfers, known as the “Bay Boys,” quickly surround them, snarling their local creed: “Don’t live here, don’t surf here!” The gang’s self-appointed leader, Scally (Julian McMahon), is a charismatic yet menacing figure who treats the public beach as his personal kingdom. His followers enforce an unwritten law that outsiders are fair game—anyone not “from here” is terrorized until they flee. Humiliated in front of his son and burning with wounded pride, Michael sends the boy home and chooses to remain at the beach alone, determined to reclaim both his right to the waves and a piece of his past. It’s a reckless decision that will cost him dearly.
Power, Territory, and Tribalism
From its opening act, The Surfer sets up a confrontation not just between one man and a gang, but between two opposing worldviews. Scally and the Bay Boys embody toxic localism and exaggerated macho posturing—tribalistic thugs who believe that might makes right. Their sense of ownership over the beach is so inflated that it borders on dark comedy. They smear war-paint-like zinc on their noses and patrol the shore as if defending a fortress, complete with hazing rituals and even sabotaging the public water fountain to make life miserable for outsiders. Scally’s twisted ideology reduces belonging to a brutal contest: only those who can endure suffering and inflict it on others deserve a place. “Before you can surf, you must suffer,” he proclaims with a shark-toothed grin—a mantra that justifies their violent gatekeeping as a cruel rite of passage.
The Bay Boys’ philosophy is a warped form of tribalism, one that mirrors real-world exclusionary movements. Their belief system is rooted in a hyper-masculine, survival-of-the-fittest mentality, where dominance is the only currency. The film satirizes this mindset, drawing parallels to reactionary ideologies that seek to preserve power by excluding outsiders. Scally’s rhetoric echoes the kind of populist demagoguery that thrives on fear and intimidation, convincing his followers that their way of life is under siege. His gang operates like a microcosm of authoritarian rule—an insular community where loyalty is demanded, dissent is punished, and suffering is glorified as a test of worthiness.
A Man Stripped Bare
Michael’s descent in The Surfer is as much about psychological unraveling as it is about physical deprivation. What begins as a man’s stubborn refusal to back down morphs into a brutal stripping away of everything that once defined him—his wealth, his status, his dignity. The Bay Boys don’t just deny him access to the waves; they systematically dismantle his identity. His surfboard is stolen, his car disappears, and even the simple act of buying a coffee becomes an ordeal when he’s forced to barter his watch for it. As his possessions vanish, so does the illusion of control he clings to, leaving him stranded in a hostile landscape where survival is reduced to its most primal form.
The film makes this degradation visceral. Michael, once polished and composed, is reduced to a desperate figure scavenging for scraps. In one particularly nauseating moment, he resorts to eating a rat, a scene that underscores just how far he has fallen. The Bay Boys’ cruelty extends beyond physical violence—they sabotage the public water fountain, ensuring that even the most basic human need becomes a struggle. The more Michael resists, the more he is punished, until he is left with nothing but his own stubborn pride.
Yet, even as he is stripped bare, Michael clings to a delusion—that if he can just buy his childhood home on the cliffs, he can somehow restore his family, his past, his sense of belonging. It’s a fantasy built on nostalgia and denial. His marriage is over, his son is slipping away, and yet he convinces himself that securing this house will magically repair everything. The film subtly critiques this mindset, exposing the futility of trying to reclaim a past that no longer exists. His obsession with the house is less about home and more about dominance—an attempt to prove that he still has power, that he can still carve out a space for himself in a world that has rejected him.
Comparisons to Surf Nazis Must Die and The Swimmer
While The Surfer is steeped in psychological horror, it shares thematic DNA with Surf Nazis Must Die (1987), a cult exploitation film that also explores territorialism and violent surf gangs. In Surf Nazis Must Die, a group of neo-Nazi surfers take control of California’s beaches, enforcing their rule through brutality. While The Surfer is far more nuanced, both films depict surfing as a battleground where power struggles play out in exaggerated, almost dystopian ways. The Bay Boys, much like the Surf Nazis, weaponize localism, turning a leisure activity into a violent contest of supremacy.
On the other end of the spectrum, The Surfer also draws inspiration from The Swimmer (1968), based on John Cheever’s short story. In The Swimmer, Burt Lancaster’s character embarks on a surreal journey through suburban pools, confronting his past and unraveling emotionally along the way. Like Lancaster’s character, Michael is a man clinging to an idealized past, desperate to reclaim something lost. Both films explore themes of nostalgia, masculinity, and existential crisis, though The Surfer injects these ideas with a feverish intensity that borders on the nightmarish.
Critical Reception
Since its release, The Surfer has sparked divided reactions among critics and audiences alike. Some have praised its feverish descent into paranoia and survival, likening it to genre classics such as Wake in Fright and Falling Down. Cage’s performance has been widely lauded for its raw intensity, with Time Out describing it as a “lurid psychological horror that’ll thrill midnight movie crowds”. Others, however, have found the film’s themes struggling to align with its manic energy, with MSN noting that while Cage is given free rein to go wild, the film itself leaves him hanging.
On Rotten Tomatoes, critics have been more favorable, awarding the film an 86% score, while audiences have been far more divided, with a lukewarm 45% rating. Some viewers have found the film’s surreal, almost Kafkaesque descent into madness compelling, while others have struggled with its pacing and unconventional narrative choices. Regardless of the mixed reception, The Surfer has cemented itself as another unpredictable entry in Cage’s post-studio-era career, proving once again that he is willing to take risks few actors would dare.
Final Thoughts
The Surfer is a feverish descent into paranoia, humiliation, and survival, blending psychological horror with social commentary. Finnegan’s direction, combined with Cage’s raw intensity, makes for a film that is as unsettling as it is gripping. It’s a story about the thin line between man and beast, and how far one will go to reclaim what was lost. Whether it’s a cult classic in the making or a divisive oddity, one thing is certain—this is Cage at his most unhinged, and that alone makes it worth the ride.
My plan to review every episode of the current series was almost derailed by season 4, episode 4, Lucky Day. Never before has an episode of Doctor Who, and possibly an episode of any long-running television series, offended me on such a scale politically that I’ve finished it wanting to stop watching any future episodes, entirely and forever. I got over it sufficiently to watch episode five, The Story and the Engine, but that doesn’t mean I like Lucky Day any better. I’ll come to that shortly.
The Well, season 2, episode 3
Firstly, I need to catch up with the episode that immediately preceded it.
The consensus seems to be that this was one of the strongest, if not the strongest episode of the series, and possibly of the RTD 2 era so far. I’d go along with that. For once, Davies, with co-writer Sharma Angel-Walfall, put together a cohesive story that held my attention, and a consistent tone and atmosphere, more or less throughout.
The decision to make this a sequel to 2008’s Midnight, which I gather was not Walfall’s original intention, gave the story a wider context, making it bigger than it would otherwise have been. But it also invited comparison, and one that will only serve to confirm to viewers that, despite a marked improvement this season, the show has still fallen far below the standard of its glory days in terms of quality.
Positives
Gatwa continued his improvement and embodied the character of the Doctor for more of this episode than for any other. For the story to work, we had to believe that this was recognisably the same character as Tennant’s Tenth, on a deeper level than could be achieved through a flashback to Midnight, though inevitably, we got that too. Gatwa just about pulled it off.
Varada Sethru’s Belinda is becoming more of a believable companion with believable reactions, though the fear she displays here doesn’t fit with the blasé way she accepted being kidnapped and taken to an alien world by giant robots in episode one. That’s not Varada’s fault. It’s just an inconsistency of characterisation, and that’s down to the writers, particularly to Davies. She and Ncuti do at least show a bit more chemistry together than Ncuti and Millie Gibson’s Ruby managed in the last season.
The episode was also elevated by the performances of two of the supporting actors, Rose Ayling-Ellis as Aliss and Caoilfhionn Dunne as Shaya.
Ellis in particular was excellent as Aliss, and her real-life deafness was made good use of in the plot, rather than being simply another ‘representation’ tool.
Unlike most anything else in RTD 2, The Well presented a cohesive story and making Aliss the focal point, sitting alone, away from the space station soldiers and the Doctor and Belinda worked in building up the tension, with her disability adding vulnerability and believability to the character and the situation. The use of sign language and the character’s desperate appeal for the other characters not to turn their backs when speaking was a point worth making, from which some viewers might learn something and maybe adapt their behaviour in a real-world interaction, rather than being yet another pointless virtue signal.
Dunne’s Shaya was given some characterisation, and we were introduced to skills she possessed, shooting and running, that were important to the plot resolution, and she did a good job with the material she was given. However, suddenly giving her a back-story in flashback about one minute before her climatic act of self-sacrifice was another example of the lazy, rushed, disjointed writing we’ve come to expect.
Mrs Flood made her now customary appearance at the end of the episode. For once, she wasn’t nodding and winking at us through the fourth wall, but dressed as a proper Science Fiction character, possibly from Star Trek Next Generation, with an appropriate Science Fiction backdrop. She was asking the surviving soldiers on the base about the Doctor and his ‘Vindicator’ gadget.
It was at this point, watching last Saturday afternoon, that I had a moment of realisation and solved the riddle of who is Mrs Flood, the question that’s been exercising the collective mind of the nation since her first appearance in The Church on Ruby Road seventeen months ago.
She’s Susan the Doctor’s granddaughter!
I won’t go into how I arrived at this conclusion, because I’m much less sure now than I was on first watch, and so many other rumours, concerning both her and Belinda are now running riot throughout the ranks of fandom. It’s still a possibility, though one I hope won’t be realised. I’ve been campaigning for the return of Susan since the triumphant rebirth of the show in 2005, but it would be wrong on every level to do this without giving Carole Ann-Ford, the real Susan, 1963-4, and The Five Doctors anniversary special, 1983, a valedictory bow; and I hate to think what the modern incarnation of RTD would do to the character.
All that needs to be said in this context, is that at least the ‘Who is Mrs Flood?’ story arc is giving me a reason to continue watching.
Negatives
This was the first of four episodes this season to feature a name other than Davies on the writing credits, and, as I’ve already said, RTD has acknowledged that the sequel idea did not come from co-writer Angel-Walfall. With a bit of between-the-lines intuition, I’d guess that Davies took this writer’s original story idea, decided it had a Midnight vibe, and decided to revisit one of his best loved stories, ultimately making the episode much more his work than hers.
That might be jump, but the whole sequel idea did seem tacked on, rather than either planned or arising organically from the story.
Without the Midnight link, with a few changes, we would have had a serviceable, old-fashioned ‘Base under siege’ type episode that stood or fell on its own merits, and would have avoided the risk of comparison.
This was better paced than either Robot Revolution or Lux, doing a decent job of building tension, especially around the Aliss character. But, as usual, the ending was rushed, and the resolution unsatisfactory.
Or, perhaps ill-judged might be more exact than unsatisfactory. The strong possibility that the entity survived Shaya’s attempt to kill it by leaping to her own death down the well once the unseen antagonist had attached itself to her, suggested that Shaya’s heroism had been in vain, a suggestion that I thought we could have done without.
The selfless heroism that’s been a feature of the show since the beginning has been in short supply in recent years, and whether Shaya’s self-sacrifice was of value or not, it should be pointed out that, once again it was not the Doctor who saved the day, a lack which has been a big problem with Gatwa’s Doctor from the beginning. The central character has never been a ‘superhero’ in the conventional sense. But he (or she) does need to be a hero.
There were many plot-holes, but I’ll mention in this context only those concerning the way the entity was defeated, if indeed it was. Firstly, it was established that these events took place 400,000 years after the events of its parent episode. What reason do we have to believe that something as simple as a long plunge would destroy it? For that matter, what reason was there to believe that we were dealing with a single ‘entity’ and not a whole colony of them, especially as we were dealing with something that was invisible to the human (or quasi-human) eye?
Having praised (a bit) the two lead characters and the two main supporting actors, this was quite a big cast, most of whom had no function other than being killed by being hurled against the wall by the power of the entity, and it didn’t seem believable that this was sufficient to kill all of them, given their heavily padded suits and helmets. It was very predictable that the only white male with a reasonably significant role would turn out to some be a ‘wrong un’ to some degree. Sure enough, it was he who attempted to lead a mutiny against Shaya, an act for which he received his just deserts, though it seemed that his actions weren’t entirely unjustifiable if thought of in purely military terms.
I’ll mention just two more things. The episode began right after the events of Lux, with the Doctor and Belinda still dressed in their 1952 outfits. I like that, as it’s a callback to the very earliest days of the show when Hartnell and co. would often go straight from one adventure to another. But, it now seems to have become a ‘thing’ that the two disappear into the Tardis wardrobe, accompanied by either time-appropriate or cheesy music (Brittney Spears’ Toxic this week, a song that also used in season one 2.0, episode two, The End of The World with Ninth Doctor Christopher Eccleston way back in 2006, which may or may not be significant) after first getting all excited about the prospect of playing dress-up. I hate this, and here it was completely out of step with the tone of the rest of the episode. It was made all the worse by the Tardis supplying them with the exact same black shiny space suits as the soldiers they were about to meet on the space station.
Here, with every character bar Aliss (who looked a bit too West Earth 2025 than was necessary) dressed uniformly, the Doctor’s continuing lack of a distinctive costume was even more glaring than normal.
Having said the use of a deaf actor/character worked in serving the plot, and while there was less virtue-signalling here than we’ve grown accustomed to, there were two glaringly stark examples of it related to Ellis/Aliss’ deafness.
The first of these was when Aliss was told that Belinda was a nurse, but was unable to sign. Aliss came back with, ‘A nurse who can’t sign, I thought that was against the law?’ It doesn’t seem a very hopeful vision of the future, 500,000 years in the future, that a species who transverse space, and mine a planet for its diamonds can’t also develop cure for deafness. It also doesn’t seem a very practical use of resources to force nurses to learn what is essentially a foreign, non-verbal language which they will rarely use, thus likely requiring regular refresher courses.
The other ‘moment’ was when the Doctor was signing with Aliss and the dodgy, would-be-mutinous white male soldier barked ‘No private conversations!’ This seemed fair enough, for a soldier, in a dangerous situation, who’d found himself in the company of three individuals, the Doctor, Belinda and Aliss, who he’d never met. But the Doctor thought differently, explaining, to the other characters and to us at home, that ‘Even in the future, people get paranoid when people sign.’
Do they, really?
I thought that RTD, and/or his ‘co-writer’ missed a trick here. ‘People still get paranoid when people talk to each other in a foreign language’
would have worked much better, if they must virtue-signal, because it contains at least a grain of truth, and would have emphasised the point that sign languages arecomplex languages in their own right, and not just people waving their arms around and hoping for the best.
These things might seem like nitpicking or ‘hating’ on the show. But if you’re going to make political points, then they should at least be thought through. More importantly, it’s bad writing, not serving the plot, and immediately taking you out of the story. I know I’m not alone in rolling my eyes and thinking ‘Here we go again’ at such moments.
Conclusion
The Well is not some great return to form, but it is a reasonable episode with the positives outweighing the negatives. It was the best of the last two series’ so far, but not top-drawer. It’s probably too late to turn around the fortunes of this season, and I don’t have confidence that Davies can even maintain or build on the mild impetus provided this episode. But I’m still enjoying the ride, wherever it might lead.
Lucky Day
Season 2, episode 4
Or, at least I was enjoying the ride.
Rarely has anything on television made me as angry as the diatribe by the ‘Doctor’ in support of authority and ‘expert’ monopoly of the control and dissemination of information. The co-opting of this iconic character as a propaganda mouthpiece for the elitist politics of showrunner Russell T Davies and episode writer Roger McTighe (the man behind the almost equally vile Kerblam! In the Chibnall/Whittaker era) is a disgrace, and one from which the show does not deserve to survive under its current management and ‘creative’ team. I’ve committed myself to watching and reviewing the remainder of this current season, but I will now do so reluctantly and I won’t watch further than that unless, and at a minimum, Davies steps down or is removed from his current position.
It would be pointless to go through the numerous plot holes and the amazing coincidences which kept the ‘story’ moving. It would also be pointless to mention the weak, lazy characterisations and their confused motivations. Pointless, because the story only had one reason exist, and that was to tell the viewers what to think.
The politics of the episode can be summarised as, ‘Trust Authority!’, ‘Only listen to approved sources of information!’, ‘Anyone who says differently is your enemy!’
Positives
The first twenty minutes or so are soapy and confused, but at least there was the return of Mille Gibson’s Ruby to enjoy and, as usual, Mille did as much as an actor can do given such a sub-standard script.
Visually, the episode is good, in places, and the alien, the Shreek, looked like a good, old-fashioned Doctor Who. It was criminally wasted here.
The idea of the general public questioning the existence and funding of Unitis not a bad one. But you have to do more with it than use it as a flimsy pretext for an attack on ‘conspiracy theorists’ and ‘Far Right grifters.’
I’ll leave for another time the many reasons that Unit and its leader Kate Lethbridge-Stewart have increasingly become a joke in the modern show. I’ll also put aside the confused world-building which has made the relationship between the human race and life beyond the Earth unclear: How many times is it now that our collective memory of the many alien invasions we’ve faced been wiped? We’re certainly a long way from the diverse and colourful universe Davies introduced us to during his first time as showrunner between 2005-9.
Negatives
It’s a small issue, given this much wider context, to ask why we needed another ‘Doctor-lite’ episode in a run of a mere eight episodes, as indeed it is to question why we should invest any interest in the ‘Get Belinda home’ story-arc when we are fed an episode in which Varada Sethru’s character barely appears.
These are valid issues, but such things disappear beyond the horizon once the politics of the episode become obvious, and especially when Gatwa finally re-appears close to the end, to hammer home this narrative for all he’s worth.
This character has battled the Daleks and their evil space-Hitler creator Davros, the Cybermen, the Master, the Sontarans, the Silence, the Great Intelligence, Sutekh and many other would-be destroyers of the human race/conquerors of the universe. But never, in the sixty-two-year history of the show have we seen him as moved to anger as he is by Conrad Clark, a human podcaster in England, Earth, 2025.
This character, well-acted by Jonah Hauer-King, who could have been a decent Doctor in another, almost certainly better universe,, if we can look at such things in a purely technical manner, separate from the heavy-handed, exclisionay politics on display.
But the character is nothing more than a cipher a representation of all that RTD, McTighe and everybody else involved with the show hate, which amounts to any of us that thinks or speaks outside their ‘in-group’ mindset.
On a meta level, following one of the themes of Lux, this ‘out-group’ enemy most definitely includes fans critical of the current direction of the show.
The climatic scene when the pseudo-Doctor transports Conrad to the Tardis, or materialises it around him, or whatever, is akin to the Time Lord appearing in the universe of the great John Carpenter film They Live and angrily snatching away and grounding underfoot the glasses that enabled people to see through the surface messaging that surrounded them, to the real nature of those with the wealth and the power.
In other words, the Doctor became an enemy of the people.
What made it worse was how petty, meanspirited and spiteful it was, with the Doctor railing against the ‘noise’ of people asking questions and putting forth alternative viewpoints online: ‘You exhaust me!’ he spat out, before outlining the future that awaited Conrad, one of dying alone and broken at the age of forty-nine.
So, this is the Doctor, is it, travelling forward through time to watch a puny human being die, and then back again to gloat about it to his face?
This was truly hateful writing, indicative of the real nature of Davies’ oh so kind and liberal politics.
It was a novel and strange experience to find myself rooting for the supposed villain of the piece as he pushed back against the Doctor at the end.
This Channel 4 documentary, aired Monday night at 8pm, took a look at an unlikely but very real rivalry: Greggs versus McDonald’s. It’s not a matchup that would have seemed likely a decade ago, but today the homegrown bakery chain is going head-to-head with the American fast food giant in ways that are impossible to ignore.
Gregg’s has emerged as an unlikely UK rival to the US multinational McDonald’s and we’re lovin’ it!
Presented by Dani Dyer, the programme mixed light investigation with sharp business analysis, making it more than just a foodie show. It explored how Greggs has muscled in on territory McDonald’s once had all to itself – breakfast, lunch, and now even the evening trade. Dyer’s approach was informal and accessible, sometimes cheeky but never flippant. The format combined interviews with customers, insiders and experts, along with archive clips and current footage showing how the two brands stack up on price, popularity and strategy.
Greggs, once a regional bakery from the North East, has undergone a dramatic transformation. What began as a small business in 1939 has become a staple on high streets and retail parks across the UK. Its growth has been driven by sharp decisions – moving beyond sausage rolls and pasties to take on the breakfast and lunch markets with meal deals and fast service, and more recently entering the dinner scene with hot pizzas, burgers and other filling options. They’ve even opened drive-throughs – still only a handful so far, but clearly aimed at competing with McDonald’s on convenience as well as price.
Where Greggs has really shown its strength, though, is in reading the room. They’ve been fast on their feet with social media, using humour and popular culture to stay relevant and visible. Their marketing campaigns – often irreverent and self-aware – cut through the noise in a way that bigger brands can struggle to do. They’ve also been clever about choosing store locations, moving into stations, petrol stations, universities and retail parks – not just relying on the high street.
That said, it’s not just about expansion. The documentary rightly pointed out that Greggs has made an effort to offer healthier choices too. Over the past few years, they’ve introduced lower-calorie options, more vegetarian and vegan lines, and reformulated some recipes to cut salt and fat. It’s progress, but there’s room to go further – especially now that they’re offering more dinner-style foods. We’d like to see them push on with this, not just to tick boxes but to genuinely support better eating habits.
One of the strengths of the film was how it placed Greggs’ success in the context of changing British habits. It showed how, despite being a national chain, Greggs has kept a sense of regional identity – rooted in its Northern beginnings, still treating staff relatively well, and managing to feel familiar rather than corporate. It’s this mix of accessibility, affordability and adaptability that makes it a real competitor to McDonald’s, particularly in the UK where American-style fast food doesn’t always have the final word.
The tone of the documentary was light without being shallow. It didn’t pretend Greggs was perfect, and the contrast with McDonald’s wasn’t forced. Instead, it allowed viewers to see just how far Greggs has come, and how its ability to adapt, experiment and stay culturally relevant has made it a genuine force in the fast food world.
We wish Greggs well. It’s encouraging to see a British firm not just holding its own against a multinational, but actively taking ground. That said, as the menu expands and sales grow, we hope they keep up the momentum when it comes to healthier options. The sausage roll will always be there – but it’s what sits alongside it that will shape the future.
Performance isn’t a film that was made so much as summoned. It came out of the restless mind of Donald Cammell — a painter and dabbler in the occult with aristocratic roots and a taste for provocation. When he teamed up with cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, Warner Bros. expected something vaguely in the style of A Hard Day’s Night, especially with Mick Jagger in the lead. What they got instead was something murky, psychedelic, violent, and deeply unsettling.
The film was shot in 1968 but shelved for two years. Studio bosses were horrified by what they saw — not just the sex and violence, but the overall tone: disjointed, claustrophobic, and morally ambiguous. Footage was cut or lost, and what finally made it to cinemas in 1970 had already been through a long battle behind the scenes.
For years it was seen as a curiosity — a film that didn’t quite belong anywhere. But as time passed, it grew into something else: a kind of underground classic, passed between those who recognised it as one of the most radical pieces of British cinema ever made.
Plot and Performances
The story, on paper, is simple. Chas (James Fox) is a brutal London gangster who’s fallen out with his bosses and is on the run. He hides out in a crumbling Notting Hill house occupied by Turner (Mick Jagger), a faded rock star who’s retreated into a fog of drugs, sex, and mysticism. The two men come from completely different worlds, but as the film goes on, they start to blur into one another.
Fox is convincing as Chas — all cold eyes and repressed fury. He reportedly spent time with real gangsters to prepare, and it shows. Jagger, by contrast, plays Turner as a mercurial figure — part shaman, part clown, part seducer. His performance is slippery, deliberately hard to pin down. He teases Chas, mocks him, tempts him. Their scenes together are charged with tension, both violent and erotic.
Also in the mix are Anita Pallenberg and Michèle Breton as Turner’s companions. The atmosphere inside the house is one of louche decadence — baths, mushrooms, mirrors, music. Reality bends. At a certain point, it’s no longer clear where one man ends and the other begins.
Themes and Style
The film is obsessed with identity — what it is, how it shifts, what’s underneath it. Chas arrives in Turner’s world with a firm sense of self: he’s a hard man, he’s dangerous, he knows who he is. But in that strange, enclosed space, the boundaries begin to dissolve. There’s sex, but there’s also role-play, theatre, transformation. Everyone is performing, all the time.
Cammell and Roeg reflect this in how they shoot the film. It’s full of sudden cuts, overlapping images, repeated motifs. Scenes don’t unfold so much as echo and reverberate. There’s a dream logic to it all — or maybe a nightmare one. At one point, Jagger’s character performs a musical number dressed as a gangster, while Fox seems to lose his grip on time altogether. It’s disorientating by design.
This isn’t just style for the sake of it. The editing, the pacing, the visuals — they’re all part of the film’s central idea: that identity is unstable, that we are shaped by those around us, that slipping into someone else’s skin is both seductive and terrifying.
Legacy and Influence
When it was finally released, Performance was met with confusion, disdain, and a bit of quiet admiration. It didn’t fit the usual categories, and most people didn’t know what to do with it. But gradually, its reputation grew. Today, it’s widely seen as a landmark — a film that broke rules, ignored convention, and got away with it.
It’s influenced everything from British gangster films to music videos. Directors like Danny Boyle, Jonathan Glazer, and Nicolas Winding Refn owe it a debt, whether they admit it or not. You can feel its fingerprints on Trainspotting, Sexy Beast, Under the Skin. Its use of sound, music, and fractured narrative was years ahead of its time.
For Jagger, it remains a career high point — not in terms of popularity, but in how close it got to the myth of who he was: not just a rock star, but a kind of cultural shape-shifter. Fox, too, gave something rare — after this role, he took a long break from acting, shaken by the experience.
Performance isn’t an easy film. It resists interpretation. But for those willing to go with it, it offers something that very few films do: a genuine sense of danger. It’s a film that stares into the void — and smiles.
Description: This edition includes a 4K digital restoration approved by producer Sandy Lieberson, with uncompressed monaural original-UK-version soundtrack. It also features several documentaries and special features, such as Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance and Influence and Controversy: Making “Performance”.
Curated by Pat Harrington.Music on the video version is by Tim Bragg. High Society offers crystalline grace. Bodies Bodies Bodies presents a disorienting descent. It’s a week of layered narratives and compelling portraits. On Saturday, a stirring new Doctor Who episode airs. There is also a haunting music documentary. On Thursday, the UK terrestrial premiere of She Said airs. It’s a landmark in modern journalism cinema. Streaming highlight: Bet, a razor-sharp adaptation of the acclaimed manga Kakegurui,
🗓️ Saturday, 10th May
Believe (2013): BBC Two, 10:00 AM ★★★★☆ Believe is set in 1980s Manchester. Loosely inspired by real events, it presents the story of football legend Sir Matt Busby. He unexpectedly mentors a young tearaway with raw talent. Brian Cox plays Busby with tenderness and quiet gravitas. He brings a warmth to the role. This anchors the film’s sentimental core. The story unfolds with charm and low-stakes humour. The pair navigate personal loss. They face team dynamics. They confront the shadows of Busby’s past.
The film resists over-dramatisation, focusing instead on the healing potential of sport and human connection. It captures the texture of working-class northern life with an affectionate eye, without tipping into caricature. The young cast deliver natural, unforced performances, particularly Jack Smith as Georgie, the boy who reluctantly discovers the value of guidance and community.
Though it treads familiar underdog territory, Believe succeeds on the strength of its sincerity. Director David Scheinmann crafts a film that is modest in scale. It is rich in feeling. It reminds viewers that redemption and legacy often come in small, unexpected moments. It’s a gentle and affirming way to start your Saturday.
High Society (1956): BBC Two, 2:50 PM ★★★★☆ This sparkling musical remake of The Philadelphia Story boasts a glittering cast. It features Cole Porter’s finest tunes. Grace Kelly, in her final film role before becoming Princess of Monaco, plays the haughty heiress. She is caught between past and future lovers. Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby are the competing suitors. They trade witty barbs and smooth vocals. Their story unfolds in a tale of mistaken intentions and reawakening hearts. It’s a sumptuous production, full of pastel glamour and high-society satire.
Despite the predictability of the plot, the charm lies in the performances and music. Crosby exudes laid-back charisma, while Sinatra brings a sharper, more worldly edge to his role as a tabloid reporter. The standout moment, however, belongs to the duet “Well, Did You Evah!”—a sequence that crackles with humour and rhythm. Meanwhile, Kelly navigates her character’s emotional thaw with understated precision. Her transformation feels believable even within the constraints of the genre.
If High Society doesn’t quite match the sophistication of its predecessor, it compensates with grace, melody, and a whimsical spirit. The film is a reminder of the golden era of Hollywood musicals. Artifice became artistry. Even the most jaded character could be redeemed by the right note at the right moment.
Doctor Who: “The Story & The Engine” (Series 15, Episode 5): BBC One, 7:10 PM
In this richly layered episode, the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and companion Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu) arrive in Lagos, Nigeria. They meet a world where stories hold tangible power. The narrative focuses on a mysterious figure known as the Barber. This figure reigns supreme in a community trapped by a deadly web of revenge. This web is spun by the enigmatic Spider.
Rebecca (1940): Talking Pictures, 9:05 PM ★★★★★ Hitchcock’s first Hollywood film, and still one of his most haunting, Rebecca adapts Daphne du Maurier’s gothic novel into a psychological thriller thick with atmosphere and ambiguity. Joan Fontaine plays the unnamed heroine, swept into a whirlwind marriage with the brooding Maxim de Winter, only to find herself eclipsed by the memory of his late wife. The estate of Manderley becomes a maze of secrets, where the dead exert more power than the living.
What elevates Rebecca is not just its suspense but its study of identity, insecurity, and social isolation. Fontaine is exquisite as the timid second Mrs de Winter. She struggles to assert herself in a world shaped by wealth, grief, and manipulation. Judith Anderson’s performance as Mrs Danvers is chilling. She is the housekeeper obsessed with Rebecca’s memory. Her portrayal remains one of cinema’s most iconic portraits of unspoken menace.
Hitchcock later claimed it wasn’t “a Hitchcock picture.” Still, the film is suffused with his signature control over tone and tension. Its shadowy visuals create an intense atmosphere. Emotional claustrophobia grips the audience. Undercurrents of repressed longing guarantee that Rebecca endures as both a ghost story and a psychological drama. A timeless, elegant descent into obsession.
🗓️ Sunday, 11th May
Unforgotten: The Bradford City Fire: BBC Two, 9:00 PM
This harrowing and deeply moving documentary revisits the tragic events of May 11, 1985. On this day, a fire engulfed the main stand at Bradford City’s Valley Parade stadium during a match against Lincoln City. It claimed 56 lives. The film airs on the 40th anniversary of the disaster. It offers a poignant exploration of a catastrophe. This tragedy has often been overshadowed in the annals of British football history.
The documentary features compelling personal testimonies. Survivors, bereaved families, and first responders share their stories. These accounts paint a vivid picture of the day’s events and their enduring impact. The inclusion of archival footage and interviews provides a comprehensive narrative. It honors the memories of those lost and highlights the resilience of the Bradford community.
Executive Producer Jaimie D’Cruz and Director Andy R. Worboys handle the subject matter with sensitivity and respect, ensuring that the voices of those affected are at the forefront. The film commemorates the victims. It also examines the broader implications of the disaster. This includes its influence on stadium safety regulations and the importance of collective memory.
“Unforgotten: The Bradford City Fire” stands as a testament to the strength of a community facing unimaginable loss. It serves as a crucial reminder of the need to remember and learn from past tragedies.
Brooklyn (2015): BBC Two, 10:30 PM ★★★★★ Brooklyn is a film about leaving home—and learning what “home” really means. Saoirse Ronan stars as Eilis, a young Irish woman. She emigrates to New York in the 1950s. She is in search of work and opportunity. The story begins with culture shock and personal growth. It deepens into something far more moving. It becomes a meditation on longing, belonging, and the fragile duality of identity. Ronan’s performance is radiant, filled with grace and restraint.
The film is directed by John Crowley. Nick Hornby adapted it from Colm Tóibín’s novel. It is visually lush with warm period detail. The evocative cinematography enhances the experience. The contrast between the muted tones of Enniscorthy and the vibrant hues of Brooklyn reflects Eilis’s shifting internal world. Her romance with the open-hearted Tony is delicately handled, offering emotional security without idealisation. Yet the return to Ireland complicates everything, and Ronan captures Eilis’s emotional conflict with aching subtlety.
Brooklyn avoids melodrama in favour of emotional authenticity. It’s a story built on small, significant choices. A letter, a glance, or a missed ferry carries the weight of a life’s direction. By the end, what lingers is the quiet strength of a woman. She is carving her own path through the push and pull of two homes. It’s a story many will find intimately familiar
🗓️ Monday, 12th May
Greggs vs McDonald’s: The Fast Feud (Channel 4, 8:00 PM) This quirky documentary unpacks a battle of British fast-food titans. On one side, the humble northern bakery with sausage rolls and steak bakes; on the other, the American giant serving Big Macs and fries. But it’s about more than meat and pastry—this is a story of branding, regional identity, and changing appetites.
The programme delves into how each company adapts to shifting cultural trends and economic pressures. It also looks at the way they communicate class, convenience, and comfort food, sometimes in surprisingly political ways.
Entertaining and unexpectedly insightful, it frames the feud as symbolic of broader societal change. Fans of business strategy and British quirks alike will find something to savour.
Inside Our Minds: ADHD (BBC Two, 9:00 PM) This documentary series starts by empathetically exploring ADHD in adults. It also dives into the perspectives of children. The first episode focuses on diagnosis, daily challenges, and the invisible barriers those with ADHD navigate. It offers not only medical perspectives but also deeply personal insights.
Participants speak candidly about stigma, misunderstanding, and the emotional toll of being labelled “difficult” or “lazy.” The episode excels in capturing both frustration and resilience. It highlights the need for more inclusive environments at school and work.
With thoughtful pacing and clear-eyed narration, the show goes beyond pathology to tackle lived experience. A valuable watch for educators, employers, and anyone interested in mental health.
True Things (BBC Two, 11:40 PM, 2021) ★★★★☆ Ruth Wilson is riveting in this psychological drama about a woman caught in the gravitational pull of a dangerous affair. Her character, Kate, begins a volatile relationship with a mysterious stranger (Tom Burke), and her life starts to unravel.
The film doesn’t sensationalise the spiral; instead, it hones in on the emotional fog and disorientation that often accompany destructive intimacy. Wilson gives a performance full of nuance, letting us feel every moment of hope, confusion, and desperation.
With naturalistic direction and a script rooted in emotional truth, True Things avoids moralising. It’s a challenging, intimate portrayal of a woman losing and slowly reclaiming herself.
🗓️ Tuesday, 13th May
Kind Hearts and Coronets (Film4, 12:35 PM, 1949) ★★★★★ This is a classic of British black comedy. This Ealing Studios gem shows a disinherited aristocrat eliminating eight relatives. He does so to inherit a dukedom. Alec Guinness famously plays all eight doomed relatives with glee and elegance.
Dennis Price’s suave narrator brings a chilling detachment to the tale of social climbing and revenge. His droll delivery and the film’s crisp script guarantee the murders stay darkly funny rather than gruesome.
Beneath the humour lies a sharp satire of class and entitlement, making it as culturally relevant now as ever. A true masterclass in tone and restraint.
Convicting My Ex (BBC Three, 9:00 PM) This true-crime documentary focuses on a woman’s pursuit of justice. She seeks justice against an abusive ex-partner. It chronicles her decision to bring the case to court and the exhausting legal and emotional process that follows.
What sets it apart is its raw honesty and refusal to simplify complex emotional territory. The programme examines trauma and memory. It also investigates credibility and the strain on victims. These victims are forced to relive their ordeals in public.
It’s a sobering but essential watch that handles its topic with sensitivity and care. A crucial reminder of how much support and reform is still needed within the justice system.
🗓️ Wednesday, 14th May
Garbo: Where Did You Go? (Sky Arts, 9:00 PM) This documentary is a haunting meditation on the disappearance of Greta Garbo from public life. It is less biography than elegy. It tries to understand why one of Hollywood’s most luminous stars chose to vanish at the height of her fame.
It uses archive footage, photography, and letters. These elements build a complex portrait of a woman. She defied convention both onscreen and off. Garbo’s retreat becomes a symbol for privacy in a time of celebrity overexposure.
The film is a thoughtful, poetic reflection on fame, solitude, and the right to vanish. A quietly mesmerising experience.
Carol (Film4, 11:20 PM, 2015) ★★★★★ This film is a masterful adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt. It follows a forbidden romance between two women in 1950s America. Cate Blanchett plays Carol with regal poise and aching sadness, while Rooney Mara’s Therese evolves from uncertainty to quiet strength.
The cinematography showcases muted palettes and delicate framing. It reflects the repression of the era. It also captures the emotional intensity of the characters. Every glance and touch feels monumental.
Todd Haynes crafts a film of rare beauty and emotional precision. It’s not just a love story—it’s an act of defiance in a world built to suppress such truths.
🗓️ Thursday, 15th May
Classic Movies: The Story of The Dam Busters (Sky Arts, 8:00 PM) This documentary revisits one of Britain’s most iconic war films and its legacy. It provides context around the real-life mission, the cinematic innovation of the film, and its enduring place in national myth.
The programme doesn’t shy away from critiquing the film’s dated elements, even as it honours its craft. Viewers learn how the use of miniature models, editing, and music helped shape a patriotic classic.
It’s both a celebration and a critical look at storytelling in wartime cinema. Fans of film history will find much to enjoy.
She Said (Film4, 9:00 PM, 2022). ★★★★★ This powerful dramatization of the Weinstein investigation stars Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan. They play the New York Times journalists who broke the story. It’s a film about courage, collaboration, and the often invisible work of holding power to account.
Rather than indulging in melodrama, the script focuses on journalistic rigour and solidarity. Scenes between survivors and reporters are handled with care, never sensationalising pain.
A vital entry in the canon of films about truth-telling, She Said shows how small decisions can change the world. An absolute must-watch.
The Drop (Film4, 11:35 PM, 2014) ★★★★☆ At first glance, The Drop might appear to be a straightforward crime thriller. Yet, beneath its gritty narrative lie profound social, ethical, and political themes. These themes elevate it beyond genre conventions. The film explores economic hardship and the forces that push people into morally gray survival tactics. Tom Hardy’s character plays a quiet bartender entangled in gang activity. His character illustrates the struggles of working-class communities. In these communities, financial instability can lead individuals down dangerous paths. The narrative critiques the cyclical nature of crime. It shows how desperation and power imbalances can shape lives beyond one’s control.
Moral dilemmas and redemption weave through the story, symbolized by an abandoned pit bull. More than just a subplot, the dog represents vulnerability, loyalty, and second chances. Hardy’s relationship with the animal mirrors his own internal conflict—a man searching for meaning and connection in an unforgiving environment. The themes of power and corruption become clear through James Gandolfini’s final role. He portrays the fading remnants of mob influence. The film subtly examines how old power structures weaken. New ones emerge in unexpected ways. The film raises questions about who truly holds authority. Is it those who enforce brute strength or those who quietly manipulate from the shadows?
Justice and survival are tightly connected. The slow-burn tension builds and forces the audience to confront the blurred lines between right and wrong. The film avoids easy answers, compelling viewers to reflect on the complexities of morality in an uncertain world. Atmospheric and absorbing, The Drop offers more than just crime. It is a meditation on human nature. The film explores resilience and the ethical challenges people face when caught between forces beyond their control. Whether one watches for Hardy’s unforgettable performance or its deeper themes, this is a film that you remember.
🗓️ Friday, 16th May
Kate Bush at the BBC (BBC Four, 10:00 PM) A compilation of performances that chart Kate Bush’s singular artistic evolution. From wide-eyed theatricality to minimalist mysticism, the BBC archive offers a rare view of her stages of transformation.
Whether it’s “Wuthering Heights” or “Running Up That Hill,” Bush performs with total commitment and emotional intelligence. Her voice alone is an instrument of daring expression.
For fans and newcomers alike, this programme captures the spirit of an artist who has never played by the rules. Endlessly compelling.
Bodies Bodies Bodies (BBC One, 11:30 PM, 2022) ★★★★☆ Online personas are curated in this world. Here, self-awareness collides with self-obsession. Bodies Bodies Bodies offers a razor-sharp dissection of modern friendships and privilege. It explores the fragile trust that holds them together. Set against the chaotic backdrop of a raging hurricane, a group of affluent young friends gather in isolation. They are seeking thrills and validation through a party game. This game quickly unravels into something far more sinister.
Halina Reijn’s direction imbues the film with a neon-drenched aesthetic. This mirrors the performative nature of its characters. Every interaction is a performance. Every emotion is exaggerated for greatest effect. Paranoia is increasing, and alliances are fracturing. The film exposes how digital spaces shape real-life relationships. These spaces amplify insecurities and erode genuine connection. In their desperate attempts to define truth and assign blame, the characters inadvertently reveal the contradictions within their own self-perception. They are deeply vulnerable. They are also aggressively self-serving.
Darkly comedic yet eerily prescient, Bodies Bodies Bodies goes beyond the typical whodunnit structure. It weaves in biting commentary on the very culture its characters embody. It turns the lens inward. It forces the audience to confront their own complicity in the spectacle. What remains is something far more chilling than a traditional slasher. It’s the realization that trust, sincerity, and identity are increasingly blurred in an age of curated narratives. A perfect late-night watch for anyone willing to confront the reflections lurking in the shadows.
🌐 Streaming Picks
Bet (Netflix, from Thursday, 15th May) ★★★★★ A high-stakes thriller set in an elite boarding school where underground gambling dictates the social hierarchy, Bet follows the arrival of Yumeko, a mysterious transfer student whose fearless approach to risk-taking disrupts the status quo. As she challenges the powerful Student Council, her secret quest for revenge threatens to unravel the school’s carefully controlled system.
With a sharp script and electrifying performances, Bet combines psychological tension with dazzling games of chance. Fortunes rise and fall in an instant. The series captures the intoxicating thrill of high-stakes wagers, weaving in themes of power, manipulation, and obsession. Every gamble is more than just a game—it’s a battle for dominance, survival, and truth.
A gripping adaptation of the acclaimed manga Kakegurui, Bet delivers a stylish, adrenaline-fueled ride that keeps viewers on edge.
The writing is tight, the direction tense, and the performances haunting. There are no easy outs, only the heavy cost of denial and compulsive behaviour.
Bet is a dark mirror to modern anxieties about risk, control, and technology. One of the most gripping dramas of the year so far.
Sunset Grove (Walter Presents, Channel 4 Streaming, from Friday, 16th May) ★★★★☆ In a Finnish retirement community, a trio of elderly women find a suspicious death. They decide to investigate. What follows is part murder mystery, part black comedy, and entirely delightful.
The series has fun with genre tropes while never mocking its protagonists. The charm lies in the chemistry between the leads and the show’s surprisingly sharp social commentary.
If you liked Only Murders in the Building, this is your next fix—but with more knitting and less pretence.
Murderbot (Apple TV+, from Friday, 16th May) ★★★★★ Based on the acclaimed novellas by Martha Wells, this series follows a rogue android who hacks its own governing protocols. Equal parts security unit and soap opera addict, Murderbot is one of sci-fi’s freshest antiheroes.
The show blends action with philosophical questions about autonomy, humanity, and identity. And it’s funny—genuinely, dryly funny.
It’s rare for sci-fi to be this smart and this much fun. Murderbot could be Apple’s next breakout hit.
Culture Vulture is published weekly. Listings and commentary are by Pat Harrington. Music selections are by Tim Bragg. We aim to inspire cultural curiosity. We highlight the best of film and television. We offer thoughtful context for our changing times. Longer reviews of some of the films and programmes featured are often available on the Counter Culture website. Check some out, and till next week, stay curious!
This week’s selections shine a light on visual imagination, artistic legacy, and dramatic storytelling.
You might find yourself escaping into the dream logic of Annihilation. Or you could revisit the enduring sweep of Lawrence of Arabia. There’s a wealth of viewing to challenge, delight, and provoke. Our picks this week range from the speculative future to Britain’s legal past. They prove that television and film remain some of the richest canvases for cultural engagement.
We’re especially drawn to the bold and the beautiful this week. Alex Garland’s Annihilation stuns with psychedelic strangeness, while Tuesday’s immersive Hockney retrospective reminds us that great artists never stop reinventing. Midweek, Mads Mikkelsen faces the elements in Arctic. Jimmy McGovern stars in the searing drama Common and offers his reflections on it.
Whether you’re in the mood for noir, nostalgia, or narrative risk-taking, there’s something here for every discerning viewer. As ever, all selections have been handpicked by Pat Harrington, with original music on our video version from Tim Bragg.
🌟 Highlights this week:
Annihilation brings visual and psychological brilliance to your Saturday night. Lawrence of Arabia remains an unmatched cinematic epic on Sunday afternoon. A David Hockney night on Tuesday offers layered artistic insight.
📅 Saturday, 3 May
Annihilation (2018) – Great Movies, 9:00 PM 🌟 Alex Garland’s sci-fi mystery dazzles with strange beauty and creeping dread. Natalie Portman leads a team of scientists into “The Shimmer,” a mysterious zone where the laws of nature seem suspended. What begins as an expedition quickly unravels into a psychological and existential journey.
Garland weaves a hypnotic atmosphere, enriched by eerie visuals and an unnerving score. The film examines grief, transformation, and the unknown, with echoes of Tarkovsky and Cronenberg. It’s a cerebral experience as much as a visceral one.
Though its abstract nature divided audiences, Annihilation remains one of the boldest science fiction films of the past decade. Ideal for viewers who prefer their thrills slow-burning and their questions unresolved.
📅 Sunday, 4 May
Lawrence of Arabia (1962) – Film4, 12:50 PM 🌟 Lawrence of Arabia is one of those rare films. It transcends mere historical drama. It becomes something far more intricate—a meditation on identity, power, and ambition.
It’s visually stunning, of course. The desert cinematography, the sweeping scale, and Maurice Jarre’s haunting score all contribute to its legendary status. But beneath all that grandeur, there’s something deeply unsettling about the man at its center.
Lawrence, played with mesmerizing intensity by Peter O’Toole, is a man caught between worlds. He’s fiercely drawn to Arab culture. He takes up their cause in the struggle against the Ottomans. At the same time, he is undeniably a product of British imperialism. The film doesn’t shy away from showing his shifting loyalties. It reveals how he wrestles with the idea of belonging.
The British establishment ultimately manipulates his idealism. There’s a bitter irony. His passion for Arab unity is undercut by the very forces he’s working for. He’s both a visionary and a pawn—a man who dreams big but is powerless against the machinery of empire.
Then there’s the question of Lawrence’s sexuality. The film doesn’t make explicit statements, but it certainly hints at something beyond traditional masculinity. O’Toole’s striking, almost ethereal appearance makes him stand out among the hardened soldiers around him. He’s not driven by the same bravado. His relationships, whether with the Arab tribes or his British compatriots, have a certain emotional ambiguity.
One of the most unsettling scenes is his capture and torture by the Turks. This scene is often read as containing elements of sexual violence. The film seems keen to explore Lawrence as a man fundamentally out of place. He is out of place not just politically but personally. Whether or not this aligns with historical accounts remains uncertain.
It’s this elusive quality that keeps Lawrence of Arabia so compelling. It’s a film about war. Yes, it’s also a film about one man’s inner battle. He battles with his allegiances, his desires, and his very sense of self. That ambiguity, that refusal to fit neatly into one box, is what makes it endure.
Even after more than sixty years, it remains unmatched in its depth and grandeur.
📅 Monday, 5 May
A Quiet Place (2018) – Great Movies, 9:00 PM Creatures that hunt by sound overrun the world. In this world, silence becomes survival. John Krasinski directs and stars alongside Emily Blunt in this tense and innovative horror-thriller.
What sets A Quiet Place apart is its economy—both in dialogue and spectacle. Every sound carries weight, every silence amplifies dread. The family dynamic at its core adds emotional stakes that feel earned.
It’s rare to find a genre piece that balances innovation, emotion, and tension so deftly. This one does, and it lingers.
📅 Tuesday, 6 May
David Hockney: A Life in Art – The Interview – BBC Four, 10:00 PM 🌟 The programme is an intimate exchange. It reveals much about one of Britain’s most influential living artists. Hockney reflects on fame, creativity, and the shifting art world with clarity and wit. The programme offers not just biography, but insight into process. Hockney’s reflections are accompanied by a rich visual tour of his work. This makes it an aesthetic treat. It is also an intellectual one. It is a must-see for art lovers. It also appeals to anyone curious about continuing to create with joy and vision into their 80s.
Imagine – David Hockney: A Bigger Picture – BBC Four, 10:25 PM This companion piece delves into Hockney’s Yorkshire landscapes. Focused on his late-career work, it’s both painterly and philosophical. The film captures how Hockney reinvents himself through colour, light, and technique. It also addresses the changes brought by age and technology. A beautiful meditation on reinvention and legacy.
Hockney: Double Portrait – BBC Four, 11:20 PM This is a documentary exploring one of Hockney’s most iconic paintings. It delves into the personal relationships behind it. Revealing and sensitive. The portrait becomes a lens through which to examine the intersection of intimacy and creativity. Archival footage and modern interviews bring it to life. Essential for anyone fascinated by the emotional stakes of visual art.
Face to Face with David Hockney – BBC Four, 12:15 AM A candid one-on-one interview that strips away pretense. Hockney’s humour and insight shine through. The intimacy of this late-night slot suits the tone—quiet, personal, sincere. A quiet gem in a packed night of programming.
📅 Wednesday, 7 May
Arctic (2018) – Great Movies, 11:35 PM Mads Mikkelsen is the lead in a survival story. He plays a man stranded in a frozen wilderness. With almost no dialogue, it relies on visual storytelling and raw performance. The harsh environment becomes both enemy and backdrop for existential meditation. Every decision matters; every failure is fatal. Sparse but powerful, Arctic is about resilience when hope is almost gone.
Gogglebox: 10 Year Anniversary Special – Channel 4, 10:00 PM A decade of watching ordinary Brits watching telly has provided more insights than expected. The show has revealed more than we anticipated. It reflects our identity, emotions, and reactions to the world around us.
This special celebrates ten years of laughter, tears, and heated debates from UK living rooms. It blends nostalgia with the wit and charm that have made it a cultural staple. It’s one of my favourite programmes.
Beyond the entertainment, Gogglebox offers something deeper—a quiet but powerful reminder of how much we have in common. No matter our class, ethnicity, or background, we all gather around the TV. We laugh at the same absurdities. We feel the same emotions.
We find connection in the everyday. We feel collective joy over gripping dramas. We share outrage at political scandals. We experience mutual fascination with the bizarre corners of reality television. The programme showcases the threads that unite us.
This anniversary special promises to be warm and funny. It also provides a surprisingly insightful reflection on how we consume culture. Just as importantly, it examines how we consume each other’s perspectives. A decade on, Gogglebox remains a rare gem. It is a programme that entertains. It quietly reinforces the fundamental truth that we’re more alike than we are different.
Dead Man Walking: Dan Walker on Death Row – Channel 5, 9:00 PM Journalist Dan Walker examines capital punishment. He does this through a series of interviews and case studies. The personal stories are haunting. The documentary avoids easy answers, focusing instead on moral complexity and judicial fallibility. A sobering, necessary watch.
Jimmy McGovern Remembers Common – BBC Four, 10:00 PM The acclaimed writer looks back on his hard-hitting legal drama. It is about joint enterprise laws. Personal and political, McGovern’s reflection sheds light on the motivations behind his work. A timely revisit in light of ongoing legal reform debates.
Common – BBC Four, 10:15 PM A young man faces murder charges under the controversial joint enterprise doctrine. Sean Bean co-stars in this tense, issue-driven drama. Common is not just a legal story—it’s a moral indictment. Powerful, affecting, and still deeply relevant.
📅 Thursday, 8 May
Baby Done (2020) – BBC Three, 10:05 PM A refreshingly honest comedy about a couple struggling with impending parenthood. Stars Rose Matafeo in a standout performance. Funny without being flippant, it captures the ambivalence of growing up. Whip-smart and heartwarming in equal measure.
The Invisible Woman (2013) – BBC Four, 10:10 PM Ralph Fiennes directs and stars in this tale. It is about Charles Dickens’s secret love affair with actress Nelly Ternan. The film is restrained, elegant, and quietly heartbreaking. Felicity Jones excels as Ternan. A literary biopic with emotional weight and visual grace.
The Real Adolescents: Our Killer Kids – Channel 5, 10:00 PM A provocative documentary exploring extreme youth violence. Harrowing but responsibly handled. Raises difficult questions about justice, rehabilitation, and society’s role. Not easy viewing—but important.
📅 Friday, 9 May
The Shape of Water (2017) – Film4, 11:35 PM Guillermo del Toro’s lush, genre-defying romance captivates audiences. A mute cleaner falls in love with a sea creature. This unique story won Best Picture for a reason. Part fairy tale, part political allegory, it’s visually sumptuous and deeply humane. A film that embraces the outsider and dares to dream.
Michael Portillo’s Travel Diaries: In Prague (Ep. 1 of 3) – Channel 5, 9:00 PM The colourful traveller swaps train for footnotes in this personal tour of Prague. Less formal than his railway shows, this series reveals more of Portillo the man. Gentle, informative, and quietly engaging.
📺 Streaming Choices
Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld – Disney+, all six episodes available from Sunday, 4 May Criminal syndicates and bounty hunters in a gritty galaxy far, far away.
The Handmaid’s Tale (Season 6) – Prime Video, new episodes weekly from Saturday, 3 May Resistance continues in Gilead.
Longer reviews and expanded commentary on many of the films and programmes featured this week are available on the Counter Culture website. For example, Tony Green has written in-depth critiques of the first three episodes of the current season of Doctor Who, examining their themes, structure, and resonance in greater detail.
We hope this issue of Culture Vulture has offered not only guidance but inspiration. Until next week, stay curious.
România, o țară cu un țesut bogat de folclor, tradiții ortodoxe și o istorie literară și artistică deosebită, și-a lăsat amprenta asupra Hollywood-ului într-un mod discret, dar semnificativ. Nu prin mari studiouri sau infrastructuri cinematografice, ci prin moștenirea personală a unor dintre celebritățile sale. Poveștile acestor vedete servesc drept punți între moștenirea culturală a României și cinematografia globală. Ele dezvăluie un fir de reziliență, creativitate și artă narativă care depășește granițele.
Fran Drescher: Umor cu Suflet
Fran Drescher este iubită pentru vocea sa inconfundabilă. Este emblematică pentru rolul lui Fran Fine din The Nanny. Are rădăcini românești prin străbunica ei maternă, Yetta, care s-a născut în orașul Focșani. Această regiune, situată în estul României, a fost istoric un centru important al comunității evreiești. Fran a vorbit deschis despre cum rădăcinile ei evreiești-românești i-au influențat profund identitatea.
Simțul ei al umorului – curajos, cald, autoironic și adesea plin de subtext emoțional – reflectă tradițiile de povestire ale culturii evreiești din Europa de Est. O mare parte din această cultură a fost modelată de viața din satele și orașele românești. Abilitatea lui Fran de a echilibra vulnerabilitatea cu lejeritatea poate avea origini în aceste tradiții culturale, unde umorul era adesea o formă de supraviețuire în vremuri grele.
Dincolo de farmecul său pe ecran, viața lui Fran este o dovadă a perseverenței. A supraviețuit unei agresiuni violente în propria locuință. A trecut printr-un divorț foarte public, dar amiabil, formând ulterior o prietenie strânsă și un parteneriat creativ cu fostul ei soț. De asemenea, a învins cancerul uterin. În tot acest timp, a rămas o susținătoare vocală a sănătății femeilor. Puterea și optimismul său – trăsături adesea celebrate în basmele românești – întruchipează o forță aparte: în aceste povești, eroinele înfruntă greutăți cu grație și ies mai înțelepte și mai puternice.
Sebastian Stan: De la Constanța la MCU
Sebastian Stan este cunoscut la nivel mondial pentru rolul lui Bucky Barnes / Winter Soldier din Universul Cinematografic Marvel. Are legături directe cu România – s-a născut în Constanța, un oraș-port la Marea Neagră. A petrecut primii opt ani din viață acolo, înainte de a emigra în Viena și mai apoi în Statele Unite. Experiențele sale timpurii în România, în ultimii ani ai regimului Ceaușescu, i-au modelat identitatea. Emigrarea a contribuit clar la tenacitatea sa.
Stan a vorbit cu căldură despre copilăria sa în România. Ocazional, folosește limba română în interviuri și exprimă admirație față de cultura, limba și istoria țării natale. Face parte dintr-o nouă generație de vedete globale care își poartă identitatea duală cu mândrie – este atât american, cât și român; atât actor, cât și pod cultural.
O Moștenire Mai Largă
Dincolo de Drescher și Stan, numeroși alți actori de la Hollywood au rădăcini românești, adesea prin ascendență evreiască sau est-europeană. Natalie Portman, deși născută în Israel, are moștenire românească din partea tatălui. Familia paternă a lui Winona Ryder are origini în România și Rusia – numele ei real, Horowitz, indică aceste rădăcini est-europene. Dustin Hoffman, Harvey Keitel și Rosemary Harris – deși cunoscuți pentru roluri profund americane sau britanice – au și ei legături de sânge cu pământul românesc.
Johnny Weissmuller, primul Tarzan și campion olimpic la înot, s-a născut în Imperiul Austro-Ungar, în ceea ce este acum Timișoara. Este un exemplu timpuriu de român care a atins succesul în epoca de aur a Hollywood-ului. În mod similar, Julianna Margulies, apreciată pentru rolul din The Good Wife, are și ea rădăcini românești în familie.
Acești artiști acoperă genuri, decenii și stiluri diferite. Ce au adesea în comun este o legătură profundă cu arta narativă – o artă ancorată în transformare, reziliență și complexitate. Dustin Hoffman exprimă o forță emoțională brută; Natalie Portman strălucește prin inteligență; Sebastian Stan transmite o intensitate tulburătoare. Urme ale unei moșteniri culturale bogate se regăsesc în prestațiile lor.
Cultura Românească: Un Curent Subtil
Contribuțiile României la cultura globală sunt adesea trecute cu vederea. Istoria sa, influențată de otomani, austro-ungari și sovietici, a creat o identitate complexă, stratificată și adesea pătrunsă de dor. Poetul Mihai Eminescu a surprins această trăsătură în versurile sale, iar ecoul ei se regăsește în creațiile cineaștilor, muzicienilor și actorilor români de astăzi.
Țara oferă o sursă profundă de bogăție creativă – de la melancolia doinei la turlele baroce ale bisericilor ortodoxe, de la umorul teatral al lui Caragiale până la realismul neînduplecat al cinematografiei românești de tip Nou Val. Vedetele cu ascendență românească poartă cu ele aceste urme culturale – uneori în mod conștient, alteori în subtextul operei lor.
O Legătură Vie
Hollywood-ul este adesea considerat un creuzet cultural. Poveștile lui Fran Drescher, Sebastian Stan și ale altora confirmă că moștenirea contează – nu ca limitare, ci ca sursă de perspectivă unică. Prin acești artiști, tradițiile românești își găsesc o expresie discretă, dar semnificativă, pe scena globală. Fie că este vorba de comedie, dramă sau blockbustere cu supereroi, aceste vedete duc mai departe spiritul unei țări care a cunoscut atât lupta, cât și victoria.
Într-o epocă în care reprezentarea și originile contează mai mult ca niciodată, parcursurile lor sunt o dovadă a forței firelor culturale. Chiar și cele mai subtile pot conecta trecutul cu prezentul și România cu lumea.
Romania has a tapestry of folklore, Orthodox traditions, and a rich literary and artistic history. It has made a quieter but meaningful impression on Hollywood. This is not through major studios or film-making infrastructure, but through the personal heritage of some of its stars. The stories of these celebrities serve as bridges between Romania’s cultural legacy and global cinema. They reveal a thread of resilience, creativity, and storytelling that transcends borders.
Fran Drescher: Humor with Heart
Fran Drescher is beloved for her distinctive voice. She is iconic for her portrayal of Fran Fine in The Nanny. She has Romanian ancestry through her maternal great-grandmother Yetta. Yetta was born in the city of Focșani. This region is nestled in eastern Romania. It has historically been home to vibrant Jewish communities. Fran has spoken candidly about how her Jewish-Romanian roots helped shape her identity.
Her comedic sensibility is bold, warm, self-deprecating, and often tinged with pathos. It bears echoes of the storytelling traditions found in Eastern European Jewish culture. Much of this culture was shaped by life in Romanian shtetls and towns. Fran’s ability to balance vulnerability with levity may trace back to these cultural roots. In tough times, humor often served as a lifeline.
Beyond her on-screen charm, Fran’s life is a testament to perseverance. She has survived a violent home invasion. She went through a very public and amicable divorce. Later, she formed a strong friendship and creative partnership with her ex-husband. She also successfully battled uterine cancer. Through all this, she has remained an advocate for women’s health. Her strength and optimism, often celebrated in Romanian folktales, embody a unique power. In these tales, heroines endure hardship with grace and emerge wiser and stronger.
Sebastian Stan: From Constanța to the MCU
Sebastian Stan is known worldwide for his portrayal of Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He has more direct ties to Romania. He was born in Constanța, a port city on the Black Sea. He spent the first eight years of his life there before emigrating to Vienna and later the United States. His early experiences in Romania during the final years of the Ceaușescu regime shaped his identity. Emigration clearly contributed to his tenacity.
Stan has spoken warmly of his Romanian upbringing. Occasionally, he breaks into Romanian during interviews. He expresses fondness for the culture, language, and history of his homeland. He is part of a newer generation of global stars. They carry their dual identity proudly. He is both American and Romanian. He is both an actor and a cultural bridge.
A Broader Legacy
Numerous actors in Hollywood have Romanian roots beyond Drescher and Stan. Many acquire these roots through Jewish or Eastern European ancestry. Natalie Portman, though born in Israel, has Romanian heritage through her father’s side. Winona Ryder’s paternal family traces back to Romania and Russia. Her real surname, Horowitz, hints at this Central/Eastern European lineage. Dustin Hoffman, Harvey Keitel, and Rosemary Harris—though known for distinctly American or British roles—also share familial ties to Romanian soil.
Johnny Weissmuller was the original Tarzan and an Olympic gold-medalist swimmer. He was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This is now Timișoara, Romania. He stands as an early example of a Romanian-born figure making it big in the golden age of Hollywood. Similarly, Julianna Margulies, celebrated for The Good Wife, and her family line too touches Romanian ancestry.
These artists span genres, decades, and styles. What they often share is a deep connection to storytelling. This storytelling is rooted in transformation, resilience, and complexity. Dustin Hoffman showcases emotional grit. Natalie Portman exudes radiant intelligence. Sebastian Stan delivers haunting intensity. Traces of a rich heritage emerge in their performances.
Romanian Culture: A Quiet Undercurrent
Romania’s contributions to global culture often go under-acknowledged. Romania has a history shaped by Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Soviet influences. Romanian identity is complex, layered, and often tinged with longing. The poet Mihai Eminescu captured this quality in verse. It continues to echo in the artistic output of Romanian filmmakers, musicians, and actors.
The country offers a deep well of creative richness. This ranges from the melancholic strains of doina music to the baroque spires of Orthodox churches. It also includes the theatrical wit of Caragiale and the unflinching realism of Romanian New Wave cinema. The stars with Romanian ancestry carry these cultural traces with them—sometimes consciously, sometimes in the subtext of their work.
A Living Connection
Hollywood is often viewed as the ultimate melting pot. The stories of Fran Drescher, Sebastian Stan, and others affirm that heritage matters. It is not a limitation but a source of unique perspective. Through these artists, Romanian traditions find quiet but meaningful expression on the global stage. Whether through comedy, drama, or superhero blockbusters, these stars carry forward the spirit of a country. This country has known struggle and triumph in equal measure.
Representation and origin stories matter more than ever in today’s age. Their journeys serve as a testament to the power of cultural threads. Even the smallest ones can connect the past to the present and Romania to the world.
Between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one, 1976 -83, I was a ‘serious’ chess player, meaning that I competed for a club and played in small tournaments, such as weekend chess ‘Congresses’. My club was Immingham, after discovering this new club through an advertisement on a notice board at his Conoco oil refinery workplace.
I was a proud member, alongside my elder brother, of a team that won the Grimsby League championship the first time we competed. We also came within one match of lifting the still more prestigious Lincolnshire League, though the pressure proved too much and we slumped to a seven-one defeat away to Appleby Frodingham in the season decider.
‘Serious chess players’ read books full of notation incomprehensible to ‘normies,’ and if chess is on television we will do our best to watch it. My chess ‘career’ happily coincided with the Golden Age of the game on British TV.
I’d first learned the rules, like so many, in response to seeing late-night coverage of the legendary Fischer v Spassky World championship match in Reykjavik, 1972. Veteran Soviet defector Victor Korchnoi’s heroic, though ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to wrest the crown from loyal Party man Anatoly Karpov in Manila in 1978 got huge television coverage, as did their shorter, less dramatic rematch in Merano, Italy, three years later.
Popular television magician David Nixon also had a late-night television program devoted to chess, which was excellent for beginners and those starting out on their competitive chess ‘journey.’
Best of all was BBC‘s The Master Game, which was shown annually from 1976 to 82.
The format was simple, but effective. Eight players competed against each other in a knock-out format consisting of single-game ‘matches’ shown on a week-by-week basis, culminating in the final, perhaps influenced by snooker’s Pot Black, which did a lot to promote that game away from smoky ‘billiard halls’ towards a mass television audience. On the screen, we would see the now familiar, but then innovative, diagrammatic representation of a game in progress and the two players filmed from the neck up. Their voices, dubbed after their game had been played away from the cameras, could be heard talking through their thought processes when it was their turn to move, in truncated form to fit the show’s half-hour format, so it appeared as though we could see them thinking.
The series was presented originally by Leonard Barden, a respected chess author and British international who became the chess columnist for the Guardian in 1955 and, seven decades later, is still the chess columnist for the Guardian.
The first series, an all-British affair, was won by International Master Bill Harston, as was the second series. From the third series, 1977-78, with the winner’s prize increased from £250 to a whopping £12500, the tournament shedding its parochialism and becoming international, and attracting some of the best players in the world for the remainder of its run, Harston took over from Barden as presenter.
Harston, who was also the main presenter for BBC coverage of the Karpov v Korchnoi and later Kasparov v Karpov and Kasparov v Britain’s Nigel Short championship matches, was a great presenter. Anyone remembering TV chess from this period will likely visualise Bill presenting it. Rather bizarrely, forty-years after The Master Game disappeared from our screens, he turned up on Channel 4’s Gogglebox, talking about shite on television, with no indication ever given that he wasn’t just some random member of the public, but an International Chess Master and former TV presenter in his own right.
I was quite excited to learn from my brother earlier this year that a new version of The Master Game, now called Chess Masters: The Endgame was now showing on the BBC.
The time had been ripe for a revival since the first appearance of the time-limited drama series The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix five years ago.
I’d read the novel this was based on by Walter Trevis (also author of The Hustler, The Colour of Money and The Man Who Fell To Earth all making the transition to successful movies) back in the nineties. I’d liked it a lot and was always going to watch a TV dramatisation. But its success as a massive global success was a welcome surprise.
It earned its success by working on a purely dramatic level as a great human-interest story (which is faithful to the novel) with a charismatic, attractive female lead (Anna Taylor-Joy as Beth Harmon), which could be enjoyed by those who didn’t even know the rules of chess. The chess itself, unlike a lot of TV and movie chess, was spot on, adapted from real-world top level games, with Gary Kasparov on board as the technical chess advisor (Breaking Bad, also on Netflix, had a technical methamphetamine advisor, to ensure that viewers at home with a working knowledge of methamphetamine production couldn’t sit at home tutting and mumbling ‘That’s not how it’s done!’ to themselves).
TheQueen’sGambit led to a big increase in the sales of chess sets, in people scouring work’s noticeboards (or their modern online equivalents) for the whereabouts of their nearest chess club and registering online to play against like-minded people around the world in semi-competitive, usually fast time-control games on sites like Chess.Com.
So, to the new kid on the block.
If a work colleague, or random person in McDonalds was to ask me to sum up ChessMasters: Endgame in one sentence, I’d say ‘The contrast between this show and it’s forerunner on BBC television The Master Game can perhaps best be understood as being emblematic of a general decline in western cultural and intellectual standards, as reflected through the lens of popular entertainment, over the last four decades.’ I’d then sit back with a self-satisfied smile, and that would be that.
Instead of International Master Bill Harston expressing surprise to Grandmaster Walter Browne that ‘Speelman should risk such a dubious line of the Dutch against a player of the calibre of Larson’, we get ‘TV personality’ Sue Perkins inviting the winners of this week’s first game to go up to the ‘Balcony of Dreams’ to wait to find out who would be joining them in the next round.
And instead of hearing Nigel Short ‘thinking’, ‘Yes, Timann is following the game we played at the Rotterdam Invitational a few years ago. I played ND2 in this position, and he came out on top in the endgame because of his Queenside pawn majority. But I have an idea to generate King’s side counterplay with h5, which should be enough compensation, so, yeah, h5 it is,’ we have ‘average club players’ telling us their ‘interesting’ backstory: ‘In recovery from cancer,’ ‘Went to prison when I was younger,’ ‘Accidentally murdered the sister who taught me how to play, and so I’m hoping to win in her honour,’ etc, the usual gameshow/talent show contestant stuff.
They’ve also been given ‘interesting’ nicknames, like ‘The Viper’ or ‘The Chess Queen.’ I’ve forgotten the others, though, as far as I remember, the only contestant not given a nickname is the one who looks as though he (or could be ‘she’) was the most likely to have arrived with several of them already.
The players compete against each other in an overcomplicated series of eliminators which incorporate not only plain old ‘ordinary’ chess, but also variants like Fischerandum/Chess960 (which is quite interesting, to be fair) and in solving puzzles of varying degrees of difficulty, the low point being one called ‘Bashing the Bishop’.
Annoyingly, the players sometimes talk to each other during games; play on to the bitter end in positions where any player with an ounce of respect for the game, their opponent or themselves would resign, obviously having been told to do this, so the editors could have the satisfaction of inserting double-action replay’s of the climatic checkmate; and utter the sort of inanities that nobody who’s ever played the game to a reasonable level would ever say, unless they were handed a script and told to read it at gunpoint, like ‘I love it when I’m in a losing position, because that’s when I start to fight back.’
Worst of all, we are never allowed the opportunity to dwell on a position in a game, or on a puzzle, for a few seconds, working out what we would do, though we can watch the ‘final eliminator’ in full in a separate program on the iPlayer straight after the episode has aired.
Sue does have assistance from people who actually know about the game. These take the form of somebody called Anthony Mothurin, who’s billed as a ‘chess expert and/or ‘chess teacher’, and Grandmaster David Howell.
Anthony manages to be more even more annoying than Sue, excitedly attempting to shout us into a frenzy of enthusiasm over an early check or to ramp up the human drama to the max’ with comments like ‘Given her opponents chequered history, the Chess Queen will be concerned about the weight of that chess clock. One of those would do considerable damage to a fragile female skull, if misused, David.’
Poor Grandmaster David Howell. I remember his name from Chess magazine (‘Chess, Sutton Chess Coldfield’ was where everybody sent postal orders for their clocks and score pads before the internet existed) as a prodigy of roughly the same generation as Short. He does his best to retain a degree of decorum in the face of an unending avalanche of low-brow hyperbole. He even tries to sneak in a bit of proper chess analysis when Sue and Anthony aren’t looking, but he knows it’s a lost cause. How can he ever face his Grandmaster mates again? I imagine him shrugging apologetically at the Margate Open or somewhere and pointing out that he got paid more for this than he’s earned in prize money in the last decade, an attempt to deploy what’s now known in chess circles as the ‘Harston Defence.’ But at least Gogglebox was funny, occasionally.
Chess Masters: Endgame is also funny if you know a bit about chess and watch it ironically, as I have.
But I’m not sure who else it’s for. It’s being shown in the BBC’s Quizzical slot, so it’s presumably aimed at people who like game shows. But I can understand how even somebody whose general knowledge is close to zero can find drama and excitement in The Chase (my knowledge of TV gameshows ends in about 1995, apart from this one). But even that requires some prior explanation of the rules. With Chess Masters, if you don’t know how to play chess, then no number of fascinating backstories or nicknames could ever make it work.
Anyway, it’s the Big Final tomorrow night (28th April) and I’ll be watching. Two series worth of The Master Game are to be found on YouTube.
I already had one of these on DVD, and no others are to be found online, so it’s possible that these are all that survive. By the mid-seventies, The BBC (and ITV weren’t much better) had been shamed into ceasing their pointless erasure of our cultural history by destroying episodes of Doctor Who, television appearances by the Beatles and much else, but they might have thought, even then, that nobody could ever be interested in rewatching something as niche as this. It’s a shame, if that’s the case, but at least we have something by which we can measure our devolution from civilisation to barbarism.
Incidentally, the 1983 The Master Game tournament was won by Britain’s first Grandmaster, the tragic Tony Miles, who beat Karpov in the final. It has become known to devotees as The Missing Link because it was never broadcast due to industrial action. It was dubbed into German and shown there, so there is hope.
A critic asked to summarise Lux in two sentences, at some unspecified point in the future might write, ‘It was ambitious and innovative, had loads of potential, retains many good points, but, like almost every episode from the ‘RTD 2 era’, it is an incoherent, unsatisfying mess. Lux is remembered primarily for one ‘Meta’ scene that both referenced and hastened the show’s long hiatus.’
Plot
After last week’s more traditional Science Fiction season opener, The Robot Revolution, we’re back to the Pantheon of Gods, which Russell T Davies (RTD) first introduced us to in The Giggle, the last of the three Sixtieth anniversary specials in late 2023.
This time in the spotlight, almost literally, we have Lux, the God of Light, who manifests in the form of a traditional, old-school Disney-type animated character, Mr. Ring-a-Ding, in a cinema in Miami, Florida, 1952. Breaking free of the cinema screen, he imprisons fifteen local cinema goers within the frames of celluloid film.
The Doctor and Belinda, as part of the ongoing season arc of attempting to return the new companion home to England on the date she left, May 24th this year, find themselves in Miami and begin to investigate the disappearance of the ‘Miami 15’. In their interactions with the lead villain, they too find themselves trapped within celluloid, briefly turned into animated form themselves, before finally escaping by smashing through a modern flat TV screen into a British living room where they interact with ‘Doctor Who fans’. These three fans advise on how to defeat Lux. Returning to Miami, our heroes follow this advice, and with the help of Mr. Pye, the cinema projectionist, who sacrifices himself with the help of his dead wife by setting alight to the many rolls of film, burning down the cinema. This exposes Lux to outside sunlight, an influx of light so great that he begins to grow, to lose his animated form, ultimately merging to become ‘all light’. The missing fifteen walk free from the cinema, seemingly unharmed.
That’s a simplified version, and much else happens along the way, but that’s essentially it.
Positives
It looks great. Miami, 1952, at least an idealised, Disney-fied version of it, is very well realised, the cars, the clothes, the gaudy neon signs, the diner, the ‘picturehouse’…
An early shot of one of the ’15’ screaming out from the frames of film looks genuinely terrifying. The animations of Mr.-Ring-a-Ding and of the Doctor and Belinda were impressive and, based on my admittedly limited knowledge in this area, looked appropriate to the period. Close to the end of the episode, the distorted image of Lux as he began his transformation away from his animated Mr Ring-a-Ding manifestation towards infinity was also impressively horrifying.
Even the ‘fourth wall’/Meta-break is visually striking.
Ncuti Gatwa continued the improvement seen in his portrayal of the Doctor in last week’s season opener. Arguably, he even finally had his proper ‘Doctor moment.’ This was in the diner when he had been explaining to a shocked Belinda that they were at a point in history when segregation was still in place in America. He responded to her incredulity that he wasn’t as outraged as she was about this fact by saying, ‘I’ve toppled worlds. Sometimes I wait for them to topple themselves.’ I shine.’ Good lines, well-delivered, which could have come from the mouth of any of the modern Doctors not played by Jodie Whittaker.
Grudging credit must be given to Davies for his tackling of the segregation theme in general. We might have expected him to go to town on this, but, for once, he showed restraint. Or, maybe, as I mentioned in my review of The Robot Revolution, much work was put into post-production and re-editing in response to criticisms of last year’s series. Of course, there was no necessity to set the episode in segregation era America in the first place, either, and it could be argued that the contrast between the restraint displayed here and the histrionics on race-related issues at the end of Dot and Bubble shows an inconsistency of characterisation. True, characters should grow and develop over time, but that was a mere five episodes ago, and the Doctor was, supposedly, no less a Time Lord then than he is in Lux.
Sadly, though not unexpectedly, Ncuti’s good work was undercut by his usual array of campy posturing, with no consideration given by Davies to how adding such flamboyant characteristics, clothes and modes of speech (‘honey,’ ‘babes’) to his skin colour would likely have been received at this time, in this place.
Gatwa’s threads look very nice, but once again, he’s deprived of a recognisable ‘Doctor costume’ which immediately signals to the viewer that this is the character he is portraying.
Verada’s Sethu’s Belinda was a much more engaging character here than in the season opener, with less moaning and ‘pushing back’ against the Doctor and more entering into the spirit of being a companion at the beginning of what ought to be a series of epic adventures through space and time.
There was some good dialogue and banter between Doctor and companion, and other characters, and some good one-liners from Mr Ring-a-Ding (‘I never should have learnt perspective!’), and it’s probably a bit late in the day to be mentioning how superbly voiced the ‘villain’ was by Alan Cummings. I believe he does this sort of thing for a day job, and you can see, or at least hear, why.
Negatives
As much more of a Science Fiction than a Fantasyfan, I’m not greatly impressed by the move in this direction since Davies once more took over as showrunner. I can certainly appreciate the genre in the hands of masters such as Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Ursula Le Guin, and even J.K. Rowling. But these writers spent decades, a lifetime in the case of the former, building complex, internally consistent worlds full of characters who are believable in the context of those worlds. RTD is no Tolkien. As far as I know, he has no track record of writing Fantasy, and I have no sense of him believing in his ‘Pantheon of Gods’ to the extent of being able to stand even a few minutes of questioning concerning the nature of these ‘Gods’ and how they relate to one another. For Davies, it seems the ‘Fantasy’ tag is merely a convenience that frees him from the need to write plots that make sense to anyone other than himself.
In addition, as Brendan, host of my favourite Doctor Who podcast (‘SenseSphere’) puts it, ‘These Gods are crap!’ turning up in random places which may or may not be related to the Doctor turning up at the same place and time, and then being quickly and easily defeated after causing harm to a limited number of people for a while or, this case, maybe not defeated, because becoming at one with all light is presumably where Lux as the God (or ‘a’ God?) of Light, started from before randomly manifesting as a cartoon character in a cinema because of a chance occurrence (moonlight reflected from a spoon).
I also don’t feel invested in the Belinda ‘Journey home narrative’. It worked fine with Ian and Barbara in the early days of the show, because it was clear at that point that the Doctor had no control of where and when the Tardis materialised.
But here?
As I understand it, the Tardis can’t land on the target date of May 25th, so the Doctor has built a gadget, the Vortex Indicator (Vindicator), which, in theory, could, by getting somewhere (and somewhen) in the right vicinity, drag the Tardis to the desired destination. In which case, why are they in Miami in 1952? It would make sense for the Doctor to at least attempt to materialise on May 24th and, if successful, take Belinda to one of his favourite clubs for a few hours until the clock strikes midnight and, voila, it’s the 25th. She can say a quick ‘Hi,’ to celloist mum and karaoke dad (new information gained in Lux. What a surprise that it’s only the mum who is given a proper career), have a few hours’ sleep and be at the hospital in time for her 2-10 shift preventing the NHS from collapse.
Job done.
Such things are logistic plot-point problems writers can easily deal with, explaining away as necessary, if they are aware of them. But that will often require an editor with the confidence and authority to read through their work and drop them a friendly email saying ‘Very good, but…’
Pacing
Like so much of this incarnation of the show, the actual plot is slight and could be raced through in much less than its forty-five-minute time allocation. But telling it in such a way that it doesn’t strain the viewer’s credulity, at the same time as peopling it with believable characters we feel we’ve come to know and have grown to care about, can’t be. So, that early image of the character we saw screaming from within a celluloid frame was never capitalised upon, because we never saw this character again until he miraculously walked free from the cinema at the end. He didn’t even have a name (only Tommy Lee, son of one of the characters at the diner, had that), so why should we feel relieved that he’s been rescued from his horrifying ordeal?
A lack of consequences is another big problem with the show in its current run. Almost every major character was dissolved into dust early in the season one finale The Empire of Death. By the end, they’d all been resurrected. Similarly, Mr. Pye was the only character who died in Lux.
Linus Roche, a fine character actor in his own right as well as the son of William Roche (Ken Barlow in Coronation Street), deserves a lot of credit for his portrayal of the projectionist. But he got no more than a few minutes of screen time, so, again, why should we care?
***
Over the last week, I’ve watched the latest run of six Black Mirror episodes on Netflix, and this set me thinking that, in at least one future world, Doctor Who could be improved if it could be detached from the BBC completely (as far as new content is concerned). The move from Channel Four to a fully streamed service allowed Black Mirror to achieve what Davies had said was his ambition for Who, to take it from being a niche British show to a truly global phenomenon which enjoys both public and critical acclaim. Netflix provided Black Mirror with a much bigger budget than could have been imagined during its first two series, which were funded by and shown only on Channel Four. But, more importantly, the move freed it from forty-five to fifty-minute episode time constraints. Stories now take as long as the show creator and writer, Charlie Brooker (sometimes with co-writers), feels are needed to tell them. I’d recommend watching, back-to-back, the season four episode, USS Callister and its new season seven sequel USS Callister: Into Infinity, both feature-length, both incredibly tightly written, working on several levels, including meta-Star Trek parody, but managing to incorporate genuinely thrilling SF adventures with real consequences for believable characters who viewers have formed a relationship with.
It helps that Brooker is a brilliant writer, and even his early, time-constrained episodes stand up well. But he would never have been able to produce something this ambitious within the parameters of British network television.
And Doctor Who could never attempt to emulate it, no matter how many billions Disney, or anyone else, throws at it while it remains tied to BBC television scheduling.
The ‘Meta’ Scene
I intended to say more about the ‘scene with the fans’ than I will, because it remains to be seen if this will have a significance in the series beyond Lux, in the season climax as, I think, is strongly suggested by Mrs Flood’s nod and wink references at the end of the episode. I’ll provisionally stick to three short points: 1) It put a break on the story, adding to the pacing problems 2) If the show does end up on ‘indefinite hiatus’ then, as I indicated at the beginning of the review, this is the scene that everybody will remember it for, irrespective of its many good qualities. 3) It’s the sort of indulgence that a show can perhaps get away with when it’s at the top of its game and is still clearly beloved. I doubt many Buffy fans rewatch the musical episode often, but they can forgive and even admire its existence. In a show that is haemorrhaging viewers (I’ll talk more about ratings in a future review, but a 23% drop in the overnight figures from The Robot Revolution to Lux can’t be spun in a positive direction, and now even the pretence of pretending all is well is falling away) it risks further alienating loyal viewers, whether it was affectionately stereotyping Doctor Who fans or not, as well as being incomprehensible to new viewers.
If the show is cancelled, what photo-still from its illustrious sixty-two-year history will accompany the headlines? I’ll take a wild stab that it’ll be of Ncuti Gatwa and Veranda Sethru standing, with three cosplaying ‘fans’, next to a television screen upon which are displayed the ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘BBC’ logos as well as the legend #RIPDoctorWho.
