There’s a point in a horror icon’s career, usually when they’re still bankable but aren’t the newest fright any more, when they go meta. The roots of this can probably be traced back to all those Universal movies that pitted the studio’s once-formidable monsters against Abbott and Costello. Later on, […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Familiar Touch (2024): dementia drama without the melodrama
On a recent episode of the Adam Buxton Podcast, Kathy Burke spoke about going to see Alexander Zeldin’s play Care, which chronicles the last year or so of a woman’s life in a care home. After effusively describing it and the effect it had on the audience, the host asked […]
Doctor Who A-Z #122: Time-Flight (1982)
Time-Flight is one of those Doctor Who stories that people tend to criticise just by saying what happens in it, as though you’ll never come up with a dismissal of it more damning than “this is the one where they thought they could successfully film Concorde crash-landing on prehistoric Earth”. And that’s completely […]
Doctor Who A-Z #121: Earthshock (1982)
Back in the Usenet days of Doctor Who fandom, people used to talk about “frock” versus “gun” episodes of Doctor Who. Some people liked the show for its “frock” elements (camp humour, weird juxtapositions, eccentric characters), some for its “gun” elements (military action, recurring monsters, violent deaths). I was never sure how seriously […]
The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955): audacious thought crimes in Buñuel’s serial killer satire
Luis Buñuel began the 1950s by making arguably his first mature masterpiece, Los Olvidados; he ended with Nazarin, a cult satire that counted Andrei Tarkovsky and Pope John Paul II among its unlikely but influential fan club. The films he made in between are too often overlooked, and it’s easy […]
Doctor Who A-Z #120: Black Orchid (1982)
The decision to spend two episodes of Peter Davison’s debut season trying to revive the “pure historical” – a subgenre of Doctor Who where the Doctor and the TARDIS are the only science-fictional elements, which hasn’t been attempted since Patrick Troughton’s sophomore story – is usually regarded as a baffling […]
Doctor Who A-Z #119: The Visitation (1982)
So here we are, the first serial to bear a screenwriting credit for Eric Saward. To say his rise was meteoric would be an understatement; not yet forty and without a Doctor Who story to his name, he’s already the script editor at this point. The happiest thing to note […]
Doctor Who A-Z #118: Kinda (1982)
Kinda doesn’t make it easy for you. Normally even the most intricately plotted classic-series Doctor Who story will at least work superficially as an adventure story, but – even with a ticking clock, a giant monster and a madman in charge of a colonial base – Kinda is clearly more […]
Doctor Who A-Z #117: Four to Doomsday (1982)
Terence Dudley makes his screenwriting debut with Four to Doomsday, but he’s been around for a while. I’m not just referring to him directing Meglos last season, although it is an odd quirk that Season Nineteen contains no less than two writers who started out as directors the year before. […]
Doctor Who A-Z #116: Castrovalva (1982)
One of the morbid fascinations of looking over old Doctor Who is assessing all the moments when the series could have ended – the 1989 cancellation, obviously, and the 1985 hiatus. It could have stopped when William Hartnell left the role, and conversations about the wisdom of keeping the show […]