Killing off a main character

Phil: Being a bit of a Dr Who nerd, I was pleased to see buried away on one of the less fashionable TV channels, an abridged episode called “Earthshock” recently.

This is notable for a rare and major plot twist – the violent death of one of the main characters. Who aficionados will remember that the character concerned is Adric, best remembered as a whiny pain in the backside nobody liked.

Despite his unpopularity, it’s a big step to kill off a character in this way (slamming him into the Earth to kill off the dinosaurs since you ask). Up to that point, the Doctors assistants tended to leave with a bit of blubbing but generally quite happily.

Killing off one of your main characters is a tough thing for any writer to do. Whilst it will give your reader a useful shock, you might well alienate them by removing their favourite character from the story.

You’ll also make them wonder exactly who is safe. This can both put them on edge wondering what happens next, or make them lose interest in the plot since it’s obvious that the writer doesn’t care much about them. All stories call on the reader to identify and care about the characters. Those that fail to do this won’t engage the reader or viewer.

Beyond not engaging the audience, there are other pitfalls. While the BBC happily killed off most of the main characters in the spy series “Spooks” over its run, When Hamish MacBeth’s dog was run over, it had to be replaced by the end of the episode. Humans can meet the reaper all you want but cute animals? Oh no – not on Sunday evening telly!

Mind you, there are ingenious ways to make the best of it. Returning to the sci-fi world, Star Trek killed of Mr Spock at the end of the second film, a major shock for the audience. Fortunately this allowed a third film where they got him back again – a result for the filmakers and accountants. Better still, in the JJ Abrams re-boot of the series, he reverses some roles and kills off Captain Kirk for a few minutes to the pleasure of fans, film studio and the accountants all over again!

Strangely, we’ve never thought about killing off one of our major characters. I did want to skewer a middle-ranking one once but Candice told me I wasn’t allowed, so for the moment they are all safe…

Why can’t I click on the page?

From: Clients from Hell.net

Client: I love the flyer you sent! It’s clicky!

Me: Great! So we’re done now?

Client: No. When I print out the flyer, the links aren’t clicky. Can you make them clicky?

Me: I don’t understand.

Client: I want to be able to go to our website … when … um, when I …

Me: You do know that a piece of paper can’t be interactive, right?

Phil: I read (on-line) the posting above at the same time as I was reading (on-paper) “Who Goes There – Travels through strangest Britain in search of the Doctor” by Nick Griffiths, and it struck a chord.

I enjoy travel books. Sometimes they make me want to go and see the places described. Mostly my traveling is vicarious but none the worse for that. I also love Dr Who. Put the two together and we should have a winner – right?

Wrong.

Even once you get past the stream of consciousness writing style (it calms down after the first few chapters) and the lack of capital letters in the title (Grrrr) there is a fundamental problem with the book. The author keeps referring readers to his website so they can see photos of the location he visits.  That’s lovely but I was reading on a train and so constantly being pointed at a web page was a reminder that I was missing out on a good chunk of the fun to be had from Griffiths travels.

To compound matters, he keeps referring to Who episodes that I don’t remember. I mean, I love classic Who, but I don’t have an encyclopedic memory of a TV show I watched when I was 5 or even one from before I was born. I’m nerdy, but not that nerdy. Thus, I often have no idea what the location being visited looks like ‘cos I’ve not seen it on telly or on the web.

Frustrating. Very.

But, Candice and I were chatting about this over tea and squash earlier in the week, more and more people are reading on eBooks. Travel on the tube in that there London and you’ll hardly see the traditional paperback. It’s all iPads and Kindles now.

These are perfect for a book like this. If I want to see the picture, I can click on a link and assuming I’m not in a signal-free tunnel, up the photo will pop. If licensing were possible, even a clip from the show could be included. All this makes writing a rather more involved job than traditional, but it creates a very different type of book/website hybrid that could be very exciting.

None of this works (for me) on paper but it does beg a question. If the eBook/website hybrid is the way things are going, has this book about a time traveller fallen back through a wormhole from a few years in the future?

Reading Dr Who

Phil: To celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the BBC’s DrWho, a range of books have been packaged up in new covers, a bit of text from the author has been added to the start and then they were thrust out into the world. Whether sales were rubbish or the plan was that they would be distributed this way, the books ended up in a “3 for a fiver” offer in my local remaindered bookshop.

How could I resist?

Reading a book based on a TV show is an interesting experience. None of them are great tomes and one was even joyously knocked off in a single day. I love being able to wallow for a day just reading and eating chocolate. That’s what Christmas is all about.

Anyway, what are they like?

Festival of Death is a Tom Baker (the best Doctor) story involving some complicated time travel stuff with 3 versions of the same Doctor in the same space. This was the one I read in a day and I’m glad I did as the plot is reasonably complicated. The author mentions some serious planning in the new introductory text. For most of us, our characters bumble along on a single timeline, perhaps we get occasional flashback but the subject of our interest generally stays firmly rooted in time and can’t meet another version of his or her self. Stick with the story and it’s good fun.

Earthworld occupies a very special place in Who history. It dates from the era when the show had been cancelled, living only in the minds and literature of the die-hard fan base. The BBC maintained a Who desk which had responsibility for keeping the show alive with novels and it was from here that this book was commissioned. Ostensibly a Paul McGann style Doctor story, it includes companions who were never part of the TV version, something that confused me to start with. A quick look on the Interweb filled in the background and after a while I wasn’t worried.

The story takes place on an Earth theme park of a type that will be familiar to anyone who saw the film Westworld. There’s a lot of philosophical stuff about what it means to be human and some very poignant parts as one companion is recovering from seeing her boyfriend killed in the previous story.

Remembrance of the Daleks is the only book here that is a novelisation of a TV story. Easily the best from the underrated Sylvester McCoy era, it appealed to me as the only decent story he got during his tenure. What’s interesting is that the book version allows the characters to develop depth and a proper back story. The companion “Ace” always struck me as one of the most annoying people allowed in the Tardis but here we get character development and an explanation where she came from, something the TV version omitted. Maybe my memories from 1988 (I looked it up) aren’t great but the books takes a good story and makes it a much richer experience and an awful lot better for it.

Worth a fiver? Certainly. Apparently 12 books were released, I might go back and see if they have the rest.

I love Dr Who, but hate the sonic screwdriver

Phil: It’s no secret that Team Nolanparker are Dr Who fans. Over lunch last week I was quizzing Candice about the finer details of her trip around the Dr Who Experience in Cardiff.

Apparently the first part is really good where you take part in an “interactive experience” after which you go through the “more anoraky” display of props and costumes, which sounds more fun to me but then I am the more anoraky half of our team.

Anyway, we are both looking forward to the 50th Anniversary Episode this weekend. There will be no painting or kitchen fitting going on in one Solihull household from ten to eight on Saturday. Sadly, I’ll probably be on the train back from the NEC so I’ll have to record it, but this doesn’t greatly worry me. I have reservations about the thing.

In the good old days of Tom Baker (the best Doctor obviously), stories were long, 4 to 6 episodes, and the plot cerebral. The Doctor plotted and schemed his way out of trouble.

Modern Who fans want everything tied up in 45 minutes with lots of flashing lights, noise, a bit of tonsil hockey with the companion and the thud of a story arc landing. That doesn’t leave much space for plot so the writers have taken to employing a deus ex machina in the form of the sonic screwdriver. From a rarely used prop (Jon Pertwee was the first to have one but you hardly saw it), the thing is now brandished like a magic wand. It unlocks doors, boost mobile phone signals, scans bodies and anything else that needs to be done without all the trouble of coming up with a convincing way of doing this. Basically, we get 35 minutes in, out comes the screwdriver and hooray, after a little more running down corridors, we’re all done.

Which brings me to “The Day of the Doctor“. Trailers show David Tennant and Matt Smith brandishing their screwdrivers at an advancing army. All I think when I see this is “it’s bloody Harry Potter”.

The Doctor doesn’t need a magic wand. He needs brains and cunning and ingenuity. He’s a clever man with 900 years of experience to help him get out of trouble. In the good old days, and even some of the modern ones, he thought his way out of a scrape. For the modern era, two of the best episodes are Blink and Dalek and in both the screwdriver stays in the pocket.

Of course, the world has changed. Modern viewers (apparently) can’t handle a storyline running across 4 episodes. Everything really must be wrapped up in 45 minutes. Harry Potter was massively popular so turning your main character into a sci-fi wizard works well for an audience educated at Hogwarts. And it’s only a telly programme so I should stop being so grumpy.

I’m sure the 50th anniversary episode will be worth a million X-Factor shows. I’m really looking forward to “An Adventure in Space and Time“, a drama about the creation of the series. Re-runs of old episodes were a much better option for Friday night telly than Children In Need last week too. More to the point, it’s great that we can still produce big-budget drama that doesn’t involve miserable cockneys. Best of all, it appeals to all age groups, something very rare nowadays.

But you’ll have to excuse me if I wish the Dr would learn to use a lock pick. Or even just blow the bloody doors off.

Twitter could kill TV storylines

Phil: I’m not really a Twitterer. I might have a user name (Practical_Phil since you ask) and 38 followers (14 less than someone else) but despite quite a bit of research, I still don’t get it.

Apparently, Twitter is all about conversations and the way you take part in these is to use the appropriate hash tag. I’ve been meaning to give this a go so on Christmas day, I watched the Dr Who special and tuned in to #drwho on my ‘phone.

What I found there was lots of moaning. 10 minutes in and people are pronouncing the episode a terrible failure. As we progress, they are commenting that of course the potential new assistant looks like a character seen in a previous episode because it’s the same actress. And so it went on.

Now the show only lasted an hour. That’s 60 minutes. You could watch the whole thing and even if you didn’t like it, you hadn’t really wasted much of your life. Not for the Twitteratti though, judgements had to be made instantly because their opinions were vital to the sum of human knowledge.

This is all fine. People love a moan and if it keeps them entertained, who cares. Except that despite being aimed at a slightly drunk audience with bellies full of the devils own Brussel Sprouts, the plot was a little bit more complicated than it appeared. Yes, there was the main story about killer snowmen to entertain Granny, but alongside this was a darker plot with an emotionally damaged Doctor finding the will to carry on after the “death” of his last companions.

It brought to my mind the book version of James Bond in “You only live twice”. This opens with Bond recovering from the murder of his wife and we first find him a depressed man in mourning, not unlike the Doctor at the start of his story. Like Bond, by the end of the show, he is back on form and we have a new mystery in the form of Oswin who we are told will become the new companion despite dying twice in two very different eras.

All good you might think. We like slightly convoluted plot lines, mysteries and twists in the end. Except that those hammering Twitter don’t. They want nice, sequential, simple stories that they can comment on and understand at every single point. Mystery, no thanks. They want everything served up on a plate. We can’t waste time building the plot – give it to us now ! They yearn to see behind the curtain and if the Wizard wishes to keep his secrets, the result will be a tantrum.

This might not matter except that the people who commission this sort of stuff read Twitter. They will remember the opinions of people who couldn’t wait until the end to make comment. Commissioners will demand ever simpler plots full of linear narrative. It will be a gradual process but slowly, the complexity of TV drama will fade.

Still, we’ll still have books won’t we? Surely no-one tweets as they read?

 

Doctor How?

Candice: I had a jolly day on set on Friday, filming for BBC Doctors.  You know, lunch time drama, 1.40pm Monday – Friday, filmed in Birmingham.  You don’t?

Well to be honest, you wouldn’t be the only one who hasn’t heard of it.  Up North – Shameless, Hollyoaks, Emmerdale; Cardiff – Doctor Who, Casualty; Bristol – Trollied, the Cafe…. Birmingham – Doctors.  It’s a shame for us extra’s based in Brum and for those at BBC Birmingham because they really don’t seem to be giving much to the Midlands.  Up until last year there were a few things filmed locally, Hustle etc.  So I didn’t mind the odd stint on Doctors in between being in something my working friends actually watch.  But now, I have to travel to be in something I might have any chance of people ringing my parents to say “Did I see Candice in…” as happened when I was in Casualty last year. Not that I want to hog the screen or anything but I’m just saying…

However, there is one show I really want to get on and so far have had no luck – Doctor Who.  Really I should have joined the Agency that does extra’s for it years ago but I never timed it right as you can only register once a year.  But now I am, but my requests for a position as second cyborg on the left fall on deaf ears.  I think I have finally worked out why, they think I am a Whovian.  Ie a super fan who is desperate to get on set and play with the Doctor’s tardis (oh er).  But I’m not, it’s just a cool programme and I’d like to say just once I have been on.

However, watching this weeks episode I think I have worked the other reason why (and it’s not because I’m a red head and would clash with the Pond).  They really don’t have any extras on the show.  Unless I’d wanted to play a robot or a dinosaur, this weeks episode had the sum total of five extras.  With over 1000 people on their books, I’m unlikely to get a job I think!

However, I am determined to give it a good go so will back off a bit in my requests and hope that they forget my desperation and give me a go.  Last job I did in Cardiff, the guy I sat next to said, ” I did Doctor Who last week and I’ve only been doing this a month.”  There was a lot of teeth gritting!