Beyond the Roundels

Some nice things:

1. Trailer for the new Librarians series! It looks just as fun as before! I have NO idea how I will see it, but I've been missing having a fun magic TV series so much, and especially The Libs. (My usual method was to wait for the UK DVD release and then rewatch it all to death, cheering myself up muchly. ha bloody ha, as they say.)




2. I don't know what was in the water re. my fandoms for last Yuletide, but not only have I continued to have much fun with edwardianspinsteraunt and The Winslow Boy, but someone showed up this week on tumblr to first shower love on my for writing the only Jack/Angela The Net fic on the internet, but then wrote their own start of an AU, which promises to be fun, and turned up on AO3. (The Net is v hoky, but also deeply nineties, and Sandra Bullock and Jeremy Northam play a fun game of cat and mouse, plus JN, a cyber terrorist, fails to win because he doesn't know when to use an escape key, which should get some sort of prize for popcorn-worthy silliness.)

Alive on Paper (2842 words) by theelectriccat
Chapters: 2/?
Fandom: The Net (1995)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Angela Bennett (The Net 1995), Jack Devlin (The Net 1995), Ruth Marks (The Net 1995)
Additional Tags: Suspense, Killer For Hire, Crisis of conscience
Summary: Angela Bennett sees her perception of the handsome Jack Devlin crumble before her, but before he can fulfill his employer's expectations, he has a crisis of conscience, which only intensifies when his coworker notices his obvious attraction to his target.


3. Talking of The Winslow Boy, I am now watching the 1970s BBC version from The Rattigan Collection - I didn't entirely mean to, but I finally treated myself to rewatching the 1980s Browning Version with Ian Holm & Judi Dench & Michael Kitchen (&, as it turns out, a wee Stephen Mcintosh as Taplow and, briefly, Imogen Stubbs as Mrs Gilbert) for the first time in 30+ years, and it was on the same disc. I wasn't sure if I was ready to be fair to an alternate version, but it's got such different emphases etc, plus I can see more of where the 1999 does differ from the play, and it's not only really good in itself, but it's fascinating. Sir Robert has just turned up, and I was intrigued to see what Alan Badel would be like, because I mainly know him from being the perfectly OTT saving grace of duff 1960s films, and it's a very different performance to anything I had expected he might do (but good obv.) Eric Porter has rocked up for duty, aged up as per usual. I am happy to see him, but I am beginning to worry that he spent the entirety of the 60s and 70s as an aged up Edwardian gent. XD


4. My main way of calming myself lately re. the whole world being what it is has somehow turned out to be watching the better end of the Thomas More vids for The Tudors (with occasional relapses into Obidala vids, as per 2020). (It was because I knew I had found a good one, but I'd lost it, but I rediscovered it last week. It turned out I had saved it, but it was to Hallelujah and I'd assumed no good could come of fandom's eternal use and abuse of every version of that, and then another one, if with some dialogue going on there, and apparently angst and dodgy hat-wearing angles help? Plus, I'll give the person who couldn't resist making one to I'm Just More points for the lols.)

... oh drat, late for dinner now!

I actually managed to do this meme this year! I haven't got more than partway through it since about 2021, which I do regret, but here we are, I've been chipping away at this for a week or so:

Your main fandom of the year?:

Doctor Who, as ever. Not that I don't run off to flail at least briefly about many other deeply obscure things every other day, communicating my enthusiasms to the distant and patient sympathy of the flist by means of semaphore or something, but that only feels fannish if someone responds, and that can't be expected very often.


( Cut for length of me wittering about TV, film, audio & books under here )

How difficult this week has been is reflected in the fact that the most exciting part of this post happened on Saturday and I took this long to come here and flail about it loudly.

1. You may or may not recall, back when I first started trying to collect and listen to all the full cast BBC Radio installments containing Martin Jarvis, that I ran into a serial called The Twelve Maidens from 1971 that may or may not have still existed and certainly hadn't been repeated any time in the last 50 years, nor did it seem likely to be, and I was taken enough by the description to hunt down the novelisation, as I talked about here, last year.

Well, guess what? Apparently BBC Radio 4xtra has request weekends, and people called Colin and Steven can just email them and ask them to rerun random SFF serials from 1971, and they just go, okay, and do it and so... I've been listening to it!! I've heard the first two eps! It is pretty much exactly as the book suggested and very enjoyable and easy going so far.

Each ep is up on BBC Sounds for 4 weeks after broadcast (so don't wait for completion; eps1-2 will be gone before eps 5-6 arrive) and you can listen to it here from anywhere in the world: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0021q9s

\o/

I only found this because I was very bored and restless while supposedly resting on Saturday(?) afternoon, and thought I'd browse through categories of drama on BBC Sounds just in case. I squealed and nearly fell right off the bed instead of being duly calmed and distracted. (sovay got my initial squeaking by me being incoherent trying to dreamwidth on my phone, which nobody deserves.)

I honestly thought it must be incomplete from what little I knew of it.

But apparently if you're pining for something from the archive, you can just email the beeb at [email protected] and hope they take pity on you. I can't believe that includes this, but I am delighted and looking forward to the next ep after it goes up post broadcast tomorrow at 4.30pm.


2. My browsing was inspired by me finishing Hamlet (1971), which I enjoyed very much - I am discovering that, provided I already know the play, Shakespeare on radio can really work for me. They can't be ponderous, the way some of the BBC TV Shakespeares can at times, they can get amazing casts (radio's probably the quickest medium to make, so people can fit it in), plus there's an intimacy with the radio format that makes it more emotive to me. Which is to say that this play was 3 hours and I would have sworn it was two. And I wasn't even all that taken with Ronald Pickup as Hamlet! (I mean, I still enjoyed it, so obv he was good; I couldn't have with a bad Hamlet, but, you know, whichever Hamlet will be 'my' Hamlet(s), I have not yet found. It wasn't BBC TV's Derek Jacobi either, so really no shade on Ronald Pickup. Obviously, I enjoyed Martin Jarvis as Horatio, but I particularly liked Robert Lang as Claudius and Angela Pleasance as Ophelia, too.)

As I mentioned in another post a while ago, most of the same cast reprised their roles for the 1978 radio Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, starring Edward Petherbridge & Edward Hardwicke, with Freddie Jones as the Player and Martin Jarvis as Hamlet (he was Horatio in the 1971, but played Hamlet on stage in between the two performances). I was entirely new to this, save very confused osmosis, and I also enjoyed this a lot AND am now more knowledgeable and enlightened. \o/ (My own enforced radio literary education programme via Mr Jarvis; it seems to work.) sovay informed me that Edward Petherbridge originated the role of Guildenstern on stage, so it was even cooler than I thought, and it was also adapted by Tom Stoppard himself.


3. After that, and prior to random miracle repeats, I got determined to find something good to listen to, because I'd been having a run of lesser SNTs, some with as much as five whole minutes of David Collings in them somewhere, and things like that, which wasn't good enough for summer.

I found a couple of possible things in the BBC Radio collection on Internet Archive, but was very intrigued by the sound of the SFF series, Pilgrim, which I discovered there. The first episode wasn't great, but I did like Paul Hilton as William Palmer/Pilgrim himself very much, and since I assumed it couldn't have run for 9 series if it didn't improve, I tried the second episode & that was much better, and promises to be the right sort of summer listening I was after.

Pilgrim or William Palmer is a Canterbury pilgrim cursed to eternal life by the king of the Greyfolk for insulting him on the road in 1185, and now he wanders around doing errands for the king, and/or helping ordinary people caught up in Greyfolk business or trying to find a way to end his own curse. As well as the IA link, there are a couple of (s9) episodes on BBC Sounds at the moment here.

Another crosspost for my Fave Eps of Old Telly tumblr sets, and one this time that is part of the reason I started making it, because sometimes you get something like this.

Original tumblr post.

---

Favourite Episodes of Old Telly: The Shadow of the Tower Episode 5 “The Serpent and the Comforter” (BBC 1972. Written by Hugh Whitemore; dir. Moira Armstrong.)
( What more unanswerable question is there than death? )

The Serpent and the Comforter (YouTube) | and on Daily Motion

I'm not sure what else to add here, but it does seem to be the one that everybody else who watches it really likes as well, so clearly this is not just about me and my weirdness or my James Maxwell fixation. (This is what gave me my JM fixation.)

1. sovay wrote a beautiful review of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy!


2. yuletide sign-ups are open! (I have my requests ready, I think (ha), but offers - I want to make sure I am ok to write whatever I offer, because I'm so bad at managing fic lately.)


3. I have finished Vivat Rex! I honestly didn't know what other things I listened to once I realised I was finally at the end - I've been going through it since June.

Anyway, I got to the last episode, and being halfway through Henry VIII with Robert Lang, Sian Phillips, Diana Rigg, Jack May and Stephen Murray, I did not expect any new cast members. VR, of course, immediately wheeled out John Gielgud.


(The answer to what I listened to next was obv: I went back to my Martin Jarvis Saturday Night Theatre collection instead, but anyway, wow, that was a ride. I think LotR is still my favourite radio, but VR was truly amazing and I enjoyed it so much.)

So, back in autumn, I found the collection of BBC Radio's Saturday Night Theatre someone had put on the Internet Archive (also originally here with often slightly better audio at OTTR), ranging in date from the 1950s to the 1990s and with the help of the BBC Genome to identify things, downloaded all the Martin Jarvis ones, all the David Collings ones and a couple of bonus plays while I was at it. Ever since I've been slowly listening to them, although as I did them chronologically, and Mr Collings didn't get going on radio till the 80s, it's been mostly Mr Jarvis.

I've been wanting to talk about these because a lot of them were really easy and enjoyable intros to interesting or well known mid-century novelists and playwrights that I had never read/seen and probably never would have any other way, and that was just really nice. I ended up writing these and being all "I enjoyed this!" Which is frustrating, because that doesn't generate conversation, but I do want to talk audio plays and I did enjoy most of them a lot.

Martin Jarvis was mainly a lot of young officers who were either nice or messed up in some way. I feel like they were all called Peter or Paul or Michael, but I'm not sure that's true.


1. Journey's End (1970) - adaptation of Sheriff's play, with Martin Jarvis as Stanhope. I was very excited for this one, as I wanted to familiarise myself with the play because James Maxwell played Osborne (apprently very well) on stage in the early 70s (with Peter Egan as Stanhope), and this made for a very accessible way for me to finally do it. It's set in WWI and it's very good. It's had a more recent film adaptation, so people probably know of it anyway. (Richard Hurndall was also in it, because obv Richard Hurndall is just obligatory at this point. I was not at all surprised to hear him. I'm only surprised he didn't turn up again.)


2. A Question of Fact (1970) - an original radio play, set in the 1950s, where Martin Jarvis a teacher at a boys' public school, who discovers shortly before his marriage that he's adopted and is the son of a murderer and starts worrying about bad blood and whether he should have married his wife (whose parents don't approve of him anyway) and if he should still be teaching etc etc. The sound on this one wasn't that great (although ok!) and I was worried about where it was going, but once his birth mother turned up, it all went to places I didn't expect and had a rather good ending, and I enjoyed it. I'd have enjoyed it more if I'd known that was where it was going and not had to worry what the 1970s-written, 1950s-set thing was going to give me.


3. The Wind Cannot Read (1971) - adaptation of Richard Mason's novel. This one was really interesting! I hadn't heard of the author before and had to go and look him up, because the story was actually pretty unusual. It turns out the book is still in print and there was also a film version and that he wrote a few other novels - I might see if I can read some one day.

It was set in WWII in the far east. Martin Jarvis is an injured soldier sent to learn Japanese for intelligence work, who falls in love with the teacher, a Japanese woman who is helping the Allies, and who suffers a lot of prejudice and suspicion directed at her. It's a full on weepy, so you can guess what happens, but it immediately felt unusual for the era and sympathetic enough to catch my interest, as I said.


Not (sadly) 4. The Twelve Maidens (1971, 6 pt occult drama serial) - this one was not a SNT but it caught my attention going through the MJ Genome results, because I do like a bit of dodgy 1970s village of evil type stories. It may exist (or at least partially; an episode or something was returned to the BBC Archives relatively recently), but whatever the case, it is not available to me on the internet. It was also adapted shortly after in teh 1970s for German radio (ironically this DOES still exist and IS on the internet archive for download, so if you speak German, it's yours), but the writer turned it into a novel as well, and I got hold of it! It did get a bit preachy (the author was a founder member of the UK Wiccan religion and keen to explain it all in his novel), but most of it was so dialogue heavy, those parts had to be straight out of the radio play and it gave a really good idea of the plot and characters and how the audio aspect would have been handled - its origins were so clear that someone else who reviewed online basically said "this would make a great radio play." It also immediately struck me as possibly being one of the sources that fed into Chris Boucher's Image of the Fendahl - the general tone, and opening with the scientists, and in particular Martin Jarvis's character Peter being a similar combination of sceptic-despite-overwhelming evidence-BUT-still-helpful to the end as Colby that I've not seen anywhere else (although of course, maybe the ur-Peter-Colby figure comes from some more famous example of the genre, because, being a horror-wimp, I haven't even managed Quatermass yet so what do I know?)

I loved that Peter was basically bewitched twice, witnessed several performances of magic and probably killed the baddies by magic and remained entirely sceptical. Even the security guy was into white magic before the end, but not Peter. EVeryone else was just: Peter is an idiot, but he's our idiot, and you can't keep casting spells on him.

This is the ending, so you can see how delighted I would be to listen to this one if I could. I would probably write fic, too:

( Cut for my pics of the last 3 pages for the delectation of my readlist )

Plus, I want to know if all the nudity is in the actual serial or was just part of the extra sexy bits added to the book. (I'm just amused at radio nudity. The easiest kind of nudity for actors to play! No need for any fuss or worry or catching chills in a draughty studio! lol)


4. Mutiny on the Bounty (1973) - adaptation of the famous novel, fictional version of historical events, I don't need to tell the story. Martin Jarvis was Fletcher Christian. He did some mutinying and disappeared off with his ship. I enjoyed it. The sound was a bit questionable.


5. & 6. The Prisoner of Zenda & Rupert of Hentzau (1973) - adaptations of the novels with Julian Glover as Rudolf (both), Hannah Gordon as Flavia, Nigel Stock as Colonel Sapt and Martin Jarvis as Rupert of Hentzau. This was as much fun as I'd hoped. I did once read or try to read Zenda and I was not keen on it at the time. (I was a teenager, I was very unimpressed with the lack of stuff for the women to do and I couldn't be bothered. I think I ended up skimming through it and rolling my eyes.) This was a great way to actually find out the story without having to attempt any more reading of the series (other than watching The Androids of Tara, of course! XD) Obviously, if your no. 1 priority is sword fights, you can only listen to these, which I suppose must be a drawback (although you can amuse yourself imagining probably true images of Julian Glover and Martin Jarvis doing their own sound effects with cutlery or similar.) Anyway, it was good and I enjoyed it much more than trying to read the book back in the day. Rupert is a terrible villain, though; he keeps just running off and ruining his and other people's evil plots because he gets fed up and shoots the wrong people.


7. Strode Venturer (1974) - adaptation of a Hammond Innes novel. This one I didn't enjoy so much, but tbf, that was probably because the audio quality was poor AND it featured a lot of storms, helicopters and modern ships, so I spent most of it trying to work out what was going on. But John Shrapnel was looking for Martin Jarvis, which was a lot of effort because Martin Jarvis kept going off to different hard to find islands in the far east, so Martin Jarvis was lucky John Shrapnel was patient enough to do it. Eventually John Shrapnel had enough of looking for Martin Jarvis and went back and married his sister instead, who was much easier to find and less inclined to be trouble and wasn't called Peter. or Paul. Or Michael.


8 The Road to Gretna Green (1975) - historical drama based on a true story, in which Martin Jarvis was a bounder who abducted teenage Rosalind Ayres (his rl wife) out of school and tried to take her to Gretna to marry her and that is a sentence that does weird things to my head thinking about it and listening to it happen. But it was good! It's just actors have peculiar lives sometimes. (It's not as bad as Karen Archer and David Collings, but we won't go back to the whole sex on the radio thing until next time David Collings turns up in one of these in the 1980s. /o\)


That is not even all of the 1970s Martin Jarvis Saturday Night Theatre installments I have listened to! But it is enough for one post.

Anyway, in short, if they interest you, they are all good adaptations/plays and the only hang up is that a couple of them do (understandably, as older off-air recordings) have poor audio.

This is a bit random, but I made this post in response to a tumblr query and it is so long and I don't want to risk losing it in case it should ever come in handy again. But don't worry, I haven't finally completely lost it and assumed that everyone wants to stalk James Maxwell round strange old telly and film. However, if you do, here is your guide to what's good (for Mr Maxwell anyway) complete with warnings for particularly terrible facial hair. I might come back and edit in YT links later (maybe even gifs), but I'll leave it here as it is for now, just so that tumblr doesn't eat my ridiculous work (because tumblr).

*waves*


***

More of a guide than a recs list, because old tv/film depends so much on availability. It’s also hard as there’s nothing surviving that’s really like SotT for him (his voice is always slightly different, too & rarely the grand one from SotT) - I found it hard to find where to start back in the day, so I hope this makes it easier. However, I have starred my favourites (rated for JM content only).

I’ve divided things into categories and jurijurijurious​ (or anyone) can make up their own mind as to what to go for.

Where to find things: Luckily in the UK, it’s not too bad! Network Distributing are the DVD supplier to keep an eye on (they do great online sales), you can find secondhand things cheap on Amazon Marketplace & eBay, and several Freeview channels show old TV & film, especially Talking Pictures. I’ll note if things are on YT or Daily Motion, but they come and go all the time, so it’s always worth searching.

( Cut for very long post of me rating episodes on a JM scale )

Giant Public Eye icon repost! (And I mean giant - I made two sets originally, so altogether I think there are 150 icons. Mostly Alfred Burke and Pauline Delany, but also a random assortment of familiar guest stars.)

Teaser:



( I always end up disappointing someone )

Concluding my Incomplete Gifology of the career of James Maxwell with the 1970s, because I'm sure you were all thinking that your flists had been devoid of random grainy JM gifs lately. Luckily I can fix that!

( Cut for a lot of JM but grossly misleading lack of terrible facial hair )

So, I've been meaning to share some of this here for ages, and here goes. I've been giffing my way through the Dracula adaptations I've seen so far (6 currently) and have completed five, with Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) still to go. (I got stopped by people spoiling my fun by suddenly making a new Dracula in the middle of all this, which meant people were taking notice of my posts and it was too much. Also now I'm not up to date! Damn them. Couldn't they have waited? ;-p)

Anyway, I'm not a visual person, or not without prompting, which is one of the things I really enjoy about screencapping, iconing and giffing, because it makes me look at visual media in ways I never do otherwise. So this isn't anything profound, but in the process, I noticed some interesting visual nods from one production to one or more of the others, so here is a post about that.

( Cut for giffage and vampires feat. 1931, Hammer, TV 1968, TV 1977 & TV 2006 )

It's going to be interesting doing BSD in this light, because, though this blows my mind, the previous version it seems to be most obviously referencing is... my much-loved shaky old 1968 TV version. How very dare. 0_o

1. persiflage_1 just linked me to this Dec 1977 London Weekend Television promo pic, and I'm so strangely charmed to see Emily Richard, Bernard Horsfall, and Alfred Burke standing together (they must have started work in some shape on Enemy at the Door,) and yet all smiling and happy and not at all war-worn and sad. (I want that AU, please. :lol:)


2. I finished my epic quest to gif an awful lot of the 1968 Thames TV Dracula over at tumblr and am now (via the queue) posting the final, collected character and ship editions - calliopes_pen, I actually have done a Jonathan one! (Be proud of me. <3)

But if you want to understand why Dr Seward is so hopeless at fighting vampires, here's his photoset, complete with quote that explains that in one sentence. :-D


3. Pers also pointed out that Big Finish were doing Adam Adamant Lives! audios next year, but I looked at the page and got as far as learning that it didn't involve the original actors and the line "And to his rescue comes history enthusiast and would-be novelist Georgina Jones" and ran away. I mean, yes, of course make Georgie more pro-active in a reboot by all means, but if you want an Edwardian Adventurer & Gent culture clash with a with-it 1960s girl, making her a bookish historian instead of a DJ is, er, not the way to do it.

Besides, Georgie would be so horrified at the mere idea of that description! As would Adam, for different reasons. And Simms would never let her live it down. There would be limericks. I'm tempted to write fic. (But not the limericks.) ETA: I'm going to be laughing a lot at that line every time I think of it...

I am being bad at posting and I am actually really enjoying the Stuff I Love meme, both seeing other people's posts and self-indulgently going on about things I love. I am tired, though, so let me be obvious tonight.

Anyone who's been following me for more than about two minutes will have gathered that as well as obscure old telly I love obscure old actors who appear in it. It was an inevitable consequence, really. David Collings, Barbara Murray, Alfred Burke, Suzanne Neve, Gemma Jones and a bunch of others. David Collings is the person whose fault it was, and who dies improbably and entertainingly a lot. But my current favourite is James Maxwell. I would explain myself, and there is a sort of explanation in there somewhere that started with David Collings and BBC period drama but it passed through Sapphire and Steel fancasting and theatrical ghost stories and a nice obit, to "I just like your face, sir" and then what can you do?

Anyway, James Maxwell was a character actor who was one of the founding artistic directors of Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre, which he is now reputed to haunt. He was actually American, but came to the UK to study at the Old Vic Theatre School in 1950 and stayed here till he died in 1995.

Things I like about him:

1. He crossed an ocean because of Dame Edith Evans. (Literally: he went to see her in the theatre and no less than two days later he was on board a ship for the UK, arriving in Southampton with no forwarding address.)

2. The ghost story about him can basically be boiled down to "his colleagues wanted to have him still around." Bonus for the ghost story: he is said to have made an appearance on TV from beyond the grave on Most Haunted. Not something everyone can claim.

( And now I will just illustrate my point with gifs )


I was prompted to post this particular entry today because someone on tumblr had found a new source of theatrical pics for him, which I shall now share, watermarks notwithstanding.

( Ah, yes, the one in the short skirt holding someone's hand... )

I was going to write a sensible post about JM and do him justice (because actually he was a pretty interesting person and it has been fun trying to find out more about him and there is a lot to say) but I am tired. So you got the gifs that survived my tumblr-pocalypse.

But this list could have been a lot longer and had more gifs, so you can't complain too much. ;-p


ETA: oh, also THIS LIST. <3

corvidology came up with this idea, which sounds much more fun than shit-posting:



I don't know if I'll post every day, but I also don't know how to be short about stuff I love. Anyway, I just randomly discovered (via someone linking some of the others on tumblr) that someone's reuploaded a lot of the Thriller episodes onto YouTube. (If you remember, the ones I started epically picspamming for the lols before I gave up - there were 30+ episodes okay - and which mainly involve Americans getting randomly menaced every time they visit the UK). Including, yes, you've guessed it...

Good Salary, Prospects, Free Coffin, aka the One Where Julian Glover and James Maxwell move in together and bury girls in the back garden. Theoretically this is because they're spies with a ridiculously complicated and improbable plan, but it actually involves Julian wearing manly pullies and digging graves while sneering at James Maxwell for reading classic lit and wearing cardigans and vaguely angsting about all the murdering going on.

Plus, it has the proper number of Americans getting menaced, natty knitwear, Keith Barron is randomly the world's worst boyfriend, and basically it is 1 hr and 10 minutes of pure beige cheese.

I have a lot of things I love with people I love in and I could recommend many of them and rhapsodise about them. This is not one of those, but, let's be honest, I have watched this too many times since liadt sent me a piratey version and since I got the actual anthology myself. I just wish it was a sitcom with less murdering and more episodes.

Thriller was not really for me, but I did enjoy the starry casts, the supernatural ones (like the one where Diana Dors is Satan and Patrick Troughton is a drunken priest) and the ones that were pure cheese. I also liked Suzanne Neve getting to sword fight and seeming truly nice and normal before she tried to bake people in ovens and I was highly amused at Brian Clemens' determination to menace any and all Americans who dared to cross the Atlantic.* But mostly I love the above piece of 100% cheddar. (Alas poor Babs, though! Too dim to live.)

I think this post is totally in the spirit of both memes.


* Thriller was an ITC film series, made with US money. The US backers liked to see American characters in leading roles. However, in Thriller that starts to look like something they should have thought through a little bit harder, much to my amusement...