THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO review. Saturdays, ITV

FAB! 

Happily, Thunderbirds are still go, but a misjudged transmission time could do more to finish off International Rescue than anything dreamed up by the Hood.

International Rescue - the next boy band? (Image: ITV)

Ten years ago, a 1960s family favourite returned to British television. Since then, Doctor Who has sent a lot of ripples through the TV gene pool, resulting in new BBC fantasy shows such as Life on Mars, Merlin, Robin Hood and Atlantis, to name a few. ITV’s best shot at the title was the dinosaur runaround Primeval, but beyond that they’ve struggled to come up with something that’s made a lasting impact.

So you can understand why ITV has looked back to its own 1960s golden age for inspiration. For a generation of children, the science fiction puppet shows made then by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson were the ideal complement to Doctor Who. Where the BBC’s series, though often scarily brilliant, was actor-centric and mainly confined to atmospheric (and small) studio sets, the Anderson’s oeuvre offered cinematic visualisations of the future populated by organisations with great, Bond-ish names like WASP and Spectrum, cool uniforms, rousing theme tunes you could sing on the way to school and, above all, stylish, must-have futuristic vehicles that gave the Daleks a run for their money in toy shops up and down the country.

The Anderson series that made the most impact and inspires the most affection is Thunderbirds (1965-66), featuring the square-jawed Tracy family (who, thinking about it, all vaguely resembled John F. Kennedy). Their family business International Rescue operated from an island base in the Pacific, and the Tracy boys did exactly what their secret organisation’s name said on the side of their iconic craft – the Thunderbirds of the title – saving lives in natural and unnatural disasters around the world. Perhaps that’s why the show was the most popular of the Anderson shows, generating two TV series and two feature films and, thirty years later, again taking the country’s toy emporiums by storm thanks to archive repeats on BBC2.

Watching ITV’s 2015 CGI revival is fascinating. Like the new Doctor Who, it’s an instructive exercise in how to update something but retain its original appeal. The producers have kept the theme music and title sequence that got us all so excited on a weekly basis, counting down through each of the Thunderbirds – ‘5… 4… 3… 2… 1!’ – until Thunderbird 1 blasted off into an exciting montage of clips from that week’s episode, just before the brave Tracy lads were each given an on-screen selfie. That’s a brilliant introduction guaranteed to keep anyone watching, in 1965 or 2015.

The CGI itself isn’t so sophisticated that it doesn’t have a charm of its own – the likenesses of the Tracys, bespectacled scientist Brains and arch-enemy the Hood are all recognisable from the original – and the thinking seems to have been that if CGI had been available to the Andersons in the 1960s, this is what they would have come up with. While the endearingly elaborate launch sequences have been kept (Thunderbird 1 from under the swimming pool, Thunderbird 3, bizarrely, through the brothers’ house), this time around, the Thunderbird machines, complete with crash zooms, can move as fast as any ICBM. You can also see how the concept has been filtered through modern action films like Mission: Impossible and Gravity, with International Rescue’s all-in-one jump suits obviously influenced by the X Men and the Marvel Avengers films. Pleasingly, the Tracys run, swim and pirouette in zero gravity as realistically as any human action star.

M'Lady and the guv'nor. (Image: ITV)

Rewarding the faith of the 1960s audience is the return of voice artist David Graham as Aloysius Parker, International Rescue agent Lady Penelope’s chauffer/safecracker/partner in crime. This time he’s sleeker but somehow tougher, and you’re left with the feeling that you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of this particular cockney geezer. Penny herself is voiced by bona fide film star Rosamund Pike and, as in the ill-fated 2004 feature film, you can see that that these two may well shape up to be the best thing about the revival, as they have a devious edge that the clean-cut Tracys lack.

The stories themselves are straightforward enough for kids, with the occasional self-aware touch to keep parents chuckling as they watch alongside their children (if they’re up at 8am on a Saturday, but more of that in a minute). The Tracys can now sit at home watching their siblings’ missions, just like we’re watching them on television, and, in the opening two-parter, the Hood showed the maturity of a latter-day Bond villain when he announced, ‘I don’t want to rule the world: I just want to own it. Let someone else run the place.’

Ah yes, the scheduling. ‘Whaaat?’ Mum squealed, nearly dropping the sponge fingers on that Easter weekend when Thunderbirds are Go debuted in ITV primetime. ‘8 o’clock on a Saturday morning from next week!? Kids are still in bed!’ I’ve no doubt that their parents would like to be too, and it is rather mystifying that having clearly spent a small fortune on a new 26-part series, ITV are relegating the successfully reinvigorated Tracys to the early hours of the weekend. Mum may have enjoyed wallowing in a bit of nostalgia at 5pm on Easter Saturday – she was always reading to me back in the day from TV 21, the comic that Thunderbirds appeared in – but she certainly isn’t going to get up at 8 in the morning to do it, and neither am I. Of course there’s ITV player, but it’s not the same, is it?

Why not have a primetime repeat on ITV (in what’s now universally regarded as the Doctor Who slot) or, better still, just keep Thunderbirds are Go there, particularly as the series revolves around a family working together, a commendable idea that you don’t see much these days in TV fiction (soaps aside).

Anyway: Thunderbirds are still go. Hurrah for that.

THE HITCHCOCK MURDERS review

SPELLBOUND  
Alfred Hitchcock makes deeper cuts than usual in Gavin Collinson's entertaining debut novel.

Danger: maestro at work. (Image copyright: BFI)

I’ve always been envious of people who can write fiction. With factual writing you get to a point where you know it’s complete, whereas with fiction you can keep editing and refining endlessly. That being the case, I’m delighted to be able appraise my friend Gavin Collinson’s first novel The Hitchcock Murders. It’s a great idea: a serial killer is targeting attractive blonde women – a fetish of the famous thriller director Alfred Joseph Hitchcock – and dispatching them in grisly ways based on the slayings in Hitchcock’s movies.
          

As it’s such a great idea it has been done before. The 1973 film Theatre of Blood, in which a deliciously camp Vincent Price played a Shakespearean actor who took out his critics in murders based on murders in the Bard’s plays, is the most obvious example. Then there’s the TV series Whitechapel, which has serial killers basing their modus operandi on historical crimes, not to mention numerous episodes of The Avengers, where villains fanatical about everything from cats to clowns dispatch their victims in bizarre ways that reflect their obsessions. 

More recently, there’ve been Ben Aaronovitch’s books about the Folly, a secret division of the Metropolitan Police which deals with supernatural crime, in which an ingénue officer is paired with an experienced mentor. There’s the same kind of relationship in the newly promoted Detective Chief Inspector Josa Jilani and veteran criminal consultant Daniel Blake at the centre of The Hitchcock Murders, but unlike Aaronovitch, Collinson roots his story firmly in an every day here and now. 

Josa is a British Asian Muslim woman and, apart from dealing with a Hitch-obsessed killer, has to cope with prejudice inside and outside the police, as well as the political pressure of being the poster girl for the Home Secretary’s ethnic initiative within the force. This angle, together with other genuine touches, such as how a new DCI wins over their team, the gulf between commander and rank and file officers and the amount of tedious slog involved in investigations, indicate that unlike some of his contemporary writers Collinson has actually been inside a police station. His authentic grip on Josa’s working environment adds a lot to the story and is an effective contrast with the macabre sequences.

Collinson is also hip to the role of the press in complicating and compromising police investigations, together with the absurdity that can result in a 24 hour, 24/7 greedy media culture. For instance, the day the Hitchcock connection is announced, the Shopping Channel has features on how blondes might like to try on a selection of ridiculous new hats to hide heir hair colour, as well as a new type of sponge that lets you have an all-over body wash without the need for a shower (so you don’t end up in a watery grave like Janet Leigh did in Psycho). Observations like this are just some of the novel’s many incidental pleasures.

Refreshingly, the flirtatious relationship between Josa and Blake isn’t so much will-they-won’t-they, as they’re-both-gagging-for-it-but-the-crimes-keep-getting-in-the-way. Josa and Blake are so well realised that you’d like to hang out with these people, and because of that are compelled to keep turning the pages to see what happens to them. There are also tantalising hints about the enigmatic Blake’s dark past, cannily set up to be developed in successive novels (and it’s a sign of he publisher’s confidence that the second, They Keep Killing Marilyn, is announced at the end of the book). 

Every thriller needs a great suspect, and Collinson really knows his stuff here. Professor Paul Salinger, a pompous and arrogant academic who just happens to specialise in teaching Hitchcock, dances around Josa and Blake swapping verbal volleys to revel in. This is a character steeped in a history of memorable confrontations that take in Bond and Blofeld, Holmes and Moriarty and Dr Who and the Master/Mistress, to name a few. If you like any of those you’ll love the battle of wits here.

A supporting cast of regular characters also make an immediate, engaging impression: the stiff-necked Superintendent Kim Gilmour who’s Josa’s careerist boss; the garrulous, American bear-of-a-man Jack Dempsey who’s Blake’s ‘father’ (you can just see Edge of Darkness’s Joe Don Baker playing him); Preya, Josa’s statuesque older sister, who the detective is slightly jealous of and Karen Sherwood, a blatantly opportunistic journalist, all live and breathe through sharp, clever and funny dialogue. In fact, Collinson’s lines are so good they could drop unaltered into a screenplay adaptation. 

The prose style is a joy to read too, particularly in the way physical descriptions are used to define characters’ personalities. Two that stick in the mind are portraits of one of Salinger’s students and his personal assistant: Todd Marten has ‘something inverted about him. It was like he was embarrassed there was so much of him, as if he’d prefer to have taken up less space,’ while Cordelia Smith has a face ‘invariably set in an expression of mistrust and displeasure, as hard and warm as a butcher’s slab.’ I’ve rarely seen action scenes described better, too. It’s as if Collinson storyboarded them first (as a film director would) before he wrote them up. Maybe he did.  

Did Salinger do it? Not saying. Even though The Hitchcock Murders is a hefty tome, the pace is so strong that you’ll be devouring the pages to find out and be delighted that there’s still more to read. 

I know next to nothing about Hitchcock, so a handy filmography at the end, which is very informative and enlightening, is an extra bonus. And the cover is just beautiful, inspired by Hitch’s graphic designer Saul Bass. 

All together, a very stylish package and a striking debut. Gav done good.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Hitchcock-Murders-Gavin-Collinson-ebook/dp/B00SV9QU1K

KINGSMAN – THE SECRET SERVICE review

THE CORRECT WAY TO KILL

Fun, spectacular and rather rude, Kingsman - The Secret Service  is a refreshing new spin on the spy movie.

The Avengers was never like this... (Image: Moviestore.com)

  

Still wrestling with the blues and unemployment, I threw caution to the wind on Monday and went to see a film. As a tonic for the blues, for me there are still few things better than going to the pictures and, as the last film I paid to see was Pride last summer, I thought it was way past time I did my small part to help out the British film industry again. Kingsman: The Secret Service seemed a good choice as I’d heard positive things about it and it was about spies, one of my favourite fascinations.

Stone being blasted out of a Middle Eastern fortress and forming the film’s credits hinted at something a bit out of the ordinary. I’d heard somewhere that the film was based on a comic but I’ve never seen or read it. As it unfolds, you’re intrigued by the revelation that the sophisticated Harry Hart (Colin Firth, having a ball) works for Kingsman, an ‘independent international intelligence agency’, whose operatives are all suited and booted in bespoke tailoring. When Gary ‘Eggsy’ Unwin (Taron Egerton, impressively confident), the son of one Harry’s agent’s killed in Iraq, asks for help with the police, Harry takes him under his wing and trains him up in the organisation’s secret arts.

The film is at once a fresh spin on a well worn genre and defiantly old fashioned. The contemporary social observation is new: Eggsy’s mum (a highly believable Samantha Womack) slides from being a grieving army widow in 1997 into being, in the present day, the punch-bag for a criminal step Dad in charge of a gang of low-life chavs. Eggsy himself has given up a promising career in the marines, settling for ‘drugs, petty crime, never [having] a job.’ You don’t normally see the British underclass in modern spy fiction and it’s done pretty authentically.

On the other hand, there’s always been the tradition of the working class outsider getting the better of a predominantly upper espionage class establishment in spy fiction, and it’s a punch-the-air moment for long-term spy fans to see Michael Caine – Harry Palmer, the working class hero himself – turn up as Kingsman’s chief. With Eggsy up against a batch of toff recruits, the film settles into an enjoyably predictable groove as he gets the better of them in ingenious ways thanks to his street smarts, most notably in a brilliant, heart-in-mouth aerial parachute drop. He also bonds with posh girl Roxy (the spirited Sophie Cookson), albeit with a lot more four letter words than Palmer or David Callan used.

There’s also self-aware fun to be had for spy-fi fans in spotting more references to other films, primarily with the pleasingly up-to-the-minute villain Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson), an internet millionaire who knows he’s the evil mastermind in a spy film. Hart and Valentine even nostalgically discuss vintage spy movies, finding modern ones ‘a bit serious’ and reflecting that ‘the old Bond films were only as good as the villain.’ In a similar vein, Valentine’s master plan is gratifyingly insane – complete with a traditional countdown to Armageddon – but, elsewhere, Kingsman cleverly subverts old super spy film conventions, in a couple of scenes to particularly dramatic and shocking effect.

Every spy film baddy has to have a henchman or henchwoman, and Valentine has the sensual assassin Gazelle (Sofia Boutella), who uses Oscar Pistorious-style walking blades to kill (an upgrade of Rosa Klebb’s poison blade-concealing shoes in From Russia with Love). In light of what happened to the South African runner, I couldn’t help feeling uncomfortable about this aspect of the film, not to mention thinking that it was in questionable taste, even as I was carried along by the action.

And, if you like action, Kingsman will have you open-mouthed at some sequences. As a fan of The Avengers, I got a blast from seeing immaculately suited secret agents getting the better of the opposition with umbrellas again in elaborately staged, Manga-style ballets of violence. Colin Firth must have revelled in the chance to be an action hero at last, particularly in the utterly insane, over the top, but brilliantly shot and choreographed sequence where he takes on the entire congregation of a church. I don’t know how they did it, but it’s hugely enjoyable. I can’t say much more about the action scenes without spoiling the fun, except that one near the end is breathtaking in its ultraviolence.  

As is the tradition with spy films of a certain age, Kingsman ends on the risqué realisation of Eggsy’s belief that ‘posh birds love a bit of rough.’ Let’s just say it makes Roger Moore’s saucy ‘Keeping the British end up, sir,’ from the conclusion of The Spy Who Loved Me, look like something by Noel Coward. 

Is Kingsman un-PC? I have to say so. Is it extremely violent? Guilty as charged. Is it a fun action film with some clever, intelligent and unexpected touches? Yes – and that’s why it’s worth a night out.