Funny Draculia
Yesterday Dr Who returned to the screen. It was pretty good. The last series lacked wit, depth, interesting stories, credible villains and had characters so sketchily rendered you couldn't tell whether they were a cloud or a horse. Yesterday's was pretty much the same but at least it was speedy. A weedy pastiche of James Bond, featuring Lenny Henry as the bad guy, it sort of hung together. But Yaz finally got to do some acting (and she was very good) and Sacha Dhawen turned up as mysterious rogue agent "O". Graham and Ryan were, as usual, as stiff and awkward as a hard-on on the bus and I assumed that was because Chris Chibnall's dialogue is so desperately ordinary. But Sacha rocks up - he is a class act - and suddenly those same words sound natural, breathable, correct. Maybe "Team Tardis" (!) are just lamentably poor. There will be no spoilers here but Dhawen's final furlong brought genuine jeopardy, a moustache twirling performance that seemed authentically unhinged and failed to eliminate tissue compression. It was the best show of the thirteenth doctor's run by some margin...but...
But...no one cares. And the reason no one cares is because by 10.30 that evening two previous writers of Dr Who had utterly blown it out of the water. You have to wonder about that scheduling, don't you? Dr Who returns after a years absence on the same night that Moffat and Gatiss drop their version of Dracula and remind you of all the wit and perversity they injected into their iteration of the Dr. Chibnall's Who looks bandy-legged and panting by comparison: flapping, flaccid and lumbered with ever more useless companions. They used to complain that Clara was too clever to be a companion. They ain't complaining now. Why would an alien want to hang with these dullards? No one needs that much exposition.
Dracula though is a genuine triumph. Sexy, funny, perverse, dripping in Kensington Gore and marbled with genuine body horror like suetty fat. And, as it stays relatively close to the source novel, (relatively) there's no need for horrifically complicated story-arcs derailing it all over the shop. Gatiss' recent forays into horror have seemed a little (Vlad) tepid. His ghost story at Christmas was by the numbers and a bit silly despite being yer actual M. R. James. Moffat's previous foray into horror was the Jimmy Nesbitt fronted re-imagining of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which is a lot better than people recall but hobbled by bizarre casting choices and Moffat's inability to LEAVE IT THE FUCK ALONE, STEVEN.
But they are much better as a team. They seem to cancel each other's worst excesses: Gatiss' occasional smug silliness and Moffat's just-one-more-twist-I-can-handle-it plotting are mitigated. At least early on. They do tend to spiral horribly out of control the further they get away from the source material.
Dracula is like Jekyll through the prism of Sherlock: they know how to do this now and they are doing it very well. They cheated too. In the pre-publicity they complained about the difficulty of having a lead villain instead of a hero but in the first episode Dolly Wells' atheist nun Agatha Van Helsing is the central character. And she is fabulous. Claes Bang is also pretty great: tall and dark with Ken Campbell's nose and David Bowie's teeth. His Eurotrash accent is nice too (predictably causing a storm of protest on Twitter with tin-eared tweeters asking why he's a "geezer"). I keep expecting him to call out "Hey fun-boys! Get a room!". He doesn't though. Oh, they're also worried he's gay. And on the second episode they'll no doubt be bemoaning the fact that there are too many Black and Asian characters in it (Sacha Dhawen has turned up in this too! Gatiss' little black book has about 12 names in it). Fans can fuck right off. They don't like anything they like.
I'm really enjoying it, halfway through the second episode now...
They aren't half trotting out that "I don't drink...wine" line, though...
But...no one cares. And the reason no one cares is because by 10.30 that evening two previous writers of Dr Who had utterly blown it out of the water. You have to wonder about that scheduling, don't you? Dr Who returns after a years absence on the same night that Moffat and Gatiss drop their version of Dracula and remind you of all the wit and perversity they injected into their iteration of the Dr. Chibnall's Who looks bandy-legged and panting by comparison: flapping, flaccid and lumbered with ever more useless companions. They used to complain that Clara was too clever to be a companion. They ain't complaining now. Why would an alien want to hang with these dullards? No one needs that much exposition.
Dracula though is a genuine triumph. Sexy, funny, perverse, dripping in Kensington Gore and marbled with genuine body horror like suetty fat. And, as it stays relatively close to the source novel, (relatively) there's no need for horrifically complicated story-arcs derailing it all over the shop. Gatiss' recent forays into horror have seemed a little (Vlad) tepid. His ghost story at Christmas was by the numbers and a bit silly despite being yer actual M. R. James. Moffat's previous foray into horror was the Jimmy Nesbitt fronted re-imagining of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which is a lot better than people recall but hobbled by bizarre casting choices and Moffat's inability to LEAVE IT THE FUCK ALONE, STEVEN.
But they are much better as a team. They seem to cancel each other's worst excesses: Gatiss' occasional smug silliness and Moffat's just-one-more-twist-I-can-handle-it plotting are mitigated. At least early on. They do tend to spiral horribly out of control the further they get away from the source material.
Dracula is like Jekyll through the prism of Sherlock: they know how to do this now and they are doing it very well. They cheated too. In the pre-publicity they complained about the difficulty of having a lead villain instead of a hero but in the first episode Dolly Wells' atheist nun Agatha Van Helsing is the central character. And she is fabulous. Claes Bang is also pretty great: tall and dark with Ken Campbell's nose and David Bowie's teeth. His Eurotrash accent is nice too (predictably causing a storm of protest on Twitter with tin-eared tweeters asking why he's a "geezer"). I keep expecting him to call out "Hey fun-boys! Get a room!". He doesn't though. Oh, they're also worried he's gay. And on the second episode they'll no doubt be bemoaning the fact that there are too many Black and Asian characters in it (Sacha Dhawen has turned up in this too! Gatiss' little black book has about 12 names in it). Fans can fuck right off. They don't like anything they like.
I'm really enjoying it, halfway through the second episode now...
They aren't half trotting out that "I don't drink...wine" line, though...
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