michael-stead

The battle of Thermopylae was one of the most significant of the ancient world, giving definition to the notion of Greek strength. It was a tale that was retold to emphasise the bravery of the 300 Spartan warriors. The film does the job of retelling the battle beautifully, and conveying its importance.

Each shot is beautiful and watching the film is like looking at a succession of film posters. The battle scenes were gruesomely beautiful, but more importantly very well edited, so that the narrative of the battle was easy to follow.

The film clearly owes a lot to recent cinema milestones, the use of the rhino and elephants and the appearance of the Persians, came straight from Lord of the Rings, and the slow motion shots follow clearly from The Matrix.

The film was also very funny at moments, where it intended to be. I wasn't sure why there were subtitles - perhaps people felt that the English accents would be hard to understand, but I thought everyone enunciated very well.

The film had the unremitting ferocity of The Passion of the Christ, and did not set out to question the morality of the protagonists, but such concerns are probably best left to documentary makers. 300 has dramatic impact and stunning imagery, it deserves to be counted as a masterpiece of film-making.

At the time this was just viewed as a gentle skit, with the chance to see a few old Doctors, who agreed to appear because of the charity aspect, when there was no chance of formally arranging for them to appear in the show – even if it had been running then.

Within the bounds of their existing dispositions (Tom and Jon both being irretrievably dotty, and Peter having lost the peachy bloom of his youth) everyone played the show for real and even though they were only brief, there were some lovely performances from Louise Jameson and Lalla Ward, as well as the other supporting cast.

Outside of the context of the skit, this item has a wider cultural impact, as it brought together Doctor who at its most camp, with East Enders at it's most depressing and had the two realities created for the BBC interact in an absolutely serious manner. In many ways this was a Doctor Who episode rather than an East Enders one, although it fits equally well, or badly, into the continuity of each. East Enders is as much a work of fiction as Doctor Who, but represents television's vision of the ordinary, everyday, kitchen sink lives of its viewers – the same viewers who would sit down to watch Doctor Who, so in some sense this is an example of how the BBC picture the Doctor walking out into the audience.

There had been an idea in the 1960s to have both the Beatles and the cast of Z-Cars turn up in Doctor Who and neither proposal quite worked. Here the mingling of East enders and Doctor Who was pulled off, and even though it was like fingers down a blackboard for fans at the time, it could prove to be a much more important cultural marker for media historians of the future.

As an adventure it just about held together and pressed forward to a conclusion, however for those fans who prefer to see plot holes, this is Doctor Who as Swiss Cheese.

I found this to be absolutely enchanting. There is a richness to the cinematography reminiscent of the film Babe, making it super-real, and the special effects add a layer of beauty to the film, rather than being a distraction.

There is a strong narrative thread, based around two half-brothers, washed up on the shores of the island. You have to make the leap into believing that somehow this island exists - almost undiscovered - as a haven where dinosaurs and humans co-exist.

The drama is driven along by the fact that the brothers barely know each other, having been brought up by different mothers. As they search for their father, who was with them in a plane that crashed, their differences become exacerbated.

With the exception of a lone tyrannosaurus attack, the story steers clear of the usual dinosaurs; instead it showcases some that appear less often in modern films, such as the enormous ankylosaurs, who act as acolytes and guards on the island.

I found myself caught up in the magic as the brothers take a ride on a dinosaur bus to Waterfall City. One of the lovely conceits of the films is that dinosaurs and humans work with each other in a variety of different ways. It is through the interaction with dinosaurs that the brothers each go on a journey of self-discovery and development.

There are some plot twists along the way, some love stories, and a complex villain, played very well by David Thewlis. The drama is divided up into rather lengthy sections. I find them enthralling and have watched them several times, but you really need to set a large chunk of an afternoon or an evening aside to enjoy each part.

This is a very male-centred drama, the women tend to be brought on in supporting roles and sometimes the leading characters behave quite infuriatingly. However, even though you are, like the brothers, dropped in the deep end of the story, it all makes sense, all the important plot strands get resolved and you can come out of it wishing that the island was real.

Too many adaptations of Dickens seem to play up the preposterous aspects of his characterisation; here everything was beautifully underplayed, to terrific effect.

I found the drama as compelling as any modern soap opera. We are so used to the format by now, that it was never going to be a surprise that several seeming unconnected leading characters would end up being close family relations, but it was still fascinating to find out who would be related to whom, and which characters' love stories would end up in happiness.

The performances were so excellent that it seems unnecessary to single a few out for praise. Yet there were some for me that were especially memorable. Gillian Anderson was sublime as Lady Dedlock and I was transfixed whenever she was on screen. The whole relationship between her and her husband and the issue of her 'past' was beautifully portrayed, and I found it very moving towards the end when crusty of Sir Lester (Timothy West) stood by her grave and said 'If only she knew how much I loved her, and how little I cared for what the world thought of her.' Philip Davis' Smallweed was a masterly performance, keeping firmly grounded a character that could so easily have been merely a period grotesque if handled less skillfully. Anna Maxwell Martin made the goody-two-shoes Esther believable and three dimensional. And Johhny Vegas brought an interesting sinister dimension to Krook, which came as something of a surprise to me having known previously only his knock-about subtle-as-a-brick comedy persona.

What particularly pleased me, as someone who tires of shoddy dramas that thrown in foul language and humping bums to generate interest, is that Bleak House brought a tale of sexual misdeeds, and doomed amorous attachments, set partly in a world of grinding poverty, criminality and violence, without the drama itself being offensive. It is rare that drama is really adult these days; but Bleak House was, I felt, real entertainment for grown-ups.

I remember seeing this as a child, and I believe it may even have been repeated soon afterwards. It was quite hard-hitting bleak stuff for the children's slot, and very welcome because of that. David Garfield as a hard-bitten leader in the post-industrial dystopia gave a memorable performance. In fact in the years since it was last shown (an before IMDb or other internet sites made it easy to dig up these old shows) the only thing I had to convince myself that the show really existed (in the face of blank stares from my contemporaries) was David's performance. The title of the show was certainly unmemorable.

I imagine that at the time this was seen as a junior version of Terry Nation's 'Survivors', and was in the same mould as 'Ace of Wands', as a slightly unsettling half an hour of entertainment. This was in an age when every schoolchild grew up believing that at any minute the Russians and Americans would set off nuclear Armageddon, and so in some ways it was also rather like one of the Public Information Films of the time. I think that in these days of shouty Blue Peter presenters and the thunderingly moronic "Dic 'n Dom" it would be utterly out of place on CBBC.

As we 'know' everyone was bewilderingly racist in the 1970s . . . except that millions of children were introduced to Sikhism through 'The Changes'. The only people unaffected by the destruction of society were the rather noble band of Sikhs.

I suppose what was rather alarming about 'The Changes' would have been the juxtaposition with 'The Wombles'. In the latter a broken television set was the prompt for Tobermory to turn it into a new camera or automatic hot water bottle for Great Uncle Bulgaria. In the former it would be left discarded at the side of a wind-swept wasteland as the rest of society crumbled around it.

The end of the series was rather haunting, as the children who were the heroes found their way to a cave deep under a mountain in wales, where a huge pulsing white rocky crystal was sending out the waves of hate which had perverted the world.

So far BBC worldwide seem not to have considered this for release as a DVD. Perhaps the special effects would seem a bit dated today, but I am sure that as a piece of quality drama it would have lasted quite well.

What the excellent review already on this site has missed, is the one joke I remember from this series, which was picked up on by the young boy, who found it hilarious that there was a Mrs. Gotobed in Druid's Bottom.

Beyond this, the performance of the male lead, Mr. Evans, is certainly one of the most memorable aspects of this show. In the days before television drama decided that every difficult relationship between a child and an adult was centred on sexual abuse, this show very cleverly showed how a stern and strict adult could be absolutely terrifying to a child.