How's The Health, 007?

Ian Fleming’s gentleman spy has faced many adversaries over the years. Megalomaniacs, master criminals, underworld bosses - the list is endless. Although these antagonists are as deadly as the next, it seems that his greatest challenges always come from the real world. Villains like Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (the screenwriters of the invisible Aston Martin in Die Another Day), woeful CGI (again, Die Another Day) or the current enemy number one: the financial condition of MGM Studios.

It’s not the first time that Bond’s future has looked shaky. I remember the long gap between Licence To Kill and Goldeneye, which when I admit was only 6 years seemed much longer than it actually was. During that black hole – when Bond was the most unfashionable British import – it seemed like the franchise had been closed forever. Now, despite the momentum of a new Bond for the 21st century, production for the 23rd official film in the series has been put on hold. In April, Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli announced that the new film had been suspended “indefinitely” with the media speculating that the studio is heading towards bankruptcy.

With the Bond franchise being the studio’s only real source of income, both for its present worth and its future earning potential, it looks unlikely that the studio will sell the character (this arrangement would leave Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer practically redundant). Instead, MGM are looking for a possible strategic partner to restructure the studio. Hopefully this will happen soon, otherwise we may be waiting a lot longer than 6 years for Bond 23 to come around.

Still, isn’t Wikipedia a wonderful thing? Ever wanted to see a column chart displaying the total income (both actual and adjusted for inflation) by Bond actor?

Or if that’s not enough, how about the budget vs. income correlation of the Bond films?

If you can see past the typo in this chart’s title (the charter’s, not mine), the data doesn’t exactly bode well for MGM. As budgets have risen though the years, the profitability of the films has slided. Although the chart doesn’t include Quantum Of Solace (the last data point represents 2006’s Casino Royale), it looks pretty good for Daniel Craig’s tenure – the profitability has risen slightly since Brosnan’s last woeful entry, the aforementioned Die Another Day. But look further and things don’t look too promising. There are only a few data points on the red line where a film’s profitability has increased from its predecessor. Casino Royale – Craig’s debut – is one of them; but two of the other five examples are Live and Let Die and Goldeneye – Roger Moore’s and Pierce Brosnan’s opening films respectively. This suggests that the allure of a new actor in the title role can increase the profitability of a Bond film, against the overall trend downwards in this metric.

I haven’t looked up the profitability of Quantum Of Solace. A complete lack of motivation prevents me from doing so. Instead, I’m just going to say that if Solace ends up being the last James Bond film ever to reach celluloid, then at least it’s a half-decent one. I’d rather the series went out with a bang with Casino Royale, but you can’t have everything. I’m just thankful the final film we’ll ever see Bond in wasn’t Die Another Day – to date the only Bond film I can’t bring myself to watch for a second time. An invisible car (sorry to harp on about it), windsurfing CGI and the worst Bond girl ever to grace a bikini in Halle Berry.

And while we’re on the subject of James Bond, here’s a picture of a man sat in an underwater lotus.

The Destruction Of The Daleks

Question: How many Dalek’s does it take to destroy a television show?
Answer: As many as Russel T. Davies can imagine.

I’ve been a fan of BBC’s time-travelling hero for longer than I can remember. Many of my childhood memories are punctuated my images of a white-suited Peter Davison standing against his TARDIS, and a cliffhanger at the end of every episode leading to a long wait until the next Saturday.

It was sad how Doctor Who fizzled out back in the late 80s and early 90s. Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy weren’t a patch on the previous inhabitants of the role, and the Paul McGann film that followed was so polished, so American, and most of all, so un-Who­ that it pains me to see his portrayal canonised as an official Doctor (although they were remakes of earlier William Hartnell stories, the two Peter Cushing films from the 1960s are more in key with the Who ethos; although a lack of BBC-involvement in those camp films practically excludes Cushing as an official Doctor).

So following 1996’s poor performing film, Doctor Who was all but extinct. Until the BBC – spearheaded by producer and head-writer Russel T. Davies – revived the character in 2005. The changes to the format of the show were many, intending to give the series the jump-start it needed to appeal to a 21st century audience.

Most importantly, the show is now comprised of standalone 1-hour episodes. Previously the format had always been 30-minute episodes, with between 3 and 5 episodes completing one story. Although you can understand the BBC’s motivation in this change – it makes the show more accessible to the casual viewer – it takes away one of the show’s most important trademarks: the cliffhanger ending. Many weeks of my youth were spent wondering how the Doctor (or one of his companions) would escape the peril that almost inevitably spelt death at the end of the last episode. These days, although there is a fair amount of peril to be found within an episode, it’s usually resolved fairly quickly, negating the need for schoolboys to spend the next 7 days imagining the outcome.

Where once the TARDIS was a source of perpetual randomness, the Doctor can now fully control his time-machine. Previously, the fact that he couldn’t accurately command where the TARDIS landed led to stories set on strange alien landscapes, new even to the Doctor. 21st Century Doctor Who removes this feature, and places the Doctor with a fully functioning time machine (except for the broken chameleon circuit which keeps the vessel in its iconic 1950s Police Box format).

So, now that the Doctor can now steer his TARDIS, the series gives us far too many earth-based episodes, either set amongst the chavs of Sarf Landon, or in – quite bizarrely – the Welsh city of Cardiff (the base of BBC Cymru Wales, who produce the show).

The third major change to the show is the re-introduction of the sonic screwdriver – the Doctor’s trusty tool that has a seemingly endless list of uses. Introduced by the second Doctor, the gizmo was written out of the series by the time of the fifth doctor, with the writing staff conceding that it was simply a plot device that was very limiting to the script. In Russel T. Davies’ Doctor Who, the sonic screwdriver is used relentlessly, assisting the Doctor in almost every situation. Again, this works against the show’s favour with the Doctor never really finding himself in peril. Lost your key? Sonic screwdriver. Close to death? Sonic screwdriver. Earth on the brink of extinction? Sonic screwdriver. It is the writer’s lazy way out of everything.

My final fault to be found in an otherwise excellent show is the overuse of its characters, most notably the antagonists, and especially the Daleks. In the good old days (nostalgia is never as good as it used to be), the Daleks would be used sparingly – probably as a result of limited BBC budgets. However, since the final episode of the ninth Doctor’s (Christopher Eccleston) run, the Daleks have been an all too common fixture of the series, with six episodes in the tenth Doctor’s (David Tennant) reign marking the most appearances the villains have ever had with one Doctor.

From the 1960s through the 1990s, a story featuring the Daleks would mean that the BBC props department would actually have to build the damn things. Nowadays, the availability of affordable CGI means that millions of Daleks can be written into a script – see the aforementioned episode Bad Wolf – without a thought for how this will destroy the character and effectively remove the terror that they once possessed. An appearance by the Daleks used to be a special thing – now they’re becoming like wallpaper.

Still, the future is rosy. Matt Smith has started his tenure as the eleventh Doctor, and his leggy assistant Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) marks a welcome change to the dumbed-down cockernee assistants of Eccleston and Tenant’s years. Things are looking good. I would say that Smith’s portrayal of the Doctor owes a fair deal to David Tenant, although this is probably down to him not fully finding his feet yet.

Now if the scriptwriters could just forget about the Daleks for a while - it should be moderation, not extermination.

Deja Vu, 007?

A complete fail by TVNZ. We're in the middle of TV One's Saturday night Bond season. This week's film is Sean Connery in 1965's Thunderball. If it seems very familiar, that's because last week's film - 1983's Bond film, Never Say Never Again - was an 'unofficial' remake of Thunderball, almost identical in everything but name, and again starring Sean Connery.

Hmm, or is this a joke played by a knowing TV One scheduler? Following Thunderball is the Jim Carrey film Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind - a film about the surgical removal of unwanted memories. It's either very clever programming or a complete fluke...