Exclusive filming report and videos: The Sarah Jane Adventures

***WARNING: HERE MAY BE SPOILERS***
Following the official BBC announcement last week confirming that David Tennant will be featuring in a substantial guest role in two episodes of the forthcoming ie September) third series of the breezy children's Dr Who spin-off 'The Sarah Jane Adventures', filming on the series has been continuing in and around Cardiff.

Today (Sunday) saw a crew set up in the High Street, Llandaff village (literally a cough and a spit from Stuff Towers) so your trusty reporter (ie that's me!) trundled up to have a look at the action. Around 2pm the three young cast members who play Luke, Sarah Jane's surrogate son, his best mate Clyde and Rani, their neighbour, were gathered to rehearse and record a scene where they conspiratorially approach a restaurant (Mulberry's in Llandaff), gaze through the window and then dodge out of sight. Stuff caught the rehearsal on video; when the director realised that the assembled throng (well, there were a few people gathered opposite) could be seen reflected in the glass of the restaurant window, he very politely - extremely politely, in fact - asked us to move further up the road so we wouldn't be in shot. The scene was then recorded and you'll see my videoclip (below) taken from a slightly different angle. Note SJ's little green roadster parked at the kerb.

Your fearless Stuff reporter (ie that's still me!) couldn't hang about; it was a beautiful day, places to go, people to meet, new Colin Bateman novel to get stuck into. Apparently - here be the spoilers! - Lis Sladen and guest star Nigel Havers were seen at the location later in the afternoon. Anyway, here's those videoclips - hope they're of interest...





Please feel free to link these clips to your own site/blog...just give the World of Stuff a quick mention if you do! Cheers!!

Cult TV DVD review: 'Escape Into Night'

The one with the stones...the stones with eyes...

It’s more or less a given that, when forty-somethings get together and the chat turns to “Ah, they don’t make kid’s TV like that any more, do you remember...?’ someone is eventually going to mention that one with the stones. The stones with the eyes. Something to do with a girl in a bed. And the stones. The stones with the eyes... Rarely can anyone remember the show’s name and the conversation soon changes to more readily-shared Tv memories like Thunderbirds, The Tomorrow People and Dr Who.

The show they’ll have been vaguely remembering was called ‘Escape Into Night.’ Based on Catherine Storr’s novel ‘Marianne Dreams’ (and later filmed as ‘Paperhouse’), ‘Escape Into Night’ was screened as a six-part ATV kid’s drama in 1972. Despite being screened only once and then consigned to the Archives, the show had a massive impact on its audience and while the detail of the story may have faded, those images of the stones – the stones with the eyes – lingered and remain imbedded deep in the psyche of the kids who watched ‘Escape into Night’. And frankly, having just seen the serial again courtesy of a superb new DVD from Network (not available to buy in the shops, available only through www.networkdvd.co.uk ) I’m really not surprised the show struck a chord or two with its young viewers. I saw the show too and whilst my memory has clearly cheated in some respect, I’m really rather surprised the show didn’t utterly traumatise a whole generation, turn their hair white and send them off screaming to bed, too terrified to ever fall asleep again. Unlike much ‘classic’ TV from the 1960s and 1970s which doesn’t always stand the test of time, ‘Escape Into Night’, although a bit of a period piece in terms of its production, still presents as a dark, disturbing and extremely disorientating and unsettling piece of TV. Maybe the fact that the only print available of the series is in black-and-white adds to its sense of disquieting mystery.

Marianne Austen (Vikki Chambers)is confined to bed following a horse-riding accident. Her anxious Mum (Sonia Graham) fusses over her and tries to keep her entertained but, in these pre-ipod, pre-mobile phone, pre-daytime TV days, Marianne soon gets bored and spends her time doodling in a sketch-pad. She draws a house with a figure in the first floor window. Suddenly, in her dreams, she’s there, outside the house, looking up at a fresh-faced blonde-haired boy gazing down at her. Inside the house she finds Mark (Steven Jones), the pyjama-clad boy, unable to walk, sitting in a bare, featureless room. Back in the waking world Marianne realises she can influences what happens in her ‘dreamworld’ by sketching in her pad; when the boy annoys her she makes sure he can never leave the house by drawing little blobby shapes with eyes to surround the house. When she returns to the house she finds it watched by man-sized stones with one blinking eye. She uses her ‘powers’ to give the stranded boy food and entertainment and, eventually, a bike for him to exercise on. In the real world Marianne is visited by Miss Chesterfield (Patricia Maynard), a teacher who keeps up Marianne’s education and tells her about the other children she visits – including one boy with polio who is seriously ill and can’t walk. Eventually, in the dreamworld, Marianne and Mark have to escape the house before the stones can break in and kill them...

The stuff of young nightmares, then, ‘Escape Into Night’ is a strange, almost-ethereal little series. With its tiny cast and handful of sets (and some impressive location filming around the purpose-built house where dream-Mark is trapped) it feels stifling and claustrophobic and Marianne’s dreamworld, in particular, seems distant and unearthly. In some ways it’s hard, at the end of it all, to work out quite what the story has been telling us. Is it a story about growing pains, tolerance, the power of the imagination of a child? ‘Escape Into Night’ offers no answers – we just have to assume that Marianne has this ‘ability’ to enter her own dreamworld and, by the use of a ‘special’ pencil, she’s able to adjust her dreamworld as she sees fit. In some ways this sense of unexplained mystery makes the series even more unusual; it has none of the laboured exposition and neat loose-end tying we’re used to in our fiction. It’s up to the viewer to interpret the story their own way and to make of it what they will.


Technically ‘Escape Into Night’ is very definitely of its time. The sets look stagey and the acting is terribly RP; Marianne and her mother, despite their rather modest home (or at least the bedroom and hallway we see of it) are clearly presented as upper middle class, all posh vowels and ‘Thank you, mummy’. But the performances of the small cast are uniformly impressive. After a dodgy first episode Vikki Chambers as Marianne settles into her role and handles the wordy demands of a part which sometimes veers dangerously into the ‘shrill juvenile lead’ territory of much 1970s children’s television. Better is Steven Jones as Mark; strong and confident, initially ambivalent about his predicament but later as desperate to escape the house as Marianne as the ‘living stones’ guarding the house start to become more hostile and threatening. The cast is rounded off by Edmund Pegge as a very obliging doctor (housecalls day and night, those were the days!) and a young Patricia Maynard as the likable Miss Chesterfield. Oh, and then there’s the stones...


Those damned stones are etched on so many memories, mine included. And yet over the years they’ve created their own memories of the series. For example, I watched every episode of ‘Escape Into Night’ awaiting the sequence where the stones somehow crowd around outside the bedroom window of Mariann’es home in the ‘real’ world. This never happens and yet I can see it as clearly as I can see the keyboard I’m writing this review on. No, the stones are just there, in the darkness outside the dreamworld house, their one eye blinking, their numbers increasing. In time they become more and more determined to get into the house – although they don’t seem to move very fast, if at all – and their modulated voices, a strange cross between extremely camp and extremely angry Daleks, have a surprisingly chilling quality about them as they cry “Not the light! We are coming!” over and over again as the series moves towards its climax. To modern eyes accustomed to 21st century prosthetics and flashy CGI, the stones might look like bits of fibreglass with an eye in them but there’s no denying the fact they still look creepy and threatening and just...wrong.

‘Escape Into Night’ has more in common with heavier children’s fare like ‘The Owl Service’ and ‘King of the Castle’ than the more routine contemporary adventure serials like ‘The Tomorrow People’ and ‘Freewheelers’. If you’ve not seen it before you’ll be struck by its sheer oddness and if you saw it at the time you’ll find it will surprise you and it may not be quite what you were expecting.
And if your memory of the series is the stones...the stones with the eyes... I can assure you they’ll creep you out now just as they did over 35 years ago. ‘Escape Into Night’ is a bold and remarkable television series and comes highly recommended.

Escape Into Night is not available in shops and can only be purchased by visiting www.networkdvd.com Tell 'em Stuff sent you!

DVD Review: 'Changeling'

I really think it’s time I changed my movie-going habits. Seduced by the hype and the promise of a few explosions, I’ll happily trot off to my local multiplex (over £6 for a large hot dog and a coke....I’d rather starve!) to see the latest superhero shenanigan, disaster movie or sci-fi opus. But all those highly-regarded, well-reviewed proper little films – the intimate human stories, the real-life dramas – well, I always mean to pop down and take a look but...there always seems to be something else to do. Ahem. I was caught out by ‘Frost/Nixon’ which sounded brilliant, had the thumbs-up from the critics – and yet it came and went and I never quite got there. The same is true of ‘Changeling’, director Clint Eastwood’s most recent effort, a thriller/drama set in Los Angeles in 1928 and starring Angelina Jolie as a single mother whose life is thrown into turmoil when her young son goes missing. Sounded great, if a bit TV-movie-of-the-week. Once again, I never quite got there...

Curse me for a fool. I’ve just caught up with ‘Changeling’ on DVD and I’m finding it hard to come to terms with the fact that this wonderful film has existed for six months or so without me actually seeing it. I’ve just spent a captivating two and a half hours soaking up this stunning and extraordinary film, this masterpiece, a film so good it puts all the bang-and-flash stuff back in the toybox and reminds you what great cinema really should be all about.
Angelina Jolie (a far, far better actress than she’s ever given credit for) plays Christine Collins, a hard-working single mum in 1920s Los Angeles, struggling to bring up her young son Walter whilst holding down a job as a telephone switchboard supervisor. Called in to do an extra shift to cover for a sick colleague Christine is forced to leave her son at home alone. When she gets back there’s no sign of him. Eventually the corrupt LA Police, whose reputation is at rock bottom and whose authority and honesty is constantly being challenged by a fervent local priestthe Reverand Brieglab (John Malkovich), take an interest and a few months later it appears that they find Walter, who has been in the company of a drifter wandering aimlessly halfway across the country. Christine prepares for a tearful reunion at the railway station....but instantly realises the boy isn’t her son. The Police, desperate for some good publicity, brush her protests under the carpet and eventually try to discredit her by throwing her into a corrective institute for the mentally-unstable where electro-convulsive therapy is the order of the day. The only way out for Christine is to sign an affidavit confirming that the recovered boy is her son and that she’s been labouring under a terrible misapprehension. But Christine is nothing if not determined and single-minded and she refuses to compromise. Meanwhile a young boy named Clarkwood Smith tells the Police about his experiences with a psychopathic child-kidnapper who, he says, has brutally slain over twenty young boys... The Police still try to effect a cover-up but eventually the killer is brought to justice and Christine moves closer to finding out the truth about her missing, presumed dead, son...

‘Changeling’ is a gorgeous, glorious and yet unsettling film. Based on a true story casually brought to writer Straczynski’s attention, it’s not just about Christine’s plight – Jolie takes a back seat for a while when she’s incarcerated – but it’s a no-holds-barred expose of the corruption and mendacity at the heart of the LAPD at the tail end of the 1920s and how, maybe thanks to Christine’s story, things began to change. It’s an unshowy, modest film, too, despite some opulent visuals which evoke 1920s Los Angeles with sumptuous costumes and set dressings and subtle bits of computer tomfoolery. Straczynski’s script is unshowy, too, and Eastwood’s unfussy direction allows the script’s story to unravel at its own pace and in its own way, with short, punchy and pithy dialogue and, despite its generous running time, with no narrative flab and nothing extraneous to the demands of the plot. The movie gives us a new psychopath to boo and hiss at; Jason Butler Hamer’s Gordon Stewart Northcott is as deranged as they come, all the more terrifying because the story’s ultimately not about him so we learn nothing of his motives for his slayings, what led him to become a monster imprisoning and slaughtering innocent young children for no apparent reason. We hate him and yet we feel a strange sympathy for him as he is led, destroyed, towards his ultimate, if deserved, fate.

In some ways ‘Changeling’ isn’t easy viewing; there are no neat answers and it determinedly is not a ‘feelgood’ movie. But it’s a superb achievement, a film which hooks you from the outset and draws you into its world, its characters, its situation and doesn’t let you go. So don’t make the mistake I made and leave this one of the shelf too long – as we gear up for the big Box Office summer heavyweights, it’s worth reminding yourself of how powerful quiet, restrained human stories can be in a multiplex world dominated by big robots and men in tights.

The DVD; Eighteen minutes of extras in the form of a couple of "It was a wonderful experience, Clint is a wonderful director" featurettes which manage to squeeze in a little bit about the screenwriter, the costumes and the locations. Thin stuff but interesting. There'll undoubtedly be a 2-disc edition along at some point but the film's the thing so don't sit there waiting.

Film Review: Sam Raimi's idea of Heaven...Drag Me To Hell

Licking his wounds from the sadly-deserved critical drubbing given to his bloated third Spider-Man movie in 2007, director Sam Raimi scuttled back to the horror genre which made his name (via the Evil Dead series), exhumed an old script he’d written with his brother Ivan and turned it into ‘Drag Me To Hell’, the slickest/sickest, grossest and funniest horror movie I’ve seen in ages. It’s packed with nasty stuff – projectile blood-spewing, fly-eating, embalming-fluid devouring, kitten-killing and all manner of general unpleasantness – and yet it’s bagged itself a 15 certificate in the UK. But this is because, despite the shrieks and he scares and the jumps, it’s actually a sort of good-natured horror film, tongue firmly in both cheeks, with none of the brutality and downright nastiness of your ‘Saw’s ad your ‘My Bloody Valentine’s. ‘Drag Me To Hell’ doesn’t take itself too seriously; it doesn’t really want to gross you out (although it manages it in places) it just wants to make you scream a bit, usually just after you’ve been laughing out loud.

Christine Brown (Alison Lohmann) is an ambitious loan arranger who seriously annoys a repellent and frankly disgusting old Hungarian gypsy Sylvia Ganush (Lorna Raver) when she refuses to allow her more time to make her mortgage repayments. The old crone goes ballistic and puts a curse on Alison – a curse which involves her being tormented by a demon called Lamia for three nights. Unless Alison can somehow break the curse the Lamia will take her soul and literally drag her to Hell. Alison’s kindly boyfriend Clay (Justin Long) is sympathetic but sceptical and after a terrifyingly nail-biting encounter with the old biddy in a car park,Alison decides to visit a medium to help remove the curse. But nothing he suggests makes a difference; Alison is tormented in her own home, thrown about the place, attacked and brutalised. She eventually pays $10,000 to psychic Shaun San Dena (Adriana Barraza) to try and banish the Lamia back to the otherworldly dimension it’s come from – but it takes more than a determined psychic to see off a Lamia.

‘Drag Me To Hell’ reminded me of one of better Hammer horror movies of the 1960s; even though it’s gruesome and graphic there’s an odd sort of purity in its horror, a horror that’s so extreme it can’t help but raise a smile – and the audience I saw it with (when they weren’t checking their mobile phones – more of which later) were in hysterics (but in a good way). It also reminded me of one of those old portmanteau movies with titles like ‘Dr Terror’s House of Horrors’ which consisted of three of four short, sharp horror stories with stings in their tails. ‘Drag Me To Hell’ has one...er..Hell of a sting in its tail too in an ending which you can sort of see coming but still shocks when it happens.
Sam Raimi is clearly having the time of his life with this one; he’s back in his element in the world of low-budget shlock horror and his direction, evoking much of his earlier work, is lively and dynamic. The movie works because it never does quite what you expect; you’re waiting to be shocked and he pulls back, only to spring something worse out at you moments later. The visuals are wonderfully imaginative and sometimes hilarious – who won’t laugh at the scene where one of San Dena’s assistants, possessed by the Lamia, spews out the kitten Alison has earlier killed in an attempt to appease the demon? Or the absolutely magnificently-ludicrous scene in Alison’s shed where she flattens a representation of the rampaging demon by releasing an anvil she has suspended on a rope from the rafters. As you do. ‘Drag Me To Hell’ works so well because it treads that fine line between humour and real horror; it knows it’s silly, it knows it’s nonsense but it seems to be winking at you all the way through even as does its best to get you leaping out of your seat and squealing like a girl.

I’m no huge fan of modern horror because much of it is just concerned with cruelty and unpleasantness and mutilation and gore which just gets a bit wearing after a while. ‘Drag Me To Hell’ redresses the balance a bit and puts the fun back into the genre. And it’s about time too.

On a personal note though, I saw the film in the company of the most appallingly-behaved and restless crowd I’ve ever had the misfortune to sit in the cinema with. Throughout the film the cinema was lit by the firefly glow of mobile phones being feverishly checked for messages, people jumping up and down and walking out of the auditorium jabbing feverishly at their phone keypads, the swaggering gang who came in ten minutes late, proceeded to shout incomprehensibly and for no apparent reason and then have a loud conversation with a gang of youths sprawled in one of the front rows. Now we all know that standards of public behaviour have plummeted in the last few years and most people now act like brain-dead Neanderthals with no interest in or concern for anyone else, but surely the whole point in going to a cinema is to...you know...sit and watch a film? So take some advice from someone who loves going to the cinema but would really rather arrange private viewings....leave your bl**dy mobile phones at home (you can actually survive for more than five minutes without them), sit down, shut up and watch the film you’ve paid £6 to see. Thank you and good night!

Stuff coming soon: DVD reviews - Escape Into Night, Sky, The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes....er...Father Dear Father (?)....Reality TV: Enough's enough...

TV Review: One in the Eye For Harold...or not. 1066: the Battle For Middle Earth

It goes without saying – surely? – that Channel 4 in the UK is the TV equivalent of a tide of effluent. Gok this, Jamie that, see this house, buy that house, go on this holiday, Gordon F*****g Ramsay and, the biggest slurry of excrement on a Channel 4 drowning in it – Big Brother. Brrrr... But sometimes C4 retains a tiny vestige of the broadcasting ethos which led to its birth back in the early 1980s. Sometimes, even now, C4 wants to do more than fill its prime time schedule with cheap lifetime shows and swearing chefs. It doesn’t show a lot of drama these days (Brookside, I still miss you) but when it does it does it in an imaginative, if low key and intentionally not-chasing-ratings fashion. Returning dramas are few and far between on C4 – think ‘Shameless’ (and I’d really rather not) and that’s your lot. But in the last year alone C4 has broadcast drama ‘events’ like ‘City of Vice’, ‘The Devil’s Whore’ and ‘Red Riding’ (the latter two of which are on my ‘to watch’ list – and that’s one seriously long list). Now add to that list of C4 dramas something quite extraordinary which I’ve just devoured into two sittings, reminding me of how good British drama can be and how compelling and terrifying drama can be when it’s based on a true story. And C4’s recent ‘1066: The Battle For Middle Earth’, two seventy-five minute episodes screened over two nights on C4 last week, is based on one of the most celebrated and famous true stories of all – a story which we all know from our schooldays as a story of battles and bloodshed and armies rushing up and down the country and Vikings and Normans. It’s a big, heroic story, glamorised and romanticised across hundreds of years to the point that it now seems like some Hollywood film we’ve never seen rather than a terrible, eviscerating time in British history. And in dramatising it, C4 have produced a modern TV masterpiece, a brilliantly-epic and yet ruthlessly-brutal piece of work which will live long in this memory and really should be required viewing in schools all over the UK.

What do you know about the Battle of Hastings? Ah, 1066 and all that... Something about Normans and Stamford Bridge and King Harold getting something in his eye. Something to do with Vikings too, probably, but not sure how they got in there....it was all such a long time ago and I was staring out of the classroom window at the time... ‘1066: Battle For Middle Earth’ strips away the myth and tells it like it was – or as much as we think we know it was courtesy of contemporary written record, Norse mythology, interpretations of the illustrations on the Bayeux Tapestry and much more. The film presents the story much as we know it to be true; untrained British farmers recruited to join the British ‘army’ as weapons-men, press-ganged into defending their own country against the Normans, rumoured to be planning to swarm into Britain from the South coast. Crudely trained up by the warrior Oldnar this ragtag army eventually ‘stand down’ as the ‘warring season’ ends and the Normans never show. Meanwhile, up North, the Vikings have arrived, cutting a swathe across the country. The British warriors make their way – on foot – to the North of England to engage the powerful, strong, wily Vikings in combat. It seems to be a lost cause until at Stamford Bridge – literally a wooden footbridge crossing the river – British ingenuity wins the day and the Vikings are routed. Meanwhile down South the Normans have arrived to find the country undefended, its warriors fighting in the North. Tired and battle-weary, the remains of King Harold’s army trudge back down south for a confrontation with the ruthless, determined Normans – and a bloody confrontation at Hastings.

Despite the fact that this, being British TV, must of necessity be low budget stuff, there’s an epic quality to the production and a verisimilitude which drags the viewer right into the middle of the drama (or the reality of the drama) and immerses you in the grime and blood and savagery of the 11th century. Subtle CGI gives some depth to the Viking fleet sailing out of the Norweigan fjords, the British beach encampments, the Norman hordes facing off against a determined British rabble at Hastings, specifically at Senlac Hill. This is history as-if-you-were-there, real life cleverly made real by the simple device of life by the addition of fictional characters – fictional but most likely pretty typical of the sort of frightened, normal rural people drawn into events they have no control of - who we follow throughout the narrative. So we meet Leofric, a cowardly, waggish farmer and reluctant hero who comes good in the end, baby-faced newlywed Tofi, torn from his bride on their wedding day to fight in a war he’s totally unequipped for in every way imaginable. They’re our guides throughout one of the most momentous periods of British history and while they may never have existed as we see them here, they represent the people who did exist, the people who fought and suffered and died and did remarkable things in the name of their King.

We all know how this story ends. We marvel at the way the ragtag British army rushes to confront the Vikings who have sealed their own fate by dividing their forces allowing the British to route them at Stamford bridge. And what a battle Stamford Bridge is, like something torn from some far-fetched Hollywood movie as one champion Viking lines up on the bridge and hacks away at the British as they advance one-by one. It’s an extraordinary sequence, made all the more amazing by the way the wily British turn the tables and finally chase the Vikings (or Vikingr as they were historically known) back to their long-ships, tails between their legs.

Meanwhile the Normans are stormin’ across the South of England, swaggering across the country pillaging and devastating everything in their path. Leofric and Tofi find their home village Crowhurst is levelled and Tofi’s wife, amongst other women in their village,. Has been abducted by randy Norman soldiers. Here the story veers a bit too far into action movie territory as Leofric and Tofi rescue the women from the clutches of the Normans (but not for long as is turns out) and soon enough the two men rejoin the massed ranks at Hastings, ready to launch themselves at the French invaders. The battle – and it’s long and tiring and bloody – is brutal, hard, vicious, superbly-realised. The British even seem to be gaining the upper hand and for a moment the viewer forgets what the history books have told us and we’re cheering for the army of farmers even though we know the outcome. The sly French spread a rumour that their leader, Duke William, has been slain; the British fall for the rouse and allow themselves to be caught in a Norman pincer movement. They don’t stand a chance and they’re annihilated. But you knew that anyway...

‘1066: Battle For Middle Earth’ is a brave and impressive piece of TV. What makes it work is that the cast are pretty much unknowns (the only face you may recognise is Peter McGuiness as a Norman with a bit of a conscience – he’s the husband of Roberta Taylor, ex-The Bill) so there’s no ‘Oh, look, it’s him out of Emmerdale’ to tear you out of the drama. Like the best historical dramas it’s hugely educational, too – who knew that Tolkein drew so much inspiration for ‘Lord of the Rings’ from 1066? Britain at the time was known as ‘Middle Earth’ and’Orcs’ (devils) was a common nickname for the evil Normans. Beyond this we’re told that the legend of King Harold – the old arrow in the eye legend – is probably a load of old baloney and his ultimate fate – disembowelling, gelding and eventual beheading – was a lot more eye-watering.

This is history told with more reality and style than I’ve ever seen it told before. If you missed its transmission the other week it’s out on DVD on 1st June and I’d urge you to get hold of a copy if you’ve even the remotest interest in history brought to life and, more than that, great British drama. Brilliant.

Torchwood series three trundles closer...

Broadcast of rhe new five-part Torchwood mini-series 'Children of Earth' draws nearer - except nobody knows exactly when yet. The rumoured June airing date (across five nights on BBC1) has been pushed back to July and, possibly now, pushed back to August. It looks like the series will be debutting more or less simultaneously with BBC America where the show has been a substantial hit. So whilst BBC in the UK remains a Torchwood-trailer free zone,. BBC America have just released this rather tasty little two-minute plus extract... Bring it on, says Stuff!

New Who girl announced...!

Here she is! The BBC have just announced the identity of the actress who will be accompanying Matt Smith on his travels in the TARDIS in the next series of Dr Who, due to start filming in the next few weeks to air from next Easter. Her name's Karen Gillen, she's 21, she's Scottish, I've never heard of her but she appeared as a Soothsayer in last year's 'Fires Of Pompeii' episode. No word yet on her character's name and background but it's exciting to see the season five news starting to filter through after the bombardments of bits and pieces about the end of David Tennant's era. Here's Karen...