Who Reviews Rise of the Cybermen and the Age of Steel by Tony J Fyler

 

Tony’s getting the upgrade. 

When Doctor Who came back in 2005, it was keen to redevelop what had long been the show’s #1 monster in the public imagination – the Dalek – and make it a genuinely scary threat for the 21^st century. 

When the show got its second series confirmed, and with a brand new Doctor in David Tennant, it couldn’t really avoid bringing back the Cybermen (often thought of as the show’s #2 monster), and re-imagining them for the 21^st century too. 

But there was a line to be walked. With the Daleks, they were so very vivid in the general public consciousness that what you needed to do was address their perceived weaknesses – the inability to deal with stairs, their sink-plunger arm, etc – and turn them into strengths, to make the Skarosian tank-mutants into unstoppable killing machines again, and elevate them to such a position that they and the Time Lords had essentially wiped each other out, leaving only the Doctor in the universe who could stand up to them when they returned. 

With the Cybermen, there was a different problem. It wasn’t that the public was mostly aware of their weaknesses, but that they weren’t particularly aware of what made the Cybermen tick, where they were from, what made them want to convert or conquer the universe. 

So what you needed for the first Cyber-story of the 21^st century, was essentially an origin story that people could get hold of. 

Hardcore fans of course, knew the origin story. The people of Mondas, Earth’s original twin planet, had perfected cyber-surgery, replacing the organic parts of themselves over time, and eventually removing their capacity for emotions, leaving them entirely logical and bent on spreading the gift of Cyberization to the rest of the universe. 

That’s where the second balancing act came in. Without essentially re-telling The Tenth Planet with the Tenth Doctor, how did you give the Cybermen a backstory that new viewers could connect to, without ruining the ‘canon’ for the established fans by essentially retconning The Tenth Planet? 

The solution from writer Tom MacRae was more than a touch ingenious. In ‘our’ universe, Mondas was a twin planet of Earth. But perhaps in a parallel universe, it was right here on Earth that the Cybermen developed. A twin dimension, rather than a twin planet. And Rise of the Cybermen and The Age Of Steel was off to the races. 

There’s always talk of the similarities between Rise of the Cybermen and Spare Parts, the Big Finish story by Marc Platt which takes the Fifth Doctor to Mondas as the Cybermen are actually beginning to emerge as an entity, rather than a collection of upgrades. But MacRae rightly draws lines of separation between Platt’s masterpiece (Seriously, if you’ve never heard it, go now and listen, it’s absurdly good) and his own. Yes, technically, they document the same point in the evolution of the Cybermen – but that’s about all they have in common. 

For a large part of Rise of the Cybermen, in fact, we’re distracted by the potential of a parallel universe when the Doctor, Rose and Mickey more or less fall into one. While the only energy source that can recharge the Tardis is growing and getting power, the potential of that other universe is too strong for the two companions – Mickey goes to see if his nan, who raised him, is still alive there, given she had died in ‘our’ world, and Rose is brought up short by a billboard that shows her dad, dead in our universe, is not only alive in the parallel, but successful. 

In the parallel world, Jackie and Pete Tyler are still married, but they never had Rose. And Pete is connected to the activities of a mega-businessman called John Lumic. 

Lumic, we learn early, is dependent on a wheelchair and life-support systems, making him very much a re-envisaging of Davros, creator of the Daleks. But the interesting thing is that it technically makes more sense in Lumic’s case that a man who feels himself to be an almighty brain and will, almost mocked by a body decaying with age and atrophy, would focus on creating something like the Cybermen. While he wants to wait until the last possible moment, the Cybermen for him are a kind of fantasy wish-fulfilment, an immortal, undecaying body to carry around the human brain. The Cybermen have always been the ultimate fantasy of the old and the fearful – they’re a protection both from the physical decay of ageing and death, and from the mental pain of living a life with a brain that still thinks organic thoughts in a body no longer able to experience mortal pleasures in any meaningful way. 

The Cybermen have always represented this fear, but it has never been centred in a single individual’s drive to survive until the world met John Lumic (Roger Lloyd-Pack) in Rise of the Cybermen. 

At first experimenting with society’s unwanted, the homeless and hungry (literally the spare parts of the social pecking order), the Cybermen grow in number – though it’s worth pointing out that this gradual rise is somewhat counterintuitive at the end of the story, when it turns out Lumic has had hives of Cybermen stashed away for quite some time). Weirdly though, it’s almost coincidence that brings Rose and the Doctor to Pete and Jackie’s house the night they’re hosting the President of the UK. With whom, Lumic’s toy soldiers want a word. 

Graeme Harper was the only Classic Who director to get to direct in the New Who era too at the time, and what he gave us in The Rise of the Cybermen was a masterclass in angles and the delivery of menace through the choice of shots. He made the return of the Cybermen into something that had both power and a sense of size that was frightening as they crashed Jackie Tyler’s birthday party with mayhem on their minds. 

It’s possible to argue though that the new Cybermen lost some of their Classic era menace specifically in Rise of the Cybermen/The Age Of Steel, by virtue of having no weapon except a kind of electro-touch. They also gained an unfortunately undramatic catchphrase to mimic the Daleks – intoning “Delete, delete, delete” like walking incarnations of Grammarly. And for any long-term Cyber-fan, the question of how they would sound was a vexed one – the Cybermen have had a range of vocal tones throughout their on-screen lives, but for many people the best (if least logical) was that of the Eighties Cybermen voiced (and played) by David Banks and Mark Hardy, which had a deep electronic burr to it. Nick Briggs is a master in almost all things, but the monotone he gave the new Cyber-voices, while logically in keeping with the like of Troughton-era Cybermen, felt a bit flat on screen. 

But for most viewers, that didn’t matter. Either the Cybermen were back, and looking bigger and stronger then ever if you were a hardcore Who-fan, or there was a new cool monster in Doctor Who if you weren’t. 

One of the neatest elements about the Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel is how plausible the creep of Cyber-technology is in it – people at first getting ‘earpods’ which feed chosen content directly into their ear canals and brains, and from there, the information-flow going both ways, facilitating mind-reading and mind-control as and when necessary. The Doctor’s lecture about the human race always needing the next upgrade was well observed based on a society in which technology is outdated within two years of its launch. And the universality of Lumic’s ‘earpod’ technology gets lots of people walking into Battersea Power Station early in The Age Of Steel, because if the Cybermen have always been about the fear of ageing and death, they’ve also always been about the body horror or a human brain in a metal body, the flesh having been cut away and discarded. 

The second episode of the Cyber-return to Doctor Who riffed heavily on this body horror and the emotional response to it. Where in Classic Who it was rarely made explicit how the emotions were removed, in The Age Of Steel it was given a conveniently vulnerable explanation. There was no Frankensteinian lobotomy action involved in creating a Cyberman, there was simply an emotional inhibitor, which, if you knew how, could be switched off. That would mean lots of Cybermen suddenly becoming self-aware inside their metal bodies and going stark, raving bonkers. 

The Doctor only discovers this through Mickey and his connection to a gang of anti-Lumic activists, the Preachers, who in this universe have a Ricky Smith among their number. Ricky is sadly killed along the way, giving Mickey an example to look up to (as well as a potential boyfriend in fellow Preacher, Jake). When Mrs Moore, a techie in the gang, teams up with the Doctor, there’s a touching scene where a dying Cyberman regains its humanity, and tells them it was getting married the next day. And while Mrs Moore too immediately pays the price, and the parallel Jackie Tyler is among the first batch of humans to be Cyber-converted at Battersea, the Doctor learns the way to defeat the Cybermen – find the code that controls the emotional inhibitor and broadcast it to all the Cybermen. 

This is both in the long tradition of Cyberman stories and yet somehow disappointing at the same time. While the Daleks have had issues that make them weak – stairs, plungers, etc – the list of things that, for no good reason whatsoever, allow you to destroy a lot of Cybermen in one go had grown ludicrous in Classic Who – from radiation to gravity to nail varnish remover to gold coins lodged in their chest. They have always had to be artificially limited in their power, and the emotional inhibitor, while it was a slightly more technical version of the trope, was the first 21^st century way to kill a lot of Cybermen in a hurry and so resolve a story. It was a trend which would probably reach its nadir in the Eleventh Doctor story Closing Time, when for all intents and purposes, ‘blowing them up with love’ became a thing you could do to Cybermen. 

While the ending is too easy, it leaves a lot of changes in the world of the Tardis crew. Rose reveals her identity to Pete Tyler, and he can’t especially handle it – especially not after losing his wife in the Cyber-factories. 

Mickey, meanwhile, decides to stay behind in the parallel universe and root out all the hives of hidden Cybermen, while also having some extra time with his nan. As he rightly says, in a world with Rose Tyler and the Doctor in it, “It’s never gonna be me, is it?”, so he decides to find his own destiny, free from the endless, hopeless hope of getting back a relationship with Rose. 

Rise of the Cybermen and the Age of Steel together are a fantastic spectacle of Cyber-reinvention, and they repay re-watching even today. The way the Cybermen are defeated may be little more than the 21^st century of the Classic show’s easy solutions to Cybermen, downgrading them as a threat, but the two-part reintroduction of Doctor Who’s silver medal monsters has a high bodycount, Cybermen marching en masse, a joyfully explicit explanation of how they came about (in at least one reality), and plenty of personal, emotional impact, both for the Tardis team and for us as viewers. This is an achievement underlined by quite how difficult it has proved to deliver an effective Cyber-story in the years that have followed. Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel – check them out again. 

They’re probably better than you remember.

Who Reviews The Beast Below by Tony J Fyler

 

Tony gets beastly. 

Of all the stories he ever wrote for Doctor Who, when asked if there was one he was least pleased with, Steven Moffat chose The Beast Below as an example of one that didn’t really work. 

It’s distinctly arguable he was a touch too hard on himself. There’s at least one element that’s patently absurd, certainly, but there’s a great deal to enjoy and admire about the Eleventh Doctor’s second story, and Amy Pond’s first real foray into the universe. 

First of all, like Wendy in Peter Pan, she follows her enigmatic friend into the wider universe dressed in her nightie – a first for Doctor Who companions (assuming Leela’s leather gear wasn’t used night and day), which makes her appeal to us immediately as a trusting ‘fan’ of her ‘Raggedy’ ‘imaginary friend. 

The story itself has some joy in its logic – and some human darkness too, to balance it. The idea that the human race, faced with extinction, got itself into a series of star arks, leaving only the UK (sans Scotland) unprepared, feels oddly resonant, somehow. The idea that decisions would be taken which go against everything in people’s natures, decisions that hurt a harmless, helpful creature, and cause people to regularly self-anaesthetise with forgetfulness – it’s darker than you might remember, The Beast Below. 

It’s also something of a triumph for Matt Smith’s new incarnation. Fresh from his regeneration story, he owns The Beast Below, from his bandy-legged Chaplin walk to his mysterious ‘Doing Of The Thing’ with the water glasses to discover a lack of engine vibration, his aching understanding of a child crying silently because no-one listens, his sliiiightly cringy self-definition as one who resists every chance they get, to his absolutely blow-the-doors-off sudden rage, declaring “Nobody HUMAN has anything to say to me today!” 

If you didn’t quite get the chills of New Doctor love from The Eleventh Hour – we’re not sure why you wouldn’t, but just say you didn’t – there is plenty in The Beast Below to make you love this quirky, funny, compassionate, old man, young body incarnation. The moment when he lets everyone hear the screaming of the star whale has resonances of the Tenth Doctor in Planet of the Ood, but it’s handled in a way that makes you somehow certain this is a very different Time Lord. It’s more an accusation here than it is an act of compassion or sharing, and you get a sense that while the Tenth Doctor was always giving people or menaces the option to turn away from their intent, this Doctor, when angered, might very well bring the roof crashing down on your head, and warnings be damned. 

Now, is it true that ultimately, it takes Amy pond’s faith in him to sway him from a ghastly course of non-Doctor action? Absolutely, but back then, they were both new and it felt like a pleasing balancing act – the new young companion challenging the old new Doctor into thinking bigger, and better, and more Doctor than the horrible options in front of him. 

Ironically of course, this is exactly the idea that Steven Moffatt would recycle in The Day of the Doctor, with Clara Oswald making three Doctors better than the options available. Here it feels smaller and sweeter, and somehow more resonant because it feels more every day. Amy Pond saving the Doctor from the box in which he’s thinking? Oh yes, we’ll have some of that, the companion showing her worth and her mettle early in her travelling time – great. 

There are other elements that work well, too – the idea of a Queen going under cover in her own realm is elegant, the heartbreaking pathos that it’s a scenario that’s been played out time and time and time again, her mask never changing because her lifespan has been artificially expanded and slowed. It all makes a kind of horrible, beautiful science-fiction fairytale sense, like Sleeping Beauty who every now and then re-sentences herself to ignorance and sleep, because knowledge while awake is too hard to bear. 

Creepy-seeming tentancles breaking through into the streets, undignified Geronimo-ing into the mouth of a giant star whale, and a subsequent hurl escape are all great fun, but fun with a dark tinge, revealing as they do another layer of the lies on which Starship UK is built. 

Sophie Okonedo as Liz 10 adds power and pathos in just the right amount to a story that needs them to bring the science-fiction elements and the human elements together, focusing the degree to which people will forget the suffering of their fellow creatures as the price of their own life. She also brings a glorious swish of style to the role, with her delivery of lines like “I’m the bloody Queen, mate.” Terence ‘Demon Headmaster’ Hardiman is a quiet, enigmatic force as Hawthorne too, never overshadowing the drama or its more dynamic players, but exemplifying the kind of public servant who would, for instance, efficiently feed people to the lions if their emperor commanded it. It all works extremely well to create a world weighed down with secrets and sadness, that needs a release no-one’s strong enough to give it. 

So, what doesn’t work? 

Annoyingly, it’s the Smilers and the Winders. A neat idea in themselves, creatures with revolving heads that change their face from benign to horrifying when they turn, there’s almost literally no purpose for them in the script except to force a couple of chase sequences and scare the toddlers. 

When we find out the truth about the Winders – the humans with Smiler faces on the back of their heads – the sense of the thing goes completely out of the window, forcing the conclusion that really, to make The Beast Below work as well as it could, you either need to pull out the Smilers altogether and replace them with a more mundane but more explicable threat, of you need more time than The Beast Below has in which to explain what the hell they actually are, and what they’re doing on Starship UK. Are they invented? Imported? Alien? Are they somehow channels for the pain and anger and grief of the star whale, or are they, as seems most likely, just a cool-ish idea with nowhere else to live, shoved into the story as the spur to those chase scenes? 

It’s the Smilers and the Winders that give any re-watch of The Beast Below that momentary pause for breath and brace-for-impact feel of slight disappointment. While they’re an interesting idea in their own right, and realised pretty well in terms of their physical impact, there’s zero logic behind their inclusion in the story, and they act more or less as a distraction from all the incredibly cool stuff going on in whenever they’re not pulling focus. 

Take another look at The Beast Below today. Focus on the ethics, the performances, and in particular the dynamics of a newly regenerated Doctor and a companion that proves beyond any doubt here why she’s better than many humans, and why she deserves her shot at the wider universe. For both Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor and Karen Gillan’s Amy Pond, this is at least as fundamental to their figuring out their way of being, and being in the universe together, as The Eleventh Hour with its moment of trust was. This is Amy Pond saving the Doctor from the limitations he’s imposed on a situation – the three appalling options he sets out before himself. The point being, in setting out those options, he’s Doctoring on auto-pilot. By opening up the options in front of him, and making him see the universe through the lens of how others might see him, Amy gifts the Eleventh Doctor the lack of limitations – and that in itself is enough to infuse both his journey and his nature with a brand new enthusiasm. And with it, we as fans get that same new enthusiasm, flying back into the universe with a brand new brilliant Doctor.

Who Reviews Victory of the Daleks by Tony J Fyler

 

Tony claims victory with a Jammie Dodger. 

There’s an old saw in Doctor Who fandom that says that a Doctor isn’t really a Doctor, or that they don’t really reveal what kind of Doctor they are, until they come up against the Daleks. It’s by no means consistently true, of course – the Fifth Doctor didn’t face them properly until his final season, and both the Sixth and Seventh Doctors were firmly into their on-screen time before they encountered the pepperpots of doom. 

The Eleventh Doctor had no such wait for his first encounter with the Daleks. Three stories into his first series, the Tweed-suited Time Lord came across the sons of Skaro in one of their most insidious stories since Power of the Daleks, with which the parallels are both obvious and intentional. 

Winston Churchill (Ian McNiece, giving us a believable performance that has seen him anchor box sets of Churchill adventures in audio) is in his bunker during the early years of World War II when he calls for the Doctor’s opinion and assistance with an ethical dilemma over a magical new techno-weapon that could win him the war. 

The Doctor, naturally – new body, new Tardis interior, both taking a while to wear in – is a little late, so in the meantime, Churchill acts as he sees fit. A new robotic sentinel called an Ironside, built by a Scottish professor named Bracewell, is able to shoot Nazi planes out of the sky, and also serve tea to the victors once their offensive duty is done. 

The Eleventh Doctor’s reaction to the Ironsides is especially extreme when he finds out they’re actually Daleks. Yelling, demanding they admit who and what they are, and even attacking them with giant spanners, seeing the Daleks in this scenario, hiding in plain sight, shooting down Nazis and pretending to be willing ‘soldiers’ of the Allies offends everything in his hearts. Even Amy Pond seems worried about the extreme reaction he has to them, which in itself is odd – in the history of which the Doctor is aware, Amy comes from an Earth that has seen the Daleks attack, experienced the Earth hijacked across space by them, seen people exterminated by the tank-dwelling Nazi-blobs. But she has no memory of any of that – a factor in the ongoing story of the cracks in time that are the arc of Series 5. 

But when the Doctor goes spanner-nuts, demanding that the Daleks acknowledge him, and stop pretending to be subservient to the humans around them, one of the weirdest things in almost 50 years of Dalek history happens. 

His words are recorded, transmitted through space, and apparently ‘accepted as testimony.’

Almost immediately, the Daleks drop their pretence, go on a brief killing spree they’ve evidently been itching for, and, when Bracewell pleads with them, demanding that they are his creation, they shoot off his hand, and reveal that in fact, they created him as a way of getting close to Churchill – and the Doctor. And then, in the most unDalek-like move of all, they naff comprehensively off. 

The next phase of the story stretches credulity out niiiiice and thin. The last of the Daleks, it seems, have found an ancient Dalek MacGuffin – a Genesis Ark (full points to writer Mark Gatiss there for coming up with a suitably impressive Doohicky name). In the Ark there’s some primal, perfect Dalek DNA, enough to reboot the species from a fundamental template. There’s just one problem: the modern, bronze Daleks are so far from the fundamental Dalek that the Ark refuses to acknowledge them as Daleks. 

O…K. 

Instead of acknowledging their Dalekness though, the Ark will recognise the testimony of the Daleks’ arch-enemy – the Doctor. So, all the sophisticated analytical equipment you imagine would be in a Dalek Doohickey says they’re not Daleks. But the word of the species’ most eternal enemy is good enough for the Ark to open up. 

It’s really best to stop thinking too hard at this point. When you also understand that in an effort to get the Doctor to acknowledge them, the best plan they could come up was to a) create an android professor, and b) to go and hang around with Winston Churchill for a bit, serving tea in the hopes that the Doctor might just… pop along though, you ssssort of get the Genesis Ark’s point. Conquerors of time and space, they may be. Great thinkers? Nnnno. 

Where Victory of the Daleks also seems to go astray is that having established that the Ark contains primal Dalek, pure Dalek, fundamental Dalek, what emerges from it looks significantly less like a Dalek than any Dalek we’ve ever seen on screen. Big, bulky, with skirts the size of Skaro and in colour schemes not even the Peter Cushing movie dreamed of, the New Paradigm Daleks look OK in their initial emergence scene, backed by some superbly strong Murray Gold music. And there’s no doubting the fact that they sound the part, Nick Briggs making the voice of most of them deeper and more gravelly than the bronze Daleks. 

But ultimately, they look like a marketing strategy first and a universal despot second, which is one of the reasons they never especially caught on with fans. If the plan had been to replace the bronze Daleks – themselves an extremely elegant upgrading of what it meant to be a Dalek – with a new paradigm to be used in future stories, audience reaction appeared to take the wind out of the production team’s sails, and they were only included among other varieties of Dalek in future stories, before being more or less dropped altogether in the Chibnall era. 

The point about all of which is that their look makes no sense within the context of the story.

But then, in fairness, nothing much after the Doctor hits the Dalek with the spanner makes sense within the context of the story. Once the New Paradigm Daleks have emerged, the rest of the story is simply a matter of competing stakes. 

The Doctor threatens to blow up the Daleks with a Jammie Dodger… as you do if you’re the Eleventh Doctor and all you happen to have about your person is a Jammie Dodger. The Daleks, crippled though their ship might be, threaten to destroy London simply by shining a giant spotlight on it, so the Luftwaffe can do its thing. 

Bracewell, inspired by fellow Scot Amy Pond, takes some ideas he’s had for gravity bubbles and turns them from designs to fully working versions fitted to a bunch of Spitfires in what is practically no time at all – and with one working hand, no less. Spitfire pilots, used to flying sorties from England to Germany and back, have abbbbsolutely no problem flying into space to attack the Dalek ship. And in a move to get the Doctor to call off the attack, the new Supreme Dalek – presumably plugging itself rapidly into the data banks of the former Daleks it has systematically exterminated – reveals that as well as a passport into Churchill’s inner circle, the android Bracewell is an oblivion cascade (again, full marks on doohickey-naming for Gatiss). A walking, talking, thinking bomb that will take most of the earth with it into a screaming void pretty shortly as a way to give the new Daleks cover to get the hell out of Dodge and begin being simply awful to other people in other times and places. 

The Doctor, faced with his second impossible conundrum in two weeks – the week before, he’d been on the brink of killing the last of the star whales till Amy Pond talked him round – lets them go, and returns to Earth to persuade the android Bracewell that he’s a real boy after all, on the wiiiildly spurious grounds that provoking the implanted memories of a human life within him will stop him acting like a bomb and taking the Earth with him. Because… reasons. 

But of course, it’s not the Doctor who can provoke the right memories in Edwin Bracewell to cool him down and stop him exploding. The Doctor, like Bracewell, is fundamentally not human, and his efforts to get Bracewell to believe in his own humanity are doomed to fail. 

As with the star whale conundrum in The Beast Below, it’s actually Amy Pond who brings the goods, provoking memories of Bracewell’s “lost love,” Dorabella, and the ‘good hurt’ of loving someone. When Edwin stands down from his explosive countdown, all’s well that ends well, the light over London is extinguished, and Britain lives to suffer another few years of wartime uncertainty and hardship under Winston Churchill’s government. The Daleks naff comprehensively off for a second time, claiming victory. Bracewell, we learn, will probably go looking for Dorabella – and what we wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall for that meeting. “Hi honey, I’m home, and now I’m an emotionally unstable hyper-bomb!” 

The point about Victory of the Daleks, ultimately, is that it had a lot to do. It was determined to be a riff on Power of the Daleks, with sneaky Daleks seeming to serve humans. It had to act as a celebrity historical, bringing Churchill into the fold of the Doctor’s on-screen friends, though the idea that they’ve met before had long been established. It had to pitch a brand new design of Dalek to the audience, in such a way as to erase the previous iteration and if possible spark a new wave of retail Dalekmania. And, while it was at it, it was determined to get as many war movie references in as possible, more or less for the joy of it. 

It succeeds in doing a lot of that – the subservient Daleks are effectively creepy, especially when, unwatched, they turn and observe the humans. Churchill emerges as a person the Doctor can support (albeit there’s a good deal of printing the legend there). And the war movie elements are fun, if in no sense logical. 

Where it falls down is in the very thin strands of logic that hold the thing together – the Genesis Ark believing the Doctor but not the Daleks, the likelihood of Churchill as a good locus-point by which to wait for the Doctor to show up, the logistics of preparing the Spitfires for their space dogfight, etc. 

And most of all, it falls down in that the New Paradigm Daleks look, all the way through, like a desperate plea by the production team to get people to buy new Dalek models and products, rather than as anything that was fundamentally necessary to the Daleks’ ongoing story. 

So you can still get a whole lot of fun out of Victory of the Daleks, 11 years on – but the New Paradigm Daleks, in retrospect, look like an idea forced into being for the wrong reasons, and so act as the cherry on a highly illogical, if always fun, cake.

Beyond The TARDIS The Sarah Jane Adventures: Enemy of the Bane by Andrew Allen

 

‘And you have a computer in the wall,’ says Mrs Wormwood, not entirely sans sneer. ‘I had no idea you could be so entertaining!’

And so, The Sarah Jane Adventures reaches the season finale. And if having a third season and its own Comic Relief special (complete with a guest appearance from British comedy icon Ronnie Corbett) on the way wasn’t enough of a statement of confidence, then in this story Sarah Jane Smith is now elevated to that rare status afforded very few characters who started out as support acts: getting their own arch-enemy. The Doctor has The Master, and now Sarah has Mrs Wormwood, who turns up making trouble for everybody. The plot contrives that they are seen as more ‘fun’ than murderous (in much the same way that Delgado’s Master was, despite his horrific body count), and Someone Who Is Not To Be Trusted despite the fact that they turn up asking for Sarah’s help. 

Although this is the last episode of the series (and therefore reasonably unlikely to be the place where any new fans drop in for the first time), there’s quite a bit of backstory to be revisited via Luke’s bad dreams, in which Mrs Wormwood herself is reminding the lost boy of exactly where he came from - at one point, she’ll tell him ‘Luke, I am your mother,’ in a sly aside to a certain space opera saga - not long after riffing on one of Samantha Bond’s other iconic roles when she introduces herself as ‘Wormwood .. Mrs Wormwood.’ As the episode opens, Rani’s mum gets kidnapped. Mrs Wormwood throws down the gauntlet (and a few dozen roses), baiting Team SJ to seek Gita out in an empty warehouse, while Sarah gives us all a quick update on the history of the invading monsters, the Bane. 

There are a few tricks learned from the then current series of Doctor Who itself, not least that

Sarah and her companion at one point hold each other’s hand for comfort, and Mrs Wormwood is swift to inform and unsettle Rani by telling her that she is merely the latest in a long line of assistants, mentioning that this one is ‘taller’. But it’s not long before Mrs Wormwood claims that the only reason she got Sarah’s attention in the first place was because she needed the latter’s help. Suddenly things kick up a gear when the Old Dark Warehouse they’re in gets invaded by some Bane, forcing Mrs Wormwood to scarper. Sarah gets attacked, but is saved by her former enemy. ‘I’m not past my sell-by date yet,’ she pithily snaps. 

Mrs Wormwood explains that she bears the blame for the fall-out of the failed takeover of Earth (as detailed in The Invasion Of The Bane) - during which Sarah killed the Bane mother – but even that isn’t the reason why the Bane Kindred are on the hunt for her. No, she claims to Sarah’s surprise. Mrs Wormwood is trying to save the galaxy from an ancient being known as the Horath. The only way to find out how is via an almost as ancient scroll, now in the

possession of UNIT. Sarah’s youngster friends are somewhat excited at the chance of hanging out with a bunch of alien-fighting soldiers. 

Sarah manages to sum up much of early seventies Doctor Who, and the tension between

having a lead character who famously hated guns, but also plots that largely blew everything up in the finale: ‘In my experience, guns never solved a problem they didn’t first make worse.’ 

All of which leads to the last onscreen appearance of Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier. 

There’s a certain poetry to this, as the role was originally intended to be played by Freema Agyeman’s Martha, who had to pull out because of scheduling conflicts, leading to an unintentionally neat echo of Mawdryn Undead, in which William Russell pulled out of an anniversary guest appearance, to be replaced by ... Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier.

Here, Sarah needs the Brig’s credentials in order to access The Black Archive (first seen here, then a pivotal part of the plot in the Doctor Who fiftieth anniversary episode, The Day Of The Doctor). Lethbridge-Stewart is old enough and irascible enough to go pretty much anywhere he wants (mostly by using the passcode ‘in my day..’), although Major Kilburn is keeping a beady eye on him, channelling all manner of pantomime villains (even admiring his own reflection at one point). 

However, Sarah and Rani being trapped in the Black Archive is not the big cliffhanger in this penultimate episode. Nor is it Luke and Clyde being attacked by the ‘one eyed squiddy things’. 

It’s revealed that Kaagh, the Sontaran that we were introduced to at the start of season two, is working with Mrs Wormwood, and it’s worth remembering that Sontarans were the very first alien monster Sarah Jane Smith met, 35 years prior to this episode, and still making trouble. 

Perhaps the roving reporter has earned herself two arch enemies ..

Profiles Javic Piotr Thane aka Captain Jack Harkness

 

The Early Years and The Time Agency 

Javic was born before the year 5094 in the 51^st Century and came from a ‘tiny little place’ called the Boeshane Peninsula. He lived there with his Mum, his Dad Franklin, and his younger brother Gray. He lived near the beach, and would often spend evenings with his father and brother playing cricket and sitting around the camp fire, laughing and singing. 

The Peninsula lived under the threat of invasion. Normally the enemy would pass overhead, but on the day of Gray’s abduction, they didn’t. ‘They came without warning…their howls travelled before them.’ When the creatures came, many inhabitants of the Peninsula ran for shelter. Franklin, instructed Javic to run for shelter with his brother Gray, while he would run back for his wife. Unfortunately, Franklin never made it, and the family lost their father that day. Javic had further news for his mother when he returned to the homestead. In the dash for safety, Gray had tripped and Javic had let go his hand. Thinking that Gray would still be behind him, he ran for the shelter of the trees, but was panic stricken to learn that his brother was nowhere in sight. Many more inhabitants lost their lives that day. 

Jack confessed to ‘Adam’, an entity that had forced its way into the Torchwood Hub, convincing the entire team that he was and always had been, a member of Torchwood, that he searched years for his brother but never found a body. 

In the years that followed, Javic joined the Time Agency around the age of 15 - 20 years old. He was the first citizen of Boeshane to sign up and was the poster boy for the Peninsula.

‘The Face of Boe, they called me.’ 

Thane encouraged a friend to join up with him and fight an enemy he described later to the real Captain Jack Harkness, as ‘the worst possible creatures you can imagine.’ They were captured and because his friend was weaker, tortured him and made Thane watch, later releasing Thane, to bear the guilt of his friend’s fate. I wonder if these were the same creatures that captured and tortured young Gray? 

Around the age of 20 - 35 years, and still working with the Time Agency, he was partnered up with Captain John Hart, a rebel in his own right. They once spent five years trapped in a two-week time loop, and became the equivalent of a married couple. Hart confessed after an ongoing row that he was a good wife, proving that the pair had more than just a professional partnership. 

Unlike life in the 21^st Century, the 51^st Century was so much more diverse and the attitudes towards sexuality was a lot more acceptable. 

During further missions with Hart, the two agents faced off against a horde of Weeping Angels. 

On one of his Time Agency missions, Thane fought the Navigators, and visited a black market on Fluren’s World where he bid on a Monstrom Time Destroyer. He lost out to a pair of Wrightosaur mercenaries, whom he later had a sexual encounter with. 

Thane had two years of his memory removed while working for the Time Agency, a fact that Hart knew about but refused to discuss with him. I wonder if the truth of this will ever be revealed? Shortly after this, he left the agency to become a time travelling con artist, running scams using his knowledge of future events. He preferred schemes which involved payment for items that he knew would later be destroyed. 

He was sentenced to death for unknown crimes, and ordered four hyper vodkas as his last request. Thane woke up in bed with his two executioners. ‘Lovely couple. They stayed in touch. Can’t say that about most executioners…’ 

At some point in Thane’s life, he travelled to the 17^th century and lived as a priest under the alias ‘Father Julian Horst.’ 

At the estimated age of 35 Earth years, while operating as a Con Man Thane stole a Chula war ship from a beautiful woman and used it to head to Earth where he hoped to trade with two Time Agents that he’d located in wartime London at the height of the Blitz. Unbeknownst to him, they were the Ninth Doctor and travelling companion, Rose Tyler. He’d picked up a battle ambulance, dropping it down in Lime Street Station, unaware of its cargo, and expected to be paid handsomely for it, and seeing it destroyed much later by a German bomb, that was destined to land on that very spot. It fell on a child, Jamie, who plagued the area surrounding it, making anyone who touched him, become like him, a gas mask zombie. Nanogenes had fixed him, but assuming that the mask on his face was an actual part of his genetics, had made everyone else who touched him, become the same. 

He rescued Rose Tyler as she desperately clung to a barrage balloon, wearing a Union Jack t-shirt while German and British planes had dog fights around her. Drawn into the tractor beam of his Chula ship, Jack brought her to safety and fixed her burns with saved nanogenes trapped in his ship. 

Thane assumed the identity of American volunteer of the 133rd Squadron of the Royal Air Force – Captain Jack Harkness, who he was later to meet in Cardiff, when he stepped through the doors of The Ritz Dance hall, with Toshiko Sato, during a temporal shift sending them back to 1941. He knew all about the real Captain Jack Harkness, and explained it all to Toshiko that he was undercover and needed a name. He explained that the name was convenient, as the real Harkness died in battle. ‘They go out on a sortie and are surprised by two formations of Messerschmitt's. He destroys three of the enemy. His men listen to his whoops of joy over the radio. Then it all goes quiet. He can't bail out because his whole plane is on fire, but his men all make it back to safety.’ 

Rose was quite taken with the time traveler, the Doctor less so. Jack was introduced to the Doctor some time later, who was disgusted to learn that it was Jack’s fault that people were succumbing to the gas mask invasion, due to the broken medical transporter. Jack learned that the medical transporter wasn’t empty at all. It contained billions upon billions of nanogenes, all set to fix the world, and the first thing they fixed was the dead child wearing a gas mask. 

Eventually, the Ninth Doctor managed to convince the nanogenes that Nancy, the boy’s mother is who the boy should resemble and not the gasmask that is a permanent fixture to his face, in much the same way as all other zombie patients in the hospital, and those protecting the bomb site. The Doctor is joyous when the nanogenes return the patients to their normal state, including giving a woman back her missing limb. 

Jack, using the Chula war ship, captures the German bomb destined to destroy the medical transporter for good, and transports it in his Chula warship, away from Earth and into space. Unfortunately for Jack, his ship has no escape pod. He is literally stuck with the ship and can only face the countdown to oblivion, unaware however, that the TARDIS is parked at the other end of his ship. He closes the doors to avoid the blast and travels with the Doctor and Rose, for many adventures until…one adventure changes his life forever. 

Travels with the Doctor & Rose Tyler 

The Doctor takes Rose and Jack to the location of the planet Excroth, only to discover it’s not there. The TARDIS is taken aboard a Lect spaceship which Jack and the Doctor escape from after it is attacked by Unon. Rose unfortunately is blasted into the Time Vortex but is protected from the time winds by the tachyon inhibitor she finds. After a battle between the Lect and the Unon which triggered the emergency protocol, Fluren’s World was no longer protected by the time bubble. Jack, who managed to locate Rose at a Temporal Bazaar on Fluren, subsequently is separated from her and is taken in the TARDIS to the Unon’s Perpetual City where he is once again reunited with the Doctor who he believed dead. The Doctor is tricked by the mother superior of the Unon, Arnora and Rose tricks the Doctor into giving the co-ordinates of the Perpetual City to the opposition – the Lect. Jack is taken into the sub-dimensional void and is shown what the future would look like without the Doctor around. Not a pretty sight. The Doctor is saved when Jack is released from the void, and after discovering that the Doctor cannot prevent the entropy engine from overloading, saves as many Unons as possible, and takes them to another world so that they can start again. 

The Doctor discovers a giant ziggurat and the Hanging Gardens of Slarvia. He uses his sonic screwdriver to locate a ship in orbit that had transmatted them aboard, and comes face to face with the Taggani, a famous geohacker. Jack, Rose and the Doctor had stopped the geohacker from using the Doctor’s memories to recreate the Last Great Time War. They discovered that the geohacker was none other than an art historian from the Braxiatel Collection, who is subsequently handed over to the Judoon. ‘Justice is swift’ 

While on the planet Clix, Jack and the Doctor disguise themselves as Slitheens in a bid to find Rose, who has been kidnapped by Slist Fayflut Marteveerthon Slitheen. 

A darker Jack journeyed with the Doctor and Rose to the Novrosk Peninsula and encountered Russian Special Forces, nuclear submarines and something that predates the stone circle on the cliff top, that is waking, hunting and killing. Jack finds a girl of 19, whose life has been sucked clean from her, and that only her memories survive, but she cannot talk about it, and can barely walk.

‘I used to think I was scared by death. Or by facing death – by combat and action and the uncertainty of the battlefield.  Not any more.  No, now what scares me is the possibility I might live to grow old.  I might wake up one day tired and wasted and unable to even open a beer.  I might need crutches and a hearing aid and help getting dressed.  When and if I get to that point, it’ll be my memories that’ll keep me going.  The fact I’ve lived through so much, survived so much to get there.’ 

During another journey with the Doctor, Jack spends a month in Bromley in the year 2006, babysitting a Neanderthal who can no longer return to his own time and helps him integrate into life in the 21^st century. 

When the TARDIS needed to refuel, they stopped off in Cardiff and settled the ship over the Rift, a scar that ran through the city of Cardiff. Jack was introduced to Mickey Smith, Rose Tyler’s boyfriend and earned the title of Captain Cheesecake. The Doctor discovered that one of the Slitheen still existed on the planet after the attack on 10 Downing Street and had now become the Lord Mayor. He set his sights to capture her before she caused any further trouble. The Doctor and Jack discover that beneath the plans for the new Blaidd Drwg nuclear power plant is an Extrapolator, which once the power plant goes into meltdown and destroys Earth, Margaret Blaine will ride aboard the extrapolator and escape. 

In a bid to hasten the speed of the refueling, Jack attaches the extrapolator to the TARDIS console. Instead, the device causes a massive earthquake in Cardiff, which instead of feeding the TARDIS from the Rift, does the exact opposite. It is a clever trick by the Slitheen, known as Margaret Blaine as she enters the TARDIS and takes Rose hostage.

When the Heart of the TARDIS is revealed to Blaine, she is hypnotized by it and when Jack and the Doctor finally close the Rift, and disable the extrapolator, all they find of Margaret Blaine is a Slitheen egg. They take Margaret’s egg back to Raxacoricofallapatorius, where she is given a second chance at life. 

Jack journeys with the Doctor and Rose, to the Colony World of 4378976 Delta-Four in the year 2775, where Jack finds himself committed to a lunatic asylum called the Big White House, for telling fictional stories. Inside the asylum, he faces the possibility of being experimented upon by a nutty surgeon called Cal Tyko. 

Jack, the Doctor and Rose also visited New Vegas in the 23^rd Century, where they helped detective James McNeil investigate The Whisper, a strange vigilante that was terrorizing the city’s underworld. Jack worked undercover as a reporter for the Daily Galaxy, where he befriended Daisy Hewett, but some gals are not to be trusted, and Jack found that out to his peril, when Cyrus Wolfsbane kidnapped him, in order for the Doctor to lead Cyrus to the Whisper. 

In 1336, Jack, the Doctor and Rose visit Japan but find themselves transmatted to different areas of the Games Station, where each member of the TARDIS crew awaken to find themselves in certain doses of terror, although at first, none of them see it that way. 

When Rose is zapped by the Anne Droid in the Weakest Link Game show, the Doctor and Jack are distraught but after Jack finds the TARDIS stowed away in the back of a unit, soon discovers how the trick reveals that Rose is not dead at all. What he and the Doctor uncover however is a secondary signal, into an empty location of space, where the losers wind up. Disabling the signal, the Doctor discovers that his worst adversaries, the Daleks have been playing an extremely long game, and promises to destroy them once and for all, when he flies his TARDIS into their Mothership and rescues Rose from their clutches. 

Thus, ensues the battle on the Game Station that subsequently kills Captain Jack Harkness, in a battle he knew he could never win. Facing down three Daleks, he empties his weapons on them, but already knows he’s a dead man, when they open fire. When Rose returns in the TARDIS, she has the power of the Time Vortex inside of her and destroys the Dalek’s, wiping them from existence. She was also able to bring Jack back to life, making him a fixed point in time, and immortal. The Doctor knew that the power would eventually consume her, and absorbed the Time Vortex himself. This would mark the end of the Ninth Doctor. 

When Jack gasped back to life and returned to the TARDIS, it was already dematerializing. He was stranded on the Game Station, orbiting a Dalek devastated Earth in the year 200,100. Rose suggested that the Doctor should go back to find Jack, as he might be able to help them, but the Doctor, having regenerated, couldn’t tell her the truth, that if Jack entered the TARDIS he would cause a temporal paradox and threaten the TARDIS’ proper operation, and insisted he was too busy rebuilding the Earth. 

Having been left behind by the Doctor, Jack was distraught and sought solace in a small cabin near the ruins of the Black Country Dome. He wanted to be left alone but was approached by an aspiring journalist called Silo Crook who was as intrigued as Jack, to know more about the Hope Foundation, a charity founded by Vortia Trear, which took surviving humans off Earth and gave them new and better lives. Jack and Silo discovered that Trear was a rich elite and was intending to exploit the humans below them, which naturally lead to a revolt. With the satellite station now left to fall to Earth, Jack scrambled to interact the live cables to ensure it landed safely. As Jack came around after being electrocuted, he saw an abundance of resources that could be salvaged from the fallen satellite that would enable humanity to rebuild itself.

 Jack and Torchwood

Harkness eventually set his Vortex Manipulator for Earth and Cardiff in the 21^st century, to the site of the active space-time rift, in a hope that he would reconnect with the TARDIS and the Doctor with Rose, when it refueled. Unfortunately, his wrist strap device burnt out somewhere in the 19^th century leaving him stranded in 1869. 

Jack remained in Cardiff, and after visiting the Little Girl with the Tarot Cards, and learning that it would be some time before he would reconnect with the right Doctor in his time line, decided to work for Torchwood Three. 

Jack learnt that after his third death and resurrection after being shot in 1892 during a fight on Ellis Island, that although he was immortal, he still aged, albeit very slowly. He could recover from any physical harm, almost immediately, although his legs were always the last to knit back together.

Jack eventually became the Head of Torchwood Three, after succeeding his boss, who after shooting all of the Torchwood Three agents in the Hub, turned the gun on himself, just as Jack re-entered the building, and was unable to stop him. His boss had seen the future after opening the Pendant that was known as the Bad Penny! 

On Earth and assuming the role of Head of Torchwood Three in 2006, Thane, now Harkness lamented about contraceptives in the rain. ‘You take the pill, flush it away, and it enters the water cycle. Feminizes the fish. Goes all the way up into the sky then falls all the way back down onto me. Contraceptives in the rain. Love this planet. Still, at least I won't get pregnant. Never doing that again.’ Which begs the question, which con did he and Hart work on that produced a pregnant Thane? 

Jack enlisted a new team of agents. Suzie Costello, Toshiko Sato, Dr Owen Harper, Ianto Jones and eventually, when memories of her experience returned, Gwen Cooper. Each had a unique ability that was paramount to their role in the Hub, and after the death and re-death of Costello, the team became a closer-knit bunch of agents who had each other’s back, right up till the end. 

When the alien known as the ‘456’ returned to Earth for another hit of ‘children’, Harkness knew he had to stop them, but secrets of the past encounters with them, to save the planet against Spanish Flu in the earlier decades, would drive a wedge through not only his team, but also his family. At the risk of saving millions of children, Jack sacrificed the life of his grandson, alienating the connection he had with his daughter, Alice Harkness. 

He left the Earth once the threat of the 456 invasion was put to an end, his heart broken further by the death of Ianto Jones, a death that could have been avoided – but nearly all Torchwood agents die young. 

Jack returned to Earth many years later to discover a new threat to Earth. Nobody was dying. Even the dead weren’t dying. Worse still, Jack was now mortal. To find out who was behind it, meant Jack had to dig deep to find what the connection was between him and The Family. 

When the world was put right and many sad farewells were made, Jack remained on Earth and we had a new immortal being – that of Rex Mathison. 

Much of the chaos in Earth history seems to bear some connection to Jack Harkness but surely, it can’t be all his fault, can it? 

Beyond these findings, I can find little more to write about this incredible character, who has seen more death, and more destinations than an ABTA travel brochure. 

Jack’s life is anything but straight forward. There is more than one version of Jack Harkness out there. Harkness has helped and worked with three of the Time Lords known as The Doctor, his latest was in the exploit of rescuing the Doctor from a prison planet, and stopping another invasion of Daleks, this time partly commissioned by idiots running the UK government – no surprises there. 

Although Torchwood has no physical home in Cardiff, or indeed the world, as far as we can see, Captain Jack Harkness, as he goes by these days, will be out there somewhere, monitoring the skies above and when the call to arms is made, he and the remaining Torchwood team will come out of the shadows, and defend the Earth once more, with or without the help of the Time Lord known as the Doctor. 

 

References:

Audio: Month 25

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Adam

The End of Time

Last of the Time Lords

Utopia

Captain Jack Harkness

(COMIC: Weapons of Past Destruction)

(COMIC: World Without End)

(COMIC: Slaver's Song)

(COMIC: Secret Agent Man)

The Empty Child

(TV: Children in Need Special)

The Parting of the Ways)

(AUDIO: The Year After I Died)

Boom Town

The Stealers of Dreams

Bad Wolf

(AUDIO: Night of the Whisper)

Audio: Uncanny Valley

 

 

 

 

 

Beyond The Hub A Sad Farewell to Faith Howells by DJ Forrest

 

There’s never been a dull moment in the Howell’s household, from its early beginnings to its final tragic outcome in season three, with kidnappings, murder, secrets and lies, yep, there’s definitely nothing quiet about the lives of the Howell’s.   

In the first season of Un Bore Mercher/Keeping Faith, Evan Howells is keeping too many secrets from his wife, and one Wednesday morning, disappears. She sees him as usual pulling the car away from the front of the house, and the next instant, he’s gone, and for a long while it seems, never to return. A search is on for details of Evan’s disappearance, and a substantial amount of money from the company accounts which has cleaned them out, leads Faith to discover that Evan has bitten off more than he can chew with the likes of the Vaughan’s and the Reardon’s. 

Evan may have appeared the model citizen, but when he worked with the Vaughan’s and Gael Reardon, he was anything but a saint. It led to Faith to discover what her husband had been up to before he disappeared. It put them all in danger, including young Alys, her eldest child. It led to Steve Baldini, who she had acted as solicitor for, who had promised to look out for her and her family, who knew things about Evan that even Faith didn’t know about. It led to her falling for this rugged bad boy Baldini, and towards the end of the season, you really, really hoped she would… 

Season One introduced us to a wealth of characters. The extended family including Evan’s sister and her policeman husband. Evan’s mum who came clean as to who his biological father was, after a DNA test put Tom nowhere in the picture. 

When Evan finally returned, when the truth came out about his involvement with the Vaughan’s and Reardon’s, that level of trust that Faith had had for him was well and truly lost. It also brought with it corrupt police activity in the form of the Police Sergeant who was determined to connect Faith with the disappearance of her husband, and the death of a dentist. 

Season Two saw Evan in prison, but the investigation was still ongoing and Gael Reardon was putting the pressure on Faith with packages and envelopes and handovers, that were caught on camera. Alys had reached the obnoxious teenager stage and who can blame her with the craziness of family life. Arthur, the down and out drunk in the first season, who came into his own towards the end, and became a firm friend of Faith’s and became the new childminder, and the whole family appreciated his help, even when Evan was released from prison. 

Evan hadn’t properly adapted to family life and was still tracking Faith, uncovering her investigation, the photos and paperwork from deals and contracts which had led to them almost going under in the first season. Tom had separated from Marion, and was living on his boat in the harbour. His secretary declared her undying love for him, which was very sweet, and Marion developed a limp and a walking aid and had aged incredibly after the trauma of losing her son and then her husband in swift succession. I’m not sure if Evan truly forgave his Mum for lying to him about his father. 

In Season Three, a newcomer came to town, stirring up trouble and looking for revenge. Faith’s estranged mother came for a visit, to stir up trouble, and cause untold mayhem and chaos for Faith and her family. Her concern for daughter and her grandchildren was a mask for why she was really in town and the final showdown was the icing on the cake. Her swansong. 

The final episode was a true heart breaker and tear jerker. Hankies were definitely required. Staring down the barrel of a handgun, Faith saw the darkness of the mother scorned. Her revenge was to eliminate everything her daughter truly loved, to make her feel as bad as her own life had become. But Faith, was a different person when she left home and left the clutches of her mother – a woman she never loved, or trusted. It unnerved her that she was in town, and home truths had to be laid on the table when Faith finally owned up to some things in her past, she had hoped would remain buried. When Tom learnt the truth, he ended his business relationship with Faith’s mother, who had come in to put some business his way. 

Matthew Hall, writer and creator of Keeping Faith has a way of drawing you into a character and their lives, bringing them to life before your eyes. Introducing a character who for much of the story is a regular kind of Jo, with a family, living in a small Welsh coastal town, and everything is pretty much, normal, but then taking the normal, and turning it into something bigger, stronger, brasher and introducing us to characters who you want to root for. Some you want to slap, and others you might want to hit in the face with a chair. But certainly, you find yourself humming the theme tune while working, see character scenes opening up in your head. It’s been a wonderful series and I’m only disappointed that it’s come to its natural end, but what an ending. 

It’s going to take some time to find a series that will fill the void of Un Bore Mercher/Keeping Faith. 

We Will Miss You, Faith Howell’s.

 

 

Interviews The Nathan Wyburn Interview by DJ Forrest

 

 

Have you always made portraits from bits and pieces of anything? 

Nathan: For the past decade yes! I love using everyday items that anyone kind of has laying around or are easily accessible in a supermarket! 

Were you always interested in alternative art? What or who got you into alternative art? It's really impressive.

Nathan: Thank you! It was always portraits; Andy Warhol was a huge inspiration. The alternative (weird) art began with a toast and Marmite portrait of Simon Cowell! Then I was hooked! 

Do you create your pieces in a controlled area? (As in, if you're working with soil and it's a windy day outside, would that hamper your work, and so you'd work indoors?) 

Nathan: There’s a lot to think about! Wind, birds stealing my toast... haha! Things many artists wouldn’t have to consider but I find that’s the fun of it! I love location pieces but also my studio, is my happy place! 

When you're working with any piece of art, especially when you're creating your toast and marmite portraits, do you work from a sketch first, or do you know exactly which piece is going to go where? 

Nathan: I pretty much go straight for it, if I’m filming, I’ll sketch some outlines if it’s on a canvas for guidance - but if it’s food, generally just dive right in! 

Where did your imagination begin for art work? 

Nathan: A newspaper headline about Simon Cowell that said you love him or hate him... I thought MARMITE! Then began the journey... pizza, chocolate, make up etc it all happened! 

Did you ever expect it to take off into, say a full-time job? 

Nathan: Not at all. I think that’s always a worry for creatives, I use social media as my gallery and I think that’s helped a lot along the way - as well as a good few TV appearances. 

How much preparation time do you do between each portrait? 

Nathan: Next to nothing to be honest - I work so fast and I have to be on the ball with what current events I’m depicting. It’s very impulsive and reactive to world events and celebrity stories. 

Have you been commissioned to create artwork for anyone in the Who/Torchwood world? 

Nathan: Not for the specially but by fans or events such as Wales Comic Con etc!I’ve created portraits of Russell T Davies using fake blood fingerprints based on his latest series It’s a Sin. I’ve made John Barrowman by literally torching wood... several Eve Myles artworks, Billie Piper in lipstick, David Tennant on a pizza... the list goes on! 

What is the biggest challenge when you're creating art pieces? What challenges have you experienced or faced when putting together an exhibition of your work for the public? 

Nathan: Every day is a new day on the job for me. I love trying out new things. Mostly it’s just weather challenges or kids trying to steal the food haha! Nothing too serious but that’s part of the fun!! 

Aside from the art work, do you work in any other capacity? 

Nathan: Yes, I have a radio show on Radio Cardiff, I do a lot of charity work and also sing a little bit too. I’d love to present my own art show! 

Who is your inspiration for your artwork? 

Nathan: Andy Warhol mostly - but my ideas come from world news and current affairs. 

As I'm sure you're a big fan of Torchwood, or of Eve Myles, have you ever met any of the stars of the show - with living in Wales, you must have seen a few, out shopping maybe :D I loved your Keeping Faith art of Eve. That was amazing. 

Nathan: Thank you! Eve has become a good friend, which is so lovely to be able say. Also, I converse with Russell a lot online - he’s such an incredible talent! I’ve met all of the cast at different points, at the BAFTA’s, in theatre or whilst working at Con’s. 

When you're not working on any project, how do you relax? Or are you always planning your next project? 

Nathan: Always thinking and planning! But I’m a big fan of long walks and a good hot bath!!! 

For many, the lockdown's have been pretty hard. I'd imagine for yourself; Lockdown has been a kind of blessing - plenty of projects to keep you going - but have there been any dark days when you've felt pretty low - how did you resolve them? 

Nathan: Yes. More so at the start it was just such a worry with all my travelling and work getting cancelled. But I locked myself in my studio - and created work about the world changing! There was nothing else to do! I’m proud to say I’ve made some of my favourite work in this time and kept myself going pretty well!! People needed ART! 

What are you looking forward to once Lockdown is lifted and we're all vaccined? 

Nathan: Travelling! Making art all around the world and having a good ole party! 

With your images of John Barrowman, Russell T Davies, and Eve Myles, I have to ask - are you a fan of Torchwood? 

Nathan: Of course!! I loved it the first time round and watched it all again on BBC iPlayer during lockdown!!! 

Eve Myles holding a baby whilst shooting guns... perfection! 

What advice would you give someone who wanted to start creating artwork today? 

Nathan: Just be true to you! Make work that means a lot to you and you can’t go far wrong. 

If you could meet your 12-year-old self, what advice would you give him? 

Nathan: Keep working! You’re in for a hell of a ride if you just believe in yourself!! 

Did I hear that you're going to be in a film about one of your events? Can you tell us more about that? 

Nathan: Sure, it’s already been press released last year which is exciting. Eve Myles is writing a Christmas movie about one of my events I put on with my best mate and radio co presenter Wayne. It was called Dragged To Church. It’ll be based upon how the church approached two members of the LGBTQ community (us) for help to raise money for essential repairs. We gathered local drag queens to put on a festive show like no other. It was joyous and ground-breaking! We are so excited to be working with Eve. She’s an icon! 

And finally, what would be your biggest ambition as an artist? 

Nathan: To have my own art show and to make a difference. 

Diolch yn fawr Nathan.

If you want to find out more about Nathan and his artwork or follow him on social media, here are a few links you might need. Also look out for him in the Cardiff Life Magazine and tune in to Radio Cardiff. 

www.nathanwyburn.com

Twitter, Facebook & Instagram @NathanWyburnArt

www.youtube.com/wyzynathan

 

Columnist at Cardiff Life Magazine

Presenter at Radio Cardiff