And another picspam...

[thisbluespirit]

From The Strange Report (ATV, 1968) this time. More colour 1960s TV, with David Collings - and Anneke Wills. (There will be much more Anneke Wills once I watch the rest - she's one of the three main characters - and her clothes have their own credit.)

Anyway, this arrived, and I watched Ep 1 and, since I had got the impression it did some more interesting stories (a little like Special Branch, having Current issues and things, but with action and colour, and Anneke Wills), I was a disappointed that it was so cheesy, but Anneke Wills in colour makes up for a lot. (Also Robert Hardy.) So I thought, I might as well just skip to David Collings's episode, & see what that was like.

Well, he didn't survive the opening credits. That's a record. Anyway, the thing is, this one was much, much more interesting. Except that following the amazing cheesiness of ep1, I was not expecting this one to turn out not to be your standard murder mystery but a little one-episode psychological tragedy. (And while more than five minutes of David Collings would have been nice, everyone spent the whole episode talking about his character and trying to work out how he came to die, so it felt like he was in it a lot more than most of the guest actors who did survive.)

So, picspam. No spoilers (you can't count 'pics from the opening sequence' as spoilers).



Every happy party needs someone to come along and be miserable in it. (More doorway posing also.)


Prf Marks introduces his friend John Anders to his friends Ham and Evie.


I did promise David Collings and Anneke Wills, yes?


John Anders is a brilliant young neurosurgeon, who nobody likes very much. He lives for his work, keeps everybody at a distance and sneers at lesser mortals. (So we hear.)


Oh, except for one person - Nurse Peggy Gale, his fiance. ("He let you get through," says Evie later on. Peggy: "Yes. I suppose I'm just stubborn, or I love that way.")


Then John Laurie gets up to speak about how wonderful the hospital is, so Anders smashes a few glasses and interrupts with an uncharacteristic outburst. (Yes. It is Fraser from Dad's Army - and David Collings is doomed!)


Anders: "Heroic geniuses? Well, we're not, any of us, are we? We're just a cheap lot of glory-hunting hypocrites... No, let's have the truth for once, shall we, about the almighty surgeon - that butcher in a hero's halo. His secrets and his mistakes. The death toll behind the news, the hastily buried failures. These are his guilt, our guilt. But strictly not for publication."
Dr Hornsey: "You're drunk, Mr Anders. Go home!"


Our intrepid heroes call back to see if he's okay later on. They seem to be good at missing the obvious...

And then everybody has a go at checking he's dead:





(It's pretty much immediately made clear that this isn't a sordid tale of drugs - he's a diabetic and it looks as though he took a second dose of insulin while drunk. So, a sordid tale of drink, though. Oh, and this episode's drunk!David Collings was a first.)


John Laurie then arrives and also feels the need to double check that Anders is dead.

And that was it. But Anneke Wills is very pretty:




I was going to put the details of the plot under a spoiler-cut, because it really was unexpected and interesting (and sad!), but apparently, also really complicated, so I'd better not. Let's just say that it involved dealing with depression, euthanasia, medical ethics, suicide and murder by proxy. Which after the first episode with villains from some mediterranean dictatorship running around with bad accents, kidnapping people, came as a shock. But it was very good. I now have no idea what to expect of any of the other episodes.


Anyway, another picspam. I didn't feel like doing anything else just now.

Comments

[john_amend_all]

Well, he didn't survive the opening credits. That's a record.

The way you put it reminds me of Police Squad!, where the opening sequence of every episode has a "Special Guest Star" who gets killed off as their credit appears.

[thisbluespirit]

:-)

It wasn't like that, though. It was short but very significant, I think would be the way to put it - they clearly needed someone who could make enough impact in five minutes for the rest of the episode to work. And in the 1960s, thanks to being Raskolnikov in Crime & Punishment, using David Collings worked as a shortcut for brilliant but weird/doomed/messed up young man.

[persiflage-1.livejournal.com]

Good grief! That was a short lived guest starring role!

Mind, are we sure he wasn't killed for wearing that dressing gown? *giggles*

[thisbluespirit]

It was short, but very significant. I can live with David Collings getting killed so quickly, if everyone spends the rest of the episode talking about him and who he was and why he died.

Mind, are we sure he wasn't killed for wearing that dressing gown?

LOL! But it was 1968 - if you wanted to kill people who had dressing gowns like that, you'd have had to kill most of the men in Britain. Also, no, definitely not. It all turned out to be terribly sad and tragic.

[persiflage-1.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a good enough reason for murder to me! (The dire dressing gowns, I mean!)

Of course, I'll have to take your word on how sad and tragic it is...

[thisbluespirit]

:lol: I really don't think dire dressing-gowns are a good excuse for murder! I'm pretty sure my Dad and Grandad both had ones like that years ago. And I once had the worst dressing-gown ever as a hand-me-down. It was a hideous orange thing, made out of thick material, and bits kept falling out of it. ;-p

Well, it really is a complicated plot - I had a go at typing it out for belantana, below, but basically it was all a tragic accident and nobody intended to murder anyone. He was already suffering from stress (or depression) and someone swapped his x-ray results around so that he thought he had a brain tumour and he got his fiancee to help him commit suicide. And the person who'd swapped the results around was so distraught at what she'd done, that she tried to jump off the hospital roof. It was all jolly cheerful, really. Poor unnecessarily deaded David Collings!

[persiflage-1.livejournal.com]

LOL All right then - no murder for dire dressing gowns!

Good gods, that is a MAJOR cock-up!

[belantana.livejournal.com]

Hmm, now I'm intrigued by this storyline I will most likely never see. I'm glad it was better than you expected, in any case :)

[thisbluespirit]

I will try to type it out, because, actually, it was much more interesting than I expected, and a sort of exploration of the ethics of euthanasia, 1968-style.

Basically, Anders (David Collings) is a brilliant young neurosurgeon who is pretty ruthless in his work. His secretary is a woman whose husband was operated on by Anders, and died. She finds out that the operation couldn't have helped her husband, anyway, it was just for research purposes, so she confronts Anders about it. He, as only his fiancee really knows, is actually very insecure underneath it all, having lost both his parents in the war and been sent to a posh school as a scholarship boy, lives only for his work, and doesn't let anybody in etc etc. He starts questioning his work and winds up suffering from mild stress or depression - and has spells of dizziness, blanking out and headaches - and so, being a neurosurgeon also is paranoid enough to have an x-ray done.

Meanwhile, the secretary doesn't know this, and is determined to make him suffer for a bit, so takes the chance to swap his x-ray results with those of her late husband. She assumes he'll notice, but he isn't in a fit state to do that, or deal with the news. So he gets his fiancee to help him kill himself rather than face what his patients go through. She agrees, but he's shaking too much to do it, so she gives him the insulin injection (although she then panics and tries to save him, but too late). And then the next morning some interfering private investigators come along and tell her he's perfectly healthy after all, and actually she murdered him. (With a complete lack of tact, too - just so they can have a cliffhanger before the ad break.)

So his fiancee goes to confront the secretary, and then when the secretary learns exactly what she caused, she breaks down and tries to commit suicide, and Peggy (the fiancee) has to talk her down from the roof, and they both go off with the police together, who have to work out what to charge the both of them, and Our Heroes are pretty depressed about the whole thing, too.

Given that the first one was about Obvious Clues, car chases, and dodgy dictators kidnapping people in order to do enforced heart surgery on them, I was not expecting that! I liked David Collings being in the middle of a tragic thing where the only person who loved him/worked hard to get through to him went and killed him (she killed him because she LOVED him! It's like Julius Caesar all over again, heh), but it would have been more fun for me if we could have seen him and Peggy together, instead of him just dying. However, the series is actually about some plucky investigators, so they couldn't.

Anyway, I should have known. In the 1960s, David Collings was known for being Raskolnikov in Crime & Punishment and therefore using him was a shorthand for brilliant but doomed/weird/seriously messed up young man. His hair was very pretty in it, though. I don't think the caps here quite showed how much. Although, looking again at them, it looks suspiciously as though it grew considerably after he died. :lol:

[belantana.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, that is... terribly depressing! But also interesting & certainly not the standard Moral Dilemma fare. (I can't believe you wrote that all out for me - thanks! *g*)

but it would have been more fun for me if we could have seen him and Peggy together, instead of him just dying.

And there, ladies and gentlemen, is the question - can lost_spook write fic about a five-minute character? Her friends await developments with interest.

[thisbluespirit]

I wanted to try and type it out before, but I couldn't get it straight-forward enough! That was my best attempt at it. ;-)

And there, ladies and gentlemen, is the question - can lost_spook write fic about a five-minute character? Her friends await developments with interest.

LOL. You know me too well! Of course I could! I'll just try to resist the temptation and write things where people know what I'm on about. But he doesn't get many romances, and while this definitely can't count as one, what we hear about it in retrospect makes it the one I'd ship most given a chance. (Aside from S&S of course.)

[belantana.livejournal.com]

Doooo it!

[thisbluespirit]

YOU ARE EVIL.

♥

[belantana.livejournal.com]

Also, I love that he was "shorthand" because of a previous role! (Like Gemma Jones is shorthand for Russian Spy, even if the show was decades before Spooks...)

[thisbluespirit]

She is not a Russian spy in that! It is unthinkable! ;-p

However, if you ever felt the need to write a thing where Bridget Jones's mother is secretly a Russian agent, I would read that.

[belantana.livejournal.com]

...I would also read it.

(This is why I try not to post fics straight off, because the day after I posted that Silent Witness/Connie James one, I figured out how to write the story I actually meant to write, where she is a Russian spy. But then I'd already posted the first one. Blah!)

[thisbluespirit]

Heh.

Aw, but I liked the one you wrote. You can always do another story where she is a Russian spy, someday. Maybe they're in the meme and she can be a Russian spy while doing housework?

[scifi-mel.livejournal.com]

Yay for Anneke! She looks lovely! She was so sweet in January when I met her I totally need to see more things with her in. :)

[thisbluespirit]

It's so great to see her in colour. I haven't watched the rest of it yet, but going by the two episodes I've seen, it should be quite interesting - and if you want lots of Anneke, it's probably a good one to go for.

[scifi-mel.livejournal.com]

Excellent :)

[thisbluespirit]

:-)

I will get back to you on that - with pleasure!!!

Things With David Collings In

[thisbluespirit]

I don't know how easy these are to get hold of for you, but a list, anyway. (Some of them are also on YouTube - easily findable, but I have links somewhere if you have any trouble - and I've starred those.)

Julius Caesar* (1979, Cassius, part of the BBC Shakespeare) It is awesome and like Blake's 7, really. (BBC does Shakespearean tragedy with not enough time or money.)
Scrooge* (1970, film/musical, Bob Cratchit - he has amazing hair, and sings with children and is allowed to be happy. But very poor. Also he hugs a turkey. There were some other people in the film like Albert Finney, Alec Guinness, Kenneth More and Edith Evans, but I didn't pay them much attention.)

Two things that are only on YouTUbe:
Level 7 (1967, his surviving Out Of The Unknown episode, a nuclear apocalypse/dystopian thing. His character works out what is going on and then has a mental breakdown because he can't cope with the knowledge - it's interesting to watch after RoD; I really liked it. It was missing for 35 years, but the collector who owns it has a YT channel and uploaded it for people to see).
Dark Towers (1981, a BBC Look & Read thing to teach children to read. But it is so bad it's v funny, and David Collings plays two roles perfectly well, as if he hasn't noticed he is in a rubbish thing.)

Audio:
Full Fathom Five (Big Finish - from the 2003 anniversary Unbound range with AU Doctors. David Collings plays a ruthless alternate Doctor who believes the ends do justify the means. He's brilliant in it.)
Jago & Litefoot S2 (Big Finish - he is Gabriel Sanders, the villain of S2. He is the sort of old-fashioned villain you can drop a building on and he still comes back; it's great. And Litefoot & Jago are such fun, anyway.)
Martin Chuzzlewit (BBC Radio dramatisation. It depends how you get on with Dickens, of course, but he is Tom Pinch in this. It's not available, but I got my hands on a second-hand cassette edition & my Dad digitised it for me and I uploaded it here if you wanted to give it a try.)
Lord of the Rings* (BBC Radio - he is Legolas, and the whole thing is one of the best audios I've heard. It has Ian Holm, Michael Hordern, Bill Nighy & I forget who else right now. It's expensive to buy, but someone has had it up on YouTube for a few years.)

For most of TV, he really is mainly in one or two episodes.
Elizabeth R* (1971 - he is in Ep4 as Anthony Babington. Elizabeth R is an excellent TV series anyway.)
Press Gang (1989-1993 - his appearances vary; he is in 3 eps in S1, and 2 in S5, but I love Press Gang a lot - it's a teen drama-comedy, but it was the first thing Steven Moffat wrote, and is very unusual and clever - and I really like his performance in it, even though he plays Mr Winters, the headteacher, who isn't really all that nice. One of his eps Monday-Tuesday is up on YouTube, but it's an odd episode to start with. Head & Heart in S5 is his best episode in it.)

Anyway, that is probably MORE than enough to be going on with! There are quite a few other things, though! :-) So, if you need a part 2, you can ask me!! Heh.

Re: Things With David Collings In

[thisbluespirit]

Hah. Actually, he does sound a little different in LOTR - I mean, not once you know it's him. (Someone once found me the best photo ever of them recording LOTR. I love to think he was pretending to kill Orcs while wearing that jumper. *dies laughing*)

I tend to need to get things on DVD where I can still - I get very tired at the moment when watching things on the computer. I do occasionally on YouTube, but I try not to. But, noted for future reference!

Oh, radio - yes, it's hard to know, isn't it? Martin Chuzzlewit is definitely good (he's Tom Pinch, so he's one of the main characters). My friend persiflage_1 is good at getting radio, and she sent me The Years Between, a dramatisation of a Daphne Dumaurier story, and he's one third of a love triangle (where they are all Terribly British and Decent and what have you) and I can see he played the lead in a thing called The Deceivers - I'd like to hear that.

[jjpor.livejournal.com]

It was probably wrong of me to be amused by the entire rest of the cast taking turns to make sure that Mr Collings's character was really dead. You have to be sure, I suppose. Glad to hear it was a pivotal role, even if not a lengthy one.

[john_amend_all]

The way you put that calls to mind the World's Funniest Joke (written, of course, by Spike Milligan)

Bentine: I just came in and found him lying on the carpet there.
Sellers: Oh, is he dead?
Bentine: I think so.
Sellers: Hadn't you better make sure?
Bentine: All right. Just a minute.
Sound of two gun shots.
Bentine: He's dead.

[thisbluespirit]

Well, it wasn't everybody. Anneke Wills just went and got herself a brandy instead. But the other three were all doctors of one sort or another, so...

And, anyway, you can't feel bad about being amused at it, when it was me that pointed it out and picspammed it. I have to say, John Laurie was really thorough! Er. (One of David Collings's talents: staying dead when people poke him in the eye/put their hands in worrying places. :lol:)