| Mark Gatiss: Rocket man Having had the TV hit of the summer with Sherlock, Mark Gatiss is now bringing cult horror to the masses – and putting Edwardians on the moon. Stuart Jeffries meets a shooting star'When I was a boy," says Mark Gatiss, "I wanted to be a whiskery man in a white coat saying, 'Look, it's a pterodactyl!'" He elaborates, mentioning one of his film heroes, who died earlier this year: "I wanted to be Lionel Jeffries in an Edwardian-set family fantasy film."Gatiss, now 43, has his wish. He's playing Edwardian inventor Joseph Cavor in his own defiantly kidultish adaptation of HG Wells's 1901 novel The First Men in the Moon. Cavor is white-coated, facially hirsute and occasionally ditsy. Just before they set off for the moon, fellow astronaut Arnold Bedford inquires: "I say, Cavor, we will be able to get back, won't we?""I don't see why not," says Cavor vaguely. "Probably."Gatiss, when we meet in a London cafe, proves as sumptuously whiskered as Cavor. "The reason I wanted to do The First Men in the Moon," he says, "was that there is something so challenging in the combination of space travel and the Edwardian period." Quite. The result, which airs on BBC4 next week, is a charmingly homespun, low-tech, very British vision of space travel. It recalls A Grand Day Out, in which Wallace and Gromit flew to the moon after running out of Wensleydale.Following lift-off in Sussex, Cavor and Bedford settle back under a framed painting of Edward VII for the journey, the former reading Shakespeare, the latter Tit-Bits. Once in space, they draw back the porthole's blue velvet curtains to view what no one has seen before: Earth disappearing into the cosmos. But how, you'll be asking, was space travel possible in Edwardian England? Because of a substance called "cavorite", which deflects the force of gravity. Cavor coats his copper spaceship with it and equips the craft with rollerblinds. "We'll be able to tack like a yacht using the sun's rays," he tells Bedford. Moments later, they are planting the union flag on the moon.Gatiss recognises that Wells was writing an allegory of imperialism: Bedford seeks to colonise the moon and plunder it for its vast deposits of gold, while Cavor, a naive man of science, seeks only knowledge. "Wells would have understood people like Donald Rumsfeld," says Gatiss. "We crash into places and bugger them up, sometimes with the best of intentions – and sometimes with pure evil in our hearts."Gatiss was, he says, keen to have an "art nouveau" spaceship: "I wanted it to look like the entrance to a Paris metro station." Sadly, he had to drop the novel's lunar crops on budgetary grounds. Wells envisaged fast-growing vegetation in which Cavor and Bedford lose their way before finding sustenance with magic moon mushrooms. It's one of the novel's funniest scenes: the men gibber through a jungle – lost in space and out of their Edwardian gourds.The UK's 38th most influential gay person (according to the Independent on Sunday's 2010 Pink List) is sipping coffee in a cafe near the Islington home where he lives with partner Ian and dog Bunsen. That labrador actually has a role in The First Men in the Moon, looking dolefully skywards as his master's spaceship disappears. "I trained him extensively using carrots to achieve that effect," says Gatiss, still basking in the unexpected success this summer of his adaptation, with Steven Moffat, of Sherlock for the BBC. Some people suggested that their three 90-minute adaptations of Doyle's stories couldn't have been any good since schedulers put them on in August: ratings and reviews suggested otherwise."We have all been knocked out by the response. Now I have got to follow it up." He and Moffat have been commissioned to do another season next year. "I've no idea what we'll write yet, but there's so much to play with. When [actor and playwright] William Gillette wrote the first stage adaptation, he cabled Doyle, 'Can I marry Holmes?' Doyle replied, 'You may marry him, or murder, or do what you like with him.' So I feel we've got free rein."Horror with three Purple HeartsGatiss is soon to appear at the National theatre, in a production of Alan Ayckbourn's Season's Greeting with Catherine Tate. I suggest he's working so hard because he wants to be higher than 38th in next year's Pink List. "It's bollocks," says Gatiss of the list. "Big pink bollocks." Actually, there is so much Gatiss looming on TV, especially on BBC4, that by November viewers may well be sick of the Sedgefield-born novelist, actor, screenwriter and League of Gentlemen star. This month, the channel is screening not only his moon adventure and a repeat of his 2008 Crooked House ghost story, but also his three-part history of horror films.These, the first of which began last night, will be a personal journey through horror by a long-time devotee (and a biographer of Hollywood's great horror director, James Whale). The programmes will dwell on three of Gatiss's favourites, which he feels have been neglected: Son of Frankenstein (1939), Blood on Satan's Claw (1971), and Martin (1977). "Son of Frankenstein is never talked about in the same tone as James Whale's 1931 Frankenstein," he says. "But it should be. It was Boris Karloff's last appearance in the Frankenstein series and stars Donnie Dunagan, then a child actor. By the time I caught up with him for the documentary, he was an ex-marine with three Purple Hearts."Gatiss says he chose Blood on Satan's Claw, about a demonically possessed 17th-century English village, "because it was part of that folk horror moment in cinema that includes The Wicker Man. But The Wicker Man has been culted to death. I wanted more people to know about this one."Martin, meanwhile, is "George Romero's vampire film about a disturbed teenager. We don't really know whether he is a vampire or a rapist. It's a brilliantly done film that is very much of the late 70s. All films speak to their times. It becomes obvious only after. Late 70s films like Martin are full of post-Watergate paranoia and depression."So what do today's horror films tell us? "Something terrible does seem to have happened. I'm thinking of the Saw franchise. The first was inventive, but the sequels were unbelievably cynical. I can't watch films like [Michael Haneke's] Funny Games because that is my deepest fear: finding someone at home who's going to kill me slowly."As Gatiss poses for photographs, suited and booted, he looks like a man out of his time, more than a little like the dotty Edwardian scientist he plays in The First Men in the Moon. It's hard not to think he'd be happier in another more innocent and sumptuously whiskered age. "The question I ask myself," he goes on, "is: have I really just become a squeamish middle-aged man, or has something happened to the horror genre that shows a growing appetite for watching torture, or at least a desire to explore it on film? And if so, why would that be? I can't pretend I know. I just know I don't like it."• A History of Horror With Mark Gatiss is on BBC4, 18 and 25 October. The First Men in the Moon is on the same channel, 19 October.TelevisionSherlockThe League of GentlemenComedyCrime dramaHorrorStuart Jeffriesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
The romance 25 Our guide to the greatest romantic films of all time, part of the Guardian and Observer's Film Season 2010 guardian.co.uk |
UK Film Council chairman condemns closure Tim Bevan vows to exit the public sector for good in disgust at a 'majorly regressive step' he claims will not save moneyThe chairman of the UK Film Council told MPs the decision to scrap the body was a "regressive" one that would not save money yesterday. Giving evidence to a parliamentary select committee, Tim Bevan – who produced Notting Hill and Love Actually – said the move threatened the future of British film."The UK Film Council created joined-up thinking," said Bevan. "The great danger of the Film Council being closed down is various activities being put out to disparate bodies, and that [this] joined-up thinking goes away."That would be a majorly regressive step for film in Britain. The closing down of the Film Council is a very bad idea. I don't think any money is going to be saved by the closure of it."Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary, announced in July that the council, which supports the British film industry, would be scrapped as part of the coalition government's austerity measures to cut down on bureaucracy. Bevan, whose Working Title is Britain's largest independent film company, said the decision had convinced him to exit the public sector for good."I'm out of here," he said. "If this is the public sector and the way you get treated, I'm done basically. I care passionately about film and I think you make a much bigger contribution to it through the private sector."He recalled that animator Nick Park, of Wallace and Gromit fame, and Oscar-winning film-maker Clint Eastwood had both spoken in defence of the council since news emerged of its fate, comparing their level of experience to that of Ed Vaizey, the culture minister. "Collectively, Clint, Nick and and I probably have about 100 years' experience in the film industry. And Ed Vaizey has two."UK Film CouncilArts fundingBen Childguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
A British fleet with no aircraft carrier. Unthinkable! Britain is about to become a different country – the loss of the Ark Royal is the least of itOne of my presents for the Christmas of 1956 was a fat little book called All About Ships and Shipping, edited by EP Harnack and very nicely got up by Faber & Faber with semaphore flags and rolling waves impressed on its blue cloth binding. Its prettiness helps explain its survival in boxes and cupboards for more than half a century, its original tuition (example: how to tell a barque from a brigantine) long forgotten. This week I took it out to look at the Royal Navy's fleet list in that long-ago era. Classes were lined up below their different silhouettes: cruisers, minelayers, destroyers, frigates, monitors, minesweepers, torpedo boats. There was still one battleship in service, the Vanguard, a turreted shape I can just remember seeing through a North Sea mist, but the biggest surprise was the number of aircraft carriers: Ark Royal, Eagle, Indomitable, Illustrious, Implacable, Indefatigable, Formidable … their bulldog names went on over two pages. There were 22 in all, and even if only half of them were actually sailing the high seas, the rest would have been mothballed with engines and guns greased and ready for war.Very soon, when the Ark Royal and its Harrier jets are scrapped, the Navy will be left for the next 10 years without a ship capable of flying aircraft, until the first of the two carriers now under construction is commissioned. The entire surface fleet will amount to no more than 19 warships; my little book tells me that one class of destroyers alone, the C class (Cavalier, Cossack, Crispin), had more. My point isn't to contest the wisdom of shrinking the fleet – I'm not a military strategist – but to suggest how much can change in a lifetime and not be registered as change until an incredible event occurs (incredible, that is, to people of a certain age, background and disposition). It comes as a kind of assault on the memory. A fleet without an aircraft carrier! My short-trousered, ship-watching self would have boggled at the impossibility. But all the while since the navy has been losing dockyards, ships and crew – like a long, lulling sentence punctuated with commas and waking up finally with an exclamation mark.But the end of the Ark Royal is the least of it. Britain is about to become a different country. Everybody agrees about this, with varying degrees of exultation or foreboding depending on their reading of government policy: a pulling back from the brink or a tip forward into the abyss, a leaner, fitter and more dynamic country or a smaller, meaner, more divided one. This kind of political rupture to the drift of national life is rare in peacetime history. It happened under the governments formed in 1945 and 1979, but the other big postwar date (1956, the year of Suez and my nautical Christmas gift) affected Britain's idea of itself more than the texture of ordinary lives. Never again could the state pretend to imperial power, but the people who lived in it trickled around this fissure like ants, and grew slowly but steadily richer.Next month the British Film Institute launches a retrospective of documentaries that were made during that 30-year era known as the postwar settlement. Boom Britain, the season's overall title, strikes a deliberately historic note that wouldn't have worked four or five years ago, when it could just as easily have labelled a season by current filmmakers rather than those working between 1951 and 1977. But the title turns out to be not entirely accurate: some films shine with the classic boom qualities of confidence and optimism, but others don't. They reflect concerns that are still current – the environment, women's rights, mental illness, lonely old age, abused children – and that perhaps offers the first lesson about any study of the past: that its division into tight little periods, each different to the next, can never be more than a crude and sometimes misleading generalisation.This thought, in fact, inspired the BFI's retrospective. According to Patrick Russell, its curator, the project is an act of revisionism designed to correct and enlarge the conventional history of the British documentary movement. Roughly, this story goes as follows. In the beginning was a 1929 film about herring drifters directed by John Grierson, who coined the noun "documentary" to describe films that dealt in "the creative treatment of actuality". Under Grierson's influence, several young filmmakers emerged in the 1930s who were passionately committed to social change. The brilliant wartime propaganda of Humphrey Jennings made him the most famous of them. And then after 1945 came a "black hole", in Russell's words; Lindsay Anderson and his "Free Cinema" school made a few memorable films in the late 1950s, but by then television has staked ownership to the documentary technique. The phrase "British cinema documentary" came to mean a black and white collage of steam locomotives, slag heaps, women in grubby kitchens and men in flat caps, searchlights and bomb damage. Certainly, that's what it meant to me.Of course, I should have known better. Anyone who grew up in the 1950s and 60s usually sat through a short, British-made non-fiction film at the cinema. We watched them impatiently – why were we learning about artificial fibre production when we'd paid to see Kirk Douglas? Later, we also watched them dubiously – what were the funders of these films, Shell or BP or the National Coal Board, trying in some insidious way to sell us? As it turns out, nothing very terrible. The BFI has made a four-DVD set (titled Shadows of Progress and soon to be released) and most films on it wear their sponsorship lightly; sometimes, as with a BP film on the world's finite resources, they're even antagonistic to its interests. There is just as much lyricism and sympathy to be found in them as in the prewar school, and their directors, photographers and scriptwriters deserve to be rescued from the charge that their backing by government agencies or big business necessarily compromised their art.Sometimes, of course, it may have done. One of my favourites is Britain Today, made in 1964 for the Foreign Office to show abroad. James Cameron, whose last work as a great liberal journalist was a weekly column in the Guardian, wrote and narrated the script. The film marches us around the United Kingdom and, goodness, what a promising place it looks. One wishes one lived there. New car plants, schools and universities, new nuclear power stations, Trident jets and blue Pullman trains. "Nothing can stand still," says Cameron as wrecking balls tear down Glasgow tenements. "The useless old must go." There are some unexpected moments. The crowd singing Jerusalem at the Proms is remarkably decorous, standing still as they sing and waving no flags, but these scenes follow a sequence of young people jiving: "Britain is very old – and very young."This is the film's trope. Britain is a country "sustained by its past … confident of overcoming the challenges in the long years to come". A different and unrelated Cameron could have spoken the same script yesterday. The facts may be different, count them as you will in naval fleets, public debt or balances of trade. But the rhetoric used to address Britain's problematic future never changes – it takes us forward or backwards to the new age.MilitaryIan Jackguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Yes, there is life after Mad Men As the fourth series of the Madison Avenue drama draws to a close - what will fill the gap it leaves behind?Mad Men finishes its fourth] season tomorrow – the last on the BBC. Argh. What will Mad Men saddos like me do until season five starts on Sky Atlantic next autumn? What would Don Draper do? Probably start an ill-fated drunken affair, actually. Here are some more sensible, Peggy Olson-style suggestions:• Boardwalk Empire Coming to Sky Atlantic in February, HBO's newest drama combines the period vigour of Mad Men and Deadwood (it's set in prohibition-era Atlantic City), the gangland violence of The Sopranos and The Wire, and a creative team including Martin Scorsese, Terence Winter and Steve Buscemi. It looks beautiful, and as immersive as Al Capone's gloopy moonshine.• The Mad Men diaspora At the risk of puncturing the illusion that Jon Hamm is Don Draper, you can follow the gang in other enterprises. Hamm spent his off-time filming roles in Ben Affleck's film The Town (on DVD, 31 January) and a series of great cameos in series four of 30 Rock (on DVD, February). Meanwhile Elisabeth "Peggy" Moss hits the West End in The Children's Hour with Keira Knightley (Comedy Theatre, 22 January to 2 April). Then, in the summer, January "Betty" Jones, stars in X-Men: First Class.• The British Mad Men Or is it? When Abi Morgan (Sex Traffic) announced she was writing The Hour, a drama set in a 50s topical news show, the label "British Mad Men" was sewn into its collar quicker than you can say "Ida Blankenship". That probably means it will feature nice suits and gin, but with a cast including Romola Garai, Dominic West and Ben Whishaw it ought to hit the mark.Mad MenTelevisionDramaHistorical dramaUS televisionAbi MorganMartin ScorseseWill Deanguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |