So here we are again, planet earth somehow (HOW?!?) managing to remain intact for yet another revolution around the sun - while we all anxiously hope for a genuine revolution here on the (Under)ground (Up), as those with Spectrum 48K mindsets seem determined to knuckle drag (indeed, bomb) us back into the dark(er) ages, barbarianism over civilisation. Imagine waking to find that all the resources, all the energy, all that precious human ingenuity that's being wasted on war and oppression was suddenly being used for good, to help us, to preserve us, to save us (from ourselves)!
The Fall of The Rebel Angels - Pieter Bruegel The Elder, 1562
….one can but dream on while Braw guides our faithful 5 or so readers through the past 12 months-ish of favourite irregular non-pop culture 'go-to's that keep the mental plates spinning (well, just about). Hard to think that '75 terrorizors JAWS and 'Salem's Lot (and another notable thing) hit the big (Hawaii) Five-Oh this year, clocking up a whopping half century! Where does the time go? So, sit back, wayyyy back, brace yourself for a burst of brackets (these ones) and let the pundown begin (with a middling-aged start to a piddling middle and a frankly steaming end)....
This year's big screen hitter was MARVEL's Fantastic Four ....years too late to save the house of mouse's ideas! Or, indeed, the Fantastic Four(th attempt after so many so-so fanchise misfires), Agent Rob definitely looking fourward to this genuine outing, but.... but.... somehow it just never really hit the expected Baxter Building heights, all the loving retro design work squandered on pretty iffy effects, the towering Galactus coming up short - we'd rather he looked like the comics and not Finchy from The Office, thank you - while the less said about the Silver Surfer's senseless sex switch the better. If they'd had the actual balls to go for boobs and bald, played it all out weird alien androgyny then perhaps they might have, er, pulled it off. As it was....
Hats off to the Thing!
I mean it! Hats off! What a terrible look!
Even kiddie fave The Thing, the one, er, thing Rob was sure they'd get right, somehow landed a little off - Rob just couldn't get his head around the stupid hats he was wearing around his head! - the whole, er, thing winding up a watchable yet (un)fairly pedestrian affair - the overall team casting didn't even hit the usual MARVEL mark, with no one really standing out or feeling like the best fit for their comic counterpart....
Far better in the emotional stakes was the slow-burn Bob Trevino Likes It. Sure, Rob hummed and hawed for a bit, shuffled uncomfortably in his seat as the same old US indie flick schtick played out across the screen, but in the end there's no doubt this subtle, overlooked gem would bring a tear to a glass eye....
Then there was Dune 2, which couldn't help but come off as a second best wannabe art-house opposite to Furiosa - Anna Taylor-Joy even briefly crops up in the dusty desert - the washed out waiting, the glum sunshine, the emotional tedium and overblown visuals making for a verrrry long haul all across the sands....
With virtually no worthwhile 'big on the small screen' television to speak of this year, Rob instead raided the Archives of DVDoom , those fillums that score high on the Brawtometer, to enjoy such fair as Studio Ghibli's deeper cuts - Only Yesterday, Ocean Waves, Grave of the Fireflies - as well as cult draws - After Hours, Stoker (from Braw fave Park Chan-wook) The Dead Zone, The Neon Demon (from Braw fave Nicolas Winding Refn), Donnie Darko, Flickering Lights (from Braw fave Anders Thomas Jensen)....
....while checking out Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress - notable as it's down at heel dithering double act inspired STAR WARS' R2D2 and C3PO - and, Luca$ again, THX1138 - The Director's Cut (which is actually a dreadful Special Edition style hatchet jobbing of ropey CGI into the original film)....
....and how could Rob not mention Jacques (Mr. Hulot) Tati's Trafic, last partially seen on VHS over 35(?!) years ago, a wonderfully subtle slice of Gallic charm that motors along quite artfully - nothing pedestrian about it! (A big Braw thanks too to Talking Pictures TV for screening a clutch of his fringe French fancies, Playtime and Parade). Honestly, how could you choose just one of these posters?
And as per last year, the local charity shop was always worth a browse, offering up plenty of 99p (or less) bargains, some 'one-watchers' others 'finders keepers' from 70's classics - Thief, Two-Lane Blacktop, Mean Streets, Night Moves (RIP the great Gene Hackman), The Sting (RIP the racing Robert Redford) - to curiocult-ish films - Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and Encounters At The End of the World (from Braw fave Werner Herzog) Fast Times at Ridgemont High, A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, The Liquidator, Quadrophenia, Gregory's Girl, Spinal Tap (RIP the riffing Rob Reiner)....
....through to copious world cinema gems - The Wages of Fear, Kumiko The Treasure Hunter, Red Cliff, Time and Tide, Wings of Desire, Burning, Black Book, Tekkonkinkreet, La Grande Vadrouille, Jamon Jamon, The Returned - and retro boyhood faves - Oh, Mr Porter!, The Vikings and Jason and The Argonauts....
And there was even precious (Christmas) time for Rob to put his worn feet cosy side up and indulge in some of his snowy fairest of favourites - The Fearless Vampire Killers, Noi Albinoi, Together, The Thing, Where Eagles Dare - wintry films that never fail to warm the heart....
....and while we're at it, it'd be rude not to mention the very rude Jez Jerzy: Nie Dla Dzieci! (Not For Kids), a fairly decent attempt to bring the underground hedgehog (and Poland) jerking and jiving into the third-ish dimension....
....aside from the eternally shining Bedazzled, what about, The Wrong Box - just look at that glittering gold cast! - featuring a surprisingly warm turn from Peter Cook with Dudley Moore delivering at his humble bumbling best in this witty slice of sixties silliness. Rob even slogged his way through the career slush that is Santa Claus: The Movie, scratching likely his last Dudley itch with this fantastic looking North Pole (for 1984!) piece of myth over (supposed) mirth, Moore reduced to gentle mugging in a film of two sluggish halves (that ends in a resounding 0-0 draw). Funny (not) how a film that attempts to attack consumerism and mass production stoops to the very worst of American product placement by prominently featuring McDonalds and Coca Cola. (Rob then followed this up with the late Dud's fave composer, the spirited wonder of Bach's Christmas Oratorio....)
Then again, thanks to ITVX, there was the first season of The Muppet Show to enjoy with, surprise surprise, Moore guest starring alongside a musical robot that could emulate, and thus replace, any band. Hmm, sound familiar? As well as Dud it was also nice to see episodes with John Cleese*, Peter Sellers and, geez, to see you nice, Bruce Forsyth. A 'Britcom' invasion Stateside indeed....
*While fellow former Python Eric Idle ended up on Braw's naughty list thanks to this quote, "I was 16 or 17 when I went to see the [60s satire revue] Beyond the Fringe, and it just changed me. Those people - Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett - changed the way we looked at the world we were living in." And what of Dudley's contribution? Still, Rob had to pass up a free ticket to catch Idle's 2025 tour, so all's fair....
And so it came to pass, Ncuti Gatwa's blink and you'll miss it tenure as Doctor Who coming to an abrupt close (only there were definitely no Weeping Angels, just rejoicing trolls), with an unholy CGI jumble, old school Omega turning up and, er, eating the revived Rani before being obliterated back to where he came from - truly top drawer stuff scraped from the bottom of the writer's barrel! And what about Susan, plopped into the fan-tease-tic mix only to, um, then completely disappear, hung by a plot thread. Cracking (over)stuff. Time for a Lord to "rest". Still, watching on iPlayer the whole thing loops back to the episode 'Rose' so maybe it's a sort of RTD infinity loop, round and round and round, again and again and again. But as to whether the horrorshow(runner) is over...? It certainly seems, as the Di$ney deal vanishes into the vortex, that RTD remains wholly committed to, well, what remains of his version of Doctor Who, y'know, now that he's basically writing it for himself!
Omega suffers the same shoddy CGI fate as 2024's Sutekh
There's a great quote from Alwyn W. Turner's book Terry Nation (The Man Who Invented The Daleks) that sums up NuWho (indeed any modern reboot)'s problem perfectly - “Had he consciously set out to create an enduring myth for the age of the mass media, it simply wouldn't have worked.”
Thankfully Rob could wash his mouth out with a return to Classic Who, now exploding into 1970's colour with the arrival of Jon Pertwee's all-action Doctor - nice to see him seemingly fresh off his last job, sporting a necklace and tattoos in the glorious opening HD of the wonderful Spearhead From Space. The show may be earthBBCbound, but the universe is still expanding at a great rate, with sooooo much to enjoy here, Rob revelling in a crushed velvet purple patch of previously unseen peak Pertwee! Why, there's more U.N.I.T., Autons, Axons, Silurians, Sea Devils, Ogrons, Draconians, Sontarans, Peladon, Three Doctors! – the stars, great galaxies and cosmos slowly aligning (in front of and behind the camera) all ready for Tom Baker's era to thrive. It's so constantly inventive you can forgive the occasional shouty villain (hey, Omega), exteneded earthy setting, atonal incidental music, or stretched six-parter – the hilarious Police Squad-esque gun battles of Colony In Space spring to mind – or continuity slip “A wine after my own heart.”, from the wonderfully time loopy Day of the Daleks....
And then there's the excellent support from Liz Shaw, the amazing Jo Grant and the arrival of Roger Delgado's scowling The Master – funny how the Third Doctor spends a lot if his time munching sandwiches, pulling comedy terror faces and slagging off The Brigadier's “blow it up” policy only to buddy up with Roger at the crucial moment, just as the nefarious plot holes threaten to go unstoppably awry. And it's so strange, with the benefit of hindsight, as the show switches up for Pertwee's final season – it feels like Tom Baker's already in the building with the time-tastic tunnel titles and Sarah Jane Smith making her debut. It's hard to imagine seeing this fresh for the first time week by week and not even knowing that it was going to get even better in 1975...
...and it does, Tom Baker blowing the bloody doors off the TARDIS from the get go, the high quality never really letting up across his first three years at the controls (The Brain of Morbius aside - good as it is, it perhaps leans too heavily into its Gothic influences), with the Planet of Evil a tantalising glimpse at how (in)credible Who would have looked if shot entirely on film. (And, hush, but Rob has to confess he's not a huge fan of Sarah Jane Smith, finding her a bit 'wet', a poor man's Jo Grant? – and do remember, just to put things into perspective, Rob is a poor man)....
Then quite suddenly, after the opening excellence of Horror of Fang Rock, series four wobbles around all over the place, super steely Leela suddenly comes over all feeble in the half (good idea) and half (craply realised) The Invisible Enemy, while stories like The Sun Makers, Underworld and The Invasion of Time are as flippin' floppy as Baker's broad brimmed hat.... By the time you're watching Sontarans clumping up the back stairs - evidently there's no lifts in Gallifrey, while the TARDIS one doesn't work - you begin to question just what all the retroactive fuss is all about....
In 2025 Sunday became the scene of “event” tv, a back to the old school weekly episode of Twin Peaks (accompanied by a welcome single malt), one of the greatest shows of all time, equal parts silly and sinister, warm but undercut with menace, a show that seems to embrace the cheese of American television while probing at a dark belly underneath – is it celebrating the fact or laughing at it, who can say, as characters turn on a dime, the gentle amusement giving way to uncomfortable ideas. There's no doubt it still chills in and at all the right places. Of course, it's no secret that David Lynch hates the second season of TP and to some extent he's right - you could say the final nail in its coffin is when a boom microphone appears in the top of a scene between Audrey and Ben Horne in episode 13....
And, fittingly, for Braw's final outing, Rob finally got around to Twin Peaks: The Return. What a seachange! Gone is the original's warmth (and much of the woozy music too), the show stretching out into a chilly American widescreen of scratching, repetitive atmospherics, unf'lynch'ing in its sex, violence and swearing. It's almost become its very own televisual dark doppleganger in a sense by abandoning the myriad personal dramas of the original - that'll be the daft (but engaging) dynamics of S2 being jettisoned for a more linear though no less off-the-wall tale, Agent Cooper bumbling around and slow blinking like an AI Stan Laurel while returning characters are drip fed to us episode by episode. It's hard to shake the SNL skit vibe as out of shape actors squeeze into their old costumes and have an awkward bash at delivering their stilted dialogue (as the closing dedications to the late Killer Bob, Albert and Major Briggs trickle in). Still, there's a joy in seeing the original cast return, the second episode being a particular highlight as Laura, Leland and Sarah Palmer and the (not as freaky now) One-Armed Man backtalk in the Black Lodge, while James and - woo hoo, the joy! - Shelly hang out in The Roadhouse bar....
But Rob's always been a firm believer in letting the original creators (soarly or gloriously) f*ck with their IPs as per Lucas (STAR WARS), Ridley Scott (Alien) and even, sort of, George Miller (Mad Max), people with genuine vision at whatever (the) cost. Anything's better than the results of clueless fanboy wannabees farting out tepid soft sud reboots, missing all the easy targets to the satisfaction of, well, no one....
Comedy ruled the (air)waves otherwise, from the tech-titters of the always on point Silicon Valley through to the artful situation-subversion of It's Garry Shandling's Show, The Larry Sander's Show, and Arrested Development, and UK cult comedic curio Snuff Box, leaving little time or space otherwise for either the (wearing a bit thin) concluding seasons of Homeland, the slyly watchable Sneaky Pete - Giovanni Ribisi at the head of the ever-crissing double-cross of a well assembled ensemble - the ambiguous motivations of The Night Of, or another turn from Miami's favourite serial killing series Dexter: Original Sin....
Having clocked out of Obi-Wan Kenobi after a few episodes Rob finally dipped his toe into the world of fan edits to see if the trimmed down to a movie version had The Force with it. In a sense it does, albeit a distinctly TV movie one, with shades of Episode IV, apes of Episode II's hunt for ? and a good grizzled turn by (a better suited to the role) Ewan McGregor. Sure, the hits are all very easy targets (that land perfectly as planned), but by ending on "hello there" it cannot fail but raise an affectionate fully circular smile....
Spinning out from comedy to the live stage in 2025 were firstly Tim Minchin, mildly but now firmly on Rob's radar after an evening that tickled everything from the funny bone to the broken heart, and secondly Inside No. 9, making a fantastic switch to the live arena in the old dab stage hands of Pemberton and Shearsmith....
Well, The Doomsday Machine permitting - who knows how many empires have risen and fallen since you began reading this post? - Braw will return in late February to cover a year in music, books and comics in our second half. In the meantime - and time is goddam mean! - here's a nice slice of early techno from Union Jack, a definite comfort in these beyond hellish times....
Union Jack - There Will Be No Armageddon
