Dr Who in an Exciting Adventure with Vince

 A list of the most thrilling moments in Dr Who, and what they mean to me.

The Art of Bedwetting: The Tom Baker Titles (1975-1980)

Like most kids growing up in the UK in the 70s, I watched Dr Who every Saturday tea-time with my family.  And like most kids I was utterly terrified of the Dr Who titles and theme tune, which seemed to be purposely designed to make kids wet their beds, possibly to keep us warm through the freezing winter nights, for there was no central heating in those days.  Every Saturday at 5:30pm, the living room would welcome in a swirling, sickly blue-green vortex of weird horrors and a screaming, unearthly howl – and that was just the contents of my pants.  The BBC1 Saturday early evening schedule –  Basil Brush (a sarcastic fox), Dr Who (a time-travelling box), The Generation Game (a load of old toss) – was just about the most perfect after-tea viewing a kid could want, though it did fuel recurring nightmares about conveyor belts displaying dead foxes and cuddly toy Daleks exterminating fondue sets.

Gripping: The Hand of Fear Part 1 (2^nd October, 1976)

My first clear memory of Dr Who: lovely Sarah Jane Smith in that charming Andy Pandy get-up, opening a metal box: inside is a fossilised severed hand.  Then, horribly, inexorably, the hand moves... and the theme tune screams in. I was six.  I am now 47.  I still wake up screaming.  Though that’s probably because I’m 47.   Or because my sleeping wife has “accidentally” punched me in the face again.

Going Underground: Destiny of the Daleks Episode 1 (1^st September, 1979)

Dr Who and Romana (who is essentially another Dr Who, only with even more hair) find themselves on the Dalek home planet Skaro, where the Daleks are searching for something underground.  The episode ends with the Daleks smashing through some flimsy metal walls, rounding on Romana and screaming, “Do not move! Do not move! Do not move! Do not move! Do not move!” eight hundred billion times at the terrified (and unmoving) Time Lord  I was 9; this was tremendously thrilling stuff.  I spent the week running and bounding into rooms screaming “Do not move! Do not move! Do not move! Do not move! Do not move!” eight hundred billion times at Patch the family dog, until it snapped and bit me on the big toe and had to be put down.

Life Left in the Old Boy: Destiny of the Daleks Episode 2 (8^th September, 1979)

A week later, deep beneath the surface of Skaro, Dr Who and some funky disco robots find Davros in a dusty corner. Quelle domage, Davros - that’s who the Daleks were looking for.  Davros is not in the best shape. Davros is dead.  He’s covered in cobwebs.  He probably hasn’t had a wee for hundreds of years, and there’s a moth on his nose.  But then… the withered hand twitches… the cycloptic eye illuminates the gloom… Davros lives!  The moth flies off as the theme tune screams in.  Magic.

The Inevitable Vertical of Midnight: Logopolis Part 4 (21^st March, 1981)

Dr Who’s own ghost haunts him as he hangs around on the side of dreary motorways or on distant planets populated exclusively by beardy maths teachers.  And then he falls from a massive radio telescope that’s got a cardboard cut out of the Master in it and he crumples to the ground in a burgundy heap and he smiles and he dies and he is reborn as his ghost merges into him and he sits up and smiles as Peter Davison.  Yeah, I cried.  I didn’t understand a single bit of it, and I hate maths, but I cried anyway. I was that kinda kid.

Grumpy Old Men: The Five Faces of Doctor Who (November-December 1981)

Officially the single most exciting thing ever ever ever ever ever: a repeat season on BBC2, featuring all the Dr Whos!  This was amazing – the BBC had never repeated old Dr Whos before, so here was a generation’s first look at really ancient, black and white Doctor Who.  There was a grumpy old Dr Who, and another grumpy old Dr Who, and another grumpy old Dr Who – I liked him the best because he said things like, “Steady on, Brigadier, old chap; we might get better results if the sexy girl could make us a cup of tea and then we could reverse the polarity of the neutron flow, hai!” and then he’d karate chop a mutant blob of energy until it exploded to death.  The season of repeats began around Bonfire Night and there was one story a week up to my birthday in early December.  The nights outside were cold and dark and misty, and it was thrilling to run home from school, scoff down beans on toast and watch grumpy old Dr Whos battle Krotons and cavemen and sea monsters and maths teachers (again: in order to make the Five Faces thing work they had to repeat Logopolis because there were no Peter Davison stories ready to show).  Best of all, they showed The Three Doctors, where all three old and grumpy Dr Whos got together to tell the sexy girl to make them a cup of tea.  Then at Christmas they showed K-9 and Company, a special story featuring K-9 and Sarah Jane Smith fighting lesbian devil worshipers in Shepton Mallet, and I got a Palitoy talking K-9 and a new clean pair of pants as presents.  Best Year Ever.

I Know That Object: Earthshock Part 1 (8^th March, 1982)

My dad looked up from The Daily Mirror as the shock reveal at the end of Part One played out.  “F- me, it’s them Cyber-bastards,” he said.  Nobody could have put it more perfectly.

The Whole of the Moon: The Five Doctors (25^th November, 1983)

All five Dr Whos together (almost) in a special 90 minute movie thing featuring Daleks and Cybermen and the Master and the Brigadier and Sarah Jane Smith and K-9 and Dr Who’s old yellow car and the Time Lords and… I think I may have passed out from excitement.  I’d already dressed up as Dr Who and gone to the Longleat Dr Who convention (in April) where I’d seen Jon Pertwee and Peter Davison and loads of other guys (it was all a blur) and I’d bought The Dr Who Technical Manual and I threw up near Anthony Ainley because the celery on my lapel was making me sick.  It was all too much.  But I was 13, and there’s no such thing as too much when you’re 13.  That’s why 13 year-olds don’t get to vote in General Elections.

Out with a Bang: The Caves of Androzani Part 4 (16^th March, 1984)

Properly edge-of-your seat thrilling stuff as the dashing and heroic Davison Dr Who, carrying his comatose young friend Peri, runs to the TARDIS as mud volcanoes explode around him.  He collapses into the TARDIS, saves Peri, and then dies.  I’d loved Peter Davison’s Dr Who, had had brilliant times with him, and I was genuinely sad to see him go.  He bows out in spectacular fashion though – I’d argue that this brilliant story might be one of the highlights of all Dr Who – and the Day in the Life regeneration sequence has yet to be bettered.  But then we got Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy and I lost all interest.  Ah well.  I suppose it was time for me to grow up… though I don’t think I ever really did.

Was that it?  The Paul McGann TV Movie Thing (with the Pertwee Logo) That Was Filmed in Canada (27^th May, 1996)

“It’s back and it’s about time!” The tagline is the best thing about this failed pilot for a proposed US TV series, though McGann – to date, the only Dr Who who has bought me a pint – is very good. The build up to this was super fast and exciting, but then it was all over and all that was left was an empty feeling of disappointment, like an impotent one-night stand with a sultry human cannon ball.  The TV Movie thing was announced in January, done in May, forgotten about by June. It’s the Andrea Leadsom of Dr Who.   Sadly, this was the last Dr Who story I watched with my parents (well, they were in the house, even if they weren’t watching).  My mum died that same year, and my dad died the year before Dr Who came back again.

Trip of a Lifetime: Series 1: Rose – The Parting of the Ways (spring 2005)

"Hello, I'm the Doctor... now run for your life!"

This was the first new Dr Who series I got to see with my own young children (they loved it), which added profoundly to the experience.  Series 1 is for me the best series of a television show ever made, eclipsing even the magnificent The West Wing Season 2. Fittingly, both series conclude with their strongest episodes - as Jed Bartlett rages against God and faces his darkest hour amidst a freak tropical rainstorm, Doctor Who calmly accepts his death on a Dalek invaded space station. Rose is a bright and sunny summer's day of a story - the most welcoming and engaging Dr Who had been since the 70s. It's like someone opening-up all the windows and doors of a beautiful old house and allowing the public to wander round and see how lovely it is. The Parting of the Ways is my favourite piece of fiction in any medium. It's heart-breaking and witty and exciting and full blooded. It's a slaughter of innocents (is there a better Dalek extermination scene than the murder of Lynda with a Y?), but also amazingly courageous and optimistic. Rose Tyler's declaration that Doctor Who had shown her how to make a stand, to strive to be a better person, might be a manifesto for the entirety of Dr Who.

Christopher Eccleston is beyond brilliant. This is Dr Who played real, as a living, breathing person of contradictions and inner torment. He has so many little brilliant bits (basically everything he does in Rose is an utter delight) that his era, despite comprising of only thirteen episodes, feels rich and expansive, and complete. This Doctor has a story of his own played out across the series, from that tear on his cheek as he hides his face from Jabe to his cheery sad fantastic goodbye. Eccleston is my favourite Doctor. And I was a lifelong Tom fan.

And Billie Piper is just sooo good. Rose has a life depicted in such detail and with such care that she feels totally real in every aspect. Aliens of London in particular is like watching a slice of Tyler life (Jackie's pain, Mickey's hurt bewilderment) interrupted by malevolent aliens. It's just such a fresh approach, it feels like new ground for Dr Who, and by God it works.

There are excellent scripts by Gatiss, Shearman, Cornell and Moffat. "Are you my mummy?" "You would make a good Dalek." There is a feast of memorable imagery - the Earth explodes; a Slitheen spaceship crashes into Big Ben; the Dalek exterminates a troop of soldiers; Reapers swooping down over the church; the empty TARDIS; the gasmask zombies; Charles Dickens in the snow; the Jagrefess; billions of Dalek saucers reigning down fire on the Earth...

Above all, Series 1 is an authored work; perhaps more than any other series of Dr Who it is defined by the vision, and voice of one man. It is Russell T Davies's version of Dr Who. Big and colourful and mad, heart-breaking and scary. Death is everywhere, but so is the human spirit.  Fantastic!

You are Not Alone: Utopia (16^th June, 2007)

Professor Yana opens his fob watch, heralding in the most exciting fifteen minutes of all Dr Who as most of Russell’s plot lines (The Time War, Captain Jack, You are Not Alone, the Doctor’s hand, the fob watch that’s really a chameleon arch, allowing Time Lords to disguise themselves, Harold Saxon, the double heart drum beat…) converge into an epic series of jaw-dropping revelations.  This was Dr Who at its Imperial Phase, a huge critical and ratings success that had everybody watching and talking about it and looking forward to the next episode.  Russell had rescued Dr Who and given it back to us, and everybody was so happy and thankful that even the Queen bought a book of his Dr Who scripts (it’s true!) and then gave him an MBE.  My kids were at the perfect ages through the RTD era – the youngest was 13 when Tennant regenerated.  They watched Dr Who over and over again, with me, with their friends, on their own.  They wanted all the toys and posters and cards and since I wanted them too I was happy to get it for them. Those bronze Daleks are awesome. Utopia was the key one, the spine-tingling, OH MY GOD! one, the one where following the plots of Dr Who was a national pastime. We were not alone. We were together.  It was thrilling and daring and wonderful.  It would never be like this again.

She Has a Halo: BBC1 Announcement - Jodie Whittaker is the Thirteenth Doctor (16^th July, 2017)

OH MY GOD!  Thrilling.  Daring.  Wonderful.  I have chills down my spine and a huge grin on my face.  It’s time.  It’s perfect.  It’s the new Dr Who.  I’m like a kid again, being thrilled by the Doctor in the box.  She’s fantastic.  I’ve a suspicion I might possibly maybe have a new favourite Dr Who already and all she’s done is smile.

Television isn't dead.

I have been watching random episodes from various TV shows.  These are my thoughts.

Sky Arts Portrait Painter of the Year pits a dozen talented painters against each other as they paint the same portrait (or three different portraits, as they're grouped into fours), as the accomplished artist Tai-Shan Schierenberg offers his views (there are other judges, but I only really listen to Tai-Shan).  He's brilliant at describing the form and mechanics of creating an image, and how paint is expressionistic.  I feel inspired to pick up the paint brushes!

Tai-Shan Schierenberg Self-Portrait

 
Game of Thrones is hilarious - majestic, swooping helicopter shots of astonishingly beautiful landscapes, men getting beheaded or set on fire by giant ice zombies, or beheaded and then set on fire by giant ice zombies, dragons circling the skies above writhing orgies (with real porn stars) as men get beheaded and then set on fire by giant ice zombies who in turn are incinerated by fire-breathing dragons kept by a woman named Dennis. It's a hoot.

Special Forces: Ultimate Hell Week sees a platoon of incredibly smug fitness fanatics put through bruising, exhausting physical and psychological torture by elite special forces soldiers from across the globe, but most effectively from Eastern Europe, where they kill you with their thumbs if you don't salute fast enough.  I like scoffing biscuits and cuddling the kitten under a duvet as I lazily watch arogant triAthlon runners from Essex starve through the long, rainy night on greuelling twenty hour runs up hill while Polish nutcases throw rocks at them.

The Bachelor has thirty beautiful but delusional women gravitate around America's least articulate or interesting schmuck in an experiment to see how funny it would be if he genuinely thought they were into him, rather than being on a gobsmackingly tacky and offensive television show for the money and exposure.  It's funnier than Game of Thrones, but less believable.

Hammer Vampire Land

 Some thoughts on the non-Dracula Hammer Vampire films

A Vampire's Castle, yesterday.

Vampire Circus is astonishing - easily Hammer's best film of the 70s. The pre-titles sequence is Hammer to a tee, with a lustful acolyte brazenly and shockingly stealing a child to be drained of blood by her vampire lover - a sequence that recalls Bram Stoker's Lucy Westenra's 'Bloofer Lady'.   The Circus of the Night is a sinister and surreal travelling show, with men who turn into panthers and clowns who rip off their facepaint to reveal a clownface underneath. The acrobats tumbling and jumping into the air and turning into vampire bats is not only witty, it's beautiful. Vampirism is likened to (and linked to) a plague and the village is placed under armed quarantine - but as always the evil cannot be contained until science and superstition merge into a spiritual force.

Kiss of the Vampire is almost as good, though the fanboy in me wishes that Andrew Keir's Father Sandor (from Dracula: Prince of Darkness) occupied the Professor Zimmer role (a gruff, drunk, outcast vampire hunter certainly describes both characters).  Here, vampirism is a decadent cult - something entered into willingly for aesthetic reasons as much as anything else.  Science is no good, but learning about your enemy is the way to fight back, using supernatural rituals against the forces of darkness.  It works on an instinctive level - dark against dark.

The Vampire Lovers, adapting Sheridan LeFanu's Carmilla, uses sexual metaphors effectively, as the vampire Carmilla Karnstein seduces a series of young girls.  There's a very European feel to the film - it's a story about strange unworldly people intruding into a fairytale version of adolescence. Lust for a Vampire is the same movie played again as crude sex comedy, and it's badly made too.

Twins of Evil seems to be two films in one - a striking Hammer take on Witchfinder General/The Crucible, with the great Peter Cushing as a zealous puritan "instrument of God"; and a tacky yet entertaining Karnstein vampire film with glamour models who clearly can't act and yet another cruel and sexy aristocrat bastard vampire (after Baron Meinster, Dr Ravna, Count Mitterhaus, etc.) who gets his kicks from rejecting any form of morality or restraint. It's a shame the captivating Ingrid Pitt didn't play Carmilla in all three films, as she's far the best.

Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter is a frothy romp, packed with good ideas and nice performances, but it somehow feels like a failed pilot for a TV series.  There's a great sense of the aristocracy being a class above and beyond the Church, of a ruling dynasty of evil that disguises itself effectively behind a cloak (literally) of respectability and piousness.

These films seem to be situated in a Hammer Vampire Land in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Europe. The ruling gentry are all cruel, sexy vampires, and earnest school teachers and drunk physicians have to take the fight to them in crumbling castles and deep forests.


* In Dracula, having been turned into an un-dead vampire by the thirsty Count, Lucy haunts Hampstead Heath and preys on children.

The Count and I

The Count and I

My Eighties Childhood with Count Dracula.

I first read Dracula when I was ten, but only because I loved the movies he was in – it was a chore to get through and not half as exciting as House of Frankenstein (1942) which had a thrilling chase sequence involving three horse-drawn coaches – one of which carries Dracula’s coffin - racing through the misty Transylvanian night, and an epic finale with the wolfman savagely attacking Frankenstein’s monster in a moonlit laboratory high up in the ramparts of a burning castle.  Stoker’s book is a series of letters and diary entries (and ship’s logs, newspaper articles, shopping lists, etc.) that gets mired in minutiae as the plot advances ever so slowly, like a lazy shadow.  The best bit is the beginning with Harker journeying to, and becoming a prisoner in, Castle Dracula.  You can skip several hundred pages until the end, where the Count is chased back to his homeland after his villainous plan has completely and utterly failed, and where he is gruesomely dispatched by Van Helsing and his motley crew of tight-arsed vampire killers.  Read today the novel is sumptuous and engrossing, with much to say about Victorian repression and irrational fear of foreigners, like a Brexit campaign leaflet.  Reading it aged ten I kept hoping for the wolfman to turn up and savagely attack Frankenstein’s monster.

In December 1979, the BBC repeated their recent adaptation of Dracula (first broadcast in ’77), and I was permitted to stay up late to see it, probably because my mum was in hospital and my dad was in the pub. This two-part serial, starring Louis Jordan as the Count, is genuinely brilliant and scary – particularly the scene with the three blood-soaked vampire brides feasting on a baby.  For Christmas, I was gifted the strange board game I Vant to Bite Your Finger (you move pieces around the board and try not to get your finger bitten by Dracula), a Dracula red-lined cloak, and a ray gun.  I don’t think Dracula ever had a ray gun, but James Bond did in Moonraker (1979), so that’s alright then. 

Christmas 1980.  My fashion sense hasn't got any better, if I'm honest.

 Back at school in January I went a bit mad, thinking I was a vampire, possibly because I had lost so many games of I Vant to Bite Your Finger.  I bit a school friend named Barry on the neck, but that was because he was a pain in the neck; I had The Dracula Myth on permanent loan from Horfield Library (where I practically lived anyway); and I decided briefly to become a master hypnotist of raw sexual power, like Dracula, but unlike Dracula I tended to mumble my words and avoid looking people in the eyes, and girls hated me because I was weird, so that didn’t go too well.  Hammer’s Dracula films (1958-1975) were regularly screened on BBC2, often in late night horror double-bills; I found Christopher Lee’s bloody Count to be scary and inhuman, like something from another world. Channel 4 screened the silent classic Nosferatu (1922), and followed it with the excellent 1979 remake, and the creaky Bela Lugosi Dracula (1931) popped up on BBC2 in 1983 in a Midnight Movie double-bill with (the superior) Frankenstein (’31).  A very daft cartoon series called The Drak Pack was shown on BBC1 in 1982, and was worth rushing home from school to watch. In English, pupils were expected to take turns standing at the blackboard and giving a brief speech to the class.  The speech I gave was a mumbling, rambling incoherent lecture on bats. It didn’t go down too well.

In 1983 my best friend Paul Symmons and I somehow charmed the headmaster of Lockleaze Comprehensive School into letting us skip lessons and instead use school equipment to star in and film our own version of Dracula.  God knows why he agreed to let us do this. Perhaps I had underestimated my hypnotic powers.  Over several weeks we set to work filming our masterpiece.  I played the Count, because I already had the cloak and the fangs, and the magnetic sexual prowess.  We had no script and no real idea of what we were doing, but we did have a director – Mr Voss.  And a coffin, made by Mr Gerrard.  We also had use of the castle set on the school stage that had been created for the school pantomime, and free reign of the local woods (where, coincidentally, scenes from Robin of Sherwood (1984-86) would be filmed a few years later).  Paul was (and is) great at coming up with ideas, framing shots, making special effects, and generally being excellent at things.  Mr Voss, we discovered, was rubbish at coming up with ideas, framing shots and everything else he did as director.  So we fired him.  Our second director was Mr Miller, ceramics teacher, who was much more on our wavelength, and not just because he bore a resemblance to David Dixon, who played Ford Prefect in the (superb) BBC television adaptation of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1981). Ian Miller (cheekily, we were on first name terms) had striking ideas for our version of Dracula.  Firstly, he fired me as the Count and cast Paul in the role, since Paul is tall and good-looking (and a far better actor) – Christopher Lee to my Max Shreck.  This left me to scribble down rubbish dialogue and assist Ian Miller.  We took the coffin down into the woods, and shot moody footage of it shrouded in mist (we crumpled up pages torn from school exercise books and lit a small fire).  Our very good friend Jeremy Wall played a victim/acolyte of the Count, and he was filmed (by both directors, oddly enough) running through the woods in fear of his life, or at least in trepidation of tripping over and grazing a knee.  A later Ian Miller directed scene saw Jeremy approaching through a stone tunnel deep in the woods, drinking blood (red paint purloined from the art department) from a chalice (with hokey dialogue using the phrase “I do anoint thee”), and gingerly stepping over someone’s pet rat.  Miller decided to sex things up a bit and persuaded one of the more gorgeous schoolgirls to dress up as a Victorian lady, sit at the school piano and pretend to play it (presumably setting the scene for Paul’s vampire Count to prey on her later), whilst another teacher – Miss Gardener, English – strapped on a bonnet and played her tone-death mother.  God knows what any of this nonsense had to do with Bram Stoker, but it got us out of tedious lessons so we were prepared to do just about anything.  Unfortunately, we carelessly left the coffin to rot in the woods over the summer holidays, and on our return the furious teaching staff shut the project down, so Dracula went unfinished.  And sadly, no footage survives.

We tried audio comedy instead, pitting Sherlock Holmes (me) and Dr Watson (Paul) against Doctor Fu Manchu and Dracula (us again) with a supporting cast of, err, Jeremy Wall.  We recorded directly onto tape, speaking into the microphone built-in to my cassette recorder, with spooky music playing in the background, and special effects courtesy of the BBC Special Effects Library which released collections of sound effects as records (there was a great Doctor Who one, with tracks titled ‘Dalek Hatching Chamber’ or ‘Time Lord Vortex’). Aged fourteen I collaborated with a lad who lived a few doors away on a comic book sequel to Dracula, but we produced only five or six sketchy pages before artistic differences split us apart.  He was bigger than me, and I took his threats of violence seriously.

Aged sixteen I painted a wall-sized portrait of Christopher Lee’s Count Dracula holding in his arms Melissa Stribling’s unconscious Mina Harker for the sixth form common room, but the prudish headmaster deemed it too ‘racy’ and rejected it.  I cursed him and hoped that he was attacked by a flock of angry bats on his way home, but that didn’t happen (to my knowledge), and that seemed to slam down the coffin lid of my eighties childhood with Count Dracula.

CODA:

I’ve returned to the Count in recent years – he pops up often in the silly things I write these days.  I can’t seem to escape his power, though I mock him mercilessly.  Here are a few Dracula things I’ve done that might raise a (fanged) smile.

2 Sides 2 Every Story: Professor Van Helsing and Count Dracula
Leeeeeesten to them, the cheeeldren ov the night!

A re-telling of Dracula in two short comedy monologues, this reinterprets the characters as, respectively, a Dr Strangelove -esque Dutch lunatic, and a whiny self-pitying Euro bore, and boasts superb performances from Elie Hirschman and Paeter Frandsen.

At Whitby Mental Asylum Van Helsing (Elie Hirschman) talks candidly--if not altogether lucidly--of his epic war against the armies of the undead and his pathological fear of bats; whilst in Transylvania the reclusive Count Dracula (Paeter Frandsen) moans about the property market and the exploitation of his image.

Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Devil’s Whisper
I say, Holmes!

Sherlock Holmes vs The Devil! 
Dr Watson vs Count Dracula!

A thrilling and hilarious two part Halloween Special! With terrifying excerpts from the good bits in Bram Stoker's Dracula!  Starring Jeff Niles, Elie Hirschman, Valina Cutler, Wayne Heyward, Lisanne Heyward, and Kae Woo.

Believing himself to be under a powerful demonic spell, Mr Bram Stoker consults the world's greatest detective... just as Dr Watson is about to tuck into a hearty breakfast.  As London is battered by tremendous thunder storms, Mr Sherlock Holmes pits all his powers of logic, deductive reasoning, and pedantry against a secret esoteric cult with exacting standards of cleanliness.

This was later re-written and staged as a one-act comedy play, directed by Stephanie Kempson, and starring Peter Baker, Naomi Carter, Dan Adams, Billy Quain, and Joanna Smith.

Alan Smithee Theatre: Never Likely to Bother Oscar

I am Count dracula, I beeeeed you velcum! 

Comedy sketch series! Two comedy Skits with a Funny Commercial in the middle! A Comedy Sandwich! And on the side? A huge helping of more funny bits! 

In this exceptionally silly sketch, an actor (the wonderful Jeff Niles) auditions for Dracula.  Overseeing everything, and playing Setchfield, is the brilliant Viktor Aurelius.

Happy Halloween!

Alan Smithee Theatre

My good friends Viktor Aurelius and Jeff Niles at the 4077th Productions have just released episode one of their splendidly silly new sketch show, Alan Smithee Theatre, which includes a really wonderfully produced skit I wrote about an actor auditioning for Dracula. And it's almost as good as Viktor's excellent material which forms the bulk of the episode.

With lovely performances from Viktor and Jeff, and Steve White, Eleiece Krawiec, Alex Gilmour, Ted Wenskus, Mat Weller, Sarah Golding and a pack of wolves, this episode is guaranteed to make you laugh!


 Listen to it here:

 Alan Smithee Theatre Episode One