Harry Alan Towers Month:: Harry's Versions

It is now Harry Alan Towers Month to commemorate the 3rd Anniversary of his death on 31st July. So, we are going to celebrate him by theorising his love of classic novels, and what would happen if he made today's bestseller adaptations.

Edgar Allan Poe’s Phantom of the Opera

Erique, a gifted opera singer and composer goes insane when a rival, Gaston Leroux steals his idea for an opera based on the story of Jekyll and Hyde, ‘The Mysterious Case of the Man and the Internal Beast’, which is a major success in Paris, and is preparing to be taken to London. He storms into Gaston’s chateau, and steals Gaston’s script, only to find chateau in flames, tricked by Gaston. Erique kills Gaston and escapes, to return to his love, Christine, but Erique is unaware that his face has been melted and has repulsed Christine into leaving him, so he is left to wander the streets for eternity, running an Edgar Allan Poe-themed grand guignol show until one day tormented by Gaston’s ghost, a raven on the ghost’s shoulder, he sinks into insanity, and finds himself tormented into reclaiming Christine. He discovers she has been reincarnated into the daughter of a theatre producer who is setting out to restage The Mysterious Case of the Man and the Internal Beast. Erique travels to London to find Christine, on holiday from New York. She hopes to perform the role of Christine, written for her previous self. Erique is love-starved and hops off Tower Bridge onto a double-decker bus to see her face, but repulses the bus driver, causing the bus to crash into the Thames. Christine, the one survivor finds herself in a London hospital, sung to by a hospital-masked Erique, disguised as a surgeon, but she knows that he has lost his singing voice. He claims only love can return it, while he cuts up various doctors and male patients in order to find a suitable male face. Gaston reappears, giving Erique the Masque of the Red Death from Poe legend to hide his deformed features. But Gaston is also tricksy, as he knows if he does not carry out his heart's desire of becoming flesh again, he will perish. He decides to possess Erique, but is grossed out by the fact his great-grandson, Raoul, a half-Latino French dance student at Julliard is dating Christine.

Erique traps Gaston in a bottle that is put in the freezing River Thames. He soon attacks a London opera house, downing the chandelier on an entire audience, resulting in splatter, but Christine is not there. He soon becomes known as the Phantom of the Opera. Raoul tells Christine that her father has planned to relocate the show to the Sydney Opera House. On the plane, Christine meets Erique, who confesses his passion and why he loves her, as he sits on the wing of a plane, staring through an open window. She thinks about it,  but ultimately cannot decide. At the Sydney Opera House, Erique slides down the roof and gives Christine some flowers.. Raoul is not happy, and tries to attack, but Erique flies out on some mechanical wings, taking down soldiers who are machine-gunning him. Christine tells her father that she can’t do the performance at Carnegie Hall, and he brings in the fat, faded Carlotta, but Christine decides maybe that Erique does love her, so she throws herself in at the last minute, whereupon Erique comes in, kills Carlotta and Raoul and grabs Christine, as he flies down. She realises that although Erique loves her, his love for her has driven him into insanity, and when they reach London to collect the bottle of Gaston, at a London dock,  where he dies, revealing his love tattoo. Christine opens the bottle and Gaston turns out to be Gaston Leroux, who goes back somehow to 1909, Paris, where he tells his new love, Christine about the Phantom and what happened to him. She says he should write a book.

Harry Alan Towers: The Puddingmaker

 DELETED

Big changes at Eccentrica Towers

To be honest, I don't know what to say: But I am changing the focus of this blog, to  not just reflect British culture but foreign culture in Britain. With a bit of fiction, exploitation columns, humour, fun, games, film reviews and stuff! 

So, I'll be starting with the all-star classic story of a man, who you may know or may not know.

Chuckle, Chuckle Vision!

You may not know from the sheer muddled interior of this blog that I'm still a kid, still sixteen, and I like kids' stuff. I like fart jokes. And I like the Chuckle Brothers!
For those not in the know, the Chuckle Brothers, Barry Elliott (born 24 December 1944) and Paul Elliott (born 18 October 1947), better known as the Chuckle Brothers, are British comedians. They are best known for their work on Tv, since winning New Faces 1974 and their CBBC series Chucklevision, running since 1987, and before that, the dog-dress up Chucklehounds. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCJMje871SQ

Barry is the small one, and Paul, the domineering one. Their catchphrase is To me, to you, as well as 'oh dear, oh dear' and 'silly me, silly you'. They hail from Rotherham, Yorkshire and they specialise in old fashioned slapstick.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGZU61k1ibw&feature=player_detailpage
Their enemies in the series, are their real-life brothers, former Black and White Minstrels and panto regulars Jimmy and Brian Patton or the Patton Brothers, who in this 1980 clip dfrom the Good old Days, are also the Chuckles, if you get it. The Pattons are in the middle, Paul left, Barry right,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3S9EpTy02M

They also at their age they lots of stage work, shows like 'Dr. What and the Garlics', 'Indiana Chuckles' and Pirates of the River Rother: In Stranger Tights. It's a secret unfulffilled ambition to go to one of their stage shows.

ChuckleVision I've watched since I were in nappies. It is also cheap, and sometimes had gueststars, like Gruber the gay Nazi off 'Allo 'Allo, or the voice of K9, John Leeson. But I like it.

RTD, the new JN-T

Hello, time travellers, for my next article on Doctor Who, I ask you not Who but why? I've decided to cover the more unusual things in Who, not doctors, companions, monsters, TARDISEs, but studies and criticisms of writers, directors, producers...

There are similarities with Davies, the man who revived Who and Turner, the man who both helped it and then relucantly let it die in his arms, while trying to escape it. Both are gay. There are differences. Davies is a creative mind, a writer more so than a producer, with a writer's background, not a financial budgetary one, like Turner, plus his role was born out of role for the programme.

Russell's got a new boyfriend!

Both have the same sense of show. Both have been criticised for stunt castings, like a variety manager triyng to get big stars for his theatre. RTD did start his career, writing for those mammoths of children's televisual entertainment, Paul and Barry Patton Elliot, alias the Chuckle Brothers. 

I think that's all I have to say, actually, for RTD could do a lot of bad, i.e. the cheap, tacky and ultra-cheesy Christmas Specials, like decorations on a tree with flame-throwing brass band robot Santas and spinning musical Chainsaw Christmas trees, alien threats, yes, but alien threats with novelty value, something both throat-vomitingly sickeningly sweetly terrifying and just plain horrific!
Christmas specials are only suited for comedies, and even then, it seems comedy is limp in Yuletide.
I could also rant on endlessly for the farty Chucklesque exploits of the posh greengangsters the Slitheen, like an alien version of Baby Face Finlayson, and the Fear Her story, a tale of a girl whose drawings came to life, clearly an imitation of a much better episode of US TV kids show Eerie Indiana, by Joe Dante,  was limited by the end-of-season budget, so the big monster of the dad in the closet was now just a glowing drawing!
But that ain't written by Davies, so I'll instead go on about Christmas specials!

The Christmas Only Fools and Horses specials were never that Christmassy, for example. My favourite of them, the Jolly Boys Outing is clearly filmed and set in summer, in its tale of a trip to Margate, and the abysmal Thicker than Water (1992), although wintry was focused more on a bizarre tale of bottled water from drainage, and showed John Sullivan was running out of ideas.

Anyway, back to RTD, I've run out of things to say, just to say at least he revived Who...

Doctor Who: John Nathan Turner, the Black Sheep of BBC Drama

John Nathan-Turner should be criticised for producing Doctor Who. He didn't ruin Who singlehandedly. There are so many factors. Eric Saward was a peculiar choice for script editor. He had no telly background, just radio. You need experience to be in charge of a show like Doctor Who. John Nathan-Turner had experience. I'm not saying his run of the show was bad. No.

He did good. He cast Peter Davison, who brought us a human, more fallible portrayal of our hero, and he cast Beryl Reid as a space marine (a lot of people think it negative, but trust me, BERYL REID in SPACE, what's not to love?) and he modernised the series, bringing back love and affection, after a period of decrease in popularity. He brought in Nyssa. He was responsible for the Five Doctors. He made the series fresh and yet...

He did bad. He cast Colin Baker. He created Adric (he only cast Waterhouse, because he had a crush on the fresh-faced BBC clerk boy who had a deluded desire to be as good as Olivier by the age of 20, instead becoming as good as a one-legged seal is at sprinting) and his ham-fisted tactics led the Great Michael Grade (a man who knows his entertainment, nephew of Sir Lew, a master of screen SF commissioning, and maker of rather good BBC 4 documentaries) to try to cancel it. Every spotty fan (including me) wanted to kill him at one point, as we thought as bad as Who was, surely it could get better. There was also the stunt castings, Time and The Rani, Doctor in Distresss, the escalating cheapness, the switch to all-video (which made it look like a kids show) and allowing Eric Saward near a scriptwriter. He created the Colin Baker look (popularised by Robin Williams in the film Toys, honestly Williams even said it himself, apparently) and the question marks, even criticised by Lord Barry Letts. He made characters different nationalities as gimmicks to attract foreign countries, which kind of worked with Tegan, as Janet Fielding really was an Aussie, but when your Pasadena-Californian Peri is actually from Guildford, eh...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1yW8FrrXAA&feature=player_detailpage
Unbelievably Oscarwinning composing genius Hans Zimmer was involved, yes THAT Hans Zimmer!

When Sylvester McCoy was cast, oh no... And then it did, with stories like Ghost Light and Greatest Show in the Galaxy, and characters like Ace, who although likeable enough was failed, but an honourable failure, because she looked about 25, as Sophie Aldred was, when playing her, spoke too posh and too stupid (ie don't use your name as an exclamation! George!) yet we came to like her because she was easy on the eye and she convinced us, because we felt a bit sorry for her. RTD must've been scribbling notes.

But as good as JN-T could be, he wasn't as successful as the brilliance of Letts or Hinchcliffe. He didn't have a stable script editor-producer relationship, plus really he was wrong for the series. He was a camp figure, an openly gay man with a relationship with his production manager, Gary Downie. They lived in Brighton together! Downie wrote the Doctor Who Cookbook! He was a Brummie whose real name was Jonathan Turner, became double-barrelled to avoid a mistaken identity and had a style more suited to variety, or maybe a soap opera. Doctor Who is neither. Doctor Who needs good actors, not big stars and style, not colour.

But then again, it is a trap people fall into regularly. Especially when you mix chain, lady blouse and Colin Baker coat.

JN-T never worked on TV again, apart from setting Who-related questions for Mastermind and interviews, where he came across as a big teddy bear coloured pink. He turned down Bergerac. 

He was a great man, though, rather odd, but he let the series continue, and when the series died, he was left holding it, as no one else wanted it or him...

All without mentioning a certain red-haired actress and her Pease Pottage-born character?

Cash in the Attic: Trash in the Morning

I decided to run this blog to freshen it up, to take it off Matthew Coniam and modernise it. I wanted to focus on modern things that are still in the olde Britain, and then there is Cash in the Attic. For those unaware, it is a long-running BBC One daytime antiques 'lifestyle' programme, not like Antiques Roadshow, but with dealers and presenter going to people's houses to find the so-called antiques to be sold at auction. It is an odd kettle, running since 2002, but still stuck in 1997, it is at the same repulsive and addictive, like some Italian cannibal film. The programme's tagline is The show that helps you find hidden treasures in your home, and then sells them for you at auction, which is basically the premise.

It has had about 400 presenters, there's old veterans like Angela Rippon and Jennie Bond (or former BBC Royal Correspondent Jennie Bond, as we are forced to call her), and daytime types like Alistair Appleton and Angus Purden, i.e. soulless pretty boys too fey and camp for primetime. The show itself is really conquered by the dealers, including Paul Hayes, a man so Northern without being Northern (as in Coronation Street, i.e. he's posh-Mancunian, Morecambe, an yet sounds nothing like Eric, as he has this lilting voice) that my grandad insisted he was gay by 'the manner of him' (actually, he's married with kids). It was also briefly the home of trash TV witch Lorne Spicer, the Fairy Godmother of daytime Antiques TV, who also did the awful Car Booty, a show with everything the same but with a car boot sale not an auction, and hilarriously overpriced junk (£30 for a used Cyberman voice-changer from 2007, really?) that has now spread to the minds of old ladies in charity shops. Why did I profile it? It's British Rubbish, All New British Rubbish, and it shows how much the British public loves antiques.