Ben Paddon

Category: Film & Television

  • The Light That Burns Twice As Bright Burns For Half As Long

    A Warning for British People: I’m going to annoy you immsnely by describing a series of a British thing as a “season”, because that’s more or less how it works here in America, even for British shows. That is, in fact, now it used to work in the UK as well, but at some point we shifted over and you’re welcome to do the research on the history of that if you like, but I shan’t be covering it here. Anyway, feel free to whinge at me for using an American word. If it makes you feel any better I’ll be using British spellings for words like “analyse” and “colour”. I’m sure you’ll find an American spelling in there somewhere for you to get grouchy about, but at the end of the day the spelling I choose to use is still going to be accurate somewhere, and that’s alright for me.

    …

    One common thing I get told by my New American Friends when I introduce them to my favourite British comedy shows is, “Wow, the seasons are so short!”. And, to their credit, they’re absolutely right – the average length of a season of a British show, sitcom in particular, is usually between six and eight episodes. The problem with their statement is that it’s usually said as a complaint. Which is daft.

    When it comes to television, Americans are spoilt. They are. They get anywhere between twelve and twenty-four episodes a season, regardless of genre. Almost every successful American television show finds its way into international markets. Shows that are successful elsewhere in the world wind up getting remade just for them. It’s perhaps a little understandable that they get a little snobby when it comes to the television that the rest of the world has to offer.

    But there’s an interesting corollary between the perceived quality of a show and the number of episodes a comedy has has over its run. Let’s analyse that now, shall we?

    blackbooksLet’s compare two shows from the last few years – in Britain’s corner we have Black Books, a sitcom about a cynical, alcoholic bookstore owner and his oddball friends. There are exactly eighteen episodes of Black Books, each one twenty-five minutes in length spread out over three seasons. Every single one of this episodes is choc full of cracking gags and some brilliant acting from Dylan Moran, Bill Bailey, and Tamsin Grieg. It’s a great show, and it’s one of those shows I can watch from beginning to end, over and over again, until death.

    Our American example? Scrubs, a hospital comedy that has not long completed its eighth season and is about to go into its ninth. There are, at last count, one-hundred-and-sixty-nine episodes of this sitcom, each one clocking in at around the twenty-two minute mark. The first season consists of twenty-four episodes. Twenty-four. Seasons 2 through 6 had twenty-two episodes each. Season 7 had eleven episodes, but would’ve had eighteen were it not for the 2007-08 Writer’s Strike. Season 8 had eighteen episodes, and season 9? In production right now.

    Already that paragraph is longer than the one about Black Books, and I haven’t even begun to talk about the overall quality of the show, which I will do now in a third paragraph.

    scrubsScrubs is, in its first two or three seasons, an absolutely fantastic show. It’s easily some of the best comedy that has come out of the US in the last decade. It began to falter somewhere around the fourth season, where the fantasy sequences started to get a little wobby or become a little too long, and by season 7 the show had descended into madness. The characters had become horrible parodies of themselves. The comedy was gone. The acting was dire, by virtue of the fact that the characters and the tone of the show had changed so much. Scrubs’ seventh season is an almost entirely different show. It began to pick things up again during the eighth season, which was a marked (and, for American television, incredibly rare) return to form.

    This is the problem, though: Would you rather have eighteen consistently brilliant episodes of a show, or nearly one-hundred-and-seventy episodes of a show, over half of which are mediocre tripe? If I say to someone, “I like Black Books,” that statement is consistent because the show is consistent (although here in the US I usually have to tell people what it’s about, who’s in it, and whether they’ll “get it”). If I say to someone, “I like Scrubs,” I usually have to qualify that with which seasons I did like, which seasons I didn’t, and then go on to say why.

    Personally I’ll take quality over quantity any day.

  • On the subject of Wheelchairs

    On the subject of Wheelchairs

    Perhaps one of the most annoying plot devices that comes up in bad sitcoms and most teen drama shows is the “You Think You Have It So Tough” story. In this story one of the central character’s quirks or disabilities – usually something like blindness or being in a wheelchair – is “simulated” by the other lead characters, who end the experience with a renewed respect for the disabled character and a deeper understanding of the adversity that said character has endured.

    The first season of ABC’s Fox’s Glee is going to have a story like this. I know this because I’m an extra in that particular episode. A bunch of the characters wind up being told by a teacher that they have to spend the whole day in wheelchairs to get a better understanding of just how rough the one character who is actually in a wheelchair has it. One of the scenes we filmed involved one of the able-bodied characters rolling down the corridor in his loaner wheelchair for the first time, getting his head pushed, prodded, poked, whacked, wholloped and banged by the various other students who were apparently totally oblivious to the fact that the fucking High School Linebacker (or whoever) is now in a fucking wheelchair.

    Those sort of stories bug me for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s been done to death. It’s the sort of story that writes itself because the writer has invariably already seen it done somewhere else. That isn’t what makes it lazy writing, though. What makes it lazy writing is that it never deviates from the established formula. Nothing changes. Nobody has ever done anything interesting with the concept. I can’t think of a writer other than Joss Whedon who might decide, for example, to have a Horrible Accident occur during the One In A Wheelchair that actually leaves one of the other principle characters permanently in a wheelchair for some reason.

    Secondly, the characters don’t learn anything. At all. As in the comic above, they can get out of their chairs at the end of the day. Wheely McWheelerson, the Only Disabled Kid In School, can’t.

    I forget how I was going to end this rant, so I’m going to stop typing now.

  • Rating the Doctor Who Finales

    Over four years ago, viewers in the UK (and people worldwide who naughtily downloaded stuff from the internet) were treated to the series one finale of Doctor Who. Had the show been unsuccessful that could’ve been the end of it, but no – Doctor Who‘s return to television was nothing short of a triumph. Four years later it is one of the most successful shows on British television, and we’re not far off from seeing David Tennant’s tenure as the Tenth Doctor (the new series’ second) come to an end.

    With that in mind, I thought it might be fun to dissect in the finales in order, from my personal least-favourite to the finale I consider the best of the bunch so far. So here we go, then.

    A word of warning: If you haven’t seen much of Doctor Who and want to avoid spoilers, I would advise you to give this article a miss.

    (more…)

  • Why Monkey Island is my Star Wars

    During my childhood I was sucked into a seemingly vast fictional world that was populated with rogues, scoundrels, a dark evil and a plucky young kid wanting to learn the ways a time long gone by. I speak, of course, of The Secret of Monkey Island, a game written by Ron Gilbert and published by LucasFilm Games (who later changed their name to LucasArts).

    monkey1

    I was four years old when Secret was released, and while I couldn’t really read at the time I would watch for hours as my cousin Andy played the game on our old Amiga 500. I had absolutely no idea what was going on, but I was captivated by what I saw on screen. Back then games didn’t have voice actors to deliver the lines – there simply wasn’t the space on the floppy disks – so all of the in-game dialogue appeared on screen above the characters. I couldn’t read at that age, but I pushed myself to learn so I could play the game myself. I was, I think, six when I finally completed the game for the first time, when I finally saw the hero Guybrush Threepwood and his love Elaine Marley standing at Stan’s Second Hand Shipyard watching the body of the Ghost Pirate LeChuck explode like fireworks against the night sky. I have never been so infatuated by an image in all my life. It is burned into my mind, a perfect glistening memory, the one thing I think of when I remember the youngest days of my childhood.

    A couple of years later I’d heard that a second game, LeChuck’s Revenge: Monkey Island 2, had been released. Although I would read about it in the Amiga magazines my Dad bought it would be several years before I finally got to play the game myself. I filled that time with other, similar adventure games. I found my Dad’s old King’s Quest games and worked my way through the first three in the series. They were charming but they didn’t elicit the same feeling of excitement and wonder that the first game did. The closest a game came to doing that was 1993’s Simon the Sorcerer, a British-developed game that felt spiritually very similar to Secret. This was also the first adventure game I played with voice actors instead of on-screen text, and it featured none other than Red Dwarf star Chris Barrie as the titular teenaged wizard.

    1997 saw the release of The Curse of Monkey Island, the third game in the series, but that year I was too busy wrapping my head around Revenge for the first time, having been given a cracked pirate copy for the Amiga by a friend of the family. That beast came on eleven floppy disks, by far the biggest game I’d ever played at the time. I can’t define the sheer amount of excitement that filled my young heart as I installed the game to my computer’s hard drive (at that time a beefed up Amiga 1200 that my Dad had left us when he moved to the States). Each time the installer asked for the next disk I felt the grip of anxiousness and glee tighten. One disk down, ten to go… one step closer to being able to see what happens next to our entrepid pirate wannabe.

    monkey2

    I was probably just as taken aback by the ending to Revenge as practically every other Monkey Island fan out there had been years before when the game had first come out. Without wanting to ruin it, the ending was a bizarre, unexpected, bittersweet cliffhanger that has been both hailed as one of the finest endings to a game of all time and the laziest, worst piece of trash ever to come from the Lucas stable. At the time I hated it. It felt like a kick in the groin, like LucasArt and Ron Gilbert had taken our money and ridden their solid gold speedboat down the cash river out to the open waters of the Financial Gain Ocean. Anyone who’s played any game by Hideo Kojima no doubt knows the feeling well.

    Over time, and after discovering an article that explores Guybrush’s world and what the secret of Monkey Island might be, the ending began to make more sense to me. It began to feel less lazy and more finely crafted. A second playthrough of LeChuck’s Revenge some years later (and, in fact, a playthrough of the very first game) revealed a ton of stuff to me that helped make the ending much less nonsensical to me. I now think it’s the greatest ending to a game ever produced.

    The series could, and perhaps should have ended there. It didn’t. Two further games were produced, without the aid of Ron Gilbert who left LucasArts to do his own thing. While The Curse of Monkey Island was an exceptional game, a thoroughly enjoyable and very humorous adventure, it was missing something integral… some key element that made it feel like a Monkey Island game. In many ways Curse is the end of Monkey Island because the fourth title, Escape From Monkey Island, is a trainwreck – the leap to 3D didn’t benefit the game at all, leaving fans with horrible controls, terrible fan service and failed attempts to revisit locations from the previous games. It still had that classic Monkey Island wit, but without the charm and with an ending even worse than Curse‘s it wasn’t worth the time it took me to go to the store and buy it.

    monkey3

    The entire Monkey Island franchise can be easily compared to the Star Wars saga. Secret is an utterly brilliant game that took gamers by surprise when it was released. Revenge is a marvellous experience building upon the groundwork laid down by Secret building to a crescendo cliffhanger (in this case, almost literally) that fans desperately wanted to see resolved. Curse is a good third entry, but the veneer is beginning to peel – it’s clear that this is the beginning of the end. And Escape… well, Escape is the entry everybody was looking forward to that couldn’t deliver and left fans feeling bitter and angry.

    The Star Wars parallels continue – yesterday saw the release of The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, a high-definition reworking of the game that started it all. The artwork had been completely redone from the ground up. The music has been rescored, this time using actual, real, actual instruments. The dialogue, that brilliant, gloriously witty dialogue, has been recorded by a team of voice actors many of them reprising their roles from later games in the series. The entire thing has been, dare I say, remastered. And has it worked? Well, it’s hit and miss, and I’ll address that in another blog post.

    I grew up with Monkey Island. I grew up wanting to be Guybrush Threepwood. The Secret of Monkey Island is the game that made pirates cool again. It’s the game that made adventure games not just another game on the shelf but made them events. Before Secret I hadn’t experienced a game with such a wonderfully crafted narrative before, and while titles like King’s Quest had stories they were so loose and freedom (what you’d probably call a “sandbox” game in today’s gaming vernacular) so as to be largely irrelevant. Secret was the first game I fell in love with. It’s the game that made me want to make games myself. It’s the game that made me want to be a writer.

    The Secret of Monkey Island, along with two of its three sequels, is the greatest computer game of all time. It will always have a special place in my heart.

  • James Moran is not your Bitch

    From Torchwood writer James Moran’s blog, concerning some of the angry, bitter feedback he’s had from a small group of “fans” about certain decisions they made during the story plotting process:

    So here’s the deal: I’m a professional writer. That’s my job. I write what I write, for whatever the project might be. I have the utmost respect for you, and honestly want you to like my work, but I can’t let that affect my story decisions. Everybody wants different things from a story, but this is not a democracy, you do not get to vote. You are free to say what you think of my work, even if you hate it, I honestly don’t mind. But the ONLY person I need to please is myself, and the ONLY thing I need to serve is the story. Not you. I will do my work to the very best of my ability, in an attempt to give you the best show, the best movie, the best story, the best entertainment I possibly can. Even if that means that sometimes, I’ll do things you won’t like. I won’t debate it. Either you go along with it, or you don’t. None of it is done to hurt you, or to force some agenda down your throat, or anything else. It’s all in service of the story.

    I have to say, I agree with him entirely. Read the entire post here.

  • Wayne Allwine – RIP

    I’ve just been informed that Wayne Allwine, the voice of Mickey Mouse since 1977, sadly passed away on Monday from complications caused by Diabetes.

    I had the pleasure of meeting both Wayne and his wife Russi, the current voice of Minnie Mouse, on several occasions when I worked for Disney. Wayne never struck me as anything but a gentleman. It always surprised me just how tall, thin and naturally deep-voiced was (certainly deep in comparison to the character he voiced for thirty-two years). Seeing him and Russi was always a treat, and they never seemed like people who thought themselves too important or too busy to stop and chat with a desk monkey like me.

  • The Beatles: Bigger Than Chuck Norris

    Tonight has been spent alternating between early planning for an animation pitch (one that has me very excited and more energized than anything else I’ve worked on over the past two years) and jumping onto Twitter to join Peter Serafinowicz and Graham Lineham in their #beatlesfacts meme. I actually have no idea if they started it, but the certainly brought it to my attention and I’ve enjoyed participating. Here’s a few I posted…

    • Ironically, John Lennon was born without an imagination. 
    • Ringo Starr was struck by lightning during the Beatles’ first tour of the US, temporarily leaving him able to play the drums. 
    • Neither John Lennon nor George Harrison are actually dead. Paul, however, is. 
    • Liverpool didn’t exist until 1942. McCartney was born in a meadow, and the city erupted out of the ground around him.
    • All four of the Beatles were allergic to Arsenic, and would refuse to eat any meal that included it as an ingredient. 
    • Yoko Ono is actually Bono in a wig. 
    • The Beatles were fully trained hyponotists, often hypnotizing whole stadiums at the start of a show then napping for 2 hours. 

    And here’s some of my favourites from others:

    • President Obama owns the only egg ever to be laid by a Beatle (Ringo). – Serafinowicz
    • Of all their many lineups, most agree the definitive one was John, Paul, Vince, Salbatoré and Prototype-Ringo. – Serafinowicz
    • Paul had a malformed Siamese twin growing out of his chest who occasionally displayed telepathic powers. – pamberjack
    • None of the Beatles was actually ever a Sargeant. – johnrshanley
    • The Beatles originally wanted to call themselves The Coleopteras, but couldn’t figure out how to misspell it. – loki5
    • The character of Mean Mr. Mustard later pursued a successful military career, albeit one blighted by accusations of murder. – stephen_normal
    • When startled, Ringo Starr can inflate to over 6 times his normal size to deter predators. The dark glasses are precautionary. – bookemdanno
    • Ringo stands to collect a huge payout from Corals if he can just get Paul to eat meat. – jonrshanley
    •  In a mathematical anomaly which has baffled academics for years, the square root of Beatles = Beatles. – stephen_normal
    • “The Beatles Kama Sutra” was withdrawn from bookshops after a woman was killed during a Reverse Flying Ringo. – blearyboy

    This is far too much fun. The best ones need to be collected on a Chuck Norris Facts style website. Brilliant.

  • An open letter to Film Critics

    Dear Film Critics,

    I’m not going to lie, I’m slightly envious of your position. You have somehow managed to reach a point where you are basically paid to tell people what you think of this film, or that film. Bloggers like myself are doing that for nothing, which either means we’re remarkably stupid or you’re remarkably clever. The idea that someone can find a career as an Opinion Merchant is one that appeals to me greatly, and I hope some day to be able to count myself amongst your numbers.

    I do take exception, however, to just how incredibly lazy some of you are.

    Firstly, I think it goes without saying that “If you liked x, you’ll love y” is not a review. It barely qualifies as a comparison. Telling me that I’ll love Watchmen because I think The Dark Knight is brilliant? That’s rubbish, and it’s easy-to-write rubbish because they happen to fall into the same genre. I know people who love Notting Hill but absolutely detest Love Actually. There are more than plenty of people out there who adore Lord of the Rings but cannot stand Harry Potter (and no, I don’t care what you say – they are the same genre). If I were your Editor-in-Chief, I would dock your wages for telling me that y is good because it happens to share some familiar elements with x.

    This goes double for “it’s x meets y“. That’s not a review. That’s a pitch. You don’t have to pitch the film to me, you just have to tell me what you thought of it. If your thought was “it’s x meets y” then your opinion is, I think, far too limited to deserve being paid for.

    Finally, and this is perhaps the most important point, there is no such thing as a “popcorn movie”. It doesn’t exist. Nobody, and I mean nobody goes to the theatre to sit there and just eat the popcorn. Describing any film (a recent example being X-Men Origins: Wolverine) as a “popcorn movie” is non-committal, time-wasting bollocks. The film is either worth seeing or it isn’t, and if the best you can muster in the review is thoughts on the concessions then the film probably isn’t worth seeing. I can stay at home and eat much nicer popcorn for far less the expense.

    Please think about this the next time you get to see a movie for free so you can write about it.

    Kind regards,
    Ben Paddon