{"id":208,"date":"2014-02-26T13:39:07","date_gmt":"2014-02-26T13:39:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/?p=208"},"modified":"2014-02-26T13:40:53","modified_gmt":"2014-02-26T13:40:53","slug":"episode-three","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/episode-three\/","title":{"rendered":"Episode Three"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"tardis-round\"<\/a>
\n<\/span><\/strong> <\/h1>\n


\n <\/p>\n

\u00a0I mentioned in my memoir about Doctor Who, Blue Box Boy, that I had a sneaking affection for the old American day time soap Dark Shadows, which ran for five years at the end of the sixties. I had never seen it, though I had heard of it, until I found myself living in America, where it was being recycled at an ungodly hour. It\u2019s easy to take the piss out of, with its wobbling sets and its glacially slow pace and the struggles of its actors to remember lines, but once you appreciate the circumstances under which Dark Shadows was made – the programmes were recorded as live, five days a week – you begin to recognize that the cast were doing rather wonderful work.<\/p>\n

Many of the central characters \u2013 Barnabas Collins, Quentin Collins, Julia Hoffman, Willie Loomis, even the witch Angelique in her evil way – have an authentic note of the tragic. The series began as a rip-off of Jane Eyre, and there is something mini-Bronteish to these damaged people, living day to day, year to year, even century to century, with a kind of dignity. What I admire about the series is its weirdly unflinching sense that nothing can ever be put right.\u00a0 There are moments of calm, the consolation of occasional sex, but these are impermanent. The characters are cripples who have to find a way to live with their condition.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (There are some subtextual elements which I strongly dislike. Women in their late teens and early twenties always fall head over heels in love with men in their forties, and \u2013 much more troubling \u2013 women who express the slightest interest in non-marital sex, prostitutes and non-prostitutes alike, unfailingly die violently before the end of the episode.)<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The producer of Dark Shadows, Dan Curtis, cashed in at the height of the soap\u2019s popularity by making two films, House of Dark Shadows and Night of Dark Shadows. Both these films were horribly re-edited by the film company, so the versions we have are mutilated.\u00a0 The last half hour of the second makes no sense whatever.<\/p>\n

Plot elements of the soap opera are reused, but to completely different effect. The films occupy an alternative universe a great deal bloodier and more brutal. \u00a0In House of Dark Shadows, the TV cast play their TV characters, and Curtis proceeds to kill nearly all of them off in a swift ninety minutes. The ten-year old boy David, in a scene cut by the film company but to be seen in a trailer, hangs himself. There are operatic amounts of blood of an extreme, stylised redness, offset by blues and foggy whites. Jonathan Frid, freed from the schedule of daytime TV, is majestic.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to escape the sense that the many shots of peculiar beauty came about because Dan Curtis didn\u2019t quite know what he was doing, but that doesn\u2019t make them less beautiful. House of Dark Shadows feels like a commentary on all the tropes of the gothic horror film. If it had been done in French, everyone would now recognize it as a high-camp art-house masterpiece!<\/p>\n

Anyhow, James Goss at Big Finish productions, who have a line of Dark Shadows audios, read Blue Box Boy and dropped me a line:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dear Matthew,<\/p>\n

Would you like to play a mild-mannered occult-worshipping serial killer in an episode of Dark Shadows?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0I had always wanted to play a mild-mannered occult-worshipping serial killer. I don\u2019t think<\/p>\n

there\u2019s any Equity member who hasn\u2019t .<\/p>\n

I had no doubt that doing \u2018Dark Shadows: The Creeping Fog\u2019 would be great fun, which it was, but I didn\u2019t expect to be playing such an interesting character \u2013 one of the most interesting I have ever played \u2013 and I didn\u2019t expect a script of such a high quality. It\u2019s essentially a two hander between David Selby and I, augmented by some spooky voices. The core of the piece was recorded in one day in LA.<\/p>\n

\u2018The Creeping Fog,\u2019 written by Simon Guerrier, is one of a number of episodes which take place during World War II. The immortal Quentin Collins finds himself in a pub in fogbound London in 1941, where, seemingly accidentally, he bumps into a vague, scholarly and bumbling middle-aged chap called John Cunningham who runs a dusty, down-at-heel museum over the road. \u00a0They find themselves overnight in the museum, where the bumbling mask which John presents to Quentin keeps falling away, to reveal, at first, the glint of the true obsessive, then something very dark. To put it simply, he\u2019s completely crazy. I\u2019m not giving anything away; the attentive listener can deduce this by John\u2019s second line, the distracted listener by his third.<\/p>\n

\u2018The\u00a0 Creeping Fog\u2019 is a mad and dark and sublime piece of gothic fiction.<\/p>\n

While in the studio in LA, I also did a couple of cameo characters for a story called \u2018The Crimson Pearl\u2019 by James Goss and Joseph Lidster. I didn\u2019t see the full script for this, only my own lines, so I didn\u2019t have any real sense of what \u2018The Crimson Pearl\u2019 amounted to until I heard it recently. It turned out to be an adorably lavish 45th<\/sup> anniversary special with a vast cast \u2013 just about every surviving Dark Shadows actor, and cameos from Doctor Who people Nicola Bryant, Louise Jameson and I. \u00a0James and Joseph had the brilliant idea of doing this story in a series of bite-sized five minute episodes, a sort of miniaturized, Faberge egg version of the soap opera itself, as the mysterious pearl (\u201cas if Lucifer plucked out one of his own eyes\u2026\u201d) is passed from hand to hand down generations and centuries.\u00a0 If the episodes are miniature, the story isn\u2019t \u2013 it crosses two centuries in an hour. Everything-but-the-kitchen-sink anniversary specials, ranging through the entire history of a series, are enormous fun, and \u2018The Crimson Pearl\u2019 is as good an example as I\u2019ve come across. The effect is of a sort of audio 3-D!<\/p>\n

When the TV series finished, it left a library, so to speak, of reconstructed, slightly warped variations on every gothic character archetype \u2013 the vampire, the werewolf, the ghost, the witch, servants of satan, every damned thing you can think of. They have endless possibilities.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  \u00a0I mentioned in my memoir about Doctor Who, Blue Box Boy, that I had a sneaking affection for the old American day time soap Dark Shadows, which ran for five years at the end of the sixties. I had never seen it, though I had heard of it, until I found myself living in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-blue-box-blog","czr-hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":210,"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions\/210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}