There’s a few frames of the end credits of Dallas right at the start of the tape, swiftly overwritten by the end of the final episode of Michael Palin’s Around the World in 80 days. It’s always struck me as an interesting ending. Palin arrives in London, and his first encounter (at least, the first encounter they show) is with a surly Evening Standard seller. How much of this was an editorial choice, and how much was spontaneous and real is hard to tell, but it was a melancholy end to an otherwise very uplifting show.
The most interesting part, though, is when he is turned away from the Reform Club at the end. I can’t help thinking that the trustees would have watched that episode and kicked themselves that they came across so curmudgeonly. These days, when every organisation has ‘media directors’ it wouldn’t have happened. But you can see their point of view – they had no idea what the TV show was, Palin had no record as a travel broadcaster, so they erred on the side of caution, because they were AN IMPORTANT INSTITUTION.
I’m not sure why I only have the end of this episode. I don’t think I recorded the rest of the show. And this is not just a random recording before Star Trek – it was recorded for its own sake, as the recording switches after it ends.
Next recording starts with the end of a documentary about young people with facial disfigurement. Then a trailer for an episode of Under The Sun.
Then, more from Star Trek The Next Generation. It opens with Worf seeming to suffer from indigestion. But we’re swiftly distracted by an unusally old distress signal from ‘The European Hegemony’ – “the first stirrings of World Government” according to Picard.
But when Riker and Picard exit his ready room, Worf has collapsed. Cue titles.
This episode is Up The Long Ladder. The distress signal comes from a lost colony of comedy Irishmen, complete with all their pigs and chickens. Riker is particularly take with the daughter of the group’s leader, played by Rosalyn Landor – familiar to us from those awful Renault advertisements, and also from the ITV cop drama Cat’s Eyes. They even get to smooch, which seems to me to be terribly inappropriate behaviour for the First Officer.
Meanwhile, there’s a second lost colony, this one populated by clones of the original colony crew. They’ve cloned so often that their gene pool is degrading, and the idea of just having sex is ‘repugnant’. So they ask for cell samples from the Enterprise, but Riker declines, unhappy with the idea of thousands of Rikers walking around. So the colonists steal their cells, leading to a moral quandary. Riker et al refuse to let their cells be used for cloning. Pulaski makes the valid scientific point that a new cell line would only delay the inevitable if they continue to rely on cloning. “What they need is breeding stock”
Obviously, the answer is to send Rosalyn Landor and her jolly Oirish rogues to live on the colony – since both colonies arrived in the sector on the same ship. Riker jokes “It’ll have to be a shotgun wedding” which is apparently fine according to the moral code of the episode. Forced marriage of sentient beings is OK, but stealing a few cells is beyond the pale.
And then the whole negotiation takes place between the two head men – nobody even thinks to consider asking the women in either population how they feel about it. And because they have to generate a viable population, each woman would have to have children from three different men.
Mrs Renault berates Picard for making all the decisions without asking the women (at least), but takes two seconds to be attracted to the idea of having the Prime Minister as a husband.
I’m sure I’m being terribly old fashioned, and that monogamy is just some tool of the patriarchy, but the gender politics in the episode seem terrible to me. And couple this with some of the worst Irish accents this side of Sean Connery in The Untouchables.
Not Star Trek’s finest hour.
BBC Genome: BBC Two – 28th August 1991 – 18:00
Recording switches, and we get the end of a cooking programme. It’s John Tovey’s Entertaining on a Plate.
There’s a trailer for Gimme Eight: Yearbook.
Then, the next episode of Star Trek – Manhunt – in which Deanna’s mother returns to the Enterprise en route to a diplomatic conference. She’s in the Betazoid equivalent of the menopause which, for them, means their sex drive is quadrupled, so she’s on the hunt for a new mate, and Picard is in her sights.
I’ve always found Gene Roddenberry’s prediliction for ‘hyper-sexual’ aliens to be problematic. It’s a problem he shares with many of the SF writers of his era. It probably stems from a knee-jerk reaction to the censorious nature of the world in which they grew up, so the idea that ‘really advanced races’ would have a more open attitude to sex probably seemed enlightened and modern, but to me, now, it just seems a bit creepy. I don’t know if it’s better or worse that the character he uses to explore these issues is played by his own wife.
I guess we should be happy that a middle-aged woman is being presented as having a sex life at all, but when that sex life presents her as a predator (albeit a comical one) it’s not a good thing.
This episode barely has any plot to speak of. Lwaxana Troi arrives, tries to woo Picard, who then retreats to the holodeck, with his Dixon Hill program, to hide from her. Troi briefly toys with Riker, visits the holodeck, vaguely falls for one of the holodeck characters, then they all arrive at the conference and Troi tells the crew that the other alien delegates, who had been in some form of stasis for most of the flight, were actually intending to destroy the whole conference and should be arrested.
Still, on the plus side, we get to see Picard in dress uniform. As Lwaxana says, ‘Nice legs’.
BBC Genome: BBC Two – 4th September 1991 – 18:00
Next episode is The Emissary. A half-human, half-Klingon emissary arrives on the Enterprise to tell them about a Klingon ship which has been in suspended animation since before the war with the Klingons ended, which had just woken up. Obviously, she’s also an old girlfriend of Worf. Cue lots of angsty growling and holodeck sparring, Ho hum. This has not been a vintage set of episodes, but then, it’s Season Two.
Worf defuses the potential battle with the renegade Klingons by pretending to be the Klingon captain.
It’s nice to see the old-style Klingon ships, but it’s a shame they obviously only had one angle of the ship – a head-on view.
BBC Genome: BBC Two – 18th September 1991 – 18:00
Following this episode, there’s an action-packed trailer for the imminent repeats of Thunderbirds.
Then, recording switches to some old-school Star Trek, as William Shatner faces off against the Gorn. It’s Saturday Night Clive, talking to William Shatner by satellite.
Clive’s studio guest in this episode is the always good value Mel Brooks, here to sell his movie Life Stinks.
BBC Genome: BBC One – 21st September 1991 – 21:50
Following the end of this, there’s a trailer for Dancin’ Thru the Dark, a Screen One film.
Then, a film, Hostile Witness just starts, when that recording stops.
Underneath, we have a programme presented by Alan Titchmarsh, featuring at one point Ian McCaskill letting off 1000 balloons in aid of the homeless, or something.
It seems to be a programme about Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. On his trip he stops at Aylesford Priory, which I remember from childhood trips with the family.
The tape stops here.
VHiStory 