Mark Gatiss is a busy man these days. Not content with being a regular contributor to Doctor Who and half responsible for the outrageously brilliant Sherlock, he’s also just finished presenting a documentary series tracking the history of horror movies. (It’s imaginatively titled A History Of Horror, and it’s worth a look if you’re interested in the genre.) As if that wasn’t enough, he is both the writer and star of BBC4′s recent dramatisation of the H. G. Wells novel The First Men In The Moon.
In it, he plays a growling, humming, impressively-moustached Professor Arthur Cavor, inventor of the gravity-defying substance Cavorite. Rory Kinnear (no relation to Greg Kinnear, I should point out) takes on the role of his companion, the avaricious, failed businessman Julius Bedford. It’s greatly to his credit that Kinnear brings some much needed humanity to a character who could otherwise seem like he has more shallows than a paddling pool filled with rocks. The pair share an easy, affable chemistry on screen and Gatiss positively bubbles with eccentric Edwardian lunacy. His love for both the character and the source material is definitely clear to see.
Great care is taken, justifying the impossible aspects of historical space travel, anachronistic to an audience so aware of the difficulties of real lunar exploration, and the program neatly side-steps the issue by being unashamedly deferential to the book’s era. A great deal of time is spent lovingly and very intricately explaining some surprisingly plausible yet utterly ridiculous science and it’s sometimes hard not to find yourself sort of wishing that it was true. Visually the program owes a lot of its style to the classic silent film Voyage Dans La Lune, and in homage to that it includes a surreal little dream-sequence that comes almost straight out of the classic film itself. The visuals create an idealised, dreamy, alternative skew on history. It’s one that, along with a plethora of suitably period-looking brass fitting and fitments, is almost enough to make you long for the days when it felt like space really could have been conquered if we’d just applied enough elbow-grease, stiff upper lips and a proper pair of goggles.
If the actual space capsule, replete with trimmings and curtains, does look slightly like it could have been built by Wallace and Gromit, then at least the content of the program itself manages to remain playful without ever sliding into tongue-in-cheek mockery. Cavor and Bedford are both portrayed with a suitable earnestness despite all the trappings of fanciful, historical silliness.
I very much wanted to like this show and on the most part it’s a generally enjoyable, if somewhat preposterous, sort of romp. It was only for the latter part of the story that my interest began to wander. Despite that, I would say it’s worth sticking with until the end, if only to see how neatly things tie up. Professor Cavor’s fate is resolved more definitively than in Wells’ original but, on the off chance that you want something a little more to keep you tuned in, then stick with it just to see a cameo appearance from the guy who played Stan Shunpike in Prisoner of Azkaban decked out in spectacularly cartoonish bathing-man attire. You’ll never look at the Knight Bus the same way again.
The First Men In The Moon is now available on BBC DVD in Region 2 format.
Lady T
Lady T is a great lover of British TV, which is helpful as that's mostly what she gets to watch. She strongly believes that tea can't be made using a microwave, that children's programming really was better when she was a kid, and that there's nothing in the world that can't be solved with a liberal application of common sense. She very much enjoys reading but like most of the rest of the world would some day like to write a book herself. If she ever succeeds in doing so there's a pretty good chance she'll never shut up about it. She can be contacted at lady_t_220 @ yahoo.co.uk.
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You had me at Mark Gatiss.
His ‘A History of Horror’ 3-part documentary series was good too. Very thoughtfully put together and hitting some interesting less-famous works along the way, not just the big names.