Breaking all the rules (Top Ten TV Characters)

Member Name: mpeh

Product:	Top Ten TV Characters
Date:	13/07/04 (225 review reads)
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WARNING: I like meandering off topic, this begins as a blog almost, if
you want a strict review look away now. Easier still just scroll down a
bit, I get onto the TV characters eventually. Honest. And this is only
a top 5. I'm on an old unixx system currently and the only way I could get this here was by emailing it to my yahoo account, hence the odd line breaks. Deal with it. grin

Ok. I wanted to write a top ten scifi series ever or something like it.
When I stopped to think about how many series there were that I wanted
to write about I foundt hat getting to 10 was difficult, so i stopped.
In no particular order (well maybe the order tells you something about
me) I came up with:
Star Trek (if we split this into TOS, TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise we
only get a few in the top 10 list)
Babylon 5
Blake's 7
X Files (I know but the mid few series were truly excellent, Gillian
Anderson was enough for me)
and already I'm running short of series that I've seen that are good
enough to list in a top 10. So instead here I am writing a best 5 TV
characters opinion instead. Should be fun.

I haven't been on Dooyoo in a long time. I got fed up with it
basically, too much effort for too little reward. I milked my way to 100000
points or whatever it was, took my cheque and ran. I broke this abandonment
by posting a review about Matrix Revolutions which I wrote for a
private webpage and then decided I may was well post on dooyoo. I posted it
in the wrong place but it seemed to meet with some small level of
approval and all's well... Anyway the reason I'm back here writing this is
because, in my postgraduate haze of internet browsing, I remembered
dooyoo and drifted back, read a couple of reviews, shocked myself with how
many old timers are still going strong and bumped into this category. I
am just about to leave

to go on 'holiday' for a while and so am finding
it difficult to actually focus on anything that will take longer than
two days. Writing a silly Dooyoo review, and if you hadn't already
guessed that is what this is very likely to turn into, shouldn't take that
long. So here we are.

I don't know at this point if I will be able to rank my top ten, I will
write about the characters that spring to mind and then maybe come back
at the end and put numbers by them, this will have the interesting
effect (well interesting may be too strong a word, curious?) of not listing
them in either asceding or descending order but some hodgepodge of
stream of consciousness spewing forth from my bored psyche.

Sir Humphrey Appleby, in Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister played by
Nigel Hawthorne.
**********
You have to thank JOHNDMR for this. He wrote a review of The Madness of
King George and compared Hawthornes acting in that with his acting as
Sir Humphrey in a manner which I found lacking in sympathy for comic
talents. Not to say the rest of the review wasn't fine, in a proper
meaning of fine not the lax meaning of 'adequate'. I've broken two cardinal
rules already, name dropping and review dropping, twice in fact this
latter. Anyway John said that there was a world of difference between
Hawthorne's acting in Yes Minister and in King George. I am in complete
agreement. My point is that the way in which this statement was phrased
suggested that there was some fault with the acting in Yes Minister,
there wasn't.
Right, I should actually tell you something about it. Yes Minister was
a satirical look at the inside of a fictitious government department
(the ministery for administrative affairs) via the minister, his chief
secretary and an under-secretary. The relationship between the three of
t
hem,
Paul Eddington, Nigel Hawthorne and Derek Fowlds (later of
Heartbeat 'fame') was what made the series so excellent. In fact the
characterisation was very strong throughout. The basic tenet of each episode was
some political jiggery pokery where the civil service, in the guise of
Sir Humphrey, wrapped the minister around their little finger and made
him jump through the necessary hoops. The undersecretary was being
educated by the knowing Sir Humphrey in how to handle a minister.

Hawthorne was truly excellent, when the script left things unsaid he
REALLY left them unsaid in the loudest tone of voice possible. He had the
knowing looks, the injured and totally fake innnocence down pat and his
comic timing and deadpan were sublime. Hence he gets my vote.

At this rate this is going to be a long op.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation played by
Patrick Stewart
**********
I'm a fan I admit it. That doesn't change the fact that he was very
good. I'm going to run out of suitable adjectives and superlatives long
before I finish this op. Bother. There were seven seasons and they
started with a basically novice cast bar Stewart. In the first few seasons he
really pulls the whole thing along. Other members (most notable Frakes
as Riker) develop into good actors but initially the weight and
gravitas (such as it is in a namby sci fi series) is provided by Stewart.

Picard is an anti-Kirk, he doesn't womanise (well he doesn't tell
everyone about it if he does), deal with every situation by breaking the
rules, get in lots of fights, let testosterone make every decision for
him. In fact he is a captain for the late 80's early 90's in the same way
that James Tiberius (muffled laughter) Kirk was for the 70's. He is
considered and yet very much not perfect.

Wh
at really
makes me choose this character is that even when the script
is, um, not to put too fine a point on it, lacking, Stewart manages to
deal with it. He is totally believable (which in a sci-fi series isn't
bad going), he takes the character, develops him and makes him his own
and then is entirely consistent throughout the seven years. Brilliant.
Also when serious acting is required he is more than up to the task.

Arnold Judas Rimmer in Red Dwarf played by Chris Barrie
**********
The finest work of his career (yet). Ignoring series seven and eight
(don't even go there) Red Dwarf is a modern classic. Made, initially, on
a shoe string budget, the story of the last human, his dead
hologramatic nemesis, an eveloved bipedal feline and a subservient robot trapped
in deep space for eternity, is cracking stuff. So far removed from
reality with no effort to keep things remotely real this was side splitting.

Rimmer is a thoroughly detestable, self centered, cowardly, miserable
excuse for a human being, even a dead one. His antics and general
detest of everyone and everything he meets are delivered with suitable
malice at every opportunity. Barrie revelled in Rimmer's self pity and
really managed to make the character funny on two levels. There is the
immediate, laugh out loud humour that requires a certain level of comic
ability, timing and such but there is also the deeper dark humour that
underpins Rimmer's personal tradgedy and Barrie delivers this ubtlety as
well. In amongst this he also manages to make you pity this unpitiable,
detestable wreck of a man.

Consultant Surgeon Robert Kingsford in Always and Everyone played by
Martin Shaw
**********
'Played by Martin Shaw' should be enough really. Deserves it for that!
Rather than list every Martin Shaw character here though I will focus
o
n this one. Its
hard to divide a character being acted well from the
script being well structured (and not just around that character) but I
suppose this is a character list not necessarily an acting list.

An ITV casualty, A&E was a series set more in reality, more in real
life (there's a difference) and more in an hospital. Shaw plays an
overworked, over caring surgoen trying his best but simultaneuosly being very
human. It seems a lot of my favourite characters are human, not perfect
television heroes always making the right decision, for the right
reasons. Shaw delivers a character full of depth, full of hidden agendas and
personal agonies. The whole series revolves around humanity and
interpersonal relationships on a personal and professional level and Robert
Kingsford, as the lead character (certainly earlier on) epitomises this
dichotomy between being professional and yet caring and human and real
all at once.

How realistic the series is in terms of a real hospital internal
workings I have very little idea but it is easy to believe that it is
accurate and certainly that the flavour of things, the demands of beuracracy,
the conflicting priorities of the various people and departments are at
least relevant issues.

Tony Soprano in The Sopranos played by James Gandolfini
**********
I find it much easier to justify this if I limit myself to series 1.
There have been five seasons of the Sopranos, a family Mafia soap, all
have been very good television. Thef irst season was genuinely brilliant
and each series after that fell off a little until the fifth, that's
not to say that they aren't good quality television, they are, they just
don't match the peak of the first 13 episodes.

Tony Soprano is a mafia boss. He is a real working person with real
cares and concerns. The biplay between a relati
vely normal home lif
e,
family, kids' school concerns, discipline, disagreements with his wife,
bills, doctors, dentists, the works, and the totally unreal violent,
sickening 'day job' where he extorts, tortures and murders routinely is
slickly underplayed by both the director and Gandolfini. One of the things
that makes this series so good is the acting. Gandolfini is no
exception and as the overweight, semi-sensitive but hating it, highly stressed
don he really achieves something unusual in television soaps.

There we go. I got briefer towards the end.

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