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Totem effort
Writer: Phil Ford
Director: Ashley Way
THE ONE WHERE After visiting a local museum that is showcasing a gruesome totem pole, Clyde is hit by a curse which makes everyone hate him.
VERDICT One of Phil Ford’s very best Sarah Jane scripts uses a story about a curse to highlight the issues of both bullying and homelessness, and is an admirable addition to the SJA canon. The central conceit is a lot of fun, while at the same time being not a little heartbreaking: Clyde getting shunned by his friends and his mother is genuinely affecting, and Daniel Anthony’s performance is among his best, largely devoid of his usual quips. Episode two, in which he is befriended by down-and-out Ellie (Lily Loveless), offers an unnerving portrait of the world of the homeless, one “more alien to us” than other worlds, as Sarah Jane says. Other plusses are Sky becoming useful and likeable, and the surely long overdue use of a totem pole as a scary monster. Great work all round.
DID YOU SPOT? The spot. In the car scene in episode two where Rani and her dad are talking, Anjli Mohindra has a big white spot right between her eyebrows! It’s not there the next scene she’s in.
DID YOU SPOT 2? The bearskin stretched out in the museum looks a lot like Doctor Who ’s Cassandra when seen from a distance! I hit rewind just to check it wasn’t her.
IT’S WOTSERNAME! Mystic Mags is played by Angela Pleasence, daughter of Donald, and genre veteran in the shape of Doctor Who (she was Queen Elizabeth in “The Shakespeare Code”), Amicus’s From Beyond The Grave , Dr Terrible’s House Of Horrible and many others.
BEST LINE
Clyde: “You tried to ruin my life, to take away everything and everyone that was important to me. Well I’m a survivor and you failed, you big plank!”
Russell Lewin
