Scott Matthewman

• 15/05/05 updated to cover up to episode 8 (Father’s Day)
• 18/05/05 updated to cover the first three Ninth Doctor novels
• 28/05/05 updated to cover up to episode 10 (The Doctor Dances)
• 08/06/05 updated to cover episode 11 (Boom Town)

Something that’s really setting the Doctor Who fan community alight are continued references, at roughly one per episode, to a “Bad Wolf”. Quite what these repeated comments are referring to is a complete mystery — albeit one that’s destined to become clear in the penultimate episode of the series, which it has now been announced is also called “Bad Wolf”.

So far, we’ve seen or heard the following:

1. In Rose, the Nestene Consciousness quite clearly shrieks the words “Bad Wolf!” as the Tardis is revealed (the Doctor says it has recognised the Tardis as “superior technology”). (now discredited)
2. In The End of the World, the Moxx of Balhoon mentions to the Face of Boe that they are facing “the Bad Wolf scenario”.
3. In The Unquiet Dead, psychic scullery maid Gwyneth tells Rose that she’s seen the darkness in her mind — “the big bad wolf”.
4. In Aliens of London, a young boy tags the Tardis with the words “BAD WOLF” in white paint.
5. In World War Three, the American newsreader is identified as Mal Loup — at least, on the website version (requires RealPlayer). I can’t see such identification on the broadcast version.
6. In Dalek, the call sign of Van Statten’s helicopter is identified as “Bad Wolf One”.
7. In The Long Game, The Face of Boe announces his pregnancy on Bad Wolf TV (see More Bad Wolf sightings).
8. In Father’s Day, the words “BAD WOLF” reappear in graffiti form — this time on a poster promoting a rave (Energize, to be held on 20 November 1987).
9. In The Empty Child, there was nothing overt at all — although many people (including the myriad people who continually impress me with their theories in the comments to this post) have compared the Doctor and Nancy’s conversation in the railway yard to the “what a big nose you have” conversation wit the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood.
10. In The Doctor Dances, Captain Jack rides a WWII bomb, Doctor Strangelove-style, that has “Schlechter Wolf” (the first word’s obscured by his oh-so-manly-thigh — but confirmation arrive courtesy of Mickey and UNIT).
11. In Boom Town, the nuclear power station planned for the centre of Cardiff is called “Drwg Blaidd” — Welsh for ‘bad wolf’. We have the first on-screen acknowledgement of the fact that those words have been following the Doctor and Rose around for some time. The Doctor laughs it off as “just coincidence” — but is it?

In addition, the supporting websites that the BBC has been creating to tie in with the series have added their own references. After the events of World War Three, Mickey (new webmaster of Who is Doctor Who?) tell us:

When he said goodbye, The Doctor gave me a disc. He said it contained a virus that would wipe him from the internet.

Thing is: I can’t bring myself to use it.

You see, he’s off, making another decision for us, all “I’m the big bad wolf and it’s way past your bedtime.” Well, I don’t think so. Not this time.

It’s enough for us all that I’ve got the virus. On CD. And I’m ready to use it. If he really is that dangerous. (link).

This week, the Geocomtex site, promoting the products and services of the company headed by Van Statten in Dalek, lists as one of its products:

• Node Stabilised (Lupus and Nocens variants)

Of course, lupus is Latin for ‘wolf’ — and ‘nocens’, while more properly meaning ‘harmful’ or ‘injurious’, can also be translated as just plain ‘bad’.

The latest version of the main Doctor Who website, to support Saturday’s episode, The Long Game, includes in the bottom right-hand corner a picture of a wolf. Click on it, and the word badwolf appears many times over.

And now, with the publication of the first three in a (hopefully long) line of Ninth Doctor novels, the habit continues:

• In The Clockwise Man, the Doctor is accused of turning up “like a bad wolf”.
• In The Monsters Inside, Rose and her friend are trapped in a spaceship cockpit as the alien pilot bangs at the locked door, “like the big bad wolf”.
• In Winner Takes All, Mickey’s front room is littered with video games, including one called Bad Wolf.

So who, or what, is the Bad Wolf? Haven’t got a diddly’s, to be honest. There’s much debate amongst fans old and new. Some think it’s the Doctor, some think Rose. Is it a foe that has been seen in the series so far, and is set to return in episode 12? And how does all this fit into the other story thread this series — that of the Time War that seems to have wiped out all Time Lords but the Doctor, and all Daleks but the one that was purchased by Van Statten?

The name “bad wolf” has proven to be a genius move. It evokes memories of the scariest fairy tales — the Big Bad Wolf huffing and puffing down the houses of the three Little Pigs; the wolf eating, and taking the place of, Red Riding Hood’s grandmother. Echoes of both of those stories can also be seen at various points in the series (Rose, when we first meet her, is wearing a red hooded top; the Slitheen decoy is a pig; Nancy’s deconstruction of Christopher Eccleston’s face is, besides being the right side of insulting to be funny, an echo of Little Red Riding Hood’s “what big eyes you have” conversation with the wolf (thanks, all our commenters!)).

I’m looking forward to finding out just where this is going. If I was to put my money on anything, though, it’d be that there are reasons that neither Rose nor the Doctor yet know of for the references continually cropping up: maybe the ‘huffing’ and ‘puffing’ of a third, as yet unnamed, enemy in the Time War (an enemy that has already caused the destruction of the Dalek and Time Lord houses) is causing ripples throughout space and time such that the phrase crops up subconsciously in myriad places.

Time, as they say, will tell.

Last night, ITV1 soap opera Coronation Street said goodbye to Ray Langton, Deidre Barlow’s first husband, as he lost his battle against stomach cancer.

Langton (played by Neville Buswell) left the soap in 1978, reappearing earlier this year. He told Deirdre and their daughter, Tracey, that he’d been living in Holland all that time. But there’s something he didn’t tell them…

For a brief period circa 1997, he was working as a waiter in a Las Vegas hotel. In the straight-to-video spin-off “Coronation Street - Viva Las Vegas!”, he bumped into Vera Duckworth, who was there with her husband Jack. This being Corrie, however, it wasn’t quite as simple as that — Jack and Vera had rowed, after Jack revealed that he’d faked his age on their wedding certificate, invalidating it and rendering the last forty years of their marriage void.

Viva Las Vegas is, with enough cheap plonk inside you, a bit of a laugh. Never designed to be shown on television, the script (by a then unknown hack by the name of Russell T Davies) is full of knowing winks for fans of the soap. From Maxine Heavey bursting into a spontaneous, badly dubbed version of Happenin’ All Over Again (a one-hit wonder for Maxine’s alter ego, actress Tracey Shaw), Liz Dawn directly addressing the camera and some cracking jokes (when Vera discovers she and Jack are not legally wed, she wonders aloud what that makes their son, Terry. “I suppose,” answers Jack, “it makes it official…”), the high points outweigh some crass stereotyping and more ludicrous plotlines than have ever been seen in the broadcast show.

The absolute highlight, though, is the reunion between Ray and Vera — more accurately, Vera’s recap of what’s been going on in the Street since he left. As Jack sits in another bar, complaining about how dull his life is, Vera goes into full flow with the hope of impressing her new American friend, Biddy Baxter:

Well, it’s called a Street; it’s more of a crescent — an avenue, really. I mean, it’s very upmarket, isn’t that right (sly wink to Ray)? … Well, I own it now, you know, the Rovers… mind you, we’re lucky it’s still standing. Just after you left, 79 was it (“78.”) Oh, right… Deirdre left Tracey outside the Rovers, you know, in a pram. All hell breaks loose ‘cause this lorry drove straight through the windows. Buried Tracey under two ton of planks. Well, it didn’t really, because she’d been kidnapped two seconds before… That’s only the start — you wouldn’t believe what’s happened since you’ve been gone…

[Deirdre] married a Moroccan, she’s Mrs Rachid now. Well, she was, because he went to give Tracey a kidney, only he’d no choice, ‘cause he died… Nobody knows, it’s a mystery. Very hush-hush.

And Emily Bishop, d’you remember her? You think Ernie’d being shot’d be enough, but no, she goes and marries Arnold Swain, who turns out to be a bigamist. Then he tries to take her in a suicide pact — well, me and Ivy were very upset.

Alan Bradley tried to murder Rita Fairclough… but he got killed by a Blackpool tram.

All of which, apart from the avenue bit, was true — yes, it’s hard to imagine now, but Jack and Vera did briefly own the Rovers. Of course, Ray doesn’t believe a word — well, who would? — and in return, tells Vera that he got married in Amsterdam to a bloke called Raymond. They adopted three Vietnamese boat people and now he’s on the run from his evil twin.

The most unbelievable thing about it is that Vera didn’t breathe a word…

Last night, Jason and I (plus Jason’s friend Helen) went to an invitation screening of extracts from four films funded in part or in total by money from the National Lottery (either via the Film Council or the Arts Council for England). The screening is to become part of a future edition of ITV1’s current affairs programme, Tonight with Trevor McDonald, currently scheduled for Friday 19 November.

If any evidence was needed for the atrocious dumbing down of the ITV network’s current affairs output, last night provided more than enough. I have never witnessed such a brazenly manipulative attempt to wring the desired answer out of a group of volunteers masquerading as honest journalism.

We were given a large card ‘thumb’ each with which to vote after seeing the first 15 minutes of each film. Our voting was, we were directed, to be conducted along the following lines:

• Thumbs up if we would like to see more of the film, and we thought it deserved Lottery funding.
• Thumbs down if we didn’t want to see more of the film, and we thought it didn’t deserve funding.

As you can see, two distinct and unrelated opinions were being deliberately conflated. The only way you can justify doing so is if you take it as read that the only films deserving funding are ones that you yourself would enjoy. That’s not necessarily true. A number of us said so in various ways during the Q&A sessions after each film clip, but it will be interesting to see how much remains in the edited programme.

If I sound sceptical about the production team’s editing, it’s not without cause, I fear. After the second of the four films (Scottish Walter Mitty/Amelie wannabe, Janice Beard), presenter Jonathan Maitland asked for volunteers from the audience to talk about the film — requesting two people who had voted thumbs up, and two who had given the thumbs down. After recording two positive comments and one negative one, the team moved on to a woman in the front row who had voted negatively. She gave the quite reasonable comment that it wasn’t the sort of film that did anything for her, and quite possibly wouldn’t have gone to see it at the cinema. However, she said, she didn’t have any objection to it receiving Lottery funding, because it would encourage diversity and experience within the British film-making industry.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Maitland answered her comments with a brusque, “Thanks. Anybody else who voted ‘thumbs down’ want to say anything?” The implication was clear: that wasn’t the sort of reasonable comment they were looking for.

The third film received a unanimous thumbs-up from the audience; hardly surprising, since it was the critical and commercial success, Touching The Void. Maitland expressed surprise that the UK Film Council only funded that film to the tune of £350,000 when, say, Sex Lives of the Potato Men got £1 million. That, to my mind, betrays his lack of understanding of several points:

• documentaries - even those with dramatic reconstructions, such as Touching the Void - will have fewer overheads than a film which by its nature requires a larger cast, multiple locations, and all the ancillary costs that go with a full-scale drama;
• Touching the Void had its funding ‘topped up’ by the UK Film Council after arranging funding from third parties (Film Four);
• when this film was in the planning and funding stage, documentary feature films were not enjoying the resurgence they’ve seen recently (and of which Touching the Void has been a part) — meaning that any funding would have been considered a potentially greater risk.

There are always questions to ask about state subsidy of the arts, whether directly from Government coffers or via revenue generated by the National Lottery. However, I get the distinct impression that Tonight with Trevor McDonald won’t be asking them.

Out of interest, the National Lottery has distributed £16 billion of funding over the last 10 years through its various endowment bodies. In contrast, the UK Film Council has an estimated spend of just £60 million (PDF) each year. Just a small portion of that (£17m) is invested directly in feature film production (counting the Development Fund, Premiere Fund and the New Cinema Fund).

It will be interesting to see if Tonight mentions that its report is concerned with just 1% of annual Lottery spending. From what I’ve experienced, though, I doubt it.

Out of interest, the four films from which we were shown footage were:

• Sex Lives of the Potato Men
• Janice Beard 45wpm
• Touching the Void
• Body Song

Body Song is also available in an interactive form online (requires Shockwave).

I can’t believe that Strictly Come Dancing hasn’t been setting the blogging world alight. It’s one of those love-it-or-hate-it shows that denies people the opportunity of ambivalence. I have to admit that, in the last couple of weeks, it’s promoted itself to “unmissable” in our household.

Whether it’s the public’s unfailing saving of Chris Parker despite his being by far the weakest dancer, or the rumoured (and occasionally hinted at on screen) rivalry between some of the female celebrity contestants, there’s always been something worth tuning in for. And recently, the quality of the dancing has jumped to new levels — just brilliant. Even Parker, normally content to play the fool and ride on public sympathy, actually put in the effort this week and produced two competent, if not particularly professional, dances. If only he’d given that commitment at the start of the series, he’d have deserved his place in the final.

And as for Strictly Come Dancing on THREE - if BAFTA decided to create an award for Best Supporting Programme on a Digital Channel, SCDOT has taken the BBLB format and kicked it up a gear. I hated Justin Lee Collins when I first heard him on Xfm — mainly because he had four hours on a Saturday afternoon talking about women’s “norks” when Kevin Greening only had two (with, thankfully, norks not being the subject of his shows). Now, though, I love him. He may be the bastard child of Silent Bob and Jennifer Aniston, but that doesn’t stop him from being one of the most watchable presenters on British television at the moment. Tonight’s samba with Paul ‘Killer’ Killick had me in sheer hysterics, topped only by JLC’s attempt to conduct an interview immediately afterwards while still hyperventilating.

SCDOT’s weekday shows, which I normally miss due to my commuting tendencies, will be hitting the Sky+ box in this, its final week. Next week’s final on BBC1 should prove unmissable…

BBC Television’s latest foray into costume drama is to be another adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, reports MediaGuardian.co.uk.

In a move that shows a spark of imagination, it’s going to be packaged into short half-hour segments, in an attempt to recreate the suspense of the original serial publication of Dickens’ works.

In a move that shows no imagination whatsoever, Andrew “show me a bodice and I’ll rip it” Davies is doing the adaptation.

Is there really no-one left on this planet capable of adapting period novels for today’s market?

As a new West End musical, Thoroughly Modern Millie has already quite a reputation to keep to. Descended from a multi-Oscar winning movie and a winner of 6 Tony Awards on Broadway, Amanda Holden plays Millie, a young girl who comes from Kansas to New York City in the Roaring Twenties. Not content with working her way up the career ladder, she resolves to be utterly modern in her approach - and marry a millionaire, even if she doesn’t love him.

Of course, as is the way with these things, nothing quite goes to plan, but everything sorts itself before the final curtain. As with all musicals of this type, the plot is paper-thin, serving only to act as a line upon which the big musical numbers are hung. And it’s these numbers which are the show’s biggest joys, and it biggest failings.

For the Broadway show, Dick Scanlan and Jeanine Tesori created several new songs, supplementing them with others appropriated from various sources. Among the latter collection are the film’s unforgettable theme song, written by James van Heusen and the incomparable Sammy Cahn, a balletic speakeasy sequence with a jazzy riff on Tchaikovsky, and a lovably demented version of the Al Jolson classic “Mammy” in surtitled Cantonese. There’s also a wonderful scene as Millie tries out for the job as a stenographer, as Graydon (played with the right degree pompous charm by Craig Urbani) dictates at faster and faster speeds. If it doesn’t quite sound like it fits in with the rest of the score, it’s little wonder - it’s adapted from a Gilbert & Sullivan piece, with all the tongue-twisting literary wordplay one would expect.

Against such a collection of great numbers, the original songs suffer greatly. They’re not bad, just not as great. Cameo appearances in a party scene by George and Ira Gershwin, brought in for one of the weakest jokes in the script, merely serve to highlight the deficiencies of Scanlan and Tesori’s work. This doesn’t stop a fine cast giving them their all - with Sheila Ferguson as the sultry Muzzy van Hossmere and Maureen Lipman (playing the landlady-cum-slave trader Mrs Meers with the most bizarre Chinese accent since Peter Ustinov’s Charlie Chan) particularly deserving of praise.

It’s Holden’s performance that glues the show together. When allowed to express its full range, her voice is simply breathtaking. Combined with the killer combination of virtue and vixen, as well as an adept display of comic timing, one can hardly fault her casting. The only downside is that, in some of the more complex dance routines, she did look as though she was concentrating on getting her moves spot-on to the detriment of her character. Hopefully that can be put down to first week nerves, for once noticed, it’s almost impossible to appreciate the breathtaking precision of the relaxed, happy dancers because all you can notice is a rictus grin on the leading actress.

An unimaginative set (save for the hotel elevator driven by the power of tap-dance) serves as a backdrop to some glorious costumes and some finer acting. As the characters are propelled to their happily predictable endings (apart from one, ever-so-slightly-gay, coupling), you won’t feel overly moved, but you will feel happy - and wanting to insert the term “Bo do-de oh” into everyday conversation just to see if anyone notices.

• Originally published by Gay.com UK

There are, it’s sometimes said, only seven plots in existence. If that’s true, one of them - love across the divide - is epitomised by Romeo and Juliet. It’s the classic tale not only of enemies being lovers, but of children being thrust into the violent, bloody, tragic world of adulthood before their time.

Writer/director Joe Calarco’s new adaptation, transferring from New York for a limited run at the Arts Theatre, accentuates the theme of premature adulthood by relocating the drama to an American boarding school with more than a little echo of Dead Poets Society.

Four schoolboys rebel from days full of confession, conjugation and social etiquette by reading some proscribed Shakespeare after lights out. Starting by finding innuendo in many of the lines (admittedly not a difficult thing with the Bard), things take a more serious turn with the first fight scene, and even more so with the first appearance of Juliet. Not for this all-male production a simpering thirteen-year-old: while the initial appearances of the nurse and mother start off as camp pastiches, when the ‘heroine’ arrives there’s a sign that these four students are beginning to take their roles more seriously.

What follows has all the promise of an intense studio performance: with minimal props (a couple of chairs, a book and a bolt of red silk) and the bare minimum of cast, there are some extremely powerful scenes - but it’s Shakespeare rather than Calarco we have to thank for those. While the framing device of having a quartet of schoolboys perform the play throws some extra frisson into the developing passion of the star cross’d lovers (are they acting? Or are the two pupils developing feelings for each other?) there are all too many times where the framing device intrudes.

While all four actors (Matthew Sincell, Jason Michael Spelbring, Jeremy Beck and Jason Dubin) never break from character, their characters themselves do. By necessity, when ‘Romeo’ and ‘Juliet’ face opprobrium from their fellow students after their romance is discovered, the same actors have to shift from being disgusted with them to being their best friends in a trice.

The play-within-a-play setting, the theme of loves discovered at night, of identities assumed and discarded, don’t sit well with the intrinsic tragedy of possibly the most tragic of all plays. They’d be far more suitable for A Midsummer Night’s Dream - indeed, throughout Shakespeare’s R+J there are allusions to the latter, including a well-realised reworking of Puck’s ‘if we shadows have offended’ epilogue. Strip the artifice away, though, and you would have the makings of a truly great play - a contemporary-dress, all-male, minimal-cast telling of the fearful passage of a death-mark’d love.

Now that would be a play worth seeing.

• Originally published by Gay.com UK

It’s been a long time coming, but it looks like we’re finally on the road to having legally recognised relationships between gay or lesbian couples.

The Government’s Women and Equality Unit, part of the Department of Trade and Industry, today unveiled its white paper, Civil Partnership: A framework for the legal recognition of same-sex couples. The consultation document outlines how the Government sees gay and lesbian couples’ rights being safeguarded and extended until they match those of married straight couples.

Under the proposals, which will affect England and Wales (with some knock-on effects in Scotland and Northern Ireland), couples would have to sign a civil partnership register, to be kept and maintained by the same council register offices that currently handle marriages. The bad news for anybody who’s signed one of the non-legally binding registers local councils have instigated around the country is that you’ll have to go through it all again: none of these registers will automatically get promoted to legal status. Which is a good thing, as there are so many rights and responsibilities attached to partnerships that we shouldn’t assume everybody who wanted to sign a decorative piece of paper would be happy signing one with strings attached. For those that do, however, there’ll be another license fee to pay.

The full document stretches to nearly 90 pages, and covers most of the common areas that we think of when discussing the disparities between married, straight couples and gay couples. But it also dispels some of the myths. For all the talk about ‘next-of-kin’ rights, particularly when one partner is taken ill, there is no such thing as the ‘next of kin’ in law. The paper notes that this causes much confusion, both for patients, their relatives and hospital staff. The Government are going to ensure guidance notes to NHS staff take account of same-sex relationships, but that’s not something that has to wait for a change in the law to take place.

Another issue the paper tackles head-on are people’s concerns that unmarried opposite-sex couples also have concerns over their own rights (the common perception of “common law”, like that of next of kin, being false). Quite correctly, in my view, it believes that the needs of unmarried couples, regardless of gender, are an entirely separate legal issue.

Whether it’s prison visiting rights, parental responsibility, or your rights should your partner die, basically if it’s available automatically to married couples, it will also be available to registered couples. The similarities extend to break-ups — dissolution of a civil partnership could end up as costly, both financially and emotionally, as divorce, and in exactly the same ways.

Indeed, most of the ramifications of a civil partnership scheme boil down to the same thing: money. If you and partner register your relationship, the state will assume that you pool your incomes and calculate benefit entitlements accordingly – just as they do for straight couples who marry.

One major difference will be in state pensions. Everything about this area of the law moves incredibly slowly. At the moment, current pension law is some of the most sexist legislation we have, dating back to the times when the husband went out and earned the pennies, while the wife stayed at home sprouting kids and cooking everybody’s dinner. Thankfully, that’s changing, but it means that gay and lesbian registered couples will only start achieving parity with married partners in 2010, with full equality across the board only achieved once state retirement ages equalise between men and women in 2020.

To all intents and purposes, the state will recognise you for what you probably already regard yourself – a family. Indeed, it’s incredibly gratifying to read the statement: “The Government proposes that registered partners should be treated as a single family unit.” None of this “pretended family relationship” nonsense that Section 28 tried to saddle us with: we’re real, we’re families. And about time, too.

• Originally published on Gay.com UK

The death of 21-year old Wyoming student Matthew Shepard shocked America and the world. Beaten up by two youths, he was taken to the outskirts of town, tied to a fence and beaten mercilessly until the only part of him that was not covered in blood were the tracks of tears down his face. He died in hospital six days later, on October 12 1998.

The event rocked the small town of Laramie where Matt and his murderers grew up. For a while, the nation’s — indeed the world’s — eyes were upon a town with less than 25,000 residents. As part of the analysis, playwright Moisés Kaufman and a group of actors from this company, the Tectonic Theater Project went to Laramie and conducted interviews with the townsfolk. Out of those conversations came the play The Laramie Project, an adaptation both of the transcripts and the process of acquiring them.

As a stage piece, I’ve always felt the play was fundamentally flawed — with a small ensemble cast, each having to take on multiple roles, the mechanics of theatre tend to overshadow the horrors of the reality the cast attempt to portray. This was one of the main faults of the recent London performance, powerful as it was. And so, it was with some trepidation that I sat down to watch the film version, now available on VHS and DVD (to rent, and to buy from 7 July 2003).

The film was selected to open the 2002 Sundance Festival, and from its opening frames it’s easy to see that the medium of film has transformed the stage play into something far superior.

The play’s director Moisés Kaufman again takes the helm, making his debut into the world of film direction. Apart from two of the original Theater Project actors (who play themselves), each character is portrayed by a different actor or actress. This makes for a far more believable experience as a viewer, requiring less suspension of disbelief. Financial backing from US cable channel HBO means that the cast consists of some of the cream of American acting talent. The impressive roll call of actors includes Christina Ricci as a friend of Matthew; Janeane Garofalo as the first out lesbian professor at the University of Wyoming; Steve Buscemi as a car service driver who took Shepard to a gay bar in Colorado; Joshua Jackson as the bartender who served Shepard the night he met Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, the men who murdered him; and Amy Madigan as the police officer who was first on the murder scene.

Shot in a documentary style, Kaufman intercuts reconstructed events with his expanded acting troupe with genuine news reports surrounding the aftermath of Matthew’s death. Unlike the play, the lives of the residents of Wyoming comes to the fore, and the actors collecting the interviews become less of a focal point, which is as it should be. While it’s always apparent that these are actors working to a script — the speeches are all too measured, too contemplative, to convince anyone that they’re watching a documentary — there is not one performance that is anything less than solid. Special praise has to go to Madigan’s police chief, as she learns that her desperation to help the blood-soaked Matthew had left her exposed to the AIDS virus after hearing that Shepard was HIV-positive; also to Jackson’s barman, who plays exactly the right level of self-deprecating humour that shines through from the original transcript. James Murtaugh also puts in a chilling performance as the hate-filled Reverend Fred Phelps, who led his church into protesting at Shepard’s funeral and who has organised numerous protests at stagings of the play and the film ever since.

Not even the hardest of hearts could sit through this film with a dry eye. It is a powerhouse of a film that will leave you mourning someone you never knew, and determined to ensure that nobody receives the same fate as the young man that the world took into their hearts.

In the US (and, in a few weeks’ time, on Sky One here in the UK), Buffy: The Vampire Slayer will be hanging up the stakes and garlic for the last time, as the series reaches the end of its seven-year run. It’s generally perceived as going out on a high, with its final season garnering much critical acclaim. US site PlanetOut.com described it as “the gayest show on television”, and is picking out a fetching funeral outfit for the final episode later this month.

For UK terrestrial viewers, though, who are one year behind, the series is coming to the end of a much more difficult batch of episodes.

The sixth season of Buffy was a tortuous period in the series’ history. On screen, Buffy Summers was brought back from the dead by her friends, who later discovered they’d not rescued her from hell, but wrenched her from heaven. Rupert Giles gave up sunny California for his native rain-drenched West Country England. Xander and Anya bored everyone with their marriage plans for most of the season, before it all ended in tears at the altar with not a single vow exchanged. But most heinous of all, Tara Maclay - beautiful, shy, funny, bewitching, lesbian Tara - was killed.

It was that last action that many fans found hard to take. Amber Benson’s character, introduced a season and a half earlier, had become an instant favourite since her first appearance in the near-silent episode, Hush. Not initially conceived as a lesbian character, the chemistry between Benson and Alyson Hannigan as Willow was so electric from their very first scene together that the characters were soon an on-screen item. Willow’s growing discovery of her own sexuality, her coming out to both ex-boyfriend Oz and her larger group of friends, was handled deftly and sensitively in a manner that earned production company Mutant Enemy much praise.

As Willow and Tara’s relationship blossomed throughout the series’ fifth season, Amber and Alyson became the American darlings of the gay press. Any criticism of the series’ handling of the relationship was mild, and aimed at the sometimes comedic presentation of Willow’s coming out (in Triangle, she herself describes her orientation as “gay now”, while a robot replica of Buffy summarised the character’s sexuality in an on-screen caption as GAY: 1999-PRESENT). Generally, most people were simply happy that two regular characters in the same show could not only both be gay, but be shown having a loving, intimate and sexually charged relationship. In American television, Willow and Tara were unique.

Even in the troubled season six, the couple were still setting the screen alight, despite fractures in the relationship based on Willow’s over-reliance on magic. In the much-vaunted musical episode Once More, With Feeling (available on DVD, audio CD, script book and probably tea-towel by the time you read this), Tara sings the standout song of the episode, I’m Under Your Spell, about how bewitched she is by her girlfriend (ironically, unaware that she really is bewitched, as Willow has cast a spell to ensure her girlfriend does not remember an argument they had the previous episode). The song ends with Tara floating over the couple’s double bed in what seems to be orgasmic delight. The top of Willow’s head can be seen doing something further down Tara’s body - it doesn’t take much to guess what.

As Willow’s deception is uncovered, the couple break up, and stay apart for the rest of the season. In the episode Seeing Red (to be broadcast today, 8 May, on BBC2 at 6:45pm), the couple finally reconcile and spend pretty much all of the episode making up for lost time in bed. In the last few minutes, though, a stray bullet aimed at someone else fells Tara at her girlfriend’s feet.

That fans of the show, of the character and of the actress were upset at Tara’s death comes as no surprise. That the upset spilled over into anger and fury aimed at the show’s makers, though, took producers Mutant Enemy completely by surprise. But was it justified?

Tara’s death can certainly be justified dramatically. It propels Willow down a very dark path in her grief that shapes the concluding episodes of the season, and sends her character on an arc that continues until the series’ end a year later. In terms of character development, it can also be argued that Tara didn’t have anywhere else to go. Apart from one spell gone awry in season five, she was practically perfect in every way - acting as a surrogate mother not only for Buffy’s sister, Dawn, when she was left without anyone else to look after her, but also for the rest of the gang. And while that sort of emotional stability is something that most of us hope for in real life, in terms of television drama it becomes stale very easily.

While the series’ previous big death, that of Buffy’s mother Joyce, had been far more emotionally charged a year previously, the fact that Tara was gay threw the situation into a much more complex light. As author Keith Topping, writer of the critically acclaimed Slayer series of episode guides, noted, “the amount of Internet bandwidth used to discuss the possible subtexts surrounding Tara’s death… could have filled Wembley Stadium.”

In a series of blunt and frank essays, the first of which is entitled It’s Not Homophobia, But That Doesn’t Make It Right, former television writer Robert A Black argued that to kill off one of the only lesbian characters on television, only for the surviving partner to go on a homicidal rampage, conjured “images of the many dead and evil lesbian characters that have appeared on American TV and movie screens before. For Mutant Enemy to have placed these images on the screen and not expected viewers to hearken back to the homophobic stories of the past is as naïve as if they had placed a swastika on the screen and expected the viewers to think it signified good luck.”

Even critics such as Black acknowledge that the course of Tara and Willow’s relationship had, up until that point, been incredibly positive for the gay community as a whole. “Today, there are several gay and lesbian characters on American TV, but none of them are in a steady long-running relationship,” he wrote. “The fact that Willow and Tara were together was what made them unique. The relationship was greater than the two characters individually, because together they gave the gay community something it could find nowhere else.”

Topping agrees. “Willow and Tara, whether by accident or design, have been positive role models to gay people everywhere,” he writes in Slayer: The Next Generation, which covers Season Six and the fallout over the character’s death in some detail. “They’ve shown that you don’t have to hide your sexuality or to be an outsider, that ridicule and homophobia are products of ignorance.”

But, as Black notes, when you can count regular gay or lesbian couples on television not on one hand but on one finger, killing one half of that relationship carries a far greater impact than any death of a straight character could ever do. “It can be difficult for the heterosexual community to understand how important it is to see one’s self reflected onscreen. It’s so common for heterosexuals that we take it for granted, often to the point where we don’t even think it matters at all. But to a marginalized segment of the population, where there is a constant feeling that one’s very existence is being denied, that onscreen reflection can be priceless.”

The most eloquent critics of the decision to kill Tara are at pains not to label the show’s producers as homophobic. “A group of homophobic writers and producers could never have given the world the Willow/Tara relationship in the first place, and there’s no reason to assume that they have all suddenly turned homophobic now,” says Black. “On the other hand, even if Mutant Enemy didn’t intend to tell a homophobic story, they were still capable of placing a homophobic image on the screen.”

The argument gains strength given the juxtaposition of Tara and Willow’s make-up shagging with the death straight afterwards. Buffy has always portrayed sex and death as being metaphors for one another: the ‘siring’ of a new vampire has always carried strong sexual overtones, and when Buffy herself lost her virginity to Angel (a vampire whose soul had been returned to him) he reverted to the ultra-evil serial killer he had been in centuries past. But in a series where death is generally no hindrance to continued appearance in the series, redemption has generally always been on offer — at least, as long as you’re straight.

The only other recurring gay character in the series at this point had been Larry, a high school student who was one of two killed during the climax to the series’ third season. The other victim, high school bitch princess Harmony, became a vampire herself and popped up on numerous occasions. For the gay characters to be the only ones denied any chance of redemption, it can be argued, sends a terrible message to the audience — a message that may be unintentional, but is no less damaging for it: sex is bad, but gay sex is worse. Producer David Fury admitted in an interview in May 2002 that “in retrospect, I can see the cliché. That was not our intent. We wanted to show them together and happy. It created the impression in a lot of people’s minds that [Tara’s] death was linked to them having sex.”

The show’s producers, especially series creator Joss Whedon, say that the negative reaction to the loss of Tara from the show took them by surprise. “It was an episode that was clearly about male violence and dominance,” Whedon told E! Online, “and suddenly I’m a gay basher.”

In America (and for satellite viewers in the UK), a year’s worth of episodes have gone by since the events of Seeing Red. Willow’s still gay — and making the faltering steps back into coupledom with new girlfriend Kennedy. While played almost completely played for laughs, Tom Lenk’s Andrew Wells brings the total of recurring gay characters by the series’ end to three — which is three more than most TV series have ever achieved.

Amber Benson will be missed from television screens both sides of the Atlantic. Not only because there’s one less positive gay character, but also because she’s of normal build, with a curvaceous beauty that is so rare in an industry where most actresses can only succeed if they’re genetically cross-bred with a stick insect. Still, her own career now has some great opportunities ahead. She has written and directed an acclaimed film, Chance, and is co-author (with Christopher Golden) of the remarkable animated series The Ghosts of Albion for BBCi’s website. And thanks to DVD and video, Tara and Willow can remain together for as long as we need them to be.

• Originally published on Gay.com UK (original article no longer available)