Cosby, the Freak, and the House of Milan: When is sexual assault not sexual assault?

IS sexual assault by a celebrity the new normal? Must we all now have tales of molestation by famous faces from the past?

Cult gay icon Maggie Kirkpatrick (famous for her role as Joan "The Freak" Ferguson in Prisoner) was convicted of historical child sex assault charges last week, whilst the Bill Cosby rape show continues to play out. Meanwhile, vlogger Stahr Milan has been accused of "molesting" Tahj and King Milan. In their case, the term "molest" has been used to calculated effect; Stahr was the "gay mother" to "children" Tahj and King; these young gay men are holding onto their identity as "children" as if their lives depend on it. But they are no more children than Stahr Milan is a mother.

With huge fanbases, Kirkpatrick and Cosby have benefited from vocal, vociferous defense. And not just from their fans; questioning minds might wonder how anyone could be found guilty of a sexual assault, committed in 1984, and on a psychiatric patient. When the evidence amounts to my word against yours, you have to wonder. Or is it guilt by association a factor? Is Maggie Kirkpatrick guilty because Rolf Harris got away with it for so long? Nevertheless, a jury decided that was the case. Another jury might have decided something else. In the case of Cosby, we hear fewer and fewer voices raised to defend him. In part, this is because so many in the black community hated him even before the allegations came to light. Like Kirkpatrick's, his alleged crimes are also of a historical nature, but the statute of limitations means he can't be tried. There are those who would say that is right and just. Can you remember what you were doing in the '80s (assuming you'd even been born)? How about the 1960s? Veteran Coronation Street actor William Roache faced a lengthy and humiliating trial for crimes allegedly committed fifty years ago. He was found not guilty. How about former British Prime Minister Edward Heath, who faces accusations of child sex abuse? He can't defend himself: he's dead.

The Cosby case is usually framed as a picture of a rich and powerful man taking advantage of defenseless women. I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that, as much as the rich and powerful man part might be true, it's also true to say that rich and powerful men (and women) attract a certain type, people who might play with fire because they hope to get something out of it for themselves. Well, guess what, if you play with fire, sometimes you get burned. Some might say that cashing in 20 or 30 years later, with lucrative book deals and talk show appearances, is coming back for a second bite of the cherry.

The Cosby case casts a long shadow, and it's in its shadow the House of Milan saga blossomed. You can laugh at their self-appointed status as celebrities, but their claim to celebrity status isn't any less valid a claim than that of those these young gay men worship and emulate - the Kardashians and their ilk. In the court of public opinion (read: YouTube), Stahr Milan has been tried and convicted as a paedophile and a rapist. Depending upon whose account you believe, he was having sex with Tahj and King when he was 19-years-old, and they were 16-years-old. The insane babble of online commentators have cast him as a predatory old man (he's now 23-years-old) and the boys as innocent victims. Anyone who's seen one of King's YouTube videos - or his Instagram account - might find that hard to swallow: the boy makes Nicki Minaj look like Mother Theresa. It could well be that Stahr was an older boy who used his position as top dog - or "gay mother" - to get what he wanted. But it's hard not to form the impression that what actually happened was three gay teenage boys, living together unsupervised by responsible adults, ended up having sex, consensually, with two of them doing so (at least in part) in exchange for favours.

When we read about sexual assault and accusations of rape, we're encouraged to think in terms of predatory perpetrators and innocent victims, but often there's more to the tale than meets the eye.

I condone myself with professionalism

WHAT
I watched

LAST NIGHT
EVERY GREAT FILM SHOULD SEEM NEW EVERY TIME YOU SEE IT

Saturday Night At The Baths

To understand the Conservative voting, heteronormative gay male of today, we must first understand the "predatory homosexual" of yesteryear. That grotesque stereotype of the feared and loathed homosexual is present in writer/director David Buckley's fascinating 1975 film Saturday Night At The Baths. But Buckley (who's straight) comes with good intentions, and his film is a brave one.

It's clear the director is straight, because of the prolonged straight sex scene at the beginning of the film. In fairness, there's also a (shorter) gay sex scene towards the end, featuring the beautiful Don Scotti, an actual employee of the Baths who has since disappeared off the face of the earth. If you're buying the film, take care to purchase the uncut director's cut, and not the earlier butchered release, which saw the gay sex scene cut.

This story from New York's infamous Continental Baths, shot forty years ago, ain't perfect. Its low budget shows, and the performances are straight out of the porn school of acting. But it's a fascinating, pre-AIDS time capsule of a New York long since disappeared, and worth seeing for the incredible Beyond The Fringe drag show alone.

RuPaul's Drag Race

S7 Ep14 - Reunited!

Is the mask slipping, Ru? There has been muttering about this year's season having been below par, but to me it seemed like business as usual. The big success was Untucked's much-needed facelift; this stripped back version was more intimate, more real, and a demonstration of that old adage "less is more".

Early on in the season, it really did feel like Aryan Airlines, with a gaggle of young, pretty white boys I could barely tell apart. And it seemed inevitable that one of these commercially acceptable young white couture queens would win, but I was holding out for Kennedy Davenport and Ginger Minj. If I want skinny bitches doing fashion I'll watch America's Next Top Model, thanks. Let's hope next year's run is more diverse.

But back to RuPaul himself. "If you hear somebody talking about good vibes and letting it all hang out, run a mile," Captain Cook once said. I learned that lesson myself last year, when someone I looked up to and admired turned on me like a Cobra when I didn't toe the line. He, like RuPaul, is fond of preaching positivity, love and acceptance. The emphasis being on preaching, you understand.

But, in coming out in support of right wing bigot Katie Hopkins, RuPaul made a serious error, and this interview (in which he talks about apparently leaving a drowning man to die) is pretty disturbing, too. I guess there's only so much concealer can do for a girl...

Randy Blue

Dominic Santos & Austin Wilde

When I put together the biannual KAOS Top 30 Porn Star list earlier this year, I wasn't really aware of Dominic Santos. Had I witnessed his stunning clash with Austin Wilde, Santos would easily have been top ten material.

The Sword is calling it "the hottest scene of the year", but that's underselling it. In twenty years of porn watchin' (my first movie was Kristen Bjorn's Gangsters At Large. On VHS), I can recall just a handful (fistful?) of scenes that match the intensity of Wilde and Santos' pairing. This is intimate love making at its finest, and by the end of the scene, you're convinced the boys are going to move into a cute loft together in San Francisco. "We just started dating, like, what, six hours ago," Austin jokes in the post-coital interview. "The wedding invites go out next week."

Coronation Street

20th September 1989

I was a kid when I started watching Coronation Street in late '80s Northern Ireland, and a depressed, isolated teen when one of Australia's commercial broadcasters finally starting airing episodes from 1989, several years late, in the mid-90s. Those episodes were a reminder of a time of when I was happy, before I was uprooted for a new life in "the arse end of the world". I recorded the episodes on VHS, and watched them back, over and over. Sad, yes, but it was better than real life.

Thanks to the miracle of the internet (and the work of other "Corrie" devotees), most of those old episodes are now available to view on YouTube. And so I gave up watching the desperately sensationalist pap my favourite soap has degenerated into in recent years (a slow decline that began in the late '90s with the axing of several older actors, an increase in the number of episodes, and the end of rehearsal time) and returned to the exquisite characters of old, performed by actors who could flip from comedy to drama in the blink of an eye.

As painful as Corrie's decline is, there's still forty years worth of episodes to look back on. That's summed up in this 1989 episode, which saw Mike Baldwin's factory demolished. Walking away from the ruins, Phyllis (who has a voice like Harvey Fierstein) tells Percy, "That's why we've got us memories. That's what's permanent. And they can't knock them down, try as they like."

This episode also features Gail and "Poison" Ivy's epic row. "You still blame me for what happened to Brian," Gail spits. "May God forgive you, Gail," Ivy gasps. "Yes, well he might, but you never will," Gail hits back. Oh, gurrrl...

Whoever finds love beneath hurt and grief disappears into emptiness with a thousand new disguises

MASS

in

MOTION
IT'S A MAN'S WORLD AND YOU MEN CAN HAVE IT

Remember when the tram derailed from the viaduct and crashed into Coronation Street? Irwin Allen eat your heart out! Back then, you were startled by the shocking turn of events the soap had taken. But not half as startled as you are now by 24-year-old Jaye's epic proportions. "Only Labour will secure our basic human rights," Jaye says. "That's why I'll be voting Miliband in May!"

I'm so sorry I have to go

 W H A T   I   S A W   L A S T   N I G H T 

 Coronation Street 

LAST night, a transsexual committed suicide. Not only did it happen on Coronation Street, a soap, but the mainstream audience was distraught: this was one universally loved transsexual. 10 million tuned in to watch her slip away.

Hayley Cropper (Julie Hesmondhalgh) has been dying from terminal pancreatic cancer since last year, and as her illness progressed, she worried that she'd start to lose control and lapse back into being Harold, the man she once was. So Hayley decided that when things got really bad, she'd take control and end things on her terms. That moment came on Monday night (ITV, 9pm).

Hayley is a rare thing in soap these days, a genuinely lovely frump who's embarrassed by confrontation and nastiness, who would never have a tawdry affair, or have drunk slanging matches in the Rovers. She was a moral compass.

The actual moment of Hayley's death is genuinely shocking, a real punch in the guts, stripped of sentiment or melodrama. It's brutal, visceral; she takes a desperate gulp of a huge glass of meds and chokes. Her beloved Roy puts his hand out to help, but she bats it away, and keeps gulping. The camera abruptly jerks away from observing the act, mimicking the audience, many of whom will have averted their eyes. It's a truly awful moment of real life horror, and that's how it should be.

Not everyone watches soaps. Some people think it's beneath them, presumably preferring to watch more worthy things like BBC Parliament, or the opera. (Fewer still have an interest in transexuals.) But there's room for soap, and the opera. Hayley Cropper's death is a reward for those of us who do watch soap operas. It delivers the kind of impact you can only get from investing in a character not just for years, but for decades. The pared back production style still favoured by most British soap (except for the gaudy Hollyoaks) leaves all the work to the actors and the writers. There's no elaborate direction with fast cuts, or intrusive background music to distract us. Coronation Street and EastEnders have their faults (most of which can be put down to network demands for bigger and more frequent explosive stunts) but when they're at the top of their game, nothing else on TV - on either side of the Atlantic - comes close.

Dying on T.V.

Which T.V. death - fictional or behind-the-scenes - left you in pieces?

LATELY I'VE been catching up on NYPD Blue, now it's finally been released on DVD, and found myself gripped - and unexpectedly moved - by the death of Jimmy Smits' Bobby Simone. He takes five long, gruelling episodes to die. Not from a bullet in a shoot-out with some skells, or some other dramatic device, but from a nick on his gum after a trip to the dentist.

What follows is the painfully slow demise of an alpha-male detective, his physical collapse depicted in unrelenting, devastating detail. The hospital scenes are a perfect master-class in exactly how to get it right, stripped of the cliché we usually get on network T.V. What we're left with is a frightening, uncomfortably intimate, voyeuristic insight into a man's dying days. Initially, a junior (Latino) doctor deals openly and honestly with our traumatised couple, but an added frisson creeps in when a calculating WASP surgeon - who "talks down" to Bobby and Diane, vividly portrayed as working class Irish and Latino - tries to use the situation to his advantage.

The storyline is the most perfectly handled depiction of a character's death I've witnessed onscreen.

Over on Coronation Street, long-running transsexual character Hayley Cropper is dying from cancer. Hayley's portrayed with immense warmth and humanity by Julie Hesmondhalgh, and has been in the show since 1998, long enough for regular viewers to consider her an old friend. The trajectory is devastating: the routine check-up, further tests, the news that It's Not Good, the surgery that doesn't fix it... And then the death sentence. Yeah, I cried a little when consultant told the uncomprehending couple that palliative care was Hayley's only option. By dint of its characters sheer longevity, soap can still have that power.

Coronation Street is famous for making viewers blub. It was long before my time, but everyone knows of the famous scene where cleaner Hilda Ogden returns home from hospital with that pathetic bag of husband Stanley's possessions, and pulls out his famous glasses. In 1964, the credits rolled in silence when Martha Longhurst died suddenly in The Rovers Return, and conceit that would be repeated on that show and copied by others.

Years later, Doctor Who's controversial 1980s show-runner, John Nathan-Turner, would use the same "silent credits" conceit for the death of (gay) boy companion Adric. Actually killing an assistant was unheard of, and was never repeated (they backtracked on the brave butchering of Peri in 1986's The Trial of a Timelord). In Doctor Who today, if a leading character dies (and they do, often. Amy Pond seemed to die every week) they simply come back to life again, or become immortal. Death is meaningless.

Too many characters die in our our soaps these days - it's a bloobath out there! - although there at least they tend to stay dead, Dallas missteps notwithstanding. New Year's Day 2012 saw the death of Pat Butcher, a character who'd been in EastEnders since 1986. But it was an episode that aired a few days earlier that really tugged the heartstrings. For one last drink, Pat ventured out to the Queen Victoria pub, her local for decades. The camera slowly zooms in for a long, lingering close-up of actress Pat St Clement's face. In the background, various friends and relatives are told the news of her impending death, as Tony Bennett croons The Good Life, "please remember / I still want you, and in case you wonder why / Well just wake up / Kiss the good life goodbye..." She knows it's time to say goodbye, and we, the viewer, are left with no illusions that there's no hope of reprieve. The cumulative impact is devastating.

Click to 28:50.

Barbara Windsor has recently claimed that Pat St Clement phoned her up in tears upon learning that Pat was being killed off. It's an area EastEnders has form in, with the premature killing of Dirty Den in 2005, after actor Lesley Grantham was caught doing something he shouldn't on a webcam. Killing characters off can be a big mistake, as 1980s behemoth Dallas discovered when Patrick Duffy decided to jump ship - then come back. The entire ninth season was written off as a dream sequence, in one of TV's most epic fails. The worst part of this decision was the loss of Barbara Carrera as the terrifying Angelica Nero.

Redskin beauty JD Williams has twice died in cult dramas - as Kenny "Bricks" Wangler in Oz, and as Preston "Bodie" Broadus in The Wire. In both series, he played a long-running character who died abruptly, brutally and without warning. But most abrupt of all was the shocking gang killing of Kevin Alejandro's Detective Nate Moretta. Southland's writers sprang that one on us out of nowhere. Both Oz and The Shield open with characters who appear set up as series regulars, but see out the first episode in a body bag.

Dystopic late 1970s/early 1980s BBC sci-fi drama Blake's 7 loved a death, killing off all of its cast over its four season run - with the exception of evil super-villian Servalan. Famously, the remaining permanent cast were annihilated in the series finale, Blake. But I'm always drawn to the dreamy 1980 episode Sarcophagus, by sci-fi writer Tanith Lee, in which an alien entity takes over Cally. After centuries trapped in a tomb, she's freed, only to be thwarted by anti-hero Avon. For the alien, death is not an option, and her malignancy gives way to a desperate plea as she's sent back to limbo for another eternity: "I want to live, to live. I want to live, to live, to live. I want to live, to live, to live..."

Blake's 7 even killed off characters who'd already departed. Original character Jenna was said to have died - off-screen - in that terminal episode. EastEnders is also fond of telling us that long-departed characters have since died: we're told that Angie Watts finally succumbed to her alcoholism, years after she was last seen in Albert Square, and fellow '80s favourite Kathy Beale was said to have been killed in a South African car crash. The prematurely cancelled Noah's Arc had its second season finale resolved in a film, with the heartbreaking news that Dre did die in that Black Pride car crash, after all. I can't be the only one who wished that it had been Wade, instead.

Sometimes, the actors who play the characters we love pass away, whilst the characters they played live on - at least, for a while. Most recently, Glee's Cory Monteith died, leaving producers of that show to figure out an exit strategy for his character. Comedian Phil Hartman was murdered by his wife whilst he was still appearing in the NBC sitcom NewsRadio, and David Strickland committed suicide in a Las Vegas hotel room whilst appearing in the Brooke Shields' vehicle Suddenly Susan. Yootha Joyce succumbed to alcoholism whilst her sitcom George & Mildred was at the peak of its success.

To coin a phrase: a friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.

Sex and the soap

In the absence of religion, I have my soaps. I'm just slightly older than EastEnders, and Coronation Street's history stretches back to 1960s. I've watched both my whole life.

There's also Emmerdale, a series I never took to. Likewise Hollyoaks, the young upstart: loud, brash and shallow. It won't enjoy the sort of history EastEnders or Coronation Street do (as a child, Coronation Street's Steve McDonald was a devastatingly handsome teen; I now watch him as a middle-aged wreck) because its cast is an ever-changing parade of pretty young things cast solely for their looks. It's totally disposable.

Brendan teaches Ste a lesson in lurve.

All four soaps boast a variety of ongoing GBLT storylines: EastEnders has Christian and Syed, an inter-generational, inter-cultural, interracial relationship that could have been so interesting, yet is saddled with clumsy writing and cringe-inducing performances (particularly John Partridge's deeply embarrassing prima donna Christian). Coronation Street has its lipstick lesbian teens, and dreary asexual frumps Sean and Marcus. Emmerdale has a cute "lad" struggling with his sexuality.

Then there's Hollyoaks, a show I don't follow. I recorded the omnibus from a weekend or two ago, fast-forwarded through the tedious hetero shenanigans, and discovered a thrilling, red hot, super-sexual gay interracial love/lust triangle.

Brendan: "I am your father." Noah: "Love in the club."

Brendan Brady is a dangerous, nightclub-owning Irish thug, with an excellent line in menace. His psychosis is palpable. He became embroiled in a secret, abusive relationship with cute twink Ste, beating, bullying and manipulating him within an inch of his life. Enter nice guy Noah, a grounded personal trainer who takes Ste under his wing. Ste and Noah become love's young dream - but Brendan isn't about to let Ste escape his clutches, and embarks upon a campaign to destroy the couple, mainly by tempting Noah over to the dark side.

This can't end well.

The scenes between uber-psycho Brendan, and grounded nice guy Noah (who's fighting a losing battle to hold onto Ste whilst overcoming his lust for Brendan) are some of the most sexually charged scenes I've seen on TV in a long time. There's danger and sexual tension and lust.

EastEnders and Coronation Street, which command huge audiences, aren't doing the GBLT community any favours with their tepid, cringe-worthy gay storylines (both are currently fixated on gay parenthood, a massive turnoff for anyone with a pulse). Hollyoaks - lightweight teen soap, and underdog - is telling it like is, and giving us a helluva ride to boot.

Rail replacement bus services are in operation

THROUGHthe
LOOKINGGLASS

a pixelated pick'n'mix

Halfway out of the dark

review

Doctor Who, EastEnders,
Coronation Street

L

ast night's editions of EastEnders, Coronation Street and Doctor Who - all highly publicised Christmas specials - provide an intriguing insight into the national psyche.

What does it say about us, for example, that the soap's festive editions were both full of vicious, poisonous women - one of whom stabbed herself in the stomach to keep her man - and that the supposed SF drama was sentimental mush, a sort of lightweight sci-fi Mills & Boon?

There's something seriously wrong, either with the viewing public, or the people responsible for the shows, if this is what we want to watch (or what they think we want to watch) on Christmas Day.

How is it remotely appropriate that we witness Janine Butcher (EastEnders, BBC One, 8pm), pick up a carving knife, put it in the hands of grief stricken, bipolar Stacey Slater, and plunge it into her own stomach? On Christmas Day. Before the watershed.

I could talk lovingly about EastEnders 'til the cows come home, and I usually love crazy Janine's antics as much as the next twisted, vindictive queen, but this just wasn't called for. A step too far beyond the boundaries - even if it wasn't Christmas - the scene was nasty, disturbing and exploitative.

Coronation Street wasn't much better. Just a couple of weeks after the nightmarish tram disaster, which also saw John Stape bash his bunny boiler stalker's head in with a hammer (and subsequently conceal her body at ground zero), we see Tracey Barlow rejoin the cast. She's been away in prison for bashing her boyfriend's head in with an ornament, you'll recall (a pattern, or just repetition?)

A character without any redeeming features, Tracey Barlow isn't someone you want to have around - expecially not on Christmas Day. So quite why the Coronation Street production team thought it would be a good idea to bring back this vile creature to spend Christmas with us... Oh wait! More sensationalism! More magazine covers! And so we endure an hour of screeching, brawling harridans in the Rovers Return (with fellow white trash specimen Becky, who, let's not forget, indulged in a spot of looting during the tram disaster, whilst friends and neighbours were dying around her).

Coronation Street therefore managed to trump EastEnders' stabfest, with a level of ugliness and inhumanity unheard of on British television since Katie Price was last on telly. Thank God for the brief appearance of Scary Mary and her mobile home - that's real Coronation Street.

Which brings us to Doctor Who. I really wanted to hate this latest episode of the new series. This year's season was abysmal, for numerous reasons, and expectations were rock bottom. There's showrunner Steven Moffat's familiar tedious obsessions: we must endure yet another episode in the company of a child, and there's a dreary hetero romance, opera singer Katherine Jenkins cast presumably because Moffat would like to get off with her. But on the positive side, Karen Gillan's ghastly Amy Pond is barely seen, tucked away on a crashing space liner (sadly, she's saved in the end).

It's glossy, inconsequential, and gutless. I'd be lying if I said the emotional payoff didn't have me welling up - yes, it was terribly sad, and Jenkins sounds lovely when she opens her gob and sings - but I don't watch Doctor Who to be moved to tears, which seems to have been the primary goal in recent series. Women and metrosexuals will love it, but what I'd love is for the series to have some balls, just for once.

Maybe it could learn a thing or two from EastEnders.

They've bin talkin' about me ever since I put me first pair o' nylons on

Is this the best soap trailer ever? Just check out the final, doom laden shot panning up to the viaduct, from which death and destruction will descend this Christmas. It's epic.

This year, Coronation Street has featured the marriage of a longstanding transexual character - with abundant warmth and love, and without fuss or sensation - and has managed to come up with the most persuasive advertisement for lesbianism, in Sophie and Sian (I want to be a lesbian!), ever. And let's not forget recent appearances by radiant boy candy Lucien Laviscount (far left).

Next month, the serial is 50 years old. It's going to be epic.

More Lucien after the jump.

There are no things, only processes

THROUGHTHE
LOOKINGGLASS

MAGGIE JONES IS DEAD

THE ACTRESS MAGGIE Jones has died at the age of 75.

The actress is best known for her role as Blanche Hunt in Coronation Street - quite possibly the funniest character on TV today.

"She gleefully defied the maxim that if you hadn't anything nice to say about somebody, you shouldn't bother saying it. Instead, she broadcast her malevolence from the rooftops and to her victims' astonished, deeply offended faces," says The Times. She last appeared on screen on 20th November.

...out of time

It's almost fifty years since this picture was taken. I wonder what Ena Sharples would think of her Street now, fifty years later. Homosexuals, transexuals, and coloured folk too! The past really is a foreign country. Corrieblog say of the fantastic picture above: "The photograph appears on the back of H.V. Kershaw's book The Street Where I Live and shows Ena Sharples standing on the balcony of a towerblock, looking down onto the Victorian terraces below. This photo is very striking and for me it epitomises Coronation Street of the 1960s - old meeting new. Ena is confined to the balcony, trapped by the glass and metal of this new 'street in the sky'. The height of the block and the distance that Ena is from the world below only amplifies the isolation that I assume many people of her generation felt as the communities they had always known were flattened around them. Brilliant." more...out of time

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there..."

Not The Only Gay In The (African) Village

Every now and then, the producers of EastEnders or Coronation Street decide to provoke some controversy (and boost the ratings) by throwing a gay kiss into the mix. It's almost always between two middle class white men (rather than confuse the audience they like to keep things simple - a black gay would be too much for Mrs Smith of Sussex).

Things are a bit different in South Africa. The soap Rhythm City has provoked some controversy with a kiss between the characters Stone (Zenzo Ngqobe) and Thula (Wright Ngubeni), whose mother has been struck down with HIV. Thula is selling his body to a married man; his best friend Stone finds out and confronts him, then plants a sexy kiss on Thula.

Well, it all sounds pretty good to me. Actor Zenzo Ngqobe, who appeared in the film Tsotsi , had this to say: “Personally, I think it wasn’t too graphic. In their subtle way, the producers did their bit to open a window for the audience to what homosexuality is about. Most fans were happy with that scene.”

ChrisTube

Doctor Who and EastEnders were the winners in this year's Christmas ratings wars, with the long-running series managing 12.2 million and 13.9 million viewers each.

For Doctor Who it was the series' highest ratings since 1979, and the largest audience since its revival in 2005, doubtless helped by legions of homosexuals tuning in to see Kylie 'acting' in a spoof of The Poseidon Adventure. The sand-grubber, bent on grabbing every last pink pound for her pension (which isn't far off) didn't detract too much from the festive edition of Who, and even managed to keep that ghastly Australian accent in check. What casual viewers didn't realise, however, was that it was all a con: the plot was a rip-off of a 1970s disaster movie, and the 'sailing ships in space' idea had already been done in the 1983 serial Enlightenment, whilst the stylised robot servants were a direct lift from the 1977 story The Robots of Death. It's been done before, and it's been done better.

In EastEnders the culmination of a year-long storyline, Max's affair with daughter-in-law Stacey, paid handsome dividends, and invoked memories of Christmas past - the series has a tradition of nightmare Christmas misery stretching back to Dirty Den serving divorce papers on Angie in 1986.

The Christmas top 10 was:

1. EastEnders (8pm, BBC One): 13.9 million

2. Doctor Who (6.50pm, BBCOne): 12.2 million, peak 13.8 million

3. EastEnders (6.20pm, BBC One): 11.6 million, peak 11.8 million

4. BBC News (6.05pm, BBC One): 10.4 million, peak 10.1 million

5. To The Manor Born (9.30pm, BBC One): 9.8 million, peak 10.1 million

6. Shrek 2 (4.40pm, BBC One): 9.1 million, peak 10.1 million

7. Coronation Street (8.30pm, ITV1): 8.9 million, peak 9.6 million

8. Strictly Come Dancing (8.30pm, BBC One): 8.3 million, peak 9.9 million

9. The Queen's Speech (3pm, BBC One & ITV1): 7.5 million

10. Finding Nemo (3.10pm, BBC One): 7.1 million, peak 8.3 million

Review: Broken Sky

Hypnotic, enticing and achingly beautiful, Broken Sky puts the rise and fall of a relationship under the microscope, depicting the pain of unrequited love, rejection and loss with blistering accuracy.

There's barely any dialogue - proof indeed that actions speak louder than words - with most of the action played out in body language: stolen glances and intense sex are the language of this piece. The BFI says it's a "masterful exercise in visual storytelling" and it isn't wrong. The two leads, Jonás (Miguel Angel Hoppe Canto) and Gerardo (Fernando Arroyo) as two students, are thoroughly engaging, and just so happen to be very, very easy on the eye - even if, distractingly, Jonás bares an uncanny resemblance to Jason out of Coronation Street.

If there's one flaw it's the duration, an ailment modern cinema suffers acutely from - at more than two hours and eighteen minutes this one tests the patience, and my reaction might well have been considerably less favourable had I been trapped in a cinema for that long. But here we have quantity and quality, and that's rare. Broken Sky is nothing less than stunning - if, by the final act, you don't feel the full, stomach-churning impact of the flashback revealing what really happened on the dancefloor, then you haven't really loved and lost...