Puppy Love

Has anyone else been watching 'Outcasts', the BBC's earnest new sci-fi about earnest space explorers? It's a little bit Lost, a little bit Survivors, a little bit Dune, a little bit of a lot of things, but very, very earnest.

I mean, I'm glad the future of humanity still concerns itself with what's wrong and what's right, but it does sadden me that it's all they care about. Mankind will colonise planets far and wide and then just fret about the morality of everything they do, rather than, y'know, having a laugh. Characters cry at the prospect of past crimes (You mean, you ordered the deaths of these poor worker clone people? Sob. That's wrong.) and shout when someone might do something that could save their lives...but at what cost to their moral authority? I have blood on my hands. Again.

To be fair, I'm only two episodes in, and eps three and four might be about engineers Compo and Clegg trying to build a submarine out of a bath, only for Pike and Jones to mistake them for space-invaders. Don't panic.

Anyway, I'm not here to pick it apart. So far it sort of works. They manage to keep the formula answer one question/present two more questions going for now. I'm hoping the series makes better use of Amy Manson - who was fantastic in Being Human, and less of Hermione Norris (or better yet, demonstrates why people keep casting her in things.)





No. What I wanted to talk about was dogs.

You see, the first two episodes of Outcasts have used Children-in-Jeopardy storylines, and I just haven't cared. In fact, in the opening episode, I actively disliked the child at the centre of it all. A bowl-headed brat who squeaked William Blake's poetry, when he wasn't saying 'Mummy, what about the tigers?'. He was made to seem valuable: The mum tried to take him, the dad kidnapped him, the goodies went and rescued him, and yet the whole time I was thinking; why didn't they make him a dog instead?

Now, I'm not some curmudgeon who hates children and clings to that principal. I like children, a lot. My godson came to visit me last week and I absolutely love him, unconditionally. He's amazing. And I often get a bit weepy when I see dads and their boys on the bus or train, going somewhere on a Sunday, like my brother and I used to be treated to days out in St. James' park. I have no rule against children in fiction, or fiction for children. The class in School of Rock? The kids in A Series of Unfortunate Events? (Yes, the boy and the baby too. Not just Emily Browning.) Kay Harker in Box of Delights? I root for these guys. Goonies is awesome; fact of science.

It's just, for every 'Empire of the Sun' era Christian Bale, there's a hundred Picard's Children
So, if you're only going to use the child as a device, you aren't going to make a proper character of it, and you can't find anyone with any charisma to play them - why not just use a dog?



Dogs mean a hell of a lot to their owners, right? Sure, not everyone can relate to that, but then not everyone can relate to a parent's anguish. Jamie Bamber's out there on his desert planet, a tiny pocket of living things - and he doesn't want his wife to stop him seeing his German Shepherd 'Puffy'. He wants to take 'Puffy' out of the camp and forge a new frontier for himself. And 'Puffy' is going to wag his tail and jump and run, because - practically - it's easier to get a dog to do those things than get a boy to recite 'Tyger, Tyger' with anything resembling charm. Hermione Norris is desperate to find out if her pedigree Sharpei 'Regina' made it on the transport off Earth, as she's had that dog since she was fifty, and loves it with all her heart. It sounds like Earth is dead in Outcasts, so it makes more sense here for people to care desperately for their pets than it would in an episode of Eastenders (Ronnie slipping the collar off her dead Staffordshire Bull Terrier 'Fleetwood' and switching it for Kat Moon's sleeping puppy 'Jumbo'.) but the trend could start here, no?


The two memories that cut me up the most are:

1. My cat Tom had been hit by a car, and although surgeons had fixed his bones, he didn't recover very well. One morning he had a blood clot and slipped into a coma. My dad had me pump his chest to keep him breathing, while he phoned the vets. After a while, Tom stopped taking in air, so I tried to give my cat mouth to mouth - desperate, idiot boy that I was. Tom died, and my dad sent me off to school - which was the smart thing to do, as I would have fixated on it all day if I'd stayed home and avoided the miseries of Mr. Roberts' maths monastery.

2. Trying to feed my dog Max a last supper of Maltesers in the car outside the vets and the chocolate falling out of his mouth because he was so scared. I held him when the vet injected him and he died in my arms faster than I could process the unreal and irreversable scene.

Heck, I'm a bit misty-eyed now, which is more than any stage-school prog with a bowl-haircut is likely to manage for me no matter what you write for him. With a dog, you can bypass worrying if they'll time your dialogue right. You've written that scene where the goodie runs over to the tent, to see if the boy is alive or dead...oh god, please don't have killed him. He's not moving! Gently, cautiously, she places her hands on him. He stirs. HE'S ALIVE. The boy says something like 'I want my mummy.' Our heroine sobs. Earnestly. Well you can do all that with a dog, except instead of a whiny 'I want my mummy', Puffy the German Shepherd wags his tail to show he's still alive. WELL BETTER. He springs up, and leaves the tent, but then, ears down, he sees his former master, dead. Our heroine (provided she's not Hermione Norris) can convey emotion because she's an adult, and helps us out with the gravitas the scene needs. Something 99% of eleven year olds can't do. They just can't do it. They can barely get the intonation right for an advert about sweetcorn, let alone depict the mixed emotions of being rescued/losing a father. Good actor + Trained Animal = Pathos. Good actor + bowl-hair toddler = as much sympathy as you'd show Beth Ditto for breaking one of your chairs, even though she's really hurt her wrist.




I can't tie this post up in one of those glib lines that mirrors the start. But often, like child actors, unless they are good, I hate them.