| abstract
| - The Grand was a British television “period soap drama” series first broadcast on ITV in 1997–1998, set in a hotel in Manchester in the 1920s. There were only two seasons made before cancellation, both of which were novelised into one book in some strange kind of masochism; I bet sold like hotcakes. This programme pretty slack even by ITV standards. Ok, so WTF right? “Even the British Film Institute has deleted The Grand from it’s webpage,” you’ll say, “why should I give one fuck for this British historical about the upper and lower classes like Downton Abbey is, when the Britbongs seem to make a new goddamn one of ‘em every other week?” Two reasons: 1.
* The Grand starred Doctor Eight’s brother Mark McGann. I bet you didn’t even know Paul McGann had an actor-brother did you, you pleb? You’d better goddamn well believe it, and that Paul and Mark’s other two brothers are also fucking straight-up actors too! Mark McGann plays “suave scheming asshole” so well that it left me wishing that rotten 1996 Doctor Who Fox film had become a TV series and he had been cast opposite his brother Paul - as the goddamn Master. Come up with some bullshit story about the Master had tried to copy the Doctor’s face when he regenerated or something, whatever. It would have been a goddamned thing of glory I tell you. In fact, that’s the only reason I’d ever want to have seen any more Fox TV Doctor Who, so it’s probably best it never happened, but damn, Mark makes a good slippery snake of a character. 2.
* The second Doctor Who connection to The Grand is right there during its sepia-tone opening credits which the writer egotistically signed every episode: none other than Russell The Davies himself. So yes, The Grand is going to pretty obviously suck and be full of clunky soap-opera writing; Davies himself admitted it’s unoriginal crap: "1920’s melodrama in a big hotel. To this day, I am in hiding from the creators of Upstairs Downstairs. Hush, is that Jean Marsh in my porch? First and last time I got (briefly) audiences over 10 million..." But of course he’s proud of that one episode about the barman being gay that pops up out of fucking nowhere near the programme’s end; to be fair it was a reasonably decent story in both writing and structure, but it’s has zero to do with the programme and completely interrupts the other ongoing plot lines. Not that /who/ wiki has any problem with gays, mind you: without gay men, women would realize they have nothing in common with men and our race would go extinct; without lesbians, men would have to find something else to speak clueless about (like Doctor Who). The big sin here is inconsistent writing - welcome to Rustyville, population: /who/. It’s like finding a shiny, if small, coin in some dog turds after you’ve stepped in them. After Ruined-The-Doctor's beloved The Grand was cancelled - well, not so much cancelled as just nobody could be arsed to renew it - RTD himself was literally the only person upset and “Davies had an existential crisis after almost dying from an accidental overdose” (totally true because Wikipedia said so). These turns of bad luck convinced him to let up on the drugs a bit and to make a name for himself by producing a series that celebrated his homosexuality - and so Doctor Who was reborn! Actually it was Queer As Folk, but close enough.
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