British Cliff Hangers

[shannon_a]

It started out with the new Doctor Who. I increasingly noted that in each two-part Doctor Who episode, at the end of the first episode there was an extended period of a minute or two where the characters screamed, ran about, and generally kept repeating the same actions to make it bloody clear that we had a cliffhanger.

I marked it off as being just Doctor Who, an homage to its cheesy scream-filled roots.

But then last night I was watching the first part of Hogfather, and I noticed a very similar pattern. There was a moment or two when we kept cutting back through the same scenes again and again. There was no revelation, no change, just this heavy-handed repetition. Perhaps it was supposed to raise tension or something, I dunno. It usually makes me hope for the credits.

Thinking back, I realized that the first season of MI-5 ended the same way, with a full minute or two of repeated action.

Now here in America, people know how to write cliffhangers. There's a sudden shock or surprise of some type, then we hit the credits running. None of this ridiculous, hey it's the same person doing the same thing. (Except maybe on 24.)

So why the difference? Group director think? Cultural difference?

Comments

[pwca.livejournal.com]

I seem to recall that the Doctor Who of my childhood could do cliffhangers, but then the writers had three or five attempts to do a compelling cliffhanger, depending upon story length. The current series, breaking from this format seems to loose much, particularly a sense of tension and of menace.

Perhaps I was just lucky in growing during the days of Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker?

[shannon_a]

You could well be right. With 23 minutes of show you have a lot less time to pad things.