The Tripods: John Christophers teen dystopia finds a home on British tv

John Christopher's Tripod series (The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, The Pool of Fire) was one of my childhood favorites, so I eagerly watched the 1984-85 British TV series when it appeared on PBS, part of the British invasion that also included Doctor Who, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Tomorrow People, and The Prisoner).

The plot was about the same: in a dystopian future, people live under the thrall of the tripods.  On their 16th birthday, teenagers are capped with mind-control devices so they won't rebel.  Will  (John Shackley, left) decides to flee to the White Mountains (the present-day Alps), where he can be free.  He brings two companions, his cousin Henry (Jim Baker, center) and a French boy named Beanpole, or Jean-Paul (Ceri Seele, right).

When they reach the White Mountains, Will and the German boy Fritz (Robin Hayter) are sent out on a reconnaissance mission to a tripod city.

But the differences were depressing.

There is an extraordinary amount of beefcake, but the heterosexism is rapant.

In the book, a homoromantic bond is Will's motive for trying to escape: Jack, a few months older, has been capped and no longer cares for him.  In the tv series, the homoromance is absence.

In the book, Will briefly considers staying at the Chateau Ricordeau in France, where everyone is very nice to him -- he could have a "normal" life instead of always running.  He meets a girl named Eloise, but they are just friends.  In the novel, Will falls in love with Eloise and decides to marry her. There's an entire romantic plotline.

Beanpole is also given a heterosexual romance.

In the book, Will infiltrates one of the tripod cities, along with his German friend Fritz.  They have an intense, passionate, homoromantic friendship.  But in the tv series, they are coworkers and acquaintances, nothing more.

During the 1980s Reagan-Thatcher era of conservative retrenchment, homoromantic subtexts were rare, and the "fade out kiss" emphasized even more aggressively than in the 1970s.  So I should have expected it.  But I didn't.  After a few episodes, I stopped watching.

None of the principal actors has continued in show business.  Today John Shackley and his wife live in Chile, where he works in hotel management.

"The Seven Dials Mystery": Murder on an English country estate in 1925, with a gay couple, a gay bar, Bluemel's backside, and Frodo's junk

 

Link to the n*de dudes

Note: I revised this review based on Episodes 2 and 3.

I've been trying to get into reading mysteries lately, including classic Agatha Christie: Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, and The Seven Dials Mystery (1929): one of her earlier works, while she's still fumbling around to create an ongoing amateur sleuth.  A tv adaption has dropped on Netflix, starring Corey Mylchreest, who is straight but likes to pretend to be gay.  So maybe he'll be pretending here, too.

Prologue: An elderly man walks through Ronda, an Andalusian village about an hour from Malaga., with beautiful establishing shots.  He enters the empty Plaza de Toros and checks his watch, and finds a note (a picture of a clock).  Suddenly a bull rushes out and gores him to death!

Scene 1: Chimneys, a stately country house in Gloucester, 1925.  A party, with everyone wearing masks and being decadent.  Lady Caterham (Helena Bonham Carter) and her daughter Bundle hate the ghastly masks, but they had no choice; it was the idea of Lord and Lady Coote, to whom they are indebted.  Lord Coote wants to meet George Lomax, so they can form a relationship: "His Foreign Office, my steel factories." 

Lol, I can't hear the name Coote without thinking of Cornelius Coot, who founded the city of Duckburg in Disney comics.

Bundle, apparently the focus character, continues to mingle.  She approaches Ronny (gay actor Nabhaan Rizwan, right) and his Boyfriend (Hughie O'Donnell), who explain that their mate Gerry hasn't gotten up before noon all week, so they're going to prank him with seven alarm clocks hidden in various places in his room.

Next, she talks to Gerry (Corey Mylchreest, top photo, backside on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).  He gawks with Girl of My Dreams hetero-horniness, and tells Bundle how incredibly gorgeous she is.  Ok, so he won't be pretending to be gay in this one.  She counters that he is incredibly gorgeous as well.  

They gaze at each other for about five minutes, then he asks her to dinner, and implies that he's going to propose.  The gazing continues.  I'm fast-forwarding past it.

Scene 2: Cut to the boyfriends giggling as they hide alarm clocks in various places in Gerry's room.  Then to a card game, with Bundle and Boy of Her Dreams Gerry continuing to gaze at each other while the others chitchat. Jimmy (Edward Bluemel, left, backside on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends) joins them.

 Then raucous Jazz Age dancing and more gazing.  

The boyfriends are not dancing.  They are engrossed with each other.  I think they're a canonical couple.

Bundle drops Gerry to mingle, then goes out into the garden. 

Scene 3: Morning.  Establishing shot of the country house surrounded by marshland.  Ronny and his Boyfriend complain of being hungover, and fill their plates.  The others arrive, equally hungover.

At 11:15, the alarm clocks go off in Gerry's room.  He's not turning them off, so they send the Butler to wake him.  Then Bundle goes.  She finds that Gerry is...dead!

Cut to the doctor (Tristan Gemmill, p*nis on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends), who finds a sleeping draft next to the bed.  Gerry must have taken a draft to help him sleep, and since he was drunk, the combination was lethal.  

"Impossible!" Bundle exclaims.  "He never used sleeping drafts!"  And she knows what he did before bed because....

"Then maybe it was deliberate?" the doctor suggests.

The Boyfriend: "Well, he was stressed at work.  His boss, George Lomax, was always riding him."

"No way!  Impossible!  He was planning to propose to me."

Next up: a bumbling detective (Jake Davies, left), on his first case, ineptly examines the crime scene while making jokes.  Bundle thinks that it was a murder.  Otherwise be lousy story.

"Wait -- there are seven clocks on the mantle.  I thought you guys hid them?"  The Boyfriends glance at each other in shock.

More after the break

Gerran Howell: The hot doc from "The Pitt" plays a vampire, troubled teens, and Ozma's boyfriend, speaks Welsh, drops his trousers.

 

Link to the n*de photos

If you've been watching The Pitt on MAX, about emergency room staff and patients, you've certainly noticed Dennis Whitaker.  The fourth-year medical student moved to Pittsburgh from a farm in Broken Bow, Nebraska, which causes a lot of derision from the big city doctors, and got a degree in theology before going to med school. Don't you need a lot of courses in biology and chemistry?   He gets squelchy scenes where he is splashed with the body fluids squirting out of patients, but also heart-tugging scenes where he establishes an emotional connection with a dying patient.

So far Dennis hasn't expressed a romantic interest in anyone, although fans on the Pitt Reddit eagerly pair him with Nurse Kim, because she offered to find him new scrubs after a patient ur*nated on him, or the wife of a dying burn victim whom he comforts.

Plus when Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle) is treating the victims of a mass shooting, he flashes back to treating COVID victims and the death of his beloved mentor and has a panic attack.  Dennis helps him out, and the two hold hands.  About 1,700 fan stories on Archive of Our Own move the relationship forward into romance (and explicit s*xual activity).

Noah Wyle n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends.

That's enough to warrant researching the actor, Gerran Howell.

Well, being 5'7" and exceptionally cute helps.

Turns out that Gerran is not Nebraskan, he's Welsh, born in Barry a resort town near Cardiff, in 1991.  He's bilingual in the Welsh language, and got to speak it as a fan service during Season 2 of The Pitt.

Nice swimsuit, mate.

After attending Barry Comprehensive School, Gerran studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.  His first on-screen roles came in 2006, in a PSA about the dangers of swimming in the Welsh Reservoir and the short Mummy's Boy, about a boy traumatized by his brother's death. 

Next he starred in Young Dracula (2006-2013), as the teenage Vlad, The Chosen One (of course) who moves from Transylvania to Wales with his family.  According to the episode synopses, he may have gotten a few gay-subtext buddy-bonds along with the usual assortment of girlfriends.  

The role brought Gerran a lot of fame in Britain: talk-show interviews, cooking on Blue Peter, a tutorial on how to spot a vampire.

In The Spartacle Mysteries (2011-15), everyone over age 15 is zapped into a parallel dimension.  It's up to the kids to survive -- and bring them home. So, was it a one-time deal, or does everyone who turns 16 zap over?  Gerran plays Ernesto, the leader of a rebel gang who doesn't want the adults back: the world is better and safer without them.  He gets a girlfriend.

Emerald City, the dreary, depressing take on the Wizard of Oz mythos (2016-17), stars Oliver Jackson-Cohen (n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends) as Dorothy Gale's boyfriend.  Gerran plays Jack (based on Jack Pumpkinhead), who helps Tip escape from the witch Mombi, and falls in love with her after she turns into a girl. But she's not into him.  Being into trans women makes him a LGBT ally.

More after the break

Bentley Storteboom: Dutch, 25 years old, or gay? Or all of the above? With KJ Apa's d*ck, Karl Urban's backside, and Gavin Munn

  

Link to the n*de photos

When I saw this photo of someone named Bentley Storteboom (censored for reasons that will become apparent), I concluded that he was obviously Dutch, about 25 years old, and gay.  Turns out that I was wrong about two of the three conclusions.

1. Is he Dutch?   Storteboom means "Fallen Tree" in Frisian, spoken by 400,000 people in the northern regions of the Netherlands, like these musclemen on the beach.

No, he's Canadian.

2. Is he 25?

No, according to the IMDB, as of this writing he's 13 1/2! 

  

He may look 25 in the top photo (especially the censored part), but here he looks like 16-year old Gavin Munn of The Righteous Gemstones.

Bentley was born in August 2012, in Maple Ridge, a suburb of Vancouver.  According to his mom, “He wasn’t your typical boy that wanted to play soccer or sports,” but he was interested in movies and the theater, and started asking about how kids got on tv.  His parents had no experience in performing arts, and had no idea.  Kudos for not trying to push him into sports, Mom and Dad.  My parents never let up.  "You're a boy!  Boys like sports!  Try out for football!"

They did some research, enrolled Bentley in the LeClerc School of Acting, and found him an agent, and he started auditioning at age six.  Soon he was appearing in commercials, and got the starring role in the student film Small Boy (2020): "After getting left out during a hide and seek game, a small boy realizes what he wants is different than what he was seeking from others."  So, different from the others?  Gotcha. 

That fall he won two Joey Awards (for Canadian youth): best actor in a commercial and best actor in a student film. 

In 2020 he won an iconic role in the series finale of Supernatural (2020).  As Dean is dying, he tells his gay-subtext partner Sam that he must "carry on."  The time for the "manly love of comrades" is over; it's time to accept his heterosexual destiny.  A few years later, Dean looks down from heaven and sees that Sam has acquiesced: he's got a wife and kid (Bentley). And the kicker: they're playing ball!  Bentley might not be "like the other boys," but his son is.  We hear the Kansas song:

Carry on, my wayward son. There'll be peace when you are done.
Lay your weary head to rest.  Don't you cry no more.

Funny, I feel like crying at this negation of the gay experience. 

Episodes of Nancy Drew (2021) and YoShowBiz (2021) followed, but Bentley's big break  (at age eight) came with what the local papers breathlessly praised as "a recurring role on a hit tv show!"  It was Riverdale (2017-2023), the campy, over-the-top, NSFW adaption of the Archie comics world. 

KJ Apa, formerly Archie, on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends.

More after the break