in hindsight.

TV Anna Nolan from the first Big Brother UK, in hindsight:

"As I was sitting on that couch 10 years ago, all cameras on Craig and me, waiting for the show's presenter, Davina McCall, to call out the winner's name, two thoughts went through my head. The first was: "I could kill for a pint of lager"; the second: "How do they choose the winner?" I had not seen how we came across, I didn't know yet that the production of this massive show brought narratives, drama, love stories and war into what had seemed an uneventful 10 weeks. Big Brother had created personalities out of all of us, and we were the last to know. The Z-list celebrity had been born."

if only I'd had a camera.

Food Sarah Morgan is a freelance film writer and her blog, Sunset Gun, is one of my favourite reads for its emotionally inciteful commentary on classic cinema.

She recently visited New York on holiday and took a cab from the airport which included a pit stop for some food.

The resulting video is like a modern Cléo de 5 à 7 as we watch a slightly bewildered Morgan being fed by this taxi driver in one of those moments were most of us might say later, "if only I'd had a camera".

R-a-x-i-c-o-r-i-c-o-p-h-e- [ping]

Sport No, not the World Cup. There was controversy at the 2010 Scripps National Spelling Bee in the US, made internationally famous by Jeff Blitz film documentary Spellbound) when effectively the needs of television dictated how the competition was run.

Like all such things, its best to read the unfolding narrative but if you have seen Blitz's documentary you'll understand how serious these kids and their parents take the championship and how any advantage, however slight can make all the difference.

As to what happened next, npr has a live blog.

This is a song called Ironic.

Music



Never mind the Pandorica opening, this is the musical equivalent of a space/time implosion, especially for long term readers of this blog, and not least because it happened at the House of Blues in 2005 and this is the first time I've heard about it. Later Lavigne repaid the favour. Notice how the audience know the lyrics to this song:



Now searching for some missing Kate Bush / Tori Amos duet.

Elsewhere I've reviewed last night's Doctor Who. It's a bit old school.

does make me rather angry.

Life The comments in this Guardian story about the status of freelancers in the benefits system do make me rather angry not least because most of them seem to have been made by people for whom it has never happened.

One of my previous employers, a few years ago, didn't have their own payroll and so requested/demanded that all of their workers/employees register as freelancers for tax purposes, even though they were being paid a wage.

Some of them already were for this and that reason, but it was a bit of a surprise all round to the rest of us. Not knowing much about anything at the time, and eager to work, I agreed.

It was a temporary position, didn't last very long and I ultimately didn't make very much on the deal other than some good friends. I was also obviously unable to request benefits for the period too. Within a couple of months the work ended and I had to go and sign on ...

... and found myself in the situation outlined, unable to claim benefits initially because of my "freelance" status and faced with welfare office that couldn't compute that I was a freelancer who'd been an employee.

It was eventually resolved, but the appeals process took months during which time I didn't have an income and couple with my working when they need me/decided to give me some work position during my "employment" built up a debt which took me years to pay off.

All of which hopefully explains my reticence to go freelance again. So now you know.

Woody Allen's Whatever Works is released in the UK.

Film Finally. Almost exactly one year after it was released in the US, Woody Allen's Whatever Works is finally reaching the UK on the 25th June.

I've phoned some favoured venues. Cornerhouse Manchester will have it for two whole weeks from the release date onwards. It's booked into FACT Liverpool but they aren't when they'll be showing it yet.

Empire Magazine (which is where I first saw the news first) gives it two-stars. Reviewer Angie Errigo calls it awful - though it's rare that I agree with her assessment of anything anyway.

Rotten Tomatoes is kinder with 73% overall.

I'm -- optimistic.

[the story so far].

majesty

Film The majesty of Mark Kermode's Sex And The City 2 review:



Just in case you want to sing along.

haul himself or the TARDIS into it

TV About a week ago - and with apologies for not catching up on this before -- Allyn Gibson was good enough to say some nice things about my Doctor Who writing and to pick up on that infamous post about where exactly the narrative arc of the current season is going. Towards the bottom of his post, he says this ...

"Though I am throwing out the idea that Moffat may push the reset button that Davies did not."

Here's something. I'm not. As I think I've mentioned at some other time (though for the life of me etc.) there was a rather good article in Doctor Who Magazine just after Moffat took over which described what his approach to the series might be, especially its internal narrative, and one of the options was to wipe out RTD's tenure. But I think he'd go further. So in tribute to Allyn's own raggedy theories, here's a theory of my own.

What will happen when the Pandorica opens?

Early synopses for the finale -- without dropping in a lot of spoilers unless you're outside the UK and haven't seen the Silurian episodes -- suggest that the time travel element of the series is going to be the "big bad", that the Pandorica really is a huge fairy tale concept that will effect the fabric of the universe or more specifically the web of time. Which is fine and some of the juxtapositions sound really, really interesting.

What if when the Pandorica opens something bigger happens and the only way that the Doctor can stop it is to haul the TARDIS into it -- he talked about doing something similar in Flesh and Stone before resorting to using the Weeping Angels. Assuming the effects are similar to when Rory was enveloped, the loss of the TARDIS to the time line would be catastrophic.

It would be as if the Doctor never travelling in time.

Most of his adventures gone, forty odd years of adventures snuffed out. Are you a spin-off writer working on a new Big Finish cd? I wouldn't bother, it probably doesn't matter. The Doctor hasn't met the Monoids yet. Assuming the human race even managed to survive long enough to take The Ark route to the stars.

The ultimate reset button.

It's not perfect. The spectre of Turn Left looms large. Does the crack and time really have the ability to paper over all of the those alien invasions, the time war, revolutions and what have you or would it simply let everything go to crap? Torchwood wasn't that good was it? Or would it simply have been a different timelord travelling the time lanes doing much the same thing. A benevolent version of The Master perhaps.

Plus The Sarah Jane Adventures has to be taken account of, and we know the Doctor is to appear in the next series of that along with Jo Grant. A universe wide reset button negates this even if the Doctor survives to exist within it -- which he has to of course because otherwise there isn't a show. I don't have another explanation for Amy not remembering the Daleks other than something on a more personal level ...

Of course a reset button can manifest itself in other ways. It could be a nu-Trek solution with the Doctor and Amy entering a different version of the Whoniverse where everything is different like the season two cyberworld. Or my favourite idea -- which hasn't surprisingly yet been done and inspired by the Last Action Hero -- in which the Doctor enters a universe in which he's the only "alien" element and which is exactly like ours.

What would the Doctor do without monsters to fight?

an actual moonrocket.

Space Cork's Catherine Ryan Howard spent a year in and around Orlando, Florida working for Walt Disney World. Her memoir of the trip, Mousetrapped, includes a chapter about her visit to the Kennedy Space Center which is everything you'd want to be -- a nostaglia tinged fact filled reportage. It's previewed/published at Keris Stainton's blog:

"I was in the presence of an actual moonrocket. After landing five Apollo crews on the lunar surface, and with the Soviets well and truly beat, Americans turned their backs on the space program and NASA’s once limitless funding all but dried up; the remaining Apollo missions were cancelled. While I was happy to see a real Saturn V at KSC, it should have been used to take men to the moon on Apollos 18 or 19. Instead, this Saturn V was helping visitors from all over the world understand the true meaning of the phrase ‘mind-boggling.’ Taking in its stats made my brain ache like it did when I tried to make sense of what was going on with Lost."

The first chapter of Mousetrapped is also available at the book's official website, and has the gossipy tone of the best pen pal you've ever had.

hypercritical of himself

Music This Village Voice piece about Woody Allen acts as a kind of prose sequel to Wild Man Blues and demonstrates that his commitment to preserving the traditional jazz sound is undimmed, even if the dark clouds of extinction hang over the genre. He also continues to be hypercritical of himself:

"The problem is, not enough feeling comes out of my music. I mean, I play my heart out and I close my eyes and hunch my shoulders and do all the external motions that great players do to pump the feeling through their horn, but I can't get a lot of feeling through it. That's been one of the sad things in my life, that I hear a real great clarinet player and they'll just play two or three notes, and those notes are so beautiful and full of feeling. And I'm killing myself and trying so hard to squeeze that note out and get the feeling into it, but it's just not there. It has to be somewhere in your chromosomes or something."

[printable version]

Richard Curtis and The Black Adder

TV Richard Curtis is interviewed in this week's Radio Times about his nu-Who episode on Saturday and he alludes to a first pilot for The Black Adder, which by a strange coincidence I happened to find on YouTube yesterday. He says of it:

"I watched some of my things before with groups of people. I remember when we did the first Blackadder, we had a little pilot, which we thought was pretty good. And I watched it with 12 friends. There was this horrible silence at the end."

And it's really not that bad. The episode is closer in tone to Blackadder II with Rowan Atkinson's cunning central performance pitched somewhere between the Bean-alike who turned up in the full first series and the sly wise-cracker from the later runs. It's the wrong Baldrick though and it lacks a proper sense of place due to the tiny sets and unclear time frame. Nevertheless, it's a fascinating first draft.

Click below to see the whole episode ....

Double Falsehood. As Brian Hammond

One of the thrilling elements of my amateur scholarship of Shakespeare is the ever present sense of discovery, which might have its nucleus in Hamlet stagecraft but reaches much, much further. The controversy surrounding the lost play, Cardenio stands large in literature academia but my eye opening first experience of it was during Michael Wood’s superlative 2003 documentary In Search of Shakespeare, in which he tasked the Royal Shakespeare Company to recreate a fragment surrounding one of the extant songs.

Two actors portraying the title character and a friend stood in a spotlight at the edge of the stage listening to Woods, Rocks & Mountaynes and at the close they looked on in fear as it magically seemed as though their tiny pocket universe had reached a premature implosion. The mystique of that moment was enough that when I later read about the “discovery” of a text for Cardenio, I was eager to find out more.

I was disappointed to discover that the heralding of this new play into the canon wasn’t cut and dry. This wasn't some new text, but the refurbished provenance of a known play, Double Falsehood. As Brian Hammond, editor of this handsomely put together printing of the play explains in his thorough introduction, scholars have argued about this old play's authorship for centuries, as to whether it's purely Shakespeare, a collaboration with John Fletcher, Fletcher with Middleton and someone else, or if indeed as has been the main assumption, due to the absence of a source text it was a forgery perpetrated by Lewis Theobald, its eighteenth-century editor.

Given these odds, there has been some criticism of Double Falsehood appearing The Arden Shakespeare range alongside Hamlet and Macbeth because of the legitimacy that confers. But with a clear awareness of that Hammond meticulously unpicks each of the arguments against this having any of Shakespeare’s verse within and though he’s careful to add a few qualifications, largely convinces us that after uncovering some new documentary evidence, Double Falsehood is indeed the Shakespeare/Fletcher collaboration that was premiered at court in 1613 via a restoration adaptation through to the Theobald text we have in our hands now. Hammond himself outlines the guts of this argument in this University of Nottingham vodcast:



He offers a strong argument that Shakespeare has to have written a large proportion of the first half of the play, in which case it has as much right to be canonised, venerated as a lost text now found and given the Arden treatment as Henry VIII or Two Noble Kinsmen -- and Edward III or Sir Thomas More, both of which are to be published next year. Some academics, like the rebuttal witness Hammond's appearance on the Today programme, seem very reticent about inducting new plays into the canon which is understandable considering the addition baggage they may have in terms of rewriting and disproving existing theories about his life.

But for this layperson, the idea of a whole new play to enjoy is breathtaking even if, as Hammond is keen to stress, he’s not resurrecting gold. An adaptation of a sub-plot from Don Quixote created as reaction to the massive contemporary popularity of Cervantes and all things Spanish, even in its original form, Double Falsehood/Cardenio would have seen both authors falling back on some of their more familiar tropes of chivalry and revenge, transvestism and masquerade, though of course their inclusion is one of the reasons "we" have been able to crystallise its authorship.

As it stands, Double Falsehood is interesting but has clearly had some of the complexity knocked out of it across the years to fit the taste in later century more linear, less thematically complex storytelling. An initially grim tale of a domineering prince taking sexually violent advantage of the girl his brother is romantically interested in which spins of into a more pastoral adventure in the style of The Winter’s Tale, there are more logic breaks and inconsistencies in characterisation than an episode of Flash Forward. Plot strands begin, never to be tied up.

I’m cautious about reviewing it too closely as a piece of drama. Without an actor's interpretation and despite the staging plan in the appendixes it's near impossible to get a sense of such things as pacing and emotion. But in the current absence of that (bar fractions), simply on a poetic level there is much beauty here. Some of the descriptions of Leonora, the object of both brother’s desire, rank alongside those connected with Juliet and Rosalind and it's impossible not to take the view, confirmed by the footnotes, that a brain as complex as that behind Hamlet (which is alluded to throughout) has to have had some hand in these passages.

With that in mind, I can't help feeling some sense of melancholy that due to the egotistical rivalry between Theobald and Alexander Pope over who had best rights to Shakespeare’s legacy (described in gossipy detail throughout this volume), general snobbery to Elizabethan and Jacobean work which hasn’t previously been verified as Shakespearean and the fact that it's not until recently that textual analysis has gained the scientific rigour such that it can offer authorship suggestions based on the syntax of a line, that the play has been outside of the repertory for long enough that its mostly only been treated to amateur productions in the past half century.

Hammond’s extensive production history mentions shows based on the text as it stands, on supposed recreations of the original Cardenio scholarly and otherwise and even how a completely different play, Hamiton/Middleton’s The Second Maiden’s Tragedy has erroneously been produced under that name due to the misunderstanding of an influential academic paper. Though that’s due to be rectified by its appearance as the premiere production at the newly refurbished Royal Shakespeare Company, there now seems to be a hole in the BBC’s 80s canon series where this play should be. Perhaps if Arden's valuable perhaps even miraculous volume had been published earlier, we'd now be able to enjoy a Jonathan Miller studio production starring Graham Crowdon as the old Duke and Mary Tamm as Leonora.

Double Falsehood (The Arden Shakespeare) edited by Brean Hammond is published by Methuen Drama. £65.00 hardback, £16.99 paperback. ISBN: 978-1903436776..

everything’s renewed and revitalised.

Books Justin Richards has been a writer in and editor of the Doctor Who spin-off range of novels for some years. Here he talks honestly about the process of tearing the main story arcs and the quality of his own books:

"I think the ones that work best are those first few books where the Doctor is trapped on earth, not knowing who he really is. Especially as the character and his situation are such a contrast to the epic scale and events of The Ancestor Cell. Really what i was trying to do was to make it all rather more personal, and to get away from the mass of continuity and narrative baggage that had built up in the books over the years. It’s no one’s fault that this happens – it just does. And as soon as we ‘reset’ everything, we started building it up again! Typically, on TV, a regeneration has a similar effect – everything’s renewed and revitalised. Finding a way to do that in the novels without being able – or allowed – to regenerate the Doctor was a challenge. And in The Burning, I got to write the first ever Doctor Who story. Sort of. How great is that?!"

The Burning certainly achieved that and a lot more. I'm slightly concerned about what he means when he says that future past Doctor novels "will happen soon - though perhaps not in the way that people expect".

What we expect is two or three hundred pages with a beginning, middle and end about familiar characters. Admittedly there is the usual range issue in terms of delineating them with nu-Who books and where to put them in the book shop and how to pitch them in terms of content but these aren't insurmountable.

It's just a shame they can't at least go about reprinting the Virgin and BBC Books from the nineties and later perhaps in special editions of linking Doctor/Companion groups in chronological order, perhaps by classic season. Those old novels are about the only classic material that isn't being resurrected.