Elsewhere I've read and reviewed my second novelisation of Hamlet from Ophelia's POV of the week.

"In that studio was a table."

Radio This week's BBC Ariel letter's page is a vintage especially the first letter from Pete Bestwick, GNS on the subject of tables:

"Once upon a time there was a radio studio in TVC used daily by guests talking to the BBC's finest radio stations. In that studio was a table.

One day, something very heavy was dropped on the table and it broke. Guests were left with an apology and many spilt drinks on the un-even surface."

You'll have to read the rest yourself but needless to say it ends ... predictably ...

a donkey head

Shakespeare The BBC's Drama on 3 radio slot has returned after its Proms enforced hiatus and next Sunday (September 11th) they're offering a new production of A Midsummer Night's Dream recorded on location in Sussex woodland with a brilliant cast that includes Lesley Sharp, Toby Stephens, Emma Fielding and Nicholas Farrell.

Pier Productions has a short documentary with footage of the recording though it might demystify the experience if you watch it beforehand, especially after they've gone to trouble of capturing the natural sounds of the forest. Roger Allam as Bottom does not act in a donkey head.

It should be on the iPlayer too for the following week.

It’s not the most complex of plots

Books While we're on the subject of stuff noticed whilst watching Doctor Who, you won't remember but three years ago I read the single example of published erotic fiction that tangentially fits within the Doctor Who universe. Reviewing the review for various satirical reasons related to a twitter conversation (again) I stumbled upon one small detail I bothered to mention in the plot synopsis:

"Claudia, a recent widow is surprised one day when she discovers a buff young man taking a skinny-dip in the lake on her land. She prays that he’ll find his way to her big house, which he unsurprisingly does, bedecked in an Edwardian frock coat, covered in bruises and claiming to have lost his memory. His only point of identity is a small note which says his name is Paul. She takes him in, and after a doctor friend, Beatrice, gives him an examination, ‘Paul’ moves in with her. Not long afterwards, her best friend Melody, leaves her husband and she moves in too. Then there’s a fancy dress party and the truth of who this male house guest might be is stunningly revealed on television. It’s not the most complex of plots, I’m sure you’ll agree and there’s a fairly obvious reason for that."

Steven's magpie mind couldn't really be referencing The Stranger. Could he?

Elsewhere I've watched my thirty-third Hamlet, Innokenty Smoktunovsky (pictured).

Elsewhere I've reviewed Lisa Klein's quiet good Hamlet novelisation, Ophelia, which is far more impressive than its cover suggests.

the Doctor shouldn't die when he's supposed to die.

TV I should probably be saving this for next Thursday but well, hum. Updating the ever popular contemporary Who chronology with Night Terrors (reviewed here and below), I realised I needed to work out if it went before or after Torchwood's Miracle Day. Finally bothering to look in the TARDIS Index File at the dates when these fictional events in a fictional universe occur I stumbled on this:

Torchwood's Miracle Day is set in and around 22nd March 2011 and knocks on for a good few months.

The astronaut parts of The Impossible Astronaut are set in Utah, USA, 22nd April 2011.

WTF?  FFS!  etc etc etc

Davies and Moffat apparently have chatted about how the two shows effect one another in which case how could something like this occur? From a suspension of disbelief point of view, it would mean the Doctor wilfully ignored the world going to the wall and neither Amy or Rory bothered to tell him.  Or River.  Or Canton Delaware.

But, as a few people noted on Twitter when I posted this information there, it would also logically mean the Doctor shouldn't die when he's supposed to die.  Ish.  Arguably he does become a category one, and they did burn the body. 

But we don't know how Miracle Day's going to end.  For all we know all the category ones could miraculously be re-constituted from the ashes, in which case so could the Doctor.

I suppose it's one thing for the many decades of spin-off media to be contradicted by the television series, it's the mechanism under which Doctor Who has always worked.  It's something else for the two television shows to contradict each other quite this much, especially after all the hoopla in Torchwood's first couple of series enmeshing itself with the parent series.

Assuming it is a contradiction and Miracle Day isn't indeed going to be used to resolve all of this. Either way, we can probably now add, "ruining Doctor Who" to the list of its crimes.

Updated! As has been pointed out, the headline to this post is potentially misleading since the Doctor isn't human and its been established that Miracle Day only effects humans. Unless, I suppose he wasn't joking in the TV movie. But the point still stands. This means the Doctor et al are on Earth during Miracle Day when everything is going to pot and do nothing about it ...

Updated! Showing the kind of determination only a fan would have, I've sat through the thing again and found the on-screen proof. It's Rex's text message towards the end:



The only potential contradictory bit of info is that the text was sent at 6:13pm, but the on-screen caption just before says they landed at 5pm:



Though that can be explained away through the complexity of international time zones. Obviously.
/
Update! 06/09/2011 Another possibility. Perhaps this part of the episode was being shot this March and no one bothered to change the date and time when they sent the text message to the prop assuming no one would be paying attention this or bother to freeze frame.

They obviously don't know us very well.

Assuming that is the screen from the prop and not a CGI replacement. If it is a CGI replacement, that makes it deliberate. In which case we're back where we started. More along, move along ...

Update!  11/09/2011  This post has been featured at SFX Magazine's blog.  Here's a new blog post about that.

the distorted Modigliani faces of the dolls

TV As you may have gathered if you’ve been reading this blog for long enough I live in a high rise. Not the kind of monolithic Soviet edifice which the Doctor investigates in Mark Gatiss’s Night Terrors, just four corner flats per floor, but similar enough to be able to relate to the experiences of this family and little George. At night, when everyone has gone to bed and the only sound which should be heard is the gentle hum of the freezers, there’ll always be odd, unreal noises in the distance. They’re probably perfectly domestic, the closing of a door, an argument, a television. But in the dark, especially if you’re a fair-weather insomniac like me with a wandering imagination, in my mind’s eye they can become all manner of phantasmorica.

Fear Her done properly, Night Terrors taps into these qualms and returns to one of the pre-occupations of Moffat, those things which scare children. Perhaps he has them scrawled on a list taped to his writing desk and even if he can’t write it himself, he puts them in the season plan so that he can cross them off like a narrative chasing Earl Hickey. Before broadcast he apologised to parents for turning one of the child’s few refuges against them and in truth however us adults might have been unnerved by the distorted Modigliani faces of the dolls, this is an episode designed especially to give children nightmares. In their own bedroom. There’ll be a lot of parents doing the thingy with the lights tonight.

Everything Matthew Graham’s rushed script second season script failed at, Gatiss’s manages with style. Whereas, as was the vogue back then, the situation was needlessly escalated to put the 2012 Olympics, the world and Huw Edwards’ career in jeopardy, the only jeopardy here was a few residents in the block, the Doctor and his friends. Having the monster in the cupboard Chloe Webber’s abusive father made it too specific, whereas the general bric-a-brac of a wardrobe can contain all kinds of dark secrets. When the Doctor was zapped into the drawing he disappeared from the episode, whereas trapping Amy and Rory in the doll’s house kept them very much in the adventure and a guide to the mystery in the first half.

Plus as I said the other day, the Eleventh Doctor is even more of a children’s storybook magician that his earlier incarnation who as we’ve seen time and again is able to relate to children which we saw here in his efforts to cheer George up, playing with a Rubik’s Cube, making his toys come to life. Tenth was most often seen in teaching roles, an authority figure, whereas Eleventh is much more adolescent (presumably because he’s played by an actor who’s closer to the child’s age himself by a few years). He’s closer in that sense to Fourth, and like we’ve seen in some of the dvd outtakes, you could imagine Matt keeping little Jamie Oram amused between takes just as Tom did.

Which means that to an extent in order to communicate with the parent, as we saw with Alex, he tends to have to return to their innocence by describing the universe to them, bigger and more fantastical that they can comprehend so that they will understand and won’t try and throw him out of the house before he can make the tea. Daniel Mays gives a very brave performance here. Usually seen in cocky roles, leaders, he’s called upon to pull all of that back and just be an ordinary bloke thrown into extraordinary circumstances and like James Corden in The Lodger, his scenes with Matt were a highlight. Such behaviour doesn’t come out of the blue, as we see with the landlord he has a natural fear of authority. The Doctor just tweaks that a bit.

Such analytical talk usually indicates when I’ve enjoyed an episode and I did not least because it also risked making the real world seem sinister from the moment the TARDIS landed. Director Richard Clark and photographer Owen McPolin perfectly recreated the eerie artificiality of a near deserted housing estate bathed in yellow street light, and the sense that anyone could be living behind these anonymous doors (not least the girls from The Shining). Notice that for all the accents which point in the direction of the south east and imagery towards the south-west (the episode was shot in Bristol), no location was given rendering the story fairly locationless as though it could have been happening in your city.

The ensuing exploration is of the kind which is always my favourite bits of the longer spin-off stories, allowing the characters to interact more than they’re usually allowed to in the plot-based format of the Moffat era. We’ve had few scenes like the one in The Impossible Planet in which Rose and the Doctor mulled over the implications of the lost TARDIS and although this wasn’t quite the same, it was refreshing to see Amy and Rory just together, existing, albeit whilst searching for a frightened small child or making their way through a darkened house armed only with a wooden pan. Like I’ve said before, I could quite happily just have forty-five minutes of these three chatting in the TARDIS console room or some such.

But for all of that, Amy and Rory’s drift through the doll’s house wasn’t as chilling as it might be. At a certain point I became very pre-occupied with the windows which throughout had light streaming through them. I wondered why neither of the companions thought to open the slats especially in the kitchen once used for The Unicorn and the Wasp. To do so would have given the game away too soon of course, but it's an example of wilful obliviousness of the kind we usually see in the T-word. Later, when Amy became the doll, it was treated in a strangely offhand manner, not the end of the world scenario that similar transformations wrought on Peri, Rose, Donna or even the Doctor were.

Perhaps this is partially a side effect of the episode’s change in series position. Night Terrors was filmed earlier then later exchanged for The Curse of the Black Spot. Perhaps it was switched because an element of the resolution was so close to The Rebel Flesh, albeit with a human father coming to terms with a non-human child rather than the other way around. But the episode ran short (only about forty-minutes) and ended somewhat abruptly suggesting that all the team did was to reshoot the closing scene. When originally shot this was supposed to be the Ganger-Amy, who would have become a doll. As Arthur might say, "Not sure how that'd work. Um. Err."

As the previous thousand odd words probably illustrated this was an episode better watched than written about, unless your Kim Newman or indeed Gatiss and can draw upon the history of horror as your reference point. That's unusual in this continuity heavy future with its plots and arcs. It's also an episode which unlike Let’s Kill Hitler doesn't demand an immediate rewatch so that every angle can be dissected and chewed over. Like Black Spot, this is old school Who but unlike Black Spot, there was a confidence to the storytelling, a clear understanding of the pacing and none of the characters disappeared mid-episode without an explanation. Perhaps next year, Moffat will surprise us and produce a season with a few more of these. As it stands this was just the thing for a rainy night in a high rise, as winter closes in.

Liverpool Food and Drink Festival 2011

Liverpool Food and Drink Festival 2011, originally uploaded by feelinglistless.

"Amidala discovering her own dark side"

Dance Watching the excellent Tournée not too long ago, the low budget comedy about a French impresario managing an American Neo-Burlesque troupe, it didn't take too long for me to wonder whether burlesque dancers ever themed their show, most specifically with sci-fi reference, injecting one of the more obvious sub-cultures. Well, some of them do:

"And what better narrative to bring than the rabidly beloved interstellar adventures of Star Trek and Star Wars? While they do play up the rivalry between the two, there’s plenty of room in the show’s dozen or more acts for both franchises to bare all—so for every Amidala discovering her own dark side (performer Keela Watts) there’s an aerial Borg dancer navigating her way around a suspended cube (Miranda Tempest). And taking the award for “Best Ever Use of William Shatner’s cover of ‘Common People’” is BoylesqueTO’s Patastrophic Sexapeel, whose cheeky turn as Captain Kirk brings the show to a triumphant close."

The pictures are here and well worth a look, if not safe for work.  Of course, Doctor Who was already pioneering the effort on television in the 1980s ...

the pseudonymous Robin Bland would do

TV It’s the fucking resurrection gauntlet isn’t it? Eight whole episodes and I’ve finally cottoned on to the idea that Torchwood’s Miracle Day is the Owen arc from series two spread across the world like a rash. These families (which at this point might as well be the Slitheen with better compression technology) have the gauntlet, rescued from the wreckage of hub one, connected up to one of Russell T Davies’s patented pieces of made-up magical technology to create the global morphic field Jack keeps knocking on about. Either that or they got the Immortality Gate from The End of Time to work properly. Or a mixture of the two.

But let’s face it, who cares? At this point I’m tapped out. As expected in the week when its parent series gave us one of its most confident episodes ever, Torchwood hasn’t looked more like an illegitimate child so that the most exciting moment is when two actors from a completely different franchise say a few words to one another making the whole thing look like the boringly titled Official Star Trek Convention has staged an invasion of Gallifrey One. About the only thing which made Jane Espenson & Ryan Scott fittingly titled End of the Road watchable was the sight of John De Lancie swaggering around frantically waving his Q-schtick.

At least with Star Trek, because the episodes came at you on mass, even if there was the odd duff episode, an admittedly liquid ratio depending on the particular series, there was at least the knowledge that there were another twenty-odd which might be ok. We’re at episode eight of this and every single revelation across the weeks has proved to be worth as much as the in-universe economy with Colonel Kira’s at the close of the last one a prime example, and we’ve even reached a stage were the characters themselves (Gwen) are throwing their hands in the air wordlessly frustrated at the implacable engineered plotting running on a filler-based fuel.

I imagine the professional reviewers (I tend not to look before giving my "opinion") are digging around repetitious looking from something interesting to say, about how touching individual scenes like Jack’s remembrance of Ianto or Esther speaking to her sister are touchingly well played. Just touching. Gwen’s teary flight home. Again.   They’ll be addressing the scene in which Oswald Danes tries to cosy up to a prostitute and show a capacity for change only for it to be spit back in his face, the hitherto unknown category ‘0’ for those people who were supposed to be executed already anyway suggesting the whole Danes strand has been a waste of screen time just like so many other dead ends this series has thrown up along with the expected bits of carrot.

But they’re wasting their time. We all are. RTD and the gang have somehow conspired to produce a piece of drama that inspires nothing but grim determination from its viewers or at least those viewers with high enough standards than the commenter at The Guardian who says “TV is not supposed to be high art, nor life lived, it's just some escapist thing to relax to. So chill out, haters.” The rest of that thread, under an column in which blogger Dan Martin hitherto generally quite balanced in his reviews shows signs of fatigue, has next to no other positive comments and that’s from a fairly general public. Gallifrey Base is reaching for the category one volunteer papers.

Even the revelation that anonymous blonde at the CIA is one of them didn’t illicit so much as a gurgle. Jack’s been shot? Yeah, he’ll be fixed next week. The null-field revelation which should have been cool was rendered with all the style of a sub-Sarah Jane Adventures attic scene, Mekhi Phifer suddenly turning into Clyde Langer rather than a professional member of the security services. About the most surprising moment was that Jilly Kitzinger wasn’t already part of the family, something which her behaviour in the first few episodes might indicate and betrays an element of late rewrite to make her viewpoint character when something else fell through.

When the episode ended, I decided this was going to be a six paragraph review. Here we are in paragraph seven but there’s not going to be another one. Like I said, I’m tapped out. There’s only so many times one can say the same things in different ways about a series which itself doesn’t seem to know what it’s doing. And to make matters worse episode nine looks like its going to be about Gwen defending her father from a man from the local council and knocking over the local chemist, and Frances Fisher quoting from The Eleventh Hour which only goes to remind us that what this series need is a Doctor, though a writer like the pseudonymous Robin Bland would do.  Same time next week then?