TV Just as they updated the YouTube offering for British Movietone, AP also massed over a hundred thousand more recent clips from the past few decades. Let's have a look shall we?
Sci fi clcassic celebrates 45th anniversary - typos are a feature of this upload. The metadata on this clip says "Peter Davidson" whoever he is. Barnaby Edwards is our spokesman here in a tour of the exhibition in Cardiff in 2008.
UK Prince William meets the stars of Middle Earth at UK premiere - including Sylv.
Entertainment Weekly: The Biographer - post-TVM, pre-Big Finish Paul on the set of a film about Diana in which he plays Andrew Motion featuring Captain Henry Avery and Elder Ood. Yes really. Only ever released in the USA and Japan according the IMDb. There's a longer making of here.
Entertainment Daily: My Kingdom - released on Who's 36th anniversary, a short piece about the gangster remake of King Lear shot in Liverpool starring Richard Harris (and very good it is too).
Entertainment Daily: Invisible Circus - Chris at around the same time. With hair and oh so young. Bless.
There are also lots of clips of John Hurt.
Natural Regression (The Scientific Secrets of Doctor Who)
Books Given its content, a very short story within an anthology threaded through a fact based look at the television series approach to science, Natural Regression is a nonetheless fairly momentous entry within the franchise. The first new piece of Eighth Doctor prose published by the BBC Books imprint since Fear Itself in 2005 (Spore was a Puffin eBook), it's also the opening salvo in a coincidental multi-platform reveal of what happened him between the end of the Big Finish audios and his regeneration (including a comic series and audio) refreshing the character again. As one of the architects who helped establish the character, despite the slender pagination, Justin Richards instantly captures Eighth in his usual status quo, planets and galaxies exploding all around and just him and his small blue box trying to do their best against insurmountable odds. The motivation for this small adventure fits within the scientific theme of the book (as well as poignantly paying homage to the educational roots of the series) and the only criticism I have is that it ends at just the moment when you want to read about him going off on further adventures with a potential new companion. After nearly twenty years, this version of the character continues to surprise.
Identity Loss.
People The Guardian has a useful piece about memory loss or more specifically identity loss and how it's not uncommon:
"For some, amnesia is specific to a situation: being in car crash or witnessing a murder. In others, it is not a solitary personal experience that drifts away in time but your identity, your self. “Who am I, what have I been doing all my life?”
"Jason Bournes in the real world are usually found by police on street corners and led, in an often dishevelled and confused state, to emergency rooms. No name and no memories. Some have travelled hundreds of miles from home as part of their psychogenic fugue (fugue is Latin for flight). It is a departure from a distant physical location, but a remote place of the mind, too."
My Favourite Film of 1988.
Film Still on air now in a different form and long after I stopped listening to commercial radio on purpose, the "peaceful hour" on Liverpool's Radio City was how I went to sleep during my school years, broadcast between midnight and one. I can't remember who the DJ was, though YouTube suggests it might have been Paul Leckie, but I do have two vivid memories. One that every night someone would request Minnie Riperton's Loving You and there was a brief moment when my tweenie soprano voice could actually reach some of those high notes and the adverts repeated at what seemed like ten minute intervals for the latest film releases at the Video City chain of which our local was in Garston.
These adverts, which included clips of dialogue from the films and what must have been a pithy synopsis supplied by the film company were repeated so often that after a while I could quote them verbatim. Now there's only three films which pierce the fog: The Pick-Up Artist ("Hi, I'm Jack Jericho." "Did anyone ever tell you that you have the face of a Botticelli and the body of a Degas?"), The Boy Who Could Fly ("You told your mother something about a boy who rescued you." "What are you, a shrink?") and Working Girl ("I have a head for business and a bod for sin."). Every night these same adverts. But for some reason I never did actually see any of these films, on rental from Video City, which was odd because we were in there all the time.
As a family we were lent our first video player in the mid-80s. We ventured out that night to buy a blank tape from the Asda at Hunts Cross which would eventually be the permanent home for a recording of the James Spader starring Starcrossed which was broadcast as part of a sci-fi season on Channel 4 (with, if I can complete the memory, a purple sticker across the top which had been given away free with the 2000 AD spin-off "magazine" Crisis). But that evening it allowed us to finally experience the magic of recording something from live television and then playing it back. Pretty soon afterwards we decided to try renting some films and the nearest shop which wasn't also an off license was Video City in Garston.
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, this is where I first hired Star Trek: The Next Generation, but before that, one summer holiday, I remember working through the whole of the available Police Academy series, loads of Disney and oddly one Sunday afternoon Robocop, which would have been my first 18 certificate film. Not a bad place to start. The decor is about what you'd imagine a mid-80s video shop to be, with woodchip wallpaper and those red plastic display boxes for new released and wall shelves for the back catalogue (with its often lurid box art). There might even have been a small, walled off section for adult selections. The place seems huge in my memory, but was still relatively small, so it could have been about the size of an average off license.
Yet despite all of the advertising efforts I would eventually see these three films through other means. The Pick-Up Artist, starring Robert Downey Jr in his notorious phase opposite Molly Ringwald just after she'd fallen out with John Hughes and was seeking more adult material was broadcast in the middle of the night on ITV back when they didn't simply rerun Loose Women and posh teletext, The Boy Who Could Fly was I think shown one morning on Channel 4 and I think I eventually saw Working Girl on a recording the same relative made of it from Sky for us. Even as I type this, I still can't believe that all these archaic means of accessing film were only thirty odd years ago. Though given that I'm forty, that is actually a very long time. Let the river run.
BBC Genome adds links to actual programmes.
TV The BBC Genome is a massive database of everything broadcast on the BBC from 1923 to 2009 created by scanning in back copies of the Radio Times. Since it went public it's been an invaluable source of information as to what was transmitted when, providing the useful ability to remind us when memories of various shows actually happened.
Now it's even better. Now they're going through and linking entries to actual programmes available on the BBC website across television and radio:
Now it's even better. Now they're going through and linking entries to actual programmes available on the BBC website across television and radio:
"When I started the work to find the programmes, we weren't sure how many published programmes, which are available outside the 30 day catch-up period for programmes available on BBC iPlayer — we would find on the BBC website. Over the years, different departments have uploaded select broadcast programmes, and they sit under different collections on bbc.co.uk – sometimes categorised and alphabetised, sometimes not. We knew about the large and well-documented collections, and estimated there would be many more obscure, single programmes too.They're asking for user submissions, so of course ...
"Our guess when we started was that we might able to link about 3,000 videos or radio programmes – so far, we have found about 8,500 (282 television and 8,200 radio). And we're still working on more."
Are you MARVEL or DC?
Film At a certain point, I began to think of the MARVEL cinematic universe, which I favour because it's good, and the WB/DC projects a bit like political parties or at least with the sort of tribalism with which kids used to defend their favourite 8-bit computer with (a debate I was largely on the fringes of even then with my Acorn Electron during the Spectrum/C64 years and then owning a C64 while people were throwing STs and Amigas in each others faces).
Partly this is because the creatives, or actors at least, are almost choosing which of the big comic book franchises to join to the point and there's little or no crossover between them. As far as I can see, none of the cast of the Suicide Squad or Batman vs. Superman films has previous appeared in the MCU or vis-versa so it's entirely possible for us, or at least me to think of them as either being, "MARVEL" or "DC" and be otherwise disappointed if they've chosen the latter.
Rachel McAdams is a favourite actress, so when she says she might be in the Doctor Strange film, it's a relief because it means she's MARVEL. Finding Amy Adams in the Man of Steel was a shame because I like her too but she's hitched herself to DC (even if she was a predictably good Lois in an otherwise bad Superman film). It should be noted that anything pre-Iron Man or pre-MoS doesn't count so I'm still in hope that Anne Hathaway might play one of the Inhumans or some such.
Is it possible to guess if an actor will turn out to be MARVEL or DC? Maybe, maybe. When the cast list for Suicide Squad was released, I wasn't surprised by most of the names. Looking at other franchises for inspiration, Emma Watson feels very MARVEL, but Rupert Grint is clearly DC. Daniel Radcliffe could go either way. Greta Gerwig, MARVEL. Brad Pitt, DC. Cary Grant, MARVEL. Gary Cooper, DC. No idea why.
Partly this is because the creatives, or actors at least, are almost choosing which of the big comic book franchises to join to the point and there's little or no crossover between them. As far as I can see, none of the cast of the Suicide Squad or Batman vs. Superman films has previous appeared in the MCU or vis-versa so it's entirely possible for us, or at least me to think of them as either being, "MARVEL" or "DC" and be otherwise disappointed if they've chosen the latter.
Rachel McAdams is a favourite actress, so when she says she might be in the Doctor Strange film, it's a relief because it means she's MARVEL. Finding Amy Adams in the Man of Steel was a shame because I like her too but she's hitched herself to DC (even if she was a predictably good Lois in an otherwise bad Superman film). It should be noted that anything pre-Iron Man or pre-MoS doesn't count so I'm still in hope that Anne Hathaway might play one of the Inhumans or some such.
Is it possible to guess if an actor will turn out to be MARVEL or DC? Maybe, maybe. When the cast list for Suicide Squad was released, I wasn't surprised by most of the names. Looking at other franchises for inspiration, Emma Watson feels very MARVEL, but Rupert Grint is clearly DC. Daniel Radcliffe could go either way. Greta Gerwig, MARVEL. Brad Pitt, DC. Cary Grant, MARVEL. Gary Cooper, DC. No idea why.