Level-Up.

Comics For all that I might say that I don't buy comics, here's the list of comics I'm currently buying regularly:

Buffy: The Vampire Slayer
Angel & Faith
Star Trek (the movie version with all its related spin-offs) (yes including Green Lantern)
Secret Wars
Lois & Clarke

We'll return to the bottom one shortly.

You'll notice the lack of Doctor Who: that's mainly because there are so many releases that to keep up with them all would be a messy and expensive business even though some of them are really good I hear. I'll be picking up George Mann's Eighth Doctor series though, for obvious reasons.

For a while I did collect the SHIELD comic, for about eight months, until it became clear that it was simply going to spend its issues recreating bits of the television series within the 616 utilising their versions of the characters who aren't really the ones from the television, however much they attempted to re-engineer them a bit. I'm replacing it with Devil Dinosaur and Moongirl.

Nothing about DC new 52 reboot has interested me. As a Who fan I understand and appreciate the notion of renewal but in the 52verse, DC seem to have taken a group of characters who through some strange alchemy have worked perfectly well for decades and survived through successive reboots which have still kept their core elements and after throwing all that out, from everything I've read, introduced shadows of them.

But Lois & Clarke does the interesting thing of bringing back the original Lane and Superman and put them in that universe, still trying to help but keeping under the radar. The first issue does a good job of explaining this status quo and of making us quite certain that these are people who existed pre-Flashpoint (the event which sparked the reboot).

The professional reviews seem to like it and judging by the comments underneath, more regular readers seem to appreciate the return of these characters, salivating at the suggestion that perhaps they'll end up replacing the version that's in the 52 however unlikely that is.  There's now the added problem that whenever there is a major disaster happening elsewhere, readers may wonder why this Kal-El doesn't pitch in.

They were reintroduced in the Counterpoint crossover event, a sort of parody of Secret Wars in which chunks of different realities appear on the same planet and the heroes therein fight each other, designed to cover publisher DC's house move to LA from New York and I realised as soon as I'd finished that opening issue that I wanted to read their first reappearance.

Problem.

Comics chains no longer carry back issues. Neither Worlds Apart or my usual haunt Forbidden Planet keep issues older than at least three months outside of the inside of graphic novels or trade paperbacks.  Apparently its because comics simply don't sell after three months other than the big titles.  By then, people are simply waiting for the trades.

Options on Ebay and Amazon are expensive due to postage.

Then one of my contacts in Forbidden Planet pointed me towards Level Up, a games/music/comics shop in the basement of Grand Central Shopping Centre, the old Methodist Hall on Renshaw Street, the Liverpool equivalent of Affleck's Palace in Manchester.

It's basically perfect, everything you'd hope a comic shop would be, with its long boxes of back issues in the centre, older issues on the walls, retro games and dvds and well, yes, it's great.

Asking at the counter I was pointed to a long box containing complete sets and near the front were the Superman issues of Counterpoint at a price cheaper than they would have been on original retail.

Afterwards I promised I would talk about them on the internet and here I am plugging away.

Of course having read those back issues, I now realise I also need the main Counterpoint series to get the whole story and we're back to all the reasons I don't read too many comics.  But at least I know now where I might be able to buy them.

"Important changes to your LOVEFiLM By Post membership"

Film Uh-oh. With streaming in the ascendency particularly Netflix, I've been wondering just how long the Lovefilm outpost of the Amazon empire could survive and indeed how many people still use it.

So when I saw the subject line "Important changes to your LOVEFiLM By Post membership" on an email my heart sank to the inevitable that my ability to borrow silent films from the 1920s going to be curtailed and I'd finally be required to pay Murdoch money to watch newer television shows.

Happily it's not quite that but it's still a hit though interesting from a business perspective.

When Lovefilm was absorbed into the main body of the Amazon website and became an adjunct of Prime all but the unlimited per month offers were cancelled and the subscription charges split.  So whereas with Lovefilm I was paying £9.99 per month for two disc at home unlimited plus streaming, it became £4 for the discs and £6 for the streaming.

Realising I wasn't actually using the streaming, what with not having a decent app on my television I cancelled that pretty quickly which has meant for a couple of years I've been paying £4 per month to watch on average about fifteen discs a month.

Recently I signed back up to Prime after taking advantage of a special offer and so now the streaming's back and I have an Amazon Fire Stick so I can actually watch the odd thing if I want to but that's by the by.

Charging four pounds a month for that service was unsustainable and I imagine a lot of people will have done the same as me.  This must cost Amazon a lot of money, even taking into account people who subsequently signed up after the change and paid £7.99 per month for the same thing (£6.99 with Prime membership).

Now they've answered.  As the FAQ page about the change describes:

What are the new plans and prices going to be?
From February 2016, customers will be able to select from three membership plans: 2 rentals per month with 1 disc at home at £4.99 per month, 4 rentals per month with 1 disc at home at £8.99 per month (£7.99 alongside a Prime membership), or unlimited rentals with 2 discs at home at £11.99 per month (£9.99 alongside a Prime membership). If you would prefer to update your plan to one of these, you will be able to do this on your LOVEFiLM By Post membership page from February 2016.

Will I still get a discounted By Post package as a Prime customer?
Yes. Your LOVEFiLM By Post plan will be discounted whilst you also hold a Prime or monthly Prime Video membership. If you have an Unlimited rental membership, your plan will be discounted by £2.00 per month whilst you have a Prime or monthly Prime Video membership. If you have a light use plan with 4 disc rentals per month, your plan will be discounted by £1.00 per month with a Prime or monthly Prime Video membership.

The upshot at my end is that my charge is going back up to £9.99 per month thanks to having the £2 discount due to my Prime membership.

Even though that's a huge leap, I'm still keep subscribing.

In pricing terms it's an utter bargain when compared to actually having to buy films to watch them especially the older back catalogue titles.  Netflix and Amazon Prime function well as Blockbuster Video substitutes in supplying newer films but neither of those have a copy of Josef Von Sternberg's Dishonoured available, a film which hasn't been on terrestrial television since 1994 according to the BBC Genome.  A physical copy of this film which I'll probably only ever watch once is £6.18.

Psychologically, my approach is to think of it as paying for the past in the future, that having paid £4 per month for all this time and knowing full well that wasn't sustainable, I'm repaying a loan.  Or at the very least all of that postage.

Beyond that, what can this mean?

Well, first that Amazon aren't ready to leave the rental disc model just yet.  I can't think of another similar service now, not since Lovefilm went out and bought all of the competitors then was purchased by Amazon (always a bigger fish).  Blockbuster has gone too.

But the increase in price also suggests that there's a dwindling subscriber base and so it won't last forever which again is to be expected.  How long before dvds and blu-rays in and of themselves become scarce or films simply start skipping a physical release altogether?  That's already started with minor releases which haven't even seen the inside of a cinema.

I give it a year or two then ... don't know.  When the inevitably happens I won't suddenly have nothing to watch.  There's my own collection, Netflix and Amazon Prime albeit with the slightly long wait for films to go to stream.  If BFI Player+ gets its act together and actually has an app on more television platforms that looks like it could be fine.

Nevertheless, having used the service through its various iterations since 2004, it'll be a difficult habit to break.

RSC's Volpone to be streamed by the BBC.

Theatre Beginning this weekend, the BBC's On Stage season will televise three plays, offer some more on radio and have a lot of documentaries about theatre. The quasi-film version of Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser starring Hopkins and McKellen does look marvelous based on the clips, but once again there's a sense, as is always the case with television these days, that theatre is something to be talked about rather than shown, far cry from days past when it was a Sunday night theatre.

But hidden in the press release, right at the bottom is:

RSC’s Volpone
BBC Arts Online
We’ll capture Trevor Nunn’s brilliant adaptation from Stratford as co-commissioned by The Space.

That's it. That's all it says.  The RSC's page is here.  Hopefully like the many operas and ballets it'll simply be available to stream on the BBC Arts website for six months, the first semi-televised broadcast of a Ben Jonson play on the BBC since the mid-60s (according to the BBC Genome).

Steven Moffat on the Doctor's Hearts.

TV The New York Observer has a very thoughtful interview with Moffat which actually manages to get him to talk about some things in a way he's not really covered before. Some of it reads like a busked version of one of his DWM columns but it's useful and interesting to hear how he currently thinks of the character:

"We know that as an incontrovertible fact that he’s been a father in his life, and it’s not something you can dismiss or ignore. He’s capable of all that. I think he just doesn’t. This is my theory, and just the fact that I write it right now doesn’t make it more important than anyone else’s theory. I don’t think he’s incapable of feeling real love at all, in fact I think he’s quite badly susceptible to crushes, but he doesn’t seem to do anything about it. He seems to have taken the position that that is no longer what he does. He’s something of a gentleman, really, and to do all that would mean proper commitment, in his book, and he’s not really good at proper commitment. "

There's also a useful pointer right at the end as to what the Christmas episode is going to be like (even if when I read the final sentence all I could think was "Well, you wrote it...").

My Favourite Film of 1975.

Film There's a weird moment right at the end of The Adjustment Bureau which I'm about to spoil, so here's a trailer for The Brother's McMullen to cover the gap between you getting to the end of this sentence and allowing your eyes to look somewhere else for long enough to close this page or click somewhere else or whatever it is that you need to do.



If you're a film fan and watching The Adjustment Bureau and you've been paying attention you'll notice that actress Jennifer Ehle from Pride and Prejudice as well as a great many other things plays a bar person who interacts meaningfully with Matt Damon's political candidate figure. As the film spins towards its climax and there's much talk of a chairman and the Matt and Emily Blunt, his dancing love interest burst onto the roof of the said bureau, you fully expect Ehle to burst wander through. Instead, Anthony Mackie brings the news they'd hoped for and says that the chairman isn't who they might expect and that it's different for everybody.  People have been a bit sniffy about the film but I find it enchanting, clever and witty, and a lot of it has to do with this climax.

Apparently there was originally a chairperson who was supposed to be in the film, but it was decided, either by George Nolfi or the producers, reports differ, not to pin down a single figure in case audience members had conjured their own ideas.  Except Ehle wasn't that either - actress Shohreh Aghdashloo actually shot scenes including a version of this one, before being dropped during reshoots.  Yet, by having an actress as prominent as Ehle in that role, however small, and in conjunction with Mackie's character's line, we still can assume that she is the chairperson especially since she's a conduit of communication between Mackie and Damon (the note).  There's nothing in the film to say she is just as there's nothing to say that she isn't.

There are plenty of other similar one or two scene cameos or jolting appearances by prominent performers in films either because they've had a whole sub-plot cut or they were doing a jokey favour for the director ripe for filling in such blanks.  Elizabeth Perkins has a close-up on the final press conference scene in The American President and having asked in two different forums over the years (rec.arts.movies.past-films and AskMefi), no one has a clue why.  In my mind she has a whole hidden subplot as a journalist trying to discover the truth of the romance between Annette Benning and President Michael Douglas and some of the things he's referring to in that final speech are because of her attempted reporting and what we're watching is seeing her being won over.

@feelinglistless No, twas not I!😐

— Elizabeth Perkins (@Elizbethperkins) September 6, 2015

Oh erm. There are plenty of other similar one or two scene cameos or jolting appearances by extras who look like prominent performers in films such as the woman who isn't in any way Elizabeth Perkins who has a close-up on the final press conference scene in The American President and having asked in two different forums over the years (rec.arts.movies.past-films and AskMefi), no one has a clue why.  Presumably because it wasn't her. Though seriously, look at this picture. It's not just me is it? I mean there are people on those forums who saw this person and agreed that it must be her.



Anyway, in my mind she has a whole hidden subplot as a journalist trying to discover the truth of the romance between Annette Benning and President Michael Douglas and some of the things he's referring to in that final speech are because of her attempted reporting and what we're watching is seeing her being won over. But it's not Elizabeth Perkins.  Except look at this photo from Moonlight and Valentino in 1995:



They're not that different. are they? I mean the eyebrows perhaps.  The nose.  The mouth.  Yes, alright she also looks a bit like Melanie Lynsky, but Melanie Lynskey wouldn't have been old enough.  She was only eighteen.  But that woman's older than eighteen.  Anyway, it's not either of them so let's move on.

Then there are the films in which actors were entirely cut out but you can sort of feel their presence.  Andy Garcia was in Dangerous Minds as Michelle Pfeiffer's love interest.  There are apparently a multitude of actors in the trimmings on Love Actually including David Morrissey (presumably playing another character seducing his employee so no great loss).  The always brilliant Sienna Miller has just been cut from Black Mass (Johnny Depp's apparent comeback for people who didn't understand Transcendence)  Terrance Malik is habitual about this enough that there's a listicle.   None of which explains why Merlin isn't in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  Tim the Enchanter?  Oh purlees.

The Doctor Donna.

Audio Even though it's late, this shouldn't go without mention. Look at them. Look at them. The Big Finish logo over David's shoulder, the URL above Catherine's head, Nick doing the interviewing honours. Truly we are blessed and on the day The Underwater Menace is released on dvd too.

The full press release is here with news about writers (Jenny Colgan!  James Goss!  Matt Fitton!) and stories, oh the stories.  So many questions about how they'll sound, if they'll attempt to mimic the era or try something new and who the rest of the cast will be.

Oh and oh if it isn't listed as Volume One suggesting there'll be more of them, perhaps we'll have a whole extra season's worth or more.  Or Billie or even Freema can be convinced to return.  Or Jenny because that would be hilarious.

Interesting narrative questions. When in the fourth season will these be set?  Also there's an odd cloud over them thanks to the end of Journey's End because we know now what Donna's fate will be.  Will they foreshadow?

Matt next?  Chris?  Matt seems not unlikely especially if David's signed up although he doesn't have a lot of distance from the thing yet or perspective.  Plus unless they give him a new companion we're then in the territory of having to get Karen or Karen and Arthur back.

Nevertheless, bwilliant!  Allons-Y!

The Woman Who Lived.

TV Earlier today the ever brilliant BBC Archive Twitter feed posted an old news report from when such things, however minor, were shot on film, in which a reporter gamely vox popped the great unwashed about whether the clocks were supposed to go forward or backwards that evening. Amid much confusion, most of them don’t really have a definite answer with one woman saying she effectively utilises the method of looking out the window and seeing how light it is. With this in mind I’ve already consulted the internet for confirmation and turned my Casio Digital Bell alarm clock back which means it feels like I have an extra hour to write this review even though I’ll be as tired as I usually am at around midnight even though it’s eleven o’clock, me time.

Note that's me time rather than Me time, which is a whole other experience, Maisie Williams’s character having been gifted or cursed with eternity rather than just an extra sixty minutes. Plus to continue the tangent for a moment, it really depends on which year you’re born as to whether you’re really gaining an extra hour or regaining it having lost it earlier in the year or being loaned the hour on the assumption that you’ll be paying it back the following Spring. Either way, this whole extra hour business is an other example of how we collectively construct fantasies so that we have these automatic treats which aren’t conditional on us knowing anyone else, in this case longer in bed (which makes me akin to Me, a bit, I suppose).

Before I begin pondering the effect this has on night workers, it’ll perhaps be an idea to actually talk about Catherine Tregenna’s The Woman Who Lived which is one of those entries which has the lustre and clear ambition to be an example of Doctor Who at its best and is a fine watch but ultimately feels a bit flat thanks to enduring death by a thousand niggles which makes it of a piece with its ancestor last week and the likes of Time Heist from last year. The epitome of “It’s fine … but …” Not a disaster, but not quite living up to the all the clips it gifted the Comic-Con trailer subsequently foregrounded in the BBC’s publicity campaign and quite rightly criticised for its irrelevance to the wider audience by Tom Spilsbury in this month’s Doctor Who Magazine.

Central to its fineness is that the main theme of episode, the fleeting lives of humans and immortality,  have been done rather better elsewhere and name-checking the most obvious example, Captain Jack Harkness at the close of the emotional arc of the episode, however squeeable, only serves to remind us of this. Whilst it’s true that one of the features of Doctor Who is the restatement of these ideas for each successive incarnation of the show and so potential new audience, with those episodes so present through streaming services and repeats, it’s impossible not to have relevant conversations from School Reunion and The Girl in the Fireplace and Utopia and Father Time playing in our heads in the background.

Outside of Who, we look towards a thousand vampire stories, Highlander, Orlando and Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium not to mention the little seen but utterly sublime The Man from Earth, written by Jerome Bixby, about an immortal fellow who admits to his university colleagues that he was originally born amongst the early humans and has survived into the contemporary age. If you’ve not seen that I’d highly recommend it, since it’s a great example of how high, epic drama can play out in a single room from a well paced script and well pitched performances. Like Me, John Oldman’s (yes indeed) memories shift to such an extent that at one point, I seem to remember, he became a historian of himself.

Maisie’s character clearly had the cleverer notion, perhaps having been subliminally inspired by seeing the Doctor reading what’s now his two thousand year diary in the previous episode. The best element of the episode is clearly the notion of Me’s memories existing on paper in these many volumes, centuries of autobiography available at the fingertips of anyone with access to the house. If she continues after her encounter with the Doctor, this will be a powerful document especially to historians within this corner of the Whoniverse allowing anyone to access the past of the planet Earth, albeit through the eyes of someone whose enduring it. If the episode can be criticised for burying the headline at all, it’s this.

If anything the portrayal of this past, however superficially entertaining in a swiping montage sort of way, also creates numerous problems in the conception of Me’s character. The death of a child, in any circumstances, is a horrific burden and its deployment here as a kind of character explanation shorthand feels misjudged, if not a little bit clichéd, the implication being that she hardened to the reality of immortality due to the death of her children, somehow failing as a mother and the sadness of not aging when they do. Apart from having the technology to save at least one of them, something purposefully ignored for the needs of the plot, what are those missing pages supposed to suggest?  What did she do afterwards that led to her tears?

Perhaps this material might have resonated more with a different chemistry in the central performances because I take no great pleasure, especially since I’ve loved her work elsewhere, that Maisie Williams is a rare example of someone being miscast within a key role. Which feels really harsh now that I’ve written the words, but while she’s utterly compelling in some places notably when she has an onrush of surety towards the end, when she’s called upon to really turn on the arrogance or the moral ambiguity of the character, it doesn’t quite fit, doesn’t sound right. Giving her the benefit of the doubt, it’s just possible I’m detecting, just as the Doctor noted, that it’s a mask she’s wearing and Williams is playing to that, but it’s not clear within the writing or edit.

Perhaps it's partly as a result of Ashldr having been under introduced in the previous episode and so having not really had the chance to become attached to the character back then, unlike say Jenny in The Doctor’s Daughter.  Her reintroduction doesn’t have the weight because she’s not yet the significant figure she should be, despite the spinning face in history. Not to mention not being as significant a figure as we all assumed she would be having seen the aforementioned trailer which included the Doctor’s moment of recognition which we all knew wasn’t tied with her being some much larger presence from his past but secretly hoped (dear, dear Susan). All of which doesn’t mean my perspective won’t change when she probably returns for the finale and I’ll feel a bit embarrassed about all of this.

That damned trailer also implied greater La Belle et la Bête resonances and although the trans-dimensional doo-hikey absorbs some back draft from Warrior’s Gate dragging a fair amount of Jean Cocteau’s imagery in its wake, once more this season in Leandro we’re saddled with a pretty vacuous foe who generally stomps around looking well designed, in this case a cross between King John from Disney’s Robin Hood and the results of a challenge from The Great British Bake-Off (thanks Radio Times, I’ll not be able to unsee that now), named after a Hungarian national footballer, growls a lot (in this case not voiced by someone from a rock band I barely know) before being vaporised at the end.

None of which is aided by us, and by, I mean me, not at all being convinced that the other Me (a joke under-used in the episode) being this long lived, having seen everything she has person, albeit with her self-confessed teeny-tiny human brain, being taken in by his lies even if her only other apparent alien encounter is the Doctor especially if, as is suggested, like a one-woman LYNDA she’s encountered the results of his ripples on history in other ways. People do stupid things when they’re desperate and we’ll talk about what the Doctor’s actually done a bit later, I have the time, but it feels contrived, part of the requirements of needing a tacked on monster related plot rather than something which has developed from the situation.

The results of these shallow narrative foundations are ultimately a redo of The Shakespeare Code albeit with the healing power of technology rather than Harry Potter’s sorcery as the solution. There’s a lot of that in the revival; grand poetic mcguffins like a jewel which resembles the eyes of Hades or what have you which turn out to be some sort of big button which does a thing which the Doctor essentially has to turn off at the end through some means or other. Well, ok, the whole of the franchise’s history too, but when stories had much longer durations, it was much easier to hide such things behind more entertaining character business. Or indeed more characters.

Nevertheless, this isn’t by any stretch a rubbish episode, it is, in being the definition of fine, not without numerous benefits, chiefly Capaldi, who yet again feels like a man entirely at peace with his life and how to play the Doctor. Much of that has to do with the philosophical underpinnings of the character as he is now and the most telling moment is when the Time Lord almost acknowledges his lack of caring in the past year and how it only works for so long but that you eventually “fall off the wagon” and embrace empathy again, because he is the Doctor and he saves people. It’s almost as though he feels like he’s playing the Doctor now, the version who uses rudeness as a tool rather than it simply being a personality trait.

He also has a lot of disappointed glares both because of what Ashildr has become and by definition internally at himself for what he’s created. Make no mistake, in saving Me, he doomed numerous people who might not otherwise have been, to their death. He might try and blame her to an extent, and how he didn’t realise that age would rust her heart, and comfort himself that she’s saved as many, but those are ripples he can’t roll back. Even if he did decide to move her to a different planet, she’s another fixed point in time so the ripples would continue there instead. In a way he’s proved everything the Valeyard said about him in the trial about his recklessness, but given the choice about not bringing a life back into the world, what choice did he have?

Which shows that large portions of the script are incredibly well written, despite my reservations. Ashildr/Me would also be excellent at Cinema Sins, as she notices that if the technology exists in the universe to do what it did to her, why doesn’t the Doctor offer it to Clara? (ding)  Why doesn’t she benefit? To extrapolate that further, why doesn’t he have baskets full of these resurrection patches lying around the console room just in case? When Rose brought Jack back it was expressed as being a one-off, impossible gesture caused by her being exposed to the TARDIS’s power but here we have something similar which is basically nothing. The chance to begin again and continue beginning again and again.

The script offers a fair amount of Blinovitch-like obfuscation in an attempt to paper over this potential item in the universe which now makes the Doctor look cruel if he doesn’t use it. That the recipients might not be too happy about receiving near eternal life. That they can be killed even if it’s a much more difficult proposition (see Groundhog Day for potential methods). That by implication they’re not readily available, having been innovated by this particular race of walking pillar boxes on a particular planet. But the Doctor suggesting that he needs to be sure that people in his company have potential for death in order to remind him that their lives are fleeting is hazy to say the least.

To focus on that a bit more for a second. The Doctor suggests that he can’t travel with another immortal because he sees the weariness in their eyes to which Me suggests that their perspectives are too vast. When he pulls the Jack reference, has he forgotten that he only really travelled with Harkness when he was mortal or glossing for the benefit of his argument and if it is the latter, for whose benefit is it, since she’s never heard of him (as well she wouldn’t since at this point in time he’s buried in Cardiff somewhere). He also sets aside Susan, Romana and River, though I suppose they shared an implied mortality (he’s allowed to forget the whole Fitz business, he certainly did while they actually shared the TARDIS) and didn’t have his experience of the cosmos at the time.

But you know, in the end, the episode would probably have just benefited from having more Rufus Hound, this year’s Frank Skinner. Wasn’t he great? The role is pretty much as himself, or the person you assume he must be, give or take the thievery and some buckle swash, but across his, count them, two scenes, he made the kind of impact Cribbins did during Voyage of the Damned and it’ll be a crime against the franchise if he isn’t back for the finale. If Romola Garai wasn’t next, he’d also probably a decent candidate to the play the Doctor too so weird would the implications of this be and so charismatic is he on-screen. How is he in dramatic roles, London readers?

Then at the end, all too fleetingly is Clara.  The Doctor misses her?  I missed her, though I understand why she was nudged out presumably for production reasons.  Given that episode eleven is supposed to be very Doctor heavy too, perhaps we'll be getting some Doctor light stories in the next four?  Or at least episodes in which the Doctor is stuck in a single room so all of his material could be a could in a day or so ala Flatline.  Notice how, now that the two of them seem to be more relaxed in each others company, they've only really been together for all of two episodes, three and five, having been separated for most of the rest.  Hmm...

My review plan ends with the note “Final round on Me as a character – implications on future events” and well, yes. Although we said this last year and it didn’t quite happen that way, we seem to be seeing a series of different pieces being thrown around which have implications for the future. The confession dongle from the first story, Clara’s general attitude, the Doctor’s hiding of Me’s existence to her here an embarrassment which will no doubt be part of his latest companion’s departure, a lie too far perhaps? Is Barrowman back somehow and will we find out about the missing two years? Either way, despite everything I’ve said tonight, we’re in a much stronger position at the half way point than we were last year. Good, good.

Romola on preserving film.

Film The (future) Doctor gazes into a hand-held time space visualiser at footage of the original suffragettes and comments on the implications of being able to see something as it happened rather than having rely on contemporary written reports.

Our Digital Past.

Life Next year this blog will be fifteen years old and I will have been writing something here since I was twenty-six. Although it's not as much of a personal diary as it used to be way back and there's much less about what's happening right now, there's just enough that I expect that if I'm still doing this in another five or six years I'll be able to read between the lines and be reminded of what was happening at this moment.

Sometimes our past is being recorded without our knowledge as Matthew Malady of The New Yorker discovered whilst browsing Google Street View the other day. We've all gone and searched for the places we remember from our life. How many of us find something this immediate?

"According to the Web site, the images had been taken in April of 2012, and I was glad to see that my old street was doing just fine. That was no great surprise, though; my mom lived on a suburban block in a middle-class neighborhood with lots of trees. What I saw was pretty much what I had expected to see.

"When I reached my mother’s house, that all changed. First, I noticed that a gigantic American flag had been affixed to the mailbox post at the corner of the driveway. That was new. Then I spotted the fire pit in the front yard that my mom and her husband, my stepfather, used for block parties, and the grill on the patio, and my mom’s car. And then there she was, out front, walking on the path that leads from the driveway to the home’s front door. My mom."

Good luck with reading this.   But it's a reminder that often what used to be simply held within our own minds and personal knick-knacks now have a back-up online.  Somewhere.

Claudia Wells on Back To The Future II.

Film Claudia Wells played Jennifer in Back To The Future but hadn't given up acting to care for a sick relative so decided not to participate in the sequels and was replaced by Elisabeth Shue. Under The Radar has an interview with her today which asks her how she felt when she saw the two sequels. It's a cornucopia of trivia and not just about BTTF:

"I saw Part II in the theaters, and I saw Part III in the theaters. Both times I went by myself and slumped down in the seat and watched the movie with everyone else. It’s funny that Elizabeth Shue got the part, because I’d screen tested for Adventures in Babysitting. That role had come down between her, me, and Phoebe Cates. So, the fact that she wound up getting my role in Back to the Future is a funny synchronicity.

"Almost every movie in the 1980s came down between the three of us and Sarah Jessica Parker. It was the same group, no matter how many people auditioned, it was almost always the same people it came down to, just switching up who got it. Phoebe Cates got Gremlins, and then I got Phoebe Cates’ role, Linda Barret, in Fast Times [the TV series]. So, literally, it was a very small group of people that got most of the parts.

"There was one audition one morning where Sarah Jessica Parker and I were trying for the lead in a movie, and then that afternoon it was between the two of us for the starring role in Martin Sheen’s directorial debut, Babies Having Babies. When I saw Sarah again that afternoon, I went to her and said, “Sarah, let’s make a deal. You get one part, and I’ll get the other. Let’s shake on it.” [Laughs] As if we had any power. So we shook on it, and she got the morning part, and I got the afternoon part."

This has happened ever since, a small pool of actresses working around projects. My guess is it's something like Emma Stone, Mila Kunis, Jennifer Lawrence, Michelle Williams and for a time Carey Mulligan with Shailene Woodley in there too.

As a bonus, here's Wells giving an interview in French:

My Favourite Film of 1976.

Film "Nobody knows anything." Hello William Goldman. If there's an co-architect of my film appreciation, its William Goldman and his books, notably and especially Adventures in the Screentrade of which "Nobody knows anything" is the key and most often repeated quote. As the wikipedia notes in a rare example of bit of editorialising surviving the editor's knife, it's often used in film articles to suggest film executives are stupid, which is why such and such a film has been a failure, but what Goldman actually means is that executives, however much planning they do, can't really know how a film will be received until the opening weekend. In other words, Waterworld was going to be an expensive, expensive failure until it wasn't.

For the uninitiated (and what is wrong with you), Adventures in the Screentrade is part biography, part screenwriting manual and filled with extraordinary anecdotes about filmmaking during the 1960s and 70s.  As well as the above quote, it's also the source of the Marathon Man story about Dustin Hoffman killing himself physically as part of his method process until Larry Olivier tells him to "just act".  But that's just the start.  If Kevin Smith's anecdote about working with Jon Peters on Superman Lives sounds extraordinary, he's essentially following the Goldman pattern of expurgating the irrational twists and turns many screenwriters have to cope with thanks to indecisive producers and directors.  If his name's on a script, it doesn't necessarily mean he wrote any of it.

Goldman's book introduced to me to All The President's Men, a rare example of having read around a film thoroughly before having a chance to see it.  In writing the script, as I explain in this ancient article about film adaptation, Goldman bravely garoted Woodstein's original account of their investigation into the Watergate break-in, ending his story half way through removing their self adulatory and triumphant conclusion, which in the film is relegated to the newsroom wire machines.  Realising that the lesser known material will be of most interest to an audience which has seen how they story ends, he chooses to close on a downbeat moment in which his characters are on the brink of failure.  Imagine trying to sell that story beat in 2015 without a second film having been greenlit.

The reasons why it's a favourite, if you've been keeping an eye on this list will be pretty obvious.  As with so many of them, it's about city folk dwarfed by their surroundings, architecture as antagonist (see this essay about the Library of Congress sequence for an in-depth analysis).  It's beautifully shot by Gordon Willis in a style which has been cribbed by David Fincher and his DPs in most of his work, especially in the presentation of night contrasting with the blary light of the newsroom (made all the more present by the use of dual focus lenses which keep both a foreground and background object in focus) (discussion of a key shot here).  But mostly it's because Dustford is so damn witty as Woodstein, making Goldman's script feel improvised and natural even though they're following it to the letter (or part of the Bernstein/Ephron draft).

What makes Goldman's book timeless is that in mixing anecdote and methodology he manages to make each of the films under consideration deeper experiences without entirely removing the veil, even those films, like The Stepford Wives, in which his contribution is almost gone.  Knowing his approach to structuring A Bridge Too Far we now can see the difficulty he had in bringing the characters in and out of focus and servicing its miriad stars (a work the Russos would do well to have a glance at before embarking on the Avengers 3 circus).  Arguably the final third of the book in which he writes a script for others to poke holes in is less readable or useful for people who aren't considering a job in actual screenwriting but we forgive him because the other two chunks are so compelling.  Expect me to return to some of its themes again over the coming year.

Sarah Silverman on her Career.

Film Note I haven't actually watched this yet, but putting it here so I can remind myself to. In a rare move, TIFF have included clips that they're talking about, which are usually edited out for copyright reasons.  But yes, can't wait.

Linda Gray on Directing.

TV The most recent Random Roles on the AV Club is Linda Grey. Back in the 80s when he contract renegotiation happened for season eight of Dallas, she didn't want more money, she wanted to direct an episode. This was the response:

"... at the end of season eight I went to my producers—it was the time to negotiate for the next two years—and I said, “I would like to direct.” I had been studying with a French woman director, whom I adored. And I said, look, I don’t want to go in there and say, “I want to direct and and you’re going to let me direct, blah blah blah.” I didn’t want to be that person. I wanted to go in with a solid bag of my solid work, my homework, and I did it. I said to my director I was studying with, “Tell me when you feel that I’m ready.” So after a long time, she said, “Okay. You’re ready.”

"So I went in at the end of season eight and I said, “I’m really tired of Sue Ellen drinking and having affairs. And the world is changing and women are changing and I really would like to direct.” And I said, “I don’t want money, I’m not asking for money, I’m just asking to direct one in 52 episodes. The next 52.” And they said no."

To spoil the ensuing text, Larry Hagman threatened to resign and so they let Gray direct and as a surprise to the them, because men, was pretty good and ended up directing at least five according to the IMDb.  As a side note, I'd love to know which French woman director was mentoring her.  Let's pretend it was Agnès Varda.

The Girl Who Died.

TV Good old Donna Noble. Despite having suffered a Time Lord lobotomy and presumably still knocking around on Earth enduring the new perils besetting the planet (you bet she was on one of those planes frozen in the sky with Wilf underneath looking aghast and hoping his Casanova looking friend is somewhere around), the Doctor’s own memory of her, crying in the console room, pleading with him to show some humanity bubbles to the surface causing the Doctor to once again do something rather against the rules. You might well ask why it’s only now that the memory suddenly emerges given the shit he pulled last year, but nevertheless, this risky flashback to the Russell T Davies era, surely another part of the subtle celebration of the revival’s tenth year on television is utterly gut wrenching. The Netflix stream of Fires of Pompeii’s going to have a spike in traffic this evening.

There’s a hypothesis I’ve been cooking for quite some time about who the Doctor is, or at least how Time Lords are wired internally. In The End of Time, there’s much talk of how the Tenth doesn’t want to go because one man walks away and another takes his place. Still the Doctor, but a different Doctor. The nature of this and how it’s explained has changed over the years because different writers have interpreted it in numerous ways, from Terry Dicks’s assumption that essentially it’s not about the words it’s the actor to the majority of other writers and producers who’ve very clearly tailored his attributes to a given actor. The Eccleston incarnation is a different man to Tennant and to Smith and to Capaldi and more often than not its impossible to imagine them reading each other’s lines.

Here’s my theory. I think that inside each Time Lord there’s a core being, a kind of sub-conscious creature who is the Time Lord who then essentially inhabits each new incarnation like a suit. But rather like a TARDIS it isn’t autonomous and when each new body emerges, it essentially takes control of this core being. In other words, a Time Lord’s conscious being changes around his or her subconscious, which is also an archivist for everything the being known as the Doctor is. So when the Tenth Doctor says he doesn’t want to go, when he talks about it being a kind of death, it really is for him, as his conscious mind goes to replaced by another who has all of his memories and knowledge, sort of, but with a different approach to how they can and should be used. None of which explains the whole Romana business, of course.

When the Twelfth Doctor says he’s been given this face for a reason, it’s because his subconscious pulled that face from his memory as a way of providing guidance for this new man who’s taking control. Except he’s been wildly slow on the uptake. Part of the problem I had last year was if this was supposed to be the same man with all of the memories of the deeds and compassion of his previous incarnations, how could he then act that way? Increasingly its looking like we were witnessing a season long post-regenerative torpor. With his conscious mind on an even keel, his subconscious finally feels confident enough that if it throws up the memory of Donna in the TARDIS crying and of saving Caecilius and his family from the fire he’ll know what to do with it. Last year you could imagine him dismissing it out of hand.

If all of that feels a bit like discussion heavy obviscation its because as I write, I’m not sure what I thought of Jamie Mathieson and Steven Moffat's The Girl Who Died. My instant reaction is that it’s a hilarious, Pythoneque romp which suddenly takes some very odd narrative turns in order to set up the next episode and that even though Maisie Williams was very good, she didn’t seem to be given enough to do in order for her death to resonate enough to be an emotional gut punch but that you could argue that given the title essentially sets up that death, the paratextual noodlings about this being a multi-episode visit for the actress meant that we knew she wasn’t dead anyway and we were just waiting to see the method of recovery so that she could turn up in an obviously much later setting in the following episode which is presumably were she’ll have a much stronger role anyway.

On the whole, this near stand alone Vikings adventure was just a welcome change. With the exception of The Time Meddler and the iconography of The Curse of Fenric, probably for reasons of cost in relation to convincing production design, this is a time period barely tapped by the television series.  There are also only sporadic appearances in the spin-off material, the key texts being Jenny Colgan’s Eleventh Doctor hardback Dark Horizons about a Scottish village under constant menace from a Viking horde and Marcus Sedgwick’s The Spear of Destiny in which the Third Doctor is caught between two warring factions during a search for Odin’s weapon. Perhaps its because Vikings tend to be utilised as antagonists. I’m not sure, for example, that we’re even told what the Viking warriors here were doing before they met the Doctor and Clara, though the indication is that it’s something the Time Lord probably wouldn’t agree with.

Like Mathieson’s Flatline, this is about the Doctor in purely heroic mode, the whimsical figure who, as Clara recognises, throws together an otherwise inconceivable plan, in this case by proving to some farmers that they can’t actually be warriors and that its entirely possible to fight without picking up a hand weapon because what else are you supposed to do against a villain who’s taking cues from a Terry Gilliam animation on how communicate with humanity (“A blessing, a blessing from the Lord! God be praised!"). All of which is hilariously played with Capaldi and Coleman at their comedic apogee, the latter notably during the description of the action we’ve just missed as broken villages loll about as we *lol* too.

The Mire are as much a narrative function as an alien race. Apart from having an MO straight from Soylent Green via Jupiter Rising, they generally exist to be a menace in a similar way to the kinds of monster or the week or fortnight or month (depending on the publication era) of Doctor Who Adventures and the solution to punishing them is in just that mode. Giving one of them a human face, albeit modelled after a God, does provide some point of interest, but recognising everything else which is happening the episode, the writer purposefully barely sketches them in. Perhaps for monsters to make their mark in the revival they have to be the key point of the episode, as per the Weeping Angels and we haven’t had anything with that kind of complexity since the turn of the regeneration.  Which isn't to say that this lot won't make good on their threat and return.

Weaving through that is Ashildr's story. To use this word again, the Doctor ruminating on how his choices affect time isn’t especially new, as the overt flashback to Pompeii underscore, but it’s the fact of this version of the Doctor having those concerns, to see the pain of Eleventh during Vincent and the Doctor washing across Twelfth’s face worrying about how saving one person can create ripples coupled with some of the manic rule breaking bravado of Tenth during Waters of Mars, knowing full well that his actions will have consequences even if the Time Lord’s aren’t around to tut at him from under their giant circular hats. Capaldi’s performance in these moments is superb and if you want another example of how he’s answered the question for himself about who the Doctor is, it’s here.

There’s also Clara’s acceptance of Ashildr’s death. Way back in World War Three, when Harriet Jones notices the rather blaze attitude of Rose considering all the deaths which have been occurring in Number 10, the companion suggests that travelling with the Doctor changes you. Clara herself seems to have become inured to death now too, both of the Vikings on the space and unsurprised in some ways here about the girl’s demise even having guessed the cause and that perhaps the Doctor was well aware that this might be the outcome. But this no longer shocks her and indeed it’s the Doctor’s kindness which probably astonishes her more, especially having had to convince him to stay earlier in the episode. This is probably the most mature portrayal of the relationship between Doctor and companion we’ve had in quite some time and equal, particularly in comparison to last year.

The writing in the closing scenes is multi-layered and complex. On the one hand it is exposition heavy, the Doctor explaining what he’s done, why he’s done it and what the results might be, cue Arthur Darvell screaming at his television that he didn’t get a spinning homage to George Pal’s The Time Machine crossed with the Genesis Wave when plastic Roman Rory guarded the Pandorica for two thousand years (while it brought Amy back to life). But it’s also thick with the themes of the opening Dalek two-parter about having the right and the Doctor having created a hybrid (the resurrection scene itself being reminiscent of Laszlo’s resurrection in Evolution of the Daleks). To an extent, the Doctor’s become Davros to Ashildr, utilising alien technology in order prolong her life.

But what’s unusual about all of this is that in televisual terms, this is a cliffhanger in which mystery resides in the results of the Doctor’s own actions and his self-revelation that in allowing his subconscious right of way the man he is now is going to have to deal with the consequences of leaving the gate open. If the Doctor hasn’t saved Ashildr there’d be no The Girl Who Lived. Also, at the risk of thinking too far ahead, these two episodes will also be analogous to The Ark, both in terms of structure, revisiting characters in two different time zones in what’s essentially the same story, and also in that Dodo’s illness is what changed the status quo of the Security Kitchen in a similar way to the Doctor’s actions here albeit on a more conscious level. Bet there won’t be many reviews which make this comparison.

Having written all of that I think am able to have an opinion now and it's much the same as before. I liked it. I laughed a lot and it’s lovely to have the heroic, questioning whimsical Doctor back.  But it's tonally all over the place and  I think bits of it feel rushed and that we’re never quite properly introduced to Maisie’s character early on and there’s a lot of reliance on cross franchise empathy with Arya Stark but that some of this will be mitigated by her return in the next episode and rewatching the two together. We’re five episodes into the series and the whole thing has an undercurrent of reliability which is really comforting. I’m back to looking forward to the next episode again for the first time since the Moffat era 1.0 and how brilliant is that?

Olivia Wilde on Producing.

Film Olivia Wilde has decided that the only way to get the kinds of films she wants to appear in to be made is to take a more active producing role. After gaining some experience on Joe Swanberg's superb Drinking Buddies, she's now going to champion female filmmakers, beginning with Reed Marano, an otherwise cinematographer who's new film Meadowland, in which she's starring and producing (trailer above). Buzzfeed interviews:

Wilde was also motivated by her desire to support a female filmmaker in an industry where directors who are women are still consistently overlooked. In her quest to get funding for the film, Wilde was confronted directly by the gender bias she was rallying against.

“It was incredibly difficult to get financing,” she said. “Reed Morano has DP-ed Oscar-[nominated] films. She is no newbie. Of course she’d make a great director based on [her] experience. So for me, it seems like a pretty safe investment. I wonder if it would have been easier if she were a man. I suspect it would have been.”

The piece is diplomatically short on detail. We don't discover who refused to fund the film and the reasons they gave (presumably because to break those confidence could affect future projects).  Let's hope the funding process on Marano's next film, Lioness, coming in 2017 film and starring Ellen Page is much simpler.

Dunham Massey.

During the First World War, this Georgian house, set in a magnificent deer-park, was transformed into a military hospital, becoming a sanctuary from the trenches for almost 300 soldiers.

To mark the centenary we have turned the clock back. Discover what life was like for the patients and how members of the Grey family helped injured soldiers to recuperate. Spend time in the ward, nurses’ station, and operating theatre as you experience the Stamford Hospital as it once was.

Dunham Massey has one of the North’s great gardens, with plenty to inspire throughout the year, including a stunning rose garden and one of Britain’s finest winter gardens.

Heritage Let's begin with some route talk. When I last visited Dunham Massey for the other project, I travelled all the way to Altrincham from Liverpool Lime Street, changing in Manchester then took a bus out from there.  This time, having consulted the ever useful Moovit app, I trained-it to Warrington then took a number 5 bus out to the house shaving a whole hour off the journey each way.  Not that it was quite that easy: at the travel office I asked for a train+bus ticket and the clerk busked and just gave me a Warrington rover ticket for the other end which was entirely invalid for the journey so I had to pay the fair to the property again on the bus.  On returning to said office to ask for my money back I was told that refunds due to clerical error required a £10 fee - so we pay them ten pounds even if they're the ones that make the mistake.  Imagine that system in other retail situations.  A complaints form is in the post.

Dunham Massey's the first place I've used my National Trust membership card which arrived in the post on Saturday.  The covering letter is short but still somehow made me weep. It says, "This is the start of something exciting.  Goosebumps, wonderful memories and many stories to share [...] Your membership isn't just the beginning of your journey with the National Trust.  It's the start of finding a a place you love."  Even if that wasn't written by Sharon Pickford, Members and Donors Director despite the letter having her facsimile signature and instead someone in the publicity department, it's still just the sort of poignant Doctorish sentiment which I needed, for various reasons, at the moment I read the words.  This is very much the reverse of "You wouldn't want to be a member of any club that would have you as a member."

As you can see from the above synopsis, the house has changed dramatically since my last visit.  Whereas then it was about displaying the history of the house across the generations, and I urge you to revisit that entry for a potted history of the building and its inhabitants, currently the interior has been changed to reflect a single three year period in its history, when the ground floor rooms were transformed into hospital wards and operating theatres and the then current owners of the house, the Stamfords and Greys aided in the care of soldiers who were broken and ripped apart by the war.  Based on photographs and eye witness accounts, halls have been turned into a replica ward,  recreation room and nurses quarters with an operating theatre set up at the bottom of a stairwell, the upstairs rooms largely changed too to recreate how the living areas would have been like at that time.

Judging by the reproductions of contemporary photographs in the spaces the accuracy is stunning, right down the patterns on the blankets, the playing cards on the bedside tables and the curtains on the modesty blinds.  When the display began, the house administration apparently assumed there wouldn't be much change in visitor numbers but these increased to such an exponential degree, pretty soon timed entry was introduced at ten minute intervals, but from my experience yesterday, the spaces were still very busy for a stately home on a cold October Wednesday afternoon.  Even with these crowds in the spaces, it's impossible not to become swept away into this history, aided by the sounds of patients in pain emanating from the bed clothes and diagnostic boards at the end of each outline the injuries some of these men had to endure.

The ticket to exhibition is a pamphlet filled with facts about the hospital.  It tells us that Dunham Massey was one of 3,244 auxiliary hospitals created to treat the wounded, designated between April 1917 and February 1919.  By the time of its closure, 282 soldiers have been treated.  But the effects of the war continued for both them and the house owners who even after returning the various rooms back to something of their original state won't ever have been able to think of their home in the same way.  Indeed much of the belongings and treasures which went into storage in one of the large hallways stayed there until the house was handed over the National Trust in 1976, subsequent generations losing track of what was there.  That room is partially returned to that state in this recreation, furniture covered in flysheets, the walls covered in many more paintings than usual.

Verisimilitude is aided by a group of actors playing various inhabitants of the hospital who wander through the spaces in costume playing short scenes, about sixteen different in all.  The effect is frankly unnerving, like seeing ghosts stepping through time like an episode of Torchwood.  We're asked not approach them, but we daren't as these fearless players,  offer their short performance pieces in a way which is entirely convincing.  There's the flirtation between patient and nurse, the rivalry between amateur and professional caregivers, the pain of post-traumatic stress and the tragedy of wife visiting the hospital searching for her husband and heading away empty handed.  I've nothing but admiration for these players who can remain in character amid the gaze of visitors with their cameras and noise and disinterested chatter.

The version of me who visited the halls for the paintings would have been disappointed if he'd left Dunham Massey until now.  Although a couple of the rooms have been turned into exhibition spaces to highlight the treasures of national importance, the silver and whatnot, in seeking to bring the atmosphere of war the designers of the display have quite rightly returned luxury items into the shadows, the artworks I venerated last time are barely visible amid the low lighting and any information about them has been removed.  They'll all be back out again next year when the interior changes again with a new emphasis on an even earlier inhabitant, the Booth family of whom there was apparently scandal.  But for at least another month until the current exhibition closes, it's about stepping into the war period.

Stepping outside after a couple of hours, I decided to finally take the ranger tour of the grounds, which was supposed to be an hour's duration but stretched out for an extra forty minutes as ranger Bob, who's apparently been visiting the house and gardens since the 1950s offered thorough, interesting explanations for everything from the hollow trees still charred by the effects of the blitz to the slaughter house used as part of the park's utility for breeding deer during the Georgian period.  Their descendants are still in the park and were always in eyeshot as we walked around, the tour group gasping with excitement every time they hopped past.  My favourite fact was that the house's Mill originally used for grain, later wood, was the model for The Old Mill by Atkinson Grimshaw which is displayed in Leeds Art Gallery and I remember vividly from when I was a student there.

In other words, on the whole this was a happy, contented day and there's little doubt that if I lived in the area, the grounds would be somewhere I'd want to spend a lot of time (they're open 365 anyway due to being a legal right of way).  Even having received my card, part of me's become quite nervous about visiting too many houses, too quickly.  Glancing through the handbook I see that the National Trust owns a variety of different kinds of property but I don't want to become as blase as I did during the art collection project or treat the visits as a chore or box ticking exercise as can sometimes happen.  The trick with this will be to take things slowly, relish each visit for the privilege that it is.  Plus the revisits, oh the revisits.  Dunham Massey changing its interior again during the the closed winter months means I'll be back again next year.

Jennifer Lawrence's Wage.

Film From Lenny, Lena Dunham's new newsletter:

"It’s hard for me to speak about my experience as a working woman because I can safely say my problems aren’t exactly relatable. When the Sony hack happened and I found out how much less I was being paid than the lucky people with dicks, I didn’t get mad at Sony. I got mad at myself. I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early. I didn’t want to keep fighting over millions of dollars that, frankly, due to two franchises, I don’t need. (I told you it wasn’t relatable, don’t hate me)."

Unarguably, J-Law's the most famous actor in American Hustle thanks to the two franchises she's talking about and yet they thought it fair to pay the three blokes more money.  Shame on them.  I daren't think how much Scar-Jo is getting at Disney for The Avengers films in comparison to her co-stars.

My Favourite Film of 1977.

Film The first film I saw at the cinema was Pete's Dragon.

At least I think it was. Having asked my parents, they seem to agree that it must have been though they don't know why they chose that in the end. I think it might even have been that my Dad wanted to see it and since it was of a low enough BBFC rating I was brought along too instead of asking someone to babysit me.

If it was at this first release, I would have only been about three years old so you'll have to forgive me if I don't have some wild anecdote about seeing the film. The only image that's lodged itself in my greys is of a little boy, which I have to assume is Pete, dancing along the road with the dragon which on reflection might have been from a trailer montage at the beginning of a VHS release for some other Disney release later.

The only solid memory I do have is of walking away with Mum and Dad, down the stairs from the 051 cinema on Mount Pleasant to the underpass, this being a rare example of me at that age being in town relatively late, I'm assuming past ten o'clock. From what I can gather this would have been early 1978 (oddly enough at about the same time as Star Wars and it's pretty typical of things that the giant animated dragon film would be my first cinema experience).

Having thought about this event across the years, there's one anomaly which has always, not so much bugged me, as given me pause.

Back then, in the 1970s, we lived in Speke which for the uninitiated is a suburb way out in the sticks of Liverpool, so far out that it was part of Whiston until 1932 when it was bought by Liverpool Corporation from the original owners, the Watt family (and indeed so old that it was originally owned by Christmas).

Going to secondary school ten years later involved a half hour bus ride to Penny Lane (yes, that one) so going into Liverpool city centre by bus in '77 would have been something of an achievement.

Which is why we'd usually see films at the Woolton Picture House (see Star Wars). A few years later there was an ill-fated evening trip to see a rerelease of Herbie Goes Bananas which we missed because the newspaper listing was wrong. It had already been replaced with Videodrome. I cried and cried in the rain outside the telephone call box as my Dad phoned home to tell her.

Or we'd make the semi-slog to the Cannon Classic on Allerton Road but that only tended to be on extra special occasions or if I was being taken by relatives. That's how I saw most of the Bond films in my youth, though I slept through most of Octopussy. If I'd been especially well behaved I'd be bought a hot dog which was a Cannon speciality.

So why did we travel all the way into town for Pete's Dragon and why wasn't it on locally? Aha, perhaps we met Dad after work - he worked in the city centre.

Hold on ... I'll ask my parents about that too ...

It's quite simply. Mum says its probably because that was the last place where it was still showing. The 051 was a second run house in those days.

Either way, that answers that question.

Moral: Ask your parents about things you can't remember. They'll tell you stuff.

Miranda July interviews Rihanna.

Music And she's star struck, bless her. A really well written piece in the style of her first person books:

"Souls are funny things. They stay constant even when the outside changes, or when the heart makes mistakes. Souls don’t really care about good or bad, right or wrong — they’re just true. Everlasting. It makes you sound dumb to talk about this stuff, which is why no one could tell me exactly what it was about Rihanna. But millions of fans don’t seem to need it explained to them. A soul just knows a soul. I never told you she was pretty because that’s not what I experienced. My understanding, from the moment she sat down, was that we were in love. We were the most in love any two people had ever been. The sun was finally setting. We’d been talking for almost two hours. I just had one more question."

Don't forget to watch the interview with Miranda about interviewing Miranda. It has one of the most Miranda July moments you'll ever see.

On The Doctor and Strategies.

TV Just a short note.

One of the running themes of reviews of last night's episode of Doctor Who, Before The Flood, including mine to be fair, is how the Doctor's solution to returning from the dead, hiding in a box for several centuries, has been used as a plot device before, notably in the shape of the Pandorica and by Captain Jack in Torchwood. Oh and the passing of a message via a hologram resembled Blink.

This is a common complaint you see about the programme. That the Doctor uses such and such a device, or the narrative takes such and such a familiar turn and isn't that boring and repetitive and why couldn't the writer have tried something new.

Well now, and I'm including myself in this, stop.

One of the inherent problems with a television narrative, especially if it resolves itself around a single protagonist, is that their arc has to be more fluid than it would be in a more self-contained text like a film. To an extent, the characters have to remain relatively static or at least change more slowly than they would over ninety minutes.

Doctor Who has been running for over fifty years and it's only in considering last night's episode that I realised that the Doctor going out of his way to find another solution to the problem for the purposes of narrative originality would be have been illogical and frankly unrealistic.

In fact, a strength of Doctor Who, his way of "learning" if you will, is that he's gained the ability to repeat game plans across time, to know when a survival strategy or approach to repelling an alien invasion works and being able to replicate it when the situation requires or the opportunity arises.

As with so many things, this was even turned into a character point during the Eighth Doctor novels when he and Sam Jones actually gave such strategies numbers, rather like the Eleventh Doctor's "rules". When she left he was somewhat bereft because he'd shout a strategy number at the new companion who wouldn't have the slightest clue what he was on about.

Most often the Doctor does have to utilise bespoke solutions in unique situations.

But when we talk about how the Doctor uses similar approaches for dealing with Bootstrap paradoxes it's because he's realistically realised how best to deal with them and is making the necessary arrangements. Blowing the dam in Before The Flood to create that piece of expected history in the same way as The Fires of Pompeii, albeit with a smaller death toll.