“Sickness, like sex, demands a private room, or at the very least, a discreet curtain around the ward bed” - Violet Weingarten

Life One the rare occasions when I do get a cold, it's never a bang, fuck you, and out. It's a slow process in which I can feel every symptom creeping in and taking up home. It probably accounts for why I've been so out of sorts this week leading to a rather lame showing on the blog. You'll forgive me, then, hopefully for presenting a few odd comments and links huddling together pretending to be something better. Back to full strength soon I hope.

Review 2007: Update: eight contributors so far and as with the last couple of years I'm trying to get one for every day in December. Details available here. Don't worry if you don't think you can write. I've been writing this for six and half years and it's never stopped me. Also if you're one of the eight, do please reply by the end of this month so that I can start posting thing from the first of the month.

Martha Rosler’s Library: "The library consists of nearly 7800 volumes all from Rosler’s collection, mostly in English, and includes catalogues, essays, documentation in subjects ranging from art, theory, women’s studies, science, politics, revolution, poetry and fiction."

Found in the referrer logs: The difference between Mozart and Shakira. Well, there's their ages for a start.

Ancient Marvels Abound at Vintage Computer Festival: "Topics at the Vintage Computer Festival ranged from a discussion of the RAMAC -- the first spinning disk drive -- to a brief history of "phone phreaking" to the role of the TRS-80 in the PC revolution."

I've updated the filmlog.

Are you malcoordinated or uncoordinated?

I've also attempted a review of last night's rather wonderful Doctor Who Team-Up. Warning, the sofa seems to be lost in a vortex at the moment so the link might not work.

Teen Accused of Stealing Virtual Goods: "The youth in the Netherlands was on one of those Web sites where you create virtual people to wander around virtual buildings spending what amounts to real money. You pay cash for credits to spend online. The 17-year-old allegedly stole $5,800 worth of imaginary furniture. Real police arrested him. They suspect other teens of receiving the stolen goods."

The BBC consolidates its disparate blogs onto one page with a single mega RSS feed.

Odds and Bodkins: Isabella Rossellini Awkwardness, Much More: "So there I am with Isabella and David. Me: HowdoyoudogoshImsohonoredtomeetyou. Isabella: What did you think of the movie? Me: You must be very proud. Isabella: That depends on what you thought of the movie."

Time Crash.

TV As soon as it started I felt privileged to be a Doctor Who fan. Sir Guy of Gisbourne was stalking menacingly around Nottingham Castle again and it was all to do with whomever Maid Marion has been spending her time with. Strangely the appearance of Pudsey Bear was less anachronistic than it might have been considering everyone else in that version of the twelfth century seems to have been to the John Lewis sale for their make-up and costumes. You do have to feel sorry for the Robin Hood fans who have to content themselves with a non-canonical skit, albeit with a cute wink from the lovely Lucy Griffiths and the sight of Guy almost hanging a stuffed bear.

Not for them a musical lead in from Myleene ‘full of’ Klass and John ‘full of’ Barrowman (far preferable to the Jordan and Andre suck fest from last time which some of us still have to endure if we want to hear the proper cloister bell). Not for them a Radio Times cover and mention in the listings, a canonical story which brings back a well loved incarnation from the past, written by the man who brought us the best episode of the last series. Not for them a whole five minutes dropped in to the mayhem, instead their mini-episode wrapped around some shambling on some stairs with Wogan menacing a school boy for some cash. Kind of makes you feel like tv fan royalty.

The script for Time Crash was vintage Steven Moffat; funny, exciting and touching and enveloped around a time travel related conceit. In fact, it was the same kind of paradoxical causality loop we saw in Blink, in which the Doctor could only follow the plan that Sally had already passed on to him in the folder. And so Tenth knew how to fix the Tardis because he’d already seen it as Fifth, even though neither of them had experienced the brainwave. Of course it does beg the question how he then forgot about telling himself about the return of the Master (and his wife) but that information was probably lost in one of the Eighth Doctor’s several spells of amnesia so we’ll forgive him. That should sort out problems with The Five Doctors too. Oh how we wish that the series had been this well written back then.

I think Time Crash was about as good as we could have hoped it would be, ultimately ignoring many of our expectations and doing something better. Whereas I’d expected some veiled reference to Dimensions in Time and the emotional journey being the fact that Tenth couldn’t tell Fifth about the time war (which I do hope they’re saving for the extravaganza with the Eighth Doctor which my fan gene expects this was a precursor to) this was about what is to be a fan, in an even more direct way than Love and Monsters (Fifth’s heard of LINDA! Yay, LINDA!), and more specifically a fan of David Tennant’s generation for whom Peter Davison was their Doctor and who we (because he was really – I just say Paul McGann because I like looking at raised eyebrows). Even the title must be a riff on a certain story recently released on dvd featuring a supersonic aircraft and the Master in a rubbish, sorry, rubber mask).

All of the continuity references! As well as affectionately ripping the piss out of the Peter Davison era, with its synthesiser music (nice one Murray 'err um' Gold), spectacles, the hands free, rubbish beards, funny hats and decorative vegetables, David got to say things like Nyssa and Tegan and the Mara (but not Adric or Turlough) as though remembering when he was pulled out of history and we remembered with him (even if it suggested a placement for Fifth as just after Snakedance which means we’re remember Martin Clunes in make-up (boxset with Kinda due next year then).

And wasn’t Peter Davison good? When the new show was being cast, way before we were waiting for Christopher, I suggested that Pete should be given another go at it. I can see why that didn’t happen (see Russell's comments on older actors from Project Who), but he’s really grown into the role. Often maligned because his television era only really brought us about four unequivocally good stories, he himself has admitted it wasn’t until Caves of Andronzani that he really understood how to play the Doctor and that certainly shows in his Big Finish stories from which I think you can see some continuity here – the grumpiness is definitely a carry over as well as the gruff.

Davison's was a very gracious performance, essentially providing something for the current incumbent to bounce off. Tennant was certainly at the apogee of his Tennantness, but that just heightened the differences between them even as he listed the similarities. For all Russell’s bluff about taking Terry Dick’s opinion that the Doctor stays the same and it’s whatever the actor brings to the role, he does spend a lot of time making observations, making fun, turning on a dime in a crisis and shouting which are things that Davison’s Doctor rarely did. Not that he had much time with all the bickering.

It’s a shame that Graham Harper didn’t receive an on-screen credit here since his work here was superb, never once letting the camera rest too long anywhere – loads of energy and whatnot, always keeping the two Doctors in the same frame underlining their connection. Tucking the story into the end of The Last of the Timelords worked well too and unlike the Pudsey Cutaway, you really couldn’t see the join, well not with these old eyes. Except the colours in the Tardis seemed much richer to me, the lighting emphasizing the yellows and greens highlighting the two costumes.

Were they really Peter’s old cricket whites? That stick of celery looked far too healthy …

“Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius.” -- Robert Hughes

TV There's a rather irritating advert for Radio 5 Live knocking around the BBC at the moment. Actually the idea is quite good. In order to demonstrate that the station does analysis as well as just news and sport it features a couple of situations in which news worthy and erm, sport worthy events are broken into as the protagonists then talk about what they're doing and how it could be done better. The first is a police chase in which a copper manages to pin a criminal to the ground who then gives him a discourse on his technique. What I'd like to know is -- why is the criminal a scouser? Haven't we gotten over this stuff? Why have different accents anyway (the copper is a cockney)? It just seems wrong to me that the BBC are reinforcing an age old stereotype in an advert for a radio station.

"He was my Henry Higgins." -- Nick Frost

TV Clips from a really informative and funny Q&A about Spaced. Wish I'd been there.

"Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it." -- Ernest Hemingway

TV Douglas McGrath offers a really useful explanation for why the writer's strike in the US is happening: "When video came into being, a new accommodation was made, allowing a small residual for tapes and then DVDs. I am not being hyperbolic when I say "small." For a DVD sold for $19.99, we are paid 4 cents. To put that in perspective, that means that to pay for one tank of gas, a writer needs to sell 1,500 DVDs. To put it another way, it's a penny less than if we returned an empty can of Coke."

"There are some things a man just can't walk away from." -- Stagecoach

Film O.A. Scott uncovers the Western genre and quotes from a few of the sources I used within my dissertation: "That description has been challenged by some recent scholarship. The film theorist Rick Altman, in “Film/Genre,” sees Porter’s film not as a western but as “a combination of travel and crime genres.” It was only over the course of the next decade, he argues, that the word “western” went from “a geographical adjective, designating a favored location for films of various types” to “a loosely defined film genre capitalizing on public interest in the American West.” In the earliest days of commercial cinema, exhibitors and advertisers described their wares as “cowboy pictures,” “Wild West films” or “westerns melodramas” (or comedies of romances). The West represented a setting and a style rather than a theme or a set of narrative conventions. The selling point, frequently, was a vicarious journey to an actual place. Altman reproduces a 1911 ad in Moving Picture News, purchased by a Chicago-based company, promising “real western pictures made in the land of the cowpuncher.”

“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” -- Orson Welles

Radio Orson Welles meets HG Wells. Broadcast during the production of Citizen Kane which is mentioned. Just wonderful.

“If there was a trick, there must be a trickster.” -- Dorothy Miller Richardson

Elsewhere Now that I've wigged you out a bit -- seriously I'm alright, I probably just need to get out more -- here is something you may have missed.

“How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Life How are we feeling? As the autumn turns to winter I'm feeling it more than usual, as the nights drop by earlier each day and each morning is greeted by a very gray looking sky I can feel myself getting ever more unimpressed, not necessarily short tempered as slightly lost. This of course happens every year, but even with work and keeping myself busy around that, I just feel as though I'm missing something. Of course, there are all of things that many people my age do have, a relationship, a family, a mortgage, a car, a cat or a dog, responsibilities in general, but it's really not that. I'm missing something that's not related to any of that. It's like I'm a block of wood floating on a stream, with a world below that it only touches along the edges and surfaces, which is about to head into a river, rushing ever faster with the tide into a lake, with a heavy rainfall pushing it downwards into the deep just now and then.

Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? (Part Two)

TV Perhaps the most illuminating discovery to be made watching the deleted scenes section of the new dvd release of the third series of nu-Who, other than the fact that the opening speech from Torchwood does indeed mean sod all just as we suspected, is how much everything in this untreated footage looks rather cheap and indeed like an old fan video before the final grading of the footage, the music and the ADR are added. It’s a sobering lesson in how the programme making process doesn’t end when the initial shoot is over and it isn’t simply a case, as some misguided fans I’m sure believe, of The Mill dropping in a few effects and Murray drowning everything in his music.

It’s also interesting to note though how much is lost – I don’t think the Daleks have quite as much presence in the final version of Evolution of the Daleks as they do in the theatre scene featured from there, the sound of Nick Briggs’s ring modulator ominously filling the space. To a certain extent too there’s a different the immediacy of the performances; Miranda Raison’s accent seems far less strained here and her best scene as Tallulah, trying to get across that field in her shoes was lost on the cutting room floor. David Tennant too still commands the camera even when it looks like something shot by Bill Baggs in the early 90s.

Goodness knows then what …

The Sarah Jane Adventures: Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?: Episode Two

… looked like before grading and whatnot, especially as it cut between the past, the alternate present and the void, all different and requiring their own special shooting conditions. Was the void shot against a green screen or in a studio not unlike the one in which the opening episode of The Mind Robber played out? Since the backing to the blog this fortnight seems have been shot on location in there, did Maria bump into Romana while she was waiting for Sarah to return? Was the sepia look of the scenes in the past achieved through a camera filter or in the computer? Just how did Sarah-Jane only appear in the mirror, Quantum Leap-style during the central show down with Andrea and The Trickster in her old attic?

But to be honest I’ve only thought of these questions after the fact – I was too rapt up in the episode to care, which is quite a compliment. This was a far talkier wrap up than in previous stories, dodging the typical run around in favour of big dialogue scenes covering weighty topics such as what a life is worth and whether the existence of one human being can be justified as being more important than another. Certainly this shares thematic similarities with The Family of Blood, but whereas John Smith was a fictional construct, Andrea Yates was a real person who’d simply not wanted to die at the age of thirteen.

Despite causing the abduction of Maria and nearly her father, Andrea somehow came across as a much more sympathetic character than last time, not genuinely evil just misguided and this had a lot to do with Jane Asher’s performance, as layered a characterisation as this series has seen, from her hostess duties at what had the potential to tip into Abigail not Andrea’s party to her sexually charged flirting with Maria’s Dad (which certainly turned this viewer’s head in more ways that one) to perfectly presenting a rapidly broken woman coming to terms with memories of a childhood decision and the implications of it.

This, then, was the first time in the series that the adults, including Sarah Jane, were at their most prominent. Joseph Millson was finally given something to and took advantage of the chance to shift Alan from being rather a one-note Dad figure into someone able to cope with the new alien discoveries as much as his daughter. It’s a shame that the secret from across the road has been revealed to Alan so early although it’s to the good that the potential paradox machine, sorry, reset switch that could have simply put everyone back to where they were with the same level of knowledge before the adventure began wasn’t flicked, the events of the story still having consequences.

Liz Sladen wasn’t a slouch either, dependably facing down the trickster whilst fretting about Luke whom she’s by now bonded with as though he were her real son. I’ve read a criticism somewhere in the past week that this iteration of the character has little to do with the figure who travelled with the Doctor which isn’t true at all, and indeed she’s a more logical progression that the rather strict woman who strode through K9 & Company. People change when they’re provided with differing perspective and responsibilities and like Captain Jack before her, she’s essentially carrying on the Doctor’s work the slow way. As Sarah admitted herself in the first part of the story, she has become a bit mumsy, but there are still the flashes of humour tempered with a new found authority when required.

My consternation last week of the result of Sarah Jane being taken from the time-mix were sort of addressed in the void, at least from a spin-off perspective as Ms. Smith listed her conquests and the Trickster said that he’d deflected them from Earth. It’s a pity the script didn’t go further though, talking about how the effect of pulling the character from history would have touched other eras of history. It would have odd though not to have mentioned the Doctor but then that led to my fan genes trying to work out exactly when he’d be pulled from time and how different the universe would be without him. Perhaps we’ve already seen that during the second series of new Doctor Who, the alternative world that gained a Rose still being devoid of her time lord friend.

Frankly, I could go one for many more thousands of words about how much I enjoyed this episode but at some point you do fear that you could head off into a territory of layering in superlatives that the actual programme can’t withstand. It can’t be that good can it? That meteor wasn’t the best we’ve ever seen, for example. Why did it seem to be targeted directly at Sarah Jane's house conveniently in the path of her laser beam? The alternative Clyde seemed a bit inconsistent – would cake really be enough of a reason to stick around at a birthday party with those people having not yet been softened by his association with Luke? I’m still not sure about Chrissie Jackson, who was given some pretty funny lines in here but seems to be a mismatch with the other Jacksons – you can’t plausibly see them as ever having been a family unit in the past and she hardly seems like Alan’s type.

The Graske, though a wonderful creation, could never sustain a full adventure (I'm hankering after a 3D Beep The Meep), but it would be a waste if this was the last we see of his master the Trickster, who was still bone chillingly scary. The quality of the ‘flashback’ was brilliantly realised considering the budget (great mini-Sarah), even if the accident at the pier might be another blow to the economy of seaside towns. Graham Harper’s direction, particular in those scenes, was superb and it seems bizarre that he’s not working on feature films, so able is he to cover action and actors, selecting the angles at which to shoot the pier hanger for maximum effect. The music was probably the best of the series, even if the Mr. Smith fanfare is becoming a bit repetitive. As with the rest of the series, at no point did it seem as though Gareth Robert’s script was oversimplifying everything for the kids, granting them with some intelligence, expecting them and us to keep up with the rapid scene and story changes, presenting a global apocalypse from a localized perspective.

This might well have been the best story of the series (so far).

Next week: The mystery of UNIT dating is finally solved. Possibly.

“If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?” -- TS Eliot

Anatomy Wikipedia's list of famous tall women, some of whom are famous for being tall.

"Destroy him, my robots." -- Digital voiceover, 'Impossible Mission'

Books My first computer was an Acorn Electron. It was the cheaper home version of the BBC Micro with a similar cream finish but smaller and I loved it. I think my parents bought it from Dixons for about eighty pounds one Christmas in the mid-eighties and I spent every waking hour using the thing for years. It’s were I learnt to type and although I know now the games weren’t all that good I used to spend hours playing the likes of Kissin Cousins and Hacker, Repton being far beyond my price bracket until they appeared in the Hits compilations years later. My Dad too would sit up until the wee small hours playing Pacman knock-off Snapper and later Chuckie Egg, a time he also looks back on with nostalgia.

My next computer was a Commodore 64 and I loved that too, the music, the games. I was there during its glory years when Zzap! 64 magazine was the place to read about the best new games and I ‘enjoyed’ the arguments about whether it was better than the ZX Spectrum, especially since it clearly was. I’d borrowed a Sinclair whilst one of the Electrons (since we went through a couple) was repaired and it just didn’t seem as good. My cousins had an Amstrad CPC and I did envy that since it had its own monitor and built in disk drive. Anyway, I was still trying to beat Wizball on the C64c right up until and after the boat had sailed and everyone was hammering away on Sony Playstations. After that was a low-spec PC and it was PCs all the way until the relatively high spec machine I’m writing this and somewhere along the line I stopped playing games.

But I was still ripe Jack Railton’s excellent The A-Z of Cool Computer Games, a nostalgia trip through a period that he himself claims can nebulously described as the golden age from the early seventies through to time of the Playstation, when the simple act of moving a white line of pixels up and down a screen to deflect another pixel was considered revolutionary and having a small black kit built computer without a proper keyboard was the cutting edge of home computer entertainment. At this point I should reveal that Jack Railton is revealed inside to be the pen name for Jack Kibble-White one of the contributors to the Off The Telly website (which I’ve also been known to write for), a fact I was entirely oblivious of until I bought it and was looking inside the back cover sitting on Chester Station, closely accompanied by a exclamation of ‘That’s what you look like!’ after seeing the photo.

As Jack explains on a page marked ‘the point of this book’ this is a subjective collection – it’s no encyclopaedia and certainly not exhaustive. In each entry, rather than providing a detailed production history of the game or computer system, we find instead an evocation of the experience, what the packaging and loading screens looked like, how difficult a game was to play and the technological pitfalls of the system it plays on, like the fact that Jet Set Willy couldn’t be completed because it had been rushed to the shops or the famous colour glitches on the Speccy. It’s also pleasingly British in its perspective; too often similar books have hailed from America were Arcade machines and consoles were the story and no one would know what a Dragon 32 was. It’s Sega Megadrive not Genesis here and Jack even takes the time to give the Acorn Archimedes some of the credit it deserves – Risc OS was robbed – those machines seemed as fast then as modern PCs are now.

Some of the best entries aren’t about the games at all, but the social mores paraphernalia which surrounded them, the magazines, the shops and the television programmes. There’s a very detailed entry on Gamesmaster, the Channel 4 show hosted by Dominic Diamond which clearly stopped being indispensable when Dexter Fletcher took over. Jack’s the only other person I know who seems to remember First Class with Debbie Greenwood, late of QVC, at the helm. Long held aspirations are punctured – it turns out the Mindlink peripheral didn’t in fact control games through thought but the twitching of an eyebrow and the Virtual Boy which sits in the window of most GameStations is going to go unbought upon discovery that it’s not really proper virtual reality and all done with mirrors. It’s also good to hear that I’m not the only one who finds the process of seeing how far a digital environment has been designed more enjoyable than playing the game and that the goal was called a ‘painted-on wall’. My least favourite was an upturned car in Resident Evil which could clearly be jumped over but could only be traversed by hiking back through half of the Raccoon City.

Ultimately, the book cleverly recreates a time when computer games weren’t really mainstream and neither were the computers they were played on. You either spent most of your time outside playing football or inside playing Football Manager – rare was the kid who did both. It was also a solitary activity; no matter how many games had a two player mode, a lot of the kids at the keyboard were using both players. Throughout, a seasoned retro-gamer like me will find latent memories coming to the fore – the smell of the computer games shops, the interminable wait for a game to load via cassette, copy typing a programme from Electron User only to find it didn’t work or the computer would crash before finishing. He addresses piracy as it was then – a school friend stacking up a mass of games on a C90 cassette some of which might even work. And even if neither the Acorn Electron or Wizball receive their own separate entries, this is still a valuable social history which is sure to get us old timers firing up their emulators to relive the glory days.

Review 2007: Update: 7/31

Review 2007 Don't forget I'm still looking for contributions to this year's Review 2007 and it would be great to have you along. The full details are here. So far I've been lucky enough to get seven definites, a possibly definitely and a couple of possibly maybes. If you feel you have something to say, do let me know and I'll add you to the list.

“Questions are never indiscreet: answers sometimes are” -- Oscar Wilde

Politics So Kate Moss apparently mistook David Cameron for a plumber. Here is the problem I have with the story as Cameron tells it and feel free to warn me to lighten up if you like.

On the one hand he's labeling Moss as stupid for not being able to recognise the Leader of the Opposition and of the Conservative Party which is hardly very discreet considering he's the Leader of the Opposition and of the Conservative Party and therefore taking the piss out of a potential voter then constituent or useful supporter.

On the other, he's essentially reminding people that even though he is the Leader of the Opposition and of the Conservative Party, he's not a recognizable enough figure yet that even celebrities know who he is. Either way it's enough to make us wonder if he's enough of statesman to be Prime Minister.

one hundred and one more things I would put into room 101...

It's nearly five years since the last list so it's about time for an update. Although frankly this time I could have gone to five hundred and one:

1. Tourists who get their picture taken next to a thing without bothering to look at the thing
2. Ring openers on food tins
3. Using the words geek and nerd in a derogatory way
4. Mobile phones in auditoriums
5. Misogyny
6. Boring dvd commentaries
7. Oily ham
8. Potichomania
9. Musak
10. People who congregate at the front of a bus near the door when the rest is empty
11. Websites that assume that everyone is using broadband
12. Alistair Campbell appearing and smirking anywhere on the BBC
13. Incomplete art due to mortality being completed by someone else
14. Bad ideas that seemed like good ideas at the time
15. Romantic comedies longer than an hour and half
16. What Women Want
17. Having a lack of invention
18. ITV1
19. Jeremy Kyle
20. Exploitation on television
21. So-called reality television
22. The death of Alan Coren
23. Staying in on a Friday night (again)
24. Right wingers (with one or two exceptions)
25. Left wingers (with one or two exceptions)
26. The lack of a clear choice in politics these days
27. Harry Enfield playing Dirk Gentley
28. David Jason playing Rincewind
29. Me not being very good at video games
30. Still biting my nails
31. Time flying when you’re having fun
32. £60 to get to London from Liverpool
33. Being less well read than I appear
34. Experimentation being used as a smokescreen
35. George Lucas' delusion that the prequels improved the Star Wars saga
36. Itchiness
37. Glitchy Freeview
38. Not giving credit when it’s due
39. Ballads ruining perfectly good pop albums
40. The Sugababes without Siobhan or Mutya
41. Musical prejudices
42. Country music
43. Baseball caps
44. Soccer in general
45. People who call it soccer when they don’t have to
46. Stinging nettles
47. The death of narrative cinema
48. The Underworld films
49. Unacknowledged emails
50. Farting at just the wrong moment
51. Sharon Osbourne
52. Pointless arguments
53. Tabloids
54. Sorkinless The West Wing
55. Mertonless Room 101
56. Racism
57. Jokes about Liverpool. Now.
58. People who clap between movements in classical music
59. People who couch theatrically between movements in classical music
60. Discovering classical music at the age of 32
61. Stagecoach
62. Weblogs going mainstream
63. Peter Andre and Jordan appearing on other chat shows to publicise their own chat show
64. Poorly planned art galleries
65. Whispering when you should be shouting
66. People not ‘getting’ me
67. Dvd caddies
68. Simon Cowell
69. My handwriting
70. The first series of Torchwood
71. Idiocy
72. Gaps
73. Woody Allen’s films not getting a proper release in the UK
74. Widespread flooding
75. People who piss on the seats in public toilets
76. Experts who clearly aren’t
77. Conversations that entail someone describing an episode of The Simpsons to you
78. Self service tills in supermarkets
79. Bad writers who’ve been told they’re good writers
80. People treat the cinema like their own living room
81. Piles
82. Misanthropy without satire
83. Jimmy Carr
84. Demolishing modernist architecture
85. Not having enough hours in the day
86. People who hate the French
87. Shouty television presenters
88. Self-righteousness
89. Caffeine making me sleepy
90. Global warming doubters
91. The HD-DVD / Blue-Ray war
92. Cello taping free gifts to the covers of magazines
93. Homophobes
94. Comic Sans
95. Tesco’s Healthy Eating range
96. Remembering the things I do
97. A Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare
98. Pointless pink
99. Glenn Gould singing along as he played
100. Rudeness
101. Not being able to think of something post on the blog and having to take drastic action

“Attraction is not a choice.” -- David DeAngelo

Dating Marvo at The Impulisive Buy considers Match.com: "Sure I could do it the old fashioned way and walk up to a complete stranger, introduce myself, tell her she’s beautiful, ask her if she would be interested in a date, she replies “With you?,” I say “yes,” wait during an awkward pause while she thinks of a good excuse, and then says, “I’m sorry, I already have a boyfriend” or “I’m sorry, I’m not into guys,” but getting a date via an internet dating site is so much easier because, if you do your search correctly, women on these sites are most likely single and not a lesbian."

Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? (Part One)

TV Deep in the mists, probably the late nineties, I was at one of those parties having one of those conversations with someone who’d clearly been drinking more than I had. I could tell I was having one of those conversations because somehow we’d managed to discover that I was (what was then) a late blooming Doctor Who fan and they were talking about how great Jane Asher had been in the series – I think they must have spotted one of her cookbooks on a shelf in the random strange house where these kinds of parties tend to happen.

Despite my protestations they were adamant that Jane had been in the programme, all posh like, and had been absolutely brilliant. Briefly, like Maria in this week’s episode, I began to question my own memory and wondered if the milfian cake maker had actually been in the series somewhere in its long history and I’d somehow blanked it out. Then, when they said between burps ‘You know with the bloke with the scarf’ and ‘Paris’ it became apparent that he’d gotten her mixed up with Lalla Ward, which is interesting because only lately have they begun to look at all alike.

Of course, as with pretty much every actor in the uk who isn’t Christopher Lee, Asher has been in something connected with the good series, replacing a character usually played by the clearly alive and therefore available Carole Ann Ford in the radio drama-documentary Whatever Happened to Susan Foreman?, the title of which could have been of some inspiration to Gareth Roberts when naming …

The Sarah Jane Adventures: Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?: Episode One

… otherwise it was a massive coincidence and he’ll have a surprising moment when someone points it out to him.

Since the great New Earth scandal I’ve tended to be quite suspicious when anything is previewed/reviewed as well as this episode has been. I’ve seen this one stamped with classic status and one of the best bits of new Who everywhere from The Stage blog through to the popular press and certain other discussion boards to the extent that you have to question whether a half hour series can really sustain the plaudits. I mean I gushed over last week’s episode, but that’s the kind of thing I tend to do when I’m tired and desperate (see FearHerGate). But for once, everyone was right, this was amazing.

Was it the series getting around to the alternate reality timey-wimey story just seven episodes or four stories in? Yes. Wasn’t it similar to Doctor Who’s Human Nature in that we were seeing a world with the title character at a time of great peril? Yes. Did the performance of not as little as you think she is apparently Yasmin Paige threaten to tip into the kind of shouty melodrama not seen since Gates McFadden tried to justify the existence of Welsey Crusher in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Remember Me? Yes. Was the sight of her screen Dad spinning up and down on a skateboard the singular most bizarre image on television this year? Oh yes.

Yet, this was exciting and surprising and funny and truly scary in all the ways it should be. It was these things because instead of cynical adult going through a world that was almost but not exactly like there own cracking jokes about Tony Blair and airships, this was an early teen discovering that everything she knew had changed, a girl not yet a woman, the least likely to be believed and whom adults always seem to assume are telling tales, even though in this day and age shockingly they actually probably are more clued into what’s going on in the world than we are, even when they’re sitting at the back of the listening to bloody Leona Lewis through the speaker on their mobile phone.

I was probably rather harsh on Yasmin because she had a rather a job to do carrying the episode and mostly did it with aplomb. At no point did Maria crumple under the pressure, not really, dragging her dad to a library, shouting Andrea down in a way that Sarah Jane would have been proud of (shades of the Doctor’s rant from the end of Bad Wolf too), generally being the force of nature she needs to be. For this girl, the event was a problem to be solved and all she needed to do was think her way through it (all the while us older viewers shouting ‘It’s in the box’). That said, I've had mornings, including probably the one after the aforementioned party, when I've woken up and felt like I've been living in a different reality, but a bacon butty rather than this box of delights usually sorted it out for me.

Actually Jane Asher was probably perfect casting, a figure very much in the mould of what Sarah Jane might have been like had she not become a journalist, fallen in with the Doctor and been spat out at the other end of the continuum. Her teary reaction to remembering what she’d done as child was a wonderfully played contrast to similar scenes in which her old best friend glared down an alien. Not sure about the accent, though it must have been chosen to make the difference with our hero as stark as possible. Purposefully, Andrea seems to be weaker and more interested in frippery than Sarah probably as a way of explaining how she could come under the spell of The Trickster.

He’s a grim bastard isn’t he? The Trickster was a classic example of how lighting, costume, a gravely voice and a well shot prosthetic can certainly be a match for CG. Isn’t it heart warming to see after all these years that the old trick of filming a mouth upside down is still a valid way of creating an alien? Actually he reminded me of Bruce Dern’s gatekeeper from The Lord of the Rings films with the evil dial turned up to eleven. Could he be the Black Guardian for the new age? I mean were does something like this come from other than the realm which hovers above the Whoniverse?

Sadly, true to his name The Trickster rather created the main plot hole in the episode. Why hasn’t the universe imploded given the amount of things that Sarah got get dungarees mixed into during her time with the Doctor and since and how come he hasn’t noticed her absence? Did someone else fill in the gap or did he travel alone, leaving countless unbound stories in his wake? Is The Trickster so powerful that he can make this kind of change and not create ripples? Clearly Maria hasn’t simply slipped into another reality – it is her reality in new clothes, otherwise how did her Dad also experience a similar problem at the mind bending and truly unsettling close.

Still there’s no denying this was an excellent episode. Even the brief appearance of Sarah at the opening was a joy as the bond between her and Maria grows ever larger and we discover that to Alan she stopped being the crazy lady who lives across the street, she's become a bit mumsy and that Maria's become her best mate (perhaps indicating that she understands what her relationship meant to the Doctor all those years ago). It also resisted the urge to shoehorn in Luke and Clyde into the main action in these early stages preferring instead to keep with Maria front and centre, even as she was epically dragged through the not very good at his job Graske’s strange realm (I mean wow -- look at that!) and dropped into a costumed past.

Next week: How we used to live.

“We Barbie dolls are not supposed to behave the way I do.” -- Benjamin Jowett

Music My ears! My eyes! Too much pink!

"A children's animated classical music experience, Barbie™ at the Symphony is a special Film with Orchestra presentation of the best-selling Barbie™ “Princess” movies. This series of 6 CGI animated films features Barbie™ singing and dancing to some of the world's best loved musical scores, with ballet sequences choreographed by Peter Martins of the New York City Ballet. Released in over 30 languages, these popular films have introduced millions of children to Ballets such as The Nutcracker and Swan Lake and the timeless music they are set to. Now, for the first time ever, families can enjoy the classical music from the films, played live by a full symphony orchestra, while watching favorite scenes on the big screen."

I can't help but wonder if the motivation here is to get kids interested in classical music or not to have to pay a composer for doing something new. As Samara notes at The F-word, there are some perfectly good unaugmented works from the canon which have been tried and tested for years. I'd also like to throw the original Fantasia into the mix which at least seemed to respect the music.

When I was a pre-teen in the early 80s (in other words before the age of twelve when I automatically became awkward around the opposite sex) I remember girls loving ballet anyway because of the ballet and the dances and the shoes and the mystique and a bit of Degas . Have we really reached a stage where a CG version of a Mattel creation is the only way of creating this kind of interest?

It'll be Optimus Prime rocking out to Wagner next. Although, actually I'd like to see that.

"Thou Shalt Signal Thy Intentions To Manoeuvre" -- Meg Pickard

Lists Meg Pickard offers Ten Commandments of Modern Social Decency: "Honour Thy Fellow Citizens (Or At Least, Thou Shalt Not Be A Prick To Strangers): Like, when someone asks you for directions, telling them to fuck off. Or loudly passing comment about someone’s dress-sense/hair/age/etc. When did it become even slightly acceptable to be rude to or about complete strangers in public? One of the only things which keeps society functioning is a modicum of politeness and sense of socially-acceptable behaviour, and when that goes - when it’s OK to punch a pensioner because he’s slow to move out of the way when you’re trying to get off the tram - we’re clearly doomed."

"For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake." -- Alfred Hitchcock

Film Lisa Drysdale reveals a quirky New York cinema:

"At DRV-IN, good weather is assured (it's actually indoors) except for the upcoming Halloween shows, when a decent shroud of (fake) fog is forecast. And if you want to make out under the potted oak tree, you can do so in complete privacy. Your $75 buys the entire automobile for the duration of the movie and, although it seats six, it's entirely up to you who you invite along. Such is the demand for this particular set of wheels that a 4pm weekday matinee performance has already been added to the two evening shows screened daily."

Then in the comments someone says: "Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds used to be £1.50 on a Monday night with student discount - those were the days..." They certainly were.