The Magician's Apprentice.

TV Fucking-A! No sober reflection from me here as we embark on another series of Saturday evening ministrations. After last year, my expectations for these twelve weeks have been lowered to such an extent, anything half competent probably would have done, episode one of The Space Museum as opposed to the other three if you will, and yet here we are, judging by the Twitters, all relaxing in the splendour of watching the show that we know and love reconstituting itself before our eyes. Look at a something like The Magician’s Apprentice with its swagger and general sense of “Yeah, we’re back” and it’s impossible not to think, “He knows he done wrong last time. Moffat knows he done wrong.”

Dispassionately (right?) you might wonder if another idea would simply to have produced an excellent example of a more traditional piece of Doctor Who, with the Time Lord and Clara landing somewhere, chasing about for forty-five minutes heading into a cliffhanger and underscoring the fundamentals of the series, demonstrating that Doctor Who’s an event no matter what it’s about, not unlike the classical mode, a Terror of the Autons affair or Horror of Fang Rock. This is actually a moment when such a thing could have made sense, since a companion’s already in situ and a new incarnation isn’t being introduced. Last time we were in this space was The Impossible Astronaut, so yes, the other approach would have been something neutral.

I can relate. When the show was non-televisual, after a while it existed in two streams, the past Doctor material which archaeologically excavated the show’s history and the Eighth Doctor material which for the most part didn’t. Arguably it went off the rails slightly when it tried to be too experimental, the Divergent Universe on audio and whatever it was Lawrence Miles was doing in the books, but there was always a sense of trying to move forward, do something new. But as the reaction to the Divergent Universe on audio and whatever it was Lawrence Miles was doing in the books and arguably the modern tv equivalent which was last year’s season demonstrate, if you don’t get it completely right, you’re sunk. As is the case with most genre material, we want it different, just not too different.

Having acknowledged that, let’s just throw it out of an airlock (a proper one not something pretending to be an alien planet) and remind ourselves that the part of the mode of the revival is beginning each season with a big brassy occasion and that however much we tell ourselves the Weight Watchers Chocolate Roll is tasty enough and will do, what we really want is the Cadburys. We’ve been so spoilt now, that not for us any more a bog standard alien invasion story or base under siege. Which is a bit weird when you consider that during the Davies era, pretty much all his season openers were just that. Go back and read a synopsis of Smith and Jones some time in the context of tonight’s episode. For goodness sake.

Now, we’re simply not happy with a season opener unless the Doctor’s running to or from something with his current companion(s) wondering what the hell’s going on. Moffat knew that as he wrote The Impossible Astronaut and here he is again, but with near Sisyphian task of pulling back to the fold those of us who strayed and thought he’d lost his mind when putting something as expressively appalling as The Caretaker or Kill The Moon into production and the way to do that is through our fan gene. Taking the chocolate roll metaphor to stretching point, The Magician’s Apprentice is the televisual equivalent of the Tesco Express that has just moved in around the corner with its aisles filled with pastries and cakes within five minutes walking distance. Sticking with the Weight Watchers has been an act of will. But I’m six stones lighter than when The Name of the Doctor was broadcast so …

Davros. Fucking Davros. You and me both know for how many years I’ve been making that joke about every mysterious figure which has darkened the narrative’s door would turn out to be Davros and finally, there he is, pre and post the Big Finish spin-off series (which hasn’t been contradicted yet – that began when he was sixteen years old). I think you can imagine me laughing rather than doing this which was presumably the reaction they were going for, but it’s so rare to be genuinely surprised at such an early stage in a season’s development. Excellent build up too, with the false sense of security surrounding the non-descript battlefield, which if you’ve heard the bullshit rumour that was floating around a couple of days ago, led me to wonder if this young chap was actually the Doctor.

There are multiple questions about this. If young Davros’s existence is pre-Time War, then how’s the Doctor able to go back in time to save or kill the boy? True, such things have become a bit fluid lately, as per Listen - in which Clara confusingly visits the past of a planet which is “lost” in the future – but even the Doctor’s progress through the time vortex wasn’t that easy back in Genesis and he didn’t have a time lock so stringent it sent Dalek Caan mad when he traversed it in order to retrieve Davros. You see, this is what happens when you stack and episode like this with mythology, sections of it are bound to topple over. Perhaps we’ll be gifted with an explanation next week, but probably not.  We'll talk more after the story resolves itself about the effects of the Doctor stepping into his foe's timeline.  Perhaps Hayley Westenra will sing on the soundtrack this time around.

In any case, the callback to Tom’s speech from Genesis was the last thing I expected to hear to tonight which means of course it’s probably just the thing I needed to hear. As the clips tumbled out of the speakers surrounding Julian Bleach (a feat of archival casting worthy of a John Wells drama in an episode filled with them), I almost expected Joseph Lidster’s Terra Firma to put in an appearance to represent the Eighth incarnation and felt slightly cheated when it didn’t. But then Tom’s face actually appeared and those sodding wires and I forgave them everything, even if it wasn’t clear exactly who captured the footage. In universe I mean. David Maloney directed the episode but the TARDIS Datacore entry is a bit thin on facts when it comes to camera operators.

Such are the way of things in an anniversary year, when Moffat’s in the mood to produce his version of The Five Doctors. With all of the references to the Davies era in the episode, it’s impossible not to think of the story as being in some way a tenth birthday celebration, even to the point of the Doctor holding up a gun, not just to a Dalek this time, but their creator. Oh well good. Not the gun thing - hopefully somebody will be there to stop him - because sometimes he needs someone to stop him - but the acknowledgement that although this is all one story, that something immense happened ten years ago. Incidentally, I’m also convinced I saw Martha’s silhouette in The Maldovarium so part of me’s hopeful Freema was able to make some time in her Sense8 schedule.

But this was still very solidly of the Moffat era. Anyone else think Kate and rest of the UNIT were especially uselessless in this episode with Clara essentially telling them the plot? What was with all the freezer-like temperatures in the base? I’m having a lapse in memory but wasn’t a cold environments one of the requirements of the Zygon race? Were we looking at the real UNIT or their doppelgangers from the other anniversary story and if that’s the case why didn’t Clara pick up on it as she was striding about being oh so clever? I expect I’m reading too much into a slightly overaggressive piece of CG, but this could also be a new item of mythology to deal with autonomous Zygons lacking stored imprints, a different strain to the version portrayed in Alan Barnes’s Eighth Doctor audio Death in Blackpool.

Missy’s back too and we’ll forgive them the winking manner of it, the yes I’m alive and can’t even be bothered with explanation because "So you escaped from Castrovalva..." was weak mead even in the 80s. Michelle Gomez feels like she’s been playing the character for years, but there’s a clear re-modulation of the approach in comparison to Dark Water with its Dutch angled push-ins and strange gesticulations, a realisation that a downbeat menace has a more long term gain and funnier in some respects when she’s bluffing away. Best moment (because it’s supposed to be): her approbation at being lower, if not non-existent in the Doctor’s pecking order of arch enemies than Davros. Oh and clearly not dying again at the end.

Her re-emergence also sees Jenna Coleman up her game as she’s forced to rationalise how her character can interact in any kind of meaningful with the Time Lord who slaughtered her boyfriend and put to the back of her mind seeing the deaths of those UNIT agents at the moment when she’s supposed to be working with this lunatic. Her approach is to mainly follow the requirements of the script which sometimes puts her the companion mode to Missy. But watch her in the background of shot, especially her eyes and we're sure that at any moment she could treat this murderess with all the diplomacy that Amy Pond did with Madame Kevorkian (taking us right back to Davros’s speech from Journey’s End about how the Doctor trains soldiers even if he doesn’t mean to).

Is she dead? Hmm, probably not yet, although given yesterday’s announcement which now feels like a piece of stage management rather than post-tabloid damage control, I’m not entirely discounting the idea that they shot footage specially for the trailers featuring her in other locales and that the synopsis for all the episodes after this are a complete blag. Unless Clara’s being played by a different, much younger actress. Or they’re different Claras from across history. Part of me even wishes this extermination was real, due to the poetry of a facet of the character having been somewhat introduced as being a Dalek and her now being killed by one. Well, not poetry exactly, but using a phrase like “narrative bookends” is a bit clunky in this context.  Or one of Lucas's rhymes.

Bestride all of this is Capaldi who now, after a shakier start than we’re used to in the revivals or expected, feels like the Doctor, feels like the same man who played tiddlywinks with Lenin and eloped with Marilyn Monroe, the benevolent alien deploying rudeness as a prop rather than simply his mode. Oh and stop it with your harrumphing over the guitar playing and the tank – this is precisely the sort of business you were expecting from an incarnation played by this actor and were disappointed when you largely didn’t get it last year. I know I was. Everything about Capaldi here is more confident, from his line readings, to his physicality, to his hair, which has finally decided to do that. A lot. The clothes help. The Pertwee homage of last year was fine, but the relaxed David Banks homage, albeit with a darker jacket over the t-shirt, feels more like him.  It's also about the feels, essentially, finally.

Just as an aside, notice how the two prologues that accompanied this episode online actually deepened the experience of the episode, especially The Doctor's Meditation which appeared on Facebook earlier today featuring more from the Doctor's friend Bors played by Daniel Hoffman-Gill (who I'm sure is one of the blokes from that horrendous deodorant commercial which filled the cinemas this year with the dance-off in the middle).  After seeing those five or minutes, we have a real connection to character which makes his fate in the actual episode all the more horrible.  Although paradoxically releasing it before the broadcast of the episode did rather ruin the reveal of where the Doctor is and also one or two of his jokes.

With all this talk of characters and actors, it’s all too easy to ignore the production elements, what's changed from last year, what hasn't. Having expected the show to return to the editing style of Eleventh’s era, perhaps the more interesting aspect is that scene durations are still surprisingly long. One of the more striking choices last year was how some dialogue scenes continued for whole minutes and the general lack of parallel storylines and The Magician’s Apprentice still has those. The teaser is really just two long scenes and there’s a lot of characters chatting in rooms, sitting or standing, admittedly sometimes very large rooms in the case of the arena.

But it doesn’t feel static. Although we don't quite reach the level of editing inherent in something like The Crimson Horror, the cameras are certainly moving around a lot more, shooting from a greater number of angles than last year where directors in some cases seemed to have been asked to provide a mutation of the multi-camera set up of the 60s to 80s.  Now, there’s less of a sense of being able to see which scenes would have been shot on film back then. Everything has the same visual viscosity, not that the style isn’t still markedly different to Blink, Hettie MacDonald’s previous credit for the series. Plenty of the episode is similarly about atmosphere however, notably around the young Davros scenes. For a few brief moments up front, I was somewhat convinced we were about to see a return to The War Games.

But no, it’s Skaro, it’s the Daleks and its multiple Daleks from many eras including what looked like a CG recreation of an classic version in the wilderness. The “new” paradigm’s pretty much dumped now isn’t it? Not since the Mechanoids has a new Dalek related creation been set to one side and good riddance to them. Unless there was one there and I didn’t notice it. The return of the battle-model from Remembrance and such is another attempt to re-engage us older viewers and we’re suckers even though my wilderness years birthed fandom inoculates me a little bit, probably. Armies with a single, authoritarian visual look feel more impressive and deadly than this ragtag, whose slightly jaded appearance resembles the Dalek equivalent of LINDA, even if they clearly have just as much of a destructive capability.

As is the case with two-parters, of this season is supposed to have several, we won’t really know if this is able to maintain the same level of squee-inducing slack-jawed intensity. We fans know that no matter what’s in the throw-forward trailer, we can never completely trust what we see with our eyes and the chances of any of those three having gone are pretty slim. Perhaps my biggest complement is that I wanted to watch it again straight after it had finish, which is quite something when you considered that some of the discs in my copy of the blu-ray set from last year still haven’t left the trays in the amaray case. Welcome back Doctor and welcome back Doctor Who. Here’s to the next eleven weeks and Christmas. Fucking-A!

Bye then Jenna.

TV After days of the media thinking fans would be rioting in the streets about it as though a companion moving on was some new thing after fifty-odd years, Jenna Coleman confirmed on the radio this morning that she's already left Doctor Who, having filmed her final scenes even before the show's reached broadcast, Christopher Eccleston style - though obviously with warmer feelings about it.

Would we know this if The Mirror hadn't decided to stick it in the front page?  I shouldn't think so and it's another example of how the modern commercial media's scrutiny of the show effects how we interpret and enjoy the fiction.  Now the season will about how Clara leaves rather than "Wow, she's leaving..."  Unless, as has been highly speculated about the Chris X cover story, it was leaked to a tabloid by someone on the production team.  On purpose.  For some reason.

As you know, I've always firmly been in Team Clara camp, though I know she's not been an especially popular companion over the years.  This is partially due to her introduction as a plot point with multiple versions rather than as a straight in through the doors kind of figure, the version we have now only having shown up after us seeing to earlier fragments of the same personality.  Exciting idea in principle, well conveyed, but still with the inherent Dollhouse-style protagonist problems.

The above interview is as ever about what's not being said.  Jenna hints that it might not be before the end of the year and in fact so tied down is Cardiff now in terms of production blocks and the order of filming, it could well be that her final wrap scene wasn't in her final episode.  Her first episode shot was Hide, with the TARDIS scenes only being filmed months later.  One of these days I should get around to compiling that production calender based on the Pixley specials.

Agent Carter finally reaches UK BD.

TV Why did we end up with BD as the acronym for blu-ray rather than BR. Yes, I know it's supposed to stand for Blu-ray Disc - in much the same way as Digital Versatile Disc for the other thing, but it really is confusing. Plus I never can tell whether to capitalise blu-ray or Blu-ray or Blu-Ray. The Guardian's style guide indicates "Blu-ray -- TM; full name is Blu-ray Disc (not Disk), abbreviation BD" because it's a trade mark, which make sense I suppose.

In any case, Agent Carter is finally available on Blu-ray Disc in the UK.

DVD too.

Jimmy Carter's Cinema Choices.

Film As you know I like a good, massively depthful and time consuming annotation project. So here's a very good, massively depthful and time consuming annotation project. Matt Novak has worked his way through Jimmy Carter's presidential diaries and made big long list of all the film that President watched:

"It seems like Carter would watch anything and everything, with over 400 movies screened at the White House and Camp David while he was in office. Some of the screenings were private affairs with just the President and First Lady. Other times a movie was that night’s entertainment for guests at the White House. An April 30, 1979 screening of the Ingmar Bergman film Autumn Sonata notes that there were “approximately 48 members of the White House staff” on hand to watch."

Of course it's worth reminding younger viewers that in order to view these films in the late 70s and early 80s he would have had to have viewed an original print. The first film he apparently saw after his inauguration was All The President's Men, which is of course, hilarious. But the title at least of his final film more than beats it.  I'd say if you wanted a pretty varied, cineliterate list to work through, this would do the job, albeit a few decades out of date.

Isabel Hardman on the Twitters.

Social Media I might not agree with everything Isabel Hardman says, but I always find her contributions valuable, at least in terms of offering a verifiable direction as to where my own political compass is.

 Although she writes for The Spectator, which is in so many ways anathema to me, she has an even hand doesn't feel as ideologically guided as some of their other writers.

 Now here she on Medium talking about just much of a pain that is:

"Those in a political tribe are the least able to judge what is “balanced” or what valid questions are. That is why the stream of angry tweets every time one of us writes an article about any political party or politician don’t make any difference to the journalists reading them, other than to foster a sense that Twitter is just becoming unbelievably tedious. The partiality of those complaining that we’re prioritising something they they consider tittle-tattle is so easy to spot. Often they seem only to have read pieces that they know will make them angry, rather than the ones that paint their opponents in an unfavourable light too. Write a piece about Jeremy Corbyn not singing the national anthem and you’ll receive hundreds of messages asking how you dare do such a thing. Write a piece about the Tory changes to tax credits, or disability benefit cuts, or countering Isil, and it’s as though they were never published. The mob is busy elsewhere."

Twitter has become really quite tedious and certainly not as much fun as a networking tool as it used to be. A lot people who I used to follow/talk to have, I suspect, migrated to the walled garden of Facebook, a place which like tumblr I barely understand or like that much.

In Our Time: The Angry Years.

Radio Having embarked on a project to listen my way through the In Our Time podcast from Radio 4 the last thing I expected to hear was just how argumentative the programme was back when the format was first broadcast back in 1998. For just over the past decade, it's generally been a kind of encyclopedia in discussion format with subjects broad and narrow explained in as much detail as is possible in half an hour by three academics refereed by Melvyn Bragg.

But the first series is markedly different, much closer to Start The Week, which Melvyn had just completed  a year's stewardship. In 1998/9 a guest academic with a new book out would be invited on to what was essentially a Phd supervision meeting with someone else in their field and Melyvn, whose style was far more analytical and journalistic back then. From what I've heard so far the discussions were often intriguingly fractious with old scores bubbling to the surface. Here are some highlights.

Feminism.

Dr Helena Cronin vs Dr Germaine Greer.

There are few things in life more entertaining than hearing Greer in full flow and on point destroying the argument of someone who she disagrees with, and so it is with Cronin and her Darwinian theory about women in society which is essentially that men and women have evolutionary developed to be capable of different things and that society should get around to accepting that. Things begin well when Greer, having heard Cronin's initial argument, gives a very lengthy, very telling pause. What follows is twenty minutes of evisceration in which Germaine more than lives up to her name. Utterly thrilling and also likely to promote a goodly amount of righteous indignation, notably when Cronin suggests that women are predisposed not to be geniuses...

Modern Culture

Roger Scrutton vs Will Self.

Oh yes. I think you can imagine which way this goes and it's a typical example of how Melvyn and his guest would essentially tag team as they pick holes in the other guest's work. On this occasion, Scrutton's selling his monograph An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture which if their discussion is anything to go by ignores all popular music but for Nirvana and Oasis, film (something Bragg is especially distressed about) and modern technology in general. Admittedly for much of the duration it's good natured sniping, but there are moments when Scrutton sounds like he wants to leave because he knows he's on to a loser. Self is superb on how the artificial walled gardens between high and popular culture are increasingly designed for no other reason than to make intellectuals feel better about themselves.

The Avant Garde's Decline and Fall in the 20th Century

Professor Eric Hobsbawm vs Frances Morris.

Bit of surprising one this. Morris was then specialist in contemporary art and Art Programme Curator for the Tate Gallery of Modern Art and so obviously has an interest in defending the avant-guarde, something which Hobsbawm is keen to indicate is merely the process of watching the decline of a once great cultural force, suggesting that film is by far the more vibrant and important visual art in the twentieth century. Unlike the other two I can see this from both sides, mainly because comparing Gone With The Wind and Guernica seems like an essentially pointless exercise. Everything begins relative genially and then Hobsbawn starts referring to Morris patronisingly as "my dear" which gets her back up, with good reason.  It's an age thing, but it doesn't half start making you want to side with her.

Shakespeare and Literary Criticism

Professor Harold Bloom vs Jacqueline Rose.

There are few things more entertaining than when Melvyn scoffs and there's a classic one in here when Bloom suggests that Freud's Oedipal complex was more heavily influenced by Hamlet. "Do you have proof of that?" Bragg asks and we then hear a superb example of how the arguments some academics have around subject are too complex to be able to articulate in a few sentences whichever side of the fence of correctness they're on.  Worth listening for the moment when Rose utterly destroys Jane Eyre for any reader with a social conscience and Bloom proposes an utterly barmy new approach to teaching literature in universities.

Architecture in the 20th Century

Daniel Libeskind vs Richard Weston

Actually pretty good natured even though the participants are on opposite ends of the architectural belief spectrum. The real meat is in how Bragg and Weston attempt to describe Libeskind's buildings for the radio, notably the Spiral Extension to the Victoria and Albert Museum which wasn't subsequently built.  Most of it isn't anything the architect hasn't heard before, but there is still one moment which made me "oof" as I was walking around Sainsbury's.  As with all these discussions, they're time sensitive and there's plenty of talk about where architecture is in the 20th century and where it will be going in the next couple of decades.

My Favourite Film of 1981.

Film With the school exam results released in the past few weeks, I thought again, somewhat wistfully, of those days, though cautiously given that I was bullied mercilessly most of the time and didn't come away with anything like what might be described as decent exam results. But it's still possible for me to think of the good times, the aforementioned art classes (see the Adventures in Babysitting entry) and pre-GSCE English classes when a teacher took it upon himself to show feature films during English lessons for a year or two. One of those films was Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Perhaps it's important to contextualise this.  Some of the films were Shakespeare adaptations.  It's here I first saw - and giggled through it has to be admitted - the Polanski Macbeth and the Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet, my only recollection of that viewing being his boasting that part it had been filmed at his house (something which to this day I've not been able to verify).  But some of his choices were rather more eclectic.  Even the afterlife of the Pythons made an appearance in the form of The Jabberwocky and Time Bandits.

The television room at school was a tiny space which would otherwise have been used as an office for a head of department.  I can still smell the dust of the wooden varnished floors and the chair were those fairly standard 70s stacking examples with the tubular metal frames as featured in this eBay entry;   The screen was a 26 inch DER colour CRT locked in a large television cupboard with a top-loading VHS player underneath.  All of the films we watched were off-air recordings with the adverts edited out via the pause button during broadcast were necessary.

Much of the time this English teacher would simply show the films.  But every now and then he'd throw in some rudimentary film studies, perhaps as a way of introducing us to how narratives work in preparation for future exam courses.  In Raiders of the Lost Ark, this meant the mechanics of the action sequences and character foreshadowing.  He'd pause the film now and then to highlight signposts.  How establishing shots emphasise the geography of the plane before Indy struggles against Pat Roach.  How Indy earlier notes his lack of appreciation for serpents before later being thrown into a pit full of snakes.

In that period just before the National Curriculum was introduced and teachers didn't feel constricted about how to teach or indeed what to teach, I wonder what value any of this had other than to give us access to something which we might not otherwise have encountered at least not in the context of serious discussion rather than pure entertainment.  Part of me wishes he'd been able to go further and still do.  Despite its academia, film is still considered the poor cousin of literature despite, as I've since discovered, having the potential for just as much complexity to tax the young critical mind, both through textual matters, themes, signs and meaning.

Dr Hannah Fry on Ada Lovelace.

Science Dr Hannah Fry has a new BBC Four documentary on Thursday about Ada Lovelace. Which is, well it is, isn't it?

"Ada Lovelace was a most unlikely computer pioneer. In this film, Dr Hannah Fry tells the story of Ada's remarkable life. Born in the early 19th century Ada was a countess of the realm, a scandalous socialite and an 'enchantress of numbers'. The film is an enthralling tale of how a life infused with brilliance, but blighted by illness and gambling addiction, helped give rise to the modern era of computing."

If you're as much of a fan of Fry's work as I am, you might like this collection of talks I put together earlier in the year.

Vancouver.

Film Welcome to the newest edition of Every Frame a Painting, the film essay channel in which @tonyszhou offers incredibly compelling slices of commentary in about ten minutes. The latest montage is an especially personal example in which he describes how his home city is constantly on film, but never as itself. Yes, it has a shot from the Doctor Who tv movie and yes it does acknowledge the existence of Continuum.  I wonder if a rep cinema or tv channel in Vancouver has ever scheduled a season of these films?

We've generally been more lucky in Liverpool for all the reasons you can imagine, but there has been an increase in seeing parts of the city centre doubling for everywhere from London to other European capitals and especially New York, the streets around Dale Street resembling Manhattan and Brooklyn.  None of this will be on the scale of a Cardiff audience watching Doctor Who perhaps, but it's still relatively jarring to be watching the car chase in Fast & Furious 6, heading through the Mersey tunnel or past the World Museum and William Brown Street.

Doctor Who Series Nine: The Prologue.

TV With my attention elsewhere, I've only just caught up with this. As usual ...

(1) Capaldi sounds like the Doctor. Properly the Doctor. He seems like he's finally realised how to play it and his line readings are on point.

(2) Claire Higgins returns as Ohila from The Night of the Doctor as a representative from the Sisterhood of Khan. Note that it doesn't actually feel the need to tell us who she is and who they are because it knows we've watched the Eighth Doctor's regeneration story.

(3) Speaking of which, "Look after the universe for me. I've put a lot of work into it." was another Twelfth Doctor's final line - the Hugh Grant incarnation from Curse of the Fatal Death (though the canonical Eleventh used a version of it in his first adventure). Note how Capaldi says it somewhat ironically.

(4) Isn't that the same rock face that appeared in The Time of the Angels? It'll be a repurposing but it's nice that they've branched out from reusing Peace Hall every week.

(5) Who is this enemy?  Clearly we're briefly supposed to assume it's Missy, but the pronouns are all wrong now.  Is it Sabbath?  Rassilon?  Borusa?  As earlier or later incarnation of himself (and wouldn't it be refreshing to have himself as an antagonist) (depending on your opinion of the Valeyard).

Either way, along with the feature in this month's edition of the parish circular and Last Christmas, I'm much more positive about this next season that I was at the close of the last.

Aspect Ratio Explained.

"My name is Paul, and I was Gordon the Gopher."

TV The BBC's Head of Editorial Standards has a confession to make:

"‘Waggling’ Gordon was just one of the jobs the producer had to do in the small room - normally used by the BBC one announcer - that became the iconic base for children’s programmes on the BBC. None of us were puppeteers, and to be fair, no one had any idea how popular Phillip and Gordon would become. And we could be rubbish! So it came as quite a shock when mainstream entertainment shows in peak time, like Brain Conley’s ITV show, started to parody us. It was also incredibly exciting to get invitations from Spitting Image, Noel’s House Party and Graham Norton to appear. We even switched on some Christmas lights once, but I can’t remember where... wherever it was, we had arrived."

Squeek. Squeek. Squeeeeek.

My Favourite Film of 1982.

Film Christmas shopping in Chester one year, back when there was an Odeon in the city centre, I noticed they were showing Blade Runner's director's cut. There wasn't a particular reason - the film wasn't in re-release that year and it wasn't supporting one of the upteempth home releases. From what I gather, one of the staff liked the film and just decided to schedule it so he could see it on the big screen and presumably made it an open presentation to offset the price of the booking. For a four o'clock showing on a Saturday, the small screen was relatively busy and come twenty past four we were wondering when the show was going to begin. Eventually a staff member appeared - and this wasn't something that usually happened in the Odeons as where and said that they were having technical difficulties because the print they'd been supplied with was in such bad condition. They were happy to run it but would understand if anyone wanted to leave and get a refund. No one did. And so we sat and watched one of the scuzziest 35mm prints of any film I've seen.

Blade Runner's a film which I'd already seen plenty times in different ways in different places, in different formats and editions, but it was perfect. The aesthetic of the film is urban, broken and derelict already and so many lines across the screen, hairs and dust only enhanced the atmosphere of what we were seeing. Even when the sound fell out of synch briefly it simply felt like it was because were watching a transmission from the future, a future which is numerically closer to us now than the original release date of Blade Runner. However grand it is to have the pristine images of digital project and blu-ray, something organic and unpredictable has been lost from our analogue past. Plus it put in mind what it must have been like at that Los Angeles Cineplex-Odeon Fairfax Theatre in 1990 when a fan audience realised pretty quickly that they were watching one of the equally messy original workprints of the film which ultimately led to this "Director's Cut". When the doors closed at the end, Deckard and Rachel safely in the lift, I remember the audience applauding.

The first time I watched Blade Runner was during a late night broadcast on ITV, also at Christmas, I think, some time in the mid-eighties when I was still young, just before secondary school. The idea that there were different versions, that it was panned and scanned would have meant nothing to me (just as it meant nothing to the most of us) but I have a vivid memory of lying chest first across the floor on a duvet cover, watching from the across some pillows, scared witless, Dad watching on from the couch, Mum having gone to bed. Until eventually buying a VHS, my only real memory of the film was the giant advertising screens, of the echoing voice, the Geisha popping something in her mouth and the resonant voice from elsewhere advertising off-world colonies. Little would we know that of all Douglas Trumble's futurological design work, it's this which would become realised and quickly. Remember this image of an advertising screen in Beijing three years ago? Now there are half a dozen in Liverpool city centre too.

Then, of course, the boxed set of every version you could wish for was released and I finally got to see that work print version for myself and as expected, despite all the work Ridley Scott put into his final version, digitally cleaning shots, fixing continuity mistakes, notably making Joanna Cassidy cry on first seeing herself be terminated at Zhora rather than the stand in, it's this version which still feels most authentic. Yes, the music isn't wholly Vangelis's score, temping in incongruous pieces of Jerry Goldsmith and the pacing is just slightly off and the editing and continuity are flat out wrong in places, but its this first draft which seems to capture the original ideas before the studio decided they knew what was best based on the reaction of a dodgy, unreceptive test audience. The Final Cut is the work of an older man trying capture what he was originally trying to do.  But for all the poor mathematics in the mission sequence and wrong Zhora, here it is.

About Journalism in Comic Book News Sites.

Comics The Outhousers has a long column from Richard Caldwell about comic book journalism or journalism about comic books which also goes for other type of culture and media. Here's a typical paragraph:

"For god knows what reasons, many smaller news sites will not acknowledge a story unless it has already been covered by one of the larger sites. Adversely, I have seen before that should a smaller news site grow a spine and break a story, then that story will go untouched by the larger sites, evidently in scorn at having been scooped. This is even more stupid than the battle of the sexes. There is bias in all forms of media, and the comics journo game is no different. Sometimes, the bias in comics media is deliberate and malicious, but there are even more occasions where it is simply the result of negligence or ignorance or incompetence. And it does not have to be that way."

We live in a largely unreported world in which something only really seems to be happening when the mainstream media flashes its light against it usually when it doesn't have a choice.

Some of my associates.

About Associate links. Apparently something people do on their blogs is to add an associate link to the end of a URL when they link to Amazon.  I signed up to the Associates programme years ago but never really did anything with it so even after at least five years I've never quite managed to reach the £25 minimum for a gift voucher.

One of the reasons I haven't gone to town on it is because I don't know the etiquette really.  Some people say it's expected, others say they want to know if an associate code has been added which makes sense but feels difficult to implement without being too clunky and obvious, but again I don't want to be underhanded about it somehow.

Plus there's the notion of exactly why I'd want to.  I generally do this for fun (not that it seems that way sometimes) and the idea of y'know, a kickback, feels a bit alien.  Now and then I've had offers to put advertising up here too, or had suggestions about a "tip  jar" somewhere but again it changes the boundaries between whether this is a hobby or something more.

I'm not sure it works anyway.  I've had those links under the "support feeling listless" heading in the sidebar for ages and nothing has happened.  Perhaps I don't get enough visitors.  Or I'm just not very good at this.

For now, I've decided to finally put a link on the most trafficked post on the blog, the Doctor Who chronology.  Just some text and a link, nothing obnoxious I don't think and I'll keep an eye on it and see what happens (you can see it at the bottom of the list here) (feel free to comment on language).

Last time I tried this, with the coffee bag thingy, I made about fifty virtual gift pence and that's pretty much stopped anyway now that they're available anywhere and everywhere, notably Home Bargains and Waitrose.

We'll see.  With any luck I'll manage to scrape together enough vouchers to stream Agent Carter at least.

"It was purple."

TV Two weeks to go. Meanwhile Wesley Crusher's teaching the "Doctor" how to drive the Enterprise. Three things:

(a) You never forget these things. I could still probably operate bespoke applications for jobs I vacated fifteen years ago on ancient systems which don't exist any more.

(b) Jenna's face, notably her eyes while Wil Wheaton's describing the process. Is she thinking, "Am I going to be answering this question about the TARDIS myself in twenty-odd years"?

(c) Wil Wheaton's beard.

Nevertheless it's a more entertaining Doctor Who/TNG crossover than the whole of the IDW comic.

The Problem with First World Problems.

Philosophy A couple of weeks ago, PBS Idea Channel considered the issue of when leisure becomes work. Here's the original video here after which someone inevitably posted the comment "First World Problems".  The presenter Mike Rugnetta, always diplomatic, had this to say on subject of just this type of comment in the following comment response video:

"There is a feeling that I get when I see comments like this that I have a very hard time articulating. So I'm going to try to say it and hopefully I will work it out as I say it.  And that is that I think when you describe something as being a first world problem, you implicitly or accidentally deny the humanity of people who live in the third world or not in the first.  Because what you're saying is that those people, the people who don't live in the First World, only have these massive infrastructural, economic, or societal problems and they don't have small, irritating personal gripes or troubles. And I think that everybody-- I think that it is part of the human condition that you have these things in your life that are just kind of irritating or that they are problems that you try to solve but maybe there's no solution and you just kind of live with them and mull them over. And I think that when you describe something as a first world problem, you imply that it is not part of the human condition, that it is part of a more privileged condition. And I have no specific idea or stake -- like, I don't know for sure that people in the Third World have anxiety about keeping up with any semblance of popular culture, whether or not it's the things that we were talking specifically or not. But I think to unilaterally and outrightly deny them that problem by calling this a First World problem is unfair. So I hope that makes sense. If it does make sense, that's how I feel. And if it doesn't make sense, I feel a different way."

Won't be using that phrase again then.

Catastrophic.

Art Yesterday, I finally managed to see the Whitworth gallery in Manchester for the first time since it reopened following a refurbishment and building of an new extension, all of which has been awarded Building of the Year by RIBA. Having rather loved the old place I was concerned that all its 60s wood panel and stone and modernist intentions and nooks and crannies had been swept away but I'm pleased to see that the architects at MUMA have simply built upon, what the introductory booklet rightly describes as "Scandinavian-style spaces" by Bickerdale, Allen and Partners.  The new large atrium cafe sits within and overlooks on ancient trees and opens out into Whitworth Park in a way which feels both urban and pastoral.  As I sat eating a cheese bap, I felt that any time I wasn't looking out of the window was being wasted, especially on a day with such changeable weather.

Unfortunately, the display of the Whitworth's other key draw, its permanent collection, which is arguably of national, if not international importance is nothing short of catastrophic.  The notion, as tends to be the vogue for smaller galleries, is to present the works in a series of shorter exhibitions around themes, rather than simply have everything on show, all of the time.  This is not something I necessarily disagree with, since it allows for a wider selection of the work to find wall space and also has the added benefit of generating repeat visits from an audience who might otherwise stay away having assumed that they'd already seen what was there.  At the moment the themes are acquisitions from the 1960s, Watercolours, Green textiles, New Acquisitions and Portraits.

Except the way they're displayed is dismal and abysmal.  In all cases, the policy seems to be to get as much out there as possible and so the works have often been splattered across the walls without any apparent notion of how they'll be viewed by the public, floor to ceiling with centimetres between the frames not unlike a commercial gallery and with what seems like an eye to how they work aesthetically in an interior design sense rather than how they relate to one another.  Whilst this isn't unusual in galleries, it tends to be with larger canvases - see the main atrium at Birmingham Art Gallery or many rooms at the Walker.  But with smaller works, these are watercolours, prints and even oils, it's impossible to focus on one image over another, the eye darting from one to the next, constantly intensely distracting from each other (not helped, however understandable it is as a conservation requirement, everything being glazed leading to obscuring bulb flair).

To make the job of enjoying the work even more impossible, because of the proximity of the frames to one another, there isn't any room for labels and so the gallery has instead provided booklets containing wall maps and silhouetted boxes as a key through to titles and their artists which works rather like an Argos catalogue which means the visitor spends half their time in the space with their head down trying to match the painting they're looking at with the details and I did hear visitors in pairs and groups not discussing what they thought of a painting but if it was the one that was in the booklet.  Oh and outside of the New Acquisitions barely anything has supporting material so in some cases its impossible to really appreciate a work and how its important within its own context.

I tried.  I tried.  In the Watercolour section there's a section filled with Turners, but they're piled into two columns next to each other reaching floor to ceiling and none of them at typical eye height.  The Portraits exhibition is the epitome of how damaging these choices are as Hogarth prints are thrown in with pre-Raphaelites paintings and tapestries, Freud paintings, photographs and video art but they're just sort of there, assuming your eyes can actually see them, assuming you're not having to crouch or which you had a step ladder to see things properly.  To be fair, all of this is also true of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, which also has higgledy-piggledy staging and booklets, but it's also true that's a light airy space whereas the Whitworth has necessarily darkly painted walls and subdued lighting.  Eventually I walked, unable to cope with the confusion of images.

Surrounding all of this too, I could see was empty wall space, or large dramatic walls with just one or three measly paintings or prints on the bottom so this isn't also just about maximising the potential.  I've been to many regional art galleries with a similar (if not necessarily as important) collections stuck on a landing or in a stairwell but that is usually because they don't have the budget or the room.  The Whitworth seems to have plenty of both.  Try and replace the display format if you want, but just as the page upon turnable page antics of the printed book have survived for hundreds of years because it works, the model of artwork at shoulder height with an information label does too because it allows the viewer to think, the ponder and to concentrate on a single image at a time.  Much is gained from sacrificing quantity for lucidity.

Elsewhere in the gallery at the moment, there's a really excellent exhibition of Chinese art from the 1970s which follows the classical display model with labels next to the paintings and free booklets containing pages of contextual information.  At the centre of the space is a really poignant Ai Weiwei installation, Still Life, in which the artist presents hundreds of Stone Age axe heads and various other ancient carved paraphernalia with the context deliberately removed, the reinvention as an art installation "an iconoclastic gesture designed to offset the value and importance of these ancient objects".  As I reflect on this, this is pretty close (albeit with more facile implications) to what the Whitworth's done to its permanent collection in these initial presentations.  Luckily it is just the initial presentations which will change and hopefully with a less chaotic, more thoughtful approach.

I hope that they also won't bury the headline as much either.  Within what I think is another part of the extension is a study area and it's here that some of the real jewels of the collection are displayed, largely unheralded and well away from the main spaces, so easily overlooked.  A Rembrandt drawing.  Two Lowrys.  One of those Constable cloud sketches.  Another Turner.  I think I saw a Pisarro.  I definitely saw an Ian Hughes and a Stanley Spencer.  Why would you bury this stuff in what feels like the basement (albeit with a ground level entrance)?  Oh and again mostly without accompanying information?  Yes, at least I've seen them and it was nice to enjoy the experience in something akin to corporate office space rather than a "white cube", but it's listed as "Collections display" on the map which really does obscure what's here.  I could have missed it.

Well that was a rant but I think it's rare that I've been this disappointed with this kind of experience.  I'm usually pretty satisfied if there are some nice paintings to look at and an adequate toilet.  There are several toilets and they're more than adequate but like I said the building deserves the awards it's received.  Along with the Chinese art exhibitions, there's also a spectacular Cornelia Parker showing of a new artwork which consists of a massive embroidered reproduction of the Wikipedia entry about the Magna Carta stitched together by two hundred people often with a life connection to the words.  So the temporary displays are varied and rather special.  But I just feel, and I appreciate this is really a disagreement about a curatorial decision or policy, that the permanent collection should be as well served.  Rant over.

Extracting the BBC Genome: Lost and Found.

Film Back in 1994 and 1998, BBC Two offered a strand called "Lost and Found", seasons of films described as being "rarely (or never before) seen on television, or presented in restored versions" something I was entirely unaware of until the VHS Video Vault YouTube channel, part of the VHistory blog, uploaded an introduction to Michael Mann's The Keep (see below).

The BBC Genome predictably has a list of all the films in this strand. Just as a test, I'm also going to see how available these ancient scheduling choice are now.  At a time when the notion is that everything is supposed to be just there, sometimes its good to see if that's actually true, especially with a list of film developed before the introduction of dvd.

1994 Season

Becky Sharp
(Rouben Mamoulian, 1935)

No official UK release but multiple other editions available from abroad.  But buyer beware.  The reviews are the same on all the editions listed on Amazon.  This page says the cheapest has atrocious sound.  There's an pleasantly poor print at the Internet Archive which says the film's in the public domain - which might account for what it's all over Google's video service as well.

A Star Is Born 
(George Cukor, 1954)

I actually have a copy of the Warner Home Video BD which is utterly gorgeous and seems to be the version suggested in the listings, with scenes restored from surviving footage (mainly the characters in long shot travelling and getting in and out of cars) and set photographs with an audio track underneath which looks for all the world like a Doctor Who recon.

The Ghost Ship
(Mark Robson, 1943)

Region one double pack with Leopard Man or region two double pack with The Seventh Victim.



The Keep
(Michael Mann, 1983)

Still no dvd release.  Only available on a deleted VHS.  Given that, it's quite extraordinarily on Netflix UK at the moment.  Best watch it then.

Caged Heat
(Jonathan Demme, 1974)

Multiple editions, with varying degrees of exploitation covers.

Before the Revolution
(Bernardo Bertolucci, 1964)

UK BFI release.

Pursued
(Raoul Walsh, 1947)

Region free dvd release.

Tokyo Drifter
(Seijun Suzuki, 1966)

UK dvd release from Yume Pictures at a budget price.

Confidential Report
(Orson Welles, 1955)

UK release as Mr Arkadin.  There's also a Criterion release which has three different versions.

I Only Want You to Love Me
(Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1976)

UK release of a restored print from Park Circus.

It Happened Here
(Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, 1963)

UK release.

Suddenly
(Lewis Allen, 1954)

UK multiple releases which suggests its out of copyright.

Le Samourai
(Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967)

Criterion release (R1).  French BD.

1998 Season

Waterfront
(Michael Anderson, 1950)

UK BD release from Network.  Well done chaps.

The Man from Morocco
(Max Greene, 1944)

UK DVD release from Network.

Car of Dreams
(Graham Cutts & Austin Melford, 1935)

UK DVD release as part of a John Mills boxed set by ITV Studios.

Owd Bob
(Robert Stevenson, 1938)

UK DVD release from Odeon Entertainment.

Street Song
(Bernard Vorhaus, 1935)

No dvd release.  Not at the Internet Archive or on YouTube.  The list has finally defeated us.

Nevertheless for whatever reason most of these films are available in some form or other and loads in the UK thanks in large part to Network.  Congratulations to the modern world.

The Underwater Menace DVD. Now available to pre-order? Again?

TV George Bush famously said, "There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."

Well, here we are again, another page indicating a pre-order of Doctor Who's The Underwater Menace on Amazon.



This has one more thing in it's favour than last time. A tweet from the club journal:

DWM has learned that the 1967 story The Underwater Menace (of which Episodes 2 & 3 survive) will be released on DVD after all. Details soon.

— Doctor Who Magazine (@DWMtweets) September 1, 2015

We don't know how they're getting around episodes one and four not having moving images available. Probably recons though expect the omnirumour crowd to be out in force.

The BBFC hasn't classified anything new yet.

But yes, on this occasion I want to believe.  In the recons version at least.

Incidentally, I've decided to try something and put my "associates" thingy in the above Amazon URL to see what happens.  After about ten years of being registered, I'm just £15 away from my first gift voucher.