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30th August I'm too engrossed in season three of House to waste time on long, rambling and ultimately pointless prose this evening. That's why this is a more compact update than usual - I feel the urge to be elsewhere. TheArtist and I have been playing a game which I think I'm right in saying is more tragic than Consecutive Number Plate Spotting. It's nutritional information Top Trumps. He takes his snack food of convenience, I take mine and we use the nutrition per 100g. We haven't got as far as deciding whether the higher number wins or the more healthy value but these are early days. I had some unexpectedly good news when I saw that September's UFC from the O2 Arena in London is being shown on Setanta Sports (in addition to the PPV for non-subscribers). So I can watch Rampage vs Henderson (ably supported by Crocop vs Kongo and Hammill vs Bisping) live and for nothing. Hurrah. I'm cross with Amazon - I finally decided to order a GPS on Monday. Within two hours of placing the order it went into "We're preparing this order for dispatch" mode which sounded good. It was finally sent out about an hour ago - they make it sound as if the sellotape is being stuck to the parcel when it actually means it'll sit there for a few days. A few days in which you can't cancel the order. Not that I wanted to but it doesn't take four days to prepare a small parcel for dispatch and the cynic in me thinks they are abusing their system to prevent people changing their minds. All of which means I probably won't be able to play with it this weekend as it is coming via one of Amazon's notoriously unreliable couriers. More annoying BY FAR is the customs charge I've been slapped with for my Jason King boxed set. A £21 item has attracted £12 in tax. That is absurd. Why can't stores give you the option to pay the duty when you place the order? And how does £3 over the £18 threshold add up to £12? Methinks they are either stupid or taking the piss. Part of it is, I believe, an admin fee. Isn't that what the tax goes towards? Tax collectors are traditionally paid out of the tax they collect. They don't levy a fee on top of the amount they demand with menaces. Sons of bitches. Would you pay over 50% in tax just to watch Department S's garish and vapid baby brother? Bah. I hope every single person involved in collecting duty on DVD imports loses their hair within the month. That would teach them. And to top it all, I bet the fuckers have accidentally-on-purpose confused the dollar value with the sterling value so they can charge twice as much. Cockmittens. M'self and my sidekick (for that is what he is) went to a meeting this afternoon in which half a dozen middle aged men spoke a different language for an hour. They are downstairs people - mainframe bods who dabble in ancient magicks. They nod their heads in a sage-like way when someone says "the foo-jit-soo batch runs are being migrated". We learned to nod in the right places, smile at what seemed to be jokes and agreed to train a couple of hundred people on something we don't yet understand. But it's good news about the foo-jit-soo. I think. And from wise men to the exact opposite. Three more genuine items of correspondence sent from our office by a special member of staff.
That would be some new definition of the word "clarifies" of which I have never been made aware. Another office moment which I'd forgotten was when someone was telling me that her son had finally moved out and was now living with his boss. The boss was paying most of the rent because he was "grateful for the company". She said she didn't know much about the boss. "I know he's gay but I don't know what sort of gay he is." "I'm fairly sure he isn't a lesbian" I replied helpfully.
27th August I've finished Torchwood now. The ending was very Russell T Davies and the rolling-back-time when the Big Bad was defeated was an audacious thing to do with the same ending planned for six months down the line. But now Torchwood is over and I miss it so they must've done something right. I've moved on to the
third season of House. I can't watch weekly shows at the moment so
saving them up and watching them en masse is the only way to go. Except
that Thursday's season finale double bill was ruined when a national
fault made my V+ box go loopy. Thank goodness for an unnamed torrent
site which can come to my rescue. Broadcasters can whinge all they like
about downloads but they can come to the rescue when everything else
lets you down. Anyway, five episodes in and it is really good. The
season's story arc has just kicked in and things aren't looking so good
for This weekend's UFC show was more or less great. I proved again that I am a WINNER~! by coming out a staggering 26p up on my wagers. Thank goodness for Randy Couture. The guy is awesome. And thank goodness people doubted him or I wouldn't have got a night-saving price for him. I mean, he was only 16 years older than his opponent. His opponent was only coming off a stunning knockout victory over the best heavyweight striker in the world. How could anyone possibly doubt Randy? Good times are ahead - depending on how the chips fall, his next fight could be against FEDOR~! or even BROCK LESNAR~!~! Golly I want to see both of those. Now. Today. This morning in fact. Make it so. I watched Dumb and Dumber on Saturday. The first time I saw it was in 1995(ish). I was ill and housemate Kevin rented it to cheer me up. It was the only time I can ever remember laughing so much I thought I would die. So I wasn't as sophisticated a student as I liked people to think I was. I'd seen it once since then - when it first came out on video - and finally this weekend I watched it on DVD. I laughed maybe once, maybe a little half heartedly. Perhaps I simply remembered all the best jokes. Perhaps twice is the optimum number of times to watch it. I've certainly not grown out of childish, farcical bottom comedy as the new Dennis Brent diary will prove. I think I'm just an even more miserable person than I was when I was a student. Which scarcely seems possible. And I was slightly confused at Rafa Benitez's strange outburst following the Heinze decision. We can ignore all his burblings about fixtures favouring some clubs over others as it was the same drivel that every manager can be relied upon to say when prompted by one of the cheaper newspapers. But his claims that Man United received special treatment in signing Carlos Tevez was just weird.
Might that have anything to do with the fact that Liverpool's agreement for Mascherano was the template for United's deal with Tevez? Once the issues over ownership had been settled, the actual paperwork was relatively straight forward. Because Liverpool had already done the spade work. It really isn't that hard to separate common sense and conspiracy theory. And let's not forget that FIFA bent their own rules to allow Mascherano to sign for Liverpool when by rights he should not have been allowed to. So there is nothing to see here - you and your Jeremy Spake beard can calm down and stop talking nonsense.
22nd August I'm ten and a half episodes into Torchwood now and I have to say it is a lot better than I had been expecting. Reaction online was, from what I'd seen, muted. The couple of episodes I'd watched last year were unremarkable and the gimmicky use of Jack in the Doctor Who season finale and Martha in all the publicity for Torchwood 2 suggested it was a series which needed a helping hand from its big brother already. It took me a while to realise why Torchwood is so great. I'd been thinking of it as the Earthbound equivalent of "Andromeda" - a show which tried to be epic space drama but which tried so ineptly to be so different that it ended up far more generic than the series it was trying to emulate. Torchwood seemed to be aiming to be Buffy with swearing, Angel with daylight (also with swearing) and the X Files (with swearing) all rolled into one. And was succeeding in being Scooby Doo with Welsh accents. But then I got it - Torchwood is like an old ITC series (but with swearing). The small band of operatives with unlimited funds and equipment, no real accountability and a back story only when it suited the writers. Torchwood can be a top secret organisation with a huge base, five members of staff and a car with their top secret name on. They can be the hush hush crew that everyone knows about. Because the rules of Torchwood include one about things not needing to make sense in a real world context. And I'm fine with any series which has its own internal rules and sticks to them. They sky can be orange as long as it is always orange and that the orange isn't forgotten about sometimes and they sky is green for no reason. Onto the episodes (which contain spoilers) "Everything Changes" introduced everything - people, concepts and rules. The people bit was easy because we knew Jack already, Tosh looked like a geek and was a geek, Owen's first words were "I'm a twat" and he is indeed a twat, Ianto looked dour and is in fact dour and Gwen looked big-eyed, sentimental and Welsh and is of course big-eyed, sentimental and Welsh. But they swerved us magnificently when Suzie turned out to be a baddie and then shot herself. Full marks for that. The rules of Torchwood are that alien technology does whatever the show needs it to do, there will never be an explanation as to why the technology exists, where it came from or how it works. As first episodes go, it's a great one. "Day One" was the one with the sex. One of the ones with the sex, actually, but the one where the plot was all about the sex. Of course it was tacky - it was as if someone had literally had sex on top of the episode. But it worked reasonably well considering it was ultimately nonsense - the plot was like a box of paper clips - any bits which hang together do so only by accident. "Ghost Machine" bucked the trend by being genuinely good emotional drama as opposed to lots of gimmicks thrown together in an ultimately enjoyable way. They don't waste time trying to explain the alien machine - they get on with using it to tell a story where we first hate Ed Morgan for the cold and brutal way he kills a girl for no obvious reason and then we feel sorry for the present day Ed Morgan because he's so broken and pathetic. Perhaps it didn't need the seeing-into-the-future strand but even that was used to some effect. "Cyberwoman" was an old fashioned locked-in-with-the-monster episode but given a Torchwood twist because suddenly Ianto has feelings. What's more, his feelings in this episode make his lack of feelings elsewhere make sense. I would ask the question why was it quicker for the Cybermen to convert entire bodies than it was to transplant the brain? Answer - it just was. Now get on with it. Though they should've left the episode at death-by-barbeque-sauce and not added the bit where she swaps brains with the pizza girl. A sentence I've never written before. A word here about the Hub - a fantastic set with its mish mash of different styles, levels and periods. It gives a real sense of there being history within Torchwood 3's base of operations. It is everything I would've preferred the new Tardis interior to have been. "Small Worlds" was the most anticipated episode of the season - being the return of PJ Hammond and all that. So it's a shame that this is the worst episode of the season, the worst episode of anything connected with Doctor Who and possibly the worst episode of television. "Countrycide" was great because it took a cliché and made it interesting because it wasn't what we were expecting. In a show about alien monsters and alien technology we are conditioned to expect alien monsters and/or alien technology to be killing everyone. It comes a such a surprise that there aren't any aliens and there isn't any alien technology - just a bunch of inbred villagers with a taste for human flesh - that we'll ignore the fact that Jack and the Jackettes have wandered into Royston Vasey. "Greeks Bearing Gifts" completely fails to make any kind of logical sense by the end (she knew where the transporter was for two hundred years but didn't use it because she was an exiled political prisoner but the moment Torchwood took it away she is suddenly desperate to get back home because the political climate will have changed at home and she'd be safe). It is still a great episode because Tosh goes gay not because she's been mesmerised by the alien or drugged or brainwashed or anything like that - she just really fancies Mary. And then - best of all - no one makes a big deal out of it. Toshiko isn't angst ridden because she shagged a woman - she's angst ridden because she's given the power to hear other people's thoughts. Which is a much more sensible thing to be angst ridden about. "They Keep Killing Suzie" takes us back to episode one and revisits Suzie the misguided and ultimately psychotic second in command. All the stuff about Suzie and Gwen being linked and the former is draining off the latter's life force feels a bit made up as they went along but it is interesting nevertheless as a counterpoint to Jack's indestructibility. He dies knowing he'll come back - she killed herself when her world fell apart and now she's back amongst the very people she betrayed. I'm not entirely sure I buy her supposed plan to use subliminal suggestions to engineer a killing spree which would get Torchwood involved which would make them use the glove to revive her, all apparently so she could come back to life and kill her father. If she's that smart and has that much foresight surely she would've prevented her own death in the first place. Her own stupidity got her caught but we're supposed to believe that under that stupidity was a masterplan. Or something. I don't know. It showed us the cold side of Jack and that was good. "Random Shoes" is Torchwood's "Love and Monsters". It isn't as good as L&M but it has a decent stab. We get a likeable Elton-esque hero giving a voice over as he wanders invisibly around the story. The ending would've been good had it not involved him appearing in front of everyone for no reason and then floating up into the sky (as corny a crane shot as you'll ever see). Eugene is a tragic figure - his life is one long failure and his death is utterly pointless. But we like him and he gets a happy ending. The theme of Torchwood is that it isn't formulaic and pretty much anything can happen (within the rules) and that unpredictability is never more apparent than in this episode. Nothing really happens but it still manages to feel important. "Out of Time" is absolutely superb - it shows Torchwood can do comedy without trying to be anything other than Torchwood. It can then contrast that levity with the utterly grim suicide of John Ellis - made all the more shocking when we realise Jack is in the car with him, making sure he won't die alone. And it has Olivia Hallinan in it - only the third prettiest actress in Sugar Rush but she was up against impressive competition. My only complaint was the final departure of Diane - the skies above that airfield cannot possibly contain an open rift. They established at the start that it was a million to one chance that their plane slipped through. I can understand her wanting to try and get back through but (a) Owen believing she would succeed and (b) her succeeding were absurd. She may not have got back to the 1950s but for her to go anywhere was ridiculous. Planes must take off from that airstrip every day and none of them fly through a vent in space and time. It wasn't the dramatic ending the music seemed to think it was - it was silly. And that's where I'm up to so far. Nine really good episodes and one crap one. A very commendable hit rate. Anyone who, like me, didn't get into it should have another go - the episodes are all so different from each other that you're bound to find something you like.
19th August Further to last episode's influential comedies list, someone reminded me I'd left "Vic Reeves' Big Night Out" off my suggestions for shows which really should've been in the top ten. It is true that much of the home-grown Channel 4 comedy of the past 15 years can trace its roots back to VRBNO (and there has been at least one book with that as its central hypothesis) so I'm happy to include it. This got me thinking and "The Mary Whitehouse Experience" really ought to be considered - it spawned the concept of comedy as "the new rock and roll", it made Oxbridge comedians cool again after a decade of anti-Footlights anarchy and it made radio the stepping stone to television superstardom in a way not seen since the 1950s. Not wanting to make this too 90s-centric but "The League of Gentlemen" paved the way for the grotesque, bad taste sketch comedy which evolved into "Little Britain" so at the very least, Gatiss and co should be ranked ahead of Lucas and Walliams. I mean, who or what the fuck as been influenced by "The Vicar of Dibley"? And, much as I adore the absolute perfection of their shows, what is the legacy of Morecambe and Wise? In truth, it is Little and Large and Cannon and Ball - the light entertainment double acts who bickered between sketches and forced whatever talent they had into Saturday evening formats which were absurdly popular for a while until people decided to vomit up their own eyeballs instead. Right, that's it, I'm not thinking about that wretched poll ever again. As an interlude, a rare example of the ADBS venturing below the waist.
Speaking of below the waist, I've been watching Torchwood. I only saw three episodes when it was first broadcast - I didn't make a conscious decision not to watch it, I just didn't watch it. Three is still two more than I managed before losing interest in Robin Hood. So, to fill the ever widening gap between me placing my order for season 2 of Battlestar Galactica and CDWOW actually sending the second season of Battlestar Galactica I thought I'd finally give the Captain Jack show a bash. I've now seen the first five episodes - two new ones plus the three I'd already seen - and it holds up better than I remembered. Ok, so I found the whole paedophile angle in "Small Worlds" to be absolutely horribly realised (and unnecessary but Torchwood delights in doing the unnecessary if it makes the show more "adult"). But apart from that it was good stuff. And finally, we went to "comedy night" at a local public house a couple of weeks ago. I wasn't going to mention it because I seemed to be the only one who didn't enjoy it and therefore the problem lay with m'self and not with the show itself. But then the Candy Man so succinctly summed up what I wanted to say...
15th August It's fair to say that most polls annoy me - from the 100 most beautiful women in the world to the quinquennial choice of Prime Minister - but this one has annoyed me more than the average.
I would draw your attention to the word "influential". This is not a list of the ten best comedies (in the opinion of those viewers who haven't stopped watching UK Gold in disgust when it became the shallow husk of a once great channel) - it is the ten most influential. I'll happily accept Python at the top of that list. But none of the others can be described as influential in any sense of the word. The closest would be The Young Ones but even that cannot claim to have been as influential in the growth of alternative comedy as Saturday Live - the show which introduced Edmonson and Mayall alongside virtually every other comedian of the 1980s. Little Britian has spawned merchandise and catchphrases. It is a good show but millions of people repeating "Yeah I know" does not make it influential. The Office is in every comedy list by law but it wasn't original and it hasn't inspired anything but an American remake. A proper list of the ten most influential comedies would have to include - The Goons (the series which inspired the Pythons and everyone else of that generation) That Was The Week That Was (the birth of television satire and the first comedy series to have "edge") Hancock's Half Hour (the sitcom which defined the genre on radio and did so again on television) Saturday Live (Elton, Fry, Laurie, Enfield, Mayall, Edmondson and loads more - it took the raw "alternative" comedy and transitioned it to TV) The Goodies (they used television's possibilities in the same way Spike Milligan used radio's in the 50s) Have I Got News For You (took the radio panel game and made it work on TV) The moral of this story is don't say "influential" when you mean "favourite" but are too embarrassed by the banality of the question to say it.
12th August Danny Baker's "All Day Breakfast Show" podcast which I've done my bit to shamelessly promote and which is fantastic, long may it reign, is going subscription-only in September. Dan has been very up front about this - they're doing it for nothing at the moment, they want to carry on but to do so they need to start paying the people who make the show happen. Which seems fair enough to me. The plan is to charge £2 per week for five daily shows (plus the semi-legendary Baker and Kelly football shows at the weekend). Again, this seems fair enough to me. There is some resistance from sections of his fanbase. I have no problem wiht people who don't want to pay for something they've previously got for nothing. That's understandable. As a sidebar, this is why pay per view has never really caught on over here. In the US, big events like boxing matches had moved to closed circuit TV in the 1970s, pay per view took over in the mid to late 80s and so now they are entirely used to things being on pay per view. Here, things were on free TV until Sky created "Sky Box Office" (too gutless - then and now - to use the term pay per view) and suddenly you had to pay for things. Fifteen years on, people still act surprised that the big fight is going to cost them extra. Little do they know or care that Americans have paid a lot more for a lot longer and don't think anything of it. Back to Baker - there is a message board which is home to many of his biggest fans. It is - though he would regard it as self regarding nonsense - a Danny Baker fan site. Some of the posters are revolting at the suggetion that they pay for the podcasts. Up until this point I'm not annoyed. Now the bit which annoys me. One poster did a bit of maths and worked out that £2 per week is £104 per year. So he (I'm assuming it was a he) starts posting about how outrageous it is to be charged £104 for the podcast. Others who had previously muttered against it but who were too embarrassed to actually come out and say that £2 was too expensive were now lighting their torches and posting furiously about how they were being expected to pay £104 for the privilege of listening to the ADBS. How dare Danny Baker demand over a hundred quid for a podcast. What absolute wank. Every time I see that £104 trotted out it makes me want to bash someone over the head with my keyboard. If someone asked them out for a pint would they say "No thanks - it costs £1248 a year to go out for a drink". Quite aside from their use of a misleading statistic to cover their own meanness, any casual Baker fan stopping by the boards might actually believe the podcast will cost them over a hundred quid to listen to. If you don't want to pay for something, don't pay for it. I'm sure the internet will give you copies for free if you want to search them out. But don't distort the truth just so you don't have to hold yourself up to ridicule by complaining about a charge of 40p per day. Or 0.6 pence per minute. Or £8112 over the lifetime of the average person. Because your clever statistic isn't shocking or proof of Danny Baker's greed. it's just a number and numbers can jump through whichever hoops you put before them. You'll have noticed elsewhere that I've been watching Department S this week. A fine series. I ordered the DVDs from Australia when I learned I'd got a job at The New Place and so wouldn't be needing to survive on my redundancy money after all. I could fritter it away on ITC boxed sets and shit. Looking round the internet, there isn't as much about these old shows as I thought there would be. There is a gap in the market for some lovingly created ITC/Anderson guides - we've already made Wikipedia with Bus's "Captain Scarlet" and Zillak's "The Adventurer" but what of the rest? There must be someone out there with a burning desire to dissect Randall and Hopkirk, Man in a Suitcase or even Sapphire and Steel. Get in touch if you feel an urge. I should probably clarify that - get in touch if you feel the urge. Though one I might reserve for m'self is this gaudy piece of nostalgic nonsense. With luck the DVDs (America this time) will be arriving shortly. I was in two minds until I saw the cover. There is literally no way this can't be great.
9th August Have you ever spent what feels like far too long talking about salutations? I know one person reading this can say "yes" but for the rest of you I'd imagine you're saying "no". It wouldn't be an issue had computer people in the 1970s not decided to save disc space by excluding fairly important information. Ask your parents about the millennium bug - that was a big worry years ago and it happened because the programmers used two digits instead of four to record years. The people who designed one of our mainframes used similar logic and didn't record anyone's title. So no "Mr", no "Mrs" and no "Miss". They hadn't invented "Ms" back then but if they had, it wouldn't have been either. This causes a problem when you create your Customer Information Database (CID) from the mainframe data (which logic dictates you have to as the human imagination isn't capable of making up several million people just to populate a database) because the new records mimic the flaws in the old ones. When you use that CID to generate letters you're left with one of two options. (a) you can address your letters "Dear (forename) (surname)" or (b) you can address your letters "Dear (first initial) (surname)". But lo! You're ignoring the obvious possibilities offered by data which was poorly entered in the 1970s and has been poorly maintained ever since. What if the customer never had a first name? What if a lazy computer terminal operator in 1974 thought they'd stick two initials in the christian name field and be done? So your name might be Mark Anthony Shipton but to the mainframe you are nothing more than friendly old Ma Shipton. I can tell already that you don't care. Letters have been going out to "Dear A Dick" for a couple of years now (assuming Alfred Dick exists and had consulted us over something or other) and no one really cared. Users can correct bad data, users can amend badly saluted letters but few of them bother - at best they'll ask someone else to do it, most just ignore it completely. Well, after long discussions, they've finally fixed it. Not actually in the sense of fixing it but they've made it less bad. Mark Antony Shipton will now be M Shipton but Alfred Dick will remain A Dick. The second stage of repair is going to be assigning "Mr" to all customers with a male flag. Sadly, not all our customers currently have a gender. More tight-fisted programmers and lazy computer operators in the olden days. So men are easy enough but women are another matter. They are a more complicated group. I see noddings of head. Needless to say, there is no married flag on the mainframe. And if there is, it isn't reliable. But never mind - it's 2007 and women no longer identify themselves by patriarchal possessional nomenclature. Oh, apparently, yes they do - I'm told few things are more likely to generate a flood of complaints than addressing a married woman as "Ms". So bang goes a simple solution to an irritatingly boring problem. It is now necessary to devise rules about other householders, age differentials, policy types and so on just to give a reasonable guess as to whether each untitled woman is likely to be a Mrs or a Miss. So it isn't just the mainframes that are stuck in the 1970s. The sooner we become cool and groovy like Virgin Media and start addressing letters "Hi Alfie!" the better. Danny and David are discussing why people in Hong Kong take their shoes off if they see someone bump their head when Dan makes a shocking discovery...
5th August Has a news article ever made your skin crawl more than this one did to me?
I don't even know where to begin. Children are too busy to read a weekly comic. They have hectic lifestyles which, you'll note, don't actually involve any physical movement. They have turned a humble comic into a "lifestyle magazine" for the under 10s. I want to commit genocide. I want to eradicate from the species any- and everyone who seeks to turn childhood into a "lifestyle" and make it part of a cynical and cyclical exploitation which will last for the rest of their lives. I heard something on Radio 4 the other day about cheap clothes. There was a ghastly woman on who was patronisingly explaining that the likes of Asda and Primark can't continue selling tat to peasants because eventually the peasants will realise that £2 for an entire outfit isn't a massive saving because they buy half a dozen at a time (because they're so cheap) and they fall apart within a few months anyway. The woman went on to say that "decent" fashion, "proper" fashion was a much better buy because that would last for "one or two seasons". Or "a few months" in English. I would've had some sympathy for her if she had said "clothes" instead of "fashions" every time. Surely "fashion" is temporary. That's the whole point of it. You're not encouraging people to buy things that will last - you're encouraging to buy things that will age very quickly. Of course there is something suspicious about very cheap clothes - either the materials are dubious or they were made in sweatshops. That much is obvious. So obvious that no one mentioned it on Radio 4 - they just let a self-interested hag from the fashion industry spew out her propaganda about seasons and fashions and how you don't really want to be a peasant, do you? Of course there is too much rubbish being bought. When charity shops turn people away at the door because they've got more stuff than they need, that's a pretty good sign that overabundance has become a problem but solving the problem by making people spend more on clothes which are designed to become out of date within months and thus consigning them to the back of the cupboard until you have daughters who will wear them during an ironic revival is hardly the answer. Father - a pragmatic Primark shopper who saves space in his homeward suitcase by leaving all the £2 shirts he's worn on holiday in various Californian bins - is trying to get to grips with the new MP3 player he's bought. He has a pile of CDs he wants putting on the device. I've thus far has to talk him through each one. Why doesn't he just give me the CDs and the player and let me do it? He wants to do it himself. It works exactly the same way as the last MP3 player he bought and I had to guide him through that as well. And the one before that. Each time I tell him to get an iPod and he doesn't. So we have to copy things manually from folder to folder - easy enough in theory. I'm not even going to touch the subject of tidying up the info iTunes pulls from the CDDB. I'm terribly precise and everything has to be super organised in my iTunes folder. But I don't think I have enough life left in my body to explain (a) how and (b) why he should edit the ID3 tags. And if you think I'm grumpy today, you haven't met telehistory's finest.
So Doctor Who is safe and doomed and safe and going to be produced by a lesbian and it's going to be rested and it's become a bargaining football being batted about within the BBC. I hope the political backstabbing is being captured for a future Confidential special and that if Suzie Liggat does end up as the producer, we'll get kd lang in next year's Christmas special.
1st August Season one of Battlestar Galactica ended with... wait - these are spoilers so (hoorah) I get to dust off my Alice Roberts spoiler-avoidance pictures again. Scroll down to the second one if you don't want to know what happened.
The final couple of episodes struck me as being just the sort of thing I'd hate if it was New Doctor Who. The Galactica stumbled across a planet which turns out to be from their version of the Bible (a cobbled together mish mash of New Age, classic mythology, Old Testament and nutty sect scribblings). This isn't the end however - Starbuck is asked by the President to go back to their home planet and recover a magical arrow which will get them all to Earth. Yes, a magical arrow. Suddenly "Last of the Time Lords" doesn't seem so bad. Add to that a truly bizarre sequence with Dr Baltar and his imaginary Cylon girlfriend finding something - a baby? - in a concert hall and you've got something peculiar. I guess this is how television is nowadays. The BG season finale was rubbish and yet it was really good. Rubbish because much of it insulted the intelligence but really good because none of that mattered. I suppose it scored over RTD's Doctor Who because I still have faith that the BG stuff is going somewhere. RTD has done miracles for Doctor Who and I admire him hugely but I can't dismiss the bad stuff because it is part of something bigger and better. Not everything in New Who is there for a reason. In BG, I still believe that every item - good or silly - is there for a greater purpose. Having finished season one I'm keen to see season two. I've yet to have a DW season finale which has made me anything other than grateful it won't be on again for a few months.
You may have noticed this update being a little thin on the ground. I'm spaced out almost to the point of narcolepsy (and without any medication to blame it on), my inbox is pretty much empty and the site is running on fumes. And all at its peak of popularity. More people are coming through its portals than at any time over the past nearly-four-years and I feel burned out like a piece of toast before the butter is smeared upon it. Maybe that's just my toast. Ironically, the last popularity upswing was during the two months I had no PC and so couldn't update anything. The problem is clearly me - the less there is, the more the people like it. Here's another David Kuo story. This time he's decided to learn an important new skill.
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