The Other Doctor Who Roundup

Over the course of nine weeks, the Drama Channel ran a series of 'classic' Doctor Who stories - one for each Doctor, edited together into a single 2-hour omnibus - which, coming so close after the latest series of 'New Who', gave me an excellent opportunity to compare and contrast the two versions of the series. One of the things that has bugged me about the detractors of the new series is the way it's treated as inferior in every way to the original series. Also, in particular, this latest series has copped some flak for being 'overly focused on death and horror'. Personally - and ignoring my personal bête noire, the David Tennant era - I have found the series to be at least on a par with the original, and frequently better... Though I have often expressed the opinion that the stories could be longer - multi-part stories, like the original series, rather than a series of self-contained episodes, vaguely serving a series-long arc. As far as the death angle goes, I thought the series has always had that element and, whether by accident or design, the Drama Channel re-runs have supported what I remember.

It started with the William Hartnell-era story called simply The Aztecs, in which the very first crew of the TARDIS find themselves among people for whom human sacrifice is a common occurrence, and one of their number is mistaken for a goddess. There's at least a couple of fistfights (thankfully not involving Hartnell) and certainly the implication of death by poison and by sacrificial dagger, as well as one character rather dramatically killing himself for reasons of religious observance. Some of the sets are wobbly and the fights are deeply unconvincing (I doubt fight trainers or choreographers were common or easily available in those days), but the story is solid and there are a couple of quite funny moments - such as the Doctor not understanding that asking a woman to share hot chocolate with him amounted to a proposal of marriage. The whole bit about people from a 'more civilised' future trying to change the 'barbaric ancient culture' was a bit obvious, more than a little daft, and clearly doomed to failure, but one must remember that Doctor Who was originally intended to be 'Edutainment', so the examination of Aztec beliefs and a comparison to our own was inevitable.

The second story was Tomb of the Cybermen, in which Patrick Troughton's Doctor gatecrashes an archaeological expedition into the titular tomb... only to find the expedition is more than meets the eye, and the couple funding it have a very deadly hidden agenda. Again, it's quite violent and, while it's difficult to take the Cybermen of that era - or the ridiculously cute Cybermats - at all seriously, there's certainly a lot of implied peril. When the hidden agenda is revealed, things go all kinds of wrong, people die, but the Doctor is eventually able to save the day. Sadly, his companion in this one was one of the 'helpless screamer' variety, and not a patch on the original crew, but the story and supporting cast were pretty good, even if there was a bit of racial stereotyping... The sets were decent, but still pretty wobbly and it was obvious, by this point, Doctor Who was no longer considered 'Edutainment'. This can only be a good thing.

Spearhead from Space was John Pertwee's very dramatic introduction as the Doctor and, while he had been stranded on Earth by the politicians of his homeworld (or rather, the budget cuts and restrictions forced upon it from the top dogs at the Beeb), it still managed to be pretty imaginative and horrific. While I don't find the Autons especially scary, their system of replacing people was a little disturbing, and the 'waxwork' museum was straight out of a horror movie. The only really disturbing thing was this story's early take on the Nestene Consciousness (which only ever returned in the first ever episode of the reboot, Rose, featuring Christopher Ecclestone as the Doctor). Once it had been revealed in its plastic box, it pulsed like some enormous hideous space anus. Its tentacles, when it attacked the Doctor, were a bit rubbish though. I tend to like any episode featuring the Brigadier, so this episode made for a particularly strong intro. It's also notable for the brief glimpse you get of Jon Pertwee's tattoo in the shower scene. Yes, I said 'shower scene'.

While Jon Pertwee's time in the TARDIS - or, more accurately, out of it - tended toward Hammer Horror, it was Tom Baker's era that basically pulled out all the stops, and Pyramids of Mars could easily have functioned well as a pure horror story without any of its sci-fi trappings, with its tale of an ancient 'god' trapped on Mar and plotting its escape. Some of the (remarkably few) special effects were pretty ropey by today's standards, and some plot elements were a little vague (how did an archaeological dig in Egypt wind up inside a Martian prison?) and the Robo-Mummies looked terrible and moved clumsily - no doubt due to the clumsiness of the costume as well as the continued lack of any kind of choreographer. Interesting to see the Doctor disguising himself in one of the mummy costumes... but how did that work, if they were robots? It was a treat to see Elizabeth Sladen - who died back in 2011 - as companion Sarah Jane Smith, particularly when she got to play sniper wearing a pretty white dress in this one.

Peter Davison took over from Tom Baker while I was watching the show as a nipper so, while I still consider Baker to be 'my Doctor', Davison was the one I saw more of until the show started getting re-run. He's a bit of a contentious Doctor, since he was the youngest at the time - about 30 when he first got the role - and was perceived by a former colleague of mine to be a rather weak and pathetic Doctor. Earthshock showed him to be just as distant, arrogant and mercurial as some of the more recent Doctors, particularly in his treatment of Adric. Weirdly, this was a story I had quite strong memories of from the first time I saw it, in its episodic form, though I had completely forgotten the utterly incongruous presence of Beryl Reid in the cast. The scene where a Cyberman walks through a closed door (which had had its molecular structure altered by some sort of beam), only to become trapped part-way when the Doctor connects the spacecraft's antimatter containment system to the door (SCIENCE! This got quite a clever explanation - something along the lines of 'antimatter cannot be contained physically, so computer control constantly adjusts the molecular structure of something-or-other to keep the antimatter contained, so connecting the system to the altered door brought it back to its normal, solid form'). I also remembered to Doctor taking out one of the Cybermen by rubbing Adric's gold badge into its chest (Cybermen, we were told, are allergic to gold). This episode had a clever, if bittersweet finale, in that Adric sacrificed himself to save Earth, inadvertently causing the extinction of the dinosaurs in our distant past. It's also interesting that the series of omnibus episodes as shown a fair bit of the evolution of the Cybermen (that is, their costumes), here in their accordion-chested, moonbooted phase. Of course, for me, the best thing about seeing this story was that, back in the day, I had a massive crush on Nyssa, played by Sarah Sutton.

For many viewers, Colin Baker's appearance as the Doctor following Davison was the beginning of the end for the show. From the harlequin costume/Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat to the increasing wobbliness of the sets, it became obvious that the BBC no longer took the show at all seriously and Vengence on Varos (amusingly referenced in The Five(ish) Doctors) was pretty terrible in a lot of ways. The sight of a topless, oiled-up Jason Connery, chained to a wall as he pretended to be in the throes of torture by some kind of gun dragged on just that little bit too long to be entirely decent, the special effects were lazy (most of the budget must have been spent on the little electric carts the guards drove around in), and the Doctor was basically secondary to the story, with barely any real influence on the outcome. The supporting cast were theoretically good... but seemed to be acting as if they were on stage rather than in front of a camera.

But if the Colin Baker era was the beginning of the end, Sylvester McCoy's time had the death knell ringing in the background the whole time, and it rang loud in Battlefield. With scenes of alien 'knights' with an Arthurian schtick arriving on Earth much like the first batch of Cybertronians in the original live action TransFormers movie (though the effects here were obviously not as polished), a very confused plot involving a convoy of UNIT weapons (though only incidentally), a submerged alien spacecraft and Excalibur, as well as a scene than very nearly proved fatal for Sophie Aldred, rather than just the character she played, it was far from being one of the best stories even of the time. Add the possibility that the Doctor is actually Merlin (can't wait to see if Moffat ever references that!) and a new, grumpy, female Brigadier and you could be forgiven for thinking the story was written as a full-on comedy.

One might expect a retrospective to finish there, but Drama decided to screen Paul McGann's first and - until the 50th Anniversary - only outing as the Doctor, in the terrible, terrible American-made TV movie. I'm glad Sylvester McCoy argued himself a bigger part, as it felt more like a proper handover, but so little of the story actually made sense, and one could make a drinking game out of the number of times McGann had to spout a non-sequitur added to the script simply to remind apparently ADHD US audiences that "that thur mayun ain'tnt hyoomin... he's a ay-leen!", only you'd be paralytic within a few minutes just from his random outbursts of "I have two hearts!". Internal consistency was at an all-time low in this adaptation, and it introduced the idea of the Doctor being half human on his mother's side for no reason whatsoever (I believe this is now referred to as one of the Doctor's many fibs, intended to make it easier for his companion to relate to him. Sadly, his companion was just as implausible... though her daft surgery attire has only comparatively recently been trumped - on a weekly basis - in Body of Proof. I don't necessarily object to the daft resurrection of the Master (it's no more daft than what RTD did in his 2-part swan song), or even Eric Robert's impressively hammy performance, but the idea of the McGuffin within the TARDIS which is capable of destroying the world under certain circumstances, but which - under those same circumstances - will also allow the Master to steal the Doctor's remaining regenerations was very poorly conceived.

So, in the aftermath of that fairly decent little retrospective of original Who, I feel reassured that the style and the content hasn't changed that significantly. It's more polished, the effects are infinitely superior, but the single episode story format really isn't doing it any favours. The original series told a story over the course of, on average, about four half-hour episodes. The new series tries to tell a story over the course of forty-five minutes. Sometimes it succeeds, but far more frequently it could do with more time to really flesh out the situations and the secondary characters.

This year's Christmas special was only fifteen minutes longer than usual, but it felt just about right. The storyline hovered somewhere between Inception, Alien, The Thing and Miracle on 34th Street (the latter three being directly referenced within the story, one way or another) and was certainly an interesting take on the idea of a Christmas special. At first, it seemed a small and intimate tale, along the lines of Matt Smith's first Christmas special, A Christmas Carol, but later hinted at something far bigger and more deadly (the title of the episode was 'Last Christmas', after all) though I felt it did so in a way that belied the greater threat. I'm fairly happy with the way it ended, but I can't help wondering what it had been like if, while riding alone with Santa, when the camera zoomed in on Clara's face, it then zoomed out again to reveal Danny Pink - in his Santa suit - driving the sleigh, offering Clara a very different choice that would have tested her motivation. It would have made for a very different ending, to be sure, but perhaps a more poignant one.

I did like Nick Frost's take on a rather ambiguous Santa Claus (did he exist?), though he reminded me a lot of Richard Attenborough, circa Jurassic Park (or, perhaps more appropriately, the Miracle remake), and it was great to see Dan Starkey out of his Strax makeup.

I now have high hopes for the next series of Doctor Who... as long as the writers can steer clear of having the Doctor continually tell people to "shut up!". If they can also see their way clear to giving us more multi-episode stories with more actual story and setup, and bringing back Michelle Gomez as the Master, I'll be a very happy chappy.

The Dawning Realisation...

...Is that I'm really not going to finish what was originally looking like a four-part epic around the holiday my girlfriend and I took to the States earlier in the year. I had good intentions, and had it planned out reasonably well - one post about the two theme parks we visited (Disney and Universal), one about the shopping and eating out we did, and the final one being a more general thing about the transport, accommodation, pool, and our last half-day in LA before getting a plane back home and suffering jet lag for about a week.

While I still remember it well enough, I just can't bring myself to write about it in the sort of detail I'd originally intended. Suffice it to say, then, that it was an excellent break, I didn't get too nervous about the prospect of navigating a strange city using frankly terrible public transport (let's be clear: the buses are pretty great - they're quick and cover a lot of ground - they're just not frequent enough and some routes are quite patchy). The food was excellent, though we both ended up skipping some meals as there was so much food in each one we had. We didn't do as much proper sightseeing as we'd intended, largely because of the trouble with public transport. We didn't get to see as much of my girlfriend's best friend as we'd have liked due to her work commitments. On the upside, while my girlfriend's anxiety and depression symptoms - particularly lethargy - did manifest themselves quite strongly on a couple of occasions, the effects seemed - to me - to be very much short term, and didn't hinder her overall enjoyment of the holiday. And it's not as if Griffith Park or the observatory are going anywhere anytime soon.

A few things deserve honourable mentions, however:

The day at Disney was absolutely awesome, though the queues are terrible. Just getting into the park took longer than it needed to due to comparatively short queues for tickets that took ages to move. Seriously, I do not understand how it can take some people upwards of ten minutes to buy tickets - even for a family group - when all it takes is announcing how many tickets you wish to purchase, whether or not you want the optional extras (tip: yes, you do want the front-of-queue passes) and, at least if you sound foreign, telling them whether or not it's your first visit (which gets you a badge to display proudly as you wander around the park). It took my girlfriend and I maybe two minutes to get our tickets after at least half an hour of queuing, with only three or four groups ahead of us.

Weirdly, there are LA street gangs that associate themselves with Disney characters. It sounds like a joke one of the locals might play on a tourist but, sure enough, you'll see groups of extensively tattooed people wandering round the park, dressed in stereotypical street gang style, but with Mickey Mouse (for example) embroidered on their jackets or tattooed in strategic locations, where any other gang might have something a bit more traditional/threatening...

Both my girlfriend and I felt that the best ride of the day was the Indiana Jones Adventure though, even in this day and age, more sedate experiences like Pirates of the Carribbean (with its somewhat incongruous and obviously hastily-added Captain Jack Sparrow animatronics) are still pretty cool and enjoyable. I'm a little upset that we missed every single opportunity throughout the day to meet Honda's Asimo robot, but it's not as if we were ever idle. There is honestly so much to do there, let alone just wandering around and observing the many actors portraying famous characters, that one could easily spend a few days just at Disney... and the daily finales of fireworks and shows could probably stand up to repeat viewings from different vantage points.

By contrast, Universal is pretty tiny... and the newest ride - TransFormers: The Ride-3D - is probably the best of the 'traditional' theme park experiences (or perhaps I show a bias here?). However, the studio tour mixes in factual stuff about the studios and more motion ride shenanigans, including a 360° 3D section based around King Kong and some first-hand experience of practical special effects. If you're efficient in your planning - and have the VIP passes - you can almost certainly see everything it has to offer in one day. We ended the day watching the Waterworld show, which had a brilliant bit of pre-show audience participation, though it did lead to a couple of English tourists of the sunburnt variety getting very vocally upset when a bucket of water got chucked at them. Not sure I understand why, considering the seats they'd occupied were so clearly labelled "SOAK ZONE". While the show is very well done, the most impressive thing for me was that, at 20 minutes, it was far more efficient at telling its story than the movie it's based upon.

Weirdly, I ended up buying more TransFormers toys at Universal (three) than I did at either Toys'R'Us (one) or Target (one), and we were advised against going to Walmart, so I can't say much about them.

Even more weirdly, my girlfriend and I were mistaken (for the second time in our two-year relationship) for father and daughter. As we entered the theatre for the Despicable Me Minions ride, we found ourselves in different blocks of seats (each row has twelve seats, with an aisle between each group of four, and we were preceded by a group of three). An older couple - also English, if I remember correctly - offered to move back one seat, suggesting that I could "sit with one of your children". More than a little embarrassing... not that it stopped me taking them up on the offer.

One of the biggest advantages of staying with my girlfriend's best friend was that her appartment complex has two swimming pools. I haven't been swimming in decades, and had to buy a pair of swimming shorts before we went out there since it's been so long. I think my last pair of trunks had my first/middle school swimming badges sewn onto them. Swimming was a great way to start the day and, once I'd plucked up the courage to join my girlfriend in her morning swim, I began to regret not getting to it sooner. That said, considering how wheezy I got after a short time in the pool, never even completing one full length, it seems I'm completely out of practice. God only knows when I'll next have an opportunity to swim... It probably won't be in the sea at Skegness, though...

The flight home wasn't as pleasant as the flight out there. For starters, we were sat apart - each on the end of a row of seats, either side of an aisle - and both of us were sat behind people who dropped their seats back without warning, which meant the in-flight entertainment was at an odd angle and our breathing room was a little restricted. The food wasn't as good, either, though the service was still very good. Next time, I think we'll upgrade to business class, if not first...

My girlfriend has hinted at some surprise that we didn't break up as a result of the holiday but, while our relationship may not be plain sailing, we've yet to argue about anything significant (and frequently fake arguements about whether she's 'Northern' (she's not) or whether I'm a Cockney (nope). Our sense of humour still tends along the same lines, though her anxieties occasionally cause a more severe reaction to some of my 'practical joking' than I had anticipated. Since the holiday, we've celebrated our second anniversary (a quick meal out and an evening of awesome improvised comedy at The Comedy Store), so our relationship is certainly still going.

Getting back to work after the holiday was easy enough, though I had to come home early on my first day back due to jetlag. Things have been unexpectedly hectic since then, with one of the year's largest products taking right up till the last minute to come together, and our regular deadlines compressed to ensure the products were delivered before Christmas.

There was also the office Christmas party, which I decided not to attend due to my experience of too many office Christmas parties with my last full-time job. I dodged out of most of them over the years, but felt more-or-less obliged to attend others. The company I worked for back then was basically banned from returning to every venue they used over about a five-year period for one reason or another (generally the foul behaviour of the younger members of staff), and the way they were organised never really suited me. Sit-down meals tended to descend into drunken binging, and those parties that offered only finger food were little different, except that I tended to leave hungrier.

My current employers insisted they'd be different whenever I told Christmas party horror stories from my past, yet they turned out to be much the same based on the stories I heard on Monday. My boss got paralytic and did several embarrassing things some of which, had she been male, might well have resulted in the loss of her job. One of the girls in Sales was desperately trying to chat up the gay designer. One of the guys in Sales was desperately trying to chat up anything female with a pulse. One might think there was the opportunity for a crossover there, but she apparently wasn't interested in anyone but the gay designer. It sounded as though some people had a good time, to be fair, but there was vomiting and, if the MD (who left early, and so was reporting second hand news and could easily have been joking) is to be believed, some fighting as well.

Nevertheless, we met all our deadlines... though the schedule wasn't especially well considered as it transpired that our distributors closed a day earlier than us, and so were unable to receive the last couple of magazines. We only received next year's schedule (beyond April) this week, and several dates look rather dodgy... Hopefully there will be some discussion about it in the New Year.

And so, here we are, on Christmas Eve. All our presents are wrapped, but we're having a quiet Christmas Day together in my flat, then heading to my folks on Boxing Day. After a day back home, we're heading off to Lincolnshire for a few days with my girlfriend's family, then returning before New Year, since I return to work the following day... The biggest thing we're doing is baking some Christmas cookies to take with us... Our Christmas dinner will be decidedly non-traditional.

Doctor Who Series 8 Retrospective

Doctor Who has now been back on our screens for eight years, and we're now onto our fourth (or fifth/sixth, canonically) new Doctor. The end of the seventh series not only revealed the identity of the 'missing' Doctor, but explained how he could regenerate beyond his originally-allotted twelve times.

I've previously noted that the first episode 'subtly' explained that the concept of 'young, sexy, Doctor-as-Boyfriend' has now - finally, thank God - been ditched in favour of a return to the older, wiser Doctor of old, personified currently by Peter Capaldi. In theory, this should be a good thing... but I have to say I enjoyed this series far less than I'd expected. Some of the stories - not to mention the monsters - seemed like weak rinse-and-repeats of things we've seen before, other stories just didn't seem like Doctor Who and left me wondering what the fuck I'd just been watching. The main problem I had, though, was Peter Capaldi himself.

Don't get me wrong, I still think he's an excellent choice: a great actor, very adaptable... but until the last couple of episodes, he didn't seem to find the character that was his Doctor. He seemed to be acting entirely to the script rather than bringing anything unique to the role. One thing that really didn't help was the way each Doctor has developed a catchphrase in this contemporary reboot. Christopher Ecclestone had "Fantastic!", David Tennant had several repetitive, tedious utterances including, but not limited to, "Allons y" and "I'm sorry... I'm so, so sorry", Matt Smith had "Geronimo!" and "Bow ties are cool"... Thusfar, the closest Peter Capaldi's version has had to a catchphrase is "Shut up!", frequently repeated several times in quick succession.

Then there are the stories themselves, which were almost all based on a good idea, but quite poorly conceived and several were just badly written. Part of me still wants to argue that they'd have been better in the old format of one story spread over three or four episodes, so the subject matter could be properly explored, but some of these stories were so badly done, they just didn't deserve it.

Having already written a little about the first four episodes, I'll plow on with the remainder...

Time Heist could definitely have worked better as a two- or three- episode story. The concept was pretty clever and the execution reasonably good. Having the Doctor break into a bank for reasons unknown, ultimately leading to a subtle twist ending could have used fleshing out, but the recruitment of his partners in crime was reduced to a quick montage towards the end of the episode, when they could have been interesting stories in and of themselves. The identity of the mysterious mastermind behind the heist was played with fairly well - I spent most of the episode thinking (as I was supposed to, I guess) that it was the Doctor himself... so the revelation would have carried a bit more weight if there had been some build-up to it.

Bringing the Doctor into an everyday, mundane setting that turns out to be anything but isn't a new trick, but The Caretaker was certainly not one of the best examples of it. The robot's presence on Earth was never explained, nor how the Doctor knew about it (one could almost get the impression, sometimes, that writers believe he has either a shopping list of monsters to fight or planets to save, or some sort of instrument on the TARDIS that detects anomalous things). Worst of all, there was neither explanation nor reason for the Doctor's plan to involve the school Clara and Danny teach in. The robot started out in some disused building elsewhere and was attracted to the school - a deliberate act - by the Doctor, seemingly because the only place his plan could be put into effect was the school's assembly hall. The temporary displacement could have been more interesting but, despite some acrobatics from Danny, the ending was just plain dull... and, much as I like the practical effects Doctor Who now uses, the robot was a bit rubbish...

Kill the Moon was possible one of the worst episodes I've seen in a long time because literally none of it made sense. From Clara's fixation on the idea of the Doctor validating the schoolgirl she arbitrarily brought along, to the rushed and deeply unsatisfactory explanation of the 'spiders', to the completely ridiculous denouement which revealed that, after all, nothing of any consequence actually happened, despite the implication once the contents of the moon were properly explained. It was another one of those episodes where the Doctor refused to help once he understood the nature of the problem, but it all felt rather forced and unnecessary.

The trailer for Mummy on the Orient Express immediately reminded me of the episode - the end of one of Matt Smith's series - where the Doctor received a phone call on pretty much that exact subject. I recall hoping it would be a Christmas special, where the extended running time would allow for something interesting. What we actually got was a rushed, fairly jumbled tale that was part murder mystery, part horror story with a rather sad ending. And, unfortunately, that's sad in the sense of "not very good", with the 'monster' turning out to be almost sympathetic. The background characters were straight out of Agatha Christie, and the fact that most of them weren't even real seemed to contradict at least one of the deaths... but perhaps I wasn't paying enough attention. Frank Skinner was something of an elephant in the room, being all too recognisable for his stand-up comedy and game show appearances, but I almost wished he'd accepted the Doctor's offer at the end... the 'train' engineer could have been a pretty cool companion...

Flatline seemed daft from the trailer - a rather desperate attempt at horror - but was actually one of the better episodes of the series, dealing with the invasion of Earth by a two-dimensional form of life, which was killing people to study our third dimension. It could have been better, but could have been a heck of a lot worse... The group of people who ended up tagging along with Clara (and slowly getting whittled away) were a fine collection of stereotypes with utterly predictable 'conflict' dialogue, and came away from their experiences utterly unchanged. The most disappointing thing was that the creatures became the same sort of Silent Hill-esque twisted humanoids as have appeared in far too many episodes already. Seeing the TARDIS in its emergency configuration was interesting, but immediately made me think of the AllSpark cube from the first TransFormers movie... or perhaps the Lament Configuration...

I honestly don't know what to make of In the Forest of the Night. On the one hand, there may have been the seed (pun intended) of a good story in there, but it ended up being a different take on the idea posited by M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening. Seeing more of Danny Pink in action with his pupils was good fun (even if the kids didn't agree), but the end was implausible... and just a little bit 'hippy tree hugger'... It may have been trying to be a faerie tale - which I would normally like - but that element of the story really didn't seem to fit with the rest.

Throughout the series, we had been teased with brief appearances by a character identifying herself as "Missy", and who claimed, variously, to be in 'paradise', 'heaven' or somesuch. Dark Water saw the beginning of her true introduction (or reintroduction), as well as an insight into her terrible plan, and her involvement with Clara. Naturally, it contradicted the events of the earlier RTD series to some extent but, as Moffat has pointed out since, certain characters have a knack for self-preservation. Sadly, the big reveal for this episode was somewhat spoilt by the production photos which turned up online, so I'd put two and two together the moment the 'dark water' was demonstrated to Clara and the Doctor.

The series concluded in suitably epic fashion with Death in Heaven, though I'm not certain the connection between Missy and Clara was explained sufficiently - it was all rather perfunctory, and everyone just kind of accepted it, amongst the myriad other wacky things that were going on. Cybermen 'invading' London (only not), Missy gleefully killing people (including, sadly, the UNIT scientist played by Ingrid Oliver) and chucking the current head of UNIT out of a plane, generally acting as one would expect that particular character to behave. The very end of the show, with Danny Pink sacrificing his opportunity to return to the land of the living to send back someone he felt was more deserving (and thereby absolving himself of some of his guilt) was a decent end for the character, and very in keeping with the way he was presented throughout.

By and large, the main problem with this series, for me, was that most of it was eminently forgettable. I've had to remind myself what each episode was about before being able to write anything about them, and still found myself struggling. Granted, I've left it rather too long when, previously, I might have been writing up each episode every week, after it aired, but the stories were all pretty weak. I was disappointed, but not at all surprised, by Danny Pink's fate - he was one of the few characters I actually liked during the series - all credit to Samuel Anderson - because of his no-nonsense approach to everything, and the way he stood up to the Doctor. Much of their dialogue could have ended up the same as that between previous Doctors and Mickey Smith, but Danny was far more self-assured.

While it seems that Missy was disintegrated, I certainly hope she returns in future... Just not too soon, and not as an end-of-series villain or as the mastermind behind another series-long arc.

On another note, the point that we'd all seen Peter Capaldi's face before was very well made in the first episode, but the Doctor's own question "why this face?" was never touched upon again, let alone answered. This is fairly typical of Moffat's planning: it will come up again, and it'll either be the most important thing in the series (that is, exactly the way the Doctor's name was the most important thing in a previous series) or it'll be utterly irrelevant and dealt with in a completely offhand way.

It has struck me lately that the Cybermen have been very popular in this rebooted Who, turning up in almost every series since their return. I'm sure I've written before about how the first batch reminded me of the original RoboCop, while these new ones seem aesthetically more similar to Iron Man from the Marvel movie franchise. What bugs me is that they still move in exactly the same slow, stiff way (apart from the occasional burst of super-speed). What I'd like to see in future 'upgrades' is swifter, more fluid movement - suits that actually allow the performers to run, for example - because, surely, the Cybermen must realise they're in need of such abilities... In terms of mobility, they cannot consider themselves highly upgraded from an unaltered human.

On another note, it did not escape my attention that the show has been aired far later this time round... and there have been far more complaints about the subject matter (lots of death). Amusingly, it is possible to directly compare 'New Who' with 'Old Who' at the moment, because the Drama channel is showing one story - 2 hour long omnibus episodes - featuring each of the original Doctors. So far, we've had William Hartnell in The Aztecs (dealing with human sacrifice), Patrick Troughton in Tomb of the Cybermen (archeological dig with a hidden agenda), Jon Pertwee in Spearhead from Space (Autons replacing humans with plastic doppelgangers, and a seriously dubious slimy sphincter in a box) and, just this last weekend, Tom Baker in Pyramids of Mars (alien/ancient Egyptian god uses the reanimated corpse of an archaeologist, plus an army of robo-mummies, in an attempt to escape his prison), all of which have proven how much death and horror have been a part of Doctor Who from the very start.

I would argue that the later timeslot means fewer younger viewers will be able to watch it, even though many adult fans - parents now - remember the original series and all that 'hiding behind the sofa' stuff. That was always part of the appeal of the original series, so it seems strange both to deny that pleasure to contemporary youths, and to complain about an aspect of the show that isn't new.

But then, some people love to whine about anything and everything...

Another Wacky Dream Involving My Flat

OK, so my plan to write about my recent holiday over the course of the following week was probably doomed to failure before I even conceived it, but it was worth a try... Part two is in the works but, in the meantime, here's what I remember about a rather strange dream I had last night.

It started with me - and, I believe, my girlfriend - house-sitting in a fairly large, very strangely laid-out house. No idea whose it was or why we were house-sitting, but I remember feeling somewhat grateful about the arrangement... at least until we started exploring.

Most of the house was garishly colourful, massively spacious and opulently furnished. In the lounge, we learned that, due to some unspecified problem with the enormous widescreen television, it was projecting its picture onto the adjoining wall, which was somehow transparent as I could see the picture from another room.

There seemed to be no shortage of bedrooms, though, and while most of them seemed bright, welcoming and comfortable, the first one I happened upon could easily have been a large cupboard. It was furnished as if for a child and, being in the centre of the house (as far I could tell based on my exploration) it had no windows. This, coupled with the soft toys strewn on the floor, made the room feel rather creepy - as if the child was hidden away in this room for some sinister reason - and I was keen to get out of it as quickly as possible.

The house share didn't last long, however, as the dream quickly shifted into a version of my own flat that had fallen into decay. It was like an alternate homecoming after the holiday, where heavy rains had leaked into every room. Some of the furniture was missing and the lounge carpet was covered in blooms of mould where water had dripped down from the ceiling.

It's interesting timing for this sort of thing, considering there has been a small measure of progress on my roof. Well, I say 'progress' but what I actually mean is there's another temporary fix in place, with a 'plan' to renew at least part of the roof in the spring of next year... That's a whole different blog post (which is also in progress but incomplete, and so will probably appear at some ridiculously out-of-context point in the future), but the temporary fix appears to be working - we've had some quite heavy rain, but all three affected areas have thusfar remained dry, and I haven't been disturbed by 3am streams of water in the bedroom or the irregular thud of water dripping onto the ceilings and then into a plastic bowl...

A Short Jaunt to the States, Part I

Just for a change, I have a good excuse for my lack of blogging recently... Well, OK, over the last week.

For the first time in about ten years I've had a proper holiday abroad... It was also my first holiday during that time that did not involve my parents (either in terms of financing the holiday or going along with me)... and my first ever proper holiday with my girlfriend. Since we don't seem to ever do things by halves, we travelled across the Pond to Los Angeles, to visit her best friend.

It had also been quite a few years since my girlfriend flew anywhere, and those flights were comparatively short. To get to LA, we'd be in the air for about eleven hours - slightly longer than I'd anticipated, but still better than the brain-melting eighteen hour flight to New Zealand I took with my parents many years ago. Getting to and through Heathrow was easy enough, but every trip abroad by plane reminds me how clumsy Heathrow's layout is. Getting from the Tube arrival point to the specific terminal is a slog, helped only a little by the use of travelators. Between those two points was the check-in desk, at which we got ourselves flagged for additional security checks later on because my girlfriend didn't have to hand any note of her friend's address in LA. All it really meant was that our carry-on luggage got a slightly more thorough investigation, we both got patted down, and I got scanned. Weirdly, the scanner thought it located something on my shoulder, hip and ankle, though obviously the guy who patted me down to confirm the scanner's findings wasn't able to locate anything untoward.

My girlfriend, having not been on a plane for so long, was nervous about the flight itself but, after a few moments of tense hand-holding, once she realised we were actually already in the air and on our way, she relaxed considerably. It helped, too, that in-flight entertainment has come on in leaps and bounds over the last decade. Last time I flew long-haul, you got maybe two different movies and a couple of terrible meals. Our flight to LA had a whole library of music, movies and TV shows as well as a few fairly basic videogames. I'd brought along two books and bought a third at Heathrow... I barely glanced at any of them over the course of the holiday.

Instead, I allowed myself to be introduced to the likes of Sleepy Hollow and Hannibal, a couple of new TV series that probably won't turn up on UK TV outside of the premium satellite channels for quite some time (OK, we've just got Gotham, which should inspire me with some confidence... but it doesn't) as well as watching a couple of movies. I don't even remember which movie I watched first, but I did get most of the way through Edge of Tomorrow before the PA kept interrupting to inform us of our impending arrival.

The meals on this flight were very impressive, all things considered. For the first meal, I had a roast chicken thing with veg while my girlfriend had the vegetarian option of pasta. The next was a simple selection of snacks, and 'breakfast' (we actually arrived in the evening) was a deep pan pizza.

Arrival in LA was, as has always been the case when I've travelled to the USA, a complete dream - simplicity itself, with very little wandering around. We'd made jokes, on our way through the airport, about how unfortunate an abbreviation LAX is for the airport, since it leads to signs indicating 'LAX SECURITY', which is surely not what one wants in an airport... thankfully, they all seemed on-the-ball, and certainly not as grumpy as those at the airport that kept an old schoolfriend of mine waiting about half an hour while they conducted a detailed search of his luggage simply because he'd made a joke. On our way through, we were photographed and officially fingerprinted, making another first for the both of us. We had to wait a while for our luggage to materialise, and my suitcase was a good few minutes behind my girlfriend's, but the worst thing that happened was that I dragged a second suitcase off the carousel along with mine, and another passenger was kind enough to throw it back on while I wrestled my case out of the way. My girlfriend had to answer a few questions at one point, as she'd indicated on a form that she was bringing in foodstuffs but, once it had been confirmed that none of it posed any threat to US agriculture, she was waved through.

We were expecting to be met at the airport by her friend, but parking outside the airport isn't easy - it's for pickup and dropoff only, so the car - driven by one of the friend's housemates - had to do a circuit of the terminals. I eventually caught sight of the friend outside while my girlfriend was double-checking inside the reception area of the terminal but we were off almost immediately.

Our first port of call was a sushi restaurant at The Americana in Glendale, where we met yet another friend of the friend and had a small dinner - all we could manage - before, almost keeling over from exhaustion, we were driven back to the apartment which was to be our base of operations for the week.

More to come, hopefully during the coming week...

It Has Come To My Attention...

...That today marks the eighth anniversary of this little blog. It'd be nice to be able to say I have something big planned but, considering it's been over a month since my last post, the chances of that would be slim at best.

And, in fact, I have nothing planned - big or otherwise - largely because, as usual, I'd forgotten all about it. I've even got a reminder set in my phone... but, of course, it only reminds me on the day, rather than in advance, so I just have to hurriedly throw something together.

Like this.

So, another year, and another load of massive changes. My girlfriend has been living with me for a few months now. Aside from the occasional anxiety attack or bout of depression, it's been going very well and, having ditched one degree at the end of term earlier this year, she's custom-built her own Open University degree and is enjoying her studies for the first time in years.

Having been temping for three years since I was made redundant, I've accepted a permanent position at one of the companies I worked for briefly, and that's been going well. It's an odd environment - any office is odd, but this one, being a small company, is particularly so - and some of the people are taking some getting used to. Hell, they probably feel the same way about me, to be honest. On balance, though, it's a far more pleasant experience than my last permanent job. A turning point was marked recently, when I asked to have a private word with my boss, and her response was "you're not allowed to hand in your notice!"

There may even be movement on the sorry state of my roof. I was recently contacted by another of the leaseholders and, without wishing to go into too much detail, it has been determined that there are some irregularities regarding the service charge applied to flats in our building. I don't want to say any more because wheels are currently in motion... but the situation looks far more positive now than it has for quite some time, despite a rather massive change in overall circumstances.

There's probably a lot more I could write about, but I have a headache, so I should probably get some rest.

Nevertheless, happy birthday, blog... I'll try to pay you a bit more attention.

Almost Cultural

In recent years, a strange thing has happened to theatre: it's become popular... but not necessarily in the way the theatres themselves might prefer.

I refer, of course, to the trend for screening theatrical productions in cinemas. Initially, it seems like a ridiculous idea: why bother, when it's taking away one of the most important features of seeing a theatrical production - the very fact that you're right there with the performers? Upon reflection, though, the obvious answer presents itself: not everyone can afford theatre tickets (though cinemas seem to be hiking their prices up all the time) and, with some productions, not everyone can obtain theatre tickets before the run is sold out.

Such was the case with a production of A Streetcar Named Desire, put on at the Young Vic and starring the one and only Gillian Anderson. That is to say, it was one of those situations where the full run was basically sold out before my girlfriend and I even heard about it.

Amusingly, Gillian Anderson isn't the only reasonably famous name in the cast - there's also Ben Foster (Warren Worthington III in X-Men: The Last Stand, the slightly scary sidekick in the 2007 remake of 3:10 to Yuma) and the very versatile Corey Johnson (who turns up in so many things but, memorably for me, in the New Who series 1 episode 'Dalek'). Also amusingly, playing opposite Anderson's Blanche DuBois as her sister, Stella, was Vanessa Kirby, previously Estella to Anderson's Miss Havisham in the BBC's terrible 2011 3-part adaptation of Great Expectations (inferior in almost every way to their own 1999 TV movie, though Ray Winstone was a very good Magwitch).

The stage was set on a revolving rectangular platform in the centre of the theatre - the Young Vic does pride itself on innovative use of space - on which Stella and Stanley Kowalski's tiny apartment was represented by furniture and a couple of doors. The platform started moving the moment Blanche started drinking and, as far as I can tell, didn't stop for the rest of the show... Seeing it in the cinema, I couldn't be sure as the camera frequently moved along with the stage, and the audience weren't always easily visible.

If I had a gripe about the production, it would be over the use of loud (and sometimes quite incongruous) music during scene shifts. The shifts themselves were cleverly done, with the cast moving some things around and the stage hands others, but the first couple of musical interludes I could have done without, and had my girlfriend plugging her ears. She later suggested that the excessive volume could have been more the fault of the cinema than the stage production.

If I had a gripe about the experience of theatre at the cinema, it's that far too many people were talking pretty much throughout the performance, and one can only hope they wouldn't have done that had they been in the theatre. Granted it was complimentary (on one occasion when Blanche fell over, a guy behind me commented "She's a marvellous actress" and the woman next to him replied "Oooh, yes") but, seriously, this is the sort of shit you do when at home, watching a fucking DVD, not in the cinema where everyone around you has paid the same amount (roughly equivalent to a new DVD) to enjoy the production.

And the really annoying thing is that one might expect this sort of behaviour from children or teenagers... but virtually everyone in that screen was either my age or older... The teenagers and school groups were in the adjacent screen, watching the same thing. Many of the older members of the audience clearly had mobility issues (and hadn't brought aids like walking sticks) based on the shaky way many of them leaned down to the armrests as they teetered down the stairs to the exit in between acts and at the end of the presentation. Also worthy of mention was the old lady who whacked me about the head with her handbag, shuffling through the row behind to have a natter with a friend.

So, much as I like the idea of bringing theatre to the masses, making it more accessible in as many ways as possible, the utter snob in me would prefer to keep some people away from theatre, so that those of us who actually appreciate it (and stay to applaud the cast for their encores, rather than leaving as soon as the stage lights dim or the curtain falls for the first time) have a better chance of getting a ticket for a live performance.

(Addendum 20/9/14: special mention to the little piece in the intermission, presented by Emma Freud, talking about the production and the Young Vic generally, while patrons were milling around behind her. One guy paused, in just the wrong place, to glug down most of an entire pint of whatever beer he was drinking before dashing back into the theatre... How wonderful to have captured that moment on film... I do hope they now play that recording every time)

In other news, I have recently been working with one of the Editors on a side project... a little book we're publishing on behalf of a third party. It has been an interesting project, but the Editor in question really doesn't have a very good grasp of using computers to their best advantage. For example, I split the photos we'd been supplied into sections so they could be more easily sorted through to see what we actually wanted to use (originally they were all supplied in a single directory, all photos were named with DSC-numbers and weren't in any sensible order). When we started choosing images, she suggested making new directories for photos we might possibly use, when I'd already started making subfolders of images that just weren't worth using. The second time she wanted a whole new directory where one already existed, I pointed out a better way of sorting the files, and started to use it without awaiting her agreement.

Even before that, though, she started getting on my bad side by presuming that her time was more valuable than mine - telling me she was going to have a quick lunch, then shortly after telling me she was ready to start when my lunch hour (part of my employment contract I'm aiming to keep to, to avoid my workaholic tendencies as far as possible in this environment) was only halfway through. Granted she had a schedule to keep to... but then, so did I. Working with her that day kept me away from my regular magazine work.

She also has an interesting relationship with fractions. For whatever reason, despite using OpenType fonts for her main magazine, she prefers to create fractions manually (superscript the numerator, forward slash, reduce the point size of the denominator) and feels that the automatically-generated OpenType fractions aren't as "elegant" or as easy to read. When I related this to the two designers in our team, one actually did a double-take... and not ironically.

She also had a ridiculously long-winded way of explaining that the 'oe' part of a word in the text should have been a diphthong... and claimed that it was a function that Word could not perform, while InDesign could. I mean, OK, not everyone knows that PCs deal with most special characters using alt codes (œ, Œ), but surely one should not be afraid of using a word like 'diphthong' to describe the appropriate character..?

Out in the real world, my girlfriend is getting excited about her upcoming Open University work as more of her materials arrive. The latest packages were (literally) a box of rocks and the accompanying literature (including posters) for her Geology module. Considering she's been down in the dumps and very anxious recently, it's truly delightful to see her getting so enthusiastic and feeling so positive about things... Alongside her coursework, she proposes to volunteer for a local public service and recently met up with an old science contact about doing some freelance work on the side. My girl likes to keep busy.

I'm starting to feel the need to get off my arse and do something a bit more constructive with my evenings and weekends, but still struggle with motivation and, in the case of blogging in particular, subjects to write about. If I manage to squeeze out another post here this month, September will have been my most prolific month this year... with a total of only five posts.

There's also a fair bit of sketching I want to do... not least a cartoon version of someone else's original TransFormers character, requested as a result of another toon I did for myself.

Oh, and before I forget, the third series of Body of Proof started today... it's the first time I've watched it with my girlfriend, and we had a good time picking out all the ridiculous flaws in the presentation (not least, why does Megan never tie her hair back or wear a cap while cutting up corpses?) but, as implausible American television goes, it's still pretty good fun.

On a similar note, we watched Last Days on Mars last night... a strange Brit-Flick starring Liev Schrieber, Olivia Williams and Romola Garai. Its science is horrendously flawed and it features far too many horror movie clichés, but it was reasonably fun to watch. That said, space zombies are still, ultimately, just zombies... and I was rather hoping for a bit more Dead Space-style kerb-stomping...

The Inevitable TV Roundup

Yes, it's about damned time I said something about things I've been watching on TV recently... I'm sure there's something I'm forgetting, but here's the most significant recent(ish) stuff...

Had I known before watching approximately half of the first episode of The 100 that it was based on another scintillating work of teen fiction, I probably wouldn't have bothered watching even that. There's just something about this sudden movement of 'Young Adult' writing, and particularly the way it keeps getting made into terrible movies and TV shows, that is deeply frustrating. I know TV/Movie adaptations aren't necessarily the best indicator of the original medium's quality, since most tend to go through at least one stage of stripping out everything that made them interesting and unique, and adapting whatever 'message' might be hidden in their pages so that it's obvious enough for couch potatoes, but the premise behind The 100 is so unpromising that it deserved to be left to gather dust in teenagers' bedrooms throughout the world.

Actually, maybe that's unfair... Some aspects of the premise are perfectly adequate: after some kind of nuclear holocaust, the few humans left alive are stuck on a conglomeration of international space stations (and yet are all, somehow, unapologetically American) which is slowly failing, and the government (because, naturally, any group of people larger than about 50 requires a government to tell it how to behave while stuck in a can out in the vacuum of space) is hiding that fact from them... gradually becoming more fascist, and ejecting any dissenters into space.

Where it gets stupid, and where it basically tries to retread the same ground as, for example, Lord of the Flies, is that this government decides that the best way to determine whether or not Earth has become habitable again (less than 100 years after the war) is to send down 100 of their criminals.

And all their criminals just happen to be... Teenagers...

So, naturally, the first thing they do when they alight upon the formerly scorched earth, after deciding that the air is safe to breath, is have a party. I wish I was kidding. Then they start removing the devices that tell the folks on the space station what condition they're in, health-wise. From there, it only goes downhill, because they all decide to blindly follow the loudest voice in the group, who also just happens to be a former member of the station security team.

My big problem with this is that we're meant to be rooting for the kids, but they're all such whiny, selfish, short-sighted idiots, I found myself getting more enthusiastic whenever one of them died. In fact, the most believable thing in the few episodes I could bring myself to watch was when a little girl (whose 'crime' I recall no mention of), having been told to 'fight her demons' (or somesuch... I don't recall the precise phrasing), decided that the most efficient thing to do was stab to death the son of the guy who killed her father (by having him chucked out of an airlock... which is, I'm sure you'll agree, a far more sensible punishment than simple imprisonment for any totalitarian society with a premium on living space and oxygen).

The adults, meanwhile, acted like people who didn't understand the concept of 'the big picture' - first sending 100 teenage 'criminals' down to a planet they felt was probably still inhospitable to human life (clearly the concept of radioactive half-life has been lost to history by this point), sending them down without any real equipment or means of survival beyond landing, and without any sensible means of communication, let alone any way of ensuring they do what they were supposed to do. The situation on the space station was such that, at one point, they had to 'accidentally' lose life support in one area of the station, killing a certain number of people, to ensure a temporary reprieve for the rest. All their 'solutions' are distinctly self-serving and short term, and the three main characters are the driven doctor, the indecisive politician and the power-hungry head of security - all very stereotypical, and enabling all sorts of illogical plot 'twists' that are obvious well in advance. I frequently found myself wondering how people like these actually found themselves on a space station in the first place - clearly none of them were Astronauts.

Naturally, life on Earth wasn't one big party... Everything from mutant animals to Lost-derivative yellow clouds of death to the 'shock revelation' that, actually, there were humans alive on Earth already, but they're sort of tribal-goth mutes. And just when things started settling down, one main character's girlfriend made the perilous journey to the surface, seemingly just to increase the tension, because he'd just slept with another main character.

Suffice it to say, I gave up on it as another lacklustre teen drama... It really does seem that nothing will ever get close to the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in terms of handling human drama in a mature and thoughtful way, while in a fantastical setting.

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I'd been told all about Murdoch Mysteries many years ago (probably when it debuted in the UK on one of the Sky satellite channels), and it sounded pretty good, so when I noticed it in a Freeview TV guide, I was keen to tune in. Based on a series of novels, it's essentially a Victorian era Canadian CSI, where a policeman uses pioneering (and anachronistic) investigative techniques to solve crimes, and meets 'celebrities' of his day, like Nikola Tesla and Arthur Conan Doyle. It also attempts to deal with 'issues' like gender equality, religious strife, domestic violence and even homosexuality, through the lens of Murdoch, who can be a little puzzling. For example, even his unreconstructed superior, Inspector Brackenreid, has a better attitude toward homosexuality than the strict Catholic Murdoch... but then, Brackenreid has become better developed as a character over the course of the first half of the series (not least the sudden revelation that he's a big theatre lover) than almost any other character, but particularly the titular character. In fact, I'd have to say that Brackenreid (played by Thomas Craig, formerly of lots of British television) is easily my favourite character of the lot. William Murdoch is a very straight-laced sort of guy, albeit one who is given to (very useful) flights of fancy when it comes to identifying and examining evidence. The thing is... he's virtually always right. In fact, the only significant time he was wrong, the matter involved his estranged father.

Granted, not everyone can have a Moriarty-style nemesis who's able to outwit them, or even offer a challenge, but there haven't really been any (convincing) false leads so far... and, aside from his very ignorance-of-the-time views on homosexuality, Murdoch is almost unfailingly nice to everyone he meets. There's also a very obvious (yet frustratingly slow) budding romance going on between Murdoch (a widower) and the completely anachronistic coroner/forensic pathologist, Dr Julia Ogden, who - despite being a mere woman (remember, this is the 1890s!) - is very well respected and well connected in her field. OK, perhaps Canada was more enlightened than the UK or the US at the time, but it still stretches credulity.

Then again, I don't think this series was ever really meant to be taken seriously, if only because Murdoch's long-suffering sidekick, Constable Crabtree, invariably gets involved in some rather embarrassing crime reconstructions to make up for getting just about all the comic stuff not already delivered by Brackenreid. It certainly makes a change from some of the more po-faced police procedurals out there, and is a welcome antidote to the CSI franchise, which quickly disappeared up its own backside as it branched out.

The fact that Murdoch has appeared on Freeview about six years after it made its original debut brings me some hope that the likes of The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne will eventually turn up on UK TV...

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Under the Dome returned to our screens with a spectacular lack of fanfare considering it's the second half (I hope) of the adaptation of a Stephen King novel. Trouble is, like The 100, its characters don't really behave like real people, just characters in a weird sci-fi/mystery series who are directed by the necessities of the plot. I may yet read the novel, but I've completely given up on the TV adaptation as it's bloated, dull and frequently feels quite pointless... And I'm not sure I even watched the whole of the first episode. It's incredibly frustrating to be watching something and constantly screaming "why would you do that?" to the characters...

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Quirky new British crime drama Chasing Shadows is a whole different kettle of fish. It functions on two levels: first and foremost, it's riding on the coat tails of The Bridge and giving us our own version of Saga Norén in the form of Detective Sean Stone, a socially inept but gifted investigator who is introduced to the viewer making a complete mess of an interview about the successful conclusion of a case, because he feels it wasn't successful enough. Rather than being immediately sacked, his enraged superior palms him off on Missing Persons, to be partnered with Ruth Hattersley, and the pair frequently run into Detective Inspector Carl Pryor over the course of the first two-part story, in which a killer is preying on missing, vulnerable teenagers. Its secondary function seems to be as a Doctor Who reunion, of sorts, with the awesome Don Warrington (several roles in Old Who) as Stone's superior, Alex Kingston (River Song) as Ruth, Adjoa Andoh (Martha Jones' mother) as her boss and Noel Clarke (Mickey Smith) as DI Pryor. Even Reese Shearsmith has a Who connection, having played Patrick Troughton in An Adventure in Space and Time, the drama based on the very beginnings of Doctor Who... I can't wait to see who they bring in next.

It lacks the bleak, subdued colour palette of The Bridge, as well as its Noir-ish elements, but it has all the smart - and frequently very funny - dialogue of its Swedish/Danish cousin. Stone isn't quite as prickly as Norén, but Hattersley is following Martin Rohde's example by very quickly jumping into bed with Prior, even after declaring that her terrible taste in men has included far too many police officers in the past.

It's very nice to see Noel Clarke in a role like this, where he plays a less stereotypical, more human character who actually gets to smile once in a while, but I can't help thinking that there's something missing in both Shearsmith's portrayal of Stone and Kingston's portrayal of Hattersley... but, until I figure out what that is, I'm really enjoying the show, and looking forward to more in future (the current series is only set for four episodes).

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When ITV broadcast its first original follow-up to its adaptation of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, I was rather dubious. Optimistic... but dubious. The trouble was, Whicher was something of a cypher in the book - we learned a few facts about his career, but his personality (other than his dogged determination) remained largely mysterious as it had no bearing on the events. Paddy Considine's portayal was good, but the original - much like the book - was ultimately unsatisfying because the case was never solved. A new mystery seemed rather pointless and ended up being more of an attempted exploration of everything we don't know about Whicher, and particularly how his sense of self tied into his work in the police force, with very little focus on the mystery. To say I wasn't impressed would be an understatement... but it was obviously received well enough that they commissioned another two original tales.

The first of them, broadcast last weekend as I write, felt fairly simplistic and didn't really seem to go anywhere. Whicher was employed - by the very man who had him cast out of the police force over the Road Hill House incident - to look into a man who seemed to be following and threatening his son. Hints were dropped about dark goings-on while the son was in India, but the whole production was really quite dull. Had it been any more interesting, I might have stuck out its two hour running time... as it was, I was more keen to get a full night's sleep... aided, somewhat, by such an enervating first half.

In many ways, the point of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher - both the book and the dramatisation - was that no-one knows what happened but, as one may gather from the title, Mr Whicher had his suspicions. The follow-ups have shown Whicher to be reasonably competent as an investigator, but chronically unsure of himself and consistently undermined by his comparatively low social status and the memory of that one unsolved case... And that doesn't work especially well as a repeating element in a continuing drama.

Needless to say, I haven't bothered with tonight's installment... it didn't sound especially interesting and, again, I'm more keen to get some sleep tonight.

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Of course, no round-up of my recent viewings would be complete without mentioning the return of Doctor Who with the new Doctor, played by Peter Capaldi. Part of me feels Capaldi is just that little bit too well-known for the role, but he seems to be settling into the role very nicely.

The first episode featured more clockwork robots (a deliberate reference to Moffat's New Who series 2 episode, The Girl in the Fireplace), a Tyrannosaurus Rex in the Thames, and a very tense conversation between Clara and Madam Vastra which was, on the surface, about Clara's reaction to The Doctor's regeneration but, underneath it all (I suspect) a very frank explanation of the previous casting choices, and a hint at where the show will be going in future. The opening episode - which my girlfriend and I went to see in the cinema (much to the disappointment of her mother, who felt it was a waste of money since it was shown for free on BBC1) - also introduced a character currently known only as Missy, who is now the subject of much speculation in the fandom: Is she The Master? The Rani? The Tardis? Is she 'rescuing' people who sacrifice themselves for The Doctor? And what is this 'Promised Land'?

The next episode was the first disappointment of the series... To me, it seemed unfinished - in the sense of being in need of a little extra work - and also somewhat of a retread of some elements of the sixth episode of the first series of the reboot, entitled 'Dalek'. The whole Dalek rampage bit could easily have been library footage for all the effect it had, and the concept (originally mooted for a tie-in computer game, according to Moffat) was actually pretty half-baked. The idea that 'the only good Dalek is a seriously damaged Dalek' had some potential, and the episode was very open-ended,

Episode three took an almost entirely new direction, popping in on Sherwood Forest and meeting the real Robin Hood. Of course The Doctor couldn't believe there was such a thing - Robin Hood is a famous British myth, after all... and so the episode tried to deal with the concept of a man who became a myth, thus referencing The Doctor himself. It was one of the sillier episodes, with The Doctor engaging in a sword fight with Robin while armed only with a spoon (and is it just me, or did anyone else think they saw Capaldi very subtly stick up his middle finger as he put on his glove?), bickering senselessly, and generally letting Clara do all the important stuff, like uncovering the Sheriff of Nottingham's devious scheme. Quite a good episode... but was anyone else disappointed that Gatiss didn't make the Sheriff's soldiers Cybermen?

The latest episode, screened yesterday, felt very odd... On the one hand, it was intended to be a chiller - more for the kids than for the adults in the audience, I feel, but that's a good thing - while also giving us more glimpses of a new character in the series, former soldier Danny (or Rupert) Pink. I wonder if the 'monster' is going to appear in later episodes, since we didn't actually see it ourselves.

Moffat is certainly continuing his fixation on the companions - having already shown us that Clara Oswald was instrumental in guiding The Doctor throughout his life as a wandering Time Lord, here 'the impossible girl' proved to have been very influential in The Doctor's early life... And, given his terse exchange with a soldier at the end of the second episode, I'm very curious as to how Danny Pink fits into the grand scheme of things.

While he remains a very divisive showrunner, I still have far more confidence in Moffat than I did during the majority of Russell T. Davies' tenure. In particular, some of his 'relationship' dialogue (prime examples being almost any verbal exchange between Clara and Danny thusfar) has been painfully good. There's a sense of toe-curling honesty to it that was completely lacking in Davies' melodramas, and it's helped immeasurably by the complete absence of David Tennant's gurning.

On Going Up A Size

I have noticed, over the last year or so, that some of my clothes - particularly some of my favourite shirts - have been getting tighter. With several, it has come to the point where they strain at the buttons when I sit down (and, thanks to their propensity to fold over along the line of buttons, reveal glimpses of my pasty, furry flesh that I might prefer they didn't).

The funny thing about this is that I hadn't noticed my waistline expanding significantly during this time... certainly, no-one else has mentioned it. In fact the last time anyone so much as asked if I'd put on weight since they last saw me (assuming it was a significant length of time) was probably over a decade ago.

I'm not sure I've ever suffered terribly from vanity. Due to a combination of being tormented as a child about being ugly/weird/fat/a long-haired hippy, I don't tend to worry too much about my appearance (though my now-shorter hair is a source of some frustration due to becoming unruly after a couple of months' growth and because it's slowly thinning on top), and there's a tendency for males in my family to get a little larger after the age of about 30. Middle-Age Spread doesn't concern me overly...

What it does mean, though, is that some of my older clothes - such as the aforementioned most prized shirts, a couple of which are, after all, more than a decade old themselves - will have to be replaced.

I'm sure there are some folks out there who just read that last line and though "What the actual fuck? This dude has been wearing some of the same shirts for ten years?"... To which I shall inevitably respond by referring them back to the opening sentence of the third paragraph, and add that the shirts in question are seriously fuckin' cool. I mean, one of them - which I commonly and very fondly refer to as "my gay cowboy shirt" was purchased while on holiday in New York, taking advantage of the discount card offered by Macy's to any tourist that walked in their door and visited the customer service desk. It was also my first ever designer shirt (Guess, if you must know :P), setting the precedent that has since allowed several other designer shirts into my wardrobe, after I spent my teens and early 20s pouring scorn on such foppery.

But I digress.

The problem with the idea of replacing some of these shirts is that the style is no longer en vogue (or, quite probably, in Vogue). I'd quite like to replace these shirts with something similar, but the kind of thing I was buying back then just doesn't seem to be as common these days. When I took my girlfriend shopping over the last weekend (neatly reversing the gender stereotypes by dragging her around Menswear departments throughout the many clothing shops in Uxbridge), I was more than a little disappointed to find that lumberjack shirts seem to be the in thing at the moment. That kind of thing is OK... but it's not the sort of thing I'd fill my wardrobe with.

Distressingly few shops, in fact, had anything I was especially interested in, let alone in the right size... but I have found - so far - that moving up from Small shirts to Medium makes them even more difficult to find in stock.

Amusingly, when I picked up a new pair of jeans - to replace a pair that had worn through between the legs (it's not exactly 'chub rub', but I certainly don't walk like a cowboy who's been too long in the saddle) - I decided to get the size larger than my usual because my previous usual now tends to be a little tight around the hips and (ahem) groin. The last time I bought a pair of jeans in the larger size, I had to hold them up the first day I wore them, and dive into a shop to buy a belt before getting to the office, lest they end up round my ankles at some awkward moment. This new pair can still be pulled off without unfastening, but they're a better fit overall. Kudos to Asda, I guess...

Also, on an entirely unrelated note, I've started purchasing boxer shorts as underwear to replace those that have become worn out (I don't think any of my pants are a decade old, but I honestly can't be certain). I used to dislike them as they offered no support and tended to ride up my legs during the day... but now, aside from finding certain parts of my anatomy hanging in unexpected ways, I find them far more comfortable. I'm buying them a size larger than I need to, since I'm clearly on the cusp between waist sizes now, and the fit is tolerable... and very airy.

So while I may no longer be the lithe figure of my youth, I'm not desperately unhappy about my current build. I can tell just by looking that the state of my waistline is due more to spending far too long sat down and, to be honest, slightly slouched (sedentary office work is clearly the scourge of modern life). I know I'm not completely unfit because I don't get desperately out of breath too easily. I know I'm not overeating because, while I'm working, at least, I don't get (or give myself) the opportunity.

In many ways, this is a follow up to - or a continuation of - the previous post: I like my life... and I'm pretty happy in my skin.

Who'd have thought?

As an aside, I noted a distinct upswing in visitors to this blog the day the new series of Doctor Who started. Apologies for not getting onto that (and other things) immediately... as you may have gathered, other things have been going on... Normal service will be resumed soon. Ish.

I Like My Life

OK, I'm slipping again - over two months since my last post here... But, in a way, that's kind of a good thing.

Work has been a bit manic recently, August being one of two properly busy months in their calendar (the other, coincidentally, being December... and it all seems to be through exceptionally poor scheduling). When I say 'manic', what this amounts to is about an hour and a half of overtime spread over three days a couple of weeks ago... and I have only two deadlines this month. Compare and contrast to my last full-time job, which would keep me there till 6 or 7pm almost every night because there were six deadlines per team, per month, plus the minutia of keeping it all going.

My counterpart hasn't had it quite so easy, but it seems that his Sales teams just aren't as reliable or helpful as mine (for example one title manager was still selling on his press day, today, and giving advertisers till 5pm to get their copy in... amusingly, this led to one advertiser being very proud of himself for getting his copy in at 4pm - "an hour early!"). Even so, his overtime has been comparatively minimal, just a bit more frequent.

Making matters more interesting, our boss was on holiday during the busy period, and yet remained in just enough contact with the office to be irritating without being in the least bit helpful. Emails regularly flood in issuing edicts and stirring up trouble, but enquiries go unanswered.

The rest of the team are ticking along, getting stuff done, working late where necessary... I felt quite guilty walking at almost on time while things were 'manic', but I'm always up to date... and, with a week's holiday booked after the last deadline in August, I made a point of making a start on this month's work just after sending my last August magazine to press, just so I wasn't leaving anything for the others to do on my behalf while I'm away (quite unlike our boss, who ignored a couple of important marketing projects and moved one of her regular magazine press days so we had even more work to do during the busy period and while she was away. Classy).

But the thing is, I'm really enjoying it. The increased sense of urgency this month has made it - bizarrely - more fun. It's not hectic enough to trigger my workaholic tendencies, but it's certainly keeping me occupied.

When I got back to work after my holiday (another visit to my girlfriend's family) I found that things somehow managed to go horribly wrong in my absence. Based on what went wrong and how/why, I'm certain it would have gone wrong even if I was there, but it's an interesting echo of my last full-time job, not least because, following a short meeting, my counterpart and our boss decided (jokingly) that it was all my fault. I hadn't the heart to tell them that joke follows me around...

And, out in the real world, I'm slowly getting used to having my girlfriend living with me. After about five years of living on my own, in my own place, it felt a bit weird to begin with. Part of me kept sort-of expecting her to go back to her own place eventually (despite knowing full-well that, now she's quit university, 'her own place' would have to be her parents' home) and was inwardly bemoaning the lack of privacy (which, let's face it, was my motivation for buying a home of my own and moving out of my parents' house in the first place), but I can't deny the benefits of having her around.

It's not just the practical stuff - for example, she'll invariably have prepared dinner so that it's ready to serve when I get in from work. Despite being a bit of a loner (some would say 'hermit') by nature, it's nice to have company... someone to talk to in the evenings, someone with whom to share my favourite movies and TV shows (some of which we already had in common), someone to exchange hugs with, someone to snuggle up with in bed. I've never really felt that I'd be entirely comfortable sharing my life with someone to this extent, but it's been far easier than I'd expected. Having someone else around means I'm (slightly) less prone to wasting all my time doing nothing, and am generally a little less self-absorbed. We often come up with ideas of things to do together, but we're also doing our own thing occasionally, so everything seems that much more fulfilling. By the time the end of the day comes, both of us (usually) feel ready to get some kip in preparation for the next day.

That said, living with someone who suffers from Depression and anxiety isn't the simplest life one could imagine. Most of the time, things are fine... but there have been episodes were, having arranged to go out and meet friends, she's had an anxiety attack at the last minute (though, I suspect, they could have been brewing for days before they actually became evident to me) and either not gone out at all or come back within a few minutes. On one recent occasion, I actually caused a meltdown one evening. For almost of full 24 hours, she denied that anything I'd done was wrong and said that everything was her fault - pretty much the usual mantra when Depression takes hold. When I got home from work the following day, she could barely look at me or talk to me, and the hug that usually greets my arrival was delivered with elbows and clenched fists. Then, just when I started worrying that our visit to her family would end with me coming home alone, she seemed to just snap out of it... realising - she said - that the situation wasn't her 'fault' and that I could have been a bit more sensitive about things the night before.

And when I later mentioned my fear of her returning home, she actually laughed at the idea. "It's much better here."

Communication is at the heart of all relationships, and it's a constant learning process. Very little of my previous relationship experience is applicable to this one and, while my girlfriend and I are very similar in many ways - we may not finish each other's sentences, but we're often thinking of the same context-related joke - she's not quite at the point where she can comfortably ask for things (other than an occasional back-rub) or make suggestions or talk about all of the things that are bothering/worrying her... though that seems to be more to do with things in her past than it is anything in our current home environment.

And, by and large, she does seem to be in a better place these days - both geographically (home was always too quiet, with too little to do, compared to London) and emotionally. Having quit university earlier this year, she's quietly excited about her upcoming OU courses and, despite experiencing some writers' block on some additional, unrelated work, she's clearly raring to go.

Even better, she's getting involved in some voluntary work in one of her myriad areas of interest and speaking openly with her new GP about her illness. As a result, she is due to partake in some group therapy soon. While I'm not expecting to become involved in that, talking with other people should help our communication indirectly.

On a semi-related note, it could be argued that I'm the kiss of death for her sister's relationships. Each time I've met one of her boyfriends on our visits to the family home, they've broken up shortly after. The 'current' boyfriend broke up with her (again?) by phone, while we were there (literally in the next room, as it happened) but they've since got back together again (much to the displeasure of the parents) and are already arguing. Now, I know none of that is actually my fault - the younger sister's taste in boys could be charitably described as 'picking up strays' - but the timing has been uncanny...

It also highlights one of the other benefits of my current relationship: we don't argue. There are times that I sense some of my behaviour hasn't been received especially well... but it's evidently not bad enough to cause any significant problems and, despite my girlfriend constantly blaming herself for anything that goes wrong and describing herself as 'rubbish' and/or 'lazy', she's really anything but, and continues to be as positive an influence in my life as I hope to be in hers.

Adventures in Space Trading

Well, I've remembered one of the things I wanted to blog about!

People of a certain age might remember an ancient computer game, released first on the Acorn/BBC computer (on a 5 1/4" floppy disk, no less) then converted to just about every imaginable format (otherwise known as 'the popular ones') over the next few years. That game was so wildly popular that a documentary was made about it, presented by Peter Snow, which revealed that it had been rejected by several publishers before being taken on by Acornsoft.

That game, that seminal experience, was Elite.

I don't mind admitting that, back in the day (and once my father had sorted out a copy of the game that loaded in just after the horrific LensLok copy protection perpetrated upon owners of the Spectrum conversion) I spent many hours playing that game... many hours over many days, over many weeks, over several years, in fact. It wasn't so much a game as a way of life, for a while. I amassed a fair old fortune and achieved a combat rating of Dangerous... One of the things I admired most about the game was its ranking system which (very sensibly) suggested that an 'Average' pilot (and an 'Above Average' one, for that matter) was still not considered 'Competent'.

But the 48K Spectrum version was substantially cut-down. Several ships were missing, there was only ever one kind of space station (the Coriolis) and I'm not sure any of the 'missions' were included. It had all eight procedurally-generated galaxies, but I only ever ventured a short distance away from Lave, and increased my combat rating the cheaty way: force-failing a hyperspace jump between two very close systems and shooting the crap out of the Thargoids that invariably awaited me in Witch Space.

I played that game so damned much I started dreaming about wireframe space battles. I still remember one particularly vivid dream in which I found (and battled) a mythical giant space snake.

Many years later, David Braben came up with a pair of sequels - Frontier and First Encounters. These were released before they were entirely ready due to pressure from the publisher, and never quite lived up to the promise of being "The Sequel to Elite". I played them... or at least the first of them... but didn't enjoy them half as much, despite the option to buy bigger and better ships, and the massive galaxy based loosely upon our own (and including an accurately-modelled Sol system!). Frontier's reach far exceeded its grasp, and the introduction of 'true' physics to the spaceflight effectively crippled the game for many players, not just me. Frontier's docking computer was a fully functional automatic pilot which could take you from arrival in a new system to docking with a space station or landing on a planet, all of which could be switched into super-fast-forward to avoid the tedium of flying through space for several months of real time. Unfortunately, it could easily fall victim to the game's bugs and/or physics, and was just as likely to crash through a planet in an attempt to land on the opposite side. My abiding memory of Frontier is attempting to land on a planet in a binary star system using the docking computer. Due to the complex gravities in the system, the docking computer was unable to plot a course that got anywhere near the planet before my fuel ran out, leaving me stranded in space, forever orbiting the binary stars as an unwilling satellite.

First Encounters reintroduced the Thargoids, added more new starships and 'improved' on the graphics engine, offering an early, very rough attempt at texture mapping. I believe it garnered better reviews than the first 'sequel', but it was still underdeveloped. At the time, my computer wasn't up to the task of running the game, so I skipped on it entirely.

Aside from brief experiments with emulators - both for the Spectrum and BBC - I haven't played Elite for absolutely ages... Probably something approaching two decades, considering the last version I spent any time on was the Amiga remix, with its super-colourful shaded vector graphics and graphical user interface in the space stations.

A couple of years ago, David Braben announced that he and his team at Frontier Developments were starting to work on the first 'true' Elite sequel, Elite: Dangerous. Going back to the more fluid, fly-by-wire faux-physics of the original and taking advantage of the massive improvements in processor and graphics hardware that have turned up since the original game, this would be a massively-multiplayer online space trading and combat game. I've been keeping half an eye on the development of the game but, again, I lack the hardware to really make use of even the Beta-testing stages.

At some point earlier this year, I discovered Oolite, which is a complete update of the original game. With freely-downloadable extensions it can run using texture mapping, bump mapping and all kinds of lovely graphical tricks... or it can run in BBC-like wireframe mode. It really is that game I played so much all those years ago, just with more contemporary visuals... And it's basically the game I've been waiting for all this time (no disrespect intended to Braben and Co. and I'm sure I'll love ED if I ever get to play it).

I knew this when I first tried to dock with a space station without a docking computer, and felt that familiar lurch in my stomach as the docking port filled the screen (now a 1920x1080 widescreen monitor, rather than a TV screen at 256x192 pixels!) while I tried - and, many times, failed - to match my ship's rotation to that of the station.

I knew this when I was first attacked by pirates - though such occurrences seem less frequent in Oolite than they did in the Speccy version of Elite - and realised that my underpowered Cobra Mk III was no match for a Python and a pair of Kraits, so I'd have to figure out how to avoid pirates until I could upgrade my armaments (tip: Pirates hover along the direct route from the hyperspace entry point buoy and the local space station, so fly away on a perpendicular course, at least until the buoy is off your scanner, then aim back toward the planet).

I knew this when I first realised that many space stations are actually visible, hovering around the planet, the moment you arrive in a new system... Hell, you can even see them rotating on a 1920x1080 monitor!

Above all, I knew this was the game I'd been waiting for when, having amassed enough money to allow me to venture forth through the first galaxy, I started heading toward the galactic centre to strike off in a new direction... and encountered Thargoids in the wild.

I should mention also that it's quite possible to see a battle raging in the distance, between your point of entry to a system and the planet, because laser fire is visible at incredible distances in this version of the game. When I first saw a Thargoid ship, I wasn't even sure what it was, just that its laser beams were an interesting new colour, and that it was very aggressive - seemingly wrecking asteroids just as keenly as it did any ship unwise enough to approach it. Like mine... Because once you have a Thargoid's attention, you'd have to be a far better pilot than I to stand a chance against it. You certainly can't escape.

And, just like the original, each Thargoid ship can launch a series of drone craft to increase their firepower, so you go in thinking you're only tackling one ship, and soon find yourself in the middle of a swarm.

It's been a long time since any game caused the sort of gut-wrenching fear and the absolute dread of a new location that Oolite has elicited, and for a rather interesting reason, too... Elite and Oolite suggest I may actually get space sick, even though I don't suffer from any other form of travel sickness. And clearly I experience a much more visceral fear in docking with a simulated space station or facing combat with another spacecraft when I am hopelessly outmatched, than I do while guiding my human avatar through a haunted, ice-stricken town... a fear that's not even eased by the sampled voice of Bill Paxton proclaiming "Game over, man... Game over!", which is the only 'penalty' for dying in Oolite.

I'd heartily recommend Oolite to any fan of the original game, and it might be worth downloading if you've heard about Elite: Dangerous, but aren't sure it's the game for you. Personally, I've had to force myself to stop playing, as I'd started to obsess about the commodities markets, and had been spending far too many evenings in space, rather than getting important things done...

...And if that isn't a recommendation, I don't know what is!