Sylvester McCoy says that during his turn as Doctor Who the production crew filled the episodes with Leftist propaganda that would have made Militant Tendency proud. Not surprising with the likes of the script editor, who at his interview said,
I’d like to overthrow the government.
Their efforts included a story that was a thinly veiled call for Margaret Thatcher to be overthrown by a worker's revolt and an anti-nuclear speech delivered by the Doctor courtesy of CND.
The amazing thing about this story is that it claimed that nobody noticed at the time. If so, it can only because they didn't see the episodes, because I did at the time and being hit over the head with a clown hammer would have been more subtle.
The only thing sadder than Doctor Who limping toward its grave in the late '80s was watching it do so while squeaking pathetic Trotskyite tirades.
Terry Jones is Welsh, and what Terry has never been able to accept is that the Welsh, a subject people, were put on earth to carry out menial tasks for the English. I think that’s why we had a few arguments.
The Sci Fi Channel has finally dropped any pretence of having anything to do with science fiction and is officially changing its name to "Syfy".
None of this is surprising, since the channel has been on a long, slow descent into indistinguishability for over half a decade. In it's heyday, the Sci Fi Channel was an oasis for those who enjoyed science fiction–especially the classic variety and whether it was locally available was the deal breaker in my deciding which part of town I'd live in. Then came the inevitable slide with the science fiction content being replaced by horror, shlock Z "original" productions notable for basement budgets and hideous acting, pseudo "reality" programming, wrestling (wrestling?!?) and films that included such hardcore sci fi as Apollo 13 and Braveheart. What little science fiction remained was relegated to soap operas (*cough* Galactica *cough*) openly targeted at a female demographic by producers who apologised for the science fiction looking like science fiction. After that, I only tuned in fleetingly out of morbid curiousity.
No funeral announcements have been made because no one expects any mourners.
I can't stand the Academy Awards. Maybe it's the horrendous self-congratulation, maybe it's the boring films that are nominated, or maybe it's memories of days back in Britain being forced to stay up until some ludicrous hour just to find out who won "best mustache in a supporting role".
Okay, I'll admit the latter wasn't so bad because odds were that if I was doing that I had a couple of gallons of beer in me and I had a girlfriend at the time, so there was a more promising sequel in the offing. It all balances out.
Left to myself, I'd have skipped the whole dreary mess, but the wife share her sex's inexplicable fascination with celebrities, so we had the show on the telly while I fried up bacon sandwiches. I didn't give a damn and the whole thing went by in a series of aggravating flashes, such as the "best supporting actress award" being conducted by five women delivering fawning praise to the nominees like Greek goddesses giving tributes to the fallen at Troy. It would have been ghastly, except that the five goddesses were all so low-powered talents that it came across as merely pathetic.
Other than that, it was noise, lights, noise, hypocrisy, noise, and a double scoop of noise. When a clip from Harvey Milk came up showing two men kissing and I realised that a) it was 6:45 PM local time, b) my six-year old daughter was in the room and c) I now had some fast talking to do, I couldn't decide whether to be outraged at the producers for not being aware of the time and the presence of children in the audience or thankful that at least there was at least some distraction from the tiresome rituals.
Don't ask me how it all ended, because I don't know. I only lasted a little over an hour and by that point I was in a very bad temper and desperately needed a drink. Luckily, wife and daughter retired to the other room to watch while doing daughter's reading homework while I retreated to my office and sanity in the form of a very large glass of very cheap plonk for which I would like to thank the Academy.
Number Two: Du musst amboss oder Hammer sein. Number Six: You must be anvil or hammer. Number Two: I see you know your Goethe. Number Six: And you see me as the anvil? Number Two: Precisely. I am going to hammer you.
Town Crier: A proclamation: All citizens take notice that carnival is decreed for tonight. Turn back the clock. There will be music, dancing, happiness, all at the carnival, by order.
Number Twelve: Why don't we settle this like gentlemen? Number Six: You're claiming to be a gentleman too? Number Twelve: Very good, very good indeed. That line is worthy of me.
Number 6: Elections? In this place? Number Two: Of course. We make our choice every 12 months. Every citizen has a choice. Are you going to run? Number 6: Like blazes, the first chance I get. Number Two: I meant run for office.
Number Two: Do you still think you can escape, Number Six? Number Six: Oh, I'll do even better than that. Number Two: Oh? Number Six: Going to escape and come back. Number Two: Come back? Number Six: Escape, come back, wipe this place off the face of the Earth, obliterate it, and you with it.
Matt Smith, age 26, has been named to take over from David Tennant as Doctor Who.
He's not black, a woman, Graham Norton, or (God spare us!) an American, so we should be grateful for small mercies for dodging the character-lethal bullet of stunt casting that would have been on a par with giving Rosie O'Donnell the title role in a remake of Shaft, but you'd have thought they'd have at least cast an actor who shaves more often than once a week.
I see that the BBC is reviving the 1970's sci fi series Survivors. From the trailer, I'm not getting my hopes up. It looks all very, very PC with lots of pretty people and strumming guitars, so I'm not getting my hopes up. In fact, since the cast includes the ghastly lead from Bonekickers and one-note actress Freema Agyeman, I shall regard my hopes lightly squashed.
If you want some idea of the standard the remake faces, have a look at the original credits, which I suspect contains more drama than we can expect from the entire first series of the new version.
Panorama looks at the G-Wiz and hails it as the "electric dream" of the "green revolution."
The reality
To be fair, it does point out that it doesn't meet safety standards, but that's like saying that crashing into a mountainside in an egg crate is less than optimal.
Who cares about Derek Zoolander anyway? The man has only one look, for Christ's sake! Blue Steel? Ferrari? Le Tigra? They're the same face! Doesn't anybody notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!
Mugatu
I feel Mugatu's pain. Reading reviews of "Midnight", the Doctor Who episode that aired in the US on Friday, I keep having the feeling that I must have a television that receives broadcasts from an alternate dimension. It's been called the best episode of this series, Davies' finest work, a classic, a brilliant claustrophobic gem and God knows what else.
Let's just step back a bit. We are talking about the episode where the Doctor leaves the dreadful Donna on the sun deck of an interstellar resort sometime in the future while he goes on a day trip in a tour bus only to have an alien "something" rip the driver's cabin off and possess one of the passengers, which causes the other tourists to descend into snarling paranoia? That the one?
No, can't be. That was, in technical terms, a steaming load of poo. We'll pass over Davies' standard missteps, such as the strange idea that, no matter what time period, people in the future will dress in 21st century clothes; the gratuitous homosexual reference; the collection of "realistic" characters treated with patent condescension by the writer who don't fit the setting or story at all, "moments" that has bloody all to do with the plot and just bring it crashing to a halt; or this season's annoying teasers for the Big Secret later on that no one will give a toss about when All Is Revealed. The story itself has enough in it to loathe and, amazingly, I wasn't the one to cast the first stone this time (In my defence, we only had it on because my daughter was in the room and I refused to watch Spongebob Squarepants, which I now regret). As the storyline about people fearing what they don't understand and turning into savages unfolded my wife, who has acted in and directed dozens of stage adaptations of the Twilight Zone in Seattle and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, pointed at the screen and said "It's 'The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street!'"
I couldn't help but agree, except that, heavy handed as Rod Serling had been half a century ago, at least he wrote dialogue for his characters while Davies, apparently went in for (bad) improv with everyone shouting "Stop it!" for half an hour interposed with thespian depths not plumbed since The Blair Witch Project. Then the creepy bit of demonic, sorry, "alien" possession occurred (why should one be any more likely than the other?) and the possessed person (with the appalling name of "Sky") starts repeating what everyone else is saying to her (*cough* Buffy *cough*). Many a review called this a tour de force of acting, though my better half just snorted and said, "Great! Now we're getting first year drama school exercises." And she knows from whence she speaks.
This was the highlight of an episode that wasn't helped by the fact that it merely demonstrated how weak David Tennant's Doctor is compared to previous incarnations. This 10th incarnation can't even control a busload of emotional cripples while Tom Baker's could silence a gaggle of homicidal telepathic priestesses with a glower and a glib word.
It was, however, marked by the new series' trademark of the action pushing forward at a furious pace to cover the fact that the actual plot doesn't move at all, but this this at least covers the fact that a) in the end, the Doctor does absolutely nothing and b) the panicky loudmouth who wanted to shove the possessed woman out the airlock was right all along.
Still, I must give Russell T points for a good moral: "If it looks dangerous, then it probably is, so kill it quick before it gets another shot in."
I don't think that's quite what Mr. Serling had in mind.
Bonekickers is a new BBC series that, judging from the previews, is the sort that as a writer I'd run down a side street to avoid. Maybe it has something to do with its self-consciously ethnic and gender balanced cast, painfully cliched "feisty" female lead and publicity stills that uses the dreaded Pose™ that says "We think we're tough and edgy with that indefinable rock-star vibe, though nobody over the age of 15 who doesn't live in their mother's cellar will agree." It looks predictably awful in that hideous trendy way that fills in for creativity these days and I'd probably put it with Torchwood, Robin Hood, and Hex in the Do Not Watch Unless Threatened By Lord Olivier With A Pair Of Dental Pliers file if it weren't for the fact that it is about a load of archaeologists.
This would have been worth a laugh because as a retired archaeologist I've very low expectations about how my field is portrayed in popular culture as a glamorous sort of licensed tomb-robbing and treasure hunting rather than the meticulous, often boring enterprise that it really is. I'm even willing to forgive that the average archaeologist is never shown in truth as a chronically skint bastard forever on the lookout for a decent job. True, according to the reviews, one character is shown as a hard drinker, but the fantasy lies in it being one character.
But I'll let that pass. Let them forever be Indiana Jones chasing after the Holy Grail or the True Cross or the Lost Bus Ticket and more power to them. There are worse ways for a profession to be portrayed (*cough* Casualty *cough*).
Even the BBC is willing to admit this by running an article that points out the... "heightened" nature of the programme. Except they leave one tiny detail out.
You'll notice that I said that it "would have been" worth a laugh. That was before I noticed the buzz on the Internet about the premiere episode that tried to be "contemporary" by having as the villains a load of crazed, white Christian fundamentalists who want to drive all other religions out of Britain and start off their reign of terror by decapitating a peace-loving Muslim.
Marvelous. One moment I'm anticipating a nice MST3K giggle and the next I'm confronted by the BBC using the licence fee to produce something out of an Al Qaeda recruiting video. Suddenly my sense of irony is lacking and I don't feel much like laughing.
The BBC Trust has wagged a bony finger at Top Gear's polar special for allegedly "glamourising" drink driving by showing a scene of Jeremy Clarkson sipping a gin and tonic while motoring across the arctic wastes to the North Pole. Leaving aside the bizarre notion that Mr. Clarkson could glamourise anything, the producers quite rightly put forward the defence that the North Pole is outside of British jurisdiction and therefore no offence was committed.
Now if they'd had the presence to also point out that since the programme aired there have been remarkably few incidents of drunken British young people tearing around the Pole in SUVs, its impact may be emperically regarded as minimal.
I can't, however, say the same for the scene in another episode where they showed of James May driving an Aston Martin in Italy stark naked because his car was a racer and therefore didn't have air conditioning and couldn't open the windows. It's of such things that eye bleach is made for.
For £28.56you can get a kit from Middlesex University Teaching Resources that allows you to recreate a 1924 Baird mechanical television.
This would be pretty neat except a) it uses modern electronics, which takes a lot of the fun out of it and b) once TV broadcasts go digital you'll have a thirty quid paperweight.
Top Gear, the only car show in history that got me to watch a car show, is to be transmitted on NBC television in the States. Sorry, not the BBC original with Clarkson, Hammond and May, but an American version that somehow is going to catch lightning in a bottle twice running.
The creative ineptness and poor judgment of American network television never ceases to amaze me–particularly when it comes to buying successful foreign shows.
Any other broadcaster for anything other than game shows would simply have bought the broadcast rights for the original programmes and left it at that, but the major American networks operate by their own bizarre rules due to a little episode in the 1960s when Britain's ATV started making heavy inroads into the syndication market, followed by The Avengers becoming a smash hit on ABC television. The Hollywood production companies had a collective infarct when they saw the possibility of competing with British programmes that they threw down the gauntlet to the networks and told them that if they ever bought another foreign product the producers would boycott the lot of them.
Since then, not a single British series has aired on a network unless it was essentially an American production filmed in Britain and so certifiable hits like Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Spaced are relegated to cable while the networks indulge in the strange practice of buying formats, but leaving everything else behind. Sometimes this worked, as in the case of All in the Family and Three's Company, or The Office, though all were pale imitations of their parents. More often it ended up with painful abortions visited upon such classics as Fawlty Towers and Couplings that vanished in a mercifully short time.
Science has decreed that marrying first cousins in now hunky dory, but what about an actor dating his television daughter who is also the real-life daughter of another actor who played the first actor's television character previously.
When SciFi Weekly used this phrase to describe the 2008 remake of The Andromeda Strain, I could feel the cold hand of foreboding resting lightly on my shoulder. Any time a television production pairs "attractive" with "cast" it invariably means something that looks like the image on the left; a load of pretty people with solemn expressions taking the place of real actors on a pseudo hi-tech set with odd lighting.
And that pretty much sums up the production that aired on A&E last Monday and Tuesday evening. It was originally supposed to be on the Sci Fi Channel, but the parent company noticed that some of the screen personalities had somewhat recognisable names and therefore deserved to air on a channel it was less likely to rub shoulders with repeats of Boa vs Python.
I had a difficult time coming up with a way to describe this remake of the 1971 Robert Wise film until I realised that this was not, in fact a remake of the The Andromeda Strain, but Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Or Alien. Or whatever other story revolves around a malignant life form invading an unwilling host and taking it over for its own disgusting purposes. In this case, The Andromeda Strain has been infested with a strange hybrid of The X Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Outbreak, and (God help us) Resident Evil.
Since this is 2008, it's a union rule that The Andromeda Strain must be "reimagined" and screenwriter Robert Schenkkan reimagines the hell out of it. All you have to do is look at the main cast (who will, against screaming protests, be referred to as an "ensemble") to see this. Where in the book the scientists were all middle-aged white men and in the film they were middle-aged white men and a middle-aged white woman, in 2008's version the producers used an "inclusive" criteria that reduces the cast members to ethnic representatives in a fashion that is at the same time so self-congratulatory and so cynically racist and sexist that it makes the bad old step-n-fetch days of Hollywood look like the height of enlightenment. Without exception the main cast is all young and attractive with a Germano-Peruvian Indian leading a black woman, a female doctor who is (another union rule) a hot babe, and a Chinaman late of the People's Republic who inexplicably speaks with a flawless American accent. Oh, and there is a white guy, but he turns out to be gay. To balance the latter out, he's also a US Army major, which means he's belligerent, racist and constantly advocating nuclear strikes, but who suffers a risible death at the hands of an unlikely atomic reactor. Nowadays this is what passes for imaginative.
The basic plot of the original book and film about a team of scientists in an underground laboratory studying an American satellite that returns to Earth with a deadly alien germ on board is kept, but Schenkkan seems almost embarrassed by his source material. Where Robert Wise focused on a taut, claustrophobic thriller/mystery about characters racing against time trying to understand an alien menace while cooped up in an antiseptic facility so artificial that even eating and sleeping are banished, the 2008 version looks and feels like every other sci fi offering on television since somebody thought that scientists only work in oddly furnished, windowless places underlit from entirely the wrong angles and populated with a highly improbable assortment of characters–in other words, Torchwood. The plot, as I said, is still there, but where Wise made the hunt for Andromeda (the code name of the germ) into almost a procedural that used the mechanics of science as a way to build dramatic tension, the 2008 version treats the science in an offhand way–except when it gives an opportunity for pointless slow motion shots of someone walking through bubbly liquid. Where in 1971 we'd see the intricacies of testing for amino acids or preparing blood samples, 2008 has people walking in and casually mentioning that the germ has no DNA as if they were commenting on the weather.
This is surprising, given that the 2008 version runs at almost twice the length of the original, but maybe they needed more time for the pointless soap opera plots about Bill Clinton reborn several stone lighter and without the sleaze, divorces, estranged teenagers and laboratory romances that would only be realistic if the super secret laboratory in the midst of a crisis was run along the lines of a television production company office. Or maybe it had to do with the ramped up violence and horror as the disease spreads with a virulence and pure bloodymindedness that made me wonder why they didn't just go whole hog and have the übervirus bring the victims back as zombies and be done with it. Then at least we could have had Milla Jovovich blazing away with an Uzi in each fist. The horrible thing is, this would have been an improvement. As it is, we have to make do with dream sequences and double-talk about buckyballs and wormholes.
Don't even get me started on the time travel rubbish that makes the current series of Doctor Who look like Out of the Unknown.
Some of the violence is downright disturbing, though not in the way that director Mikael Salomon intended. The grisliest ends in the film are reserved for women with one committing self-immolation and a (union rule) female fighter pilot trapped screaming in the cockpit of a crashing F-16. These are depicted with such loving detail that one wonders if the director doesn't have certain... issues.
Writer Schenkkan justifies all this because "If you're going to update the story, which is our mandate, you have an obligation to reflect the world as it is."
That's updating as in ignoring the fact that the United States gave up bioweapons development forty years ago. And it reflects a world "as it is" where there are no straight white men–at least, none that aren't in the pay of the Military Industrial Complex or a coke-addicted journalist who wants to both Woodward and Bernstein who is caught in the web of a hideous conspiracy perpetrated by an American government run along the lines of the Cosa Nostra.
The latter is part of the "updating" that Schenkkan grasps so tightly to his chest. Wise's 1971 approach to the story is far too old fashioned, so Schenkkan updates it with a paranoid storyline about an evil government bent on evil conspiracies, which is far more modern.
Spurred by a visitor's comment, Ephemeral Isle is proud to present this exclusive sneak preview of Joss Whedon's cutting edge and absolutely original new series about programmable secret agents.
Over at Wired, we get a look at Dollhouse; Joss Whedon's new series about (all together now!) bioengineered assassins in the involuntary service of a corrupt, super-secret government agency.
In a nod gritty realism, Whedon confronts today's grim fact that anyone who looks like a model, dresses in dark tones and sports a solemn expression must be up to no good.
Disney has demonstrated that their bolderisation of Winnie the Pooh was not a one-off and is bringing back Enid Blyton's Famous Five-- or, at least, an "updated" animated version.
Unsurprisingly, one of the girls is now a Californian "shopaholic", the other is, in accordance with the 1975 Childhood Integration Act that requires that any gathering of more than two juveniles must include a member of an officially recognised ethnic minority, Anglo-Indian, one of the boys is a computer nerd and no doubt we will subsequently learn that the blond boy is homosexual.
What character atrocity is planned for the dog remains undetermined.
According to the BBC,
Producers say the animated tales remain faithful to the themes of storytelling, mystery and adventure central to the original books but add a contemporary twist.
That's "contemporary twist" as in looking like every other PC cartoon on television.
Due to a billing mix up, the satellite television service at Chez Szondy has been interrupted for a couple of days, to which my wife remarked last night, "I guess we'll just have to go to bed early."
I could only agree. After all, we only had DVDs, the Internet, Youtube, itunes, online games, streaming audio and video broadcasts, and digital satellite radio to fall back on. Oh, and reading, board games, cards, playing with the dogs and child, watching the fireplace, or just talking to each other.
Yup, in our house survival tactics are how to get from the hot tub to the remote.
Everything that The Phantom Menace could have been and more.
Will Chewbacca get home for life day? Will Harrison Ford ever live this down? Has Harvey Korman no shame? Did Mark Hamill need the money this badly? And what is Carrie Fisher breathing besides oxygen?
Comedienne Jennifer Saunders is in talks to play Doctor Who in a one-off episode; the first time a woman has been cast in the role (not counting parodies).
According to the Sun,
TV bosses are keen to get a woman on board the Tardis for one of those shows.
Translation: We want fans of the show to know that we have no artistic integrity, we hold the character and format and their history in contempt, and that there is no depth to which we will not stoop for cheap, trendy "shock" value wherein we demonstrate nothing more profound than that we cannot differentiate between shock and flat-out bad taste. Oh, and we hate you all, too.
As a writer, I've always been impressed with short stories and films done well. Here we see Johnny Vegas and the P G Tips Monkey doing a complete narrative in under two minutes. This is especially impressive, given that one of the actors is a sock puppet.
Sylvester McCoy says that during his turn as Doctor Who the production crew filled the episodes with Leftist propaganda that would have made Militant Tendency proud. Not surprising with the likes of the script editor, who at his interview said,
In a staggering example of originality, 
Television–Very early television.
