When Harvey Met Bob

TV dramadoc about the iconic 1985 Live Aid concert which looks as though it cost about the same amount to stage as the original event.

The dichotomy of visionary Bob Geldof's (Domhnall Gleeson) idealism versus organiser Harvey Goldsmith's (Ian Hart) realism is a chemical bomb waiting to explode throughout. It takes the latter about three-quarters of the programme to figure out that the only way to fight back against Geldof's uncompromising demands is to threaten to quit, a ploy that is testimony to the unspoken respect which develops between the two characters.

By the time Paul McCartney (Paul Rhys) starts crooning Let It Be at the concert's close, the all-eighties soundtrack has become a bit of a singalong, but with such a feelgood motive underscoring the whole story, that's hardly a bad thing.

Today's celebrity Bible-reader is… Lisa Marie Simpson

I've even become smarter than my teachers

- Psalm 119:99a (Message)

Polka Party! - "Weird Al" Yankovic

There's one thing you really need to know before buying this album, and that is that it only contains one polka track.

Well, imagine my disappointment after a cover like that.

Imagine also my delight at the inspired silliness of the other nine songs to be found on this 1986 release.

Addicted To Spuds is everything the title suggests, while Here's Johnny parodies El deBarge's also contemporary Who's Johnny, and features guest vocals from the one and only Ed McMahon.

As usual, Al's original compositions are well-represented here too, including the rare country number Good Enough For Now. The is the nearest that Al has ever got to releasing a serious ballad, and as such the joke lies in just how close this love song gets.

"Now, it seems to me I'm relatively lucky,
I know I probably couldn't ask for too much more,
I honestly can say that you're an above-average lady,
You're almost just what I've been looking for."

This penultimate track is eclipsed however by the CD's big finale - the sugar-coated Phil Spectre-esque extravaganza Christmas At Ground Zero.

"Everywhere the atom bombs are droppin',
It’s the end of all humanity,
No more time for last minute shoppin',
It's time to face your final destiny."

It's an incredibly catchy number to end the disc on, and over the years I've caught it going through my head on several occasions, which is a little frustrating, as it's not the kind of yuletide hymn that you can really get away with singing in public.

Speaking of non-singalongs, I wouldn't say that there are any actual duds in this collection, but some of Al's early material does go a bit more for funny voices and poking fun at easy targets (Toothless People). Still, it hardly notices among so much feel-good humour and first class production values.

All in all, I have to admit that I think this is a much better deal than that wall-to-wall polka concept would have been. Mind you, he'd arguably already done that on his debut album, which as I recall I rather enjoyed too…

The 12 Fails Of Christmas

Blogs and tweets are well known for the minutiae they can contain about the author's life. Today I'm going to go one lower. Here are twelve trivial things that I didn't even do this Christmas Day.

1. Eat breakfast.

There - I've just blogged what I didn't eat for breakfast. D'you get where I'm going with this?

2. Watch the made-for-TV spin-off special Shrek The Halls.


Made by DreamWorks and featuring the cast of the original movies, this is set following Shrek The Third, but was cleverly aired by BBC1 roughly 22 hours in advance of it. Still determined to watch this spin-off in sequence, I duly taped it, but then managed to miss its prequel the following day. D'oh! Well at least I know what to ask for next year...

3. Take The Day Off Work.


Being a double-negative, this wasn't really a fail. Spent three hours moderating the web-page for NewstalkZB's Christmas Day afternoon show. This is the first time I have ever worked on December 25th! What a lovely atmosphere.

4. Go To Church.

Had to skip midnight mass in order to research and prepare material for the above site's feed. Then I slept through the morning service.

5. Watch the Doctor Who Christmas Special.

Still with the watching episodes in order deal, I've still got four episodes of The Sarah Jane Adventures to go before I can see this. The fact that it started late made the DVD timer fail to fit the ending onto the disc anyway.

6. Watch the film Edward Scissorhands.

Billed to start on Channel 4 at 7pm, straight after Doctor Who was scheduled to finish over on BBC1. Well, like I said above, the haphazard Time Lord ran late, so the DVD cut off the ending, so the parallel VHS backup had to be left running, so it was impossible to record the first four minutes of Edward Scissorhands, so I decided to abandon it.

('scuse me, just pausing for a humbug...)

7. Give/receive gifts.

They're not even wrapped yet. Current ETA is December 27th. (UPDATE: failed then too) Christmas Day never happens on Christmas Day in my house. I know, I live in a glass house, and this Christmas have asked Santa for a stone-throwing kit.

8. See Friends.

Herschel bought me a gift for thanksgiving several weeks back, however we haven't caught-up for a while, so it has now become a Christmas gift. However, since it is a Frijj flavoured milk drink, it has now passed its expiry date. He keeps asking me if he can pour it away, but I am determined to enjoy it one day, no matter what. That might sound to you like I have some sort of a mild addiction going on, but what I choose to do in my own private spare time is none of anyone else's business, and anyway, I'm allowed to choose to borrow all this money to fund my habit. Uh, hobby.

('scuse me, just taking another swig of... uh, humbugs)

9. Send Cards.

In fact, I had posted 6 to 8 Christmas cards about a week earlier, but they had all been to friends who are not on Facebook. I mean in recent years Facebook has pretty well replaced Christmas cards as a means of maintaining contact with people. Hence, the early hours of Boxing Day found me typing away over 100 personalised messages to RL friends all over the globe, some of whom were even in places where it was still Christmas Day. This took me most of the night, but was still quicker and cheaper than the time it would have taken me to write and address a similar number of cards, and also still required me to make the individual effort over each acquaintance.

10. Watch the late-night mid-eighties comedy film starring John Cleese that I've never seen before entitled A Fish Called Wanda at 12:25am on BBC1.


Given how long I've been waiting to enjoy this, it was only after significant deliberation that I decided to miss it in favour of the film that it was on against - that other classic John Cleese movie that I've never seen Clockwise, which was to start an hour later.

11. Watch the late-night mid-eighties comedy film starring John Cleese that I've never seen before entitled Clockwise at 1:40am on ITV1.


I turned on the telly six minutes early at 1:34 to find it apparently already in progress. There was Cleese, actually berating another character for his poor timekeeping. Missing the irony, I turned it off again, and went back to Facebook.

In fact, before we get to 12, here are a few more shows that I won't be watching this yuletide season:

The Goodies: Scoutragious which was replaced by another episode, neither of which, like the other episodes in this long-awaited late-night series of family-friendly reruns, are available to catch-up on from the much-vaunted BBC iplayer.


The new Wallace And Gromit film. Now I like the claymation version of One Man And His Dog as much as anyone, but featuring them on the cover of the Christmas Radio Times when no such new programme is even on this year is patently misleading. The usual reruns of old editions in the wrong order Gromit yes, but that's hardly cover material. For this they actually bumped the Doctor Who Christmas Special cover forward to a week when that show wasn't airing either!

Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, showing four days before its prequel Raiders Of The Lost Ark, both on BBC1.

Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, which despite being explicitly set in the same shared universe, are scheduled against each other on January 2nd. (17:00-19:00 on ITV1 and 17:40-20:00 on Channel 4 respectively)

Three Men And A Baby and Three Men And A Little Lady, which despite currently constituting the entire series, are scheduled against each other on January 3rd. (13:00-15:00 on Channel 4 and 14:30-16:10 on BBC1)

So, the number 12 thing that I didn't do this Christmas Day was...

12. Watch the new series of K-9, airing all this week on Channel 5.

I've decided to wait for the DVD to come out.

With respect, Channel 5 have now had more than ten years in which to broadcast at least one series of anything without a logo obscuring the corner, the end-credits squeezed into a box, a caption over the action to trail what's coming up next and a timeslot that they're interested in actually sticking to. I hardly think they're likely to start respecting the material with the first episode of this, let alone cope with maintaining it for the subsequent 25 episodes. (It's presently billed for 10:00, 11:10, 9:45, 9:35, 9:35, 9:35 and 10:00)

Therefore, after careful consideration, I've decided to go with the DVD menu screens that will probably merely keep giving away clips of each upcoming plot instead. Sheesh, how hard can it be to just show a programme? Finger. Play button. Press. Then leave alone and just DO NOTHING.

(chokes on last humbug)

Remember, TV executives, a special is not just for Christmas. Each year hundreds of films and programmes are billed for December 25th, but a few days later show up aimlessly floating around the schedules, unwatched, unloved and often uncredited. Christmas TV schedules are not just for Christmas Day, but also for watching later off of timer as well. If Radio Times doesn't know when it's on, then neither can anyone else.

Next year, will it be your children missing a programme that they had been looking forward to?

Well, enough bah-ing. I'm off to eat another humbug. (if it's still there)

(ῧ)

Today's celebrity Bible-reader is… Frank Sinatra

I'm spreading the news...

- Exodus 15:2b (Message)

Today's celebrity Bible-reader is… Detective Inspector John 'Jack' Regan

GOD will fight the battle for you.
And you? You keep your mouths shut!"

- Exodus 14:14 (Message)

Elvis Sings The Wonderful World Of Christmas

Christmas is all about kings.

We portray magi as kings, listen to carols from Kings and, heck, are even celebrating the birth of the king of kings, yet somehow, I don't know how, we always seem to overlook Elvis.

Hey - Elvis is 83% elvish.

Even the cover above, which was released on LP in 1971 and then snapped-up by myself on CD in 1999, was arguably aiming to catch my eye on the basis of its Xmas theme, rather than the king of rock'n'roll who sings on it. If you zoom-in on the snowman and santa images (bottom-left and bottom-right respectively) you can just about make out two early attempts at elfing the monochrome Pelvis, but that's about it.

It's a far cry from my old cassette copy of this from 1977:

That's really going to the opposite extreme isn't it? I mean they could have at least put the star of Bethlehem behind him or something.

Anyhow, this remains the only tape of Christmas songs that I've ever owned, and as such is a pretty mellow collection of predominantly slow numbers. Not much of a singalong then.

After opening with a couple of crooned traditional carols - O Come, All Ye Faithful and The First Noël - the bulk of the album contains songs about the festival itself, but with an unmistakable Presley angle. Titles like Holly Leaves And Christmas Trees, It Won't Seem Like Christmas (Without You) and Merry Christmas Baby should give you a broad idea of the sort of rocky rhythm and blues we're talking here. The inclusion of the Imperials Quartet on most tracks also expands the Elvis atmosphere nicely.

One curious mutation on the cassette release is the transposition of tracks 6 and 7. It's most likely just to even out the durations of each side of the tape, however I'd like to suppose that someone at RCA also realised that I'll Be Home On Christmas Day ran a little oddly straight before the similarly titled track 8 If I Get Home On Christmas Day. (which itself ought to come earlier chronologically!)

Either way it's a very short album - barely 36 minutes - so imagine my delight when today I realised that my CD copy contains two unheralded bonus tracks!

If Every Day Was Like Christmas is a slow gentle lament about how the goodwill of the season might as well continue all year round. That this track is omitted from the cassette, but illustrated bottom-left on the LP/CD artwork, suggests one possible reason for replacing the cover picture.

That's then followed by an alternate more country version of I'll Be Home On Christmas Day. This is quite a minimal production, really enabling the sheer beauty of the guy's voice to warble through over everything.

The one track which sums the whole album up though would have to be the third one - On A Snowy Christmas Night. This is a bit gospel in its lyrics, lazy in its tempo, and quite shamelessly northern hemisphere in its outlook:

"Mother Nature wears a bridal gown,
For the world is dressed in white,
There's a silent glow that fills the earth,
On a snowy Christmas night."

Yes, when it really snows, the whole planet gets covered.

In fact, the only offering more explicit on this subject is my favourite number on here, the immediately following Winter Wonderland, written by the entertainingly named Dick Smith. Following the Parson Brown version of the lyrics, it's somewhat more upbeat, features no references to Christmas, and best of all slows right down for an outstanding Presley close.

"Ah said a walkin'…

… In a winter…

… Won. Der. Laaaaaaaaand!!!"

[EVERY INSTRUMENT GOES CRAZY]

Lawdy! Merreh Chris'mas, y'all.

(available on multiple media with various different track-listings here)

Today's celebrity Bible-reader is… Tarzan, Lord Of the Jungle

I live among lions,
Who gobble up people!

- Psalm 57:4a (CEV)

The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Empty Planet

If there's one thing that The Sarah Jane Adventures can do really well, then it's turning in a great part one, followed by an ill-fitting part two.

This week's story finds Clyde and Rani waking up one morning to find the rest of planet Earth deserted.

The power still works, although their phones don't. The animals have been left behind, except for Mr Smith. Best of all, whatever sinister alien force lies behind the mass-abduction of seven billion people, has also taken much of the incidental music with them, enabling us to clearly hear our heroes as they then try to work out the mystery.

In a move that felt quite out of place to me, there's a shot of them in deserted central London that looks as though it may actually have been filmed there…


… apparently followed by one which doesn't:


Anyway, they sit down and try to logically figure out what can have happened during the night, and it's great to wonder along with them as they turn over not just the last 24 hours, but also the recent years, looking for any clue that might single the two of them out.

They do make the odd error, for example mistaking static on a TV as indicating that the rest of the world is deserted too, however the thing that really lets their reasoning down is the story's eventual solution. In the whole world, they are lucky enough to be just five minutes walk away from the kid who the aliens are looking for. Wow - good job he wasn't somewhere impossible to get to, like Brentford. Where now all that earlier clever reasoning? Maybe I missed something.

When everything gets restored to normal, apart from the world-population having lost 90 minutes, Rani's dad also looks at the world situation, but from a purely local perspective. He reasons that all the weirdness that has been going on lately has all been in this road. This is despite the many high-profile planetary invasions that took place before their move there, and the similarly worldwide nature of events since.

Though the plotting needs work as usual, here's hoping that the much better style and execution on display here continues.

With a small cast, simple story and much better dialogue than usual, this is definitely one of SJA's better outings.

It Turns Out That You Actually Can Take It With You

Those who obey the LORD
are daily in his care,
and what he has given them
will be theirs for ever.

- Psalm 37:18 (CEV)

;)

Today's celebrity Bible-reader is… Miss Eglantine Price

My bed has been floating forty days and nights

- Psalm 6:6b (Message)

Today's celebrity Bible-reader is… the Batman

The Sarah Jane Adventures: Death Of The Doctor

The story opens with UNIT sending half a dozen armed soldiers in three vehicles to advance upon Sarah's house.

Why? In order to break to her the sad news of the Doctor's recent demise.

It paves the way well for a story in which emotions and spectacle fare much better than logic.

For example, when Sarah's friends have to watch her go into denial, feeling quite helpless to comfort her, there's some quite touching stuff.

Haresh: "It takes time. 'Cause when someone dies it's so massive it's like you can't fit it all inside your head. That's what Sarah Jane's doing. She's denying it."

Clyde: "So… what do we do?"

Haresh: "Wait. That's all you can do."

So Sarah, Clyde and Rani all go off to attend the Doctor's funeral at UNIT, which it seems just one other identifiable character from his 31 series also attends. They don't even pick up Luke and K-9 on the way.

That lone returning individual who does make it - Jo from the early 1970s - then sadly gets nothing to do for the entire story. She sticks to Sarah like glue, and aside from momentarily producing a drop of blackcurrant juice to power an alien machine with, just copies her throughout the tale. She even brings her grandson Santiago (Finn Jones) along with her, who likewise just dumbly follows Rani and Clyde everywhere, contributing nothing of his own to events.

Now don't get me wrong, it's very nice indeed to see Jo again after all these years, still ably played by Katy Manning, but it is a shame that she makes next to no difference to the story. She does get plenty of good character material though, exploring how she dealt with life after the third Doctor.

Hard as it is for me to admit, a greater pleasure here is the later appearance of Matt Smith as the eleventh Doctor, who then proceeds to prove that he's not dead after all by taking over the show. The Shansheeth even shoot him at length at one point by way of providing a cliffhanger (I guess they didn't think of that earlier), yet he even survives this without a word of explanation. (I think they didn't want to kill Clyde, but they sure do look surprised at themselves)

The alien Shansheeth have stolen the TARDIS and want to make a copy of the key, so to achieve this they have faked the Doctor's death in order to stage a dummy funeral, thereby attracting two people who remember what the key is like so that they can extract the memory of it from them and make a new one.

I'm not sure why they couldn't have done this with just one person, and I can't help wondering whether this tale was originally plotted for just Sarah, Clyde and Rani.

Doctor: "Come on - use the sonic lipstick!"
Sarah: "Haven't you got the screwdriver?"
The Doctor: "They took it."

Well then, maybe they should have just taken the key off him at the same time?

Sarah: "No sonic screwdriver?"
The Doctor: "It's inside the TARDIS."

Yeah, even that plot-point turns out not to work.

Groske: "Groske build rocket for funeral! Come and see! Come and see!"

Okay, so you either built this rocket in the last week then, or you started building it four years before hearing of the Doctor's death. Said Groske also knows that he is helping to prepare the funeral of a man who is still alive, but for some reason decides to only hint at this.

Shansheeth: "The Shansheeth have presided over infinite funerals."

But no maths lessons.

The Doctor ruminates to Jo about why he never visited her:

"No, because you're right, I don't go back, I can't. But the last time I was dying I looked back on all of you, every single one."

And we missed it! All of it! Even his granddaughter Susan, oh no wait she's dead now. And Romana. Leela too. And the first K9. Even though those events are supposed to be time-locked. Sheesh I wish he hadn't said that. Well, no more old-companion-returns-after-a-long-absence stories from now on then.

It all ends when it turns out that the Memory Weave has a built-in automatic self-destruct function, which is a bit of a design-flaw if you ask me.

In the epilogue, as Jo and Santiago leave again, Sarah suddenly reels off what she's found out various other old companions of the Doctor's are up to these days, and they're nearly all charity workers now.

She even speaks of Tegan, despite still apparently no longer remembering meeting her on Gallifrey in The Five Doctors.


Maybe she just forgets everyone whose hand she shakes?

As for the rumour that Ian and Barbara no longer age, I know it's of dubious canonicity, but it's a downer for that lovely introduction to the VHS release of The Crusade:


On a more positive note, there is less music in this one, apparently to compensate for the actors' speech having been recorded so quietly. This is a good thing, especially because the actual script is terrific fun. The banter and dialogue brings back just how enjoyable this show could be, if only the events that it accompanied held together.

Clyde: "We've got a moonbase?! Oh, man, I am runnin' out of reactions!"

Groske: "Shansheeth too scary - we hide!"

Clyde: "Can you change colour or are you always white?"
Doctor: "No. I can be anything!"
Clyde: "And is there a limit, I mean, how many times can you change?"
Doctor: "507."

The Shansheeth are a well-conceived new race of giant undertaking vultures, while the cowardly Groske works well as a silly counterpoint to our heroes' predicaments too. There's one crazy scene in which they all get to the end of a ventilator shaft, only to have to reverse all the way back through it in a hurry. Fantastic! What a shame that its immense size makes it look surely designed for people to escape through…


In a later scene the baddies remotely seal off the ventilator shaft and try to boil our heroes with hot air from… the "internal vent". That's another ventilation panel, and presumably shaft, on the next wall at right-angles to it:


Colonel Karim does this by turning the temperature up to "maximum", and then two scenes later "increasing" it.

So Rani yells for help through what appears to be another ventilator shaft, just above the first one.


There's just nowhere left to hang anything on those walls, is there?


This could work if our heroes' location was some sort of ventilation junction, but it's clearly a room.


However the very best thing about this two-parter is its shamelessness about the rest of the Doctor Who legend. (ignoring Martha, Mickey, Torchwood and The Five Doctors obviously) There's no fear of the series' young audience not understanding that there are episodes they've missed, just like with the time war. Jo even gets to use the word "Karfel", although we still don't know who the second companion on that trip was. If it were thought-through better, then this would definitely be the deeper worldview - or continuumview - that the show should embrace a bit more.

And finally, yeah, there is a token zombie in it, just briefly when the Doctor takes over Clyde's body:


I guess he really can become anyone.

Ghostbusters II

I think this is the sort of film that gave sequels their bad name.

The original film featured our underdog heroes working their way up to success and popularity defeating ghosts, and getting Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) and Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver) together.

This one opens with them having lost all of that, and then spending the entire film getting it all back a second time.

But what's the point, when there might well be a third film to take it all away from them again?

Though the tone throughout is still one of good enjoyable silliness, it has to overcome slower scenes, dreary music and the sure-fire death knell of any comedy - a baby. The kid is cute, certainly, nice even, but no amount of work is ever going to make him/her a worthwhile reason to see less of Bill Murray and/or Dan Ackroyd. It should be on car stickers - "Babies Kill Comedies".

(Now, Peter MacNicol is funny.)

Throw in a city-wide infestation of ghosts that - on this airing at least - never gets resolved, and we have the definitive style-over-substance sequel.

Even the really funny guy from the first film (Venkman) is reduced to spending most of this one miserable.

Overall, I liked this film, and will happily watch a third one if they ever get around to finally shooting it. Likewise, I have every confidence that I'll enjoy it again too.

I guess I don't mind because I just don't care about it enough.

Available here.

The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Vault Of Secrets

Something of a mixed bag this one.


Returning meanie Androvax turns several characters into zombies again (spare a thought for actress Mina Awar - it's her third time portraying this) in a worthy but savage bid to save his race from extinction. Yes, it's the end of the world again too.

The ensuing story of his plotting to break into the Vault Of Secrets - not to be confused with the Black Archive - is an enjoyable runaround, and raises plenty of exciting questions that don't really get explored. Maybe in later stories?

Paramount among these is the return of the Alliance of Shades - including Mr Dread - from last year's animated Doctor Who Dreamland. Although now live action, they do look encouragingly consistent:



Although their presence in a children's show means that they can't really hurt anyone, it's exciting to watch our heroes repeatedly running away from them anyway. (their aim is about as good as the Daleks')

The Alliance's mission is to remove evidence of aliens from contemporary society, including brainwashing anyone who knows of it. This just the sort of enthralling storyline that the contemporary Doctor Who universe needs after its recent dozen or so high-profile invasions. Alas the opportunity is not mined for it, with the result that at the end of the tale, the world is still an incohesive jumble.

The Vault Of Secrets exemplifies this problem, trying as it does to squeeze two very hard-to-reconcile recent histories into the same tale, indeed often in the same scene. On the one hand Earth has been publicly invaded many times lately, for example when almost everyone on the planet lost family members in Doomsday. On the other, hardly anybody believes in the existence of aliens, so that it can paradoxically also feel as though the story is set in our own world.

It sort of seems to me that those characters who are still denying the possibility of extra terrestrial life, after everything that's happened, must be a really tiny minority, yet according to the programme-makers, the opposite is true.

Specifically, this story features a self-help group for people who believe in aliens, who are portrayed throughout as a bit strange. The relentless incidental music clumsily drops into comedy mode whenever they have anything to say. Even the group's name is BURPSS (British UFO Research and Paranormal Studies Society), a monicker which only really stupid people would call themselves without noticing.

The biggest lead weight in these scenes is the otherwise excellent continuing double act of Haresh and Gita (Ace Bhatti and Mina Anwar respectively). Alas, all their considerable comic skill still can't overcome that Gita needs to be portrayed in the story as right, not mad.

Worst of all, even Sarah and her friends nonsensically belittle the members for their beliefs throughout. In previous series Sarah has tried to open people's minds to the possibility of extra terrestrial life. I can understand her trying to protect her own privacy here, but not by being so mean.

It's a terrible example to set for children, to rubbish people who are hurting because they don't believe what you want them to. How compelling could these scenes have been if told from Ocean Waters' point of view, exploring the tragedy of her and her friends' isolation from society? In fact, shouldn't this small group of outcasts really have consisted of people who don't believe in aliens?

As is common with modern Doctor Who shows, the narrative also suffers from some awkward pacing, particularly when Rani, going out of her mind trying to prevent her mum's imminent death, suddenly forgets all that to stop and chat with Clyde about life, the universe and everything.


It must be uphill work for the actors to find motivation for this sort of thing. Even harder than performing a script in which they then turn out to have impossibly overtaken the person who they're chasing after, who themself has also forgotten where they're running to.

There were some great ideas for a good adventure here, but I thought these ingredients needed a lot more cooking to bake them into a story.

Not sure what became of Mr Smith's body either.