Vacances en Vendée: Day #3 of 11 - France Plants

I needed more local currency, but to get it I had to ask in the bank pictured above, because I didn't know the French word for bureau de change.

Afterwards I asked the teller where Le Jardine des Olfacties was. He pointed behind me and out of the window at the opposite building also pictured above. Oh. Yeah. I didn't see that there.

(stoopid tourists!)

Um... let's begin this post again...

Vacances en Vendée: Day #3 of 11 - France Plants

'Le Jardin des Olfacties' seems to translate most straightforwardly as 'The Garden of Smells', or as the holiday camp staff are fond of calling it, 'The Smelly Garden'.

It's a small building on the main road (D2006) through the small French town of Coëx, opposite the bank, and nestling between a church and the nearby estate agents.

Somehow it also hides a back garden that covers five hectares.

Yes, five hectares of plants, from all around the world, that we paid to go in and spend the afternoon sniffing.

Along the way we bumped into a couple from our camp who offered us a much cheaper ride home than the taxi we had booked. We turned them down. This was one long sunny afternoon that we were definitely not looking to hurry...

(loosely) 'Love without confidence, is like a flower without scent.'

And finally, we finish today's programme with a quiz question:

Don't phone in - it's just for fun!

(Day 1: Lost In France here)
(Day 2: Culture Shop! here)
(Day 4: All Alone On The Site here)
(Day 5: The Haunting Of Cabin 88 here)
(Day 6: Saint-Gilles-Croix-De-Vie here)
(Day 7: SunDay Service here)
(Day 8: C'est La Vie here)
(Day 9: Olonne Sea here)
(Day 10: Camp Sights here)
(Day 11: Nantes Jaunt here)

Bus Ride In Auckland vs. Bus Ride In London

Isaiah 35: 1-5

Once again, read by my mum! (ῧ)

1 The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom.
Like the crocus, 2 it will burst into bloom; it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy.
The glory of Lebanon will be given to it, the splendour of Carmel and Sharon;
they will see the glory of the Lord, the splendour of our God.
3 Strengthen the feeble hands, steady the knees that give way;
4 say to those with fearful hearts, 'Be strong, do not fear;
your God will come, he will come with vengeance;
with divine retribution he will come to save you.'
5 Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped.

Pit Stop advert

Pit Stop advert I'm in! Visit www.pitstop.co.nz. Kudos to Noggin Films.

The Phantom of the Opera NZ

New Zealand in the early 1990s: Forget Michael Crawford, Kiwi performer Jason Gunn portrays the local incarnation of Phantom Of The Opera.

(with thanks to flatmate Dave)

Steve Goble: Star Trek Memories

(2,500 words)

The familiar iconic TV theme echoed up the stairs, and Lee and I looked at each other in Pavlovian excitement.

"Star Trek!" we both chanted!

Well, that was that. We rushed down the stairs and were in front of his television set for the duration.

That's my first memory of Star Trek.

How old were we? Pfft. Single figures.

I mean we weren't even that into the series, but everyone at school in the UK, heck everyone in the whole wide world, knew who Dr. Spock was. And his Space Ship Enterprize. Not to mention Captain Slog's famous catchphrase that he said every single week: "Beam me up Scottie!" "Ye cannae change the laws o'physics!" Oh no, that's right, that came later with that song. Och, everything was so straightforward back then. We were like mini Trekkies.

(which sounds like a chocolate bar)

However it wasn't until roughly 18:40 on Tuesday 26th June 1984 - when I was 13 - that I would really get into the series properly, albeit in black and white.

BBC1 began to run what Radio Times was trumpeting would be "the entire series again". I was quite into Doctor Who at the time, and while that was off the air between seasons, it seemed like I really ought to be absorbing other science-fiction shows too.

This screening also looked to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. In London in 1984, we had just the four TV channels. Star Trek was a 20-year-old import, which was not available to ever be watched again by any means other than BBC1 deigning to repeat it. It was not available on VHS, apart from anything else because every sell-through VHS tape cost in the region of £30.00 each, so releasing all 80 episodes was plainly impractical. Frankly, if the BBC were about to rerun all three series again, and in the 'right' (NBC) order, then this would probably be my last chance to follow the entire run for the rest of my life.

Because we had no video recorder (in fact only a black and white telly at that point), the coming years would see me saving my pocket money to buy quite a few blank audio tapes to record almost all the show's soundtracks on. Bizarrely, two WH Smith 60-minute tapes worked out much cheaper then one TDK 120. However to avoid missing the middle of each show while turning the cassette over, right from the start I would record the programme onto one side of the C120, and then during the week dub it via a DIN lead onto both sides of its own C60, making sure that the end of side one and the start of side two overlapped each other. (upon later getting a VCR, because videotapes were several times more expensive, I sometimes used the E180 instead of the C120) It took me ages to realise that I could save time by having two tape recorders running for the first half hour. Today I still have a big tin containing all those audio cassettes, and on occasion, BBC continuity announcements, including a few over the final scene!

Copying out the castlists from Radio Times onto the inlay cards, I quickly found that new words were entering my lexicon, as I had to figure out who people like "Uhura", "Shatner", and "De Forrest Kelley" (sic) were.

Attempting to begin watching Star Trek through the lens of my Doctor Who experience, the series struck me as inherently weaker, for several reasons:

1. Until I could get up to the movies, there could be no continuity to Star Trek. The 78 self-contained episodes were even aired in a different order to how they had been made, which exacerbated this. Try as I might to get involved, I knew that no event could affect the universe, or even the characters' memories, for any longer than 45 minutes.

2. Unlike in Doctor Who where the characters' feelings were usually implied, here they sometimes got verbalised. This was always done badly. Sometimes they would even kiss, reducing the show from a science fiction, to just a very ordinary one. I would just have to sit these scenes out until when the imagination came back on again.

3. The music was only orchestral, and therefore sounded historical, rather than electronic and futuristic.

4. The characters couldn't travel outside of their own time, much.

Nonetheless, I quickly came up to speed, as like so many viewers before me, the exciting world of Star Trek took a firm hold of my imagination.

I bought the third TV novelisation by James Blish, but quickly decided that these 15-20 page abridgements of each episode couldn't really compare with the one book to one story methodology of Target's Doctor Who range. I started buying the all-original Star Trek DC Comic series, despite UK distributor Comag regularly pasting a "35p" sticker over the preprinted "30p" label as though they thought we collectors wouldn't peel them off and notice. On occasion I would even make up my own Star Trek stories, and record them onto the blank spaces at the end of my audio tapes, with full music and sound effects of course.

I had dreams about living on the USS Enterprise. That transporter was a thing of fascination for me. On the show the characters would freeze as they dematerialised, so did that mean that they were temporarily paralysed, or no longer conscious? Were their bodies reformed using the same molecules, or were they locally-sourced copies, and what implications did this have for their souls? What the heck did that warning notice on the transporter's wall in the movies say, let alone mean that they were in danger of?

In fact, the disparity in technology between the TV episodes and the concurrent movies had my muse working overtime.

That same year I went to London to see the new movie Star Trek III: The Search For Spock (or, according to the reliably-informed BBC continuity announcer, Star Trek III: In Search Of Spock). I discovered that the Enterprise's many different warp options had by now been reduced to just the one "Warp speed", which sounded inferior. This now left a colourful rainbow-like trail behind the ship too, which on 70mm film sounded ear-splitting, like Concorde was going overhead. At another point I could swear that there was a tannoy announcement being made outside the back of the cinema, but only during the one scene. Hm. I don't know, with all the 'advances' in technology, movies just never seem to work that unforgettable magic on me today.

Back on BBC1 though, I was about to learn a harsh lesson about how well the BBC's word could be trusted, or maybe just the personal opinions of its controller in those days. Today it's hard to believe that BBC1 used to broadcast any science-fiction at all from America at prime time, as after only nine episodes the BBC rescheduled the show - for the first time ever - to within children's programming at 17:10 on Tuesday afternoon.

There was an enormous outcry of course - how were those adults who had been following the series now supposed to keep up with it while on their way home from work? The BBC's solution was that they should simply miss it, but presumably continue to pay their licence fee.

A few months later the BBC1 channel controller would cancel Doctor Who and a while after that the promised third series of the SF book-trilogy The Tripods. Thanks Michael Grade, who years later in 2002 would admit "I actually hate sci-fi." (he was appearing on Room 101, to argue again for the banishment of Doctor Who, three years after the end of its final episode)

It was the worst time to be a young science fiction fan in Britain, but at least these reruns of Star Trek continued to offer a refuge when they were on, despite their slightly haphazard presentation.

In the US, and indeed in Britain today, Star Trek always begins with a prologue scene, followed by the opening credits, followed by the first act, over which the episode title, names of guest stars and other sub-credits are superimposed. However for many years in Britain the opening credits were chopped out and spliced onto the very start instead. Why, I can only guess. Week after week this resulted in two things:

1. Upon the final fade-out of the opening credits, the sense that I was now on the brink of three quarters-of-an-hour of pure unadulterated Star Trek. The Americans never got that feeling, and it's missing from all British reruns today, including the DVD versions. To experience that moment, you had to be there each week.

2. The story's interruption by a second series of credits several minutes adrift from first lot.

For some reason this was standard practice in the UK for all US programmes.

Today most TV companies transmit shows from a computer file, but in the mid-1980s, the BBC was still airing Star Trek off of high-definition film. What I mean is that while I was watching it at home, someone in BBC Television Centre would be simultaneously running an actual reel of film of the episode past a white light in a machine to broadcast it. Of course they were - that's how they'd been transmitting the show since the 1960s.

However with repeated transmissions over the years, the film prints had also suffered damage. Bits and pieces would have to get cut out, sometimes resulting in a significantly depleted running-time. When this particular airing got up to the episode The Return Of The Archons, the splice holding the end of the prologue to the start of the first act memorably broke live on air:

(these days the digital picture just freezes and pixelates as standard)

By now the series had been restored back to a later 6:55pm slot again (barring the above episode at 7pm), which held for five whole episodes until Who Mourns For Adonais?, when it was taken off the air completely for several months. Responding to complaints from cheated viewers, Radio Times slimily clarified that "… although the re-run of Star Trek was announced as being 'complete', it was never planned to be continuous…"

Okay. So that's how you want to run your station. The viewers who fund you have to watch what you want to show, not the other way around. Okay. Welcome to the BBC's definition of 'public service broadcasting'.

But you know what? Star Trek did indeed periodically return.

We got our first colour telly, and BBC2 took over the series' airing, on occasion tarting up the black background of their big knobbly orange logo with the show's opening starfield, and then very slowly dissolving out while the theme started.

(as it happened, such programme-specific idents were the shape of things to come) Eventually, after a brief detour for the Leonard Nimoy: Star Trek Memories clips show on 29th August 1985 at 18:40 (bumped back 25 minutes from 18:15 by the cricket), the BBC even make it all the way through to reshowing the final episode Turnabout Intruder. Well, most of the way. For as it turned out, this re-run would be neither 'complete' nor 'continuous'. Because the BBC missed out four episodes altogether.

Miri had been banned due to unsuitable content after its first transmission back in 1970, following which Plato's Stepchildren, The Empath and Whom Gods Destroy had been preemptively removed from the BBC's schedules. Seriously, we never got those episodes at all until the next complete run-through, which began on BBC2 in the 6-7pm slot in August 1992, interrupting the Beeb's first run of The Next Generation, straight after part two of The Best Of Both Worlds. Yep, they took the new episodes off the air for 18 months to rerun the originals yet again!

This time the BBC had also acquired brand new copies of the whole series on videotape. On the one hand, these were full-length versions with the opening credits in the right place after the prologue etc. On the other hand, they were 625-line UK videotape transfers from inferior 525-line US videotapes. Garish colours, awkward movements, muffled sound, but what are you gonna do? Well, if you're like me, now with a job and an income, you carefully record them all over again on VHS in production order, and hang onto those old audio cassettes just in case the BBC have again tinkered with them anyway…

But no, I didn't watch them all a second time, even despite the opportunity to resee the early ones in colour. I did however watch the very first episode.

Rather beautifully, BBC2 kicked off this latest repeat series with yet another hitherto missing episode - the first ever full-length UK screening of Star Trek's original hour-long pilot The Cage. The full colour version of this had only just been rediscovered, and was a delight to see, even despite its non-synoptic status with regards to the rest of the run. Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike… wow, I could watch a whole series with that cast…

As I say, further down the line all four banned episodes did get shown this time, maybe due to changed attitudes, but it seemed to me more likely because no-one at the BBC now knew that they had been banned. They were, after all, no longer in the same film cans, being on tape.

When each of the last three of those 'new' shows went out though, somehow I was doing other things. I caught bits of each of them, but was secretly pleased that within my VHS archives I now had what to me were three fresh instalments of such a great show to look forward to one day watching fresh.

Time passed, along with the rest of The Next Generation, further movies, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise. I even managed to rediscover the old cartoon series.

This year - 2013 - I finally dug out those old tapes of the three episodes that I had never seen, and we watched them, in production order, and with the few intervening episodes between each of them, at a rate of one a week (mostly).

Enthralling, and so worth the wait.

In this article, I haven't spoken much about Star Trek's merits as a series, because it seems to me that enough commentators before me have already got that more than covered. However returning to view these later episodes in my forties, I am honestly bowled over by just how good the old show was (usually). It really is very serious indeed, there's a lot of subtlety to the writing and performances, fantastic ideas (Wink Of An Eye!) and enough time and exploration to really get your teeth into a story. I've also found it to be surprisingly musical. Somehow, no other incarnation of Star Trek has ever quite managed to reproduce these things. Well, maybe apart from Deep Space Nine, but in a different way.

So, this lunchtime, aged 42, I watched my final 'new' episode of Star Trek entitled Whom Gods Destroy, which turned out to be reminiscent of Plato's Stepchildren.

After four seasons of Star Trek: Enterprise, it's sparkling to see other alien races like the Andorians through such a deeper, broader context. It's refreshing how Kirk and Spock manage to take a back seat to events and become passive enough to let the Rigellian Marta perform her whole dance, secure in the knowledge that their viewers are as much interested in the place where they've landed as they are. Today lead actor William Shatner would be expected by all to sing a song himself, or at least narrate it.

Yes, here in 2013 William Shatner is now a TV icon for sending himself up, and in this episode he plays a dual role! As Fleet Captain Garth pretending to be Kirk, he screams, runs, waves his arms in the air, sinks to his knees and pummels the ground in his defeat! Is he just trying to make his other role look good?

Well, after almost thirty years, I guess that's what we now refer to as Star Trek: The Original Series complete for me. I always thought it was a mistake to stop making movies with this cast - get as much new Trek out of them while we could I reckoned - but it's encouraging to look back at my 13-year-old self and see that I made a good decision there that Tuesday night in 1984.

A five-year mission? Well, I admit I might not have started if Radio Times had told me that it would be a 29-year one!

(available, without the above sketch, here)

Douglas Camfield 1931-1984

The original run of Doctor Who had an insane number of different directors working on it at different times over the course of its 26-year saga, but the work of one man is remembered by fans as standing head and shoulders above the rest.

The late Douglas Camfield.

As a director, he turned in about 50 episodes across its first 13 years, including the first and last UNIT stories of its era. The influence of his own military background in realising that fictitious wing of the army surely cannot be underestimated.

There were many other episodes on which he worked as Production Assistant, including the pilot. At one point he was even trying to get made a script that he'd written for the series.

Some of his earliest Doctor Who episodes are no longer known to exist, including the fourth ever story Marco Polo. Despite its never getting repeated, for the rest of the series' decades-long run it always remained my father's favourite story, bar none.

But this post is not really about those programmes. For me, growing up as a Doctor Who viewer and later fan had the unusual spin that Douglas Camfield also attended my local church.

Well, perhaps that should more accurately read, had attended my local church. I only really learnt of his name after he had sadly died at the ghastly age of just 52.

So did I ever meet him then? Probably not, not least because I rarely even went to services, but I did find myself within its walls on multiple ocassions throughout the year. School events and so on.

However if, rather than a building, a church is rather the group of people, then Douglas' voice still echoes there amongst so many other memories to this day. It seems that he used to be quite active. It's not just that his old friends still remember him, but among the church's records are Douglas' contributions to the community's newsletter of the day Crossroad - the circular which was partly responsible for his coming into the church in the first place. I remember these things getting pushed through all the local letterboxes every other month, or however often they were printed.

I've read so many pieces in books and magazines over the years about his work on my favourite TV show, but I've never got to read about his walk with God.

Well, if you too are interested, then please feel free to click on the pages below to hear a bit more from and about who this guy was, both inside work, and out…

With thanks to Faith Honeysett of St Stephen's Church, East Twickenham.

Isaiah 9:2-3 & 6-7

And today's celebrity Bible-reader is... my mum! :)

Richmond to Waterloo in 17 minutes

Alright, 17 minutes 11 seconds.

We were sitting at Richmond Station when the announcement suddenly came over that we were now going to travel fast right through to London Waterloo. This is that journey. My phone isn't great quality, but for this route to ignore Clapham Junction (Britain's busiest railway station!) does seem like a rare event. Also sped through are North Sheen, Mortlake, Barnes, Putney, Wandsworth Town, Queenstown Road and Vauxhall.

Shot on my Ideos phone at about 09:50am on 26/10/2012, looking south/west.

The Joy Of Teletext

Whatever else you might say about teletext, it has never looked old-fashioned.

In fact, for quite a while there, it looked accurately futuristic. After all, in the 1980s it looked exactly the same as it would today in 21st-century 2012. It didn't even display a different year.

When I was ten, I used to sit in our dining room watching it on a common household appliance which was in those days known as a "black-and-white television set". I was entranced. In fact, said analogue box couldn't even pick-up this new computerised information service, but every weekday afternoon BBC2 would, to testcard music, present a rotation of pages from it as a programme in its own right, billed as Ceefax In Vision or latterly Pages From Ceefax.


First there would be news.


Then weather.


Then other stuff. Then it would go round back to the beginning and run through the news again. It was a bit like going to the cinema and arriving late… oh, wait, that's another whole way of viewing that we no longer have. Sorry, bad analogy, 2012-ers.

You might remember those days though. Watching, captivated, that rolling three-digit number at the top, snapping quickly through all the other page numbers. Trying to speed-read each page quickly enough to finish it before it was replaced by the next one, and in so doing failing to really take it in. Trying to turn it off but waiting to see the next page first just in case it would be interesting enough to remain viewing after all.

There were also lots of adverts in newspapers and magazines for TV sets that could pick up this cool new service, and these I would duly sit staring at too. Presently the page would still flip over and change, but such interactivity just didn't offer the same passive thrill as watching it on the telly.

In 1984 Russian president Yuri Andropov passed away, and Ceefax actually accompanied this news with a pixelly rendition of his face. I would love to quote that here, but I'm not sure if anyone in the world retains a copy of it now.

The thing is, computers generally looked a lot more fun in those days. Of course they did. They looked a lot more like toys. Everything was made out of simple brightly-coloured shapes, but even better was their promise to us. The future would be full of computers like these ones. Therefore the future would be similarly fun. As fun as toys.

Now this is the point in my post when I would normally proceed to run through a personal account of my teletext viewing alongside how it changed down the years. However teletext didn't change. It stayed the same. So did ITV's Oracle version, and Channel 4's 4-Tel. (I later heard that Channel 5 had something called 5-text, but this seems unlikely as it would have required them to have enough brains to be able to organise something)

Oh all right then…


In the 1990s, Hosko and I would play 4-Tel's Bamboozle quiz game live on my overnight radio show. At Christmas these question were jokes with multiple-choice punchlines. It also quietly came in handy for reading out less-important things on-air like the weather.

In 1999, my dad finally bought a set capable of receiving the proper interactive service (we were colour by then!), so I started playing Bamboozle at home, as well as keeping up with the weekly adventures of Turner The Worm:

Occasionally it even came in useful, such as when my family needed to keep an eye open for when I had a flight landing. Or when Murray Gold took over the music on Doctor Who and we needed subtitles.

Teletext wasn't even restricted to broadcast TV, as similar in-house services sprung-up in my life everywhere from my college (which I would occasionally have messages put up on) to Butlins.

In a nutshell, teletext worked, and since it never broke, no-one at the BBC ever fixed it.

Until today. (well, here in London and the South-East, actually until about six months ago)

Sure, funky interactive digital TV today may be able to use different fonts, show alternative video streams, access the internet, rotate your house so that it's always facing the sun and revive your dead loved ones without their incurring any additional taxes, but at the end of the day, I think they're just discontinuing teletext because it all looks too easy.

Although it made little practical difference to my life, I will miss those words and pictures made up of coloured squares.

When I first discovered teletext, our technological future looked so bright, and absolutely enthralling.

Today's future offers nothing to replace that optimism.

Edison Kinetoscopic Record Of A Sneeze AKA Fred Ott's Sneeze (1894)

Bizarre commentary on nineteenth century life, in which the hapless Fred takes a pinch of snuff and sneezes. And that's when the trouble starts! Well actually that's when the film ends. Not for this production post-credits tag scenes or hilarious montages of out-takes. No credits. Did they run out of budget?

It should be noted however that, despite the ubiquitous presense of his handkerchief throughout the movie's entire running time, in the event, Fred instead uses his tie.

Ministry Of Works sketch 5 of 4

Our current series at cession | community church is entitled "Get Better Work Stories". That may sound like it's been copied from the NZ Police's never-ending recruitment campaign, but in fairness I think the cops in turn had stolen it from the title of Howick Community Church's sermon this morning.

Anyhew, today I was asked to reprise the 'boss' character from our similarly-themed 2007 series 'Ministry Of Works'. Not for a sketch this time though, but to read-out the church's notices. (called 'community life') At least, I don't think the idea started out as a sketch…


(rest of the service here)

Click here for sketch 1 of 4
Click here for sketch 2 of 4
Click here for sketch 3 of 4
Click here for sketch 4 of 4

(with thanks to Paul)

John 1:1-5, 9, 12-14 / 8:12 (NIV)

The second of two readings that I performed as voice-overs at cession church here in Auckland tonight.

Click here to hear.

Reading #1 here.

Rest of the service here.

Psalm 22:1-8 (NIV)

The first of two readings that I performed as voice-overs at cession church here in Auckland tonight, for week two of our series entitled Break Of Day.

Click here to hear.

Reading #2 here.

Rest of the service here.

Numbers 20: 1-13 (NIV)

Reading at cession church in Auckland tonight, part of our series The Amazing Race.

With thanks to Daniel.

Rest of the service here.

The Amazing Race: Entry Into The Wilderness

Sketch at church tonight, inspired by Numbers 14. Team-members: Jon, Brett, Caleb, DaNae and Rob.

Rest of the service here.

The Politician's Guide To Dirty Tricks

Sketch wot I wrote at cession church in Auckland tonight. With thanks to Nigel.

Absolute Radio Advert

Recorded another quick advert today.

Hear it here.

Neighbro's episode #3 of 3

Neighbours parody at cession church in Auckland tonight. Somewhere buried in here was a message about community synergy.

Big thanks: Carmel, Jon, Scott, DaNae, Caleb and Daniel. With apologies to Brett.

Episode #1 here.
Episode #2 here.

Neighbro's episode #2 of 3

Neighbours parody tonight at cession's church service in Auckland. Somewhere buried in here was a message about being a good neighbour.

Big thanks: Kate, Carmel, Tes, Jon, Rachel, Scott, DaNae, Caleb and Daniel. With apologies to Brett.

Episode #1 is only a footstep away here.
Episode #3 is only a footstep the other way here.