Postman PACT

Went to another PACT (Prayer and Action Changes Things) meeting tonight, where we prayed and wrote Christmas cards of support to persecuted individuals around the world.

Some are in prison for their beliefs, others are fighting for justice, still others are simply trying to rebuild their devastated lives.

As I leafed through the options, I found that it was those in prison to whom I felt drawn to offer some encouragement.

"Filep Karma, a civil servant in West Papua, was charged with treason and rebellion after raising the 'Morning Star' flag to commemorate West Papua's independence. He has now served seven years of the fifteen-year prison sentence he was given. At the trial, the chief judge mocked him and his Christian faith, saying 'Where is your God. I don't see your God here.'"

"Sentenced to death in 2002, for blasphemy against the prophet Mohammed, Kingri is still in prison eight years later, pending appeal."

"Between 2,000 and 3,000 Christians are currently detained without charge or trial in Eritrea."

From inside a cell, it must seem insane that not very far away everyone is allowed to believe whatever they like and go for a walk in the sunshine. But for the frustrating detail of geography, so much could be okay again. As I prayed at the end of the evening, I found I was getting a bit angry about it. Well, merely annoyed really.

What we will do to someone, because of a theory.

Rowan Atkinson Live

One reason why the theatre doesn't usually excite me is because when the run is over, it's over. Gone forever, unless a lot of people go to a supreme amount of trouble to make the whole thing happen in exactly the same way all over again.

TV cameras go some way towards fixing this, capturing the performance to enable untold millions in the future to travel back in time and visit it to.

This then is a 1991 TV re-enactment of highlights from Rowan Atkinson's 1981 and 1986 one man shows, which themselves featured reworked material from even earlier in his career.

I'm not sure that the intention here is exactly to preserve the show though. Perhaps more to simply transfer it (in some cases back?) to another medium, and in the process hone it even further. For example, the joke about Kylie Minogue wouldn't have made much sense five years earlier in the mid-80s, so I assume that the original shows had some other celebrity's name in there.

As usual, Atkinson is at the absolute top of his game throughout. His comedic range is milked here for all it's worth. Mime. Deadpan. Character pieces. The sketch in which he plays a headmaster aloofly informing a father of his son's death has so much going on under the surface that the scene appears lifted from a film. Basically, Atkinson knows how to make even the few dud skits at least watchable.

His assistant Angus Deayton - seen here before he became such a household name - does an exemplary job too, but by going to the opposite extreme. To magnify Atkinson's performance, poor Deayton has to do his darndest to not be funny at all, which with all due respect, his poker face is extremely good at. When he takes a bow at the end, you get the impression that he's not so much the other performer, but more likely today's temp from the agency. Job well done then.


Finally the scripts are mostly gems too. The opening classic about the devil welcoming everyone to Hell is hysterical, and sets the tone for the rest of the show brilliantly. Even the long-winded and frightfully dull sketch about the Indian waiter serving football hooligans still offers up the following gem:

"Oh! Dear. Here - let me help you up Sir. Err, no no, it is a tricky bit of floor that, err, deceptively flat and unimpeded."

Some of the swearing sadly makes this unsuitable for family audiences, which is quite a shame given how jolly the majority of it is.

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of this production though is that the whole thing is now available for FREE! Atkinson himself has now got it uploaded to his own YouTube account.

As 70-minute TV specials go, this one is simply faultless.

Available here!

(with thanks to flatmate Dave)

The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn (movie)

I know very little about Tintin.

And that's just the way I like to come to most movies - ignorant. Let the work tell me its own story, I say, without being pre-empted or worse sabotaged by secondary sources.

In Tintin's case, in the 1980s I'd watched the TV cartoons of The Secret Of The Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure stripped on BBC1 in the 3:55pm slot after The Magic Roundabout. Despite my detailed recall of the TV schedules those weeks, my grey matter's stored data on the actual programmes is a lot vaguer. (much like the BBC's own archives...)

My brain retains the deafening announcer on the opening credits, a guy smashing a log at the camera, and that the two tales ran on from each other, but that's about all. Oh, and that the dog was called Snowy rather than Milou. And longtime pal Mr Monty once mentioned on Radio Cracker how 'Tintin' is correctly pronounced, but now my memory on the subject really is drained.

So even though I had seen a version of this story before, I was now in the ideal situation of having forgotten it - result!

The movie's hype-machine had other ideas though.

I should have been safe from spoilers in the cinema. However just as the film was about to begin, Rank Screen Advertising actually showed us an advert for M&Ms, which featured clips of the upcoming movie, along with interviews with its stars.


Unbelievable.


Yellow: "Hey, why weren't Tintin and Snowy on the red carpet?"

Red: "Well they're just characters. Y'know - made with computers."

Just what was the point of that? Did they expect me to get up and go buy a ticket to the film that I already had a ticket to? Or maybe to miss the film in favour of buying some M&Ms? No wonder they call it rank advertising. (6/10)

After all that deconstruction they actually had to gall to flash up a caption daring me to somehow still be able to "Enjoy the film". Well, I certainly won't be buying any M&Ms for a while. They now owe me a part-refund of my ticket.

By the way, M&Ms are manufactured in a big metal machine, they're coloured brown, yellow, green, red, orange and blue, and they all taste of milk chocolate.

I had also been told about all the wonderful motion capture involved in shooting this movie, which once the film had begun compelled me to think of the actors wearing those reflector thingies. Were they the same actors as the ones doing the voices, or different, more specialised physical performers? Were they doubling up? Please, don't tell me these things, I just want to watch Tintin and believe that he's real.

In the event, the mundane opening scenes did indeed look so real that I had to also wonder why they had not just gone out and shot it in the usual way. The animation looked fantastic, the closest to believable that I've ever seen. However when Milou / Snowy began to chase a cat around, the jump from realistic motion capture to more stylised aeronautics transformed the feel to more that of a Dreamworks flick.

I also knew that this had been principally scripted by Doctor Who's current head writer Steven Moffat, so I kept expecting a mysterious child in a spacesuit to ring up. Unusually, this didn't happen, not even when Tintin was breaking into the spooky Marlinspike Hall. But somewhere off-screen there was one, I could tell.

I suppose the enormous irony here is that, at the outset, I actually needed some off-the-screen information, specifically to tell me where the film was set. The characters seemed to be English, but the location seemed to be France. Afterwards someone told me that it had been Belgium. Just where in the film did they get that information from? I missed it.

I didn't follow the story here (I'm no good at mysteries as you can probably tell from the preceding four sentences) but I did thoroughly enjoy the style of this. The opening credits and initial shot of Tintin's portrait looked respectful, the animation has a distinctive style all of its own, and the direction…

Wow.

There are endless shots through diegetic glass lenses, beautiful scene-transitions, and points-of-view that made me feel as though I was flying. Action sequence after action sequence had us whirl around the location in long continuous takes, making the adventure a rollercoaster ride in more ways than one. Yes I was watching it in 3D, but frankly it wanted those Super X flight-simulator seats that shake you around too. I was feeling seasick in a good way.

There are some nice lines, clear intelligent characters, and thankfully no formulaic love interest to gunge the momentum up. Overall I enjoyed the whole thing start to finish, including the subtlety of faces that were reserved enough to only pull minor expressions.

I have no idea how true this is to the original strips, or even in what ways it maybe should be, but I did have a good time tonight, and look forward to the next one.

Not that I want to know anything about it, thanks.

(available here)

Doctor Who: Campfire Trailer

At 40 seconds, this is right on the edge of what I would consider recognising as a Doctor Who mini-episode.

Donna: "There are things waiting in the darkness. Creatures of metal, fire and blood. But he's out there, burning through time, facing a thousand dangers across the stars, and never giving up. He looks like a man, but he's a legend. And his name is the Doctor. He'll come back to save us, and this time, I'm gonna be ready. Then - just like that - p' - we'll be gone."

Produced to publicise the 2008 series, it features Donna Noble sitting at a camp-fire talking about the Doctor in the same dreamy manner as all female companions do these days. (Tegan would kill her) It's interspersed with shots of Daleks, Sontarans and the odd Ood, although she does not refer to them by name. Although they were intended as flash-forwards for the audience of the day - who hadn't seen season 30 yet - they appear to be flashbacks for Donna.

The snag with that is placing when this campfire monologue happens. In the series, Donna does indeed meet all three featured races, but upon encountering the last of these, promptly loses her memory of them all, and the Doctor. Given that she is waiting for him to return to save her and whomever she's speaking to, just when can this scene take place?

I'd put it in-between the two episodes of Silence In The Library and Forest Of The Dead. Donna had met both the Sontarans and the Ood by this point, and had probably found out about the Daleks during her investigations into him prior to Partners In Crime. Additionally, at this point in history Donna is suffering from intermittent amnesia of her travels with the Doctor anyway, as she is being integrated into an alternative existence in an artificial reality. In Forest Of The Dead her medical doctor - Doctor Moon - then treats her to forget her flashes of memory from that past life.

There are also three much shorter edits featuring each monster with no dialogue, but they are just cutdowns of this full-length trail.

And then - just like that - p' - it was gone.

Torchwood season 4 overview

I guess it's been the series when Torchwood finally began to catch up with the rest of the genre.

The TV series got flooded by America, and was enormously improved for it. The influx of a team of writers to brainstorm and moderate each other resulted in - unusually for Torchwood - a series that had been thought about. I really enjoyed most of the first six TV episodes this year, which won me over from the initial ickiness that I felt at sitting down to have to watch another ten hours of this spin-off. (not that I can blame anyone else for my own choices) Sure, there was still some swearing and porn in there, but in the other scenes there was actually something to get my brain into.

The radio episodes continued. Something of a hit and miss affair, but scheduled for afternoon transmission, they too bucked the original TV series and avoided offending anyone.

And the animated cut-scenes in the online game Web Of Lies. They featured a lot of guns being toted, but really not much actual violence.

Most of the time this year, Torchwood was mostly okay. At best brilliant, at worst awful. But most of the time at least okay.

If I'm honest, I'm still quietly hoping that that's the end of it though. It's just not anything like that nice Doctor Who programme.

Which after four seasons is still the only reason why I'm watching.

The Devil And Miss Carew
Submission
The House Of The Dead
Miracle Day
Web Of Lies

Torchwood: Web Of Lies

10-part online sister series to Miracle Day, consisting of animated cut scenes embedded within a game. (this is only a review of those scenes, not the game itself) (I'm rubbish at computer games)

And game is the operative word. When Holly's brother Miles is shot undead (nobody can die following Miracle Day remember), she sets out to track down his would-be killer, and re-unravel the conspiracy that he had uncovered. (the same conspiracy as being unravelled in the main series - it's not much of a secret is it? ;) )

The extent to which Miles has encoded his findings is extreme to say the least, hiding a phone number in a sudoku puzzle, setting his laptop to self-destruct after three uses, and secreting a gun in the enemies' base with only a lie to reveal its location.

How Holly successfully cracks all of these riddles is a miracle in itself, but that's only the A storyline.

The sub-plot is set four years earlier in 2007, and this is more what I was up for. Jack has been captured by one of the Family, and it's up to Gwen to race across Europe to Chernobyl to save him. This ties into the main series better, forming as it does a lost episode from sometime during series one and two. Tosh is referred to, but neither seen nor heard.

At the end, Jack and Gwen are overcome by retcon gas, and awaken realising that they have lost a day, and seem to be in Chernobyl. Hey-ho. (they take this extremely well)

Surprisingly, the two storylines never seem to converge.

For what they are, I found these cut scenes increasingly holding my attention towards the end. Miles' puzzles at least kept my brain switched on, while the Jack / Gwen scenes inevitably held greater interest, purely because I'm more familiar with those characters.

To this Brit, Eliza Dushku as Holly sounds very similar to the main series' Alexa Havins as Esther Drummond, and that they shared so much computing prowess didn't help to clarify things.

The comic-book style animation is awkward, often giving the impression that a character is wearing a life-size picture of their own face over their actual face, but beyond that I was quite interested. The way Jack uses an electromagnet to shoot his captor is genius.

I guess each of the ten episodes are meant to be watched after each TV episode of the same number, but chronologically, as I say, I'd place Holly's scenes after episode 1. Jack and Gwen's 2007 scenes, from memory, I'd place after Out Of Time. She doesn’t seem to have her engagement ring, but I really haven't looked at the material or the episodes too closely. It's Torchwood, I just don't care enough. Heck, I don't even have series one any more.

Spin-offs from spin-offs, where does it all end. Would it be cruel, arrogant and unkind to hope for here?

Doctor Who: 2010 trailer

With Doctor Who's recent proliferation of prequels, deleted scenes, mini-episodes, minisodes, TARDISodes, webisodes, apocryphodes, and/or pleasemakethemallstopnowMichaelGradewasrightisodes, this spectacular minute-long trailer from last year takes on a new status.

Granted it's a bit nonsensical, but then so was The Big Bang. Nonetheless, it is a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, although apparently no solution.

The Doctor and Amy (it was shown out-of-sequence before season 31) are stargazing, when the ground beneath them explodes, and they tumble through some sort of whirlwind, spotting various foes from the same season as they go. At one point they get separated, but then find each other again. And then they're back stargazing once more.

Since there's no explanation for how they return to their position of safety, it seems as though the whole sequence is some kind of trippy flash forward, and/or flash back. In fact it makes most sense as an encounter with the crack in the universe.

The questions the two have for each other imply that it's early days for the pair, suggesting the former. However, the implication that their enemies have been wiped from history prevents their later encountering them, so I'd err on the side of latter, obviously before Amy's marriage to Rory.

In fact, it's the Doctor's final question that perhaps holds the greatest insight:

"All of time and space. Everywhere and anywhere. Every star that ever was. Where do you wanna start?"

This would run smoothly into the beginning of The Pandorica Opens, when he is taking Amy to see the oldest message in the universe, so that's where I'm placing it.

Stylish. Be nice to see an episode directed like this.

Doctor Who: Meanwhile In The TARDIS

Once upon a time they used to release movies in cinemas.

Then they started to rerelease them on Super 8 and VHS.

Then they started to rererelease them on VHS, but with additional sequences.

Then they started to rerererelease them on DVD, but with even more additional scenes.

Somewhere along the line, probably on the quiet, new movies began to have additional scenes shot specifically to be embargoed for this purpose. I cannot prove it, but I have grave suspicions about the single-take extra scene included on the Batman & Robin DVD that I borrowed from Herschel. Conversely, I understand that the faux extras on The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy had no shame at all about themselves.

Which brings us to Doctor Who: Meanwhile In The TARDIS - two self-contained extra scenes specifically shot to be DVD extras. They're both written by the series' head writer, both filmed on the TARDIS set, both featuring just the Doctor and Amy, and both bridging the gap between two specific episodes. They're minisodes.

And they're also both very talky, which negates their suitability for the frantic pace of the actual show these days.

Scene One

After taking off at the end of The Eleventh Hour, Amy grills the Doctor on all those questions that new viewers might be asking. Why does the TARDIS look like a Police Box? What can you see through its windows? It's made of wood, so why doesn't the air inside escape? Finally the Doctor shoves her out of the doors into space, leading straight into The Beast Below, in which there disappointingly turns out to be a forcefield.

Scene Two

After taking off at the end of Flesh And Stone, Amy grills the Doctor on all those questions that new viewers might be asking. Why he won't go to bed with her? (uh, because you cheat on your men Amy?) This leads into the deeper and far more interesting question of why the Doctor travels with a companion, and he's forced to admit that he might not be quite so aloof as he likes to think.

Doctor: "I look at a star and it's just a big ball of burning gas, and I know how it began, and I know how it ends, and I was probably there both times. (Y'know) after a while everything is just stuff. That's the problem - you make all of space and time your back yard, and what do you have? A back yard. But you - you can see it. And when you see it, I see it."

Amy: "And that's the only reason you took me with you?"

Doctor: "There are worse reasons."

Amy: (splutters) "I was certainly hoping so."


Amy accesses the TARDIS' visual records of its previous occupants, only for it to cheekily show her just the girls. This catalogue even includes Liz Shaw, who arguably never travelled in the TARDIS.

Finally the Doctor sets the TARDIS' controls for Rory's stag night, leading straight into The Vampires Of Venice, which disappointingly turns out to be miserable. In fact, the inclusion of this scene on the beginning would have significantly improved that story, by providing evidence of the Doctor's pure motives, and therefore a much nicer context for events.

Still didn't explain why he hid in the cake though.

The Sarah Jane Adventures: Sky

Q. What do you get when an alien race takes a baby girl, turns her into weapon to kill her owners' enemies, she grows up very quickly, gets given a new ethereal name, uses her free will to change and become good, and has one of the Doctor's companions for her mother?

A. River Song. No, wait, this just in… or Sky Smith.

It's probably just a coincidence, but airing this a mere month or so after Doctor Who: A Good Man Goes To War / Let's Kill Hitler, was always going to invite comparisons. Heck, it even features a return appearance from the now self-consciously named Professor Rivers. Okay, they really have to stop giving so many characters such environmental names now. There are only so many earth-nouns to go around.

Aside from that accident, as Sarah Jane Adventures go, this one definitely hits above average, and is maybe the best one so far to represent what the series is about. Note: not necessarily the best story (although it's a good one), but one which sums the series up well.


The zombies, the nosey neighbours, Floella Benjamin, Luke, Clyde, Rani… the only classic ingredient really missing here is K9, more so because he's not even in the pre-creds montage of clips from upcoming episodes. Ooh, I do hope he's back too. Mind you, that they've kept the Doctor's appearances absent from these montages in the last two seasons means that this year we can't rule anything out.

My main criticism is of Sky's disarmament, which was as convenient as most of SJA's conclusions. In this series, any old cause can bring about any old effect, if only empowered to do so by the right sentence.

Even the mysterious Captain and Shopkeeper from Lost In Time put in an appearance towards the end. Well, I hated everything about that story, and yet here I was so pleased to welcome them both back again.

Are they going to appear again this series? They seem to somehow belong in that attic, and the mysterious Shopkeeper seems like a good character for the kids to throng around, he might even work well as a replacement… for…

... oh dear.

Oh dear.

I mean that's the truly appalling paralell with this year's series of Doctor Who isn't it? We knew all the way through that the Doctor was going to die at the end, but then we also knew that, somehow, he wouldn't really.

Similarly, we'll also know all the way through this series of The Sarah Jane Adventures, that it all finishes with the appalling real-life death of lead actress Elisabeth Sladen. It's an unpleasantly heavy context for the episodes to be viewed in, and not the one that they are supposed to have.

Throughout I found that I was approaching this story in a way that I hadn't any earlier one. I found it hard not to deconstruct everything. Like listening intently to the audio and wondering whether they had intended to ADR some of it, but in the end not had the chance. Really, that attitude doesn't help anybody.

Mostly though I took a deep breath, determined to be as critical as usual, and genuinely enjoyed watching it. Yes, I liked this. Without any sentimentality, it actually was a good entry into the SJA canon.

Sarah: "I don't want to risk the gates again. Old investigative reporter superstition - never break in the same way twice."

Welcome back Sarah Jane. I'm looking forward to the rest of this series.

DVD Postcard: New Zealand - South Island

After the evening we spent last January watching a touristy VHS tape entitled New Zealand - Kiwi Country, I knew exactly what I wanted to buy David as a souvenir from my latest trip down under.

Obviously, a DVD along similar lines. Hence on my way back home through Auckland Airport recently, I paused in a shop to select a good one, checked the region coding, paid my money, and headed on through security to pick it up from the duty-free area.

Today however I noticed the price-tag - about a quarter of the one on David's old VHS. Suddenly I found I was doubting that we would find another full hour's worth of material on here.

In the event, once David had introduced his DVD player to his new TV and successfully got them both talking to each other, I think we got a full six minutes of footage out of it. Well actually we got twelve - it was such a great home movie that we watched it twice!

It's really just a montage of brief shots of the highlights of South Island, smoothed along by some appropriately mellow instrumentals.

I still haven't actually set foot on SI, though beauty spots like Lake Tekapo were on my itinerary even back on my first visit to NZ in Feb '04, so the absolutely gorgeous shots on this disc sure felt like they brought me a bit nearer.

The Doctor Who Prom 2010

Interrupting a woman who looks suspiciously like one of his companions, the Doctor again lands at the Royal Albert Hall during the Prom, gets the audience to shout "hello" several times, and then saves everyone.

If it sounds like a re-enactment, then it literally might be. Not only does this semi-live mini-episode recreate the interaction of its corresponding insert two years earlier, but the second half also got performed twice, on July 24th and 25th.

What this spin-off does achieve though is the challenging feat of bettering that already excellent last one. After the prerecorded insert, the Doctor actually does show up live in person, now donned in a radio mike. (shame he wasn't wearing that in the earlier footage - he had good reason to be)

What a magical moment that must have been if you were actually sitting in the audience close enough to recognise that it really was him.

In terms of canonicity, this is still very near the knuckle though. Smith pulls off his live appearance, keeping his character's verbose persona switched on throughout. He even gets a child from the audience to help him diffuse the alien bomb that he's brought with him, which is a huge risk to be taking if either is genuine.

Fortunately the eleventh Doctor is very good with kids, and I couldn't help but smile as I watched him take a quick moment at the start of this section to reassure the little guy that they weren't in any danger really.

Yet again though the concept of whether this live performance sits within Doctor Who's chronology or not is what sets my mind buzzing. The Doctor makes no reference to the last time he was here (in Music Of The Spheres), but that's not actually a contradiction. However there are autocues around the theatre impossibly displaying the Doctor's words as he speaks them. Hmm, well I guess we can file that under the same heading as the TV show's occasional non-existent boom microphones, and maybe his aforementioned headset.

The most obvious problem of all though is that this scene was enacted twice on different nights, each with a different assistant.



On July 24th it was Ellis, but then on July 25th it was Ben. So which version are we even considering here?

It’s not quite the same question facing full-blown Doctor Who stage shows like The Ultimate Adventure, because although those were performed multiple times, creating many unique and therefore contradictory versions, none of them holds the qualification of having been televised.

Given therefore that the Ellis version of this is the one that actually got broadcast, that would make the Ben one on a par with an alternate take, although it's not unthinkable that, for the Doctor, the two very similar events both happened on two different nights. After all, if he repeated the exact same lines in two back-to-back scenes in the show, we'd take it to be an intentional joke. Or maybe they were even alternate Doctors.

I think the version that was actually broadcast has to take precedence though, even though it omits the Doctor's line about how, by accident, "Sky TV's been taken off the air."

I guess you could edit that back in though…

Overall, as with last time, I'm happy to wave this through, for pretty well the same reasons, but with pretty well the same reservations too.

Doctor: (reading from programme) "Apparently I shall be leaving you in the capable hands of 'Karen Gillan' and 'Arthur Darvill', and err 'Matt Smith' whoever that is. Urgh, what a dull name."

Presumably those three presenters look nothing like the TARDIS crew.

As for when this entry comes for the Doctor, well that depends.

If you're just considering this sketch as an isolated minisode, then I'd say it comes after The God Complex and before Up All Night / Closing Time. He's revisiting the Royal Albert Hall because he's on his farewell tour!

If on the other hand you're considering the entire evening, including monster cameos, identical actor versions of the TARDIS crew and alternate evenings with a different audiences, then I'd say just before The Wedding Of River Song, when time on Earth has gone haywire and everything in history is happening at once.

Come to think of it, there are a few other nonsensical stories that might also fit here...

The Doctor Who Celebration - Twenty Years Of A Time Lord

In 1983, to celebrate twenty years of non-stop Doctor Who, the BBC organised a two-day convention at Longleat, on Easter Sunday and Monday.

Today those of us who were there refer to it as Doctor Who's Woodstock. It was crowded. It was muddy. It was unforgettable.

Despite this last point, a bit like the 1960s, if you can't remember it, then it's still entirely possible that you were there that weekend. No, nothing to do with the Silence, more like the BBC underestimating the show's popularity again. It was advertised on the Ed Stewart Show and everything. "A transdimensional experience of which 3-D specs will be of no use to you whatsoever".

Is this all making little to no sense? All right, I'll rewind back to the beginning.

They expected 50,000 people to attend. Indeed, on day one, the first 35,000 of them duly arrived. Sadly, for I guess something like 10,000 of those, arriving turned out to be all they could do that day. Sheesh, were maybe 1,000 family days-out really ruined, and those just on day one?

I was 12. We came down by train for day two, quite innocently expecting to buy our tickets on the door. Although we hadn't pre-booked our entry-tickets, we had pre-booked seats on a minibus from the station. It was here that the minibus driver informed us that BBC radio had that morning advised that only people who had pre-booked should now attend.

Which was fine, for all his other passengers. (some of whom were bizarrely also called Goble)

The minibus driver told us not to worry. If we couldn't get in, then he'd actually have a word with the guy on the door, and… and… arrange for us to all go around the safari park instead.

Well, that was one long minibus journey. I spent it praying.

The queue for non-ticket-holders outside Longleat House was enormous, but we stood there, British to the end, and just waited. At one point we all spotted the grinning face of Peter Davison in the distance, making his way through the excited public either into or out of Longleat House.

Then something pivotal happened, which for many people would change the entire day.

The queue moved.

But not in the direction you would normally expect. Not forwards. No, not even backwards. This queue moved sideways.

I guess it must have been in response to some announcement over the echoey tannoy (apparently by actor John Leeson), as the whole queue suddenly disassembled, swarmed down the grassy verge, and reformed itself in a new order leading into the tented ticket office.

I ran after it, so did my mum, and best friend Alex, and a thousand other folk.

Alex got there first out of our party, found a place in the new queue, and we all joined him. Presently we got inside the tent, bought our golden (well, green) tickets and entered the convention!

Barely five minutes later the announcement came over that ticket sales were now to be suspended for two hours. "This is to ease congestion in the exhibition area". Even more ominously, the tannoy continued that a barrier was being set up outside to distinguish those who might get in from those who might never get in. To this day I don't know whether or not Alex had pushed-in, and still don’t want to know.

No matter how many people were still queuing outside, there was surely a greater number already inside. We couldn't move, and were slowly forced along by the crowds through tent after tent that was already packed to capacity and unenterable.

The first tent contained a display of studio sets - some of them not to be seen on TV for more than six months yet. These included UNIT headquarters, Gallifrey, and of course the current TARDIS interior, which even featured the panel that Turlough had recently wrenched off to sabotage the space-time element behind in Terminus.

Consistent with the end of the last televised episode, Kamelion was set-up here. He was still able to stand at this point, and thanks to a cable trailing out of his foot was even making his usual slow robotic movements while soundbites from The King's Demons played out of a speaker.

"Unexpected as it may be, I do have a mind of my own."

If the crowds were sluggish enough, then you got to see more minutes of Kamelion here than in the series.

Later that morning we made it into the sound effects tent, and witnessed an entire presentation by Dick Mills of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. He let us in on how he'd recorded various sound-effects for the show, including using squelching baby-wipes for embryo Daleks, and then played these to us.

"This is the sound of something indescribable crawling up Sarah's much bigger leg."

I'm pretty sure that those were his exact words because, each time these clips were played, from my position to his right, I was subtly turning on the tape-recorder that I had hidden in my bag. I'd brought it with me hoping to record some of the old episodes that were showing in the cinema tent. As the day wore on though, I never had a chance of squeezing in there, but every 25 minutes the EEEYYYOOOWWWWWWW of another episode's cliffhanger screamed out across the masses.

Visual effects demonstration - heard the explosions in the afternoon, but that was all.

Polaroids of oneself with assembled monsters outside the TARDIS in a tennis court - I didn't have the money for that, but Alex did.

Autograph room - never even tried.

Celebrity panels - you must be joking.

Tom Baker flew past us in the crowds at one point.

At another moment, Jon Pertwee swooped down the path, attracting a flock of followers like iron filings to a magnet. For some reason I reckoned that he was about to turn left into the auction tent, so I cut the corner, got there ahead of all of them, and made eye-contact.

"Mr Pertwee, can I have your autograph?" I asked, holding out my Target book and pen. Well of course, if he'd stopped for me, then he would never have made it into the tent.

He said nothing, but simply gave me a bright silent grin instead.

Then he accidentally trod on the edge of my shoe, which tripped me up and left me sprawling on the ground, as he reached the safety of the packed tent that no-one else was allowed to follow him into.

I wasn't the least bit offended, fully understanding why he couldn't stop, but all the same, this encounter still made Pertwee my least favourite Doctor for many years. Today I look back on that moment with pride - Jon Pertwee smiled at me! That's priceless. I can't sell that on Ebay.

Having listened to an auction, seen Bessie, bought a badge and reacquainted ourselves with the much smaller permanent on-site Doctor Who exhibition, I realised mid-afternoon that I was Who'd out. I still recognise when I reach this limit today. We left the convention and went around the Longleat maze, before ultimately climbing into the same minibus to be carried back to the station again.

We excitedly swapped stories with the other fans on the bus, one of whom had spent four hours queueing for autographs, which he showed us. Mark Strickson's went everywhere.

However I suspect that none of us will ever forget the numbing sight, as we drove out of Longleat, of those thousands of people still queuing outside…

Less than two years later, the BBC axed Doctor Who, apparently believing that its funders should watch what it wanted to make, rather than the other way around. Outraged public opinion had that decision back-pedalled by the end of the day, but that turned out to be an even sadder story.

Tonight - over 27 years later - I finished watching Reel Time's documentary DVD about that incredible weekend in the life of this unique TV series. They'd interviewed a ton of the original organisers, guests, attendees and - yes - even one of the now grown-up kids who hadn't been allowed in.

"I was quite disappointed not to have actually got into the event. Especially having travelled all that way from London. It's... one of those things you never forget."

There's also tons of VHS camcorder footage from the event, including several Q and A sessions with castmembers in the extras. Wow, all those people who unknowingly put some of the magic in my life, and so many of whom are sadly no longer with us. Though the sound and vision on these panels is quite challenging, and very little of interest is said, the sheer atmosphere of being in that tent, and seeing those people, during that era of the show's popularity, is a special feeling indeed.

But for me, one particular interviewee in this doco stands out. Nick Briggs, a fan who now plays the voice of the Daleks in the series, tells how as a young viewer he attended a sound effects demonstration by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, secretly armed with a tape recorder hidden in his sleeve. He tells how he kept asking the man to replay several effects so that he could, um, listen to them again.

Thanks for being my decoy, Nick.

Burley-esque

You know how, upon their completion of a long and arduous journey, a person will incredulously regale you with every last painstakingly dull detail of it?

Well, I'm not going to do that.

Because there was so much of my disastrous car journey with Perry last Friday that, even straight afterwards, there was just no way that I could remember it all.

So instead, here are the main factoids of our 6-hour odyssey that have burnt themselves onto my memory, in no particular order: (this in no way makes me guilty of paragraph one)

1. Finally finding the town that we were looking for - Burley. We knew where we were on the map. We drove down its high street. We read the roadsign of the street that we were on - 'Burley Street'. Then we somehow lost it again. No, not the road, the entire town. For several hours.

2. Later stopping in the middle of nowhere, with nowhere stretching out through 360 degrees around us, and Perry exclaiming, "We were there! We were in the town! We were actually in the town!!"

3. Trying to turn a sharp corner in the dark, taking it a little too sharply, going up and coming back down the grassy mound in the narrow road's sharp corner, and finding that we were now at right angles to the road itself, with a grassy verge hemming us in at either end of the vehicle. Think of that scene in Austin Powers when he's got the golf cart impossibly stuck at right angles to the narrow corridor that he's in, and that's how our vehicle was.

4. Sitting down on the toilet in Rownham Services and leaning back slightly, only to discover too late that it had one of those optical switches for operating the flush.

5. Sitting in Rownham Services trying to get my Android phone to opt out of Weekend Freebee in order to be able to top up again without immediately losing money, and thus utilise its SatNav. Apparently I was also opted-in to something called Vodaphone International, so I opted out of that. Apparently I was also opted-in to something called Vodaphone Passport, so I opted out of that. Then the signal went dead, and I realised that I was no longer opted-into anything. Furious jabbing of the buttons ascertained that I was now unable to even contact Vodaphone to fix it.

6. Driving up and down the same stretch of the A31 a total of seven times, including making it all the way back to the Northbound M3 towards London again, and passing a sign that entertainingly included the word "Midlands".

7. On the motorway, overshooting our somewhat hidden exit.

8. At length, overshooting the same somewhat hidden exit a second time.

9. At further length, slowing down to cautiously approach the same somewhat hidden exit a third time, only to find that since the second time it had now been coned off.

10. Trying to drive into Picket Hill, through a bunch of people with placards. All right I made that one up.

11. Perry muttering under his breath that the whole fiasco was "not even a joke."

12. Perry later muttering under his breath that the whole fiasco was now "beyond a joke."

13. Back on the motorway, my trying very very hard indeed to not start laughing. My looking away out of the passenger window and silently wiping the waterfall of tears that was cascading down my cheeks. My getting out of the vehicle in order to privately weep at the whole ridiculous catastrophe under cover of darkness.

14. My refusing to abandon the car to continue on foot through the darkness, mud and rain.

15. Perry abandoning the car to continue on foot through the darkness, mud and rain.

16. About an hour later, my abandoning the car to continue on foot through the darkness, mud and rain.

17. Turning my torch on and discovering that the slab of off-white stepping-stone that it was illuminating in front of me was in fact a large and very wet puddle.

18. Finally arriving at the house, Rich opening the door, and my barking straight at him "Not! A! Word!!!"

19. John laughing at us harder than ever before in the 22 years that I have known him.

20. Bish interrogating me: "Steve - who was navigating?"

21. Rich referring to the pizzas, or more specifically the gorgeous, hot, tasty pizzas full of precious carbohydrates with the words "I don't think I've ever seen Steve each so much so quickly."

I guess that after such an expedition, the rest of the weekend really should have paled by comparison, but the whole event was a ton of fun. We caught up, rewatched This Is Spın̈al Tap, played Scrabble (undefeated winner again :) ), messed about with apps at the pub (specifically Shazam), and ate quite a bit.

Oh, and somewhere along the line, we also fitted in quite a bit of actual walking. Despite what these photos suggest, we definitely didn't spend the rest of the weekend continuing to get lost…










Maybe the explorers of old called it The New Forest because it took them so long to find it.

Torchwood: The Lost Files: The House Of The Dead

*** Contains spoilers ***
Jack: "There is a secret hidden underneath the rift. A shadow from the oldest universe of all. Syrieth - the death feeder. She's been trapped since before there was such a thing as time."

That's all shorthand - or longhand rather - for a story about ghosts.

The thing that I'll remember it for though is that wikipedia had indicated this radio episode to be set following the TV story Children Of Earth. As a result, the presence of Ianto (who died in that story) in the first scene probably meant one of two things - either that wikipedia was wrong, or that Ianto was to be revealed at the end as a ghost.

It was the latter. Dang - that would have been a fantastic twist, and only really possible upon its first broadcast. (few science fiction fans will listen to any audio spin-off without first checking where the episode comes)

The irony for me was that the episode seemed to work much better without this reveal. It raises too many unanswered questions, like why Ianto's dad never told him that he was dead, why he arrived before all the other ghosts, why he doesn't know he's a ghost, why Ianto is more missed by Jack than his grandson, where Ianto gets his headset from, why he doesn't turn it on, why he never notices that it's not turned on, and what Jack is doing back on Earth. Really, just ditch that twist and set it before his death with the other episodes in this series already. You know it (would) makes (more) sense.

Not to mention what a cliché a character turning out to have been dead all along has been ever since that movie a few years back. You know the one. It's so famous for that ending that I don't even have to name it. Or see it.

I've been listening to these three radio episodes - at the moment still referred to by their broadcast title of The Lost Files - whilst getting on with other things, but come the final conversation between Jack and Ianto, I just had to put down what I was doing and pay attention. It's just the sort of talky scene that TV today doesn't have time for, and to hear the two having a chance to say a proper goodbye was an important moment in the series' history.

There was a point where my interest began to wane though, and when Ianto sacrificed his reanimated life to save the already immortal Jack, well, that was just utterly, utterly stupid.

Again, just set it before Children Of Earth and let Jack blow up the building already.

Otherwise, as a listener, you're really better off just turning off after the first half hour and making up your own ending.

Like the TV series that inspired it, this episode could have been much better had it not been trying so hard to prove itself.

Torchwood: The Lost Files: Submission

Fifty years ago, a literal voyage to the bottom of the sea failed to return. Today an underwater cry for help has been heard around the world emanating from the area. With approval from UNIT, Torchwood head down in a submarine to investigate. They find a zombie.

I very rarely criticise anyone's acting in my reviews, but I'm afraid it's the one thing that really stood out about this radio episode.

Right from the word go, the script has trouble communicating all the visual information through the characters' dialogue, a fact exacerbated by the cast's varying success at making it fly, or rather dive. One of them plays off of the others so little that I'd easily believe they were in another room, or recorded on a different day. It's all a bit of a thud after how naturally the preceding Devil And Miss Carew flowed.

This and the less-than-spectacular production make the unfolding mystery as murky as the undersea location in which it is set.

I did like the central concept of a being taking memories in order to dampen a particularly devastating one, and the simple location of the tale was one which got the cast to become explorers for a change. Being so Earthbound, they don't get that opportunity very often.

Also computer-whizz Ianto gets a moment which is perhaps his finest hour…

Jack: "Battle stations people, I wanna to know how big this is."

Ianto: [AT COMPUTER] "Okay, searching 'cry', 'scream', 'siren in the water'… Wow!"

Gwen: "Whoa."

Ianto: "I am getting hits on every social networking site around the world. Facebook, Twitter, Mixi, Qzone… Most reports are time-stamped. If you were in the water from 23:42 to 23:46 GMT, then you heard the cry."

Gwen: "So anywhere in the world, if your head was underwater…"

Ianto: "… then you heard it."

Gwen: "Yeah."

Ianto: "Reports from every continent."

Gwen: "Well look at that! 'Several People Drown in Thailand due to an Intoxicating Sound' - look."

Jack: "See - it's an alien attack! Does anyone have a recording of it? We need to analyse it."

Ianto: "Hold on, I'm hacking the Pacific tsunami warning centre in Indonesia… I am IN! Downloading… and…here it is. [PLAYS INDECIPHERABLE SOUND] That is creepy. It's not coming up as any known alien language."

Gwen: "Well can we trace this back to its source? If we use the network of microphones…"

Ianto: "… echo-locate the transmission! - yep! I'm running an algorithm…speed of sound: 343.2 metres per second."

Gwen: "That's in air though."

Ianto: "Right, it's approximately five times faster in water, baseline… bear with me… that's 1,560 metres per second, but, accounting for salinity, temperature, all factors of depth, using the slight time variations between the hundreds of microphones spread throughout the oceans… and wait for it… there!"

Gwen: "There…? What are you pointing at - Papua New Guinea?"

Ianto: "No - the bit of ocean south of Tokyo and east of Manila!"

Jack: "That's not any bit of ocean. That's the Marianna Trench."

Gwen: "As in the bottom of the sea?"

Jack: "Oh yeah."

Ianto: "Mm-hm."

Gwen: "Lovely."

Jack: "You don't have to be a 51st century time-travelling immortal to know this is alien."

Ianto: "Ye - maybe the alien isn't used to talking in this atmosphere. If I slow the whole thing down… put it through a Bizenfield filter… listen?"

Voice on recording: "Help… us…"

No wonder the Doctor has never made a guest-appearance in Torchwood. Even his technical wizardry would be completely out-classed.

Pollux Et Le Chat Bleu vs. Dougal And The Blue Cat

When I was a tot, I loved the TV show The Magic Roundabout. Hey - who didn't?


It's legendary. In the 1960s and 70s Le Manège enchanté was a series of short stop-motion animations from France, but with a British-language soundtrack written and voiced by the BBC's Eric Thompson, with little if any regard for the original French script. Really - he just had to watch the whole thing mute (and on a tiny screen), and then make something up, right down to who each of the characters were.

There was no talking down, no life lessons, and precious little story in these jammy reworkings. Surreal? These five-minute reels of madcap fun before the news might just have inspired the word.


When I was a teenager in the 1980s, I loved the repeats of the colour series, and would race home from school to catch them. Sometimes I'd hop off the bus in town to watch it on a TV in Boots. On another occasion, I screeched in at home just as it was ending to find my dad patiently audio-taping it for me.


I listened to the LP of the movie spin-off Dougal And The Blue Cat - which aside from its feature length and Fenella Fielding is virtually indistinguishable from the TV series - and loved it.


At 19 I watched Jo's VHS of the same movie at a church weekend away with John, Rich, Bish and others - again it was considered delightful by all. After this 85-minute epic, none of us could comprehend returning to the meagre five-minute doses.

At 21, after Eric Thompson's sad passing, the later Nigel Planer-led series happened on Channel 4, which I'm sorry to say I found to just not be as good as the original. The characters seemed a little meaner, some of their voices quite similar, and the slower pace struck me as filling time. These opinions hold little authority though, because I only watched a few episodes, one of them ironically on a boat to England from France! Planer's series may well have been genius.


Then at 39 I sat through the awful travesty that was the patronising 2005 remake. Well, nobody liked that, not least my friend Brian, who had actually been named after Brian the snail.


By the time earlier this year when - in Australia - I observed Scottish Dave's kid watching new episodes based upon the rereremake, the original UK version's place in my heart was secure.


Until I watched Dougal And The Blue Cat again on DVD this month. I hate to type this, but… um… I don't like it any more.

The story now makes so little sense. And it's so agonisingly slow. And Dylan… he actually is coming out with sly drugs references.


So that cynical urban legend about him was true after all. And after all my protesting that that was just another lame-o urban myth. Drag.

Elsewhere on this DVD are talking heads telling me how vastly superior the British version is to its original French counterpart. Well, all I really had to do to check that out was turn on the subtitles and watch the film again in French…

Oh yes, the original French version of Le Manège enchanté. I knew that the dog was called Pollux, and that I had the TV theme on a really obscure CD somewhere, but that was about it. So, just how different was Eric Thompson's British soundtrack really?

Well, for a start the French language version is louder. Especially Brian, who yells at everyone like… well, like a really annoying Frenchman.


Promisingly, it turns out early on that the mushrooms line is also in the original French version, so maybe 'our' Dylan's clean reputation is secure after all.

Some of the incidental music in the British version hides more singing in the French (hence that funky train underscore), there's more explanation (the reason they go to the moon is to paint it blue), and for my money the whole story makes a lot more sense. Without narration, the script is a lot tighter, and every bit as intelligent as Eric Thompson's.


There are also aspects that may be lost on the British viewer who doesn't speak French, such as the international flavour of the original. Margote (Florence) is Chinese, hence her look. Flappy (Dylan) is Spanish, hence all his siestas. Pollux (Dougal) is British, hence his love of sweet things like sugar. It's all starting to resemble a summit of the United Nations. When the blue cat becomes King and declares war on everyone, well.

But I guess the really bewildering moments are when you realise that what you had previously thought you were watching, had in fact been something quite different. Zebedee's choir of singing girls, in the French version are Zébulon's choir of singing… lollipops. The room of nightmares is actually there to terrify the world's children in their dreams. And the (nameless) blue cat's minions are… um… well, turn off now if you don't want to know… whips.



On the whole though, for the British viewer, maybe the best way to watch the French version is simply with the sound turned off. As I read the subtitles, I found it quite easy to attribute much of the characters' dialogue to the British incarnations that I knew and loved.


Yes, I've come out of watching the French version with a renewed respect and understanding for the British one. In comprehending the plot better, I think I will enjoy and appreciate the film a lot more if I watch it again in the future. Heck, yes, I'll even say it, my love of the original has been… restored by it!

Because, and I know I'm going to lose friends for saying this, but I honestly thought the French one was better.

Sorry Brian.

Torchwood: The Lost Files: The Devil And Miss Carew

Miss Carew: "You see I did a bad thing, Miss Cooper, I sold my soul… to the Devil."

Despite the giveaway episode-title, it takes the script 26 minutes to get to the above line, however let's bear in mind that in this Miss Carew actually neither sells her soul, nor has any actual dealings with Satan. (unless we're going to get all judgemental about her death at the end)

Presumably set after The Dead Line, The Devil And Miss Carew is about an alien somehow offering life to the terminally ill in exchange for help invading Earth. It's a thin story, and does very well for it. Not very much actually happens, enabling the main players to come to the fore through plenty of dialogue.

There is a tiny bit of suggestiveness, but as with the last radio series, this is thankfully the family-friendly version of Torchwood again. The absence of zombies also benefits it, forcing Miss Carew to actually have some motivation for her complicity. There is still the usual machine to save Earth at the end, but since it's really Miss Carew's failure to fix it that solves everything, that's not quite the same deal. The play's opening location of a nursing home is close enough to a hospital for it to count though.

Nothing special, but nothing terrible either. Funnily enough the same day that I listened to this I had coincidentally already watched A Pinky And The Brain Halloween, which conversely did feature the duo selling one of their souls to the evil one.

In fairness, no other series is going to compare well after that.

Gwen: "Well, whoever he is, you're under his control, aren't you?"

Miss Carew: "No! No-one controls me. Everything I do is of my own free will."

Gwen: "If you were acting of your own free will, I don't think you'd be kidnapping people and locking them in your basement."