Old Year Resolutions

New year's resolutions are cool.

For about a day.

Some inspiring heroes I hear actually keep them, but for most of us it's a tradition of writing down a series of twelve-month-long promises to oneself, and then genuinely losing the piece of paper. If it's a computer file, then this stage is even easier. Really, who opens a Word document when they already know what it says?

A while back I supposed that one of the hurdles to keeping these decisions at self-improvement is when I make it possible to fail for the whole year on day one. However if a failure has to emerge over a period of time, well, then I get a lot of second chances.

For example, to fail at "Don't eat chocolate" all I really have to do is pop one Malteaser. However, to fail at "Eat less chocolate", I have to keep tabs on how much I'm eating throughout, say, the month of January. Even then, if on January 31st I conclude that I've eaten far too many of the light snacks that melt in your mouth but not in your hand, it still doesn't actually fail me for the year. I can then keep on curbing my appetite and cutting back right up until December 31st. I suppose I commit to the journey, rather than to just the destination.

Apparently, according to this dust-covered clipboard that I've unearthed in my room, 365 days ago someone with my handwriting scrawled a confused side of A4 with the very best of intentions. Was I drunk at new year 2011? I certainly don't remember it. Mind you, there was that out-of-date Frijj drink that Herschel kept on trying to give me for that Christmas…

Anyway, I'm not going to quote everything on the clipboard here - clearly I was brainstorming during a quiet time - but it is interesting to psychoanalyse my younger self, and see if in the past 12 months anything's changed.

For example, that guy had been living back at home for three years, and wasn't really sure if he'd ever return to his other home in New Zealand. Meh, been there, done that.

Oh, all right then…

"Things I would like to do in 2011.

Be more positive! (especially about people)"

I think I've done that. I even liked Doctor Who this year.

"Finish reading Good News Bible."

Oh, that. Well that's absolutely top of my list this year, if I write another one.

"Finish reading CEV Bible."

Again.

"Finish reading God's Word Bible."

Oh, SPIN ON!

"Collect stuff from New Zealand."

Yes!! :)


Ignoring the fact that I still failed at three of the above, I'm pleased to see that I set myself some goals that were actually achievable. For example further down the list we have "Get new passport + visa" and "Get driving licence", which in all three cases were quite an operation while overseas, but ultimately ones that I succeeded at.

Then it moves on to more long-term creative intentions and a few personal ones. However it's interesting to me that my tone increasingly moved away from specific achievements, and onto more gradual self-improvement.

"Let God be God."

"Make fewer decisions because of a system or reason."

"Be brave and confident." (that's a repeated Bible quote)

"Learn.
?Sign language.
?Dance moves.

"Return towards vegetarianism."

"Justify my life to others in my identity in God, rather than measurable results."

"Spend less time on the internet + more time film-making."

(I'm quite pleased to have made Neighbro's)

"Do things out of choice rather than because I have to (e.g. because I said that I would)." (something of a disclaimer?)

"I will pray honestly."

"I will not have set daily prayers." (failed!)

"I will make my own decisions (& mistakes) rather than lazily let my rules make my decisions for me."

"I will become someone who always speaks positively of people."

"Rules and 'laws' are observations, not necessarily forces."

Clearly by this point I'd made the transition from writing resolutions to just plain philosophising.

Buried away in here though is one commitment that I decided to copy across from the preceding year - "I will not be afraid." Big fails there. Don't ask.

Another one that I didn't write down was to simply "do less". Well, maybe I should have commited that to paper too. Or would that have been defeating it?

I think in scrawling all this out there was also some attempt to just get a bit closer to understanding who I am, so that I can better aim to be that person.

"1. Find more opportunities to make people laugh.
2. Speak positively of people.
These seem to be who I am."

Finally, in large letters across the bottom, and underlined twice, I've written what obviously seemed of paramount importance, and I still can't argue with it:

"Make people laugh!
+figure out why."

I don't know if I'll make a list this year. These still seem like a good direction for me to be aiming in.

And anyway, I still haven't finished those three Bibles.

Shrek The Halls

I've been waiting a year to watch this.

I taped it last Christmas, because the BBC had decided to air it a day before the chronologically earlier movie Shrek The Third. Of course I wanted to watch them in the right order - I mean who wouldn't?

Anyway, somehow I managed to then miss said prequel, so filed away the unwatched tape of Shrek the Halls, and seven months later borrowed the DVD of the preceding chapter off of Brett. Coincidentally, by that point I was in a hemisphere where it was winter again.

Now however it's Christmas once more - and winter for a third time too - so this morning I duly dug out the old tape to find out what happened next to Shrek, Fiona and the babies they had just had.

Shrek The Halls is an enjoyable gag-packed addition to the Shrek canon, offering a welcome opportunity to drop-in on most of the movies' characters at Christmas time.

But what does Christmas look like in a land filled with people from storybooks? I mean do incarnations of the characters from the Christmas story exist in this world? Could versions of Mr and Mrs Christ show up here, complete with three kings from Orient, and looking for a stable to freeze in on the night of December 24th? Well, there's definitely a donkey…

Now obviously I wasn't expecting a discussion of metaphysics from a Shrek story, but I am disappointed that the writers kept this Christmas special as far, far away from the birth of Christ as it is possible to get. Come on, it is called Christmas! :)

But y'know, even that huge omission would be fine with me, but that the central story here is of Shrek himself learning what "the real meaning of Christmas" is. (not sure how he and Fiona missed last year's one - how long have they been married?)

"The real meaning of Christmas" is family, friendship, and fun. Not of a creator loving his created beings, and entering that world to restore them. Whether you believe in God or not, having him enter a world of created characters - as one of them - really ought to have fitted in perfectly here, albeit for different reasons to different groups of viewers.

And no, neither does it seem to be because the makers had an eye on redubbing the show for cultures that don't celebrate Christmas - these wintry visuals are specific to modern-day Crimbo.

Mind you, I suppose the characters themselves might have objected. Just how might the nativity story come across in a world where fairy stories are true? The residents of Far, Far Away might reasonably have protested that since God and the other nativity characters have never existed in their realm, therefore they are irrelevant. They're atheists! :)

Which I guess brings on the inevitable question - just who do fairy tale characters tell stories about?

But enough of what this 20-minute programme didn't contain.

There are plenty of good gags in here, but it does get gross towards the end, and whoever's writing Fiona has apparently never watched the first film, much like whoever wrote the third one. I'd graciously suppose that her generic mom-ness here is some sort of character-development, but it really seems more like the opposite. She might as well be Ellie from Ice Age 3.

I guess they might do an Easter one next.

In which case, I don't rate the Gingerbread man's chances.

(available here)
Related reviews:

Shrek
Shrek 2
Shrek The Third
Shrek Forever After

Bedknobs And Broomsticks

Herschel reckons that this is quite a slow film, right up until the point when all the animation begins.

I reckon that this is quite a slow film, but only after the point when all the animation begins.

Which of us is right? There's only one way to find out… FIIIGHT!!!


Well, maybe not.

When I was a kid, I really wanted to see this film, purely because of the clips that I'd seen of the live action cast and their bed travelling through the world of a cartoon. After all, cartoons equalled fun, so what kid wouldn't want to be transported to such a realm? Truly, this was exactly the sort of dream that the cinema made its trade delivering upon.

It's a first class tribute to Disney that today - some 40 years later - these now iconic composite sequences still deliver the fantasy with compelling authenticity. The frame-rate, the multiple layers - there are just no corners cut here. Unlike say in 2003's Looney Tunes - Back In Action.

Not only do Miss Price and company go on their own voyage to the bottom of the sea, but the intensity of ideas in the subsequent insane football match ensure that this cartoon world is as real, if not more so, than the significantly duller live-action one of the surrounding reels.

The tone of the whole film feels like it wants to be another Mary Poppins. As well as the hybrid sequences, we have another kindly witch, more independently moving household objects, and show-stopping songs galore, although none quite so catchy. Even David Tomlinson is in here. When a crowd of dancers begin springing around on a studio set of a generic American street trying to pass itself off as the centre of London, you can't help but wish that Dick Van Dyke were here'n'awl, busta.

Bedknobs And Broomsticks can be quite slow in places, and it's a shame that the famous cartoon / live action material actually represents only one small chunk of the film, but it remains as timeless now as ever.

(available here)

Doctor Who: The Liar, The Wish And The Wardrobe

(I know. :) )

I can usually recognise when Doctor Who is a 'special'. It's all up there there on the screen in the opening credits…

"Doctor Who"

"Starring:"

"Matt Smith"

"And…"

"Some woman you've never heard of before."

All right, so Claire Skinner is probably quite well-known, in fact they all probably are, but each year this viewer has genuinely had no idea at all who on earth Catherine Tate, Michelle Ryan, Lindsay Duncan and Katherine Jenkins were.

(I assumed 2007's billing of "Kylie Minogue" to be a joke)

Guest stars hold little sway with me. The recognition and reminder that it's someone from another series behaving in a way different to how I expect breaks the illusion somehow. Here, Alexander Armstrong as Reg reminded me of someone, but I wasn't sure who, which distracted in a different way.

The one guest who I did recognise here - Spaced's Bill Bailey - duly does his usual world-weary bureaucratic thing, so I was good with that.

As for the eleventh Doctor, never before has he so proved himself as such a watchable incompetent fool.

Well, he's not actually that incompetent, but there are sequences in this that are, frankly, Mr Bean with dialogue.

That whole opening sequence for example, with him blowing up the spaceship and wrestling to get the spacesuit on backwards, before being driven blind into town, walking into a lamppost, and eventually trying to take-off inside an actual Police Box. I can hear him graciously accepting my gushing praise now…

Doctor: "I know."

Alas, one reason why his visual comedy works so well might just be because some of his dialogue here is so hard to make out. There's a classic scene when he's showing the children around their Christmas bedroom, which would be wondrous, but for his off-mic dialogue getting hammered into submission by all the heavy music. Maybe they can remix this and/or even redub it as a DVD extra - such an epic sequence deserves to be set free.

As the episode progressed, the storyline seemed to be moving quite slowly, which was an achievement given that it also fitted in enough mystery to make the episode feel quite eventful.

I mean all right, yes, so the aliens turn humans into zombies as usual. Yes, there was a spacesuit which hid its wearer's face from view as usual. Yes, there are enormous coincidences that no-one notices as usual (the proximity of the Doctor's crash-landing to the TARDIS, the foursome's eleventh hour arrival in the forest). Yes the Doctor, pretending to be dead after The Wedding Of River Song, still draws attention to his TARDIS, even parking it on a street corner at the end.

However the bottom line for me is that I found the whole thing fun, funny, touching and Christmassy.

I mean what else was I really looking forward to here?

After this CS Lewis tribute, and last year's A Christmas Carol, I wonder if the pattern has been set for a different famous Christmas story to be the show's inspiration every year? Next yuletide I'm hoping for The Wizard Of Oz (complete with song and set in Australia), and after that, oh I don't know, maybe Star Wars.

But then, it kind of looked like we were getting that at the start this year:

Bad Hair Day - "Weird Al" Yankovic

Yes, it's that time of year again!

More specifically, the early hours of Christmas Day, when I can usually be found wrapping last-minute prezzies all night to a CD by the man called Weird.

I've been carrying on this tradition for so many years now that I'm surprised to find that I've still got any of his albums left. But here it is - Bad Hair Day from 1994. I'd say that it's from his heyday, but Al's heyday seems to have started in the 1980s and still be going strong. Like I said, he's Weird.

The track from this one that everyone remembers is the opening number - Amish Paradise. Funny track, awesome production, but arguably a bit mean-spirited. If the Amish can't hear the song, then it's impossible to laugh with them, which makes it feel like we're laughing at them.

In fact, several songs on here are unusually nasty for the funny singer with the family-friendly image. Since You've Been Gone, I'm So Sick Of You, and The Night Santa Went Crazy are all catchy feel-good numbers about how terrible someone is.

Although the joy is missing from many of the lyrics, it's well in evidence in every tune on here, not least Syndicated Inc. (a parody of Soul Asylum's ironically-entitled Misery) which extols the virtues of syndicated TV shows.

Speaking of which, the second track on here - Everything You Know Is Wrong - really ought to get made into a weekly TV series itself. Just listen to what the plot of one such episode would be:

"I was walkin' to the kitchen for some Golden Grahams,
When I accidentally stepped into an alternate dimension,
And soon I was abducted by some aliens from space,
Who kinda looked like Jamie Farr.

They sucked out my internal organs,
And they took some polaroids,
And said I was a darn good sport,
And as a way of saying thank you,
They offered to transport me back to,
Any point in history that I would care to go.

And so I had them send me back to last Thursday night,
So I could pay my phone bill on time,
Just then the floating disembodied head of
Colonel Sanders started yelling…

[CHORUS] Everything you know is wrong…"

This is one of my all-time favourite songs ever. Please Al, can you write a sequel? I just gotta know what else happens to this guy!

TRACK LISTING:

1. Amish Paradise.
2. Everything You Know Is Wrong.
3. Cavity Search.
4. Callin' In Sick.
5. The Alternative Polka.
6. Since You've Been Gone.
7. Gump.
8. I'm So Sick Of You.
9. Syndicated Inc.
10. I Remember Larry.
11. Phony Calls.
12. The Night Santa Went Crazy.

Doctor Who: Up All Night / Closing Time

1. Up All Night

What the heck is this deleted scene doing masquerading as a minisode?

No Doctor, no companions, no TARDIS, no story, no aliens, no new information. Just the guest-characters from Closing Time in a scene set just before the start of that episode. Even the title bears no relevance to it.

What happened - did they label the wrong video-file?

No, this is the unreleased prequel isn't it?

As a trailer, the only thing really wrong with it is the awful incessant music drowning the whole thing into submission. Certainly not something I want to pay to see, or hear.

Please bill this as what it is, it doesn't stand a chance otherwise.

2. Closing Time

"Hello Craig - I'm back!"

Oh, all right then.

Let's face it - last season's The Lodger just wasn't anything special. The plot was thin, the science-fiction content entirely there to service the emotional journey, and the Doctor was… well, weird.

But it didn't offend. In fact, it didn't really do much of anything. The Lodger was a real non-episode.

So - they chose that story to make a sequel to, and you know what? Closing Time hits all the same scores.

It's a comedy again. It's Amy's episode off again. There are Diet-Cybermen invading London, uh, I mean Colchester, uh, I mean a shop in Colchester, but as before the aliens are only really there as a means to bring out hapless Craig's feelings.

Speaking of the Diet-Cybermen, are these the same ones as in The Next Doctor? How come they have Cybermats like the original full-sugar versions, and why did the Doctor suddenly refer to them in The Almost People? I hope he's not going to rewind through his life again next week.

Anyway the two flatmates' reprised double-act does pretty well here, even despite the constant millstone of a baby, probably because it is so incidental to their tasks. In fact, the eleventh Doctor seems to spend rather a lot of his time around minors, and it has to be said that he always shines at this. The Doctor's gentleness is just as watchable as his barminess, and you have to wonder just how much Matt Smith is improvising.

But hey, according to The Impossible Astronaut, for the character it has been 200 years since just the start of this series, and it's a shame that more isn't made of the Doctor's touching 'farewell tour'. Did he similarly drop in on the Brigadier? Sarah Jane? His granddaughter Susan? Oh that's right I forgot she's dead. (killed off with all the other Gallifreyans in The End Of The World)


And did I hear right? Did little Alfie actually refer to him as 'Doctor Who' at the end? Good call!

The ending segues rather nicely into a cliffhanger for next week's season finale. At present it all looks like a horrible tangle of events to find motivations for. Eg. how the Doctor knows he dies tomorrow in his timestream, why he's going along with it, why River kills the Doctor against her own wishes, why River forgets killing the Doctor, why in a spacesuit from a lake, why the Silence don't just shoot the Doctor themselves while he's looking the other way (stoopid Silence)…

I'm not expecting a season finale that makes much sense, but I am hoping to enjoy it.

Much like last season's one.

Doctor Who: First Night / Last Night

A two-part minisode story, which holds the impresssive distinction of being easier to place within River's timeline than the Doctor's, especially without having seen the next series.

However its inclusion within the DVD box set of season 32 implies that it's supposed to happen sometime during this set of episodes.

Amy and Rory are referred not only as asleep, but also as River's parents, further narrowing the window down to after Let's Kill Hitler, but before their departure three weeks later in The God Complex.

I think I'd go for placing this straight after the Doctor has left River the diary in Let's Kill Hitler. At the start of this he briefs her on how to use it, which from his perspective seems to be a part of the same plan.

The tension against all of this is that in episode two the Doctor meets his future self. Given the high number of duplicates that the Doctor routinely encounters, it's a surprise that he accepts his future self at face-value, but the real problem is how much this encounter disables the inevitability of his upcoming murder at the end of the series.

On the one hand it would make sense for him to take River to the singing towers of Darillium before his impending death, given how essential the trip is to his saving her in Forest Of The Dead. On the other, I can't help expecting that the bulk of this date will still go and show up in a future full-length episode, which would grant him foreknowledge of his murder's failure.

Mind you, despite this story's brevity, it also squeezes in the start of River's sentence, the launch of her diary-keeping, and her apparently getting used to her new name after Let's Kill Hitler. These are also events that I've been hoping to witness in the series proper, and it's a bit rich to expect me to either shell out a load of additional cash for a DVD box set to see them, or miss out. I've already paid my BBC licence fee, thank you, and not for an incomplete service. The joy of River's character (and arguably the Doctor's) lies in what a jigsaw puzzle her life is, so to withhold some of the pieces sabotages that.

These minisodes are impeccably made though, and trounce the productivity of every other science-fiction series that I've ever heard of, but if licence-payers are expected to pay extra for them, then they should actually be extra to the story, not essential.

Finally, the moment the Doctor realises that River is only pretending to be unconscious to get him to give her mouth-to-mouth, he appears to break the fourth wall with an Oliver Hardy style camera look.


By the way, just a quick reminder, River arguably didn't die at the library, although I agree that all her subsequent appearances would be better if she had.

Doctor Who: Good Night

Minisode apparently set 24 hours after Bad Night.

In the TARDIS, Amy pinions down the Doctor on what's become of her life history. (or should that be her life herstory?)

For my money the explanation that Amy and Rory both now have two contradictory sets of memories really ought to have been covered in The Big Bang, not eighteen months later if you're willing to pay extra for the DVD that features this minisode.

Again throwing his own rule about not crossing personal timelines to the wind, the Doctor takes Amy back into her youth (alright even further back into her youth) and messes with her head even more, purely to prove a point you understand.

Like a scientific experiment, it's important to observe what happens to Amy's memory as the Doctor takes her back to that childhood day. Before the journey back in time, she says that she was alone that day. During the journey back in time, she still says that she was alone that day. However, as soon as the TARDIS materialises, her memory updates with the event of her having met her older self, despite it not having actually taken place yet for either Amy.

Conclusion: History seems to update at the moment when the TARDIS first enters and changes the timestream. From this moment on, all of the Doctor's and Amy's imminent actions in this time and place are already a part of history, although they have yet to cause them. Presumably the effects of their next visit will not be a part of the universe's history until they have first landed there either.

Nobody in the series has clearly explained how time-travel works in Doctor-Who-Land yet. They tend to just hide behind the words "It doesn't work like that."

It's great to see author Steven Moffat expounding his vision of how time-travel works, but again, I really needed to be informed of his system before trying to follow something like A Christmas Carol, or it can just look like a load of contradictions.

Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory

This film wants so badly to be a comedy, knows it wants so badly to be a comedy and, fortunately, actually is a comedy.

I would love to make that last line "and is very badly a comedy", but the truth is that Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory succeeds very well at it all.

The opening half hour charges all over the world, introducing us to sketch after sketch featuring characters who we never hear of again. Even Tim Brooke-Taylor shows up, surely reading Graeme Garden's lines, as he argues with a huge 1970s computer about whether or not it will tell him where the remaining Golden Tickets are.

Everyone does their job pretty well here, although for me the one element that clashed was the music. The ballads, though very catchy, just don't seem to belong in such a larger-than-life world, and even the incidental music is so brash as to make the whole movie more reminiscent of a circus. Which makes sense in the choreographed factory scenes, but less so elsewhere.

Still, ignoring the holes, and ambiguity as to location, it's a great simple story, told very clearly, and Gene Wilder makes his title role a hard one to pigeon-hole.

For my money, there's not a lot to distinguish it from the more recent 2005 version starring Johnny Depp, other than obviously that whole backstory about Wonka's dad, which is nowhere in this one.

Midway through watching this two nights ago I actually did eat a bar of chocolate. It seemed like the thing to do. It seemed only fair as I'm pretty sure I also took the trouble to eat one while watching the other version a year ago.

Now as I type this, I read on wikipedia that this film was originally conceived as a feature length advert for an actual Wonka chocolate bar.

Well, that turned out to be a far-sighted business move.

(available here)

Doctor Who: Bad Night

Minisode which looks as though it's going to fill-in what happened when the Doctor and River met Mr Fish (referred back to in the earlier episode The Impossible Astronaut), but then sadly doesn't. A missed opportunity. They had a fish right there in the TARDIS and everything.

Anyway, I think I'd plonk this straight after Space/Time, because in that Amy said that she wanted to ask the Doctor a question, which she then didn't, and here she seems to be making another attempt. It's also kind of funny how the Doctor and Rory seem to be quietly bonding without her.

It is difficult to see what the motivation is for this DVD-only piece of slapstick. The previous series' specially-shot extra scenes had the agenda of filling in gaps between episodes. This one makes no claim as to when it happens, ties no loose threads up, and thanks to implied off-camera events - both before and after the action - feels more like it comes between two other minisodes that I've missed.

Would it be too much to hope to see those released with the following series?

The Sarah Jane Adventures - season 5 overview

It was probably a fluke, but this final season achieved what I've been hoping for in these reviews for years - a return to the high standard of the first one.

For me, the first two stories have been okay, and the final one pretty good, but what's really stood out this year has been the style.

The characters have displayed a lot more subtlety, nowhere more so than in the last story. It's a credit to author Gareth Roberts that this higher standard has generally noticed in his scripts over the years, at least in their opening episodes.

New character Sky didn't get long to establish herself, but just about scraped through. K-9's absence has been a disappointment, most notably because of the opportunities for him to cameo with Luke.

Given the brevity of this series - well, half-series really - it's a surprise that each episode's opening trail of shots from upcoming episodes was not only retained, but elongated, despite the shortage of material. Nowhere did this do greater damage than in the final episode, where it subtracted from the amount of time available for the farewell montage at the very end.

It's infuriating that there aren't six more episodes of this. However if there had been, chances are that they wouldn't have been as good as these six. Alas, but after six such great episodes, we were now due the season's usual six turkeys.

I do think it was a mistake to broadcast these (on BBC1 at any rate) in the recent twice-weekly pacing. With only half the usual episodes we needed these spaced out to make it feel like a full 6-part series. I'm very pleased that that's the way we watched them in my house.

I'm alternatively surprised that they weren't reworked as hour-long Christmas/Easter/Christmas specials.

Myself, I hope that that is the end. I have no wish to either watch Luke and Sky dealing with their mother's death, or hear any more about Clani. I admit that by the end of the show's run - specifically in the final story - they just made it to being a gang worth watching, but given the show's track-record, future scripts would be unlikely to maintain this standard. Even if they did, thanks to the all the argy-bargy music, I doubt that we would be able to hear them.

I actually find myself wondering whether Rani will make the transition to full-time Doctor Who companion. (let's not kid ourselves about the others) Thanks to the writers, and not least actress Anjli Mohindra, she's already fully-qualified there. She even has the usual family established. However despite how nice it might be to see more Rani stories, I really hope this doesn't happen. There is just no way of pulling that off without constantly reminding us of Sarah Jane's off-camera absence. Sadly, I think the TARDIS' navigation system has to now draw a very thick circle on its internal map around Bannerman Road, Ealing.

All the same - to everyone in Sarah's whanau, whether they were in that rushed closing montage or not - K-9, Mr Smith, Maria, Luke, Clyde, Rani, Sky, Alan, Maria's mum, the tenth Doctor, the eleventh Doctor, Haresh, Gita, Professor Rivers, the Captain, the Shopkeeper, the Brigadier, Jo, Santiago and you Sarah Jane Smith - I'm telling myself that I'll see most of you later.

After all, I trust that in years to come, you'll be seeing much more of each other.

Individual episode reviews:

Sky
The Curse Of Clyde Langer
The Man Who Never Was

(my own tribute to Elisabeth Sladen here)

The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Man Who Never Was

It's been said that writing for TV is a series of compromises.

There are jammier shows, but throughout its successful five-season life, The Sarah Jane Adventures seems to have survived by this principle too.

We’ve had many stories in which a strong part one has been compromised by a much, much weaker part two. We've had clever endings that have been compromised by being preceded and followed by other stories with very similar endings. And pretty well every regular character has been compromised by being turned into a zombie, very rarely to remember afterwards how often.

This story however, even after completion, was always going be a series of compromises, for the very saddest of reasons. After all, just how is it supposed to be possible to watch The Man Who Never Was without compromising its achievements by dwelling throughout upon the lead actress' untimely death shortly after wrapping?

With that awful knowledge, I find it impossible to watch this one objectively, and yet, this final story is arguably The Sarah Jane Adventures' finest hour.

It's not the story that anyone would write as the series' finale. It doesn't feature the Trickster trying to change history so that the last five years never happened. Neither does Maria return to attend her mother's wedding. Nor do Clyde, Rani and Sky go their separate ways to university. Nor does it finish with Sarah turning down the fourth Doctor's offer of more travels in the TARDIS in favour of her new family on Earth. Heck, they don't even sit around the attic recalling clips. Nope, it's just business as usual.

Because it was.


As such, there's yet another zombie, who as per normal is treated as though such a concept has never been featured in this show before, and certainly not over a dozen times. There's a pantomime baddie who has no redeeming features at all, just in case we might find some excuse in his attitude to challenge our own selves. And there's also the machine that he's using, which has to be turned against him. Even BBC News gets in its usual report about the impending worldwide disaster.

However lest you think that SJA limped out with yet another half-hearted go at its exhausted regular formula, the series' consistently best author turned this telling into a doozy.

The characterisation throughout is as spot-on as it gets. The comedy actually has banter, which never lets up. The tale carries an educational message about the modern-day slave-trade, with the whole thing a satire on ipads and much computer hardware's alleged sweatshop origins.

Even the successful subversion of Harrison's control device isn't really what this conclusion is about. There's a tasklist of other challenges that our heroes have to successfully make happen too, against the odds of course.

And the direction. Quality, just, quality. It felt like a really good Doctor Who, and what more can we really ask than that?

There is no sense anywhere of these being the last two episodes ever, but they maintain a consistency of tone that so many others fail to, and are genuinely enjoyable.

Well, mostly. The way that hologram was operated was inspired lunacy, but when it went wrong I found the comedy trying too hard. Funny Toy Story line though. Shame the aliens never used their hypno ray on their master.

In terms of accidentally tying up the series' loose ends, it's an enormous relief that siblings Luke and Sky get to meet each other in this, and indeed gel together so well. Had the series concluded one story earlier, that introduction would have remained gallingly outstanding. Maybe the truncation of this planned final season didn't get away with quite as much damage as it could have.

And production-wise, that's the really big compromise - that we should have had three more probably dreadful stories after this about Sarah Jane and friends noisily defeating BBC News-heralded-zombies by switching their machine into reverse by just speaking the right sentence.

Instead we finished on a two part-story which I pretty well loved all of. Really, I did.

Except for, crushingly, the final 30 seconds. I feel sure that many saw this closing montage and were genuinely touched by it, but I felt it finished the show on a series of fumbles.

But you know what? I don't think my many problems with those 30 seconds are worth going into. It's good that they made the effort to draw a line under the series rather than leave it open-ended, and no-one wants to pan an obituary.

Tell you what I will point at though, and that's the final on-screen caption "And the story goes on... forever."

What the heck is that supposed to mean? Does Sarah continue saving Earth with Luke, Sky, Clyde, Rani and K-9? Or do the kids carry on without Sarah next year? Or does Sarah carry on without the kids next year? Does everyone get replaced? All of these possibilities are suddenly hinted at by that non-committal caption. For all the questions it raises, they might as well have just mysteriously flashed up "The end…?"

So, ignore that. Think of the series as finishing with Luke and his sister Sky hugging instead. There - everything worked out well for Sarah and the gang in the end.

What's that? A new BBC book containing the scripts for the remaining six unmade episodes?

No thanks. The Sarah Jane Adventures are complete.

And what a high to go out on.

:)

The Making Of Neighbro's

"Neighbro's,
Everybody needs good neighbro's,
Just an L&P each morning,
Helps to make it sweet as, aye?
Neighbro's,
Live in units near each other,
That's when good neighbro's become best mates."

Part 1 of 6 - Inspiration.

To: cession | chaordic team
From: bj
Subject: Next round of services
Date: Mon, 11 Apr 2011 17:21:30 +1200

Sunday 15 – 29 May – Neighbours series – an exhortation to serve, share and sacrifice for the community in which we are placed
Yes, we will do the Aussie Soap series as a rip off!

The day after the above email we had a meeting to plan the creative content of the church's upcoming series, to be entitled 'Neighbours'.

Since the creative content of previous series had arguably been inspired by such retro media franchises as Indiana Jones, Miami Vice, and Fraggle Rock, there really wasn't any discussion as to what a series concerning how we relate to our neighbours should be themed around.

Back in the 1980s, for a while there, I was watching Neighbours enthusiastically. I still maintain that the first nine months on Channel 7 had featured some excellent long-term plotting, and the next three months of its life on Channel 9 had seen it soar ever higher as more of a daily sitcom.

But then the rot had set in. Characters would forget the events of earlier episodes. Characters would get recast, despite the availability of the original actors. Characters would get replaced by identical characterisations with different names. The residents of Ramsay Street were behaving less like people, but more like TV characters.

When they made little Lucy grow several years older so that they could start using her for puberty storylines, I stopped watching.

I have always had an axe to grind about all of that.

"So," I asked at the meeting, "are we talking current Neighbours, or classic Neighbours?"

The three-word answer that emerged from the room was "cricket match Neighbours".

Almost immediately Nigel was showing us all the opening credits to the very first episode from YouTube, and straight away I was picking them apart. No no no, I protested, that's not the first episode, that's the second series on Channel 9, not Channel 7. And anyway, Tom didn't join until later when he replaced his brother Max, taking over his house, his family, and his current attempts to take up golf.

Like I said, still with an axe to grind. And yet, I didn't know if I still wanted to go on grinding it after all these years. So when the call went out for someone to author three video-sketches to shoot and screen before the congregation as ice-breakers, I kept quiet, and let Jon take it.

It didn't work - I just kept on getting ideas and emailing them to him.

Well, Jon knew an easy route out of more work when he saw it…

Part 2 of 6 - Writing.

So I started to type.

Flatmate Dave's old laptop, which five years earlier I'd used extensively for this blog, was now a little old. It was slow. It took a while to boot up. Word was no longer installed, so I had to make do with Google Documents. The net result of all this was my spending a couple of evenings typing agonisingly slowly, as the amount of time between my pressing the keys and actually seeing the letters come up on the screen rose to over 30 seconds.

It was strange - watching myself half a minute in the past typing something, and forming an opinion of him for all those typos that he kept making.

Still, I had three episodes to compose, each one of which had to not only parody a series that I seemed to remember more clearly than anyone else, but more importantly support the message of that week's sermon.

Trying to understand the intended message of each week, let alone dressing it up in a script, was something that I found a huge challenge. One of the best pieces of advice had come from Jon - "The message of the sketch is always the opposite of the message of the sermon."

So I absolutely scrutinised every last word of that planning document:

"Week 1 – Thinking Missionally – The Incarnation Principle – God Came to be with us – we do the same – challenging thinking about church and understanding where cession|community sits within the possibilities – Frank Ritchie speaking"

So in part one, Grundy Street is a metaphor for the church, with Lame Brain SuperJane seeing new members as a threat to the old order.

"Week 2 – Thinking Neighbourly – what does it mean to live as neighbours to people in our worlds and to love them – practical application – Brett Jones"

So in part two, Lame Brain SuperJane and Kylie, through indifference, are really bad neighbours to Jason.

"Week 3 - Thinking Synergistically – When the church does incarnation and neighbourliness well as a BODY – the community of faith, the body of Christ, the priesthood of all believers – tying this to what we are doing in Community Engagement through the trust and other initiatives – Rob Reynolds"

So in part three, when Jason can't help Kylie, another resident from the street steps in to help instead, but for the wrong reasons.

After much brainstorming, I made the mistake of sending an early draft round to friends for feedback. I say 'mistake' because it seems that, unless a person is used to offering feedback, no matter how many times you use the words 'early' and 'draft' together, people will still think that you think that it is your finished masterpiece.

But you know what? A lot of that is just my own insecurity. By the following month's meeting I knew exactly what I wanted to do, exactly who I wanted for which tasks, and even who I hoped would sing the opening music.

But I couldn't express any of that. At the next meeting I kept torturing myself that everyone would think that I was taking it too seriously. To me it was a creative project, but to everyone else they were quick sketches for church. As my paranoia became a self-fulfilling prophesy, I watched helplessly as my vision slowly began to unravel through others' hands, with barely a peep of an objection from me.

The following morning I agonised to Josh about it on the way into work. I told him how much I'd been punishing myself for not standing up for the creative choices that I wanted. Josh seemed to chuckle at this, and spoke words so deep that they might just stay with me for the rest of my life.

"And there's the irony. You berate yourself."

Part 3 of 6 - Shooting.


On Saturday 7th May, Scott shot the opening credits. I didn't have the confidence to say that I wanted a slightly different version for episode three, to incorporate new character Darius.

Picking my battles, I did however stand my ground over the presence of a character in two locations at once. I didn't like the idea of someone in the street simultaneously watching themselves from indoors behind a window. Such an event was impossible, which I felt was crossing a line. Scott on the other hand saw its value as an extra joke, and one which we were compelled to include because there were no other actors available to stand behind the window and react. In the end we compromised, and Scott himself played the extra neighbour behind the window.


Another instance was the parody of the final aerial shot of Ramsay Street. Scott had some perfect aerial footage that he'd shot recently in Christchurch, but I wanted it to actually be Howick - the same town in which the viewers at church live. Scott conceded the battle but won the war, as I later decided that, although I hadn't seen his Chch material, he was probably right.

With the opening credits in the can, that night was Jon's karaoke birthday party, so I went off to that instead of learning my lines.

Mistaaake.

The following afternoon we began shooting the scenes. Originally I had anticipated two shoots for these, and accordingly written the script to exploit two locations. By now however I'd reset all the coffee shop material - in fact the entire series - into the one room of the one house. There was no greater practicality about this, it just appeared more doable on paper. At least one person told me that they expected to get all three episodes in the can that afternoon. I made it clear that I only expected to get half of the series done. In the event we got two-thirds completed - right up to the end of episode two!

So I arrived carrying various props including two wigs that I'd bought, but found Kate and Carmel enthusiastically having their hair done 80s-style.


They looked great! I just didn't have the heart to explain that I'd bought wigs, so I let it go. After all, when you compromise the fun, you're losing sight of a large part of the reason. Nobody had got the joke yesterday during the credits about Carmel's rainbow wig anyway, so I had already decided to drop that.

One of the most disappointing compromises was losing the dog Barker. He/she (there were to have been contradictory references) was to have represented the good neighbour, the only one who stayed behind with Jason, and hopefully elicited a serious "Aww" factor from the viewers. Yes, there was to have been a serious moment, and Barker was it. Still, we got his/her name in.

Pleased to have exceeded my expectations of how far we had got with shooting, various factors had to be juggled afterwards to find a final filming date for episode three. This was the bit that I was glad to have let go into DaNae's hands - phoning around everyone trying to get things organised. In the end, rather than lose any castmembers, we had to let the unavailable house go, and shot the final part over at DaNae's flat instead!

The closing shots, in which Kylie's long-lost half-cousin Katie shows up, were to have ideally featured whoever extra was available, but in the end we just asked Carmel to play a dual role.

When Katie shoots Kylie, the final line was going to be Darius exclaiming that old chestnut "One nun dead and Katie!" However Jon didn't get the darts reference, and so I supposed that other Kiwis might not either. So instead we went with my back-up line "Time for you to shoot-through, Kylie!"

This however meant that the character did not now need to be called Katie, so I wanted to change it to Terri, for reasons that Neighbours fans will understand. With all the rush to finish and go home though, somehow her name remained Katie, although now I think about it I suppose it should really have been Maxine.

Anyway, to dress up Carmel as her identical twin half-cousin Katie, I finally opened the packet containing the wig that I'd originally bought for Jane. My heart hit the floor as I realised that it had been a perfect 'Kylie wig' all along… and the character called Kylie hadn't been wearing it! Oh, big gag lost there. Big gag. Sad face.

The next day at home I cleared a lot of furniture to one side to take some additional shots to drop in of Jason's deserted house. Yup, that room was played by three different buildings. I briefly considered trying to work flatmate Dave's cat Jade in in place of the dog Barker, but heaved myself back. I also took a couple of photos of a house and street for the closing credits.

Part 4 of 6 - Editing.


Then it was time to start editing by watching the rushes, and I discovered how backlit some of the first two episodes had come out. It looked like we were filming in a real house, as opposed to on a set. Dang.

Similarly, right from the off I'd been aware that using the built-in mic on the camcorder would catch the reverb off the walls and give the same roomy effect, so at time of shooting DaNae had recorded all of the dialogue separately on a flash mic from my work. This was much nearer to the actors, and gave them much greater presence, most of the time. Anyway, plenty of syncing up to be done.

However, in episode three, at one point while Kylie and Darius are on the phone to each other, I somehow messed-up and accidentally used the feed from the camera's mic for one of them. The result made no descernable drop in quality, but did nonetheless sound different. As we had shot both halves of the conversation in the same room, the different mic-feed was a great enhancement to the sense that Darius was indeed speaking in a different location to Kylie. Result!

One of the more long-winded editing jokes comes during the same exchange. Darius is listening to Kylie on the phone, and as well as via the crackly handset, we can also hear Kylie 'over on the next set'. It's a minor point, and probably sounds like a error, but that's the intention!


In fact, the flash-mic's proximity to the actors turned out to have often been a little too close, as evidenced by its ubiquitous appearances on the edge of the frame. Now I know what you're thinking - I could have just left the microphone in shot and it would have served as an extra 'deliberate mistake' gag, at the expense of the TV series that it was parodying. However, I think most of the audience sees it for what it is - a genuine error. They can tell those a mile off. In fact, if there's any ambiguity as to whether a mistake is accidental or intentional, nine times out of ten I think they'll assume it's the former.

So this was where my cropping the widescreen footage down to 1980s TV's 4:3 really came into its own - I could cut out every single instance of the mic appearing on camera, and nobody would ever suspect a thing.

The irony here would be the mute opening credits, which Scott had edited himself. These looked absolutely fantastic, and were already in 4:3, but had somehow wound up with the caption "Neighbours" superimposed over the top left hand corner, instead of "Neighbro's". So I actually cropped that down to widescreen in order to clip the end of the word.


I've never liked widescreen TV (always feels like I'm wearing a visor), so now I felt dirty.

There was one other visual effect that the editing package - Sony Vegas - was able to help me out with. As part three had been shot in a different house to the preceding instalments, the geography wasn't quite consistent. In parts one and two, off camera-left, there had been a patio door. Now in part three Kylie was exiting in the same direction and we were cutting to an exterior shot of her emerging from a regular door. What to do?

After seeking advice from Rob about how to get the software to do it, in the end I gritted my teeth and horizontally flipped almost every shot in the whole episode, like a mirror. Now Carmel was exiting through a regular door camera-right, which was no contradiction at all.


It also transformed Jon's wedding ring into just a ring, and made some of the other geography make more sense too, although the shots of the final cliffhanger were a little more of a challenge. No-one queried with me why the left-handed phone had, between episodes, changed into a right-handed one!

The push-back was my gut instinct that, right-to-left, it just didn't look as funny as left-to-right. I'm serious - that's how I felt about it. I could remember how everything had been positioned at time of filming, so to now see it all the other way around, well, of course it felt wrong… it WAS! Using logic to overcome feeling when deciding how funny a thing is went right against my convictions, and I'll have to give some thought as to how this impacts my understanding of free will.

The theme music was an unreserved disaster, and yet again it was all because of my paranoia that when asking for help, people might think I'm a sad idiot. I had nobody to sing it. There were people I knew, at the same church, who were astounding singers, but I just couldn't pluck up the courage to ask any of them. It's a measure of how deep my emotional paralysis runs that, rather than ask any one of a number of people, I instead sang it myself, knowing just how grating the whole nightmare was. I also just didn't have enough confidence if flatmates David or Cathy were in while I was doing this. In the end this theme song ruined the fun tone of the whole series, and this was a shame, given how much trouble Brett had gone to to record the underscore.

Finally, there were other editing gags that had to go, as I just didn't have enough time or discipline. I'd written some spoof credits to flash up over the themes. I rather fancied hearing Morris Minor And The Majors performing on the radio in the background behind Darius, so that the line they'd sampled from the original Neighbours theme could either be replaced by my grating "Neighbro's", or sync with the start of the theme at the end of the episode. And I wanted some more shots of houses for the closing credits.

Nonetheless, a deadline is a wonderful discipline.

Part 5 of 6 - Projection.

On Sunday 15th May, I headed into church with my hard drive and copied the first two episodes - I hadn't edited the third at that point - across onto the church's laptop. I advised Richard to clear-out the cache before projecting it, as they were big files, and I didn't want any chance of them freezing up during playback. We also made sure that the video-projector was set to the correct aspect-ratio.

The service (podcast here) got going, and then the moment came.

I watched the whole thing from the corridor - as far behind everyone as possible. Throughout production, DaNae had repeatedly referred to me as the one with the vision for the whole thing, and inevitably I felt that this series would reflect upon me personally.

And it's always an awe-inspiring moment to watch your filmic creation up on a big screen in front of an endarkened audience. The way the bass was bouncing off of the walls took me back to the actual 1980s when I had worked in a cinema. For me, the slow moments are the ones that seem to command a greater attention from the audience, who are still looking at the screen between stronger reasons to.

There was laughter at the start as Kate and I were pulling silly expressions at each other to cheap-sounding synth music. A bigger ripple when my character ran through all the 1980s merchandise that he'd had stolen. Then the revelation that it hadn't been stolen after all because the burglars had thought it wasn't worth anything - that got a good one.

I wished now that I'd left a longer beat there before the next line. It sounds trivial, but that's the sort of intense scrutiny that one puts one's own work under. Even the line about the bailiffs got a laugh. Was that supposed to be a joke? Oh well, I'm not turning it down.

Five minutes later the episode ended, with my morose 'singing' again. It really did just sound quite spectacularly miserable. Literally - straight afterwards I actually heard two people describing it with the word "miserable". It truly was the anti-Neighbours theme - swapping bubbly optimism for sheer hatred of self. I worried that, if it turned out to be as relentlessly catchy as the original, then in the coming weeks some of our congregation might just compel themselves to jump off the Auckland Harbour Bridge.

Brett, beginning his sermon straight afterwards: "Lesson to myself: Do not let Steve Goble loose with popular culture - he will destroy everything."

Still, there was little I could do about the credits, as the next day I was fleeing the country to Australia for a week. While I was away, Jon tried to rerecord it, but quickly discovered just how hard this was. Had he been successful, then I'd have wanted to justify it creatively by featuring a third voice on the final episode. But the alternative was that my repeated self-loathing scrapes might at least become annoying in the same way as the original.

Come episode two, which I had just made it back from Oz in time for, they faded down the closing music very early, and this time I had no wish to argue. That cliffhanger though - I love my church for letting me show that.

Over the next week I edited episode three, running things so tight that it was actually still being copied onto the church's computer while Brett was introducing it! This time as they all watched it for the first time, I did too…

Right at the start DaNae came up to me with a look of absolute betrayal on her face. Under her breath she whimpered. "Why did you do that? Why did you take our living room and reverse it? It's not like that in real life. It's the other way around. Why would you do that? Why? WHY? Dear God man, WHY?????"

Really, her expression said all of these things, some of them even in sync with her voice. Well, I guess that's how a person feels when you sneakily turn all their furniture around while they're not looking.

I had rather assumed that everyone had found the first two episodes to be just plain weird, but episode three was without doubt the one that they all understood. Mind you, I didn't get why they were now laughing so much at the same opening credits that they had seen twice before.

I suppose it helped that - shot in the evening - this episode wasn't so backlit as the earlier editions.


The biggest laugh of the series surprisingly came on Jon's line "I'm Jason's brother Darius." Kylie's rendition of the Rick Astley lyrics got laughter too, although the instrumental break garnered nothing.

The joke that I think it'll be remembered for though is the reveal that Kylie and Darius are in the same room. It didn't get the biggest laugh, but I like to think that it wrenched people's brains a bit, especially since we cut to it from Darius' perspective, giving the initial impression that Kylie is in his house, as opposed to him being where she is. I'm quietly proud of the direction of the rest of that scene too - we just get on with the rest of the conversation because we credit the audience with enough intelligence to understand this nonsensical situation.

After the final credits had rolled - including a photo of a monkey house that I'd now taken actually in Australia - Brett stood up again and said "I think a cliffhanger like that demands a second series!" Well, I'm not always sure when Brett is joking. Later in his sermon about God being in us, he remarked "which there were rife references to throughout Steve's script," and I still couldn't tell if he was serious.

Anyway, with the intentionally unresolved cliffhanger left hanging, that was that. Neighbro's was no more.

Part 6 of 6 - Tweaking.

And yet, a few things still bugged me.

Well, one thing really.

Everyone was brilliant in this, except for that guy droning the flipping theme song. It was the biggest killer of laughs in the whole series, and would spoil any screening I might give of these episodes to friends. For example, Jamie had asked to see them.

Still, that was the theme that we had used.

So if I were to rerecord it, was there a way in which I could improve the track without it contradicting anyone's memories?

So I tried rerecording myself in the same low voice, but going for a happier 'lumberjack song' delivery. Then I remixed it as best I could.


Finally, I got out my old battery-operated cassette recorder and transferred it in pieces onto a really gunky old tape, and back again. I was inspired by the abysmal amount of wow and flutter we had suffered in the UK on the theme tune to The Young Doctors during the same era.

The result was still pretty bad, but I was reasonably sure that this version didn't run the risk of driving anyone to slit their wrists afterwards. It also enabled me to fix the captions on the credits, and throw in some additional pictures of houses at the end.

Today I finally have a copy that I don't feel quite so self-conscious about.

Thank you so much Jon, Rachel, Carmel, Tes, Kate, Scott, Brett, DaNae, Caleb and Daniel.

You're a totally excellent bunch of neighbro's.


For Neighbro's episode one, click here.
For Neighbro's episode two, click here.
For Neighbro's episode three, click here.

The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Curse Of Clyde Langer

It's raining fish.

(hallelujah)

In the world of The Sarah Jane Adventures this sort of bizarre occurrence goes on every day, so it's no big surprise when everyone rationalises it and just gets on with breakfast. (presumably with fingers, and custard) Well, apart from the kids, who are all running away screaming. Hey - the bewildered fish are still alive. Sheesh, that new kid at school must be putting up with such a lot of flack for having a name like 'Sky'.

In other news, Clyde is planning to create a comic strip series entitled Susie June Jones - Alien Slayer, boldly declaring "Look out Stan Lee - here comes Clyde Langer!" He says this in exactly the same way as no self-respecting comic-fan ever would. In real life Stan is rightly beheld with even higher awe than the Beyonder.

In other other news, the local museum has just imported a totem pole which promptly curses Clyde, causing him to lose his friends, his family and his home. By episode two he's sleeping rough under a bridge, adopting the alias of 'Enrico Box', and burning his own artwork for warmth. Well, that's what a totem pole will do to you for insulting Stan Lee.

Sadly, Stan The Man™ does not cameo as a homeless version of himself, however that doesn't stop us all incredibly imagining what inconceivable encouragement he might have amazingly offered, had The Sarah Jane Adventures been that hip.


"The answers you seek are sealed inside of you, Enrico Box. Excelsior!"

Well, 'nuff said. Literally.

Also absent are Luke and K-9, leading to one of those empty one-sided phone conversations that TV budgeters still think are a pretty neat idea. Another missed opportunity.

Anyway so far, so good. In fact all of this story is quite watchable. Part two moves so slowly that it feels much more like it's building up to a second cliffhanger, rather than the pale conclusion that we get. That the pole is defeated by our heroes merely having to say Clyde's name to it is utterly pathetic, yet it's played and directed so well that somehow they get away with it.

However the muscle of this story really lies in Clyde's new life as the tramp Enrico, and in particular his friendship with Ellie, who gets a truckload of great dialogue.

(on how to beg) "Whoever heard of a homeless person having charisma?"

"It's like everywhere else - there's good people and there's bad."

"That's Max. He used to be a boxer, then he got too old. He's been on the streets years. That woman in the duffle-coat - Polish or something - came over to get married. Got dumped, can't get home. And that's Polly the Porsche. She used to work in the city, always telling everyone what she used to drive. Now she pushes everything she's got around in an old trolley. All of them - ignoring us on the street - they wouldn't believe how easy it could be. One day it just all falls apart, and you're here."

Best of all is how gentle a learning curve this all is for Clyde. There's no big realisation on his part that a whole nother culture exists in London alongside his one. He already knows about it before his life collapses around him, and as such is already helping those within it. Sure, his 48 hours of poverty teaches him more, but not that much more than he already knew. More empathy, really.

Despite such a great backdrop, the story again suffers from SJA's still extremely tired formula of mind-control being reversed by something quite arbitrary. The opening flash-forward, which usually has its context changed by the time we catch up to it in the story, has this time even been refilmed and performed for a comedy meaning. The Clyde that we see at the start darkly asking "Where were you the day of the storm?", ultimately turns out to be him making light conversation about fish.

Neither the actress playing Ellie, nor the person writing her lines, seems to know what the 'Night Dragon' is ultimately going to be revealed as at the story's conclusion.

Overall, I found this one of the most watchable Sarah Jane Adventures. The brevity of the plot enabled much more room than usual for us to see the characters and take in their situations. Even the ubiquitous music seemed quieter.

And as for Ace Bhatti portraying Haresh with his mind externally dominated for a third time, well, I can't really criticise. After all, with so much experience, he must by now be quite an authority on how to play that.

The Pocket Essential Hitchhiker's Guide by M J Simpson

I must admit I'm impressed.

This second edition manages to plunder every version of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy that I've ever heard of and more, yet remains easy-to-read throughout. It's an absolute breeze, and this morning it became one of only a handful of books in my life that I've managed to read in just the one sitting.

Sure, I mean everyone already knows about the radio series, the books, the TV series and the insipid 2005 movie (nope still not over that). Before reading this book I even knew of the LPs, one or two of the stage versions, and the short written spin-offs for Comic Relief. But Marvin's later unreleased singles? Various school stage plays? The third volume of The Meaning Of Liff published only in Finnish?

Well, it's mightily encouraging to discover that there is yet more work of Adams' out there still waiting for me to share and enjoy it.

Half the fun in these reference works is trying to come up with some omissions, so I'm duty-bound to add here that Peter Jones also recorded a TV Radio Times advert as the Book (launching the second radio series), Marvin put in an appearance on Blue Peter to promote his record, and I thought episode two of the TV show was the only one edited down on repeats (despite shorter timeslots publicised for the others). See how hard I'm working to find something here?

Although this pocket-sixed tome also covers various non-Hitchhiker's material - such as the Dirk Gently books - these are quite welcome to read about too.

Since this was published in 2005, there's unexpectedly been more Hitchhiker's material. The aforementioned movie has been released, the last eight radio episodes have been broadcast, and a sixth novel has been written.

Perhaps the time will soon be upon us for a third edition?