Well, there went Eurovision again. As ever, the presenters were bad, although (with the possible exception of the Serbian Bradley Walsh in the green room) not as bad as last year's. As ever, the previous year's winner informed the style of several of this year's contenders, but consider what that means: 2006, Lordi win, 2007, lots of attempted goth rock knock-offs; 2007, a bland ballad wins, 2008, lots of bland ballads. As if Eurovision weren't full enough of them already. Overall this year's contest was but a pale shadow of last year's.
So the show opened with Serbia's Harry Potter impersonator reprising her winning song from last year, but this time with the added twist that she kept removing layers of someone else's clothing while she sang it. Meanwhile a phalanx of stripping brides danced behind her in what sadly turned out to be one of the most avant garde performances of the evening. All this on a stage that looked strangely like a diagram of the human bladder. (Or the womb, but no, I think perhaps the bladder is a more appropriate organ.) On with the show. As with last year's show, I took field notes and present them here for your perusal.
Romania. The male singer seeks out the camera with the predatory gaze of a snake preparing to strike. The female singer's voice is... hard to ignore. They're both pretty flat. The key change scores +2 damage.
United Kingdom. What's happened here? It's a good entry! We've fielded a good Eurovision entry! But... but how?! Looks like the bassist is on happy pills. Then again he could just be fired with euphoria at the startling fact that we've fielded a good entry! What a shocker.
Albania. A relatively subdued number. Or perhaps "restrained" is the word I'm looking for. No key change, no pyrotechnics, no excessive cleavage - in fact, the only gratuitous element is the wind effect in the singer's hair. (But where are the hidden fans?)
Germany. Sung (I use the word advisedly) in English. Wouch. (Because sometimes, neither "wow" nor "ouch" are quite strong enough for the job.) Four unconvincing trannies, and not a single one of them could stay in tune with any of the others or the music. We're reasonably sure one of them was actually a set of bagpipes in a wig. At the end someone kindly set off ground flares in an effort to hide them from view, but too late, too late. There could have been key changes throughout this one and we'd never even know.
Armenia. Half sung in English, in the traditional one-verse-on-one-verse-off format. A graduate from the Shouty School of Singing and three convulsives, the poor unfortunates being put to work as her dancers. She's bouncy but she's off-key. Is there a child standing off-stage playing the recorder?
Bosnia & Herzegovina. What is this, brides again? Is there some unspoken theme this year? A scary schoolboy erupts from the laundry basket while Looby Loo hangs the clothes out. This number scores highly in terms of Eurovision style, but not so well as a song. Terribly, in retrospect this was the weirdest entry of the evening. Come back, last year's Ukrainian entry, all is forgiven.
Israel. Half sung in English. The entry from the only Middle Eastern country in Europe (?!) is good, very good. The guy can actually sing. It's a bit boy-band-ish, mind you, and it doesn't look as though anybody's choreographed the backing team at all. Still, a strong contender.
Finland. Ah, no prisoners from the nation that speaks Spinal Tap's language. Battle drums, attack! Gratuitous pyrotechnics throughout, but we won't hold it against this entry.
Croatia. "75 Cents"?! Is he singing (or meant to be) while the gangster sings, or is he just trying to start a conversation with the flamenco dancer? I think he's had too much to drink, either way. English translation (a rough guess): "You bloody kids, turn that noise down!" I'm as confused as 75 Cents. Like the musical wine bottles, though - good effort.
Poland. Sung in English. Is this what happens when you splice Jordan with Bonnie Tyler? Quite a lot of gratuitous cleavage on display here, but it looks like it's trying to spare our blushes by heading south of the camera. Average pop song.
Iceland. Sung in English. The unexpected shift from pop into rave seems to have caused serious cameraman failure. And lighting failure towards the end. Another act that skipped the technical rehearsal, perhaps? This duet between Vanessa Feltz and Gary Barlow has failed to capture my heart.
Turkey. Appears to be Mr Morden from Babylon 5, backed by a group that sounds like Supergrass. It's good! Of course, he does have the power of the Shadows behind him, so I'd expect him to go far this evening. I just wish he'd stop staring at me like that.
Portugal. Those hidden fans are back again. Although actually, with the opera singer's dress billowing like that... Too much chorizo? Considering the operatic overtones, this song comes across as somewhat dull. The extreme key change doesn't help.
Latvia. Sung in English. Come on guys, the Pirates craze was two years ago. I can't help feeling The Mighty Boosh have secretly fielded this entry - "Future sailors, we're future sailors..." Look at those cheap hire costumes - we've got that exact same plastic cutlass! On the face of it this ought to score highly for Eurovision style, but as it's sung in English and has an ill-advised key change and features pyrotechnics and cleavage, we must mark it down, down to Davy Jones' locker.
Sweden. Sung in English, or a close approximation. Now there's a woman who's had too much plastic surgery. Note the robbery of classic pop lyrics ("Staying alive" et al) - tsk. Deserves a point for the arty monochrome opening, but we must dock that point straight off again for the key change.
Denmark. Sung in English. What's with the cheeky chirpy Cockney costume? Note again the robbery of classic pop lyrics ("Celebrate good times, come on"). Average.
Georgia. Sung in English. Wins the award for outstanding costume change of the evening. "Now that's magic!"
Ukraine. Sung in English. What's with the giant mirror wall? Will Muppets appear over the top halfway through the song? (Well, in a manner of speaking...) Tolerable pop, but alas, no vestige of the weirdness of last year's entry.
France. Sung mostly in English. Now, last year I commented on this issue of English lyrics in French songs, but this year it actually got mentioned in the news. I'm glad the French let this one through, though. Those BeeGee beards, even on the woman... the golf cart... the helium... that's not Euro-weirdness, they're trying! They're being wilfully odd! But even without the oddness, it's still quite a good entry.
Azerbaijan. Sung in English. Pure hilarity. If you remember one image from this year's contest, try not to let it be the bloke wearing angel wings singing falsetto. The devil character's costume change might, we suspect, have looked quite nifty if the cameraman hadn't ruined it by nipping round the back and making it look clumsy.
Greece. Sung in English. Bland pop from some young woman in her nightie. What's with the Birdie Song dance in the middle? And the set dressing is rubbish.
Spain. Half sung in English. Lovely start with the child's musical toy. Thereafter Rapping Rolf Harris' act goes downhill. There's one really rubbish dancer - surely that must be deliberate? Surely they must have choreographed her to be rubbish? Or is it all down to pre-show hospitality?
Serbia. Once again, a bland ballad. Who else heard the percussion from Chariots of Fire? This isn't too bad, apart from one or two bum notes.
Russia. Sung in English. Oh my, it's the Russian Peter Andre (or Pyotr Andrei, as we shall henceforth call him). Looks like the Moscow Mafia have done his kneecaps - oh no, there, up he gets. Apparently belief is symbolised by a bloke on roller skates. This one's the bookie's favourite and Terry Wogan's winning tip, but come on, surely they won't go for this?
Norway. Sung in English. At last, this year's "Ooh" song (there had to be one). Rather ordinary, to put it mildly. Still, they can at least sing - well, until the last note (oof).
A less appetising selection than last year's, with noticeably fewer weird/joke entries (shame!). Once again, only a third of the non-English entrants fielded English-free songs (shame!). My personal top five: Turkey, Finland, France, Israel, and oh, what the hell, the UK! Actual top five: Russia (bah!), Ukraine, Greece, Armenia, Norway. Not one song that I'd consider better than average. No surprise there - we've established before that I can't predict Eurovision winners. But the real shocker was the UK finishing last. (At least it wasn't nul points...) Equal last with the German entry - that's just insulting. Surely, even allowing for the institutional political voting, we should have scored more highly than that?
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Monday, May 19, 2008
Caught by the fuzz while I was still on a buzz
Ah, I knew I'd be able to come up with a song lyric title eventually.
So, The Wasp and the Unicorn. I'd place this one below Planet of the Ood but slightly above The Doctor's Daughter, somewhere around a 7. (In view of which I'm going to fix Daughter at a 7, but I'm also going to re-evaluate The Fires of Pompeii from an 8 to a 7, because I think it's more or less on a par with both these episodes.)
I went through a phase of reading Agatha Christie novels in my teens. (It was around the same time as my phase of reading PG Wodehouse and my phase of reading Jeffrey Archer. Dear god, why Archer, you ask? Because it was what the school bookshop stocked. It was that or David Eddings, and I had to draw the line somewhere.) What I learned from that experience was that Christie wrote in a formulaic way, but that you still couldn't necessarily predict the murderer's identity because some vital but absurd bit of information would be withheld until the last minute.
Some years later my erstwhile housemate, the estimable Dr Pittard, explained to me the real value of Christie's oeuvre ("or egg") - she may have had her shortcomings in some areas, but she had a real talent for engineering new ways for the crime genre to work. The murderer had to be the least likely candidate, not simply in narrative terms, but in terms of their mechanical function within the story. One of the victims did it. Everybody did it. The narrator did it. The policeman did it. The detective did it. Maybe you did it. Where were you on the night of Chapter Two?
So this might be seen as a kind of reversal of Gareth Roberts' previous New Who, The Shakespeare Code. The greatest asset of aspiring actor and jobbing hack writer Shakespeare was his understanding of human nature, yet the witches in The Shakespeare Code are after him for his technical ability. Only he can write the pseudo-magic incantation that will release the rest of their kind (or rather, as it turns out, only he can act as a flopping puppet through which they can channel the incantation, so really they might just as well write it themselves... oh, anyway, it's bulwarks). Here, on the other hand, the Doctor needs the help of genre technician Agatha Christie to unravel a murder mystery because only she supposedly understands human nature well enough. Hmmmm.
If Christie really were brought in to work on this story, she'd just wait around until the third murder, throw in a red-herring jewel thief (so far, so good), then contrive some way for the least likely possible candidate to have dunnit. By that token, it really would have been more appropriate if the culprit had been "You, Donna Noble!" or "You, Agatha Christie!" It's not all that Christiesque that the vicar should have dunnit; perversely, it's more fitting that the murderer turns out to be a giant alien wasp. Naturally there's an unlikely family connection disclosed at the last minute ("I loved him, even though at night he transformed into a giant wasp" - what?!). It's ridiculous, but not much more so than Hercule Poirot's Christmas.
What is ridiculous is the vicar's bzzzzzing just before he metamorphoses. I know, I know - it's the vibration of the wings that makes the buzzing sound, not the wasp saying "bzzzzz". That's not why it's ridiculous. He's an alien giant wasp, after all, and in any case a wasp that size ought to sound like a Chinook helicopter close up, so it's not as if they weren't already taking liberties. No no, it's just figging ridiculous.
But it's a comedy episode and therefore can be forgiven much. The shoehorned Christie title references are often quite laboured, but the story overall is a pleasant bit of fluff. Still though, halfway through the season and still no episodes I'd particularly want to get on DVD. Sigh. Next week, the Doctor faces a Dirty Two Dozen of bad pop acts. Oh no, wait, it's Eurovision.
So, The Wasp and the Unicorn. I'd place this one below Planet of the Ood but slightly above The Doctor's Daughter, somewhere around a 7. (In view of which I'm going to fix Daughter at a 7, but I'm also going to re-evaluate The Fires of Pompeii from an 8 to a 7, because I think it's more or less on a par with both these episodes.)
I went through a phase of reading Agatha Christie novels in my teens. (It was around the same time as my phase of reading PG Wodehouse and my phase of reading Jeffrey Archer. Dear god, why Archer, you ask? Because it was what the school bookshop stocked. It was that or David Eddings, and I had to draw the line somewhere.) What I learned from that experience was that Christie wrote in a formulaic way, but that you still couldn't necessarily predict the murderer's identity because some vital but absurd bit of information would be withheld until the last minute.
Some years later my erstwhile housemate, the estimable Dr Pittard, explained to me the real value of Christie's oeuvre ("or egg") - she may have had her shortcomings in some areas, but she had a real talent for engineering new ways for the crime genre to work. The murderer had to be the least likely candidate, not simply in narrative terms, but in terms of their mechanical function within the story. One of the victims did it. Everybody did it. The narrator did it. The policeman did it. The detective did it. Maybe you did it. Where were you on the night of Chapter Two?
So this might be seen as a kind of reversal of Gareth Roberts' previous New Who, The Shakespeare Code. The greatest asset of aspiring actor and jobbing hack writer Shakespeare was his understanding of human nature, yet the witches in The Shakespeare Code are after him for his technical ability. Only he can write the pseudo-magic incantation that will release the rest of their kind (or rather, as it turns out, only he can act as a flopping puppet through which they can channel the incantation, so really they might just as well write it themselves... oh, anyway, it's bulwarks). Here, on the other hand, the Doctor needs the help of genre technician Agatha Christie to unravel a murder mystery because only she supposedly understands human nature well enough. Hmmmm.
If Christie really were brought in to work on this story, she'd just wait around until the third murder, throw in a red-herring jewel thief (so far, so good), then contrive some way for the least likely possible candidate to have dunnit. By that token, it really would have been more appropriate if the culprit had been "You, Donna Noble!" or "You, Agatha Christie!" It's not all that Christiesque that the vicar should have dunnit; perversely, it's more fitting that the murderer turns out to be a giant alien wasp. Naturally there's an unlikely family connection disclosed at the last minute ("I loved him, even though at night he transformed into a giant wasp" - what?!). It's ridiculous, but not much more so than Hercule Poirot's Christmas.
What is ridiculous is the vicar's bzzzzzing just before he metamorphoses. I know, I know - it's the vibration of the wings that makes the buzzing sound, not the wasp saying "bzzzzz". That's not why it's ridiculous. He's an alien giant wasp, after all, and in any case a wasp that size ought to sound like a Chinook helicopter close up, so it's not as if they weren't already taking liberties. No no, it's just figging ridiculous.
But it's a comedy episode and therefore can be forgiven much. The shoehorned Christie title references are often quite laboured, but the story overall is a pleasant bit of fluff. Still though, halfway through the season and still no episodes I'd particularly want to get on DVD. Sigh. Next week, the Doctor faces a Dirty Two Dozen of bad pop acts. Oh no, wait, it's Eurovision.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
"SMAAAAACK!"
The Skoda has taken to jumping around as though it were demonically possessed over the last couple of weeks. We half expect it at any minute to turn its radiator grille through 180 degrees and spew split pea anti-freeze all over us (possibly while growling "Your Toyota sucks cogs in hell!"). It's kind of on-off, but no fix has lasted more than a few days, and we're getting tired of spending money on it. To be honest, we're probably more tired of the car bucking, rattling and pulling sharply to the left.
Today the garage got their top bod to cast his eye over it - their Kwikfit Haderach, if you will - and using his oracular powers he identified at least three expensive components that could be at the root of the problem. The car shall get the full dismantling it richly deserves on Monday, and then hopefully we'll find out what the real problem is and exactly how expensive it would be to fix it. But it's looking very much like we'd be better off scrapping it and trying again. Our third car in less than a year.
On to the subject of last weekend's Comics Expo. We had a bit of a flying visit this year, owing to landlady shennanigans that required our attention in the afternoon, but we got up early enough to get the freebie bags again.
The freebie bag was a bit of a letdown this year after last year's impressive package. No full size books, no plastic figurines of Hellboy or of anyone else, and neither Marvel nor DC contributed anything. In fact, once you filleted out the spammage, most of the bag was taken up by sample issues from a small comics press called Markosia. Hurrah to Markosia for stumping up the goodies. The actual content of the samples varied wildly, in quality and in the issue numbers provided:
Fortunately the bag was easily supplemented by blagging freebies from the stalls inside Brunel's shed. These included:
Naturally there was some Comic Book Mayhem. Let's see, what am I prepared to admit to buying?
Crossing Midnight, vol 2 (DC Vertigo).
Second collected volume of the story of two kids with supernatural powers in modern Japan. They were born either side of midnight after their father made a pact with the kami of all swords, and when the kami kidnaps one of them as his price, the other goes in pursuit. Much fairy-tale adventure ensues. It's all good.
Scarlet Traces and Scarlet Traces: The Great Game (Dark Horse).
High adventure sequels to The War of the Worlds, set in a world where the British Empire is given a new lease of life through cannibalised Martian technology. I'd been considering buying these for some time.
The first starts as a murder mystery and ends up exposing the dark heart of the new Empire. The second takes the story to Mars, where the Imperial army has been waging war on the Martians for forty years in an effort to protect itself from another invasion. This is the more fun of the two books, because of the wealth of cheeky references hidden throughout, but after building up the mystery of what's really happening on Mars over most of its length, it ends very abruptly. A third book exploring the journalist heroine's discoveries and their ramifications would have been very welcome, but presumably the creators didn't want to risk not being commissioned for another book.
Macbeth and Henry V (Classical Comics).
Oh yes, comic book versions of Shakespeare's plays. We're talking the full text, scene by scene, lovingly animated with added sound effects ("SMAAAAACK!").
At least part of the intention here, as we understood it from the people running the Classical Comics stand, is to make required school texts more accessible for pupils. I can appreciate this where Shakespeare's concerned - the best way to really understand his work is to see it performed, but how many kids will get that chance? This must be the next best thing, bar films, but the obvious advantage is that this needn't take up two to three hours of school time.
We bought the versions with the full original text, but they also do versions in modern English for kids who'd have difficulty with Middle English (which I expect would be most of them), and yet a third "quick" version with the text reduced down by about half for the kids with really short attention spans. The website even offers schools specific downloadable scenes from other required works of the Bard as study aids. A worthy cause in my estimation.
But more exciting for us is the prospect of some of their non-Bardic forthcoming titles: Frankenstein! A Christmas Carol! Um, Jane Eyre! Come on, Jane Eyre with sound effects!
The Lovely Jo was also able to buy - at last! - our own copy of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as illustrated by Hunt Emerson. Recently reprinted in an attractive, durable hardback, hurrah! The in-laws have a copy of this, but we despaired of ever finding our own. And a punned-up slapstick reimagining is just what that gloomy drug fiend Coleridge needed, heheh.
Today the garage got their top bod to cast his eye over it - their Kwikfit Haderach, if you will - and using his oracular powers he identified at least three expensive components that could be at the root of the problem. The car shall get the full dismantling it richly deserves on Monday, and then hopefully we'll find out what the real problem is and exactly how expensive it would be to fix it. But it's looking very much like we'd be better off scrapping it and trying again. Our third car in less than a year.
On to the subject of last weekend's Comics Expo. We had a bit of a flying visit this year, owing to landlady shennanigans that required our attention in the afternoon, but we got up early enough to get the freebie bags again.
The freebie bag was a bit of a letdown this year after last year's impressive package. No full size books, no plastic figurines of Hellboy or of anyone else, and neither Marvel nor DC contributed anything. In fact, once you filleted out the spammage, most of the bag was taken up by sample issues from a small comics press called Markosia. Hurrah to Markosia for stumping up the goodies. The actual content of the samples varied wildly, in quality and in the issue numbers provided:
- Scatterbrain (issue 4, plus a few sample pages in one of the other titles) is presented entirely in one colour, a sort of dried blood russet, and the artwork is a scribbled mess that makes it impossible to tell how many characters there are and what they're doing to each other. Without some expository dialogue towards the end of the issue, we'd have no idea what's going on. In fact, even with it we're not sure.
- Carnival of Souls (issues 1 and 3, several times, but no issue 2) is a lot better visually, and moderately entertaining, but not something we'd actively look for.
- Midnight Kiss (between us we had issues 1, 2 and 3, remarkably) is in the next league up - we would actively look for this one, and hope to see a collected TPB some day. It's another one of those stories that plays games with fiction, which puts it in an increasingly crowded arena, but it's hard not to love what the writer's done with the world of Oz. Takes until issue 2 to really get going, so we're glad we had that one.
Fortunately the bag was easily supplemented by blagging freebies from the stalls inside Brunel's shed. These included:
- apparently limitless supplies of a manga sampler book;
- equally numerous supplies of Hellboy: The Mole (I'd already picked up a copy in the registration queue, so the copy in the freebie bag came as a bit of a surprise);
- free Gnasher badges from the Beano stand (ahh, the nostalgia);
- two entire books of something called The Hunter (Dare Comics, USA) that looks high quality and quite entertaining (aw, they even have flashbacks in the old four-colour style);
- and the prize of my freebie haul, The Shiznit (issue 4).
Naturally there was some Comic Book Mayhem. Let's see, what am I prepared to admit to buying?
Crossing Midnight, vol 2 (DC Vertigo).
Second collected volume of the story of two kids with supernatural powers in modern Japan. They were born either side of midnight after their father made a pact with the kami of all swords, and when the kami kidnaps one of them as his price, the other goes in pursuit. Much fairy-tale adventure ensues. It's all good.
Scarlet Traces and Scarlet Traces: The Great Game (Dark Horse).
High adventure sequels to The War of the Worlds, set in a world where the British Empire is given a new lease of life through cannibalised Martian technology. I'd been considering buying these for some time.
The first starts as a murder mystery and ends up exposing the dark heart of the new Empire. The second takes the story to Mars, where the Imperial army has been waging war on the Martians for forty years in an effort to protect itself from another invasion. This is the more fun of the two books, because of the wealth of cheeky references hidden throughout, but after building up the mystery of what's really happening on Mars over most of its length, it ends very abruptly. A third book exploring the journalist heroine's discoveries and their ramifications would have been very welcome, but presumably the creators didn't want to risk not being commissioned for another book.
Macbeth and Henry V (Classical Comics).
Oh yes, comic book versions of Shakespeare's plays. We're talking the full text, scene by scene, lovingly animated with added sound effects ("SMAAAAACK!").
At least part of the intention here, as we understood it from the people running the Classical Comics stand, is to make required school texts more accessible for pupils. I can appreciate this where Shakespeare's concerned - the best way to really understand his work is to see it performed, but how many kids will get that chance? This must be the next best thing, bar films, but the obvious advantage is that this needn't take up two to three hours of school time.
We bought the versions with the full original text, but they also do versions in modern English for kids who'd have difficulty with Middle English (which I expect would be most of them), and yet a third "quick" version with the text reduced down by about half for the kids with really short attention spans. The website even offers schools specific downloadable scenes from other required works of the Bard as study aids. A worthy cause in my estimation.
But more exciting for us is the prospect of some of their non-Bardic forthcoming titles: Frankenstein! A Christmas Carol! Um, Jane Eyre! Come on, Jane Eyre with sound effects!
The Lovely Jo was also able to buy - at last! - our own copy of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as illustrated by Hunt Emerson. Recently reprinted in an attractive, durable hardback, hurrah! The in-laws have a copy of this, but we despaired of ever finding our own. And a punned-up slapstick reimagining is just what that gloomy drug fiend Coleridge needed, heheh.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Bring your daughter to the slaughter
Not bad. I might give that one a 7 or an 8.
The big thing for me about The Doctor's Daughter is that, whereas the Sontaran two-parter was the sort of thing a fan might think a Who story ought to look like, this actually was an old-style Who story. It felt a lot like mid-to-late Tom Baker. A mysterious set-up, a few clues and the big revelation in a tower that's pretty obviously a spaceship. Proper SF, in fact, albeit a small helping of proper SF concealed within forty five minutes of slam-bang action. Of its genre, as opposed to merely generic. And, like a very few other New Who stories, it felt like it had the material of an Old Who story condensed into the three quarters of an hour. It felt like it could have been expanded into a solid four-parter. You could almost see the natural cliffhanger points.
Also nice to get a bit more consideration of the Doctor's role in the Time War. Last week would have been an obvious place for this sort of thing, what with the militaristic aliens and UNIT butting heads, but strangely the issue of a normally pacifist Doctor taking up arms and fighting wasn't addressed. There were a couple of brief, subtle moments in which you could almost see the script starting to turn that way, plus the slight end-of-first-series overtones towards the end, but ultimately it didn't really happen. This week, on the other hand, it was brought right out into the open. Perhaps it went too far in the opposite direction, perhaps it was too unsubtle? But then again, if a Who story is going to examine an issue, it has to at least spend some time on it.
Negative points now. There didn't seem to be any good reason for Martha to be in it. Apparently someone needs to get separated from the Doctor so that we can see the conflict from the Hath point of view, and yet... do they really? It's not as if Martha's journey serves any real purpose in the end, except to get the sympathetic Hath killed (although, with that breathing apparatus on his face, couldn't he survive under that marshy stuff?). The only obvious reason for it is so that Donna can hang around being the Doctor's conscience while he tries to come to terms with the new family member, but with a bit of rejigging (or more screen time, of course) she could have done that and been the viewer's ambassador to the Hath. But anyway, next point.
It's an old, old bugbear for SF fans that cloning machines and the like always seem to generate perfectly fitting clothes for the new people they create, but that's not my point. It's pre-watershed TV, for goodness's sake, and in any case I think we all know what the average fanboy is really thinking when he complains about clothed clones. I say it's the 60th century or thereabouts, and we didn't actually see inside the magic box, so for all we know there's some whizzy bit of technology in there or a small but very, very fast tailor that produces clothing for the new soldiers. However, my next point does concern dodgy science. It's that Source thingy. So a small globe full of airborne microbes is going to terraform an entire planet? All right, it's the whichever century, maybe there's some nanotech in there too. But the entire planet, in about two minutes? One minute a cloud of magic pixie dust, the next ten feet of earth is excavating itself from the other side of the windows? Bugger off.
Then there's the slight cheese of the ending. I think we all knew it was going to happen, but still. Who's going to be turning up again in the series finale, then? And probably dying tragically (barring further cheese)? And just why does she love running so much? She's not one of those... ugh... joggers, is she?
So I'd place this episode just behind the Ood episode. Still waiting for a sock-knocker-offer. Looks like next week is going to be filled with all the standard Agatha Christie cliches that Agatha Christie isn't actually to blame for. Comedy lightning a-go-go.
The big thing for me about The Doctor's Daughter is that, whereas the Sontaran two-parter was the sort of thing a fan might think a Who story ought to look like, this actually was an old-style Who story. It felt a lot like mid-to-late Tom Baker. A mysterious set-up, a few clues and the big revelation in a tower that's pretty obviously a spaceship. Proper SF, in fact, albeit a small helping of proper SF concealed within forty five minutes of slam-bang action. Of its genre, as opposed to merely generic. And, like a very few other New Who stories, it felt like it had the material of an Old Who story condensed into the three quarters of an hour. It felt like it could have been expanded into a solid four-parter. You could almost see the natural cliffhanger points.
Also nice to get a bit more consideration of the Doctor's role in the Time War. Last week would have been an obvious place for this sort of thing, what with the militaristic aliens and UNIT butting heads, but strangely the issue of a normally pacifist Doctor taking up arms and fighting wasn't addressed. There were a couple of brief, subtle moments in which you could almost see the script starting to turn that way, plus the slight end-of-first-series overtones towards the end, but ultimately it didn't really happen. This week, on the other hand, it was brought right out into the open. Perhaps it went too far in the opposite direction, perhaps it was too unsubtle? But then again, if a Who story is going to examine an issue, it has to at least spend some time on it.
Negative points now. There didn't seem to be any good reason for Martha to be in it. Apparently someone needs to get separated from the Doctor so that we can see the conflict from the Hath point of view, and yet... do they really? It's not as if Martha's journey serves any real purpose in the end, except to get the sympathetic Hath killed (although, with that breathing apparatus on his face, couldn't he survive under that marshy stuff?). The only obvious reason for it is so that Donna can hang around being the Doctor's conscience while he tries to come to terms with the new family member, but with a bit of rejigging (or more screen time, of course) she could have done that and been the viewer's ambassador to the Hath. But anyway, next point.
It's an old, old bugbear for SF fans that cloning machines and the like always seem to generate perfectly fitting clothes for the new people they create, but that's not my point. It's pre-watershed TV, for goodness's sake, and in any case I think we all know what the average fanboy is really thinking when he complains about clothed clones. I say it's the 60th century or thereabouts, and we didn't actually see inside the magic box, so for all we know there's some whizzy bit of technology in there or a small but very, very fast tailor that produces clothing for the new soldiers. However, my next point does concern dodgy science. It's that Source thingy. So a small globe full of airborne microbes is going to terraform an entire planet? All right, it's the whichever century, maybe there's some nanotech in there too. But the entire planet, in about two minutes? One minute a cloud of magic pixie dust, the next ten feet of earth is excavating itself from the other side of the windows? Bugger off.
Then there's the slight cheese of the ending. I think we all knew it was going to happen, but still. Who's going to be turning up again in the series finale, then? And probably dying tragically (barring further cheese)? And just why does she love running so much? She's not one of those... ugh... joggers, is she?
So I'd place this episode just behind the Ood episode. Still waiting for a sock-knocker-offer. Looks like next week is going to be filled with all the standard Agatha Christie cliches that Agatha Christie isn't actually to blame for. Comedy lightning a-go-go.
Monday, May 12, 2008
So, the Fforde Ffiesta is behind us. An entire bank holiday weekend of fannishness and unstrenuous activity dedicated to the work of Jasper Fforde. The Lovely Jo has now blogged about this, but I might yet be able to add something on the subject.
We had in fact done this once before, in 2005, but back then it was called the Fforde Ffestival and it only lasted one day. It felt similar in some ways and yet overall, quite different. The Goddard Arms Hotel is gone now, so I feel I can safely describe its grandeur as "seedy". (The Swindon De Vere, on the other hand, proved a large and comfortable venue for our hundred or so punters, and served a very nice breakfast too. Probably the nicest of the year so far, just edging out the breakfasts of the B&Bs around Loch Lomond by virtue of sheer merciless quantity. And mushrooms. Many, many lovely button mushrooms. Sir achieved true fungal breakfast nirvana that weekend. But sir digresses.)
The director of the committee made it quite clear, and continues to make it clear today, that he didn't view this as a convention. "Convention", after all, has connotations in the chip-shop press that any event organiser would consider undesirable. (Although I hasten to point out that the coverage we got from Swindon's local press, including interview and photos, was favourable, genuine and accurate. There's a lesson there for Exeter's local press.) I've consequently come to think of the two Fforde happenings as "fan events", which is a nice, vague, catch-all term. Nonetheless, even though The Lovely Jo and I were the only members of the Ffestival committee ever to have even seen another convention, and even though we only brought one other convention-goer into the Ffiesta committee, we soon recognised the outward signs of conventionishness. Perhaps inevitable in any event designed to bring together fans of a genre-ambiguous author and present them with silly things to do.
We got one very shitty write-up from a guy who sent his thoughts to Ansible, the SF fandom newsletter, and his beef seemed mainly to be that we weren't a well-oiled autograph queue machine with parallel programme tracks and a dealers' room. In other words, that we were a fledgling fan event catering for a small and uncertain fanbase, and that we weren't a miniature version of Eastercon. Fair enough, we'd advertised in Ansible on the assumption that some Jasper Fforde fans must also be SF fans, so it could be claimed that we were presenting ourselves to con-goers as a convention, but even so. Had The Lovely Jo and I then known and properly understood the word "relaxacon", we might perhaps have tried touting it as one of those, and I believe we'd have gotten away with it. However, in the intervening years between Ffestival and Ffiesta the world has seen The Year Of The Teledu, an entire convention of chaos programming. A con so utterly chaos-based that when it started soliciting subscriptions at Eastercon 2006, it didn't have a venue or even a date. I like to think that the author of the write-up - if indeed that is his real name, which I doubt - went to Teledu and suffered a chronic explosion of the brain. In a post-Teledu world I imagine we'd have got away with it all even more easily. But what the hell, everybody else enjoyed it and the Ffestival made money, so a follow-up was planned.
For a number of complicated reasons that follow-up happened two and a half years later. In that time, we were able to apply the lessons learned from the first event, rejig and rebrand, and make the whole thing look even more like a convention (knowingly in some cases, unknowingly in others). And yet it all started to look a bit shaky. Like George W Bush on a tiny scale, we spent our reserves and soon ran up a deficit - perhaps not a huge deficit by event organising standards, but big enough, and more significantly one that we would personally have to shoulder if it didn't go well. And none of us particularly wanted that. Ticket sales were sluggish - we could easily put this down to the large hiatus between events, but what if that one bad write-up had had an effect as well? Then just a few months before the Ffiesta we had word that Jasper's partner Mari was due to give birth soon, and it all went quiet. I stopped looking forward to the event and started to worry. We were facing potential ruin, and the committee director's assurances that it'd all turn out all right weren't winning me over.
Perhaps I should point out here that the Fforde events are linked in some part of the back of my brain with car-related stress. The journey down to the Ffestival saw the bonnet of the Punto flip right back while we were driving along the M4, causing us several minutes of brown-trousered terror on the motorway and the largest repair bill the Punto ever incurred in its eight years of service, not to mention having to leave the car in a Swindon garage for two weeks. Our weekend committee meetings for the Ffiesta had seen a string of hiccups and minor malfunctions in the Toyota and, latterly, the Skoda (which is still misbehaving at time of writing), such that as we drove down to Swindon two weekends ago I fully expected a repeat performance. Basically I was more than prepared to believe that this event had personally wreaked this havoc on our cars and would take a more terrible toll yet.
Fortunately the committee director was right and I was wrong. What I had forgotten, and he had remembered, was the tremendous goodwill and camaraderie that can build up around events like this. We made what preparations we could, but ultimately it all hung on the auction, and here all our wildest hopes were exceeded. From our initial position of debt we suddenly found ourselves with enough funds to donate a fat wad to Alzheimer's research and lay the groundwork for another Ffiesta next autumn. (Although The Lovely Jo and I won't be on the committee for that one, owing to the possibility that we could be in New Zealand by then.) And yet again Jasper put in a tremendous amount of time and energy helping to keep the event bouncing along, even while he was taking his turn to nurse baby Tabitha. In short, it was a tremendous success, and we have every single person involved to thank for that. Much relief and handing over of bank account to other committee members.
We had in fact done this once before, in 2005, but back then it was called the Fforde Ffestival and it only lasted one day. It felt similar in some ways and yet overall, quite different. The Goddard Arms Hotel is gone now, so I feel I can safely describe its grandeur as "seedy". (The Swindon De Vere, on the other hand, proved a large and comfortable venue for our hundred or so punters, and served a very nice breakfast too. Probably the nicest of the year so far, just edging out the breakfasts of the B&Bs around Loch Lomond by virtue of sheer merciless quantity. And mushrooms. Many, many lovely button mushrooms. Sir achieved true fungal breakfast nirvana that weekend. But sir digresses.)
The director of the committee made it quite clear, and continues to make it clear today, that he didn't view this as a convention. "Convention", after all, has connotations in the chip-shop press that any event organiser would consider undesirable. (Although I hasten to point out that the coverage we got from Swindon's local press, including interview and photos, was favourable, genuine and accurate. There's a lesson there for Exeter's local press.) I've consequently come to think of the two Fforde happenings as "fan events", which is a nice, vague, catch-all term. Nonetheless, even though The Lovely Jo and I were the only members of the Ffestival committee ever to have even seen another convention, and even though we only brought one other convention-goer into the Ffiesta committee, we soon recognised the outward signs of conventionishness. Perhaps inevitable in any event designed to bring together fans of a genre-ambiguous author and present them with silly things to do.
We got one very shitty write-up from a guy who sent his thoughts to Ansible, the SF fandom newsletter, and his beef seemed mainly to be that we weren't a well-oiled autograph queue machine with parallel programme tracks and a dealers' room. In other words, that we were a fledgling fan event catering for a small and uncertain fanbase, and that we weren't a miniature version of Eastercon. Fair enough, we'd advertised in Ansible on the assumption that some Jasper Fforde fans must also be SF fans, so it could be claimed that we were presenting ourselves to con-goers as a convention, but even so. Had The Lovely Jo and I then known and properly understood the word "relaxacon", we might perhaps have tried touting it as one of those, and I believe we'd have gotten away with it. However, in the intervening years between Ffestival and Ffiesta the world has seen The Year Of The Teledu, an entire convention of chaos programming. A con so utterly chaos-based that when it started soliciting subscriptions at Eastercon 2006, it didn't have a venue or even a date. I like to think that the author of the write-up - if indeed that is his real name, which I doubt - went to Teledu and suffered a chronic explosion of the brain. In a post-Teledu world I imagine we'd have got away with it all even more easily. But what the hell, everybody else enjoyed it and the Ffestival made money, so a follow-up was planned.
For a number of complicated reasons that follow-up happened two and a half years later. In that time, we were able to apply the lessons learned from the first event, rejig and rebrand, and make the whole thing look even more like a convention (knowingly in some cases, unknowingly in others). And yet it all started to look a bit shaky. Like George W Bush on a tiny scale, we spent our reserves and soon ran up a deficit - perhaps not a huge deficit by event organising standards, but big enough, and more significantly one that we would personally have to shoulder if it didn't go well. And none of us particularly wanted that. Ticket sales were sluggish - we could easily put this down to the large hiatus between events, but what if that one bad write-up had had an effect as well? Then just a few months before the Ffiesta we had word that Jasper's partner Mari was due to give birth soon, and it all went quiet. I stopped looking forward to the event and started to worry. We were facing potential ruin, and the committee director's assurances that it'd all turn out all right weren't winning me over.
Perhaps I should point out here that the Fforde events are linked in some part of the back of my brain with car-related stress. The journey down to the Ffestival saw the bonnet of the Punto flip right back while we were driving along the M4, causing us several minutes of brown-trousered terror on the motorway and the largest repair bill the Punto ever incurred in its eight years of service, not to mention having to leave the car in a Swindon garage for two weeks. Our weekend committee meetings for the Ffiesta had seen a string of hiccups and minor malfunctions in the Toyota and, latterly, the Skoda (which is still misbehaving at time of writing), such that as we drove down to Swindon two weekends ago I fully expected a repeat performance. Basically I was more than prepared to believe that this event had personally wreaked this havoc on our cars and would take a more terrible toll yet.
Fortunately the committee director was right and I was wrong. What I had forgotten, and he had remembered, was the tremendous goodwill and camaraderie that can build up around events like this. We made what preparations we could, but ultimately it all hung on the auction, and here all our wildest hopes were exceeded. From our initial position of debt we suddenly found ourselves with enough funds to donate a fat wad to Alzheimer's research and lay the groundwork for another Ffiesta next autumn. (Although The Lovely Jo and I won't be on the committee for that one, owing to the possibility that we could be in New Zealand by then.) And yet again Jasper put in a tremendous amount of time and energy helping to keep the event bouncing along, even while he was taking his turn to nurse baby Tabitha. In short, it was a tremendous success, and we have every single person involved to thank for that. Much relief and handing over of bank account to other committee members.
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Smoke on the water, fire in the sky
Well, The Poison Sky certainly fulfilled the promise of last week's episode: a Who story that ambled its way out through the saloon bar doors of the 5 Out Of 10.
Readers who were here last year or who've checked out my blog since may think I'm just being mean to Helen Raynor. Then again, it's possible those readers watched this episode as well.
I mean... yes, it's nice to see an actual Sontaran army. Yes, I'm sure a lot of fans out there believe that simply having UNIT in an episode is in itself some sort of automatic boon. Yes, it was a very pretty explosion. But beneath the engaging visuals and yet more surprising work from Catherine Tate, there lurked a very, very perfunctory story. Not so much "Who by numbers", nor even "Who by join-the-dots", but more of a stick figure standing next to a blue box with an arrow and the word "docter" drawn above it. Everything teenage DW forum members think an episode should look like, with in-jokey references to better stories thrown in in the hope that they'll drag this one up by association.
And then the planet blows up. Well, the Doctor sets light to the atmosphere, at any rate. Now see, when this half-cocked idea was included in the script of Destiny of the Daleks, itself not a well-regarded Who story, the programme makers at least had the decency not to actually have it happen. Sooo... you burn all the poisonous clone food out of the atmosphere, in a fireball that encloses the entire Earth in seconds, but which is apparently extinguished by an inrush of lovely, clean... oxygen-bearing air. Good thing air doesn't support combustion, isn't it? PS - good news, today everyone gets a free meal of roast pigeon! Bad news, tomorrow the ecosystem falls over.
So you somehow remove the noxious stuff from the air but completely fail to do anything about the millions of machines that are generating that noxious stuff in the first place. Then you flip a switch on your Macguffin that turns it from "human air" to "Sontaran air", notwithstanding the fact that we've already seen humans breathing that Sontaran air, and vice versa, and there's been absolutely no indication that there's any difference between them. Except that there must be, because the explosion that left the entire surface of the Earth unravaged blows apart a spaceship that can allegedly withstand nuclear attack. Let's face it, this was just one of those scripts that needed the Doctor to dramatically flip a switch, the Mill to produce a really showy explosion, and the plot to magically resolve itself.
The pinnacle - well, the pothole - of this episode's weakness must surely have been the Doctor's farewell. "Donna - thanks for everything, take care. Martha - you too. Luke - give me two minutes and then sacrifice yourself, OK?" Or were we the only ones who heard that line? This truly was a sleepwalking episode.
But there were some nice moments - the fact that the UNIT colonel didn't piss about when faced with the Sontaran commander was quite pleasing. The prosthetics were good. Visually, as I've said, it was engaging. And needless to say it's still better than a lot of other TV, so it still gets its "average episode" 5 out of 10.
Next week: the Doctor turns out to be Buffy's dad. Who knew? (Shouldn't Torchwood be making that episode?)
Also this weekend - we survived the Fforde Ffiesta! More about that anon. For now, let this suffice:
Readers who were here last year or who've checked out my blog since may think I'm just being mean to Helen Raynor. Then again, it's possible those readers watched this episode as well.
I mean... yes, it's nice to see an actual Sontaran army. Yes, I'm sure a lot of fans out there believe that simply having UNIT in an episode is in itself some sort of automatic boon. Yes, it was a very pretty explosion. But beneath the engaging visuals and yet more surprising work from Catherine Tate, there lurked a very, very perfunctory story. Not so much "Who by numbers", nor even "Who by join-the-dots", but more of a stick figure standing next to a blue box with an arrow and the word "docter" drawn above it. Everything teenage DW forum members think an episode should look like, with in-jokey references to better stories thrown in in the hope that they'll drag this one up by association.
And then the planet blows up. Well, the Doctor sets light to the atmosphere, at any rate. Now see, when this half-cocked idea was included in the script of Destiny of the Daleks, itself not a well-regarded Who story, the programme makers at least had the decency not to actually have it happen. Sooo... you burn all the poisonous clone food out of the atmosphere, in a fireball that encloses the entire Earth in seconds, but which is apparently extinguished by an inrush of lovely, clean... oxygen-bearing air. Good thing air doesn't support combustion, isn't it? PS - good news, today everyone gets a free meal of roast pigeon! Bad news, tomorrow the ecosystem falls over.
So you somehow remove the noxious stuff from the air but completely fail to do anything about the millions of machines that are generating that noxious stuff in the first place. Then you flip a switch on your Macguffin that turns it from "human air" to "Sontaran air", notwithstanding the fact that we've already seen humans breathing that Sontaran air, and vice versa, and there's been absolutely no indication that there's any difference between them. Except that there must be, because the explosion that left the entire surface of the Earth unravaged blows apart a spaceship that can allegedly withstand nuclear attack. Let's face it, this was just one of those scripts that needed the Doctor to dramatically flip a switch, the Mill to produce a really showy explosion, and the plot to magically resolve itself.
The pinnacle - well, the pothole - of this episode's weakness must surely have been the Doctor's farewell. "Donna - thanks for everything, take care. Martha - you too. Luke - give me two minutes and then sacrifice yourself, OK?" Or were we the only ones who heard that line? This truly was a sleepwalking episode.
But there were some nice moments - the fact that the UNIT colonel didn't piss about when faced with the Sontaran commander was quite pleasing. The prosthetics were good. Visually, as I've said, it was engaging. And needless to say it's still better than a lot of other TV, so it still gets its "average episode" 5 out of 10.
Next week: the Doctor turns out to be Buffy's dad. Who knew? (Shouldn't Torchwood be making that episode?)
Also this weekend - we survived the Fforde Ffiesta! More about that anon. For now, let this suffice:
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