Who?! The man who is talking over Doctor Who from Russel T Davies. The seriously cool man who wrote the Best. Episode. Ever: “Blink”. He also wrote “The Empty Child” (’are you my mummy?’) which is the SCARIEST. EPISODE. EVER. I only have to say ‘muuuuuuuumy’ in that voice and my five year-old son flinches and runs to find cushions, which is frankly a useful weapon to have in one’s arsenal, and for that alone respect is due to the scare-meister Moffat.
He also wrote Press Gang, but I’ll forgive him that. And the new Tintin movie which might not suck after all.
NOTE: Just read this on Wikipedia and - if true - I like him even more now:
During production of the second series of Press Gang, he was having an unhappy personal life after the break-up of his first marriage. Producer Sandra C. Hastie was secretly phoning his friends at home to check if he was alright. His wife’s new lover was represented in the episode “The Big Finish?” by the character Brian Magboy (Simon Schatzberger), a name inspired by Brian: Maggie’s boy. Moffat brought in the character so that all sorts of unfortunate things would happen to him, such as having a typewriter dropped on his foot.
Flickr is down, so I’m forced to blog.
Ashes to Ashes is getting better and better. Two highlights this week: Gene Hunt looking at one point exactly like Martin Fry out of ABC (memo to self - get screengrab off AutoROT). And the line - which I have to say I saw coming - “Bugger Bognor”. These were supposedly the Famous Last Words of King George V, which I only know because Peter Greenaway used famous last words as a theme in Drowning by Numbers, hence the names of the Bognor bothers in the film.
By the way, I read somewhere that Moe Sizlack in the Simpsons is based on comedian Rich Hall. They do look identical, but this has to be a joke? Isn’t it?
Great movie double-bills that will never happen: Drowning by Numbers and Bugsy Malone. Alan Parker once said something about leaving the country if Peter Greenaway ever made any more films - always a bad move, threatening to leave the country. The words “don’t let the door slam you on the way out” always spring to mind. But I love both these movies.
I’m still not quite sure about Ashes to Ashes, but as I had an idea for a prequel to Life on Mars - set in the 1960s, to be called The Laughing Gnome - I was pleased to see lots of, well, laughing gnomes in last night’s episode.
My eldest son, 8, had picked up a bit on the TV show Smart being pulled off CBBC and the Mark Speight case and asked me about it - I said vague things about him just being in the wrong place at the wrong time, he’s not a bad person, all very sad. But my youngest son William, 5, must also have been listening.
Today my little girl was looking at a Shaun the Sheep comic.
“Dad”, said William.
“Yes.”
“Is Shaun the Sheep on TV at the moment?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not? Did he kill his girlfriend?”
I got Dawn of the Dumb, Charlie Brooker’s collection of Guardian columns for Christmas, and I’ve been chuckling my way through it since the big day. This despite the fact that I’m clearly the sort of person Mr Brooker would cheerfully toss under a speeding car - I’m middle class, I sometimes buy organic food, I have not one but three children - called Sebastian, Tiger-Lily and Polenta. I even quite like Jamie Oliver, for chrissakes. But I chuckle on, even snickering at columns like ‘Kids are such c*nts’ and ‘Kids and how to murder the c*nting selfish b*st*rds’. Okay, I may have made those titles up, but you get the idea. He is terribly funny, filthy rude and easily the best TV critic since Clive James made The Observer worth reading thirty years ago.
Tonight I finished reading the boys another chapter of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and settled down to finish reading myself another Charlie Brooker column. It was a good one, attacking mystics. Imagine my surprise when the first paragraph I read mentioned Narnia. And the piece immediately following was published on my 40th birthday. I was half expecting the one after that to address me by name and tell me which famous British actress I have a crush on. Which is all very confusing - Charlie Brooker’s coruscating attack on psychics makes me think that something spooky and other-worldly is going on…
(The index is a good read too. For example: ‘nasty grief-raping sucksacks, see psychics’. Or ‘complete and utter c*nts, see psychics’. And then there’s ‘Walliams, David, enjoying sexual intercourse with a potato’.)
Apparently - according to a trailer - kidnapped BBC journalist Alan Johnston is talking exclusively to the BBC’s Panorama programme.
This truly is a scoop of award-winning proportions. I’d have expected the BBC journalist Alan Johnston to have gone with Sky News. Or Richard & Judy.
Aside from a tiny clip from the great long-lost Granada sketch show Alfresco, last night’s Stephen Fry love-in had me laughing myself stupid over this sketch dialogue:
A: I’m just wound up about the divorce. I suppose I did go too far. I emptied trifle over her head.
B: Did she get custody?
A: Yes, she got very custardy.
Further to my pathetic joke “Is ITV 2+1 the same as ITV3?”… we were just watching ITV 2+1 and the announcer said “…and if you missed this programme, it’s just starting now on ITV 2+1″. You’re twisting my melon, man.
Anyway, I think ‘plus one’ channels should be banned from DTT / Freeview. That kind of profligacy with bandwidth is ok for you Sky types, but not us down here on Planet Perky.
Another series of Doctor Who ends, and you gotta admire the boy Davies’s chutzpah.
It’s great but he seems to have nicked half of it from Star Wars, and the other half from the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. As Matt has pointed out, the timelords staring into the ‘vortex’ which drives some mad is more than a little like the Total Perspective Vortex in Hitch Hiker’s. And a couple of episodes ago they went… to the end of the universe. Arthur Dent even got name checked in the first David Tennant episode.
Tonight we had plenty of Star Wars imagery - the severed hand, the weapon sliding across the floor by telekenisis, the Master dying in the Doctor’s arms, then burning on a funeral pyre… hello! We have seen Return of the Jedi!
It was great TV, though.
Bad stuff happened in London today, and as I attempted to impose some order on our office by finally, finally tidying up (shades of Withnail - “Don’t go in there!”). While I was tidying up I had News 24 on. I watched - and mainly listened - to it for about 4 hours straight. I learned the following:
- London is a very busy city.
- It’s busy at night as well as in the day.
- According to one expert they had on “there are more things we don’t know than we do know”. (He really earned his fee there. I hope MI5 have him on their books.)
- One woman was really pretty cheesed off her journey to work had been disrupted.
- At one point a presenter interrupted her own question with the words “sorry to interrupt my question, but we have some news just in”.
- Another newsreader described events as ‘fast-moving’. I’d been listening for a couple of hours at this point and - aside from the discovery of the first car bomb which had not exploded - nothing at all had actually happened.
- The first car bomb could have killed “hundreds if not thousands of people”.
- The real MI5 is not like the TV show Spooks.
- We should feel sorry for the “plight” of people living in Haymarket. Yes, let’s have a whip-round.
- If nothing has happened for 4 hours, your lead story can still be captioned BREAKING NEWS.
All this put me in such a bad mood that even after removing 5 cart loads of gear from our office and sorting all the cat 5 cables into different lengths and putting every different kind of serial and VGA lead in separate boxes, the office still looked messier when I went home than before I began.
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