Half a Dozen Streets and a Bit of Waste Land

Now A Major New TV Series (A Guest Post)

2012-02-06T15:08:00.000Z

Square eyes, my mum used to call me. Watch too much TV,you’ll go blind, she said. Wait, no, that was something else.

Anyway, I don’t watch nearly as much TV as I used to whenI was a kid, but I grew up on some greats – not least of which was Doctor Who – and I’m glad to say thereare still a few series that induce a similar level of addiction. Sadly – andcuriously - not many in the sci-fi department. Setting Who aside, the most recent SF shows to have become a compulsion forme would be the likes of Battlestar Galactica and Farscape. Andbefore them, Babylon 5 and The X Files, up to a point.

That’s just me, I guess. Too darned fussy. I’m sure theremust be other stuff around, but wherever it’s lurking none of it has jumped outand grabbed me. No doubt folks can offer recommendations.

In the meantime, I guess when you’re a writer and shortof a decent slice of SF adventure/entertainment the thing to do is write yourown. I’ll bet that’s how JMS got started on B5.

Of course, unlike Mr Straczynski I am a) blessed with asurname that’s quite easy to spell and pronounce and b) not in the world oftelevision. So whereas he set out to craft a sweeping epic novel in TV form, Iset out to create a TV series in novel form.

EvilUnLtd was born many, many years ago out of a deep and profounddissatisfaction with Star Trek: The NextGeneration. All those people boldy going about the universe beingdreadfully – and I mean dreadfully – nice.

Blech.

What I needed for my ensemble space-faring cast was aleague of extraordinarily despicable gentlemen. And that’s where I began – byprofiling my main characters. From there, everything else followed. Situations,plots, splashes of background to the universe and plenty of seeds for somewicked world-building. And enemies – often known in other series as ‘heroes’.

And given that every piece added to the mix wouldgenerate more ideas, more fuel for future episodes, I was never going to beable to stop at just the one book. From the get-go, Evil UnLtd was doomed to be a series.

There’s an in-story reason for it too, but this is whywhen you open an Evil book you willfind sections headed up 1.1, 1.2 and so on like TV episodes. These ‘episodes’combine to form a full novel-length tale and in some respects you can look onit in terms of an ongoing ‘season arc’, of the sort that characterises many amodern TV series. Except the storyline runs over the course of a book and notfive or so years of 22 45-minute episodes padded with convolutions, flashbacks,flashforwards and Previously Ons which the writers, let alone the viewers, sometimeshave trouble following.

Initially, I had it in mind to continue like that witheach book like a volume in a DVD box set – but having episodes 1.4-1.6 in Book2 was just asking for confusion. So instead I suppose we’ve ended up more likethe BBC’s Sherlock, with a season ofthree episodes per year. Which, yes, is a lot less than JMS ever wrote for B5,but in our defence he sometimes had trouble keeping up that kind of pace and wouldoccasionally churn out a few stinkers.

We don’t want that for Evil.

Indeed, for some point in the future, I have fancifulnotions of inviting other authors to contribute to the series. That’d be myultimate (pipe?)dream where this project is concerned. Because then you’ve notonly won over a faithful following of readers, you’ve inspired others to wantto write stories for your characters, set in your universe.

For the present, our ambitions here at Galaxy Six are morerealistic, with aims to release a third Evilvolume in December 2012. (The title’s already decided, with more than enoughmaterial in hand and the writing has begun.) And, all being well, a fourth forthe following December.

We’re primarily focused on the ebook market, but we doproduce a paperback version of each book for those who prefer the feel ofsomething physical in their hand.

Mainly, we’re in it for the fun right now. The ride.Okay, I have some notion of where it’s taking me for the next book and beyond,but it’s still an adventure with plenty of unknowns and cliffhangers ahead.

Sure, we’ll never be able to match the immediate gratificationand appeal of a TV show, but on the other hand our cast members will not betempted away into other projects like some Strictly judge jumping ship to BGT.There’s no studio screwing us around so we don’t know whether we’re going tohave a fifth season or not and our dialogue is rarely, if ever, drowned out byan overly bombastic score. And our fx budget is awesome.

Tune in. You never know, you might find it habit-forming.

EvilUnLtd. A TV series in book form. It’s like a subtitled showwithout the pictures.

[This was a guest post by Simon Forward, author and all round good egg. Buy Evil Unltd from here now!]

A Weekend, with friends, in August...

2011-09-02T19:18:00.000Z

It was lovely round our house last week, with Paul visiting for his by now traditional Festival weekend (when we don't go to see any shows) and George up for the what I hope is the first visit of many. I'm a sucker for things repeating themselves, finding great comfort and pleasure in repeated actions, and it looks as though these August visits are naturally falling into a patter.

First Paul arrives by train at about lunchtime and, after dumping his bag, we head into the Grassmarket for a pint at what used to be The Fiddlers Arms, but is now called Bar: Alba, I think. It's a nice pub but one that seems to change hands every year and so the decor changes every time we go in, like an interior chameleon circuit. After that we wander up the West Port, browsing the second hand bookshops. Paul piled the pressure on me by buying me copies of The Dark is Rising and Maybe the Moon, neither of which I've read and which are, it seems, his two favourite books. There will be dark mutterings and dreadful imprecations should I read them and say they're rubbish, I suspect...

Home then, and out to the airport to pick up George, flashily turning up by plane, then back to the house for an evening of chinese food, wine and old telly. Luckily George likes old tv as much as Paul and I (which is to say, somewhat more than Julie does) but in any case a few bottles of wine and a running conversation soon means that everything we watched took on the form of a single very long episode - so the sub-Avengers Spyders Web leaked into the ITV Avengers of Jason King, and the Two Ronnies acted as an intro to the strange Prisoner-tinged, Patrick McGoohan directed episode of Columbo. Plans to watch George's brother Scott's silent Cthulhu movie fell by the wayside, but luckily George kindly left a disc for me to watch later.

No hangover on the Saturday, which was good so (after a detour to take my son to a party) into town for a wander about Stockbridge, buying books left, right and centre - and totally failing to stick to my three book limit. A Dennis Wheatley science fiction novel, some sf short story books, one of Willows sequels (which looks upsetingly elegiac), a fabulous looking Umberto Eco style medieval mystery from George and sundry other bits and pieces that took my fancy and that was a carrier bag largely filled.

It can be a bit dull describing a day wandering about, no matter how enjoyable it might be for the wanderers, but some highlights:

Watching Steve running (back very straight, like one of the Scooby Doo gang) straight past the end of the street we were having cake and tea in, all the while speaking into his phone like it was a Star Trek communicator.
Meeting Mark and Gillian (both lovely, though Mark's views on Cilla leave something to be desired!) and having Gillian say 'Are you Stuart Douglas? Obverse Books?'
Paul remembering a wee pub down a back alley, past a junk shop which looked like it probably contained every trim phone ever inside its walls, where we got a comfy seat out of the rain (I'm getting old, clearly!)
In the Blue Moon for great steak pie - the only place in Edinburgh where the staff take the time to act a bit flirty!

Annoyingly, for the second year in a row CCs was full of people staring into space and intimidating, thieving teenagers with fat thighs, so we didn't stay long but headed home for a last couple of drinks and a bit of chat - a lovely, relaxed end to a fantastic weekend. Roll on next August!

The Obverse Quarterly

2011-04-15T11:27:00.001Z

The Obverse Quarterly is a new venture in current small press publishing. Taking our cue from the New England Library paperbacks of the 1970s, Obverse Books are delighted to present a set of four paperback short story collections, available both by annual subscription and as single volumes, each covering an area of interest to the genre fiction fan. From horror to fantasy, science fiction to detective stories, and with brand new stories from the likes of Michael Moorcock, Conrad Williams and Paul Magrs The Obverse Quarterly has something fresh and unexpected for everyone!

Book 1: Bite Sized Horror, edited by Johnny Mains

A chewable selection of horror and terror from some of the masters of the field, edited by Johnny Mains – Mr Pan Horror!

Brighton Redemption - Reggie Oliver
The Between - Paul Kane
His Pale Blue Eyes - David A. Riley
The Unquiet Bones - Marie O’ Regan
The Carbon Heart - Conrad Williams

To be released 30 June 2011, available for pre-order

Book 2: Senor 105 and the Elements of Danger, editor Cody Quijano-Schell

Senor 105, masked Mexican wrestler and fighter of evil and infamy returns in his own collection, edited by 105 creator Cody Quijano-Schell and with an introduction by comic star David Yurkovich!

Glyph – Joe Curreri
Señor 105 contra el Bigote de Perdición – Lawrence Burton
Mechaluchador vs Iguanadios - Jonathan Dennis
Are you Loathesome tonight? - Blair Bidmead
The Anti-element – Julio Angel Ortiz
Jackalope – Cody Quijano-Schell

To be released 30 September 2011

Book 3: The Diamond Lens and Others Stories: The Short Fiction of Fitz-James O'Brien

One of the very earliest science fiction authors, whose work has not been in print since 1929, Fitz-James O’Brien was an Irish writer of poetry, plays and short stories who fought in the American Civil War and was killed in battle in 1862. His imaginative and often surreal fantasies have rightly been described as one of the earliest forerunners of modern science fiction.

To be released 01 December 2011

Book 4: Zenith Lives! Edited by Stuart Douglas

For much of the first half of the twentieth century, the detective Sexton Blake appeared to be a cross between Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, as he foiled super-villains and evil geniuses time and again in the pages of boys comics. Foremost amongst those villains was Zenith the Albino, an opera cloaked gentleman with a taste for danger and excitement and little thought for personal safety. Obverse Books is proud to present new Zenith adventures from some of Blake’s biggest and best known fans!

With new Zenith stories from Michael Moorcock, Paul Magrs, George Mann, Mark Hodder and Stuart Douglas.

To be released 30 March 2012

Pricing

UK
Annual Subscription (for four titles) - £28 plus £6 P&P
Individual Titles: £9.99 plus £1.50 P&P.
International
Annual Subscription (for four titles) - £28 plus £12 P&P
Individual Titles: £9.99 plus £3 P&P.

http://obversebooks.co.uk/shop/obverse-quarterly/

It's all gone a bit quiet here...

2010-12-30T19:57:00.002Z

...now that Obverse Books has its own blog.

So I've started a new reviews only blog here - http://fromastoryby.blogspot.com/

Go and have a look; it;s got Cagney and Lacey and Sexton Blake on it already.

I'm going to aim to write something most days for the first month or so, something occasionally for the next year, then forget the login details altogether...

Smooth Operator

2010-11-29T11:07:00.004Z

Too good just for Facebook.

WARNING - Contains (allegedly) Doctor Who fandom.

Unlimited Evil

2010-10-11T18:05:00.002Z

My good (and talented) pal Simon has decided to dip his toe in the virtual book market and released the very funny Evil UnLtd on Kindle via Amazon.,

The first volume of their exploits - Evil UnLtd: The Root Of All Evil - is now available, from the Kindle store on

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Evil-UnLtd-Root-All/dp/B00457XLMI/ref=pd_ts_kinc_16?ie=UTF8&s=digital-text

and, for readers in the US

http://www.amazon.com/Evil-UnLtd-Root-All-ebook/dp/B00457XLMI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=A7B2F8DUJ88VZ&s=digital-text&qid=1286532276&sr=1-1

Trust me, there's no greater volume of Evil.

And don't worry, if you don't happen to have a Kindle device the Kindle software is available to download FREE for a variety of platforms: PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, Android and Uncle Tom Cobbly and all.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_ipad_mkt_lnd?docId=1000425503

Go on -- buy a copy!

Find and Replace

2010-10-01T14:24:00.003Z

Katy Manning is brilliant. Really, that should be a required t-shirt slogan for every single Doctor Who fan. Not content with playing that emblem of early seventies Britain, Jo Grant, she also had a pivotal role in creating the audio version of the wonderful Iris Wildthyme.

As she says in the short interview which follows on from the action in Paul Magrs' fantastic new Companion Chronicle, Find and Replace, when first playing Iris Peter Davison, playing the Doctor, asked in horror of her accent 'Are you really intending to play it like that?' and thank God she said yes, or we'd have missed out on so much. Without that broad Mancunian accent perhaps the character would have remained trapped in prose but with it she flew until that voice is now the one that I hear when reading Iris' adventures, a the defining characteristic of Miss Wildthyme.

Which means that the combination of Katy playing Iris, Jo and the Third Doctor in Find and Replace is a dream come true for someone like me who adores all three and views the seventies as the high-spot of British television. Throw in the best writer of modern Doctor Who penning the script and, frankly, I'm in genre heaven.

Make no doubt about it, Find and Replace is the best single Big Finish release bar none since Magrs' earlier Ringpullworld and demonstrates that, when the company uses the very best talent available, it's capable of creating stories on a par with any genre work in any medium anywhere.

The acting is, of course, superb. Katy is astonishing, at times switching smoothly from Jo's winsome little girl voice, to Iris' barking Lancashire to Pertwee's patrician tones in the space of a few seconds. That Alex Lowe as the novelisor Huxley is in no way embarrassed by such a tour de force performance is indicative of his quality too, but both actors are helped immeasurably by the quality of Magrs' script, which flows and eddies as smoothly as a pint of Guinness, sliding from nostalgic reverie as Jo imagines the Doctor moving about in his lab directly above her, to unexpected confrontation as...well, you better listen to it yourself really :)

There's a very genuine sense of sheer pleasure in every aspect of Find and Replace, a very real feeling that everyone involved is having a whale of a time, best summed up by the triumphant whoop of 'Let's go back to the Seventies!' which ends part one. Credit for some of this must presumably go to director Lisa Bowerman, who contrives to keep everything moving along and to avoid the temptation to clutter the sound-scape with intrusive background bells and whistles (unlike some of the other BF directors).

Hugely recommended.

Random Notes on Dracula (1931)

2010-09-27T15:10:00.007Z

As part of a vague idea of tracking what I actually watch I had planned to write a review of some sort of every film I watch for the next little while. However, the film I watched whilst ironing shirts last night was Tod Browning's 1931 classic, Dracula, and I don't imagine that anything I say about that movie is likely to be in any way new or interesting. So instead - some random thoughts (which at least have the benefit of brevity).

1. Transylvania must have insanely vindictive contract law - how else to explain both the fact that the coach driver does take Renfield to make his appointment with Dracula, or that Dracula is so confident that Renfield will turn up at midnight?

2. Renfield starts off being played by Harold Lloyd, then slowly turns into Harry Enfield, before ending the movie as Peter Lorre, complete with vocal impersonation.

3. I bet Steve Reich has heard the incidental music - I spent the whole movie expecting elderly Jewish voices to start speaking, in the style of Reich's brilliant Different Trains.

4. The bats are rubbish, but given the staginess of the entire production, that seems appropriate.

5. It's a far simpler story here than it often is in future, but the longing in Lugosi's "to die, to be truly dead, that must be glorious" is a beautifully layered performance which briefly undercuts Draclua's otherwise iron cast self-belief.

6. Charles Laughton obviously saw this movie - the random interpolations of armadillo, possum, spiders and insects is strangely reminiscent of Night of the Hunter.

7. While there are some very nice shots - Renfield framed in the stairs of the ship full of corpses is a particulary effective moment - the scene where a maid and John Harker, standing on the balcony, see (off screen) a wolf running across the lawn and relate this in detail to the occupants of the dining room is laughably poorly done, like Nick Briggs' early audio plays.

8. The ending is very odd indeed, to those used to modern horror movies. Having found Dracula's coffin and broken off a piece of wood with which to stake him, the camera cuts to the Harkers' reunion and the only evidence of the destruction of the vampire is a sound of hammering from off-stage. Cut back to Van Helsing emerging from the crypt and the Harkers essentially saying 'come on, let's go out of here'. Van Helsing shakes his head and says no, he'll follow on in a minute...and then the film ends, just when you were expecting the obligatory 'twist'.

9 Forgotten Gems from David Bowie

2010-09-23T12:51:00.004Z

Would have been ten but if anyone is still reading this blog, they could put any tenth suggestion in the comments!

Tin Machine – Goodbye Mr Ed

As out of place on a hard-rocking Tin Machine album as something like 'After All', this is the single moment when Tin Machine actually created something worth listening to. That it sounds far more like a Bowie solo track than a Tin Machine band effort is, obviously, neither here nor there.

David Bowie – Buddha Of Suburbia

From Bowie's great lost album, a title track which both stands alone as a great song and harks back to previous moments of glory, even to the extent of quoting from 'All the Madmen'.

David Bowie – In The Heat Of The Morning

Best heard on the Deluxe cd reissue of the first album, 'David Bowie' (where you get three different versions for your money), and brilliantly covered by the Last Shadow Puppets, this is a great tune with fabulous lyrics, and deserves to be far better remembered than it is.

David Bowie – Conversation Piece (Stereo Version)

There's an updated version of this seventies out-take, recorded as part of the Toys project and eventually added to the 'Diamond Dogs' re-issue, but this more acoustic version, available as one of the extra tracks on the Rykodisc release of 'Man of Words, Man of Music' is the superior release.

Kashmir – The Cynic

Most times Bowie collaborates it's obvious that Bowie is the driving force - think 'Little Drummer Boy' with Bing Crosby or 'Under Pressure' with Queen - but here he's just a vocalist doing a duet on someone else's album and he turns in a sparkling performance, aided no doubt by the steady hand of Tony Visconti on production duties.

David Bowie – Alternative Candidate (A Demo For Proposed 1984 Musical)

A totally different, and just as brilliant, alternative to the standard Diamond Dogs track.

Inside every teenage girl there's a fountain
Inside every young pair of pants there's a mountain

Fantastic.

David Bowie – When I'm Five - Love You Till Tuesday Soundtrack Version - Mono

I always loved this song, both in the Bowie original and the Beatstalkers excellent cover, but I can never seem to convince anyone of the fact that the lyric is the darkest Bowie ever wrote: the story of a four year old boy dying of some horrible unspecified illness while his parents marriage collapses around him in a welter of recrimination and blame. And then the last verse which would break the heart of a stone man. God, it makes me miserable just thinking about it...

David Bowie – Remembering Marie A.

Well, there has to be something from Bowie's frankly mildly bonkers decision to release an EP of Bertolt Brecht songs - and this is my favourite one. A real tour de force of singing and some great lyrics.

The Beatstalkers - Silver Treetop School For Boys

Sadly not available on Spotify so the link goes to You Tube, but it is on a best of cd which every self-respecting Bowie fan should own. A cover version of a Bowie song which DB never recorded himself, this is The Great Lost Bowie song, especially if you like his early, post-fame stuff.

Wilfred McNeilly's Sexton Blake

2010-09-20T13:17:00.002Z

I've been reading Sexton Blake Library paperbacks from the 1960s recently. They're as thin as a Terrance Dicks Target novelisation, and come complete with gaudy covers showing a naked woman framed by a a telephoto lens or a screaming pop star partially obscured by lurid green mist. If ever a series shouted out 'cheapo cash-in' the later Sexton Blake stories certainly do.

And they come with a reputation too. A reputation for tackiness and unpleasantness, with Blake - once the nemesis of super-villains and criminal geniuses - reduced to sorting out blackmailers and rapists, finding lost kittens and working for insurance companies. A depressing mix of the utterly mundane and the unnecessarily visceral.

But they're not like that at all, at least in the case of those written by one Wilfred McNeill.

According to a post on the Groovy Age of Horror McNeill was a hard-drinking hack for hire (in the best possible sense), turning out whatever sort of story he was asked and contented that he died with a new advance partially spent on whisky! War stories, tv tie-in novels, horror fiction and Sexton Blake were only part of a career spent writing millions of words at speed and to dealine.

Which experience possibly explains the deft way he handles the more constrained, less extravagant sixties Sexton Blake and contrives to make a real silk purse form a definite sow's ear.

I love the way that, in the absence of proper super villains, he populates his books with grotesques and oddities - the middle-class, middle-aged kitchen table abortionist who turns up early in Death in the Top Twenty for instance, or the recurring characters of the crafty, but destitute Duke and Duchess of Derwentwater.

I love the way he drops meta-fictional asides into the text bemoaning that very absence of proper bad guys (in each of his Blake books, he has Blake himself muse about the good old days when he tackled real villains instead of the tiresome insurance work which makes up the bulk of his 60s work) and explaining other jarring elements of the Blake Library (brilliantly the sole explanation for Tinker not being about 100, given he was born in the last century, is that he's very young looking for his age!). Particularly great is an aside form Blake about the fact that writers never get paid enough!

I love the characterisation of the regulars - Blake is essentially the same character as he was in the 1920s, with the same attitudes and morals, only now living in the Swinging Sixties, like an early precursor of Austin Powers or a contemporary of Adam Adamant. Tinker, now more generally referred to by his name, Edward Carter, is a real ladies-man, given the task of seducing anyone from pub barmaids to spurned girlfriends.. And Paula Dane is far more than the sort of stock female weakling you would expect in such a novel, proving herself to be a doughty fighter and a master of disguise, infiltrating the villain's lair more often than Tinker and frequently suffering quite extreme violence for her efforts.

I love the plots - Death in the Top Twenty, for instance, is about someone trying to kill a 60s pop star who uses a body double for every part of his life, including his sex life and living in his mansion, because he prefers to live with his mum!

Most of all I love the arch humour of lines like "Riparian rights are liable to enter the leasehold and no riverside dweller can be absolutely sure that by immemorial custom swan-upping does not take place on his front lawn every third Tuesday of September." Really, how unexpected is that in a hard-boiled crime thriller? And how brilliant?

I have to find more of McNeilly's books - I think he did some Danger Man novelisations for a start...

Torch Singer (1933)

2010-09-05T21:17:00.003Z

It's an odd sort of film, this. For one thing, reviews on the internet call it a soapy comedy, even though there are only a few jokes and the story is about a woman left alone and pregnant by a wealthy blueblood, who can't get a job, gets evicted from her apartment and then gives up her baby for adoption, before finally becoming what one character describes as 'the most notorious torch singer in town'. For another, the story the film is based on is called 'Mike', the name of the
blueblood father - a character who doesn't appear until the final quarter of the movie and even when he does he says and does almost nothing. For a third, there seems to be a chunk of th movie missing, even though, in fact, there isn't. Finally, a one year old baby gets star billing for reasons which utterly elude me. Like I said, it's an odd sort of film all round.

But a great little movie, nonethless. It has the wonderful Claudette Colbert in it for a start. Made only a year before scooping the Best Actress Oscar for her comic role in 'It Happened One Night' and a couple before her nomination for the same award for 'Private Worlds', this film shows Colbert at her magnificent best, equally adeptly dealing with the dramatic and the comic elements in the story. Really, if you've never seen a Claudette Colbert movie, you should watch this one just to stare at cinema's most expressive eyes - she can do more with one frown than most actresses in the early 30s could do with their entire body - and one of the movie's great sexy voices (probably the best scene in the film features Colbert in the role of Aunt Jenny, a radio presenter for small children (a position she combines with that of the most notorious torch singer in town) saying"naughty boys have often tried to tease your Aunt Jenny - sometimes they've teased her until she had to give in', a line which would send shivers down the spine of all but a corpse).

The rest of the cast are basically functional at best. Errant rich kid Mike is played perfectly adequately if two dimensionally by David Manners, and to be fair there's not a lot of meat on the bones of the character, but I can't help thnking that in the hands of a Jimmy Stewart something more could have been made of his obvious selfishness and occasional harshness, even after he comes back after four years and goes looking for the woman he left behind, than Manners manages (('Please stop acting' he tells her when he comes back and then blames her for becoming hard and cold - 'like glass', she counters' 'and only diamonds can cut glass so come back with some'). The rest of the cast are much of a muchness, though it's worth highlighting the absolutely gorgeous Mildred Washington, in the role of Colbert's black maid.

To return to the odd nature of the movie, it does have *some* comedic sections. There are sundry excellent one liners throughout and this exchange between lily white Colbert and a five year old black girl Sally, the same age and with the same name as Colbert's lost daughter
is beautfully done:

Colbert: "I used to have a little girl named Sally'
Little Girl: "Was she black like me, Aunt Sally?'
Colbert: "Darling, it was so long ago I can't remember.'

The fact that the writers are willing to make even a small amount of humour from the plight of an unmarried mother does highlight the fact that, as a film from 1933, this is a pre-code movie (the print I watched is form the Pre Code Hollywood box set - well worth buying, incidentally). The film opens with Colbert and another unwed mother giving birth in a charity hospital run by nuns, but there's no suggestion from anyone that their state is in any way a sin or a subject of opprobium. Instead, the nuns are sympathetically drawn, her fellow unwed mother Dora supports her while she is able, a doctor wonders aloud where the fathers are when they're needed and when Colbert gives away her daughter, no-one blames her for doing what she
has to. Instead, all the main barbs are aimed at the wealthy - Colbert's rich, trendy pals run her down the second she asks them to leave her flat because she's tired and upset, Mike's rich, patrician aunt refuses to help Colbert with some money to prevent her nephew's only son being placed in the adoption system, and the wife of a wealthy (and admittedly sympathetic) businessman never misses a chance to insult her, all but accusing her of being a whore, now that she's - horror of horrors - a torch singer.

Which brings up the issue of the missing section of the movie. There is no missing section obviously - it's a standard 70 minutes long and always was - but there's a massive and unexplained jump between Colbert's first attempted audition without her daughter, in which a
male promoter tells her that "a woman must suffer a lot to sing a little" (she replies that she'll be back in year but 'in the meantime watch me suffer') and the very next scene in which she's a successful torch singer and signs up with the same promoter, presumably having suffered plenty in the fade out in between. It's a clumsy bit of tell not show which jars in amovie otherwise very nicely directed (for instance, there's a lovely brief scene just after she signs up to be a big star in which all you see are her feet walking in new shoes, with plasters on both her heels, suffering for her new prominence).

Perhaps the oddest thing in the movie though is the fact that the name Baby Le Roy appears on the card announcing prominent cast members at the beginning of the movie - I assumed that was the name of one of the flapper types who befirend Colbert after she makes it ig - but it
turns out to be the name of the one year old kid used as Colbert's daughter. Baby, real name Ronald, obviously became something of a minor child star, appearing in a couple of WC Fields movies and alongside Maurice Chavalier in 'A Bedtime Story', but enough to makethe titles aged 9 months?

Odd.

Weekending Shenanigans Part 1

2010-08-24T12:11:00.009Z

Paul was up at the weekend, for our by now traditional (can two years count as a tradition?) Edinburgh Festival drink and books get together.

It's not a complicated tradition or anything - just a chance to sit around, gabbing about books and telly and people we know, fuelled by alcohol and chinese takeaway. The specific plan this time round was to watch telly and get drunk on the Friday night, then go book shopping on Saturday, followed by dinner and more drinks.

As it turned out, Julie, Paul and I managed to get the chinese meal ordered and eaten, contrived to fill up sundry glasses with red wine, cider and vodka (not all at once, you understand) but then ended up gabbing and drinking until about 11 o'clock and so by the time we turned the tv on, we were all a bit half-cut and nodding off.

Which might explain the disparity between...

Friday Night Viewing (planned)

The Love Boat (pilot episode)
My Family and Other Animals (an episode with Brian Blessed as Spiro)
Crossroads (random black and white episode)
Raven (an episode not already on the Network DVD Look Back sampler dvd)

Friday Night Viewing (actual)

Crossroads
The Love Boat (abandoned half way through due to drunken tiredness)

Crossroads in 1966 was a far different beast to that in 1979, we discovered. Like Coronation Street at the same time, it's a more realistic series than soaps nowadays, with nothing very much happening and a lot of the screen time being taken up with characters talking to one another.

There's no sign here of campness or cheapness, no wobbly sets or comedy ethnic characters. In fact it's not even really about the motel at all, merely using that as a base around which the staff live their lives. A pre-accident Sandy gives evidence in court, Miss Diane (looking very young and just plain 'Diane' at this point) worries about something or other to do with tea, and an equally young but still not very attractive Audrey Roberts bats her eyelids unconvincingly at all and sundry (presumably Wendy Richard wasn't available for the role on the day required?). Noelle Gordon is even more brilliant than she is later on (though sadly she doesn't sing) and all that I really missed from the 70s series I watched at tea-time is the dashing figure of David Hunter (actually, where was Jane Rossington, I wonder?)

The other unexpected thing (and again, similar to contemporary Corrie) is how quickly an episode shoots past. We watched it for what felt like five minutes, paused the dvd to talk about Noelle's hair and her resemblance to Thatcher, turned it back on - and it was finished! Presumably part of that is down to the short running time, once adverts have been removed, but even so, for a show full of talking it was no great trial to get through...

To be honest, all I can remember clearly about The Love Boat was the presence of Phil Silvers, some plot bits about the ship's doctor having been a newly wed woman's old friend and a jealous husband threatening to belt him one. And some sort of bedroom swap, but things were going a bit blurry and cross-eyed by that point. I did laugh though, I think so worth re-visiting.

Saturday's goings on, including scary giant bears, posh ladies, ill-informed booksellers and overly screechy teenagers, later...

Won't You Admit it's Getting Better?

2010-06-23T15:32:00.002Z

Why is this season of Doctor Who so much better for me than the last several years?

Some people have claimed that any differences are so minor that any stated preference for one over the other *must* be a result of prior unreasoning dislike of one writer or other. This is clearly nonsense. For all that the basic set-up of Doctor, companion, TARDIS has remained the same and Steven Moffat has chosen to use the RTD season template wholesale for this new year, the cumulative minor differences in tone, style and set-up make this a very different beast from the Russell T Davies years.

These differences range from the utterly unimportant (say, the fact that there are fewer gay characters in this season than in previous ones), through interesting, but hard to see that it really matters (the redesign of the TARDIS console, for instance) to fundamental shifts in the entire shape of the series (granted, it's harder to label that a minor change convincingly but I'll get to that).

Taking the minor issues first, there are several things in the Davies' years which, taken together are enough to generate a low level irritation field round the entire series.

1. Russell T Davies is simply not a witty writer.

I don't think Davies would recognise actual wit if it bit him in the arse and announced itself as a Tom Sharpe character. I like injections of humour in my Doctor Who, and for all that Davies constantly tries to force some jokes into his episodes he inevitably fails miserably. Burping wheelie bins and farting aliens I can forgive on the grounds that Davies was still experimenting with tone at that early stage, but exchanges like

The Doctor: I am a doctor.
Jackie: Prove it. Stitch this, mate!

and

Rose: My mother's cooking.
The Doctor: Good. Put her on a slow heat and let her simmer.

are so ancient that they might as well have been the words written on the first planet in The Pandorica Opens. Even the most highly praised of Davies' jokes - something like Donna complaining that the wedding reception went ahead without her, say - would fit imperceptibly into a sub-standard seventies sitcom like On the Buses.

2. I can't be bothered with super-humans...

...regardless of where they start from. So I find Rose's thirteen week move from shop girl with no future to Defender of Earth, flitting from one universe to the other as annoying and false as Martha's journey from junior doctor to guerilla fighting, planet saving uber-mensch.

3. He's a lazy bastard, isn't he?

I want the every element of plot and setting to make at least a modicum of sense within the over-arching framework of the series and it annoys me when they don't, especially when they could so easily be fixed. Fans online spend hours patching up these Davies plot holes and though they make interesting reading they're also often rather desperate stabs at explaining some of Davies' more mental logic disasters. And don;t let anyone convince you otherwise - there are more annoying and lazy plot holes (for want of a better term) in the first half hour of, say, Gridlock than there have been in the entirety of Steven Moffat's first season combined (minus Beast Below which I didn't like for much the same reason, but which slightly gets away with its illogicality due to the sheer force of Matt Smith's performance as the Doctor).

The fact that Davies doesn't seem to care about such things - even basics like his grasp of UK politics and how exactly the internet works - annoys me even more because it feels so contemptuous of the viewer.

4. No Payoff

Well there just isn't any - dying heroically to save Wilf (which was done so badly in any case that it was actually a little bit astonishing) is not payback for the arrogance, hubris and plain old fashioned up-himselfness of the Tenth Doctor.

As to the major differences, well they're quickly covered since they all link together.

First off, I hate Hollyoaks. For some inexplicable reason it's become acceptable to assume that 'soapy' is an insult. Consequently anyone accusing Davies of soapy writing is apparently making an unwarranted attack on the poor dear soul, but that shouldn't be the case. Good soap opera is good writing, and soap characters are merely normal dramatic characters written ever so slightly larger. Add in exaggerated situations, melodramatic scenes galore and a large cast of people with issues and problems and you have a soap opera style drama.

Which is what Davies created. Rose, Jackie, Pete and Mickey and their various interpersonal issues necessitate frequent trips back to Earth to visit the crappy sink estate on which the motley bunch live. Plot lines based round Mickey, the Doctor and Pete appearing as other Universe duplicates of themselves, second Pete coming back from the dead and getting together with Jackie, Mickey taking Ricky's place to nurse his old granny, then eventually marries Martha, Rose hooking up with the equivalent of the Doctor's twin brother - it's all so like a series of plots for some sort of soap pastiche, which is what I assumed Hollyoaks was for quite some time. And since I can't be bothered with any of the soaps in 2010 it's no real surprise that I find Davies' collection of ill-functioning families tiresome. I don't watch Doctor Who to get teenagers and their problems with boys and spots, or middle aged women who can't keep a man. I couldn't care less about Marta and her implausible family of over-achievers or Rose and her raddled bag of a mother. Clearly some people do like that sort of thing, but I'd prefer if they got their fix from actually watching Hollyoaks instead of dragging the tropes of that genre into those of Doctor Who.

Which is sort of beside the point (except tangentially). The real issue is that from 2005 to the introduction of Donna (at best, most forgiving reading), the series was as much about the companion and her life as it was about the Doctor and his adventures. Suddenly Rose was a legitimate series lead, on a par at the very least with the Doctor, in a way that no companion had been before. And though that's something I first mentioned back in 2005 in a blog post entitled 'Re: The Rose Show [was Doctor Who]' at that point I was really just complaining that Davies had allowed his love for his own creation (Rose) to blind him to the series' format and thus made her the person who saves the Doctor as opposed to vice versa. And like I said, I can't be bothered with super humans.

Martha continued that practice, to the point that - just as Rose saves the Doctor through the power of lurve in 'Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways' so Martha saves him in his Dobby Doctor form in 'Last of the Time Lords'. Doctor Who used to be a show about the triumph of the intellect, compassion and honesty of a mysterious alien over the forces of evil, but in the Davies years it became a show about the triumph of brilliant, plucky, fantastic humans over anything that gets thrown at them, a thread which reached its logical conclusion in Turn Left' where Rose and Donna combine to save the world without the Doctor's help at all. Donna, at least, starts off far more flawed than the soon to be perfect Rose or the Perfect from Day One Martha, but by Journey's End she's a half human, half Time Lord super Donna.

Compare that to the first Moffat season. Amy is quite clearly the junior partner in this relationship. The Doctor leaves her when it suits him, even when she's in danger she's demonstrably unable to deal with. She's brave and reasonably intelligent, but she doesn't understand how many things work and the Doctor explains only if it suits him. She comes on to the Doctor and he tells her to bugger off - none of your moody looks and protestations of mutual love here, thankfully. She's getting engaged to someone a bit rubbish and wimpy and she acts with him like real people act with the apparently slightly unsuitable partners that they are inexplicably in love with. She's a real person, in short, but one only sketched in in many ways and only properly formed in those respects which the Doctor needs to know about.

I was called sexist the other day because I said there was no need to have any companion as a joint lead of the show, nor for them to serve any major purpose other than making necessary exposition less painful. And I felt a bit guilty at first for saying that, then realised that it was true - because Doctor Who is not a show about two equals travelling through time, it's not a series about a meeting of minds over a steamy console, and there's no need for the human companion to be half the story, trailing hangers on and family of her own behind her. Certainly, in today's tv environment there does have to be some recognition that the audience identification character is more than a mere cypher, but there's huge distance between that and episodes in which every human character ever featured in the proceeding year or tow comes together with all their mates and kids and boyfriends and forms a Legion of Super Humans to - yet again - Save the Day.

None of that (for me) is what Doctor Who is about in short - and I'm delighted that it looks at last that someone in charge has remembered that.

My nana is 90...

2010-05-25T16:34:00.003Z

[My cousin Angie recently created a document of my nana's life for her 90th birthday - the text below is directly from that document, and all in my nana's own words]

... I am 90 today, 15th April 2010, and this is the story of my life so far, as told to Christine & Angela...

Childhood

- I was born on 15th April 1920 on a Croft in Port Nalauchaig, Arisaig.
- Port Nalauchaig is Gaelic for “Port of the Mice”.
- My maiden name was Macdonald.
- I was brought up in Arisaig in the Scottish Highlands by my grandparents, Angus and Catherine Macdonald.
- The name of the house we lived in, Port Nalauchaig, was changed to Cullen View after the renovation in 1937. The name was changed when we had a guest staying with us and he said it should be called Cullen View because of the beautiful view across the water to the Cullen Hills on the Isle of Skye.
- When my uncles did the renovations, we got a bathroom put in. Electricity was put in in 1947 and Granddad’s first comment was “How do we reach up that high to blow out the light at the top of the stairs?”.
- My mother, Mary Ann Macdonald, lived mostly on the Isle of Arran, where she worked in service on a Croft as a housekeeper. I spent my school holidays with her on High Clachalig Farm in Arran.
- I walked about 6 miles a day to St. Mary’s School in Arisaig, sometimes barefoot. That’s the only school I went to. I left school when I was 14 years old.
- Miss Gillies was my teacher – she was a bitch. She gave you the strap for nothing. She’s in heaven now – or maybe hell, I don’t know.
- My head master’s name was Simon Macdonald. He was a Lewis man. (From the Isle of Lewis).
- The nearest Secondary School was miles away in Fort William, so I just stayed at St Mary’s.
- I remember I had an eggcup for an inkwell at the school.
- When I started school, I couldn’t speak English, I only spoke Gaelic at home, you see.
- I attended St Mary’s Roman Catholic Church, Arisaig. Father McNeill was the priest.
- There was plenty to do when I was young. There was work looking after the animals on the Croft.
- I regularly milked the cows. Fresh warm milk from a cow is lovely.
- We had sheep and black & white border collies, Billy, Bessie and Smart, to herd the sheep and cows. Collies are beautiful and good protecting dogs. Smart was my best dog – a pedigree.
- I collected eggs from our hens. Newborn chickens were separated from their parents and brought back to them when they were big enough to follow them safely.
- I had pet rabbits too.
- Later in life, I still love animals. I remember a black and white collie, Fruchin, and a Labrador, Bracken, both from Arran. Fruchin is Gaelic for “heather” and came from Arran.
- I did a lot of cooking and baking, and made bread in a range oven. We grew our own vegetables and I liked gardening.
- I would walk to Morar where my first cousin, Morag Gillies, lived. There is a lovely beach at Morar with miles of white sand.
- I often walked the 12 miles to Mallaig, and from there I went fishing in the Atlantic with my uncle Angus. We caught mackerel, herring and flounders. I could catch salmon from the boat with a rod, and trout from rivers. The boatyard belonged to the Henderson's. I was always welcome there. Elsie, my step sister, married Duncan Henderson.
- There was time for fun too. I had a Macdonald of Clanranald kilt and I wore it when I danced the Highland Fling and the Sword Dance at the Highland Games in Morar and Mallaig.
- There was other dancing too. I liked the Quadrilles, Eightsome Reels and the Lancers – but best of all, I liked Strip the Willow.
- There were some sad times as well. One Friday, I danced all night with the local boys. They went out fishing on Saturday and were never seen again. The boat sank. The sea feeds you, but it is cruel.
- My mother was from a family of 6 children: Alan, Mary Ann, Johnnie, Bella, Flora and Angus.
- When I was nine Nurse Thompson from Stobhill Hospital in Glasgow brought us a little girl to bring up, Ina Gray, who was 6 months old. Ina’s father had died and her mother could not care for her children. Ina’s brothers and sisters’ names were John, James, Peter, Margaret and Robert Gray. The older children lived with Uncle Alan but Ina was the youngest so Uncle Alan asked if we could take her. Uncle Alan lived in Drumdugh, Arisaig.
- When I was twelve, Nurse Thompson brought us another little girl, Elsie Reynolds, who was 11 months old. Both girls were brought up by my granny, but I did most of the cooking. Elsie married Duncan Henderson from Mallaig, Ina married Eric Hancock from London. Ian and Eric live in Cullen View now.
- I have a half sister, Margaret McIvor, who is eighteen years younger than me. She lives in Arran. Her husband’s name was George. He was from Lewis.
- Katie “Fach” is my aunty. Her maiden name and married name are the same – Macdonald. She married uncle Angus, my mother’s youngest brother.
- In 1940 I had to leave Arisaig to go and work for the War Effort. I went to British Aluminium at Fort William. What a shock that was!
- I drove a ‘loco’ which is a steam tank on wheels. Aluminium powder is mixed with water and boiled in the furnace until it becomes liquid. I transferred this to my ‘loco’ and moved it around the plant to where the ingots were made. It was scary until you got used to it, mostly because of the flames that came out the back.
- My first love was Bobby French, a soldier. He left me for another.

Married Life

- I met my husband at a dance. His name was George Wishart Small Douglas. He was born in Edinburgh on 6th February 1920.
- George had lovely blue eyes.
- George was a Commando in the Cameron Highlanders, and was billeted at Rubanna Lodge, which belonged to the Nicholson family.
- The nicest tartan you can get is the Cameron Highlander’s Regimental Tartan. It is yellow, red and green.
- I came to Edinburgh to marry George. We were married on 10th June 1942 at Richmond Church, Craigmillar. The Minister’s name was Mr Hutchison.
- My family treated me as an outcast because I married out of my faith.
- On my wedding day I wore a royal blue costume and a wee hat with a brim.
- When I came to Edinburgh, I first worked in the Royal Infirmary at Lauriston as a cleaner. Later I worked in the Rubber Mill, where I made rubber piping.
- My mother-in-law, Catherine Douglas, was a lovely woman who looked after me. She was a nurse and delivered all my children at home, except for my last one, Margaret. I could not have managed without my mother-in-law.
- My father-in-law was a butcher. His name was Reginald James Douglas (same as my son).
- Our own first house in Edinburgh was in Waverley Buildings in 1942, near the Magdalene Chapel in the Cowgate. It was a big change from the Highlands! Reginald, George and Alan were born in this house.
- After that we moved to 4 Broomhouse Gardens East where all my other children were born.
- In 1960 we moved to 94 Stenhouse Street West where I lived for 27 years.
- Through the years I have also lived in Hailsland Park, Murryburn, Calder Grove and Calder Drive and in 2006 I moved back to Stenhouse Street West – where I now live with Felix, my cat.
- I had one child every year for a long time. In the end I had ten children, although one, Helen, died when she was five years old.
- George and I grew our own vegetables. I loved having a garden.
- George worked as a butcher with Munro’s and later as a bus conductor. We managed fine.
- Redgie and his wife, Eleanor, emigrated to South Africa. I don’t think I’ll see Redgie again on this earth.
- For years I made a dumpling at Christmas for each one of my family. I made them to my granny’s favourite recipe and everyone wanted one. I also made all my own black bun, shortbread, etc. I was good at scones too. I don’t bake any more as I no longer have a cooker.

My Children

- Redgie, being the first born, was the favourite. He was a good laddie.
- Dode was a lovable rogue. He spent Christmases in Soughton Prison because he liked their 3 course dinner.
- Alan was clever at school. He brought home certificates.
- Alex was very shy and quiet except when he burnt my bed with his cigarette.
- Helen died when she was 5 of silent Pneumonia. She was a tomboy and stood up for everyone.
- Anne was a blue baby at birth. We had to rush her to the hospital to have her blood changed. Anne was George’s favourite.
- Eddie has his trade as a stone mason. He was the first to buy his own house.
- James loves animals and birds. He used to leave home with a carrier bag when he got a row – but only went as far as the car park where he’d hide behind a car for a little while, then come home again.
- Christine looks after everyone – just like my mother-in-law, after whom she is named. She looks after me day-to-day and I really appreciate it.
- Margaret was the only one born in a Hospital so that I could get sterilised straight afterwards. Margaret was a sweet bairn.

Retirement Years

- Tom McFarlane worked as a train driver and had a dog called Dusty. He had a car and took me all over. We also went to France once and got stranded and had to spend a night in the railway station! He had a life-long railway pass.
- My pal, Archie Cameron, was from Fort William. I went to the same school as him. We met again in the Club 85. He was my close friend. He died of cancer.
- Felix, my cat, protects me. She has a boy’s name, I know. I got her as a kitten from my granddaughter, Amanda’s cat. The wee thing looked like Felix the cat from the television and I didn’t realise she was female until the vet told me. It was too late to change her name then. Felix is a great pal to me. She sleeps with me and if I get up to go to the toilet during the night, Felix sits at the bathroom door and waits for me, then sees me back to my bed. She’s rare and warm, just like a hot water bottle.

Did You Know?...

- I panic unless I have my keys, handbag and walking stick near me at all times.
- Whisky is the “Water of Life”. The Gaelic word for whisky is Ish-kabe.
- My favourite colour is light blue.
- We always washed in the sea, and I don’t really like hot water. Cold water is healthier.
- Autumn is the best season – it is the shooting season.
- My favourite music is Scottish Music. I particularly enjoy Kenneth McKellar, Andy Stewart and Alistair McDonald.
- I wear a silver link bracelet. Eddie bought me that from his first week’s wages.
- We were fed porridge twice a day, for breakfast and dinner, and I now hate hate hate porridge!

[All this text, as collated by Angie, has been shamelessly pinched from my cousin Steven's blog

Remember the LibDems?

2010-05-10T15:10:00.002Z

It's easy to forget, when pottering round your Facebook pals' pages, reading the usual blogs or following your favourite twitter feeds, that politics is more tribal than anything in this country which doesn't involve a Sky Sports presenter. Cocooned in our little online world, it's all too simple to allow yourself to believe that the world outside the 'net reflects the (largely) left-wing consensus which informs web communication (in my online world, anyway).

Almost no-one is a Tory or a Republican, no-one objects much to a bit more taxation in return for a state which looks after the weak and the poor, and everyone thinks that far too many Americans are borderline bonkers.

It's comforting. It's warm and snugly and reassuring. If every one of the hundreds of people you interact with online is to the left of Billy Bragg, then surely the majority of the real world is the same - after all, one is a merely a sub-set of the other, isn't it?

Well, no. Obviously not, when you come to actually think about it. For a start, my online world is in large part composed of Doctor Who fans, genre tv aficionados and lovers of children's books, with a further sub-set of writers, illustrators and other creative types and a last group of people working in academia and social services. It's hardly surprising, therefore, that most people I talk to online are opposed to the racist, homophobic, little Englander Conservative Party. But most people aren't writers, illustrators or social workers - they're brickies and lorry drivers and shop keepers (and writers and illustrators and social workers too, naturally), and there's no particular reason to believe that that utterly non-homogeneous mass will ever vote en masse for the most left-wing party in any election.

So, you know, the Tories got most of the vote in England, Labour got nearly all the vote in Scotland and we will soon have a Tory government, led by old Etonian Dave Cameron and his gaggle of oily creeps and sneering snobs. The less well-off in Britain can expect to get shafted every way from Tuesday over the next few months and it's our own fault for so many people believing the Tory lies on immigration and the suitability of Gordon Brown to lead in particular.

Well actually, that's not quite true. It's not entirely our fault. A large part of the blame looks like it'll soon be lying at the door of Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats.

I voted for them, I must admit, just as I voted for them at the two previous elections. I've always voted for whatever party has the most inclusive, most socially aware, most left of centre manifesto. And that has, recently, been the LibDems as the Labour Party tried to prevent leaking support by pandering to the undecided middle classes, wooing the natural Tory voters with pseudo-Tory promises. In a landscape in which the traditional left and right are so close together, the presence of a genuinely socially sensitive party was a god-send for people like me and it was that, as much as the ridiculously American party leader debates, which caused the Lib Dem approval ratings to jump in the weeks of the campaign. To quote Johann Hari from last week "the gap between Labour and the Tories is far too small - but people live and die in that gap" - and for a few weeks it genuinely felt like the LibDems had moved into that gap.

Not any more though. One of the most disappointing aspects of the election result and actions since then has been the rather sad scrambling on Lib Dem activists to claim that the actions of Nick Clegg are fine, that anyone who expected a centre-left manifesto to translate into the actions of a centre left party was deluded and that if any voter feels betrayed by Clegg they're being absurd or stupid or just don't understand the Great Liberal Way. Best - or worst - of all comments I had aimed at me - 'Nick Clegg said he'd talk to whichever party got the most votes so he's fooled no-one' as though this country has been engaged in a national presidential election - what the leader of the party says in some speech is of considerably less importance than what the party manifesto said and on which basis you vote for your constituency MP.

It's patronising and insulting and frankly counter-productive - if activists want to make sure that the LibDems never again trouble the political commentators post-election result, they need only antagonise the many, many voters who switched to their party on the basis of promises which, it's now clear, Mr Clegg has no intention of keeping. There is literally no way that the Conservative leadership can agree to PR or any real electoral reform - Cameron can't even promise a referendum on PR, since he'd be out on his ear quicker than Lord Tebbit could call him 'a commie lapdog' and thrown into the same locked cupboard that that notorious Tory grandee declared would be the best place to stick Clegg while "the big boys sort [the forming of a government] out". Even intelligent and thoughtful posters like Alex are coming out with statements like "we will be going in[to negotiations] saying "I think you'll find that we got 23% of the vote and you got 36%, so we'll be splitting the power 40:60 if you don't mind" as though that were in any way at all not the sheerest fantasy. Mr Clegg will bow the knee to Mr Cameron in exchange for a cabinet seat or two, a small, largely irrelevant say in the big boy games and the chance to be remembered as the last Liberal leader to have any part to play in the formation of a British government.

Because he will be the last if he decides that he should shore up the Tories, a party he knows the majority of his party view as anathema. He will be the last if he yokes the LibDem wagon to a party which failed to defeat a tired fourth term government, fatally wounded years ago by the decision to go to war under Blair, knocked flat on its back by the expenses scandal, and then kicked round its recumbent near-corpse by the world-wide economic meltdown. He will be the last and he will deserve to be the last for throwing the poor, the needy and the weak to the Tory dogs. He will get everything he deserves since he'll be no better than his Conservative masters.

Of course it's not too late to step back - and if the Tories give Clegg as little as they hope to give the unemployed and the poor then that's likely to be a very small amount indeed. Maybe he'll get himself away from the edge in time - let the Tories form a minority government, then watch as the essentially decent people of this country recoil in horror at full-blown Toryism in action.

Don't allow your party to be used to detoxify Toryism, Mr Clegg, or lend a false air of decency to a party completely without it. Be remembered as a man of genuine integrity, leading a party of genuine change - or as the lackie of the party of privilege, jumping into bed with whomever offers him the most pocket change to do so.

PCC - Pretty Crap Complaints service

2010-01-20T07:53:00.001Z

Well there's a surprise, given the toothless nature of the PCC and the fact it happily lives in the back pockets of the tabloids.

Dear Stuart Douglas

Thank you for sending us your complaint about the Daily Mail article on the subject of the death of Stephen Gately. We have received numerous complaints about this matter.
I should first make clear that the Commission generally requires the involvement of directly affected parties before it can begin an investigation into an article. On this occasion, it may be a matter for the family of Mr Gately to raise a complaint about how his death has been treated by the Daily Mail. I can inform you that we have made ourselves available to the family and Mr Gately's bandmates, in order that they can use our services if they wish.

We require the direct involvement of affected parties because the PCC process can have a public outcome and it would be discourteous for the Commission to publish information relating to individuals without their knowledge or consent. Indeed, doing so might unwittingly add to any intrusion. Additionally, one of the PCC's roles is dispute resolution, and we would need contact with the affected party in order to determine what would be an acceptable means of settling a complaint.

On initial examination, it would appear that you are, therefore, a third party to the complaint, and wemay not be able to pursue your concerns further. However, if you feel that your complaint touches on claims that do not relate directly to Mr Gately or his family, please let us know, making clear how they raise a breach of the Code of Practice. If you feel that the Commission should waive its third party rules, please make clear why you believe this.

Press Complaints Commission

Obverse Books News

2010-01-18T15:07:00.004Z

With apologies to my many, many readers who may already have seen this on various Dr Who fora and elsewhere, here's an update on Obverse's plans for 2010...

First off, the next book in the Iris series is to be called Ms Wildthyme and Friends Investigate, which Cody Schell described as "a quartet of loosely connected mystery-infused stories with danger and intrigue from the more obscure corners of the Obverse-iverse" - and that's as good a description as any.

Essentially it's four overlapping novellas which taken together make a single complete mystery novel.

Iris and Panda are in each story, but are only the primary stars of the final one. The other stories concern, respectively, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger; the Manleigh Halt Irregulars (as first seen in Paul's Panda Book of Horror tale, 'The Delightful Bag') and Senor 105, the Mexican masked wrestler created by Cody for his Celestial Omnibus story.

The authors for this book - Jim Smith, Nick Wallace, Cody Schell and myself - are already hard at work, since we're looking to publish the book in May 2010.

Secondly, the fourth book in the Iris series - and the second and final book for 2010 - is to be called Iris: Abroad (like the pun?), and will be a new short story collection edited by Paul and I along the lines of the two books already out. The only theme is that the stories can't be primarily set on the British mainland and must feature Iris and Panda as seen in the Panda Book/Celestial Omnibus. Anyone interested in pitching a story (as previously at leats one slot in the book will be reserved for a cold pitch via email or the website) should have their synopsis to us by the end of February 2010...

The publication date for this one will be November 2010 (publishing on 12 December turned out in retrospect to be a bit of a mistake, with the Christmas post slowing everything down).

Eh, and I think that's it.

Three Books

2010-01-11T15:22:00.004Z

Let's see - what have I been up to recently? Nothing really, so here's some mega quick reviews of three snatches of recent reading...

The Year's Best Mystery and Suspense Stories, 1989, edited by Edward D. Hoch is a decent collection of short stories, marred by one bloody awful crock of a tale, written by an American, about the plucky IRA 'freedom fighters', robbing the rich and feeding the poor, and the crooked British police in Northern Ireland. Seriously, someone needs to shove the entire book right up the author's arse.

The Affinity Bridge, by George Mann. After the disappointment of all but the first Lucifer Box book from Mark Gattis, it's a pleasure to report that this alterate history sf spy story set (roughly) in time of Empire is a cracking read throughout. Sir Maurice Newbury and Veronica Hobbes are believeable and interesting heroes and the world they inhabit, full of giant airships and shuffling plague-ridden zombies, nicely mixes the steampunk and horror genres to great effect, all leavened with a flavouring of the truly fantastic. Good enough that I've already bought the sequel, The Osiris Ritual. You should too.

Hells' Belles, Paul Magrs. This book is - enormously cooly - dedicated to me so I can't in all good conscience do a proper review. I will say however that it's as good as (if not better than) previous entries in the series, and I've scoured ebay for pre-release review editions of those previous entries, so enthralling are the adventures of Brenda and Effie. Seriously, go out and buy the damn thing - even if it didn't have my name in it, it'd still be fabulous and still be one of the best books you'll read this year.

The End of Davies' Time

2010-01-02T21:41:00.006Z

When I was very small, maybe 3 or 4, I had one of those Disney singles, a double a-side of the Ugly Duckling on one side and the Emperor's New Clothes on the other.

I loved both sides with a passion unequalled until I discovered David Bowie, but The Emperor's New Clothes was my favourite. I mention this fact both because (a) I just remembered about this single whilst I was walking the dog in the snow just now and the memory made me happy and (b) because I intend to very clumsily segue from here into a discussion of the final two part episode of David Tennant era Doctor Who.

Essentially, as a child and as an adult I've always thought the moral of the ENC was that people can convince themselves of anything if they want to badly enough, and for nearly five years now I've been saying that a lot of Dr Who fans have been doing exactly that, so desperate are they for the new show to be not just a success but meaningful. After decades of ridicule, the Hardcore We so wanted the "re-imagining" to be critically lauded, to be a significant event, to be good...

And so the shallow Future Shock of Gridlock becomes a parable as deep as the ocean, the laughable society of The Doctor's Daughter is applauded not derided and Boom Town isn't slammed as a piece of sub-soap opera foolishness churned out by a writer who doesn't even understand the issue he's putting into his character's mouths never mind having anything interestnig to say on the subject.

This wilful blindness had I thought peaked with the Stolen Earth/Jounrey's End two parter which ended last season. The Doctor recruits an entire Scooby Gang, he tows the Earth on a big rope, Davros has a BIG BOMB OF DEATH and it turns out that six people are really needed to run the TARDIS. And yet otherwise sensible people, rather than going out and renting Buffy DVDs to remind themselves what good fantasy writing sounds like, went out of their way to fill the gaping holes in the plot, to provide meat to the skeletal bones of the story and to conjure up magic blu-tac to shove into the rents in logic which peppered the whole sorry, histrionic mess.

And, to be fair, that was the lowpoint of Who fandom's attitude to Rusty, since with this last two part send-off I see even real Davies' fans posting on fora and Facebook and Twitter and mailing lists, metaphorically scratching their heads and saying 'hmm, that was a bit rubbish, wasn't it?'

Don't misunderstand me - there were some lovely bits in The End of Time, though nearly all of them involved Tennant and Cribbens sitting alone, talking. They're both fabulous actors and can wrench meaning out of even the most asinine dialogue, but in all honesty there was, for once, a feeling of genuine emotion in Davies' words. That the emotion was largely a meta one - that Davies doesn't want to go but if he does have to he wants to make sure everyone acknowledges how brilliant he is - was made evident as the writer has Wilf derail the beautiful scene in the cafe by calling the Doctor the most wonderful person ever with tears in his eyes. More annoyingly still, in the final scene after the removal of the Time Lords, Wilf accepts the Doctor's sacrifice all too easily rather than trying like a proper old soldier to set off the gas before the Doctor can swap places with him.

Davies is like a sort of reverse JK Rowling I think - he can do character but not plot whereas she can do story but not character, and they both desperately need a proper old school script editor who isn't scared to say 'no, that's just stupid' to them. Sadly, they both evidently prefer to be surrounded by Yes Men who will agree that 'yes, it's a great idea to do a scene in the Mos Eisley Cantina where Russell Tovey decides what he likes in a man is looking like a 45 year old twink'. A decent editor would have asked the simple questions - questions like 'what is the point of the PM and his daughter? Was there one?' and 'is it really that believable that the guard who takes Lucy Saxon to her doom happens to be working for her?' and 'Do we really need the self congratulatory wanking of the last 15 minutes?' and, most importantly, 'Oh, and why does that first scene look like Harry Potter and that Gryffindor girl stopping the Slytherin guys from resurrecting Voldemort? Really, Russell, you need to at least try and obfuscate the things you're pinching!'

The End of Time in fact summed up a lot of what I think about RTD's era - he's a writer with almost no imagination and is utterly unsuited to the sf/fantasy arena Dr Who largely inhabits. So he sets everything on Earth and writes as much Who as contemporary drama as he can get away with. When he can't do that he throws big (frankly, old and bad) ideas at the screen and then fills in the inevitable gaps with what he fondly believes to be cool sounding sf titles (I actually laughe dout loud as the Doctor rattled off the ridiculous sounding names of the terrible Time War weapons, for all the world like a fanboy listing epsiodes of Old Who - 'The Lamentation of Bollocks, The Dreadfulness of Quorn and so on). Take him off earth and away from straight forward angasty soap opera drama and he's lost, reduced to, as someone wisely said, farting glitter in great clouds of bare competence.

One thing though, which I need to admit - the Master was handled beautifully in the second episode. For all that sending the drum beat (didn't it used to be three beats?) back in time to his childhood is the exact same plotting as Bad Wolf, the idea that Rassilon collatorally damaged the Master on purpose, knowing it would lead to a life of evil, is a brilliant one and the Master's realisation and revenge, killing himself as he blasts Rassilon back into Hell, following in his footsteps as he throws his own life away destroying those who caused his destruction - well, it's the single best thing in all of NuHu - no, the best thing in all of Doctor Who, post 2005 and possibly even before.

If only Davies has fully written the rest of the script instead of his usual lazy, half written work, then this might even have managed to be a classic. Unfortunaltey it falls far short of that and ends up merely being good by Davies' low standards.

Still, if Matt Smith in the season 31 trailer is anything to go by, maybe I'll soon be looking back on The Unicorn and the Wasp as the Golden Age.

Or, based on the final 15 minutes of End of Time, perhaps not...

A Recommended Author

2009-12-09T11:30:00.004Z

A Sinister Aura - Bret Herholz

And now for something completely different. If the autumn felt like a good time to be reading old detective novels set in simpler times, then the winter is definitely time for pulling the curtains closed, sticking on the fire and curling up in a big round chair, reading kids' books, ghost stories and comic books.

This is the first of Herholz's graphic novels I've read, though I've loved his Edward Gorey style illustrations since I first saw them (to the extent that I'm delighted that he has graciously agreed to do a cover for an upcoming Iris book).

It's the story of a strange suicide/murder in 19th century America and one potential, scandalous solution.

Herholz moves the story from its original 1889 setting to one about 30 years later, in order to make the apparently clairvoyant Miss Polly a little more modern while retaining the Crichton/Jeeves style manservant Handgraves (it's a lovely detail that these are the adventures of Polly and Handgraves, and not vice-versa as one might expect). It's a good idea, I think, as the drawing (which is particularly fabulous in those panels which feature what appear to be ghosts) lends itself particularly well to the post-Victorian period.

The mystery is intriguing, the writing taut and without a pound of waste and the illustration and lettering all top notch. Throw in an additional short story, a note from the author and a preview of Herholz's next work, and this comes highly recommended to anyone looking for something more than the latest Spider-Man.

(Hardly any) Winter Reading

2009-12-08T11:02:00.015Z

Just been thinking about books I've read recently and I seem to have stopped reading altogether. By my mental count I read exactly four books (not counting graphic novels) in November - four! I read more books when I was six.

And as one of those was the magical Hell's Belles (Which is dedicated to me, doncha know, and so deserves a post of its own), I might as well describe the three I did read...

Murder on the Brighton Express - Edward Marsden

This is the fifth in the best selling Railway Detective series, a series that I've been meaning to take a look at for ages. It was OK, competently written (which is all you need really in mystery novels) but like loads of these kinds of serial historical books the mystery is fairly unmysterious and the characters fall fairly neatly into 'black', 'white' and 'Looks So White that He's Bound to be Black'. Also, it's just Peter Lovesey's Cribb novels (or more specifically, the excellent TV adaptations starring Alan Dobie) with more steam engines and fewer interesting idiosyncracies.

The Pilot to Cribb

The Fallen - Dave Simpson

This, on the other hand, is like a Fall single rather than anything as flashy as a tv show. It's a series of short, repetitive pieces - look for ex-Fall member A, find him/her, chat about the way in which Mark E Smith tormented/facilitated member A, look for ex-Fall member B - each headed by a grainy black and white photograph.

'Repetition' - The Fall

"Repetition in the music and we're never gonna lose it", and while Simpson (like the Fall themselves) mainly avoids the tedium that kind of repeated refrain can cause, it's a close run thing at times. Fairly obviously one for the fans only...

Blackberry Wine - Joanne Harris

I haven't read Chocolat, Joanne Harris' massive international success and had a vague half-idea in the back of my head that it was the kind of book I don't like - full of people sighing at each other's European beauty combined with an extended and over-stretched metaphor acting as the spine of the story.

Maybe Chocolat is, but Blackberry Wine - the second of the author's self-described Food Trilogy - isn't. Instead it's an involving story of an author with one big literary hit behind him and a future filled with booze and a series of psuedonymous hack novels churned out to pay the bills. Then he opens a bottle of homemade wine left to him by an old friend...

It doesn't sound like much - in fact it sounds like it's verging perilously close on the sighing at beauty/over-extended metaphor territory - but Harris has a lovely style, her writing is warm like red wine, rich like good chcolate and full of unexpected moments of brilliance, like...hmmm...a Victoria Wood sitcom (damn, blew it!).

In the style of food and wine magazines everywhere (the edition I read actually came free with Good Food Magainze), this book is a perfect accompaniment to falling leaves and dropping temperatures.

And I've not read it yet, but Elaine (bless her cotton socks) finally repaid me for stealing my copy of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (and the Abbess of Crewe probably, plus sundry Asterix books) twenty odd years ago by sending me beautiful Folio Society edition of the book for my fortieth birthday. She's a star (and a big thief, obviously, but still - a star). Though pointing out that she was pushing the boat out for my 40th because I might well not make 50 was a wee tad harsh, if you ask me.

So I'll read that next, then invigorate my reading palatte by battering through some trash. A
Star Trek: Enterprise tie-in and EC Tubb's Space 1999 book, perhaps, or a couple of the Doctor Who NSAs and a certain someone's Merlin books (which are at least bound to be well written even if the need to remain true to the tv series has potentially emasculated anything interesting in the story).

The Magic Mole in the Adventure of the Velvet Curtains

2009-11-24T13:37:00.007Z

Has there ever been a less likely Torch singer than Cilla Black? She spent her teens and early twenties looking as though she'd borrowed her big sister's clothes, and her later years as the ginger love child of Mrs Thatcher and Larry Grayson. She's got a Liverpool accent so thick that even when singing it keeps popping through like an unwelcome neighbour scrounging sugar. And she has that weird mole, sometimes blacked in like a beauty spot, sometimes covered over with enough make-up to fill the space under every nail on your hand. And latterly, gone altogether.

You can certainly have plain torch singers (Nina Simone was no classic beauty for a start) but Cilla surely takes the prize for plain odd.

In any case, she was a marvellous singer when she got going, with a set of lungs like a bouncy castle and a huge voice with so much power that it could turn geraniums into coal. And that's what counts really - the fact that any self-respecting record collection should have a cd of her singles.

The one I have on just now is this one, and as well as nearly twenty brilliant singles (and sundry crap later tracks) it also contains a decent dvd summary of her career, showcasing performances ofrm the 60s and 70s on various TV shows, including her own eponymous one.

She starts off doing You are my World at the Royal Command performance, wearing her mother's old velvet curtains turned into a dress, sensible shoes and a haircut presumably designed to woo her lesbian following. Barely moving from her spot in the centre stage, Cilla's fine but nothing special.

Skip forward a few months and here she is on Ken Dodd, fashionable haircut and 60s mod dress in place. It's a far better look, even with the puppy fat and mole on her chin, so it's just a shame that she seems to have been taking lessons in hamming it up from Donald Sinden as she does a very nice live version of Don't Answer Me partially ruined by a series of huge sweeping motions which wouldn't have looked out of place in an early Kate Bush video.

Next up is the brilliant Step Inside Love. I'll forgive Cilla for talking at the beginning of the clip - it's not her fault she's Liverpudlian after all -because her singing is so good. Her skirt's micro-short this time round, the mole is coloured in and Christ does she look uncomfortable, battering the song into submission in that gigantic voice of hers and waving her skinny arms around in vague approximation of the beat like some prototype Ian Curtis doing a cabaret turn at Butlins...

1968, and she's obviously decided that wearing skirts so short you can all but see her knickers is not for her - so she's decided to dress like Princess Anne's idea of a Mod instead. Oh well, it's her show, she can wear what she like. And she absolutely nails Love's A Broken Heart.

TOP OF THE POPS! One of her lesser songs, true, but even doing Where is Tomorrow? Cilla on TOTP is something to savour. Disappointingly the majority of the performance has been directed by a git, determined to show only Cilla's head and shouders, so it's impossible to tell if it's just the collar of her dress which is curled up on itself or if she's buttoned it up wrong and thus looks a little bit special in full view.

Liverpool Lullaby is obviously a song Cilla is comfortable singing, but even so she couldn't look more odd than in this clip from 'Cilla'. She's wearing another very short dress and cool shoes, for a start, which is a better look on Twiggy than Cilla, but with the sort of haircut more suited to her mum and which at times threatens to make her look middle aged. For the first time on this dvd in fact she looks like an entertainer than a singer, someone who parents might like at least as much as teenagers do. Take away the dress in fact and chuck her in a trouser suit and she could present Surprise Surprise no bother. The only surprise in this really is that there's no dancers pretending to be starving in the snow or anything behind her as she sings.

Arrgh - duet with Cliff! He's a good looking lad that Cliff - until he sings, when his mouth goes all weird and you can hear his bloody cringingly sincere voice. Horrible.

20th February 1969 - I was an embryo by this point! I suspect even then I could dance better than Cilla, who bops around at the start of Surround Yourself in Sorrow on TOTP, but presumably in time to a different song that only she could hear or even to the voices of dead christian missionaries singing Hallelujah in her head. Or maybe she was having a very minor stroke? And she's miming! Bah. Humbug.

I can't stand Yesterday and would have skipped past it had it not been the first colour clip. Even then I only managed 27 seconds: just enough time to check out Cilla in a red dress which just about covered her arse and with her hair now long and ginger, as opposed to short and an indeterminate colour in black and white. She looks almost exactly like Liz from Corrie actually.

From what is presumably the same 71 tour, she then does Going out of my head fairly dully, except for the fact she's back to wearing curtains as clothes again, this time yellow and billowing, making her look like Margot from the Good Life or a slimmed down post-op Demis Roussos. Not great on any level.

You've Lost the Loving Feeling - hate that song and Cilla's rubbish at it, starting off too low to allow her to hit the later high notes. I am Woman? You're So Vain? I can Sing a Rainbow? Imagine!?!?! Oh bugger off - all that's left is a succession of bad cover verisons briefly envlived by Alfie from 1973 sung by Cilla looking every inch the comfy seventies variety artiste so I turned the dvd off there and watched Black Books instead.

All in all The Ultimate Cilla is worth picking up for the superb disc of singles. The extra disc of music is patchy, leaning towards rubbish at times, but with enough interesting stuff to pass a happy hour.

And the bonus video is awesome! From 2003, it features Cilla miming in a tasselled cowboy jacket and boot cut jeans, spinning like a compass on the heel of one boot, with a slightly humiliated bunch of what seem to be christian rockers playing behind her. You just don't get enough of that sort of thing...

Cilla and the Christian Rockers

Cilla when she was good, doing Norwegian Wood with the Shadows

A football fan writes...

2009-11-13T12:23:00.000Z

Dear Players of Grimsby Town FC

I am writing with regard to my absolute astonishment and disbelief as to the sheer magnitude of your complete lack of talent and failure to carry out the job for which you are paid to do. I am not aware of any swear word or other derogatory phrase in my current vocabulary which comes close to a description of your ‘performance’ (and I use that term loosely) this afternoon, but let me just say that you have collectively reached a level of inadequacy and ineptitude that neither I nor modern science had previously considered possible.

In fact I recall a time, in my youth, when I decided to call in sick at work and instead spent the entire day in my one bedroom flat wearing nothing but my underpants, eating toast and wánking furiously over second-rate Scandinavian porn. Yet somehow, I still managed to contribute more to my employer in that one Andrex-filled day than you complete bunch of toss-baskets have contributed to this club in your entire time here. I would genuinely like to know how you pathetic little píssflaps sleep at night, knowing full well that you have taken my money and that of several thousand others and delivered precisely fúck all in return.

I run a business myself, and I believe I could take any 4,000 of my customers at random; burn down their houses, impregnate their wives and then dismember their children before systematically sending them back in the post, limb-by-limb, and still ensure a level of customer satisfaction which exceeds that which I have experienced at Blundell Park at any time so far this season. You are a total disgrace, not only to your profession, not only to the human race, but to nature itself. This may sound like an exaggeration, but believe me when I say that I have passed kidney stones which have brought me a greater level of pleasure and entertainment than watching each of you worthless excuses for professional footballers attempt to play a game you are clearly incapable of playing, week-in, week-out.

I considered, for a second, that I was perhaps being a little too harsh. But then I recalled that I have blindly given you all the benefit of the doubt for too long now. Yes, for too long you have failed to earn the air you’ve been breathing by offering any kind of tangible quality either as footballers or as people in general.

As such, I feel it’s only fair that your supply runs out forthwith. I trust, at this precise moment in time, that Mr Fenty is in his office tapping away on the Easyjet web site booking you all one-way flights to Zurich, complete with an overnight stay with our cheese eating friends at Dignitas. Don’t bother packing your toothbrush – you won’t need it. In the event that our beloved chairman can’t afford the expense (understandable given that he’s soon going to have to assemble a new squad from scratch), then I am prepared to sell my family (including my unborn child) to a dubious consortium of Middle Eastern businessmen in order to pay for the flights. Christ, I’ll drive you there myself, one-by one, without sleep, if I have to.

Failing that, understanding that most dubious Middle Eastern businessmen are tied-up purchasing Premier League football clubs, I ask you to please take matters into your hands. Use your imagination, guys – strangle yourselves or cover yourself in tinfoil and take a fork to a nearby plug socket, or something. Just put yourselves and us fans out of our collective misery.

So, in summary, you pack of repugnant, sputum-filled, invertebrate bástards; leave this club now and don’t you fúcking dare look back. You’ve consistently demonstrated less passion and desire than can commonly be found within the contents of a sloth’s scrótum, so frankly you can just all fuck off – don’t pass go, don’t collect your wages, don’t ever come back to this town again. I look forward to you serving me at my local McDonald’s drive-thru in the near future.

Yours sincerely

A very disillusioned Mariner

Strange Girls and Other Stories

2009-11-10T12:56:00.009Z

I took the train across the Pennines from Manchester to Leeds in the spring, with the hills all verdant and the little train stations we stopped at glistening and bright from spring showers. The sun was shining in that weak, tentative sort of way it has in March and April and every town and village the train passed through looked like it was probably packed with second hand bookshops and winding streets full of junkshops and little cafes.

And yet the best bit of my trip south was none of that, but was when the train slowly chugged its way through the outskirts of northern industrial towns like Bolton and Blackburn, past abandoned factories and tumbling red brick walls, the signage long gone but the names of forgotten places still visible greyly amongst the soot. Obviously working factories are to be preferred to derelict ones, but I love industrial history and abandonment is perversely usually the only way to preserve industrial places as they once were.

That, and writing about them.

Co-incidentally, I picked up a copy of Sallie Day's The Palace of Strange Girls on another trip south, this time in Ilkley in Yorkshire. I bought it in one of those two books for a fiver deals you get in bookshops occasionally, and in another peculiarity showed it to Paul, who I was meeting up with in Ilkley, and he said 'I was on the judging panel who gave that book the Portico Prize you know'. Small world and all that...

The Palace of Strange Girls is set in that unfashionable post-war decade or so which existed before the Beatles and the sexual revolution. It's a particularly British period - or at least it feels that way to me - of austerity and want giving way to affluence and possession. It's an era amrked by masses of working class British teenagers aping their American counterparts for the first time, but in an awkward, not quite right, way that I recognise from my own teenage years in the early 80s but which no longer exists due to the Internet and the swamping of British television by US imports nowadays.

And yet at the same time it's a period of industrial upheaval, of layoffs and factory closures, as traditional working practices lose out to innovations generated by the wartime economy now filtering down to the country at large.

The story is of the Singleton family's trip to Blackpool in 1959: sickly Beth recovering from a heart operation ('A fifty/fifty chance of success' according to the surgeon), big sister Helen hoping to assert herself an an adult and parents Jack and Ruth bickering about everything, but mainly their differing ambitions.

It's a delightful, intricate sort of story, as the family interacts with other Blackpool inhabitants, permanent and transitory, and large and small tragedies loom out of the pages to come like speeding cars in the dark. In a very first novel sort of way, subplot layers upon subplot but unlike many first novels this kitchen sink approach works on every level.

And in the background, the destruction of the Lancashire cotton industry is tied neatly in to the familial strife, as Jack decides whether to take a job as a factory manager or as an area rep for the Union, and Ruth begs him to go with the union so that they can move to a bigger, better house.

It's Jack's story in many ways, in fact, which comes as a surprise in a book which could easily be read as very superior chick-lit. He has the glamorous past, the responsible and successful present and the promising future. His actions and inactions make or break everybody's future: financially, socially, personally, emotionally. His physicality - described at various times as a soldier, a worker, a fist fighter and a passionate lover - is contrasted with his intellectual abilities and more gentle nature: there's a gorgeous passage, for instance, where Jack wanders round the hotel dining room, naming the weaves in every different kind of cloth as Beth points to curtains and tablecloths, clothes and napkins. And in the end, even while the author claims that he is 'not a sentimental man' it's Jack who ensures that all of those who matter to him get what they want, even where it's not entirely what they deserve.

A lovely book all round, really - one character says towards the end of the book that he'll be glad to see the back of the fifties, but I'd have been happy to stay with the Singletons a little longer.

Blackpool in 1959

* Factory image courtesy of Mzacha

And that was Bagpipe Whisky with their Asparagus Puppy EP

2009-11-07T18:34:00.008Z

Like most people my age I suspect, I seem lately to have got in real rut musically. I own thousands of albums and cds and mp3s but I tend to find myself putting on the same dozen or so albums over and over again. Bit of Antony and the Johnsons, bit of Bowie, maybe a track or two by Frightened Rabbit, the Eels or a compilation of my favourite tracks. Rarely anything new.

And it used to be so different.

Back in 1984, lying in bed in the dark, listening to John Peel discussing the latest Liverpool game in between tracks, writing down band names on pieces of paper (is Bogshed one word or two? where the hell can I buy Retard Picnic by the Stupids? Are I, Ludicrous more like the Fall or Half Man Half Biscuit?) or borrowing albums from our mate Dave, who had effortlessly cooler music taste than anyone else I knew ('you'll like this', shoving a copy of 'Y' by The Pop Group in my hand before we headed to the pub. He was right).

But now it's 2009, and I don't seem to have the time any more. Plus DJs are all about wacky catchphrases, irritating jingles and comedy sidekicks. So I hear far less new music than I used to.

Until last night, when I downloaded a podcast by an iPal, Ned, who likes Iris and wrote a nice story which almost made it into the Panda Book of Horror. Plus he seemed to have good music taste, which is handy.

(I've always been a bit wary of podcasts, incidentally. Just an excuse for spods to talk at interminable length about how much they fancy David Tennant, or for fans of Radio 4 to pretend that theirs is the only kind of radio that matters. As dull and pointless as Craig Burley, frankly.)

To cut to the chase - since I'm supposed to be taking Matt and Cameron round to Spar to buy gogos - Ned's podcast was brilliant. It lasts an hour and 8 minutes and I'd stuck it on the mp3 player for when I was walking the dog, thinking I'd give it ten minutes then switch to the new Twilight Sad album.

By the time Ned signed off, the dog was knackered and I was soaking after an 80 minute walkin the rain, but it was well worth it. Someone doing radio in a normal speaking voice, interspersing the music with brief chat about what was going on round them ('it's pissing down' Ned pointed out at one point - at least he was indoors!) but crucially remembering that the show was primarily about the music, not the chat.

Of course it helped that the music was worth listening to. Not all my cup of tea but some great stuff (for those interested, I was particularly taken with the first track, a cover of Blue Midnight by a band called Grand Erector and by an extended drone by a Norwegian guy) and always interesting. Plus a good little interview with James from the mighty Twilight Sad (whose new album is worth a listen btw).

It's obviously a work in progress - the segues during the interview into Twlight Sad tracks were a little too abrupt, and I've never been a fan of little clips of songs as played during the recommended Five Tracks section, but other than that it was all spot on.

I mean how can you not love any DJ who says, in a conversational tone, 'That was Bagpipe Whisky with "Men Bason" from the "Asparagus Puppy" EP"*?

And not a comedy sidekick in sight...

http://wasistdas.co.uk/Radio.htm#Show2

* As a former member of bands called My Dog Eats Spiders and The Creepy Fish, I do appreciate a mental band name...

Win a copy of The Panda Book of Horror

2009-11-03T14:49:00.003Z

We (Obverse Books) are running a small competition in conjunction with Outpost Skaro!

To win a copy of the Panda Book of Horror, just create an image or animation promoting the book (you can use the image to the left if you want) - go to

http://tinyurl.com/ycl7q5s

and have a bash! (you need to join the forum to do so but it's a decent sort of place, promise).

Attack of the Killer Cucumbers

2009-11-03T12:54:00.004Z

The Butcher of Smithfield: Chaloner's Third Exploit in Restoration London (2008)

Susanna Gregory's Matthew Bartholomew books are entertaining if slight medieval murder mysteries set in and around 14th century Cambridge University. More efficient than inspired, they're the kind of books you buy to take on holiday and then leave in the hotel for the next guest.

They pass the time enjoyably enough, but you're unlikely ever to want to re-read them, basically.

What they're definitely not is Patricia Finney style medieval spy novels, Smiley in Elizabethan times, with richly described historical detail, intricate and logically consistent plots and a cast of finely sketched characters moving around a wholly believable world.

Which is why I should have suspected Gregory's second series of historical detective novels might be a bridge too far for the author - and for the reader. The Thomas Challoner books are set immediately post the restoration of Charles II, with the eponymous hero a spy for the Earl of Clarendon - a position he formally held under Cromwell's government. It's a promising set up and an interesting and relatively unexplored period, but where in the hands of a Finney or Martin Steven I'd expect something deep and layered, here the prose is at best workmanlike and - more importantly - the central puzzle has so obvious a solution that the failure of Challoner to spot it for several hundred pages serves only to make him look an idiot.

An incredibly straight-forward and obvious anagram turned ludicrous co-incidence, a scattering of clues so completely telegraphed that they may as well have been written in a different font to the rest of the text and a tendency to change the intelligence of each character from page to page in order to shove the story onwards, made this a real struggle to read.

Add in a habit (admittedly slightly less pronounced than in the Bartholomew novels) of devoting paragraph after paragraph to pointless and unconnected historical data which serves merely to highlight that the author has done some background reading, and this is a book - and I suspect series - to avoid like the mysterious and poisonous cucumbers which kick off the mystery (that's not as interesting as it sounds, incidentally).

Saturday was my birthday!

2009-11-02T11:00:00.003Z

Presents galore...

iPhone!

Star Trek TOS Season 1 on Blu-ray!

Pon Farr sex perfume (not cologne due to idiocy on Scott's part)!

Hitchcock dvd box set!

A jumper which I look slim in!

Books! Books! Money to buy books with!

Then...

Food!

Comedy!

Alcohol!

Dancing!

More alcohol!

Taxi home in the wee small hours!

Subsequently...

Hangover!

Hangover!

Oh God, hangover...

Panda Book of Horror Now Available

2009-10-28T21:46:00.002Z

Ding Ding! All aboard! Room for a little 'un at the back!

Iris, Panda and their transtemporal double decker Routemaster bus are just about ready to leave the terminus and set out on their most terrifying adventures yet!

Yes, The Panda Book of Horror will soon be on its way to the printers, with a publication date in November 2009!

Along for the ride this time are...

Paul Magrs
Mark Clapham
Mark Michalowski
Simon Guerrier
Ian Potter
Paul Dale Smith
Phil Craggs
Eddie Robson
Nicholas Nada
Blair Bidmead
Matt Kimpton
Mark Morris
Jac Rayner & Orna Petit

Many of these names will be known to Who book fans from the Virgin, BBC, Telos and Big Finish ranges, but new to Who-related fiction are Nix Nada and Blair Bidmead, both of whom submitted stories via the Obverse website, and Phil Craggs, editor of blankpages magazine. As for Orna Petit, who can say? All we know is Jac insisted and who are we to argue...

With cover art by Paul Magrs and a pretty damn nifty pastiche of the original Pan Books of Horror design by Cody Schell, we think you'll enjoy The Panda Book of Horror...though perhaps enjoy is the wrong word...

Available for pre-order from Obverse Books now! Publication date: Late November 2009

And don't forget - the Celestial Omnibus is still available!

The Scottish Zagreus

2009-10-21T11:42:00.005Z

"Zagreus likes a game of Yahtzee,
Zagreus is a massive Nazi,
Zagreus doesn't cheer for Hearts he,
Supports an old firm team like other fascists.

Zagreus has a bacon bap,
Zagreus has a little nap,
Zagreus wakes up, has a crap,
That's weekdays for Zagreus"

[courtesy of Swyrie]

On the Blog...

2009-10-16T14:24:00.006Z

Been meaning to point these out for ages - some my favourite blogs which I haven't mentioned before...

http://thepenguinblog.typepad.com - regular but not too frequently updated blog covering book cover design mainly.

http://goldenmasks.blogspot.com - knowledgable and interesting reviews of OTR. If you're one of the idiots who didn't like The Hornets' Nest and/or think that OTR is 'old-fashioned' or 'crap' then it's probably not for you. But you are clearly thick as three week old mince, so that's no loss to anyone...

http://www.paulmagrs.com/blog/blog.php - Beautiful looking site, this one, with daily updates.

http://www.nickelinthemachine.com - my favourite blog ever and one which I would gladly buy in book format. Informed articles on obscure corners of London and its history. Go and read it now, you'll love it.

Finn's Reviews - not a blog really, more a massive collection of film, tv and book reviews by oen of my favourite reviewers (even when some of his opinions are bonkers!)

And a late entry which is also not a blog - Cav Scott (co-author of one of the fantastic stories in the Celestial Omnibus) has a new website: http://www.cavanscott.co.uk

Barry Letts (1925-2009) RIP

2009-10-09T19:38:00.001Z

[reposting in full an email from Jim Smith about the sad news]

Doctor Who's only writer/director/producer. A man who worked on the series in each decade of the twentieth century in which it was made. The co-writer of 'The One With The Giant Maggots'. The director of 'The One With The Giant Spiders'. Author of one of the most admired Target novelisations. Indeed, the man who said 'Yes' to the *idea* of Target novelisations. A decorated naval officer. An actor for twenty years. A man who took on the job of producing 'Doctor Who' because no one else would and despite never having wanted to be a producer, only a director and who *doubled* its ratings inside two years. The director of the dayglo pop glory that it 'Terror of the Autons', one of a handful of 'Doctor Who' stories to gain viewers for every week of its original run. The creator of Sarah Jane Smith, Jo Grant and the Master. Producer of the Timothy Dalton-starring 'Jane Eyre'. A director on 'Z Cars' and a famous, admired 'EastEnders' two hander. Producer of the BBC's lauded 'Diary of Anne Frank'. The man who said 'Why don't you write the *geneis* of the Daleks'. The man who asked Tom Baker to play Doctor Who. The architect, directly and indirectly, of millions of childhoods.

The earth will shake.

Competition Time

2009-10-01T10:06:00.003Z

Paul Magrs, mine host for the Novelcon later this month in Manchester, has book four in his excellent Brenda and Effie series out next month, and he's giving five copies away for free on his website.

To grab a freebie copy of Hell's Belles, go to http://www.paulmagrs.com/competition.php and say why you'd like to go to Whitby and meet the ladies...

NovelCon in Manchester

2009-09-29T10:27:00.002Z

A limited number of tickets remain for NovelCon, the upcoming Doctor Who event dedicated to the long history of Target books, Virgin New Adventures and BBC books to be held on Sunday October 11th at the Lass O'Gowrie pub in Manchester.

Appearing on the bill will be...

Paul Magrs, Mark Morris, Mark Michalowski, Steve Lyons, Paul Dale Smith, Andrew Cartmel, David McIntee, Daniel Blythe, Justin Richards, Simon Guerrier, Martin Day, Trevor Baxendale, Paul Cornell and Gary Russell.

Various panels will take place throughout the day, with conversation covering the various forms of Doctor Who novel from TV adaptations to readings and some fun stuff thrown in.

If you're a lover of Doctor Who literature, then you cannot miss NovelCon - it takes place at the superb Lass O’Gowrie pub in Manchester on Sunday, October 11th.

Full address is:

The Lass O’Gowrie
36 Charles St
Manchester M1 7DB

T 0161 273 6932
E info@thelass.co.uk

For more details of the pub, visit www.thelass.co.uk - note that at this late stage there is no guarantee tickets will be available on the door.

This is a murder in a 19th century public school, so the leaves must be falling

2009-09-21T20:37:00.005Z

I went to grab a new book to read the other day and found myself shoving tie-in paperbacks and gritty Harlem detective novels back in the bookcase, prefering instead to immerse myself in a hot bath ato read The Sudbury School Murders by Ashley Gardner.

It must be autumn.

Having spent the summer reading bright, shallow Star Trek: Enterprise novels and brittle autobiographies of Carry On people, I can tell it's autumn now because I find myself buying and reading mainly historical crime books.

I just finished The Galleon's Grave by Martin Stephen and before that James Anderson and now I find myself eyeing up The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale which I can see from my seat, balanced precariously on top of a copy of James White's The Watch Below, which I raked out of a box in the shed the other week having mentioned it online somewhere. It's something to do with the warmth this kind of book engenders: not quite the cosy England of Rosemary and Thyme and the like, but with a certain taste in their settings of mulled wine and the feel of brown crackling leaves underfoot, with hardy protagonists defending the reputations of near fallen young women and solving baffling crimes in the orange light of lamps and lanterns.

The Sudbury School Murders could serve as a template for these sort of books - rarely empoying a flashy turn of phrase, Gardner writes solidly and well, and creates a world where nothing is too awful. She fills that world with misty canals and public schools, retired army captains on half pay and notorious dandies with more money than sense, crisp nights of adventuring and warm pints in village pubs.

There's something terribly appealing and Octoberish in it all...

Stuff wot I have seen and heard...

2009-09-07T14:03:00.001Z

Not the world's most clever or amusing blog post title, but I'm in a bit of a mood today.

So - following on from my own daily Twitter aide memoire, #threegreatthings - more detail on three things that are great...

The Robin Hood audios from Big Finish

I marginally preferred The Siege to The Witchfinders, but both were a bit more enjoyable than, say, the similar Doctor Who Companion Chronicles. It helps enormously that Richard Armitage is a very talented voice artiste who does quite fabulous impersonations of the rest of the cast (his Much is uncanny) but the stories are interesting and engaging and make good use of the audio format, and even manage to include the same level of silly plot convenience as the TV Series (such as the frankly silly reason given for not pulling the pretend Lazarus' hood off in Witchfinders) . I'm looking forward to pikcing up the rest of these at some point.

The Henry Grisham novel series by Martin Stephen

I'm on the third of these (The Galleon's Grave) and this remains the best serious(ish) historical fiction series I've read since Patricia Finney. An engaging hero with a bit of a mysterious back story, a fine sense of historical detail and a solid and flowing writing style make these top notch novels.

Obscure (and not so obscure) Girl Groups

I've been listening to a 4 cd set of slightly obscure girl bands from the 60s called 'One Kiss Can Lead to Another'. Lots of great pop songs, but '442 Glenwood Avenue' by the Pixies Three and everything by the Shangri-Las are especially brilliant.

Interesting fact of the day - Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las allegedly attracted the attention of the FBI for transporting a firearm across state lines...

Some definitions from fandom

2009-09-04T15:40:00.003Z

Full cast audio drama: An audio play from Big Finish in which four actors all have a speaking role.

Talking Book: An audio play from BBC Audio in which four actors all have a speaking role.

Companion Chronicle: A generally accepted, industry standard term for an audio play which features any narration at any point.

Doctor Who and The Pescatons: The WORST DOCTOR WHO STORY EVER. Also a Companion Chronicle style audio play. Only not as good, obviously.

Audio Soundscape: Something very noisy in the background.

A Few New Sites

2009-08-12T14:16:00.004Z

Somenew things from friends of mine, which I recommend to your august attentions, both of you...

paulmagrs.com

Paul's nice shiny new website, written in typically half-arsed fashion by yours truly. It's got a blog and a guestbook and - perhaps slightly more importantly - writing from the cutting room floor, drawings of characters from Paul's books and a link to be his mate on Facebook or Twitter.

Finn Clark's Reviews

All I did for this was supply some server space into which Finn Clark, aka Best Genre Reviewer Ever, has dropped over a thousand reviews all laid out a nice, easy to flick through front end. If you want to read the definitive (if often totally WRONG) review of any Doctor Who book ever - or anime or horror or obscure 30s British movies - then this is the first place to go!

The Photo Project

Latest baby of Scott's fertile and cheapie craving mind, the Photo Project is a charidee affair, serving as a base for a series of high quality photo books with themed images collected from top snappers everywhere and all proceeds going to charity.

I thought a Doctor Who Locations one might work well, but Scott will listen to any and all suggestions...

Classic SF Books Memery

2009-07-28T15:11:00.007Z

I picked up a copy of John Clute's excellent Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science Fiction in a chairty shop in Poole last week and, flicking though, came across a section which lists the essential and classic sf texts which you really should have read.

And I was a bit surprised to see how few of them I'd actually read, given that most people I know would say I was a sf geek; and also a bit surprised at the amount of Robert Heinlein in the list, frankly.

So in a fit of minor memery, here's the list:

[Books I've read in bold, books I own but have never read in italics and the rest waiting to be picked up.]

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
After London - Richard Jefferies
From the Earth to the Moon - Jules Verne
A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur - Mark Twain
The Time Machine - HG Wells
Two Planets - Kurd Lasswitz
War of the Worlds - HG Wells
A Princess of Mars - Edgar Rice Burroughs
RUR - Karel Capek
Ralph 124C 41+ - Hugo Gernsback
We - Yevgeny Zamyatin
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Dawn of Flame - Stanley Weinbaum
Swastika Night - Murray Constantine
Out of the Silent Planet - CS Lewis
Star Maker - Olaf Stapledon
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Slan - AE Van Vogt
Skylark of Space - EE Doc Smith
Consider Her Ways - Frederick Grove
Dark Carnival - Ray Bradbury
Beyond This Horizon - Robert Heinlein
Sixth Column - Robert Heinlein
The World of A - AE Van Vogt
1984 - George Orwell
Earth Abides - George R Stewart
I, Robot - Isaac Asimov
Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham
City - Clifford D Simak
The Demolished Man - Alfred Bester
Farenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
Childhood's End - Arthur C Clarke
The Space Merchants - Pohl and Kornbluth
More than Human - Theodore Sturgeon
Brain Wave - Poul Anderson
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Double Star - Robert Heinlein
Mission of Gravity - Hal Clement
Tiger! Tiger! - Alfred Bester
The Green Odyssey - Philip Jose Farmer
Andromeda - Ivan Yefremov
A Case of Conscience - James Blish
Starship Troopers - Robert Heinlein
The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut
A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M Miller
Solaris - Stanislaw Lem
Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Martian Time-Slip - Philip K Dick
The Burning World - J G Ballard
The Man in the High Castle - Philip K Dick
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch - Philip K Dick
Dune - Frank Herbert
The Einstein Intersection - Samuel Delany
Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
This Immortal - Roger Zelazny
Lord of Light - Roger Zelazny
Stand of Zanzibar - John Brunner
Rite of Passage - Alexei Panshin
Camp Concentration - Thomas Disch
Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K Le Guin
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
Ringworld - Larry Niven
A Time of Changes - Robert Silverberg
A Maze of Death - Philip K Dick
To Your Scattered Bodies Go - Philip Jose Farmer
The Gods Themselves - Isaac Asimov
334 - Thomas Disch
Dying Inside - Robert Silverberg
Rendevous with Rama - Arthur C Clarke
The Embedding - Ian Watson
The Dispossessed - Ursula K Le Guin
The Mote in God's Eye - Niven and Pournelle
The Female Man - Joanna Russ
The Forever War - Joe Haldeman
The Condition of Muzak - Michael Moorcock
Man Plus - Frederick Pohl
The Fountains of Paradise - Arthur C Clarke
Gateway - Frederick Pohl
Engine Summer - John Crowley
Timescape - Gregory Benford
Riddley Walker - Russell Hoban
The Snow Queen - Joan D Vinge
Lanark - Alisdair Gray
Foundation's Edge -Isaac Asimov
Downbelow Station - CJ Cherryh
The Book of the New Sun - Gene Wolfe
The Helliconia Trilogy - Brian Aldiss
Blood Music - Greg Bear
Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Through Darkest America - Neal Barrett Jr
Cyteen - CJ Cherryh
Islands in the Net - Bruce Sterling
Hyperion - Dan Simmons
The Uplift War - David Brin
Queen of Angels - Greg Bear
The Difference Engine - Bruce Sterling & William Gibson
Take Back Plenty - Colin Greenland
Sarah Canary - Karen Joy Fowler
Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick
Steel Beach - John Varley
Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robonson
White Queen - Gwyneth Jones
A Fire Upon the Deep - Vernor Vinge
Doomsday Book - Connie Willis
Coelestis - Paul Park
Parable of the Sower - Octavia Butler
Beggars in Spain - Nancy Kress
The Broken God - David Zindell
Somewhere East of Life - Brian Aldiss
Brittle Innings - Michael Bishop
The Ultimate Egoist - Theodore Sturgeon
Feersum Endjinn - Iain M Banks

I wonder if the gap after Neuromancer co-incides with my leaving university or my getting back into Doctor Who?

Go on, have a go...

Too funny not to share

2009-06-17T12:38:00.002Z

http://nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com/1331079.html?style=mine

It's quite a funny story to start with but it becomes utterly classic once the author of the initial email appears in the comments' section, and then becomes hilarious when someone quotes his web commentary on Dickens' (unfinished due to his death while writing it) Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Sheer genius - could Jonathan Maberry and Magister be one and the same person?

[Thanks to Mondy for the original link]

Free Online Gaming

2009-06-14T12:25:00.003Z

Twitfishing

On Twitter, pick one word and add it to a tweet (not as a #hashtag) then see how many auto-follows you get. My current record is seven for 'SEO'.

Alternatives to the Doctor Who Forum

2009-06-13T20:28:00.003Z

With the long-standing fan favourite Doctor Who message board soon to close, there seems to be a fair amoutn of scabbling round by other online fora to grab floating posters.

Since I was escorted from the premises a few weeks back I've probably had more time than most to see what's out there, and here's the ones I;ve liked for one reason or another...

Outpost Who [http://www.outpostwho.com]

Pros

Looks exactly like the DWF boards, even down to replicating the exact position of each sub-board in the same categories as DWF has.

Very friendly crowd - some familiar faces already plus some names rom fandom that I haven't seen at DWF for a while, all of whom are friendly and interesting to talk to.

Seems to be the quickest growing site.

Cons

They've even replicated the 'Are Books Canon?' thread and that's already dragged in Magister like a moth to the flame...

Anorak Zone [http://anorakzoneforum.informe.com/forum/]

Pros

Irreverent, funny boards with little or no respect for the more idiotic corners of the fan world, and generally insightful and humorous posters.

They have the "Who is the Biggest C*** in Fandom?" thread, which is very funny (for reference it's almost everyone except m'colleagues Lance Parkin, Daniel O'Mahony and Simon Forward)

Cons

It's the most ramshackle looking board, with a free hosting company I think, and no dedicated books section.

Outpost Skaro [http://outpostskaro.1talk.net/index.htm]

Pros

Very similar to the Anorak Zone, the board was formed to some extent as a reaction against what some saw as the problems at DWF. As a result, expect posters to speak their minds as opposed to toeing some preconcieved Cardiff Line and to call a spade a spade (unlike other places where the admins would check who owned the spade first before any comment could be made).

Even handed and intelligent moderation - say what you like and so long as it's not libellous, illegal or a brutal personal attack, then it'll stay up and the poster will stay on board.

Cons

Again as with the Anorak Zone, it's pretty ramshackle looking. It does have a books' section however and is supposed to be moving to a new top notch server soon.

Kasterborous [www.kasterborous.com]

Pros

It's easily the best looking forum - clean lines, intelligent design and a well planned layout make the forum extremely easy to navigate and use.

Christian and Anthony, the brains behind the site, are both extremely nice guys.

Cons

Not as busy as the other sites. You might think of that as a good thing of course.

Doctor Who Online [http://www.drwho-online.co.uk]

Pros

Bright, colourful site with an excellent news section, a pro-active owner in Seb Brook, and an extremely professional set-up.

Cons

At the moment the posters seem to be younger than elsewhere.

The layout of the fora for anyone other than new series fans is poor and makes checking out Bokos threads, for instance, a bit of a chore.

Jade Pagoda [http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Jade_Pagoda/]

Pros

Some of the most intelligent, well read, and thought provoking posters in Who fandom

Even handed and intelligent moderation by people who are genuinely only doing this because they're fans not because they think it makes them important.

A willingness to shoot anyone down in flames if they're obviously talking rubbish. You will get challenged on any dubious statement you make.

Cons

It's only books.

It can be a bit daunting at first.

It's not a forum, it's a mailing list.

Anyway, this isn't an exhaustive list (there's the Son of DWF, the oddly named Gallifrey Base, for a start) but it's a list of the ones I've liked in the past few weeks wandering about like a sad bugger with no mates.

Join them all and see which you like best...

From Warren Ellis' 'Whitechapel' board

2009-06-11T12:57:00.001Z

[courtesy of Warren Ellis via Blair]

'This may or may not last here. Even if it doesn't, then if you read it before it goes, please yank it and distribute.

I'm possibly not the only person it'll occur to, due to ideaspace, and I hope it goes far and wide anyway.

Right. Here goes:

1. The BNP winning European parliament seats means they have a budget to employ staff and various sub-contractors.
2. These budgets and staff positions are subject to anti-discrimination laws, as they come from public funds.
3. Watch out for when these positions are advertised. If anyone sees them advertised, chuck the ads about on as many social networks, blogs etc as possible.
4. Man the Harpoons - If you fall outside of the BNP's discriminatory membership criteria, due to being black, Jewish, whatever, apply. If you are white British and want to help out this plan anyway, just spread the idea about.
5. When you/they don't get the job, take it to an employment tribunal.
6. ????
7. Profit.

Even if you're not especially bothered about taking the BNP to an employment tribunal, spreading this idea about, and forcing them to consider it and raaage over how unfair to the poor ickle racialists it is, it's still funny'

Go on - you know you want to... :)

Vote Now! Don't Vote Brain Dead Idiot!

2009-06-04T15:19:00.003Z

It's a simple and straight-forward plea. If you dislike the Labour Party sufficiently to be considering casting a protest vote for one of the minority parties (rather than, say, voting Lib Dem which is, I suspect what I'll be doing) then for the love of sanity, do not vote BNP!

It may feel like a real slap in the face for the government to vote for the party furthest away from them politically, but these people are not worthy of anyone's vote. The are a party of racist, homophobic bigots with a twisted and in no way realistic view of this country and should never benefit from anyone's vote, unless racism, homophobia and bigotry are something you identify with (and that's no-one reading this, surely?)

Most amusing tweet from a BNP supporter today:

"if you don't vote BNP then the veterans of WWII died for nothing"

As m'colleague Daniel O'Mahony pointed out, he presumably means veterans of the Waffen-SS...

To which I can only add - don't veterans generally survive wars? Isn't that what makes them veterans?

Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus now in Stock!

2009-05-29T15:06:00.000Z

What is there left to say about Iris Wildthyme – transtemporal adventuress extraordinaire, metafictional explorer of texts and subtexts, double-decker-dwelling interstellar bag-lady, amnesia-prone political and sexual revolutionary, writer of wrongs, wronger of rights (especially copyrights), all-round champion of freedom, occasional nightclub singer and frequent barroom floozy?

Well, there’s always something...

Obverse Books are proud to announce the release of their first short story collection, 'Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus', edited by Paul Magrs and Stuart Douglas.

Continuing the adventures of time traveller extraordinaire Ms Iris Wildthyme, 'The Celestial Omnibus' contains stories by such Who luminaries as former BBC Books editor Steve Cole; Mark Wright and Cavan Scott, producers of the Iris audios for Big Finish; and Iris creator Paul Magrs himself. With an introduction from Katy Manning, the Omnibus travels from 1950s England to the last sun at the end of the Universe, encountering the crew of the Battleship Anathema, Marlene Dietrich and Panda's mysterious former lover, Gemma, on the way.

Available in hardback, with an exclusive cover painting by legendary BBC costume designer June Hudson, 'The Celestial Omnibus' costs £10.99 plus postage from www.obversebooks.co.uk while stocks last!

Shaun Lyon - on 'being a twat'

2009-05-27T08:42:00.011Z

So (this might be a long email so settle down with a cuppa and a biscuit)...

Those of you who frequent the Doctor Who Forum might have noticed this morning that all mention of Obverse Books and the Iris book have been banned by Shaun Lyon. As he says,

"Please be advised that discussion, direct or indirect, of Obverse Books and/or its Iris Wildthyme material is no longer permitted in this forum under any circumstances.

Anyone who does so will have their membership revoked.

Sorry, but I won't be answering inquiries about this. Suffice to say that if you'd like any explanation, you are welcome to take it up with them."

Given that the fault for all this for once has little to do with me and everything to do with certain other people telling lies it seemed worth going public with this, and at least providing some entertainment for the faithful readers of this blog and, hopefully, the Iris book.

I promise not to editorialise or make my usual snarky comments, but essentially a poster on the Doctor Who Forum, one Magister, doesn't like me because I once or twice pointed out the idiocy of his canon argument in a thread on that forum (yes, I know, canon debates - I should know better).

He's obviously a bit mental, hence his suggestion here that a load of PE teachers should come round and give me a kicking :)

http://www.doctorwhoforum.com/showpost.php?p=7796195&postcount=412

Which is fine, really - lots of people over the years have been less than fond of me and I can no doubt be a pain in the arse at times.

However Magister then took advantage of the fact I was banned from (Steven Hill, Chief Admin of DWF, banned me rather hilariously for saying in jest that my pal Jonn was an absolute arse. In spite of Jonn immediately posting pointing out that he started it and we were pals and it was just a joke. Ho hum.)

Eh, where was I? Oh yes - Magister took advantage of my two week ban to post various things which suggested that I had used his order details improperly to find out private details about him. Starting on the 4th of May with this narky but relatively benign post where he first asked from nowhere 'How secure is the ordering system?" and then when Phil Purser-Hallard pointed out that it was 100% safe, followed up with

"I was more posting about how secure the information is within "Obverse Books", and how personal details are used by Stuart."

http://doctorwhofor um.com/showpost . php?p=8211966&postcount=172
(though its been taken down as of yesterday I think)

Bit annoying and enough to piss me off a bit, but that was all.

I did think I better say something rather than leave that hanging, so I sent a humorous (I thought) post from a new account, called 'Madge', featuring an avatar of Madge from Neighbours and styling myself 'The Representative of Obverse Industries' (any of you Jandek fans? :) as
follows:

"[QUOTE=Magister;8211966]

Thanks for the reply. I was more posting about how secure the information is within "Obverse Books", and how personal details are used by Stuart.[/QUOTE]

As Obverse Books' legal representative on doctorwhoforum.com I can assure all interested parties that Obverse Books uses only "Paypal" for its "payment" system, as this is by far the most secure such "system" around, on the grounds that Paypal only sends the customer
"address" to the vendor. No credit card details or other financial information is in any way available "to" Obverse Books.

Obverse Books has not as yet had any "order" from a Mr "Magister" but looks forward to receiving such in the "future".

Mr Douglas would also like to apologise to Mr Jonn Elledge for calling him an absolute arse and a total tit. This is patently not the case and having taken objective steps to re-appraise his position non-subjectively, Mr Douglas now finds it hard to credit he was ever so vile.

Further he would like to agree with Mr Elledge's mum that Mr Elledge is in point of fact "a very nice boy with a lovely smile" and with Mr Elledge's granny that "the other boys are just jealous of his good looks and will be his friend once they realise that that haircut works
just as well on a boy as on a girl".

Best wishes

The Representative of Obverse Industries."

http://www.doctorwhoforum.com/showpost.php?p=8220642&postcount=179

All obviously tongue in cheek and in no way intended to subvert any rules on OG but in any case I got banned for life from DWF by Steven Hill for that.

Again, not the end of the world even though it meant I would need to get Paul Magrs or CodySchell or someone to make update posts to DWF. I did send Steven Hill an email apologising for creating duplicate accounts, but also pointing out that I had made no attempt to hide that it was me and was obviously joking but that if he felt an apology was called for then I certainly apologised.

In fact, here's the full text of my email to Hill from 6 May, the day after I was banned:

Dear Steven

Apologies for the duplicate account. I was not aware that there was any stricture in place to prevent me from creating a temporary new user for a specific and, I thought, important, reason, but now that I have been made aware of that fact, I naturally understand that this
breaches the rules.

In my defence, however, I should point out that there was no attempt to create a genuine sock puppet, not did I make any attempt to hide the fact that it was me posting. It's just that I - and several other people who PM'ed and emailed me - felt my integrity was definitely
being called into question and, given the recent concerns raised by the Forbidden Planet fraud, I felt - and still feel - an immediate response was required.

I have in the past run several highly successful and profitable businesses and while Obverse Books is more by way of being a sideline, did not succeed with these companies in the past by ignoring a statement which, with the greatest respect to your post to OG, is malicious, potentially libellous, almost certainly damaging to my business and which I did consider discussing with my solicitor.

In any case I had thought that the obviously humorous and exaggerated manner in which I both answered Magister's question and apologised to Jonn for an offence which he didn't take, made it clear that I had no intention of deceiving anyone as to the identity of the poster and had expected that to be taken into account.

That said, if you feel an apology is required then please do accept my genuine apologies.

I did consider mailing you to ask if you had any objection to my setting up an Obverse Books account solely to post news about the books, but that seems largely pointless when I already have an existing account. Should my account be restored, I have decided not to post to the forum in future except where it impacts upon my book which, though a shame, is probably for the best all things considered.

I look forward to your thoughts in this matter.

Regards

Stuart Douglas

to which Hill actually replied on the 7th May (the sole reply before Shaun's final, banning obverse email) as follows:

Stuart,
Before I can respond to this myself, I need to have Shaun take a look at it. Any time anyone mentions legal complications, it becomes Shaun's business.
-Steve

Sadly neither Shaun nor Steven Hill bothered to get back to me after that (and Lyon presumably now claims that Hill was lying and never sent the email on at all, if his initial claim to have known nothing about the matter is accepted at face value).

Magister however continued to post. On the 8th of May he said

"I'm going to try for a final post on the subject. I'm going to Pm a copy to Steve. I'm sorry Steve if this post isn't allowed. If you have to delete it please could you also delete the referenced post by Stuart on the other thread. If this post gets deleted I wont post on this subject again.

I've gone out of my way not to be defamatory, but to make as open comments as I can so that Stuart can reply.

The start of this, which I hoped to avoid posting for Stuart's sake, was that within days of me ordering, stuart posted on the books not canon thread the following:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Stuart Douglas View Post
You know, I am so glad that I've now been told who you are in real life [ - I'd hate to think you'd one day be teaching my kids]

It was that post that led me to try, without breaking forum rules, to find out from stuart how he had used my order to find out who I am in real life.

I was hoping that Stuart would reply without me having to go into details."

Now he knew I was banned and all he had to do was ask me how I knew who he was (a fact I'd mentioned in passing jokey reference) - and I would have told him the truth, that a couple of people had told me it by email. Leaving aside the fact that I had no idea he'd ordered a
book, there's no way you can do anything with a Paypal email other than read it! But rather than email me via OG or the Obverse site, he took advantage of the fact I couldn't reply to suggest pretty plainly that I was up to no good.

With no reply from Messrs Hill and Lyon thus far and Magister getting more outrageous - and as the date of publication got nearer - Paul Magrs emailed Steven Hill directly via the OG address, as follows:

Hi-

I'm a bit annoyed about this Magister bloke. It seems that he and Stuart Douglas have had a long-running debate about canonicity and other fun things. However, now it seems this Magister person has started to impugn Stuart's integrity and reliability, very publicly on the forum. To me it looks like it could have a very adverse effect on sales of the Iris Wildthyme anthology Stuart is publishing this month.

I'm not very happy about that. That book is something we've both put a lot of effort into. It's not right if a spat about something silly like continuity can end up with someone deliberately casting
aspersions on somebody's trustworthiness. That's what Magister's messages look like to me. In these straitened times it's hard to launch a new small press. It's really unhelpful to have someone
behaving as Magister seems to be doing. It looks like silliness and spite, but can have an effect on floating customers.

Stuart's been banned from OG, I believe. So he can't come back on these debates. His being banned is beside the point in all this. I don't have time to keep looking at these discussion pages, but I don't want people bad-mouthing Stuart's or Obverse Books' integrity. Will you, as a moderator, put a stop to this snideness, please?

i'll look forward to hearing from you,

paul m

Again, Paul got no reply.

I mail Hill again asking if Shaun Lyon had had a chance to look at my email yet and again get no reply. So I asked Jon Dennis, as a friend of Shaun Lyon's, to email him on my behalf, simply asking him to get in touch, as follows:.

"Shaun,

My apologies if you are no longer running the Forum, but as far as I know, you are. I'm normally loath to ask a favor like this, but Stuart Douglas' company has been subjected to some defamatory posts by some guy calling himself Magister and Steve Hill appears more interested in staying on Magister's good side. I'll admit it's partially self-interest, I have a story in the book in question and Magister seems intent on costing it some sales. At least one of these posts could be considered libellous, so I think it might be a good idea if you contact Stuart at sa douglas at gmail.com."

Shaun never got in touch at all - and presumably claims not to have received this email either.

A week or so passed with no replies from any of the emails to Shaun or Steven Hill from me, Paul or Jon, and then on the 22nd May Magister popped up again and, after a few daft snidey comments about me, posted this:

"There's a lot more I could say about one poster which I'm not allowed to by forum rules which I respect, but I do have information I ought to find a way to become more generally available. So I do bite my tongue here a lot, as I'm sure others do to and if unguarded comments are leaking out I apologise...It is my responsiblity to find a way away from OG to share the inappropriate actions of a particular poster, and I should not have referred to him here in that way. I will redouble my efforts not to do that again."

in response to a post which mentioned Phil PH and I. I was banned but Phil took reasonable umbrage and pointed out that the statement was potentially libellous and would he care to elaborate. He sent Phil a PM apologising to him and confirming that his quarrel was with me.
He's of the opinion that I'd "used" the personal details he submitted with his order for the Iris book, which is demonstrably neither possible nor the case, as he'd been told on OG when he first brought the matter up.

That last post was the straw that broke the camel's back for me as was a follow up post where he 'apologised' for the allegation while simply repeating it.

With the book coming out in a week and these posts presumably putting some level of doubt in the minds of the potential readership (already spooked by the FP International issues just previously), I spoke to a mate who's a lawyer in the States and showed him the same email
chain I've added above. He said that the final post in particular was "defamatory" and "likely to do material damage to [my] business" and definitely actionable. I told him that I didn't want to do that - apart from anything else it's expensive, I could conceivably lose and - most importantly - it would be overkill. He suggested I therefore send an email to Shaun Lyon via as secure a method as possible, laying out the problem in a calm manner, as one professional adult to
another, and pointing out that as owner of the forum, Shaun Lyon was legally liable for the content contained on it, especially if it has been previously brought to his attention.

I asked round, got two different email addresses for Shaun from mutual friends, plus got Jon Dennis to send the email via Facebook mail so that he couldn't pretend not to have received it, although I suspected that the suggestion of legal consequences should at least guarantee a
reply.

What I sent was:

Dear Shaun

I am extremely sorry to have to bother you but as Steven Hill has chosen to ignore emails from myself and Paul Magrs and continues to allow one poster, Magister, to make posts on OG which increasingly look likely to force me to instigate formal legal proceedings against
you, it seems best to at least attempt to go over his head before I have to spend further money on lawyers.

I have no idea if you know what has been going on over on the DWF but as you are the owner of that site you are unfortunately legally liable for the content posted on it, particularly if that content has been reported for potentially illegal activity and nothing has been done by the people you appoint to run the boards.

Please note that this is not a plea to be reinstated on the forum, from which I am currently banned by Mr Hill. Mr Hill is in my opinion clearly partial, but membership of a public forum is equally clearly in the purview of the owner and his representatives and if you feel that DWF is better served without my presence then that is your decision.

However, this Magister has some vendetta against me quite out of proportion to the fact that I have on several occasions pointed out - I admit possibly less than politely - the foolishness of both his arguments and of his ability to use English correctly.

So out of proportion have they become in fact that one of his latest posts (number 792 in the Canon thread in the Books section) is most definitely libellous and aimed at me. The libel is self-evident - in reply to a post from BryanB in which Bryan pointed out that Magister's
previous post was both defamatory towards Phil Purser-Hallard and I - Magister said, in part,

"There's a lot more I could say about one poster which I'm not allowed to by forum rules which I respect, but I do have information I ought to find a way to become more generally available...It is my responsibility to find a way away from OG to share the inappropriate
actions of a particular poster, and I should not have referred to him here in that way. I will redouble my efforts not to do that again."

and then confirmed to Phil by PM, when he quite rightly replied to highlight the libel contained therein, that he was talking about me.

His problem is that he in some way believes that I have misused a Paypal email from him to identify who he is, when this is in fact utterly impossible (as he has been told) - while obviously anyone who buys a product online needs to put his name and address down, there is
no magister@ email in the orders thus far and so no way in which I could identify him from that.

In fact, I had no idea he had ordered a book and was actually sent the same name for Magister by three separate people within a couple of days of one another advising that should I ever need to legal action against him for the more inappropriate things he had said about me
that his name would be helpful. Had Magister emailed me directly I would have told him this, but instead he has chosen to continue to post false claims about me, with the collusion of Mr Hill and, therefore, the approval of yourself.

I have spoken to a lawyer who specialises in US law and he tells me that this statement, when combined with confirmation of its target, is certainly libellous and likely to cause material harm to my business (in this instance, Obverse Books), especially given that any suspicion
- or hint of mistrust - about my handling of credit card details could be particularly damaging in light of the recent card fraud from Forbidden Planet International sales.

I am informed that all of this, combined with DWF's failure to take appropriate action in the face of multiple and repeated complaints about Magister, is a solid basis for a civil action.

As examples of these multiple complaints, Paul Magrs wrote directly to Mr Hill via the DWF email address but received no reply as did I; several people have reported Magister's posts multiple times using the DWF Report function; and others have posted directly in the thread
itself highlighting various inappropriate and potentially legally damaging posts by Magister - only to be effectively told to shut up by Mr Hill. All of these people are happy to confirm their actions.

As I say I am not attempting to be reinstated to the forum, but for all that Obverse is not my primary business it is a business nonetheless, and I thus have no choice but to take some action to ensure that Magister is no longer allowed to post libellously about me on a public forum and to obtain an apology and public retraction from Magister for the libels he has posted thus far.

I would be grateful if you could both reply to confirm receipt of this email and give some thought to its contents. I should stress that I am more than willing to take foral legal action in this matter if need be but would obviously prefer to avoid such unpleasantness over a problem which can be easily solved from your side.

I look forward to hearing from you but if I have had no reply with in one week of today then I will assume you are unwilling to take any action and are giving formal as opposed to merely tacit approval to Magister's activities on your forum, and will act accordingly to protect my personal and professional reputation.

Regards

Stuart Douglas

For once, Shaun Lyon replied quite quickly - the following morning the email below was in my Inbox (and in Paul's too incidentally).

"Stuart,

I think you have a lot of nerve, opening a dialogue with a person you've never met -- and who had no idea about ANY of this -- by taking a warning shot. Not a friendly "by the way". Not a "can you please help?" None of that. Just a reprehensible "Shaun, I have a problem, and if you don't solve it, I'm going to try to fuck you over." I am absolutely *disgusted* that you would choose this tack with me, considering that so many of your contributors are people I know personally... Mark Wright, Jonathan Dennis, Steve Cole, Steve Lyons, Steve Wickham, and especially Katy Manning. If it was your intention of being a twat, you've been a great success at it.

I read Magister's post in question, and frankly, if I wasn't one of the twelve or so people who might actually know what he's on about, I would have completely bypassed it. Whatever. I've taken Magister's post, and a reply to it, and removed it. I'm going to warn him not to
make any statements against you in future. I've put my staff on alert that he is not allowed to make any further comment about this, and should he, he will be removed from the forum.

Meanwhile, I am hereby letting you know that the discussion of your book and/or Obverse Books is hereby a topic non grata in my discussion forum. Period. I don't want anyone mentioning it, nobody discussing it, nobody putting links to it in their signature files, etc. As it
is *my* Forum, I don't want one single byte of my bandwith used for the promotion of your material. If you'd like to share that fact with your contributors, be my guest... be sure you make note of the fact that you threatened to sue straight off the bat.

Does that work for you, or is there anything else you'd like to take umbrage with?

Shaun Lyon

I said wouldn't editorialise so I won't mention Lyon's aggressive attitude or even the swearing, but one thing he seems to think is that in some way I would have issues in telling anyone what had happened. Which is why I copied this mesage to every one of the book contributors, the contributors Lyon seems to believe I would be avoiding for some reason - every message, post and mail of which can be confirmed as the truth by a variety of other people involved. I also copied Shaun Lyon in on it - I've no idea why he thinks I would have a problem explaining why he's banned the Iris book from his forum given that I'm certainly not the one who ends up looking a 'twat'...

And remember kids - www.obversebooks.co.uk to buy a copy of Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus!

Out now!

Oh, and some relevant blog posts...

Philip Purser-Hallard's blog

Simon Bucher-Jones' blog

Jon Dennis' LJ

Louise Dennis' LJ

Alex's Blog

[NB I got an email today saying that it was a breach of netiquette to put private emails online. Fair point, but in my defence I should point out that the main reason I put this online as opposed to my original email to the book contributors is that Lyon emailed one of the writers and told him to ignore anything I said because I was a liar. And I mailed all the contributors with the exact post I made below, missing nothing out but adding nothing in, several of them advised similar contact and suggested I put it all on my blog. As the posts below demonstrate, I have nothing to hide. Meanwhile Lyon is defriending anyone on Facebook who so much as mentions Obverse Books.]

Panda's Spotify Playlist

2009-05-16T17:06:00.003Z

Iris Wildthyme's acerbic bosom companion, the redoubtable Panda, has been kind enough, in between doing interviews for his new book, to allow me to record for posterity an evening's musical entertainment chez him.

Which means that so long as you have Spotify, just click here for an hour or two's musical highlights from a gentler, more innocent time...

Favourite Telly Moments

2009-05-06T12:03:00.008Z

Over on Rob's rather splendid blog, he's asked people to name their favourite all time telly moments. And you know me, that's not a request I'm ever likely to ignore.

So (in no particular order):

- The ending of the Monk episode, 'Mr Monk and Mrs Monk' where the actress impersonating Trudy dies in Monk's arms, but only after promising to tell Trudy that Monk still loves her.

- The flash forward montage of John Smith's potential life with Joan Redfearn from the end of the Doctor Who 'Human Nature' double header.

- The young women mocking Jack Ford for his tale of his captain dying in his arms on the Somme in the final series of When the Boat Comes in

- the little girl turning off the TV in the final scene of Life on Mars (I didn't like this at the time but it's really grown on me).

- DI Billborough's 'dying man's statement' from the Cracker episode 'To be a Somebody'.

- Reg Deadman's comically misplaced disgust as Gary gives Eric the kiss of life in the first episode of Goodnight Sweetheart

- the whole nightclub/murder of Maddie scene from Twin Peaks - 'it's happening again'

- the scene in The West Wing where Josh and Toby discuss people sending their children to stay with neighbours before armed gangs arrive and torture and rape them in front of their parents. (also loads of other West Wing).

- Greg smiling to himself as he rides away, dying of cholera, to infect the bad guys in Survivors

- the 'fuck' scene from season 1 of The Wire

- the entire episode of The Good Life where everyone gets drunk and considers swinging.

- the scene in series 1 episode of Dads Army, 'The Battle of Godfrey's Cottage' where Mainwairing, Fraser and Jones discuss in a matter-of-fact manner the fact that they'll probably be killed by the German invaders

- the final scene of the Sandbaggers' episode 'Special Relationship'

- the executions in the courtyard as Albert watches on, from Secret Army

and so many more, but I have to go and do some work...

Why is a pre-order not just an order?

2009-04-23T11:13:00.001Z

Well we've finally just about got there! Some nine months or so after Paul and I first discussed doing a new Iris Wildthyme short story collection, I spoke to the printer this afternoon and sent our lovingly created print ready pdf and Mark Michalowski's brilliant setting of June Hudson's fabulous cover art into their capable hands. All things being well, I should have the finished book in my hands, ready to post out at some point during May!

Which is where you all come in!

If no-one buys the book, this will all have been a bit of a waste of time, so please do nip along to www.obversebooks.co.uk and pre-order a copy for the bargain price of £10.99 plus postage for 234 fantastic, fun-filled pages!

Just click on the Panda to order...he says he doesn't mind, he likes to do his bit!

Phorm Blocking

2009-04-15T14:06:00.004Z

If you have any interest in computers and that, then you probably have heard about the current furore with the EU intending to sue the UK for allowing ISPs to provide access to user data to PHORM, a company which basically records your personal on-line history without asking (potentially including webmail and other extremely private areas) and then uses it to target you with un-requested ads.

If you are a customer of one of BT or Virgin Media (Carphone Warehouse’s Talk Talk is also involved but apparently provides an opt-out) then you should be particularly concerned as they are the companies that are involved with PHORM (formerly alleged spyware company 121Media) and selling your browsing history to a company that is, imo, only a small step up from spammers. (Trend and Kapersky seemingly intend to block PHORM's cookie as adware, which tells you all you need to know really).

This post here has some good tips on anti-Phorm proofing your PC. I recommend you take them. And to be safest of all, follow the advice of Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University, who recently said: "if you care about your privacy, do not use BT, Virgin or Talk-Talk as your internet provider."

I use Virgin currently, but if I can't block Phorm then I won't be using them for much longer.

Quoted for Truth

2009-03-30T08:31:00.002Z

"I hate most Michael Bay movies because they’re just shiny things. An hour and a half of visually stimulating nothingness followed by ten minute conversations consisting of, “Were you watching when that guy got impaled on the rusty pole?”. But most of you goddamn idiots, most of you goddamn members of Ritalin Generation love Michael Bay movies because, to you, visually stimulating nothingness is everything. Well, going to the movies shouldn’t be vapid, mindless entertainment. You should cry; you should laugh; you should fall in love with the characters; you should fall out of love with the characters; you should think; you should question; you should ponder; you should, flat out, be alive."

- Mark Rawden discussing 3D Cinema, but he could talking about any number of popular primetime television series too...

Paula Murray and the Daily Express

2009-03-18T14:51:00.004Z

Paula Murray wrote an article for the Daily Express this week in which, after conning survivors of the Dunblane massacre, she printed pictures of them and described how

"DUNBLANE survivors have "shamed" the memory of their dead peers with foul-mouthed boasts about sex, brawls and drink-fuelled antics as they reach adulthood."

even though nothing in their behaviour was in any way linked to the massacre (in which many of them were injured and 18 of their friends died).

Paula Murray deserves to be sacked and never employed as a journalist again. She is, frankly, the lowest of the low.

The original Express article as text

The original Express article as a pdf

A petition to have Murray disciplined and an apology printed

Graham Linehan writing very well about the article, the Express and Murray.

Boarding the Bus!

2009-02-20T12:12:00.004Z

And travelling on the Bus this time round are...

[BIG DRUMROLL]

Introduction - Katy Manning
A Gamble with Wildthyme - Steve Lyons
Sovereign - Mags L Halliday
The Unhappy Medium - Mark Wright and Cavan Scott
Living Legend - Stuart Douglas
Battleship Anathema - Phil Purser-Hallard
The Dreadful Flap - Paul Magrs
Not A Drop - Steven Wickham
Iris Wildthyme y Señor Cientocinco contra Los Monstruos del Fiesta - Cody Schell
Why, Because We Like You - Jonathan Dennis
The Scarlet Shadow - Stewart Sheargold
Only Living Girls - Steve Cole

Messrs Lyons, Magrs and Cole and the delightful Ms Mags Halliday will be well known to Doctor Who book readers, while Mark Wright and Cav Scott are in charge of the Big Finish Iris range. They and Stewart Sheargold have written extensively for the Big Finish ranges.

Jonathan Dennis and Phil Purser-Hallard have both written Faction Paradox fiction, with Phil also writing for novellas for Telos and Big Finish.

Finally, introducing Cody Schell and Steven Wickham with their first published pieces of Who related fiction, though Steven has appeared as an actor in over a dozen Big Finish audios.

Oh, and me - but that's sheer nepotism so probably best glossed over quickly...

With specially commissioned cover art by June Hudson, legendary Doctor Who costume designer, and logo courtesy of the lovely Anthony Dry, we're aiming for a publication date in early April.

Here's a sneak preview of June's brilliant cover art:

http://www.obversebooks.co.uk for further details (as soon as I put them up, later today) and expressions of childlike glee from Paul and I...

Did I mention the introduction by Iris herself, Katy Manning?

Cheers

Stuart

Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus - Update

2009-02-14T16:27:00.002Z

Nearly there now! Just waiting for one author to finish up and then we can see how it all fits together.

Further announcements on obversebooks.co.uk soon...

(hmm, does that sound too much like one of those spam comments which litter blogger?)

Nice review

2009-02-10T09:28:00.001Z

[of my story in Shelf Life, that is]

No Place Like Home by Stuart A Douglas

We are on the very edge of Whoniverse here. This is an Iris Wildthyme story although Iris herself is little more than a framing character. This really belongs to a pacifist Cyberman, a pair of individualist Sontarans (who rebel against the clone world by wearing a hat with a feather in it or a leather jacket), and a loner Auton who doesn't want to be part of the pack. In case you hadn't guessed - this is a comic piece that vaults the highest bar by actually being funny. And it gets better on a second or third reading when you can go back and enjoy the little throwaway lines instead of powering ahead to find out what is going on.

http://www.doctorwhoforum.com/showpost.php?p=7668937&postcount=152

The book has just been re-printed, so you should definitely go and buy a copy if you haven't yet!

Blossom, Bubbles, Buttercup

2009-01-29T17:54:00.009Z

It's a tricky business, this book reviewing lark.

Too harsh a review and you come across as an embittered never was, a non-writer who's jealous of those who can. Too nice and you sound like a mewling sycophant, the dead spit of some wannabe Who writer falsely praising the crappy books of...well I can't say who. After all I might want to publish a Who book at some point!

Which makes it a relief to review The Beatle Man, a novel by Scott Liddell, my oldest friend in the world (33 years and counting).

Most importantly, I can't come across as embittered because I like the damn thing a lot. And I'm not likely to inflate my best mate's head by saying that unless it was true. I mean - after all this time he could hardly go in a huff if I said it was a bit pants, now could he?

Luckily, it's not pants at all. but rather is an effectively written and tightly plotted thriller somewhat in the Rebus mode.

It starts well, with a firm authorial hand on the tiller as the narrative kicks off in faintly comedic strain. The various characters are introduced in a steady early stream and each proves to be engaging and interesting, while the central conceit of the title (a presumably mentally ill man who speaks only in Beatles' lyrics and the effect his passage through life has on those around him) is just odd enough to hold the attention.

All of which would be worthless if the plot was weak or uninvolving. Fortunately, the story of how Danny McColl collides with the terrible Finch family and appoints himself a sort of weirdly ineffectual protector for those who live in his new stair (including the Beatle Man) is well told by the author and comes to a satisfyingly twisted conclusion which ties up every loose end.

Don't get me wrong, this book isn't perfect (the completely pointless lesbians from the first draft have disappeared for a start) but it's faults are minor. There is perhaps a slight tendency to lean in the direction of caricature (Asian shopkeeper, Glaswegian wideboy, posh lawyer who likes a drink and the ladies and so on) and the writing does at times seem unsure if it wants to be a more chatty, less idiotic Irvine Welsh or a 'proper' gritty crime novel, but these failings - such as they are - are never enough to adversely effect the narrative.

All in all, this is both an excellent first novel and a good novel full-stop. If it had been by a stranger I'd probably have missed out that last paragraph of faults, but since it's by a friend I had to go that extra mile to demonstrate my impartiality.

Finally - The Beatle Man is miles better than JK Rowling. That isn't actually that proud a boast, in my opinion, but I include the claim here in hopes of a pull-quote on the back of the second printing of the book...

Do you know what cheapies are?

2009-01-26T13:16:00.004Z

"getting your cheapies": def. being overly pleased with yourself, often as a result of some outside agency

The lovely, tasteful Damon (who I don't even know!) has been reviewing the entirety of the Craig Hinton fanthology, Shelf Life, and got to my own little contribution today.

And he liked it! I am so totally getting my cheapies!

No Place Like Home by Stuart A Douglas
We are on the very edge of Whoniverse here. This is an Iris Wildthyme story although Iris herself is little more than a framing character. This really belongs to a pacifist Cyberman, a pair of individualist Sontarans (who rebel against the clone world by wearing a hat with a feather in it or a leather jacket), and a loner Auton who doesn't want to be part of the pack. In case you hadn't guessed - this is a comic piece that vaults the highest bar by actually being funny. And it gets better on a second or third reading when you can go back and enjoy the little throwaway lines instead of powering ahead to find out what is going on.

http://www.doctorwhoforum.com/showthread.php?p=7670205#post7670205

Iris Season 2 Box Set

2009-01-26T09:36:00.006Z

The quickest of plugs for something very dear to my heart: Big Finish have now released the artwork for the utterly fabulous looking and sounding Iris Wildthyme season 2 box set.

Consisting of all four of the new season stories, and with each disc also coming with Anthony Dry's Official Best Ever Artwork, the box set is available for pre-order from Big Finish now at a fairly sizeable discount compared to buying them individually!

I've read two of the stories and they're brilliant (and I can't believe that Messrs Wright and Scott will have allowed either Simon Guerrier or Mark Magrs to turn in anything less good than that).

There's nothing not to like here - go and buy them now, and whet your appetite for the plethora of Iris related...well, stuff due out this year.

Smoke Lingers 'round your fingers...

2009-01-12T14:43:00.003Z

Courtesy of Paul, a great blog with some fantastic stories about London in the last century.

http://www.nickelinthemachine.com

And could this be Iris' bus appearing through the smog?

http://www.nickelinthemachine.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/smog-g2.jpg

Obsessive fans

2008-12-23T09:32:00.003Z

Take a look at this Freedom of Information Act request, courtesy of Stuart

It seems to me that if this woman's real name is not Annie Wilkes, but that she's taken her nom de plume from Kathy Bates murderously obsessive fan character in Stephen King's Misery...well, if I were Tennant, Gardner or Davies, I'd be a wee bit worried.

You know you've seen her somewhere before...

2008-12-22T15:03:00.003Z

Admit it, you know this girl.

She's all over the internet, smiling her faintly impatient little smile at you as you curse the closure of a site which Google suggested might have contained exactly what you were looking for.

Or you've typed the URL in wrong, and changing 'amzaon.co.uk' to 'amazon.co.uk' might be a good idea...

Anyway, she has a life away from mildly censorious glares of approbation at your fat-fingered mistyping, as these images from a stock image site demonstrate.

http://www.istockphoto.com/file_search.php?action=file&filetypeID=&userID=39198&text=hf7

It's a shame that it is a stock photo site actually - I quite like the idea of the mystery girl getting a penny for every time her face appears on the internet. She'd be rich by now and could retire to the Florida Everglades, there to grow old and wrinkled as her Dorian Gray like image remains for ever young and ever so slightly pissed off at getting her picture taken.

Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus

2008-11-27T19:16:00.002Z

You know how it is. Your favourite book series goes belly up or starts printing books that just aren't as good as they used to be. You're stuck re-reading The Also People and The Blue Angel and - good as those two books are - moaning to people that everything's a bit rubbish now.

So it was that, with the various Who books lines either disappearing or printing books aimed at a younger audience, we - that's Paul Magrs and I - decided that this would be a great time to launch a new more adult oriented Who-related fiction imprint, publishing officially licensed Iris Wildthyme books.

Everything's a little bit hush-hush at the moment, but the first book is going to be a short story collection entitled

'Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus'

and will be published late next Spring. We're keeping authors names under our hats (there will be a story from Paul obviously) but expect lots of Who fiction luminaries to be announced over the coming few weeks

The aim is to use any profit from the short story collection to kick-off a series of twice yearly Iris novellas. The books will only be available in a limited, numbered and autographed run. Don't worry though - they definitely won't be wildly expensive. Books are for reading not hiding in display cabinets.

One thing we can announce is that June Hudson, utterly legendary Who costume designer and the brains behind the famous season 18 costumes amongst many other things, has kindly agreed to do the cover art, about which we're both totally chuffed.

Further information will appear on obversebooks.co.uk, where you can currently sign up for our mailing list and so keep abreast of upcoming news...

Audio Returns

2008-11-24T11:09:00.003Z

Now this is what I call a mother lode of returned telly - or, to be accurate, off air audio recordings of old telly. I'm not entirely convinced all of this is missing, but I know a geat deal of it and as this only covers tapes for a year or so in the late sixties, and there are many, many more tapes to be checked, this could turn out to be one of the most significant finds ever.

Collected by Paul Vanezis from an old radio enthusiast, the most important find for me is an off air audio copy of the missing Dads Army episode 'A Stripe for Fraser', but the rest are all important recordings (and equally hopefully there's more to come from this massive collection).

Now, someone just needs to get them out on disc or on the radio (although given that the recovered audios of Ace of Wands didn't even make the dvd box set, I'm not overly confident)

Dads Army
Up until now this has only been available as one of the full cast re-recordings for the Dads' Army radio show.

29/03/69 A Stripe for Fraser

Not Only...But Also
The February show is held in the archives missing some sections. The March show has until now been lost entirely.

18/02/70
18/03/70

'Til Death Us Do Part
Some of these are presumably repeats - for instance there was no first-run episode of 'Til Death of 27 December 1967, and the episode 'State Visit' was originally shown in February of that year.

23/01/67 Caviar On The Dole
06/02/67 A Wapping Mythology
13/02/67 In Sickness And In Health
27/12/67
29/07/67 State Visit
05/08/67 Bulldog Breed
Talkback - Till Death (14/01/68)
26/01/68 The Funeral
02/02/68 Football
09/02/68 The Puppy
28/12/68 Monopoly

Q5
24/03/69
28/04/69
05/05/69

Do Not Adjust Your Set
14/09/66 - Do Not Adjust Your Set There's a Fault in the Programme - Recorded from the ABC in Australia
11/01/68 - #2
26/02/69 - #15
12/03/69 - #17
19/03/69 - #18
30/04/69 - #24
14/05/69 - #26

Horne a Plenty
13/11/68

Harry Worth
02/04/67
14/05/67
28/05/67
04/06/67
23/04/69
30/04/69
19/11/69
02/12/69
09/12/69
16/12/69

At Last...the 1948 Show
The missing episodes of these shows already exist as off-air recordings, but hopefully these are better quality and particularly the recording of 26 September 1967 contains the scene from the beginning which is missing from the - until now - only recording of the show. The recordings from April and May 1967 are presumably repeats of the first series, which finished in March of that year.

25/04/67
02/05/67
09/05/67
16/05/67
26/09/67
03/10/67
10/10/67
24/10/67
31/10/67

Oh Brother!
13/09/68 - The Voice of the Turtle
18/10/68 - Treasures on Earth
18/04/69 - Thine House in Order
25/04/69 - A Mother in Israel
02/05/69 - Behold This Dreamer
09/05/69 - An Uncertain Sound
16/05/69 - In The Beginning
27/08/69 - Root of All Evil
16/01/70 - A Still Small Voice
23/01/70 - By The Fleshpots
30/01/70 - The Laughter of a Fool
13/02/70 - The Hand of Esau
27/02/70 - The Fullness of his Days

The Frost Report
20/04/67 - The Army
27/04/67 - Advertising
04/05/67 - Parliament & Politicians
18/05/67 - Industry
25/05/67 - Culture
01/06/67 - Transport
09/06/67 - Crime
??/??/?? - Europe
29/06/67 - Showbusiness
17/03/67 - Youth
31/03/67 - Countryside

The Rolf Harris Show
Larger Than Life

Comedy Playhouse
Spanner in the Works
The Chars
House in a Tree 25/06/67
Heirs on a Shoestring 09/06/67
To Lucifer a Son (with Jimmy Tarbuck)
Tooth and Claw
The Lovers 12/05/69
The Making of Peregrine 19/05/69
Joint Account 18/12/69
Keep 'Em Rolling 11/03/1970
Better Than A Man 18/03/1970
Mind Your Own Business 08/07/1970

The Galton and Simpson Playhouse
26/04/69 - Friends in High Places
04/05/69 - Never Talk to Strangers
17/05/69 - Pity Poor Edie, Married to Him
21/11/69 - ??

Top of the Pops
15/06/67
13/07/67
05/10/67
25/12/68
26/12/68
20/03/69
03/04/69
10/04/69
24/04/69
01/05/69
08/05/69
29/05/69
11/09/69
13/11/69
18/12/69
26/12/69
18/02/70
19/03/70

Unexpectedly Creepy

2008-11-20T09:00:00.002Z

How creepy are the lyrics to Bucks Fizz's Land of Make Believe, when divorced from the infectiously annoying tune? Time for that guy who did 'Mad World' on piano to record a follow-up?

Stars in your eyes, little one
Where do you go to dream
To a place, we all know
The land of make believe

Shadows, tapping at your window
Ghostly voices whisper will you come and play
Not for all the tea in China
Or the corn in Carolina
Never, never ever
They're running after you babe

Run for the sun, little one
You're an outlaw once again
Time to change, Superman
He'll be with us while he can
In the land of make believe

Something nasty in your garden's waiting
Patiently, till it can have your heart
Try to go but it won't let you
Don't you know it's out to get you running
Keep on running
They're running after you babe

Run for the sun, little one
You're an outlaw once again
Time to change, Superman
He'll be with us while he can
In the land of make believe

Your world is turning
From night to day
Your dream is burning far, far away

Into the blue
You and I
To the circus in the sky
Captain Kids
On the sand
With the treasure close at hand
In the land of make believe

In the land of make believe

Run for the sun, little one
You're an outlaw once again
Time to change, Superman
He'll be with us while he can
In the land of make believe

Run for the sun, little one
You're an outlaw once again
Time to change, Superman
He'll be with us while he can
In the land of make believe

I've got a friend who comes to tea
And no-one else can see but me
He came today
But had to go
To visit you
You never know

AlbumsOneBowie: David Bowie (1967)

2008-11-17T10:19:00.015Z

Being a fan of all periods of David Bowie should be a real problem, you'd be forgiven for thinking.

After all, the man is better known than any other artist in music for constant re-invention. The word 'chameleon' is defined in the OED as, in part, 'pertaining to David Bowie'.*

This problem is particularly apparent when listening to Bowie's first studio album, the eponymous 'David Bowie'.**

It really is a struggle to come up with another artist who made such a massive sea-change in direction - in Bowie's case from whimsical, English music hall to sex-obsessed Glam Rock - in so short a period of time. Consequently, Bowie's brief early years do contain whole albums which seem hard to place in a logical, consistent and organic timeline.

David Buckley described this record as "the vinyl equivalent of the madwoman in the attic" and while that probably suggests a greater degree of sound and fury than is merited, Gus Dudgeon's claim that it was the 'weirdest thing Deram had ever put out" seems closer to the mark.

It certainly stands out even in the Summer of Love, eschewing the sort of hippy love and peace concerns suggested by the faintly psychedelic cover font in favour of a succession of mini-stories, flavoured by vaudeville and music hall rather than drugs and free love (the drug and, well, gang obsessed 'Join the Gang' is the odd track out in this respect).

Because of this, any search for musical fellow travellers for David Bowie leads only to individual songs rather than actual sustained work: bits and pieces of the Beatles output (most obviously John Lennon's 'Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite'), occasional Kinks' tracks and obscure British psych acts like The Blossom Toes.

The Beatles more whimsical moments are, in fact, the closest popular match for these early Bowie tracks. Utilising brass and strings, recording tracks with odd timings ('Maid of Bond Street' is in waltz time, for example), and injecting humour via the spoken word and 'funny' voices ('Please Mr Gravedigger' in particular) are all elements which have a mirror in Yellow Submarine/Pepper-era Beatles.

That the Beatles' tracks generally work far better is a sign that Bowie was as yet an emerging artist, still finding his musical feet and searching for a voice of his own, but there are things to admire in this first, uneven recording.

Most obviously, it is possible to trace certain of the themes which Bowie embraced right up until the early 80s in this very early and atypical work. 'She's Got Medals' deals with cross-dressing and trans-gender issues, 'Uncle Arthur', 'Maid of Bond Street' and 'Little Bombardier' address unusual, possibly illicitly sexual, relationships and 'We Are Hungry Men' concerns itself with a dictator/Big Brother/messiah figure attempting to save a future dystopian society.

Of the two other primary thematic threads on the album, however, one is quickly discarded by Bowie after this album and never shows up explicitly in the future, whilst the other remains a staple only briefly and very rarely appears in later recordings.

The soon to be discarded theme of the effect of recent wars is evident in 'We are the Hungry Men' ('Achtung, achtung, these are your orders') and 'Little Bombardier' ('War made him a soldier...Peace left him a loser'), and even a throw-away like 'Rubber Band' (with its petulant and painful spoken 'I hope you break your baton' final line) slips a reference to the First World War into its music hall pastiche. War remains a potential lyrical source for future Bowie, but never quite so specifically.

The themes of innocence and the positive elements of childishness, however, are very pronounced on David Bowie and are also the areas in which Bowie moves furthest away from the straight music hall and in the direction of the Syd Barrett/Gong style nursery rhymes which made up another strand of very British psychedelia.

'When I Live my Dream', 'There is a Happy Land' and 'Silly Boy Blue' set the template for a fair portion of Bowie's songs before he embraces 'rock' with The Man Who Sold the World. Swooping strings and overblown and fantastic lyrics (reincarnation, slaying dragons and a 'special place in the rhubarb fields' all on one album!) combine with fears that the real world is threatening our innocence, and push this specific strand of Bowie into the realms of the quainter fringes of the hippy counter-culture.

Fortunately, Bowie redeems himself by his ability to engender real emotional impact from what seem at surface level to be trite place-holder tracks. Later on, the theme of childhood threatened would lead to the subtly despairing 'When I'm Five', while straight-forward romanticism would reach it's peak in the beautiful 'In the Heat of the Morning' (though it's possible to see echoes of this approach as late as the 'Absolute Beginners' single in 1986).

In the end, there are enough areas of overlap between this album and later Bowie works to appeal to the die-hard fan. Putting those people to one side, however, and this is one Bowie record which is, at best, a curio and an example of an era rather than of an artist coming into his own.

That Bowie had discarded all music hall elements by the time he recorded his next album, Space Oddity shows that he too recognised that this approach was not one on which to build a career.

Side one

"Uncle Arthur" – 2:07
"Sell Me a Coat" – 2:58
"Rubber Band" – 2:17
"Love You Till Tuesday" – 3:09
"There Is a Happy Land" – 3:11
"We Are Hungry Men" – 2:58
"When I Live My Dream" – 3:22

Side two

"Little Bombardier" – 3:24
"Silly Boy Blue" – 4:36
"Come and Buy My Toys" – 2:07
"Join the Gang" – 2:17
"She's Got Medals" – 2:23
"Maid of Bond Street" – 1:43
"Please Mr. Gravedigger" – 2:35

* Not really, but it bloody should be
** I'll be ignoring those early RnB singles with the Lower Third, Manish Boys etc that are forever being repackaged and re-released on cd, and so should you.

Passing Thought of Little Interest 4

2008-11-13T10:35:00.007Z

The track 'Slip Away' from David Bowie's Heathen album should really have been the third of his songs about Major Tom, after Space Oddity and Ashes to Ashes and instead of the pretty poor Hello Spaceboy.

Just switch Uncle Floyd for Major Tom in the chorus and the lyric fits perfectly - wonder if that was the original intention?

Don't forget
to keep your head warm
Twinkle twinkle Uncle Floyd
Watching all the world
and war torn
How I wonder where you are
Oo-o
Sailing over
Coney Island
Twinkle twinkle Uncle Floyd
We were dumb
but you were fun, boy
How I wonder where you are
Oo-o

More Comparing and Contrasting

2008-11-04T15:15:00.004Z

Have a look at these two Wikipedia pages relating to current Hearts' manager, Csaba Lazlo - and as you decide which is the truthful one, note the level of citation in each.

Hearts' fans sold another puppy, anyone?

Csaba Lazlo's Wikipedia Page Today

After his appointment as a Head Coach of Uganda, they missed out on qualification for the African Cup of Nations in Ghana 2008 on goal difference in favour of Sudan. Unfortunately, he was unable significantly to improve Uganda's FIFA Ranking, which rose from 99 when he joined to 97 when he left in 2008. 1

He was also accused him of "fail[ing] to oversee the creation of under-age teams to feed the senior side"[2] and "not watching the local league and repeatedly frown[ing] at the idea of putting up youth structures to unearth the next Ibrahim Sekagya"^[3]

Uganda beat arch-rivals Nigeria for the first time in football history and in December 2007, they finished third in the CECAFA Cup. However, they also underwent their longest run without an away victory for seven years, and lost to Lesotho, Niger, Benin (a loss described as a "humiliation" and "inexcusable")^[4] and Tanzania (a "lame-duck display" according to the Ugandan press)^[5].

Csaba Lazlo's Wiki Page just after his appointment by Hearts

His appointment as a Head Coach of Uganda was an incredible boost for the East African nation.^{[citation needed]} After his arrival, they went on their best run in 24 years^{[citation needed]}; missing out on qualification for the African Cup of Nations in Ghana 2008 on goal differnence in favour of Sudan^{[citation needed]} and jumped from 167th to 91st in the FIFA World Rankings.^{[citation needed]} He also helped the development of Ugandan players Noah Babadi Kasule, David Obua and Ibrahim Sekagya^[^{citation needed]}.

Uganda beat arch-rivals Nigeria for the first time in football history^{[citation needed]} and in December 2007, they finished third in the CECAFA Cup^[^{citation needed]}. Thanks to his charisma and hard work,^{[citation needed]} FUFA (Uganda FA) signed a 1 million USD sponsorship deal^{[citation needed]} with African mobile telephone giants MTN and African giants Satellite Television channel GTV signed a 5 years contract to broadcast the league games of the Ugandan football league^{[citation needed]}. In 2008 Csaba László became the only foreign trainer who has been able to remain as a national team coach of a African side for over two years.^{[citation needed]} He became a cult hero in Uganda;^{[citation needed]} he has been nicknamed "The Miracle Man" by the African press.^{[citation needed]}

No Regrets

2008-10-29T15:42:00.003Z

I pinched a copy of Mrs Osbourne Regrets from a friend. He got the book directly from the author in return for allowing one of his photographs to be used as the front cover, and I pounced on it when I saw it lying on the dashboard of his car.

It's self-published by Lulu and, to be frank, isn't too prepossessing to look at, with blurred text on the front cover, and the photo my friend took has been altered to make the women in it look like she put her lipstick on in the dark.

Still, I'll read most things and, even though romance novels are probably my least favourite genre, nothing ventured...

It's a slightly peculiar book, in that while the dialogue was at times leaden and one of the two romantic leads was a misjudged cliché who often slipped into horny-handed yokel territory, the 100 pages of the novella slipped by quickly and enjoyably. In many ways, it reminded me of the description of another writer someone mentioned to me recently - Karen Mason is clearly a writer, but she needs to learn to write better. She's a storyteller who can tell a good story and tell it interestingly, but the actual mechanics involved - the specifics of writing a realistic novel, the craft maybe - still need some work.

Down to specifics then.

I've no idea if the background to 1950s high society was realistic or not, but it felt reasonably true to my own vague understanding of the era and Angela Crawford, the middle class good time girl who married rich, rang particularly true, and could have been used more by the author had the work been longer. This is a general fault of a sort, actually - the book is too short, with the result that events are skimmed over when more detail and a more in depth view would have been helpful (the ostracism of Mrs Osbourne by her erstwhile friends, for instance, is over in two pages, and thus feels rushed and unconvincing).

Mrs Osbourne and her family also happily approached the three dimensional, even if the shortness of the work again meant that they often filled convenient and specific personality trait shaped holes (dutiful wife; steady, but selfish daughter; rebellious but loyal daughter; selfish gay pervert of a husband).

That last actually is the least satisfactory element of Mrs Osbourne Regrets. Charles Osbourne, MP, is portrayed as a wholly one dimensional, pleasure-addicted roue, whose only thought once he is caught cottaging is to have sex with as many young men as possible, prior to moving lock, stock and barrel to Morocco. He ignores his family, shacks up with a dissolute actor and his coterie of rent boys, and almost over-night becomes fat, dirty and repellent as a result.

Obviously the charitable way to look at this - and the unpleasant way in which every character seems to be under the impression that homosexuality is primarily concerned with buggering young boys - is to allow that these are the views of the characters and not the author.

There is a very funny scene for instance in which Mrs Osbourne's prospective son-on-law tells her that he had to have the family doctor explain to his homophobic mother that any children of the union would not be automatically homosexual themselves (bringing to mind Homer Simpson's concern that Bart would 'catch gay' from John Waters). That he immediately undercuts this by continuing that homosexuality is a 'perversion' and a 'lifestyle choice' is unfortunate, but it doesn't detract from the sharpness of the wit nor the cleverness of the pastiche of homophobia in the preceding lines.

It does seem odd that not a single character appears to view gay men as anything other than perverts, not even George the builder (who expresses some pity for Charles, if not for his 'ways'), but I'd hazard that this is an over-sight on behalf of a relatively inexperienced writer than anything more deliberate.

Overall, the most positive thing I can say about this novella is that I read it quickly and found myself opening it for a quick glance as I walked from the car to the office or waited for the kettle to boil. There's some awkward turns of phrase and the story needs more room to breathe properly, but any novel which has me reading it at every available opportunity is to be recommended.

http://sites.google.com/site/authorkarenmason/ to buy a copy.

Too Good to Miss

2008-10-27T10:03:00.003Z

I don't often randomly recommend websites (actually, let's pretend this is simply one in an ongoing series of such recommendations), but this site is brilliant:

http://usedfaqs.com/

What's not to like in a site which answers the age-old questions "If a woman is menstruating, does that increase her risk of bear attack?" and "Do Mormons wear special undergarments?"

Public service websiting at its best.

Read early, read often...

2008-10-25T19:19:00.007Z

That dear misguided fool Jonn Elledge is the official New Statesman blogger for the 2008 US election (or 'Feeshul Lection Blogger' as shouted aloud by a newspaper vendor in Princes Street).

Go to http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/america-decides-2008 and read/add the feed to your blog reader.

Remember - only Jonn Elledge stands between you, and America placing Sarah Palin one elderly and unwell Republican away from the Presidency.

The Sound of Scotland

2008-10-24T10:16:00.000Z

Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters - The Twilight Sad

'Like Billy Bragg in 'My Youngest Son Came Home Today' mode', according to Jim. It's a compliment.

Whereas according to me (in a 30 second mailing list comment I'm lazily recycling)

"If The Telescopes had had more than just 'The Perfect Needle'; if My Bloody Valentine had mastered decent lyrics; if Spacemen 3 had had a bit more discipline, they might have been The Twilight Sad, only not as good.

Singing in a broad Scottish accent over washes of big guitar, The Twilight Sad can hopefully manage to wrest the indie guitar crown away from generic pop rock bands like The Killers and shitty tadium fillers like Coldplay and U2."

So really good music, basically.

Glasvegas - Glasvegas

Lauded as the next big thing by the music press, Glasvegas ultimately fail to fulfil the promise of their demos from last year, turning out an album of bog-standard guitar tunes, like a poor man's Twilight Sad or - given that I swear they play bagpipe on their guitars at one point - a Big Country tribute band.

They're not rubbish, but neither are they as awesome as NME would have you believe. Highlights are 'Geraldine' (primarily for the lyric 'My name is Geraldine and I'm your social worker') and the (almost) novelty track 'Stabbed', which is a poem recited over Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and so gets points for at least trying something different.

Disappointingly one and a bit-note and dull, really.

The Midnight Organ Fight- Frightened Rabbit

This is far more like it. If The Twilight Sad are Arcade Fire with better melodies and lyrics and proper accents, and Glasvegas are Big Country with attitude (trite labels, don't you just love them?), then Frightened Rabbit are the distillation of every Scottish pop band ever (lyrically particularly Aztec Camera) crossed with the indie mega-brilliance of The Wedding Present. Flat, accented vocals, jangling guitar lines and miltary style drumming, combine with razor sharp lyrics to make this the best album of the three.

I'll stick to my guns, but from now on it's war
I am armed with the past, and the will, and a brick
I might not want you back, but I want to kill him

and

and leave the rest at arm's length
keep your naked flesh under your favourite dress

You can hear them here but really, buy the album as well - only then will you realise why I haven't listed my favourite songs off it. It's because they're all brilliant.

Best Scottish debut album since Psychocandy.

Three Billy Goats Guff

2008-10-21T12:35:00.007Z

What makes a troll? That's the internet type, not the mythical creature of Norwegian (probably - I can't be arsed checking, I've had a tooth out, my face hurts) origin.

I had always thought of a troll as someone who comes onto a forum solely to cause trouble, deliberately and perversely arguing for something essentially ridiculous and making stuff up to suit their mental argument. And all desigend to provoke a reaction.

As opposed - to get down to cases - to someone going on a web forum and arguing an unpopular line which just happens to be true.

To get down to actual specifics, I've been banned from the doctorwhoforum. In itself that's no big deal - I've been banned by better sites than that, I can tell you mate - and I can even understand why they banned me. After all, I was upsetting the kind of 'proper' Doctor Who authors which the forum relies on to give its indefinable cachet and I may well have been a bit rude about it (I don't deny that I can occasionally get so wrapped up in the argument - and am so used to the 'anything goes' nature of certain mailing lists - that I can slip into, well, mildly unpleasant sarcasm).

But what I was saying was the truth, and I was never what I would consider to be very rude, nor was I trying to provoke a reaction so much as getting irritated at what I saw as rather creepy behaviour.

Previously I'd been warned for the sin of saying Times Champion was rubbish (it is), that a particularly stupid poster appeared to be borderline special needs (he is) and for defending myself against a sneaky and smug personal attack by a sycophantic guffmonkey named Ben Adams (he is - a sycophantic guffmonkey, that is).

I should probably just have left when my post defending myself was removed by the forum Mods but clown boy's attacking me wasn't. I should certainly have left when a post I did asking what was so great about 'In Vision' was deleted along with various subsequent posts by other people asking why my non-objectionable post had been deleted also got deleted (goodness, all those deletions - it's like a particularly poor episode of New Who).

As it turns out I never got the chance to leave as I got banned for was for saying that Justin Richards doing four of the 10 books in the new multi-part Who series was just another example of the rank nepotism at work in the Who book world and a sign that the publishers could care less about quality. As that was actually me agreeing with a couple of other people who had said exactly the same thing earlier on, you'd think that would be OK, but within seconds the usual suspects appeared on the scene like particularly cringe-making vultures at a feast of arsiness. Lance (who I like as a writer and who, this trait aside, is funny, intelligent and knowledgeable about cool stuff) did his usual 'anyone who might one day commission me is perfect' schtick, and Peter Anghelides - check his bibliography and see how many non-Who plays, short stories and novel he's done, and then remember he's one of Justin 'I Commission Only my Mates' Richards oldest friends - came along, shuffling like Uncle Tom and twisting the facts into pretzels in an effort to make Richards and his little coterie of poor writers look less nepotistic.

Anyway, I thought I was reasonably polite - I scoffed a little at Lance's ridiculous claim that co-editorship of the schoolboy criticism which is the poorly mimeographed 'In Vision' series counts as professional non-fiction experience but I deleted a long post marking out exactly how Peter A had been disingenuous in order to defend his friend, on the grounds that defending your friends is an admirable thing.

But I still got banned for being rude and incapable of courteous behaviour, or some such.

Anyway, to cut a long story short I have very little time for most of the mods on OG, who are a shower of smug, self-congratulatory idiots, more interested in buttering up the very minor writers who post there than anything else, and so being banned by them is hardly a blow to my ego.

But someone I do like and respect a great deal did say to me later that I had been trolling a little and acting a 'bit wanky' and, basically, got what I deserved (he said the last bit nicer than that, but I knew what he meant). Other people mailed me to say that I wasn't trolling and didn't go far enough, and a couple of people I know less well agreed I had been at it, but still...it continues to bother me several days later that this one person thought I was trolling because he's an honest guy and obviously thought I was.

And I genuinely wasn't intending to do so.

Oh well, I'm sure I'll recover - I am, after all, hardly thin-skinned - but maybe I'll stay off all web fora for a while, just in case he was right and I was doing something more than just arguing my case.

For reference though, every writer except Richard Dungworth (who I don't know) involved in the Darksmith Legacy is a bad, bad writer and get commissioned far too much for no immediately obvious reason.

Radio - live transmission...

2008-10-13T16:00:00.001Z

I've long been a fan of the DWIN Myth Makers collections and have remarked in the past that they are consistently of a higher quality than the official Big Finish releases, so I was definitely intrigued to see the name of the erstwhile editor of Myth Makers, Richard Salter, on the front cover of Transmissions.

I did wonder whether his editorship of pro writers would match his handling of fanfic authors was just one reason to buy the book, but I needn't have worried, in spite of a slightly rocky start...

Adaptation of Death - Graeme Burk

I came to Transmissions having given up a couple of Who books in a row as lost causes - and then nearly dumped this Short Trips collection within the first three pages as the book gets off to a disappointingly average sort of start.

Middle-aged music references (Cher, for God's sake), plays on words which would look poor in a Clayton Hickman audio (PQ Rowling, author of Harry Potter and the Half Moon Dentist) and future pop culture references that would make Russell T Davies wince ('Apple Coldplay' - what the hell does that even mean, has Apple Martin/Paltrow changed her name or has the band? Is this some descendant named after the band? Did anyone think any of this through at all?).

If the book was entirely along those lines - high school creative writing class, basically - then I decided that maybe it was time to give up on fiction and go and read that history of the last millennium I've had lying in the bookcase for about five years.

Luckily it does improve from this unpromising beginning.

The writing as a whole is variable but Burk certainly seems more comfortable with pastiching action movies in the film scenes than with creating the prose required for the rest of the story. Clumsy metaphors litter the story from the very first paragraph (where someone is 'like Adonis' stunt double on steroids') and jokes which weren't funny first time round get repeated until they've lost whatever small gloss they might once have had (chief amongst these 'jokes' are the names of film actors of the future - Kel-Al Cage, Chris Culkin-Rock, Jude Law the Third. Seriously guys, that wasn't a good joke the first time you made it).

There are some nice lines, to be fair - "whatever the Doctor was, he was too used to the sight of death" sums up the entirety of Journey's End in somewhat less than half a sentence, while 'Poor source material is no defence' initially fooled me into thinking that the story was going to be a meta-textual commentary on something other, only to discover that, sadly, it wasn't anything of the sort.

The basic idea is a good one - aliens with a deep-felt love of the truth come to Earth to prosecute a writer for penning an action movie which fictionalises their race's involvement in fighting off an invasion force. The character of Ekode, the alien most unfairly denigrated by the movie, is an intelligent and thoughtful creation and the aliens themselves are given some interesting characteristics. The narrator talks in bad prose and poor metaphor a lot of the time, but being charitable that might well be intentional.

Unfortunately, this is one of those Big Finish short stories with no ending. Or rather, there is an ending in the book, but it's a hasty tack-on, unlinked to, and unforeshadowed by, anything which has gone before. It reads as though the author got to near the end and realised that he'd written himself into an executed Doctor shaped hole - cue an unlikely twist (thought that seriously over-estimates the cleverness of the 'twist' in question) and wriggle through to the end, the Doctor and your story - sort of, if you squint a bit and stick your fingers in your brain - saved.

Not the worst story ever written in a Who collection (stand up, Joe Lidster - that's one record you're likely to hold for longer than, oh I don't know, Adonis' stunt double on steroids) but a good idea let down by some fairly uninspired writing and a below average resolution more fitting for the pages of sixties' TV Comic is not a great start.

Policy to Invade - Ian Mond

Thankfully the cunning editor has placed the ever reliable Ian Mond at second place in this 17 tale relay and he takes the baton like a pro (no, I've no idea where the sporting metaphor came from either).

In some ways this is Mond's version of Steven Moffat's outstanding Decalog 3 short story 'Continuity Errors', with the Seventh Doctor manipulating events for all he's worth in order to bring matters to his desired end.

The use of the minutiae of office communication is, to my surprise, something I'd never come across in a Who short story before, and each successive memo, report and position paper comes across as entirely believable.

Which makes the entire story sound terribly dry, but the reports are scattered amidst a series of witness statements that effectively build up to the satisfyingly well-considered conclusion which firmly puts the collection back on track.

Only Connect - Andy Lane

It's a nice little story which has its central tenet a theme close to my heart - that real history is composed of the actions of millions of people and that the way they live is as important as the activities of statesmen and generals.

Problem is, it's not a Doctor Who story. A cafe in which assorted time travellers drive taxis incognito in order to find out about their passengers? And the Fourth Doctor is one of those drivers? No, I really don't think so.

It's the pilot story for another collection entirely, levered into a Who collection by search and replacing the main character's name. There's an attempt to make it into a Who story by linking the Doctor's actions to a revelation about Seeds of Doom, but I'd bet an entire pound that the revelation was different in the original story.

Nicely written, but ultimately pointless in a Doctor Who collection and not a little annoying in its disregard for its subject.

Gudok - Mags L Halliday

This is very nearly perfect. Mags Halliday's is the pre-eminent Doctor Who historical writer and while lack of familiarity meant that I found her Faction Paradox novel a trifle hard going at times, 'Gudok' succeeds on every level in conjuring up the Trans-Siberian railway in the early twentieth century. Little touches - 'the little cards in the corridor', the remarkable lack of a piano in the upper class carriage, the bolster being used a barrier on the bed - litter and colour the text, and Halliday really nails the interation between Tegan and Turlough against a backdrop of a train journey through high mountains and a brief, tragic trip on an ice breaker across the world's deepest lake. The solution to the mystery is a little obvious due to the lack of possibilities in the limited space of both train and story, but the chinese whisper nature of the transmission is both satisfying and fitting.

Generation Gap - Lou Anders

This is an odd story altogether and one I'm still not sure if I liked or not. On the one hand, some of the writing is clunky - having established the names of the Doctor and Sarah-Jane in dialogue, the author feels constrained also to clumsily point out their names in the body of the text, for example - and the second person present tense narrative jars at times.

On the other, this narrative approach is at least an attempt at novelty and some of the writing is pleasingly bonkers (the Doctor "relaxing [his] bones" is a stand-out on the bonkers front, I have to say ). There's some good, more straight-forward lines in there too - 'Reverend carries more weight than Professor these days, the reverse of how you feel it should be' - and the resolution is neatly done.

Incidentally, it's a little odd to have two stories in a row which mention Beatles lyrics, but that's either an editorial goof or signifies something in the collection as a whole. We'll have to wait and see.

As I said, it's an odd sort of story, but on balance the interesting outweighs the leaden and that's good enough for me.

Lonely - Richard Wright

This was a little bit of a 'meh' story for me, possibly because it's written entirely as a conversation in an internet chatroom. Competent and capturing the McGann persona reasonably well, it just felt too slight to engage the reader much beyond a quick skim read, and the resolution in which all the characters learn A Valuable Life Lesson too trite to make much of an impact.

Not bad, not great, just meh...

Blue Road Dance - James Milton

Whereas this is bloody good.

Normally I'm not a fan of any imaginary culture which involves mystical dancing (I had it in my head that I'd come across loads of those over the years, but now it comes to it I can't actually think of any) but Milton really makes the concept work by listing the movements of the dancer protagonist like a Who version of Umberto Eco collating mythical animals.

More than I dislike dancing stories though, I love stories in which the Doctor takes on an element of myth, as here. 'Blue Road Dance' is in the tradition of previous favourites like Paul Dale Smith's 'Blossom', a tale in which the presence of the Doctor is subsidiary to the idea of the Doctor, where he serves as an archetype and not entirely a character, and in which the activities of other characters drive the narrative.

This is a beautiful story, with space even for the unexpected - the Doctor's reaction to a girl calling 'grandfather' is wonderful, for example - and an open ending which (unlike, say, The Doctor's Daughter) fully deserves to be left open and entirely works on its own terms.

I seem to recall being impressed by the only other story by James Milton I've ever read - a few years ago in one of the Myth Makers collections also edited by Richard Salter.

Hopefully his next story won't be so long in arriving.

Tweaker - Dan Abnett

Another oddity. It's a decent story, well written by Dan Abnett, especially for anyone who remembers the glorious experience of playing old vinyl.

It is a bit of a shame that the musicians who get mentioned are imaginary and the central recording created by the author - there are, after all, any number of obscure and lost blues records which could have been used instead and thus added another minor layer to the puzzle.

But what made this otherwise pleasant but unremarkable story feel odd to me was the fact that it features the Davison Doctor, when it feels like it should be a job for the McCoy incarnation. Intricate planning in advance, long-term planning and dropping stuff in super-novae spells out the manipulative Doctor of the Cartmell Masterplan for me, not the open face and innocent abroad qualities of Peter Davison.

Still this is exactly the kind of pleasant but not earth-shattering story that any collection needs.

Link - Pete Kempshall

I have been known to moan that the thematic backbone of the Short Trips collections is usually next to non-existent, a convenient hook which is discarded the second it becomes inconvenient, or a linking method where the links are often tenuous to the point of puzzlement. This collection occasionally strays slightly into the latter, but generally it's a well-thought out sets of stories in which the common thread has been maintained throughout, for which the editor is to be congratulated.

'Link' is perhaps the story which best makes use of the idea of transmission, referring to both means by which information is transmitted and the way in which infection is spread. As a story it's more compact and straight-forward than some in the collection but comes with a diverting beginning in which the author neatly tricks the reader into expecting some kind of Starship Troopers style gung-ho special, only to subvert that expectation almost immediately as the narrative pulls back a little.

It's noticeable in fact that there are times when this reads like nothing so much as a Target novel (expressions flash across people's faces, words are emblazoned on signs not written and the like) - but given the audience that's no bad thing, and it ensures that the plot rattles along appropriately.

There's not a lot else to say except that the resolution when it comes is very well constructed and reminiscent of one of the Third Doctor's earlier television adventures.

Certainly a better than average story.

Driftwood - Dale Smith

It's the nature of the beast that most Doctor Who writers are either fans with word processors or essentially hacks for hire, as capable of churning out a Warhammer novel or a bland kids' series about a wacky detective as the latest NSA.

There are exceptions though. Dale Smith for one. 'Driftwood' casts an eye over the early days of Human/Dolphin relations (as seen in his earlier novel, Heritage) and, with customary skill, turns out a story packed with arresting imagery, believable characters and and an intriguing setting.

Uniquely in the collection I had to read this one twice before I figured out what was going on, but that's no bad thing. Perhaps lacking in the poetry of Smith's earlier 'Blossom' or the timey-wimey cleverness of 'Recursion', 'Driftwood' is nevertheless a thoughtful and immaculately written contribution to the world of Who fiction.

Methusalah - George Mann

I'm a sucker for any story which goes cast distances in time or space and makes some attempt to show rather than tell that distance. Sadly, most Who stories post-2005 settle merely for saying 'This is a long time in the future' and leaving it at that. It happened a bit in the pre-1989 years too but, thankfully, prose attempts have been far better.

Lance Parkin's The Infinity Doctors does it best, with its universe a few years before Event Two, where everything once thought important is gone, and a section to the Key to Time lies discarded in the dust of one of the few remaining planets. George Mann goes for a similar approach, with a Universe largely devoid of light and a single dying star burning beneath the starship Methusalah. It's effectively done, as are the scenes with Peri stuck on 10th century Earth with what appears to be a raving madman.

Compact, tidy and straight-forward but with a glimmer here and there of greater ambition, this is a far better story than Mann's disappointing solo entrant in the Telos' Time Hunter series.

Nettles - Kelly Hale

Too often in Who the Doctor is essentially a simple White Hat, coming to the rescue of the beleagured population, overthrowing the dictator, removing the threat. So it always comes as a pleasant change to see a degree of genuine moral ambivalence in a Who story, and Kelly Hale doesn't disappoint in this tale of the Doctor's borderline emotional abuse of a genetic engineer on a planet under occupation. The ending is as unexpected as it is particularly beautifully done, though major kudos should go to whichever of Hale and her editor decided on leaving one small revelation to a flashback in the final story, 'Transmission Ends'.

Larkspur - Mark Stevens

Screw the story, check out the imagery. The Falkland Islands at war, a landscape littered with dead time machines, a name spread across millenia, a TARDIS in need of company. That the story is decent is a bonus when a writer uses as many arresting images as this.

See No Evil - Steve Lyons

I didn't like this story much when it was called The Stealers of Dreams. I like it a bit better now that it's shorter and features Mary Whitehouse, but something new would have been nice. Dreadful last line too.

iNtRUsioNs - Dave Hoskins

So who's Dave Hoskins then? And why doesn't he have an NSA out? I'm exaggerating bit, but this is a truly top drawer story, the best in the collection and one of the best short trip stories I've ever read. The story - of a meme infiltrating the mind of a postal worker obsessing over an unknown woman in the Melbourne Dead Letter Office - is intriguing, imaginative and engaging, and the portrayal of the First Doctor is spot-on, with Hoskins managing in only a few lines to capture the more ruthless and pragmatic portrayal of the the early Hartnell years.

The writing's lovely as well - "The baby's head was soft and Sam was hUngry and at last the liTeS were oN." - good enough to make me shiver uneasily, in any case.

Between this and 'Blue Road Dance', the rest of the stories could be written by Trevor Baxendale and Joe Lidster and you wouldn't feel as though you'd paid too much for the book.

Breadcrumbs - James Moran

This is a bit of a coup I would have thought; getting James Moran - the new blue eyed boy of British serial drama - to pen a story. It's decent enough, opening with a nicely rendered season 17 sketch and containing a neatly ourouboric (is that a word?) plot. Nothing to have you raving, but tidy and, like I said, Moran is a bit of a casting coup.

Transmission Ends - Richard Salter

In one way it's a shame that editor Richard Salter has to tie all of the stories together in his final tale. The need for inclusivity means that a couple of the minor elements he uses from other stories feel shoe-horned in and add little to the otherwise engaging, intriguing and - most of all - damn clever emerging tale. That said, the challenge of finding space for everyone has clearly caused the author to raise his game to a high level and the core idea combines with sharp characterisation (of the young hero in particular) and a tender if bittersweet ending to provide a real sense of developing other areas of the collection. A fitting end to a superior short story collection.

In sum, Transmissions demonstrates that the skills learned in fanzine publication are transferable to professional commissions. Richard Salter has taken the time to mould a collection of short stories into a genuinely coherent whole, putting this book at the top of the pile of straight Short trips collections and approaching the quality of the previously untouchable Life During Wartime and Wildthyme on Top.

Hopefully it won't be too long before we see Salter at the helm of another.

Land of the Free?

2008-10-02T21:31:00.003Z

Courtesy of Geoff, and taking a huge leap away from my usual obsessions, this has me genuinely filled with (basically impotent) rage this evening.

Police: No evidence of hate crime at local mosque

"There was nothing left at the scene or anything that makes us believe this is a biased crime." said retarded moron Police Chief Richard Biehl.

Do they get their police chiefs out of a lucky bag over there, or is it the equivalent of the post of Village Idiot, given to whatever twunt the uniform fits?

I'd be embarassed to show my face outside if I was this fool, but I bet he thinks he's protecting the good ol' Us of A.

Timelash - a Tale of Two Parts (neither all that good)

2008-09-29T13:14:00.001Z

A boring day in the summer...

A dvd arrives in the post...

Part 1

It's sunny and warm outside, everyone's buggered off and I have the afternoon to myself for once.

Let's watch Timelash!

An hour or so later...

Hmm, that was pretty painless actually. Timelash isn't as bad as I remembered, and nowhere near as awful as fandom claims.

Admittedly not a great deal happens, but I was quite impressed by the android, the beekeeper guards and the Borad himself. Actually scratch that - I was really impressed by the design and costuming of the cast. The Borad is, I think, the best make-up until the Destroyer in Battlefield. The android is suitably odd looking which makes its sudden and unexplained appearance in flames all the better.

Which is not to say that it's all good obviously; there's little plot to speak of, the Morlock rivals the Shrivanzale, the Myrka and the Magma Beast for worst colour monster ever, Vena's makeup is awful and there's lots of generic native milling around.

You know what's really bad though? Whichever clown writes the DVD liner notes obviously thinks it's rubbish and as a result they're most apologetic I've ever seen ('padded', 'over-acted', 'cheap looking' and similar adjectives are used throughout). If he doesn't like it, couldn't they get someone who wasn't basically a tosser to do the notes? You have to assume anyone buying it is a fan and having the sour-faced mewlings of some idiot lambasting the show the BBC are busy selling you is neither helpful nor intelligent.

In any case, I thought only the actress playing Vena lets the side totally down, with Darrow turning in a perfectly reasonable if deliberately stagey performance, for all that the sleeve note fool seems to think that this is story packed with old hams and hamettes, chewing the scenery with gusto.

That's forty five minutes in and I'm cautiously looking forward to part 2...

time passes...

a week later...

Part 2

My cautious optimism was pretty much misplaced.

The second part of Timelash is like a lost TV Comic adventure or a Tom McRae two parter. Key events take place for no reason (one particularly useful scanner just appears on the wall unbidden), plot progression takes place by illogical authorial fiat (the execution of Tekker's potential deputy for treason, for instance) and there are more coincidences than generally turn up in a whole season of the increasingly lamentable 24.

As for the plot - well there's nothing in the new series which makes as little sense as the Borad's plans for Peri (even in a period of Who keen on both body horror and marriage to aliens for Peri) or for Karfel itself.

Not that it matters since the Borad (who still looks excellent and is well played by...eh...quick Google...Robert Ashby) turns out to be Just Nuts, so that it explains it all nicely.

Most disappointingly, the design work which I liked in the first part defaults to 'Shit with Styrofoam' in part two. The neck manacle and cell Peri is locked up in are both good but in no way make up for the astonishing ineptness of the Timelash interior, for which the adjective 'cheap looking' is in fact too kind.

The acting too swiftly heads down the crapper. Darrow turns in the hammy performance I expected throughout, although he's never as bad as is often suggested, while the various rebels roll about unconvincingly in the assault scene and the actress playing Vena continues to be rubbish. Baker's very good in the scene with Herbert in the TARDIS though.

The usual collection of unprofessionally lumped together further random thoughts:

I wonder if the solution to the cliffhanger in Rise of the Cybermen is a tribute to the cliffhanger here? Or just equally rotten.

Is the rope in the Doctor's decent into the Timelash designed to stop him falling off the polystyrene, to prevent him being torn into the vortex or for Colin Baker to hang himself with as he realises what happened to his youthful dreams of appearing at the RSC?

Why is the picture of the Third Doctor over a mirror anyway? Surely the Board wouldn't have done that?

And why is he bothered about mirrors anyway - he seems otherwise very proud of his new form.

Why does director Pennant Roberts spend so much time showing us the Morlox when they're so obviously crap? Oh yeah - it's Pennant Roberts.

All the answers presumably boil down to lazy writing, even lazier script editing and talentless directing.

All in all, a really disappointing conclusion.

Will I never learn? When it's sunny, go out and play with the other boys and girls...

Idiocy on a Grand Scale (aka Helen Raynor is rubbish)

2008-09-24T13:40:00.007Z

I've become a recent convert to the joys of half-wit watching on the web forum formerly known as Outpost Gallifrey, but now called (cleverly) doctorwhoforum.com.

It's full of high quality guff - from Chris McKeon telling everyone his charity book/ride on the late Craig Hinton's coat-tails, Time's Champion, is an official release because Justin Richards once told Craggles to write it, through Gary Russell claiming that he was excluded from the cool kids' New Adventures book club, all the way to someone called Marvin proving that the body can survive for ages after the removal of the brain.

Maddest (and in many ways saddest) of all however is a completely bonkers thread called 'The Helen Raynor Apology Thread', in which sundry OG posters supplicate themselves at the feet of Ms Raynor and apologise until their tongues bleed.

And the reason for the apology? Because Rusty - in his new collection of emails, notebook scribbles and illegible instructions to himself in bookie's biro on kebab wrapper ("what does that bit say? 'fuck Eccleston' is it?") - says she was crying her little eyes out when the bad freaks, sad geeks and barely pubescents twinks on OG said her Dalek two-parter wasn't very good.

Which it wasn't. There's no doubt about it. It was ineptly edited, poorly acted and badly directed for a start. Oh - and written as though someone had used a razor to cut up an already pretty crap script and then only kept the really rubbish bits. It's awful. Dreadful. Amateur. A total waste of time and energy for both those involved in making it and those unfortunate enough to sit through it. The fact Raynor (a) got paid for it and (b) got asked back to write more just sums up what a jobs for the boys no-taste arse Russell T Davies can be.

But hey - Raynor got paid good money for writing it, so she can at least use the cash to buy girly stuff like sexy underwear and the Mamma Mia DVD even while she sobs her tiny Princess Perfect heart out. And Davies is still fellated daily by assorted fanboys and girls in spite of the lazy pap he traditionally passes off as quality television every season end, so presumably he's delighted.

So why are the hand-wringing, personality-free, painfully right on and socially aware idiots who infest the Doctor Who world so keen to prostrate themselves in guilt and shame that they've set up a whole thread to say sorry?

Obviously, it's mainly in hopes Rusty will come back to OG and read the thread, remember the names of everyone who said sorry and therefore know, however briefly, who they are (or what they call themselves at least, given many posters preference for 'hilarious' pre-teen internet nicknames).

He might even mention thread originator Steve91 in passing in some future tome, acknowledging the fact that the 91st Steve on Outpost Gallifrey was the only person man enough to stand up and say 'SORRY HELEN!", even though he didn't personally say anything negative at all, has always has a lot of time for scripts by ladies ('or is it women? or people of femininity? OMG, it's the whole black/coloured Martha thing all over again!!! Forgive me Helen, forgive me!!!) and in any case wasn't even on OG that day because he was off walking a blind chinese lesbian's two legged dog round a local Halal butchers.

But other than that? What could motivate anyone to say something as dripping in saccharine piety/pompous moral condemnation as "No amount of after-the-fact rationalisation can change the emotional impact of first reading those insults." or "my little input is to say i have nothin against ms raynor, and i did enjoy her episodes for series 4 and her tw ep. but i was mean about her series 3 dalek eps. i still dont like those eps but i could have been less vocal about it - cringe"

It's because she's a girl, basically: a doe-eyed sweetheart of a girl who can't speak up for her little itsy bitsy self. She needs defending from the Big Bad (in this case spotty herberts who can quote whole chunks of Hitchhikers) by the forces of Good (in this case pious twerps who used to be OG Mods and who think a second not spent arse-kissing is second where a good pair of lips are going to waste).

How else to explain the lack of a 'Steven Greenhorn Apology Thread' or a 'Matt Jones Apology Thread'?

They're a shower of sexist swine over on that OG Forum, so they are...

Congratulations finally to one Grafty for this post which was easily the most interesting in the entire - as of just now - six page thread, and Yetaxa for pointing out that the original insult thread sounded a damn sight more entertaining.

Passing Thought of Little Interest 3

2008-09-16T11:56:00.002Z

""Google and YouTube are just parasites. The day they start spending £1bn a year on content is the day I'll start worrying". -ITV executive chairman Michael Grade

ITV spend £1bn a year on content and the best they can come up with is Celebrity Love Island and Flood?

Shining in the Darkness

2008-09-12T09:43:00.004Z

Shining Darkness is not quite as good as Mark Michalowski's previous NSA Wetworld but it's a close thing - and in any case Shining Darkness is still a good deal better than most of the soul-less and dull NSAs which came before it. Michalowski's prose tends to stay this side of lyrical, but that's clearly deliberate and no bad thing given the target audience. He's also already proven to be one of the NSA writers who can actually do comedy, and this novel is no less likely to raise a smile than his previous offerings.

Actually the humour really shines through with a particular highlight being Donna and Mesanth discussing humans, the solar system and the sun is brilliant - even if "our galaxy is miles away" makes Donna sound a little bit too thick, suggesting that Michalowski may have had the Runaway Bride Donna a little too much in mind (incidentally, I reckon this book should be placed early on in Donna's travels with the Doctor).

Slightly less subtly, the entire section concerning the Jaftee introduction to the Shining Darkess and the alien 'gods' is also very well done - the totally unexpected discovery that they're not stupid savages is funny, and worthy even of the late Douglas Adams (an obvious influence on the passage). Line after line made me laugh out loud ("Darkness, they muttered in awe, that Shone! Cool!", "High Priest of What We Believe Today", "Enchikka, loving the fact that there were lots of capitals", "Sacred Artefacts were just the dog's bollocks" etc.). This style of humour continues into the next section on the planet Junk, where giant gay robots squabble and bitch at one another and our two heroes, whilst the planetary administrator, 77141, comes across like Prosthetic Vogon Jeltz's less successful provincial cousin.

Away from the funny, the author is obviously keen to take a look at bigotry and prejudice and imo he hits a decent balance between making the point too subtle for younger readers and mere didacticism. In the main this involves Donna's changing attitude to robot life, but even here Michalowski manages to combine humour with just a hint of the more subversive: "Let him have his way and before you know it, we'll be on the scrap heap – literally – and these… these appliances,' he spat the word, 'will be doing our jobs for us." one of the giant robots says of what are basically other, smaller and faster robots.

If there's any real negative to the book, it might be that it's slightly too linear in plotting, moving rapidly from point a to point b to point c, with little of the digressions you would expect of a novel aimed at an older readership. That said, that's a criticism you could aim at virtually all of the NSAs and Shining Darkness turns it into virtue by acknowledging that the whole story is an extended chase and packing each location in that chase with interest and imagination. As linear(ish) novels go, this is a good 'un.

Other unconnected thoughts that peppered my brain while reading 'Shining Darkness':

- someone says the horribly bowdlerised word 'heckuva' early on - it's obviously because the BBC think either that all the readers are under 6 and so have to be protected from even the mildest of profanities, or think that all the readership is American and religious and so have to be protected from even the mildest of blasphemies, but either way it doesn't ring true. Luckily Michalowski's a good enough writer that he manages to subvert that by slipping in a joke about a prostitute only a few pages later.

- "a high speed collision between a truck and steel mill' is a brilliant description

- 'Earthers' vs 'humans' - well it made me laugh.

- I assumed in chapter 4 that Khnu em Llodis was to an anagram, cos that's what Who writers do. Twenty minutes with paper and pencil and the best I could come up with was 'uh, kill demons'? Hmm, maybe not...

- the Wirrn get a mention! ISTR that they're making their comeback either in an NSA or a BF audio or something, but I still squeed like the sad old fanboy I am when they appeared (given the setting of the Andromeda Galaxy, a mention of Drathro from the Mysterious Planet would also have been pretty cool)

Finally, I spotted the ending about a page before it was revealed. Which is just about as perfect an ending as you could want...

An excellent contribution to a series of extremely variable quality, Shining Darkness makes Mark Michalowski the first NSA author to turn in two good books. Recommended even if you've been otherwise disappointed with the range.

The Howling Castle

2008-09-05T09:59:00.004Z

Just a quickie to point out that the second book in Puffin's Fright Night kids' series, The Howling Castle is in the shops (well the online ones anyway) now.

Written by Simon under a pseudonym based on Captain America, Cameron liked the first one in the series, which is as high a recommendation as I can think of.

Buy it. Buy it now.

Passing Thought of Little Interest 2

2008-08-26T20:57:00.006Z

You know what's really awful and jaw-droppingly amateur?

Well yes, Bonekickers obviously. Ok, and Spooks: Code 9.

But also the way that writers of Big Finish audios forget that Doctor Who is supposed to be real on one pretty basic level and that, therefore, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart would not introduce himself as 'The Brigadier' just because that's what fans call him (Minuet in Hell, I think), nor does passing mention of someone called the Doctor automatically lead people to assume that the person speaking means The Doctor, the interfering Time Lord, and not - for instance - a medical man who happens to be kicking about (Bride of Peladon).

Does no-one edit these things?

Underwhelmed

2008-08-26T08:53:00.010Z

As a Doctor Who obsessed boy there were a handful of Target novels that I adored. They weren't necessarily the best or the cleverest books, nor were they the most fully-realised nor the most fabulously well written. What they had though was a sense of huge scale; an epic feeling caused by massive distances in time and space. Chief amongst these was Doctor Who and the Underworld, a story which was not only set at the very edge of space where galaxies were created, but which featured a planet which had formed around a spaceship. What a great idea*, I thought at the time - I bet the TV version is utterly brilliant!

Foolish, idealistic boy that I was.

And yet, on the basis of the first episode at least, my recent viewing of Underworld wasn't a complete disappointment. It may just be that the CSO had yet to intrude, but I enjoyed episode one immensely.

Possibly a residual fondness for the novel meant that where others saw lack of interest and laziness in the acting performances, I thought the flat, emotionless speech of the crew simply reflected their 100,000 years of tedious life.

There's no need to look for excuses for others positives though - from minor things like MinYANS being pronounced differently from the MinYINS I expected, through the nicely underplayed links between the Time Lords and the Minyans (the fact that the TARDIS is recognised not by some computer analysis or by sight but by the wheezing of its materialisation sound is excellent) to the happiness gun and the regeneration machines.

I particularly liked K9 being used to run the ship (presumably the Minyans use something similar to Time Lord technology, hence the Doctor knows enough detail to hook him up on the spot, otherwise they could do that for every dodgy ship) and the Doctor figuring out the hull was getting thicker, like House diagnosing a disease from a oddly coloured fingernail and fondness for blue cheese.

It's not perfect and it certainly doesn't fulfil the promise of brilliance I expected from the novelisation, but generally at this early stage it doesn't fall down due to script or acting issues. There are some odd directorial decisions, which might explain why the director, Norman Stewart, helmed only one more Who and then asked to be moved back to non-directorial duties. Most glaringly, when the crew force the Doctor at gun point to order K9 to fly into the nebula the Doctor is standing right behind the robot dog and so K9 presumably heard all of the threatening dialogue. All that was needed was to have K9 slightly further away or out of earshot/sight line - presumably it's this kind of elementary mistake that critics of Stewart's direction have in mind.

Still, for all that I'd heard Underworld as 'utterly woeful' it had started pretty well (did I mention the excellent model work?) and I was looking forward to watching episode two.

Fool that I am.

Even allowing for CSO so bad as to distract even me, the second episode is abysmal. Did Tom Baker fall out with someone just before filming started, because his performance is miles worse than in part one? It's still miles better than most of the Trog acting though, but as the story goes nowhere and looks so bad, it doesn't really matter. Twenty two minutes of apparently half-pissed performers droning out the contents of a leaden script, as their heads appear and disappear into the background. Really, who decided that the BBC could do CSO well enough to construct half of the sets out of blue screened photos?

In short, this is an episode of Who where the best thing in it is the guards' hoods.

All the great stuff I remembered from the book - 'the sky is falling', the old guy trying and failing to dig his family out, then his grief turning to suicidal anger -turns out to be awful on screen. The Trog's resignation to their fates is accurately conveyed it's true, but only because resigned Trogs and listless and uninterested actors are harder to differentiate than you'd think.

And so onto episode three, where I found myself pondering on just how bad episode two must be when the inclusion of some lift muzac in episode three marks a major upturn in quality. It's a big enough upturn, in fact, to move Underworld back into the very low reaches of what are the majority of ordinary Who stories.

By this point I was clutching at straws and desperately casting about for something to cling onto - the Gravity Lift music is funny, and there are a ~~handful~~ ok, one decent line: 'the Doctor has saved many fathers'.

Added to these two tiny straws, I'm willing to suggest that the Trog son's performance is really quite good - semi-comic at times and non-realistic, but it at least feels like a deliberate decision to play the part in that manner, which is fair enough imo. I could even point out that the use of CSO means a lot of the shots the director has to use are the same longish shots from either straight ahead or at a slight angle to the action, which is hardly his fault.

So much for the positives. The negatives still do win the day by quite a margin. Chief annoynace for me is the characterisation of the Doctor. First off he seems quite happy to see Alan Lake et al kill any number of guards. Possibly they're only stunned, since the weapons of the P7E crew and the Guards seem to fire the same rays (for obvious reasons) and multiple hits on Herrick don't kill or even wound him particularly badly, but that's never made clear.

Worse though is the Doctor's lack of urgency in getting to the scene of the Trog Dad's execution and then, once there. standing back and preparing to watch the man being executed by way of the world's slowest burning material. Bad enough having no plan whatsoever, but doing nothing and leaving it to the son to save his father and then settling for grabbing a sword and waving it self-importantly around in the aftermath?

Other less jarring minus points are awarded for the other Trogs acting (again) and the laughably bad design of the Seers heads, which have something of the look of a metal Mr Blobby about them I thought. As for the slow and poorly shot 'running' battle through the corridors as the Trogs make their escape - well there's no way to ameliorate the culpability of the director here, sadly. It's just a very poorly realised series of shots.

God, there's another episode to go. In the interests of sanity I'll skim over it quickly. The Orcale features a bit, there's a couple of fission grenades which can't be defused and which the Oracle (fortunately) doesn't recognise, all the Trogs (about 35 of them in total) escape in the Minyans ship and the Doctor - the bloodthirsty git - is delighted to see all the guards and their families getting blown to pieces. It's one of those episodes where the holes in the plot, society and characterisation are so obvious even Russell T Davies would be embarrassed.

Thinking back the other Target novel I really, really loved was The Sun Makers which comes right before this. I still haven't seen that and on the basis of Underworld I'm not sure I should...

* Later nicked by Rusty in The Runaway Bride.

Two Plays

2008-08-21T10:02:00.012Z

The Zygon Who Fell To Earth - Paul Magrs

Story

The Doctor and Lucie bump into Auntie Pat (from 'Horror of Glam Rock'), only in the 80s this time rather than the 70s. And she's married to an ex-muso named Trevor, who turns out not to be entirely what he seems...

Great Bits

* "I wandered lonely as a clown"

* Mimms the Gay Zygon with his slight stirrings of human emotion.

* "Palpate her cybernetic dugs"

* Auntie Pat not being fussed that Trevor is a Zygon and giving the Doctor a row for lumping all Zygons together

* "I've gone native"

* "Change your form if you're going back to reception"

* "Certainly not, I was always like this"

* "Or as you know him...TREVOR!"

Minor Disappointments

It's a shame that "Sting him, sting him to death" didn't end "sting him vewwy hard" like Life of Brian.

Major Disappointment that turned out not to be

And I was just thinking that the end was a bit flat with [SPOILER] selfishly coming back - then felt a right halfwit at the strangely moving final revelation.

Major Disappointment that you can only blame Nick Briggs for

This was going to be called Trevor of the Zygons, which may well be best Who title ever. Nick 'No Talent' Briggs pooh-poohed the idea however.

Conclusion

As a sort of sequel to last year's Horror of Glam Rock this fits comfortably into the first of Magrs' two basic approaches to Big Finish plays - the essentially light-weight and silly but with an undercurrent of 60s northern soap opera strand (I know that's quite convoluted for a 'basic' strand).

Full of whimsy and packed with genuinely funny dialogue, if you liked the earlier play you'll love this.

And with Tim Brooke-Taylor molesting a Skaresen, what's not to love?

The Boy that Time Forgot - Paul Magrs

Story

With the TARDIS stolen, the Doctor and Nyssa try to use a seance to get it back - only to end up a long, long time ago in the presence of an old, old friend...

Great Bits

* the basic premise of the story

* an Alternative Universe that's actually interesting and whose existence has consequences.

* the Cliffhanger to part one.

* "I've never been taken up the Limpopo. I've never braved the inhospitable bush"

* the names of the various Scorpions

* the way in which Nyssa gradually realises that the old, old friend is still an absolute arse.

* Andrew Sachs. He's very, very good.

Minor Disappointments

The sacrificial death of one character may be customary but I was still disappointed when it happened near the end of the final part of this play.

Major Disappointments

Actually, thinking about it, that death may count as a major disappointment.

Major Disappointment that you can only blame Nick Briggs for

Exile. Ok, so it has nothing to do with this but just how inept, juvenile and crap was Exile*? And the rest of the Unbounds were so good, as well.

Conclusion

It's about as unexpected a comeback as you're likely to get in Doctor Who, on a par with bringing Ivy back to Corrie.

And yet it works.

By turns funny, clever, silly, sad and moving this is the perfect exemplar of the second strand of Magrsian audios for Big Finish: the relatively serious story which plays about just enough with the series' history (see also the excellent sixth Doctor offering, The Wormery).

There's not much I can say about it without spoiling it completely (I may already have gone too far, I think) so just go and buy a copy and give it a listen.

Unbelievably, it's so good that it tempted me into getting the previous Davison audio. Maybe this could be the play to bring me back to the BF fold**?

* Whatever the otherwise reliable Rob says
* *I really hope not - the Classic Series figures are taking up all my money as it is

I've read well and I've heard it said...

2008-08-14T15:20:00.004Z

According to Simon, according to The Big Read, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books in their list. :

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or for whatever reason loathe.
5) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them.

Let's see how trashy my reading tastes actually are:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling - for no obvious reason since they got progressively more badly edited and full of rip-offs of better writers
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 ~~The Bible~~
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - a load of them at school
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 ~~War and Peace~~ - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime And Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - in Cyprus, on holiday
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 ~~The Kite Runner~~ - Khaled Hosseini
38 ~~Captain Corelli’s Mandolin~~ - Louis De Bernieres
39 ~~Memoirs of a Geisha~~ - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 ~~The Da Vinci Code~~ - Dan Brown Read it, not reading anything by him ever again.
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69 ~~Midnight’s Children~~ - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 ~~Ulysses~~ - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 ~~Possession~~ - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Which makes 53 by my reckoning.

That's better than I expected (and there a couple n there like The Color Purple that I think I've read but I can't be sure) although several hundred books less than my count of Doctor Who novels read, which probably marks me out as something less than the intellectual creme de la creme.

Having nicked this meme from Simon, I'll now pass it on to Scott, who likes this kind of thing.

Combating Evil: A Primer

2008-08-07T10:29:00.010Z

From recent watching of Doctor Who, some notes on defeating Evil.

1. Should you wish to lure an evil genius scientist away from his nefarious experiments just as he's about to unleash a monster on the planet, knock on his door. He won't be able to resist answering and while he's doing so your temprarily blinded assistant can cause havoc.

2. If you're concerned that one or other of the new friends you've made may be infected by a malevolent space virus, look out for the one suddenly wearing giant space sunglasses.

3. The best place for a mechanical dog in a music video is on top of a crumbly brick wall in the countryside. Don't ask my why though.

4. The likelihood of one of your companions having an exact duplicate amongst the guests at a country house party is the same as that party expecting a man dressed the same as you are and with a very similar name to your own. The laws of BBC drama mean that the man they are expecting will only turn up after you've left.

5. Watch out for Michael Sheard - he's never up to any good.

Passing Thought of Little Interest 1

2008-08-04T20:07:00.004Z

There's a reason that Jaws is a classic. It's not the mildly laughable shark or Robert Shaw's bizarre performance as Quint; nor is it the head rolling out of the gashed boat or the literal fountain of blood as Little Jimmy gets bitten in two.

No, the real star of Jaws are Roy Schneider's wonderfully nineteen seventies glasses.

Seriously - can you imagine another action movie ever in which the hero wears such uncool eyewear?

Badger (n. & tr.v)

2008-07-29T10:31:00.006Z

Just in case anyone reading this is one of the eleven people in the United Kingdom not already spamm...informed by Ian Potter about the availability of his radio sketch show, No Tomatoes, please consider popping along to

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7/listenagain/sunday/rams/2315.ram

and giving episode one a listen. There's a damn fine joke about badgers in there for a start, and at a mere fifteen minutes that's a minimum of one more joke than Snuff Box for half the time invested.

[DISCLAIMER: Ian's met Eric Sykes, you know. This brush with Legend is the main reason I'm promoting his work: you never know when he and Eric might decide to nip round to mine for a cup of tea and a live commentary on The Nineteenth Hole.]

Saddest Comic Strip Ever Part III

2008-07-22T10:28:00.004Z

Not that I expect anyone to remember but some time ago I did a post saying this was the saddest comic strip ever written.

Then later I did another one suggesting this was in fact the biggest bummer in the history of comic strips.

Now, I'm wondering if it's this strip here, which I came across the other day. I don't know who Chris Aubry is (maybe this guy?) but this really is a beautiful if depressing comic.