Rose Elinor Dougall’s album release date is almost here and now a video for Carry On has appeared. It’s very 80s but not in a ha ha funny hair and synthesizers way, oh no. It’s a bit different to the previous singles which were rather more reflective and relaxing but I still love it:
Foxy Shazam may be the new Mika. Or Queen. Or somehting like that, just keep Ben Elton away from them as he might come up with a new horrible musical. Their good album is still not out in the UK but I bought the import a while back and they have a new video which has been made by someone who enjoyed that Supergrass video. You’l know which one I mean if you watch it:
The Dawson Bros used to write for Mitchell & Webb’s sketch show buy not any more. Now they write for bloody everything (including that awful thing where Richard Hammond pretends to give a damn about people falling in the water over and over again from the safety of a dry studio in a different country) and have also made what was supposed to be a short viral clip but it now a full length video for History by Groove Armada. This is a fun amusing video (alwaays a good thing) and I have liked the song for some time now:
Also cool: zombies!
No, not a remake of 28 Days Later but a TV version of The Walking Dead with That Bloke From This Life and Teachers. The official site won’t let us watch the trailer but I have found it elsewhere and it is below:
Everything American has to have British Actors With American Accents since it become the bloody law. Shockingly, I have never read the comics it is based on but am pleased to see another massively geeky TV show is forthcoming.
I spend too much time watching television so if I write a bit about I maybe I can justify my actions. Here’s what has been flickering before my eyes recently:
The Big C is a new series on the network which is as good as HBO aka Showtime. No idea about anyone planning to screen it in the UK, as is often the way with new things that I like (see Party Down and United States of Tara for other examples of this) and this caught my attention because it has Laura ‘The Actor Previously Known As Mary Ann Singleton’ Linney in the lead role and she’s always pretty damn good in everything. She plays a rather uptight woman who finds out that she has cancer but it’s more about how people react to bad circumstances and the weird behaviour of humans rather than a miseryfest pity party ‘dark’ kind of comedy. Only seen the first episode but I liked it a lot.
True Blood is now in its third year over on HBO and is definitely more confident now. The wobbly first season which I temporarily gave up on is a distant memory now and they’ve got that third season peak thing going on like Buffy (if you want a lazy vampiric comparison). This year is pretty much Twin Peaks + gore + sex + silly accents + more gore so that’s all fine by me.
The Great Outdoors is a quiet little BBC Four comedy that did its three episode run with little fanfare but caught the attention of people who like an amusing character comedy. It’s the least ‘sit’ sitcom ever as the characters are part of a walking group and if you liked Rev recently you may well like this too. It’s on the iPlayer (for now) and there’s a link a few lines up on the name of the programme.
Hung is another HBO show and there are a lot of those around as it’s the Summer time. Series one of this was a bit just ok but year two is coming together nicely as we are used to all the characters and the comedy can come a lot easier. Easily my favourite comedy drama about a male prostitute.
Persons Unknown is a nice silly mainstream American mini series (on NBC) so nobody can say fuck or bugger which is a bit weird to me. It’s got a finite lifespan so the plot is rattling along nicely and it is a bit like what the recent disappointing remake of The Prisoner should have gone for. It has Dee from Battlestar Galactica in it as a completely different character (both butch and violent! Excellent!) that what we are used to so hurrah for acting and that.
Grandma’s House is currently on BBC2 on Monday nights and even though we’ve all remarked that Simon Amstell is not the world’s greatest actor the writing is good and it’s a half hour of enjoyable domestic comedy which always contains a couple of moments I can relate to … and so will you if you have been to family gatherings as an adult. So that’s pretty much everybody then and mine are from Essex so I get a bonus point. Bound to be on that iPlayer as well as the telly.
Louie is my current favourite comedy. It’s just very very good at being funny and also having a point to it, which sounds simplistic but this is pretty essential. It’s on FX in America so will probably end up of fucking Sky.
That Mitchell & Webb Look is that thing that I have written about quite often on my other blog and it’s still on the iPlayer. The hit and miss sketch show (for that is what it is) is still good fun although by the time it gets to being on my telly I’ve run out of LOLs due to note books, blogs and generally waflling on about it a lot.
Haven is a newish sci-fi-ish show on that American channel they all SyFy and it’s apparently based on a Stephen King book (or is it a short story? I have no idea). It’s corny fun if you’re in the mood for that kind of thing and it uses the following familiar types of plot: city cop and local cop team up, small town with secrets, inevitable sexual tension and big life-changing secret from the past, all with slightly dodgy CGI.
We’ve also been still watching Emmerdale with our dinner as it’s quite fun and not just because of Duncan Preston’s jacket potato fillings plotline, the sheer volume of sarcasm from nearly every character, Amanda Donohoe doing that face at the cliffhanger, an interesting soap opera gay couple or the oddness of Pauline Quirke being there. Yes i am an old pensioner. I blame that trip to the Yorkshire Dales.
Gawd bless the internet and the people I have met from it, especially Twitter and the way it leads to various separate friends ending up knowing each other and getting on due to shared supergeek levels of fandom for things (usually involving Doctor Who) … my pal Bert (from the days of MySpace, bloody hell) ended up becoming mates with my ‘follower ‘ Michael (I am the new Jesus or something) and the three of us all went out to the South Bank last night for some food and drinks. Not been round there for a long time and had lots of time to kill so I wandered about and admired the concreteyness of it all. Weird how it has been modernised yet the old fashioned greyness still shines through , looking uncannily like the future Earth in Frontier In Space…
To kill a bit of time and read a bit of book I went for a coffee in a leading chain which is not bloody Starbucks and found the man serving me to be a rather excited geek, staring at my True Blood t-shirt. He asked where I got it so I told him it was off Amazon and then he grabbed a piece of paper and wrote down ‘Amazon’ on it… sweet. I don’t know if he knew that it was a website and he had not heard of Forbidden Planet when I pointed out it was also available there so I hope he finds one. He insisted that I not pay for my drink because of this so finally being a massive nerd pays off. Oh those crazy vampire fans, but not Twilight. Never Twilight. True Blood season three is coming along nicely and is basically Twin Peaks with more accents and a bucket of gore every week, which is not a bad thing at all. I should do a TV round-up blog while I think of it but not right now.
While waiting outside the BFI bar I listened to the next chapter of my Daleks: Mission to the Unknown audio book which is the first one I have actually bought in the ‘Target Books Read In An Interesting Way By Actors Plus Music and Sound Effects’ series. From the sleeve notes I learnt that The Actor Peter Purves has directed over twenty five pantomimes which sounds like something the delightful Matrix Data Bank (follow on Twitter if you are Who Geek) would make up. Then I spotted Margaret from The Aprentice (sorry new lady Apprentice boss with the nice hair but you are no Mountford) walking like a normal human being and then I noticed that the new hipster beard is in fact a hipster moustache and vowed never to be a hipster. We eventually went for a food and drink extravaganza in the BFI bar and learnt about guest ales:
” A pint of the guest ale please. What is it?”
“I don’t know. But it never changes.”
“So it’s always the same guest but you don’t know what it is?”
“Yes.”
The mysterious guest ale was very nice and I may have had too many of them and stayed out bloody late, meaning I took forever to get home (at gone midnight) which was careless as Jamie had to get up for work in the morning. Oops. We had a lovely time and ended up reappraising Delta and the Bannermen (it’s The Doctor Who Summer Special), listening to unrepeatable tales about Doctor Who actors and impresionable teenage fans (but not me. Never me), made “played a Voord but in a non-speaking role” one of my favourite phrases, and agreed that I had to write a proper review of the forthcoming DVD of Time and the Rani. Hmm…
This week on the internet we learnt a new word: sodcasting. The Guardian article here. Rather good: Sodcast [noun]: Music, on a crowded bus, coming from the speaker on a mobile phone. Sodcasters are terrified of not being noticed, so they spray their audio wee around the place like tomcats.
Also in that Guardian was an amusing article about pop stars coming out of the closet. I wish some had stayed in, wonder if George Michael can have his next tour sponsored by Snappy Snaps? : The Moment I Realised can come in many forms. For Joe, for example, the “penny dropped” after an internet whispering campaign (see: Internet Whispering Campaign). However, The Moment I Realised must never, ever involve looking at a man and thinking, “Phwooarr, I wouldn’t mind a bit of that.”
Bryan Ferry has some good new music coming out soon but the Daily Mail was more concerned about the famous 65 year old man looking a bit paunchy: Love used to be Bryan Ferry’s drug. But by the look of his portly body, his addiction these days is extra helpings. Weirdly, my comment on that article was the highest rated:
I can’t bear to watch Eastenders because it’s an inconsistent wobblyset shambles and I prefer the freaky multi-tone oddness of Emmerdale these days but was amused that top comedy character Karen from Pulling has apparently turned up and is now calling herself Rainie. She has already managed to get Phil Mitchell hooked on crack and cause outrage on the Mail site:
Pulling is out on DVD (except for the final ‘special’) and is almost as more-ish as crack.
I finished watching my Revenge of the Cybermen DVD and it was neither dreadful or excellent (no pun intended) enough for a full review. Good human characters in this one but the Cybermen start their journey to rottenness with the wrong kind of dialogue, acting and voices. They’re still quite creepy and not anywhere near the stompy stompy noisy marchy style of recent times and bring the (oddly redesigned) Cybermats with them to attack humans in scenes with lots of acting involved. The familiar messy back story with major rewrites and a disgruntled writer made it interesting to hear about and I would have to agree that yes those emotionless Cybermen really should not be so angry all the damn time. Jolly good fun though even though I found myself unable to follow the plot but that may have been because I was doing Wii aerobics for most of it. Definitely worth a go though, and the person who wrote the production notes subtitles deserves at least a biscuit.
*shakes fist* Excellent. There is a rather lovely documentary about the VHS piracy market in the bad old days before the BBC released everything, if that can tempt you a little bit more. I must warn you that it contains images of an Ian Levine nature.
Just watched Silver Nemesis on DVD, from the new Cybermen box set which is not really a box set and more like two stories in normal packaging stuck together in a cardboard sleeve actually… and it’s still a horrible mess. The basic plot is beyond all over the place: It’s 25 years since Doctor Who started so Producer JNT decides they need to commemorate this in a special story but he has no ideas but luckily this man called Kevin wants to do one and pretends he has a wicked storyline but then realises when JNT decides to meet him that he has not thought of anything yet. Kevin makes something up about The Doctor being God and JNT says oh wow yes skill but we can’t actually say God in case it upsets the religions so change all that plase so Kevin does. Then JNT writes a list which includes The Queen, some Cybermen, a load of nazis (but we can’t call them nazis because real nazis might get upset) and also some Jacobean over-acting characters and that famous American lady from the musicals who JNT is a massive fan of with a wig and a massive car please. So Kevin starts to write the story and decides he wants to add jazz to the list and asks Courtney Pine to come for tea, making the story not a big complicated mess at all. There’s no time to show how all these things that happened off camera actually happened so they just use bucketloads of expositionary dialogue as that is just as good as showing stuff innit, but then the main cast have no time to do any rehearsals or reading or nothing so it’s all improvisationy and fresh or something and not all chaotic.
The story is about an olden days lady who is the nemesis of The Doctor but we have never heard of her ever before and she is after a statue that looks like her that flies about in a plastic rock in space which is coming to Earth in 1988 (which is when it is on the telly) and she finds this out with a bit of magic then makes a drink which lets her and her friend travel to Windsor in the 80s (not actually in Windsor though), as you do. At the same time some 80s nazis in South America also discover that the statue in the plastic rock is coming to Earth and get in their racist van which takes them to Windsor very quickly in time for it to land. But oh shit then a space craft arrives in Windsor as well and it has some ‘excellent’ Cybermen who also found out the statue in the plastic rock is landing so it’ a right kerfuffle (and also now in Greenwich before they built that Dome)! What are the chances?
Anyway, The Doctor and Ace (yes they are in it too) use Ace’s tape player and some jazz to stop something bad happening, the Cybermen are even more ineffectual than usual (gold… GOLD!), the nazis do an evil face and are bad at shooting and then it gets even more complicated and I still don’t quite get it.
The DVD extras are quite fun, with lots of deleted scenes showing how it could have made more sense if it hadn’t been cut to shreds and how some scenes in the transmitted edition were in the wrong order which hardly helped matters. Kevin Clarke’s interview about writing it is very amusing and there are some fun behind the scenes photographs that are well worth a look. Al in all, a horrible mess of a story with some interesting background material but still a damn mess with far too many ingredients for it to end up as a fulfilling story. I need to watch Revenge of the Cybermen next, not seen that one since the early VHS era.
There was a Making Of documentary on the VHS of Silver Nemesis which is sadly not present here so you will not find out more information on how the incidental music was made. Here is a picture to help you imagine what you are missing:
It’s Video Monday! Mostly because I found some clips I like and it is the first day of the week.
HURTS started out bloody ages ago with their rather good single-but-not-actually-a-proper-single Wonderful Life. Now it’s back and has another video which cost more than the old one which was quite nice anyway but never mind:
It’s all very 80s in a stylish way.
The Divine Comedy have chosen I Like as the second single from the new album. Not a bad choice, quite commercial:
Odd but good.
I thought Architecture In Helsinki released That Beep as single ages ago but apparently not. I love it and the video is suitably weird:
Robyn’s first single from her second Body Language not-an-LP-but-more-than-an-EP is a more produced version of a track from the first Body Language. Diffferent I guess:
Bonus clip for the geeks! It’s Arthur ‘Rory from Doctor Who’ Darvill in Sooty, made at some point during the two thousand years where he waited for Amy, probably:
Busy busy busy but I have to mention Sherlock being on tomorrow night (9pm on BBC1):
It’s a Moffat / Gatiss thing so you can imagine why I am rather excited. There’s a nice BBC website worth a browse-through here.
A modern version of the Holmes experience sounds like something The Daily ruddy Mail just have to get upset about. What can they find to squeal about in this first episode which has had excellent press reviews?
Well:
That ridiculous paper is bloody obsessed with The Gay!
It’s the latest screen portrayal of Sherlock Holmes, but it is far from elementary. Not only are the detective and his assistant Watson fighting crime in modern-day London, but viewers hear the pair discussing their sexuality… and are left wondering if the pair are gay. While the scenes are meant to be comedic, they will come as a shock to viewers accustomed to the more straightforward relationship between Holmes and Dr John Watson in previous TV and film depictions.
Taking misinterpretation to new levels for editorial agenda reasons once again, then! What else could upset the readers?
In stark contrast to the classic sleuth image of deerstalker, pipe and magnifying glass, Holmes is seen brandishing a ‘smartphone’, using the internet and texting criminals in a bid to solve crimes.
I’m not even going to mention the whole Deerstalker never mentioned by Conan Doyle in the books thing… but internet? texting? They may as well have shat all over the Sherlock Holmes Museum itself.
So what does the article actually base its mad headline on?
In one scene, Watson asks Holmes whether he has a girlfriend. He replies: ‘Girlfriend, no. Not really my area.’ The conversation leads to Holmes saying: ‘John, I think you should know I consider myself married to my work and while I am flattered by your interest, I am really not looking for anyone.’
So Holmes has no girlfriend and jokes that Watson may fancy him. Let the outrage commence!
Pavlovian reader response time:
Why read the article when you have a perfectly good (dodgy) headline to get you frothing at the mouth?
Damn you, BBC! Ruining everything.
It must be so lonely and miserable being a Mail reader. Nothing is exciting or fun, just rubbish or scary or wrong and should be banned.
Busy busy busy but good kind of busy. Last Saturday was a special occasion where I met some of my friends with some of my other friends for the first time in Fancy London. Gawd bless the internets. Shame about the usual weekend lack of tube service plus cancelled replacement service and broken mega escalator and heatwave but a good time was had and included a lunch and beers in Chandos (I am now wishing it should be renamed Chantho’s and be run by insect people with a strange yet polite way of speaking) , the first trip in years to that vintage magazine shop in Soho (where my thrown-away past returned to haunt me, sealed in bags and priced as luxury goods), a bizarre visit to a second hand shop that mixed ladies’ shoes with 1970s annuals, the obligatory Forbidden Planet moment (Amy Pond and new Weeping Angel figures plus new Gotham Central volume) and a gay old time being massive geeks about Doctor Who, comedy and precious things:
Yes I made a crappy montage. This relates to the Very Great Thing which was given birth to this week (not in a literal sense of course):
Oh yes, it’s issue two of Talk About The Passion: This time it’s a PDF! It’s free, like Mr Humphries and it lives here. My contribution is about Saint Etienne but there’s plenty of other good stuff inclusing a bloody big Frank Sidebottom tribute.
I’ve been going made on Amazon and buying far too much old 1990ish music: this week’s post included a dodgy C&C Music Factory Best Of (campest raps ever), the Seduction album (a bit ropey actually) and that old Beloved remix album that came out after their debut (marvellous). I got sick of the new Foxy Shazam album to get a UK release so bought the import and then the new James Yuill album arrived in the post today and it is maybe even better than his debut, which is also good. Video of new single to illustate my point:
Other newish music of interest includes this new Mark Ronson track which I posted on Facebook the other week but forgot to put on here. It is bloody marvellous:
One for the mashup brigade now: it’s Reborn Identity: Jacko’s Rocket. mp3 is here.
Party Down was officially cancelled this week: meh.I need to find new shows to love. Louie looks promising, will watch the first two at the weekend. No it’s not about that gurning gaylord from the fruity dance studio (not homophobia, just fact. I am a gay myself).
I gained one point in amusement over the irony of Littlejohn’s ridiculous moan about people on the internet (the toad hates criticism):
It’s that time of year when loads of random new American TV shows that I know nothing about appear and I watch them in the hope that they will be good but am mostly disappointed. There are also a fair few trailers for forthcoming shows lurking about online so here’s a big old round-up of that sort of thing:
Rubicon is a new one on AMC (home of Breaking Bad) so we gave the pilot a go. Odd to show it then make the world wait a while for the next part but it was alright enough for me to check it out when the proper series starts. It’s rather conspiracy-laden and almost becomes a bit too ridiculous but we lasted the episode so well done. It stars James Badge Dale (Chase from 24 but in a big haired non-action man role now) , Peter Gerety (Gharty from Homicide: Life on the Street), Dallas Roberts (Angus from The L Word) , TV’s Miranda Richardson and TV and film’s Lili Taylor (but not in the pilot) for starters. Good cast so worth a go.
Persons Unknown is a new NBC miniseries of mystery so that format means no open-ended dragged-out sagas which is kind of nice. It’s created by Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects) and set in a ghost(ish) town where a group of random strangers have been brought to a hotel for reasons unknown and are being watched by people unknown via loads of bloody cameras. It’s obviously inspired by Lost and is a bit more schmaltzy (lead kidnapped woman keeps blathering on about her stage school child actor daughter who has allergies, yawn, and her mother is involved somehow, yawn) but it’s good fun. It stars Alan Ruck (Cameron from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) , Tina Holmes (Maggie from Six feet Under season 5) and apparently at some point Kandyse McClure (Dee from Battlestar Galactica).
Scoundrels is an ABC show (I think it’s a comedy) based on New Zealand show Outrageous Fortune starring Virginia Madsen from all those films as the mother of a criminal family who attempt to go straight after the father is sent to jail for five years. Interesting fact: the original dad actor left the production after a few days of filming because (allegedly) he was too religious to do the love scenes which would have been in the script all along. Odd. It’s all rather predictable:
The Gates is another ABC show, this time going for that old spooky suburbia with secrets oooh spooky vibe. The ‘twist’ is that it takes place in a gated community. Hmmm… secretive characters include some very old-looking American teenagers (are there any other kind on these programmes?) and an English suburban housewife played by TV’s Rhona Mitra who happens to be a vampire. Yes really. Papi from The L Word is also in it but presumably not as a rather excellent lesbian. Shame the show is such a bloody awful mess, it doesn’t know whether it is a campy nonsense thing, a creepy mystery or a generic soap opera and it fails on all points:
Memphis Beat is a TNT show and stars Jason ‘My Name Is Earl’ Lee from some Kevin Smith films, Jerry From ER and the marvellous Alfre Woodard from all those films (and this week’s True Blood) and I watched the whole of the pilot without turning it off so I’ll give it another go. It’s a cop show and was directed by Clark Johnson (great actor from Homicide and director from The Shield and The Wire) which is what got me interested. In case anyone is wondering, no it is not an American remake of Mersey Beat. Not that you would be wondering such a thing.
Running Wilde has not premiered yet. It’s created Mitch Hurwitz , Will Arnett and Jim Vallely (Arrested Development links there) and will be on the show-killing Fox network. The trailer is not exactly good, so I hope that’s a blip:
NBC are plugging The Event as the next big event show (pardon the obvious language). It stars Zeljko Ivanek from every good TV show ever (Homicide, True Blood, Heroes, Big Love, 24, Lost, Oz) , Sarah Roehmer from Disturbia and Laura Innes (Kerry Weaver from ER, hurrah) and is about a shedload of stuff which somehow all links together. The trailer is a bit mad but I’ll check it out as I am rather curious:
How the heck were they going to get out of that one? Well…
The season finales using recurring themes have always slightly niggled me in the past: that whole ‘Bad Wolf was a message sent by Rose who ate the vortex’ nonsense, the repeated awareness of Torchwood leading to them going there for a visit, that one with the pantomime Master/Saxon/Prime Minister bollocks that ended up with a reset button, the missing planets and the Earth being dragged through space on a pieces of special time string by the TARDIS… but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed Steven Moffat’s masterplan this year. I will certainly actually rewatch them all after Christmas when I acquire the usual box set (but maybe skip that Dalek toy advert episode). Some of it was rather mad but it fitted the tone of things and the elements came together in a way that almost answered most of the questions. Some are left over for next year, which is either good planning or a shortage of time.
The many deaths of Rory Williams (and Amy Pond, come to think of it) aka Mister Pond (bless) seem to have been erased now by some OTT season arc plotting. Even the lone stone Dalek did not annoy me, which made a pleasant change. I would have been happy with Auton Rory joining the crew on a permanent basis, what with his handy attachment and inevitable unintentional conflicting loyalties to be revisited but the fancy way the pieces were demolished then put back together hardly made me shout at the telly so bravo and all that. I love a good wedding and it was nice to see everything turn out ok and then have the TARDIS trio go off for more adventures together, especially as the Doctor or companion usually changes or leaves at the end of the series and I have loved this year’s cast very much. It’s going to be a long six months until the next episode.
More from The Secret Origin of River Song next year (some people will go boo to this but she entertains me) and more on the ominous ‘Silence’ too. Ooh. And will the Christmas Special actually be set on the Orient Express… in space? I doubt it but am hoping.
I feel like wearing my fez as they are indeed cool. Maybe I will… soon. Not had a bow tie since the days of the early 90s clip-on Little Chef one. Shame.
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