I am full of curry as we have just got back from a birthday meal with our friend Mister Mystery. He is technically called Mistry but I think the other spelling makes him sound like some kind of masked detective with a special cave under his house where he stores his crime fighting paraphernalia and it’s my bloody blog!

We went out to Blue Ginger (no, not a depressed red-headed person) near Harrow for a lovely meal and I am now trying to burp myself back no normality. After a few Cobra beers, a mixed platter of veggie starters and some kind of dhal thing with spinach with pilau rice and garlic naan I am a bit windy yet very happy. It’s been a very nice day as I have spent it with the man that I love very much. 34 isn’t all that bad so far.

From the Time Out Eating and Drinking Guide 2007:
A big hit with the affluent British Asian set, Blue Ginger combines a sports bar vibe with club-like atmosphere. A glossy black granite bar, a plethora of flat-screen televisions, and an assortment of comfy sofas and seating arrangements are easily accommodated at this spacious venue. A selection of classic North Indian kebabs and curries is served, alongside Indo-Chinese choices. Amritsari fish, a popular Punjabi bar snack, raised battered fried fish to a different level with a delectable chilli-speckled batter hiding lemon-steeped white fish fillets. North Indian main courses and accompaniments also delivered the goods. Yellow lentils, simmered with spinach paste and ginger, made an earthy and wholesome treat – ideal for mopping up with a stack of rotis. In comparison, Indian interpretations of Chinese dishes didn’t get off the starter’s block and were akin to mundane takeaway offerings. For best results, order chilled lagers and tuck into North Indian staples. If you fancy giving the crowds a miss, visit at lunchtimes rather than weekend evenings. Service tends to be harried when the place fills up, but the staff remain friendly throughout.

It is my actual birthday today. MySpace made people think they had missed it for some reason but then that space is a stupid space. Look what it gave me as a present:

The bastard.

Husband Jamie got me a non-surprising present. Non-surprising as in I had begged him to buy it for me and it’s just easier to give in to my childlike whine sometimes:

Oh yes! A whole two seasons to watch and I haven’t even seen them before unlike most of the Dee Vee Dees I acquire. I need another week off.

Jemima from the Blogger Land sent me a cake:

… and very tasty it was too.

I also received a surprise present from the previously mentioned lovely husband which amused me no end. Especially as it took me fifteen minutes to get it out of the bloody box!

I am slowly building a Cyber army, featuring a massive Dalek and a small tin dog. I shall soon be taking over the world. Or maybe I’ll just take some real photographs rather than be lazy and rely on Google Images.

Happy birthday to me. No longer thirty three.

Saturday 31st of March.
Put in in your diaries.
Or your Outlook.
Or those fiddly things that look like mobile phones but aren’t just a phone.

I practically live on the internet this week.

Radiophonatron? Anybody? No? Ah go on. You can make all the diddly dums and oo-ee-oos you like.

What is The Magic Position? I would ask someone like Paul Daniels but I am frightened by what I may learn. It’s also the name of the third album by Patrick Wolf and it came out yesterday. It’s very hard to define as he’s a bit all over the place but in a very good way. If I had to be a lazy bastard writer I would say a male Tori Amos / Kate Bush with fiddling instead of pianoing but there’s also loads of synths and guitars too. Patrick Wolf is one of those annoyingly clever people who does everything himself and has produced his most coherent album yet. I found it a bit hard to get into his previous work and condensed them into one 80 minute playlist to make them more palatable to my listening mood but this CD has nothing I want to delete. It features brooding, piano and fireworks on Bluebells (a previous single), a manic song about love with a fair bit of strings and handclaps on The Magic Position and a similarly themed song with loads of what sound like retro computer game noises and percussion on Get Lost. In a way it’s mostly an album about falling in love… but then the love went wrong. Bah.

This isn’t the real cover but I prefer it to the real one as it might put people off with its wackiness. Wacky is rarely a good thing.

So where was I? Oh yes, everything was going a bit wrong. It all started with endless question marks on lapels and celery on jackets and eventually reached the scary levels of question mark-shaped umbrellas when it wasn’t even bloody raining! Still, with the arrival of Doctor 6.0 we had a chance to see something that we could relate to as viewers:

Haven’t we all wanted to strangle a Doctor Who companion at least once or twice? Bear in mind that this was before the days of Bonnie Langford so it was ahead of its time. Doctor 6.0′s time got cut short but his rebirth in a certain range of audio dramas could change even the most 6-phobic fan’s mind.

The regenerations kept going a bit wibbly every time but the clothing stayed as piss poor as ever. By the time Doctor 7.0 arrived the ratings were a bit worse that embarrassing and it didn’t help that his main acting technique was mostly an excess of rolling of the r’s and more gurning than one of them old men with no teeth who used to do gurning on the telly in the days before we had better things to do, like the internet and the legalisation of vegeterianism. Doctor 7.0 reached a new nadir for the show with his pointless running, jumping, explosioning and playing of spoons, shown here in this compilation of ‘highlights’:

That may not be completely historically accurate but you get the drift? He wasn’t all bad though, just very annoying.

The silliness killed the programme and all was quiet until those Americans revived it. They really shouldn’t have. No, really. While there was nothing wrong with Paul McGann as Doctor 8.0 it was pretty much everything else that was wrong. All the magic and English crappiness that made it what it is was replaced by shiny newness and kissing. The TV Movie (for that was what it was) didn’t persaude the important television people to make a new series. Never mind.

… sometime later, it all got sorted out. By a gay (only fair as a gay had killed it). Doctor Who was back and this time it had proper actors, good stories, funny comedy bits and dramatic serious bits. And Mickey. Even rubbish pop star Billie Piper was fantastic. Talking of fantastic, Doctor 9.0 aka Christopher Ecleston was damn good at everything:

He did get a bit upset with that Dalek though.

And so to Doctor Version 10.0 or David Tennant is he is more commonly known as. Scottish in a way that Doctor 7.0 is not, he ended up playing it a little bit cockernee but that didn’t matter all that much. Even the loss of the most properly-created travelling companion couldn’t bring the show down for very long:

Boo hoo. So now what?

The new girl, Rhino-faced soldiers, Father Dougal as a cat flying a plane, some art deco Daleks, several Dinnerladies and a Gentleman from a certain League, for starters.

What have we learnt today, on this marvellous Day One Of My Holiday?

We have learnt that I am shit at tiling and shit at cutting tiles to the correct size on our fancy tile cutter thing. We have learnt that the bathroom walls are wonky, which makes square tiles not quite fit. Is this true for all walls in all rooms in all houses? How the hell would I know? I do the painting and colour schemes and knick nacks!

We have learnt from that drama Recovery that David Tennant is a very good actor but we don’t need to see his bottom ever again. We have learnt that spending 90 minutes of our day feeling depressed, upset and depressed due to a television programme means that what they did make they made good. Or summink.

We have learnt from Hollyoaks that you can get pregnant and give birth without anyone even noticing but only if you are a teenage schoolgirl who then pretends to be upset that she is ‘a bit fat.’ Your parents will not realise, your Swimbint sister will not realise and your mouthy friend will not realise as she is too preoccupied with her gay brother being newly gay and her older stupider sister designing a Gay Sandwich as an act of support. Yes, really.

Next time on Hollyoaks: The producers realise that everybody in the opening titles is now dead so they shoot some new ones but unfortunately encourage all the actors to do ‘sexy’ but they all fail miserably so they turn the O’s in the logo into them male and female signs to make it look sexy but that fails too. And John Paul goes to a gay bar with his Mum. As you do, when on the road to Coming Out On The Telly In A Soap.

Crikey!

… and another thing I hate is what I call Bald Shame.

If I see a man with a comb-over he, like all drivers of 4x4s on regular roads, parents who shout and swear at their children, and Daily Mail readers flaunting their lifestyle choice in public, gets an evil glare.

I also love them wigs. Why do people wear them? There’s nothing wrong with being a baldie except for the cold Winter head issue.

There are so many celebritiwigs around at the moment. Which one is worst?

Is it Travolta and his current longer wig than the other ‘just painted onto scalp’ look that he sported until recently?

Is it Spears with her ‘Whoops I need a lie down’ wig?

Or is it Cage with his ‘Johnny Blaze Special’?

You decide. Or not. I don’t really give a shite.

That silly yet sensible programme that also travels in time is back soon. Are we excited? I couldn’t possibly comment, I have a huge pile of old annuals on the dining room table to sort out, including the rather shitty K-9 Annual 1983. How strange that they made only the one …

Anyway, I thought I would waste some time looking for old clips so I could do one of them things like what BBC2 would do in the old days in between series, i.e. do a load of old repeats. I am not a television channel so here are some clips that you can find the rest of the bits for if you want. If not, skip to the end…

First up we have William Hartnell as The Doctor Version 1. He was like well old by the time this clip (The Tenth Planet) was made and kept forgetting what to say. They had a cunning plan that was actually really cunning and not just a regular plan with the word ‘cunning’ attached to it: They would get everything to go all whooshy and he would change into another man. But first he had to meet them Cybermen. I love the olden dayes ones with their cloth faces and freaky voices. They are sneaky too, as their boots don’t make that loud annoying clanging noise like the new ones do:

Hurrah for the BBC as they taped something rubbish like The Black And White Minstrel Show over most of that episode. How careless! I have loads of blank video tapes, if only they had asked me.

They then taped over most of The Evil Of The Daleks which was a very big evil indeed and starred Patrick Troughton as Doctor Version 2.0. Episode two still exists so here’s some very odd pepperpots:

Ha! They’re so weird!

Eventually the BBC got colour tellys and it was all exciting. But they still didn’t have remote controls so you had to get off your sofa to switch it on. Bah humbug! Never mind though, they had now got Doctor 3.0 and he had a new assistant who was a bit silly. He bickered with her sometimes but never actually tried to strangle her:

By the time the show was really really popular it had Doctor 4.0 who was Tom Baker and his very very long scarf. He even wore it in hot places such as quarries that were really alien planets and stuff. He was very funny and very serious as well so everyone decided that it was the best thing on telly and it was, and not just because he had sweets in his pocket. Then Sarah Jane had to go home and everyone cried:

After a hundred years of being The Doctor, Tom Baker decided to be other characters who were really very similar to The Doctor in other programmes that wer not called Doctor Who so the new producer who kept ruining things got Peter Davison to be Doctor 5.0. He had too many companions and they kept fainting or getting captured or getting possessed by evil snakes or something so they all had something to do. In spite of all that he was still very good at doing the acting. Then Adric got killed and everyone didn’t cry:

Whoops. They may have been the wrong clip. Sorry!

Tomorrow: The producer had some more bad ideas but wouldn’t listen to people who tried to tell him they were bad over and over again until Doctor Who went away!

Onetwo , Instead is a shiny CD that was released into the wilderness today. If you are of a certain age you will remember the two people who make up Onetwo (one word, two people) as they were around in the 80s (oh yes, a most underrated time) as key parts of Propaganda (mentalist arty but fantastic German synth lunacy) and OMD (shorthand name for a rather good synth band with a very long pretentious name, the other one of which made Atomic Kitten, whoops) as they are Claudia Brucken and Paul Humphreys. I am and have always been a bit of a Claudia Brucken geek, although I think I have lost some of my old seven inches (but I do not need those spam emails to help me regain them, thanks) as I used to have too many records. Anyway, the album is a folow-up to that EP they did ages ago (featuring the song Cloud Nine, which is included here) and it’s pretty much what you would imagine if you know what you’re looking for: Pop songs without too much mentalism in a synthy modern way. Nothing surprising, just a very good solid collection of songs that I like very much. Sometimes that is all I need. If you like the idea of listening to an album by ‘half a psychotic ABBA’ then this is very recommended. Or I could just be a geek.

This isn’t quite the actual CD cover as I wanted to combine the graphics with the group shot. So I did.