Author Archives: reverend61
Adherents of the Repeated Meme
I’m not asking you to watch all of this. It is quite a good one, but I’m sure you have better things to do. Just watch the first forty seconds. — — It gets everywhere.
In the gallery
A little art for a Friday, with a touch of the Spice Girls… Some are easier to identify than others; I couldn’t get them all. (And one of them just looks wrong.) Also of note may be the identical noses, which Gareth attributes to the chameleon circuit. Just don’t ask me to explain how he [...]
Where’s WALL-E?
Courtesy of George Takei (who I daresay found it somewhere else, but thanks George)…
What lies beneath
In response to today’s DM story about the archaeological dig on Easter Island:
Is it just me? #5
Gareth sent me a snooker video this morning, and it suddenly occurred to me that I’ve never seen these two together. (Gareth attributes this to Blinovitch, which is as good an explanation as any.)
As seen on Twitter
This has baffled me a bit.
The God…complex?
“When Russell T. Davies left the TARDIS at the end of the last decade, Doctor Who was still compelling television, even if it had deteriorated into soap. His obsession with grounding the Doctor and giving him a family (completely in opposition, one could argue, with the original spirit of the show) had detracted from some of the very good ideas he’d had, because all too often we were forced to watch the invasion stories through their eyes. Thus when John Simm used his DNA as a template for every human being on the planet, we were treated to three minutes of Catherine Tate crying on her mobile. When the Autons crashed through a shopping centre, we were forced to endure a screaming bout from Camille Coduri. And when the Children of Time (and don’t get me started on how much I detest that terminology) were trying desperately to get hold of the Doctor, the entire sequence was hampered by Billie Piper’s incessant whinging. Frankly the only extended family member on Doctor Who that never outstayed his welcome was Bernard Cribbins, who was never less than great, even when he’s dropped into the middle of a shameless Star Wars rip-off.”
How ‘The Wedding of River Song’ should have ended
“Call me picky or devoid of any sense of fun, but personally I found ‘The Wedding of River Song’ to be a bloated, incoherent mess. It was just Moffatt showing off. There’s a ludicrous teaser, with pterodactyls and generic CG and unnecessary cameos from Simon Callow. Then the story gets going and it’s all downhill from there. It solves certain problems – one rather cleverly, and with less irritating smugness than usual, but so much of it is wrong (and makes no sense) that it’s too little, far too late.”
Kind, but extremely firm
“It’s the mirror that does it for me. It’s simply that she has a bag that’s bigger on the inside than on the outside. It’s the same science as they use in – hey, wait a minute!” I said, leaping up in the realisation that I was actually onto something. “That’s it! Mary Poppins is a Timelord!”
Things to do on a wet bank holiday
The other week, Joshua and his brothers went to visit their friend Yinka, who lives a few streets away. Visits to and from Yinka are a regular activity. Yinka loves the Smurfs and anything pink, but somehow she and Joshua get on like a house on fire. Yinka has an interesting book in her collection: [...]
Museum piece
“Daniel lasted a minute and a half. It didn’t help that he was tired. It also didn’t help that the moment you walk through the door there’s a whopping great Dalek in the entrance by the TARDIS door, as the Doctor Who music loops in the background: effective for conjuring up the spirit of the thing but not so good if you’re a sleepy three-year-old (or near enough) who is discovering lately that certain things frighten him more and more. We had, I think, been lulled into a false sense of security after Cardiff, when – being too young to really understand – he had been taken in by the sights and sounds; if I remember correctly it was Joshua we’d had to reassure and console. But today, Daniel was having none of it. We tried to show him that it was just a bunch of models and that nothing was real, but since Cardiff, he’s actually seen the show, and after five minutes of screaming and head-burying and cries of “I DON’T LIKE IT, IT’S TOO SCARY!” Em and I cut our losses and she took him back to the car, while I walked round with Josh. Then we switched.”
A brush with death
Last Thursday, my colleague popped over from Ireland. Jim works from his home in County Clare, and his visits to the UK are infrequent, so it was a good excuse for lunch. We held a team meeting in a pub in the middle of Abingdon, and drank ale and talked about old times. Jim probably [...]
Adric?
This morning Joshua asked if every regeneration was performed standing up. I answered no, of course it wasn’t. And then later on we viewed one of those YouTube montages that are like a rash all over the web, showing every regeneration from the first to the most recent (which – given that we’ve just started [...]
Events occur in real timey-wimey
“Emily and I devoured 24. I can still remember the look on her face the night she discovered the identity of the mole at the end of the first season; she spent the rest of the evening wandering round the house, occasionally muttering “I can’t believe it was them!”. But part of the show’s appeal is rooted in its sometimes unintentional humour. We know, for example, that the beloved Chloe is supposed to be funny, and that her Asperger’s renders her prone to bouts of tactlessness (“I just think we need to be really nice to Michelle, you know, because of Tony getting shot in the neck”). But it’s hard not to chuckle when you hear presidential advisor Lynn Kresge announce that “I just got off with the Secretary of Defence”, at least if you’re British.”
One year on
We miss you, Lis. The Whoniverse is just that little bit less colourful without you.
Willo the Silent
“One would assume that the Silence can remember each other even when they’re looking the other way. It would be awfully inconvenient if they couldn’t. Gareth pointed out that a Silence Olympics would, for example, be farcical, because whoever dashed into the lead would instantly forget that there was anyone behind him, and he’d then wonder “Why am I running?”, and then stop and let everyone else overtake him, and then the whole cycle would begin again with someone else. (I’d also have thought that the Angels were similarly hampered, simply because they can’t ever look at each other. Weeping Angel tennis matches must be short.)”
Father-of-mine of the bride
From Gareth: “It occurs to me that ‘A Good Man Goes To War’ could be summarised somewhat as not so much losing a daughter, but gaining a Song. (I also wondered whether the final episode could be not losing a Song but gaining a Doctor.)” I swear.
Track record
Given how much the original scene is ingrained in my memory, I really shouldn’t find this funny. But I do.
In the flowerpot
“If you’re going for an iconic Doctor, it needs to be the Fourth. It’s the one everybody recognises. I still don’t know where we got the scarf, but it was perfect. Sadly the only photos I have of my father in that outfit are blurry and also feature me, which is why you don’t get to see them. Our props master / set builder constructed a TARDIS, from which we had the Doctor emerge in the opening sequence, in order to invite a group of bored children on a trip to see the Bee Gees. Naturally it goes awry and they spend the rest of the show trekking through the twentieth century, munching jelly babies. Every time one of the kids had to ask the Doctor to clarify one of the suggestive jokes, he would look flustered and reply “I’ll explain later”. In his first entrance we sequenced a flushing toilet to immediately follow the TARDIS materialisation effect, which got the biggest laugh of the night. (I also made the classic mistake of having the Doctor refer to himself as ‘Doctor Who’, which I think can be excused on the grounds that the BBC were doing that in the credit crawl as late as 1981.)”
Go figure
“My charity shop browsing usually involves a look round the toy racks, a quick examination of the trinkets shelves in search of kitsch mugs (it’s a long story, and you would find it dull) and a look through whatever CDs / DVDs / games they have that I’d not spotted weeks before. I am always on the lookout for Doctor Who items, but they usually manifest in the form of those tedious Tenth Doctor novels (typically the ones with Martha, which were a low point) or jigsaws that I won’t do and that Joshua has no patience for, or the DVDs I happen to own anyway. I’d love to come across a few of the Classic Who two-disc sets, or perhaps a vintage annual, but the people who own such things have, I suspect, sensibly realised that these items are worth a few bob and that they’d be much better off trying to shift them on Ebay or Amazon.”
