Have I Got Whos for You (Indicative Vote edition)

Keep your eyes peeled for another video roundup coming not-exactly-live and by-no-means-exclusive to Brian of Morbius. That’ll be online in a week or so, once I’ve written it.

In the meantime, here’s a little something we made earlier. Well, several somethings, collated. In the first instance, it was National Potato Chip Day the other week. I didn’t even know National Potato Chip Day (or Crisp Day, if you’re British) was a thing. And while I love a bag of salt and vinegar as much as the next man, I’m really not sure whether their adulation warrants an entire day.

Still, any excuse, right?

Also, can I take this opportunity to say how much I miss Brannigans? Oh, I know you can still buy them on the internet. But it’s not the same as wandering down to your local Rusts and getting a packet of beef and mustard to have along with the wine gums and ginger ale you were going to scoff while watching Heat on rented VHS. Those were the days. I’d rent three videos and watch them over the course of a weekend, on my own, because I had no life. Or I’d buy them in the 3-for-£12 sales they’d have every week at HMV. I never saw anybody, except my parents. But I did become quite au fait with the classics, and enjoyed a great many of them, even if I still think Citizen Kane is mostly shit.

…Where were we? Oh yes, International Day of Happiness.

We could all do with a little happiness right now. Certainly it feels as if Britain is temporarily broken. It’s not so much a problem with whether or not we leave the EU – I am resigned to the fact that we probably will, and I can’t help thinking it probably won’t be as bad as the militant Remainers insist it will be. Nor will it be as rosy, of course, as the Leave campaign insist it will be, although that could all change if they keep shifting the goalposts – first it was going to be marvellous and we’d get a fantastic deal; then it wasn’t going to be quite so marvellous and yes the NHS figures were fabricated but it would still be great; then it was going to be difficult but worth it in the long run and we knew that when we voted; then we’d be better off with no deal, then the deal we had might be the best option after all, and then there’s a lot of vagueness about WTO from people who don’t actually know the first thing about it.

I mean, I don’t have a clue. I don’t! But I voted Remain not because of any particular affinity towards the EU – I am always one to err on the side of caution in these matters, and defend the status quo unless the boat is in severe need of rocking – but because I could see this referendum for what it was from the outset. It was a grab for power: a vote-winning fiasco made by a desperate man who jumped ship (to extend the metaphor) as soon as it didn’t go his way. I firmly believe that you shouldn’t let the man in the street decide this sort of thing in any case – at least not these days, when people are so unilaterally thick – but if it’s unavoidable it needs to occur under the right sort of circumstances, and this was a political hotbed. How many people do you know who voted Leave simply because they despised Cameron? Exactly.

We saw this again in the Commons, just last night: support for Theresa May’s deal improved when she said she’d resign if they voted it through. If you can’t trust MPs – who are supposed to be sensible about these things – not to be fickle and spiteful (or, if you’re Rees-Mogg, just a shade Machiavellian) when it comes to making incredibly important decisions, then what hopes for the rest of us? This was not something that should ever have been decided by the ballot box, at least not under the current administration, who are too out of touch, too insular and frankly too incompetent to carry this through. I knew that back in 2016, and that’s largely why I stuck to the Remain camp. And three years later, I turned out to be right.

Certainly there is a tangible sign of Referendum Fatigue – as up in the hills, despite the local area being a strong Leave constituency, there is a disappointing turnout on Nigel Farage’s March For Brexit.

Here’s the problem. It’s not so much the deal or no deal fiasco: we will, eventually, get through that and come to some sort of slim majority that will be heralded as a great victory by the winning side and a fraudulent travesty by whoever came second. Parliament will move on, and we’ll survive Brexit, in whatever capacity it occurs, or doesn’t. But there is a schism across our country now. You’re either a Brexiteer or a Remainer, and there is apparently very little room for middle ground. There is a sense of division, as espoused by both sides, and the fact that most of the arguing takes place on social media (which is, let’s be honest, an absolute cesspit) doesn’t help matters. Theresa May has been appealing for calm and unity – shortly before she gave up and announced “That’s it, I’m off” like a geography teacher who’s fed up with a rowdy class – but it doesn’t help that her idea of unity is that everyone do exactly what she says, however ludicrous it might be. I don’t know where we go from here. I truly don’t.

In the midst of this week’s chaos the ‘official’ Facebook page for Britain Bites Back ran a poll about whether we should leave or not, only to throw their toys out of the pram when it didn’t go their way. They then ran a second poll, which had a similar response, and then proceeded to vent about how you should only be on their page if you agreed with their views, dismissing anyone who didn’t as a ‘hacker’. You can read all about the saga here, although the jury is out as to whether this really is a genuine page or a spoof. If it’s a spoof, it’s frighteningly convincing and Poe’s law is in full effect, but I can’t help thinking the joke’s over now and they ought to back away, because somewhere along the line it stopped being funny.

At any rate, a friend of mine asked me to do something Who-related with it. So –

We end today’s little missive on a lighter note, with the news that the Toy Story 4 trailer has finally dropped. Those of you who felt that the story drew to a natural conclusion at the end of the last movie – as the characters found a new home and said goodbye to Andy – will undoubtedly consign this to the ‘sequel too far’ drawer (you know, the one that’s chronically overstuffed and has just about fallen off its runners). I can’t help thinking you’re probably right, but I’ll see this anyway because the concept fascinates me: given that the new guest star, Sporky, is a piece of living cutlery, at what point do creatures in the Toy Story universe gain sentience? Is it all about loving something enough to make it real, like it was in The Velveteen Rabbit? Do you have to cast a spell, or breathe over them like Aslan does at the end of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe? Or is it simply a matter of sticking a pair of googly eyes on something and then standing back to watch the fireworks? I think we should be told, and even if we’re not I suspect there will be several BuzzFeed articles about it.

In any event, if you think you’ve seen Sporky before, he crops up in a deleted scene in ‘The Doctor Falls’.

“I’M NOT A COMPANION!!!!”

“Garth. That was a haiku.”

This, dear children, is how I’ve been spending World Poetry Day. Because why not? And yes, a number of Doctors are missing, but I’ll write more next year. Probably. You might even get a sonnet.

In the meantime, have fun. And as a footnote, that last one is something that I actually read this week, and is perhaps the best example I can give right now of a fandom that is apparently broken.

Have I Got Whos For You (Part 379)

There’s nothing like a bit of dumbing down, is there? I mean it even happens in here. There was a time when this site was more than simply a glorified meme collection, but most of my sensible writing is reserved for other pages these days. I do have another video collection coming up, but that’ll have to wait for a bit.

What’s been happening this week? Well, the staff at Holby City had to deal with a devastating Cyber attack.

(Yes, that is a Cyberman smoking a fag in the background. You get ’em outside every hospital.)

If you actually saw the thing, it was a two-part story which incorporated various characters from both shows interacting in a joint storyline which put two of their finest on the operating table. While Connie tried desperately to save Ian, who’d overdosed to get away from his incredibly annoying sister, rival queen bee Jac Naylor was fighting to get to the sole working theatre in the building in order to save Sacha, who was clearly in a worse state than he was prepared to let on after he climbed out of the car he’d just crashed. (Inevitably they wound up saving each other’s patients, and everybody learned a valuable lesson.) Meanwhile Sacha’s daughter was downstairs with Essie, who’d had a diabetic attack and was lying prone on the floor of the radiology department, which led to Ric Griffin crawling through the ventilation ducts in a scene that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Alien. All the while, the lights were going out along the corridor, one by one, which is really not how power cuts tend to work.

It did rather remind me of The Stolen Earth. Josh watches Casualty on Thursdays with Em (yes, I know it’s broadcast on Saturdays, but they watch it on Thursdays), and Em and I watch Holby once a week. She is the only one who watches both, which led to Josh filling me in on the Casualty cast and vice versa. But when you drop in characters to both shows it gets awfully confusing. Or, as Gareth put it when Ianto and Gwen were facing off against that Dalek, “Oh great. More people from spin-offs I don’t watch and therefore don’t care about”.

Last Friday, of course, was Women’s International Day.

What? Oh. Oh well, have this anyway.

“Why oh why oh WHY,” someone said, after a fashion, “did you go with a picture of Davison when he didn’t like the idea of a female Doctor? Or are you deliberately trying to get someone to retaliate?”

“I just went with the cricket vibe,” I said. “I don’t think it matters.” You can have great fun mashing up things like this. It annoys the heck out of the traditionalists, and people who don’t understand why you’ve posted this in a Classic Doctor Who group when it’s been tainted with the ineffable stench of something that was created nine years (or sixteen, depending on how you count) after a designated cut-off point. I mean, there’s a market for separating old and new, for certain, because they are very different shows. But it inevitably leads to fallout. How long is that going to last, do we think? Will there be a point at which it’s all…I don’t know, Doctor Who?

Presumably, if and when that happens we’re going to have to find new ways of annoying the puritans. Luckily I’ve got a stack of them lined up.

This one was funny. I had someone tell me that the Daleks were older than Vader.

“No they’re not,” I said.

“21 December 1963 to 1 February 1964 first appearance of the Daleks. 1977, first appearance of Darth Vader. Yes yes they are “

“No, no they’re not. The Genesis of the Daleks happened thousands, if not millions of years in our future. Star Wars happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.”

“The Daleks have a time machine and were created outside of time and space by a fallen Time Lord. There’s nothing stating that it happened in the future but according to several episodes the Daleks and their creators were at war with the Daleks in the time before time began. Ergo still older.”

“Somewhere along the line I fear you may have rather missed the point of all this.”

“No, I caught on when you commented but decided to just continue being sassy. :P”

GAAAH. I hate it when they catch me out.

What else has been happening? Well, there was tension at a house in London when Dr Simeon elected not to dress up for World Book Day.

—

And in politics, Theresa May isn’t having the best of weeks, but she did have time to upload this to her Twitter account.

(If you missed the reference, have a read of this. It was almost certainly down to the person who runs the Downing Street Twitter account, and as is the case with most things of this nature, it is very churlish to blame her directly. Watching her handle this train crash of a government I happen to think she’s probably a very nice woman in an impossible situation, and whatever my misgivings about Brexit she’s the best of a very bad lot. I also imagine she’s a lot of fun at parties.)

Much of the Brexit campaigning, of course, consisted of both sides telling us about dreadful things that would happen if we stayed in / left the EU, most of which probably weren’t true at all. It was done largely to scare people, which in turn distracts us from the really important issues and drives up internet traffic, and what was weird about it was that it isn’t something that normally happens, at least not in popular culture.

Away from fake scare stories there has, at long last, been word from the Disney front about the upcoming Aladdin remake, with a full length trailer finally released this week. And for all you Doctor Who fans, there was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Easter Egg during the magic carpet sequence.

“A whole new w-”

THUD.

Have I Got Whos For You (Part 378)

Hot enough to barbecue, isn’t it?

Well, it was. March may have been in like a lamb, but it still feels cold, largely thanks to the the sub-tropical temperatures that adorned our country this time last week, which led to a myriad of park selfies and fretting about global warming. Myself I tend to hide under the bedclothes (all right, on top of them) when the sun comes out. There are two types of people in hot weather: cats and dogs. I am and always have been a dog. But that’s fine; you all enjoy the sun. Just remember to keep up your fluid intake.

I swear, that girl gets everywhere.

In other news, Jihadi Jack’s interview went rather sour.

And there was an exciting announcement about a new instalment of Doctor Who, accompanied by a hurried publicity shoot.

I confess I’ve not encountered virtual reality in its current form. The overriding memory I have is the strange, 3D-rendered thing they did back in the 1990s where you had blocky, pixellated monsters following you; a quick Google tells me it was called Dactyl Nightmare, which worked on more than one level. I’m past the point of brushing off contemporary VR as a gimmick, on the grounds that – from what I hear, anyway – developers seem to have found a way to do it reasonably well, which is due in no small part to the development of the FPS genre, to the point where games look fairly realistic, even if you still can’t see your feet unless it’s Alien: Isolation or something. To all those whinging about the absence of a new series this year, and the money that’s been wasted on this instead, did you really think the two were mutually exclusive? That’s not how budgeting works. At least it’s something to chat about, even if the Doctor’s head is abnormally large. She looks like she’s auditioning for a remake of Mask or something. Would a bit of proportion control have been so difficult, really?

Still, you’d probably play it if this happened.

Well, all right, maybe you wouldn’t.

Anyway. Enjoy your Pancake Day, won’t you?