Have I Got Whos For You (Everybody’s Gone To The Moon Edition)

I’m not gonna talk about Boris; in fact, we’re not gonna talk about Boris at all. We’re gonna keep him out of it.

Let’s talk about the moon landing. But before we do that, let’s talk about a book I read thirty years ago in my first (and second, and third, and fourth) year at secondary school. It was called Arthur C. Clarke’s July 20, 2019 – a date which, at the tender age of eleven, seemed like a distant prospect. Compartmentalised into thematic chapters, taking us through smart houses, healthcare, travel and work on a single day in the then future, it explored a typically optimistic future society where things have mostly gone right, anchored by the celebration of fifty years since the moon landing. I can still quote bits of dialogue but I’m fuzzy on the detail; nonetheless people who still have the book assure me that the results were a bingo card, with some astonishingly accurate predictions and others that either haven’t happened yet or which happened years ago. It was glossy, and the photos were very nice. Sadly the Amazon prices are not, so it’ll have to stay as a memory, which is probably for the best.

Anyway, Armstrong didn’t quite make it to the fiftieth anniversary – but Aldrin did, and he’s still keeping his mouth shut about what really happened.

People got really cross when I did this. “I don’t like the idea of the Doctor being part of this conspiracy,” said one. To which the obvious reply is – well, she isn’t, she’s just landed the TARDIS in Shepperton instead of 240,000 miles up. Listen, I don’t have the monopoly on stuff like this. The X-Files got there first. Actually, I’ve been doing some thought in recent months and have decided that much of the way society is today can be blamed on The X-Files. Because it gave us a world where chemtrails were real, the moon landing was faked and governments were using vaccinations as a ploy to infect us all with viral pathogens, and the heroes were two likeable, intelligent white Americans whose job it was to convince us that this was all really happening. And the opposite of obedient sheep – “Comrade Napoleon is always right” – is abject paranoia, which really isn’t any better. So now no one trusts a thing they’re told by people who frankly know more about this than they do, and before you know it you’ve got people believing the Earth is flat.

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Anyway, at least – thanks to the miracles of modern technology – we can finally find out what that Silence was really saying back in 1969.

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Finally, to the far side of the moon, where an old enemy is about to run into some old friends.

“Christ. Not you lot again.”

 

Have I Got Whos For You (half rice, half chips edition)

In the news this week: there is general panic in supermarkets up and down the country as Donna and Martha struggle to keep the Tenth Doctor away from the ice cream.

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An alternative, previously unseen angle from the Apollo 11 moon launch fifty years ago throws up a disturbing sight.

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And the full, unseen edition of the poster for Patrick Stewart’s new Star Trek vehicle shows exactly what Picard was staring at off to the right.

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Elsewhere, the Thirteenth Doctor’s pleased when her Amazon order shows up.

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And a deleted exchange from ‘The Sound of Drums’ proves to be oddly prophetic for Boris Johnson.

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Talking of Boris, his announcement during last week’s debate that “we must get off the hamster wheel of doom” kind of gave me an idea.

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Finally, this week’s recipe, which has no ingredient lists or method, and consists instead of a single instruction from the War Doctor. “Great men are forged in fire,” he tells us. “It is the privilege of lesser men to light the flame.”

Be good, and if you can’t be good, be careful. And if you can’t manage that, remember the date.

 

The Smallerpictures video dump (2019, part four)

I’m not always making videos. But when I am, they invariably end up in here, sooner or later.

 

1. Doctor Who: The Blockbusters Edition (April 2019)

The Twitter conversation is still pretty clear in my head. It was the trailer from Pale Rider – that 1970s Clint Eastwood vehicle where he may or may not be a ghost – and what strikes you about it, if you’re British, is that it uses the Channel 4 News Theme. Or, to be precise, it uses a piece of stock music titled ‘Best Endeavours’ (composed for the library by Alan Hawkshaw, who also wrote the Countdown theme) that’s turned up all over the place, as stock music is wont to do. Anyway, there then followed a conversation about whether Jon Snow was actually a cowboy, and then somebody else quipped that in the original version of the Star Wars cantina sequences, the band was playing the music from Blockbusters.

Bang. There it is. Why has nobody done this before? Blockbusters is the eighties quiz show personified: all drum machines and synths and overly dramatic stings that made you feel the stakes were much higher than they were. It was staple viewing in our house – watching those incredibly grown-up looking sixth formers with Italian style shirts and mullets flounder over what ‘R’ defines an unsophisticated and rural person (Rustic, in case you were wondering). You tried to plot their pattern across the board, working out which spaces would be likely targets for the battling contestants, and you cheered when they won a Thailand holiday at the end of the Gold Run.

Plus the music was awesome, particularly when they were doing the hand jive on Friday evenings (and, unless my memory is playing tricks on me, singing some sort of lyric during a special anniversary show). It’s taken years – and a Wikipedia entry – for me to notice that it actually contains snatches of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which is the sort of thing you can never unhear once you’ve noticed, and (as a consequence of this) something that’s been stuck in my head for the last three months. Make no mistake: the Blockbusters theme is infectious.

And it works perfectly with Series 11. Don’t ask me why. Perhaps there was an inherent cheese factor in that as well – some people loved it, some didn’t, but no one can deny its presence. Making this was simplicity itself: it was simply a question of delving into the episodes for appropriate footage. Cole and Gill really do deserve their own title cards, but the whole thing’s only about forty seconds long and I had a lot to get through, so there had to be sacrifices. And the synchronised shoulder pat at the end turned out to be a happy accident, but the sort I’m always anxious to repeat. I don’t always feel pleased with my work, but this was one time I did. And it made The Poke, of all things, so it was a good day.

 

 

2. Bungle from Rainbow dances to the Doctor Who theme (April 2019)

Let me conjure a picture. It’s the very next morning after the Blockbusters video went live, and I’m wandering home from the school run in the fresh heights of an Oxfordshire spring, and of course I’m ignoring everything around me because I’m on my phone. And then a video pops onto the feed of Bungle doing a dance to…something. I can’t remember. It might have been Soft Cell. But it was the sort of thing that happened a lot on Rainbow, which is the price you pay for creating an inherently musical show featuring only one non-human character with legs. Bungle got the lion’s share of the soft shoe numbers (well, you can’t exactly do ballet in a furry onesie) and usually it was to some sort of Rod, Jane and Freddy throwaway they hadn’t used for a while, but my mind started wandering and  there was something about his turn in ‘The Show Offs’ (a 1986 story in which the entire cast get to act like dickheads) that struck a chord. In the story he’s dancing to an instrumental version of ‘We’re Singing A Little Song’, but…

This took me thirty-eight minutes. You can tell. It’s not quite in sync, which is something I probably could have fixed if I could be bothered. As it stands, I think the rough-and-ready nature probably works in its favour. And Peter Howell’s version of the Doctor Who theme is the one from my childhood and probably the best version of them all. Although I’m guessing Bungle was probably more of a Pertwee fan. Call it a hunch.

 

3. Tim Shaw the Enchanter (May 2019)

Yeah, this doesn’t quite work. But I’d been putting it off for months, and I really needed to confirm that it didn’t quite work. And now I have. And bits of it are good. Probably. Maybe. Anyone fancy rabbit stew?

Have I Got Whos For You (Disney special)

I seem to have far more doctored images and bad jokes than I generally get round to posting in here. In many ways that’s a good thing – if your content creation ratio outweighs your posting ratio then you usually have a surplus, which is great if there’s a famine round the corner (or in my case, a holiday). But I’m mindful of the fact that there are a number of memes sitting on my hard drive that just haven’t been posted yet. And while it’s good to be in a Seven Years Of Plenty kind of place, I might as well use the downtime between series to catch up a bit.

Today’s batch is – you’ll have seen – all Disney-related, beginning with the news that WALL-E is about to have a very, very bad day.

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Elsewhere, the Potts gang are having a lovely time of things, until the Eleventh Doctor drops in.

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Here’s a little cutting room floor footage from Aladdin.

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Fan theory: a new explanation for the breakdown of Amy and Rory’s marriage.

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The Tenth Doctor wonders if this might be a good spot to surreptitiously ditch his new companion.

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And the Mulan remake opts to recreate the opening of ‘Day of the Doctor’.

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Over in the pridelands, alternate dialogue recorded for The Lion King foreshadows the final words of the Twelfth Doctor.

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There are scenes of general dismay when Bill Potts returns home to visit her family.

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The cast of Monsters, Inc. watch a video.

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“One jump ahead of the Dalek…”

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And finally, as news of The Little Mermaid splashes across the internet, the Doctor confesses she’s really not sure about this new aerial.

Poor unfortunate soul.

Doctor Who Does The Smiths

It all started on Sunday afternoon, when the BBC used Kylie’s Glastonbury set to unveil a new Series 12 monster.

I’ve had great fun winding up the Thirteen haters this week. “Jesus H. Christ,” said someone who clearly doesn’t follow the English music scene (or German popular culture) yesterday. “If that’s a monster we’re in for another series of the same crap.”

“He’s right,” echoed someone who had thankfully got the joke. “We should stick to recurring monsters. Better the devil you know, and all that.”

“I don’t know why you’re complaining,” I said. “I made this especially for you.”

“Hmm. I should be so lucky.”

Kylie was lovely. I’ve enjoyed her music for years, unashamedly and without regret. It’s plastic pop for the masses but ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ is a stroke of brilliance – Kylie’s best songs may be written by other people but she knows how to pick ’em, and she seemed genuinely overcome on Sunday. The tabloids broke the news that a secret reunion with Jason Donovan would be part of the set, and when he didn’t show – awkwardly leaving the male parts of ‘Especially For You’ to the backing singers and the audience – you suspected that a last-minute cancellation was the likely reason. Perhaps he had another Dairy Milk commercial. Either way, we didn’t miss him, not when we had Nick Cave.

Elsewhere, there was bad language from Stormzy and Bad Wolf from The Cure. The highlight of the Killers’ set, of course, was the moment when they took a short breather – just about long enough to nip down to the 1980s to retrieve the Pet Shop Boys. When the melody of ‘Always on My Mind’ popped up, just before they joined the band onstage (one in a ridiculous parka, the other in Patrick Troughton’s hat) I nearly jumped off the sofa. Then Neil Tennant opened his mouth, and it was all downhill from there.

To give the man his due, he warmed up – he’s sixty-four and you really can’t expect him to hit the high notes like he used to. And it’s a relief to know that, even after all these years, Chris Lowe still doesn’t smile. It may not have been vintage PSB, but it was authentic PSB, and it was lovely to see Flowers and co. paying tribute to their early musical influences.

They did the same thing a few minutes later, in the company of Johnny Marr – who also managed to finish the set whilst looking as stony faced as my mother always did whenever Red Dwarf was on (I can hardly help it if the first episode she happened to see was ‘Holoship’). It was wonderful to watch Flowers croon his way through ‘This Charming Man’ (a song that seemed almost tailor-made) and I know the Smiths weren’t exactly the cheeriest lot, but is some sort of facial recognition honestly too much to ask for? I mean really? A part of me wonders what would have happened if they’d also got Morrissey, without telling Marr, but I suspect there would have been a frosty avoidance of eye contact, even before the hurtled bottles of urine started to litter the stage.

Anyway: this set me thinking, and without further ado, and for no really good reason, here’s a collection of Smiths lyrics, accompanied by semi-appropriate Doctor Who references. If your favourite lyric is not included, leave it in the box at the bottom and I’ll find something that fits. Probably.