The Smallerpictures Video Dump (2020, part three)

I wish I could tell you that I’d got on with that novel while we’ve been stuck at home. Or that I’d learned to sew, or reached a sense of inner peace, or at least slowed down a bit. But my life was already fairly slow and empty, and I rather liked it that way. My world now, instead, is a world of hastily improvised routines of family breakfasts and Zoom webinars and P.E. with Joe; of virtual meetings with my church housegroup; of listening, every Thursday, to the sound of no one in our street clapping for the NHS; of refusing out of principle to partake in those watchalongs because if there’s one thing DW fans know how to do it’s take a good idea and flog it to death, or at least until all the novelty has well and truly worn off. We’re fortunate, where we are, but oh dear God this road is long – and there are no winding turns, simply a series of erratic curves.

Anyway, how are the Doctors spending lockdown? Today, we catch up with just three of them. But they’re the three everyone likes, so that’s a good start.

 

1. Public Safety Announcement (April 2020)

You know we never stoop to cliche here at Brian of Morbius, but if we did, this would be the point at which I told you this will all be over by Christmas. That’s actually based on scientific insight, correct (at least theoretically) as we go to press, which dictates that under an idealised plan of social distancing and appropriate quarantine the virus could be squashed by 4 December. Now, you and I both know that this is unlikely, but I do at least hope we’ll be allowed out by then – and not stuck in Caerphilly Castle with Peter Capaldi, who’s been wandering its dimly-lit corridors for the better part of four billion years.

This was a lot of fun to put together, largely because it was simply a question of going through the episode and finding appropriate (yes, all right, inappropriate) clips to match up with the government advice. Sometimes that’s a long, hard slog – unless you know exactly what you’re looking for, and generally I don’t, then you have to rely on memory and association and transcript searches. But sticking with a single episode restricts you, which makes that endless scrubbing back and forth all the easier to endure. Every one of this clips is taken from ‘Heaven Sent’ – with one exception. Can you spot it?

 

2. The Ninth Doctor channel hops (April 2020)

The Twelfth Doctor’s been dive-bombing a lake and getting his skull melted by a Dickens reject. Three regenerations back, one of his predecessors is stuck in a flat with Jackie Tyler. I know where my sympathies lie. Sorry, Peter; you’re on your own.

Eccleston is notoriously catty about some of his former roles. Thor 2, for example, was “like having a gun in your mouth”. He’s not much happier about G.I. Joe. I also read that he hated to be asked about Raymond Calitri, which is why it’s in here – but supposedly he’s cooled off about that over the years, so perhaps a reconciliation with the MCU may be on the cards. Although somehow I doubt it; he’s not exactly in a hurry to go back to Doctor Who.

But everyone has a breaking point. What would it take for Eccleston to relive those hours in the makeup chair? Watch it, and you’ll see.

 

3. The Tenth Doctor in Lockdown (May 2020)

Now, this was a departure. Not because it’s particularly different in tone or approach – awkward enjambment of two contrasting sources is something I’ve been doing since year dot – but because I managed, after some trial and error, to get a picture-in-picture effect when the Doctor’s watching the screen. It lasts for approximately three seconds and it’s by no means perfect (look closely and you can see Tennant’s head walking through the bottom of the image) but it’s vital, because it establishes that he’s looking at it there and then in the heart of the Crucible. You nail that, and everything else follows.

Oh, and I make no apologies for anyone I might offend with this, because I think the only person who’s likely to be offended is Ian Levine. And Ian Levine is, for want of a better word, a complete cockwomble.

Have I Got Whos For You (generally vague edition)

It’s a beautiful morning here in lockdown city – and, having pulled an all-nighter, here’s the Doctor waiting patiently for the Epic Games store to refresh so he can download GTA 5.

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You will have watched the Prime Minister’s announcement on Monday with…well, I don’t know. There was a lot of conflicting information and I was thoroughly incensed by it. Not so much the confusion over whether or not you’re supposed to go to work – it’s a moot point in our house – but the denial of culpability, a broadcast that was intentionally vague not because we have an idiot in Downing Street but because we have someone who is in fact very clever, and who knows that if he words things correctly he’s off the hook.

Let me (or, rather, let someone else) put it this way:

Sir Humphrey: We’ve issued a clarification of the slogan, Prime Minister.

Jim Hacker: Good. Will we be withdrawing the campaign?

Sir Humphrey: No, Prime Minister, it’s important that the message gets out.

Jim Hacker: What, even if people don’t understand it?

Sir Humphrey: Especially if they don’t understand it. That way, if the restrictions are too stringent and cause economic problems then we can say our message supported relaxing them, and if they’re too lax, and cause a second wave, then we can say our clarification clearly said the rules weren’t being relaxed.

Jim Hacker: So the purpose of the clarification is to put us in the clear?

Sir Humphrey: Yes, Prime Minister.

“Yes,” I can hear the Tory supporters chanting, “but the British public need to be free to make up their own minds! They don’t deserve to be treated like children!”. To which I will respond with “Boaty McBoat Face”, and drop the mic.

Anyway, the only real response from lunacy like this is to mock it, so here’s a deleted still from ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’.

—

The slogan itself was memed to death, mostly with pop lyrics (most of which were very funny, although I do wish I’d got to ‘Hot Dog / Jumping Frog / Alberquerque’ before someone else). There were also nods to Father Ted (‘Down with this sort of thing!’ / ‘Careful now’ / ‘Will you have a cup of tea?’). Me, I spent ages thinking about how you could spin it into a Doctor Who reference before coming up with this one:

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Then there are the alert slogans, which had no sense of scale or timing but which were nonetheless self-explanatory. At least they are now I’ve put Daleks in them.

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Oh, and there’s the alert scale; we’re currently at amber, and I do wonder if when we go up to red someone’s going to say “Sir, are you absolutely sure? It does mean changing the bulb.”

“What about radiation?” someone asked on Twitter. “Or plague?” I told them I’d run out of numbers.

There has been some actual Doctor Who news this week, as Moffat admits in an interview that he’s always thought of Colin Salmon’s antivirus character from series 4 as a future Doctor, living in the library computer to keep River Song company; it’s utter bollocks of course, particularly as it’s only come to light now, but I suppose after series 12 anything’s possible.

—

The warm weather last weekend brought out the crowds, of course, with beaches flooded with tourists, although some people were at least willing to enforce social distancing.

Elsewhere the nation was out in force to celebrate V.E. Day, as thousands of households marked the defeat of the Axis with street parties and mass singalongs, of a kind not seen since the last spate of street parties to celebrate the Queen having some sort of birthday or something. I’m not one to kill the mood but there was something almost jingoistic about the furore of national pride, given that it was marked in the Daily Mail as ‘A Victory over Europe’ (possibly a typo, but almost certainly a Freudian Slip) and that in the midst of waving union flags and shouting about taking our country back people seem to have forgotten that it wasn’t a British victory, it was an Allied victory, and that we wouldn’t have won it without the Russians and the Yanks. And I’m really not sure how I feel about marking every sodding anniversary with another blowout, even if this one had to be observed from behind closed doors. I do Remembrance Sunday, because it’s important we mark it somehow, but…well, let’s just say that this wasn’t really about the Second World War, was it? Nonetheless, I accept I am a minority view, and I share my views with people who will understand them, as well as occasionally dumping them on a blog no one reads.

Of course, not all of it went smoothly, as evidenced by this screen grab from Katharine Jenkins’ performance outside Buckingham Palace.

—

You do wonder what on Earth Churchill would have made of it all, although even if he were around to ask, I can’t help thinking our questions might have taken a different tack.

“Come on, be reasonable. It’s a bank holiday and I’ve not been outside in weeks.”

The Smallerpictures Video Dump (2020, part two)

The clock ticks, the politicians dither, and you’re still all stuck inside. But fear not, constant reader: we’re here to entertain you, probably by throwing on a gingham dress and clucking like a chicken. (This will either make sense or it won’t; if it doesn’t I’m not about to explain it.)

There’s a musical theme to today’s collection. That was an accident, a coincidence of scheduling. But I’m not complaining: these are usually arranged solely in the order in which I did them, so it’s nice when they actually have something in common for a change.

Shall we?

 

1. REMASTERED: The Rings of Akhaten, new score (March 2020)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but Ulysses 31 was a big part of my childhood. It didn’t matter that the first time I was encountering the monsters and sailors of the Odyssey was in a futuristic space setting. It didn’t matter that the episode with Chronos terrified the pants off me. It didn’t matter that the robot was annoying. The whole story was so epic in scale and ambition, visiting new universes, weaving complicated narrative threads of morality and free will, and telling a complete tale with a beginning and an ending. I even managed my own mashup of Doctor Who footage to accompany the theme song. It’s the sort of tale that really is ripe for some sort of revisit – I’d originally envisaged a trilogy of films but I now think that a limited run Netflix series would be better. Inevitably, of course, it would have to be updated, presumably by bringing in some sort of Freudian conflict between Ulysses and Telamachus (who was, in the original series, cloyingly loyal), as well as implementing a more contemporary score. Which is a shame, because the original (composed by Ike Egan, Denny Crockett, Haim Saban and Shuki Levy) really is a piece of work, encompassing disco, Focus-esque distorted rock and a full orchestra. Even on its own, it’s worth a listen.

Veteran readers here may remember that, way way back in the day, I had the idea of marrying up some of this music with the Doctor’s speech from ‘The Rings of Akhaten’. It was 2013, and I’d just discovered unscored audio, which exists in abundance if you know where to look – those lovely people who’ve isolated the dialogue and sound effects from Doctor Who stories so you can do what you want with them, chopping and changing bits without having to worry about background music. It made the editing process exponentially more satisfying, but it only works if you have an audio track that matches up with the video file you’re using, and thanks to differering frame rates and quirks of encoding, this isn’t always the case.

So the version I made years ago was, while well-intentioned, a complete mess. Seriously, it was all over the shop. I was chopping and changing and shifting and rearranging and still I could never get it quite right – there are moments where the Doctor’s tongue is somewhere and his voice is somewhere else, like a lagging Zoom call, and then – and then, after I’d torn out most of my hair trying to make it work, the bloody thing wouldn’t sit on YouTube because copyright. So I stuck it on Vimeo where no one ever goes, and consigned it to the bin of Things That Didn’t Quite Work and then tried to learn from the experience.

Years down the line, I had a go at remastering it, and this time I’m happy with it. And more to the point, both Facebook and YouTube are happy to host it. So that’s a win.

 

2. The Goats of Llandudno (March 2020)

We have kites nesting in the trees next to our garden. You can see them all over this part of Oxfordshire, but we see them a lot. Last weekend I was emptying the bins of an evening when I observed two of them, soaring and swooping in a dazzling aerobatic display, as they squabbled and scrapped over a piece of meat that one of them had collected and the other one wanted. For about a minute and a half. It was hypnotic, and of the moment, and I’m glad I didn’t try to film it.

Anyway, that set me thinking: just what, exactly, do our animals and birds make of this? They must be aware that something is different: that there are fewer people around (or that, at least, certain public areas are now quieter), that they can perhaps be a little bolder, that the air is a little less filled with carbon. That the planes are grounded. What does my cat think, for example, of the fact that we’re now all at home, every day? Certainly she must know something, even if she is happy to keep her opinions to herself – unlike my mother-in-law’s border collie, for example, who has had to adjust to the fact that she now only gets one walk a day.

Not long after they implemented the lockdown, a story broke about a goat infestation in the suddenly deserted streets of Llandudno (that’s in Wales, if you were wondering). I think I’ve been to Llandudno, or at least through it: it is a pretty place, if now a little less safe if you value your garden plants. There they were, hordes of horned beasts, chewing the hedges and kicking at the walls trampling manicured lawns underfoot (I was going to do the “This town is comin’ like a goats town”, but the Guardian got there first).

The Guardian got some great footage, but it was mostly silent, save the ambience. I had the idea of dropping in some of Murray Gold’s Doctor Who score – several things didn’t quite work, but the one that did was the music from ‘Heaven Sent’, notably the discordant, menacing rumble that fills Caerphilly Castle as the Veil casually stalks the Doctor. Matched with images of goats overrunning a village, it loses some of its potency. Still, it works.

 

3. Twin Peaks characters dancing to the Doctor Who theme (April 2020)

Oh, this is just a bit of fun. And the idiot on Facebook who said “Can’t you make something better?” can piss off. Seriously, piss off.

Have I Got Whos For You (isolated bank holiday edition)

OK. You remember that boot thing that was doing the rounds this week? Well…

It was a silly thing that took me ten minutes and I’m not even the first to do it, but it sort of exploded. An awful lot of Rocky Horror memes, and quite a few Barrowman references. Which kind of fits, I suppose.

Elsewhere: it’s World Naked Gardening Day, although some people are keener on the idea than others.

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Speaking of Mr Capaldi, here he is celebrating World Penguin Day.

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Sometimes when you’re bereft of ideas, you just have to check the trending column. Every day is a celebration of some sort; even the most ridiculous, mundane things (National Beard Day? Really?) get their own hashtag, sparking all sorts of inane chatter and, if you’re me, some hasty Photoshopping to catch the traffic. I won’t pretend I’m proud of this, not least because all the time I’m doing that I’m not writing the book, but we’re on lockdown and I keep telling myself it’s a mindfulness activity.

For example, 26 April was Alien Day, named as it is for colony LV426. It’s a little flimsy, but so is Pi day (which doesn’t work, incidentally, if you’re British, any more than the “Hey, look at that van go!” ones do). Still, any excuse.

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The Thirteenth Doctor’s been doing the rounds a bit this week. Here she is at a table tennis match.

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“No, honestly, it’s me; I’ve just lost a bit of weight since then.”

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I can’t work out whether the others have seen something off camera or are simply bored. Either way it looks like it’s all about to head south. Perhaps they’re better off staying closer to home.

“Yeah, you remember I mentioned the Woolly Rebellion…?”