Occupy White Walls Does Doctor Who (part two)

Last time we spoke, I was telling you about art. Well, not art so much; more the practice of curating it. There are probably rules to this, although I’ve never bothered to learn them; it’s more a matter of common sense. Bench positioning is crucial. Watch your lighting. Galleries with wallpaper are a gamble: everything looks better on white. You need to make the most of blank space, to hang with care and consideration, allowing the artwork room to breathe.

I can’t remember at which point I decided to build a TARDIS interior, but it made perfect sense. Here was a space you could fashion from the ground up with walls and doors placed more or less wherever you want: the notion of a space that opened out onto a seemingly infinite expanse was actually quite easy to do. I called it, for want of a better title, @biggerontheinside.

What I really wanted was to do a nice sort of walkthrough where I film myself wandering around the place, telling you all about it. But my ageing PC is simply not up to the job, and the 7 FPS bit of test footage I managed to cobble together was enough to convince me that this was, at least for now, a terrible idea. I may rethink a little further down the line – everyone likes videos – but for the moment you will have to put up with still images and a bit of narrative from yours truly.

We start out in the Twelfth Doctor’s study.

Well, sort of. You can get a vague idea of it, can’t you? I mean there are bookshelves and wine bottles and a desk of sorts, although it’s way too big. The mirror over at the far end is a teleport that leads you back to my main gallery, and the window beside it overlooks a pleasant little courtyard. But it’s the blue wall in the corner you need to look at. As entrances go it’s pretty terrible, but it’s where the magic begins.

The main console room, if you hadn’t guessed, is designed to be a variant of the one Capaldi was using. You can’t easily do round rooms in OWW, but it sort of works, particularly if you’ve got one of those fish-eye effect filters on your phone. The main problem was assembling a central column which had a sufficiently convincing time rotor, or at least something that might pass as a time rotor. I got round it by using a tree.

Dotted all around the TARDIS are little passive-aggressive exchanges between the Doctor and Nardole. I realised they’d spent about a thousand years together, so they’re basically flatmates. This first one is a nod to ‘The Pilot’.

Can I say at this point that I was really quite pleased with the corridor lighting? It isn’t often you find something in OWW that just fits what you’re trying to do, but this one really gels.

Wander a little further along and you’ll encounter the library – specifically the one Clara wanders into during ‘Journey To The Centre of the TARDIS’. You can’t see it properly here, but it’s a vast, multi-levelled thing, and thankfully nowhere near the swimming pool.

It’s no great secret that ‘Journey’ ranks among one of my least favourite episodes – seriously, it’s a great big turkey of a tale – but it did provide me with a fair bit of inspiration for this little collection. One of the silliest things about the episode was the Architectural Reconfiguration Suite (you remember, the one with the Stuff That Can Make Other Stuff), but I’ll go out on a limb – pun intended – and admit that it was quite fun to build. Lighting is very resource-hungry in OWW, but I managed to pull this off without overloading the system. You know, apart from the crashing.

Now we get to a bit that’s entirely made up. It occurred to me, fairly early on, that I really ought to put some actual art into this place, and thus I came up with the idea of the Memory Garden, a place in which the Doctor stores paintings and mementoes of his previous exploits, sort of like the Batcave. This is half Oxford college quadrangle, half National Trust driveway.

I tried to make sure that everything in this room had at least some Doctor Who connection, no matter how tenuous. This is the ‘City of Death’ pillar; Van Gogh has one all to himself.

When you examine a piece of art in the in-game AI, you have the opportunity to leave comments about it, both positive and negative. That photo on the right has a thread full of people saying “DON’T BLINK!”

‘Journey’ wasn’t the first Doctor Who story to feature extensive exploration of the TARDIS. We also saw a fair bit in ‘The Invasion of Time’, although for some reason in that story the corridors resembled an abandoned hospital. Still, wander down the stairs in my TARDIS and you’ll discover a whole basement full of nods to this particular story. Here, I’ve tried to recreate the Undergallery.

Baker didn’t always hang out in the white room. At times he favoured a secondary chamber done out in panelled wood, and that was an opportunity to try out something a little different. As I think I mentioned before, console rooms are a pain in the neck to do, because it’s extremely difficult to build a hexagonal structure, so this will have to suffice. At least the wood is convincing.

Just along the corridor from the secondary console room was the botanical garden, as seen in ‘Invasion’. There are a lot of plant and tree assets in OWW, so I made the most of them. If it looks a mess, that’s deliberate.

Perhaps the bit I’m most proud of is the swimming pool. It’s not the one we saw in ‘Journey’ – that dimly lit Olympic sized one that Clara witnesses as she’s wandering the corridors, although I daresay I could have had a go at that if I really wanted. No, this is the one in which Leela takes a plunge just before they head back to Gallifrey at the beginning of ‘Invasion of Time’. It’s a more little art deco than it was on TV, and I don’t know why the Doctor’s built a sauna at the far end, but ours is not to reason why.

I may have mentioned before that the default floor in OWW is water. So it was dead easy to build a pool: you just create it at ground level and the water is filled in for you automatically. See the mosaic on the right? I built that, tile by tile. It took ages, but as with everything else in this inconsequential little vanity project, it was totally worth it.

And that’s your lot. I’m still building in OWW, irregularly, but the latest project is going to be a long time coming, given that it’s a full scale recreation of Portmeirion, as seen in The Prisoner, right down to the plastic bubble on the beach. When it’s done, you can see it. Until then? Be seeing you.

Have I Got Whos For You (aaannnddd…we’re into October edition)

Well. We’ve got a bumper crop of memes for you today. This is because I have spent much of September writing other things, and also because my WordPress account is playing up and I can only, for whatever reason, access this from Firefox. It has taken me all of a week to figure this out; clearly the technology is moving on without me. Cripes I feel old.

Not as old as this lot, who were discovered waiting for the new Bond movie.

What else has been going on? Well, the anti-lockdown demonstrations have continued in earnest, although an overheard conversation between two unmasked protesters indicates they’re not all as unified as we might have thought.

Elsewhere in London, the Doctor and Clara run out of corridor at the most inopportune moment.

And some of the other Doctors react to that recent Radio Times poll.

There are tensions on the alien mothership during the Sycorax leader’s re-election campaign.

In UK politics, on a publicity drive to highlight the Government retraining scheme, MPs take it upon themselves to visit a number of people from the arts sector trying out new careers.

“No. Absolutely not. Go away.”

Still, all the spin in the world can’t hide the fact that the NHS is sorely under-funded.

Of course, it happens on the other side of the pond as well.

“Hang on, Mike. Hold still. I think there’s something on you.”

“Don’t look at me like that. There’s more than six of them, and we’re supposed to call it in.”

And over in Downing Street, there’s an angry reaction when the powers that be discover that curfew laws apply to them as well.

“They shut the bar at ten? Bastards.”

Have I Got Whos For You (shameful catch-up edition)

Gosh. Has it really been a month? I’m sorry. I’d make the excuse that we were away – that usually works – but we weren’t away that much; I think things have just got on top of me a bit. There are reasons. You don’t get to hear them. Still, it’s time we got back into the swing of things – I have a bunch of new videos to show you, the second half of that Production Myths debacle that landed me in hot water in at least one Facebook group, and…well, who knows? But we’ll talk about something, usually Doctor Who. Come with me, semi-constant reader, as we tread the fine line between social distancing and all-out lockdown that will hopefully take us to Christmas, and a new episode that is bound not to live up to the hype.

 

First, this.

Cue brief Facebook explosion.

 

“HANDS! FACE! SPACE! HANDS! FACE! SPACE! HANDS! FACE! SPACE!”

—

Thorpe Park, and it looks like we’re all screwed.

—

“Listen, we’re gonna get you out of here. But with the benefit of hindsight, I think you probably shouldn’t have tried to sing Rule Britannia.”

—

“Gavin? I think I’ve fixed that algorithm.”

—

Posted without comment.

—

And finally: we have the Prime Minister to thank for this one. Well, at least he’s good for something.

Have I Got Whos For You (end of term edition)

It’s the first of August, and I haven’t posted in ages, and I’m about to head up to Staffordshire for a few days, and we really do need a meme dump. So what’s been going on in the hallowed hills of Whovania these past couple of weeks?

 

To honour World Chocolate Day, which happened a few weeks ago, we present this deleted scene from ‘Pyramids of Mars’.

—

Landing on the moon for the first time in July 1969, Neil Armstrong is disappointed to discover that the Russians have apparently beaten him to it.

—

“REVERSE! REVERSE! REVERSE!”

—

There is joy and celebration across the country as it’s announced that swimming pools are ready to re-open.

—

But some people really don’t take too kindly to being told to wear a mask.

—

“Man. Woman. Person. Camera. TV.”

—

Super Saturday, 2264.

Elsewhere, using a relatively new technique allgedly pioneered in Botswana, scientists have been able to determine that the enormous Sarsen stones that make up the bulk of Stonehenge actually came from a forest outside Marlborough, about twenty miles up the road. Of course, the research team has yet to determine precisely how they were moved.

—

Bristol, and not everyone is impressed with the replacement Edward Colston statue.

—

“Oh, she doesn’t mind.”

—

And in a secluded factory somewhere…

“Right. Everyone slowly and carefully back away in the direction of the TARDIS.”

Have I Got Whos For You (beachcombing edition)

“Right. This is gonna be fun.”

I’m at a loss. The hottest day of the year, and you go to the beach? Not only the beach, but one of the busiest, most popular beaches in the country? What, did you think that no one else was going to have the same idea? Or did you think it was like those voting cartoons where everyone assumes that they’re the only ones who feel this way and so nothing gets done?

I mean, it’s Bournemouth. We don’t go to Bournemouth, even though it’s the nearest place with any sand, at least as far from here. We’ll drive up the road to Southborne. Or Boscombe, which is quite pleasant since they did it up and which has its own police box. (Yes, it’s still there, at least it was last August.) If we’re feeling particularly adventurous we may – emphasis on the may – walk along to Bournemouth city centre (God knows you can’t park there), if it’s the middle of autumn, or a weekday. But in the middle of furlough, in thirty degree heat? Yes, I could have driven my family there, or I could have taken them on a hike through the Danakil Desert instead, which would have been mildly more sensible.

Anyway: it’s Canada Day, so here, for no reason at all, is a picture of Peter Capaldi accompanied by a moose.

My parents went to Canada years ago. They didn’t see any moose, although there was a bear or two. At the beginning of the year, before all this, Emily and I had a spa day at a local hotel – one of those Groupon things – and while we were swimming casual lengths the two of us considered blowing some of my mother’s inheritance on an all-out trip to New York and Canada in the summer. Then there were bats and jokes about coughing and then it all stopped being funny, so we’re glad we’d already postponed it until next year.

Meanwhile, the Eleventh Doctor’s been in lockdown so long, he’s beside himself.

There are many ways to cope. For example, I’ve been going back through Grand Theft Auto 5, doing all the bits I never got round to doing on my first playthrough, a few years back. You can cycle up mount Chilead, learn to fly a plane, get in a few rounds at the golf club – oh, and do yoga. I was perusing Google images on International Yoga Day, just the other week, when I noticed that one of the classes depicted in stock photos seemed to have picked up a stowaway.

 

—

Art news now, and in Spain, hidden cameras reveal the culprit in the botched restoration of Murillo’s The Immaculate Conception.

—

And as the entertainment world mourns the loss of venerated actor Sir Ian Holm, the Doctor introduces Clara to the new version of Handles.

—

We return briefly to politics, as Matt Hancock, having failed to correctly name Marcus Rashford on Good Morning Britain, drops another clanger outside Downing Street.

—

Deleted scenes from ‘Daleks In Manhattan’ clearly show the influence on Boris Johnson’s post-lockdown strategy.

—

And during a crisis at the local hospital, the Doctor inadvertently places the world in jeopardy when he elects to demonstrate his fitness levels to Amy and Rory.

“No, really. I’m fit as a butcher’s dog. I can do loads of press-ups. Hang on, I’ll show you…”

The Smallerpictures Video Dump (2020, part one)

Population 51,201. Possibly not for much longer.

One good thing about a lockdown: I’ve had a chance to amalagamate all the leftover copy I’d not got round to filing these last few months. Which means we’re in for a busy few weeks here at BoM, as we go through series retrospectives, how-to guides, and even a bit of myth debunking along with all the meme roundups and general idiocy. But we’ve also got a few videos to get through, so let’s rewind to the beginning of the year, when we were all still allowed out.

 

1. The Name of the Master (January 2020)

Don’t get me wrong. ‘Spyfall Part 2’ was quite fun, but this whole thing really was a bit dom / sub, wasn’t it? Never mind that the relationship between the Master and the Doctor is already tapping a wealth of unresolved sexual tension, long before either of them swapped genders: a scene like the Master’s ‘Kneel before Zodd’ moment took it to the next level, and it really is like handing a silver platter to the fan fiction writers along with a note reading “Go on then, you win”.

It was Pip Madeley who turned this into a Fifty Shades of Gallifrey type thing – he may even have called it that; the Tweet is proving elusive so we may never know. My own version is a good deal less suggestive and not terribly funny, relying as it does on the conceit of the Doctor forgetting (either deliberately or through sheer scattiness; you pick) exactly whom she’s supposed to be addressing. The tricky part was dropping in names that weren’t saturated in background noise (something I’m not particularly adept at removing), which meant several otherwise viable candidates had to be removed. Still, there were enough left, and the end result hangs together. Just.

 

2. Twice Upon A Time: The Deleted Scene (January 2020)

This seemed like an obvious joke, so I ran with it. It was a crazy week: everyone was busy arguing whether Jo Martin’s Doctor was pre-Hartnell or pre-Pertwee (the consensus: it had to be the latter, because she had a police box and otherwise EVERYTHING HARTNELL DID IS RUINED). Then ‘The Timeless Children’ came out and all hell broke loose, given that it essentially validated just about every tinpot headcanon theory in existence. In the meantime, I’d been making this: having promised the others he’ll be quite some time David Bradley takes a walk into the snow, and then pops back to his TARDIS, only it’s not his TARDIS. Nor is it Capaldi’s. You see where we’re going, don’t you?

 

3. The Angels Take Manhatten, Rescored (March 2020)

Wrestling. That was it. There was content to show and plot lines to advance (and, one suspects, a series of expensive contracts to fulfil) and so the WWE, in their infinite wisdom, elected to broadcast Wrestlemania 36 within the confines of a studio instead of an arena. There were no queues, no gigantic foam fingers or homemade banners, no jubilant teenagers fired up on coffee and Red Bull giving their predictions. Just a lot of thirty-year-old men, pumped with steroids and rehearsing their lines in a mirror. Yes, I know you could hear the trash talk. I don’t want to hear the trash talk; I just want them to work the crowd. If there’s no crowd, it’s all rather flat.

The fans seemed to know this as well, which is why a Twitter user who goes by the name of SideEye elected to overdub a heartfelt confrontation between Brad Wyatt and John Cena with, of all things, the Laura Palmer theme from Twin Peaks. It was mad, but it worked (and it was, as you’ll see in the article I’ve referenced, not the first time someone had paired professional wrestling with Angelo Badalamenti). There is something about that music that is both emotionally overwrought and just a little bit artificial, which is the entire point of Twin Peaks and one reason why it’s so brilliantly unsettling. And while I concede they’re very different shows, it really ought to work with Doctor Who as well, surely?

It does. If you can time it so that final, climactic change from minor to major happens at the precise moment Amy vanishes, everything else just sort of slots into place. Who knew?

The 1975

My beloved Emily has a birthday this morning. She is the best of me: a constant, soothing presence in a difficult world, kind and beautiful but also strong and resilient; loving and faithful; considerate and considered; intelligent and practical; vulnerable and authentic. She drives me mad. I can’t do enough for her. We agree on the important things and disagree on the largely trivial. She is my reason for getting up and my solace when going to bed. She is my best friend and she has carried me – we have carried each other – through more tempestuous waters than I care to recount; suffice it to say it’s been a difficult year and we have fought our own separate battles, alone but never really alone, and I think we’re stronger because of it.

I was never any good at art. I can’t draw or paint. Hand me a chisel and I’ll split a hole in a wall with it. Even my photography isn’t up to much – those few shots worthy of note have been mostly down to luck and good timing. I’m sure that anyone can learn, but I also think you have to have a certain aptitude, which I do not posess: my human figures are inevitably disproportionate, with wobbly misshapen legs and huge heads, a sort of Peanuts meets the last eleven minutes of Akira. My art teacher (a man I recently bumped into outside my local Greggs, of all places) was a lovely man but I think he despaired of me.

But one thing I’ve got reasonably good at over the years is dabbling with Photoshop – that careful refining of hues and meticulous brushstroking around the edges of objects and people really is a form of mindfulness – and thus today I bring you four fresh offerings. Three of them are self-explanatory, not to mention Who-related: I am particularly pleased with one, although I’ll leave it to you to work out which. The last image stems from my growing realisation that, over the years, I’ve taken a disproportionate number of photos of Emily walking away or standing with her back to the camera – partly because she’s not always happy to be photographed face on – and quite a few of these seem to be on beaches.

So I took five of them across thirteen years of history (and a number of different beaches) and turned it into a quintet. What would happen, I’ve long since wondered, if you encountered a bunch of previous versions of you? So it’s a sort of Five Doctors thing. There, I knew there’d be a connection somewhere.

Have I Got Whos For You (seasonal cheer edition)

I’m on a bit of a clock today, so this is going to be light on the text front. We’ll just get on with the pictures, shall we?

This week in world news: while posing for that Time Magazine cover, Greta Thunberg inadvertently blunders into a scene from series 7.

—

There are disturbing developments at a pub in Suffolk.

—

And in a deleted scene from Game of Thrones, Bryn Terfel is coming.

—

Also coming soon: the Eleventh Doctor stars in The Collect Call of Cthulhu.

—

And Tom Hanks, fresh from promoting Mr Rogers or whatever he’s doing now, begins work on the upcoming Forrest of the Dead.

—

Speaking of the Eleventh Doctor, news emerges of an abandoned exchange from his regeneration story in which Clara voices what we’ve all been thinking for years.

—

And Chris Chibnall capitalises on Boris Johnson’s Love Actually parody to bring us this.

—

Last but not least: filming for the new Ghostbusters trailer is interrupted by an unexpected visitor.

“Seriously, Amy? Again?”

The Smallerpictures video dump (2019, part six)

Midnight. Not a sound from the pavement. Until the unmistakeable noise of boots on concrete, a plaintive, distant roar, and the cry of “DOCTOOOOOOORRR!”

There are cats in today’s video roundup; of such things you may be sure. But we’ll get to that. First, the Doctor’s off to Norway.

 

1. Doomsday: The Sitcom Version (July 2019)

It’s no great secret that I’ve long found the ending of ‘Doomsday’ unintentionally amusing. Oh, I know it tugs at the heartstrings. I know there is a great tragedy in the story of Rose’s death and eternal separation from the Doctor, where ‘death’ means ‘dropped off a stack of papers at the council registry office’ and ‘eternal separation’ means ‘off screen for a year so Billie Piper can get her teeth done’. At the time, it was like the end of the world. For some of us. I was sitting there wondering if Davies would be able to outdo his “I think you need a Doctor” line from ‘Parting of the Ways’. I was not disappointed. The Doctor flits in and out of vision on a beach in Glamorgan and bottles out of the conversation in the middle of a sentence when the signal drops. He even burns up a star, for pity’s sake. The TARDIS carbon footprint must be astronomical.

So here’s a thought: if it’s funny by accident, what if we made it funny on purpose? What if I stuck in a laugh track? And the theme from Me and My Girl? How many Tennant fangirls and humourless puritans could I annoy? As it turns out the answer is ‘quite a lot’, although doing a quick headcount I do think I made more friends than enemies. It works reasonably well, given that this was a first attempt, and I know what I need to change for next time. “It would work better,” someone said, “if you had less general tittering and stuck to some belly laughs. As it stands, it becomes a lot of white noise.” Which is a perfectly valid criticism. “OH MY GOD YOU SICK UNFEELING BASTARD HOW COULD YOU MAKE THIS?”, I’m afraid, is not.

 

2. The Cats Trailer, Doctor Who style (July 2019)

The Cats motion picture is the new Class. It’s a film nobody asked for and nobody really wanted. It exploded onto the internet in a nightmarish display of peculiarity: a half-lit freakshow, filled with pawing and acrobatics and bizarre, decontextualised choreography. James Corden bounces and Taylor Swift sits in a hammock and Judi Dench plays Judi Dench, only in a wig. It was horrible. “And besides,” said hundreds of Doctor Who fans everywhere, “we had cats in Doctor Who and they looked much better than this lot”. Which is true, of course, although it’s not exactly fair: we’re talking about two largely separate mediums, and the requirements for the two types of role are completely different. It doesn’t help that I actually can’t stand Cats, although I do love a bit of Lloyd Webber: it is a disjointed melee of stories and ‘character’ songs, some of which work, some of which do not, and a tedious, oversung finale.

Within a day of the first trailer drop, someone had uploaded their own version, which married the footage with the music used in the trailer to Us, with alarmingly good results. And however misguided the complaints about makeup and CGI, there was – I realised, just in the nick of time – a definite market for a Who-themed remake. And so I took footage from ‘Gridlock’ and ‘The Shakespeare Code’ and stuck in a couple of carefully chosen soundbites and then put the whole thing together on one fevered, insomnia-drenched evening back in the summer. To answer a frequently asked question, the cats from Doctor Who aren’t in here because they simply wouldn’t have worked next to this lot: you’d just have a weird and confusing juxtaposition of different styles of feline and sometimes it’s best to just keep these things simple. As it is it hangs together, much like Tabitha is currently hanging from the edge of my tablecloth. For heaven’s sake, I’ll feed you in a minute.

 

3. Flatulent Clara (August 2019)

Fart jokes are brilliant, aren’t they? I make no apology for loving them to bits. Russell T Davies built an entire recurring villain around them. Dropping in a fart gag, in any capacity, is a good way to sort the wheat from the chaff, because supposedly sophisticated people are always very quick to tell you how juvenile you’re being and how toilet humour is the lowest form of humour. Sod the lot of you, I say. Fart jokes are funny, just like a pie in the face is funny. I love a bit of Oscar Wilde as much as the next man, but who can honestly say that The Importance of Being Earnest wouldn’t have been improved if Lady Bracknell had tripped over the handbag and landed flat on her arse?

There are plenty of brilliant fart redubs on YouTube – a Star Trek one and a quite spectacular reimagining of the restaurant sequence from ‘Deep Breath’ are just two of the mashups I’ve seen comparatively recently – but when I was dipping a toe into the murky waters of flatulence gags, it was Clara, of all people, who stood out. I think it’s the eyes. Jenna Coleman does most of her acting with her eyes, whether she’s gazing fearfully at a rampaging monster or staring incredulously at the Doctor, waiting for him to finish monologuing. There are lots of moments like that, and it struck me that – as good as her acting was – many of them would have been improved with a couple of gas bombs in the background.

This originally started life as a single scene – the notorious console room ballet that opens ‘The Rings of Akhaten’, in which Clara and the Doctor are seen cavorting round the TARDIS interior like a couple of tryouts for Swan Lake. Try as I might, I was unable to get it to gel, but it then occurred to me that Clara’s penchant for meaningful pauses and penetrating stares extends far beyond that one story, so I widened the scope to encompass the whole of series 7B. Akhaten still has a reasonable part to play, but you’ll also see shots from ‘Hide’, ‘Cold War’ and ‘The Crimson Horror’, among others. I tried to do something similar the other week with Jodie Whittaker, with only limited success – despite the scrunching she really doesn’t lend herself to that sort of humour. I might have another look. In the meantime, Clara’s done three series. Keep the clothes pegs on standby.

Have I Got Whos For You (Star Wars-tinted interlude)

We open with a deleted scene from ‘Cold War’.

—

You always wondered why they favoured close-ups for that scene, didn’t you? Well, now we know.

I was up at six this morning scrubbing through the Rise of the Skywalker trailer for stuff to Photoshop. Heaven knows there was no other reason. I was about to say I can’t remember when Star Wars trailers got so dull, but actually I can: it was the moment they released the full trailer for The Last Jedi, which was to all intents and purposes a direct copy of the one they did for The Force Awakens, and the moment that you realised that not only had they decided to emulate the teasers, they were also doing the same for everything else. I know I probably shouldn’t moan about this but there is something very lazy about the whole process: this idea that because something works you do it again, in exactly the same way, purely because people expect it.

So in no particular order, you have…ominous voiceovers! People glaring through the blades of ignited lightsabers! Running through forests / corridors / the snow! Wide shots of battle fleets! Cruise ships! Spacecraft flying through explosions! Ambiguous shots of first generation characters who might be killed off! General tedium! Next time, can we have a little information on the actual story? I’m not suggesting the entire story – the world does not need another Double Jeopardy – but something, anything that the gossip rags can talk about with actual substance, rather than combing Reddit threads for fan theory. God the rumour mill is tedious this time around. If it’s not mind games about Rey’s parentage or the redemption of Kylo Ren, it’s people trying to decide whether C-3PO is going to turn evil or sacrifice himself for the rest of the crew, or possibly both. At the same time.

They also talk about Matt Smith, of course – whom we assume was cast as the Emperor, although there was some fun to be had going back through the trilogy working out who else he might be playing.

—

What else has been going on? Well, the fallout about whether Doctor Who has become too politically correct continues in earnest, with the Real Fans on one side and the True Whovians (I leave it to you, dear reader, to determine which is which) on the other, and the likes of yours truly in the middle – wondering whether history is destined to repeat itself, wondering when “bad writing” became a cop-out soundbite for describing something you didn’t particularly enjoy without actually making the effort to explain why, and also wondering how it’s possible for a bunch of human beings to be so obnoxious and generally shitty to each other about a wretched television programme.

—

I mean God almighty. Still, on the upside, it’s something to read while you’re trying to circumnavigate Occupied London.

“How are we supposed to get through that lot?”

I’m not sure how I feel about Extinction Rebellion. I’m not sure how I feel about Greta Thunberg either, to be honest, but I suppose that’s the point – just as E.R. wouldn’t exactly be doing anything of consequence if we didn’t find them a nuisance and a pain. They’re getting out there and doing stuff, and perhaps that’s better than not doing anything, which is what I do. There are conversations to be had about their use of Starbucks and McDonalds, rather than the home-grown organic fair trade produce I presume people expected them to be carrying in those cotton rucksacks – either you can criticise them for double standards, or you can applaud them for doing what they can and acknowledge that everybody’s human, with the possible exception of some residents of South Dakota. I tend to veer between one extreme and the other, according to how generous I’m feeling. Still, it’s better than the Mercedes van-driving idiot who appeared on Good Morning Britain dressed as a vegetable – and who then, having already crossed the line between effective parody and preposterous nonsense while most of us were still in bed, proceeded to drag out a banana from his pocket and pretend it was a phone, in a scene worthy of Bert and Ernie. Now there’s a Rubbish Monster waiting to happen.

“Yeah, the red one next to the – hold on a second. Ah, Doctor. We meet again.”

To take our minds off all this, Emily and I elected to catch up on Holby City – we’d watched the episode where the plucky Scottish nurse was trapped in the holiday cottage with baited breath, and then lost interest when it sputtered out in a disappointed sigh as things failed to resolve the way we hoped (i.e. with a corpse). Here’s a fun fact: if you unravel the small intestine in any adult male, it will stretch to precisely the same length as this ludicrous Chloe and Evan story arc, where the locum doctor followed the predictable path from ex-boyfriend to current squeeze to husband to demented abuser within the space of a few weeks, before finally meeting his death when the respitory machine malfunctioned and Kate Stewart’s son left it just a little too late before telling anybody. Suffice it to say the bastard had it coming – he was a slippery customer and would almost certainly have weaseled his way out of things, as we were told in a clumsy monologue that reinforced, with the subtlety of a sledgehammer to a walnut, precisely how justified Cameron had been in his breaking of the Hippocratic oath. Evan was a nasty piece of work – a plot device used for issue highlighting, which is always Holby at its most annoying – and he would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for that meddling kid.

Things are back to normal now, except Sacha Levy appears to have gained the ability to teleport across from the hospital entrance to the taxi rank, completely unobserved, as long as the cameras aren’t on him. Weeping Angel, anyone?

—

It was Emily wot noticed. That should probably go on record, because she gets huffy when I don’t acknowledge her as the source for these things. (It reminds me of a paper that arrived in the proofreading pile some years ago: the first draft read “Professor ____ also acknowledges his wife, H.C. _____, who read through the original submission”. When the corrected proof came back from the authors, the final paragraph read “Professor ____ also acknowledges his wife, H.C. _____, who read through the original submission and provided many helpful amendments”.)

And she has been brilliant these past months: has that been written down yet? She is so much better than she realises: the rock and the anchor and the port in the storm and all the other cliches you can think of – but a cliche doesn’t invalidate truth. She is the best of both of us, and in a world where everything is hazy and grey and mad, she will carry you home.

Seriously. I could do this all day.