My Motley Meanderings

Check out the latest Hijinks Ensue comic strip.

At Orbital 2008 last weekend I directed another episode of Torchwood Wobblevision. For the uninitiated this involves randomly choosing an episode of Torchwood from a selection of pre-prepared scripts, casting the characters pretty much at random, staging each of the key scenes in places around a convention hotel using any props that happen to come to hand, taking photos of them, and posting them on the web as a captioned slide show. I stole the idea from Blake's 7 Wobblevision to do at Year of the Teledu and it was so much fun that I volunteered to do it again.

So, without further ado, I present Day One.

We ran into a few teething troubles related to casting but I have some ideas for ways to make the scripts easier to work with in the future. The crowded social space we were working in and the fact that we overlapped with one of the most popular items of the whole weekend caused some slight problems but I think the end result turned out pretty well, I had lots of fun doing it, and I'd like to thank the cast (especially Carys) for being such great sports.

In case you missed the one we did at YotT, it was Cyberwoman.

I have already volunteered to do another episode at Redemption 2009 and could easily be persuaded to do it at other cons I'm going to if you give me a bit of notice to sort out the scripts in advance.

Here is a sneak preview of my entry for The Great Crystal Cyberdrome Exhibition that will be held at Orbital 2008 next week. ( Read more... )

I just saw Phoo Action, a new TV programme which aired on BBC 3 earlier this week. What brilliant fun. It's an action comedy near-future SF with a very cartoonish feel that takes the mickey out of a wide range of topics from Shaolin Kung Fu to the British monarchy. Highly recommended.

Apparently it was only the pilot episode but BBC3 has commissioned a full six-episode series to be aired next year.

Why did nobody tell me they're showing a new series of every dirty-fingernailed engineering geek's favourite TV programme?

ETA: I've just realised they're only now showing the final few episodes of the series they started earlier in the year. With such a long mid-series break and minimal advertising anyone would think Channel 4 are trying to sabotage SC's viewing figures...

Congratulations to tlanti and steverogerson, who just appeared on The One Show on BBC1 in a piece about the Cult TV con.

I got this meme from sharikkamur.

When you see this post, quote from Doctor Who on your blog/journal.

Ace: "Do you feel like arguing with a can of deodorant that registers 9 on the Richter Scale?"
- Dragonfire

That was my favourite Doctor Who since The Empty Child. A strong intelligent protagonist, clever plot, genuinely scary enemy, and not a sonic screwdriver in sight. More like that, please.

I correctly guessed the winner again. Interesting that the best singer won despite a rather unimpressive performance - the exact opposite of what happened last year. I was a bit surprised by how poorly the UK scored, and as for Ireland, their performance was pretty bad but certainly not the worst in the contest. It seems like the block voting is actually getting worse. I wonder if we can enter separate Scottish, English, Welsh, and Northern-Irish songs next year?

I've finally seen the last episode of The Prisoner, years after I first saw the rest of the series. What wonderful, incredible, bizarre, inexplicable nonsense... The perfect way to bring it to a close - instead of resolving the mysteries, explode them. Whatever must McGoohan have been smoking when he wrote it?

This programme just gets better and better... I don't think I'll be able to think of Bring me Sunshine (not a spoiler) in quite the same way again.

I saw the third episode of Torchwood last night and loved it. Great cameo role for Gareth Thomas, who played the title character in Blake's Seven. I doubt it was a coincidence that they ran a supernatural-themed story near Halloween. As others have said, I too was expecting the ghost of the little boy lost in the railway station to ask, "Are you my mummy?"

It always felt to me like the new series of Doctor Who were trying just that little bit too hard to be something they weren't. Holding onto some old traditions like the ubiquitous Sonic Screwdriver while abandoning others such as the design of the Tardis control room made it seem slightly schizophrenic. Torchwood is free to be its own thing without forty years of prior tradition, and it takes full advantage of that.

John Barrowman as Captain Jack Harkness is just as cool as he was in Doctor Who, Eve Myles as Gwen Cooper is simultaneously intelligent, driven, vulnerable and gorgeous (I love that "giant eyes" thing she does when she's surprised), Gareth David-Lloyd as Ianto Jones is intriguing (I'd be surprised if he doesn't end up with a bigger role in later episodes), and Burn Gorman as Owen Harper is just as bizarre as he was in Bleak House. Naoko Mori as Toshiko Sato (who formerly had a cameo in Doctor Who) seems a bit underutilised at this point - come on Russell, give her a few alien corpses to dissect!

I'm finding it impossible to avoid comparing Torchwood to that other new BBC series, Robin Hood. I was expecting Torchwood to suck, frankly, and have been pleasantly surprised by how good it is. Robin Hood on the other hand seems to have missed the target. The actors are all smug, irritating, and far too pretty for their own good. Keith Allen provides some comic relief as a caricature of The Evil Sheriff of Nottingham, but it's not enough to hold the series together, and the issues explored in the stories (the effects on the English peasant class of being taxed into the ground to fund a religious war in the Middle East) are so oversimplified that you have to be careful not to think or it all unravels. As a result I'm having a hard time suspending disbelief long enough to enjoy the series for what it is - light entertainment with archery and silly costumes.