Doctor Who: Love & Monsters

Short version:

"Move over The Android Invasion, The Five Doctors, Attack Of The Cybermen, Father’s Day, Boom Town, Bad Wolf / The Parting Of The Ways, The Christmas Invasion and New Earth – here comes the latest successor to the title Worst Doctor Who Story Everrrrrrrrr."

Long version:

The plot:


Loner Elton actually remembers that Earth has been invaded by aliens a few times recently. He makes contact with several other loners to compare notes. They conclude that there is a mysterious man called The Doctor who seems to be involved, but they run out of information, so they form a pop band instead. Elton then falls in love with one of the loner girls – Ursula. Then a new loner – Victor Kennedy – arrives and begins to order them all about to find the Doctor by first tracking down Rose.

Elton then betrays Ursula to have sex with Rose’s mother, but is himself rejected when Rose telephones, and his cover is subsequently blown.

Meanwhile all the other loners apart from Victor and Ursula have been disappearing one at a time. Elton and Ursula discover that Victor is in fact an Abzorbaloff from the planet Klom, and has absorbed all the other loners into his fat body. They converse with their friends’ disembodied faces, which are still visible all over his now almost naked person.


After absorbing Ursula, the Abzorbaloff chases Elton down a nearby cul-de-sac, where he is defeated by the Doctor and Rose arriving. After the Abzorbaloff has melted into the pavement, the Doctor manages to save Elton’s ex-love Ursula, but only by welding her face to a paving-slab.


In the final shot, Elton says how happy he is with the love-life that he and Ursula the paving slab now have.

Things I liked:


The early slapstick, with the Doctor, Rose and an unnamed alien running in and out of multiple doors leading off of a corridor. It’s not something that Christopher Eccleston's Doctor could have pulled-off, but in such a flexible format as Doctor Who, this style has its place.

When Elton refers to Elton John at one point, we get a very quick (alas entirely random) clip of the singer himself thrown in for laughs.

The subtle comedy with which we followed the new friends’ early meetings, including when they got bored and set up a band. I too was getting bored at this stage, but I like it when a programme looks nothing like itself. It acknowledges the diversity of real life. That's why I liked Attack Of The Cybermen when it got hung-up on Lytton and his cronies planning a bank raid. There was no evidence at all that I was actually watching Doctor Who.

The Torchwood references were actually legitimate this week, being both in the present day, and said by an insider. In this case, Victor had stolen a copy of the Doctor and Rose’s file from Torchwood. On the other hand the ‘bad wolf’ reference as usual in no way told Rose to return to the Doctor, as was awkwardly claimed by the same writer in The Parting Of The Ways.


The utterly revolting alien Abzorbaloff. Looking at this almost-naked monstrosity, with several human-heads grossly protruding from all over, I had to admit that this time this author had impressed me with something truly way-out. It was a little derivative of Borusa’s fate in The Five Doctors, but transformative enough.

So, things I didn’t like:


Elton’s video footage. (he narrates the episode in flashback to his video-camera) Just show me one video-camera anywhere in the world that adds 4 corners over your recorded picture. Even these have been bent by the addition of an extreme wide-angle lens.

In summary, if the designer wanted to show that this was camcorder footage, he really would have saved time, money, credibility, everything by just leaving the picture as it was first shot.

Having assured us in The Christmas Invasion that this time the public would remember getting invaded by aliens, they apparently don’t. The implication is that Elton and his friends are the exception to the norm. It’s the same plot hole as in every contemporary story so far in the modern series. (as far as I know, there wasn’t a single present-day public alien invasion written for the original 26-year series – the two modern series have had three so far and counting)


The pantomime of the second half was too extreme for me. No attempt was made to make this monster anything more than an actor in an apathetically-made children's TV show. Even his mouth was left unmade-up. This was a parody of Doctor Who - the sort of thing The Krankees used to do.


Jackie seducing Elton - awful. Elton's keenness to betray his girlfriend - similarly. No sympathy there.

After having been absorbed, none of the Abzorbaloff's victims called out to warn their other friends. They think of doing this only after the viewer has learnt of their fate, although they have known of their own fate for some time. Once again, the characters can only act upon what the viewer knows, just like the Autons not knowing their own plan in Rose, the Adherents of the Repeated Meme not knowing they don’t exist in The End of the World, the Reapers not knowing they can chase or eat the Doctor while he’s off-camera in Father’s Day, both the Doctor and Margaret so many times in Boom Town, the Daleks not knowing they are invading Earth until they’ve been discovered in Bad Wolf, the Sycorax not knowing where the Doctor is until their deadly Christmas tree is discovered in The Christmas Invasion, Cassandra not knowing a) that she has a body-swap device, or b) that she doesn’t need it to do so until Rose shows up in New Earth, Albert not knowing his own plan until it’s discovered after his death in Tooth and Claw, the Doctor not knowing he isn’t drunk until he’s revealed it and the clockwork robots not knowing they’ve built a series of time-doors until the Doctor etc. have found them in The Girl In The Fireplace and the Doctor not knowing about all the devices he’s carrying in his pockets in The Age Of Steel. Here, the Abzorbaloff didn’t know he absorbed people until he first met the loners, or he’d have plenty more faces on his body.

Elton chooses to flee down a road so nearby where they regularly meet that he must know it to be a cul-de-sac.

After cornering Elton, the Abzorbaloff slows down his advance to give the Doctor enough time to arrive and defeat him.

The Doctor and Rose have no explained way of knowing where or when to materialise the TARDIS.

Rose, generally a rude self-centered character anyway, is at her most horrid in this episode when she hypocritically blames Elton for how her mum feels.

Rose doesn’t know who Elton is. She can only know who he is by having watched the programme, just like the Doctor impossibly knowing of Adam’s answerphone message in The Long Game, Rose impossibly knowing of both her childhoods in The Parting Of The Ways, and the Doctor and Rose impossibly knowing of Jack’s survival and subsequent career choice in the Children In Need Special.

Have you ever heard that old adage about learning from your earlier mistakes?

Authorial Questions

Four – count ‘em four - production concerns came to light after I’d seen this show…


1. The Absorbaloff had been designed by 9-year-old William Grantham for the children’s TV show Blue Peter’s ‘Design A Monster’ competition, not by the author I had credited it to.

2. Following transmission, much back-pedaling has been done by the production team to justify the story’s legion holes, actually claiming that the episode’s narrator – Elton – was the one who got so much wrong, not them.

This however does not account for the same inconsistencies being made in so many other episodes, as detailed above. (and that’s why I’ve listed them)


I have since read some of the prepublicity for the episode in Doctor Who Magazine #371, but nothing I’ve seen from before the episode’s transmission corroborates this claim.


3. The same magazine says that these odd social inadequates are meant to represent Doctor Who fans. I can’t comprehend of any reason why they would think this of their viewers, and certainly not why they would crow it in our faces. That 9-year-old kid must feel great. Thanks guys, gosh, I really respect you for that. Well, I respect you more than you do me.

4. Finally, I’ve been told that the script owes a great deal to the Buffy The Vampire Slayer episode entitled Storyteller. As I haven’t seen the show in question, I really can’t comment on this, but the pictures appear relevant enough to share...
















(screencaps from screencap-paradise.com and doctorwho.time-and-space.co.uk)

0 out of 10. And after last week’s script was so good.

Today Is A Good Day To Die On Stage

It was, quite unavoidably I’m afraid, all Brett’s fault.

I’ve been attending Cession Community Church, on and off, for about a year and a half now, but it’s only recently that I’ve successfully committed to calling it “my” church.

Last week therefore, as I was vacuuming up after the service at Botany Downs Secondary School, I had the pleasure of being asked, by the Pastor – the aforementioned Brett – to read the Bible in the following week’s service.

Yes! The subtext was undeniable - I’d been non-verbally accepted as a part of the regular Cession congregation! I was IN!

There was just one small, tiny, absolutely microscopically miniscule barely-even-worth-mentioning detail – Brett wanted me to do the entire reading… in Klingon*.

* Or Klingonese depending upon which part of Qo'noS you are from, and not to be confused with Klingonaase.

Brett’s extremely convoluted reasoning was that we were doing a series entitled “Up-Side Down Religion” about how Christianity repeatedly reflects the exact opposite of what one might expect of it. (the weak becoming leaders, God getting pulverised, then offering forgiveness instead of justice for his torture – that sort of thing) Brett therefore believed that presenting a reading entirely in Klingon would in some crazy way reflect this.

I really shouldn’t have been surprised – after all, tonight’s reading had been done by a ventriloquist’s dummy.

For the past 7 days therefore I’ve been contorting my tongue into all sorts of parts of my mouth where it can’t usually reach, to spit, foam and gargle my way through Luke 14:25-33 in the KLV. (Klingon Language Version) Flatmates Dave and Cathy probably overheard me and assumed I was either choking, demon-possessed, or from Ulster.

I’ve also been heavily reading up on the history of the Klingon language. (more correctly known as tlhlngan Hol)

Originated by James “Scotty” Doohan for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), it was greatly expanded by Mark Okrand for subsequent movies and episodes, and today has a dedicated following.

One visionary – Dr. d'Armond Speers – began to raise his newborn son to be bilingual in both Klingon and English. Ultimately the kid rejected the Klingon language – but apparently only because there were so few people other than his dad who he could use it with.

Considering my costume, for practical reasons I sadly decided to ditch the “later Klingon” look (the one with the knobbly ridges on the forehead) in favour of the simpler-to-achieve “classic Klingon” look (human with goatee beard), and discovered that, contrary to my preconceptions, they actually all had differently-styled beards.


So I began to grow my own one. My Klingon even had a name - Tannick.

This morning, with 3 hours to go, I was up in the city giving an interview to the national Christian Life Korean newspaper about the free English lessons I’ve been giving at the Salvation Army. Of course they photographed me, complete with the one-off goatee.

Fortunately the service at Cession didn’t start until 6pm, which gave me plenty of time to catch my bus.

Unfortunately, I discovered that there was no bus.

Thank God for the miracle of text-messaging.

Hi Dave. Bit of a disaster – no buses from the City to Botany all day on Sundays. Can you find someone to pick me up from Pakuranga Plaza at 5:50?

After a whole week of rehearsing, was my big Klingon debut to be cancelled due to Howick & Eastern Buses unexpectedly not running any 68s on Sundays any more? Would Pastor Brett shake his head in disapproval at my tardiness and vow to never let me darken the Cession stage again???

Dave’s answer managed to be both helpful and at the same time throw me yet another curveball…

Sender:
Dave
Sent:
30-July-2006
17:06:47
See what I can do. Also, since your number isn’t in my phone, can you tell me who we should be looking for… ^_^

Stuck on a delayed, crowded bus crawling to somewhere that wasn't quite Botany, and surrounded by people standing-up, it wasn’t very easy to rehearse.

6pm, and Dave successfully picked me up from Pakuranga, just as the service was simultaneously getting starting over in Botany. Incredibly, we were now racing down Te Rakau Drive to get there in time for Dave’s sketch in the service too, which was actually scheduled before my reading.

Oh, and I was getting hungry too.

We crept into the back of the congregation. A video-clip was running. Dave threw on his “Random Dave” costume in readiness for his sketch, and began making his way to the front as his theme music played.


As he was performing his bit at the front, at the back I was squeezing slowly into some army boots he’d brought for me, and a wig. My only privacy whilst changing was that everyone was looking away from me and at Random Dave.

At some point someone whispered to me that Greg was going to be playing my interpreter. Greg? Greg? But-but… who’s Greg??

It was time to go on. It was time to stand in front of 50 people, most of them strangers, on the far side of the world, wearing a ridiculous wig, an embarrassing beard and boots that were way too small, with a guy I’d never met before, and preach the Bible to them… in Klingon.


So we walked to the front. There was a bit of tittering. From somewhere in the second row I clearly heard Frank Ritchie - the mate who’d first introduced me to this church, snigger gleefully “It’s Steve!”

I had my script in Klingon. Extremely new friend Greg had his in English. I addressed the audience. Surprisingly, speaking English with a Klingon accent came quite naturally to me.

“On our homeworld of Qo'noS, we have heard of your puny English translation of the Bible, however to fully appreciate its teaching, you must hear it in the original Klingon.”

I looked at Greg, but he was speechless, and so we began our well-established finely-honed long-lasting rapport-defining double-act of many years’ standing.

14:25 DaH Dun multitudes were ghoS tlhej
ghaH. ghaH tlhe'ta' je ja'ta'
Daq chaH,
14:26 “ chugh anyone choltaH Daq jIH,
je ta'be' disregard { Note: joq, hate }
Daj ghaj vav, SoS, be'nal, puqpu',
loDnI'pu', je sisters, HIja', je
Daj ghaj yIn
14:26 je, ghaH ta'laHbe' taH wIj disciple.
14:27 'Iv ta' taH' SIQ Daj ghaj cross,
je ghoS after jIH, ta'laHbe' be
wIj disciple.
14:28 vaD nuq vo' SoH, desiring Daq
chen a tower, ta'be' wa'Dich ba'
bIng je count the cost, Daq legh
chugh ghaH ghajtaH yap Daq complete
'oH?
14:29 joq perhaps, ghorgh ghaH ghajtaH
laid a foundation, je ghaH ghobe'
laH Daq finish, Hoch 'Iv sees begins
Daq mock ghaH,
14:30 ja'ta', ‘ vam loD taghta' Daq
chen, je wasn't laH Daq finish.'
14:31 joq nuq joH, as ghaH goes Daq
encounter another joH Daq veS, DichDaq
ghobe' ba' bIng wa'Dich je qel
whether ghaH ghaH laH tlhej wa'maH
14:31 SaD Daq ghom ghaH 'Iv choltaH
Daq ghaH tlhej cha'maH SaD?
14:32 joq else, qaStaHvIS the latlh
ghaH yet a Dun way litHa', ghaH sends
an envoy, je asks vaD conditions
vo' roj.
14:33 vaj vaj 'Iv vo' SoH 'Iv ta'
taH' renounce Hoch vetlh ghaH ghajtaH,
ghaH ta'laHbe' be wIj disciple.

Half-way through, as the microphone began to glisten with saliva and the front row started thinking about putting up umbrellas, my blood ran cold. The Klingon-translation program that Brett had used – at http://klv.mrklingon.org - had had trouble with translating a few of the words, so I was simply clouding them in a thick Klingon accent, and hoping that no-one would notice. But one person was noticing – me. I was noticing because, somewhere, somehow, Greg and I had got out-of-sync.

Effectively, he was now reading the Bible in English, while I was translating it for the benefit of any Klingons that might be present.

Or were we two verses out? About 98% of my brain was concentrating on trying to speak Klingon, so I wasn’t even sure who was actually ahead. Either Greg was going to run out of English to say, or… I was going to run out of Klingon.

Unless I could… oh no. No no no, I couldn’t possibly start improvising in Klingon.

I listened very intently to Greg’s inflexion, straining to hear if his tone was dropping considerably at the end of each verse, indicating that it might be the final one.

Greg wasn’t letting-on.

Two verses before the end I looked at him quite intently, something that was easy to do in character. He looked back at me. I looked back at him. The audience probably thought that I was about to bite his head off.

He seemed to have finished. We silently nodded at each other, approvingly. I turned to the congregation and, completely unscripted, yelled “Qapla’!” (“Success!”) It seemed like the thing to do. We began our exit. It was over. We had indeed maintained our Klingon honour.

Then, just as we were leaving the stage, I spotted Brett creeping on with the stand for his sermon notes. After the sheer adventure of the past week, due entirely to him and his mad crazy ideas, I stopped, in full view of everyone, and got away with something that precious few parishioners anywhere in the world ever get to enjoy doing to their minister.

On the stage, in front of everyone, I growled at him.

And he backed away from me…

Only another month and a half to go before my plane-ticket runs out again, and today – whadayaknow – I suddenly get offered a new full-time job for a new company with a new Work Permit!

I’m a bit cautious – perhaps in contravention of my faith in God to come through for me, I’ll believe it when I see it.

Smash Your Radio and Save Yourself

A mid-to-long term ambition achieved tonight – I dropped into Hope City Radio with a 10-hour (well, 9.75-hour) compilation DVD of past shows.

Literally – I’d taken the final 10 editions of That Friday Feeling from April-June this year, digitally remastered them from the original CDs where available, popped in some adverts, idents and the necessary legal messages at the appropriate times, and voila – from now on it’ll regularly be a Friday Feeling marathon on 106.7 FM.

This is why I try to keep archives of everything – so that God can go on using them if he wants to.

1 Kings 22:19-23 (NIV)

19 Micaiah continued, "Therefore hear the word of the LORD : I saw the LORD sitting on his throne with all the host of heaven standing around him on his right and on his left. 20 And the LORD said, 'Who will entice Ahab into attacking Ramoth Gilead and going to his death there?'
"One suggested this, and another that. 21 Finally, a spirit came forward, stood before the LORD and said, 'I will entice him.'

22 " 'By what means?' the LORD asked.
" 'I will go out and be a lying spirit in the mouths of all his prophets,' he said.
" 'You will succeed in enticing him,' said the LORD. 'Go and do it.'

23 "So now the LORD has put a lying spirit in the mouths of all these prophets of yours. The LORD has decreed disaster for you."

El Aura (The Aura)

A man wakes up on the floor of an ATM kiosk. It's night. He's alone, but for the aforementioned ATM, beeping impatiently for him to take his money. Bleary-eyed, he completes the transaction, and stumbles out into the night.

Who attacked him? Why? How long has he been unconscious? Disconnecting the viewer from such crucial (assumed) facts is a classic hook, yet here such disconnection is precisely what the film is about.

The man is a taxidermist, and as such spends much of his time alone, recreating accusingly lifelike animals from their own dead furs. Work for which disconnection is an essential quality.

Yet he actually maintains this distance from everything else in his life too. His objectivity enables him to plan a bank robbery down to the finest detail, yet with so little experience of interaction, he lacks any of the confidence necessary to make it happen.

He can't even face a hunting weekend with his (apparently) only friend, but when his wife leaves him, his need to connect with someone forces him to make a half-hearted attempt. He goes, but cannot bring himself to share the reason why.


Fearing the death of one of the animals he's been stuffing for a living, he ruins the day for his friend, and winds up left alone with a stroppy teenage boy, a dog, and a similarly uncommuicative battered woman. Oh, and a corpse. Not much chance of making any connection with this lot.

And yet, therein lies his strength. As the odd people he meets try to fill in his silent blanks, he gently slides into assuming the dead guy's identity, and inherits the guy's dodgy scheme to rob the local casino. Playing along with these people's expectations of him is his only way of escaping punishment for the criminal's murder, but it's also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to turn his incredible mental skills into actions.

The publicity for this movie makes a great deal of the "complex" robbery, yet it is far more about both the safety and tragedy of avoiding getting hurt. The battered woman is desperate to escape her abusive husband, and personifies the lead character's fears of facing such a hostile world. Yet she is also his salvation, as with the very last thing he says to her, he faces the risk of suffering everything that he fears, for no possible reward but her own comfort.

For me, this film's pondering tempo led to an overlong running-time and, dare I say it, a lead character with whom I just couldn't connect. (!) However I found Ricardo Darin's tortured performance utterly believable, and an uneasy reminder that in this sometimes Godawful life, you just have to take the bad things with the good, or inside you curl up and die.

Hair Today, Gone To Manukau

One thing that I never pay for these days is a haircut.

For years now I’ve been getting it sheared at a barber training centre in Auckland’s Central Business District. They need heads for their students to train on, so they offer a free supervised cut to anyone who’s game.


Originally they were in the Elliot Street Apartments literally next door to Matthew’s old flat, on whose floor I had slept on my first night in Auckland back in March 2004. It was a curious feeling – having my haircut whilst looking out at exactly the same view. (give or take a few feet)

Then they moved across to opposite Aotea Square, where they still are today. The thing is, I’ve moved too – all the way to Howick, but by my calculations, it’s still cheaper to catch the bus into town than to pay for a chop locally.

Having read on the website that they close at 3:30, I therefore paid my $5.40 bus fare and walked in at 2:53 to be turned away with “We close whenever we feel like it.”

My protests were met only with the suggestion that I pay for one next door.

I was fairly annoyed about that. Much of my day was now both expensive and useless, and all because I had believed something they’d put on their website specifically for me to believe.

RRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrr…

No problem, I’d been offered another free haircut by some of my Asian students who lived in Manukau and ran an actual barber’s shop. Yet whilst I welcomed the chance to see them, it bugged me that I’d said such unpleasant words to my regular place.

Today therefore I went back to Queen Street, very early, had my hair cut by a Red Dwarf fan called Belinda, and when I left it was all smiles and politeness. Everybody had won.

And would you believe, they later corrected their website.

À Nos Amours (To Our Loves)

Forget sex, swearing and violence – this film features gratuitous loneliness.

Suzanne is an ill-disciplined teenager, having grown-up always getting her own way. At 15, she's having sex with almost every guy she talks to, yet with each passionate liaison, her hopes of love grow fainter. Her family, having failed to teach her values earlier, compensate afterwards by physically punishing her.

Finding love in neither great sex, nor her warring family, it seems that only her gutted ex-boyfriend Luc has feelings for her that endure. Alas, her bruised emotions render her unable to risk exploring this with him, and he eventually falls for her best friend.

This is not a story-driven film. As soon as something starts to happen, Director Maurice Pialat cuts away to the next scene, casting aside events that might distract from the real-life characters we're watching. Indeed, he presents their everyday carelessness with shocking starkness, and dwells upon their individual pain with beautiful patience. On the big screen it's possible to really study these people's faces, and wonder just what on earth's going on in there.

The downside to this approach is that it subtracts from the viewer's understanding of the characters' motivations. For example, in one scene Suzanne is, apparently, engaged. Without having seen any evidence of this, the viewer is forced to suppose that she might just be lying.

Sandrine Bonnaire's performance as the self-serving Suzanne is simply faultless. Her descent from a happy, pure teenager into a numb, sassy bride-to-be all feels like such a galling waste.

If only, instead of seeing what she could get out of a relationship, she'd looked at what she could put in.

Talking Through My Butt

Last Friday, I accidentally walked into a reality TV show.

As usual I was just dropping into Alt TV to hand-over that night’s edition of That Faithful Feeling for Patrick to broadcast on Hope City Radio, when I had to negotiate my way through a large crowd of punters at the entrance on K’Road.

“We heard we could audition to be TV presenter here” one told me.

Yeah, yeah that sounded like Auckland’s voluntary community TV station to me.

They were short-staffed, so had taken their need and turned it to their advantage – by transforming the search into a reality TV show. Probably to be called Alt TV Idol or something.

So I ducked back out of shot as the 20-odd contestants were all filmed walking en masse up the stairs and towards the TV studio.

Once the shot was in the can, I followed them in, found Patrick, gave him tonight’s radio show, and then stopped to take-in what was going on around me.

Forms were being handed-out. Contestants had to fill in their NAT details along with answers to other, more creative questions.

Well, you know what I was thinking.

I whizzed through the form.

If you were putting on a music show in Auckland, and you could book anyone, which 3 bands would you choose?

My answer included The Beatles and Elvis on the basis that dead people couldn’t fail to draw crowds of legendary hugeness.

I gathered from the form that TV2 might be culling some of the footage to use somewhere too.

Looking at my phone, time was against me though. It was about 10 to 7, and in ten minutes’ time I had to be around the corner teaching English to Korean migrants at the Salvation Army on Queen Street.

10 minutes. 10 minutes. 9 minutes.

I watched them all taking turns to sit in front of a camera, hold a 1970s in-vision microphone, and introduce themselves for 10 seconds. Hanging back until last, I sized up the opposition, and was pleased at the quietness the camera was inducing. This lot were going to be a pushover.

My turn. Sitting-down, I leant forward, fixed the camera with eye-contact, and bellowed:


“Hi – my name’s Steve Goble, and I present a show called That Faithful Feeling on Hope City Radio every Friday night, playing the very best in contemporary and classic Christian music, and I’d love to be able to bring some of that to Alt TV.”

That was my 10 seconds, and, whatever they might think of the words I’d chosen, my delivery had been definitive. I raised my eyebrows at the cameraman to check if he’d got it okay.

“Yeah…” he replied thoughtfully, “…yeah. You really need to be using…the microphone.”

…

Oh yeah. That’s right. Everyone else had been holding that 1970s in-vision microphone. Where had the 1970s in-vision microphone gone?

With every single frame of this going down on tape, I looked all over for it.

I had been sitting on it.

After a second take, I made my excuses and fled for the welcoming arms of my Korean English students. Reaching the corner of K’Road and Queen Street however, I stopped. I could sense that I was at one of those pesky life-changing decisions.

On the one hand I could go back and do the interview stage. I was pumping with adrenaline, and ready to spew verbal diarrhoea all over any question they could possibly throw at me.

But then, I don’t much believe in TV any more. I couldn’t take on any job that required me to constantly encourage people to stay in and spend more and more time watching a box instead of living their lives.

And yet, making TV shows is what I’ve spent most of my life wishing I could do. That’s how I got into radio. That’s why I started making movies. That’s how I started writing, and ultimately led to this blog. Because I had wanted to make TV shows.

Maybe I would be rubbish.

I looked down Queen Street. Almost 7 o’clock. The Koreans would be waiting for me. They’re a punctual lot, these Asians, and I’d promised them I’d be there.

Deep in my heart though, I knew I should go back. God would fix it so that the Koreans arrived late or something. I was 100% certain of it.

But I just couldn’t break my promise. Or maybe I didn't believe in myself. And then again, I really did have no intention whatsoever of being recruited by any company in such a condescending manner. If they wanted to phone me to arrange a proper interview (like a real station would for a real presenter), they had my number.

So I went to the lesson.

And the first Korean arrived 20 minutes late.


A week later, (tonight) I was teaching the following English lesson to the same people, when suddenly my mobile warbled that I had a text message, from… Karen? Fellow Brit Karen from Hamiltron, who I haven’t seen since Parachute? What on Earth could she be texting me about?

Curiously I pressed READ.

Sender:
Karen
Sent:
21-July-2006
19:23:07

Nice on Close Up mate!

Doctor Who: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit

The most impossible thing about this planet is that, just for once, it’s not called Earth.

Let me rephrase that – this is the first Doctor Who story since 1988 NOT to be set on or in orbit around Earth. For all viewers under the age of 20, the fact the TARDIS can travel through space must have come as something of a shock.

It’s also the seventh story in the modern series to feature crowds of silent zombies, following as it does...

Rose (plastic zombies)...

The Unquiet Dead (dead zombies)...

The Empty Child (gasmasked zombies)...

The Christmas Invasion (blood-controlled zombies)...

New Earth (ill zombies)...

Rise Of The Cybermen (Cyber-zombies), and...

The Idiot’s Lantern (faceless zombies).)

(I’m not counting School Reunion, although technically there were some young zombies in there too)

This week, being as I say away from Earth for a change, they presented us with alien zombies.


(collective mind, no thoughts of their own, etc…)

All that aside, I actually found these two episodes unexpectedly brilliant. I'm really quite shocked that the BBC have accidentally come out with something this good. The story, the dialogue, the tone – it was like a completely different show. (flexibility being one of Doctor Who’s key ingredients) Maybe they should have called it The Impossible Programme.

Landing on a planet in orbit around a black hole, the TARDIS gets irretrievably lost in an earthquake. We presume it’s been sucked into the black hole, until we find out that it's actually only at the bottom of a chasm, which robs the moment a bit.


Afterwards, the Doctor is bleakly reflecting on his new life without the TARDIS, when he realises that he’ll now have to settle down and get a mortgage: “No, no, that’s it, I am dying, it is all over.”

The build-up to the bad guy’s release was also both sinister and funny.


Rose: (BEING SERVED DINNER BY AN OOD) “I did that job once – I was a… a dinner-lady. Not that I’m calling you a lady. (EYES HIM UNCERTAINLY) Although I don’t know, you might be. Do you actually get paid though – do they give you money?”

Ood: (POLITELY) “The beast and his armies shall rise from the pit to make war against God.”

Rose: “I’m sorry?”

Ood: (bangs his translation-device irritably) ”Apologies. I said ‘I hope you enjoy your meal.’”

And the whole thoroughly hopeless atmosphere, with even The Doctor deciding not to investigate the pit any further. His analysing his own thought-patterns and preconceived belief-systems were scenes that you could really wonder along with him.

Alas, ill-conceived script-editing still barged it's way in, with the most painfully unworkable Torchwood advertisment yet, and a teasing prediction about Rose's future death which, if true, means the villain could also forsee his own plan's failure. (maybe he was actually looking in a mirror when he said “You will die in battle”) Tellingly, he taunts everyone else with only their past.


The black hole caused alot of problems too, not least why the ancient race had gone to so much trouble entombing the baddie next to it, instead of just in it. (I'm ignoring the Doctor's line in part one about how even light can't escape from it as both he and we were watching it). And how on Earth does the TARDIS show up again at the end - just there next to him?

Still, very watchable.

Finally, a word about the villain, who seemed to think that he was Satan.


The encyclopedia of baggage that comes with this concept was, as usual for non-Christian fiction, largely glossed-over. No-one prayed, and no-one made the connection that real evil, which Satan (or whatever you call him) is supposed to be heavily involved with, still thrived both while he was imprisoned and after his defeat at the end, although Ida came close. When writing for any “character”, you have to follow what we already believe about them. It’s really the first thing you look at.

That said, this script was clever enough to only imply Satan’s identity (and that all religious writing on the subject is just misguided), so it is possible to watch the show and discount the villain’s many names as simply lies or madness. The story wasn't, after all, saying that Satan is an alien, but rather inviting one to challenge one's preconceptions, and to that end, it couldn't draw conclusions.

When challenging preconceptions however, the task is surely to offer something at least equally plausable as an alternative.

And no-one, Christian or otherwise, really believes that Satan is just a big physical monster chained to a rock.

Great absorbing stuff - 8.75 out of 10.

I can see the headlines now: “GOBLE LIKES NEW DOCTOR WHO EPISODE ABOUT SATAN”…

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

Tonight, Rhett was driving Sarah and myself to meet Katie at the cinema, when - quite seriously – he asked me the following question about my clown friend Herschel:

Rhett: “Your friend Herschel – is he really a clown, or is he just a clown for fun?”

It was to become an evening of difficult-to-answer questions...


Once in the cinema, as we were all watching the opening credits roll, Katie suddenly leant over and whispered “I can’t remember – how did the last one end?”

Blowed if I know.

“Happily ever after,” I blagged. This seemed a reasonably safe bet, given that it had been a self-contained movie from Hollywood. Still, I knew my answer hadn’t quite contained the level of detail she required, so in the absence of any genuine recollection, I just kept on shamming it.

“There were definitely credits at the end. And a production company logo. I remember leaving the cinema.” This wasn’t going well. I was reasonably sure that I could keep on giving fake answers for a while yet, (I had still to get onto Herschel's kolourfully kopyrighted kostume next to me) but I knew that sooner or later I would run out of fudge and have to recap what had happened in the plot. Fortunately, at that moment the opening credits unexpectedly finished a few minutes early, and I was in the clear.

Despite my amnesia of its ending, Pirates Of The Caribbean 1 had actually held my attention really well for its two hour duration, but it wasn’t a film that I had ever cared to sit all the way through again. In fact I was disappointed that it had dropped its piratey hook half-way through to delve into samey science-fiction horror.

This first sequel therefore held a strange wallpapery interest for me. I expected to have fun for two hours, but to do so I’d left my brains back at Rhett and Sarah’s place, and was now just waiting for inane belly-laughs.

And I wasn’t disappointed.


This was a movie with two utterly brilliant set-pieces, and a script that some people had actually sat down to work quite hard on. It also assumed that I remembered the original in detail, which we’ve already established that I didn’t, but unlike with Doctor Who, I was perfectly happy to take the whole thing on faith.

The thing that I did remember – that infamous 'But why did you burn all my rum?' line – was sadly over-milked on several occasions, when just one reference (preferably the “hide the rum” one) could have been hilarious.

And that long-lost ingredient of science-fiction - depth. The scarring soul-searching of Jack and Elizabeth as they both make choices against their opposing lifelong ethics… and the devastating consequences… awe-inspiring stuff. Fascinating to believe in and reflect upon afterwards.

After the extremely long closing-credits, (paradoxically they had to fit in the belated opening credits here as well) the post-credits tag scene had us all in stitches, and there was some discussion in the car park about whether there would be a third film.

I’d be thoroughly disappointed if there wasn’t. What other franchise leaves so many threads hanging without having already filmed them?

(available here)



Related Posts:

Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl
Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End
Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides