Today the BBC announced that they would be making a Christmas special and a second thirteen part series of Doctor Who.
Tomorrow some of the tabloids will state that Christopher Ecclestone has quit and even the BBC News site is reporting “Actor Christopher Eccleston quits as Doctor Who after just one series. More soon.”
[Update - 00:23] Looks like it’s official. And is there anything bitchier than a Doctor Who fan? Look at some of the comments on the Outpost Gallifrey forum. 
I finally got Internet Explorer to behave properly with respect to the sidebar. By taking all the width properties off the individual blocks and adding instead adding the width to a new surrounding <div>, suddenly IE stops screwing up the first link in every list and sub-list. This means I can get rid of all the <!--[if IE ]><li></li><![endif]--> hacks. Yippee.
Now I just need to work out how to get rid of those annoying single pixel gaps in Gecko.
The latest comment spam to fail to get past WordPress’s filter contained a link to the usual sort of pill pushing site. This image was on the site:
Now, do you think they’re selling pills for bladder control problems?
£23.77 on Rebel Storm minis off eBay.
Running total is now £380.54
Today I got a comment spam, nothing very unusal just the normal online poker thing. But what was odd, and novel, about it was that the two dozen or so links in the comment all had rel="nofollow" as part of the link code.
Hang on, I thought, isn’t nofollow supposed to be defeating comment spam? (It’s not intended to stop comment spam hitting your blog, at least not straight away, but it is intended to make comment spam less attractive to search engines thus eventually killing it off by reducing the ROI.)
So why would a spammer send out comment spam with nofollow already included?
It could be that the spammer in question is an idiot who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Nice thought but most spammers are actually quite smart. I know it doesn’t look like it when you receive a million penis/breast enlargement spams which (a) you don’t need anyway 
and (b) don’t apply to your half of the population, but they are playing the numbers game in a big, and profitable, way and they do know what they’re doing.
So maybe they’ve discovered that some blogs are letting comments through without moderation so long as they have rel="nofollow" on all links, coupled with search engines that don’t yet support this new “standard”.
Or maybe they’re just experimenting to see if the above case is true anywhere. Damn I hate my blog being used as a lab rat.
Any thoughts?
Okay, we’ve all seen it now, so how was it for you?
This was not aimed at people who wanted Doctor Who to be the same as in 1975 (or 1965 or 1985). This was not aimed only at hard core SF fans. This was not aimed only at kids.
This was aimed at a 2005 family audience – think Harry Potter meets Buffy meets Lord of the Rings meets Casualty.
And every posting I’ve read that speaks about showing the episode to children or spouses says how much they loved it.
The only bad mouthing has come from a small subset of old-skool Doctor Who “fans” who seemingly hate any innovation. Well, here’s the news for those people – a show made for you would have a fraction of the budget, would have nowhere near the amount of talent and would be shown at some God forsaken time on a digital channel. So screw you.
How could the BBC manage to get bits of sound from whatever Graham Norton was doing transmitted over the top?
The CGI was a bit ropey in places, though it must be said that a certain plastic quality (a traditional problem with CGI) is appropriate for the Autons.
The sound mix was much better on transmission than on the leaked copy and I never had the issues with it that some people did. So let’s move onto…
The plot might be wafer thin but that’s partly on purpose. This story is told from Rose’s point of view. The Doctor is some mad man who blunders into life and starts babbling about aliens and intelligent plastic and stuff. For most of the audience this will be the first time they’ve ever seen Doctor Who so having a real person react to the Doctor in a real way is a great introduction.
The madness that enters Rose’s life plus the fact that they have to introduce the Doctor, the TARDIS, Rose, and some of the basic concepts of the series all in 44 minutes goes some way to explaining the very frantic pacing. You are out of breath by the end – but that’s a good thing. Were you gasping for breath and gasping to see the next episode? I was.
With fewer introductions, and some two parters, the other twelve episodes should be a bit less packed. But, again, this is Doctor Who for 2005 not 1975.
Christopher Ecclestone is brilliant. Manic, intense, flippant, goofy, angry – all in the space of a few minutes. He’s a great actor and will be worth watching every week, so long as he keeps on getting great lines. I loved his “I can feel it moving” speech.
He was very unexpected casting but the sort of brilliant characater actor who can make the part come alive. (In many ways what Ecclestone has to do is recreate the part – just as the other three “good” actors who took part did: Troughton after the first regeneration, Davsison after seven years of Tom Baker and McGann in the TVM. )
(The constant stream of comedians and light entertainment presenters that the tabloids had put forward as potential doctors was something that drove me mad. Comic actors have been cast in the past – Hartnell and Pertwee – but they played it straight. What comedy existed in Doctor Who was part of the character’s reaction to the situations he found himself in, not the essence of the character.)
Piper is fine. Nothing exceptional but nothing terrible about her performance (which is probably ideal – see above regarding Rose being a real person). Her Buffy moment at the climax is well handled as is her decision to run off with the Doctor at the end.
The new TARDIS interior is fantastic. Elements of the original, the Cushing film version and the McGann TVM version. I like it so far but I’m not totally sure it will work in the long term – it’s fine here where it’s used a getaway vehicle but presumably later on it will need to be used as a home base as well. Will we see any rooms other than the console room?
8/10 and bring on next week.
Lord Callaghan dies aged 92 which is the first Deadpool casuality of the year. Putting gleet into the lead.
New theme to celebrate the new series. I’d love to make one based on the new TARDIS interior but all that bronze and coral and fluorescent green is a bugger to get right in PhotoShop, so traditional it is.
I’m one of the naughty people who downloaded tonight’s episode but I’m going to be nice and not post my review until after it airs.
The things people list on eBay. Only 2150% markup on the shop price.
Five minutes to play. Wales lead 32-20 but Ireland are fighting back hard. The championship is probably safe (Wales need to lose by more than ten points to lose the championship) but is the Grand Slam?
Argh. And I’m due in town at six.