(With apologies to lonemagpie and everyone else who got the reference out on the web before I did.)

I say this every week - but Here Be Spoilers

Sometime it’s scary to think about how long Doctor Who has been running. Sarah Jane Smith joined the series when it was already eleven years old, and also in the year I was born. Which is a roundabout way of getting to the points that (a) Liz Sladen looks great and (b) I don’t have any original memories of her time as a companion (and very few of the K9 years) though I have seen some of her stories on video/DVD and I have childhood memories of the K9 and Company spin off. So I fell somewhere between those of Russel T Davies’s generation who have a strong attachment to Sarah Jane and those who started last year and who have never heard of her.

So what did I make the grand reunion? Good stuff. Liz Sladen was note perfect as someone who’s been waiting thirty years (or twenty depending on your attitudes to UNIT dating - and if that means nothing to you then for your own sake don’t ask) for her man to walk back into her life. And David Tennant did well with his side of the deal - his joy at seeing her becoming guarded as he saw how he had affected her and was affecting Rose.

In fact this was the best performance from Tennant so far, except for the classroom scene at the start. I like him much better when he’s playing angry or mysterious or surprised. His bouncy puppy motormouth act is rather tiring, but apart from the aforementioned scene it wasn’t much in evidence this week. With the impact of this week’s glimpse at the past and future for the Doctor and Rose, and with Mickey joining the crew, I hope that the shake up will mean fewer “we’re great we are” scenes with Rose and more of this good stuff.

Those of us how have read the novels are used to companions having to deal with life after the Doctor (in fact Sarah Jane has featured in a number of books) but for people who just watch the TV (whether new or old) this was new territory - and exactly the sort of more emotional but still sci-fi tone that the new series is rightly aiming for.

Oh look, they had K9 and giant bat monsters and they blew a school up. How couldn’t anyone love all that?

(Interesting touch - the skin colour of the bat monsters matched the skin colours of their human forms.)

Can Tony Head act or not? It seems that he can, but there’s always a vague (sometimes not so vague) whiff of ham about his performances. From the way the producers were salivating in Confidential you would think that the scene in the swimming pool was the greatest piece of acting ever seen. It was okay, and by the standards of Doctor Who was even very good. And most importantly it was a Doctor - villain set piece of the sort that’s been rather lacking in the new series. More please, but don’t get too up yourselves.

Plot? Not as weak as New Earth, for example, but still rather simplistic and rushed with a few loose ends (the rats?). But really, this was an episode about the Doctor and his companions (all four of them!) and the plot just gave them something to run away from and blow up.

Another 9/10 (in fact I’m almost considering revising last week’s down to an 8).

Very True Mood: giggly

Not my usual reading matter, but this month’s copy of New Woman was brought to my attention:

Well done Jo on getting the web site URL included.

This is how it works: Comment on this entry and I will give you a letter. Write ten words beginning with that letter in your blog, including an explanation what the word means to you and why, and then pass out letters to those who want to play along.

So snapesbabe gave me L

1. Lettice
   Of course, the one and only pink_weasel, my wife. The source of much happiness, silliness and messiness.
2. London
   My home for eight years and now my job. Huge, noisy, smelly, confusing, polluted, congested, over priced and badly run. Come to London and spend lost of money!
3. Lock Forward
   My preferred position back when I played Rugby. Fine when I was at school as I was taller than most of my classmates but a bit tricker in the sixth form and at college when some people just kept on growing and I was relegated to being a roving utility forward (hated playing at prop, and flanker in today’s Rugby is just a back who pretends to be in the scrum). And yes, the locks are the ones who stick their hands between the prop’s legs - want to make something of that?
4. Liberal
   I’m far too lazy to understand the nuances of political philosophy but being liberal puts one in the middle of the spectrum in Europe and in clear opposition to Bush at al. in the US. And that can’t be too bad a place to be can it?
5. Links
   The web wouldn’t be the web without them. The implementation of inks in HTML/HTTP is primitive compared to most hypertext systems but the simplicity of a one way, stateless system of linking is what allowed the web to take off.
6. Leather
   Sorry veggies. A good leather jacket can’t be beaten for looks and practicality. And then there’s skin tight shiny leather, mmmm…
7. Laughter
   See also Lettice. I like laughing, who doesn’t?.
8. Learning
   I never want to stop learning. Though unlike some people this doesn’t mean that I want to be a perpetual student.
9. Lead
   Actually most of my little friends aren’tr pure lead, and many have very little or no lead in them at all these days. The lead started to go out of toy soldiers over ten years ago when some US states brought laws in out of fear of lead poisoning. Never mind the termial kinetic energy poisoning from lead bullets…
10. Looms
    See also Lettice. I don’t know much about looms but they seem to cause equal measures of joy and stress to my beloved.

Very True Mood: sleepy

So will the safety elephant hang onto his job or not? And in the long run will it make a blind bit of difference if he goes? We’ll probably still end up haveing ID cards forced upon us.

Very True Mood: cynical

Just been reminded that today I’ve got to go and talk to a group of students from Central St Martins about blogs. I have very little idea of what they’re expecting from me, so I’ve scribbled a checklist of semi-technical issues that new bloggers might find themselves needing to think about.

• Allow comments or not?
• Single or multiple authors? Show identity of individual post authors or use a collective identity?
• Allow themselves to make some off topic posts (the blogs in question will all be fashion focussed)?
• Frequency and length of posts.
• Post-publication editing and updates. ‘Stealth’ editing.
• Searchability, both within the blog itself and from web search engines.
• Update notification services.
• Tags (as in Technorati not as in HTML).
• RSS.
• Trackbacks and pingbacks.
• Linking to other sites and especially to other links. Permalinks for inbound links (and finding permalinks when linking out to blogs).

Have I missed anything? I’m not there to give them technical advice on LiveJournal/Blogger/Word Press/whatever they’re using, nor am I there to give design advice.

Very True Mood: surprised

I was looking at the review of The British Museum on our web site:

The world under one roof and the greatest museum on the planet. Check out the controversial Elgin Marbles while they’re still there (be prepared - they’re not actual marbles, but impressive slabs of marble art).

Written with miss_newham in mind? Explanation

Very True Mood: drained

So here I am admiring the free Arthur and Mordred figures from Salue on Saturday and I see that there are already three for sale on eBay.

Very True Mood: cynical

There’s not really much to say about the new Sharpe story that started on telly last night. It seems to be a mash up of the three India books (Sharpe’s Tiger, Sharpe’s Triumph and Sharpe’s Fortress). The prologue was straight from Triumph and even set in the right year -1803, whilst the rest was bits and pieces from all over mixed up and moved to 1817 (to keep the episodes in their own chronological order; to excuse the older looking Sean Bean; and to get Harper in there somehow). Killing Lucille off screen presumably to free Sharpe up for a tumble with the generals’ daughter (who was displaying some gratuitous naked breasts on ITV1 at 9:30pm on a Sunday). Sean Bean doesn’t really need to act to play this part does he? And Toby Stephens makes a very good posh villain, possibly better here than in Die Another Day.

In other words, business as usual - good low brain escapism.

I wonder if they’ll do Sharpe’s Devil at some point? It’s the one full length story actually set after Waterloo and as the remaining novels are all tied to historical events set much earlier (Trafalger, Copenhagen, Torres Vedras) that would be difficult to muck about with as was done here.

Very True Mood: tired

Spoilers. Yes spoilers. Lots of them. You have been warned.

Right, let’s get the science bit out of the way. No not the moonlight and diamonds stuff, that’s just pure bollocks anyway. Queen Victoria did not, technically speaking, have haemophilia - it’s a recessive trait carried on the X chromosone and hence women only have it if both parents carried the defective gene. She was however a carrier and passed on the gene to her children. For her to have been “infected” in 1879, long after the birth of her children would pose a problem. Unless we want to believe that she went wolf and bit [1] all her children [2]. So it looks like the scratch was just a scratch after all.

The episode opens with probably the best fight sequence in the 43 year history of Doctor Who. Not actually a very hard task. But why were the monks wearing red? Didn’t it occur to the production team that everyone watching would think of those terrible BBC1 channel idents? And a good old fashioned scream at the end of the teaser - that would have been the episode one cliffhanger in old year following a whole load of wandering around on the moors and getting the various characters to bump into each other.

Good stuff - Ian Dury. Maggie Thatcher. Doctor James McCrimmon. Naked Rose (not naked enough for a large part of the audience). Nice Bad Wolf reference. Queen Victoria shooting the monk. Superb work from the supporting cast, especially Pauline Collins. The “books are the best weapons” line (borrowing heavily from the Buffy research scenes?).

So so stuff - The ‘not amused’ running gag. CGI Werewolf worked well in close up but moved a bit odd in long shot. The Torchwood links could have been, oh, about a hundred times, more subtle. Typically dodgy science.

Bad stuff - Not much.

So the Doctor has pissed off Queen Victoria now as well as Harriet Jones, Prime Minister. After destryoing his home planet is RTD now making him unwelcome anywhere and anytime in his adopted home?

The implication that the Doctor and Rose are getting too cocky and actively seeking out danger looks like it will be this year’s theme. Should be interesting to see where this goes. The things that niggle me about Tennant’s performance might be sorted out if he has to portray a Doctor who gets shaken up by a big mistake at some point.

I’m giving this one 9/10.

[Updates]
[1] - Ah, there was a line to this effect but I missed it first time around because I was talking about the haemophilia bit being rubbish.

[2] - Not all her children. Just those that had the haemophilia gene (a carrier like Queen Victoria has a 50% chance of passing it on to each child) - Princess Alice, Princess Beatrice, and Prince Leopold. And despite all the inbreeding amongst her descendents the gene has not reached the current royal family. Unless, as the Doctor implies, the werewolf DNA multiplies within the host body over the generations and stops manifesting itself as haemophilia and starts manifesting itslf as lycanthropy, but in that case Victoria wouldn’t have been doing any biting and so we go round and round in circles…

Very True Mood: cheerful

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