Endemol has excelled even its own proud record of providing “entertainment” in the true tradition of the Roman arena.
It’s about to produce a reality show on Dutch tv where three people who need transplants will compete for the kidney of a dying person.
What can you say? What fun. Life for one winner. Death for 1 person for sure and possible death for the 2 losers. Continue reading
A job in any sci-fi movie or tv series is a job for life.
Actors get constantly recycled within the genre. Think of the self-effacing officer from the original Star Trek turning up as the sinister Bester in Babylon 5. Officer Sun and the captain from Starscape becoming SG1 crew members. Quark from Deep Space Nine in Buffy. The Doctor from Voyager in almost everything. Even the Quantum Leap man became the captain of Enterprise (did I mention it doesn’t have to be good sci-fi?) And so on.
The same applies to tv cop shows. (There is a certain amount of cop/sci-fi crossover but I guess that probably just constitutes an acting career rather than a pattern. E.g. The blonde woman out of last year’s series with the fishy aliens is in more cop & medical shows than she was in fish episodes.)
I am now going to make a mockery of my pure and true love of the Wire by sharing my personal TV trivia game.
(Don’t judge me too harshly, here. I’m just following HBO’s lead. They offer downloads of “Naimond’s” choice of classic hip-hop, or such.)
The original game consisted of trying to spot the entire cast of the Wire in old LawnOrder episodes. Anything from the LawnOrder stable counted (classic Law and Order, Special Victims or Criminal Intent. Or even the new spinoff, with lawyers, that’s set slightly outside the format, that I haven’t really got into. In fact even old episodes of Homicide might count, if I am feeling pushed for successes.
So far, I can only really claim Avon Barksdale, Omar and the female cop for definite, because I only recently realised the gameplay was up to a really extended scoring system. Bit I think I’ve seen Stringer Bell in one. And I’m sure I started squealing with joy because Marlow was spotted in an episode.
Then I thought, even with the most intense TV watching, it wouldn’t be possible to match the whole cast to Law and Order spinoffs or precursors.
So the new challenge is to match every speaking part actor in the Wire to EITHER a Law and Order character – 1 point each episode – OR the most comically different role in any visual medium – 5 points, but it’s got to be REALLY funny.
This lets me score points for McNulty in the 500 and Bodie in the Cosby Show. Omar scores 10 in anything, for being so extreme. Naimond’s mom would score 10 as well, but I’ve never seen her in anything else.
My ambition is to find the whole Barksdale crew. Contributions welcome. All the same, it only counts if I actually see it. Shortcuts like searching IMDB cost 10 conceptual penalty points for nerdiness above and beyond the call of duty.
My alternative ongoing games include:
This is further to the post about Dr Who’s references to other sci-fi and some very knowledgeable comments, one of which pointed out that sci-fi movies owe a fair bit to Dr Who.
Spotting the refences and cliches makes up a good part of the enjoyment of sci-fi. There’s an inclusive list on cthreepio among other sites. Here are a few of my own favourites:
All alien races speak English. This is very convenient, of course. (Although, unusually, Klingons do have their own language.)
The most advanced computer can be completely confused into breaking, by being asked to process a contradictory statement.
Any high spec computer will become sentient. And homicidal. It can then only be defeated by making use of the surprising design fault listed above.
Non-humans usually look exactly like humans or exactly like humans with insect heads or with some wierd ear, nose, eye or forehead attribute.
About 70% of all non-earth civilisations are identical to those of medieval Europe. A further 20% are basically the same as Ancient Egypt.
The crew of any spaceship will happily mate with non-humans but there is less than 1% chance of crew members of different earth “races” ever getting involved with each other. Which is odd, given that space travel is only achieved when the earth becomes one big happy international family.
The holodeck is always broken in such a way that game characters will come to life and threaten the life of the crew, while the crew will never be able to end the game. Nevertheless, the holosuite is never dismantled. The crew will still go blithely into it. They will always choose Nazi Germany or an interplanetary war or some other blatantly dangerous setting.
Any Stargate crew member that you’ve never seen before who speaks a few lines at the beginning of an episode is doomed to die in the next few minutes. Being assigned to SG6 is a death sentence
Another pretty good Dr Who episode tonight.
Visually, Dr Who is getting better and better. There was better rendering (a good space ship and a bubbling sun) and more interesting lighting (red and blue on the face close-ups) than we’d expect from normally cash-short British tv.
Altogether, it had the look and feel of “proper” sci-fi. Racing headlong into the sun is par for the course. (Solaris, and the film where Bruce Willis has to destroy an asteroid.) So is being trapped on a space ship with an unknown evil entity. (Alien, 2001.) As well as being stalked by a mechanical humanoid figure. (Predator, Terminator, Judge Dredd.) The computer female voice that keeps giving out unemotional messages of the pressure of time (can’t think of a reference sorry, but it seems standard…)
The main visual influence seemed to be the Alien movies (with a nod to Das Boot, but maybe that’s just me.) Both male and female technicians looked like the crew of Alien (vests, combat suits, artfully arranged sweat) . The ship also had the same sort of look and there was an intense claustrophobic feel to the plot, as well as to the sets.
This episode was called “42”, with a nod to Douglas Adams (the “answer to the universe”) and to “24” (the episode was supposed to be in real-time and there was a 42 minute timer countdown providing constant pressure).
So, a bit of an art-house-for-nerds episode. This series is shaping up to be the best one ever. Although this is from someone who loves sci-fi clichés. And who thinks that the very first Dr Who series – with that weird Quatermassy feel and the old man with long white hair – and the mainly-played for laughs Tom Baker Dr Who were the only really good bits, out of what was often dire.
[tags]42, dr-who, episode, rave, sci-fi, sci-fi-cliches, television, tv, BBC, Douglas Adams[/tags]
The Wire (official “best tv series ever”) shows how the need to mess about with statistics distorts the nature of policing. It’s called something impenetrable like “juking the stats” (duking? jooking? dooking? On the basis of a brief Googling, I went with juking as it seems to mean “being deceptive”.)
The drive to constantly improve crime figures – numbers of crime and clear up rates – leads to several wrong-headed initiatitives, such as harrassing large numbers of people for petty misdemeanours in pointless swoops and attempting to ignore the existence of large numbers of bodies left by Stansfield’s crew.
As in art, so in life, to add yet another cliche to the “crimes against cliche use” tally in this blog’s statistics. British police are now protesting about the distortions created by the drive to improve statistics.
Continue reading
In an old Wire-ophile post here, I called the Wire Dickens for the 21st century.
In case that wasn’t clear enough, this was supposed to be a compliment…. I was referring to Dickens’ passionate awareness of social injustice, the huge cast of wierd characters and his plots that took in every section of society. (Obviously, I’m alive in the 21st century, so I think the Wire outshines Dickens, but that’s just me.)
I have carefully failed to rave endlessly about Wire series 4 because I blatantly can’t do it justice. Plus, I have to see it a few more times to even begin to tie together the plot strands and understand the subtle ironies and get all the references. yada. yada.
But wow, there is actually going to be a Dickens for the 21st century and its name is Dickens World.
No, really. A faked Victorian London is being created as we speak. According to the BBC:
The overall effect is rather like Disney painted brown and plunged into twilight.
“Highlights” will allegedly include a Great Expectations boat ride, a Haunted House of Ebenezer Scrooge, Newgate Debtor’s Prison and a Dotheboys Hall Victorian classroom.
I must admit to being baffled as to who this is going to appeal to. I thought of myself, aged about 8, an obsessive reader who was lucky enough to live next door to a public library. I vacuumed up all of Dickens’ books, although even I recoiled at the mawkish bits. I certainly wouldn’t have enjoyed Dickens World at all.
Kids who don’t enjoy reading Dickens are not going to have any idea what any of the set pieces are about. So I imagine it will be a depressing experience to visit a downbeat version of Disney World for them.
Even in the event that a non-reading-obsessed child becomes interested by it and picks up a copy of Great Expectations or David Copperfield…. Bloody Hell, these are A Level English Literature set books. That will put off the average kid from reading for life.
This park was thought up by the creator of Santa’s World and (Hans Christian) Andersen World. Theme parks based round a Christmas myth and a collection of only moderately disturbing fairy tales. ( Not a Brothers Grimm Theme Park, you might note.)
Somehow a theme park based on child labour, workhouses, disease, debtor’s prisons, homeless orphans and child thieves’ gangs doesn’t seem like very much in the way of fun.
No, what am I thinking? I am putting in my patent claim now for the concept of a Wire theme park. (I have already drawn up the specs. I’m not wasting an investment opportunity by putting the details here.)
No, forget that. It’s in the USA, it may not be harrowing enough. What about a theme park that shows what life is like in parts of the cities of the developing world. Do you see the entertainment potential in child labour, orphans, child thieves’ gangs, ruin, disease, homeless kids raising each other in the streets? Blimey. What fun.
A fair bit of social comment from Dr Who in another good episode.
I guess that makes it proper sci-fi. It certainly “referenced” lots of existing sci-fi. The sky traffic flows brought to mind the Fifth Element; the people changed into animals looked like they’d stepped off the set of Dark Angel. There were still some specifically British elements, like the old ladies singing inspirational hymns in way that brought to mind both Vera Lynn (who is astonishingly still alive and giving lucid interviews) and Songs of Praise.
For a change, the setting wasn’t London, it was set in a future dystopic New York, although you certainly couldn’t tell from the accents. Which has got to be better than actors trying to fake American accents, given how few have the gift of getting away with it. The acting standard seemed to be up a few notches in any case.
People in the lower levels of the city chase away unwanted thoughts by patching on medication. The rest are on the motorway. Everyone on the motorway lives in groups of one or two, on an endless commute to nowhere. Communication is through receipt of central instructions from the tv. The police put you on infinite hold until you finally get through to two women who can offer almost no assistance. Everyone is expressing a borrowed “individuality” while remaining isolated. (See what I mean about the social comment)
Their cars are a cross between old Volkswagen Travellers and Tardises laid on their sides. With skirts instead of wheels, bacause they fly. They are fitted out with all the necessities of life, like human wastes recycled for food.
I’ve just watched the accompanying “Making of” show on BBC4 (?) where the scene designers discussed what they’d done and why. There was a great bit – that I must have missed through the dsitractions caused by defragging – where they played Snow patrol’s Chasing Cars to a scene of the flying cars. (Sorry, I just really like Snow Patrol.) THe making of programme is pretty good as well.
Apparently, a subtle Iranian disorientation technique involved likening captured Brits to Mr Bean.
I can see how that would work. It would be hard to think of a more devastating putdown.
Mr Bean is beyond repellent. But he’s just an example of the criminally unfunny programmes that Britain makes as comedy and sells around the world. The Simpsons did a brilliant bit in one episode where they had the writer of Bridget Jones complaining that Americans don’t get our subtle irony. (Obviously taking the piss, this being the Simpsons, that always comes with a side order of extra irony.) (Continued after the fold)
Granted it was still set in London, and granted the no-longer-new Dr Who still has an annoying face, this episode was a blinder.
THe plotline was a bit Shakespeare in love meets Charmed. There are witches, who turn out to be evil aliens, using their witch skills to turn the the Globe Theatre into a conduit for more evil aliens. To do this, they remote control Shakespeare (who falls for the Dr’s new assistant) and hypnotise him into inserting a spell with planetary co-ordinates into the end of his new play “Love’s labours won”.
It was obviously made with at least one eye on global sales. So it was streets ahead of most British tv in looks. Beautiful lighting, beautiful sets, more beautiful people than you would ever expect to see on home-grown British tv and some quite fearsomely effective – if simple -special effects. Shakspeare, the Globe, medieval London, Elizabeth I – you can hear the English Tourist Board’s tills ringing in joyful anticipation.
In case the adults got bored, it threw in lots of Shakespeare quotations. and in-jokes. All the obvious ones but still satisfyingly erudite for mass tv. (Maybe it will make some schoolkid get interested in Shakespeare, it’s always possible.)
It even tied together the flirtation between Shakespeare and the new Dr Who assistant at the end, with Shakespeare planning to write a sonnet to his Dark Lady.
Grrr. Virgin Cable TV:-
Sky One= no great loss.
FX = only channel you can legitimately watch the Wire on UK TV.
Happily rewatching series 4 tonight, ready to catch all the smart bits of dialogue that I didn’t quite get the first time or read the messages supposedly coded into Omar’s t-shirts by the costume designers that I wasn’t paying attention to. And so on.
Screen goes blank five minutes after the credits.
Ominous blue box comes up, holding the words that I’m not authorised to view this channel.
So it costs about £80 a month – for broadband, tv and a phone I make barely half a dozen local calls on – no matter what the ads say – and they can’t even pay out the Wire now?
The new series of Dr Who started on BBC1 today and, while I was only half watching it, I must say that so far it is not as good as those that went before. I am not sure if it is a combination of dodgy scripting or atrocious supporting actors, but there is certainly room for improvement.
First off, sadly, David Tennant is a very, very good Doctor. Christopher Eccleston is a very good actor and really got the new series off to a good start after the problems which ended the series in the late 80’s. (Colin Baker and Sylverster McCoy truly have a place in the LinuxGod’s hell for their part) Despite this, Eccleston never really was “Doctor Who.” He was a touch too agressive and militaristic (maybe I just remember 28 Days Later too much).
Tennant is as close to the real Doctor (Tom Baker of course) as any one since has ever been. Shame everything about him screams that he should be terrible, he just isn’t.
Unfortunately he is pretty much on his own though. For some reason Dr Who’s scriptwriters – who include some of the most imaginative people in Britain – have a hard time putting together a decent plot. I suspect it is not all their fault, the constraints of the new format are against them.
Compared to the old series, the new ones are rushed. They try to introduce a setting, build tension, create a conflict, get the audience attached to the protagonists, get all dramatic and conclude in about 45 minutes. That is never going to be good. If you look at the Tom Baker years, each “episode” ran about 3 hours long and the extra breathing room certainly pays off. The plots are massively more engaging and you can actually get into the characters and their interactions. Are children really so short of attention span now? I doubt it myself.
The scriptwriters obviously collude with the set designers to make life easy. Oddly it goes horribly wrong. Unlike the first seven doctors, Doctors 9 and 10 never seem to leave Earth. It is rare for them to go anywhere other than London. Nearly every episode starts and ends “today” which seems to miss most of the point of it being Sci-Fi. None of this fighting Daleks on Skaro or the like, now the Doctor largely fights comedy monsters in London. Sometimes it is Victorian London, and I think a total of three episodes out of the last two seasons have been elsewhere. On the massively rare off chance any one involved reads this GET OFF EARTH! Go to colony ships in deep space, go to weird trading worlds, or planets which are stuck in a combination of the middle ages with lasers. Get SCIFI! Please! Don’t turn this into Hollyoaks with a sonic screwdriver.
Obviously the set designers like this because it should be easy to mock up sets that look like London. However, they still get things weirdly wrong. Tonight’s episode had a hospital moved to the moon, and every time they tried to show shots of people looking at the stars, or the ones back home looking at the hole you could see massive visual artefacts round the join points. I know it is not high budget, but this is 2007. Even the BBC can afford a decent Linux box with decent software… surely… ?
Add to all this the nonsensical “baddies” and it seems the BBC is trying to cut costs for what should be the flagship programme for 1900hrs on a Saturday. In the episode tonight, there were two sets of baddies, a blood sucker (who kills Dr Stoker – see, humour is not dead) in the form of a little old lady and some intergalactic police. When the police turn up, they are basically cybermen in black with bigger helmets. They walk the same, they form up the same and initially they act the same. It was almost painful. Please Dr Who scriptwriters. Use decent monsters. Stop going for people with funny masks on. Remember this is 2007. Check your calendar if you don’t believe me!
In a similar vein, despite Tennant’s excellent acting skill, the rest of the cast are painfully bad. I thought “Rose Tyler’s” family in the last season were poor but this new crop reach a new nadir of poor acting. The new sidekick/leading lady “Martha Jones” (Freema Agyeman) is a poor actor. She seems to be constantly giggling and gives the program the air of watching a secondary school play (High School for the Americans). Even at the most traumatic, shocking, surprising or scary moments, she appears to be fighting to suppress a grin. It is painful. I can only assume she will get better.
That said, she outclasses the rest of the supporting cast by an order of magnitude. Watching them pretend to scream, pretend to faint, argue or whatever is painful. I know this is “Kids TV” but if the support can’t act, write scripts that need less of them. Stop trying to recreate Ben Hur in a hospital.
I know this is a bit of a rant and there seems to be quite a few whines, but overall, I quite enjoyed the program. I am sure kids today will like it, but sadly they miss out on the real joys that Dr Who could provide. The lack of a cliff hanger is a shame and it seems to pander to limited attention spans rather than make people want to come back and watch more – this is odd, as each episode shows a taster for the next one…
Maybe someone, who knows someone, who knows someone who works on the team for this will read this blog and pass on some comments. If it changes for the better, brilliant and it could be a fantastic series. If it doesn’t, never mind. It will still be OK (if repetitive). At least the science is broadly sound 🙂
[tags]Dr Who, Doctor Who, BBC, Freema Agyeman, David Tennent, Tom Baker, Television, TV, Daleks, Sci-Fi, Science Fiction, Rants, Christopher Eccleston, Martha Jones, Cybermen, Rose Tyler, Society[/tags]
Just when I was starting to feel positive about Virgin.
(My net connection service is sorted. I was even beginning to feel a mite guilty – maybe the fault really was my raggedy cat5 – further damaged by the building work.)
An advert in the bus paper – the Metro – this morning compared the great cheap Virgin cable service – 10 MB broadband plus cable channels plus phone rental for £30- with the inferior Sky service.
The advert showed Sky with an impressive 80 MB or something- can’t remember the detail, sorry, but Virgin claimed it was capped and is slower the further you are from the hub (isn’t that true of all DSL anyway?) and costlier, at £36 plus £11 BT line rental.
Now, I was already a mite baffled, because surely it’s 10 Megabits not MB, which I am pretty sure usually means MegaBytes. Maybe it’s just how they put these things in ads, but as far as I can see, it’s exaggerating the speed by a factor of 8.
But I get home and open a letter from Virgin. It announces a 1 May price increase to £37 (though doubling the bandwidth, I am pleased to see) and an increase in phone charges. (Well, an exciting new way of calculating the phone charges, that sounds like a reduction – if you take some extra inclusive phone charge package – but slips in that they are rounding up to the nearest minute.)
So the price they are advertising today as being £6 a month lower than Sky’s package is actually going to be £1 more in a month. (And still minus Sky One.) Hmmm.
Here’s a link to the BBC site for the Trap.
I hate things that say they might change your life, as one of the intro pages says. (I am sure your life changes pretty much all the time, but not very much change is set off by TV programmes. Though I suppose switching from Discovery Machinery +2 to BBC for an hour on a Sunday might consitute a change of something, I hope your life isn’t that circumscribed.)
Apart from that, the BBC2 site is a good coherent introduction to the issues in the programme. Even the best TV is better if it’s supported by something you can read and think about at your own pace. And the Trap certainly requires some serious thinking.
This week’s programme was the second of the 3-part series. It was really well-argued. It wasn’t as engaging as the first one – the clips were a tad duller, but the logic was much clearer
Good points:
The way that public service targets have become straightjackets, undermining standards of service rather than improving them.
Blair and Brown have taken the Tories’ projects and run with them, taking them to levels that Major and even Thatcher would never have got away with.
Tranquilising the masses is creating a population who treat normal emotional variation as illness. (Surely the argument of the anti-psychiatrists who Curtis blames for the whole thing in the first place. Thoough I guess this argument is moreThomas Szasz than RD Laing)
There are apparently some clips on the BBC site, so you can catch up with the arguments even if you missed the shows.
My house is getting brought into the 21st century. (I’m typing this on the floor, with a mouse mat and keyboard wobbling on top of the PC box, surrounded by binbags full of mouldy books, dishes and raw food detritus) This has wreaked havoc with my capacity to even switch on my PC, let alone comment meaningfully on the Virgin Media service, but I’m going to do it anyway.
It may be that the random moving of cables and the cable modem are to blame. So, I’m still not confident enough that I can justifiably phone up and berate the relentlessly chirpy Virgin Customer Service operatives.
All the same, I’m going to badmouth the service here. 10 Mbit seems to being interpreted as 10 Mbit amonth, as far as I can see. The connection keeps randomly going off. This is so irritating because it makes everything I try to do on the Internet – like post to this blog – depressingly unpredictable. I am reconnecting to Microsofdt messenger at least two or three times an evening, and whole days have passed without me being able to connect at all. Grr.
If anyone else has had a similar experience, I’ll suspect it’s not just me. So please can I have some comments? Also, if every other ex-Telewest customer has perfect service, I’d like to know so I can sort it out here rather than embarrass myself complaining about faults that turn out to be mine. (Tech support in work would probably say there was no surprise there)