The moving finger rants

Last week I attended the preview screening of the new Doctor Who episode. In front of a packed theatre at the Filmhouse, The Moff Himself got everyone to promise not to release any spoilers.

After the episode, everyone said Well, obviously you all see now why we specifically asked you not to give out spoilers, because mumble. I had no clue what they were talking about, sat there with a blank look on my face: whot?

I am now apparently so unspoilered that I can't even be spoilered for spoilers. Thus have I reached levels of fandom previously attained only by Ian Levine.

Of the new episode I shall say only this: you guys are going to love tonight. SO MUCH.

~

After the episode there was a Q&A session with the Moff. All of the fatter, sweatier types of nerd in the room—of which there were many, and I say this with love—had clearly been researching and honing their question for the last several weeks. Most of the questions involved phrases like character archetype and recontextualize.

And then there was the eight-year-old girl in the pink top, whose question was: Do Cybermen go rusty in the rain?

For those of you who are interested, Word of God on this pressing matter is as follows: no they don't, they're plastic. Everything has to be waterproofed; it's Wales. Anyway, no. Oh wait, there was the rusty one in The Pandorica Opens, and I wrote that, I should know better. So, yes.

Go now and be enlightened.

Oo-wee-oo.

It's okay, Moff. Everybody kills Hitler on their first trip.

(I didn't know it was possible to hold one's breath for forty-five minutes.)

As for the rest... we'll see.

Same cliff face as The Time of Angels and the same castle as Amy's Choice. Nice.

I suddenly find myself unable to continue ignoring the royal wedding. It's got Daleks in it.

A royal wedding street party with a difference will see a Dalek serve up trays of drinks and snacks to guests on Friday - presumably with cries of 'Extermi-Cake'.

More likely, WOULD YOU CARE FOR A PLAS-TIC CUP OF LUKE-WARM CHE-RRY-ADE. Although, the more I think about it, the more this starts to make sense. What better way to celebrate a great British institution than with a terrifying symbol of imperialistic aggression? Particularly, one that some bloke from the Home Counties has spent a week painting red, white and blue?

I am no stranger to those odd periods of mass hysteria that we're all subjected to on occasion. When Diana died I bought Candle in the Wind twice. I saw Titanic three times in the cinema (and each time, because it is a four-hour-long behemoth, I had to go to the loo just before Kate Winslet gets nekkid.) We're all allowed to get emotional beyond the bounds of reason now and then, especially if we blog self-deprecatingly about it years later. But this one just seems supremely pointless. Two people I don't care about are performing a ceremony I don't care about. I'm not invited. I don't get any of the cake. I am unsure what, as a nation, we all gain by waving flags to solemnize the fact that, according to a book most of us haven't read, two young people are now permitted to fuck.

I shall be at work tomorrow. Although I might take the opportunity to have an excuse to rewatch The Princess Bride.

Yes, Prime Minister
The King's Theatre (run ended)

It takes massive balls to follow in the footsteps of Nigel Hawthorne. Now I know why Group Captain Gilmore's men call him ‘Chunky’.

A touring stage show of a twenty-year-old political satire? That's never going to work, surely? Well... yes and no, Minister. Original series writers Anthony Jay and Jonathyn Lynn deliver the same crackling character-driven dialogue as before, and it is wonderful to behold. But occasionally—just occasionally, mark you—it becomes apparent that the state of political satire has moved on since the 1980s, and Jay and Lynn may have failed to move with it.

It's Chris Morris' fault, of course. There's only one man who can make child prostitution funny, or Anglo-Arab relations in a world beset by Islamic terrorism (and even he can only do it when Armando Iannucci is producing). During the 1980s it was possible to make a gentle comedy of manners about the terrible things that happen in politics: now it's necessary to refer to the the giant elephant in the room about illegal wars and thousands of needless deaths. A proper satire should skate along the uncomfortable, but this crossed the personal line of everyone I spoke to. It's brave to make the attempt, but it shouldn't be surprising that the show is most successful when it more closely emulates the original series.

Let's talk acting. Characterizations range from absolutely bang spot-on (the aforementioned massively-genitalled Simon Williams as Sir Humphrey) to bloody good with certain caveats (an interesting choice by Chris Larkin to play Bernard as much less hesitant and impressionable than the Bernard we're familiar with). Richard McCabe deftly navigates a narrow corridor between the Jim Hacker of old and that oleaginous fuckface we're currently lumbered with as the (sadly real, non-fictional) Prime Minister. (I wonder how much of a problem this was for Paul Eddington: navigating between his own character and Maggie.) Charlotte Lucas excellently plays a competent policy advisor to Hacker's PM, but alas she's given the sort of character who, like Frank Weisel in Yes, Minister or Dorothy Wainwright in Yes, Prime Minister, would be quietly dropped after a few episodes for lack of anything interesting to do.

On which note: the plot. It would fill a half-hour episode or even a newfangled fifty-minute episode very neatly, but at two hours it tries to do too much. Entire scenes and at least one character could be excised: the BBC Director-General appears for a while to bluster about government interference in broadcasting—clearly one of Jay and Lynn's pet subjects, given the number of times that identical dialogue appeared in the TV series—and to agree to an interview that forms the climactic scene of the play, which could alternatively have been arranged by a single line of conversation somewhere. It's important to pile multifarious and myriad pressures upon our beleaguered PM for the surprisingly effective payoff in the second act when it all degenerates, or rather develops, into farce: but it could have been done more tightly. And as observed above, there are some lines you don't cross in light comedy. Child prostitution, sex trafficking and the mounting death toll in Afghanistan are three off the top of my head. Had the play not deliberately and with malice aforethought crossed those three lines in succession, it would have been the length it deserved.

As a revival show for a well-loved cult comedy, even one with a few contemporary jokes thrown in, it's brilliant. As a current satire, sadly, it fails. As a feature-length pilot for a new series?... I'd commission it, but I'd keep a close eye on it for improvements.

I've had my obligatory obscure Doctor Who reference for this post, so this one's a free bonus. Watching this was just like the TV Movie. It was glorious to have it back just for one evening, but still it wasn't quite right.

Welp, 2011 is two weeks old now, and thus far I am significantly less than impressed. I'm putting you on notice, 2011. You've got fifty more weeks to pull your socks up or else... or else.

That said, this morning was rather fun. I attended an accent workshop at the Lyceum Theatre, based on their current production of A View From The Bridge. I saw A View From The Bridge once, many years ago, while I was still in school. I was far too naive to pick up on any of the subtext and recall very little except people shouting I took the sheets offa my bed for you over and over again. Fifteen years on, having actually had opportunity to look at a couple of pages of the script, what strikes me is Miller's stunning ability to use voice to draw his characters. In paragraph two on page one, Alfieri says that he's an Italian-American immigrant, Brooklynite, came from Sicily aged 25 and educated at law school. By the time he tells you all that, you already know, just based on the way he uses language. It leaps off the page at you.

Miller is a fucking genius. I'd give both nuts to write like that. And he married Marilyn Monroe, too. Bastard.

Accents: the first thing you do with an accent is work out where it comes from in the mouth. The Scots accent is quite far back in the throat. Mississippi-type ah do declay-uh voices are very high up in the roof of the mouth; Liverpudlian likewise. The Brooklyn accent is so far forward that it's dripping off the front of your bottom lip like leaden drool. I nearly dislocated my jaw getting it right.

(I neeyuhly dislowcaded my jawuh is a fun phrase to say in Brooklynese. Saying it just now, I nearly dislocated it again. I've invented physical onomatopoeia and, with it, an excellent name for a rock band.)

I was doing fine until about halfway through the session, when the bloody dire Daleks Take Manhattan jumped into my head and wouldn't leave. The whiny nasal showgirl woman kept repeating Laslow on a loop in my mind. To compensate I dropped the pitch of my voice, so my own version of Brooklynese sounds like a more thuggish version of Mistuh Diagoras.

Two hours work, and now I can say cawffee correctly. And I have an urge to watch Goodfellas tonight.

Oh, Amy.

These are absolutely lovely. I'm grinning like it's 12th March 2003 again.

No additional plot to speak of, just some marvellous character moments and a handful of fannish callbacks. Oh yes, and there's another shot of Amy's legs. As ever, this is likely to send certain haters into an uncontrollable frenzy of totally unjustified rage, and they may wish to avoid for that reason, but you don't know what you're missing.

Seriously. Calm down. They keep her feet attached to her hips.

(Hat duly tipped to lizbee and her capslock-abusing friends.)

The Twitters are afire with the startling new revelation, made by the Doctor in his guest appearance on the Sarah Jane Adventures, that Time Lords are immortal now. Apparently the Doctor makes an offhand comment that indicates a vastly increased regeneration limit.

But everybody knows that Time Lords have twelve regenerations, witters the Radio Times in a spate of self-promotion: to claim otherwise would contradict canon dating back to 1976. The horror!

A few relevant points:

• The Deadly Assassin [1976] itself already contradicts canon established in The War Games [1969], in which—as the RT notes—the Doctor said that Time Lords live forever, barring accidents;
• The Deadly Assassin was dull as fuck, and introduced a whole slew of problems into Doctor Who canon—let's just say that it wasn't the best idea in television history to reduce the Time Lords from powerful, enigmatic, mystery beings to a handful of squabbling bureaucrats in silly collars—so I, for one, would be quite happy to see it vanish from my personal canon;
• Doctor Who doesn't even have canon anyway. For fuck's sake, we've seen the fall of Atlantis three different times, and we've met three different Rassilons.

Not to mention, let's not forget, that regeneration limits are controlled by the Time Lords' omniscient council of vagueness (so they could offer the Master a new set in The Five Doctors), who don't exist any more; or possibly by the Eye of Harmony, which may or may not be inside the Doctor's own Tardis, so maybe he's hacked it since the Time War; the Doctor is far more than just another Time Lord; and besides, Rule One—the Doctor lies.

Is anyone really surprised about this? The BBC is making unimaginable amounts of money off the back of its most popular flagship program, but in about six years from now, after Matt Smith's replacement quits, they should start planning to shut it all down so as not to contradict a line of dialogue written 34 years ago?

A lot of subsequent stories have been based on that line of dialogue—like the entire plot of Mawdryn Undead. I've no sympathy. That's what you get for writing derivative works. Specifically, that's what you get for writing derivative works based on canon that a series doesn't have.

Besides, Matt Smith is my Doctor and he's going to be the Doctor for ever and ever and he can retire when he's eighty or something and hand over to the Twelfth Doctor then and not before. That's my personal canon.

A+++++++, would do the Time Warp again.

Significantly less impressed with this one.

Aside from that utterly objectionable piece of bullshit, a mildly amusing breather between an emotionally heavy episode and the season finale, which I assume will be likewise. Distinctly average at best, and especially compared to the rest of the season, rates no more than a ‘meh’. I do hope that they show some actual Doctor Who next week.