Not great things about Frontios:
- The direction.
- Cockerill suffers from the deletion of the scenes that properly set out his character arc.
- The direction.
- There’s only about 2 episodes’ worth of music.
- The direction.
- The writing: the sense of the years leading up to the story conveyed by the characters’ memories and grudges. The exploration of the limits of knowledge and the Doctor being the engine that breaks through them. The humour.
Things to love in Frontios:
- The regulars. All of them get to push the story forward.
- The guest acting- the contrast Jeff Rawle brings to Plantagenet’s public and private faces, the calculation and warmth Peter Gilmore puts into Brazen.
- Theatricality (complementary). The *layers* in the sets.
“Catherine de Medici- beat you cock!”
I’m assured that there are films that aren’t The Zone of Interest or Threads. Dozens of them.
They’ve also got the BFI franchise, with a nice line in ‘shutting at 8.30 when a sold-out screening finishes at 10’.
I’d suggest a graph of ‘Nipple count by 20th century Doctor Who producer’ if this hadn’t been done in the Tavern in 1998.
@cooraysmith.bsky.social ‘s tell for a Tosh rewrite is that characters stop speaking sentences and start declaiming paragraphs.
Northern Line is running trains every 15 minutes until 8 p.m.
The only reason that I don’t think that there was an actual memo headed “How to destroy a successful television series in 10 weeks” is that you’d have found it by now.
There’s been a lot of Wiles and Tosh round our way lately.
It’s sort of amazing how each of their decisions manage to be uniquely disastrous. No telesnaps! Piss off/sack your regulars! Kids don’t want Daleks, they want religious genocide screeds! Use your boss’s characters without asking!
My take is the political appointment got fudged (disingenuously) with “he’d be good at it”.
There’s a parallel with the NI peace process- he *was* good at it, but so was the woman who was pushed out to give him the job.
It is inconvenient, don’t get me wrong, but it saves trashing a new road surface which could have a longer lifespan.
Providers of gas, electricity, water and broadband infrastructure are collectively frustrating a single integrated programme of roadworks and pipe/wire mapping.
This ensures that roads are extensively dug up multiple times in quick succession, so everyone gets a go on the big drill.
Side note: when I did careers fairs there were people who were convinced that the Government Legal Department were involved in conspiracies.
I learned to patiently engage after a sarcastic “yeah, security operatives are cake eating shortarses like me” was met with *nodding*.
Or the DGSE got wind of the proposed Lethbridge-Stewart/Quark spinoff and acted for the good of humanity.
IIRC John Wiles happened to be passing a Doctor Who convention in the 90s and managed to get in by saying “do you know who I am?”. Somehow simultaneously entirely justified and entirely on brand for John Wiles.
I’ve written, with my colleague @davehillonlondon.bsky.social , what is basically a short book about the London borough elections. Want to know the recent history, the key wards, the local parties? It’s here londondecides.lowickhedry.com
There’s a Harry Hill routine about a funeral service request for “Oh Happy Day” (gospel) being met with “Happy Days” (theme to US sitcom).
Instagram post from Jessica Gregson, June 2020 with the following text from a Doctor Who magazine article: Surely strangest of all, when DWM's Jonathan Morris tweeted analyses of old scripts, this led to Jessica Gregson asking her father, 92-year-old Michael Craig, to record a new reading of a particularly odd line of dialogue he'd had in 1986's The Trial of a Time Lord. Just on the day it was posted, that video was viewed more than 8,000 times. You can see it at tinyurl.com TonkerTravers
The tiny url link shows that Jessica Gregson deleted her tweet with the video, sadly.
Also, as far as Talor’s concerned it’s just a bigwig at his workplace passing by on the late shift. I shouldn’t blame the guy for saying the first thing that comes into his head.
He had a do over!
“Impulse laser?”
I would like to add to the ongoing Bono grievance list that he wasted the title of ‘Funky Pontiff’ on Pope John Paul II instead of your man Leo.
Unused cover for the 1996 Doctor Who New Adventure Christmas on a Rational Planet. The cover illustration has a distorted image of the Seventh Doctor’s face in a blue sphere.
It’s the Wario to the unused cover for Christmas on a Rational Planet*, even down to going with a blue colour scheme rather than orange.
*infamously described by The Completely Useless Encyclopaedia as “making Sylvester McCoy look like Jasper Carrott”.
The thought occurs that there’s a non-zero chance Alan Bennett got a comp copy of The Savages.
[a Blu-Ray player is fired up in Camden Town]
“Oh dear.”
Ooh- is that Ling Hill?
Friend’s 6 yo is getting into old Doctor Who and is happily playing with Jim’s action figures. Picks up a Mandrel:
6yo: What does this one do?
Me: It’s a monster that gets trapped in a computer zoo by the baddies because if you zap them they…ah..
6yo: What?
Me: Do you want to light some fireworks?
Extract from Enough Said by Alan Bennett, the 2024 chapter: 12 March. At 2.30 comes Charles Norton, who had written wanting to interview me about my memories of Innes Lloyd. Comes with a big burly cameraman who Rupert says is American but if he is I don't catch it. I don't do it well ... and was meaning to ask to record the last paragraph I wrote about him for Writing Home. (Charles Norton has just rung to say there won't be a problem.) As it is I still feel wanked out, the result of talking as much about myself as about Innes. Maybe that was the point of it, an interview by stealth.
Reading Alan Bennett’s Enough Said.
If you were wondering if he diarised his participation in the Innes Lloyd documentary, here’s his…unique…reaction to Doctor Who VAM.🍆
