TV

Blurzillas, the Olympics and Jet Li’s Piss

So the BBC have launched their slightly abstruse trailer for the Olympics. It being a two minute summary of Wu Cheng’en’s Journey To The West, better known in the west as MONKEY. The animated two minute trail takes a while to get on to the subject of the Olympics, and is subtitled Journey To The East - as that is what the BBC will be doing to cover the Olympics (DO YOU SEE). One assumes the music and imagery are largely based on the recent stage version of Journey To The West by Damon Albarn and Chen Shi-zheng, designed by Jamie Hewlett whose animation is unmistakable here. Fun that it is, it will probably infuriate a lot of people, and confuse anyone under thirty. Unless they know the story of the Monkey King all that well. Which they may have picked up a bit from Dragonballz, or seen the recent Jet Li, Jackie Chan film The Forbidden Kingdom. … read on …

Who Aggregates the Aggregator Aggregators?

And perhaps more importantly - who cares? If the impending closure of the obnoxiously “Web 2.0″ BBC Sound Index this Friday is any guide, the answer is pretty clear.

Oh sure, the site boasts more than 22 million “comments, posts, plays and views”, but those comments and posts are all from OTHER sites like YouTube, last.fm, iTunes, myspace, and the like. Sound Index sent automated “robot” scripts to these sites looking for the names of bands, fed what it found into some kind of magic algorithm, and produced a constantly updated list of the 1000 buzziest bands on the planet. Or well, the English-speaking planet. Probably. Slap some shiny, gumdrop-like buttons on the results, organise things with a direct rip-off of the iTunes “Coverflow” feature and hey presto.. well, what exactly? … read on …

All My Friends Were There

The signature of Russell T Davies’ tenure as Dr Who ’showrunner’ has been a sustained examination of the dynamics and the dramatic possibilities of the Doctor/Companion relationship - from the obvious (what if they DO IT), to the relatively unexplored (what happens to those left behind? what happens after you get left behind?). His vision of the Doctor, ultimately, is as an agent of change - which chimes with how the character’s been portrayed since Baker T, at least, but that tended to be situational change: the Doc as the random element that twists outcomes  differently. Davies’ Doctors (Tennant in particular) effect change on a personal level. One single adventure with the Doctor is enough to transform Donna’s outlook on life: two seasons turn a Peckham shopgirl into a gun-toting dimensional warrior. Spoilers follow if you haven’t seen the last episode: … read on …

Best Ever Doctor Who Cliffhangers As Chosen By Me

Whatever happens next Saturday, now is a time for rejoicing as “New Who” delivers its first bona fide, ZOMG, who saw that one coming REAL ACTUAL CLIFFHANGER. Not that the new series hasn’t been jam-packed with moments that would have made magnificent old school episode climaxes (just imagine Professor Yana’s pocketwatch, or the in-your-face Weeping Angel, or the empty TARDIS in “Father’s Day” with the eeeeowwwwwwwwwww end of episode noise…) But often the new series cliffhanger has been a clumsy beast, generally through trying to pack too much in: either having every character menaced at once, or having the monsters yell their playground-ready catchphrase a few times too often, or by simply diluting the shock with parallel threats. Take this season’s “Silence In The Library” - a good cliffhanger to be sure, but if they’d just stuck to the “Donna has been turned into a computer terminal” one, left the lumbering skellington suit out and cut down on the repetition it would have been several times more effective.

Anyway, they’ve finally got it right, so to celebrate here’s my own list of Who cliffhangers that stick in the brain. Some of these are, I believe, canonically accepted as awesome, others more obscure. The list draws heavily on ones I saw as a kid, the prime time to be shoXoRed by a Who ending… and yes, there will be spoilers!

… read on …

Japes From the Vine : NSFA

I had considered tagging this link Not Safe For Work, but truly it is Not Safe For Anywhere. One of my favourite parts of watching the Daily Show is when they show the ridiculous graphics and bombast of American election reporting. And then, on a night like last night, with a few council elections I have to shake my head at the nonsense that now presents itself as election coverage here. David Dimbleby has now ossified in his role as presenter, snappy, rude, not listening to anyone and making jump-cut links whenever he decides and usually when the gallery aren’t ready. I am used to that. What I am not used to yet is Jeremy Vine, who has taken over Peter Snow’s role as the man with the graphics. Snow had a way with stats, and an expansive excitement in the ways that new technology could help explain in layman’s terms how an election was progressing.

Vine is just a twat. No, sorry that’s a bit harsh. ON TWATS. Sorry, I still haven’t recovered from this bit of footage which was on at about 1am last night. … read on …

Do Polar Bears Dream Of Bickering Humans?

I don’t know why I am still watching Lost. It makes me feel terrible about my own ability to follow a narrative storyline, and how easily my buttons are pushed but the simplest of TV trickery. I have never believed that the writers have really known where the whole things was going from the beginning, though I have based this belief on the fact that the writers of 24 don’t know how their series will end - and there are only 24 episodes of those. Lost, with its endless pointless mysteries, time wasting flashbacks (and now flash forwards) and bunch of on the whole unlikeable characters should have driven me off by now. Take the Lost “numbers”. Important in series one and two, they haven’t been mentioned since, and I still can’t see a way of their quasi-mystical importance being explained. Do I think there will be anything like a satisfactory conclusion to the mess which is now taking in time travel, faking the death of hundreds of people and massive conspiracy theories? Nope. Yet I keep watching.

Of course the show trades on its mysteries, though the web of unexplained nonsense is so tangled that I believe nothing coherent will really come out of it (its at least one persons dream*). But this has been further confirmed by USA Today running a competition for viewers to submit what they think is going on to the producers to be graded. … read on …

more reasons (as if anyone needs em) to despise nick broomfield

i: yes this was entirely my fault for sitting down in front of a “michael barrymore: what really happened” documentary…

ii: viz that i (and all viewers) have to endure jacques peretti constantly concluding that “no one can possibly know what really happened” ftb HE THE GREAT JACQUES PERETTI cannot get someone to confess all on-camera after a rigorous interrogation of duration 23 seconds

iii: to be fair the depth of JP’s bad faith is by no means of broomfieldian dimension, and he spent a fair part of the show angst-ing at the awfulness of it all: which if yr generous you can interpret as “i JP am ashamed of myself for plunging this low”

iiia: but basic rule — … read on …

stendernauts misled: it is to weep

p^nk s lord thingamajig is on the way to london fields lido and crossing hackney’s graham road where it meets mare street in the Easty East of End when a small but full car stops and a woman addresses him thru the window:

woman: excuse me do you know where albert square is?
p^nk s lord t: er d’you mean the real albert square or the one on telly?
woman: YES!
p^nk s lord t: ok but they aren’t the same! the one on telly isn’t a real place — it’s a film-set up in north london somewhere that they film on
anguished voice from deep inside car: what? but we’ve driven all the way from birmingham to visit it!
p^nk s lord t: ok well it is findable but it’s far from here and i don’t know the way
woman (despondently): ok thank you
*car drives off trailing collective thinks-bubble of baffled upset*
p^nk s lord t (thinks to self): oh dear i wonder if they meant fassett square — that’s what albert square is based on and it’s just round the corner

Come Dine With Me – Awesome

The Guardian’s “not Nancy Banks Smith” TV reviewer Sam Wallaston is a reliable sort of guy. I watched last night’s Come Dine With Me and was agog. “This is the best thing I’ve seen on Channel 4 in a long time” I exclaimed while watching between my fingers. Sure enough Wallaston’s review: “the worst programme on television”. He didn’t like it. And that’s why I read his reviews. “Never knowingly correct” goes his strapline. (Don’t get me started on his “ha ha geeks eh, this IS complicated and silly” he did the other day on Battlestar Galactica.)

Anyway… COME DINE WITH ME. Last night’s was more than awesome. This show has grown — a day-time staple, it’s gathered celebrity editions, and now it comes in a new format. No longer a short show every day of the week covering 5 people — they now compress 4 people in to a one hour show. It’s a sensation. Well for something that’s come from day-time. (It even has a rip off version on the beeb hosted by Simon Rimmer who seems to be trying to be on telly every day of the week for an entire year.)

But then having established a regular format, with often witty and interesting people who occasionally come to verbal blows, it goes HAYWIRE. Remember that first edition of Wife Swap with the foul mouthed racist woman — it was well train wreck. This was much the same but written by Mike Leigh. … read on …

And you though Knitler was the most evil soft toy: what about the Daleknit

So the internets have had a chance to watch the first episode of Season 4 of Doctor Who. And they all seem to be saying the following:
a) Catherine Tate wasn’t all that bad*
b) The episode was typical RTD sonic screwdriver fannydangle
c) ROSE!!!
d) BBC marketing genius soft toy for Christmas Adipose fat monsters.

Little has been made of the actual plot being really rather benevolent, in that the diet scheme would have lost a lot of people lots of weight with not apparent side effects at all until the Doctor and Donna (henceforth known as D&D) mucked it all up. Still back to the cute waving Adipose. You can’t buy them in stores, but you can get them for a fiver on Ebay. Or at least a knitted version that looks something like it. Here’s another one found on Flickr, which is considerably cheaper if you know Chemistry:
… read on …