| R.B.7 2 A V I E W 2 0 1 0 |
 |
1
IM 448199 |
| R.B.7 2 A V I E W 2 0 1 0 |
|
1
IM 448199 |
(click here for the ration book rules) (red text = new items; + = new points to existing items) (pale text = repeated items unseen; murky text = taped items) |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| WEEK FOUR The BBC can't really win. This week it got stick for having over-spent by a few million on the retention / redevelopment of (National Treasure) Broadcasting House, for spending money on art projects (like everyone has to (and should) do with new-builds), and for investing on new facilities outside London (the bastards). Fully chastised for spending money, and preparing itself for possible Conservative rule, the corporation is (or so The Guardian tells us) reacting with a plan to save money by closing two radio stations (6 Music and the Asian Network), halving the size of its website, reducing spending on sport and imports, and selling off some of its magazine titles. Ok, I can't get too upset about the loss of the two radio stations: I wasn't a 6 Music fan so I did nothing. But BBC4 is next on that particular list, so it does not bode well. Reducing spending on sport means giving sport to Sky, which is a bad thing. Reducing spending on imports might not be so bad, assuming that C4 or ITV chip in in their stead. Ditching the magazines presumably means ditching an alternate source of revenue, which strikes me as stupid, but there may be perfectly sound economics behind the decision when one considers the malaise in the print-media market at the expense of web-content. But when one considers the same again, the idea of halving the BBC's internet presence is particularly nightmarish. What do they intend to cut? I just watched an old clip from the BBC's now defunct archæology series Chronicle, which is one of the more recent additions to the corporation's on-line Archive: one of the more exciting works in progress I can think of. Given that the Beeb will be covering a native Olympics in two years time, its dry run of vancouver 2010 was rather disappointing with not nearly enough on-line content. With Glastonbury we get a dedicated page with all the coverage streaming through it: every channel including the BBCi streams. And yet with the Olympics, the only way you could watch live coverage of certain events was to get a satellite dish. Perhaps there were rights issues but I suspect not given that BBC2 coverage was streamed and recorded coverage was made available (albeit in a painfully untidy iPlayer listing). The iPlayer really should have the BBCi streams, especially now that Freeview viewers have lost 302. It's ridiculous to pretend that these things are not channels and to ignore them in the on-line telly-player. The Winter Olympics should have had a webpage listing all the events, in order, with links to all BBC coverage, live and recorded. Instead one had to negotiate a maze of excerpts, BBC2 repeats and pictures of Sue Barker. It was a mess. It will be even more of a mess if quarter of the IT staff are made redundant. Of course, The Guardian could be doing a spot of artful exaggeration in order to whip up public opinion while the BBC execs are still making their minds up. Let us hope that this is the case and that the powers that be at the BBC are awake to the hostility against any such self-mutilation. Unfortunately for them, they are trapped between a rock (the Tories) and a hard place (Ben Bradshaw) and their only real hope for the future is a Lib Dem landslide. WEEK THREE Being Human carries on in its merry way, though it seems to have got itself into something of a hole. The premise: 'a ghost, a werewolf and a vampire share a flat' seems an interesting prospect on paper, but practice proves that it is flawed: it is flawed because the three characters are not of equal interest: ghosts are comparatively boring and there's only so many things you can get them to do before you start having to repeat yourself; werewolves are only interesting once a month, and even then all they do is turn into angry, bloodthirsty animals, so they're boring too. Vampires, on the other hand, raise more questions for the writer to answer; first there's the metaphysics to chop through, then there's the morality. We're on the morality part in BH at the moment, with the vampires going through their AA schtick and the Helsing-like organization preparing to wipe them all out. Shades of grey and all that, like, inevitably, late Buffy. It is unsurprising that it is the vampire's storyline which is the most engaging, not only for the automatically compelling narrative but also for the scope in flashbacks inevitable from a reasonably immortal creature. All grist to the vampire mill. The werewolf, who all too often is too whiny to be likable, has been given some anger-issues to work out, and the complexities of family life have been hurriedly attached to his storyline in an effort to give him something to do. It's just about working. As for the ghost, everything she touches turns to Swayze. At least they've made her a bit more ghosty this series, but her role still seems, essentially, to be standing about and making tea, and there are only so many times you can do that as an in-joke before it becomes stagnant. Perhaps she will end up as some sort of spirit social-worker, but is that going to make particularly compelling television? And so it is that Being Human remains, at heart, Mitchell the Vampire. Can vampires be blown up? Evidently they can, unless next week proves otherwise. It's a shame, as I quite liked the new vampire, Ivan, and not just for his excellent choice of name. Meanwhile, in Vancouver, the Winter Olympics is taking place. Britain got its token lump of gold last night with the women's skeleton bob, spoilt only by the useful and tidy interjections of Alan Partridge-alike ex- hammer-thrower Paul Dickenson. Better commentary can be found in the curling courtesy of the impressively paired Steve Cram and Rhona Martin. And it goes without saying that Ed Leigh has given good value in the box, this year accompanied by the constantly gasping and presumably nerve-wrecked Stine Brun-Kjeldaas. The gasps were largely induced by a widespread inability amongst the women snowboarders to successfully make it around this year's snowboard-cross course without falling over or flying into a fence, all of which, of course, makes excellent television. WEEK TWO Back in the Tardis then to 1974 for Jon Pertwee's final tour of duty in Planet of the Spiders. I've never been wholly comfortable with the Pertwee era, though it has moments. In this serial all the cringeworthy action sequences and kung-fu that defined his period were limited to a single concentrated sub-Avengers episode complete with a hovercraft chase. While it was a nice reminder of the brilliance of hovercrafts, it felt a little desperate. Once on Metebelis 3 we even met Gareth Hunt, which didn't exactly help break us free of this ATV sensation. Still, for the most-part things were more conventionally Whoy. The spiders themselves were rather fun, despite being somewhat limited in their movement (they vibrated and very occasionally leapt onto people's backs). The Brigadier had some surprisingly decent lines in what was a strong script and the acting was rather good across the board (a surprise given some of these serials). Sarah-Jane and Yates made a good double-act as companions but the Doctor's regeneration felt a little hurried and lacked the impact of certain others. Next in line is probably going to be Troughton. With some time to kill after a lovely bath, I found myself watching Poirot of all things. It became evident from an early stage that it was going to do something of a Rashomon so I stuck with it and was reunited with some familiar faces along the way. It did not, however, do Rashomon very well: the first account was impressively shot, at times in near-first person, but later accounts lost interest in this. They also did not differ in concrete facts but were rather simply selective in their depiction of the evidence. As with most Christie yarns I've seen, the red herrings were bright red and the real culprit quite obvious but arbitrary, signalled principally by last-minute evidence. Even that mainstay of period drama, the wardrobe and makeup, was let down by Marc Warren's stick-on beards. Still, better than most Poirots, and the murderer got to walk away at the end. The following line contains pornographic imagery and should only be read by persons over the age of eighty: Tonight on ITV1 one can witness a cock and a cunt engaging in intercourse when Gordon Brown desperately brings his private life into politics in an interview with Piers Morgan. WEEK ONE On the 1st of February I got my "invitation" (the sort of invitation one applies for in advance) to beta-test SeeSaw, the online television service previously known as Project Canvas (the online television service previously known as Project Kangaroo until it was scuppered by the Monopolies Commission for being too much like a good idea). SeeSaw (a dreadful name that defaecates on the memory of early '80s children's television, but no worse a name than its working titles) is a commercial venture operated by Arqiva (the company (owned by an Australian bank) that resulted from the merger of NTL (formerly the engineering arm of the once-glorious IBA (as stolen from us and privatized by Thatcher's Broadcasting Act 1990)) and National Grid Wireless (formerly the engineering arm of the still-pretty-glorious BBC (as stolen from us and privatized by John Birt in 1997)) in 2007, and who own the UK's transmitter network, a fifth of Freeview and multiplexes C and D). It currently consists of a selection of programming from the BBC, C4 and C5, and it certainly has the look and feel of a love-child twixt the iPlayer and 4OD. It is still a little buggy but it's quite alright. As with 4OD one gets a forced ad at the start of a broadcast, plus ads every fifteen minutes or so, but the interface owes more to the iPlayer and is consequently less unpleasant to use. The C4 content is a straight port from 4OD but the BBC stuff is a bit different: they've done a spot of light archive-raiding; nothing very special or very old with the exception of Doctor Who whose first seven incarnations get a serial apiece. And so it is that I have been revisiting the old physician's available antics. Naturally I went straight in at Tom Baker and The Talons of Weng-Chiang, a slothful six-parter in which the Doctor (as Sherlock Holmes) takes on a Fu Manchu type. The dialogue is pretty tight and snappy and some of the characterization is impressive, but the Fu Manchu character is a Caucasian caked in makeup and consequently looks faintly embarrassing. The sweeping chinoiserie is layered on equally thick and the whole thing is terribly stodgy and as arch as the Maidenhead Railway Bridge. But once we get through the opening few episodes and past the needless sewer-stalking giant rats, things start to get a bit better and everything ties up nicely in the end. The end is something Peter Davison faces in his last serial, The Caves of Androzani, accompanied by the erstwhile Peri and her amazing floating accent. If one disregards the 'Phantom of the Death Star' villain and the (again unnecessary) comedy dragon stalking the tunnels then this is actually a pretty decent little story (in four parts): a war-torn mining planet with industry, parliament, government troops, rebel androids and gun-runners all being played off each other by a scheming mogul with a comedy pony-tail. Who could really ask for more? Then we get a nicely handled regeneration albeit one spoilt a little by the swirling heads and the revelation of Colin Baker. Colin, still with Peri, is the Doctor in The Mark of the Rani, where the two, dressed for pantomime, touch down in Blists Hill, Ironbridge, to do battle against a gang of RADA rejects with some of the worst Geordie accents imaginable. They've had their sleep stolen by renegade Timelady The Rani (clad in leather trousers and '80s nylon) and we're also forced to suffer tedious King Rat-alike The Master, rubbing his velvet-clad hands in glee and cackling like an evil duck. The pantomime is at times rather painful and reaches its nadir with an animated tree. But it's not all bad, and, beyond the costume, Colin Baker's doctor gets some good lines now and again. Alas, for the most-part, though, it is spineless flotsam, and particularly cringe-inducing for its questionable 'history' content. Next up for consideration will be Mr Pertwee, never a favourite of mine. Then I can enjoy the Hartnell and Troughton as an electuary to McCoy. By which time number eleven will be around the corner. Let's take a look at him, courtesy of the BBC's trailer:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
