Sitting in the gay seat drinking crafty Magners and talking about Ben Goldacre

You know how sometimes a given venue will have everything you want to see for a few months, and then nothing? I remember when I was at the Windmill most weeks, and yet I don't think I'd been there this year until Saturday. And this having been tempted by Friday's line-up too, but two nights in a row was not going to happen and I knew more people in Saturday's line-up than Friday's, so sorry rhodri. I know augstone managed it, but he's an American, dammit. Anyway, Saturday.I always forget about Maps except when they're running their advent calendar, but they (he?) have pretty good taste. First off, steve586's solo debut. The first track I assume to be the forthcoming solo single, the last is 586's 'We Got Bored' (so much better yelped live than it was on record), but in between it's versions of 18 Carat songs; as is often the way with shows of this kind, the songs work better the more distinct they sound from the band versions, and I'm not just saying that because the iPhone playing the band version of 'Ride The Blue Tiger' as a backing track was interrupted by a voicemail alert (the perils of convergence). Then MJ Hibbett, endearing as ever, though I miss the beginning of his set because I'm hanging with the smokers and a dog, followed by White Witches, who reprise their excellent cover of 'Boys Keep Swinging'. Next up, one of the these days obligatory all-star bands, doing festive covers. And yes, it's not quite December yet, and I'm normally pretty hardline about that, but I'm not totally inflexible and they are pretty good, especially the massed ranks of the evening's acts singing 'Do They Know It's Christmas?' (Rory gets the Bono line). Finally (for me), Pagan Wanderer Lu. I've seen him before and thought he was very good, then completely failed to keep up with him for some reason. It's one man, a laptop, a guitar and the truth, and there's a lot of that about these days; I can't really explain why he's ahead of the back so will instead just note that most of his set is on Spotify.
Headliners Revere sound quite good from their Myspace, good enough that I half-regret not staying for them, but I was flagging and not best placed to get the most out of a new band, and the quantum computing book which had been annoying me on the journey down was now calling to me*. Of course, it turned out to be the kind of flagging where you get home and can't sleep and end up watching iPlayer and tapes until your eyes hurt and you have to force yourself to sleep.
Speaking of which, I watched some 'classic' Doctor Who this weekend - Frontios. I'd never seen it before, but from the Target novelisation, I liked it. In the far future, further than the TARDIS should travel, a fragile human colony has survived the death of Earth - barely. Their failure-proof machines, failed. They cling to life on the planet Frontios, but the soil of the planet is sucking colonists to their deaths...this was a dark and stirring vision.
Except on TV George from Drop the Dead Donkey is the colony's charismatic centrepiece, the sets are appalling and the monsters are worse. The direction's a mess - even scenes which could work on a school stage (Turlough's decision whether to head underground) are taken from the wrong angle and rushed. The whole thing makes you see why Rusty was so scared of alien planets at first, because if they look wrong enough, it undermines the whole enterprise. The 'wobbly set' thing is a cliche, but when it gets bad enough, in the most damaging ways, it does torpedo a story. Or at least, it does unless the story is rock solid, and while writer Christopher Bidmead was responsible for the brilliant Logopolis/Castrovalva pairing, here he seems to have been having quite the off-day.
The (badly) animated new David Tennant story, 'Dreamland', also has critters sucking humans down into the ground, this time in the course of a Roswell story which, as we've come to expect from Phil Ford, goes over ground Who has already covered, but less well. I mention it here chiefly because I wasn't aware it existed until a Facebook friend mentioned it, so some of you might also have been in the dark. Georgia Moffett also features, but not as Jenny. I don't know why her name goes ahead of the credits and Tim Howar (as equally-featured male pseudo-companion for the story) doesn't.

Yesterday whizzerandchips was in town so we all went to the pub, but I'll leave the full reports on that to people who got pictures of the plasticine genitalia.

*Part of the problem could well have been the reading environment. Opposite me sat a man muttering to himself (or rather, an invisible presence in the middle distance) in what sounded like heavily-accented French. On his lap, a vinyl copy of the Shaft soundtrack in a carrier bag, held bolt upright; the bag is occasionally rolled down and then up again, as if in flirtation,