London is the opposite of pathetic fallacy.

Unsurprisingly, I liked Steven Moffat's take on Sherlock Holmes quite a lot. Not least because this was essentially Holmes as the Doctor, except ruder. But then that makes perfect sense given Holmes was inspired by Doyle teaming up with the Doctor, and/or teamed up with the Doctor himself, depending which book you believe. The Holmes-vision in particular was very reminiscent of the Doctor-vision we saw in The Eleventh Hour (and which was then quietly dropped even though Confidential suggested it would be a Thing). The modernisation was a smart move, so much better than another take on the character reduced to yet another costume drama, yet another pale shadow of Jeremy Brett - although of course you can't have a modern Holmes in a modern London without it also being an alternate world story, because Baker Street 2010 wouldn't be anything like the same without a Victorian Holmes having been. The only failure of modernisation I spotted was the first appearance of Holmes; yes, the corpse-beating scene was great, but a century on, with results from the Knoxville body farm &c to consider, it wouldn't be necessary. There were other problems: ( spoilers )

Not perfect, then - but still very good. Though whether the other writers will keep up the same standard remains to be seen, especially when one of them made his last screenwriting appearance with 'Victory of the Daleks'.

A reasonably quiet weekend, spent largely watching films (of which more later in the week) except for Saturday when there were two parties. A situation which can often end in tears, or at least unconsciousness, but fortunately I fell asleep in the kitchen at the one where I knew almost everyone, so they're used to me. Yes, I really am that classy.

Read Si'mon' Spurrier's Contract last week, with high expectations; alongside al_ewing, Spurrier is the best of the recent crop of 2000AD writers, which is no slight praise. And it's by no means a bad read - well, it's a 'bad' read in the moral sense, because it left me stood in Poundland thinking 'you know, you could get everything you needed to torture someone in here, and still have change from a tenner' - but it does suffer from one of the characteristic problems of novels by comics writers. Not the having seen it all before - yes, Spurrier has had a protagonist with the surname Point before, yes, the amoral lead is his thing, but those are all fine to revisit, and I wasn't left with the feeling of repetition for the prose audience which I got from, say, the first half of Neil Gaiman's American Gods. The problem is more...what to call it? 'Over-concentration', perhaps. Because comics writers are so used to conveying everything in a couple of lines per panel, and leaving the rest to the artist, once *everything* is filtered through a first person narrator, the characterisation can be almost too strong. It's a similar situation when a pop lyricist - or a good one, anyway - writes a book. Nick Cave's debut was excellent, but he was so used to fitting epics into four or five minutes of song that, given hundreds of pages, he produced something where the same density, over a greater length, was almost too much. It makes you realise how easy people who only ever write extended prose have it.

There's a trick which I think Art Brut began to popularise, and which several bands have taken up recently, of giving songs the same names as songs which already exist, without them being remotely the same songs. Not necessarily as diss or homage, just...liking the title. And normally I rather enjoy it, but on the new Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan album, they come a cropper. Because when I saw 'Come Undone' and 'Time of the Season' on the tracklisting, I thought, I really want to hear Isobel and Mark cover those songs. Maybe that's the problem, because I never for a moment thought the Art Brut album was going to include a M/A/R/R/S cover, or that the Indelicates album would have them doing the Stones.