Summer! (take two)

[alexsarll]

Spent Thursday evening sat in friends' garden until gone 10 and a fair amount of Friday reading in the park, then yesterday there again for a pleasingly languid picnic interrupted by one attempt at skipping, which I'm sure didn't used to feel so terrifying, but then that was about 20 years ago when my legs weren't so long and easily caught. Also my first ice cream of the year, except it turns out there age hasn't changed so much, and I still get the sauce down my front. Other weekend activities: Nuisance, which in amongst the beloved and the half-forgotten and the not-really-Britpop-but-it's-ace-so-who's-counting*, once again managed to redefine 'going too far' with an airing for Kula Shaker's 'Mystical Machine Gun'. Just as the Beatles' 'All You Need Is Love' is justified by its use in the final episode of The Prisoner without in any way being redeemed, so with 'Mystical Machine Gun' and Phonogram. Not that even 'Mystical Machine Gun' is as bad as 'All You Need Is Love', obviously. Nothing is.
Still, good night otherwise. Also, one of the Monarch's bouncers talks like a Mexican Darth Vader. Brilliant.
Then on Saturday, one of my occasional forays into DJing, this time at a masked ball. Turns out I'm no worse on the decks than usual without my peripheral vision, but it's amazing how badly even a little mask affects other stuff like dancing, stairs &c. How Doctor Doom copes I shall never know. I was what I believe the professionals call 'back to back' with augstone. But not like that. You can probably guess who picked what.
You Make Me Want To Drink Bleach (This Is Where I Stand version) - Easyworld
Maybe - Emma Bunton
We Are The Gothic Archies
Heaven on the Seventh Floor - Paul Nicholas
Cruel Summer - Bananarama
What's Your Name - Depeche Mode
Because You're Frightened - Magazine
Cradle of Love - Billy Idol
I'm Going To Hell - The Long Blondes
Rasputin - Boney M
Close-Cropped - Luxembourg
Seven Boom Medley - Freezepop
The Fear - Lily Allen
Stereo - Pavement
Magnatron - Kenickie
This Is For Real - David Devant & his Spirit Wife
We Hate The Kids - The Indelicates
Delicious - Shampoo

Otherwise - the final Ashes to Ashes. Which reminded me a little of A Matter of Life and Death - never a bad thing - but even more so of another wartime film I once saw whose name I can never remember, where a group of people who have all had near misses on the way to the docks are on a cruise liner. Which turns out to be taking them to the next life, because they didn't have near misses after all, they died. And the chap who killed himself has to stay on the ship for however long, as a steward.
It's been obvious for ages that Keats was the Devil. I liked that they didn't give him a big speech to that effect - though part of me wonders if they wrote one then cut it; if so, I'd love to see it. I'd been sure since they all saw stars that Ray, Chris and Shaz were in the same position as Sam and Alex - but I still thought Gene was something else until five minutes in to Friday's episode, when it hit me, no, he's 6602 and he was the first. But as against the shows built around a mystery which allow the mystery to become all, LoM/AtA knew that they were only one strand of what kept us watching, so I was no less gripped by seeing the exact details of how it would play out. And how wonderfully well it did. I was a little sad that we only got Nelson coming out of the Railway at the end - no glimpse of Sam, not even an overheard voice - but the pub as Heaven! Whether they were consciously referencing GK Chesterton or Arthur Machen's gloss on Dickens, I have no idea. If they weren't, and it's just an idea lurking in the British collective unconscious, that's almost better. Some people see Gene's position at the end as tragic, which I don't think is how it's intended. He's a copper. He's got a job to do. He's OK with that, because it's not as if the pub is going anywhere. Wonderful.

On the other hand - Doctor Who. I had assumed that with Russell T Davies' departure we would also see the back of the hopeless Chris Chibnall, but no, apparently he has incriminating polaroids of Moffat too, so he doesn't just get to do one episode, he gets two! Reintroducing the Earth Reptiles! As soon as we see that he's called his Welsh village Cwmtaff, it's clear that the cluelessness and laziness we expect of Who's answer to Jeph Loeb are unimpaired, and so the episode lurches predictably from unoriginal and unconvincing jeopardy to cackhanded Issue of the Week speeches (as has been noted elsewhere - if you're doing a Middle East analogy, it might be better not to cast giant lizards as the Jews). And the redesign - ugh! So boringly human. I am of course blaming Chibnall for that, whereas all credit for the city visual at the end goes to the design team, and any good bits - the Doctor's conversation with the boy, for instance - are clearly attributable to Moffat on the final script polish. Seriously, though - eight minutes to cover an entire village with a surveillance network? That felt improbable, and since it accomplished nothing, it wasn't even an improbability which served a plot purpose. It was filler of the worst sort; you might as well just have had a chicken ride a unicycle around the church for three minutes singing 'Copacabana', that would at least have been novel.
(Who fans might also be interested to know that Radio 7 are airing a new series of Eighth Doctor stories - afraid this is the second, but I only barely caught the first myself)

*Although the ex-Menswear guest DJ did push it when he played Dolly Parton.

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[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

What's not to love? The fact that it's Crispian Mills doing the shouting!