'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

After a week which at times saw the first three TV channels all simultaneously screening oafs in shorts bothering grass with their balls, thank heavens for Channel 4 which, while it may be airing the undignified death throes of Big Brother, an experiment superseded before it even began (on which more in a moment), brought back The IT Crowd. Still far from revolutionary or life-changing, still a good, direct, paradoxically old-fashioned sit-com. Not that the other three channels had entirely lost it, because right on time (and thank heavens, I couldn't have waited a minute longer) along came ( the Doctor Who finale ) Though, semantically it's wrong to say that the Doctor is a Jesus figure. Jesus was a Doctor figure, or equally a Superman figure - the best a pallid, nasty, ersatz religion-substitute could come up with in the dark centuries between the fall of the old gods, and the creation (or discovery) of superheroes and Doctor Who. And just as christianity stole the festivals from the old religions, so Doctor Who is stealing them back. The prime significance of Easter? NEW SEASON! The prime significance of Christmas? SPECIAL!

That Big Brother comment above? Don't worry, I'm not watching the new series (and if anyone else is, they've not mentioned it, which is in some ways a shame as following it through my friends' posts was far more edifying than watching the real thing). Rather, I watched We Live In Public by Ondi Timoner, the maker of Dig!, and if you follow that link any time over the next 17 days then so can you. As in Dig!, she follows someone generally regarded by those around him as a genius/messiah, but who would in fact appear to be a loon. Internet pioneer Josh Harris is essentially Nathan Barley as played by Eugene Mirman. He starts off with Pseudo.com, an internet TV network, but is edged out after attending business meetings dressed as a scary clown. Instead he sets up Quiet, which is something between a Berlin squat and a cult bunker (and this in the run-up to the Millennium), but is also the Big Brother house, except less boring (there's loads of shagging, unlimited booze, and guns in the basement - what could go wrong?) and less humane (CIA-trained interrogators, cameras in the loos). And after that's run its course, he sets up home with his (first) girlfriend in full public view - there's even a camera in the bowl of the loo, pointing up, though mercifully the only footage we see from it is the cat having a drink. There's a bit of a rubbish coda, but the film is otherwise a fascinating look at a very damaged man - and proof that the Big Brother 'experiment' was outmoded from the off.

What else? Well, I went to the N19 two nights in a row, and the Camden Head two nights in a row, but my life is in no way in a rut, honest. Oh, and then N19 again, but only after heading up Parkland Walk for a picnic and some art (a bunch of installations up the Highgate end, returning this evening from 6 if anyone needs the excuse for a summer's evening walk). Oh, and I read Evelyn Waugh's final novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. An autobiographical account of an ageing Catholic writer who mixes his medicines and starts hallucinating, it may only be 150 pages but that's still too long - like the genuinely insane, Waugh was clearly unaware of the need to edit, of how little illumination one sheds by repetition with minor variation. It has also that nasty Ricky Gervais quality, where the supposedly satirised autobiographical pratagonist is still sneakily presented as indefinably nobler than most of the other characters. And it comes in a book with two horrid, pinched little stories, 'Tactical Exercise' and 'Love Among The Ruins', which remind one of nothing so much as the weaker, more tiresomely reactionary writing of Evelyn's son Auberon - and if you don't know Auberon's work then put it this way - at his worst, he was Richard Littlejohn with the occasional good turn of phrase.

The best thing about a Moffat two parter is that after a first part which was brilliant, you get a second part that's even better. ( Spoilers! )
I'm sure by now we all know about Lawrence Miles' interesting if infuriating blog, and Paul Cornell's has been about for a while (as if getting mainstream coverage for Gordon Brown vs the Skrull Empire weren't enough, turns out he's adapted Iain M Banks' The State of the Art for radio. With Anthony Sher as the Ship and Nina Sosanya as Sma, no less). But I was happy to discover this week that the other big beast of the Who books* finally has one too - Lance Parkin. In part because he's writing a Tenth Doctor book. As in, just the Doctor. There's not a lot up yet, but he does link to an interview in which I made the sad discovery that one of my favourite Who writers wanted to kill off one of my favourite companions.

Shaun Tan's The Arrival is not a comic per se; it's a wordless picture book. The wordlessness perfectly suited to the story of an immigrant's experience in a New World whose language he does not know, a city of wonders as strangely familiar as the lurking horrors from which he fled in the old country. It has some of the most haunting artwork I have seen in a long time, and some of the most heart-rending. I imagine it would be a particularly good purchase for any child which parents fear may have been exposed to Mail headlines about immigrants eating house prices, but it deserves an audience far beyond that.

I love White Mischief, so I'm glad it's popular, but dear heavens it gets hot in there with those crowds, especially if one is making an effort to dress up (which the vast majority did, splendidly so - at one point I thought "What the Hell is that girl wearing?" before processing that she was in jeans and a teen top, ie what would outside be considered normal). Some fine acts, though - I particularly liked the Brel-singing acrobat and the sword-swallowing, and if Tough Love and Ebony Bones had just played shorter sets, they would have absolutely killed.
And for all my irritation at last night's multi-clash, I at least got to say hello and cheerio to some of the Poptimism lot on my way home.

*Kate Orman I would have counted for her Virgin work, but once she went to BBC books and started co-writing with that guy, they no longer grabbed me in the same way. And Daniel O'Mahony was excellent, but he only wrote two.