alexsarll: (crest)
Yes, I should be out enjoying the sun, and everyone else will be so this will go unread, but I'm waiting for the washing machine and I have a week to get down before it slips my mind. A week spent mostly in Devon, where some newly-revealed clay from about 150 million years ago had its first encounter with the mammalian age when I plunged in up to the knees while looking for ammonites, and I went to Jasper Hazelnut's cafe, and saw someone with a hare lip outside ads for Third World children for the first time I can remember, and couldn't really blog on account of a deranged cursor. The train to Devon is lovely, following a stream much of the way and passing fields with cows, and llamas, and in one case horses and chickens grazing contentedly together.

And when the nights drew in, what did I watch?
Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle: good, but perhaps not as good as we all expected after his long absence from our screens. An out comics fan has no place attacking adults for reading Harry Potter, but beyond that, simply filming stand-up feels weird, like watching a straight filming of a stage play.
Given Mad Men's scrupulous sixties style, what the blazes were they doing soundtracking the opening of last week's episode with the Decemberists? Yes, they sound timeless, and it wasn't as if Don Draper was getting into MIA, but it still threw me.
I only watched the first episode of Party Animals, but my mum's a fan and had missed the final episode, so I watched along - an unusual experience for me, who is never normally a casual viewer. The main interest, of course, being to see what the Eleventh Doctor's performance was like. I'm still mainly repeating 'Trust Moffat. Trust Moffat' to myself. Andrea Riseborough and Excelsor from No Heroics were good, though, if basically playing the same characters (the devious slapper and the smug git).
The Tomb of Ligeia is the last and not the best of the Roger Corman/Vincent Price/Edgar Allan Poe films, in part because one of the major roles is the possibly-possessed cat, and as anyone who's seen Breakfast at Tiffany's will know, cats can't act - they can at best be thrown onto the set by the AD. Typically, the film owes as much to Poe's 'M.Valdemar' as 'Ligeia', but more than anything else Vincent Price seems to be playing James Robinson's Shade, right down to the hat and the glasses. No bad thing, obviously.

"The Pope also warned of a threat to the Catholic Church...from the "growing influence of superstitious forms of religion". Next week; why racism threatens Nazism. Sidious' deranged ramblings about condoms in Africa are, of course, a despicable attempt to take advantage of the vulnerable, but closer to home, last night on Stroud Green Road there was a team, dressed like bouncers, of 'Street Pastors', strolling around at closing time looking for the lost and lonely like so many spiritual date-rapists.
(And with perfect timing, as I finished writing this some more of the scoundrels came to my door. Given I'd discharged my bile here, I didn't even have enough fire left for more than a curt 'No Thank You' and a slammed door)
alexsarll: (bernard)
Finally saw Daniel Kitson last night, after having been raved at about him by at least three mostly separate sets of comedy chums for, what, a couple of years now? It was a self-confessedly shambolic preview of his new show, 66a Church Road, and one which will probably bear scant resemblance to the finished product, but yes, he is very funny. I am, however, more mystified than ever as to how come so many girls I know have crushes on the guy.
I went to see him at Battersea Arts Centre, of which I've similarly been long aware - but that utilitarian name never filled me with enthusiasm. I hadn't expected something so grand, murals of burning skies behind a grand staircase down which people sweep to the strains of Mono because someone who works there knows exactly what incidental music sets their space off to its best advantage. I'm now kicking myself that I never went to see The Masque of the Red Death while it was there - but that's London for you, isn't it? The man who is tired of London is tired of life, but look at that the other way round and it's a reminder that in London, you always end up missing out on something.

I know I'm not the first to say this, but who would ever have thought that a Doctor-free, Donna-heavy Doctor Who episode, and one flashing back to her debut in The Worst Who Story Ever at that, could be as good as 'Turn Left'? I still worry, though - the over-egged ending was its weakest moment, and while the Next Week trailer was arresting...well, on paper and even on clips, 'Doomsday' looked arresting, and look what a pig's ear that was.
I worry even more about the point that Lawrence Miles made - we watch this bleak vision of what would happen in a world without the Doctor, and we forget that there's another parallel without a Doctor, one all too close to home.

'Freebooter' and 'freelancer' are pretty much synonyms, aren't they? So why does 'freebooter' sound so much more dashing when boots are, in and of themselves, far less exciting than lances?
(This thought occasioned by doing the Salisbury quiz for the third time, with the third totally different team. And less than spectacular results, but that's by the by)

I've liked most shows I've seen James Lance in, and ditto Nicolas "Nathan Barley" Burns. They've worked together before, to great effect, as support in the Stephen Fry PR-com Absolute Power. So surely I ought to be glad that they're reunited in a sitcom about a bar for off-duty superheroes, particularly given what a rich source of comedy such settings have proved in comics?
Well, I would be, but it's on ITV. And given the near-infallibility of ITV's reverse Midas touch lately, that pretty much guarantees that it will make My Hero look like JLI.

December 2017

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