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

Just finished reading The Thin Veil of London, a book loosely concerning the great Arthur Machen, and a companion to a walk I went on a couple of Sundays back. Elements which could have felt like am-dram instead felt like they were genuinely ruffling the surface and some Thing might chance through at any moment, as we walked streets I'd never seen within ten minutes of where I've been working for two years. And Machen's grandson was there, now old enough to resemble the great man's jacket pictures. Truly an experience to treasure.
Other London adventures:
- Victoria Park, which I have passed but never entered, finally visited. Would be lovely if it didn't have so many wasps and men who think they're it.
- The Archway Tavern has now become a tiki bar, and not in the half-arsed manner one might expect - there's even an indoors water feature. Also tequila girls and bog trolls. They come with the venue. The night, being loosely glam, had attracted a bafflingly mixed crowd, including some full-on townies and what looked like US-style good old boys as well as the obvious. Most terrifying, though - one man who looked like a seventies TV presenter, and one girl wearing the classic 'sexy school uniform' look. In defiance of all laws of comedy, they didn't seem to know each other.
- I've never sat in Greenwich Park and not faced the view North before. Around the bandstand it feels like another park, less London, older. I like it.

Saw Menswear again on Friday; I say 'again', last time it was Johnny Dean and the Nuisance band, but a rose by any other name would smell as Britpop. When I wear a suit, I can even confuse other nineties indie celebrities into thinking I am him.

I was dimly aware Art Everywhere was coming, but it was very much background knowledge until I glanced at a billboard and thought, hang on, what the Hell are they trying to sell with John Martin's fire and brimstone? And they weren't; it was just saying 'Hey, look at John Martin! Isn't he good?' Second one was Samuel Palmer. I don't go to a lot of single-artist exhibitions, but I've been to see both of them. Approved.

War of the Waleses is, by its dramaturge's own admission, 'sillier and nastier' in its current version that first time out. I can see how the shorter version, with fewer actors, is much better suited to the practicalities of Fringe life, and making any play crueller about Princess Di is fine by me (the new line about her "simpering sedition" absolutely nails it), but I miss some of the Shakespeare resonances lost - especially when it comes to John Major and the vanished John Smith. The comparison of the two takes set me thinking - Major was our Yeltsin, wasn't he? By which I mean, a very long way from perfect, and you can entirely understand the pisstaking at the time, but it was a brief glimpse of doing things a slightly different way before the ancien regime reasserted itself, more dickish than before in so far as that dickishness was veiled around with a new insincerity.

I'm up to the end of Breaking Bad's third season, whose pacing and tone seemed a little off - too often the show overegged the comedy, before slipping into mawkishness when it pulled back from that. Too much old ground was re-covered in the tension between the leads. And then I saw an interview with Bryan Cranston where he claimed that other TV shows were about familiarity, about seeing the same character each week, and nobody on TV has ever changed like Walter White. And I thought, no. Absolutely take your point about most network crap, and even some very good shows, but never say never. Because Babylon 5 had Londo and G'kar, and they changed like nobody's business. So this nudged me back towards my paused rewatch of B5's second season, and I realised, it wasn't just the general principle of a character who changes: Walter is Londo. He's a proud man, feeling his time has passed, staring the end in the face. So he makes a deal with the devil and at first he's thrilled by the power, before realising that he has become something he hates, and there's no way to get off the ride. He even has a conflicted relationship with a younger sidekick possessed of a certain inherent haplessness!
Other television: Justified got a fair few articles this time around about how it deserved more attention, which is more attention that it used to get, but still not as much as it deserves. I'm intrigued by the way other characters were built up this time out, especially among the Marshals - it could almost survive without Timothy Olyphant, I think, not that I'm in any hurry to see it try. The Revenants was good, even if it did cop out a little by going to a second series WHICH HAD BETTER BLOODY ANSWER EVERYTHING. Speaking of cops, French police uniforms suck. I did love how unashamedly Gallic it was in scattering sexy superpowers around the populace. And BBC4 continues to brutally beat down every traitor who ever dissed the holy BBC. Dominic West and Helena Bonham Carter as Burton and Taylor was a suitably meta final outing for their big dramas; just as Cleopatra marked the end of Hollywood's grand era, so this brought down the curtain on BBC4's days of riches (at least, until I rule the world, when the accumulated wealth of the entire Murdoch mob - and the proceeds from sale of their organs - will all go to bolster the licence fee). But they still have their documentaries, the sort of shows other factual broadcasters pretend they're going to make, before wheeling out a load of gimmicky recreations, recaps and silly music. Consider the recent show about Ludwig II of Bavaria; I'm by no means unfamiliar with him, but there was so much here I didn't know. His grand castle Neuschwanstein is the basis for the Disney castle - but I had no idea it was itself a theme park, with modern architecture and engineering hidden behind the scenes, council chambers which were never used - essentially a private playpen. All this was the work of a constitutional monarch conscious modelling his private realm on absolute monarchies - yet at the end they talk to young citizens of Bavaria who acclaim him as too modern for his time. Most broadcasters would be unable to resist a honking noise then, a reminder of the mistake, but BBC4 trusts us to make our own connections.

Feels like life has been fairly quiet of late, (except when it hasn't, of course - Hyde Park picnics, Leyton pubs that are at least decently apologetic about hating my people, SE14's answer to the Shaftesbury). But in early summer, especially this year as it's still picking up from the tardy spring, I don't mind that. The evenings are still simply beautiful, without that complex melancholy they acquire later on - though it would help if I had the park for them, when instead it's being turned into some sort of prison camp for Madchester arseholes (sorry, tautology, I know). Still, I've had my chances to go a-roaming - up trees, over banks, through hedges and across a Heath resplendent with buttercups like I've never seen. Even got to share a tree with a jay at one point - a much better companion than parakeets, who may be beautiful, but in prolonged proximity are no better than the sort of person who wears Beats By Dre headspeakers. Guessed a stranger's dog's name, too - though given my guess was Slobberchops, based on obvious physical features, I don't think that's much proof of psychic potential.

Been watching a lot of adventure series lately - The Avengers, Brisco County Jr, Adventure Time - and hardly any films. One exception: Night of the Eagle, which as the name suggests is close kin to the MR James adaptation Night of the Demon. Peter Wyngarde - excellent value as ever - plays a sixties Richard Dawkins who discovers his wife's a closet witch and makes her burn her "protections", after which their lives go about as smoothly as you'd expect. There are loose plot threads all over the place and it doesn't even seem quite sure whether magic works or not in its world, but it's thoroughly eerie nonetheless. Spartacus ended for good, and Doctor Who for now; the former was the downer it was always going to be, the latter much better than I'd dared expect, though it may have helped that I had the contrast of having just finished the rambling Reign of Terror, the first full Hartnell I've attempted in a decade or more.

And then after 'The Name of the Doctor' there was Eurovision, in which as ever the worthy victor was robbed - this time it was Romania (or rather Romoania) with the gay dubstep vampire. We left after that and Bonnie Tyler to see The French Electric live down the road, sounding like the National before they went boring, covering songs from Dare! and getting away with it. They were followed by a tragic act who could have sounded like Mazzy Star or Lana del Rey if only the drums had been turned down (or preferably off), which was my cue to depart. Thee Faction and Joanne Joanne at the Buffalo Bar were excellent, same as last time they played there together, and once again I drank entirely too much. Possibly because I'd realised that, if they're a genderswapped Duran Duran and Keith and I had been hanging with them in the pub earlier, that made us genderswapped 'Girls on Film' video babes. I should possibly be seeing them again tonight, but outside was calling, and I'm still in a certain amount of gig-shock after seeing the Art Brut birthday gig on what they weren't allowed to call the Glass Ceiling Tour. Ten years! They've learned a lot in that time, though. And the Scala...I'd forgotten how much I liked that venue. I'd forgotten how much I like the rare big gig - and it turns out they do still exist - where the crowd Get It. And the support slot from Keith et al wasn't bad either - I think the best show I've seen them do since the Devant support with the spiralling, near-infinite 'One Thing After Another'. They're a big band, a big stage suits them.

Anyway, my dears, I think I need another cup of decaf tea before Justified. It's a rock'n'roll life and no mistake.

Went to 333 last night for the first time since it was still vaguely cool. It's a lot better now it isn't, although there were still residual traces of venue-that-thinks-they're-it cluelessness. The ground floor has become essentially a normal pub called the London Apprentice, to the extent that I was wandering baffled around the frontage looking for where the venue entrance had gone to hide, and had to be assisted by one of the Ethical Debating Society (who are much tighter these days, though seemed surprised to hear it). Then there was another band who had a keytar in their favour but not much else, before The Murder Act who were looking very striking and sounding more so, somewhere between Gallon Drunk and One More Grain. After which we pissed off to drink cans in the street because we are that cool. Q and I, both having recently been touched for funds by our alma mater, got a picture complete with cap in hand, which we may or may not send them by way of explaining our refusal.

Other gigs seen since I last posted about gigs seen:
augstone in acoustic troubadour mode on Upper Street, on the day when Upper Street was haunted by a most unpleasant smell. No connection, I should add. At least, not so far as I'm aware.
Brontosaurus Chorus Dom's new band, who were a bit loud for the 12 Bar, supporting Rebekah Delgado and her sexy weeping angels.
The Gonzo Dog-Do Bar Band, whose Bonzos tribute bafflingly omitted 'Sport (The Odd Boy)' in spite of the show coming right before the Olympics. Still, they finished with a damn fine 'Mr Apollo', and generally did justice to songs which can easily lose the appropriate strangeness. martylog's Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra supported, with a very eerie new song about allotments the high-point.
The Thlyds - or rather a tribute - in a show which can be heard here. If The Thlyds did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them - a voice for disaffected young Britain which, crucially, isn't the risible Plan B. 'Let's Have A Riot' at the Olympics fell a little flat, what with us doomsayers having been proven wrong for once - but the rest was brilliantly sneering.
Gyratory System, in the perfect venue of the Social, which is to say a fashionable breeze block. They sounded - or more than sounded, felt - like a burning robot factory - but with a groove.
Thee Faction, incendiary in another sense of the word, and Joanne Joanne, an all-female tribute to...you can work it out. But only the early stuff. More punk than Rhodes, Taylor and le Bon ever sounded on record, but that works.
Keith ToTP and Dream Themes. I've written about them both plenty on here before. Whatever it is they have, they've still got it.

On Friday I was at Nuisance, and Spearmint's 'Sweeping the Nation' was spun before those bloody tables were off the dancefloor, and it made me sad that this hymn to the overlooked was being overlooked once more. But then on Saturday, as I arrived at the too-seldom If You Tolerate Bis, what should be the first song playing as I pay? Damn right. And this time, there was a floor! And dancing! And two songs later was 'You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve'. HELL YES.
Not that I only go to retro indie nights, honest. Two Saturdays earlier I was out in London's Fashionable East London at a self-parodic art opening, briefly elevated by dance-and-light elements which turned a clear plastic shelf (in itself, an Express writer's idea of modern art) into a sort of phantasmal butterfly. Though even this was accompanied by a soundtrack of abrasive noise obviously intended as some form of confrontation, but which I found quite soothing. At one point someone farted and I wondered if this was also part of the artist's multi-sensory assault. And on the intervening weekend I went, briefly, to a cocktail place on Covent Garden. You know when you're in the West End on a weekend, and you see the normal people up from the outer zones for a night on the town, and wonder where they go? This place is one of the answers, and they're welcome to it.
Also: Hillingdon, which I have passed plenty of times on the Oxford Tube. It always looked - by night, anyway - like a strange, shining city of glass and steel had left its outpost in the wilds. Up close...not so much. It is also very noisy, and what appeared to be a zombie pigeon was on the stairs. But the territory between there and Ickenham is lovely, that edge of the suburbs country where you get lots of waste ground, streams, trees, a rope swing or two on which a friend of a friend is always rumoured to have broken something, just because that keeps everyone alert. The sort of place that's fairly hopeless once you become a teenager but, up to about 12, is heaven.
And now I am in Devon, where I spent the morning in a weirdly Mediterranean fishing village, and have just finished chopping wood. Delightful.

- I imagine when Cronenberg's Shivers came out, the parasites and the sex zombie behaviour they cause were pretty shocking, but now they can't compare to the fear and revulsion inspired by the styles worn by uninfected 1975 suburbanites.

- I like the Buffalo Bar, which is why it saddened me that after seeing dozens of gigs there with my umbrella safely in hand, one of their bouncers has now decided it is a problem - and worse, started quoting bullshit 'Health and Safety' and 'it's the law' claptrap to that effect.

- I need to find out why part of the Regent's Canal, not far from Little Venice, is lined by the aggressively private grounds of oddly squashed Regency palances. But I know that when I do it will be a disappointment. Still, I love the almost post-civilisational greenery of that part of town.

- Bevan 17 covering the Sugarcubes' 'Hit' was lovely. 47th Street Demon Exchange covering Therapy?'s 'Nowhere' slowly was inadvisable. Mr Solo covering Cypress Hill was...I don't know what that was.

- Sons of Anarchy came back from the debacle of the Oirish season with a finale which used one of my favourite narrative tricks, and not one I would normally have associated with this show. But also lots of badasses staring each other down. Obv.

- If David Shah hosts another night at the Wilmington he needs to give himself more stage time with the Soft Close-Ups, and parodic examples of the singer-songwriter genre a lot less.

- Community choirs performing in pubs: a lovely idea, so long as you're not too close to them.

- Enjoyed the Nuisance band's take on Blur, with steve586 as that hitherto inconceivable creature, a Graham Coxon I don't want to punch. And for all that Nuisance invariably attracts some bell-ends, we had already seen the evening's finest en route, when a yellow Maserati got into a race with our bus, and literally every passenger on it was making jokes about the motorist's inevitably inadequate manhood.

- Amusing to see Hamas agreeing with the line from the old Israeli joke about how one Israeli is worth a thousand of theirs.

- The Tate's John Martin exhibition is excellent. Yes, maybe he couldn't do lightining or faces - the former more of a problem than the latter - but he's still the go-to man for shit getting real. When an empire - or a mountain - falls, John Martin is your man. Or, when you want the great timeless cities off in the corner of an immense Arcadian landscape where I could quite happily lounge for an infinity or two, he does those also. Wonderful.

Managed a fairly major weekend without once going more than a few hundred yards from home. In the case of Sunday that was because the insane Death Valley heat meant I *couldn't* get more than a few hundred yards from home, but Black Plastic and asw909 and _pinkdaisy_'s party would have been must-attends even if I had teleportation capability. I also managed a third, and I suspect final, listen to Lady Gaga's Born This Way. Popjustice said it's "yet to feel like an easy listen. Maybe it will never be background music; it was clearly never meant to be". Which surprises me, because while I may not always agree with their enthusiasms, seldom do I feel so totally at odds with their whole assessment of a record. Even the dud tracks on Gaga's first two albums caught the attention, whereas with this one I have to struggle not to tune out. I can see what she's doing, I think - making a record that sounds mainstream, attempting to capitalise on her position and become even bigger, and using that massiveness to preach acceptance and openness and all that. And yes, in a big picture sense, that's for the good. Except that in the process she's made a record which is, like the Lex says, very sincere and direct. And I always liked the playfulness, the masks, the sense of theatre to Gaga - even before I came to like the music. Then, once the music had me snared, I liked its strangeness. So what I don't especially need is a record that, more even than the Madonna comparisons which only really apply to the title track, sounds to me like the filler on a Pink album, or the less exciting songs on Marc Almond's nineties Fantastic Star (this bit goes especially for 'Marry the Night' - "down the street that I love in my fishnet gloves I'm a sinner" and all). Oh well. At a less exalted level, Patrick Wolf also seems to have sacrificed much of his charming strangeness in pursuit of a wider crossover, and has also made his least exciting album in the process. In their defence, at least neither of them are the much-touted Wu Lyf, who sound like they're trying to rip off The Strange Death of Liberal England, who themselves were only quite good to begin with. If it hadn't been for the Wild Swans' beautifully English reunion album (and I wasn't even that big a fan of them first time around), it would have been a sorry few months for music.

Watched two films this week. Freedomland was a quiet little urban drama; Samuel L Jackson and Julianne Moore were the marquee names, but it's awash with Wire alumni - based on a book by Richard Price, plus supporting turns from Herc, Lester and one of the Season 4 kids, as well as a bonus Carmela Soprano. Much more about individual responsibility than The Wire ever was, and with slightly Hollywood direction at times, but still, it felt like it was telling a truth about life as it is lived at the bottom. Not something you'd expect to be true of X-Men: First Class too, but its motor is the contrast between well-meaning, moneyed chump Charles Xavier (James McAvoy's take, at his best, comes across like the Eleventh Doctor if he weren't scared of girls, but at other points has terrible echoes of David Cameron's blase side) and Magneto. Magneto, who has seen life and people as they are at their worst, who has survived the concentration camps, and has seen what 'humanity' really means. Magneto, who has cool powers, and uses them to kill Nazis, which makes them even cooler (though sadly we only see flesh wounds for communists). Magneto who - eventually - even has a better version of the outfit than Ian McKellen (not something I say lightly given the strength of McKellen's performance). Magneto who, as per the t-shirt I wore to the cinema, was right. This is the first time in the films we've met a human who's not a dick - Moira. ( spoilers ) Third-best X-Men film? Which given the second remains my favourite superhero film ever, isn't bad.

Any other business? Bevan 17, still ace. Finally seen the Inevitable Pinhole Burns. Finally been to St Pancras Old Churchyard. The weather seems to have paused its wild mood swings and just settled for Nice And Summery. Life's not bad.

Yes, it's that time of year again; I think I've heard everything that's coming out (and the Duran Duran was really not worth waiting for), I've listened back to the ones I couldn't make up my mind about, and then I've started juggling positions and seeing which orders made sense. Nonetheless, this list is of necessity provisional; I completely missed until this year the arrival of at least two albums which should have been in 2009's top 20, by Circulus and George Pringle. It should also go without saying that like any such list, it is entirely subjective. And Number One is really not going to surprise anyone to whom I've talked about music in the past couple of years. So without further ado, ( the chart rundown )...and there was a 30-40, but halfway through putting in the HTML for the italics, I decided no, all of those are either too samey or too patchy. They had lovely moments, but they weren't great albums. And moments don't make albums. A lot of my favourite songs this year - Big Boi's 'Shutterbug', Robyn's 'Dancing On My Own', My Chemical Romance's 'Na Na Na', Shrag's 'Rabbit Kids', Underworld's 'Between Stars' - were from albums other people really rated, but which to me sounded like more than half filler. Then you had Spoiler Alert!'s 'Booster Gold' and Mitch Benn's 'I'm Proud of the BBC' (an EP track and a stand-alone single, respectively), and Gaga's 'Telephone' from a 2009 album. I don't buy the whole death of the album line, mind; there have always been great singles that hunt alone, or live on patchy albums. But I have found that when an album isn't physically present, it can no longer nag at you from the corner of your eye. When it's not even digitally present, when there's only access to it - on Spotify, most especially, with its refusal to tell you what you were doing even the five searches back that it used to manage unless you specifically note an item at the time - then only a song itself, lodged in the brain can remind you about an album, remind you that you were briefly very impressed, pull you back. And it doesn't happen as often as I would have expected. Is that determined by the music the year had on offer, or is it a general thing? No idea. But looking back at that list, thinking about all the albums that didn't make it, an awful lot of music this year has sounded tired. That is not in itself a bad thing - tiredness is an emotion which, like any other, can set the tone for great art. But not all of them were accomplishing that transmutation and, even when you think about the ones who were...well, it's not the best of zeitgeists, is it?

I think it's fair to say that I have had better weeks. Neither finances nor my immune system have been all they could have been, there were all too many intimations of mortality (Dexter Fletcher's decrepit appearance in Misfits the least of them), and even a book I'd been hoping might provide a romping diversion, Charles Yu's How To Live Safely In A Science-Fictional Universe, turned out to be largely a McSweeney's-style autobiographical affair about a difficult childhood, in which the main power source for time travel is regret. I feel it was slightly misrepresented. Keeping me on an even-ish keel, as ever: friends, TV comedy and Doctor Who. The one big excursion was Friday's Nuisance, packed with lots of people I knew and, as ever, a few too many I didn't including some right dodgy elements. And I remain unsure whether the two strangers who wanted pictures with me were impressed or taking the piss. Still, onwards and - hopefully - upwards.

One interesting revelation in the slightly disappointing Neil Diamond documentary Solitary Man: talking of the period in the sixties when his 'I'm a Believer' was a massive hit for the Monkees, there was discussion of the difficulty in following it up. One miss, everyone agreed, and you were no longer infallible, you were human, and your career could well be over. Whenever you see someone talking about the short-termism of the modern music industry, its failure to develop artists, remember that. The music industry always broken, foolish and greedy.

Giuseppe di Lampedusa wrote The Leopard, one of the finest novels of all time. He came from Italy, often rated as a country that knows a thing or two about food. And yet his letters show that upon his arrival in Britain, "toast comes as a great and pleasant surprise". Truly a wise man.

That Kinks book I read sent me to Spotify in search of Preservation, mentioned in hushed tones as a grand folly of Ray Davies' wilderness years. And yes, musically it's dreadful. But the lyrics of the title track are timely:
The people were scared
They didn't know where to turn
They couldn't see any salvation
From the hoods and the spivs
And the crooked politicians
Who were cheating and lying to the nation
Crucial detail - they didn't know where to turn. I'm seeing a lot of people retreating into cosy tribalism over the Spending Review, choosing to believe that if Brown had somehow survived then things would be very different. Which may be a nice dream, but ignores his pre-election rhetoric and New Labour's record. Demonisation and squeezing of welfare claimants, Murdoch-approved bullying of the BBC, cossetting wealthy tax evaders - all straight from the New Labour playbook. The tuition fees now ballooning so obscenely were an introduction of New Labour's first term, their supposed golden age. Hell, even Ed Miliband's new non-New Labour are still holding disappointingly close to the idiotic consensus of toughness on the deficit, failing to distance themselves from their predecessors, failing to see that some economists a little more substantial than George and Gordon, people like Keynes and Krugman, offer a way at once kinder and more effective.

What else? Watched Mark Gatiss' intriguing adaptation of HG Wells' First Men in the Moon, which looked like it had made a little money go a long way. I expect we'll be seeing a lot more of that sort of make-do attitude given the BBC cuts snuck through in the Review. Had a first game of occult Nazis vs GI Joe killfest Tannhauser, which I suspect will be even better once we know the rules but was great fun even when played at retard level (at one stage I said "I'm going to move this man here and do shooty at that man." I hadn't even been drinking). Oh, and I picked up the first comic in a while which I've felt the need to post about. It's not that there haven't been any good comics lately, it's just that most of them have been in series which have been good for 30, 60, 120 issues now and are continuing to be good in much the same way - hardly worth posting about. And complaining about the disappointments always risks turning one into this guy (though it has to be said that hardcore Spider-Man fans are the comics fan's comics fans - who but the geekiest would look at all the heroes available, and choose as their avatar that schmuck Peter Parker?). Paul Cornell, whom some of you will know from his mostly excellent Doctor Who work, also writes some very good comics. Probably the best of which was his Captain Britain and MI:13, tragically cancelled in large part because nobody outside Britain was reading the thing. So he's gone over to DC and somehow persuaded them to let him do a miniseries with Knight & Squire, the British Batman & Robin, which is even more British. Here's the first page, with the opening line "Tch! What a palaver about a bit of how's-your-father!" Which I suppose means I can end on a certain note of "there'll always be an England" consolation. Heavens know I need it.

I see that Lewis' Japanese chums have taken a break and we're now being spammed with thoughts on Snape which, while equally out of context, do at least read like plausible comments and come from Livejournal accounts. They also come with payloads of Russian links on my Gmail notifications, but not on the posts themselves. Seems odd that the links can be filtered out but not the posts.

Largely a weekend of pop; on Saturday I was feeling sufficiently gigged out to skip Guided Missile, albeit with regret, and just hit Don't Stop Moving. A busy and bouncy night filled with booze, tunes and incident, and I even won some Spice Girls hankies, which I think makes up for losing my icecoldinalex birthday hadrosaur. And on Friday, the last Poptimism. Of late it had got into a vicious circle of irregularity and sparse attendance, so I was glad to see it make a good end, concluding with 'Ebenezer Goode' (and then one-more-ing with 'Being Boring', and then again with something I didn't know, and possibly more but I left because I never like sticking around for the very end of the end). Still, one gets the impression that the moment has been prepared for.

Speaking of which, also found time for a bit of a Who day. First up, The Two Doctors. Now, I've seen The Three Doctors and The Five Doctors many, many times and yes, they're fanservice and no, the plots don't make a great deal of sense, but I love them. Here, for all the appeal of putting Patrick Troughton and Colin Baker together, you get the sense that rather than simply accepting that the plot wasn't the main attraction, they lapsed into actual laziness. Hence we get bad nonsense rather than good nonsense, the kind that insults the intelligence instead of just letting it take a break. Also, the evil mastermind looks way too much like Karl Lagerfeld. Whereas The Curse of Peladon is put together well enough that it can easily survive not only a king who's the spit of Heaven 17's Glenn Gregory, but an alien ambassador who looks like a dick. Literally.
(I also saw Will Ferrell's Land of the Lost, based on an American kids' show about which I knew nothing, but which I inferred from this spoof to have been not that far from an American Doctor Who. Except it seems that the same creators made something even closer in The Lost Saucer, where two Earth youngsters are trapped with two aliens as their defective time-and-spaceship ricochets around history)