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

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.

Last time I posted here, I wasn't really aware of the comedian and Being Human star Colin Hoult. Since then, I've beaten him at a comics-themed pub quiz, where he was teamed with Stewart Lee (of whom I am very much aware), and seen him play the romantic lead in a musical also featuring Thom Tuck, Kevin Eldon and catbo (ditto). So well done Colin Hoult for effectively increasing awareness of your work among the key barrysarll demographic. Because I was watching Kevin Eldon narrate martylog's adaptation of ETA Hoffman's "last and worst" book, I had to iPlayer the first episode of his deeply uneven sketch show, and then further wonder why it was scheduled against another BBC show clearly appealing to much the same audience, the excellent zombie rehab drama In the Flesh, which has been by some distance the best thing on TV recently. And Bluestone 42's not bad either - between the two of them, they're in danger of giving BBC3 a good reputation. Doctor Who, on the other hand...well, I went in to the mid-season whatever you call 'The Bells of St John' with low expectations after Moffat's last two episodes, and it was at least better than I expected, but I still can't decide whether it was actually any good.

In less grand gig news, not taking place in hidden Hoxton music halls, I've caught up with Bevan 17 successor entity Desperate Journalist, who have a very Banshees sound, and otherwise mainly seen former members of Luxembourg. 60% of them were playing 'Mishandled' and 'The 2 of Us' at a Suede tribute night in the Boogaloo, which was spine-tingling, and another 20% was taking pictures. I asked if he'd fancied joining in, but he insisted that it would only dent the chances of a big money reunion a few years down the line. And then the final 20%, Jonny Cola, was playing his first gig in a while, but given he's now down two of his old kidneys and up one of his fiancee's, maybe it was more like 19%? It's like a glam rock Ship of Theseus. Anyway, they were all better than hearing an oompah band covering Coldplay in a venue devoted to the consumption of beer and wurst, followed by a trip to Covent Garden's Roadhouse, a club where I suspect rohypnol and Red Bull is the house cocktail. A shame, as that day had previously been going pretty well, if you count loud discussions of dogging and Ulysses in a riverside pub as a good afternoon, which clearly I do.

Other than that? Photo exhibition launches, book launches, the general whirl of media scumbaggery. Waiting for the Spring to finally arrive, like everyone. Watching Yahoo Serious' Mr Accident (it's no Young Einstein). Being astonished that an unremarkable Earl's Court pub can charge £4.55 for a pint. Hoping that the Leisure Hive does well, because clubs like that make me feel a little less old. Writing this at a gallop because if I dither now it'll take another fortnight.

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.

Local venues the Archway Tavern and Nambucca have both had refits, but the latter is still the same bloody shambles it always was, with the same misguided belief that this is somehow endearingly rock'n'roll. The Archway's transition to some kind of weird nineties theme bar, on the other hand...well, at least the theme seems to extend to what now constitutes a cheap pint, but in the nineties would still have been a nightmarish three quid. The bands at both were led by Davids, and more an exercise in larking about than anything else; both were a great deal of fun. The supports at both were bloody embarrassments. And both were Hallowe'en events, of course*. Normally I'm adamant about celebrating the great festivals on the actual day...but it's Monday today. Even the restless dead don't rise with any enthusiasm on a Monday.

Speaking of the dead rising - I finally read DC's zombie superhero epic Blackest Night. Which, to my utter lack of surprise, has all of writer Geoff Johns' usual sins - including that unseemly tendency to get all metatextual about how comics used to be so bright and innocent, and why can't they be like that still, while taking a sordid delight in demonstrating the gruesomeness of the modern by repeated graphic dismebowelments &c. He wants to eat his tasty braaaaains cake and still have it, really. In total, Blackest Night sprawls across seven collected editions of tie-ins (for no real reason beyond perversity, I read the core series last). The Exterminators, on the other hand, covers a mere five books. One of the many comics from Vertigo (aka 'the HBO of comics') to be cancelled before it reached its proposed destination, this was a planned 50-issue series which only made it to 30. Largely because, as writer Simon Oliver acknowledges in a rueful foreword to the final collection, it's about bugs, and so at least a quarter of the potential audience would be too revolted to read it. And it is, make no mistake, a revolting series. But also, for all its fantastical elements, one which feels like it's saying something interesting about humanity, and nature, and the poor schmucks who have to hold the line between the two. Whereas Blackest Night, for all that it manages some lovely tricks with colour, really doesn't have much more to say than 'Dude, if Hawkman was a zombie he'd be even more badass!' Which is not only fairly hollow - it turns out it isn't even true.

*Though unlike Christmas creep, Hallowe'en crawl has some limits. On Friday, even in Camden, there was little sign of sexy cats &c. Or at least, not specifically Hallowe'eny ones. The alleged retirement show of Steven Horry, Frontman, with support from Rebekah Delgado and Aurora, was many things, but spooky was not among them.

So Doctor Who came back, and 'Let's Kill Hitler' turned out to be a total bait-and-switch, and then Mark Gatiss supplied the closest thing he's managed to a decent TV episode, and while I'm still loving Matt Smith, part of me can't help but feel that just maybe the whole long-arc-storytelling business has got a little out of hand, such that the done-in-ones now feel extraneous. But Moffat has himself said he's scaling back from that next year, and of course we'll still have Matt Smith, so really there's no cause for concern. And it's not as if things have got so horribly out of hand on that front as in Torchwood: Miracle Day, a show which one increasingly feels is dealing with the modern fascination with/abhorrence of spoilers by making sure that nothing happens from week to week. Every point it thinks it's making was already covered much better in Children of Earth. The closest it came to interest was in the flashback episode, where the hackneyed journey to a predictable destination at least mentioned Sarah Jane's antagonist the Trickster, thus providing a brief, happy memory of a TV Who spin-off that didn't suck.
(Speaking of spin-offs, the last couple of Who books I read were an interesting pair. James Goss' Dead of Winter is aimed at kids, more or less - it ties in with the new series. Matthew Jones' Bad Therapy was one of the fabled New Adventures, which started off by filling a gap when the series was off-air in the wilderness years, but ended up creating much of the template for its return. They're both historicals - one 19th century, one 1950s. Both are about alien tech curing people through creating idealised companions for them. And while the adult book can be a little more detailed about stuff like The Gays (though arguably less so than the modern TV show), they both have a real edge of nastiness. There's one scene in Bad Therapy especially which caused a sharp inhalation on my part, where a boy pursued by thugs finds his escape down an alley blocked by the TARDIS, hammers on the door - and dies because the Doctor and Chris are in a nearby caff. Which isn't how things should work when the Doctor's around. But even Dead of Winter finds room for some chilling stuff, in particular the Doctor's line "I'm going to tell you a story about a man who travels, and everywhere he goes, he makes everyone's lives better. I'm not that man. That man doesn't exist. I wish he did. I'd believe in him.")

Unrelated to the blue box, I've also seen the utterly batsh1t mental French-Czech animation Fantastic Planet, and the epically epic Neville Longbottom and the Speccy Emo Kid Who Keeps Stealing Neville's Screentime. And when I got home from the latter, I watched David Hare's Page Eight, in which Michael Gambon has a mission to take down the Dark Lord (or 'Prime Minister') Ralph Fiennes, except he dies, and Bill Nighy has to execute Gambon's legacy. A perfectly competent middlebrow drama, but the Potter films did it all so much better. Band-wise, I'm in the unusual position that none of the acts I've seen lately are my Facebook friends (although Patrick Duff did end up staying at the Maisionette Beautiful). First up, Duff and Andrew Montgomery, each playing one old song ('She's Everywhere' and 'Fall Apart Button', respectively), each still recognisably the same man as in their post-Britpop almost-pomp. Spookily so in Montgomery's case; he still looks and sounds as cherubic as in his Geneva days. Whereas Duff...well, you could tell from the twisted ferocity of a Strangelove show that his life was never easy, and the haunted folk he's playing nowadays may not be as loud, but emotionally it's no easier. All of this works brilliantly in the upstairs of the Old Queen's Head, which previously had never really gelled for me as a venue; with acts like this, who'd have been right at home in the old Spitz, its faded living room ambience is ideal. Then over to Hoxton to see Thomas Truax, essentially a mad scientist who has realised that making music with his mad science is less likely to get him arrested than robbing banks. Mostly his self-constructed instruments manage to steer clear of feeling like a novelty act, though the inevitably metronomic nature of automated percussion doesn't suit a song like 'I Put A Spell On You'. His own material, conceived around his technology's strengths and limitations, is another matter - at its best there's an eerie fairground quality and also a genuine pathos to it. The headliner is Jason Webley, a man who's also navigating a tough course around the jagged rocks of novelty act status. The first time you see Webley, his ability to get the crowd involved is glorious. But then you get hold of the albums and hear some of the brave, fragile, beautiful songs on there which don't work with an audience bellowing along, and realise that he doesn't play them live (even though, as a solo performer with no band to coach, he can presumably play anything from his back catalogue at any time), and understand that like any strength in an artist, that connection with the crowd can also become a trap. Still, he does sneak 'Against the Night' into the set, and then explains how as of November, he's taking a break - not because he's sick of music but because of how much it means to him, and how much he wants to make sure he's doing it for the right reasons, and the speech isn't 100% coherent but I got the feeling that he was maybe struggling towards the same worries about himself as I'm dancing around here. And he finishes with the gorgeous, self-explanatory 'Last Song' ("Maybe the world isn't dying. Maybe she's heavy with child"), and it's a perfect, cathartic climax...
And some berks start bellowing 'More! More!', because sod structure and artistry and rightness, at the end of a gig, shouting 'More!' is just what you do, right?
This is why I mainly go to gigs where I know most of the audience.

And I'm going to politely gloss over the abysmal punk band who marred the early stages of Saturday's Glam Racket. They wouldn't even be interesting to insult.

I am in a church social club where one of my favourite bands are launching their concept album about David Koresh. I want to go to the loo, but it is marked 'DANCERS ONLY'. Two of my favourite singers are waiting for their guest spots as ATF agents, and insist that I should do a dance to make sure I am able to use the loo. Not a dream, not a hoax, not an imaginary story. And from there the weekend went pretty much like the last days of the Roman Empire, except I don't think the Romans had cider. charleston's birthday gig was at the Silver Bullet, which I may have mentioned before is one of my favourite venues what with the whole being-at-the-end-of-my-road thing, but the cider on tap there is Addlestones, which while very tasty is maybe not the best idea for prolonged sessions with dancing, so apologies to anyone caught by what I'm told was some impressive flailing.

A poor Doctor Who this weekend from Matthew 'Fear Her' Graham, supplying the opening to the dull, plot-holed two-parter which each new series season seems inexplicably obliged to offer. It was not entirely without merit - the setting was excellently atmospheric and Fang Rock, the lack of any aliens was a welcome escape from the formula of recent years* and Matt Smith was as excellent as ever - but boy, was it boring. Run through every cliche in the clone/replicant book, and just for good measure, add in a few moronic errors - "only living things grow" was a particular corker, but I think I may have winced even more at "cars don't fly themselves", simply because it thought it was so science-fictional and clever, while failing to notice that automation of driving is progressing a damn sight faster than getting cars airborne. Got the bad taste out of my mouth on Sunday with Planet of Fire, where Peter Davison goes to an alien planet which looks authentically alien because it was filmed on Lanzarote - although they do rather undermine that by then having a few scenes on Lanzarote too. But still, Turlough being a devious little sh1t! Peter Wyngarde as an evil high priest! And tiny Master in a box! That, Graham, is how you write a cliffhanger.

The news, as ever, is mostly too dismal for comment, but I find the whole Strauss-Kahn business especially grim. The IMF has its uses, but on the whole it has tended to take advantage of circumstances to screw low-status workers from poor countries, and not give a fig for their objections. And then suddenly the managing director is headline news because he tried to do that to one low-status worker, instead of a nation's worth? Just goes to prove what Stalin said about how one death is a tragedy but a million is a mere statistic...

*If the Flesh turns out to come from space, I will not be impressed. I suspected my hopes for a return to pure, alien-free historicals were not going to be met, but in their absence, strictly Earth-born near-future threats in the vein of WOTAN, Salamander and BOSS at least move us a step away from invasion-of-the-week.

One can't say he was taken too soon or anything, but it's still a shame about John Barry. I watched a film he scored this weekend, Boom. Tennessee Williams' favourite film adaptation of his own work, and directed by the great Joseph Losey, it is nonetheless a dispiriting, messy slog. Elizabeth Taylor, after so long as the epitome of female desirability, has here become the sad, pilled-up drag queen's pastiche of herself that we know today - a much-married woman still convinced of her own desirability, hemmed in by injections and paranoia, the fleshiness of that face already running to fat. Noel Coward queens around in a role that contributes little beyond exposition and some baffling innuendo. Richard Burton has a certain battered dignity, looking surprisingly plausible in a kimono, but he can't do more to save the film than help with the couple of scenes near the end where Taylor remembers she can act.

I'm reading a Bogart biography at the moment, so it's appropriate that this weekend was mainly spent at gigs watching the usual suspects. Bevan 17 in Brixton first, and then much of the PopArt weekender, with Brontosaurus Chorus (if 'Louisiana' really was their last song ever, it's a shame Johnny and I didn't barrel on stage and start in with the chainsaw); Subliminal Girls (I spent almost the entire set at the bar, the service at the Bloomsbury Bowl was so bad); Keith TotP et al (vocals inaudible, but hey, lots of guitars); MJ Hibbett (I was obliged to contribute a sort of civilised heckle over his buying into Fantastic Four death hype, but the song in question mentions 'sulking like Black Bolt' so I can forgive much); The Laurel Collective (since I last heard them, Mystery Jets have happened, so now the poor sods sound like they're ripping off Mystery Jets even though they were doing this first); Abdjouparov (Les Carter was a young Bowie fan, and alas, he is now in his own Tin Machine phase); Mr Solo (minty Polo); and the PopArt Allstars (complete with Mr Solo mixing 'Space Oddity' and 'The Laughing Gnome' into the 'Modern Love' outro, Hibbett's 'Live and Let Die' accompanied by terrifyingly exothermic party poppers, and a 'Brimful of Asha' which I genuinely thought might never end).
Perhaps more importantly, I also confirmed that I have not lost my table football skills. Excellent.

I've finally read David Mazzuchelli's much-praised graphic novel (and for once, the term does apply, instead of just being an embarrassed synonym for 'comic') Asterios Polyp and yes, it is excellent. Remember a few years back when the mainstream critics were getting over-excited about the miserable piece of crap that was Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth? Because being, quite often, middle-aged men who feel they have wasted their lives, a lot of critics like works addressing similar themes (a good example in cinema: Sideways). Asterios Polyp, like Jimmy Corrigan, is a miserable middle-aged man, but instead of taking it to the absurd and risible lengths of Ware's effort, Mazzuchelli's protagonist is a success, of sorts...just one who still doesn't feel like he's succeeded, because how many people do? And beyond being more believable, it has vastly more to say. The one thing I did like in Jimmy Corrigan was the architecture...well, Polyp is an architect, and that gives us the way in to what Mazzuchelli is getting at here, expressed in a staggeringly versatile art which gives key characters their own art styles and then lets those spheres of influence ebb and flow into each other as a way of investigating how our own subjective worlds sometimes, somehow do manage to connect.
I don't want to get carried away here - obviously it's no All-Star Superman - but for people who really can't stand reading anything involving superheroes or robots or magic or teenage antics (ie, anything genre; ie, anything fun) then this may be the best comic in the world.

Apparently the 100 Club should be saved - but only through a sponsorship deal and associated renaming. So last night I went for probably the last time before it becomes the Sony Rebellion 100 Club, or the George Osborne Tax Shelter 100 Club...just imagine how those giant zeroes at the back of the stage will look when they're replaced with Rupert Murdoch faces! Still, for one night only, David Devant and his Spirit Wife could make us forget that. After coasting a little of late, they've got new songs! A new spectral roadie! And the magic tricks are back, even some la-la-la-la-la-lead piping! Excellent stuff. Between songs, Vessel reads from My Magic Life, but it's his own running autobiography, not the original Devant's. It is an excellent way to mark a midwinter solstice after which we all hope things will get brighter - even if outside, all that's happened so far is that rain has replaced snow. Remember how, two winters ago, we all got massively excited and rushed off to build snowmen and have snowball fights, because we only had one chance? And now we're back to thinking of snow as a wintertime fixture, like we always imagined it was supposed to be from the Christmas cards.

The last weekend before Christmas seemed to be largely cancelled on account of snow and illness this year, and yet I found myself not minding too much. I just holed up with Powell & Pressburger's first collaboration and Howard 'Misfits'* Overman's underwhelming Dirk Gently adaptation, then moseyed through the snow to Dalston for a pleasantly subdued Sunday. It may have helped that on Friday I got through the following:
- The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.
- Tom Baker being Tom Bakerish at some unsuspecting ancient Celts in the first of a new series of audio adventures, The Relics of Time.
- Volumes 12 and 13 of Robert Kirkman's superhero epic/soap opera Invincible.
- Nuisance, complete with house band playing Britpop covers.
Of each of these things one can fairly say: that was great fun, but also, really, what the fvck?

*Speaking of which, I was slightly underwhelmed by the Christmas special. Yes, any Christmas special which is motivated by a thorough hatred of the church is doing something right, but the religious plotline felt a bit too much like the first season finale, and I wonder whether the resolution might not be a cop-out. Still, I suppose a lot remains to be seen depending on the unseen choices they made.

A few visits this week to remodellings. Around where I used to work, there's a whole stretch along the edge of Pimlico which seems to have suddenly gone up in the world, and most shocking of these gentrifications is the Cask. Formerly a dog rough estate pub, I suppose it always had potential if only because the estate in question consists of buildings called Noel Coward House and Aubrey Beardsley House, and looks like a red brick Hanging Gardens of Babylon. And now the old Tram is a genteel, polished wood affair, more gastro than I normally like a pub but somehow getting away with it, and offering booze that wouldn't be out of place at Ale Meat Cider. Approved.
Similarly, North Library's renovation has worked out nicely. Too often library renovations seem to end up with more 'accessibility' and fewer books, but this is the opposite, and while the old shelves are gone, there's a delightfully labyrinthine aspect to the new ones. And, one of the books in pride of place for the relaunch is a shiny new copy of Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire.
Finally, the Silver Bullet, another rubbish pub reborn; it's now the venue which I'd always felt was the one thing Finsbury Park really lacked. It's been there for a while, I was just waiting 'til it hosted a band I wanted to see. Last night was Performance, and they played 'Surrender', so I was happy. Now all we need to do is see about getting all the bands I know with local members to play a local gig for local people there.

Zowie Bowie's debut feature, Moon, perhaps impressed me less than viewers without a science fiction background, because conceptually there wasn't much new to it - but it was beautifully executed. And if you're going to make a film that's pretty much all one actor, who has to be both versatile and mesmeric, then Sam Rockwell is a hard choice to beat.

Russell T Davies' The Writer's Tale is excellent. I know we all loved nitpicking his Who, comparing his scripts unfavourably to Moffat's and so forth - and we were right to do so, and if you come to this book expecting much in the way of mea culpa, you're going to be disappointed. At times, you'll even be shocked by how close he came to being even worse - it's only his correspondent here, DWM's Ben Cook, and Moffat, who dissuaded Rusty from bringing back the sodding Daleks, again, for David Tennant's finale. But this is also the man who wrote Midnight and Turn Left. Who moved heaven and Earth to bring back Doctor Who, and made of it something which the public and - mostly - the fans could love. And this is the behind the scenes story of how he did it, or at least the bit from Voyage of the Damned onwards. It is also a very useful book for writers generally (anything Who-specific is footnoted), not to mention a hefty 700 pages which can be applied firmly to the head of any luddite fool who says the era of the email and text means we'll no longer get collected correspondences. There are fascinating glimpses of stories as they might have been - Planet of the Dead was almost a Star Trek pastiche, or might have brought back the Chelonians long before Moffat did. Kate Winslet was the first choice for River Song. There's a brilliantly slashy Master/Master scene that was never going to make it to TV, but the script survives here. The title 'Death of the Doctor' floated around the main series for a while before ending up on Sarah Jane, as did the idea of a mysteriously empty London from this week's episode. And so on. But the most exciting bit is that sometimes, as Davies is tapping out an email to Cook, he's basically thinking aloud, and we see the exact moment an idea is born into the world. Here you will find the exact moment when it becomes clear that Wilf knocking will mark the Doctor's end. And for all the things I'd have liked him to have done differently, for all the moments where he comes across as a bit of a daft old queen, the abiding feeling which remains is of a man who loves TV in general and Doctor Who in particular, and good on him.

...though at times it still didn't feel all that massive. Saturday night, for instance, seemed to have nothing much doing so we just ended up down the local, where a possibly misguided attempt was made to embiggen proceedings via the medium of pink vodka. And on Sunday, walking down through Islington to see the Deptford Beach Babes, every pub I passed was Sunday quiet not Bank Holiday Sunday busy, and most other venues seemed to be shut. The DBB were playing the Cock Tavern in Smithfield, of which I'd heard but never before had cause to visit. And if I ever do again it won't be in anything like peak time, because as a man who should know observed, the bar staff seemed to be on ketamine. Weird place even beyond that, feeling like it should be hosting a provincial wedding reception rather than a suave rockabilly crowd. The Babes were excellent, and for the first time I was in a position to see their drummer, who can only be described as real horrorshow - not just fun to watch but a proper performer, miming ennui, possession and craze as appropriate. The only other acts I caught, given the dearth of service, were two burlesque girls. I have seen burlesque performers who did something a bit different, every now and then, but these were more at the 'striptease except it's classy because there's no fake tan' end of the bracket. Not that they didn't have nice breasts, but it's still not really art, is it?
(Also: bad form of the promoters to say the night was £6.66 and then actually charge seven quid. Yes, I was wondering what the Hell their float must look like, so I'd brought sixpence in coppers because I'm thoughtful like that. Charge what you like for your night, but stick to what you said, no matter what. There was also a terribly intrusive photographer, but I'm not sure whether he was theirs or an independent)

Before that - Friday, with a trip to see Don Juan in Love at the Scoop. The comedy and the horror worked a lot better than the romance, though I may have been slightly distracted at times by certain people giggling at "an impoverished and corrupt nobleman" comparing himself to Alexander*. Then on to Cheeze & Whine, of which what I remember includes 'Rhythm Is A Dancer'. Oh yes. And on Monday, off to Devil's End (which for security reasons goes by a different name on most maps) for a pint at the Cloven Hoof, titting around Mr Magister's church in a fez and general hijinks, culminating in a small child on the village green getting mouthy about the crack in time and space which could be mistaken for a tear in steve586's trousers. Good times. Especially given we were out of there by sundown.

The weekend was especially welcome because last week had been so thoroughly quiet and wet and dreary. Spent most of it watching films, many from another DVD rental free trial but one I'd taped years back (and the property show trailer beforehand was more of a blast from the past than any of the wartime setting). Contraband was an early Powell & Pressburger which initially seems like a forgettable flag-waver about how important the decency of neutrals can be. But then their strangeness and charm take hold, especially once we hit blackout London, and like everything else they did, it becomes very special. Not something one can say of another war/espionage film, GI Joe - The Rise of Cobra, which I watched mainly to see prima donna prick Christopher "too good for Who" Eccleston as Destro. Also with tax bills due when they got the call were Joseph Gordon Leavitt, Jonathan Pryce, and Adebisi from Oz who at least gets to cradle a bazooka in each arm and be a hardass. It's really not very good, but I am of the demographic that is always going to find some appeal in a film where ninjas Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow fight in a pulse cannon generator in an undersea base beneath a polar ice cap. Oh, and the Team America comparisons you may have heard are unfair - well, except in the Paris scenes.

Sillier still is Frank Miller's take on The Spirit. This is not the charming action-adventure strip which is about the only early comic I can read with enjoyment; instead we get a brooding Central City which looks uncannily like Sin City, a Spirit who wear's Dwight's Converse and is generally somewhere between Miller's Batman and Looney Tunes. So yes, it's Miller's spirit not Eisner's, but what are the alternatives? Another unnecessary panel-to-screen transition of a comic which, even more than Watchmen, was designed to work precisely as a comic? Or another Spirit comic in which Miller does his take? At least this way we kill two birds with one stone, and probably up the sales of the Eisner collections into the bargain. And one thing Miller and Eisner do have in common: they like the girls. So Sand Saref is here, out for "the shiny thing to end all shiny things", and Silken Floss is Scarlett Johansson in a Nazi uniform, smoking, which excuses a lot in a film (and makes a Hell of a lot more sense than Samuel L Jackson in a Nazi uniform) "Is every goddamn woman in this goddamn Hellhole out of her goddamn mind?" asks a very Frank Miller take on Commissioner Dolan. Well, yes, but that's what Frank Miller does.

Oh yes, and I finally saw The Hurt Locker - accidentally good timing given this was the weekend of America's withdrawal from Iraq. The basic idea is brilliant; so often the climax of a film is a ticking time-bomb, so why not make a film about bomb disposal teams where the whole damn film is like that? And Kathryn Bigelow films violence like Oliver Stone on a good day, than which I can offer few higher compliments. A rare film to win big Oscars without being preachy middlebrow dreck.

*Finally watching Robert Downey Jr as Sherlock Holmes the next day, I am amused to see that film also mentions a performance of the tale, albeit in its Don Giovanni version, as Holmes and Watson pass Tower Bridge, or at least its beginnings. It's heartening that, when either Guy Ritchie's version or the BBC's could so easily have become Sherlock Holmes in Miami, neither did, both Cumberbatch and Downey sharing an essential Holmes-ness with Brett and Rathbone. Also - age suits Downey a lot better than I'd ever have thought.