Day 1951: Booms and BAFTAs

Sunday

Tonight on the telly we watched KRAKATOA on the BBC.

This was the story of the famous EXPLOSION of the island volcano and how some lucky people SURVIVED to write about it.

It was a VERY SAD story though as lots and lots more people didn't survive but were KILLED, either by being DROWNED by the tidal waves or by being SOUTHERN FRIED by great galloping clouds of super-hot ash and pumice. Ew!

The story was based on the actual account written by a Dutch scientist, Rogier Verbeek, whose book about it is the basis of what we know about volcanoes nowadays. Because it is his personal account, it seemed to me that it concentrated a BIT MUCH on the Dutch people and did not mention very many of the INDONESIAN people, of whom rather more got exploded!

Also, there were no signs of Dr Who who is supposed to be there at least twice: Christopher Eccythump poses for a local to sketch him and one of the early ones (Mr Billy or Mr Pat) was there as Mr Jon Twerpee remembers the sound it makes when he is at the "Inferno".

Mind you, on Sunday they said it was loud enough to be heard in AUSTRALIA so maybe Mr Billy was catching some surf!



Perhaps Dr Who was not there because he was at the BAFTAs instead. These are an award ceremony where they give prizes for the best shows on television, a bit like the Oscars but with a nice gold face on a stick instead of a silly little man.

They gave prizes to lots of people, including friendly fluffy person Mr Sir Alan Sugar for putting up with POWER CRAZED ALIEN LIZARDS – more about them after Wednesday! – and Miss Anna Maxwell Martin for being FABULOUS as the lady hero in BLEAK HOUSE even if my Daddies thought that Miss Gillian Anderson was EVEN MORE FABULOUS!

But the BIGGEST winner was DOCTOR WHO with THREE prizes: it was given BEST DRAMA and the public also voted it BEST PROGRAMME and then Dr Who HIMSELF gave a very special DENNIS POTTER prize for LOVELY WRITING to Mr Russell T Davies for all of the wonderful things he has written and we saw him give his boyfriend, Mrs T Davies, a BIG KISS.

Hooray!