Day 2465: Cat-Monsters Not So Tough

Tuesday:


It turns out that the SABRE-TOOTHED CAT MONSTER – of whom I am NOT in any way afraid – may have been less of a TIGER and more of a PUSSY-CAT.

Scientists have used computers to create a model of the Cat Monster's skull and jaws and famous TEETH and deduced that its bite was only about a THIRD as powerful as a MODERN LION.

Er… hang on, that means LION MONSTERS are EVEN MORE SCARY! Where is Mr Stripy; I need a hug!


Speaking of TOOTHLESS, the Competition Commission has issued a bit of a slap to Mr Rodger Stavro Moredick's Sky Empire over their purchase of seventeen-and-a-bit percent of ITV.

You may remember that Sky snapped up a chunk of ITV in a BLOCKING MANOEUVRE to stop Virgin Media from taking over the venerable terrestrial commercial channel. Er, I mean, as A SOUND INVESTMENT in a promising industry… an investment that has so far lost them TWO-HUNDRED-MILLION pounds as ITV's share price has continued DOWNWARDS.

Virgin Media today welcomed the announcement:

"Sky should not be permitted to remain in a position where there is any question whatsoever about its ability to influence ITV," said a spokesperson.

After all, that's what Virgin wanted to do!

(Not that the Virgin Group EVER holds a grudge… those NICE people at British Airways will testify to that!)

In fact, the Commission does have a point. We benefit from a VARIETY of different providers of television in competition with each other. The BBC is funded by the Licence Fee; ITV is funded by a few pennies on everything you buy in the shops (what, you thought that the advertising money came from the companies?); Sky and Virgin are funded directly – though they take some of those advertising pennies too.

That competition OUGHT to drive them to make BETTER programmes as they try to attract a TV audience that will justify the advertisers' investment / the licence fee money / the subscriptions of their viewers.

Sky's share in ITV – the Commission said – put them in a position to take advantage of a rival. They could sabotage deals for ITV to get better television (say, by seeing a bid for sports coverage before ITV could submit it and then topping it by a pound).

Not that they ever WOULD do such a thing, but the danger would have been there!

Those IMPARTIAL people at Virgin called for "strong penalties" to put an end to the "problem".

The case, though, has been referred to Mr Frown's Secretary of State for Tripe and Infamy, Mr John Hutton (dressed as Lamb).

I am sure that Mr Moredick will want to clear up any UNCERTAINTY that this might cause – especially with the possibility of a General Election so soon! No doubt he and the government will be able to WORK SOMETHING OUT.

So long as the Competition Commission's BARK is – like the Sabre-Toothed Cat Monster's – worse than it's BITE, Mr Moredick is bound to remain the KING of the BEASTS.

Day 1931: Happy Oyster

Monday:


Today, Daddy Richard made us watch The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe.

WHAT a WASTE of life THAT was!

To start with, I was VERY confused because I thought the big bad lion was the BADDIE!

Here is the evidence:

I am an ELEPHANT: Lions are BAD. Even the one at the start of the JAMES BOND films.

Peter and Susan were bullying Edmund: they might be posh, but they were still bad – they were on the Lion’s side. Lion bad.

Edmund met the White Witch and she gave him SWEETIES (even if they were YUCKY Turkish Delight). Lion. No sweeties. Bad.

Also, aren’t WHITE witches supposed to be the GOOD ones?

[A: Yes, but this is called ‘propaganda’.]

And the Lion was played by QUI GON JINN from STAR WARS: he thought it would be a good idea to let DARTH VADER be a JEDI and look at all the trouble THAT caused!



So on the whole I was a bit surprised that we were supposed to be SAD when Qui Gon Lion who we’d just met five minutes ago got himself killed by the White Witch.

Although I was even more surprised that that wasn’t the end. Then he went and played his get out of being dead card and the film went all LORD OF THE RINGS lite.

Actually, that was a REALLY unbelievable bit: the reason KING ARAGORN can whip the butts of fifty TROLLS is because he has been training to be a SUPER-HERO for, like, eighty years and also he wasn’t TWELVE!

Daddy Alex has explained to me that most of the things in the book are METAPHORS; that is, they are made up things to make you think of something else. So in the BOOK the METAPHOR battle is REALLY about Peter finding COURAGE, which is why if all happens OFF.

The main problem it turns out is that this film is missing the most IMPORTANT character of all: the narrator, CS LEWIS himself! The book is written in a much more CHATTY style. It is like a COSY story told to you by a FAVOURITE UNCLE.

(No, NOT the one with the WERTHER’S ORIGINALS: he’s CREEPY!)

This is why we do not care whether Qui Gon Lion gets the chop: in the BOOK, the narrator has lovingly built up a PRESENCE for him while he is still off-stage by telling us lots of lovely things about him and telling us how even his name makes the good people (and/or Peter and Susan) feel WARM AND FLUFFY inside.

Daddy Alex mutters the word “insidious”. But also “comforting”.

Narnia is NOT about some great sweeping epic goodies versus horrible-mutant-orc baddies, no matter how many sweeping HELICOPTER shots over the landscape the director throws at you. Sweeping HELICOPTER shots are GOOD for huge historical narrative, but TERRIBLE for this sort of PERSONAL journey and only EMPHASISE that you are missing the COMFY narrator.

Without “Cuddly Uncle Clive” this FILM turns into a horribly PO-FACED attempt to do Tolkien on the CHEAP.

With KIDDIES.

Day 1929: DOCTOR WHO: New Earth

Saturday:


Hooray, the New series of DOCTOR WHO is here at last. This means that my Daddies will stop fretting about it and buying lots of copies of the RadioTimes and can watch it instead.

Here is Daddy Richard’s first review:

Future generations will, probably, view David Tennant’s first season as beginning with “The Christmas Invasion” and more happily watch this as a comfortable second episode, bridging to the greater thrills that we are promised next week. Alright, they’ll call it a filler. But this year “New Earth” bears a heavier burden that future viewers may not expect of it as it is the 2006 season opener. Charlie Brooker in the Guardian speaks of the dangers of anticipation. My thought is that people will be harsher critics for just this reason, and in the future it will be ripe for that favourite verb of the Doctor Who fan: re-evaluation.

Because if it has a fault it’s that it’s not total genius. So, overlooking that, there are lots of good things here: first thing to notice – the Doctor solves the problem himself. That may not sound much, but I suspect that it means someone has listened to the critics of the first season and the ninth Doctor’s back-seat-driver approach.

Second, isn’t Billie Piper cracking as the Lady Cassandra. “It’s like living inside a bouncy castle.” Dialogue and character are Russell’s great strengths but doesn’t Billie just shine. In fact, she’s rather better than David Tennant. It was great to have wicked Lady Cassandra back, and I’m rather sad to see her passing. Mind you, we had that last year too, so you never know…

And the army of plague zombies, one touch and you’re dead, were creepy and yet sympathetic as well, deadly just because they’ve never been hugged, marvellously Doctor Who in concept. And it brings us back to the Doctor’s solution: cure rather than kill.

We do have a bit of the (sadly) usual Russell T Davies glossing over the hard details. If the Sisters of Plenitude have cured every know disease, why do they still have their plague-zombie-powered machine; if they haven’t cured every disease, then how is the Doctor able to do so using a cocktail of their serums?

[A simple fig leaf occurred to me: if the Doctor had given the solution a stir with his finger and so added a hint of Time Lord DNA – wink to Rose/Cassandra – and so his own regenerative powers help to power his instant magic cure.]

The presence of the Face of Boe was, unfortunately, a bit anti-climactic. Not just that we copped out of delivering the “great secret” that he’s promised to impart, but his telepathic voice was something of a sci-fi cliché: I’d have preferred maybe some subtitles over an alien arpeggio (the nun earlier spoke of his “singing”).

And for a story called “New Earth” it wasn’t very about New Earth: you could have made the planet itself a dark honey-trap, or perhaps done a piece on nostalgia. Still New New York looked gorgeous, proof that the BBC can do George Lucas on one millionth of the budget and that at least someone watched Futurama.

As with all superior Doctor Who, there is a more complex moral message to think about inside the comic run-around. The Sisters of Plenitude here are BAD because their miracle medicine is based on experimenting on living people. On the surface, this is the, if not original, at least very Doctor Who message: if the happiness of many depends only on the suffering of a few IT IS STILL WRONG. A Liberal, and not very Socialist message, at that.

However, thinking deeper about this, the idea seems to be that it is BAD to conduct experiments on living beings (or at least certainly intelligent ones). The irony, then is that this seems to be exactly what the Sisters were trying to avoid: their machine is set up to use clone tissue to generate human simulacra on which they can experiment without harming any “real” people. The fact that the simulacra are in fact intelligent appears to be cock-up rather than conspiracy. The evil of which the Sisters are guilty is that they didn’t check properly that their creations were not sentient, in spite of increasing evidence. That’s still pretty bad, but it’s bad in a different and more complicated way that necessarily comes across in the episode.

[Incidentally, my first guess was almost the exact opposite of the way it turned out – I thought that the Sisters were growing clones of their patients and then using the mind graft machine to put the dying victims mind into the new healthy clone body: the twist being that the machine copies minds rather than transfers them, so that the originals were still suffering and dying in the huge green vaults while a copy was bouncing around in their place. This would have tied nicely to Cassandra’s story too, as she would have come to realise that she too was only a copy and that she’d accidentally let her “real” self die without even noticing.]

Anyway, this reminds me of the Virgin New Adventures: when this is “average” is it is only because the series has set the target of “good” so very, very high already.

Next week: a werewolf and, more terrifyingly, Queen Victoria!