Day 2297: Yum Yum

Monday:


We settled down with a late dinner this evening to watch "Edwardian Super Size Me", an everyday gastronomic adventure with all the trimmings and a side order of lard. And extra trimmings.

And extra lard.

It turns out that the people of the Edwardian Era, led by King Edward VII or King Tum-Tum as he was known by his loving subjects, were rather fond of their food. It would be unfair to say that they ate like pigs, mainly because "entire pig for breakfast" seems like a pretty average start to the day!

For this experiment, restraint critic Mr Giles Coren and very funny but much underused Ms Sue Perkins were asked to be Edwardians for a week – wearing all the clothes and eating all the food.

Mr Giles went to see a DOCTOR, Doctor Petty. Or Doctor Pennyfarthing as Mr Giles ended up calling him after his soon-to-be-nightly glass or two of Madeira wine.

"You're completely mad," was Dr Pennyfarthing's professional opinion, "and you'll be dead in a fortnight!"

Good job they were only doing it for a week!

Monday's menu consisted of: Porridge, Sardines on Toast, Curried Eggs, Grilled Cutlets, Coffee & Drinking Chocolate, Bread & Butter, and Honey.

And that was just breakfast!

Luncheon of sauté of kidneys on toast, mashed potatoes, macaroni au gratin and rolled ox tongue (bleurgh!) was followed by High Tea of fruit cake, Madeira cake, hot potato cakes, coconut rocks, bread, toast, and butter before settling in for Dinner of oyster patties, sirloin steak, braised celery, roast goose, potato scallops, and vanilla soufflé to finish.

Well, "finish" if you don't count the aforementioned glass of Madeira and a goose leg that poor Sue just hadn't been able to face.

But Monday was just a run-of-the-mill sort of a day. No really! That's what they ate when they WEREN'T trying to impress anyone.

Tuesday started with breakfast at Simpsons on the Strand with a light repast of smoked haddock, scrambled eggs, kippers, cold cuts, one roast pheasant, fruit, bacon, sausages, devilled kidneys, scones and kedgeree.

By this time Sue and Mr Giles were barely able to move, so they decided to try out an Edwardian diet. This turned out to be, basically, exactly the same as any other Edwardian meal, but chewed and chewed and chewed until either the food turned to liquid or you died of lockjaw.

Oysters, foie gras terrine, roast cod with asparagus, mutton hotpot, pink Yorkshire rhubarb and clotted cream were all given this treatment. Which was a shame as it probably wasn't helping them cut calories but it was killing all the flavours stone dead.

It was claimed that King Edward had tried this diet himself – but, said Mr Giles looking at a portly portrait, the evidence would appear other wise. This made both of my daddies scoff. (No NOT in the Edwardian fashion!) Surely the evidence is only against him having used the Fletcherism Diet if it ACTUALLY WORKS! said Daddy Richard; personally, I think the evidence of him shows that the diet has no effect whatsoever, said Daddy Alex.

Still, no time to worry about that as they had to hurry home in order to host a dinner party.

Melon glacé, mock turtle soup, sole au gratin, crab and asparagus mousse in aspic, boiled mutton with caper sauce, quail pudding and a rather wobbly punch romaine jelly for pud. The quail pudding, by the way, was a whole quali each, wrapped in fillet steak and sealed in a suet crust.

By this point, Daddy Richard was looking rather queasy, but Daddy Alex said his mouth was watering. I said that we could try this diet if I could have the equivalent in STICKY BUNS, and Daddy Alex AGREED!

I reckon that this must be at least ten-million-and-four sticky buns, but Daddy Richard tells me that 5000 calories a day is only about 20 sticky buns. I think he is trying to get out of it, don't you!

Meanwhile, dinner guest Mr Roy Fattersly was pointing out, while tucking into the suet pudding, that only nought-point-one per cent of the population could actually afford to live like this. The rest were on bread and dripping once a day if they were lucky. Not that this had stopped Mr Roy from turning up for the dinner, but maybe it was just so that he could make exactly that point. And at least he had the grace to depart before the food fight broke out!

In fact, Mr Giles told us that a dinner party like this one – which, if you were a society hostess, you would be expected to serve up two or three times a week – would cost £24 in old money. Which was equivalent to TWO THOUSAND POUNDS today.

Or to put it another way, you would need something like SEVEN MILLION pounds of capital just to be able to afford the DINNER PARTIES.

And that was just dinner for 8 – you might be expected to have up to 20 guests. Multiply the money appropriately.

Wednesday, and after the usual breakfast, Mr Giles was off to Simpsons Chophouse of Cornhill for the lunch of a city gent: steak and kidney pudding with a giant sausage, then a huge pork chop and then stewed cheese served with mustard on little bits of toast.

Sue unfortunately was not allowed in. Simpsons did not admit women until 1916 and that was after the Edwardian era was over – King Tum Tum passed away from (to nobody's surprise) a massive double heart attack in 1910.

So, barred from the bastion of male do-dah, she took a day-trip to Brighton instead.

The Edwardians loved to take the train down to the coast, though on the way they would take in a – you guessed it – five-course luncheon. Sue doubted that South West Trains were quite up to the silver service these days, so brought a HUGE hamper and a picnic of lobster mousse, toasted whole sardines, a rolled salmon cone (which Sue called an oily fish CORNETTO) and something in a plastic tub made of curried fish and garlic the smell of which left most of the other passengers to Brighton in a semi-comatose state. I hope that the BBC paid for their train tickets!

Daddy Alex, on the other fluffy foot – a Daddy who claims not to be as fond of fish as he is of LARD – has CONFESSED to a strange HANKERING to find out what the deadly fish-and-garlic-box contained. But not while Daddy Richard is in the same hemisphere, he promises.

(Incidentally, on the subject of the EVIL FISH COURSE, dear Mr Paul suggests I might have something to say about Scottish politics. Whatever can he mean???)

Sue was, of course, doing all this in a full-on WHALEBONE CORSET. So, she admitted, it was sometimes something of a STRAIN. (And that was BEFORE we went into the to-camera TOILET MONOLOGUES!) Despite being taught the ETIQUETTE of eating cakes at the Ritz – small bites and then make conversation about sewing, or try a little French – she had to admit that a lot of the time she was just pushing the food around the plate and leaving lots. In fact, she said, many Edwardian ladies would confine themselves to bed rather than face the horrors of the breakfast and luncheon tables!

Mr Giles was also kitted out in Edwardian garb, and that afternoon it meant big flappy shorts in order to try some Edwardian exercise: a game of five which looked like a crowded squash court where everyone had forgotten their bat. I am NOT SURE that the athletic authorities today would approve of Mr Giles use of BANNED SUBSTANCES either – namely a big cigar and a bigger glass of brandy.

Then back home for another huge dinner.

In the interest of a more feminine approach – and to try and rebalance her now desperately Atkins diet – Sue took Mr Giles to a vegetarian restaurant on Thursday. Yes, it turns out they DID have veggie restaurants in Edwardian times. About thirty of them. Not that the Edwardians really thought of vegetables as proper food.

They were also a HOTBED of the SUFFRAGETTE movement. This came about for three reasons. Firstly, because the vegetarian restaurants were also Temperance Houses and so, with only ginger beer to drink, rather than falling asleep in the afternoon they could spend it in fervent political discussion. Secondly, vegetarian food did not need as much preparation as half-a-dozen meat courses and this liberated ladies from the stove. And thirdly, anyone unlucky enough to be sent to prison for protesting the right to vote was well advised NOT to eat the meat!

The thing to go with all of this FOOD is of course something to DRINK, and the Edwardians were it turns out terribly fond of CHAMPAGNE. In fact it was usually BREAKFAST TIME when they were wiring their way into their first bottle and the rest of the day would be carried along in a fizz of bubble.

No wonder Mr Steed is always dressed as an Edwardian gent!

So, after having some pink fizz at Harrods to start them off, Saturday saw Sue and Mr Giles off to Hampstead Heath for a spot of picnicking. Of course, they didn't have the forty-odd servants to lay it all out for them, and Sue did insist on experimenting with a newfangled (invented 1892 but commercially available from 1904) Thermos flask for TEA, but good old Mr Giles stuck in to his lobster and champers.

But the climax of the week was to be an all out blow out at the Savoy, recreating an actual meal from 1906. King Tum Tum had SERIOUSLY taken to eating out – after years of having to cope with his mother's home cooking at Windsor Castle, you cannot really blame him! And apparently, a huge meal, like the one that Mr Giles and Sue were about to indulge in, would cost only £7. Obviously that is still the equivalent to £600 today. But remember how expensive the dinner parties were in comparison. Eating out quickly became VERY popular.

(Plus there was the whole "you can mix with exciting and exotic actors and dancers and opera stars without having to invite such a vulgar class of people into your own home". Which was nice.)

Of course, today in the real world, eating at the Savoy has gotten a BIT more expensive. Here is what they had to eat. And by now they were no longer having to force it down. Which was nice for tonight, but probably a bit worrying for the next week when they have to come down to today's portions.

First course: £1,000 worth of Beluga Caviar and native and rock oysters.

Second course: Pot au feu Henry IV. Mr Giles called it the shoulder, shank, rib and tail of beef braised all day and served in their broth with a blob of béarnaise, but it's basically beef soup. With the beef added back in.

Third course: A choice of sole cardinale and whitebait. Or, if you're eating the Edwardian way, both.

Fourth course: Chicken d'Albufera, i.e. a whole chicken (each, obviously) stuffed with rice, truffles and foie gras, served in a sauce of boiled cream, triply-reduced, with mushrooms and more truffles and quenelles of veal tongue and chicken.

Fifth course: saddle of lamb with spring vegetables and parsley potatoes. Not that the Edwardians really thought of vegetables as proper food.

Sixth course: pressed Rouen ducklings. This was the bit where even Daddy Alex went a bit cross-eyed. Four duckling were individually hand strangled especially for them in France. Once roasted, they were placed into a solid silver duck press so that they could be crushed before their – and our! – eyes. "Ooh, it's a duckling smoothie," said Sue. What was left of their insides was then scraped out, stuck in the liquidiser, liquidised, brought back and boilded up in a silver dish with the blood that had been squeezed out and a dash of champagne (obviously) in order to produce a sauce for the meat. "Mmmm, slightly bummy duck's blood," said Sue.

Seventh course: asparagus hollandaise, just a little something to clear the palate. Or in Sue's case, to get caught immovably between the teeth. The Edwardians apparently loved this but it's supposed to be a bit bad for the gout.

Eighth course: Peach Melba, served in a hand-carved ice-swan that was bigger than ME!. This dessert is of course named after the famous opera singer: Dame Placido Flamingo.

Ninth course: Canapés à la Diane, which looked like yet more truffles on toast.

Tenth course: call for ambulance!


The week finished with a return visit to Doctor Pennyfarthing, whose tests of Mr Giles revealed that he had increased his body fat by 10%, increased his cholesterol by 15% and increased the gout-causing urea in his blood by a third! And he was now clinically dead.

The Edwardians, you see, had a life expectancy of 42. Yes, 42. Oddly enough, something about eating the equivalent of an entire family of hippopotami every week might have had some deleterious effect on their health. Either that or they just EXPLODED.

So presumably they didn't live long enough to learn that all that bacon was good for the latest health scare very bad for you.

Sadly, this whole way of life was killed off by World War part one and an invasion of American BREAKFAST CEREALS.

Anyway, even before the ICKY SQUISHED duck, Daddy Alex had started to realise that something was MISSING from all this Edwardian excess. And then it dawned on him: the missing ingredient – CHOCOLATE.

Stuff that for a game of soldiers, then, he said. The Edwardian diet is OFF!

Day 2296: His Legacy will Live on!

Sunday:


No, not HIM – Mr Barry Nelson, who was the first person to bring JAMES BOND to the screen.

Mr Barry starred in a version of "Casino Royale" for the telly and that (Mr Kevin McClory aside) was where all the legal trouble started. Thankfully, this has all been resolved now.

So even though it is sad that he has passed away, the recent hugely successful proper film version of "Casino Re-al", staring Mr Daniel, is a testament to the enduring appeal of the visual Mr Bond.

And as ever, James Bond will return…

Day 2295: DOCTOR WHO: Gridlock

Saturday:


Daddy PROMISES that he did NOT KNOW!

In “Gridlock”, Russell T Davies has written a rather beautiful fairy story, or possibly a future-religious mystery, of a community of people trapped in a perpetual circular purgatory who nevertheless keep the faith and are eventually released to enter the heavenly city through the actions of two people seeking redemption and the sacrifice of a lonely immortal.

The story is profoundly allegorical: heaven is dead; no one realises it, because they think they are still hearing the voice of an angel, even if it’s just a traffic update. People who lie or kidnap find themselves on the fast lane to hell, where even the monsters have “fallen” from their one time pride. The hope for the future is the everyday folk, the salt of the New Earth in all their myriad forms, who are just struggling to get through the daily commute.

The Doctor goes all “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”: when he sins – lying by omission about Gallifrey – he loses Martha who becomes the object of his quest, leading him to cross the threshold from the mundane world of the pharmacists’ alley and enter the dark underground place (the “belly of the whale” – just look at the architecture!). There he faces trials of endurance and supernatural monsters before receiving aid from the wise old mentor who ultimately dies, having passed on his wisdom. In the end, the Doctor is able to surrender his own ego – his quest to forgive himself by saving Martha – in return for a greater boon for all mankind – releasing the trapped drivers to take their places in the city.

(Joseph Campbell’s 1949 work “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” is, of course, famously one of the main inspirations for “Star Wars”, so there’s no irony in New New York looking like – and indeed rather better than – the “Star Wars” capital of Coruscant. Or indeed from the fact that the Doctor’s lost home had two suns, just like Luke Skywalker’s Tatooine.)

As a flag for the way that the series might be going: in a story that is very much about Gallifrey being dead, the Doctor repopulates the heavenly city with humans, even as he learns “you are not alone”. And the story closes with a view of the burnt orange sunset over the city skyline, a reflection making it look for a moment like New Earth might have two suns. A kiss to the past, or a promise of a future?


As science fiction, of course, it’s nonsense.

Too many bits of the story wilfully ignore real world considerations.

There’s something rather… Castrovalvan about the situation that the population of the motorway find themselves in. Their cars are designed as living spaces and all come stocked with food and fuel and the comforts of living… even the ones that have been there from when the gridlock began twenty-four years ago.

Because of the plague, the motorway is supposed to be sealed. People are trapped on the motorway because all of the exits are closed… but new cars can still join the motorway so how sealed is it? And has no one, no one in twenty-four years, thought of driving the wrong way up an entry ramp just to get off? If the motorway is such a nightmare, why not just turn off the auto-pilot and take your anti-gravity car up over the top? It’s not like there are any police left to nick you. For that matter, has no one thought of just walking into New New York?

We might perhaps infer that the motorway is New New York’s M25, the ultimate orbital from hell, encircling the “promised land” of the city that people from the suburbs are trying to reach. They enter from the outer side of the motorway, but all of the inner exits and entrances are sealed.

But the situation still requires that no one outside the city – and definitely no one on the motorway – knows that everyone in the city is dead. Can it really be the case that no one in the suburbs has noticed that the only communication from the city is an automated traffic hologram?

And you would think that sooner or later those little CB communities on the road would pass round enough messages that someone would work out that every route into the city is sealed, and then leave the other way to try and get some news.

And where does the smog actually come from? How can the cars have self-regenerating fuel cells if they are pumping pollution out the back end in thick clouds? If they are pumping stuff out there must be something that they are using up. Or are they effectively getting more fuel from nowhere? I suppose you could argue that the clouds coming out the back are actually the toxic products that the cars air-conditioning has extracted from the air drawn in so that the people inside can breathe… but then why are there any toxins in the air in the first place? The entire system seems to be supporting itself – like Baron Munchausen – by pulling up on its own bootstraps.

To be honest, the problem is at least in part caused by Russell wanting this story to continue characters from his last Year Five Billion story, which limits the time gap from New Earth. Though would it have been that difficult to say it was 250 years later – the Face of Boe is almost immortal anyway, and Novice Hame could have had a throwaway line about being on her ninth life (haha). A bigger time gap would have allowed for the traffic jam to have existed for longer than anyone we meet has actually been in it – long enough that it is reasonable for it to have become a permanent feature, and long enough that the Doctor could be excused not discovering it last time.

But does any of this matter? Well, no, not compared to the fact that a story with the Macra in it was able to make me cry twice.

Oh yes, it’s got Macra in it and the giant crab/insect/bacteria/metaphors of the Troughton era join a surprisingly elite band of Doctor Who monsters who have returned for a second appearance.

Daleks and Cybermen; Yeti and Ice Warriors; Autons, Silurians and Sontarans. And the Slitheen. You might also add The Mara from the Peter Davison era and Sil/the Mentors from the Colin Baker era. And depending on definition, you might want to add humans and Time Lords to the list. And Aggedor, the eponymous Monster of Peladon does make a come back too, if you must (though it would turn him quite puce with shame to call Alpha Centauri from the same stories a “monster” – and when is the hexapod ambassador coming back in the new series, then?).

In the original “Macra Terror” the Macra are literally as well as metaphorically in control. Here they are more a symptom of the problem than the disease itself. Some have argued that it would have been nice to find a giant white Macra squatting in the senate, responsible for the plague of Bliss that killed the city, but I think that would have detracted from the tragedy.

The CG realisation is pretty much as ropey as the original fibre-glass prop versions – and quite right too. The moment when they emerge from the smog was terrific in spite of the cartoon look. Their arms may resemble Florence the Plasmavore’s bendy straw, but their huge claws were magnificent. If their brain power has diminished, their physicality has gone the other way: the 1960’s giant crabs were the size of a mini, but these fellows are big enough to grasp something the size of a VW Dormobile between their pincers – truly they have become titanic. And in such numbers that they certainly would crawl all over you!

In the end, the Macra are there because if you’re going to have a monster that lives in the fumes at the bottom of a tunnel, then it might as well be the Macra.

And it’s not like they’re dead at the end – room for another Year Five Billion sequel next year if you want, Russell.

(Although allegedly David Tennant jokes on the podcast commentary: “next year, the Monoids”. So, let’s set it in the year 5,000,000,700 and really annoy the people who insist that “The Ark” must still take place in the year 10,000,000 rather than, say, admitting that the notoriously accurate first Doctor just got the date wrong!)

But never mind the Macra, in spite of all the huge CGI spectacle – killer crabs included – this is a remarkably personal story, about the Doctor and his realisation that Martha is worth more to him than just as a quick fix for dampening his sensation of his losses, of Rose and of Gallifrey.

In many ways, the Doctor’s mad scramble down through the cars of all the wonderful people that he meets is really a journey to discover that Martha is uniquely valuable for herself.

And a brief note to the people who complain about “cats” breeding with “humans” – there aren’t any humans. Lady Cassandra was the last human – she explicitly says that all the others have become blended with other species. They’re all just people now: Ben Aaronovitch might call them People (if Iain M Banks wasn’t calling them the Culture) or Lawrence Miles might call them Posthumans.

There are some wonderful touches in all those magnificently diverse posthuman people, different and yet together in their community – yes, obviously we loved the married old ladies, they were gorgeous and sweet and hooray a same sex couple! and we loved the naturist couple, but we loved the white person and the red person and the furry person and the cat person too. We even liked the American Gothic couple at the start, their appearance foreshadowing both the New New York setting and the religious overtones.

But it’s still a story about the Doctor. Freema continues to be brilliant as Martha, brilliant scared, beautiful and lovely, saving the day because she watched a film on television once. But this is the Doctor’s story. And David Tennant really shows us what he can do here, delivering a heartrending performance, as we first here him talking about Gallifrey with a longing and lie that it might still exist, through his anger at himself and the realisation at what he has done, to the conclusion where he is honest and sad and at least able to share his secret, broken heart(s) with Martha.

And the Doctor’s line in the “Next Time” trailer, just for once perfectly chosen in what it reveals: “they always survive… when I lose everything.”


Next time… from New New York to Old New York; from one old enemy to another. They always survive. “Daleks in Manhattan”

Day 2294: Wolfie in Sheepish Clothing

Friday:


Oh dear, the Monkey-in-Chief’s imposition as head of the World Bank, Mr Wolfie Paulowitz has had to APOLOGISE.

Mr Wolfie, who has sworn to crack down on corruption and nepotism, has very slightly used his position to give a great big job and a huge pay rise to his GIRLFRIEND without asking the permission of the actual people in charge.

“I was new to the job and made a mistake,” is his version of the story. The mistake being that he forgot he was no longer in the Monkey-in-Chief’s WHITE HOUSE where it is ROUTINE PROCEDURE to fix big jobs and huge wedges of wonga for our mates. Allegedly.

Quite a lot of people at the World Bank are seeing this as an excuse to get rid of the hated [bad word] a reason why the compromised chief should consider his position. The Bank’s staff association called it “grossly out of line”, though when they go on to suggest that he has “compromised” his “integrity and effectiveness” they have clearly forgotten who they are talking about!

But before we call out the villagers with the pitchforks and flaming torches, we should, however, listen to the WISDOM of Liberal Democrat MALCOLM the BRUCE.

He points out that singing the Schadenfreude Song and sacking Mr Wolfie might be FUN, but it could just let the Monkey-in-Chief appoint another NUTTER to the job, and actually PROLONG the New Con power over the World Bank.

Day 2293: Chocolate Fireguard

Thursday:


I learn from Mr Jonny that some BIGWIGS off the Internet have said that there must be a CODE OF CONDUCT for bloggers and diarists like ME!

I think that this is a bit RUDE! I do not need someone telling ME what I can and cannot write!

Besides, who could possibly think that a fluffy toy like me could ever be rude to anyone. Well, anyone except Lord Blairimort, that is. He is a twonk! Oops, see!


The whole point of writing a DIARY like mine or like any of the diaries on the Wibbly Wobbly Web is to have your OWN voice and write what you want in your OWN way. And not in some Star-Trek-like “any utopia you like so long as it is OUR utopia” pre-defined voice set out by a tiny group of people from one tiny part of our great big planet.

If you want the great joy of freedom of expression in blogging to be that you can go your own way then OBVIOUSLY you have to let everyone ELSE go their own way too! And that means that you have to put up with the shouty, ranty people too. And the boring people. And the people like Mr Millipede whose diaries are programmed into them every morning by the MASTER COMPUTER.

You do NOT have to put up with them in YOUR OWN space – if you do not like what they say then you can always DELETE their comments. I often have to ask Daddy to nuke comments when some SPAM-MERCHANT sticks an ANNOYING ADVERT on my diary.


So, what are we supposed to sign up for if we want to be good little members of the United Federation of Planets?

1. We take responsibility for our own words and the for the comments we allow
2. We won’t say anything online that we wouldn’t say in person
3. We connect privately before we respond publicly
4. When we believe someone is unfairly attacking another, we take action
5. We do not allow anonymous comments
6. We ignore trolls

You know, that wouldn’t all be TOO BAD, at least not if it was a PERSONAL statement of one person’s rules for their own diary.

But as a set of universal rules, isn’t it just a bit, well, sweeping?

Let’s just ignore that point three is just MANAGEMENT SPEAK for “we try to take the conversation off-line and into the real world” (never mind HOW you guarantee to contact someone before you lay into them: should I be checking in with Lord B before I say something about him EVERY TIME? Would slow things down just a TAD do you not theink? And at the other end of the scale, not EVERY blog has a contact e-mail on it you know. And contacting someone before you make a harsh point may make you feel like a big grown up newspaper, but it also kills stone dead the idea that comments are a “conversation” between the diarist and the reader, and makes it just “letters to the editor”.) So let’s just ignore and skip to the good stuff.

An earlier version of point four was “if you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so” which is actually MUCH BETTER, because it is about promoting good behaviour to your FRIENDS, and it is about suggesting and informing, not ENFORCING. The phrase “we believe someone is unfairly attacking another” does not just cover SOMEONES that we are friends with, i.e. people who might value our advice or our opinion of them and their behaviour – it just means anyone we take a dislike to. Yes, that could be someone who is issuing death threats. But it could be “someone who once looked at me funny”. And “we take action” isn’t just restricted to having a QUIET WORD… it could be anything up to starting a full on flame war. Or, if you are the Monkey-in-Chief, starting an ACTUAL war.

Point two is just silly. I say LOTS of things online that I would not say in person. This is because I am TOO SHY. (And NOT because I am too short to be seen over the podium at Liberal Democrat conference!) The Wibbly Wobbly Web gives us a lot of freedom to speak that we have not been used to. In some countries it is the ONLY freedom of speech that they can have, and anonymity is a great BOON to them.

And points five and six are trivial. And essentially the SAME point, since who is a “troll” is often in the eye of the beholder. Find what works for you. Accept comments or do not accept comments. Accept anonymous comments or require registration. Let anyone say anything or delete things you don’t like. I would recommend a bit of honesty – like not deleting all the comments except the ones that say how LOVELY you are – but I am not going to put my fluffy foot down about it. Remember, if you DO delete all the comments except the ones saying how lovely you are, people will soon notice and you may get a different reputation than “lovely” for it.

But of course they are also really just the same point as point one, or the second part of it anyway.

Taking responsibility for our own words is WISE. We should all know that saying things has consequences – in fact a lot of the time we would not say them if we did not think that SOMEONE would be changed just a little bit by reading them. Made happier, made angrier, made to think just a little bit. Some words are made to hurt or to harm too.

I LOVE the badges though. That is “love” in the IRONIC sense – I mean how patronising are THESE?

We are nice...

...and we are nasty

But to say we must take responsibility for ALL the comments. And that “we allow” – how very THOUGHT POLICE. I am quite lucky because I do not get too many comments for me to read all of them. But do you REALLY believe that someone like Mr Dale Winton should put up his hand to take responsibility for ALL of the comments that get posted on his diary?

(I mean, personally, I would not like to put up a fluffy foot to be responsible for some of the DIARY ENTRIES that he makes, but that is just me!)

If you want to be able to debate ideas you are going to HAVE to allow opposing ideas in your comments, and to take responsibility for those ideas would be, er, a bit schizophrenic at least.

It is all about BLANDIFYING the Wibbly Wobbly Web.

We have only HAD the Internet for a few years now, and we are still finding out about all the new ways that we can interact. We have to get used to each other in a whole load of new ways – and sometimes we just can’t, or aren’t ready to yet. It’s no good glossing over that, trying to hide it behind NET CURTAINS.

There ARE horrid things out there, and horrid people. But – like Doctor Who says – there is so much more than that, so much wilder, so much madder, and so much better.

What we need is to just keep doing it, writing our diaries and our comments and plugging away, knocking the rough edges off each other until we do figure out how to get along. Each of us in our own way.

Enjoy the liberty.

PS

Read this while you are at it!

Day 2292: Doctor Who and the gay daddy agenda

Wednesday:


Mr Lawrence Miles published a review of last weekend’s Doctor Who, only to RECANT very quickly and remove it from his diary. Nevertheless, like all the words of Mr “Mad Larry” Miles, it has made a bit of a SPLASH.

Basically, he said that when gay daddies write for Doctor Who, if they AREN’T Russell T Davies then they have a problem writing for attractive young women. Not older women, older mumsy women are fine, just the young ones. And Mr Larry implies that it must be because young women must do K.I.S.S.I.N.G!

This is the CORE of what he had to say:

“But every gay writer in Doctor Who, other than Cuddly God-Bear Russell T. Davies himself, seems determined to turn each new female character into a mother-figure, a hate-object, or a human sacrifice: see also the “work” of Mark Gatiss and Matthew Jones, who routinely bump off the girls and let the mothers live.”

Of course, by “every gay daddy” he actually means “the THREE gay daddies who aren’t Mr Russell”. (Or, as daddy puts it, of the twenty scripts by gay daddies we will ignore sixteen.) This is not what you would call a STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT sample.

In the first year, this means Mr Mark Gatiss, since Mr Rob Sherman, Mr Paul Cornell and Mr Steven Moffat are all pretty much married to pretty much ladies. Mr Mark wrote “The Unquiet Dead” – a story that Mr Larry has been not uncontroversial about before – which DOES feature the young woman getting exploded though, to be fair, everyone else who isn’t Charles Dickens has ALREADY been killed and turned into ZOMBIES. In the second year, he contributed “The Idiot’s Lantern” where the female characters were the downtrodden mummy who finds some backbone and the evil television lady.

Now at FIRST GLANCE that might look like a perfect correlation with Mr Larry’s stereotypes. But in order to do that you have to look at, say, Mrs Rita Connelly and say she is Tommy’s mummy and that is all we need to know. In fact, as Daddy Alex points out, almost none of her story is about her being Tommy’s mummy. In actual fact, it is about her being abused by her husband, and then standing up for her own mother and for herself. Far from JUST being a “mother”, she steps out of that ROLE to become her own person.

Alternatively, look at the MALE characters in those stories. Mr Dickens re-discovers his love of his family (father-figure); Mr Sneed is a weak man who gets killed off to become a Gelth zombie (human sacrifice); and Mr Eddie Connolly is revealed as a bully and a sneak (hate-figure). It is EASY to put people into BOXES, isn’t it? In fact, all three of these men are more complex than that too: Mr Sneed, for example, has a rather wry sense of humour, and though he may sometimes appear to bully Gwyneth it turns out that he is also rather generous with her pay.

You might also look at what the other (non-gay-daddy) writers do with THEIR lady characters. The only lady in “Dalek” is Ms Diana Goddard – named after Mr Rob’s WIFE! – who turns out to be a bit naughty at the end where she takes over from her evil boss. The attractive young woman in Mr Paul’s “Father’s Day” may not be a human sacrifice, but her wedding goes a bit up in smoke when everyone ELSE gets eaten by the Reapers, and the WHOLE of “The Empty Child” two-parter hinges on Nancy being a MOTHER FIGURE.


So being sneery about Mr Mark Gatiss’ work may not actually stand up.

But what about Mr Larry’s other evidence: “The Impossible Planet” where the pretty, young woman was killed by a pretty, young man (who is a bit possessed by the devil), and this week’s “The Shakespeare Code” where a pretty, young man was quickly killed by a pretty, young woman (who then turns out to be an evil ugly witch).

If we just brush over just exactly how much of “The Impossible Planet” was REALLY written by him and how much was written by Mr Russell – because that’s a WHOLE other can of WORMS – then Mr Matt Jones is the new gay daddy writing in Doctor Who’s second season. Though, we do not really know about Mr Toby Whithouse or young Master Tom MacRae. But we do know that Mr Matthew Graham has talked about his sons: Sam Tyler in “Life on Mars” is named after one of them (that’s right, he’s Tyler Graham).

In fact, the one most obvious “mother figure” in the new series so far is Trish Webber in Mr Matthew’s “Fear Her”, who has nothing to add to the plot other than her “concerned mother” acting. That’s the OTHER problem for Mr Larry’s theory: if the non-gay-daddy writers do the thing that he says only the gay daddies do it looks less like a pattern and more like he’s just picking evidence to support his attack.

But back to “The Impossible Planet”, the thing about killing off of an attractive young lady character is that it is IMPLICITLY a threat to kill off the Doctor’s best friend Rose, who funnily enough is an attractive young lady character. And this is especially true in “The Impossible Planet”/”The Satan Pit” where the Beast pretty directly threatens to do exactly that to Rose too!

And this, of course, is where Mr Larry’s theory falls completely to pieces. Because quite obviously EVERY episode has an attractive female character who is (as seen in the first twenty seconds of “Rose”, and loads of times since) not above a bit of K.I.S.S.I.N.G. And yet, whether she is Rose or Martha, she is a rounded character with strengths and flaws.


Mr Larry picks up on one line of Martha’s in “The Shakespeare Code” where she asks what Bedlam is – as an intelligent medical student, says Larry, she should know that. And he is RIGHT, she should. It is one of those difficult moments for the writer: someone needs to ask on behalf of the audience, so that the audience can know that Bedlam is (a) where mad people go and (b) supposed to be a hospital. It can’t be Shakespeare because he’s local and OBVIOUSLY knows what it means; it cannot be Dr Who either, because he is an ALIEN GENIUS who knows everything. So it has to be Martha asking the “What’s that Doctor?” question.

Of course, you COULD have scripted it better – had the Doctor explain it to Martha automatically and have her say “yes, I know!”. But that risks ALIENATING your viewers from their identification figure by having her be Ms Know-It-All.

The problem is that, based on this one slip, Mr Larry then throws up his arms and says: “woe, woe the smart cookie of ‘Smith and Jones’ has been dumbed down by the nasty gay daddy!” But to do that he has to overlook the fact that within seconds of coming out of the TARDIS after her first trip, Martha is asking intelligent time-travel questions; that she consistently throughout picks up on the important clues that the Doctor gives her and improves the way she interacts with 1599; and that in the end, she – not the genius Shakespeare, not the genius Doctor – comes up with just the right word to finish the “spell” that banishes the Carrionites again. (And remember – earlier the Doctor complained that she was a novice because, unlike Rose, she didn’t know the right word to say.)


A lot of people have written already about why Doctor Who is apparently very popular with gay daddies. They often say it is because Dr Who does not do LURVE – which made the series surprisingly ASEXUAL, in a way that the MACHO, MANLY American Sci-Fi really isn’t – everything from “Knight Rider” to chromium-era Battleham Galacticake, to the definitely-NOT-gay daddy of them all, “Star Trek”.

Well, the re-invention of the series by Mr Russell has kept remarkably many of the things from the first twenty-six years of Doctor Who – Daleks, Cybermen, Venom Grubs – but one thing that it has NOT kept is that “no hanky-pancake” rule. Dr Who himself has fallen for a GIRL. And not just any girl, but one with a whole LIST of people that she flirts with (Mickey, Adam, Captain Jack, the Face of Boe…) all of them BOYS! Now, unlike all those American series I just mentioned, Doctor Who does not present boy/girl romance as the ENTIRETY of human experience – Captain Jack on his own covers so many other bases. But there are still very, very few gay daddies to be seen on the show. And even then, they are a bit UNDER COVER: Rickey and Jake on the alternative Earth of Pete’s World (keep very quiet about it thanks to dialogue being snipped); Tommy Connolly in “The Idiot’s Lantern” (one allusion to being a “mummy’s boy” and one remark about being allowed to “love who you choose”, neither of which might meet anything); a couple of “rather severe” ladies who now live in Elton Pope’s childhood home (whom we don’t actually meet).

One of the EASIEST ways to cause a fuss on the Outpost Gallifrey forums is if anyone suggests that anything more… OVERT should be put on screen. “Why do you NEED to see BOYS kissing BOYS or GIRLS kissing GIRLS?” is the usual cry. “Well, because GIRLS kiss BOYS all the time, in this new series!” seems a fair enough answer.

To try and suggest that the gay daddies writing for Doctor Who have some kind of PLOT to portray girls as ICKY is seriously to overlook all of the very pro-girls-who-like-boys-who-like-girls-ness that now comes fitted as standard.

Okay, so this week – for the first time in thirty episodes – we had a “kiss the girl and she turns BAAAAD” moment. So what’s the big fluffy deal – “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” did “kiss the girl and she turns BAAAAD” in its OPENING SCENE ("Hello, Darla!"); they did “kiss the BOY and he turns BAAAAD” as a major theme for the whole second year. Did people make a fuss that “nasty” non-gay daddy Joss Whedon had some anti-straight agenda? I think they did not.

And anyway, as Doctor Freud WISELY puts it: sometimes an evil cackling witch is JUST an evil cackling witch.

Please check you OWN agenda at the door.

Day 2291: Life After Mars

Tuesday:


We are very SAD that the BBC’s OTHER Time Travelling TV series has come to an early end. Two seasons of “Life on Mars” weren’t enough. Three years would have been more satisfying: with the first about Sam’s life, a second to explore the world of 1973 before wrapping up in the third.

On the other fluffy foot, they did do that rare trick of having the ending live up to expectations.

Look away now, if you haven’t already seen it!

Because in the end, DI Sam Tyler wasn’t mad, wasn’t back in time and wasn’t in a coma.

He was dead.

Mr James has QUITE RIGHTLY criticised “Torchwood” for being Buffy Season Six. But this is what you COULD do with that concept if you turn it on its head. For Sam, HEAVEN is 1973, a golden memory of childhood before innocence was lost, when he doesn’t have all the rules that constrain him in 2007, but he can still be the good cop AND be proved right every week. And THAT’S why it can be 1973 two years running, and always summer.

1973 might be full of nasty colours – brown, bronze, brick mostly – but, in comparison, 2007 is only grey.

And rather wisely, “Life on Mars” only spent ten minutes there after dragging him back from the afterlife, before letting him return to a gloriously happy (if deceased) ending.


The OTHER good thing about the ending was that it characterised Sam’s 1973 boss DCI Gene Hunt as fundamentally HEROIC. He may break the rules but he does it to uphold the law. And he has a good heart. We were all very worried when Sam started believing that Gene was a SYMPTOM of his disease: an incarnation of brain cancer. We felt that that was just WRONG.

Of course, Sam should have been tipped off when he was getting the same message from the SINISTER Test Card Girl, who has haunted him throughout and is the only person in 1973 to try to lead him astray.

Mr Matthew Graham – writing in the RadioTimes – points out that she was really the biggest clue to what had happened to Sam: in 1973, she only appeared on television ONCE THE PROGRAMMES WERE OVER.

Then again, the Detective Inspector from Hyde, the creepy Frank Morgan, kept giving us nasty-piece-of-work vibes too. He too was trying to tempt Sam into betraying Gene and in the end even tricking him, promising to bring backup when he really intended Gene Hunt and his team to die. His excuse: we need to make an example so that we can bring in the new ways. But if the ends justify the means for Morgan, then isn’t that EXACTLY THE SAME as why he thinks Gene (beat a confession out of them) Hunt is WRONG? At least Gene was honest about his motives.

Of course, Mr Matthew reveals, “Frank Morgan” is another clue – Frank Morgan played the Wizard of Oz in the Judy Garland movie. So, in the “real world” (grey Kansas) he is a QUACK; and in Dorothy’s dreamworld he is a FAKE who FAILS to get her back home. Do you see?

Other hints include all the “Hyde” references, supposed to make us realise that Gene is Mr Hyde to Sam’s Doctor Jekyll – they are two sides of the same coin. And of course DI Morgan shows Sam his own gravestone (which appeared in all the trailers – a la Sky One’s trailing of the Buffy season five climax “The Gift” – though Daddy Alex kept Daddy Richard and me from seeing any of them. THANK YOU DADDY!)

We wish it could have carried on longer, and hope that rumours of a SEQUEL series “Ashes to Ashes” are TRUE. (In fact, we hoped that there would be a trailer after the final episode of “Life on Mars”.) There are not so many great series around that we can let one fall by the wayside.

We have to admit, though, that it was all VERY hard work for Mr John Simm who had to be in every single scene. (Except for that one clever episode where they gave him a drug overdose and the power to see what the other characters were doing dream in the third person.) He has probably had enough of Time Travelling adventure by now.

What?

Day 2290: Oyster Prayers

Monday:


I hope that you have all been having a lovely PAGAN HOLIDAY, celebrating the rites of SPRING and the goddess Eostre and her sacred symbol of renewal and rebirth: the EGG!

We have been on HOLIDAY too! We went to FRIMLEY: Daddy says this is where the FIMBLES come from, but I am not sure that I believe him! In fact, we went to celebrate the BIRTHDAY of Daddy Richard’s sister Emma and to play Star Wars Lego II on my cousin Jamie’s computer.

Auntie Em

We also did a QUEST for chocolate eggs and Daddy Alex discovered that he has the power to launch small people into ORBIT!

I am back now!


Listening to the BEARDY-WEIRDY of CANTERBURY’S song and dance hour on the radio on the way, though, I was particularly struck by the way it finished with everyone DRONING the “Lord’s Prayer” like a DIRGE.

I always think that this is very SAD: if you look at what Mr Jesus is supposed to have SAID it seems to me that when he says “this is how you should pray” he means SPONTANEOUSLY not “in these exact words”. The verses before even say DON’T just mouth off in the synagogue to show how GOOD you are!

Mind you, Mr Luke’s version does have him say: “say this”. Not that people speak them in ARAMAIC anyway!

When Mr Jesus starts the prayer with the word “Abba”, the familiar term for Father, he’s suggesting being conversational and familial (and NOT that the LORD is a member of the Swedish super-group).

In Hebrew nowadays “Abba” is used to mean “Daddy”!

Not that I recommend praying to MY daddies – I have been asking for a seat in the HOUSE of LORDS CLUB for AGES and am still waiting for “and ye shall receive”!

Day 2289: Tolstoy Trunk-ated

Sunday:


Apparently, there is to be a new and shorter version of Mr Tolstoy’s ultra-epic Russian Masterpiece, “War and Peace”

Henceforth is to be just “War”.


This diary has been abridged.

Day 2288: DOCTOR WHO: The Shakespeare Code

Saturday:


HURRAY for the power of petitions! After last week’s EXCESSIVE rhino intrusion, I have given Dr Who a stern talking to, and lo and behold this week he stays in a pub called THE ELEPHANT. Things are definitely LOOKING UP! I think I will let my daddies carry on watching this show after all.

For my NEXT petition… I think Dr Who needs a SOFT TOY as his assistant!

Well, Shakespeare was never like that when I was at school.

The Power of Words is one way that we often refer to Doctor Who’s seventeenth season, with its recurring theme of books and learning that obviously builds up to “Shada”. And season seventeen is, in some ways, where Gareth Roberts came in, after a couple of successful New Adventures, really finding himself in capturing the light-as-a-bubble relationship of the fourth Doctor and second Romana (not forgetting K-9) in [Graham Crowden voice] three! I have seen three! Missing Adventures: romantic adventurers in every sense.

Not that this feels like a story from season seventeen. It looks too expensive, for starters. But that same love of language is richly woven into this adventure of the Doctor, the quintessential scientific adventurer, meets Shakespeare, the genius of the arts, as they bat aphorisms back and forth each sizing up the other and approving.

Shakespeare, as they say, is all quotes. And here Gareth uses that, the very fact that Shakespeare’s words have entered the language as common currency, to have a running gag that also, you would hope, might encourage some people to open a book and find where those quotes came from. “Ooh, that’s good,” says the bard from time to time. “You should write that down,” notes the Doctor, or “You can’t have that, it’s someone else’s.” The punchline “that’s one of mine!” is all the funnier for knowing that so were all the rest.

Taking the cue rather more from “A Knight’s Tale” than “Shakespeare in Love”, here we meet a bard who is the rock god of his Elizabethan age, Dean Lennox Kelly playing him with panache, sparkle and quite a lot of chest hair. It’s rather fun and again, one hopes, will break down the image of the balding bloke from Stratford. The in-jokes do not intrude; who can fail to get something like “no autographs, no you can’t be sketched with me, and please don’t ask where I get my ideas” even without knowing that it’s an author caught by fans at the Tavern? But it is also an admiring portrait, with Shakespeare seeing through the psychic paper (Russell T claims this is a first, but we recall Dr Ragesh Singh saw through it too in “Army of Ghosts”; perhaps that was just Torchwood’s superior training.)

Of course, the Doctor has met Shakespeare before. Only just not yet. “City of Death” (guess what, season seventeen) reveals that the original “Hamlet” is written in the Doctor’s hand – Shakespeare having sprained a wrist writing sonnets. No, it’s not rude. But this is 1599 and only at the end does Shakespeare think it is time to write the play that will deal exorcise his dead son, Hamnet Shakespeare.

The Doctor also mentions to Sarah having met the Bard; says he was a lousy actor, but that could be in the future too.

(And we’ll draw a delicate veil over “Time of the Daleks” and “The Kingmaker” which appear to have Shakespeare meeting the Doctor at the beginning and, er, the end of his life. The missing adventure with the first Doctor “The Empire of Glass” features Shakespeare too, but he does at least get his mind wiped of the adventure; mind you, that Shakespeare remembers a Tom-Baker-like younger brother of the first Doctor helping him with “Hamlet”.)

With Will as guest hero for the week, the villains are – to be “in period” – the three witches. Okay, so they turn out to be three Carrionites, aliens from the dawn of time, once banished into the darkness by the eternals. (Is the name Carrionite derived from “carrion”, or from demented killer psychic “Carrie”, do you think?) The Carrionites use a science based on words instead of numbers – says the Doctor – hence the magic spells, incantations and power of “true naming”.

Now, far be it for me to suggest that there’s some more Lawrence Miles in here, but the central theme of his first New Adventure, “Christmas on a Rational Planet”, was that the Millennium of Blood and Magic was overthrown by Rassilon and the Time Lords imposing their Age of Reason on the universe and now the powers of Magic would rather like to return to the old ways.

The reference to the eternals is interesting too – one of several, including in “Army of Ghosts” the eternals referring to the void as the “howling halls” – are these really the same beings encountered in Enlightenment, or is Russell building a new mythos for the new series?

It is a little bit naughty to suggest that their magic works just because they have used words instead of numbers as the basis of their science. Mathematics only enables us to make a model of the universe; outside of Logopolis, we can’t use the numbers to change the world directly – an aeroplane doesn’t fly by the pilot sitting at the front and chanting “2, 4, 6, 8… now let us degravitate!” And I don’t think there’s any combination of numbers that will let you fly on a broomstick.

But that’s really missing the point isn’t it. This is really about the power of words in its literary and metaphorical sense. Words can and do change the world; the Doctor’s own magic here is that he inspires Shakespeare to undo the witches’ work.

The three Carrionites themselves, lovely Lilith, Mother Doomfinger and Mother Bloodtide (oh, spotted another in-joke Johnny Morris’s Big Finish audio; he wrote the other famous season seventeen missing adventure, didn’t he?), appear very much as your traditional child’s view of witches: hooked nose and chin, wrinkled skin and hunchback. And what’s wrong with that? Doctor Who has always merrily revealed everyone from Egyptian gods to Minotaurs as one bunch of aliens or another. They don’t really resemble the ones that we see released at the climax very much though – those are much more spectral beings, with eerie gaping fanged mouths. Is it possible that Lilith and her mothers have taken possession of human bodies, better to secure their bridgehead here?

Lilith, who can at least pass for human – and beautiful – is a delicious villain, half diabolical mastermind, half pouting sexual predator (and don’t let’s even get into the reverse-Buffy psychology of “kiss the girl and she turns evil”). Pity poor Wiggins, the lutist lured to his death in the pre-title sequence. (And not the scholar of Shakespearean Drama and writer of Doctor Who DVD subtitles.) Christina Cole turns in a smouldering performance and it’s only a shame that she ends up imprisoned, Phantom Zone-like, in her own crystal ball at the end. Still, it looks pretty fragile and the TARDIS doesn’t half bounce about these days… maybe she’ll get out.

If there is a flaw, it is that we learn nothing at all about the play that is at the heart of the story. Yes, re-creating a lost Shakespeare masterpiece is probably a bit of a big ask, but it seems surprising that at no point does the Doctor ask any questions at all about the plot or writing when these things are clearly an important part of the Carrionites’ plan. To tie in with the Carrionites’ own history, something about the lovers being imprisoned in a “dark place” with the climax of the play being their release to “Dravidian light”.

(Word for today: “Dravidian” is a proper English word, meaning “belonging to a dark, long-headed, wavy-haired race of the Deccan [the southern peninsula of India]” or “belonging to a group of languages in Southern India”. And nothing to do with the Drahvins.)

The key magical phrase used to release the Carrionites – a string of numbers as “crystal activate” – does sound a little clumsy amidst all the carefully crafted couplets that the witches have been using for their spells so far.

I would, perhaps, have preferred something to say that the whole of the play, all its powerful words, was used to charge up the tetra-decagonal Globe so that the final trigger could unlock the Carrionites’ prison. That would have explained why only one creature appeared in the rehearsal, and why the whole play had to become “lost”. Else, why could not Shakespeare merely have changed the final scene?

The visuals were impressive and overwhelming, particularly the Globe exploding with Carrionites at the climax. Though I must confess, almost all of those awesome matte-paintings did look like paintings rather than genuine cityscapes. That’s not to be too critical, they set the scene perfectly. Though I did wonder if there wasn’t one shot with the Houses of Parliament in the background; Her Majesty’s New Palace of Westminster not having been built at the time. Alex suggests that maybe it was old St Stevens Hall, the oldest part of the houses. And did Bedlam look like Albion Hospital, or was it just the way the gate was shot?

Freema and David continue to make us love them as not so star-crossed lovers. Martha asks all sorts of bright questions on stepping out of the TARDIS – another New Adventures nod with her sudden Butterfly paranoia (though Millennium has explained in the past why the Butterfly Effect shouldn’t bother a time traveller; not that the Doctor takes it too seriously, either) – and later contributes the vital literally (in every sense) magic word. But there’s also the lovely, bittersweet bed scene where the Doctor is at his most “just doesn’t get it”. She thinks she’s pulled; he brings up Rose. The candle being blown out is a perfect full stop.

David Tennant continues to be ever more in control of the role now, being able to be sulky without being silly, be angry, authoritative or just plain adorable. The slapstick getting his second heart restarted could have been awful (and last year probably would have been) but this year he makes it work.

And the final coda, an appearance by Queen Elizabeth – a Queen of Hearts more Lewis Carroll than Princess Diana, I fear – which reveals the tenth Doctor seems to have a habit of greatly annoying British monarchs, particularly the female ones. It could be foreshadowing, but it works even on its own as a great Torchwood gag as, reversing the sense of the Doctor having met Shakespeare in Shakespeare’s future, the Doctor’s own future catches up with him. It’s inspired; a very different way of having the Doctor make his normal quick exit. A great ending.

Next time... the Doctor looks for Free Parking as he returns to New Earth, and the Face of Boe reveals the secret we’ve waited for since last year. Is it “Dial M for Ma…” Everyone is caught in the “Gridlock”.

PS

Happy Easter everybody!

Day 2287: Fear of Climate or Climate of Fear?

Friday:


What is the world coming to? Well, a STICKY END, it would appear – but at least everyone seems to be agreed on that now!

Obviously it is a BIT of a rum do when a lot of scientists submit their workings and it is up to a bunch of politicians to say whether they are right or not. You might think that in a SENSIBLE world it would be the other way around.

So, the general problem is that there’s not going to be enough water for lots of places and the land for growing food is going to get a good bit smaller. Not to mention the most diverse ecology in the world, the Amazon rainforest, turning into a grass car park. Still, who needs oxygen? Meanwhile here in Britain scuba diving is to become part of our daily commute.

How doomed are YOU? Well, here is a handy BBC map to tell you.

But this is actually the SECOND report into Climate Change because, like Doctor Who, they come in a SERIES this year. All that was missing was the bit at the start where Giles-from-Buffy says: “Previously on ‘So this is it, we’re all going to die!’.” In the LAST report, it was agreed that something is going on and that it is probably YOUR fault.

Unfortunately, we all have to wait for part three before we can find out what we are supposed to DO about any of this.

So, could everyone please not PANIC in the meantime and we’ll see if we can agree on some ideas that the Chinese and the Americans will actually let us do.

You know, sometimes I don’t think you people are even TRYING to survive.

Where are the “Recycling Can Be FUN” initiatives? Where are the “Cycle to Work and Leave Your Shoes and Chauffeur Behind” schemes? Where are the ALIEN SPACE LIZARDS trying to sell you a “Clean up your planet electric whisk with filter coffee attachment”? I still think we have not put enough thought into the idea of everybody going to the seaside and blowing on the ocean till it cools down a bit.

I have said it before and I will say it again: the future should be FUN, not all of this grim death nonsense.

Saying “Billions will perish” just makes you sound like Sean Connery doing his Avengers-villain accent. If everyone makes a little change, we CAN all work together to make a really BIG difference.

The future is OURS to make – let’s make it better!

Day 2286: The Best of News; the Worst of News

Thursday:


No sooner do we have the GOOD NEWS that the Iranians have released our sailors and marines, than we get the TERRIBLY BAD NEWS that four more of our soldiers have been exploded in Iraq.

Both of these stories in their contrasting relief and horror remind us that our armed forces are brave and loyal and doing the very best that they can. But that we should NOT have sent them out there in the first place and that so long as we make them stay in a dangerously unstable region then we are making the situation worse and not better.


For a week, the Iranians put our people onto the television one at a time to “confess” and “apologise”, milking it for all that they could, and once they had got all the propaganda they thought that they could get, they go for a surprise release to make themselves look even more like the good guys.

It is probably more complicated than that, of course. There are factions within Iranian politics that we do not properly understand. Although Mr Ahmadinejad is President and sort of in charge, the real authority comes from the RELIGIOUS powers, under supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Another key figure is the spokesperson for the Supreme National Security Council, Mr Ali Larijani, and he gave an interview to Channel Four news during the week. That was when he said that the British sailors were NOT going to be put on trial.

You might guess that once President Armageddonjab heard that a SHOW TRIAL was off the cards, he decided that his EASTER GIFT would be the next best way to get a final PR stunt out of the crisis, before it started to look to the rest of the world like Iran was just holding the sailors as HOSTAGES.

I asked my daddies why Iran would think that they could get away with forcing the sailors and marines to tell fibs on television. After all, we were bound to find out what really went on as soon as they were released and allowed to tell of their ORDEAL.

(Funnily enough, the thing that I thought was most insulting – and I mean insulting to ME with my Western ideals; I was sure even then that the sailors themselves had worse things to worry about – was that when they put Leading Seaman Faye Turney on the telly, they took away her uniform and made her wear a headscarf. Just think if we have made an Iranian woman appear WITHOUT a headscarf! They were totally rubbishing our belief that Ms Turney is completely equal to the job of being a frontline sailor. And that was WRONG!)

My daddies pointed out to me that while we here in Britain were NEVER going to believe the Iranian version, it wasn’t US that the Iranian government was trying to convince.

Iran has now dismissed the sailors’ version, calling it “staged” and “theatrical propaganda”. (Which, oddly enough, reminds me of the Labour complaining about the police being “theatrical” when they arrested Ms Ruth Turner. I wonder, from whom have the Iranians been getting their propaganda lessons?)

So, now we have two sets of televised statements and how can people be expected to tell the difference between OUR propaganda and THEIR propaganda?

Thanks to Lord Blairimort in the House of Commons and Mister Alistair Henchman and the dodgy dossier and the downloaded dossier, people have every reason to believe that the British government tells LIES. Never mind that we have a free press that can dig the dirt and usually ends up finding out when the government fibs, our reputation for honesty has been trashed.

So, the people in the Middle East have been given a SHOW AND TELL that says: “look how good and how put upon we are here in Iran; we are your friends and the West is your enemy.”


There are also those COMPLETE COINCIDENCES that an Iranian diplomat held hostage in Iraq has suddenly been released, and that the Americans have suddenly allowed the Iranians to have consular access to several people that the US was holding in Iraq on allegations of helping terrorists.

Now, actually, since NOT letting our British consular officials have access to the captured sailors was one of the things that we thought Iran was VERY WRONG for doing, then it is only right that we should tell the Americans that they have to let Iran have consular access when things are the other way around. So, even if it had nothing to do with our sailors, then it is GOOD that this has happened.

As for the diplomat being released, that is probably a good thing too. Let us just hope that it was NOT because the British government paid a ransom on the Iranians’ behalf.

And the worst thing is that we are GIVING all of this PR to Iran as a GIFT, just by all the dumb things we have done ever since the Monkey-in-Chief persuaded Lord Blairimort that flattening Iraq with an army was the best way to “spread democracy”.

It IS all about hearts and minds – and this week, they’re all being won by the religious ideologues in Iran.

Day 2285: Is GOD a psychopath?

Wednesday:


Well, the Very Reverend Jeffrey Jones Dean of St Albans worries that he MIGHT just come across that way, what with the whole labelling you monkey-people as SINFUL and then demanding that his one and only son be horribly tortured to death in order that he (GOD, that is) might persuade himself to forgive your sins.

This is enough to get the Very Reverend KNICKERS in a twist for World Daily Net, Christian News Wire and the HILARIOUSLY named Virtue Online.

The obvious answer is NO… because GOD is not REAL.

Never mind whether ANY kind of "god" exists – and remember I am a MILITANT ATHEIST BABY ELEPHANT! – but the Very Jeffrey Reverend Dean is worried about the CHARACTER of that name in THE BIBLE, and the Bible is OBVIOUSLY a work of IMAGINATION – not even a very ORIGINAL one, as the Hittites and Sumerians and Cult of Mithras and all the rest could testify. All very inspirational in its sweeping metaphor I AM SURE, but it still cannot get pi right, has two different, contradictory versions of creation (both wrong) and some VERY peculiar ideas about shellfish.

On the other fluffy foot, there are LOTS of characters in FICTION who are psychopaths: Mr Norman Bates is not real either, and he is DEFINITELY a Psycho: it says so on the tin!


According to the World Wide Web of Wibbly Wobbly Facts, a PSYCHOPATH (also known as a SOCIOPATH) is an OLD FASHIONED name for an ANTISOCIAL PERSONALITY which is

"A personality disorder characterised by a continuous and persistent pattern of aggressive behaviour in which the rights of others are violated."

So, does the character of GOD fit in with this definition?

Well, in between all the bits that I am SURE are very inspirational, GOD does seem to find time to do quite a lot of SMITING. Quite a lot INDEED.

It would appear that the Bible records GOD as being responsible for 2,270,368 actual killings.

This scores better than the MOVIE "Se7en", apparently!

In fact, this only adds up the RECORDED number of deaths, not the instances where death is meted out but in numbers too vast to count: the Flood, the Cities of the Plain, the poor old Egyptians first born, all of those people who get massacred by the Israelites and their cities razed to the ground, people picking up sticks on Saturdays (nowadays Sundays) and so on.

Recalculating for WORSHIPFUL MASS DESTRUCTION, GOD's estimated death toll, still according to the Bible, is 32,920,670!

That's an additional thirty millions for the entire human population of the world circa two-and-a-half thousand B.C. (less Mr Noah and family, but not including innocent dinosaurs) and a half million for the first born of Egypt (plus Pharaoh and army of charioteers (non-swimming)) and a few thousands for assorted cities (vices of undisclosed nature).

Cuddly Cthulhu would be proud.

Satan in contrast scores 10 – by dropping a house on the sons and daughters of Lot. And GOD was egging him on to do them in too!

Still, as Daddy reminds me, GOD is the NICE ONE.


Having said that, that really DOESN'T push GOD into the BIG LEAGUE of fictional people who have destroyed WHOLE PLANETS – Governor Tarkin (Alderaan, Star Wars "A New Hope"), Director Stahlmann (alternative Earth, Doctor Who "Inferno") and Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz (Earth, "The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy) have all got to have a score in the BILLIONS at least.

The Doctor (Skaro, Doctor Who, "Remembrance of the Daleks") may get let off on a technicality, as the planet as last seen in "Destiny of the Daleks" was practically uninhabited. Or he may have taken out several billion Daleks, Thals and the lake of mutations in passing. Gallifrey (Doctor Who, "The Ancestor Cell" and/or The Time War) may also need to be taken into consideration.

And the Master (Doctor Who, "Logopolis") managed to accidentally destroy a third of the entire universe.

Beat THAT, GOD!

Day 2284: Sir Mr the Merciless' Baptism of Fire

Tuesday:


"Reject the Labour and all its works, and all its empty promises!" urged Sir Mr the Merciless today, at the launch of the Liberal Democrat campaign for the local elections in England.

This year, the Liberal Democrats are the ONLY party to be fighting to represent EVERY part of the United Kingdom, from leafy suburbs in the South to the urban landscapes of the North, from the Valleys of Wales to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.

Everywhere, people are saying that they have HAD ENOUGH of Lord Blairimort and his dreadful, centralising authoritarian government. In the South, many councils no longer have ANY Labour representative AT ALL!

And yet, Mr Balloon's GYMKHANA-LAND Conservatory Party remains in full retreat to its heartland and has given up on even being the opposition in large parts of the country.

So for people in the North, ONLY the Liberal Democrats offer them a chance of change, and a real hope for a better way, protecting the environment and protecting people from crime.

While in the South people have to decide between a TRULY LIBERAL party that will oppose the government's heavy hand just as much as they will oppose crime, and a wishy-washy "us too" Conservatory opposition that most of the time does not even seem to oppose Lord Blairimort!

This will be our real test: can we hold out against Mr Balloon's promise-anything Conservatories when they are riding high, and at the same time take the fight to the Labour in their rotten-borough strongholds?

The polls are predicting big gains for Mr Balloon, and with the dog end of Lord Blairimort's premiership still hanging around like a nasty smell, we have to say that anything less than 500 gain for the Conservatories would be a BAD NIGHT – anything over 1000 and they are really flying.

Similarly for the Labour: if their losses are contained to less that 500 then they can be hopeful of some recovery. Much worse than that and we can expect Mr Frown to be barricading himself into Number Ten until 2010 at the earliest.

AND US? can we do better than coming out holding on to as many seats as when we went in?

Our aim has got to be to get as many seats for as many Liberal Democrats as we possibly can. Even if the polls are predicting a net loss of over a hundred for us now, we have got to come back with more councillors.


Meanwhile in Scotland, where they have PROPER elections[*], the Liberal Democrats will be encouraged to hear that the latest poll has them gaining ground – and SEATS!

Of course, it is only one poll, but it is GOOD NEWS to get them off to an ENTHUSIASTIC start to their campaign for a BRIGHTER FUTURE.


[*]using FAIR VOTES – what did you THINK I meant?

PS

Later we watched the Newsnight Show with their three BRASS MONKEYS: Mr Danny Idont-Finkso of the Conservatories, Ms Olly Organ-Grinder for the Liberal Democrats and a Sharp Suit for the Labour.

First, they played some clips of the campaign launches. Mr Frown and Lord Blairimort, together again, one oozing fake bonhomie the other looking like he would rather be at his own funeral – which in some ways, of course he was. Then Mr Balloon launching his latest search for a policy “What are we going to do about the Police Force, with Graham Norton” surrounded by some very dubious looking policepeople and an even more dubious looking Mr Davis David, in fact looking like there was a VERY BAD SMELL coming from… well, almost exactly where Mr Balloon was stood. Finally Sir Mr the Merciless speaking with honesty and passion about finding a better approach to policing, one that solved problems, protected people and tried to reform criminals. I know that I am BIASED but I really think he had the BEST clip.

Turning to their spin doctors, Mr Paxo asked what they thought. Obviously ALL of them were SPINNING; it was interesting what their spin WAS, though.

Both Mr Finkso and the suit dismissed Sir Mr the Merciless out of fluffy foot:

“Too old!” they chorused

“Well look,” said Ms Organ-Grinder, “after Lord Blairimort and the war and now Mr Frown and these pensions decisions, people are looking for some trust and one thing that is obvious about Sir Mr the Merciless is that he says what he means.”

“Too old!” chorused Mr Fink and the suit. “La la la we’re not listening!” they added.

I have to say I was SURPRISED at how DESPERATE they were to spin against Sir M like this. Are they really so afraid of him?

The ONLY person who can decide when Sir Mr the Merciless is “too old” is Sir Mr the Merciless himself. Anyone else is just being AGEIST!

Mr Balloon got almost as short a shrift.

“No policies!” said Ms Organ-Grinder and the suit.

“He HAS got policies!” squeeked Mr Fink. “He had some policies there… or at least he will have! Anyway, looking nice is much more important!”

“Oh shut up,” said Mr Paxo.

But they spent most time discussing the would-be man of the moment: Mr Frown. Mr Fink had a GOOD piece of SPIN – which had the advantage of also being TRUE. Mr Frown’s dilemma is that he can be seen as CONTINUITY or CHANGE. What he needs to be is CHANGE, but he keeps on being MORE OF THE SAME. And being seen with Lord Blairimort is only going to reinforce that message of MORE OF THE SAME.

Ms Organ-Grinder was also trying out some spin against MR Frown: that after the pensions trick in his first budget and the tax-cut-that-wasn’t in his last budget, he is just too TWISTY-TURNY clever by half. This seemed to get some traction with the audience… so long as you remember that the audience was Mr Paxo.

Most astonishing, though, was the spin from the suit. He was clearly a BLAIRITE, because he would go through a sentence staying on message, staying on message, staying on message… and then suddenly veer off and suggest something BONKERS like Mr Frown should face a challenge from his own campaign manager, Mr Man O’ Straw. It was as though, after so long in power, the Labour can no longer even be bothered to rein in all the internal hatreds and jealousies.

All of the QUALITY people from the Labour’s early cabinet have been FALLEN BY THE WAYSIDE over the years, and now they really only have two actual ASSETS left: Lord Blairimort himself, of course – even though there are increasing numbers of people who start throwing things the moment he appears – and of course Mr Frown too.

And yet, such is the depth of the BITTERNESS that has grown over all these years, that EVEN the Labour themselves cannot bring themselves to see that Mr Frown is obviously the best thing they have left. Twisty-turny and TAINTED as he is.

Day 2283: Mr Frown Makes Plans for Retirement

Monday:


Once upon a time, the LIBERAL Government of Mr Squiffy and Mr Lloyd George introduced a PEOPLE'S BUDGIE that would raise tax from the rich in order to provide welfare for the unemployed, insurance for the sick and a PENSION for the elderly. And everyone lived happily ever after.

Nowadays, the Labour would say this was all just a FAIRY TALE.

Which is why, when they got into government, the COMPLETELY ILLIBERAL government of Lord Blairimort and Mr Frown decided to do a smash and grab raid on everyone's pension fund!

Now, to be FAIR, the Conservatories had just left them with a rather huge black hole. Their Chancellor, Fatty Clarke (the one who ISN'T the safety elephant), had borrowed squillions to try and set the economy straight after Mr Balloon and Norma Lamont had wrecked it on Black Wednesday. Mr Frown's first job was to… well actually it was to nick the Liberal Democrat policy he had campaigned against and make the Bank of England INDEPENDENT, but his SECOND job was to try and pay that big loan back before someone sent the boys round.

So Mr Frown went out and got lots of money in lots of ways: he raised a WINDFALL TAX on the utilities, he sold off the 3-G telephone licences at vastly inflated prices and he abolished a little known squiggle in the tax laws called ADVANCED CORPORATION TAX, replacing it with companies having to pay most of their tax up to fifteen months earlier.

(Companies paying their tax early is like Mr Frown getting one free wodge of cash. Before the change you get a steady stream of cash in; after the change you get the same steady stream of cash in because companies still have the essentially the same tax to pay. But DURING the change you gather forward all the tax that you would have got in that fifteen months. Suppose the people you work for decided to switch from paying you at the end of the month to paying you at the start of the month: one month you would get paid on the last day, and then get paid again on the next day – so it would be like having two months' salary at once, but only for the month of the change. Well Mr Frown did the same thing, so he could use the extra money to reduce the national debt.)

What used to happen was this: if a company had enough money to pay a DIVIDEND to the shareholders then – said the Tax Man – it's got enough money to pay some tax to me too.

For every £1 that the company paid in dividend, they also had to pay 25p to the tax man. This is what was called Advanced Corporation Tax or ACT, sort of a payment on account, or a deposit. And when the company's final tax bill came around they could deduct the ACT that they had already paid.

BUT the people GETTING the dividend also had to pay tax on the money that they received, and they could ALSO deduct the ACT (or the bit of it that related to their shares) that had been paid.

Now, the SHARP EYED will have spotted that this is a GOOD TRICK: the government got ONE lot of ACT tax paid, but it counted as being the tax paid by TWO different lots of people. And in fact, people who did not have to pay tax could actually claim the ACT back from the government as an overpayment of the tax they didn't owe.

In particular this applied to PENSION FUNDS – with no tax to pay they used to get an extra 25% on every dividend they received. And most of the money that a pension fund gets IS dividends, as the pension money of the people in the fund is all invested into stocks and shares (and government bonds too).

So Mr Frown's little trick with grabbing cash early, had the added benefit of saving him all those ACT refunds to pensions. But unfortunately, that also meant that all the pension schemes' investment income was suddenly one fifth less.

(Imagine how YOU would cope if you suddenly lost a fifth of your salary. It would be like working all week and not getting paid for MONDAY!)

And then ANOTHER of Mr Frown's little tricks – remember that he sold off those 3-G licences for oodles? – the technology firms paid SO MUCH money for those licences that it was one of the things that finally broke the back of the dot com bubble. Which crashed the share market. Which made all those pension funds that had invested in shares worth an awful lot less.

(And then, new regulations came in that made them invest less in the stock market and more in the government bonds which meant that they could not follow the share market recovery back up, either!)




These days, the government tells us we cannot expect a FREE RIDE when it comes time to give up our day jobs.

If you are WISE, then you should already be setting up those lucrative city directorships, speaking tours of America or book and newspaper deals for your memoirs to make sure you have something to fall back on.

Of course, not all of us can have Lord Blairimort there to fix these things up for us after he has had us sacked. We cannot ALL be pioneers of the New Labour revolution. Some of us might have to think about putting a few pennies aside.

Sadly, all the GOOD PEOPLE who were doing the right thing and saving for retirement have ended up being mightily [BAD WORDED] by the government. From a great height.

Far be it for anyone to say: "I told you so!" But it turns out that the Civil Service DID tell Mr Frown so, and they can prove it. And now, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, so can the Times Newspaper.

Predictably, the Conservatories called for an inquiry to say how BAD Mr Frown had been in spite of having no actual pension policy of their own.

This meant their pension spokesperson came a bit UNSTUCK on the Newsnight Show when pressed:

"So, if this was such a mistake, would you restore the old rules for pensions?" asked Mr Paxo.

"Well, look, er, if Mr Frown hadn't already spent the, er, money, we could give it back but he has so, er…"

"But would you RESTORE the old rules for pensions?"

"Well, er, Mr Boy George Oboe will write his, er, budgie after getting into power…" (and presumably after someone has taught him how to ADD UP!)

"I'll take that as a 'no' then," said Mr Paxo.

A hint for the Conservatories: if Mr Boy George Oboe thinks that he can leave off writing his budgie until after he has been elected, then his is NOT GOING TO GET ELECTED, is he!

Meanwhile, the row took another turn for the worse when the Treasury's wonky spin machine tried to claim that the CBI, or Collection of Barmy Ingrates, had lobbied them to make the change.

Lord Airhead Turner – who had been in charge of the CBI at the time – reacted angrily:

"Oh no we didn't!" he said!

This is very IRONIC, because when Lord Airhead retired from the CBI, Mr Frown fixed him up with a nice little pension scheme in the form of writing a report into how to fix everybody's pension scheme.

In short, Lord Airhead's advice for people who want to retire is: YOU CAN'T!

Mr Frown defended his decision saying it was all for the good of the economy.

"The benefits of a strong economy for pensioners," said Mr Frown, "include getting hand outs from me, rather than having any of that nasty money that they worked so hard to save in the first place."

He went on to blame the pension crisis on the dot com crash (oops, see above!); companies taking pension holidays when the Conservatories were in charge; and people living longer.

Well, of course even in the 1980s there were strict rules about companies skipping a year of funding for their pension scheme and the rules all said that they could only do it if the actuaries said that there was plenty of money in the pot already. Which of course there WAS before the actuaries' predictions were skewed up by Mr Frown having it away with a fifth of the pension funds' income and the stock market slicing up the value of their investments.

And it is good to know that Mr Frown blames people for surviving into old age. Does he REALLY mean he would rather they lived a BIT LESS??!! Well, fortunately for him, they will presumably start STARVING once their pensions have run out!

Day 2282: Iain Dale attacks Mr Balloon

Sunday:


Responding to the revelations that Mr Balloon had been FOUND GUILTY of taking CASH in return for IMPROPER USE of his Commons Office, famous diarist and losing Conservatory candidate in North Norfolk, Mr Dale Winton, struck out, saying:

"I condemn 'cash for access' wherever it happens."

Further SCORNING the Conservatory Leader's LACK OF MORAL FIBRE, Mr Dale continued:

"I stood at the last election with 10 promises of how I would conduct myself in Parliament. I was the only Tory candidate to do it"

Mr Balloon REFUSED to make those same promises to be GOOD! You tell him, Mr Dale!

Having already castigated the Labour's junior Minister Stephen Timmy for selling breakfasts at £80 a head, just THINK how CROSS Mr Dale must be at the thought of his very own Mr Balloon doing the same thing at a £1000 a head!

Why, he must be TEN TIMES as angry [R: twelve-and-a-half times, even]!

No doubt it is just because he is so QUIVERING with RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION that he cannot write that he has not put up a full diary entry about it and can only point a MUTE but INDIGNANT finger to a couple of entries in a comments thread. I do hope he does not suffer a brainstorm!

Mr Dale is to be LOUDLY CONGRATULATED for his bravery in telling Mr Balloon what a crook he is – in fact, I think the Liberal Democrats in North Norfolk ought to make a SPECIAL EFFORT to see that all of the people there get to hear what Mr Dale has had to say about Mr Balloon and his NAUGHTY WAYS!

That way, everyone will know how the Conservatory Party has CHANGED!

PS

Happy April Fools' Day!

Day 2281: DOCTOR WHO: Smith and Jones

Saturday:


HONESTLY! As if it wasn’t bad enough that last year Dr Who returns to CAT MONSTERS, this year Dr Who returns to STUPID THICK RHINOS!

Where are the SPACE ELEPHANTS, then? Wise and kind and wearing nuclear-powered rocket packs!

I am off to start a PETITION for Space Elephants in Doctor Who – I will leave Daddy Richard to write some stuff about last night’s adventure.

The question that everyone wanted answered was, after the departure of Billie Piper, after Torchwood, would the magic still be there? Well, the answer is a resounding “yes”, with that fantastic mix of the brilliantly bizarre (a hospital transported to the Moon), the horribly frightening (blood-sucking vampires), with down-to-Earth relationships (a whole new family to get to know) and finest British whimsy (a dotty little old lady with a straw).

When the Doctor asks Martha if she really believes they’ve been abducted by aliens, her answer might as well be about the success of Doctor Who itself:

“A couple of years ago no one would have believed it, but these days, what with that space ship hitting Big Ben and then Christmas…”


“Smith and Jones” consciously plays up similarities to “Rose”, the first time that Russell T got to introduce us all to the Doctor’s newest friend. Opening with a musical sequence and rapidly intercutting scenes to give us the shape of Martha’s life; the Doctor taking her hand with the word “Run!”; and the introduction of the TARDIS with a full explanation of the acronym. This isn’t just because “Rose” was such a brilliant primer on all the series’ basics, but also to express the contrasts between Martha and Rose as much as the similarities, and we quickly come to love Martha as much for those differences as for the courage and zest of life that she and Rose have in common.

Martha challenges the Doctor. Where the Doctor expected Rose to keep up with him, Martha expects him to match her, in deductions and observations and actions. For her he has to earn the title of “Doctor”. Like Rose, she saves the Doctor’s life in her first story; unlike Rose, she uses her skill and intelligence instead of instinct – as a trainee doctor herself she knows the technique of CPR, but she is also smart enough to adapt immediately to a patient with two hearts. Martha is clearly much more sorted than Rose, settled on her path in life and going places. Even though she is the one that her family seem to turn to as the calm source of advice who can get things put right, she is obviously much more independent.

The Jones family are necessarily drawn in sketches so far, appearing only in the opening and closing minutes of the show, for obvious reasons. I hope and expect that we’ll learn more about them over the season. Dad Clive in particular seems a bit of a cartoon at the moment, with his Ricky Gervaise-esque cry of “this is me putting my foot down!” I thought Mum Francine was wonderful: a go-getting lady, like both her daughters, but with an acid sense of humour used to cover up some deep hurt. It’s Russell’s genius to draw such a fleshed out character with barely two scenes.

On the other hand, it’s also clear that Martha’s instincts lead her wrong, because she has read rather more into the Doctor’s offer of a trip round the universe than he may have intended to offer. Even knowing that he’s an alien, she’s still assuming that she can read human meaning into his behaviour. Even knowing about Rose, she hasn’t twigged that he’s already given both of his hearts to her. The second of the BBC’s trailers for this season – the “I need a guy who’s smart…” one – suggests that Martha isn’t just looking for a taxi driver. There may be tragedy ahead because of this.

Anyway, in between all this genuine emotion, real-life trouble and strife, there is an exciting adventure on the Moon. Again like Rose, the plot is a bit secondary to all the introductions going on: there’s a villain on the loose in the hospital and someone has sent in the space-police. Or rather a bunch of hired Judoon thugs. And just like mentioning the Time War, Russell uses off-hand little asides to suggest that this is all part of a bigger picture: the Doctor telling Martha about intergalactic law and that the Earth is off limits because of it.

The Judoon are the military police of the galaxy, it would seem. Though who elected or appointed them to the position is a bit more questionable. They stick to a strict legal code and that makes them different to other aggressor species that we’ve come across so far. Not necessarily more predictable or more pleasant but at least with a different motivation. And of course, people who are convinced that they are doing the right thing (like upholding some arbitrary version of “the law”) are often more dangerous than outright villains, especially when – as here – they do not give a stuff about collateral damage. I have no idea who these heavy-handed new centurions of the galactic order could be referring to. The lovely moment when the Judoon captain hands Martha a wad of useless currency because she requires “compensation” says it all.

Their arrival is fantastic. As if the hospital on the Moon wasn’t already a fantastic visual, the landing of the three truncheon-shaped Judoon spaceships, and the deployment of their troops onto the lunar surface is awesome.

The costumes too are great – and a little bit camp, with their leather battle kilts – great big black space armour with huge helmets, leading up to the shock reveal that underneath they’re… Well now, Russell did do the same trick with the Sycorax helmet masks, but here it’s even more obviously an homage to “the Time Warrior”. You do have to admit, the Judoon are very, very Sontaran-like: heavyset warriors and, well, a bit thick. On the other hand, the Sontaran obsession with war and nothing else would make them inappropriate for this police role, still less the idea of working within anyone’s galactic law other than their own. Probably means we’re not going to see the Sontarans in the new series though.

The prosthetic mask for the Judoon captain with its fully animated mouth was really brilliant, though, one of the finest “creature” creations I’ve seen on television. Makes a Star Trek bumpy forehead look really shamed. We can’t wait for the action figures.

And they aren’t interested in conquering us, so they conclude their business and just go – perhaps with the opportunity to return later in the season, or the next time intergalactic law needs some enforcement.

In spite of the harm that they do, however, the Judoon aren’t the real villains of the piece: that honour goes to the Plasmavore. Tall, gaunt, arrogant Mr (Bram, do you think) Stoker is a brilliant bluff and it is, of course, the batty little old lady who is the real enemy. Never has a straw been made to seem so sinister. Her solid leather sidekicks (does it need to be said reminiscent of the sold plastic Autons?) are convenient (and easy to costume) heavies, but it is a terrific turn by Anne Reid as vampire Florence that really sells the idea, turning on a dime from ditzy to deadly.

There is of course absolutely no connection to the character of Nurse Crane played by Anne Reid when she last appeared in Doctor Who in “The Curse of Fenric” almost twenty years ago… when she was bitten by the vampiric haemovores (no relation).

The best scene is in fact the moment between her and the ever-marvellous Roy Marsden as Stoker where he dismisses the concerns of the old lady patient because they are now all going to die on the sodding Moon. Only she in turn dismisses his concerns because her plans involve the use of not his assistance but just his blood.

Not that the rest of it isn’t marvellous too, in particular the two leads. David Tennant has reigned in his “look how wacky I am” tendency, and this is a great improvement. Underplaying the Doctor’s crazier scenes – taking his shoes off, taking his tie off – actually makes them seem more barking and less affected. He still does that on-off thing with the deadly serious so well, as the Doctor’s mind flits from one obsession to the next, and is able to light up with every discovery of joy, of which Martha is the latest. What is also rather nice is the way that he probes and tests her throughout, as though even though in the aftermath of losing Rose he actively rejects company at the moment, he still can’t help road testing a potential new companion. And he seems to have come up with a new little wink, just for Martha, that is very quick and very charming.

In some ways – perhaps subtly reflected in the way the title is “Smith and Jones”, splitting it fifty-fifty making it more a relationship of equals than the all-about-me title of “Rose” – this story is the Doctor discovering Martha just as much as she discovers him and his world.

And, of course, Freema Agyeman is just as brilliant; what a discovery she is. From her casual amused byplay with her crazy family members in the opening, through her intelligent and yet thrilled reaction to finding herself on the Moon to her sassy, okay we can play hard to get acceptance of a place aboard the TARDIS, she really nails it. Everyone has said that Billie Piper’s Rose would be a hard act to follow. Well, Freema’s following, catching up and equalling.


This being a Russell T Davies script, Dr Science is barely troubled since the laws of physics aren’t nearly so important as the laws of what makes spectacular television.

The thoughts about the air are good – Martha’s observation of the lack of explosive decompression that first impresses the Doctor about her and then the gradual running out as the people use it all up.

“Ooh,” says Alex, “People suffocating on the Moon: it’s gone all ‘Timewyrm: Revelation’.” As if Russell T Davies would go around remaking one of Paul Cornell’s novels for television…(!)

But although we remember the sudden lack of air, we do overlook the abrupt 83% drop in local gravity. Still, that’s rather harder to film than just people lying down gasping, isn’t it.

And yes, of course those Judoon ships are so powerful that the sound of them can be heard through a vacuum (we post facto justify by saying that the sound is being transmitted via the lunar surface, or the shockwaves are causing vibrations in the force-field that holds in the air).

But these are trifles compared with such great images as the rain falling upwards that precedes the hospital-napping.

The Doctor’s ability to absorb radiation and move it around his body may be what Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood would angrily describe as a random super-power (one that would have been handy at the end of “Planet of the Spiders”), but it’s really no more than a giggle. And when the effects people have taken the trouble to paint in the Doctor’s skeleton, visible as he X-Rays the Slab to death (and the solid leather Slab’s lack of a skeleton at the same moment) you have got to appreciate how much love goes into this show.

And, as in previous years (“Bad Wolf”, “Torchwood”), it appears that the creators are deliberately setting something up as an arc to reward the committed viewer. This year it’s “Mr Saxon” – first seen in a newspaper headline on Victor Kennedy’s newspaper in “Love and Monsters”. In “Smith and Jones” he gets a name-check on the radio, as Martha’s colleague Oliver recounts the days events and says that “Mr Saxon is right about the threat form aliens!” Who Mr Saxon might be and what is his agenda will have to be revealed over the coming weeks, but so far it would seem that he is a politician and intends to do a bit of an “Amazing Mrs Pritchard” – i.e. come to power on a wave of populist support. Whether he will then govern like a dictator remains to be seen. And, if I can make a stab at a guess, is it too much to expect that Martha’s high-flying PR woman sister, Tish, might end up being called on by a such a man in search of a good campaign?

It does occur to me, though, that the opportunity to take over the British government like this might only have arisen because the Doctor decided to topple the previous government of Harriet Jones. (No relation, we assume!)

Finally, I know I’m always dwelling on timing and chronology, but this is a series about time travel, so it feels right to try and pin it down where we can, especially when the new series seems to have made a serious effort to give us the clues to do so. Here we seem to have a bit of a knot: off air evidence of Martha Jones’s My Space blog and Mr Saxon’s election campaign material seem to date it to the present day, i.e. 31st March 2007, rather than the one-year-in-the-future that we had become used to while Rose was on board.

It would seem (from the same material) that Mr Saxon isn’t Prime Minister yet – but he will be by Christmas 2007 when “The Runaway Bride” is set, since he gives the orders to shell the Racnoss’ spaceship. So, slightly perversely, this seems to occur before the immediately preceding story (at least in Earth’s timeline). But that would all be consistent, particularly if there is an election going on in Spring 2007 because of Harriet being defeated in a no confidence vote after the Sycorax invasion.

But, Martha refers to the Cybermen, and to her cousin (don’t groan) Adeola vanishing at Canary Wharf, meaning that these events are post-“Doomsday”. (Not that dating “Doomsday” isn’t tricky enough already with the Cybermen having taken three years to get across the void, and therefore being at least three years after “The Age of Steel” in Pete’s World, but apparently later the same year in ours.) Doomsday does have to take place “some months” after “Love and Monsters” because that’s how long the world has had to get used to the ghosts; and “Love and Monsters” itself takes place at least three months after “The Christmas Invasion” because that’s how long LI’N’DA lasts for. So “Doomsday” ought to be at least Summer 2007, or possibly sometime in 2010.

For the moment let us tentatively say “late summer/autumn 2007” and hope for better clues later.

Where “New Earth” was a bit shaky as a season opener – working better as a second episode after the new Doctor’s big introduction in “The Christmas Invasion” – this year has got off to a spectacular start, all the better since “The Runaway Bride” was a much more stand-alone story. The intimations for the next three stories are all good too (I hope!) with Daleks obviously to look forwards to, and before that the conclusion of the “New Earth Trilogy” and the keenly anticipated secret of the Face of Boe. But, as presaged by the blue time tunnel at the end of “Smith and Jones”, history first.

Next time… “Why Mr Shakespeare, what an enormous Globe you’ve got!” in Gareth Roberts’ “The Shakespeare Code”.

Day 2280: Without a Paddle

Friday:


And the PRIZE for the WEIRDEST place from which someone has followed a link to my Very Fluffy Diary, so far, goes to…

Google search for

"how to build a dirigible in your own hat without a paddle"

where The Very Fluffy Diary of Millennium Dome, Elephant came out third!


This has been my 400th diary and is brought to you by the miracle of MyBlogLog!

PS

Never mind that; read THIS!

Millennium points a fluffy foot – Daddy hops to it!

PPS

One day to go!