The Interesting Times

So now we know who the next Doctor will be. I've never heard of him, and he's pretty young (or, indeed, pretty and young) but he's got something. That interview showed a passionate and excited actor with a light in his eyes and great expressive hands. The kid might be all right, as they say, though to be honest the casting is less weird to me than the fact that I will now be sitting around waiting for 12 months or more before I find out if the guy is any good. Unless they do something unpredictable and interesting like give him more than ten seconds at the end of Tennant's last episode.

Now I can get on with other things, though. Grand.

I didn't get a chance to write about it on here, what with moving in the intervening five days between being told and the event, but yesterday was the last Impro Sundae for The Crew. I've been with them over a year now, and I've always been immensely proud to be part of a team that have produced a weekly impro comedy show consistently for more than six years...and now it's over, with hardly any notice from management and so no time to organise a proper send off. It's very sad...but while it may be the end of Impro Sundae, we will return with a regular show somewhere, sometime.

But in happier news, tonight I will watch, with the usual suspects, the last two episodes of series three of Doctor Who. I am excited. I mean, Utopia's main plot was nothing special, but that last half...? Derek Jacobi as...well, as you-know-who, assuming you do? Awesome. And of course I won't do more than vaguely allude to what happened after, but hot damn.

I've had The Sound of Drums in my hot little hands for a week - and not watched it. I've managed not to spoil myself for it either. Or the last episode, about which I know bugger all except that it's 51 minutes long. It's...well, how much television can cause this much excitement? In my case, almost none. Doctor Who's effect is magical. I mean, come on - anything that can make me take leave of my reason and cause me to watch Torchwood must be putting the 'fluence on me, surely?

This post is not terribly deep, but it should bring y'all up to speed:

• The Crew's sixth birthday will be celebrated this Sunday with an Impro Rumble! Come and cheer me on. Please? 5:30pm, at the Comic's Lounge. The usual drill except it will be an improvised battle royale and yours truly is in the running. If you only come to impro once this year, make it this weekend.


• After two months of screwing things up and occasionally blaming me for said cock-up, I have finally been paid by one of my employers for work I did back in March. Only they've double-paid me, and now I have to go through the hassle of figuring out how to give the money they accidentally gave me back. Perhaps I should have said nothing and seen if they worked it out.


• Probably moving very soon - haven't had any luck finding people to move in with me here once Darren and Emma leave. Got a few more tricks to try this week, but after that I'm out of time and will need to start looking.


• Several possibilities for more science-comedy work have come up; nothing concrete, but all interesting.


• Make sure you get good Channel 31 reception (and if you haven't tried for a while, tune in again now) - I'll be on two shows there in June/July, Planet Nerd and Theatre Games LIVE!


• I have so far managed to avoid buying a PlayStation 2; I don't really have the time to play, as much as I would like to. But now I find out that Guitar Hero III is coming, not only with a Gibson Les Paul style controller, but with songs including Sabotage, Knights of Cydonia, School's Cult of Personality and...The Metal. By Tenacious D. It will be harder, but I shall continue to resist.


• I like series three of Doctor Who a lot. Except for the Dalek two-parter (I like to pretend it didn't happen), every episode has at least been fun, and several have been great. Fan opinion tends to disagree, of course, though this is notable because I thought the last series was a lot worse. And now I'm looking forward to the next two-parter, Paul Cornell's Human Nature/The Family of Blood, which is based on a novel he wrote. Could be a corker. I'm excited.

Okay people, for those who are waiting to see more new Doctor Who, the unofficial start date for series two (presumably including The Christmas Invasion, the special which introduced David Tennant) is July 8th, with episodes on Saturdays at 7:30pm. This is from an email sent in response to a fan query and forwarded to a news site by a fanclub, so hopefully it's true but maybe not.

The Children in Need mini-episode of Doctor Who is awesome fun. Go check it out; it's the best 7 minutes you'll spend watching anything in a long time.

Tennant is going to rock our socks off.

If you know nothing at all about the new series of Doctor Who - and I mean not even what the BBC have been saying in all their press releases, even I'm trying to avoid the stuff which has been leaked from behind the scenes - then you may wish to look away. (This is what we used to call in the old days a "spoiler warning".)

There's been a lot of nay-saying about the new look Cybermen, finally revealed on the BBC web site today. In fact there have been some very rude things said - that it (Cybermen are, after conversion, technically without gender, despite the masculine posturing and voices) looks like Metal Mickey (bollocks!), that it's Tweaky from Buck Rogers' big brother (they're both silver metal humanoids is about as far as it goes), and so on.

Well I say yah sucks boo to the lot of them; the new Cyberman is awesome. It looks like it could take on the Terminator and win, and the subtle bulk of the costume really suggests the strength they've always had (remember the gruesome scene in Attack where they torture Lytton just by squeezing his arms, crushing them until they bleed?) it could certainly crush you in one hand if it wanted to ("That would be illogical; it would damage the specimen and prevent the conversion process.") And they've got it just right, I reckon, as with the Dalek update (though more different obviously) - recognising the soundness of the original design and updating it, giving an overall more menacing and powerful effect.

Now I'm itching to see them in action; truth be told, I probably like Cybermen better than Daleks, so I'm super excited even if other rumours about their two-part episode are a little disappointing. (Don't worry, I'm not going to mention them here.) March/April just can't come soon enough; hopefully the ABC will jump on board right away this year!

PS - I originally screwed up this post by accidentally using the non-existent tag <awesome> and frankly, I think it's a crime that it doesn't exist.

Thanks to all the people who directed me to this image of David Tennant in costume as the Tenth Doctor. I mean...wow. This is a man whose style I want to emulate, whose look is, essentially, an extension of how I would like to dress and have been working toward. And whoever thought I'd say that of the Doctor? If you want to find me, I'll be scouring the second hand shops for a brown pinstripe suit and a long, suede coat. I don't know that I'd do it with sneakers, though; as one person has pointed out, it makes him look a bit like Jarvis Cocker.

By the by, the Einstein thing? Went great. I've already been invited to participate in a school debate as Einstein, though admittedly the teacher is the partner of one of the Physics Forum's organisers, and I live opposite said school - though I'll have moved by the time the debate rolls around.

I'm a thief. I steal the BBC's intellectual material by downloading it every week. This is a fairly inoffensive crime to most people, of course, but let's not kid ourselves and think this should be okay by the law just because I do it in a way I find ethically sound (i.e. I plan to spend money and buy the DVDs when they come out, rather than just download and watch it). But all bad things come to an end: the torrent tracker site I used to find the new episode each Sunday, btefnet, is one of six sites sued on May 12 by the MPAA. And it's down, there's a placeholder "domain parked" site where it was. I haven't been able to find a replacement, though it's likely one will spring up somewhere.

So, no new Doctor Who for me now until the ABC catches up to where we were up to, which by my calculations will be July 9th. Ah well, we've had a good run.

As usual, though, the MPAA doesn't seem to want to go about this the carrot way. As people better versed in cultural theory have no doubt said before m, the nature of entertainment delivery, of how it's viewed, is changing. Information has been freely available on the Internet for such a long time that to take it away is seen as an outrage by some, and the MPAA is not winning any fans. There are people out there - many of them, apparently - who see nothig wrong with downloading films or music, let alone television episodes, for free. (Television is usually held apart in such arguments as it is broadcast free-to-air, so no-one's depriving anyone of revenue. Of course, this is bollocks; if you don't watch the program when it airs, then the ratings are lower than they "should" be, and the advertising for that program becomes less valuable. And of course there's now DVD sales to think about, and the majority of people who regularly download this stuff do it as an alternative to buying DVDs, rather than as a shortcut to seeing the program before DVDs are available.)

But at the end of the day, with press releases like this one, the MPAA is interested in making it clear no-one should stand against them, which will only make it a challenge to serious file sharing networks to try again. As long as they continue to hold out on giving a cheap, legal paid download service (as the BBC has been reported to be working on in the past), they won't win any fans by such legal action, despite the fact that they are in the right to take it. And they are; I don't deny them that. They just need to follow up with something, because otherwise they'll never change the attitude of the people who steal content - who no doubt feel a bit like Robin Hood or at the least like they're sticking it to the man.