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  • #27651

    @thekrynoidman

    You are right. It is one of the greatest musical numbers of all time.

    And a brilliant parody of something that so deserved being sent up.

    #27648

    I saw a few strange things today. And then I saw this.

    http://makingstarwars.net/2014/05/star-wars-episode-vii-mysterious-nexus-character/

    #27645

    It seems that I am Sherlock. Mrs Blenkinsop is in agreement about the sociopath bit.

    #27580

    @phaseshift

    You’re old? Young whippersnapper!

    <Blenkinsop re-adjusts his dentures>

    #27545

    @thekrynoidman

    I hope you enjoy it, but I am not sure the movie could possibly be better than your leaping Godzilla gif. Brilliant!

    #27528

    @fatmaninabox

    <Blenkinsop furtively emerges from his place of hiding in the wake of his rather unfortunate failure to distinguish fact from fiction, and…fortified by an evening glass of wine (hurrah!)…engages with the outside world again>

    Yes, indeed, apparently Tennant is confirmed, along with Colman and <get it right, get it right…> Darvill <whew!>.

    As for The American version, I too had read that they were going to reveal a different murderer. But, given the fact that the impact of the resolution in the original on Olivia Colman’s character is absoultely central to the whole show (boy, is it difficult doing this without revealing spoilers…) it seems to imply that the American version will lose all of that. Which seems like losing much of what made Broadchurch the emotional punch to the gut that it was.

    #27522

    @toinfinityandbepond

    whoops!

    What can I say that adequately responds to my hideously embarassing error? Under the circumstances, it will have to be the following:

    There is a great sequence of dialogue in “Letter to Three Wives” (1949) where a character is addressing Kirk Douglas, who plays a school teacher, only to realise he has made a mistake. He tries to laugh it off by pretending he has to leave, by saying:

    Tempo fugit. Right, professor?”

    To which the Kirk Douglas character replies:

    “Almost.”

     

    #27516

    @fatmaninabox

    Just following up on your link (sadly no longer active) to the trailer for the American version of Broadchurch. Watching the trailer brought on a strange feeling of deja vu, yet they claim the story is going to have new characters and a different resolution. I fear no good will come of this!

    I assume you have heard that Broadchurch 2 is a go, with Olivia Colman, Rory Williams and David Tennant all back and Charlotte Rampling as the lead?! I do so hope it doesn’t become Midsomer Murders-by-the-sea.

    #27499

    @fatmaninabox

    Exactly!

    And here is the evidence of the essential compatibility of Eurovision with James Bond :

     

    #27493

    @thekrynoidman

    Absolutely not! Alice Cooper doesn’t work at all as a James Bond song. Working as a James Bond song has got nothing to do with being good music, but everything to do with capturing the essential silliness of the James Bond product. Conchita Wurst captures it in a pitch perfect way, and understands what makes James Bond, well…James Bond.

    A good James Bond song (to work as a James Bond song), is much closer to the Eurovision song contest than it is to actual music.

    #27486

    @thekrynoidman

    Wow. That Alice Cooper James Bond track was really bad! Let’s face it, Conchita Wurst’s “Rise like a Penis” (that was the title wasn’t it?) would make a really good James Bond theme.

    (Sorry, on an iPad, otherwise I would provide a link.)

    Surely someone could provide a link…

    #27456

    @arbutus, @phaseshift

    The Seventies. Definitely my period as well. Not sure if you know “Detectives on the Verge of A Nervous Breakdown” from The Comic Strip Presents; about a group of 70s TV detectives brought back to solve a crime, but it is brilliant. The music number start at about 1 minute 30 in…

     

    #27452

    @fatmaninabox

    As Eurovision is on shortly (I’m watching it under duress, honestly)

    Yes, of course we believe you…

    But as for Day of the Daleks…wine and cheese, a ruffled shirt, velvet jacket, lots of curly hair and a companion with a very short skirt…it is sort of like the Doctor as Jason King. And I love it!

    #27364
    #27362

    @arbutus
    I will think about some fine wine related music clips to accompany your clip, but in the meantime, what was the killer South African malbec? Mrs Blenkinsop and I are in Vancouver for a few days (hurrah!) and, unlike dour presbyterian Ontario, Vancouver is home to many purveyors of fine wines!

    #27343

    @phaseshift

    Happy with any of them. (oh, well, maybe The Daemons) But then, Inferno…what a great story! with an evil version of…oops, spoilers!

    No, any of them are great.

    #27284

    @thekrynoidman

    I love that song from South Park! And you have provided a meta-dimension to the humour, because when I click on the link, it tells me that the video is not available in my country. And my country is…Canada!

    #27263

    @purofilion

    Your brother sounds like a man with very civilised interior design skills. I must have a word with Mrs Blenkinsop about the necessity to move her clothes.

    And speaking of wine, I believe the time has arrived in the Canadian colonies for a glass of Australian shiraz. I shall toast ABC1 and my fond memories of rage.

    #27260

    @arbutus

    You are right, it was the late 80s. How time flies.

    #27254

    @wolfweed

    Brilliant Pathe clip of Jon Pertwee at the Radiolympia exhibition. (How do you find all these things?)

    One is tempted to wonder whether it had any influence 23 years later when they put him in Bessie in a cloak.

    #27251

    @purofilion

    You really are suffering. Not only the lurgy, but still over 30 degrees at the end of April! That is really unfair. You could always rely on the summer heat to end by Easter.

    What one needs to cope with the lurgy is something really silly and they don’t come much more silly than this (and it is, I confess, an old Blenkinsop guilty pleasure). And it comes from rage. Now rage is one thing from the 90s that I do miss about Australia. Watching rage late at night after a very long day at work was one of the things that kept me sane.

     

    #27242

    @purofilion

    You have my sympathies, my friend. Not only do you have the lurgy, but you have the lurgy in Queensland! I always felt that simply living there was a form of the lurgy.

    I tried to find some music that captured the sophistication that is Queensland. I offer you this:

     

    #27136

    @whisht

    It is hard coming up with a caption when the personality is completely unknown (to me) and the picture does not have any of the laugh-out-loud appeal of @wolfweed ‘s crazy caption images.

    But since I discovered she is a food writer, the best I could manage was “Eggs-terminate”

    I know…feeble.

    #27110

    @thekrynoidman

    I have long wondered whether this a Morricone score at all, but instead a John Carpenter score with, perhaps, minor tweaking by Morricone. It does sound strangely similar to numerous other John Carpenter scores for movies he directed.

     

    #27094

    @thekrynoidman

    Ha! Well, guilty pleasure, like beauty, is perhaps in the eye of the beholder.

    Now, THIS is clearly one of the greatest films of all time. (Oh, all right, one of the greatest opening credit sequences of all time) With fabulous music, and, another Blenkinsop guilty pleasure.

    #27091

    @whisht, @thekrynoidman

    “Once Upon a Time in the West”. Ahh, what guilty pleasure that movie (no…experience) is! The music of Ennio Morricone and the visuals of Sergio Leone…does it get any better?

    I totally agree with credits at the end of this clip.

     

     

    #27053

    Easter. I have always felt that Easter was like the Hancock radio episode, “Sunday Afternoon at Home”, only it lasted for four days! My relocation to dour Presbyterian Ontario where the Liquor Control Board has deemed that alcohol shall not be sold on Easter Sunday has, alas, only confirmed it. Like Hancock, I feel it is an awfully long time before the pubs open. So, I thought it only appropriate to share this. Enjoy.

     

     

    #27022

    OK, there is choral music and…there is choral music. This is probably known to everyone, but it is still brilliant:

     

    #26960

    @janetteb

    Excellent point. Of course, if Sherwood forest only looks like it is on earth but is actually a construct brought to life from the pages of a children’s book, perhaps?

    #26938

    @bluesqueakpip Oh dear. I did not intend my opening sentence to imply a confusion between person and character. Clearly, I expressed myself poorly, for what I was trying to say when I said I was not being harsh on Rose, was that I felt I my assessment of Rose was entirely reasonable and accurate, and that my harshness was directed towards the way RTD wrote the character. My fault entirely for not expressing myself more clearly. I would not want you to feel that I was trying to be “clever” at your expense. That was certainly not my intention.

    And I certainly respect your interpretation, but I will let what I said in the post above (apart from the poorly expressed opening!) stand.

     

    Cheers.

    #26931

    @purofilion (and all other Who Enthusiasts)

    I came across this quote by Burgon about his time writing music on Doctor Who:

    Being asked to write music for Doctor Who (1963) came out of the blue and as a complete surprise. I had previously written only two scores for television, but it was the second of these that attracted director Douglas Camfield. It was a ghost story, the music of which was scored for a small and unusual group of instruments, plus two countertenors. The supernatural quality of the score appealed to Douglas, and I imagine it was the small number of musicians that appealed to the producer, because the Doctor Who (1963) budget ran to just four players, plus myself on whatever I could play, and access to the Radiophonic Workshop. I used the latter quite sparingly, mostly putting selected instruments through a ring modulator to make them sound quite unlike the original, thereby creating a bigger sounding group than I actually had. It was a great experience for an emerging composer, and I am terribly gratified to have been part of such a legendary television phenomenon.

    For anyone who is not familiar with Burgon’s work as a composer of sublime and beautiful choral music, you can listen to it here:

    http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/al.asp?al=CDA67567

     

    #26929

    @bluesqueakpip

    No, my friend, I am not being harsh on Rose, but I am being harsh on the character as RTD writes it. At the end of the day Rose is childish, selfish and petulant. You ask:

    If it were a selfish aim, why on earth do both Mickey and Jackie end up helping her?

    Because they love her–unconditionally. They display a selfless nobility of spirit that her character lacks.

    @arbutus says it with far more eloquence than I do:

    her attitude after being returned home shows that she essentially views all her experiences and travels with the Doctor as being all about her, rather than showing her that she is one person in a very large universe

    But at the end of the day, of course, she is simply a character. And a character written by RTD. Compare her character with the character of Lorna, who dies at the battle of Demon’s Run. Those two sequences, and those two characters capture, for me, the difference between RTD and SM as writers, just as they capture the difference between the RTD years and the SM years.

    But as I said, without RTD, we would not be looking forward to seeing Peter Capaldi in a few months, and we would not have experienced the 50th anniversary the way we did. So I am tremendously grateful to RTD for that.

    #26913

    @thekrynoidman

    The closing credit music on “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” by Geoffrey Burgon has to be one of the most perfect pieces of music for television ever.

    And Burgon did the music for “The Terror of the Zygons” as well!

    Methinks it is time to hop over to Amazon for a bit of shopping…

    #26866

    OK, I will start with a confession. I never really engaged with the RTD years. I could understand why he was doing it the way he was so that he might engage a new audience with the idea of Doctor Who. I could understand the focus on action for those reasons. I could understand the emphasis on bright special effects (like invading Daleks) for those reasons. And I could understand his reasons for making companions like Rose and Donna who they were, as it reached out to a TV audience that represented a 21st century demographic. But…I simply could not emotionally engage with any of that. I found the tone of most of the RTD years to be shrill and immature.

    Indeed the stories I remember fondly from those years were written by Moffat.

    With Moffat, I felt everything changed. The shrillness was gone, and there was a maturity to stories, to the characters and to the writing, and yet it could engage the 7 year-old in the audience and well as the 47 year-old. And it could capture a sense of magic and wonder.

    So, having said all that, I have to confess that I still don’t think all that much of The Parting of the Ways. With one exception: I found the explanation of the return of the Daleks (the fact that they were made from the de-humanised remains of the dead, and as such, hated even themselves…that, I found pure genius. And the interplay between the Doctor and the Dalek Emperor was excellent.

    But so much of it (for me) was representative of the things about the RTD years that I could not emotionally engage with. Rose, screaming out: “There’s nothing for me here” as her mother and Mickey continue to do everything for her. Selfish, childish and petulant. Sorry, but that was how I responded.

    I am more than grateful to RTD for being responsible for bringing Doctor Who back to our screens. A wonderful, wonderful achievement. For me, at least, that is his achievement, so it is less important that I have never been able to emotionally engage with the RTD years.

    #26794

    @ScoutTheAiredale

    You and Mum hang in there.

    #26725

    @alicerose

    Doctor Who is timey-wimey, so there is no need to show your mum the introduction of River Song in order.

    If she refuses to watch the Library episode, so be it.

    I would suggest showing her The Time of Angels, and telling her it has the best opening of any Doctor Who ever (which it does) and after the two-parter is over, you can then explain that River Song appeared earlier (but it is all timey-wimey) and, who knows, she might agree to watch the Library episode.

    Mums can be obstinate, but I am sure you will find a way!

    #26716

    and who can’t love Vorg and Shirna

    Well…

    But I will happily second ‘The Daemons’. A story to watch from behind the sofa!

    #26712

    ‘Carnival of Monsters’? You don’t think it is a bit too, well, Colin Baker-ish, but before Colin? I see the point about running time, but in that case wouldn’t ‘Day of the Daleks’ or ‘The Three Doctors’ better capture the Pertwee tenure?

    Just a suggestion. Will go with whatever the Time Lords decree.

    #26693

    @phaseshift

    I would plug for Inferno. For anyone who has never seen it, it is a corker, and a fine example of the show trying something quite different.

    But happy with whatever is chosen, of course.

    #26681

    @fatmaninabox

    This is an April Fool’s Day story, surely? (the misspelling of Eccleston in the link is a bit of a giveaway)

    #26663

    Blimey. More dangers in tampering with the timeline:

     

    http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/mar/29/daylight-saving-heart-attack-time-sleep

     

    #26661

    That is really sad to hear about Kate O’Mara. I know that it is convential wisdom to dismiss both the Rani and Colin Baker’s Doctor, but it is only when the actors who play characters are gone that you realise how much you miss those characters after all. (So hang in there, Colin.) And speaking for myself, Kate O’Mara had a definite sort of (ahem) appeal. And her Rani was just so…deliciously and amorally evil.

    I mentioned upstream on the Speculations/Whishlist thread that I hoped S8 might give us a renegade Time Lord as a point of comparison with the Doctor. Well, why not the Rani? I am sure that someone like Lara Pulver would make a great Rani.

    #26617

    @craig

    Happy Birthday, O Wise and All-Knowing Emperor.

    May your birthday celebrations be suited to your station.

    #26608

    @phaseshift, @thephantomtollbooth

    These reflections are one of the reasons that this site is the only site that I subscribe to.

     

    #26597

    @fatmaninabox. It seems  that I am the 1st Doctor too. (And I was trying so hard to be Colin Baker…apparently ‘wise and a bit grumpy’ will out. At least I got the grumpy bit.)

    #26583

    @janetteb

    Ian: Yes indeed.  I, too, do so hope they will bring back Ian for one final appearance. I can even visualize the Doctor (with his still faulty memory) mispronouncing his name (“Hello Chatterton”) as a call-out to Hartnell’s problems with getting the name right. The whole scene could be lovely and unbearably poignant.

    #26581

    First, whishlist:

    I am keen that they return to the premise of not being able to change time. This was a cardinal rule at the beginning, and something I have always believed constituted a core element of the show. It was first explored “The Aztecs” and dealt with in many other early stories. More recently, it was done to perfection in “Vincent and the Doctor” ( and a side wish to my wishlist is to get back Richard Curtis to write another story, although who knows if he could recapture the lightning in the bottle of that story). But, please, no more spaceships crashing into Big Ben, or giant Cyber Kings trampling over Victorian London. Moffat was clever enough to find a way around that when he took over, with the play on memory. But I would really like the whole notion of non-intervention in time to come back front and centre.

    UNIT: while there is definitely an appeal to featuring them, I am a bit concerned that it could “domesticate”the Doctor, somewhat. The Doctor was originally a rebel, and the problem with UNIT during the years of The 3rd Doctor in particular was that he was too much a figure of the Establishment. Moffatt captured the Doctor’s antagonism to authority well in the Angels two-parter in S5, (even though it did not feature UNIT) And, for, me, that antagonism to authority is part of who the Doctor is, and so I think UNIT should be treated sparingly.

    Timelords and Gallifrey: I think Gallifrey should stay “out there” (for the reason Gattis explained in a link upstream somewhere), but I do hope we get to see at least one other Timelord to compare the Doctor to. It might be the Master, or it might be a character  like the Meddling Monk (not the Meddling Monk as such, but a flawed TimeLord).

    The Doctor: now that we have an older actor, we have the possibility to change the whole dynamic of the Doctor. I really hope that Moffat takes full advantage of this. The whole colour of my kidneys line sounded too much like something Tennant or Smith might say. I am hoping for a Doctor with more gravitas, a Doctor who makes you feel uneasy, and not simply cuddly.

    Speculation: still brewing up the double yoker on that one…

     

    #26550

    What a great episode, and what a fabulous cliff-hanger ending! This episode and this whole story is a perfect example of why I sat glued to the TV, open mouthed and wide eyed almost 50 years ago.

    I will not try a synopsis or analysis, but leave that to those like @phaseshift and @bluesqueakpip, who can do it better justice, but I will call on @fatmaninabox. This was what I was talking about when I said that I can still clearly recall crying out (almost 50 years ago) at the TV with the exclamation: “Oh, Wow!” at the end of this episode.

    And, of course, this is the story that opened up the whole Who universe. Watch it. It is truly a classic.

    #26517

    @wolfweed

    The Tadis box set of music looks fabulous. And the Blenkinsop birthday is approaching. But…£135?? Yikes!

    #26480

    @fatmaninabox

    I confess to disloyalty as well. I voted for Patrick McGoohan. Something to do with age (and the fact that I have always harboured a secret desire to be John Drake from Danger Man).

Viewing 50 posts - 1,601 through 1,650 (of 2,064 total)