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@whisht

I’m going to head the frogism off at the pass:

And, just to the actual Human League in..

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And also the story of the frog not realising the universe was getting hotter.

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7 grans, eh?

Has that been done before?

A tale of grief and loss, of what was and is gone and never can be again.

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@theguardian

The terrorist, as was spelled out in text. He ‘had to test the bombs’.

Then the system, in a catastrophic moral failure, tried to teach him a lesson by blowing up the one he loved.

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@cathannabel

The Sheffield soundtrack is a really good point. Press on! Wasn’t Mark Kermode, the film critic, in Comsat Angels?

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@thane16

It occurs to me that you may be more familiar with this Heaven 17 song, which a lot of people erroneously think is Human League.

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@thane16

that was a interesting song. I have not known of that group before

Fun fact: Heaven 17 were formed by members Human League who wanted to go in a different and more explicitly political direction that Phil Oakey. But the split was entirely amicable, and Heaven 17 are entitled to 1% of all Human League royalties since the split. Don’t You Want Me Baby alone would have made them a friggin’ fortune.

When Fascist Groove Thang was first played on BBC Radio 1 by John Peel he said: “Have a listen to this while you can. I think it’s going to get banned”.

I don’t think it ever was, but student discos featured it a lot. I mean, A LOT for a fat chunk of the 80s.

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@craig

One of the things I spotted was the bowelstreak-esque sites crying about bloggers trying to deny the ratings collapse.

Next tine I’m just going to point out that a twat on YT is still a twat, and just a blogger with a camera.

Just notice I mistagged you when I put up my blog, so I case you haven’t spotted it, it’s there.

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@kevinwho

Should we start calling this the divisive Chibnall era?

Unlike the Unified Moffat era.

solely in that it’s turning off a percentage – probably not a very big percentage

But the ratings tell a different story. It has manifestly picked up new viewers. As a friend of mine said when Whittaker was unveiled: representation matters. And his daughters are loving it.

What I’m hoping is that Chibnall and any future successors can sit down and analyze what makes the show appeal to both groups,

It is hard to imagine a worse way to go about fostering creativity and innovation that “this is what has worked in the past, so let’s do it forever”.

Moffat was overambitious with story line cleverness

Yep – he should definitely have been conservative and dumb. Seriously, such comments really insult young people.

 Imagine being able to enjoy Doctor Who in isolation. A complete vaccume where no one else can doubt you or tear down your views. That was me growing up watching Sylvester Mccoy. That’s my children with Jodie Whittaker. It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks but you. #DoctorWho

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Oops – duplicate

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Apropos of nothing…

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@Criag @jimthefish @thane16 @bluesqueakpip @blenkinsopthebrave @cathannabel @mudlark

I might have blogged…

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@thane16 (while you be changing to Thane17? Inquiring minds need to know).

Welcome to being almost-but-not-quite legally an adult!

May I introduce your new theme song:

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@kevinwho

Wow, that last sentence just kind of grew…

Everything good is done in the edit… 😉

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@craig @bluesqueakpip

I think @jimthefish just picked the last one he saw. No wrist slap.

But I will take the issue on: none of you will be shocked to learn that I am very much of the ‘front them up’ school. I used to be ‘don’t feed the troll’s’, but I no longer believe that is tenable. I’ve seen too many communities wrecked by ‘ignore it and it will go away’ thinking. It doesn’t. It just gives them licence.

Farage (too pick up Jim’s example) prospered because a lazy media played along with his fags-and-booze-man-of-the-people shtick without ever pointing out that he is a Dulwich College educated money broker whose headmaster expressed concern at his taste for Nazi regalia, songs and imagery. Nor did they ever perform the basic journalistic due diligence of challenging the manifold lies he has spewed for years. See also Rees Mogg.

So studiously hit the “Don’t like” button and mock their inability to get laid or engage in whatever way floats your boat. Anything.

But never validate them by letting them dictate the terms of discussion. Silence does that.

 

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@thane16 @bluesqueakpip

Union Jack t-shirt

Yes, quite right – but still massively out of style, especially with jeans.

Because the line really wasn’t necessary, and points up that the team should be in period costume.

I suppose it could be an accidental leftover from the original script,

It was consistent with every other episode this season (and much BG Who) that they were on there way elsewhere when Old Sexy had other ideas. There is nothing to suggest they were going as guest of Liz One. And given how close the coronation was to one of the busiest ports in the world – less than a mile up Strand, or a very short barge ride – even a couple of Moors (as I guess they were still called then) and a striking blonde would have been fairly unremarkable and their garb no more than a curiosity.

No holograms needed. Just awareness of geography.

BTW (@all)

A couple of tweets from the Ashmolean:

https://twitter.com/AshmoleanMuseum/status/1067387262592344064

https://twitter.com/AshmoleanMuseum/status/1067387262592344064

(@craig – do you have any idea why tweets are no longer embedding?)

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Some of you may have seen this.

For the benefit of our overseas friends, the run up to Christmas has become a competition among the large stores to see who can make the most…well, choose your adjective in the whole gamut from saccharin to sentimental… Christmas commercial. It has become quite high stakes and this your John Lewis shelled out however much it cost to secure Elton John plus full advertising budget spending. £millions. On one 2 min film. The JLP advert trends on Twitter.

This, on the other hand, was made by a West Country film maker for about £50 with no marketing budget. It does not advertise anything.

It is quite, quite extraordinary.

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@whisht

Let’s go s little more oblique:

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@mudlark

Are you by any chance conflating

No I just tagged @bluesqueakpip in the wrong place.

But you are still treating it as a historical drama rather than an episode of Doctor Who.

It is much more common than not that the Tardis crew go out in their regular clothes. It’s the norm for Who, such that when Donna dressed up for Agatha Christie, Clara for Robin Hood, or Bill for the Thames Fair it was noticeable. Generally the always-in-the-background perception filter can be safely assumed, unless there is someone astute enough to see through it, as they might see through the psychic paper. Rose had a Union Jack mini skirt on in the Blitz, Amy had her micro-skirt in Churchill’s London (both of which would likely have got them arrest for prostitution in 1940s London), and Martha had her leather jacket-and-jeans in Shakespeare’s London.

And literally nobody gave a fuck.

So why is it suddenly an issue when Chibnall is doing what has usually been done?

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@mudlark

Come on – you must surely understand that there is not a single dramatic representation of history that doesn’t take liberties to aid storytelling. It is simply not reasonable to apply documentary standards to drama (imagine how @jimthefish or I wince at almost every portrayal of a journalist ever, and neither of us do much of that anymore.) Yes, Yes, they need to guardian willing suspension, but they sure as hell can’t write for the benefit of history (or historical geography) nerds. You are apply standards that the show cannot possibly meet. And this season has been noticeably MORE diligent than many earlier ones.

And every AG Doctor has been a gurner. Co-o-o-me on!

And (to @bluesqueakpip also) I’m pretty damned sure that the number of times Doctor and/ or Rose/ Martha/ Donna/ Amy/ Clara/ Bill dressed for the period is massively outweighed by the times they didn’t. Why the fuck is this suddenly an issue now? Are people looking for things to whine about?

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@rorysmith

Duh! Of course it’s a fucking gremlin. As old as WW2 but still alive and well in the Tsuranga belt.

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@jimthefish

I like the scarf too. It makes her look like a girl who went to uni.

The thing to not letting it wear you out is to realise that the alt-right and the many cohorts that cluster around that pustulant sore on the arsehole of the universe are not remotely interested in acting in good faith. It is amazingly liberating to realise that you do not in any way have to be nice to these fuckers, but instead focus on taking the piss and watching them get more and more wound up. Youtube’s woefully corrupt algorithms push confrontational bollocks  like bowelstreak or shitstain or whatever the fuck he/she/it is called and I have no compunction whatsoever dishing it out to them. Strictly drive-by; never look back to inspect the damage.

There are legit questions about how the show is going, and the answers are far from simple. But none of those fuckers add anything but noise, so boot them hard and move on.

Having said that, I feel a bit of a blog coming on and if I get a mo, I’ll post it. Because there is an issue independent of those fuckers. Because there is something a bit similar in both Star Trek and Star Wars fandoms and, in honour of Brexit we could probably call it ARSE+++.

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News Year’s Day teaser…

The scarf shouls really piss off the wailing fanboys….

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@bluesqueakpip

Also interesting that The Doctor engaged with James as the expert on witchcraft that he claimed to be, not as a fire-and-brimstone fundamentalist it would have been easy to go with. I think that exchange was Whittaker’s “Doctor” moment.

Mind you, after the ducking,  I wouldn’t have minded a passing reference to the respiratory by-pass system that got Baker’s Doc out of trouble at least once.

 

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@craig

And what did the building have to say for itself?

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There is literally not a single second that I didn’t love.

But Alan Cummings playing King James I as a not-really-that-repressed-at-all homosexual, while somehow managing to stay just the right side of scenery chewing, may be my most favourite thing ever.

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@craig @jimthefish

Somebody unlock the episode thread!

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This should save a lot of posts….

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@misslegaleagle

I can’t recall when the specific reveal was  off the top of my head, but it was Missy.

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@ichabod

I’d read about pubs going under all over the UK, a development that I’ve seen attributed to the influence of inflows of muslim residents into old neighborhoods

Jesus H Christ On A Bike, ichabod. That you even gave such transparent horse shit credence does not reflect well on you.

Read this. It’s about urban and rural change and it’s what I investigate for a living.

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@fatmaninabox

You made me think of hungover Sunday mornings in a Balham house-share and Channel 4’s line up of The Wonder Years, followed by a rotation of Bonanza, The Invaders or The Fugitive followed by The Waltons in full and in order (up to and including Wrong John Boy).

If TP ever shows the 1954 Peter Cushing 1984, now that’s work a look.

(Passing thought, @thane16 Senior – did you ever see the unaired Buffy Pilot with Wrong Willow?)

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@thane16 @xad4

The System was right and placed the Doctor next to what it knew to be the real threat (we really do need to slightly fanwank that it had no faith in the humans to solve the problem, and we know its own infrastructure had been compromised by cybernetics expert-cum-terrorist AND that the humans WERE trying to investigate – but had no faith in the System). So the System found the best person it could and tried to park her next to the threat. Then The Doctor overrode that and went off chasing red herrings.

The System was trying to look after its work force, AI and organic.

The senior humans were trying to look after those who worked for them.

In turn they were trying to look out for each other.

Apart from the one who was scared, who wanted to kill millions in about as cowardly way as could be.

Scared and cowardly and inadequate, like Tim Shaw;

Scared and lonely and inadequate, like Epzo;

Scared of anything other and pathetically inadequate, like Jim Crow and future Nazi;

Scared, vain and cowardly like Not!Trump;

Scared people on an imposed border, terrified that love might shattered their certainties, caused by a woefully inadequate failing Empire;

And a scared robotist terrorist liar exploiting a gap of trust between human and AI.

No arc? Really?

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@kevinwho @janetteb

As a theme survivor’s guilt has been kind of mined out in Who.

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@turntheclock

Trolling score:

Technical merit: 2/10 – excellent failure to punctuate properly.

Artistic impression: 0/10 failure to be original, failure to show craft, failure to even give a good laugh.

Deductions:

-2 for claiming to be a long time watcher. Sheesh, half term was weeks ago.

Overall 0/10.

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@whisht

You could go all Bletchley Park and have Station Whisht…

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@whisht

Well, this time I’ll be Capt Obvious

I’ll that THAT as a challenge…

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@kevinwho

Leave it alone – trolling rule 101: never tag people properly, even though the method is obvious to anyone with an IQ higher than that of a frozen pea.

Also, this one has form.

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@misslegaleagle

When you say “we”, who did your polling for you?

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@seeoswald

It’s nice to see you are the same trolling halfwit you were three years ago, the last time your witless trolling got you into a lather while everyone else pointed and laughed.

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More on ratings, this time with added graph

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Rewatch

Per @juniperfish, Charlie was never presented as a ‘union’ man – he lied to get the job and referred only to ‘The Cause’ – and was closer to a Luddite (aside: although they could easily be interpreted as proto-middle classes trying to protect their privilege). He had murdered and was planning mass-murder.  He was no Tolpuddle Martyr, but a terrorist infiltrator.

But then The System killed Kira, a wholly innocent bystander to try to get Charlie to see the error of his ways, but to me that is an unambiguous bad, its “by any means necessary” outlook showing the gruesome truth of Sartre and Malcom X’s aphorism.

But neither of these were spelled out, the hymn to the moderate middle-folk being left to speak for itself. No Blue Peter insert.

Which I am OK with.

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@lionheart564

The system didn’t kill Kira – the terrorist did.

The terrorist who had hacked the system.

Work by definition is to through labor, physical or mental, to gain something you want or you need, it is a mean to an end

Work isn’t only a means to an end. Something like 80% of marriages are between people who meet through work.

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@bluesqueakpip

Also, per The Doc’s “That’s robotist” crack, the biggest robot was the system that called for help. Which makes one wonder if it is constrained by Asimov’s three laws, and in particular the first:

A robot must not harm a human being, or through inaction allow a human to come to harm.

 

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@juniperfish

Nice-ish middle-management, historically, are not the engine of betterment.

But a large and stable middle class is a sign of it. Entire empires, from China to Rome, and even Britain have fallen because of the lack of a stable middle class and, instead, reliance on various from of indenture (from outright chattel slavery to marginal-waged slavery). The greatest increase in general wealth and equality happened (in the industrialised world) at the peak of middle class living in the post-War decades, of ordinary decent people – who had had a close-up look at the alternative – doing ordinary decent work, for the most part ordinarily and decently, and the state back that.

And the hallmark of what is usually (and inaccurately) called the neoliberal era is the erosion of that middle class’s wellbeing, from Reagan to Trump and Thatcher to the Brexit headbangers and a new leaner, meaner corporatism led by silicon valley sociopaths, raised on a diet of Ayn Rand. And the left has no answers because it has never moved past seeing the middle classes as petit bourgeoisie.

So the middle managers of Kerblam! might just be a signifier that there is an alternative. There is always an alternative.

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@fatmaninabox

I know. I let myself down on 5th Nov ‘cos I was out photographing these:

This ep also had the tightest dialogue and direction/editing so far, so I would be intrigued to know the shooting blocks.

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@cedarbranchtardis

Why can’t the Doctor go back in time and visit Amy and Rory?

Short answer: cast availability (Lis Sladen is dead, Karen Gillan and Jenna Coleman fantastically in-demand and busy).

Slightly longer answer: the show needs to keep moving and looking forward. Once it gets bogged down in its past, it is dead. Moffat trod a very fine line, with an aim to resolve many of the cruft-laden inconsistencies that a 55-year-old show has accrued. But now there is almost no historic plot-hole that can’t be resolved by saying “That was a Claricle fixing thing”. Which is good, even (especially) if it enrages the Angry Virgins.

If there is a really good story-telling idea (or a gratuitous excuse like an anniversary) I see no problem with bringing past people back, if they are game. But in storytelling terms it is not helpful for a show that is at least half about the unknown future.

@blenkinsopthebrave

There is much love for Grace, and I think that is why her loss was such a powerful storytelling device.

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Good old fashioned hokum. Enjoyed that.

And once again, the obvious baddie is not the baddie…

I’m sensing a theme….

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@mudlark

Christ on a bike that’s tiresome – but definitely better to get it nuked early (and it is good that the Docs are still free to err on the cautious side).

 

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