Blog On The Motorway

You may have noticed that things look all shiny and new around here, as promised I have a new theme until the site gets a full overhaul for the launch of BOTM. One downside, however, is that the change seems to have borked my analytics right up, so I can’t see if anyone is actually reading any of this. Any other bloggers will know that there’s little worse than not being able to obsess over your stats, but hopefully this will all resolve itself in the next few days. Today I’ve managed to get a bit more writing done for Blood as well, so I’m now six issues in. For those of you who are interested, I will be aiming for two posts of 1000 (or so) words a week, so this will take care of the first three weeks while I’m getting set up. Ideally though I want more of a cushion, something around the 10 issue mark, so I can make sure I’m not putting anything out without adequate revision. One of the real threats with doing online fiction is that I’ll end up putting up stuff that’s not quite good enough, so I want to try and keep a buffer as much as I can so that things are getting a few revisions before they go up, unlike this blog, which tends to fall out of my head via my hands, and get whacked straight up.

But anyway, I promised you some thoughts on the good and bad of what I’ve been watching of late, so here goes:

1. Doctor Who. I mentioned before how much I thoroughly loved this whole season of the Doctor. I can’t claim to have been the biggest fan in the past, I never really watched it as a kid and while I liked the Ecclestone series and parts of the Tennant stuff (although I never really liked Tennant himself) I now feel as though I have ‘my’ Doctor in matt Smith, and together with Karen Gillan (be still my heart) and Stephen Moffat they have finally created something that stands up as well as anything produced by the Godlike genius of Sci-Fi, Joss Whedon. Smartly scripted, emotionally engaging, brilliantly performed, this was children’s TV that remembered that kids are smart, and they are people. Wonderful stuff, and the double-finale was about the best I’ve seen a series wrapped up, and the episode Vincent and the Doctor (Richard Curtis, where the bloody hell did that come from?) is easily the best thing I’ve seen so far this year. The scene in the Museum had tears streaming down my face, and Ellen’s too.

2. Desperate Housewives. Ellen managed to hook me into this a few years back, and I have been a fan ever since. Again, taking what is essentially whimsical melodrama and marrying it to taut storytelling, good performances and wry humour all combine to make this a show I look forward to more than most, and this season has been excellent, right up until the last episode, which aired on Channel 4 last night. How on earth did they misjudge it so badly. All the various strands and interweaving plotlines were left vaguely resolved, but without any emotional payoff. I mean, there was a serial killer arrested, and a car blew up in the middle of the suburbs with a wanted terrorist inside, but by the very next scene these individual plots were completely ignored. It was lazy storytelling, plain and simple, with the writers too eager to shoehorn clues about next year’s plots to bother resolving this years. Disappointing to say the least, and it makes me wonder if the show’s days are numbered when the writing staff have clearly disengaged.

3. Southland. Ellen and I managed to sit through about twenty minutes of this distincly average Shield clone, before I realised that it was actually nicking the plot from the pilot of the Shield wholesale. Terrible, and the acting was pretty substandard, and the characters should have been walking around wearing their cliches on a billboard rather than cop uniforms. Woeful. Although still not as bad as the Idris Elba vehicle on BBC1, Luther, which was so bad that I’ve tried my utmost to forget it even exists.

4. The IT Crowd. OK so we’re only a couple of episodes in but once again Graham Linehan’s sticom is better than everything. Fact. And I want most of Roy’s T-Shirts, and the pictures he has in his new flat. Hell, I’d even take the bicycle off his hands.

5. Films. Not all of them, obviously, but one of the big pluses to having a V+ box is that I no longer have to miss those cool films that they inevitably stick on at one o clock on a Wednesday morning because I have to go to work the next day. Last night we watched To Kill A Mockingbird, which I was sure I’d seen before but I’m now not sure I had. Needless to say it was brilliant and moving and I now want to use Gregory Peck  as Atticus Finch as a template for how to be a good dad. Oh, and I finally got round to watching both Zombieland and An Education, both of which I highly recommend, although obviously for completely different reasons.

Anyway, that’ll do for now, back to the apocalypse, goodbye.