pedanther | Entries tagged with tv

. I've finished the Star Wars jigsaw puzzle, with the last several days spent filling in the black and speckled-black spaces in the image by trying pieces one at a time until I found the one that fit. I've enjoyed having a jigsaw puzzle on the go and filling bits in at odd moments, but now I've done all the puzzles I own. I'm thinking about going back to the oldest one and doing it again, since buying a new thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle every fortnight seems like a bad habit to get into when I'm trying to keep expenditure down.

. At board game club, we played Mysterium. I got both the suspect and the location first try, and then spent most of the rest of the game completely failing to interpret the clues I was given about the murder weapon: by the time I got it, there were only two potential weapons left to guess, and I still would have gone for the wrong one if the other investigators hadn't talked me out of it. All of the investigators made it to the finish line in time, some by the skin of their teeth, but when it came to the final deduction there was near-complete disagreement about the solution; only two investigators agreed on a solution, and unfortunately it turned out not to be the correct one.

Over the weekend, we also had one of our occasional sessions where a few of us get together outside the usual weekly meeting. Usually it's to play a big game that there isn't time for at the weekly meeting, but not enough people could make it on this occasion, so we just played a string of smaller games instead: Ticket to Ride: London, Sequoia, Shake that City, Star Fluxx, and Hero Realms.

. At one point this week, I found myself somewhat overwhelmed on the new media front: within a couple of days, a new season of a TV show started, two podcasts that have been quiet for a while released several hours of new content, and the new Rivers of London novel came out, in addition to my usual podcasts, the regular episodes of Jet Lag and Taskmaster and the backlog of Natural Six that I'm still trying to work through. In one area, at least, it came out to a net decrease in the number of things I was actively trying to keep up with, since the new Rivers of London novel immediately muscled aside the other two novels I'd been making some attempt to read; apart from that, though, I found myself with a lot of things to watch or listen to and not so many hours in the day in which to do it.

I caught up with Agents of SHIELD this week.

I feel like there was quite a bit of unrealised potential in this half-season. Once they'd mopped up the obviously evil HYDRA they set up a couple of situations where the conflict came not from good people and evil people but from good people and another group of good people with an incompatible viewpoint. There was a lot of opportunities to talk about things like trust and loyalty and the balance between the needs of the many and the needs of the few. But the trouble with a good-vs-good conflict, from a network TV standpoint, is that to really commit to it you have to let the good people on both sides be wrong sometimes, which means you have to let the show's designated heroes be wrong sometimes, and what usually ends up happening instead is that everyone who disagrees with the heroes either sees the light, or dies, or becomes obviously evil (or sees the light and then dies, or turns evil and then dies), and then everything they disagreed with the heroes about can be quietly forgotten.

It's going to be interesting to see where the show goes from here. The mystery of Skye's past has been a big plot engine for the show so far, but it's pretty much been tapped out now. Same for Coulson's mysterious recent history. We've even been given the real story of What Happened to May. They've pretty much cleaned out the supply of mysterious pasts. It's always a tough moment for a show when it resolves the main point of tension it's been running on and needs to figure out what to do next; people always talk about what can happen to a show when "Will They Or Won't They" turns into "They Did", and this is basically the same thing only with less kissing. What I'm hoping is that they do find a new balance, and don't fall into the mysterious-past equivalent of "They Did, but then they kept breaking up and getting back together because the writers didn't know what else to do with them".

1. I mentioned that I was planning to keep the moustache I grew for a role last year until I found out what, if any, role I'd be playing in the Rep Club's next production, which is a season of short plays. As it turns out the role I've got is that of a director instead of an actor. This will be the second short play I've directed, and I realised after I picked the script that it has some interesting similarities to and differences from the first one. It's going well so far. (And I'm keeping the moustache, because having a colonel's moustache helps me feel like someone who is and should be in charge.)

2. I have managed to maintain fairly frequent gym-going even after the holidays ended and all my other time commitments started up again. I've even managed to schedule another meeting with the trainer without an unreasonable amount of procrastination, and was rewarded with a more challenging exercise routine.

I did slightly squib out the last time I was at the gym, though: one of the exercises requires a bit of solid flat wall, of which there isn't much in the gym that isn't rendered unsuitable by, for instance, being covered in floor-to-ceiling mirror glass, and the one bit of wall I've come to rely on is currently unavailable because they've parked a membership drive display in front of it.

3. One of the commitments that's started up again after the holidays is the brass band. So far this year, I've been alternating between playing trombone and baritone: I was moved from trombone to understudy first baritone last year, but most of the trombone section have left town and the old first baritone player hasn't yet, so depending on who shows up to any given rehearsal or performance I'm sometimes needed more in my old chair.

4. In a tiny victory against the forces of clutter, I obtained some press-seal bags and sorted all the counters and cards and tokens in my copy of A Study in Emerald so that if I ever play it again it will take a bit less time to set up. (The game did ship with some press-seal bags, but not enough to do a full divvy; I think whoever chose the number was expecting all the player bits to be kept together, but it's more useful to make a separate "here's all your starting bits" bag for each player.) My immediate reward was that I got to confirm that all the bits are present and correct, including the card that was apparently missing when I played with my brother (it was stuck to the back of one of the other cards).

5. The first two seasons of Sherlock have recently been being reaired here, with "The Reichenbach Fall" scheduled this evening. (I had hoped they'd also be doing season three, which I still haven't seen yet, but no dice: next week it's new episodes of Broadchurch.) There was an exchange in Steven Moffat's season-two episode that in retrospect strikes me as marking one of the stops on the train of thought that led to the latest Doctor Who season finale.

1. The Christmas show opened this week. Everybody's enjoying it so far. The local newspaper gave it a terrible review -- not in the sense of not liking the show, but in the sense that it spelled everyone's name wrong and gave away all the best jokes. (And it's going to be a while before we stop ribbing our New York-born lead actor about how impressed the reviewer was by the authenticity of his American accent.) Still, they say there's no such thing as bad publicity, and I remember what it's like to get no review at all, so I'm not going to complain. Much.

2. I'm still playing Doctor Who: Legacy on and off. I'm getting gradually better at it, and although I'm still not really invested in the "story", it's designed like most smartphone games to be easy to pull out and play for a few minutes while you're waiting for something else.

3.

glvalentine has done another list for TV Club 10, this one 10 notable TV adaptations of 19th-century English literature. Strikingly, neither the 1995 Pride and Prejudice nor the 2004 North and South made the top ten, although they're the first two honorable mentions; as with the last list, there's a rule enforcing variety in the top picks, and they were beaten out by 1995's Persuasion and 2009's Return to Cranford respectively.

4. Over the last few years, Sesame Street has been making a series of spoof movie trailers in which Cookie Monster learns lessons about self-regulation skills like patience, perseverance, and consideration of the feelings of others. My current favourite is Star S'Mores, in which our hero plays the role of Flan Solo, accompanied by his faithful sidekick Chewie the Cookiee... which goes about as well as you might expect, considering this is Cookie Monster we're talking about.

5. Man, I love Cookie Monster. One of my favourite parts of doing Yuletide last year was watching Cookie Monster videos and calling it research. Here's a classic from twenty years ago: Monsterpiece Theater present Little House on Prairie.

1. In the end, I didn't sign up for Yuletide this year; when it came down to it, I couldn't think of anything to ask for. (Though I thought of a couple of things almost as soon as signups were over, which I've carefully written down somewhere that I'll hopefully be able to find them next year.)

I may yet end up writing Treats or something, and I'm on the pinch hit list, same as every year, although being in this time zone I almost never get to see an unclaimed pinch hit of any kind, let alone an unclaimed pinch hit I can do something with.

2. Rehearsals for the Christmas show continue. Scripts are down. The song list is mostly stable (several songs were thrown out or replaced for reasons of pacing or being blatantly inappropriate to the character and/or situation) and the dances are mostly choreographed. In the big opening song-and-dance number, I'm taking full advantage of the fact that my character is explicitly called out in dialogue as being not a very good dancer.

3. I stopped going to the gym for a few months out a combination of winter and snowballing awkwardness about peripheral business like When Should I Ask For A Follow-Up Meeting With The Trainer? and What Happens When I Run Out of Spaces On This Log Sheet?, but I've started going regularly again, and I'm feeling better than I did when I wasn't.

Also, I managed to organise a follow-up meeting with the trainer (which helped me straighten out some things I'd been doing wrong) and got a new log sheet, which is a slightly different design from the old one and very helpfully includes a space for the trainer to explicitly write down when he expects to hear from me again, so I may be able to avoid a repeat of the snowballing awkwardness.

4. A few days ago, in a fit of procrastination, I downloaded the smartphone game Doctor Who: Legacy, which some of my fannish acquaintances are enthusiastic about. I don't know how much longevity it's going to have for me; in the absence of an intriguing plot (and Doctor Who: Legacy features a near-complete absence of plot), I tend to stick with a game only so long as I can coast without having to put any actual effort into mastering the tactics and strategies of the game mechanics, and I think I've about reached that point already.

[edit to add: And the "gotta collect all the Doctors and companions" aspect isn't doing it for me, because I'm not feeling like there's any meaningful connection between the collectables and the actual Doctors and companions; Rory, to pick an example, is just a cardboard cutout and some numbers and none of the things that made me like Rory-the-character so much. Though I'll admit I was a bit thrilled when Porridge showed up, because having Warwick Davis on the team will never not be a bit thrilling even if it is just cardboard-cutout Warwick Davis.]

(It's been interesting comparing Legacy to Worlds in Time, the last Doctor Who computer game I played with any regularity. The basic game mechanics are very similar, to the point that Legacy might almost feel like Worlds in Time with a lot of bits missing, except for the crucial difference that the bits Legacy does have all work much better than Worlds in Time's bits ever did.)

5. Around Halloweentime, TV Club 10 did a list of ten noteworthy TV vampire stories (limited to one episode per series, to promote variety; Buffy and Angel are represented by "Fool for Love" and "Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been", respectively). Apart from the obvious candidates, the top 10 includes the 1968 Mystery and Imagination version of "Dracula" with Denholm Elliott and James Maxwell in. (There is also a list of honorable mentions, which includes an episode of my favourite underappreciated vampire series, Ultraviolet.)

1. The season of one-act plays has successfully reached its conclusion. The tradition in the Rep Club is that each director is presented with a commemorative spoon at the after party, but apparently they weren't ready yet, so we were each handed a teaspoon from the tea-and-coffee concession and promised that the real thing would be forthcoming at a later date. I managed to hold onto mine for most of the evening, but the others had vanished by the time I went looking for a second spoon later. (By that point, the party had evolved into a sing-along arranged around two people with guitars and one person with a ukulele, and it was late enough that adding a bit of spoon-playing to the mix seemed like a good idea. When I was only able to come up with one spoon, one of the actors raided the kitchen and found a fork, but it just wasn't the same.)

Each of the directors also got a copy of the official cast photo for their play, and I was also presented by my actors with a copy of the unofficial cast photo for mine (the photographer having had some time on his hands and a photo he'd taken at the zoo of a family of chimpanzees), along with a picture book about monkeys in which the cast had written messages of appreciation and drawn arrows from their names to the three silliest-looking monkeys on the first page.

2. Last week, I managed to lock myself out of the house again. On the way out the door in the morning, I got distracted at just the point when I would have gone over to pick up the keys from the table where I usually leave them, and realised as soon as the front door had locked behind me that they were still on the table. I got the bearer of the spare key to meet me after work, so that was all right, but it being the second time I've locked myself out of the house that way, I decided I needed to rethink where I keep the keys. They're now hanging from a lanyard hooked over the inside doorknob of the front door.

3. I've just started playing Portal 2 again, after a break of several weeks. I hadn't been in a hurry to get back to it, because the plot had been going through another slow patch. So of course it turns out that there was a major plot development about three minutes after the point where I'd stopped.

4. I don't watch much live TV except on Sunday evening, when for reasons that are unlikely to become clear again at the moment it's easier to watch TV than not. Currently that means the new Sinbad TV series. Not terribly enthused about it so far. I'm finding Sinbad himself less interesting than his supporting cast, and they're mostly familiar stereotypes. (He's also leading the field in Failing To Be Convincing As An Inhabitant Of Whatever Century This Is Supposed To Be, which appears to be something of a national sport; it was several minutes into the first episode before I was sure this wasn't a modernised setting of the story.)

This week's episode guest starred Sophie Okonedo, walking off with every scene she was in, appropriately as a pirate queen. Basically, Sophie Okonedo rules.

5. Speaking of which, the Doctor Who online game, Worlds in Time, recently added a new story arc set on Starship UK and featuring Liz X (who, you will recall, was played by Sophie Okonedo in the TV series). One of the first plot points to be revealed is that Starship UK has a king now, which had me worried that something had happened to Liz, but she's still around, and rather annoyed that, after all the trouble she's been to sorting out the old autocratic regime, somebody's stolen the crown with the intention of setting up a new autocratic regime. Somebody had fun writing this story arc: Liz X pronounces her surname differently these days, and her associates in resisting the new order are collectively known as -- what else? -- the London Underground. [ETA: Also, there's an alien starship captain going Ahab on the star whale. And the leader of the Underground? Call him Ismail.]

As the only surviving episode of the SF anthology series Out of This World, "Little Lost Robot" is an important piece of television history. Sadly, as an episode in itself, and particularly as an adaptation of the Isaac Asimov story, I can't say it's much good.

For a story that depends on them, the robots are a great disappointment. They're very obviously men in suits: big, clunky suits that make one wonder what use such a lumbering machine would be. They never travel above a stiff-legged shuffle, even when they're supposedly racing to the assistance of a man in mortal peril. (Feigned, fortunately for him; I find it hard to believe they'd have reached him in time.) The whole plot depends on the idea that the robots are identical and indistinguishable in appearance and action, but in group scenes no effort is made to have them move in unison.

The author of this adaptation, apparently feeling that the original story was insufficiently dramatic, has added a subplot in which the human characters worry that the "lost" robot, with its non-standard programming, might become a danger, might even be the seed of a robot rebellion. This despite the existence of Asimov's famous First Law of Robotics; at the beginning of the episode, a concern about the alteration of the robot's programming is met with a reassurance that the First Law still renders it incapable of causing harm to a human being. There's never any further discussion of how the First Law might have been weakened or overruled; by the end of the episode, the characters seem simply to have forgotten that there's any such thing as the First Law. So does the scriptwriter.

Another aspect in which this adaptation seems to feel the original story was lacking is in the matter of romantic action. For Susan Calvin, a woman whose main character trait is that she gets on better with robots than with other human beings (and that other human beings get on better with robots than with her). Annoying, but by the time it becomes obtrusive it's hardly the worst of the episode's problems.

Not recommended.

I do, however, recommend the Youtube channel I found "Little Lost Robot" on. (Thanks to

lost_spook, who found it first.) It's stuffed with classic British TV SF, not all of which can be as disappointing as this. (Two... no, three words: Nigel. Kneale. Eeeee!)

If you're thinking I've left it a bit late to write about Sunday, you're not wrong. I actually started working on the first version of this two Sundays ago. I'm trying to avoid making it three.

Sunday night television at the moment is Last Chance to See, Poroit, and Sherlock. (Poirot and Sherlock are scheduled against each other, as if that means anything in the age of home video recorders and streaming video.)

Last Sunday's episode of Poirot had a minor character played by the actress who went on to appear as Agatha Christie in Doctor Who.

I'm enjoying Sherlock so far. Well, I liked the first episode, but the second was disappointing. (It's supposed to be bringing Sherlock Holmes into the 21st century, so what was with all the outdated oriental stereotypes? They don't even have the excuse of it being in the original story - all the chinoiserie is new material.) I hear the third episode is a return to form, though?

Last Chance to See so far seems to be giving the original series of twenty years ago an opportunity to live up to its name - two episodes in, both the featured species have been no-shows when Mark and Stephen went to look for them in the wild. And then there's the Yangtze river dolphin, which they didn't even go to look for because it's been declared extinct since the original series was made. Disturbing.

(There's never been a moment when I've been tempted to forget that Stephen Fry isn't Douglas Adams, but there are times when he's in narration mode where he sounds remarkably like the original series' narrator, Peter Jones. Although this is perhaps not so odd; after all, it's not the first thing he's taken over from Peter Jones as narrator of.)

Those of you on my friendslist who have done the "30 Days of Television" meme, can I tempt you to try "13 More Days of Television"? ( Read more... ) Or "30 Days of Shakespeare"? ( Read more... )

I don't catch LJ memes much, but in this case I'm willing to be a carrier. C'mon, you know you want to. *tempt* *tempt* *tempt*

(both memes via

angriest)

I originally got a Livejournal account only to make it more convenient to keep track of my friends and comment on their posts, never intending to make posts of my own.

My first post was about Cranford, because there was somebody on my friendslist I thought would be interested. (I later realised that I wasn't on her friendslist, so she probably never saw it anyway. C'est la vie.)

That was a year, five months, and a day ago, which is too awkward to be a proper anniversary, so I only mention it because the first episode of Return to Cranford aired here tonight.

(Return to Cranford. Hmm. "Conductor, I'll have a return to Cranford, please.")

----

In other TV news, this week's episode of Collectors had a segment on Norman Hetherington's collection of bits from his classic TV show Mr Squiggle. It's on iView for the next week and a bit.

Sam Stewart had nothing whatever to do with the murder this week. Maybe she isn't the long-lost ancestor of Jessica Fletcher after all.

I've just been watching a documentary about Russell Mulcahy's days as a music video director.

I was particularly fascinated by the section about the notorious video for Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" - it turns out Bonnie Tyler has no more idea what it's about than the rest of us, which frankly doesn't surprise me.

(I get the feeling Mulcahy didn't know, either: the way he told it, he was just throwing striking images together - "imagery", he said that a lot - without really thinking about the final effect.)

Also: wow, Bonnie Tyler's accent is completely different when she's just talking.

Doctor Who, "Flesh and Stone": In the end, I got the feeling that Moffat was trying to do too many things in this episode, and didn't end up doing any of them as well as he might have.

I particularly thought he overdid the monsters. The first time we saw them, thay had an elegantly simple concept that went straight to the primitive fear centres of the brain and lodged there. (Only episode of Doctor Who that's given adult!me insomnia.) All the extra things he's added to their story last episode and this, in my experience, make them less powerfully frightening, not more. (The primitive fear centres of the brain are not very good at lists. "Amongst our weaponry...") And that thing that happened just after Amy lost the communicator? I can see what they were trying for, but for me it was a definite case of 'The monster you never see is always scarier'.

Foyle's War. Last week, Sam got involved because the murder victim lived in the house where she was working. This week, she got involved because the murder victim was a guest in the house where she is now working. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence...

Since my first proper post on LJ was to complain that there was nothing interesting on TV on Sunday nights (which, for complicated historical reasons, is the only time I watch TV), balance perhaps requires me to mention that right now the Sunday night pickings are pretty good.

The new season of Doctor Who started a little while ago (only a few weeks behind the UK, for a change). Yesterday was the first part of the "Time of Angels" two-parter; I'm looking forward to part two.

Also yesterday was the first episode of the new season of Foyle's War - which is interesting, because the previous season was supposed to be the last, and finished with the War ending and the cast splitting up. Not that I am complaining at all, mind. (Although I do wonder if they're going to have to resort to outlandish coincidences to get Sam Stewart involved every week, now that she's not Foyle's official sidekick any more. This week she happened to be the one who found the body, which did nicely, but that's the kind of thing that you can only really do once.)

ABC1 has started showing Series F of QI, the panel game of unexpected answers to apparently-obvious questions. It's running on Tuesday evenings, with episodes remaining available on iView for a fortnight thereafter.

This week's episode included a round on the meanings of nautical signal flags, with the panellists, it being that kind of game, going for laughs by extracting double entendres and suggesting non-nautical situations where each signal might be useful. Which took an unexpected turn on the last flag of the round: the Foxtrot flag, which signifies, and I quote, "I am disabled; communicate with me."

Sunday night television has become boring again: Cranford has come to an end, and Rob Kelly's Doctor Who-themed run on The Einstein Factor has fallen flat after two episodes.

( The Einstein Factor: Giants never strike the same house twice )
( Cranford: did I mention it has Philip Glenister in it? )

Next week in the same timeslot is the first episode of Lost in Austen. I think I'll pass, thanks.

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