Weekending Shenanigans Part 1

Paul was up at the weekend, for our by now traditional (can two years count as a tradition?) Edinburgh Festival drink and books get together.

It's not a complicated tradition or anything - just a chance to sit around, gabbing about books and telly and people we know, fuelled by alcohol and chinese takeaway. The specific plan this time round was to watch telly and get drunk on the Friday night, then go book shopping on Saturday, followed by dinner and more drinks.

As it turned out, Julie, Paul and I managed to get the chinese meal ordered and eaten, contrived to fill up sundry glasses with red wine, cider and vodka (not all at once, you understand) but then ended up gabbing and drinking until about 11 o'clock and so by the time we turned the tv on, we were all a bit half-cut and nodding off.

Which might explain the disparity between...

Friday Night Viewing (planned)

The Love Boat (pilot episode)
My Family and Other Animals (an episode with Brian Blessed as Spiro)
Crossroads (random black and white episode)
Raven (an episode not already on the Network DVD Look Back sampler dvd)

Friday Night Viewing (actual)

Crossroads
The Love Boat (abandoned half way through due to drunken tiredness)

Crossroads in 1966 was a far different beast to that in 1979, we discovered. Like Coronation Street at the same time, it's a more realistic series than soaps nowadays, with nothing very much happening and a lot of the screen time being taken up with characters talking to one another.

There's no sign here of campness or cheapness, no wobbly sets or comedy ethnic characters. In fact it's not even really about the motel at all, merely using that as a base around which the staff live their lives. A pre-accident Sandy gives evidence in court, Miss Diane (looking very young and just plain 'Diane' at this point) worries about something or other to do with tea, and an equally young but still not very attractive Audrey Roberts bats her eyelids unconvincingly at all and sundry (presumably Wendy Richard wasn't available for the role on the day required?). Noelle Gordon is even more brilliant than she is later on (though sadly she doesn't sing) and all that I really missed from the 70s series I watched at tea-time is the dashing figure of David Hunter (actually, where was Jane Rossington, I wonder?)

The other unexpected thing (and again, similar to contemporary Corrie) is how quickly an episode shoots past. We watched it for what felt like five minutes, paused the dvd to talk about Noelle's hair and her resemblance to Thatcher, turned it back on - and it was finished! Presumably part of that is down to the short running time, once adverts have been removed, but even so, for a show full of talking it was no great trial to get through...

To be honest, all I can remember clearly about The Love Boat was the presence of Phil Silvers, some plot bits about the ship's doctor having been a newly wed woman's old friend and a jealous husband threatening to belt him one. And some sort of bedroom swap, but things were going a bit blurry and cross-eyed by that point. I did laugh though, I think so worth re-visiting.

Saturday's goings on, including scary giant bears, posh ladies, ill-informed booksellers and overly screechy teenagers, later...

Saturday was my birthday!

Presents galore...

iPhone!

Star Trek TOS Season 1 on Blu-ray!

Pon Farr sex perfume (not cologne due to idiocy on Scott's part)!

Hitchcock dvd box set!

A jumper which I look slim in!

Books! Books! Money to buy books with!

Then...

Food!

Comedy!

Alcohol!

Dancing!

More alcohol!

Taxi home in the wee small hours!

Subsequently...

Hangover!

Hangover!

Oh God, hangover...

Obsessive fans

Take a look at this Freedom of Information Act request, courtesy of Stuart

It seems to me that if this woman's real name is not Annie Wilkes, but that she's taken her nom de plume from Kathy Bates murderously obsessive fan character in Stephen King's Misery...well, if I were Tennant, Gardner or Davies, I'd be a wee bit worried.

You know you've seen her somewhere before...

Admit it, you know this girl.

She's all over the internet, smiling her faintly impatient little smile at you as you curse the closure of a site which Google suggested might have contained exactly what you were looking for.

Or you've typed the URL in wrong, and changing 'amzaon.co.uk' to 'amazon.co.uk' might be a good idea...

Anyway, she has a life away from mildly censorious glares of approbation at your fat-fingered mistyping, as these images from a stock image site demonstrate.

http://www.istockphoto.com/file_search.php?action=file&filetypeID=&userID=39198&text=hf7

It's a shame that it is a stock photo site actually - I quite like the idea of the mystery girl getting a penny for every time her face appears on the internet. She'd be rich by now and could retire to the Florida Everglades, there to grow old and wrinkled as her Dorian Gray like image remains for ever young and ever so slightly pissed off at getting her picture taken.

Three Billy Goats Guff

What makes a troll? That's the internet type, not the mythical creature of Norwegian (probably - I can't be arsed checking, I've had a tooth out, my face hurts) origin.

I had always thought of a troll as someone who comes onto a forum solely to cause trouble, deliberately and perversely arguing for something essentially ridiculous and making stuff up to suit their mental argument. And all desigend to provoke a reaction.

As opposed - to get down to cases - to someone going on a web forum and arguing an unpopular line which just happens to be true.

To get down to actual specifics, I've been banned from the doctorwhoforum. In itself that's no big deal - I've been banned by better sites than that, I can tell you mate - and I can even understand why they banned me. After all, I was upsetting the kind of 'proper' Doctor Who authors which the forum relies on to give its indefinable cachet and I may well have been a bit rude about it (I don't deny that I can occasionally get so wrapped up in the argument - and am so used to the 'anything goes' nature of certain mailing lists - that I can slip into, well, mildly unpleasant sarcasm).

But what I was saying was the truth, and I was never what I would consider to be very rude, nor was I trying to provoke a reaction so much as getting irritated at what I saw as rather creepy behaviour.

Previously I'd been warned for the sin of saying Times Champion was rubbish (it is), that a particularly stupid poster appeared to be borderline special needs (he is) and for defending myself against a sneaky and smug personal attack by a sycophantic guffmonkey named Ben Adams (he is - a sycophantic guffmonkey, that is).

I should probably just have left when my post defending myself was removed by the forum Mods but clown boy's attacking me wasn't. I should certainly have left when a post I did asking what was so great about 'In Vision' was deleted along with various subsequent posts by other people asking why my non-objectionable post had been deleted also got deleted (goodness, all those deletions - it's like a particularly poor episode of New Who).

As it turns out I never got the chance to leave as I got banned for was for saying that Justin Richards doing four of the 10 books in the new multi-part Who series was just another example of the rank nepotism at work in the Who book world and a sign that the publishers could care less about quality. As that was actually me agreeing with a couple of other people who had said exactly the same thing earlier on, you'd think that would be OK, but within seconds the usual suspects appeared on the scene like particularly cringe-making vultures at a feast of arsiness. Lance (who I like as a writer and who, this trait aside, is funny, intelligent and knowledgeable about cool stuff) did his usual 'anyone who might one day commission me is perfect' schtick, and Peter Anghelides - check his bibliography and see how many non-Who plays, short stories and novel he's done, and then remember he's one of Justin 'I Commission Only my Mates' Richards oldest friends - came along, shuffling like Uncle Tom and twisting the facts into pretzels in an effort to make Richards and his little coterie of poor writers look less nepotistic.

Anyway, I thought I was reasonably polite - I scoffed a little at Lance's ridiculous claim that co-editorship of the schoolboy criticism which is the poorly mimeographed 'In Vision' series counts as professional non-fiction experience but I deleted a long post marking out exactly how Peter A had been disingenuous in order to defend his friend, on the grounds that defending your friends is an admirable thing.

But I still got banned for being rude and incapable of courteous behaviour, or some such.

Anyway, to cut a long story short I have very little time for most of the mods on OG, who are a shower of smug, self-congratulatory idiots, more interested in buttering up the very minor writers who post there than anything else, and so being banned by them is hardly a blow to my ego.

But someone I do like and respect a great deal did say to me later that I had been trolling a little and acting a 'bit wanky' and, basically, got what I deserved (he said the last bit nicer than that, but I knew what he meant). Other people mailed me to say that I wasn't trolling and didn't go far enough, and a couple of people I know less well agreed I had been at it, but still...it continues to bother me several days later that this one person thought I was trolling because he's an honest guy and obviously thought I was.

And I genuinely wasn't intending to do so.

Oh well, I'm sure I'll recover - I am, after all, hardly thin-skinned - but maybe I'll stay off all web fora for a while, just in case he was right and I was doing something more than just arguing my case.

For reference though, every writer except Richard Dungworth (who I don't know) involved in the Darksmith Legacy is a bad, bad writer and get commissioned far too much for no immediately obvious reason.

Passing Thought of Little Interest 3

""Google and YouTube are just parasites. The day they start spending £1bn a year on content is the day I'll start worrying". -ITV executive chairman Michael Grade

ITV spend £1bn a year on content and the best they can come up with is Celebrity Love Island and Flood?

Passing Thought of Little Interest 2

You know what's really awful and jaw-droppingly amateur?

Well yes, Bonekickers obviously. Ok, and Spooks: Code 9.

But also the way that writers of Big Finish audios forget that Doctor Who is supposed to be real on one pretty basic level and that, therefore, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart would not introduce himself as 'The Brigadier' just because that's what fans call him (Minuet in Hell, I think), nor does passing mention of someone called the Doctor automatically lead people to assume that the person speaking means The Doctor, the interfering Time Lord, and not - for instance - a medical man who happens to be kicking about (Bride of Peladon).

Does no-one edit these things?

Combating Evil: A Primer

From recent watching of Doctor Who, some notes on defeating Evil.

1. Should you wish to lure an evil genius scientist away from his nefarious experiments just as he's about to unleash a monster on the planet, knock on his door. He won't be able to resist answering and while he's doing so your temprarily blinded assistant can cause havoc.

2. If you're concerned that one or other of the new friends you've made may be infected by a malevolent space virus, look out for the one suddenly wearing giant space sunglasses.

3. The best place for a mechanical dog in a music video is on top of a crumbly brick wall in the countryside. Don't ask my why though.

4. The likelihood of one of your companions having an exact duplicate amongst the guests at a country house party is the same as that party expecting a man dressed the same as you are and with a very similar name to your own. The laws of BBC drama mean that the man they are expecting will only turn up after you've left.

5. Watch out for Michael Sheard - he's never up to any good.

Passing Thought of Little Interest 1

There's a reason that Jaws is a classic. It's not the mildly laughable shark or Robert Shaw's bizarre performance as Quint; nor is it the head rolling out of the gashed boat or the literal fountain of blood as Little Jimmy gets bitten in two.

No, the real star of Jaws are Roy Schneider's wonderfully nineteen seventies glasses.

Seriously - can you imagine another action movie ever in which the hero wears such uncool eyewear?

This is not a meme, son

To re-iterate, this is not a meme. But my chauffeur, Scott, asked the following pretty diverting question in his blog a few days ago, and I wasted a solid 80 minutes on Amazon answering it. Which either means that it's a genuinely intriguing question, or that I'm a sad little man who can't resist making lists.

Anyway, the question:

You are about to go to a desert island forever. You have £50 to spend on Amazon. You can only buy books, CD's or DVD's (assume that you can play such on this mystical isle). This will be all the entertainment you will have on the island for the rest of your life.

What would you spend it on? You can make use of any available offers at the time of purchase and assume free postage. You must provide links to the items and their prices.

I decided to forget about dvds and went for:

Music

Grace, Jeff Buckley £5.47
Must I Paint You a Picture, Billy Bragg, £4.98
No More Shall We Part, Nick Cave - 4.98
Blood on the Tracks, Bob Dylan - 4.98
The Dreaming, Kate Bush - 4.98

Books

From Hell, Alan Moore - 15.99
The Lord of The Rings, Tolkein - 10.73
Around the World in Eighty Days, Jules Verne - 1.80

which (after swapping Buckley for Bragg) left me just enough change for a copy of Doctor Who Monthly from eBay to wile away the lonely evenings (which is cheating, technically, but what can they do to me - I'm already being sent to a desert island with no access to Bit Torrent).

I'm a bit worried that there's a lot of slow music and nothing really loud and rocky, but I've picked two thumping tomes of books so if the cds get boring I can always read for a while. Or talk to a basketball or something.

Anyway, not a meme and I'm tagging nobody but feel free to play the game if you're really bored. Scott would love to think he'd come up with something viral ;-)

And don't you wish you had taste as great as mine*?

* Also, aren't you glad that your life isn't as obviously empty of incident as mine :-)

Shelf Life Update

Craig Hinton was a lovely, very funny man, and a talented author who died far too young at Christmas 2006.

In tribute to and rememberance of him, Jay Eales, Adrian Middleton and David McIntee have put together a collection of short stories, entitled Shelf Life, each with some kind of link to Craig and his life and work. Included is a brief Iris story of mine, entitled 'No Place Like Home' - I'm no writer, but I don't think it's entirely awful, and there are any number of proper writers in the book to make it well worth buying. All profits from the book go to a charity nominated by Craig's family.

It's not out yet, but the cover art is, to whet your appetite...



Pretty nifty, eh? I think Craig, as a big comics fan, would have liked it.

For No-One

In an unexpected change from the usual witterings about Doctor Who and old telly, this is going to be one of those posts no-one ever reads about what I've been doing lately.

I've been on holiday in Florida, spending a week touring the state and then a week in Orlando doing the theme park thang. It was fabulous, a really, really great holiday - and that in spite of the fact that it was in the company of my entire extended family.

Highlights included:

• Getting sun poisoning on our first day there, after my beloved daughter removed the towel I had over my legs whilst sunbathing on Clearwater Beach (I'd been jet ski-ing and thought my sun tan lotion might have been rubbed off) in order to dry her face. Actual Sun Poisoning! How messed up does that sound? Allergic to the sun! I expect to break out in People Poisoning any time now, and am confident I'll be living inside a plastic bubble by the end of the decade.
• Getting invited to a lesbian wedding (which sadly we couldn't attend, as we were moving on that day). 'Looks like Harold Lloyd marrying Shrek' someone was heard to remark, but lovely people nonetheless.
  
• Walking naked and drunk along Cocoa Beach
• Spending a week in the villa Jodie Marsh had her honeymoon in (all the more interesting once someone explained to me who Jodie Marsh actually was - a sort of cut-price Jordan, if you imagine such a thing being suffered to live and not being exposed on a hillside as would seem natural)
• Getting lost in downtown Tampa in the early hours of the morning and twatting the curb with the car in a fit of pique
• Meeting a massive pesticide mutated redneck named after Winston Churchill who congratulated me on 'that guy at Scotland Airport kicking shit out of those muslimics' and further promised that, were there ever another 911 style terrorist attack, he personally would shoot the first American of arabian descent he met (that one's more a point of horror struck fascination than a highlight, though J bursting into his hotel room whilst drunk to lambast him for finishing her Jack Daniels was very funny)
• Watching the shuttle launch live. Genuinely awe-inspiring.

Other than that, I went on an upside rollercoaster for the first time ever (can't say I enjoyed it much), went on the brilliant new Simpsons simulator ride and decided that Revenge of the Mummy is the best ride in Orlando.

Also a Tom Tom is the best thing ever.

Of Detectives, Elves and Neo Fascists

For anyone wanting to listen to the type of Sherlock Homes radio plays I mentioned the other day, you can do so for nothing at this excellent site.

http://www.botar.us/sherlockholmes.html

On the subject of freebies (and thanks to Simon for pointing this out) Tor books is giving away pdf versions of twelve of its sf novel catalogue, if you sign up at

http://www.tor.com/

Within a day of entering your details, you get links to the books. The first one is Mistborn by Branden Sanderson (available here and if the cover is anything to go by probably rotten and featuring elves). And the second is Old Man's War by John Scalzi, a novel once described by t'other Simon as "unpleasant right-wing polemic" and 'neo-fascistic drivel', so perhaps best to stick with the Sherlock Holmes.

De Vere, There and Everywhere

I've just read Bill Bryson's pretty decent short biography of Shakespeare, which prompted this thought.

Claiming that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote the Shakespeare plays is akin to suggesting that Brian Jones wrote all of the Beatles hits, in that

• he was dead while they were still releasing new work
• his own surviving work shows he was nowhere near as talented as the writers of the Beatles' hits
• no-one at the time ever linked him to the Beatles works
• lots of people at the time were certain the Beatles wrote their own songs
• and he never claimed that he wrote any such thing.

Even in a world where conspiracy theories are in vogue as never before, the idea is totally preposterous.

And de Vere is generally accepted as the best possible alternative author of Shakespeare's plays...

Major Andrew Olmsted

I just heard today that Major Andrew Olmsted of the US Army in Iraq was killed yesterday in an ambush.

Which would not generally be something I would take much notice of, but he wrote an interesting and insightful blog about being in the US Army and volunteering to go back to Iraq. I can't remember how I came across him (via Geoff Wessel maybe, which is where I saw the news he'd been killed) and I didn't always agree with everything he wrote but he was honest and intelligent and certainly not the gung-ho military fool that their idiot of a Commander in Chief might be thought to represent.

His final, posthumous post, which he asked a friend to put online in the event that he was killed is a wonderful, touching and humbling piece of writing and makes me wish I acted...I don't know...better in many aspects of my life.

Anyway it's online here and I recommend everyone read it.

Arty Farty, Me?

I have just discovered that I'm not very arty at all.

By chance I happen to have been stacking books I've finished reading in a pile on my desk and when I went to shove them all haphazardly back in the bookcases this morning I discovered that the last 8 books I've read are as follows:

A Celebration of 'The Good Life' - Richard Webber
'Close' - Martina Cole
'Making Money' - Terry Pratchett
'Chicken' - David Sterry
'Timeslip' novelisation
'Dusted' - Buffy Episode Guide
'Hollywood Vampire' - Angel Episode Guide
'Still Getting Away with It' - Nick Courntey

So that's one novel about a male hustler; four books with a link to 70s sitcom or Joss Whedon; one Doctor Who actor autobiography; a Terry Pratchett and a Martina Cole Gangster Bitch novel I pinched off Julie or my mum.

Sadly for my credentials as an interlekshull I probably enjoyed the Martina Cole book most of the three novels - I have a soft spot for the sheer effortlessness involved in reading them, especially after you've read a few. They're not always brilliantly written (but that's not the end of the world since many far cooler books I've read this year have just as many clunky sections) and they all have much the same plot but a Martina Cole book is guaranteed to batter along like a right old bastard, which is exactly what you want sometimes.

Ah, who wants to be arty anyway - read anything you can get your hands on, I say. And bugger those people who say they haven't got enough time even to read the great books which are out there, as though a diet exclusively of the brilliant is the only thing worth aspiring to.

Don't Dare - Failed Pilots of the Future

Deaf and Dumb Borstal - the screenplay of Scum told entirely in the medium of the ever humorous speech patterns of the profoundly deaf. Includes strong language, but you'd never know unless you were really concentrating.

Reply from BBC: Thank you for your submission. You may well be correct that this would be funny for the first five minutes, but we have certain reservations that it may prove offensive to the aurally challenged.

Seven Brides for Seven Sisters - the Howard Keel musical, using the music of the Smiths. Main scene: Howard on the edge of a cliff singing 'I Know it's Over' in a powder blue shirt and very tight trousers.

Reply from BBC: Many thanks for your interesting proposal. We swithered over this one for quite some time, with a good deal of interest from BBC2 in particular, but will have to pass as, sadly, it turns out that Mr Keel is in fact dead.

Joey's Joey - Joey Deacon, iconic seventies mentalist, in a series of wacky adventures with his kangaroo chum.

Scrawled post-it from BBC: You are kidding presumably? All we can suggest is killing the kangaroo and having its spirit talk to Mr Deacon, then try sending it to LivingTV.

Sunday morning, praise the dawning

To anyone reading this I give fair warning - this isn't about old tv, science fiction or books I've read, and hence will be of interest to almost no-one*.

On Sunday morning I got up at the ridiculous hour of 8am in order to go with Alex to see Jacqueline Wilson at the Edinburgh Book Festival.

As I generally get about four hours sleep a night during the week and make up for it by sleeping in until 10 at the weekend, this counts as a major sacrifice, but you know how it is - when I'm old and wetting myself and under the impression I'm the Emperor of all France, I'm hoping she'll take me in rather than dump me in some home run by a Nurse Ratched-a-like.

It was entirely worth it though. Alex was enormously excited at (a) being in the audience for the first ever reading of 'Kiss', the new JW novel, (b) the thought of all the new books she was bound to score in the bookshop later and (c) actually getting to meet the author in person. As she tends to do in such situations, she rabbited on like a mad thing as we waited in the glorious morning sunshine for a signature on 'Jackie Daydream' and we talked about books and authors and similar stuff for a surprisingly quick hour and a half.

Anyhow, Jacqueline Wilson was great - funny, enthusiastic, interesting and friendly, even after hours sitting in the signing snug.

She had massive silver rings on each finger (as she always does, apparently) and silver shoes and looked for all the world as I imagine Jo Grant would look thirty years on.**

There should be a law, in fact: all authors should look and act like Jacqueline Wilson.

All in all, it was lovely, frankly - quite the best morning I've spent in a long time.


* Assuming that posts on those subjects interest anyone either.
** There you go - a Dr Who link. I can't help myself.

Nothing much to say

Other than the fact that should you ever be looking to host a function in Edinburgh the Bainfield Bowling Club should be avoided at all costs as it is run by a pathetic, foolish, cowardly worm of a man by the name of Peter Ramsey - a man who ran away from a simple question asked of him by an eight year old boy.

I'm rather proud of my son right now.*

* And of my little brother for remaining calm. I often don't agree with the things he says and does, but he's a big lad and it was nice of him not to ruin J's party by ripping Ramsey's head off.

Filling in lunchtime

I've been tagged, which is a thing The Kids do, and thus makes me feel very much more as though I were 15 instead of my actual creaking 37. And it's a boring lunchtime so this will fill ten minutes nicely. Thanks John.

These are the rules:

1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write in their own blog about their eight things and include these rules in the post.
4. At the end of your post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
5. Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog.

And these are the facts:

1. I can remember a stylised version of a visit to my great gran's nursing home, made when I was around two. The memory involves massive fluted columns and beams of dust filtered sunlight, whereas the reality apparently majored heavily in wallpaper with Grecian pillars on it and one very high, dirty skylight.

2. I think James Bolam's performance in series 4 of When the Boat Comes In is the finest ever seen on UK television.

3. Eating bananas causes blisters to appear in my mouth. So I don't eat them.

4. I consider Elvis doing 'Suspicious Minds' to be the greatest song of all time.

5. I harbour a secret belief that I could write a very funny sketch based radio comedy, but as only Scott seems to find me sufficiently funny, that may well be a pipe dream.

6. I own so many books that I now have to store boxes and boxes full of them in the attics of friends and family.

7. I always cry (in a moist-eyed yet manly way) at the end of It's a Wonderful Life.

8. I sunburned my face so badly at the weekend while going to Loudon Castle with the family that my entire face is now bright red and peeling unattractively.

As for the eight people, well how about these (with the proviso that I won't leave a comment on their blogs pointing this out to them and will quite understand if they don't need a Work Avoidance Meme right now*)?

Tim
Ross
Phil
Simon
Scott
Mark C
Ian
Mark M

* Though given that I know that at least three of them are on Facebook, they obviously are not averse to wasting time on t'internet