Dad's Army and Me

I've been working on a little collection of archive treats to mark the 40th anniversary of Dad's Army, and it seems to have been leapt upon by the press.

The Telegraph did a nice piece about the background to the series last week, and I was interviewed on BBC Radio Kent and BBC Southern Counties on Wednesday. The Today programme did a two-minute piece too, and there was a news item on BBC News online too. All in all, the press rather eclipsed the main events on BBC1 and BBC2 this weekend, unfortunately. But I'm just glad to see the show being championed once a again.

Vanity Searches

I'm struggling to get going today. It seems the more work I have, the harder it is to start it.

So, instead, I googled myself. What a tw*t.

First up is an interview I did for the Off the Telly website.

A (frankly bloody glowing) review of my Scorsese book from the Scorsesefilms website, and another from Kamera.co.uk.

Nice to see myself in The Times, back from when I worked on h2g2, plugging our then-new mobile service.

... and speaking of which, here's an interview I did to coincide with the launch of the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie. You need RealPlayer to hear it though. The interview was part of OnPoint, a news magazine broadcast by WBUR-Boston and National Public Radio USA. I didn't actually know it'd go out nationally until after I finished the interview. Gulp!

I was once the official BBC expert on Spooks, answering viewers' questions during series 2. Despite my extensive knowledge of the show at that time, most of the questions were about how to get a job in the Security Service - to which I was tempted to say 'Learn how to spell.'

A real blast from the past, this one - a site that lists some of the games I was credited on when I worked for PlayStation.

Nev Fountain's blog provides a handy reference to the Aardman-style model I made for a Dead Ringers sketch.

And blimey! There's a review of the DVD of Pyramids of Marson this site (unfortunately can't direct-link to it) that even has a pic of me (which I've stolen for the top of this blog).

Yesterday, a young colleague told me she'd used one of my books for an essay she wrote at university.

Random, eh?

Annoyingly, something has changed in Blogger that doesn't let me paste text into a blog. Instead, it appears at the bottom of the page. This has taken a bleedin' age to do.

Lunch, anyone?

Wimbledon Crescent

I walked into the living room on Monday night to find my flatmate watching the men's game - some French man was beating the guy from Napoleon Dynamite, when suddenly Dynamite started winning.

I know tennis is the one sport my flatmate tends to enjoy, and as it had gone into extra time, and the on-screen announcement hinted that this was a big thing, I sat down and watched.

So, firstly, the counting goes 15, then 30, then 40, then if they've both got to 40 there's deuce, then an advantage and then they have to get a second advantage - in which case they win the game - or it goes back down to 40.

Then there are certain parts of the grass that the ball can go into, and some parts it can't. It's allowed to hit the net, but only if it bounces back off and heads into a particular bit of the court...
After discovering that 'Henman Hill' is now called 'Murray Mound', I turned to my flatmate and asked if this was like the sports equivalent of 'Mornington Crescent'.

And after all of that, he told me it wasn't the men's finals as I'd thought, but a qualifier for the quarter finals.

What a load of crap.

Bad and Wrong

Saw this picture of Leona Lewis this morning on the BBC homepage, and immediately my brain rearranged the image in my mind so it looked like the one below it.

Misreading the News

This is a bit rubbish, considering how poor my blogging has been so far this year, but...

This headline on BBC News.

Am I the only one humming this tune now?

Say the Word - and Be Like Me

I've been a reader of The Word magazine ever since it first launched and my flatmate bought a copy to read on a long train journey. Back then it used to promote itself with the phrase 'At last - something to read', which was a marketing idea I stole for my related links section over there > and was as wonderfully reassuring as The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy's 'Don't Panic'. I like this mag, partly because of the people who write it - all ex-Smash Hits, Old Grey Whistle Test and NME (back when it had something to, um, read in it). I also like the mix of people the mag thinks I might want to know more about. I don't think I'd actively look to know more about broadcaster Mark Lawson, but I enjoyed their interview with him and every ow and again they mention a band or a song that I never knew I'd always liked.

One such ditty is the them from the 1968 drama Take Three Girls - a mad folk song with an irregular time sig that rejoices under the name of 'Light Flight' and comes from a band called Pentangle. Now, it just so happens that Pentangle or a major obsession of The Word's editor, Mark Ellen, so it's strange to discover such a random song and then open a mag that week and discover an article about it's creators.

Recently - well, I say 'recently', but as I've lost track of time, this could have been a year ago - I started to listen to the magazine's podcasts, where Mark Ellen, David Hepworth and one or two of the other writers chat for about 40 minutes about whatever comes to mind. The podcasts went weekly a while back, so thanks to iTunes, I get a new chat-track delivered to me each Wednesday or Thursday.

I'm not a huge rock fan, but I enjoy hearing people talk about stuff knowledgeably and with passion and wit. Hearing last week's edition, where Mark Ellen described the time he interviewed country singer Lucinda Williams, ended up going for dinner with her and only when it was too late did they realise they were out at a restaurant on Valentine's Day. This was the latest of the HORA - the 'hoary old rock anecdote' that closes each show and must surely skirt incredibly closely to libel on many occasions.

This particular podcast also has the power to enrich our vocabulary in hitherto unimagined directions. Where else could I have heard a room described as being so quiet 'you could hear a mouse piss on velvet' or hear someone exclaim that they are so hungry they could 'eat the arse off a low-flying duck'.

You can subscribe to The Word podcast via the website link at the top of this entry, via Facebook or through iTunes. Go on, what are you waiting for? New edition - world safe!

Da dah da, dadada da da

After nearly two months, nothing comes to mind here. Actually - not true! Except I'm about to start blogging as part of my job, so a lot of my thoughts are focused on that there weekly panic instead of an occasional free-form Jazz brain-dump on here.

This week, I accompanied a work colleague to visit a lady who once worked at the BBC and had accumulated an attic full of old scripts and paperwork, which we offered to take off her hands. Some of it's quite dry and of very limited interest to be honest, but the scripts of Z Cars episodes now lost from the archives are a real treat. Best thing she gave us though was a prop walkie talkie - complete with pop-up aerial - that had once served the good men of Newtown prison about 30 years ago. Either that, or the tomahawk that had somehow featured in an adaptation of Dumas' The Man in the Iron Mask. We might take that along to meetings from now on, as a means of persuasion...

One other fun thing about this woman's collection is, she seems to have been an unstoppable hoarder, so she's kept some amazing scraps of paper. One Z Cars folder contained little notes about various crimes - a theft from a scrapyard, a house burglary resulting in the loss of £3000-worth of silver - which I couldn't at first work out. Then I had the idea of reading the script and there they were: these little slips of paper were prop telexes that the police officer would have read from to brief his superior officer about recent cases that have been opened, along with the character's scripted asides, like 'I bet he did it himself for the insurance'. So if you've ever wondered if there's actually anything written on those pieces of paper actors shuffle in drama, well, there is. Their script, usually.

Rats Join Sinking Ship

Bloody hell, Doctor Who was good last night. It had the titanic, Kylie, Bernard Cribbins and the funniest Queen-related scene ever. In the words of my favourite film reviewer ever*, 'it made me laugh and it made me cry'.

The Titanic might have been a difficult sell to an audience sandwiched, as this episode was, between two grimfestive episodes of EastEnders, but trust Russell T Davies to find a way to make it tense and exciting without it feeling bleak. Sure, it wasn't the actual Titanic, but a space ship of the same name and design, but the first shots of the ship cruising above the planet Earth have to be the single best special effects ever made for British TV.

I got a bit teary-eyed at a few points - the frustration and shock of the young midshipman, shot by his loony captain and unable to do his duty while the captain lives, was heartbreaking, as were the deaths of the fat couple who wrong-footed me by being instantly likeable (Debbie Chazen is best-known for her co-starring role in the dismal sketch show Tittybangbang so I wasn't prepared for how good she actually turned out to be). But the biggest shock came with Kylie Minogue's character Astrid taking a decidedly active and terminal role in the conclusion to the adventure. I'd heard rumours that her character would turn out to be something a bit magical (based on her first name being an anagram of 'Tardis') but when that turned out to be wrong it was even more upsetting.

Then the final credit: 'Dedicated to Verity Lambert OBE'. I knew it was coming, but it still got me choked.

... and I wasn't pissed either.

So, I had high expectations for the ratings, which I didn't think would be available until tomorrow. The overnights (as reported by BBC News) are suggesting 13.8 million, with a peak just under 15 million at one point. Blimey - this is the show they couldn't get people to make, never mind watch, in 1989.

There are only a very few stories of the original run of episode of this series that managed to get ratings that high. Three stories in 1965 ('The Rescue', 'The Romans' and 'The Web Planet'). 'The Ark in Space' in 1974 and 'The Power of Kroll' each had individual episodes that peaked at around the 13 million mark, and only 'Destiny of the Daleks' and 'City of Death' went above 14 million (the latter reaching 16 million, thanks in no small part to a lengthy strike taking ITV off air).

The TV landscape has changed a lot over the years; the days when EastEnders can pull in over 20 million have long gone. Home computers, videogames consoles, multi-channel TV and home video / DVD have all combined to ensure TV is no longer a medium that can unite a nation. But Doctor Who last night was seen by about a quarter of the population of the UK, about 50% of the viewing public. The equivalent would be something like 25 million viewers in 1979.

It really puts the embarrassment of being a fan for the last 20 years into perspective. A show that was once so niche that even the regular viewers didn't like it now has an audience who might not call themselves fans but still love it to bits. With TV in the state that it is, that's no bad thing. Just ask ITV, whose highest-rated programme peaked at 8.9 million (a 35.4% share of the viewers). Sad though I am about this, Coronation Street can't claim to be the nation's favourite any more. 'Eighth-most-popular' is about as close as they get.

In 1988, when Doctor Who was watched by about 4 million people out of habit, it was scheduled up against Corrie. Some might say revenge is a dish best served cold, and on Christmas Day...

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* Some woman I once worked with, whose only criteria for a 'good film' seemed to be a binary opposition of emotions.