Yeti in the Underground

Yes, I'm back making monsters and this one's my latest, a Yeti from the Doctor Who story 'The Web of Fear', lurking in my also-new underground set. Oh, and the eyes glow in the dark (which doesn't quite come across here).

Flatmate's birthday

So it was my flatmate's 40th birthday party this weekend (although he doesn't actually hit the big four-zero until the 15th). What a lovely bunch of people - I didn't get around to speaking to everyone, but I managed to catch up with a few people who I hadn't seen in a long time. Oh, and I ended up with black cake icing being smeared over my face. Cheers, Mr Mayor! Haha.

Still, the flatmate had a much deserved brilliant time and going on the comments on Twitter and Facebook today, so did everyone else.

I Can't Get No Sleep.

What is it about Sundays that causes insomnia with such regularity. It's not even that I slept in this morning, because most other Sundays I get up early and still can't get to sleep come night-time.

And I'm not alone in this either. I see so many friends on Facebook and Twitter who experience the same frustrating routine.

Ah well, at least I can work from home tomorrow, avoiding the tube strikes.

Out in Politics

So the chief secretary to the treasury, David Laws, has resigned his post in the coalition government because of an expenses scandal that has also exposed that he is gay. It's a situation so tricky that on his programme this morning, even Andrew Marr said 'for once, I have nothing smart to say about it'.

The facts are that between 2004 and 2007, David Laws claimed expenses on properties he had rented from his long-term partner, James Lundie. In 2006, Parliamentary rules were changed to forbid MPs from 'leasing accommodation from a partner'.

It's debateable whether the word 'partner' is just a catch-all to include husbands, wives, common-law partners and civil partnerships (which have been legal in the UK since 2004), but Mr Laws clearly believed that his own relationship with Mr Lundie could not be described as fitting the parameters of that clause. Furthermore, to protect his own privacy in an environment where the prejudices of the public could have prevented him from serving them, it looks as if he continued to claim expenses until such time that he could cease doing so without it drawing attention to his private life.

I do wonder if any straight relationships were exposed in a similar way in the last round of expenses scandals: an unmarried MP in a relationship claiming rent on a property owned by their partner. If there were, would they just have been all part of the same scandal, so that the nature of their relationship might not have been clear, or is it just that the press wouldn't have felt the need to expose a heterosexual relationship because it doesn't have the whiff of scandal that a homosexual one does?

Whichever way we look at it, David Laws is clearly a victim of homophobia. He's felt compelled to live in the closet, keep his relationship a secret and maintain a practice of claiming for expenses to as not to draw attention to his private life. Though his resignation was prompted by those expense claims - which he's vowed to pay back - some might say that there's an issue of trust here that David Laws has betrayed. It might even be suggested that gay people who live their lives in the closet cannot be trusted with a position in public office. But we also have to look at the reasons why a person might choose not to come out. After all, how many MPs have lost their seats because of revelations about their private lives?

David Laws had to resign because he is gay. What's interesting is that, unlike almost every other MP to have resigned a post because of a 'private matter', the view here seems to be that he is an 'honourable man' - and without any of the irony that the phrase might carry from Marc Antony's use of it. Could this in fact be a turning point - that a member of parliament might not have to resign because of his or her sexuality? Well, that's down to the voters and, sadly, the reactions from the Daily Mail this week could be seen to reflect many of them (I won't provide a link to that, simply because it only helps them in the long run).

Last Wednesday, I was honoured to be among the guests to witness the election of Camden's new major, councillor Jonathan Simpson. The mayor is joined on the council by new deputy leader Angela Mason, a major figure in gay equality campaigning since her days as head of Stonewall in the 1980s. The inauguration took place during the council's annual general meeting and entertainment was provided by, among others, the London Gay Men's Chorus... and a local resident who had some rather forthright views on one of the other councillors.

Camden council has had its troubles recently, but the new mayor's agenda of promoting the area's wealth of musical talent and fundraising for its venues seems to be very welcome. As so many of the musical entries I've written in this blog were inspired by tickets provided by him as his 'plus-one', I can wholeheartedly vouch for his passion for live music. I'm sure he'll make great progress for the council and for Camden in the next 12 months. Congratulations, mate!

- Camden New Journal

- Camden Gazette

- Camden Council

More Ashes to Ashes

Thanks to the wonders of BBC iPlayer, I've managed to catch the final episode of Ashes to Ashes. No spoilers in this post, except to say that I appear to have predicted the ending in this post from last week.

I loved that. A really emotionally satisfying ending that makes sense, seems to tie up all the questions, leaves room for viewers to piece together more of the clues and - yes! - makes me want to go right back to the start and watch it all again.

Some lovely cultural references there too - notably Angel Heart, though they at least didn't go the whole hog and give the relevant character an obvious pseudonym like Louis Cypher. There was also a moment where I wondered if there was some kind of inspiration from the old TV Comic Doctor Who strips, where the Doctor was dragged off and forced to regenerate by Time Lord-controlled scarecrows. But thankfully, that's probably more to do with my hand-over than anything intended by the writers.

Thanks Ashley and Matthew for a brilliant series - and cheers, Gene - you always will be... The Guv.

News Update

In ancient times, like Greek or Roman or Egyptian or those other places like Mesopotamia that I can barely spell. It doesn't matter. The point was back in the past when everyone except the rich went about on foot. Back then, the rich people used to pay people to bring them their news.

It was a hazardous occupation. You'd be despatched from your News Hut to a location many miles away. Possibly crossing a continent just to get to the location. You might manage to do some of the journey on foot, but inevitably there'd be mountains that needed climbing, dense forests that would tear at your clothes and flesh, wild beasts with hunger in their eyes, enemy armies looking to make sport with a weakling from the other side of the border and even cut-throat thieves who'd think you were worth the risk.

And then you'd arrive at your destination and find out what was required.

If it was bad news, you might be thinking whether or not your life would be immeasurably safer without your master's unpredictable temper being the deciding factor in whether you have an early death or not.

The return journey would be even more dangerous and eventually, after weeks away from your master's home, you'd return. You'd stagger up to his throne, tell him the news... and then die, exhausted, at his feet.

I mention this because in the week leading up to the coalition government, Sky News got more attention than ever for some spectacularly unprofessional behaviour on the part of its reporters. First, Kay Burley bullied a protester on live TV, refusing to let him speak and being generally hostile. Then, a live report on Tuesday saw Adam Boulton completely lose it in an exchange with former Labour spin-doctor Alastair Campbell. Campbell remained calm and authoritative while Boulton spat furiously and accused him of somehow manipulating the election into a situation where... what, Adam? You're claiming Campbell and Mandelson conspired to make sure the Conservatives got into power?

You sad, paranoid idiot, working for an international joke. A terrifying, powerful, disgusting joke, but a joke nonetheless.

It was magnificent to see, and courtesy of many YouTube viewers, it's now been seen by so many more people than were watching at the time.

- Boulton v Campbell on Sky News. "Dignity... dignity..."

Funk to Funky!

I'm writing this half an hour before the penultimate episode of Ashes to Ashes hits our screens. They've been weaving this particularly media-literate modern fairy-tale for the last five years, the first two of which as Life On Mars. Is the gruff thuggish Gene Hunt the retro hero he was hailed by those kind of tedious Sun readers who believe the phrase 'political correctness gone mad' is an actual point to make? Or is he the villain, waiting to be exposed? Was Sam Tyler mad, in a coma or a time traveller? And if he was one of those things, is it the same for his successor, Alex Drake? Are any of those supporting characters directly involved, or just hapless victims?

I genuinely don't know. After series one of Life On Mars, I thought I had it all worked out - and I was right, kind of. The characters were all living on Mars in the future, and BOTH realities were an illusion. Except... this didn't happen in the version shown on British TV, but was the resolution of the US version. Some thought it was weak, but I loved that ending because it dared to be different from everything else on TV.

For those who've stuck with it, Lost is also approaching its finale. Like Life On Mars and Ashes to Ashes, Lost has relied upon withholding information to build its mystery. And similarly, it's this perverse restriction of information that has made these extended conclusions such essential viewing. Unlike other long-running dramas that come to a natural end, we still don't actually know what these shows are about, and whatever they reveal in the final seconds will probably be the first thing mentioned in every review from now on. The Prisoner wasn't as baffling as many lazy critics would have you believe - it's really only that final episode that refuses to give us the neat conclusion we'd all hoped for (I say 'we', but no-one I know watched it on first transmission, because it's not the kind of thing my parents watch and none of my mates were old enough).

The Prisoner is dead easy to understand though - if we only take it at face value. If we just watch the series knowing that the central character IS Patrick McGoohan, it all falls into place. A frustrated actor creates a situation that will eradicate his feeling of typecasting, only to replace it with a completely different feeling of typecasting that he can never escape.

The new version of The Prisoner, currently showing on ITV1, is harder to explain. How could they get a concept with such potential and make it so relentlessly dull as to make it lose the channel about five million viewers every Saturday night? Such a waste.

Lost, meanwhile, has never interested me. I was bored rigid by the very first episode, so I'm pretty sure that even once it's finished and friends tell me what happened, it'll mean nothing to me.

But for those of us who've followed Gene Hunt's story, I think it's safe to say we're all hoping for something utterly barking. Unlike those original viewers of The Prisoner, we WANT this to be completely baffling. We WANT to feel slightly cheated. We want it to be nothing like anything else we've ever seen - because if it's even remotely guess-able, we really will feel let down.

So, with five minutes to go before part one of the Ashes to Ashes finale begins, here are my two guesses.

1. They're in purgatory, limbo or some other pre-Heaven place. The solution will be that they discover they're all dead and had to atone for past sins. The thing is, we might welcome a quasi-religious ending in an American film, but would secular TV Britain be happy to accept an ending where they say God exists?

2. It's 'Six Characters in Search of an Author'. They discover to their horror that they're fictional characters. Some of them struggle to cope with the news, but the others band together and tell them - Sod it! We feel real, so we're real. They sack their author (Jim) and tell him to get out. A Twilight Zone ending would be great, and on the verge of nihilism they could make something rather rebellious and uplifting.

Right - it's on. Let's see if they're going to string this out right up to the wire, or if they'll give us any clear confirmation at all.

Be seeing you!

A Little Bit of Politics

I'm not a political animal. I'm interested in politics and I have my own political preference, but like many, I'm reluctant to get too involved, because I've seen too many people get eaten up by frustration and disappointment. Better to stand on the sidelines and offer a critique on the passing parade. So, I'm writing this more as a bookmark, to put together some thoughts this evening.

For the Labour Party to win a third term in office was a historic moment for British politics. The likelihood of them securing a fourth term in 2010 was unlikely at best. More, a Conservative win was pretty much inevitable. But a majority win was not.

Even before the election was announced, most statisticians would have reminded us that massive swings tend not to go beyond about 4%. All of those polls predicting 20-point leads for David Cameron, frankly, might as well have been held in Narnia for their resemblance to reality. If the best the Conservatives could hope for was a 4% swing, the very best they could have hoped for was a hung parliament.

This is what the Liberal Democrats knew, and they knew that whoever secured the bigger share of seats, the centre party would have the casting decision in whether or not they got to govern or not.

We can ignore all of those Tories bleating about Brown not having a moral right to govern in these last few days. He every right to govern, as set out in the constitution. Cameron did not, however, have a right to demand to be given the first opportunity to set in motion a coalition.

Opposition tends not to win elections - the sitting government tends to lose them, and inheriting the damage caused by the Iraq war and the global recession, it was unlikely that Labour's successes in looking after our pensioners would win them many votes. As (of all people) Lembit Opik pointed out today, the Conservatives didn't win this election. In an 800-metre dash, they fell at 700 metres; they got further along than everyone else, but didn't complete the course. it could be argued that many of the new votes they attracted this time were the result of negative voting - people who've had enough of Brown and want to see the back of him, rather than positively voting for Cameron. Likewise, most people in this election voted for someone other than the Conservatives, and many of those votes would have been a negative vote away from the Conservatives rather than specifically a vote for Labour or the Lib Dems.

The Conservatives need to remain humble here. They didn't receive a vote of confidence from the public and they'll need to negotiate at every turn. If they don't, they'll lose the ability to govern at all. Similarly, the Liberal Democrats have secured their greatest opportunity to govern since 1918. I hope they don't waste it by punching above their weight or not picking their battles wisely.

As a Labour voter, obviously I believe Labour are better for people like me and my family. I'm not blind to their faults - I still believe tuition fees to be a betrayal of their core values. But I know many people cannot get past the Iraq issue and it's meaningless to try to debate that, because minds are closed and set, and nothing I might say can open them. The Conservatives also supported the move to war - their track record in both the Falklands and the first Gulf War meant they couldn't very well not support it. At the time, the Lib Dems opposed it, but then it's easy having principals when you'll never have to make the decision yourselves. Now though, they might.

Many people have attacked Nick Clegg for considering an alliance with the Conservatives. Politics isn't about only working with your friends. You have to be able to work with your enemies too.

Believe it or not, I think Clegg's being very brave here. If the Tories are as bad as some of us suspect them of being, with any luck, they'll be restrained to some extent by their their new allies. If they get out of hand, the Lib Dems can pull their support at any point. Whoever's in power, they've got some tough choices to face. Had they won a majority, I suspect we'd have been in a terrifying position as the Tories could have been insufferable and spiteful, as they were post-1979 (if that's not your view of that time, you probably didn't live in Liverpool, Glasgow, Newcastle or any of the mining communities which, for some people, felt like they were being targeted for their opposition to the Tories in the mid-1970s). Now, we might be able to benefit from Conservative economics tempered by liberalism. It's not what I voted for, just as I'm sure it's not what Conservative or Lib Dem voters wanted either. It's what we've got, though, and I'm just hoping that with so many people awakened to politics this year, perhaps this coalition will create a new generation of activists, which should be a good thing.

One thing that I've loved from today though is the generally good natured banter on BBC News. While Sky reveal their true colours with pit-bull after pit-pull losing their cool and revealing their political bias, the BBC approach has been respectful, honest about the confusion and genuinely entertaining. One German journalist was asked how his home country had coped with their own coalition, which had taken 40 days to arrange. Was it, he was asked, a time of panic for Germany? 'No,' he laughed. 'As in your country, Germany's really run by the Civil Service. It made no difference at all.'

- Brown's final speech as PM

- Cameron's first speech as PM

The Lost Hitchcock

The word 'rare' is overused. 'Rare' photographs, 'rare' outtakes'... whenever people talk about archive material, it seems they love it to be akin to a lightly bruised steak.

There can't surely be such a thing as a rare film by the single more famous film-maker ever, but even the silent ones are at least commercially available. Yet, there's one film that, currently, qualified as rare. Waltzes from Vienna was made by Hitchcock under some duress - it really wasn't his kind of picture at all and he later told Francois Truffaut that he made it during his 'lowest ebb'.

When I was commissioned to co-write a book about Hitch, I wanted to make sure that I'd actually seen the films. This might sound obvious, but I know of a couple of authors who've written extensively about material that they'd not bothered to watch, which is why certain errors get passed on from book to book. One film, The Mountain Eagle, is lost - the last remaining print of it disintegrated decades ago (Hitchcock pragmatically didn't seen too upset by this development, describing the film as 'awful').

A trip to the USA gave me the opportunity to pick up almost all of his silent films and a few early talkies, but after five months one film eluded me. Waltzes from Vienna has, to date, never been released commercially and as far as I'm aware has never been shown on television. The only way I could see it was to rent time with a stack of film reels and a moviola.

It's by no means a great Hitchcock film; there are few of the directorial flourishes we associate with him even in this early period. But it's entertaining enough, telling the story of how Strauss the younger finally won the respect and admiration of his father.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, and thanks to various differences in American copyright law, you can actually watch the film at Archive.Org. But if you've managed to collect all of his other works, you'll find a hole where Waltzes from Vienna should be.

Today, I made the first approach to someone who might be in a position to rectify this. Let's see how far this campaign goes.

Revisionism

So, after a conversation with an experienced blogger last night, I've just made a few deletions from this thing. Funnily enough, the entries where I was most open and revealing about my life are the ones that were badly written and completely lacking in any real insight.

So - bye bye bad story about getting drunk and boorish. Bye bye an entry about someone else's embarrassing goodbye email to people she'd worked with for two weeks (cruel to mock and it'd be relatively easy to piece back who I was writing about) and bye bye that one entry that, two years down the line I have no idea what I was on about.

Now... what should I write about today?

Waiting for the Inevitable

Just flicking through the TV channels and caught the episode of tonight's episode of The Bill - 'Suffer in Silence'.

I'm guessing we'll be seeing other episodes over the next few months called 'Prolonging the Agony', 'Treading Water' and 'Someone Remember to Cancel the Milk'.

In other news, my journey home was delayed tonight. The train driver announced: 'Sorry for he delays here this evening, but one of those new trains is further up the track. It's broken down and they're trying to get it into the sidings. Once again, the NEW TRAIN has broken down and we're waiting for it to get out of the way.'

Had the carriage been less congested, I'm sure his mintiness would have been accompanied by a mass raising of handbags. As it was, we all rolled our eyes, clutched the handrail and prayed it wouldn't last much longer.

Oh look - special guest star on The Bill this week is Lee Ross. Looks like his character is a child abuse victim who's suffered in silence for some ti- oh... that might be the meaning of the title.

Suddenly life's that tiny bit less ironic. Damn....

Pertwee Tardis

And a slight reworking of my Hartell Tardis control room sees the addition of a new console for Pertwee.

UNIT Lab!

I always wanted this - a set for my Doctor Who dollies - and what better set than the UNIT lab?

I'd originally wanted to do the lab as it appeared in season eight, but the spiral staircase put me off. That and pressure from my chums made me go for the later lab, as it appeared in season 11. I could have gone for the lab from 'The Three Doctors', but it had too many windows. So I adapted the printouts that my pal Phil had made for his ActionFigureTheatre site to make it look like it did for Pertwee's final year.

Also included in this set are my custom Sarah Jane, in her 'Monster of Peladon' outfit, and my custom Master, in his grey suit and gold tie. You might also be able to make out the welding device from 'Terror of the Autons'. Oh, and the Tardis is a customised moneybox, repainted. That'll be replaced once I get the forthcoming classic Tardis from Character.

More Monsters

I haven't done this for a while, but prompted by Paul Cornell's blog, here's a few more monsters I've made recently.

This one's a Blatherine from The Sarah Jane Adventures, which was a present for the author for the episode that they first appeared in. It's customised from a Slitheen figure, with shorter claws, a remolded face and a paint job.




Next up, a Mutt from the Doctor Who story 'The Mutants' (1972). It's pictured in the UNIT lab set that I made. Ooh, there's a thought - I haven't put any pics of that up. That'll be in the next entry then.




Inspired by the brilliant Babyjelly from OutpostWho / GallifreyBase fame, here's a muto from 'Genesis of the Daleks'.




I decided I wanted to make a Navarino from 'Delta and the Bannermen', and then realised it had to be a present for my pal Neil, who always wanted to write a story called 'The Guns of Navarino'. Next to it are two Haemovores from 'The Curse of Fenric'.





And finally, in my quest to make more and more figures that will probably never be made by Character Options for the official range, here's the Keller Machine from 'The Mind of Evil'. It lights up an' evreefink!

Mystic Pizza

I'm in sunny Pollokshields with my beloved and, after a stress-free journey there yesterday afternoon, I decided we should have pizza for tea, because we'd both been very good and deserved a treat. A new pizzaria called Pizzahub (see what they did there) has a sign on the front saying 'Opening Soon', but not soon enough for us, sadly. So, we went to a multi-cultural venue round the corner, which offers kebabs and pizzas along with its curry selection.

So, I asked what toppings they offered and the man behind the counter said they had a, um, chicken tikka pizza and, er, a minced lamb pizza, and, um, that's it.

'Don't you do anything like a Hawaiian? Y'know, ham and pineapple?'

The man shook his head and looked at me blankly.

Chowing down on the chicken tikka pizza back at the flat 15 minutes later, I asked my other half why they don't do any normal pizzas.

'Well, y'know - ham's not hallal.'

No wonder the man looked at me blankly. Epic cultural fail!

Bye Bye Bill

Another one of those mornings where, having not blogged in ages, three things take my interest at once. This one's a eulogy. Ish.

It's been announced today that ITV has axed The Bill. This comes as no surprise to many of the people who've stuck with it for 27 years, even less to me, who gave up on it about a decade ago. I got tired of the repetitive drug-related storylines, the complete disregard for factual accuracy (no, June Ackland, you can't stay at Sun Hill if you get a promotion!) and - yes - the greater attention given to the private lives of the officers.

The thing is, I used to love the show. Really adore it. In fact, at a Doctor Who convention in 1997, I embarrassed myself in front of Simon Rouse - who'd appeared in the Who story 'Kinda' and still plays DCI Jack Meadows to this day. I went up to him and said, as casually as possible, 'Doctor Who's not my favourite show - it's The Bill'. He said 'Oh', and turned away the way one would when confronted by a six-foot, sweaty-faced loon professing his love for a telly show. Such blasphemy deserved to be treated so. I'm sure it wasn't quite as uncomfortable for him as the scene a few hours later when he tried to disentangle himself from the unwanted attentions of a drunken Patricia Quinn.

When Doctor Who came off the air in 1989, many of my friends jumped onto the nearest sci-fi option to hand. I'm sure this is why Red Dwarf suddenly became such a hit, just as so many people who I know to be lifelong Whoovers began obsessing about Star Trek: The Next Generation or B*byl*n F*v* (it's apparently bad form to mention its name nowadays, but back in the 1990s it was the cause of many a geekgasm). I held out until 1999 when, after Paul McGann failed to excite with the Doctor Who TV movie and the only chance of new Who was a rather excellent spoof by Steven Moffat for Comic Relief, I finally succumbed to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

But in that ten years, holding out for a new Time Lord, I switched my affections to police procedurals. I taped every episode of The Bill when UK Gold began the complete rerun (stopping only when DI Frank Burnside finally left the series) and watched the first three series of Prime Suspect more often than any other Doctor Who except 'The Five Doctors'. Sun Hill became so familiar to me that when I finally moved to London and visited a friend who lived in Brockley, I was thrilled to pass a street corner that I remembered from an episode of The Bill where I'd seen PCs Stamp and Quinnan try to prevent an altercation between an IC1 male and an IC1 female outside of an estate agent.

It was possibly a late bonding exercise between my Dad and me, too. He'd be sat in his chair and we'd settle down to another exciting instalment of live in Sun Hill. We watched London's Burning too, until that also went the way of all good dramas that decide to go sexy. My Dad had been a fireman, so that was interesting to hear him comment on how truthful and accurate those early series had been, but The Bill was better, because they had something other shows didn't have - PJ Hammond.

The creator of Sapphire & Steel somehow switched to writing for The Bill in (I think) the late 1980s and continued to write episodes until the mid-1990s. His always had a macabre or unexpected element, which helped keep The Bill as a fresh anthology series with a regular cast. One episode involved Mr and Mrs Chamberlain, a middle-aged couple who came to Sun Hill station to report a missing girl. Their blonde, busty neighbour's social life had caused the couple some distress in the past, but now they were worried for her, as she'd apparently disappeared. Mr Chamberlain was played by David Ellison, who I recognised as the grumpy PC Beck from Juliet Bravo. It turned out that the reason Mrs Chamberlain had insisted they report the girl as missing was that many years before, she'd suspected her husband, a butcher, of being responsible for the murder of a young woman who he'd grown obsessed by. Recognising the return of his symptoms, she fabricated the missing story to give her enough time to alert the police that something was wrong.

Such a brilliant, grizzly twist.

I rescued a box of tapes from my parents during a recent visit and brought them back to London with me. Almost every episode had someone in that I recognised, playing a guest role, and I still remembered the stories to many of the episodes, so it was strange to see an episode I remembered with a guest star who'd subsequently become famous: a juvenile offender played by Jake Wood, Max Branning in EastEnders; a child abuse victim played by Harry Peacock ('Proper Dave' in the Doctor Who episode 'Silence in the Library') - and his violent father was played by John Leeson, who'd voiced K-9!.

Hearing this morning that The Bill was being culled made me sad, but also relieved. It was like hearing that an old friend who I haven't seen in ages had been suffering from some dreadful illness but had finally died. I'm not sure I'd want to see a friend in pain like that, but I'm also unsure whether I'll be watching The Bill's last episode either. It'll be full of people I don't know, with the odd aged face that I can just recognise used to be familiar. There's only Jack Meadows left now. If he lasts to the end, maybe I could somehow try to tell him again that I used to love that show he was in, love it even more than Doctor Who.

Nah, I think that'd just end up being embarrassing for both of us. Better to just slip off quietly, so no-one knows I'd ever been there.

Space on a Budget

Another link shared to me by Rob, this is a much happier story. How an amateur photographer took photos of near-space on a budget.

Vatican Drops Ball, Journalist Runs With It.

Thanks to Rob of Whispers and Moans for this.

At the risk of sounding like the Express, I stopped reading newspapers when the 'Princess of Hearts' Diana died, sicked my the sanctimonious muck-raking from people who I've seen participating in the same actions they condemn others for. I've experienced the bile of a Sun journalist destroying someone's career with one hand while using class-A drugs with the other. (A friend of a friend of a friend - story for another time).

I saw the Jan Moir thing about Stephen Gately's tragic death from afar, but as with all those people who didn't actually hear Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand's show, I still felt I had the right to complain about Moir's behaviour after the fact. Likewise, I'm not a football fan by any means, but the joint behaviour of the Evening Standard and the Sun over Hillsborough has made me boycott those papers ever since. Even now the Standard is free, I refuse to take a copy from the station vendors, and the same goes for our 'complimentary' copy of the Hate-Mail that our local supermarket forces upon us with home deliveries. (Each time we say 'No thanks, take it back', the delivery guy smiles and says 'They all do that round here.')

So, the Times has announced that from this June, they'll be charging for access to their site. In a climate where advertisers need all the exposure they can get, I can't help thinking this is a shot in the foot for the Times, but then cleverer people than me have discussed this at length and I'm not going down that root.

No - far better to point at something the Times has inadvertently done today while reporting the news that the Vatican has once again actively hushed up a sex scandal and accused the media of starting it. This might define ambivalence - the Catholic Church attacking tabloids. Hmm... who's best? There's only one way to find out, etc.

Anyway, the journalist reporting this has a long history of quality journalism and I'm sure it didn't strike anyone as inappropriate for his name to appear at the top of this article, but... well, it's unfortunate, isn't it.

The Thick of It

My flatmate and I were writing comedy sketches last night, into the early hours of the morning, fuelled by vodka. I dread to think what our neighbours thought of any phrases they might have heard coming from my mouth in the wee small hours, but I can say firstly that my Malcolm Tucker impression's coming on okay, and secondly that I might be in danger of destroying Steven Moffat's reputation within the fandom elite in the same way some fans now view the Sarah Jane Adventures episode where she bodyswaps and hear my 'Smeagol / Gollum' impression of her.

Oops.

Consequently - first hangover in ages this morning. When I fall off the wagon, I thud on the ground.

In other news, I've almost learned how to make home-made rice pudding. In that I've narrowed it down by twice learning how not to do it. If only that bloody rice would soften more. I think my flatmate's right - I need different rice.

Holidayyy (Ooh yeah!)

It's been very busy at work these last few months, and with research taking place on about eight projects at once I've just not felt chatty enough to come up with a new blog entry. Even Facebook has spent literally weeks with the same status updates from me. Shameful.

I worked through most of Christmas, with just three days off over all, so today marks the beginning of my longest stint of holiday in quite some time. So of course I couldn't sleep last night and I've woken up grumpy. SO it's really cheered me up to read that Big Finish has won the license to resurrect the Short Trips short stories as audiobooks.

Like Simon, I owe a good amount to Big Finish for giving me the chance to write short stories and giving me some excellent advise. Unlike Simon, I've not made the time to capitalise upon that and write more, which I'd like to fix.

My other half and I have been working on a short story just for the fun of it since the submission slot for their final book closed. But shhh... no spoilers just yet.