Month: July 2009

Sitting Tennant

Friday’s Sitting Tennant (from Jaradel)

31 July 2009 Rob Buckley 14 Comments

Jaradel's Sitting Tennant

Well, this is it. The last captionable Sitting Tennant before I head off on holiday for a fortnight. Fingers crossed, I won’t get caught up too much in things on Monday, and I’ll be able to leave you some more pictures to keep you going over the break.

But since I won’t be there to judge any more captions, this will be the one you all get to stare at and write about until I’m back. It’s been provided by Jaradel and is probably from Secret Smile, but I’m not exactly sure.

  1. Rullsenberg: 44.5
  2. Sister Chastity: 41.5
  3. Jaradel: 31.5
  4. Rosby: 2.5
  5. Amy: 2
  6. Toby: 1.5
  7. Persephone, Sabine: 1

Meanwhile, over in witty captions, we have a first, with Marie and Rullsenberg working in sisterly cooperation on the Sitting Tennant collective farm to fashion a joint caption together. So they both get 10 points.

PS: I own the Great Blonde Elevator. Persephone’s collected DT for her own Elevator Without Theme. He does not have his own elevator. Those are the ground-rules.

  1. Marie: 152.5
  2. Toby: 141.5
  3. Rullsenberg: 102
  4. Jane Henry: 70.5
  5. Persephone: 45.5
  6. Jaradel: 38.5
  7. Electric Dragon: 31
  8. Rev/Views: 25
  9. Scott 2: 14
  10. Joe, Sister Chastity: 10
  11. Scott: 3
  12. Aaron: 2
  13. almostwitty.com: 1
  14. Stu_N: 1

Remember, you can submit as many captions as you like for today’s picture, with the wittiest getting 10 points next Friday.

Got a picture of David Tennant sitting, lying down or in some indeterminate state in between? Then leave a link to it below or email me and if it’s judged suitable, it will appear in the “Sitting Tennant” gallery.

Every photo displayed on Monday (one per person who sends one in) gets a point, with a bonus point if it’s from the latest DT production; the best pic in the stash each week will appear on Friday and get three points.

You can also enter the witty and amusing captions league table by commenting on Friday’s Sitting Tennant photo, the best caption getting 10 points.

Audio and radio play reviews

Review: The Companion Chronicles 3×12 – The Stealers From Saiph

31 July 2009 Rob Buckley Post a comment

The Stealers from SaiphMaybe I was a bit hasty in my declaration last review that the Companion Chronicles might be a better range than the Doctor Who range. For one thing, I keep forgetting about the fourth Doctor stories.

The Stealers from Saiph is by Nigel Robinson, one time doyen of the 80s Who books, but who hasn’t touched Who in over a decade. This is his first audio play, and it features Mary Tamm – by herself, rather than with another actor, in a break with Companion Chronicles tradition.

Tamm, of course, plays Romana I – not the alternative version from the Big Finish Gallifrey series but the Romana of the Key To Time season. This is the first problem: what happens if you’re going to try to write authentically to a particular time period of the show and you find yourself picking a sh*t one? Do you have to write badly, too?

The second is that Robinson has written the whole thing as a novella. In other words, Tamm is reading it out to us.

Drama? Who needs it?

Continue reading “Review: The Companion Chronicles 3×12 – The Stealers From Saiph”

What have you been watching this week (w/e 31st July)

31 July 2009 Rob Buckley 7 Comments

Your chance to recommend some TV shows you might have watched this week, so others can enjoy them, too.

  • Dragons’ Den weirdly featured Robin of Sherwood‘s Sheriff of Nottingham, Nickolas Grace, looking for some cash to direct some musicals. He didn’t get it.
  • Top Gear was a bit dull, but James May driving around in an old Citroën with Madison Welch was classic stuff.
  • I’ve carried on watching 10 Things I Hate About You, which is entertaining enough still, even if it’s not a patch on the original. I quite like where they’re going with Kat/Patrick, but Cameron/Bianca is just retarded.
  • I’m watching last night’s Burn Notice at lunch time, but last week’s was probably the worst of the season so far, with its “return to formula” that I hoped we’d dispensed with already.
  • Royal Pains was interesting mainly for Tony Shalhoub making an appearance as a slightly OCD software developer, and for the ongoing Hank/Jill storyline; otherwise, it was an average episode.
  • I thought Leverage this week was only okay: the continuing descent of the gang into “not very good” territory, with their scheme being rumbled again and Christian Kane getting slapped around a bit, is all a bit disheartening. They’re supposed to be good at this in an unbelievable kind of way. Adding reality in doesn’t make it better, only not as unique.
  • New Channel 4 arrival How The Other Half Live, in which rich people get to meet poor people and feel a bit guilty, felt somewhat superfluous – the rich people could have easily done all of their charitable work without TV cameras and there was nothing really new shown in the lives of either group that would have surprised most people too much.
  • BBC4 is of course showing the straight-to-DVD Wallander series from Sweden. They’re not based on Mankell’s novels, so I’m still none the wiser about whether those are any good (I feel Ken B’s version probably diverges from them too much). But this week’s was probably the best of the series so far – very bleak and upsetting. It does, however, feel a bit like a Swedish version of A Mind To Kill, rather than anything too groundbreaking.
  • You Have Been Watching continues to be funny, although not as side-splitting as you might hope, and I’m really starting to like Josie Long. Surprising how many of the assembled comedians came down against The Swan in favour of feminism, too. That’s heartening.
  • I also caught the final episode of Valentine, which has one of those game-changing cliffhanger endings that makes you wish for more (albeit without Jaime Murray and the whole matchmaking thing), but can’t because the show’s been cancelled. Interesting to see the arrival of the Egyptian gods in the show. Oh well. Nothing to be done there.
  • We’re up to episode four now of Caerdydd. Definitely not liking the new Jaimie and Emyr’s gone all weird. And since when has Peter been Peter Sellers in Being There, like some spiritual gardening guru? And that singer so does not need more practice at Welsh, the liar.
  • And, of course, The Daily Show carries on. Does anyone else forward wind through the correspondents’ pieces?
  • Queued up in my pile to watch is Breaking The Mould – did anyone watch this? Should I bother?

As always, no spoilers unless you’re going to use the <spoiler> </spoiler> tags, please

Friday’s renewals news

31 July 2009 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

The Daily News will return some time in August!

Doctor Who

Film

Theatre

British TV

US TV

The CarusometerA Carusometer rating of 3

Third-episode verdict: Dark Blue

30 July 2009 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Dark Blue, the TNT show doing its level best to be dark and gritty but hobbled by being a Jerry Bruckheimer production, has now made it to its third episode so time to pass verdict.

On the whole, it’s pretty much the same as it was before. Perhaps a little more coherent compared to the first episode and obviously not trying as hard, but more or less the same. 

In fact, the set-up has become marginally less interesting, now the question of whether Logan Marshall-Green (unrecognisable compared with his Traveler character) has switched sides has been answered. Each episode seems to revolve around the cops having to prove they’re crims – usually something that involves knowing some useless fact about some other crim – things going badly wrong, and some crap plan being devised at the last minute to make it all turn out right, usually with Dylan McDermott swirling around in his raincoat.

Episode two did try to alter the formula, in which our goodies do nothing too bad and only pretend to, by having them trying to sell drugs to get $100,000 for an arms deal after one of the twatty undercover operatives decided to go home for his wife’s birthday (as you do). But again, nothing too bad happened, no one did anything too awful, and frankly, they all should have been rumbled within the first few seconds of the episode.

Episode three was a marked improvement, however, with our heroes finally doing things perhaps they shouldn’t have done, misusing witnesses and getting good people killed as a result. This is probably the ‘dark’ in the title that they’ve been searching for for a while. If it carries on in this vein, it might be tolerable.

There are two big problems with the show: Dylan McDermott, with his fluffy hair, who undermines any attempt by the rest of the cast to look street or to be able to masquerade as undercover cops; and the lack of real edge. It’s just so Bruckheimer that you know this is as close to reality as Spooks or 24. The undercover cops all hang out together, they take about ten seconds to set up their fake identities each week, and the baddies never shoot first and ask questions later. Frankly, you long for the days of Miami Vice and Don Johnson, just to show them vaguely what having an undercover identity might be like. Which should show you how far off Dark Blue is.

It’s just about worth watching for Logan Marshall-Green, who shows the others how it should be done, but other than that, there’s not much to redeem the show and make it something you’d want to stick with.

Carusometer rating: 3
Rob’s prediction: Will probably last about a season at most