Year: 2010

Caitlin Moran interviews Julie Gardner and Russell T Davies for BAFTA

13 January 2010 Rob Buckley Post a comment

The YouTube one is unembeddable, but BAFTA itself has a nice vid of the recent event where Caitlin Moran of The Times interviewed Russell T Davies and Julie Gardner about Doctor Who. It’s 25 minutes so go make yourself a nice cup of tea first. BAFTA also has some other vids as well, if you’re interested, so click through to them if you have any more time after that.

UPDATE: BAFTA tell me they’re going to take down the embedded version soon, so watch it here before it disappears, or watch it on their web site when it does.

UPDATE 2: BAFTA now tells me their one’s going to stop working, but the YouTube one is now embeddable, so I’ve embedded that instead.

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Competitions

Competition and Review: Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale – The Final Chapter

13 January 2010 Rob Buckley 27 Comments

Doctor Who - The Writer's Tale: The Final ChapterAuthors: Russell T Davies, Benjamin Cook
Price: £16.99 (Amazon price: £11.04)
ISBN: 978-1-846-07861-3
Pages: 704
Publisher: BBC Books
Published: January 14th (that’s tomorrow, baby)

Writing’s not easy. It’s very hard. Ask a writer. Go on. Any writer. They’ll tell you about it at length. Really quite absurd length.

Journalist Benjamin Cook asked Russell T Davies how hard writing is, some time just before the launch of the third series of Doctor Who in February 2007, and the resulting email and text correspondence lasted, well, years. But in a radical move, Cook and Davies decided to turn all that correspondence into a book, and thus Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale was born.

Since then, Russell T Davies has continued to tell Benjamin Cook just how hard writing is, and the additional 300 pages or so of correspondence have been collected together and added to the original book to produce Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale – The Final Chapter. This not only continues Davies’ insights into writing for Doctor Who, as well as Torchwood, The Sarah Jane Adventures and indeed television in general, but also looks at the politics of television, the nature of television production, how PR and the press work, and more.

And if you keep reading this exciting review, you’ll be able to win a copy of it. How’s that for fun?

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Question of the week: what are the merits of sadness in drama?

13 January 2010 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

As Sally Sparrow once said, “Sad is happy for deep people.” And indeed, there have been a whole load of miserable plays, TV programmes, films et al designed for smart people: I love Se7en (as a quote in the introduction to the BFI book on the movie says – or was it one of the special edition DVD commentaries? – “Of course I love Se7en – I’m an intellectual”), for example, and Callan and The Sandbaggers are so brilliant because they’re so bleak. Think of Turn Left and Midnight in the latest series of Doctor Who, as well as the fate of Donna in Journey’s End: better for bleak, no?

Over the last year, though, there’s been an increase in sad TV programmes on the Beeb: Wallander, The Day of the Triffids, Survivors, Paradox, Criminal Justice et al have all been deeply miserable. As Paradox shows, being miserable doesn’t mean being good, but does it help – the bleaker moments of Paradox were its best bits.

So today’s question (in parts) is:

Does being depressed, sad or miserable increase the chances of a show being good? Is sad happy for deep people? Are TV shows getting more depressing of late (thanks to the recession maybe?) And do you like watching sad shows?

As always, leave a comment with your answer or a link to your answer on your own blog.

OMG – new The Wire clips I haven’t seen – and they’re prequels!

13 January 2010 Rob Buckley Post a comment

OMG! Actual bits of The Wire I haven’t seen! These are all prequels that I think HBO put on its web site before the fifth season or stuck on a DVD or something, so some of you might have seen them already. But it’s actual The Wire footage I haven’t seen. I’d forgotten how joyous that felt.

Before the jump, when McNulty met Bunk for the first time. After the jump, it’s Young Omar and Prop Joe.

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