Doctor Who
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In the UK: Monday 6th July, 9pm, BBC1. Parts 2-5 airing Tuesday-Friday
In the US: Monday 20th July, 9/8c, BBC America. Parts 2-5 airing 21st-24th
You know Apple, right? Makes iPods.
Well, it was set up by a guy called Steve Jobs. You know him, right? He has a reality distortion field.
Anyway, he got thrown out – and the whole company fell apart. When he came back, it suddenly became great again. Insanely great.
All of Apple’s intervening bosses said more or less the same thing: Apple has Steve Jobs’ DNA. Only Steve Jobs can run it.
I’m beginning to wonder if Russell T Davies is the Steve Jobs of Torchwood. He created it. It’s his baby. He wrote the first ever episode, which was really very promising. Since then, he’s had minimal input and it’s range from absolutely horrifically bad to not bad but still not great.
However, has it ever quite achieved the heights we thought it could achieve?
No.
Essentially, it’s an embodiment of all his obsessions and interests: sci-fi, soapy relationships, sexuality, Welshness, action and Doctor Who. Who else could ever work with those themes as well as he can?
Well, guess what? After moving from BBC3 to BBC2 and now to BBC1, Torchwood once again has Russell T Davies in charge for a five-part, nightly mini-series called Children of Earth. I won’t pretend episode one was an absolute classic of television, but it really was pretty good.
See what I mean? He’ll be creating the TorchPod before you know it.
Continue reading “Review: Torchwood – Children of Earth – Part 1”
Today’s Joanna Page was going to be Radio 4’s Dickens piss-take, Bleak Expectations:
The plot revolves around Philip “Pip” Bin and his two sisters, Poppy and Pippa, whose seemingly ideal life is disrupted by the death of their father and the madness of their mother. They are then locked away by their guardian, Mr. Gently Benevolent, in St. Bastard’s, the most vicious boarding school in England, and St. Bitch’s, a nearby convent. Pip and his sisters attempt to free themselves of their guardian with the help of Harry Biscuit, whose father invented the biscuit.
I knew she was in it: her IMDB page says she is* and IMDB would never lie, would it?
I listened to the whole first series, trying to work out which character she might be. It’s actually pretty good if you know Dickens even vaguely, although it does remind me of all those skits you used to write in sixth form where you’d play on words, looking for a silly alternative meaning to every line and then running with the sillier meaning. But it’s very funny all the same, and Anthony Head’s great as the evil Mr Benevolent. I’ll probably scout out the second series when I can, and a third series has just been recorded.
Anyway, for a second, I thought she might be Flora Dies-Early, a pastiche of David Copperfield‘s Dora Spenlow, whom she played in the most recent BBC1 adaptation. But she wasn’t.
Was IMDB mistaken? Surely not. So I investigated further…
I remembered what one* was I going to do last week: I can’t imagine why it slipped out of my mind.
It was, of course, Help!… It’s the Hair Bear Bunch!
Possessing one of the longest, oddest names of any TV programme, Help!… It’s the Hair Bear Bunch! was a show of its times – the swinging, free love, hippies and playboys 70s. Produced by Hanna-Barbera in 1971, it featured three bears who live in a zoo: the giant-afroed Hair Bear, Square Bear and Bubi Bear. However, unbeknownst to the zoo keeper, their cave is really a convertible bachelor pad, and the pacifist sleuth of bears spends all its time trying to escape from the zoo to get to parties. This they do with the aid of their invisible motorcycle.
Huh. How 70s is that.
It got cancelled pretty quickly and obviously hasn’t lasted, being so much a product of its time. It probably only lingers on as a memory for anyone who watched Multi-Coloured Swap Shop on Saturday mornings in the UK.
Anyway, here are the titles. The theme’s pretty catchy though.
* By which I mean ‘old title sequence that probably isn’t that weird but which makes Rob a little bit nostalgic’. I know what I’m doing next week, too. How’s that for planning?
Doctor Who
Film
British TV
US TV
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