Kneale Before Nigel

The Quatermass Memoirs

The Quatermass MemoirsI don’t know if you’ve ever done jury service or not. But if you haven’t, you may – or may not – be delighted to hear there’s often plenty of waiting around involved.

It’s up to you what you do with your time, of course. You can read, which will at least enable you to hear the tannoy system telling you where to go to ruin someone’s life. But unless you bring your own books, you’ll be reduced to reading whatever some kind person’s left behind.

Plus somehow, when you’ve just helped send someone down for eight years and everyone on the jury is having to eat massive amounts of chocolate to keep their blood sugar levels up from the shock of all the horrible things they’ve heard, you’re often just not in the mood to read anything too taxing.

You could, if you wanted to, blog. Judging by the GPRS charges on my Virgin bill for this month, this is a bad idea that will clearly bankrupt you.

So audio books are where it’s at. Now you won’t have time to get through all of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (I’m on hour 18 of 34), but something relatively light like a Big Finish play is just what the Doctor ordered.

Unfortunately, I’d listened to all mine already. So instead, I chose to listen to a little known oddity: The Quatermass Memoirs.

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Thursday’s news

Doctor Who

  • Chats (probably nicked from press release archives, cos it’s The Metro) with former Who guest stars.
  • John Barrowman talks about series three of Doctor Who and series two of Torchwood. He’d like the latter to be more adult.
  • David Tennant talks about series three, too.
  • Derek Jacobi is to appear as “The Professor” in the third series of Who, too. Horrible flashbacks to Ace. Urk.
  • I’ve found the Ainsley to my Nigella. I said Immortal Beloved was 25% State of Decay, 25% Mawdryn Undead, 50% The Romans. Someone else argues it’s more a mix of State of Decay, Mindwarp and The Savages. Ooh, flavoursome.
  • David Tennant is 13th on a list by New Woman of the world’s sexiest men.

Media journalism

Music

British TV

US TV

Review: Doctor Who – Immortal Beloved

Immortal BelovedIf you’ve been a Doctor Who fan for long enough, you’re probably a bit of a Nigella by now. Take any new Doctor Who story and in an instant you can come up with the recipe used to make it.

Immortal Beloved‘s quite an easy one:

  • 25% Mawdryn Undead
  • 25% State of Decay
  • 50% The Romans.

Ta da!

Are you impressed? Thought not.

Anyway, despite being relatively easy to pin down, Immortal Beloved‘s a reasonable addition to the new BBC7 range of eighth Doctor stories. Better than Horror of Glam Rock, not as good as Blood of the Daleks, it still has some interesting, slightly sicko ideas and some good performances. Apart from son of Who’s, that is, but we’ll get onto that later.

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The weekend’s news

Honey to the Bee

Doctor Who

Film

  • The Mummy 3 is coming packed with spoilers.

British TV

US TV

Review: Doctor Who – Horror of Glam Rock

The Horror of Glam Rock

Well, we’re between cases so I’m using my pre-afternoon break to blog. If I don’t do it now, I never will and there’s no point starting on a whole article just yet. So here we go: Horror of Glam Rock, the second of the Big Finish plays for BBC7.

In contrast to the first story, the grim Blood of the Daleks, HoGR is a relatively jolly piece filled with guest stars previous Big Finish plays could only dream of. While not as good as its predecessor, it’s certainly not the epic disaster it could have been and is actually pretty entertaining.

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