UK TV

An archive of blog entries about UK TV programmes and production.

Events

Doctor Who Exhibition fun

17 July 2006 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

I spent the weekend in Cardiff, which was very nice and very sunny, despite the usual Welsh weather. Cardiff, of course, is where Doctor Who is filmed, so the challenge was to avoid anything Doctor Who related. This was easier said than done.

I could brave the posters, the banners, the fliers and the leaflets. I could survive my wife’s repeated hints (“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to see the Doctor Who exhibition?” “Yes!” “You know you want to…” “Can we not see the birds at the wetlands reserve instead?” “It’s Doctor Who…” And so on.). But then the mother-in-law turned up and I was out-numbered (“We’re just going off this way. If you’d like to come with us…”). So we went to the exhibition.

It’s not bad actually. It’s just a couple of rooms really, but only costs £4 per adult and there’s plenty of props from the new series, as well as a few props from the classic series that are starting to look a bit droopy. There’s plenty of buttons to push, behind-the-scenes facts, Doctor Who background information and a shop for buying tatt. Plus, of course, there’s a shrine to RTD.

Here’s a few pics from the exhibition (incidentally, a piece of advice: if you drop your camera on the floor and break the zoom on your lens, don’t try and brave your way through it. It’s time to buy a new camera)

Continue reading “Doctor Who Exhibition fun”

Watch some shows for free over on Sci Fi Pulse: Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place, The Amazing Screw-On Head

14 July 2006 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

US cable network The Sci Fi Channel is giving us all (for some reason, they haven’t banned British viewers like they normally do) the chance to watch a couple of TV shows streamed over the Internet in not very high quality. Hoozah.

The first is Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place, a Channel 4 series that starred Richard Ayoade of The IT Crowd among others. It’s a parody of just about every 80s sci-fi/horror anthology series and serial going, with references to The Twilight Zone and The Ray Bradbury Theater in the opening titles alone, although the likes of Stephen King and Shaun Hutson are the main victims.

It’s not actually very funny though. It’s like something a bunch of students put together to show how clever they are (I, erm, wrote similar things when I was 16…): yes, you can see exactly what they’re satirising, but it doesn’t make you laugh, only go “Oh yes. Very clever.”

Also appearing in stream-o-vision is The Amazing Screw-on Head, a pilot for a new animated series based on a comic book of the same name. Not too great either, but you can vote on it at the end to decide whether it should be made into a series.

While you’re about it, if you decide to watch anything on the site, you’ll get the SciFi video player and be able to watch interviews with the Doctor Who team. It has Eccles-cake in full humourless mode, sucking the fun and joy out of the atmosphere. But it’ll make you all nostalgic for 2005.

UK TV

The changing naming conventions of kids TV

13 July 2006 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Shuriken SchoolRemember Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Well, they’ve been making a comeback recently so the answer to that is probably “yes”. But they first appeared during the 80s in a comic and then later a cartoon series. Back then, the idea of a cartoon series with the word ‘Ninja’ in the title was so upsetting to the BBC, they forced the series’ makers to rename it Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles.

Times have moved on. I was looking through the schedules yesterday and came across Shuriken School over on children’s ITV. It’s a cartoon series about a ninja training school, it turns out.

For the unenlightened, a shuriken is one of those ninja throwing star things*. And the Beeb was worried about the word ‘ninja’? What next? Uzi School? Two-by-four-with-a-rusty-nail-in-it school?

I’m not that fussed. I’m just amused by the change in standards…

* Okay, there are other kinds of shuriken, too, not just the star-shaped ones. But how do I know what a shuriken is? My first encounter with these lovely things was back in 1985, form 2(iii). I was walking along merrily when my spidey sense started to tingle. I stopped and a second later a razor-sharp metal star embedded itself in the wooden door about six inches in front of me. It was Steven King’s (not Stephen King the author, but Steven King) shuriken – he was practising his throwing technique and hadn’t noticed me, he claimed. Hmmm. He also carried a box of home-made HNTD explosive around with him, and stashed wooden nunchaku in his school bag. Ah, we had happy times growing up in SE London…