Sitting Tennant

Today’s Sitting Tennant (from Toby): Attack of the Gratske

29 July 2008 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Attack of the Gratske

Today’s Sitting Tennant, is a little bit wibbly wobbly, but given it’s from an interactive web game, that’s not Toby’s fault. Yes, it’s David Tennant sitting down on an actual chair in Attack of the Gratske. No fudging the definitions here.

The current form card puts Rosby in the lead with five entries, Persephone at four. Poly with three and a half, Toby on three entries and Scott on two entries.

After the massive splurge of creativity that the last Sitting Tennant produced, the witty and amusing captions league table is looking very different. Toby is now top with six captions to his name, Marie is now second-equal with Persephone with five captions each, Rullsenberg and Electric Dragon both have three captions to their names and Poly and Stu_N are on one each.

Will this one inspire as much as the previous one did? Let’s wait and see.

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

Tuesday’s W news

29 July 2008 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

Doctor Who

  • BBC America buys the third series of Torchwood. Plus a few hints of what will happen

Film

British TV

US TV

The CarusometerA Carusometer rating of 2

Third-episode verdict: Flashpoint

28 July 2008 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

So we’re three episodes into Flashpoint, the Canadian-US co-production that doesn’t like to mention the word Canadian. It’s a sort of SWAT procedural for hostage situations, but without the omnipresent firepower and machismo you might expect of a US show.

Anyway, we’re three episodes in and not much has changed and a formula is emerging. We open with the hostage situation. We backtrack a bit to see how it all started. Then we see how the situation is resolved.

And that’s pretty much it. Everything’s a bit angsty, as the terrible toll of having to shoot people every other week gets to the tough but sensitive cops. We have a bit of banter, a bit of character background every week. And we definitely don’t ever mention that we’re Canadian and work in Toronto. Oh no. That would never do.

Although it’s reasonably well made with decent scripts, there’s nothing too special going on. At the moment, it’s interesting if you’re into SWAT tactics and procedures with the minimum amount of hyperbole and exaggeration necessary in a TV show. But even that’s likely to wane after a while if nothing changes, dramatically. Fingers crossed for future interest.

September at the BFI

28 July 2008 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Time for our regular round-up of tele events at the BFI. Despite the presence of a “Time Machine” season in September, there’s not really anything timey-wimey. However, we do have the following:

13th/14th: Classic children’s TV, including Noggin the Nog, The Clangers, Bagpuss and Mr Benn

25th: Nigel Kneale and Rudolph Cartier’s BBC adaptation of 1984

Tr2n trailer

28 July 2008 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Tron was one of those ground-breaking movies of the early 80s (cf Blade Runner, The Terminator) that naturally did very poorly at the box office but found its audience when the home video and cable markets exploded.

At first, no one understood it, computers were still baffling and alien to most people and so everyone ignored it on first release.

A Disney movie, it got lost down the side of the sofa by the company whenever the embarrassment about its costs compared with its audience got too much for Mickey’s friends – they never like to admit to anything as un-Disney as failure.

Featuring Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner, Tron was set in the real world but also inside a computer, as hacker Bridges gets ‘digitised’ by a rampaging artificial intelligence and forced to fight for his life against other computer programs. The most famous of these went on to launch dozens of imitator real-world games – in particular, the light cycle game.

The film featured groundbreaking computer graphics – which ironically eliminated it from winning any special effects awards, since that was regarded as cheating in the early 80s. But as computers became familiar and omnipresent, so people started to ‘get’ Tron.

Anyway, Disney, mindful that Tron went on to inspire a generation of computer programmers, has finally got round to producing a sequel, starring Jeff Bridges. Footage was shown at a panel at this year’s Comic-Con and here, live from someone’s camera phone, is Tr2n.