Wednesday’s question-answering news

5 March 2008 Rob Buckley 8 Comments

Doctor Who

Film

Commercials

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US TV

Audio and radio play reviews

Review: Doctor Who – Max Warp

4 March 2008 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Max Warp It’s a cracking show, looking at the latest, fastest, sleekest models. There’s three guys who present it: an old, politically incorrect guy who’s well known for his outspoken nature and his support of the armed forces; there’s the younger, cooler one, named after a a furry rodent; and there’s the older, duller mechanical spod who likes talking about mechanics.

It’s all going so well right up until that young cool one goes and crashes an experimental vehicle and dies.

Hang on. Dies? That can’t be right.

Did you think I was talking about Top Gear?

No, of course you didn’t. I wrote Doctor Who at the top for one thing. No, this is the spaceship show ‘Max Warp’, starring the vocal talents of Graeme Garden, James Fleet and Duncan James (who used to be a pop star or something). And you can hear it in the latest, and possibly the most tasteless Big Finish Doctor Who play so far.

Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – Max Warp”

Tuesday’s early renewals news

4 March 2008 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

Film

British TV

US TV

How do you help someone catch up with Lost?

3 March 2008 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

Lost is now up to its fourth season. It’s actually a very good season, so far, and the flash-forwards/time travelling/boaties are working very nicely so far. In fact, I reckon it’s probably the best season of them all.

So the question is, given it’s good now, how do you help people catch up with a show like Lost? There have been getting on for 60-70 episodes, I reckon (without any research). That’s a lot of days of TV viewing for anyone to watch every single episode so far.

Do you just show the curious all the episodes and hope they have the time? Do you get them to rent the box sets one at a time until they’ve caught up? Can they skip seasons – is season two relatively missable, given that all the new characters introduced are dead now (more or less)? Or is there a cheat sheet of redundant episodes somewhere that have unimportant flashbacks and mere padding?

The trouble is what’s padding to one person is glorious happiness to another – after all, the “Nikki and Paolo get buried” episode looks like padding at first, but it explains a lot in retrospect and is wonderfully dark yet silly (Billy Dee Williams!).

Any ideas? Or should the uninitiated simply have put the time in when it was all the craze?

The new reviews A-Z

3 March 2008 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

Well, the blog’s been going for a few years (two and a half) now and since a good proportion of it has been reviews, I’ve built up a fair old count: about 500, give or take, including third-episode verdicts, et al.

This can make it a little harder for y’all to find things than I’d like. After all, I do preview and review many new US shows quite some time before they make it across the pond: Dexter, season one, started last Wednesday on ITV1 (it’s already been on FX), a bit over a year after it aired in the US; and Mad Men started on BBC4 last night, six months after it first aired overseas.

There’s the complete archive, the search engine and tagging here, of course. But even if the show’s virile enough to have merited a tag, quite a few articles can get tagged relatively quickly (Dexter‘s chalked up 30 so far, while Mad Men’s chalked up 13), which makes finding the review a bit of a chore.

There have been complaints.

So, after building a rudimentary lathe and after an hour or so of clanging round the back, I’ve put together the Reviews A-Z, a simple index of all the reviews and (almost) nothing but reviews, sorted by title in alphabetical order.

It seems to work all right, although it does make me wish I’d been a bit more rigourous in my naming conventions, a whole lot sooner, but it should be of help. You can always find it at the bottom of the reviews list in the ‘Reviews’ tab to the right – yes, the grey bit under the “Featured Articles” bit and above the “Recent Videos”.

Let me know if you find any problems, or if you hate it. Or if you can’t find it. Oops.