fanboygeeks

RTD is going, Tennant to follow...?

Ever felt a pang of guilt when something happens that you've been hoping for?

Russell T. Davies is stepping down as lead writer of Doctor Who after his four specials next year, and Steven Moffat is taking over the róle for a new series in Spring 2010.

Fantastic.  I couldn't have hoped for a better result to my post last week! (Because it was obviously down to me...).

Here's what no-one else has thought of, though...

This means that David Tennant must be stepping down too.  Do the math.

• Tennant will be filming this year's Christmas Special now, then from July to November he's playing Hamlet at the RSC.
• He'll be filming the four Specials from Jan 2009 (ie four double length episodes, the equivalent of eight episodes).
• Moffat's first season is due to start Spring 2010, thus filming will have to start in the summer of 2009.

Unless Tennant plans to be filming Who for the entirety of  2009, he's not going to be The Doctor in Moffat's series (unless there's a mid-season handover...).

The new Doctor speculation starts here.

FanboyGeek Keir suggests Julian Rhind-Tutt.  I think he ticks all the right boxes...

Stu ;-)

Not that I had high hopes...

A very highly placed inside source told me that he thought the pilot script was "crap" quite some time ago, and he told me that he'd told David E. Kelley so.  He'd hoped they'd have done something a bit different with the idea.

Well, I don't know if the script has been re-written, or if it now has his seal of approval, but the trailer for the US version of "Life on Mars" didn't exactly get my spine tingling, and ABC have now pressed ahead with a series commission.

ABC appear to have turned a quirky (and very British) programme into something that looks rather bland.  Instead of standing out from the crowd saying "this is going to be a bit different" it just looks like another Journeyman, or Day Break (and we know what happened to them) or any other procedural on TV (but a bit more orange).

Will all the characters smoke?  Remember Fitz, the American version of Cracker?  Robert Pastorelli as the titular character never lit a cigarette once in any of the 16 episodes.  Will the characters swear (on ABC?!), and will any of the 1972 characters display the sexism and rascism they did in the British original?

And, where is the David Bowie music? (Life on Mars - it was playing on the radio when lead character Sam Tyler was run over, geddit?).  Oh, and why is it 1972 in the States when it was 1973 over here?

Ashes to Ashes, which was basically series 3 of the British version of Life on Mars had a problem when it placed itself in the 1980s, because there wasn't really a strong cultural template for what a 1980s police show was - unlike in the 1970s where The Sweeney defined it.  Instead it had to borrow from Miami Vice, leading to a quite out-of-place speedboat chase in episode 1.

America certainly had Starsky and Hutch, but that didn't actually start until 1975, so a bit of retconning may be required.  It'll take more than just putting Sam into a brown leather jacket with big lapels to lend it authenticity.

I'm a huge fan of Kelley's returning series Boston Legal and the safe hands of Aaron Sorkin's buddy Thomas Schlamme directed the US Mars' pilot so I'll give it a chance, but as with Coupling and Men Behaving Badly, mainstream American TV needs to learn that if a programme is good because of it's risquéness, grit and rough edges, remaking it won't work if you take these elements out.

Stu ;-)

If you ever doubted that Bill O'Reilly is the devil

I spotted this clip on Joe Bua's essential I Am A TV Junkie blog in which Fox News attack dog Bill O'Reilly utterly loses the plot when recording the closing for the Inside Edition show.

Maybe Bill caught a reflection of his ridiculous syrup in the teleprompter, or maybe he was momentarily distracted as he imagined  the time in the future when he'd claim that he won a prestigious Peabody Award - when in actual fact the show would win a rather less prestigious Polk - years after he'd left....

Stu ;-)

Why is New Doctor Who a bit pants?

Don't get me wrong, there are few people living or dead that *love* Doctor Who more than me.  And, in the New-Who canon, episodes such as "Dalek", "The Empty Child", "The Girl in the Fireplace" and "Blink" have been truly wonderful television.

But, in general, New-Who, and particularly this current series, is a bit pants.  It's not for the want of good acting talent - Eccleston, Tennant, Piper, Agyeman and Tate have been terrific.  Add some classy supporting actors and a terrific technical team and and it should be great telly.  But it's not.  It's at best patchy.  Why is this?

It's obviously the writing.  New-Who is shallow; derivative; inconsequential; lacking in subtext and internal consistency; and it awkwardly lurches from kitchen-sink drama to fantasy, never managing to be good science fiction (sometimes not even managing to be good drama).  The damn annoying thing, though, is that the episodes mentioned above prove that New-Who *is* capable of being great television, and certainly not *just* children's television which is what it currently seems to have resigned itself to have become.  And that is what frustrates me.

Let's take a look at who's writing Who and what they wrote before Who to qualify for the job.  Then we'll look at the outstanding re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica and *their* writers:

DOCTOR WHO

Helen Raynor
Doctors

Stephen Greenhorn
River City, Where the Heart Is, The Bill

Gareth Roberts
Swiss Toni, Brookside, Emmerdale

Tom MacRae
Lewis, Marple, Mayo

and of course,

Russell T. Davies
Linda Green, Bob and Rose, Queer as Folk, The Grand, Children's Ward, Chucklevision

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA

Ronald D. Moore
Carnivále, Roswell, Star Trek (NG, DSN, Voyager)

Michael Angeli
Medium, Twighlight Zone, Monk, Dark Angel

Anne Cofell Saunders
Chuck, Eureka, 24

Michael Taylor
The Dead Zone, Star Trek (DSN, Voyager)

Jane Espenson
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Angel

Jeff Vlaming
Reaper, Numbers, Keen Eddie, NCIS, Xena: Warrior Princess, Lois and Clark, Weird Science, X Files

Toni Graphia
Carnivále, VR5, Quantum Leap

My point is not just to slag off a group of British writers, I'm sure they're all very talented and well respected in their field.  And, I'm very aware that we don't have the breadth of fantasy TV writers in Britain to choose from (such is the blandness of British television), but come on, what makes an Emmerdale writer qualified to write Britain's showcase sci-fi series?  Who shortlisted this group of writers?  Any by the way, with few exceptions, the list of Directors has the very same problem.

I've been saying it for a long time, Russell T. Davies cannot write sci-fi.  He's due a great deal of thanks for using his clout to bring the series back, but as Executive Producer and Lead Writer, he must take the blame for not only his own appalling writing, but for his poor decisions in green-lighting and overseeing other below-standard episodes, and for letting the show become kids TV, which it's always been more than.

Doctor Who is taking a break after the current series in order that both Russell T. Davies and David Tennant can work on other projects.  Basically the BBC is oblivious to the problem, believing that Doctor Who IS Davies and Tennant, because the current ratings are good.

In two weeks Steven Moffat gets his series two-parter.  If it's as good as his previous work, it will further justify the call I made half-way through the last series for Moffatt to take the róle of Lead Writer and for Russell T. to let his Fanboy fantasy job go.

Stu ;-)

ITV's "Pushing Daisies" idiocy

I've really been enjoying the utterly charming and delightfully quirky "Pushing Daisies", a US series that was described to me as "Amelie" if directed by Tim Burton.

It seems to have been a surprise hit for UK's ITV1 channel with a respectable 5.7 million viewers for its first episode, aided by lots of on-air advertising and press promotion of its British star Anna Friel.  ITV1 is Britain's most watched commercial channel and "Daisies" was a curious purchase considering its usual schedule of mainstream soaps and quizzes and cozy dramas such as Heartbeat and Wycliffe.

However, with the Euro 2008 football season starting in eight weeks, ITV has just realised that the nine part series won't fit into its schedule.

So, what are ITV going to do?  Say "Doh" and realise they should have started it a week early? Schedule one episode at a different day or time? Run an episode on one of its other three channels? Or, run a special finalé double bill?  No, in their infinite wisdom ITV are just going to... miss out an episode!  Episode 2 as it happens, because it was the only episode "we could drop without spoiling the storyline" said an ITV spokesman, who seems to believe he knows more about story structure than the episode's director, multi award winning director Barry Sonnenfeld and series creator Emmy Award winner Bryan Fuller.

I truly struggle to find the words to express my fury and frustration at the philistinism of the cretinous network hacks who made this decision, showing no imagination, creativity or love of the medium they're working in.  Seriously folks, don't bother showing the programme at all or give it to a channel that has some integrity.

How about this idea (because its just as sensible): show the last episode of "Pushing Daisies" in place of the first half of the football match (in a tournament that England aren't even participating in, by the way).  Why? - well because it won't "spoil the storyline" of the match.

I don't watch scheduled television at all any more.  Now I remember why.

Stu

KITT powered by a Mac?

I'm half way through watching the new "Knight Rider".  Can't say I'm impressed, it's very 80s but with CG.  I must say, though, I like Val Kilmer as the spaced-out voice of KITT.

Anyway, I just had to post this frame grab of KITT's keyboard - it's an Apple wireless model!  I think it's therefore safe to assume that KITT is run on Leopard on a Mac!  Like Vista was ever an option...

Stu ;-)

Moving Wallpaper - a surprising cameo

I've just been splurging on Moving Wallpaper, ITV's comedy-behind-the-"real"-soap TV series by my pal Tony Jordan.  Now, I'm still not convinced by the back-to-back broadcasting concept of Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach as I have no interest in watching a new soap opera - particularly one that immediately follows a programme continually telling me that the soap isn't real (and peppering the soap with in-jokes constantly breaking my suspension of disbelief).  However, Moving Wallpaper is great fun, and Ben Miller's stand-out performance is balanced by a fine supporting cast and some very slick writing.

I was rather pleased with myself when I spotted a very brief and obscure in-joke in episode one.  Miller's obnoxious character, producer Jonathan Pope, is lambasting the production team for the unattractive cast of their worthy Cornish drama "Polnarren", and demands it be rebranded as the sexier-titled "Echo Beach" with "actors that ducked the ugly stick".  Then with a cry of "I mean, for goodness sake" he plucks an actor's photo from the wall as an example.

I hit pause, wondering what poor actor had befallen this fate, then I recognized the face... as Tony Jordan himself.  What a nice bloke Tony is to fall on the sword like that for a joke that only a few people would get.

I never watch ITV (Corrie, natch, and the still-surprisingly-good Primeval excepted), so what do I know about the channel's viewers?  But, I can't help feeling that Echo Beach is just unnecessary.  I'd expand Moving Wallpaper to fill an hour and just have cameos with the Echo Beach "cast", which could ever-evolve, and show odd clips á la Extras.  It'll be interesting to see how the show goes down, and I'd be sad to see Jonathan Pope axed if the current format doesn't work.

Stu ;-)

Russell T. Davies Bingo

Print, cut out and keep, and tick them off when the new series starts at the end of March....

Stu ;-)
Thanks to FanboyGeek friend Adrian Bamforth.

In the footsteps of Dinosaurs

In 1999 I was working as a researcher at BBC Science alongside Producer Teresa Hunt (now a good friend, and the reason I got a job there, but that's a long story for a later date...).

We were seconded to work on a programme for BBC Knowledge (now BBC Four) called "Meet the Dinosaurs" which was a weekend-long outside-broadcast from the Natural History Museum in Oxford, linking episodes of Walking with Dinosaurs and Dinosaur Detectives with some original content.  It was presented by Julian Richards from "Meet the Ancestors" and Sally Gray from "Dinosaur Detectives" - hence the show's title.

As well as co-ordinating the audience of schoolkids, I was PA on a location shoot at a council landfill site in Oxford where some dinosaur footprints were discovered. 

Co-presenting this sequence was palaeontologist Dr Phil Manning from the University of Manchester who was demonstrating how he identified the footprints as those of an iguanodon. 

Dr Manning was just like Sam Neill's Dr Alan Grant from Jurassic Park and when he excitedly told us that the 10-meter long beast was probably running at the time we all had goosebumps.  Even though it was 6am on a very cold and wet winter's morning, that day was a life high-point - standing there looking at a set of 120 million year old footprints walking off into the distance where the sun was rising.

Anyway, I was delighted to read that Dr Manning was in the news the other week having apparently found a 76cm-long T-Rex footprint in Montana.  Read a BBC Q&A with Dr Manning here.

Stu ;-)

Dancing NBC logos - ITV are at it too!!!

Some idiot at ITV has obviously been watching NBC.  Three minutes before the end of Coronation Street last night (ie not before or after an ad break or titles or credits) a huge animated banner ad popped up on the bottom of the screen saying "Stuart, stop what you're watching, look at me, look at me".

After telling me what was on next (like I care), ANOTHER banner ad came up telling me what was on AFTER the NEXT programme (again, like I care).  By this point I'd lost the thread of an important scene. (Jokes about why I was watching Corrie aside, but for heavens sake, Rosie was almost caught by her Mum snogging her teacher!).

ITV is a channel in crisis, with plunging audiences, scandals galore, and a truly bottom-of-the-barrel line up of programmes.  Why are they screwing up the ONLY programme on ITV worth watching?  I repeat again, what is the justification for treating viewers with such utter contempt?

And why, after I pointed out how bloomin' annoying the dancing NBC logos are, did ITV go ahead and do the same?  Don't ITV execs read this blog!?!

Stu ;-)

ps  The last sentence wasn't meant to be a joke.  Here's why.