Misc. including a mildly spoilery Doctor Who remark and the Radio 4 pips

Two things slightly odd crossed my radar today.
Firstly was the revelation that Radio 4 generates its pips live. You may wonder what I'm warbling about.
They announce the hour and that the news is coming. (You also hear it on, amongst others radios 1 and 2 but 4 does it without any sort of musical bed.) Here they are in all their glory.
And tonight their pip machine wasn't working. So Eddie Mair, the wonderfully quirky evening broadcaster, did an impromptu piece and yes, these things are generated live.
I'd assumed that nowadays it was a sample played at a precise time. Instead it seems that there's a pip generator and a back-up pip generator that both weren't working.
You would have thought it would be pre-recorded samples triggered at precise times but apparently not.

Next up is Doctor Who.
Mr. Moffat's been talking to the press again and what he's had to say is interesting. It's spoilery in that it rules something out so, well you've been warned,

spoilery talk here

The Daleks aren't coming back in the near future.
Which isn't a bad thing. Whilst I seem to be in the minority in enjoying last year's Victory of the Daleks, I did kind of feel that their stock was cheapened somewhat in Tennant's time by appearing every season.
Yes, the media seems to think that whenever someone leaves the show, they get exterminated by the Daleks. And it's true that the show wouldn't have lasted most likely, had it not been for Terry Nation's genius creations.
But they're best used in small measures. It builds up the threat level.
And it gives the writing staff time to think of fresh takes.
It's been done before. In 1967 the Daleks were written off supposedly for ever in The Evil of The Daleks. They wouldn't reappear until 1972's time-slip classic Day of The Daleks.
Yeah, I'm with Steven Moffat on this one. (And, yes, I don't think this is misdirection before a shock reappearance by them in Saturday's mid-season closer. They wouldn't be so crass.)

The Hangover Part 2 - review

As a rule, I don't care for blokey comedies, particularly ones of the gross-out variety.
But I was persuaded to see the original Hangover and was pleasantly surprised. There were three plus points:
1. Filming on location, giving the proceedings a veracity
2. Solid comic acting by Ed Helms and Bradley Cooper
3. Alan.

In fact, Alan's character, and Zach Galifanakis's portrayal, took the film into both darker places and, due to his naivete, also more innocent places. Sometimes simultaneously.

This sequel has all 3 points but it's not as good.
Partly the issue is the long-winded intro (if you thought this review had a laborious start, it's nothing trust me).
The other main problem is that Alan's plain unlikeable for the opening third. Yes, it makes sense that he would be possessive of the members of the Wolfpack.
The direction is, as with the first one, very good at capturing a sense of place. Bangkok looks both gorgeous and, at times, menacing. It's also not quite as cliched a view of Thailand as you might think (one of the big cliches is shown comparatively briefly but the other is mercifully ducked).

Methinks, another issue is structure. Cooper and Helms have said they didn't feel they had earned the right to make any drastic changes to the narrative framework.
Which doesn't help to be honest as you can see the mechanics quite clearly in some places (particularly as I watched the original the night before).
And, if there's a third offering (which seems likely), can we move away from wedding plots? I suspect a christening of Doug's kid would be the most plausible (with a missing baby).

It's fun, don't get me wrong. Helms and Cooper are charming as ever. It's just I won't want to buy this installment on DVD for posterity.

Doctor Who - The Almost People (spoilers)

Well, that was a lot stronger than the first episode.

It went darker places.
Solid acting all-round help finally bring this to life, a minor miracle given how unimpressed I was by the first part.
And also, in retrospect, last week's offering had a lot of water-treading to do to conclude with that cliffhanger.
So, free of that burden, this installment explored the dilemmas of having clones wandering about and the inherent questions of identity and what it means to be human.

Mucho spoilers

And this whole storyline was clearly foreshadowing for THAT cliffhanger.
Amy, trapped in a booth, about to give birth whilst watched over by the eyepatch-sporting woman.
Easily the best cliffhanger of the Matt Smith era.
And I love how it calls back to all the deaths of Rory we've seen. He's kept on dying but coming back alongside (for this season at least) a fake Amy Pond. And the Tardis was right. The only water in the forest is a River.

I still think we'll have a Ganger get-out for the dead Doctor mystery.
But now the Doctor knows he's going to die so maybe he'll be able to cook up a better plan than that.
The twist as to which Doctor was real was unexpected. To be honest, that question hadn't crossed my mind. And it was such a wonderful and in character way for Amy to spill the beans to the Doctor.

On the whole Ganger question, yes, it slightly devolved into a monster-of-the-week but at least we saw that one Ganger lived and we saw that Gangers weren't as monstrous as the humans. It would have been more fun (and messier) if both an original and their Ganger survived. (Didn't think that would be my sole criticism before I started watching this part)
And, so after all we weren't seeing the beginning of the Autons or the Sontarans or even a breakdown in Amy and Rory's marriage. But I somewhat suspect we're leading up to the Ponds' exits.

God knows what's going to happen next week. I hope we'll get a final answer as to whether River is Amy or Amy's daughter or none of the above.

Alicia Keys v ticket touts

Next month Alicia Keys is in town to play the Royal Albert Hall in a one-off gig to mark a decade since the release of "Songs in A minor"
Yes, ten years already....

But that's not the remarkable thing.
What is very interesting is the ticketing arrangement (yes, I know I have banging on about Olympic tickets recently and I'll resume to normal non-ticket non-sport service soon).
To gain admission to the RAH, you need not only your ticket but someone in your party needs photo ID to show that they're the buyer of the ticket. Here's the RAH announcement on it.

I'm in favour of this in principle. It'll reduce touts. (It can't stop it as you'll always get unscrupulous touts and desperate fans wanting to chance it)
But it'll be interesting to see if the Albert Hall follow through on this.
I remember in the build up to the France 98 world cup seeing much UK government-funded TV ads saying that fans will be turned away at the gates if they come with tickets in someone else's name. This, to the best of my knowledge, didn't actually happen.
But it does happen at Glasto.
Yes, the Alicia Keys fans might need to be a bit patient in the queue in case someone is there sans ID. And, yes, there may well be some, if not ugly then sad, scenes.
Though, if this becomes the norm for big gigs in London, it'll eat away at the touts and their habits of bulk-buying anything at sizeable venues even if they've never heard of the acts concerned (thus reducing access to real fans).

So, Alicia and management, more power to your elbows.....

On Olympic tickets

The Olympics are coming to London.
You may have heard.
Last month we completed our application for the ballot.
In June we find out what tickets we are getting for London 2012.
And this month, well, this month they take the money out. Despite us not knowing what we've got yet.

It is an odd system but apparently how other Olympics do it.
Though the thing that bugs me is that they keep on switching the day the money comes out.
Yes we are still within May but it had been suggested money would be withdrawn at the start of the month.
Delay it by a week or two until a date when you are sure you will be ready. Not this shifting timescale. I appreciate there are bigger things in life to fret about though as an Olympic consumer, I am a tad hacked off right now....

Peter Reid - you're awesome

We're straying a bit here from the usual geeky fare.
However, I just want to give genuine thanks to Peter Reid, the current (at time of writing) manager of my football club Plymouth Argyle.
This time last year we hired him, having been relegated into League One.
Now, we have fallen into League Two and my respect for him is immense.
On the face of it, this might seem very odd. However, the club have had severe financial problems.
Our most important away fixtures have been in the Royal Courts of Justice, pleading against winding-up orders for unpaid tax bills.
Players and backroom staff alike have not been paid.
The majority shareholder has been disinterested in stepping in to help protect his investment.
Some managers would have jumped ship.
Not Peter Reid. Instead he's been paying the heating bills out of his own pocket and seemingly doing everything he can to keep the club afloat.
He has no connection to the region that I'm aware of so this isn't part of any boyhood love for the club. This is his professionalism. His desire to the job he's been hired to do (even when he hasn't been paid for it).
There is some speculation that he might be lured away. And, if he does, I'm ok with that because when the club needed a solid friend, a rock, he was there.
God bless you, Peter Reid.

Faulks on Fiction

As a rule, I tend to avoid companion books to TV series. Too often they're dumbed down versions of the author's other work.
Or are too reliant on your having seen the original show thus giving a feeling of someone blathering on about a great party you missed.
This however is a solid primer.
Sebastian Faulks, author of Charlotte Gray and Birdsong amongst others, groups together characters from British novels and uses them to explore not only the novel and their function in it but, sometimes, the genre.

Now I'm nowhere near as widely read as Faulks so I don't know how contentious some of his essays are. Whilst I found Chanu Ahmed's character in Brick Lane so off-putting that I gave up on the book, I can see why Faulks files him under the Snob category.  Certainly Faulks's pieces on Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Heathcliff were spot-on.
And I've since started reading Vanity Fair on the strength of this.
He doesn't out-right spoil but gives you enough of a taster for you to want to read the novel.

Also, in the James Bond chapter, there's a glimpse into his writing process as he describes how he wrote his Bond novel Devil May Care. Admittedly I haven't read that novel but his analysis of Bond is interesting.
The Sherlock Holmes section is also a somewhat affectionate look into the difficulties of writing genre fiction. (And there's an observation about Watson that I won't spoil here, but it is absolutely hilarious).

Once or twice, I feel that I'm not part of Faulks's target audience. He compares one character to an Archers character (suggesting to me we're aiming for middle-aged middle class readers here). However these are only fleeting.
All told, it's thought-provoking and made me want to explore (some of) the books covered that I hadn't read.
These can only be good things.