Mindless Ones

This photo is from what I think was the last ever photocall the Monkees did, on what I think was Davy Jones’ last visit to his hometown of Manchester. I was about three feet away at the time.
At the show that night, Davy Jones made a joke that he made every night of that tour – “I used to be a heartthrob, now I’m a coronary”.

So why am I talking about Davy Jones here?

It was the end…but the moment had been prepared for.

Far more than The Tenth Planet, The War Games was the end not just of a Doctor, but of Doctor Who itself as it had been known up to that point.

I’m sorry I’ve been absent from posting for a month, but here’s a xmas mix for those who enjoy such things (click Amiga Mountain).

Although there’s tracks from years gone by in there, there’s also a great deal to love from this year too. It’s a shame everything I enjoyed couldn’t get a look in, but I just don’t believe in making mixtapes that last much longer than sixty minutes. From the biting cold synths of Pye Corner Audio’s November Sequence to the scuzzed-out wooze of Hype Williams, the thrumming desert horror of Ayshay and the complete and utter big-up-yer-bogle rudeness of Jam City, the year’s best music is pretty well represented here. Hope you enjoy and forgive me for the cobbled together nature of the whole thing and the fact that, well, it sounds too quiet on my computer and too loud on the headphones – it’s my first time using Audacity and I’m in the Isle of Man for New Year’s without a sound expert scientist like Gary Lactus to nag.

Tracklist:

The Beegees – Until
Roly Porter – Caladan
Pye Corner Audio – November Sequence
Jean Claude Vannier for Yves St Laurent
Hype Williams – You Little Nothing
Amy – Ramirez
Cold War slow dance 1979
Omar S – Night Over Comption
Inga Copeland – Trample
Sand Circles – Midnight Crimes
Innercity – The Bells of Backworld
Ayshay – Warn-U
Julia Holter – Goddess Eyes
Rangers – Airport Lights
Machinedrum – Now You Know The Deal 4 Real
Jam City – Aquabox

What do you get if you cross Doctor Strangelove with The Thing From Another World?

The template for pretty much everything Doctor Who would do for the next forty years.

Yesterday was, as many of you will be aware, the forty-eighth anniversary of the first episode of Doctor Who. This means that next year, 2012, is the fiftieth year of Who’s existence.

Over the next year or so, on a roughly-weekly basis, I’ll look at one story from each of those fifty years, from 1963 to 2012. To start with, let’s travel back to that time just after the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.

“If you could touch the alien sand and hear the cry of strange birds and watch them wheel in another sky”

Mark Gatis has, in the past, been the most infuriating of writers for new Doctor Who. While most of the ‘name’ writers on the series have done precisely what one would expect of them, with Neil Gaiman writing a Neil Gaiman story and Richard Curtis writing a Richard Curtis one, there’s always been the sense that Gatiss could do far better.

His first story for the new series, The Unquiet Dead, was, apart from a few dud lines, one of the better ones from the 2005 series, (though as Lawrence Miles pointed out, it had an entirely unintentional anti-immigration subtext that leaves a nasty aftertaste), but after that, every episode with any involvement from Gatiss either as writer or actor has been nearly universally regarded as the weakest of the year.

It’s very odd, because on paper, Gatiss is the perfect writer for the show. He’s clearly an imaginative, witty writer, as both his work for the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and his novels have shown. He’s also a longtime fan of the show (his first professional filmed work was a direct-to-video series called P.R.O.B.E. which is required viewing for anyone who ever wondered what it would be like if The X-Files were made in Britain for a fiver, and had a middle-aged pipe-smoking woman who used to be The Doctor’s companion instead of Mulder and Scully), and seems hugely enthusiastic to be working on it. Yet a Gatiss episode is now always the one everyone knows to avoid.

This time though, he has done the best work of the series so far.

More after the evil disembodied eye stops looking at you…

One of the reasons I was asked to join the Mindless Ones last month is that we’re expanding our range of topics somewhat. We’re still going to concentrate on comics, of course, but we’re going to be venturing into other waters – expect the occasional post about TV, films or video games. And one of the things we’re going to do is a weekly look at Doctor Who.

Yes, it’s going to be a week after the broadcast. But it’s a programme about time travel, after all. More to the point, there’s a good reason for the delay – Moffat-era Doctor Who, more than any other era of the programme, takes time to sink in. Often what appeared at first glance to be a hugely impressive rip-roaring adventure will, on a rewatch, prove very problematic. Sometimes, less often, the reverse will be true, and an initially unimpressive story will reveal hidden depths.

So we’re going to look at each episode a week late, and see what actually worked and what didn’t.

Having enjoyed the Attack the Block panel at Kapow! back in April, I finally got round to seeing the film this weekend.

Turns out it’s easily the most enjoyable new movie I’ve seen all year – a creature feature that’s as tight and energetic as Edgar Wright’s cinematic efforts, if less overtly referential.

According to writer/director Joe Cornish, the idea was to take kids who would be described as feral and heartless by the tabloid press and put them up against creatures that actually exemplify these traits. This theme is flagged up in an unsubtle line of dialogue near the start of the movie (courtesy of an obligingly distressed old lady no less!) but judging by some of the reviews this approach wasn’t blatant enough.
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In no particular order.

1.

Some of this stuff came out last year, but only an anally retentive comics fan would care about something like that.