Who's For Sunday Afternoon

Saturday night has always been Doctor Who night in my mind. However, my regular rentals of classic series DVDs from LoveFilm have rather made it a Sunday afternoon thing. I started off by renting a couple of disks that I had fondly, but faintly, remembered from 40 years ago and watched them with the children on the big TV screen (far removed from the 16” sets we had back then). There are usually a few documentaries on the disks that are usually of more interest to me than the children but there is typically a “coming soon” feature which is whatever the BBC restoration team was working on at the time. More often than not, it is entered into LoveFilm’s wish-list  and the DVD arrives through the post a few weeks or months later.

I was looking though the list of series and we have covered quite a bit. We have rented all the surviving Second Doctor with the exception The War Games and over half of Jon Pertwee’s output. What surprised me is how well the children took to the Black and White episodes. The early series were rather stagey in their presentation. This was mainly due to the limited nature of video editing at the time but they seem to take quite well to these (although possibly more to the Sci-Fi than the historicals). I’ve also shown them some of the later 1980s episodes which they seem to enjoy but to me they look more low budget than the early 1970s episodes and don’t have the advantage of monochrome to hide the cheap sets.

Last weekend I rather messed up on the disk rentals and ended up with two of the longer Pertwee stories: 1970’s The Ambassadors of Death and 1973’s Green Death (for some reason, “Death”, “Terror” and “Doom” seem to feature quite heavily in the titles.) Ambassadors was new to me and is one of the DVDs that have been re-coloured from a Back and White tele-recording. To be honest it shows on the picture quality but this is made up by a cracking 7 part story. I showed this to the kids in 2 sessions, worrying that they may get bored, but the episodes don’t drag and there are plenty of action scenes which appear to have been made in the days before health and safety (in fact the documentary confirmed this as quite a few accidents ended up in the final cut). I saw the Green Death when it first came out and have seen it since on video. It’s regarded as something of a classic and it’s easy to see why. Its ecological sci-fi story was more typical of the Doomwatch series and with hot topics like fracking in the news it feels as contemporary as ever. It also has one of the most heart-wrenching final scenes as the Doctor says goodbye to his assistant Jo – the actors were good friends so I think it was somewhat more than just good acting.

With the children having seen quite a bit of Doctor Who I asked them who their favourite Doctor was. Raymond, who is now 11, chose David Tennant. He was really Raymond’s first Doctor so that is understandable but when I pushed him on the classic series he did say that he preferred the 2nd, 3rd and 4th incarnations. Jake is almost 8 (his birthday is next month) and he said, without a doubt, Tom Baker. He hasn’t seen as much of the new series as Raymond so he has gone more with the classic episodes that we watch but it’s interesting that he should take to the darker tone of the 4th Doctor. Sophia is 5 and she went for John Pertwee’s 3rd Doctor. The interesting thing is that he was really my first Doctor and I was a similar age to her when I watched him. Aside from that, the 2nd Doctor, Jamie and Zoe appeared to be very popular.

As for me, it’s difficult to say. In terms of the classic series I think it splits very much into decades and I would say I prefer the 1970’s followed by the 1960’s episodes. The 1980s was a bit of a mixed bag: I thought Peter Davison’s Doctor was very good but the script writing went drastically wrong for Colin Baker – having seen some of those episodes again I can, at least, appreciate his performance. I think it picked up again towards the end although it was obvious that the BBC bosses were looking for any opportunity to kill the series off. Having now seen more of Patrick Troughton I really love his portrayal but I suppose your first Doctor is you favourite. Jon Pertwee really is "my" Doctor.

Circus

As it is the last weekend before the kids go back to school we had planned on doing something a bit fun with them. Such an opportunity presented itself in the form of the Moscow State Circus which had rolled into town as part of their UK tour. In fact, it was my mother-in-law who spotted this – I think she has always harboured a longing to run away to the circus. As it was, the most she managed was crossing the Berlin Wall. I don’t think this involved any death defying feats of acrobatic ability (although it must have taken a little nerve).

When I was growing up the “circus coming to town” was one of those events that seemed to carry a certain aura around with them. These were almost always British based circus troupes – I can certainly remember going to Billy Smart’s and the Chipperfield’s circus. Circuses have certainly changed since the 1970’s. They have always been about spectacle but back in the 70s, whilst there were lots of clowns and  acrobats, many of the acts would involve animals. Some of these I quite enjoyed: performing horses and dogs seemed to quite enjoy the event whereas elephants seemed a bit more long suffering. However, much of the spectacle and daring-do was related to lion taming and the like (essentially some git with a whip taking the piss out of dangerous wild animals). One event I can recall being much vaunted was a boxing kangaroo – this sounded great but consisted of Skippy with his fore-arms stuffed in boxing gloves being goaded by a clown. He didn’t box so much as bugger off as fast as possible – it was actually a rather distressing sight.

The Moscow State Circus is a very different animal – for a start, there are no animals involved apart from one very small dog used in one sequence by the clowns. The clowns are also very different and very far removed from the misanthropic child-molesters that I recall from circuses of old (I know they were meant to appeal to kids but I would honestly have preferred being left alone with the lions and tigers). The Muscovite clowns are much closer to traditional mime artists and also include elements of magic in their sequences. As well as providing sufficient time for the other artists to change their costumes and prepare their acts they also provide a running theme which connects the various performances into a greater theme.

The real mainstay of the Moscow State Circus lies in traditional circus arts – acrobats, jugglers, trapeze artists and  all manner of gymnastic display. In common with many modern circus performers (Cirque du Soleil springs to mind) the acts are as much about artistic expression as they are about death-defying stunts and it makes the whole experience more spectacular. When the stunts come one after another it becomes clear that they aren’t that death-defying whereas with the Moscow State Circus there is the definite impression that if one of the jumps or flips went wrong then they probably wouldn’t be doing another one any time soon.

Anyway, as family entertainment goes I think it really works as three generations of our family loved the experience. And without a marsupial pugilist in sight.

VW Golf VI - So Far So Good

I posted back in June about my early days of VW Golf ownership. I liked it then and I like it now although I am still trying to find a convincing, positive reason for buying the thing other than it being the “car that you buy when you don’t know what you really want.”

I suppose the main thing with it is that it does most things very well: it rides excellently – possibly not as good as a Jaguar or the better French models but it isn’t that far off. It’s got good interior space – not exactly an MPV (we also have one of them) but perfectly adequately for everyday use. It’s efficient – nothing to worry a Toyota Hybrid but not far off. You get the picture? The only negative I’ve found is that cruise control would be nice for long journeys - I may get it retro-fitted but currently I wouldn’t use it much so it is difficult to justify the cost. I also noticed a minor problem with the wing mirror which appears to have been repaired (probably due to it’s former life as a hire car) – the replacement mirror is slightly off centre which causes the motors to catch. I may well get this fixed at some point.

The one thing I wasn’t sure of back in June was the fuel consumption. I didn't know how accurate the trip computer was – it turns out that it over-reads by about 2-3 mpg. That’s about 5% optimistic which isn’t too bad but considering the 15 year old Yaris design was pretty much 100% spot on you would think it was not beyond the wit or wisdom of German engineers to come up with something that could match it. Anyway, the actual consumption is pretty decent. In the 2,000 I’ve driven since buying it I’ve averaged 52.9 mpg. On a long motorway based return trip to Liverpool (a tank will actually get there and back now) I averaged 53.6 and the last tank managed 54.2. Carrying extra passengers and using the air con kills it a bit but by and large it seems to be largely comparable to the Yaris which isn’t bad for a vehicle weighing a quarter of a tonne more. I expect the consumption to drop in the Winter but I don’t see this being a bank breaking experience.

Overall there’s not much to report – which is as it should be. I’ve still to experience VW after sales service although I plan to get this serviced independently in the long run. The next thing I’ll need to get sorted is some Winter tyres as the Yaris ones won’t fit but that’s for the Autumn – probably after I see what ADAC are recommending this year.

Doctor Omnishambles

In the 1970s and 80s the identity of the new Doctor would be one of the few TV acting announcements that would make the BBC early evening news. Now, the announcement gets a whole half hour dedicated to it, after which the Internet explodes. So who would have seen this coming?

On Saturday afternoon, Ladbrooks were offering the following odds:

Ben Wishaw 28/1
Idris Elba 28/1
Ben Daniels 25/1
John Hurt 20/1
Daniel Rigby 13/1
Andrew Scott 5/1
Peter Capaldi 1 /4

A clear favourite then. There were even odds for some more unlikely actors and if you fancied Miranda Hart for the role you could have got odds of 94/1. This means that if you placed  a bet of £10 on Miranda, then you would lose £10. I’m not a fan of the bookies but the odds are a bit of fun. However, whether or not they believed the identity of the actor was already known is a mute point as they suspended betting shortly afterwards.

Fortunately, it isn’t bookies that chose the actors. It isn’t even done with public voting on some sort of X-factor type talent show (I shouldn’t have typed that – don’t you dare BBC!) but by the show’s producers and writers. By and large I think they have always got it right. The main thing is to chose an actor that is unlike any of the others that we have seen and will challenge our perceptions. Of the actors that I can recall being awarded the role previously the only one that I would describe as a household name was Peter Davison who was well known from Sunday night TV’s All Creatures Great And Small. Of the others, some have been well known actors in their own right such as Paul McGann and Christopher Eccleston but neither had a defining role in the public’s mind. The last two Doctors were not well known outside of the profession although I had seen Matt Smith in a TV role which had completely not registered with me. Peter Capaldi is one of those actors who is know and respected and probably just falls slightly short of “Household name” category but who will be recognised by many as “Oh it’s him from …” I suppose his most famous creation is Malcolm Tucker from The Thick Of It. Although iconic he isn’t the most appealing of characters so the risk of typecasting by playing the Doctor must be appealing rather than daunting.

We have been making a bit of an afternoon of it by watching The Time Meddler, an old William Hartnell adventure from 1965 which even featured Peter Purves in his pre-Blue Peter days. I expect Peter Capaldi must have watched this when it was first broadcast. The nice thing with watching the old black and white adventures with the kids is that I often haven’t seen them either. It’s also quite amusing seeing the kids trying to work out why everything from when Dad was a kid is in black-and-white. I think they assume this has something to do with my colour blindness. The one thing that delights me is how well an older Doctor works. Since the series has returned the Doctor has been as much of an action hero as an insightful genius and for me, the Doctor always was an older character – even if Jon Pertwee did fancy himself as an elderly James Bond at times.

As for Peter Capaldi we will have to see how he develops but I am absolutely delighted with his casting. Matt Smith has been magnificent in the role and settled any doubts I had about him in his first few minutes on screen. I’d like to have seen at least another series of him but at 3 years in the role he is pretty much par for the course – only Tom Baker and Jon Pertwee were in the role for significantly longer. Will Peter Capaldi stay that long? I do hope so. Anyway we have still got the 50th anniversary special to look forward to and we should have a new Doctor on Christmas Day – that’s only 143 days away. Bring it on!