Down to Earth with a bump!

This is my first posting in quite a while. Partly this is because I've been too busy to write anything; partly it is because I couldn't think of much to write about and partly it is because I haven't been very well of late. However, there is a new series of Doctor Who on so I had to write something.

The Woman Who Fell To Earth is the first episode of the 11th (or possibly 37th) series of Doctor Who and features a new Doctor (Jodie Whittaker), a new ensemble cast (Mandip Gill, Tosin Cole and Bradley Walsh) a new lead writer (Chris Chibnall) and new soundtrack (Segun Akinola). So this is really the newest new Who since the show returned in 2005. So how did I find it? Well, to be frank, just a little bit disappointing.

I wouldn't say I hated this, exactly, I just thought it could have been better written. I'm prepared to cut it a fair bit of slack as it was trying to introduce lots of new characters and also introduce the whole show to a potentially new audience. However, the best way of doing this is surely to "show-don't-tell". There seemed to be vast quantities of needlessly explanation when a simple scene without dialogue would have made the point far better.

On the theme of "show-don't-tell" why no TARDIS? If you are trying to pull in a new audience then show this key element of the series, don't just talk about it.

The "monster of the week" was just a take off of the Predator. There's nothing wrong with that but what was the point of the tentacle thing? The story should have concentrated on the mystery of the Doctor and anything else was surely just a side show to give the characters reason to interact (the faithful old McGuffin).

From a technical viewpoint they have apparently gone to great expense to film this is ultra-high definition, which no-one can receive, in an 18:9 aspect ratio, which no-one has, but they didn't even bother to broadcast it in Dolby Digital which previous series have done and which makes the most of the sound editing.

On the plus side:

• I loved Jodie. I had really hoped that she would be good but I think she has pitched it perfectly. Hopefully that will knock the whole woman as the Doctor thing on the head.
• The other lead cast members all seem likeable and I think Bradley will be outstanding once his character is filled out somewhat. 
• The music was brilliant. I loved the arrangement of the theme tune at the end and I am looking forward to the new opening titles next week. 
• Having the companions (inadvertently) abducted at the end of the episode actually makes some sense and is very much in keeping with the history of the show.

I remember when JNT took over Doctor Who, he changed the look and feel of it without altering the main cast. It took a few stories to really get into its stride (I think it took off at Full Circle). I suspect that is the case here: the ingredients for a really great show are all there, they just need to be mixed correctly. I'll be stuck on a ship in the North Sea for next week's show so I'll have to watch it delayed. I suspect some sort of Likely Lads escapade may follow! Anyway, I'm hoping it's upwards and onwards from here.

Old Maps

First posting in a month, albeit a brief one. Whilst sorting through a box of old books I came across a "3 Miles to 1 Inch" road atlas from 1957 that appears to have belonged to my cousin (presumably a long time ago as they emigrated to Canada in the 1970s.)

I really like these old maps. On the face of it they are completely redundant given their original purpose but it is fascinating to see what has changed over that period (61 years in this case).

I looked up the pages for where I was largely brought up and found the following image:

There has certainly been some urban sprawl since then but it is nothing compared to where I live now which appears practically rural by comparison:

In fairness, there has probably been more change in that area since 1997, let alone 1957 as it has changed from a small foundry village to a large commuter town in that time although the houses in which I lived in either location where in existence when the maps were produced. I suppose I should zoom in and play "I can see my house from here".

Snow!

It snowed. In fact it snowed more than it has done for a good eight years. Not that we weren't warned as the Met Office gave us a "Red" warning. This is there most extreme warning and follows from "Yellow" meaning that there may be crappy weather, through "Amber" which means that there will be crappy weather, whereas "Red" means zombie apocalypse.

This first picture was on Wednesday morning. We had had the "Orange" alert for a while with quite a bit of snowfall but this was just before it went "Red":

This is the following morning just after the "Red" was lifted. The snow had drifted to almost a metre in height in places and my car was well and truly buried regardless of whether the tyres could handle any snow:

I walked down to the supermarket on Thursday rather than attempt to dig anything out. This was quite odd as I had never seen so many people wandering to and from the shop with bags of shopping. It's easy to forget that most people tend to drive for their groceries.

By Friday the snow plough had been around and I ended up shovelling the snow from the driveway which took a backbreaking 2 hours to complete:

I hope my neighbour doesn't mind that I rather yobbishly dumped all the snow on his front garden:

The Confounded Conniving Kitchen

When we first moved into our house the kitchen was, let us say, idiosyncratic. I managed to find an old picture from the estate agents brochure and it looks quite nice with its breakfast bar but, in truth, it was horribly laid out. The breakfast bar was largely unusable and the ergonomics of the rest of the kitchen were appalling , what with the refrigerator stuck out in the utility room along with the dishwasher and (inexplicably) the microwave oven. We cut back the breakfast bar and moved the appliances in which did make things slightly better and we did have the previous owners to thank for leaving the dishwasher and gas cooker, both of which have been providing solid service until recently.

The kitchen - sans fridge, dishwasher and microwave.

The utility room - with all the kitchen stuff but no dryer .

My tale of woe started around three weeks ago when I was trying to grill some burgers in the cooker. The burgers ended up well cooked – flame grilled, in fact, as the dripping fat caught fire sending flames pouring out of the back of the cooker. My initial thought with this was that the cooker needed a thorough cleaning and set about attacking it with some oven cleaner (an effective but dreadful spray that could probably double up as a chemical weapon). It was only when putting the cooker back together that the real problem came to light as the glass on the cooker door fell out. A replacement cooker was in order.

My first thought was to get something like-for-like and I trouped down to Currys to find something. It turns out that stand-alone gas cookers are not exactly cheap and when including the installation charge they can easily go upward of £600. I thought I’d try to scale back a bit and read up about cooker standards to see what I actually needed. Having had a quick look through the fitting guides the one thing I discovered is that our existing cooker was not fitted correctly as it was hard up against the adjacent cupboards. I looked at the next size down (55cm width) and, to my surprise, these were even more expensive. I don’t even like gas – at least the gas ovens with their caveman friendly “gas mark” numbers in leiu of an appropriate temperature setting.

This is where my ideas started to run away with me. There is already a 45A fused electric connection behind the cooker and it is perfectly possible to buy a separate electric oven and hob for under £200 and then fit them to a simple kitchen carcass (around £25). Of course I would need a new worktop but I was pretty much sold on this idea and ordered a not exactly basic hob and oven from Currys / eBay. All well and good until the confounded dishwasher decided to choke itself to death in protest. “Oh well”, I thought, “I’ll use the Fairy bottle.” Well I did. Once. I then determined that this was too much of a faff and ordered a new dishwasher. The one I wanted was also fitted so I am also getting a new carcass and worktop for this as well.

To cap it all, I cleaned the cooker hood extractor fan in preparation for the new hob. Needless to say the bastard thing fell apart and is now supported by a paper-clip. Essentially, what I needed was a new kitchen. I had a quick look at the handy pricing guide on one of the kitchen fitter’s websites and swiftly decided that I could not afford the “bargain” £7,500 they were offering for a new kitchen. As ever, I will make do and mend. Unfortunately, I have outspent my income in 7 of the last 8 months so it is a case of quite how little I can spend without making a total hash of it – and also without ending up with the microwave next to the washing machine.

An Unexpected Find

One of the odd things that turned up in the loft of my mother-in-law’s house was an acoustic guitar that I had no recollection of whatsoever.

On further investigation it turns out to be one that Nina bought in the early 90s at a flea market in North Shields. I was going to offer it to a local guitar teacher to see if any of her pupils could make use of it but I wanted to find out a bit more about it first.

The label inside identifies it as an Antoria F-710 which is only described as “Foreign” but which I am guessing was a Japanese import. Quite when it was manufactured is another matter. I’d estimate it as being early 1970s with the strings made in the 1980s judging from the amount of rust on them. It actually feels like a nicely made bit of kit but the harmonics are off on the neck which points to it needing some sort of truss rod adjustment.

So the upshot of this is that I’ve ordered some new strings for it and I am fiddling with the neck rod with an allen key. I suspect this isn’t going to the guitar teacher after all. I’ll just have to find some more room for my hoardings.

Clearing Out

My mother-in-law packed her bags and moved back to Germany this week. She had been living in Britain for nearly 20 years but really needed a flat on a single level rather than our old terrace house with its tight staircase. I think it would have suited us for her to move to a flat locally but the uncertainty surrounding Brexit has left her feeling unwelcome for some time. Maybe if Scotland had become independent she would have stayed but as it is she wanted to jump whilst she could still make the journey back. I suppose she has experience with this after experiencing the inhumanity of both the Nazis and Stasi (which she maintains consisted of exactly the same personnel) and she has a fairly good idea of how badly things turn out when a bunch of extremists are left in charge. Catching a ferry from Newcastle is somewhat more dignified than having to jump a fence in Berlin.

The upshot of all this is that we now need to clear out her house and sell it on. She took quite a bit of furniture and belongings with her but there are still a lots of things that I need to find a home for. In terms of the furniture, my first thought was to contact a few local charities. The British Heart Foundation have taken quite a few items, mostly shelving units and a glass TV unit. I was hoping that they would take the sofa but they thought it was too stained. I cleaned this up with carpet cleaner and it looked brand new so I phoned the Salvation Army but they only take suites. As it is, I managed to spill oil all over our (rather tatty) sofa at home so I’m taking this myself. If nothing else it is whippet coloured so shouldn’t show up any dog hair. The one other item was a single bed which someone from Freegle has taken.

Aside from the furniture she also left lots of books – almost all German language ones. For the most part these are in very good condition but there is a limited market for German books in the UK. Some of the German “classics” were taken by our local library who were quite happy to restock their foreign language section but many of them are just novels and biographies. Raymond has expressed some interest in them. I am planning to go through the boxes with him and anything that he isn’t interested in can go on Ebay. Even if I only cover the postage costs with them I will at least know that the books are going to a good home.

The rest of the house clearance is actually much more familiar to me. Over the years we have used her loft space as an additional storage area. Having removed the boxes I now have a house full of my hoardings. I will have to decide what to do with an electric bass guitar, a 1980’s Japanese Heavy Metal guitar an acoustic guitar that I have no recollection of and an early 1990’s Roland Synthesiser. To be honest, I rather fancy keeping some of these, providing I can find somewhere sensible to store them, but one of the other things to deal with is a rather large collection of old vinyl records.

A few years ago it was almost impossible to give away vinyl but now it is increasingly becoming a major force in music with the vinyl release often being the big money spinner – especially for older acts. I’ve never thrown out a vinyl record; I do have an emotional attachment to them as I can often recall where and when I bought them but I much prefer the clean sound quality of CDs and I have replaced many of my old LPs with their remastered CD equivalents. If I haven’t, more often than not it is because I’m not that bothered with the record itself. However, like Helga with her books, I would rather that they found a good home rather than being flung out en masse. My thinking is that I will sell those on Ebay that I either have on CD or haven’t bothered with for years and only keep those that are irreplaceable or that I have a particular emotional attachment to.

The only thing with all this Ebay selling is that I am going to have to research the peculiarities of book and record grading. To me it is the content that is important but I’ve noticed that collectors can be right picky sods.

Box Set Madness

Watching live TV is rapidly becoming something of an oddity. Aside from obviously “live” events such as sport or reality contests it is now very common for shows to be watched on a PVR or, increasingly, via steaming and catch up services. The BBC’s iPlayer was very much at the forefront of this as a catch-up service but although it was very much a disruptive technology in its own right it is now playing catch-up itself. Channel 4 operates its own service, All 4, and aside from catch-up it also offers access to its extensive back-catalogue with “box-sets” of old shows available on demand – many going back to the 1980s.

Over the Christmas period, the BBC offered its own box-sets for a limited period. I ended up watching Peaky Blinders, a show that I had heard many good things about but hadn’t watched since I had missed the first series. Over the last couple of weeks I have watched all 24 episodes and I am really glad that I did. It’s essentially a gangster series set in Birmingham in the post-World War One period but unlike many similar programmes it has far more of the personal and social background of the period – particularly in terms of how damaged many returning from the trenches in France really were. In that respect it reminded me more of something like the Godfather films which put the greed and brutality of the characters in the context of the poverty from which they were escaping.

It’s definitely a plus point for the BBC making this available but with it only being on the iPlayer for a month I have really had to binge watch it to make sure I didn’t miss any episodes. However, with Channel 4’s All 4 service I would have been able to delve in and out of the series at leisure. The main difference between iPlayer and All 4 is that the Channel 4 service carries adverts whereas the BBC doesn’t. I can actually live with this on All 4 as they are offering a decent service free-to-view but it does make me wonder whether the BBC are missing a trick.

The iPlayer typically has around 3 Billion hits per year. I don’t know what Channel 4 charges but a typical YouTube single advert costs about 15p. A similar charge for the BBC would mean showing a single advert before a programme could result in an extra £450 million per year – and that is purely for the catch-up service. If box sets and archive programming were available in a similar manner to All 4 that could be considerably higher. Of course, the BBC is tied down by its charter not to show adverts but just a small change could potentially bring in a huge amount of revenue whilst still allowing free-to-air programming and increasing its independence from the UK government.

Of course if it did start putting up old series there are quite a few I’d love to see again: Sci Fi like Blake’s 7 and The Triffids; comedies like The Goodies and Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em; documentaries such as Civilisation, Life on Earth or The Ascent of Man; some old Play for Today or Our Friends in the North wouldn’t go amiss. I do wonder how many of these fondly remembered programmes would stand up to the test of time but there is only really one way to find out. How about it BBC?