Primeval is coming...

Moffat on Moffat

I love hearing writers talk about their craft and one of the most articulate (and most frequently on the telly talking about his stuff at the moment) is Steven Moffat. If you're like me then I think you'll enjoy this offering, filmed by Moffat's son.

Nostalgia kick

I don't know why, but I've been on a bit of a nostalgia kick lately. Yesterday I sat down and watched the very first two episodes of the seminal Robin of Sherwood. I own every series on DVD now (I wore out the VHS versions long ago) but it's been a while since I watched them - years in fact. But I intend to watch the whole lot again in order over the next few weeks.

As well as the 80s I also love my iPod - I recently bought the theme music to that other 80s classic of television, The One Game. I used to only be able to satisfy my desire to listen to Saylon Dola by leaving the menu page on the DVD running but now I can listen to it wherever and whenever I like. And you can listen to it right here...



And then there's Knightmare. I loved this as a kid, which was hardly surprising seeing as how I was a Fighting Fantasy fan and this was the closest I was ever going to get to living my dream. But thanks to Mark Charn Newton I also came across this the other day - scathing and funny, and just a little bit rude. You were warned.

Spell-casting! Y-O-U-T-U-B-E

The Eleventh Doctor in action

My prediction is that the young lady in this clip turns out to be Amy Pond, the Doctor's new companion.

Not long to wait now...

The Day of the Triffids

I am a huge fan of the BBC's dramatisation of The Day of the Triffids from 1981 that I enjoyed again this year in its entirely on BBC 4. And so I felt a mixture of excitement and a little trepidation at the prospect of there being a new take on it this Christmas. In fact it starts tonight on BBC 1.

But I can't help thinking, no matter how good the special effects are, the production team won't be able to top the sinister knocking of the triffids communicating with each other that made the original series so creepy. Only time will tell...

New Who Logo

Doctor Who, the series, returns to our small (or not so small) screens in 2010, with a new Doctor, a new show-runner and a new logo as well.


I, for one, love it!

Primeval saved from extinction

Good news, fellow Primeval fans, the best thing on ITV (after Lewis) is coming back! So the team have obviously thwarted Helen Cutter's tampering with the past and got history back on track. Yaay!

Suffer the little children

I was out of the country when Torchwood: Children of Earth first aired and only just finished catching up on it last night. All I have to say on the matter is - how good was that?

Well, okay, it's not the only thing, but it was the best series of Torchwood ever, in my humble opinion. I know that John Barrowman (a.k.a. Captain Jack Harkness) has expressed how disappointed he was that the series transferred to the Beeb's flagship channel and was then cut drastically in length but, as far as I'm concerned, it was the right thing to do.


Torchwood was always a series I wanted to love (being a HUGE Doctor Who fan) and I have seen every episode. However, it was a horribly inconsistent series (at least for the first two years). It had its highlights - Countrycide and A Day in the Death - but also it's low points - take, for example, the dire Small Worlds. (Are supposed to believe in magic now too? I know that most of Doctor Who relies on magic rather than science, but at least it's consistently dressed up as science fiction.)

Too often the sex and drugs and rock-n-roll in Torchwood, that was added to the mix to justify it's post-watershed tag, seemed too tagged on and not entirely germane to the plot. (Did we really need a sex-mad alien rumpy-pumpying people to death when Species did it long ago?) It was as if a bunch of 15 year-old schoolboys had tried to see what they could get away with and were sniggering behind their hands for the duration of the show.


And then came Children of Earth. Harrowing, taut, exciting, dramatic, dealing with some serious issues, putting our heroes in genuinely threatening situations and having to make impossible decisions that no-one should ever have to make. And as a result it was utterly compelling and brilliant.


We got to enjoy some top notch writing by Russell T and top notch direction by Euros Lyn. It featured fantastic performances by Peter Capaldi, playing tragic scapegoat John Frobisher, Nicholas Farrell as the loathsome Prime Minister Mr Green, Susan Brown as Bridget Spears, John Barrowman, Gareth David-Lloyd, Lucy Cohu as his daughter Alice and of course Eve Myles. And what's not to like about Eve Myles?

The Supersizers Eat... Medieval

In the BBC series The Supersizers Eat... restaurant critic Giles Coren and writer and comedian Sue Perkins experience the food culture of years gone by. Last night they went back to medieval England to live the life of a Lord and Lady in their country manor.


It was up to Anglo-Saxon lookalike Martin Blunos (who also just happens to be a Michelin-starred chef) to cook all their food for the week, which included everything from roast cockentrice - a creation made from the forepart of a chicken sewn to the rear of a piglet - to peacock, coqz heaumez (helmeted cock), suckling pig, boar's head and hippocras.


Now, it just so happens that recipes for a number of things they ate can be found in What is Myrrh Anyway? So, if you fancy finding out what frumenty tastes like for yourself or you're curious about the health benefits of hippocras (a.k.a. ypocras) then why not pick up a copy today?


There was also much discussion - mainly with monks - about fasting and what the Medieval mind considers to be fish. This is also covered in What is Myrrh Anyway? as Christmas Eve was a fast day, and fish could be eaten on fast days.

What is Myrrh Anyway? - it's not just for Christmas!

George and the Dracorex

So I finally caught up with this week's episode of Primeval...

I feel that overall, the current series of Primeval (series 3) has been the best. It's grown from what appeared to simply start out as a time-travelling Doctor Who wannabe into very much its own monster, with some fun family friendly sci-fi (rather than the magical realism that DW relies upon) and an ever-increasing mythology tied up with a whole range of conspiracy theories that would make the X-Files proud. But back to this week's episode...

Still a very cool image, even if the episode wasn't the best.

Knights and dinosaurs - how could it go wrong? Well, in many ways, apparently. Knights and dinosaurs is an idea I've tried to sell in the past (and hope to again, more successfully, one day) but the problem with this week's Primeval (easily the weakest of the series so far) is that there wasn't enough of the knight vs the dinosaur.

There were some nice ideas (I liked how Sir William spoke of being in 'the world to come' thinking that he was talking about the afterlife, when in fact he was in the future, as far as he was concerned) but there was too much that jarred. A medieval knight speaking perfect modern English, rather than French or even Middle English, Sarah casually popping back into the past (having done a tidy bit of shoplifting) with no fear of the anomaly shutting at some inconvenient point, the hardened medieval mercenary not actually killing anything, the 'dragon' turning out to be a herbivore and yet having a set of gnashers Esther Rantzen would have been proud of... I could go on.

I was amused, however, to discover that the dragon of the piece, Dracorex (a dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of North America) was only discovered by palaeontologists in 2006 and that it's full name is Dracorex Hogwartsia, meaning 'dragon king of Hogwarts'. And I wonder if there'll be any more guest appearances from Jason Flemyng's old mates (Tony Curran, who played the knight, was The Invisible Man to Flemyng's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen).

The episode seemed particularly poor coming, as it did, after the nerve-shredding terror of the Terror Birds and the fantastic future Killer Fungus (although this one did make me wonder if anyone has been inspired by my own work, just as I am inspired by that of others). Fortunately, next week's episode (featuring a creature designed by 16 year-old Carim Nahaboo from Essex) looks much better. I'll be staying in for that one!

What could you do with 202 litres of Diet Coke and 523 Mentos?

Having just watched Richard Hammond's Engineering Connections, part of which had him explaining how North Sea gas comes out of the seabed under pressure, I was reminded of this well-known 'experiment'. If you've not seen it yourself before, enjoy.

Ghost Watch

Since it was first broadcast on the night of 31 October 1992, Ghost Watch has become something of a notorious television phenomenon. Although it was in reality a 90 minute TV drama, it was filmed as if it was a live television broadcast.

I didn't see it at the time, and I haven't seen it since, but even knowing that it was nothing but a work of fiction, just reading about it and watching clips on YouTube still leaves me feeling uneasy and unsettled, a cold knot of doubt in the pit of my stomach - and I write some pretty unpleasant stuff myself from time to time. But then that's the power of fiction for you!

Thanks to Steve Parker for putting me onto this one.

Knightmare nostalgia

If you were a child at the end of the 80s or start of the 90s, then you probably remember Knightmare. It was, for its time, an innovative virtual reality adventure set within a magical dungeon world, and it was on children's television.

Being a loyal devotee of the cult of Fighting Fantasy it seemed obvious to me that the programme was born off the back of the success of the gamebook phenomenon (oh, and RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons - you might have heard of it).

It was a much tamer experience than your average FF adventure, of course, there were no orcs to gut or horrifically described death scenes, but there was still the wandering around a labyrinth of gothically-decorated rooms, weird quasi-medieval characters to chew the fat with, and even some monsters (like the green-screened pet tarantula).

For those of you who remember Knightmare and the dungeon Treguard (the fantastic Hugo Myatt), then the following will probably fill you with feelings of nostalgia. If you were born after the advent of real VR interactive gameplay and the phenomenal rise of the games consoles, then you don't know what you've missed.

Imagine if you worked here...

One of the things that I've had to adjust to again over the last year is working from home for half the week. It has much to recommend it but then there are downsides too, and one of these is not having the company of others.

A ex-colleague of mine, from my days of full-time gainful employment, sent me the following video. Its a brilliant lip dub of Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger, which is also used as the theme music to Channel 4's equally brilliant (and disgusting) Peep Show.

The dub below is performed by a company called Connected Ventures, which is basically a group of friends who work for, Vimeo, CollegeHumor, Busted Tees, and Defunker. And I think the 'group of friends' tag says it all. That's what you lose when you make the break from full-time, office-based employment (or the equivalent). That and a guaranteed income, sick pay, incremental pay increases...


Lip Dub - Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger from amandalynferri on Vimeo.