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…that people still think the biggest problem with “old” Dr Who is that the sets were wobbly, when throughout the final episode of the new series of Dr Who all I could think when Daleks lined up to invade the earth was “if only one of them would wobble a bit they might look like real Daleks”.

Alas, none of them wobbled and they continued to look as unconvincing as Daleks from the 1990s computer game Dalek Attack as realised on an Amstrad CPC464.

Marianne Levy wonders if the whole episode was “a bit of a let down”. Well yes, it was. Not because it wasn’t exciting and so on, but the whole revelation about what “bad wolf” was, as an ending to a story arc, frankly rubbish and felt a little bit as though Russell T. Davies hadn’t really decided what he wanted it to be in the first place. The weirdo fans who write regular weblog entries about the series had much more exciting ideas.

It has also been accused of being a classic case of deus ex machina, something which I have already commented seems to be a bit of a Russell T hallmark. But in fact, the whole TARDIS magical powers element was based on a deus ex machina from a previous episode, which surely makes it a deus ex deus ex machina. (My Latin grammar may not be entirely correct, so perhaps we should call it a deus ex tardisinia or something.)

More worrying, surely, is the fact that David Tennant delivered his few lines in the same voice as Michael Palin’s cockney shop-owner in the infamous Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch. That would indeed make for an irritating characterisation of the Doctor. (“Nah, the Cybermen aren’t dead…they’re just pining for the fjords….”)

Anyway. It was jolly good fun, it just wasn’t as good as Tom Bell told me it was. He thought it was worth losing oxygen over, which is funny because as a rule Tom Bell is not easily pleased. He was certainly not pleased when he got locked out of my house last night.

No, I concur with Marianne. Oh, except she says that “the CGI was cool”, so obviously she wasn’t bothered by the lack of wobbling. I thought it looked kinda naff, personally.

On a completely different subject, has anyone else discovered the Hyperion Records home page? It allows you to download tracks from all of their CDs, so if you have a half-decent broadband connection you can sit at your computer listening to some of the finest recordings currently available to man.

Having just returned from Istanbul, I was somewhat shocked when I went to buy a sandwich today and wasn’t offered anything else at the same time, such as a snow globe of the Blue Mosque, or a tile depicting Ataturk pretending to be British.

This has come as quite a culture shock, although to be honest I can happily do without any more upsell from street corners, something the Turks seem to have perfected. It’s not so much the Amazon.com “you might also be interested in” style of upselling, but more the “you’re here, why not buy” style. I admire their inventiveness for doing it, but most of all I admire the fact that they manage to get away with it without becoming annoying. A quick brush off and they’re happy to move onto someone else – in fact, they were all quite lovely, with the exception of the rather grumpy flight attendants on the flight home (although to be fair they weren’t Turkish, as they belonged to the Airborne Sisterhood of the Orange).

And no, I didn’t buy a carpet. I’m not entirely certain what I’d do with one.

Yesterday was probably the most exciting day of my life to date.

The media conference I was on reached its climax with guest star Ann Widdecombe, who was completely bonkers but thoroughly entertaining and who I feel sure would be a perfect Prime Minister, if only anyone was brave enough to put her in that kind of position. At one point she declared “I’m not a world dictator, though maybe I’d like to be and the world would be a better place…”

On its own that would have been enough to make my day at least extremely memorable. But then in the evening I went to London to see Mary Poppins, which I watched with a big grin on my face and tears running down my cheeks. I haven’t been so insanely ecstatic for a very long time.

In many ways Ann Widdecombe and Mary Poppins are comparable for their inspiring qualities and their no-nonsense approach to life. But Ann Widdecombe didn’t fly over the audience, which I think on balance can only be a good thing.

Biotechnologists believe, apparently, that they have discovered (again) that sexuality is genetic after all. As reported in The Independent, they changed but a single gene in female fruit flies and they suddenly became all butch, engaging in “complex male mating rituals, vibrating their wings, licking other female flies’ genitalia and curling their backs ready for copulation”. No doubt a similiar gene change in a male fruit fly would cause it to start mincing around, listening to Kylie and using hair straighteners.

It may be that, if sexuality is actually proved to be genetic (which it never will be) certain groups might reassess their position towards homosexuality (it is technically difficult to maintain that homosexuality is unnatural when it is proved to be natural). But I doubt it. There are already arguments saying that even if homosexuality is genetic, “it’s just God’s way of telling you to be celibate” (cf. the “lung cancer is just God’s way of punishing smokers” argument).

But to my mind there is a far more dubious moral area to be tackled here. What about the poor lesbian fruit flies? God didn’t make them gay – biotechnologists did. Was this the biotechnologists’ way of telling them to be celibate? And will the fruit flies now be punished (either by God or by biotechnologists) for licking other female flies’ genitalia?

Were the fruit flies even given a LesBiGay rep to support them in this situation?

http://www.makepovertyhistory.org/whiteband_small_right.js http://www.makepovertyhistory.org

George W Bush has decided that debt-relief for Africa “doesn’t fit our budgetary process“.

What does this mean, exactly? “We need that money for more wars”? “African debt-relief isn’t part of the American dream”? “Gee, but cancelling their debt won’t make us any richer”?

How is it that a man can believe God has instructed him to make holy war against Iraq, yet for budgetary reasons won’t consider writing off Africa’s debt – which is, after all, a scriptural concept?

Could it be that Bush is not listening to God at all?

Because if he’s not, it seems unlikely that he’ll listen to Bono, Bob Geldoff or other assorted celebrities either.

In the mean time, though, there is information about what you to do if you want to email Tony Blair and urge him to give Bush a good slap here. Or you could try emailing president@whitehouse.gov if you reckon there’s any chance that he’ll read it.

Whilst out for an innocent evening of sociable fun, a Polish person approached me and asked if I wanted to have a threesome, enquiring “what do you like in bed?”

I responded “A nice cup of cocoa and a good book.” From the reaction this got I gathered that these are not concepts they are familiar with on the continent.

It being a bank holiday, today I have been asked to man the telephones for BBC Radio Cambridgeshire. All day.

There are two of us responsible for this task, which so far has worked out as one phone call each.

Three hours in, and the situation is clear: nobody is listening to us. We could sit swearing on the air, or we could broadcast the complete works of Keff McCulloch – nobody would ever know.

I guess it must be like this every day at Radio 3.

We’ve seen a fair amount of the new series of Doctor Who, and while it’s pretty good, it needs to get better for the second series. Here are some of the things that seem obvious to me.

• Write three times as much plot in every episode. There have been several episodes – even the Dalek episode, which was generally very good – where special effects, or protracted sequences of people doing nothing in blind panic, have been used instead of having more going on. Even the best episodes take a while to get going, and they all seem to have this appalling bit about thirty minutes in where everyone is about to die, and the camera cuts back and forth between all of them until someone remembers to press the “don’t die” switch. Write much more plot and this won’t need to happen.
• When writing an episode, don’t assume you’re smarter than the audience. The two-part aliens-invading-earth story had a lot of painful hints that the female MP was going to go on to be Prime Minister – really, only one was needed. Get lots of ideas going, and trust the audience to keep up.
• Learn the difference between comedy and humour, and don’t try to do comedy. There’s a bit in the first episode that is presumably supposed to be farcical, where the Doctor keeps on failing to notice the London Eye as the big circular thing he’s looking for. The joke isn’t bad, but the execution was terrible. (Actually, perhaps it was so protracted because they thought the audience needed time to get what was going on, in which case: see above.) Humour is a vibe that helps relieve tension and allows drama to be darker; comedy is something light and frothy that people forget by the morning. We don’t want people to forget Doctor Who.
• Have a single person who oversees everything from story inception to post-production – Russell T Davies has made it obvious he doesn’t see this as his job as lead writer, but it’s a job that needs doing. This is what Doctor Who producers used to do, before we went all pseudo-American with executive producers. Interestingly, this is exactly what executive producers do on the best shows. The job of the creative mind behind an episode, or the series, is not done on delivery of the script.
• Drop the minor characters and let Rose carry the weight of the human factor. Billie (and presumably her successor) is more than capable of carrying the human perspective in stories (indeed, The End Of The World had only one real human – Rose – but considerably more humanity than the episodes set on Earth have managed). Instead of half an hour of soap-style bickering and moaning to get the point that Rose isn’t sure whether running around with the Doctor is the right thing to do, one ten-second shot of her looking at a photo of her mother would be more effective. Trust in the actors.

And while I’m here, a technical niggle:

• There’s something wrong with the process used to make the digital footage look like film – it looks stretched, and the colours are weird. I don’t know what actually needs doing here, but there’s something not right, and it needs fixing.

This week I am staying with my family in Cheltenham, for that is where they all live. It’s been some time since I was here properly, and I would make the following observations:

1. Cheltenham gives me asthma.
2. In the same way as Letchworth Garden City makes a feature of trees and plants, Cheltenham has seen a number of new bits of concrete erected, as if it’s a beautiful material which adds a touch of je ne sais pas to a town. I don’t mean new buildings, I just mean lumps of concrete. There’s also a new circular piece of tarmac in the town centre, which you really ought to make sure you see if you’re ever here.

Although some of them remained unaware of it, yesterday evening saw the piecemeal unplanned reunion of most of the key members of the 2001-2002 Footlights Committee, due to a series of coincidences revolving around London locations from my favourite screen moments.

Call me a geek, but these locations are something of an interest of mine. I often used to escape from my degree by taking the tube to remote areas to see a place that had featured in a classic TV programme of some sort – random graveyards or bus shelters suddenly took on a whole new significance because they had once been in pivotal scenes of, say, to choose a very random example, Dr Who.

So when I arrived at King’s Cross station yesterday evening to discover that the next train back to Cambridge wasn’t for another fifty minutes – fifty! – I didn’t panic at the thought of waiting around on a cold platform reading a dull book.* I thought, “that’s fine, I’ll wander up the Caledonian Road and have a look at where they once built Mrs Wilberforce’s house for The Ladykillers“. This place, Frederica Street to be precise, has been completely rebuilt since then, but Roger Lewis’ brilliant but harrowing The Life and Death of Peter Sellers informs me that “it is still possible to stand above the railway tunnel and see the strange, smoke-filled panorama”. And I rather fancied a strange, smoke-filled panorama.

Unfortunately I rather miscalculated the amount of time it would take me to walk there, so I meandered a little too lazily and by the time I reached Frederica Street I didn’t have any time left to find the strange, smoke-filled panorama. Very disappointing. But as I ran to leap onto a bus in the hope of not missing my train, suddenly Tom Bell (Footlights vice-president 2001-2002) emerged as if he had been waiting there for the sole purpose of seeing me onto the bus. We exchanged brief hellos and he told me that he’d just been visiting Anthony Windram (Footlights sercial sercreter 2001-2002).

It wouldn’t have seemed so meaningful, except that but an hour earlier I’d been accosted by Ed Weeks (Footlights president 2001-2002), whilst in a completely different area of London – namely the White Hart pub near Waterloo, just around the corner from the location that was Ratcliffe’s yard in the 1988 Dr Who story “Remembrance of the Daleks”.

Who knows, perhaps if I’d bothered to take a trip to Fitzroy Square, the location for the fabulous dance sequence for “Who Will Buy” in Oliver!, and incidentally also in the opening overhead pan of the 1965 Dr Who story “The War Machines”, I might have bumped into Day Macaskill (Footlights membership secretary, 2001-2002).

This speculation aside, I fear nobody else realised the significance of last night, and in all probability they never will. During my conversation with Ed Weeks he declared “I HATE weblogs!” so I feel there is little chance of him reading this; Tom Bell is notoriously badly organised and I suspect he still needs to catch up on his previous mention on our diary here; and if Anthony Windram still keeps up to date with our weblog he’s keeping very quiet about it, especially in view of things like this.

*Alexander McCall Smith’s hugely overrated Von Igelfeld trilogy