Through the looking-glass

Amongst my mother's collection of recipes, I find an ancient (and somewhat revolting-sounding) Delia Smith cutting for Noodles with Cream Cheese and Mushrooms ("What is essential is the cream cheese flavoured with herbs and garlic... you may have to search around in delicatessens or specialised food shops.") On the back are listings for that night's BBC1 viewing:

6.25 - Nationwide
6.50 - Triangle: Episode 25 of the North Sea ferry saga
7.15 - Looking Good, Feeling Fit - Bracing health series checks up on stress, make-up for black girls and how Spandau Ballet keep up appearances.
7.45 - The Freddie Starr Showcase - new-talent acts are introduced by Freddie Starr.
8.30 Only Fools and Horses - Superior comedy series with David Jason as a South London hustler continually at cross-purposes with his brother and grandfather.

How did anybody get out of the eighties alive? *Clicks heels together* There's no place like home... There's no place like home... There's no place like home...

Music Monday on a Tuesday

Slipping under the bar at 11.22pm, it's Music Monday on a Tuesday. Today I drove my sister and my brand new niece to Heathrow airport as they left for home - Mozambique - and another long, long stretch in which I will not see them. Very sad. When my sister was little she had two favourite toys, Sunshine and Orange Donkey (never 'Orange Donkey and Sunshine', what, are you crazy?) Orange Donkey was an orange donkey, and Sunshine was a very floppy bright yellow dog type thing. I tell you this not only to cloy you with nauseating nostalgia-flavoured over-sweetness, but to explain, even more so, my song choice for today. (For those who take an interest, my niece's favourite toy is not chosen yet, she is only two months old, but we can assume it will be a rabbit, because all the toys she has been given so far have been rabbits.) Anyway: the classic Ain't no Sunshine performed live and acoustic by the brilliant (put the duck in the oven until its) Bill Withers in 1971:

Doctor Who: The Time of Angels

"I know they call him ten-inch, but you should see mine."

Wow. I mean - wow.

This episode scared the bejeesus out of me and I didn't even know I had bejeesus in me. Plot summary, not entirely coherent: River Song summons the Doc across time and space to save her life, and while he's at it, do battle with one of those nasty weeping angel statue thingies from Blink. River and the Doc bicker and flirt a lot, which I like, Amy laughs at them, which I also like, they team up with a bunch of warrior monks with a rather sexy leader in the form of Iain Glen, which I like hugely, helloooo Iain, it's all quite jolly and then OH MY GOD, AMY'S LOCKED IN WITH THE ANGEL AND IT'S COMING ALIVE ON SCREEN, IT'S COMING TO GET HER, NOW IT'S IN HER EYE, IT'S IN HER EEEEEYYYYEEEEEE, BLOODY HELL, SHIT NOW THEY'RE IN A MAZE, A MAZE OF STATUES AND DEAD PEOPLE, AND THERE'S AN ANGEL IN THERE WITH THEM, WHERE IS IT, WHERE IS IT, OH GOD, SOMETHING WEIRD IS HAPPENING TO THE MONKS, THIS IS LIKE THOSE WALKING BODIES IN THE LIBRARY ONE, THAT WAS SCARY TOO, OH GOD, ANGELS, ANGELS, ALL OF THE STATUES ARE ANGELS, ONLY THEY'RE ALL MESSED UP AND LOOK EVEN SCARIER WITH MELTED FACES, HELP, THEY ARE ROYALLY SCREWED, SHIT, SOMETHING REALLY WEIRD IS HAPPENING TO AMY, OH NO, THEY'RE IN A TRAP, AND THAT VOICE OF BOB THING IS FREAKING ME OUT, OH GOD, WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN TO THEM, OH NO, OH NO, OH what the fuck is an animated Graham Norton doing on screen NO, THE DOCTOR IS SHOOTING A GUN, HE NEVER SHOOTS A GUN, THIS IS SERIOUS SHIT, AND OH MY WORD IT'S THE END OF THE EPISODE.

(Spot the BBC's deliberate mistake.)

It was bloody brilliant and properly written and directed and all of that, and if I had a tiny little quibble it would be that early on in the episode the Doctor still comes across as a bit hopeless in comparison to River "I can reverse park this Tardis into a space even smaller than a Fiat 500" Song and Amy "give me a day to save and I'll save it" Pond, and I don't think the Doctor should be hopeless. But he gets very angry and unhopeless at the gunslinging end, so I have middling-to-high hopes of lack of hopelessness in future. Man of steel under his bumbling professor image etc.

What think the rest of you? It was great, wasn't it? Yes. Great. Definitely.

Any more for any more?

Following on from yesterday's controversial name / weight / beard quasi-synesthesia, I hesitate to reveal the following but reveal it I will:

- Odd numbers are male and even numbers are female. I believe this so strongly that it actually came as a surprise to me that other people didn't. Interestingly, or I find it interesting at least, the only other person recorded to have held this belief is Pythagoras. And he knew even more about maths than I do.

- Also, crotchets are male and minims are female.

I hold these truths to be self-evident.

Fattypuffs and Thinnifers

This post from my big-mouthed friend reminded me of my theory of fat names and thin names, and my sub-theory of bearded and clean-shaven names, which I don't think I have ever elucidated here.

Basically, it's this. Some names are fat. Some names are thin. Some names suggest beards. Some names do not. So Brian Blessed correctly has a beard and is fat, but Geoff Hoon, who should be fat and bearded, is erroneously thin and clean shaven. I get away with being thin by virtue of my name Marie Phillips, but if I had married a boyfriend of long ago and become Marie Barraclough I'd be so fat you could roll me down a hill. Russell T Davies is fat. Steven Moffat, despite the word "Fat" in his name, is thin. David Tennant is thin. Matt Smith is fat. Karen Gillan is thin. Billie Piper is fat. And so on.

This makes perfect sense, right? Right?

Music Monday on a Tuesday: Postscript

I just thought of this lovely gardening-related song, with a beautiful video to match: 'Mango Tree' by Angus and Julia Stone. I had a snoop around Youtube and it turns out that all their songs are great and they've got a nice line in imaginative videos. Another album purchased, another work afternoon wiled away not working...

Music Monday on a Tuesday

Once, when I was nineteen and had had a particularly emotional day (read: had just got dumped), my father told me that life would get much easier as I got older, as I would no longer feel things so deeply but instead become interested in antiques and gardening.

He was half right. I am definitely a lot more interested in antiques and gardening. In fact I spent this morning deadheading my jasmine and marvelling at the fact that it has spent several months doing a perfect impersonation of a large dead twig, but the moment the sun has come out it has leapt to glorious, verdant life. I think the jasmine and me have much in common. I am genuinely excited at the prospect of going to the garden centre on Saturday to replenish my herbs and replace the dead geraniums (geraniums will just die - I refuse to take the blame), and then I am going to get stuck into the weeds, and in fact the only thing I don't love about gardening is filling the watering can. I don't know why. I just hate it. (Oh, and cutting back the ivy, but that's not gardening, it's crowd control.)

There aren't a lot of songs about gardening, as it turns out. Feel free to suggest a few. Here's Crosby, Stills and Nash performing Our House, which does mention flowers and a yard. Just try to resist the singalong at the end. God, they look old. I wonder if they still feel things deeply and how they feel about antiques?

Doctor Who: Victory of the Daleks

Oh dear.

While not being nearly as dire as [insert your least favourite Doctor Who episode here], Victory of the Daleks wasted an exciting premise (Churchill recruits Daleks to win him the war) on a boring resolution (Churchill is deceived, not the pragmatic bastard history teaches us he was [cf sinking of Lusitania], WW2 setting swiftly abandoned for grandstanding on board Dalek ship) and bar a bit of fun with a jammy dodger was largely devoid of humour or danger or, well, anything. The Daleks get a redesign for the Apple generation, the Doctor gets hasty and flustered and nearly cops out yet again, Amy saves the day yet again, and how come I am using the words 'yet again' to describe episode 3? How can it already be feeling tired?

Next week should be a blinder, the first of a Moffat-penned two-parter featuring both River Song and the Blink angels. If they can't pull that one off I will be weeping into my life-sized David Tennant cutout* (*may not actually own one). Sex sells, but it also helps keep a girl awake. Could this be the beginning of the end of my love affair with Who?

Music Monday on a Tuesday

As previously mentioned, tonight I will be hosting Granta Magazine's first ever pub quiz, at the Crown Tavern on Clerkenwell Green in London, and the theme will be sex. Therefore I have decided to choose a sexy song that is not gross for today's Music Monday on a Tuesday. A sexy song that is not gross. There are fewer than you might think. (Feel free to name some in the comments.) But in honour of the sunny weather I am going with one of my all-time favourites: Hot Fun in the Summertime by Sly and the Family Stone. Sadly I couldn't find the fab live version I saw on Youtube a few years ago, and this doesn't even have a video, but it's just too good. Also it's not actually about sex. But it's sexY. Hot Fun:

Doctor Who: The Beast Below

(By the way, when I post my Who reviews on a Monday I'll do Music Monday on a Tuesday, just to spread things out a bit. This is how I roll, baby. Just call me an anarchist.)

This week, the Doctor and Amy (in nightdress and slippers) went to a future dystopian 'Earth' comprising of a bunch of towerblocks floating through space, looking for a new planet to call home. It's a police state, ruled by those creepy heads in glass boxes you get at carnivals that spin to reveal three faces: 'friendly but weird', 'scary and weird', 'demonic with teeth, coming soon to a nightmare with you. Oh and by the way, you're about to be eaten by a giant monster. Bye!' Stephen Moffat, as has been observed by many before me, has a real eye for the everyday stuff that, with the most minor of twists, can traumatise children for life.

I didn't enjoy this quite as much as last week's - junior Amy Pond was sorely missed (I really hope we get to see more of her, though timeline-wise I can see it might not quite work) - but partly, I suspect, it's because Doctor Who seems to have taken a more child-oriented direction, and that can only be good. So it was unhappy children who moved the Doctor's heart to disembark at that particular articulation of Earth, and unhappy children to provided the denouement of the whole tale. The world seemed to me to be highly evocative of children's nightmares: do your homework or you will be dropped into a fiery pit and eaten alive. I didn't find it all that scary, but I'm about to turn 34. I don't think that I should be the Who target audience. Having said that, I found the "protest or forget" polling booth unaccountably sinister, so maybe Moffat will prove just as good at tapping into dark corners of my subconscious too.

However, my particular pleasure in this episode was the development of the eleventh Doctor's character, and especially what I'd been hoping for ever since the announcement of Matt Smith's casting: that he would be an old head on a young body. His Doctor moves old, sounds old, dresses old, acts old. But he's full of bonkers enthusiasms and inexplicable behaviour. He's basically an ancient, eccentric, boffiny professor trapped in a young man's body. Which is exactly the way I want him to be. I was also pleased to see him lost patience with the human race, as it was all getting a bit lovey-dovey under RTD's stewardship, and was properly taken aback when he lost it with Amy and threatened to send her home.

Amy is proving herself smart and resourceful as well, and it was nice to have her save the day so early on in the series. I liked gun-toting Liz 10 as the guest star, and if the "star whale rescues crying children" ending was a bit sappy, so be it - seems appropriately reassuring for a younger audience. (My contrary head was full of questions like how come the whale's tentacles had teeth, and if Scotland really had gone on a "different ship" does that mean that they all died?)

All in all, another good effort, and I'm looking forward to see what Moffat does with the Daleks next week.

(Picture courtesy of Rob's review on The Medium is Not Enough, always an excellent purveyor of Who and other TV / film-related stuff.)

Events, dear boy, events

Next week is ACTION PACKED with events. ACTION PACKED I tell you.

On Tuesday 13th April I'm hosting a pub quiz at the Crown Tavern on Clerkenwell Green in London to launch Granta magazine's latest issue. The theme of the mag is Sex, and so is the theme of the quiz. Let's not speculate about why they asked me to do it. No. Let's not. Details are here, alongside a list of other related events which unaccountably do not feature me.

And THEN on Thursday it's the Firestation Bookswap in Windsor, hosted as usual by me and Scott Pack, and featuring young feminist Kat Banyard, novelist Ray Robinson, and cake. Lots and lots of lovely cake. I could do a great post with lots of clever links to everyone, but as it turns out Scott did that already so if you want more details pay him a visit.

Hope to see you at one or both events. One will have more sex and the other will have more cake. I will judge you entirely on which you choose.

Voice of the TARDIS

Helen made the following excellent observation in the comments of my Who review:

"Did you notice the speaker phone thingy? Will this TARDIS have a voice?"

No I did not notice the speaker phone! And am immediately intrigued. If the Tardis had a voice, whose voice should it be? Brian Blessed? Jane Horrocks? David Mitchell? Anyone but Stephen Fry, please, whose voice is marvelous, but ubiquitous.

I open the floor to your suggestions...

Beautiful Minds: Jocelyn Bell Burnell

I have a new heroine. Her name is Jocelyn Bell Burnell and she is a very famous scientist. Not famous enough, obviously, for me to have heard of her, but then the only living scientists I have heard of are Stephen Hawking and Stephen Hawking, and as it happens Stephen Hawking (or a photograph of him, anyway) turned up in last night's fantastic TV documentary about Jocelyn Bell. Bell's work discovering the existence of pulsars paved the way for Hawkins's black hole theory to gain greater credence, basically. So Bell made Hawkins, AND SHE CAN BREAK HIM JUST AS EASILY. *DEMONIC LAUGHTER*. Oh sorry. Got distracted. It's sunny in my office, what can I say.

To return to the point, Bell was the subject of the first episode of the BBC4 series 'Beautiful Minds', profiling great scientists. As a Phd student in the 1960s, Bell first built and then scanned the results of Cambridge's Cavendish Lab's new radio telescope, a fantastically strange creation involving lost of poles in a field linked by miles and miles of wire. (It took Bell the first two years of her Phd just to assemble the thing.) The telescope produced 94 feet of readings a day, all of which had to be manually scanned by Bell, readings which were constantly being scuppered by interference from pirate radio stations, police radios and the like. But amongst all this, Bell noticed a quarter inch of slightly divergent results. She pushed and pushed for these results to be investigated, against her supervisor's insistence that it must just be more interference. Eventually she demonstrated that the "interference" was in fact a star that was sending out pulses of radiation. As her supervisor excluded her from meetings to discuss the implications - was the pulse a signal from space aliens, and what should be done about it if so? - she persisted in her work, discovered another pulsing star, and the rest is history, and physics, and Nobel prize glory! But not for her. Don't be ridiculous. It was her (male) supervisor - the one who didn't believe her findings - and her (male) head of department who were awarded the prize, something that Bell appears remarkably sanguine about.

Bell was a terrific interviewee, endearingly modest about her achievements and yet justly proud of what she had done. She was brilliantly articulate, and her face spoke as much as her words. Her eyes shone as she spoke of human beings as being made of the same stuff as the stars; her face fell into still-smarting hurt as she described her isolation as a physics undergraduate, the only girl on her course, greeted by whistles and catcalls as she walked into lectures; she was moved to tears as she remembered her school physics teacher's pride in her success. Contrast her appallingly smug supervisor, who lacked the grace to acknowledge Bell's contribution to the Nobel-prize winning work, saying that he was the captain of the ship and it didn't matter who the crew was. Bell's contemporaries remember it differently, saying that perhaps only one scientist in a hundred would have noticed and acted on the anomaly that Bell spotted.

It was a simply-made, absorbing documentary, punctuated with well-chosen archive clips of scientific films from the 1960s, and blissfully free of dramatic reconstruction. If you're in the UK, you can watch it on iPlayer here.

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Hour

So here are the headlines: I love him. But I don't want to shag him.

It was fab, wasn't it? I was deeply freaked out by the last few seconds of last season's finale, but with hindsight I defy anyone to step into the clothes of a dead David Tennant and say "We're crashing. Geronimo!" in any way convincingly. As it turns out, Matt Smith is brilliant and - hurrah - it looks like the 11th Doctor is going to be deeply, deeply weird. I am taking the fishfingers and custard combo as a very firm statement of intent. Am super-pleased about this: the Doctor is an alien after all, and the 10th incumbent did spend a bit too much time making dreamy speeches about how bloody brilliant humans are (open a newspaper, Doctor. We aint that great.) MS is at his best doing odd doc, which suits his odd looks, and slightly less convincing in what I'd call the DT scenes ie sudden moments of soulful introspection.

And how do I love thee, new Tardis. So many whistles and bells! Actual whistles and bells! And that typewriter! And the concierge bell! Did I mention bell? Yes, the Tardis has been reborn as a Heath Robinson collage of weirdness reflecting the inside of its owner's mind. There's been mention of a library and a swimming pool, and this is just a personal thing, but all through the RTD era I have been desperate to see more of the Tardis's interior beyond the console room and I am very, very excited to think that I might finally get my wish. I might not. But I might. Meanwhile the Tardis has a proper personality, a very sexy personality as the Doc himself said. I might fancy the Tardis more than I fancy the Doctor.

Speaking of fanciability, I doubt very much that many of the men (or lesbians) watching will have been disappointed by new companion, kissogram (ahem) Amy Pond. Start with a looker and then put her into a fake policewoman uniform complete with micro-mini and seamed stockings. I hope my brother was watching (were you, Bro?) I am proud of myself for having spotted that that radio was plastic, duh. I was possibly less distracted than some might have been by other aforementioned aspects of aforementioned outfit.

New New Who also impressed by casting people who could actually act in all the supporting roles - as well as Karen Gillan, who is totally convincing and pleasingly bonkers as Amy, there's junior Amy Pond (a child who can act! I predict great things for Caitlin Blackwood, who apparently got the part on the strength of being Gillan's cousin), Amy's slightly wet boyfriend Rory the nurse (way more convincing than Metal Mickey), some old lady, some bloke called Jeff, I mean this is exciting stuff! All this and a minor role for Olivia Coleman. Truly my cup (Doctor Who-branded official Tardis-shaped cup) overfloweth.

Hated the theme tune. Moving on.

The plot was... fine. Functional, better than functional, but not a classic. Who cares? There was a lot of introducing to do. I did like the slight Time Traveller's Wifeyness of the Doc appearing and disappearing in Amy's life. Moffat is clearly a fan of the Time Traveller's Wife, judging by the, shall we say, homage of Girl in the Fireplace (which is itself referenced in Niffenegger's follow-up novel, so we can assume all is forgiven.) Amy dumping her wedding to take off across the stars with the Doc was also a nice move. What do we think, people? Was she marrying Rory, or Jeff? Looking forward to returning to that storyline. Also, at some point next season there's bound to be a two docs episode, and I wonder if the libidinous Doctor 10 will be rather jealous of Doctor 11's pulchritudinous companion. Ooh. Some 10 and Pond flirting. And 11 getting jealous. I like the thought of that.

So a bucketload of squee from the Talk Too Much jury and very much looking forward to the rest of the series.

Placeholder Post

So, new Doctor Who: I absolutely...

...have to go away from my computer for a few days. Full report on Who when I get back. Expect at least an entire paragraph just about the new-look Tardis.

Meanwhile, Happy Easter. Don't do that thing of eating chocolate just before you go to bed so that when you brush your teeth the spit is brown. Just me? Oh.