Malcolm Tucker vs the Daleks

Bob, Anna and I gathered round the tv in our holiday cottage to watch the Doctor Who special last Sunday. 

I probably owe Zoe Ball an apology after being so critical of her choice as presenter. She did a very good job. In fact, it was Rufus Hound who let the side down, making two factual errors in his comments. First of all he said that Bernard Cribbens' Wilf Mott had knocked 3 times to cause the death of Tennant's Doctor and then that Peter Eccleston was the 9th Doctor. It's like he was trying to give the lie to Ball's claim that nobody in the studio knew who the new Doctor was.

I was still fairly convinced that it was going to be Capaldi - it would have been very stupid of the production team to let that speculation build as it had. By the time of the announcement, everyone had the idea of Capaldi firmly in their head and anyone else would have been a disappointment. He has the versatility, skill and authority as one of our best actors to play the Doctor. We know how well he can do both comedy and drama. If you haven't watched Torchwood: Children of Earth and seen his portrayal of Home Office official John Frobisher, watch it now. 

I had one wobble, though. When Matt Smith was interviewed, he said that the new Doctor had come up to him in the street and congratulated him on his debut performance, saying "Well done, mate." I couldn't really imagine Capaldi saying that. Maybe I had got it wrong after all.

My favourite part of the whole programme was when the new Doctor said he hadn't played the Doctor since he was 9 years old. It's good to have a genuine fan, who knows what it's like to grow up being petrified and enchanted in equal measure. 

It seems that Capaldi was the first choice of the production team and the only person to be seriously considered. I like the fact that we're going to have an older Doctor again, for the first time since the series came back in 2005. Maybe we'll get an older companion, too, particularly an older female in the style of Liz Shaw. That would be a novel departure for the new series. So far we've had companions who had few prospects before the Doctor came along to rescue them, companions who fancied him, companions he fell in love with. I'm not saying we should dispense with Clara, although it will be interesting to see how Jenna Louise Coleman and Peter Capaldi work together, just that I want to see something a bit different.

Capaldi has become so associated with Malcolm Tucker in the minds of those of us who watched The Thick of It and the various gifs of Tucker swearing at daleks and the like have been very amusing. It will take time for us to stop waiting for a sweary outburst, but we'll get there. I will, though, be very disappointed if Tucker's Law doesn't get some sort of oblique reference in the script.

One consequence of Capaldi's appointment is that Anna is very keen to watch The Thick of It. After two nights, we're at the end of the first series and she loves it. She seems to have the idea that this is how Government works, though. That's probably more scary than any dalek.

There are two episodes of Matt Smith's tenure to go, though. I want to enjoy every minute of them before thinking about next year's series, though.

Starfury Midnight: Eve Myles and Gareth David Lloyd

I know I'm late to posting this but, well, Christmas got in the way. When I came back from the Starfury: Midnight Doctor Who convention on 16th December, I had literally done nothing for Christmas. Santa had been briefed, but that was about it.I took notes from a few of the talks and the first one covers Gareth David Lloyd and Eve Myles from both Saturday and Sunday. They were both very relaxed and in great form, despite having been working since 9am having photos taken with huge amounts of people on Saturday and Eve in particular having a wee bit of a headache on the Sunday. She'd been up pretty late partying. I have to say that both of them were lovely to Anna. Gareth was really sweet when she had her photo taken with him and Eve showered her with compliments when we got her autograph.

You really do learn something new every day. One of the things they talked about was the shrine to Ianto in Cardiff Bay. I had a quick google to find an article about it and discovered that Peter Black, Lib Dem AM, had, in 2010, supported the Save Ianto campaign's aim to get him back on screen.

Anyway, Gareth did have a bit of a laugh about two things - dirty knickers on the shrine and he told how he'd found a woman crying at the shrine and gone up and tapped her on the shoulder. Can you imagine? going up to crying fans.

The circumstances surrounding Ianto's death were pretty shocking and emotional to watch. He was wiped out, as Gareth inimitably pointed out, by an alien fart. Anyway, what we learned was that the scene where Captain Jack wakes up after he too had been killed, again, was prey to a Barrowman prank. When Eve Myles pulled back the sheet covering Barrowman, she saw him lying there with a huge handlebar moustache.

Eve clearly enjoyed the weekend and said in the panel that it was "brilliant to get the opportunity to meet the people who watch our work." She added that it was "joyous" to have the weekend away on her own in a posh hotel minus her 3 year old.

She went on to say that she loved playing Gwen: It's great to play action figure who isn't size 6 & blonde."

Gareth said that Countricide was his favourite episode because: "They let us run around on the Brecon Beacons like loopy loos." At one location, Gareth banged his head on a bell. That didn't put him off going back there to get married. He discovered that they had moved that big bell higher because "some idiot had banged their head on it."

Gareth said that Ianto was supposed to die half way through the first series, so getting another two years was a huge bonus. He kept teasing us through the weekend that Ianto would come back, but said that this would cheat the drama they'd achieved. One of the things Gareth had to do as Ianto was kiss John Barrowman, a lot. When asked what it was like, he said. "Awful. I taught him everything he knows." Eve chipped in that Barrowman has no tongue.

Having said all of that, Gareth told us that a crew member's dog was really badly injured in an accident and faced being put down. Animal lover Barrowman paid a massive vet's bill to save its life.

Eve was asked how she would like the character of Gwen to develop in another series of Torchwood. She was quite unequivocal - it had to involve eating cake and shooting things. Oh, and she'd have to become a wine connoisseur and a black belt. She talked about how her little girl loved Merida, the Princess from Disney's Brave and how this character was a really good role model to both boys and girls.

She also talked about having to learn to ride a Harley, in about 20 minutes, for that scene in Torchwood: Miracle Day. She said that it was touch and go whether they would let her do it because the winds were really high. Gareth really took the mickey out of her when she said rambler instead of scrambler, too. He would have enjoyed the motorbike stunt as he said he loves extreme sports - he's a real thrill seeker apparently.

The questions people ask at conventions range from ingenious to downright weird. Someone asked Eve what she would do if confronted with 3 things: a gun, Barrowman and cake. She said she'd put the gun in Barrowman's hand, eat the cake and take them both home.

It's hard to convey just how irreverent and funny these sessions were. I would happily go and see either of them at a convention again. It might actually be good to get them on their own. They were fab together, but I'd like to see how they were when they didn't have the other to banter with.

Reflections on Starfury's Midnight Doctor Who convention

I've just about recovered now from the fabulous weekend Anna and I spent in Birmingham at the Starfury Midnight Doctor Who convention. The first 24 hours involved prize pooches and daleks with handbags, as I wrote the other day.

My convention going experience ranges from the hyper-official (the Official Doctor Who convention in March and Star Trek: Generations at the Royal Albert Hall in 1995) and the cosy and intimate - an event called Cult TV which took over a holiday camp in Norfolk in the 90s. That, actually, was where I found myself on several occasions chatting to the lovely Lis Sladen when we were both outside having a cigarette. Midnight was much bigger and more formal than Cult TV but not as regimented as the official events.

I really need to thank Blogtor Who because if he hadn't posted a few months back that David Tennant and Billie Piper were going, I doubt we'd have even considered attending. David Tennant is Anna's Doctor in the same way as Tom Baker is mine, though. The one you grow up watching is always special. There was no way we could turn down the chance to see one of his rare appearances, or miss Billie's first.

So, let me give you a little flavour of the weekend. I will do some additional posts with more notes on the main guests' talks later.

If I knew when I'd booked what I know now, I would have made sure that we stayed the Sunday night as well. I had assumed that David \and Billie's talk would be over by late afternoon but it wasn't scheduled to even start until 5 - and everything had run late the whole weekend. They managed to get it back on track, but I was worried for our flight at 8:30. We also missed a party on the Sunday night, so if there is a next time, we'll be staying right through.

The Guests

Apart from David and Billie, the headline guests were Torchwood duo Gareth David Lloyd, whose character Ianto was killed by a vengeful alien sneeze in 2009, and Eve Myles, who plays Gwen Cooper, the only character with any common sense in that show. Gwen, actually, is one of my favourite female sci-fi characters. She's feisty, brave, passionate, stubborn, funny and generally the sort of girl you'd want to go out for a few beers with. Anjili Mohindra, who played Rani in The Sarah Jane Adventures was appearing at her first UK convention. Script Editor Gary Russell, Sontaran actor Dan Starkey, Slitheen actress Annette Badlands, Dalek operator Barnaby Edwards,  and writers Phil Ford, Tony Lee and Jim Swallow completed the line-up.

All the guests worked really hard. Poor Billie Piper was full of the cold, but it was hard to see where she had a break all day. She and David Tennant spent the first 3 hours having photos taken with virtually the entire convention, then 4 hours signing autographs for the same people and then had to go out and sparkle during their talk. The others' workload included at least one panel, plus photos plus about 6 hours of signing. The Saturday autograph session was supposed to finish at around 6:30 but it was 7:20 before we got out.

I will be eternally grateful to Eve Myles for being lovely to Anna. She said some really complimentary stuff to her, the sort of stuff I tell her all the time, but I'm only her mother so I don't really count. Anna really likes Eve, and when you're 13, when someone you really admire takes the time, unbidden, to pay you an enthusiastic compliment, that means a lot. I visibly saw my girl grow about 4 inches on the spot. It was the end of a very long day for Eve, and I really appreciated her effort. Her autograph queue was about a mile long because she was chatting to everybody and she partied happily long after I went to bed.

Anjili Mohindra was also fantastic - very friendly and she was handing out Skittles to people.The sweets, not actual skittles, you understand. I was really sad that I didn't get to see her solo panel on the Sunday because I was queueing for photographs as we had to leave immediately after Tennant and Piper. I think it would have been better to have had her solo talk on the Saturday. She had a panel that day with Gary Russell and Phil Ford but, to be honest, it turned into what Jennie would call a sausagefest. Any young woman who has ever been to a meeting on anything will tell you about middle aged blokes talking to each other and pretending she isn't there, talking over her, ignoring her and then regurgitating what she's said a while later, passing it off as their own idea and that sort of thing. And the thing is, I bet you Gary and Phil didn't even realise they were doing most of that. Had I been moderating that session I would have made sure Anjili was brought in a bit more and given her own space. Credit to her for butting in and trying to take it back herself on occasion, but she shouldn't have had to and it was intensely irritating to watch.

And while we're on the subject of writers and females, I was less than impressed when somebody asked Tony Lee about whether he'd like a female doctor. He said that, yes, he'd welcome it and she wouldn't have to be a "young dolly bird", she could be like an elder statesman figure. Because, clearly, those are the only two types of women there are. I despair.

Eve and Gareth probably shouldn't be let out in public. Both of their panels were hilarious, irreverent and highly entertaining. We certainly got our money's worth out of them.

David and Billie were great, too. I liked particularly her honesty about being slightly overwhelmed by the fandom thing. Rose Tyler was a job to her, it didn't come with the baggage we fans give to the Doctor Who world and she didn't try to pretend any different. She did it in a lovely way, not disrespectful at all. She finds it very strange that "every conversation" she ever has "is dominated by" the two years she spent playing Rose. Tennant's obvious attributes are enhanced by the fact that he was the sort of colleague you would love to have around when there's idiocy going on. I could not believe the things that they were asked by a couple of people. Bearing in mind that this is the first time Billie had ever faced the fans in this way, to have someone ask if she and David would like to sleep with each other is beyond the pale. I really felt for her, but David diffused that one with humour, asking if the questions had been set up by John Barrowman. He also brushed off another stupid question which went something like "If Rose had been a call girl (Billie played the lead role in Secret Diary of a Call Girl), would the Doctor have tried to rescue her from her wicked ways." Tennant said that the Doctor wouldn't make moral judgements about people's personal lives.

The Parties

I love a good dance to really cheesy music - and I got it. The evening discos went on until 2 am and were really good. The very same dalek who was pictured with the handbag was apparently doing the Macarena on Saturday night. The music was great and I learned loads of convention dances that I didn't know before. I have done the Slosh to the Doctor Who theme tune. My life is complete.

For the future, though, I think it would be good to have a sort of fringe, like you do at party conference. At Cult TV, way back in the mists of time, we used to have this thing called After Dark where a group would gather and talk about geeky stuff to a reasonably set topic. I think there's scope for that sort of thing at a Starfury event. I'm sure fans to lead these things could easily be found. Some of the guests came along, too. Kevin Davies was a regular, for example.

The organisation

Dealing with the number of people they had to deal with on Saturday was one thing - and that was no insignificant task.On Sunday, when everybody wanted to meet David and Billie, it was something else. The convention staff were all brilliant, especially the people on the photo sales desk who had to distribute all the photos to people, no mean feat, especially when they were arriving in dribs and drabs.

The one point which I felt let them down was the closure of the queue to get electronic copies of the photos at 3:30 on Sunday with no possibility of getting any more. Now, there was a good reason for that - I really wanted the photo staff to get to see Billie and David's talk and that was the only way that was going to happen. However, I think there should have been another way of acquiring the photos electronically, even after the event. 

The autograph queues were a little strange - at previous conventions I've been at, there's been a single queue and you just go from guest to guest. For this one, you had to queue for one, then the next. There presumably was a reason for that, but I'm not sure I can see how it helped. By the way, I clearly hadn't thought through what we were going to get signed. You could take one personal item and one paid item to David and Billie. We didn't have any personal items - and then it suddenly dawned on me that I could get him to sign this:

Credit for that idea has to go to Sarah Green, who several years ago got Ross Brawn, Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello to sign hers.

I have to make special mention of the very scary hall steward, who ruled the hall with a rod of iron, making sure people weren't recording any of the proceedings. I was using my phone and iPad, but, as requested, it was always on flight mode and I was using it to take notes. He told me off at one point but when I showed him the little plane in the corner he was happy. And when he was outside the hall, he wasn't scary at all. You generally need someone like that at big events, who will take no nonsense in their domain.

Sadly, nonsense there was because footage has apparently appeared of some of the talks on the internet.It will never be anything like as good as being there, but people will see it who didn't pay to go and that is unacceptable to the organisers. There's been a bit of a stooshie online about it, with the organisers sounding like they regret allowing any phone use in the hall at all. I think that there has to be a balance here.In this day and age, you can't expect people not to take their phones - and in some instances they are people's cameras and the only way they could get footage of the event. If  someone is determined to record something and put it up on the internet, having phones on flight mode isn't going to stop that. It only means you can't put it up from the hall. I don't know how many people we're talking about here, but hte vast majority of  people behaved like adults and deserve to be treated like adults. Surely the simplest thing would be to have, like in the cinema, a "if we see your red light, or catch you recording anything, you will be ejected from the convention, barred from future events and made to delete the material. Then the majority of rule abiding attendees can be left in peace to use their phones as they need. And is there really any problem with tweeting through an event? One person was tweeting in the Midnight hashtag during David and Billie's speech. They're easily identifiable and they were allowed to do it. So, there is already an inconsistency there.

Venue

It was held in the Hilton Metropole Hotel near Birmingham airport which is right next to the NEC and a really good venue for a 1000 people plus event. It would be even better if they moderated their exorbitant bar prices a little. £8.10 for a large glass of wine really is taking the mickey, although it kept me sober all weekend. In the lounge, I discovered on Sunday that if you ordered a coffee from the bar, it cost significantly less than if you ordered it from Costa Coffee. Eating turned out to be less expensive than I'd feared. They did a buffet for £10 a head which was pretty reasonable value, but it could have done with being on for an hour longer given that it had finished by the time we got out of the autograph sessions on Saturday night. However, judicious choices from the menu in the bar, with the 20% discount for attendees, worked out cheaper. The room was ok, but it was either too hot or too cold - there didn't seem to be a way of getting the temperature to stabilise. And the pillows were too soft and the mattress too hard for my liking.

The staff were generally pretty friendly and helpful, although the concierge people were really snippy on the Sunday. Yes, they had 500 bags to deal with, but if they're a regular conference centre, they should expect that.

It was also really good that they came and picked us up from Birmingham International station in their courtesy bus. Getting back wasn't so reliable, though. The bus we were booked on left early and I just jumped in a taxi rather than risk losing my flight.

We absolutely loved the weekend. It's slightly concerning that Anna is now viewing the fact that they are running conventions next year around both her birthday and Christmas. She made a friend her age who is into all the things she's into, all the same animes and programmes, and it was quite good for her to realise that there are, actually, at least 1000 people in the world who are quite like her. I think we'll wait and see if there is going to be another official one around the 50th anniversary and then decide what to do, but we'd certainly go back to another Starfury event. I'll even volunteer to proofread their schedule for them. Seriously, it has to merit a place in the Guinness Book of Records for the most errors to space ratio ever...

John Barrowman catches thief in Glasgow hotel

We're used to seeing Captain Jack Harkness getting himself into scrapes and fights as he saves the earth as leader of the intrepid Torchwood organisation. We associate the actor who plays him with fluffy Saturday night entertaining and the occasional

Well, it appears that art met reality the other night in a Glasgow hotel where Barrowman rugby tackled a young thief who'd been helping himself to the contents of a fellow guest's room.

The Daily Record has the story.

The striking thing for me is that Barrowman's attitude is not to lock the thief up and throw the key away, but to try to offer a different future by offering a job on the panto he'll be in this Christmas.

Torchwood Terror (includes Spoilers)

It's a long time since a tv progamme left me physically shaken and emotionally shocked and stunned, but Torchwood did it.

First of all, I'm glad that the BBC didn't shy away from the hideous nature of the conclusion and order writer Russell T Davies to make it all a bit more cosy, so congratulations to them for keeping the deep, deep darkness in.

Secondly, what a triumph of writing, casting (Peter Capaldi as the Government official unable to find the spine to do the right thing), music, from the tense, pacy stuff to haunting choral melodies, and effects (why is it that nothing makes you jump quite as much as a liberal splattering of green goo?) this was, all brought together by director Euros Lyn.

For me the scariest thing wasn't the druggie alien in the tank, frightening though its misty profile was, but the way in which the Government first covered up the past and then conjured up a truly evil plan to deal with the situation. The cleverness of the writing, tapping into our perception of the current political scene, even tapping into the Swine Flu anxiety, to create a chilling credibility, had me shaken. If I, who generally view politicians as good people, could find the fictitious Government's actions so easy to believe, we really do have a problem.

Having said that, I can't imagine that anybody really thinks that the real life Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg would ever preside over a Government that would hand over 10% of our kids to a random alien junkie, but everybody's favourite elephant has done a much better job than I ever could of showing exactly why we could so easily fall for that storyline in his reviews of the last few days. I do disagree, however, with Millennium's comparison of Denise with Harriet Jones. Davies shut off any avenue of hope for the future by ensuring that the discredited PM was replaced by the Jacqui Smith type who came up with the idea of selecting the kids from the failing schools.

While I'm on this theme, I don't quite understand why Gwen and Rhys don't, if this woman becomes PM, release the recordings they had tfrom the earlier discussions to discredit her.

I wondered how Aaron Sorkin might have tackled the plot challenge of an alien demanding the handover of children. I can't imagine that complying would ever have entered Jed Bartlet's head. I suspect that his administration would have concentrated on trying to either cure the alien species of its dependence or tried to produce a synthetic substitute.

What did defy credibility was that a Government could so quickly and efficiently organise a round up of all those children when they had spectacularly failed to kill three relatively unarmed people. Sure, they had the ingenious ideas of bombs in stomachs and encasing the man who can't die in concerete, showing him naked, handcuffed to a table first, but they could have saved themselves loads of trouble by simply making sure that their snipers had had eye tests. How many of them missed both Ianto and Gwen, leaving them free to turn up at the secret base where Jack was being held? How incompetent was it of the bosses not to circulate to the gate people pictures of Gwen and her husband as they turned up in the undertaker's car? Did their Welsh accents not ring any bells? Really!

As if the scary Government wasn't bad enough, the final conclusion, where Jack sacrificed his own grandson, was grotesque and something which actually hurt to watch. Stephen was here watching it with me. He had the help of a rather nice bottle of night harvested Aussie dolcetto to help with the pain and prevent him from having the ability to get behind the sofa, while I had to rely on Coke Zero.

Seriously, though, a programme which could render two blethers like us speechless was quite something.

And for the future - yes, there's potential for Jack to meet up with the Doctor in the future. The ending might have looked like the end for Torchwood, but I suspect the BBC will bring it back given the critical acclaim this series has received.

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