Television

[iainjclark]

I'm not normally one for fan-made videos setting TV clips to music but this one of Firefly/Serenity to the music of Wicked has Joss Whedonian and Tim Minearian endorsement, so I went to look. It's extremely well done.

< insert obligatory *sob* for Firefly here >

While I'm here, the 2007 in Review piece in Strange Horizons has a very small contribution by yours truly, in which I inexplicably can't find anything better on TV last year than Doctor Who. Three times in a row. It's just wrong. Fortunately everyone else is very erudite and reads books and stuff. Also pikelet is insane but you knew that.

Of course The Wire is far better than any SF-related TV currently airing but that doesn't count for Strange Horizons. My Season 4 DVD arrived today, and Season 5 has just started in the US. It's just so very satisfying, layered and intelligent and you should all be watching it but will you lot listen? *Will you*?

In lieu of any other good TV and with anyone who could potentially write some being on strike, we've resorted to DVDs. We've been hugely enjoying Cracker on DVD, a series we missed in its entirety when it was on TV. Robbie Coltrane is fantastic, and the writing is incredibly sharp, with a real interest in psychology and themes rather than just the surface process of investigation. This definitely puts it a notch above most other ostensibly 'crime' related television which seems more formulaic with each passing year. We've only the final one-off special and the more recent Cracker reunion TV movie to go.

We've also been bingeing on old Doctor Who. The Time Warrior is splendid, and gives me my fix of Sontarans in a way that The Sontaran Experiment just didn't accomplish. The Claws of Axos is, sadly, complete rubbish despite featuring some iconic images that have stuck with me since childhood. In contrast, Tom Baker's debut story Robot is great. Yes, even the rubbish FX are great. All of this has made me so nostalgic that I've rashly ordered the Beneath the Surface box set, despite it having the really terrible Warriors of the Deep in it.

Comments

[fba.livejournal.com]

If you took out the Merka 'Warriors of the Deep' would be a workmanlike base-under-siege with flashes of genius that pretty much sums up Davison's Doctor. As it stands it will always be the one with the pantomime seahorse getting karate chopped by the main villain... I hope the release Kinda and Snakedance soon - despite the dodgy snake they are really wonderful multi-layered stories and there is something about them that really sums up 80s Who.

[iainjclark.livejournal.com]

I liked Davison's Doctor a lot at the time, but now I feel strangely reluctant to go back and rewatch his stuff--unlike, say, Tom Baker where it seems to belong to a more distant and nostalgic era entirely. Not quite sure why. I've seen Earthshock and Caves of Androzani in the last few years and enjoyed them.

You're right about the Merka, and I did like Snakedance/Kinda.

Part of me just doesn't want to own a box set combining two Pertwee stories and a Davison because, anally retentive as I am, I'll only want to break it up to put them in chronological order with my other DVDs. :-)

[fba.livejournal.com]

I think you need to watch some of the last two seasons of Baker - there are flashes of the old greatness (City of Death is still totally awesome) but once you get to the eSpace stuff it is all starting to look rather tired and the end of Logopolis comes as blessed relief tbh. What is great about Who - even now - is that they always reach for the stars and even when they don't quite pull it off you can't fault it for lack of ambition. When they do pull it off you get some of the best TV of any genre.

Part of me just doesn't want to own a box set combining two Pertwee stories and a Davison because, anally retentive as I am, I'll only want to break it up to put them in chronological order with my other DVDs. :-)

As the box sets tend to be individual discs in slip cases I nearly always break them up as the slip cases don't fit in the DVD racks properly (and I also like to put them in chronological order).