craigoxbrow

I happened to be in front of the start of Channel 4 showing another season of Why Isn't Superman in Costume Yet? in its Saturday-morning wacky yoof strand, and the presenters introduced it like so:

Boy: Y'know how cockroaches can survive a nuclear war? Apply that kind of indestructibility to an American teen action-drama with a supernatural twist.
Girl: (excited) Buffy's back?!
Boy: Uh, no, it's Smallville.
Girl: (dejected) Aw.

Glee episode three, and Will's dad is Victor Garber! (In a somewhat alarming cardigan-bowtie-flatcap combo.) After Eli Stone it's another reminder that we never got to hear Jack Bristow sing.

Add that to the list of great never-happeneds and may-never-have-been-considereds, like an animated Doctor Who special with nice animation. (If the Beeb really wanted to cross the streams, get Aardman on it!)

Part of BBC1's attempt to put a new genre show on just about every night between one episode of The End Of Time and the other, a new Day Of The Triffids. Well, after a fashion. Fans of the book are mad grumpy.

The giant killer thistles take the role of the zombies in early Romero, as a thing that looms at the edge and causes society to collapse in entertaining matters. Mostly it's an action riff on Blindness (which was a thoughtful riff on the blindness aspect of the book, kinda). It has Eddie Izzard being cheerfully villainous, a Neil Marshal alumna in a sadly minor role, children with guns, the Wilhelm scream and more.

Far from a classic for the ages, but issa laugh.

David Tennant went along with the "Hamlet is mad if the actor decides he is" theory. Seemed faaairly mad at times. and a couple of Doctor-y asides were a bit odd, naturally.

Sir Patrick Stewart pulled double duty as Claudius and his late brother, being very still and controlled in one and crazy big booming in the other.

Nice minimalist direction and cold black-and-white design, lots of playing with mirrors and cameras. The naturalistic grave scene seemed a bit jarring, but hey, Yorick.

And then it was followed by an advert for Doctor Who. :D

There have been bloody loads of them on for the last month, and with the exception of another massively-overblown Chanel ad, they're all so half-assed.

I know they only exist to let a voiceover say the name of the thing, and I realise that they can't get across how the stuff smells and smelling is its entire putpose. But do they all have to be ten seconds of disconnected black-and-white or oversaturated-colour images and the intro to a song chosen by throwing a dartboard at a copy of Now 75? Or a bored Hollywood star in a nice outfit holding the funny-looking bottle? Isn't this what press ads are for?

(Exception: that creepy D&G advert with the kids who look about fourteen having a threesome. Please note that this is not an exception to the rubbish part.)

Really, it's a long way off a world-class advertising culture's A game. Bring on the weirdly avant-garde deconstructive car commercials and the inexplicably-monster-filled cough syrup ads.

Via Evan Waters on RPGnet: Sand animation wins.

I would love to imagine this happening here, but she'd get three minutes, not eight.

The soothing orchestral string version of a Metallica song was a bit odd, though.

Yeah, Glee pretty much rocks the all-singing all-dancing demographic in an arch and funny way.

Okay, so I just saw the Vampire LARP episode of Being Erica.

Which bizarrely enough features London from Never Let Go as the romantic interest guy looking entirely out of place. (Never mind the show being about our heroine working with a Time Lord called The Psychotherapist.) It was... oddly right about several things. Not least the overdramatic vampire shouting. Other than it being a boffer LARP, yeah.