The Journal of the Browncoat Cat

One glimpse of the Sun, and people go mad. Out come the strappy tops and short-sleeved shirts. The fact that the wind could still freeze the hairs of the back of your hand means absolutely nothing. A little common sense please, it is still only March. My great grandmothers used to say “never cast a clout, ‘til May is out” in other words, wait until June before getting too excited about the Sunshine.

Please note I am not complaining about the weather. I am really pleased to see the Sun, and the extra hours of daylight are wonderful. I hate the winter, I hate the greyness, the closed doors and closed minds that the cold engenders. Thank gods that there is now something to look forward to.

I hope that this weather can be maintained until Friday. That will mean that Sharon and Jonjo will have a nice day for their wedding on Thursday. Things will look so much better in the sun, even the grotty Cardiff Registry Office in Cathays Park.

Still, this warm weather will hopefully encourage the wearing of short skirts by all the women who have bought them from the clothes shops in Cardiff. Yes, I know, I need a life, or better yet full time female companionship. When did young free and single become sad and middle-aged? (more…)

Last week I was off line between Tuesday and Saturday. And as the song says, you don’t really appreciate what you have got until it is taken away. By the time the line was repaired and I was back online, I was a bit frantic. The wind had blown down my telephone line. It had such ferocity that it pulled the fascia board of the side of my house. The first I knew of it was when I tried to log on to the Internet after I got home from my hospital appointment in Cardiff. Switched on the Iyonix PC, the usual status box from !PopStar appeared in the top right hand corner of the screen, as did the status box from !Newshound. Unfortunately, they seemed to be stuck on the “resolving host”. Eventually both programs timed-out. So I tried my telephone. Dead, no dialling tone present. None of the phones I tried in my sockets worked. It was Gary who spotted the problem, as he realised that the wire was very slack. Sure enough, the wire was still attached to my house, but very little else.

So at my Mother’s house I dialled 151, the automated fault reporting system. It told me that the problem was with my equipment. No the problem was with BT’s wire outside my house. The operator I eventually spoke to was very sceptical about this. She said that there would be a minimum £58 call-out fee if it turned out to be a fault with my equipment.

Wednesday came and went with no sign of a BT Engineer, as did Thursday. On Friday the bloke at the BT call centre told me that I might be without a phone line until Tuesday. This was a scary thought, I had already notched up nearly three megabytes of emails, and lord knows how many Usenet articles sitting waiting for me. Fortunately, the BT engineer came on Saturday Morning, as I was getting ready to go to Cardiff for the Rugby Match.

I am sure that since the repair my Internet connection has been smoother and faster. Barry in Barnstaple says that the fact that I have got new equipment between the exchange and me has reduced the amount of noise on the line, and as a result increased the speed of the connection. Thank goodness that I have Broadband, all the stuff I had waiting for me, which would have taken forever to download using a dial-up modem just whizzed to me through the ASDL router.

BBC News’ Web Page is carrying an article that states that Billy Piper, the 21 year old pop singer turned actress is in line for the role of Rose Taylor (got that wrong for starters, its Rose Tyler), the travelling companion in the new series of Doctor Who. I hope this turns out to be a load of old ropes. I have only seen her acting in the recent modernisation of Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale that was on BBC One last year and I was not greatly impressed. It is true to say that casting Ms. Piper would garner a lot of publicity for the series. Unfortunately, that is just the sort of thing that the late John Nathan-Turner would have done, cast a person for their publicity value, for instance Ken Dodd, and not whether it was good for the series. The article says that Billy Piper is Russell T. Davies’ number one choice, hopefully this will be as accurate as reports that Bill Nighy was going to be cast as the Doctor, as he was RTD’s number one choice.

The main thrust of the article repeats what has been previously been said by RTD, that a traditional girlie screamer type companion would not work in today’s world, a world where female characters such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Lara Croft are so popular.

This article introduced the idea that Rose Tyler would have psychic abilities. This is a new development. Again something else I hope is wrong. The companion should be as ordinary as possible. The companion is the person we can associate with, our eyes in the TARDIS.

This interview was broadcast in the Welsh Regional News programme BBC Wales Today on Monday, 22nd March. It featured the Anchorman Jamie Owen talking to one of the Executive Producers of the new series of Doctor Who, Julie Gardner.

Jamie Owen:
Now, I don’t know about you, but when I was little I used to watch Doctor Who from behind the sofa. Well now the Time Lord is back, Christopher Eccleston is the star of Shallow Grave and he is the new Doctor. Filming starts this summer and it {the new series} will be made by BBC Wales. Julie Gardner is the Executive Producer.
[Owens sits on a settee in front of a large screen showing Hartnell Doctor Who title sequence]
Now, first about Christopher Eccleston, you have worked with him before? 

Julie Gardner:
Oh, he is just so brilliant. We could not have done better with this casting, he is just instinctive and he is great to workand he just loved the script. [fade to a clip of Eccleston in a train from Flesh and Blood]
And he is such a fan of Doctor Who. It is so thrilling. I have been looking at the Internet postings today and people seem to be largely delighted by it.

Jamie Owen:
And a very strong Welsh connection as the writer is from Swansea and it is going to be filmed in and around Cardiff?
[Cut back to the Studio]

Julie Gardner:
It is really exciting. A number of Doctor Who episodes were filmed in Wales, with Snowdonia doubling as the Himalayas, with lots of people dressed as Yetis in those hills, It is such a great landscape. We can do cities, the countryside, the beech; it is a great country to film in.

Jamie Owen:
What do you think the enduring appeal of Doctor Who is?

Julie Gardner:
Fear! Absolutely fear.
[Cut to a clip of An Unearthly Child on the screen at the back]
We want to get people back behind behind the sofas.
[fade to the clip filling the screen]
I think it is such an eccentric show. It has great humour, you can tell amazing stories with it. You can go anywhere in space and time and have adventures.
[cut back to the studio]

Jamie Owen:
And when can we see it?
Julie Gardner:
Soon, absolutely soon. We be working hard to bring it to our screens early next year.
[The Tom Baker Titles are now playing on the screen]

Jamie Owen:
And will you be watching from behind the sofa?

Julie Gardner:
I will probably be lying down, as it will be a hard shoot. But we hope to make it full of scares and humour for the whole family.
Jamie Owen:
We wish you well. Thank you for coming to talk to us.

Julie Gardner:
Thank you.

There you have it, short but sweet. It only took a few minutes of the programme, but it speaks volumes for the new attitude at the BBC about Doctor Who. It is nice to see a senior BBC executive being complimentary about the series for a change. Ms. Gardner is the only one of the three Executive Producers who was not a fan before the project got its green light, so if she is excited, it must be good. The fact that she is actually taking time to see what the fans are thinking by looking at the various Internet forums is quite amazing.

Today I received a number of emails that I had apparently send myself. I have been advising myself to visit online casinos, to buy Viagra at knock-down prices and to re-finance my mortgage with companies that only deal with properties in the USA (clever considering I am in he UK). When I took a look in my Spam trap, I found that lots and lots of people who I have never met are sending emails from my domain. How the hell did this happen and what can I do to stop it? (more…)

…Christopher Eccleston

The BBC has confirmed that the new incarnation of the Doctor, in the new television series of Doctor Who will be played by the Mancunian actor. Eccleston is a superb actor, and will no doubt be great as the Doctor. His connection to the people making the new series made him the inevitable choice. He played Stephen, the latter day Son of God in Russell T. Davies’ award winning Second Coming, he was in the drama series Clocking Off which was produced by series producer Mike Collinson, and also, he appeared in The League of Gentlemen, hich was written by scriptwriter Mark Gatiss. Eccleston normally plays dour characters with very little sense of humour, does this mean we are going to have a miserable bugger piloting the TARDIS, taking I hope not, the character of the Doctor has to be likeable. William Hartnell might have been an old curmudgeon in reality, which is how Doctor#1 started, but he soon became the friendly grandfather type character.

What is more, this was front page news on the Daily Mirror but then they went and spoilled it all, by publishing this photo on Page 7 with the full story, of Eccleston in the Doctor#4 Tom Baker outfit. Still, I cannot remember the last time Doctor Who was front page news.

My only gripe about Christopher Eccleston is his age. When I was a child, the Doctor was an old geezer, he cannot possibly be played by someone who is just three years older than my, who I might have been in school with if I had lived in Manchester. Time’s wing’d chariot again.

So with the Doctor cast, who will be the companion/assistant Rose Tyler? What will here character be like. We are told that she will be a capable modern woman, not the traditional screaming bimbo in a mini-skirt. They need someone like Keira Knightly, obviously they wont get her, she is to big in Hollywood now, but that is the sort of character that they need. Dream piece of casting, Michelle Trachtenburg, who played Dawn in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Comments

(20.3.04 13:32) Never mind all that! Is the theme music going to be in a new hip-hop version? (20.3.04 13:45) Actually, the drum and base version used on the webcast was quite groovy. And lets not forget that Orbital have done a really good version of the Doctor Who theme.

Saturday is my nephew William’s first birthday. These past twelve months have just flown by. When I was a child, the annual six-week holiday seemed to drag on forever, now it seems to go in a whiz. As I get older, then time is passing at an accelerated, and accelerating rate. I used to think that the rapidly approaching Millennium was the reason for a perceived speeding up of time. People were looking forward to the event, the real Millennium in 2001 and the ersatz Millennium in 2000, the population of the world were wishing its life away, willing the glorified New Year Party to come sooner, and subconsciously we were making time pass faster. I had hoped that sanity would return, and the World’s mad dash into the future would slow down. Unfortunately, this has not happened, the perception of time has been set at fast forward permanently.

Scientist tell us that smaller creatures, such as cats experience time at a different rate to us, that it is all relative to their size. To a cat, a day is considerably longer than a human; feeling more like a week would to you or me. It must also be true that children, who are smaller than adults will experience a relative difference in time based on their size. Just because it is natural, it does not mean that I have to like it. I resent getting older, and I want my life to seem as long as possible. (more…)

As I type on my computer at home, I have the BBC 10 O’Clock News in a small window in the top right hand corner of my monitor. On Sunday I bought a Pinnacle Rave PCTV PCI card for my IyonixPC. Those of you out in Windowsland might be thinking so what, PCI expansion cards are normal. However, this is a real big thing for the RISC OS world. The IyonixPC is the first machine that can cope with this sort of expansion card, and Simon Wilson’s superb !PCITV is the first driver designed to run such a card.

I was ever so slightly concerned when I fitted the card, as I did not want to destroy my computer by putting the card in wrong. So taking the case of my computer was a bit of gamble. It was easy enough, then once the expansion slots were exposed, there was only one way that the card could possibly fit into the computer. Cover back on the computer, ariel attached to the new socket on the back of the computer, and away to go. The software automatically tuned in to the channels and I can now watch TV on my desktop.

So why did I do it, after all, I have a damn good TV in my living room, with DVD player, SKY+ and surround sound system. Because it is a set top ariel connected to the card, the picture is only as good as the a portable TV, and of course only the four terrestrial channels. Well, as I said, it is so that I can keep on working whilst the news is on, I am a news junky, the channel I watch most on the Satellite is BBC News 24. I am currently watching Newsnight BBC News’ daily analysis and discussion program.

So, the five men recently released form the US Base at Guantanamo Bay on Cuba have been released, after being declared no danger to security. It makes you wonder how many of the other detainees at Camp X-Ray are innocent. Granted, there must be some Al-Quaeda members being held there, but the way in which they are being held is just plain wrong.

It will all change after January next year, when John Kerry has been elected, and the new administration follows international law, and either sends the detainees home, or arrests them properly, with real charges, access to legal representatives, following due process of the law.

It occurs to me that George W. Bush is not a Republican, he must be a Stalinist. Think about it:

• George W. Bush came to power in a rigged election. Lets face it, it must have been rigged, the State of Florida where all the argy-bargy took place was run by Dubya’s brother Jed, and Bush Snr. Was so certain when seen on BBC News 24 that they had not lost Florida.

• George W. Bush’s government invades countries it does not like, installing puppet regimes which promise democracy. These countries then become economically dependent on the US. 

• He runs Gulags. What else can you possibly call Camp X-Ray. Josef Stalin would be proud of the way the US are running things on their last outpost on Cuba.

Tonight I had such a wonderful gastronomic treat. A taste sensation bar none. Yes today I had a chicken curry pie from Fray Bentos. It consisted of chunks of chicken in a dubious yellow sauce that was mildly spicy. A whisper of the East that was so quiet that a damn good microphone is needed to hear it. Give me a proper Curry any day, a Chicken Pathia with accompanying pilau rice, sag paneer and peshwari naan. Fray Bentos should stick to what they do best, beef pies with a crispy crust, not this sort of silliness.