The Journal of the Browncoat Cat

You have to admit, that in spite of the madness of King Roly, the BBC is doing a storming job at advertising the new series of Doctor Who. For instance, the latest trailer, which premièred tonight. Narrated by Catherine Tate, it is dark, minimalist, and absolutely outstanding.

Well, 7pm on Holy Saturday has been and gone. Instead of the start of the Fourth new series of Doctor Who in its current run, and the Thirtieth overall, we had a trailer. A very good trailer, but only a trailer. (Yes, it is the cinema trailer, but is now available at the BBC Channel on YouTube at a much higher quality than before.)

It has been announced that the new series will start on Saturday, 5th April, 2008, two weeks late, but at least we have a confirmed start date.

Unfortunately, the start time has not been confirmed, and the DigitalSpy web site is claiming it will start at 6.20pm. So not only are the trained monkeys currently working at the BBC Scheduling Department starting the series two week late, they are now playing silly buggers with the start time. Large chunks of the audience will miss the episode because they will be expecting it to start at 7pm.

The only thing I can think of is that the schedulers are related to the people who cancelled the original run back in 1989, that they have either Cregeen or Powell as a surname, and are allowing their familial hatred for all things Doctor Who to cloud their judgement.

It has just been announced on BBC News 24 that author and inventor Sir Arthur Charles Clarke CBE has passed away in his home in Columbo, Sri Lanka at the age of ninety.

Born in Minehead in 1917, Clarke was one of the greatest minds of the twentieth  century.  A true populariser of science, he wrote both works of fiction and non-fiction on the subject.  In 1948 he heralded the start of the modern information age by theorising that a satellite in orbit at a height of 22,000 miles would appear to be fixed in the same point in the heavens.  The Geostationary Communication Satellite has done more to bring the World together than any other invention.  His many science fiction novels and books about science have opened so many minds  to new ideas, that the world would have been a poorer place without him.  You do not find many minds as powerful as Arthur C. Clarkes in a generation.

Love Over Gold was Dire Straits fourth studio album. I have had a version of it that could be played on every form of music player I have ever owned. I was listening to it on my iPod Touch on the train down to Cardiff last night. I first heard of Dire Straits when Mark Knopfler was being interviewed by Tommy Vance on Radio One, way back in 1982, about the imminent release of Love Over Gold. During the course of the interview, three of the five tracks were played. This piqued my interest enough to buy the album a few weeks later.

When I first played Love over Gold on my dodgy stereo, the opening track Telegraph Road was a revelation. It was 14 minutes and 20 seconds of perfection, instantly topping my list of “The Greatest Rock and Roll Song Ever”. It opens with a single note held on a synthesiser for what seems like minutes that disappears into the background of the song. A leisurely guitar and keyboard intro eventually gives way to the lyrics that  open with “A long time ago came a man on a track, walking 30 miles with a sack on his back” and then tells of creation, rise, fall, death and finally decay of the industry along a long strait section of highway somewhere in the USA, ending with the line “From all of these signs saying ’sorry but we’re closed’, all the way, down the Telegraph Road“.  Interspersed with the lyrics are instrumental solos and changes in tempo reflecting the status of the road. This is powerful stuff, and then, when you think it is all over,  there comes four and a half minutes of instrumental majesty,  displaying shear mastery of the guitar, keyboard and drums.

The pace slows for the second track, Private Investigations, which chronicles the unnamed investigators dissatisfaction with his lot in life, “for what have you got, at the end of the day, what have you got, to take away. A bottle of whiskey and a new set of lies, blinds on the windows, and pain behind the eyes”. Again this shows mastery of music and lyrics that is beyond compare.  The music paints a picture, you fear for the detective, who is obviously up to something nefarious to aid his investigation during the course of the song.

Things lighten up a bit for the third track, Industrial Disease. However, the lyrics are as sharp as ever, with the humour containing some biting criticisms of both the early Thatcher Years and the industrial relations nightmare that was the late 1970’s.

Then we come to the title track, Love Over Gold which chronicles somebody’s carefree and unrestrained love life. The person in question is acting like a tightrope walker, or someone dancing on thin ice by throwing “your love to all the strangers, and caution to the wind”. The use of the marimba gives the song a very light feel,which none the less contains a very pointed message that if the subject of the song is not careful, things could turn nasty, that every thing that the person holds dear could “…fall and be shattered, or run through your fingers like dust.” This song pre-dates the AIDS era, but could easily have been written during it, warning against easy and careless promiscuity.

The song Private Dancer was written for this album. This song was dropped because Mark Knoppler thought that it was a song that worked best with a female vocal. Private Dancer later became a massive hit for Tina Turner which launched her solo career. I wish that the band had opted to include the song, with a guest vocalist, as it fits so well in with the rest of the tracks.  A song dripping with dissatisfaction with the subjects lot in life, her low contempt for her customers and her wish to be anywhere else but here.

The final track It Never Rains is a perfect example of over egging the pudding. It is very dour in tone, and its length just makes it dreary. When I am listening to the album, I usually skip this track, especially the instrumental section at the end which just drags.

Whilst the following album Brothers in Arms might have had more commercial success, I believe that Love Over Gold is Dire Straits’ most powerful album. I would argue that it is the greatest Rock album ever made. It celebrated its 25th Anniversary in 2007, and it has not aged at all.

It is Holy Saturday in two weeks time. The Saturday before Easter. For the past three years, the new series of Doctor Who has either started on Holy Saturday or the preceding Saturday. This year, it looks as if somebody in BBC Scheduling has decided to do things differently.  It is looking increasingly likely that the start of Series Four [30] of Doctor Who could be as late as Saturday, 12th April, 2008. If this is true, somebody in BBC Scheduling need to be whacked repeatedly around the head with a clue-stick until they come to their senses. It is established in the mind of the great viewing public that Doctor Who starts at Easter. Why change this now? It is neither big nor clever.

Come on, there is still an opportunity for you to come to you senses. On Holy Saturday there is a big fat slot of prime time BBC ONE real estate that has yet to have anything scheduled. Between 5.25pm and 8.35pm nothing has been confirmed. That is plenty of time for the second episode of I’d Do Anything, the BBC’s new star search programme, Partners in Crime the first episode of the new series of Doctor Who and something that runs for an hour. Come on BBC Scheduling, you know it makes sense.

Written by Toby Whithouse
Directed by Declan O’Dwyer
Starring Russell Tovey as George, Guy Flannagan as Mitchell, Andrea Riseborough as Annie and Colin Salmon as Herrick

1. Plot
It is the dead of night, deep in a forest a young man strips naked and sits on a log, shivering. Meanwhile, in a flat somewhere in a city, a young couple are getting intimate, the Byronic young man is being dark and mysterious, and is told that there a dangerous edge to him by his pretty young girlfriend. In the forest, the young man is racked with pain, in the flat the intimacy becomes more physical. As Snow Patrol’s song Chasing Cars reaches its crescendo we are shown the full Moon and the truth is revealed, the young man has transformed into a wolf and the boyfriend is a vampire who has bitten into his girlfriends jugular and drunk her blood.

The following morning, George, the werewolf is picked up by Mitchell the vampire, they head back to the hostel they are living in and then go to the hospital they work at as porters. During a break, they discuss the nature of their lives. Wandering from hostel to hostel, job to job. Julia, the woman George was engaged to when he was first cursed has been admitted to the hospital after an epileptic fit. Mitchell tells George that they need to settle down in one place, that the true curse is not what happens once a month but being forced to live a strange unnatural life, and that they should fight back, be normal, by being human. (more…)

It’s not that I have that much hair to cut anyway, but it has to be trimmed every three weeks.  If I don’t it starts curling and irritating my scalp.  Anyway, I was due to have it trimmed on Friday, but because of the lurgies, I was unable to make that appointment.  So on top of the pain in my throat, I felt like tearing my scalp off. 

The solution was quite simple, I let my mother trim my hair with the clippers that my sister uses for her brood.  Something I have been resisting for a long time because I felt that if  I was too mean to go and have my hair cut by experts, then there would be no hope for my soul.  So just this once, I have had a home haircut.