The Journal of the Browncoat Cat

Written by Gareth Roberts
Directed by Graeme Harper
Produced by Susie Liggatt
Starring: David Tennant and Catherine Tate
Guest Starring: Felicity Kendall, Fenella Woolgar, Christopher Benjamin, Felicity Jones, Tim Goodman-Hill, Ian Barritt, David Quilter, Adam Rayner, Daniel King, Charlotte Eaton Leena Dhingra, Sandy McDonald

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Once again, Doctor Who was dropped in favour of the Eurovision Song Contest.  So last Saturday, instead of getting Silence in the Library, the first part of Steven Moffat’s two part story there was a trailer for the second half of Series Four [30].  They are really emphasising the fact that Rose Tyler has somehow managed to find her way back to the real Universe and has a big gun for fighting Daleks. There can be little doubt that partly blacked out Dalek is not a Dalek, but is in fact Davros’ bionic bucket.  So the Dalek Caan went in search of the creator of the Daleks at the end of The Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks.

After the very disappointing preview clip for The Unicorn and the Wasp, the preview for Silence in the Library is back on form.  This is obviously the part of the pre-credits teaser, with the version on the official BBC Doctor Who web site doing a better job of cutting out the sting at the start of the theme.  Who is the little girl, and how can she see a library in the fifty first century when she appears to be from the twenty first?

I really cannot believe that it has been fifteen months since I moved from Vodafone to T-Mobile.  My initial contract was due for renewal last Saturday, so before I headed off to the Central Bar in Cardiff to watch the FA Cup final with my friends, I called in the T-Mobile shop in the Saint David’s Centre to renew the contract and get a new phone. 

My previous two mobiles had been what is known as Smartphones, trying to be pocket sized computers that were all whizzy.  I have grown tired of the Personal Digital Assistant paradigm, and come to the conclusion that if you want a portable computer, you should carry a laptop around with you.  The problem with the PDA is it is too small be really useful.  So in the T-Mobile shop on Saturday, I ended up getting myself a T-Mobile Sidekick Slide (manufactured by Motorola).  In operation it is more or less a modern mobile, yes it has a cutdown web-browser and in can be used for sending and recieving emails, but basically it is just for telephone calls and text messages.    The screen slides upwards, with a whoosing sound effect to reveal a small but perfectly functional qwerty keyboard for typing text messages and for adding and searching for entries into the address book function.  Navigation around the easy to read screen is by using a joystick built into the microphone.  The standard phone keypad is not immediately obvious as part of the qwerty keyboard also doubles up for this function.  This can be confusing at first.

However, what I really like about it is that  it looks so utterly cool.  This looks so science fiction.  When I was a child, I imagined that in the far future we would all be using devices, not within a few short decades.  The phone has different themes, which control the backgrounds, wallpapers and sound effects it uses. What I really need to do now is to find a suitable theme, and if one does not exist find out how to put one together, so that when this phone is locked, it has the words Don’t Panic in large friendly letters on the screen, and when it slides open and shut it make the beeping noises that the Guide made in the television version of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 

The time has come for Hilary Rodham Clinton to quietly bow out of the race to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for the upcoming Presidential Election.  There is no way that she could win enough State Delegates at the upcoming Convention, she would have to rely on support of the so called Super-Delegates, the party apparatchik.  If she got the nomination that way, it would go down like a cold cup of vomit with the voters, and guarantee that the GOP candidate John McCain would get elected.  It is more than time that the General Election Campaign proper started, and the contest between Barrack Obama and John McCain got under-way.  She should let Denver in August become a coronation for Obama, and accept the fact that there will one day be a female President of the United States of America called Clinton, but her christian name will be Chelsea. 

It just goes to show how much of an impact Doctor Who has made in the past few years that when Russell T. Davies announces he is stepping down as Executive Producer/Head Writer, it is headline BBC Web Site’s home page, that it is mentioned on the BBC News Chanel, that within hours a thread on the Doctor Who Forum discussing the news reaches its 1000 post limit within three hours of the first post.  OK, so the last one is not really out of the ordinary, but the fact remains that Doctor Who is now massively newsworthy.

Although what really surprised me about this announcement was who would be replacing RTD.  None other than Steven Moffat, the creator of The Press Gang, Chalk, Coupling, Jekyll and writer of Hugo Award winning Doctor Who stories like The Empty Child and The Girl in the Fireplace.  Yes, I know that he is a massive fan of Doctor Who, but it always struck me when I heard him speak, or read interviews with him, that Head Writer/Executive Producer on the series was a job that he really did not want.  That he by far and away prefered creating his own series from scratch than working on a show that was created by other people, and the odd few episodes per year that he did write for Doctor Who were more than enough.  Shows how wrong I am.

Of course, all the people who hate the way that Russell T. Davies does Doctor Who must be wetting themselves with joy that their saviour has taken over, will be deeply disappointed.  After all, this is the same Steven Moffat who:

• Has created a number of successful situation comedies.  Who created the funniest lines of dialogue to grace the series since the days when Douglas Adams was Script Editor. I doubt am Moffat Series would be the “dark and gritty” humour-free zone they clammer for.
• Has written stories that intimmated that the Doctor dances, in other words has a sexuality. In a Moffat series the Doctor would not be the iconic Asexual Character that they want him to be.
• Sings from the same hymn book as RTD. To such an extent that he does not have his work polished before filming.  Russell T. Davies can rely on Steven Moffat to write a script that fits into the corporate identity of the over all series without any inerference.

So, apart from a few cosmetic changes, the series will continue on under Steven Moffat in more or less the same pattern as it followed under Russell. T. Davies.  In other words as teh massively popular, award winning, critically acclaimed  mainstream drama we have had for the past four years.

Twenty one years ago, I was living in Coventry, and for some unknown reason, I managed to be in Liverpool on the day that Coventry City  lifted the F. A. Cup.  So I missed the atmosphere of being in the home of the winning team on the magic day.  I hope that I will not duplicate that mistake tomorrow.  I will be in Cardiff probably in a pub watching the match, hoping that today’s team will emulate the illustrious team of 1927, and bring the “English Cup” back to Wales.

The fruit trees arrived on Monday afternoon.  I’m not exactly sure when, as the box they were sent in was sitting on my doorstep when I got home from work.  Three very sorry looking sapplings sitting inside with a bag of begonia tubers were inside the box.  First thing I did was put the sapplings to stand in a bucket of water, as they looked parched.  Later, I transfered them into the large containers that I had prepared for them shortly after I had placed the order for these plants.  They are still looking mightily sorry for themselves but I suppose it is still early days. 

I don’t know if the sudden change in the weather from warm and dry to cold and damp has had any affect on them.  I suppose they will be spending more time in the cold and damp than the warm and dry, so they had better get used to it.

The thing that surprised me was that each of the apple trees had already seperated out into a number of branches.  I was under the impression that these trees only had the single central trunk, with short fruiting spurs growing along the length.  It looks to me that as soon as they get established, I will have to get out the secatuers and prune away these side branches, in order to encourage the central stem to grow stongly.  Needless to say, I am getting a book on pruning from work, as I want these trees to produce a bountiful supply of fruit.

Last night two football teams, each from another country came to England to play in the final of an international football competition.  Next week two teams from England go to another country to play in the finals of an international football competition.  Am I the only person to see the absurdity of this situation?

Last year, a new sign was erected outside Treherbert Branch Library, as part of a Corporate Rebranding.  It left an area  of disturbed empty soil in the garden that needed filling. Fortunately I had collected some seeds from the Welsh Poppy (Meconopsis cambrica) that had grown in my garden, so I sprinkled them on the ground in hope that nature would do its magic and fill the space.  Out of the hundreds of of tiny seeds I sprinkled, only one germinated, and it produced a rather sorry looking specimen, that died back to virtually nothing over the winter.  This year, things have been much improved, with life returning to the plant at the end of March, with vigorous growth throughout April, leading to a profusion of pretty yellow flowers here in May and throughout the rest of the Summer.

Written by Stephen Greenhorn
Directed by Alice Troughton
Produced by Phil Collinson
Starring: David Tennant, Catherine Tate, Freema Agyeman
Guest Starring: Georgie Moffet, Colin Terry, Joe Dempsie, Paul Kasey, Ruiri Mears

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