The Journal of the Browncoat Cat

Updated:
The Press Association (PA),  a well known and well respected News Agency (no, not like WHSmiths) were the first people to report that David Tennant had officially resigned the role of The Doctor from the series Doctor Who.  That he will appear in the upcoming Christmas Special The Next Doctor, and the four specials next year that make up Series Four Plus [30+].  Then that will be it.  A regeneration story at the end.  The PA is not the sort of fly-by-night flibberty-jibbert organisation that would have made a story like this up just for the hell of it, so it had to be true.  The story was embargoed until after David Tennant received his National Television Award, whilst accepting the award in Stratford during the interval in Hamlet he dropped the bombshell. As can be seen in the clip below.  Unfortunately, somebody at the Media Guardian web site jumped the gun, but that web page was quickly pulled. 

The announcement was quickly confirmed by this item on  the official BBC Doctor Who web site.  Needless to say, The Doctor Who Forum went completely bonkers. 

Paramount have started to release publicity images for the new J. J. Abraham’s version of Star Trek.  My first impression is that this is not just going to be a major re-imaging of original crew of the Starship Enterprise, but of the Enterprise as well.  The main characters all look the part,  but the set of the bridge is radically different from the original series bridge.  It strikes me as being a lot closer in look and feel to the bridge aboard the Enterprise from Star Trek: Enterprise than the ship from the 1960’s vision of the future.

It was announced today what this year’s contribution from the Doctor Who production team to the annual BBC Children in Need Appeal Telethon will be.  As a special treat, the first three minutes of the 2008 Christmas Special, The Next Doctor will be shown on the telethon.  During Series Four [30], clips of the upcoming episode were made available on the official web site a few days before the episode aired.  This is a similar notion, but on a much grander scale.  I think this is an absolutely brilliant idea.  It will remind the general public that Doctor Who will be on again on Christmas Night, as the highlight of the evening, and it will get the Fans buzzing on places like The Doctor Who Forum.

To really whet the appetite, this promotional photograph was released by the BBC today:

David Tennant, Velile Tshabalala and David Morrisey as Doctor#10, Rosita and 'The Next Doctor'

It was confirmed in the book, The Writer’s Tale, with the publication of the first couple of pages of the script, that this story would be very similar to the Big Finish Audio drama The One Doctor. in which the Doctor encounters a conman claiming to be him on a planet in the far future. However, in The Next Doctor he encounters a conman claiming to be the Doctor in Victorian England. Matters are complicated by Cybermen falling out of the Void and trying to take over the World on Christmas Day 1851.  David Morrisey plays the conman and Velile Tshabalala play his accomplice Rosita.

This news has gone down like a cup of cold sick with certain members of The Doctor Who Forum, who think that seeing the first few minutes of a new Doctor Who is a bit disappointing, as they will be seeing it all in a few weeks time anyway.  Honestly, what planet are these people on.  So what if it only a taster for the rest of the story, it is stil new Doctor Who for goodness sake.

The Republican are getting desperate.  They know that they are going to lose in twelve days time.  That on 5th November, 2008 Barrack Hussein Obama will be the President Elect of the United States of America.  That Senator John McCain and his running mate Governor Sarah Palin don’t stand a cat in hell’s chance of winning the election.  So what do they do, demand to see Obaba’s birth certificate, but not the copy that is available in the public domain.  No, they want to see the one that is in the archives in Hawaii, because they claim that the copy in the public domain is somehow incomplete or erroneous.  The claim is that the real archived  birth certificate will show that Obama was actually born in Nairobi in Kenya and not in the State of Hawaii, and is therefore not eligible to stand for election as President of the United States of America.

All I can say is Dream on.  Does anybody imagine that the Democratic Party would have allowed someone inelligable to stand for the office of the President of the United States of America to  take part in the Primary Elections for that office. That the Democratic Party would not have run the most basic of checks on Obama’s credentials  when it was obvious that he was winning the Primary Election and would be their candidate in the General Election.  This whole ferago is just another example of how nasty the GOP has been this time around.

Written by: Phil Ford
Directed by:Michael Kerrigan
Starring:Elisabeth Sladen, Tommy Knight, Anjili Mohindra, Mina Anwar, Ace Bhatti, the voice of Alan Armstrong
Guest Starring:Bradley Walsh, Hugh Higginson, Floella Benjamin

1. Plot:
Part One
Any parent’s worse nightmare is that their child vanishes.  Once again, this nightmare is being visited upon the parents of the London Borough of Ealing.  In recent weeks three children have vanished.

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A recent edition of the BBC Wales current affairs programme Week In, Week Out was presented by former President of Friends of the Earth, Jonathan Porritt, in which he weighed up the advantages and disadvantages of building a ten mile long barrage between Cardiff and Western-super-Mare.  If it were to be built, this barrage would generate upto 5% of the United Kingdom’s electricity requirement, very cleanly.  Porritt was obviously in favour of harnessing the huge amount of tidal energy that exists within the the Severn Estuary, and the programme was ever so slightly biased towards the scheme. The programme featured the opponents of the scheme, but  it then heavily favoured those experts who have spent their lives studying the Severn Estuary and who do not think that the Barrage would do that much damage to environment.

I am a great opponent of the building of wind turbines, as I do not believe that  they  are really that environmentally friendly, and would much rather see the harnessing of tidal energy, but I am dubious about the value of such a mega-engineering project.   Are there better ways of harnessing the power of the sea?  Will this one project suck dry the entire budget for tidal scheme in the UK, creating a huge white elephant? I think that this programme should have been at least ten minutes longer and should have spent more time examining the other methods of harnessing the third highest tidal flow in the World.

Yes, this will be the final entry in the ongoing series of articles chronicling how I got my E-System 1201 laptop that I bought from PCWorld Online to run with Ubuntu Linux.  The reason being that everything now works as I want it to work under the Open Source operating system.

The biggest bugbear was the built-in wireless internet card.  No matter what myself and my friend Ruth tried, it just would not work.  As I reported in a previous updates, it would not even switch on under Ubuntu Linux until I took the risk of installing the development version of Ubuntu 8.10 on the laptop, and even then it would detect the presence of my home network and still would not connect to it.  The problem was with the driver for the wireless card.  I had been using the Windows XP driver that came with the laptop, running it under a nifty piece of software called NDISWrapper in Linux.  I later discovered that I should have been using the Windows98 driver.

However before I could remedy the situation, something in threw a spanner into the works and I was forced to re-install Ubuntu Linux from scratch. It is a good thing that the laptop is my spare machine, used only for surfing the Internet, and has nothing important stored on it.  I would never have run an alpha version of an operating system on my main desktop computer in my Study, it has too much important stuff on it to risk anything so experimental.

Anyway, after re-installing Ubuntu and upgrading to 8.10β, I downloaded the latest version of NDISWrapper and then theWin98 driver from the RealTek web site and ran into a brick wall.  When Windows98 was the latest thing, the Internet was still in its infancy, and wireless networks were something of a rarity.  Security on wireless networks used a system called WEP to secure themselves.  These days WEP is seen as frighteningly insecure and has been superseded by WPA and WPA2 encryption.  The problem was that even though I had WPASupplicant a software package on my laptop that would allow its wireless card to connect securely to my home network, that is protected by WPA/WPA2 encryption, because of the age of the driver running the card, it could not make the initial connection with network that would authenticate the link with the network.  So I was crafty, I re-installed the Windows XP  driver that came with the USB Wireless Adaptor I had been using to get on line with the laptop under NDISWrapper, and made the initial authenticated connection with that.

One final point about 8.10β.  It comes with a plug-in for the Totem Media Player called BBC-Plug-in.  If you use the BBC iPlayer a lot to catch up with programmes on Aunty that you might have missed, then this plug-in allows you to watched the streamed content not through a small box on a web page, but through the Totem Media Player, in full screen mode with a near broadcast quality picture.  If Ubuntu 8.10 only had this, it would be a winner in my book.

We seem to be having some very strange weather for the time of year.  On Sunday, I went up to my mother’s house, and I had my breakfast with her out on her patio.  If it was not for the orange and brown shades of the soon to fall leaves on the trees, anyone would think it was  a summer morning.  During the actual Summer it was far to wet to even think about eating a meal al fresco.  I suppose that the good thing about this Indian Summer is that it will make the autumn/winter seem a lot shorter.

Written by: Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec and Scott Rosenburg (Based on the Kudos International/BBC Wales drama Life on Mars)
Directed by: Gary Fleder
Starring: Harvey Keitel, Jason O’Mara, Gretchen Mol, Michael Imerioli, Jonathan Murphy and Lisa Bonet.

1. Plot:
Detective Sam Tyler, NYPD is on the verge of cracking the case of a viscious serial killer when he is run over and falls into a coma.  He wakes up and it is 1973.  He is still a police detective, but he is now operating in a more primative and less efficient era, working without the benefits of twenty-first century technology.  He discovers that a killer with the same MO as the man he was persuing in 2008 is stalking the streets of Manhattan in 1973.  This makes no sense, as his suspect in 2008 would only be a child in 1973.

2. Thoughts:
I had only seen parts of the aborted original pilot for the US version of Life on Mars and what I saw sucked on all cylinders.  This afternoon I saw Tte version that was finally broadcast last Thursday on ABC was a great improvement on the pilot.  Sam returning to the New York of Kojak rather than Sam beign time-warped to Starsky and Hutch made the look and feel of the piece far more like the UK original. In fact, in many ways this is a very faithful adaptation of the original, almost a scene for scene adaptation, which sometimes makes me wonder exactly what is the point.  Why not just show the UK version?

John Simm’s original Sam Tyler was spiky, neurotic and not very likeable. Jason O’Mara portrayal of  Sam Tyler on the other hand is a pleasant well meaning chap.  Making Sam conventionally good looking underestimates the audience, as if they can only  sympathise with a hunk. I wonder if the casting of a “pretty boy” was at the insistence of Network Executives and bringing Sam within a whisper of killing an as of yet innocent young child was designed undermine this growing sympathy and bring back some of the edginess of the UK original.

Harvey Keitel was very good as Gene Hunt but this was a very different Gene Geenie to the one portrayed by Philip Glennister.  This Hunt is older and more world weary than his British alter-ego.  I suspect that this Gene Hunt saw action on the beaches of Normandy, or somewhere equally traumatic during World War Two.  He is not a man who broadcasts his bigotry, he spreads it through quite, subtly making it appear acceptable and reasonable.  I wonder how far the  executives in US Network ABC will allow the character of Gene Hunt to go in this version, will they for instance allow the “spastic in a magnet factory” line.  As much as I dislike the racist and sexist attitudes of Gene Hunt, it is vital to remind people that such people and attitudes exisited and just how wrong they are, not to try and pretend they never existed.

In the aborted pilot, Annie was already a detective.  In this version, as in the UK original, she is still in uniform waiting for her big break. This is a good thing, as Annie’s growing confidence and eventual promotion were one of the best things about the UK original.  It showed that there was light at the end of the tunnel, and that things were about to change. To be perfectly honest, I think I prefer Gretchen Mol’s Annie to Liz White’s original.

As with the UK original, the characters of Chris and Ray are still in the background in this opening episode.  I suspect however, we will see a more likeable side to the character of Ray Skelton in this series, as his UK counterpart had no redeeming qualities what so ever.

So on the whole, and enjoyable first episode, and I look forward to seeing the rest of the series.

3. Stars:
3.5 out of 5

Writer: Phil Ford
Director:
Starring: Elisabeth Sladen, Yasmine Paige, Tommy Knight, Daniel Anthony, Joseph Milson, Juliet Cowan, voice of Alexander Armstrong.
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