The Journal of the Browncoat Cat

This post to The Journal of the Browncoat Cat is being automatically posted by the Wordpress.com system, and marks an historic moment.  Treherbert Branch Library has just closed for the night after its last ever Friday Evening session.

New Openning Hours will be introduced on Monday, 1st December, 2008. So from now on, this Library will be open to the public  between 9.15am and 6pm Modays to Thursdays, 9.15am to 5pm on Fridays.

The BBC Children’s Department has just announced yesterday that a third series of The Sarah Jane Adventures has been commissioned for the Autumn of 2009.  The announcement came in a BBC Press Release for the Winter/Spring 2009 Schedules.  The excellent rating success that this series is having on both BBC One and the digital CBBC channel meant that this commission was a bit of a no-brainer.  The fact that it was announced so early is clear evidence of this.

Although there is something intrinsically pessimistic about Doctor Who fans.  On a day when we should all be celebrating some good news, a couple of unsettling rumours have surfaced.

• On The Doctor Who Forum there is a discussion about the future of Clyde Langer as played by Daniel Anthony.  That he  might be leaving The Sarah Jane Adventures at the end of the series.
• On the Usually reliable Sarah-Jane.tv web log there is a report that Upper Boat plan to make series Three the last series, wrapping up both the RTD era spin-offs giving Steven Moffat free rein with Doctor Who.

I think this is plausible as this is after all a children’s programme, and children grow up and move on.  First we lose Maria and get Nanny, sorry Rani in her place and now it looks as if Clyde is going as well.  Although it is not really surprising, as Daniel Anthony will be 23 years old next birthday, and might want to move into playing adults closer to his own age.  However I refuse to believe the second rumour.  Both Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures might have started life as spin-offs but they are now both successful television series in their own rights, and the BBC  would be mad to cancel them just because the boss of the mother series has changed.

So onward to the third series.

The episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures that was broadcast on the CBBC channel on Monday has finally and irrefutably ended the Great UNIT Dating Debate that has raged in Doctor Who Fandom since the early 1980’s.  In part one of The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith we see Sarah Jane and her adopted son Luke travel through a rift in time to August 1951, and where they meet her parents and a three month old baby called Sarah Jane Smith.  Now that means that the Doctor#3 story Invasion of the Dinosaurs has to be set in1974, because Sarah Jane says that she is 23 years and that story is set days after her debut in The Time Warrior.  So if one UNIT story is contemporaneous with original broadcast, it means that all the rest have to be.  Stone cold and completely irrefutable evidence.  The logic of mathematics cannot be denied.

Unfortunately  there are still fans on The Doctor Who Forum arguing that the UNIT stories were set in the 1980’s.  Producer Barry Letts refused to be pinned down on exactly when the third Doctor’s  Contemporary Earth Exile stories were set, saying that they were at some point  ahead of, but not to far ahead of  when the episodes were first broadcast.  Somehow this was interpreted by the Fans as being ten years in the future.   They base their false and utterly defeated arguement on two lines of dialogue:

• Professor Travers states in the 1966 story The Web of Fear that the events of the earlier story The Abominable Snowman took place “forty years ago” in 1935.  So The Web of Fear with the YEti Invasion of London had to be set in 1975.
• In the 1975 story The Pyramids of Mars Sarah Jane tells the Doctor that she is from the 1980’s, a decade  in advance of the original broadcast

These two points are easily demolished.  With the first point Professor Travess is portrayed in The Web of Fear as a man whose powerful intellect is being clouded by the early stages of senile dementia, so his claim that he first met the Doctor and company forty years ago is a bit questionable.    And the second point can easily be dismissed as un unusual piece of sloppy script editing by Robert Holmes.  So there is nothing to build a theory on.

The people who insist that the UNIT stories took place in the 1980’s totally fails to take into account the fact that the series itself tried to end the contoversy back in 1983.  The story Mawdryn Undead, which has segments set in 1977 shortly after Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart  has retired from the army, and the main body of the story is contemporary with its broadcast in 1983.  Some fans  come up with all sorts of silly theories to try and disguise the fact that characters are seen wearing t-shirts with the distinctive “1977″ logo that was everywhere during the Silver Jubilee year, and characters are heard talking about the upcoming Jubilee celebrations.

There is even one guy over on The Doctor Who Forum trying to argue that all the “contemporary” stories from the classic era took place in a crazy 18 month period between January 1979 and August 1980.  OK, so it is just his theory, but it is not a very good one. For starters, how do you fit Mawdryn Undead which is unquestionably split between 1977 and 1983 into that narrow band?

I know that I am bound to have comments stating that the Fans have the right to think what they like, and if they want to set the stories in the 1980’s then they can.  But the fact remains that they are wrong, as the stories are quite clearly contemporaneous with their original broadcast and not set in the 1980’s.  The Doctor#3’s exile on Earth and the UNIT years happened in the 1970’s.

Arthur King of Time and Space 11/17 © 2004-2008 Paul Gadizikowski http://www.arthurkingoftimeandspace.com

I think that this is a great daily web comic, and if you haven’t checked it out yet, go and do it now.  So far it is nearly five years into a twenty five year long project to retell the legend of King Arthur in a daily web comic.  There is a link to a “story so far…” page to help new readers get up to speed.

Well, the hype machine for JJ Abraham’s re-imaging of the original Star Trekhas moved up a gear, with the release by Paramount Pictures/Bad Robot Productions this trailer.  I was discussing it with my friend Graham, and a couple of points were foremost in the conversation.

1. It seems odd that the people James T. Kirk will command during the famous “Five Year Mission” are already junior officers aboard the Starship Enterprise, whilst he has yet to enter the Starfleet Academy.  Did he do so well at the Academy that he got fast track promotion after graduating?  I suppose this will be answered in the film.
2. Graham questioned how James Tiberius Kirk even managed to get into the Starfleet Academy in the first place.  In the early twenty-first century, the armed forces of the World do all sorts of Psychological Evaluation tests on the people who join them as Officer Cadets, and this is unlikely to change in the twenty third century.  Anyone who has pulled the Thelma and Louise type stunt featured in the trailer should fail this sort of psych testing and not be allowed to command a whelk stall, let alone a fiercely armed starship.  I pointed out that Kirk was  always a bit edgy and never the most well balanced of starship captains.  He retorted that there was difference between being “edgy” and being “Two stations short of Dagenham.*”

Apart from these two points, it looks as if JJ has cooked up one hell of a Star Trek movie, and if this does not revitalise the franchise, nothing will.  Zachary Quinto is very good as Spock, looking more like Leonard Nimoy that Nimoy does. I cannot comment on McCoy and Uhura, but they are looking good. I am even starting to get won over by Simon Pegg playing Scotty.  And of course, the women of Starfleet are still wearing short skirts, not as unfeasably short as in the original series, but still enough to keep me happy.

* Barking.

Written by: Joseph Lidster
Directed by: Joss Agnew
Starring: Elizabeth Sladen, Daniel Anthony, Tommy Knight, Anjili Mohindra, Yasmin Paige, Joseph Milson, Alun Armstrong
Guest Starring: Ace Bhatti, Jocelyn Jee Esien, Gary Beadle, Perry Millward

(more…)

Whillst I think that really big flat-screen televisions are cool, I really don’t see the point of hanging them up on a wall like a picture.  To me, it totally destroys the main reason television became so popular in the first place, its comfort.  Cinema had already established itself as a form of mass entertainment before the advent of television and most homes already had a radio by the 1950’s.  However, with cinema as well as the inconvenience of leaving your home, and in the days before comfortable multiplex seats, you have to sit up strait on a narrow seat with very little legroom.    Television gave you the glamour of the cinema, in your own home and you could relax in your favourite chair whilst watching it.  With  modern wall mounted televisions, instead of comfortably looking down at the screen, people once more have to sit  straight to look up at the image on the wall, I can see now why it is called Home Cinema.

David Morrissey

This year’s Doctor Who Christmas Special The Next Doctor features David Morrissey as a Victorian conman claiming he is the Doctor.  Of course he isn’t and the real Doctor has to bail him out when the Cybermen turn up.  This is a very similar plot to the Big Finish Doctor Who drama The One Doctor where Doctor#6 met galactic conman Banto Zane, who was claiming to be The Doctor.

According to rumours, Mr. Morrissey was a last minute replacement when the actor originally cast in this role dropped out.  I am now firmly of the opinion that the Production Team at the Upper Boat studios knew that David Tennant was leaving when this special was filmed, and were so blown away by his performance that they have already cast David Morrissey as Doctor#11.  Lets make it clear that I am not expecting some sort of double-bluff and the character in The Next Doctor turns out to really be the Doctor and is hiding the fact from his earlier incarnation.  I imagine that there will be a Commander Maxil/Doctor#6 or Princess Astra/Romana#2 situation where the Doctor regenerates and just happens to look like someone he has already met.  I expect that when Mr. Morrissey takes up the role, he will create a brand new Doctor that is miles away from the character in this episode. Because lets face it, the image on the right is exactly how some of the more reactionary Doctor Who fans out there would want the Doctor to dress, and in modern day Doctor Who that is never going to happen.  Of course, I know nothing, and I am probably extremely wrong.

My brother-in-law Gary has collected the engine for the Gilbern.  Well, he actually collected the old Ford Scorpio that he bought off eBay from someone in Devon  to get the engine and all the electronics that go with a modern automobile engine.  Now all he needs is the time to do the work on it.

President Elect Barack Husein Obama II

The States of California and Washington declared at 11pm EST and those rock solid Democrat States  took Obama over the winning line. With the announcement by the major television networks that  Obama was projected to win well over 270 votes he needed in the Electoral College, he was declared President Elect of the United States of America.

At just after 11.20pm EST/4.20pm GMT Senator John Sidney McCain III the Republican Party candidate in the 2008 Presidential Election conceded defeat.    Forty minutes later at Midnight EST, Senator Barack Husein Obama II acknowledge his victory and on 20th January, 2009, he will become the Forty Fourth President of the United States of America.