Symbolic Forest

Like half of the people in Europe, I was glued to the edge of my seat at midnight (UK time) last night waiting to see the final outcome of this year’s Eurovision. Like almost everyone watching in the UK—plus a few migrants elsewhere, like my friend SJ who moved from Yorkshire to Mexico—I was in a state of shocked disbelief that we were actually doing rather well at it all. We won the jury vote and came fifth in the popular vote, pushing us up to an overall second place. Really quite a surprising result compared to some previous entrants; see, we can do well in Eurovision if we actually take it seriously.

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Keyword noise: television, Eurovision, Eurovision Song Contest.

The other day I was rather pleased to discover, on YouTube, a documentary from the 1970s that I’ve known about for a while but had never before seen. The Campbells Came By Rail is a documentary about the everyday life of Col. Andrew Campbell.

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Keyword noise: Cymru, Wales, Gogledd Cymru, North Wales, Rheilffordd Ffestiniog, Ffestiniog Railway, television, The Campbells Came By Rail, Dduallt, maps.

Recently, I’ve been watching the Netflix documentary series Surviving Death, covering various pieces of evidence for the existence of an afterlife, across various themes. It was…an interesting watch, which tries to stay even-handed; but its thematic approach meant a huge degree of difference between how each topic was presented and how plausible each one seemed to be.

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Keyword noise: Netflix, Surviving Death, television, death, mediums, paranormal.

With winter starting to approach, it’s time to start thinking about traditional Yuletide activities. Putting up the tree, sticking tinsel around the mantlepiece, lighting the candles; and settling down in an armchair to read a scary story.

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Keyword noise: ghosts, Christmas, Yuletide, ghost stories, M R James, The Tractate Middoth, O Whistle And I'll Come To You My Lad, Jonathan Miller, Mark Gatiss, television, BBC.

Many people are concerned just how much corporate technological behemoths have embedded themselves into our lives nowadays. A few years ago now I spent a few days in meetings with some Microsoft consultants at their main British headquarters, and I entertained myself by counting the number of times I saw a pained look on the face of a Microsoft staffer having to physically stop themselves using “Google” as a verb. “We’ll just do a…” wince “…internet search for that.”^*

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Keyword noise: television, Netflix, The Stranger, Deep Water, fake, GPS, plausibility.

To the Severn Valley yesterday to play with trains, possibly for the last time in a while. I’m not on the roster for next month, and as the pandemic appears to be getting worse again, who knows what will happen after that point. The pandemic timetable makes it a quiet day, just four trains in each direction, and only one crossing move. Here it is, with one train waiting in the station and all the signals pulled off for the other to have a clear run through.

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Keyword noise: Severn Valley Railway, signalbox, railway, signalling, train register, shooting, television, Geoffrey Body.

This blog still gets quite a lot of hits from people searching for the locations used in the BBC supernatural drama series Being Human, particularly the house used in the first couple of series. Now, I wrote quite a bit about those two series on here, partly because at the time we lived in South Bristol, the series was filmed largely in South Bristol, and it was quite an enjoyable thing to watch. The last time I wrote about it, though, was to (successfully) predict one of the plot-lines of Series Three; however, when that series made it onto the screen ,I hardly wrote about it at all. I hardly wrote about it because, to be honest, I didn’t think it was very good.

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Keyword noise: BBC, Being Human, drama, filming, ghost stories, Cymru, Wales, Casnewydd, Newport, television, vampire, werewolf.

Well, hello there. Happy new year and all that.

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Keyword noise: BBC, Bristol, coalition, Dirk Gently, Easton, electoral reform, Flight Of The Conchords, prediction, referendum, tea towel, television, voting reform, washing up.

The problem with no longer having a connected-up TV, and relying on the internet for our TV service, is that we no longer get to see trailers. We no longer get to see trailers, we no longer see adverts in the paper, and so we don’t generally have much idea what’s coming soon on the good TV channels. It’s too easy to miss stuff we’d really enjoy watching.

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Keyword noise: BBC, Bristol, Dirk Gently, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams, Greenbank, Montpelier, television.

Regular readers over the past couple of years might have noticed that I quite enjoy spotting the filming locations of the paranormal TV drama^* Being Human, filmed in a variety of easily-recognisable Bristol locations: Totterdown, Bedminster, Clifton, St George, College Green, and so on. Not for much longer, though, we thought: although the first two series were Bristol-based, the third series is apparently being moved over to Cardiff. Whether it will be the recognisable Cardiff Cardiff of Torchwood, or the generic anycity of Doctor Who, remains to be seen; but this was all clearly set up when, at the end of Series Two, the protagonists were forced to flee the house on the corner of Henry St and Windsor Terrace for an anonymous rural hideout. No more Bristol locations for us to spot, we thought.

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Keyword noise: BBC, Being Human, Bristol, drama, filming, First Great Western, ghost stories, railway, St Philips Marsh, television, Totterdown, trains, vampire, werewolf.

Regular readers of this site might be aware that, in the past year or so, I’ve appeared on telly a couple of times, showing off my inner geekiness. If you weren’t aware: specifically, I was a contestant on the 2009-10 series of Mastermind, parading my knowledge of French history (I won, hurrah!) and steam trains (lost, but not because of the trains).

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Keyword noise: BBC, Brain Of Britain, game shows, Mastermind, Only Connect, quiz shows, radio, television.

Off to Birmingham yesterday, to see Flight of the Conchords at the National Indoor Arena, the great hulking ostrich egg sat in a nest of redeveloped Birmingham canalside next to a clutch of restaurant chains. Despite their radio series and their sitcom, I still think that FotC have the feel of a cult hit to them, one of those acts^* who nobody apart from us has heard about. It’s slightly surprising, then, to find that they can head out on an arena tour which – in the UK, at least – seemed to sell out within a morning. I wonder if the other thousands of people in the audience all entered to the same thought: “what, there really are other people who have heard of them?”

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Keyword noise: BBC, Birmingham, Bret McKenzie, comedy, Eugene Mirman, Flight Of The Conchords, gig, Jemaine Clement, live, live comedy, live music, music, National Indoor Arena, show, television.

Regular readers – if there are any left – might recall that back in January I spotted some TV filming going on in our neighbourhood, that turned out to be for a drama about prostitutes, drugs, etc. that wasn’t set “specifically in Bristol.”

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Keyword noise: Ashton Gate, BBC, Bedminster, Bristol, documentary, drama, Five Daughters, Ipswich, Suffolk, television.

On my way home, last night and the night before, I noticed something going on along Ashton Road. Big floodlights, lighting up the whole street: some sort of night filming was going on.

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Keyword noise: Ashton, BBC, Bedminster, Being Human, Bristol, drama, filming, ghosts, television, Totterdown, vampire, werewolf, Windsor Terrace.

If there’s one band that was ubiquitous in everyone’s best-of-2009 lists the other months, it must have been Florence And The Machine. Everyone, pretty much, loved their debut album, Lungs, and every review couldn’t stop raving about it. We got a copy; and it was, I have to say, pretty decent. I was impressed.

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Keyword noise: Florence And The Machine, Lungs, music, television.

Last Thursday’s post, I mentioned Gödel, Escher, Bach, the long, complex and self-referential book by Douglas Hofstadter which features a tortoise, Achilles, a crab, Alan Turing and Douglas Hofstadter trying to find the links between self-referentiality, consciousness, and the works of the three titular men.

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Keyword noise: Britain's Real Monarch, Channel 4, documentary, Douglas Hofstadter, Godel Escher Bach, history, inheritance, royalty, television, Tony Robinson.

Through the last year, we’d managed to avoid watching the various Doctor Who specials that popped up around each bank holiday. The reason being, the last full series, back in 2008, really hadn’t grabbed us very hard. Despite having a few sparkling gems within it, there were too many painful moments and mystical endings. So: the one-off specials passed us by, as if they had never existed.

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Keyword noise: BBC, David Tennant, Doctor Who, John Simm, Russell T Davies, science fiction, Steven Moffat, television, The End Of Time.

It being Yuletide, there’s nothing quite like a ghost story. Was it Dickens who started the Christmas ghost story tradition, or is it more down to BBC schedulers of the 1970s? Never mind. It being Yuletide, we sat down in front of the telly to watch the latest BBC version of The Turn Of The Screw, by Henry James. It seems like only the other day that it was last made for the TV; but here it is again.

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Keyword noise: anachronism, BBC, Cranmore, East Somerset Railway, ghost stories, Great Western Railway, Henry James, literature, Peter Quint, television, The Turn Of The Screw.

I recently said that Maximilien Robespierre was, well, one of the villains of the French Revolution. And – well, he is and he isn’t. He’s also someone who, in many ways, I admire: that’s not really a way you can describe a villain. But, having thought of the handy “for some people he’s a hero, for others he’s a villain” line, I couldn’t bring myself to call him a hero.

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Keyword noise: France, French Revolution, history, Mastermind, revolution, Robespierre, television.

Regular readers might recall that, a few months back, I produced a few posts referencing the French Revolution, partly because it seemed relevant to events, and partly because it was on the top of my head at the time. To be honest, I thought I’d mentioned it more than, looking back, I actually have.

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Keyword noise: BBC, French Revolution, Mastermind, revolution, Robespierre, television.

Fans of supernatural TV drama series Being Human, currently making its move up the channels to BBC1, might be interested to know that location filming for its second season is just getting under way.

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Keyword noise: BBC, Bedminster, Being Human, Bristol, photography, Redcliffe, television.

Regular readers will know that I find it pretty easy to get worked up about local news reporting, especially when it involves the Grimsby Telegraph. I do realise, though, that they do tend to operate under tight deadlines and very low budgets. It tends to alter the nature of their coverage. We love to sit at home and watch the local news, to see what stories they have come up with; they love stories that are simple to report and aren’t too serious, such as the time the local BBC news interviewed me purely because I happened to be inside their building.

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Keyword noise: BBC, Bristol, news, television, local news.

Now, I know I shouldn’t believe advertising. I know I should assume that most people probably don’t believe advertising, and I shouldn’t let myself get worked up about it. But, still, something has been getting my goat lately.

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Keyword noise: advertising, crisps, lies, marketing, misleading, Phileas Fogg, television.

Sometimes, when we’re idly sitting on the sofa after work, we put the telly on and can’t even summon the energy to change the channel. Instead, we leave it showing things we’d never normally bother watching; but sometimes that throws up an interesting gem. Like tonight’s One Show for example. We wouldn’t normally watch The One Show, but occasionally it does have some interesting inserts. Tonight: an item on the Wensleydale Railway.

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Keyword noise: BBC, railway, steam, steam train, television, The One Show, transport, Wensleydale Railway.

It’s been quiet on here lately. We’ve had too much other stuff to do, culminating (for me) in a busy day in Manchester yesterday, sitting in a room eating some rather nice free food.

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Keyword noise: Manchester, reality, television, Mastermind.

The other day, various news media carried the story that Ryanair, the world’s most controversial airline, was planning to charge fat people extra. Because that was, apparently, what its customers wanted. They’d been polling and everything.

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Keyword noise: BBC, disability, discrimination, media, newspapers, overweight, publicity, Ryanair, television, The Guardian.

Regular readers might remember that, back in the mists of time – well, December – I mentioned that we’d been watching The Wire on DVD. And that it was very good. None of the bogus and ridiculous “science” you get on CSI;^* not much patronising or heartstring-tugging, no deus ex machina and no wrapping the plotlines up inside an hour; just lots of what was – to someone who doesn’t know anything about the real thing, like me – lots of realistic investigative work.

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Keyword noise: BBC, crime, Dexter, drama, ITV, police procedural, television, The Parents, The Wire.

Series of posts, on here, always seem to take me longer to write than I had planned. It’s now, ooh, at least six weeks since I wrote the first post in this series, so I really should tidy it up and finish it off. For people who aren’t regular readers: some time ago, a Jewish Studies professor called Tudor Parfitt made a documentary about the lost Ark of the Covenant, the Biblical artefact which starred in Raiders of the Lost Ark, which in reality has been missing for well over 2 millennia. Professor Parfitt’s theory is that, although the original ark is probably long destroyed, it passed into east Africa, into the possession of a Jewish tribe there called the Lemba, and that its replacement is a war drum now sitting in storage in an Harare museum. Feel free to go back and read what I’ve written so far, if you’re a new reader.

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Keyword noise: Africa, archaeology, Ark Of The Covenant, Arras Culture, Britain, Channel 4, documentary, East Yorkshire, Harare, Hull, Iron Age, Israelites, Judaism, Lemba, Parisii, television, Tudor Parfitt, Wetwang, Yorkshire, Zimbabwe.

Given the amount of space I’ve used to talk about Totterdown-set^* BBC3 series Being Human on here, it’s about time I mentioned the series finale – it was a fortnight ago now, after all. Before the finale had been shown, we already knew that Series Two had been commissioned, which, I have to say, took away some of the suspense. It was possible that the writer would follow through the compulsary penultimate-episode cliffhanger by “killing off” the main characters (who were, of course, technically already dead); but it wasn’t likely. It was also very likely that we’d lose some of the other characters; and, indeed, it happened.

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Keyword noise: BBC, Being Human, Bristol, drama, ghost stories, Redcliffe, television, Totterdown, vampire, werewolf.

About time I finished off writing about SOAS Modern Jewish Studies professor Tudor Parfitt, and his rather dodgy theory, shown on TV in his documentary The Quest For The Lost Ark, that the Biblical Ark Of The Covenant was not the ark that is biblically described, but was in fact a drum; that it was taken to Africa, survived in the possession of a Jewish tribe there, and that its final version is now in storage in an Harare museum. Which might make more sense if you read the previous posts I’ve written about it: part one, and part two.

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Keyword noise: Africa, Ancient Britain, archaeology, ark, Ark Of The Covenant, The Bible, Biblical, British archaeology, British prehistory, Caitlin lectures you, change, Channel 4, cultural change, culture, Deuteronomy, diffusion, diffusionism, Exodus, Harare, history, Jewish, Judaism, Lemba, Moses, Old Testament, prehistory, Scotland, Scottish archaeology, television, telly, theory, Tudor Parfitt, tv, Zimbabwe.

No blogpost yesterday, because – well, I was rather busy. Regular readers might remember this post from last week, in which I speculated vaguely about auditioning for a TV quiz show - I didn’t say which one, but it was fairly easy to guess. Those auditions, as it happened, were yesterday.

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Keyword noise: game shows, general knowledge, interview, news, quiz shows, television, trivia.

Or, the perils of knowing a little on a lot of subjects.

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Keyword noise: audition, game shows, general knowledge, quiz, Mastermind, television, trivia.

Time to return to Tudor Parfitt‘s documentary The Quest For The Lost Ark, which I started to discuss last week. A brief recap: Prof. Parfitt has discovered, in a museum in Harare, a 14th-century southern African war drum whose descent can, arguably, be traced back to the Biblical Ark of the Covenant, as described in Raiders Of The Lost Ark Exodus:

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Keyword noise: Africa, Ancient Egypt, archaeology, ark, Ark Of The Covenant, The Bible, Biblical, Channel 4, Deuteronomy, documentary, drum, Egypt, Exodus, Harare, Israelites, Jerusalem, Judaism, Moses, Old Testament, relic, religion, reliquary, ritual, television, Torah, Tudor Parfitt, Zimbabwe.

We sat down last night to watch one of the Christmas present DVDs: Arrested Development Season 3. It got me thinking, after yesterday’s post, about pseudo-archaeological documentaries.

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Keyword noise: archaeology, Arrested Development, Atlantis, comedy, conspiracy theory, Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown, documentary, fake history, fake mythology, Freemasonry, Graham Hancock, history, Illuminati, Knights Templar, mythology, narration, Nostradamus, occult, Priory of Sion, pseudoarchaeology, Ron Howard, television, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.

In our attempt to make sure we didn’t do anything too romantic on Saturday, we stayed in and watched an archaeology documentary on the telly. Or, at least, it said it was an archaeology documentary. It quickly veered off towards pseudoarchaeology, and stayed there.

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Keyword noise: Africa, archaeology, ark, Ark Of The Covenant, The Bible, Biblical, Caitlin lectures you, Channel 4, documentary, drum, Egypt, Harare, Israel, Israelites, Jerusalem, Judaism, Lemba, Moses, Old Testament, relic, religion, reliquary, ritual, television, telly, Temple, Torah, Tudor Parfitt, tv, Zimbabwe.

Some more notes on Being Human, which continues on the telly for the next few weeks.

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Keyword noise: BBC, Bedminster, Being Human, Bristol, drama, ghost stories, Redcliffe, television, Totterdown, vampire, Warden Rd, werewolf.

After the post last week, I felt we really should watch Being Human, the new BBC3 series set largely in Totterdown. We were, I have to say, pleasantly surprised.

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Keyword noise: BBC, Being Human, Bristol, drama, fantasy, ghost stories, review, sitcom, television, Totterdown, vampire, werewolf, Windsor Terrace.

Bristol often pops up on the telly. Famously in Casualty, Teachers and The Young Ones; slightly less famously in Only Fools And Horses.^* Just lately, though, I’ve noticed a lot of trailers for a new BBC3 series, Being Human. Not only is it obviously filmed in Bristol – and south Bristol at that – but the city is practically the most distinctive character in it. Lots of shots of typical Totterdown terraces; with steeply-sloping streets, and brightly painted houses with rooftop parapets. I suppose that, as you arrive in the city, Totterdown is a rather prominent and visible area, what with the way it looms over Temple Meads like a pastel-coloured precipice.

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Keyword noise: Being Human, Bristol, photography, television, Totterdown, Windmill Hill.

Ah, it’s a sad day. Oliver Postgate, one of the most creative writers to work in children’s telly, has died, at the age of 83.

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Keyword noise: Bagpuss, childrens tv, Ivor The Engine, Noggin the Nog, obituary, Oliver Postgate, Smallfilms, television, Tottie.

Just recently, we’ve been spending a lot of time sat indoors in front of the telly, watching season one of *The Wire*, which a friend was kind enough to buy us on DVD, saying: “it’s the sort of thing you’ll like”. And, indeed, it’s very good. I’m not normally a fan of police dramas; but The Wire is good enough to stand as a drama on its own without the “police procedural” aspect of the show.

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Keyword noise: drama, Ethernet, gadgets, opening credits, police procedural, television, The Wire.

A long day on Friday: a day out to Manchester, to see The Mighty Boosh Live. When the tickets for the tour went on sale, of course, we had to buy them straight away before they sold out; and back then, over a year ago, we had no idea that we’d have moved to an entirely different part of the country within a few months. So, back up to Manchester, to the MEN Arena.

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Keyword noise: comedy, gig, live comedy, Manchester, MEN Arena, Mighty Boosh, television, theatre.

We turned to each other and said: “it was never this silly in the Old Days,” was it? And I don’t think it was.

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Keyword noise: BBC, Catherine Tate, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Russell T Davies, television, The Doctor.

Christmas came, and brought the flu. I was in bed most of yesterday, aching, coughing and sleeping.

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Keyword noise: Yuletide, Christmas, David Tennant, Doctor Who, flu, Russell T Davies, sickness, Steven Moffat, television.

We’re stuck.

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Keyword noise: childrens tv, costume drama, fantasy, help needed, ITV, Keith Waterhouse, Lilliput, Lilliputians, period drama, television, telly, The Return Of The Antelope, tv, Victorian, Willis Hall, Yorkshire TV.

As for Doctor Who: as you’ve probably heard, catchphrase-based comedian Catherine Tate is going to be back in the show for a whole series. It’s been in all the papers, after all, and lots and lots of people, who shudder in terror at the mere mention of the name Bonnie Langford, think it will all go horribly wrong. It might be interesting to see if Tate can act, rather than just mug through with a comic voice and lots of makeup until she gets to the catchphrase.

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Keyword noise: BBC, Bonnie Langford, Catherine Tate, Doctor Who, Russell T Davies, science fiction, television.

…about Neverwhere: it features Tamsin Greig, star of a lot of the best sort of telly, in one of her very first roles – according to IMDB, the first in which they managed to spell her name right in the credits. She plays the reason why your fear of goths^* is justified, and I barely recognised her, until she started speaking.

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Keyword noise: BBC, Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere, Tamsin Greig, television.

Classic mid-90s fantasy series Neverwhere has recently been released on DVD. As I hadn’t seen it since it was first shown, of course, I had to buy a copy.

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Keyword noise: BBC, fantasy, Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere, television.

Two thoughts about last Saturday’s Doctor Who.^* Firstly: if your name’s Lazarus, and you become a scientist, you must feel completely stereotyped. “I’m going to have to invent some cunning way to cheat death,” you’d say to yourself, “otherwise everyone’s going to take the piss.”

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Keyword noise: BBC, David Icke, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Mark Gatiss, monster, reptilian, science fiction, television.

I was pleased and slightly surprised the first time I heard the band Camera Obscura on the radio. I was even more surprised the first time I turned on the radio at random and heard a Camera Obscura song playing.^*

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Keyword noise: advertising, BBC, Camera Obscura, indie, music, radio, television, Tesco.

In the news today: the BBC says that Moira Stuart definitely has to retire, as they get rid of newsreaders and replace them with Proper Journos. Personally, I still believe Stuart‘s best days were spent in dragon form – maybe if the news doesn’t want her, then that will return instead. Well, we can hope.

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Keyword noise: gronda gronda, Moira Stuart, newsreaders, television, The Adventure Game.

You often see stuff about road safety on the telly. Less often, things about specific roads. And it’s very rare for this area – the Forest, if you like to think of the Symbolic Forest as a physical place – to get on the telly at all. So when I heard that there was an hour of Channel Four last night solely devoted to road safety in this area, I had to watch it. Even more specific than that: it was purely about one road, the one from here down to Somerset.

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Keyword noise: accident, bad driving, danger, documentary, driving, Grimsby, Lincolnshire, North East Lincolnshire, road safety, television.

Ardal O’Hanlon is bound to turn up in Doctor Who again, before long. The only question is, when:

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Keyword noise: Ardal O'Hanlon, BBC, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Russell T Davies, science fiction, television.

I was expecting to be disappointed by the ending of Life On Mars, and, of course, I was. There was no way, to my mind, that they could wrap everything up and leave everyone happy, because too many contradictory things had gone before.^* The ending I had in my head was, to my mind, a better one, but that of course is because it’s the sort of ending I like.

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Keyword noise: Baconian, BBC, conclusion, drama, East Lancashire Railway, fantasy, finale, John Simm, Life On Mars, railway, television.

Whilst we’re kind of on the subject, from yesterday: Doctor Who.

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Keyword noise: David Tennant, Doctor Who, John Simm, plot holes, Russell T Davies, science fiction, television.

The world’s largest supply of garlic butter is in the centre of the city of Kyiv, Ukraine.

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Keyword noise: April Fools Day, brick, carnivorous, distance, Doctor Who, Egypt, factoids, falsehoods, Kiev, Knights Templar, lies, Mission Impossible, pharoah, Priory of Sion, roadsign, silliness, television, trees, Tuthmoses.

Not much has been happening to me this week. Which is possibly the wrong way of looking at things: just the same number of heartbeats have happened, but for some reason I haven’t thought them notable. Maybe I’m not paying enough attention to them.

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Keyword noise: Doctor Who, quiet, television, The Invasion Of Time, Tom Baker.

So … OK, the Doctor worked out that closing the breach into the Void would suck in all the alternate-universe Cybermen, not to mention the Cult of Skaro refugee Daleks. But did he know beforehand that the Void would somehow manage to suck them all in through one small window, instead of just acting like a big attractor and leaving thousands of Daleks and Cybermen stuck to the side of the Canary Wharf tower?

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Keyword noise: Cybermen, BBC, Dalek, David Tennant, Doctor Who, His Dark Materials, Phillip Pullman, plot, plot holes, Russell T Davies, structure, television, The Amber Spyglass.

Political campaigner Julie Bindel has been writing in The Guardian again, this time about changing lesbian stereotypes on the telly. Ostensibly her line is: lesbians on the telly now might be shown as happy, sex-loving people, but that’s still a stereotype. Her main concern, though, seems to be: there aren’t enough people like her, or her friends, on the screen:

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Keyword noise: activism, bias, designer lesbian, feminism, Finn Mackay, gay, homophobia, Julie Bindel, lesbian, stereotyping, television.

Apparently there’s some sort of international football competition coming around again. I’m going to do my best, after this post, not to mention it. As I might have said in the past, I don’t care about football at all. Neither does Big Dave, even though if you met him you’d probably expect him to be a supporter.^* If there’s one thing both me and Big Dave dislike more than football, though, it’s the assumption that even though we don’t like football we must be interested in the World Cup. We get funny looks just because we don’t give a toss whether England win or lose.

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Keyword noise: Big Dave, England, Englishness, football, television, World Cup.

…is a phrase I never really understood.

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Keyword noise: Allo Allo, comedy, fourth wall, end credits, Hi-de-Hi, sitcom, television.

I hate to say it, but I’m still not convinced.

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Keyword noise: BBC, David Tennant, Doctor Who, review, Takin' Over The Asylum, television.

New Channel 4 comedy series *The IT Crowd* starts tonight; being a big geek, of course, I had to watch it. And, overall, it’s rather good.

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Keyword noise: Channel 4, comedy, computing, Great Wave At Kanagawa, Hokusai, IT, review, television, The IT Crowd.

Today, author Mario Reading is in the news. Lucky for Mario Reading, because it gives him a chance to plug advertise his new book, a new translation and interpretation of Nostradamus. It’s the book, in fact, that’s newsworthy. It claims that in a couple of years’ time, someone will try to assassinate George Bush, and if they are successful he will be succeeded by his brother, who will take revenge with terrible results. Reading’s American distributors are rather upset about the prophecy – you’d think he would have seen the fuss coming.^*

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Keyword noise: books, future, George W Bush, literature, Mario Reading, marketing, news, Nostradamus, prediction, prophecy, prophet, psychic, publicity, reading, television, telly, tv.

Lots of controversy in the news at the moment about George Galloway, the far-left MP currently competing on Big Brother. The Guardian tried hard to find out who was dealing with constituents’ issues whilst George is busy being on the telly,^* but could only get hold of his PR agent, who said she couldn’t really help.

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Keyword noise: Big Brother, George Galloway, parliament, representation, television, reality tv.

This Christmas, I have received:

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Keyword noise: Yuletide, Christmas, criticism, David Tennant, Doctor Who, gifts, giving, presents, Russell T Davies, television, BBC.

The cruel hoax TV series Space Cadets, which I wrote about recently is due to finish tonight. The contestants have successfully been made to look like idiots; and sadly, no aliens have been caught on camera.

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Keyword noise: alien, Bentwaters, game shows, gullible, hoax, Johnny Vaughan, lighthouse, RAF Bentwaters, reality tv, Rendlesham Forest, Space Cadets, Suffolk, television, UFO, Woodbridge.

Like, I imagine, many other people, I watched the first episode of the new Channel Four series Space Cadets with a slightly queasy feeling. If you’re foreign and haven’t heard about it – or if you’ve been in outer space, of course – it’s a show where former drug-dealer Johnny Vaughan^* makes fun of the gullible and easily fooled, by persuading them they’re going to be Britain’s first reality-TV astronauts.

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Keyword noise: Channel 4, game shows, gullible, hoax, Johnny Vaughan, reality tv, Space Cadets, television.

I seem to have got the stupid thing working sort-of reliably now, by unplugging the old Windows hard disk completely. Well, I hardly ever used it. It’s not crashed at all since I did that.

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Keyword noise: computers, television, Eurovision, Eurovision Song Contest.

Well, it’s still broken. Sort of. I managed to get it running again most of the time—I’m not sure really how—but every so often the disk drive starts making nasty clonking noises and the whole thing just freezes. Actually, it did The Noises just then, but for some reason kept on working.

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Keyword noise: Edinburgh, computers, television, Eurovision, Eurovision Song Contest.