Broadening my horizons

I haven't been anywhere for fun this year except Berlin, at Easter. Unusually, I've had two trips away with work, to York and Preston, and it was nice to get a brief change of scene. I'm looking forward to a trip to London at the end of this month, though. Of course, there are lots of things to do indoors there, but it would be nice to get out and have lunch in a riverside pub, or see the wildlife at Richmond Park - that kind of thing. I can put up with cold and dull weather for another week or so, but I hope it improves by then, both there and here.

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New Who

The name at the top of the bookmakers' lists this summer for the next Doctor Who was Peter Capaldi. I was interested to see the list but pooh-poohed this, as it seemed the production team were set on casting only young actors - I think it was even said at one point that only someone in their 20s could keep up with the pace of production. I was delighted to hear back in August that the rumours were, in fact, true. The choice pleased me for two reasons - firstly, as a long-term fan of the programme (except for the awful period in the 1980s when the production went badly astray) I wanted to see a Doctor with the authority that only an older man could have; secondly, I knew Peter back in the 1970s as a fellow fan - we're the same age and I've followed his career since the 1980s. I had met Jon Pertwee a couple of times, during the making of Death to the Daleks and Planet of the spiders , and got to know Peter through the Jon Pertwee fan club (started by an old school friend, ...

PODcasts

It's amazing how many producers of these seem to forget the name. As podcasts are (by definition) for mobile devices and therefore meant to be listened to on the move, the likelihood is that there will be background noise from traffic, etc. For safety reasons, the volume shouldn't be turned up so loud that this is drowned out. If the listener is on a bus or train, things are often no quieter. For these reasons, it's essential that the volume of a podcast should be "normalised" (i.e. the peaks should be at the maximum allowed undistorted level) and its dynamic range should be severely curtailed - that is, there should be very little difference between the quiet and the loud bits. I probably have hearing that is just below average in efficiency and I've lost count of the number of times the podcast was so quiet that I couldn't hear most of it (even when turned up to full volume on my phone), or had a section with various speakers muttering inaudibly in t...

Who can do better (2015)

Not since Tony Blair joined forces with George "Dubya" Bush have I been so disappointed in a person's misguided choices as I have since Steven Moffat took over the reins of Doctor Who. What happened to the genius who gave us the hilarious Coupling, and wrote Who stories like The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances and Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead ? If you look back through this blog you'll see that I've sung his praises . By writing Who and Sherlock simultaneously, it seems he just bit off more than he could chew. Good storytelling is the bedrock of a programme like this and, for me, that has just not been there. This season (and, sadly, most stories since Mr Moffat took over) have fallen into two types: "edited highlights" (the plot escaped the writers, and the episode came over as a series of extracts - more like a trailer than a coherent story. Examples: Before the Flood, The Woman Who Lived ) and Laboured centre pieces (instead of a plo...

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