prussianblue

No offence, but I think most of us think your family are reactionary cranks.

@harrymcnallysblueandwhitearmy, you were my first thought when I saw it. Can you casually mention Trump and Musk in a few threads now?

I'd throw in William Orbit, who decided to take up drugs in his early 60s. Ended up having a breakdown. Now 67 and seemingly recovered, but he looks really haggard. Interview in which he discusses some of his issues in depth: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/nov/19/madonna-drugs-and-helicopter-trained-dogs-the-dark-starry-life-of-william-orbit

New year, new doctor. Now working my way through the Patrick Troughton stories (currently The Faceless Ones). He's not one I was previously very familiar with, which I put down mostly to him being the main victim of the wiping policy. I know he was my mother's favourite doctor, and I am enjoying his take on the role, but it seems funny that I'm experiencing him far more as an animated character courtesy of the recreations. Will I take to the real man as much?

Notable Scottish sausage machine/volume housebuilder Stewart Milne has entered administration, with the loss of 200+ jobs. A familiar name from countless hoardings around greenfield sites promoting 4 bedroom aspirational Monopoly houses in soulless car-dependent suburbs. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-67918029

I love a '70s shoot 'em up and Magnum Force is good fun.

I'd add Eva Green to the 'French actresses famous in the UK' list. Casino Royale does a lot of the heavy lifting but she's been in plenty of other English-language productions.

Maybe should have gone with Julie Andrews instead of Walters, then you'd have had a Mary Poppins theme team with Dick and Glynis.

Can't forget his biggest contribution to pop culture: https://youtu.be/UIPSvIz9NDs?si=FCkfyg20lN33J2th

*Frederick X. Frederick IX was Margrethe's father.

I'm continuing my Hartnell run and I endured The Gunfighters yesterday. Not keen on westerns anyway, and it didn't change that. I lost track of who was who (no pun intended), and I was mostly bored to tears. But dear god the worst part was that fucking song! How anyone in the production thought it was good enough to use once, let alone another ~500 times. Lynda Baron was also a weird choice of vocalist. Onto The War Machines now and a considerable improvement in the viewing experience. Hartnell in a fab Swinging London nightclub, the dire Dodo soon to be gone, and Michael Craze doesn't hurt to look at.

Thanks to Cavell's wiki I've just learned that there is the post of Bishop to HM Prisons.

He wasn't just some faceless bureaucrat. The Delors presidency essentially created the EU as we know it. Created the single market and set the single currency in motion. Saw significant membership expansion. Even adopted the (already existing) European flag.

Another notable One Foot in the Algarve guest star was Edward de Souza, who's still going at 91. Incidentally, Algarve has been cleaned up and transferred to HD. Watched it on BBC4 on Christmas Eve and it looked great.

Financial of course, as he's been morally bankrupt for years.

Jane Fonda is 86 today.

The deadline for the grifters family to lodge an appeal against the demolition of the St Captain Sir Field Marshal Sir Captain Sir Tom Tom Ground Control to Major Tom Memorial Paddling Pool has passed. Unclear if they have bothered or not: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-67761441

I was looking up the data as I understood US economic growth to be very healthy (at least rates that the rest of the west would kill for), and that should surely count in Biden's favour. Most of the post-covid/Trump numbers are good. GDP is up, unemployment is down, debt is down. Rishi would be envious of net migration figures halving in 2 years. Perhaps of most interest for our purposes is that life expectancy has started going down, from 79 in 2019 to 76 in 2021. The murder rate has almost doubed in the past decade. It's quite a rabbit warren: https://data.worldbank.org/country/united-states?view=chart

I know that TV and real life personas don't necessarily match, and it's meaningless to say that someone doesn't seem the domestic abuser 'type', but I agree this one does seem bizarre. The recent episodes of Celebrity(sic) Antiques Road Trip he appears in are still on iPlayer. He doesn't seem to have been in the current or previous series of the standard version.

A vocally anti-abortion Christian who says that the Old Testament is his favourite book, but who is married to a man and is a corrupt shill for the gambling industry. A man of contradictions!

Rishi lives to fail another day. How much further up the length of tenure league table is he going to get?

Coincidentally I was reading this article about how his film career died only this morning. I know him mainly through Barry Lyndon and being Tom Scavo's dad in Desperate Housewives.

The sets are one way in which I've found the historical episodes to be superior. There are depictions of an Aztec garden, a Roman villa, a medieval Jaffa bazaar etc. that are quite convincing, considering the scale and budget they had to work with. Somehow the futuristic cities and spaceships feel much more cramped and cardboard to me. I don't know if that's just that the BBC set designers and builders had relatively more experience or skill in creating period looks? The I, Claudius sets from a few years later are pretty much on a similar small scale, but they look great. A non-historical story that did do some great sets was Planet of Giants. It would have been very easy to make those scaled-up plugholes, phones etc. look terrible, but they don't.

I thought the Reign of Terror animated reconstruction episodes were fairly good, would love them to have the resources to do that with all of the survivors in audio-only form. I've been surprised at how little I've been engaged by the 'space' episodes compared with the 'time' ones. I found The Sensorites and The Rescue really quite boring and stagey. Even The Daleks drags a bit. I enjoyed The Keys of Marinus, but I know that's not thought highly of by some. I was reading into the wider losses at the BBC and the moon landings really does stand out. Fair enough not valuing a kids sci-fi show, but argubly mankind's greatest achievement? But even NASA fucked up preserving that footage.

I don't watch new Who (has just never interested me), but I've been enjoying working my way through the original episodes on iPlayer. I find myself cursing the indiscriminate way in which the BBC wiped the tapes. I really like the Hartnell historical episodes, so of course they had to junk all of Marco Polo, half The Crusade, etc. Meanwhile the embarrassing tedium of The Web Planet is preserved in its entirety, all 6 overstretched episodes worth.