themaninblack

Well it's back folks. For most on here it's the usual drill but for newcomers and lurkers here are the procedures: On the front page and the rules page there's a direct link to the email to send to me with the entry form all set out... The rules are here: http://www.derbydead...nd_scoring.html Good luck everybody!

Good point. My main issue with the pics. They not be much but they add up and the web server has limited capacity. Perhaps a compromise is to keep the bios but get rid of the pics and just have those who snuffed it on the who's dead pages. 2003 would be the template for such an endeavour...

If he was any sort of man at all he'd go on his own talk to him about it and see what he can do...

I'm seeing them at Wembley next week, and I am literally PISSING MY PANTS WITH EXCITEMENT. Royal Blood and Iggy Pop are supporting, this FILLS ME WITH JOY. I have seen the Foo Fighters twice before, and both times I had to sit in a pile of my own urine all the way home. I would totally let Dave Grohl ruin me. Could be that your knickers may remain dry for the moment...

Latest stiffs up...

Cole Tucker, Is that some sort of sordid phrase or summat?

As a measure of how inexplicable it was, we all completely missed the first anniversary of Rik Mayall's death on 9th June...

A case of "bye-de-bye" then. Yeah, yeah, I know where my coat is...

...and he still didn't get a UK obit either! Still, I'm going to make some archival changes in the next few months, minimilising all those long lists just to recent years as a lot of the entries have inaccuracies and are a bit irrelevant. I made a start with just a list of the stiffs and the scoreboard for 2003 and will work on that..

Easier said than done...

Bush v Clinton II, what a depressing prospect...

I think we're heading for another hits record, just a question of how many...

Watch this space...

He needs some meat...

They're hopping mad in East Yorkshire in Raging Hull Sean Connery returns as a tight-fisted Bond in You Only Give Twice Tom Hanks discovers a half-woman, half rock guitarist in Slash The American Space Program goes in search of the perfect tobacco in The Right Snuff The Marx Brothers have no time for starters in Fuck Soup

I'm seeing them at Wembley next week, and I am literally PISSING MY PANTS WITH EXCITEMENT. Royal Blood and Iggy Pop are supporting, this FILLS ME WITH JOY. I have seen the Foo Fighters twice before, and both times I had to sit in a pile of my own urine all the way home. I would totally let Dave Grohl ruin me. So possibly not all urine then?

I haven't seen that film in years. Brutal, absolutely brutal...

I saw him play Anthony in Anthony & Cleopatra in 1991 at the RSC I am hoping that his original attempt 20 years earlier was a lot better. His Anthony was too old and a bit bluff and his death scene was unitentionally comic. Funny that, I saw him in that play too and it was in 1992, with Claire Higgins as Cleopatra...and I agree exactly in what you said about the death scene!

Take 'em while you can get it, that's what I say...

Shame. He was great in 'Anglo-Saxon Attitudes'...

Bloody hell, you're right! What I'll do is rejig that bit rather than wait till next time. EDIT: Updated...

Nor did I, otherwise I might have come up with a different pun!

And we're up again...

Yup...

Didn't know Tanith had gone. She was my favourite B7 writer after Chris Boucher. When "Wife in Space" was blogging B7 last year, some of the site's readers tried to find out about Mr Steed and there isn't much information on him at all. In fact, the suggestion was raised that "Ben Steed" might even be a nom de plume for another writer, given the controversial nature of his scripts (the perceived sexism). Perceived? They are atrocious. "Give her to your men" On his imdb page he has credits for a lot of other programmes such as CATS eyes, Crown Court, Dramarama & Coronation Street. It is hard to tell if Kairos is a parody or serious. Remember the rock "distorts and exaggerates things" so the hyper-masculine male character may be a parody. If so, it was still badly written and ineffective. Power is a bit ambiguous too since it says that a war betwen the sexes leads nowhere and all of the male tribe were portrayed as being fairly dopey so perhaps there is a bit more depth there in the script than most people realise. Whatever his intentions, the overall execution of his scripts was terrible though. I would rank Moloch along with The Web and Dawn of the Gods as being the three worst episodes. All of Allan Prior's episodes are fairly wretched, apart from Volcano. I like Horizon but agree that Animals would only just be outside that bottom three. Yes, Horizon's has a good premise and arguably more topic than ever in this day and age but it doesn't quite work for me. BTW, I have recently purchased Paul Darrow's Lucifer trilogy. I haven't read them yet but I have briefly skimmed through. They read very much like scripts so I suspect they have their genesis in the sequel trilogy/mini-series project that Darrow and Andrew Mark Sewell were trying to get off the ground some years ago as "Blake's 7 Enterprises." According to the Paul Darrow Fan Club, only the initial premise (Avon being trapped on an island a la Napoleon on Elba) came from Terry Nation's idea for a sequel story. The rest of it came from chats between Darrow and Nation before that latter died but a sub-plot about China emerging as a global power was all Darrow's own idea. As I said, I have only read a few extracts at this stage but parts of it are very florid. Other parts are quite good but it is very much written by an actor with an eye for the dramatic. There is also a lot of graphic violence in it but on one level that is good since Blake's 7 is basically about evil people doing evil things to even more evil people so emphasising the violence and ruthlessness of the characters even more than they could on the television show could emphasise the moral vacuum they all live in. After all, the only really "nice" and moral character in the series, Bran Foster, dies half way through the first episode... BTW, even the title of the series, "Lucifer", is meant to highlight how morally bankrupt the characters in the B7 universe are. Darrow himself has noted in interviews that we are meant to be left guessing who the Lucifer character is: is it Servalan? Is it Travis' daughter? Is it the Chinese ruler? Is it Avon? They are all candidates for the title of fallen angel. I did read Darrow's book Avon: A Terrible Aspect which was essentially Avon's back story. It was never published in the UK but I managed to get a US import it was comeptently written and ends as the series begins which left me wanting to see better adaptations of the series which could be fleshed out. If you read Trevor Hoyle's adaptations who get glimpses of how the characters were developed by the actors particularly the first one which seems to have been writted from scripts rather than what was transmitted. I always thought that the Avon/Cally relationship was interesting she being almost his conscience and after her death he descends into his obsession with Blake which leads to the final confrontation. Definitely a thing was going on between those two, I think one of the episodes from series 3 implies this...