TV

Time Out Of Mind

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

Back in 1979 the BBC produced a series of five half-hour documentaries about science fiction called Time Out Of Mind. I don’t think that I saw the programmes at the time, and I’m not sure that they have been shown again since. Given how sloppy the BBC are with their archives, they may even have lost the originals. But video recording had been invented in 1979, and now, thanks to British fan Arnold Akien, I have copies.

There are five programs in all. Four of them focus on specific writers: Sir Arthur C Clarke (plain Arthur as he was back then), John Brunner, Michael Moorcock and Ann McCaffrey. The Moorcock programme also features M. John Harrison — including some live rock climbing — and Hawkwind. But it is the fifth programme that really caught my eye, because it was filmed at the 1979 Worldcon in Brighton.

Yes, seriously, a whole half hour documentary devoted to Worldcon. There are interviews with the likes of Brian Aldiss, Fred Pohl and Robert Silverberg. There are interviews with fans. There’s Filthy Pierre (with a fine crop of dark hair) playing the Star Wars theme on his signature keyboard instrument. Somewhat to my surprise, there are Christopher Reeve and Tom Baker. And some of the best interviews are given by a very calm and professional looking con chair, Peter Weston. There’s film of the masquerade, including a young lady wearing nothing much except a pair of 40-foot wings. And the programme closes with a very happy Vonda McIntyre clutching a silver, rocket-shaped object and thanking Avram Davidson for inspiring her to write Dreamsnake.

I have to say that the quality is not great. This was the very early days of video, and the tapes are now quite old. But I do have digital versions. The files are currently VBOs and quite large, but I’ll see what I can do about converting them into something more compatible with YouTube and the like. There’s also a question of copyright, of course, but I don’t suppose the BBC will object to my posting a few minutes of a Hugo Award ceremony.

If anyone knows who at the BBC I should talk to about this stuff, please let me know. And if people are interested in getting copies, or showing it at conventions, let me know.

Santa Has Been

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

And he has given me an order of magnitude speed increase in my DSL service. Many thanks to him, Zen and BT for the improved technology. I now have a good enough connection to watch steaming HD TV. Unfortunately it is Christmas and most of what is available on the iPlayer is pretty awful.

You Realize You Are Old When…

~ Cheryl ~ 9 Comments

… You are talking to a feminist, career girl friend and your realize that she’s too young to have been inspired by this…

Never mind, Mary, there are plenty of us who grew up wanting to make it on our own because you gave us hope.

(Sorry about the opening and closing ads, but this was the best version I could find on YouTube.)

Economist on Internet TV

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Today’s issue of The Economist includes a fascinating article about Internet television. Economists love talking about disruptive technologies, and this one seems to be a classic. According to the article, cable TV companies are doing everything they can to resist the adoption on Internet TV because they are terrified that it will destroy their business model.

Having said that, once of the things that opening up the market will do is emphasize the power law nature of the market. Right now minority taste TV companies make money because they get packaged with more popular channels by cable and satellite companies. In the ultra-competitive world of Internet TV, consumers will eventually only pay for the programs they want, they won’t even have to subscribe to a channel. And that means huge viewing figures for whatever is popular, and a very tiny share of the market for everyone else. Just like trying to sell a book on Amazon. This will doubtless be good and bad in varying quantities.

Personally I won’t care too much as long as I can get baseball on TV when I’m in the UK, and cricket and rugby on TV when I’m in the US.

Meanwhile I’d be interested to hear from anyone who is using Boxee. The only Linux machine I have with me is the Asus, which is not ideal for TV-watching.

Paul Cornell Interview Online

~ Cheryl

Heads up Ireland and Doctor Who fans. I have finally got the video of Paul Cornell’s Guest of Honour talk from P-Con online. There is much interesting Who talk in it, but I have to admit that the highlight is where Paul starts to talk about Alan Moore and things get a little silly. If you are looking for a convention guest, do take a look at this. Paul is very good value.

The interview is divided into 8 sections because it is an hour long and YouTube has a maximum time limit of 10 minutes (and I wanted to put the cuts in sensible places) but I have gathered all of the links into a single post. You can find them all here.

Refuse to be Made Invisible

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

I have acquired a new heroine. Cerrie Burnell is an actress and TV presenter who has recently been given a top job on the BBC’s children’s channel, CBeebies. Parents are outraged. Does no one think of the children? Surely vulnerable little minds must be protected from such a monster? This is political correctness gone mad!!!

So what exactly is wrong with Ms. Burnell? Is she a terrorist? A drug addict? A lesbian? A transsexual? As far as I know, she is none of these – particularly not the last two as she has a young daughter. No, Ms. Burnell was simply unlucky enough to have been born without a hand on one of her arms. She has been talented enough and determined enough and brave enough to make a successful career for herself nonetheless, but, as The Guardian reports, her refusal to hide her disability has resulted in a stream on unpleasant comments on BBC message boards from angry parents who believe that disabled people should be hidden away so as not to upset them or their children.

As Ms. Burnell points out, children are rarely upset by her disability. It is the parents who are the problem.

As I am sure I have said before, there is very little point in having laws against discrimination if people continue to despise those you are trying to protect. Diversity only works properly if people actually accept difference, not if they are just told to do so. And if the objects of their hatred are forced to hide away from view, how will they ever get used to them?

A Tale of Two Reports

~ Cheryl

Last night I watched the final of the current series of University Challenge. I’d seen several of the earlier rounds and I knew that both of the teams in the final were very good. I wasn’t disappointed, it was an excellent contest, and I wasn’t surprised to see it reported in the papers today. Interestingly, however, The Guardian had two reports: this one by Leigh Holmwood and this one by Sam Wollaston. Check them both out. I would be interested in opinions.

Update: Via Christine Burns I find some interesting material on the BBC web site that not only shows Gail Trimble in action, but talks about the perils of being known as a clever woman.

Pigs Do Fly

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

It is rare that I have anything good to say about the Daily Mail, and this is probably an accident, but it is rather amusing. As some of you may remember, Russell T Davies thinks that Doctor Who can never be a woman because it would mean that fathers would have to explain sex changes to their children. Well, the Mail, ever in search of salacious news, has discovered that Matt Smith, the young man who is to take over the role of the Doctor after David Tennant, has appeared on stage in drag. Oh horror! Will fathers now have to explain transvestism to their children? Should we ban the Daily Mail to save our kids?

Those of you who want to see what Mr. Smith looks like in drag can click here.

Good Deed for the Day

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Today I got email from the BBC – or rather the Hugo Awards did, and as I’m one of the people who helps maintain the web site it got forwarded to me.

The message was from a researcher who works on Doctor Who Confidential. They wanted some information on Steven Moffat’s Hugo Award wins. Sadly this is all for a short piece they are doing for an industry event (they didn’t say which, and I’m not speculating). However, if the film ever does go public I shall let you know.

Economist on Display Technology

~ Cheryl

The week’s Economist has a couple of interesting articles on display technology. The first one is about electrophoretic displays – the sort of thing that is used in the Kindle and Sony Reader, which helps make them much easier on the eye (and on the battery) than an LCD screen. The exciting news about these displays is that they will soon be available on a flexible film, just like real paper. For now they are still black and white, but we managed with that for long enough with paper, didn’t we?

The other article is a rather sillier subject – 3D television. In most cases that still means wearing silly glasses. However, at CES Philips were demonstrating actual 3D projectors. Goodness only knows how much they’d cost right now, and of course there is very little in the way of programming for them (Blu Ray is another matter). But I guess it is coming.

Ms. Doctor?

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Gosh, a Doctor Who post! Whatever has prompted this?

Well, I have absolutely nothing to say on the subject of Matt Smith. However, over at Biology in Science Fiction Peggy asks whether there are any good scientific reasons why the new Doctor could not have been black or female. On the gender issue, she’s unusually lightweight, pointing only to a Wikipedia article that claims all of a Time Lord’s cells regenerate during the process of growing a new body.

If you are one of those people who thinks that determining sex is easy then perhaps you’ll be happy with this, but actually it should have been a marvelous opportunity to explore some of the weirdnesses of human biology.

There are, as I understand it, over 70 different intersex conditions currently recognized by science. The Intersex Society of North America lists many of them. One that I would particularly like to highlight is Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. This affects around 1 in every 20,000 people. What happens to these folks is that the cells of their bodies are “male” – that is they contain XY chromosomes – but due to a problem recognizing androgen, a masculinizing sex hormone, their bodies look to be those of normal females. Someone with AIS will almost certainly be declared to be a girl at birth, but they have no uterus or fallopian tubes, so they can’t get pregnant.

So actually it is entirely possible for something to go wrong with the creation of human bodies and make them look female even though they have XY chromosomes. Obviously Time Lords are aliens, but they might suffer from similar problems. Goodness only knows what sort of gender identity problems they might have as a result.

Planet Earth

~ Cheryl

After many evening of happy viewing I have finally come to the end of the BBC’s Planet Earth series (thank you, Kevin!). I’ve seen a fair amount of nature programming in my time, and I have to admit that this series really does have some awesomely spectacular photography. Scenes like the surfing dolphins, the chimp war, the great white shark and snow leopard hunting, the vampire squid and so on will stay with me for a long time. If you have an interest in the natural world, the series is definitely worth buying.

If I have a complaint at all it is that the series is still very much bogged down in the traditional male naturalist view of what a nature program should be about: sex and death. Animals do exhibit a wide range of different behaviors, but put a man behind a camera with some animals and what he’ll want to film is them either fucking or killing each other. With mammals in particular an essential part of behavior is raising their young, but this is much less often shown, and even when we do get shots of mother leopards and bears the narrative is all about how she catches food for the cubs, not how she trains them to hunt, which she surely must do.

Still, given the quality of the shots, and the efforts that the camera crews went through to get them (the “diary” sections at the end of each program are very revealing), I can hardly complain.

What is more, some of the best stuff was added at the end. The final DVD contains three 1-hour programs that are illustrated with shots from the series, but are primarily talking head debates about the current state of the conservation debate. I have to admit that the BBC did a superb job in finding the most oily and unconvincing people to put the Rethuglican case (not that this really mattered – their position was fatally caricatured long ago by Shea and Wilson in the form of the guy in Illuminatus! whose ambition was to be the person who killed the last ever bald eagle in America). On the other hand, some of the environmentalists, particularly James Lovelock, are equally scary. In the end what matters is that we save the planet, not that someone with a rigorous and narrow ethical standpoint forces everyone to do what he says.

Red in Tooth and Spore

~ Cheryl

The “Jungles” episode of Planet Earth has been the most gripping yet. The segment on cordyceps fungi shows that nothing Jeff VanderMeer has come up with in any way underestimates the bizarre abilities of our mushroom rivals for control of the planet. Thankfully they are currently engaged in an ongoing and seemingly endless war against our other principal rivals, the ants.

However, the film of the chimp war, and its cannibal aftermath, was for me one of the most dramatic and disturbing things I have seen on a wildlife program to date. Chimps are disturbingly like humans, in way too many aspects of our behavior.

The Christmas Post

~ Cheryl

Other people seem to be writing about presents, so I guess I should too. Not that there is a lot to write about. I’m not part of a big present-giving culture. My mother, who obviously knows me too well, always gives me money to spend on clothes in the sales.

Still, I did get some lovely, and very unique, jewelry from Kevin’s family. Gigi gave me some chocolate (which I am eating) and Rina gave me some shower stuff (which I shall be using). Kevin very cleverly bought me a subscription to Culture magazine. He also got me the Planet Earth DVD set, and I have been working my way through them, one a day, during the holiday. Thus far the verdict is that the script is pretty silly, but the photography is absolutely awesome.

Christmas dinner will be chicken curry. My excuse is that it is for health reasons, but actually it is because I have some chook left in the fridge and it needs cooking before it goes off. Once it is cooked I can start experimenting with recipes from the new Nigella book.

The other thing I should be doing is listening to the Boxing Day Test from Melbourne, but this year ABC have only got rights to stream the commentary inside Australia, so in the absence of a proxy server I’m limited to following the game on CricInfo. Punter seems to have everything under control, but I see Katich has just got himself out. Could be a close game.

Narnia Astrology?

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Today’s Guardian carries an article about supposed planetary influences in the Narnia books. It politely calls this “medieval cosmology”. Apparently a BBC documentary will reveal all next Easter (oh look, symbolic timing!). That should give everyone plenty of time to get riled up. Archbishops will denounce Satanic influences at the BBC (which we all know is run by teh gays), questions will be asked in Parliament, and members of the House of Lords will be roused from their slumbers. The government will propose banning all fantasy novels “to protect the children” and introduce stringent new school exams to ensure that all of our kids acquire essential knowledge of classic British literature by such greats as Lewis, Tolkien and Rowling.