Inspiration... What's That?

I'm just going to ramble about totally random shit since I don't actually have anything to say.

As to the title, it's a very bad Coupling misquote (yes, Moff, I am still struggling to convince myself that next year is going to be better than a Sparacus holiday special), but as I upload my stuff onto the new blog, I was trying to finally finish Human Nature so I can at least bask in the joy of finishing that production block. But no. My genius stormed out of the room, slamming the door after it and leaving me utterly clueless. Maybe it's format of the blog, the black and green somehow ruining my creative process (mind you, I speak from experience that the other options are worse - even Mr. Goacher, Mrs. Nyder and Mr. Pirate King prefer it).

Basically, I've done everything except the "plot" bits. Which is a real pisser as technically I'm trying to mock not one story but two, simultaneously. I don't have ANY ideas, bar a handful of moments.

I worked out the premise: the Doctor checks his wiki entry and realizes the NAs aren't canon. Pissed off, he vows to relive them all again... but after five minutes realizes a lot of them, deep down, were quite crap. I mean, really. Finally he finds Human Nature and goes, "Ooh, that one's good, I'll do that!" and since the plot involves him turning human and falling in love, Martha is urging him on with disturbing acularity. So the Doctor wires himself up to the Chameleon Arch, but it got broken by Lucie (remember her? Not for long) and so instead of being turned into Hugh Grant, the Doctor is turned into a human David Tennant who merely ACTS like Hugh Grant as a stuttering shy virgin who bangs like a dunny door in a cyclone.

...and that's pretty much it (bar a sequence where Father of Mine tries to pretend to be the Seventh Doctor to fool Martha) until the final scene, one which I really am quite proud of in thinking up: the Doctor goes back to see Joan and apologize for basically stealing her boyfriend's body, when Joan pulls out HER OWN fobwatch and opens it: poof! She's the Rani, and the Family were actually chasing HER all the time. Very awkwardly they part company and agree that this never actually happened.

Well, I found it amusing and clever.

But nothing in between leaps out. Absolutely sod all.

Bollocks.

It appears a similar creative lapse struck Big Finish as they wrote out Charley Pollard forever. Though Briggsy once again shows a disturbing propensity to want to rewrite the Season 3 finale (we have a story about humanity reverting to savagery and attacking civilized people in underground bunkers, personality changes, and a whacking great reset time paradox) but, fair's fair, the story's quite reasonable. In everything except writing out Charley.

For a start, there's a retarded subplot about whether or not the Charley who leaves is the real thing. To cut a story short, a kind of freaky psycho alien turned herself into an exact physical copy of Charley and everyone seems unable to tell the difference between the two, despite the fact one of them is a creepy baby-talking stalker who wants to be with the Doctor forever and ever and ever. She's a complete idiot and manages to nobly sacrifice herself in the "Sorry, DON'T press the red button?" way Katarina did.

With one Charley dead, everyone turns to the other and asks, "Oooh, which Charley are you? The real or the fake?" as if the fact she didn't stupidly blow herself up by accident wasn't a clue. They then try and pull this again AFTER she gives a very long and detailed description of her wild party life with the Eighth Doctor, something that the fake Charley knew ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT and in the scene before she died pointed out, repeatedly, that she had no idea that Charley had jumped timelines to hang around her boyfriend's prior incarnation. Sorry, Briggsy, but the audience have an attention span so I fail to see why you're trying to intrigue us - mind you, you pulled the exact same retarded prank in Dalek Empire III when the Tenth Doctor's superhero sister sends the message to the authorities about the Daleks being evil and then bounces up and down in front of the Daleks screaming "I HAVE TOTALLY FUCKED YOU OVER! KILL ME IF YOU CAN!!!" and then ends the story by asking, "Hang on... did she REALLY send the message?" Um. Obviously. It was never in doubt. You idiot.

So Charley decides to try and save the continuity of the universe by mind-wiping the Sixth Doctor and leaving him with the confused impression any adventures he had with her he had with the stalker who looked like someone else. He then wanders off to a beach somewhere to get ratted and lighten up, while Charley stays on a spaceship with the Viyrans. Now, this is a bit dodgy as the whacking great reset project would logically mean the Viyrans weren't there to do this nifty MIB mindwiping, let alone REMEMBER who the Doctor and Charley were in the first place. So, we don't actually know where or when Charley has been left or why she didn't, say, stay with the Doctor for once trip back to 1930s Earth or anyway. The story ends with the Doctor wandering off to drown his mind-altered sorrows, and after the theme music we cut to the Viyran asking Charley what the fuck she thinks she's doing. She admits, she doesn't have a clue. The end.

Now, is that a better end than ANY of the ones offered by Girl Who Never Was?

Frankly, I suspect the Viyrans mindwiped Briggs and made him forget this was the titular "Charley Finale" as "Wierdass Charley Plot Device Cameo" would be a better description. I cannot think of a companion... bar Dodo... or John and Gillian... or maybe Destrii... that has had such a shithouse departure. Is her story over? Surely an ending, rightly or wrongly, requires some kind of explanation. Imagine if Martha had left at the end of Blink, explained solely by a shot of her walking away from the TARDIS after the end credits and you'll get a clue of how satisfying this is.

I'd say it logically leads to her being brought back but quite simply, the new Briggs administration is culling every companion they can get. Since the 100th release we've seen C'Rizz, Erimem, Charley, Evelyn, Amy and Lucie get their marching orders, and Hex seems to be on his way out as well. Are they quitting from some kind of baldtoothbrushwieldingaphobia?

Speaking of random insanity, I've been watching 1970s PI comedy drama Hazell recently (played by the bloke who was Jim Morrison, the supercool sociology teacher in that party episode of The Young Ones, or the psycho simulant in Red Dwarf: Justice) and for some reason there is a running gag where small children ask him if he is Dr Who. Considering his cockney accent, pinstripe suit and way with the ladies, it makes more sense now than it did at the time. He looks, sounds and dresses nothing like Tom Baker, doesn't use any kind of police box, offer people jelly babies, play yoyos... yet kid after kid asks their parents to question our hero about possible Gallifreyan origins. WHY?!

(Mind you, one episode has him flirt with a jailbait Lalla Ward... could it be that?)

Hazell as a show got me into some mild bother too, as to this wierd business of uploading and seeding. Basically, once you download something you have to leave the whole thing switched on until the infinity symbol vanishes and you can finally do something with the file you've been downloading. I have no idea how on earth this is in any way useful but apparently you need to upload to balance your download, a kind of paying for what you've taken. Now, I don't mind that to an extent, but the problem is I can't upload ANYTHING until I've FINISHED downloading. Right? This is the trouble, as to do Hazell required downloading 3 GB. For some reason I managed to do that in half an hour, about a hundredth of the expected time. This basically meant I'd tested the website's patience and unless I uploaded exactly that, no more downloads ever. So, thought I, fair enough, just leave the file cooking until it paid back what was taken. But it didn't. It's reached around 18 MB and not moved a sodding inch. Annoying, is it not?

Almost as annoying as Alex Drake in the finale of Ashes to Ashes, which I can't be arsed to watch properly, but not NEARLY as annoying as that stupid watermark on Channel 7 for Flashfoward, which I deliberately decided to avoid. So there.

Christ, all this randomnocity had bored even myself and I can't even rant any more.

Cut to the chase

- I came up with a really epic Dalek story to end all Dalek stories but can't be arsed to write it

- 1960s Batman is plain disturbing if you watch for the subtext

- The Wedding of Sarah Jane was originally going to have the Tenth Doctor meet the Brigadier, but alas Nick Courtney's had a stroke and ain't being in it. Bummer.

- Spara's latest film outline is pathetic even by his own standards

- I really, really wish that Tom Cookson would shut the hell up. Not so much because I don't want to read what he wants to say, but the fact he just keeps inserting the same goddamned I-hate-everything-after-Season-17-society-is-fucked in every single review. No matter what. Every single review the same. Over and over and over again. Please. I'm begging you, you media student, that half of the Ratings Guide is now nought but you saying the same thing over and over again - is it some kind of plan to have your rant on every single review? IS IT?!?

- I worked out a slight rewrite of Man of Iron, with the Gay Bore of 84 turning out to be the next stage of Mutoid, and Algor selling it to the highest bidder - whether that be the rebels, Space Command, Servalan's lot or the Earth Admin. I thought up a cool opener where some troops are killed by mutoids and then the mutoids are killed by Gay Bore

- the film version of Quatermass and the Pit is crap, no matter how damn hard Julian Glover tries

- in the last episode of The Dalek Masterplan, there's a truly shocking moment where Hartnell totally loses it and starts screaming when he sees Sara Kingdom turn to dust. Wierdly, he sounds exactly like Sylvester McCoy in Colditz, which is strange because for quite a lot of the time, Hartnell sounded quite like Tom Baker

- Season 7 of Red Dwarf really IS rubbish. I mean, how brain damaged is Tikka to Ride? Not only do they make Lister a total fuckwit with no morals, the plot resolves itself by JFK killing himself... despite the first half of the episode relying on the fact that you can't get someone to kill themselves without events resetting themselves all over again. And how the hell does a VR character escape from a suite that needs goggles and gloves? And, really, didn't anyone notice the first half of Stoke Me A Clipper was the first scene of Gunmen of the Apocalypse only not funny? They have a story about jumping dimensions, and then make all the scenes where Lister is a knight VR rather than an alternate universe? Couldn't they come up with a single original gag for the funeral scene? Utter trash, yet sadly there's just enough genius (usually from Rimmer: "A minute's flatulence!" "One minute you're down..." "Morning!" and the brilliant farewell of "I just needed ONE MORE GOODBYE!") to make you miserable. How anyone could prefer this season scares me.

- I still laugh uncontrollably at watching one scene in Nightingales

(Bell and Carter are doing an exam together)

CARTER: "Question 20: You are in charge of security at a business convention, a delegate has forgotten his pass and wants to gain access to the building - what do you do?"

BELL: Kill him.

CARTER: Kill him?! You can't kill him!

BELL: Of course you can! He shouldn't have forgotten his pass in the first place!

CARTER: No, it was an honest mistake! The bloke left it in his hotel room when he went down for breakfast, that's all...

BELL: I tell you what he was doing. He had a tart in his room. I bet she took his wallet when he was asleep!

CARTER: Rubbish! ...what, and he left his pass in his wallet? Oh. Well, this puts a different complexion on things, dunnit? I mean, I was prepared to give the bloke the benefit of the doubt, but I mean... what about his poor wife at home?!

BELL: Well, you know what these reps are like. He doesn't give a toss! And I bet she's got a bad leg...

CARTER: I bet you're right! And I'll reckon the son's not too good either!

BELL: Son?

CARTER: I mean, it makes you mad, doesn't it? You've got this five year old boy - with a squint - you've got his mother, you know, at home, limping around the furnitute, trying to make the place look nice. And then his father, you know, "daddy", this filthy rutting dirty stinking little animal having his end away in some crappy hotel room!

BELL: Look, shouldn't we let the wife know what's going on?

CARTER: No! This is family business, Ding Dong! I just don't want to get involved in anything like that, you know. I mean, I bet he's not ALL to blame, really...

BELL: Oh, the wife you mean?

CARTER: Yeah the wife. I mean, OK, she's got a bad leg, right? We feel sorry for her. But she could make an effort now and again, couldn't she?

BELL: Yeah, get her hair done now and then.

CARTER: A little trip to the hair dresser's would not go amiss, and what's the problem with a spray of perfume now and again? What's wrong with that, eh?

BELL: Yeah, he wants a cooked meal when he comes home...

CARTER: SHE DOESN'T COOK!

BELL: Oh GOD!

CARTER: HE LIVES ON TAKEAWAYS, THE POOR SOD!

BELL: Do you know what gets me?

CARTER: Don't! You don't have to tell me!

BELL: OK, OK, so the son's got a squint, right...

CARTER: Yeah, but he could make the effort at home! Help his mother out now and again, right?

BELL: Yeah, cook his dad a meal!

CARTER: Exactly! I mean, the poor bloke's tired! He's been out till all hours, attending conferences and...

BOTH: ...screwing prostitutes in his hotel room...

CARTER: I mean, he's exhausted! You know, when he comes home, he wants a hot meal inside him! And when he gets home, what does his son do for him?

BELL: He does nothing!

CARTER: NOTHING! He just sits there!

BELL: He just sits there!

CARTER: And squints!

BELL: ...BASTARD!