Keith Martin

Olympics - A New Approach

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:32:53 GMT

The news that the spectacular "footprints in the sky" part of the Beijing Opening Ceremony was actually faked up with CGI comes as a disappointment. On the other hand, it must be a huge relief for the London Olympic Committee, who were surely panicking at the thought of having to top the Chinese effort. I mean, if CGI effects are permitted, then we're home free.

We may not have the mega-budget. We may not have a national heritage that we're allowed to talk about anymore. But we do have some excellent digital effects houses who are used to working to tight schedules and low budgets (i.e. for the BBC).

Yes, I am saying: "Let's just fake the entire Opening Ceremony."

After all, the whole thing is mostly for the TV audience anyway. The VIP guests don't really want to be sitting in a draughty stadium, when they could be watching the whole thing on big-screen TVs in a bar somewhere.

We have four years to do this. Let's get started. A hundred digital acrobats, a thousand synchronised dancers. A re-enactment of Caesar's invasion of Britain. With elephants. Why, the Walking With Dinosaurs people alone could provide us with a huge cavalcade of prehistoric monsters. All at a fraction of the cost to the taxpayer. You know it makes sense.

In fact, this could be the answer to all our Olympic problems. No-one seriously believes that the new stadium and attendant complexes will be finished on time and under budget, so stop building them now. Just rent a few dozen acres of set-aside farmland in a cheap county somewhere and hold the Olympics there. The digital image of a state-of-the-art stadium can then be CGed into the background for the broadcast.

I really think I'm on to something here.

Doctor Who (The Stolen Earth)

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 19:10:36 GMT

That was the most shameless piece of self-indulgent fanfic writing I have seen in a long time.

That was superb, that was.

[UPDATE: On the other hand, it would be nice if Journey's End made sense at some point.]

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 21:56:12 GMT

Looking at the most recent Doctor Whos, I'm struck by the contrast in approach between Davies and Moffat, which may perhaps say something about how the programme will change in 2010. (Or then again it may not.)

Most of the New Who episodes that have been set in the future have been the work of Davies himself. He has two recurrent motifs: (1) a schoolboy fascination with really big numbers ("the year 1 billion", "the year 5 trillion" etc.), (2) the tendency for every future, no matter how remote, to look exactly like now (or earlier). People wear early 21st century clothes. They have the same social relationships as people today. (Not a generation ago, not a generation from now, but today.) They use basic 20th century technology (glasses for vision problems, slide projectors, wired-in telephones with 1970s sound hoods).

Upside: it lets Davies tell stories that are allegories or satires of present day themes. It lets him use character types that his audience immediately recognise.

Downside: It isn't ever intellectually convincing as being set in the future. It is potentially depressing. (You can get in the Tardis for wonderful adventures in the far future. Except that everywhere you go is exactly like it is back home.) Plus, in just a few years, all this stuff is going to look terribly dated.

The other writers who have ventured into the future have mostly used isolated spacecraft as a setting and refrained from mentioning the date. The exception is Steven Moffat.

Three out of four Moffat Who stories have featured or referenced the future. In each and every case, that future has been the 51st century. It's the time period Captain Jack is from (The Empty Child). It's the time that the Clockwork Robots came from (Girl in the Fireplace). It's the time of the Library and Professor River Song (Shadows in the Library). Probably not coincidentally, the 51st century is also the latest specific date ever given for an Earth-based story in the original series - it's the origin time of the war criminal Magnus Greel, the villain of The Talons of Weng Chiang.

Since Steven Moffat is undoubtedly capable of coming up with any number of dates for his stories, we must assume that (1) he wants to build up a detailed picture of a particular time in future history (2) he really liked The Talons of Weng Chiang.

The Time Agency that Jack worked for is surely meant to be the same Time Agency that Magnus Greel feared would pursue him to the Victorian era. (And there's a fanfic to be written there, if it hasn't already.) Intentional or not, there's a neat technological fit between Library's flesh donors or Fireplace's human organs interfacing with machinery, and Weng Chiang's Peking Homunculus, made from cybernetic components and the cortex of a pig.

Whatever its origins, Moffat's future is a distinct contrast to Davies's. It shows more influence from written SF ideas. It has people who are still like us, but give a sense of living in a different time and place. It's a time with technologies quite unlike ours, but where technology does not dominate its people's lives. It has time travel (though restricted to use by a few), teleporters, flesh donors, neural downloads and guns that make square holes in doors. Judging by Jack and River, it also has rather a lot of sex.

I'd place Moffat's 51st century stories a generation after the apocalyptic war alluded to in Talons of Weng-Chiang. They could fall into a sort of 51st century 1960s, where the world has changed and the possibilities seem limitless. These people seem to have all the technology they need and to use it largely for fun and aesthetics (in a vaguely Culture-like way). They build a library the size of a world, with hard copies of every book for people who don't want to read them on a screen. Does it really have a practical purpose? No, but that doesn't seem to be an issue. The teleport terminals are tastefully constructed in wood, the security monitors have brass fittings. They can build robots out of practically anything, but a ship called the Madame Du Pompadour has robots made out of clockwork. Because they can.

Ok, there's always a slight danger of being eaten by shadows or dismembered by misguided robots, but on the whole Moffat's 51st century is somewhere that I'd be happy to relocate to.

Does all this tell us much about what a Moffat-driven Who will be like? Possibly not, but it does emphasise that lots of things are likely to change.

The Clatter of Redundant Hippos

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 15:49:17 GMT

The first batch of people at work reached their redundancy date today. Other departments are being kept on for different lengths of time, according to some plan that they haven't explained to us.

There's a big, open lightwell between our floor (where everyone is staying on for the moment) and the floor above (where everyone finished work today). It was hard to know how to react as we had to carry on working to the sounds of partying by 200 slightly manic people upstairs who had, after all, just lost their jobs.

The sounds of music and loud voices echoed down to us for much of the day, along with a strange, loud rattling noise that we couldn't identify. Eventually, curiosity led me upstairs, where I found that someone had set up a Hungry Hippos game in the midst of the tables of food and drink, and the staff were taking it in turns to bash away at it.

Strange day.

Our section is the last to go, at the end of April. It'll be a big, lonely, empty building by then.

Robin in the Hoodie, Season 2

Sat, 06 Oct 2007 20:08:54 GMT

Just saw the first part of season 2 of the BBC's "Robin Hood". I'd given up on it a few episodes into Season 1 but dipped back for the last episode (and the one with the ninja ballerinas). Wasn't remotely impressed, but I thought I'd have a glance at the new season.

Am I coming down with the flu and starting to hallucinate, or has it actually got a bit better?

The tone is darker, the sheriff suddenly has a motivation beyond just being evil, and they've come up with a reason why Robin doesn't just put an arrow through the sheriff's chest. There's some actual characterisation and a degree of tension that the first season totally lacked

On the other hand, Robin and Marion are still wet and weedy, I can't tell the rest of the outlaws apart, and the "humour" is frequently awful.

Overall I slightly enjoyed this episode, which is worrying me.

Testing

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 17:54:17 GMT

Being a first entry and a test.

Not sure yet if I'll be one of those people who posts huge and frequent ramblings, or one of those who doesn't get around to making an entry from one year's end to the next.

Possibly both.