Fan Culture will Hate Itself: Lady GaGa to star in Doctor Who!!1!!ZOMG!!1

It’s been reported in the Daily Star, The Telegraph and even on a website in India, Lady GaGa is to appear in Doctor Who!

Except…

Except, she’s not is she? This is the least feasible story ever and feels like someone has just taken me up on my Doctor Who Press Release kit. Gareth Roberts has appeared in the July Issue of Doctor Who Magazine discussing his latest script for the show which is due to co-star James Corden. Discussing his previous draft for the upcoming ep, Roberts suggested that the script may one day resurface as Big Finish project (a series of audio plays starring the 5^th, 6^th, 7^th and 8^th Doctors) or Lady GaGa doing it because she’ll need the work.

The brilliant/face palm thing is that the Daily Star et al have taken his exact quote and, despite it reeking of sarcasm even when separated from the rest of the interview, have reported it as absolute FACT! With a capital F and a capital ACT and a lowercase arse.

From the Daily Star:

The star, 24, has already sported costumes which resemble Cybermen, Yeti, Ood and Tree People.

And scriptwriter Gareth Roberts revealed he has already come up with a storyline that would see The Doctor (Matt Smith, 27) go GaGa.

Gareth told Doctor Who magazine: “The script might end up on screen one day with Lady GaGa, who will have fallen on hard times.”

In a way it’s fantastic. Right down to pointing out that Lady GaGa dresses weirdly and, ergo, should be in Doctor Who. As they suggest, she could be a Cyberman, Yeti, Ood or a horrific, highly popular, more-iconic-than-the-Daleks, Tree Person…

Ah yes, the Tree People, a race of trees that resemble people, or are they people that resemble trees? Truly that is the mystery of their race. Either way, they burn up a treat. It’s fair to say that whoever wrote the article thought ‘’Ang on! There were tree people in that episode with Billie Piper. Lady GaGa looks like a twig. Yeah, I’ll whack that down’.

So, if you’re a blogger looking for info on this story or a tabloid hack, please allow me to be one of many to tell you that you are talking arse.

(I am very aware that there is a good chance that I could be misquoted and later this week you will see the headline, Lady GaGa to Play Talking Arse.)

Fan Culture Will Hate Itself: Season Finales

Warning: The following article contains spoilers to the shows Ashes to Ashes and Lost.

So, it’s the start of a new week and the end of two popular sci-fi shows. Namely Lost and Ashes to Ashes. Both have spent several series layering twist and turn upon twist and turn till everything came out a bit twisty and turny. Like the scoreboard from new faces.

And how did they both resolve their storylines? With a big dollop of death.

Nothing like death to trim a few storyline threads you’ve got hanging off your immaculate story suit which was made by the story tailor in story lane in story town…

I’m drifting.

In the case of Ashes to Ashes, Alex discovered that she had been dead since she was shot trying to save her daughter in series one and that Gene, a 45 year misogynist who turned out to be the spirit of a 19 year old copper, was simply there to guide her from this life to the next. All rather touching and guessed by pretty much the entire fan community, most of whom will have had their grannies down as a wager as soon as John Simm’s monologue was over Life on Mars.

Lost also went for the death motif by suggesting that a number of scenes in the final series were in fact the main characters reliving their lives in a style of their choosing before going over to the other side. Apparently, when you die you’ll be able to relive the favourite moments of your life. Even if that moment is being stuck on an island with a shadowy organisation, polar bears, no way of escaping and only the prospect of eating Hurley to give you comfort.

Both finales have been met with the usual ‘OMG!!1 IT WAZ MAZING’ vs ‘I could write better. I have already written a 12 page synopsis which I have sent to the BBC in the hopes that they will sit up and take notice’.

Angry Ashes to Ashes fans seem to be upset primarily because they had already predicted the ending back in series 2 and certain Lost fans are grumbling because they didn’t predict how the show was going to end. So, it’s really turned into one of those ‘dammed if you do, dammed if you don’t’ moments.

This all in all makes you feel a bit sorry for Steve Moffat. In a month’s time, the new showrunner will be placing the final two episodes of his first series of Doctor Who at our feet and hoping we don’t kick him whilst he’s down there kneeling.

Whilst a few papers *cough* Daily Mail *cough splutter* have been more than vocal about this latest series of Doctor Who, it’s worth noting that overall it’s been pretty consistent. Steve, like RTD before him, has made some bold choices in terms of directors, writers and actors. Yes, with Rory on board the TARDIS, it does seem like it’s in danger of becoming Scooby Doo, but it is holding together despite the prospect of James Cordan on the horizon.

So, with the Pandorica still to be opened, Rory and Amy yet to be married and the crack in time getting ever bigger is Moffat going to be able to end it all satisfactorily? Not a snowball chance in Hell. Whatever he has written will not be good enough to the over-zealous fan boy, who will take great pleasure in letting everyone else know how the story should have ended. Despite RTD and Moffet being very open about how they collaborated on a few ideas before the series started so that it could be linked with last years specials, there will be cries of ‘RESET’ and ‘Doctor Who 1963-2010’ when the final credits roll. Some fans will blame Karen Gillan’s legs whilst others will lament that it hasn’t been the same since Adric died. Some fans will be hated and crucified for loving the finale and those who hated it will be treated the same. Some will convoluted ideas about how the DoctorDonna should break through his dimension with Rose in tow and help the 11^th Doctor. Some fans are just born idiots.

So, can I put forward the thesis that we end the war now and save millions of lives. When it’s all said and done, let’s just be happy that we’re that little group of 8-80 year olds who take 45 minutes of their lives each week to enjoy some escapism and, though sometimes the execution can be a little bit off-kilter, the heart and the imagination is still there as it was with Hartnell, Pertwee, Troughton and Baker.

Except in Victory of the Daleks.

That was fucking awful.

Seriously.

Ad’s All Folks: Animated Graham Norton

Trapped in the vault of the Byzantium, the Doctor, his companion, Amy Pond, and his possibly wife/girlfriend/pet chimp, River Song are surrounded by the Weeping Angels. As their dying torches flicker their last beams of hope, the angels take advantage of the momentary darkness and sneak ever closer. As the Doctor begins to formulate a plan, it seems it’s too late.

It has arrived and there’s no going back.

An overly large forehead, rictus like smile and glittery yellow skin; it looks human but it’s far from it.

It’s an animated Graham Norton advertising Over the Rainbow.

Quite why the BBC chose to promote their latest reality TV talent show for the morbidly bored  in the last five minutes of Doctor Who is a puzzling conundrum. A conundrum further complicated when they proceeded to advertise the same show directly AFTER the end credits.

These idents have been popping up for a while now, if you’ll excuse the trite pun. Their full name is a Digital On-screen Graphic. A series of words that seem to come across as a giant oxymoron only cobbled together because someone thought it was really funny that you could say ‘Oh look! There’s our DOG running across the screen’. The American import warehouse that is Channel Five was the first to use such graphics in the UK and over the last ten years they’ve spread across the televisual medium like a very infected rash. The freeview channel, Viva, specialises in a special brand of DOG that seems to consist of noises as well as animation. Whilst the output on Viva is nothing to write home about, the channel hardly helps itself by having Cartman take up half the bottom of the screen to fart out when South Park is on next with accompanying sound effects.

Aside from ruining cliff-hangers of popular flag ship shows, what purpose do they actually serve? It’s not as if anyone is ever that desperate to find out what’s next on TV. Having never watched Over the Rainbow, I now presume it to be filled with numerous reminders about what you’re watching  made directly to camera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Charlotte ‘did you know I’m Welsh’ Church. There’s probably very little in the way of music because Graham Norton is too busy telling the great unwashed what’s coming next. Maybe it doesn’t stop with mind numbing casting couch auditions aimed at the nose picking masses who consider Britain’s Got Talent to be above them intellectually. Maybe during the lottery results, a plasticine persona of a third degree burns victim tears of bits of his own skin to form the words ‘Casualty 9:00pm’

My only thought is that they’re not there to promote the latest show. No, they are there to direct your anger away from the tits that talk over the end credits of all your favourite programmes.

If you don’t know what credits are, they are those things that list all the talented people whose sweat, blood and tears go into making the very things you love to watch/write blogs about/masturbate to. You know what I’m talking about. You’ll find them crushed into the left hand side of screen when they’re advertising Over the Rainbow. Just after the animated Graham Norton.

Shit, he gets everywhere.

Ad’s All Folks/Fan Culture will Hate Itself: New Doctor Who Trailer

Lying on the ground of Hampstead Heath, staring at the stars, in complete defiance of the traditional act of dogging normally found the Heath, the Doctor and, new non-Rose companion, Amy Pond choose their next adventure… It’s a simple start to an advert that wears its budget on its sleeve. Lots of swirly colours, floating Daleks and grinning creatures ensure that those in the audience wearing 3D glasses are in for an awe inspiring 40 seconds. Okay, so showing a 3D advert on the BBC to advertise the new series of its flagship show on a medium often associated with being quite flat did give the whole proceedings an air of watching Jaws 3D when the shark explodes, but it was still an opportunity to see more of Matt Smith as the new Doctor.

But what do the fans think? Well, not a lot really. There are already cries of it not fitting into Doctor Who continuity. A 45 year old poster has spoken on behalf of the 8-15 year old target audience decrying the trailer as nothing but tosh. So angry was he, that he had no time for spelling or grammar.

Okay: “if” Amy didn’t know who he was: why was she lying on Hampstead heath looking up at the stars with him asking him what certain stars were? Why crack the joke that all RTD critics have hated in it’s repetitiousness for the last five years? Why have a promising looking earthshock…followed by a lone dalek and some seriously out of place Weeping Angels, one of which could have got Amy because it was behind her…and as for the blue back drop…it was just a bit CBBC – now the head at the end was new and the “Smiler” was there but almost ignored…it’s not a question of arguing over it being a teaser or a trailer: it’s just being diappointed in the quality of what we were given…no extrapolations on the series can be made from it but it clearly wasn’t a good way to introduce the viewing public to MT/SM’S era in my opinion when an audience of floating viewers waiting for Lets Dance were around – looked just like the sort of CBBC trailer that airs before “Eastenders” most nights….

And thank God he did speak out against this 40 second piece of propaganda. It’s been widely known amongst the fan community that since its reboot, Doctor Who has been purposely morphed from its traditional adult themes of time travel and robot dogs, to something resembling a family show aimed squarely at everyone outside of the continuity picking bracket. As a Doctor Who fan myself, I find it tough to swallow the BBC’s incessant need to distance itself from thought provoking drama and pour money into a show that may as well be called Queer As Folk series 3. The special effects are shoddy, the acting appalling and, in some cases, it all comes across a little too cheesy and childish. The following is just a number of instances where in the last five years, Russell T Davies has pissed on the corpse of William Hartnell. I only present them here so Steven Moffett can learn from them and quickly amend any problems before the new series in March.

1)    The 2009 episode ‘Robot’ found the Doctor and his companion Sarah Jane (God when will we see the last of her!), taking on the might of a giant robot. The worse part about this whole episode are the special effects. How are we supposed to realistically accept that Sarah Jane has been kidnapped by a Robot when she’s clearly CGI. If I wanted to cry at a bunch of 1s and 0s, I’d watch fucking Avatar.

2)    Russell ran a competition on Blue Peter for one lucky winner to design a bad guy for Doctor Who. The winning result was this:

Eventually played by Alan Carr, this episode served to show that Russell had completely lost the plot.

3)    With a new doctor came a new outfit and it wasn’t long before the fans were in a fevered rage only reserved for Gary Glitter and war. The image below shows how RTD’s gay agenda was in full effect. In a style that was later dubbed ‘geek chic’, the Doctor looked every inch the kind of person who appreciates the work of Van Gogh… If you catch my meaning.

Ooh, hello Mary!

4)    Russell was well known for trying to be overtly politically correct and this was never more obvious than in this clip taken from 2005’s Talons of Weng Chiang.

Fuck off Russell, you Guardian reading ponce!

5) David Tennant’s portrayal of the Doctor took a battering over the last few years and quite rightly so. As we see in this trailer for 2007’s The Time Meddler, David chooses to portray the Doctor as a crotchety old man who fumbles his lines! A long way away from the train punching Doctor we hardcore fans have come to love. Where’s the moodiness? Where’s the darkness? We expected more! Heck, we deserved more.

6)    Another example of Russell’s need to inject his lifestyle into the show can be seen in the opening sequence. Look hard enough and you’ll see the Doctor wink. Wink, for Christ’s sake. We all know the kind of people who like to wink. The same kind of people who like to read the Daily Mail in the dark… If you catch my meaning.

7)    Finally, just when we thought it safe, RTD gave us the 10^th Doctor’s final episode. And what a mess it was. The entire thing was set on Earth, John Simm returned as the Master for what could quite possibly be the campest portrayal of the criminal genius and to add insult to injury, how did the doctor die? Not in the hail of bullets we would have all liked that’s for sure. Instead, RTD’s constant hints of ‘The Doctor falls off a satellite’ turned out to be nothing more engrossing than the Doctor falling off a satellite.

Steve, if you have any ounce of dignity, you’ll listen to the fans, take note of the points above and give us a Doctor we want. One that justifies why we argue with 16 year old kids on forums whilst our wives file for divorce.

Fan Culture Will Hate Itself: Death to the Creator

Not as bad as everyone is making out...

Fan culture is a tiresome affair sometimes. I mean that genuinely. Reading the latest batch of rumours to come through the Doctor Who filter, the same thing comes up time and time again. Someone declares their misguided idea as fact and decries Russell T Davies et al for being nothing more than idiots for not following suit. More commonly, a writer will try something new and the same ‘fan’ will try to claim that they could have handled it better then anyone at the BBC ever could.

Whilst a well meaning maniac is part and parcel of the whole sordid sci-fi affair, its grating to read these ‘fans’ claim to know more about the show than the actual creators. As if somehow sitting in your bedroom watching endless box sets and eating turkey twizzlers gives you a green card to being a show runner.

Look at Matt Smith. The forgotten Beatle has yet to have an episode air and some members of the Doctor Who community are crying for him to lynched from his spot and replaced with someone ‘old and dark’.

The reason why I bring this bile up is that I’ve just recently finished ‘And Another Thing…’ by Eoin Colfer, the sixth part of the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. A lot of fans have been very upset about the idea of someone other than Douglas Adams writing about the adventures of Arthur Dent. This, to me, seems  a bit unfair to Eoin and a bit generous to Douglas. Let’s be honest, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish was awful and Mostly Harmless wasn’t far off from being next to suicidal. Even Douglas Adams admitted that he could have written them better. When talking about the ending of Mostly Harmless, he’s quoted as saying:

People have said, quite rightly, that Mostly Harmless is a very bleak book. And it was a bleak book. I would love to finish Hitchhiker on a slightly more upbeat note.

But, no, there are those supposed fans who feel the need to talk for all of us. They hated the book and, in the case of one particular blogger, started a hate campaign before they had even read it.

For me, whilst some of the language was a tad cruder than expected, it was enlightening to see that Zaphod Beeblbrox had one head. This was something that happened in the movie too. Sam Rockwell played the Big Zee as mono-cranium. Oh, how the fans cried out! What was happening here! Why would someone do this! Where was this one you called God now!

The movie makers tried their best to deflect the blows and point out that most the script was taken from ideas by the big DA himself. And yet the ‘fans’ cried foul and took their ball home refusing to play.

Now, here, in this new book, Zaphod has one head and, once again, the ‘fans’ are upset and the publishers etc are telling them that the ideas are form Douglas’s notes.

To be honest, I like my Zaphod to have two heads but when two different types of media crop up both claiming to be based on the scribblings of the original author, I’m happy to put my hand up and say ‘fair enough’ and ‘why not?’. Is it that difficult for some ‘fans’ to think that the original creator of the show might have a better idea of what direction he wants his creations to go in than, say, the spotty goit forever furrowing his brow and banging his fists against a keyboard in sheer blind anger because the Doctor isn’t dark enough.

No doubt when David Tennant hangs up his converse at the beginning of next year, there will be a division of opinion and, in some cases, even a sigh of relief. However, amongst the chatter of like minded fans, there will be that lone beacon of pouting, sulking  and megalomania and when that voice rises, we must be to do the only grown up and sensible thing we can do. We must stick our fingers in our ears and go la la la. And if that’s not grown up, we could teach them how to put their anger to better use.