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.

The One Show vs Kick-Ass

A Toby Jug full of piss apparently....

The one show arrived on our screens in 2007 and its agenda was simple: to be a light and airy magazine show with vaguely interesting guests and numerous segments filmed in the Trafford Centre, Manchester’s testament to Liverpudlian shopping.

Since then, it’s evolved from this initial idea to: knowingly be a light and airy magazine show with vaguely interesting guests and numerous segments filmed in the Trafford Centre, Manchester’s testament to Liverpudlian shopping.

Each week, Christine Blakely and, the ginger equivalent of an all knowing git, Adrian Chiles run us through numerous inane stories that serve no other purpose than to fill in the time before Eastenders. Actual stories I’ve seen over the last few months include:

• Pot holes and the repairing of
• Colour and the standisation of
• A warehouse filled with 70’s clothing and the finding of
• Old people and the euthanasia of
• Alan Shearer and the pointless of – Actually this may have been an actual interview with Alan Shearer

Each VT is bookended with Chiles looking off camera and pretending that this is all beneath him.

‘So, that was pot holes then… Interesting, eh?’ He smirks as the studio crew laugh along.

Oh, how they understand their position in life. This is just a bit of fluff. It’s for the old dears that have nothing to do but wait patiently for death, innit? In fact, one could argue it’s like The Word for OAPS. A few more tits and you’d never notice the difference.

As I say though, it isn’t always like this. When the going gets fluff, the fluff get fluffier. After Carole Thatcher’s rather ill-judged comment about a black tennis player, the show piled on the fluff even more. Oh look, here comes Gyles Brandreth with an amusing story about combing squirrels. Where was Chiles’s smirking after this report? Nowhere to be seen. Having been the person who grassed Thatcher’s backstage comment to the heads of the BBC, Chiles proved he knew which side his bread was buttered on. This meant everything went back to being supersweet and inoffensive.

But now we’re back to normal and Chiles, a man once described by Stewart Lee as like ‘being stuck in the buffet car of a slow-moving train with a Toby jug that has miraculously discovered the power of speech… A Toby jug filled to the brim with hot piss’, is back to rolling his eyes and looking off camera and making sure his cheque has been signed properly.

So, imagine my surprise last night, when The One Show took five minutes out from troubles of shaving pebbles to discuss the weightier matter of censorship. In particular, the movie Kick-Ass and the now infamous line uttered by 11 year old Hit Girl, ‘Which one of you c*nts wants to die first’. If you want the full story, do a bit of searching on the net, if you want a knee jerk reactionary version of the current story, here’s a link to the Daily Mail’s article.

Intermission – I don’t want to get into the whole should an 11 year old even be saying that, but just quickly, films like City of God and the Boy in the Striped Pyjamas show children as young as 8 or 9 in severe distress and the biopic Before Night Falls, has a 12 year old child having a 30 odd year old woman simulate a blowjob on him… So, as far as I see it, it’s okay if it’s ‘artistic’ but if it’s mainstream movie then we have to follow a whole new set of badly written rules. When, oh, when, oh, when will the liberals and the lefties and the commies get it.

Back to the show…

So, there sits a very bored looking Matthew Vaughn, the director of Kick-Ass, bracing himself for the barrage of questions.

‘Do you think it’s right for this child to be saying this?’ Christine Blakely asked in a serious tone she’d learnt looking at herself in the mirror

Vaughn responded that if you read the comic book or watch the film and take what is said and done in the right context then there’s really no issue. After this, the journalistic dynamic duo of Chiles and Blakely floundered. Frost vs Nixon this was not.

Chiles managed to lose all respect by telling Matthew Vaughn that he hadn’t seen the film yet, but he’d seen a picture and it outraged him. Chiles even offered the counter-argument that you can take anything out of context which seemed more reasonable to be coming from the defence as opposed to the prosecution. Vaughn suggested Chiles watch the film and Chiles attempted to bruise Vaughn’s ego by doing his usual eyerolling. Blakeley then later admitted that she had seen the film and that she enjoyed it despite its violence. 30 seconds later, Vaughn was thanked for his time and they moved onto the topic of hot curries.

Magazine shows don’t have to be hard hitting, but neither should they be smug or self-serving. However, if you deliberately aim to be like this than you will eventually be exposed. Chiles, a man used to interviewing monosyllabic footballers and Blakely, a woman I’ve yet to find an interesting fact about, were out of their depth. There was only so much hmmmming and furrowed browing one can do before you come out as being ill-educated on the subject you’re talking about. Chiles admission that he hadn’t seen the film showed disrespect to his guest and that’s why the interview began to drown.

One can only hope that next time they want to do a hard hitting interview, they get Carol Thatcher back in and get Chiles to explain why he grassed her up to the boss. Should be a little bit more entertaining than Harry Hill talking male nappies.

BBC Death List

Reports have surfaced across the internet that the BBC have a  death list of celebrities. Unlike the death lists that can be found in many offices up and down the country, this one hasn’t been put together in the hopes of putting on a bet and making a little money like a morbid Grand National.

This death list was split into two categories. Category One concerns the Queen, Prince Phillip, Prince Charles and Prince William. Category Two includes Bob Dylan, Muhammed Ali and those members of the Royal Family who we’re less than enthused by, but who would probabaly sell a few papers should they have their candle sneezed out.

Should anyone from Category One pass on then all BBC channels will begin to air an offical statement. Category Two has now been abolished and all those on the list have been grouped under the umberella ‘Other Notables’.

A bit of fuss has been made about the loss of Category Two. Nothing too in your face. Maybe the same kind of fuss you might make should your partner break wind in bed. Idiot Box did some digging around and managed to find not only the original list for Category Two, which includes names such as Pinky and Perky and Noel Edmonds, but also a further list entitled Category Three.

Category Three is a series of events that, should they happen, would have caused all BBC channels to shut down and air an official statement in full HD.  The following is just some of the events:

• Ant and Dec to be replaced by the Euro.
• The antics of Katir Price/Peter Andre/Alex Reid to be officially categorised as a Class A drug and anyone even close to taking an interest in them must be imprisoned for 50 years.
• The man who created the ‘Webuyanycar.com’ jingle to be tried and executed at dawn.
• Barack Obama admitting that the last couple of years have been a drunken college bet that’s got terribly out of hand and he’s really sorry.
• The Daily Mail is revealed to be written and published by the creators of Viz magazine and was originally entitled ‘Tony Tory: He’s Got a Story’.
• Sky New’s Kay Burly to be dubbed over by the sounds of an abbatoir during busy the busy season.
• Kerry Katona to apologise for being in the public eye for so long for no discernable reason before being filled full of helium and made to dissapeer over the horizon.

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.