So, impelled by a strange force from outside the solar system, or something, I’ve been exploiting my Netflix account in order to watch just about every single episode of Doctor Who that has been released on dvd (at least, those titles which Netflix has acquired). In the mail today came some offerings from the “Sixth Doctor” era — some dude named Colin Baker is the Doctor, some chick with a there-and-gone-again accent is the girlfriend (oh, okay, “companion” — geez), and it’s The Eighties, which I gather from the plots, the surprising lack of acting excellence for something British, and the general tinfoil/kandy-kolouredness of the sets was a particularly bad time for Britain, whatever said decade may have been for the US. Still, Baker wasn’t that bad of a Doctor — don’t know why they fired him for that weird fat guy, wosname. (More about Seventh Dr. some time in the future, if I can bring myself to write about it.) He probably wanted a real salary, oops. Anyway, I’m watching this, and then there appears on the screen my ex-boyfriend. The hell??? I swear, the actor playing this character (a real doctor on the episode’s planet, apparently) looked exactly like my ex, right down to the hair. Don was famous for defying fashion norms and doing things like showing up at parties in the late 90s dressed in a polyester suit just like Carl Kolchak’s. It’s too bad I never talk to the jerk or else I’d show up at his house with the dvd and force him to watch it. He liked crappy tv too. His loss!
20 Responses to “And now for the completely other side of British culture”
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May 14th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
Your ex sounds like the kind of guy that would now be balding, with a comb-over. π
May 14th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
Mwahahaha! Last time I saw him, tho’, it was with a greasy hippy ponytail. Ew.
May 14th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
Andrea,
when Kae gets off her arse and sends me back my “special” Dr Who tape, I’ll have it copied and send you a copy.
It’s a very rare episode starring Rowan Atkinson as The Doctor.
Hurry up Kae!!! I want the tape back!!!
May 14th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Carl Kolchak? Ahhhh! Now you’re talkin’ art!
May 14th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
A few years ago the ABC (Australia) ran the whole Dr Who series from the very first series with the old, white haired guy. Awesome! Because it was in black and white, the sets didn’t come across quite as cheesy. I liked the old guy because he didn’t have any plot killing techno-gimics.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Hi Brett, how’ve you been?
I remember that! That was so cool! We watched all of them. My local Library also used to have videos of Dr Who from across the series that we could borrow.
Have you seen the episode of Dr Who I mentioned earlier? The one with Rowan Atkinson?
May 15th, 2008 at 6:31 am
The Rowan Atkinson Dr Who was a parody, and so not part of the official series run. I’d like to see it, though, but I don’t currently have a videotape player. (I’m thinking of hunting one up, though — believe it or not, not everything has been released to dvd yet, including a whole bunch of Dr Who episodes that I’d really like to see. Never mind the ones that are permanently gone because the BBC threw out the master tapes. Stupid socialists.)
May 15th, 2008 at 7:21 am
Oh bugger! I was hoping you didn’t know that!!! I thought you’d be wracking your brains wondering why you’d never heard of it!!
Kae’s going to have the tape copied onto DVD after which I’ll make some extra copies. Then I’m going to share them around. I was going to send you a DVD copy if you’d like one. Won’t be for a few weeks until Kae’s on holidays.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:12 am
“weird fat guy…” I’m guessing you mean Sylvester McCoy, the guy who single handedly got me to quit watching Dr. Who.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:58 am
Yeah that’s him. I don’t think he was that bad so much as the writers had goten all retarded or something.
May 15th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Andrea, is there a way I can contact you by way of email? I need your wisdom on WordPress stylesheet changes…
May 15th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
NBC did the same thing with the first couple of years of Carson’s Tonight Show.And AIUI, there are a bunch of episodes of Red Skelton’s show (CBS’ first color show) that exist only as black and white kinoscopes.
May 15th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
I still say we need to migrate to a forum type thing.
A forum with lots of different topic areas to post links to interrrrrestink stuffs we run across. A forum with a place for social chat simply for the sake of social chat. A forum with a place for news chat simply for the sake of yelling at the computer..errmm…I mean chat for news views and opinions.
Etc etc. Forums are much more flexible and open ended that a blog, and every blogger in our community could cross feed, or discuss, or do whatever social types do when socializing, and then migrate the finished product to their own blogs.
This is a real community… or as close to one as can exist in the distributed world of electro gizmology. We need a real community hall. With a big dance floor and lots of meeting rooms.
We could call it Blairistania or somesuch.
May 15th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Hi All
#12
Old Grouch, I loved Red Skelton when I was a kid. I also loved Jackie Gleeson – he was funny without being smutty or rude.
#13
Grimmy Blairvista? Blairvision? Blairvent? Blairview?
May 15th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
kae:
Those names would imply Blair ownership or somesuch imo.
But, Blaristania says to me “this here’s the folk what met at Blairs and made a place fer themselves in a migration event” sort of thing.
May 15th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
Oh, I don’t like forum format, the ones that the TV stations have are too annoying to read, clicking in and out of comments.
May 15th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
I’ve been a forum crawler for much longer than I’ve been a blog trawler.
Most forum systems are very easy to navigate and use. The forums are broken down into topic areas and each thread starts with a lead post on a subject, often with a link to source, and then comments flow just like they did on the old Blair blog.
The nice thing about forum rather than blog format is that th forum is, in function, like a plethora of blogs all on one page.
May 15th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
For those who might be unfamiliar with the forum thing…
Here’s an example in usual layout and function. This one happens to be the forum for a game that’s going live in a few days, so the comments tend to be from kids and kid like folk preparing to play the game…
http://forums.ageofconan.com/index.php
But it does serve as an example of how a forum can be set up with different specialty areas to focus comments, and how comments tend to flow.
May 15th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
Sharon: twistedspinster-at-gmail.com (turn the -at- into @).
Grimmy: I don’t really like the forum setup. For one thing, it’s all backwards. I know that blog posts are also latest first, but the comments are oldest first, making them easier to scroll through. That being said, a future forum is a possibility.
May 16th, 2008 at 9:02 am
Actually, you can set the forum comments to display oldest post first. Only a few forums I’ve read have the “newest post first” setup and I found that annoying.