Yes kids, I’m back! Did you miss me?
I’m recently returned into the bastion of home (ie a dirt-encrusted hellhole out in the middle of nowhere) after returning from a couple of days in Edinburgh (or as you Americans like to say, Edimburroo - learn proper English, you twonks! Or Scottish even) whereupon I won an actual proper award for my writing (okay, you don’t have to believe that, but it’s very definitely totally f%^&ing true, God’s honest truth guv). Thankfully for the lot of you my ‘deeply interesting and accomplished’ (actual genuine quote from a proper well-educated academic and everything) short story most probably will not be showing up around these parts since this blog (for the benefit of you newcomers, ie anyone) is basically a forum for me to rip the piss out of Doctor Who and the world of sci-fi in general. And no, I still haven’t got around to finishing my piece on The Next Doctor, but that will be just around the bend for anyone who’s still waiting on tenterhooks to read it (ie nobody probably).
So while I was in a fairly shoddy hotel room in Edinburgh (being a veteran of the hotel trade, I could possibly do a whole entry on things that can go wrong in budget hotels - sugar bowls instead of teacups? Soup spoons instead of desert spoons? Bloodstains on room walls??? No really. I could go on. I won’t) and in the wake of just having been applauded (a lot) for my amazing short story (which made absolutely no f%^&ing sense anyway, so somehow I managed to bamboozle the judge with my incredible visionary prose which might as well have just been scrawled out in ten minutes, on the back door of a toilet stall, in excrement, by an alcoholic psychopath - ie more like this blog) I managed to catch a significant portion of the first and third episodes of Moses Jones on ye olde telly box (I missed the second part and was too lazy to go back and watch it on the BBC iPlayer, since IT ALMOST NEVER F%^&ING EVER WORKS AT ALL, but we’ll probably come back to that thorny issue in later posts).
Being not the sort of person who tends to ever bother watching proper ‘drama’ on televison - ie anything that isn’t in some way sci-fi, fantasy or horror-esque - I decided to give this a cursory glance. And what's more, this wasn't even exclusively down to the fact that this bloke Mark E. Smith from out of the Fall had a significant role in it. And maybe he had more to do in part two, but crikey, it was very much a case of don’t blink (no Who-episode related pun intended) or you’ll miss him - I think he only had about two lines in the final episode. Owing to my sporadic paying-of-attention to said series, I unfortunately had very little idea what was going on in the general plot department, other than some reasonably mad stuff to do with immigrant workers, brothels, voodoo and Idi Amin, four subject areas which - going by the general feel of the show - might almost put Moses Jones into the realm of the fantastical.
So rather than Who Eleven (playing the unusually-named Dan Twentyman - surely it should have been Doc Elevenman? Okay maybe not) the main star of the show was the always excellent Shaun Parkes, who also starred in the filmed adaptation of Moses Jones writer Joe Penhall’s play Blue/Orange - and, of course, has already been in Nu-Who, back in the season two 2-parter Impossible Planet / Satan Pit. It’s roundabout noticing this that any Doctor Who fan inevitably starts playing the game of ‘Spot the nu-Doctor Who bit-part guest actor who’s a tiny bit more famous and well known now’ when watching virtually anything new on British TV or even in movies - the same sort of rule you can apply to watching old episodes of virtually any long-running television series from the last twenty years or so. (Good grief! There's Someone out of Something showing up in an episode of Diagnosis Murder from ages ago! And they're the flipping murderer! How unbelievably exciting!)
There’s also the emerging tendency in the new wave of major British fantasy-type shows to feature actors who have had recent prominent roles in Who - see Being Human, Merlin, Survivors and no doubt the rest, virtually all of which seem to invite a protracted amount of ‘oh look, there’s him out of Voyage Of The Damned / her out of Gridlock / him out of the Shakespeare Code (and that’s just the main cast of Being Human). Moses Jones also featured Indira Varma better known (to some) as the only slightly dead Suzy Costello in Torchwood. Despite all this diversion and despite my not actually paying not that much attention to it, the series was intriguing enough that I’d certainly tune in to another series, with or without Mark E. Smith - who this little article was originally going to be about but, going on how little I saw of him in Moses Jones, I couldn’t really have all that much to say anyway. Other than that he’s definitely an interesting character, and I’m now all the more interested/terrified to see what’s going to happen when he finally takes over from Tenners in Doctor Who.
And for a final comment on Moses Jones, it certainly makes a change to see a mainstream British TV drama where there’s an almost exclusively non-white cast, with Mr. Smith being relegated to playing the often-seen stereotype of ‘token slightly useless white sidekick’ role which in so-many rubbish movies is so often filled by the token black actor. This degree of reverse-role progressive thinking in TV is mildly amusing, and perfectly fine by me.
And when it comes to spotting actors who’ve showed up in Doctor Who, Dennis Waterman also cropped up briefly in Moses Jones. He hasn’t been in Who yet! Surely this can’t be legal. What the hell’s going on?
I’m recently returned into the bastion of home (ie a dirt-encrusted hellhole out in the middle of nowhere) after returning from a couple of days in Edinburgh (or as you Americans like to say, Edimburroo - learn proper English, you twonks! Or Scottish even) whereupon I won an actual proper award for my writing (okay, you don’t have to believe that, but it’s very definitely totally f%^&ing true, God’s honest truth guv). Thankfully for the lot of you my ‘deeply interesting and accomplished’ (actual genuine quote from a proper well-educated academic and everything) short story most probably will not be showing up around these parts since this blog (for the benefit of you newcomers, ie anyone) is basically a forum for me to rip the piss out of Doctor Who and the world of sci-fi in general. And no, I still haven’t got around to finishing my piece on The Next Doctor, but that will be just around the bend for anyone who’s still waiting on tenterhooks to read it (ie nobody probably).
SHIT
So while I was in a fairly shoddy hotel room in Edinburgh (being a veteran of the hotel trade, I could possibly do a whole entry on things that can go wrong in budget hotels - sugar bowls instead of teacups? Soup spoons instead of desert spoons? Bloodstains on room walls??? No really. I could go on. I won’t) and in the wake of just having been applauded (a lot) for my amazing short story (which made absolutely no f%^&ing sense anyway, so somehow I managed to bamboozle the judge with my incredible visionary prose which might as well have just been scrawled out in ten minutes, on the back door of a toilet stall, in excrement, by an alcoholic psychopath - ie more like this blog) I managed to catch a significant portion of the first and third episodes of Moses Jones on ye olde telly box (I missed the second part and was too lazy to go back and watch it on the BBC iPlayer, since IT ALMOST NEVER F%^&ING EVER WORKS AT ALL, but we’ll probably come back to that thorny issue in later posts).
SPOT THE WHO ACTOR (OR DON'T)
Being not the sort of person who tends to ever bother watching proper ‘drama’ on televison - ie anything that isn’t in some way sci-fi, fantasy or horror-esque - I decided to give this a cursory glance. And what's more, this wasn't even exclusively down to the fact that this bloke Mark E. Smith from out of the Fall had a significant role in it. And maybe he had more to do in part two, but crikey, it was very much a case of don’t blink (no Who-episode related pun intended) or you’ll miss him - I think he only had about two lines in the final episode. Owing to my sporadic paying-of-attention to said series, I unfortunately had very little idea what was going on in the general plot department, other than some reasonably mad stuff to do with immigrant workers, brothels, voodoo and Idi Amin, four subject areas which - going by the general feel of the show - might almost put Moses Jones into the realm of the fantastical.
TWENTYWHAT???
So rather than Who Eleven (playing the unusually-named Dan Twentyman - surely it should have been Doc Elevenman? Okay maybe not) the main star of the show was the always excellent Shaun Parkes, who also starred in the filmed adaptation of Moses Jones writer Joe Penhall’s play Blue/Orange - and, of course, has already been in Nu-Who, back in the season two 2-parter Impossible Planet / Satan Pit. It’s roundabout noticing this that any Doctor Who fan inevitably starts playing the game of ‘Spot the nu-Doctor Who bit-part guest actor who’s a tiny bit more famous and well known now’ when watching virtually anything new on British TV or even in movies - the same sort of rule you can apply to watching old episodes of virtually any long-running television series from the last twenty years or so. (Good grief! There's Someone out of Something showing up in an episode of Diagnosis Murder from ages ago! And they're the flipping murderer! How unbelievably exciting!)
I'VE BEEN IN DOCTOR WHO, GET ME INTO SOMETHING ELSE
There’s also the emerging tendency in the new wave of major British fantasy-type shows to feature actors who have had recent prominent roles in Who - see Being Human, Merlin, Survivors and no doubt the rest, virtually all of which seem to invite a protracted amount of ‘oh look, there’s him out of Voyage Of The Damned / her out of Gridlock / him out of the Shakespeare Code (and that’s just the main cast of Being Human). Moses Jones also featured Indira Varma better known (to some) as the only slightly dead Suzy Costello in Torchwood. Despite all this diversion and despite my not actually paying not that much attention to it, the series was intriguing enough that I’d certainly tune in to another series, with or without Mark E. Smith - who this little article was originally going to be about but, going on how little I saw of him in Moses Jones, I couldn’t really have all that much to say anyway. Other than that he’s definitely an interesting character, and I’m now all the more interested/terrified to see what’s going to happen when he finally takes over from Tenners in Doctor Who.
And for a final comment on Moses Jones, it certainly makes a change to see a mainstream British TV drama where there’s an almost exclusively non-white cast, with Mr. Smith being relegated to playing the often-seen stereotype of ‘token slightly useless white sidekick’ role which in so-many rubbish movies is so often filled by the token black actor. This degree of reverse-role progressive thinking in TV is mildly amusing, and perfectly fine by me.
And when it comes to spotting actors who’ve showed up in Doctor Who, Dennis Waterman also cropped up briefly in Moses Jones. He hasn’t been in Who yet! Surely this can’t be legal. What the hell’s going on?
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