Archive for the ‘TV / Media / Music’ Category
So I’m casting a net a little further afield:
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From: Daniel Cooper
To: dutyoffice@itv.com
Date: Aug 9, 2006 10:31 AM
Subject: General Enquiry
Dear ITV
I was wondering if you were going to accepct unsolicited applications for the role of Controller of ITV in the wake of Charles Allen’s departure.
I’m young, confident, motivated and know a lot more about television than Mr Allen, as borne out by his tenure at your company.
Any information on who to contact directly would be wonderful, thanks
Daniel Cooper
Almost forgot. Charlton Brooker returns this evening for some more appointment viewing.
Do not miss. I’ll be busting a cycling-based-gut to get back in time, so you’ve got no excuse.
“This is the story of War on Earth”
Well since everyone & his brother in law will be opening their mouths and waxing idiotic for this now, don’t expect to see too much of me around for the bit. I don’t want to know what happens, I want to see it fresh, as I watch them on Saturday evening. (And for Doomsday, Saturday Night… bloody work)
Either way, expect little of me.
I’ve written a post about Doctor Who s2, but it is so long and rambling, I’ve decided to shape it down into seperate posts about each bit.
A chap I know (He stopped talking to me when I said Rose was Godawful) asked people for Finale predictions. Here’s mine:
Spoilers
The Doctor, steeled by the fact he’s become a blistering SHOUTING bloke with a God complex and all the more uninteresting as a consequence, will be attacked by a group of Cybermen from the other dimension, through a hole opened up by the souls of all the Cyberised humans on Alternate Earth. Dereck Acorah’s cameo will be as nauseating as he his all the other time. The Cybermen will capture Torchwood’s weapon (from TCI) and turn it on Earth itself, for the shits’n'giggles, and Rose will die in the attack on Torchwood Tower, much to the Doctor’s character-spinning upset. He’ll stop being such a twat, and Series 3 can carry on, hopefully better.
[Is anyone else pissed off at how much the Doctor bandies about the word "Soul" in season two?. It's in almost every bloody episode, meaning something else.]
I have a feeling that “Fear Her” will lead directly into AOG, mostly having two contempoary stories side by side means that I’m begging for the sort of Frontier in Space/Planet of the Daleks style merging, that since the Cybermen will be back, perhaps naturally the “Other Dimension” Cybermen (Unless we are to take it that the Doctor’s been knocking about all this time on present-day Earth and didn’t spot a second John Lumic) will bring Mickey back with them.
My reasoning for this is simple -RTD said that he dumped Jack and left Rose solo with the Doctor is that he needed a character who couldn’t deal with his regeneration. Which is fine, but since the Audience will also need a character who is familiar to the audience, it would seem that Mickey and Jackie would still remain the emotional anchor of the show, so Mickey needs to be back. Also, I’m pissed off that RTD promised us Jack Harkness in Series 3 of Doctor Who, but since 3 started lensing a week ago now, and Torchwood’s been pushed back so long, it seems that no longer will we have Jack around, and so the most inauspicious departure of a companion since… well…
Tegan? Christ.
If nothing else, I’m saying that Torchwood should be cancelled if it gives us another 13 hours of proper Doctor Who with Captain Jack. To think, I wanted to cut his nuts off in “The Empty Child” for being a greasy shit.
Well. That’s something.
Using the power of statistics, I can now tell you that we’re in a dead heat between The law Clinic and Statutory. Who decides? You decide.
The Law Clinic: 50%
Statutory: 50%
Irishman: 0%.
In September, Myself, Matthew, Paul & Eddie are going to be kicking off our attempt at making a Channel 101/102 pilot.
If you’ve not seen them, then the concept is thus - You make a 5 minute “Episode” of a TV show, and if you are on the top 5 most popular at the screening (At Cinespace in LA and AFA in New York), then you are demanded, nay required to return a month later with a sequel. Like a TV channel, your show either gets “Renewed” or “Cancelled”.
Both coasts have different mentalities, and I’d be remiss if I tried to pigeonhole them here. Basically, 101 is in LA, has lots of celebrities and it’s shows either die in month 1 or 2, or they go on for-bloody-ever (There are more than a few 6 Month+ shows, most of them now famous - like “The One where the guys got jobs on SNL”, “The one about Smooth Music” and “The one about the guy who farts lasers” etc. New York has a closer, down to earth and more cynical attitude, and they place production value high on their list. No attitude is preferential to the other, but either way.
Hopefully by September I shall have recieved the necessary information to work out how to get my Hi-8 Camera to work with my iMac and then find some way of converting them to NTSC DV, film the pilot by stealing some Drama Students and then sending it off to both coasts to try our luck at the October screening.
But, in preparation for this, I’ve been writing like a nut, and I wrote 6 pilot episodes. The first two I discounted immediatley because they still had the weakness of my middle-inability, so we’re down to three, and I want you, my loving audience to choose.
The Three pilots are:
Statutory
A personal favorite of mine, mostly because it is sick and disturbing in so many ways, this is the story of a Professor who solves crimes with his girlfriend. Did I mention she’s 12? Obviously she’s going to be played by an Adult in the show itself, but. You know. It’s very much a dark show.
The Law Clinic
The story of what happens when a Law clinic starts to lose clients.
Irish-Man
A superhero story with an emerald isle twist.
to Vote: please send an email to brooschlee [at] gmail [dot] com telling me your choice.
You have the unpreceedented oppourtunity to decide. Please help our team out!
Dan
All pilots are the property of Dan. No being naughty, please.
Sadly I’m forced to disagree with Charlton Brooker’s Screen Burn this week, mostly because the object of his hate for Big Brother is Grace, the gormless sloane ranger who spends a fortnight acting like a conniving weasel and then displays a great deal of upset when the public, i.e. those who have been observing her every move, suddenly disapprove of her.
No, the subject of my ire is, and perhaps always be Nicki. Why? Because if I wanted to watch a 4 year old with a mouth the size of a hot-tub wax idiotic, moan, bitch and wail, I’d go to a primary school and punch someone. Sadly, this constitutes appointment viewing for a significant portion of the nation, but immaterially.
Nicki is really less of a human being and more of a cypher as to why being proud of the country we live in is in inexorable decline. The second that girl/woman/mouth with genital attatchment breeds is the day I move to somewhere nicer, like Nazi Germany.
Allow me to explain. When Nicki took on/was forced to become the PA to Big Brother, her job was simple. Sit at a fucking desk and type. Sadly, instead of behaving like a sane person would, in a job, she displayed the customary employees selfish distaste for work. Of any kind. She bitched about and confessed that she would sit at her desk for hours, just talking on her phone, she’d sit and eat at her desk, and generally gave the nation the impression that when she does a job, she’d better be treated like some sort of demi-god. Or worse.
Is it too much to hope that this sort of call-centre idioltary is limited to just her, or do you think that because people like her know that if they get fired for doing almost no work at all, she can just fool the psychometric testing into thinking that she doesn’t have a personality for every other call centre in the UK?
See - this is why we have outsourcing, because people like Nicki resent having a job yet demand to be rewarded handsomley for it. Stupid wide-mouthed shrill cunt.
So, I’m currently spinning four pilots for Channel 102 (Yeah and the other one). The problem, is that I’ve got one of those artificial problems like Derek Zoolander’s left-turning. It’s turning into a killer.
I can’t write middles.
I’ve been perfecting the art of the sixty second beginning, and I’ve finally learnt the wonderful art of redrafting. In my first run of “The Law Clinic” Episode 4, I had a three page dissertation of dialogue as to how the lead character had gotten to where he was. But then It was both a) clunkly written and b) dull as old people fucking.
The other problem was that I was still in the bad head-space of thinking that all of this had to be conveyed through the dialogue forgetting, like most people who look like Kevin Smith - that I have visuals to play around with. Once I got over that hurdle, the speech was cut to one line. Something I’m immeasurably proud of.
The problem is, is that I’ve got a beautiful opening and a fine ending, but absolutely no middle to speak of. It’s a terrible thing, mostly because I know it beset a lot of my other writing (Anyone who has read Nerds knows that it’s funny beginning which lasts for 60 pages and then a funny ending that lasts for 30) - but thankfully I could hide that, because it was meant to be all “meta” and “intertextual”. I’m having trouble of finding the meat of any story I care to tell. I know what I’d like to happen, but have a real difficulty expressing the jouney from A to B. Which kills me, It really does.
Anyone else spend all Saturday expectantly waiting for Matt Jones… doing… Doctor Who… on TV!
and then got upset when there were no
1) Hoary old women
2) Hoary old gay women
3) Inadequate gay Goth boys with makeup
4) Lesbian Couples?
and then assumed that her-with-the-curly-hair and her-who-wound-up-floating-on-the-roof were in a subtextual relationship to vill the void?
I should really stop here before I come off sounding like a mentalist bigot. I’m not - Matthew wrote “Bad Therapy” - the first NA I read / bought when I rediscovered Who as literature, and then when I said that it was not only beautifully written, but engaging (Apart from that Peri shit at the end) on RADW, he sent me some lovley emails thanking me for my kind words. Similar thing happened when I rushed out and bought the (then just out) “Beyond the Sun”. He’s a really nice bloke who happens to always include at least two of the four things listed above in his work.
But naemind. Bloody good ep, and bereft of a lot of the pacing problems that held back “Cybermen”. And a lot of the shitty dialogue that held back “Cybermen”. And a lot of the clunky acting tha….
[EDIT - Anyone else notice that the base is in the shape of a sprawled stick figure man lying down? I thought it was about time someone twatted Simon Templar]
Those of you who heeded my advice and went to watch Channel 102 all those days ago, please be advised that two of their best shows ever are self-cancelling this month, and most sadly, it’s my two favorites; “Cakey, The Cake from Outer Space” and “Puppet Rapist”. The latter was steaming toward a conclusion quite rapidly, which is fair enough, but Cakey’s being taken from us, at such a very, very young age, and with so much potential. It’s tragic.
You can find both shows on the front page of channel102.net
