Barely survived the first heatwave of summer. Not that it’s technically summer here until the end of the week. Thank you climate change!
The heatwave lead to sleep deprivation which lead to an odd obsession with Mike Batt’s musical version of The Hunting of the Snark. It’s very good but I’ve listened to it far too many times over the last week, to the point that I’m mentally throwing around casting choices and mumbling fragments of verse under my breath. “But at first sight, the crew, were not pleased by the view, which consisted of chasms and crags…”
This caused me to dig out my copy of the poem – purchased on a whim from Elizabeth’s bookstore in Subiaco in its old location out the back of the markets in around 1990 – and discovering that it’s one of only 1,995 collector copies of the Centennial Edition, published in 1981. I hopped online to check out the value and it’s worth about $100 in good nick – not that mine is in particularly good nick, and I wouldn’t consider selling it anyway. But it’s nice to know that it’s somewhat exclusive.
I’ve also become obsessed with building a 40k scale model of the epic Siegfried Light Tank. I’ve scoured the internet for photos (there ain’t many) and have managed to get a design together for every part of it except the back. I rather suspect I may have to buy one on eBay which while not massively expensive is still a bit of an investment for a tiny piece of metal. And for a model that – if history is any judge – I’ll never get finished. Although maybe if I spend money on it it’ll actually motivate me to finish it. Hmmmm. I wouldn’t bet on it.
Oh, and over the weekend when I was supposed to be getting other stuff done I did an update of my Warhammer 40,000 according to the Simpsons bit of nonsense. The current version is revision 4, but I’m already thinking I need to add the Men of Iron, and know exactly what screenshot to use. In any case here ’tis for your edification and enjoyment.
Need to add those Men of Iron…
Now that things have cooled down, maybe I’ll be able to get some sleep. I wouldn’t count on it mind you…
Mr Wong, has got it going on, He’s all that you need when you’re visiting Hong Kong, What kind are my cheques? Why, they’re American Express! I know it might be wrong, but I’m in love with Mr Wong,
Today the Scarred for Life Twitter account (@ScarredForLife2) alerted me to the existence of this 1973 TV advertisement for the UK’s Vauxhall Motor Company.
I can’t (between bouts of horrified weeping) but wonder if this… “character” shall we say, had an influence of the Owlman sightings that started three years later at Mawnan Old Church in Cornwall. Compare the following drawings by witnesses…
For the record I find the eagle owl hypothesis fairly convincing, but seeing things like… that… on TV could well have an effect when confronted by something large, scary and bird like.
I was quite startled this week to discover that Erasure’s synthpop classic about Timelord on Dæmon violence in a Chinese garden – Always – was not recorded as I assumed in about 1983, but over a decade later in 1994 when I was apparently so confounded by my first year at university that it completely passed me by.
I could make some snide comments about being behind the times, but when you consider some of the other music being released in the early to mid 90s, determinedly clinging to the styles of the 80s seems quite sensible. Also they threw a bar of 5/4 time in there which is the kind of tricksy musical tomfoolery I’ll always support.
Temperatures plummet when the giant Dæmon appears. This makes perfect sense if you’ve watched episodes 21 to 26 of Season 8 of the original Doctor Who
The Lord President of Gallifrey can’t fly? The Lord President of Gallifrey can do whatever he damn well pleases!
At 80’s end did Channel 9, A brand new drama show decree, With plots to rival Ramsey Street, Knock Summer Bay from off its seat, Atop the ratings tree, And there was Abigail there, and Rachael Beck, And Alyce Platt to act did try, And starlets eyeing record cheques, To catch the viewing public’s eye…
Back in the year 1990 Australia’s Nine Network was getting a bit miffed about rival TV stations capturing all the ratings with their popular soap operas Neighbours (Channel 10) and Home and Away (Channel 7). So they did the only logical thing and decided to launch their own soap, a saga about rival Anglo and Italian Australian families with a Romeo and Juliet style forbidden romance named Family and Friends.
(Channel 10 also had E Street, but more about that later)
The advertisements for Family and Friends mostly consisted of the cast standing in a white room gurning at the camera, but they managed to capture my attention nonetheless by the simple expedient of playing Kate Ceberano’s Brave over the top, which was – and still is – a fantastic song, as you discover for yourself below.
They did not of course incline me to watch the show, teenaged me having far more interesting things to do with my time, and it seems their effect was similarly poor on the rest of the Australian population as the series turned out to be a ratings disaster, surviving only three months before being axed – its cast dispersing to roles on its rival soaps and leaving the saga of the Rossi and Chandler families forever incomplete.
This impressively stark failure however sparked an idea in my mind, an idea that has lurked in the deepest caverns of my memory for over 30 years. An example of what the young people today would refer to as ‘trolling’ although back in the ancient days of the 90s we would have simply called ‘a prank’, and it is this idea I share with you today.
Create a brand new soap. Hire staff and writers and a cast, get production underway, and start a major advertising campaign about the hottest new drama series to hit the airwaves – possibly using a Kate Ceberano song to catch people’s attention if you think that’ll help.
Premiere the series and let it run with the standard kinds of plots you find on the streets of Erinsborough or the sands of Summer Bay. Build up an audience (hopefully) and get established as a part of the TV landscape.
Then after four or five months, with absolutely no warning, have – in the space of a single episode – World War III break out, the town get nuked and everyone die, followed by an announcement that that was the last ever episode.
Yes, it would be an incredibly expensive prank to pull, and – particularly in our modern age – difficult to keep a lid on before it happened, but can you imagine peoples’ reactions? The viewers’ heads would implode!
Anyway, the reason I mention all of this is because I recently became aware of the final episode of British TV series Byker Grove, a teen drama set in the northern English city of Newcastle, which finished up in 2006.
This man is a Geordie
(I was vaguely aware of Byker Grove prior to this thanks to occasional online references to the startling facial hair of one of the characters, but couldn’t have told you anything else about it. Oh, and it’s apparently the origin of Ant and Dec, who I understand are like a British version of Hamish and Andy, and equally as annoying, for whatever that’s worth.)
Anyway, it seems that someone at the Byker Grove production offices back in 2006 was having thoughts about TV finales similar to my own, as the final episode of the show featured the cast realising that they’re characters on a fictional TV show, an attack by a tyranosaurus rex, a Neverending Story style nothingness consuming the world, and a last ditch “save the youth club from the developers” plot which culminates in said youth club blowing up, killing everyone who hadn’t yet been eaten by the dinosaur or consumed by the void. Now THAT’s television!
I don’t think anything on Australian TV has ever come close to that level of blatant and wonderful insanity, although the final couple of seasons of the aforementioned E Street had their moments (see, I said we’d come back to it). In an attempt to prop up falling ratings the writers introduced such elements as werewolves, angels and a psychic serial killer named “Mr Bad” – which shamefully just isn’t the kind of thing you see in Neighbours these days. I mean what’s Harold up to? Is he even still in the show? Could they bring him back as a Vampire? Now that would get me watching!
And to finish off with here’s the song Wait by Gyan which I include because it came out about the same time as Kate Ceberano’s Brave and I always used to get the two confused, and it’s a great song, and I have no other idea how to end this post.
When I was a kid, my parents always went out of their way to watch an extremely boring British soap opera named Howards Way. This was not because they found it particularly compelling, but because it was filmed in the vicinity of the Hampshire village resided in by my Aunt. As such any given episode would feature glimpses of places they knew, with an outside chance of spotting someone they’d met walking past in the background.
The idea that we all eventually turn into our parents is a cliché, however the problem with clichés is that they only become clichés in the first place because they’re true. As such I now find myself in a similar position, making room every Thursday night to watch the ABC’s The Heights, solely because it’s filmed just down the road.
(Excuse me for a minute, I appear to have been bitten on the wrist by a spider or something and have to go put some cream on it. If I never post again you’ll know why.)
Anyway, yes, The Heights. Needing both some exercise and some direction in life I decided yesterday to go on a walking tour of Heights shooting locations, and take some photos along the way.
My first stop was Arcadia High School, which is actually the Mount Lawley TAFE college on Lord Street. I caught the bus down there and arrived just as it started to rain.
A short walk through the drizzle to East Perth train station and an equally short train trip bought me to Arcadia Hospital, which funnily enough is another TAFE college, this time the East Perth branch at Claisebrook. Along the way I realised my camera lens was filthy and cleaned it – hopefully making subsequent pictures a bit sharper.
The fact that it’s directly across the road from Perth’s ABC headquarters is surely a complete coincidence…
A short walk along the reconstructed Claise Brook – which doesn’t seem to have had any maintenance in the last 10 years, seriously, can we do something about that? – takes us to the steps that I think are where Shannon got bawled out for arriving late for community service. It was certainly somewhere along Claise Brook anyway.
Following the steps upwards takes us to the old Boans furniture factory, home to the apartment inhabited by Claudia and Sabine.
By now the rain was starting to get serious. I had plans to walk down to the river and take some shots of the parks and bridges which often show up in episodes, but instead decided to stop in somewhere dry and have some lunch. I had a quite decent pizza at the Royal while drying out and reading the latest Fortean Times, then considered my options.
My original plan included a trip down to Trinity College (AKA Embleton) then across to Wellington Square (location of many open air scenes), hitting up the Towers themselves just behind the Old Mint, then getting a bus across to Iris’s store near Hyde Park. But the weather didn’t look likely to improve much, so I decided discretion was the better park of valour and I’d be better served by taking a quick jaunt directly to Wellington Square, see if I could grab a long shot of the towers, then head home. This turned out to be complicated by massive roadworks all along Wittenoom street, and work being done on the square itself but I did my best.
And thus ended my grand day out.
Sooner or later I’ll get around to some closer shots of the towers, the river parklands and Iris’s store. In the meantime I did take some shots last year covering the old Perth Enterprise Centre that serves at the exterior of the Railway Hotel, and the mural on Moore street that’s often seen as an interstitial with trains rushing past it. I stepped in an actual human turd (the city really needs to do something to support the homeless population) getting these pics, so appreciate them!
And that’s your lot! Be sure to tune in to ABC at 8:00pm Thursdays to see these places on air. Or not, I’m not your dad.
You know, Threshold – the infamous episode where Tom Paris travels really fast, turns into a salamander then has salamander babies with Captain Janeway) really should have been the last episode of Star Trek: Voyager.
I don’t mean production should have been shut down, everyone fired and the sets put to the torch – although a case for that can certainly be made – I mean that they discovered a perfectly plausible way to get back to Earth in no time flat.
The souped-up, transwarp shuttlecraft that inexplicably turns people into horny amphibians moves at infinite speed – it occupies every point in the universe at once until the pilot decides where to drop out of transwarp. As such there’s nothing stopping the pilot jumping instantly from the Delta quadrant to Earth orbit. The transformation into a space salamander takes some time to start, so they can land at the nearest medical facility and explain that they’re about to grow gills and cough up their own tongue, but that their doctor has prepared a complete treatment protocol and it’s right here on this PADD. A couple of days later they’re back to normal with no harm done and they’re home.
Janeway should instantly have devoted all of Voyager’s resources into building transwarp shuttles, packing them full of crew members and sending them back to Earth. The last person to leave the ship sets the self destruct to avoid contaminating the Delta quadrant with Federation tech, and everyone arrives back home safe and well with only the slight inconvenience of turning into an amphibian for a couple of days.
But no. Gotta hit that end-of-episode reset button! How else would we have been treated to the exquisite cringiness of the Doctor and Seven-of-Nine duetting on You Are My Sunshine?
