h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

But he did just say it out loud without looking.

I bow before thee, Uber-Geek! You are indeed a god among geeks...

Here's hoping RTD does some social commentating on hard-core porn next season: its popular you know!

Although if RTD is doing it it would probably be gay porn which ain't my bag baby.

I do believe that Turkey Twizzlers, MacDonalds, sugar maxed drinks, smoking and all night benders are popular. However, they are all being shown as bad for us and we should reduce or totally stop indulging in them.

Just because reality TV is popular does not mean we have to have it not-so-popular better TV and drama programmes.

<>

It looks to me that you're just dressing up a petty prejudice as the moral high ground... it's done now so get over it.

And, in real terms, how is reality TV *bad* for us?

What he said...

Getting back to the normalisation of homosexuality...
Isn't Doctor Who following in the footsteps of groundbreaking Science Fiction?
When Star Trek came out in the sixties people were up in arms about black people working side-by-side with white? So much that some southern states showed a blank screen rather than broadcast the first interracial kiss between Kirk & Uhura.
"Doctor Bender" is surely the 21st century version of "Kirk the N****r lover"
Give it a decade or 2 and we'll all be looking back at it and laughing at the idiots

"Give it a decade or 2 and we'll all be looking back at it and laughing at the idiots"
optimist!

I suggest you and Bleus Shark look in the mirror.

Ha. Ha.

Given that I don't watch reality TV that really does fall on its face...

Ok, subjective answers to the question "How is Reality TV bad for us?"

"Monkey see, monkey do..."

It irritates me that the people chosen for BB have almost no skills in conflict resolution. I may be wrong regarding this in BB6, but in BB5 the most compelling person (for me) was Dan, who did have some skills in this area, but he was very much the exception. BB could teach us how to manage ourselves in situations where we have no choice but to get on with people, simply by choosing housemates who can do that. Instead it teaches us fifty ways to have a screaming match.


"Don't you know who I am...?"

Fame or celebrity is becoming the goal of our society. This feeds upon the insecurities of the individuals who seek it, and it *feeds* their insecurities, undermining their emotional health. It is good for plastic surgeons, and good for stylists and so on. (What the *hell* is a "Celebrity Life-Style Consultant"? I saw one credited in a tv show a couple of months ago.) But vapidity is valued more than skill, beauty over integrity, and neurosis over good mental health. The celebrity-industry (which is largely fed by the print media, to be fair), creates these facile goals of non-achievement, where an individual's self-worth depends entirely on the reaction of others, and not on their own strengths, skills and abilities. Girls who want to be famous hang around in clubs, snorting coke and trying to shag footballers. If you can get half a dozen of them into bed with you at once, then you can live mortgage free on the income from newspaper stories alone. Fair enough, if you pay off your mortgage, but how many actually have to pay off their credit card bills?


"Oh, god, it's so bo-o-o-o-oring"

Ok, this is the familiar 'dumbing down of intellectual ability' argument which says that there is no cultural value Strictly Dance Fever, and we should all be watching 'Giselle'. Actually, I don't entirely buy into this argument, so I won't labour it, but I do find it interesting that if you watch a makeover programme, say, it is assumed that you cannot remember that Pete is helping Jo with her garden / her finances / her hair / her children or whatever it might be for more than 4 minutes at a stretch. Why do they repeat simple points three times? It could be because of channel-hopping, it could be because they are competing for head-space with the Internet, the radio, making the tea or doing the housework, or it could be because our attention spans are falling. In the 18th Century 'hedge preachers' like John Wesley preached to the poor and illiterate for three or four hours at a stretch, and they flocked to listen to him and debate with him.

I guess I could go on.

I won't unless asked to.

I now return you to your original programming.

Ben

Yeah... but no... but yeah... but....


Daleks rock!

They do, don't they?

Ben

Those were probably the section of the poor and illiterate who were also interested in such discourse.

Ever tried reading from a 17th century newspaper or pamphlet Ben? If historians are quoting from The Sun in a century's time then we'll still come off comparatively well.

Sorry, just read a backlog of over 70 posts, so I'm only just up to speed on what you're all talking about. But the headlines are:

Doctor Bender - This will actually be the name of the Judd Nelson character from 'The Breakfast Club' when they do a sequel twenty years down the line. Doctor Bender, having cleaned his life up, (and lost the affections of Molly Ringwald in the process, 'cos she was only after a bit of rough,) qualifies from medical school and goes and works in a city-centre hospital, dealing with life and death situations every day. One day the Molly Ringwald character is brought in, high on smack and clearly having been living on the streets. All of Doctor Bender's old feelings for her are rekindled. But can he save her? And how does he choose between his feelings for her and his job, 'cos it'd be, like unethical? And will she just take him for all she can and blow it all on junk? Nah, course not. It's a John Hughes film. More importantly, what will happen to Ally Sheedy? Hell, what *did* happen to Ally Sheedy?

We're liking the rather ambiguous nature of Captain Jack, though. Whoever it was who said that RTD was preaching to the unconverted was right. I still get a little shock of recognition when homosexuality is hinted at in something like Doctor Who. Not so long ago that kind of thing would have caused the switchboards to be jammed, but I doubt if they got more than a couple of nuts complaining, if even that.

"Can you two stop flirting?"
"But I only said hello!"
"But for you, that *is* flirting."

At that point Captain Jack had been talking to a man, and his lascivious grin afterwards made the point wonderfully. It's not too blatant, but it's cunning and very amusing. Would kids get it? Who knows? Who cares? If they do, then they know all about it already. If not, then what's the damage?

By the way,do you reckon that Captain Jack is named after the Billy Joel song of the same name? In the song, 'Captain Jack' seems to be a euphemism for masturbation. Just a thought.

As for reality TV, I think it has now got to a point where the whole genre will be subverted by the boredom of the viewers. I don't watch a lot of reality TV shows, as I try and avoid them. I do admit to having watched most of BB1, though and some of 'I'm A Celebrity.....' when John Lydon was on it. So shoot me. My point was to do with 'Celebrity Love Island', however. I have watched quite a lot of this, mainly because it involves a lot of attractive ladies wandering about in the sunshine wearing bikinis. This, as far as I'm concerned, is great. I can sit an read a book with it on in the background and look up every so often to see women wandering about not wearing much. What's not to like?

Trouble is, for much of the time, that's all there is. Literally. They don't talk much and they don't do anything. They just lie in the sun with not much on. Instead of watching paint dry, you watch sunscreen dry on the bodies of supposed celebrities. It's so mind-numbingly dull it's actually funny. The viewing public, no matter what you think of them and their viewing habits, will not watch nothing at all happening forever. Eventually the bottom of the barrel will be reached and everyone will realise that they do want to find something with a little imagination in it to watch instead. It's inevitable. There are fads in TV-making just as there is in everything else. This one will run its course and the broadsheet analysers, tabloid nipple counters and middle-brow 'has-it-come-to-this?' doom merchants will all move on to the next fad. Which might be copycat shows of Doctor Who, for all we know.

And yes, I have stopped watching CLI now, much as I've always had a soft spot for Jayne Middlemiss. Now I look through all the other channels on Sky for repeats of Have I Got News For You from 1991 and obscure foreign motor racing. Shoot me again, please.

Did anyone else see Christopher Ecclestone on Top Gear last night? Clarkson has celebs on there to try and do the fastest lap of their circuit in a Suzuki Liana. The feature is called 'Star In A Reasonably Priced Car'. CE has only been driving for 14 months, though, and can only drive an automatic, but still managed a very respectable 1 minute 52 and a bit, which beat Vinnie Jones and put him about a third of the way up the list.

'Ach, you can love me in a sexual way too, PollyandCass.'

Errrrr..... *bites tongue.*

Sorry. You can all carry on now.

"In an interview on the Our Friends in the North DVD, Chris Eccleston quotes the line "TV is where the nation talks to itself" (I forget who said it first). Here, Doctor Who is doing the social commentary thing so lacking elsewhere. Some people might find it wearisome, but seriously - Doctor Who has never been so well catered for. Watch some of the old serials and they're utterly puerile in comparison."

There was, apparently, some extremely heavy-handed satire and comentary in the later '80s serials too. I say 'apparently' because I can't remember it. If you look at the beeb's own Doctor Who site, they can't stop congratulating themselves on what a clever, smart satire on Thatcher and Capitalism (nice way to counter accusations of BBC bias, chaps) 'The Happiness Patrol' was. I just remember it as a silly story where people in pink trousers got shot for not smiling and a giant Bertie Bassett killed people. And 'Vengeance on Varos' (which I can barely remember, if at all, I recall Sil but it might have been from a later story) was apparently full of grumpy heckling about the evils of Big Business and worker's rights that much of the audience simply wouldn't have cared about. Frankly, give me cheeky non-ranty jokes about the '45 minute' claim or the intelligent sophistication of the 'Boom Town' death-penalty subplot (which didn't pretend there were any easy answers) than that sort of '80s hectoring.

I just used to like it when Tom Baker offered someone a jelly baby.

This *isn't* a spoiler.
It's a warning...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/avoid.shtml



I've already seen one of the trailers...even Andrew stopped in his tracks when he heard the music and the voice.

I do believe Doctor Who (he loved the elevating Daleks last week) has turned my son into a sci-fi fan.

That makes two in my family

So, why the f*ck do they show teaser trailers straight after the show. Why do they think they need to build up any more suspense or hype than they have done already?

Does anyone know whose decision it was to show the teaser trailers at the end of each episode because, for me, it ruins the next episode. If you are watching Dr WHo you are watching it. You are hardly going to sit through an episode and think 'Well, I am not going to watch next weeks.'

Revealing the Daleks were going to be part last weeks episode in the trailer the week before was crazy. Did it pull in more viewers? Did it remove a major bowel opening climax to the show? Yes.

We all knew the Daleks were going to appear(even when one avoids the trailers because people talk)) we were just waiting for the moment. All the little teasers within the programme with Rose looking startled and the reflections were wasted. We knew they were Daleks and hence any suspense was removed.

"Did it remove a major bowel opening climax to the show? Yes. "

You make this sound like a bad thing. No matter how much I like Dr. Who, bowel opening on the sofa is simply not done.

Does this gay agenda by RTD mean we get to see Lynda and Rose get it on in the next episode?

I can see the point about Star Trek. It is probably a good way to get people to think differently about homosexuals. Although couldn't he then have chosen a different person rather than some annoying, self-loving yank that you want to throw to the Daleks?

Throw him to me!



Another thing I like about what RTD has done - this season has lots of lovely eye-candy in it.