Colin Harvey – author

If you click on this link, you’ll see some thoughts on Saturday night’s Doctor Who (Vincent and the Doctor) which contain spoilers. This added comment will avoid them.

What prompted the post was my own reaction to the episode, and a number of negative comments that I’ve seen lamenting the direction that the series is taking.  And in making the story small, even intimate (no threat to the world this week, just one Provencal village in danger), in making the drooling, near-psychopathic alien somehow almost poignant, and –heresy of heresies– in showing how resiliant the time-line is to change, Curtis certainly seemed to be deliberately flouting a number of conventions. But isn’t it about time some of the series’ conventions were flouted?

We’ve had five years of ever more grandiose set pieces. It’s about time Doctor Who lost some of the pomposity it accreted under RTD’s stewardship.

Various bits of Odds and Sods-ery for your erm, pleasure today.

First of all, I’m pleased to see that I’m not the only person who was pissed off at the BBC for allowing a cartoon Graham Norton to clamber across the screen at the supposed climax of Doctor Who last night. What were they thinking of when they decided to do that? Were they thinking at all? Seriously, Beeb, WTF?

It’s enough that we have to cope with a new Doctor (jury still out, but generally OK) a new assistant (thumbs up) and the most intrusive music and background noise since 1972 (thumbs very much down) but now this? What’s the point of making drama programmes if you throw the audience out of the drama at key moments?  If you want to complain, here’s the link.  I urge you to do so, or we’ll have no quality of programming at all.

And I’ve posted the latest review at Suite101; in line with my continuing fascination with Children’s Literature I borrowed The Wolves of Willoughby Chase from Newton Park Library. It’s a good-ish book, marred somewhat by the moron who borrowed it before me deciding that they were an editor, and that they could ‘improve’ on Aiken’s prose. So many, many passages have been pencilled through and ‘alternative text substituted in the margins or over other text.

Are you sensing a theme this morning?

Well, if so, here’s something completely different. The launch of Silversands yesterday included Gareth L Powell reading a chapter of his debut novel and free vino. What more could you want? Certainly not me desperately improv-ing a 30-second interview on AudioBoo…