Colder than

[altivo]

...a well-digger's ankle? Well, actually, that's what my father used to say, but he was usually pretty decorous. My maternal grandmother would have said "It's colder than a witch's teat out there." And so it is.

Went to guild meeting in the morning, lunch and grocery shopping in the afternoon. In keeping with our usual little anomaly in gasoline prices, I found that in Marengo, gas was $2.78 and $2.77, while in all the surrounding towns it is $2.87 and up. This defies any economic logic or reason.

Replacement for the wrong disc from Netflix arrived in today's mail, as promised. Watched it tonight, it was the right one this time and no defects. So now I have finally see Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor. To tell the truth, I'm not much impressed, though I did find that the third episode, with Charles Dickens and the apparent haunting by "undead" in the funeral parlor, was particularly well-written.

Also filled half a bobbin with finely spun merino wool while watching, so it was at least somewhat productive.

It's late and so to bed.

Comments

[shep-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Although I'm not a big Doctor Who fan, I preferred Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor over David Tennant.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen Tennant yet, but my tastes are "old-school." Most Americans seem to have preferred Tom Baker, but Jon Pertwee was my favorite. After Tom Baker, it all seemed to be going downhill.

My fave as well:

[hartree.livejournal.com]

Yay! Another Jon Pertwee fan. Pertwee did a great job of conveying the air of someone who had truly lived for a massively long time.

Re: My fave as well:

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yes, and he was always dignified and polite, too. I particularly liked his old car, Bessie, and his frequent involvement with the Brigadier and UNIT.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

That was largely the influence of Mark W Davies, as I recall. I liked all the Doctors, but the stories they were given could be quite bad. "The Key To Time" seemed to drag on and "Trial of a Time Lord" likewise. The incredibly annoying Peri as a Companion didn't help.

I did like Tom Baker but that might well be as he's my "first" Doctor - I might have seen a Pertwee episode when rather young, but it was Tom Baker who I saw later and more than once. The one actor I did not care for was Peter Davison, which to be fair is because he was far too good at playing a jerk in an earlier role. I just couldn't shake the incredibly wrong image of Tristan Farnon (All Creatures Great and Small) pretending to be the Doctor.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'm quite fond of the Key to Time episodes, with the exception of Kroll (which was just stupid.) The connecting thread of the key itself is weak, but the individual stories are very high class. This is especially true of The Pirate Planet, I'd say.

We agree about Davison. He was too good as Tristan, and therefore you can't get those images out of your head. On the other paw, I kept picturing his small role in The Hitchhiker's Guide where he played the talking roast in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. That's even more distracting than the All Creatures imagery. The writing of the Davison episodes seemed pretty weak too. All that stuff with Teegan being possessed by a spirit from another realm was just hokey and incomprehensible, though we do like the very first one, Castrovalva. There's another BBC series in which Davison played a detective, similar to Lord Peter in the Dorothy Sayers mysteries. He did that role very well and was sufficiently different that I never thought of his other previous parts.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I never really noticed it was him as "the meat" so that role was never an issue.

[flamekist.livejournal.com]

The first time I remember seeing Eccleston was in Shallow Grave, then again in The Others. But it wasn't until I saw him in Dr. Who that I realized who he was. To me he always seems taller than he is, but he's only 6'-0". I've enjoyed him in Heroes back when I was watching it.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I'm not a whole lot of a media fan, so I had never seen Eccleston at all until now. We did like the old Who series, and have seen almost all the existing episodes more than once. Consequently, anything new is viewed in contrast to the originals. Eccleston's Dr is much too "punk" for my tastes.

[flamekist.livejournal.com]

Being the gentle pony that you are, you certainly wouldn't like Shallow Grave! You might like The Others, but Eccleston only has a minor part in it. It was actually the first Nicole Kidman movie I enjoyed. I followed Heroes until I missed a couple of episodes, then I had trouble getting back into it.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'm mostly too gentle for today's television and films. That's why I generally avoid them in favor of old classics, or else just don't watch anything.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

Ah..you're seeing the resurrection of "Dr Who" are you?

With regards the writing quality of the episodes (the quality of stories being the ace in the hole for the historically under budgeted British sci-fi shows) you may find an interesting mathematical formula.

It has occurred to me that the quality of the story is inversely proportional to the level of input Russell T Davis has.

He bragged the he persuaded the BBC to resurrect the series by promising “the return of an old favourite with a distinctively modern twist.”

Oh yes, it has a modern twist alright. It's certainly not the format of shows that I remember from my childhood.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

We've only seen the first three stories so far. The third, "The Unquiet Dead," in which the Dr and Rose visit Cardiff in 1869 where they meet Charles Dickens and foil an attempted invasion by some sort of aliens who were reanimating the corpses in a funeral parlor was certainly similar to the plot lines and writing of some of the old originals. The first two suffered from rather too much "modern twist" in my opinion, and the second was largely stolen from Douglas Adams' "Restaurant at the End of the Universe."

You may well be right. Davies wrote the first two, while Mark Gatiss (with whom I'm otherwise unfamiliar) write the third.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

The first two suffered from rather too much "modern twist"

Exactly the problem in my opinion. Keep watching, and you'll get what I mean.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Heh. I think I've already got it. From the fractured bits we saw of the fourth and fifth episodes on that damaged disk, I suspect that Davies' writing is just not going to be my cup of hemlock.

Give me back Douglas Adams, or even Terry Nation. ;p

[megadog.livejournal.com]

I've been known to use "Colder than a Polar-Bear's Pucker" .

Let's face it, here in .UK we've been having uncharacteristically-cold weather so I have an excuse for using those sorts of expressions.