Ghostrider

Watching Ghostrider on Channel 5 tonight. Normally I enjoy a good bit of pulp fiction / comic book adaptation / so bad it's good style film entertainment, but this one's particularly bad. It has the look and feel of a low budget early '80's superhero flick. Surprised to discover that they've started filming a sequel this month!

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Hour

Samwise has a subscription to Dr Who Magazine. This weeks arrived early, so we had a sneak preview of some of the main scenes from tonight's episode.

I must admit that we didn't think it looked all that good, and got the impression that we could be disappointed tonight. I'm pleased to say that we weren't. Matt Smith seems to be giving the character the feel of a slightly manic public schoolboy - which works OK.

Think he could have had a better choice of attire. His choice of assistant however is fine by me!

Steve Moffat is great at finding something simple to freak kids imaginations with - cracks in the wall this time. I'd better get the boys bedroom re-plastered.

Looks like we'll be buying 2 new sonic screwdrivers soon. The old ones we have are on their last legs - one didn't really survive the washing machine too well. Plus that large tardis interior diorama is going to have to change.

Looking forward to WWII British Daleks, if the series preview clips are anything to go by.

January Sales - Primeval

Nipped into our local Tesco this morning, with Samwise, just to pick up a couple of pint's of milk before visiting his Grandma.

We discovered that they're selling off the Primeval TV series action figures that came out last year, but at the reduced price of 2 quid, as opposed to a tenner, which they originally retailed for.

http://www.hotukdeals.com/item/479579/primeval-action-figures-reduced-fro

Since the boys love the TV series, Samwise spent some of his Christmas money on 7 boxes of figures. They're made up as they now have a complete anomaly detector computer rig, which would normally cost a lot of pocket money, as it takes 3 sets of figures to collect all the parts.

And Now, The Gallery...

First of all Oliver Postgate* takes the music boat to the Iron Chicken and dies just before Christmas, and now Tony Hart packs up his paint box.

There's a lot of obituaries out there saying how he inspired a generation of children. Far from inspiring me to artistic achievements, he made me realise that I would never, ever be as good as that, so why bother trying :)

* Something I never knew before. I spotted a link on Oliver Postgate's wikipedia page that looked like it might be out of place, but discovered that in fact it wasn't.
Oliver Postgate had a hand in creating Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines!!

Torchwood Series 2, Episode 1.

I'd kind of given up on Torchwood towards the end of the last series, however the first episode of the new series was a hurricane of fresh air.

Great performance by James Marsters.

"That's a Poodle". "Nice!"

Good News and Bad News

Bad News:
Today should have been the day that we had a wall knocked through from the kids playroom to the garden and a set of French Windows fitted, plus a new front door.

I took a day off work for this. The people doing the job were due to arrive in the morning and take a day to do the job (plus a bit of warranty resealing on the windows that we had fitted a few years ago).

No show by 10:30, so I rang the installation supervisor - no reply. Customer care line 1 - no reply. Customer care line 2 - an answerphone message - left a message. The salesman who did the deal - no reply, left a voicemail message. Finally the showroom number. I'm smelling a rat now. A calmly spoken chap took my details and said that he would get somebody to call me back.

Eventually the salesman called back. The company has gone into liquidation yesterday!

Oh Joy!

There may be a solution - the salesman says that he can to get another company to do the job, at no extra cost for us. We're going to find out more when we see him on Saturday. Hopefully we can do this although, it could be another month before the job gets done.

Good News:
New BIG TELLY arrived today - 32 inch LCD.

Too early and too expensive to get a High Definition DVD Player at this stage, due to the format wars going on between Blue Ray and HD DVD. So I've found the next best thing - a standard DVD Player that can upscale the output up to 1080P (and it only cost 50 quid).

Still getting used to it - compared to the old telly, the image is sharp enough to shave with.

Sarah-Jane

A discussion with a couple of work colleagues yesterday, regarding childrens television programs, led on to us discussing the various presenters on the CBeebies channel.

The conversation between three middle-aged men with children inevitably swung around to talking about Sarah-Jane Honeywell.

I must admit that I didn't actually know her surname until yesterday, but one of my colleagues seems to know more about her than seems healthy for a married man :) He pointed me to her website.

IMHO she's obviously a product of stage-school, and has a cute, but sometimes odd look, somewhere between a pixie and a goblin.

Whilst I was Googling some info for this blog post I discovered a much better summary about her by The Splund than I can probably write.

Boston Legal

Boston Legal - best comedy on the box at the moment.