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Anniversary overload
Nov. 23rd, 2013 10:52 pmWe are weathering a perfect storm of significant anniversaries.
This is subjective, but certainly the anniversary of the death of President Kennedy was the first to impinge on my consciousness: that is, where I recall seeing the earliest signs that there would be a lot of fuss made of the anniversary. This isn't in itself surprising, though I hadn't expected the extent to which all the revelations and criticisms would be set aside, and we find ourselves back in Camelot. However...
Like most fantasy / SF fans, I've known for a long time that C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley died on the same day as Kennedy. The press found out a month or so ago, and we've had a little flurry of articles about Lewis, readings from The Screwtape Letters, news stories about his plaque in Poets' Corner ("between John Betjeman and William Blake," according to The Guardian) - occasionally accompanied by a footnote saying oh, yes, and Aldous Huxley, too...
For the last couple of weeks, all this seemed likely to be washed away by a rising tide of Doctor Who. Anything I watched on television or listened to on the radio was preceded by a trailer: for the anniversary programme itself, for the online 'prequel' (which is surely a trailer itself, so that a trailer for it is a meta-trailer), for a documentary or a chat show or the after show party (the WHAT?)...
We've watched our share of it. At least, we've watched a couple of programmes, which seems a fair share: Mark Gatiss's film-length Adventure in Time and Space told the origin story of Doctor Who (the show, that is, not the Doctor) with a particularly sympathetic portrait of William Hartnell, and a documentary in which Matthew Sweet got to wander around and talk to people, which was more fun than it sounds. But I wouldn't want to overdo it. I could have watched the moon landing, but I was so sickened by all the advance hype (how can you hype men landing on the moon? it shouldn't be possible to overstate the importance and excitement of this, but my recollection is that they managed it) that I went to bed rather than sit up and endure more of it. I've come to regret that decision.
So this evening we watched The Day of the Doctor. It was trying very hard to offer something for everyone, and didn't make a bad job of it. Of course, what's put in to please one person will be the very thing that irritates another person (I have heard quite enough about the Doctor's Tragic Past, and may have rolled my eyes a bit at this point), and the overall effect gets a bit busy, but there also some generally clever bits.
The anniversary fun isn't over yet: tomorrow is Robin Williamson's 70th birthday. Surely we can think of a way to celebrate that? This isn't entirely the most appropriate song, but it came high up in my search results, and I do love it:
This is subjective, but certainly the anniversary of the death of President Kennedy was the first to impinge on my consciousness: that is, where I recall seeing the earliest signs that there would be a lot of fuss made of the anniversary. This isn't in itself surprising, though I hadn't expected the extent to which all the revelations and criticisms would be set aside, and we find ourselves back in Camelot. However...
Like most fantasy / SF fans, I've known for a long time that C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley died on the same day as Kennedy. The press found out a month or so ago, and we've had a little flurry of articles about Lewis, readings from The Screwtape Letters, news stories about his plaque in Poets' Corner ("between John Betjeman and William Blake," according to The Guardian) - occasionally accompanied by a footnote saying oh, yes, and Aldous Huxley, too...
For the last couple of weeks, all this seemed likely to be washed away by a rising tide of Doctor Who. Anything I watched on television or listened to on the radio was preceded by a trailer: for the anniversary programme itself, for the online 'prequel' (which is surely a trailer itself, so that a trailer for it is a meta-trailer), for a documentary or a chat show or the after show party (the WHAT?)...
We've watched our share of it. At least, we've watched a couple of programmes, which seems a fair share: Mark Gatiss's film-length Adventure in Time and Space told the origin story of Doctor Who (the show, that is, not the Doctor) with a particularly sympathetic portrait of William Hartnell, and a documentary in which Matthew Sweet got to wander around and talk to people, which was more fun than it sounds. But I wouldn't want to overdo it. I could have watched the moon landing, but I was so sickened by all the advance hype (how can you hype men landing on the moon? it shouldn't be possible to overstate the importance and excitement of this, but my recollection is that they managed it) that I went to bed rather than sit up and endure more of it. I've come to regret that decision.
So this evening we watched The Day of the Doctor. It was trying very hard to offer something for everyone, and didn't make a bad job of it. Of course, what's put in to please one person will be the very thing that irritates another person (I have heard quite enough about the Doctor's Tragic Past, and may have rolled my eyes a bit at this point), and the overall effect gets a bit busy, but there also some generally clever bits.
The anniversary fun isn't over yet: tomorrow is Robin Williamson's 70th birthday. Surely we can think of a way to celebrate that? This isn't entirely the most appropriate song, but it came high up in my search results, and I do love it:
