Venusberg | That's not your heart, it's a piece of helicopter casing

Saturday, May 28, 2005

Staggering out of Friday last, I noticed that Charing Cross Road Library (small, but excellent selection of Chinese-language exercise videos) was having a book sale, from which I emerged clutching one of these little beauties. If I needed proof that the time for appalling vampire fiction was now, it came in the form of my next charity shop purchase. It's like some sort of... masquerade. I am no less ecstatic to discover this Voltron of shitty, shitty vampire fiction, out there waiting for me.

So far I have managed about a hundred words of the former. Blame Quicksilver, which is an attention sponge. I should be focused on the Quicksilver Trilogy.

Elsewhere, and after the badness of last week, what better cure than Eurovision, seen over at 's gaff? Next year, I must remember to keep track of the number of references to destiny, fires, turning around, forgetting and European Union. Considering the celebratory nature of Eurovision, although what exactly is being celebrated apart from Eurovision remains cloudy, the songs tend to focus on pretty depressing subject matter, barring brave contributions from Moldova (EMF), Norway (KISS) and Lithuania (morris dancing). Having doubled this up with Doctor Who, I feel the United Kingdom's best chance next year is to have a chorus of begasmasked mutants singing "Are You My Mummy?". It can't do materially worse, after all. Ruslana, Ukraine's winning entry last year, should in the same spirit of reform be made some sort of warrior-queen of Eurovision, and be provided with a better flamethrower the better to defend her borders.

Sunday found a home at the Riverside studios, where a double bill of the mid-60s Peter Cushing films Dr. Who and the Daleks and Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150AD was showing. Tremendous fun, if your idea of tremendous fun is Bernard Cribbens in a PVC bodysuit. No, really. The Daleks, by comparison, are severely lacking in menace. In fact, as Dalek the first explains the plot to Dalek the second, the Universe's most relentless killing machines become camp country cousins.

Lessons learned: Daleks are good with impact and explosives, less good with sheer stress - an angled blow will knock them into sections. They can be grabbed and rotated quite easily, and will often forget that their weapons are far more effective against other Daleks than anything you might have to offer - do not, as the last resistance of London does, forget to bring any guns to your attack on the evil spaceship, by the way. They might help. If you get a clear shot on either Roy Castle or Bernard Cribbens, bring them down. If somebody in the audience asks you if you were invited to reprise your role in "Dr Who and the Daleks", try to be polite when explaining that you were busy playing Ursula Brangwen in Women in Love. And if you see a Thal, just kill it.

Really. The Thals are one of the very few powers in this world able to make me root for the Daleks. They have no weapons more powerful than knives, and yet have mastered the milling of plastics and the creation of complex medication. This is perfectly reasonable until you remember that they live in a hostile radioactive wasteland lousy with mutants and one over from a city full of insane cyborg killbastards. Despite having nothing in the way of weapons more impressive than a knife (one, shared between), they have all brought mirrors across the desert, with which to check their glam-rock hair. Doctor Cushing theoretically uses these mirrors to bewilder the Dalek's short-range sensors, but I bet he was just trying to keep morale up. Having said which, sending Roy Castle off to near-certain death in the Swamp of Scary surely must have been enough to create good cheer. Since the Daleks cannot leave the city and their weapons have an effective range of about ten metres, bamboozling aforementioned short-range sensors is pretty much utterly pointless.. All sensors, at any range, serve merely to inform them of how much further the enemy have to travel before the can of whoopass can be opened. It is not really explained how we go from Daleks (unable to leave patio) telling the Doctor (outside patio area) that he was their prisoner and the Doctor actually becoming their prisoner, suggesting that Skaro was in fact devastated by the deployment of Austenian performative speech acts.

Fortunately, no race that responds to "Look out, there's some sort of gigantic monster in the swamp" with "I'm just going to refill the water bottles. You fellows go on ahead" is likely to remain viable for long. It's the circle of life.

3 Comments:

Is 'Voltron' an already recongised term to refer to a part-work by multiple authors combining their relative skills to create something stronger?
If not, it should be.

By Bizunth, at 2:47 PM

And so should 'recongised'.

By Bizunth, at 2:48 PM

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By Anonymous, at 3:02 PM