Blake's Seventh Seal

Last night I was watching an episode of How TV Ruined Your Life, hosted by writer, comedian and TV critic Charlie Brooker. This episode was about technology and how TV had influenced people's views on it. It had a lot of clips from old TV shows, particularly some weird ones from the fifties which basically said that by the 1990s everyone would be living on the Moon with their own personal robot servant. It also had a few clips from a 1970s British show called Blakes 7, which Brooker described as being so downbeat it was as if the "lenses were crafted from frozen widow's tears". I've seen a lot of Blakes 7 and it was a good show and it was pretty much usual adventures in outer space with mosters, aliens, and so on. Part of what was interesting about the show was the unremitting bleakness of it all. The main characters pretty much spent all their time arguing and fighting with other and being alternately insulted and patronised by a super-computer that looked like a glass box full of old Christmas tree lights. It was a little like if Ingmar Bergman had directed Star Wars and it's still kind of notorious for ending the series with all the main characters being killed. The show continued with clips of David Hasselhoff flirting with his car in Knight Rider and clips form a show about text messaging, which seemed to be all the fun of watching a lot of people texting, i.e. not any fun at all.

I also started writing a new thing last night It's basically set on another planet and the idea is that it's going to be a really big thing from when people first arrive and start settling down there to the establishment of it's own kind of civilisation.

It was another quiet day at work. However one good thing was that I did get a lot of praise for the way I'd been working. The boss said that my work has been "excellent", which was really nice to hear.