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.

Factory People

It was a really quiet evening yesterday. I write a bit of my script and watched an episode of Blake's 7 on DVD. It is a really good show and usually pretty well-written, even if the production values and sepcial effects have really not aged well.

It was a really average day at work, and fairly dull (which I guess goes without saying). Right now I'm watching a TV documentary called Factory People about the group of people who used to hang around Andy Warhol and his studio, the Factory. It is pretty interesting, and gives a good insight into what life was like in a more than slightly strange group. Interestingly enough Warhol always seemed to me to be less interesting himself than the stuff that he had going on around him.

She's All That

Last night I was watching the 1999 movie She's All That, directed by Robert Iscove, on TV. The movie tells the story of a high school senior, Zach (played by Freddie Prinze Jr.), who is the most popular guy in his high school and is dating the most popular girl (Jodi Lyn O'Keefe), until she dumps him for a reality TV star. Zach makes a bet with his friends that he can turn even the most unlikely girl into the prom queen, and his friends nominate Laney Boggs (Rachael Leigh Cook), an intelligent and artistic, but unfashionable, student. Of course, there's no prizes for guessing how it ends. It's not a great movie by any means but it's fun and it has Rachael Leigh Cook, who is the best thing about it, so I have seen the movie quite a few times now. I'd forgotten that Anna Paquin (from True Blood and the X-Men movies) was in it.

I was watching an episode of Blake's 7 afterwards on DVD. In this episode the ship arrives at a remote planet where two of the crew attempt to steal a vital computer component while the rest of them have to contend with a derelict 600 year old spacehip that is filled with a deadly virus. It was a good episode although it really struck me when I was watvhing it how much Paul Darrow (who plays the cynical Avon in the show) resembled an early Beatles era George Harrison. Apparently polo necks and the moptop cut will come back in a big way in a few hundred years time.

I was writing some more of my TV show script. I am motivated with it, because I don't want to be a complete loser for my whole life and time is passing. I'm aiming to get it made for HBO.

It was another very quiet day in the office. It was probably one of the hottest days of the year so far, if not the hottest. It was amazingly hot, but I hadn't realised that when I left this morning and so I was wearing my thick winter jacket, which is like a fleece inside a waterproof anorak, because I thought it was going to be either cold or wet. I walked home and I had to carry the jacket instead of wear it, because it was just too hot for it.

TV Show

Last night I wrote some more of my script. I am planning to write it at the rate of an episode a week. At the moment I've got what I think is a good opening sequence and a title for the show. I really hope that it works out. As time has gone on I have become more and more determined to be successful.

After that I was watching an episode of Blake's 7 on DVD, which was pretty good.

It was another really quiet day at work today.

An Electric Ant

Last night was really quiet. I finished reading Human Is?: A Philip K. Dick Reader by Philip K. Dick. The final three stories I read in it were "An Electric Ant" in which a man is shocked to discover he is in fact a robot and, when he discovers that his reality is artificially generated, decides to experiment with his own perception of reality. That was followed by "A Little Something for Us Tempunauts" in which the USA's first time travellers arrive in the future a few days after they supposedly died returning to their own time. The final story was "The Pre-persons" in which children up to the age of 12 can be legally executed.

I was also watching a few epsiodes of Blake's 7 on DVD. Blake's 7 was a British science-fiction TV show which ran for 52 episodes over four seasons from 1977 to 1980. It was kind of a blend of Star Trek and Star Wars and concerned a rag-tag group of bickering revolutionaries and criminals who travel around space in a derelict alien spacecraft fighting against the totalitarian Galactic Federation. These days the show is often made fun of due to the often really bad (by modern standards) special effects and production values. However, the show was usually well-written and clever. It was also a lot grittier and bleaker than most science-fiction shows with a strong vein of dark humour.

Today I went out and got some postcards to send to a friend and I also got a CD called Dirty House Blues by Lightnin' Hopkins and a book called The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami. on my way home I stopped off in a bar and had a couple of drinks and read my book.

It's been a good weekend mostly, but it has been marred by the fact that I've been feeling really kind of depressed recently about the fact that I really am a complete loser (mainly the facts that I am kind of stupid, I'm ugly, I've never really had a girlfriend and I have never achieved anything). It does happen fairly frequently.

Oh, To Be a Blobel!

Last night I was reading a few more short stories by Philip K. Dick. The first one was called "The Days of Perky Pat" and is set in the Los Angeles of the future after Earth has been devestated by nuclear war and the few survivors (or "flukers" as they call themselves)live in protective bunkers living off packages of food and equipment dropped off by "careboys" on Mars. The survivors spend pretty much their entire time playing an elaborate game using a Barbie-type doll called Perky Pat which serves to help the time pass and indulge in an idealised vision of their old lives.
The second story was called "Oh, To Be a Blobel!" which is set eleven years after a war between Earth and an alien race known as the Blobels (which are basically like giant amoebas) and tells the story of a one-time Earth spy who during the war was surgically disguised as a Blobel and now, although he has apparently regained his human form, he keeps reverting to the Blobel form at least once a day, and whenever he is under stress.
The third story was "We Can Remember It For You, Wholesale", which told the story of Douglas Quail a small, meek clerk whose one main ambition in life is to visit Mars. He decides to visit a company called Rekal Incorporated, which specialises in implanting false memories, and buys himself a package which will make him believe he has visited Mars as a secret agent. However when the technicians implant the fake memories they are shocked when they uncover a set of previously erased memories and learn that Quail's dreams about Mars were not just dreams. This story was loosely adapted as the 1990 film Total Recall, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was originally planned to be adapted by David Cronenberg in the 1980s who wrote a script that was very closely based on the story but the producers told him: "This is wrong, you're making the Philip K. Dick version". To which Cronenberg replied: "Well, isn't that what we're supposed to be doing?" And the producers said: "Oh, no. We want to make Raiders of the Lost Ark go to Mars!" I really thought it was a pity they changed the twist ending to the story.

Today I went out and got a Father's Day card for my Dad and the book The Sigma Protocol by Robert Ludlum as a Father's Day present. For myself I got Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk and "Yipee Ki-Yay, Moviegoer!" Writings on Bruce Willis, Badass Cinema and Other Important Topics by Vern. Vern is an on-line film critic who writes for the famous Ain't It Cool News.com website and the book is a selection of reviews and essays about movies and so on. I also got season two of Blake's 7 on DVD so that should be really good.

Blake's 7

Last night was pretty quiet. I was watching a number of episodes of Blake's 7 from the DVD that I got on Wednesday. It was a really good show. It was a British science-fiction show that ran from about 1977 to 1981 and was like a kind of combination of Star Trek and Star Wars, but it was much darker and grittier than those two. Basically, it was set in the future and was about a group of disperate rebels and criminals who use this advanced alien spaceship to fight against a tyrannical federation. The show was often pretty bleak, and even the "good" characters barely tolerated each other and were usually very cynical and miserable. Especially the character Avon (played by Paul Darrow), who became the lead in the later seasons, who always gave the impression of being quite willing to kill anyone if it in any way suited his purposes. The show did suffer from spaceships that looked like they were made from a child's model kit and the fact that the scenes on alen worlds all looked like they were filmed in the same quarry, but it was very well written and it also had a very strong vein of dark humour.

Today I stayed in all day. It's freezing cold and there is snow and ice all over the place outside.