The Eccleston Era Pros and Cons

 The pros and cons of the one and only Doctor Who season with the ninth Doctor, Christopher Eccleston.

M.R. James Stories Ranked (2024 edition)

 I do this every year, but haven't posted the results on the blog for a number of years now. The position changes marked below are in line with my rankings from last year, which I posted on Gallifrey Base, and which were the first time I'd included the five extra stories not included in Collected Ghost Stories. I do like the idea, given the publication date of The Experiment, that, no sooner had M.R. James written in that collection that he didn't see himself writing any new tales, than he was immediately writing another. 

Without any further preamble, here are the ghost stories of M.R. James, ranked from least good to best...

Oh and fragments (Mr Humphreys, Game of Bear, etc) aren't counted. It's the 30 stories in Collected plus Experiment, Malice, Vignette, Fenstanton Witch and Speaker Lenthal's Tomb, the latter of which I feel is complete enough to make a judgement. All opinions are of course solely mine, so apologies if I slag off your favourite ghost story...

Election Forecast 2024

 

I said after last time there was no way I'd be doing a seat by seat forecast this time round. Not a chance. No chance in hell. And, of course, here it is. 

I've been aided in the task by, to be blunt, "doing an Iain Dale". In 2015, Iain Dale predicted every seat, with such gems as "Glasgow South West - safe Labour hold". In fact, my 2015 seat by seat was in reaction to his, an attempt to do better than Dale. And, that, I achieved. By which I mean we both sucked, and missed the David Cameron majority. Hell, I called 28 seats for the SNP "a great night for them", and warned the Lib Dems could wind up with as few as 25 seats, a target they haven't seen since!

But now that I am older and frankly more worn out, I see the wisdom in Dale glossing over the safe seats. And with the movement of traffic in the polls, hopefully I am as wrong in my "22k Tory majority, safe hold" projections as he was in trying to predict Glasgow in 2015!

Some seats are more interesting that others. For example, there's a three way marginal seat in Ayr, whereas Walthamstow will continue to produce North Korean like majorities for Stella Creasy! 

Oh and like a complete chicken I am not doing the Northern Irish seats because I lack enough knowledge about the likelihood of each party. Just the 632 seats of England, Wales and Scotland. 

French Traitors S2 Thoughts

LES TRAITRES (SEASON 2)

France, 2023

French Season 2 thoughts and contestant ranking (All Spoilers)

I was asked for my views on some of the Traitors series I've seen, so I'll start with the first non-English series I watched in its entirety. Thanks to the Traitor Archivist! The French second series is hosted by the chap who apparently hosted the first one, Eric Antoine. He takes a bit of adjusting to, as he plays the role of host in full vaudeville OTT manner. The subtitles actually read "Hahahahahahahahahaha" for twenty seconds straight at some points. But once you get used to his melodramatic presentation, he's a lot of fun - certainly better than the NZ host at least. Location is the French countryside so very aesthetic and lots of lovely scenery. The Missions are mostly what we've seen elsewhere. Yes, that damned Church one is back again. The Bank Job mission near the end was fun because it felt so different from other games at the time. Some of the games are given a nastier twist - the buried underground game includes cockroaches in the coffins. And one of the games includes snakes.

The Moonbase

 There’s absolutely nothing I can write that will live up to the expectations for this one, so with a few deep breaths:

The Moonbase

(episode 1)

Well, here we are then.

We’ve escaped from the nefarious plots of Zaroff, and now the TARDIS is crashing!

The Doctor desperately tries to stabilise his machine as his companions hold on for dear life, and succeeds.

The TARDIS took this opportunity to land.

Polly thinks the inhospitable landscape seen on the scanner is Mars.

The Underwater Menace

 The Underwater Menace

(episode 1)

Right, let's get back to the Troughton era.

It's episode 1 of that story Official Fandom always told us was a bit naff, until Episode 2 got found and it got reappraised as "our kind of naff".

Still, four months on from Gerry Davis murdering the historical, let's see if some B-movie shlock can improve things.

The Highlanders

 Gerry and Innes kill off the historical, in one final flourish. We are also introduced to a Doctor Who icon, not that you'd know from this.

The Highlanders

(episode one)

I knew sod all about this story, incidentally. Jon Arnold speaks highly of it, Jamie joins the TARDIS crew, and a very young Hannah Gordon appears in it.

It's Scotland! Culloden Moor. And there's a fight going on. Young Frazer Hines drags a man to safety. Another man rushes a red coat and kills him. Lots of people battle.

I thought Gerry Davis was aiming to lighten the historical mood?

Top 40 Chart Singles (1994)

The slowest moving project in the world continues. I'm not saying it's glacial, but George RR Martin has been mocking its deadlines...

The recap:

A number of years ago, when the BBC4 Top of the Pops repeats reached 1984 (they are currently on 1994) I realised that, if you took the best forty songs which made the Top 40 in that year, you would get an amazing playlist. Which you did. The challenge was then to create such a list for each year of the charts. To gnash in fury when favourite songs only made it to forty-two in the charts, and were thus ineligible. To try and get forty good songs out of a year dominated by Jive Bunny.

The elephant in the room is that this is based on the art. Some of the artists may not have been the nicest of people. I'm a Gerry Rafferty man. He was a musical genius, and also a complete sod. So far, I've only disqualified one song based on the artist, a Welsh one from 2001. Which is to say that, when we eventually cover his era, Michael Jackson will be there, because you cannot look at the eighties and ignore Billie Jean. However, R Kelly will not be appearing at all, because personally I think his stuff was rubbish. Hope that helps.  

This is the 1994 edition of this project. 1994 was a brilliant year for charting music in the UK. I can say this with confidence because I turned eight years old in 1994, and watched Top of the Pops religiously for the first time, and so all of the major hits are nostalgically embedded into my brain. This made a list of forty rather difficult, however. Where does nostalgia end and greatness start? For too long, I wanted to hang on to songs I liked because they reminded me of youthful times, while finding no room for subjectively better tracks. In the end, here is the best hodgepodge of 1994, and tomorrow I could give you a different list.

Columbo Episodes Ranked (Part 4)

 Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Here we are, it's the final episode, the cream rises to the top, the A list. 

What we have left is solid TV gold and yet, someone sod still had to rank them.

Columbo Episodes Ranked (Part 3)

 Part 1

Part 2

Part 4

We are now into the top thirty-five, of all the Columbo episodes. It may surprise some to realise that we have multiple episodes of the nineties era still to go. It's not that the new series era was terrible, it's just that the gems are sometimes disguised by the duds and the weaker stories around them. However, we've got rid of all of those now, so what's left must be great TV.

In the B class, we have the stories which come recommended as enjoyable slices of TV sleuthing, but which just miss the top for small reasons. Maybe there was one loophole too many in the plot, or something about the production didn't quite work. For many, it's just that simple case that there are better stories, but as the top fifteen are among the greatest exhibits of American TV yet made, being just below that is no crime. 

Indeed, I think some of these are quite underrated by fans.

And so, while trying to avoid being the enemy of succinct for a moment, on we go:

Colombo Episodes Ranked (Part 2)

Part 1

Part 3

Part 4

 Last time we saw the least good. This time, let's move up to the C list of Columbo. Those episodes which don't work, for a variety of reasons, but have enough in them to be enjoyable watches if they are on TV. Some might be quite bad, but amusing. Some might fail on a basic plot principle. Some might just miscast badly a crucial role. 

Sorry, George Wendt, I know all of those refer to your episode but I'm not picking on you. Honest.

Some even might have gone in Part 1 if not for one thing which raises them from the bottom rank.

Without further waffle, the flawed diamonds in the rough of Columbo!