On Twitter, Fish-Keeping And Not Fancying Chris Pine

I have much to say, so I thought bullet points would be a nice idea for a change. They make my comments look much more… well, professional. Like slipping an essay into a plastic binder, or using a staple instead of a paper clip. Maybe you agree. Maybe you don’t. Whatever you think, here they come…

• Buy this month’s Total Film. Go on. It’s a great issue, and it just so happens to contain a big feature about The Lord of the Rings which was written by yours truly.

• What? I’m not allowed to self-pimp on my own blog?

• I’ve started keeping tropical fish. They are surprisingly intelligent and seem to know who I am, and they also get very excited when they see me because they think I’m going to feed them, which makes me feel as though we have some kind of bond. Okay, so they’re not quite as cute as kittens, but they’ll do.

• I started watching The Mentalist. I really don’t like the lead guy (Simon Baker) but the show’s not bad.

• I also started watching Castle. I really like the lead guy (Nathan Fillion) but the show’s pretty poor.

• The Mentalist and Castle are essentially EXACTLY THE SAME SHOW WITH DIFFERENT CASTS. It’s creepy.

• I hate Twitter. It’s clunky, pig-ugly, counter-intuitive (seriously, can anybody use it without having to ask a friend what to do?) and it spams you with porn.

• I appear to be addicted to it. Twitter, that is, not the porn.

• I blame http://twitter.com/qikipedia, the Tweets from the Elves who put together all the information for the BBC show QI; they’re fascinating. And I also blame http://twitter.com/TW1TTERTRACKER, run by The Tonight Show, which re-Tweets banal messages from celebrities and pokes fun at how “exciting” they are. And I mostly blame http://twitter.com/mishacollins, who has taken Twitter to an entire new level by whipping up an alternate reality in which he’s either imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, being held for treason by Her Majesty the Queen or crawling through the desert to bring down the corrupt government of Iran. The fact that he’s posting pictures of himself and his friends living out these fantasies makes his Tweets all the more amazing.

• I went to Oxford the first time the other day and visited the Museum of Natural History. They had a kakapo! And the building was glorious and sort of steampunkish and also quite similar to London’s Natural History Museum in its architecture, which is a good thing, because London’s Natural History Museum is my favourite building in the whole world. It absolutely rocked!

Also, Oxford is beautiful:

• I seem to have been the only person in the world who liked Terminator Salvation. Oh well, it’s not like I’m a film critic who needs people to respect and trust my opinion or anything.

• Wait, hang on…

• For the record: in this month’s SFX, the contents page suggests that I “love Chris Pine”. I would like to say that I love him as Kirk. I do not love him in any other way. I know this sounds silly, but I have so many celebrity crushes that being accused of having a crush on a celebrity I don’t actually have a crush on seems insulting.  In fact, I’d like to state for the record that I don’t have a crush on anybody in the new Star Trek movie at all, okay? Not even Karl Urban. (Although I will admit to having had a crush on him in the past. So he sort of counts, I suppose.)

• I do, however, have a crush on Rafael Nadal, and now he’s pulled out of Wimbledon I am major-league sulking, because I was actually going to watch it this year. Dammit.

And I think that’s about it for the bullet points for today.

Achin’ Asylum

Normally when you come back from attending a convention of some description you jokily say to your friends, “Well, I survived the weekend!” Never has this been more true with last weekend’s Asylum convention at Birmingham’s Hilton Hotel. Not only did I survive the queues, the £4.50 coffees, the heat, the queues, the screaming fangirls, the queues and the fact that the hotel charged £15 a day for internet access in its rooms (mercy!)… I also survived the car crash I had on the way there.

I’ve never had a car crash before. I don’t drive. I hate motorways. I used to have a phobia about them, but I’m better now. (Well, I was…) But when my friend Biddy and I saw the car stop in front of us on the hard shoulder on the M42 – which was open for traffic, so the driver really shouldn’t have stopped, particularly because it appears he stopped to make a phone call, which is illegal – I thought, “Christ almighty, we’re gonna crash! After all these years it’s finally going to happen!” And then we stopped in time to avoid him.

“Phew,” I thought. “Escaped.” And then I realised the car behind us probably wasn’t going to stop in time, and the next thing I knew we’d been rear-ended, and Biddy was howling in pain, and frankly all I can say is: CAR ACCIDENTS ARE NOT FUN.

Biddy dislocated her shoulder and fractured her arm. I got a (hopefully very minor) whiplash. Nobody else was hurt, thank goodness, but Biddy’s car and the car behind us were write-offs, and the bastard idiot who caused the accident in the first place sustained nothing but a scratch on his bumper. I have no words for how much I hate that man right now.

Photos for you – here are the paramedics tending to Biddy:

And here’s the car that was behind us:

The paramedics were FANTASTIC, and oh my god, so funny. Once Biddy was on gas and air (and, later, morphine) she was funny too, so much so that apparently the ambulance crew told everybody about her so that when Biddy rather coincidentally bumped into one of the paramedics a few days later his other partner had heard all about her. The police were great, too, and also happened to be the stars of the BBC series Motorway Cops, though sadly there was no camera crew with them that day to record events.  Which I’m sad about, because did I mention that Biddy was funny on drugs?

Anyway, the upshot of the crash was that Biddy and I spent eight hours in Heartlands Hospital as she was x-rayed and treated and given copious amounts of drugs by the very friendly staff. We finally left the hospital near midnight (after sharing strawberries with an 88-year-old lady and a very chatty alcoholic in the recovery ward) and reached the Hilton at long last by taxi. (Which reminds me: when two women get into the back of your taxicab and tell you how they’ve just been involved in a smash-up on the M6 and one of them is very poorly and wearing a sling, you’d really think you wouldn’t drive at superspeeds while illegally talking on your mobile… particularly when the two women have just informed you that said crash was caused by a man talking illegally on his phone. TWAT.)

Somehow, and lord knows how (I think the drugs helped), Biddy managed to make it through the weekend in Birmingham and we both ended up enjoying Asylum, although the queuing on the first day was ridiculous. While she went to bed, I got chatting to a great group of girls who ended up making the day go a lot quicker, and frankly anybody who wonders why a grown woman would ever want to attend a convention for a TV show should check out some of the friendships that are formed at these events.

Here we are queuing (hope they don’t mind me posting this pic!):

As for the convention itself: well, Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki were great fun and their talks were hilarious; the other guests were great value for money, too, particularly Charles Malik Whitfield (aka Agent Victor Henriksen) and Gabriel Tigerman (Andy). But anybody who’s been following Misha Collins’ Twitter account won’t be surprised to hear that he pretty much stole the entire weekend simply by being completely and utterly batsarse bonkers in both of his talks – particularly on the Sunday, when he had to cover for Jensen (busy signing endless autographs) and almost brought the house down by mocking everything from Barbara Bush to, uh, turnips.

Oddly, however, the thing I’ll remember most about the weekend – car crash, queues, heat and whiplash aside – is probably the sight of Mr Ackles wiggling his butt mere feet from my face. I can’t imagine why that’s staying with me, but there you go…

I also got to interview a few Supernatural fans for the official magazine, which was great fun, particularly when it came to hunting down men (a rare breed, apparently) and anybody who loved Sam. Why are there so many Dean girls and hardly any Sam girls? Or did I just talk to the wrong people? Hmmph.

The police came to the Hilton to talk to Biddy on the Friday night (she was too out of it on drugs at the hospital to be a reliable witness the day before). While she discussed the crash with the male officer, I tried to explain to the female officer what was going on at the hotel and why there were so many fangirls loitering outside wearing Supernatural t-shirts and squealing about the fact they’d just met “J2”. Intrigued by the idea of several hot TV stars inside the hotel, the officer saw three girls walking by with posters in their bags featuring photographs of said hot guys.

“Can I see in your bags?” she asked, and the girls froze – probably thinking she was looking for drugs – before pulling out the pictures and gleefully pointing out Jensen and Jared.

“Forget them,” said the officer, pointing straight at Misha Collins. “Who’s HE?”

I really liked her. I think I should mention that.

Alas, we couldn’t think of a premise to get her into the hotel to interview the stars – after all, they didn’t witness any crimes – so she just made a vow to watch the show. Wow, the lengths I go to to drum up new viewers…

Here’s Biddy and the coppers (all the Day-Glo stickering on their car made it blurry):

I would post pics of the actors on stage but my camera sucked ass, and frankly all you have to do is go looking on LiveJournal and there are millions of the buggers. Instead, have a picture that’s close to Misha’s heart:

And that’s what I did at the weekend, in a nutshell.

Wheely Good Fun

I’ve spent the past week sub-editing on Procycling Magazine, which is somewhat ironic when you consider the fact that I haven’t ridden a bike since I was eight years old and didn’t even know what Lance Armstrong looked like until seven days ago. Now, however, I know what a peloton is, which team Armstrong rides for and, most importantly of all, that looking at pictures of fit guys in tight Lycra all day is something I rather enjoy.

Ah, life is good.

On Thursday I’m heading off to Birmingham for Asylum, so I’ll be spending the weekend surrounded by a few thousand Supernatural fans and having heated discussions on topics such as “Will Lucifer destroy the Earth?”, “How many miles can a ‘67 Impala travel on one tank of gas?” and “Holy crap, why are there no male Supernatural fans in this hotel?”

If you’re going to the convention, please say hello if you see me – I may even interview you for a feature. (No, really. I’ll take a picture and everything. It’s not a wind-up.) If you’re not going to the convention, have a nice weekend. Why not go cycling if the weather’s nice? You could even form a peloton!

Twitter…

Quick note: I succumbed to pressure and joined Twitter. Find me here: twitter.com/kakapojayne.  I really don’t like Twitter – it’s ugly, it’s clunky, it keeps saying “Too Many Tweets!” and breaking, but what the hell. If Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman and the frankly bloody hilarious Misha Collins are all there, I might as well join the party.

Be sure to friend Empire and Total Film so you can watch them bicker, too. Fun for all the family!

Terminator Salvation

I love that rattly-clangy metallic bashing noise that makes up the music of Terminator. I saw Terminator Salvation last night and every time it popped up – which wasn’t often, mind you, only in moments of great impact – all the hairs on my neck stood on end. That “ba-da, da BA-DA!” sound makes me want to whoop and holler; frankly it’s a miracle I didn’t actually jump up and yell “Yee-haw!” halfway through the movie.

(However, at one point I did say “Dude!” rather more loudly than I intended to after Sam Worthington’s character kicked some ass. Almost as bad…)

Anyway, the verdict: I loved it, although Salvation has its problems, not least with Christian Bale. I can’t believe I’m saying this but he’s actually the least interesting thing about the film; he’s outclassed by Worthington (to the nth degree; can’t wait to see him in Avatar and Clash of the Titans, too), Moon Bloodgood (who’s excellent, and I’m happy to see her doing so well after sullying her career with the dreadful Pathfinder – the same goes for her Pathfinder co-star Karl Urban and his resurgence in Star Trek) and Anton Yelchin as Kyle Reese, who somehow manages not to look wimpy and Chekov-like and instead gets a bit of a Michael Biehn vibe on. (Except, oddly, he looks more like The Sarah Connor Chronicles’ Thomas Dekker at times, which is a pleasing coincidence seeing as he’s effectively playing his dad.)

So John Connor’s a bit growly and dull – picture Connor spending the entire film as the sweary Bale caught on tape during filming, only with less profanity – but it doesn’t matter, because the FX are what makes Salvation so much fun. McG can really handle action: from one superb opening scene involving a helicopter crash to the tense final battle, this is brilliantly directed. And the sound design may even rival Star Trek’s – those creaking, groaning Terminators are truly the stuff of nightmares, as long as you view them in a cinema which is happy to crank up the volume and make your seat rumble.

It’s not the most cheerful of films, true, but then again, it’s set post-apocalypse, so if you go into it expecting witty fun and frolics you’re in the wrong place. And it does end rather suddenly, leaving you aching to watch the sequel. But there are so many nods to the original Terminator movies (famous quotes, the tattered picture of Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor looking wistful) that it more than rewards you for sitting through the gloom.

And hey, there’s always that music. Altogether now: “Ba-da, da BA-DA! Da-da, da BA-DA!”

Hey now, little mouse…

I’m addicted to The Ridiculant website, an internet round-up of all the cool/silly/scary stuff currently going down a storm on this big giant thing we call the interweb. They’re sarcastic, they’re funny and they have great taste, unlike so many of us (sigh).

Their latest post is this curious remix song – courtesy of an artist named Matt Brown – of the TV show Look Around You. For anyone who’s never heard of it, Look Around You was a spoof science programme parodying the dreadfully beige and dull educational shows that used to air for kids in the ’70s. It ran from 2002-2005, starred Peter Serafinowicz and Robert Popper and featured lots of very bad hair.

I didn’t watch it, but I know people who loved it. They tell me Look Around You was funny. This remix, however, is genius.

Look around it.

Fade To White…

[No spoilers here, peeps!]

This is the most stressful fortnight of my year.

Not because I’ve been sub-editing on two different magazines. Not because I have to write a 3,000 word, research-heavy feature for Total Film by Monday morning (I should be doing that now, actually… oops). Not because I have no food in the house and no time to go shopping. Not because I need to spring-clean my flat, or do my ironing, or get a haircut, or pay some bills or transcribe three different interviews or even re-pot a houseful of plants (some of whom are starting to suffer, bless their petals).

No, this is the most stressful fortnight of my year because it’s finale time. In the last few days I’ve had to lose everything from Chuck to Medium to House to Dollhouse (which I even started enjoying towards the end, much to my amazement).

Today it was the turn of Lost, which packed everything up for the summer with a two-hour thriller that reinforced the fact that this is one of the bravest shows on TV – as though you hadn’t already figured that out from the time-travel storyline they’ve been working this year. As bored as I am by Jack and Kate and Sayid, I love Hurley and Locke and Ben and am a firm admirer of Richard Alpert’s guy-liner (even though I think I read somewere that Nestor Carbonell insists he doesn’t wear any). I love the big giant foot statue, the way nobody ever burns themselves on those flaming torches they’re always carrying through the jungle (seriously, would they even work without some kind of lighter fluid?) and the swoosh-noise that pops up whenever there’s a flashback or flash-forward.

Lost hasn’t lost it, and I’m very grateful for the fact. But I’m annoyed I have to wait months to find out what happened after everything went white in the finale…

…which is exactly how Supernatural ended, too, so white-outs seem to be all the rage this year. Although I certainly didn’t scream the freakin’ house down when Lost faded to white, and I did for Supernatural. Jesus, and I thought last year’s cliffhanger was bad!

It’s going to be a long summer. Oh well, at least I’ll have time to re-pot those plants now.

Popular With Google, Apparently

The cool thing about WordPress is that it lets you know how people have stumbled onto your blog via internet searches and suchlike.

Because of this, I know that yesterday 30 people Googled “Wolverine” and ended up here.

Eleven people searched for “George Clooney” and found me. Similarly, two people Googled “George Clooney bum” and arrived here, too.

Other recent searches have included “Castiel”, “Bruce Greenwood”, “Misha Collins” and “How to be Wolverine?”

I really don’t know what to think about the fact that – with the exception of my own name – pretty much everybody who ends up here after an internet search has done it after looking for the name of a good-looking guy. Or his bum.

Maybe I should talk about something else for a change?

(And during the entire duration of this blog precisely 69 people have searched for “facehugger” and found me. Interesting…)

Talking Over The Asylum

I spent most of yesterday sitting at a table in a bar in central London and discussing Supernatural with a (thankfully) lovely bunch of ladies from the SFX forum, who I’ll be seeing again in a couple of weeks at the Asylum convention in Birmingham.

We didn’t know each other beforehand and there was a faint ‘blind date’ aspect to our meeting, up until somebody propped a picture of Jensen Ackles against a wine bottle so that new arrivals would spot it and know who we were. (And the waiter, too, who informed us that his ex-girlfriend loved the show, but neglected to mention whether he liked it himself.) Much wine was consumed (I’m tee-total, so I got hyper on coffee instead), many theories were aired (Ruby – good/bad?), spoilers were avoided and much glee was expressed at the prospect of getting together again for Asylum.

And, just in case a group of Supernatural fangirls taking over a corner of the building wasn’t curious enough, during the course of the day we were slowly surrounded by a parade of fellow punters who included a Geri Halliwell lookalike, an Amy Winehouse lookalike, three Mr Ts from The A-Team and an entire contigent of men dressed in classic Star Trek uniforms (some of them, may I say, had the bums to wear a Trek miniskirt, while some of them had more boobs under their tight Lycra tops than even Shatner could manage).

I have no idea what was going on in Leicester Square yesterday – a Britain’s Got Talent audition, perhaps? – but when six tipsy women loudly discussing whether Lucifer is going to escape from Hell and run riot across the Earth while the angels chase him down ISN’T the weirdest thing going on in a room, you know reality is getting a little warped…

Drinks, anyone?

Two posts in one day! …Mainly because I forgot to mention something in my last one.

So I’m heading off to Asylum at the end of this month – no, not that kind of asylum; I mean the big Supernatural convention taking place in Birmingham. It’s been a while since I’ve been to a con and I’m very much looking forward to it, and not just because of (a) the subject matter or (b) the guests, but also because (c) I’ll be hanging out with some very good friends for a few days.

Speaking of which, apparently there’s some kind of pre-convention meet-up being arranged for this weekend by some people from the SFX forum: 12pm, All Bar One, Leicester Square, London. I’ll be there – why not come too?

(Although if anybody spoils me for the show’s finale next week, I won’t be held responsible for my actions…)

Vampires, Stop-Motion Fish and Japanese Kitty Kats

Okay, for those of you who asked: my James Marsters interview (and a very long one, at that – we chatted for an hour, which was very generous of him!) will be appearing in the SFX Vampire Special, out in all good stores in early June. It’s looking like a good Special and, as we all know, VAMPIRES ARE COOL excluding that bloody sparkly one with the wimpy girlfriend so you know you want to read it!

It’s been a good week for interviews, actually, because I also got to chinwag with Neil Gaiman yesterday about Coraline (out this weekend – you’re seeing it, aren’t you? Aren’t you?) and also discussed the movie with the director Henry Selick, which was rather lovely because I adore his work (his fish creations for The Life Aquatic, let alone everything else he’s done in his career, just blow me away). Also? The PR people fed me while I waited to speak to them, and there is no bad in that. Particularly when kiwi fruit is involved.

Because I haven’t posted a video in a while, have this:

But please don’t try it yourself, okay?

And also – have you met Maru yet? He’s a little obsessed, bless him. Show him a bag or a little box and he does this:

Show him a big box and he does this:

We should envy Maru. He is made happy by the simplest things. He is a zen feline.

Coincidences

The funny thing about being a freelance journalist/sub-editor is that you never quite know where your next job will come from.

You’ve got your regular gigs, such as the six days a month I work on DVD & Blu-ray Review magazine, which I’ve been lucky enough to have for over two years now. And there are other regular gigs, such as my SFX column or the advertorials I write for Total Film, or the semi-regular pieces I scribble for Supernatural Magazine.

And then there are the jobs that come out of the blue. These can happen when someone you’ve never heard of emails you and says, “Hey, would you like to write something for us?” and you can’t figure out how they know you until you discover they’ve heard of you through a friend of a friend. Or, more often than not, a person you last spoke to two years ago recommends you for a job and you end up being commissioned and owing them a very large drink. There’s a lot of backscratching in this industry, and I try to scratch back as much as I can to even the balance.

Or there’s just coincidence. A few weekends ago I went to Crystal Palace for a meal with my friend Paul. We hopped on a bus back to his place and he pointed out of the window and said, “Hey, look at that guy’s socks!” I looked, and there was a chap walking down the street wearing some rather bright red socks that would’ve stopped traffic a mile off.

“Hey, that’s my friend James,” I said, because it was. Small world!

I sent him a text message saying “Nice socks!” and didn’t think anything else of it until three days later when he emailed me to apologise for not texting me back. A few emails after that, he said, “Hey, are you free in May?”

And thus I got two weeks of work on his magazine simply because my friend Paul spotted James’s socks and thought they were worthy of comment.

Freelancing can be like that sometimes. Now I owe both James and Paul a large drink apiece.

That’s not the end of the coincidences – last weekend I interviewed James Marsters and decided it would be a good idea to rewatch the very last episode of Angel because I hadn’t seen it for years and couldn’t remember what had happened to his character, Spike. I watched it, blew my nose (it’s sad), wandered into the kitchen and turned on my iPod, which was set to ’shuffle’.

The episode was called “Not Fade Away”. The first song that popped up on my iPod was The Rolling Stones’ “Not Fade Away”.

I did a little dance of awe around the kitchen.

I love coincidences, whether they bring me work or not. They’re still cool.

Of Hedges And Hedgehogs

So what can I say about the new Star Trek movie?  Well, I’m seeing again, for starters. That should tell you a few things. And it was funny, really funny, and at times I missed great chunks of dialogue because I was giggling so much. The cast were great – my love of Bruce Greenwood continues unapaced as his Christopher Pike was rather wonderful – and the only thing letting the film down, I think, if I want to be really picky, was the score… mainly because I wasn’t humming it by the end of the film. Should’ve been catchy, yes? No.

All other comments I’m saving for my next SFX column, in which I wax lyrical about the word  “Bones”. Weird, I know. Incidentally, the SFXers among you might have noticed that my column has been moved to the front of the magazine, which means that now not only do I get more exposure but I can also talks about things that aren’t TV – hurrah! My word count’s shrunk a little, though, but I don’t mind because it means I have no room to ramble. And, as anyone who reads this blog knows, I can ramble on rather well…

What have I been up to recently? My friends Pet Shop Anny and Matt paid me a visit last week and we spent (a rather rainy) day at Hever Castle, childhood home of Anne Boleyn:

Now there’s a nice place to grow up! I’d actually never heard of the castle in my life and didn’t recognise a thing as we were exploring, which just goes to show that Britain is full of wonderful, historical surprises and you should never take anything for granted.

However, another surprise was my discovery that I’m rather phobic of mazes – I walked two feet into Hever’s ancient yew maze and walked right back out again feeling rather ill. Last year I spent a while in the maze at Hampton Court and remember becoming a little panicky towards the end, so I can only assume my subconscious has taken that feeling and nourished it in the time in between.  Why thank you, brain! Much appreciated!

I blame Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire and this:

So now I have three hideous phobias: spiders, zombies and mazes. If ever I’m lost in a maze with zombie spiders chasing me I’m as good as dead. Fingers crossed it’ll never happen, eh?

I was also lucky enough to see Wolverine last week, though I can’t talk about it because I signed all sorts of scary forms saying I’m not allowed to discuss the film (and I can’t remember when the embargo runs out, either, so I may just stay tight-lipped forever). As you may recall, I was hoping to go to the press junket and sit in the same room as Hugh Jackman but due to events beyond my control it didn’t happen… bugger. However, I did get to interview Wolverine’s director in the room next to Jackman, which tickled me even if I never got a sniff of the guy. So near, and yet so far!

Gavin Hood, may I add, is a DUDE. We’d actually met on the set of Stargate SG-1 in 2004, back in the days when he was acting, and we had a casual ten-minute chat by a catering table as I waited to speak to Richard Dean Anderson and he waited to film a scene. The fact I still remember this chat four years on just goes to show how lovely he was back then, and he still is – he even recreated his Stargate character’s Russian accent for me! (For those interested, he played Colonel Vaselov in ‘Lockdown’, which means that the guy who directed Wolverine once shot Jack O’Neill. I love how freaky that is!)

Can I also add that when the interview was over, Hood gave me a massive hug? And that I’ve been a journalist for nine years and an interviewee has only ever hugged me once before?

Like I said, he’s a DUDE.

(For the record, the other hugger was Terry Gilliam, which was one of my favourite interviews ever because I’d been a fan of Gilliam since I my childhood self figured out that I should stop being scared of his Monty Python animations and start being amused by them. Seriously, to this day his giant hedgehog, Spiny Norman, freaks me out:

…although I do secretly wish he’d had a face-off with the giant kitten from The Goodies:

My money would have been on the ’hog.)

And would you look at that – I’ve rambled on! Must dash!

A-mazeing

I will be posting in the next couple of days with my thoughts on the new Star Trek movie, how I discovered I have a phobia of mazes and how I came within ten feet of Hugh Jackman and never saw him (DAMMIT!). Until then, have a video of a slow loris being tickled:

He’s no Wolverine though. Sigh.

Easter’s no fun without the eggs. Just so you know.

Happy Easter, everybody! Although Easter really doesn’t seem to be much of a holiday these days; just an endless trudge along foggy motorways for your average Brit, followed by the disappointment of a rainy seaside, which is then followed by another trudge along another foggy motorway a few days later on the journey home.

(Still, even that sounds more fun than being locked inside your house catching up on endless housework while fretting over all those features you’re supposed to have written by Tuesday morning when all your editors are back in the office…)

But Easter did bring us one lovely thing this year: Doctor Who – Planet of the Dead, which I enjoyed very much indeed, oh yes; particularly Lee Evans (just the right balance of slapstick and mad boffin tomfoolery). It also brought home the fact that I will really miss David Tennant as Number Ten: he’s so brilliant in the role, from the tips of his tatty Converse All-Stars to his delightfully scribbly hair. When his Doctor dies over Christmas I fear I shall blub like a very blubby thing indeed. Not the least for the scribbly hair, which will hopefully be replaced by Matt Smith’s deliciously quirky hair instead. We shall see…

I’ve been working hard this weekend in preparation for a very busy week: all in all, I have one day in the office, a screening of Wolverine to attend (not exactly a hardship, that), friends arriving and many adventures to be had with them, a trip to the Royal Albert Hall to see the London Philharmonic Orchestra perform all the music from The Fellowship of the Ring live, a screening of Star Trek to attend (not exactly a hardship there, either) and there’s also a small possibility I’ll be sitting in the same room as Hugh Jackman for a little while as he talks about Wolverine. Which will be rather fabulous, should it happen, particularly if the film is as great as we all hope it is (I can’t discuss it here, however, as I have to sign an embargo on my review).

I do have a sneaky suspicion that this week will be fun. If it’s not, there’s something fundamentally wrong with the universe.

I’ll tell you what isn’t fun, though: Dollhouse. I’ve now seen the first eight episodes and I’ve only enjoyed one and a half of them. Please, please get better, Dollhouse, or I might not even make it to the end of the season… although it’s a moot point because chances are this season will be its last anyway. Oh dear.

Oh, and something else that isn’t fun? Being on a diet over Easter. No chocolate eggs for me. I can’t even look at one. Still, I’m losing weight and eating so healthily my body keeps whispering, “It’s about time, woman!” in my ear every night when I fall asleep. Hurrah!

But yes, a Cadbury’s Creme Egg would go down very nicely right now. Sigh.

Praise Be!

As anybody who reads this blog – or my columns in SFX – no doubt already knows, I’m a huge fan of Supernatural. (And if you didn’t know, it’s probably because I try very hard not to enthuse too much because I don’t want to become a Winchester bore, although frankly I’m not sure my self-control is that impressive.) Not only do I love the show, I’m also lucky enough to write the odd piece for the official Supernatural Magazine, which is pretty much about as dreamy as a dream job could ever get, particularly because I do it on a freelance basis and thus can remain spoiler-free in the process.

This week’s episode of Supernatural, which I won’t spoil for anybody reading this who’s watching them on ITV2 and isn’t up to date with the US broadcasts, was like nothing I think I’ve ever seen before. I’ve watched it three times now and I am still stunned that the writers managed to pull it off – ‘audacious’ doesn’t really cut it. Without being too spoilery, we’re talking about an episode which effectively broke the fourth wall and mentioned Supernatural fandom – seriously, there was a scene in which Sam and Dean discussed FANFIC. And somehow, it worked. The writing team got away with it. It was silly, and then it got terribly serious, and by the end it all made absolute, perfect sense. What an amazing episode. And this, hot on the heels of ‘On The Head Of A Pin’ a few weeks ago, which was so exciting I tried to talk about it afterwards to a friend and actually ran out of words. Pigs? They flew.

Damn, season four has been astonishing.

But I’m not really here to big up Supernatural, because… well, I don’t really need to. The reason for this post is because I wanted to acknowledge the fact that Supernatural has been kicking ass. In the UK, it’s ITV2’s highest-rated show – last week’s episode, ‘Heaven And Hell’, got 678,000 viewers, which might not sound like a lot, but it’s on against Lost on Sky One and ITV2 is a pretty small channel. It’s a fantastic achievement!

In America this week, however, Supernatural managed to do this (according to a press release from The CW):

THE CW’S “SUPERNATURAL” BEATS THE DEVIL,

POSTING ITS BEST ADULTS 18-34 RATINGS SINCE OCT 2006

Facing E.R. Finale, SUPERNATURAL Posts Its Best Adults 18-34 Ratings in 2 ½ Years; Matches Its Best Men 18-34 Ratings EVER on The CW

The CW’s Matches its Best Thursday of The Season in Adults 18-34

Ignoring all the techno-speak (why are American ratings and shares so damn complicated, anyway?), essentially what this is saying is this:

SUPERNATURAL HELD ITS OWN AGAINST THE VERY FINAL EPISODE OF ER.

…Not to mention the special 200th episode of CSI. I am so, so proud of my favourite television show right now. Go Team Winchester!

(And I might also mention that Issue 8 of Supernatural Magazine is in shops right now, and features the very amusing interview I did with this guy:

That’s Misha Collins as Castiel, if you don’t know, and yes, he’s dressed like John Constantine on purpose. Did I mention how much I love this show?)

And this concludes this month’s gratuitous Supernatural fangirling from your host. Thank you for listening. Drive carefully, now.

Hamster in a wok. All you need to know.

…Although you should also turn the sound up to truly appreciate the awesome soundtrack.

Andy Hallett, RIP

I met Andy a couple of times and he was absolutely adorable. What a lovely guy.

And only 33 years old, too. I don’t even have the words for how cruel that is…

Ooh la la!

My friend Gillen – aka my comics pimp – recently lent me a stack of Marvel stories which I’ve been ploughing my way through this week. I was just sitting here reading The Mighty Avengers: The Ultron Initiative by Brian Michael Bendis/Frank Cho when I spotted that they used a picture of the Eiffel Tower and labelled it as being in Brussels.

“Well,” I thought. “That’s not on.”  So I texted Gillen to tell him. I knew he was on holiday, and I knew he was in France, but guess where he was standing when he read my text?

Okay, don’t guess. Here’s the photo he sent me:

Jesus. It’s a small world, after all. And also? NOT BRUSSELS.

Life. TV. Etc.

I’ve just had a week off. This might not sound very exciting in the grand scheme of things, but it was. It was exciting because I’m a freelance journalist and that means I often find myself working every day of the week, so having seven straight days with nothing to do was just bliss. Of course, being that I’m freelance, it was also accompanied by a worrying “Oh crap!” feeling, because I wasn’t earning any money. However, this morning, within 45 minutes of each other, I was commissioned to write two huge features, and so all is well with the world again! Phew. That was a close one…

(I can’t say I did much during those seven days off, mind you. I pretty much settled on my sofa on Day One and stayed there. When I veg, I veg.)

So what’s happened since I last blogged? Well, Battlestar Galactica ended, but I’m not mentioning anything about the final episode here because I know so many people who still haven’t seen it. Spoilers are eeeevil, guys. But I will say that I loved it, and I cried, but that’s not really saying much because that show made me cry every week anyway. I am such a bloody wuss. And the same can be said of Supernatural: I cried buckets at last week’s episode. Which is odd, really, because between them they’re a sci-fi show and a horror series, and you wouldn’t expect such a large amount of salty goodness to come from either of them.

…um, I didn’t mean that to sound rude. Honest.

I’ve also discovered the joys of Being Human. Being a fanatical follower of American television, I often overlook current British shows (Doctor Who, Torchwood, Top Gear and The IT Crowd aside), so it wasn’t until this week that I sat my ass down and watched it. All I can say now is: what took me so long? So funny! So warm! So witty! I even enjoy all the Somerset accents sported by the extras – it reminds me of when I lived in Bath. Awwww. I have so much love for this show, it’s unreal… and what with this and my recent infatuation with Merlin, I think I should make a point of actually watching new British shows when they first air from now onwards. Oops.

And finally: tonight I watched The Fall. It was exquisite. Buy it, rent it, I don’t care: just watch it. Lawrence Of Arabia aside, it’s without a doubt the most beautiful movie I’ve ever seen.

Don’t believe me? Check out these stills…

I could go on, but I’ll just gush. And you really don’t want to see that. You’ve had enough of my salty goodness for one post.