Tag Archives: David Tennant

Morganville – SDCC trailer

02 Saturday Aug 2014

Posted by in Film, Publicity

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As you should all know by now, I am a big fan of the Morganville series of novels by Rachel Caine. So much so that I became a backer for the Kickstarter campaign that aimed to produce a Webcast show of the series. I guess that makes me a producer (I am opting for the title of Chief Executive Producer in charge of giving over a small amount of cash to help make this happen). Anyway, the trailer for this series was released at San Diego Comic Con and while I was not there to see it myself, I did get sent an exclusive link to see it because of my backer involvement… so here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwUtF-P6cqs

Of course they did not follow my casting picks. I guess David Tennant was not available to play Myrnin and Anthony Stewart Head was not able to play Oliver. However, looking at the trailer you can see some stellar choices made. In particular you may recognise Amber Benson of Buffy fame as Amelia and Robert Picardo (yes, THAT Robert Picardo of Voyager fame in a grey wig) as Oliver.

So it is all looking promising and reasonably close to the source material. About the only thing I have spotted so far that is possibly different is that if this series is following book 1 they are introducing Myrnin too soon but since he is awesome I cannot see an issue with that…

So, yes, in my opinion (as Chief Executive Producer in charge of giving over a small amount of cash to help make this happen) you should totally check this out when it airs… especially if you like Buffy, Vampires or Voyager.

D.A Lascelles is the author of Lurking Miscellany, Transitions (Mundania Press) and Gods of the Sea (Pulp Empires). He lives in Manchester UK. You can sometimes see him writing about Zombie porn on https://lurkingmusings.wordpress.com/ but he mostly blogs about books, vampires, science fiction and Terry Pratchett. He is inordinately proud of the fact that one of his Pratchett articles was referenced on the French version of the author’s Wikipedia page.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DaLascelles

Twitter: @areteus

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Doctor Who Anniversary

23 Saturday Nov 2013

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If you are not by now already aware that today, the 23rd of November, is the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who then I suspect you have not really been paying attention. It’s not even as if it is only talked about in geek circles or ‘on this internet thing that kids use these days’. It has in fact been all over the media – on the television and even in mainstream newspapers. Even Google got in on the act with one of their interactive games.50th_iconic_wallpaper_16x9

So yes, the 23rd of November, is the anniversary of the day that the first ever episode of Doctor Who, An Unearthly Child, was broadcast to a television audience that likely had no idea what to expect and which would, years later, officially become the world’s longest running science fiction TV show with 798 episodes as of the end of the last series in May 2013 (presumably the feature length anniversary special will make it 799 and the Christmas special with Matt Smith’s regeneration into Peter Capaldi number 800 which is rather neat numerically speaking). This is not only a major milestone anniversary (a Gold anniversary if it had been a marriage) but one which occurs while the show is still on the air, thereby allowing a special episode to be shown as part of the normal timeline of the series. Many previous milestones were not marked in this way because the show was off the air at the time. This includes the 40th (or Ruby anniversary) which occurred in 2003, two years before the 2005 reboot with Christopher Ecclestone as the Doctor, and the 30th (Pearl) which was in 1993, four years after the show was cancelled in 1989. There were no special episodes for those years.

In fact, to get to the nearest anniversary special before this one you really have to go right back to 1983 and ‘The Five Doctors’ which was aired to celebrate the 20th anniversary and that is a hell of a long time to wait between specials, especially ones that include more than one actor playing the role. Before that we have the tenth anniversary episode, The Three Doctors, which was broadcast as the first story of the The%20Five%20Doctors%20(1)tenth series between December 1973 and January 1974.

Obviously the expected pattern is an adventure featuring more than one Doctor. Though only one of them (The Three Doctors) actually managed to achieve all the Doctors present and all played by the original actors. By the time The Five Doctors was being filmed, William Hartnell had unfortunately died (and was replaced by Richard Hurdnall) and Tom Baker had refused to be involved in the project (he was replaced by unaired film footage and other trickery). The 50th anniversary special (The Day of the Doctor) is also not showing the complete set. But then it was never the intention for it to be ‘The 11 Doctors’ (or should it be 12 now that John Hurt is officially confirmed as ‘The War Doctor’, thanks to the recent webisode ‘Night of the Doctor’?*). I suspect that Steve Moffat decided to not even attempt to achieve what would be an almost impossible task to complete satisfactorily – replacing the three deceased actors with convincing copies alone would be difficult enough, not to mention producing convincing enough make up jobs on some of the surviving actors to put them plausibly back in approximately the right age range they were when they first played the role. The closest we are ever going to get to the ’12 Doctors’ on TV is, I am afraid, that which was quite ably achieved in ‘The Name of the Doctor’ with the quite clever use of old footage and glimpses of familiar costumes to give the impression of the old favourites coming back to haunt the current incumbent.

Still, despite this, The Day of the Doctor promises to be interesting, with a fascinating combo of Matt Smith and David Tennant and an appearance by Billy Piper as Rose Tyler.** And while TV is now never going to see much more than that in the way of multi-Doctor stories there is still scope for these to occur in other media. For example, soon after the 1996 TV movie starring Paul McGann, Terrence Dicks wrote the novel ‘The Eight Doctors’ which included appearances by all then existing versions of the Doctor. There was also the IDW comic series, The Forgotten, written by Tony Lee, which included short stories featuring all the incarnations up until David Tennant and a quite epic finale in which all ten appear in the same scene. Finally there is also scope for it in audio dramas with Big Finish using many of the previous actors to do voice work on a range of new stories.The iconic scene from Tony Lee's The Forgotten

 
The iconic scene from Tony Lee’s The Forgotten

So, while I guess my long held dream of there being something equivalent to ‘The Five Doctors’ (one episode I have fond memories of) being produced on television is never going to happen, there is still a lot of good stuff out there. I for one am looking forward to this, the first anniversary special in thirty years…

* An excellent mini episode which allowed Paul McGann’s eighth Doctor the swansong he truly deserved and made me wish we had seen more of the adventures which had led to him being in that situation on TV instead of on audio and in books.

** And I am not going to talk about the speculation about who would be involved or why certain actors were not invited to take part, that is a whole mess of pain and suffering and troll bait right there…

[Vampire Month] Still a better love story than Twilight

29 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by in Vampire Month

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‘Still a better love story than Twilight’ seems to be a common refrain on the internets at the moment. Twilight has been a book and film series that seems to have polarised geekdom, turning many against the idea of Vampire fiction while, at the same time, bringing a horde of teenage girls into it.

Many misunderstood Ridley Scott’s reimagining of Romeo and Juliet

Geeks are a weird bunch. We hate change. We like routine and things to be as they have always been. We recall the ‘good old days’ like dear old grannies recall the casual racism and horrors of the past – through spectacles so rose tinted we are practically blind. We remember how great things used to be without recalling some of the really awful things – shoddy special effects, awful dialogue, overacting. When something new comes along claiming to be ‘geek’ we hate it and the ‘johnny come lately’ fans that come with it. They aren’t real geeks, we complain. They weren’t there, man, in the trenches in the days when they cancelled Doctor Who, they call themselves Vampire fans and they don’t even know who Christopher Lee is. I mentioned Lestat to them and they looked blank. THEY HAVEN’T EVEN READ DRACULA!

Of course, in 20 years time those same teenage girls who are the target of all this ire, will be there themselves –  hating on some other new trend. Sneering at some young newcomers at a con and complaining into their brown ale that these new Vampires don’t sparkle and that this entirely detracts from the whole angsty drama of the inherent horror of the vampiric condition because it juxtaposes the darkness of their soul with the light on their skin thereby providing a visual contrast the reader can identify with. This is how it goes in the cycle of geek. By then, of course, I will be an old man laughing at both groups, knowing that I am still far more geek than either and safe in the knowledge that the previous generation of geeks is not in any position to contradict me.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that Twilight is good. There are many flaws in it and these do not include the ludicrous ‘glowing in sunlight’ nonsense which seems to be one of the main foci for attack. The heroine is far too passive, for example, which gives the whole love story angle a stalkery feel and, as the indoctorwhotwilightternet has reminded us repeatedly, undermines almost 40 years of feminism by convicing a new generation that all they need to be happy is to find an older man to look after them. This, above all others, is the main reason why the phrase ‘still a better love story than Twilight’ has been applied to a number of crazy pairings. The very fact that Fifty Shades of Grey started out life as a Twilight fan fic should tell you the inherent nature of the relationship here.

So, Twilight is certainly not flawless but I am not sure that the level of hate is quite to scale here. I think it is largely because it is such a big target – a massive fanbase who are intensely fantatical, the amplification of that fanbase through the films and a number of glaring flaws that even the dumbest geek can spot. At the moment it seems as if the entirety of geekdom is kicking into the franchise with big bovva boots because they have nothing else to do. And, yeah, I’ve done my share of that too. In geekdom the roles are reversed. It’s the big kid who gets attacked. And while I am not sure it deserves all the hate, it is equally undeserving of all the popularity.

However, it is worth considering what Twilight has actually achieved. Just as Interview with the Vampire and Buffy the Vampire Slayer before it, it has yet again put the Vampire in the forefront of publishing. Like the creatures themselves, it seems the vampire phenomenon is a hard one to kill – just as interest wanes something comes along to ressurect it. It is, I feel, a fitting concept. Plus, as Harry Potter did for fantasy, there is also the fact that more children/teenagers/adults reading is a good thing. Even if they begin by reading Twilight, many move onto to other things and the Vampire renaissance has led to such things as the Morganville Vampire books, which are in my opinion superior in many many ways. If only because they feature an insane, Welsh, medieval alchemist character by the name of Myhrrin who really should be played by David Tennant when they make the movie.*  So, maybe we should let the Twilight franchise alone for a little bit. It’s over with, the last film has been released. There is sure to be another thing we can enjoy hating along very soon.

*Yes, I have in fact written the cast list for the Morganville Vampires series in my head. It’s what I do. It also, by the way, includes Olivia Williams and Anthony Stewart Head as Amelia and Oliver. Please do not judge me in my insanity…

What might have been…

25 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by in Musings

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Not too long ago, this article was flashing about the internet.sue perkins

http://www.scifind.com/features/the-other-11-doctors/

It is an article with a single premise – what if the Doctor was female? It essentially takes each of the 11 incarnations of the Doctor and considers the most likely actor who might have played them based on who was around at the time and had approximately the same CV as the male version in our universe.

It is an interesting read and throws up a number of interesting choices. I would never, for example, have considered Hattie Jacques in the role. Her fame being largely based on her involvement with the Carry On franchise it never seemed to fit in my mind that she would be good for the role. However, the article gives a good argument for why she would have made a superlative second Doctor. Ditto Penelope Keith – I had never considered the star of To The Manor Born and The Good Life stepping into Tom Baker’s emormously large scarf but here again the article is convincing as to why she would be perfect.

It is unfair in other ways, I have to say. To tar Miriam Margoyles with the position as the sixth Doctor is unfortunate. Based on her other performances, I would have thought she would have done far better in the role regardless of script and production issues than is intimated here. Then again, I suppose that she can do loud and brash rather well so this may have been a way she would have taken the character.

I am, however, especially impressed with some of the casting. Honour Blackman as the third Doctor is a rather obvious one and Joanna Lumley was always one who was under consideration for the role should the Doctor ever have regenerated into a woman (and indeed was in Curse of the Fatal Death which also had Johnathon Pryce as one of the best Masters I have seen – watch the interviews on the DVD for true ‘method acting’) though putting her in the position of the sensitive and caring fifth Doctor rather than a more action oriented one is a stroke of genius. Sue Perkins wearing David Tennant’s ‘brainy specs’ is also absolutely spot on casting and part of me loves the idea of the love story between the Doctor and Rose still being there in that circumstance – an excellent piece of pro LGBT casting. Though I would also have liked to have seen the reversal in genders go further than that to the extent of more of the companions being male instead of remaining female.

In fact, this article has affected me so much that I have actually begun to re-imagine some of the stories with these actors in play. I rewatched the more recent Christmas special not long ago* and I could totally see Miranda Hart prancing around the big snow globe thing pretending to be Sherlock Holmes and Sue Perkins as a School Mistress** in 1913 or being grim and fatalistic with Bernard Cribbens.*** Obviously, the idea has legs and those legs are kicking.

So, the question has to be, can something be done with this concept? Yes, this is another ‘somebody make this happen’ post. Obviously, until the advent of safe and effective time travel we cannot go back in time and film new episiodes of Doctor Who only with the female counterpart, but there could be other ways. For example, I would love to see an anthology of short stories in the style of the old Doctor Who Short Trips series with a story per Doctor. I would also love some audio adventures and, maybe, in a universe where all my dreams came true, Steve Moffat might make a couple of shorts in the style of the Comic Relief/Children in Need sketches and the recent ‘Pond life’ web broadcast teasers. Were I a less lazy author, I’d get proactive and troll fan fic sites or lobby writers I know who are involved in Who in some manner to do something about it. I’d campaign Miranda Hart and Sue Perkins to agree to star in something linked to this, stand outside Steve Moffat’s house with placards, demand my MP did something about it and so on. However, I am lazy so none of this is going to happen. If any of you out there wish to do something about it, though, I’ve totally got your back. I might even submit a short story to an anthology or something. I can probably summon up enough proactivity to achieve that.

So, some questions…

What do you think about the selection of actors chosen here for a female Doctor?

Would you change any of them?

What already filmed Who story would you like to see redone with a female Doctor and do you think the story would be significantly changed by it?

Feel free to answer these in the comments….

* How many times has Richard E Grant been in Who now? Quite a few, I think. He played the Doctor in Curse of the Fatal Death, was also the Doctor in at least one online animation and now is here as a villain…

** And no, not in THAT way…

*** Another actor who seems to have been in Who multiple times.

The Next Big Thing

22 Thursday Nov 2012

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So, I got tagged in this meme thing by Melinda Dozier (you should totally go and check out her site…) the point of which is to answer questions about your work in progress.

Here are the rules:
1) Answer the questions.
2) Tag 5 other
writers, providing the links.
3) Let the writer’s know you tagged them.

What is the working title of Your Book?

Gods of the Deep is the current working title, which is a step up from ‘Un-named sequel’ which was its previous working title. It was chosen to fit in with the previous published story which was Gods of the Sea.


Where did the idea come from for the book?

The idea for Gods of the Sea came from a LRP game I used to play (now long defunct). I decided I wanted to tell the origin story of how two of the characters met so one Christmas I got out my laptop and tapped out a few thousand words and sent it to a publisher who I knew were looking for ‘pirate stories’. It got picked up and published in the Pirates and Swashbucklers anthology. No one was more surprised at this than me.

Then, earlier this year, the publisher contacted me and as a result of that discussion the concept of ‘Gods of the Deep’ was produced – an anthology of short stories set in the same world as Gods of the Sea, including both a reprint of Gods of the Sea and some form of sequel. Again, I was surprised.

 

What genre does your book fall under?
It’s mainly fantasy with some pulp elements. And Pirates, Because you’ve got to have pirates…

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie?

Many years before I’d even considered writing Gods of the Sea, one of the organisers of the LRP game told me that they believed Professor Everyn Crowe should be played by Christopher Ecclestone. Not sure I quite agree with that assessment but I am hard pressed to find an appropriate alternative. Someone like David Tennant would be good too but I am not sure if that is not just me showing my Doctor Who geekery. Of course there is also the fact that any casting choice may have to take into account Everyn’s foreign nature as he is supposed to  have a ‘Mediterranean’ look but that has never stopped Hollywood in the past before.

Captain Rachel Drake obviously has to be played by a strong, British woman. Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery (Lady Mary Crawley) is a possibility but there are a few other actors who would be excellent in that role. I think there may, however, be a general call for ‘anyone other than Keira Knightly’ which I agree with…

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I am still writing it so no idea. Am hoping to get it finished soon, though. It is my Nano project and completion of it is the target I have set myself for this month. However, Nano style writing is different to how I usually do things. The concept of splurging words onto the page in order to acheive a word count target and worrying about the editing later is alien to me. I prefer a slower method with less faff afterwards. However, slower methods do not let you reach deadlines so easily.

Gods of the Sea was written in a number of days, however. And not whole days, either. A few hours each day in between doing other things. Possibly the fastest I have ever written anything intended for publication that actually got published.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

 One of my crit partners did say that Gods of the Sea read a little like a Michael Moorcock story and I have been strongly influenced in the past by his work, specifically the Elric novels. So I suppose you could say that the closest comparison to Gods of the Deep would be a Michael Moorcock story in style if not in the features of the story. The fact that Gods of the Sea and Gods of the Deep are shorter fiction (Gods of the Sea is a short, Gods of the Deep a novella) which have a direct continuity with each other also fits the pattern of early Moorcock, where one novel was comprised of several shorter stories that directly followed on from each other.

Who or What inspired you to write this book?

The main inspiration for the story came from the LRP game, Adventures in the Arcroc, which I played many many years ago. The Arcroc was the name of a fantasy world with a technology level roughly somewhere between 1600’s and 1800’s. It’s not particularly precise in its historical comparison because there are elements from all over history thrown in there, but the history is also an inspiration as are stories of swashbucklers and pirates and adventures at sea – anything from Sinbad to Hornblower and Pirates of the Carribean.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? How about a teaser?

There are demons… and a scene I love where Everyn runs to Rachel’s rescue, thinking he is the only one who can save her from assasination, only to find when he gets there that she has quite happily rescued herself and is now being rather suave about it in an ‘injury? What injury? Oh this? Just a scratch…’ sort of way.

“But…” he stammered. “The demon…” He waved the horse statue in the air in front of his face. “I’m here to… banish it.”

“Banish it?” She smiled as she checked the length of the blade for nicks and scratches. “No need, everything is under control.”

“But, the only way you could have banished that demon was to have empowered a suitable vessel with the correct incantations and blessings and trapped its incorporeal essence therein…”

“Not the only way, no.” As the dressing on her wound was completed, she stood and tested her weight on the leg, wincing slightly as she did so.

“Well, no, you could have physically ablated its physical form using brute force but generally such creatures are immune to most forms of weapon. Many can only be harmed by a blessed weapon or something composed of an alloy with a significant quantity of silver.”

“Hmmmmm, yes….” She held the sword up, letting the light fall on its shiny surface and reflecting on her face. “Silver alloys. I wonder where someone with my wealth could get hold of something like that?”

And so there you have it…. now to spread the infection…

I am tagging:

R.A Smith

Ninfa Hayes

Erica Hayes

Marie Roberts

And… YOU, Yes, you over there, the writer who is reading this. If you want to do the next big thing challenge, feel free to consider yourself tagged by me, just make sure you link back to me when you do…