Nevertheless, whatever’s happening with the production at the moment – or what might be speculated as happening with the production – I still think there are a whole host of reasons to be optimistic. And, in my position as Official Red Dwarf Cheerleader, I feel it’s my duty to remind people of them.

Because the shows are great. Really, seriously, great. You can call me biased if you want, but anyone who knows me knows I’ve been plenty critical of Red Dwarf when I don’t like it. I know that due to my current role, I’d obviously have to be positive about the new series in public no matter what – but if I didn’t like the new episodes that I’d seen filmed, I’d simply avoid talking about them except in an “official” voice. As it is, though, I love them. Obviously, I can’t say too much about them without giving away things that aren’t meant to be given away, but here are just a few of the reasons why the return of the show fills me with so much joy:

• First and foremost, they’re funny. Each of the episodes I saw (four, out of the six – although in one instance we only saw somewhere between half and two-thirds of the total running time being filmed) had at least one absolutely huge audience reaction moment, but the genuine laughs are healthily distributed throughout the entire series.
• The stories are great. Strong, memorable, well-constructed plots, throughout the entire series. One episode - which I didn’t actually see being filmed, but have heard a detailed synopsis of – has a genuinely inspired and innovative central premise, one that I don’t think anyone has ever done before. It’s the sort of thing that carries on the fine tradition of episodes like “Future Echoes” and “Thanks for the Memory” in exploring inventive, original sci-fi ideas.
• It’s fan-pleasing. A few of the episodes are really heavily rooted in established Dwarf lore, and do things that we might never have expected to actually see on screen. But man, are they satisfying.
• Then there’s the final episode. Well. To say anything detailed about it would ruin the many, many treats it has to offer – but if it doesn’t immediately leap high onto the “all-time favourite” lists of the majority of fans, then the majority of fans are mad. It’s brilliant: thrilling, clever, funny, surprising, and even a little bit moving. It contains not one, but two of the best guest actor performances the series has ever had. And it has a final line that – no kidding – nearly moved me to tears right there at the recording.
• The lead cast are all on top form. Any concerns about not slotting back into the characters after such a long time away were fairly well alleviated by Back to Earth anyway, but across this full series they feel comfortable, happy and confident in these roles. And more than anything, this is the series that will dispel the myth that Lister and Rimmer are simply too old these days for the show to work. They’re not – the show has simply adapted its tone and premise to fit them.
• The guest actors, as already hinted at, are pretty much uniformly superb, too – I can’t think of a single bad performance across the episodes I saw, but I can recall at least three or four superb ones. A handful of actors get to play roles that are quite significant to the Red Dwarf mythos – and which rely on their being able to fit in with preconceptions a fan audience might have about them – and without exception they do so with aplomb.
• It looks amazing. Obviously, we haven’t seen the special effects, model shots and so on yet – but I remain confident that, even with whatever technical problems are currently going on, ultimately it’s all going to look and feel terrific. One thing is for sure, though – the sets, whether onboard Red Dwarf itself or elsewhere, are astoundingly good. The Dwarf interior, in particular, feels like a combination and culmination of all previous incarnations, and ultimately it’s almost like the ship how it always should have looked. Maybe I’m biased towards it having spent a day walking around its corridors (and, I’ll admit, pretending I was actually onboard the ship), but I fell in love with it before that, at the moment I walked into the first audience recording. It’s beautiful.

That’s probably about all I’d better say, anyway (though if you want more from me on the new series, I wrote a bit more about the actual experience of a recording day in my official capacity) – there’s a delicate balancing act in talking about this series, because everyone with any kind of connection to it – whether official or fan – wants to avoid ruining the twists and turns it has to offer before its broadcast later this year. But my point is this: the recent chatter on Twitter about model shots and music is just about the first negative-sounding word that has come out from anywhere connected to the production, and it shouldn’t cancel out the immense positive feeling from the episode recordings – the feeling that, quite simply, Red Dwarf X is just about everything that a new series of Red Dwarf should be.

It’s going to be amazing. And Autumn can’t come soon enough.

And also, although it was a few weeks ago, I’m quite pleased with my main contribution to the Doctor Who review canon this year (we’ll ignore my sloppy, far-too-short and unfocused review of “Day of the Moon”) – I’ve been waiting a long, long time for Neil Gaiman to write an episode of the show, so there’s a good reason why my write-up of “The Doctor’s Wife” is somewhat long and rambling. But I think I hit upon a nice theme with it, and that it’s a good piece all in all, so… yeah.

Specifically, I collected a load of articles about Red Dwarf written by the Ganymede & Titan team over the last eight years, shuffled them around, edited them, formatted them, and turned them into a print-on-demand book that’s now on sale via Lulu.com. Hurrah!

There’d been talk about doing a G&T book of some kind for years, but it was after getting Jane Killick’s Stasis Leaked (a collection of old articles of hers on the making of Series I) for my Kindle that I again reasoned we could probably do something similar. The original plan was for an eBook release, with a view to possibly printing at some point – but as I investigated publishing options, it became apparent that getting a physical copy out there would actually be pretty feasible. The deadline I’d set – to have the book onsale at the Dimension Jump convention this last weekend – made it too tight to actually get any new material in (for one thing, I wanted to do a mammoth article on the history of the Dwarf novels), but it’s still a pretty solid package, with 200 pages of material that while available online will probably not have been read even by everyone who visits the site regularly. And if this one does alright, we may well do a Volume 2 – with more in the way of new stuff – in future.

G&T’s Photoshop wiz Danny Stephenson came up with an absolutely astounding wraparound cover based on my original concept, and this is one of the things that I think really helps it stand out as a darned fine artefact in its own right. Here’s what it says on the back:

Red Dwarf, the cult BBC2 and Dave sci-fi sitcom, has entertained millions of fans worldwide since its first broadcast in 1988.

Ganymede & Titan, a Red Dwarf fan website, has entertained literally several of those fans since its launch in 1999.

Now, a selection of the site’s best articles from between 2003 and 2011 have been rounded up and thrown into The Garbage Pod, the first such collection of unofficial fan writing in the show’s long and illustrious history.

Inside, you’ll find analytical critical commentary, bloody-minded arguing, meticulously researched Lists of Stuff, hard-sci-fi theorising and elaborate swearing from the site’s team of entirely unprofessional and equally unsanitary writers.

Over at Lulu, we’re selling the print copy for £4.99, and the PDF download for £1.99 (and a Kindle version might well follow when I can sort out creating/formatting it). We’re making a small profit on each copy sold, all of which is being donated to Amnesty International. And while I imagine most of the people I know who are Dwarf fans are already G&T readers so know all about it already, if there’s anyone who isn’t but would be interested in picking it up, you can do so right here.

We figured, though, that our best business would be done at DJ – and it seemed to go down pretty well. We sold around two-thirds of the copies we’d ordered in bulk and brought with us, and drummed up a decent amount of interest. We also gave copies to, among other people, visual effects king Mike Tucker, and – most excitingly – Doug Naylor himself (who insisted on paying for his copy, and asked us all to sign it, which was A BIT OF A THRILL). People who got around to reading any of it while there seemed to enjoy it, which was great.

So it may be a daft little self-published vanity project with an incredibly narrow niche market - but still. I’ve got a book out. Yay!

I’ve been watching lately a fair few episodes from what I’d call the “Late Imperial” era of The Simpsons - that is, the era in which, at its best, it was still the best thing on television; but in which it wasn’t hitting its “best” with every episode. This has largely involved watching most of season eight, but I’ve also watched odds and sods from seasons seven and nine as well. And this got me thinking in more detail about a theory I’ve had for a little while, which is this:

I believe a Simpsons episode is more likely to be good if it opens with an in-universe TV show/film/radio show than if it doesn’t.

I’ve come up with this theory based on the fact that the “show within a show” kinds of fiction (largely covering TV shows, but also including movies and radio stations) often tend to be among the funniest and most memorable moments in the series’ history (particularly when they involve Krusty, Kent Brockman or Troy McClure). And for some reason, when an episode opens with one of these scenes, it instantly feels sharper and more imaginative than one that just brings us in to a random scene somewhere in Springfield or at the Simpsons’ home. This is particularly noticeable during these later seasons (and when I say “later”, I mean “later in the good period” – we’re going by the assumption that the programme is largely not worth watching, and thus non-existent in my head, after around season eleven), when it’s the more dull and boring episodes that seem to start in this mundane way, and the better ones that give the laughs by opening with – for example – the Krusty Komedy Klassic, or an edition of Eye on Springfield. It therefore feels to me like I’m simply more likely to enjoy an episode if it’s got one of these opening scenes (which from now on I’m referring to as “TV openings”, even though they also covers other forms of media).

So, I’ve decided to test it out. And count up data in Excel. And turn it into a graph. Because that’s how I roll.

The test, then, goes like this. I’m going through four seasons – the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth. This is because I think figures would be unfairly skewed by looking either at the first five seasons (during which the show is as close to consistently perfect as anything can be, and so attempting to graph it would be useless), or any from the tenth onwards (where I simply don’t know a lot of the episodes well enough to pass judgement on them, or where I know that the majority are too weak to offer fair data). This “middle period”, however, seems to be the most variable in quality – in that there can be utterly fantastic episodes in the same season as major stinkers – and so the most interesting to test out.

For each season, I’ve listed the episodes and – from memory, without looking them up or checking whether or not they have TV openings in order to avoid subconsciously skewing the data – given each my own rating out of 5. It’s worth noting that these are my own, personal opinions – I’m basing this survey on my taste, and not on any sort of general consensus or view of objective quality. I’ve also excluded, in each season, the Treehouse of Horrors and clip shows (or, in season eight’s case, the Spin-Off Showcase), as they stand somewhat separately from “normal” judgement. Finally, I’ve gone through and marked out which episodes count as having “TV openings” (there’s got to be a better phrase for this, right?), and which ones don’t. Here are the ground rules:

- The first scene of the episode has to feature an in-universe TV show, movie or radio programme, being watched/listened to by onscreen characters
- For the most part, the first shot of the episode should be a shot of the screen in question. However, I’m also allowing episodes that have an establishing shot (e.g. Bart and Lisa switching on the TV in In Marge We Trust) so long as it’s clear that the TV show is still part of the first scene
- Circumstances where the TV show in question is talking to us the viewer (rather than characters onscreen) shouldn’t count. Since I’ve excluded clip shows, Treehouse and the Spin-Off Showcase, though, I think the only example of this is The Springfield Files.

After that, I gave an average rating for each season, and then for each season’s episodes with and without the TV openings. And then I put it all in a graph. So without any further ado… on with the data!

Season Six
Although this season has a couple of episodes I’m not keen on – Bart vs Australia is the first ep, post-season-one, that I’d only rate at 2 out of 5 – it’s still remarkably strong on the whole. The average rating is 4.26. Nine of these episodes have TV openings, and they’re all pretty spectacularly good – five get the full 5/5 rating, and four get 4. Therefore, their average is a whopping 4.56. Meanwhile, the average of the 14 “without” is a mere 4.07. So far, so good.

Season Seven
The average ratings start to drop with this season – down to 3.57 already. Things are also much closer when testing the hypothesis – of the seven episodes that have TV openings, only one is a 5er (Two Bad Neighbors: “It’s the grand nationals of sand-castle building… preview!”) , while there’s also one I’d only rate at 2 (Scenes From The Class Struggle In Springfield, which opens with the family watching Bumblebee Man – I’m being generous by counting it). This all makes for an average of just 3.57. Meanwhile, of the remaining sixteen eps, there are four stone-cold classics (including Radioactive Man and Team Homer), and despite some clunkers, there’s an overall average of 3.56. So for season seven, it seems clear that opening with a fictional TV show doesn’t really make a difference.

Season Eight
Ah, the season whose watching caused me to have this theory in the first place. Will the figures bear it out? Well, the overall season rating is down again, to 3.48. But we’ve got seven TV openers again – and this time it’s a much stronger crop. The average rating is 4.00, with an excellent set that includes Bart After Dark and Homer’s Enemy. Even the weak My Sister, My Sitter (opening with an Eye on Springfield ep) can’t bring the average down too much. Elsewhere, though, it’s disappointment – the remaining sixteen episodes only average at 3.25, despite including Homer vs. the Eighteenth Amendment and You Only Move Twice. So in season eight the contrast is much more stark – the funnier, more imaginative episodes, on the whole tend to open with footage of a spoof TV show or film. But the mundane episodes on which this season often falls back are easily identifiable by not doing so.

Season Nine
Finally, a season that does still have its moments, but also a lot of duff filler. Average rating is just 3.30 – the only five-star ep I’d count in the entire season is The Trouble With Trillions. Interestingly, though, that ep doesn’t actually fall in the TV openings – and all of a sudden, my theory is thrown out somewhat. Because the five TV-opener eps include two rated at only 2/5 – making for an average of 3.30. This compares with the rest of the season’s average of 3.39. It seems that by this point, the makers had got bored of these sharp and funny pop culture spoofs – and as a result, the episodes that feature them are no longer generally the funniest.

Here, then, is how those four series graph against one-another:

ON THE WHOLE, HOWEVER
Despite season nine being the one at which the bottom falls out of my theory, it still just about holds true over the course of the four seasons. Of 92 episodes counted, with an overall average rating of 3.65, there are 28 with “TV openings” – and they hold an average score of 3.89. Meanwhile, the episodes that don’t have them only average 3.55. Therefore, the results are clear: Simpsons episodes that open with a spoof TV show or movie are (a bit) more likely to make me laugh than ones that don’t.

There. Was it worth all that? Probably not. But graphs are fun. And my mom says I’m cool.

To mark Hallowe’en this year, I’ve decided to sit down and watch The Simpsons‘ annual “Treehouse of Horror” episodes, in order, at least up to the point where they stop being any good (probably about season 11 or 12). And I thought I might as well throw out a link to something I wrote three years ago – a list of what I think are the ten best individual segments.

Whether I still agree with that list after watching ten or eleven of the things in a row, meanwhile, remains to be seen…

For now, though, I wanted to link to a video. In 1994, BBC2 ran a theme night called “Goal TV”. This was back in the infancy of the TV “theme night” concept, and unlike some of the lazy efforts that would later characterise the genre, “Goal TV” had proper thought and care put into it. It ran for bloody hours, and had some lovely, specially-crafted continuity inbetween segments. It had longer and shorter programmes, including a brilliant Nick Hornby-narrated documentary on the game’s appeal called “The Ball is Round”, a musing on goalkeepers called “L’Etranger”, that Likely Lads episode, the 1966 film Goal!, and that sort of thing – as well as being interspersed with little two- or three-minute highlight packages of some classic World Cup games and a “Greatest Goal Ever Scored” phone vote (Maradona ’86 won). It had a very When Saturday Comes sort of feel to it – in that it was a bit intelligent, and was about a general appreciation of the game and its rich and varied culture and history, rather than descending into the laddishness, flag-waving or tribalism that often sadly blight it. Basically, it was fantastic, and I watched it – or its constituent parts – many many times on a taped copy that for a good decade or more has now sadly been lost to the ages.

I’ve tried for years to track down a copy online – either to download or even to buy on tape – but sadly very little reference to it exists. Which is why finding this rather daft but fun 20-minute programme called The Beautiful Frame, in which Clare Grogan looks at the checkered history of football’s relationship with film and TV, was such a joy. It’s a bit cheap and cheesy, but it’s still pretty enjoyable, and was the first time I’d heard of things like Jossy’s Giants. Pleasingly, the clip also includes the accompanying section of the aforementioned lovely continuity. Despite dating from two years after the Premier League’s formation, there’s a pleasant sense of pre-Sky innocence about the whole thing, and if the World Cup has got you in an all-things-football kind of mood, it’s well worth a look. Er, once this game’s finished, anyway.

The man is a miracle, frankly. It’s far too early to start talking about his place in the pantheon, especially with his distinct character still in the process of being established, but he just gets it. He is the Doctor – it’s telling that he seems to echo so many of his predecessors at different times, but it’s as if he’s studied them all, and adheres to Moffat’s notion that “there aren’t eleven Doctors – there’s one Doctor with eleven faces” resolutely, in a way that Tennant (who had echoes of one or two, particularly (of course) Davison, but generally felt specifically Tennantish) never really did. He’s got a brilliantly nuanced awkwardness to his poise that makes him feel like the old man in a young and unfamiliar skin. He’s got the comedy fingers. He’s got the mixture of genuine authority and perpetual-verge-of-getting-called-out bluff that the Doctor should carry into any environment. He’s absolutely at home in the role, and to have been so from his first moments onscreen is an astounding feat. My only hope for him is that he can keep it up.

Quite good, then.

I’ve also been pounding out a few bits and bobs in Comics Daily’s new non-review format recently – a quick think-piece on DC’s current problem of having two characters with identical names, powers and costumes running around entitled How Do You Solve A Problem Like Wally West? ended up getting picked up and discussed by a couple of forums, which means it’s probably the most-read thing I’ve written since I was last in a magazine. And we’ve been having a bit of fun this week by taking advantage of the volcano-induced lack of new US comics to do something we’ve called “Ash vs Britain” week – so I’ve reviewed the latest 2000AD (featuring two strips by Friend of Some Of You LiveJournal Lot Al Ewing), and recommended a few excellent back issues.

Oh, and hey, did I ever link to my Kick-Ass review? A bit late now, I suppose, since the film’s been out here a few weeks, but it’s good to have the link up for posterity. As hinted at a while back, I really rather liked it (and a second viewing did nothing to change this) :

Against the odds, this is going to take some beating as the most purely entertaining action film of 2010 – and the best superhero flick since The Dark Knight. Your move, Iron Man.

I should be writing on this thing a bit more, anyway. And not just linking to stuff, either, but actually using it to post halfway worthwhile original content. I’ve a few ideas kicking around, so expect something soon. Bet you can’t wait.