So, zazzle.com nixed my first attempt at creating a Doctor Who-themed running shirt, on the grounds that it violated copyright. It's a fair cop, though I thought they might let me get away with it as a one-off. (I really liked the tag line I'd come up with for the back: "Team TARDIS: Running throughout Time and Space since 1963.") I wonder if the ( Read more... )

Just listened to a rather lovely Radio 4 documentary, The Doctor And Douglas about Douglas Adams's time as script editor on Doctor Who. It's a really fun little program, and you get to hear Steven Moffat gush about "City of Death", and Lalla Ward talking about how Douglas introduced her to Richard Dawkins ( Read more... )

Stumbled across this rather fascinating Radio 4 documentary about an incident that occurred in Glasgow in 1954: hundreds of children aged 4 to 14 swarmed one of Glasgow's cemeteries, armed with stakes and knives, hunting a vampire that they claimed had eaten two local boys. (No local boys were in fact missing.) American horror comics were blamed, ( Read more... )

BBC Radio 7 has been pulling lots of interesting stuff out of the archives this week (enough that I've been recording some of it, because I don't think I'll get a chance to listen to all of it before it falls out of iPlayer availability.) Some highlights:

• There's still a couple of days left to listen to this 2 part radio adaptation of The Hound of ( Read more... )

House-hunting continues. Today's oddity: a kitchen painted black. (Cue the Rolling Stones.) We could fill it with black appliances and have a goth kitchen.

Nearly 3 months back, I posted about submitting a storyline for Chain Gang, BBC7's collaborative storytelling project. The final episode aired today, and came to a remarkably satisfying ( Read more... )

Just a note, that BBC production of Richard III that I mentioned yesterday turned out to be quite good. (Especially once you get over the initial reaction of "Oh my god, it's Bilbo Baggins playing Richard of Gloucester!") Though you might want to consult Wikipedia or another source to refresh your mind on the details of the Wars of the Roses before ( Read more... )

Chain Gang is a collaborative storytelling project that BBC Radio 7 does from time to time. The basic idea: get a writer (award-winning Robert Shearman in the case of the currently ongoing series of Chain Gang) to write a few minutes of a story for radio. Broadcast it, and invite listeners to submit their storylines for what happens in the next few ( Read more... )

So, I was driving home last night listening to my local NPR station, KQED, when they cut to a pledge break. Alas, perhaps, for KQED, I've also been listening to the audiobook of Chris Anderson's Free, which produced an interesting mental dialogue between me and the pledge commercial.

( Normal people talk to their radios, right? )

I just stumbled across Rigor Mortis, a BBC radio comedy set in a pathology lab. It features Peter Davison as an endearingly geeky histopathologist. If the idea of a comedy series dealing with corpses doesn't sound inherently icky, I'd recommend checking it out.

I'm feeling much better today. Sleeping for 18 hours works wonders.

I just discovered that if you mistype and try to go to a non-existent URL on the BBC website, their "404 not found page" has a picture of the Test Card clown on it. (Viewers of the British Life on Mars series will know what I'm talking about. Others, if you're really curious, see ( Read more... )