Cyberclogs

And there goes another Xmas, which was over as quick as usual (especially if a flash is a very quick 24 hours, which it was!). And it was quite a nice pleasant affair, although not too quite as we had a few visitors and then me and the folks went down to visit my sister, her hubby and their two noisy wee ones, not to mention we came in armed to the teeth with xmas presents for them. So apart from accidentally and nastily slicing my finger with a rather sharp butterknife it was not too bad a Xmas day. So I look forward to chilling out some more tomorrow and gorging on some pleasant junk food (until I'm utterly sick of it as usual!).

Which brings me onto my annual review of the Doctor Who Xmas special, which was thankfully far more enjoyable this year. The Next Doctor being an unusually intruiging title, the Doctor meets his potential future self (in the past if that isn't ironic enough) in London 1851, a man (David Morrissey great here) who claims to be the Doctor and even shares the same memories and knowledge as the Doctor (to an extent). As things progress though we find out what is really going on with this fella who claims to be the Doctor, oh and on the way the Cybermen drop in for some invading who are headed by the evil Mercy Hartigan (wonderful Dervla Kirwan who kept reminding me of Queenie in Blackadder II for some reason!). This isn't probably the best Xmas adventure but it certainly is a massive improvement on RTD's disaster last year (and again making a disaster Xmas episode proved to be well... nuff said). But this time Russell gets a few things right, the plot this time is a bit more intruiging, the cast are fine, especially between the two Davids who banter very nicely together. The only thing that lets it down slightly however are the Cybermen themselves, they are a bit more turgid as the main villains this time round, despite the cheesiness of the second season finale, I was hoping to see a bit more of the Cybermen confront their enemies with some lethally serious sarcasm, but again I guess they needed the Daleks to do that! The inclusion of the massive CyberKing thing at the end was also a bit ridiculous as it reminded me of the The Iron Man novel idea. But overall it was entertaining stuff and much better than last year.

So that's all for now, going to get some kip soon, and get up for some more Xmas gorging (and food).

Well I've been off work since Friday with some kind of bug, which is typical for this time of year as the bugs seem to be doing their rounds again. So I've been sitting around feeling sluggish with weak arms and legs and a fuzzy head, thankfully though its now starting to wear off a bit, although I'll probably keep myself off work tomorrow so that way I don't go back too early, as I may find myself dizzily wandering the corridors if I did, something about work can make you feel ill again ha ha. Ah well. This will be our last full week in work before we finish for Christmas anyway and I'll be off next Monday, and I'm in for one half day on the Tuesday and that's me done for the hols!

Anyways in the meantime I'll try and get back to convalescing and the water and paracetemols.

Welly well, after all that slogging and acting stuff that's been going its now left with me with plenty of spare time and to be honest I'm quite glad to get a breather from doing anymore for now. But on the other hand I kind of miss being busy with it too in a strange way, nonetheless a break is a good thing. I only wish I had a longer break from my work just now as it feels like such a chore to get up in the mornings and going into the place just now, coh! Which I have to say is one thing that doing the acting this year so much (and getting to perform) makes me not want to work a day-job!

I don't blog much about work and with good reason cos its fekkin dull, working in admin I have to say is a waste of time (or my time anyway), but I guess we all have to make ends meet somehow or other (one of our acting tutors for example in their spare time does DIY jobs for people, at least I think they do). Thankfully we are getting close to Christmas and I'll be 2 weeks off from the place, all things considered working at Clydebank College isn't all that bad, I've worked in worse places.

Anywayysss, now that we are getting closer to Christmas I've managed to get some shopping in already, praise the lord for the Internet as it really helps cutting down on waiting in shops or rooting round trying to find stuff you can't get. So apart from that over Christmas it'll be the usual fare of sitting on one's ass and eating a lot of crap (and food). I will of course quite keenly be watching the Doctor Who Christmas special and hope its better than that cack fest that was on last year, it almost certainly couldn't be worse. I also think that it would be great to see if David Morrissey or someone like him took up the Doctor mantle as I think he'd make a really good Doctor, he has right look for the part, not to mention he's a damn good actor. It will be good to see the return of the Cybermen too on this one, with new types of Cybermen, Cybershade and the CyberKing (he can do anything, well maybe).

On a final note I went and saw The Changeling at the pics on Sunday there, the latest Clint Eastwood film and I have to say I really wasn't that impressed by it. Angelina Jolie plays the part of a mother who's son goes missing, months later the police locate a boy who claims to be her son but when she meets him she is adamant that it isn't him and she continues to press the police into finding her actual son, so the Police take matters into their hands and lock her up in a psychiatric hospital to avoid any public embarassment. I don't know what it is about Clint Eastwood's films as a director, I've never really been impressed by them, A Perfect World was not bad (with Kev Costner) but overlong, Unforgiven was totally overrated in my humble opinion and this is much in the same vein. I don't deny that the performances were impressive especially Angelina Jolie despite her gorgeous looks, somehow seemed to totally fit into that period look (there are scenes though where she looks totally pale and ghostly!). The overall tone of the film was very grim but that was appropriate to the film's themes, but I just felt it was a rather hollow, heavy going experience. Not really my cuppa tea. In short in terms of references to pieces of art of the same name I much prefer the Simple Minds song. ;-)

Ah well on a different and yes final (finally!) note, I've got some Christmas lunches/dinners coming up and so looking forward to them, the first one being in work tomorrow, so bring the food on, and then the hols and then Christmas.

On Saturday there I went to see the Radio Theatre Group's latest (and last show of the year) show, Festive Fear, which was alot of fun I have to say. Being more ambitious in scale and presentation than the Suspense season (which I was very privileged to be a part of!) the Festive Fear season, was a collection of four short radio plays, two of them presented by two of RTG's veteran performers, Derek MacDonald and James Keenan.

Back for Christmas the first play of the night was great fun to watch, James did a fine job as the henpecked husband who plots to murder his nagging wife . After that we had The Nightmare Before Christmas, which was acted out on the stage by Derek MacDonald who did great job as the spooky Jack Skellington (I wonder who did his make-up). After a break we had another solo stage performance from James who played The Grinch who Stole Christmas, James was really entertaining in this role, bounding round the stage (using a single chair as a sleigh no less!). But the grand finale was grand indeed as The Plot to Overthrow Christmas was an excellent ensemble piece, with six actors all on the mics, all as devils who conspire to kill Santa Claus. I think it was safe to say this piece was my favourite of the night and it was great to see some actors I hadn't seen before play some wonderful character roles, Alasdair Mitchell in particular I thought was great as Ivan the Terrible. John Love (who I worked with on Sorry, Wrong Number) did a fine job as the head devil Mephisto (even sitting down he looked quite fearsome!) and also as Santa Claus. The ryhming speech of the scripts made the pieces even more unique, and overall I loved the staging of the plays, "Plot" in particular made great use of the actors mingling with one another when not involved in scenes. Oh and a big shout goes out to Bruce Downie who did another fine job operating the sound effects not to mention directing everything, oh and also Teresa who did the announcing of the plays and "links" between them.

So overall it was fun to see the finale of the RTG season and its always a pleasure to watch (even more so to take part in). I'm looking forward to their new season next year, The Escape Season, hopefully i can take part in that too at some point. RTG provides something unique in theatre and its good to see it gets an audience, as something different in theatre is always welcome. So bring on the next season....

Well its not over yet of course but its been quite a year for me so far, I've had a very busy acting season as our class and group (in some form or other) have been doing classes fairly constantly on and off since the end of January right up until 1 December there. And on Monday night I had my last acting class of the year with Iain McAleese, sadly that night also clashed with Scott's Citizen Theatre group class who were doing a showcase there, and it would have been nice to have seen that.

But it was a great last class as everyone did their chosen scenes for Iain, my two scenes went down pretty well as I did the Glass Menagerie with Gill (who was terrific and did a wonderful Southern accent) I played the angry irate son Tom and Gill played my controlling mother Amanda. For the other scene I did Glengarry Glen Ross with Mark, as I played Moss and Mark played Aaronow, given the short space of time we had to rehearse it, the scene flowed pretty well. The others in the class did very well, the Memories of Water, a 3 hander with Kathleen, Judith and Fliss worked really well. Arlene and Fliss did a funny scene from Alphabetical Order a Michael Frayn play, which was nicely played by Arlene who played the comedic character and Fliss was the straight man (or woman, who did some fine character acting as a manager, you could believe she was working there!). And Judith and Fliss at the end of the night did great with a scene from Rebecca, Judith in the space of the week had gone from one initial read through without knowing the lines to completely memorising her lengthy long passages of dialogue, in short she did great!

So that was that, Iain gave us all some nice feedback after class, we might end up doing some more classes next year with Iain so I'll be prepared to take another Iain bashing (in the best possible sense of course!) also might consider doing the Citizens Theatre classes next year too, see how it goes. And that's the acting over for now folks.

So last night I went to see Alan and Arlene do their debut comedy performance up at Maggie May's pub in Glasgow, as part of their stand-up comedy class at Strathclyde Uni they get to do a live show and do five minutes of material each. The acts were all good and quite individualistic in their approaches to comedy, Alan and Arlene were both very funny, some good well observed material I thought, ranging from the terror of pound shops to rats with tampax. Sadly Gordon from our acting group who was part of the stand up class was also supposed to do a performance but he didn't show, ah well, there's always next time. To be honest though it looked like a lot of fun to do stand up comedy althought it definitely looked scary but the audience were all very supportive and there was minimum heckling.

So there we go, got a quiet week ahead for a change, will be going to see the Radio Theatre Group's Festive Fear show on Saturday night, which I look forward to, its a collection of short Festive radio plays this time rolled into an 3 night run this Thursday, Friday and Saturday. So I'll post up something about that fairly soon.