Cyberclogs

Not much to report as they say??

2009-08-19T20:26:00.002+01:00

OK, its been a bit of quiet spell for me just now, still unemployed and looking for a job and the Abigail's Party cast are taking a break from rehearsals for a few weeks so we will reconvene at the beginning of September, looking forward to that. On the job front I will at least be starting some workshop called Strive as part of the Lennox Partnership, it last 3 weeks so I start Monday, hopefully I can get something out of it by the end like a new job would be nice! I'm sure exactly what it entails other than a series of structured workshops so it remains to be seen what it will be like. We'll see how it wents.

On the TV front been recently enjoying a couple of things such as The Kevin Bishop Show which is in its second season now and its good fun, I like Kevin Bishop's fun pokes at other comedians, he's not necessarily the best impressionist but he does do some pretty good mimicing such as Gok Wan fashionist and David Mitchell of Peep Show ("Great Spunky Shitcastles!"). And any man who slates Chris Martin with a spoof Coldplay song called Cocks deserves credit. It also makes good fun of Hollywood movies (by doing alternate endings or realistic versions of Hollywood blockbusters) and the mess that is cable television in general. Also the fact that it includes the lovely Karen Gillan (to be the new companion next year in Doctor Who) in the show is a bonus too!

I've also recently in my spare time been getting into Battlestar Galactica, having watched the first 3 seasons I've been gripped by it nearly all the way, although I'm needing a break from it now so I'll probably come back to season 4 some other time. BSG is definitely really well done and amazingly well shot, the space battles are terrific, but most importantly it is a series that has some really rootable characters (and a few lesser ones) with Edward James Olmos as Admiral Adama at the centre of it all and Katee Sackhoff providing a different (and sexy) take on the Starbuck character (with Dirk Benedict) and James Callis as the cowardly Gaius Baltar who somehow manages to gell all the woman!!! The only thing the series is lacking in is humour, ok there are some moments of dry humour here and there (most probably provided by Starbuck and Gaius) but overall it is pretty dreary stuff. Nevertheless BSG is worth getting into although it has taken me ages to finally get into it!

And well on that note I haven't much else to say, but I'll think of something....

Unemployment and ehh, now what?

2009-07-31T18:30:00.003+01:00

OK that's me now officially unemployed, my contract with Clydebank College has now ended so I'm now as they say "back on the job market". I have to say the College could not have picked a worse time to make me redundant given the credit crunch and current climate, but hopefully I will be able to find something pretty soon. I actually don't mind being employed for a bit as its good to have your own sense of freedom and not have to answer phones or do typing etc, but after a bit it becomes a bit impractical and you need to think of money. So I'll see what turns up....

On the bright side in regards to the Patter rehearsals for Abigail's Party they are coming along very nicely and its also been good to keep busy with the acting as I've become unemployed. So we've pretty much got Act 1 and 2 worked out for blocking and lines are pretty much all learnt, it just remains to polish things up and get use to working with props, get our costumes sorted out etc, and soon hopefully we will all be set.

OK if you are not a fan of tech stuff skip this bit, even better just don't read it if you are a technophobe:

On a different note I recently splurged some money (well from my last wages, and thankfully Pixmania did refund me at last!!) on a new LCD TV, I've been agonising over this for the last couple of months as I hastily purchased a Panasonic 32" LCD TV back at the end of May, and while it was a very good I was quite disappointed in its peformance with black levels, meaning the TV couldn't handle darkly lit scenes in movies or TV shows very well. LCDs cos they are backlit with such bright panels can have a tendency to bleed some colour out so in darker scenes you can be left with a tinge of greyness round the edges, and with the Panny it had wall to wall greyness in the dark scenes, when someone walked across the screen in a dark scene the picture would go from black to misty grey! OK this all makes me sound like a nerdy technophile and to extent that's true (I own up!!) most people wouldn't really care about such matters and neither should I, but all the same, I decided to hunt for something better. So after much hunting and scouring the net and shops, I opted for an LG (again), my previous TV was an LG so I figured why not go for them again, so I got a very nice 32" LG 32LH7000 set, which I'm happy to say has been great, the colours, detail and yes those dreaded blacks are all excellent, and its a very good all rounder for SD and HD sources. So I can sit and revel in Blu-ray and DVD heaven once again. (OK nerd mode off).

Anyway I'm off just now once again, time to watch some Hellboy II on Blu-ray.... :-)

In Pixmania we trust???????

2009-07-23T00:10:00.004+01:00

Well, I've learnt a rather hard lesson over the past couple of weeks as I had ordered a new LCD TV from the online conglomerate that is Pixmania. To be honest when I received the TV I wasn't as happy with it picture quality wise as I'd hope to be so I decided to return the TV to the seller (Giant Buyer who sell on Pixmania's site) and try and get a refund. This has been almost 2 weeks ago, since then I have not been refunded, I have since phoned the seller Giant Buyer who claimed they have processed the refund and requested this to Pixmania last Friday there. However when I contacted Pixmania one of their costumer care (or care-less!) reps said that as Giant Buyer were the sellers that Pixmania could not take any responsibility for the refund or the order!! So I am naturally rather pissed about all this, I feel Pixmania who had taken the money from my account themselves, have totally swindled me here!! I have never come across an organisation such as this who can get away with daylight robbery, their behaviour in this matter has been utterly reprehensible. I am utterly disgusted and sickened by their conduct in regards to this problem.

So I am now down over £500 on the deal, and have sent Pixmania a rather strong email requesting a refund or I will take the matter further. I probably won't get my money back though as I've seen from this forum page and others that Pixmania have got a history of robbing people of their money. Here is a link to one of them which shows many thoroughly cheesed off and abused buyers who didn't get their money back:

http://forum.pricerunner.co.uk/index.php?s=4f9b66e8787858b1480d04c831b7369c&showtopic=4844&st=0&p=16567&#entry16567

So if anyone reads this blog entry, please consider this a careful warning: DO NOT I repeat DO NOT use Pixmania, they are a bunch of money grubbing, backstabbing, untrustworthy bastards! Nuff said.

All sorts of things!!

2009-07-16T23:06:00.002+01:00

Its been a while since I posted up anything as quite alot has been going on so thought I'd post about it just now. Well we are a few weeks into rehearsals for Abigail's Party the Patter Merchants next venture and so far its going pretty well, the cast (which includes Susan (who plays Sue funnily enough) and Gill (who plays Beverly) from our last PM show and a couple of newcomers Tessa (as Angela) and Martin (as Tony) have all been excellent so far and we've been doing the usual bonding, warm ups, getting to know one another. We've also been lucky to get a very good director, Richard, who has a good understanding of the play and has already worked out some of the blocking. As I'm playing the character of Laurence, I've got a fair bit of dialogue to learn so its been a challenge but I'm getting there slowly. So there will be alotta work ahead over the forthcoming weeks before Abigail is ready for public consumption, which hopefully will be in September at the venue Stereo soon!

Anywayss onto other things my redudancy at Clydebank College is looming ever closer, to be honest I'll be glad to get out the place at the end of the month, as I need a change, although given the current climate, I don't think they chosen the best time to let me go!! So its difficult job hunting and trying find something when theres a hundred odd people applying for the same post, but that's the way it goes. It is a pain trying to find something though! It will be good to get a break but I'll need to find something fairly soon.

On a film review note I went and saw Public Enemies at the weekend there, to be honest I did enjoy it but I felt it was a bit overlong and lacking in places. Johnny Depp played the part of John Dillinger really well, and Michael Mann provides some excellent action scenes, but overall the film fell a bit flat at times. Hollywood licence no doubt would be taken with certain scenes (I can't imagine John Dillinger walking into the FBI headquarters in disguise while they were all looking for him!). Nevertheless it is an entertaining film and worth a watch.

On another review note I recently bought a Doctor Who DVD The War Games, which was Patrick Troughton's final story. This story is worth mention as for one it is an epic 10 part show, which does drag occassionally but overall holds the attention, but more importantly it is the first story that introduced the Doctor's own people, the Time Lords. The Doctor with his companions Jame and Zoe at the start end up in what appears to be the trenches during World War I but as it goes on they end up in different in wars from different time zones, such as the Roman times, the American Civil War, and others, pretty soon they discover they are part of a grand scheme controlled by aliens called War Lords, and one of the Doctor's own people, The War Chief. Despite its remarkable length (over 4 hours!) The War Games is a great send off for Patrick Troughton and he is great throughout the story. The introduction of the Time Lords is also really well done and the final episode has got to rank as one of the best, not to mention one of the most dark and downbeat endings for a Doctor (with the Doctor's trail resulting in his exile to Earth and being forced to regenerate, which leaves the Doctor spinning throughout space, helpless). The supporting cast are also really good too, with Fraser Hines and Wendy Padbury as fine as ever, and Edward Brayshaw providing some good panto villainary, and Philip Madoc providing some chilling underplayed Welsh villainary. Anyway its a good DVD so if you are a fan of the show, buy it!

And on that note that's enough for now.

Terminator Salvation!! And job hunting...

2009-06-22T22:01:00.003+01:00

OK in reverse order.... I might as well announce on this blog if not anywhere else that next month I'm going to be made redundant at Clydebank College. To quite honest it will be a relief to get out of the place as the management have took it upon themselves to do a restructure of the collge, which means cutting back on budget, which inevitably means jobs will be cut and the old redundancies rears their ugly heads. To be fair its not been a bad place to work, although there have been some days I definitely wished I was elsewhere and the odd member of staff that has made things rather annoying and difficult! (I won't say who!). So I'm now hunting for another job, its great fun of course, not! Applying for anything on the go really, especially in the Admin field, mainly cos I don't have much experience in any other work area (sadly!). But anyway hopefully I will get something, somehow.

Now onto Terminator Salvation, which I went and saw last night. I think it probably is fair to say it is the weakest film of the four but having said that, Salvation is far from a disaster. In fact TS is quite entertaining, my only real problem with it is that it takes itself way too seriously, and it sorely lacks the humour of the previous 3 films. Just imagine the start of T3 and the dreary voice over from Nick Stahl, well its kind of like that tone wise throughout. However the action scenes are actually really good and quite visceral, finally getting to see the human wasteland of the future fully visualised is something of a thrill. The terminator machines manage to keep their menace and are quite scary in places (watch for the "Arnie" cameo). Characters wise everyone is of course deadly serious but the supporting cast do well in their roles especially Anton Yelchin as the young teenage Kyle Reese who is helped by ex-inmate Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) and Moon Bloodgood (yep now there's a name!) is not bad as the spunky, saucy Blair. But I have to say Christian Bale as John Connor just didn't really work for me, he is the weak link in the cast, Christian just seems to have taken playing the part straight just a little too literally, he certainly doesn't have the humanity or vulnerability that Nick Stahl brought to the role. So I think Christian Bale to be honest was mis-cast, perhaps with the right actor in the role, TS could have been even better, but instead I was kind of waiting for some more explosions and action when he was on screen.

Anyway regardless of all that, Terminator Salvation is definitely entertaining, yeah sure its deadly serious but its got non stop action and its action is great and that's enough to reward its place in the Terminator series.

Summer colds are here again and The Apprentice ep 11 and 12!

2009-06-09T17:09:00.002+01:00

Guess what? Yep, I have the cold again! Well it is the summer (well just about) so guess I was bound to get it at some point, my immune system hasn't had much luck of late over the past couple of months, but I am at least starting to get over (although I am still a bit blocked up) it. So its been sneezing, runny nose, achey limbs, the usual cold joys. But I'm on the mend anyways, so enough of my health worries...

Thought I would blog on the the last two episodes of the Apprentice since I haven't done so since they've been on. A quick recap of episode 11 saw the remaining 5 candidates go through the usual tough interviews stage, most of the candidates faired well except for James who got all flustered in the interview especially with Claude. Claude also read out some crass comments from James's CV one which was a classic said "I put a leash on people who spunk their money up the wall!". It just makes you wonder what kind of idiot puts this sort of thing in a CV and how they could think it would make a good impression! Anyways however the other candidates were not without flaws either, Yasmina was pulled by Claude for not knowing what the term "turnover" actually meant and she didn't know the difference between net and gross profit. Kate was also pulled up for her alleged robotic and efficient manner as well as griping about working within teams comprised totally of women since they she felt they bitch and moan alot (not to sounds sexist or anything but I totally know what she means!). Anyways in the boardroom Sir Alan made his decision and he finally fired James, which to be honest he should have done weeks ago, as James's presence in the show up to Week 11 was a miracle if nothing else, or mainly just cause he made for good TV. Then followed Lorraine and Debra, leaving Yasmina and Kate in the finale, at least Sir Alan got it right in the end.

For the final episode the two finalists Kate and Yasmina had to come up with an idea for a brand new box of chocolates to sell to a certain market and pitch them in front of industry experts. Kate and Yasmina both did very well at this task in different areas although Kate over priced her chocolates while Yasmina's chocolates tasted poor (Strawberry and Basil choccie anyone?! No I didn't think so!). But in the end in the boardroom after much deliberation and cogitation Sir Alan chose Yasmina as his winner and I think once again he chose the right person. To be fair I think it was a real tough call between the two of them but overall I think Yasmina had the right amount of friendly personality, get-up and go, ambition and determination to be the winner. So that's another Apprentice over and done with, and I'll look forward to next year's when we have another 12 weeks of fun again.

Apprentices Ep 9 and 10

2009-05-27T22:41:00.003+01:00

Didn't get a chance to write up on ep 9 of the Apprentice so a quick recap, it was selling baby products at a baby show, to which saw the end of the arrogant and cocky Ben, to be fair he did struggle in this episode and he did let go of some of his attitude somewhat. Seems a shame and in fact I'm surprised James who PM'd this task and failed it didn't GET fired for it, he really is the cat of this series, how many more lives can he have! Anyway....

Just been watching episode 10 of the Apprentice, and I really enjoyed it as its the usual QVC one, where the remaining candidates have to pitch products live on TV and yep its great fun to watch them make a tit of it!

To be fair I think both teams did very well in these tasks and it was a very close call on the decision. The ever efficient and excellent Yasmina managed Empire whilst the ever efficient and also excellent Howard lead Ignite. For Empire's team James and Yasmina pitched together and not surprisingly James made a bit of a tit of himself (forgive him for being nervous of course) as he stumbled to begin with. But Debra did a very good job presenting live and in the secured alot of sales. On the Ignite team Howard and Lorraine presented together and they also did a good job and chose more expensive products (as Empire chose cheaper products) while Kate did an OK presentation of some pretty poor products (an air guitar "head!" and some cat pin thing!).

In the boardroom though it was decided that Empire were the winners as they sold the most, with Debra selling the bulk of their sales with over £900 out of about £1500. This came as a real shock as I thought Ignite would definitely win with their choice of products being more expensive, such as the deep fat frier which would be a dead cert surely. However in the boardroom Sir Alan had to make a decision and regretfully he chose to fire Howard, which I felt was a mistake, as Howard is definitely one of the strongest candidates in the entire show, even Margaret felt Sir Alan was wrong. But Sir Alan felt he didn't take enough risks, a point which the clairvoyant Lorraine raised early on in the episode, and sadly Howard didn't listen to Lorraine on taking a risk on one of the choice of products, pity, another one underestimates Lorraine! So that means James has escaped the firing line once again and he is the only remaining man in the competition! (a real surprise considering!).

So I'm really looking to next week's episode which features the interviews, where the remaining contestants get shredded in the interview process by some of Sir Alan's toughest interviewer experts (so bring on the bulldogs Claude, possilby Paul, and the ever shrewd Borden if that's his name).

Other stuff and The Apprentice ep 8

2009-05-16T11:59:00.003+01:00

Right this is going to be a big one:

OK, I'm feeling better now, this week actually has been good for me as I've got the place to myself while the folks are away on holiday, so its the usual fend for oneself and try to remember to all the household chores (ok not that many really!). Last night though I was pleased cos I managed to finally get to cook for myself as I've been out at nights quite a bit this week so last night was a night in, made some sausage pasta, yum yum! The week to myself however could have been better if didn't have that viral bug come back on me like it did last Friday night as I felt a bit crap for half the week, but thankfully its cleared up for now (for now! or for a good while I hope!).

Anyways as I said its been a busy week, on Monday managed to get a couple of DVD/Blu-ray discs, so I was chuffed to finally get Doctor Who: The Deadly Assassin on DVD (OK nerdy mode on!) which was really good, hardly forgotten how good it was and it showed Tom Baker effortlessly holding his own without a companion to assist him (he basically needs someone to spout out the exposition to!). The story is a wonderful mix of suspense, thrills, high drama and there's some comedy too of course (I love the line where Cardinal Borusa says to the Doctor "You will never amount to anything in the galaxy as long as you retain your propensity for vulgar fascetiousness!"). The story is about the Doctor returning to his home planet Gallifrey to try and prevent the assassination of the President of the Time Lords only to find himself framed for the crime himself.

The cast are all great in the show with excellent performances from George Pravda as Castellan Spandrell, Angus MacKay as Cardinal Borusa and Bernard Horsfall as Chancellor Goth. The only thing that slightly let it down for me was that the Master albeit played excellently by the late Peter Pratt was perhaps a little too dramatic all the time with too much emphasis on high drama and hardly anything in the way of wit and humour. In short it didn't remind of the Master as he should be, but I guess as the character was dying he would be highly melodramatic. All the same The Deadly Assassin is a classic from a time when Doctor Who was at its absolute peak, and its a real reminder of just how good the show can be, as this show certainly stands miles above the current Russell T Davies ressurected campathon, much as I enjoy it, it'll never scale those heights again.

Now onto The Apprentice episode 8 which was once again very entertaining and had me shaking my head at the screen at certain points going "Why? Why? Why, Debra??!". But anyway this week's ep saw the two teams having to come up with an idea to rebrand Margate, Empire chose a theme of the gay community while Ignite's theme was family. From the get go Ignite's campaign showed much more promise mainly because the team worked as a team, apart from some resistance from ever gobby Lorraine always having her say. But Yasmina proved herself to be an excellent project manager again as she kept a level head and just got on with it. The Empire team however was a different story, with Debra bulldozing her way into being the project manager despite Howard initially stepping to do the job. Howard despite not getting to be project manager did manage to supervise the creative side of the task and he did an excellent job. However I think their task was let down by a lack of support from Mona, and James to be fair did his best to pitch in despite making the odd off colour comment (to the guy models pretending to be a gay couple he said "OK guys we're not making a porno!"). Their posters were frankly awful and their leaflet for their campaign left a lot of blank space in it, too, this was mainly Debra's fault as he spent so much time mucking about not making a decision. Another important point here was that Debra doesn't listen to anyone, or rather she is unable to as it goes in one ear and out the other! Howard while trying to make a good point about the poster having too many words just fell on deaf ears while Debra was supposedly listening, and their posters ended up with too many words. During the pitches by the teams, both pitches were well received but it was Empire who fell short of the mark as people thought their posters were dreadful and confusing.

In the boardroom Sir Alan told them that of the two teams Ignite were the winners as the Local residents and Industry experts gave them 7/10 while Empire only got 4/10. After that in the boardroom Debra who came back in with James and Mond, showed a bit more restraint this time probably because of her verbal warning from Sir Alan about her attitude towards Nick last time. But in the end Sir Alan had to chalk it up to how people had peformed in the past weeks and he decided to fire Mona because of her lack of creativity (although he did fire her "with regret"). To be honest though I thought Sir Alan was wrong to fire Mona too, as she herself said, if anyone should have been fired it should have been Debra, she mis-managed the task badly and didn't listen to anyone. James was also skating a bit on thin ice as his contribution wasn't major from what I'd seen Mona took more to the asking the questions, James seem to hang around the background. I'm also not so sure about James in the show now as I think he seems to be watching his own back and try and not get himself fired as well as being a bit of a grass by dobbing on other people (namely Mona). So out of the remaining contestants so far, the ones I'd like to see with a chance of winning and getting into the final would be Yasmina, who has really proved herself as a manager and has a good positive way of working with everyone, and Howard, who really stepped up in this episode and also is very level headed and Kate, who is very capable although she does appear to be a bit icy at times.

Phew! That was a long un. That's all for now.

Return of the bugs and Apprentice ep 7

2009-05-10T11:23:00.003+01:00

Well well well (3 wells!) just when you thought it was safe to go out into the world again low and behold I've been feeling bugsy again over the weekend, its not the same viral symptoms as last time, weak arms and legs with rash on my tongue, no its morely upset tummy and muzzy head and slightly weak limbs. To be honest I think I've just been feeling run down after all my hectic activity of late with my acting classes/group work and going out etc. That's the only downside to my acting is that after all the rehearsing for a show and after you perform you usually feel pretty drained once its over, especially after doing the Tom Stoppard double bill in February I was totally done in! (as was Scott who did it the other show then too). So I've actually decided to stop being a couch potato so much and have ordered myself an exercise bike, so that way I can actually try and build up some energy after work nights so that way I'm not so zombied at nights, we'll see how that works out!

Anyway on another subject having watched Apprentice episode 7, thought I'd post up about it. It was another very enjoyable episode, this time the two teams had to travel North to Liverpool and sell two chosen products to stores. The task had mixed success as Empire lead by Mona did very well on their sales with over £4000, while Ignite lead by Lorraine did rather poorly with only sales of over £1400. In the boardroom Lorraine received a bashing not only from Sir Alan but also from Philip and Kate who were on her team who didn't sell a single thing (Lorraine was actually responsible for most of the sales in her team!). But after much slinging and slagging Sir Alan finally made up his mind and fired Philip because of his arrogant cocky attitude, which I think was the most deserved firing yet, Philip didn't know when to keep his mouth shut, he didn't listen to criticism and most of all he didn't listen to Lorraine. Lorraine was Philip's nemesis all along, but he really did bring it upon himself by purely being arrogant and thinking he was better than everyone else (which he wasn't!). Lorraine was skating on thin ice as well though as she clearly alienated the other people in her team apart from Ben and Yasmina (although they did have a run in over who would take control of the sales pitch). But she did sell well and she has the weird sixth sense of being right especially when other people are wrong. Kate on the other hand also showed no loyalties toward anyone, as she even went as far as going against her seemed ally Philip by criticising his performance in the task, as well as denying that they had a relationship (which is debatable based on the footage). So even though she's pretty effective lady (and pretty of course!) we'll need to watch out for her. Ah wellie well!

Anyways look forward to the next one.....

Apprentice ep 6

2009-04-30T08:22:00.002+01:00

Last night's episode of the Apprentice was once again very entertaining and it always starts to really get going when it reaches the halfway mark (hard to believe we're already there eh??).

This time the two teams had to sell a lot of bric-a-brac on the streets of London at a profit (that means Ben, that you sell it for more than its valued at!). The two teams were lead by Ben lead Empire while Philip lead Ignite, now while this may sound like two of the most assertive and competent candidates were leading this time round, things still managed to go way off course. For starters Ben decided to unevenly split up the selling of the items, by given half his team 3 and his other half (that he would sell) 7! Surely as Debra pointed out a 50/50 divide would have been much better. To top things off Ben drastically kept underselling every item, he seemed to completely miss the point of the task, sell at a proift not a loss, Ben! On the Ignite team, Philip was no genius either mind, because of his previous clashes with Lorraine he once again completely chose to ignore her advice on valuing the Indiain carpet item (which turned out to be the most valued item on the list at over £200!) so they ended up wandering round trying to get it rid of it last without even valuing the carpet in the first place since Philip seemed to think it was nothing but old tat!

But at the end of the day (its a cliche I know) Philip's team managed to win the task because they at least took more of a profit than Ben's team did (albeit both teams still made a loss, Philip's team just made less of a loss). In the boardroom Ben after some hesitancy decided to bring back in Noorul and Debra for the failure of the task, and after a little show of fire and self defence from Noorul, and some rather lippy words from Debra to Nick (shame on her! She got a well deserved warning from Sir Alan) no to mention a flustered Ben trying to defend himself, Sir Alan made the decision we have all been waiting for, and fired Noorul. Let's face it Noorul was probably the weakest contestant in the show, Majid even showed more interest and passion than he did on the odd task but Noorul either through TV show editing or a pure simple lack of contribution, didn't show us anything, so it was time for him to go.

Anyways that's it for now, time for some work.... blueeghhh!!

Citz classes!

2009-04-29T20:59:00.003+01:00

Had my first Citizens Theatre class last night and it was actually good fun, albeit a throwback to the basics since it was Level 1 Beginners class, nonetheless it was far from an insulting reminder of the stepping stones toward performing. Our tutor Leann was very good, quite light hearted and had a nice way of putting across the material as well as providing plenty of fun games for us to work with. The class being of mixed ages (again mostly women with a few guys) made it fun to work with everyone and it was also nice to see how up for it most of the class members were, which is always encouraging to see there being no stick in the muds! (otherwise why bother acting?).

Anyways it was good fun, a nice little intro to the beginners classes, personally it would have been nice to get into the more advanced class, but due to it being oversubscribed with people I wasn't able to get in, but it doesn't really matter as these classes look like good fun and will be a good reminder of the basics and mechanics of the craft of acting.

Apprentice ep 5 andddd the Citz!

2009-04-27T17:15:00.003+01:00

Well tomorrow (well) I start my first night class at the Citizen Theatre, I missed the first one last week cos I was still feeling a bit bugsy and under the weather so this week I feel better so I'm going to give it a go tomorrow. The tutor will be a Leann O'Kasi, so it will nice to have the opportunity to work with someone different for a change, rather than the old tutorial crowd (Iain, "yeahhhh", Bill, "stand up straight, Kenny!"). Its only the level 1 beginners level, and although I've had extensive class experience (well not to sound big headed but I have!) I've heard that there will be people at different levels of experience in the class so it should be fun and interesting to see how it goes tomorrow.

Anyhow more on that tomorrow night, tonight I thought I'd blog up on the latest episode of The Apprentice which was very entertaining stuff. The task saw the two teams having to come up with the idea for a breakfast TV commercial, complete with breakfast cereal, packaging, and a filmed advert. Ignite lead by New Yorker contest Kimberley, came up with the naff (or pants) idea of a superhero called Pantsman who tells kids to pull up their pants in the morning and put them on the right way by eating their cereal "Wake up call". The other team Empire (lead by the lovely and efficient Kate) came up with the idea for a Teasure themed TV add, the cereal was called Treasure Flakes and featured the portly Ben in the pirate outfit! To be honest the packaging for the Treasure Flakes was far better but ironically their advert was poor, on the Wake up call side the advert itself was very good but the packaging for the cereal was rubbish as it seemed to leave out alot of the information. In the end Sir Alan being the client had to make the decision once the advertising experts had given their opinions.

In the boardroom Sir Alan chose Empire as the winners (with James on the winning side for once! To be honest I'm starting to like this guy) and Ignite as the losers with Kim choosing to take Lorraine (who was highly critical throughout the task) and Philip (who was highly arrogant and cocky throughout, but made the biggest contribution) back into the boardroom. Now I don't much care for Philip, I think he's a cocky smug overbearing git, but he did raise a good point? Why do they keep letting the quiet, useless ones pass under the radar again and again? Mainly I mean Noorul, who did absolutely nothing once again! (Except wear the Pantsman outfit which required him to do nothing but move about a bit!). But clearly I think Sir Alan did choose correctly in firing Kimberley, she was a bit hypocritical and her marketing expertise could have won her the task but in the end it made her lose it. Lorraine on the other hand was very bitchy but I think she had good enough reason because no one would listen to her!

Anyways that's enough Apprenticing, we'll see what happens next week....

The Apprentice episode 4

2009-04-20T11:43:00.002+01:00

Well I've been feeling a bit bugsy over the weekend so I'm off work today, hopefully might go back tomorrow as its not that bad a bug as my previous one last year, however still feel a bit achesy in my limbs and my tongue is a red with a rash or something, that's the 3rd time in over the last year or so I've had that bug so not sure what its about. But they seem to be doing their rounds anyways, but I might return to work ramorrow, so we'll see how it goes.

Anyway on a different note I watched The Apprentice Episode 4 the other day and really enjoyed it as the task this week was to create a beauty bath product that could be sold to retailers. The two teams Ignite (lead by Noorul, or maybe lead isn't the right word!) and Empire (lead by Paula) set about the tasks, Ignite came up with a honeycomb soap bar while Empire came up with soap bar made from Seawood, Cedarwood and sandalwood oil. Despite a rather poor product Ignite came up as the winners in the end as they made the largest profit and Empire made a loss of £68. In a way it seems incredible that Ignite actually won they had virtually no direction from their leader Noorul, who just stood around looking confused (yet he said "I'm a natural born leader!").

In the boardroom on the losing team Paula brought back in Ben and Yasmina and both of them seemed to gang up on Paula especially Ben who had a real go at her (probably due to his small penis!). In the end though Sir Alan chose to fire Paula as she was overall in charge of the task and didn't get the costing right. It seems a shame that they did fire Paula as she was one of the nicer contestants (and nice) on the programme rather than leaving in the snakes simply cos they make for good TV. No doubt Ben will get his later on in the show. In the meantime I look forward to this week's episode.

Patter Merchants Mark 3

2009-04-18T13:49:00.003+01:00

Welly well, that's another Patter Merchants stint over, haven't had much chance to write up about it until now so thought I'd post something up. Well I'm glad to say the 3rd PM stint was a very enjoyable experience, this time round we had longer scenes so there were fewer of them this time, only 6 as opposed to the ambitious 12 that we had done last time. Also we had some music from our very own director and maestro Bill Wright who provided some fine musical interludes between the scenes, as he did covers of Lou Reed and Johnny Cash (nice guitar by the way Bill!).

The scenes themselves were all fairly comedic although quite dramatic in places too, Scott and Gill opened the night with an excellent performance of the opening scene in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Judith and Susan did a scene from the Killing of Sister George which was fun to watch as Judith was so crazed in it! ("Ohh shut up, silly bitch!"). Gordon and newcomer to the group Amy, were both really good in their scene from The Lovers, which they both put on fine Irish accents, I liked Amy's acting out pregnancy pains too! After the break we had two other newcomers to our group, Jamie and Rania do a scene from the play some Some Girls, which I liked and thought they both did really good accents, in fact I think most of the scenes had accents! Scott and Gill were up again next who did a scene from The Birthday Party, which was quite a short scene and "succulent!" to quote Scott's character. And last but not least was my scene with Alison who is also new to the group, Some Voices, which was frankly the best thing of the night! (I joke of course, really!). For my scene I did an London accent, so it was fun to work with accents again, as I haven't really done too much of that in the Patter Merchants (although I have done plenty with RTG). But I enjoyed the scene and thought Alison did really well with her part too, as she had to play ambivalent emotions, playing an abused pregnant girl in a bar who basically wants to be left alone but I come over and try to chat her up for some company as my part Ray is a young guy suffering from schizophrenia (but I didn't really play the illness). So we got some laughs out the scene which is always good.

Anywayssss that's pretty much it for now, another one down, we'll wait and see what happens next but for now its nice to have a wee break and chill out before stepping into anymore draaama.

Red Dwarf Back to Reality... sorry Earth!

2009-04-13T11:06:00.002+01:00

OK so the final part of the new Red Dwarf Back to Earth was on last night and I have to say it left me with a big decisive feeling of "mehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!". It was basically not any better than the first and second parts, the third part did at least complete the story but it wasn't really much of a story to begin with. The gags again were very lame, again there were some very feeble references to Blade Runner and again I felt there was a feeling of "Why did they bother?". The story sees the ending being something very similar to the plot of Back to Reality with and PLOT SPOILER: the whole Red Dwarf crew being stuck on the real Earth as fictional characters as just being the effects of the big tentacled beasts hallucinatory ink, just like the despair squid, except this was a joy ink. Its ironic that the new Red Dwarf's comeback tried to emulate one of its own best remembered and loved episodes with some of its absolute worst.

I'm really disappointed in Doug Naylor's attempts to bring the much loved and once very enjoyable show back to the small screen as it could have been much funnier and more entertaining than it actually was. Red Dwarf Series 8 was for me hilarious and really enjoyable, its just a shame they couldn't lash the same level of attention on it this time. But I guess being on a cable channel we can't really expect too much I guess, if only the BBC got their hands on it they could have lavished a bit more attention on it. Achh well, ho-hum. So who knows what lies next for Red Dwarf but I think the words "an urgent reboot" will be required should they ever bring it back again.

Doctor Who Easter Special, Soul-Fi and Red Dwarf Part 2

2009-04-12T14:19:00.003+01:00

Its been a busy weekend on the TV front this Easter with the return of Red Dwarf and the Doctor Who Easter Special. Having just watched Red Dwarf Back to Earth Part 2 I wasn't much more impressed by the second installment than the first, I would say it was only slightly better than the first one, but that isn't saying much. In the second episode the Red Dwarf crew got back to Earth through some kind of wormhole created by Claudia Winkleman's character only to find they are considered as fictional characters on Earth as they see DVDs and posters of themselves everywhere. So they try to track down their creator see if they will carry on as it sounds like they might be killed off. Judging by the poor quality of this episode it wouldn't really matter if they were. To be entirely kind, there were a couple more laughs in this episodes (so that's 4 laughs in total from me so far!) one where Lister spots the Red Dwarf DVDs and Kryten explains that DVDs used to be used in the 21 Century before they went back to using videos! And Rimmer provided probably the best laugh so far when he was reading about his character being neurotic "I was never neurotic! Even as a child, I was too busy washing my hands!". Other than that it was "a naff effort" it also had some really lazy and pointless references to Blade Runner throughout it too (complete with folded pieces of origami courtesy of the Cat). So the 3rd episode is on tonight, but I won't expect too much from that either.

Which brings me to the Doctor Who Easter special, this thankfully was a fair bit more entertaining than Red Dwarf was. This time the Doctor meets up with Jewel thief Christina or Lady Christina (nicely played by the rather nice Michelle Ryan of Eastenders and Bionic Woman fame) on a bus which takes an interdimensional trip through a wormhole (yes another Easter TV trend wormholes!) onto an alien desert planet which is filled with rather nasty hostile creatures. The hour long specials for Doctor Who can be a bit hit and miss and this one was not too bad but overall nothing special. There are some nice touches in it though and David Tennant and Michelle Ryan both seem to enjoy their onscreen chemistry, but why on Earth does Russell T Davies always have to write in the companion kissing the Doctor! I wonder if Steven Moffat will cure the series of that trend when he takes over. I felt the CGI in this episode was a bit naff the desert was fine but the CGI for the nasty bugs was a bit crap. Lee Evans was ok in his part as the scientist despite his somewhat silly gushing hugging the Doctor and saying "I love you!" over and over near the end. But anyway it stood head and shoulders over Red Dwarf at any rate and the next Dr Who special The Waters of Mars looks fairly promising (and creepy!).

So brings me to the last note of this entry, as I went to see my brother's band Soul-Fi last night once again and they were really good (once again) I haven't really blogged about them much before so thought I'd give them some credit. Soul-Fi do cover versions of soul songs, from quite a wide ranging selection of artists such as Stevie Wonder, Amy Winehouse, Aretha Franklin, Van Morrison, Jamiriquai, and so on. It was on in the Basura Blanca Club on Brunswick St which is a nice little venue, so it was quite busy and they played for a good 2 and a half hours at least (I wish I could act as long as that! OK maybe not). Its also nice to see a band with a brass section too (Claire in the band plays sax and Sarah plays trumpet), as it offers something different from your average trendy indie bands or guitar driven bands, so seeing that is always a welcome change. They will be playing again the same venue next month so should be good.

And on that note I'll leave it there.

Its cold outside and there's no kind of atmosphere...

2009-04-11T11:01:00.002+01:00

The title to this blog could almost be applied to the first new episode of Red Dwarf which was on the Dave Channel last night. Frankly I was a bit disappointed in it, for starters being on a satelitte channel it was a bit too much to hope that they could show it without adverts, but given the episodes short lengths (only 22 minutes! For the sake of cable channel viewing of course!) there was no doubt there would be.

Unfortunately the episode itself was to quote Larry David "meh", it was way too short, didn't really have that many funny gags in it either, Rimmer looked a bit weird (perhaps Chris Barrie is just getting old), and the Cat's witticisms seem to go back to the sub standard quality of Series 7. Not even Kryten managed to contribute any laughs here, the only new interesting (and rather nice) addition of Claudia Winkleman (Sophie's half sister) gave things a change of direction. To be entirely fair there were a couple of laughs, the bit where Lister and the crew are in the diving bell fighting a big tentacled underwater monster while Rimmer dances away on Red Dwarf at the camera station oblivious was amusing, and the sight of Lister using the wing mirror on his motorbike as a beer coaster was funny too. However that's about it, the episode ended on a real "Is that it?!" kind of note which left me less than enthused for more. I'll keep watching to see how the other 2 episodes will go, but I don't expect too much from them given the "quality" of what I've just witnessed.

Oh and the Easter special of Doctor Who is on tonight, let's hope that's halfway better than Red Dwarf!

The Apprentice and Patter update

2009-04-10T19:32:00.002+01:00

So the next Patter Merchant show isn't far away now at all as next Tuesday and Wednesday night we'll be ready to do another show up at Gramofon (on King Street). This time round the scenes will be lengthier and fewer in number so there's still a challenge for the group there. I'm only doing one scene this time, which is fine for me as last time it felt like we had to juggle quite a bit doing the two (although I did enjoy it of course!). So we'll see how it goes next week, I won't say too much about it just now but I'll post up an entry once the shows are over.

And a different note the new series of the Apprentice has been on 3 weeks now and I've really enjoyed it so far. Thankfully this year even though they still have recruited some plonkers the overall group aren't the nasty assortment we had last year (bar a few of course) and this week's task was quite enjoyable. This week Sir Alan wanted the two teams (cheesily named Ignite and Empire) to create a piece of home exercise equipment that can be sold to retailers. The two teams both struggled at first to come up with ideas, and James who lead his team (or did he?) left it up to the young and cocky Ben to come up with their idea of a box you could use to work your lower muscles and triceps (I think!). The other group lead by Deborah (who's shaping up to be a real domineering pain!) came up with an idea for something that resembled a toilet seat which could be used to exercise your overall "core" so to speak. Nevertheless SHOW RUINER: Ignite won the task as they managed to secure the biggest amount of sales while Empire secure the least amount of sales in the entire show!

When it came to the boardroom bash James the team leader brought in Ben (who came up with the idea for the failed product) and Majid (who apparently stood around doing nothing throughout the task). After much boardroom debate, Sir Alan chose to fire Majid on the grounds of not contributing enough to the task. I felt even though on this task Majid didn't do as much, it wasn't really his fault, surely this boiled down to poor delegation from James, who didn't clearly give him enough to do, leaving the guy out feeling like a spare part, as I clearly saw Majid contribute quite alot in the previous task. James on this task also failed to assert himself by expressing his doubts and reservations about the product Ben which hilariously praised as the best thing he's ever done! In fact I'm amazed that James wasn't fired for this task the responsibility of its failure rested largely on his shoulders, it was only Margaret's observation that he was not bad at management that kept him from getting the black hack taxi, personally though I don't mind him so much, despite being a plonker he is fairly likeable. Ben on the other hand has been quite irritating so far as he clearly has far too big an ego and an inflated opinion of himself, and yes he did contribute alot to this task, but he made the biggest contribution to a failed task. Did he really deserve a second chance? Maybe not. But he got one anyway.

Anyways that's enough of the Apprentice. More blog entries will follow this weekend in fact as the Doctor Who Easter Special, Planet of the Dead is on ramorra and Red Dwarf is back on our screens tonight in the first of a new 3 parter, Back to Earth, wohoo!! Let's hope its good!

Acting and things update

2009-03-24T18:31:00.003Z

Welly not too much to report the now, except for on the Patter Merchant front things have gotten into gear as the rehearsals have started and its early days as we've only had one so far (the second is tomorrow night) but things should start taking shape nicely as we progress.

On another note I'm still doing Iain McAleese's classes, which I've quite enjoyed so far, although the choice of plays have been a bit unusual this time, with MacBeth, which to be honest I'm not a big fan of Shakespeare, however this week we covered Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit which was very enjoyable to do (with Ann who has come back to the class, doing a grand job as the ghostly mischievious Elvira) and next week we shall cover Harold Pinter's The Homecoming, which as a play I liked but it left me somewhat disturbed. The Homecoming is definitely quite a shocking play for its time and I did like it but the characters in it are quite repellant and its hard to empathise with any of them, the end of the play also left me a bit disturbed and in a state of disbelief (PLOT SPOILER!! The character Ruth who is married with 3 kids to Terry one of the family's brothers, decides at the end to go on the game and work for the family out of the blue!). Perhaps though the state of disbelief is Pinter was after with this one. Anyway that's for next week, so we'll see how it goes.

Gran Torino

2009-03-19T08:24:00.003Z

Went and saw Gran Torino at the Springfield Quay last night and I'm pleased to say I thoroughly enjoyed it, partly because I had no idea just how funny it was going to be. Clint Eastwood (who directs it too and this is apparently his last acting role, why Clint?!) plays a retired Polack American car worker Walt Kowalski, who is cantankerous, stubborn, and above all xenophobic. The fact that his neighbourhood have all but become populated by Asians makes his life even more difficult as he has to adapt to them. However things change when one of the Asian group's family's teenage son Thao (nicely played by newcomer Bee Vang) gets bullied and goaded by a local Asian gang, Walt takes matters into his own hands and stops them. After this the Asian community suddenly become friendly toward walt and are indebted to him, soon after, Thao is given to Walt to repay a service to him.

Gran Torino is suprisingly hilarious as it is Clint's acting swansong it provides him with a great opportunity to show off his natural comedic acting skills not to mention that cantankerous film personae he has developed over the years. But it also provides some powerful moments of drama as well as Walt makes a stand against a local Asian gang things get more serious as it effects Thao and his family also. Despite the powerful drama that underlies the humour this film could honestly be classed as a comedy on its own because it so funny, Walt's prejudices are so amusing in a shocking kind of way (saying "what are you gooks looking at?!") and even though they sound offensive because of his old school mentality they never seem to dissuade the people who are subjected to them. It is an interesting film as well as it tries to bridge age and race gap and show more of an understanding on both sides of the fence for the Asian community and Walt.

So Gran Torino is an excellent fairwell to Clint Eastwood the actor, with the only off note being the very end where we hear Clint sing over the credits (mental note, Clint, you ain't no singer, stick to directing!).

Patter Merchant revival, Doves, and RE5!

2009-03-16T21:56:00.003Z

So the Patter Merchants is making a comeback pretty soon folks! So far we've done a few workshops together in the new Patter Merchant line up that were to do with voice, movement and text analysis, the workshops have been good fun and interesting, pretty soon we will start on the rehearsals for our scenes (which start this Friday) so I'm looking forward to that. I have to say the process of this Patter Merchant group has been more enjoyable this time round as the workshops have let us have a little bit of bonding time and sorting the scenes has been a bit more straight forward. I won't say too much about what scene I'm doing just now I'll keep that for a bit later on, but hopefully it will be a good one.

On a different front, note, thingy, I bought Resident Evil 5 last Friday there when it came out and I very pleased to say that I think its an excellent game, after playing the somewhat infuriating demo, I was relieved to see the game itself is far more forgiving and playable. There of course been some naysaying (when isn't there?!) about the gameplay and control mechanics, and that the movement is a bit too slow and you can't run and shoot, ok fair criticism, but personally I find the movement in the game to be largely fine. The gameplay itself is great, as largely follows the same format as RE4, with the third person camera view in front of you, the zombies are again very similar to RE4 as well, as they have been infected with the Los Plagas virus and charge, stalk, try to infect, kill, stab you, just the usual niceness you'd expect from an infected livestock. The action in the game is of course RE5's strongest point, the action zips along at a great pace and the graphics are nothing short of stunning, with some of the best most realistic looking character models yet seen (the character Captain Josh Stone looks lifelike!). Also having a partner with you in the game, Sheva Alomar (looking good!) also keeps things fresh and the inventory sharing system actually works very well, you can quickly grab or stash items and share them between the main character Chris Redfield and Sheva. My only criticisms of the game so far are yes I have to admit there movement is a bit quirky at times, when you auto aim at something sometimes you spin round and face the wrong way! Also those chainsaw zombie guys are a real pain in the ass to kill, you constantly run away from them before they chainsaw you to death. Apart from all that Resident Evil 5 is an excellent sequel to the superb RE4, it may not last quite as long and it isn't quite in the same league, but it is a damn good game. Thankfully it is a game I can see myself playing again unlike say GTAIV, RE5 has more to offer in that respect and keeps the great name of CAPCOM. They know how to make a good game.

And on a different note last night I went to see Doves at the ABC and they were pretty bloody good also, the played a fine set list of material along with some new songs which are from their forthcoming album Kingdom of Rust, which isn't out until April and yep they were pretty good too. The lead singer bassist Jimi Goodwin provided little moments of banter in between songs (not much though) I liked the bit where they were about to play Pounding and he said to the audience "How do you say it here? Is it Poonding?!". Also I liked the moment where they played the theme from Knight Rider and little bits of Golden Brown, although I was hoping they would show more back projection of them going to the pub whilst waiting to go back on stage for an encore. But a very good gig from one of the best British indie rock bands out there. And well that's enough for now.

Slumming it

2009-03-04T21:51:00.002Z

Well (that's another post beginning with "well") rather than go back to the cinema again so soon, I decided in view of all the fuss I had heard about Slumdog Millionaire, I thought I would bit torrent it instead and I've just finished watching it. I have to say I did enjoy it and it was a good film but in view of all the hype I was sort of left expecting a bit more from it. Thankfully though it is an intelligent film and also quite thought provoking, the whole idea of a slum kid winning a million bucks (or 20 million rupees) and knowing all the answers (or most of them) based on experiences from his life was really quite original (well you can't say too many contestants would really have answered all the questions in real life like that!).

The largely unknown cast were all quite impressive too Dev Patel in the main role of Jamal Malik was very good (actually a British born actor), Anil Kapoor as the host of Who wants to be a millionaire was great too, and Freida Pinto was good as the lovely Latika, whom comes across as a very sympathetic character. Danny Boyle keeps the whole film moving along at a nice pace and I was glad that he didn't sacrifice the ending (for a major feel good copout). All the same though I wouldn't say I was totally bowled over by the film, parts of it did kind of leave me wondering, for example how did he actually manage to get on the show, unless I skipped that bit I don't think they actually show you. I also found although I did sympathise with his tough upbringing and life, that Jamal's character always seemed to know the answer to the questions through some horrible experience in his life (bar the first one!) rather than from something a bit more silly or spontaneous, but I guess that was to add more realism toward the proceedings.

In the end Slumdog is in my humble opinion a pretty good movie, but not necessarily a great one. Anywayys that's enough critiquing.

A curious case

2009-03-01T23:17:00.002Z

Just got back from the cinema (for the first time this year!) after seeing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and I quite enjoyed it although I did find it to be a bit overlong. Nonetheless the story was suprisingly quite charming and pleasant, which is a real change of pace for David Fincher (if you think you will see Brad Pitt in this film beating the shit out of some bar patrons think again). The story follows the eponymous Benjamin who is born with a strange condition that makes him appear old as a baby with wrinkly skin as he grows up though he actually becomes younger and younger. During his life though he meets his life long companion and partner Daisy (Cate Blanchett looking rather radiant here!) and they throughout the events of his life they part and meet up again, but Daisy grows older Benjamin is getting younger.

So for once here we have a Fincher film that doesn't rely on fancy camera moves, loads of profanity or serial killers or people just being beaten and stabbed, I'm not dissing Fincher at all here, in fact its quite a pleasant story. Its subject matter is also quirky enough to keep it from becoming too sentimental or gushy, Fincher also provides some laughs along the way too the old guy getting struck by lightning 7 times and the scene where Brad and Cate finally get it on is funny:

Cate: Sleep with me.
Brad: Absolutely!

I didn't think the film struck me as one of the Fincher's best works but I think the fact that he can handle such material in an intelligent and sensitive way without turning it into a version of Forrest Gump was quite impressive. Its only the film's leisurely pace that kind of lets it down as it feels the pacing should have been tighter. But the cast are all great, Brad does fine in his quiet and assured role, Cate is terrific once again, there is also a nice cameo performance from Tilda Swinton (who faintly resembles Cate too). The aging makeup is terrific too, Brad's transformation from an old man into a shockingly young looking Pittster is totally believable looking (especially that towards the end where he literally looks about 18! Its quite freaky!).

So if you've got a few hours to kill I'd suggest you go and see Benjy's Button, its worth a watch.

Longing for the nights IN

2009-02-16T23:32:00.001Z

Well, that's me in from a 7 nights in a row stint of being out (or 6 nights really). After the last week and doing the RTG Tom Stoppard show, which finished on Saturday I'm really pleased with how the RTG shows have turned out but I'm also glad they have come to an end as it'll be good to get a rest. In fact I am very much longing for a nice quiet night IN now! As I miss being able to chill out, its funny going from one extreme to another.

Anyways. I had the first of (or second I missed last weeks class) Iain McAleese's classes tonight and it was not too bad, the first half was text analysis of Shakespeare's MacBeth, however being 7pm at night and after so many nights out my brain simply wasn't taking it in. But the second half was fun as we moved into working on the scenes in pairs. Looks like it will be a promising six weeks ahead with Iain again (and no doubt challenging!). So we'll see how that goes.

Anyway that's all for now, I need to rest....

Hear Hear Mr Chairman!

2009-02-13T00:49:00.002Z

Well (see I DO start posts with well quite a bit!) that's the first two nights of the Tom Stoppard double bill in so far and its been great fun to do. The first night despite a few fluffed lines and jitters went well, but I felt tonight went very well indeed and we had a really good audience tonight (no offence to the first night's audience!). Albert's Bridge has been a lot of fun to be a part of, and yes fairly hard work too, trying to remember lines for myself isn't that much of a breeze, but one of the scenes in the play (namely the first one going down the ladder addressing the painters which is hard as hell!) has been a nightmare to try and get right. It just shows how difficult the craft of acting actually can be. But so far its been a blast and the cast have all worked really hard, Stephen Redman who plays Albert the main part of our play has had a real tough job as its such a wordy role but he's pulled it off admirably. The rest of the cast have been great too, especially well everyone (and yes Alasdair, you might read this blog, so I will mention you! Yep mate, you did great as Fraser (BANG!), Bob (watch me feet Charlie!) and Dave (Hear hear Mr Chairman!!). Charles Donnelly as the Chairman and Father and Dad has also been hilarious to work with too, he's great (very much an actor that's hard to keep a straight face in front of!).

I felt the other play of the double bill I'll be Glad you'll be Frank has gone very well too, and I enjoyed seeing the final dress rehearsal on Tuesday and the cast all did great there too, especially Natalie Clark who played the main role, it was a superb performance she gave, Peter Lamb also did great too (he looks alot like Iain McAleese in fact, yeah yeah!) not to mention I enjoyed my fellow thesp actor's role Scott who played one of the porters.

So with two nights down and another two to go I've really enjoyed finally getting to act in the main part of the Ramshorn Theatre, so hopefully I will get the chance to do some more at some point this century (if not this year!). So we'll see. That's all for now. Time for bed.

Tom Stoppard's bridge

2009-02-04T00:09:00.002Z

I've been a bit secretive about what's going on the acting front so I might as well announce that I have a small part coming up in one of the Radio Theatre Group's Tom Stoppard plays, Albert's Bridge. Well actually its two parts, Charlie a bridge painter and George, a disgruntled council member (I seem to always get the grumpy parts! Not that I'm complaining I quite enjoy them ;-).

Albert's Bridge was a radio play back from the 1960's which RTG director Bruce Downie is doing something rather interesting with by staging the radio play as an actual play so this will be a bit of new challenge for me to be involved in full ensemble piece in the actual theatre of the Ramshorn! (as opposed to the foyer where I performed last year for the lunchtime matinees). So the rehearsals are well under way and we are finally getting into the theatre tomorrow to rehearse and get into the space of the theatre, which I'm looking forward to very much. Not to mention getting to perform 4 nights in a row at the Ramshorn will be a real challenge, and the cast have been fine to work with so far, so hopefully we will all get our lines right on the nights (at least I hope!). At any rate I look forward to being part of the final product and I'll post up some more once the plays go out.

RSMAD workshop

2009-01-26T08:27:00.002Z

Well (noticed quite often how most of my entries start with "well") I had the RSAMD workshop with Bill Wright the other day which introduced us to some new group members for the next Patter Merchants. It was a voice workshop so it was quite enjoyable but also quite intense aswell, as Bill really made us push our voices from high notes to low, which I found somewhat uncomfortable to do. Bill had already told us some students are known to cry when doing this exercise because of the power of the voice and the emotions rise out of them (so to speak) although no one in our group did cry, although I did laugh a few times myself. Apart from that we also did some breathing techniqes and got a massage too (not from Bill of course!). Although I have to say it was an interesting workshop I'm not sure if we would use these techniques in any of our performances or scenes but it would intruiging to see some more of this stuff later on maybe.

A couple of weeks in

2009-01-18T10:32:00.002Z

Its early days of 2009, but already it looks like it could shape up to be a busy year, as I've got a few things coming up on the acting front, I won't say too much about them at the mo, as more info will be posted as I go along. I am starting new classes though this week at the Citizens Theatre on Tuesday night, as I had heard some good things about them from Scott, this will be a bit of a step into the unknown again as I'm pretty sure no one I know will be at these classes as it will be a kind of re-education again of acting with a whole host of different people and a different tutor, so I'll see how it goes, so kind of scary and fun I hope!

On the Patter Merchants front things will be going ahead, with a couple of workshops to start off so I've got one of those starting next Sunday, which I look forward to, so we'll see how it all shapes up as things progress, its all early days as I said so it remains to be seen what we will be doing scenes wise.

On a different note I haven't really commented on the choice of the new Doctor (11 th Doc) in Doctor Who, Matt Smith, to be honest I'm not too sure what to think of that one yet. Matt being only 26 seems an unusual choice to play the Doctor, but then again the Doctor can look any age when he regenerates, it just seems weird that he will get younger when he changes, if he gets any younger it kind of threatens to undercut his authority, so no one will take him as seriously (in the show I mean!). I could imagine Catherine Tate slagging him off when he tells her to do something "Sod off, sonny, you can't tell me what to do!". Perhaps again these are silly thoughts, as if the right actor plays the Doctor you can end up believing their potrayal regardless of the age. Although I haven't really seen Matt Smith in anything on TV or theatre so I can't really comment on his acting ability one way or another, I guess we'll just wait and see what he's like at the moment when David Tennant finally stands postrate and his face, and hands go on fire and change into Matt (as you do).

Anyway on that peculiar note that's enough for now.

Happy New Year! 2008 recap

2009-01-01T00:50:00.003Z

What do you know? Its now 2009! Happy New Year everyone and hopefully it will be a good yun.

I have to say 2008 for me was a really good year, on a personal level I felt like I had accomplished something by performing live in front of an audience as an actor, which was both great fun and really nerve wracking at the same time, but its something I've grown into over such a short space of time (doing 6 live performances over the space of two months!). But I don't want to sound like I'm blowing my own trumpet or anything. Overall though 2008 was really good for me, let's hope 2009 can bring some more performance opportunities for me, I'm sure on some level it will. I'll let you know what they are when I know.

But on other fronts its been a good fun year too, there's been plenty of nice social outings, a trip to Ireland (which I often don't do), trekking through to Edinburgh quite a bit, and other stuff too.

And since 2008 is now over here's a quick recap of some of the fun stuff I enjoyed in 2008 (again alot of this is acting related):

January - Starting Acting 4 and seeing the Glass Menagerie at Edinburgh Lyceum (superb).
February - Watching No Country for Old Men and being transfixed and disturbed simultaneously.
March - Finishing Acting 4 and moving onto new advanced classes with director/tutor Iain McAleese.
April - Starting Shakespeare in Practice classes with our future tutor and Patter Merchant director Bill Wright, which was great fun.
May - Finishing Iain's classes and managing a decent final showcase performance for the group. Seeing Public Enemy deliver the gig of the year (after a 2hrs 30 min wait!).
June - Day long workshop with Bill in Govan, which was both alot of fun and utterly painful. My birthday (having a whole pub wish me a happy birthday was both fun and humiliating!).
July - Going to Ireland for a week and seeing how lovely Co Donegal is not to mention eating BIG! Starting summer classes which unbeknowst to me would lead to our first live peformance as a group! Oh and Dark Knight anyone? Want to see a magic trick?
August - Jaunting through to the Edinburgh, seeing fellow thesp Scott do great in a Fringe show, having a great day out!
September - My very first live stint as an actor with our group The Patter Merchants, many nerves but very satisfying.
October - Getting to perform as part of the Radio Theatre Group at the Ramshorn Theatre for the first time, in Sorry, Wrong Number! playing both a killer and a Western Union Man which was great fun!
November - More RTG stuff at the Ramshorn playing a Hitch Hiker, helpful hillbilly Gas Station attendant, cranky shopkeeper. Also performing my second live stint with the Patter Merchants, this time doing two scenes, being a scary clown and a pompous theatre director.
December - Finishing off my year long run of acting classes (with Iain's classes) and performing a scene from The Glass Menagerie, which went down well, which ironically I started the year seeing, and ended by performing! Weird eh?

Anywayyyyyyy that's mostly it. Again mostly acting related. I'll see how this year goes. So all the best for 2009 guys (and girls!).

Another Xmas down! The next Doctor??

2008-12-26T00:11:00.002Z

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).

Winter bugs

2008-12-14T19:54:00.003Z

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.

Spare time? Yes I remember that now. Oh and nearly Christmas.

2008-12-10T21:06:00.003Z

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.

Festive Fears

2008-12-08T18:18:00.003Z

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....

Acting season finally over and some comedy

2008-12-03T21:34:00.003Z

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.

Quantum of kindness?

2008-11-22T21:48:00.002Z

I went and saw Quantum of Solace the latest bond film on Friday and I have to say I rather enjoyed it, it turned out a lot better than I thought it would as I had heard mixed things about it. But its is actually a much tauter film that Casino Royale which was very good but overran a little and was a bit flabby in places.

Daniel Craig does a fine job as the irrevocably cold secret agent James Bond, in fact the only thing that kind of leaves me cold about Daniel Craig's Bond is that he is almost like a human version of the Terminator (or inhuman) as he kills ruthlessly throughout the movie, piling bodies thicker and faster than any previous Bond. His Bond does of course have little moments of kindness but they are of course few and far between, nonetheless it is good to see a grittier Bond on screen rather than the overly tongue in cheek ones that went before. The action in the movie is really good and it comes very fast, in fact this movie feels more reminiscent of a Jason Bourne movie, except with some moments of humour in there to relieve the drama. The bond villain was also very effective Mathieu Amalric who played a very creepy Dominic Greene, in fact that has been a good strength of Craig bond movies, the villains have been very sinister. Oh and Olga Kurylenko is pretty hot as the Bond girl.

However when I saw Quantum I had to leave the cinema about 20 minutes before the end to catch a train to Edinburgh so I'll need to go back and see it again to catch the rest of it! Bah! (Mainly thanks to Cineworld putting on 30 minutes worth of trailers and adds which we could all do without!). But I will look forward to see it all so I might go back tomorrow to my local cinema and view it again.

Oh and I went through to Edinburgh to see my fellow Patter Merchant Judith's band play, and they were pretty good so it was a good night, even though there was some crazy drunken women stoating the stage area trying to hump or dance with everyone in sight! (quite funny really). The band played well and their music was kind of reminiscent of Pavement, the drummer was really good, he had the energy of Keith Moon and Danny Goffey of Supergrass (although he moved around more like Keith!).

So all in all quite a good day yesterday, and its nice to have a chilled weekend for a change.

Patter Merchants Round Two

2008-11-21T15:15:00.002Z

So the long awaited (well two months wait anyway) Patter Merchants follow up I'm glad to say went very well and everyone in the group performed great. This time round we had 12 scenes to go through, which was split up into two halves, so we had a good variety of scenes, in fact we had a fair bit more comedy this time round than last, although there were still some dramatic scenes too.

Some highlights included Scott and Miriam's hilarious scene from Damsels in Distress (complete with Scott acting as a supposed former SAS man and a rubber bat). The Odd Couple with Judith and Miriam was also very funny as it was female version of course (taken from a re-written version for women) and they both had great New Yoirk accents. Teresa and Hilde were also great in their scene from Angels in America, Teresa really got into her bizzare character in this one, it was great to watch. Top Girls with Wilma and Arlene was also pretty powerful stuff and the heaviest scene of the collection as Arlene played a young runaway girl and Wilma played her enstranged mother. My scenes went down quite well too, He Who Gets Slapped, where I play a clown and Fliss plays an acrobat, and I gave her a scary palm reading, and A Laughing Matter where I played a pompous arrogant theatre director and Wilma played an ex-mistress and theatre star (both replete in period dress). On both nights we had really good audiences so it was a good boost to get such a response from the crowds.

Anyways that's the Patter Merchants over for the year, perhaps next year more will follow, not sure when or what will happen, but we'll wait and see.

RSMAD weekend! Patter Merchants and The Hitch Hiker

2008-11-09T03:30:00.006Z

Its already been a bit of a mad weekend so far. I've just come home from a rather busy day out in the town, in the afternoon I went up to the RSAMD where Bill our tutor who takes us for the Patter Merchants group to rehearse our scenes. Being my first experience of the RSAMD, I must admit I quite enjoyed looking around the building, even though I was a bit infuriated by its long winding corridors and less than helpfully marked door signs!! I had a bit of bother trying to find Bill's room only to find he wasn't actually in it but in a different room altogether! So good start. But thankfully we sussed it out and got on with some rehearsing. One bit of advice if you are ever thinking of buying a cup of tea from the RSAMD, don't bother as you will just end up trying to pull the cover off and spraying hot tea all over yourself!! (If you are me that is!).

Anyway I'll be back in again tomorrow for some more rehearsing with my other scene partner Wilma, which so far it has been going fine (although we await more scene "tweakage" tomorrow!).

After that I went home and went back up in the evening to see electronica melancholica band Cinephile do their stuff up at the Gilmore G12 building, which is a very nice venue, and they were very good indeed, Susan their singer put in a great vocal performance and Kenny Inglis (the songwriter and deckman) expertly chruned out the samples and keyboard work. So I look forward to the next time they play, G12 is a great venue too, would like to see another gig there sometime.

Oh and a quick note on my Radio Theatre Group play during the week which I played the eponymous Hitch Hiker (which involved a fair bit more than my first role, mainly me scribbling down many notes on when to appear as the Hitch Hiker and how to do it), it was good fun up at the Ramshorn Theatre again. It was a good show and Derek MacDonald's main performance as Ronald Adams was in my opnion very good and everyone I have to say did a fine job. So that's me finished with the RTG for now, I might have a small part coming up for their Festive Fear season (in December of course) so we'll see how it goes. I have to say I've enjoyed working with Bruce Downie, as the direction he does give you can be quite creative, incisive and provides a good end product. So I'll look forward to getting involved again.

That'ss enough for now, more soon, in the meantime I'll get on with more Patter rehearsals! But for right now.... time for bed!

Sorry, Wrong Number!

2008-10-30T22:36:00.003Z

Well well well...! That's my first live performance as a Radio Theatre Group actor over and done with, as our first radio show in the RTG season ran yesterday afternoon, Sorry, Wrong Number! at the Ramshorn Theatre and it was a lot of fun to do I must say. I played two parts in the show as the murderer and a Western Union man, both parts had uniquely different voices, so I did my best to shine up my vocal chords and give it all (I also managed not to fluff just about!). The other cast members were great too I have to say, especially Linda Woolfson who had the toughest job playing the central character Leona Stevenson, a neurotic bed-ridden wife who overhears two men on a phone planning a murder. John Love also did great job as the irate Sergeant Martin (and 1st killer!) and of course Teresa did sterling work as all the phone operators (her nurse's voice was great too!). A big shout of course also deserves to go out to Bruce Downie our director, who directed us with much patience, humour and light-heartedness, and also for his frantic operation of all those sound effects that made it uniquely a part of Radio Theatre. We should be able to get a copy of the performance from Bruce at some point in the near future so hopefully I'll be able to play it and back an say "Hey! I was in that!". (And then cringe ha ha!)

Anyways the RTG has been great fun and it was really good to perform at the Ramshorn at last (only my 2nd time there and I'm already performing in it!). So the Hitch Hiker will follow next week, rehearsals have been not too bad so far, and tomorrow I get a night off so we reconvene on Monday to carry on. So I'll post up more as we progress towards more... suspense!! ;))

Radio active! Oh and Patter Merchant update

2008-10-26T12:19:00.002Z

Welly well... its been a while since I've giving an update on my acting activities so thought I would blog about it (I may have more to blog about tonight at this rate!).

On the Radio Theatre Group front things have been going pretty well so far, Bruce Downie the director of the theatre group has been good to work with and is quite encouraging and also quite helpful in providing ideas on how to play the characters. Its also nice to see that the small cast (just four of us well five if you include James Keenan, but he'll come in later) are all a really nice pleasant bunch (so no divas or prima donnas in sight thankfully!). Its also been quite an interesting learning process on developing the voice and getting the right character voices for the scenes and its a good because the rehearsals are really starting to come on (we'll have two more next week). In the play we are working on Sorry, Wrong Number! I only have two characters to play, the killer and a Western Union Man (both roles couldn't be more different!) but its been great to be involved in it so far. So Sorry, Wrong Number! will be on live at the Ramshorn Theatre this Wednesday coming at 1.15pm, so I'm really looking forward to it, its more acting experience at any rate, and Bruce will record the live show so I'll get to hear how good/bad I will be!

Anyways onto the Patter Merchants, which to be honest has been a bit of struggle this time round, certainly not as much fun, mainly because of the difficulty involved in choosing appropriate scenes (that Herr Bill will approve of! No offence Bill!). But also because one of our group (Barry) has barely kept in touch and he has only showed up for one class so far and myself and Wilma were supposed to be each doing a scene with him but he has been impossible to contact as we have sent him dozens of emails and texts with no reply (why do people do that??!! Its a real peeve of mine). So if Barry doesn't show tonight then Wilma and I will have to move on and try and work on another scene together. My other scene with Felicity (or Fliss as she prefers) has been going well so far and is shaping up so that's something I guess.

Anyways that's enough reporting for now, more will follow later in the week...

All things DO happen at once! (so it seems!)

2008-10-19T11:53:00.003+01:00

I've got a few more developments to mention about my current "acting" career and it looks like things are starting to get a bit busy in that department. As you may or may not know (or those who wittle away time reading this blog may know) I'm currently doing acting classes that will lead up to another Patter Merchants performance in late November, and in addition to this I'm also doing some more classes with Iain McAleese on Monday nights (which have been fun, tomorrow night we will do a ensemble piece from Brecht). And last week I got a reply from Bruce Downie who runs the Radio Theatre Group who has offered me smaller roles in two of his radio plays! As part of their Suspense season the RTG will be doing 3 old radio plays. So naturally I'm a bit excited by all this but it does seem all things definitely do happen at once.

The Radio Theatre Group has been something I've been trying to find out and get into for a while so I'm quite chuffed to get to be a part of it, it also means I'll get to peform live at the Ramshorn Theatre (a bit of a step up from Gramofon's small space! gulp!) with script in hand and performing with an old fashioned radio mic. I will have 3 nightly rehearsals this week and 2 next week for the first radio play, so I kind of know to what expect as I previously had audtioned round at Bruce's flat (where the rehearsals will take place). The roles as I said are smaller ones but fairly sizeable nonetheless so I'm looking forward to making a start on them. So we'll see how it goes, at any rate its more acting experience and that's what counts. I'll post up more details as they follow and as our rehearsals progress. So in the meantime stay alert and we'll keep you in.... suspense!!!

Patter Merchants update and Iain!

2008-10-09T23:29:00.002+01:00

Well on the Patter Merchants front I've managed to get one scene together for it with Felicity from our group (or Fliss) as we will be doing a scene from an old play He Who Gets Slapped (Bill vetoed Hedda Gabler), where I will play the part of a clown, so yes that means I will need to dress up as a clown and get wear make-up and get slapped! Its all in the name of fun, I just I hope I don't get dermatitis!! But well you've got suffer for your art I suppose.

Trying to source the second is proving a bit more difficult I have another scene in mind but our tutor Bill has reservations about my ability to pull it off, ah well, to be fair it could be a difficult scene (from The Glass Menagerie) to stage convincingly. I supposed as actors you need to learn to walk before you run when it comes to tackling the more challenging scenes. However there are times (and no offence to Bill) that he doesn't provide much encouragement for his students and it would be nice to get that from him from time to time. Its also proven quite difficult this time round to even source appropriate material ourselves that is suitable for the group, as plenty of scenes have been "vetoed".

Oh and onto my second lot of acting classes with Iain McAleese, as I had my first class with him there on Monday and it was very good, nice to be working with Iain again, as I have to say he is very down to earth and (yes) encouraging to people. At times Iain can of course be a bit full-on and give alot of direction (and by that I mean he can interrupt you quite a bit) but he definitely is very helpful and I'm pleased to be working with him again. So far its been good fun getting into messing around with improv and next week we'll learn a bit more about Bertholt Brecht (the German playwright). After that its back to chewing over which scenes we'd like to do again in Iain's group. So it might be about time get some duologue books methinks.

Killing Joke and (wait for it...) MORE classes!

2008-10-04T11:07:00.003+01:00

On Thursday night I went to see Killing Joke at the ABC (this is the 4th gig I'll have seen at the ABC this year! Which means all the gigs I've seen this year were at the ABC) and I'm pleased they were bloody good. I don't know a vast amount of their material but thankfully I managed to recognise most of the songs they played and they sure did a great set. Gaz Coleman the lead singer is a really good front man, albeit he does look pretty scary with that make-up on, a cross between Beetlejuice and The Joker (and maybe a little bit of Marilyn Manson). The audience I have to say was a bit of strange one too, loads of guys in their late 40's and early 50's by the looks of it, some goths of course and even some guys wearing leather jackets dancing away as if they were listening to ska (or something else!). Overall though it was easily one of the best gigs I've seen this year, Killing Joke were excellent.

Oh and guess what? Yes I shall be doing MORE acting classes, starting on Monday I'll be doing a new set with one of our previous tutors Iain McAleese, who has been very good to work with so I think it will be a case of bringing our own suggested scenes to the group (Iain will provide some too should we need them, which I might!). However the Patter Merchants group is proving a bit more difficult this time round, mainly because we have to choose our own scenes too and it is a bit tricky trying to find something suitable. We will all have to do our own little bit to pitch in to help Scott with organising certain things which is fine as it will help take some pressure off the organising for him. Anyway the next Patter Merchants peformances will be in late November so I'm hoping it will go as well as the last set did. Depending on how this one goes I doubt there will be another one until next year anyway (and if there is another after this one I will definitely take a break I think for some breathing space). But its all infront of us for now, so we'll see how it goes.

Patter Merchants reconvene and Wipeout in HD!

2008-10-01T08:26:00.003+01:00

The second round of the Patter Merchants started (rather the classes for them did) there on Sunday and Bill again will be directing and tutoring us so it was an entertaining first class which featured clown work, running around like a well... clown trying to entertain the rest of the group. Later on we sat in a group circle (in chairs no less!) and brought to the group table what scenes we would like to do, I brought in a couple, one being a scene from Hedda Gabler, which I read through with Wilma and the other was a scene from Closer (by Patrick Marber) which was more adult and had some rather dirty language in it. I'm a bit concerned about the language factor (i.e. for the audience) so I'm considering not doing the Closer scene, so I will inspect for other scenes to bring. Of course plenty of the other scenes brought to the group had loads of swearing in them!

Oh and finally I was chuffed to see the release at last of Wipeout HD for the PS3 and I'm pleased to say its really good, with lovely new graphics, some really good race tracks, and the only thing that let's it down are some of the piss poor music tracks, they could have selected them a bit better. But its great that you can purchase and download new games for PS3 as it does save on time and to an extent your wallet too (Wipeout HD only costs £11.99). Its already the most addictive game I've played in a while, so if you own a PS3 (and a decent broadband service) you should buy it.

Right enough for now, back to work.... :((

The Patter Merchants ermm triumph!

2008-09-19T00:41:00.002+01:00

Well I'm just in from the second (and last) of our little acting groups performances up at Gramofon Bistro, or as we are better known as, The Patter Merchants and I'm pleased to say its been great fun to do. I have to say though the first night personally was more fun than the second, but both nights were very enjoyable to be a part of. I have to give credit to the entire group as they all performed brilliantly and also a big shout should go out to Bill, our director and tutor who gave us much invaluable help along the way.

Onto my scene which was The Virtuous Burglar by Dario Fo (Italian playwright) which was an Italian farce (which was translated into English for our audience of course!) and I played out the scene as a the burglar (complete with stripey top, ski cap and velvet gloves to create the illusion) with Judith as my nagging wife phoning me up sick with worry (she stole the scene of course!). But it was great fun to do, and thankfully we all got some nice feedback from some of the people who came along. Other scenes that stood out included Blood Brothers (written by Willy Russell) who were played by Tim and Barry (both great!) Educating Rita (also Willy Russell) played out by Nathan and Pamela (again great and guess who played who??) and Alan and Wilma who did a comedy scene called Skullduggery (you'll never look at policemen the same way again).

Scott our group organiser also deserves major credit for making this happen, and also as an actor as he acted the hell out of his two scenes (The Magic Tree and Fields of Glass) both of which were very dramatic and powerful scenes to play. All the other scenes were also great by the group (but mine and Judith's was the best ha ha! Kidding!). Everyone deserves equal praise for pulling off our 2 night stint, hopefully our next one will be just as entertaining. We should be doing another Gramofon performance in November hope hope, so keep a lookout, in the meantime we'll need to get our acting skates on again and find some scenes to do for it. But its been a real pleasure to finally get to perform live on stage (or in a space at least!). Bring on the next un!

Gramofon looms...

2008-09-16T08:21:00.002+01:00

Well my performances at the Gramofon Bistro are definitely looming now as tomorrow night I shall take the small stage (or space) and perform my scene, gulp! To be honest though despite the nerves I am really looking forward to this, it should hopefully be a good laugh for everyone involved (and hopefully not too painful for our audience!). Tonight our group will have its final rehearsal (also a dress rehearsal!) up at Lansdowne Church, which is fine but its a pity we couldn't use the Gramofon venue but sadly it shuts early tonight so it wouldn't be practical to use. So I'll see how we get on tonight, so far the scene is coming along fine, but I will keep schtoom in regards to what its about. Whatever happens it should be a laugh (with emphasis on the word "should"). Ah well cue the black velvet curtain...

Hellboy II oh and a little showcase(!)

2008-09-06T10:29:00.002+01:00

Again of late I haven't really posted much up on my blog, this has been a mixture of extreme laziness and well other things (but probably mainly the first one). But I thought I would write up about a couple of things. First off I thought I'd like to mention me and my acting chums are going to be doing a little "showcase" performance at a little venue in town called Gramofone which has a small rehearsal space which we shall use for our performances (with the emphasis on little!). I won't divulge too much about what scene I am going to be doing at present but I'm hoping it will turn out quite well and pray that it goes down well too and that we (or I) don't get booed off the stage (or space). So I look forward to it very much with a slight sense of dread (which will grow into full blown terror!) but I guess that is natural. Also on the acting front one or two other things might be coming up but I'm not fully sure what they will be yet so I'll post more when I know.

On Thursday I went and saw Hellboy II: The Golden Army, which I thoroughly enjoyed, I'm not sure its actually better than the first film and I know some critics didn't like the first one as much but I really did like the first Hellboy. Ron Pearlman is again great as Hellboy, no one else could pull off playing that part as well, and despite his red skin and sanded down horns (or in other words his outwardly demonic appearance), he IS the good guy. But Hellboy II is definitely funnier, it contains some really funny moments such as Hellboy's stand off against a big monster with a BIG hand kind of like his, also a scene where Hellboy gets schooled by the new goodie and FBI supernatural expert Dr Krauss (voiced by none other than Seth McFarlane!). It was also good to see a little cameo from John Hurt reprising his role as Dr Broom, and Selma Blair looks kind of hot with her new haircuit (although I don't really rate her much as an actress). The surprise inclusion of Luke Goss of 80's pop duo Bros (he finally IS famous) also worked well as he plays the main baddie with enough moves to shame Jet Li (OK perhaps its a stunt double!). I felt perhaps the overall tone of Hellboy II though was at times just a little bit too comical but I enjoyed it so much it didn't really matter, it is a great Saturday night movie (or Thursday depending when you see it) and a fine sequel.

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrright that's all for now.

Edinburgh Festival and little bit of acting (just a bit)

2008-08-18T20:45:00.002+01:00

I haven't written much up on my blog of late so I figured since I was at the Edinburgh Festival there on Saturday that I'd write up about that. The festival was good fun as I went through with some of my acting pals and we all had a good day, one of the highlights being seeing our noted star actor Scott, perform in a Fringe play, Absinthe, which (careful what I say here!) was entertaining but very cheesey, sadly I missed most of Scott's performance (no thanks to British Rail keeping me late!) and saw the last third act which was without Scott, and it did suffer somewhat without him in it as Scott was as watchable as he ever is (I need to get his autograph!).

The rest of the day was fun too as we went and had lunch than drank some, and later we saw another play, The Magic Tree, which was written by a friend of Felicity's (fellow actress in our class, who isn't a fellow). The play was quite heavy in tone and the first act was quite impressive as the small cast, gave powerful performaces, as it centred on a girl who wished to seek refuge in a deserted house, but then she encounters a young man, who tries to befriend her, but in a twist two of his friends later show up with the intent to rape her, the young man then must decide whether he can let his "friends" go through with it. Thematically the first half is fairly complex as its not straightforward the intentions of the young guy, but the second half ruined it for me somewhat, as the reality of the situation was thrown out the window, when the young guy takes the would-be raped girl to Thailand for a holiday (most assault victims would most probably run a mile than be with the accomplice to a crime!). The ending also left me confused as to what actually happened, sometimes I think writers like to leave things ambiguous for audiences but this isn't always a good thing.

Anywayy the rest of the day was also good fun as we drank our body weights (ok not quite) and then headed for home, although it did take me until nearly 5 am to get home!

And on a final note I've been doing yet another acting class with the usual crew (and some new people who Scott worked with on a Citizens Theatre group class) which so far has been good but a little dissappointing at times. The Citizen group have been great and are a nice bunch of people to work with but our current tutor, Davey McGowan, who is a professional actor we've been getting for the past 5 weeks, isn't really a proper tutor in my opinion. Davey (no offence Davey) quite often spends too much time talking about the objectives of the scene we are supposed to do rather than let us work in our pairs, so much of the time in our classes has been wasted, with maybe 5 to 10 minutes of scene acting and improv from each pair and Davey talking for maybe about an hour and a half per average a night! I don't mean to criticise Davey, clearly he is an experienced actor, and it is good to hear the personal experience of a trained actor, but when people have paid money to show up and perform in a group and don't get a chance (as half the group have just sat and listened to him for 2 to 3 weeks in a row!) it is a waste of the group's time. Thankfully the last 3 weeks of our classes will see us return to Bill Wright, who is a great tutor and knows how to keep things simple without too much chat, he also makes sure everyone gets up and participates in the class, which is exactly the sort of thing you need in an acting class.

Anywayyyyy that was a big long rant, so that's all I have for now. More to follow later...

Dark K(night)

2008-07-31T00:19:00.002+01:00

I went and saw the highly anticipated and much hyped sequel to Batman Begins on Tuesday night there, The Dark Knight, and I'm pleased to say it did live up to my expectations. The plot this time round is quite involved (and covers alot of ground) but to sum up Batman faces a new set of villains, both mob bosses and a more fearsome enemy who calls himself "The Joker" (superbly played by the late Heath Ledger) who wants to make his mark as the new crime boss of Gotham. The Joker threatens to kill one person every day until Batman turns himself in, which he duly does but of course Batman doesn't give in too easily. However on a personal level Bruce Wayne also comes up against a new hero in Gotham, Harvey Dent (Aaron Erckhart), the new DA who doesn't mess around with criminals in court, and he also just happens to be dating Rachel Dawes, Bruce's ex-sweetheart (played more solidly by Maggie Gyllenhall). As events progress all their fates intertwine as Gotham once again spirals out of control.

Christopher Nolan, is a film maker of a rare quality in that he hasn't made a single bad Hollywood movie ever since he's arrived in America. This film is no exception and carries the same thrilling momentum as Batman Begins did, again taking a very dark, at times bleak tone, but thankfully Nolan never spoils Batman or forgets to make it fun. The action and setting maybe more realistic but there is still plenty of dark witty humour in the script. I also like how Nolan puts his characters in real danger and when you think all is lost it gets turned round. Nolan should also be applauded for reinforcing Batman's humanity as his Batman is a moral avenger who didn't believe in killing, unlike Tim Burton's Batman, who was more than willing to take lives.

Performance wise of course this film is all about Heath Ledger, his Joker, is both chilling and amusing all at once, his creepy facial makeup really makes your skin crawl when you see him, despite plenty of unsettling chilled moments, Ledger's joker is also funny, just not overtly so, and he does provide one of the film's biggest laughs (involving a pencil!). He could well be up for a posthumous oscar nomination next year, its just a real shame that he won't be there to receive it. Christian Bale again puts in a decent turn as Batman but I must admit Bale as an actor is caught between two extremes, as Bruce Wayne he mutters quietly under his breath, as Batman he talks very huskily under his breath (just a bit too husky methinks!). Nonetheless he is still the best Batman since Michael Keaton. Aaron Eckart is (as always) worthy of note as he puts in a really good performane as Harvey Dent (later becoming Two Face) and he neatly balances the self righteous goodie with his tormented and twisted transformation into the half-scolded Two Face. My only let down here was we didn't get to see enough from Two Face (or perhaps we did!) as he didn't appear enough to justify his character.

Anyways regardless of any minor niggles, The Dark Knight is an excellent sequel and a great continuance of the rebirth of the Batman franchise and here's hoping that Chris Nolan helms the next one.

Back from Oireland (well four days ago!)

2008-07-15T22:46:00.003+01:00

I was over in Ireland last week with the family (i.e. the folks) to Buncrana in Co Donegal, and it was actually quite a pleasant little holiday, we took the bus, so it took about 9 straight hours to get there, so it was a rather long haul. The only snag for me on the holiday was much to my embarrassment most of the passengers were OAPs so I did feel just a little bit out of place on the bus. Nevertheless the experience of Ireland itself pretty enjoyable, it was nice to be in another country for a change.

Over the five days we were there (OK four and a bit) we went to different places such as Letterkenny (which was rather nice), Dunlewy (which was OK), Doagh which was rather stunning (home of the Doagh Famine Village which we were given a tour of, and turned out to be fascinating). We also travelled to Derry (or Londonderry) which any of you who has been to Derry will see the sign posts that say "Londonderry" with London sprayed out. This has caused alot of controversy within the city of Derry itself as catholic and protestant factions in the city remain divided on whether the city should be associated with London given its history. We were also given a tour of the city by a rather passionate speaker, who spoke frankly of the city's historical troubles with the British army and the IRA and it was rather scary to hear that the army presence hadn't fully left Derry until last year! To look at it now Derry seems such a thriving place to be in and its seems difficult to believe it has had such past troubles, but you could still get a feel for its past time trauma especially with the murals of Bloody Sunday shown in one of the urban streets. The final trip we did though was Donegal town, which was very nice indeed.

So overall it was nice stay if you can forgive the Irish's over indulgence when it comes to food (this time though I could handle it! Unlike the last time in Dublin) and its insistence on using the Euro and Pounds (just to confuse you!) in the South and North, I'd recommend a jaunt over there.

It isn't easy being a Time Lord

2008-07-06T22:20:00.002+01:00

The finale of the fourth season of Doctor Who, Journey's End, was a pretty solid and entertaining episode although I would hardly say it was magnificent but it was nice to see all the companions finally meet up with one another. But I did have a few problems with this episode, mainly the exposition again from David Tennan was rattled off very quickly, so you'd need to rewind to try and catch it, I also had a hard time trying to follow all the gobbledegook from Davros aswell and what the "reality bomb" actually did to the humans. I don't know if Russell T Davies just delights in confusing his audience but he certainly does do a good job of it. As usual I have to rely on Wikipedia to decipher half the stuff that's in the plot! The Donna Doctor thing from the Ood episode did finally also pay off but I felt it was just a bit naff how big a deal they make of it at the end, that this one woman who was a big loudmouth who by her own admission couldn't wire a plug, could be so important, with the Doctor saying "in planets all around the universe they are singing songs about her". Come on.

However there were plenty of good things about this episode aswell, I enjoyed watching the "human" grown version of the Doctor make his entrance, which was very funny with a startled Donna watching the naked new human Doctor, she says "You're naked!" and the Doctor replies "Oh yes!". Julian Bleach did a fine job as Davros despite not reaching the perfectly modulated heights of hysteria and madness that Michael Wisher brough to the role in Genesis of the Daleks. Also I found the end of the episode very compelling and at the same quite poignant as all the companions say their farewells, and Donna with her (PLOT SPOILER) newly binded Time Lord DNA in her head killing her as its simply too much for one human to deal with. So the Doctor takes her back home and wipes her mind of any memory of the Doctor and her travels with him as reawakening those memories would spark off her Time Lord DNA again and kill her. It was the first companion since Zoe and Jamie (back in the Patrick Troughton days) who's had to have their memories erased, so even though Donna was back to her original self absorbed shrill self, she would never remembered all the good she had done as the new and improved Donna throughout the season. So it was kind of sad to see, although it does get a bit schmaltzy at the end between Bernard Cribbins (as Donna's father) and the Doctor at the end.

Ah well that's another season over, overall this was a rather good one, again though there were some episodes better than others, but it was mainly very entertaining. The casting of Catherine Tate actually turned out to be the season's biggest success as she really surprised me with her dramatic acting abilities, which actually outweigh her talents as a comedian. So it would be great to see her do some drama in the future rather than just duff comedy (OK to be fair I liked her in Big Train). So that's it until Christmas, where we'll get another special, this time with the Cybermen! I just hope its better than that turd fest we got last year with Kylie Minogue (she definitely wouldn't get an OBE for that!!).

Stolen planets

2008-06-29T15:55:00.002+01:00

The penultimate episode of Dr Who season 4 was I have to say really a rather good one, with just about the whole cast of companions coming back into the fore, The structure of the episode was actually a bit busy but thankfully things keeping flowing along nicely as the story jumps between the different characters. So it was great to see the return of Captain Jack (and his 2 remaining Torchwood crewmembers) Sarah Jane, Martha, and of course Rose (again). With all the planets in the local constellation being pulled together the Doctor and Donna are trapped in the TARDIS in desperate need to get back to Earth and with no real way to contact any of his companions, not to mention a whole army of Daleks on their way to harvest Earth, and to top it off with the return of their evil creator, Davros, just how could things get any worse?

I felt this episode was definitely one of the strongest ones of the season so far, my only problem with it is I found it hard to follow some of the exposition that was going on as David Tennant was rattling it off about 100 miles an hour, its definitely one you'd need to play back on your iPlayer to get the gist of. Its really good to see all the companions back again and the surprise return of Penelope Wilton as Harriet Jones "former Prime Minister" (still flashing her credentials!). Another slight niggle though is that this episode assumed that people were fans of all the spin-off shows in order to get some of the references, as otherwise I struggled to identify who was that boy with Sarah Jane (until she said who he was) and what's that home defence tech system she has? Also having not watched Torchwood in a while (since the beginning really!) I didn't get who that guy was with Captain Jack either. OK and another slight niggle seeing the return of Davros was good, and Julian Bleach did a fair job as him but it didn't quite scale the heights of Michael Wisher's fantastic original performance, but it would be a tough act to follow. My niggle with Davros though is if he used his body to regrow his Dalek force wouldn't have no body left at all? There is quite a lot of them!

Anywayyy one of the highlights of the episode of course was seeing The Doctor running towards Rose to reunite with her, only to have their wonderful moment ruined by a Dalek, which brings up what will happen next week in the finale? And who is going to die next week? We'll find out.

The works of Grotowski and Turning Left

2008-06-23T11:25:00.002+01:00

Sunday is called the day of rest, well for me yesterday was a Sunday unlike any other in recent memory as I did an acting workshop with our group, and out tutor Bill Wright, who put us through the mill of punishment ha ha. Actually it was a really good day as in the morning we worked on text and "action" i.e. putting the actions into the text we read, its not as easy as it sounds, but it was great fun to play and do infront of the group. And we were given a scene to do from a play which I acted out with Judith from our group (who is hilarious and very talented I might add) using an actors theasurus book to help us come up with words or intentions to put into the text, this worked quite but only up to a point as we only got so far with coming up with words to use. It was a bit like a crossword for actors. Bored yet?

Anyway in the second of the day punishment came to town in the form physical work, Bill used the methods of the Polish Theatre director, Jerzy Grotowski, and had us basically run round the room in different ways, leaping, jumping, crawling on all fours etc, it was very demanding stuff. Later we had to use the actions we worked on to incorporate them into our text or monologue, I chose to do a scene from the Alan Bleasdale drama GBH and I did find it tough to combine the movements with the text but I think overall I did OK. So suffice to say today I'm feeling a bit done in with cramp in both legs, it was a really good day though I would do it again but not in a hurry.

Anywayyy moving onto the Doctor Who Episode 11, Turn left, which was a rather good episode, Russell T Davies despite having had many ego attacks writing on this show, making it as cheesy and camp as possible, he does best when he writes episodes that challenge the format of the show. Turn Left certainly does that to an extent by taking a "What if" scenario and expanding it into a story, the story being what if Donna never met the Doctor. The result of this of course is the Doctor dies and all the bad things that happen on planet Earth happen because he isn't alive to prevent them. But then Donna receives a strange visitation from a familiar face, Rose Tyler who tells her she will die at some point and the Universe is in danger.

This episode was a nice departure from the norm and to be perfectly honest some of these episodes work better without David Tennant's larger than life Doctor persona all over them (no offence David you still are good!). The real surprise in fact of this episode and this show is actually Catherine Tate as she proves more than anything she can act. This episode is hers and yeah ok there are a couple of typical loud shrill "Donna" moments but she carries this episode on her own. Another fine example of her acting was actually in the Pompeii episode aswell where she begs the Doctor to save the greeks from the Volcanic eruption (OK I degress). But she can handle the emotional serious scenes very well. It was also great to see the return of Rose Tyler, Billie looking great as usual, her scenes with Donna were excellent. But the highlight of this episode had to be the end where that familiar phrase is uttered again "Bad Wolf". Next week's looks very interesting. My only hope is that Russell T Davies doesn't crucify the ending.

Midnight??

2008-06-21T10:33:00.002+01:00

Having just recently watched the 10th episode of Doctor Who, Midnight, I'm struggling to fathom what it was actually all about?? The Doctor and Donna go to the lovely idyllic looking planet Midnight, where Donna decides to chill out at the baths and the Doctor goes on a shuttle ride over the planet, but as usual things go horribly awry on the flight, as an unknown outside influence tries make its way into the ship.

This episode was to be a fair a good change of pace, with the Doctor and Donna separated from each other for most of it, and also no TARDIS aswell. But I really did struggle to get to grips with what it was actually about, the outside evil influence whatever it was, was never identified and where did it come from? What did it have to kill the crewmembers and try and absorb them? I understand being Dr Who evil always has to be afoot and has to do something but in this episode it just wasn't clear what was going on. So by the end I was somewhat baffled and a bit annoyed again by the lack of explanation or exposition, there seems to be a fair bit of that in this year's episodes. Its good to have a bit of mystery but to honest if the mystery ends up just confounding then why bother? Achhh anyway, the next episode Turn Left, looks really promising and sees the return of a familiar blonde haired campanion: Rose.

The Apprentice finale

2008-06-18T22:55:00.002+01:00

Well well well, I'm finally getting to writing about The Apprentice finale which was on last week, so a week late eh??! Ah well a lot has been happening, well OK not really but sort of. Enough gibbering get on with the Apprentice then...

Well I was somewhat underwhelmed by the final to be honest, the task itself was pretty unremarkable to watch, design and pitch a new perfume to wholesalers of perfume. The two teams actually both worked fairly well, and we saw the return of six ex-apprentices who actually all contributed well enough to the teams without too much moaning and bitching. The main bitching actually came from Alex and Helenne, two of the finalists who just couldn't agree on anything together! Alex kept suggesting names for perfume bottles and Helenne just kept knocking them back, and she didn't suggest anything herself! To be fair to Alex he did come up with the unique idea of making the bottle design, into a kind of two-part giveway thingy (I don't know much about perfume of course!). But Helenne did sweet FA as usual, I really don't know why she was in the final in the first place! Even ex-apprentice Jennifer commented and said Helenne should be happy to be in the final but she just looked miserable and stressed out. Claire and Lee definitely worked a whole lot better together than Alex and Helenne did, although Lee did feel the pressure mount on him went it neared time for the presentation, something which he does struggle at. But when it came to the presentation Claire and Lee's presentation was by far the better one, Claire I have to say did really well and Lee redeemed himself and kept it together. Alex and Helenne's presentation was pretty bland and they also used some really irritating music to plug it aswell!

But in the boardroom Sir Alan thankfully chose the right two candidates to fire first, Alex and Helenne, they really didn't deserve to win, although I did feel a bit of sympathy for Alex as he drove away in the taxi in tears. Out of the two finalists, Lee and Claire, I really did feel Sir Alan did have a tough choice, they were both really good, strong capable candidates but I really felt Sir Alan did make the right decision, Lee did deserve to win. He was far more level headed and seemed to have a better capacity to listen to someone than Claire did, if Claire did win she probably would have just gotten on Sir Alan's nerves in no time at all, but she would have probably done a real good job. So that's another series over and it was one of the best yet despite a somewhat lacklustre finale, but thankfully I felt the right man won.

Ghosts in the library

2008-06-14T15:20:00.002+01:00

Managed to finally get round to watching the latest two part Dr Who story, Silence in the library and the Forest of the Dead. The first part where the Doctor and Donna turn up in a futuristic library with absolutely no one in sight was fairly creepy in places but then Professor River Song (Alex Kingston, still looking good!) turns up in a spacesuit with some crew members also suited up who are trying to make sense of the mysterious forces in the library. To top things off Professor Song seems to know the Doctor rather well (initmately it seems) or at least in the future, but the Doctor has no idea who she is (as he hasn't met her yet!).

The first episode was fairly OK but kind of lacked any real intruige and I felt a bit tired of the storyline by the end of the episode, as the Doctor mainly runs around (again) spouting out confusing expositionary dialogue. The second part picked up the pace a bit more and turned out to be a more satisfying conclusion to the story, with writer Steve Moffat making clever use of technology to "save" people, to quote Professor Song a "Spoiler" is coming: the library has stored all the saved people into its massive hard drive (probably explains all the fragmented scenes with Donna and her hubby and kids in the fantasy world or hard drive). And its up to the Doctor and River Song to get them out.

Overall this story wasn't a bad one, the first half was a bit dissapponting but the second episode certainly makes up for it. Alex Kingston does really well in her role as Professor Song but I was left a bit annoyed at just how little she gave away as to how she knew the Doctor, the only thing the Doctor lets slip is that she knows his real name which she whispered into his ear earlier in the 2nd part. I guess they just like keeping the mystery in all things. To be honest does it really matter what the Doctor's real name is, it could be something either really mundane or unpronouncable (it could even be Phartifukballs!! that was Slartibartfast's original name!). Anywayyss Midnight is coming up next, with the Doctor taking a rather dangerous looking shuttle bus journey. Looks promising from the trailer.

The Apprentice Episode 11 and an annoyance

2008-06-04T22:57:00.002+01:00

Episode 11 of The Apprentice promised to be a great one and it was rather, as it was the episode we all were dying to see, the interviews. The final five contestants went up against four of Sir Alan's most trusted interviewers who proceeded to grill them all in their own unique ways. So we got the usual bulldog nastiness from Paul Kelmsley (the big heavy gruff one with designer stuble) and Claude Litner (the highly cynical older bald one) and thankfully a bit more restraint and incredible shrewdness from Borden (the beardy one) and a nice interviewer this time Karren (who managed Manchester City football grounds or something at the age of 23) who didn't bitch and goad anyone.

The apprentices actually all did fairly well in their interviews, apart from Lucinda who really did bark up the wrong tree with Claude and Paul, who really got her gander up and brought out Lucinda's aggressive side. But they did raise an excellent point, why is she here? If she enjoys working as a contractor and already earns 100 grand why go work for Sir Alan? Lee did struggle a bit in his interviews, he did well enough with Paul, but Borden dropped a clanger on him by bringing up issues of his education, where he lied on his CV about completing a course that took 2 years but he dropped out after 4 months. Claude also picked up Lee on his CV's various spelling errors as Lee clearly seems to be dyslexic, but to be entirely honest being mildly dyslexic myself I don't think it really should hinder his chances. Alex was less impressive in his interviews as he really kept repeating himself by saying he was so young at being just "24" all the time, in fact Paul just spent most of his interview saying how boring Alex was until he said something about his past that was laudible. Helenne on the other hand probably realising just how crap she has been in the previous 10 weeks decided to go "balls out" so to speak and give her all in the interviews and she ended up being in virtually all the interviewers good books!! If only they had seen her over the past 10 weeks tasks!! But it does appear that with Helenne that task performance doesn't count so much as boardroom and interview performance.

After much deliberation with the four interviewers Sir Alan, it gave him some feedback on who should stay and go, and shockingly enough it was mostly all positive apart from Lucinda. And in the end Sir Alan made up his mind and decided to fire the colourful, fussy yet likeable Lucinda. I felt this was a fair decision though, she was an excellent team leader but she didn't work very well within a team, she was too whiny and hindered the teams more at times than helped them, shame cos she was doing really well mid-way throughout the program, but I think the last two weeks tasks sealed her fate to be honest. But I am shocked at Sir Alan's decision to keep the four remaining candidates as finalists, I mean what is he exactly playing at here? Helenne should have gone for sure in my opinion and I could almost see him fire her there and then but he didn't, so he must be going soft! Alex also rather unpleasantly brought up Lucinda's doubts in the boardroom about accepting whether she wanted the job or not, something which he shouldn't have done. I mean this boy has already backstabbed in the past, he tried to fire Claire twice and he usually takes any opportunity to raise something that will try get someone fired, not good in my book. However I'm quite pleased Claire is in the finale, she has come along way from the gobby big-mouth from earlier weeks, but then again during the interviews that side of her came out again, so has it all just been an act to adapt herself so she can't get through then become all gobby again? Maybe. Lee however I'm well chuffed to see in the final, he's a good all round guy, he can also hold up his hands to making mistakes and has consistently performed better than any other candidate (apart from Claire of course) and deserves to win more than anyone. So next week should be interesting....

Now quickly onto an annoyance: Paypal suck ass, they really are getting on my wick, they have introduced a new policy where any payments are made through ebay buyers to sellers, won't be processed until the buyer has left feedback for the seller or 21 days has gone by without feedback. I mean this really is a bloody swindle, I'd also probably question the legality of what Paypal are doing in this instance. If someone has made a payment to a seller, Paypal should have absolutely no right to withold that payment in fact I think its f-ing disgraceful! This is clearly a problem since some buyers clearly don't remember to leave feedback for some items or probably don't even bother, which means I will need to email them all in future in order to secure payment. Shocking! I hope there are some serious complaints made about this as Paypal repeal this stupid decision. Annoyingly enough on ebay sellers can no longer leave negative or neutral feedback for buyers, which is also really annoying, it gives the buyers alot more rights than the sellers, and leaves out the possibility that some buyers might take the piss in regards to making payment. I don't think its right that sellers on ebay should be biased by either Paypal or Ebay. So let's hope something get's done about this. Rant over.

Public Enemy oh and Apprentice Episode 10!

2008-05-30T18:33:00.002+01:00

Oh yeah be meaning to write up about Public Enemy (or PE to their fans) who played ABC in Glasgow on Tuesday and after a ridiculously long wait (nearly 2 and a half hours!) for them to come on the stage they were utterly amazing. They played (and rapped) with the energy of about 100 bands combined and Chuck D and Flavor Flav were both superb on great form, with some good stage banter in between tracks (I liked Chuck D's conspiracy theory that the Queen killed Diana!). They did, rightly enough, get pissed off at all the beer that was thrown at the stage, assholes that do that shouldn't really be at gigs. My only complaint is of course they started way too late so we had to leave early before they finished to get home. Other than that though PE were awesome, go and see them, just make sure you go for a pint or three before you do as you will have one might long wait.

Onto the Apprentice episode 10, which was another fine one which finally saw the kicking of a certain extremely arrogant person out of the show. The task this time was to rent fast cars to people on the street for a few hours ride round London. This task was one of the toughest without a doubt, selling to anyone can't be easy but it was a real test of the stronger candidates to sell well. However Lucinda, who I have to say over the past two weeks has sadly averted back to her original self by being whiny and complaining about everything without even suggesting how to make things better. And on this task she was hopeless as she couldn't sell to save herself she needed team leader Lee, to hold her hand in order to even make a sale! Lee and Alex did manage alot better in their sales and they proved very capable. On the other team though Michael as project manager was totally useless, he had hit rock bottom and clearly had no enthusiasm for fast cars (or cars for that matter) he setup the car to be sold at Portobello Market where there are absolutely no affluent rich well to do people there!! When he did see a customer he had to resort to stalking him and ended up failing to secure a single sale. However Claire did manage a fair bit better and secured a few sales at a much better location I might add!
In the boardroom having found Lee's team won again and Michael's lost, Sir Alan finally let go of his soft spot for the young upstart and had him fired, and not at a moment too soon. Michael had long outstayed his welcome in the program, it was only his arrogant attitude and puppy dog eyes routine in the boardroom that kept him in the show. But he clearly didn't have enough talent for sales to stay in the show, even though he claimed he was best salesman in the show!!! Yeah with only one year's work experience. Pathetic. However I felt Helenne was equally useless on this show, over the past 10 weeks she has proved to be thoroughly inefficient, she basically does nothing but stand around idle and watch other people do things. In the boardroom she did justify herself fairly well enough to Sir Alan and put up a enough of a struggle to keep herself in, just barely. But I basically feel she is useless, her attitude is all wrong towards the other contestants as she clearly has no respect for any of them whatsoever (as she said "I can't stand being in a show with 15 gobshites!"). Well if she can't stand to work with these people then how can she expect to stand working in a team for Sir Alan?!! She is on borrowed time for sure and she will go first next week after the interview process, well either her or Lucinda. So my money is on Claire and Lee for the final, perhaps maybe Alex or Claire even, but I sincerely hope its Lee instead, he's far more animated and capable. Anyways the interview episode will be a real highlight next week so I can't wait to see it. It will be really interesting to see who will get through to the final.

The Curse of Agatha Christie

2008-05-29T00:43:00.002+01:00

I've not been able to fully write up about the 7th episode of the new series of Dr Who as the last time I did the friggin Internet cut out on me and it didn't save the post! So here goes...

I really enjoyed this episode where the Doctor and Donna meet up with Agatha Christie at a dinner party back in 1926 round about the same time as her mysterious real life dissappearance and this time they have to thwart off a big killer giant wasp as it kills off the inhabitants of a mansion one by one. So in fine super sleuth style, the Doctor and Agatha try to deduce who exactly was the murderer.

This episode was really enoyable from start to finish I liked the use of Agatha Christie's real life disappearance which was smartly woven into the storyline. The best scene occurred when the Doctor is poisoned and he describes to Donna while gasping for breath what he needs to expel the poison from his system, it was a real laugh. This is of course followed up by the obligatory kissing scene, added to every season, it must be a contractual thing for David Tennant that he has to get off with all of his campanions once! This is not too bad a thing as Russell T Davies always neatly uses the "kiss" for another reason altogether rather than just a bit of sexual tension.

But this was a really entertaining episode hopefully the next one Silence in the Library, which was postponed last Saturday because of the God awful Eurovision Song Contest, will be a good un, should be, its penned by Steven Moffatt, who has been rumoured to write the whole of the next new series of Who.

Don't believe the hype

2008-05-27T08:13:00.002+01:00

Well that's another bank holiday weekend over, and it was a rather nice one, as I went to the theatre for the first time in a little while and saw Drawer Boy with Scott (our main acting class organiser/thesp group actor) and it turned out to be pretty good although not quite as brilliant as everyone was saying it was. There seemed to be a lot of repetition in the script and there were times were I kind of lost attention but the actors were all excellent, especially Brian Pettifer, who's a veteran character actor who has been round for years (he started off I believe in Lindsay Anderson's If.....). The younger actor Brian Ferguson was also very good and he affected a rather unusual Canadian accent (to top it off with his wig he looked alot like Beck!).

On Sunday went to the Falls of Clyde in New Lanark with my cuz Dale and it was nice little day out, although I did pick up a midgie bite somewhere (on my face that is!) but scenery was stunning and the falls were lovely until you come across the rather ugly Scottish Power building and big reservoir pipes, which kind of put of a blight on the beauty of the site. After that we got a Lanark town curry which was excellent and then back to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which I have to admit was rather disappointing overall, it was entertaining with some good action scenes, but the plot was really naff and it got bogged down in it too much. It was nice to see the return of Karen Allen in it though but she was largely sidelined and wasn't given a whole lot to do except smile at the camera and dodge things.

Anywayyyyyy that was the weekend tonight I shall being going to see Public Enemy at the ABC, so we'll see if we should believe the hype. Oh and I hope Sir Alan finally fires Michael tonight in The Apprentice (which is on tonight!) but I doubt it somehow but you can live in hope.

An acting showcase (ermm of sorts)

2008-05-24T00:25:00.004+01:00

I haven't had much time to write up about my acting group lead under Iain McAleese's tuition (and direction) which as I've said before is really good and has been a bit more intense than any of the acting we've done so far. Our last night there featured a showcase from the group, which involved us in pairs doing scenes from either Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts or A Streetcar Named Desire (Tennesse Williams). My chosen scene was from Streetcar which I did with Judith, I played the downtrodden Mitch and Judith played the manipulative Blanche, and it was a really good scene, and thankfully I didn't manage to disgrace myself on the acting "physicality" side I managed to keep it together and Judith was terrific. Overall the class on the night were actually really great, especially one of younger members in our class, Gordon, who played a doddering drunken older character from Ghosts, and he was brilliant at it as he had so much dialogue to remember. Its great and refreshing to see in our class how many natural actors there are and that I am the best out the lot of them (as if!!! Big headed bullshit mode off). Nah. I jest, but seriously there are some really talented people in our group and I'm quite chuffed to be working with them. Iain wants to continue with the acting classes in a month's time, where he will aim to go a bit "deeper" than what we've already done, so it will be interesting to see how it goes...

So it was a great night and after we had some wine and nibbles (well OK i didn't take that many nibbles) followed by the pub and then a drunken wander towards a taxi rank, and I left the evening feeling rather chuffed (and slightly aroused! In short I kind of sort of got off with someone, and yes it was a female!).

So I look forward to the next acting classathon when it comes. In the meantime the Shakespeare in Practice classes have so far proved to be really good fun and our tutor Bill Wright is very good, who has a funny mixture of being laid back and intense at the same time (you might have seen him in small parts on Taggart! Well maybe). Righhhttt enough for noowww. I shall enjoy (or try to enjoy) the weekend. Going to see Drawer Boy at the Tron Theatre tomorrow so I may post a review of it here, if it floats the boat.

Sir Alan what??!!!

2008-05-22T19:10:00.002+01:00

Episode 9 of The Apprentice was highly entertaining and was a nice step up from the dissaponting episode of the previous week. The two teams had to come up with a brand of tissues, film an add for it and then pitch to tissue companies and guess who would be watching the final product?

The two teams both had very different dynamics, as Raef's team seemed to get on well with one another as Raef and Michael worked together on the filming of the add while Claire and Helenne worked out the production of the box and the sales pitch. Claire excelled herself at the pitch in the presentation, however I must admit that Raef on this task did appear a bit too up his on arse and full of his own self importance. However at least they got on better than as a team than Alex's, who lead (or totally mislead) Lee and Lucinda with a bland of idea of presenting a family using the box of tissues. Alex and Lucinda almost right from the get go didn't get on, but Lucinda was right in what she thought about the choice for the tissues, the family idea was bland, the box was too garish to look at (someone blowing their noses!). However Lee turned out to be far more impressive on the task than Lucinda and Alex put together, who just squabbled mainly, he came up with the "Atishu" name and he also tried to refocus the team when they argued, but his pitch was somewhat poor, as he seemed pretty flustered by all the people in the presentation.

The result of Alex's team winning was a bit of a surprise as it was hard to pick a winner out of either of those two products. Alex's product looked hideous (might aswell have someone blowing snot out their noses!) their add was pretty tacky and naff. However Raef's add was better directed but it completely missed out the point of product, i.e. the tissues! In the boardroom though Raef was shockingly put in the firing line and went, Sir Alan dismissed him as being nothing but "hot air". Raef has far more integrity than Michael who was also brought back into the boardroom too, as Michael lied by saying that all the good things about the task were attributed entirely to him. What a load of bullshit! I can't fathom why Michael is still in this show? Does Sir Alan really see this guy as the next Apprentice? I would be seriously worried if he turned round and picked him to win. To be honest if anyone deserves to win its Lee, who is totally straight down the line hard working, dedicated and tries his best to get on with everyone. Michael is just a bullshitter who's running on borrowed time, but somehow he's still there! Claire I have to say though has come good through this whole show, I didn't like her at first but I'm beginning to warm up to her as she doesn't resort to backstabbing and bullshitting the others, she just speaks her mind, so hopefully she will make it to the final, but then again Sir Alan might have it in for her. I did love Sir Alan's comment about her just before she was going to be called back into the boardroom "Claire will no doubt get her 500 rounds of bullshit and load it into her AK-47!". Priceless.

So again I feel Sir Alan made the wrong choice with firing the debonair Raef, he's a decent all round guy, he even made good entertaining TV and he was really capable, a bit too pretentious maybe but he was a real diplomat. A shame. Achh well bring on the next one!

Apprentice Episode 8

2008-05-16T00:21:00.002+01:00

The 8th episode of the Apprentice was actually a bit of a letdown in comparison to the excellent previous episodes, which kept building up the momentum of the show. Possibly because now most of the snakes have been ejected from the house (although there's still the odd one in there!) there is less "good TV" drama to watch. Nonetheless it was watchable.

This week's task was to sell wedding dresses to prospective female buyers and the team who made the most profit will win. The teams were both headed by Lucinda and Helenne. Now for the warning: episode SPOILER:

Yes the team that won was in fact headed by Lucinda, funnily enough, this is the second time she has been team leader and also the second time she had gotten credit for it. Lucinda's main strengths actually seem to lie in delegation as she got Claire to go out and supervise the buying of the dresses and which designer of the dresses to go with, and she also mixed in Lee with the selling of the wedding accessories, which worked out successfully too. And yet again despite Helenne's so called efficiency she was anything but efficient as a team leader, she seemed to make the wrong choices in cakes and accessories, the dresses were well sold by Alex (who acquitted himself again this week by making some good sales for Helenne's team). Michael and Sara also were not very good this week either as they both tried to push for the hard sale with their customers, in fact most of the customers felt intimidated and put off by their sales techniques.

In the boardroom though Sir Alan finally had had enough of Sara and her refusal to listen to people in the team and poor communication, and he had her fired. I didn't entirely feel this wasn't justified as Sara didn't perform very well in the task, she did push and try for the hard sale a bit much towards the end. In the long run I don't Sara could have been a serious contender for the show, as she said herself she felt she doesn't get on well within a team, but I found it quite encouraging when she said she would go and work for herself in the future, good for her.

But to honest Michael was far worse, he practically intimidated a woman customer at one point into buying a cake, which just put the customer off even more! The fact Michael wasn't fired by Sir Alan shows he still must have a soft spot for this boy, after he pleaded to stay and to be made project manager again next week. But clearly Sir Alan was getting fed up with Michael's whole admittance to his mistakes and the "I'll never do it again" attitude, and I'm sincerely hoping that his number is up pretty soon, as I really don't want him to win, given the look Nick gave Sir Alan after he let him go, Sir Alan would be mad to let him away with it again! Which brings me to Helenne who I felt didn't justify herself at all well in the boardroom this week and to be honest I felt the failure of the task was based mostly on her poor decision making. She said to camera that she felt she would not like to work with these people in the real world and would have them all fired if they worked for her, to be honest I can't see her doing too well in the real world if she is anything like the way she is in this show!

So my money on those to be in the finale would be either Raef and Claire, although I would much like to see Lucinda in the final aswell as she has really been good since the halfway mark of this show and shown her skills as a team leader. Its hard to tell who will exactly stay in at this stage but it will be fun to find out.

The Doc's extended family

2008-05-11T21:59:00.002+01:00

Episode 6, Doctor's Daughter (of Dr Who), I have to say was thoroughly enjoyable, in fact a good candidate for one of the best episodes of the fourth season yet. The Doctor takes Donna and Martha on a forced journey (i.e. out of his control for a change) to an alient planet where they are soon captured and the Doctor is taken for a DNA sample and bingo... the result comes out of a big fancy machine, producing a rather beautiful young woman who turns out to be the Doctor's daughter, its amazing what a DNA sample can do in the future!! To top this off though, the humans that inhabit the world are fighting against a group of alien creatures called the Hath in a struggle for supremacy (or basically fighting until one of the species has been wiped out) and Martha is kidnapped by the Hath. But the Doctor with the help of Donna soon unravels what is going on.

This was a bit of a surprise this episode as I thought it would be a bit naff on paper, but in practice it was very entertaining. The idea of the Doctor having daughter when you think of it isn't too ludicrous, and he comes back to his "real" family who of course apparently died years ago, you realise he must have had family, a wife and children of his own many many years back. In fact it was a nice touch to see the Doctor react with fear towards his newly born DNA sampled daughter as it made him afraid that he would lose her like his family before. The episode also neatly poked fun at the format of the show as Donna in one scene mentions to Jenny (the Doc's daughter) that travelling with him is a lot of fun but there is a lot of running involved. It was about time they mentioned that!! It was kind of disappointing though to see Martha just go back home at the end but I guess she had found her home and place on Earth and settled in. But the ending also produced a nice little surprise which hopefully will pay off in future episodes.

The Apprentice - Episode 7

2008-05-08T17:47:00.002+01:00

Warning - This blog entry contains spoilers of this episode!

Last night's episode of The Apprentice was again totally riveting TV as the task for this week saw the remaining contestants being sent out to Marakesh where they had to barter with the local market dealers to get 10 items for cheap prices. This certainly doesn't sound easy as a task and it proved a real challenge for both teams, but they both got there in the end.

Along the way though I was quite shocked by the cheap manipulative and under-handed tactics of Jenny who deliberately tried to sabotage the efforts of the other team when they both ended up in a sports shop to purchase 2 tennis rackets. Jenny tried to bribe the shop assistants into delaying the production of the rackets so that way they wouldn't get them in time. This was really a low display from a low character, as Jenny went even further down in my estimation than before after that. Michael was no better who guilt-free went along with Jenny on this act of sabotage, in fact going back to my dislike for Michael, he proved it even more in another piece to the camera when he said "People say "you are arrogant" and I say "yes I'm a 100% arrogant! What are you going to do about it?". Shouldn't people really go up to him and say "yes and you are also a total asshole, what are you going to do about that?!".

Moving on to the outcome of the task, delightfully it was good to see the good team win, i.e. Lee's team consisting of Lucina, Sara, Helenne and Raef, all of whom performed very well under pressure, even though Lee kept repeating the same phrase "That's what I'm talking about!!" a 100 times. They also didn't subscribe to the same pathetic underhanded tactics of the other team, but it was revealed that Jenny and Michael never told the other team mates or Jennifer their project leader (i.e. cold but foxy Dubliner) about the incident either.

In the boardroom Sir Alan let rip on the losing team and much to my delight he overruled the decision of the team leader bringing 2 people back into the boardroom, he brought them all back in where they all had to state their case. And thankfully and finally Jenny was fired for her insubordinate act of trying to stall the rackets from being made for the other team as well as not purchasing a "Kosher" chicken (cos she didn't know what Kosher meant!). It was about time this snakey manipulative bitch got her commupence. Sir Alan accused her again of shifting the blame onto others which she once too often did throughout this contest, but even after she was fired, driving away in the taxi she still denied being in the wrong, as she lied about not knowing what Kosher meant and tried to blame Michael. Jennifer came the next victim of Sir Alan, which I think was fair because she really did struggle and fumble around as project manager. Ironically Lucinda actually turned out to be a far more effective project manager than Jennifer did after Jennifer berated her in week five!! Jennifer also tried to argue her case while spitting out venom at the other contestants and even at Sir Alan. Jennifer claimed to be honest and not a cheat but she was too much of an ice queen and a snake to work in that line of business.

I was kind of dissapointed though to see Michael get spared, as Sir Alan obviously has a soft spot for this boy, as he said he saw himself in him, imagining himself at his age of 25 being that arrogant and over-enthusiastic. But to be honest I sincerely hope this boy doesn't win The Apprentice as it would be a real travesty if he did, and it would also mean that Sir Alan would have too much of a sentimental streak for people who mirror his personality. At that point I think Nick and Margaret should take him into a white room and beat him up. But speaking of Margaret I was also rather annoyed at her comment about Edinburgh, as Nick said Michael's an educated boy from Edinburgh Uni and he should know what kosher means to which Mags said: "I don't think Edinburgh is what it used to be!". Cheeky bitch! Anyway that's quite enough for now.

Poisonous skies!! Hayfever!! Shakespeare!!

2008-05-07T08:14:00.002+01:00

Episode 5 Poison Sky of Doc Who was quite entertaining I have to say, it was a pretty good conclusion to the two part story involving the Sontarans (or Sontrans as Donna would say) where the Doctor, Donna and Martha, oh and a squad of soldiers all fight back against the rutheless potato heads.

The action was pretty good when we saw the sontarans storm the factory and wipe out the soldiers, with General Staal's second in command shouting out insults with glee as he zaps anyone within a two foot radius. I also liked Donna's takedown of a sontaran soldier and she did it quoting Alan Partridge ("Back of the neck!"). The end of the episode left me very curious about next week's installment as we are about to meet the Doctor's daughter (and she looks good!). I was sceptical about the notion of the Doctor's family being introduced but then again Susan was his granddaughter, which suggests he did have kids at some point, and we know so little about the Doctor as it is. Anyway bring on the next one.

On a separate note, in spite of the sunny weather I'm suffering from a bout of hayfever just now, so I'm sneezing away as I write this, damnit!! Oh yeah also I've not had a chance to write on my Shakespeare class yet, more on that later, but its been quite enjoyable so far, although we have been concentrating on the theory side of it so far, but I think Shakespeare warrants a fair bit of theory before leaping into the text. And last night's class was fun because we got to hurl some Shakesperian insults at one another in a kind of slanging match, you are nothing but a cloth-eared puss-ridden caxcomb! Etc etc. Anyway that's all for now.

Acting classes (again) and The Apprentice ep 6

2008-05-01T17:05:00.002+01:00

I'm coming fairly close to the end to the acting classes I've doing with one of our previous Art of Acting tutors, Iain McAleese, as we have two more classes to go. Its been actually pretty good so far, we've had a fair spread of different things, improvisation, scenes from plays, warm ups, movement exercises etc. But I must admit there are times where I can get a little frustrated at Iain and the way he can direct his students, quite often when you do a scene or in the past I have done a monologue in front of the class, and he would quite often stop me in the middle of the scene to comment on my physicality and movement. Now this is fine, but in the classes we do we only get so much time, in fact only 2 hours in these classes, and 2 hrs 30 mins in the previous ones, so while I appreciated his feedback it quite often means I don't get a chance to complete my performance of the scene. But I guess that's just time is against us really, but it is a bit dissapointing we can't all get a chance to do our complete scenes. Ah wellie. But I don't mean to moan as it has been very good so far and Iain is a good director, and I think we have all been quite brave to take Iain's direction (he can be intimidating at times!) and the tough scenes he's given us to do. Its also good he's giving us more deeper and intense situations and scenes to play with as I guess we should all have a balance of the dark and light.

Moving on now to last night's episode of the Apprentice, which I thought was again one of the best ones yet. The task this time was to create a themed post card and pitch it to big companies such as Clifton cards and Tesco. Right off we could see that of the two teams, the one that would fall down was Kevin's team. Kevin (who looks like a younger Matt Lucas, of Little Britain etc) is another idiot with a vastly overvalued opinion of his own abilities who took it upon himself to do the pitch in front of the companies, despite the fact there were two people in his team, Jenny and Claire who were both far more qualified to do that than he was! That was his main mistake as he refused to listen to the rest of his team who urged to let Claire or Jenny pitch for him, if they did, they possibly could have if not won, then gained more sales. But their theme of posting a card to someone about saving the environment seemed a bit hypocritical as you are hardly saving the environment by sending one of these cards!

Michael's team on the other hand were more sure footed as was he as a team leader, but to be honest I really don't like this guy. In his piece to the camera at the start of the episode he said "there isn't anyone I wouldn't screw over to get to be The Apprentice" right then and there I knew this guy had zero moral integrity. Having people on like Michael definitely highlights what is wrong with the show as its displays more than anything that ruthless bastards can and will succeed in business. But should they?! I don't think so. Michael himself largely comes across a humourless, soulless asshole, who throughout this whole episode he barely smiled once not even when he won the task, rather than shout and smile jubilantly, he shouted like a thug at a football match, even then he was incapable of smiling!! For him it seemed like it just wasn't about winning but defeating the other team. In short he's a real prick.

And once again I do agree wholeheartedly with Sir Alan's decision to fire Kevin, he really was incompetent on this task, he did 3 terrible pitches, he didn't listen to anyone else for advice. He also picked the wrong person to go back in the boardroom, I felt he should have chosen Jenny instead of Claire (to be fair she bit her tongue a bit more since her last telling off) as the environment was her idea and it was a bad one, possibly then Jenny would have been fired. And that would have been great as Jenny is a really spiteful, nasty piece of work, her shifting the blame to Sara for lack of input on the task was somewhat pathetic as it wasn't her input that failed the task, it was Jenny's! (and Kevin's).

But the real shocking moment of the show was when Sara came back to the house and the others berated her for not pulling her weight in the task, especially Jenny, Alex and Lee. This was really out of order, and it made me realised what a bunch of snakes they really have put in this year, in fact there are too many of them, hopefully next year they can select less bastards and give us some decent hard working folk. I was dissappointed to see Lee rip into Sara especially as he's always seemed to be an OK guy, a grafter, but I did appreciated Raef's defence of Sara as he really stood up for her (and sir Alan's decision). If I were Sir Alan I would fire Jenny, Alex, and Michael altogether at once, the three of them are self serving backstabbing tossers.

Anyway enough ranting and raving, I can't wait for the next edition.

Apprentice ep 5

2008-04-28T19:00:00.002+01:00

Just been watching over (again) episode 5 of the Apprentice, which each week gets better and better mainly because it gets more and more tense as the weeks carry on. The latest episode saw the two teams make their own flavours of ice cream at a diary farm, which they would try and sell to businesses. The production of the ice cream surprisingly turned out to be the easy part but the selling was the toughest part (understandably). Both teams struggled with the sales but in the end one of the teams just managed to outsale the other (spoiler fact: it was Renaissance who won, lead by a new and improved Claire). The other team Alpha lost, mainly due to the fact that they failed to secure enough sales, as three of their leads also made their own ice cream!

I was somewhat surprised by this episode as it showed the ditzy contestant Lucinda (a risk management assessor) to be quite effective as a team leader, but again as team leader she did somewhat fail to gain the respect of her sales team, who seemed determined to work as a little threesome without her help. Ironically in the board room, Lucinda's idea to mix up the teams by having one of those who helped with the production of the ice cream go in with the sales team and vice versa, went down very well with Sir Alan, but it didn't go ahead because it was met by a stony silence from the three sales people: Jennifer, Lindi and Raef. This episode also did reveal Jennifer (the foxy looking Dubliner) to be a bit of a snake and a icy bitch, something which Lucinda highlighted in the boardroom, after Jennifer spoke up and said how indifferent Lucinda was as a team leader. Ironically aswell Helenne when speaking in front of the camera defended Lucinda for once as a good team leader, and said Jennifer was a snakey bitch, yet later in the boardroom she denied this! Just goes to show where loyalty is these days! So I ended up feeling a bit sorry for Lucinda, as I felt these two women actually were backstabbing her, I also felt it was a bit unecessary and nasty of Jennifer to raise the issues of her being icy and a snake in front of the whole group later on back at the house. This just comes across as a nasty attempt to have all the people side up with Jennifer, but to honest they are all out for themselves regardless of who they get on with.

But in the end sir Alan did fire the right person, Lindi, who was somewhat useless as a second in command in this task, as she wandered through the task with a deluded over-confidence of her own abilities. She also allowed Jennifer to make 2 sells promising full exluscivity to 2 businesses, which she had no authority or right to do. This girl wasn't too brilliant in the past either, as she offered one laundry business to do their laundry for £5000 as opposed to £200!

Anyway I'm definitely looking forward to the next episode to see who is up for the chop next!

Revenge of the potato heads

2008-04-27T17:09:00.003+01:00

Episode 4, the Sontaran Stratagem saw the return of those ruthless potato headed military driven alien swines. And on behalf of the Sontaran race I would like to apologise as I called them egg-headed last week but they are indeed potato headed, not egg-headed. But the episode was to be fair not a bad one, it also marked a nice re-introduction of Martha Jones aswell (who looks rather lovely once more!). Another pleasant surprise was seeing Christopher Ryan play a Sontaran general very effectively, it was almost but not quite like listening to Kevin Lindsay again (the late great actor who played the original Sontaran officers back in the 70s very well).

There were a few drawbacks to this episode though, mainly that the stories still rely on the same old recurring solutions such as the Doctor (again!) in mid-episode running away from trouble, it also relies heavily on the Doctor using his sonic screwdriver all the time on everything, and in deadly situations its actually next to useless because of deadlock seals! The inclusion of Luke Rattigan as Ryan Sampson was a bit annoying to watch, as his character is such an irritating little dweeb (bet he gets commupenced next week!).

But there were some nice little touches here and there too, one of them being the scene where Donna tells the Doctor she is going home, and he misreads her meaning entirely as he thinks she is going home for good, but she's just going home for a visit. And yes the Sontaran make-up is pretty good aswell, Chris Ryan's line about the time war was quite good too "The greatest war in history and we weren't allowed to take part in it!".

So the second part should be hopefully more entertaining (or maybe less who knows) but it wasn't a bad little ep. Cue the next un....

GTA IV is almost upon us!

2008-04-26T19:26:00.002+01:00

Its only 3 days until one of the most anticipated games of the year comes out, yep GTA IV. Can I wait? Nup. Can you?

The Ooddies

2008-04-20T11:06:00.002+01:00

Planet of the Ood, the 3rd episode of the fourth season of Doctor Who, was for me a bit of a dissappointment after the last two rather entertaining episodes. The Ood themselves as aliens were actually not too bad and to finally see their planet and backstory made them a bit more likeable. But the story itself just lacked something, it all seemed pretty formulaic in a way to have the likeable alien "Oodies" turn into evil killers and wait, but wait, there has to be something behind this heinous behaviour, and there is also the usual runaround (or runaway) from the Doctor who increasingly seems to solve alot of problems in the middle of the episode by simply running away (and just what is with his hairdo in this episode!). The Ood song bit was also a bit cheesy and naff and in the finale moments (PLOT SPOLIER!!) the Doctor and Donna are treated like Gods, again! All the same I did like Tim McInnerny as the villanous Halpen who treats the Ood like cattle with foot and mouth disease (watch out for his peeling end).

But overall this episode was (to quote Chris Morris) a bit of a naff effort, hopefully next week's episode The Sontaran Stratagem (which features none other than Mike from the Young Ones!) will be an improvement, and mark a welcome return to those rutheless weird egg headed aliens.

The apprentices?!!

2008-04-17T22:21:00.002+01:00

I've just watched something rather shocking and yet totally compelling, yep as the title suggests I've just watched the fourth episode of the new series of The Apprentice. The reason why its compelling is fairly obvious (well to fans of the show like myself) seeing a group of power hungry, ambitious, self-driven business men and women go at it for and against each other in 12 weekly tasks is always fascinating to watch. But what shocked me about this week's episode was not from who lost the task, but who won it! In the team who won the task, which was to take themed family potriats of people in a shopping mall, not one of the members could actually burn a CD of photos on a computer!!! If these are the apprentices and (at least) six of them can't even burn a bloody CD, what hope do they have of working for Armstrad?!! Its not exactly the most difficult thing in the world to do, but it does show how shockingly PC illiterate some people are out there, but to pick some of those people and put them on a show like The Apprentice is just ludicrous!

Anyway it was a great episode as there was plenty of on-the-scene drama between the two groups, sadly I felt Sir Alan Sugar fired the wrong person in a way, and left the other one, a bossy controlling madam go back to the house (hopefully she won't get too far). But it always appears that they manipulate who they keep in just for the sake of them making good or entertaining TV, so there always is that "Big Brother" element of reality TV in there with this show aswell, as long as the people left are a bunch of conniving backstabbing bastards then we can sit and watch with some glee. But its kind of sad to see the more straight down line ones go especially if they are capable but screw up at some point then get the boot in favour of an asshole who probably spoke up for themselves.

Well that's enough ranting about one of my favourite shows on just now. Back to the TV...

Cisco exam done!

2008-04-15T18:06:00.002+01:00

So I decided to resit my Cisco Semester 4 exam today and hurrrayy I managed to pass! I got 89.4% (admittedly even though it was a different exam the questions were fairly similar) so I can't really complain about that. A pass is a pass. Just that dratted skills test to do and I am free of the CCNA Semester 4 course. Huzzzaaa! After that just a little hair tearing out will be involved in preparing for the big CCNA exam, which can be done in one or two parts, but I'll leave that one for another day (or month or three).

Cisco sucks aghhhh!!

2008-04-14T18:16:00.002+01:00

Well I sat my final semester 4 CCNA Cisco exam tonight and failed it, by a narrow margin of 4.5% (that's a 65.5 percent score) so I'm a little pissed off and gutted that I didn't get it. That's the third time in a row I've failed a final Cisco time first time out, mind you I'm sure i've not been the only one been here. Cisco is no piece of cake (and if it was it would be a shit cake in my opinion ha ha!) so guess I will just have to bite the bullet and take it again probably next week and go over what I got wrong. But I'm rather gutted I didn't pass as it would have been one step closer to finishing it all off, after this there is a skills test to do aswell, which thankfully won't be quite as hard (hopefully!). After this of course there is the option of study and prep for the actual full big nasty CCNA Certificate itself, which would take months of personal torture and hair removal but I'm not entirely sure I want to go down that route (or router) just now. Personally I can't wait to rid myself of this accursed course and move onto something else entirely. Ho hum, the cookie crumbles that way, as they say.

Up Pompeii!! Oh and some more acting

2008-04-13T01:21:00.002+01:00

Well thought I would say a little about another acting class I have been attending of late, which was arranged by our acting thesp and social network organiser Scott (let's face it we all owe this guy alot of credit for organising well... everything!) and one of our former art of acting tutors, Iain McAleese is taking.

The classes take on pretty much the same format as before, and the group are mostly people from our last Acting 4 class, all of which are a nice bunch of people, so its good to get invovled with them. The class also includes one of our acting 3 classmates Ann, who was terrific in Acting 3, and shamefully did not get into RSMAD when she auditioned! So far we've done a fair bit of improvisation in pairs from scenarios given by Iain, fairly soon we will get on to doing scenes from a few plays chosen by Iain. Iain has said he will go a bit deeper with his approach and probably push us a bit more than he did in the "Acting" units so it'll be daunting and interesting to see how we get on.

Sooooo onto something else, tonight's episode of Doctor Who, Fires of Pompeii was rather a good one. After a slightly (no pun intended) shakey start it got pretty good and also featured a nice bit of moral dilemma drama, should the Doctor try and save the people of Pompeii from the fate of Mount Vesuvius's inevitable explosion or should he let them perish to preserve historical accuracy. The cast were also on pretty good form too, Peter Capaldi was entertaining as Caceillius, and Phil Davis hamming it up wonderfully as the villanous Lucius. Catherine Tate also manages to shine in this story at certain points too (and I don't really care what some people might think of her looks, but I think she looks pretty cute in this episode) especially confronting the Doctor towards the end about the fate of Pompeii. David Tennant what can we say is on fine form and he can easily juggle between the light hearted gags and the life threatening drama, although I must admit in this episode especially he did do a bit too much eye bulge acting (mind you he always does it!). So I look forward to next week's episode with those strange Ooddies (probably not quite as amusing as Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie and the other one).

Oh and finally went and saw Supergrass tonight at the ABC, and they were pretty good, but my left ear is still ringing. Ah well. Nuff for now.

Partners in Crime

2008-04-06T02:22:00.002+01:00

Well the first episode of the fourth new series of Doctor Who got off to a fairly decent start and thankfully allayed a few of my fears regarding Catherine Tate.

The set up of the episode was actually quite good fun with Donna and The Doctor at the start both independently investigating the Adipose corporation, who specialise in selling capsules that help with weight loss (literally!) and they don't even know they are both doing it until later on. The adipose themselves were hardly a menacing alien and to be honest not really a villain, the real villain was of course Sarah Lancashire who played the evil wet nurse that was using adipose for other purposes. The main appeal of the episode was of course not so much that Catherine Tate was in it, but that they managed to re-write her character enough to make her more likeable than before as she is no longer the shrill loud mouthed harpie she was in the Christmas special. Donna is now looking for something more purposeful with her life having met the Doctor, something which pretty much all his companions have done after their short time with him, so its a nice touch to see someone who was a brief companion be affected by him that in that way. I also liked the surprising bit towards the end of the episode which will leave the viewers guessing as to how it happened.

So the teaming up of David Tennant and Catherine Tate thankfully and hopefully doesn't look too bad after all and Russell T Davies does deserve some credit for re-writing Donna's character so it will remain to be seen how the next 12 episodes will go, but hopefully they will be just as enjoyable.

Doctor Who the new series!

2008-03-20T19:44:00.002Z

Good news, just read that Doctor Who will grace our screens again for its fourth series starting on Saturday 5 April. I read the first episode is called Partners in crime and will re-introduce Catherine Tate as Donna Noble from the 2006's Christmas Special story. I must admit I'm a bit concerned at the notion of Catherine Tate being cast as a full time companion as it could really bring the wrong kind of tone to the show and make it excessively campy or comedic, I'm hoping this isn't the case but it could well be. It will be equally annoying if she continues ranting and raving like she did in the Christmas special as it will make for a difficult 13 episodes to watch (in that case hopefully the daleks will get her eh?!). Although the good news is all the other companions will come back, Jack, Martha and even Rose Tyler! So it will be quite a busy series but whether it will be a successful one or not remains to be seen. Watch this (time and) space....

A couple of annoyances and little bit of good news

2008-03-18T22:37:00.004Z

I thought I'd write a quick blog about a couple of things that currently annoy me, number one, doing Cisco CCNA Semester 4 is getting to be a bit of a grind and a pain in the proverbial, but thankfully I'm at the last chapter and then its a question of revision for the final exam, which will be fun (not!!).

I personally can't wait to get rid of this effin course, to be honest I started off enjoying doing Cisco in Semester 1 with all the intro to networking stuff, but as it went on it just gets more infuriatingly tedious and technical with enough mind bending stuff to keep Stephen Hawking rather busy. The use of electronic labs is also annoying as there are plenty of labs to work through and you have to constantly type in the same commands over and over, its a hair tearing out exercise at times Cisco. The reading is pretty heavy stuff too with so much techno jargon and stuff to learn, when you don't work in IT it just becomes a drag to read after a while. No wonder there is only one lecturer who teaches Cisco in our college as none of the other lecturers want to have anything to do with it!! (They also have to score 100% in order to qualify as a lecturer in it, so another indicator as to why its not popular with them!). So begone Cisco from my sight!!

Another thing that has bugged me of late is MSN Hotmail as every time (virtually anyway) I try to send someone an email from it (I'm using Vista maybe that's why!) it tells me to sign out and sign in again, thereby I am unable to send the email and I need to copy and paste it in again. Aghh!! Friggin Microsoft!!

Now onto some better news as my Acting 4 classes finished last week, which marked the end of the Art of Acting units altogether, so our class have been trying to form a little theatre group of our own, and we've managed to secure 8 weeks of classes with one of the acting tutors Iain McAleese (from our Acting 3 classes). So as a group hopefully we can work on a play or some kind of piece and perform live some day in front of an audience somewhere. This will no doubt be a toughie to pull off but we might just get there.

Also I went and saw my fellow acting class thesp Scott in his first play at the weekend there at the Ramshorn Theatre in a classic play Playboy of the Western World, which he convincingly affected a baffling Irish accent and brilliantly played a drunk, it was a great laugh to watch.

So that's for now. Bring on the acting group and banish Cisco from my sight!

The Five Doctors and Tom Baker says

2008-03-10T23:55:00.002Z

Warning: this blog entry isn't for non-Doctor Who fans.

Well I don't write too much about Doctor Who on this blog (ha ha ha ha ha!! Much derision at that one!) well by that I actually mean I don't write about classic Doctor Who much i.e. pre-Russell T Davies. And I recently purchased The Five Doctors 25th Anniversary edition on DVD, and I'm pleased to say I really rather enjoyed it as much I hoped I would. The Five Doctors doesn't quite stand as one of the all time great Who stories but it is undeniably solid and entertaining. Looking back on it I find it possibly even more enjoyable than I did before, especially as the DVD release features the original broadcast version and the Special Edition which came out on video back in 1995.

Peter Davison was at that time my favourite Doctor (although Tom has since superseded him imho) and I even vaguely remember this story on its original broadcast. Looking back though on most of Peter Davison's stories they were really rather boring, but this is definitely one of the better ones. Terrance Dicks's script is very entertaining and witty, and the inclusion of Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee is also frequently delightful (or scarecrow and the fancy pants as they call each other). Richard Hurndall is also pleasant surprise filling in the shoes of the deceased original William Hartnell as the first doctor, although sadly he too passed off not long after this show as broadcast. The rest of the cast is both amusing and delightful as well, especially the inclusion of Paul Jerricho as the Castellan (a high-up Gallifreyan dude) who's hammy performance is well worth remembering (especially his line "No! Not the mind probe!"). I was surprised though to learn just how little Terrance Dicks liked the Cybermen as he always thought they were ponderous and boring, the Cybermen being morely Eric Saward's (the then Dr Who script editor) inclusion in the story. I must admit the Cybermen by this time had become bastardised from their original robotic, cold, logical selves, and become more emotional in their responses ("Excellent!" "You will be destroyed!"). Ironically though Eric Saward was less enthused to bring in the Daleks as only one appears in the whole story! Probably also the reason why Eric Saward botched Ressurection of the Daleks (an awful dalek story complete with disco death dancing!).

Regardless of this The Five Doctors is alot of fun and a charming and commendable way to commemorate the show's 20th Anniversary.

On a different and on a slightly connected note my friend Stephen let me know about this site tonight which I've just looked at, which is pretty hilarious, Tom Baker says, where through some voice software they've been able to create audio files of Tom Baker saying many different things such as jokes, sayings, quotes from movies (listen to his quotes from Die Hard, Pulp Fiction and Planes Trains and Automobiles), even songs. Its quite funny to hear Tom say motherfu**** and the like as I'm not usually used to that, although I gather he does swear like a trooper. You can find this delightful site at:

http://tombakersays.com/

OK on that note I'm off.

Brotherly gig

2008-03-02T21:15:00.002Z

I was in Edinburgh the other day with my cousin Dale and my pal Stephen to see my brother's band Soul-Fi as it was their first gig and they were actually pretty good I have to say. As their name implies they played alot of soul "covers" so we were treated to stuff like Wilson Pickett, Stevie Wonder, Jamiraqui and others, and my bro Steve did plenty of cool nifty noodling on the bass, putting a lot of players to shame (which he usually does!) and musically the band were very good musicians, with four women and three guys (in fact why couldn't I ever find a drummer as good as that?). So it was a good gig only hampered by the very cramped venue it was set in, The Old Bakehouse cafe, which has a downstairs basement for gigs which makes the 13th note cafe's basement look like the SECC, not to mention the gents bathroom was right next to where the band were playing!

But anyways it was a good gig and quite a good day too apart from the crappy weather in Edinburgh which was the same all over anyway, in fact I can't wait till we get out of this crappy post-winter weather and get into spring, should it ever come.

RIP HD DVD and hello Juno

2008-02-19T08:22:00.002Z

Well that's it, the plugged has finally been pulled on the HD DVD format, despite gaining Paramount as an official backer last year (cos they preferred the format they said), Warner have since pulled out, and now Toshiba has swung the final blow and stopped manufacturing HD DVD players. So that's it for the format I think, everything will be Blu-shaped from now on in the HD market. This is a shame in a way because Blu-Ray wasn't regionless but HD DVD was, which means we can only really get Blu-Ray discs from the UK now that will work, damn! But hey-ho, it was a format war and only one format could have won (finally Sony get it right!). So I better start selling my HD DVDs on ebay.

Different note time, I went and saw Juno at the pics on Sunday and after a fairly slow start I was pleased to say I really enjoyed it. Juno (Ellen Page who is great in it) is a "kooky" (OK hate to use that word) 16 year old girl who has gotten pregnant courtesy of one of her male friends (Michael Cera) and she is on the verge of having an abortion when she has a change of heart and decides to have the baby, but she doesn't want to raise herself, she wants to put it up for adoption. This is a charming little movie, really it is, it doesn't really rely on f-words, major profanity, or gross-out gags to be funny. Ellen Page is not only pretty damn cute, she is also a really good actress and this role will almost certainly ensure her career will take off. J.K. Simmons and Alison Janney also provide great support here too as Juno's parents. The dialogue is also pretty funny too, one of my favourite scenes is when Juno says to one of the prospective adopted parents "And I bought one of those Sonic Youth CDs and they suck! It's just noise!".

Anyway that's all the blogging time I have the now.

Bye bye HD DVD??

2008-02-17T20:58:00.002Z

Well I've just read on the web that HD DVD could be kissing itself goodbye as Toshiba are on the verge of pulling the plug on the format, Toshiba have been the main manfacturer of HD DVD players and now it looks like even they are jumping ship. HD DVD has already lost backers on the disc front as Warner have dropped out and gone over to the Blu-Ray format as have HBO too (I think who are owned by Warner). So could this be the end of the HD DVD format? Maybe.

Either way I'm not going to buy anymore HD DVD discs for now, seems a waste of time, I guess once the format has gone kaput and gone the way of Betamax, we will have to sell all this stuff on ebay. Seems a shame, why have a format war in the first place? Why don't we just have one format and use that one anyway?! Achhhh well that's the latest news anyway on HD formats. Until then I'll stick with decent ol DVD.

Ahhh feel better at last!

2008-02-10T21:08:00.000Z

Well I've been feeling pretty yucky and out of it from all last week so far, so I'm glad to say tonight I'm starting to really feel a fair bit better, my appetite seems better, feel less tired, so thank the Lord for that, I also had my first game of golf of the year today, which was good, so I'll see how I get on this week, hopefully better.

On a different note I had a rather interesting day on Saturday there were I went to one of my fellow acting chum's Tom's flat, who with another guy from our class, Mark, went over some scenes from scripts and improvisations just for practice. Mark also had an audition for this Monday to go over and Tom who has already previous experience of auditions and acting helped him with how to do the scene, which was from a BBC drama which is due to be on this Autumn. We all had a go at Mark's audition piece as well to give him a different flavour of how to do it. I quite enjoyed our get together as it allowed us to try out some of the exercises we had learned already from our acting classes in addition some new ones from Tom. Tom was hoping he could get more people up for a get together round at his next weekend for more of the same, I for one would like to try more of this little workshop.

Wabbidy wabid its Febwuawy

2008-02-04T19:48:00.000Z

Well I was off work today feeling a bit under the weather, my legs and arms feel weighed down like lead balloons so to speak, so when it came to getting up and going to work time I could hardly lift myself out of my bed. I haven't been doing any exertive stuff lately so I'm guessing its some kind of bug that is on the go just now which I've picked up, I have heard in previous weeks a few people in my work mention about having something like it so I guess that's what it might be, so I'll just need to keep at the water and paracetemols and see how I feel.

On a different note (and before feeling like this) I went and finally saw No Country For Old Men, which was pretty good, also rather intense and creepy in places. The cast were all pretty good, Josh Brolin did a very good Burt Reynolds in Deliverence type performance, Tommy Lee Jones effortlessly did the old wisened Sherriff, and the surprise turn came from Kelly MacDonald, who affected a very good Southern accent (perhaps she might be up for Oscars!). I can't of course forget to mention the chilling performance from Javier Bardem, who plays the "human" version of the Terminator and racks a fair body count by the end of the picture. A few people have said that the end of the film was someone strange and left some things unresolved which I can sort of see but I happen to think the ending is fitting.

Anyways back to some water and paracetemols.

Papypal issue sorted (no longer hate them) and other things

2008-01-30T20:35:00.000Z

Well I managed to get my Paypal problem sorted, the payment had in fact gone to another Papypal account I had created under my hotmail account (as opposed to my yahoo one) a couple of years ago (which I haven't really used since and had completely forgotten the password). So my payment is in place, horrayyy, or rather yahoooo!

On a different news item, Acting 4 started last week and it was a really good fun class, although it did rank as one of the most physically exhausting ones yet, as we did more running round and crazy warm/games than before. But as I said it was good fun, the new tutor, John Gilmour, seems like a decent enough chap with a refreshing approach to acting, i.e. cut the bullshit and keep it natural. So I look forward to tomorrow night's class and see what craziness we will get up to. The only snag though is the classes are now held in the Weir building further down the road from the usual Graham Hills building, so its a bigger, heftier walk up the stairs, but it is a bigger room, so that's better for losing yourself in (literally and metaphorically).

On a separate note I've decided I really must get back to the cinema this weekend and see something, preferably No Country for Old Men or even I Am Leg-end. Which is another thing as quite a few of my fellow acting thesps are heavy movie go-ers and I feel I'm falling behind in the picture watching stakes (OK so its not a competition!) but I do fancy seeing something.

On that note that is all.... for now.

I hate Paypal!

2008-01-28T21:50:00.000Z

Well it turns out my first use of Paypal to make a sale on ebay has turned out to be less than user friendly. Having managed to sell of a set of speakers on ebay at the weekend there, I received an email from Paypal stating I received an instant payment and I was to click on the given link to accept it, so I did and guess what? It took me to an error page that said "page not found". I've tried this link countless times since and it hasn't worked and I still haven't received payment. To make things worse I read on the internet that this is a known technical glitch and it does appear to have happened to other people too, which doesn't leave me with much confidence for Paypal as a simpler, safer, smarter way of gaining money. However apparently there were technical problems announced on the Paypal site around the time on Friday there when my received payment went through saying that switch/credit card payments would be effected by this, but the normal service would resume (of course!) this also was announced on Friday morning yet my payment was due that night! And it isn't right that I have an unclaimed payment lying around somewhere, floating in Internet limbo waiting to get picked up!!

I've sent Paypal an email expressing my concerns so I can only hope that it gets sorted soon. Paypal: Safer, Simpler, Smarter. My ass.

Achh the start of the year

2008-01-15T00:16:00.000Z

Well we are two weeks into the new year and its not been too busy so far, ok it is early days, but that will change, as my final Art of Acting unti will start up soon, next Thursday in fact on 24 January, seems like we just finished the 3rd one! So it will nice (and a bit sad) to give the acting program some closure (well for now until something else pops up!).

On another note though I'm back doing my Cisco (Computer networking shtuff) and I'm on the last semester of the CCNA 4 (which basically as my lecturer Graeme says qualifies you to become an Internet plummer's best mate). And unlike Acting 4 I will be glad to see the back of it, as you have to do plenty of study, reading up on mind bending concepts of networking, which are all a bit too technical to bother with on this blog (or any blog).

And on a finale note, I finally got round to watching Michael Moore's Sicko, about the state of the health care in the US, and again Moore exposed the terrible state of affairs in America, where this time, lots of people who have had health insurance had either been dropped or extorted for the privilege. It also focuses on the people who didnt qualify for health care and how their sickness wasn't covered by health insurance. Basically the film boils down to the greedy corporations are the ones that control the health care in America, and if you want to go to hospital to get any treatment you have to pay the bill. I was kind of amused by Moore's travels to different countries to check out their health care systems, especially in London where he seems totally beumsed to learn that everything is paid for by the NHS.

It is a good film and again Moore deserves some credit for raising the awareness of the shambles that is the Health Care system in the US. Although having also seen Manufacturing Dissent, a sort of anti-Michael Moore film (which wasn't too anti Moore, more sort of constructively critical) I kept thinking how much of the film footage did Moore manipulate? How did he convince so many Americans to go with him on a potentially dangerous trip to Guantanamo Bay? And how will others think he comes off as a saintly figure sending cheques off to his biggest protestors? Does Moore just do this to carry favour with the rest of the world while he continues to berate America? Who knows, its not really for me to say of course. I'm not a big Moore basher, I enjoy his films, but sometimes you do have to take his opinions with a pinch of salt. And on that note I'm off ta bed.

That was the year that was 2007!

2008-01-01T01:12:00.000Z

Well that was 2007 and for me it was a really good year, a lot of fun, and its kind of a shame its over, so anyway here we go on into 2008, hopefully it will be a good one, time will tell. Anyways for a change of pace, I thought I'd post my favourite list of TV show, films, games, and music from 2007 as follows below:

Favourite Films of 2007

Hot Fuzz (best British film of the year!)
Die Hard 4.0 (best Die Hard since the first un!)
The Bourne Ultimatum (Yes sue me I liked it! Best of the Bourne)
American Gangster (One of Ridley's best recent films)
Shooter (very entertaining Anton Fuqua movie)

Favourite TV Shows of 2007

Heroes (goes without saying, it was the best show of 2007)
The Sopranos (excellent finale season)
Peep Show (back with a hilarious 4th season)
The Apprentice (the only decent and compelling reality TV show out there!)
24 (The sixth season at first view was a little disappointing, but on a second viewing, its as compelling as ever!)

Favourite Games of 2007

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warefare (the latest and best COD game in a while)
Crysis (a great PC game if you have the PC for it!)
Bioshock (everyone said how good it is, that's because it is!)
The Darkness (A highly entertaining, gruesome, visually stunning 360 game)
Tomb Raider: Anniversary (really entertaining remake of the original Lara Croft game)

Favourite Music of 2007

Foo Fighters - Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace (their latest and best album in a while)
Rush - Snakes and Arrows (one of their most consistenly good albums for a while)
Queens of the Stone Age - Era Vulgaris (The Queens still prove their worth without Nick Olivieri)
Jose Gonzalez - In Our Nature (another delicate, beautiful album)
Radiohead - In Rainbows (Radiohead return with... a very good album)
Mark Ronson - Version (I'm adding this in because it really is rather good and annoyingly catchy (Amy Winehouse even sounds likeable!).

Oh forgot to say, Happy New Year!!!!!

Xmas TV reviews

2007-12-26T12:16:00.000Z

Well Xmas TV has been a bit crap as to be expected of late, but there are of course a couple of decent things here and there.

I can't fully say one of them was the Doctor Who Christmas Special, Voyage of the Damned, it was OK, fairly entertaining, but it slapped of more silliness, cheesniess (if there is such a word!), and some rather poor writing. As a bit of plot, The Doctor lands the TARDIS in a space cruiser called the Titanic, where humans of different classes are on a voyage to Earth, and the ship is manned with golden robots, and a demented Captain (Geoffrey Palmer) who crashes the ship into three meteors, leaving things rather damaged, and the Doctor, with the aid of waitress Astrid Peth (Yes Kylie) to save things.

To be fair there are some fun moments in here, the Doctor makes fun with the whole disaster movie setting and turns things round just when you think there's no going back or hope (well OK he is the Doctor!). I also liked the theme of how Earth's Christmases are always bad, as they've had 2 alien-invaded Christmases in a row, so the people evacuate and go to the country to get away from it all. Its nice little bit of ongoing continuity. But the writing I have to say here is pretty naff, Russell T Davies, might as well have phoned the script in for this one. It features some of the worst dialogue I've heard yet in the programme especially Astrid's line "Things aren't so bad for Cyborgs. Cyborgs are getting equal rights now." Not to mention that bit towards the end with the Queen!! I mean come on!! The whole episode kind of left me feeling dissapointed it was entertaining I guess, but it just felt a bit lazy and lacklustre, come on Russell you can do better. Ahh well the trailer for the next series looked OK, essentially more of the same, but I just hope the dynamic of David Tennant and Catherine Tate doesn't ruin or make the show excessively comedic and camp again.

The other thing I did watch which was a bit more successful in my view was the Christmas Extras Special, which follows Ricky Gervais embittered character, Andy Millman, who is possibly England's grumpiest man, who is just not happy with his fame, mainly because he plays the lead part in a crass, broad comedy with catchphrases. The public love it or rather the wrong demographic of the public love it, which leaves Andy even more bitter and cynical, he wants to do something that will allow to flex his creative acting muscle and gain respect and integrity. But of course after he quits the show things kind of go pear shape for him, not to mention, his hapless but sweet friend Maggie (Ashley Jensen) who struggles far more to get any decent work as an extra, and also decides to give up and goes for any manual labour job on the go.

There are as usual some good fun cameos in here, especially Clive Owen, who plays a big headed exaggerated version of himself, and George Michael, wandering around Hampstead Heath looking for you know what, even Gordon Ramsay makes an amusing appearance. But the show has an underlying theme of poignancy running through it, as it really focuses on the struggle of coping with fame (for Andy) and the struggle of just hanging on (for Maggie). To be honest though I never really liked Andy Millman's character much in the show, he's usually very unpleasant and nasty to most of the people he meets, and he comes across as being too cynical and bitter for anyone to actually like him. David Brent I always found was a far more sympathetic and likeable character, as he did say offensive things, but at heart all he wanted was to be liked. Andy at heart wants to be left alone, yet ironically he also wants to be famous and rich, but he finds he can't have both. To be fair Andy does have some redeeming value and his friendship with Maggie is what keeps the show going, and keeps him from being a total twat. The show of course is also splendidly backed up by Stephen Merchant, who is hilarious as Andy's incompetent agent, and Shaun Williamson, playing a failed version of himself. There's a bit worth watching where they sell a mobile phone to a customer in the Carphone Warehouse!

Anyways that's it for now on the TV reviews. I'll wait and see if there's anything else on worth watching.

Merry Christmas mofos!!

2007-12-25T11:54:00.000Z

Well its another Christmas everyone and hope you all have a good one this year. Myself I got the usual assortment of clothing, accessories, and the odd DVD too (currently Ben Elton's Get a Grip Live Tour DVD is in my player, and its actually quite funny!).

So it will be the usual, turkey, chocs, crisps, wine, eat till your waist line is about to explode and then the usual comedown the day after, followed by more turkey!

Anyway have a good one!! Oh and I will post a blog review of Dr Who's Voyage of the Damned, so that will prob be on here tomorrow.

Acting 3 over and other things

2007-12-13T08:22:00.000Z

Well my Art of Acting 3 classes came to an end last Thursday night, so it was a case of us doing our monologues on the final night in front of the class, which was pretty nerve wracking, even though the class was thankfully smaller this time round than before. Well actually cos of my chickenpox this is the first monologue I had to deliver so for me it was more nerve wracking. I chose to do Alec Baldwin's Glengarry Glen Ross speech, where he berates the salesman of a real estate office, to start getting their asses in gear and sell or get out. Our class tutor Iain McAleese, was a bit tough on us that night as he was giving us proper feedback on our monologues, and he said mine was by no means bad but it needed some work, and I addressed it to the audience instead of setting it in the office as Alec Baldwin's character does. All the same I thought I did well enough despite the usual nerves and forgetting my lines half the time. The rest of the class did well too, despite Iain giving one or two of them a bit of a grilling (I won't name names, just in case its leaked out and I get the blame ha ha! Fat chance really).

Anyway that's another acting unit over and I'm always a little sad to see the back of it (mushy sentimental moment over!), but Acting 4 will hopefully go ahead in January, if the theatre administrator, Sylvia who organises the courses, can get the numbers for it. This has gotten us aspiring thesps into a panic if we can't get enough people for the class but hope hope we will.

Soooooo, I've got three nights out ahead of me, a brother and friend one tonight, a workie night out tomorrow, and the acting buds on Saturday for some stand-up comedy (i.e. we're going to see some stand-ups, we're not on stage!!). After that I'll gladly ask for a night in.

Not too much to report?

2007-11-28T22:50:00.000Z

Well I haven't reported too much on my blog of late so thought I might as well put something up, since my last post which was written in a drunken haste (3am just back from seeing the Foos and breaking my use of the no f-word policy I just made up there).

Well apart from work, and my acting classes not too much to report of late, last week's acting class was one of the best so far as we did scenes from Romeo and Juliet and I had to play a female part (yes a female part!) of a nurse, an aged nurse I might add. It was actually great fun to try and do and somewhat challenging as its the first time I had to play such a role in classes, although one of my classmates Teresa reminded me back in the day that the men use to play the female parts too as women back then didn't play in the Shakespeare plays. We did another scene which involved the two rivals Mercutio and Tybalt facing off one another, and the rest of us would act as background crowd taunting one another, which was broken up amusingly by Alan who yelled "TRANNY!!" which caused Scott who played Tybalt to break up with laughter.

So tomorrow night will be the second last of the acting 3 classes, which Ian told us would involve improvisation, so it will be fun to get back to some of that, as in the past when we did it feels like wandering into the set of Whose Line Is It Anyway? So I'll look forward to that and maybe post up something more blogworthy of it then.

On another note I went to the cinema there on Sunday and saw American Gangster, with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe starring, it was pretty good I thought, although a bit slow in pace at first it does get more gripping as the film carries on. Denzel was pretty incredible once again (he usually is) and Russell Crowe was pretty decent in his role too, although he did fall short of the mark that Denzel had set. Its one of Ridley Scott's best films for a while although not necessarily one of his world best, but I'm glad he directed rather Tony Scott, as it would have been made with all too much flash etc, annoying MTV like images all over the place (which we've come to expect from Tony!).

So that's it for now ermm I think. Except to say its less than 4 weeks to Christmas!! Shit!! And I haven't really bought anything yet. Suggestions???

Foos!!!!

2007-11-10T02:42:00.000Z

Well I'm just back from the Foo Fighters gig night and I have to say (and forgive this first use of the f-word on my blog) they were fucking amazing!!! It was one of the best gigs I've been to in years. Dave Grohl totally commanded the audience with his amazing good nature and charisma, he cracked many a joke and played many a brilliant and memorable song. I was also delighted with the fact that at the SECC they had removed all the seats and it was for the first time I'd been there a totally standing gig, and this allowed us far easier access to the front of the gig, and in the middle they played an acoustic set aswell and moved to a middle podium where audience could easily crowd round and take photos. There were many great songs played, my main favourites included "Monkey Wrench" "Skin and Bones" "Everlong" "DOA" and "In your honour". To be honest the whole gig was fucking brilliant. Dave and the band (which I was delighted to say included the acoustic set up of the "Skin and bones" DVD aswell as Pat Smear who played back in the "Colour and the Shape" tour days).

Even the section between the set finale and the encore was great as we saw big screen video footage of Dave drinking beer off stage and licking the set list, which was really funny! And towards the end of the night I even was brave enough to subject myself to the mosh pit, which was fairly mild to be honest, I've seen far worse, so I didn't mind being subjected to some "friendly violence". Anyway it was great, the Foos did come, rock and conquer, in short they were fucking superb!!!! And if you haven't seen the Foos yet, do yourself a favour and go and see their next show at the nearest venue next to you. You won'r regret it!!

Under the fire and the Foos

2007-11-07T00:02:00.000Z

I'm combining two things in this post, first up: I'm just back from seeing a play which I went along to with some of my acting class crowd, the play was Under the Elms, written by the late American playwright Eugene O'Neill. It was set back in the old west and was essentially about three brothers (at first) who own a farm, but then two of them sell of the farm to the Dad and his new beautiful young bride, but the younger, weaker willed son, falls for her and they soon have an affair and, well, it gets messy from there.

Unfortunately I couldn't get into this play at all, as the characters just didn't interest me or engage me in any way (especially the two brothers at the start, I just couldn't wait for them to leave the stage!). And some of the acting was pretty poor in places, especially when it came to breaking down in tears acting something they young guy didn't do too well, although the girl managed a lot better in that department. I guess it must be difficult to convey raw emotions on stage convincingly even if you are a professional actor. But another fault of the play was some of the dialogue, which reeked of corniness, especially the way the actors kept yelling "Carliforn-IA" all the time, which got pretty annoying, and the Mills and Boon effective level of love talk "I love you, I want you to kiss me, hold me, and let it last a thousand years!" etc etc. Pass the sick bag please.

To be fair the actors were pretty professional, I just don't know if it was a mixture of the dialogue and the characters that they were portraying that just didn't ring true or seem believable, or what. But I wouldn't recommend going to see this play, and none of my fellow acting chums would either I think.

Secondly: on a more positive note I will be seeing the Foo Fighters on Friday at the SECC, which I'm sure will rock like mad (I expect a fully ringing pair of ears by Saturday morning). Thankfully the show is still on, as I was a bit mislead by the billboard posters round Glasgow of the Foos gig, which said "cancelled" on it. Which it turned out was a ploy from the City Council to stop billboard posters from being put up, but hardly seems fair to put a false sense of insecurity on people who have bought tickets for an event. Anywaysss, the Foos will come, rock and conquer on Friday, and I'll probably leave a review of it on Saturday, if I'm able to.

Acting Utopia

2007-10-27T00:22:00.000+01:00

Well tonight I witnessed something rather interesting in that we went and saw our current acting tutor's play, Utopia, which he directed and made the concept for, which involved acting students who had done acting units 1,2,3 and 4. And the play was actually not bad and the actors, whom this was their first public appearance ever, did exceptionally well, they seemed very relaxed and in the moment and didn't make any mistakes at all with their delivery. Its amazing to think that they were just a bunch of acting class beginners like us just a year ago and they went on did a play in front of an audience, it was very impressive. I guess it shows that if you put in the work and effort you can do it. The actors as I said were all pretty impressive, I must admit it looked good also to see actors and actress be on stage and get a snog out of the evening, there should be more of that in our classes!!

Ah well, because of the play we didn't get a class this week, so our third acting 3 class will be next Thursday, so it'll be interesting to see what we will do next. From what I understand we will be covering some Romeo and Juliet, which is naturally one of the more confounding Shakespeare plays as you have to learn all that thi, tho, therefore where art tho, bla bla dialogue (well the bla bla stuff doesn't come into it). Should be interesting, so we'll see how the rest of Acting 3 shapes up, and maybe one day we might get to appear in a play.

Acting 3 (Return of the Thespi)

2007-10-12T00:45:00.000+01:00

Finally after nearly a 4 month hiatus I went back to my acting class, Art of Acting 3, and it was pretty much as good fun as the ones in the past. Our new tutor, Ian McAleese seems like a decent enough chap (although my fellow acting bud, Scott, told me he lacked decent body hygiene!) and will lead us through the next 8 weeks. The first class tonight was a good little intro and breaker in, with some usual warm up exercises, which are always fun, it was good to return to walking round the room really fast and changing direction (believe its more fun than it sounds).

Tonight we also did some improvisation which was a good laugh, as we got into pairs and did some scenarios which Ian gave us to work on, mine involved me and Alan (from my acting 1 and 2) pretending to be a couple, and I was pissed from a party and came home late and had to pretend not to be very drunk, which I admit I didn't do too well, but it was a great laugh still. Other improvs that were fun included two new girls in our class one of whom was terrified to do a parachute jump and the other convincing her to do it. Scott also did a very good patronizing manager of a singer who wanted to do different songs for her act.

So hopefully Acting 3 will turn out to be just as good fun as the previous ones, another bonus is the class is smaller than the previous ones as only 12 of us showed up, so it relieves the pressure a bit when it comes to performance. Ian also seems to be quite a level headed tutor, we heard he doesn't mince words of hold back on critique, but so far he seems fine, perhaps his true colours might come out but so far, he seems pretty good as a tutor. Anyway it was a good first night, cue part 2.

Rush at the SECC

2007-10-07T23:12:00.000+01:00

So, I'm finally getting round to writing about the momentous and rare occasion when one of the world's biggest touring bands came to town (no, not REO Speedwagon), Rush, who played at the SECC on Wednesday there, and well, they were terrific as usual.

With their new album Snakes and Arrows out Rush came to Glasgow and put on a great show, starting off with Limelight, they ploughed through as much of their prolific repotoire as they could manage in the space of 3 hours. There were some songs they played which believe it or not I didn't actually recognise (the second one in fact, what the hell was it?!). But the highlights were plenty, which for me included Tom Sawyer (which had a funny South Park intro video to it), Dreamline with its terrific green light show, XYZ the finisher of the night, but the main highlight for me was Natural Science (off of Permenant Waves) which was terrific and one of their best songs from the early 80s period. Also I can't go without mentioning Neil Peart's terrific drum solo, which involved using an electronic drum kit aswell, which sounded like something out of an 80s video game!

Rush as usual displayed their quirky Canadian sense of humour throughout the show with their funny backscreen projection videos, not to mention the one at the start which saw Geddy Lee dress up as a Scotsman, affecting the best Scottish accent from a Canadian since Mike Myers (ok slight sarcasm there). The only slight criticism I could speak of is probably the price of the tickets, at 45 quid, they were very steep, no matter how good Rush were it is a bit exorbitant. But Rush put on one hell of a good show and they don't come here often enough and I look forward to when they do again.

The Rush!!

2007-09-29T01:38:00.000+01:00

Ah well, it'll be a pretty quiet one this weekend (unlike last weekend) but come this Wednesday I shall see Rush at the classy dinfest that is the SECC, and I'm pretty sure they will rock the place. Need more be said? Nah.

Incubus are in the house! And GAG

2007-09-23T23:35:00.000+01:00

Well its been a fairly busy weekend for me for a change, as on Saturday night I went out to the Arches and watched play, GAG, which featured one of our acting tutors, Bill, whom I'd never really seen before (cos I didn't get him as a tutor). The play itself was pretty good and the cast were all on pretty good form, the young girl in particular playing the part of a cocky, troubled bulemic teenager was very good, although she took a while to shift into gear. Bill was also very good in his role, having never seen him before this, he was pretty intense, but I was already warned of that beforehand by my acting fellows. The play was also just about the right length as it was only about an hour, and the story structure kept me watching and I didn't catch onto the story "twist" until towards the end. So it was well worth a watch. After that us acting lot went and had plenty of drinks and I ending up feeling rather drunk and knackered (well its par for the course really!). So cheers again to Scott for organising the night (he always does it!) and it was great to see all who turned up.

So out again tonight having seen Incubus, an alt american rock band for those who don't know them, and they were pretty good too. The band played a decent cross section of their most well known material (well to Incubai-heads at least!), some of the highlights included "Megalomaniac", "Sad Sick Little World", and "Circles". As usual it would have been nice if they played a few other songs off of their latest Light Grenades album and Crow left of the murder, which is their best album in imho. But it was all mostly good although I must admit Brandon Boyd is pretty unremarkable as front man, as he doesn't really project any kind of charisma ofestage presence at all. He's like the William Baldwin of the rock music scene (watch Backdraft and you'll know what I kind of mean!). But it was a pretty good gig, so can't really complain.

Well I'm off ramorra as its September weekend, so guess I will enjoy lulling around doing as little as possible, oh and purchase the new Foo Fighters album, which is well worth the purchase folks!

A further note to the techie nerds (like me)

2007-09-18T23:41:00.000+01:00

PC technie nerd warning: Don't read this if you don't like PC tech stuff. But feel free to read it.

Well well well, further to my last blog post, turns out the noise I was banging on about all along was the graphics card after all, and not the chipset fan (although that was the whirring noise!). But as it turns out I think the culprit behind the noisy mother was really the power supply, which I've been using of late, a cheap Q-TEC one now those who know their Power Supplies will know that in a word: Q-TEC don't have a good reputation, in fact most people think they suck ass.

And to an extent I think they are right as I used to get a number of cheap PSU's from an old PC retailer and they were also QTEC and they didnt work. Although I have an old faithful one (rated 550 watts) which does work well enough, but the PCI-Express graphics card definitely noisies up more with it, I guess because it is a cheap PSU which doesn't dissipate heat well, and yes one day it may just blow up my system, so guess I don't want that to happen, especially as I've just got a new board fitted and everything seems to be rosy again, well for now.

So finally I've put back in my more powerful and stable OCZ Game XStream power supply (which I bought with my latest graphics card anyway) and the PC runs much quieter now with games. Anyway as an amusing footnote to this whole problem look at what one young guy thought of Q-TEC on youtube (he gives them a kicking so to speak!):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZTvxAjf_DY

The death of a motherboard (chipset)

2007-09-14T22:20:00.000+01:00

Warning: This blog entry contains technical details of PC's which may leave some people bored and baffled.

I'm a bit of a PC enthusiast to quite an extent so I have to admit I spent a fair wad of my cash on upgrading my PCs now and then, and can it drive my family near to madness every time I purchase something (mostly because of the inevitable delivery of many parcels!). But this time I'm kind of in need of proper genuine replacement.

The motherboard for my PCI-Express (OK going to get into technical terms here!) system had annoyingly loud and distracting chipset fan mounted on it. At first I thought it was the graphics card I had at the time which noisied up when it was playing games (which I guess fans kick in when it runs hot, but gfx cards don't really run that noisily). But after a while with different components the same noise presented itself. And it was only until recently I realised it was in fact the chipset fan on my board which was the noisy mother making all the fuss. I've also looked up my Asus board on the internet and various users have had the same problem with this fan do I really need to listen to a suprisingly small fan make a loud whirring racket or noise like a small jet taking off when I play a game? Don't think so. So I tried to replace the fan with a heatsink (which is a silent cooling solution which Asus should take note and install on all their boards!) but it wouldn't fit properly as my graphics card was too big and would interfere with the positioning of the heatsink. Sooooooooo, I plugged in the old Asus noisy beast and to my limited surprise had gone dead.

So I've now ordered a new board, an Asrock one, which doesn't have a chipset fan on it but a proper heatsink. Word to the wise: Do not buy a motherboard with a chipset fan installed, cos it will keep you distracted all hours of the day (if you play games that is).

As a footnote to my problem here's an amusing web page I found on which some guy describes the same problem I had with a similar board:

http://digital-lifestyles.info/2007/03/29/driven-mad-by-a-whining-asus-fan/