I'm Really Not Obsessed with Doctor Who

It might seem like I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about Doctor Who, but it just isn't so. But having said that, I did just hear a preview of an audiobook that kind of blew my mind.

Who knew? It seems that these audiobook-exclusive stories done by the Beeb are well popular in the UK. Sometimes they get other cast members to narrate, like Freema Agyeman, but in a recent one called Doctor Who: Pest Control, the reader is Doctor number 10 himself, David Tennant.

The really amazing thing is, if you like language as much as I do, that Tennant does all the characters (after the fashion of these British audiobooks) and each one is in a different British accent. The narration is in his voice, which is Scottish. And of course, he does the Doctor himself in his semi-posh accent. And he does a cracking job imitating Donna Noble. Throw in some Irishmen and a Northern accent or two and you've got an encyclopedia of speech patterns.

It'll be hard to find this recording at your local Barnes & Noble, but you can download it from iTunes.

Random News

Nipping in to bring you three "titbits":



Ronaldo (Christano Ronaldo ... not to be confused with the Brazilian one-named Football star) announced today that he will be staying with Manchester United.









David Tennent (Doctor Who #9) and Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard) are tearing up the boards in Stratford. Their Hamlet (the Doctor has the title role, Jean Luc is Claudius) is receiving excellent notices.















Noel Gallagher made news when he railed against the writers at the Guardian and the Observer: "It really pisses me off ... all these spotty herberts whose mams and dads voted for Margaret Thatcher all those years are now sitting on some moral fucking high chair."





Spotty herberts sitting on a moral high chair? I'll never learn this language.

Am I Bovvered?

Thanks to the Phonybrit community, I can share this nice radio interview Catherine Tate did on the BBC Women's Hour. Now, that's something I'm not likely to have found on my own.

Most Americans didn't know who Tate was when she suddenly appeared on Doctor Who, first on a Christmas special, and then as his regular companion. I admit I had never seen her work, but I had heard of her catchphrase, "Am I bothered?" (Catchphrases seem even more important on the British Isles, maybe because it's so easy for some bit of pop culture to run wild in a short amount of time.) The phrase comes from her famous character, Lauren, who seems like someone Ali G had a one-night stand with. (Don't tell "his Julie.")

What Doctor Who fans on this side of the pond weren't likely to know is that in addition to Donna Noble and Lauren, Tate is a cast of thousands in one person -- plus, I hear she's an hilarious standup comedian.

Now it makes sense: Those lingering shots in that first Doctor Who show, the startling music when she first appeared. This lady was already pretty famous. It would be the same thing if you didn't know who Whoppi Goldberg was and she suddenly appeared on Star Trek: Next Generation. You'd be like, "They're spending an awful lot of time with that bit character, the bartender."

In the UK, Tate is almost as well-known for the tour-de-force performance she put in with the then-current PM for Comic Relief. Just one viewing will show you how mad her comedy is. (BTW, the actor she mentions at the end was on EastEnders. I had to look it up.)

BBC 7 / BBC Heaven

It's annual report time for the Beeb, and just like every year, there's a kerfuffle over the licence fees. According to this report from American Public Media's Marketplace, the the networks take in $6 billion -- 6 thousand million. And the bulk of that money still comes from the license fee.

The license fee is a mandatory fee for anyone in the UK with a television set, and it's been going on for decades. Instead of fund drives, the authorities have developed all kinds of technologies for
detecting if a given household has a telly and they cross reference that to make sure they're not freeloaders.

It's amazing to me, in the age of Sky TV and cable and dishes and Internet that this is still going on. But they must be doing something right. Just off the top of my head, look at what they've produced over the last few decades -- and this isn't even mentioning the news:
Doctor Who
Monty Python
Upstairs Downstairs
Red Dwarf
As Time Goes By
French and Saunders
The Vicar of Dibley
Coupling
... I could keep going for pages ...

Yet, today, when I've been lucky enough to get to somewhere carrying BBC America (my local cable company doesn't carry it and I can't get the dish) it's all been reality shows and games shows -- not my cup of tea.

And don't they get money from BBC America and the exports of all the great shows over here (I'm including the documentaries that they co-produce with the Discovery Channel and PBS)? I guess not enough, not if they want to keep making the amazing documentaries and other expensive programming that rarely makes it across the pond.

Doctor Wha?

I'm not even going to give you the link of the Guardian's Organgrinder blog, because despite the huge words *spoiler alert* right in the beginning of yesterday's entry, it's impossible to read much of it without finding out stuff you don't want to know.

We get each episode in the US on the SciFi network a few weeks after it has aired on the Beeb, so to us this would really be a spoiler. What I can tell you is that the last episode or this series (in American, that's "season"), is meant to be an incredible, jaw-dropping cliffhanger that really make you wonder what next season will bring.

From where I stand, I was please to have Steve Moffat taking over. I always thought thought his comedy, Coupling, was very inventive. Plus the previous guiding light, Russel T Davies, had to devote some more time to the spinoffs: Torchwood and the Sarah Jane Adventures.

One thing that's been very interesting about this project is hearing back from people about what I call their "entry point" -- how their fascination with England started. For many, many people, it was Tom Baker, the 4th doctor that hooked many fascinated 12-year olds via PBS reruns. Most of those 12-year olds turned into dedicated adult Anglophiles. (Quick primer: Doctor Who is a scifi series that started in 1962. The main character has the power to "regenerate" -- so far nine actors have played the Doctor.)

Me, I somehow missed Tom Baker ... I think it was on too late or something. I have only seen a handful of scenes with him, but I've seen everything with numbers 8 and 9, Christopher Eccelston and David Tennant, respectively.

I just hope they don't change things too drastically.

His Lordship

My friend Monica is engaged to one of the keenest Anglophiles I have ever met (which is saying something). He even popped the question at the top of the London Eye (aka the Millennial Wheel).

Needless to say, this bloke and I hit it off straight away.

One of the most intersting things about Brian (and something I just learned) is that he has created a whole alter ego called His Most Noble Lordship, Frederick George Arthur Wyatt Foppington, 36th Baron of Pilton and Didcot and the 14th Earl Foppington. Lord Foppington's website is lordfoppington.org. To quote Monica and Brian's personal website: "Is Brian merely masquerading as His Lordship or is His Lordship merely masquerading as Brian?"

This got me thinking about nobility. I'm not sure I have a firm opinion about the peerage system, the House of Lords, and all the titles and so forth. If I were actually British, I think I might be a republican (small "r" please), and definitely would vote Labour.

Still, I was super-pleased when Russel T Davies (who revived Doctor Who and has turned it into the current franchise) won his OBE, and of course when Macca became a knight of the realm. So maybe I do have a soft spot for the all this stuff too.

Great Scot: James McAvoy (The Last King of Scotland) is appearing in a huge Hollywood leading role ... too bad he had to adopt an American accent, but the film looks like a great ride. Wanted opens June 27.

Red Dwarf memories

Podcasting has to be the biggest boon to Aglophiliacs since PBS started importing Britcoms. Today is Saturday, so a new Jonathan Ross radio show is up. I suggest you subscribe in iTunes immediately.

Ross has been on a roll lately ... a few weeks ago he had David Tenent, then Paul Weller. This week he had Patsy Kensit (ex-wife of both Jim Kerr and Liam Gallagher!) But last week was a real cracker. You can listen to it here.

The show features both Noman Lovett and Hattie Heyridge -- the two "Holly"s from Red Dwarf. Now, as "Wossie" (said with love) describes it, the average Red Dwarf fan is somewhere between the age of 12 and 14 1/2. But what he doesn't realize is that so many of us stateside didn't discover this amazing show until we were proper adults and we still loved it.

For those of you who don't know about it, you're a smeghead (that's meant to be funny to fans of the show). Red Dwarf was an inventive comedy set 3 million years in the future and it follows the adventures of the last human left alive -- a 22nd-century curry-loving Liverpudlian who's been in stasis as the millenia past by.

And since it is Saturday, many of you have seen last night's Doctor Who by now, which was a real cracker, wasn't it?

Straight away

Right. It's an obsession. It's a quirk. A glitch in the old wiring. Something between crossdressing, a penchant for Dungeons and Dragons, and scholarly curiosity. Anglophilia.

For some it's so acute that they move there. For others (to stretch the transvestite metaphor to its limits), we don't want to be British, we just want to act British sometimes.

There are lots of entry points: music, literature, britcoms. For some of us it's an obsession that started with the Beatles and Monty Python reruns. From there it can run into all kinds of estoterica (if can call it that -- I mean everybody should listen to Jonathan Ross's radio show now that you can get it on iTunes).

For me, the moment when I decided to explore this impulse was when I got a special thrill while reading Nick Hornby's book How to be Good (which, of course I was reading because it's so British) and I caught a reference to Melvyn Bragg (he's a presenter on Radio 4) and knew who he is.

Is Doctor Who better than an American scifi show just because of the accents? Or My Hero? Or As Time Goes By? What make you pick up a Hornby or Mark Haddon novel before a Yank equivalent? Do you have a wave of righteous indignation when someone asks you who Paul Weller is? Can you name the current mayor of London? Maybe you sign off emails with "Cheers."

You might have the same disease.

So let the gates open. I'm going to try to explore my crazy interest in all things British, trying to understand the impulse a little better. And you add to the conversation.

Let's see what we see.