Christmas Telly
From http://alex-holden.livejournal.com/
I don’t watch telly much when I’m in France. It’s not just because it’s all in French, but also because French TV just doesn’t seem to evolve quickly enough. They’re still doing the same peak time quiz shows they were doing 10 years ago, and those interminable panel programmes in which minor French celebrities make pithy comments about old clips. There are also a surprisingly high number of what appear to be mime artists.
On the other hand, they do have their own version of FreeView now: TTN or TNT or TTFN or whatever they call it. Not that my in-laws get it. They had a satellite dish installed last year, which they deliberately pointed at the wrong satellite (Gromit), so that my father-in-law could watch bullfighting on Spanish TV. Fact! When we were in the hotel on the way, I flicked through the TNT channels, which include TF4, featuring none other than Doctor Who. Dubbed!
To give you an example of how quaintly old-fashioned French TV is at Christmas, guess what they had on on the day we left for home? The circus! The bloody circus! Which threw me back to 30-35 years ago and Billy Smart’s Christmas Circus. Which I hated, even as a little kid. Circuses, like pantos, are shit and always have been.
Anyway, it was so good to get home and watch the recorder full of… er re-runs of great shows from years ago, like Morecambe and Wise. You can tell it’s magic, because my 11-year-old daughter was in hysterics, and she didn’t know who the fuck Shirley Bassey and Andrew Preview were. She just thought “the one with the glasses” was very, very funny. I’m tearing up.
Anyway, I just wanted to register my mild and pleasant surprise that RTD’s Steampunk Festivus Special of Doctor Who was actually quite good. I mean, properly steampunk almost to the brim, with steampunk cyberpeople and even an airship of sorts.
By coincidence, I’m reading a steampunk anthology at the moment, and that giant steam-powered robot at the end could have come out of its pages. RTD has been reading BoingBoing, I think!
Filed under: BBC, Entertainment, France, Nostalgia, SF, TV, Television, Travel, arts, media studies, sci-fi, science fiction | Leave a Comment
Tags: steampunk
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