In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

I appreciate that I've basically stopped posting here other than WIDAWTW posts, but this is one small thing I can manage to keep up. A list of the books I read for leisure in 2024 and pictures of most of them. (Some were read on Kindle or returned to their owners before I got round to taking a picture.)



1. Tanya Kirk, ed. (2022), Haunters at the Hearth - Christmas ghost stories in the British Library Tales of the Weird series.
2. Simon Raven (1960), Doctors Wear Scarlet - the basis of the film, Incense for the Damned.
3. Matthew Lewis (1796), The Monk - a real page-turner, brilliantly arch and knowing, read on Kindle.
4. Susan Hill (1983), The Woman in Black - the novel, having read the play c. 25 years ago.
5. Bram Stoker, Dacre Stoker and Samantha Lee Howe (2022), Dracula: 125th Anniversary Edition - skim-read, mainly to pick out the textual variants between the original type-script and the published novel, as I haven't had the opportunity to 'read' the type-script before.
6. Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1817), History of a Six Weeks' Tour - read online along with the relevant parts of Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont's journals, borrowed from the University library.
7. Florence Marryat (1897), Blood of the Vampire - vampirism as a racial curse.
8. Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston (1927), Dracula: the vampire play in three acts - 1960 performance edition published by Samuel French
9. Elizabeth Hand (2007), The Bride of Frankenstein: Pandora's Bride - first-person account of the Bride's experiences after escaping from the fire at the end of the film.
10. Terry Pratchett (2007), Making Money - read mainly so that I could finally give it back to the person who lent it to me without taking into consideration the question of whether I actually wanted to read it.
11. Hamilton Deane, John L. Balderston and David J. Skal (1993), Dracula: The Ultimate, Illustrated Edition of the World-Famous Vampire Play - I skipped the 1927 edition of the play in this, as I'd already read it separately only a couple of months earlier.
12. Thomas Love Peacock (1818), Nightmare Abbey - I know it's meant to be satire, but the extended scenes of people trying to out-clever each other in drawing-rooms are just unbearable. The source of the phrase "ruinous and full of owls".
13. Adam Wood (2021), The Watchmaker's Revenge - about the husband of the woman whose jet mourning brooch I inherited from my uncle, who shot her and five other people (none fatally) and spend most of the rest of his life in jail for it.
14. Charlotte Dacre (1806), Zofloya or The Moor - written in the vein of The Monk but with a female central character who has no interest in even trying to behave morally from the start.
15. Jane Mainley-Piddock, ed. (2023), Casting the Runes: the letters of M.R James - this review was fair, but there are a few gems in there nonetheless.
16. Mike Ashley (2020), Queens of the Abyss - short macabre stories by female authors in the British Library Tales of the Weird series.
17. Simon Stern (2018), The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories, Volume Three - borrowed from Joel and finished on the last day of the year.

Onwards with the Cellar Club tweet-alongs... Films 6 to 9 of 2022 were a bunch of Hammer vampire rewatches connected with the live webcast I did about them, and I wrote those up separately at the time (LJ / DW). So this entry covers 10 onwards.

( 10. Burnt Offerings (1961), dir. Dan Curtis, broadcast 18 February )

( 11. Theatre of Blood (1973), dir. Douglas Hickox, broadcast 25 February )

( 12. Scream and Scream Again (1970), dir. Gordon Hessler, broadcast 25 February )

( 13. Count Yorga, Vampire (1970), dir. Bob Kelljan, broadcast 11 March )

( 14. The Vampire Lovers (1970), dir. Roy Ward Baker, broadcast 18 March )

( 15. Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1972), dir. Curtis Harrington, broadcast 25 March )

( 16. The Return of Count Yorga (1971), dir. Bob Kelljan, broadcast 1 April )

( 17. The House of the Long Shadows (1983), dir. Pete Walker, broadcast 15 April )

YES I DID IT! 🥳 I am now up to date on my film write-ups. Just a honkin' great pile of books to tackle... 😬

I saw this with lady_lugosi1313 at the Hyde Park Picture House shortly before Christmas. It's basically Glee in a British small town school with a zombie apocalypse and a keen awareness of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Oh, and it's also a Christmas film, because that's when it is set. As you might imagine, this adds up to a great deal of fun, although it does also involve quite a lot of gore and a surprisingly-high death rate for well developed characters. It has something it wants to say about modern communications technology. On the whole, this is portrayed negatively, for example though a song about how the surviving characters are desperate for a human voice rather than something on a screen (full lyrics here), by drawing attention to the self-absorption and distorted priorities of selfie culture through people posting their zombie escape selfies to Instagram, and by having the zombies themselves easily distracted by TV screens. But then again, it's clearly a disaster for the human characters when they lose their mobile phone signals and internet connection, and we are invited to feel great sympathy for one character who, knowing he has been infected by the zombies, helps his daughter to escape and then lies gazing lovingly at her picture on his mobile phone screen as he dies. So it's a bit mixed. The songs were generally pretty good, with an absolute highlight being an upbeat dance number sung as a duet between Anna and her best friend John as they leave the house for school and work their way across town to meet one another, so wrapped up in their own determination and sunny outlooks that they don't notice that zombie-induced carnage has broken out all around them. That said, I personally found that my enjoyment of the songs qua songs dropped off rather as the film went on, partly because I'm not very keen on musical-style music anyway, and partly because they just began to sound a little samey. So I won't be buying the soundtrack, but I would recommend the film.

Well, that about wraps up my film reviews for 2018 - hoorah! I've just got to get started on the four films I've already seen in 2019 now...

Since the two books I read before this one had been awful and disappointing respectively, I turned to this one for a reasonably-guaranteed good read. That's the advantage of literary classics - people are likely to have kept reading and recommending them for a reason, so you're on safer ground than with something new and untried. This one was lent to me by lady_lugosi1313 probably up to a year ago now, when the film was on at the Cottage Road cinema and we were thinking of going to see it. In the end, we didn't, but I kept the book anyway and this was its time. I have seen the film in the past, but before I began regularly blogging films here I think.

Breakfast at Tiffany's itself is a novella of c. 100 pages. It's told in the first person from the perspective of an unnamed narrator who is a writer by profession, and has a fresh, light modern style which seems simple but is actually quite finely crafted when you stop to look at it. The broad set-up is similar to the film - Holly Golightly moves into the same brownstone apartment block as the narrator, lives an expensive and aspirational lifestyle funded by her rich lovers, turns out to be the child bride of a simple Texan farmer, gets arrested for inadvertently assisting a drug trafficker, and is then released on bail. But the ending is very different, in that the film gives Holly and the narrator-character (Paul for screen purposes) a romantic happy ending, whereas in the novella she gives him the slip and disappears from New York and his life forever. This is hugely more in keeping with everything we learn about her character over the course of the novella - she is a fly-by-night, living in the moment but always searching for something better, who is fundamentally incapable of settling down anywhere or with anyone. That doesn't mean her portrayal in the film, or its ending, isn't appropriate and satisfying in its own right, of course. It's just that the two have to be treated as quite different animals.

The novella paints a picture of New York living which must have seemed quite shocking at the time (and certainly led to a bit of difficulty getting it published). It's not just Holly's transactional relationships with men, but the fact that she smokes weed, speaks openly about her 'dyke' friends and at one point declares that a person ought to be able to marry men or women because "Love should be allowed. I'm all for it." Indeed, the same sort of subjects come up in two of the other three stories included in the book. The first, 'House of Flowers', is about a Haitian woman who starts the story as a sex worker in Port-au-Prince and ends up going into the mountains to marry a simple farmer (who treats her appallingly). She's a kind of reverse Holly Golightly, in fact. The second, 'A Diamond Guitar', is about an older prisoner who becomes such close friends with a younger man who arrives in the compound one day that "Except that they did not combine their bodies or think to do so, though such things were not unknown at the farm, they were as lovers." Capote himself was gay, but also clearly more broadly interested in challenging conventional morality and exploring the lives of people at the bottom of the social pyramid. The final story, 'A Christmas Memory', is more sentimental and wholesome, featuring the friendship between a young boy and a much older female relative who conspire to make Christmas cakes together despite their very limited means, but Wikipedia confirmed my instinct that it too reflected Capote's personal experiences, drawing on his rather financially and emotionally deprived childhood. I certainly read it at the right time of year, since I finished this book in early December, though I hadn't planned that.

Christmas was very nice, involving a soft new dark purple dressing-gown, this book, a roaring fire and a roast duck. Today we have been out in the melting snow to saw up a wardrobe and take it to the tip, and now I've got a couple of hours of quiet time before a family friend comes round to dinner. So let's get started on those over-due reviews I mentioned. A batch of films first, the first two of which must date back to at least June, because I saw them before I went to Australia at the end of that month.


12. Nothing But The Night (1973), dir. Peter Sasdy

This one I watched with ladylugosi_1313 because we just fancied a bit 1970s Cushing-Lee action (a fairly permanent state of mind for us). I've seen it before, and my review from last time (LJ / DW) does not exactly brim over with enthusiasm, but we actually found it better than either of us had remembered on a re-watch. Much of my complaint last time was that it suddenly seemed to switch genres in the final 10 minutes or so, whipping out a supernatural explanation for what had until then appeared to be a perfectly ordinary murder-mystery story with little time to process it or understand why a child was suddenly burning her own mother to death. But of course if you know that supernatural explanation from the beginning, it doesn't appear quite so incongruous when it comes, and you can pick up small ways in which it had actually been telegraphed much earlier on in the film.

There's still a problem with the ending, though, even after the supernatural explanation for all the strange goings-on has been revealed. Basically, the story drives itself into a moral corner by putting a bunch of grown adults who have all done terrible things and therefore need to get their come-uppance into the stolen bodies of children. The dilemma is that because they look like children, it would be a hard sell to convince the audience that it would really be OK for the heroic point-of-view characters we have been following throughout the narrative to gun them down, destroy them in a blazing inferno, or deploy any of the other methods typically used to defeat villains in fantasy movies. However much the audience might have been told that they are adult villains, the visuals of horrible deaths being visited on people we instinctively see as innocent just wouldn't be good. So the solution chosen instead was for the children to enact justice on themselves by deciding to jump off a cliff en masse at the first sign that their plans had been rumbled and they might shortly have to face justice. Unfortunately, though, this just doesn’t ring true at all given the lengths they have already gone to to secure immortality, and contributes a lot to the sensation I'd experienced last time of just feeling that the entire film had plunged spectacularly off the rails in the final few minutes.

Oh well, it still has Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in it, and lots of great '70s period detail, so watching it certainly wasn't a waste of time. But I doubt it will ever be terribly high up my list of their best pairings.


13. Son of Frankenstein (1939), dir. Rowland V. Lee

This was another one watched with ladylugosi_1313, quite possibly on the same night (I can't remember). It features Basil Rathbone as the title character, returning to his father's castle to restore his reputation - except that this includes reviving his Creature, and things start to go horribly wrong when the local Ygor (Bela Lugosi) uses the Creature to wreak revenge on the men who once sentenced him to a hanging (a fuller plot summary is on Wikipedia). Everyone is very good in it - perhaps especially Lugosi as the shaggy, conspiring Ygor - and Basil gets an excellent, athletic swinging-on-a-rope moment at the end to knock the Creature into a sulphur pit and save the day. But the absolute stars of the production really are the wonderful sets, and especially this beautiful pair of matching fire-places in the main living area:



14. Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter (1974), dir. Brian Clemens

I watched this one on the plane from the UK to Thailand, mainly because it was available on Google Play Movies, so I could easily get it onto the tablet which I had bought especially for that trip and watch it when offline. I had seen almost all of it before, but never all sequentially or while properly paying attention. It’s a creditable go at a fresh take on the vampire film on Hammer’s part, and it has some good sequences. I like the scene in which Kronos and Grost have to find out how to despatch the semi-vampirised Dr. Marcus by experimentation, with him urging them on all the while. It offers a good note of black humour and a fun tongue-in-cheek dig at the conventions of the vampire genre. Caroline Munro also does a very good job of experiencing a creepy night in front of the fire at Durward Manor (the vampires' strong-hold). But I find Kronos himself a bit characterless, and Caroline Munro isn’t given enough to do beyond looking scared, wenchlike or sexy. Her performances as both Laura in Dracula AD 1972 and Margiana in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad show a capacity to convey a sense of adventure and vitality which wasn’t given enough outlet here.


15. Dracula: The Dark Prince (2013), Pearry Reginald Teo

Another one downloaded onto my tablet before my Australia trip, and watched in a hotel in Brisbane. I straight-up loved it! It belongs to a particular sub-genre of Dracula stories which are sort of about the historical Vlad as a vampire, but which treat 15th-century Wallachia as a generic Game of Thrones-ish medieval fantasy world rather than making any very serious attempt to situate him in a real historical context. Dracula Untold is on the edge of this field, although it makes more effort than most with the historical setting, and the opening scenes of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) are of course what really kicked them all off - but most are novels or comic books. Although I haven’t read any of those, I'm aware enough of the genre to recognise it here, and I have a lot of respect for the approach. It basically takes all the fun bits of the various branches of the Dracula mythos, and doesn't let historical or literary purity get in the way of constructing epic Gothic adventures out of them. Quite right too! This particular film it isn’t anything very much to write home about as far as scripting, acting, direction or cinematography are concerned, and nor does it win any prizes for its representation of gender relations, ethnic diversity, disability or anything else. But as Gothic brain candy it is wonderful and uplifting and enchanting, and I definitely want more films like this, please. I might even explore some of those novels or comic books at some point...


That will have to be enough reviews for today, though, as it is time to get in the shower and then help with getting dinner started.

I have wanted to make this post for three days, but have been unable to do so until now because I could not load my LJ photo galleries. As multiple friends have noted, LJ has been shonky in a number of ways over the same period, and although it seems OK again now, the problems seem to be associated with a server move to Russia - and I must say I also feel very uncomfortable about relying on anything in Russia for the ongoing preservation of a journal I have been carefully curating for 13 years now. I've never felt so inclined to set up a Dreamwidth mirror... but then again something nwhyte said in an entry earlier today made me doubt that Dreamwidth has proper picture-hosting facilities at all. It's all sadly ironic that this should happen just when people are genuinely popping up on LJ again, thanks I understand to a FB LJ-nostalgia community.

Anyway, here's what I actually wanted to post - a few pictures of our Christmas. We booked a cottage in the Cotswolds village of Bourton-on-the-Water this year - 'we' in this case being me, my Dad, my sister and her husband and children. None of us had ever done Christmas this way before, but we decided to try it on the grounds that it would be healthier and cheerier to do something new and different this year, rather than try to re-create our normal family Christmas but with one person missing. It would also allow flexible levels of participation for each person, in that everyone could choose whether to hang out with the other cottage residents, go out for a walk or simply lie on their bed reading a book. And I'm glad to say it worked really well. We did remember Mum of course, and Dad had a couple of tearful moments. But for a first Christmas without her, it was actually really nice and enjoyable and nothing like as difficult as I suspect it would have been in the family home, or even my sister's home (where Mum had also been for Christmas day a couple of times in recent years).

We arrived in the afternoon of the 23rd, in pretty rotten weather, and got settled in. We had brought a LOT of food, which took quite a bit of unpacking and putting away, while Christophe admired the (fake) Christmas tree which the cottage owners had supplied, and Eloise enjoyed The Snow Dog.

( Pictures start here )

Anyway, here we are in the Festive Perineum (h/t inbetween_girl), which I found boring as a teenager, but has now become one of my favourite times of the year. The obligations of Christmas are all fulfilled, my work email account is blissfully free of people demanding things, and it is genuinely OK to sit around in my dressing-gown watching a Buffy marathon on SyFy and ordering the unpurchased items on my Amazon wish-list. I wondered about driving up to Allendale for their New Year's tar bar'l procession this year, as 2016 is a year which I feel pretty strongly could do with a good burning out. But the weather reports say it will be raining pretty heavily there right over midnight, so maybe not. I am open to other suggestions, if anyone has any?

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The central conceit of this year's Christmas special was that Doctor Who is just as real, and just as unreal, as Santa Claus. In and of itself, I loved this. It was very meta, perfectly true, and extremely productive for bouncing the two mythic traditions off against one another. As the Doctor himself put it, "D'you know what the big problem is in telling fantasy and reality apart? They're both ridiculous." Maybe it was a slightly repetitive line to take, after having done much the same thing with Robin Hood earlier this year, but that's less of a problem for a Christmas episode than it would be a regular one, given that Christmas episodes tend to pull in a higher proportion of casual viewers who may not have seen Robot of Sherwood anyway. And there were lots of cool moments to enjoy, like the snarky Elves, Santa rearing up on Rudolph like a heroic knight, Nick Frost generally being completely brilliant, and everything about Shona.

But a week, much musing, and some re-watching of key scenes later, and I'm still both puzzled and bothered by the question of whose dream(s) we are seeing at any given stage in the episode, and where the dreams end and 'reality' begins. I realise that worrying about this at all is at odds with that central conceit, according to which it doesn't matter, since everything you're seeing is a story anyway. But the difference between Doctor Who and the mythos of Santa Claus is that Doctor Who is an ongoing, unfolding story presented by an identifiable single source (the BBC TV series), which purports to offer internal consistency of plot and character development. So while Santa Claus can merrily get away with being and doing many different and contradictory things, depending on who is telling him, Doctor Who cannot - or at least not if it wants to keep hold of viewers who care about what has and hasn't actually 'happened' to the characters they are following.

As far as I understand it, the official line on this episode is that everything we see is a dream (often within one or more other dreams), except for the final scene when the Doctor arrives at the large house in which a twenty-something Clara is now sleeping, rescues her from the last dream-crab, and they leave together in the TARDIS. This, at least, is what Moffat himself has stated. The problem is that this scene comes at the end of a whole story in which the Doctor has repeatedly insisted on applying critical thinking to determine the difference between dreaming and reality. "Trust nothing, interrogate everything", he says. But the 'waking-up' scene which Moffat insists is 'real' comes directly after the Doctor has voiced the wish to older-dream-Clara that he had returned to her sooner, so it is a wish-fulfilment scenario for him (the second chance he doesn't normally get, as he says), while the tangerine on the windowsill is a heavy hint that this is meant to have been set up for him by Santa. So everything that has gone before this scene should have trained us to spot the big red flags here, and recognise this as another dream. And yet Moffat is insisting outside the text that it is real, without having given us anything within the text to support that.

This feels lazy to me, as well as like Moffat is trying to have it both ways. Within the story he's saying that the distinction between dreams and reality doesn't matter, yet from outside the story he is still leaning in over our shoulders anyway to tell us which bits are dreams and which 'real'. If that distinction matters to him after all, couldn't he have put the effort into making it clear from within the story itself? Like a lot of Moffat stories in recent years, what this all feels like is that he had a promising idea for what could have been a really great episode, but in practice it didn't go through enough rewriting drafts, so that we have something nearly-brilliant, but which kind of flakes out at the last hurdle. And what really bothers me about all this as a viewer is not so much not knowing which scenes are dreams and which 'real' per se, but the fact that a knock-on consequence of this is that we don't really know whose dreams we are seeing at any given time either, and thus whose subconscious we are being granted an insight into. These are the various different possibilities which could apply, as far as I can figure them out:

1. As per Moffat's Diktat, "Everything except the very last scene is a dream". This means that dream-crabs really exist, since we see the Doctor removing one from Clara's face, and I think we're meant to understand that both were attacked by them (the Doctor in a mysterious cave and Clara in her equally-mysterious house), and were somehow experiencing a shared dream from their different locations. Under this scenario, then, the Doctor and Clara have both effectively told each other that they were lying about Gallifrey and Danny respectively at the end of season 8, because they did this in a dream which both were experiencing. Both have also effectively admitted to each other that they really just want to keep on travelling together. But, as I've said above, there are pretty hefty in-story reasons to view Moffat's Diktat as bollocks and read the last scene as just as much of a dream as everything else. In which case, they possibly haven't shared these emotional breakthroughs after all.

2. Even if we accept Moffat's Diktat, the roles of Shona, Albert, Fiona and Ashley remain unclear. By "the very last scene", does he literally mean the last scene with the Doctor and Clara, or does he extend that to mean each of the other characters' last scenes as well? (Well, except for Albert, who doesn't get one 'cos 'e snuffed it.) I.e. is it a shared crab-induced dream with input from all of them, which began for each character in the various different real-life locations where we see them waking up towards the end of the story? Or not? Do the other characters even exist, or are they dream-inventions of the Doctor's and / or Clara's? After he rescues her from her dream-crab, the Doctor tells older Clara that "The dream crabs must have got to me first and then found you in my memory. The others were collateral damage." But this doesn't really clear things up. Does it mean they were in his memory too? Or hers? And are they present in the dream as the Doctor and / or Clara's subconscious memories, right down to dreaming happy endings for them where they awake back into reality, or are they there as real people who are dreaming too, and really do wake up back in their own realities? When Albert, who put his hand on Shona's knee during the briefing process, is sucked into a security monitor and never seen again, is that Shona's sub-conscious wish-fulfilment? Or Clara's? Or the Doctor's? Or what?

3. Another approach is to ignore Moffat's blethering, and rewind back to the end of the last episode of season 8, where we saw the Doctor nodding off at the console of his TARDIS, before being rudely awakened by a knocking at the TARDIS door and Santa coming in declaring that he couldn't leave things with Clara like that. Everything Last Christmas has shown us should signal this, too, was a dream, and one which we never see the Doctor waking up from throughout the entirety of the Christmas special. Under this scenario, we can actually forget about the dream-crabs, and read the whole of Last Christmas as a perfectly normal non-crab-induced dream of the Doctor's, and his alone, within which he has presumably invented (or subconsciously remembered) a character, Shona, whom he imagined in turn inventing both the crabs and Santa Claus out of a combination of her favourite movies. This is actually what I think is the most plausible reading of everything we've seen on screen - but it does matter quite a lot for ongoing character development purposes whether or not it's correct, because under this theory, the Doctor and Clara haven't admitted to each other that they've lied, or that they want to keep on travelling together. In fact, they still haven't even seen or had any other kind of contact with one another since parting in the café.

I don't really know why I'm worrying or puzzling over any of this, because I am 99.9% sure that at the beginning of the next season, Moffat will carry on regardless. We'll never really know whether any of what we saw 'happened', and thus what the Doctor and Clara have or haven't said or revealed to each other, and it will all just become yet another unresolved plot string to trouble us vaguely in the background even while we're being asked to follow another. But the fact is that the weight of those loose strings is bothering me, and making me more and more jaded about each new one that follows. I wish we could find some way to cut free of them all, so that I can get on with enjoying what are otherwise still a lot of awesome stories and great characters.

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Rewinding a few days here to the pre-Christmas period, I went to see this at Leeds Town Hall with ms_siobhan, planet_andy, nalsa and Mrs. nalsa in honour of planet_andy's birthday. I've never been to a film screening at Leeds Town Hall before, so that was fun in itself, and nor had I seen Die Hard in spite of its classic status. It is an action film after all, which is hardly my genre, but going to see it in its reinvented pomo guise as a 'Christmas film' - now that, I could handle.

It is, of course, masses of fun. Indeed, I might well have gone to see it earlier if I'd cottoned on to the fact that it has Alan Rickman in it being deliciously villainous. His character even got in a Classical reference, too:

"And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer." Benefits of a classical education. [Source: IMDb]

Obviously, that actually boils down to your standard use of Classics to denote morally-bankrupt posh people, and is thus exactly the sort of thing which puts people off the subject, but never mind! It's still good to hear Alex getting a name-check, and it's not like it was a mainstay of the plot. Other things I particularly liked included McClane's message on the first terrorist victim's shirt: "Now I have a machine gun - ho ho ho!", Johnson & Johnson the ineffective FBI agents and Argyle happily living it up in his limousine while blithely unaware of the major terrorist incident going on in the building above him. I assumed for ages that he would spend literally the entire film like this, and just drive out the next morning wondering what was going on, but it was also cool that he got to play his part in overcoming the bad guys too.

I do realise that this bit is going to make me sound like Noam Chomsky on his day off, but gosh - you really couldn't present a more fully-developed fantasy of hyper-masculinity as a response to male anxieties about successful career-women than this film, could you? That is literally how McClane wins his wife back after their marriage has been broken apart by her promotion to Director of Corporate Affairs at the Nakatomi Corporation. But anyway! Helicopters and explosions and cool one-liners and stuff! Yay.

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OK, yes, internet. I think we are all agreed that that wasn't the best episode of Doctor Who ever. But that's OK. Not every episode in the world's longest-running SF show can be brilliant.

The basic problem this time is that Moffat pretty much just put up on screen all the notes he's been keeping about how the time crack, the Silence, the question hiding in plain sight, Trenzalore and the Lore of the Twelve Regenerations should be resolved, without troubling to knit them into a coherent story or to give them any emotional weight. They were all there, all answered - tick, tick, tick - and it's nice to get the twelve regenerations thing sorted and out of the way especially. But they came too fast, devolved into rabid canon-fodder, and most of us ceased to even care because there wasn't enough of a story to bind them together.

Still, there ya go. Tasha Lem was pretty cool, although considering she was the most fleshed-out newly-introduced character of the entire story, I could still have done with a bit more time getting to know her. I hope we might see more of her in future, anyway. Also nice to meet Clara's family - and perhaps we'll see more of them, too, now that Moffat has gone to the trouble of inventing them? It's not like they were really needed for this one episode, so I hope they have a future in some others. And I did very much like the idea of the Doctor growing old in Christmas town, knowing that he can never leave and never win, but fighting off enemy after enemy all the same, and counting each one as a victory. In some ways it reminded me of The Last Doctor, a short story which Paul Cornell wrote for Christmas 2009 - except that Cornell's story is much, much better, because it has characters and emotions in it, and a still small calm at its core, rather than just a whole shopping list of enemies and plot elements.

The small things:

• When the Doctor talked about making an invented boyfriend, and said that there was "no easy way to get rid of an android", was that seriously a shout-out to Kamelion? A genuine question - I still haven't seen any of his episodes, so can't answer properly myself.
• Or maybe he just meant Handles, who was excellent, and a lot like K9?
• I'm no Strictly Come Dancing fan, but I liked that it was on the telly in the Oswalds' flat. That's the kind of ordinary lives touch that RTD used to be so good at, and which I miss sorely - not to mention a lovely cheeky BBC bit of self-inter-textuality.
• The people in Christmas town telling the Doctor to "be happy here" reminded me of the creepy villagers in Children of the Stones wishing each other 'happy day' all the time. Except that that came to nothing, because the locals weren't actually creepy at all. Pity, really.
• I liked the idea of the Silence's true purpose being to act as confessional priests, with everyone forgetting what they have said to them. That gives them a depth they've never quite had before for me.
• And yeah, the poem which ends "Eleven's hour is over now, the clock is striking Twelve's" was nicely used.

Otherwise, that's it. I have nothing more to say about this episode. On to a proper Peter Capaldi story, please.

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I went to see this this morning amongst one of the fullest houses I have ever seen at the Cottage Road cinema. I've watched and reviewed it twice before in this journal: once in 2010, when I found James Stewart's profile pleasing, but just couldn't buy into the sentimentality or the idealisation of small-town America and its reactionary values, and again in 2011, when I had moved on to considering James Stewart 'fab' and noticing the meta-referentiality of the first half of the film, but also expounded further on the racism and sexism - especially the scene where we are supposed to find the spectacle of a young George Bailey pressing his advantage on Mary while she hides naked in a hydrangea bush romantic and funny.

This time... I don't know. Maybe now that I've articulated how I feel about both the sentimentality and the various -isms embedded into or even celebrated by the story, it's easier for me to separate those out, treat the film like the curate's egg it is and enjoy those parts of it that are excellent? Or maybe it was just the large audience in a festive mood, who laughed along appreciatively to what are actually a lot of very funny lines - not to mention the mince pie and mulled wine which I bought during the intermission. It being my third time round I also spotted various small things which I don't think I've noticed before, like the large bust of Napoleon on the windowsill in Mr. Potter's office, which nicely symbolises his aggressively imperialising approach to business. That kind of attention to detail always helps me to warm towards a film.

I also thought properly for the first time about why The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is so important to the story that the angel, Clarence Odbody, goes round clutching it throughout the entire film, and then gives it to George as a Christmas gift at the end. In part it must be because the book puts such emphasis on the friendship between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, which fits nicely with Clarence's inscription on the front page at the end of the film: "no man is a failure who has friends." But (having just re-checked the plot on Wikipedia), I can see now that more important is probably the episode in which Tom, Huck and their friend Joe run away for a while to an island in the Mississippi, and have a wonderful time until they realise that their families back home think they have all drowned in the river. That resonates with two key notes in It's a Wonderful Life - not prioritising your own desire for adventure over other people's happiness, and (because Tom secretly observes how his family are responding to his absence) getting to see what the world would be like if you weren't in it. So, yes, I see how that's an important inter-text.

One more thing - it occurred to me this time that since the angel Clarence watches the first two-thirds of the film from heaven as though on a film-reel before he goes down to Earth and meets George Bailey, he should have seen exactly what happened to the $8000 dollars which Uncle Billy misplaced, and have been able to tell George where it was and who had it. Obviously, that would have scotched the sentimental ending in which everyone chips in to help George cover the loss, and as it has taken me three viewings to even notice it, I guess it isn't really a problem, plot-wise. Plus Clarence is characterised early on as a bit dim, so maybe he just didn't even realise himself that it might be helpful to explain to George what had happened. But still, it would have been nice at least to know whether Mr. Potter ever got his comeuppance for keeping it.

I probably wouldn't ever bother to watch this film again in my life if it weren't a regular fixture on the Cottage Road cinema's Christmas programme. Indeed, that was already true after only one viewing of it. But since it's there, and since after three viewings now it has effectively become a Christmas tradition for me, and since James Stewart... I guess I won't go out of my way to avoid future viewings in the same setting.

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