I have just returned from a holdiay in the Algarve, in Portugal! Which means I'm full of lots of new ideas and I've also lost a few old ones... actually, due to committing the dangerous act of thinking about something too much, I'm now an episode short on my Doctor Who fan series. Damn. The episode that's been lost would have been set on a train, in the old west and had lots of amazingly complex wibbly wobbly timey wimey... stuff. However, I finally convinced myself that there is no way we could film on a train. So now I need another episode. I have one or two ideas, but I'm still not sure...
Anyway, whilst on holiday I found, like everyone does, that there is actually a lot of time in the evening and some time in the morning where you can't go out or do anything and so you just end up watching TV. Which then annoys you, because you realise you could be doing this at home! So you try to kid yourself into thinking it's alright because you have different channels. Ha.
So. TV on holiday. In the evening, after a busy day doing the mad things people do on holidays and then going to a restaurant, so you're too tired to care about what you're watching. And that's why I ended up watching some of the chavvy teen soaps rubbish I never usually would - Wallaby Road (Hm? What's that? Waterloo? Yes, nice song, but now's not the time.). The funny thing is though - from a writer's point of view - there is some good stuff in that show! It was on a dodgy "BBC Entertainment" channel, so I don't know how old the episode was, but they had a school student, who you saw with drugs (I don't know whether his reason for having the drugs was revealed already - if so, then it's not quite as good as it could have been) and all the teachers were having a go at him, saying he was a druggy (a teacher accused him of "sniffing crack" - that was bad! No real teacher would do that!) and later you see him at home, with his mum, who's shaking and not in control of herself. It turns out the drugs were a medicine for her and he's a home carer. That is good drama! And he wouldn't admit to it because he was scared his mum would be taken away by a hospital, or social services, or something. That show might be largely codswallop (I love that word!) but that was incredible. I'd say the writer deserves an award if it wasn't for the rest of the garbage he or she had put into that episode. A boy in a prison school for dangerous driving, whilst his girlfriend keeps going to the police, trying to take the blame for him. ZzZzZzZzZzZzZz... Wouldn't really happen. No relationship is that strong when you're "14" (that actress was not 14!). And then the girl tries to prove it by crashing a van into a bin. HAHAHAHA! BORING! And, again, it would never really happen.
So there was a small glimmer of hope in Wallaby Road (would you stop saying Waterloo?!!! I'm not interested in ABBA right now!) but it was largely consumed by the average nonsense that appeals to the average teenager. But, that show wasn't the worst thing I'd seen. It got much worse...
2 Fast 2 Furious? More like the... you know, 2 *something insulting that rhymes with fast* 2 *something insulting that rhymes with furious*. What a total pile of codswallop! (I said I liked that word!) Dialogue that people would never use in real life, characters that wouldn't exist in real life, doing things you wouldn't get away with in real life in a film that is a gross mockery of real life. It's so childish! According to the vast knowledge of the internet, that film was a PG13 in the USA, which I suppose means 12A in the Queen's English. My brother is 11 and he got bored with that film. It's really aimed at young children that film. Even the over-the-top swearing. Little kids find that cool. By the time you've grown up a bit, you realise swearing is everywhere in modern films and TV, so it's not a big deal. And it becomes obvious they just put the ridiculously exaggerated swearing in to make it look cool to young kids. The problem is, no parent would let a 4 year old watch that film. In fact, no human being should let themself watch that film. A whole gang of muscle cars race down a main road, ducking and weaving in between lanes and other vehicles and not one police car shows up. Lines like "I've got a problem with authority!" really make you cringe. NOBODY SAYS THAT! And if they do, nobody replies "I've got that same problem!" Two main characters talking about the film's cliche girlfriend character. Guy 1: "Why are you checking her out?" Guy 2: "I'm not." Cut to: the two of them at a dinner table. Awkward pause, due to bad editing. They sit down. "Guy 1: "Yeah you were!" Guy 2: "Yeah, okay, I was."
I hate it when writers assume our conversations will randomly stop and then continue a considerable amount of time later, from the exact same point we left off, just so that the audience can convienently hear the whole conversation, whilst one scene can still neatly cut to the next. Also, nobody changes their mind that fast! "No I wasn't." "Yeah you were." "Yeah, okay, I was!" Nobody has ever been so easy to convince in the history of humanity!
So, that's that film destroyed forever. Apart from some dodgy TV, the Alrgarve was great! And I now have a notebook to write down all my ideas and plans for different writing projects.
GOOD NEWS: The script for episode 2 of my Doctor Who fan series has been started! By me, obviously. It's called "Sword And Sceptre"! I love that name because originally I was going to call it "Knightmare" (being a medieval episode) but that was a horrible, pun-ridden name!
AG :)
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