Pre-departure Meme

Book meme nicked from shadow_lynne. Bold the ones you've read.
( I counted at least three I'm planning on reading before the year's out, so I italicised those... )

Negativity

Dear dis_connection:

Yes, we all get that you do not like the new Doctor Who. You hate the scripts. You hate the acting. You hate the plotlines. You hate absolutely every damn thing about it. It depresses you, it galls you, it twists inside your guts like acid-resistant millipedes every time you watch it. Every time. Without fail. You find no redeeming features with the new Who. At all. Okay. We get it.

Now, a question for you: why, then, are you still watching it?

sclerotic_rings tends to point people at a Biblical proverb about how the dog returneth to its own vomit at around this point, but I'm a little less literary about it. Look, I'll grant you that I don't like the new Who very much either. However, it comes on at my house every Saturday evening without fail on the grounds that dodgyhoodoo has a higher tolerance when it comes to this sort of thing. He doesn't expect as much from it. While there are a lot of things that twist the knife and turn him into a ranting slavering critique-beast (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie, for instance), Doctor Who is not one of them. Mostly because he doesn't think it's all that bad. I mean, really doesn't think it's all that bad.

I think it's all that bad, personally. I think it's getting better, partially because Tennant is kind of working out a way to make that manic act work in the part (kind of. Sort of. Maybe), but I really do think it's all that bad. The deal with the werewolves ... okay, that sucked. Rose trying to force Queen Victoria to say the famous "We are not amused" line ... sucked. The Anthony Stewart Head plot was ripped directly from The Tomorrow People. Tennant's a nutjob and let's face it -- Eccleston, with his 'daft old face', has more charisma in his left pinky-toe than Tennant has in his entire Cocker-wannabe body. It's unsubtle as hell. In short, particularly in comparison with last season, it blows dead goats for nickels. I agree with you there. Still, I've learned to at least develop a mild appreciation for it, for two reasons:

1) It predominantly suffers in comparison to last season, when you had the charismatic Eccleston, the stunning revelation that Billie Piper can act, and the sheer *squee* factor of "It's BACK!"

2) It is still far and away better than just about any other fucking thing on TV right now.

Let's look at point 2. Let's see; what's on TV these days? You know what? I have no damn clue, because I don't watch it, because most of it seems to suck. There are the never-ending 'dramas' (read: soaps) -- Brookside Close may be a distant memory, but we've still got Eastenders, where they had to resurrect a fucking dead man to get ratings; Coronation Street, which had to turn a villainous character psychopathic to get ratings; Emmerdale, which just seems to be happy with its core viewers or has vanished off the air, I'm not sure which; Hollyoaks fucking sensational teenybopper sex-n-drugs bullshit; and let's not even get started on the Antipodean shit that predominantly appealed to bored sixth formers on lunch break. There are the 'docu-dramas' that Channel Four keeps advertising that turn all manner of basic shit into an hour-long AV tabloid. Picking apart Shakespeare like the Da Vinci Code people? The guy with the Jack the Ripper hoax? And of course, Channel Four is the worst purveyor of "Top 100" programmes since VH-1. And let's not forget 'reality TV'; Big Brother seems to have decided that the 'circus freak tent' is the way to go this year, and then there's allowing a working MP who's supposed to be minding his constituency into the Celebrity Big Brother house (way to fill us with confidence in our ever-failing government), and I don't know if they're still doing "I'm a Celebrity; Get Me Out of Here!" but honestly, if they are, I want it to turn into Lord of the Flies...

But you see, I don't watch any of this. I don't bother, because I know it won't be worth my time and I will be sitting there feeling like, "There's an hour of my life I'm never getting back". I watch Lost, because I'm desperately curious. I watch Invasion, because it's actually worth watching. And, provided I don't feel that the episode sucks complete baboon arse, I will watch Doctor Who. I watched the Cybermen two-parter, for example, because I had never actually seen the original Cybermen and given that corone insisted that they were far scarier than Daleks (okay, even in this incarnation, NO), I thought I ought to. But I sat out the time-window thing and the werewolf one because I didn't want to waste my time watching something I obviously wasn't going to enjoy, and would just piss me off so I'd have to rant like a ranting thing while knowing all the while that what I was really ranting about was not having Eccleston in the title role.

You can't get away from politics. You can't get away from the PM trying to give this country over to mob rule. You shouldn't try. But really, with all the things in the world that are going wrong, why ruin your times for entertainment by watching a programme you obviously don't like so that you have yet one more thing to rant about? Why not find a different programme, one that you like, and rave positively instead? Or at least as well? I may go on long, vituperative rants about things I can't stand (the Star Wars prequels, Hostel, the second Harry Potter movie and how overrated the LotR films were, to name a few), but at least in the middle of all that ranting, I can stop and go, for example, "Yay Silent Hill!"

And yes, I am probably going to see the Da Vinci Code. I expect to rant about this, but if I do, I just won't go see it again. So no dog returning to its own vomit here, thank you.