I’m free

The Guardian reports that the ASA admonished the Sunday Telegraph for its giveaway of my audio CD Pest Control. The adjudication is here. Thank you to m’colleague Oli Smith who drew my attention to this, and warned me that BBC Watchdog were going to camp on my doorstep and demand an explanation.

I waited until Anne Robinson shouted through my letterbox and then poked her with a sharpened pencil through the open flap. When you next see her on TV, you may notice she has an awkward tic in one eye.

Alas, one complainant felt misled that the audiobook was in two parts and only one was attached to the paper. Another complainant didn’t think the redeemable vouchers made the audiobook ”free” from WH Smith because they didn’t live near a store, and therefore had to stump up nearly thirteen quid for all the CDs.

If it’s any consolation, I spent a quid to get my free Pest Control Part 1 CD in the Sunday Telegraph, and then forgot to get the Monday Daily Telegraph paper altogether. Oli Smith’s audio (free the previous day) was good, though. BBC Audio (or possibly AudioGo) plan to issue it officially at a later date with music and sound effects.  That cover mount was the first time Oli had heard the final version — he got up at 7 a.m. on the Saturday to buy the paper and listen to his CD.

Actually, you can still get both Pest Control CDs in a nice box with a booklet for a mere six quid from Amazon. Or for listeners in the US, for less than $20 here.

Random facts

What better way to test WordPress on my iPhone than to do something random? So here are 25 random things about me.

(Yes, I am this vain. I will even interview myself.)

1: My first published work was a competition-winning story composed from book titles. I won a book voucher with a photo of a Concorde jet on it. This was the 1970s.

2: When I was a teenager, I had the temerity to cold-call Terry Nation at home. He was very nice, considering, and did not exterminate me.

3: I had a reputation for getting lost on school trips. One teacher proudly announced in assembly that the highlight of her class trip was that I did not go missing at any stage.

4: Curry was an unknown treat until I was 21 years old. This was an availability thing, not some weird religious requirement.

5: My office at work had a view of the women’s toilets. (The toilet door, I mean, not the inside, that would be ghastly). When the door opens, it’s a movement in my peripheral vision, and I had to resist the temptation to look up. Or use a stopwatch. http://twitpic.com/19402

6: The union flag is such a splendid design that I have decided is worth displaying (e.g. at work, on my Twitter page) without worrying that people might think I am a right-wing nutcase. The thing needs reclaiming for the broader population.

7: Primary school treats: reading Dickens, trips to the Isle of Man, milk in 1/3rd-pint bottles.

8: None of my immediate family are left-handed, except my younger son. He does not look like our milkman.

9: I was the only Manchester City supporter I knew at my all-boys secondary school. One day, the coach company that took us to school ran out of coaches, and so we were delivered in the Manchester United team coach.

10: The carpet in my first house smelled of dog. Doing the Shake’n'Vac did not put the freshness back. I got a carpet shampoo machine, but that only made the house smell of boiled dog.

11: My name in Greek is Пέτρος Аγγελíδες but I cannot speak Greek.

12: I wrote an article for “The Listener”. Some years later, a journalist friend told me that they’d liked it and wondered why I hadn’t pitched them more stuff. I was foolishly waiting for them to ask. It doesn’t work like that.

13: Why don’t I play badminton twice a week like I used to? Indolence, lack of time, and the fear of putting my back out again.

14: I do not have any aliases in online news groups where I participate. I think it’s a bit odd to have an ID like “The Ergon” or “Matt Smith’s Hair”, but perhaps I’m an Old Fuddy Duddy. (That could be a future alias, I suppose.)

15: TV shows I think I’d like but can’t be bothered to hunt out: the new “Battlestar Galactica”, “The Wire”, “Mad Men”. The first television programme I saw in colour was “Play School”. Humpty turned out to be purple and green — who knew? Hamble looked like we should call Social Services.

16. My favourite car colour was a citrine yellow Ford Orion. I loved it. Everyone else said it was horrible. One writer I interviewed said it was the colour of baby diarrhea. He went on to win an Oscar. I went on to sell the car to my parents.

17: I did a radio interview about my “Doctor Who” books in Winchester, and the badly-briefed presenter said: “So, your favourite monsters are the Cybermen, aren’t they?” For the sake of politeness, and to avoid embarrassment, I agreed, and explained why I loved those silver giants. Lucky that he didn’t say: “So, you once killed a man with your bare hands, didn’t you?” because I’d probably have agreed and been arrested on my way out of the studio.

18: Barry Took once sent me a bottle of champagne on my birthday, because he liked the contents of my matchbox.

19: Two friends and were invited to watch the final episode of “Blake’s 7″ being recorded in the studio. I can’t imagine what made the BBC decide it was a good idea to let us do this. After they recorded the final scene, director Mary Ridge declared loudly from the gallery: “Thank God, they’re all dead!”

20: I wanted to make a donation to the British Heart Foundation in memory of my late friend Craig Hinton. And http://www.bhf.org.uk/ is the place to go to help them beat off heart disease. But I discovered that the “uk” part is really important, otherwise you end up visiting a porn site, where it’s not heart disease they are beating off.

21: Just at the point when I might have contemplated laser eye correction, and be in a position to afford it, I am going long-sighted and so there’s really no point any more.

22: I asked John Barrowman to sign a copy of my first “Torchwood” novel so that I could auction it for charity. Instead of just signing it, he personalised it with such a lovely comment that I decided I could not part with it.

23: I used to worry that I’d go bald. There’s still time, but I’m more phlegmatic.

24: I enjoy driving, and I prefer automatics. But I waited nearly 30 years after passing my test to get an automatic.

25. One of these random facts is a lie.

Update: to add a photo,  I had to use the web-based client. I couldn’t manage that from the bath, where I was using my iPhone. And that’s what the photo illustrates.

Big fat geek wedding

Modern geek love appears to be a USB wedding ring. Mashable reports that the fiancée of Microsoft Game Studios Software Development Engineer Ray Arifiant has bought him a custom-made ring to celebrate their pending nuptuals and “for a lifetime of memories”.

How times change. I got married quite a while ago, and all I could offer my fiancée was a 5¼-inch floppy.

Now and again

Charles Norton interviewed me as part of an article he wrote for Sci Fi Now Magazine. Inevitably, there’s always more to the interview than gets published. The article itself appeared in the magazine earlier this month, and I commend it to you — it features other interviews with Doctor Who people. For a flavour of how these things get constructed, here is the original Q&A for my bit.

Charles Norton: Gary Russell told me that he felt that Doctor Who was the kind of programme that encourages its fans to work in the media. Star Trek fans tend to become scientists and astronauts. However, Doctor Who fans tend to become writers, directors and producers. Doctor Who seems to get people interested in the mechanics of TV and story-telling. Has it been like that for you? To put it another way, do you think that Doctor Who made you want to write?

Peter A: I enjoyed writing as a child, whether for my school essays in English or History, or for my own interest. Doctor Who was an early childhood enthusiasm, so it certainly featured in my writing then, or the games I acted out,or the films I made on Super 8. Followed by fan magazines. Followed by the chance to get published professionally.

CM: How do you feel that that the past five years has seen Doctor Who change? Is it still the same show? Does it matter if it isn’t?

PA: Television has changed since the “classic” series was last on the the late 1980s, its entire context — multichannel broadcast, acting styles, editing and cutting conventions, and the whole panoply of alternative media that surrounds contemporary TV programmes. Doctor Who plays into that really well.

Classic Who was a very splendid product of its time. The new series is a fabulous modern version. It’s all the same show. A whole generation never knew Classic Who and, for the most part, that won’t bother them in the slightest, any more than today’s Coronation Street fans would worry that they’ve never heard of Ena Sharples and Minnie Caldwell.

CM: What different disciplines does writing a Doctor Who story now demand, as opposed to five years ago?

PA: Depends on the story. The media is more varied, so with audios you have to work with the expectation that families listening to it on the car CD player have it as a shared experience like watching the telly, and aren’t going to skip back a few tracks to work out what happened, whereas with a novel it’s a solitary experience that you can scan back over if you wish. You can see a greater variety of styles and tone (yet paradoxically all still “true” to the TV series) in things like the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and the Doctor Who Adventures one, or the tie-in novels and the “Darksmith” stories, or the short stories in the annuals.

CM: The return of the TV series has brought Doctor Who much greater public attention, but do you think that there’s been any down sides? Do you feel that giving the series a new future has come at the expense of remembering its past? Has the old become sidelined by the new? I’m thinking particularly about the BBC’s decision to axe the ‘Past Doctor Novels’.

PA: I think that’s a bit parochial. There is hugely more tie-in merchandise than ever before in the show’s history, and the Beeb are very conscious that it’s a huge hit and so needs to meet the needs of a mass market, and quite right too. There are some niche things (do they still do those wildly expensive Doctor Who chess sets?) You only have to look at the “Monsters and Aliens” type books that include Classic Series monsters, or the BBC website that meticulously lists information and reviews of the old stories, or William “Yikes! He’s old” Hartnell pictures in Doctor Who Adventures, or listen to the Big Finish CDs or the Eighth Doctor on BBC Radio 7, or the Fifth Doctor on Children in Need, or all the Doctors appearing on screen in Matt Smith’s debut, to spot that the Classic Series undeniably isn’t forgotten. So I am entirely phlegmatic that they haven’t got round to publishing some more Past Doctor Books. I notice that they haven’t done any new Weetabix cards since the 1970s, either, but that doesn’t mean Nabisco are snubbing the show.

CM: Through people like yourself, Doctor Who kept on going throughout the wilderness years, even without a TV series to support it. If the BBC were to axe Doctor Who again and take the TV series off the air, do you think that it would still somehow manage to stay alive? Would it come back again? Will Doctor Who ever truly end?

PA: I can’t see it ever stopping completely, in one form or another. It’s the show that comes back. But I don’t really stop to think about that. Why worry about it? Be in the moment. Enjoy it wholeheartedly for what it is while we’ve got it, right now. The glass isn’t half empty. It isn’t half-full either, it’s spilling right over the edges.

CM: One last, really obvious cliché of a question, but do you have a favourite period of the show? Is there an era or set of stories that never fails to enthuse you? Perhaps you’re an Andrew Cartmel fan or a big follower of William Hartnell.

PA: I love it all. For example, the Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker years were really important parts of my childhood, and I’ve loved that the Eccleston and Tennant years have been important to my children. But I loved being part of the group of writers working on the Eighth Doctor novels, too. And now I’m relishing the chance to write for Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy, because that reminds me of when they were the Doctors. Plus, we’ve got all new Who with Matt Smith! What’s not to love? You can’t ask someone which of his kids is the best looking!

Fry’s jerkish delight

I was going to post something about Stephen Fry’s odd assertion about Doctor Who being a drama for children not adults. It seemed like an odd knee-jerk reaction unsupported by viewing demographics and scheduling.

And then I was delighted to see someone had already blogged a much better response: http://scyfilove.com/2528/stephen-fry-is-wrong-doctor-who-is-for-everyone/

June 18 update: Stephen Fry tweeted:
“Phew! Me delivering The Annual #TVLecture @bafta http://bit.ly/TVLecture – proof I never called Dr Who infantile or childish “

Norton virus

Poor Graham Norton. He’s unwittingly inflicted two offences on Doctor Who. The first occasion was when the opening episode of Series 1 was interrupted by his voice transmitted live from the studio of Simply Dance Fever. And then last weekend his animated alter ego popped up and preened in an in-vision advert for Over The Rainbow, inexplicably played during the thrilling cliffhanger conclusion to Series 5′s The Time of Angels.

It’s like he’s the official interruption for Doctor Who, if you don’t count the week off for Eurovision. In fact, let’s blame him for that now as well. He’s practically a rash. A Norton virus.

The first occasion was an accident. But the second was a deliberate decision on prime time BBC One. Viewers in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland were spared this crass interruption. This must be one of the few occasions when a “regional opt-out” was preferable.

Over five and a half thousand people have complained so far. Some others have suggested it’s an overreaction, or that it’s just “fans” grumbling. I think they miss the point. If the BBC is proud of its prime time dramas, whether Doctor Who or Casualty or EastEnders, why spoil the end of any of them? In what way was the added animation in the service of the programme? How many viewers did they think might say “d’you know, I’m so glad they mentioned that. Especially now. And thank goodness they didn’t wait until the end credits before furnishing that vital intelligence.” Vital intelligence being, by an odd coincidence, what was  missing from whoever authorised the addition on this occasion.

BBC drama production teams spend plenty of time and effort on shot composition, editing, and picture grading. So slapping a distracting animation in bright colours with text to read, over the darkened final scene, and in the process obscuring the leading man’s mouth while he delivers the final lines of the episode, could hardly have been more intrusive.

It’s not the end of the world. It hasn’t brutalised a sacred object. It didn’t “Ruin Doctor Who”. But it did spoil the enjoyment of the story for lots and lots of viewers.

This isn’t the first time that the BBC has done something this stupid, though previously these thoughtless overlay interruptions seem to have been confined to dramas on BBC Three. For some reason, Spooks seemed to suffer more than most — the most egregious example being an episode in which the lead character was silently and poignantly comforting his son after the death of his mum in an affecting long-shot rendered meaningless by a bright advert for a forthcoming programme.

The BBC allegedly conducted a “review” of these trails five years ago, and ignored a similar but smaller rash of complaints at the time.

Their latest mealy-mouthed apology after complaints an order of magnitude greater than that merely suggests the “timing” was inappropriate. Quite what timing would have been appropriate is left to the peeved viewer’s imagination.

I especially like the GallifreyBase news story that points out how unsuccessful the animated advert was anyway:

The cartoon Graham Norton didn’t prevent over two million leaving BBC One once Doctor Who finished. The average audience for BBC One between 7.00-7.05 was 7.01 million and the average between 7.05-7.10 was 4.81 million.

The BBC’s not-quite apology is a bit of an insult, really. But not so much of an insult as suggesting that viewers are so eager to bail on a programme they’ve watched almost to the end that the BBC needs to capture their attention with something else. Or that any viewers tuning in a bit early for Over the Rainbow might think “bugger me, they’ve put Doctor Who on instead — let’s see what’s on ITV.”

In the meantime, I offer the following as further possibilities for similar “advance publicity”:

• A fruity voice speaking sotto voce over David Archer’s discussion with Ruth about her latest meeting with Sam Batton: “Stay tuned for Front Row, in which Mark Lawson interviews Jim Carey about The Grinch!“
• A dancing animation of Jonathan Ross obscuring the “Rosebud” scene at the film’s conclusion: “From Citizen Kane to Kane and Abel – our new Jeffrey Archer miniseries is coming right up!”
• A tannoy announcement at the RSC over Horatio’s “Now cracks a noble heart” speech, to remind patrons that tickets are on sale in the foyer for next week’s Mother Goose pantomime.
• Interrupting the poignant dance conclusion to the drama series Casanova with a snippet of EastEnders in which brutal Phil Mitchell yells about “slaaaaaags!”

Oh no, hang on, they already did that last one. It was in 2005, and the BBC’s mealy-mouthed apology on that occasion suggested that they didn’t really think it was a problem: “We hope it did not affect anyone’s enjoyment of the final moments of this fantastic drama”.

Well, people complaining that it did affect their enjoyment might have been your first clue. And so it is again.

Covermount update

The Daily Telegraph has now provided fuller details of the audios that they are giving away free from next weekend. Details here.

Saturday 24th:  The Runaway Train, read by the new Doctor, Matt Smith (and written by Oli Smith)

Sunday 25th: Part One of Pest Control, read by David Tennant

Monday 26th: Get a voucher that you can redeem in WHSmith for Part Two of Pest Control.

Tuesday 26th: Voucher for Slipback, starring Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant

Wednesday 27th: Voucher for Exploration Earth starring Tom Baker and Sarah Jane Smith

Thursday 28th: Voucher for Genesis of the Daleks, abridged novelisation narrated by  Tom Baker

Friday 29th: Voucher for Mission to the Unknown, original soundtrack with narration by Peter Purves

Telegraph covermount

The Daily Telegraph is going to covermount a set of audios as a “Doctor Who Collection”. I’m particularly pleased, because they’re including my audio Pest Control (read by David Tennant) on Sunday 25th and Monday 26th April.

Before that, readers will be able to get new Doctor Matt Smith reading The Runaway Train, which is a bit of a scoop. After Pest Control, the Collection will contain Slipback featuring Colin Baker, Genesis of the Daleks and Exploration Earth featuring Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen, and finally Mission to the Unknown, the soundtrack recording of the single-episode Hartnell-era story that (uniquely) doesn’t feature the Doctor or any of his companions. It’s a Marc Cory Story.

“It’s a thrilling collection of unique original audio stories, rarely-heard radio adventures and classic TV soundtracks,” says Commissioning Editor of BBC Audiobooks, Michael Stevens, “featuring the voices of much-loved Doctors, companions and monsters – including the brand new current Doctor, Matt Smith!”

Updated: corrected the dates and the reference about “Mission…” It’s the soundtrack, not the novelisation.

DITAster?

OASIS DITA Technical Committee will today approve an interim renaming of the XML-DITA standard. “Following a successful court case brought by a fundamentalist religious group in the U.S.,” said Susan Denim of the committee, “we are obliged to accept a revision to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture nomenclature. We’ve been instructed that DITA cannot be said to have evolved in a Darwinian way. We’re frustrated, obviously, but the court ruling clearly directs us to accept that the standard is the product of intelligent design.”

“It’s obvious,” reported the plaintiff, a delighted Rev. Josie Watt-Ardeed. “XML is not an undirected series of actions, and therefore cannot uncouple itself from a creationist process. The entire terminology of the so-called XML-DITA points to a teleological argument for the existence of a central creator. I mean, it’s not called ‘single source’ for nothing. The whole Darwin thing is clearly a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. And I’m not talking about a filetype:xml clause, do you know what I’m saying?”

Not all former-DITA specialists are so phlegmatic. An unnamed high-placed IBMer wrote on a personal blog: “This wasn’t the kind of constraint I was expecting. This ruling tears apart my whole conceptual data model. If you ask me, the output is PDF — Pretty D*mn Foolish.” He was subsequently obliged to withdraw this remark for the use of an unresolved reference.

OASIS are now frantically drafting a workable alternative, expected to be published by the end of this year and formalised by 2015. The initial draft is “Architecture-proof Relationship Indication Language”, or “ApRIL (1st)“.

April 1st p.m. updated to add:  Check out some others on TechCrunch.

No Lovelace lost

As I type this, it’s still Ada Lovelace Day. I intended to write more, but alas have time only to say this: computing and IT companies want to hire more women. IBM UK (where I work) want to see substantially more women applicants for their hundreds of graduate trainee vacancies.

While I don’t represent the company on this blog, I’m happy to point people to a recruitment site that talks about what it’s like to work in the IBM UK Ideas Lab. The hope is that many more modern-day Ada Lovelaces will apply — not favouritism, just encouragement.

(Men can apply too!)

It’s also worth noting that these vacancies are for a training scheme. So while applicants, men or women, may have a computing or IT degree, they do not have to — a good degree in any discipline is acceptable.

I have blogged a bit more about this on eightbar.

Ideally, I would have blogged about the achievements of a woman in technology and science. So I’m going to cheat and post a link to a blog by Laura Cowen, who is herself a splendid example of a woman in The Ideas Lab, but who has also helpfully linked to blogs by women who inpired her: Laura Czajkowski and Ana Nelson.

Pass it on!

Edited to add: I pressed “save” at one-minute-past-Lovelace! Tsk!