FUN With Your New HEAD (25 July, 2008)

(I wrote this at work earlier in the week but forgot to post it. Thus its TARDIS-like disregard for the fact that I just posted something else. I could edit it, but... bah. You won't notice.)

... don’t you think time is speeding up? It’s only yesterday evening you were reading the entry for May 1^st, and now look at the calendar. You’re getting old, you know, when you don’t notice time scuttling past like a plague of chronologically-fascinated scorpions.

I thought today I would start talking about our attempts to have “fun”. There’s a famous Thomas M. Disch story called “FUN with your new HEAD” which you can find online in various places, e.g. here (http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/head.html). Similarly, although in an unrelated way, we have recently attempted to do slightly less and enjoy life a little more, after several hectic months of no fun. So what can we report?

Well, our Nintendo Wii is a hoot. And has potential for being great FUN at parties – although we only have two controllers for it at present, and only one plausible party game. The principle of the Wii, you see, is that while the X-Box 360 and the PlayStation 3 have gone for expensive power, the Wii has gone for involvement and a distinctive selling-point: its controllers are motion-sensitive, and games can detect how you’re holding, tilting, and moving them. You’re then supposed to act out the actions which normally would happen on screen at the touch of a button. This might sound like hard work, but it means that for the first time, playing a computer game of tennis actually means serving and playing shots kinda like you would in a real game. It’s not quite the same, and you can cheat and make much smaller moves (and you don’t have to run around, it does that for you) – but Sarah and I have suffered minor cases of tennis elbow from playing too much in one session, which is a change from getting RSI from bending your fingers over a strangely-shaped controller for two hours at a time. Anyway, the Wii isn’t hugely more powerful than the last generation of consoles, but it does have a bunch of fun games. The Twines already have a Wii, so I foresee plenty of tennis when they come over next month. People here have liked it in various measures: James got to grips with it quite quickly, while Kim was lunging so far forward to play some shots that I feared for the TV. But everything and everyone survived, so ‘tis good. Our FUN HEAD factor for the Wii: 8 fun heads out of 10.

More fun. We’re watching the Tom Baker Doctor Who stories, all of them in order. Or at least we’re going to. So far we’ve managed to watch the first one: “Robot”. If you ever wanted a demonstration of J. Michael Straczynski’s comment that UK TV sci-fi had cardboard sets and three-dimensional performances while American TV had the reverse, this is it. Amidst wobbly sets, confronted by a comical robot that looks like Bertie Bassett the lollipop man gone metal, and watching, at one point, a 3” plastic tank being disintegrated in a chromakeyed sequence which looks like it cost all of tuppence-ha’penny to film… nevertheless, the actors are pretty much all delivering committed performances, taking their characters seriously, and carving out strongly-defined roles in the plot. The extras are a bit gormless – all on day release from Rent-A-UNIT-Soldier Ltd – but there’s the Doctor, Sarah Jane, Harry, the Brigadier, Sergeant Benton, Miss Winters, Professor Kettlewell, Jellicoe, and the guy inside the robot. That’s nine lead roles. And there’s time to *breathe*. Four episodes at twenty-two minutes apiece gives you enough space for some essential downtime, and because this considerably predates the New Who with its well-done-but-sometimes-slightly-portentous atmosphere of supreme power and supreme loneliness, the Doctor is, while confused after his regeneration, still intrinsically having fun at all times. Sure, he isn’t up against a universe-challenging foe, just a little matter of a stolen disintegrator gun (Earth tech varies up and down considerably in this show) and then against a neo-Nazi cabal of science-fanatics who have obtained the launch codes for the world’s nuclear weapons from a cabinet minister’s safe because, after all, what country except Britain could be trusted to possess such important info? Slightly ropey plotting, sure, but fun. And of course there’s Tom Baker. Born to play the Doctor, never matched except in occasional flashes from David Tennant. It’s interesting that at the time they cast him, they weren’t sure how he would play the role and whether he’d be into performing stunts, so they wrote in Harry Sullivan to be the clean-cut square-jawed action hero. Within a series they’d clocked that Tom Baker was quite action-packed enough to carry it himself, so Harry got written out (“Think I’ll stick to British Rail from now on, Doctor”). You have to admire the power of reincarnation, though. To carry a show through cast changes as a way of life… wow. So anyway, roll on the rest of Tom Baker’s first series – the impeccably-connected sequence continues on from “Robot” with “The Ark In Space”, “The Sontaran Experiment”, “Genesis Of The Daleks”, and “Revenge Of The Cybermen” – is it any wonder that this is the first series that stands out in my childhood memory as being The One Thing That Made Me Afraid Of Being Sent To Jail, Because They Would Have No Televisions And I Would Miss Doctor Who? Our FUN HEAD factor: 9.5 fun heads out of 10.