Saturday 20 April 2013

TV

Arrow
1x19 Unfinished Business


Doctor Who
33x10 Hide

That's more like it!

I say that, but I've enjoyed most of this series of Doctor Who. Not so the reaction online, though, which seems to largely coincide with my above sentiment. Either way, this is the best episode of the current run so far; possibly the best episode of the series fullstop for some time. Considering writer Neil Cross was responsible for one of the most disappointing episodes in yonks (last fortnight's Rings of Akhaten), that's some turnaround in ability. He actually wrote this episode first, and it was on the strength of this that he was commissioned to write another, and it's easy to see why.

It's billed as A Scary One, and it properly is. No blood or guts or gore, but I'm not convinced this is only a PG (as recently passed by the BBFC). That monster was freaky! And even worse were those photos of the ghost... Shuddertastic. Scares aside, there was a solid story, dispensing with the all-too-repetitive "save the entire world!" palaver we've been getting too much of, really. Instead we had a mystery, which was investigated, and which produced a moderately original solution. Plus all the Clara vs TARDIS stuff was finally made more explicit, amongst an array of other character bits that were never too heavy-handed.

A triumph, then. Hurrah! And next week's looks awesome too...

[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]


The Voice UK
2x04 The Blind Auditions 4
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

Films

Ted (2012)
[#42 in 100 Films in a Year 2013]

DVD Extras

Teddy Bear Scuffle

A short making-of featurette on Ted that shows how they achieved one of the film's most memorable sequences (if you've seen it, you can guess which). Definitely worth a watch to see the amount of time and effort and skill that had to go in to creating such a short scene.

Non-Fiction

JN-T: The Life & Scandalous Times of John Nathan-Turner by Richard Marson
Chapters 5 - 6

Collection Count

Collection Count tracks my DVD/Blu-ray collection via a number of statistics every week.

One new addition this week, and a couple of tweaks to bring numbers I thought were right in line with my big DVD database. No idea how they got out of sync, which always worries me.

Number of titles in collection: 1,551 [up 1]
Of which DVDs: 1,160 [no change]
Of which Blu-rays: 391 [up 1]

Number of discs in collection: 3,882 [up 1]
Number of films in collection: 1,668 [up 2]
Number of TV episodes in collection: 5,754 [no change]
Number of short films in collection: 380 [up 3]

Plus this week it's time for a running time update, so...

Total running time of collection (approx.):
280 days, 1 hour, and 34 minutes.
(Up 21 hours and 21 minutes from last month.)

See you next week, faithful reader.