Brilliantly, absolutely nothing to do with Doctor Who, but:
Posted a two part joke on Twitter. I thought it was quite amusing, but nobody else seems to care in the slightest. Undeterred, I’m now presenting both parts to you, here.
*ahem*
and Part Two.
It’s the dates of the Tweets…oh, forget it.
My youngest brother came in to the living room on Wednesday evening. To be honest, it’s not very often he leaves his bedroom. Being eighteen years old, he rarely gets up before mid-afternoon, preferring to stay upstairs and play new fangled computer games. Youngsters today.
“Are you going to see Eddie Izzard on Friday?” he asked me.
I am a massive fan of Eddie Izzard, and have been for well over 15 years. I went to see him Live in both 1999 and 2009, and, as his new tour, Force Majeure, headed into Sheffield, of course I would love to go and see him again, only the £35 per ticket price tag/lack of money thing putting me off.
Eddie Izzard and myself, backstage at the Sheffield City Hall, November 1999.
“No,” I replied to my brother (remember him?). “Why, are you?” I said this more than a little sarcastically, fully expecting the answer ‘yes’. He and his girlfriend have a tendancy to go to a lot of gigs (usually in Sheffield, occasionally Manchester or the like), and I am a little jealous, as he has a Hell of a lot more freedom than I had at his age (he also has a girlfriend and a social life, which I’ve also rarely had, if ever. A bit jealous of that, too.).
“My friend can get us some tickets, says they’re only £1. Do you want to go?” As far as stupid questions asked, this was right up there.
“If they’re only a pound, then yes please, of course I do!” My sister and other brother also answered in the affirmative, and the first – as far as I’m aware – and very probably only Bromley Siblings outing was tentatively organised.
None of us were expecting the tickets to appear, at least not for only £1.00. We were expecting some misunderstanding in communication between my brother and his mate, and were certainly not allowing ourselves to get too excited. But no, he came home on Thursday (after venturing out to the cinema to see Star Trek Into Darkness – very good, by all accounts) with an envelope containing five tickets for Eddie’s Friday night gig at the Sheffield Arena. They weren’t dodgy, knocked off, fake, fallen off the back of a truck or anything. It merely turned out that this friend of my brother has a cousin who works at the Arena who’s entitled to a few free tickets (yes, ‘free’ – we actually paid more than they were worth!), and we were the lucky souls who’d grabbed them. Now we could start getting excited.
Two of the seats were on the Arena floor, in Block A – my brother and his girlfriend had those – and the other three were about halfway back, up on the second tier, so my other brother, my sister and I had those.
We did arrive a bit earlier than we expected. We figured there’d be a bit of trouble with traffic, and we’d have to wait for the tram, then it’d take a while to get into the Arena and find our seats…We actually arrived at the venue some ten minutes before doors opened, and, after buying a programme (£10 – I didn’t really want to buy any merch, as I’m rather skint, but I couldn’t not buy a programme, could I? It’s a very good quality item, it has to be said – particularly well-bound), we were sat in our seats for 85 minutes before the show began just after 8pm. Ah well, c’est la vie (Ooh, that’s French. Do you think anyone noticed? No, never mind.).
The show was fantastic, possibly the best of the three I’ve seen Live in person (though Glorious remains my favourite show of Eddie’s – I was listening to the audio tape of that show on Friday afternoon as I got ready; I can pretty much recite it, I’ve listened to it so often over the years), and while I wouldn’t want to spoil the show for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet – it’s out on DVD in November, people – I will just say that his routine in this show about Dressage is one of the funniest things I have seen in a long, long time.
The show ended around 10.20pm, and after joining the queue just to get to the tramstop (there really were quite a lot of people), we managed to (literally) squeeze onto a tram, transfer in town onto a bus, and were home just over an hour later, a much shorter time than we envisaged.
All in all, a rather bloody good night out.
Eddie Izzard, centre stage at the start of the second half.
Deary me. Me, out on two rather excellent social occasions, with different people, within the space of a single week? (I did wear the same ‘going out’ clothes, I must admit, on both occasions, the only alteration on Friday night being the addition of the Eddie Izzard: Stripped t-shirt I bought at the last tour.) What is my life coming to?
I have remained in Eddie Izzard fanboy mode since. I watched Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story on Saturday (for, shockingly, the first time – I thought I’d seen it, but borrowed the DVD off my sister, and realised that I’d seen nothing more than the trailer, shown on the Stripped tour), so I enjoyed that. Then today I’ve been watching the Live at the Ambassadors video from TWENTY years ago. I imagine I’ll probably spend the week going through all the shows in order. I’m like that.
Eddie Izzard. Magnifuckingique.
Sort of.
Went to a pub over the other side of town last Saturday (well, two bus journeys away, anyway) to meet a load of girls. No, really. I don’t generally go to pubs. I don’t really ‘do’ socialising, as I don’t have a great many friends in real life – I talk to everybody online, and meet very few people face to face.
Anyway, for the last couple of months, we – a number of former BTEC Performing Arts students at Norton College – have been talking via Facebook about getting together for a ‘Reunion’. The date of May the Fourth (be with you…yeah, yeah, whatever) was settled upon, and at 4pm (in order of arrival) Jenny, Lindsay, myself, Natalie, Shelley, Faye, Anna (who’d ‘arranged’ the get together in the first place) and Angelina assembled at The Broadfield pub for a few drinks. There were other students – I wasn’t the only male on the course, though I was one of only six (the other five being unable to make it due to working, being otherwise engaged, not being invited, or, in one rather worrying case, suffering a heart attack earlier in the week – get well soon, Steve) – but we were the only ones brave enough to gather again, in our thirties, some sixteen years after we first met.
(l-r) Shelley, Natalie, Lindsay, Angelina, Anna, Jenny, Faye…and me.
I do have to watch my alcohol consumption, and, no doubt due to the fact I hardly ever drink, I was already fairly fuzzy-head after just two hours and three pints (I had planned to stop after two, but Lindsay gave me the money for drinks, and wouldn’t take the change off me, so I made the most of it).
I had to leave at 7pm – the whole ‘going out’ thing is a bit of worry, (what with the whole ‘being prone to throw myself onto the floor’ thing and whathaveyou), so we don’t like to tempt fate too much – but a fantastic time was had by all (certainly by myself – I even missed Doctor Who to attend this gathering), and I believe everyone carried on for the whole of the rest of the day – I know lots of alcohol was consumed, and Jen, Faye and co were still going at gone midnight.
So that was the main event of my week. In Comics news, I’ve bought a Beano or two, and updated my list accordingly.
And I did a little scribble earlier today of The Cat from Red Dwarf. Took a photo, Tweeted it, and was duly RT’d by the man himself, Danny John-Jules. Which was nice.
Almost made me forget about not being able to attend The Red Dwarf Fan Club Convention, Dimension Jump XVII, at the weekend.
Almost. Not quite.
So. It’s the 4th of May. May the Fourth. Claimed long ago as Star Wars Day. Because ‘May the fourth’ sounds a bit like ‘May the Force’, as in “May the Force be with you”, which is something they say quite often in the Star Wars movies, apparently.
Geeks worldwide are having a field day today. On Twitter, as I write, Worldwide Trends include ‘May the 4th’; UK trends include ‘#starwarsday’; and the US of A (where all the nutters live) also have ‘#starwars’ and ‘#maythe4thbewithyou’ trending.
You see, on Star Wars Day, lots of people Tweet “May the Fourth be with you!”, along with those other assorted hashtags – #StarWarsDay, #maythe4th, #maythe4thbewithyou…etc etc. So far, so what? I hear you ask.
Well. Last year, I Tweeted ‘May the Fourth…’as usual. Then, rather hilariously*, the following day, I Tweeted ‘May The Fifth Be With You!’ along with the hashtag ‘#StarWarsDayplusone’. And somehow, it kept going. Someone asked if I could keep doing it, as a bet or a dare (though there was no money involved, and it’s hardly very daring, so a misnomer on both counts, I think you’ll agree).
So I decided to do it for a whole year. My first Tweet everyday, usually at the stroke of Midnight, has followed the ‘[month] The [date] Be With You! #StarWarsDayplus[x]‘ format, usually accompanied by a #stillgoing hashtag, just for the hell of it.
Twitter and it’s archive being as massive as it is (I do Tweet quite a lot), and what with me not really being as tech-savvy as I’d like, I can’t, unfortunately, show you all my ‘SWD+’ Tweets. The earliest I’ve managed to find was this one from May the Ninth last year:
But they’re there, honest. Go and look me up on Twitter – @bromley001 – and see if can spot them yourself.
I’m not even much of a Star Wars fan.
(* – not hilarious)
Just to let you know I’ve updated The List. I now have a grand total of 383 comics.To be honest, I’ve only got eleven more since the last time I updated – that’s two and a half months of new Beanos, no old ones, I’m afraid. Actually, I buy The Beano every week more out of a sense of duty – supporting the British Comic (and it’s artists and writers), as it were – and I hardly ever read it. I have a look at Bananaman, and that’s about it. Seriously wondering whether I should stop buying them – £2 a week is a lot when you’re skint.
So, on that happy note, I shall leave you for now.
So, the BBC have today confirmed that David Tennant and Billie Piper will be returning to Doctor Who for the 50th Anniversary Special.
Which is all very nice, obviously…but how? After all, the finale of series 4 left Rose and her Blue-suited DoctorDonna Doctor in their unreachable parallel world with Rose’s Mum and Dad and baby Doctor Tony, never to be seen by the Doctor again. Even when he was Regenerating, and going on his farewell tour, taking in his past pals, it was a pre-Tardis Rose the Tenth Doctor caught up with.
So it stands to reason that for the Tenth Doctor and Rose to appear together again, they ought to be plucked from somewhere in their respective timeline. Maybe some time between their televised adventures in 2006…
My theory/suggestion:
Love & Monsters was 2006′s ‘Doctor-lite’ episode. The Tenth Doctor and Rose weren’t in it a great deal. So where were they? Off on an adventure involving the Eleventh Doctor and Clara Oswald of course! The Anniversary special could even involve a necessity to chase random Hoix around abandoned buildings…
Simple.
Of course, already people are worrying that Tennant’s return will just bring back all the screaming fangirls who don’t think he should have ever left in the first place (presumably the same class of idiot as the Sun readers who believe David Tennant should become the Twelfth Doctor when Matt Smith leaves, definitelythisyearhonest, thus not really understanding the concept of Regeneration), and of course we’d like some nods to the ‘classic’ series, but the fact of the matter is that Tennant looks the same now as when he was the Doctor. Tom Baker et al really don’t.
So there we are. Let the arguments/speculation/discussion begin…
“As a SF geek, I was overjoyed when my girlfriend told me that my penis had a certain TARDISlike quality to it. ‘What,’ I asked with a grin, ‘you mean it’s, heh, bigger on the inside?’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘It’s an odd shape and a peculiar blue colour.’”
Ba-dum tish. I’m here all week.
