Slings and Arrows, and Doctor Who

I have made a to-do list. It has various items like "make phone calls", "go into work", "deposit Cerberus cheques", etc. The last item is, alas, "sort out life."

So I am not going to talk about real life at all, and instead I'm going to talk about Slings and Arrows, which is great. It's a Canadian black comedy about a theatre company putting on a Shakespeare festival, which already sounds fab, but add the fact that the main character had a mental breakdown mid-performance of Hamlet and has been dragged back three years later with his sanity hanging by a thread, and the fact that said character, Geoffrey Tennant, is played by Paul Gross, and I am so beyond sold it's not even funny.

Of course, I blame likethesun2, who showed me the first episode in a hostel room in NYC. I have this wonderful, vivid memory of the two of us perched on a bunk bed in a room with no other furniture, our first night in the city, continuing a long-running tradition of pimping TV.

Actually, speaking of which, I remember, and I remember writing about, that last night in New York, but mostly I remember being drunk. It has recently become apparent that likethesun2 remembers much more of the evening than I do, and all my memories have indeed come crashing back. We watched a lot of QI that night, and got steadily more vocally affectionate about Alan Davies, and during the course of this, we apparently opened the wrong file on the laptop and I knew it was porn before anything actually appeared on screen.

The best question that got asked in that episode was, "Who was the last survivor of the Crimean War?"

"A TORTOISE," I said, and I do, now, remember saying it. I apparently also said, "It's always a tortoise!"

Um. Um, why, why did I think this. And I occasionally wonder about my education, its being sufficient to tell me that a tortoise was the last survivor of the Crimean War and not, for example, how to open a bank account. Coincidentally, I spent a lot of the last week watching QI online and once here, on television. I never stop loving that show; I remember when it was first shown, someone I knew at the time said, "They could have designed it with you in mind, couldn't they?"

This is true. It is a show about Stephen Fry, Alan Davies and vast quantities of useless information.

Anyway! Back to Slings and Arrows. Having watched the whole of the first series in two days, I am now completely hooked. It has a weird realism I've never seen in an American or Canadian seris before - this sort of tendency to focus on the mundanities of everyday life, and it's beautifully written and acted. I especially like the way they render Geoffrey in such a way that at this stage, his mental illness is ambiguous. You could feasibly describe him as a high-functioning schizophrenic, but equally as a very eccentric but mostly sane man who, er, sees dead people. I really like this idea - I think it plays nicely off absinthe_shadow's and my many discussions about altered mental states in fanon and canon - and yes, I am sold on this show. Two more seasons to watch, still.

And in other fannish news, something else that has cropped up all over the place and I need to talk about it to make sure I am not a terrible person. It's that bit, near the end of ( Utopia spoiler )

Oh dear. And I won't get to see the second half of the episode this Saturday - I think I'll have to do something silly and convoluted, like download onto a memory stick from an internet café and carry it up north with me or something.

Anyway. Rather than babbling about stuff, getting out of bed may be a productive thing to do.