Psalm 39 (Good News)

1 I said, “I will be careful what I do
and will not let my tongue make me sin;
I will not say anything
while evil people are near.”
2 I kept quiet, not saying a word,
not even about anything good!
But my suffering only grew worse,
3 and I was overcome with anxiety.
The more I thought, the more troubled I became;
I could not keep from asking:
4 “Lord, how long will I live?
When will I die?
Tell me how soon my life will end.”

5 How short you have made my life!
In your sight my lifetime seems nothing.
Indeed every living being is no more than a puff of wind,
6 no more than a shadow.
All they do is for nothing;
they gather wealth, but don't know who will get it.

7 What, then, can I hope for, Lord?
I put my hope in you.
8 Save me from all my sins,
and don't let fools laugh at me.
9 I will keep quiet, I will not say a word,
for you are the one who made me suffer like this.
10 Don't punish me any more!
I am about to die from your blows.
11 You punish our sins by your rebukes,
and like a moth you destroy what we love.
Indeed we are no more than a puff of wind!

12 Hear my prayer, Lord,
and listen to my cry;
come to my aid when I weep.
Like all my ancestors
I am only your guest for a little while.
13 Leave me alone so that I may have some happiness
before I go away and am no more.

Psalm 20 (Good News)

1 May the Lord answer you when you are in trouble!
May the God of Jacob protect you!
2 May he send you help from his Temple
and give you aid from Mount Zion.
3 May he accept all your offerings
and be pleased with all your sacrifices.
4 May he give you what you desire
and make all your plans succeed.
5 Then we will shout for joy over your victory
and celebrate your triumph by praising our God.
May the Lord answer all your requests.

6 Now I know that the Lord gives victory to his chosen king;
he answers him from his holy heaven
and by his power gives him great victories.
7 Some trust in their war chariots
and others in their horses,
but we trust in the power of the Lord our God.
8 Such people will stumble and fall,
but we will rise and stand firm.

9 Give victory to the king, O Lord;
answer us when we call.

Moon Lighting

The following photo never happened:


That's the thing about taking a flash-photo in pitch darkness - it's a sure-fire way of getting everyone in a 'natural' pose, yet because everything looks so bright, it still gives a completely misleading record of the event.

Oh, but the surprise flash, if you're lucky, can make people laugh too...


What is accurate about these photos, is that they portray flatmate Dave as our leader that evening. While the rest of us were certainly interested in watching the total eclipse of the moon going on above us, and indeed keen to photograph it too (who wouldn't be?), the above picture also shows Dave clearly trouncing our feeble efforts in terms of professionalism.

Still, as the evening drew on, a great many laughs were had, and I realised that, rather than waste my precious 35mm film, I would be much better off just asking Dave for a copy of his best shot afterwards.

Remember that pesky blinding flashbulb? They were ready for it by the time Cathy got snapping...



Well it was becoming a long evening, so I stretched-out on the ground next to the tripod. What could go wrong with that?



I assume this is an alien.




At last, the final results are in..!


Cathy got this one, which I have to say shows what's happening pretty well, in much the same way that mine doesn't:


Yes, I cleverly took this handheld. I think I was standing there holding the camera still with the shutter open for... ooh... maybe 30 seconds? I've counted at least 36 moons there, which means I managed to briefly stand still at least 36 times. How many moons can you see?

But top prize must, unsurprisingly, go to experienced postcard photographer Dave for these last awesome two. By this point the moon was totally in shadow, illuminated only through the sunsets and sunrises ringing the planet Earth at the time.

Wow.

Nehemiah

On my quest to finish reading the bits of the Bible that I’ve never read before, today I finished Nehemiah. It’s rather different to the other books I’ve read, because so much of it is told in the first person. We get insights into the working of Nehemiah’s mind, as he sets out to achieve the impossible, or at least the very very improbable, task of rebuilding Jerusalem’s wall.

Towards the end I was really rooting for this guy. It seems that every time the Bible presents us with an easy-to-pigeon-hole good guy, by the end of their life they go and get all arrogant and blow it. I was really hoping that this guy would not fall into that category. Today I read the last chapter of Nehemiah and, sure enough, he gets all zealous and starts threatening and attacking people.

Darn it.

Torchwood season 1 overview

Torchwood season one has been an uneven ride.

Just like new Doctor Who, the weakest scripts have easily all been written by the same person.

Like new Doctor Who, the guest-writers have made it worth watching, although their wildly contradictory scripts suggest that none of them have been told the show's premise in any detail. For example, in some episodes Torchwood is a secret organisation. In others, the United Nations, (Greeks Bearing Gifts) the army (Day One)and even the cops (They Keep Killing Suzie) seem familiar with them. In several episodes, they actually have their top secret name "TORCHWOOD" written in large letters across the front of their car.

Jack gets a new back-story every few weeks, leaving the audience to try and reconcile, among other things, how he's both stolen someone's identity, (Captain Jack Harkness) and had flashbacks of their life. (Small Worlds)

And - someone has to say this - the high level of bisexual staff at Torchwood looks like discrimination of some sort.

To sum up, like new Doctor Who, the elements of Torchwood that don’t work are its embarrassing attempts to be grown-up.

Children are generally quite happy being children.

Teenagers, generally want to hurry up and become adults.

Adults, generally, either get on with being an adult, or spend their entire lives still stuck in that teenage phase, forever trying to fake maturity by childishly pointing at non-childish things.

Torchwood, with its super-pretentious saturation of swearing, violence, and sex, looks like it's being made by students.

If you want to make an ‘adult’ show, then please grow up.


Individual episode reviews:

Everything Changes
Day One
Ghost Machine
Cyberwoman
Small Worlds
Countrycide
Greeks Bearing Gifts
They Keep Killing Suzie
Random Shoes
Out Of Time
Combat
Captain Jack Harkness
End Of Days

Torchwood: End Of Days

*** CONTAINS SPOILERS ***
What a rushed ending. Lots of factors from previous episodes are brought into play together here, but we’re still suffering attempts to mimic the worst aspects of new Doctor Who. It’s another very public invasion, complete with TV parodies, and it gets forgotten almost as soon as it’s started. Did I understand this right? Did Jack really order all five of them to round-up every single historical interloper from all over the world in a few hours and incarcerate them in the Hub?


We’ve even got that teenage cliché of borrowing evil from other sources but forgetting all the baggage that goes with it. Even if ‘Abaddon’ really were just a big snarling monster, he's not really in the same predicament as he was in The Satan Pit.


The unstoppable force meets the unmovable object, as Jack is killed, even though he can’t die. This is a great final showdown, although, as in episode 1, there is still no explanation for Jack’s knowledge of when he acquired his invulnerability.

I also liked the final scene, in which we find out just whose disembodied hand Jack has been keeping on his desk throughout the series, and the Doctor, for reasons as usual unexplained, returns to pick him up again, but only by implication.

Well, they should be having quite a good old chinwag in the TARDIS. After the last 13 divergent episodes, there are quite a lot of things they must now disagree on...

Torchwood: Captain Jack Harkness

Oh maaaan, it’s all becoming like new Doctor Who again…

Jack’s new back-story from Small Worlds is forgotten and replaced with a new one again. Then there's the remote coincidence of Jack meeting the man whose identity he stole, (so much for his earlier flashback to that life) the ignorance of why on Earth he would have stolen someone’s identity in the first place, let alone that of a dead man in another country entirely, or whether he had some dealing with him the following day, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, they’re returning to their old folly of forcing a word into the background again…

Oh yeah, and Jack actually falls in love with himself.

Did no-one on this science fiction show notice that they could have had a story about time-travel here? Well, let's hope we only have another seven episodes until all this is forgotten again too.

Torchwood: Combat

I was right – this show is finally finding its feet.

This is a fairly gritty episode, following logically on from the events of previous ones, that gives Gwen, Owen and even Rhys room to react to the building stress of having Torchwood in their lives. The storyline about the weevils being used as yuppie-punchbags at an underground fight club was told clearly too, and effortlessly imbued the creatures with sympathy.

If only things could continue as well as this.

Torchwood: Out Of Time

This would probably be the episode when Torchwood finally found its feet. The series has always tried to be a more adult version of Doctor Who (Jack=the Doctor, Gwen=the companion, the Hub=the TARDIS etc.), though so far it’s generally just been a student version, which is ironic as that's heading towards a younger average audience than 'family' telly.

One of Doctor Who’s key ingredients though, has always been its flexibility, and the way that each new story could have an entirely different style, cast and subject matter to the previous.

To that end, Out Of Time is about 75% charming.

Three airborne travellers from 1953 accidentally wash-up in the present-day, where their reintegration into society inadvertently becomes the moral responsibility of Jack, Gwen and Owen.

The scenes in which John meets his aged son with Alzheimer’s disease are just harrowing.

Emma’s culture-shock, particularly the group-sequence at the supermarket, works well too.

Diane’s sex scenes with Owen on the other hand, are out of place and have nothing to do with culture-clashes, time-travel or original fiction.

And Rhys finally voices his building mistrust of Gwen, noting not just her lie to him, but the practiced ease with which she did it.

Unfortunately this only draws further attention to the show's now almost weekly rewriting of its own premise. This week Jack can survive death without the usual suffering, while "top secret" Torchwood happily opens its doors to the newcomers before letting them loose in public, and cannot now even fake a driving/flying licence.

However like so many moving episodes of Quantum Leap, the characterisation in this one is so strong that it actually overcomes this.

Torchwood: Random Shoes

Terrible. Absolutely disastrous. 0%.

Trying to emulate the worst episode in Doctor Who’s history is… just… I am honestly lost for words to describe just how bad a notion this was. The only redeeming feature about copying such dross would be that it’s just not possible to do it so badly. The same old mistakes are dutifully reproduced in this version – most unforgivably portraying all Torchwood fans as stupid idiots – again implying some very wrong things about what the writers think of you and me.

Don’t ever watch this.

Torchwood: They Keep Killing Suzie

*** CONTAINS SPOILERS ***

Right from the title, this was riveting. An original story, with plenty of deep character scenes, and exposition delivered as clearly as possible. The old reliance on swearing to show a character’s anger is replaced by their having to make tough decisions, and as a result the way they all hate each other, if you’ll excuse the expression, just comes alive. Jack’s determination to kill Suzie is something you know he’ll do, not out of spite, but because he knows he has to. And when the moment comes, he does. Without hesitation. For one episode only, the BBC was making science-fiction again. This was the more thoughtful show that Torchwood might have been.

Right up until that tacked-on line about the creature in the darkness anyway. I don't know what Ianto’s ill-fitting exchange with Jack in the final "back to normal" scene was about, but back to normal for this show usually means yet more sex. After all, this would mean that the entire cast had now been given bisexual material.

With no other sexual orientations to reveal, next week they might actually have to fill-in with some science-fiction again. Yay!

Torchwood: Greeks Bearing Gifts

*** CONTAINS SPOILERS ***

A mixed bag this one. Toshiko gets given an alien pendant which enables her to hear other people’s thoughts. It’s a fairly familiar premise that goes through the motions, even to the point of getting destroyed at the end because the temptation to misuse it is too strong for them.


The B storyline, about Tosh jumping into bed with another woman, who turns out to be an alien, is the sort of thing that makes you wish they’d excise these scenes and just make a passable half-hour science-fiction show.

The unresolved C storyline, (all right then - a few lines in the background) about Jack getting some admin together for UNIT, did peak my interest, simply because it could have, but didn't, answer the following questions:

a) who owns Torchwood (episode one’s claims of independency appear to again have been rewritten with Jack’s call to the PM), and

b) what the two, very similar, organisations’ relationship is. Up to this point I’d been compensating by assuming that Torchwood had deliberately kept itself secret from UNIT, but they can’t use that excuse now.

On the positive side, there’s some good dialogue in this one, and the banter between Gwen and Owen, now stripped of so much uninteresting misery, is actually quite fun.

Torchwood: Countrycide

*** CONTAINS SPOILERS ***
After the last episode, it’s straight back to pretentiousness again.

The whole team go on a camping trip, without any thought as to how their base can continue without any of them there. Who on Earth is supposed to be guarding the Weevil? (I’m past wondering why it’s even being held captive now)

The only good thing I could find here was the courage to make an episode without any sf content. Good call.

Gwen sleeping around with her colleagues behind Rhys’ back just makes her even harder to sympathise or identify with.

Note to the writer though: swearing, violence and sex doesn’t make the programme look mature. It makes it look like it’s been made by teenage students.

Learn from Hammond last week.

Torchwood: Small Worlds

*** CONTAINS SPOILERS ***

High hopes for this one, as they’ve hired an established science-fiction writer to pen an episode, and they don’t come much colder than Sapphire & Steel’s creator Peter J Hammond. However, would he still have what it took to repeat the uncompromising hardness of that series, and if so, would it survive script-editing?

First up, throughout Hammond effortlessly soars over all the preceding episodes, by simply not bothering with any swearing. What an absolute breath of fresh air.

Perhaps this was because no-one appears to have given him the scripts to the preceding episodes though. This one invents an entirely new backstory for Jack (so much for what brought him to Earth in The Empty Child), and for the first time treats clutzy Gwen as the tough character she’s definitely not. Not only that, having been told in Ghost Machine that Jack doesn’t sleep, here we see him having nightmares.

Horror is not my thing, but this is the first reasonable episode so far, and as such could easily be an episode of The X Files. In-keeping with that show though, there are plot-flaws of convenience. For example, Jack is desperate to stop the fairies but won’t tell anyone about them. Another character very quickly builds an entire fence across his garden on the same afternoon that he paradoxically needs the extra space for all his barbecue guests. And when Estelle phones them for help, they hang up on her instead of splitting-up and leaving one person behind to talk to her. Which disables the viewer’s “how can they save her?” involvement somewhat.

Add to this some sledgehammer characterisation (the two guest males are quite blatantly bad purely to give their deaths some sense of ‘justice’), and, as with guest-writer scripts on Doctor Who, you’re left wondering what Hammond’s original draft might have been like, and whether these were his, or ‘fixes’.

For all that though, as the final defeatist conclusion rolled, I felt a certain ambivalence. On the one hand this was the exact same solution as one of Sapphire & Steel's assignments. On the other, it was still much better written than Torchwood has been so far.

Torchwood: Cyberwoman

*** CONTAINS SPOILERS ***
It’s back to the 1980s with a story so silly it must all be a parody… mustn’t it? I was laughing out loud, but I'm honestly not sure if I was supposed to be.


Iantis is in love with a woman who’s half-female, half-cyber(wo)man. Despite the mad premise, the guy in question – Gareth David-Lloyd – plays the whole thing straight, and it’s achingly funny as a result. It’s even pretty much all in studio, and the doofy-filmic-effected videotape makes the whole thing look like some freakish cross between a sitcom, Neverwhere and the Colin Baker years.

And how can you not laugh when they’re coming out with Homerisms like:

Iantis: (sobbing)”I have nothing left to lose!”
Jack: (encouraging)”There’s always something left to lose!”

I think the author threw all caution to the wind with this one, and kudos to him for doing so, and keeping the dialogue so straight. What a disaster it could have been with actual jokes.

Gwen, like Rose, is now flirting with and kissing just about anyone behind her boyfriend’s back. I really don’t like her at all. I mean who would? Certainly not Rhys. Nothing to identify with or aspire to there, just like with Rose.

I guess that's why she didn't just hide in a separate compartment.

No explanation for why the Cyberwoman wasn’t swept into the void at the end of Doomsday either.

Torchwood: Ghost Machine

Now this is more like it. Alien device magnifies traumatic events from the past and future to the extent where the user actually experiences having been there. A great expansion on established time-travel concepts, and an open-ended resolution as to whether the future can indeed be changed with foreknowledge. And no zombies. More of this would be good.

Torchwood: Day One

Utterly pretentious rubbish. The pub plays I used to see by this guy in Hampton Wick were better than this.

An alien comes to Earth (that’s present-day Earth) and takes over a woman (turning her into a zombie) because it wants to have sex with as many people as possible “for the kick.” Even the comedy clutz Gwen (who we’re supposed to be identifying with) has a fling with her.

Utterly, utterly dreadful. It’s episode two guys, and your “adult” show is this low-brow already?

Torchwood: Everything Changes

*** CONTAINS SPOILERS ***

With the latest season of Doctor Who due to start on Prime this Sunday, tonight I faced the inevitable challenge of sitting down to start watching "adult" spin-off series Torchwood.

After the main show’s disastrous dumbing-down for today’s audiences (trumpeted in the rest of today’s dumb media as ‘quality’), it was inevitable that I had a checklist of blunders that I was expecting.

Unfortunately, in this opening episode, despite the awesome first scene (brilliant!), most of those blunderboxes then got ticked...

Their hideout is a tip, like the current TARDIS.

Lots of swearing to try and look tough, lots of kissing (including boys on boys) to try and look cool, and as usual the central character is a supposedly ‘tough’ girl swept off her feet.

And zombies. On present-day Earth.

First up, yes, yet again it was written by the same burnt-out writer as usual, however this spin-off is his idea, so who am I to complain about that? Ah, no, wait a minute, it’s not his idea, it’s a reworking of the original series' U.N.I.T. It even has an awkward throwaway line to acknowledge this duplication in the Doctor Who world.


No, wait, this is Buffy. We have a race of neck-biting zombies on present-day Earth, a public taking rationalisation to impossible extremes, and a space-time rift from which all manner of strange creatures are emerging. Hellmouth anyone?

And we’ll continue to ignore the naming of the lead character after Pirates Of The Caribbean's “Captain Jack.”

The standard, generic set-up – super secret organisation investigates aliens on Earth – is still a good one though, (albeit done to death in these post-X Files days) but I really wish they would stop spoon-feeding us all this stuff like it's the first time we've heard of it. The old show never did that, it had some respect.

Another presumption I came with was that it would follow the same plot-structure as his other show-openers – Rose and Invasion Of The Bane – and this it positively excelled at.

It focuses on a girl – this time called Gwen as opposed to Rose or Maria - who we’re told is tough, but soon turns out to be less so.

She briefly meets a mysterious stranger, who vanishes, so she looks him up on computers, and finds he exists on records from many years ago. He shows up again, and tries to make her forget him. She won't. He takes her into the TARDIS/upstairs/the hub, explains the show’s setup and together they defeat the villain, following which she decides to help him regularly.

She also has an un-heroic boyfriend, who she doesn’t tell about what she discovers. The ‘Doctor’ character can even regenerate.

It's a definitive example of that old adage that if you write to a formula, then of course you'll produce something formulaic.

I sincerely hope they’ve given the rest of the series to fresh writers like the old show thrived on.

Please skip reading this section.

It's only my own formulaic list of plot-holes...

There’s no explanation for how or why Captain Jack travelled back in time 50,000 years after the end of The Parting Of The Ways, or how he knew from what point in his life he became indestructable, (surely he’d assume he’d been born that way) or how and why he came to be in charge of Torchwood, or how or why Torchwood operates from such a dump with only half-a-dozen people, or how or why they’re top secret again, or who owns / funds them (it used to be the crown, but not now apparently), or how Suzie didn’t already know of Jack’s invulnerability, or of why this Torchwood is completely different to the one we saw in The Army Of Ghosts, but... at least they’ve told us why Jack was pointlessly forced-into 5 episodes of Doctor Who with nothing to do in 2005.

But hey - it's episode 1, so let's go easy on all this. :)

An Englishman In New Zealand

Today's Celebrity Bible-Reader is... Nelson Muntz

"Bakbuk, Hakupha... Harhur!"*

*Nehemiah 7:53 NMV

You Gonna Burn

In 1989, when I was 18, while working for Richmond cinema, I took a small group of people's tickets and, as usual, told them "It's all non-smoking, and if you'd like to follow me I'll show you to your seats."

One of their group dryly replied "Yes – follow the anorexic one."

I was later assured by a colleague that "they're just jealous."

A decade later however, at the age of 30, any possible jealousy about my thinness would surely have been firmly liposuctioned away...


In January 2003 there was a special offer at work, whereby you could get an entire week at a health club for free, without actually agreeing to join. Well, now there was no excuse.


I'll never forget day one. After-work aerobics.

Unsure quite what I should even be wearing, I shuffled into the back of a large gym room peopled almost entirely by women. I glanced nervously around, because if I could just spot one other guy there, that would have made my presence feel alot less intrusive. As it was I couldn't shake this nagging gut-feeling that this was obviously a women's class, because it was called aerobics, it had a female instructress, and it was at a fitness club, which is obviously the sort of place where only women hang out, because guys aren't generally concerned about their bodies.

Oh, and everyone else there was female.

No wait, there was another guy there.

It was a guy I worked with. Oh great - any possible lessening of my embarrassment just got negated ten-fold.

Fortunately Jese was full of encouragement for the step I was taking, and this paved the way for a better working relationship back at the office too.

As the music began pumping and the room began to move as one, waving their arms and step-aerobicing about, I made the mistake of looking beyond the instructress and into the huge mirrors lining the opposite side of the room. There I could see maybe a dozen beautiful and perfectly fit supermodels, all lifting up and down with apparent balletic choreography, surrounding one fatty wiping his sweaty hair our of his eyes as he wobbled uncertainly at the back.

In my head I had to ask: "Oh NO - what the heck is that guy doing here? It's obviously his first day, he's clearly never going to keep the lessons up, why is he wasting his time?"

Sometimes I actually find negative thoughts like that helpful. "No," I replied to myself. "I'm going to keep it up. You'll see."



Six months of "Body Pump" classes (weight-lifting to pop music) later I was much thinner. Friends who I hadn't told that I'd joined a gym had remarked repeatedly on how much weight I had lost. I was about 75kg. My goal of taking my t-shirt off on the beach without feeling ashamed whilst on a Mastersun holiday in Bali, Crete had been realised, and my energy levels and confidence had gone right up. One person even told me I was too thin again.

I was truly sorry when I had to discontinue my gym membership. My job had ended, and with it the club's geographical proximity to my life was just no longer convenient enough.

However, although I've never joined another gym, thanks to all the exercises and advice I'd received there, I have maintained, on and off, some form of regular exercise and healthier eating in my daily life. Or at any rate, I did for a while...


By the start of last year, I had somehow put on another 15kg again, and was at the unheard of 90kg mark.

So this year, using lent as a motivator, I've got back into doing sit-ups, and also bought a cut-price skipping-rope I found in the specials basket at Countdown. It has an electronic thing in one of the handles to measure how many skips you do, and multiplies them by your weight and how long you've been skipping to calculate how many calories you've supposedly burnt.

My family also got me a pedometer for Christmas, albeit a highly unreliable one, as you can see below.


Today I'm rather pleased to have got all the way back down to about 80kg again. I'm finishing with the pedometer and the skipping-rope though. I have to mix it up to avoid my body getting used to it, and me getting too bored. Exercises are, after all, thoroughly, thoroughly boring. (a fact that has presumably escaped you if you're still reading this) I'm still going to continue doing exercise of some sort however, preferably half an hour a day, and keeping a reasonable eye on my diet.

When I first joined that club four years, they gave me alot of motivational bumpf led by headlines like "Did you know that today your entire life has changed?"

They were right.

The Edge Of The World

From Class Suggestions

1 Peter 1:13 - 2:3

Ezra

Short book about the prolonged rebuilding of God's temple.

It's always uphill work reading all the recorded stats in the Bible, but it does endorse the thing with a sense of authenticity. Just like when it suddenly dips into the first person for a while, which I personally find quite refereshing and real:

I was ashamed to ask the king for soldiers and horsemen to protect us from enemies on the road, because we had told the king, "The gracious hand of our God is on everyone who looks to him, but his great anger is against all who forsake him." So we fasted and petitioned our God about this, and he answered our prayer. – Ezra 8:22-23 NIV

And, in fear of big punishment from God, how can you not relate to a line like:

...all the people were sitting in the square before the house of God, greatly distressed by the occasion and because of the rain. – Ezra 10:9b NIV

The rather galling end of the book – in which the people repent of intermarrying with other races and actually send all their wives and children away – surely demonstrates either:

a) just how strong their loyalty to God now was, or

b) just how disastrous their understanding of God had now become.

Or maybe both.

The Simpsons Movie

*** CONTAINS SPOILERS ***

It’s been about 10 years in coming, but The Simpsons Movie is finally here.


And it was an odd feeling sitting in the cinema with my doughnuts and banoffee pie Frijj carton. On the one hand I had high hopes of seeing the greatest episode ever.

On the other, given the sheer epic scale of some of the TV episodes, I had to wonder just what a movie could achieve that the TV show couldn’t.

Even Homer stands up in the opening scene and accuses the audience “I can't believe we're paying to watch something we could see on TV for free! If you ask me, everyone in this theatre is a big sucker!”

But, for the next half an hour, he was wrong.

One thing The Simpsons has always done quite well is church, and at the outset this actually looked like it was going to have some strong spiritual content, just like so many episodes that deal with religious themes so well. Serious story, with extremely funny gags.

Bart: “This is the worst day of my life.”
Homer: (comfortingly)“The worst day of your life so far.”


Herschel: “If you can find a greasier sandwich, you’re in Mexico!”


Homer J Simpson: (singing) “Spider-Pig, Spider-Pig. / Does whatever a Spider-Pig does. / Can he swing / from a web? / No he can't, / cause he's a pig. / Look out! / He is a Spider-Pig!”

Mr Burns: “What are you telling us, we’re trapped like rats?”
Russ Cargill: “No, rats can't be trapped this easily, you're trapped like... carrots.”

We (Dave, flatmate Dave, Paul and myself) were laughing out loud almost non-stop, as this threatened to become a classic even more quotable than the dizzying Marge Versus The Monorail.

Then however Springfield got encased in a giant dome that no-one thought to dig under, and with it the storyline shifted away from everyday situations and into much more unreal ones. Don’t get me wrong, the gags were still there, but they were spaced out more and lacked the satirical bite of ordinary everyday life.

Marge and the kids finally leaving Homer was a great move. A massive development that had room here to be explored properly. Unfortunately it happened in the middle of such an unreal situation – with them all on the run from the US government in Alaska – that it consequently just didn’t ring true. How much more harrowing would these scenes have been if Homer had been alone in his living-room and having to face going to work the next day as usual?

To answer my earlier question though, the advantages of the big screen were as follows:

1. Massive crowd shots. The CGI was a little awkward and unfamiliar, (the same way it often is in Futurama) but who cares?

2. The laughs were bigger thanks to the presence of other people to watch with.

3. Err…more time?

Overall, this was a brilliant transition from TV to big screen. The same cast, the same feel, and absolutely no attempt at all was made to introduce the characters to new viewers. It was just like a long episode of the TV show, and in no way felt separate. And the time just flew by.

I wish all TV adaptations could be handled as properly as this was. Oh, wait a minute, they can.