Ben Paddon

Blog

  • I’m On a Train

    It’s late and I’m currently in the top bunk of the Antrak Starlight North to Seattle. We left at 10.15 this morning and we arrive on Thursday evening. And then on Fridqy comes PAX, easily the best games convention in the US. The highlight of my gaming social calendar.

    Joining me is Michelle Osorio, who’ll be entering the Rock Band tournament along with friends Andy and Adam to form the greatest band of all time – the Paxstreet Boys.

    Chief concern right now is making sure I dot fall out of this bunk. I’m sleepy and eager to get to Seattle.

  • Search for a Star

    I was looking at the analytics statistics for Jump Leads, and I discover that rather a few people have found the site by searching for “british comedy sci fi” (oddly enough, most of these searches seem to be coming from Google UK). Out of curiosity, I thought I’d find out where we stand on Google’s search results.

    The results are… well, see for yourself:

    Google UK results for "british comedy sci fi"

    I have to say, I’m rather proud of this. Which is, I will admit, rather silly. But there we are.

  • io9 post list of top 100 scifi shows, have big ugly face that’s as dumb as a butt

    io9, the scifi & fantasy blog owned by Gawker Media, have taken time from their busy schedule of Googling for pornographic Futurama fan-art to post a “Top 100 Science Fiction/Fantasy Shows Of All Time” list. I happen to side with Mil Millington on the subject of “lists as journalism” – namely, it’s bollocks – and their list is more reprehensible than comprehensive. Let’s take a look at some of the items on that list, shall we?

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  • We’re All Flawed, and We’re All Brilliant

    I read the UK government’s ePetitions website, and I do so as a hobby.

    But, Sir… started life as a hobby. Friend and fellow Jump Leads writer Andrew I both followed the RSS feed for the ePetition site in Google Reader and we’d often share the more ludicrous petitions with each other. The idea hit one one day that rather than just pointing them out to each other like children passing notes around class, why not collate them in a blog for everyone to see?

    Since then reading through the petitions has changed for me. It’s no longer a way to kill time. It’s almost a job. It’s something I enjoy doing a lot because, in all honesty, everybody likes to make fun of stupid people. Recently, however, it began to sit uncomfortably with me. “How on earth,” I’d ask myself, “Can there be this many stupid people living and working in the UK?”

    Indeed, idiocy is all around us. Here in the US we have to deal with morons like Orly Taitz and the Birthers, and the Healthcare Reform nuts who believe that Obama is going to send “death panels” to their grandparents’ houses to shoot them in the head. Or whatever. Indeed, there is a public perception amongst the rest of the world that America is full of mindless, gormless, overweight neanderthals who barely have enough power in their minuscule pea-brains to recall even the simplest of PIN numbers. Y’know what? I’ve lived here for over two years and I think that I’ve personally encountered more morons in the UK than I have in the US. The problem, really, is that the American morons get more news coverage – well when a country elects a complete and utter bollock-brain like Bush twice, they’re bound to get weird looks.

    British citizens like to look down on America, as though it were a less intelligent nation. But the simple truth is this: “Like German tourists, the stupid are everywhere.” The UK is not full of… actually, Americans, you should take note of this as well. The UK is not full of tea-drinking, wine-sniffing, witticism-spouting intellectuals who gather around a fine wooden table to discuss Matters of Great Importance. Not everybody there knows what a bidet is. Many of them have never even seen the inside of a Parlour, nor looked through the single lens of a monocle. The UK isn’t full of anything. What it has, just like any other country, is its fair share of smart people and its fair share of morons.

    The balance has always seemed off-kilter, and this is usually because idiots are louder. America has its Town Hall meetings where ignorant, gun-toating Beckites shout idiocies and moronisms at elected officials because they’re terrified that their healthcare system might be improved, and the UK has the Government ePetitions site and the BBC’s Have Your Say pages where our own special breed of idiot can shout more or less the same stupid comments either directly at the government or the internet in general (incidentally if you want to see real lunacy in action I’d suggest you check out spEak You’re bRanes, which does for the Have Your Say comments what we do for the ePetitions). This sort of halfwit has existed since long before our time. We’ve had idiots for decades. Centuries. Millennia. The only difference now is that they’ve been handed a worldwide platform for their mad ravings. Used to be you just stood on a street corner and told people that we should bring back Crucifixion. Now you can get on television and tell an entire nation, or  jump online and tell the world.

    Reading the ePetitions site might be enough to drive a lesser man into a pit of cynicism, depression, and a sort of general bitterness for the human race as a whole. Despite my bitter ranting in the last couple of paragraphs I feel I have to make it clear, I don’t despair for the state of the human race. I don’t lay awake at night wondering what’s become of us. I may well have a deeply-routed antipathy for the willfully ignorant, but that is not a label that can be applied to humanity as a whole. Me? I love the human race. We’re fantastic! How can you not love a world were an overworked, underpaid supermarket soda monkey does this with his spare time? Or where a lover sends his other half bits of card to tell her how much he loves her?

    People – cynical, jaded people in particular – seem to forget that just as human beings are capable of great stupidity and horror, so are we capable of remarkable intellect and acts of incredible kindness. For every Charles Manson there is a Danny Wallace, for every Fred Phelps there is a John Lennon (which logically means there’s also a Yoko Ono, but let’s not think about that).

    You can’t ignore that there is so much bad that goes on in the world – the media makes sure of that – but you mustn’t forget that there’s a lot of good going on as well.

  • The Light That Burns Twice As Bright Burns For Half As Long

    A Warning for British People: I’m going to annoy you immsnely by describing a series of a British thing as a “season”, because that’s more or less how it works here in America, even for British shows. That is, in fact, now it used to work in the UK as well, but at some point we shifted over and you’re welcome to do the research on the history of that if you like, but I shan’t be covering it here. Anyway, feel free to whinge at me for using an American word. If it makes you feel any better I’ll be using British spellings for words like “analyse” and “colour”. I’m sure you’ll find an American spelling in there somewhere for you to get grouchy about, but at the end of the day the spelling I choose to use is still going to be accurate somewhere, and that’s alright for me.

    …

    One common thing I get told by my New American Friends when I introduce them to my favourite British comedy shows is, “Wow, the seasons are so short!”. And, to their credit, they’re absolutely right – the average length of a season of a British show, sitcom in particular, is usually between six and eight episodes. The problem with their statement is that it’s usually said as a complaint. Which is daft.

    When it comes to television, Americans are spoilt. They are. They get anywhere between twelve and twenty-four episodes a season, regardless of genre. Almost every successful American television show finds its way into international markets. Shows that are successful elsewhere in the world wind up getting remade just for them. It’s perhaps a little understandable that they get a little snobby when it comes to the television that the rest of the world has to offer.

    But there’s an interesting corollary between the perceived quality of a show and the number of episodes a comedy has has over its run. Let’s analyse that now, shall we?

    blackbooksLet’s compare two shows from the last few years – in Britain’s corner we have Black Books, a sitcom about a cynical, alcoholic bookstore owner and his oddball friends. There are exactly eighteen episodes of Black Books, each one twenty-five minutes in length spread out over three seasons. Every single one of this episodes is choc full of cracking gags and some brilliant acting from Dylan Moran, Bill Bailey, and Tamsin Grieg. It’s a great show, and it’s one of those shows I can watch from beginning to end, over and over again, until death.

    Our American example? Scrubs, a hospital comedy that has not long completed its eighth season and is about to go into its ninth. There are, at last count, one-hundred-and-sixty-nine episodes of this sitcom, each one clocking in at around the twenty-two minute mark. The first season consists of twenty-four episodes. Twenty-four. Seasons 2 through 6 had twenty-two episodes each. Season 7 had eleven episodes, but would’ve had eighteen were it not for the 2007-08 Writer’s Strike. Season 8 had eighteen episodes, and season 9? In production right now.

    Already that paragraph is longer than the one about Black Books, and I haven’t even begun to talk about the overall quality of the show, which I will do now in a third paragraph.

    scrubsScrubs is, in its first two or three seasons, an absolutely fantastic show. It’s easily some of the best comedy that has come out of the US in the last decade. It began to falter somewhere around the fourth season, where the fantasy sequences started to get a little wobby or become a little too long, and by season 7 the show had descended into madness. The characters had become horrible parodies of themselves. The comedy was gone. The acting was dire, by virtue of the fact that the characters and the tone of the show had changed so much. Scrubs’ seventh season is an almost entirely different show. It began to pick things up again during the eighth season, which was a marked (and, for American television, incredibly rare) return to form.

    This is the problem, though: Would you rather have eighteen consistently brilliant episodes of a show, or nearly one-hundred-and-seventy episodes of a show, over half of which are mediocre tripe? If I say to someone, “I like Black Books,” that statement is consistent because the show is consistent (although here in the US I usually have to tell people what it’s about, who’s in it, and whether they’ll “get it”). If I say to someone, “I like Scrubs,” I usually have to qualify that with which seasons I did like, which seasons I didn’t, and then go on to say why.

    Personally I’ll take quality over quantity any day.

  • It Fills A Hole

    We’re all humans, right? I mean, unless an animal testing laboratory has been raided and dozens of cerebrally-enhanced genetic super-chimps have been freed from their cage, slipped out of the building masked by the confusion and tear-gas and then, having discussed amongst themselves what they should do with their new-found freedom, decided to hightail it to the nearest Internet Cafe and look up an obscure British writer’s blog, I think it’s a safe assumption to make.

    So with that in mind, I think it’s fairly safe to say that sometimes, when we are faced with feelings of emptiness and dissatisfaction with the current state of our lives (Why haven’t I got any regular income? Why won’t the BBC return my calls? Is The Beatles Rock Band really $250?!) we turn to unusual places to plug up the gaping hole that has pushed itself into our lives. Some people fill that hole with television, or sex, or by writing abusive emails to publishing companies. Others, such as myself, tend to fill that void with food.

    It’s a dangerous thing. I’ve spent much of the last few months couped up on my own in my house. Often I haven’t left my bedroom because I’ve been on my computer either writing, talking to friends, or playing Tales of Monkey Island. Occasionally I will leave my room, slouching and scratching my back like some sort of well-dressed caveman, and wander into the kitchen where I will, for no real reason whatsoever, get something to eat.

    There’s no need for this. I’m not hungry. I’m not even peckish. And yet I have lost count of the number of times where I have been sitting at my computer, blinked, and then found myself standing in the kitchen looking into the fridge. Occasionally I have gone one step further and found myself sitting at my computer desk with a tub of Pringles and a jar of dip, an occurance which fills me with dread because we never buy Pringles.

    Then there was a recent incident where I found myself eating Nutella out of the jar with a spoon. Such antics are forgivable of a young boy who just likes chocolate, but I’m a 23 year-old man. I’m supposed to be a professional. So why the Hell am I shovelling chocolate and hazelnut spread out of the jar and directly into my mouth?

    It’s possible I am simply a Disgusting Human Being. Indeed, I don’t dismiss this option. There is at least one item in my DVD collection that would probably validate this theory (and, y’know, who amongst us hasn’t gone to Amazon UK and seen series one of Not Going Out for the limited-time-only price of £3 and subsequently purchased it in a moment of heady recklessness?).

    I used to go for a daily walk. I stopped doing that because It’s Fucking Hot, and I am tall and red-haired and British and therefore not built for the surface-of-the-sun levels of heat LA seems to endure for 347 days of the year.

    So my plan from tomorrow is this: Eat healthily. Yes, that’s ridiculous. Yes, my primary source of food for tomorrow will be a local AM-PM and the only food they serve there has been treated with more chemicals than a Marvel superhero. But dammit, I’m going to eat healthily or not at all. One way or another I’m going to get Results. I’m not huge, and I’d like to keep it that way.

    Meanwhile, I have to find something else to fill that hole with. What were the other things I mentioned earlier…?

  • On the subject of Wheelchairs

    On the subject of Wheelchairs

    Perhaps one of the most annoying plot devices that comes up in bad sitcoms and most teen drama shows is the “You Think You Have It So Tough” story. In this story one of the central character’s quirks or disabilities – usually something like blindness or being in a wheelchair – is “simulated” by the other lead characters, who end the experience with a renewed respect for the disabled character and a deeper understanding of the adversity that said character has endured.

    The first season of ABC’s Fox’s Glee is going to have a story like this. I know this because I’m an extra in that particular episode. A bunch of the characters wind up being told by a teacher that they have to spend the whole day in wheelchairs to get a better understanding of just how rough the one character who is actually in a wheelchair has it. One of the scenes we filmed involved one of the able-bodied characters rolling down the corridor in his loaner wheelchair for the first time, getting his head pushed, prodded, poked, whacked, wholloped and banged by the various other students who were apparently totally oblivious to the fact that the fucking High School Linebacker (or whoever) is now in a fucking wheelchair.

    Those sort of stories bug me for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s been done to death. It’s the sort of story that writes itself because the writer has invariably already seen it done somewhere else. That isn’t what makes it lazy writing, though. What makes it lazy writing is that it never deviates from the established formula. Nothing changes. Nobody has ever done anything interesting with the concept. I can’t think of a writer other than Joss Whedon who might decide, for example, to have a Horrible Accident occur during the One In A Wheelchair that actually leaves one of the other principle characters permanently in a wheelchair for some reason.

    Secondly, the characters don’t learn anything. At all. As in the comic above, they can get out of their chairs at the end of the day. Wheely McWheelerson, the Only Disabled Kid In School, can’t.

    I forget how I was going to end this rant, so I’m going to stop typing now.

  • Rating the Doctor Who Finales

    Over four years ago, viewers in the UK (and people worldwide who naughtily downloaded stuff from the internet) were treated to the series one finale of Doctor Who. Had the show been unsuccessful that could’ve been the end of it, but no – Doctor Who‘s return to television was nothing short of a triumph. Four years later it is one of the most successful shows on British television, and we’re not far off from seeing David Tennant’s tenure as the Tenth Doctor (the new series’ second) come to an end.

    With that in mind, I thought it might be fun to dissect in the finales in order, from my personal least-favourite to the finale I consider the best of the bunch so far. So here we go, then.

    A word of warning: If you haven’t seen much of Doctor Who and want to avoid spoilers, I would advise you to give this article a miss.

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