John Paul II

The Pope is dying.

Peter Jennings was trying very hard not to lose his composure on BBC News 24 America. His voice broke a few times.

I'm fighting against tears myself, the pictures from St Peter's Square are very moving. A quiet dignified vigil.

I wrote last month, when the Pope went into hospital, that I hoped he would die soon, partly because he was oviously in pain and blatantly on his last legs, but mainly in the hope that his successor would be less hardline on things such as contraception, abortion, AIDS etc. This was not in disrespect to JP II. Objectively, this century needs a new Pope with perhaps a wider world view. JP II has been an excellent Pope and a strong man, the right person to hold the papacy these past 30 years. To the Catholics, he was a father.

I mourn not because the Pope is dying, but because a good and old man is saying his final prayers. There is a place set for him in the afterlife.

Dr Who.

The Doctor returned and I have to say I am not a fan of the new style. Eccleston's doctor is great but the format and the direction are trying to be trendy and some of it comes off as childish, some of the cgi looks worse than if the special effects had been mocked up by hand. I am a great believer in improvisation, the show never had a decent budget so the techies had to mock stuff up from what was around, it often looked cheap and homemade but it's better than middling cgi which just looks careless.

I still can't accept Bilie Piper as an actress, everyone says she is fantastic, I just don't see it.

I won't go on about what I disliked about the show, safe to say that Eccleston is such a fantastic actor he sibglehandedly redeemed it. I can put up with the rubbish to watch this Doctor. He's not quite what anyone might have expected but he's so charming you don't care.

Sylvester McCoy was the Doctor I grew up with and loved, there was an undercurrent of darkness in every pore, a hint that nothing was as it seemed, that even though events may appear out of control the Doctor was behind the scenes of every aspect, even if he wasn't. I loved that. He wasn't the funniest, smartest, most human, or even darkest of the Doctors but more than any of them he was the one I would have followed to the ends of the universe. The Doctor never ran, he strolled, nonchalently. Eccleston's Doctor never strolls, he always runs. I think that is why he won't displace McCoy's Doctor in my affections.

The producers of this series should look at the revamped Battlestar Galactica as to how to effectively update a series. Another show I loved as a kid the remake has, within a season, established itself as the premier SF show. It's just fantastic.

The eighties were all about machismo on TV and while it was insane fun it lacked any reality at all, which is perhaps where late nineties to modern American Television has made incredible strides. I think it must have been The X Files which drew the boundary.

British Telly is different. In America and other countries such as Australia, if you have an idea that can be pitched succesfully then you get to make a show. If your idea is good enough then it will pick up viewers. Of course this isn't enough to keep a show on the air, great series such as Millenium, American Gothic, Farscape, Sliders, and Crusade have all been axed after a few seasons or even midstory but there is potential for these to live on in other mediums, although there is the danger of turning into another Lexx, originally a fantastic show with some absolutely brilliant actors and characters it's budget was repeatedly cut and it's writing degenerated into the insanity of man eating carrots.

But the net has allowed these stories to carry on.

In Britain however it is almost impossible to get an original idea on to TV. We may be the best in the world with our period dramas but we do have great writers today, not just from the past. When was the last time Britain created a classic piece of original Science Fiction telly?

Ok, after actually trying to answer that question I've come up with Red Dwarf and the Tomorrow People both of which began in the early nineties, one as a sitcom in space, the other a kids program and itself a sequel to an eighties kids program.

Compare this to America which has so many brilliant SF shows the ones it has to cut are in fact brilliant.

Can you imagine the BBC taking a chance on a pre Buffy Joss Whedon? As much as there are problems with America, it is not with it's telly, even outside of SF there are shows as diverse as Ally McBeal, Sex in the city and The Sopranos. What do we get, endless make over shows, endless.

Ok, BBC 2 is doing quite well at the moment, there's an opera on. At least it's cultural, but exciting new shows, in the vein of thinking which created Dr Who and Blake's Seven, you must be joking. I don't blame the BBC for not taking scripts for Who, they'd be buried under mailbags, but for some reason British born new Science Fiction has become a rarity if not a taboo. It simply doesn't exist and that's a sad state of affairs.

Ooh, remembered another piece of SF that got made, around about 1996, Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. So that's three then.

While I'm on the subject of Telly, saw an absolutely brilliant short japanese film a while back on C4 called Bus 46 (or 45?) I might have mentioned it before. A really beautifully acted piece. A man gets on a bus which gets attacked by some hoodlums, the female bus driver is dragged off and raped. Only the man goes to help but gets stabbed in the leg. The other passengers watch the event or ignore it, but they do nothing. When the driver returns to the bus, the man asks if she is ok. She tells him to get off the bus. He is confused having been the only one to try to help but does so and the bus drives off. Confused and hurt the man hitchikes further along the road, he is passed by police cars. He reaches the scene of the incident and overhears a policeman talking about the accident, a bus drove off the bridge, the driver must have been crazy, no survivors.

The look on the man's face at the end is a really beautiful look, a pleasure of a film to watch and not as disheartening as it sounds.

The Beatles and Tennessee

There was once a journalist who went to interview Tennessee Williams. Williams met him outside the house and hustled him upstairs where he proclaimed he'd just heard the music of heaven. Tennessee turned to the gramophone and started it playing and the record was the White Album by The Beatles.

That is a fantastic story. We think of Williams as a million years away from The Beatles, can't imagine any relation to Eleanor Rigby and Blanche DuBois. Two completely different mediums. Williams is the dustbowl playwright, of the four greater than great 20th Century American writers - Williams, Steinbeck, Hemmingway and Arthur Miller, his America is the most distant, a noir beyond reality that somehow anchors itself in a greater reality than any of the others. The other three I find staid, too rooted in the actual. Williams understood the power of writing, the possible rather than the probable, the others only understood the power of stories. His natural progeny are William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson.

I saw The Glass Menagerie in the West End with Dame Diana Rigg. At the time I was still reeling from seeing Democracy by Frayn (Possibly the greatest play I shall ever see) and Oleanna by Mamet (Possibly the worst) so I didn't really appreciate it. Now I wish I could see it again. One of Williams' greatest assets is that southern states drawl which is imbued in his characters. It really is one of the great accents. Sometimes things strike you with immediacy, sometimes you don't realise their impact for years.

He was homosexual, apart from that I don't think I know anything about Williams. I've read and I've forgotten. But I know he liked The Beatles. I can imagine him, sitting on his bed in a sparse room, a typewriter on a table in a far corner, full moustache, gramophone on, listening to Ob La Di Ob La Da, or While my guitar gently weeps or perhaps Happiness is a warm gun. Maybe he danced when he was alone. I think that sometimes an image is all you need of a man to know him.