A Crocodile Dundee Moment

Edit: For some odd reason, this post gets more regular hits than any other.  I'm wondering why.  It occurred to me that some people might think this is a post about knives.  It's not.  They might think it's about Paul Hogan.  Or the Crocodile Dundee films.  It's not.  But thank you for coming to my blog.  Stay a while and read.



News International have been hacked.

Some might say that it was only a matter of time, and possibly timing, because Lulzsec hacked The Sun website. It's a "That's not a knife..." moment. According to claims made by Lulz, who were reported to have disbanded, they not only replaced the website's main page and later diverted it to their twitter feed, they also have emails. Lots of emails. Which they may choose to release.

News International are in so much of a mess right now - what with the arrest, the possibilities that James and Rupert might be asked to step away from the corporation, the possible FBI investigation in the USA and perhaps whispers of one in Australia too- that this hack might well be their smallest concern right now.

On the other hand, they have rather poked the internet with a stick.

In the US, Fox has apparently been playing up the angle that one little incident of less than moral journalists listening to voicemail is not as bad as, say, the cyber record of China. True, that. On the other hand, the PRC is doing what every other nation state is doing: conducting espionage operations against powers and states who threaten their interests. It's only scary because we don't understand it. So let's have a little perspective.

If people from outside the USA hack the Pentagon and steal information, it's almost exactly the same as if they had turned a member of the defense department and got that person to steal and sell secrets. The scary part of it is that they used technology and didn't need to get anywhere near the Pentagon. Of course, the CIA and the NSA have been conducting operations against enemies of the USA. It's a safe bet that these operations have always been going on, and we never get to hear about them. It's National Security, and even if you believe fervently that no one should be doing this sort of thing at all, you can understand why they don't tell you it's going on.

The good news is that the cyberspies of China, or North Korea, or Iran, don't give a tinker's cuss about you. You, as an individual, are not interesting to them. They do not need to go grubbing about in your email for salacious details of your private life.

News International, on the other hand, might. All that needs to happen for News International to invade your privacy is for you to be involved in a 'news' story. Even peripherally. What sort of stories? Let's compare front pages.

The Sun

The Guardian

I could have linked to The Telegraph or The Independent and you'd have seen different approaches to much the same story. The thing is, while News International might have fancied a rummage around in your hard drive or your voicemail, the broadsheet papers aren't interested in you either.

The larger story remains, and will likely get lost in the kerfuffle.

The Murdoch papers and media empire have set themselves up as Kingmakers. All of a sudden, we are aware that politicians owe this company favours...not minor politicians, the actual Prime Minister of the UK is effectively in the Murdoch pocket. The price for delivering assistance in securing an election victory was a Downing Street blessing over News International owning BSkyb and increasing pressure on the BBC.

It seems strange that one can talk about an organisation that is effectively a state broadcaster, set up by Royal Commission, as being a bastion of freedom of speech. But in the last decade, as the power of News International grew, that's what the BBC effectively came to represent.

Having lived in the USA and spent some time around Fox News broadcasts (and the assorted Talk Radio broadcasters), I came to value the surprisingly even handed approach of the BBC. Yes, it leans to the left. It leans to the left like a learner biker on his first attempt at a roundabout. Which is to say "not very hard". But, and this is important, you know it's there. The BBC has often been critical of whichever government is in power, because it's had the access to ask questions of those in Downing Street. Obviously, no sitting government likes that and both Labour and the Conservatives have taken issue with things the Beeb has said.

They've been able to because there are ways to take the BBC to task. But up until very recently, there was no effective way to do the same to News International.

There may not be. It depends what the outcome of all this turns out to be. But it's important we not take our eyes off this story, because it's about one organisation's attempts to own significant parts of the English speaking world's media.

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Begun, the media snark has

The News of the World is dead, and no sooner has it gone than The Sun believes it has identified the foul conspirators who sealed the doom of this bastion of journalistic integrity and honour.

It's blaming the BBC, the Guardian and a smattering of others. But mostly the BBC and the Guardian.

It's worth remembering that the reason the BBC is roundly loathed by some of the press is because the BBC is a public service broadcaster and a major news outlet. It also makes some rather excellent television programmes. But mostly the reason News International and the Daily Mail hate the BBC is the news output.

There's quite a lot more. I've linked to one item from Paul Mason, which explains something about why this whole story is a lot more interesting than just an expose of shoddy journalism.

He notes that the broadcast media in the UK - notably BBC News, ITN News and even Sky News (which is part of BSkyb, the organisation that News International has bits of and wants to buy outright) have all played a part in keeping the whole mess in the public eye.

The Sun is attempting to remind people that the BBC is funded by the Licence Fee and that 'fat cats' waste public money. If you want to know how that money is spent, click here. A News International publication is attempting to motivate it's readers to feel incensed that the BBC could participate in taking out a rival.

Of course, now that people are aware that News International wasn't beyond lawbreaking and bribing police, they're looking at how other News International publications have behaved, and there's the possibility that they may have played less than fair.

Some of the questions this issue asks are huge.

How far can the press go in finding information to substantiate stories?

Should the freedom of the press be limited by government?

What is the Public Interest?

Should one organisation ever be allowed to become so powerful that it is capable of manufacturing consent?

How comfortable are we with our politicians owing favours to companies or organisations that do not represent the population as a whole? - because let's not forget that although Dave Cameron is most likely in hock to Murdock, generations of Labour politicians ad close ties to the Trade Union movement and it's alleged that Ed Milliband still does. Is that actually OK?

It's all worth thinking about, in an assortment of serious and careful ways. Because however nice it is to see "your side" win one, this story is more than just two media organisations going to Handbags at Dawn...it actually affects how the last election was fought, how much power people are allowed to have and how this country is run. It's like lifting up a stone to catch a glimpse of what scuttles away.

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Hacked Hacks Pack!

A sort of follow up, which is only appropriate since this is only a sort of blog.

The News of the World is closing and going away for ever. Or at least until The Sun on Sunday (or perhaps just Sun-day) starts up.

Apparently, people as annoyed about their casual use of phone phreakery and hackery mounted a small campaign using social media to raise awareness of how much distrust there is in the News of the World. Advertisers pulled ads from the paper. And Rupert Murdoch is closing it down.

Is this good news?

Not as such.

Rupert Murdoch still wants to own Sky. He still wants to dismember the BBC and he still wants to do all this with the permission of the Conservative government, who owe him big time for the election victory Murdoch's UK papers and media outlets helped them achieve.

We have to remember it wasn't all Murdoch. Labour failed magnificently to be a political party that anyone could actually vote for, but nevertheless, Murdoch's price is all about making him the sole player in the UK's media.

This all gets a bit murky, because although I love the BBC and although I believe that Mr. Murdoch's ambitions are basically incompatible with civilisation, I am forced to admit that he's a very successful businessman and he's where he is for a reason.

Having given the Devil his due... I am glad to see the back of NotW, and I am hoping to see an investigation which uncovers exactly how much we can trust News International. I doubt we'll get that, but we can hope.

I was about to launch into a rant about business, education and art. Again. I still believe that business needs to **** off out of education and we, as a nation and as a civilisation, need to pay more attention to the arts in general.

It occurred to me today that I can't remember the names of any businessmen from a hundred years ago. I remember, dimly, the names of the men who we hold responsible for the industrial revolution, and I remember the names of scientists and artists. In fact, I can remember the names of artists all the way back to the ancient greeks.

I just can't name and businessmen.

I doubt that in a hundred years time we will remember who Lord Sugar is. I doubt that we will really remember who Murdoch is, especially since the name Hearst is now fading from popular memory - even though he's linked to Citizen Kane. I don't think any of the entrepreneurs and businessfolks are ever going to be remembered and it will not matter what they said or did.

We'll remember the artists, though. I have a feeling that names like Pratchett will carry on. I have a feeling that in a century people will still know who Truffaut or Spielberg or Scorsese were. There are bound to be artists like Damian Hurst who get remembered. I think our descendants will still know about Elvis and The Beatles, perhaps even Take That.

But the names of the businessmen are dust on the wind, perhaps because deep down we really don't care what they do.

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Who Hacks the Hacks?

If you pay attention to news about the internet, and about security, you may be aware of two groups:

Anonymous

and

Lulzsec

Both have recently had members arrested by law enforcement after attacks on high profile targets.

In the case of Lulzsec, The Sun have pitched in. A chap by the name of Ryan Clearly got himself arrested, having been identified variously as a "criminal mastermind" - largely by the red top press. The Sun proceed to do a hatchet job on the lad, who currently has quite a lot to be miserable about.

The Sun says that Lulzsec have been involved in hitting targets that were supposed to have been secure and security conscious. Like Sony, who lost several million sets of customer details. They have also struck at law enforcement. The point is, you are supposed to trust these companies and organisations. Lulzsec have been attempting to demonstrate that this trust may be misplaced.

Ryan has been given a thorough slating by The Sun. They have sought to depict him as some kind of consistently dazed idiot, and therefore as harmless. They are suggesting that we have nothing to fear from hackers like Ryan, because a hapless teenager cannot possibly be a threat and should not be taken seriously.

It's not a bad point. Ryan's current claim to fame is that he's all over the Sun news paper for inhaling lighter fuel, which is one of the dumber ways to make yourself feel good that I've ever heard of. He's clearly an idiot. The Guardian, however, shows what Lulzsec have been up to.

It's a scarier read, which one would expect from a newspaper for grownups.

So why minimize Ryan? A boy who was only caught because he made the mistake of counting coup on the wrong people, since it appears he may have been turned in by members of the hacker community (who allegedly posted his contact details online). The Police claim that the arrest is significant, and you can bet they will be using whatever means they can to extract names and locations of other lulzsec members in the hope that the hacking group will collapse. Since it took law enforcement a day or so to get the SOCA website back up, you can see why they might be giving this matter a lot of attention.

However...admitting that Ryan might actually be dangerous (see how the article says he would sit in his room, a room that contains two (!!) computers, when other normal people were smoking spliffs, as if the use of a computer is what makes him a freak) would mean admitting that other members of lulzsec have power, and may also be kids. If kids are able to take the best efforts of adult professionals and kick them over or break them down, we have to admit that these people have power on a similar level to an agency or government.

There are things to keep in mind. Firstly, Ryan got caught because he was an ass.

The same is true of the recent Anon. arrests - Spanish authorities picked up some kids who had downloaded, installed and deployed Anon's favourite DoS weapon, the Low Orbit Ion Cannon. And they had done so without the proper understanding of how to effectively cover their tracks. These were not hackers, these were Scriptkiddies who saw some instructions on 4Chan and decided, in the way that kids do, to do something stupid because it was cool or funny at the time.

The people who organize and who do the real hacking will take a much more concerted effort to catch, if they are caught at all.

Be that as it may, you might remember that The Sun is a News International newspaper. It's owned by Murdoch, who also owns The News of the World. The News of the World was recently in the press because of a phone hacking scandal.

Now, at the time I seem to remember NoTW hacks claiming that the information they had illegally accessed was in the public interest.

Does this mean that hacking is OK when you're a News International "journalist", but not if you're a teenager?

Speaking entirely personally, while it's difficult to condone the actions of Lulzsec it is important that we recongnise the service they perform. Our institutions do not take IT security seriously. DoS attacks are survivable and certainly should be one of the easier forms of attack to deal with. A high profile organisation, particularly one that is involved in government work or Regnum Defende, needs to be better at this. Particularly given what China is alleged to have been up to.

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Shakespeare in Klingon

Look at this: Soliloquy in Klingon. What's wrong with that? In it's own terms, nothing. It's a good performance and actually it's interesting to see that a decent actor and Shakespeare's lines can still have meaning in an artificial language.

Mind you, Ken Campbell knew that when he translated The Scottish Play into pidgin. There's a review here. Nope, it's not the language or the performance that make the To Be Or Not To Be speech out of place in Klingon. It's the choice of play.

Hamlet is far too...wet...to be a Klingon. Had Hamlet been a Klingon, the play would be one act long, that act consisting of the message from the ghost of Hamlet's father and then a brutal fight scene ending with Claudius bifurcated and a dying Hamlet giving Fortinbras a solid kicking too.

The whole 'Hamlet in Klingon' thing comes from the Star Trek movie The Undiscovered Country, in which a Klingon character insists that one can best understand Shakespeare only in the original Klingon.

Fair enough. Bill's got the same haircut and exposed forehead as a Klingon, and Bill has a talent for writing stirring pre-battle speeches.

However, to see how a Klingon really should handle Shakespeare we might as well turn to a master of the art. Here's Sir Ian doing the opening bit to Richard III.

It is possibly the most badass introduction to a character that Shakespeare ever gives. Within the space of one speech you know everything about Richard that you will ever need to know, and you come to respect his intelligence and his cunning all at the same time. You know that Richard is a soldier first and foremost, too, which should make him appealing to Klingons.

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Doctor Who?

Over at Den of Geek, which is one of those pro-bloggy sites which I can't seem to stop reading and would probably quite enjoy working for, I found a thought provoking article about Doctor Who.

It's here, and it's a critique of New Doctor Who. I enjoyed reading it, I also enjoyed disagreeing with it on a couple of points. Rather than attempt a fannish evisceration of the article - where would the point be? The writer isn't wrong - I thought I'd put together a counter argument.

The darkest days of Doctor Who came in the 1980s. As a fan, it was one of the staples of my life. I would ritually settle down in front of a title sequence that I was getting less and less happy with (the one I grew up with is probably still my favourite), listen to the theme music that had drifted away from the spine chilling electronica that to this day I can't get out of my head, and try to pretend that it hadn't all gone a bit wrong.

In the 1980s, Doctor Who was being torn in about three different directions at once. Some of the writers and script editors wanted the show to be a bit more grown up. Some of the fans did too, because by this point it had been on for something like twenty years. The kids who had been introduced to the Doctor in a Totters Lane junkyard now had families of their own, who were seriously unimpressed with the low budget, effects-poor fare that compared rather unfavorably to TV shows from across the Atlantic, and those parents now wanted a show which reflected their changing priorities.

The BBC didn't want the show at all.

The Producer wanted to try for some popularity. John Nathan Turner is often lambasted for his time on Doctor Who, and very unfairly so, given that without him the show wouldn't have lasted as long as it did. His decisions on guest stars, and on some of the directions the show would take, have made him a byword for all that fans thought was wrong with Doctor Who at the time.

What really happened was this: Doctor Who was in no position to move with the times. The BBC didn't want to spend time and money looking at the programme and the format. They had no interest in giving it the budget it needed to look as though it was punching at the same weight as the competition.

All of these things aside, us fans got something close to what we wanted with Sylvester McCoy's last two seasons. We got what appeared to be final stories for the Daleks and the Cybermen. We got a Doctor who started out a clown and became something very much more complex. And then the whole thing got handed off to Virgin Publishing, where a series of 7th Doctor novels would show what Doctor Who was capable of.

I read them. I think I read all but a couple. Some of them were brilliant. Others, not. They all had one thing in common: they were not suitable for children.

The show as it stands now is back with its roots. It is a TV show you can sit a 12 year old down with (or a bright younger child) and be reasonably assured that they will be entertained and that their imagination will be fired. This is what Doctor Who did for me, it's what Doctor Who does best and it's what Doctor Who is busily engaged in.

Aspects have moved on. The kids that started watching in 2005 are now six years older. Some of them will be turning 12. Some will be turning 18. To keep those viewers interested, stuff changes a little. But not much, and certainly not enough to - for example - alienate the new generation of viewers.

Doctor Who can be dark, because fairy stories are dark, and scary because a lot of children's tales are scary. It can be quite callous and hard, if it wants to, because children aren't the lovely bundles of fluff that some parents have decided they should be. Are you kidding? Listen to children playing some time. Children are so empathy-challenged that you can sit them in front of the Disney Channel for 12 hours - an experience that would make even the most ardent BNP supporter want to investigate how good it can be to share things with people who aren't like us - and they will still be selfish, capricious little shits at the end of it.

The call, by some older fans, to make Doctor Who grow up and be something different is never going to be heeded. To survive, the show needs to recruit new viewers and - paradoxically for a show that completely changes every couple of years - it needs constants.

In his article, Mark Reed said that the show suffered from a poverty of vision and that it could be so much more than 50 minutes of fast-paced lightweight scifi. It could be something like The Wire.

It could. And that would mean it stopped being Doctor Who.

Things do change. Companions come and go, there's continuity (of a sort) over years...decades, even... and the style of the show changes. Watch something from the first year of Doctor Who, then have a look at the Patrick Troughton story The Invasion. Then watch something like The Silurians. Treat yourself to Talons of Weng Chiang, and then watch Frontios. It's a completely different style of show, and yet exactly the same. Like the Doctor himself.

The thing that keeps us coming back to the show is not a desire for it to be as dense or complex as The Wire. It's different for all of is fans, but it hinges on the show saying something important to us when we were younger and continuing to say it today.

The Moffat Era is still talking to me, and although I really would like a network and a writer to take a science fiction idea and do with it what was done to The Wire, or The West Wing, I don't believe Doctor Who is the show to do it with.

Perhaps the new incarnation of Torchwood might have what people are looking for. It's a TV show for adults.

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Hands in pockets, mooching about

It's been a rough week.

Not particularly rough for me, you understand, because my problems are few, but for at least one friend.

So, happy thoughts towards him.

Anyway. Books.

I thought I'd made a serious mistake because having decided to do this NatNoWriMo thing, I've realised I have no plot, no characters and no setting.

Except I think I have them now.

Of course, this leads me to talk of naming spaceships.

If you look back over the best loved spaceships, you end up thinking about Star Trek. You might recall Lost in Space but you probably won't recall the name of their ship. Odds are, though, that you know the USS Enterprise. So any book that features a space ship has to give that ship a memorable name. It has to feel right. It has to have weight, and purpose.

All the parody names that people have come up with don't quite work. Even the Protector from Galaxy Quest doesn't really have "it". Galactica does, at least these days, and that's mostly thanks to the re-imagined BSG which gave the ship the dignity it never had in the original series. It's even got more cultural weight than TARDIS, which has entered the English language to mean any space which is deceptively roomy.

So, if you want to give a starship a name, it has to have a unique something.

I think the Nostromo has it,but it's pinched from a Conrad novel and that seems to help.

Inevitably, Wikipedia has a list of fictional space ships and most of the names are rather...naff. Compared with some of the names the Royal Navy used for cruisers and battleships (come on! who doesn't love the name Warspite?) they seem rather dull and thoughtless.

So, loads of source material for all this stuff, and loads of words to play with.

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So, having decided to do this novel writing thing it seems like I ought to actually have an idea.

I've got a couple of months to research, which gives me ample time to figure out what I want to do and then do whatever reading I want to do in order to lend whatever plot I come up with some kind of believability.

On the one hand, part of me wants to write a fantasy book. It's not that they're easy, or that they have particular challenges that I relish, it's just that I have never really written anything like that before.

I've also set myself a specific challenge. No fan fic, None. So whatever I come up with must be an original idea and use original characters. No short cuts.

I already realise that I'm going to regret this. Surely a first novel written under pressure should be easier on the writer than this?

I don't think I want that at all. In one sense, this is a test of whether or not I can hack it as a writer and a novelist. This is the dream I have had since I was a kid, and perhaps after November that's going to be a dream I will know I can make true, or not. In that light, it has to be done right. Everyone has at least one book in them.

Plot. Character. Tension, opposition and antagonists. And an ending. I suck at endings.

Speaking of which, I've got to present a five minute 'thing' on the journey of faith next Sunday. Why do I agree to these things?

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Novelist

I decided to sign up for National Novel Writing Month.

In November, I am going to spend my month turning out at least 30,000 words of story. Following that, I am going to edit and re-write what I come up with in an attempt to actually sell a novel.

If that fails, I will do it again the following year and use the time in between to learn about how to edit, re-write and market a book.

Why?

Because I want to at least try.

In the mean time, I plan to finish the short stories I have rattling around in my head.

Edit\: fifty thousand words. Oh.

Fifty thousand.

OK. That's...one thousand six hundred and sixty six point six recurring words a day.

I can still do that. Totally.

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I should do this more often

I don't like people very much.

That's not true really. People are generally amazing and I enjoy their company.

What I despair of is ever getting anything done that involves more than three of them.

Here's a simple thing: at work, a couple of m'colleagues wanted to join a book club. They like reading, so why not? Why not indeed.

Being a practical sort, I suggested they form their own.

The easy way to start a club or group or anything is to get people to show up in one spot and do whatever it is they came to do. You are, for the most part, organizing a pissup in a brewery.

So I thought we could just get together in a Starbucks and talk about books.

Since that point, everyone who has become involved has wanted to modify what should be a simple exercise and we are now at the point where I'm thoroughly exasperated. It's my own fault, I'm trying to be accommodating. What I should be saying to specific people is:

"You know, it's great you want to be involved and everything, but you can quit trying to ruin a good idea now. The fact is, the potential for this event has always existed but not once in the preceding months did you have the wit to arrange it. So fuck off, you're wrong."

In future, I will keep my ideas small and quiet until they are well established.

In happier news, I was delighted to see Google Music in Beta.

It bravely announced that it would allow me to send all my music, from whatever device it was stored on, to the Cloud and access it from anywhere!

Neat!

Plus, knowing Google, it'd be free.

I noticed this at work, and came home with the intention of telling Spotify that it was all over between us. I fired up Spotify and, lo and behold, it proceeded to catalog all of my offline music and make it available in a Cloud, so I can access it on my mobile - which is an HTC Desire Z droid phone - and any other device.

I might still bin Spotify, because money is getting tight and the monthly subscription to premium is looking iffy, but it's nice to see Google beaten to the punch.

Also, the ability to mooch around Spotify for new stuff is very pleasing and has kept me usefully amused for hours.

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Science fiction triple feature

I've been away from this blog for some time. I'll explain later.

The bad news is that I had written this post just before Blogger died for a couple of days. I know I saved the whole thing as a draft. I mean, I know I did, because I hadn't finished the post and besides that, I wanted to come back and edit it.

Well, it's gone. All of it. As they say in America, sonofabitch.

Never mind. Writing is re-writing.

DOUGLAS ADAMS

is dead. He has been dead for ten years, more or less exactly.

He died young, he left the world much poorer for his passing and it has had to struggle on without him ever since.

I did not know Douglas Adams. I think I might once have communicated with him on a forum - possibly the Digital Village - once. But that was it.

Just as well, too. The horrible teetering thing about being a fan is you might meet the person you idolize and find out they aren't the person you imagine them to be. That might be crushingly awful. Of course they might be wonderful, but people tend to be people no matter the height of esteem you hold them in.

So, the Douglas Adams I knew was constructed from his work. This is the nice thing about writers; they let you into their heads - or limited bits of their heads - and show you what they're thinking. Of course the craft of writing means this is artifice and you have to be wary of that, because this is where the whole fallacy that you know the artist comes from. It's much saner to say that I knew the work of Douglas Adams and was profoundly pleased to have discovered it.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was the place where my sense of humour lived. I damn near memorized several versions of the story. I can still bore people with quotes, although these days I very nearly have the maturity not to. To put this in context, there have been shows - The Goon Show, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Hancock's Half Hour - which define a sense of humour. These shows provide a home, a place where those who share that sense of humour, belong.

I came late to the Goons and Python. I was obsessing about towels long before I understood about pining for the fjords.

With typical Geek appetite, once I had discovered Douglas Adams I wanted to read everything he'd ever written and consequently discovered his love for technology and his concern for the environment. I also discovered that he wasn't a novelist at heart (but had managed to write some good ones anyway) and, essentially, wanted to be given the chance to tinker with stuff and then enthuse about it to people who had receptive minds.

I'm glad that he had the chance to do this. I'm delighted by his imagination, because things he wrote are still with us to be enjoyed, and I'm grateful to him for giving my sense of humour a place to call home.

Moffat Slams Spoilers

There's a really odd relationship between fans and spoilers.

Some of us love them. I think it's the thrill of secret knowledge. Other people love the tang of the illicit.

Like any piece of art - yes, television is art and if you disagree then sorry but you're wrong (at least for the purposes of this blog) - people form relationships with a TV show. Most of us have a pretty normal, healthy relationship with the show and are satisfied with that. Some want more. They want clandestine meetings in seedy hotels, they want to explore relationship elements which, to others, would seem transgressive.

I think that's part of the thrill of spoilers.

My own relationship with spoilers is similar to a Lovecraftian protagonist's relationship with the Mythos. Sure, I want the knowledge. Crave it, even. But I know having the knowledge will drive me mad and result in my face being bitten off by something with too many mouths.

Generally, I try to be Spoiler free.

However, for those who want to be Spoiled and who consent to be Spoiled...well, I can't really tell them they're wrong. Any sensible fan, and any sensible forum, has a special place reserved where people who want to engage in a little harmless Spoilering...can. Behind closed doors, so to speak. If you're a consenting fan, there's no harm in this.

The Moff has vilified the other type of fan. The one for whom blurting spoiler information where any unsuspecting person might see it is cruise control for cool.

I always assume this person is either looking desperately for validation, or else has a staggering lack of empathy, but either way it's a cry for help.

If Doctor Who is art, and if people form relationships with it, then the senseless spoiler is rather like the graceless idiot who sidles up to someone in the first blush of first love and, in an oleaginous whisper, says 'oh yeah...goes like a bunny, they say'.

Neil Gaiman Writes Doctor Who

I saw something in a facebook post. Someone said that the episode written by Neil Gaiman is superb - something I agree with wholeheartedly - and is much the better for the fact that it's written by someone who isn't one of The Moff's inner circle of friends.

I had a chuckle about this.

Because it's wrong.

Well, it's mostly wrong.

I don't want to comment on the relationship between Neil Gaiman and The Moff. I have no idea what it is, beyond the comments made by the men themselves on Doctor Who Confidential. I also have no desire to know. It doesn't matter.

Well, it doesn't matter beyond this: Neil Gaiman is a talented author and all round generally capable writer who wanted to write for Doctor Who and, after having met Steven Moffat, wrote to him to ask if he could.

It helps, of course, that Neil Gaiman has several novels to his name. And some screenplays. And some comics. And quite a lot of other things. Frankly, if Neil Gaiman wrote to you and said that he'd like to try writing an episode of your show, you'd be mental to dismiss the prospect out of hand.

Be that as it may, the author of the original facebook comment may have misunderstood the nature of writers and script editors. To an extent, there's a lot of social networking that goes on. It happens in every walk of life. If we're in a position to be handing out work, we will give it first to people we know and trust. These will, in all probability, be people we also find it easy to like. Before you know it, you've got yourself an inner circle of friends.

Being outside the whole process of Doctor Who, we do not see it and we do not understand it properly. My time as an amateur parapsychologist taught me that when people half see something, they will make shit up to explain what they believe is happening, and that this shit is worryingly difficult to dislodge.

We have to be really careful if we're trying to be critical, careful not to equate "this doesn't work for me" with "I totally understand how this happened, and it's a bizarre conspiracy".

Especially when we're looking at a social network which we're not a part of and which we have no chance of being a part of. It's hard to see what's really there when the shadowplay that hints at how we only think the world works is so much more comforting.

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