The most receny series of Dr Who (DW) has finished. By all accounts, even the die hard fans have found this poor at best, and the future of the show is in the balance, again, with the loss of the latest actor to play the lead role, Ncuti Gatwa.
There are plenty of sites and books where you can look up the history of DW and find clips and even whole episodes.
We have a few thoughts.
I used to enjoy football when I was tiny, but don’t any more and rarely even look at it on tv.
Like so many sorts now, a 90 minute match (plus half time) can become a 3 hour marathon on multipe channels, with armies of pundits and exhausting analysis.
The players get a lot of money, some in the hundreds of thousands per week, I am told.
Here’s an idea to make big matches slightly more interesting – have the penalty knock out first, before the actual match. This will give one team at least a greater incentive to play – at the end, if it’s a nil-nil draw, we know who will be the victors.
The new Formula 1 (motor racing) season is well under way. This year there are 24 races, going on until December, so roughly one every two weeks, except it isn’t that as they have a winter break of several months, plus an extended break in the summer. So you will have races once a fortnight or sometimes once a week (eg Bahrain and Saudi Arabia).
We can remember following the sport in the 70s and especially 80s, when there were fewer races and each race seemed more of an event.
Some are on purpose-built race tracks (eg UK), some are on street tracks, public roads that are blocked off and converted (eg Monaco).
Monaco was a recent race. It’s always hyped as being special, unlike any other and so on. The track is quite short, so the leaders can catch up with the back markers and lap them maybe twice. For our brains, it’s confusing. Also, the streets are narrow and windy and overtaking is very hard. The recent race was just a procession. Even the commentators say, the qualifying is everything. Get to pole position and, barring accidents etc, you will win.
In other words, it’s dull.
We used to watch on BBC1. Murray Walker was the commentator, with maybe James Hunt as his sidekick. It was entertainment for a couple of hours.
Now it’s on cable channels. The coverage is extensive. Apart from the interviews and build up, there’s Free Practice 1 (FP1), FP2, FP3, Qualifying, the race, Sprint Qualifying, the Sprint, and all the post interviews and analysis. Hours and hours of it. If you are a dedicated fan, there’s not much more you would need.
It used to be a novelty when a car had a camera above and behind the driver. Now every car has multiple cameras, including inside the driver’s helmet (how can that be safe?) and you can use technology just to watch your favourite, to the exclusion of all others, if you pay the subscription.
We always watch on tv, rather than going. We knew someone years ago who went and, even in the 1990s, paid £100 per person for general admission. We’re sure we saw tickets in the thousands for last year’s UK race.
