This is rare. A possible clue to finding out… just who is The Stig?

Autoblog posted this photo, taken with flash which temporarily rendered The Stig’s visor tint transparent…

I’m listening to ‘The News Quiz’ on Radio 4 at the moment. Our little DAB radio in the kitchen has consistently been displaying the wrong information for both ‘The News Quiz’ and ‘Just A Minute’ regarding the participants for the entire series of both.

Right now it’s telling me Armando Ianucci’s on it. He isn’t. It’s Jack Dee.

Special.

Trekmovie.com is reporting that the upcoming Star Trek movie has been pushed back to May 2009, apparently as part of a bigger reshuffle at Paramount. No proper confirmation yet but I’m sure they’ll have something there soon. So, two days after my 35th birthday.

Thanks to ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha, I found out the annual Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture has an extra feature this year: a performance of the radio scripts of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by many of the surviving original cast!

Artists hoping to take part include Simon Jones, Geoffrey McGivern, Mark Wing Davey, Susan Sheridan, Stephen Moore and Roger Gregg (who will play Eddie), with a Very Special Guest at the voice of the book.

I’ve booked my tickets… 🙂

After a pleasant afternoon where we all watched Raiders Of The Lost Ark (Ben was transfixed) we switched over to Star Trek II on Sky Movies. Conversation happened, Ellie wanted to see my old Star Trek uniforms from when I was a proper Trekker. Oh dear!

I know where they are in the loft, so ten minutes later we had the old suitcase in the front room. Apart from a musty smell and a few missing pins, they’ve fared pretty well – I only tried the Wrath of Khan uniform top, which fit OK although I had to breathe in a lot to fasten the poppers and the belt. Mind, the remaining elements are all tops – I don’t think I’ve got the trousers any more (size 28L, which would have no bloody chance considering I’m 36R now, porky bastard).

Hmm, I wonder if Sheffield Space Centre is still open – might be able to get a replacement rank pin for the Wrath of Khan top (the original Captain pin has broken in two, no idea how) and for some reason the combadges from the TNG and DS9 uniforms are missing.

OK, the new Trek trailer came out yesterday (over at the official site). Because I was a bit busy I’ve only just got time to watch it now – I bet it’s quite breathtaking on the big screen.

It does look a bit different to the Enterprise we ‘know’ – more rounded nacelle pylons, more curved secondary hull, the nacelles have a different ‘feel’ to them… and it’d definitely being constructed in some pressurised gravitational atmosphere. Surprised the port nacelle Bussard ramscoop is spinning slightly too.

I’ll shut up about it now: it’s a ‘re-imagining’, so I’ll not be as nerdy. Promise.

The new Trek trailer comes out on the Intermawebs on Monday. Trekmovie.com has a shot from it, the new Enterprise. It’s apparently being constructed on Earth.

Now this is odd. While it makes sense for the ship to be partially constructed planetside (and in the case of 1701-D the saucer was partially constructed on Mars at Utopia Planitia) you can clearly see the nacelles behind. The problem with this being that the integrity of the ship is not designed for planetfall – they would quite simply come crashing down, and on top of that it would be really very very dangerous to make first flight with a shitload of antimatter next to a planetary body!

OK, the 1701-D tech manual isn’t canon even though it was Okuda and Sternbach who wrote it; the plaque on the bridge of Enterprise had note that it was constructed in San Fransisco; the only other partial construction of a Constitution-class vessel is in one of the Lost Years novels where the refit 1701 saucer was landed for work then re-assembled in spacedock. But for goodness sake we saw NX-02 being constructed in spacedock back in Star Trek: Enterprise.

It just doesn’t make sense to have it assembled planetside. The integrity would fail, and there’d be an awful lot of bits of starship scattered around all of a sudden. Never mind what the vessel weighs…

(I know it’s just a movie… I think I need a bit of fresh air now…)

Update: There’s a screener of the trailer over on YouTube. No breathing apparatus, not sure they’re in space, no real hints other than it’s “under construction” which could of course just be something specially done for the trailer… 😛

Torchwood is a spinoff of Dr Who, written by Russell T Davies. It was aimed as an ‘adult Dr Who’, and initially aired on BBC3 last year in its first series, starring John Barrowman.

I gave up on Torchwood after about 6 episodes, because although the premise was good (alien investigations on Earth – think ‘X Files’ set in Wales) it tried too hard to be an adult programme. The plots were frequently interrupted with needless sex, and an almost constant need for the main characters to try and shag each other. At least with Dr Who the writers were bound by the pre-watershed time and thus the hands were tied leaving a lot more time for plot. Anyway, series 2 started last night and in the absence of anything else to watch, we apathetically clicked over to BBC2 in the vague hope that this series might be watchable.

It’s not. For a secret organisation it’s remarkable that the first scene opened with some woman at a pedestrian crossing saying “bloody Torchwood”. The initial car chase (why do they have their 4×4 festooned with blue LEDs anyway?) led us to a poorly-scripted reminder of the roles of the main characters and the predictable entrance of Captain Jack. Hell, it was only 12 minutes in that we got the first gay snog followed by a fight between the principle character and the (presumed) principle baddie of this series, reminiscent of Oliver Reed and Alan Bates in ‘Women In Love’. More setups for sex later on in the series, a plethora of innuendo and schoolboy humour, and a crap plot terminating in the setup for the series story arc. At one point me and Nicky were looking at each other saying ‘ahhh, there we go!’ as predictable plot ‘twist’ followed predictable plot ‘twist’.

As a conversation last night went, it’s like Davies is trying to remind us every bloody minute that it’s Adult Dr Who, so it’s gotta have sex! He wrote Queer As Folk, so it’s gotta have sex! There’s no watershed, let’s have sex! Christ, man – do you not get any at home or something?

I won’t be watching next week.

Kevin Greening, one of the few radio DJs I enjoyed listening to, has died according to BBC News. Used to catch him on Radio 1 when I still listened to it in the mid-90s.

He was only 44. Very sad.

Slashfilm have mocked up images of the new cast of the forthcoming Star Trek prequel, directed by JJ Abrams.

To say I’m not convinced by Simon Pegg as Scotty is a complete and utter understatement.

Right, I’ve kept shut about the new Trek movie coming in 2008, but yesterday’s Comic-Con revealed:

• Heroes star Zachary Quinto will play a young Spock, and Len Nimoy has been confirmed that he’ll reprise his role as an older version of the same character (pic side-by-side). This says to me ‘flashbacks’. Or (and I really hope I’m wrong) time travel.
• Kirk hasn’t been cast. Abrams has confirmed he’d like to get Shatner in but they won’t “shoehorn” him if it doesn’t feel right.
• There’s a new teaser poster – doesn’t reveal anything but is on the front page of startrek.com with the US release date of Christmas Day 2008.

No other real confirmations – we were expecting something a bit better I think, but hey.

I’m still trying to work out if the art department at the Beeb have touched up Quinto’s eyebrows on this article 🙂

OK, I’ll admit this first – I’m not a Virgin/NTL customer: I’ve got Sky+ and I’m reasonably OK with it (in the context of televisual services which are encoded at a horrendously low bitrate that sometimes you think you might be watching a Real stream online).

However, reading the various reports that Sky have dropped Virgin’s feed for Sky 1, Sky News, etc. I can’t help thinking that this is degenerating into playground insults; not on the side of Sky but by Virgin, renaming channels and accusing Sky publicly of taking their ball home.

For example, I’d have had more respect for Virgin if they hadn’t renamed one of the channels to “Sky Snooze” – more about that on DigitalSpy.

Bloody silly, really.