Joe Cornish @ BAFTA

Joe Cornish, director of the fun British sci fi actioner ATTACK THE BLOCK is giving a talk at a screening for BAFTA. They say:

"Writer/Director Joe Cornish's Attack the Block is one of the year's biggest
home-grown hits, a brilliantly inventive south-London set sci-fi horror
where 'inner city meets outer space', as the tagline memorably puts it.
We're delighted to welcome the filmmaker ahead of tonight's screening to
discuss some of the movies which influenced him, from the work of directors
John Carpenter and Walter Hill, to E.T. and action-packed 80s extravaganzas
such as the first part of tonight's double bill, Die Hard."

So if you've not caught up with the movie yet or you want to listen to the man about what it takes to make a sci fi blockbuster then head over to the BAFTA what's on board and look up July 30th.

TORCHWOOD remains Welsh

Russell T Davies has promised on the BBC news website that Cardiff remains the spiritual home of TORCHWOOD despite the fact that it is now part-financed by the Starz Channel from the USA and he himself is living in LA.

Considering that Children Of Earth was one of the best things on TV that year and made up for two decidedly lacklustre seasons by blowing us away, we're willing to take anything that RTD has to say on the matter as gospel truth.

We're willing to bet, however, that the so-called gay agenda will be referenced/continued and someone will be a bad/abusive or absent father.

Erica meets ADAM'S FAMILY

The lastest episode of the time travel as life therapy show from Canada showed on E4 on Sunday.

Life is turning around once again for Erica. Her mother's cancer has been successfully treated and her business is on the way back, but Adam has decided to stay with the woman that a vision of a different life told him would be his wife. When he finds it hard to deal with the prospect of a full relationship, Dr Tom sends him back to his early life.
Our parents screw us up, but we are not our parents. That's the message and it's obvious from the very moment that Adam is transported back into a row between his mother and father. It's cereal box psychology that is only saved by the powerful performance from Adam Fergus when his character breaks down under Dr Tom's pressure.
Everything else has the spectre of soap opera hanging over it. A glossy, well-produced soap opera to be sure, but a soap opera all the same. This is disappointing after last week's episode and the dilemma of a man who has seen an alternate reality and is now caught in the trap of whether he should make it happen is barely addressed.

GAME OF THRONES ends, but will be back

Following the death of Lord Stark, everyone pauses to consider the new landscape. The war is running against the Lannisters, the young King is refusing to be commanded by his elders and in another land witchcraft has dramatic results.
It was the big finale, except that wasn't.There was no climax here, no conclusion, no bringing together of the plot strands into some sort of satisfactory whole. Instead, the plot continued to meander on, there were more meaningless conversations and patience was stretched to snapping point. The end result of ten hours of the most vaunted fantasy series ever was an astounding 'is that it?'.
The show tried to pull things out of the fire (literally) with the birth of Daenerys' dragons, but by that point it hardly mattered. Faith must be hugely high in the continuation of the show since no effort was made to wrap up even one single storyline or present a cliffhanger. The story didn't come to an end, it just sort of ... stopped.

The Future's Not Bright, The Future's British

Before the reboot of Battlestar Galactica brought in the new era of gritty, realistic science fiction, US television was the home of the bright and shiny future. From STAR TREK through to STARGATE SG-1, the future was shiny and bright.

Not so in the UK. The British view of the future has been unremittingly bleak.

 The most recent example of this was the BBC space opera OUTCASTS, set on a far flung colony planet where life is near to impossible and the colonists don't know if Earth has been destroyed in some sort of cataclysm of mankind's own making. Gritty drama it might be, but bleak and depressing it most certainly was as well and it wasn't just part of the current trend for dark material reflecting the current climate.

Way back in 1978, the BBC created its own space saga to rival STAR TREK in the shape of BLAKE'S SEVEN, but instead of a huge ship full of integrated crewmembers from a peace-loving Federation spreading joy, love and the American way throughout the galaxy we got a bunch of thieves, killers and murderers on the run from a crushingly oppressive totalitarian regime. It's true that this show came from the mind of Terry Nation who created that other bleak British future SURVIVORS in which virtually the entire world's population was wiped out by a manmade plague in the scariest opening montage sequence ever. It was remade recently.

Even the otherwise bright and cheery dinosaur nonsense that is PRIMEVAL posits a future in which mankind's few survivors are at the mercy of carnivorous predators and giant insects in the ruins of a destroyed civilisation. And the list doesn't stop there. THE LAST TRAIN had a world devastated by a natural catastrophe and the survivors reduced to a medieval standard of life and THE CHANGES had a future where mankind had developed a terror of mechanical things and had destroyed them all.

About the most positive of the futures were from Gerry Anderson's puppet shows, but even though mankind has created the most incredible machines and structures, they are needed to avert a string of huge disasters in THUNDERBIRDS and the Earth is fighting a destructive war of attrition with martians in CAPTAIN SCARLET. Even the human shows didn't escape since SPACE 1999 had the moon blasted out of orbit and UFO had another alien race at war with the Earth.

The more realistic MOONBASE 3 had us on the moon, but struggling to finance the mission and the most recent QUATERMASS had the youth of world turning on their elders to destroy the fabric of society before being eaten by a space entity.

One thing seems clear, if you want a bright and better future then US TV science fiction is the place to be.

Collectormania at Milton Keynes

It's a bank holiday weekend and that means that it's going to be raining, but don't be downhearted because the great and the good of the science fiction world will be meeting in glamorous Milton Keynes for this year's Collectormania.

This isn't a convention, more a glorified trade show, but there are tons of stalls to buy all that hard to get memorabilia at , loads of people wandering around dressed as your favourite science fiction icons and a whole bunch of people who were once in sci fi shows signing autographs at £20 a pop.

I know that sounds cynical, so let me put you right straight away, I love Collectormania and not just because it's free. Yes, we used to frequent the Memorabilia show at the NEC in Birmingham, but that got a bit too expensive for our humble pockets (entrance plus parking?). Collectormania may be smaller, but it's free and there's so much parking around the stadium that you don't have to worry about finding a space or paying for the privilege.

Invitees this year include Buffy's watcher Anthony Head, the Enterprise's doctor Gates McFadden, two Doctors in Colin Baker and Peter Davison. River Song (Alex Kingston) will be there, the all-powerful Q (John DeLancie), the ever scary Freddie (Robert Englund) and many, many more.

We'll be there anyway.

Friday 13th is GHOSTBUSTERS night

Who you gonna call?

Yes, tomorrow night we're all warping back to 80s at the invitation of Sony Pictures to enjoy a mass GHOSTBUSTERS viewing.

The twitter address is @GhostbustersDVD and, taking the time difference into account (and probably getting it wrong in the process) the time is 11pm UK.

Be warned though, GHOSTBUSTERS is not as good as you remember it being, but there are still enough laughs and certainly who can resist Sigourney Weaver in full on vamp mode and a giant killer Stay Puft marshamallow man?

All together now... When there's something weird in the neighbourhood...