Beyond the Roundels

Here be snippets and suchlike from a whole bevvy of fics I would most certainly never write, yes.

( For orgies, romance, dead elements and a man-eating ghost )

Let's finish this meme, since I've said all I need to in the vid...

26. Favourite quotes

I included a bunch in my big Public Eye post, so I'll just find some different ones I also like, except for this, which is my favourite:

Helen: "A man seems to think all he has to say to a woman is 'I need you' - she'll pack a nightie and a toothbrush and run!"


( And the final questions... )


(Now, what show next for this meme? ;-p)

19. Something that made you think

Public Eye nearly always makes me think, and that's one of the main reasons why I like it. For something that features very low-key, mundane stories most weeks, it causes me to spend a lot of time thinking about it and rewatching things and working out what it's about. It varies (episodic old TV!) but most of the time, it expects me to make my own mind up, it doesn't tell me what I should be thinking. Which takes a little while to get used to, but it's wonderful once you have.


20. Something that made you laugh

Oh, meme, you want me to sit here and describe jokes while everyone else looks on unmoved? Okay, once I rewatched the Christmas episode from S6, that made me laugh quite a bit. (My favourite part is when Frank shouts at two carol singers, and then turns round, looks at them, and plaintively begs for a chip.) Also, the whole of the scene in S5's "Transatlantic Cousins" between Frank and Sir Roger L'Ettrell is just priceless. You'll have to take my word for it, but, really, you should have been there...


21. Best series opener
22. Best season finale

If you've been paying attention so far, you'll realise "Best anything" usually winds up at S4, so... "Welcome to Brighton?" and "A Fixed Address" (S4 opener and finale). "Welcome to Brighton?" is so bleak I find it hard to watch, but it's still exceptional TV.

For the other series: S1-3 don't have any openers/finales surviving. "Don't Forget You're Mine" feels like an opener (and a great one, too), but it isn't. If "Cross That Palm When We Come To It" existed, it might win best finale but it doesn't. (It's quite intriguing that the only time in 10 years that Public Eye knew it was coming back, they set up a really impressive story arc. I can't help but wonder what they'd have done if they'd ever had that knowledge again?) "A Mug Named Frank" (S5 opener) probably has the best opening scene, in terms of effectively introducing the character - Frank, in a supermarket, stops to help a shoplifter. (♥) S7's opener "Nobody Wants to Know" is pretty strong, too. But S4, people, S4.


23. Crackiest moment

There aren't a lot of cracky moments in Public Eye (at least not that I can think of off-hand), but there is one that's down to the fact that the first few scripts were written before the lead was cast, and so Roger Marshall still had in mind that Frank would be a man of iron. (Fate and the S1 producer happily had other ideas.)

So, in the first surviving episode, Frank's getting beaten up by two hired heavies... and the next scene, they're both lying unconscious. How did that happen? The mind boggles. Maybe he tried his divide and conquer tactics and had them fight each other, or an anvil fell out of the sky? Or they both inexplicably fainted, who knows? (I'd add in the whole storyline in which he's hired as bodyguard to a millionaire, except that Frank clearly found the whole idea as amusing as I did.)

Oh, and this:
( Unintentionally amusing moment )

( The Questions )

I felt in need of a writing meme tonight &, as ever, resurrected this one, which often seems to work for me:

1: Pick five fandoms. List them in alphabetical order.

1. Doctor Who
2. Dungeons & Dragons
3. Press Gang
4. Public Eye
5. Spooks

2: Visit this site to find your first RANDOM POEM OF POWER. Write down the 5th line (yes, even if it's an E.E. Cummings poem and you wind up with an apostrophe). Repeat five times and - you guessed it - list 'em in alphabetical order! (No cheating, mind! This is a challenge and it's always been about creativity.)

3: I think you can see where this is going. Write a very quick 50-word half-drabble for each fandom (try to do it all in one sitting - make your brain explode!), using the line from the poem as a prompt. You don't have to include it in the half-drabble - it's just inspiration.

4: Bravo! Have a cookie.

( And the resulting demi-drabbles... )

I said I might finish the other fic today. It is Public Eye, but it's also a series of crossover vignettes & (I hope) no real knowledge of PE is needed.

I said, when I first watched S4, that there ought to be a companion series where Mrs Mortimer sorted out people's problems at her B&B and though, really, she is too sensible for that to work in the same way, it's still enough for a fic.

Winter Where You Are (4595 words) by lost_spook
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Public Eye (TV), Doctor Who (2005), Doctor Who (1963), Sapphire and Steel, Spooks | MI-5
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Relationships: Ben Jackson/Polly Wright
Characters: Helen Mortimer, Sapphire (Sapphire and Steel), Steel (Sapphire and Steel), Connie James, Ben Jackson (Doctor Who), Clara Oswin Oswald, Frank Marker
Additional Tags: Crossover, 5 Times, 1960s, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Women Being Awesome
Summary: A seaside boarding house out of season can be a strange place at times - you never know who'll wind up staying for the night...


(Or, as ever, it seemed like a good idea at the time.)

I was, btw, definitely not signing up for unconventionalcourtship myself this time, oh no. I'd only try and write inappropriate Public Eye fanfic for it, if I could even manage anything.

I looked through the summaries (and mostly boggled, and thought WHY? and questioned characters' life choices) and then I wrote most of this in rough by early this afternoon:

78) Between Strangers – Linda Conrad
Rescuing a stranded mother and baby from a raging blizzard hasn’t been part of Frank Marker’s plans. Yet he couldn’t abandon Helen Mortimer. And ended up getting snowed in with her, tasting those fiery kisses. She was all wrong for him, so why did she feel so right in his arms?

Needless to say, there will not be any fiery kisses in my Public Eye fic, even if it is set 20 years pre-canon in the hard winter of 1947 when Our Heroes were 18 and 24 respectively (or thereabouts) and - if you follow Timeline #1 - Helen was, in canon, a single mother with a baby. (Denis Mortimer did marry her, but only four years later when it was convenient for him, of course.) (My working draft summary is something like this: Frank Marker’s trying to sell encyclopedias in the middle of the worst winter of the century, which probably wasn’t the best idea to start with. And now he’s wound up trying to rescue a single mother and her baby who’ve been abandoned at a bus stop, and all he’s got to hand is a car that won’t go, and a dozen copies of the A-Z of Everything... )

Please send help. Things the world does not need: Public Eye fanfiction. I mean, really. Even aside from nobody watching it but me, it works by showing, not telling, and cleverness, and Alfred Burke's face. I have none of those things; I have a Mills & Boon summary and a due date of May 2nd... /o\

Anyway. It's a fun ficathon - you get the prompt on a plate, full freedom to be as unromantic and trope subverting as you like or the reverse, for those who aren't me and will write fiery kisses for characters they ship. (Mind, I think this one might qualify as more romantic than last time when Silver and Steel got stuck in a romance novel, or, to put it more honestly, I cheated outrageously by use of the nature of S&S.)

For hc_bingo square "prostitution". Meta on the character of Frank Marker from Public Eye and how much he can and can't be said to prostitute himself (metaphorically at least).

(~1200 words. Non spoilery and hopefully accessible. No warnings needed that I can think of.)

( Public Service? Public Eye Meta )

Still tired, but I have another post-I-made-earlier. (I really should stop making posts and hiding them, but never mind.) Also, I am posting my fandom_stocking fics about places finally. If I post any to AO3, then anyone suddenly getting a "gift", it'll probably just be that. Sorry.


In your own space, share a book/song/movie/tv show/fanwork/etc that changed your life. Something that impacted on your consciousness in a way that left its mark on your soul.

I saw other people saying that they had no such show/book etc. Perhaps I'm too impressionable, then, but I have several. (Although, maybe it's partly my tendency to rewatch things, and most of them were from when I was a teenager - which is probably true for most of us - and I was ill and stuck home a lot. And to a certain extent, some from when I've been ill again. I suppose if you've got hours and hours to lie there and think about odd bits of the few books and TV episodes you can manage to read or watch, (and re-watch) and so on, it's bound to creep into your thinking in ways things don't when you're running about in your normal life.)

Anyway, some I can't (or won't) explain here, but the main one is Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones, which is a very good book, but also very complicated, dark and twisted up, in a way that I didn't really get as a teenager but I do now. However, I read it and read it and I still so often do my thinking through it, and snatches of it still run through my head. It's hard to explain what I mean exactly, but part of it is the idea of how heroism might work in the real world (Now Here) as opposed to the dramatic way it does in stories, fairy tales and so on (Nowhere) - "Being a hero means learning to ignore how embarrassed you feel." And giving a means of expressing the way real life and imagination intersect. (The "Now Here/Nowhere" thing, just one letter, one turn away, the same and opposites). It made me think, and still does. And to try to look properly at things, instead of see what you expect to see.

And other things, in lesser ways, mostly, but yes. I was explaining something in Public Eye to myself the other day by means of Fire & Hemlock.

But Diana Wynne Jones, S25 and S26 of Doctor Who (especially The Happiness Patrol - yes, really!), Press Gang, CS Lewis's NF - these are the things that got into my head and shaped me and challenged me and gave me new ways of thinking. I didn't get out much as a teenager; I was ill for four years, so I needed something and those really weren't bad things all told. The weirdness of my brain, let me show it to you. But I like it this way.

And, yes, again now, things for helping my find my way through being ill, for being sort of channels of thought when I was in an incoherent fog, or for distracting me - Joan Aiken's Midnight Is A Place (by Joan Aiken), Enemy at the Door and Public Eye (all things that in some way involved working through bad times, setting a pattern for me to follow) and Sapphire and Steel, which certainly distracted me beautifully for about a whole two years.

After all, if there weren't some stories, in whatever format they may come in, that impacted us and touched our core, or soul, or whatever you prefer to call it, there wouldn't be all that much point in them, in the end. We use them to make sense of the world, supposedly. And so I just happen to make sense of the world through Fire & Hemlock, which I suppose is a little weird, but then again, I think the world's more than a little weird, too, so I have no regrets.

Preview:



Posted here at my LiveJournal.

(Sorry, but for Photobucket-related reasons, image-heavy posts only go one side or the other these days.)

I've finally finished watching Public Eye S6, so hopefully I can start to talk to people about things that aren't it soon. I did get rather tired because of rl stuff. (For some reason, I always suffer from stress when I have to visit the doctor, which is annoying, because then I can't even tell her things properly. It's mainly to do with the fact that i can't prove I'm ill in any way, so if she decided to stop believing me, I'd be stuffed, I think. So I was glad to have something to watch when I came back.)

Anyway, the wretched thing also had me waking up repeatedly for two nights in the past week trying to understand what was going on in the episode, and being terrified of one of them. I should have known last night to wait before watching the final episode, it being by Roger Marshall, but I did, and then, aargh, it slapped me in the face with stuff I did not want right at the last minute. I get impressed by it, I get amused, baffled, informed (I had no idea there were ever milk vending machines in the 1970s) and then I get madly angry and shocked with it for being... made in the 1960s/70s and letting itself down. I don't know how it does that to me. Or how-why-what is TV that doesn't have Alfred Burke in?

Also... the episode "The Man Who Said Sorry" - I feel as if I've seen the ending of it before, but I can't think how. I can imagine it being the sort of thing that would have turned up one way or another on those endless Channel 4 nostalgia/Top 100 things they used to do, but I don't understand why I would have had the same feeling of mystification about the suitcase. Maybe it was only because that was the one I dreamt about all night until my brain had worked out the suitcase in the morning. But still... Strange. Maybe something else used a similar device accidentally or in direct homage? (It is a very clever, weird and twisted up episode of TV - an isolated two-hander between Paul Rogers and Alfred Burke - who are both excellent in it - that takes place almost entirely in Marker's office. And kudos to the director, Jonathan Alwyn, because there's such a palpable sense of threat throughout, yet it's never exactly justified by what's happening.)

So, hopefully now, I can catch up a bit and do other things again. (I can't have the next series till after Christmas, and that's the end of it. I suspect now they burninated the 60s episodes for my protection, which is a bit mean on everyone else, but probably fair enough. Maybe.)

I shall now try and turn my attention fully to Yuletide fic and the talking meme and being capable of talking about things that aren't obscure British TV. Well, ish. I always talk about some obscure British TV...

ETA: Also I didn't get hit by a tidal wave, though that was probably self-evident from the rest of the post. I hope nobody else did, either. (The sea came in over the defences, which is very unusual here, especially since they've just been building them up, but no worse.)

Okay, so for everyone who said I should definitely finish off #1 when I did the WIP meme the other day, here it is:

Police Boxes Don’t Just Vanish, Do They? (4748 words) by lost_spook
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Doctor Who (1963), Public Eye (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Ian Chesterton, Barbara Wright, Third Doctor, Jo Grant, Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, Frank Marker
Additional Tags: Crossover, POV Outsider, POV First Person, Private Investigators
Summary: For one private detective, missing persons cases and inexplicable vanishing police boxes seem to go together

Also here on Teaspoon.

I hope people aren't too be put off by the obscure crossover - I was making use of Public Eye to do an Outsider POV for Doctor Who. (I kind of hope no one who actually knows Public Eye reads it, really. Bit of a nerve to go round attempting writing Frank Marker POV on this short acquaintance, but I thought it'd work rather nicely from the Doctor Who angle. They intersect quite naturally, but come from two very different viewpoints. /o\)

(I wanted to add in a section where someone from Polly's family employs Marker to buy off this random sailor she's moved in with, but realised he'd be in Birmingham by that point, so it was a bit hard to come up with any realistic reason why that would happen. Life is so hard at times... Still, it wouldn't have actually involved a police box, so maybe it's all for the best.)