Beyond the Roundels

I've not been posting or even keeping up with people so much because I've largely been wiped out for one reason or another or prioritising something else with the reduced summer PC time - sorry. This will continue for a little while yet, until it is eventually replaced by my usual slightly less flakeyness.


* The other week I managed some flash fic/scribblets for AU_gust (AU August) on tumblr. I've only managed to tidy up and post one of them since, & there are 2 others to follow once I tweak them a bit, as well as 1 more that I don't know if is worth proper posting & a drabble I still need to type up. But this used up my posting energy for now, so they can wait.

Anyway, in a shocking attempt at pandering to what might pass as popular demand among my works, I committed another Miss Marple + supernatural fic(let):

Tea on Sunday (572 words) by thisbluespirit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Miss Marple - Agatha Christie
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Jane Marple, Griselda Clement
Additional Tags: Ficlet, Alternate Universe, Witchcraft, AU-gust | August Writing Challenge, Community: allbingo, Community: 100_women, Community: 100fandoms, Miss Marple is a witch
Summary: Miss Marple's secret is out.


* In other writing, before summer got underway, I typed up the bulk of the longest continuous sequence I'm doing for the current arc at rainbowfic, and then ever since have been scraping away at finishing it and editing it, and I am nearly there, although I suspect it'll still take another week or two before I have the first section ready to post. (I knew this would happen, so I also started two shorter pieces, but one of them, which is more or less done, has just been even harder to edit because tiredness etc. and the other one is still stuck at only two paragraphs, so that plan went well. Summer brain is not up to much. That was why I had to silly no-pressure AU ficlets my way back to life and even then summer rudely and immediately interrupted all over again). But there has been writing of sorts even so.

(The long sequence was one of the very first bits of this arc that I drew up, which is very funny because I essentially set up a sort of grand house murder mystery affair except that then everything changed so much that now my main characters aren't bothering taking part in the murder bit so am not sure if it will read ok (hopefully when edited) or if I committed Worst Murder Mystery ever as a result. I think probably I will also write a note on the header when we get there saying that One Day I Will Come Back, yes, one day I will come back, until then all 2 or 3 of you should go forward in all your beliefs about how people shouldn't wave a murder mystery at you and then literally run away from it, and I will eventually demonstrate that what is going on is in fact an Apocalyptic Overarching Plot, so there. And edit, of course.)


* I am currently listening to: a 1989 BBC Radio adaptation of Wilkie Collins's No Name I was delighted to find, starring Sophie Thompson as Magdalen, Jack May (as Captain Wragge), Eleanor Bron (as Mrs Lecount) & Robin Ellis (as Captain Kirke). I'm going slowly, but have just started part 3. It's very good and they're making excellent use of the epistolary bits, which is where radio has an advantage over TV. Mrs Lecount and her sinister toad have just turned up and Eleanor Bron is obviously a v good choice.


* I have watched some things, which, aside from what I've already mentioned, and a ridiculous amount of TV detectives, includes these:

The Tribe (1998), The Halfway House (1944), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), The Admirable Crichton (1957), Creation (2009), Cause Celebre (1988) & Eye in the Sky (2015), all of which were either v good or worth talking about anyway. (Creation and Eye in the Sky have brought me very nearly to the end of my Jeremy Northam's viable CV, so I'm a little bit in mourning now; I suppose a new blorbo will come along in time. Talking of which, I found that the iPlayer had the BBC 1970s All Creatures on it, so finally got around to seeing Suzanne Neve's episode of it, which would be the one thing I would certainly have watched with her when I was a child to see if I had shadowy feelings and indeed, as soon as she appeared, before even I saw her, the set was suddenly Significant in the back of my head, so yeah. I think I can prove childhood imprinting on all my top faves and that's what the thing is about, and why even when I'm so ill they reach me in ways that other people, no matter how much I enjoy them in things, don't unfortunately.)

(Hopefully I will get to talk about some of them properly, but I am happy to attempt such talk in comments if wanted, although sense is not guaranteed, and it is true that at least one or two I watched in a fugue state that all I can say is, well, it was good and I watched it very slowly in bits and there we are, but, yes it was good /o\)


* Also random funny thing. My old housemate N lent me a DVD (!!) of The Residence (was not joking about the sheer amount of detectives watched this summer), which I enjoyed so much I recced it to my Dad. A couple of weeks later we had this conversation:

Dad: I've been watching that medical drama you recommended, but it's not that great, really, so I've stopped.

Me: ... Medical drama??

(It turned out he'd found The Resident on one of the back Freeview channels, so I emailed him a trailer of the 2025 Netflix detective show that I magically got lent on DVD as if it was 2015 or something. He found a pirate source and then lost it again, but he definitely liked what he watched so far a lot better than the Resident).

I actually managed to do this meme this year! I haven't got more than partway through it since about 2021, which I do regret, but here we are, I've been chipping away at this for a week or so:

Your main fandom of the year?:

Doctor Who, as ever. Not that I don't run off to flail at least briefly about many other deeply obscure things every other day, communicating my enthusiasms to the distant and patient sympathy of the flist by means of semaphore or something, but that only feels fannish if someone responds, and that can't be expected very often.


( Cut for length of me wittering about TV, film, audio & books under here )

More things, updating from the last report of things!

1. yuletide assignments have gone out! I have an excellent one, but obv no more can be said. Good luck to everyone else also starting the writing in secret portion of the Yuletide experience.


2. (a) Re. my resolution to Watch More Rattigan, which is progressing, or at least half progressing. I realised after making my last post about it, that such an animal as the BBC Rattigan Collection existed on DVD and was currently going too cheap not to snag, so I used lingering b'day/Christmas money.

Now it has arrived and it is mine, all mine! I have my mitts on not only ones I haven't seen but also the lovely 1976 BBC French Without Tears that YT provided the other week, and the Ian Holm and Judi Dench Browning Version that I haven't seen more than brief clips of since about 1993. \o/


(b) However, in the meantime, I looked at my Royal Exchange Theatre book to see if James Maxwell had directed or performed in a Rattigan play, and resolved that, if so, I would start with that one. It turned out that he did, directing While The Sun Shines (1943), a wartime comedy. I had a feeling this wasn't included in the BBC set, and I was right, so what I am doing currently is listening to a BBC 1969 Radio production via RadioEchoes of While the Sun Shines (also on YT). (Even the absence of the Internet Archive could not hinder my Rattiganisation.)

I think of the Rattigan productions I've experienced so far this is my least favourite, but given how stellar those have been, that is not really much criticism. I'm enjoying it, but I haven't got to the end, so I won't make any final judgments on the play itself yet, although it is more like French Without Tears than the later two. I am curious to know how it will wrap up, and it's not hard to see some of the aspects that might have interested James Maxwell as a director.

So far, though, Rattigan keeps making the hero sleep with other servicemen, for Reasons, and also the French Lt, talking about talking to people on trains, said that usually, When in Rome... so on English trains "I act as if I had died in my seat" which. Amazing. Accurate to this date. (Exceptions only in events on things going terribly wrong on the train, which was what happened to him.)


(c) YouTube noticed my interest, and threw me this little Part One of introduction to Rattigan by the National Theatre, which helpfully covered exactly the three plays I had seen. It's very short, but I really thought the director (directors?) talking about The Browning Version at the end (and calling it a perfect play ♥) absolutely got it. (And incidentally the photos they showed along with it suggested that the NT have done a version that had Anna Chancellor as Millie! With what looked like Nicholas Farrell, to me. Which made me go !!!!)


(d) And then also Talking Pictures turned out to be showing the film of Cause Celebre with Helen Mirren last night, which is another play not included on the BBC Boxset, so I recorded it. I feel like the world at large has just gone: at last! And is queuing up to shove three decades of long overdue Rattigan at me.

I will go slowly though and just watch one every so often as a treat. (WHICH PLAY NEXT THO???! XD)


(e) re. French Without Tears and my (now lapsed again) BNA subscription, I realised I'd claimed the 1987 one I had snagged a review of was directed by Sue Wilson, but actually I misremembered: she directed the next play Jeremy Northam did at Salisbury that year, and this one was by Lynn Wyfe. But The Stage did pause to vindicate my feeling that a v young JN would have been an ideal Kit Neilan, as the review singled him out for first praise: "Jeremy Northam produced all sorts of little tricks to make his portrayal of Kit Neilan touchingly appealing..." (although everyone else was good, too, they said.) Ha.


3. Talking my BNA sub, and finally escaping Rattigan's clutches for a moment, I did a quick search for my granddad's cousins, George & Bill Partleton, who were make-up artists on films, and retrieved this very random pic that should also please liadt, so I had to share it:

( Under here for pictorial evidence )

I sort of temporarily stalled again on the icon-making, but the new graphics software is nevertheless conquered to a reasonable degree, and I have enough icons to make a post. So, here is an icon post! (I did post ten of these previously under flock, in case anyone's getting confused.)

Teaser:



( This is 1873. Emotions are like port - to be corked up tight, left in the cellar for forty years and given to your godson on his 21st birthday. )

How difficult this week has been is reflected in the fact that the most exciting part of this post happened on Saturday and I took this long to come here and flail about it loudly.

1. You may or may not recall, back when I first started trying to collect and listen to all the full cast BBC Radio installments containing Martin Jarvis, that I ran into a serial called The Twelve Maidens from 1971 that may or may not have still existed and certainly hadn't been repeated any time in the last 50 years, nor did it seem likely to be, and I was taken enough by the description to hunt down the novelisation, as I talked about here, last year.

Well, guess what? Apparently BBC Radio 4xtra has request weekends, and people called Colin and Steven can just email them and ask them to rerun random SFF serials from 1971, and they just go, okay, and do it and so... I've been listening to it!! I've heard the first two eps! It is pretty much exactly as the book suggested and very enjoyable and easy going so far.

Each ep is up on BBC Sounds for 4 weeks after broadcast (so don't wait for completion; eps1-2 will be gone before eps 5-6 arrive) and you can listen to it here from anywhere in the world: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0021q9s

\o/

I only found this because I was very bored and restless while supposedly resting on Saturday(?) afternoon, and thought I'd browse through categories of drama on BBC Sounds just in case. I squealed and nearly fell right off the bed instead of being duly calmed and distracted. (sovay got my initial squeaking by me being incoherent trying to dreamwidth on my phone, which nobody deserves.)

I honestly thought it must be incomplete from what little I knew of it.

But apparently if you're pining for something from the archive, you can just email the beeb at radio4extra@bbc.co.uk and hope they take pity on you. I can't believe that includes this, but I am delighted and looking forward to the next ep after it goes up post broadcast tomorrow at 4.30pm.


2. My browsing was inspired by me finishing Hamlet (1971), which I enjoyed very much - I am discovering that, provided I already know the play, Shakespeare on radio can really work for me. They can't be ponderous, the way some of the BBC TV Shakespeares can at times, they can get amazing casts (radio's probably the quickest medium to make, so people can fit it in), plus there's an intimacy with the radio format that makes it more emotive to me. Which is to say that this play was 3 hours and I would have sworn it was two. And I wasn't even all that taken with Ronald Pickup as Hamlet! (I mean, I still enjoyed it, so obv he was good; I couldn't have with a bad Hamlet, but, you know, whichever Hamlet will be 'my' Hamlet(s), I have not yet found. It wasn't BBC TV's Derek Jacobi either, so really no shade on Ronald Pickup. Obviously, I enjoyed Martin Jarvis as Horatio, but I particularly liked Robert Lang as Claudius and Angela Pleasance as Ophelia, too.)

As I mentioned in another post a while ago, most of the same cast reprised their roles for the 1978 radio Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, starring Edward Petherbridge & Edward Hardwicke, with Freddie Jones as the Player and Martin Jarvis as Hamlet (he was Horatio in the 1971, but played Hamlet on stage in between the two performances). I was entirely new to this, save very confused osmosis, and I also enjoyed this a lot AND am now more knowledgeable and enlightened. \o/ (My own enforced radio literary education programme via Mr Jarvis; it seems to work.) sovay informed me that Edward Petherbridge originated the role of Guildenstern on stage, so it was even cooler than I thought, and it was also adapted by Tom Stoppard himself.


3. After that, and prior to random miracle repeats, I got determined to find something good to listen to, because I'd been having a run of lesser SNTs, some with as much as five whole minutes of David Collings in them somewhere, and things like that, which wasn't good enough for summer.

I found a couple of possible things in the BBC Radio collection on Internet Archive, but was very intrigued by the sound of the SFF series, Pilgrim, which I discovered there. The first episode wasn't great, but I did like Paul Hilton as William Palmer/Pilgrim himself very much, and since I assumed it couldn't have run for 9 series if it didn't improve, I tried the second episode & that was much better, and promises to be the right sort of summer listening I was after.

Pilgrim or William Palmer is a Canterbury pilgrim cursed to eternal life by the king of the Greyfolk for insulting him on the road in 1185, and now he wanders around doing errands for the king, and/or helping ordinary people caught up in Greyfolk business or trying to find a way to end his own curse. As well as the IA link, there are a couple of (s9) episodes on BBC Sounds at the moment here.

1. Big Finish have finally resolved the rights problem with the their Sapphire & Steel audios and are re-releasing them in download format. They're boxsets only, it looks like, which is a nuisance if you were wanting to fill some gaps or pick up a specific one, but they are available again!

They remain some of BF's best audios, whatever else they are, so that's really cool.

One other good thing is that they have helpful content warnings, which is thoughtful, especially as several of them are very dark indeed. (In a perfectly S&S sort of way, but definitely worthy of warnings for people who'd want them.)


2. I've already forgotten what my other things to say were just in the process of typing that up.

Probably only gifs. Have some more wee Jeremy Northam gifs, why not:

( Cut for gifs )

Anyway, these may not look like much, but you should see my source material.

(Somebody reblogged one of these last night! I cunningly put Julian Glover in it, and that did the trick. A Julian Glover person reblogged it and a Jeremy Northam person then saw it. tumblr is very hard work if you're creating posts for obscure things people aren't thinking of looking for but might like if they stumbled over; you don't have comms for that like we did on LJ.)

(I'm overtired, I'm babbling as per.)

Following on from how much I got hung up on a 1984 radio production of Dangerous Corner, I did take some steps to continue by J B Priestley experience by listening to a 1994 production of Time and the Conways, another of his 'Time Plays'. I spotted this one on the wiki and managed to find it at Radio Echoes. It had Stella Gonet, Amanda Redman & Toby Stephens in it, and it was adapted and directed by Sue Wilson, who did at least two of the Christmas at the Wells installments I thought were so good.

(There's also a 1984 version here starring Zena Walker; and a 2014 version here with Harriet Walter. Apparently the BBC are only permitted to perform it in years ending with a -4?? ;-p)

Anyway, generally, I'm not regretting my decision to continue, but right at the end of the second third (Act?) of it, two characters had a conversation that included this:

"...it’s hideous and unbearable. Remember what we once were and what we thought we’d be... Every step we’ve taken, every tick of the clock — making everything worse. If this is all life is, what's the use? Better to die... before you find it out, before Time gets to work on you. I’ve felt it before, but never as I’ve done to-night. There’s a great devil in the universe, and we call it Time.... We've seen it to-night. Time beating us."

and: "No, they're real and existing, just as we two, here now, are real and existing. We're seeing another bit of the view – a bad bit, if you like – but the whole landscape's still there."

And I was just... omg, J B Priestley effectively laid out part of the premise of Sapphire and Steel right there in 1937.


I haven't stopped listening to Crown House; I was just interspersing the odd SNT in between. I am about to get back to it, as we left it at a point where Richard Pasco might even possibly be persuaded to leave the roses alone and have some plot, but I don't count on it. XD


(I did distract myself a bit because Welcome to Our Village Please Invade Carefully s2 is now on BBC Sounds again, after them repeating s1 in the autumn. So a head's up, anyone listening to it that way and left hanging for s2. It's here! And obv. could not resist listening to "Tempting Fete" and now the next episode is up... and a person can't help but press that play button every now and then. (It's the pub quiz one now.) It is such a cheering thing. <3<3<3)

Btw, BBC Sounds (which is usually NOT geo-locked) also has some things up for the Doctor Who anniversary.

They have a collection of archive material of interviews and documentaries varying from about 1m to 1hr, mostly on the shorter side, Through Time, which amongst other things, includes William Hartnell's Desert Island Discs episodes, which I definitely want to try and listen to.

Plus, they've also been broadcasting some of the Big Finish Ten and Donna stories to lead into the special here.

Both say they should be up for a year. Enjoy!

So, back in autumn, I found the collection of BBC Radio's Saturday Night Theatre someone had put on the Internet Archive (also originally here with often slightly better audio at OTTR), ranging in date from the 1950s to the 1990s and with the help of the BBC Genome to identify things, downloaded all the Martin Jarvis ones, all the David Collings ones and a couple of bonus plays while I was at it. Ever since I've been slowly listening to them, although as I did them chronologically, and Mr Collings didn't get going on radio till the 80s, it's been mostly Mr Jarvis.

I've been wanting to talk about these because a lot of them were really easy and enjoyable intros to interesting or well known mid-century novelists and playwrights that I had never read/seen and probably never would have any other way, and that was just really nice. I ended up writing these and being all "I enjoyed this!" Which is frustrating, because that doesn't generate conversation, but I do want to talk audio plays and I did enjoy most of them a lot.

Martin Jarvis was mainly a lot of young officers who were either nice or messed up in some way. I feel like they were all called Peter or Paul or Michael, but I'm not sure that's true.


1. Journey's End (1970) - adaptation of Sheriff's play, with Martin Jarvis as Stanhope. I was very excited for this one, as I wanted to familiarise myself with the play because James Maxwell played Osborne (apprently very well) on stage in the early 70s (with Peter Egan as Stanhope), and this made for a very accessible way for me to finally do it. It's set in WWI and it's very good. It's had a more recent film adaptation, so people probably know of it anyway. (Richard Hurndall was also in it, because obv Richard Hurndall is just obligatory at this point. I was not at all surprised to hear him. I'm only surprised he didn't turn up again.)


2. A Question of Fact (1970) - an original radio play, set in the 1950s, where Martin Jarvis a teacher at a boys' public school, who discovers shortly before his marriage that he's adopted and is the son of a murderer and starts worrying about bad blood and whether he should have married his wife (whose parents don't approve of him anyway) and if he should still be teaching etc etc. The sound on this one wasn't that great (although ok!) and I was worried about where it was going, but once his birth mother turned up, it all went to places I didn't expect and had a rather good ending, and I enjoyed it. I'd have enjoyed it more if I'd known that was where it was going and not had to worry what the 1970s-written, 1950s-set thing was going to give me.


3. The Wind Cannot Read (1971) - adaptation of Richard Mason's novel. This one was really interesting! I hadn't heard of the author before and had to go and look him up, because the story was actually pretty unusual. It turns out the book is still in print and there was also a film version and that he wrote a few other novels - I might see if I can read some one day.

It was set in WWII in the far east. Martin Jarvis is an injured soldier sent to learn Japanese for intelligence work, who falls in love with the teacher, a Japanese woman who is helping the Allies, and who suffers a lot of prejudice and suspicion directed at her. It's a full on weepy, so you can guess what happens, but it immediately felt unusual for the era and sympathetic enough to catch my interest, as I said.


Not (sadly) 4. The Twelve Maidens (1971, 6 pt occult drama serial) - this one was not a SNT but it caught my attention going through the MJ Genome results, because I do like a bit of dodgy 1970s village of evil type stories. It may exist (or at least partially; an episode or something was returned to the BBC Archives relatively recently), but whatever the case, it is not available to me on the internet. It was also adapted shortly after in teh 1970s for German radio (ironically this DOES still exist and IS on the internet archive for download, so if you speak German, it's yours), but the writer turned it into a novel as well, and I got hold of it! It did get a bit preachy (the author was a founder member of the UK Wiccan religion and keen to explain it all in his novel), but most of it was so dialogue heavy, those parts had to be straight out of the radio play and it gave a really good idea of the plot and characters and how the audio aspect would have been handled - its origins were so clear that someone else who reviewed online basically said "this would make a great radio play." It also immediately struck me as possibly being one of the sources that fed into Chris Boucher's Image of the Fendahl - the general tone, and opening with the scientists, and in particular Martin Jarvis's character Peter being a similar combination of sceptic-despite-overwhelming evidence-BUT-still-helpful to the end as Colby that I've not seen anywhere else (although of course, maybe the ur-Peter-Colby figure comes from some more famous example of the genre, because, being a horror-wimp, I haven't even managed Quatermass yet so what do I know?)

I loved that Peter was basically bewitched twice, witnessed several performances of magic and probably killed the baddies by magic and remained entirely sceptical. Even the security guy was into white magic before the end, but not Peter. EVeryone else was just: Peter is an idiot, but he's our idiot, and you can't keep casting spells on him.

This is the ending, so you can see how delighted I would be to listen to this one if I could. I would probably write fic, too:

( Cut for my pics of the last 3 pages for the delectation of my readlist )

Plus, I want to know if all the nudity is in the actual serial or was just part of the extra sexy bits added to the book. (I'm just amused at radio nudity. The easiest kind of nudity for actors to play! No need for any fuss or worry or catching chills in a draughty studio! lol)


4. Mutiny on the Bounty (1973) - adaptation of the famous novel, fictional version of historical events, I don't need to tell the story. Martin Jarvis was Fletcher Christian. He did some mutinying and disappeared off with his ship. I enjoyed it. The sound was a bit questionable.


5. & 6. The Prisoner of Zenda & Rupert of Hentzau (1973) - adaptations of the novels with Julian Glover as Rudolf (both), Hannah Gordon as Flavia, Nigel Stock as Colonel Sapt and Martin Jarvis as Rupert of Hentzau. This was as much fun as I'd hoped. I did once read or try to read Zenda and I was not keen on it at the time. (I was a teenager, I was very unimpressed with the lack of stuff for the women to do and I couldn't be bothered. I think I ended up skimming through it and rolling my eyes.) This was a great way to actually find out the story without having to attempt any more reading of the series (other than watching The Androids of Tara, of course! XD) Obviously, if your no. 1 priority is sword fights, you can only listen to these, which I suppose must be a drawback (although you can amuse yourself imagining probably true images of Julian Glover and Martin Jarvis doing their own sound effects with cutlery or similar.) Anyway, it was good and I enjoyed it much more than trying to read the book back in the day. Rupert is a terrible villain, though; he keeps just running off and ruining his and other people's evil plots because he gets fed up and shoots the wrong people.


7. Strode Venturer (1974) - adaptation of a Hammond Innes novel. This one I didn't enjoy so much, but tbf, that was probably because the audio quality was poor AND it featured a lot of storms, helicopters and modern ships, so I spent most of it trying to work out what was going on. But John Shrapnel was looking for Martin Jarvis, which was a lot of effort because Martin Jarvis kept going off to different hard to find islands in the far east, so Martin Jarvis was lucky John Shrapnel was patient enough to do it. Eventually John Shrapnel had enough of looking for Martin Jarvis and went back and married his sister instead, who was much easier to find and less inclined to be trouble and wasn't called Peter. or Paul. Or Michael.


8 The Road to Gretna Green (1975) - historical drama based on a true story, in which Martin Jarvis was a bounder who abducted teenage Rosalind Ayres (his rl wife) out of school and tried to take her to Gretna to marry her and that is a sentence that does weird things to my head thinking about it and listening to it happen. But it was good! It's just actors have peculiar lives sometimes. (It's not as bad as Karen Archer and David Collings, but we won't go back to the whole sex on the radio thing until next time David Collings turns up in one of these in the 1980s. /o\)


That is not even all of the 1970s Martin Jarvis Saturday Night Theatre installments I have listened to! But it is enough for one post.

Anyway, in short, if they interest you, they are all good adaptations/plays and the only hang up is that a couple of them do (understandably, as older off-air recordings) have poor audio.

For eve11 in the Fic Commentary Meme, this segment of Prospero's Daughter, a fic for Big Finish's Unbound series of AU Doctors (published to celebrate DW's 40th anniversary in 2003). This one was for Full Fathom Five, with the AU in that audio being essentially, what if the Doctor went dark? (With the Doctor in question being played by David Collings, so clearly it was a strange and explicable thing that I found myself listening to it, obv.).

I also have a bit of an odd relationship with the fic, because it was the first thing I wrote properly after relapsing with the ME in Jan 2011, and it left me with no mental concentration for a month afterwards, which was pretty terrifying. I thought I'd never write again, and even if it was probably only a month or two later I was writing a tiny tiny Sapphire & Steel ficlet, it felt like a lot longer, and it still took me another year before I could manage that many words again, and I panicked about whether or not it was any good afterwards. It became a Fic of Doom.*

( The bit with the jelly babies; it's always the bit with the jelly babies )

In your own space, talk about a creator. Show us why you think they are amazing. It can be a detailed, thoughtful analysis, or a squeeful, joyful post. Or maybe a combination of the two. Make a recs list, link to their archives or master lists or websites, maybe create a Fanlore page for them. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

The challenge says if you feel uncomfortable about a thing not to do it, and I think I feel uncomfortable about this one. It's almost impossible to narrow it down to one, and for another, isn't fandom about how we all watch and (if we're in the fandom, one trusts) love the same thing, and then interpret it and celebrate it in our own unique ways? In purely practical terms, there are a lot of people just on my flist that I friended in the first place because I was reading nearly everything they wrote... So: narrowing it down would be a nightmare even before I throw in other types of fanworks. Also, having said that, I kind of accidentally did this already for Day 2, didn't I? :lol:

Moving on, then, to the next day!

In your own space, share a favorite piece of original canon (a TV episode, a song, a favourite interview, a book) and explain why you love it so much. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Even more impossible! I'm a multi-fannish sort with my primary fandom being Doctor Who - all 50 years of it. However, I thought for a bit and realised there was a post about a piece of canon I wanted to make anyway, so here it is:

I'm relistening to the BBC Radio LoTR at the moment and busy falling in love with it all over again. (I was worried I wouldn't enjoy it so much the second time, but it's great and my fears were groundless.) Anyway, if you weren't around when I was going on about it in 2011, there is in fact another full dramatisation of The Lord of the Rings, and it's also wonderful in its own way. (It was made in 1981 and has Ian Holm as Frodo, Bill Nighy as Sam, Sir Michael Hordern as Gandalf, Robert Stephens as Aragorn, and John Le Mesurier as Bilbo.)

The thing I want to say this time is how much I love the music. It was composed by Stephen Oliver and, for a BBC production like this, it's an amazing amount of music, and lovely in itself. It's not the beautiful, big cinematic score of the films, of course, but it has a low-key, pleasingly right feel for Middle Earth - and also it's used very inventively to cover the limitations of the format. All the big battle set-pieces are done using the music, and each done differently. And then there's all the songs in the narrative, sung by the actors in context, often unaccompanied...

Here are some of my favourite tracks (you can follow the links for more, if you wish):

The Lord of the Rings - Main Theme
Seek For the Sword That Was Broken (the theme used for Aragorn)
Shadowfax

And, best of all the in-character moments for me, Bill Nighy as Sam, singing in sheer desperation in Mordor: In Western Lands Beneath the Sun.

Anyway, I like it very much.

Not really relevant, but: Searching for the links in this post explained why Michael Hordern was so immediately my Gandalf as soon as I heard him - he was apparently also Badger in The Wind in the Willows. There are some things not even Ian McKellen can compete with, and being Badger in that particular Willows is one of them... *amused*