Beyond the Roundels

I started this on 27th Feb 2021 for 100fandomicons and have finally completed it, after taking longer than anybody else ever has, which I suppose is one claim to fame. (You can see the fandoms if you hover over the icons.)

( 100fandoms table under here )

1. yuletide is upon us! I'm still not entirely sure whether it'll be a good idea to sign up or not, but it looks likelier. I nominated Craddock & Co, Indigo Saga, The Winslow Boy and Wish Me Luck. I'm going back and forth on whether or not I'm actually going to request TWB (there's another request for it already anyway, so it will be in Yuletide regardless), but I will with the rest. I might also possibly go for WtOVPIC and/or Sister Boniface, but I'm undecided as yet.

I was also excited/intrigued/so stunned you could have knocked me down with a feather to see Heyer's No Wind of Blame, Louise Cooper's The Time Master series, but with characters for the second trilogy, with Karuth, which is my favourite bit, The Year of the Unicorn, Love's Labours Lost (2000), and I feel so vindicated that someone nommed The Net (1995) requesting Jack/Angela, because the foe!yay clearly needed to exist.

Also, someone who was absolutely not me nommed The Shadow of the Tower! I had a very nice fic for it for last year, and I'm giving it a rest (I will be back), and I did a double take for a minute and had to check with myself that I hadn't done it without noticing. idk if they will actually request, though. Oh, and plenty of other nice things as usual!

Who else is thinking of signing up, and what have you got your eye on?


2. Talking of Jeremy Northam, I got another BNA sub for a month, and I've snagged some of the articles I mentioned ages ago that I'd spotted in a search on his name, so I am currently well informed on his theatrical engagements pre-1989, which is cool. He was in some school/amateur dramatics before that, and it even coughed up pictorial evidence that he existed prior to the late 1980s, which I wasn't expecting. I am in the process of posting the articles to tumblr - these are what I've done so far:

1979/1980 School/AmDram productions in Bristol here, with two pictures, although the earliest one is so dark that you'll just have to take their word for it that the white blob to the left in the darkness is probably Jeremy Northam's face, but the second one has a nice article about him learning to roller skate in order to be in a Ben Jonson play, as one does.

No pics, but review of him as Benedick in Much Ado as a finale to his time at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.

Brief, but did give another couple of pics with it - first professional gig in Salad Days at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1986. (The cast got a free salad for lunch at Debenhams, so there's glamour for you, lol.)

Then I skipped ahead to 1988 get a couple of Wish Me Luck interviews up - a nice one with Suzanna Hamilton (who played Matty), which came up as she mentions him in it, plus two versions of what presumably was the a longer interview or press release from elsewhere wth Jeremy Northam here, on playing Colin.


3. Since this now means that I actually know what he was in prior to appearing to the world in WML, I looked some of them up and one (that I haven't yet posted to tumblr) was French Without Tears in 1987. This turned out to be an early Rattigan, and as I want to see more Rattigan, I looked for adaptations, and there was a film and also a 1976 BBC Play of the Month version, with a cast that included Anthony Andrews, Nicola Paget, Michael Gambon & Nigel Havers, so I looked for that on YT, but with no luck.

And, then, just after I'd been talking to lirazel about The Winslow Boy and reminding myself that I really need to try some more Rattigan, it magically appeared on an old TV channel I subscribe to, and I was in the mood to manage watching online, so I did. I enjoyed it a lot. It was, as wiki had said, an early fairly light-weight comedy about a bunch of young Brits studying French so they can pass the exam for the Diplomatic service & having romantic shenanigans, but it still had a lot of Rattigan touches and didn't tie up half as neatly as it might have done as written by someone else. ( It was also pretty easy to see why they'd cast a young Jeremy Northam as Kit Neilan a decade later, so that was good fun all round.)

(The 1986 theatre version was directed by Sue Wilson, whose 1991 BBC radio Christmas at the Wells plays I liked so much; she seems also to have been involved with the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School - she directed that Much Ado, so she'd obviously worked with Jeremy Northam a few times before she got him onto the radio. I'm sure her version of FWT would have been very good and interesting, as her radio plays certainly were.)

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. sovay wrote a beautiful review of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy!


2. yuletide sign-ups are open! (I have my requests ready, I think (ha), but offers - I want to make sure I am ok to write whatever I offer, because I'm so bad at managing fic lately.)


3. I have finished Vivat Rex! I honestly didn't know what other things I listened to once I realised I was finally at the end - I've been going through it since June.

Anyway, I got to the last episode, and being halfway through Henry VIII with Robert Lang, Sian Phillips, Diana Rigg, Jack May and Stephen Murray, I did not expect any new cast members. VR, of course, immediately wheeled out John Gielgud.


(The answer to what I listened to next was obv: I went back to my Martin Jarvis Saturday Night Theatre collection instead, but anyway, wow, that was a ride. I think LotR is still my favourite radio, but VR was truly amazing and I enjoyed it so much.)

persiflage_1 asked for my Top 5 David Collings performances. It's a tough call and I had to separate them into TV and audio to make it fair:

( Under a cut because gifs )

from beccadg: Top 5 Time Travel Stories Any Medium

1. Doctor Who
2. Does Sapphire & Steel count? Because S&S
3. A Traveller in Time - Alison Uttley
4. Tom's Midnight Garden - Philippa Pearce
5. Back to the Future


Top 5 Plays by William Shakespeare

Oh, tough, I've never really tried rating them before. (Also I haven't finished watching my way through the BBC Shakespeare yet so some of them I don't know.)

1. Henry V
2. Twelfth Night
3. Much Ado About Nothing
4. Measure for Measure (I have feelings, I don't know, I just do! *fights people*)
5. Julius Caeasar. (I once hugged my BBC copy of this when I was very ill and I felt grateful for its existence but I was so ill I fell asleep like that and its cover plastic has now gone wibbly because I softened it with my love in a very literal way).

I feel bad about leaving RIII off though, as it is awesome, especially in the BBC Shakespeare version (which accounts for most of my Shakespeare watching). But top 2 still goes to the two I actually studied properly, despite my demon English teacher. Even he couldn't ruin Shakespeare too much.


Top 5 Cartoon Series From the 1980s

THis is basically another banana one because there is Dungeons and Dragons and then there's everything else, but hey, I shall try.

1. Dungeons & Dragons
2. Mysterious Cities of Gold (that was an epic ride when we were about 9 or so)
3. Visionaries (or was that just 1990s) - I do recall having a thing for that one, but it might have been early 90s
4. Ulysses 31
5. Um...? Oh, yes, Battle of the Planets. I know nothing about it now, but I adored it when I was six and it is a real thing that I didn't dream, despite nobody else my age ever remembering it when we talked children's TV. (Me: "So they had like bird helmets and one of them talked like a duck, and there was a robot and a really scary baddy!" EVeryone else: ??? *backs away slowly*)

Top 5 TV Shows With a Fantasy Theme

Which is tricky, because there's not much TV that is actually fantasy rather than SF; TV people are always so scared of magic things.

1. Once Upon a Time
2. The Librarians
3. Legend of the Seeker (I haven't rewatched this one since, which is always a telling thing, but I did enjoy it a lot when I did watch it)
4. Once Upon a Time in Wonderland
5. Buffy the Vampire Slayer

I wanted to link to some of the results of the Genremixer meme from the other week, because people actually did write things and they were great. But also, look what I found in my local supermarket bookstall:



For only 50p I could not resist its peak 1970s-ness and am also laughing at this way of selling classic lit - it's totally occult, right? (Instructions on how to summon a devil, no less.) (Btw, liadt, our Peak 1970s theory is confirmed here: it was published in 1974. I know you will not be surprised.)

Anyway, more importantly, the fic:

astrogirl - The Way to an Angel's Heart Is Through His Stomach (Good Omens, drabble.) For the prompt: Aziraphale / Crowley - Dessert/Sweets & amnesia

ernest - Pose, You've Gotta Save Your Reputation (Hamlet/Twelfth Night, Viola/Orsino, Laertes, 744 words.) Prompt: Laertes + Orsino - Pets/Animals & forced to face fear

ernest - I Aim to Be Your Eyes (Twelfth Night/Hamlet, Viola, Hamlet, 1260 words.) Prompt: Viola + Hamlet - doppelganger & stranded/survival scenario

Frosting-Forged Friends (501 words) by human_nature
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Nyssa of Traken, Leela (Doctor Who), Fifth Doctor
Additional Tags: Flash Fic, cake!fic
Summary: While bound and covered in cake, Nyssa meets someone who shares a mutual friend. Prompt: Leela/Nyssa/ whump and Desserts/sweets

Foretaste (1526 words) by JohnAmendAll
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Doctor Who (2005)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Thirteenth Doctor, Yasmin Khan
Additional Tags: Flash Fic
Summary: Yaz is reunited with someone she hasn't met yet. Prompt: Yasmin Khan / Thirteenth Doctor - Reunited & pre-canon

A Quiet Moment (823 words) by Elennare
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Yogscast "High Rollers" D&D Campaign
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Qillek Ad Khollar & Lucius Virion-Elluin Elenasto
Characters: Qillek Ad Khollar, Lucius Virion-Elluin Elenasto
Additional Tags: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares, Wordless Communication
Summary: In the cells in Gusthaven, Quill has a nightmare. Lucius helps. Prompt: Quillek/Lucius - Wordless Communication & cages.


My Yuletide fic is beginning to have a proper shape & I'm going to try and see if I can get first typed draft done by tomorrow, after which I'm not going to be able to for a bit.

For hc_bingo's March Amnesty Challenge, 15 fic recs for the square "hallucinations".

stalkers

loss of hearing

hallucinations

( 18 fic recs in Angel, Doctor Who, Dracula, Historical RPF, The Hour, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Legends of Tomorrow, Lord of the Rings, Once Upon a Time, Ripper Street, Shakespeare, Spooks & Star Wars )

I'd like to write an interesting post, but I can't think of anything interesting to write about, which does scupper that plan somewhat.

So:

I started watching the BBC Shakespeare Coriolanus and it had Joss Ackland in and naturally instead I thought about the episode with the two generals in from Enemy at the Door and writing fic and then thought, how dodgy will they be? (very), but then that it would fit the hc_bingo square "atonement" giving me a bingo! (I mean, it is too late for it to count, but it's still silly to have four in a row and then never do the fifth, even in amnesty.) So obviously bingo squares win out over sense and things.

I was going to ask for sensible suggestions for what to call a WWII German aristocratic general (he doesn't have a first name, and I can't get through the fic without giving him one), but if you Google top German names for the 1890s, the internet will provide. (This is why authors have no excuse for the whole Carolyn business. Srsly. GOOGLE before you casually Carolyn your Regency romance.)

I can't do polls over here, but in Random Name Choices, for [Blank] von Wittke, I am considering:

*Paul
*Emil
*Erich
*Bernhard
*Bruno

(I think in the usual way EatD is so layered and details can be teased out on rewatching, so it almost feels as if I ought to be able to find his real name, but other than by somehow obtaining a script, this is not true. But it still feels wrong, so help me with random selection! /totally logical)

(hyarrowen, if you see this, there is no infidelity I promise, but yet some very slight shippage! At least in my notebook, that is, or actually, that bit might not even be in the notebook. So, actually, there is no shippage as usual... I should go type my dodgy WWII fic about DOOMED generals who understand they kind of deserve to be DOOMED, instead of waffling.)


I haven't watched enough of Coriolanus yet to comment on that although it seems at this stage to be a very strong entry (but I won't commit to anything until I'm at least halfway through). It stars Alan Howard, Irene Worth, Joss Ackland and Mike Gwilym. So far Joss Ackland wants Alan Howard to take up public life, but Alan Howard would so much rather be having semi-naked bloody wrestling matches with Mike Gwilym. A valid life choice, I suppose, although Mike Gwilym seems less keen.

(My friends came, had a nice time, liked each other, and went. I am now vv tired and also have not yet watched DW, because vv tired so catching up must wait, but in the meantime, one of two posts I made earlier; in this case my final Yuletide recs post. <3)



Somewhat belated, but better late than never, as they say.

( 19 recs in Discworld, Georgette Heyer, Howl's Moving Castle, Hundred & One Dalmatians, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, King Lear, The Librarians, North & South, Northanger Abbey, Owl Service, Poldark, Timeless & Victoria )

Terribly late for me - and about half of these at least were still anonymous when I read them. And I still haven't finished going through the collection again. (The penalties of getting to read actual books, I suppose!) This includes a few from Madness (although I haven't properly been through that yet.)

( 21 recs in All Creatures, As You Like It, Bletchley Circle, Cadfael, Casting the Runes, Colditz, Dead Authors Podcast, Discworld, Doctor Thorne, Doctor Who, Enchanted, Expert Markers to Deter Human Intrusion, Father Ted, Georgette Heyer, Hilary Tamar, History Plays, The Librarians, Oxford Time Travel, Pride (2014), TLF Travel Alerts and While You Were Sleeping )

These are pretty much all of what I've watched, generally just trying the fandoms I know. (The vids are all still anonymous at this stage). You'll find any warnings/ratings on the vid posts.

( Recs )

The full Masterlist is here if you want to check out what teeny tiny fandoms now have extremely shiny vids made for them. :-)

1. One of the joys of Yuletide is stumbling over things you never knew about before. One this year that amused me muchly was the music video of Shakespeare's Sister's Stay. Now, this is a song that I recorded off the radio when I was a teenager (onto a tape, I'm a historical thingumy) and I was always fascinated by it - I reasoned that it was all one voice and maybe some fairy queen who seemed nice but wasn't (a la some Tam Lin/Thomas the Rhymer thing, because I had been reading Fire and Hemlock by that point), but NO. That is not what it is about!

As it turns out, voice one is a woman trying to get her dying boyfriend to stay with her and voice 2 is Death. Who in this wears a sparkly catsuit and does an outrageous dance because... er... um... it's an 80s music video? My favourite bit is Death's eye-roll at the end because, frankly someone's who's been doing a sparkly OTT catsuit dance like that has no grounds on which to eye-roll at people. Oh, and for some reason, it all seems to be happening in space because why not?

( Cut for embed )

Anyway, I'm grateful to the requester because otherwise I would never have watched that and my life would have been the poorer for it.


2. Talking of amusing vids, it's been at least a year or two since I mentioned that Julius Caesar Poker Face vid, and every so often a person just needs to remind themselves that it exists and laugh themselves silly at the combination of Richard Pasco and David Collings and their ridiculously opposite faces set to appropriate-inappropriate pop music. Do not worry if you do not like Julius Caesar, 1970s BBC theatricality, Lady Gaga, or Brutus/Cassius. None of those things should come between you and it:

( Cut for embed and Richard Pasco )


3. And now for something completely different, because otherwise I'll forget again, I wrote some more runaway_tales:

Two in the same AU timeline:
Double Cross (PG, 4367 words. Edward Iveson, Julia Graves, Rudy Graves.) Julia’s having nothing but trouble with men – her brother seems to be in danger and Mr Iveson’s trying to buy her off with sandwiches…

Not Just a Passing Phase (PG, 5262 words. Edward Iveson, Julia Graves, Rudy Graves, Elizabeth Long.) The last thing Julia wants is for Mr Iveson to be lying dead in her kitchen with her brother to blame for it…

Faulty Connections (All ages, 1176 words. Anna, Liesa.) Liesa and Anna have the opposite problem when it comes to family.

I've had a few answers for this meme done or semi-done for a while, so it's about time I posted one, and here goes - From femme_slash_fan: Favourite TV shows almost nobody knows about and should watch? (Seriously... I need more stuff)

Shows that nobody else knows about seems to sum up my entire fannish life of late (and always, really), but since femme_slash_fan specified "and should watch", that's a whole other thing. I have plenty of strange things I love - I don't necessarily think anyone else should have to watch them!

I avoided anything with its own (reasonably active) fandom, like Blake's 7, Sapphire & Steel and The Avengers (obviously, people have heard of them, if they're being fannish about them), and anything I thought was too inaccessible to count as something people should watch. What counts as something 'nobody's heard of' is so relative anyway. (Some of these things really don't count if you're British but do count if you live anywhere else. What can I do?). Of course, much of it assumes some willingness to watch studio-bound, video-taped old British TV of some kind, which I know not everyone is up for. If you are, or you're willing to try, these aren't bad places to start.

Anyway, here's a list! Not in any particular order, really. (I numbered them so I would know to stop if I went over ten, because that would be silly.)


( Under here for the list!! )