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.)

I continue to be tired/ill from Friday, but usually three days is the charm, so here's hoping for tomorrow! In the meantime, some things:

1. Someone has put together a complete timeline overview of OUaT here. (Well, I say here; it appears to be in four very long parts plus a Wishrealm edition, because OUaT. I've been looking at some bits of it when I can manage it & it's quite interesting to see, especially the chronology of the in-show mythology bits.)


2. I made more gifs and then I had to stop because it was too many gifs for my current state. They were all ( Colin and Matty gifs from Wish Me Luck )


3. If you can do reaction vids and like being cheered up, during the Writer's Strike, the channel Gallifrey Girls stopped doing all their usual shows and did Red Dwarf instead, and went from not having a clue what it was to it being their new favourite show, which was fun to see: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcEstOLrIdVVGpfu7hHebva1Osjzbim2K

/end random.

One day I will make a proper post again. Probably. I hear those may be a myth...

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.)