Panic!

Yet another assignment has found itself flying my way which brings the total to a gut wrenching four on the go at the moment. The latest one comes courtesy of my speech processing module and the only thing that makes me feel slightly better about this hideous workload at the moment is that at least I don't have an exam in this module. I do however have another assignment for it and have no idea at the moment how the lecturer plans to fit this in without intruding into the Christmas holidays which makes it as good as an exam anyway as that's the time I would be spending revising. The other problem with this assignment is that upon seeing the brief I thought it was impossible and initially had no idea where to start. After getting over that initial panic however, I went through the notes and found a decent starting point so with a bit of luck it shouldn't be that difficult although balancing all of these assignments is going to require a bit more effort than I'm used to.

So the natural progression from panicking about lack of time is... yep, you guessed it, watching TV. It is slightly worrying that fitting all of this wonderful programming into my daily schedule is currently being prioritised before coursework but I'm choosing to gloss over that minor detail at the moment. First up is a lack of a FlashForward episode this week, nicely timed with the collapse of mininova. The problem with living in the UK is that most of the time American series come much later and being impatient, I choose to watch them when they are broadcast in the USA. Now that my primary source has gone however, I will either have to put up with watching them several days/weeks/months later here (or more likely just find somewhere else to watch it!) One upside is that since the US has had a weeks break in the scheduling, it means that the UK's own Channel Five will actually be showing the episode before the US.

Spooks next and another gripping episode with yet another rogue agent. I can't seem to understand why all of these ex officers always seem to be turned after years of dedicated service protecting against exactly that. Most of the time it seems to be motivated by money (or lack thereof) in the same way as police get corrupted but on a much more dangerous scale. My other thought was that bugs etc didn't work inside 'the grid' and that the whole point of being in that special room meant that you were scanned on entry and exit to make sure that you were clean. Or at least this seemed to be the case when Malcolm was in charge, maybe the new guy hasn't figured it all out yet. The other thing that strikes you as odd is that they would be so stupid as to use wireless keyboards! Surely any wireless signal can be picked up and as far as I know, keyboards aren't encrypted and it shouldn't cause too much of a hassle to have a wired keyboard. In fact in my experience, the wireless keyboards are always more of a problem that they solve and seem to constantly be needing new batteries, what good would that be if you need access to the computer in a time critical operation and the batteries die. "What happened, why didn't we prevent this...?", "Sorry sir, the batteries in my keyboard went flat and I had to nip to the shops to get some new ones." Can you imagine the outrage if that happened and found its way into the press?

An unexpected addition to the viewing line-up tonight was Friday Night With Jonathan Ross who tonight had an amazing line up. Jeremy Clarkson, Laurence Fishburne, Peter Kay and Muse! I think that is without a doubt the best line up he has ever had on that show so there was no way I could miss out. JC was as funny as ever and seemed to be eating all of LF's thanksgiving food - whilst all of the others just admired the presentation, he seemed to be tucking in to everything (after coating it all in maple syrup that is). Not sure about those Hawaiian hula chairs though, they looked more painful than beneficial and you certainly couldn't watch the telly whilst sitting on one, at least not without missing most of the programme through distraction. As for PK well, I'm still not sure about the CIN charity single, fair enough, the video is marvellous and clearly a lot of time and effort was spent making it but you don't buy the video do you, you buy the audio which - let's be honest - isn't exactly a work of acoustic delight. A medley of mediocre songs sung by PK and Neil Morrissey amongst others isn't my idea of a good single really. I would be more than happy to go out an buy a song that was nice to listen to but some reworked hash sung by non-singers seems frankly daft.

Muse's performance was as spectacular as ever and letting them perform two songs was an even more unexpected treat to add to the nights entertainment. Not only that but then the frankly poor car race at the end, I sensed some cheating going on there but it was nice to see Matt overtake Laurence just before the line and it looked like Jeremy got lost on the track for which he usually mocks his guests on Top Gear for. Comeuppance perhaps?

Finally I ended the night watching Dr Who's Dreamland series after seeing the banner advertising it on the iPlayer homepage. I thought I'd give it a chance, the whole thing was less than an hour long despite being split up into annoying ten ish minute chunks, forcing you to watch a previously that you had seen less than thirty seconds previously and the title sequence which I subsequently skipped after watching it for the second time. Overall rating isn't brilliant, it's so far off the quality of the normal series that most of the time you are thinking about how bad it is rather than the story line - which in itself isn't great. The animation is pretty poor, so much so that they didn't even manage to get normal walking right and instead it looks like they are all MJ style moonwalking - but forwards. The premise of the mini-series is that an alien spacecraft has crash landed in none other than Roswell and it is set in the fifties when alien conspiracy theory is at its peak. They find a part from a spaceship which turns out to be a genetic bomb of sorts that will wipe out an alien species from the cosmos. One of the evil aliens attacks the Doctor and his new friends and so the US army intervenes and takes them to Area 51. After trying (and failing) to wipe their memory with amnesia gas, the Doctor and co uncover the aliens hideout and their plan to demolish the earth. The only way to stop them is to rescue the alien that built the genetic bomb - who is being coerced into destroying the device in return for his wife who is being held captive. The male alien is injured and his wife along with the Doctor have to recover a medical instrument from the basement where the contents of her crashed spaceship are being held. Turns out there is a scorpion fly brain inhabiting this building and so once they find the device they have to escape in a box. The Doctor is reunited with the TARDIS which has been brought to him by his new friends and once the genetic device is activated the Doctor uses the TARDIS to make a loud high pitched noise with it that scares the aliens away. Why he had to have this device to do that I don't know but I guess the story would have been a lot shorter otherwise.