Geeky Weeks

This is turning into quite the geeky or nerdy week. Seven days ago I volunteered to be a library assistant in the village library. Six days ago I wrote about Sherlock Holmes. Four days ago I was approached to be parachuted in as an emergency university lecturer. Three days ago rumours about found missing Doctor Who episodes started swirling about in earnest. Two days ago I wrote about comic books.  Yesterday I started working. Today, Doctor Who gossip continues to swirl until the press embargo is lifted at midnight and it somehow seems as if the storm is over.

Sometimes weeks are just irretrievably nerdy.

As all the Doctor Who speculation goes on and on and on (hooray if it does turn out to be 'Enemy of the World' and 'The Web of Fear', by the way) one had to wonder why Star Trek doesn't get anywhere near this attention anymore. There are no missing episodes of Star Trek of course, which makes it harder to be nostalgic about but it's also indicative of the facet of this show that allowed it to bloom so hugely but also then collapse: The franchise of Trek. For the great majority of its history Doctor Who is one show, constantly relaunching and metamorphosing, but one show at a time. Star Trek is six different television shows that mostly burst out in one brief period before collapsing inwards again having burnt all their narrative fuel. The original show, groundbreaking and exciting as it was, was the phenomenon and its movies and the spinoffs are the effects of its original success. Star Trek the original series will be remembered longer than its spinoffs but it only ran for three years and six revival movies. Even as the reboot Star Trek movies roll out once every three or four years it's hard to get excited, mainly because they're not really Star Trek to be honest. In contrast to all that, Doctor Who is about to have its fiftieth anniversary and has been in production for about thirty four of those years.

I love Star Trek and Sherlock Holmes, not Doctor Who so much but if third and fourth items were compulsory Doctor Who would definitely be one of them. I've rambled on about them before but those three sets of characters are multi-platform cross-media behemoths of incredible vitality, and my favourite Star Trek is the weakest in energy and vigour.

Lest that people become convinced that my life revolves slowly around television I must reveal that I have been reading a lot of Dorothy L Sayeys, who truly seems to be one of the unfairly lesser remembered gems of the Golden Age of Mystery Novels. What Sayers lacked in volume of output (Agatha Christie beats everyone there) she gains in painstaking effort, love of detail and probably re-readability. Once I've finished there shall be words on 'Gaudy Night' but what you get from her Peter Wimsey novels is a long-term, real-time narrative where time passes in between novels as it does for us, and the series as a whole thus seems somehow just a little more satisfying. Creativity is born from limitation. Yes, there shall be more on Lord Peter Wimsey of the ridiculous name.

That's a wrap. There's not much to say. Stories are coming though. Stories! And I guess more geeky talk. I need more novels.

O.