Eurovision 2014

It's the one Caturday night of the year when there's something more fabulous than Blakes 7 on TV, and that night is Eurovision night!

This year was no exception, with many wonderful and fabulous entries (and a few bland or underwhelming entries too, but they can't all be best) from all over Eurovision.

Here are my comments, recorded live as the show was being performed.

1. UKRAINE | Tick-Tock by Mariya Yaremchuk
Manny doing impression of a mouse in a wheel. He should be pounced on like all mouses because mouses are for pounces. Great start.

2. BELARUS | Cheesecake by Teo
Manny with silly hair dancing with his clones.

3. AZERBIJAN | Start a Fire by Dilara Kazimova
Trapeze act slowly getting more impressive while teleporting to different locations, and with a song going on too.

4. ICELAND | No Prejudice by Pollapönk

Very colourful mannys, one of whom is Timothy Claypole from Rentaghost. Fun song. They turned the audience colours too.

5. NORWAY | Silent Storm by Carl Espen
Manny in black with a sad song, very different to the last one and made for an abrupt change of mood. Made me feel sad. I don't want to be a sad cat.

6. ROMANIA | Miracle by Paula Seling and Ovi
Another manny in black with silly hair, like a cross between Belarus and Norway's entries. He has a teleporting friend and a circle piano to help him stand out, and the song did get exciting.

7. ARMENIA | Not Alone by Aram MP3
He has a badge. The Monkeys With Badges like him. He made his badge himself. His song got dramatic and exciting towards the end after a dull start.

8. MONTENEGRO | Moj svijet by Sergej Ćetković
A skater danced around to try to distract from the blandness of the song.

9. POLAND | We Are Slavic by Donatan and Cleo
Fun costumes and loud singing just as cats like Eurovision songs to be. I'm not sure what the dancers were doing though, it seemed very unorthodox.

10. GREECE | Rise Up by Freaky Fortune feat. RiskyKidd
Leather jackets, trampoline fun, and a great catchy song too.

11. AUSTRIA | Rise Like a Phoenix by Conchita Wurst
This is clearly a James Bond theme song. I am an overexcited cat. I am a sleepy cat. Time for sleeps. Zzzzz.

12. GERMANY | Is It Right by Elaiza
Zzzzz. [I missed it because of sleeps.]

13. SWEDEN | Undo by Sanna Nielsen
Zzzzz... An explosion in the song woke me up in time to see the end of this. I don't think I missed much though.

14. FRANCE | Moustache by TWIN TWIN

Song about a moustache. With very silly hair.

15. RUSSIA | Shine by the villainous Tolmachevy Sisters
Boo! Boo! Russia are the baddys of Eurovision this year.

16. ITALY | La mia città by Emma

One of the Roman gods has returned, meaning to win Eurovision. Where is Captain Kirk when we need him? He knows how to defeat returning ancients gods like that. (Either with hugs and kiffs, or with his own singing.)

17. SLOVENIA | Round and Round by Tinkara Kovač
This tried to be exciting but there have been much better songs already.

18. FINLAND | Something Better by Softengine
Lots of lasers! Neem! Neem! The audience all got lasered.

19. Notorious Eurovision Cheats SPAIN | Dancing in the Rain by Ruth Lorenzo
It's raining inside in Denmark. I hope that doesn't happen here as we don't want to be wet cats. Poor manny got wet while singing. In the rain. From Spain.

20. SWITZERLAND | Hunter of Stars by Sebalter
A spoof Eurovision song by Chris Morris  has turned up in the real thing. (Nobody could tell the difference.)

21. HUNGARY | Running by András Kállay-Saunders
The manny knocked over his chair in his hurry to sing his song. That's passion! He loves Eurovision almost as much as big, gay, long cats do. Who's playing the piano?

22. MALTA | Coming Home by Firelight
Quite good song but a generic performance.

23. DENMARK | Cliché Love Song by Basim

An all-out comedy song! At last! Amazing dancing too, it reminded me of Tongue Tied.

24. NETHERLANDS | Calm After the Storm by the Common Linnets
Expensive Luxury Cat liked this one, I'm not sure why.

25. SAN MARINO (who?) | Maybe by Valentina Monetta
Another comedy song. In fact, here it is:

Lol, I am a silly cat.

26. UNITED KINGDOM | Children of the Universe by Molly
Children of the Universe sounds like a Blakes 7 episode. Oh wait, I'm thinking of Children of Auron.

Well, Austria won the competition, but it wasn't the best song for me. My best song was from Iceland. Here's why:

The Armageddon Chrysalis

"There are some corners of the universe which have bred the most terrible things. Things which act against everything we believe in. They must be fought."

This interesting story alternates showing the Doctor's point of view with a first person narration by the evil monster Voorvolika, with his bits in bold to emphasise how scary and powerful he is. Cthulhu says that Voorvolika is one of his friends.

The Armageddon Chrysalis begins with the Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan already in peril, having been knocked out by Voorvolika before they even had a chance to leave the Tardis. It is as if Voorvolika was so keen to nom them that he couldn't even wait for the story to start before capturing the Tardis.

The Doctor wakes up and only has time to discover that the Tardis is very low on energy before he falls unconscious again. Then it is time for Voorvolika's first paragraph.

The thing had been given many names, but men called it Voor-volika. Those who had seen it had compared it with a vision of hell. Voorvolika meant evil. Those who had seen it and felt its touch had died. Voorvolika knew that some were feeling its touch now. A tiny thing called Tardis. Living beings whose names would come to it soon. Energy. Voor-volika was hungry. Voorvolika was feeding.

The Doctor wakes up again and this time Tegan and Nyssa are awake too. We get filled in on how they came to be captured by Voorvolika - the Tardis was "approached by an object of immense size" and then they were knocked out. Not much of a flashback really.

Nyssa has gone to look out the window in the "observation room". She screams so the Doctor and Tegan go to where she is and then they look out the window and see Voorvolika (well, a bit of him) too.

The thing pressed up against the thick plastic of the observation port, totally obscuring anything else. Here and there, grotesque suckers adhered to the plastic, releasing sickly white fluids which oozed slowly downwards. Elsewhere, the body crushed inward, fist-thick veins and arteries pulsing with life.

Voorvolika contacts Nyssa telepathically as he begins to nom her energy, and she learns his name. Then we get another Voorvolika bit.

The beings were aware of Voor-volika now. Voorvolika could sense it. What were their names? What had it learned from the one called Nyssa? The names. Tegan. The Doctor. Yes, Voorvolika had touched the one called the Doctor before. It was a strange name, but it had energy. Voorvolika wanted to feed. Voorvolika wanted the energy of the names.

Voorvolika seems to place importance on names, and it is interesting that he gets the Doctor's name from Nyssa, so that if "the Doctor" was not his real name but just what Nyssa knew him as, then he would not know the Doctor's true name.

The Doctor realises that Voorvolika is trying to drain all their energy, so he decides to use the same plan as in Timelash.

No, not that Timelash.

The episode of UFO that is also called Timelash (and which isn't as good because Paul Darrow isn't in it).

In UFO's Timelash Ed Straker takes a dangerous drug to counteract the baddy's effect that is slowing everybody down by speeding him up. The Doctor takes a drug to counteract Voorvolika's effect that is draining everybody's energy.

B929 energy concentrate is a highly potent drug; ten drops have been known to give a man sufficient energy to destroy an army, twelve drops have been known to make a man literally explode with uncontrollable power. The Doctor gave himself eleven drops.

The Doctor puts on a spacesuit and takes a device from the Tardis console for use in his plan later (we don't get to know what his plan is at this point; it is like Mission: Impossible). He then goes outside the Tardis into Voorvolika and it is time for another Voorvolika paragraph.

The tiny being called the Doc-tor was going to fight Voorvolika! He was there, now, ready to enter the body. It could not be permitted! What was he going to do? Voorvolika touched the mind of the being called the Doctor and it knew. The Doctor would die! Voorvolika would touch him more than it had touched any-thing else! The Doctor would touch Voorvolika. All Voorvolika had to do was wait!

Naughty Voorvolika wants to give the Doctor a bad touch.

The Doctor walks around inside Voorvolika and sees the "remains of other beings and ships" that had already been nomed by Voorvolika.

The Doctor hoped that one day another like him would not gaze into the walls and see the shape of a small, dark blue police box.

Voorvolika catches the Doctor in a good old-fashioned sliding walls trap (so much for "All Voorvolika had to do was wait!") and begins to crush him. But because Vooorvolika is trying to squash the Doctor using the inside of his body, the Doctor escapes by squeezing a nerve.

Pain! Voorvolika has never felt pain! Voorvolika must fight! Voorvolika must survive!

"Touched a nerve there," the Doctor doesn't quip, because Davo had some class. As we come to the last page, the Doctor comes to the chamber where Voorvolika keeps both his brain and heart.

It was a grotesque combination of a brain and heart, fused in symbiosis like Siamese twins.

The "brain-heart" attacks the Doctor with energy lightning, but it is the Doctor's turn to trap Voorvolika:

He knew that he had just commenced perhaps the worst fight of his life, and it was one in which he had no intention of fighting back! As he felt the searing heat of the energy columns begin to penetrate his suit, burrowing fingers of flame through the material to search out his flesh, the Doctor looked at the measuring device and saw that his plan was working. Already, the needle had begun to move up the scale...

I am Voorvolika! Voorvolika must not die! Voorvolika must multiply! No! The thing called the Doctor has tricked Voorvolika! The tiny, feeble thing has beaten me! Voorvolika weakens! Energy! So little energy! Voorvolika must kill! So little ener...

...and that is the last of Voorvolika's bits. While this sort of Trojan Horse plan is not an entirely original way for the Doctor to beat the baddys (The Web of Fear, The Masque of Mandragora, and The Myth Makers, to name but three), it is a fitting resolution to this story. Especially as it turns out that Voorvolika is not killed by this, only drained and forced into "suspended animation."

This is a very good story. It is well paced over the course of its seven pages, managing to be scary and exciting with the pictures reinforcing the text, and Voorvolika is an interesting creation, evocatively described.
The Armageddon Chrysalis ends with the Doctor speculating about a possible return for Voorvolika in the future...

As the Tardis spun off through space, the Doctor remembered feeling the mind of the thing touch him. He remembered knowing in that instant that it was totally evil. And he remembered learning with horror exactly what the thing was; an immense galactic grub which slumbered in a chrysalis state, waiting until the day it had fed upon enough innocent souls and space-craft to multiply itself in a terrifying form!

One day, when the effects of suspended animation finally wore off, the thing would awake again and once more begin to prey on life. On that day, thought the Doctor, a certain Time Lord would have to make sure he was nearby. He was not looking forward to it.

The God Machine

Our next story begins with Nyssa and Tegan investigating a stepped pyramid on an alien planet. They get disappeared by something only hazily described, which sets up a mystery without revealing too much in the first paragraph - a promising start.

The next paragraph is about the Doctor, back at the Tardis, when he gets concerned about how long Nyssa and Tegan have been away. The Doctor of this story lacks self-awareness:

When Nyssa and Tegan returned from their curiosity-aroused exploration, a potentially dangerous habit he would have to steer them away from, the Doctor reminded himself, they could resume travelling.

The Doctor goes to the nearby city to look for them and explores "seven avenues".

There was no sign of life anywhere, and nothing to shed light on his companions' in-explicable disappearance! The Doctor knew that he could not search the entire city alone-and he did not intend to try-but, before he returned to the Tardis to rethink the situation, there was one more place he wanted to investigate: the giant, central pyramid that dominated the city.

Why did he not go there first? Silly Doctor.

It turns out there are alien natives on the planet. Given how simplistic these stories often are, there is a relatively sophisticated technique used to show (as opposed to 'tell') us what happens to the Doctor when he meets them.

Curious eyes turned on the Doctor. Silence and stillness hung in the air, then the leader, an old man, walked over to the Doctor. "You are a stranger," he said , smiling. "I am Sorl, of the North tribe."

The first thing that the Doctor thought when he regained consciousness was, so much for the Tardis's records. Harmless natives! He could still feel the lump from the single blow from a club that had knocked him to the ground!

The Doctor has been captured and, as we are now half way through the story, he meets a girl to give him the exposition about what is going on. Their ancient god Vi'Al has returned and demanded sacrifices, and they don't want the Doctor to interfere because they fear Vi'Al's wrath. But there are some natives that don't really believe that Vi'Al is a god, and they help the Doctor escape and get to the temple to see the sacrifices being made.

The natives even help him get a disguise.

Indicating his need to the natives, he watched as they scanned the rear of the crowd and moved off towards a man who stood alone. The natives surrounded the man and, when no one was watching, knocked him unconscious then dragged him into a nearby dwelling. The Doctor followed and had soon slipped the loose-fitting garment over his own clothes.

The Doctor sees Sorl and his followers sacrifice gem-stones to Vi'Al on the sacrificial stone of the pyramid.

The false god Vi'Al was going to be a very rich man!

This avoids the most obvious old cliched plot device of having Nyssa or Tegan be the sacrificial victim.

Sorl triggers the same stone that Nyssa and Tegan stepped on back in the first paragraph and, because he has worked out what is going on, the Doctor and three friendly natives run to where the gems are.

A stark and brilliant blue light enveloped the temple!

The Doctor felt his nerve-endings tingle with the after-effect of a teleport beam.

They are inside the pyramid, and when they go around looking for their friends who have been kidnapped by Vi'Al, discover that the pyramid has traps waiting to be triggered. Avoiding them, they find captors and captives:

Peering in, they saw five men sitting around a table, laughing and joking. Each man wore the odd and colourful garb of intergalactic pirates, and each man carried a laser blaster strung around his waist. These men were the false god Vi'Al!

Sadly there are no pictures of the pirates in their "odd and colourful garb", but since all the pictures for this story are just in blue then they may not have lived up to my imagination anyway. The Doctor rescues the captives while the natives decide to have a fight with the pirates.

As he climbed a set of steps to the surface with Nyssa and Tegan, the Doctor heard the crashing of falling stone deep below him.

"What was that?" gasped Nyssa.

"Booby traps," answered the Doctor. The sound of crashing stone was followed by the victory cry of the natives, and he knew that they had taken their revenge. The pirates had been entombed with their treasure, forever!

That is the end of the story, with the Doctor being oddly accepting of the natives' violent revenge-taking. There isn't much of the Doctor's character on display here, and Nyssa and Tegan only get three sentences of dialogue between them (and one of those is "Doctor!") so, on the whole, this is a generic story which makes only a token effort to avoid being a complete cliche and does not feel like a Doctor Who story at all.

The art - blueness aside - is the best thing about it, with Davo and both companions being recognisable still a rare, verging on unique, occurrence in the Doctor Who Books Project.

It would only have taken a small change for this story to become a crossover with Blakes 7. The five colourful pirates could have been the crew of Scorpio! using their teleport capability in a con to try and get wealthy. Obviously Avon wouldn't have been entombed forever; he'd have just teleported back to Scorpio! and they would have flown back to Xenon base to try another zany scheme next week. That sounds like a much better story to me, I shall have to write it...

The Penalty

The Penalty wants to be a scary and disturbing story, and the illustrations do their best, but it is undermined by the fact that the entire narrative is about the Doctor having a nightmare while suffering from "Ponassan fever", as is made clear in the first paragraph when Nyssa and Tegan deliver the exposition to each other and to us reading. Hence we know that none of the dangers the Doctor faces are "real."

The Doctor turns on the Tardis scanner and hallucinates a lot of scary faces looking at him.

This is a pretty scary picture, although I know how to make it even scarier!

The Doctor's nightmare then changes so he is being threatened by the Thallisans,

thousands of deadly, robotic war-machines whose war-sirens sounded death!

They sound like a great monster, but what a pity that they aren't actually in this story. The same goes for the Dren,

heartless mutated reptiles with artificial minds who had come to earth to conquer it!

The Doctor imagines them too, and then the "Omegans" who don't even get that much of a description.

The Doctor forgets who he is, and then he remembers, and then he is being chased. They catch up to him and he worries that he may regenerate:

The Doctor knew that he would not die. Knew that he could not die, not yet, not for so long. He knew that he would regenerate, return from death re-formed. Regeneration was both the gift and the curse of the Time Lords. The Doctor had felt the touch of death before, so many times before...

...and then the Doctor gets better. The pointlessness of this story (redeemed, in part, by the pictures) is encapsulated by the final paragraph, in which the title is explained:

Later, when the Doctor was finally preparing to dematerialise the Tardis from the surface of Ponassa, he pondered on what had happened to him. He had read somewhere of a theory that stated that whatever horrors a person meets in a nightmare, they are, in fact, only warped realisations of half-buried memories and experiences, magnified by imagination; fears and feelings that are ignored when awake but let loose when the body slumbers. He vaguely remembered someone describing nightmares as the penalty that has to be paid for enjoying an untroubled day and life-the more adventurous the life, the greater the penalty. The Doctor did not necessarily agree with the description, but it was at times like that that he regretted having adventures that stretched hundreds of years into the past and far into the future, because one thing was for sure: in the time just passed, his penalty had been collected.

I also have a theory. My theory is that this is utter nonsense.

It is time for sleeps now, bye bye. Zzzzz.

We are made of socks

When the Monkeys With Badges told me they had made a spaceship, but that it was a Spaceship of the Imagination, I was a skeptical cat. I doubted that there was such a thing, and I though they were being cheeky monkeys with troll faces.

Then they showed me the TV series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, in which the main character Neil deGrasse Tyson travels through space and time in his Spaceship of the Imagination.

It is sort of a cross between a documentary series and Doctor Who, with lots of science and addressing the camera with things beyond the ken of cats mixed up with interesting stories to keep us cats (with our short and fickle attention spans) entertained.

The Monkeys With Badges' Spaceship of the Imagination doesn't look as impressive as Neil deGrasse Tyson's does. It looks a lot more like the cardboard box that Duncan's printer came in.

Danger Down Below

Danger Down Below features the Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa. At the beginning of the story it is mentioned that Nyssa is staying in the Tardis because there is no requirement for more than one Companion in this story.

The Doctor has come to the planet Aronassus 49 to help his "old and dear friend, High Minister Threll of the Prime City Triumvirate." The mannys of Aronassus 49 are starving because all their noms are going missing, which sets up a mystery and gets the plot going very quickly

I like how the positions of the Doctor and Tegan in this picture are very similar, but not precisely the same, as in the first picture.

The Doctor and Tegan are observed, and then captured, by some guards who think they are the ones who have been stealing their noms. The dialogue manages to capture Davo's portrayal of the Doctor:

Tegan got up from the bed. "What happened?"

The Doctor turned to face her. "Neuro-paralysis dart. Not exactly the welcome I expected."

The Doctor's friend Threll quickly releases them, so the paragraph of them being captures reads like the sort of pointless captured-and-escape padding of the TV show.

The guards are still suspicious though, and this becomes a plot point later on. 

The Doctor has chubby cheeks in this picture. Maybe he has been stealing all the mannys' noms!

Threll tells the Doctor that some of his mannys were electriced. The Doctor shows Threll a black ball that he found. It is time for some exposition:

It was soft to touch, yielding under finger pressure. "I found that on the surface," the Doctor said.

Threll shuddered at the feel of the thing. "It feels alive!"

"It is-it is one of the killers of your men."

Threll stared at the Doctor, then back at the thing. "This?" he said incredulously.

"Not on its own. By itself it has only limited power. By the hundred they could devastate a complete city."

Tegan moved over to look at the thing, overcoming her revulsion. It was pulsing now, like a tiny heart. "What is it?"

"Another galaxy's equivalent of our own bodily defence mechanism, like a white corpuscle. The only difference being that these live outside the body they protect, stopping any dangers approaching their host."

Threll was taken aback. "Like my men," he said grimly.

The Doctor nodded. "Whatever  they are protecting down in the production plants is not a threat to you -you are a threat to it."

"A being from another galaxy! I never dreamed..." Threll trailed off.

The Doctor wants to resolve things peacefully, but then Chief Guard Sholl comes to arrest the Doctor, Tegan and Threll. It is clearly time for a cliffhanger-style moment:

"The sentence for these charges," he continued, "is immediate death."

"No, you fool!"

The black ball saves them by flying into and electricing Sholl and his guards.

Threll takes the Doctor and Tegan to look for the black ball's host alien, and they have to stay ahead of the rampaging mob of hungry mannys that Sholl had following him. The black ball electrics anyone who gets in their way, and they make their way to the place where the mannys keep their "food processing machinery".

Tension is quite skilfully built over the course of a few sentences before the reveal of the creature. Or we could look at the picture on the same page...

The creature occupied most of the large food distribution chamber. It was amoeba-like, almost like a gigantic human cell in appearance, and its flesh undulated and rolled like slow-motion waves, sending green tendrils snaking across the floor; tendrils that enveloped cases of Prime City food supplies and drew them back to the main body, which absorbed them.

The Doctor recognises the creature as a Migrator, from the Andromeda galaxy. He thinks it is on this planet by accident, and decides to take it away in the Tardis. Leaving Threll and Tegan behind (where they are protected from the mob of mannys by "a veritable army of defence balls"), the Doctor goes back to the Tardis and materialises it in the room with the Migrator.

When he was ready, the Doctor called Tegan and Threll into the time and space vessel, where they met a bewildered Nyssa, crushed up against a wall by a somewhat cramped Migrator, Threll could see that the Migrator's bulk had oozed through other doors and was probably enveloping a goodly portion of the maze-like Tardis corridors.

The Doctor ejects the Migrator into deep space, where it is apparently going to be fine. The story ends with the Doctor offering to take Threll back to his planet a week in the future, to give the mob of mannys time to calm down.

"I think by that time," Tegan observed, "your people should be glad to see you." She smiled. "I'm looking forward to your reinstatement as High Minister."

"And I," said the Doctor, "am looking forward to a really good meal."

Danger Down Below isn't a great story - it's a bit bland, a bit predictable, and a bit light on dramatic tension. The best that can be said for it is that it captures the feel of the TV series of that era well.

My words are backed by NUCLEAR WEAPONS!

I haven't posted in a while because Scary Cat, Expensive Luxury Cat and I have been busy playing Civilization V in preparation for the BBC making a new version of their Civilisation TV series.

I like playing the Celts because I am a Scottish Cat. Here is my kingdom of Western Scotland:

Scary Cat likes playing the Scary Germans, and Expensive Luxury Cat likes playing the Expensive Luxury Netherlands. They are very colourful so I like them too.

I like renaming things to make them more cat-like. I made my religion be called "Ceiling Cat" lol. I also like making Great Works of Art (although I wish they weren't called "Works" because cats do not do the "W" word), because then you get to see the art that you have made.

I presume this is how the game ties in to the TV series, because I don't remember Lord Clark threatening anybody with his atomic bombs, or launching any spaceships to Alpha Centauri...