Okay, we know that Doctor Who is about time travel and everything, but have we slipped into some kind of freakish parallel universe where Catherine Tate is actually funny and ought to be in more T.V. shows?

No, we didn’t think so because Doctor Who is clearly a television programme. Therefore were it to genuinely effect the space-time continuum, then frankly the BBC would have a lot to answer for on where on Earth they’re spending our license fees.

Although to be honest we thought some sort of written explanation (or apology) was in order when we inadvertently stumbled upon The Catherine Tate Show when it was first on. Then another explanation when the show started being described as “refreshingly original” or “hilarious new comedy” during the promos. We wrote this off at the time as some sort of act of desperation by the BBC realising that the show stank and attempting to trick idiots into watching it. Maybe it was. Maybe it worked.

But the upshot of all this is that, horror of horrors, Catherine “I’m seriously not funny” Tate has invaded prime time favourite and all round wonder-show, Doctor Who.

Catherine Tate said in the BBC News Story, “I am delighted to be ruining Doctor Who”, or something along those lines.

What to do? The best we’ve come up with so far, is to print out the following image of Freema Agyeman:

and stick it onto your T.V. during the new episodes, in the hope that it will at least partially block the Tate from view. Look what she’s done! She’s even ruined the word “Tate”. My brain used to associate that word with the Tate Modern in London - a very well respected art gallery even though the cafe’s a bit of a rip-off. But now, I hear the word “Tate” and I immediately become enraged and have to go and lie down for a bit and maybe watch a bit of The Thick Of It or Absolute Power, or any other - you know - funny comedies.

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There are about a bazillion things I miss from my C64. Things which made games games, like SID chip music, flashy loading bars and loading screens. Music which defined the game rather than being some bog standard hip-hop track or something that could have been lifted from any random film. Joysticks with suckers attached to the bottom, and a user manual with instructions for how to program a simple game. These are the things of “proper” computers and “proper” games. These are also things which everybody who grew up with them fondly remembers during pub conversations while getting dirty looks from the scary blokey blokes in the corner talking about football or something.

So I’m not going to go on about those things any more. They’re a given. What I really miss is something that was born out of necessity – a hardware limitation which (as quite often turns out to be the case) resulted in something that not only looked cool, but in my opinion looked better than it’s non-limited modern day counterpart. And that’s the palettised fade. And by palettised, I’m talking 16 colour fixed palette.

Let me demonstrate:

Isn’t it lovely? Isn’t it gamey? So much more visually interesting than:

Yawn. And the thing is, apart from some TV and film credits where they do something swanky with their text fades, it’s something you oh so rarely see in games from which medium they were born. It’s just, “let’s just make the alpha go from 255 down to 0 and that’ll do” over and over and over again.

Somebody somewhere bring back the palettised fade!

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Craggy Island officials will send a letter to Steve Martin demanding an apology over the alleged American remake of Father Ted which is said to be in motion.

They will ask the man responsible for pissing on the grave of Peter Sellers to remove the script from his fat talentless sweaty palm of injustice, and to provide backing to anti American remakes of British comedy campaigns throughout the country.

Apparently, Steve Martin had such respect for Dermot Morgan that he put off the decision to accept the role until he felt that, similarly to his adaptation of the Sellers role, he had sufficiently bastardised the character into a shallow national stereotype, and had cleverly broken down the dry and witty humour into easily digestible slapstick junk.

A Craggy Island spokesman said that comittee leaders would meet on Monday to draft a letter to discuss what other action to take.

He said the letter would make four demands:

• An apology for the disrespectful and defamation of character that occured during the filming of The Pink Panther (2006)
• Withdrawal of himself from television and film because, frankly, he was never really very good in the first place, except for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988)
• Steve Martin to make a substantial donation of Martin’s profits from Cheaper by the Dozen, Cheaper by the Dozen 2, and all the other shit he’s been making recently to Ireland’s T.V. comedy department to target more effectively people who are actually funny.
• Martin to support other groups in Ireland who are fighting against making a fucking sequel to The Pink Panther in 2008 for Christ’s sake.

Tony Blair said he would contact Bush on Tuesday “to shove his special relationship up his fecking arse” if such violent acts were to continue.

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Nice blog, innit? Would be even nicer if the stylesheet was finished for these blog posts… and we had nice funky comments… and the tabs at the top worked.

But… oh noes! It would appear that these last few changes will have to wait. For instead of finishing what we started waaaay back yesterday afternoon, back-stabbing Lemmy has spurned the site and has elected to spend the evening playing Vanguard in his wizard’s hat and cape.

Me? I’m going to spend the evening doing something much less geeky, and finish playing Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. Which as we all know, is cool and trendy.

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Well this rant’s been brewing inside me like an extremely pleasurable fart on Christmas afternoon. Only for longer. And less pleasurable. Okay, so it’s not at all like a fart - truth is, I’ve only used a simile in this opening paragraph to make myself sound clever.

The thing is, advertising clearly works or else companies wouldn’t spend millions of pounds on them, but how? How is it possible that an advert that claims to give your hair a healthy “looking” shine (that’s healthy looking, not actually healthy) actually succeeds in selling more of their product?

Or how about the shampoo that claims to give your hair “20% more radiance”? 20% more radiance? That’s a bit like saying “Makes your hair look 53.6 units better”. Totally outrageously and obviously unqualifyable. It can’t be proven nor disproven. And yet the product continues to sell.

And talking of shampoo, since when did shower products start containing nano-bot technology? You must have seen them - they’re the spinny gold particles that mystically attach themselves to strands of hair and mend all the jaggy broken bits, magically transforming said hair into perfect all-new super strands. It’s clever stuff!

Or my personal favourite, the air freshener that claims to destroy smelly particles. Huh? Wha? Call me daft, but what they’re basically selling us is a spray that erradicates atoms - doesn’t that sound rather dangerous? What happens if I spray it on my dog? Or does it somehow only target floating particles… like, say, the air that I need to breathe? Boy, no wonder the ozone layer has a hole in it if we’re all squirting atomic destructors into the atmosphere.

But lets not be hasty - let’s give them the benefit of the doubt - that they somehow have the technology to target only the specific particles that cause bad odour, that aren’t structural in any way or something vital to inhale. In which case, boy these air freshener research scientists are clever chaps. Shouldn’t they be working for the Government or something? They could revolutionise mining - need to drill a hole 1000ft deep? No problem - one squirt of Glade and you can atomise those pesky dirt particles and have the oil out for about £2.95.

So how can all this advertising rubbish work? Well I’ve asked myself the same question and the theory I’ve come to I call “The Catherine Tate Effect”.

The reason that crap products with rubbish adverts continue to sell is the same reason that Catherine Tate is still on TV.

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