Some ruminations

* - Jerry Springer The Opera was great. I loved that in the bit immediately before it Mr Lee was wearing a "hated by the Daily Mail" t-shirt. Marvellous. And I also really liked that vicar chap who was defending the thing, giving good coherent reasons why it wasn't blasphemous etc. The opera itself was pretty good. I didn't really know what to expect from it, except lots of swearing, and was pleasantly surprised. Lots of laughs, lots of giggles, lots of profanity (but nowhere NEAR as much as the Maily Dail claimed), and a surprisingly moral heart. The BBC should be praised for showing it, not condemned.

* - The people who make the Quantum Leap DVDs are CVNTS!!! They release Season 1 perfectly. No qualms there. But the reports I am hearing about Season 2 are bad. VERY bad. There are music changes all over the place, pretty much every episode has songs that are removed, and the ONLY songs they leave in are those directly referenced in dialogue in the scene they appear in (such as Sam saying "and this is..." in the episode where he's a DJ) and those which the cast sing along to (such as Heard It Through the Grapevine in MIA (more of which later)). Word is it's not a case that they couldn't get the rights to use the songs, it's that they didn't want to pay the money, and only did so with those songs they couldn't edit out. Some episodes are ruined by the edits, apparently; lots of the 70s music from Disco Inferno is gone, Good Morning Peoria (DJ epoisode) has most of the songs snipped, and there are edits in almost every episode.

The most glaring of all, however, is the omission of "Georgia on my Mind" in the season finale, MIA. Those of you who know QL will know how intrinsic this song is to that episode. That final scene is a beatiful, emotional one. Ripping out Georgia and replacing it with generic plinky plonky music tears the scene's heart out, throws it to the floor and STAMPS all over it. It is truly dreadful (there is a file on t'internet comparing the two).

The thing is, really, you have to accept that music subs are inevitable at times (you try clearing a DVD that has Beatles music on it, for example+). But there are ways and means. On Remembrance of the Daleks there's a Beatles track playing in the background of one scene; this was replaced with a cover of the same song. At the end of Queer as Folk season 1 you should get the Weather Girls' It's Raining Men; you get a cover (and it's so near the original I didn't even notice 'til Russell pointed it out in the commentary).

Fools!

* - I need a new job. It's not that my currrent one is especially bad, but rather because of the uncertainty of the resctructuring malarkey. Last Thursday, the bosses boss told us in a meeting we had that as far as he was concerned things would be staying the same for us, with two seperate offices. Then on Friday we hear that someone slightly higher up the food chain than him has his eye on our office. Just for himself. So, I dunno. How much we hear is bs and how much the truth is getting increasingly hard to tell. If we do move, chances are it will be March sometime. We'll certainly know one way or the other by then.

* - And I must get off my arse and write stuff...

+ - there are a couple that do have such songs, but they're special cases...