I’ve just finished watching the Dr Who episode Blink that everyone’s been raving about. I didn’t get to see a vast majority (i.e. any) of the episodes when they first aired earlier this year on account of timey-wimey being all non-linear and wibbley-wobbley and stuff. Well, that and not having any television reception for 9 months. “Blink” was indeed very good. Wonderfully written and so very, very clever. There was one thing that bugged me all the way through it though, and that was the character of Larry Nightingale.

I kept trying to work out where I’d seen him before. He seemed so familiar that I knew I must have watched something with him in but I just couldnt’ remember what. When I saw his name on the credits, Finaly Robertson, I remembered exactly where it was: he came to the auditions for the short film I helped to produce a few years ago. In fact, the director and I spent a long time agonising over it because the choice for the male lead (I say lead - there was only one male character) came down to him and another actor. We both agreed that he was very good but in the end he wasn’t quite right for the role so we didn’t go for him. I want to say that I’m glad to see he’s doing so well now but that sounds patronising and an awful lot like we were going to give him a big break which is not what I mean. I am glad to see he’s doing well and I thought he was very good in the role.

By another coincidence, the bloke who did play the lead in the short was a lovely guy called Giles Alderson. Giles also happened to play a major part in a film called LVJ which was written by the Jobbing Screenwriter himself Phil Barron. In yet another coincidence, back around Hallowe’en when Jon was putting together a list of recommended vampire films, I happened to look up one of the films he mentioned on IMDB. At the bottom of the page was a list of related films and once caught my eye for no reason other than I hadn’t heard of it and it was a 2007 release. I clicked through to find that it was a low budget UK vampire film with none other than Giles in the lead role (and looking a lot like David “Angel” Boreanaz I might add!)

Sometime I should blog about my experience on the production of that short. It was one of hardest, most frustrating and ultimately enjoyable things I’ve ever done. It put me off film-making for some time (a fact not helped by Other Stuff) but I loved doing it. Well, aspects of it. We never did get any festival entries - they kept rejecting it which is a shame as I still think it was a very good script - but it did do the rounds on the Shooting People MobileCinema tour a couple of years ago. (The film was called Folie A Deux. Ben Blaine was very complimentary about it in his brief summary.)

Anyway, yeah, Blink. Extremely good. I totally get where Stephen Moffat is coming from when he (allegedly) says that Sally Sparrow is the best companion the Doctor never had. As the previous incarnation of the Time Lord would say, fantastic.