Eh? Elv Who? What's He Talking About? part 2

I probably could have rushed something out for The Time Travellers, but it deserves better; so instead, here are some more random thoughts.

The Title
I've had thousands of messages* asking me why this blog is called 'Elv Who', or why my internet handle is 'elvwood' when I'm quite open about the fact that my real name is John G. Wood.

Let's tackle the latter first. Cast your mind back to the autumn of 1982. I had just gone to college, looking far younger and more clean-cut than I do now. Certain people there noticed a resemblance to popular musical artist Elvis Costello, and started calling me Elvis. I hated it, and unfortunately wasn't very good at hiding this - which meant people kept on using the nickname. Ain't humanity wonderful? Anyway, I eventually gave up trying to do anything about it, and friends decided to use a modified version - shortened to 'Elv' - which was actually OK. When it came time to pick my first email address, I needed to use something unique - and longer than three letters.

I picked 'elvw'. Later, inspired by The Blues Brothers, I lengthened it to 'elvwood', which (unlike almost any variation of 'John Wood') doesn't seem to get used much by other people, allowing me to use it for all of my (non-business) internet activity.

Okay, on to the first question. I wanted to put my internet/nickname in the blog title as well as indicate the Doctor Who connection, and I was choosing a name shortly after watching An Unearthly Child - where the misquote that heads this entry comes from. You should be able to see that the title was an obvious choice.

So now you know.

Other Shows
One idle thought I had was: if I wasn't doing this, what else might I have tackled instead? Probably my next-favourite 'canon' is that of the roleplaying game Traveller, but I can't see how to make that fit this form. I'm not interested enough in Star Trek, the obvious contender; nor Babylon 5, although I enjoyed that a lot. In fact, I could only think of one show that I would be happy to think this deeply about.

Firefly.

OK, so it would be a lot shorter, and Joss Whedon's commentaries short-circuit a number of things I'd like to say about some of the episodes (going deeper and saying them better, too); but it would still be fun. I should be finished with this marathon in another quarter-century or two. I'll see about it then. ;p

Scoring
Quite some time ago, when discussing The Who, I mentioned that the album Who's Next included my first, third and fourth favourite songs by the band - but that it still wasn't my favourite album of theirs. This puzzled one friend, until I explained that Quadrophenia took the title because it was more than just a collection of songs, and that the coherence of the work added a lot to my enjoyment.

Having been doing these reviews for some time, I find myself unsatisfied with the idea of averaging episode reviews to decide the overall score for a story. for one thing, doing this pulls the scores towards the middle, so most stories end up somewhere around a 6; but it also fails to take account of those aspects of the story that can't be judged from individual episodes. I adjusted the score for Farewell, Great Macedon based on an impression that it deserved more than I was giving it, and I will do so again.

And that's it for now. Have a great weekend!

* This is a lie. But it sounds impressive.

Next Time:
Really the delayed look at The Time Travellers.