Strangeness on a Train

I am thirteen, it is the dawn of a new year, and I and am about to set foot on the North Island for the first time.

1983 was the first year I'd left the Mainland, spending a week on Stewart Island for a school trip in Second Form; but this time, for the 10th New Zealand Scout Jamboree, I would be in Fielding for  ten days of outdoor activities, burgeoning testosterone, cold showers, open-air latrines, physical challenges, military catering and some of the worst sunburn of my life.

Scouting for me was a central activity from the ages of around eight through to around eighteen, and being a young simian a lot of my early life experiences involved scouting or variations of it.  There had been an Jamboree at the local racecourse 'round the corner from my house in Oamaru in 1978, so when I was old enough to make the trip myself, it was a no-brainer. I reckon that in our town that summer of 1983-84 was a halcyon period for many parents who, given the choice, could have shipped their boys entering or in that 'difficult age' off to such parts as Fielding, Palmerston North (where my brother went for a Venturers camp), or Mystery Creek in Hamilton (for Boys Brigade. I distinctly recall checking off my backpack contents with my Dad (who hadn't put his teeth in... details...) in our post-Christmas lounge the day before I was to take a chartered train up the east coast, then over to Picton, across Cook Strait to Wellington, then another three hours to Fielding.

The train journey was long. Looong: around 24 hours on the rails with l only two Making of the Return of the Jedi, the first issue of my new comic order from the local bookshop - (I'd ditched Eagle for 2000AD), some preserved ginger (I hated the stuff, but my Gran, assuming the opposite, always made sure I got some for Christmas every year) and a carriage full of adolescent males shouting, wrestling, playing cards and generally stinking the place up to pass the time. It was Lord of the Flies on rails. But, we made it through the night, saw in the new year while  in transit (one of the lads was a Bowie fan and duly played 1984 at the appointed striking of midnight.) By morning we'd reached Picton, boarded the Interisland ferry and carried on over to a quiet and grey looking Wellington - I'd never have thought it would be my future home.

The main event was a hell of a thing - a virtual tent city with seemingly hundreds of camps for individual contingents from all over the Asia Pacific region. It was all pretty chaste stuff, while there were stories that a boy had been stabbed one night on the other side of the camp, I talked and swapped badges with kids from Australia, Canada, the US and the Pacific, left my own contingent for twenty-four hours on an overnight tramp in a nearby forest; and though I dreaded what I took to be an inevitability, in the end I was sad to see the camp's abseiling tower abandoned at the end, unassailed by me. The photos I took from the jamboree are, I presume, long gone, and by memory would have been dull fare indeed - camp sites, Manfield race track (where it was held), and a few other tricked up sites of other scout contingents (Mt Roskill had a banner based on the Return of the Jedi poster which I'd thought was very cool). My memories of the trip and the event are now nudged along by some remaining artifacts - the books I took to read with me, an open air film we watched en masse (weirdly, Battlestar Galactica: Conquest of the Earth) and pop culture snippets (number one at the time: UB40's cover of Red Red Wine, local high flyer - Split Enz's Straight Old Line.) I developed a strange addition to carob bars; and with my fellow troop devised ways to avoid the Roman-styled latrines and the regular wave that would pass under the unwary sitter as it flushed the rows of seats. The showers were something else: open-air, cold water and communal.  My friend Alister managed to brave the boggy entrance to the plywood ablutions block and exited cleanly laundered only to slip arse over kite and land back in the muck again. Ee, but we were 'appy...

So much for scouting and my one and only jamboree experience, but it was an exciting, tiring time, and looking back from thirty years on, a clear disembarking point for some old my pre-high school life (I was so glad to be shot of intermediate school - and frankly, Jedi saw the end of my Star Wars interest) and the hopping-on point for a lot of new stuff and new friends.

So - New Year's Eve 1983, thirty years ago.

So Here It Is... etc

Good morning and good tidings, readers!

Time for another annual yuletide-themed video. A bit obvious, this one, but it has been getting quite a thrashing at the Monkeyhouse after Jet Jr discovered it (mix-disc courtesy of Al over at Phasmatodea), not to mention work dos,  and I tried, but it seems you can't get Top of the Pops Slade without an especially intrusive gremlin DJ at the end. Never mind, hang your stockings on the wall, everybody, and be sure to listen out for the turnip on his sleigh...

In the Beaut Midsummer

[NB: This post was being written on Christmas Eve proper, before a two-hour power cut cancelled proceedings and sent the Simian family instead to a candle-lit evening in front of an open fire. There's an irony in here, somewhere]

Santa's pants - or maybe just two red towels? Wellington, December 23rd 2013

It's Christmas Eve here in Wellington - happy festive season, wherever you are.

Sort of early apologies to my northern hemisphere readers who may be at this moment either waking up to the Eve, or even attempting to make their way to work (shudder)before a brief midwinter holiday, and then another one for New year's. Weird - how do you people do it?

Down here of course it's the middle of summer - although with today's weather you'd be surprised to hear that. Christmas in the middle of summer brings its own dilemmas for this simple Simian. Somewhere between curmudgeonly tut-tutting at the proliferation of cheap imported winter-themed tat, fake snow shopping displays and culinary stodge, and half-embarrassingly giving in to the whole upside-down tradition. The sad fact is, Christian observations aside, we're caught once again (as with Halloween) in the wrong hemisphere to be celebrating a mid-seasonal feast (hence the stodge) to keep the past literal wolf from the door. Down here, laden down with the obligatory ham, turkey, force meat and fruity pudding we'd be wolf-dinner rather too easily in the heat.

Really, it's a ridiculous premise, the tradition of fortifying oneself against the hardship of a long winter in the middle of summer with orchards and fields groaning with produce. Mind you, with cherries currently at over $11 a kilo... but I digress. Next Christmas, after grumbling about this to anyone who can't get out of earshot, I'm actually going to do something about it at the Simian abode. The Christmas pine can be replaced by a Pohutukawa, the holly and berries can feel the steel cap of my monkey boot and be exchanged for brilliant red and orange karaka berries (that puts paid to the 'pukeko up a ponga tree' nonsense as well - with karaka come the kereru or wood pigeon - even mid-winter a much more appetising bird), and latter-day cuckoo of Santa's retinue Rudolph the Red-nosed earworm Reindeer can give up his 'Sant-Nav' duties for local upstart Stickybeak the Kiwi. There - job done, and we can give a boost to our own endangered species of mistletoe too, while we're at it.

So, you see, this isn't just jingoism - it's a plea for regional diversity and putting a bit of local context into a seasonal observation that's laughably beyond irony wearing its wool-lined Santa hat in the sweltering afternoon sun. It's right and good that there are versions already about - Christmas cards can be found locally and easily with sun-kissed beaches, board-shorted Santas and pohutukawa in flower jostling alongside snowmen and red-breasted robins, and local versions aren't hard to find, really - as strings of brilliant colourful jandal tree-lights indicate. Enough of this seasonal denial, I say - let's band with our Trans-Tasman cousins and claim a proper summer Christmas with no denial!

[NB: This blog does agree with local mid-winter Christmas parties too, because they are aces]

Lead Time Lords: The First Doctor (1)

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Guv’nor, the First Doctor as played by William Hartnell.

I don’t think Harlequin did a bad job on this one. It is a tad generic, but compare it with the previous version created in the Eighties by Citadel Miniatures:

Already the two, while posed similarly, are quite different creations. What I like most about Harlequin’s offering is the face – there are hints of Hartnell’s mischievous grandfather Time Lord in the sculpt, whereas Citadel’s caricature is the sort of thing you might expect a newcomer to the series might present as a summation of the first Sixties Doctor – old and stooped, cantankerous and difficult to love. There’s a whole story of the actor and his complicated part in the role he’d come to define and inhabit still being told in fandom and to the series’ viewers. Mark Gatiss’ wonderful An Adventure in Space and Time does much to redress the balance, but we could also do with examples shown by Harlequin here, not so much recasting but reaffirming the youngest of the Doctor’s incarnations as an occasionally impish, curious citizen of the Universe.

The detail is also kind on this figure, although the fingers are perhaps a little roughly defined, and the face of my model had frightfully sunken cheeks and a moulding line across its mouth – not an easy flaw to remedy. That said, it’s a relatively easy one to paint if you don’t include the trousers (three passes, including one with a fine non-permanent pen) and the face, which I paled up a little to indicate the relative age of the Doctor and also reduce any contrast with his white hair. It’s something I could have done less with previously on the Third Doctor figure, actually, but will probably concentrate more next time I’m up to painting that particular incarnation. There’s going to be another First Doctor figure to come as well, although that’s some time off yet as well.

Additions include a golden(ish) sandy base (the First Doctor explored the Gobi desert, Saladin’s Persia, Ancient Egypt and the desert planet Aridius on television); my reference for this is a still from the (at time of writing!) missing serial popularly called Marco Polo. I’ve seen a few Hartnell Doctor figures painted with grey trousers, but I’ve gone for the more ivory colour shown in that story as well as others around it (Reign of Terror being another). Green stuff was used to fill in one of the cheeks (it really was quite a deep depression) and fashion the First Doctor’s rather practical blue-stoned ring, shown off by Harlequin’s regular ‘hands clasped across the chest’ Doctor pose.

And that’s the First Doctor done!

Lead Time Lords: The Third Doctor (1)

Here’s my next Doctor paint-job from my lead Time Lords project: Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor. It’s another Harlequin model, and one of two that the sculptors did (I’ll cover the other one later).

 As it is it’s okay – the likeness is pretty good from a couple of angles (although I’ve observed in the past that he does also bear an uncanny resemblance to local politician Winston Peters), but it’s a pretty static pose, reach as it does for something a bit more dynamic The Doctor thrusts an accusatory finger at an unseen person – yeah, that’s sort of Pertwee-esque, I guess.

The costume he wears is without doubt his Season Eight/Terror of the Autons model, with purple-lined stain cape and red velvet jacket with some nice black frogging on the front.If that last sentence suggests to you that I’ve been frequenting cosplay blogs in search of colour clues for painting, then I admit it – I have. Pertwee’s Doctor is quite the clothes horse, with seemingly very few episodes where he shares exactly the same outfit (I could check, but probably won’t, that he even finds time to change between Frontier in Space and Planet of the Daleks, technically two interlinked stories.) Sadly, this mainly-black ensemble is the one we have, and after starting earlier with the First and Second Doctors, I’d got thoroughly sick of black by this time, and so I’ve added some other colours to my blacks, in an effort to try to introduce some sympathetic blending.

Thus, there’s some purple in the Doctor’s trousers here. I’m not sure if it entirely works, of r shows for that matter, but it makes me feel a little happier. I could, of course, paint black gloves on this Doctor as well, but, really, life’s too short. The only positive thing I could get from that is being able to overlook the distinctive Greek coin ring that Pertwee wore on one hand (fashioned from a relic he found while diving in the Mediterranean, you know) Otherwise it’s black shoes, black trousers, black cape and black frogging. With a dreary match-up like that there was only one thing for it base-wise, and that’s a vivid mustard-coloured rocky surface, recalling the famous tenth anniversary Radio Times cover. And we’re done!

Lead Time Lords: The Eighth Doctor

"I'm a Doctor - but probably not the one you were expecting..."

Like you, dear reader, I imagined I’d be kicking this whole Paint A Doctor carnival off somewhere logical, like, for instance, the First Doctor. More fool us. Yes, My William Hartnell figure is in the mix, and very near completion, but first, here’s a chap I completed earlier than Bill: the Eighth Doctor, played by Paul McGann.

This Eighth Doctor is the last TV Doctor model made by Harlequin Design before they went out of business and their moulds were purchased by Black Tree. It came out not too long after the 1996 movie and, well, it shows. 

Most of the Harlequin range is idiosyncratic – heroic scale miniatures are almost by definition exaggerated and would look quite horrifying at human scale; but there’s something even more disturbing about Harlequin’s Eighth Doctor – the bubble perm, the slightly outward-bending legs (not an uncommon affliction in their DW range, I have observed), the weird hand clasp – and on the whole the figure has a sort of end-of-the-line rushed look to it. It’s incomplete in detail, and comes across as a little cursory – perhaps a fitting treatment for a cult TV hero who at the same time had been given short shrift in his homeland and was in the process of being farmed out to the ignorant colonies for a second chance at survival.

But I digress wildly. Here’s the Eighth Doctor, the only version around to this day (although, watch this space…) It’s actually a pretty straightforward model, and I’ve painted him as well as I can, including a couple of passes at doing eyes (I hate doing eyes and most of the time avoid it if I can), and some time taken with washes and blends to get that elusive bottle green/shot black velvet effect on his Doc Holliday jacket - though it comes out a lot more green in these pictures than in real life. Harlequin really didn’t try too hard on the costume here , and the hand positioning doesn’t do them any favours, but given the lack of overall ‘pop’ to the Eighth Doctor’s ensemble, I worked a bit to find opportunities for contrast and detail. Ergo, some green stuff buttons front and back, and a fob chain (nobody knew in 1996 how important fob watches would become to the series) were made, and I painted his cravat a grey-blue, rather than yet another variation on grey or beige as in the TV special itself.

The Doctor’s hair I’ve left untouched, simply because I think I’d do more harm than good in attempting a re-styling. Finally, the all-important base. Originally this was to be a Seal of Rassilon, in keeping with the motif in the movie. I had one all painted and ready to go, but faced with a crisis of application – I don’t like to cut the bases of these guys, I replaced it instead with some light card floorboards to represent his Vernean wooden TARDIS interior, and I’m pretty happy with the result!

Mrs Simian on seeing this figure complete thought it pretty good, then said as an afterthought, “It is Tom Baker, isn’t it?” You can’t win ‘em all.

A Doctor a Day?

Well, it could happen. I won't tempt fate, though!

November has come, and with it the 50th anniversary of Twentieth Century Time Lord the Doctor. And, maybe, time to dust off my old figures for a tidy-up:

This is the last time I'll post one of these old WIP shots of the Doctors as they were back in 2009, I promise! To recap, I wrote these guys up back here, and to be honest, some of them have come a wee way since this photo was taken. Not a huge way, but progress was made before I turned my attentions to Real Life and more recently my Hobbit-themed figures. Since then a few variant figures have arisen (Crooked Dice Miniatures in particular did a couple of rather nice Eleventh Doctor figures), word has it that heresy have a John Hurt-themed 'Doctor' figure lined up for the forthcoming anniversary episode, and then, of course, why - it's the turn of Mr Peter capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor. No figures yet, of course, but I believe sculpts are in process and will turn up sooner or later...

In the mean-time, there's space to finish off these bad boys. Like the Hobbit figures I've not just painted the figures, but also added bits and pieces with green stuff to bring their likenesses into line. And I'll blog on those as I go, of course.

Wish me luck, and don't mention the November 23rd as a deadline!