Man, yesterday evening started so perfectly you could set your watch by it. See, the Hipster Son loves cauliflower but dislikes carrots & broccoli. His sister loves carrots & broccoli but dislikes cauliflower. Naturally, they sell them in these absurdly non-compromisible packages. They couldn't give you, say, cauliflower and carrots. Nope, there's a bag of cauliflower which my son will eat and a bag of carrots & broccoli which my son will not.

(They also, yes, sell these things outside of bags. But, you will forgive me, I hate preparing food and would much rather just pay a buck-fifty for something quick and simple and ostensibly nutritious which doesn't require kitchen utensils.)

So we spoke of compromise and I wondered if either kid would be willing to give a little, and my son said carrots and broccoli would be fine!! Amazing! So to reward him, I said he could pick out both a nutritious snack AND something fun, so he got some raisins and some Fruit Roll-Ups. And because the girlchild didn't get competitive, I let her choose a soda and she picked caff-free Coke.

The evening stayed mostly very good. We had some discussion about school issues and some lies the Hipster Daughter has been telling there. She watched part of a Wonder Woman episode while her brother and I did some "fire safety" homework, and I had them settled in for "Scream of the Shalka" before Randy stopped by and totally threw them into hyperactive showoff mode. Among the casualties: Julian's inflatable Hulk. The boychild threw himself atop it, "wrestling," and with a BOOM the head popped straight off. Oh, was he ever upset: he treated the silly thing as an integral part of his room decoration, so we're going to try "stuffing" it with packing peanuts Sunday and figure out how to reattach the head.

I've confirmed something I've long felt over the course of the last few weeks, in light of Battlestar Galactica, The Six Million Dollar Man and Wonder Woman. These are shows which are pretty much 25 years old, and yet they seem more antiquated, stagy and stupid than programs made twice as long ago. American television from 1954 has more energy and charisma than television from 1979.

Well, I say that, but I'm really comparing apples and oranges, you know. That television which is remembered from 1954 is invariably the best stuff from the period. For all I know, Walt Disney Family Theatre Presents a Gentle Adventure with Young Dan'l Boone and a Bear Cub makes Wonder Woman look like Buffy. Land of the Lost is phenomenally stagy and I wouldn't mind reaching into the screen, grabbing that banjo that passes for incidental music and beating the director about the head with it, but at least the scripts were good and not every episode had some artificially happy smiley ending. Also, the guest stars didn't look visibly embarassed in every shot.

I'll tell you where to find some good guest stars and that's "Pyramids of Mars," the Doctor Who story which scared the hell out of the kids this week. Oddly, there's exactly one lousy scene in this whole story and that's the first one, where Bernard Archard walks around this woefully cheesy "Egyptian tomb" set which lacks even a dusting of BBC grime and is incredibly overlit and says things like "Why! This must date back to... the First Dynasty!" Once he gets possessed, he's a picture of pure hate and malice. Michael Sheard's really good, too, and that fellow who plays the Egyptian is really malevolent and mad.

I think the guest acting is one of the things that really make 1970s BBC dramas rise so much above their no-frills productions. I mean, whether you're watching Who or Doomwatch or Lord Peter Wimsey, all of which look cheap as hell, you're watching really good actors on really well-made sets deliver mostly good scripts with conviction and believability. That bit at the end of Wonder Woman last night felt like Lyle Waggoner had a real important game of tennis to finish. I also noted how so many big, strange concepts in "Pyramids" were just thrown at the audience at breakneck speed, compared to the recap in Wonder Woman about how everything we just saw happened the way it happened. Slow, agonizing television with big bangs: I'm glad this nonsense doesn't get made anymore.

(Originally posted January 09, 2004, 08:02 at gmslegion.)