Scott Matthewman

If you’re in Edinburgh this weekend — which, sadly, I’m not — and are in any way shape or form into Doctor Who — which, happily, I am — then make sure you go along to a one-off charity event in aid of ACCORD, the hospice where David Tennant’s mother worked and, recently, passed away.

Comedians appearing at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe are staging a special one-off Dr Who-themed comedy show as part of the David-Tennant.com fundraiser, which intends to raise money for the ACCORD hospice in Paisley, Scotland.

The comedians taking part were moved by the response from Dr Who fans to the recent death of the actor’s mother Helen from cancer.

The gig will take place at Laughing Horse@Linsays (Fringe Venue 56) on Saturday 18th August 9.10 - 10.10pm. Although the show is not ticketed, and is not part of the official Fringe programme, those attending will be asked to donate £10, with all proceeds going to the ACCORD hospice appeal.

Venue details: Laughing Horse@Linsays, 15 Brunswick Street, Edinburgh, EH7 5JB Box Office & Enquiries: 0131 556 8974

Full details can be found here.

Those taking part will include Toby Hadoke, the genius behind Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf, and Mitch Benn, star of (among others) Radio 4’s The Now Show.

Of course, you’ll all know of this already, thanks to its plug on Show 12 of The Stage/TPN Fringe podcast. You have been listening, haven’t you? If not, subscribe now in iTunes. As I type this, we’re at no. 11 in the Arts chart and with a few more subscribers we could well go Top Ten!

Oh, and if you haven’t been lucky enough to catch Toby live, here’s a taster of his live set:

As usual, Martin Stabe is the guy to go to for all things related to new media journalism.

His post of August 1, Essential reading for online journalism, contains links that say all the sort of things that we should keep in our heads at all times. Sometimes, though, when you have your head down because you’re stumbling from one minor job to the other, you can lose track of what route you should be taking.

Of course, it doesn’t help if you have people in your organisation who seem to be working to a completely different map…

So since I relaunched the site, I’ve been monitoring which pages have been triggering the most 404 Page Not Found errors, and have ported a selection across to the new site. I definitely prefer doing it this way, even though it’s more labour intensive: I’m ending up with a clean blog with much less cruft.

Unfortunately, as part of the whole cleanup operation I’ve scrapped my original Feedburner feed, which was sharing an account with various feeds I’d set up for The Stage. So it means I’m effectively going to be building up a regular audience from scratch, which I suppose is no bad thing in its own way.

Anyway, to celebrate this blog being back on its own two feet, I’ve published Requiem for a Songbird, a Doctor Who short story I wrote for Big Finish’s open submissions competition a couple of months ago. A previous draft of the story has previously appeared on this blog as The Nightingale’s Song, but this pass took on a number of notes I’d received from various authors in the intervening years. I hope you like it.

It was the hardest entrance he’d ever have to do. Walking into the room, confronted by people who were there to celebrate his wife’s death. How could he face them?

Gilbert looked at their faces, full of sympathy for him. No, not sympathy, pity. They were there out of courtesy, friends of the new nightclub owner. Mickey Hamilton. Word was he was the new gangster around these parts. Gilbert sighed — if it were any other day than today, he’d have squared up to him. Told him exactly how the drugs and the dirty money were changing places like this.

On any day but today. Today was different. › Continue reading

Apologies that this blog has been so quiet of late. Most of my spare time has been taken up with either TV Today, or research for the same (yes, yes, that means watching TV). Also, I was recently commissioned for my first piece of professionally published fiction. It’s only a short story, but it’s taken a lot of my time and that isn’t over yet. I had my first set of notes from my editor today, so I have another weekend of rewriting to look forward to. More on that project anon. In the meantime, I do still have all of my old posts, but to be honest most of them are either out of date or were never read by anyone else anyway, so there isn’t much to be lost by trashing all the old links and starting from scratch…

My review of Smith and Jones, the first episode of Doctor Who’s new series, is now online. A review of Any Dream Will Do is to follow.

In something of a departure for TV Today, we’re going to try and review each episode of these series, along with ITV1’s Grease is the Word, every Saturday. This is straying into the sort of territory that blogs like TV Scoop do so well, but each series in its own way is an illustration of the strength of Saturday night television — a beast who, just a few years ago, was on the brink of extinction.

I was lucky enough to bag Lesley Garrett as my first full-length interview for my first professional podcast, which is now available via The Stage. Primarily taking about her new album, When I Fall In Love, Lesley talks about her experiences on reality TV — as a judge, a contestant, and the show which chose The Sound of Music’s primary star, Connie Fisher, was chosen via the BBC series How DO You Solve A Problem Like Maria?

Lesley also talks about the challenges faced when talking about recording arias in foreign languages versus English, and the effect those songs have had on people who have communicated those songs back to her.

I don’t know how many podcasts in the series I’ll be directly hosting — I suspect it’ll be however many that others opt out of In any event, public comments can be posted http://www.thestage.co.uk/podcasts/ or, if you want a little privacy, you can email them to podcasts@thestage.co.uk.

In my personal blogging, I seem to have hit a low point recently. After weeks where I’ve been busy at work, but doing nothing that was really worth talking about, I’m now in a position where I’m doing interesting stuff, but even busier, so I have even less time to talk about it even if I wanted to.

On Tuesday, the TMA kindly invited me to their day-long seminar on Online Marketing. This was because, in one of the morning sessions, Kath Moonan from AbilityNet was going to talk about building accessibile websites, and wanted to use The Stage as an example.

Thankfully, she was pretty complimentary about it. In an illuminating and humorous talk, she described how there was a trinity of elements that are important to a holistic view of good web accessibility:

• Content: Clear, easy to understand, jargon-free text.
• Design: Clear, high-contrast text, with all images described in their alt attributes, etc.
• Markup: Semantically structured HTML, with proper use of headings, lists, etc.

In the Venn diagram she used to illustrate how these concepts linked, Kath was kind enough to place The Stage in the intersection of all three - “sitting,” she said, “like Buddha, in the middle, contemplating the Zen-like joy of having an accessible website”. Nice.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we should rest easy. There are plenty of things that we can, and should, do better. Kath brought up some pointers that I was already aware of, and am in the process of rolling out into our revamped pages, but there were plenty that were fresh concepts to me. I hadn’t, for instance, considered whether our Hamlet cartoons should have longdesc descriptions of the cartoon’s plot. That’ll be one that will take a while to implement: we currently don’t have the scope to store any metadata on each cartoon. However, adding metadata —specifically, tagging each strip so that we can direct people from, say, news stories to relevant strips, and back again — is already on our future projects list, so adding additional metadata can be incorporated into the development process.

Also, I hadn’t really appreciated that low-contrast elements are less likely to affect visually impaired users (who may well use screen readers, customised style sheets or other methods to tweak websites to make them easier to use) than they are people with dyslexia or other learning difficulties. Talking to my boss, he recalled a report that suggested there was a higher level of dyslexia among the arts community than in other professions, so that’s certainly something we shall be looking at.

Luckily, we have a new web developer, James, starting next week, so I won’t be facing issues like this on my own anymore. We’ve already discussed the need to start adopting a formal testing framework, rather than the ad hoc system I’ve been lucky enough to get away with to date. To be honest, that’s one reason why I find Rails so appealing, because it makes it difficult to justify not formally testing everything. As we move over, I’ll be doing my best to ensure that accessibility testing can, as much as practicable, be included in all our automated tests — although, of course, automated testing is never going to be enough.

One of the areas we were pulled up on was markup on our advertising. Unfortunately, I think this is one area where we’re unlikely to be able to make much headway. The vast majority of our advertising is pulled in from third party websites — we insert a piece of supplied Javascript, which in turn generates, and inserts into the page, HTML markup that, in many cases, is woeful. Now, we may be a big fish within the UK arts community, but in the scheme of Google’s AdSense publishers (to name just one example) I suspect we’re small fry. It won’t hurt to ask, but I suspect we won’t have much luck getting stuff changed.

Earlier this week, I submitted my entry for Big Finish’s Doctor Who short story competition. The closing date is tomorrow, January 31, and I don’t know how long it’ll be until I hear who beat me (such confidence, I know).

I ditched the original short story I tried writing for the competition, as I realised that it was really a Tenth-Doctor-and-Rose story that I was trying to shoehorn into an earlier incarnation to fit into BF’s licensing restrictions. And it was very obvious — there’s a tangible difference in style between the Doctor’s relationship with Rose and that of previous companions. So, after many failed rewrites, I put that story to one side. Maybe it’ll resurface one day, in some form.

The first draft of the story I ended up submitting was written some seven years ago. Thanks to the internet, it’s possible to read it as it was then if you dig around (on this site and elsewhere). I’m not going to link to it just yet, for superstitious reasons more than anything: I think the new version, which has been substantially rewritten, is a big improvement. To highlight that earlier, inferior draft wouldn’t feel right.

As soon as I get confirmation that somebody better has won, I’ll publish the new version here.

Update: The tale I submitted, Requiem for a Songbird, is now online.

Must do more blogging over here, I really must.

In the meantime, a review of last night’s The London Nail Bomber over on my work blog. It’s pretty much the angriest review I’ve ever done (save for previous drafts of the same review). I guess programmes which wilfully stop short of excellence push those sort of buttons for me.