Still awake at 6.30am, I decide it’s not worth sleeping, at least until I’ve taken my Tac, which I’ll need to grab in a couple of hours as it’ll just make me feel worse, so I pootle around the house doing not very much and watching Rocky Balboa still.
K wakes up about 10.30 and joins me in the living room, where I’m busy working on a short film script I’m hoping to put into preproduction next week for a mid-Feb shoot. K showers and has breakfast while I work on her computer (I couldn’t be bothered to move through to the study to work on mine, plus I’m enjoying having the TV on in the background while I work), then I trade the computer for the bathroom and relax in a deep, hot bath to try to revive myself.
We head out about 12 and pop to the shops to grab some flowers for our hosts for lunch and pick up a Christmas pressie package from the Post Office depot in Bletchley, before heading over to Li’l R’s for lunch with him and the fam.
We have a gorgeous lunch of slow-cooked beef which just comes apart at the touch of a fork and truly melts in the mouth, before enjoying a 2-course desert. After lunch we watch the most random comedy sketch in the world which has us all in hoots of laughter. The family have just been to Sweden and apparently this ancient 50’s or 60’s comedy sketch is traditional viewing over Christmas for almost all of Scandinavia. I’m amazed we have never seen it here and am determined to track it down.
I say “track it down” but it only takes a perfunctory YouTube search to come up with this – absolute genius. While we’re on YouTube, we are also shown a few other gems of random content, including this masterful Harry Potter homage/fantasy/mickey-take.
We get up from the sofas and head back to the dining room where we play a game of Humbugs, the most embarrassing game in the history of the world (even more so than Charades) and then Boggle while we wait eagerly for the anouncement of the new Doctor to replace David Tennant.
We sit and spend the majority of the programme trying to second-guess it, ut we’ll all entirely wrong. Matt Smith is a shock at first, looking slightly “individual” as he does, but listening to the interview and remembering his performance in Party Animals, a favourite show of mine that I sadly missed a lot of and has never returned, I think he could be an inspired choice.
The most important thing about him, I think, is that he’s going to be happy to risk things and take his own line with it, not try to follow anyone else’s footsteps. It must be incredibly hard to join a series like this after two powerful and individual performances like Tennant’s and Christopher Eccleston’s, but I think Matt Smith my have the right angle on it to make it his own.
That said, I do think he’s going to end up being a Marmite doctor – you’ll either love him or hate him.
We head off after the prog and get home to chill out for the evening, trying to put on Ben Shepard’s new Krypton Factor, but our Sky+ went screwy so we don’t have it. We fall back on the Top Gear Vietnam special, which gives us a good, pre-bed giggle, after which we hit the sack early and cuddle and chat until 10ish, when we both break out a book (how exciting) although I only get a few pages through before my eyes start closing, hardly surprising given I’ve only had an hour’s sleep from the last 36 hours.