I'd never seen The Prisoner, but I knew a few bits about it - including the ending. So when it started on ITV a couple of weeks ago I was keen to see what it was like, on the basis that if I liked it, maybe I'd like the original and if I didn't like it, then maybe I'd like the original.

So far I've found it to be alright, but not that gripping and quite slow. But I want to find out how they're going to end it and it's only six episodes, so I'm definitely going to keep watching.

And then ITV4 showed the original. Which I had to watch on ITV Player because I didn't found out until two hours after it was on (amazing, something I want to watch actually being on there!). Annoyingly my netbook does sound but no picture, but the laptop's happy. And it doesn't have adverts, which is good and unexpected.

So after having seen the first episode (which excitingly had Paul Eddington (Jim Hacker in Yes, Minister) and George Baker (Inspector Wexford) in) I have to say that I prefer the original. It's more exciting and it's more realistic. The new one has the residents of the village refuse to admit that anything outside of it exists, whereas in the original they know it does, but they can't leave. And it doesn't have as many people - it comes across as really odd in the new version that he's Number 6 when the people go up to Number 554 or whatever.

And it reminds me of The Avengers because it was made in the 60s so it just has a similar style and feel.

Although The Bill moved to Tuesdays, as far as I'm concerned, it's actually on at dinnertime on a Wednesday because I'm never in on a Tuesday.

So I've just watched last night's and not far into it I thought to myself that one of the main characters on it looked suspiciously like Lee Ross, who played Kenny in Press Gang. Much as I was tempted to skip to the end, I thought the easiest way to find out would be to look on the website. Except that this episode doesn't seem to exist! They list the last one as being on 20th April and the next one on the 4th May. Where did the 27th April go, I wonder?

I spent the episode trying to convince myself it wasn't him - the character he was playing was 10 in 1987 and without looking it up, I know Lee Ross must be older than that. But it was him. I was quite impressed I recognised him, but there's definitely something in the face that hasn't changed in twenty years.

I'm amazed at the moment at just how good The Bill is. So many episodes have me on tenterhooks it's almost like watching early episodes of Spooks, except instead of wondering if everyone's going to die, you're wondering if they're going to work out what happened and whodunnit. I can't believe they're cancelling now, when it's good again.

After writing a few drabbles for fandoms I was one short on being eligible for for Remix, I remembered how much I like writing drabbles. And how little writing I'd done up to that point.

Then I remembered how tanaqui had written a drabble a day for a year. Twice. I'm not that crazy, so I'm just going to write a drabble a day for the month of May.

In some respects it's a terrible month to pick: I have remix to write and read, the election will mean not getting much sleep, the French Open starts at the end of the month and last but not least, it has 31 days in it. But it does at least have two bank holidays. And June has three weeks of tennis in it.

So what I need are some prompts! Because I'll never be able to think up 31 drabbles on my own. As I write them I'll post them to my fanfic archive on my website, which is automatically cross-posted to pa_fic if anyone wants to follow that to check I'm doing it. I might well do a weekly roundup here.

Fandoms I'll be writing in: anything I know really, even if I haven't written in it before. If I really can't do any prompt for any reason I'll let you know - although there's nothing to stop anyone putting in more than one prompt.

I was thinking I ought to post as it's been a while and then thought, what do I have to say? I feel like I do nothing at the moment. Which is mostly true. I have a social life on Tuesdays with Rotaract. Last Tuesday we went bowling. I did pretty well and didn't get too dizzy - but I did have to walk up to the lane with the ball in both hands, bend down, make sure I wasn't going to fall over, then throw the ball.

I feel quite good at the moment, which is pretty much related to work calming down and me getting some sleep. I keep going through phases of waking up at 6 or 6.30 and if you do it occasionally then you could argue that you didn't need that much sleep. But when you keep doing it and get tireder and tireder and have to go to bed earlier and earlier, that's not a help. So far this week I've only woken up at 6.30am twice, and once dreamed I had, which was a bit surreal.

Since I actually have a brain for a change, I have managed two drafts of my Remix fic. I'm quite excited about it and quite happy with it, so hopefully I'll get it finished soon, before I start feeling terrible again. Staying up late for the election in two weeks isn't going to help with that, but that's life.

I have decided that Sports Resort is my new favourite game on the Wii. I love archery on it - you hold the remote in your left hand and pull the bow back with the nunchuck, so it's much more like archery in real life. It keeps your progress like Wii Sports does, so you can see how you're improving (or not in tennis in my case), but there are other goals you can get (like getting 10s with your three arrows in archery for example), which makes it fun.

Speaking of, I think I'll go and do some Wii playing now, before HIGFNY and Outnumbered...

I've been meaning to make some more multi-character icons for a while. Then today LJ announced that you can buy 5 more userpic spaces for £1.20 for a year and all of a sudden I can have three more and don't have to find two to take out. And can carry on using one.

So I now have six icons with three characters of the same name on. There aren't any bonus points for being able to name them all - not least because I don't think there's anyone reading this that will know which series all of these characters come from. And if you're looking at this on DW they have an extra field on the icons page that will tell you all the surnames of the people pictured.

But I felt the need to display the set: Read more...

After a week I'm now sick of the election. Or rather, what I'm sick of is listening to politicians fail to answer questions. Although there was an amusing moment the other day when I was listening to the news on my way home, wasn't quite concentrating and thought Nick Clegg was Tony Robinson... Chris Addison has an amusing blog about it all. After my post about not being able to decide who to vote for I discovered the BBC website has a page where you can look at the policies of three parties side by side. So I spent a whole two days as an undecided, and decided to vote for the same party I decided I would have voted for in 1997 had the election been a week later.

I got my remix assignment and the person I'm remixing has mostly written in fandoms I know. So I could write pretty much anything. I've been skim-reading and I think I've decided, but reserve the right to change my mind.

I've discovered I'm intolerant to all gluten, although I can eat quite a bit of it. At this rate I'll be intolerant to all food in ten years time. If they could just invent a pill to take every day that means you don't have to eat that would do me. Although I'd forget to take it half the time...

I couldn't decide whether or not to go and see the new Alice in Wonderland film. I'd seen pictures and knew it was Tim Burton, so I knew it was going to be weird. Given that Alice in Wonderland is my favourite book, I was either going to love it or hate it. My sister thought it was "alright", so I thought I'd go and see it this afternoon.

The cinema was nice and empty. The 3D glasses cost me 80p(!) and say on them that you should only wear them in theatres. So I shouldn't have been wearing them in the cinema... The thing with 3D glasses is they used to be cardboard with red and green coloured eyes. Now they're proper plastic glasses, which don't work well over glasses. So my nose really hurt. And the 3D didn't add anything - it was completely pointless, but there wasn't an option of seeing it in 2D.

The film itself was a bit of a case of spot-the-actor. Alice's mum was Lindsay Duncan. I spent the film trying to work out why I recognised Hamish - it turns out he was in the first series of Ashes to Ashes, which I watched recently. And I eventually worked out that Alice's brother-in-law was a copper, but I had to look it up to discover he was one of the Sergeants in Midsomer Murders.

I liked it more than the SyFy version - although that did turn Alice into an American, which I object to in principle. They both used the same bits of the books and missed out some of the best bits - like The Walrus and the Carpenter for instance.

My two complaints with it were that the young Alice looked like a doll and they kept calling the Jobberwock the Jabberwocky. To the extent where I thought maybe I was wrong, but I looked it up when I got home and it is the poem that is called Jabberwocky, the creature in it is a Jabberwock. That's quite hard to get wrong if they'd just read the books!

All in all it was alright, but they took a lot of the childish mystery out of it. They turned croquet into a horrible sport that hurt the hedgehog and that's not what it's all about. I'd say that the books are much better, but that's always going to be the case, really.

I keep meaning to blog more than I do but I never seem to be able to muster up the energy at the same time as thinking of something I want to say. Or more accurately, remembering what I thought about blogging when I didn't have the time.

So I thought I'd talk about the general election Gordon Brown has very kindly given me for my birthday. Isn't that good of him? It's not going to make me vote Labour, though. More accurately, I don't know who I'm going to vote for - I've never had that problem before.

In my old constituency there were four people on the ballot. Labour and the other one (it varied as to what the other one was) got so few votes they might not have got their deposit back (I can't remember where the cut off is). So the choice was between Conservative and Liberal Democrat, which isn't much of a choice at all. And it was important to vote to get rid of/keep the Tory out.

(There are many reasons not to vote Conservative - I'm not rich or posh for a start. But the most important reason is that they purposely denied me the vote in 1997 and that's something they can never make up for. If, at some point during this campaign, they mention they were in power for eighteen years, they're lying. If they'd been in power for eighteen years I'd have been able to vote.)

Here, things are a bit different. I haven't got round to finding out who might be on the ballot in the constituency I now live in, but there are more than four people. The one at the top is Conservative because there are far too many rich people here. From everything I've heard it sounds like he's actually a decent bloke and a good MP. If he was Independent I'd probably quite happily vote for him. However, he's a Tory, so I can't.

Below him, the vote is split equally between Labour and Lib Dem, so there's no way they're ever going to topple the Tory and I can't vote for one or the other on that basis. I have to vote - partially because I missed out once due to my age, I'm not going to miss out again. And also because if you don't vote you don't get to have an opinion on how the country is run.

So if I'm going to throw my vote away, I might as well vote for the party whose policies I agree with most. It's such a strange thing, all of a sudden, to not be sure. I need to do some research on the internet, but I don't intend to watch the Leadership debate next Thursday. I don't think that seeing three men not answering questions and behaving like children will endear me to any of them somehow...