After about four months in development, it’s time for the fifth Penny Dreadfuls show at the Edinburgh Fringe. And once again I’ve selected a totally boss soundtrack.

It’s back aboard the sketch train this year, but we’re still contemporary so there’s some pretty amazing beats rocking our scene breaks – in particular I’ve been able to indulge my fondness for electro/glitch/mashup nonsense as well as the usual film and game scores:

“Arriving At Jacinto” – Gears of War 2, Steve Jablonsky
“Hero” – Kung Fu Panda, Hans Zimmer & John Powell
“Bulletproof” – La Roux
“Playgirl” – Ladytron
“Tuff ‘n Stuff” – Yes Giantess
“Genesis” – Justice
“You’re The Best” – Joe “Bean” Esposito
“Go To Hell” – Doom, Clint Mansell
“‘Introduction’ From Suite Punta Del Este” – 12 Monkeys, Paul Buckmaster
“Vanished” – Crystal Castles
“Suffocation” – Crystal Castles
We use the theme to Lingo (season 2) for What’s In The Box?
“The Normandy” – Mass Effect, Jack Wall & Sam Hulick
“I Was Made For A Heavy Cross [Kiss vs Gossip] – Copycat
“Las Vegas / End Credits” – Rain Man, Hans Zimmer
“Cole’s Fourth Dream” – 12 Monkeys, Paul Buckmaster
“Sunshine (Adagio In D Minor)” – Sunshine, John Murphy & Underworld
“Gorillas!” – Mirrormask, Iain Ballamy

I’ve used our preshow house music to really get the tempo up with some of my very favourite glitchy/grimey bits and pieces:

“Zero” – Yeah Yeah Yeahs
“Cold Hot Emotional [Katy Perry vs Whitney Houston]” – Mark Johnce
“Mr Crowley Might Like It Louder [Dada, Obernick & Harris vs Ossy Osbourne vs Amanda Blank vs Major Lazer ft Nicky Sky & Ricky Blaze]” – Mark Johnce
“Bubblicious” – Rex The Dog
“Black Fag (no version)” – Crystal Castles

The crowning glory is almost our postshow noise, with the insanely catchy instrumental version of Ricardo Autobahn’s video mashup extravaganza, followed by the wonderfully thumping music to the Inception trailer:

“The Golden Age Of Video [instrumental]” – Ricardo Autobahn
“Mind Heist” – Zack Hemsey

I’m extremely pleased to have part of Sunshine in there (something I’m increasingly comfortable calling my favourite piece of music ever), and I’ve finally managed to get Zimmer’s stonkingly bobbins 80′s score to Rain Man crowbar’d into a show. Plus there’s montage music straight out of The Karate Kid, so everyone’s a winner.

Do pop along to see us if you’ve got a moment – we’re on all month in Pleasance One. There are funny bits and awesome tunes.

UPDATE: Our Superstar Producer Idil assembled a Spotify playlist, which I’ve added to with as much as we can find on there.

The first problem was what scale to use – the largest page size available for layout was about 5.4m wide, but with 755 episodes to include it was still going to be a squeeze. I allocated 1mm for every five minutes of screen time, so a standard 25 minute episode would get half a centimeter. Not an enormous amount of resolution, but enough to illustrate the basics. The final chart is 5.08m by 4.27m, although it could certainly be shrunk down for printing, perhaps to about 2m wide, and retain enough detail.

Stumbling block number 2: there’s no canon for the Doctor Who universe – nobody in charge has ever set anything in stone and the nature of a series about time travel puts a rather large spanner into attempts to say what did or didn’t “officially” happen. Better minds than I have argued the case against a definite Whoniverse, so I just decided to carve off an identifiable chunk to study: the live-action televised bits (minus a few odds and ends).

Next, I went for a “what seems to make most sense” approach with regards to the names of certain stories and characters (Susan’s surname almost certainly isn’t “Foreman”, right?). And on the subject of companions, I have my own idea of who is and who isn’t.

The chart takes the form of a timeline, with incarnations of the Doctor and companions presented in order of appearance. It indicates whether the Doctor is in the past, the contemporary present or the future (although certain stories make for quite limited accuracy in some cases, and I’ve broadly ignored the terrifying horrors of the UNIT dating controversy), and features the recurring adversaries of the Daleks, Cybermen and the Master.

It demonstrates that, as a companion, you have a 9.4% chance of ending up dead (not too bad, considering), and that 14% of all episodes are missing from the archives. And it illustrates the gender gap in companioning:

The background was looking a trifle bare, but fortunately the Hubble Space Telescope produces some wonderful, extremely high-resolution images of the cosmos. The one I’ve used in the chart is a montage of the Orion Nebula, and is available in sizes up to 18,000 x 18,000 pixels; thanks to NASA and the ESA these images are copyright free and available for use.

Anyway, here it is: Doctor Who: A Relativity Matrix (v1.0) ♐
It’s a PDF, about 3.2MB, 5.08m x 4.27m – I’ve given up on getting Flickr to accept an enormous JPEG, and a lot of things seem to choke on converting it.

Obviously all Doctor Who related content is ™ and © to the BBC and various other parties – I’m not attempting to infringe on anyone’s property here!

Chart design is © 2010 by me, but it’s released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike 3.0 license, so please copy, remix & share – let me know if you do anything with it.

Corrections, suggestions, complaints and arguments about Sara Kingdom are very welcome at the usual address: neil at notlikecalvin dot com
There will be updates and additions as the adventures continue.

(Tug o’ the forelock in the direction of David McCandless at informationisbeautiful.net, who produces far prettier stuff than I ever could; the basic section on timeframes in my chart is deliberately unspecific, steering well clear of his work on a (presumiably) more authoritative Doctor Who timeline.)

Aeneas Faversham Forever had it’s first performance all the way back in March at the venerable Bedlam Theatre in Edinburgh, with a quick stop at the Glasgow Comedy Festival. Since then it’s changed a lot and all for the better, if winning Best Comedy at the Brighton Fringe Festival is anything to go by.

This time the boys Dreadful have written an actual play rather than a series of sketches, which certainly makes lighting it a more rewarding experience. We recently held our official Edinburgh previews at the lovely Greenwich Theatre to the largest audiences we’ve ever had and it went down really well. There are still a couple of extra-special final touches that will get added to the production as it makes its way Fringewards, but we’re in great shape.

This week we’re on at the Newbury Comedy Festival, and next week we’ll be in a field somewhere in Suffolk at Latitude. Then it’s up to the wonderful Pleasance Two in Edinburgh for a whole month; please do pop along to laugh at the jokes and gasp at the gobos.

Linkage:
The Penny Dreadfuls / backstage blog
notlikecalvin portfolio
Photo gallery @ Flickr
Book online at edfringe.com

With so much quality on-stage, the show sold out a couple of days in advance, and the Pleasance was packed to the rafters with comedy cognoscente. The Defensive had some brand new material and Pappy’s held a meat raffle. An exhausting, wonderful, amazingly good value-for-money night, which is why we’re doing it again in April. (Although the current naming convention dictates the next one should be called Sketchatron vs Predator, apparently we can’t have that.) Book now!

I was a little too busy to listen live to the third episode of The Brothers Faversham last Friday night (see above), but the fourth and final episode is pushed over the airwaves tonight—you should be able to listen again for the next week. There’s a second series on the way, so I’m told, and the boys are appearing in all sorts of exciting projects in the coming months; keep an eye on the Backstage Diary for info-treats.

A few months ago The Penny Dreadfuls recorded their first radio series—The Brothers Faversham for the BBC. The first episode went out last week on Radio 7, so there’s still time to Listen Again online. It’s a four-part series glistening with comic gems; I’d forgotten just how funny it was, and the edit is some sort of miracle to cram the forty-odd minutes into a half-hour slot without seeming to lose anything.

BBC 7 largely airs repeats of comedy and drama from the archives, so a specially-made new series seems to be getting a nice push from the network—they’ve put up an interview and everything. For the even more inquisitive, my photos from the recordings are available for perusal.

Eagle-eared listeners may recognise The Brothers Faversham‘s theme tune from the live show; Maurice Jarre’s “Fanfare” from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome usually ushers in The Prime Minister, but works really well in the radio series too.

[Nerd note: the online live audio stream of BBC 7 is broadcast in mono, while Listen Again shows are stereo. Goodness knows why, but Listening Again will give you twice as much Faverfun than staying up in the wee hours.]

Content-wise, On Wonderland and Aeneas Faversham Returns now have their own sections, and I’ve added photos from the Off-Broadway run in New York to the Radio gallery.

We took Radio to the Brits Off Broadway festival at the lovely 59E59 theatres in New York City. It was fairly awesome. Sure, the New York Times may not have liked it that much, but they printed one of my photos so that was fairly awesome, too. NYC was a fascinating, enormous place and I’m certainly going back there some day.

The Penny Dreadfuls performed several times in the run-up to the Fringe, including shows at Latitude Festival and a very special send-off gig at the Soho Review Bar (where we learned the shocking truth behind the mechanics of pole dancing!).

Then it was onwards to Edinburgh!

This year Kandinsky presented Gavin O’Carroll’s play On Wonderland. The simple coming-of-age story of a girl who can’t believe her eyes, performed by the quite stunningly talented Kerry-Jayne Wilson, was a very moving little piece in the Baby Belly Caves, almost in the same spot that Enola occupied two years previously. My photographs are at Flickr, but I’ll add them to notlikecalvin soon.

The Dreadfuls were back with the appropriately named Aeneas Faversham Returns (we’re still arguing over the title for next year’s show). We sold out right from the get-go and became something of must-have ticket. The boys performed a variety of guest spots, from Lunch With The Hamiltons to 4 At The Fringe for the BBC, plus an extra-special appearance as Crisp-Off judges for grade-A dudes Stuckey & Murray. There are photos from the show at Flickr, but they’ll get added to my portfolio here at some point.

Sketchatron kept me busy for a couple of days in the Fringe, dealing with tech for a whole bunch of sketch acts. Aside from awakening dormant memories of Chock-A-Block, it was great to see the Sunday Defensive once again. I love those guys. Just not in creepy way.

Then the wonderful Illyria had to pull out of their prime-time slot at the Bedlam; with Tom barely back from New York there was just enough time to MacGuyver together yet another version of Radio for a couple of packed houses to enjoy. Although this was the lowest-teched iteration yet – I stole a lantern from the On Wonderland rig to make it happen on the supercheap – it all went very well, just like the good old days.

I got to see some great bits and pieces, too, although it’s never as much as I’d like. Now everybody’s licking their wounds and making plans for next summer. I’m cobbling together a round-up of this year’s reviews, but it might take a while: I’m off on tour for a couple of months with Inspector Sands‘ lovely Hysteria. I’ll be relighting Katherine Williams‘ design over a lot of different spaces – it’s a great piece of work and an honour to be involved. We’ll be all over the place so do pop along if you’ve got the time.

There’s the usual portfolio here at notlikecalvin, along with larger files at the Flickr photoset, both served with a dash of Creative Commons licensing.

I’m off up to Scotland this weekend, to be Simon’s lighting eyes for the start of the Moussa’s Castle tour at the Lemon Tree in Aberdeen (Simon being distracted on a different continent). I haven’t been to the Granite City since Frozen docked there in December, but I doubt they’ll be too much time for sightseeing.

Coming up: back down to London next week for a rather magical project…

An historic event, and it should be pretty interesting to boot!