Vexed should have been good, given it's by Howard Overman, the writer of the excellent ASBO superpowers series Misfits, and it stars Toby Stephens. And the plot outline - a series of murders of women whose Nectar card purchase records revealed them to be single and desperate - was novel without being gimmicky. But the odd couple cop dynamic, and the general silliness, felt too blatantly like a sketch show riff on Ashes to Ashes, and an hour of that gets wearing.

Fairly quiet weekend all in all, except for Saturday, when steve586 hosted a Matt Smith marathon during the day, followed by a party for a more general crowd come evening (the tone of conversation later was probably more disturbing, but that may just be because some of us had been drinking for eight hours by that point). Conclusions on rewatching just over half of Series 31 of Doctor Who:
Perception filters are rather overused, being one of the more common triggers in Steve's drinking game.
'The Beast Below' does have some wonderful moments, but the basic set-up still stinks, being the sort of half-coherent idea one expects from RTD, but not from Moffat.
I think River Song is going to be the cause of Matt Smith's regeneration into 'her' Doctor. That killing - taken by most for genuine murder - is what lands her in Stormcage.
And Matt Smith's central performance is even better second time around.

The late Simon Gray is now known mainly for his Smoking Diaries, but the reason his diaries were getting published in the first place was his plays. I just watched Butley, a film with Alan Bates and Harold Pinter reprising their stage roles as star and director, and it's fairly entertaining but the stage origins do show; there's a sort of larger than life performance which is always going to seem a bit blunt when you're not watching it from rows away. Bates as Butley is essentially Withnail if he'd become a lecturer; forever on the piss, doing his best to avoid the students, dragging his friends and lovers down with him...but at his age, that bilious, boozy self-destructiveness is not so endearing anymore.