I've only mentioned Primeval once this series, early on, when I worried that the changes to the format meant it was losing its charm. But over the past few weeks it's become increasingly clear that I should post again to say - I was wrong. I have no idea how long they can keep this up, but the past few episodes have shown a delightful determination to leave no stone of bonkersness unturned. They've not totally ditched the format - each week is still likely to feature a dinosaur or similar turning up through a hole in time or 'anomaly', rampaging around outer London eating stuff, and then being foiled by Our Heroes. But oh, such flexibility they've found in that format. The team has been shaken up - not least by having one of the main characters unexpectedly killed, in a mid-series episode where you're initially certain that there will be a way out of that - and there isn't. Jason Flemyng is not a great actor by any means, but he has the right sort of puppyish enthusiasm for a role where you get to eg bait dinosaurs with helicopters.
Two weeks ago, the plot formulated a situation whereby it made sense for Our Heroes to be running around some woods, unarmed, being chased by prehistoric killer ostriches against whom the only defence was dodging through a minefield. Last week, we got a double anomaly: a dinosaur turns up in the Middle Ages, and then the dinosaur and the knight who has of course taken it for a dragon end up in a modern wrecker's yard, which the knight not unreasonably decides is Hell. And that was all before the first ad break, it got stranger after that. Tomorrow, it looks like we're headed off to the post-apocalyptic future to which anomalies open up whenever they need a creature so outlandish that even the vast bestiaries of the past cannot supply it. And while I've never used ITV's iPlayer equivalent, it seems to have four episodes of Primeval available at a time. Give one a try.

So, in a clear effort to confound the suggestion that Final Crisis is just a bloated and less compelling rewrite of his own JLA: Rock of Ages, it was nice to see Grant Morrison ( spoilers ) Really - he's better than this, and he must know that.
Also in comics this week (and last, I missed a pick-up):
- delightful Anglophile teen comedy Blue Monday finally returns! Hoorah!
- Warren Ellis makes an ill-advised attempt to tie Doktor Sleepless to Freakangels!
- Pete Wisdom kills furries!

The Natural History museum is far too interactive and accessible nowadays. If I want a moving, roaring dinosaur, I shall go to a theme park, and for all that I respect Zoids and Grimlock, they do not belong in the dinosaur room of a major museum.
The glyptodon (it's an armadillo the size of a small car!), the strokeable meteoric iron and some of the loopier gem formations are still lovely, though.

America: thank you. And thank you BBC for coverage which trounced any of the US networks', not just in the increasingly irascible presenters but in the quality of talking heads. Jay Macinerney looking old! Gore Vidal looking even older! An atypically sober but still venomous Christopher Hitchens eviscerating Elizabeth Dole was good, but Simon Schama's effortless superiority when faced with The Bad John Bolton, his spurious outrage and his improbable moustache was even better. I was worried that starting the evening with the Vichy Government's annual London show might be bad juju, particularly when their new song 'The Man Delusion' echoes my own fears about humanity's inherent limitations, but last night, the US - or enough of it, at least - rose above that. Not enough that there wasn't some booing from McCain's viler supporters as he conceded - which, to his credit, he was having none of (like Michael Howard, nothing became his political career so well as his leaving of it). But against that - well, like the man said, we have the audacity of hope. Also: new puppy! Bless.

Also - RIP Michael Crichton. You may have been a climate change denier, but DINOSAURS! Also ROBOTS!

I used to respect Tom Hodgkinson; once the Idler was the best magazine going, and How To Be Idle remains (for the most part) a valuable work of political philosophy mis-filed as humour. Alas, of late he has become one of the tinfoil hat brigade, retailing tired cliches about mobile 'phones as enslavers and the like. And he really doesn't like Facebook. Shockingly, a major company has shareholders who are a bit right-wing! Not homophobes or religious nuts like run half the public transport in Britain, mind - but a utopian who's all in favour of life-extension and the Singularity. Which is a bad thing, apparently. No, don't ask me how. Oh, and apparently it's really, like Big Brother, man! that Facebook's privacy policy says "You understand and acknowledge that, even after removal, copies of user content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other users have copied or stored your user content." Because obviously if Facebook kept a record of anyone who'd ctrlC'd any of your content, and deleted that when you deleted the original, that would be in no way Big Brother-esque, would it?
Tosser.

ITV are really going for the big push, aren't they? OK, so their best show, Entourage, shows no sign of returning from its baffling mid-season hiatus, but that's an import. Their best home-grown, and the best thing they have on terrestrial, is Primeval, which restarted on Saturday. Kingdom is probably the weakest Stephen Fry offering in some time, but it's still Stephen Fry and thus better than almost anything on ITV; that came back Sunday. Royal dramedy The Palace looks like it might be half-decent, but it's scheduled opposite City of Vice (Henry Fielding fights crime - WITH WIGS!), so I shall probably never know. Oh, and there was Moving Wallpaper, wasn't there? That should have been good. I loved the idea of making a new soap, and then having a sitcom set behind the scenes of the soap, even before I knew Ben Miller was starring in it. They've also got a couple of Absolute Power alumni, and therein lies their problem - media in-jokes only appeal to a niche audience, and Absolute Power does them much better, even in the episodes written by Smug Slug*. The show has been infected with that terrible ITVitis (the disease which atrophies human acting and scripting ability even in the gifted). On top of which, they've absolutely blown it by showing Moving Wallpaper right before the soap whose production it shows/undermines, on the same channel. Echo Beach belongs on ITV1, channel of choice for the undiscriminating cudlip. The sly dig at it should not be interfering with their evening of cathode ray grazing - it should be tucked away on ITV2. Same slot, so people who want the pair reflecting on each other can still have the experience - but you should have to work for it, if only in the sense of changing channel.
Not that ITV are the only people launching inept sitcoms, of course. Consider Never Better on C4, with Guy from Green Wing once again playing a less amusing variation on the same character. But for heavens' sake don't consider it for very long, life is short and there is so much better stuff you could be watching. Or indeed, appearing in; his Green Wing brother Martin has been openly retconned into Primeval, which somehow evades ITVitis and continues to kick arse. Motorbike chases with velociraptors in a shopping centre? 'Sound of Thunder' time travel messes used to mess with the lead's head *and* sex up the set-up? Hannah S Club with a gun? I'm sold.

Have been listening to A Cellarful of Motown volume 3 a fair bit lately. It's volume 3 of a label rarities compilation and it doesn't have a single dud on it; how many labels can say that, and how many volumes would it take Motown before they started scraping the barrel? Which is not to say I love them all equally - 'Uptight' aside I never really got Stevie Wonder, and Carolyn Crawford's 'Too Young Too Long' is a bit reminiscent of the song at the end of Brass Eye's Paedogeddon - but not one track sucks. I find myself especially drawn to 'Loving You (Is Hurting Me)' but that may just be because it's credited to the Fantastic Four, so I picture it soundtracking another of those painful Reed/Sue/Namor love triangle scenes.

An interesting if grouchy piece on Marvel and DC notes that both companies, as corporate entities, place a vanishingly small amount of their emphasis on the ongoing publication of comics (against which, part of me is thrilled to see DC describe itself as the home of "such popular characters as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and The Sandman". Gaiman's boy in with the Trinity already...). And the scorn directed at the concept of an Ant-Man film is definitely misplaced when you recall that Edgar Wright has been named in connection with the project. But this ties in with something I was thinking about before christmas, except I see it as cause for rejoicing if only the message could be filtered up the line. To wit:
It doesn't matter what happens in the comics.
Corporate superhero properties have, as a rule, been reined in by a fear of hurting the brand. The theory goes that if little Tommy sees the new Batman film, and he then picks up a Batman comic at the drugstore/newsagent, it should to some degree tally with what he saw on screen. So Batman has to be Bruce Wayne (this has already nixed one of Grant Morrison's rumoured plans for the forthcoming Final Crisis).
Except drugstores and newsagents don't carry comics anymore, or if they do it's one of the reprint titles with 'classic' material. So it doesn't matter what's happening in the comics in the comic shops. Because if little Tommy goes in there, the retailer would be a mug to sell him the latest issue of the monthly. Give him one of the trades of the classics. If he says 'goddamn' a lot, give him All-Star Batman. If he's blatantly a goth, Arkham Asylum. I'm hard-pressed to think exactly what sort of little Tommy you'd need to think that giving him the monthly would be a remotely wise idea. So in the monthly, just let Grant Morrison do whatever the Hell the little voices are telling him, and everyone's happy!

Live Free Or Die Hard (fvck the UK title) is basically the same plot as Die Hard With A Vengeance + The Interweb, isn't it? Not that I'm complaining. And Die Harder is a great film overall, but definitely has the least compelling villain.

*He tries to pass for human by the name 'Mark Lawson', but does it really fool anyone?

It's not often that I enjoy a club where I barely know any of the music, but it's lovely when it does work. Computer Blue used to be one, all those strange electronic sounds forming an alternate track of pop history which at the time was a total closed book to me. And Nashville-on-Thames last night was another. I recognised the Johnny Cash song and 'Walking After Midnight', and that was it. But the great thing about country is the stories; if you don't know the song then you don't know the ending, so you get a new drama every four minutes. The live band were great too; The Blazing Zoos are travel/music journalist Andrew Mueller, two of Jesus Jones and two other blokes gone country, with a repertoire ranging from the self-referential ("Always wanted to write a country song but I never had a girl who done me wrong, no I never had the material 'til now") to the outlandish - as I say, I'm no expert, but I'm guessing there aren't many country songs about Albania.

I taped the first Primeval, but I was pretty sure I'd abandon it before the end of the episode. Unusually, I was wrong. I'm not saying it was the best thing I've ever seen, but unusually for a modern ITV programme, it didn't seem to have been aimed at an audience of retards. Ben Miller aside (and oh, how he has fallen) the actors were actually *acting*! The script only occasionally collapsed into imbecility! The effects weren't risible! And while I was initially sceptical about the creatures they were using, turns out that even the improbable winged one was real - so extra props to them for using obscurities rather than the usual suspects. Scenes which could have been hammered home were instead left to speak for themselves - cf the dinosaur-obsessed kid terrified by a real dinosaur, a well-made point you could equally play out with vikings, knights or pirates. The anomaly and the Permian were done vastly better than I'd expected (and comics readers - is it just me or does the anomaly look a lot like Wildstorm's Snowflake?) - oh, and Hannah S Club, of whom I'd never taken much notice before, appears to have become incredibly hot. I approve, and shall be continuing with this (although I'm still glad that it's only running six episodes, rather than 13 - not least so as Who clashes won't be an issue).

Is the Olympics really not enough sports-related waste and misery for one decade in one country?