State of the Blog: The Doctor called, The Prisoner escapes, box-office, adverts and italics

April's been a fantastic month for DMD! I got to interview Matt Smith and Karen Gillan last night -- the new stars of Doctor Who! That definitely ranks as one of the best moments to come as a direct result of my efforts here. I almost managed to get an interview with Steven Moffat, too, but it wasn't to be. Maybe I'll catch him while promoting this year's Christmas special. We'll have to see.

So yes, that big interview was the "Secret News" I mentioned last week. I'm hoping the interview will go up at Ain't It Cool News either tomorrow or Saturday, and I'll be mirroring it here. Keep an eye out. Oh, and because I was busy doing those interviews last night, I didn't get to see V or Mad Men, so both reviews will have to wait until Friday/Saturday.

The Prisoner remake also arrives, finally, on ITV(HD) this Saturday @9.30pm, so the review I've been sitting on for 5-months will be up for Sunday. It's a biggie (1,400 words) covering the six-part series as a whole, with minor spoilers I think people can deal with, but it's up to you if you want to read it after episode 1 of wait for ITV to air the whole thing. It'll be interesting to see what the ratings are like, as the show was a bit of a dud Stateside and episodes ran across three consecutive days on AMC (almost as if they had no faith in the show retaining a weekly viewership.) I don't watch much ITV nowadays, so have there been enough adverts to draw peoples' attention to it? If I was Joe Public, I'm not sure I'd know or care that it's on, which is a pity.

Also thought I'd mention that the Box Office Charts element of DMD has fallen by the wayside of late, partly because I don't have time, and partly because those posts never seemed to get much comment. As a staple of DMD for years, I think it's time to rest something that never really made much impact - but I hope you enjoyed them while they lasted. They were never "unpopular" per se, just never inspired anything and took a bit of effort to write for no worthwhile outcome. So, I won't be continuing them.

Also, rules about adverts are there to be obeyed, but I thought I'd sneakily draw your attention to ads in the sidebar and hyperlinks in certain movie reviews supplied by a certain Japanese manufacturer. Ahem. No pressure, seriously, but if you'd like to help DMD in a more financial way (pennies, but it all helps), then you know where to click. Sssh.

A few people have asked me how they do italics when commenting. You simply sandwich your text with < i > and < /i > (without the spaces). It's handy to do that when quoting a previous commenter, I find. Hope that helps. The Disqus software probably recognizes other HTML tags to do fancy things with your text, if you want to experiment. < b > and < / b > puts something in bold, < strike > and < / strike > puts a line through text, etc.