You may scoff, but I - and Rich Johnston (to give him his place) have it on rather good authority that Tom Baker will be in Doctor Who in 2010. I’m so confident about this, I did a piece for The Sun (see the PDF below).

And you may scoff, but may I remind you who it was who revealed David Tennant was the 10th Doctor (see the comments section to read that for free), who did the first review of the new series and who revealed that Tennant wouldn’t be using his Scottish accent (most of the time)?

That would have been me. So I’m standing by this one.

And here’s the article as a 3MB PDF…

Looking at The Drum’s Top 100 Scottish Power List - basically the movers and shakers (registration required) - and while there’s some really interesting comments (more later), one piece of news really stuck out.
Placed at Number 65 is the following: Charles McGhee, Editor, Evening Times.
Now given that he handed in his notice from The Herald on Friday - the same day The Drum came out - was this a mistook by The Drum (McGhee edited The Evening Times before he was at The Herald) or does it have a genuine scoop and he’s going back there?

(Yes, the T in the Park stuff’s coming…)
Opened up LinkedIn today to get a nice little surprise in the form of a recommendation from well-known (in the US anyway) writer and publisher Larry Young. Larry and I first met through Warren Ellis and kept in touch - sometimes a lot, sometimes a little, rarely enough - and have chewed the fat over doing some projects together, and it nearly came off once (saying nothing else as it’s still a slowly evolving project for elsewhere).

Anyway, there was a recommendation there for me, that not only made me laugh, but I may just have to find a permanent home for on the front page of here:

“Craig’s command of language allows him to make words dance like teenagers ’round the campfire, enjoying cheap beer and each others’ company on the last day of summer before school starts.”

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to round up those teenagers…

L:T in the Park: Regular cries of ‘amy, amy, amy fucking winehouse’ chanted by girls. Folk think she’s a role model? WTF?

This is a hoot - it’s a (hopefully imaginary) set of Tweets via Twitter about a zombie outbreak.

(AKA here’s one for fans of zombies, Brad Pitt, Thor or the Justice League of America)

One of the perks of trying to write a Grant Morrison biog and being the reporter who broke the news to the world about David Tennant being the 10th Doctor Who is that I have some decent contacts - who seem more happy to share stuff when I’m not a reporter bizarrely enough - who pass on the odd gem.

In this case, imagine my surprise the other morning when my inbox had not one, but three movie scripts - for Marvel Comics’ Thor, DC Comics/Warner Bros’ Justice League of America and the adaptation of Max Brooks’ World War Z novel.

Without trying to out-AICN AICN, here’s a little rundown of the three of them, starting with the last one (and isn’t it a nice change for the blog to be talking about something except media?)…

Max Brooks has done incredibly well from two zombie books and this script, written by Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynsk should see a nice little franchise develop.

World War Z is actually quite a tricky book to adapt to a movie. As it’s mostly a bunch of vignettes, it’s hard to build up concern for one character. And while the book makes you care for a huge amount of them, that’s a harder task for a two hour movie and something more suited to a TV miniseries.

But JMS takes the overall idea and adds in more from the narrator collating all these stories, adding in ideas on the the nature of duty and truth, but constantly building it around a human story that has a nice little tweak (twist would be pushing it) at the end.

One thing that JMS is often criticised for is his dialogue, yet I think when he nails conversation, there are few better at it (it was one of the strong points of his Spider-Man run) and he gets it right here.

Brad Pitt is said to be interested in this and if he is - and there’s a decent director on board - this could be a fantastic hit, especially as I think the zeitgeist over the next few years is going to be for survival under extreme conditions and the breakdown of society (if you look around, you’ll see that popular fiction has already been going that way for the last year or so).

Well worth a watch when it comes out.

Then there’s Thor - Marvel’s take on the Norse Gods. I’ve never been a big fan of the comic or the character, but he has his fans, though I wonder how they’ll take to this version because there’s next to nothing that comes from the comic - it isn’t set on Earth and there’s none of the alter-ego nonsense - this is very much tapping into the Lord of the Rings/Hobbit audience.

It’s a decent enough script and origin story - it’s the tale of Thor v Loki, the hero is banished and then discovers his purpose in life before coming back to save the day. One thing it will also be is either expensive or shot with a lot of blue and green screen as it’s more or less all set in Asgard. Rumour has it that Marvel has said Matthew Vaughan can direct it if he’s able to bring the budget down to $150million, to which I say good luck to him.

If you know your Loki from your Odin then this is your thing, but it’s not for me. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and American Gods were enough norseness for me.

So then, finally, what about the oft-ballyhooed JLA film, starring many of DC Comics’ top heroes - Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and so on. It’s a decent stab at a superhero teamup, ripping shamelessly from Mark Waid’s Tower of Babel storyline from earlier in the 2000s, but it’s the exact opposite of the Thor movie: while that has gone for an almost non-comic book feel, this script feels like it’s full of fanboy moments and marketing plugs (for example: for a funeral all of the superheroes wear black versions of their outfits).

It’s a decent script, but for something like this, decent isn’t good enough. This - to nick how Grant Morrison used to describe the JLA during his run - is a pantheon of the Gods and the threats and disasters they face should be equally epic, while reminding us why we love them.

And this script doesn’t do that. To be fair, neither did the Superman Returns script. At the end of that film, a near dead Superman lifts an entire continent into space and throws it out of Earth orbit and there was no sense of majesty, no grandeur, no awe (apart from ‘awe for God’s sake is this film nearly over?’).

DC may make the better comics, but Marvel seem to be whupping them at the box office - and you can’t use this year’s films as an indicator because there will be a lot of ghoulish attention over The Dark Knight.

So if this lot all came out on the one Friday night, what should you go and see? World War Z without a doubt. After that, it depends on your preferences. I’d just hit the pub.

Thanks to those who sent me these scripts - sorry I can’t name you for a credit, but I’m sure you would rather stay in jobs…

Oh, this is just bloody hilarious. Well done to the lads at wieden + kennedy london for giving this some exposure (and I just realised Kev F Sutherland is behind it), but anyway, just watch and click on the link or here if you’re fed up with the other YouTube video of the moment.

Normally, a new section to the Blogroll would matter not a jot, but this is something I’m growing more and more frustrated (and concerned) about and it’s a bit unfair to leave it all to Iain Bruce to take care of.

Scottish Digital Matters is going to be used to highlight Scottish companies who are grasping the new media and using it well because quite frankly there are too damn few of them doing it. I’m shocked at the number of business people who think the likes of Facebook, blogs and Twitter are just for fun and don’t have any business use - or the companies who don’t want to be engaging with their customers, which is fine to an extent because it isn’t for everyone.

But it’s for some and at the moment very few are grasping the opportunities. I mean, let’s look at it this way, if Dell and Wal-Mart can set up blogs for customer interaction, why can’t Scottish companies? Of course it would help if the majority of Scottish media was online as well, but that’s another symptom - or is a cause - of the country’s digital malaise.

Why does this matter past that of geekery? Quite obvious from a number of viewpoints: Scottish businesses are losing out on an incredible number of potential revenue-generating schemes by not being online; Scots are not getting to see the potential of online - for pleasure or business; Scots are not being able to exercise their digital skills and having to leave the country to do so; Scots are not being as informed about the world as a democracy should be.

So if none of that matters to you, fine, go stick your head in the sand, but to me having fun, generating revenue, increasing knowledge, enriching the population (hell, enriching the world) - physically and digitally - and being more informed are generally good reasons to be around in the early days of the 21st Century.

Or we can just let other countries overtake us in these areas and then moan about it, despite having had the chance to do it ourselves. Perhaps that will be Scotland’s digital legacy. Couldabeen, shouldabeen…

Here’s one for fans of Sexy Scotsmen then. As those tripping over this via a Google Link may know, I interviewed Paul McGillion of Stargate: Atlantis fame earlier in 2008 for the Scottish Sun newspaper. I waited a while to see if it would run but it didn’t before I moved on to bigger and brighter things.

I felt duty-bound not to rush it onto the site and give The Sun a chance to run it, but it never seemed to appear. And then my laptop died. And then the website went slightly dead due to some halfwit trying to upgrade to Wordpress 2.5 and making a howler of it.

Anyway, as the website is now, getting back to life slowly - and it’s nearly six months on from when I went to interview Paul - it seems a decent enough time has passed. So here’s the Paul McGillion interview, not as it would have appeared in The Sun, but a mix of questions I asked for the fans, along with the Sun version and wee bits I can remember.

(for those who are about to moan that the article contains a lot of stuff Paul fans already know, all I would say is wheesht: this was written for a mainstream audience and Paul hasn’t had a lot of exposure over in Scotland - or the UK actually, so it’s a flavour of the man. In fact there’s a question, what flavour would Paul be?)

(and if the fans don’t mind, instead of lifting the interview, could they just post the link back here please?)

(also have to say: great interview with Paul here)

Useless factoid before we begin: I posted up an interview with Iain Banks/Iain M Banks and that attracted moderate interest. Those hits were nothing - a dot on a pin on a dotted thing - compared to what happened when Paul’s name went on it.

EXCLUSIVE
By Craig McGill

HE’S travelled half-way across the universe in Stargate and Star Trek but for actor Paul McGillion, he wants nothing more than to be a corpse in Taggart.
The Paisley-born hunk might have fansites by admiring females across the globe, be chased by women at conventions and have a glamourous LA lifestyle – but Taggart is where he wants to be.
He said: “I’d love a role in Taggart, even a murdered body.
“Don’t get me wrong I’d be happier with a bigger role, but Taggart’s got such appeal and is so well known to my family that to be in Taggart would be great.
“I’ve actually just been arranging with agents to get more work in the UK as I’d love to be in more British dramas.
“Of course there’s also work like Dr Who and Torchwood and to be in them would fantastic.”
McGillion rose to rapid fame in the first few episodes of the spin-off of the hit Stargate show Atlantis.
Originally only cast for a couple of episodes he was made a recurring actor and continued to be a hit with the viewers across the globe, each episode pulling in more than 10million viewers.
But as he was starting to enjoy stardom, the rug was pulled out from under his feet.
Bosses told him that he was being let go.
He recalls: “I was surprised when they told me that the character was being let go. I had been promoted up to a series regular and then was told I was leaving again.
“I’m not going to lie – I was very disappointed, shocked and sad about it as it came out of the blue.
“But that’s acting and that’s a show like Stargate – they have to shake things up.
“Rejection is 90% of acting so you have to take your blessings where you can and to be in Stargate for three years was great and I realised that it was better to be grateful for the opportunity I had instead of being bitter about leaving the show.
“But as far as I was concerned, that was it and I set off to do other projects.”
But what no one anticipated was the reaction of the fans – and mostly females.
Outraged at the move, fans of Paul – mostly female – set up websites to save the character and emailed the studio, sending in things to the bosses.
They then topped that by hiring a pipe band to play outside the studios where Atlantis was filmed.
The first Paul knew was when a friend got in touch.
“A pal phoned me and said ‘turn the telly on right now’ and there it was on the news – a pipe band playing outside my old work.
“It was incredible.”
At that point the studio realised they under underestimated the character’s popularity and worked on ways of bringing him back for the end of season four – showing on Sky One at the moment – and the forthcoming season five, which started filming the last week in February 2008.
Paul’s delighted to be back.
“It’s great to be back amongst friends and it’s good to see the fans getting to see a character they want back in.
“And hopefully now I’m back, they won’t kill me off again, but I’m looking forward to catching up with all my old pals.
“I’m delighted to be coming back and seeing everyone again - and I don’t know what’s planned for me past these five episodes, but I would like to think that I’m not getting killed off again.
“Take from that what you will.”
That doesn’t mean it always as much fun as the fans would think. There’s been a few embarrassing moments, that have made Paul go red even so many million miles away in the Pegasus Galaxy.
“The one that alway sticks in my mind was when I was to do a kissing scene with Rodney and there we were before the take and he just grabbed me and planted one on me. Totally took me by surprise and everyone got a big laugh out of it.
(laughing)”It’s quite worrying that I can’t shake that memory”
But while he may have been given the kiss-off from Atlantis, science fiction wasn’t finished with him.
Paul was given the call to try out and audition for the role of Scotty in the new Star Trek film – and was endorsed by Chris Doohan – son of the original Scotty James Doohan.
According to Paul: “To have him vouch for me was really humbling and I owe him a pint if I get to meet him.
“I wasn’t bitter about not getting the role. It would have been fantastic and probably changed the course of my career, but that’s acting. Some you win, some you don’t and all the best to Simon Pegg.”
One thing he didn’t expect though was then to be called and told that he was getting another role in the film.
“My agent called me back and said that on the strength of the audtion they wanted to me to do another role. The director JJ Abrams wanted to find me a role.
“So I’ve done that but there’s not a lot I can say about it. It’s scenes with the new Captain Kirk and I don’t get killed off, so I could return if wanted…”
“What I will say is that I think moviegoers are in for a treat. The sets, the costumes – it all looks amazing and I don’t think anyone’s going to be disappointed.
“I’m also the first actor to go from Stargate to Star Trek, which is a nice touch.”
And while debate rages over the new Star Trek and if it’s a remake, reimagining or really something else, Paul says revisiting classics isn’t something he intends to do a lot of us – unless it’s a certain Steve McQueen film.
He said: “Classics are called classics for a reason and shouldn’t be touched. Having said that, who wouldn’t want to be Steve McQueen in Bullitt? What an incredible film that was - and how cool was he in it?”
“But for now I’m concentrating on the new season of Atlantis and having fun – I may be single but that’s no reason to be dull.
“Then I’ll be heading over to the UK to try and see what’s happening.”
Of course the plum job in Science Fiction is said to be up for grabs soon – that of Doctor Who – and would he want it?
He jumps in without hesitation: “Who wouldn’t want to be the next Dr Who? But I think it’s doubtful they would give the job to two Paisley boys in a row.
“And David has been incredible in the role. He would be a hard act to follow.
“But it would be great, as would working with the likes of Ricky Gervais. Extras and The Office were both incredible.”
One person who might not be too happy about him gaining his second doctorate is his brother – who’s a real-life medic with just one doctor qualification.
He said: “My brother just became a doctor not long after I did - on Stargate - and I used to call him and ask him how to pronounce jargon and then when he finished his studies I said ‘well done, now there’s two doctors in the family’ and the response was ‘piss off!’.
“But my family rip the mickey out of me all the time. We may have moved away from Scotland, but they still have the sense of humour that keeps you grounded.”
And while his family may not love him – or pretend not to – his fans certainly do.
And while some moan about fans, Paul can’t see him ever being that ungrateful.
“I could never see the fans as a burden or a problem.?
“As an actor, you want people to appreciate the work that you do, so how could I ever moan about people getting so engaged in the characters I play - it’s a compliment to me and to the people who write/create the characters.?
“Meeting with fans is a joy as well because they show you what they think of the character and their take can sometimes be totally different from yours.?
“There’s also another point of view that shows - from a business perspective - that I have an audience and a fanbase?
“But no, fans will never be a burden to me. I’m flattered that they take the time and spend the money to enjoy my work.”
Paul’s also concentrating heavily on keeping his workload strong, which means he won’t be at many fan conventions this year. A trip to Milton Keynes in May is as good as it got for him.
“I may manage a few more,” he says, “but the best way to find out where I’ll be is by checking my website at www.paulmcgillion.com.
“Cons like DragonCon I try to get to every second year.
“I’ve been incredibly lucky with the fans so I try to make sure that I get to see as many as possible to thank them for their support over the years - but sometimes you can’t get along because of filming or other work-related matters.”
But in the meantime, while waiting for his Taggart corpse call, Paul will just have to content himself with his treks amongst the stars – and his larks on Earth.
He chortles as he says: “David has always called the place I live the Ivory Tower – it’s a really nice flat and he’s always called it that.
“As for children in my future, well let’s just wait and see. I’m single just now and have my fun.”