Good thing to wake up to: one of the nice things about conventions for people who can't attend them (like, in this instance, yours truly) - you can rely on fandom to post reports and the occasional vid. In this case, someone graciously put up the Peter Davison video shown during the Gallifrey 21 opening and closing ceremonies on Youtube. It't hilarious, shows Peter Davison to be a great sport and features a bonus cameo of a certain Other Actor.




Bad thing to wake up to: seems that the network which renamed itself SyFy last year has found new (or rather, old) creative ways to be offensive. They're showing the BBC show Merlin in the US, and put up a website with their own descriptions for the characters. The one for Gwen (Guinevere) manages to pull off the stunning triple accomplisment of being a) completely racist ("with her wonky teeth, uncooperative hair and glasses, not even the most charitable person could call her beautiful"), b) factually inaccurate (and no, that's not "just" a matter of aesthetic judgment - if a female character is described as wearing glasses, being regarded as unattractive and wishing herself more beautiful, but said character actually has in both seasons never once worn glasses, never once shown any insecurity about her appearance, and has been called beautiful by three different characters on screen, one can only conclude that whoever concocted this rubbish never watched the show), and c) adding a whiff of misogyny, with the whole "most notorious adulteress in the world" reference. (Incidentally, it has been suggested they might have gotten this dreck from the BBC. But the character description for Gwen at the
BBC website for Merlin, which doesn't appear to have been updated since the pilot, doesn't contain any of this nonsense.) If there is any good coming out of this is, it's that such_heights has put up a gorgeous Gwen and Angel Coulby pic spam in reply.