Funny thing that Doctor Who Confidential. It is supposed to give you the inside gen of that particular week’s Doctor Who. This week, Derek Jacobi was the main guest star. Without wanting to give anything away, you would have thought they would have at least mentioned that this is his second appearance in Doctor Who, after this. A remarkably appropriate little factoid as well, given what actually happens in the episode.

(As an aside, it is fascinating visiting a website from the dim and distant past of 2003. They did things differently back then.)

It’s doubly strange given that while they appear to be ashamed of their Derek Jacobi-related past, they seemed quite happy to acknowledge their past association with Eric Roberts.

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You spot some funny things on Facebook. Today, I come across the group “Boycott Channel Four Advertisers“:

To boycott any company that advertises during the ‘Diana in the Tunnel’ programme. If Channel uses the photo of Diana dying the then advertisers who appear during the advert breaks should be boycotted.

Er, except that to know who is advertising on it, one would have to watch the programme, wouldn’t one? Something tells me this is the latest brainchild of a Channel 4 executive.

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Last week I blogged about Panorama’s then upcoming programme about the supposed dangers of wi-fi. Nich Starling castigated me for criticising the programme before having watched it, which was fair enough. So, having watched to programme this lunchtime, what do I think?

What I think is that TV programmes that investigate potential health risks ought to spend at least 25% of the time explaining the science behind the issue. What I think is that the motto that should be plastered above the monitors of the whole production team should be ‘remember the MMR scare’. What I think is that they should avoid using loaded terminology, such as insisting on the sensationalist word ‘radiation’ instead of the more mundane ‘radio waves’ (same number of syllables, natch) and shouldn’t use hyphenated portmanteau nonsense words like ‘electro-smog’ which were coined by the anti-lobby. What I think is that you shouldn’t question the independence of one scientist while swallowing whole the agenda of another, as Ben Goldacre has pointed out.

I don’t think you should use an alleged health condition like electro-magnetic sensitivity as proof of another alleged health condition that radio waves give you cancer. I think that you shouldn’t take the isolated results of one woman who appears to be able to sense radio waves as proof when the whole study has not been published yet. I think you should take note of the researchers of that study who appear to think that the best ‘cure’ for electromagnetic sensitivity is cognitive behavioural therapy. I think that if 3% of the UK population suffered from electromagnetic sensitivity, we might have noticed before now.

And finally, I agree with Guy Kewney: Sir William Stewart (not to be confused with William G Stewart, lest Will Howells accuse me of blasphemy) should indeed ‘shit or get off the pot‘. Yes, by all means have another review. In fact, with new technology like this, it is probably a good idea to have a review every five years or so for a good half-century. But let’s have a bit of perspective, eh?

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Last week, BBC’s Panorama did an expose on the Scientologists, a cult that believes we are all imprisoned space aliens. This week, the same programme is purporting to prove that wi-fi fries your brain. And so, the cosmic balance of the BBC’s sensible/face-slappingly idiotic halves is once again restored.

I don’t really know where to start. James Randerson gives it a gentle booting in the Guardian, which broadly sums up the response, but no words can quite describe the sheer appallingness of comparing a mobile phone mast signal from 100m away with a wi-fi signal from 1m away and coming up with the scare statistic that the latter is 3 times more powerful than the former. So I have to get this off my chest. Indulge me.

If the two signals were exactly the same strength, the inverse square law would mean that with a distance differential of 100, the 1m away signal would be 10,000 times more powerful. So, taking that into account, you can conclude from these figures that the wi-fi signal is more than 3,000 times weaker than the mobile phone mast (3,333 point 3 recurring, but who’s counting?). The mobile phone mast which, lest us forget, there is no evidence causes any harm in the first place.

It beats me why they stopped their. If they had compared a wi-fi signal from 10 cm with a mobile phone mast signal from 1 km away, they could have shouted about wi-fi being 30,000 times stronger than mobile phones. That sounds much scarier. And why not? There’s nothing particularly significant about 1m and 100m - just two numbers they plucked out of the air.

Compared to all this, Scientology sounds positively evidence-based, and at least Martin Durkin can come up with a couple of impressive looking graphs. On which point, I recommend everyone picks up a copy of this week’s New Scientist, which rather satisfyingly eviscerates the Great Global Warming Swindle point by point (in fact, the online version appears to have even more myth debunking).

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After the last episode of Torchwood Season One, I offered my own considered thoughts on the programme which, with the exception of the Guppy Fans, appeared to go down quite well.

One of my arguments was that the main problem with the series was the lead writer: Chris Chibnell. In the last series he wrote 4 episodes. For season two, I am now informed, he will be writing 3. Well, that’s a sort of progress, I suppose.

Meanwhile, Chibnell will be returning this weekend with the Doctor Who offering 42. I’m torn on this one. A pre-watershed Chibnell might actually work, as one thing we are guaranteed is that Martha won’t be getting jiggy with the Doctor (or, to follow the Torchwood habit of giving all the sex to the ugly annoying sidekick, K9). On the other hand, and I’m guessing here, but I suspect the name of the episode has less to do with Douglas Adams and more to do with Jack Bauer. A 42 minute episode in real time? This is either going to work very well or very badly.

I’m magnanimous enough to hope it will be the former.

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I was about to go to bed, only to discover that this blog is the top Google result for the search “similarities korean klingon” and that someone actually found me that way.

I’ve also been impressed by the number of people finding this blog over the last 48 hours because of my post about Kryptonite. It’s good to see people grappling with the really important issues of the day.

Finally, I still get a significant number of visits from Konnie Huq fans. Disgracefully, I suspect this is because of the promise of seeing her “modelling the latest in tweenie fetish wear“.

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Separated at birth?

Mark Webster	Dave Spikey

Does that make Ming Brian Potter?

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Plaid Cymru are crying foul over the BBC’s decision not to throw the Representation of the People Act out of the window and allow them thousands of pounds of state-subsidised advertising.

All I can say to that is: ha ha. If Plaid should be angry at anyone, it is the Welsh Rugby grounds who signed a contract that they surely knew they had no ability to fulfill.

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Daniel Martin has listed his five favourite - and five worst - Doctor Who companions. In doing so he exposes himself as a member of that odd bunch of people: Doctor Who fans who liked Ace.

There’s a lot of them, but I’d love to know why. As an attempt to make the companion a central part of the series, prefiguring Rose Tyler, I suppose it was a noble effort. But, seriously. The bomber jacket. The ‘attitude’. The bombs. At least K9 was knowingly stupid.

And Brian Cant was better on Playbus as well.

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I noticed this link on the BBC News page, which all looks terribly fun but I’d have liked to have seen the final interview (one surmises it was on Newsround, which on the odd occasion that I’ve watched it recently impressed me quite a bit).

If you follow the link, you’ll also find another school preparing for their interview with Cameron. Is it me or do they all look and sound a bit, well, posh? Ming’s bunch appeared to be much more fun.

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