Karsa Orlong

Delain at the O2 Academy, Islington. They give good giggage but I do find their songs all tend to sound the same after a while. Charlotte's a brilliant frontwoman, though. Quite impressed by one of the support acts, The Gentle Storm.

To be fair, he's not wrong

Helen and Aljaz were far and away the best this week, I thought. Kellie and Kevin's jive and Jay's Paso were both great. I've come up with a cunning plan: someone injure Aliona so that Joanne or Nat can take her place, then I'll be okay with Jay winning I think it's been so long since Anton's been able to dance properly that he's forgotten what he's supposed to do and how to teach someone to do it Bruno's been getting on my tits all season I hope he got a serious, erm, bollocking afterwards. Had to laugh when Craig told him he was being nasty . . . then gave a 4 himself

Yeah, the set-up was a bit predictable. It was better in the book, IIRC. As you say, the episode covers a lot of ground, but I didn't feel like they rushed it. Ep 1 stuff:

Nothing against Jay at all, but Aliona . . . Can't stand her Really, really don't want her to be the first pro to win it twice

She's backing Jay She wasn't too happy when I said I didn't want him to win Me, at the moment, Kellie and Kevin or Katie and Anton

Which other modern space opera have you read, for comparison?

The Last Kingdom 1x01 - Brilliant! The Flash 2x03 Arrow 4x03 Aquarius 1x09 & 1x10

Evil Dead!! Bruce Campbell!!! Lucy Lawless!! Xena and Autolycus reunited!!! It has to be awesome, surely??

I hope you did it in an Admiral Ackbar voice.

Well. I really enjoyed that

Now see, I'd be in big trouble if that happened. I was told last week, by the vet, that since Pixie's stomach has been sorted out she has now put on too much weight, so she's got to go on a diet!

Hear hear

^^ I've seen them a couple of times, too - they are a tremendous live act. Can't think of many of their songs I dislike, tbh.

Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald 2015 - Gollancz ebook - 393 pages The Moon wants to kill you. Maybe it will kill you when the per diem for your allotted food, water, and air runs out, just before you hit paydirt. Maybe it will kill you when you are trapped between the reigning corporations - the Five Dragons - in a foolish gamble against a futuristic feudal society. On the Moon, you must fight for every inch you want to gain. And that is just what Adriana Corta did. As the leader of the Moon's newest "dragon," Adriana has wrested control of the Moon's Helium-3 industry from the Mackenzie Metal corporation and fought to earn her family's new status. Now, in the twilight of her life, Adriana finds her corporation - Corta Helio - confronted by the many enemies she made during her meteoric rise. If the Corta family is to survive, Adriana's five children must defend their mother's empire from her many enemies... and each other. No, this isn't a sequel about the Harry Potter character This is the story of the Cortas, one of the five families - or 'Dragons - whose corporations rule the Moon. Set in the year 2110 (why not 2112??? ), some fifty years after first colonisation. the Moon is now home to one and a half million people. In one way or another they are all beholden to one of the five families: the Brazilian Cortas, the Australian McKenzies, the Russian Vorontsovs, the Ghanaian Asamoahs, and the Japanese Suns. These families form allegiances through marriage and business, or scrape sparks off each other and fight clandestine corporate wars over territory and broken contracts. The last real war between any of them happened eight years before the book starts. That start is suitably and literally breathtaking: Lucasinho Corta, grandson of Adriana (the matriarch of the family) takes part in a Luna Run, a few seconds of life or death scramble across bare yards of Lunar surface from airlock to airlock without suit or oxygen. In the wake of this, a party, and an assassination attempt on his uncle, Raphael Corta, big boss of Corta Helio, and the story is off and running. I've seen several reviews refer to this book as 'Game of Thrones in space'. I'm glad Gollancz have, thus far at least, not chosen to market the book in that vein. That sort of lazy comparison irritates me. On this occasion, though, especially if the upwardly mobile Cortas somehow resemble Martin's Starks, and the all-powerful McKenzies have a whiff of Lannister, it's a comparison that is kind of valid. McDonald is neither less frightened to take chances with his characters nor to dispatch them when the story requires it. 'Humans are not made for endless light,' one character says, 'Humans need their darknesses'. He is equally as brutal as Martin ever was and, freed from the constraints of a hackneyed fantasy setting, I found his writing style - concise, to the point - really took flight. It took me a few pages to get used to it but once in I was there for the duration, swept along by his characters, the dialogue, the imagery, the edge-of-seat action sequences, the occasional skips back in time as Adriana tells her story. Four hundred pages of plotting, conniving, backstabbing, alliances, feuds, sex, marriages, relationships, divorces and bitter, bitter enmity later and the book threw me out emotionally drained and gasping for more. It's a book full of ideas, but those ideas are just a backdrop for the characters' lives, loves, hates and desires. All of the Cortas are fantastic characters - not particularly likeable, but fantastic nonetheless. Take them, add Marina Calzaghe - new to the Moon, struggling to make ends meet, whose crucial intervention finds her on a startling upward curve - throw in the various McKenzies (who you may or may not want to punch), plus a whole host of lesser characters - it's a lot to get your head around at first, but it works. On the negative side, one or two of the ideas didn't quite work for me (particularly with regard to the use of air as a commodity that could be denied to an individual, which seemed fine if they were wearing space suits but when a character is in the same room as others and breathing the same air, but somehow denied that air . . . I must've missed some explanation as to how that worked). Also, in the early goings, frequent references to the glossary at the back of the book were required. Fortunately this is incredibly easy on the Kindle. It's not helped by the fact that there are a lot of spelling errors in the Kindle version. These weren't deal-breakers, for me, as they tended not to break the flow of my reading because the word was obvious. Still, it shouldn't really happen to this degree. Luna: New Moon is the first book in a duology. CBS have already snapped it up for a tv adaptation. I would rather a cable channel had it. I'm afraid a network may water it down too much. As the story effortlessly moves through the gears towards its breathless and breathtaking final chapter it left me with no doubts that part two can't come soon enough. It's not like Game of Thrones in space. It's much better than that.

Okay, that wasn't the Howard Jones I was expecting

Riverside, Islington Assembly Hall, London Can just about make myself out in that photo

I suppose if I came from the land that gave the world Riverdance I'd hate dancing too

I had visions of you walking around with a placard saying 'BURN JAMES PATTERSON!'

To be fair, most modern space opera is completely unlike Star Trek. The problem is, the long-running series are all Military SF, which doesn't help the OP with his search. ETA: Another one to throw in - Arthur C. Clarke's 'Rama' series. ETA2: And Jack McDevitt's got a couple of series, too.

Why do you want to burn James Patterson, Shirley?

If Amy Adams hadn't been in it I doubt I would've made it to the end

I couldn't possibly comment Channel 4 probably won't be far behind in the end, as they'll catch up during the mid-season break I expect