Or two and a half hours of this.

And isn't nice to have a trailer that doesn't rely on repeating that electronic 'bwwwaaarrrghh' to be effective.

You should read The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson (of the mars trilogy fame). It's basically a massive what if history of a world where Europe had been essentially wiped out by the plague and the major superpowers are the Chinese, the Muslim Caliphate and a coalition of Native Americans and displaced…

To be fair to the books they've now reached a point where semi stable systems now exist. Sure they may be precarious but not every community is full of cannibals our rape factories.

I guess what I really liked about this episode is that the show seems to be trying to investigate the different ways that people cope with surviving the apocalypse. Sure the concept in this episode may not have been excellently executed, but I appreciate the attempt to do something a bit more sophisticated than almost…

Well if nothing else it was nice to see Barbra out of the house for once. I was beginning to worry that she'd be locked in their apartment for the entire show.

Pour Ryan. It's not like he's even going to get to invent the horror-comedy-musical.

Although I remain unconvinced of the need for a US remake, I think Fincher as a director certainly has a visual style that could do justice to the original. One of the best things about the original is just how visually striking it is.

But to a certain extent this is the role of the Minds in the Culture, though rather than replacing the bureaucratic mechanisms of resource redistribution that requires a state in the socialist model, they seem to be responsible for ensuring a surfeit of everything.

Not just three parents, but (presumably) six grandparents. Christmases must be wild.

The biggest disappointment of the episode. That we didn't get Vod as a companion.

That's just when it started to get good! The most recent season had been mostly good, with a few truly outstanding episodes.

I think that there is an aspect of London's current wave of gentrification that is more or less happening with minimal or only transitory immigration. The boom in London property prices - 20% on average in the last year - is both driven by, and attractive to, global flows of capital that are impossible to characterise…

True, the BBC makes a lot of money selling its nature documentaries all over the world (to some 180 countries), though this says to me that there clearly is an appetite for quality documentaries. Sure they don't have to make a profit on them domestically (god bless well-funded public broadcasters), but the last big…

While I think this is largely true there is clearly still a market for well made, expensive-to-produce nature documentaries. The BBC continues to make David Attenborough nature documentaries, and while they're clearly expensive to make, they make an absolute mint on them. That being said, while there is a market, it's…

Bored now.

Legend of the Overfiend. Life-changing, just not in a nice way.

Yes it's feminism that is making a financial killing through manipulating the emotions and desires of women. Not say, the fashion and beauty industries?

Poor Tara. Twice dead and still without a decent plot line.

As much as I love the idea of a Banksian Culture-style utopia, where machines do the work and the rest of us hang about taking drugs and having sex and making art, the entire history of industrialisation has been one of an increasing concentration of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands. I'm sure we could get to…