…gets any older than it already is, I’ve gotta run down the Kim Warnick retierment roast last Sunday night at Neumo’s.

The 22-year Fastbacks singer-bassist, and more recent Visqueen sidewoman, announced she’s giving up the music-biz grind. Some longtime pals, particularly promoter (and Warnick’s fellow ex-Sub Pop office drone) Kerri Harrop, staged the big shindig to mark Warnick’s long service to the local and global music community.

The event was emceed by former local TV phenom John Keister. He’s apparently spent at least part of the past four years in low-rent exile in Ellensburg. He also looked as if he’d been eating very well lately. He opened with a short monologue about the Seattle music scene, or what passed for it, at the time Warnick began playing—one or two midweek club nights at bars that normally catered to the leather crowd.

Warnick’s father showed up, told his own Dean Martin-style roast jokes, including one in which he referred to the Fastbacks’ most famous touring partners as “Strawberry Jam.” He then narrated a slide show of Kim’s peaceful childhood years in north Seattle.

A succession of other ol’ pals (including Joe Meece from the Meeces, Dave Rosencranz from Sub Pop, and Visqueen leader Rachel Flotard) then took turns on the podium with anecdotes about wacky experiences on tour, in practice, and at day jobs with Warnick, and about her philosophy of life (“ALWAYS make your bed in the morning”).

Warnick’s longtime stage fraternal twin, Fastbacks songwriter-guitarist Kurt Bloch, attended the event but didn’t speak live. Instead, he and the band’s third permanent member, Lulu Gargiulo, appeared in a pre-made video projection, singing Fastbacks songs without Warnick’s vocals and starting but never finishing funny tour stories. (Gargiulo must have a Dorian Gray-esque painting of herself at home, ‘cuz she’s hardly aged a day in the past quarter century.)

That was one of several video segments interspersed through the night, including two vintage Fastbacks music videos from the early ’90s. (One day, we’re going to have to tell our perplexed grandchildren what “music videos” were. They’re fast becoming a scarce commodity, even on the TV channels created to show them.)

All in all, it was a quite pleasant and entertaining evening. Those of us who’d listened to Warnick’s music-making since the bitter start had a wunnerful, wunnerful time reminiscing about the (not necessarily “good,” but fun) old days.

…and I haven’t posted a remembrance of that potenially silliest of all silly dot-com-era hustle concepts, MarchFirst.com.

It was a merger of two web-design and online-services companies, which themselves were the results of several prior mergers. It was named after the date in 2000 in which the merger documents were signed.

The combined company boasted more than 5,000 employees, doing many different things on behalf of other companies. But MarchFirst’s preeminent claim was that it would help corporate clients build their Internet presences from scratch. Just one call to the Chicago-based MarchFirst, and your firm would instantly turn from an old-economy dinosaur into a new-economy powerhouse, right up there with such rising behemoths as Pets.com and Flooz.com.

None of this, however, was mentioned in the company’s costly TV ads. Most infamously, it bought naming rights for NBA halftime shows on NBC. “Coming up next: MarchFirst At the Half! Presented by MarchFIrst, where it’s all about ‘The Importance of Being First,’ at www-dot-MarchFirst-dot-com!” The commercials that aired within these halftimes were sentimental things, with gauze-filtered cameras and soft-rock music, in which a syrupy narrator talked about such feats as the first manned space flight and the first four-minute mile, and then simply reiterated the “Importance of Being First” slogan. Nary a word was given to what the heck MarchFirst was or what the heck it did.

For a company whose principal premise was helping other companies market themselves, it sure did a lousy job of marketing itself.

Within 14 months of its formation, it declared bankruptcy. Now, the URL points only to a claims site for ex-employees who were bilked out of their health benefits.

The “world’s best fast food stops” are probably not simply off-model outlets of otherwise standardized chains.

I just got my first check from my father’s life insurance policy, which means I can placate my creditors for a little while. I’m in line for a couple of potentially mid-paying jobs. And there’s women’s curling on CBC today! Life is good.

PBS ASKS, is there a Pacific Northwest accent? (Found by Slumberland.)

…John Bradshaw on the Family on the Wisdom channel. Bradshaw’s lecture series, originally made for PBS in 1985, discusses family dysfunction as a pivot point for just about everything that goes wrong with individuals and societies: “Any time you’re not your true self, you can be taken.”

Among his points: If you know how people from non-nurturing families come to think, you can manipulate them very brutally. He cited a couple of authors, including Alice Miller, who’d seen the horrors of Hitlerism in ol’ Adolf’s own ultra-authoritarian childhood family, and in the more general hierarchical, patriarchal, and anti-freedom nature of typical German family structures.

Now I finally know why the most anti-life, anti-freedom, anti-environmental, anti-equality, anti-gay, anti-women, anti-children, anti-sex, and pro-violence forces in the US use “The Family” as their ideological excuse and stick the name “Family” in the names of their propaganda groups.

…the Rocklopedia Fakebandica, which claims to be the ultimate authority on fictional rock bands in movies and TV shows, doesn’t just include the obvious entries such as Spinal Tap or Jem and the Holograms. It even has the Beets (from the cartoon Doug), Lenny and the Squigtones (from Laverne & Shirley), and the notorious ’60s would-be hipster film The Phynx!

…today to veteran actress Ruth Warrick, whose career span ranged from Citizen Kane to Erica Kane.

…the stick-in-your-head ad jingle?

This is the longest single piece I’ve stuck on the site this year. But that’s what happens when you try to talk about 26 years’ worth of anything.

On Saturday (the same evening as my appearance on A&E’s City Confidential), Tacoma PBS affiliate KBTC will air its last four reruns of Doctor Who, the venerable BBC science fiction serial.

KBTC has cycled through some 500 DW episodes repeatedly since 1987. But now, BBC Worldwide Americas is letting the show’s syndication contracts expire. Only six other US stations (all PBS affiliates) still carry it. (It was never carried on the PBS network feed.)

I first became a “Whovian” (fan) when the show first aired locallly in the early ’80s, on Bellingham commercial station KVOS. I was initially attracted to the show’s simple premise: The Doctor (the only name he uses) is an eccentric genius of a humanoid space alien. He crosses time and space in his TARDIS (“Time and Relative Dimension in Space”), with assorted short- and long-term sidekicks. Together, they confront assorted mad scientists, wannabe dictators, evil robots, bug-eyed monsters, and scientific impossibilities. The show comprised half-hour episodes, which formed four- to six-part stories.

I soon became hooked on the show. I found its spirit of good-natured adventure a welcome break from the quasi-militarism of Star Trek, the ironic self-consciousness of Star Wars, and the arcane geekiness of many sci-fi books. Star Wars was a PoMo tribute to oldtime cliffhanger serials; Doctor Who was an oldtime cliffhanger serial, made for contemporary audiences.

I also loved the sheer Britishness/Europeanness of the show. Even though the Doctor’s from another planet, he’s a thorough heir to the H.G. Wells/Jules Verne tradition of the eccentric inventor. The show’s cliffhanger format owes lots to the Dickens/Conan Doyle tradition of serialized magazine fiction. Where Captain Kirk and company tried to export the American Way to the universe, the Doctor and his motley sidekicks simply tried to defeat the monsters and promote intelligent anarchy.

And the show’s brand of sci-fi/horror was informed not by the US/USSR cold war but by the UK’s experiences in WWII. The first important DW villains, the Daleks, are essentially Nazis as bug-eyed monsters, clad in robotic body machines.

The show was even one of the few things my father and I both liked. (Though he became impatient with the “movie” format KVOS used, editing together the half-hour segments).

I eventually hung out for a while with a local DW fan club, the “Society of the Rusting TARDIS.” I’d been aware of sci-fi fandom before, but Who fandom was a quite peculiar corner of an already peculiar subculture. DW is so vast, with so many episodes and so much arcana, that it’s inherently more chaotic, and more entertaining, than Trek fandom.

Around the time Seattle’s cable systems dropped KVOS, KBTC picked up the show. It ran all the Doctors’ existing stories in chronological order. Rusting TARDIS members often appeared on camera during DW-related pledge drives.

Note the phrase “all the Doctors.” What I’d first seen of DW was what most US viewers first saw, the seven-year reign of Tom Baker in the lead role. He was the one who had the curly hair, the beady eyes, the floppy hat, and the 20-foot scarf. I soon learned he’d been the fourth Doctor, and that the show had already been running for eleven years before he joined. It had debuted in black and white, shot live-to-tape, on November 23, 1963, the day after JFK was shot.

The first time the show switched stars, from William Hartnell to Patrick Troughton in 1966, the writers explained that the Doctor’s alien physiology could “regenerate” into a new body. Troughton quit in 1969, the same time that the show moved to color. He was replaced by Jon Pertwee, who five years later asked the BBC for more money but was instead replaced by Baker.

Each of these recasts gave the Doctor a different personality as well as a different face. But the character was always a bemused outcast, an outsider everywhere he went. He was as out of place among Earthbound bureaucrats as he was among giant ant-people. But his wit, his resourcefulness, and his take-charge attitude usually saved the day, usually without the aid of weaponry. He was a hero for smart loners, eccentric computer fanatics, and plain old nerds everywhere.

The plots, within their heroes-and-villains structure, encompassed real history, fantasy history, space opera, gothic horror, fast action, scheming treachery, and broad humor.

And the production values ranged erratically from breathtaking to sufficient to laughable. Yes, there were rubber-suit monsters in front of wobbly sets. There were obviously fake chroma-key montages (like those that stick weathermen’s bodies in front of satellite maps, only more primitive). There were flubbed lines, especially in the earlier episodes. It was cheaply shot on video, except for the visually jarring switches to location scenes shot on film.

But that just added to the fun of it all.

When the US discovered Who, it was already in decline back home, both in creative quality and in the ratings. And its decline was at least partly due to its new US audience, and to attempts to please that audience.

Producer John Nathan-Turner had taken over the show in its 18th season. He wanted to make it more credible to the young-adult sci-fi “fanboys” who were its biggest US fans. He tried to tone down its fun-adventure aspects and ratchet up the “serious” science fiction. The theme song, which had only been slightly remixed since 1963, was replaced by a new disco-fied arrangement. The opening credits switched from an abstract “time tunnel” to a more pedestrian star field.

Tom Baker quit at the end of that season, in 1981. Three other actors (Peter Davison of All Creatures Great and Small, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy) successively took over the role over the course of eight more seasons, during which Nathan-Turner and his staff improved the special effects but dumbed down the scripts. The jokey asides got lamer; the sidekicks got duller; the stories increasingly rehashed villains and plot elements from the show’s past. By 1989, DW had been cut from 26 to 14 episodes a year, buried in a suicidal time slot opposite the commercial ITV network’s prime time soap tCoronation Street. The BBC then put the series on indefinite “hiatus,” then licensed it to Hollywood, where it spent a half decade in “development” purgatory. (More on that a little later.)

For a show with a quasi-immortal hero, it had a comparatively limited afterlife since its cancellation, at least on this side of the pond. Over the ’90s, American DW fandom dwindled in its size, if not intensity. (The Society of the Rusting TARDIS still holds regular screening parties, but the meetings’ focus has shifted to British comedy shows.) Fewer US TV stations kept the reruns. BBC America ran the Tom Baker episodes for a while, before that cable channel junked half its schedule for home-decorating shows.

But Who fandom remained a strong niche market, around the world.

The BBC has licensed and/or published several hundred original DW paperback novels in the 15 years since the show’s end. When combined with the novelizations of the original TV stories, the Doctor’s become one of the book world’s most prolifically-published fictional characters, right up there with Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan. (One of the sidekick characters from the novels, Professor Bernice Summerfield, was even spun off into her own book series.)

Other official DW products have included old-time-radio style audio dramas on CD and online Flash-animated cartoons.

Then there are the unofficial, not-for-profit fan productions: Short movies, zines, computer-animated Dalek images, websites, and, of course, long scarves for your costume party.

Who fandom is such an involving hobby, in part, because of the sheer volume of material to learn and love. Nearly 700 episodes were made over 26 seasons. All the existing episodes have been released on video, but they’ve never all been in print at the same time.

Note the phrase “existing episodes.” BBC Enterprises (predecessor to BBC Worldwide) had thrown out half of the early black and white episodes in the ’70s, when foreign stations ceased to buy them, before anyone realized there was still a potential market for them in this newfangled home video thang.

Some of these shows have since been found, as kinescope films recovered from foreign TV networks and private collectors. But 108 of the 253 monochrome Whos remain missing today. (In addition, a few of Jon Pertwee’s color episodes now only exist in b&w.)

Fans eventually discovered, and recovered, all the soundtracks. It turned out that when the shows originally aired, several young viewers had recorded the audio portions on reel-to-reel tapes. BBC Records has issued digitally-cleaned versions of the soundtracks on CD.

Fans also found off-air stills for 72 of the missing shows (comprising about 60-70 shots per episode), taken by a professional freelance photographer who used the trade name “Telesnaps.”

Groups of fans have produced slide-show style “reconstructions” on VHS, combining the soundtracks with the Telesnaps. For the episodes without Telesnaps, the reconstructors have used publicity stills, behind-the-scenes photos, and appropriate shots from other DW episodes. When even those weren’t enough to visually represent a story, the reconstructors have contrived Photoshop montage shots. Some of these latter images incorporate face shots of original DW guest actors, “borrowed” without permission from other TV shows and movies these actors had been in. It takes a lot of love for a show to inspire the reconstructors to work so hard on videos that are so unauthorized, they can never be sold for profit. (The BBC’s reportedly to start releasing official reconstructions on DVD-ROM next year. These would only include BBC-owned visuals, unlike the fan reconstructions.)

But all these products, official and unofficial, across such a broad range of media, left Doctor Who still off the small screen. There was only a 1996 TV movie, filmed in Vancouver by Universal Studios for the Fox network. The movie combined a confusing number of story references to the old show with failed attempts to “Americanize” the Doctor by adding chase scenes and a love interest. It never appeared on video or DVD in the US, but can sometimes be seen on one or more of the Starz! digital-cable channels.

Finally, in the autumn of 2003, around the 40th anniversary of the original show’s debut, the BBC announced the TARDIS would materialize again. Its co-executive producer and head writer, Russell T Davies (no period), previously created the original UK version of Queer As Folk. Its star, Christopher Eccleston (28 Days Later), previously worked with Davies in The Second Coming, a hilariously irreverent TV movie about a Manchester pub crawler who proclaims himself, truthfully, to be the new Messiah.

Davies and Eccleston promise the new Who will have all the fancy new digital effects now expected in fantasy media. They also insist it’ll be a smart, robust, straightforward adventure show for young and old alike, unlike the niche-audience geekfest of the old show’s latter years. The new show will appear on British screens this spring. Seattle cable viewers can see it on CBC sometime thereafter.

BBC Worldwide’s reportedly in negotiations to bring the old show’s reruns to the Sci-Fi Channel, as part of a package deal with the new show (which has no official US home yet). That would give the old episodes a higher profile, and might even help fund the needed restoration of a few of them.

Already, BBC Video has commissioned several episode restorations, for VHS and DVD release. In the process, it’s funded technological innovations available now to the whole industry. These include “VidFIRE,” a digital process that makes off-air kinescope films look more like the original video images.

Another “restoration” project has been contemplated on DW fan websites—remaking the missing episodes in computer animation, using the cleaned-up original soundtracks. It’s not been officially mentioned by the BBC, and it’d take years to complete. But some Whovians love these shows so much, they want to see ’em come back to life.

Other fans will simply be happy to see the new series bring the Doctor back into the telefantasy pantheon.

…gonna be on national cable again this weekend. A&E’s true crime series City Confidential has an episode on Saturday about the tragic slaying of singer Mia Zapata, an episode for which I gave a lengthy interview.

Now the LA Times tells us “reality” shows are fake. I’m bummed.

The CBC, as one of several attempts to overcome the ratings disaster that is the NHL lockout, came up with a viewer contest to name The Greatest Canadian.

All summer, the network and its website asked viewers to nominate the most significant Canadian citizen, past or present. This fall, the network aired documentaries about each of the top ten figures (all male, and including two of the network’s own air personalities).

On a Monday-night live special, the winner was announced. It’s T.C. Douglas, founder of what’s now known as the New Democratic Party and originator of the nation’s universal health care system.

Douglas, a prairie populist of the old Depression-era variety, remains a big reason why Canada’s now a more progressive, more Euro-oriented land than our sorry place.

(Incidentally, among the non-finalists in the contest: Margaret Atwood, Marshall McLuhan, basketball inventor Dr. James Naismith, Emily Carr, Shania Twain, Sarah McLachlan, and William Shatner.)

This is a huge week for TV goodbyes—Dakota-twanged aging anchorstud Tom Brokaw on Wednesday, preceded by quiz whiz kid Ken Jennings on Tuesday (or perhaps Wednesday; I haven’t kept up with how KOMO schedules Jeopardy! during Monday Night Football season).

We’ll all miss Dan Rather, who’s gonna retire from the CBS Evening News shortly after archrival Tom Brokaw leaves NBC.

I bet even the right wingnuts will miss not having him to kick around anymore. Conservatives hate Rather because, while he and his show often cowered to Republican White Houses (remember the show’s Reagan-era slogan “We keep America on top of the world”?), he didn’t cower passive-aggressively enough, or consistently enough. It was Rather who got the blame and invective when a 60 Minutes story about Bush’s draft-dodging included some maybe-faked-maybe-real evidence. (The evidence wasn’t all that vital; Bush could still be proven a dodger without it.)

In recent years, Rather’s magazine-show segments (and his election-night scripted homilies) have outshone and out-rated the Evening News, the distant third of the increasingly irrelevant old-network newscasts. In Rather’s early years, the newscast was a tightly-paced headline service, packed with 22 minutes of solid information and infotainment. Today, it’s down to 18 minutes of stories you’ve already heard on cable or online, punctuated by long promos for stories coming up later on in today’s show, on tomorrow’s show, or on tomorrow morning’s Early Show, or on tomorrow night’s 48 Hours Investigates. Rather seems to spend more time telling us what he’s going to tell us than he spends actually telling us. Even the show’s remaining “news” content is usually padded out with relatively timeless filler features about, say, how the recession’s affecting heartland construction workers.

Rather’s departure will give the network the opportunity to re-invent the newscast. It needs to turn it into something that will play off CBS’s higher rated magazine shows, while drawing viewers toward its affiliates’ local newscasts, and preferably while keeping CBS News differentiated from the likes of Fox. Can it be done? Stay tuned.