Wednesday 18 October 2017

Notes on What We Do Here

Hello fans, Jack here to make an announcement of sorts.

The original plan was that Wrong With Authority would just be a new podcast, in which the four of us - me, James, Kit, and Daniel - talked about movies about historical events.  But we find ourselves chronically unable to stick to one thread and format.  As some of you may have noticed, this site changed somewhat a little while ago.  This was done to reflect the fact that 'Wrong With Authority' had obviously already become something wider than was originally intended... what with commentaries and footnotes and Drunken Whocasts, etc.  WWA even played host to a Shabcast, one month when bandwidth over at Pex Lives was running short.

'Wrong With Authority' is now effectively something akin to the banner under which we do all sorts of things.  It could even be seen as our 'band name'.  But we're still releasing podcasts called 'Wrong With Authority' which are about movies about history, and intend to continue to do so.  So what's going on?

Well, we'd like you to think of Wrong With Authority as being both our 'overall' name and the name of the podcast strand we do about movies about history.  It's a bit like when a band releases an album with the same name as the band.  Except that we're going to keep doing it over and over.

But we're also planning to have other podcast strands under the overall umbrella of Wrong With Authority, so to speak.  We've already kindasorta begun doing this, as you'll have noticed.  I mean, James Whale's Frankenstein isn't based on a historical event, is it?  We could do Bride as a WWA one day... but only the bit at the start.

Am I overthinking this, do you think?

Anyway, here's the point: the Wrong With Authority podcast will continue, as will the Drunken Whocasts, and they will be joined by another strand which we're going to call Consider the Reagan.

Eagle-eyed readers will remember that 'Consider the Ray Gun' was/is an occasional strand of Oi! Spaceman, in which Daniel chatted with a guest about a book - usually SF.  Consider the Reagan, by contrast, will usually feature all four of us (or at least two of us) doing a commentary on a film released between the inauguration of Ronald Reagan as president and the inauguration of his successor - a limit we set for ourselves in amused awareness of its spurious rigour.  The idea is for us to revisit the films of the 80s that shaped us as kids.  Our ages converge just enough that this will work - to some extent anyway.  Think of the Superman III bonus episode of Watching Robocop With Kit Power as the pilot.

The first official episode of Consider the Reagan will be along soon, and will feature myself, Daniel and Kit talking over Back to the Future.  The next episode of Wrong With Authority will be along soon too, and will feature the entire gang talking about Inherit the Wind, the classic Stanley Kramer drama from 1960 dramatising a heavily-fictionalised version of the Scopes 'Monkey Trial'.

We appreciate your patience and enthusiasm as we thrash out the exact contours of our increasingly overcomplicated nest of projects.  We're still having fun.  We hope you are too.

Yours in historical inexactitude,

Jack