You’re also a part of the Amazon TV series Good Omens, which I’m very excited about!
TENNANT: Good, I’m glad!
What was the attraction to that? Was it Neil Gaiman, specifically, or was it the story and character?
TENNANT: Obviously, a Neil Gaiman story, in itself, is appealing. The fact that Neil was so involved, as the showrunner and he’s written all the scripts, and I knew that Michael Sheen was involved, and Douglas Mackinnon, a director I knew of old, was directing, and just the sweep and scope of the story and the resources that we had to make the story with, just felt like this was a project that was going to be very exciting, and I wanted to be a part of it.
What did you enjoy about playing Crowley, and the relationship between your character and Michael Sheen’s character, Aziraphale?
TENNANT: Well, it’s a bit of a double act. They are yin and yang, really. I enjoyed playing almost every scene with Michael Sheen. He’s someone I’ve known for years. We never really acted together, but I knew him and I knew his work, and I knew that it was gonna be fun, and indeed it was. He’s great to bounce off. He’s never not engaged, in any moment of a scene, and it makes you better to have someone to play with who’s that present and skillful. Crowley is a great character. He’s a demon, and they’re averting the apocalypse. We get to see them throughout all of human history. There were so many things that were just gonna be fun to get involved with. Just to be a part of this story that people love so much and that means so much to people – this novel has such a following – it can be intimidating because you don’t want to break it, disappoint people, or let people down, but it felt like the team was robust enough to make it something worth doing.
How did you find Neil Gaiman, as a showrunner?
TENNANT: Oh, fantastic! He was very present and very involved, but also hugely creative. He’s lived with this novel for so many years. It was such a formative experience for him, as a writer, writing with Terry Pratchett. And with Terry Pratchett no longer being with us, Neil has become the caretaker for the memory of Terry. I think he would acknowledge that, himself. So, he’d be entirely forgiven for being rather proprietorial about the whole thing and about wanting things done in a very prescriptive way. And whilst he had a very clear, very strong, and very persuasive view of the material, which was fantastic to have access to, he was also interested in what people brought to it. He was genuinely interested in the collaborative art of making it from a novel into something else. He actually couldn’t have been better, from that point of view, just having his skills available to us, all the time, and to have a conversation about these characters and about the show, as it developed. The whole thing was a wonderful experience.
Prompt-based fandom events are when you really learn everyone’s colors like you’ll find the people who take the prompt “death” and come up with some smarmy ship-art of character A and character B walking over dead leaves while wearing scarves and drinking hot cider and then you’ll find the people who take the prompt “sunshine” and write how a bright glint of sunshine reflected off the barrel of a gun is the absolute last thing character A sees before taking a bullet to the chest
you can lead a content creator to water but you sure as fuck can’t make him drink
today my anthro professor said something kindof really beautiful:
“you all have a little bit of ‘I want to save the world’ in you, that’s why you’re here, in college. I want you to know that it’s okay if you only save one person, and it’s okay if that person is you”
I feel like a few people I know could stand to read this.
‘female’ and ‘male’ are not etymologically related but ‘beech’ and ‘book’ quite possibly are and ‘shade’ and ‘shadow’ are just two different cases of the same word fossilized into different meanings
goes to show why you can’t just go with what sounds similar when tracing etymology
nobody asked for the Proof but I’m studying for my historical linguistics exam so you get them anyway:
female is from Old French femelle>Latin femella>diminutive of femina>from ‘the one who gives suckle [like to a baby]’ from PIE root *dhei ‘to suck’ (the dead silence of people purposefully not giggling when my professor defined this in class as ‘to give suck’ was something to behold)
male is from Old French masle>Latin masculus>diminutive of mas which we don’t know the origin of
we should pronounce female more like ‘feml’ and we should probably spell it closer to the French, but it got respelled and repronounced based on male because of the obvious semantic relationship between the two, which is a phenomenon sometimes called contamination (and a very common one)
shade is from old english sceadu which had the oblique case ‘sceadwe’; because of a rule which makes vowels with no consonants after the end of the syllable long, and vowels that have two consonants after them short, the Great Vowel Shift applied to one and not the other, which resulted in different forms, at some point they specialized into slightly different meanings (also extremely common)
book and beech are slightly fuzzier but they might be from the same Proto-Germanic root, the idea being one of writing on beech material, also fun fact which I can’t cite bc it’s from my textbook, the plural of book used to be beech probably from vowel mutation processes (like foot/feet) combined with a particular type of consonant mutation common in Old English (which is why the English for church is ‘church’ while the Proto-Germanic was *kirika)
The Palais Garnier, the Mecca of classical dance and opera, will open to a new audience by hosting from June 9 an “escape game”, a game of escape in the footsteps of the Phantom of the Opera, announced Thursday by the Paris Opera.
Presented as “an immersive experience”, this detective game titled “Inside the Opera”, which opens Thursday, will feature up to 150 participants at a time.They will have to decipher puzzles for 90 minutes within the Palais Garnier. Until now, apart from performances, access was reserved for spectators and visitors to this iconic landmark.
Speaking to “history buffs, dance and music lovers, enigmas lovers and new experiences lovers,” this “escape game” will consist of solving “the curse of the Phantom of the Opera” with the participation of different actors in period costume, according to a joint statement of the Paris Opera and Team Break, one of the leaders of these games of escape, object of a real craze.
A few weeks ago, the Parc des Princes launched its own version of this game to attract audiences other than the only football fans.
At the Paris Opera, which will celebrate its 350th anniversary in 2019, this game will take place on days without artistic shows, ballets, or operas. The participants will conduct the investigation by circulating freely in the different emblematic spaces of the places: the Grand Staircase, the Avant Foyer and the Grand Foyer but also the legendary box of the Phantom of the Opera, in the great hall of the Palais Garnier at the famous ceiling painted by Chagall. To intensify immersion and play, participants will be masked.
Based on the legend of the Phantom of the Opera, a fantastic novel by Gaston Leroux published in 1910, the game starts during the rehearsals of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” on the eve of the premiere, rehearsals disturbed by “strange events” .
“This new immersive experience in the Palais Garnier will allow visitors to discover the secrets of Charles Garnier’s architectural masterpiece, inaugurated in 1875,” says the Opéra national de Paris, recalling that 670,000 people visit Garnier every year for shows.
Available only on the internet, tickets are sold 28 euros for adults and 22 euros for children under 14 (free for children under 4 years).
Lady Karasu 