The Griper's Times

DOCTOR Who is now almost old enough to qualify for a bus pass, which inevitably means it's carrying an awful lot of history with it. One of the challenges for a show with that sort of longevity is to know when to lean into nostalgia and when to emphatically say, "you know what guys, we all love the Terrapetils, but maybe we need a new start." It's a dilemma which grows over time. When the programme revived in 2005 the task was to win over those who'd grown up with the original series and a new generation of fans. At 18 years, "New Who" is now itself old enough to get drunk, leave home and buy kitchen knives so those originally drawn in by the revival are themselves as distinct from a bunch of nine-year-olds who might be puzzled to find that the Last of the Time Lords is now suddenly a man. Had I spent more time trying to grasp the complexities of dating rather than Unit dating [there's a great pun there that will land with some 0.2 per cent of reader

IS there any more damning indictment of austerity politics than the fact that thousands of kids are unable to return to school because of very real fears that buildings might fall down on their heads? The crumbling of our public services is no longer a cute metaphor from hand-wringing "lefties" intent on doing the country down but a stone cold fact. Classrooms across England and an unknown number of other buildings are at risk of collapse. It is true enough that even the most sure-footed government might be floored by the infamous "events" former PM Harold Macmillan once spoke of. Only there's a curious pattern in the multiple crises gripping Britain today; the fact that the flashing lights and sirens were ignored by ministers. The events did not so much arrive unannounced but spent years loudly clearing their throats in the hope that someone sensible might sit up and notice. Fortunately for our current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, in this case of crumbling conc

SMASH HIT: Baldur's Gate 3 was released this summer THE recent launch of Baldur's Gate 3 has led to debate about whether this is in fact the closest video games have come to recreating the experience of traditional tabletop games. It definitely feels like a landmark release - think Final Fantasy VII or Skyrim - reminding publishers that using the arcane arts to air-fry goblinfolk is in fact very popular actually.  And it will certainly set a new benchmark for what is expected from the very best RPGs on home console and PC.  But has it attained the holy grail of perfectly recreating dice and paper gaming? Will that ever be possible with pixels? Should developers even attempt to? Interestingly the efforts are about as old as gaming itself. I've recently been reading a history of the British video game industry and how early Dungeons and Dragons players were using machines likened to giant blue filing cabinets to create the late 70s equivalent of Massively Multiplayer Online R