18:02 – Panel – The Digital Divide
Arrive at panel, find seat, shove Lilian towards the front and realise that I’m about to attend my first ever Worldcon panel. Huzzah!
Panel actually rather good. Nicholas Whyte works for some kind of institute researching politics and democracy in the Balkans, and has a large supply of fascinating insights and anecdotes. One of the other panellists has lots of experience working with mature students who aren’t quite so internet-manic as the young-uns, so there’s much discussion of what it’s like when ‘outdated’ channels are closed down in favour of the internet, as well as the effect it has on countries that are new to the internet – while vast numbers of languages are now supported, English is frequently seen as a politically neutral second language shared by everyone. How politically neutral English actually is is another matter…
From the Heart of Europe
Books, politics, languages and life
But he did work with three excellent script editors, the great Robert Holmes, the underrated Anthony Read and the celebrated Douglas Adams
Adams is rightly celebrated as a scriptwriter, but what we know of his general attitude to deadlines suggests to me that he was wholly unsuited for the role of script editor, and that this has a lot to do with the variable quality control of the scripts in this season. I suspect also that Graham Williams had to do a lot of the script editor role himself – it would not at all surprise me, for instance to find that Adams came up with the ideas for City of Death, but the hard work of making an actual script out of it was done by Williams.