maltadefender

Great work on the Defender - my pick of the bunch too

That Laverda looks spot-on. Really like that one.

Lovely stuff - particularly he FAA types

Not my era but the F-14s and F-15s look very sharp indeed

I'm completing my Airfix Blenheim today but that's astonishing work. I am, like, well jel innit?

Beautiful. Makes me wish for both time and talent!

Peter Capaldi, the oldest Doctor since William Hartnell, who will undoubtedly retain his Scottish accent unlike Mr. Tennant and be a properly baity old so-and-so. Better known as the potty-mouthed government spin doctor, Malcolm Tucker. And also the Angel Islington in Neverwhere. And other stuff. Milking it? Yes. But then I've still got all my annuals, novels, Corgi cars and other shenanigans from The Professionals... plus ca change and all that!

Ahhh, but now we've got Jenna Louise Coleman. Apparently she's in the doghouse for tweeting about the Christmas episode. Lucky dog, I say. And so we'll be weeping into our plum duff at the 'brutal' departure of Matt Smith (according to JLC) on Christmas Day, but then there's the Jock Doc to follow. I've actually never seen The Thick of it, but I really liked a lot of things that Peter Capaldi's been in like Neverwhere and Mrs. Maltadefender took me to the West End to see The Ladykillers in which he was fantastic. Matt Smith plays the 1000 year old soul brilliantly. And he's from Northampton. Funnily enough Tom Baker went to my brother's school in Northampton after they won a competition for a day with the Doctor. He apparently arrived in a helicopter on the sports field, and as he strode out to meet the children he spotted a cute looking blonde boy (my brother) and asked him to hold his big, floppy hat. Looks can be deceiving. My brother was a tearaway - and away he tore... with the hat! It might still be at the school hidden behind the water tank.

My wife has a fixation on serial killer police shows and almost without exception the plotting and dialogue of Doctor Who is streets ahead of them. Take for instance The Rings of Akhaten from the most recent series: For her first trip into the infinite possibilities of time and space, The Doctor takes Clara to Akhaten where all races and species worship a sleeping God, lest he wake up and devour them. The Doctor saves a small girl who is about to be sacrificed and realises that the 'god' is just a giant parasite which lives off the energy of daily lives: the hopes, fears, happiness and sorrows of those beholden to it. He tries to free the people from this parasite by giving it an intense dose of emotions from his 1000 years of life, but it is Clara who kills it - not with lives lived but with the infinite possibilities and unquenchable sadness of lives cut short. And, as Bill Hicks might say, "Here's Tom with the weather..." I mean for a kids' show that's rather special isn't it?

The hype is just the way that the contemporary BBC handles things - although the same is as true of any other channel with its own content. The 50th anniversary programme is 'event TV' so the Beeb needs to get as many people watching as possible or else get egg on its face. The fact that it has to be packaged and sold so zealously is a sociological problem - a measure of how far the lowest common denominator has fallen, if you will. I am officially sick to death of Zoe Ball, Connie Huq, McFly and a host of other people squealing and holding their crotches as they describe 'classic' and 'legendary' not to mention 'iconic' moments from the programme. Moments which, for the hard of thinking, happen to be being showing in the background at the same time as the nonentities hoot and holler. But it's no different to all the irrelevant gum flapping and ego massage which fills at least an hour of all Formula One coverage. Or the coverage of the Queen's jubilee. We've got Sebastian Faulks heading the 1914 centenary planning committee as well... oh dear lord! Personally I find the BBC's white elephant in Salford much more distressing than the grand old building in London. A film made about Bomber Command and filmed on location would doubtless stir someone to say 'I'm uncomfortable watching something filmed where the mass murder of civillians was planned and carried out' if they wanted to. Fine, it's their right to have that opinion. As it is I believe we were treated to an entertaining and moving piece of drama in the form of A Journey Through Time And Space (haven't watched it yet but looking forward to it), and to mark the 50th anniversary of that first episode we will be getting a blockbuster new episode. Hooray. Sadly the Beeb is starting to irritate those with more than three functioning braincells, not least with its endless mantra of '50 years of Doctor Who' (which there haven't been as the whole concept was on a shelf in the archives gathering dust for nearly two decades). It's the 50th anniversary of the first programme and I only hope that we get a rip-snorting 90 minutes on Saturday night.

Inspirational. Very well done.

Yes please from me.

Lovely detailing on this one.

I did that one aged about 10 and did a home-brewed camouflage on it. Glad to see one done properly!

Vitor she's a beauty. How did you paint/mask your 'fried eggs' on the camouflage? I've just done one brush painted and they look nothing like as good.

I'll have a crack. Not sure what with just yet...

Yes please for me.

Really charming job that... took years off me!

Delightful... nothing quite like an old favourite, is there?

I think that the Lanc artwork is a close-up of one of Mr Tooby's fine non-Airfix pictures of the Dam-Busters.

Decals for the Australian Touring Car Championship/Bathurst 1000 are available from Patto's Place, if anyone's interested. European decals are quite thin on the ground.

If I may (mis)quote The Shamen: Es are good. And this one's a cracker.

Why not a 1/24 Blenheim? Would sit nicely alongside the Mossie.

The Hurricane in my Avatar is one of the plastic ones made for the film... it's the one Robert Shaw jumps out of in the pre-credit sequence, I'm told. It was doing the rounds of air shows a couple of years back - photos for a fiver with a pair of minx-y WAAFs selling tickets!

High quality build - if it were April 1 you could put her in the new releases section and get a lot of people very excited about a fantastic new tooling!