Milton Keynes

Visited this most infamous of new towns today to check out the National Film and Sci-Fi Museum. There's a huge amount of stuff there - including Ripley's helmet from Alien, Orac from Blake's 7, multiple rooms of Star Wars stuff and loads of screen-worn costumes. Almost too much in fact; the space is too small for all this science fiction goodness.

Mind you, if you're going to visit Milton Keynes to see it, make sure you find something else to do in that place while you're there - you'll be done in an hour. Partly as there's a no photography rule for all bar a few designated points, including a replica TARDIS console that should really have been labelled as such.

After lunch, I visited the MK Gallery, which has an exhibition on Laura Knight, a 20th century English realist painter who ended up a Dame and was the second woman elected to the Royal Academy.

This one you might recognise:

This is Take Off - one of her war artist works. Lot of other good stuff there - she rather liked doing nudes... but most painters do, she seems.

The wide avenues and very non-pedestrian friendly environs of Milton Keynes are not going to be somewhere I'll forget in a hurry, that's for sure.

In any event, my Network Railcard got me £8 off my ticket from Euston, so now I need to find another £22 worth of savings... but I don't intend to ride a LNWR Classs 350 again if I can help it.

Don't be fooled by the Ankh that she's got, she's still Jenny in Half a Frock (Review: 'Logan's Run', 1976)

Jenny Agutter, to me, is Sister Julienne in Call the Midwife. I'm somewhat surprised she's only 63, because it seems like she's been a part of British media for longer than I can remember, most notably in The Railway Children.

So, watching Logan's Run via Amazon Video, it was a bit of a surprise to see her as a twenty something starlet... in an outfit less Call the Midwife and more Call the Cardic Nurse, Stat!

Anyway, more on that later.

****

Logan's Run is loosely based on the 1967 novel of the same name by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, albeit with some heavy changes.

In the year 2274, the remnants of humanity live hedonistic lifestyles in a sealed city run by a computer. It's a idyllic life if you like free love... but the drawback is that you die at 30; either by vaporisation in a strange ritual or if you try to run, via the Sandmen, the city's human law enforcement.

When one runner, Logan-5, hears of a rumoured safe home for runners 'called' Sanctuary via a woman called Jessica-6, the computer assigns him to find it and destroy it, making him a Runner as well in the process...

This review contains some spoilers.