A couple of weeks ago, I was writing here about the excellent new No Age album, and about indie orthodoxy masquerading as somehow adventurous in the world of shoegazing. Without going over the whole argument again, I think the gist was that early ‘90s shoegazing - which mainly sounds so bland now - acted as a gateway for me into a whole world of ambient, avant-garde music. I was reminded of this last week by two things. One, the arrival of an album by a band called Sennen, which I must admit I haven’t heard, but the premise of someone naming themselves after a Ride song fills me, in 2008, with very little excitement. Two, the arrival of “Sand” by Philip Jeck, which is precisely the sort of expansive, challenging, ultimately aesthetically satisfying record that shoegazing inadvertently lead me to. I have a few Jeck records, most recently his collaboration with the great Gavin Bryars on a new version of the latter’s “Sinking Of The Titanic” (LTM are releasing some Bryars work from the early ‘80s, incidentally, including some beautiful piano studies). Jeck is one of those avant-gardists who loiters awkwardly between the roles of musician and sound artist, seeing as he builds his music out of old records and record players. He isn’t the first person to fetishise balls of fluff on old gramophone needles, of course: Portishead made a fortune out of distorting old hip hop breaks on their first album, after all. But for Jeck, the surface is the depth, so that “Sand” is a disorienting patchwork of static, churn and drift, out of which faint melodies – a familiar but unnameable orchestral vamp in the middle of “Chime Again”, for instance – sometimes emerge. It’s hard to write about this sort of music without making it sound a bit forbidding, but – to use that shoegazing analogy – imagine the gauzy textures of My Bloody Valentine’s “To Here Knows When” reconstructed using radically different instruments, and moved even further away from the idea of a conventional tune. The results are immersive and pretty revitalising, first thing on a Monday morning. I guess Jeck’s nearest reference point, even though he uses guitars rather than customised record players, would be his labelmate Christian Fennesz. Fennesz has a similarly voluptuous approach to noise, a taste for soiled ambience, and a gift for creating illusions of memory through his music. Jeck’s aged crackle, and the hints of half-unremembered tunes buried beneath it, create a kind of nostalgia for . . . what, exactly? Something nebulous, evanescent, a bit pretentious. Maybe for the days when, briefly, Slowdive sounded radical to me. . .

This morning's edition of Radio 4's Broadcasting House chose to mark the death of Charlton Heston with a montage of scenes from his three most iconic films: The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959) and Planet Of The Apes (1967). These were huge films in every sense, made during the golden age of Hollywood and Charlton Heston was a monolithic presence at their centre -- competing in chariot races, or parting the Red Sea, or cursing humanity in front of what's left of the Statue of Liberty. It's perhaps easy now to colour Heston as a gun-toting, reactionary conservative, thanks to his high-profile role in the National Rifle Association and talk of "cold dead hands" while America still reeled from the Columbine high school killings. It would be a shame if we couldn't, instead, celebrate the body of work; the movies for Sam Peckinpah, Orson Welles, Anthony Mann, Nicolas Ray, William Wyler and Carol Reed that made him the screen icon of the 1950s and Sixties, blue-eyed and lantern-jawed, who Pauline Kael called "a god-like hero, built for strength." There seemed to be no role too big for Heston. Michelangelo, Moses, Cardinal Richelieu, Sir Thomas More, Sherlock Holmes, Henry VIII, John the Baptist; in 1990, in a Paul Hogan film called Almost An Angel, he even got to play God. I'm hard pressed to think of another actor with a CV of such stellar characters. It says, perhaps, much about the iconic status Heston achieved after Ben-Hur that he seemed to become the go-to guy for any larger-than-life characters. He was a thoughtful, dignified, mythic presence in his biggest films, everything these Technicolor epics demanded. I suppose I'm equally fascinated by the string of sci-fi movies he made in the Sixties and Seventies -- Planet Of The Apes, The Omega Man (1971) and Soylent Green (1973), all steeped in the paranoia of the age, issuing grim warnings about biological warfare, global warming and the perils of animal husbandry with monkeys. They chime with Heston's own political agenda -- at that time, he was a keen Democrat, who'd supported both the Kennedy brothers and been a highly vocal advocate of civil rights. His gentlemanly demeanour seemed to put him at odds with Sam Peckinpah, with whom he made the great Civil War drama Major Dundee in 1965, a "Moby Dick on horseback" according to the actor RG Armstrong. Peckinpah had a habit of fighting with whichever studio he was currently working; the Dundee shoot was no exception. As Heston explained in David Weddle's biography of Peckinpah "If They Move... Kill 'Em", the director "had this almost pathological antipathy towards anyone with a big office above the ground floor." In the end, Heston offered to forfeit his salary if Peckinpah was fired, he even ended up directing some scenes when Peckinpah himself was too drunk. And they clashed, of course, Heston reportedly coming close on one occasion to riding down Peckinpah, sabre in hand. Although the original cut of the film is considered something of a disaster (there's a Region 1 DVD of the Restored Cut you can buy), Heston is superb as the disgraced Union cavalry officer who leads a private army on an 2,400 mile trek across Mexico in pursuit of Apache warlord Sierra Charriba. I'm reminded of John Wayne in The Searchers when I watch Heston in Major Dundee; both are playing on their image as iconic men of action, both Dundee and Ethan Edwards driven on their murderous, obsessive quests by queasy notions of racial hatred. I love, too, Touch Of Evil (1958), for Welles, another movie touched by controversy, re-cut and in places even re-shot by Universal. It's a sweaty, Kafkaesque thriller, with Heston's ambiguous Mexican policeman up against Welles' corrupt American detective. The opening tracking shot is one of the greatest moments in cinema, but Heston himself is equally memorable, a fine on-screen match for Welles. But I guess for me, Heston will always be there on the beach, weeping on his knees as the surf rolls around him, haranguing the skies and the ghosts of his peers -- "Goddamn you all to hell!"

Excuse me for hijacking my own film blog to write about TV, but the first episode of Series 4 of the rebooted Doctor Who, "Partners In Crime", has just aired on BBC1. In fact, I've been mulling over blogging about the return of Doctor Who for a while. If official reports and frenzied Net chatter are to be believed, we're moving towards the end of some deep-rooted ongoing narrative from series producer Russell T Davies of the type we're really not too accustomed to seeing in British TV drama but is, certainly, a familiar staple of American shows. From The Sopranos to Heroes, The Wire and Battlestar Galactica -- another show that's similarly been rescued from retro kitsch TV hell. And anyway, those Last Five Minutes of tonight's episode are arguably worth blogging about alone. Rose! Yes! Really! I guess, first, I should probably say something about my own relationship to Doctor Who. Growing up in the Seventies, my Saturday TV viewing was governed principally by the exploits of Tom Baker, as highly charismatic a figure as you'd find on the box during that or any other era, who played The Doctor during what you might call the show's golden years. I remember watching, open-mouthed, Jon Pertwee regenerate into Baker in 1973, when I was about 4, and being blown away, having no real reference point for such an event -- TV characters, in those days, were always played by the one person, before the miracle of successive actors playing the same role became a sort of accepted norm, particularly in soaps, and anyway I was barely on solid foods when Patrick Troughton previously transmogrified into Pertwee. I think that was pretty much when I first realised that there was something different, I suppose, about Doctor Who -- that's even beyond, certainly, the reality-crunching idea of a chap travelling through time and space in a blue box fighting a colourful array of aliens and such like. Those early Baker adventures were wonderful -- a kind of rich, Gothic horror ran through stories like "Pyramids Of Mars", "The Talons Of Weng Chiang", "The Brain Of Morbius", "The Deadly Assassin" that, basically, helped fuel my childhood imagination. I drifted out of Doctor Who as the creative spark dwindled. Peter Davison had some good stories -- "Kinda", "Terminus", "The Caves Of Androzani". But I'd pretty much given up by the time Colin Baker took over, and though script editor Andrew Cartmel tried to restore some kind of mystery to the show during the Sylvester McCoy-era with adventures like "The Curse Of Fenric" and "Ghost Light", I'd moved onto other things. Girls, Britpop, films, mostly; something approximating the start of a career. But the childhood resonance of Doctor Who drew me back when Davies' relaunched the show in 2004. Christopher Eccleston was, I thought, a fantastic choice to play The Doctor. He did mug a bit too much in those early episodes (I don't think he's a particularly good comic actor, and Davies' scripts do tend to amp up the comedy) but by the time that first series was coming to a close, with stories like "The Empty Child" calling to mind the creepy horror of Old Who, and as the facts about the destruction of all his fellow Time Lords became clearer, he brought a ruefulness and reflectiveness to the part that, for a show which, in the fag end of its initial run had become a groanathon of wobbly sets and atrocious guest appearances from the likes of Hale and Pace, felt pretty groundbreaking. And certainly, the casting of Eccleston as a Saturday evening, family viewing TV hero was, in itself, quite subversive. Which brings us on to David Tennant, who I've increasingly warmed to. He's got a certain infectious charm, even if he's still slightly annoyingly when he gets over-excitable. Actually, I like more what Davies does with the companions than The Doctor. By necessity, and according to template, The Doctor is a bag of quirks -- Troughton's recorder, Pertwee's frilly shirts, Baker's scarf and jelly babies, Davison's, um, celery, and thusly on -- so Tennant does Whacky because it's part of the job description. But what Davies has cleverly done is amped up the relationship between the Doctor and his companions. So, critically, the first episode of Series 1 of the relaunch was called "Rose" -- our way into this fun-packed, alien-filled universe was through a shop assistant from a London council estate played, in an inspired and unexpected piece of casting, by Billie Piper. While back in Old Who, the companions came and went, with barely a mention after their departure, here they're equipped with families, relationships, back stories. With Rose came a mother, a boyfriend and a dead father (hey, stay with me here...). In one of New Who's best stories, "School Reunion", we caught up with Sarah-Jane Smith, one of the most popular Old Who companions, and scriptwriter Toby Whithouse showed us the effects of what happens to them, once they stop travelling with The Doctor, the trauma of readjusting to a "normal" life, how the colour just leaches out of the world. The scene where Sarah-Jane and The Doctor meet properly for the first time in nearly 30 years was emotionally charged, Sarah-Jane close to tears, stunned, saying: "I thought you died, you never came back, I waited for you and you didn't come back and I thought you died..." And now, in the last five minutes of "Partners In Crime", here comes Rose Tyler. Rose left, in case you didn't know, at the end of Series 2, stuck forever, 8 million of us thought, on a parallel Earth, a tearful farewell said on a beach called Dårlig ulv stranden, Bad Wolf Bay, in Norway, The Doctor burning up a sun -- a sun! -- so that Rose could tell him she loved him, an emotional display you'd never get in Old Who, something, then, that shifted considerably the dynamic between the leads into previously uncharted territory, great TV drama by any standards. Since then, there's been Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman, a good actress whose part was under-served by the writing team), whose love for The Doctor was, post-Rose, sadly unrequited. Now we've got Donna Noble (Catherine Tate, fortunately less annoying than she was in the 2006 Christmas Special) joining the show full time. There was a glimpse of that "What happens when The Doctor leaves" thing, too, her life since her debut in "The Runaway Bride" a little less than Technicolor after The Doctor's departure. "Partners In Crime" wasn't, admittedly, one of the best stories in the series -- an outer space supernanny fostering alien children was, like previous season openers "Rose", "New Earth" and "Smith And Jones", just a vehicle to sashay a new dynamic into the show. And then along came Rose. Just there, at a crash barrier, seen initially from behind as Donna, who doesn't know her, tells her something in passing, then Rose turning to face the camera, the camera following as she walks off, vanishing into the air like a ghost, back, presumably, to her parallel Earth, foreshadowing events we assume will come later in the series. It was brilliant, heart-stopping, reinforcing the impact Piper had as Rose, reconnecting with those moments on Bad Wolf Bay -- "Am I ever going to see you again?", "You can't" -- throwing up a pile of questions I'm going to have to wait 13 extremely long weeks for answers to. I like Rose a lot, she was funny and smart and a bit goofy and brave and held her father's hand when he died back in 1987 and absorbed the time vortex from the heart of the TARDIS to destroy 500,000 Daleks and save The Doctor's life: "I can see everything, all that is, all that was, all that ever could be... My head is killing me." Sure, quite why Davies has chosen to bring back Rose is currently one of those mystery-in-enigma-moments -- we're told the season finale will feature Rose, as well as Martha, Sarah-Jane, Torchwood's Captain Jack Harkness plus assorted members of Rose's extended family. Daleks, too, and possibly their creator, Davros. That Series 4 will resolve the outstanding storylines for all these characters, sparking some kind of reboot for the Specials next year, no proper Series 5 until 2010, so Tennant can go and play Hamlet at Stratford; and, yes, I've got tickets. Whatever Davies' masterplan, the four series arc hints as being as much about the companions as it is The Doctor, and in the end, it's probably more about Rose and The Doctor -- specifically in that order -- than anyone else. So, that's my Saturday nights sorted out until mid-June. Yes, welcome back, Rose Tyler, it's good to see you again.

A tremendous amount of proofreading this afternoon, and we haven't had much time to go through new releases, or write proper blogs. So here are the 36 songs that have just been played on John Robinson's bulging iPod. One of those shuffle sessions that turn out to work rather well, I reckon... 1. Mary Margaret O’Hara – You Will Be Loved Again 2. Bob Dylan – Forever Young (Continued) 3. Bert Jansch – Strolling Down The Highway 4. Neil Young – Organ Solo 5. The Kinks – Dead End Street 6. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - Sheets 7. Ornette Coleman – Change Of The Century 8. Pylon - Danger 9. Gram Parsons – Cash On The Barrel 10. John Coltrane - Acknowledgement 11. Bach – Violin Partita #1 In B Minor 12. Ringo Starr – Beaucoups Of Blues 13. The Byrds – You’re Still On My Mind 14. Dexys Midnight Runners – Keep It 15. The Damned - Antipope 16. Nico – Lawns Of Dawns 17. Don Armando’s Second Avenue Rumba Band – I’m An Indian Too 18. The Beastie Boys - Gratitude 19. Holy Fuck - Safari 20. Genaro Salinas _ La Numero Cien 21. Bruce Springsteen – Open All Night 22. Squirrel Bait – Short Straw Wins 23. The Groop – Wonder Why 24. Robert Plant & Alison Krauss – Stick With Me Baby 25. Blue Oyster Cult – 7 Screaming Diz-Busters 26. The Walkmen – Bows + Arrows 27. Bob Dylan – Goodbye Holly 28. Michael Garrick Trio - Moonscape 29. Bert Jansch – Smokey River 30. Blue Oyster Cult – A Fact About Sneakers 31. Jonathan Richman – South American Folk Song 32. The Groop – I Just Don’t Know How To Say Goodbye 33. Von Sudenfed - The Young, The Faceless And The Codes 34. Richard Thompson – Sunset Song 35. The Flying Burrito Brothers – Cody Cody 36. The Grateful Dead – Cosmic Charlie