A SLIGHT CASE OF OVERBOMBING

Er, Happy New Year.... and WTF?!?!?

2011-05-30T03:07:00.005+01:00

I was going to make the first post of the year glib, ironic, shallow and, you know, whatever. I was going to wish everyone a belated happy new year....and I still do.... happy belated new year.....

But things changed a bit.....

I had thought things were looking up: the ribs I cracked turned out to be broken but had healed; a generally annoying long-term recurring illness had subsided a touch and was starting to consider generally buggering off a bit which was good and then..... well, if I believed in curses, I’d start to think I’d taken a pump-action for a fun-day to a hall of mirrors, having first waltzed through a colonnade of ladders and kicked a cornucopia of black cats. But I don’t. And I haven’t.

On 5th April I watched episode one of Candy Cabs (that’s how I remember the date) this was not a good idea. And I’m sure it could be evidence at the Hague as cruel and unusual punishment. I’m certain what happened next had precisely nothing to do with bad television but given how terribly bad that television was it’s fun to make the link. And isn’t it good to have a reason for the unreasonable no matter how completely ludicrous, erroneous and unreasonable it might be?

So, programme ends. Watch news. Watch Newsnight. Start to realise my whole right-hand side has stopped working: face slumped, speech problems, arm numb and barely mobile... Alarm bells start to ring – I think we’ve all seen the advert. I was in A&E within the hour and admitted that night. Cue tests: lots of tests. The most painful part of which came after I got home – lumber punctures are uncomfortable but the headache I had for the following two weeks was like someone drilling straight into my brain through my eyes. Then pouring in liquid nitrogen. I’ve broken my ribs, my knees and sliced a thumb to the bone.... they had nothing on this. And the Doctor (likely qualified in ‘30’s Germany) said there would be no pain. Would hate to see his definition of pain. But, hey, no pain no gain; do I get a tin cup or something?

In hospital I was introduced to another new experience I could have done without: a visit from the Norovirus Fairy, courtesy of another patient’s visitor (who ‘thought it would be OK to visit while he had the symptoms’ but didn’t see the point of all those hygiene things that hospitals have taken quite a shine to – feel free to roll eyes and tut). B.P. went to 60 over 25 (which apparently is bad), required 6 litres of fluids, lost nearly a stone in 5 days, hallucinated a lot and knocked the drip out twice.... which was actually quite amusing and sort of, er, bloody.

I was released just before Easter and enjoyed two weeks of blinding headaches and lots of codeine. But at least it was sunny so I retreated into the garden with a CD player and dark glasses. I probably looked like Lermontov.

The return home was a problematic, weird experience crowned by the first couple of hours with the TV at which point I realised I couldn’t understand why anybody would ever want to watch TV or films as it’s just a bunch of inconsequential buffoons prancing like pointless puppets making empty burbling noises of no worth. Worse, I couldn’t work out why anybody in their right mind would dedicate any time to writing for such inanity. Thankfully, this seems to be wearing off.

So, where does this leave things: I’m still part paralyzed with no real idea when or if it will wear off. The list of things I can’t do seems much longer than those I can: can’t drive; can barely hold a pen or sign my name; can’t feel the laptop keys properly (so I’m using two fingers on my left-hand); have trouble holding fork, knife, toothbrush, etc. It’s a bit annoying.

Still, could be worse: I might have watched the rest of Candy Cabs.

And I doubt anyone’s reading this; so probably just pissing in the wind; I notice most Bloggers seem to have given up in the last 6-12 months.... guess everyone’s burbling away on Witter.... ‘cos, like, you know, what meathead's shagging what tart, is like, you know, so like, yeah, whatever, innit. LOL. OMG. LMAO.

Always end on a song..... one which has the chorus ‘life is unfair, kill yourself or get over it’ would be quite nice... what a coincidence...

Last Album listened to: Nine Inch Nails: Still
Last TV watched: Doctor Who: The Almost People

No Snow, No Show

2010-12-06T01:13:00.002Z

Just one simple question....

Where - WHERE! - is my snow?

Everybody else got some why didn't I?

That's a bit of a lie - there was a half inch mid-week.

Then it rained.

And it evaporated (alright, technically melted).

I have a green lawn.

I don't want a green lawn. I'd rather like a pretty white one. You know, like what I've seen on the tele and all.

I still have flowers on the rose bushes - admittedly they got caught by the frost a while back and I'm too lazy to excise them but... they still bear the impression of being flowers, just sort of freeze-dried versions.

There's a lot of water about.

It sits on the road all frozen and treacherous (i.e. plotting to overthrow Her Madge, Gawd bless Her Royal Majestic Highnessness). The temperature outside shames my refridgerator. And the cold has got into all the joints I've generally broken, dislocated or otherwise misplaced over the years.

Guess what I'm saying here is: I've got all the bad bits of Winter without the one redeeming feature. Pretty white stuff coating everything. Pristine by day, glowing by night and muffling the world's infernal din for the duration.

Of course, I know why I don't get snow in quite the same way or at the same time as others: to the East, the Cotswolds; to the North, the Malverns; to the South, more Cotswolds; to the West, the Forest of Dean and Welsh Mountains. By the time the clouds pass over these they can be a bit spent.

Don't get me wrong, it's not that I want the eight foot drifts and 'Traffic Chaos'. But three or four inches that sticks around long enough so as to say 'Winter has come and you do actually live in the same country as everybody else', well, that might be nice.

But before anyone thinks 'how dare you complain about having it easy', just remember when all that snow melts the water has to go somewhere... an' roun' 'ere we call tha' floodin'.

Boring Update

2010-09-18T14:57:00.001+01:00

I had intended the next post to be about Red Planet but instead, a couple of weeks back, I went ass over tip in the bathroom (not the most forgivingly cushioned part of a house) and cracked a couple of ribs. Haven’t bothered taking them to the doctor because, firstly, it feels exactly the same as the last time I did it (so it’s a safe assumption it’s the exact same thing) and, secondly, there’s precisely nothing that can be done anyway: just have to sit it out for a couple of months. Anyway, leaning forward over a laptop is not the most excessively comfortable thing right now.

Apologies for being so boring. However, in recompense, here’s a clip of two cracking Welshmen performing a right good version of a Manics’ song...

Further boring updates as and when.

General Rejoicing!

2010-07-31T21:54:00.006+01:00

Well, I really didn’t think I’d be in the reasonably happy position of seeing that screen. I’ll save the details for why ‘till later. But I’m just glad to see that screen. (And yes, I know I should be using Firefox!)

So, the 10 pages are in, they’ve got an all Sondheim programme with Bryn Terfel on the Proms right now, Misfits later, it’s a Grand Prix weekend, the cats have finally been fed (might even feed myself), sheep may safely graze and all is right with the world.... well, until tomorrow morning...

“We are on the brink of a new era if only...”

The Sequel

2010-07-12T23:47:00.004+01:00

So.... it’s been a while, ain’t it?

Not dead yet.

It’ll take more than life to kill me.

Hope you missed me. To be honest I didn’t hear too much wailing or gnashing of teeth and where on earth was the rending of garments? Guess there’s a recession on....

Basically, I’ve been busy and, annoyingly, an old illness snuck up on me, jumped me in the car park and, let’s just say, a fracas ensued... all a bit like Philo Beddoe against Wilson in the end of that film.

Hope you enjoyed my shamelessly bumping my post count up but I noticed I was perilously close to the ton and, lo, this is “Post 101”: the worst post in the world? It’s Post Zero.... a new start. Hopefully, I’ll be posting a little more often but I’m not going to make promises I can’t keep. But I’ll try and get something up when I’ve got the spare energy; though it would be nice to have some energy to start with, spare or otherwise.

I haven’t been keeping up with what people have been splurging out their brainpans of late so if I cover anything already dealt with or tread on someone’s toes I can only apologize in advance.

“Sorry”

See.

You can cut and paste that into your eyes each time I screw up...

I still haven’t worked out what on earth this site’s for but it’s not stopped the other three billion internet-active people in the world from blathering away endlessly about nothing whatsoever (especially those who comment on YouTube). The only question that remains is shall I tell the truth or lie prolifically and tell you extraordinary and exciting tales from my amazingly exceptional and event-packed life.

I shall consult my monkey-butler once I get out this champagne-filled gilt-lined zero-gravity Jacuzzi-pool...

Depeche Mode - Wrong (2009, Patrick Dangers)

2010-07-10T18:15:00.003+01:00

Depeche Mode - Wrong from Depeche Mode on Vimeo.

Unkle - Rabbit In Your Headlights (1998, Jonathan Glazer)

2010-07-09T23:24:00.002+01:00

Fight Club - This Is Your Life

2010-07-08T22:48:00.000+01:00

Fight Club : This Is Your Life
by Rockinde

There Will Be Blood

2010-07-08T22:46:00.000+01:00

And All That Could Have Been

2010-02-23T01:45:00.003Z

Hymnen

2010-02-23T01:36:00.003Z

All Is Full Of Love

2009-10-31T17:17:00.002Z

...and sheep may safely graze... or Cheltenham’s Ladies may safely go back to learning at any rate...

And now as SWF ’09 has already begun its pass into memory, I ought to put something down about it; just can’t think what. I managed, almost successfully, to control my crazy for nearly the whole four and a half days- the cracks did start to show on the last night- presumably due to a heady brew of zero-sleep and Strongbow. I still don’t understand or care much for networking... I find approaching anybody with my own agenda very hard.

There will now follow a couple of random opinions...

If I write nothing else about SWF there’s just one big thank you to all the good people who managed to put up with my diminishing levels of sane for the duration. The words ‘above’ and ‘beyond’ spring readily to mind. Thank you.

Here’s something you need to view, now, and throughout the next week, Girl Number 9, from the brains of Dan Turner and James Moran. It’s really rather good.

I’ve officially dumped the word ‘aspiring’ into a great big bin designed for holding ‘negative power words’*. (That should please Lord Arnopp.)

Thursday last became quite a good day- full of ups and downs, it was. Now, as I am supposed to be semi-literate I should be able to find some words to describe the feeling I’ve been left with post-Festival. Unfortunately I can’t think of any and, as I can’t share the appropriate mimes, I can only explain it with musical clips... it’s a combination of the following...

Beethoven: Symphony No. 5 Mvt. 4

(Buy this version by the way.)

Bjork: All Is Full Of Love

1998, Chris Cunningham

Final thing. Tonight is Hallowe’en. I had intended to watch some appropriate films; had decided to watch through as many Blind Dead films as possible before either a) my brain cell melts or b) I doze off. As it is, I’ve noticed they’ve got a Francis Bacon night on BBC4 instead... curse you scheduler people! Still, the documentaries finish at 11 so that gives me enough time for Tombs, Return and possibly the The Ghost Galleon

And the cat’s just got into the Hallowe’en spirit by walking past the window with a large bird obscuring his mouth. Mice, I don’t mind; birds, I do.**

*I just made that up but it’s sounds very guru-speak, don’t it?
**The cat’s started eating the bird... how can creatures so soppy be so vicious?***
***And now he’s sitting at the window looking very smug.
****!!!!

Jigsaw Falling Into Place

2009-10-23T03:03:00.002+01:00

Seen Saw... and II and III... so that’s thrice I, twice II and once III...

One simple question: is Jigsaw the most annoying psycho-killer in cinema history?

The evidence...

• he’s pointlessly loquacious, he just goes on and on and on- blah, blah, blah, blah, blah- talking endlessly, you’d have thought a guy with so little time left would be more succinct but no... has he never heard that brevity is the soul of wit?
• ...and if he thinks his message so serious why does he treat it as a game?
• ...and to what end is he jabbering, it wouldn’t matter if what he was saying was interesting, but it’s so repetitive- ‘value life’, ‘this is a test’- he could be replaced by a roadie, ‘one, two, one two, testing, testing’,
• ...and what does he say, well, it’s a sort of half-baked philosophical nonsense that’s a bit too much like it was jotted down in the back of a 15-year old’s school exercise book,
• ...and in turn this moralizing seems to have very limited internal logic; the ~~traps~~ tests don’t seem to have properly defined moral choices or a proper way out and, more bizarrely, to get one person to value life he will happily cut great swathes through the innocent members of their close family, friends and people they just happened to meet in the pub some time... and he claims he’s not a murderer!
• ...and his traps don’t seem to fulfil the parameters he apparently envisages,
• ...and his puzzles are needlessly contrived- they have so many variables that he must be either very lucky or there are several thousand un-triggered back-up plans sitting round like so much UXO and cluster bombs, in fact, he’s like some speed-freak Bond villain-cum-Satanic Mary. Whitehouse,
• ...or maybe he’s just watched Se7en a few too many times and completely misunderstood the simplicity of John Doe’s master-plan... and they say movies don’t make you violent!

...the case for the prosecution rests.

The big surprises about Saws II and III are that they don’t suck- a technical term- (II was in fact quite enjoyable) and aren’t especially violent.

The big minus... each sequel detracts from the excellent original Saw.

The big plus... at least they’re well-made (and watchable) unlike ~~Hostel~~.

PS: I loved this TV guide description of Saw II, “Think Se7en meets The Crystal Maze”. So, now you know, Jigsaw is in fact Richard O’Brien... prepare to beam back to the Planet Transsexual.

Cartrouble

2009-10-21T19:59:00.001+01:00

Recent developments....

Been a bit busy of late, gathering my thoughts for the Screenwriters’ Festival which is now looming large in something I like to call next week...

Have also managed to have another car written off- the fourth- none have been adjudged my fault. So, another write off... or is it? An air of mystery hangs over this- it initially looked as if I’d just broken a front headlight in what was a very low speed impact. I took it to my regular garage for a replacement and, having got it up on the ramps, they rang to say they spotted a chassis leg had been cracked and that this was not viably repairable. So, I had to take the thing to the insurance approved engineer and their initial assessment was it just needs a new headlight... all very odd. Now, they’ve looked at it more and concluded... it just needs a new headlight. Not sure what the outcome of this will be; would rather like it to be a straight headlight repair but fear, with my luck, it will not. But keeping my fingers crossed. I really dislike dealing with insurance claims.

Now another random conundrum. The other night I did me a pizza and settled down in front of TV (and I can’t recall whether this was during Emma [good- far lighter adaptation than most period things], the South Bank Show [interesting- about the writer of Billy Elliot] or Saw II [reasonably alright but still seems like a reductivist version of Se7en], but it was definitely Sunday night). The cat came in with a dead mouse in his mouth... he promptly proceeded to eat it in front of me.

Now, the pizza was hot, the mouse was dead... I let the cat get on with it... does that automatically make me a bad person? Or just pragmatic? The strange part was that the crunching noises from the munched mouse were rather similar to the cracking noises of the crunched crust of the pizza... makes you wonder what they put in the topping!

Anyway, I’ve had it confirmed that at SWF I have these speed-dating sessions with both agents and producers. This means I have to meet people- this is perturbing: I’m nervous enough meeting people I know; a gibbering wreck round people I don’t.

I feel comfortable enough with my anxiety to admit I’m moderately terrified.

No Fun

2009-10-07T03:50:00.002+01:00

A small, possibly erroneous, observation about comedy writing...

Quick story. A couple of months ago I submitted some bits and pieces for the ‘open submission’ satirical comedy Newsjack (on Radio 7). Each week, I did more than necessary and had them scrutinized by a writer friend who told me what worked, what didn’t and how to snazz up those that nearly worked... I then submitted the best. In total, over the 6 weeks, I submitted 15 sketches and 25 one-liners... and not a single solitary one made the grade! This was disappointing. I’d rather like to get on the score-board and radio is a ‘good thing’*. Personally, I prefer Radio 3 but they do very little sketch-based comedy... doesn’t work well between Stockhausen’s greatest hits and Mongolian nose-flute orchestras.

Anyway, this dismal failure got me thinking the simple question- why? Why?!?!?As in ‘why have I failed in such a pusillanimous way?’. I listened to the show each week; I have, contrary to popular rumour, a sense of humour, how could I fail? I think I have an answer- may be wrong, may be right- I think it has a ring of truth.

I listened to the show each week and, while I smirked, I didn’t find it laugh-out loud funny; certainly not as much as the studio audience. However, this is NOT the sour grapes thing of ‘they didn’t pick me therefore they and/or the programme are wrong’. I believe this is a case of I did not find it especially funny therefore I couldn’t write adequately in the idiom required. I love satire- Bremner, Bird & Fortune, Yes Minister, Brass-eye, The Day Today, etc. but Newsjack’s satire was not the type of satire to which I’m acclimatized.

There are two genres (technically three**) which are far more subjective than others presumably because they operate on a very deep primal level: comedy and horror. I find the Marx Brothers funny but can’t stand Laurel & Hardy or Chaplin (mawkish sentimental bilge); I find Mitchell & Webb, Blackadder, Black Books, The IT Crowd and Spaced hilarious while I find Little Britain, Russell Brand and The Catherine Tate Show about as funny as the average knee-capping. I love Blazing Saddles but the farting cowboy scene is the only bit I skip to the end; I know others with the complete opposite view. Could Eddie Braben write successfully for Lucas & Walliams? Could Chris Morris write successfully for Morecambe & Wise? And the same surely follows for horror: some find the supernatural terrifying and are bored by slashers; others think knife-wielding psychos scary while ghost stories leave them cold.

And so to the quite simple conclusion: if you don’t find the show funny, you probably won’t be able to do funny for the show; if you don’t find the monster scary, you probably won’t be able to do the monster scarily. It’s not the fault of the show or the poor beleaguered monster... it’s just that you’re not hard-wired that way. Find your ‘funny’ or ‘scary’ and do that instead.

Well, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it... it’s either that or I really am just a miserable old git.

*As they put it in 1066 and All That.
**The third would be Porn... the person who loves the plastic-clad dom' may not find the idea of 'plushies' too enticing... or the flying helmet and the wet celery...

Sweet Soul Sister

2009-10-01T12:54:00.002+01:00

To be filed under ‘shameless nepotism’...

I’ve been busy and boringly quiet so I shall just go back to something nice that happened to the sister a while back. (I can still recognise nice! Hoorah!)

Anyway, as I think I’ve mentioned before, my sister is a professional classical cellist prone to playing in orchestras. However, early this year she was approached by a band to whom she had been recommended by a third party. This, I presume, is that networking thing in action- the networking thing I can’t get a handle on. Anyway this band, Inkubus Sukkubus, a a Goth Pagan rock outfit who are better known in Europe having played some of the big alternative festivals such as Germany's M’era Luna, wanted to try some acoustic reworking, hence the desire to augment with a cellist. The sister came on board and, after some delays due to the band getting caught up in the swine flu thing while on tour in Mexico, they finally did a very low key test concert, at Lammas, to see how the sound went down with an audience and whether it generally worked. Apparently, it went rather well... bigger things may follow!

There is a strange six degrees of separation footnote to this, an ouroboros if you will... back in (probably) 1989 the band, who started locally, advertised on the local radio’s sole hard rock/HM music show (Tim Oakes, I think) for a guitarist. Having been playing a whole 6 months or so, I rang them up to offer my not inconsiderable services only to be told politely but firmly that I was neither experienced nor aged enough... they were lucky... in the intervening 20 years I have got absolutely no better! That would have been back in the days when I bought Kerrang, before they went mad and started giving 5K reviews to absolutely anything! It's inccredibly strange to suddenly remember details like that from so long ago...

...and why am I telling you all this patently irrelevant nonsense now? Because some clips from that first acoustic concert have turned up on YouTube: all your typical camera phone footage with the expected sound mix... but just this once I won’t cast my malediction on those who clutter up gigs with camera phones!

Wytches

Come To Me

Gypsy Lament

Gypsy Lament (shorter but from a better angle)

...that’s all folks!

The Days Of Swine And Roses

2009-09-13T16:17:00.004+01:00

Brief update thing...

Well, still not a perfect 100% but mainly better: throat still sore but on the other hand plummeting weight has finally stabilized. To put in context how worrying this was getting- I lost 15% of my body weight in 4 weeks and I’m currently the lightest I’ve been in about 15-20 years.

Anyway, many things need to get back on track, sorted out and generally organized but thought I’d update things so all the wailing, gnashing of teeth and rending of garments can be brought to an end... and if you’ve not been doing any of these, why not? I’m affronted... seriously... not one wail? Not one rent clothe? Not even a minor grinding of a back molar? Pah! I’ll forgive you... eventually...

***Here be possible spoilers for Waking The Dead: Magdalene 26***

Bit annoyed at missing the opening pair of episodes of Harper’s Island due to it’s scheduling: the Sunday episodes clashed with the new series of Waking The Dead (sadly, the first ever genuinely bad episodes of Waking The Dead: killed a regular I’d really warmed to; overly relied on coincidence and people behaving bizarrely; had a twist that was proposed for banning over 80 years ago- as seen in Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking- and had a flashback system that ultimately seemed disconnected and meaningless); the Friday repeats were scheduled against Beethoven at the BBC Proms- though not in person... that would just have been messy.

***Possible spoilers end***

This flue-y episode has had a couple of glimmers though- I snagged a couple of bits and pieces on eBay that I’ve been after for a long time- a couple of Hellraiser films, the Subversive Cinema release of Dust Devil and a rare film from Amando de Ossorio on VHS. Now, I just have to find some time to watch them.

Anyway, for the meantime, here’s a rather nifty music video (the best promos are surely an unsung art-form). I would love to think this was shot in one play-through though, I suspect with the high number of edits involved, it probably wasn’t. However, the imagination and choreography is still superb and it’s good silly fun.

The Avalanches: Frontier Psychiatrist

March Of The Pigs

2009-08-26T16:29:00.002+01:00

Yet another damnable long absence...

Just a quick apology for going A.W.O.L. (Afflicted With ‘Orrible Lurgee). Basically, I got the wretched Swine Flu... or Bird Flu... or Flying Pig Flu. Whatever. Wasn’t precisely top of the list of things I was intending to do but there you go.

Still, more amusing than Horne and Corden’s recent comedy outing.

So, not all bad then.

Three things I’d say about the wretched thing (swine flue that is) are- it is...
• annoying,
• time-consuming,
• boring.

I’ve had it around 3-4 weeks and I’m having trouble shaking off the final symptoms (sore throat, aching joints, etc.). I’ve lost my voice (which anyone who’s ever met me would probably maintain is a good thing) and a lot of weight. I would have loved to use the time watching endless films but I’ve been mainly unable to stay awake for long enough. Bizarrely, I’ve also lost the ability to taste tea and toast- not bread, just toast. This has happened before- I was forced to, ugh, drink coffee instead. I won’t be doing that again! And it took six long months to revert.

Anyway, enough about me... you now have a choice of viewing...

Eric and Ern with Peter Cushing failing to keep a straight face in some classic silliness (that still manages to be more realistic and mythologically accurate than a certain BBC series)...

...and for those of you with a more nervous disposition: Trent Reznor, loud noises and some swearing...

1994, Peter Christopherson.

Let Chaos reign but first... Tamiflu and cakes...

Dark Side Of The Moon

2009-07-21T15:25:00.000+01:00

A thankfully unused Nixon speech...

The 40th Anniversary of the first manned Moon Landing reminded me of something that was disclosed a few years ago. The possibility that the landing would go wrong was taken very seriously (Armstrong himself thought the mission was ‘fifty-fifty’) so much so that Richard Nixon’s speechwriter Richard Safire wrote an alternate message for the then-President to deliver. I find it quite moving.

“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.

In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.”

Meme On You Crazy Diamond

2009-07-14T15:34:00.002+01:00

Another Meme...

Well, look here, another post. At this rate you’d almost be conned into thinking I was prolific...

First, a nice little piece of Six Degree-ism: my sister mentioned the other day that she went to College with Gwen from Torchwood (of which, possibly, more later); I knew she knew the ghost, just didn’t know they were one and the same; on top, of that she teaches at one of the schools where the kids froze, the one where they wear red blazers (I think she said).

Within the same week the last meme (what I done) arrived, so did another from over yer , and I can’t recall which came first. Anyway the rules of this one...

“put the image on the blog (however, it doesn’t really match the decor),
List 10 truths about yerself,
Give the award to 5 other people (let’s not worry about that neither),
Provide a meaningful quotation (see bottom),

Here goes...

1. I have taught myself most of what I know, since a long time back; I taught myself to type a few years ago by cataloguing all my records and videos; following this up by copying out some complete Shakespeare texts. Last year, I took an online typing test (actually 5 or 6 and averaged them) and found my speed came out a rather neat 60 w.p.m.; I’m sure it’d be faster if I used more than two fingers on my left hand!
2. I have no heroes. Certainly none that are alive- to me, it’s a very dangerous practice, at best it can lead to suspension of critical faculty, at worst it leads to fanaticism. Also, living heroes are not a good idea; firstly, with the long-dead most, if not all, of the bad stuff has already emerged (anybody with a Gary Glitter tattoo must feel pretty daft); secondly, you might meet them... and you may find they’re loathsome or alternatively find them unspeakably lovely then feel unable to criticize their work. I know someone who reveres Kubrick, Scorsese, Tarantino, all the usual suspects- there is no argument that will shake their belief that every celluloid inch is a frame of perfection; I think Dennis Potter was a fine writer, better than he’s now given credit for, but I’m not about to claim every drop of ink that fell from his nib was holy writ- every Singing Detective or Pennies From Heaven is matched with a Blackeyes. So, heroes, bad thing; Shakespeare’s quite a good hero, very little’s known about him; but give me Beethoven, genius, Romantic, part-time bastard.
3. I have no favourite film, TV series, album or anything else. Last time I tried to make a top ten it came out over 200... how can you judge films from entirely different genres and eras against one another? How can I come to a conclusion that Singin’ In The Rain is better than say Chinatown, My Fair Lady, 2001, Casablanca, Oldboy, Spider, Hellraiser, Alien, Once Upon A Time In The West, the best Capra or Powell & Pressburger, 28 Days Later, Andrei Rublev, Solaris, Deliverance, Performance, The Devils, Double Life Of Veronique or Kor-eda’s After-Life... ? How do you compare? By what criteria? To me, favouritism is a futile exercise and again leads to the suspension of critical faculties; even the greatest art is usually flawed, sometimes it’s those flaws that lend greatness; it’s by understanding these flaws that greater insight arrives. (This is not to say there are not things or creators I value over others just not to devotional levels.)
4. I am possessed of many ‘critical’ heresies. I believe the critics are worth listening to, particularly those who write ‘criticism’ rather than just opinion (or worse, those who are in cahoots with the film industry) but I repeatedly find there is a cultural orthodoxy which now seems so set in stone it’s left unchallenged and that no-one bothers to justify. For me, this in part stems from (sort of) learning much of what I know about film from watching all the 4 star films listed in the back of Halliwell (and most of the 3 star films as well) and deciding for myself what’s good and why. Many films I could say ‘yes, that’s good’ but there was, and still is, a significant number of masters and masterpieces which I believe require some justification including Bunuel, Godard, Truffaut, Mike Leigh, Hitchcock... Does that shock you? Does that make you uneasy? I don’t like Hitchcock films! Next thing you know, I’ll be wearing ‘I hate Pink Floyd badges’!
5. I believe in context and interconnectivity. In a world where everybody is becoming increasingly insular and specialized in their fields I suspect great thinking is being diminished as there is no-one left saying ‘this in this field is very similar to this in this field’- think the Fibonacci sequence- not only occurring in maths but also in biology; Da Vinci, artist, scientist, philosopher. Very little occurs in isolation, in the art/ media world this is surely more true than in many others- otherwise what would anybody write, paint or sculpt about.
6. I’m not a big fan of cities. They’re too loud, too bright, have too many people and smell funny.
7. π unsettles me. Can you think of a more deeply sinister number? 666 and 13 are just numbers; π is the number. Scary.
8. I have never wanted to be famous. Still don’t and quite possibly never will- who would?
9. I write incredibly long emails. I have a sneaking suspicion in a previous era I would have been ‘a man of letters’; misspelled and frequently ungrammatical, rambling and often nonsensical, but letters none the less. It has also occurred to me- just then- that there’s no reason I can’t edit a few of these emails and use them as easy posts here.
10. Music affects me far more than film. Being a far more concentrated and immediate medium music can produce a far deeper response; there are moments that are deeply unsettling, like the final movement of Mahler’s 10th, Shostakovich’s 4th and 15th (particularly the latter bars of the final movement over the unresolved chord while the massive percussion section enacts a mocking fading mechanical heartbeat), much of Penderecki’s 1960’s output (the doyen of the horror movie soundtrack such as Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, the De Natura Sonoris pair), the aleatory passages of Gorecki’s Second Symphony, etc. However, over all these are three (possibly a couple more that I can’t recall) that I find genuinely unnerving...

Pink Floyd: Jugband Blues

Pink Floyd: Bike, the first 3 minutes are a slightly silly song, however, then it moves into the musique concrète section. When I was at school this song was thought hilarious; when I first heard this bit I felt sick... and the ‘clan of gingerbread men’ aren’t quaint, in my imagination, they’re a small army of quite heavily armed, re-animated gingerbread men, with rows of razor-sharp fangs, who descend from mountains on the unwary with murderous intent.

Portishead: Deep Water.

Finally, there is a necessity to include a meaningful quote, though to whom it has meaning or if the meaning is supposed to be inherent is left unspecified. On the Manics’ album, The Holy Bible, at the start of the track Of Walking Abortion, there is a sample of Hubert Selby, Jr. speaking. It is quite bleak but when I found the complete quote it struck a chord.

"I was home alone, and I had what I realize now was a spiritual experience, although I didn't understand it as such at the time. But I knew that someday I was going to die. And just before I died, two things would happen: Number 1: I would regret my entire life. Number 2: I would want to live my life over again, and I would die. And I was terrified, absolutely terrified. So I knew I had to do something with my life. I was terrified of living my whole life, and at the end looking at it and having blown it. I was on disability at the time, and my wife was working part-time, I think at Macy's, it was the Christmas season, so I bought a typewriter, and decided I was going to be a writer. I didn't know anything about writing. But I knew I had to do something with my life, and that was the only thing I could think to do....

So I sat there for two weeks with that typewriter and I had no idea how to write a story, I just had to do something before I died. So I wrote a letter to somebody. And that's how it started. The long process of learning how to write."

...either that or the lyrics to an old Andy Williams song...

Now, tea and cake...

Dark Side Of The Meme

2009-07-09T00:01:00.004+01:00

On an ‘unimportant’ meme from way back when...

Many, many years ago I was meme-ified* - something the ancient Egyptians did terribly well, but with more bandages- and it seems reasonable to get it done, albeit three million years later than everybody else. And it gives me something to write here. The basics of this are to “mention 6 things or habits of no real importance about you.” I haven’t any habits- well none that aren’t deeply silly, so it’ll have to be ‘things’ of no real importance.

1. My heart is in the wrong way round- last year I had to have a number of ultrasounds taken of it and they told me the pump side is far smaller than the receiving side- they assured me this was rare but in no way dangerous- though it does explain why I’m ageing backwards.

2. My maternal Gran used to tell me her memories of the day the Armistice was signed on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month; of bells ringing out and the air of relief. She also told me of her father going A.W.O.L. from the Second Boer War to be there when her sister was born; his time stationed in India and Egypt with the ‘Glorious Glosters’ before they both came along; you may well think this all horribly colonial, and for those at the top it was, but I guess taking the ‘King’s Shilling’ (actually Queen’s at that moment) was one of the better ways of escaping grinding poverty at that time.

3. I have a half inch scar just below my lower lip where I bit clean through it performing the most monumentally stupid feat ever attempted- stupider even than those of David Blaine. You must remember I was young. And stupid. So it goes like this. I came to the conclusion that if I could pick up one leg under the crook of my arm and have one leg off the ground it therefore followed that if I could pick up the other leg in the same fashion... I could... er... levitate... of course, life doesn’t always work out as planned... my chin met the floor, concrete, of course, my teeth met each other... clean through my lip. It hurt. Quite a lot. My Mum was watching Poldark at the time- so it was late 70’s/ early 80’s- I’d been eating a mix of baked beans and ketchup so my face was coated in various shades of red- and the great thing about it was that it completely disguised the hole, which of course, being so clean-cut, went straight back together; so when cleaned it didn’t look particularly serious. How do I know my teeth went straight through? They met in the middle with a nice scraping sound. Bizarrely, I escaped having stitches. It’s rather a nice scar and I’m rather attached to it- and it’s rather attached to me, so I don't have much choice in the matter. This is approximately the sixth most painful thing I’ve experienced.

4. I have a beard because after recuperating from abdominal surgery (possibly the third or fourth most painful thing) I couldn’t raise my arms to shave and, having never had a beard before, I kept it (maybe I’m a descendant of Colonel Wynne-Candy). When I was able to raise my arms and tried to wash my hair for the first time in several months I found it had become a single matted dreadlock and, but for a wonderful team of hairdressers, I nearly had to have my head-shaved. Which would have been annoying. My head’s not shaped for that sort of thing.

5. I have never won anything... I keep trying to remedy this but...

6. I have invented a new genre of music/ songs (they already exist- they just don’t realise that they exist together in my own personal genre) but I’ve not told anyone the details and won’t until I can work out what to do with it. And the only person this new music, en masse, will probably ever appeal to is... me.

7. I write all my posts in word, redraft and spell-check them all before doing a cut-and-paste job...

Apologies for not being more interesting, or informative, but it is meant to be things of no importance!

Now, you may have music... and tea... and cake... and the finest wines known to humanity, if you like. But definitely have cake. Cake is good. Cake is fine. Even the word. Cake.

FC/ Kahuna: Hayling

2002, dir. LynnFox

*And Helen can consider herself a co-source if she likes... :)

Enjoy The Silence?

2009-07-05T16:55:00.003+01:00

On not blogging...

So, I’ve been away a long, long time... there must surely have been a reason or two for just disappearing, mustn’t there?

Actually, there were many reasons I stopped blogging, fell at the way side and ended being taunted by road-kill; and they all came piling in one on top of the next at virtually the same time. And next thing I knew it was months since the last post. So, amongst other things, here’s some of the main reasons I disappeared into the land of flattened badgers...

I was feeling a bit ill (big wow, everybody feels a bit ill every now and then- get over it!).
I was incredibly tired: I get like that sometimes... well, often...
...because I was so tired, I had to make a simple choice, spend this limited energy on writing the blog or writing bad scripts... I’m afraid the bad scripts won... and they are really bad....
There are a lot of blogs out there, better blogs: I don’t think mine stands out particularly... I don’t have anything particular to say about the art, craft or sheer hard work of scriptwriting (other than ‘put words down and if you get them in the right order it works and if you don’t it won’t’) and I don’t have the ego to suspect my thoughts are so mind-meltingly important that they warrant global exposure.
There are a lot of blogs out there (Pt. II): in fact, too many to read and yet I can’t help feeling a bit guilty if I don’t try, which invariably leads to commenting, which, as sure as night follows day, leads to time sucked into some kind of giant time-sucking black-hole.
I'm not particularly smart: every time I find out something new I discover there’s far more to learn (deeply frustrating) and realise that however much I know I will never know enough. So, I can’t help wondering what actual contribution I have to make to the ‘Scribosphere’. I don’t have a great desire to waste other people’s time- I'm not a parliamentary inquiry!
There seemed to be a change in ‘atmosphere’ a while back: an influx of privately-profiled non-bloggers contributing to comment sections with apparently no other purpose than to make themselves look smart by trying to imply others are stupid. And, of course, by being non-bloggers they remain largely unaccountable. Surely a form of intellectual cowardice.
I had become increasingly concerned, through voicing my thoughts, of the potential to damage any nascent career I might have. My inept script-scribblings can do that perfectly adequately on their own!
Without a professional credit to my name I do tend to feel a bit of a fraud in a world of professional writers and readers- James Moran I am not!
Finally, I have a lot to say; many, many opinions, quite a few of them contentious... some get written and go unposted, others don’t get written and others require more and better argument*. Best not to post them.

And those are some of the main reasons...

So, what about the future... will I continue blogging, will I fall asleep for a very long time, will Lois find out Superman’s secret... watch this space as they say to find out all this and much, much more... or less... who knows?

...and anyway, now everybody’s gone mental for Twitter no-one’s going to be reading a blog anyway...

*in the old fashioned sense of the word.

Midlife Crisis

2009-06-24T15:24:00.002+01:00

I guess you could call a post, any post, proof of life... if not intelligence! And where there’s life there’s hope. And without intelligence hope’s far easier... so I guess it all works out for the best... in a cyclical sort of a way!

Hoorah for blind dumb optimism!

2009-06-04T22:47:00.003+01:00

“It's coming through a hole in the air,
from those nights in Tiananmen Square.
It's coming from the feel
that this ain't exactly real,
or it's real, but it ain't exactly there...

‘It's coming through a crack in the wall;
on a visionary flood of alcohol;
from the staggering account
of the Sermon on the Mount
which I don't pretend to understand at all.
It's coming from the silence
on the dock of the bay,
from the brave, the bold, the battered
heart of Chevrolet.’

‘I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can't stand the scene.
And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.”

~Leonard Cohen

You Love Us

2009-02-02T18:07:00.002Z

A brief note on Reality television...

The guest panellist on Mathew Wright’s programme this morning was psychologist Professor Oliver James. The topic under discussion was that ‘oh so pressing issue’ of has John Sergeant ruined television talent shows with specific reference to Todd Carty (who?) on Strictly Line Dancing On Ice (or something). A subject I’ve just made sound more like a Doctoral Thesis topic than it deserves.

However, apparently someone called Todd Carty, who I should remember as heroic bully Tucker Jenkins from Grange Hill, has proved to be doing for Ice Dancing what John Sergeant did for Ballroom (and presumably Robespierre did for the Parisian Barbers' Union). Despite being rubbish the audience have decided that he should stay on the show in the same way they decided Sergeant had to stay on Strictly despite him knocking out far more talented (and hard-working) contestants. What you’re views on such things are really comes down to whether you believe that such shows are primarily entertainment or primarily talent contests. And at present that's of less interest to me.

Anyway, Professor James explained what he believed to be the psychology behind these voting patterns. Apparently, when previous generations were more commonly in manufacturing and could both quantitatively and qualitatively analyze their, and other’s, performance in 'widget-making' (or whatever): how many made, in what time-span and how well... training, experience and expertise was held to be of primary value. Now, as more commonly people work in service industries they base their assessments of talent show contestants more on the personality and social skills of the contender thus mirroring the primary interactions of their own work-places where hierarchies and ‘politics’ are more relevant; popularity and sociability are held as key skills. As an aside he pointed out that these were the Blair skills that helped him get elected. He said these same interplays are clearly seen in Big Brother contestants as they manoeuvre for both position within the house, the housemate hierarchy and the affections of the viewing public.

Professor James then related one of the sadder things I’ve heard in a while. His seven-year old daughter was very cross with John Sergeant for his continued presence on Strictly Come Dancing and was a big supporter of Rachel Stevens. Said the Professor ‘she still believes that people should be rewarded for their hard-work’. Matthew Wright said ‘she’ll soon learn’. Everybody laughed knowingly.

She shouldn’t have to.

But why should anybody bother training or working hard on Strictly or Ice-Dance if they are going to be kicked off in favour of those who don’t or can’t bother. And what lesson is that for anyone.

I Against I

2009-01-10T16:54:00.000Z

A response to the good things/ bad things writing meme as tagged by the good Sister Elinor.

The Meme’s brief: “When it comes to writing, what do you know you’re good at, and what aspect of writing are you worst at? (Procrastination is not permitted as either part of the answer.)”

This is one of the harder memes to answer accurately because I am possibly the least self-aware person on the face of the planet- especially when it comes to my writing.

Thankfully I don’t procrastinate... I worry... but that’s usually after the event. However, even without procrastination I am very slow at the writing- at the start through caution- I was brought up with the mantra from my Dad who was good at ‘building things from scratch’ that you should ‘always measure twice, cut once’. This has filtered through strongly to my approach to writing- I do lot of pre-planning and try and get the drafts quite right from the off (which is, of course, delusional and impossible). Once done there emerges an obsessive perfectionism that requires everything to be absolutely correct. And on top of that I never know whether the result is any damn good- even now I still suspect that the Red Planet people may have got the wrong person...

So, with this in mind, I have based the good points list on the things that seem to have been regularly praised over time in various reports:

• Apparently my characters are quite interesting, compelling and well-rounded;
• Apparently my dialogue tends to be quite good- probably because I read it out loud using a variety of funny voices;
• Apparently I’m quite good at conjuring atmosphere with nifty settings and visual description that immerses people in the world of the story;
• Apparently it’s seen as quite a good thing that I have themes, ideas and something to say- which seems to be considered a plus point.

Now, the bad points (which I can do all by myself!):

• I take scenes and ideas in isolation whether from dreams, flashes of inspiration or whatever and this can lead to a fragmentary narrative;
• I am very good at over-plotting- I haven’t yet realized how little plot there is needed in the average film;
• I am appallingly bad at structure;
• I overwrite enormously- massive chunks of unnecessary description- never use one good word when fifty superfluous ones can be used- however I have now bought a red pen!
• Endings- I can really screw up an ending- sometimes something good comes to me but mainly it doesn’t. This is in part based on my dislike of the tendency of films to end with violent outbursts which, besides reinforcing notions that ‘might is right’* and that the person who is strongest is entitled to ideological supremacy, I find lazy and easy. I call it ‘Schrader syndrome’: how to damage an otherwise good film by not knowing how to end it and resorting to a convenient fire-fight (cf: Light Sleeper; Hardcore, etc.).

I’m overly self-critical and don’t know when something is actually finished- I’ve actually started just asking other people.

Then there are some areas of which I have no idea either way... as roughly everything I do is roughly within a genre and set in recognizable places I do wonder to what extent what I write might be considered ‘original’. Not helped by my having watched far too much film and television... from which I may have accidentally absorbed and subsequently used devices.

So there you go, hope that fits the brief without being too revealing. I’ll probably re-read this in twelve months time and disagree completely but at least I’ve got room for improvement- no resting on my laurels- and most of the problems areas fall under the heading of practice and technique.

If there’s anyone left out there who’s feeling untagged and left out... well, you know who you are and you know what to do!

*with the honorary exception of World War Two- see Theo’s speech in The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp for the best explanation of why.

Scarlet & Other Stories

2009-01-06T17:01:00.004Z

On going absent without leave, computers, eyes, recent developments and an important request- rather long but please bear with me...

First, I hope you all had a good Christmas and I wish you a happy, healthy and prosperous new year.

It occurred to me that it would probably be polite to start the new year by explaining why things tailed off during the last.

The last you may have heard I’d sent in a selection of random script pages to Red Planet and was pacing more nervously than a prospective father during the 96th hour of labour. Except I’d all but decided not to bother completing the complete draft having decided the first ten pages I’d written were drivel. Thankfully, I had the sense to thrust them upon a sentient being who said these were quite good so ‘write the rest’. So I did. The first draft needed to be properly storylined then clocked in at around 100 pages and was done in a couple of weeks. Then I sliced and diced until it was a more appropriate length. If I remember correctly this was dealt with by the beginning of November. While I’d written something rather poor it was still fortuitous, so it turned out, to have a completed draft...

Do you know what a ‘backlight’ is? Neither did I. It’s the thing that makes the pretty pictures appear on a laptop screen. When it dies the computer dies: it is not economically viable to repair. And thus my faithful old Toshiba started to die after 6 years loyal service while I was writing the RPP piece. Unfortunately, within a day of completing, and just before I was about to back it up and check all the most important files were also, the hard-drive imploded. So, I had to find a new laptop and hope that I could get all my data recovered including the just completed script. A new laptop was relatively easy to acquire (they sell them in something called ‘shops’), the data recovery was tough going as the hard-drive was hard to access (but apparently I only lost 14 files and I still haven’t worked out what) but the hardest thing was getting back online as apparently the drivers needed for this (and practically all other things) change by the day. And have to be downloaded. And how do you download the drivers for internet access when you haven’t got internet access?

The new laptop has taken some getting used to because at some point since buying the Toshiba they decided to change where most of the keys were and made them a lot smaller (or closer together) and the screens are now a lot wider... apparently for no other reason than so America can have two pages on screen at once... and what America wants we all get. I thought it was just to annoy me!

When I got back up, running and online in late November I discovered in a somewhat well-stuffed inbox the telegraph from Red Planet telling me that they too rather liked the play what I wrote. I was rather pleased. As it had arrived nearly a week before I was very concerned that I might have missed the next deadline- and still don’t know- and had to hurriedly go through the somewhat rough, full script making sure that it had not been ‘corrupted’. That got sent off and now I’m back to pacing in the aforementioned corridor. Of course, I’ve since realized quite how ropey the script is and have already set about a comprehensive ground-up rewrite.

The Problem
The new laptop didn’t just require adjustment to new hardware but also to new software- Vista doesn’t ever do as it’s told- I change the settings, it decides I’m wrong and changes them back again; Word 2007 is shockingly bad and I’m hunting down Word 2005 or earlier (I can’t find anybody who actually likes or uses 2007)- but these are things you can get used to... even if you don’t want to!

Now, for several years I have feared that I have been slowly glowing blind but, as I’m very squeamish when it comes to eyes, I’ve put off doing anything about it just in case there was something wrong. The new machine has a wide shiny LCD screen that has a brilliant burning intensity. I’d always turned the screen brightness down on the old matt-screened Toshiba but turn the new one down to the right level for me and it turns into a very good mirror. Turn the screen up and it feels like I’m staring into a light-bulb. In the first month of use I was finding it harder and harder to see- and using the machine less and less- I was left unable to focus my eyes, things were very blurred, over-bright and my eyes hurt and strained constantly. But this only happened after computer usage. Finally (presumably this is the approach to the innermost cave), I bit the bullet and went to the ~~optimist~~ optometrist.

Several years of worry have been assuaged- I am not going blind. In fact it turns out I have very good eyesight, both near and far, and good peripheral vision to boot. However, although the lady didn’t give it a name, I seem to have some form of Photophobia which hadn’t previously been a issue. Thankfully, it’s not severe but apparently is irreparable. I think I know where it’s arisen from though I’ll probably never be certain. In hindsight it has explained a few things including why I’ve been dreading the ban on incandescent light-bulbs as I have found the fluorescent bulbs quite painful. What I really need now is a screenguard for the laptop which is proving impossible to find- everybody says they exist nobody knows in which mythical land. If you know somewhere I can get a laptop screenguard please get in touch as a matter of urgency.

In the meantime, I’m trying not to spend so long at the machine and I write everything in detailed notes on paper (like I always used to) and just type it up so it’s a good job my typing speed is half-way decent. So you’ll have to forgive me if I spend less time online.

Other Stuff
The most unexpected thing I realized while I was computerless was how little I missed the internet- and how little I really used it for- email and eBay primarily. The loss was more irritating than devastating. I didn’t use these iPlayer type things- why watch TV in pixelated form on a small screen when I can watch it on TV? I’ve never played computer games- online or offline- life’s too short already. I just went back to music, reading, watching and terrorizing the cats with my own inimitable brand of terrible guitar playing. Being unable to type was a nuisance but I’ve always done a lot on paper anyway. The other thing I hadn’t realized until I stopped was how deeply tired I was. Maybe sometimes people need a bit of a break.

...and in the meantime, I appear to have acquired some followers. Which is strange, new and unexpected. This wasn’t there when I was last about. What’s it all about? Do I have to do anything? Should I reciprocate? When I get 12 followers I’m going to start a religion- I already have good recipe for loaves and fishes... well... pilchards on toast. And now I must be thinking about a meme- and rather a difficult one I suspect...

Starman

2009-01-03T17:54:00.007Z

*****contains spoilers for new Doctor Who*****

So, now we all* know that the new Doctor Who is... er...

Matt Smith...

...very young at 26 ...and rather needs a haircut!

Personally my choice was...

Adrian Lester

...but what do I know?

*except those who don't care, have a life and/or don't obsessively watch TV.

Someday we'll be drinking with...

2009-01-03T15:51:00.004Z

Vision Thing

2008-11-03T13:59:00.002Z

On American Elections and being careful for what you wish.

I have never been to the USA, and given my dislike of flying I doubt I ever will, however, judging by the British media, it feels I have lived there my entire life. I don’t dislike the US or my image of the US; as world leader I certainly prefer a strong US to ‘certain other countries’. So the following is very much an outsider’s view based on coverage provided on television and in the newspapers, for good or ill.

I don’t like Blair, Bush, Brown, Major, Thatcher and I’m not keen on either McCain… or Obama. ‘Heresy!’ you cry, ‘you’re European, you’re vaguely in the media industry, you’re ostensibly left-leaning- how can you not be head over heels in love with Obama?’. In Britain and the EU it is not so much expected as obligatory to love Obama. But I have a few small problems promising my unquestioning loyalty.

Through the prism of the somewhat wall-to-wall British coverage of the US elections over the last 18 months I have become increasingly dispirited by US politics. Assuming that the serious UK news programmes (Newsnight, Channel 4 News) are reporting the best and brightest bits it leads to a suspicion that the level of debate is somewhat lacklustre and, dare I say, shallow. (Although British politics is not exonerated from the Joe The Plumber-moments- anybody remember ‘Jennifer’s Ear’?) The levels of spending seems ludicrous- Obama seems to have over half a billion dollars with which to sell himself. Could there be anything more discomfiting than a candidate being able to buy a half-hour infomercial across seven mainstream channels? Maybe that McCain appeared in a skit on Saturday Night Live and Obama appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Is this what the contest for leadership of the free world has actually come down to- who can do the better appearance as a straight man? These comedy shows (as shown in the UK) seem alien in their partisanship towards Obama but presumably this is only natural and acceptable in the land of Fox News. I can’t help but find Britain’s strict election rules somewhat reassuring and comforting in comparison: all political comedy and satire is removed until the votes are all cast, scrupulous fairness is required in news and current affairs television coverage, spending limits per candidate, set party political television broadcast slots and so on.

However, over and above such electoral niceties, I find I have a minor problem with Obama (and McCain for that matter). I don’t know what he stands for. Moreover, from the coverage on Channel 4 News and Newsnight, it has become worryingly apparent that seemingly neither does the vast majority of the voting American public. Despite how deeply they delve into policy issues on Saturday Night Live! When asked what Obama stands for and why they are voting for him, every supporter interviewed said their man stands for ‘change’. Sounds good. After eight years of the Bush presidency ‘change’ has a nice ring. Pretty much sells itself. The British news crews then asked ‘how will Obama change things?’ and this is always followed by deafening silence. Can I be the only one who finds this somewhat worrying? After 18 months of campaigning and coverage this is still a mystery?

Some of the things Obama stand for include tax breaks for the poorer members of society- leading to cries that he is a Socialist trying to redistribute the wealth- but why has nobody compared this with one of Bush’s first actions to provide tax breaks for the very rich on average saving them the cost of a Lexus? Is it so much better to redistribute the wealth upwards? Obama wants some sort of nationwide health insurance coverage to help the quarter of the US population that can’t afford to become sick. Apparently, McCain also advocates something similar. However, this is decried by many because it is Socialist and would lead to an abysmal system like the (to paraphrase one commentator) ‘two-tier National Health Service where there are nothing but queues and everybody dies waiting for service’. This is, of course, nonsense- the NHS may have its failing but at least everybody has a right to treatment ‘free at the point of delivery’. And how isn’t the US system two-tier where the rich get top-notch treatment and the poor apparently barely get treatment. One ‘God-fearing man’ said it wasn’t for the likes of him to bail out people who need medical help because they should just work harder. (That would be based on a quote from the Director’s Cut of The Bible where Christ says ‘every man for himself’.) Another policy? It is claimed Obama will pull troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan- except senior Obama aides have already approached Britain warning them that British troops will be required for an Iraq-style surge in Afghanistan. He also says he will bomb terror targets inside Pakistan if the leadership there won’t act. And the only other major policy that I can find for Obama is that he favours protectionist trade tariffs. This would hit Britain hard- the UK exports as much to the US as it does to the whole of the EU- it will hit British Manufacturing and British jobs- people will lose jobs.

I would be deeply surprised if many Europeans and Brits really know what either candidate stands for. They just know they didn’t like Bush and that Obama is nothing to do with that era… while McCain is… therefore Obama is ‘a good thing’. A lot of the Left-leaning on this side of the Atlantic seem to be supporting Obama because he’s African-American and adopt the seemingly patronizing view that the US ‘needs this’ (as someone put it). But would they support an African-American if he was running under a Neo-Con ticket? Moreover, the African-American population is currently about 15% which is about the same proportion as the Hispanic minority but by the middle of this century the Hispanic population is estimated to rise to 30% while the African-American population is estimated to remain almost static. So, why has there been little consideration of a Hispanic president? And if some of this relates to correcting past sins- why has there been no suggestion of a Native American/ Amerindian president- surely correcting the first and greatest sin in the foundation of the USA. Yet why aren’t the British and European Leftists worrying about the fate of the working-classes of their home countries if this new American protectionism is made real- maybe the worker doesn’t matter so much to them any more. (Though how different it might be if this protectionism included the television and film industry!)

Then there is the unspoken and, to my mind, scariest part of these Presidential elections- the Vice-Presidential candidates. Someone once said ‘the job of VP isn’t worth spit’. Never before has it mattered more. Everybody mentions that McCain is old (though seemingly still fit) yet they only joke about the possibility of his dying in office. They forget it is a very real possibility and if he dies two years and a month into his first term the world could have ten years of Sarah Palin*. Then there have already been at least two thwarted Neo-Nazi plots against Obama and there is no reason to believe there won’t be more and no reason to believe given past history (Kennedy, Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley) that one might not be successful. And only one has to be successful. Then the world will be led by Joe Biden. Sarah Palin is incredibly scary and Joe Biden is… incredibly anonymous.

Now everybody will criticize me for not supporting Obama, for criticizing the USA, for not criticizing McCain enough and so on… truth is I can’t support either candidate and it doesn’t matter because I don’t have a vote but whoever emerges triumphant the world will change about as much as it will stay the same. My main criticism is reserved for those who have left the policies unexamined, allowed the candidates to remain unquestioned and for the paucity of political debate and coverage on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the words of that great British export to the US, Jerry Springer, I have ‘one final thought’: Obama is praised for being young, dynamic, charismatic, religious and moral though not overtly so, against war, pro-talk, pro-equality and social justice, a great orator, a little inexperienced but a beacon of change and hope after years of division and stagnation. So maybe there’s the real reason I distrust Obama as much as any other politician- I’ve heard it all before- it’s how they described Tony Blair in 1997.

*that would be two terms plus the remainder of the previous incumbent’s term if they’ve made it past the halfway mark.

Logic

2008-10-29T13:08:00.002Z

I have just noticed the following on the label of one of the supermarket medicaments I take to rein in my arthritis… ‘JOINTS!’

Is this another case of dumbing down; false advertizing to hippies, diversification (I’ve never checked the list of active ingredients) or are they just taking a leaf out of the Gospel According to Ronseal?

How long has this been going on? Why haven’t I noticed this before? Maybe I should check whether my bread is marked belly or the Piriteze is marked nose?

All rather inconsequential but does give me an excuse to include some clips from the now surprisingly prescient Alex Cox written and directed film Repo Man from 1984. If I had a short list of favourite films it would probably be on it.

***clips contain a near full house: violence, sex, swearing, drug abuse, hardcore punk and spoilers***

The Opening 10 Minutes
In which the anarchic and counter-cultural Alex Cox proves that he is not immune to following the mainstream Hollywood rules. Check the supermarket products in the scene from 4’20” to 5’50”. You also get some rather cracking music.

Miller explains the Weirdness
No relevance to the post but I like it. The logic is so perfect, so impeccable and yet so wrong.

Support the ongoing Alex Cox project by buying Repo Man and/or Highway Patrolman.

**********

Currently, 70 pages into the first draft of the TV episode- so far it’s very flabby with too much dialogue including way too much very bad dialogue. A week had to be spent initially editing and re-writing the original episode plan when a re-reading discovered several problems not least amongst these that a character actually dies twice. Not good. However, I think this current draft- which no-one will ever read- has entered the home stretch. Then the red pen can be wielded with due ferocity!

Reality

2008-10-28T01:50:00.001Z

It must be about four weeks since the deadline for the first 10 pages of the Red Planet Prize. And I have been ploughing on with the full version of mine ever since… just in case I hear the call. However much I suspect this to be highly unlikely but it’s surely better to have something ready and not be called than be called and have nothing.

In the immediate aftermath of the deadline I was comfortably thinking my entry is safely in the post- it’s not an absolutely terrible piece of writing- and I can have a couple of minutes break. It was a good feeling, most definitely it was. For as long as it lasted. Then I started to read the musings of my fellow blogonauts… big big mistake. The brick of reality flew through my window of hope. As I mentioned, I changed horses mid-race, and have probably come a right cropper, but it didn’t stop me from thinking there was some quality to what I’d done. Then I read other people’s accounts of their ten pages; how some got read 5 times, 15 times, 327 times; how they’ve been read and re-read, drafted and re-drafted; mentored, buffed and polished until the gleam would take the retinas from the pilots of passing jets… while I merely thought hard, put something down as best I could, revised it and redrafted it then put it in the post. And I realised what rather smart people I am up against. And that last year’s winner had been working on theirs for years and was mentored by someone smart as well.

I read somewhere that someone had tried to put a small cliff-hanger at the bottom of each page (apparently the new thinking) and yet if I’d tried that, catastrophe would have ensued- I would have gone back, lopped out a line or added a new one and the whole thing would have ended all over the shop pretty sharpish. So, I’ve pretty much convinced myself that I really only stand a chance if the entire pile of other scripts spontaneously combusts. Bizarrely, I will continue writing the project despite this being entirely counter-intuitive.

However, in the end it did start a new train of thought… presumably, everybody gets some ‘reading’ and notes done. Fair enough. Very sensible. And yet… is there such a thing as too much ‘script-reading’? Is it possible to have too many notes? To do too many re-writes? When I was doing the whole giving and receiving notes thing at University, in a group of four and a tutor, most people would get a reasonable consensus while I would get a pretty even split of opinion- two who loved the draft and two who hated it. I never knew why and I have no reason to suspect this situation might have changed in the intervening period. So, who should I listen to- the ones who happen to agree with me- or the ones who don’t? And after a while what happens to the essence of what you’ve written? What happens to the fire that produced that first draft- is it quenched after buckets of notes have been poured over the flames until all that remains are a few struggling embers. What comes of the happy accident? Can it just be that the ur-text is the one that really worked best, the one that retains the anger or the fire or the passion or the pain that inspired the writer in the first place? When I was learning to paint I was told it was not only important to know when to start but, crucially, to know when to stop. To stop before it’s ruined.

So, here it is, my own unique and special skill. Other people have innate talent, some have passion- I have self-doubt. I am neither naturally artistically talented or technically gifted so this self-doubt may not be such a bad thing. For a start, with low expectations there’s less chance of disappointment; also you already know you have to work hard because you know life’s not a level playing field and you will always have to go that extra mile; you work harder, think harder, revise and redraft harder because you will never really match your own exacting standards. With the self-knowledge of self-doubt you have a clearer view of your limitations so are less afflicted with ego; you’re less certain the world owes you a living and ultimately you’ll be more grateful for what you get.

So, if there’s one thing I would be destined to meet in my own personally Room 101, it will be doubt. And yet I should be grateful for it!

Of course there’s self-doubt and then there’s sheer horrible hateful reality…

Positive Thinking

2008-09-30T15:22:00.005+01:00

Well, the deadline for the Red Planet Prize has come and now gone… and despite nearly giving up on several occasions in the past few weeks I did finally get something in the post- though it was a very close run thing. It has prompted me to offer the following advice- try not to completely change projects 4 weeks before the deadline! (Annoyingly this didn’t leave enough time to farm it out to herds of people for criticism.)

To some people writing comes naturally and they can probably carry off this sort of thing. Unfortunately I’m not one of them: I find this writing lark pure hard graft- emotionally draining and physically exhausting. And frustratingly I don’t have the first idea whether I’m actually any good at this writing thing in the first place- so for all I know I might just be wasting time that I could instead be spending on my plan for ‘total world domination in the next five years’. So, I’ve had to maintain radio silence for the last few weeks to keep up the work rate- that and it gives away position to the U-Boats! Now, as a contingency for the (highly unlikely) event that I receive the call for the full episode, I now have 4 weeks to write the remaining 45 pages. What fun.

However, to all those who got something in and will spend the next few weeks anxiously waiting for results, cleaning, tidying and generally buffing up their pilots; and all those that couldn’t get anything ready for this year and are already thinking of something for next year, I dedicate the following from The Magnificent Two…

…and by a staggering coincidence this, for the time being, is a rather nice response to the recent meme (“a song that sums up what you think it means to be a writer and post the lyrics and why you've chosen it”) which various people have left as 'open tags' (and especially Elinor). I suggest it’s less about the being a writer and more about the continuing as a writer. I’m sure I have another song that is a better answer for the task but for the moment…

“When you feel down, try positive thinking,
That’s what I told them and said,
Don’t wear a frown, try positive thinking,
Laugh at your troubles instead.

You’ve got to look on the bright side,
On hope so much depends,
With your confidence sinking, positive thinking,
Helps you on the way my friend.

When things look black, try positive thinking,
Treat every season as spring,
No glancing back, try positive thinking,
Trust what tomorrow may bring.

This crazy world what we live in,
Will keep on spinning round,
But with good, strong, positive thinking,
We’ll get together and life won’t let us down.”

When You Don’t See Me

2008-09-02T18:08:00.001+01:00

Thought it might not be too bad an idea to bore you rigid with an update on the writing situation… and gives me an excuse to waste time with which I could be doing something, er, useful. Like writing.

The great thing about a lack of internet connexion is that it liberates a lot of time- this is because the internet is in fact a seductively evil time-stealing monster- enjoyable but evil… the bad thing about the lack of internet is that if what you are attempting to write is going hideously and unbelievably wrong there is nothing to take your mind off it. And little by little, hour by hour and day by day, you start to steadily go insane…

Way back in July I had a nifty little idea for my entry to the Red Planet Prize. ‘Hoorah’, quoth I. ‘That’s nifty!’, I did reiterate. Then I wrote down the bits that I knew and realised that it was only 5 episodes and didn’t have a ‘cracking opening episode’. Alright, that’s not a huge problem, I can come up with an opening episode. Could I ‘eck as like! Truth be told, while I watch a vast amount of TV I’ve never really been able to comprehend how to work it- it’s that having to roughly return things to the status quo at the end of each episode so that things can start again at the beginning of the following one that partially flummoxes me. I’m not that hot at film-writing either but at least I have a vague understanding of it. While at University I had to have a stab at writing an episode of a returning series, in this case Doctors… suffice to say it went disastrously wrong… it featured religious fanatics and an exorcism and the first draft clocked in at over an hour and a half. This was bad. Finally, I got it down to forty minutes… it was still bad.

Having a ‘nifty idea’ was rather encouraging, not having the first episode… less so. So there then followed a considerable period of procrastination… and now that period is over what have I to show for it? I have a decent outline for a feature film, a new short film script and I’ve redrafted two previous short scripts. What don’t I have? A first episode. Oops! So, with the Red Planet Blog Clock Vorderman-esquely pointing at the 28 days left on the clock I am now wondering what to do... Oh and the other big problem with the ‘nifty idea’ is that it’s really a serial. Not a series. And I’m not even sure if there’s enough material to make it a whole hour long per episode. Or is there too much? I just don’t know. I really don’t understand writing for television.

So, where do I go from here? The words are coming out all weird. Ha!. Well, I’m still going to try to think of a world-beating first episode for the possibly very boring, very parochial and very tedious serial. However, I’m also trying to think of something more series-esque. All I can come up with is something rather derivative and a bit similar to something that used to be on the telebox (whether the other thing is coming back or not, I don’t actually know). The trick will be to make it less similar and more brilliant. But is that really possible? Really?

Who knows? Or even dares to care?

Oh well, 600 hours of writing time left until the last posting date… assuming I ignore sleeping and eating… but they’re pretty over-rated.

Silence Is Platinum

2008-08-26T15:35:00.001+01:00

…except it’s not…

…it’s quite annoying!

That was bizarre… I broke the internet! Yes, I admit it, ‘twas me… I broke it… Except to be more accurate… it wasn’t the internet… it was just my little bit of it… and when I say broke I mean incapacitated… and when I say I it should actually read Microsoft. So, I was pretty much accurate apart from the actual details…

All of a sudden, a few days after my last post, I started having some ‘connectivity’ issues. I tried pulling up IE and Firefox but all I was getting was the ‘site not available’ thing. I was definitely getting a connexion to the web but just no screens so I deduced it was a software problem rather than an ISP fault which just made me more confused. Now, I’m no computer expert so I found running round like a big headless chicken rather a good idea and it sure made up for trying to actually work out what had gone wrong. Just as I was about to give up and ring my friendly neighbourhood computer engineer I thought I’d give my ISP (Demon) helpline a try. My ISP were their usual brilliant selves and after literally seconds they’d solved the problem and got me up and working despite it not being their problem. They asked some pretty simple questions: had I had a recent Microsoft update, what anti-virus/ firewall do I use, could I open it and follow their list of alterations and… lo, the internet was un-broken! So, my anti-virus had all of a sudden decided that my browsers were a serious security threat and were blocking them- who knew- I’d certainly never heard of such a thing! And a few days later an urgent security update came from the anti-virus people designed to solve the problem that Microsoft’s update had caused. So, that was weird!

Anyway, anybody else catch the British 7 minutes at the Beijing closing ceremony? Anybody else cringe with embarrassment as we wheeled out a zebra-crossing, a queue, a fight for a bus, an ageing hippie, a reality TV star and an overpaid footballist (Britain has Olympic football?!?!). Best Of British??? All it needed was a hoodie stabbing someone and a couple of puking binge-drinkers to complete the picture! Imagine this expanded to 2 hours for the opening ceremony. We’re told the 2012 Olympics is going to be ‘youthful’ and ‘cutting edge’. So they get said reality star and hippie for Beijing… meanwhile in London... Will Young, Heather Small and the cast of a 70’s themed musical. So youthful, so cutting edge! Anybody else thinking Millennium Dome contents or Jubilee Spam Fritters? And what was this dispiriting farrago meant to represent?

Anyway, there’s a herd of cobwebs cluttering up the corridors here at Castle Overbombing… time to blow them away…!

KLF with Extreme Noise Terror: 3 a.m. Eternal (Live At The Brits 12th February 1992)

The Neon Dream

2008-07-07T11:48:00.002+01:00

Now, that the blood in my alcohol-stream has returned to its traditional caffeine-carrying role I can open my little festival notebook and see if I can read my writing (which is genuinely terrible)… if this occurs successfully then I’ll flurp my thoughts down. (So there!)

This shall be Day One… expect not humour… do expect editorializing- in italics…

Barbara Machin: Opening Speech
Barbara Machin was/is responsible for Waking The Dead- this makes her alright by me- and her opening address was suitably enthralling, provocative and readily-received. Of course, she had home-court advantage.

Machin started off with a clarification that needs stating every now and again: ‘Every age before is a Golden Age’. (Rose-tinted spectacles are a terrible blinker- although I might suggest that British Television is perhaps more in the Doldrums than in the recent past.) Her main thesis was that in a world where ‘lifestyle and talent shows’ are filling the gap for ‘must-see television’ there has been a ‘loss of the nerve, verve and fervour’ in a ‘ratings-driven, risk averse’ television industry which screenwriters must rediscover. She pointed to the American model of ‘high concepts’ and writer-producer-led show-running that have produced such hit US TV series as ‘Desperate Housewives, Six Feet Under, Lost, Twenty-Four, Dexter and Damages’ whilst also singling out Life On Mars as evidence that when given the opportunity the British can manage this as well. She called for ‘the brave, the different, the fresh and the unorthodox’; for ‘brave and inventive storytelling’. Again, she clarified the notion of the Sixties as a Golden Age, ‘in the Sixties innovation was rife’ but this was clearly television was in its infancy and ‘everything was new’. She also mentioned that the creators were from ‘other backgrounds’ citing theatre, novels, etc.

This was a point that could have borne more investigation- now, the screenwriters are being trained in University straight from school; then, they were not only coming from theatre or literature, many had served in the Second World War, done National Service (e.g. Bennett, Potter, Rosenthal); been shop workers (Shelagh Delaney), teachers (Bleasdale), lawyers (Kneale), hairdressers (Willy Russell)- they had actually done something. Is it not notable that one of the most praised guests at the SWF ’08 was Tony Jordan, who did a multiplicity of jobs before starting to write?

Machin understood the logistics of television (‘money and ratings’) but called for a change in attitude an end to the ‘smash and grab’ thinking; more thought about scheduling and trailing of programmes. Particularly irksome to her were notions of ‘Lazy Audience Syndrome’ where television is ‘dumbed down’ and ‘pre-digested’ for the audience; nothing was more emblematic of this than ‘pre-trailing’ the next episode at the end of the just viewed- a pre-trail that would invariably give away most of the salient plot twists and big scenes effectively negating the necessity of watching the next episode and ensuring that the ‘audiences no longer care’. She called for a ‘full menu’ of programming.

Machin concluded by assuring us that she is not ‘a prophet of doom’; that US television can have a ‘halo effect’ raising everybody’s game and she predicted the end of ‘reality television’ (possibly a little optimistic).

Machin left the audience with the following ringing in their collective ears, the writer must ‘run and be brave’, ‘don’t be browbeaten, be inspired’ and above all…

‘Dare to dream’.

How To Make A Living Writing
A panel with screenwriters Tim Telling, Robbie Morrison, (graphic novelist; creator of 2000AD’s Nikolai Dante) and Stephen Morrison (just had first novel published)…

I was not entirely sure what I was meant to come away with from this somewhat ragged session other than that feature writing is incredibly hard so try doing other writing assignments like radio, stand-up comedy, novel and graphic novel writing and so on and so forth…

10 Producers’ Secrets…
After the slightly lacking-in-focus nature of the previous came a greater diversion…

Stephen Woolley (The Crying Game, How To Lose Friends And Alienate People, etc.) and Kevin Loader (Venus, The History Boys, etc.) were the producers in question who were spilling all the dark secrets of their midnight arts… and most enlightening it was although we were assured that there were almost certainly many more…

1. Agree with what you’re attempting to do. If you’re doing a comedy make sure it doesn’t turn into a horror film.
2. Don’t get distracted by the research.
3. Structure- don’t worry about it too much.
4. Long scripts go to the bottom of the pile- be careful about over-writing- remember producers have weak backs and don’t want to lug these things about.
5. Don’t take rejection personally and don’t burn your bridges- it takes too long to rebuild them.
6. Always listen- even ogres have something to say- even if it’s once in twenty comments. Listening costs nothing!
7. Work to the pre-determined budget- don’t price yourself out of the market.
8. It’s easy to put in clichéd phrases- don’t! These would be including 'Rembrandt dawns' and Dali floppy clock allusions.
9. It’s easy for a writer to become a pawn in the politics- don’t! Try to be crystal clear and transparent in meetings; speak your mind.
10. Don’t become possessive (of your script).

Kevin Loader added for writers to ‘be careful of over-zealous agents’ and ‘expect to be banned from the Set’. Kevin Loader on the problem of woman protagonists: ‘Hollywood wants to sell to adolescent boys’. Stephen Woolley on adaptation: ‘Adaptation is [considered] a safety valve.’

I had a lot of time for Stephen Woolley going into this session as it was through a number of films with his name at the front that I found myself becoming steadily seduced by the silver screen… and if you’re even remotely interested those would include The Company Of Wolves, Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, Hardware, Dust Devil and Interview With The Vampire… I am thankful to say I was not disappointed by him!

There then came a Scriptbite (café-based smaller discussion session) with Kevin Loader. The main message here was that people are after good writing and good storytelling; and that appearances do matter- on the page.

Breaking Down Your Walls
A discussion-cum-interview between a psychiatrist-chap and screenwriter Ronald Harwood, the man responsible for adapting The Pianist, The Diving Bell And The Butterfly and a personal favourite The Dresser.

This was a highly entertaining session which wasn’t especially bullet-point friendly especially since it was so engrossing that such matters flew out of the window!

The more memorable points included:
• On a good reason for writing: ‘money is a great incentive’.
• On purpose in his writing: ‘identity… the constant search for a centre’.
• On characters for films: ‘nice people are boring’.
• On how the writer sees (or should see): ‘[mostly they] they remain as a child’.
• He was most forthright on the position of the writer being largely neglected and urged those younger than himself to fight for the just recognition of the writer- adding that he was far too old to engage in this battle himself. This, unsurprisingly, drew a round of applause.
• On the philosophical core of his work: ‘[thinks of himself] as a moralist’ but with the caveat of ‘being wise after the event and at a distance… historically [and] geographically’. He also mentioned that he ‘despairs of people taking the high moral ground when they don’t know what it is’.
• And shared the following advice told to him by Graham Greene: ‘when you’ve finished a day’s work only stop when it’s going well’.

I could happily have listened to this man for several more hours… but, as he mentioned, he was being denied his ritual daily afternoon nap as it was!

Scripts And Scriptability
Deborah Moggach (writer, Love In A Cold Climate, (cinema’s) Pride & Prejudice, etc.) in conversation with Head of Series and Serials, BBC Drama, Kate Harwood.

This wasn’t a particularly engaging session to me… seemed very chatty without the benefit of being terribly enlightening. And having seen some clips from the forthcoming television adaptation of The Diary Of Anne Frank… I was somewhat perturbed… Moggach described it as more video diary style…

…there then followed some mooching about as the session I was after seeing was somewhat full… my name wasn’t down, I wasn’t going in… which was a shame as it was on how to write The Correct Treatment… which would have been nice to know.

Key Note: Mike Leigh
I haven’t ever taken to Mike Leigh’s films… I’ve seen maybe six or seven and again and again I have the same complaints- not very realistic, patronizing about those he portrays, sneering at anybody from the ‘lower orders’ who dares to want to better themselves, doesn’t believe these people are either emotionally literate or capable of education, the romanticizing of a milieu he frequently doesn’t seem to understand, know or even like and, possibly my biggest gripe, that he ostensibly makes film about people in a style those same people would never want to sit through… who is he making films for? Compare and contrast with Bleasdale and Russell!

However, Leigh has now made some eighteen features in a long, varied and successful career and must have something of interest to say about the writing and film-making process… This session was an abject lesson in discovering how wrong you can be!

Mike Leigh acquitted himself quite badly, there was none of the good-humour or vivacity of other speakers; he seemed quite aggravated to have to be there; his lack of passion and lifelessness were rivalled only by his curmudgeonliness. Rude, prickly, snippy, annoyed that in a Q&A people might dare to ask Qs and even more annoyed that he might be required to give As- the only person he seemed to treat respectfully was fellow ‘name’ Julian Fellowes. Trust a man of the people to dislike the ‘oi polloi!

Leigh’s actual conversation primarily revolved around a biographical account of his life and a description of his ‘improvised’ workng methods. All in a voice more tedious than Alan Bennett’s monotone. On mogadon. I kid not when I note that two people in the row in front of me fell asleep. It was upon the issue of his improvisational technique, when questioned, that he became most annoyed. Several people wondered afterwards what he might actually have had to say to a collection* of screenwriters given that he basically has the actors make up his films as they go along (alright during the rehearsals- but it’s hardly heavily pre-scripted film-making!). This could be why his films tend to lurch between the poorly paced and undramatic sections to the melodramatic and hysterical (I’m thinking of one specifically awful screeching performance from a great actress!). The most bizarre thing I discovered in this session was that Leigh doesn’t tell the actors what film they’re in or who those around them are playing until they see the finished film. This removes whole areas of how life works: rumours, Chinese whispers, second-hand information, etc. Effectively, it means that a character only has a life when the character is on them! Which seemed to say it all for me.

Entering this session I didn’t like Mike Leigh’s film, exiting, I didn’t like Mike Leigh either.

At the end of this session, while other things were being announced, it was revealed that BSSC-Kaos Films would not just be doing a short film this time round; this time sees them doing a competition for a feature film script, which will be made with a budget of no more than two million dollars.

…there then followed a packed evening of ‘carousing’… the pictures are worth a thousand words… also had a long chat with an ex-tutor of mine at some time during the day… nice to catch up on what some of my fellow students were (or weren’t) doing! Small ‘après-bar’ back at Piers’ place…

…if I can continue to decipher my mysterious scribblings then, my dear reader, I shall bore and frustrate you with yet more ‘revelations’.

*What is the collective noun for screenwriters: a herd, a desk-top, a sheaf…???

At The Gates Of Silent Memory

2008-07-07T11:44:00.001+01:00

I spotted this on the studio briefing of IMDB. Genuinely wonderful news for film buffs, cineastes and spods.

"Less than two weeks after New York-based Kino International had announced that it had completed a frame-by-frame restoration of Fritz Lang's 1927 classic Metropolis and would release it in 2009, a long-lost and badly scratched original cut of the movie has turned up in Argentina, where it was shown to reporters for the first time on Thursday. Paula Felix-Didier, director of the Museo de Cine in Buenos Aires, told the reporters that the three-and-a-half-hour print is the only known copy of Lang's complete film. The film that has been shown in theaters since that time and which in recent years has become available on home video is roughly half that length. Kino said Thursday that it may include the newly discovered footage in its 2009 release."

This would be the 210 minute version unseen quite possibly anywhere in the world since the films 1927 premiere.

…and renews the candle in the window for those who hope against hope that anything from Murnau through Steptoe to Dr. Who might possibly still turn up.

Event Horizon

2008-07-01T01:10:00.003+01:00

Right so, the postings from the wonderful wacky world of the SWF will be brought to you through the random mediums of interpretive dance and Sisters Of Mercy unofficial release titles… you lucky people!!! This may not be a nightly occurrence, of course, so lap it up while you can… these golden nuggets verily drip from my pen! Say what?

This very evening I found myself at the first annual (hopefully) Arnopp-Beckley Scribomeet… and I know you’re all just itching to know just how things went… sadly I fear you may be pinning your hopes on the wrong person for I, your humble narrator, did shamefully fall victim to the parlous evils of intemperance and, dare I say, strong drink… So tonight I can only express simple opinions as befits one to whom the torpor of liquor has tainted; for whom the fingers are ever so slightly numbed and the brain most likely addled! Or coddled.

The basics: this was, to put it mildly, a lovely evening spent in the company of many lovely people, oft-times too numerous to mention but I’ll try to give creditable names to them what has it due!

There was a veritable smorgasbord of Scribonauts… a Jason Arnopp, who you must all know by now as the fine and stand-up gentleman that he is, to whom, sadly, I may have mentioned that some Dr. Who episodes could have been better than maybe they were- yet as such a fine and stand-up gentleman he declined to enrich me with the lamping that I so rightly deserved; Piers Beckley, another gentleman of some renown; Lee Thomson, who looks nothing like his photo and presumably is in cognito (I won’t give away as what); Stuart Perry, yet another gentleman; Gavin Williams, what knows stuff; Dom Carver, who I regaled with too much information but mainly bored with abundant tales of crashed cars; Jennifer from Ireland, with whom I talked at length about religion and regionalization; Sara of Italy; Jeremiah; Ricky; Cecile, Isabelle, Tony, Steven and quite possibly literally hundreds* of other rather lovely and altogether spiffing people whose names I either didn’t catch or can’t quite, at this late hour, remember…

…of course, I knew there would be an embarrassing point and, yeah verily, I did find it! Nobody mentioned that the chap standing right there in front of me was the Adrian Mead! So what did I talk of? Offal, mutton and, specifically, why people weren’t eating enough of it! It was some time later that the irrepressible Arnopp told me with whom I was speaking and mentioned that I may be recalled for all time as the Mutton Man. Over all analysis of the night’s pre-festival festivities? Three words…

…it was good!!!

…and now to bed with the hope that I still don’t get hangovers! I feel the fear of meeting people nigh-on drip away from me in a molten fashion! Be good!

PS: One of the cats gave me a snide look as I came in... they don't like to see me in an unfit state for feeding duties!

*Not literally hundreds!!! But literally some…

Paranoid Android

2008-06-29T23:28:00.005+01:00

Well, the SWF looms ever larger on the horizon…

…and how are things going? Well, at this precise moment the nerves are really starting to hit home- I have to go out in daylight; so I’ll probably turn into dust; I can’t recall a single person on the delegate list not even The Arnopp* (eep!); can’t recall who’s actually speaking or what they’ve done; just in case I’ve tried to sort out my pitches for the couple of specs I’ve written and they’re rubbish- they always are- I’m terrible at pitches and pitching- always have been; do I bother to do anything for the rough projects that are starting to look promising- they might be lovely- actually their dark and miserable… but in a lovely way.

And what of the Festival itself? Worries course through me. What if nobody talks to me? What if I forget what people look like after I’ve already spoken to them at length? What if I embarrass myself and everybody beats me about the face and neck with fresh haddock? What if they’re all undercover cannibals and think I look mouth-watering? What if I take a can of pilchards instead of a notebook and start inexplicably hurling them at Mike Leigh? What if I don’t deodorize? What if… what if… what if… ?

...excitement is mutating into mild fear…

…and yet having just watched the documentary on the WWII comando raid on St. Nazaire dockyard I wonder what right I actually have to feel scared about what is essentially walking into a room. Albeit a large room full of people I don’t know who might, at some point, hold my fate and the course of the rest of my life in their hands. Still a bit daft really.

*Isn’t this a paradox?

Forever Delayed

2008-06-29T16:11:00.003+01:00

Tomorrow, I am officially one year older and one year closer to the grave… that sounds right miserable! It’s true though. If you haven’t worked it out- that would make it my birthday. Unfortunately, I’ve tended to have to go to funerals in this week in previous years and it’s possibly for this reason that tend to find myself looking back as much as forward…

It’s been a strange year, this last one, there’s no doubting that. I have a few more lines around the eyes, white hairs have started to streak the beard and, seemingly overnight, long white hairs have appeared down the full length of my hair. There’s been the SWF 2007 followed, nipping at its heels, by torrential rain, terrible flooding, being marooned and a complete loss of water for several weeks; the Red Planet Prize (or rather lack thereof for me!) at one point done by candlelight due to the flooding; Digital Shorts, for which I was upbraided for not giving my characters back-story… there was Jason and Dan’s premiere (which was fun) and annoying painful dislocations (which was less fun) then there was pestilential near-death experiences (which was about as far from fun as anybody’s currently found). And the writing has suffered badly. All the stoppages have disrupted the thought-flow, the worries have overwhelmed and there’s been a general loss of momentum. But, I’m reckoning that I’ve now pretty much covered the whole gamut: disease, death, flood, pestilence… let’s be done with it- bring on the rain of frogs and swarms of ravenous locusts! I’m ready and I’m waiting!!!

It’s after years like this that a sane person might begin to wonder whether making plans is actually a sensible thing at all… but I’ve tried sanity and, in the main, it’s over-rated.

I’m thinking this year to try and keep things a little more simple: maybe give competitions and prizes a bit of a miss (I just end up hurrying and getting slapdash). Of course, it will depend on the competition and the prize! I’m figuring that now’s the time to just get on and write. I’m looking towards the UKFC scheme (if, by the time I’m ready, it still exists); I’m looking to get a third spec written- then I can start stalking agents; and I’m churning around three stories at the moment which seem half-way reasonable and can’t think of any reason to stop now.

Yet, at the back of my mind, I find myself taunted by the thought- ‘am I any good?’ Not with putting words down, anybody can do that; not with structure, that can be taught; not with formatting, that can be taught or Lucy can tell you why writing in crayon isn’t the best way forward. No, I’m thinking about that unteachable intangible- the ideas themselves- do I have any? Are they any good? Am I just wasting time? In part this comes from noticing that so many people I was at University with were dealing with fantasy and the snippets of ideas I’ve heard on the Scribosphere all tend to be fantastical- there seems so much about new worlds that need saving, standing-stone gateways, flying death-fish, mythical creatures, time travel, horror, space battles- and I find myself continually wondering am I being too prosaic, too boring, too hung up on the real world. By not doing the fantasy thing it almost makes me wonder if I wasn’t listening in on the right conversation…

But as the painter Hopper said, “maybe I am not very human- what I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.” There aren’t the fantasy elements in anything I write now- they’re just about people who are trying to cope with the modern world as best as they can… maybe that’s my painting the sunlight on the side of a house… oh well, all got a little more introspective than I intended!

Anyway, this next week there is a Screenwriters Festival- no wait- the Screenwriters Festival, where hopefully this year I won’t be hamstrung by the desire to hide under a table when anybody turns to talk to me. And as I’m knowing that a bunch of Scribonauts are away to it, I presume and hope I’ll be seeing some of you lovely people in the flesh… so to speak!*

*Please, for the love of God, please keep your clothes on!!!

The Missing

2008-06-29T16:03:00.002+01:00

A few years ago there was a story about a recording of the two string quartets by the major 19th Century French composer Saint-Saëns. Had this been a recording of the Beethoven, Shostakovich or Mozart quartets there would have been barely a flicker of interest in anything other than the quality of the performance and recording themselves. However, what made these recordings noteworthy was not only that the compositions were of very high quality but that these were the world premiere recordings. In the classical music industry these days an eye is kept open (especially by labels like Naxos and Chandos) for rare and unusual recordings to give a disc a unique USP. Lost and/ or previously unknown works do appear, not least because many of the major music archives still haven’t been catalogued thoroughly and have centuries of manuscripts residing in them. After centuries of European wars, private sales, clearances, thefts or simply mislabelling things have inevitably been displaced but what made the episode of the Saint-Saëns quartets more peculiar was that these were not lost works they resided in the archives, people knew they existed, but for over a century nobody had even played them let alone recorded them. As a musicologist noted on the radio at the time, this was terribly sad… they were simply neglected.

We all know about the missing episodes scandal that has left many of the Hartnell and most of the Troughton episodes of Doctor Who lost for all time; the same goes for the four missing first series Dad’s Army episodes, virtually all of The Likely Lads and the missing episodes of Quatermass. Many aficionados know that a vast amount of early cinema has gone forever (about 80% of all silent film), not least of all because it was filmed onto highly unstable, highly inflammable nitrate stock, films such as Murnau’s illegal 1920 Dr. Jekyll adaptation Der Januskopf or Chaney’s turn in 1927’s London After Midnight. And how tantalizing is a 1920 Roumanian film entitled ‘Drakula’? But these are gone. Probably forever. Maybe one day someone will look in a can and find cause for their heartbeat to quicken as they open a mislabelled can and find… who knows? And so we should be thankful for anything that survives from the era when films were considered throwaway. Of course, sometimes films do come back, a mini-masterwork The Most Dangerous Game (made back to back with King Kong), Boris Karloff in The Ghoul and perhaps the best example being a pristine, full length print of Carl Dreyer’s masterpiece The Passion Of Joan Of Arc from 1928; long thought lost, it was discovered in a Norwegian mental asylum!

However, as with the Saint-Saëns quartets, there seems to be another category: the neglected film, works that are known to exist and yet seem to be languishing in limbo, unreleased on disc or tape, unbroadcast on television. The EU did have a scheme to make sure that certain classics of European cinema remained on catalogue (EVE) but this seems to have long since gone and it seems more likely that a film (or television programme) will be released if it comes through a smaller company. Even the classic, Witchfinder General was apparently not going to be released on DVD because the rights had ended up with Sony Pictures who had decided on a policy of not releasing films over a decade old because their profit margins would be too small- and I do realise that profit margins are a large part of the problem- which is peculiar when you consider how they kept telling us we were coming into an era of greater choice. We must be grateful to companies such as Network, Eureka, Artificial Eye, Tartan and Redemption-Salvation for throwing light through some nigh on forgotten classics but there are so many more…

Among the films and television programmes that seem to have fallen through the cracks and I would like to see appear on DVD in the UK include…

• The Student Of Prague (1913 and 1926 remake) (Essential early horror works.)
• Genuine (1920) (Footage from Robert Wiene’s film was placed on the end of the NTSC and some Pal tapes of the same director’s The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari- known to exist in its entirety.)
• City Girl (1930) (Murnau’s third American film- of four- and the only one unreleased.)
• The Naked Spur (1953) (the only one of the Anthony Mann-directed James Stewart Westerns not available on DVD- bizarre!)
• Fear And Desire (1953)(Kubrick’s first feature, withdrawn by the director)
• The Colossus Of Rhodes (1961) (Sergio Leone’s credited directorial debut- it may well be terrible but without a release- how would anybody know?)
• The Big Gundown (1966) (Sergio Sollima’s first Western)
• Privilege (1967) (Peter Watkins’ first feature film. Rights owned by Warners- I think- who have no interest in a release)
• Poor Cow (1967) (Ken Loach feature film briefly released since disappeared)
• Up The Junction (1968) (the film version of the BBC play)
• Run Man Run (1968) (Sergio Sollima’s third Western)
• Gladiators (1969) (Peter Watkins’ second proper feature film)
• Leo The Last (1970) (The film John Boorman directed between Hell In The Pacific and Deliverance; won him Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival.)
• Deep End (1970) (Apparently a classic from the end of the sixties from Jerzy Skolimowski and said to be Jane Asher’s greatest role.)
• Face To Face (1976) (Ingmar Bergman’s Oscar- and Bafta-nominated, Golden Globe-winning classic. Unavailable.)
• Bloodbath Of Doctor Jekyll (1981)(Euro-auteur Walerian Borowczyk’s grimmest film. Rights issues)
• Chinese Boxes (1984) (Chris Petit’s fourth feature with Will Patton and Robbie Coltrane)
• Drowning By Numbers (1988) (Peter Greenaway)
• The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover (1989) (Peter Greenaway)
• Prospero’s Books (1991) (Peter Greenaway)
• The Baby Of Mâcon (1993) (Peter Greenaway)
• The Pillow Book (1996) (Peter Greenaway)
• Dracula Rising (1993) (Not the most widely known Corman production but effectively the companion to his Frankenstein Unbound)
• Se7en (1995) (Seriously! This modern classic is currently unavailable at HMV online!)

(I have not included any films that remain unreleased for actual censorship reasons. That’s a different subject entirely…!)

And from television wouldn’t it be nice to be able to have releases of amongst others…
• 1984 (1954) (controversial Orwell favourite saved for posterity by the Queen- I kid you not- but even Royal Appointment isn’t enough to command a DVD release!)
• Up The Junction (1965) (the acclaimed BBC Wednesday Play)
• Ghost Stories For Christmas: The Stalls Of Barchester (1971); Lost Hearts (1973); Treasure Of Abbot Thomas (1974); The Ash Tree (1975) (The BFI released two- Whistle And I’ll Come To You and A Warning To The Curious and then… stopped.)
• No Man’s Land (1978) (classic filmed version of Pinter’s play with John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson sits languishing in the BBC’s vaults)
• The Muscle Market (1981) (pre-Blackstuff Play For Today)
• A Very Peculiar Practice (1986, 1988, 1992) (early Andrew Davies: first series released briefly; second series and one-off special… nowhere to be found)
• The Woman In Black (1989) (much sought after chilling Nigel Kneale adaptation of Susan Hill’s novel- apparently the rights are now owned by Universal and they refuse to release it- because they think they may do a big-screen version at some point in the next century.)
• Mother Love (1989) (chilling Bafta award-winning Diana Rigg starring 4-parter)
• Chimera (1991) (scary as hell, proto-genetics story)
• Blackeyes (1989) (controversial Dennis Potter classic)
• Lipstick On Your Collar (1993) (the final Dennis Potter shown during his lifetime- starring Ewan McGregor)
• Karaoke (1996) (the first part of Dennis Potter’s posthumous flourish- filming arranged so quickly that rights were not properly sorted out)
• Cold Lazarus (1996) (the second part… same reason for lack of release)

Then there are some that were available briefly and have long since returned into rights limbo: The War Game, Culloden, The Stone Tape…

I can’t help thinking I have merely scratched the surface and that there are plenty more classics (and curios) which have been lost under the welter of Star Wars re-issues, Ed Wood and Jess Franco releases.

Perhaps the thing that first made me interested in the rights and releases issue was the intriguing case of Johnny Got His Gun, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo’s sole directorial outing and pacifist film from 1971. The rights were bought by Metallica solely so they could use extensive footage in their promo for the track One They had no interest in making the film widely available and so the film languished in obscurity. A couple of years ago the film got its DVD release. Until then this was all you could see of the film…

…I haven’t yet bought a copy!

Know Your Enemy

2008-06-28T20:17:00.000+01:00

This week it was revealed that documentary film-maker Sean Langan had been released by Taliban kidnappers after a three month captivity. This can only be welcomed- I wouldn’t wish this experience (kidnapping, constant threat of death and mock executions) on my worst enemy.

Sean Langan first came to my attention with his series Langan Behind The Lines featuring episodes with titles like Taking Tea With The Taliban: the series was filmed and shown in early 2001, pre-9/11. These programmes, which seemed to give Langan unusually free access to, amongst others, the camera-shy Taliban, continually portrayed the militants, warlords and fundamentalists he met across Iran, Iraq, the Gaza Strip and Afghanistan as lovable, friendly chaps who were only too willing to break bread with him and invite him into their homes. I couldn’t help feeling very uncomfortable watching their portrayal in these and his subsequent programmes: could these lovable people have been the self-same who hold mass-executions in their football stadium, bulldoze walls onto homosexuals and stone to death adulterous women?

I was not the only one to feel uncomfortable; reporter Saira Shah was so angered by these programmes that she went undercover in Afghanistan and filmed the more disturbing distaff side to Langan’s all-too-cosy portrayals- ‘Beneath The Veil’, I think it was called and it was broadcast a few months after Langan’s, just before 9/11. It completely undermined the vision of Langan’s films and stripped them of any illusion and made them seem deeply disingenuous.

I can’t help admiring Langan’s bravery- I have no deep yearning to go into active warzones- but I do find his apparently deliberately contrary version of the scary types he meets to be somewhat disturbing… this is the equivalent of his meeting Hitler and admitting that, while he may have been a bit mean to the Jews, on the other hand he did like his dog and threw an excellent dinner party. When I heard of his release, and therefore his kidnapping, I tried hard to suppress a grim smile and thoughts of ‘chickens roosting’. I can’t help thinking its best not to put your head in the tiger’s mouth too many times because at some point the tiger may grow tired of playing along with the game.

The Man Who Gave Away The World

2008-06-28T12:15:00.002+01:00

The good news is that there is a free 12 track David Bowie CD available on Sunday (29/06) in the UK. The bad news is it comes with the Mail On Sunday. The good news is it could be worse- it could have been The Scum.

The CD has 12 tracks; favourites personally chosen by the man himself including a new mix of Time Will Crawl. Bowie’s own comments on each will be in the paper.

The tracklist includes, Life On Mars, The Bewlay Brothers, Loving The Alien, Time Will Crawl (New Remix), Lady Grinning Soul, Sweet Thing/ Candidate, Win, Some Are, Repetition, Fantastic Voyage, Teenage Wildlife, Hang On To Yourself (Live at Santa Monica, ’72).

Presumably this is all a sweetener for the first official release of ‘Live in Santa Monica ’72’ (recorded during the Ziggy Stardust tour) which is to be released on CD/LP on Monday (30/06/08). But the big question is will there ever be a new LP?

God Save The Meme!

2008-06-26T14:59:00.004+01:00

Having had a bit of scout around some of the posts I’d not seen while I was AWOL I noticed there’d been a meme thing what I’d missed… and I rather like memes… they give me a chance to make lists… I wasn’t tagged but I’ll be guessing that this here counts.

The brief would appear to be…
"List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to."

I don’t have an iPod put on shuffle (or actually an iPod) and I don’t have anything on the laptop. I just pick a CD every now and again. Then leave them lurking by the side of the stereo, on the speakers, on the turntable, in great stacks on the floor... So, here’s a track each from the discs I’ve been spinning more than others recently… To what extent the music I’m listening to influences the new writing project or if the writing influences the musical choice, I’d be reckoning must be six of one, half dozen of the other, so I’ll reckon. I was going to put some fascinating and erudite blurb but maybe the music doesn’t really need it.

Portishead: Silence (previously entitled Wicca)

from the CD imaginatively named ‘Third’ (2008).

Coruscating, exhilarating, on a ragged nerved.

(Clip from All Tomorrow’s Parties premiere- there’s an excellent soundboard quality download available in various places round the web.)

Lisa Gerrard: The Host Of Seraphim

from the CD ‘The Serpent’s Egg’ (1988).

Ethereal. Always makes me think of deserts…

Portishead: Half Day Closing

from the equally imaginatively entitled CD ‘Portishead’ (1997).

Clip and version from ‘PNYC Live’.

Massive Attack: Mezzanine

from the CD ‘Mezzanine’ (1998).

DJ Shadow Vs. Unkle: Lonely Soul-Guns Blazing Mash-up

from the CD/DVD set ‘In Tune And On Time Live!’ (2004).

Contains language some may find objectionable

Sisters Of Mercy: On The Wire-Teachers-One The Wire

from the unofficial CD ‘Event Horizon’ (Live at the Forum, London) (1998).

The CD has near soundboard quality audio; unfortunately the only clip available doesn’t- it’s from a different gig- recorded on a mobile. On The Wire is a B-side from 1984, of which I still don’t like the studio version but live… it shines. Teachers, a live standard for them since their very first gigs in ’81, is the Leonard Cohen song. I can’t believe it’s nearly 21 years since I bought my first Sisters’ disc. Scary.

Bowie: Heart’s Filthy Lesson

from the CD ‘Outside: The Nathan Adler Diaries’ (1995).

Contains imagery some may find objectionable

PJ Harvey: White Chalk

from the CD ‘White Chalk’ (2007).

Sugababes: Stronger

from the CD ‘Overloaded The Singles Collection’ (2006) and ‘Angels With Dirty Faces’ (2002)

Aren’t the strings reminiscent of Unfinished Sympathy? Heartbreaking yet tinged with hope…

Massive Attack feat. Terry Callier: Live With Me

from the CD ‘Collected’ (2006)

(The string led version of the track used on the other video is the better but the Jonathan Glazer directed promo is so appalling I refuse to give it house-room. But if you’re desperate, watch it here- then pluck out thine eyes!).

Public Image Limited: The Order Of Death

from the CD ‘This Is What You Want… This Is What You Get’ (1984)

Contains imagery some may find objectionable
May contain spoilers for the film Hardware (1990)

The clip is a pretty well-concocted assemblage from Richard Stanley’s excellent (and unfairly over-looked) first feature, Hardware. The track, Lydon intoning the same phrase over and over, is like a mantra for the wasteland…

Radiohead: Street Spirit (Fade Out.)

from the CD ‘The Best Of Radiohead’ (2008) and ‘The Bends’ (1995).

Moby: When It’s Cold I’d Like To Die

from the CD ‘Everything Is Wrong’ (1995)

So, that’s where my head’s at this moment I’m thinking. I hope it enlightened if not exactly uplifted…

2008-06-26T00:08:00.004+01:00

Here’s some general random thoughts I’ve had which I haven’t had a chance to share… if they get too long I’ll do second post, if and when… and then it’ll look as if I’m actually posting more than I actually am… Cunning, heh?

antanddec
As it has been made abundantly clear antanddec did not know anything about the massive dodginess (which some have suggested could be referred to as fraud- though not I as it hasn’t been to court, nobody has been charged and I don’t want to be sued for libel!) perpetrated on various shows that they presented and executive produced through their own production company and through which millions of pounds were erroneously expropriated of people for competitions they had no chance of winning (because they rang too late and weren’t entered; weren’t pretty enough to appear on television or just weren’t living near enough to London). Antanddec knew nothing about any of it. This, they have made ‘clear as an unmuddied lake’. We have no reason to disbelieve them.

So, the questions I found ran through my head and find hard to answer are…
• Are they fit to run a company?
• Should they have been paying a little more attention?
• Should they actually have executive producer credits? What do they do to earn such?
• Should they hire new company accountants?
• Are they really androids created by some evil genius to make the television audience stupider?

The Ruby In The Smoke
The other night I managed to catch the repeat of the television adaptation of Philip Pullman’s Victorian England set The Ruby In The Smoke (which I haven’t read and probably won’t) because they cancelled the football (and there was much rejoicing across the land- well- from me at any rate) and I was reminded of several things that I thought strange the first time around. I must make clear that it is a likable enough romp though for whom I’m not entirely sure: skewed too young for adults yet too dark, violent and mired in opium for children. However, to the peculiarities…

Firstly Peculiarity I had to scratch my head when on two separate occasions characters were twice described so as to be pointed out… firstly, when the villainous Mrs Holland warns her underling “Didn’t you know there was a stabbing in Kent this morning; only eye-witness is in shock, poor soul; ain’t breathed a word but one nod from me and she’ll swear it was a sharp young feller in a check suit and a bowler hat she saw standing over the body with a knife in his hand.” Peculiarly, Mrs Holland apparently didn’t notice the more salient point in this Victorian setting might have been that the chap was black. Alright, fine, thinks I, this must surely have been an oversight. But lo, not 10 minutes later, Miss Sally Lockhart describes the self-same miscreant (who has just stolen her note-book) as not being Mrs Holland but rather “No, it was a man, a Spiv*.” Again, she neglects to mention that he’s black. This second omission seemed more than mere coincidence. I’m perfectly happy with and supportive of colour-blind casting but there are some problems when this is applied to various period settings. In the UK, presently, the non-white population numbers between 5 and 10% depending on to whom you listen, what definitions they’re using and what point they’re trying to prove. In The Bill they still give the IC code to aid identification. Only recently I heard a historian say that Victorian England only had about 10-20,000 non-white people which in a population of around 20 million (0.05-0.10%)- works out as about 1 in 1-2,000- I realise the percentages were higher in places like London, Liverpool and Bristol but still hardly high enough to become negligible. You’d have thought that some Victorians (even in fictional TV programmes) would have thought that being non-white would have been worth mentioning. It is the unusual that people recall and mention when describing individuals, events, places or items: if I was mugged by a three-armed, cycloptic unidexter my description to police would probably not focus on his blue jeans and tidy hair. It just seems odd, given the number of throat-slashings and the later propounding of the benefits of opium, that there should be such apparent squeamishness about this particular element. Left me intrigued but is only a minor thing- and I sincerely hope doesn't come across as being racist.

Second Peculiarity. Something that actually strikes me as of far greater importance is the treatment of class. Ruby In The Smoke was a story about a trio of arty, attractive, well-scrubbed, well-educated, upper-middle-class dilettantes (Sally, a roving something-or-other of military background; an Oxbridge-educated photographic dabbler and his actress sister**) who struggle against evil, ignorant, ugly***, dirty working class types possessed of nothing more than animal cunning- with the only good working class types portrayed being the sort of typical forelock-tugging ‘noble savages’ so beloved of Victorian melodrama who tend to die nobly so the beautiful people may live. Assuming this is accurate to Pullman’s novel- isn’t it curious that while he thinks religion is evil and divisive he actively promotes an upper-middle-class, (bourgeois) view of class that is no further advanced than that of the world of Brief Encounter?

Third Peculiarity. At the end of the piece the main villain explained their part of the plot and recounted a back-story that would presumably make them seem moderately sympathetic (too little, too late) and then a further previously unseen, only mentioned a couple of times, villain popped up to describe his bit of plot which seemed almost unrelated to the rest of the story. This particular villain was Sino-Dutch… and presumably in the running for the Fu Manchu award for most culturally stereotyped villain!

Fourth (Minor) Peculiarity. The explanatory voice-over, though sparingly used, was just annoying… as people insist on telling me… ‘show, don’t tell’.

However, I’m not sure where the fault for any of this lies. I checked the writer (Adrian Hodges) on imdb and found he has a nigh on impeccable CV (including Heaven On Earth which I thought most excellent and which is criminally unavailable on DVD). Maybe there was some dabbling from others or maybe the novel’s ‘problematic’ to start with but something went slightly skew-whiff at some point. Answers on a postcard. But it enjoyably passed 90 minutes… and that’s what counts…

Now from the deep and meaningful to the shallow and pointless…

The Cherry & Whites
Isn’t it time to rid ourselves of the farrago of the Rugby play-offs? Ridiculous, stupid and patently unfair. Rugby now works like this: after a season of playing the Premiership, the Cherry & Whites come top of the Guinness Premiership and, instead of getting a trophy, they get to do an end-of-season play-off mini-championship tournament in which they loose. This hasn’t happened every year- but it has happened three times in the eight years since its implementation… and it’s getting silly. I’d like to make abundantly clear that I do not actually understand the rules of the game, if indeed there are any, but if it’s on TV I’ll try and catch it. And I’d rather like my team to win- especially when they’ve won.

…and that is the end of today’s miscellaneous ramblings. Take care you groovy-funkers!

*Did Spivs exist at this time- according to the BBC’s own Balderdash & Piffle… no! Didn’t arrive until at least the first decade of the Twentieth Century.
**It was ignored that at this time ‘jobbing actress’ was near-synonymous for ‘prostitute’.
***Don’t you just love the classic conflation of ugly and villainous?

Post

2008-06-22T15:55:00.004+01:00

Well, it’s been a fair while, so it has. Longer than it should have been but needs must when the Devil vomits in your kettle*. Firstly, I’d like to thank all those who left comments and were generally concerned. I probably ought to give you a quick rundown as to what happened…

Those of you who have been successfully cloned with elephants will recall that I dislocated my thumb a (long) while back, put it back in and thought that would be that… but as you may also recall there’s a phrase about best laid plans… I actually managed to yank the tendons into the middle of who-knows-where until they started to feel like they were burning and all swelled up. So, I was basically told that if I wanted it work properly quickly (or again) I’d have to stop using it. Have you ever tried not using the thumb on your right hand- and hence your right hand? Almost impossible. It also becomes very frustrating very quickly… bizarrely when it felt alright to start doing stuff again I discovered I couldn’t actually remember how to handwrite. Seriously. Took several days.

The whole episode was, in hindsight, a minor inconvenience…

Just as I was starting to think what my next post should be my sister’s youngest (my 3 year old nephew) was rushed to hospital having contracted Meningoccal Septicaemia" (or Bacterial Meningitis for short). In the first few hours after diagnosis it was a close race with death. He then spent a couple of weeks in Cardiff ICU before being moved to their High Dependency Unit and ultimately transferred to Swansea for skin grafts, dialysis, etc. So, the whole family switched onto a war footing. The good news is that he has made a remarkably speedy recovery- suprising even the medical types- although there’s still a long road to go. Initially he wasn’t expected to make it through the night; then he was expected to survive but lose his feet, fingers, kidneys and need extensive skin grafting to knees, legs and elbows… now, he’s getting to keep his feet, even his toes; his kidneys started working again; the skin grafts are taking well and he’s only lost three fingers on his right hand. Now, he’s even been released back home and is learning how to walk again and sending everybody insane with a non-stop diet of Fireman Sam, Ballamory and The Midnight Garden- proof that psychedelics are rife in the TV industry???- if they made these programmes in drink form they’d dissolve teeth on contact and be banned across Europe and all fifty states of the Union! So, things were bad; now they’re not so bad and looking better daily... and make my minor thumb problem seem entirely trivial.

…and now I’m (maybe) back… what next? Well, I’ll tell you I’ll probably be increasingly misanthropic, snarly and ranty and eventually convince you all to hate me. There’s a lot to snarl about: the world’s turning to shit on a daily basis, nobody seems to have an iota of sense, people become more stupid; democracy evaporates on a global scale; television has abandoned all pretence to being interested in the audience and now treats them with a mix of paternalistic pity and thinly veiled contempt and finally unfettered free-market capitalism is increasingly appearing to be to the human race what myxomatosis is to rabbits…

So, one last thought to conjure with…

A while back young Master Oli spoke about the downgrading of language (such as ‘excruciating’); as did Matthew Parris many years ago in The Times (the way politicians have devalued ‘pledge’, ‘promise’, etc. to the point where they have become meaningless). What about ‘nightmare’ and ‘hell’- as in ‘my diet hell’ or ‘my cellulite nightmare’- so, given that having to diet or a little cellulite are considered a nightmare or a hell what word is left to be used to describe counting the seconds, watching over a son fighting for breath while a resuscitation team hover in the background, and while blood blisters form all over the child’s limbs, body and face until he’s unrecognizable and turning black, as people do with frostbite? Is the epithet ‘nightmare’ or ‘hell’ suitable for that- or is it just not up there with diets and cellulite? Tricky isn’t? But let's get serious we don’t get to have ‘living hells’ or ‘nightmares’- we’re just little people. After all celebrities, well, they have it tough don’t they?

Not that I'm angry...

*I thank you Messrs. Curtis and Elton…

Channel Zero #8

2008-03-15T21:12:00.004Z

Well, I hope you’ll forgive my not posting for a little while but as you know I managed to do my thumb in. Having popped it back in place and tried to continue as normal I wrote some long emails to various people and various notes and things and discovered something rather important…. I shouldn’t have done. While typing itself hasn’t been that bad, using the mouse has just been aggravating things to the nth degree. In the end I came to the conclusion it was best to not use mouses (ha!), keyboards and anything else that might be making the recovery slower than it did ought. The weird thing is that I can’t recall the last time I did a finger like this taking this long to recover after being popped back in… then again I was younger and it was the left hand any way- so I wasn’t using it nearly so much. Mind you I can’t bend that finger properly and at least my thumb is currently still bending properly. Stupid human body- if I was a skink I’d have regrown my thumb by now!

So, all this time away from laptops, blogs and so on has given me plenty of time to ponder deeper more meaningful things… like why cheese is a bit nasty. That was a lie by the way… there is no why… cheese just is nasty. Unless involved in an ongoing pizza interface scenario…

Actually, more importantly, I finally found my spine and submitted my story synopsis to the inimitable Lucy and she pointed out some pretty useful and important things which I am now trying to fix. She was, of course, too polite to actually write in her notes ‘you have made a rookie mistake you pillock!’ but she would have been right to do so! So, I’ve been trying to sort out this problem. It’s proving difficult because, while there are immediate solutions, I can’t help thinking that I have to find the one that I can live with. It would be easier if I could grasp a pen or pencil properly as well and just get on and scrawl my thoughts down quickly. Anyway, we learn from our mistakes, not our successes. And anyway, that’s why we do the sensible thing and use readers rather than asking our pets to give our stuff the quick once over. It’s also why I write story synopsises rather than just plunging into scripts. Why rewrite 110 pages when you could sort out the problems in rewriting just 8?

Muscle Of The Week (for MJ)…
The right ventricle… essential for all your sanguinary needs!

Music Of The Week
Just to mark me out as massively behind the times I nominate…

2004, The Grey Video. Directed by Ramon & Pedro.

“Encore” from The Grey Album by Dangermouse. (Click this link for the full story.) What you basically get is my favourite Beatles LP providing backing tracks for the words of my favourite collaborator on Rihanna’s Umbrella under the auspices of my favourite Gorillaz producer… I’ve only just found the ‘virtual album’ because for a long while EMI were too successful in removing it from the Interweb. Whether it should have been counted by so many critics’ as ‘best album of the year’ is another matter when 2004 turned up new albums from Björk, PJ Harvey, Leonard Cohen, The Killers’ Hot Fuss and Miss Kittin’s solo debut. I suspect there was an element of ‘I’ve got something that you don’t have’ to the decision. Anyway, this isn’t the best track from the album but it is the only official unofficial promo video for this deeply unofficial album. Visuals ‘sampled’ from A Hard Day’s Night- previously directed by the criminally neglected Richard Lester who was also responsible for Help!, How I Won The War, Robin & Marian, the great The Bed-Sitting Room, the brilliant The Knack and the perennially enjoyable Three and Four Musketeers. There is no getting away from the fact that those Musketeer films have to be some of the most purely enjoyable films ever made…

Bonus Music

Manic Street Preachers’ Door To The River (Live at Cardiff Homecoming, 18/11/02)

Something rather nice I found a few weeks ago. I was going to keep it to myself but that would be mean! Don’t know much about the provenance… except it looks like a TV broadcast and is a very rare public performance of this particular track here augmented by string orchestra.

Now for “television, the drug of the nation… breeding ignorance and feeding radiation…” possibly…

Saturday
BBC1: 11.40 pm: Below: a rather unnerving supernatural thriller set on a WWII submarine. Written and directed by that David Twohy…

Film4: 1.10 am: Dog Altogether and Shane’s World: award-winning short films from Paddy Considine and Shane Meadows.

Sunday
BBC1: 8.00 pm: The Passion: First part of a week-long version of what’s been called the Soap Opera version of The Passion story… hoorah, more soap!

BBC3: 9.00 pm: Gavin & Stacey: Series 2. Television Of The Week Two episodes back to back.

BBC1: 9.00 pm: The Last Enemy: Finale of the sleeper. (Why the Radio Times’ reviewer finds this so difficult to understand is beyond me- I would prefer it to be harder going.)

ITV: 11.15 pm: South Bank Show: Revolution 68: a revisiting of the anti-Vietnam Grovesnor Square protests; their context and consequences.

Monday
C4: 8.00 pm: Dispatches: Iraq- The Betrayal

C4: 9.00 pm: Battle For Haditha: Nick Broomfield’s would-be-controversial drama based on the true story of an Iraq War massacre perpetrated by US Marines. Broomfield’s film-making tends to be deeply biased (I wouldn’t know in this particular case) but at least he’s a film-maker who actually believes in something. And that’s something to be valued in these times.(Followed by a documentary on the same subject on More 4.)

Tuesday
BBC4: 9.00 pm: Auntie’s War On Smut: documentary starting the BBC Curse Of Comedy season.

Wednesday
BBC4: 9.00 pm: The Curse Of Steptoe: Drama of the creation of Steptoe & Son. Anybody that caught the Channel 4 documentary on the same subject should know how melancholy, and compelling, the story of Corbett and Brambell is.

BBC4: 11.05 pm: Mark Lawson Talks To Galton & Simpson

Thursday
BBC1: 9.00 pm: Ashes To Ashes

Good Friday
BBC1: 2.10 pm: A Grand Day Out: Wallace & Gromit... what more could anybody want?

BBC4: 7.00 pm: Mozart Requiem in D Minor: Mozart’s masterful, moving final work. The performance edition is not noted.

BBC4: 8.00 pm: Sacred Music: Part 1 of 4. The story of the development of Church music starting with the origins of polyphony.

BBC2: 10.30 pm: The Assassination Of Richard Nixon: based on true story film for which history has already provided the spoilers!

Can’t Take My 'Eyes' Off You!

2008-03-01T21:41:00.002Z

The great thing about driving places is it gives a little time to clear the mind- in the past I’ve sorted out my plot flaws, mentally sketched scenes and whole spines while its been just me, the music and the open road. And so it was as I returned from the triumphant premiere of Jason Arnopp and Dan Turner’s short film ‘Look At Me’. Jason and Dan have produced a fine film, an achievement and, hopefully, this will be the first of many premieres for them and certainly bodes well for their feature A.S.K. (whatever it might stand for!). Hopefully waves of pride are still sweeping through them and they’re still allowing themselves a bask in their success.

I’m always happy when I get back near my patch of country; when I see the foothills of the Welsh mountains start to rise in the one distance and the Malverns in the other. But, this time, as I got out of the jams and drove over the Cotteswolds, sun spilling under the lowering cloud, windswept fields bathed in gold… a mellow sense settled and I recalled Gore Vidal’s saying ‘that every time a friend of mine succeeds a little piece of me dies’. What a total fool! When the good guys succeed I couldn’t be happier!!!

* * * Congratulations once more to Jason and Dan! * * *

Channel Zero #7

2008-03-01T21:36:00.003Z

Well, what a week… everything suddenly found itself exciting about four months ahead of projections. Much has been done, films have been seen, journeys have been made, people have been met, A Pitch In Time was finally entered, comments have been read and lovely people have spoken!

Right, a post… Though I reckon I’ll be trying to be a little shorter due to yet another really stoopid injury. I cannot understate how grateful I am to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Yahweh, Jehovah, Jove or any other Supreme Being for my not catching colds, flu, plague, whatever especially given my propensity for rendering myself all daddaky via the medium of the perilous everyday object. On Monday I managed to dislocate the top joint of my right thumb and that was just plain annoying… the reason is so embarrassingly banal that I’ll not go into it- instead we’ll assume I was wrestling wild bears, thank you very much. Anywhen, a little ice, cold water and patience and in it popped… and all I’m left with is the sort of minor sort of throb shown when cartoon characters hit their thumbs with hammers. Currently, I’m lacquered in Ibuleve. I'm thinking of selling the format to Channel 4: I'd be calling it 'Relocation, Relocation, Relocation'. The good news is that its affected neither of my typing fingers; the bad news is that the only thing that’s previously set me above the cats was my opposable thumb but now they just sit around me laughing uncontrollably! Bastards. :)

Finally, this week, at the last minute I decided I really ought to put in something for the Screenwriters Festivals ‘A Pitch In Time’ thing… a couple of Pitches went in about eleven on the Friday night. They’re not particularly brilliant due to the last minute nature but in the end if you don’t try you can’t fail! More seriously, I think there are issues: in the seriously unlikely event that I should get through to the shortlist there would be the whole getting up on stage thing and that would be a little unsettling. And I know that audience: they’ll be well armed… tomatoes, cabbages… spanners… grenades… they claim they only have them for research but what else are they meant to do with them afterwards?

Misreading of the week: “Expert shoplifters” on the back of a van outside of Oxford… that’s just blatant thought I. Er, not really when they’re actually “Expert shopfitters”!

Music Of The Week…

…well it’s just a single solitary track without a video… but what a track! The video’s just some rather obvious pictures that have been added for instructional purposes. It’s been being given away with this last weeks NME (without irritating annnouncer at the end)… and what is this wondrous track… the Manics’ cover version of Umbrella, that’s right the Rihanna song. And it works damn well. Simply because they took it seriously.

Television
Short and sweet: the Panorama on bottled water proved what I suspected… that bottled water is inherently pointless and evil… possibly. And the vanguard brand from the 70’s has to be possibly the vilest drink since the dawn of time. The stuff in the tap’s fine by me. With a rather more tenuous connexion… while the Daily Mail may be the epitome of evil, worse even than Hitler (*joke*), their campaign against plastic bags can only be applauded and welcomed- which will save some turtles, whales, seals and birds from horrible deaths. The Mail, after all, speaks both to and for one of the only groups that this Government cares about now: the so-called Middle England… the only other group they care about more is the super-rich especially if they have non-dom status! And you’ll never stop them from eating turtles!

My suspicions about The Last Enemy have been proved correct: the pace has picked up dramatically, there’s more tension and the increased presence of Robert Carlyle has injected much needed energy. Ashes To Ashes has seemingly bedded in and I’ve managed to put Life On Mars from my mind while watching… I assume that this can only indicate it’s acquired a life and identity of its own. The Neutron bomb conspiracy episode proved a bit of a cracker. The increasingly creepy presence and activities (watching over the sleeping Alex, creeping into her room, etc.) of the Pierrot is starting to worry me about a possible future direction that they may be heading with it: I sincerely hope my fears aren’t well-founded.

…and fair play to Kenneth Branagh, Mark Kermode and Miramax for showing the ‘missing’ Danny Boyle film, Alien Love Triangle at La Charrete, Gorseinon. Genuinely touching.

TV or not TV? That is a question…*

Well, Film4 is showing two weeks, solid, of British films so that’s a good starter. They will be giving a chance to lucky digital viewers to sample some of the best British (and in some cases all-time) films including the original caper The League Of Gentlemen, Local Hero, Withnail & I and a brace of Powell & Pressburger masterpieces A Matter Of Life And Death and Black Narcissus.

Saturday
BBC2: 9.30 pm: Gavin & Stacey: the entire first series of this fine comedy series back-to-back. If you’ve not seen this then, to be honest, you must live under a rock; if you watched it and hated it then clearly you hate television… maybe… or just have different taste… which just happens to be wrong! Hmm! Gavin & Stacey really is wonderful stuff relying on a set of clear human characters involved in situations which are all to familiar; beautifully written and acted and entirely lacking in that maliciousness that often afflicts comedy. (Available here and here so now you have no excuses.)

BBC4: 10.00 pm: Sweet Smell Of Success: Alexander Mackendrick’s cyanide love-letter to the New York scene.

Sunday
BBC2: 9.00 pm: The Last Enemy

Monday
BBC2: 8.30 pm: A Good Woman: Filmed Oscar Wilde play…

BBC1: 9.00 pm: Life In Cold Blood: Part 5: last chance to see…

Film4: 11.05 pm: Dog Altogether: Paddy Considine’s recent Bafta-winning short film.

Film4: 1.05 am: Shane’s World: Three short films by Shane Meadows.

Tuesday
BBC2: 9.00 pm: Horizon: Are We Alone In The Universe?

Film4: 9.00 pm: Oliver Twist: the new 2005 Polanski-Harwood version.

BBC2: 11.20 pm: Mad Men: the big new series of the week…

Wednesday
BBC3: 10.40 pm: Mrs In-Betweeny: is this going to leave the audience dumbstruck for the all the right or the wrong reasons?

More4: 9.00 pm: This Is Civilisation: New arts documentary series.

Thursday
Film4: 7.00 pm: A Matter Of Life And Death: Quite simply one of the finest films ever made by some of the finest film-makers ever made: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

BBC1: 9.00 pm: Ashes To Ashes: of course…

BBC2: 9.00 pm: That Mitchell And Webb Look: turns out Thursdays can be funny!

BBC2: 11.20 pm: Ideal: Exhibit B: the third series transplanted surgically from BBC3…

Friday
Film4: 7.00 pm: Black Narcissus: another masterpiece from Powell And Pressburger.

BBC2: 9.00 pm: Last Orders: the documentary starting the BBC’s ‘White Season’.

BBC4: 10.00 pm: Motor City’s Burning: Detroit From Motown To The Stooges

BBC2: 12.35 pm: Doomwatch: the film from the BBC series.

*Quite possibly said by an actress to a bishop or vice versa… we can only wait until the Fake Sheikh exposes this entanglement!

You Love A Design For An Indian Summer

2008-02-29T04:10:00.003Z

The Manic Street Preachers are now officially ‘God-like Geniuses’. I know this to be true because NME tells me so. So, in their honour and, for your general delectation, it is with the greatest of pleasure that I present to you...

MANIC
* * * STREET * * *
PREACHERS

You Love Us, 1992. Directed by Wiz.

A Design For Life, 1996. Directed by Pedro Romhanyi.

Indian Summer, 2007. Directed by Patrick Jones.

* * * Standing apart since 1986 * * *

About You Now

2008-02-24T16:56:00.005Z

I recently clocked up 50 posts; more by luck than judgement I’d say, and it got me thinking back. After technical glitches and the lay-off over Christmas, when I came back to the blog thing, I realised I couldn’t recall what I’d been annoying you with: I wasn’t even sure why I’d got a blog in the first place. (As I said in the first post, I don’t have much to say and I’ve been saying it ever since- empty vessels and all that…!)

Faced with not remembering what people blogged about, I looked at the other blogs and was reminded how individual they all are: the veritable information-stations (take a bow Danny, Lucy and Robin); some that tell you what they’re doing or have done and some offering opinions and reviews. Some blog frequently, some less so; some spread the love, some vent the spleen… but behind them all is someone with a desire to share something.

However, I’m still not quite sure why I continue with this blog… it started by accident, I was considering what title and URL to have, putting it in blogger to see whether it looked good and pressed the wrong button. That I continued was at the prompting of Phill, The Arnopp and Sister Elinor. So I continue.

Yet, I cannot help but have the same sense of being the interloper that I had at the Screenwriter’s Festival last year; there I was, surrounded by people I assumed to have worked in the industry for years discussing fascinating aspects of craft and I couldn’t help thinking ‘how terribly presumptuous of me to be here; any minute now I’ll be found out’. And here, when I think too much, I sometimes find myself thinking the same: I don’t have special knowledge or insight- only opinions; I’m not particularly qualified; haven’t been published or filmed; I don’t even watch many films- maybe one every couple of days; and I’m aware there is a lot left to watch and a lot to know about pretty much everything. So, why do I blog? And what should I blog about? I only have opinions and questions.

In the end, I suspect I blog because:

• I’m curious about things; I have questions. I like to hear other opinions; I like debate and discussion- I’m particularly interested in media attitudes. (I like comments and to comment myself.)
• Rather selfishly, I hope it gives me a chance to ‘meet’ people before I actually meet people. I retreated from people several years ago when I realised that 95% of those I knew or had known were either after something and/or felt good about themselves solely by making others feel bad; 4.5% were likable people who also happened to be veritable scumbags and who I’ve rid myself of; leaving a tiny handful of decent people…
• …and arrogantly, I like to think I have some small contribution to make to this ‘Scribosphere’ thing…

The other thing that has haunted my blogging is, being an opinionated bastard, how far should I censor what I put here. There are some pretty good reasons for this concern:

• Several recent articles on TV and in the press have discussed how potential employers (especially in the media world) are habitually Googling potential employees and searching for them on Facebook, MySpace and the various blog sites- researching attitudes and personal life- if you’re bragging about turning up seriously hungover (i.e. still drunk) at work an employer may just be put off.
• Should I mention much about any ideas I’ve had? If I put them half-formed on public show and someone (less scrupulous than all you lovely people) half-recalls one of them and uses it to great success would I be able to get legal recourse or would it just be my own silly fault?
• Not so long ago, there was a case of a teacher, Sarah Green, the details of which you can catch here and here*. Basically, Green is a young woman teacher at a public school who was previously an aspiring actress. She has been suspended, pending inquiry, because an in-industry advert for a building-clothes company, in which she appears in a sex scene (variously described as steamy or soft-porn), appeared on YouTube and was enjoyed by her pupils. Parents have declared her unfit to teach and called for her to be sacked forthwith… although she hasn’t killed anyone, slept with a kid and has presumably passed the CRB check. All she did wrong was leave a record of her legal past activities for all to see and now it’s coming back to bite her on the ass**. Does this mean Greta Scacchi shouldn’t be allowed to teach kids? What about Kevin Spacey’s workshops for kids at the Old Vic- has he not done sex scenes? So, while some blogs enjoy anonymity and can vent to their heart’s content, should the rest of us monitor everything we say or write- in fact make sure our lives are entirely blameless in case we change career? And what of Chip’s persistent attempts at career suicide? (Sorry Chip! :)

So if you’re still reading this and, I haven’t sapped either your soul or your strength, maybe you could share some thoughts on the following…

• Why did you start blogging and why do you continue?
• How do you decide what to blog about?
• Do you write straight out or pre-plan what you’re going to write.
• Do you censor yourself?

…and that’s that. Thanks for reading! :)

*Try and ignore that it’s a really terrible and sexist advert.
**There is an entirely different discussion to be had about how and why an increasingly liberal society has become increasingly judgemental and prone to leap straight for the portable gallows!

Just Experiment IV

2008-02-23T20:01:00.001Z

This week saw the physical release of Mark Ronson’s not-too-shabby cover of Radiohead’s Just. An apt moment to refresh your memory to the chilling beauty of the promo for Radiohead’ original. I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Radiohead but I can recognize some pretty damn fine songs when I hear them. I’ve currently banned myself from listening to the band: they make me want to retire to bed and never re-emerge… I can’t help thinking the promo’s premise reminds me of something; possibly something from 2000AD, possibly a Judge Dredd story… answer on a postcard (or the comments section) please!

Just, 1995. Directed by Jamie Thraves.

Strangely, the feel of the piece recalls the more extravagant (and impressively cast- that’s what happens when you get in with the Comic Strip team) Experiment IV from Kate Bush. Which in turn seems to nod towards Gilliam’s wonderful Brazil.

Experiment IV, 1986. Directed by Kate Bush.

…and, as you probably need cheering up, here’s Ronson’s take on the Radiohead video.

Just, 2008. Directed by Jim Canty.

Ashes To Ashes

2008-02-23T19:59:00.001Z

Sometimes I wish I was seven years old again, back then something was either brilliant or it was terrible; the best or the worst. Unfortunately, as I grew older I realised that most good things have flaws and most bad things have flashes. However, I still know people for whom there are only polar opposites… And so with due inevitability I finally get round to ‘the obligatory Ashes To Ashes post’. It probably won’t have been worth the wait! Of course, this is only my personal view and, let’s face it, oh my solitary reader, it doesn’t really amount to a whole hill of beans…

What is there to say about the programme? Do you look at it in terms of being a follow-up to Life On Mars or do you look at it as a show in its own right? It would be invidious to only consider it as a Life On Mars 2 but it is only inevitable and that’s how I’ve seen it. Thankfully, my own worst fears were not confirmed although there are still some irksome wrinkles. I did think it best to wait until a couple of episodes had aired, let the programme bed in, before putting anything down…

First off, Life On Mars had solid characters right from the start, immediately arresting (ha!), and these have been carried over. So, the Devil would be in any changes. Gene Hunt is still one helluva character, still has the best lines and now comes with a pre-established, near-iconic status the existence of which comes with its own problem: living up to it. This leads to instances where it seems this burden teeters the character on the brink of self-parody; thankfully, so far, this has not happened. Detectives Ray and Chris seemed to have been changed subtly and seem have been made to grow as characters; for me, this is a surprising and welcome development. (Commendably they haven’t changed the core characters to fill the hole of a character loss, as opposed to, for instance, Lewis or Taggart where Lewis and Jardine were both made more like their old bosses.) The notable omission is WPC Annie Cartwright, this is a significant loss as she represented an in situ and contemporaneous necessary balance to Hunt and his team. It could be that Shaz Granger will assimilate this role: I suspect not. So the project succeeds or fails on the strength of the big changes: the new period, the new clashes and the new lead character. Which leads to DI Alex Drake.

Keeley Hawes and her DI Drake always were going to have a tough job filling the gap left by John Simm’s Sam Tyler, whether this is being managed is open to debate- it could go either way. To their great credit the makers have not attempted a direct replacement. The problem is not the performance but that Drake seems to lack the strength, purpose and resolve of Tyler; this leaves Hunt without a strong enough foil, nemesis or counter-point and leaves him somewhat dominating the proceedings a little too much. This is partly a corollary of this character being a woman: when Tyler and Hunt disagreed there was always the very real threat of physical violence; if, as in episode 3, Tyler had punched Hunt the way Drake did, Tyler would have been punched back; however, it is considered as unacceptable to hit a woman in drama as it is in real life- while strangely it is perfectly acceptable in drama for men to hit men, women to hit men and women to hit women*. (The ‘Bolly-knickers’ epithet is already becoming wearing- and why do all the women wear stockings- were tights really widely abandoned in the 80s?) However, it is her special skill which, to my mind, is the stumbling block.

The key part of the original was the whole ‘fish out of water’ cultural clash: in that case 21st Century cop beset by 1970’s policing and societal attitudes. There were dislocations temporal, geographical, attitudinal, social and cultural. The most prominent and important of these was the character-specific difference between Tyler’s and Hunt’s styles of policing and the contrasting and shifting moral stances they maintained. Most people (i.e. the audience) can comprehend and sympathize with the rights and wrongs of whether planting evidence, police thumping those they consider guilty or beating confessions from suspects. There is a conflict for the audience, particularly in the light of 21st Century perceptions of crime, that while 70’s methods may be wrong they might be considered to have worked and that maybe the police are now so trammelled that the ‘bad guys’ are winning. (This could be debated ad nauseam but not by me!) However, for Ashes To Ashes this has been replaced by psychology and psychological profiling. This is a far more difficult prospect as vast swathes of the general public still have a wide-spread distrust or dismissal of psychologists (even some psychiatrists do) and, while it was accepted with Fitz in Cracker, recent disasters such as the Rachel Nickell case have left the subject popularly discredited even more**: the methodology clash has become theoretical rather than physical. Theoretical arguments tend to be less emotionally rewarding for the viewer than a clear visually and viscerally represented argument: effectively the visualized representation of a conceptual difference. This clash has also been hampered by Drake’s psychological approach being shown as pretty much wrong throughout the first two episodes- it would have been helpful if her methods had proved more successful from the beginning. After all, they get her shot in the first place!

The other issue these psychological aspects throw up is that the piece is at times a bit too knowing a bit too regularly and, while a line like ‘good morning imaginary constructs’ is amusing as a throw-away, repeatedly returning to and referencing the constructed nature of the world, not only extricates the viewer from the drama set in the 80’s, but also recalls that the whole thing (TV) is a construct: it breaks the spell. While his situation felt open to interpretation, Tyler was always clear that what was happening in the real world was a direct threat to him in the construct world and this sense of threat carried through to the audience- I remember vividly that gnawing sense of unease as all the lights started to turn off until Sam was left in virtual darkness as the threat was ratcheted up in the real world and he was left seemingly unable to counter; while Drake is too clear of her situation and not taking it seriously enough there is a lack of that threat and helplessness.

The geographical dislocation has also been removed: if Hunt and his team had only recently been brought to London there would have been an opportunity for more antipathy and yet he seems almost relaxed in this new setting (as relaxed as Hunt can ever be) and there is little disparagement of the place. (Isn’t setting a period piece in London courageous? London has been so vandalized recently by the likes of Norman Foster that it must be hard to shoot without including a recognizable too modern landmark- which could account for why so much of the programme is shot either in enclosed alleys with high walls down each side or with the camera angled down and framed quite close on the action.)

There are occasional minor things that niggle at the back of the mind: did ‘yuppies’ exist as such in 1981; did that sort of affluence and conspicuous decadence kick-in that early… I was under the impression that around this time the UK was still in a state of near-terminal decline and that that whole yuppie thing didn’t really start until the mid-eighties… certainly until post-Falklands; did Thatcherism kick in that early and would Hunt have understood the word when Drake uses it; did the Docklands redevelopment start that early; why did the bombing issues of the second episode seem ever so slightly out-of-place; would a high-ranking officer (or caring responsible mother) like Drake ever race to a ‘shout’ with her daughter in the car? Do they perhaps spend a little too much time drinking? Did anybody else think of Closely Observed Trains when the bum-stamping issue came up? Did anybody else think Carry On Screaming (‘Big Feet Smell Something Terrible’) when she spelled out her clues on the white-board and saw the letters columned behind her? Of course, all these sort of things can be written off as ‘it’s just a fantasy’. But I’m not sure the creators would like us to think that: I think they actually respect their creation too much for that sort of silliness and that’s to their credit as well.

The single thing that niggles most is the feeling that it’s a touch forced. Life On Mars had years to simmer and when it emerged it was as an entirely integrated and organically flowing whole; Ashes To Ashes has not had that long gestation (for which the creative team must be infinitely grateful) and feels at times to have been made slightly more ‘to pattern’. The layered dream-world flashes seem to have been templated from Life On Mars; instead of one children’s character (created for the original) there is now a different children’s television character (the Rainbow team); the powerful Granada becomes the powerful Quattro; test card girl has become Bowie’s Pierrot guy; red-splodged memory has become red-splodged memory; Tyler’s quest for the real world has become Drake’s quest for the real world and (slightly more manipulatively) her daughter. As patterns go it’s a good one so why complain too loudly. And I wonder is the real problem simply that Life On Mars seemed so brilliant and so entirely original that logic dictates anything patterned on it just won’t have that shock of the new. Would the first episode of Life On Mars even live up to its subsequent status?

Maybe the stories are not quite so strong; maybe the situations seem a little familiar; maybe the new characters and situations need more time to adjust to; maybe the tone’s changed and maybe its become a bit too knowing; maybe its just different but fair play to Matthew Graham and Ashley Pharaoh, they had a big task, they tried hard and they haven’t failed they just haven’t achieved perfection that everybody forced on them.

It would be terribly easy to slate Ashes To Ashes for not being Life On Mars and equally easy to shower it with superlatives for being pretty similar but the truth lies somewhere in between. Is it Life On Mars? No… Should it have tried to be? Of course not. Should it be judged on what it is rather than what it isn’t? Certainly. Is it still better than most else that’s on television? Quite possibly.

***Hope that seemed reasonably fair***

*I’d like to make it abundantly clear that I do NOT advocate or condone hitting women or indeed anyone but I do find it peculiar how this form of violence makes people particularly squeamish while most other violence is frequently left uncommented on to the point of acceptability.
**it is also very difficult to write genuine psychological profiling: it needs to be reduced to pat generalizations for the benefits of television and even in real-life the reality can be rather bland. For example, the Suffolk Strangler case: when it was realised they were after a serial killer I automatically told the policeman on the TV that they were looking for a white, middle-aged male; bit of a loner, relationship problems, probably in a more physical sort of job, living either in or near the stalking ground. Why? Because it invariably is: Sutcliffe, Nielsen, Brady, West. And when we get the arrest it’s the self-same individual. This isn’t Silence Of The Lambs: urbane serial killers are few and far between!

Channel Zero #6

2008-02-23T19:54:00.002Z

Life still moderately dull… dull is still far better than attacked by giant killer kangaroos- exciting it may be but high on the to do list… I don’t think so!

I have finally decided to stop ~~tinkering~~ messing about with Untitled Conspiracy Thriller’s story and finally made the decision to actually get some opinion on it. I’m not entirely happy with the way it’s ended up. But it may just be paranoia. Untitled Revenge Thriller now starts to take the foreground in the frontal lobes which strangely is one of the places that domestic appliances will take the foreground in Untitled Revenge Thriller. Spooky!

Misheard quote of the week: While Friends burbled in the background I heard Joey quote, ‘badgers, we don’t need no steenking badgers’. Presumably this was from the previously unknown Treasure Of Chipping Sodbury… a tale of greed, madness and one farmers fight for possession of his land.

I’m still kicking myself for missing the Derek Jarman documentary: I may not like the guy’s films but I would have liked to have found out some more about the man himself. Presumably in this multi-channel hell it will be repeated before too long… On the other hand I was unexpectedly surprised by Freezing… even if it was only three episodes. Swings and roundabouts!

The new Sunday night drama, The Last Enemy, was pretty much as I feared: the sparks of interest and ideas that it touched tended to be crushes by the sheer length of the piece: to put this in perspective by the end of the first episode we knew someone was dead, there was a bad computer system, a disease and a possible conspiracy… this took an hour and a half… a half hour after the end of the programme the same channel showed Runaway Jury, which managed to present all facts, characters, deaths, conspiracy, etc. and wrap the whole thing up in less than two hours. While the one is the opener of a TV serial and the other a mainstream film it did serve to highlight the former’s big flaw. Again this was another programme featuring ‘top’ people: the top mathematician, the top doctors, the top government girlfriend, the top scientist… nobody I (or many) could remotely relate to. There were also two very obvious plot twists which I predicted about 10 and 25 minutes in- and I’m remarkably dense! However, it was that sheer length that was killing it- why is it that if a programme is important it slows right down and everything is imbued with meaning? However, despite these misgivings, something tells me though, a feeling, that it may well pick up greatly in episode two, especially when they bring Robert Carlyle into play. So, I’m suspecting perseverance may pay dividends.

So, even though I still don’t know whether this is of any use to man or beast, possible telebox heaven in the outer reaches of digital hell…

Saturday
BBC2: 12.35 am: Felicia’s Journey: a wonderful creepy low-key film from Atom Egoyan; disquieting and, for me, ultimately moving. Superbly judged performances from Bob Hoskins and Elaine Cassidy (so good in the unjustly maligned and highly enjoyable Ghost Squad) to a finely crafted script from Egoyan. Rarely has loneliness, lost love and isolation been so well captured.

Sunday
BBC1: 9.00 pm: The Last Enemy: the person in the Radio Times says appositely “I suspect it’s something Spooks would dispense with in a third of the time and with a lot more style”. Mind, they also say it’s “knotty” and that they “have no idea what’s going on”… Why? It’s hardly been difficult so far.

BBC2: 10.50 pm: Storyville: Dance With A Serial Killer

Monday
BBC1: 9.00 pm: Life In Cold Blood: Of course…

BBC4: 9.00 pm: Portillo On Thatcher: The Lady’s Not For Spurning: Portillo reportedly bashes Thatcher…

BBC2: 11.20 pm: A Satellite’s Tale: the story of satellite technology that may just remind me how geostationary satellites actually ‘do their thing’.

Tuesday
C4: 1.10 pm: Seven Days To Noon: a super little British thriller from the Boulting Brothers; the British take on the absurdity of the Cold War and M.A.D. Being old and worse, in black and white, it’s being shown in the middle of the day so that next to no-one can watch it.

BBC4: 9.00 pm: Storyville: Tito’s Ghost: Timely.

BBC1: 10.35 pm: Imagine: Richard Rogers, Inside Out: a profile of the architect behind the Pompidou Centre and Millennium Dome: whatever you think of the profligacy and waste the actual design and engineering of the place was nigh on unique.

Wednesday
BBC4: 9.00 pm: The Worlds Of Fantasy: The first documentary (of three) on the art of fantasy of writing with contributions from apparently anybody who is anybody: first part on child heroes and heroines and their enduring appeal. But why aren’t programmes like this on mainstream channels like BBC2?

ITV1: 10.35 pm: Dexter: Terrestrial showing of the highly regarded US show.

Thursday
BBC1: 9.00 pm: Ashes To Ashes: …and why not?

Friday
BBC2: 9.00 pm: Spartacus: drama-documentary on the rebel slave: no matter how entertaining and informative it may prove, I suspect Kubrick’s legacy may remain unchallenged.

BBC4: 9.00 pm: Rob Brydon’s Identity Crisis

BBC2: 2.05 am: Thirst: cracking Aussie vampire film to which I gave an honourable mention here.

Bullet the Blue Sky

2008-02-20T15:15:00.002Z

Bullet The Blue Sky (Live In Sydney), 1994. Produced by Ned O’Hanlan, Rocky Oldham.

Miss Sarajevo

2008-02-20T01:56:00.001Z

Miss Sarajevo, 1995. Directed by Maurice Linnane.

War! What Is It Good For?

2008-02-19T21:50:00.004Z

From Slovenian group Laibach’s concert film, as part of their response to the ongoing Balkan Wars ravaging their country, shot on the 26th October 1995 in Ljubljana in the month before the signing of the Dayton Protocol…

“If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans.”

-Bismarck

“Fuck Dayton, Laibach has a concert.”

-Graffiti in Sarajevo, 21 November 1995, the day the peace agreement in Dayton was signed.

(Quotes taken from the band's own sleeve-note.)

Channel Zero #5

2008-02-16T20:29:00.002Z

This week has been, er, less dull than the last one… my estimates tell me that at this rate the first week of July will be ‘moderately exciting’ which is a good thing and probably means I should steel myself and go to that there Screenwriter’s Festival malarkey.

UCT is proving vexatious: I have become uncertain about the whole premise of the story. Is anybody really interested in a film about ordinary people? Is it original enough? Does it have a single interesting twist in it? Should I kill some characters? I’ve heard it said that most spec-monkeys are scuppered by their sheer arrogance; their ‘I know everything’ attitude… I wish I had that luxury…

So, as UCT hoves ever closer to the inevitable moment when I must finally stop tinkering with the storyline and actually get people to assess where it needs changing, I find myself increasingly thinking of a new story… and, lo, a film shall come unto me and it shall be called ‘Untitled Revenge Thriller’ or URT to its friends. (I’m looking forward to the day I think up ‘Untitled Horror Thriller’- it may feature cows. Think about it people!) URT has a theme and initial premise (although a nifty new kink came to me the other day). It has a couple of characters. It even has a couple of desirable scenes. It may well be a bit violent.

Something I forgot to mention: I heard a programme about new foods on the radio a couple of weeks ago. They were talking to someone from a company in the West Country that has created something along the lines of a marmite biscuit or cracker. The creator of the biscuit gets a royalty on every biscuit sold. It worked out better than being a screenwriter. I never once imagined that there were royalties for food creator-monkeys. Strange thing, life!

Misheard lyric of the week
‘…and it hurts with every cup-cake’ by Robyn. For why?

Music of the week…

A & E, the first single from Goldfrapp’s new album, came along this week. It pretty much throws out the last couple of electro-clash/ electronica/ sleaze albums and finds a new sound for the (sort of) West Country band. To my mind it’s what would come of a mating between Portishead and All About Eve. Maybe. Parts of the vocal line and some of the bass refrain seem quite similar to U2’s I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, although with a different rhythm. It all bodes well for the forthcoming LP. It’s a disarmingly sweet song and is possibly the first time that a Goldfrapp song has had genuine warmth and emotion to it. It most calls to mind the feel of another U2 song, Ultraviolet from the Achtung Baby album. Both of them have that 4.30, summer morning feel to them… that moment of cool stillness, in a night when you haven’t wanted to sleep after a sweltering day when you haven’t wanted to do anything, when you’re just sitting and watching the sun start to tint the sky at the edge of your world.

As you’ll probably have noticed by now I have neglected to post the ‘Obligatory Ashes To Ashes Post’. This is because I am a mendacious old sod who doesn’t deliver. Or do I? I am mendacious. Or am I? Is this a lie? Who cares? Personally, I’m still feeling pulled in different directions over the programme.

The Baftas were the usual strange concoction of national pride and embarrassment; it’s as if we want an awards show but feel uncomfortable with notion that we might actually award something to ourselves and have to admit we’re actually quite good at something. I don’t mind that we don’t put on as slick a show as the Americans… it’s the mistakes that give character to a thing. But I wish it was just that bit better such as maybe a better script; a few more genuinely funny jokes. Thankfully Britain won a decent number… What did strike me, from the memorial list, was the number of genuinely talented Cinematographers who died in the last year: Alex Thomson (Branagh’s Hamlet, Alien 3, Excalibur); László Kovács (Easy Rider, Copycat); and last, but by no means, least the immensely talented Freddie Francis (The Innocents, The Elephant Man, The Straight Story). Inevitably, Juno took home the Original Screenplay mask. The strange thing about Juno, a film I’ve not seen yet, is that from all the clips which I have seen I’m not quite sure what the fuss is about. A lot has been made of the authenticity of the teenage dialogue (which may well date the film quite quickly- think The Wild One or Rebel Without A Cause) yet all this praise has come from critics who seem to be in their 30’s, 40’s, 50’s. I don’t know whether the dialogue is authentic… it sounds a touch forced to me but that could be because the clips are out of context and not within the flow. And anyway, I presume I’m not really the target audience… British male nearing their dotage, not sure it’s aimed at me… I’m just too square Daddio.

Had to give up on The Art Of Spain which is a shame as it was shaping up to be a good series. BBC4 is now breaking up so badly it might as well not exist… Worryingly, the digital freeview versions of Channel 5 and BBC News 24 are starting to break up as well. Just remember what they told us when they foisted this useless system on us: the picture is superior to analogue and would break down far less.

Television, television, television… to watch or not to watch…

Saturday
BBC2: 9.30 pm: The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada: I have it on good authority that this is a fine film…

BBC4: 10.00 pm: I Vitelloni: Fellini classic which I won’t be able to watch as it’s on BBC4…

C4: 3.45 am: The Cicerones: a short film from The League Of Gentlemen’s Jeremy Dyson… sort of supernatural-type thing…

Sunday
ITV1: 11.00 am: Columbo: Ashes To Ashes: While I love Columbo, I wouldn’t normally include it… but this amused me. Gene Hunt meets Columbo perhaps. “Don’t you come ‘ere with that ‘there’s just one more thing’, you American ponce.” I demand Columbo’s Life On Mars…

BBC1: 9.00 pm: The Last Enemy Pt. 1: New conspiracy thriller thing… this is pretty much the big TV of the week. ‘They’ are making comparisons with BBC’s State Of Play: not a good thing because, as a viewer, I found State Of Play pretty poor (as did most of the rest of the viewing public- I believe by the end of this prime-time Sunday night series it was pulling a mere 1.5 million viewers- though the critics raved which may have had more to do with the writer’s name). Another thing that The Last Enemy shares with State Of Play is sheer length: at five 85 minute episodes it is very, very long. That’s seven and a half hours. State Of Play had six hour-long episodes with precious little substance before limping to its vapid and meaningless anti-climax. Can The Last Enemy do any better? Strangely, the BBC’s (again!) The State Within was a damn fine piece of conspiratorial murk and yet was disliked by critics and viewers… although not hated by as many viewers as State Of Play. I was The State Within’s viewer. By the way, I do wonder if the makers know where their title comes from…

“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death”

-I Corinthians Ch. 15, V. 26.

BBC2: 1.10 am: Limbo: John Sayles drama. I find Sayles somewhat patchy but he’s often interesting at least and that’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharpened stick. It’s also nice to be able to mention an American film-maker who stands by his beliefs and works without Hollywood’s golden city walls.

Monday
BBC1: 9.00 pm: Life In Cold Blood: “I was sitting there and the TV started chucking out lizards… what’s your name?” “Mr. Lizard.”

C4: 9.00 pm: The Day Of The Kamikaze: Intriguing sounding documentary…

Tuesday
BBC2: 9.00 pm: Horizon: How To Live To 101: terribly unambitious target when you think about it… given how long people live now, by the time I reach old age I will be expecting no less than 130! If you plot increasing average Western life expectancy on a graph (which I did a couple of years ago when I found the figures) then extrapolate onwards I reckon I should be able live to about 135… see you in the solar-powered jet cars!

More4: 10.00 pm: True Stories: Derek: feature length documentary about Derek Jarman: interesting person, useless film-maker, brilliant garden designer.

Thursday
BBC1: 9.00 pm: Ashes To Ashes: Funk or funky? Discuss.

BBC2: 9.00 pm: That Mitchell And Webb Look: Can they finally make Thursday’s funny? I expect so.

Friday
BBC1: 12.25 am: Revelation: a sort of supernatural thriller… one of those minor films that just has something about it that makes it a touch interesting: possibly the sheer wilful, throw-anything-at-it, eccentric chutzpah of the whole enterprise. This 2001 film from Stuart Urban features an ancient artefact which contains the blood of Christ; genetic cloning; the bloodline of Christ; the eternal feminine and witchy sex rites; and a conspiracy passed down throughout the ages to destroy/ protect the Merovingian line by some of the greatest minds of Western culture including Isaac Newton… sound vaguely familiar?

Channel Zero #4

2008-02-09T20:45:00.000Z

My last week seems to have been marked by a combination of listless apathy and insomnia… I suspect the two might just be related. There really hasn’t been much of any of import or excitement this week. What a wonderfully dull life I live!

Bizarre incident of the week: all of a sudden the village my Dad was born and brought up in appeared in both television and print news because they are reintroducing donkeys to take shopping up the steep hill. The house he lived in used to have three family dwellings but has since been knocked through into just one large, very expensive house… it’s good to know we have such an abundance of housing that this is possible. He has expressed interest in the past of moving back to the area but its long since been annexed by the fabulously wealthy urban weekend set… not least the air-thief Damien Hirst.

Music of the week: two great discs courtesy of those lovely folk on eBay. Firstly, a disc of assorted 20th Century Eastern European orchestral works. I bought this primarily for the recording of Gorecki’s Piano Concerto with the conductor’s daughter as soloist. Henryk Górecki, if you haven’t heard of him, is primarily famous in the West for one work, his Third Symphony ‘Symphony Of Sorrowful Songs’ which is not as bleak as the title suggests (although each movement is marked ‘lento’). While this symphony is an epic magisterial piece it is not entirely representative of the composer’s fifty-plus year career and has led to the misconception that he is of the Minimalist tendency along with Arvo Pärt. Of course, the lack of a large body of Minimalist works has made it a little difficult for the record labels to package and so the bulk of his works have rather languished in obscurity with more than half his works left unrecorded. The two works on this disc, the Piano Concerto and the Thee Pieces In Olden Style come from opposite ends of his career but both are rooted in native regional folk tunes. The Piano Concerto itself is a transcription of the Harpsichord Concerto; both have their relative merits and the harpsichord’s timbre brings a sharpness and clarity which the piano cannot deliver but the piano brings dynamics that the other instrument cannot. There is devilish swirling fury and energy to the piece and it barely seems to fit the perceived definition of a concerto. The solo line is so resolutely embedded within the whole that it seems less like a dialogue and more and wild ride to some strange oblivion. The only real glitch to this performance is a recording preference as I feel that the piano is a little too prominent with the accompaniment recessed and at times overpowered by the soloist. However, the use of the piano (a transcription I’d not heard before) did allow the revelation of textures and sonorities, particularly some first movement dissonances that had previously remained unheard by me. Now, if you’re still bothering to read I’ll point you in the direction of some other damn fine pieces by this unjustly over-looked composer: the brutal then sublime and muscular Second Symphony coupled with the similar Beatus Vir; the Third Symphony; the folk inflected String Quartets.

…and the other great thing about this CD is that being a compilation of the other 4 composers represented there are two that I don’t know the music of: Bacewicz and Kilar, the man who composed the excellent Bram Stoker's Dracula score.

From the sublime to the ridiculous: the other disc to arrive this week was the American Sisters Of Mercy CD Promo ‘Tour Thing’. This is pure indulgent completism (of which profligacy I am thoroughly ashamed) and I’ve waited a very long time for a cheap copy to turn up and now it has. And I’ve snaffled it. I believe this was produced to promote the abortive Sisters Of Mercy-Public Enemy US tour which went… a bit wrong. In other words, various towns became worried of Black-versus-White violence and the tour was ultimately cancelled.

So, what television did we get last week… some good, some bad and I should do the ‘Ashes to Ashes post’… so I probably will. Just don’t hold your breath! With the highlight of the week being Attenborough’s Life In Cold Blood. So, now there’s 4 series I’m watching a week.

Mystery televisual artefacts that might be worth your attention (which hopefully I’ll have a chance to catch) include but are not confined to…

Saturday
BBC2: 3.25 am: Eloge de l’Amour: one of Goddard’s most recent films… for insomniacs as an aid to sleep!

Sunday
C4: 7.00 pm: Inside Hamas: a documentary about Hamas’ running of Gaza.

BBC1: 11.20 pm: Last Orders: a brilliant moving film drama (from a novel I haven’t read by Graham Swift) about a group of old men on a journey to scatter their friend’s ashes at Margate during which they remember their shared past. Brilliant. Also has a simply marvellous cast boasting the talents of Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins, Tom Courtenay, David Hemmings, Ray Winstone and Helen Mirren… deftly and discreetly directed by Fred Schepisi. By the way, did I mention it was brilliant?

Monday
BBC1: 9.00 pm: Life In Cold Blood: watch it or the lizards will get you… he’s got them trained, you know.

BBC2: 11.20 pm: Watching The Russians: Stella Rimmington presented documentary on the way Britain has viewed and interacted with Russia.

Tuesday
BBC2: 11.00 am: My Favorite Brunette: fun Bob Hope film noir spy spoof, sequel to My Favorite Blonde…

BBC2: 9.00 pm: Horizon: How To Make Better Decisions: a documentary telling us what prompts us to make the decisions we do and presumably will tell us how not to be too easily influenced… but will it tell me whether to kill the annoying sidekick?

Wednesday
BBC1: 9.00 pm: Attila The Hun: drama documentary inexplicably scheduled against Torchwood. Tricky things drama-documentaries: so hard to go right, so easy to go wrong.

Thursday
C4: 1.15 pm: Paths Of Glory: Kubrick’s first important movie and damned good.

BBC1: 9.00 pm: Ashes To Ashes.

Friday
BBC2: 11.00 am: Son Of Paleface: another amusing Bob Hope sequel (this time to The Paleface) but why didn’t someone think to show the progenitors in the same week?

When You Don’t See Me

2008-02-09T20:28:00.000Z

I think it’s time for a little rant, quite possibly an ill-informed rant and the facts do seem to be constantly shifting, so if you’ll indulge me with a little leeway…

Recently, a story has emerged about the bugging of a Member of Parliament, Sadiq Khan, while he was visiting a constituent in Woodhill Prison; the constituent is detained for extradition to the US pending the results of proceedings on various charges related to the support of terrorism via various websites he ran. As if this couldn’t look more unedifying it turns out that this bugging started before Khan became an MP… when he was a human rights lawyer. It should be mentioned that the actual details of this earlier instant are open to interpretation as Khan is also a childhood friend of the suspect and it is unclear whether he ever attended in his capacity as a lawyer.

The first thing that needs to be mentioned is that the media reports have all used non-committal terms like ‘may have been’ bugged. There doesn’t seem to have been any confirmation of this. What is known is that the visitor tables were set up with the capacity to carry listening devices. And ‘may have been’ is probably the closest to an answer that we’ll get since the surveillance matters are involved.

There has been the inevitable polarization of viewpoints on the issue based either in knee-jerk reactions or cold intellectualism. It seems another complex (theoretical) issue has fallen victim to reductivism.

On one hand, this bugging seems like a terrible abuse and on the other it seems like a reasonable precaution. There has been a lot of waffle about the ‘Wilson Doctrine’, the unwritten rule from 1966 that the security services would not tap the phones of MPs and Peers. Except this is no more than a ‘gentleman’s agreement’; it has never been passed into British law and only relates to phone tapping. Tony Benn related on the BBC News 24 that he knew he was being bugged during the Seventies and while the Cabinet Office wouldn’t admit to it, they wouldn’t categorically deny it. This would seem to tally with final episode of Yes Prime Minister back in 1988 And the show is well-known to have been based primarily on genuine incidents as related by various well-placed political sources including Wilson’s political secretary Marcia Williams (now Baroness Falkender) and Bernard Donoughue, senior policy adviser to Prime Ministers Wilson and Callaghan.

The notion that it’s reasonable to surveille MPs is not lacking in logic. Is there anything especially magic about becoming a Member of Parliament that means you cease to be capable of breaking the law? (Some would say recent investigations actually prove this!) Can we assume they don’t fiddle their expenses or claim they’re employing children as researchers when they’re actually at University? Obviously MPs aren’t beyond breaking the law. And I have no doubt that Sinn Fein and Unionist MPs have been bugged in the past and for, all I know, still might be. The clarified ‘Wilson Doctrine’ allows for the bugging of MPs when there is clear suspicion of serious illegality; so clearly even MPs don’t have absolute faith in their colleagues. It seems reasonable to assert that there could be MPs who might support extremists of all or any creeds.

On the other hand, there is the feeling that the state (or the police independently) have abused and over-stepped their authority and made a clear invasion of the constituent’s privacy… I’m sure that quite a few admissions of illegality do pass in confidence between constituent and MP but there are shades of illegality: this could range from someone admitting something illegal which is in a grey area or an issue of law that they wish to be changed/ challenged or a person who is escaping an abusive partner and has taken their child with them in what could be alleged as abduction; alternatively they may be confessing a small criminality in the process of exposing greater and more significant wrong-doing, as might be the case with a whistleblower. Should the State have the right to listen in at will to anything and any body at any time?

It’s since been confirmed by the bugging-policeman that he was pressurized by his superiors to do this against his better judgment* and that he bugged other people who shouldn’t have been. It’s also emerged that none of this was ‘signed off’ by a Minister (which it needs to be at a certain level of surveillance). On top of this a lawyer has come forward to say he was bugged in conversation with his client while they were discussing his appeal strategy. Now, it’s revealed that hundreds of Legal meetings in prison have been listened in on. Because of an intelligence sharing agreement with the US, it’s been pointed out that the information gleaned from this MP’s meetings (and therefore anyone’s) can/ will go straight across the pond to the US intelligence community… and presumably could be used to implicate or undermine the man and any subsequent trial.

In the end, I personally feel deeply uneasy about these developments: firstly, that some sections of the police would appear to have become a law unto themselves; considering themselves no longer answerable to Parliament; secondly, how can a person have a fair trial if the prosecution may already be primed with the defence. Most concerning, I think, is the precedent being set; if it’s alright to bug a confidential meeting between an MP and a constituent for the reason that something might be mentioned, you could ask is it equally acceptable to listen in on lawyers with clients in their offices or the police interview room; or to doctors with patients; or at the Citizen’s Advice Bureau; or in the Confessional? Aren’t these all situations whose very function is predicated on the notion of trust and confidentiality? Surely once a society has lost all sense of trust in others and the State, and where all the places a person might freely and confidentially air problems have been removed- isn’t this just a hair’s breadth from a Police State. And won’t it be the most desperate and vulnerable who will be left with nowhere to turn?

I think we can clearly see where this journey starts and the reasons but I’m not sure we can see where it will all end.

But it’s a difficult issue, there’s no denying that. With my head, and in the pit of my stomach, I rail against yet more invasions into the privacy of the individual subject; but with my heart I can’t help asking, if a terrorist bomb slipped through due to lack of surveillance, which of my family would I be prepared to lose…

*Of course, he may be being ‘economical with the truth’... nothing is known for certain on any of this. This policeman is currently under investigation for other unrelated matters.

The Deep Blue

2008-02-09T20:23:00.000Z

***contains links to images some may find disturbing***

It may come as no surprise to anyone who’s read some of previous witterings on this, that and t’other thing that I have no great liking for whaling…* what with (some) being endangered, one of the smartest of the world’s creatures and generally being majestic and all…** And anybody who saw the unedifying spectacle of the mother and calf Minke whales being hauled from the sea may also be left with some pretty reasonable questions… (see here and here.)

So, whenever we have this annual controversy about the on-going Japanese scientific whaling programme I always find myself asking the self-same questions

Firstly, based on the masses of data that they can only gather from dead whales what conclusions have the Japanese reaches and subsequently published or are about to publish in serious scientific journals?*** Secondly, would they have any particular objections to neutral scientific observers travelling with on the ships, perhaps with a remit to peer review their scientific methodology? Lastly, would they mind if the whale carcases were taken away and used by other scientists for other scientific research purposes? After all, as we’re told these days, ‘if you’ve nothing to hide you’ve nothing to fear’.

Of course, it could be suggested that the international community might like to know more about the whalers themselves… maybe they could indulge in a little ‘scientific research’…

See! I can do short…

*With the clear exception of ‘Aboriginal Subsistence Whaling’.
**In short we must only eat ugly stupid animals!
***Maybe that whales don’t particularly like being killed!

Channel Zero #3

2008-02-02T18:25:00.000Z

Sorry for not being more exciting recently; I’ve been having to do much human stuff and it saps the time. Rest assured I have not lost any level of grouchiness; I just haven’t gotten round to angrily scratching it down yet! The year’s still young; bile will arrive.

This week presented one of those mildly irritating problems that come from being a servant to cats. The eldest of the creatures required a teeth-clean which involved an anaesthetic and therefore no food for the previous 18 hours… it’s a bit hard to keep one cat unfed while the others demand not to be; post-procedure the groggy moggy couldn’t be let out which provided a second problem- how to keep one cat in when the others are used to free access and one of them point blank refuses to comprehend the concept of a litter tray.

The latter part of the week was marked by a retreat from the internet as it eats time and prevents things being done: the interweb’s as bad as a dictionary or encyclopædia for stealing time, except not nearly so informative; you look up what you want to look up then think that’s interesting and so on and so forth. This hibernation was ended briefly this morning by a local Record Fair; the first of the year. It’s was… disappointing.

As was the last week’s television, the saviour was Monty Don’s Around The World In 80 Gardens while both programmes I was most looking forward to were vandalized for different reasons. Horizon: What On Earth Is Wrong With Gravity? was a fascinating programme ruined by modish, extravagant and ultimately utterly pointless directorial tricks and editorial decisions. It looked rather like a 15-year old Media Studies group were let loose on it. However, I now know some interesting new facts such as that time is not a constant and light doesn’t always travel in straight lines as it is affected by dense gravitational fields… which I presume may mean that light has some sort of quantifiable mass… Andrew Graham-Dixon’s The Art Of Spain was vandalized for completely non-artistic reasons. It was broadcast on BBC4 and, sadly, Digital Freeview is rubbish. The picture broke up on a regular basis until the point where it gave up bothering to come back at all. Analogue never had this much of a problem. So, why are we being saddled with this inadequate system which is so clearly not of broadcast quality? Is it because Blair had a meeting with a media mogul just before his ascent to the Palace of Westminster? Is it because a substandard free system will force people to buy subscription television in order to have trouble-free viewing? You might think that, I couldn’t possibly comment!

Possibly interesting stuff on the telebox for the coming week may include, but not necessarily exclusively, some, none or all of the following… ;-)

Saturday
BBC2: 11.10 pm: Factory: Manchester From Joy Division To Happy Mondays: documentary on Tony Wilson and Factory Records.

BBC2: 12.40am: Dawn Of The Dead: Romero’s classic zombie sequel (if you ignore the stupid custard pie fight); judging by the scheduled length it’s the so-called Director’s Cut.

Sunday
C4: 9.15 pm: Million Dollar Baby: if you haven’t seen it, you really did ought- and ignore all the people who whined about the third act!

C4: 1.35 am: Focus: all I know is it’s based on a novel by Arthur Miller and as he was responsible for Death Of A Salesman it cannot be without some merit or interest.

ITV4: 12.20 am: Sam Peckinpah’s West: Legacy Of A Hollywood Renegade.

Monday
BBC1: 9.00 pm: Life In Cold Blood: Attenborough’s Ninth and Final series. It's David Attenborough, what more need be said?

Tuesday
BBC2: 9.00 pm: Horizon: Is Alcohol Worse Than Ecstasy?

BBC4: 10.30 pm: Storyville: The Polish Ambulance Murders: would appear to be about Polish Paramedics turned latter-day Burke and Hare.

Thursday
BBC1: 9.00 pm: Ashes To Ashes: the week’s big new series.

There’s no getting away from the fact that I’m looking to this with a mix of trepidation and excitement. Life On Mars was brilliant… one of the best television dramas I’d seen in many a year. Then it ended. Before it got stale; before it got annoying and before I wanted to throw the television from the highest turret. So, a new piece from ostensibly the same team following pretty much the same formula should certainly be something worth seeing…

However, there are so many possible pitfalls that it seems a very tricky proposition; a courageous decision to quote Sir Humphrey. The first pitfall, as it is with all sequels, is purely having to live up to the quality, consistency and imagination of the original. Problem two: John Simm’s performance and character were a perfect contrast to Philip Glenister’s Gene Hunt: can Keeley Hawes’ DI Alex Drake match this? The clips shown so far have presumably been unrepresentative and out of context: high drama always looks bizarre and melodramatic taken as clips even if it works well within the programme itself. The next problem as far as I can see is that DI Drake knows the situation and what was the twist of Life On Mars and so does the audience. This seems to remove both a level of intrigue and more importantly a level of jeopardy. We, the audience, know that it’s definitely not real as does Drake; could this cause issues with the suspension of disbelief? As Drake herself understands the situation this could bring in the very real possibility of creating a situation where it becomes overly self-referential, too knowing and bordering on self-parody. There is also an issue of back-story: what does Drake know of Hunt as opposed to that which Hunt knows of himself. Does Hunt have a life outside of the imaginings of Drake or Tyler? As Gene Hunt was such a larger than life character in the original has the temptation to make him either too cuddly or too boorish been resisted? And as he’s now a known creation of Drake does this mean that she will project her own prejudices against his style of policing onto him or will he remain at the same level as for Tyler? There seem endless possibilities for getting tangled in knots over the whole notion of somebody else having the sequel to a different character’s dream sequence! I’m also more than a little curious as to how the whole of Hunt’s team can be shifted to London with adequate explanation excluding recourse to “it’s fantasy” or “it’s in her head so anything can happen”. I really want this to succeed. We’ll see!

On the other hand it’s got ‘that scary clown’ and an Audi Quattro in it, which was my dream car when I was younger, so can’t be all bad. Bizarrely (and somewhat disappointingly) I now find, with help from Top Gear, that the Quattro chucked out less horses than the (rather normal) car I’ve got sitting outside!

My Little Empire

2008-01-26T17:16:00.000Z

I just had another look at the second from last post and realised how terribly Victorian it all sounded. Like some long dead explorer’s diary entry…

‘…a strange and terrible melancholy has settled over all since we finished the last of Oates for our morning repast. I fear this could take some explaining back in the Mother country. Will have to think of something heroic to put in journal… and something new for the pot…’

So, the melancholy has lifted a touch and so on and so forth. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Time to stop whining.

The good news of the week has been the announcement of the new Bond Title, ‘A Quantum Of Silence’ (for those who live under a rock… on Mars… or just have better things to do). Which must have made everybody smile and scratch their collective heads in equal measure (for more ribaldry see here). And there’s a date posted for Portishead 3 (14-04-08).

The sad news of the week, though, has to be the death of the talented Heath Ledger. While Batman 2 has been filmed and, presumably, will be released on schedule, this does lead to the strong possibility that Terry Gilliam’s film The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus is in jeopardy.

Shiny thing of the week has to be Bjork’s Declare Independence Package. The first physical single from her latest LP. The package bears a striking similarity to a Babushka Doll… I’m not sure I’ve managed to get to the heart of it all yet!

For good or ill, UCT now has a full story which is currently (and hastily) being typed up: whether it’s any good is another matter entirely but it does have some characters and a purpose; and a beginning, a middle and an end which are all probably plus points in the general scheme of things….

…and my Gran found an old photo of my Great-Great-Grandfather taken, we think, in the 1890’s. He looked somewhat like Elgar with an enormous moustache. This sort of thing (direct-ish contact with history) always appeals to me. He worked in a pin-mill apparently (i.e. a mill that made steel pins of various sizes from lengths of steel wire).

Channel Zero #2

2008-01-26T17:13:00.000Z

Top TV of the week had to be the Oscar-nominated documentary: True Stories: No End In Sight (which I’d completely failed to notice was on until the last minute). A searing yet level-headed insight into the build-up, execution and aftermath of the second Iraq War and an examination of the key mistakes that were made. This was everything that Fahrenheit 9/11 wasn’t (and could never be): incisive, intelligent, accurate and packed with interviews with people who actually had an inside track during this period (such as Jay Garner, Barbara Bodine, Richard Armitage). Sadly, next to no-one will have seen it because of the absence of show-boating, self-aggrandisement, cynical stunts and crass humour.

Also very involving was Cutting Edge: A Boy Named Alex which I hadn’t intended to watch. A moving and uplifting documentary about a severely ill boy, suffering with Cystic Fibrosis, as he rehearses his School Choir and Orchestra in preparation for a performance of Bach’s Magnificat. When you see people like this it really does make you re-consider how much you yourself whine about very minor problems and throws the problems of some so-called celebrities into sharp relief… fame may be hard but, hey, on the other hand at least you’re not coughing up blood on a regular basis! (Repeated: Tuesday, C4: 11.05 pm)

Embarrassingly, I haven’t had a chance to fling in tape of the much-anticipated Torchwood episode yet. Ooops!

Incidentally, last week I mentioned that the under-utilized Gillian Kearney was now in Casualty; well, after other recent psychic successes I am pleased to announce that she will be guesting in Primeval on Saturday night. I am clearly responsible for this via last week’s post: that’s right, they wrote, cast, filmed, edited and scheduled this programme in a single week. And in no way was this a coincidence. Nope, not at all.

Now, I don’t know whether this was any use to man nor beast last week but if it was I’ll do it again this week. So. There.

Far flung television which has caught the eye for the coming week includes:

Saturday
BBC2: 8.10 pm: Timewatch: The Pharaoh’s Lost City: documentary about the life and times of the fascinating ‘Rebel Pharaoh’ Akhenaten.

C4: 2.30 am: The Eye: excellent Thai horror.

BBC2: 3.10 am: Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner: acclaimed film clearly scheduled for insomniacs and people who understand their VCR timer.

Sunday
BBC2: 10.00 pm: Storyville: Jonestown: The World’s Biggest Mass Suicide.

C4: 2.30 am: Exodus: a contemporary retelling of the Old Testament story. A truly terrible piece of ‘prestige drama’; its heart was clearly in the right place but the execution is so clumsy, especially when you consider the racial and political subtext, as to make the piece borderline offensive. It is, however, something that should be seen once.

BBC4: 7.40 pm: Primo: Repeat of the filmed National Theatre Production starring Anthony Sher as Primo Levi.

Monday
C4: 8.00 pm: Dispatches: Why Kids Kill.

Tuesday
BBC2: 9.00 pm: Horizon: What On Earth Is Wrong With Gravity? Documentary on ‘the true nature of gravity’ by Dr. Brian Cox who would appear to be the scientist who provides the commentary on the copy of Danny Boyle’s Sunshine that I just bought… and if he’s good enough for Danny Boyle, he’s good enough for me!

BBC4: 10.30 pm: Storyville: The Devil Came On Horseback: about one man’s struggle to alert the world to the Darfur genocide.

Wednesday
C4: 1.45 pm: Blithe Spirit: David Lean directed it, Noel Coward wrote, Rex Harrison starred… what’s not to enjoy?

Thursday
BBC4: 9.00 pm: The Art Of Spain: Andrew Graham-Dixon starts a three part series on… the art of Spain…

Vienna

2008-01-25T00:48:00.000Z

Vienna, 1981. Directed by Russell Mulcahy.

…a strange melancholy seemed to descend upon me over the last weekend and has not yet lifted. Maybe it’s the time of year… I don’t know. However, I’ve been trying to catch up with all your blog-posting that I’ve been missing over the last couple of weeks and you’re all so ~~disturbed~~ ~~insane~~ ~~eccentric~~ amusing that it’s been a pleasure and perked me up somewhat. But I thought I’d foist some of my melancholy onto you. Like a cold. Aren’t you lucky?

I suspect I’ve been thinking of the past and future just a little bit too much of late. I’ll not bore you with the details; so, broadly, I’ve been thinking on the funerals I’ve been to over the years… when it hit twenty I stopped counting and then started running through the people and all the things you should have said, all the things you shouldn’t and all the things that can now never be. These kinds of days always remind me of the Ancient Mariner’s lament. On top of this I’ve been thinking on the Screenwriter’s Festival; to go or not to go…

Vienna has been running through my head for the last couple of days… I’d completely forgotten about it and, despite having loved the song for many years, I’ve not got a copy*. It was always around when I was younger and I can’t believe how long ago it actually was. Of course, back then I didn’t realise where the image system and reference points came from… turns out to be all the films I’ve watched since! Strangely, while the song itself is inspired by the brilliant The Third Man** (1949, Carol Reed; Sp: Graham Greene) the promo itself, I think, reminds me far more of a great Burt Lancaster film, The Killers** (1946, Robert Siodmak; Sp: Anthony Veiller, Richard Brooks, John Huston)... but I’d have to check. I was staggered to find that the promo was directed by Russell Mulcahy. It's become very easy to mock 80's things but how much of current popular culture will look patently absurd in twenty years…

*I’ve just realised- I think I was invaded by the trailers for Ashes To Ashes…
**Despite all evidence to the contrary, I do actually like some films… both of these are brilliant: The Third Man being one of the greatest films ever made and if you don’t agree may all your toast burn ever so slightly for the next seven days!

Channel Zero

2008-01-19T20:19:00.000Z

As I’m really quite nice, underneath, and I haven’t done much for you recently, I thought I’d point you in the direction of some television you might have otherwise not noticed and, if this is of any use to anybody, I might do it again… let me know in the traditional manner… self-addressed bricks through the windows…

Saturday
BBC1: 8.30 pm: Casualty: I wouldn’t usually mention Casualty but tonight sees the debut of a new character and aptly illustrates a particular bugbear of mine. The new character is played by Gillian Kearney, representative of those genuinely talented actors who are inexplicably and utterly under-utilized by the tele-bods. Take the Blue Murder Pilot: it became quite abundantly clear that Caroline Quentin, while carrying the whole show, is not the best actress in the world and, as if to illustrate the point, they surrounded her with superior actors… while Kearney was relegated to guest suspect… staggering!

Channel 4: 12.50am: The Man Who Wasn’t There: possibly the best of the Coen Brothers’ canon. Still very cold and soulless though. Superb photography.

BBC4: 10.55pm: Bad Education: Not the best of Almodovar but B-Grade Almodovar is still far better than most people’s A-Grade work.

Sunday
BBC1: 9.00pm: Messiah: Part 1 (Part 2 on Monday): Will probably be deeply unpleasantly and thoroughly watchable.

BBC1: 11.10pm: The Whistle Blower: Michael Caine ‘sort of spy film’. I really liked it but very few people seem have actually seen or even heard of it. Shot just down the road from me…

ITV: 10.40pm: South Bank Show: Tim Burton. Nothing else to say.

Monday
Channel 5: 3.20pm: Three Days Of A Condor: Sydney Pollack’s brilliant conspiracy thriller being shown at a really stupid time of day… it will be cut for it’s sex scene and violence but as it is still unreleased on disc or tape in the UK, if you haven’t caught it before, is probably worth setting a VCR for…

Channel 4: 8.00pm: Dispatches: The Court Of Ken.

BBC2: 11.20pm: Atom Part 1: I’ve heard this is excellent and very accessible to the lay person. And I’m sure it was praised here but I can’t find the post which makes me the kind of ignorant lay person it’s aimed at!

Wednesday
BBC2: 9.00pm: Torchwood: Something you’ve probably already heard about… written by some bloke called James Moran…

I’ll certainly be watching but I have a small confession about Torchwood: I’m not a big fan. I watched a couple of episodes from the first series and, combined with the concomitant episodes of Doctor Who, I can only say that I just can’t take Captain Jack Harkness seriously… I keep expecting him to break into a chorus of ‘When You’re A Jet’! I just find him a bit too shiny, a bit too pretty and he just doesn’t feel particularly heroic- more a poseur. I’ve met military and ex-military people and one of them he is not. If you dress someone military, they should act military but that doesn’t necessarily mean they have to be über-macho: but seriously, compare Harkness with David Niven in A Matter Of Life And Death. Everything else about the programme is fine... However, I’m sure that this particular episode is utterly wonderful, lovely and beautifully written! Watch it!

More4: 10.35pm: 9/11: The Falling Man: Yes, it’s a repeat but one that can certainly bear a repeat viewing. It’s a long, emotional an quite draining documentary that’s technically an attempt to identify the ‘falling man’ of the iconic 9/11 photo but it’s just as much an examination of the cost of the tragedy to the victim’s families and a look into the redefinition of what was acceptable in the media in relationship to the event through the fate of the photograph itself.

Thursday
BBC2: 11.20pm: Louis Theroux: Behind Bars: if you missed last Sunday this is well worth catching… Theroux manages to completely tone down his faux naïve thing and come up with something somewhat different in a look behind the bars of San Quentin prison.

Friday
BBC4: 11.30: A Hard Day’s Night: Classic Beatles musical comedy directed by the seriously under-rated Richard Lester…

Song Of A Wayfarer

2008-01-19T17:40:00.000Z

“Home again, home again, jigitty jig, good evening JP.”

…was what I was singularly not welcomed back with… the one cat looked at me accusingly and the others just said ‘meh’ and went back to sleep… pragmatic things, cats, they care not who serves them as long as the quality of the service remains undiminished…

Of course, I completely neglected to mention I was going anywhere, didn’t I? I am a very person and shall pay someone to spank me later: did I say that out-loud? So, effectively I disappeared off the face of the earth for a while longer… in my defence, the trip did come upon me with something of a hurry. I went ‘Oop North’ for a week. ‘Oop North’ is like the West Country except colder, wetter and lumpier. And by God was it wet. Very wet. And at least it wasn’t that London… which is like nothing on earth and more akin to that which was thought under it: it’s loud, noisome, claustrophobic, dirty, too light at night and just too full of damn people who move too damn fast… often with your cash and cards… or with the blood-smeared knife they’ve just stabbed you with. No offence to all them lovely Londoners out there but how do you cope with it? My money’s on drinking. Anyway, you may just have guessed I’m not a big city sort of person. Except Leeds. Leeds is alright. To visit…

Right, so, my trip was a resounding success for a multitude of reasons. I have come to the conclusion that I have access to that most elusive and desired of things, that which I believe to be called ‘the writer buddy’. Then I journeyed further North, through the ice-fields and snow-storms, battling polar bears and militant penguins, to the city known only as Leeds where I caught up with some old (and hardy) friends. Also did some shopping aided by finding a shop closing down and selling off Tartan DVDs at two pound a time.

The most important part of the trip, however, was the discussion of UCT which, as I have expanded upon previously, has been languishing somewhat due to a lack of a sufficient ending. So, I had a decent conversation about the piece and suddenly things started to fall together mentally and, during a late night showing of Cape Fear, I worked up the day’s thoughts into a fair schematic of the ending. It’s not perfect by a long shot but is an ending; reasonably nifty and gives the rest of the story something to work towards and to which be tailored. On presentation of this to writer-munki it received a seal of approval and means I can now go full steam ahead… of course, he may just have been saying that to get me to never speak of this matter again. My other concerns are now taken up with whether the rest of the piece is too obvious (I can’t tell because I know how the story ends) and by the lack of a ticking clock. Ticking clocks aren’t essential but are recommended and create artificial tension where none otherwise exists.

I did a double bill in the main Leeds fleapit*: this is noteworthy as I tend not to go to cinemas as it means, firstly, expense; secondly, communing with humans, which gives me the heebie-jeebies and, lastly, means lurking in a darkened room for two hours with humans, any one of whom may well be heavily armed…** The films viewed were I Am Legend (2007, Francis Lawrence; SP, Mark Protosevich, Akiva Goldsman) and Enchanted (2007, Kevin Lima; SP, Bill Kelly). The former is a fine film- one of those ‘don’t mention the vampire’ stories that I think must have started with Channel 4’s excellent 1998 series Ultraviolet. Exciting, good jump moments, the always entertaining Will Smith, vampires, suspense: a thoroughly enjoyable film. Also worth mentioning, which has probably been mentioned ad nauseam in serious film magazines is the intriguing politico-religious subtext (not so sub- in some places). Ground Zero is mentioned at least three times, for example, and, while this term existed pre-9/11, the current connotations of the term can only draw the mind to the War Against Terror connexion. The continual battening down of hatches and pulling down of shutters; the withdrawal from the world: all these lead to a clear post-9/11, W.A.T. reading of the film… the nearest and clearest antecedent to I Am Legend seemed to me less The Omega Man and more The Village. If this is how Americans are currently feeling then it is concerning as, while I may not approve of everything the US does globally, I do know that this world more needs a co-operative, interacting and friendly US than not. And anyway all the Americans I’ve ever met have been thoroughly nice, decent and generous people: admittedly all these have passports and leave the country and are not those who stoned the Top Gear team! Personally, I’ve never been a big admirer of The Omega Man (1971, Boris Sagal; SP, John William Corrington, Joyce Hopper Corrington); it seems too ‘easy’ a film; too glib and just too ‘Hestony’. My real surprise came a couple of years back upon finding a copy of The Last Man On Earth (1964, Ubaldo Ragona; SP, William F. Leicester, Richard Matheson, Furio M. Monetti, Ubaldo Ragona) with Vincent Price; Price succeeds in curing the ham, the sparse setting and black and white photography producing a genuinely bleak and eerie feel which is entirely missing in The Omega Man and, to a lesser extent, I Am Legend. I would still adduce by dint of acting, direction, production values (etc.) that I Am Legend is by far the superior version, but assert that The Last Man On Earth should not be overlooked- and it does have the imprimatur of the original author. I am told by the chap I saw the Will Smith version with that the new film’s ending is completely different to the novel and inverts, changes and ultimately loses the essential point of the book. I wouldn’t know…

Enchanted, the second in the double bill, was something of a contrast… and I don’t care what mirth this choice provokes! It was that or The Kite Runner but at 11pm on a Saturday night 3 hours or Afghan misery isn’t high up the list of things you might be wanting to watch. There’s less to say about it apart from that it’s fun, enjoyable, doesn’t take itself too seriously and forced me to exit the cinema smiling… but that may also have been relief that I hadn’t been brutally stabbed in the dark!

So, after seven hundred miles of driving, the shocking discovery that if I empty the petrol tank and have to refill it this now costs over sixty quid… and to any curious Americans who’ve stumbled their way here that would be one hundred and twenty of your shiney dollars whereas the equivalent petrol at US pumps would probably have cost me about five dollars... or something... but I now have a bag of very cheap DVDs of probably very good films and an ending to UCT! So, all in all... a pretty good trip...

On coming home I discovered that now, not only does Gordon Brown want to know everything about you during life, he now wants possession of your body after death… his plan sounds good in theory but consider the implications: the State will own you for spare parts- like buying a second vintage car for parts. And they can now use pretty much anything: when you die you’ll need not so much a large coffin as a small Tesco carrier bag. But how long will it be before the State asserts ownership over you during your lifetime: claiming a lung, a kidney, a chunk of liver or a few pints of claret as and when required? Oh, and now we’re going to be force-fed cloned animals…

…but on the plus side a small herd of rare (and cheap eBay) vampire films had arrived for me when I got back… which was nice.

…and I brought the wet weather back with me… which wasn’t. We’re now facing Flood II: The Sequel. What fun. Don’t tell anyone I’m to blame… I do so hate it when the villagers hove into view with their pitchforks and torches…

*It’s not actually very fleapit-ish… it’s highly swanky and comfortable.
**I saw that documentary called The ABC Murders…

New Year’s D’oh!

2008-01-06T19:48:00.000Z

…yawn…

…stretch…

…is it 2008 already?

…I seem to have slept for the last week. One too many relatives: I’ll not eat another one. After this ‘holiday’ season I need a vacation.

Well, first thing’s first: a happy new year to all you lovely people! And may all your (legal) hopes and desires be fulfilled this year!

I haven’t had much time to think any randomized musings to post… so I thought, ‘what about telling you some New Year’s Resolutions that I’ve made up’. But I don’t… so I can’t… and I won’t. I’m singularly lacking the resolve for such things.

Right so, what I’m going to attempt in the near future:

Utilize the most excellent script notes from Mistress Lucy’s House of Correction*. Well, those I definitely agree with! That should keep me out of mischief for a while.
Finish the first of two treatment story things…
Finish the second of two treatment story things…
Write a couple of scripts from them… cunning, huh?
Become the first person in the history of Oscar to win for an unproduced script: if I don’t win this year I’m going to give up writing…
Finally quit watching TV… I actually think this every year but ‘they’ just keep making it increasingly likely!
Make loads of money: unfortunately this means giving up proper scriptwriting and becoming an odious slimy porn baron: how hard can it be (oo-er) to write ‘I’m here to fix the heating’… ‘Ooh, that’s a massive tool’… ‘It’s so hot in here I’ll just have to take all my clothes off’… ‘Nice moustache’… and most erotic of all ‘8 litre quad-turbocharged W16 throwing out 987 horses with a top speed of 253 mph and a 0-60 of 2.46 seconds’… started to drift there…
...and, of course, I will continue to obey the every whim of the Kitty Overlords...

And a big thank you to Tom for his invaluable advice to this computer illiterate…

By the way, in answer to my recent request for world-peace via the medium of Nicola Bryant, the Beeb showed Blackadder’s Christmas Carol. My mighty bloginess has the power to change things: it will cause nations to tremble! Or am I being hopelessly over-optimistic? Anyway, in this Cassandra-like spirit I shall make some predictions for the coming year…

There will be more soap operas…
Their makers will end the pretence of bringing back previously definitively dead characters with ludicrous excuses and a character will return as a bona fide zombie: nobody will notice.
Serious drama will become ‘just a shining artefact of the past’.
Andrew Davies will continue to craft fine adaptations; he will take out a copyright on the classic adaptations genre: all will start with an entirely gratuitous sex scene and focus on nubile young women… 71 year old Davies will increasingly seem a D.O.M. (apologies to Dom).
Catherine Tate, Little Britain and Jam & Jerusalem will continue to be entirely inexplicable.
Richard Curtis will continue to be a nice chap who writes enjoyable stuff and yet everyone will continue to deride him…
British cinema will still struggle to break free of its conventions: films that tick all the right boxes; films that tick all the wrong boxes; films in period costume and rom-coms and dramas set in Islington (or similar) which are completely out of touch…
Jeremy Kyle won’t do the decent thing…
Sadly, neither will The Sisters Of Mercy…

The Year may play out as follows... but probably won't!

In January, a critic will finally dare to pipe up that, especially with its new 16 episode series, Shameless is actually just Eastenders with swearing.
In February, I will fail in my bid to become the first person to win an Oscar for an unproduced screenplay. My failure to give up writing will cause a queue to form at Beachy Head…
In March, a new Poliakoff drama series will be blamed for a nationwide out break of narcolepsy… later NICE will approve its use as an insomnia cure.
In April, Big Brother will begin… this time it will never end…
From May, all the channels on Freeview will continue to change number or completely disappear with a newfound intensity: the first major change will be when all the numbers will be reversed: 23 will become 32, 24 will become 42, etc.; later changes will include moving all the numbers up one place every time there’s an ‘A’ in the month; Channel 12 will start broadcasting every alternate week… This will not make any real difference to anyone** as Freeview is still not broadcast quality.
In June, Russell Brand will jokingly tell people to jump off a bridge: thousands will…
In July, Simon Cowell will be extradited to The Hague while…
In August, the opening ceremony of the 2008 Games will climax with a mass execution of political dissidents (including bloggers), the ritual slaughter of the final Yangtze River Dolphin, the beating of some Tibetans and a cheque being handed directly to the Janjaweed; smog will render many events invisible but still they will be declared ‘the best Games ever’…
In September, a 3 hour film will be released that features 2 people sitting near motionless, about to talk to each other but never quite manage it… As an Ang Lee film critics will rave: the same would be true if it had been Wes Anderson, Todd Haynes, Alexander Payne and a whole herd of others…
In October, the US Presidential elections will be cancelled; all pretence will cease and Rupert Murdoch will be crowned King of America…
In November, an increasingly uncertain Gordon Brown will crack and also hand over power…
In December, the return of Nicola Bryant to TV will herald outbreaks of world peace…

And finally, I will continue to be nice to everyone…

There’s probably a whole host of other things that I’ve managed to forget… but there's another 12 months to grouse about them.

*That's going to be fun to watch on the search engine results.
**Except those whose analogue signal has been turned off…

Fairytale Of New York

2007-12-24T18:58:00.000Z

Fairytale Of New York, 1987. Directed by Peter Dougherty.

Uncut! Uncensored!! Inimitable!!!

…and I’m about to run out of memories! ;-)

By the way, have you ever noticed how the opening to this bears an uncanny resemblance to the synth opening of U2’s Where The Streets Have No Name? Anyway…

Happy Christmas!!!

One and All!!!

Stop The Cavalry

2007-12-24T18:56:00.000Z

Stop The Cavalry, 1980. Director: Unknown.

Our House

2007-12-23T23:52:00.001Z

Our House, 1982. Directed by Dave Robinson.

Two more promos that ‘meant something to me’… even though I can’t really recall what. Isn’t that the way with memories? I forget.

Two from The Nutty Boys, always guaranteed to brighten the day. Madness produced the first two albums that I used for ‘promotional purposes’… a friend leant me copies of what, at the time, we thought were Complete Madness and something called ‘Cairo East’, although now looks like the second may actually have been Absolutely with a missing outer sleeve!

The strange thing about Madness, in hindsight, is how out of time they seem. The music does seem to have a strange elegiac quality to it and there’s often a sadness to it all; a yearning for an already missing past. It Must Be Love: jokey promo which still manages to wring the heart-strings… how did they manage that? I suspect it might have been something called talent. Our House: possibly their best song coupled with their best promo. Again all that jokiness is undercut by the melancholy string sections. The promo seems to be harking back to the days of the Boultings, Carry On and Ealing and not with modern ‘mocking irony’ but with seemingly genuine affection; is filled with joie de vivre and musters more humour than most sitcoms can these days (by the way, has anybody else noticed how much the new St. Trinian’s film looks more than passingly like Spiceworld?). The line ‘she’s the one they’re going to miss in lots of ways’ brings a lump to the throat every time I hear it now: you never know what really matters until it’s gone…

It Must Be Love

2007-12-23T23:52:00.000Z

It Must Be Love, 1981. Directed by Chris Gabrin.

Like A Prayer

2007-12-21T02:20:00.000Z

Like A Prayer, 1989. Directed by Mary Lambert.

So classic there’s nothing much that needs to be added… so I won’t… Ha! Out-manoeuvred you again! I didn’t have house-room for Madonna until a few years back so I must have been more drawn to the promo than the song: nifty story, beautiful image making (so much so they’ve become a cliché) and a heady mix of steamy sensuality and fervent religiosity… made a major impact on my blank little mind and I loved the religious imagery. I think it was the whole image system that really caught my magpie eye. My only major quibble is the framing device that didn’t tend to get shown way back when, but it works… I guess. Mary Lambert went on to direct Pet Cemetery (sic).

It stirs a memory from somewhere of a million years ago in a different country: while on holiday I once saw one of those ‘Black Madonnas’… I can’t remember where but I’ve narrowed it down to two possibilities Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer or Rocamadour… if the W. is to be believed it may well be the latter. But I’m just not sure. There were fields of lavender around there somewhere as well… looked and smelled wonderful.

…and now I love the song as the well as the promo.

Ashes To Ashes

2007-12-20T02:40:00.000Z

Ashes To Ashes, 1980. Directed by David Bowie and David Mallet.

Not sure how to introduce this bunch of random weird but that’s never stopped me before…

I sometimes wonder what made me interested in film and the visual arts in the first place. I tend to get a bit irritated when I see some of these interviews where a big name chappy says ‘when I saw **** I knew instantly that I had to make films’. I just didn’t have that moment of epiphany or, at least, I don't think I did. I never did have much memory of my earlier years and a close encounter with a Carlton 3000 GSi (wonderful blacked out windows it had) did for quite a lot more. For no readily apparent reason recently I’ve been remembering some of those early visuals that really got me excited and interested in ‘that sort of thing’ and I thought I’d tell you about a couple of those that have come back to me because ~~I can’t think of anything better to harass you with~~ I love you all greatly and feel a deep need to share!

The family didn’t get a VCR until maybe ’90 which was much later than everybody else I knew, and cinema was an expensive treat that happened once in a blue moon, but TV- that was readily available and what seemed to really make an impression on me quite early on were the fledgling and, in hindsight, somewhat rough pop promos.

I didn’t like Bowie until right recently but this promo sank deeply into my psyche. Everything in it seemed designed to be interesting: Harlequin, or was it Pierrot? (Robert Powell anyone?), padded cells, fires burning on beaches (very Shelley), the weird colour shifts (like some wild DW CSO), images within images, the negative images, pseudo-nuns, strange religiose marches, ink black seas breaking on post-apocalyptic shores and bizarre fleshly underground chambers… Watching again reminded me how much of it I’d forgotten and how this seems to sum up a nifty chunk of my inner showreel… the odd thing is, for good or ill, I’m not sure if I commit much, if any, of this stuff to paper! Oh, and I love the large bulldozer probably because it reminds me of the times my Dad would take me down onto various sites and I was able watch all the JCBs and Barber-Greenes in action and, in Winter, the Maggy-Deutz's.

OK Computer

2007-12-18T17:23:00.000Z

So what ‘very important thing’ shall I post about today? Global warming? Economic meltdown? Possible timetable for nuclear war? Nah! Let’s go with a post for people like me… idiots!

Or more precisely, this is a post for all those people like me who are normally quite sane and intelligent* but when confronted by technology turn into a particularly stupid two-year old. And so to a modern morality tale... or at least a modern tale with some sort of moral. Or maybe even a moral with some sort of modernity in its tale. Don’t ask me…

Sometimes my head is filled with luminous luxuriant thoughts brimming full of such magnificence and glory that the sun itself could be dimmed by them; of course, mainly my thoughts tend to burble along like a clear mountain stream with a song that sings of cats, music, cats, film, cats, music, cars, music, cats and cats… And, of course, sometimes my head is just filled with a sort of molasses-like drivel that makes no sense to man nor beast.

Of late my laptop slowed to a crawl… taking upwards of five to ten minutes to load a single web page, so I gave up trying, and at one point became so gummed up that it took over an hour to become unstuck again. Now, does my poor beleaguered head tell me to think through things logically and work out how to resolve them amicably for all parties concerned? Or does it tell me to run round the ramparts wailing and gnashing my teeth waving my fist angrily at a vengeful God? Give you a clue: wasn’t the former. Finally, the brain found some semblance of sanity and remembered what I used to do on a semi-regular basis. Before the rot set in.

And here comes the moral for all the technophobes and fellow idiots out there…

Laptops, and presumably other devices, have various things lurking around inside them. These things are sometimes put there to help. There is a thing called ‘Cache’. This needs clearing out on occasion. There is a thing called ‘cookies’. These should be eaten occasionally and the crumbs disposed into the midden. If you have an ‘Ad-aware’… use it. Oh, and properly turning off ‘the machine’ rather than always just shutting the lid for hibernation is a good way of clearing the virtual memory. And lo, when all these things had been accomplished, it was good: the laptop did work wonderfully and, indeed, the internet was not actually broken.

And the moral of the story? Sometimes it’s not just the technology that’s out to get us; sometimes it’s given a more than adequate helping hand by the fool with the opposable thumbs.

Of course, the good thing about all this is that I’ve been able to take a longer than usual break from the screen which has allowed my eyes to settle back to that whole being able to see properly thing.

So, onto other ~~mindless trivia~~ exciting** news. I’ve spent a good deal of the last couple of weeks worrying about the fluffiest of the cats (known variously as Billy or Flib but known to himself only by his own private cat name… the only thing he actually reacts to is the sound of a mousse lid being peeled back- he just can’t spell!). So, Bill Flib came in and settled to doing absolutely nothing for a couple of days having been out scrapping all night… He’d only managed to get a hole carved out of him the size of a marble… no blood but the world’s largest quantity of vile smelling pus. And so a trip to vet to get it looked at and a second trip to the vet because I decided to worry unnecessarily. The vet cleaned the wound with a cotton-bud and the thing went in and under the skin about an inch: watching inanimate objects entering living flash where they didn’t ought is a genuinely bizarre sight. So for a while he was more a pusycat. I was very surprised at how fast this managed to heal up: two weeks to go from gaping wound to mere scab. Staggering!

Other exciting*** non-news: a CD bought on the highly addictive eBay arrived. The Best Of X-Mal Deutschland, apparently pressed in Brazil^ but bought from a nice chap in Poland. Took a grand total of 5 days to arrive which is far faster than most Brits can manage. It’s very good- how’s that for reviewing prowess? And also arriving was a nice 5-disc Stravinsky set (Orchestre de la Suisse Romande conducted by Neeme Järvi) which was a present to me from me. And I’ve gone back to ‘Untitled Conspiracy Thriller’ (UCT) with the intention of making it work properly this time. I’ve gone back to first principles and the entire plot is now on small scraps of paper pinned to a board. Currently, the major problem is the missing last ten minutes: I don’t particularly want to ‘do a Schrader’. This ending issue also seems to have flummoxed those who’ve trodden this road before me. I know these things: I checked.

And in the immortal words of Columbo ‘just one more thing’: does anybody know if the woman in the Bold 3-in-1 advert is the lovely Nicola Bryant, formerly of Doctor Who…?

*You’ve never met me… you can’t contradict!
**Legal note: I’m using the word in the loosest possible meaning of the word.
***Again with the lies!
^Not sure how legitimate this actually is but the quality’s good as are the songs.

Know Your Rights

2007-12-07T00:58:00.000Z

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

-Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, 1791

When I hear of the latest killing spree, when I see the footage of emergency teams stretchering out bodies, more often than not in the United States, I feel a hollow empty feeling in the pit of my stomach. I find myself shaking my head because I am no longer shocked given the seeming inevitablity of these events. Now, the only thing left to be shocked by is the size of the number preceding the word victims. I’m sure I sound very liberal, limp and wet to almost any American who stumbles across this but I sound liberal, limp and wet in a Britain remarkably spree killing free.

This time in Nebraska a 19 year old man, who I won’t name, shot and killed eight people and injured at least four others. The names of the victims (two customers, six employees)* are Gary Scharf, 48; John McDonald, 65; Angie Shuster, 36; Maggie Webb, 24; Janet Jorgensen, 66; Diane Trent, 53; Gary Joy, 56; Beverly Flynn, 47. Sadly, the killer’s name will be the more remembered; the victims will become a mere footnote to all but their friends and families.

I don’t hold with total bans on firearms: I think the Draconian British ban on certain types of firearms was a knee-jerk reaction to exceptional events and has been ill-advised and unproductive- there is nothing wrong with sensible, well-licenced and regulated gun ownership- ask the British Olympic shooting team. However, I find it hard to fathom what possible reasons there might be for private ownership of an AK-47. The Right to Bear Arms is specifically historically rooted and, sadly, we Brits are in fact to blame for it. Sorry for that. But just once after one of these spree killings I would like to hear a majority in the U.S. or a few Congressmen ask why do we need all these guns? No doubt the old mantra is already being rehearsed: ‘guns don’t kill people, people do’- so why not limit the people allowed to have guns?

The killer’s suicide note apparently stated he wanted to ‘go out in style’: he wanted to be a celebrity and seemingly this was his only way. Celebrity would now appear to have become so idolized and all-important that it no longer matters what dubious achievment attains it or whether you even live to ‘bask’ in it. A prime-time flash of breast, a night-vision filmed internet-displayed blow-job, a live bug menu or an ability to gun down the innocent… apparently anything will do.

Does it help that killers are elevated to a position of ersatz celebrity? Manson, Brady, Hindley, Dahmer, Bundy, Gein, West… we always remember the names of the killer over their victims… even better to be Chapman, Hinckley or Oswald and kill (or try to kill) a celebrity… can’t achieve success by yourself? Ride on the back of someone else’s. Remember ‘Charlie don’t surf’? Hilarious. Seven acts of butchery, a million ‘ironic’ t-shirt sales.**

“Everyone has the right to life, liberty and the security of person.”

-Article 3, Universal Declaration Of Human Rights

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights… Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”

-United States Declaration Of Independence, 1776

...as long as you're the one holding the gun.

*Sourced at Wikipedia.
**And, yes, the line came from Apocalypse Now and referred to ‘Victor Charlie’, VC, Viet-Cong but it’s long since been expropriated.

Götterdämmerung

2007-12-01T17:34:00.000Z

“I don’t think there is anything wrong in having a religious conviction… (but) you talk about it in our system and, frankly, people do think you’re a nutter.”

-Tony Blair, The Blair Years, Episode 3

“God doesn’t exist, grow up.” “Those of us who have reached the age of reason and aren’t afraid of the dark would really like all of the god-botherers to stop bothering us, thanks. … I have had it up to here with the lot of you. Fuck off and fuck off now.”

-a recent screenwriting blogger's posting.

Now, before I get started I want to make it absolutely clear that this posting is NOT about whether a God, or Gods, actually exists or whether any particular brand of worshipping in a Theistic system may be preferable over any other. This post is about something else and will mainly consist of questions…

This post was prompted by several events that seem have occurred one on top of the other but primarily by something over at Potdoll’s Palace. I first started reading the Scribosphere (the blogs primarily devoted to screenwriting) in earnest about five months ago, and you’re all jolly nice people by the way^, and I’ve found there’s much wisdom to be found here (I wish I had something constructive to add to it- I only seem to have opinions and questions!). Shortly after this inauspicious arrival there were a number of posts from various people proclaiming their Atheism. This started me thinking about something which I then put to one side and promptly forgot all about. Then the other day at Potdoll’s someone quoted a hymn but immediately qualified it with ‘I’m not a believer’… and it got me thinking again, why the need to make this clear, people quote from Shakespeare and yet nobody qualifies it with ‘I’m not a Shakespearean’ or ‘I’m not an actor’. Why would it so necessary to clarify lack of belief? Then as if to prove a point there appeared the post from which the above quote appeared.*

My exact question on Potdoll’s post was ‘is there anybody out there prepared to admit to being a Believer?’ I didn’t even realise until it was mentioned that I’d used the word ‘admit’: not profess, proclaim, declare or even just mention, but admit as if it was something shameful- people admit crimes, they admit affairs- they admit things they think they should feel guilty about- but should Theistic belief be such a thing?

I’ve been around various branches of the Arts for longer than I care to remember and in all that time I can only recall four Christians who would openly acknowledge their Faith (one tutor and three students- one from Saint Helena, one from South Korea, one from Britain) but I did find a few who were but wouldn’t publicly acknowledge. All the Muslims and Hindus have been comfortable to profess their belief and, intriguingly, the reaction to their beliefs from others has tended to be more favourable as well- I hope it was not from some patronizing paternalistic attitude or from some notion of inherent exoticism. On the other hand, I have found a large number of proud Atheists including at least three tutors who have belittled both belief and believers, in some instants to the face of the above mentioned believers (not as part of reasoned debate but purely from scorn or ridicule).

It is certainly part of the British psyche to avoid talking too much about various things: religion, pay packet size, being good at things, being proud of things, etc. and the British do seem to cringe when they hear others discussing their Faith. So a certain reticence is understandable. The British are good at reticence! Not that I’d want to boast about it! This all raises a series of questions for me in three distinct areas…

Atheism
Why do so many screenwriters (and artists in general**) seem to have no Theistic beliefs? Why is this view so prevalent in the arts? Is it harder for we artists to acknowledge a Creator given that we ourselves create on a daily basis? Is it because writers are often highly educated and it is known that there are higher levels of Atheism concomitant with higher levels of education. (Although, it should be noted, there are also many educated people who are devout.)

Embarrassment
Are people embarrassed to admit a religious faith amidst such vocal Atheism? And is this particularly so in places like the Scribosphere? If even the (ex-) Prime Minister is embarrassed to mention his religious beliefs why would any of the rest of you Scribes find it any easier? Is it easier to admit to drug-taking than a belief system? Could it be that because the Atheists are more highly educated than the Theists that the believers are not capable of the requisite skill for constructive argument and debate and so prefer to remain silent? Could it be that people don’t mention anything because a strident belief might offend other people? For example, this week an invited guest speaker, Cristina Odone, was stopped from giving a sermon in favour of outward religious expression at a church carol service because it might offend any Atheists in the audience.

General Population
The high levels of non-belief amongst writers and artists are more intriguing given the statistics for the general British population. At the last census (2001) four-fifths of the UK profess to some sort of religious faith (of the others, 15.5% stated no religion and 7.3% refused to say: presumably this included all those Jedi Knights!); subsequent surveys in various newspapers from Left and Right seem to show a general 75-85% belief rate for Britain. Is it advantageous or disadvantageous to be out of sync. with the majority view? Does this or should this give carte blanche to the artist to offend at will those who do believe? Does this mean when writing it is harder to justify belief than disbelief? Does this lack of sympathy (or downright hostility) with believers mean that we writers find making fair representations of religious matters and people harder to achieve?***

As Potdoll suggested “maybe writing is getting more popular because less of us believe? Is it another way to 'transcend' death? Is religion more private than it used to be?”

Is it possible that the general lack of contact with death in our daily lives has made thoughts of a hereafter or a higher purpose to life less necessary? Does an absence of faith mirror a sense of betrayal with religion? Have our creative impulses become a replacement for God? Has the potential of our works to survive us become our pathway to immortality? Has our creativity become our way of working through our problems, neuroses and paranoias; our psychiatry, our confession and our salvation?

“Thank you and may your God go with you”

-Dave Allen

^Blatant sucking up, you lovely, lovely people! ;-)
*And was quite swiftly removed as well!
**The one exception would appear to be composers for some reason… Tavener, Macmillan, Glass, etc.
***Watching the last 7 years of Doctors, as I have, would give a good example of this!

Gold Against The Soul: Solidarity

2007-11-28T13:47:00.000Z

The Writers Guild strike is actually very simple to understand. Writers appear to be the only creators to whom the rules of copyrights and patents do not properly apply.

Invent a food processor and licence it… you get a royalty; write a piece of music and licence it… you get a royalty; write a novel and licence it… you get a royalty…

Write a script and… er… er...

Without the originators of the ideas there are no ideas, no innovations and no products!

Hopefully the US Strike will prove conclusively that in any creative endeavour the worker truly does control the means of production.

War Ensemble

2007-11-26T01:54:00.000Z

So, as you may remember the other week, Muppet that I am, I managed to fall like a sack of spuds and managed to land on my wrist and give me what was a ‘minor sprain’. Unfortunately I have a high pain threshold (my 'physio' told me that a decade ago- I’ll tell you why some other time) and a relatively weak connexion to the real world so I was left with two choices… ‘A’, I rest the wrist and let it get better or ‘B’, I decide to ignore it and get on with it… well, I asked the audience and they said ‘A’ so I automatically chose ‘B’! Hoorah for sheer unrivalled pig-headed stupidity! After a day of trying to continue as normal I realised that there’s a reason the audience votes for ‘A’. So, having managed to successfully exacerbate the problem for twenty-four hours I decided to settle… now, my wrist is strapped up which at least reminds me that I really have to try and stop using it. It really is hard to avoid using your right hand! By the way, this episode made me realise I have a USP for any future spouse: I’m immune ‘man-ill’! So, if any future spouse can cope with my wonderful ability to get physical injuries that I don’t notice until they’re properly damaged they’ll discover that at least I don’t get ‘man-ill’. While I’ve been trying not to do anything, I really can’t stop my mind mulching thoughts around and I can’t stop scratching little notes on pretty much everything. So, here’s just a simple, easy-to-type, non-contentious thought I had recently before I return to my hibernation…

**********************

I found out a couple of weeks ago that Kenneth Branagh’s new film is a big-screen adaptation of Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute). ‘Hoorah!’ I thought, ‘culture for the masses!’. But wait… there’s more! This is Mozart’s The Magic Flute set in the World War I trenches!.

As far I’m concerned it’s not hard:

Mozart on film: fine…
Opera on film: fine…
WWI on film: fine…
Mozart Opera set in WWI on film… conceptual disaster!

The first problem is that, while Mozart is a great composer*, opera has always had a rough time in translation to the screen. The problems are diverse but the biggest tend to be:

operas are often very long (Wagner’s Parsifal clocks in at just over 4 hours, Die Meistersinger Von Nürnberg is about half an hour longer and Messiaen’s Saint-François D’Assise is recognized as the longest standard repertoire opera at around 5 hours); ironically, there are some short ones extant because they were commissioned for television or written for audiences of children;
operas are full of singing (I know it’s obvious) and while people are standing around singing they’re not actually doing very much of anything else like blowing up Mittel-European terrorists, spearing sharks or, often, even moving around very much; effectively operas are visually static and for a medium like film which thrives on visual action this is not a ‘good thing’;
casting an opera for the theatre is primarily done for vocal considerations rather than acting ability so opera singers are rarely any good at the acting part any way;
casting operas for the stage still ends up with weaker singers due to the unavailability of the ideal performer for a role- this also happens with the recordings (opera recordings are very expensive and the first recording officially topping one million pounds was Solti’s recording of Richard Strauss’ Die Frau Ohne Schatten for ‘the Opera company’ Decca in the early ’90s. It could be argued that Solti’s recording sessions of Wagner’s Ring Cycle would be more if they were adjusted for inflation.) So, if you can’t assemble the perfect cast for a run at the opera house or the recording sessions why should it be any easier to find a 6 week window for a film?
operas are frequently unrealistic and fantastical yet somehow get away with it, presumably due to the 'willing suspension of disbelief' that is more easily achieved in a stage setting than in more realistic film- from the destruction of Valhalla in Götterdämmerung to Violetta in La Traviata warbling on over-dramatically for 10 minutes about how she’s dying from consumption when in reality she’d mainly be lying back on the bed coughing up blood while people poked her with sticks from quite a long way away.

Die Zauberflöte is one of the most fantastic and unrealistic of all operas and features a story which nobody has ever quite untangled which goes on about ancient figures from Persian and Egyptian mythology coupled with a narrative primarily revolving around some kind of expression of the various Masonic trials**. I can’t recall ever reading anybody actually having fully deciphered it though some people have suggested that it may well just have been nonsense that Mozart and his librettist, Schikaneder, cooked up as a mickey-take. The opera has a very bizarre complicated story which has much to do with symbolism, mirroring and a symmetry of structuring and characterization.

The First World War, for those who live on Mars or are Rachel and Joey from Friends, was a nasty incident that occurred from 1914 to 1918 and primarily involved aristocrats ordering heavily laden soldiers to walk slowly through thick mud towards heavy machine guns. Less frivolously put, it was horrendous and even ITV’s otherwise excellent My Boy Jack, I suspect, downplayed the truth considerably. The First World War was true horror. On the notorious first day of the Somme some 19,000+ British soldiers were killed in about 12 hours: this works out around one death every two seconds for half a day. These figures don’t even include 38,000+ British casualties; 7,000 French and 10,000 Germans. Is it really appropriate to set a light, essentially frivolous opera amongst this misery and suffering?

The Magic Flute project has apparently cost some £13million (or £27m on The Late Review although I suspect they meant dollars). You can see the trailer on the official site and there gaze in bemused awe at the bizarre nature of it all… nuns dancing in the middle of the battlefield, soldiers tied to burning windmill sails, giant lips, bad CGI… it is actually quite hard to work out where the money went. Lengthier sections were shown on The Late Review complete with a stylized (idealized?) version of the First World War complete with pastel uniforms. Through these excerpts it also seemed to be somewhat kitsch, quite ‘camp’ (for want of a better world) and very ‘eccentrically’ directed with wild camera movements and angles of such a hallucinatory feel as to make Apocalypse Now look sane. To me the key to filmed opera is surely to prevent the audience from thinking that what they’re looking at is of an essentially theatrical or artificial origin, to make the whole thing become so immediately alive and real as to distract from the peculiarity and no matter how light the opera may be it should be made in all seriousness- as they say comedy is a serious business! Consider how many film-makers deal with the fantastic without making the audience step out of the reality of the fantastic: Terry Gilliam, David Cronenberg, Tim Burton, etc. It would be intriguing to see what they might do if filming an opera! More worryingly, from looking at the clips one questions recurs, who is this expensive creation aimed at? People who don’t like opera won’t go; people who do may well be put off. This would make it seem like work done solely for the benefit of a select few (mainly the creators): certainly it’s not an attempt to disseminate culture to the non-opera house masses^. Of course it’s always possible to make strange elements work, Cabaret shouldn’t work and does so amazingly well^^ and if you compare it to the straight dramatic version, I Am A Camera (1955, Henry Cornelius), it’s possible to see how well Cabaret really does work.

The Magic Flute libretto has been re-translated from the German by Stephen Fry so will be nothing less than literate (even if, in my not-so-humble opinion, he did completely miss the point of Vile Bodies- Waugh didn’t like the rich fly-by-night lifestyle and satirized it while Fry seemed enamoured of it and content to lionize it, this may not have been his intention but it’s certainly how it comes across to me) but I fear nothing will save a creation, a Frankenstein’s monster if you will, born of such disparate and jarring elements. The whole conceit of the film seems to be wilful, elitist and borderline offensive.

They’ll be doing musicals of singing nuns and Nazis before long… just you wait and see!

*Mozart worked bloody hard at his work and his scores are over-written with a large number of corrections despite what that Schaffer wrote in Amadeus. Amadeus is a rather good film but it’s so factually inaccurate it might just as well have called the composers Pinky & Perky. To paraphrase ‘Shattered Glass’… ‘is anything accurate here?’ ‘there was a Mozart apparently’.
**For a good starter you could try watching Inspector Morse: The Masonic Mysteries… it’s shown on a TV channel somewhere often enough!

^Which certainly excludes me: the tickets are excruciatingly expensive!
^^One of the best films ever made… see I do actually like some films!

Pretty Vacant

2007-11-22T03:45:00.000Z

As you will now know, unless you have been ‘living in a box on Mars’*, 25 million Britons’ details (15 million adults, 10 million children)… names, addresses, dates of birth, child benefit numbers, National Insurance numbers, bank and/or building society details have been put onto two computer discs by the Child Benefit Agency at the HMRC by request of the National Audit Office. These were then sent to the NAO. By post. Unregistered. And got lost. And could be coming to a post office, letterbox, ditch, criminal mastermind’s mountain lair near you soon…

This isn’t the first Government data security disaster: 42 HMRC laptops containing confidential information have been lost already this year, including one containing the details of 15,000 customers of just one building society; the junior doctor application system was unsecured and personal details were open to all online; the UK Visa applications system was unsecured and personal details were open to all online and the DWP had the details of 1,500 staff swiped and used in a tax fraud…

Thank God this Government isn’t thinking of setting up some kind of vast national database with the details of every man, woman and child on it; and thankfully this database won’t contain any important details like National Insurance numbers, iris scans, fingerprints and potentially another 47 pieces of information; thankfully this Act hasn’t already been put before, and passed by, Parliament in some sort of sinister fait accompli…

NO2ID

…I just hope they spent the price of not registering that mail on something really worthwhile because it’s going to cost a lot more!

*Thank you The Simpsons.
**By the way, the wrist’s now nicely swollen and I’ve had to type this, letter by letter, with the end of my nose… I share because I care!

The Facts Of Life

2007-11-20T17:18:00.000Z

Today you’ll just have to put up with a random unfocused musing. My leg went numb in my sleep and this morning when I was got up I tried to put some weight on it, fell ass-over-tip and, of course, my hand went out to break the fall. Minor wrist sprain, no great shakes... I'm more concerned about the landing on my ribs, given that I broke three of them many years ago since when they've never stopped hurting, particularly when I do that whole breathing in thing... So, what you’re getting is spell-checked but not especially brain-checked! (The bulk of this post was actually written yesterday though- so not much of an excuse really!)

So, on Sunday those good people at the BBC showed the enjoyable comedy How To Murder Your Wife (1965, Richard Quine*)^ starring the ever dependable Jack Lemmon and, surprisingly, Terry-Thomas. The basic story is of Stanley Ford (Jack Lemmon), a newspaper cartoon strip writer-artist who lives a happy well-ordered playboy bachelor life aided by his British manservant and general factotum, Charles (Terry-Thomas). The cartoon strip chronicles the travails of a super-spy named Bash Brannigan. Stanley tests out the basics of his stories for the character in real life before inking them up. Then, after a drunken party Stanley wakes to discover he’s married to the Italian Miss Galaxy contestant who wants to change pretty much everything about his well-ordered life and Charles quits his employ. So, Stanley writes this marriage development into the Brannigan strip (and doubles his audience) but as he vents his (humorous) frustrations through the strip his thoughts turn to murder: he rehearses Brannigan’s wife-killing murder plot in reality (though without wifely participation) then inks it up and publishes. Of course, his wife leaves him and he’s promptly arrested for her murder… the evidence is damning and his confession witnessed by 80 million readers of his syndicated cartoon strip…

Right, so what’s actually happened is a bloke researches and rehearses a plot for a fiction which is then mistaken for reality. A slightly more obscure film, the comedy Please Turn Over (1959, Gerald Thomas), from the writer that brought us the early more gentle black and white Carry On films, Norman Hudis, tells of a small 50’s English village that gets fired up over the publication of steamy novel written by the Headmaster’s over-imaginative teenage daughter who has clearly drawn all the characters from life but precisely none of the situations that she puts them in. Reputations are all in this village and so, for example, the imaginary revelations of womanizing by the local doctor are damaging. But what is so wrong, all this young woman has done is draw her characters from life and that’s what writers are meant to do, isn’t it?

So, here’s where I’m going. Where does fiction end and life begin or, alternatively, where does life end and fiction begin. In doing the research for a project these days you run the risk of breaking the law without knowing it: if you research methods of poisoning or bomb-making you could be unwittingly breaching one of the myriad recent Terrorism Acts. (Fight Club and Spooks both require- and give- information that could be material in the 'preparation of an act of terrorism'.) If you write your murder plot story in the wrong way it may end up looking like you’ve been plotting to kill your nearest and dearest.

For veracity’s sake you should research things but if you draw too shady a character from life you could end up indicting them and end up with both criminal and police on your back. (And how are you really meant to get in touch with these various nefarious characters in the first place?) If you delve too effectively into the underworld you may end up looking like you have been enjoying a bit of a double-life yourself! And if you just ground your characters too closely in people you know you may end up losing all your research subjects!

I’ve realised that the artist, writers in particular, is effectively committing themselves to a lifelong public Rorschach test, exposing their inner self on a regular basis for little remuneration. So, you’re meant to do the research without getting arrested, draw some characters from life without getting a ‘contract’ taken out on you or losing your friends then weld these to some original ideas and characters and situations. No matter how many times I’m told to the contrary I have never believed anything other than that the writer’s personality and stance seep in: they’re cutting their cloth from their imagination they can’t help but add some of themselves. A diamond may no longer be coal but its raw stuff is still carbon; such is the case with the writer. So now, the writer’s trying to avoid arrest, being the subject of a hit and worrying about giving too much away… such as their dark desires to invade Antarctica or ride off into the sunset with Skippy the Bush Kangaroo…

Now, if a writer puts the same characters, themes and situations in repeatedly there must be some reason, from trauma to obsession to deeply held belief, even if this doesn’t manifest itself in the most obvious of manners it will still be there. If you continually show shots of bare feet there may just be something going on; if there’s always a character plummeting from the heights the author may just have vertigo… There was an anecdote on The Culture Show the other week while Cronenberg was discussing his new film Eastern Promises. Cronenberg said that in the early 80’s he was at some event and saw Scorsese across the way. The two men finally spoke to each other and Scorsese confided that he’d been nervous about meeting someone he’d assumed to be disturbing given the nature of his films. Cronenberg thought this was amusing coming from the man who brought us Taxi Driver! But if a Scorsese can make such an assumption what hope for the rest of us…

I’d love to think I can keep myself covered and make sure I give nothing away but I’m sure as my body of specs are (when completed and) read in concentration they’ll give me away with every word on the page!

So to my conclusion… er, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t! So, I suppose you just have to get on with it and be damnd... or do nothing! I don't know... why you looking at me?

*Script by George Axelrod who also wrote the wonderful Breakfast At Tiffany’s.
^apologies for my continued use of the pro-director, anti-writer format but it’s how I was taught on my aborted Ba. and is the usual way these things are done.

In Deep Water

2007-11-20T17:06:00.000Z

Anybody watching the news in Britain today will have seen that the Fishing Industry has come up again. And again the issue is over the quota business. In short: North Sea fishermen (particularly) can only land catches of certain varieties up to the quota limit. Anything of these varieties over the limit has to be thrown back into the sea to preserve the stocks… even though by this time it is dead and is now good for nothing but gull-food. It was quite clearly lunacy when I realised this several years ago and it’s clearly lunacy now. There are a couple of problems to contend with: firstly, if you let the fish land and be sold you are rewarding people for breaking the quotas and this will end up being flagrantly abused no matter how understanding the authorities are to genuine over-catches; next, the fish in the sea are a finite resource and must be protected; lastly, the throwing back of perfectly saleable edible dead fish is unethical, immoral and unbelievably wasteful. Trawling for one type of fish is the equivalent of taking a scoop of hundreds-and-thousands and hoping you'll only pull up red ones!

Personally, my idea, which is totally naïve and daft of course, is to allow the over-quota fish to be landed and sold but, instead of directly benefiting the fisherman (the under-quota catch to be sold for their direct benefit like now), the money goes into a hardship fund for the benefit of the whole fishing community: to be used when the quotas are fully filled and the fishing fleet is laid up. The fishermen don’t benefit directly and have no incentive to over fish; the fish aren’t wasted; once the quotas are filled the fishing stops as always but there is money available to benefit the fishermen during the off-times. I know… it’s stupid and I’m entirely sure the politicians will come up with something far better and more sensible… maybe some kind of quota system which involves throwing good fish back into the sea. Dead.

We Can Work It Out

2007-11-17T00:24:00.000Z

I found this in the Sunday Times’ Culture section a couple of weeks ago then promptly lost it before I could share. Now, I’ve found it once again…

“US television series are shaped by focus groups: the blond cop in Heroes was originally a redhead, but focus groups prefer blonds. More depressing is the case of the new Bionic Woman, starring the ex-EastEnders export Michelle Ryan, whose sisters was, in the unaired pilot, deaf, and spoke as if she were deaf. That made viewers uncomfortable, and now she is a “normally troubled” pot-smoker. Such cowardice may explain Bionic’s tumbling ratings.”

-14th October 2007

I realise movies have been subjected to test-screenings for many years and changes have been made accordingly: for all I know they’ve been doing it to TV forever (so let’s all acknowledge in advance that this could be some ill-conceived spleen-venting). However, I do find some of the above slightly disturbing and I’m left wondering about a few things. Makes me wonder whether this is a step on the path to the ultimate in team-writing… why don’t we just give the audience a long list of clichés and ask them to vote on which they’d like to see in their TV shows (and maybe this is how the writer’s strike will end- with audiences collectively writing the shows!). Also makes me wonder where that ultimately leaves the role of the creative imaginative writer who is capable of thinking outside of the ‘dressing-up box’. Makes me wonder about all those poor redhead actors whom the studios have just discovered don’t sit well with their audiences. More seriously, it makes me wonder how Marlee Maitlin is going to continue working. Makes me wonder about notions of equality. Makes me wonder why it’s acceptable to remove the disabled* just because they make the audience feel uncomfortable: do these same audiences cross the road when they see a wheelchair come towards them on the pavement; do they ask for a different shop assisstant if the one they’re talking to just happens to be deaf… because Heaven forbid that they should be made to feel uncomfortable.

Anyway, on a lighter note, it also reminded me of a story I heard a few years ago about the making of Friends. I read that in later series each episode took about 6-7 hours to film because when the studio audience didn’t laugh sufficiently loudly (did they use the infamous clapometer?) they got the writing team to rewrite the line until they got the requisitely loud laugh. How an audience who were sitting through tiny chunks of dialogue being flung at them could find this funny is beyond me. (‘Laugh or the doors will not be unlocked!’) Maybe the story was apocryphal. But it’s a good stick to beat Friends with… arguably the funniest and yet blandest sitcom in the history of television!

*Which I know is not the correct word but I’m no longer sure what the correct word is. Apologies! However, as I was registered disabled at University maybe I shouldn't get too worried about it!

A Drug Against War

2007-11-13T00:12:00.000Z

There was a story that seemed to sneak out over the weekend which didn’t garner much coverage. Is it hilarious? Is it sad? Does it even make sense? It doesn’t have anything to do with writing or the media but it seemed quite indicative of something or other.

Here’s the situation as far as I’ve deciphered it: Britain is currently suffering from a major shortage of morphine (for pain relief). Morphine is made from opium poppies. So, the government has approved the growing of opium poppies in Britain for the first time but it’s all got to be done in secret locations under tight security. However, I have heard of a place where there’s quite a lot of Opium. I’ll give you a clue, begins with ‘Afghani’ and ends in ‘Stan’.

Now, it seems the original plan in Afganistan was to take all the ‘evil’ opium (destined to be heroin) and destroy it. This plan hasn’t been working terribly well. It seems the Afgan opium farmers aren’t entirely happy with this it. So, over the weekend there’s been a new policy announced… we buy the opium off the Afghan farmers then we destroy it.

Now, here’s a vague thought, a little blue-sky thinking if you will… we buy the opium and then we… use it!

Now I’m no top-level politician so I’m not all smart so I may well be wrong but I could imagine a couple of advantages…

if we buy the opium (for a fair price… Fair Trade opium anyone?) it will break the supply chain of the 80-90% of heroin on British streets originating in Afghanistan,
we can ensure that the money goes straight to the Afgan farmer rather than going straight to the Taliban who promptly buy things like guns with it,
it frees up UK fields for stuff like ‘crops’, you know, food, which by a strange quirk of fate it seems we’re actually a bit short of*,
it frees up the non-Afghan troops, Afghan National Army and Afghan Police to spend their time more productively,
it would increase goodwill with the Afgan farmers who get very upset when they see their livelihood being taken away,
lastly, let’s face it, Afghan farmers have proved they’re really rather good at growing an opium crop…

So, why aren’t we doing this? Why ask me? Oh yes, because I brought it up... I can only think of three reasons:

it’s the wrong kind of opium,
it runs contrary to some ideology-based theory (drugs are bad, opium becomes drugs, therefore opium is bad),
there's a problem with a treaty (probably money-based),
politicians are incredibly stupid.

…I know which one makes sense to me!

So there you go, nothing to do with writing but I thought it was 'curious' to say the least...

*You may not have heard this but believe it or not the EU are now predicting food supply shortages and soaring food prices in the EU because their encouragement of converting fields to bio-fuel crops has been such a roaring success that food crops have been ripped up like nobody’s business. That’s why the Italians had the strike where they refused to buy pasta. All the Umbrian wheat fields that have always been the bread-basket of Italy providing so much high quality wheat have been torn up and converted to bio-fuel. Lack of wheat and increased demand means soaring prices!

Enjoy The Silence

2007-11-12T01:22:00.000Z

***Note***

This worked for me even if it hasn't worked for anybody else so I'm passing it on for your edification! Maybe I only think it worked for me and the calls dropped off because all the companies simultaneously realised I didn't have any money!

This is a public service announcement. With guitar. Alright, I was lying about the guitar. That’s resting quietly in the other room right now. My wonderful, battered, old, incredibly cheap guitar; so patient, so loyal, so terribly badly ‘played’. And I use the word played in the loosest possible sense of the word!

So, on to the PSA. This applies to UK residents only. Inspired by this post I thought I’d bring the following to your attention in case you didn’t already know it… they don’t exactly publicize it. You may have noticed that there is a tendency for some companies, wanting to try and sell you things you neither want nor need, to phone just as you settle to meals or in the evening when you’ve just sharpened your quill for an good evening’s scribing. Very annoying. I bring you the solution: the Telephone Preference Service. It’s simple: you ring up BT (0845 07 007 07) and register yourself on the list free of charge and Paul has kindly pointed out that you can register online here. After that you are not allowed to be cold-called. By law. Then if they do ring you, you should ask the name of the company and how they got your name/ number then you listen to them squirm and virtually beg you not to inform BT about their multi-nefarious ways. If they are found guilty they are fined several thousand pounds per call.

Since signing up to this service the number of cold calls has not so much dropped as plummeted. It’s down to about one call every six months and given that previously it had been up at the five a night rate I’d say that counts as an improvement! There is only one exception to this: it only applies to calls originating in the UK. However, at present that’s the majority. Hope that’s some help!

…and talking of cold-calling… the other day a young chap rang on the doorbell. Duly, it was opened to him and as he stood on the threshold of the porch he revealed his fell purpose: he was after selling some things…

The first question, would I like a conservatory? Not really, with a North-facing garden it would be less a Summer-house more a refrigerator.

The hopelessly optimistic young chap looked at the uPVC double-glazing not one arm’s length from his very self and thus came the second question…

Had I thought about getting double-glazing fitted? Er, where exactly?

…and so the borderline delusional young man, standing in the porch, came to his third and final question…

Had I considered getting a porch? I must have fainted from the shock for when I came to the night was dark and the young man had long since fled…*

*Almost all entirely true!

A SLIGHT CASE OF OVERBOMBING

Er, Happy New Year.... and WTF?!?!?

No Snow, No Show

Boring Update

General Rejoicing!

The Sequel

Depeche Mode - Wrong (2009, Patrick Dangers)

Unkle - Rabbit In Your Headlights (1998, Jonathan Glazer)

Fight Club - This Is Your Life

There Will Be Blood

And All That Could Have Been

Hymnen

All Is Full Of Love

Jigsaw Falling Into Place

Cartrouble

No Fun

Sweet Soul Sister

The Days Of Swine And Roses

March Of The Pigs

Dark Side Of The Moon

Meme On You Crazy Diamond

Dark Side Of The Meme

Enjoy The Silence?

Midlife Crisis

You Love Us

I Against I

Scarlet & Other Stories

Starman

Someday we'll be drinking with...

Vision Thing

Logic

Reality

Positive Thinking

When You Don’t See Me

Silence Is Platinum

The Neon Dream

At The Gates Of Silent Memory

Event Horizon

Paranoid Android

Forever Delayed

The Missing

Know Your Enemy

The Man Who Gave Away The World

God Save The Meme!

Telegram

Post

Channel Zero #8

Can’t Take My 'Eyes' Off You!

Channel Zero #7

You Love A Design For An Indian Summer

About You Now

Just Experiment IV

Ashes To Ashes

Channel Zero #6

Bullet the Blue Sky

Miss Sarajevo

War! What Is It Good For?

Channel Zero #5

Channel Zero #4

When You Don’t See Me

The Deep Blue

Channel Zero #3

My Little Empire

Channel Zero #2

Vienna

Channel Zero

Song Of A Wayfarer

New Year’s D’oh!

Fairytale Of New York

Stop The Cavalry

Our House

It Must Be Love

Like A Prayer

Ashes To Ashes

OK Computer

Know Your Rights

Götterdämmerung

Gold Against The Soul: Solidarity

War Ensemble

Pretty Vacant