New Year’s D’oh!

…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

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

Stop The Cavalry, 1980. Director: Unknown.

Our House

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

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

Like A Prayer

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

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.