Truculent Sheep's Blog

Morrissey - 'Meat is Murder(ously Nuanced)'

2012-01-28T20:28:00.004Z

It's not unusual to have a Smiths/Morrissey phase, and mine began fairly recently. While chewing on their second album, 1985's 'Meat Is Murder', I couldn't help but focus on the title track, which ends the record on a rather haunting note.

At first glance, and indeed listen, of course, it is unambivalent. 'Meat is Murder!!!' the quiffed one croons, and no doubt is left in regards to what goes into his freezer. But still... Something struck me about the lyrics that made me look at them in some detail, and I was surprised about what I found.

Because 'Meat Is Murder' is more than just about being vegetarian. It's a critique on vegetarianism's politics, in particular, the way it phrases its rhetoric. How else to explain a song with well-crafted lyrics like 'It's death for no reason, and death for no reason is MURDER' that then slides into painfully bad phrasing like this?

...And the calf that you carve with a smile
It is MURDER
And the turkey you festively slice
It is MURDER...

Or:

Kitchen aromas aren't very homely
It's not "comforting", cheery or kind
It's sizzling blood and the unholy stench
Of MURDER

If you're thinking about a furious 14 year old writing pained rhyming couplets on the inside back cover of their exercise book when the Geography teacher is looking the other way, you're heading in the right direction. The phrasing is trite, clumsy, po-faced and pious. It's impossible to hear lyrics like 'closer comes the screaming knife' (do knives scream?) and not need to stifle a giggle. It's the rhetoric of people who camp out in Parliament Square, plaster their shacks with pictures of bomb-dismembered Iraqi children, don't wash for a month and then wonder why no one pays them any attention.

And yet... It's impossible not to hear 'It's MURDER!' being blasted out with a cracking, almost halting voice and not be a little moved. Nor can you listen to the rest of the album and read the lyrics and not notice that the lameness of the title track stands uneasily with them. A good writer doesn't write badly without reason, and the gaucheness of 'Meat Is Murder' is no exception.

In other words, the song works on two levels. As an emotive attack on eating meat, it is still plain and unambiguous, if only because we know Morrissey's real views on the matter all too well. But it is also a satire, the narrative 'voice' in the lyrics being an unreliable one. (In the grand tradition of self-parodying songs like 'Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now.') Through the song, we hear the same overwrought, emotive but essentially juvenile language that animal rights protesters engage in today, with only passion in their favour.

And yet for all that, it remains so inarticulate and dunderheaded, cursed with the same fuzzy hyperbole that animates outfits like PETA and its celebrity supporters (like Morrissey himself), who speak with sincerity and stupidity in equal measure.

Like their peers in Parliament Square, the radicals of the animal rights movement dutifully man their little stalls in shopping centres every Saturday, and decorate them with gratuitous pictures of dissected animals and even more gratuitous literature, full of graphic descriptions of what really goes on in abbatoirs.

It is so repellent that it is self-defeating, and seems to display a sort of nausea about food and eating itself, fully realised by more media savvy but no less monomaniacal books like 'Skinny Bitch', which reads like a bulimic's primer.

With that in mind, the point the song makes is that while eating meat is bad (from the perspective of Morrissey at least), the argument is not one that can be won, at least with language that exposes it to ridicule. You're not meant to take the song seriously because it lacks the means to be taken seriously. Instead, we have clumsy, laughable lyrics. It is infantile. The song despairs as much over its own ineptness as the animals it mourns.

When taken in context with other songs on the album, like 'The Headmaster's Ritual' and 'Barbarism Begins At Home', both of which are steeped in horror and helplessness in equal measure, we can see 'Meat Is Murder' as another song about the death of hope among the young. It is the argument of youthful people who believe but will never be taken seriously.

Beyond the tragedy of death, the song is also about the tragedy of impotence, of being ignored and dismissed. Combine this with a genuine despair and horror that harks back to another closing track - 'Suffer Little Children' on the band's self-titled debut - and it's plain that 'Meat Is Murder' is working on many levels at once.

Was I moved? Yes. But did it make me stop eating burgers though? Err, no. As the song so wryly suggests, the power to move does not equate to the power to convince.

Too Old, Too Cold? Playing older characters in D&D/Pathfinder

2012-01-22T17:06:00.001Z

I must declare an interest here - I hate the ageing rules in 3.0 and 3.5 D&D, not to mention Pathfinder. Apart from making non-magical characters ever more useless, and giving an unfair advantage to Magic classes, it also makes no sense:

At middle age, -1 to Str/Dex/Con; +1 to Int/Wis/Cha.
At old age, -2 to Str/Dex/Con; +1 to Int/Wis/Cha.
At venerable age, -3 to Str/Dex/Con; +1 to Int/Wis/Cha.

SOURCE: The D20 System Reference Document

After all, characters are not like normal people. They heal quickly with magic, survive things that would kill most people, they come back from the dead (preferably via a Cleric and not a Necromancer) and they are generally larger than life.

It's also not very fair on real old people, who often pay a price in mental terms as they get older (octogenarian Alzheimer victims, for example, don't benefit from +3 Wis), but can also stay surprisingly fit and active well into their autumn years.

Meanwhile, it pays no attention to the wide range of characters in popular fiction who are over the hill, but still formidable. Up, Watchmen and David Gemmell's novel 'Legend' all provide examples of characters who still pack a punch despite the ravages of time.

So here's an alternative system for ageing, based on the Flaws rules from Unearthed Arcana (again, accessible on the SRD D20). These impose penalties on the characters as they get older, but in return, they get a bonus feat, balancing them out while still reflecting the passage of time.

(Characters that no longer age do not, of course, get bonus feats for getting older. You can't have it all.)

First, work out how old the character is. Use the existing rules for when the characters move from adulthood to middle age, old age and venerable ages. Then consult this table to see how many flaws they get and how many bonus feats too:

Middle Age: One Flaw and one Bonus Feat
Old Age: One extra Flaw and one Bonus Feat
Venerable: Two extra Flaws and two Bonus Feats

NOTE: If character is over Level 20, bonus feats can be chosen from the Epic list.

To work out what Flaw you get, roll D20 and see what result you get on the following table. Those marked with (*) are new flaws I've added to the existing list. Those marked with (X) can only be taken once. Re-roll if you get them. All other flaws stack if you roll them more than once.

1= Broken (*)
Wounds do an extra point of damage

2 = Feeble
You are unathletic and uncoordinated.
You take a -2 penalty on Strength-, Dexterity-, and Constitution-based ability checks and skill checks.

3 = Forgetful (*)
-2 on all Int/Wis-based skill checks

4 = Frail
You are thin and weak of frame.
Subtract 1 from the number of hit points you gain at each level. This flaw can reduce the number of hit points you gain to 0 (but not below).

5 = Haggered (*)
You tire twice as fast

6 = Inattentive
You take a -4 penalty on all Search checks.

7 = Maimed (*) (X)
You recover from wounds and penalties at half the usual amount. Magical healing still works as before.

8 = Meager Fortitude
You take a -4 penalty on Fortitude saves.

9 = Murky-Eyed (X)
-4 on all Perception checks that require vision. All invisible or concealed foes are an additional -2 to hit.

10 = Nemesis (*)
One selected kind of monster (DM's choice) treats you as a Favoured Enemy. If rerolled, the DM can pick another.

11 = Noncombatant
You take a -2 penalty on all melee attack rolls.

12 = Old Git (*)
You take a -4 penalty on all Cha-based checks

13 = Pathetic
Reduce one of your ability scores (randomly chosen) by 1d4.

14 = Poor Reflexes
You take a -4 penalty on Reflex saves.

15 = Shaky
You take a -2 penalty on all ranged attack rolls.

16 = Slow (X)
Your base land speed is halved (round down to the nearest 5-foot interval).

17 = Unreactive
You take a -6 penalty on initiative checks.

18 = Vulnerable
You take a -1 penalty to Armor Class.

19 = Weak Will
You take a -4 penalty on Will saves.

20 = Wizened (*) (X)
In terms of carrying, endurance and lifting, the character is assumed to be one size level smaller than he or she actually is. So a Dwarf or a Human would be considered Small, a Halfling or Gnome would be considered Tiny and so on. They can still do damage and use weapons, armour and equipment equal to their size, however.

This also lets you play older characters. Just work out how old they are and then generate the flaws and feats. Start at Level One and play as usual, with the DM deciding if/when the character gets even older or just dies of old age. Voila! Your own axe-wielding, spell-casting Senior Citizen! Enjoy.

Police Learn Wrong Lessons In Wake of Tottenham Riots

2011-12-04T10:17:00.000Z

As regular readers may already know (more than able to fill up a telephone box as you are), I have something of a personal connection to Tottenham, which suffered a great deal during the August Riots.

So it was that I read with interest a report by the Police Federation that reveals a combination of bad planning and a lack of equipment made the situation far worse:

...Among the failings highlighted by the federation, which represents 136,000 officers, were chronic problems, particularly in London with the hi-tech digital Airwave radio network. Its failings were one reason why officers were "always approximately half an hour behind the rioters". This partly explained, it said, why officers kept arriving at areas from where the disorder had moved on...

"Mutual aid officers were often dispatched without enough equipment. They therefore could not be mobilised in a public-order capacity as all the riot gear was in use," the report says. Many found that no arrangements had been made for their welfare...

Worse, it seems the police didn't know the areas effected by the riots as well as the rioters themselves:

...It adds that senior officers took charge in some places "often without having the local knowledge of the areas" making it easier to be outmanoeuvred by rioters. Only because of a nearby football match in Tottenham were mounted police available during the early disorder in north London, prompting the question "of how well Tottenham officers would have coped without this opportune support"...

Sadly, however, it seems the wrong lessons have been learned:

...Already, signs are emerging that public order policing in the future will be less conciliatory. Last week it emerged the Metropolitan Police is training more officers to support its baton-round teams while considering the deployment of three water cannons to cover London and the south east. O'Connor told MPs that the existing reliance on cautionary tactics needed to be revised in favour of a "go forward and arrest" strategy to disperse rioters...

This is a worrying development. The real cost of the August Riots may be an ever more remote, confrontational and aggressive policing. Kettling may be the least of our concerns, if some of the thuggery perpuated by US police against Occupy protesters are anything of a preview.

Meanwhile, Neighbourhood Policing seems to have been scapegoated for fostering the 'view among criminals that police are soft', despite the obvious causes being clumsy policing combined by incompetent riot control.

The face of policing in London and beyond won't be a local policeman who knocks on your door, but hidden behind the visor of a riot helmet This kneejerk reaction will only lead to more violence and the gulf between public and police growing ever greater.

[SOURCE: The Observer]

Doctor Who, Series 6, Episode 10: The Oedipal Who Waited

2011-09-13T11:14:00.001+01:00

Much ink has already been spent on last Saturday's Nu Who episode, 'The Girl Who Waited'. Not wishing to add much which has already been said, here instead is another reading of the episode:

Rory has an Oedipal relationship with the Doctor who he sees as the father figure getting in the way of his 'mother', Amy. (How else to explain his obsessive love with her?) This reaches crisis point when he meets the older Amy who really is now old enough to be his mother. The Doctor forces Rory to choose between the young Amy (who's the right age for Rory and so represents a social norm that the Doctor, as father figure, is trying to enforce) and the old Amy, who is a physical manifestation of Rory's libido.

This explains Rory's anger - 'you're trying to turn me into you!', he says, and what is meant is that the Doctor is, by hook or by crook, trying to make Rory an adult who identifies with his 'parent' and so social norms. That he is forced perform the Doctor's adult responsibilities - to fill his shoes and see things through the Doctor's glasses - is revealing too.

(In previous episodes, Rory also accuses the Doctor of being a threat to other people, when he is in fact performing his social duty to protect as many people as he can. Rory's infantilised perspective is unable to acknowledge this, and he also wishes to reject his father figure's values and so the Doctor as parent.)

When the older Amy dies, or appear to dies, it represents Rory finally abandoning his infantile relationship with her, and accepting a psychosexual norm. He really does become the Doctor, in a sense, who has to abandon others so they can become adults in their own right, from Susan to Rose to Donna Noble.

(This is situationally ironic, given how Rory is destined to one day become the Doctor's father in law.)

Amy, meanwhile, has her own Electra complex going, as demonstrated by the swaggering tom girl/action hero demeanour she sometimes effects (penis envy) to what she sees as her profound sense of abandonment and neglect by the Doctor, the father figure she desires sexually, but who does not reciprocate, literally or figuratively.

("What's the point of you?" Amy says in 'Amy's Choice' when her idealised father figure appears to fail her. The phallic choice of imagery and her 'suicide' at the end of the episode is telling, as is the revelation that the Doctor was in control of the experience throughout - again, he was trying to help his companion grow up, but with little success.)

Amy's ongoing yearning for the Doctor and her sometimes ambivalent relationship with Rory (he may well remind her of her own dysfunction) suggests this has not been remedied. She identifies with her older self readily, who embodies - let's not forget - Rory's ideal mother/lover figure, and also wields swords and violence in a most phallic fashion.

Too old to have children, her feminine looks faded, the older Amy is her own self-image realised - an uncastrated male who can kill or reject the father/Doctor.

The main difference between husband and wife is this - Rory makes a decision to abandon his infantile urges and abandons his mother figure. Amy, however, asks where her older self is at the end of the episode. She has progressed little.

In many ways, one of the subtexts of the last two series has been Rory's ascent into adulthood, rejecting his infantilised state and becoming a grown man. This often treacherous journey makes him heroic in a fashion, whereas his wife - still in many ways the little girl left waiting - remains emotionally and dramatically unresolved.

The Shittest Days of Your Life

2011-08-24T11:13:00.002+01:00

Ah, school daze...

...Is getting tied in knots over uniform a peculiarly British problem? "There is something extremely peculiar about the British obsession with uniforms, which is part of something bigger," agrees Professor Efrat Tseëlon of Leeds University. Uniforms are far less common in almost every European country although they have increased dramatically in the past 20 years in the US, linked to attempts to control gang culture. Tseëlon, a social psychologist specialising in visual appearance, says the British devotion to uniform reflects "a general etiquette towards children" defined by power, control and a lack of trust. There is no evidence that uniforms increase discipline and arguments about "levelling" are just "conscience laundering" – uniforms are used for precisely the opposite purpose by fee-paying (and an increasing number of specialist state) schools: as a badge of distinction. What about tussles over uniform being irrelevant distractions from learning? "The only party who is obsessed with it to the point of distracting schooling is the school itself," says Tseëlon. "By excluding pupils or sending them home they are the ones disrupting the education, not the children themselves..."

- From "School skirt ban is just the latest battle in the uniform wars", The Guardian, 23 August 2011

This gets extremely dodgy, to the point of underwear inspections at Sparta College - err, I mean, King's School in Winchester. One can't help but be reminded of Frank Zappa's maxim that "if you want an education, go to the library." The rest, one way or another, is bullshit.

Happy Birthday, Lovecraft!

2011-08-21T14:20:00.000+01:00

Today is the 121st birthday of Provdence's very own erotophobic weirdo, Howard Phillip Lovecraft. He deserved better in his life, but he did in many ways invent modern horror and had a part to play in sci-fi's rise, making him one of the most influential of 20th century writers. (How many cool things did that old shit Evelyn Waugh inspire?) I'll be sipping an ale in HPL's honour in any case - Cthulhu fhtagn!

...Poor devils! After all, they were not evil things of their kind. They were the men of another age and another order of being. Nature had played a hellish jest on them - as it will on any others that human madness, callousness, or cruelty may hereafter dig up in that hideously dead or sleeping polar waste - and this was their tragic homecoming. They had not been even savages--for what indeed had they done? That awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch - perhaps an attack by the furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defense against them and the equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings and paraphernalia...poor Lake, poor Gedney... and poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last - what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn - whatever they had been, they were men!

- From 'At The Mountains of Madness', 1931 (first published in 1936)

(FUN FACT: I did my BA dissertation on Lovecraft via Lacan, Baudrillard and Sartre. One of my supervisors said it had either been written by 'a genius or a madman', which is rather fitting, all things considered...)

US equality: Win some, lose some

2011-06-26T11:47:00.000+01:00

So, more good news for civil rights in the US as New York makes gay marriage legal. Whether that means the more 'conservative' parts of America will follow suit soon is a different matter, but it seems an important watershed has been passed.

But as James Fenton hinted on Friday,there is an opposing movement away from progress. Namely, the right for women to choose whether or not to have an abortion.

Indeed, there has been an orchestrated attempt to undermine Roe vs. Wade by small increments, ranging from imposing emotional blackmail to stretching the notion of personhood (and so the definition of murder) to stretching point.

Elsewhere, vulnerable women are being shopped by self-righteous neighbours and the persecution of the Planned Parenthood organisation, where its women's health services are starved of federal funds because it also provides abortion (which isn't federally funded in the first place).

Apart from this being a sign of the US right going insane in a fashion that would put the post-1979, pre-Kinnock Labour party to shame, and probably ensuring its defeat in 2012, it is also disingenuous in the extreme.

And for all the Michelle Bachmans and Sarah Palins being used to draw in the female vote, they are more than willing to sell the daughters of their women supporters, and the supporters themselves, up the river. The hypocrisy, of course, is carpet-thick on the ground.

Thatcher was no friend to women either.

If marriage is a stabilising, civilising force, then so is letting women control what happens to their own bodies. Who really is happy with abortion? But who, with any degree of sanity and humanity, would prefer the alternative?

Doctor Who, Series 6, Episode 7: A Crap Plot Goes Through The Motions

2011-06-05T11:55:00.001+01:00

DOCTOR WHO
'A Good Man Goes To War
04/06/2011
BBC One

Last night's episode; the digested view:

DOCTOR: WOW! YEAH! We've done it, me and my highly unlikely alliance of old enemies and characters first thought up on the pack of a fag packet! We've just done a third rate Stars Wars pastiche! Astounding! Wicked! Cool, Daddy-o!

(Highly contrived time baby then turns out to be a flesh copy, because last week's episode was arguably a better cliffhanger and we've run out of ideas.)

DOCTOR: Oh no! I've failed miserably! I must now try to do that thing with my face that David Tennant spent 2005-2009 doing!

(In comes Professor River Smug, looking both smug and enigmatic.)

RIVER SMUG: Doctor, you're a very bad man! Look at all the bad things you've done! You bad, bad, bad man! Don't you know Doctor means 'healer'? I know it can mean other things, but we're trying to make you more relevant these days, which somehow means making you look like a douchebag at every possible moment...

DOCTOR: Yes, but how else was I supposed to rescue Amy? And it's not like getting angry and using violence to protect innocents is always a bad thing. Evil must be destroyed. And what about Hitler?

RIVER SMUG: Spoilers! We'll be doing a dog's dinner of that concept in the Autumn. Anyway, you're a bad person in much the same perverse and contrived way that you were in Journey's End, which this episode in no form or way resembles, oh no.

DOCTOR: Also, you did rather torture that poor Dalek in the last series and go on a shooting spree in episode two of this series. Also, domestic violence in episode one...

RIVER SMUG: I can be as hypocritical and self-righteous as I want because I'm a Mary Sue. Now start looking guilty!

DOCTOR: Also you could have told us from the start instead of just...

RIVER SMUG: We need to drag this load of arse over several series. By the way, I'm Amy and Rory's daughter, and I'm sort of cosmic because blahblahblah deus ex machina.

DOCTOR: Whahey! Woo! I'm off to save the baby! Your willful inaction, double standards and refusal to tell me anything doesn't matter at all! Geronimo!

RIVER SMUG: I love that wonderful, impossible man! Well, actually I'm always down on him and Steven Moffat would rather write glorified fan fic about me, but since when does this show ever make any sense these days? I'm now off to patronise my parents rather than come straight out and tell them who I am because that would be too logical!

(Join us in the Autumn for the next exciting episode - 'Doctor Who and the dwindling audience figures'!)

My three predictions for 'A Good Man Goes to War'

2011-06-03T16:45:00.001+01:00

Since it's a little over 24 hours away, here's what I think will happen. I may wrong:

1. 'The good man' River kills turns out to be the Doctor as he presently is, her actions driving him to such terrible murderous rage that all the decency in him vanishes for just long enough to cause some serious cosmic carnage.

This probably means that a younger version of herself abducts Rory and Amy's baby, and this is the first time in River's timeline that she meets the Doctor.

The only problem with this is how the two - apparently - fall in love afterwards. Or has River just been lying about her past with the Doctor all along, in an attempt to redeem herself?

2. There will be some rambling, pretensious, self-indulgent grand narrative maneuverings that really just get in the way of the story.

3. The next series will be Moffat's last.

EDIT: Oh Christ, it was far more predictable than that. Also, the gun-toting Mary Sue then has the cheek to appear at the end, tell the Doctor off for trying to save his friend (how else was he supposed to do this) and then reveals the crappest, most predictable 'twist' ever.

Still, 2 was right, and so will 3 be.

The fundamental need to punch someone in the gob once in a while

2011-05-19T09:34:00.002+01:00

Forgiveness they say is divine, but it is not always very human, or even humane. Hatred is every bit a human emotion as love, and so has its place. Turning the other cheek, meanwhile, serves no purpose but masochism. The right measure in each case is key.

Plays of the future

2011-05-16T10:29:00.001+01:00

What now for the stage? Well, theatre remains a vital medium, but how best to bring it to the masses? We re-imagine various plays to make them relevant to our current times:

The Romans in Britain:
Special performance of this controversial play, now set in the world of Asterix, with a nude Getafix getting bummed viciously by several Legionaries called Gingivitus, Hepatitus and Detritus, before hanging himself in shame. Ends in a frankly bizarre banquet where Asterix and Obelix are somehow conflated into the IRA.

Much Ado About Nothing:
A gritty imagining of the Shakespearean play, where Leonato murders his daughter Hero in order to preserve the family honour, and the police refuse to investigate further in deference to cultural sensitivities.

The Woman in Slightly Chalky Grey:
The ghost play returns, this time after an accident with a washing machine and too much bleach.

'Tis Pity She's A Whore:
Annabella sells her story to Take A Break and subsequently appears on Jeremy Kyle.

The Children's Hour:
Two women teachers are slurred on Facebook by vindictive teenagers until one of them becomes 'An Hero' and various sociopaths mock her death with various unamusing memes and Photoshop montages.

On the Waterfront:
Where no strikes happen at all on the docks as they use containers nowadays and anyway all the dockers were laid off in 1994, with limited media coverage.

Thoughts on completing Fable 3

2011-04-26T00:11:00.000+01:00

Firstly, the game was too easy, the story too disjointed and its moral dilemmas were contrived.

Also, the real message of the game is not that you have to be a cock to save a kingdom, but you do need substance (or rather, you need to own all the houses and businesses in Albion) behind your good intentions. A lesson for life.

Logan, despite the game's attempts to blur the lines, came across as less a necessary bastard and more an incompetent, stupid and delusional bastard. I had him killed, honoured all my promises and still had enough money to save all 6.5 million subjects.

Finally, the Gnomes are every web user ever - churning out abuse non-stop but easily silenced when you point a gun at them.

A bright sunny day

2011-04-22T12:59:00.002+01:00

For some reason, I doubt I'll be doing much surfing today.

Being Human Series 3, Episode 8 - the review

2011-03-13T22:08:00.006Z

Ten word summary:

Disappointing, two-dimensional, rushed, badly executed, contrived, shlocky, schmaltzy, overrated, shit.

The trouble with trolls...

2011-02-26T10:19:00.003Z

...Is that they're going to destroy themselves and the internet. Attracting the ire of the Daily Mail is never a good idea:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1360788/Tormented-trolling-The-vile-web-craze-taunted-family-bullied-Natasha-suicide.html

As the mainstream becomes ever more aware of trolling, the more intense the backlash. Moral entrepreneurs will be whooping for joy.

In time we may find how we communicate on the web is circumscribed and controlled because some stooped, warped creatures with mother issues can't resist abusing people.

One way of doing this would be to make site owners liable for whatever happens on their sites. If civil and criminal penalties are imposed, then the glorious days of mocking tragedies and harassing bereaved families may soon be a thing of the past. Oh noes...

The Web is a magnificent thing, but it attract turds.

Some good news (for once).

2010-12-18T21:19:00.003Z

Would it be in bad taste to say this is FABULOUS?

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/12/18/senate.dadt/index.html?hpt=T2

The military's prohibition of openly gay people serving within its ranks is one step closer to ending, after the Senate voted Saturday to repeal the armed forces' "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

Eight Republicans and independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut joined the chamber's Democrats to back the legislation, which passed by a 65-31 margin. The bill needed a simple majority -- meaning support from 51 of the Senate's 100 members -- to pass.

"I want to thank all of the gay men and women who are fighting for us today," said Sen. Susan Collins, of Maine, one of several Republicans who voted for the measure. "We honor your service, and now we can do so openly."

Note the Republican support, small as it was, was very significant - as demographic changes undermine the old certainties, it may well be that some GOPers are realising the importance of wooing the gay vote. All those gay/lesbian soldiers, sailors and airmen, it seems, can finally come out of their Log Cabins.

Things fall apart.

2010-12-17T10:23:00.006Z

An excellent set of images here by sculptor Lori Nix, depicting what happens when humans either disappear (zombies, rapture, daleks, badgerpocalypse etc.) or simply abandon their civilisation. These are actually scale model dioramas, harking back to a time when draughtsmanship was every bit as important to art as theory and concept.

http://www.lorinix.net/the_city/index.html

A particular favourite of mine is the detail rendered on the Galaga arcade machine in one image. The derelict launderette meanwhile seems simply very sad.

We've been here before, of course. There were once huge cities around the Nile and in Mesopotamia. Where did they go? They simply crumbled to dust, leaving behind only the sturdiest of stone monuments to mark their passing.

Musings after the event

2010-12-16T10:46:00.003Z

To cut a long story short, I've said my bit and left them to it. It's strange how getting caught up in flame wars can fill up so much time, but there are more important things in life.

Perhaps the big fallacy of the web is that it is a means of communication, when really it's more about informing and being informed.

The 'communication' is just a distraction from that, unless you want to know just how ugly people can be and how little they actually have to say.

Cullion: What a tosser.

2010-12-15T19:46:00.001Z

Dear Mr. Potato Head,

Good to see you've been reading my blog. A shame you're too much of a turd to not use it out of context, but cogent argument was never your strong point.

Never mind. No wonder your mother abandoned you.

EDIT: You can repeat a lie many times, but it doesn't make it true.

Penny Woolcock's On The Streets: Some Thoughts.

2010-11-08T23:07:00.002Z

Watching this on BBC Four right now. Stark, brilliant, horrifying but humane and heart breakingly honest. Others have already lauded it in more detail, so let me simply recommend this film.

Now some thoughts, through the medium of bulletpoints:

Divide and conquer works - English homeless people are conning themselves if they think their 'countrymen' despise them any less than the East Europeans they think they're better than.
Also, well done on getting off the streets later on. But remember you've got advantages a lot of fellow homeless don't have, and sometimes the dice never roll your way.
We really need to do something about people after they've left the army. Sod your poppies - actually start looking after these poor sods, who were silly or desperate enough to be dutiful servants of a nasty, selfish, hypocritical state.
Brian Haw, you're a cunt. How dare you treat that wonderful man like that? Your life is a waste - placards, and platitudes and bullshit and hate. You will change nothing. An unarmed prophet. A worthless, nasty little cunt. Actually helping Iraqis isn't half as fun as the purity of opposition, though, is it? As said, you're a cunt.
You get the horrible feeling that a sizeable swathe of the population would do away with the homeless if they could get away with it. Another sizeable swathe would look the other way.
Brian Haw, you're still a cunt.
Dogs are a higher form of life than most humans.

POSTSCRIPT: On Saturday, I bought the last Big Issue off a seller on Charing Cross Road. He was overjoyed, and so grateful. I felt a bit embarrassed but wished him well. Then I went off and spent a small fortune on a play and dinner, like tens of thousands of other people in London, night after night, and without end.

Lesley Manville: The Crappest Interview Ever.

2010-10-20T23:25:00.003+01:00

Journalism depends on many things. You must be able to write, meet deadlines and not get sued or fired. If you can do this and make it week by week without killing a sub editor with a gazelle then the odds are that you’re on the right path. This is basic Journoschool 101 stuff. But it’s all for nought if the person you’re interviewing won’t in fact let you do this. Let’s re-emphasise that. You can't do journalism if they don’t talk to you.

The brief was simple enough. Mike Leigh has a new film out, “Another Year”, and as luck would have it, one of the film’s stars - Lesley Manville - was doing interviews at the Soho Hotel in, err, Soho. It sounded easy. Just do some research, turn up, press ‘record’ and away we go.

So off I went, jotter primed and Dictaphone ready, wondering what it would be like to interview her. Would we last 20 minutes? Would we overrun? Would we touch upon her long, long career?

I sat in the reception of the suite, eating a biscuit. Around me, any number of film critic types waxed lyrical over all the films they had seen while they drank coffee. I'm not a film critic by trade or inclination so I just drank diet cola and watched the well-pressed and groomed staff glide in-between the hacks, effortlessly picking up empty glasses and used bottles as they went. They were all but invisible.

Then the PR asked me to follow her into the suite where Lesley was waiting. She was sitting down on a comfy chair when I came in, and looked lean, smooth and limber. “Hello!” I said and shook her hand. She said hello back with a voice full of flourish and not a little thespist swagger.

The interview started straight away. “I’m well!” she said when I asked how she was. But she pulled her cardigan around her as she felt rather cold. Lesley began by telling me how well the film had been received at the London Film Festival the night before and how much of the audience stayed behind afterwards for a Q&A… She sounded very pleased with herself. And why not? The critics were lapping it up, or at least giving in some good notices.

But then I asked about making the film, and she had a question in return. Had I seen the film? No, I replied. After all, I’d only just been given this assignment the day before and I thought we’d see the film first. She stopped looking so cheerful.

Apparently, the only way I could interview her, as she saw it, was if I’d not only seen the film but also had a good understanding of Mike Leigh’s work. In other words, so she could preach to the converted and not have to explain anything to an outsider. I had taken her out of her comfort zone.

It struck me as very counter-intuitive. When one asks questions, it only makes sense that you don’t already know the answers. And I was there less to plug the film, though the interview would have helped do that, and more to talk to someone with experiences and a background quite unlike my own. That’s the point of journalism - to find things out.

Still, Lesley was flummoxed. She made her apologies, leaped out of her seat and walked out of the suite to have an emergency meeting with the PR. They both sounded very concerned, like the Wild Man of Borneo had just come in and started eating the buffet. “And this is where I lose my job!” I found myself whispering at the Dictaphone.

They walked back in, looking rather earnest. Alas and alack, I was simply not equipped to interview an actress about her job without an in-depth knowledge of the subject. In any case, how I was to communicate this unknowable truth to my readers was not made clear. But I had to leave, and though they weren’t hostile, they certainly were firm about it.

I made my apologies and left. Walking out of the hotel, I realised that my only real experience of Mike Leigh’s films was watching them for about five minutes and then changing the channel. They seem to epitomise a morbid, pessimistic and mundane navel gazing tendency in British cinema. The kind that wins BAFTAs and yet seldom surfaces at multiplexes or branches of Blockbuster or wherever actual humdrum people exist outside of Leigh’s kitchen sink dramas.

But I didn’t understand. I wasn’t the sort of person who 'got' Mike Leigh, so how on Earth could I get it this time? That seemed to be the lesson I took from the interview - you’re either in or you’re out, and invites are seldom given freely.

Rat Salad Days - Why The Browne Report Is A Load Of Brown Stuff.

2010-10-13T19:40:00.004+01:00

As the findings of the Browne Report sink in (in summary, 'Pay Up or Piss Off'), let’s dwell on the real issues at stake here.

Like the hypocrisy. Some pampered had-it-all boomers love to whine that in their day only the top 5% got into university and the rest got jobs. (Ergo, all the young 'uns today should pay through the nose for what their predecessors got for free.) I feel a strange urge to shout back that this is just another spin on the 'Do As I Say, Not As I Do' argument. And then brick their windows.

Plus it sort of misses the fact that in those days there were other options for post-A Level students. Like lots of jobs that didn't need a degree. You'd be surprised at just how many shit-shovelling, low-level, braindead office, reception and call centre jobs require a BA now. Images of some blessed soul in bellbottoms climbing the ladder to paradise and then kicking it away somehow leap to mind. There was a time when you didn't need a degree to be a nurse, for example. Or, for that matter, a businessman or a bank manager. You just needed a brain, and debt was seen - for some reason - as a Very Bad Thing.

Or how about the doublethink? Many a free market maven (or 'dogmatic arsehole' as I like to call them) scream that students gain the most from their degrees so should pay most of the cost. This sounds like a strong argument until you realise, by definition, that the whole point of education is to benefit the recipient. I may well have greater earning power by having a degree, but I also earn more for being able to add up and read too. By such a standard should we also charge for GCSEs, Primary Schools and Infant Schools? Actually, pretend I didn't say that. It might give them ideas.

Then there's the old chestnut - 'why should the dustman who didn't go to university pay for those that do?' Well, Mr. Dustman will no doubt change his tune pretty damn fast when one of the Dustchildren gets into Leeds Met. Secondly, we already pay for things that do not have a direct benefit for us, but are still for the greater good. Like Mr. Dustman's medical care and pension or his children's benefits if they are unemployed, even if it means not a jot for you if they live or die. You see, that's how society works - we help each other out, even if there isn't a direct payback.

But the argument is flawed in another way too. If degrees really do improve the lives of students* then any (economic) gains are threatened by saddling those same students with crushing debts. Therefore, these people are arguing that students should be benefited by education but only in a way that does not benefit them. That makes sense if you are an idiot.

What doesn't make sense, though, are the social costs. There is the knock-on effect of parents having to divert their finances to helping their kids through the BA/BSc grinder. And then there are those graduates who have to put off buying a house or having children because of the debts they are servicing. This does not bode well for healthy, secure societies. But hey! They get a degree!

Ultimately, it is the lack of honesty that is most galling. What most fees advocates really want is all the (economic) windfalls of a well-educated society, but they sure as hell don't actually want to cough up for it. Hence why sane ideas like a graduate tax were dropped by the Coalition. No one wants to spread the cost even though this would be both more just and sensible. And curiously, very few recipients of free university education seem willing to pay for the benefits their degrees have given them over the years and decades. Nor do they seem to feel any shame for betraying the young in that artful way that horrible old bastards tend to do in this country.

Nor does anyone admit that universities are now just another cog in the economy. Joyless and miserablist as this is, it is also very naive. The skills we all thought the country needed in 1970 or 2008 were quite different from the ones that turned out to be useful. And society needs thinkers as well as doers and office fodder. Adam Smith didn't have an MBA, after all. He was a philosopher.

But what does it say about us? We are willing to condemn future generations to £35k debts, if they’re lucky. And yet we still vote for white elephants like the Olympics, Trident and a bloated NHS bureaucracy. It is a hard-faced penny-pinching age we live in, in part through necessity. But the thing to remember about misers is that in the end they are the living embodiments of false economy.

* Considering that Alan Turing's Maths degree and Sylvia Plath's English MA didn't stop them topping themselves, one must presume this is solely an economic argument.

Teabaggers & The Grizzly Paradox.

2010-10-08T17:37:00.004+01:00

The Tea Party movement is fundamentally self-defeating. It is founded on grievance, has a naively malign view of politics and has a sort of paranoid nuttiness that would be funny if it wasn't so frightening.

Yes, it's the Militant Tendency reincarnated as a right wing* nutjob fringe, with the only hope being that they will make the Republican Party as unelectable as the UK Labour Party in the 1980s, as it is equally culpable in letting its rogues take over and run amok. The parallels between both Militant and Tea Party are surprising, and yet clear - both emerged from a deep trauma in the parts of the body politic they represent, and in the end did or will do even more harm to them.

The centre, meanwhile always prevails eventually, and it is foolish to stake so much on a lumpen WASP ragemob (token exceptions notwithstanding**) just at the point when that demographic starts to fade away into also-ran status with all the other adjective-Americans. Regardless of the harm they do on their way down, this is the death spasm of a certain kind of America, with certain values, outlooks, hypocrisies and ethno-religious make-ups that no longer hold sway for better or worse.

But if all else fails, one can sit on the sidelines and laugh as the dolts realise they've been duped and used by billionaire backers who wouldn't piss on them otherwise. The right has its own useful idiots, though that is already a cliché to say. That they will be their own primary victims in the end is another.

So let's dwell instead on Daft Bint Meets Serena Joy Sarah Palin, only two years away from doing a Michael Foot and partying like it's 1983. She describes herself and her female supporters as 'Mama Grizzlies', and this easy metaphor is taken up by the teabaggers with glee.

But in a way, this description says more than just 'wild and free and innit for da cubz'. A bear after all is a solitary creature at odds with its omnivorous, inquisitive nature. It is drawn towards human settlements yet is volatile and unpredictable. It sometimes eats its own, hibernates whilst other animals are forced to live on their wits, needs space yet roams widely, and whilst resourceful and clever, is not quite able to find a place for itself in the modern world it keeps interacting with. It also shits in the wood, much as the teabaggers shit on their own doorsteps.

So in that sense, the Tea Party is profoundly Grizzly. And like many a bear, its rank and file have seen what is happening to the natural order it used to benefit from - and realise, in the end, that the game is up. No wonder they're getting rowdy.

* I hesitate to use the term Libertarian as this is a broad term and Libs don't herd.

** Whatever the merits or lack thereof of Lloyd Marcus' argument, he does it no good simply by whom he is associating with.

You Don't Need An E-Reader To Read.

2010-10-07T14:09:00.002+01:00

Ever seen that Kindle advert, where the two Bohos sit on a beach and read their e-book readers, no doubt feeling smug that they've spent a small fortune on a fashionable toy?

Well, that's part of the problem with e-readers; that they sell you a problem as well as a solution - namely, that you somehow need an electronic device to store your books whereas before you could just pick a few paperbacks and shove them in your suitcase.

But the point is that you don't need an e-reader. Books still work perfectly well, and you are in fact being taken for a ride. It's simply that - through the power of advertising - Kindles and their ilk are 'cool' (because the TV told you so!) and books are 'old-fashioned' (because in today's culture, reading is something you're forced to do at school or university). You're being sold something you've effectively already got. Ever been to a library or spent time in a second hand bookshop? Usually the answer is no, because they can't afford to advertise like Amazon or Apple or Samsung... You’ve been had.

We certainly don't need Kindles in the way that we need washing machines, medical advances, computers, flushing toilets and so on. Far from being a technophobic rant, this article is more than willing to declare that technology is great and has made things considerably better. The challenge is now not to create superfluous electronic toys but to make our consumer products ever more energy efficient, more long lasting and more affordable. That's not so sexy as, say, an e-reader, though, so we buy the products with the most allure, the most street cred - the most media exposure.

Nor are e-readers an advance that improves an existing technology like mobile phones or digital cameras/recorders. Instead, it's just conspicuous consumption, just like its equally superfluous (and smug) cousin, the iPhone. They're not really about making your life better and more about waving them about (preferably far away from any passing muggers) to impress the rest of the cool kids and make the naff kids feel guilty about having skint parents (or being skint parents). It's so petty and far, far away from the joy of reading those naff things on shelves that are made from paper.

And so what if e-readers gets people reading? If they need gimmicks and a multi-million ad campaign to do this then maybe they're not the people who should be reading books. Their time might be better spent on finding some substance to their lives. And if the book trade really wants to save its hide, then maybe it needs to focus on why people are reading less and less, or why they are not buying books as much as they used to.

And something else is being lost here - the very physicality of the book, the fact that you can hold it, feel it and know what page to turn to and when. The value of owning something (rather than a stream of data) is being lost, and this threatens our connection with the world around us as we lose the joy of that contact. It’s already happened to music – too many people live for the quick thrill of a download and ignore the joy of owning a CD or discovering an old vinyl album, the joy of actually being able to hold something. In the end, what e-readers represent is another step in our relentless march away from our surroundings and into a shallow, empty inner world of instant gratification. No wonder they’re popular.

The Road to Coronation Street: Now 100% Florizel Free!

2010-09-17T04:13:00.006+01:00

PLANET NORTH

"The Road to Coronation Street”
16/09/2010
BBC Four

Often it’s not the end product that’s interesting so much as the process that gives rise to it. Anyone who’s watched ‘making of’ documentaries or heard a decent DVD commentary may have noticed this. Once you’ve seen all the effort and hard work those goes into the end product, it seems much less exciting and interesting in comparison.

Such is the case with ‘The Road to Coronation Street’, a drama from ITV broadcast – confusingly – on BBC4 last night. (But more on that later.) This tells of how Street creator and writer Tony Warren fought, often tooth and nail, to get the UK’s longest running soap onto our screens. As drama goes, it is concise, focussed, well structured and flowing, with some great dialogue and characterisation. Which is to say, this story about how UK soaps came into being is much more fun than the soaps themselves these days.

The cast certainly helps. David Dawson plays Tony Warren as a sort of souped-up, gayed-out, speed riddled Ken Barlow on a mission. (The ‘real’ Ken Barlow, or William Roache, is meanwhile played with a sort of delusional ‘I’m too good for this’ pathos by his son, James.)

Elsewhere, Jessie Wallace (yes, ‘er from Eastenders) camps it up with brassy glee as Pat Phoenix, the audition scene between her and Dawson crackling with electricity. Meanwhile, surfacing as a sort of everyman amongst the carnival of elephantine egos is director Derek Bennet, played with both humanity and normality by Shaun Dooley.

And then, in the final act of the drama, comes along Lynda Baron, rumbling into view with a Godzilla-like presence as Violet Carson, invoking the spirit of Ena Sharples with harridan vigour and resigned fatalism in equal measure.

The story itself is a good balance of drama and fact, taking obvious liberties with the events and participants whilst not obscuring them with too much schmaltz. (Though some of the Pat Phoenix scenes do slap it on with a trowel.) The simmering professional, class and personal tensions are well depicted too, being reined in enough to not obscure the drama, but shocking enough when they do surface.

For it's telling that back in 1960, the thought of northern plebs played by northern thesps was seen as too radical and not commercial enough. This thinking remains, but has merely moved onto other pariahs who are seen as the kiss of death, unless they’re splayed out for all to see on sleazy reality TV.

And it’s telling too where this excellent drama was shown. Made by ITV Studios for the BBC, it was shown on BBC 4, light years away from the mass market ITV1 and BBC 1& 2 schedules. Almost in spite of itself, ‘The Road to Coronation Street’ leaves us wondering whether a modern Tony Warren would even get a twitch of an eyebrow from the fickle powers that be, convinced as they are that they, and they alone, know what the public wants.

BARLOWNESS: 8/10

Edgar Wright vs. The Law of Diminishing Returns (A Scott Pilgrim Movie Review).

2010-09-05T16:44:00.000+01:00

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Universal, 2010
Dir. By Edgar Wright
Starring Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead et al

Much ink has been spilt, and equal amounts of bandwidth wasted, on why comic book adaptation Scott Pilgrim vs. the World flopped at the Box Office. (Indeed, you could even say it Bob-ombed! Arf!)

Hypotheses range from the fact that it was badly marketed or that it came out at the wrong time or that it was aimed at geeks, who are unfortunately all two-faced, treacherous thieving c*nts with a bloated sense of entitlement.

Perhaps these are all correct, but let me propose another reason. Maybe the film wasn't that good in the first place?

True, at first this heavily stylised tale does sort of work. The first third of the film crackles with wit, sharp dialogue and the wonderful visual effects make a great impression. The problem, though, is that all the sight gags, SFX flourishes and one-liners get repetitive very quickly, and soon all the other flaws start to surface too.

Like the two leads. Michael Cera is awful, a flaccid lettuce with a ghastly Winnie-The-Pooh voice who brings neither passion nor life to yet another outing as a sort of everyhipster. Meanwhile, Scott's paramour cum McGuffin, Ramona Flowers, is played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead with a studied insouciance, but that's all she bothers to do for the entire film.

The rest of the cast does what it can with roles as 2D as cardboard, which is to say, not very well at all. Only Kieran Culkin, playing Scott's man-eating gay flatmate and moral compass Wallace, really delivers the goods as he tears through every scene he's in with a strong presence and a depth and soul the film otherwise lacks.

The film also suffers because its source material, a six volume comic epic set in Toronto, is basically unfilmable, at least all in one go. The Scott Pilgrim graphic novels are too epic and nuanced to translate well onto the screen in such a truncated manner (and people had the nerve to complain about Watchmen!), with the film trying desperately to include as much of the story as possible and so barely doing any of it any justice. 960+ pages just do not fit into 112 minutes, especially when most of the audience haven't even heard of the comic book in question.

What stands out is what's missed out. One major theme of the graphic novels that Scott is actually a bit of a swine, and how he overcomes his own turd behaviour. This doesn't even make it into the film, in part because the script hasn't got the room, and also because Cera's so insipid, he could rape a dog and shoot nuns, and you'd still barely even register it. Fans of the comics may well spend their viewing spotting all the bits either cut out or just ignored. Even the in-film art care of creator Bryan Lee O'Malley just serves to remind you what you're missing in the original comics. This is a film that simply isn't compatible with its source material,

It just proves that Indy comics and mass media simply don't mix. Daniel Clowes' script for the Ghost World movie was by necessity a departure from his original comic strip. Peter Bagge's forlorn quest to whore out and get a TV series will never come true. Robert Crumb won't even try, and Evan Dorkin will never be the cultural colossus he deserves to be. Why? Because by definition, any art form which rejects the mainstream will always have problems when it tries to rejoin it. And that goes for cult comics from Canada too.

Curiously, the film has strong parallels with Spiderman 2 (apart from the box office takings), in that it starts strong but overdoes it and runs out of steam, and so ends up trying desperately to recapture its original spark. The main difference was that Spiderman 2 had a bigger audience to play with and could afford to lose the plot a bit. SPVW couldn't but does so anyway.

Much too has been made of British director Edgar Wright being in charge. Tellingly, though, his most successful films - Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz - were disciplined, low budget, made for the screen in mind, had good characterisation and never alienated their audiences despite their geek heritage. SPVW is none of these things, and so is a far inferior product. At heart, the film is less a Scott Pilgrim spin-off, and more an overlong Spaced episode at its most tiresome and self-indulgent.

Put simply, it didn't work and didn't deserve to succeed. And it hasn't.

EPICNESS 4/10

Ultimate Big Brother: Josie's Twilight of the Sods

2010-08-28T13:01:00.007+01:00

ULTIMATE BIG BROTHER

Channel 4

August-September 2010

When they look back and chronicle the many ups and downs of British civilisation, one moment that will stand out is when Josie 'Farmyward Boogie' Gibson looked away from the 2010 Big Brother diary room camera with wet, puffy eyes and wept 'I'm not a celebrity. I'M NORMAL!!!'

Once, everyone wanted to be a celebrity. No one strictly knew what a celebrity was, other than a kind of pliant attention whore with no or little talent, or a glorified freak show performer with added douchebaggery thrown in for good measure.

The long and the short was - they were Faces and Heels, pointless, but successful. And they appealed to a culture where actually having enough individuality or talent to be properly successful was sneered at because it was too much hard work, and we were all too afraid to admit that maybe we didn't have what it took, and we were condemned to be non-entitites. It's a bitter truth to accept in today's narcissistic, shallow hellhole culture. 'Slebdom' was the ultimate expression of that, where you could aspire to succeed without actually having to earn that success or face up to your shortcomings.

The net result of this was a whole culture driven towards the flicker of dozens of cameras or hateful, mind-numbingly bad celebrity magazines that obsessed with women's bodies in that hideous way that only other women could stoop to. You too could be a success as long as you looked malnourished and had no noticeable human flaws that reminded others of your or their own humanity.

And then came along Josie, a somewhat well fed, non-airbrushed and mundane, yet charismatic and likeable individual in a Big Brother house of mainly nice people (for once). Tellingly, most of them weren't celebrity material because they seemed too real, not shallow enough to really be celebrity fodder, and too human to really want to be one of those shrieking cardboard cutouts. The show's last series ended not as a casting couch but more like the contest between everymen that it was originally meant to be.

Sam Pepper came close to the sort of utter prat cum performing monkey that used to prosper under the old system, but he was evicted and didn't even make it into the final. Instead, the dwindling 'sleb' faithful subscribed to that most niche of outlets - his Twitter feed - leaving the rest of the country to vote for someone they actually could empathise with.

And what then did this year's winner, Josie, do when she then found herself in a house full of 'classic' Big Brother contestants, those shrieking and empty yet loud and ostentatious shallow Gods of a preposterous age? She wigged out, and left. She wasn't one of them, and - most importantly - she didn't want to be. She chose anonymity and mundanity over a fake and glittering life under never-ending scrutiny. Reality TV yielded to reality. It was a turning point; the real had triumphed over reality. Celebrity lost to humanity.

Reviewing the Ads: Nesquik Bunny Death Spiral

2010-07-28T14:33:00.002+01:00

This then is the new Nesquik advert:

LINK

Yes, it's yet another use of emotional blackmail, junk sentiment and bowlderised reality to make mothers give in whenever their mewling little shits demand sugar-coated, processed crap. O a promo for a yummy milkshake - you may delete according to taste.

But what stands out is the almost rasping, laboured voice of the Nesquik bunny. He sounds like Joe Pasquale with severe constipation. Or like he's terminally ill, the corporate mascot recording his final poignant work even as they read the Last Rites and the hospice nurse inserts a rubber tube up his bottom.

"They only grow up once!" he gasps as his lungs collapse and his pupils dilate. It's the sort of thing an old nanna in Eastenders says to her estranged daughter just before she dies during the harrowing Xmas special, where Little Mo is later ripped apart by Yuletide weasels.

Maybe this is deliberate? You can imagine the conversation. "Mummy, why does the rabbit sound so unwell?" "Just drink your Nesquik, darling, and maybe he'll get better..." Mission accomplished, at least for the milkshake peddlers.

Doctor Who, Series 5, Episode 13: The Big Whimper.

2010-07-03T00:45:00.000+01:00

DOCTOR WHO
"The Big Bang”
26/06/2010
BBC One

So thirteen weeks of mostly disappointment later, and what do we have? Well, the Doc’s stuck in the Pandorica, Amy is ‘mostly dead’, Rory is rather upset (and plastic), almost the entire universe has ceased to exist, and the younger Amy is getting mailshots from a weird bloke in a Fez. Riversong, meanwhile, is caught up in a time loop and the TARDIS is about to blow up. So far so good.

But really, this is less a story and more an array of narrative tricks used to distract the viewer from a truly shabby script. The time paradoxes (where characters leap in and out of narrative order via Riversong’s magic wand – err, I mean, time bracelet) were done to death in “Blink” and for that matter Back to the Future II. (it’s sad to realise how much Nu Who is dependent on ‘homages’ to Hollywood movies.)

Old Who never quite got into this too much and that's for a good reason - it's too convoluted and it also sucks in terms of good narrative and structure. The show learned quickly to focus on characters and events rather than naff gimmicks.

The rest of the episode is that most loathsome of writerly cop-outs: The reset button, which, no matter how show leader Stephen Moffat wants to dress it up, is what this episode’s central conceit is, and which exposes most starkly the decline of the show after only five years of its second wind. Indeed, when it’s not trying to be Buffy The Vampire Slayer or Babylon 5, the show is now also trying to be Dragonball Z with its sheer repetitive, lazy reliance on deaths that mean nothing and worn-out formats.

Once past the cheesy happy-ending (truly sick-bucket territory and far too tidy and convenient), you then realise that what you’ve seen is not a resolution to the previous story arc but simply a preluding to yet another story arc that's just like the others and will be every bit as disappointing. There is something profoundly cynical about this, like what you are watching is pretty irrelevant, but WHAT MATTERS is that oft-promised and never-delivered extravaganza just around the corner. We cannot enjoy the show as it is but what it might possibly, perhaps, probably give us in the future. This is no longer a show in its own right but an advertisement for another show that, as we now all know, will never get made. It says a lot when all the speculation on the Web is much more satisfying than the real thing when it was finally delivered.

So how about this, Moff? Why not just tell a story instead of always setting up the next one? Or guerilla marketing where bullshit is leaked to the web so everyone is disappointed with the final article? Don't promise. Just do. And no, it's never been a fucking fairy story either. Good sci-fi needs to take itself a bit seriously after all. Maybe then we'll get stories that don't keep relying on poxy Deus ex Machina, even ones that get vaguely hinted at over 13 episodes in a sort of titanic arse-covering exercise. Or relying on novelty, leaving aside there being a new Doctor. But then that would mean facing up to the show’s many shortcomings: Its obsession with celebrity, its shallowness, its weak scripts and its cardboard characters and settings.

As for the cast, well – let’s just say I haven’t changed my mind on Karen Gillan. Yes, I have spent 13 weeks raining shit on a hapless 22-year-old actress but it's just the character is so fucking horrible, and Gillan's performance just revs it up to the max. It doesn’t say much that Amelia Pond (the eight-year-old one, as played by Gillan’s cousin, Caitlin Blackwood) is much more likeable than the grown up one, but then it’s a strange fact that little girls are often far more dynamic and interesting than young women, if not as interesting as old men.

Speaking of old men, Who XI finally starts making sense in this one, Matt Smith somehow fitting into the role at last, even if he’s still Tennanting from time to time. He may well be remembered as the Doctor with the most teething troubles, but he finally brings a unique character and bearing to the role. And as an aside, what with Old Who costume designer Barbara Kidd rejoining the fold, it may be time to do the unthinkable – AND GIVE MATT A HAT. Namely a fez, which suits him.

Also strong, as to be expected, is the interplay between the Doctor and Amy’s poor-sod fiancée (and later husband) Rory, care of the series’ big find, Arthur Darville. There are some excellent scenes between the two, with a chemistry that’s impressive to see. It’s also a father-son relationship; an old, conflicted and haunted Doctor trying to guide and protect an angry, resentful and hurt Rory, still finding his own identity and sense of manhood. And it is here, rather than all the over-amped Amy sub-plotting, that the real heart of the show can be found.

Also, suffice to say, Alex Kingston continues to deliver the goods as Riversong. (Yes, I know it’s actually ‘River Song’, but it looks better if you write it as one word.) Her lines are silly, her role too much like a lame pastiche of a superhero or space opera Mary Sue, and the ongoing ‘who the bloody hell is she?’ foreplay is getting rather tedious now. But Kingston makes the role come alive and even be worthwhile, if only when she’s not being used as yet another way of foreshadowing another vast future disappointment. She is also Moff’s answer to RTD’s Captain Jack, the character he’d love to write a series about, if it weren’t for that pesky Doctor they have to write for instead.

And so they produce cobblers like ‘The Big Bang’, almost out of spite. Cast notwithstanding, it was lazy and shallow. This is no longer storytelling; it's just setting up a 'spectacular' that everyone's already seen five times before. Strangely enough, it all seems rather repetitive now. Even RTD could write better than this load of old shit.

So, thirteen weeks later, what do we have to show for it? One genuinely good episode, one genuinely entertaining one and one passable one (Smartie/M&M-coloured Daleks notwithstanding). The rest, an awful disappointment. The kool-aid sippin’, easily impressed and poorly discriminating public have already eaten it up, perhaps in desperation as deep down they must know the Emperor is stark bollock naked. But what we’ve really had here is a series as bad if not worse as Who in its mid-to-late 80s nadir, and once the hive mind lets go of its delusion, it’s hard to see how this series has any future at all.

WHOPOINTS 5

Doctor Who, Series 5, Episode 12: The World Ends (Sort Of).

2010-07-03T00:44:00.000+01:00

DOCTOR WHO
"The Pandorica Opens”
19/06/2010
BBC One

The main problem with the new Dr. Who format is that it keeps sticking to the same formula. Namely, a season finale that’s set up throughout the series, loads of big hints, fanboys frothing at the mouth on that hotbed of Autism called the Web, and then a loud, bombastic, gormless power creep marathon at the end that never quite delivers.

True, ‘The End of Time’ sort of dodged that one, but only because it featured DAVID FUCKING TENNANT regenerating – which isn’t a common event as a rule. Otherwise, it’s been exactly the same narrative each and every time, and five years later, it’s looking rather worn out.

But like a porn freak, Nu Who keeps chasing that original thrill (which was rather lame and depressing the first time), always missing the target because there never was one to hit in the first place.

Series 5’s damp squib, “The Pandorica Opens” (followed, as with all the other damp squibs with an even damper, squibier episode which bodges everything the week after) is a case in point. We find out what’s really behind those cracks, all those questions are (mostly) answered and the subsititution of Special FX in place of story proceeds ever onwards.

Here, all the Doctor’s old enemies unite to shove him in the Pandorica, which turns out to be a giant prison cell, because they think he’s going to bugger up the universe. What this means in practice is that the cash-strapped show has plundered its storerooms for all its old (but not too old) costumes and mixed in a few expensive new Daleks and Chris Ryan (a welcome return, as it happens) pretending to be a Sontaran again. Even the Autons resurface, one of which performs the dual public service of returning Rory to the show (sort of) and killing the Pond-beast (yay!) all in one fell swoop.

It’s unconvincing, just a big set up for an ‘event’ (and some pointless horse riding) that lacks any real human depth or character. The story is shoddy. It’s incredibly lazy, and full of a sort of sterile conservatism that rivals the show’s nadir in the 80s. But never mind! Here’s some big bangs! Whooshing space ships! Loud orchestral music! This is what happens when British TV tries to ape Hollywood – an unconvincing pastiche that veers dangerously close to the nightmare scenario:Turkish Cinema.

There are good bits. Arthur Darvill, it’s good to see you back – and well done on bringing some real humanity to this mess. (And Chris Ryan, oh how we missed you and your roaring fascist ET Napoleon schtick! Keep getting cloned – you are a Sontaran after all!) Matt Smith is sounding desperately like he’s almost cracked it, give or take some lapses into uncharacteristic set-piece posturing, and the Troughton is strong in him too, with a Tomb of the Cybermen-esque pep talk to Amy. Yes, River Song returns, but the other edge to that sword is that at least we get Alex Kingston back, and she’s too good for this load of old arse, frankly.

Amy Pond? You finally rejoice when the Rory-Auton zaps her dead, as she is so annoying, obnoxious and slappable at this point, you rather hope it’s her who’s going into the magic box. The ongoing campaign to repurpose the show as ‘Doctor Douchebag’ continues too, the episode continuing to make the Doc look less like a protagonist but more of a twat, and even a villain, or at least a fool, when Matt Smith isn’t allowed to portray him as – y’know – the main character.

Perhaps a good summary of what’s wrong with this episode is encapsulated in the clash between Amy and a Cyberman. Firstly, it makes no sense – if the machine parts of a Cyberman can operate autonomously, then why do they need a human component? Also, how is Amy able to ward it off with a flaming torch and how is the Rory-Auton able to kill it with a Gladius, seeing that Cybermen are bulletproof (as a rule)? Secondly, there is the power creep again – apparently Cyberman heads can sprout tentacles and fire poison darts and their arms can fire independently. It’s not as bad as the invincincible flying munchkin Daleks of death, but it’s getting close. And finally, it is unbelievable – why would they not spot a dismembered Cyberman lying all over Stonehenge (and underneath it) in the first place?

This, plus a ‘reveal’ that suggests that the main conceit of the series is going to be rather infantile and quite literally a ‘fairy tale’, suggests a show that doesn’t respect itself or its audience that much. This is a rather depressing thought – that not only is such a show treated like children’s TV but that ‘children’s TV’ is shorthand for crap.

WHOPOINTS 3

Doctor Who, Series 5, Episode 11: The Eleventh Doctor's Eleventh Episode.

2010-07-03T00:42:00.000+01:00

DOCTOR WHO
"The Lodger”
12/06/2010
BBC One

James Corden may have peaked too early. The first time I saw him was on a Tango ad, where his house was invaded by swarms of red-head men and he was driven to madness as they broke his spirit. It was great comedy. The next time I saw him was in 2002's Cruise of the Gods, where he played - fittingly - a fanboy of a naff 80s sci-fi series, all too painfully aware of his own ironies, whilst also deeply in love with a show with heart as well as tack. Sound familiar? It was plainly Davison and (Colin) Baker-era Who, with a dash of Blake's 7 and a hint of the obscure kids' TV sci-fi show Captain Zep. He showed a lot of promise, bringing together a studied wit with a real vulnerability.

Then he peaked too soon with the overrated Gavin & Stacey as Gavin's bff, Smithy. Neither as inspired as some claim, nor likely to be remembered, it typecast him as the archetypical fat oaf, a role he still plays now on TV with his own James Corden's World Cup. And then there are disasters like Horne & Corden or the bleeding awful Lesbian Vampire Killers. Nothing fucks you over like early success, and yet as his rather sparkling performance in the TV adaption of 'The Gruffalo' (!!!) shows, he can still bring vim and vigour to his performances, when he's allowed to.

So is his role as straight man to Who 11 in 'The Lodger' a disaster or a renaissance? The bad news is that he's still playing a fat oaf, but the good news is that he brings some of that old humanity to the role, and makes us sympathise with his character Craig Owens, a loser-in-the-making, marking time at a dead end job and making eyes at his best friend and unrequited love Sophie (Daisy Haggard) while sinking into a fast-food-and-lager stasis. True, Corden is playing to type, but on the other hand, it's nice to have a lardy performer who neither apologises nor really cares about what you think re: his waistline, and Corden also puts in an entertaining, engaging and funny performance. He's still got it, after all!

Alas, there is also a nasty neighbour upstairs who keeps luring people into its lair and isn't letting them out, and a nasty black mould is spreading on the ceiling. Then a tall, lanky weirdo in a bow tie turns up at the door offering to rent out the spare room, cash in hand... And then hilarity ensues.

In many ways, then, this episode has a lot in common with 'zom-com' classic Shaun of the Dead. Both have a lovable loser whose dead end life is transformed by strange events and who ends up with the woman he loves because, and not despite, of the mayhem that ensues.

The main difference here is that it's Shaun's disgruntled girlfriend who makes the biggest journey in SoD, learning to accept Shaun for what he is rather than what she thinks he ought to be (the line 'At least you tried' can be read on many levels). Here, though, the loser's own failings, mediocrity and lack of courage is the focus, as the Doctor casually exposes Craig's every social, professional and intellectual flaw.

What is refreshing here, though, is that Craig benefits from this by finally accepting that he needs to admit his love for Sophie, and so allow his life to proceed. The Doctor is the catylist he needs rather than a threat to his manhood, despite how it may appear at points.

In previous Nu Who series, after all, the Doctor's challenging of the status quo is often portrayed as a Bad Thing. (Why Jackie Tyler's lumpenprole 'know your place' mentality was never really dealt with is just one of the show's many intellectual and moral failings. Donna Noble's mother also needed a proper bitch-slapping.) Here, though, the Doctor is more of a fairy god-doctor, which is perhaps how he should be portrayed - he is meant, after all, to be a force for good.

In any case, and as said, Corden does a good job of portraying a man who is, as the episode puts it, turning into his sofa, making his sloth and small-mindedness clear, while keeping him sympathetic nonetheless. Haggard's portrayal of Daisy is seamless too, her love for Craig contrasted with her urge to live a life beyond pizza, beer and call centres via a nimble balancing act from the performer.

Matt Smith's progress, meanwhile, continues ever onwards. He's still not sounding 'old' enough but he has the eccentricity nailed down and the episode cleverly takes him away from the TARDIS and too much Sonic Screwdriving, making him do what the Doctor should be doing - making it up on the spot and relying on his resourcefulness rather than a magic wand. Away from the ghastly Amy Pond, he also gets to work as a character in his own right and be, well, the star of the show. He can talk to cats and make sensors out of rotary clotheslines! He mindmelds by head-butting you! He can play football! He can act like an alien and really confuse Craig's friends! And his ability to see time out of synch, last seen way back in 'The Eleventh Hour', returns in this episode too, again to great effect, and in a way that makes you wish they'd used it more.

It's almost like this episode is a reminder of what a Who episode can be like without the bullshit. Even the aforementioned Pond-Beast is kept well away from the action, stuck on an unstable TARDIS, and only popping in now and then to remind us of what a total arse she is. The script is strong and well-written, with a villain that is original and not strictly speaking monstrous - merely ruthless, calculating and amoral. The only problem is when the story tries to do too much in too little time (a recurring problem with Nu Who as previous reviews have noted). But the episode also has a good structure, is fun to watch and is genuinely entertaining - if only it were part of the majority and not the minority in this ill-fated series! And if only the new TARDIS set looked as good as that of the alien ship, but that's another rant altogether...

WHOPOINTS 8

Doctor Who, Series 5, Episode 10: Van Gogh and the Disabled Space Chicken of Death.

2010-06-09T03:00:00.000+01:00

DOCTOR WHO
"Vincent and the Doctor”
05/06/2010
BBC One

(Yes, I know this one is late. Stop whingeing.)

How the hell did this script ever get off the ground? I'm not talking about the quality of the end product here. But you have to admit that the episode pitch must have been a sight to behold: "Yeah, well Vincent van Gogh meets the Doctor and they end up fighting a killer space dinosaur-chicken. Hilarity ensues!" On the other hand, connections always help, and since it was Richard 'I've written loads of comedies, me!' Curtis who wrote this script, he could probably have got away with an episode wherein the Doctor travels back in time and eats dog shit with Divine.

For those unfamiliar with his work, Curtis is a sentimentalist of the worst kind, as seen by his buying into the mawkish, fatalistic and rather 2-D folk memory of World War One in the disappointing 'Blackadder Goes Forth', or the worst excesses in overrated rom-coms like Love Actually or 'Four Weddings...'. Don't even get me started on the historical liberties he took with 'The Boat That Rocked' or the Soma-and-Victory-Gin-sodden distortion of British life in shit like Notting Hill and Bridget Jones' Diary. He is the epitome of British luvvie culture - a hack with a lazy reliance on cheap schmaltz and a complacent view of the world echoed by his click-step behind the bien pensant and the banally liberal.

His script is fittingly uneven, then, with a flat and shallow story line and little beyond the three leads (and Bill Nighy, here playing a bow-tie loving art historians) to fill the episode with any real human emotion or meaning. This draws attention to the main test that the episode fails: When its main conceit is so silly, it had better damn well have some depth to it. But "Vincent & The Doctor" just doesn't - it makes no use of van Gogh's world beyond using it as a source of victims to be killed and angry mobs to throw stones.

Worse still, the alien is awful. other than having that fake CGI look, it also looks like an enormous plucked turkey. While not as bad as the oversized Vespid in 'The Lion & The Wasp', or as embarrassing as - well, 60% of all Who monsters, c. 1963-2010, if we're being honest - it still hints at CGI for its own sake. Whereas, the fact that it can only at first be seen by van Gogh (or the Doctor, if he's using the right equipment) should have been the case for the whole episode, the creature remaining invisible to the viewer and so remaining enigmatic. That would, however, have required giving the audience the benefit of the doubt and not indulging Nu Who's over reliance on special FX, so of course, we got a naff killer Bernard Matthews' instead.

Matt Smith puts in a better performance, continuing to become ever more his own Doctor. The only question is whether he can do this in time to justify both his own long-term place in the series, and indeed the future of that series. Certainly, as gratuitous archive shots of William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton show, the show is desperate to place Who XI into the canon through association, as if it feels like it has to overcompensate, which is rather worrying. Karen Gillan is blahblahblah etcetera, etcetera, crap but shows a flicker of depth when she is confronted by the mortality of her favourite painter. (As per usual, she turns out of the blue to be a van Gogh groupie, in that make-it-up-as-you-go-along Nu Who way.)

Tony Curran's Vincent van Gogh is good stuff and shows a lot of effort, but plainly lacks the time and space to be a fully developed performance. You can't really jam van Gogh into 45 minutes with a TARDIS and a space monster and properly explore the character - there isn't the room, but at least Curran does what he can. Again, the lack of length to many Nu Who episodes turns out to be something of an Achilles’ Heel. And the episode's doubling up as a tribute to Van Gogh isn't always that good. The gushing sentimentality that takes place when Vincent is taken to 2010 and an exhibition of his own works is truly vomit inducing. The only redeeming moment is when the trip proves less lifesaving than Amy hopes, van Gogh's fate still etched in stone, or rather onto the canvas with those striking, primal colours. At last, a harsh reality creeps in.

For the good parts, when they are there, are very strong indeed. The clever set design, which recreates the many settings for Van Gogh's paintings, stands out and even serves as an effective plot device. While the scene where the evening sky is transformed into 'Starry Night' is actually a sight to behold, inspiring and rousing, and one of only a very, very few highlights in what has been a worn-out and disappointing series. And then there are the little touches: The fact that the TARDIS translates Dutch into Scottish English or the pointed comment from the Doctor that he uses the Sonic Screwdriver too much hint at a script that is more than willing to admit its own ironies. Van Gogh's musing that the monster isn't that much different from the dumb villagers who fear and harass him is a genuinely sad moment.

And the Doctor's closing speech, that life can and must be a combination of both the good and the bad and that one doesn't always overshadow the other, has a maturity the show hasn't had in years, nay decades. Curtis is, then, more like RTD than Moffat - he can very occasionally do good things when he's not entangled in his own tropes or writing cheesy dialogue for floppy haired twats like Hugh Grant. Still, it could have been better, which is pretty much the case for the rest of this benighted species, but at least it isn't as bad as some of the lamer episodes.

WHOPOINTS 6

Doctor Who, Series 5, Episode 9: Squeaky Bum Time.

2010-05-29T23:51:00.003+01:00

DOCTOR WHO

"Cold Blood”

29/05/2010

BBC One

Whilst previous Who two-parters tended to start out well, or at least not totally crap (or in "The Time of Angels'" case just plain crap), they tend to then flop badly in the next episode. (Or get really crap in "Flesh & Stone".)

"Cold Blood", the second episode in Series 5's re-launch of the Silurians, bucks this trend by following a shit episode with an average episode. Yes, it's that impressive.

The good parts are, your intrepid (Wh)Ovine can report, surprisingly many. The character interactions are well written and performed, and the 'are we any better?' debate (wherein the viewer is asked to ponder whether humans are the worst monsters) is effectively handled too. Here both sides of the argument are put across, but the final word, care of the Doctor, leaves no doubt on the real message. Humanity has to learn to be a better species. Throw in some subtle digs at Malthusianism and racism and you have a surprisingly moral episode, for even if the present sees an opportunity wasted, a better future is predicted in a blatant no-tension-really sort of way.

Of course, there's a lot here that is a wasted opportunity. Silurian Elder Eldane (as played by Stephen 'Marvin The Android' Moore) is brought in clumsily and not enough is made of him. Likewise with last episode's vivisector Malokeh (Richard Hope), whose Miyazaki-style change of heart is a bit disjointed and his character wasted. Celeb guest star Meera Syal has very little to do that Amy Pond couldn't have done on her own, and while Neve McIntosh's warrior Silurian Alaya affects a Iago-worthy forked tongue and a rather scary death wish, her sister (also played by McIntosh) is simply a vengeance-crazed cardboard cut-out.

And no, it isn't a patch on 'Doctor Who & The Silurians'. Overall, it lacks consistency and is badly paced, even rushed. The subtleties of the original are 40 years' away from the sledgehammer approach of today and the introduction of Amy's Crack (fnarr!) is equally as heavy handed and blatant. It took six 30-minute episodes to tell a story that unfolded organically in 1970. 40 years later, it takes two hyperactive toddler episodes at 45 minutes each to just churn out a slapdash narrative. Let's hear it for progress.

Matt Smith does of course make some progress of his own in this one, beginning to ease into the role, even though he's still talking like Who X, and doesn't actually do very much again. Arthur Darvill's Rory remains hapless yet also displays a dignified and heroic side that's well performed. And while he snuffs it and then gets erased from history (as usual with Nu Who, it's the Doc's fault), you just know he's not gone for good - the character just works so well and has certainly earned his place on the TARDIS. Amy Pond/Karen Gillan? Eek. But she does show some depth FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER when her character loses Rory, then forgets him with equal poignance after he's been rubbed out. (It's that naughty Crack of hers again, I tell you.)

It could have been better, but avoided being worse. That's pretty good going by this series' standards.

WHOPOINTS 6

Doctor Who, Series 5, Episode 8: Hungry A**e.

2010-05-22T23:26:00.001+01:00

DOCTOR WHO
‘The Hungry Earth”
22/05/2010
BBC One

"Doctor Who & The Silurians" is one of the classics of the old series, an epic Shakespearean tragedy where the real monster is not in the form of the Silurians themselves - ancient subterranean reptile men from Earth's past - but hubris, pride, stupidity, fear and bigotry, of which all sides, the Doctor and the Brigadier included, are guilty.

Forty years later, and the Silurian comeback "The Hungry Earth", part one of a two part serial, has quite a task on its hands to follow up on that one. So it doesn't bother. Instead it just reuses plot ideas from "...Silurians" and loads of other Old Who stories. Drilling into something awful? Inferno. A church and a forcefield? The Daemons. Welsh setting with loveable boyos in peril? The Green Death. The only way they could have made it any more derivative was if they caught Liz Shaw in the Tardis reversing the polarity with a giant maggot.

The ethical dilemma at the heart of "...Silurians", as to whether we are any better than them or perhaps worse, has meanwhile been buggered up. This time, to spare you the tedious details, it is hamfistedly executed, with the inevitable fuck-up that makes us all ashamed to be human slotted in for next week but telegraphed so loudly you can pretty much guess how it will turn out.

The characters are pretty cardboard too, with the Doctor and Rory scripted to operate as if on autopilot, right down to the already overused 'HOW COULD YOU NOT SAVE HIM/HER?' routine. Speaking of clichés, the episode also maintains the 'Doctor Is Christ/Doctor Is A Wanker' binary opposition, with no nuance or subtlety in-between. The Doctor we saw in "...Silurians" was a much more well realised Time Lord.

Amy Pond remains fucking annoying, as per usual, and the episode seems to toy with the viewer when it seems she's going to get dissected next week. (She won't of course.) But her growing lack of interest in what the Doctor does suggest some character development, if not all that much.

The worst character is the boy, whose Dad gets suctioned down into the bowels of the earth at the start of the episode. Now, please do not see that as a slur on the young actor playing him. It's just that there's something incredibly depressing about the underlying notion of a character whose only real purpose is to be precocious, then run off and get in trouble and, to top it all off, suffer from a disability-du-jour, which in this case is dyslexia. Britain, if you really want to help dyslexics, don't patronise them with token sufferers being bullshitted by Matt Smith. Actually invest in their education, stop discriminating against them and actually put some effort in assisting them in their day to day lives. But of course, this is a mainstream TV show made in Britain c. 2010 we're talking about here, so the feel-bad-but-in-reality-do-fuck-all consensus rules supreme.

Did I mention that the New Model Silurians are shite? They don't look like the old Silurians, and instead go for a generic reptilian humanoid look of the sort that Star Trek at its least imaginative might use. The makeup didn't look like a reptilian humanoid so much as an actress in reptilian makeup, which might sound obvious, but there is a clear difference between the two, in the same way that a bloke in a cheap made-in-China gorilla suit doesn't look like Chewbacca.

Throw in a plot full of holes and inconsistencies, and which often just marks time until the second episode's preamble is set up, and then mix firmly with infantile, flat characterisation. Voila! You have this episode. Fittingly, it was written by Christopher Chibnall, responsible for some of the worst Torchwood episodes ever (and that's saying something). Perhaps he took Stephen Moffat at his word and wrote the script for 11-year-olds, but that rather insults 11-year-olds, doesn't it? Last week's episode, 'Amy's Choice', was indeed a fluke, because we are back to Business As Usual: Poor scripts and shallow narratives, produced and performed in a slapdash and inconsequential way.

WHOPOINTS 4

Doctor Who, Series 5, Episode 7: Dreaming of the Valeyard.

2010-05-15T23:26:00.000+01:00

DOCTOR WHO
‘Amy's Choice’
15/05/2010
BBC One

In the words of the Doctor's future wife, SPOILERS!!!

Now, with that formality out of the way, let's dwell on the first truly great episode of this series. 'Amy's Choice' is simply far more mature, believable and nuanced than any of the episodes that have gone before it, and probably every episode that will follow. The dialogue is excellent and the script is competent and well thought out. The story line is compelling and the pacing is wonderful. What more could you ask for? Well, maybe a plot that’s not akin to The Mind Robber, but you can’t have it all one supposes – nigh-on fifty-years worth of Who will led to some repetition after all.

The plot, for those who want it over and done with, is this: Via some psychic contamination, the Doctor's hate, guilt, self-loathing and sadism manifests itself as the 'Dream Lord' who puts the Doc, Rory and Amy through a literal nightmare (or three), forcing them to make some serious choices...

...This is ingenious simply because it allows the characters to either develop or reveal hitherto hidden depths. Amy learns she really loves Rory, while Rory proves how much he loves the deranged ginger tart in turn. The Doctor meanwhile is revealed as both solution, villain and matchmaker, using the experience to lead Amy away from him and choose Rory. In fact, it could be read as the Doctor using the experience all along to teach Amy that lesson, that one day the Doctor will have to leave her, and Rory is what she really wants. Rory meanwhile leaves behind his ideal, sterile 'reality' for the imperfect but more human and genuine reality that awaits him. He learns that having a house, a child on the way and a job as a country doctor isn't enough - he needs the truth more, his self-indulgent ponytail cut off as a gesture of adulthood.

This is of course probably the most brutal episode in years. There's at least two suicides, killer aliens hiding in the bodies of old people murdering children and postmen in equal measure, betrayal and barely repressed bitterness, a pregnancy that never comes to be, bereavement, major existential crises and the Doctor finally becoming what the new series has always seemed to want him to be: a villain, a monster and a dire foe.

This does of course fit in with one of Nu Who's worst traits, its deranged obsession with diminishing the Doctor and making him look like a total wanker. (Sort of a Reverse Spike, for all the Buffy fans that Nu Who in part is rather keen to woo.) This is so 1980s, when you think about it, but 'somewho' it all seems rather lame, an adolescent iconoclasm in an age where po-mo is dead and we really do need to pick sides again.

But that's the only quibble. This same conceit is inspired in many other ways - the 'Dream Lord', played with tangible malice and cruelty by Toby Jones, is both the conscience and the Greek chorus of the story, haunting the Doctor up to and including the last frame. You may care to watch the episode twice to see all the clues that reveal who he really is. It also puts the Doctor in a new light, no longer falling in love with his assistant but trying to save her from that fate and do the 'right thing'. (Everyone chooses to in this one, which may or may not be redemption, or simply a delay of the inevitable.) And yet, it is probably not the last time we will see the Dream Lord: He echoes the Doctor's future evil regeneration, the Valeyard (from the Colin Baker era, for all the completists out there), and may be seen as his warm-up. It isn't too much like Fight Club - just in case you're wondering.

So maybe they should just give in, stop trying to make the Doctor a hero and just make him a monster for a series or two, or at least make him amoral again, like William Hartnell's Doctor. But that might blow the gaff - after all, he's still meant to be at least officially a 'hero', albeit one that has shit hurled at him non-stop, and yet this episode suggests there's much to be explored if they actually had the balls to take it as far as it can go. They won't of course, but 'Amy's Choice' shows how it could be.

Matt Smith is also getting better, slowly but surely moulding his Doctor into something that's not entirely Tennant, but with much work left to do. Arthur Darvill's slightly beleaguered Rory really shines this time, his journey every bit as taught and troubled as the Doctor, whilst the non-stop low-level love/hate between the two is wonderful. Shockingly, Amy Pond (or Karen Gillan as her parents call her) is bearable here too, mainly because the script reins in her worst traits and forces her to evolve as a character too. 'So what is the point of you then?' she spits, as the Doctor reveals to her what we all know but which she was too immature to accept: the Doctor can't always save the day, and only a child can't agree with that fact. A child like Amy.

And yet the story is ultimately about love. Rory and Amy realise how much they love each other, and the Doctor reveals how much he loves them both too. But it's not a romantic love, but the kinf that is necessary if sometimes monstrous, leering back at the Doctor on the reflective surface of his Tardis console, not gone but simply waiting.

WHOPOINTS 8.5

Doctor Who, Series 5, Episode 6: Venetian Vampires Without Bite.

2010-05-09T02:35:00.001+01:00

DOCTOR WHO
‘Vampires In Venice’
08/05/2010
BBC One

One truth often overlooked about Doctor Who is that the men are better than the women. No, that's not sexism. What I mean is that the male companions always seem more interesting and fleshed out than most of the female companions as a rule, the only exceptions being Liz (Who III), Leela & Romana (Who IV) and Ace (Who VII) who instead were women who were trying or were able to be part of what was still a men's world, and so had much more going on under the surface.

But the male companions still stand out, because the dynamic was different. With female companions, it was often a fatherly relationship with the Doctor, as opposed to today's non-stop Electra Complex love affairs. But with the men, it was often more complicated and dynamic, the glorious spectacle of two or more difficult blokes travelling through time and space and getting on each other's tits.

Top of the pile has to be Jamie, whose relationship with Who II swung from father-and-son to pissed off married couple to squabbling children, often all in the same scene. Or the Brigadier, whose relationship with the Doc was that of a brother who'd lay his life down for the other and vice versa. Of course it was also the sort of brotherly relationship where they just couldn't fucking stand each other, the frustrated spite of the Doctor and the barely suppressed hurt of the Brig masterfully played out by Pertwee, Baker and Courtney. Or poor put-upon Sergeant Benton, who took all the flak from those angry posh gits with a very British stoicism. The star turn that was Harry Reid. Or the looming Shakespearean Tragedy that was Adric. Going back to the Hartnell days, there was Ian, serving as the angry conscience for what was then an essentially amoral Doctor, and Steven, through which the show began to properly explore the implications and ironies of the Doctor in a way today's angstfests can't even begin to ape.

Even latter day male Who companions are more interesting than the Roses and the Amys. Poor old Mickey, shafted by his woman and overshadowed by a transdimensional prima donna, his reconciliation with the latter coming at the cost of the former who had long since cast him aside. Or Captain Jack, who might have been a poster boy for shagging everything that moves and which can consent, but was still told off and bossed around by the Doctor like a father, for all Jack's romantic overtures. Or Who X's last companion, Wilf, who had the deepest and most intense bonds with the Doc, despite the brief time they spent together.

This brings us neatly onto Rory, whose masculinity is as stiff as lettuce and whose macho credentials are less pronounced than his nursing degree. He's also Amy Pond's great unintended, even forced to dress up as her 'Raggedy Doctor' as the love of his life went ever more loopy. As mentioned in my interview of "The Eleventh Hour", Arthur Darvill brings a real wounded pathos to his poor sod character, right down to the timid, vulnerable body language. And in 'Vampires of Venice', last night's episode, we finally get to see him in action, so to speak.

In this one, the Doc - still reeling after Amy tried to have her wicked way with him on the night before her wedding - decides that only a romantic weekend in 16th Century Venice with Rory will save their marriage before it's even started. Of course, shit magnet that he (or the TARDIS) is, the Doctor beams them in to the middle of an infestation of vampires, or rather, Saturnynians: Blood-drinking fish monsters with mind-camouflage. I'm not making this shit up, you know.

So it's a bit of a shame that this episode was plainly written by Toby 'Being Human' Whithouse for Who X, Rose and Mickey, then dusted off and rewritten for this series. Apart from all the Tennantisms, Amy says and does a lot of Rose Tyler things (i.e., be a brave, gormless arsehole) and Rory is left doing what Mickey would have otherwise done (i.e., mope around a lot and shout at the Doctor.)

Meanwhile, the way Doc XI and Amy Pond jump up and down with joy or look excited whenever something bad happens is actually an old trope from the Doc X/Rose days, where they treated it all like a big laugh despite all the bloodletting. This was how the RTD era tried to justify punishing them for having too good a time (yes, he said this), which is a bit odd when you consider that they came across less as ghouls and more like how the audience itself was feeling. RTD himself seemed to hate the Doctor and delighted in making him miserable, which of course just kept getting in the way of the storytelling.

But when Matt Smith and Karen Gillan do it, the effect is more like two actors trying to play someone else, namely David Tennant and Billy Piper. Or perhaps two happy but delusional mental patients living in a shared dreamworld with Rory the nurse taking them out for a supervised trip to a museum. NOW THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN A PLOT TWIST

Poor old Rory, meanwhile, is reduced to saying Mickey's words, right down to the crybaby denunciation of the Doctor being a threat to everyone he knows, which is a bit like accusing the Fire Brigade of endangering lives every time it leaps into a burning building, or a surgeon being accused of being a potential mass-murderer because he works in a Casualty/ER ward. Isn't it the aliens and assorted baddies who were the killers and threats here, or did that get in the way of all the lazy RTD-era revisionism?

Things do get better as the episode develops though, not least because Whithouse's re-jigged script lets the team dynamic evolve away from its roots. Amy morphs from Who groupie to would-be menage a trois participant, the animus between Rory and the Doc giving way to an understated warmth and a very traditional love-hate relationship. Rory could be another classic male companion in the making here, if it wasn’t for the sinking feeling that they’re going to bugger it up like they always do.

Amy remains awful as usual, annoying and stupid in equal measure, and whereas last episode, you were rooting for the angels, now you're rooting for the vamps, who again fail miserably and let her live. On the other hand, it's not hard to cheer when the Doctor finally gives her a patriarchal bitch-slapping and tells her to fuck off back to the TARDIS. Not that she listens, of course. Oh nooooooo...

The story itself is rather bland. 'Venice', or rather Trogir in Croatia where this episode is filmed, is shot in a lifeless and sterile way, more a film set than a convincing setting, whilst the baddies' fortress is far too well-lit and tidy to bestow any real menace. In the end, it's all so clean and barren that you don't actually care what happens. There is no humanity here, beyond the three leads.

The vampire-fish are a wasted opportunity too. Less Lovecraftian Deep Ones and more crap CGI newts, their menace is badly handled and their human forms seem more like really bad Hammer depictions than the Gothic Horrors they should be. The faintly oedipal relationship between the Saturnynian Queen and her son is bodged too, neither character having much depth. And while the Queen's justifications for her plot to sink Venice below the waves are aimed at giving her a motivation, they only really make her sound like a delusional relativist loon.

Throw in a sub-plot with an expendable Venetian father and his equally expendable daughter (both of whom have even less personality than the Saturnynes), even more plot holes and ideas that are shamelessly and hamfistedly reused from other episodes and you have a bit of a disappointment. It's doubly disappointing coming from Toby Whithouse, who I - as a Being Human obsessive - can honestly say knows how to write when he can be arsed to. (Three words: REAL HUSTLE and HERRICK.)

Perhaps he needs a whole series to play with instead of just one episode? Whithouse does seem to do best when he has lots of episodes to play with, and fittingly it's the ongoing relationship between the Doc, Amy and Rory that's got the most life in it. In that sense it parallels Being Human - both are about two messed up, haunted men and one crazed woman, though Annie the Ghost is more 'needy' and Amy the Scots Racist is more 'hungry', so to speak.

Yet it works for the same reasons, the human drama giving some meaning that the SFX and expensive location doesn't. And who could dare slag off the glorious opening scene, where the Doctor emerges from a cake in place of a diabetic stripper and proceeds to bugger up Rory's stag night beyond all recognition? It's better to think what this episode could have been, then, than what it actually amounted to.

WHOPOINTS 6

Doctor Who, Series 5, Episode 5: Stone Angels Come To Bad End.

2010-05-01T22:24:00.002+01:00

DOCTOR WHO
'The Time of Angels'
01/05/2010
BBC One

So, the last time we were here, the Doc, his future wife, his awful assistant and a fair few expendable church squaddies were going to get croaked by weeping angels... But then the Doctor did something crap and out of character (as in, use a gun). One Deus et Machina later and we find ourselves at Part Two, "Flesh and Bone"...

But first the opening titles, where - through the miracle of really bad CGI - the TARDIS churns through the time vortex. It really does look like a large blue turd flowing down the alimentary canal of an enormous suck-beast. The music's cack too.

As for the episode itself, it's more filler than thriller. It ties up of loose ends and preludes for the rest of this series' big story arc, with little thought given to the story beyond some new Moffat gimmicks, like pissing about with gravity or cyborg trees or oblivion through time-crack.

As for the cast, it is not a pretty sight. Riversong is less of a character here and more someone for the Doctor to shout at. Though at least Alex Kingston does her best with expressions and gestures where the decent dialogue is not forthcoming. The big revelation about her is - you guessed it - yet more build-up for the 'season finale' (Joss Whedon: you are a cock) and for the most part, she's underused and squandered.

The Doctor, or Matt Smith, is still regenerating, in the sense that he and the audience and indeed the scriptwriter haven't worked out if he's David Tennant, a new Doctor altogether or something that's getting bodged until they finally work out what to do with Who XI. Sometimes he thrashes about and yet shows signs of becoming of his own man or time lord or whatever. Other times, he just looks burdened, though the way he flirts with his future bride in a sort of sleazy but naff fashion suggests a dash of comic ability that echoes Troughton/Who II.

Meanwhile, Amy Pond still needs a slap. She is obnoxious, stupid, argumentative and unsympathetic to the point that you're rooting for Team Angel pretty much from the start. The character is fundamentally unlike-able, which is quite a departure from the traditional DW formula of companions who, you know, the audience is supposed to like. We also discover she's a potential Time Lord rapist who's willing to cheat on her man the night before their wedding. What a shit. But moreover, what an awful supporting character, seeing that she is so utterly unsympathetic.

As for the 'clerics' (which, if you don't remember, are the 51st Century church gone militant), their role is simply to die or otherwise get rubbed out. At least you mourned the marines in Aliens, of which this two-parter is ever so slightly indebted to, because there was something to mourn in the first place. But when the clerics' only differentiating trait is that they have funny ecclesiastical names, it seems shoddy writing is to blame.

The only cleric with a personality is Father Octavian. But it's a sort of passive aggressive sulk concluded with a highly improbable reconciliation between he and the Doctor just before Octavian gets his neck snapped by an angel. No disrespect here for Iain Glen, who does as well as most seasoned actors could with such shit characterisation and script. The blame falls squarely on the Moff's shoulders, an inadvertent tribute to those Old Who episodes where the Brigadier was portrayed as a total wanker and Nicholas Courtney just had to swallow it like his own vomit. In that sense, like the Father, Glen can sleep well in his bed at night: he was only following orders.

The episode overall, then, is a whimper. Even the main 'standout sequence' where a shut-eyed Amy has to navigate a forest full of angels is a wasted opportunity – it ends abruptly and has no real purpose. Perhaps Lawrence Miles is right after all - Nu Who is just a juxtaposition of set piece events linked by a lame script. But still - surely they wouldn't be so cynical about it? Well, actually they would, but at least some of the Old Who magic is there: note how one wall bends as the Doc leans on it? Yes, we're back in the era of wobbly sets! Rejoice!

WHOPOINTS 4

In the Brown Stuff - Part Deux.

2010-04-28T13:59:00.004+01:00

You may have heard that Gordon Brown didn’t turn his mic off. What happened next and the response to it is, however, the real story.

After all, and whether you agree with Brown said or not, was this not a private conversation? All politicians have them and no doubt say all sorts of things the public would be shocked to hear, and yet we all can reasonably assume that things like this are said all the time. And what about the things we all say in private that are all too different from what we say in polite society? Double standards, anyone? Or is Brown's real crime that he got caught?

And while some may say that different rules should apply to politicians, this seems quite self-serving. One moment, we want our politicians to be like us, and the next minute we want them to be inhumanly perfect. We can't have both. Perhaps we need to stop seeing politics as a calling or a means to the Promised Land, or an epic battle between good 'n evil, but merely as a job full of conflicted, compromised, weak and silly people like us. And in a similar vein, so should politicians themselves.

But the real hypocrisy lies in the response to what Brown said. We demand candour and openness from our politicians and even avoid the ballot box because 'they're all as bad as each other'. Well, actually, they're not and such immoral and lazy thinking is the root cause of our political malaise, along with a dysfunctional relationship with politics itself. Do we really know what we want our MPs to do? It seems to change day by day.

And as ever, it is the voters who are the main villains here. If Gillian Duffy can say what she wants, then so should Brown. Yet we refuse to hear honest opinions if they clash with our preconceptions. This will have dire consequences. On the one hand, it has lead to spin, dishonesty, doublespeak and secrecy on the part of those who need our votes, which has lead in turn to corruption, embezzlement and indeed £1645 duck houses. We have to take a fair share of the blame for this.

But it is even more harmful than that. Whoever gets in next week will have to make cuts. Very big cuts. And so, a lot of enemies. Yet where is the honest debate? Where are the figures? The discussion? The bare facts? You won't get them because no sane politician is going to tell the truth to the public. We would rip them apart because they dared rouse us from our La-La-World retreat from reality. We all know it will come to pass but we're too spineless and stupid to face up to it. We then get the leaders we deserve.

I hate Brown, but I hate humbug and the 'have-cake-and-eat-it' mentality of the British body politic even more. Isn't it sad that Brown is done down, in the end, not for lies but for an honest opinion? And as I have said before, this story has only made the news because we have collectively decided he is a loser again. Never mind why Brown or Clegg or Cameron should be PM – why would anyone want to run a country with such a blind and pig-foul electorate in the first place?

Doctor Who, Series V, Episode IV: Stone Cold Tedium.

2010-04-24T20:34:00.002+01:00

DOCTOR WHO
'The Time of Angels'
24/04/2010
BBC One

The day will come when ‘Whostorians" will note the weird parallels between Nu Who and New Labour. Both re-launched what were seen as naff, worn-out franchises, both to great success but at the cost of their original values. Both also saw a single figure raised to almost idolatrous heights – be it Tony Blair or Russell T. Davies – who then plummeted to earth when ego and hubris brought spectacular nemesis.

The pub bores will no doubt swill many a pint over David Tennant too. Charismatic, young and the object of almost hysterical devotion, he – like Blair – jumped before an over-rated Scotsman finally took over and ran everything into the ground. True, one can stretch the idea too far: unlike Blair, Tennant is still loved, and certainly deserves some if not all of that adulation. And it was RTD who wrote ‘Torchwood: Children of Earth’, as scathing a satire of the New Labour years as you could hope for.

But still, the parallels are… eerie. Not least because Peter Capaldi keeps turning up both in the Whoniverse and as a thinly veiled Alastair Campbell. Or how 70s feminista Sarah Jane Smith was reborn as a sort of Blair Babe, a mumsy authority figure who sacrificed a family life for a career and an unrequited love for a distant, Christ-like figure.

Even the rise and rise of Who producers BBC Cymru echoes the ascent of a more confident, more assertive post-devolution Wales. Meanwhile, the growing clamour of criticism for Stephen Moffat’s tenure as ‘Show Runner’ echoes the slow rot and decay of the post-1997 political settlement under Gordon Brown. Moffat also shows another Brownish trait. He simply can’t stop living off past glories, whether they be an end to Tory Boom ‘n Bust, ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’, pouring tons of money into public services, ‘The Empty Child’, throwing Nokias at people or ‘Blink’.

For what was last Saturday’s episode, "The Time of Angels", but a trawl through an ever-more tarnished legacy, at the cost of fresh ideas or anything to say? Moffat’s last outing – the two-part "Silence in the Library" and "Forest of the Dead – had all his tropes, tricks and eccentric plot devices, as well as recycled dialogue from previous Moff episodes. The net result was a bloated regurgitation of ideas that worked last time but now seemed worn and dated precisely because they relied so much on their own novelty.

This episode features two of Moffat's 'big ideas'. Namely: Mrs. Who, aka Professor Riversong. She's a sort of bastard lovechild of Elric (in that she’s FUCKING DOOMED) and Bernice Summerfield (in that she’s a bit foxy, likes digging things up and spends a lot of off-screen time with the Doctor). Only, this is the point where she hasn't become a Prof yet, is just out of jail and no doubt hasn't married the Doc either, as he keeps flitting in and out of her timeline in a random sort of way. (Not At All Like The Time Traveller's Wife or, indeed, The Girl In The Fireplace, you understand. Oh NOOOOOO...)

The other returning idea (or rehash of old glories if you wish) comes in the form of the Weeping Angels. For those who have not yet seen "Blink", they're those statues that come to life when you're not looking and steal your potential future from you. This time though, they are NEW AND IMPROVED, with the ability to spread through images, including televisions (Not At All Like The Ring!), and steal voices of their victims (Not At All Like The Vashta Narada!), not to mention being able to infect their victims like a sort of virus. (OK, that's quite original, I'll give him that...) Also, they now cut to the chase and just kill you. HOW'S THAT FOR INNOVATION???

There are some other original ideas here though. The concept of clergy-as-squaddies is rather good, not least because it doesn't go down the path of cyber-goth/Warhammer 40,000 pastiche. Yet the tensions between the Doctor and the 'Father' are just a retread of the equally pointless tensions between Richard E. Grant's Doc and Jim Norton's Major Kennet in "Scream of the Shalka", right down to the squabbling over a radio in an underground setting. The only difference being, of course, that you really don't care if the Father dies or not.

The Doctor also gets some decent dialogue too, for once, and starts sounding like a new Doctor rather than a David Tennant tribute. Still, that doesn't last long, and soon Matt Smith reverts to waving his sonic screwdriver about and doing Who 10's hyperactive ferret act. His 'look of surprise' when it's revealed the Angels are out and about is meant to be dramatic but is so overdone it comes across more as accidental self-parody that wouldn't look out of place in Garth Marenghi's Darkplace.

But the highlight is Alex Kingston's performance as Riversong. True, the way she summons the Doctor via a message from the (relative) past was done to death in Blink. But Kingston brings a real crackle and swagger to her cocky and knowing character. In doing so, she gives the episode a sort of depth and soul it otherwise lacks. And yes, there is even more unoriginality when she does a Lara Croft at one point. Yet she is also the most interesting character here because she is both the story's ambivalent protagonist and the one with the most going on under the surface. Her 'husband', meanwhile, seems like more of a cardboard cutout, following her lead and delivering lines that wouldn't be out of place in a bad action film.

Speaking of flat and insipid, Amy Pond remains awful. Her character development in this episode can be summed up as both obnoxious and slappable. But sadly, you know the Angels won't snuff her out, so instead teeth must be gritted as she stumbles around the place like a crap heckler or a particularly unsympathetic damsel in distress. Alas, the Doctor does not leave her to her death. That would have been fun. The rest of the cast may as well not be there.

All in all then we have one more shit-to-lukewarm episode on our hands. Ironically for a Moffat episode, it's the lack of originality that stands out. Beyond all the examples just given, it's plain that the episode's high-tech military force being picked off piecemeal by an extraterrestial foe (with a numerical advantage!) is pretty much Aliens for a teatime audience. And why did that chav twat from The Streets have to make a cameo at the start of the episode? Why oh why? It would have been more fun to see him get abused in a Turkish prison - now that would have been entertaining!

Still, there's always part two, which is next week and - if the preview is anything to go by - has Amy Pond still not getting killed and Matt Smith shouting a lot. Who knows? Who actually fucking cares?

WHOPOINTS 5

Doctor Who, Series V, Episode III: Half-Decent Episode Shocka!

2010-04-17T22:34:00.001+01:00

DOCTOR WHO
'Victory of the Daleks'
17/04/2010
BBC One

One must admit to a bit of pre-empting here: Mark Gatiss' episode, "Victory of the Daleks" wasn't as shit as I feared it to be.

In fact, it was all rather good fun if you consider the whole 'Daleks & Churchill & Spitfires in Space'-type vibe. When it's breezing along like this, the episode comes alive mainly because it's having fun and so doesn't really have to deal with small matters like depth and pacing.

Because that is the real problem here: as one critic has already pointed out, the story feels like a two or four-parter Old Who jammed into 42 minutes with all that implies. It rushes along at a great speed and doesn't let the viewer digest each event before leaping on to the next.

The Daleks themselves do benefit from a nice set of touches though, like 'ironsides' painted up in WW2 khaki, and a willingness to make the tea, do filing and be killed because they're not 'dalek' enough. But it still feels more like a new toy line being launched rather than an old threat made new and scary once more. Boring old sods like me will also no doubt observe that their new luridly primary colour scheme echoes that of the 1960s Doctor Who films. At least they're not as 'emo' as the RTD era pepperpots-of-death. But still, there's too much emphasis on what they look like than what they do, which is what they're meant to be about.

Matt Smith's Doctor remains a work in progress. He’s still Tennant-ing at an alarming rate, whilst trying and failing to strike his own note. That said, the scene where he threatens the Daleks with a Jammy Dodger is inspired. Karen Gillan still comes across as Karen Gillan playing Karen Gillan - we don't feel for her character like we should. Yet the fact that she doesn't 'remember' the Daleks (despite their recent antics) is an interesting touch with many intriguing implications. So too is the way that this time the pair actually play an equal part in the resolution rather than one overshadowing the other. (As was the case in the last two benighted episodes.) This isn't ruined too much by yet more cringe-worthy dialogue between the two at the end of the episode (as was the case last week), which nonetheless suggests that the Moff-Beast, as story editor, is developing habits every bit as irritating as RTD’s.

Speaking of which, there is much symbolism here. RTD's era is symbolically blown away alongside with its take on the Daleks by new Daleks belonging very firmly to the Moffat era. Coincidence? Or some weird Oedipal shit that the Moff seems to be working out? Once again there's the 'Scottish' joke/obsession too, which rather makes one yearn for good old Terrance Dicks, who always had the courtesy to leave his hobbyhorses at home and away from the typewriter.

As for the rest of the cast, Ian McNeice's take on Winston Churchill seems alive and believable. While avoiding being that of a mere pastiche, it captures his heroic and human traits alongside the genuine darkness that at times surfaced both in the episode and in reality. The real moral of the story, that the ends do not justify the means (unless you are a Dalek/Nazi), is made all too clear through McNeice’s performance, his Churchill nearly, but not quite, entering seriously dodgy Faustian territory. This is only held back by his grasp on his humanity and his friendship for the Doctor, which is wonderfully depicted.

Bill Paterson's portrayal of Dr. Bracewell, who turns out to be the mere tool of the Daleks in more ways than one, is very effective too, despite how little the script gives him. His character's journey has a genuine poignancy and Paterson makes us feel for him. In a sense it's his character's story - a triumph of humanity vs. the soulless totalitarianism of the Daleks and the real life monsters they represent.

It's a mixed bag, then, that's true. But what stands out is how much fun it all is at times, a sort of gloriously absurd B-movie at teatime with some human drama thrown in for good measure. It's a bit of a shame that it's also trying to do too much with too little, and does feel like a toy commercial at points, but be honest - when's the last time you've had a bit of a laugh with a Dalek episode anyway?

WHOPOINTS 7

Doctor Who, Series V, Episode II: Epic Fail (Whale).

2010-04-14T21:34:00.001+01:00

DOCTOR WHO
'The Beast Below'
10/04/2010
BBC One

So the second episode of the Moffat era is here. But is it any better than the lukewarm "11th Hour"? At least it leaps straight into the action, as Who XI and rather mad new companion Amy Pond find themselves on Starship UK. This constitutes the fag-end of Great Britain, carrying what's left of the UK to safety after Solar Flares make the Earth a bit crispy. (Which ties it in nicely with the existing Who chronology, if you remember "The Ark In Space".)

Once there they discover it to be a grim place indeed. Children weep silently, as sinister mechanical overseers called 'smilers' discipline and punish. For there are a few seriously nasty secrets here, not least a Queen whose memory keeps getting wiped. And then there’s a charming scene where the Doc & Amy get caught up in a tidal wave of vomit. Yes, it's wholesome entertainment all round as the Doctor is forced to consider giving someone a quick lobotomy. Yay.

The episode lacks teeth. Both leads (Matt Smith and Karen Gillan) still seem smug and complacent. It’s like they've not quite realised that there’s more to it than just passing the sodding audition. On the other hand, Smith actually tries to de-Tennant the Doc in this one, albeit in a way that suggests Moffat really, REALLY wanted Martin Clunes instead. But the effort seems wasted as he still lapses into Tennant-esque impotent rage for the most part.

In terms of all those de rigeur high concept Moffat ideas, The Smilers are too pretentious to be really scary. But the novel use of glasses full of water placed on the floor (to reveal... well that would be telling) is a great touch. Meanwhile, the conflicts between Doc & Amy are surprisingly free of RTD's old rancour and misery. The truly clever part of the story is where Amy revolts against the Doctor because, paradoxically, she understands he is right.

On the other hand, while the resolution to the 'unresolvable' dilemma is a sound one, it all seems far too hurried and rushed, like a four part Old Who serial jammed into 42 minutes. And while the resolution also means that Amy Pond gets something to do, the Doctor is reduced to a bit player as a result. This somehow doesn't seem right, not least when you consider that the best Doctor-Companion solutions to cosmic problems have always involved equal or at least substantial contributions from both sides. It's always been a show about the poor sods taken along for the ride, but it's never been called Doctor Who for nothing either. In this sense, Moffat gets the balance wrong, perhaps being too keen to establish Amy at the cost of the dynamics between her and the Doc himself.

And of course, some of the dialogue is pretty cheesy, in fact, almost ST: OS-like in levels of pure Stilton. Some of it is painful to remember, let alone quote without cringing.

But the real problem is that the core conceit of the episode - that Starship UK is built on top of a massive Space Whale - is either a blatant rip-off or may as well be. The Space Whale, a benign intergalactic cetacean enslaved and used as a transport sounds eerily like the Acanti, of Marvel Comics fame, who just so happen to also be... benign intergalactic cetaceans enslaved and used as transports. Going back to the Star Trek angle, the Space Whale's secretly maternal and cuddly nature, combined with its ruthless exploitation by ghastly humans, sounds eerily like the Horta from "The Devil in the Dark" episode, so much so that you have to wonder what is really original about this story.

After all, a feisty redhead companion? We've already had Donna Noble. Angry conflicted Doctor wondering why he puts so much effort into protecting all those human bastards? Who III was doing that 40 years ago. Thinly veiled satire on British society? "The Happiness Patrol" wants an apology for all the shit hurled at it over the intervening 23 years.

It doesn't help that Starship UK doesn't seem particularly believable. This is not because of the swish CGI effects, but precisely because it feels like a collection of clichés, Union Jack Kitsch and bric-a-brac on a soundstage rather than a living, breathing place or collection of places, like that hinted at masterfully in "The End of the World". (Which, incidentally, still comes out looking good in comparison after half a decade). That was itself the second episode in a new series with a new Doctor, where the companion's first trip is in the far future, and so, of course, even that's unoriginal, right down to the penultimate shot where Doc and Companion stare wistfully into space after the mayhem is resolved. In that sense, this is less drama and more repetition without end, and doesn't bode well for the rest of the season.

Still, we get to see what Mark Gatiss does to Winston Churchill and the Daleks next week. What could possibly go wrong? Answers on a postcard to...

WHOPOINTS 5/10

Doctor Who, Series V, Episode I: Meh ad excelsis.

2010-04-14T21:32:00.000+01:00

DOCTOR WHO
'The Eleventh Hour'
03/04/2010
BBC One

So farewell then, David Tennant. You wowed the crowd though the existential angst was a massive downer and RTD had long passed his sell-by date. 'Look to the future' as your weird two-hearted alter ego might say... And any man who can admit to liking Coldplay and not come across as a total wanker while simultaneously doing Hamlet justice deserves at least some adulation.

And then there was Christopher Ecclestone, whose one series in the role still has a haunting resonance, despite the naff aliens, munchkin Daleks and Captain Bloody Jack.

This leaves us with Doctor Who XI, the curiously shaped Matt Smith, and new turnip-headed showrunner Stephen Moffatt. It's said that the Moff's Nu Who episodes (Blink, The Girl in the Fireplace, Forest of the Dead, The Empty Child etc.) were some of the best, but they all had a tendency to get too caught up in their own cleverness and abandon RTD's never-ending grief-fest for a sort of fetishisation of the Doc which was no more true to the source material than ol' Russell was.

The first episode of this new paradigm thingie is, then, a curate's egg farted out by a conflicted chicken. The annoyances are still there: all the whizz-bangs, overwrought drama, the ADHD-friendly pace aimed at kids (and some adults) with five-second attention spans, the improbable solutions to improbable situations, the wholly unconvincing CGI effects and the inevitable love interest rammed in to keep the morons who actually like soap operas interested too, not to mention the occasional flashes of scenery-chewing melodrama that blighted RTD's work at its worst.

In other ways, what has changed is simply cosmetic. Whilst RTD felt a neurotic urge to keep reminding us that, yes, he was gay and - FUCKING HELL! - there were other homosexuals on the planet (to which a 2005 audience should really have replied - 'who gives a fuck either way'?), so the Moff brings his own neuroses. Yes, he's Scottish, so it is no surprise that the inevitable 'Scotland's Great & England's shit' in-joke is invoked, not to mention a reference to the Jock lust for fried food. It's all horribly self-indulgent attention whoring, like a 14-year-old girl fretting about her weight and insisting on telling everyone about it every 15 seconds. What has been Nu Who's main flaw is its constant self consciousness, which manifests as both a itch that must be scratched and a lazy reliance on its heritage.

Equally cosmetic, if you'll forgive the irony, is Matt Smith as the new Doctor. It's fitting that he spends most of the episode in David Tennant's old costume before donning a new set of clothes that look a bit like... David Tennant's old costume. Obviously every new Doctor must thrash about a bit before they become their own man, but it's telling that whereas poor old Colin Baker nailed it in seconds, Matt Smith still comes across as a sort of tepid tribute act at the end of his first episode, right down to the 'timey-wimey' clichés and the weird Freudian fixation on the Sonic-Screwdriver-As-Magic-Wand schtick.

Of course, much is made of the fact that the Doctor saves the world sans Tardis (which is too busy turning into an expensive and overdone Steampunk pastiche) or the aforementioned screwdriver, like he used to before the BBC started throwing money at its one-time sci-fi Cinderella. But this seems like a drastic over-compensation for over-used tropes, as is the point when XI proclaims loudly that he IS the Doctor mainly for dramatic effect, but in part, one suspects because he hasn't otherwise sealed the deal.

It doesn't help that Matt Smith is faintly insipid. His voice lacks force and his performance is without sparkle or real presence, like there's no real passion for the gig. This is not helped by scripted dialogue that would sound stilted and routine if it wasn't coming out of Tennant's or Ecclestone's mouth, all of which creates an uneasy sense that we've spent the last five years watching a truly monumental turd polishing exercise rather than a decent sci-fi series. Worse, there is nothing remarkable about this Doctor - his costume is staid and unimaginative and his personality is indistinct. Perhaps it doesn't help that Smith's off-stage demeanour is that of a preening, self-satisfied BAPA bollock, right down to the ridiculous 'look-at-me-I'm-an-Ac-TOR' leather trilby he sports when spotted in Confidential, and the lack of personal depth and nuance he brings to the role. Tennant had old man's eyes. Smith does not.

Equally uninspiring is new time tottie Amy Pond, played by an inevitably Scottish Karen Gillan. Leaving aside the absurdity of a little girl growing up alone in a large house with an on-the-run alien criminal hiding in a room she can't notice, whilst somehow retaining a Scots accent AND ending up as a Kissergram (why does the Doctor never travel with any Plain Janes?), she is also far too abrasive and unsympathetic a character. Gillan's performance is also too cold fish and patronising, and there is none of the immediate, easy rapport with the audience that, say, Billy Piper, Freema Agyeman and Catherine Tate - or for that matter, Katy Manning - brought to the table.

Did I mention that the plot has holes you could pilot a battleship through and a cottage hospital setting that is a far-too-blatant retread of 'Spearhead From Space'? (The Doctor even gets his new clothes there a la Pertwee/III. It's surprising he doesn't steal Bessie for good measure, but this being HEAVY HANDED ROARING NU WHO, he settles for a fire engine instead.) Or that the monster (an enormous snake-like shape-shifter with silly teeth, that hangs from the top of the screen like a elephant's penis so they didn't have to put any more thought into its design) is crap?

So are the other aliens - giant eyeballs flying through space in flimsy space ships that look like they were rendered by a 17-year-old graphics student on a knackered Amiga A1200. The big Nu Who delusion seems not to be that it's as good or better than the old series but that its production values are ultimately any better, and in terms of crap monsters, they most plainly aren't. They even had the cheek to feature a montage of the Doctor's past foes, including Sea Devils, who somehow seem start-of-the-art by comparison.

And yet, parts of this episode do actually work. The possibility that Pond is as much psycho stalker as new BFF and groupie is intriguing, but doubtless will be buggered up. Whilst her hapless boyfriend Rory, played with suitably floppy pathos by Arthur Darvill, serves as an effective foil, quite literally Amy's Nurse to Amy's Doctor. His role is no doubt destined to be 'the other woman' in the Doctor's relationship with his new companion, but it would be nice if more was done with an intriguing character. The scene where the Doctor searches his memory (using a gloriously surreal time lapse photography special effect) is inspired, and the plot device of 'the crack' (apparently in a wall, but actually in the fabric of space-time itself) is genuinely ominous. It remains to be seen whether the good bits will outnumber the bad parts to a degree sufficient enough to make it different from the previous four series, but for now perhaps this series deserves just enough rope to hang itself...

...Apart from the pisspoor new rendition of the theme tune, which is in turn overly orchestral to the point of self-parody, has appalling timing and ultimately sounds like Drum 'n Bass meets Ice Cream van. Murray Gold, hang your head in SHAME...

WHOPOINTS 6/10

Brown Love & Brown Hate.

2010-02-23T00:12:00.003Z

The past 24 hours have revealed a great deal about the country.

Firstly, how easily the media can get suckered by Alistair Campbell and the Labour spin machine. It was, of course, foolish of National Bullying Helpline founder Christine Pratt to stick her head above the parapet. Not only did she breach the confidentiality of those who rang the NBH up, but she also did so without realising how easily she could be smeared, discredited and used as a smokescreen for the real issue - whether Gordon Brown is fit for office.

But then aren't we all compromised? We've all got secrets, connections and circumstances that can be used against us. (Ask Boris Johnson, for example.) Those taking part in the public flaying of Pratt might consider at some point how vulnerable they are in turn. It could happen to anybody - especially when spin doctors are looking for a distraction. This is the psychology of McCarthyism and Witch Hunts, but Christine Pratt should still have paused before acting, if only because it is such a distraction.

That is no excuse, however, for the bullying she has in turn endured. Britain is a nation of bullies, as this blog has pointed out, but in a subconscious way that seems oblivious to the irony of bullying resulting from a story about... bullying.

Still, as Rod Liddle and Brendan O’Neill demonstrate, a nation of bullies must, by necessisity, blame the victims, if only so they can tell them to Grow Up, Suck It In, Pull Themselves Together, Live With It, etc. This seems to be the main problem with exposing Brown as a bully - you get the impression that a large segment of the public sort of agree with bullying, in part because it's always good sense to side with the bully, but also because there is an unspoken loathing of the weak. As Nic Cohen said of the thuggish 'comedy' panel show, Mock The Week:

Similarly, Mock the Week tells me something about the British I would rather not know. It commands an audience of about three million. As I watched, it occurred to me that Britain may well have three million people who would happily go along with the mob if we ever had a government that incited violence against the vulnerable. [SOURCE]

And as AA Gill noted (while pretending that this is only an English rather than a UK-wide trait), even joy and laughter is tainted by this pack sadism:

English humour is the sound of the bullies. The overtold story of the English underdog overcoming the big man with laughter is simply not true. The English constantly use their humour as an indiscriminate bludgeon... The humour of embarrassment and the joy of classroom teasing is a national sport, and its very ubiquity is its open-palmed “What, us?” defence, because at some point everyone suffers for it. Obviously there’s no harm meant. If you beat up only Pakis, you’re a racist, but if you beat up everyone it’s only having a laugh. And anyway, they should be able to take a joke. [SOURCE]

This presumably explains how Brown the Bully is presently being spun as Brown the Victim. If he really were on the skids, there would be no mercy for him, as John Major, Neil Kinnock and Michael Foot's own skewerings demonstrate. And how else to explain tonight's spectacle on Channel 4 News, where lumpenprole grotesque, John Prescott, jowels wobbling away, tried to convince the nation that his party did not have an issue with bullying by, err, trying to shout down Krishnan Guru Murphy and smearing Pratt without her being there to give a response. He could do this because he had an entire political machine behind him, launching a violent counter attack like, well, a bully who's just been shoved back.

But that's not the only factor at play here. There's the herd-like falling in to line of the most insubordinate of lefties, all piling in on Comment Is Free, Harry's Place and Socialist Unity to spread the shit, repeat the spin and generally defend a man they claim to hold in contempt. Why? Because they're scared that the Tories might get in, and individual values mean nothing when there's a turd wearing a red rosette vs. a twat in a blue rosette. This is the origins of every betrayal by the left in this country - a set of strongly espoused beliefs behind which only tribalism and accompanying blood feuds really matter. At least Bob Piper is consistent, one supposes.

The only question now is whether the public will fall for it, as they seem to have fallen for the 'Pity Me!' narrative engineered last weekend, and see Brown the victimiser as instead Brown the victim. Or perhaps he truly has been wounded and so they will swarm around him like sharks, eager for more blood. The fact that The Sun has described Brown as 'The Prime Monster' suggests the latter, whereas the muddled coverage by the BBC suggests the 'narrative' is still up for grabs. Perhaps the matter will die, as the government hopes, or more shit will float to the surface. After all, it wasn't so long ago that Brown was shoving wavering Labour MPs into the 'Yes' lobby during the climax of the ID Card Bill showdown of 2006. The fact remains that Brown's bad behaviour has been common knowledge for a while - it's been in the public domain long enough to suggest that a bastard can stay a bastard just as long as he remains a powerful bastard.

But this all gets in the way of the real question: Are Andrew Rawnsley's allegations true, and if not, why has Brown merely issued denials and not libel wits? That in itself speaks volumes.

In The Brown Stuff.

2010-02-21T01:22:00.002Z

For those who didn't know, journalist Andrew Rawnsley has just published a book that makes pisspoor Prime Minister Gordon Brown look like an unstable, violent and mentally incompetent nincompoop. Do we really deserve to be lead by a man like this?

...During one rage, while in his official car, Brown clenched his fist in fury after being told some unwelcome news and then thumped the back of the passenger seat with such force that a protection officer sitting in the front flinched with shock. The aide sitting next to Brown, who had just told him the information that provoked the outburst, cowered because he feared "that the prime minister was about to hit him in the face".

Rawnsley writes that "the cream upholstery of the seat-back in front of Brown was flecked with black marks. When having a meltdown the prime minister would habitually stab it with his black marker pen"... [Source]

Whether Brown is a liability is pretty much like asking if being set on fire really hurts. But how can such a man stay in power? Well, like most abusive arseholes, he actually depends on his victims to make excuses for him, to let him off the hook.

According to Rawnsley, O'Donnell was so disturbed by the effect on those in Downing Street that he took it upon himself to try "to calm down frightened duty clerks, badly treated phone operators and other bruised staff by telling them, 'Don't take it personally'". [Source]

Yep, don't take physical assault or mental abuse personally. Tsk, don't you realise you're simply making things worse? Never mind that this is the sort of behaviour that leads to tribunals or criminal prosecutions.

Even Rawnsley himself seems sucked into this bizarre psychology, that leaves the victim both vulnerable and complicit in their own abuse. It's not his fault, he just gets angry sometimes! Why, he can be a good man sometimes..!

However, the book does show the softer side of the prime minister, recounting how he is capable of being incredibly solicitous towards colleagues at times of family emergency and bereavement. [Source]

Yeah, that makes up for manhandling people, throwing phones, being horrible to female staff and acting like a deranged thug. And then there was his single-handed rescue of the world economy which, err, shackled us with even more debt, inflation and unsustainable public expenditure.

In today's serialisation, you can also sample part of the account of the financial crisis during which Gordon Brown displayed some of his positive attributes as a leader. In October 2008, even those cabinet colleagues and civil servants who were otherwise in utter despair about the prime minister were admiring of the boldness and imagination with which he reacted to the crisis by producing a blueprint for saving the financial system which was broadly copied around the world.

One wonders if one should laugh or cry at this point.

Of course, the truth is that Brown, like all abusers, ultimately only has the power others allow him. By making excuses and clinging to the vain myth that this unpleasant, stunted man can actually do anything good rather than spiteful or myopic, we allow him to continue to ruin our country, poison our culture and plunge us ever deeper into penury. Gordon Brown has helped make the Tories electable. What else need be said?

Yet More US School Paranoia.

2010-02-19T16:30:00.003Z

Remember, spying on teenagers behind a bush or with a pair of binoculours is weird. Whereas, spying on teenagers via school computers is perfectly acceptable. Rememeber, it's for your own good:

A school district in Pennsylvania spied on students through web cameras installed on laptops provided by the district, according to a class action lawsuit filed this week.

Lower Merion school district, in a well-heeled suburb of Philadelphia, provided 2,300 high-school students with Mac laptops last autumn in what its superintendent, Christopher McGinley, described as an effort to establish a "mobile, 21st-century learning environment"...

...The district retained remote control of the built-in webcams installed on the computers – and used them to capture images of the students, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court this week.

The ruse was revealed when Blake Robbins, a student at Harriton high school, was hauled into the assistant principal Lindy Matsko's office, shown a photograph taken on the laptop in his home and disciplined for "improper behaviour"...

...n a letter posted on the school district's website, McGinley said the district had installed on the laptops a security feature that allowed the webcam to photograph the computer operator in the event the laptop is lost or stolen. He said that following the suit's filing, the district disabled the feature amidst a review of technology and privacy policies. He said the feature was activated only to help locate a lost or stolen laptop.

"The district never activated the security feature for any other purpose or in any other manner whatsoever," he wrote. "We regret if this situation has caused any concern or inconvenience among our students and families."

You only get such sincere apologies from people who've been caught out. It does raise a pertinent question though, especially in the CCTV-sodden UK (and London, where you can't scratch your nose without being spotted). Why do we so easily submit to surveillance, even though we don't know who's at the other end? Paranoia makes us vulnerable to the real thing, it seems.

Intolerable Zero Tolerance.

2010-02-18T21:01:00.003Z

While this blog likes to stay firmly in the UK, and in London, sometimes there is a news story from abroad that compels it to vomit out epic torrents of outrage and bile.

This is one such story.

Alexa Gonzalez, an outgoing 12-year-old who likes to dance and draw, expected a lecture or maybe detention for her doodles earlier this month. Instead, the principal of the Junior High School in Forest Hills, New York, called police, and the seventh-grader was taken across the street to the police precinct.

Alexa's hands were cuffed behind her back, and tears gushed as she was escorted from school in front of teachers and - the worst audience of all for a preadolescent girl - her classmates.

"They put the handcuffs on me, and I couldn't believe it," Alexa recalled. "I didn't want them to see me being handcuffed, thinking I'm a bad person."

Still it's a slippery slope from just scribbling on a desk to going tonto in the canteen with an AK-47, amirite? Alexa, it's obviously for your own good that you're humiliated in front of your classmates and be so traumatised you then spend the next three days "throwing up". America has to make sure its children are safe and don't live in fear!

After all, according to this prize plonker, Zero Tolerance is A Good Thing:

Kenneth Trump, a security expert who founded the National School Safety and Security Services consulting firm, said focusing on security is essential to the safety of other students. He said zero tolerance policies can work if "common sense is applied."

Two things spring to mind. Firstly, there's some weird double think going on if you can honestly combine 'common sense' and 'zero tolerance'in the same sentence. One suggests moderation and nuance, whilst the other signifies extremity and a simple minded black-and-white morality.

Secondly, there's something pretty dodgy about having a URL, as Ken Trump does, like http://www.schoolshootingexpert.com/ - hardly reassuring, is it? It presumes the worst case scenario and suggests you should too. So does having a company named: "National School Safety and Security Services" which offers "school security and emergency preparedness training". And it's not meant to be reassuring, because here we have the commodification of panic, where our darkest fears are sold back to us. Worse, like most products, we are not just being sold the solution but also the problem - we are being convinced to be afraid.

And yet school shootings and other such events make the news precisely because they are so rare, and so newsworthy. The mistake we make with the news and which the news lets us make is to assume the unusual is in fact everyday or ever-more likely. But it's not - you are very unlikely to die in a school shooting in the US, at least if the Center for Disease Control is to be believed. Meanwhile, in the UK, 40% of road deaths are in the 15-25 group (who only have about 12.5% of all driving licences issued). Back in the US, drivers in the 15-24 age bracket consitutute only 14% of the population but account for 30% of all injuries amongst male drivers - in 2008 alone, this amounted to the deaths of 3500 young people, compared to 323 deaths from school shootings between 1992-1997.

One death is always one too many, but where is the outrage for all those who die young and in an RTA? The ugly truth is that while school shootings are exciting, rare and - from a journalistic perspective - 'sexy', deaths in traffic accidents are mundane, everyday, and of little interest (except for those directly effected.) Perverse but true - not all dead teenagers are equal. Such irrationality leads the debate and in doing so distorts our view of it.

This brings us back to Zero Tolerance, which seeks to apply extreme responses to extreme events to the everyday and the typical. It should go without saying that this is absurd, but since when has reason ever counted in debates like this?

The real question we should be having is whether schools are the healthiest environments for children to grow up in, whether leaving our young in a state of perpetual in loco parentis really helps much, or whether a 19th century model of top-down, hierachical learning really is the best way for children to learn. But that's another blogpost, another rant, another day.

Doctor Who: The End of Time - An 'I Can't Be Arsed To Write Much' Review.

2010-01-02T18:34:00.004Z

Last night's Doctor Who - was it good? Yes, no and maybe - but you're a walking corpse if those last five words didn't break your heart and the Tennant/Cribbins double act didn't leave you in awe. At its best, which I'm happy to say was most of the time, it recaptured the initial magic and excitement of the far too quickly forgotten Eccleston era. It was an end worth mourning.

Anyway, these two very disparate reviews HERE and HERE say pretty much what I was going to write anyway, so read them instead. Let us now prepare to be enthralled or horribly disappointed as Laird Moffat and his Time Toddler begin their reign.

Winter in Harrow.

2009-12-20T19:36:00.006Z

A view of the park near the University of Westminster's Harrow Campus and Northwick Park hospital, as taken from the platform at Northwick Park Tube station.

Labouring The Point About The Tories.

2009-12-19T12:41:00.002Z

The overall consensus is that the Conservative Party will win the next UK General Election, due to take place some time next year. What puzzles many pundits, however, is what the opinion polls say. The Tories are in the lead but only by a margin of around 10%, which will translate into either a workable Tory majority in parliament, a small majority for them or, possibly, a hung parliament, and this lead will fluctuate ever more as the election draws near.

Political commentator Peter Oborne believes this is because the Tory leader David Cameron is not inspiring enough of the electorate, that Team Cameron is not invoking the sort of passion that Tony Blair or Margaret Thatcher did. I believe however that the answer is more prosaic. We are delusional and ghastly, ghastly hypocrites.

Labour survives against the odds because we want it to be something it's not. There is an odd mix of nostalgia for a time that never was and a blind faith in the never-never that explains why Labour hasn't ceased to exist. Lots of its supporters, and indeed the rest of the public, murmur dewy-eyed epithets over Labour achievements: the Welfare State, the NHS, the People's Party, the minimum wage, increased public spending...

The other half to this is a vain, always disappointed belief that all it takes is one good Labour government, Goddammit, and we'll all be living in a paradise free of poverty, waiting lists, despair or fear. This mentality is akin to blighted peasants in the Middle Ages praying for a better life in the next - it all seems much more feasible than facing up to the now and how to remedy it with what we have. Gordon Brown is simply a modern version of the hypocritical, corrupt, whoring local priest that everyone feels sorry for because deep down they really want to believe he's a good man and that at least he means well.

But for some reason, while odious acts like ID Cards, the Iraq War, Labour Sleaze, John Prescott in his many manifestations and - not to mention - the Winter of Discontent, rationing carrying on into the early 50s, political militancy, betrayal of values, shrill lefty dogma, the Orwellian Ministry of Works, student top-up fees, an appalling record in government and punitive taxes all upset people, they don't seem to dominate the public imagination as examples of villainy as the Tories do.

For that matter, while everyone curses the Tories, they don't really factor in things like economic booms, rising home ownership, unions made to behave, higher living standards and so on. True, these are often double edged swords, but so are many of Labour's contributions, and it seems odd that we focus more on the Tories' failings despite benefiting from the good things they have done as well as Labour's own positive contributions.

It all comes down to guilt. We feel that we should be Good, and in a post-war British context that means Left of Centre, redistributive and nice and fluffy (many people seem to think these all go together). Which is what Labour represents, or at least what we'd like it to represent. But on the other hand, we feel like we have to be pragmatic, self-serving, ruthless and money grubbing, all of which the Tories represent in the popular imagination.

Hating the Tories helps us ignore the sneaking suspision that we might need them, that their 'nasty party' vibe is actually how the world works and, let's be honest, reflects a lot of the miserly, small-minded, shallow and vindictive elements of the British character. We're ashamed of this, so vote in or support a party that we believe reflects our less savoury urges and then spend the rest of the time hurling invective at it.

And this is why we remember Tory excesses more than Labour excesses, because they confirm comforting beliefs and prejudices and also let us pretend that that a Blakeian Jerusalem is just round the corner. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair didn't just vote themselves in - the electorate and its own dishonesty has much to answer for, which is probably why screaming 'TORY BASTARDS!!!' makes us feel so much better.

The ultimate example of this cognitive dissonance is how we've remembered the old Liberal Party. Which is to say, we broadly haven't. We've forgotten minor details like the extension of the franchise (without which Labour would be stuffed like a turkey), social reforms, an end to child labour, removal of power from the Crown, the aristocracy and the Church and, lest we forget, the earliest incarnation of the bless'd Welfare State. Why is this? In part, it was a long time ago and our memories are, naturally, self serving. Labour has become the forlorn hope of a 'better' future, as previously mentioned, so another reforming force in British politics just confuses many people, or it rather muddies an easy, convenient political narrative that people can buy into. It also rather gets in the way of the dualism we've come to rely on - evil Tories, goody Labour, but the Liberals..? This is why the Lib Dems will probably remain the 'third party' for the foreseeable future. We don't strictly speaking want a third choice, beyond a handy protest vote or a sop to politics we know will never be realised.

For what it matters, Labour will probably lose simply because enough of the country wants or needs a change and because they've upset just too many of those voters who would normally support them. The next step will be for Labour to elect a leader we can invest our vain hopes in, who can gleam in the purity of opposition and who can let us keep believing that the Promised Land is but an election away... And the Tories? Well, they say electorates get the governments they deserve.

The Trouble with Jauss

2009-12-16T01:34:00.002Z

I have studied the works of Hans Rudi Jauss at some depth, I even based a large section of my PhD thesis' arguments on his theories. I probably owe my doctorate in part to him. But I didn't really know what he did during World War Two until recently.

From 1939 to 1945 he was a member of the Waffen SS, declared a criminal organisation at Nuremberg. But what did Jauss have to say for himself in this matter? Just before his death in 1997, he gave an interview to Le Monde - far from an open and unambiguous acknowledgement of responsibility, it seems to be an attempt to blur the lines, and obfuscate or perhaps skip around the issue. This reached almost comical heights, as the following quoted paragraph demonstrates. All footnotes and emphases are mine:

Before I turn to the history of a young German who was seventeen years old when the war started [1], I would like to remind people that there are at least three ways of understanding history [2]: the history that unfolds in the present, in which one finds oneself engaged as an actor; the history into which one finds oneself passively propelled [3], as a witness so to speak; and finally, the history that has taken place and become an object of reflection. When one attempts to examine one’s own past, those three levels may overlap, but recomposition through memory prevails. [4] What persuaded me to enter the Waffen-SS was not really an adherence to Nazi ideology. [5] As the son of a teacher, member of the petty bourgeoisie, I was a young man who wanted to conform with the atmosphere of the time. [6] That said, I had read Spengler’s Decline of the West, written by an author banned by the Nazis, and it had made me skeptical of the Hitlerian empire. [7] But along with other future historians — I’m thinking of my friends Reinhart Koselleck and Arno Borst — what we had in common was the desire not to stand apart from current events. [8] One had to be present in the field, where history was being made, [9] by participating in the war. In our view, to do otherwise would have been to flee, to confine ourselves within an aesthetic attitude, while our comrades of the same age were risking their lives. [10]

[1] Still old enough to know better.
[2] As opposed to what really happened.
[3] Nothing just happens in uniform.
[4] How convenient.
[5] What?
[6] Why didn't you join the Wehrmacht instead?
[7] So skeptical, in fact, that you joined the Waffen SS.
[8] Why not?
[9] And people were being killed.
[10] There's a hell of a difference between a volunteer and a conscript.

Not putting too fine a point about it, the Waffen SS was notable for a whole swathe of war crimes against regular and irregular combatants, in addition to unarmed men, women and children. The blood of millions is on their hands. Not to mention it was home to outfits like the SS-Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger, as lead into battle by a paedophile and which included mass rape, mutilation, immolation and throwing and then bayoneting live babies on its list of extra-curricular activities.

Of course, Jauss himself was imprisoned and then subsequently released without charge. But it's telling that only those conscripted into the Waffen SS after 1943 (often literally at the point of a bayonet) recieve standard veterans' pensions and benefits from the German government. Before then, you were more likely than not a volunteer, like Jauss. He was perhaps keen to distance himself both mentally and ethically from this fact:

The letters from my youth, sent from the front— I couldn’t reread them for a long time. When I finally did reread them, I was caught off guard by a young man who had become a stranger, whom I could not recognize as myself.

But he was that young man. They were not strangers because they were the same person. Another thing Jauss said in that interview was "my experience at the time was compartmentalized and my horizons limited", a state of affairs that arguably persisted to his death. It also applied to me, blinded but not absolved by the narrow focus of the doctoral process. Perhaps that is why Jauss found his home in academia so easily - scholarship, after all, is a selective act of remembering.

Language Use That Really Annoys Me #5 - Euphemisms.

2009-12-01T21:21:00.008Z

The postman was let go after he upset a differently abled person and said rude things to a person of colour, asking if she wanted to discuss Uganda. He subsequently returned, tired and emotional, and proceeded to make his colleagues pass away in a hail of bullets. I immediately spent a penny in my unmentionables as he pointed the weapon of mass destruction at my head and asked me if I was in some distress. I said yes, at which point the local Police Service applied reasonable force by making him pass away via a major head trauma.

'This was an unfortunate incident!' the police officer said as he pondered the collateral damage inflicted in the process. 'To think I was about to request extraordinary rendition on this illegal combatant!' I agreed wholeheartedly.

Returning home, I decided to have a small tipple in the pub to celebrate and let my hair down. Unfortunately, I let my hair down just a tad too much and had a little accident when my car had a frank exchange of views with a brick wall. I then proceeded to discuss the matter further with the paramedics, accusing one of being vertically challenged and good with colours and the other one a big boned fan of comfortable shoes. See you next tuesday, the male parademic said, as the police service arrived. I was then detained at Her Majesty's Pleasure for a period until eventually I had to discuss the matter with the two naughty boys I shared my cell with.

"You need to expand your consciousness with the food of the Gods", one naughty boy said to me, handing over a jazz cigarette. "Yes, and facilitate alternative lifestyles through non-mainstream distribution channels" said the other, pulling some Columbian Marching Powder out of his chocolate starfish.

Eventually, however, I became unwell and had a nasty accident with some razor blades. Let off early so I could get some help, I found myself in hospital next to a woman with a fuller figure. "Are you in the family way?" I asked coyly. "Nah, dear, I've got f**king stomach cancer" she replied, somewhat tactlessly.

Language Use That Really Annoys Me #4 - The Definite Article.

2009-12-01T02:04:00.005Z

Now before I start, let's note one thing: I am no climatologist, nor a climate change believer, nor a denier. I simply do not know enough about the matter and presently do not have the time nor the resources to look into the matter with any degree of thoroughness. One thing I do believe, however, is that the debate has been tainted by politicisation on both sides, with smears, ad hominems and more effort spent on denouncing the other side than actually arguing for one's own view.

With that in mind though, I still think Jonathon Porritt is a t**t. Why? He is hooked on 'The Definite Article'. Now, the definite article is sometimes useful. 'The Queen' or 'The Prime Minister' or 'The Suspect' or 'The President' or 'The Winner' allows one to emphasise the point because an emphasis is needed. However, when you abuse the definite article, to provide a false emphasis that is not appropriate, then you are abusing language to meet your own ends rather than an objective statement of truth. (Which is a tricky thing at the best of times, as I will mention later on.)

The most egregious example of this is the use of the phrase, 'The Science'. Now, it either is or it isn't science, once one applies the proper scientific method, peer review, falsifiability and so on. Science is science is science unless or until you can prove it's not. But giving it the honorific, 'The Science', is to invest in it a sort of secular divine writ that has no place in the discussion - unless it is being subordinated to a political end.

Enter Porritt. I once had to sit through a hysterical rant from this awful demagogue as part of an audience of upper middle class university employees and functionaries, who clapped blandly away despite him demanding we all start living like it's World War Two again. (His exact words were 'And we must learn to live under WARTIME conditions!!!') They then left the lecture theatre, drove home in their expensive cars, left all the lights on and didn't even stop to consider minor issues like 'cognitive dissonance'. After all, the real pain would be for poorer, less important people, amirite?

Poritt's eyes blazed and his voice almost shrieked as he mentioned those who dared disagree with him, like a trotskyite denouncing class traitors, or more to the point, a sort of museli-guzzling, ethically sourced Oswald Mosely, elevated to prominence because he talks and thinks like the present sawn-off jobsworth government does.

So no, I was not impressed by Porritt. But I realised how much I couldn't stand him when he started making crazed Tony Blair arm gestures, his eyes now practically leaping out of his sockets, as he proclaimed:

'Al Gore isn't a scientist - BUT HE KNOWS THE SCIENCE!!!'

F**king hell. Where does one begin? It's a bit like declaring that my brother's friend 'isn't a gynaecologist, but by golly, HE KNOWS THE FANNY!!!' It is ultimately meaningless as we all sort of know a bit about climate science, and so the statement is true in a vaguely clumsy and inarticulate way. But again, we see the abuse of the definite article to suggest an authority which is not actually there, except as a sort of implied bien pensant enlightenment.

But there is another danger. If, by using the definite article, you esteem 'the science' as a higher authority then you risk undermining science of any sort when 'the science' is found wanting. Writing about the recent scandal regarding rather 'revealing' e-mails at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, George Monbiot said: "No one has been as badly let down by the revelations in these emails as those of us who have championed the science [emphasis mine]. We should be the first to demand that it is unimpeachable, not the last."

And here lies 'the problem': science isn't unimpeachable - unless you think that Gallileo, Copernicus and Darwin were right shits for ruining it for everyone.

Monbiot, to his credit, has always replied to his opponents rather than dismissed them in a torrent of bile, and he has also been direct in facing up to the UEA scandal. But his abuse of language weakens his cause in the long run. As said, science is a rational process whereby we explore and study our surroundings. It does not equate to 'truth', which is a very subjective and so difficult creature at the best of times. It tells you if something works, how it works and when it works, but it does not explain WHY it works, because you can't scientifically observe an abstract philosophical concept.

If in esteeming 'the science' as the core pillar of your ideology, you then find it compromised or challenged, then you risk not only being on the side of a 'false god' but also undermining science as a concept overall, especially in the eyes of a public that doesn't know the difference between science and 'the science' in the first place, and may be inclined to see the situation, and so any subsequent warning, as that of the environmentalist that cried wolf (or doomed polar bear). The incorrect use of the definite article may therefore, in this case, prove to be very damaging to everyone's health.

Language Use That Really Annoys Me #3 - Teenage Girls.

2009-11-30T16:38:00.006Z

I hate teenage girls. Not enough of them die in wars. Think of all the ickle fluffy bunnies we could save from agonising but necessary medical tests if we used teenage girls instead. They'd get free mascara and most of them like doing weird things to their hair and skin, so it's not exactly a one-sided transaction...

But have you ever been on a train with them? It's Dante's Inferno if he included cheap perfume, desperate attempts to look 'adult' despite still being at school and too much make up. God, they're irritating. So irritating that all of a sudden drinking bleach or being eaten alive by a swarm of ravenous sewer rats seems preferable.

It's how they speak that's really annoying, the excruciating squealing tone that comes from watching too much Hollyoakes or Neighbours or American Teen shlockfests. In this shrill pidgin, one does not go to 'university'. No, one goes to 'YOOOOO-NEEEEEE'. Every exclaimation is 'OH MY GOOOOOOOoooooooooDDDD!'* and their laughter is akin to a really cruel Greek chorus cackling as a cute puppy gets run over by a Deus et Machina Land Rover.

But it's how every f**king sentence has to be a question. 'Hi Emm-AHHHH?' 'Hiya, Denise?' 'We're on a train???' 'So are we?' 'We'll meet at the station?' 'That's a great idea?' 'Love ya, babe?' 'Love you, too, gor-juss?' It's like a gaggle of South Bank intellectuals arguing over whether they actually exist and whether the Jonas Bros. are, like, the cutest boys evvv-aaaaaar.

Everybody thinks that one's teenage years are about rebellion. But as these not-quite-women show, it's really about conformity. Not the beaten down, I've-learned-to-love-the-inland-revenue, oh-shit-I'm-married-and-got-three-kids type of conformity we normally associate with 'the squares', who lost their battle with the Beast long before they even knew they were fighting it.

No, teenage conformity is far worse - they choose to obey, to follow, to think and dress and speak exactly like the rest of whatever grubby little tribe they choose to belong to. 'Teenage Rebellion', that old cliche and crutch for one's own midlife crisis, is a misdiagnosis. The rejection of parental authority is not in favour of some Sodom 'n Gomorrah anarchy, but rather, a far more strident, focussed and vicious obedience to a much more powerful, competent authority. Those girls don't give two farts about what you think about them - because they BELONG, and that means infinitely more than any personal consideration or individual nuance.

And if you don't obey the hormonal Clone-God? You will be singled out. You will be despised. You will be tainted, and You Will Pay for not marching in tune. There is a reason why the Red Guards were mostly students, the Baader Meinhof gang was young and beautiful and why most suicide bombers are young men with their best years still ahead: Only the young can love their masters as much as they do, and HATE their foes with such passion. Piggy always gets lynched by good little tribals, and there is a reason why all those charming chavs and thugs**, of the kind that congregates in large numbers and frighten grown men, all wear the same cut and style of tracksuits and hooded tops and affect the same swagger and menacing, insolent air. They're in uniform and they're on parade.

And in the end, it all comes down to language. The language you use shapes your mind and your actions. It defines you and the company you keep. By definition, any limit you impose on your language is a limit you impose on your own mind, your own decisions and your ability to choose right from wrong. And that's what's really wrong with ghastly teenage girls. They WANT to be limited and hold in contempt any attempt to improve yourself or have your own thoughts.

But there's going to be a day when I get up, walk across the carriage, stand on the table they're sitting around, whip out my homemade morning star and, while waving it about, sing: "'Girl, You'll Be A Woman, SOOOOooo-ooon...', but only when you can string a sentence together, you foul pubescent wreckers of good syntax." And then, and only then, I will threaten them with certain death if they ever raise the pitch of their voices at the end of a sentence that isn't a question. And it will be a good day. If not for my sanity, or vapid girls in scrunchees and tracksuit bottoms with 'WHORE' printed over the buttocks, then at least for language.

* In this case, Sharnice, the infernal deity of backstabbing, hairdressers, eating disorders and crap taste in music. Alignment: Neutral Evil. Favoured Weapon: Fake Gucci stiletto heel, outside a pub in Central Cardiff on a Saturday night...

** At least teenage girls have an internal life, albeit a really stunted one. Teenage boys, as a rule, haven't quite got past the grunting and saying 'c**t' a lot phase. They seldom develop further, either.

Language Use That Really Annoys Me #2 - Over-Used Cliches.

2009-11-30T04:05:00.003Z

I hate spoken cliches. When someone says, 'well, y'know, at the end of the day, when all is said and done, and - I'm not being funny but - like, you what I mean?' I want to stab them. In the head, with a tent spike. Or possibly just shoot them. If America is to be hated for anything, it is for the hideous over-use of the term 'what-not'. But then, the French keep going 'alors' and Cheryl 'I sound like Sid The Sexist in Drag' Cole probably intersperses every four f**king words with 'like', so the tendency is universal.

Why? It suggests lazy thinking. People who keep using the same phrases, time and again, are not using that most-complex-structure-in-the-known-universe that occupies their cranium. Their brains are taking short cuts, they are running on autopilot and - worst of all - they're just speaking someone else's words. They are not functioning as people, but as automotons, or jukeboxes playing the greatest verbal hits of someone much more creative.

The worst ones are however created by the individual who then proceeds to overuse them so they never need structure an original sentence again. For example, I knew one idiot who kept using the word 'intransigence' to the point that you had to wonder if that was the first four syllable word they had ever said and their tiny minds couldn't cope with the stress. 'Negative' or 'negativity' is another overused one, as is 'solutions', but so too are potted ideological arguments for people too stupid for ideology, like 'political correctness gone mad!' or 'if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear'. It even has a social cost - think of all those families ruined by 'my house, my rules!' or 'you're not going out dressed like that!'(and so on) vs. 'you don't understand me!' or 'I hate you!' or 'You're So Unfair!'. All too often, we venture into life as individuals with our own thoughts and viewpoints, and yet in the end we are reduced to stock phrases, archetypes and echoes of echoes of echoes, playing out prealloted roles with prealloted dialogue...

Lazy use of cliches is profoundly annoying, but it's also dehumanising too. But, y'know, it's like 'what-evvaaaaar', innit?

Language Use That Really Annoys Me #1 - Bully Language.

2009-11-30T04:03:00.000Z

I am an irritable ovine at heart, often getting into fights at barn dances with collies that look at my ewe funny. Also annoying are the many ghastly uses of the English language that remain both far too common and not nearly as violently put down as they should be.

For example, there's language that is offensive - for example, calling someone's mother a llama - and then there is language that is just begging for a fight. 'Bully Language' is a good example of the latter.

But what is 'bully language'? It is a phrase or cliche designed to shout down, bellitle or dismiss someone who feels aggrieved. It is often used by people who are insensitive, thuggish or who just like putting other people down.

Examples include 'live with it!', 'suck it up!' and the all-time twat classic, 'buck up your ideas!', usually applied to someone who's suicidal or severely clinically depressed. It is often used politically as well, as a way of rubbing it in and making yourself look like a cock at the same time, e.g., 'Hitler has just won the election. Live with it!' This allows you to appear masterful, no-nonsense and folksy and in control. Oh, and to be an arsehole to people you know won't hit you.

Some defenders of bully language claim it is both common and necessary in warzones. For example, 'get up and fight, you big poof! We'll find your leg later!!!' Somehow, though, it seems a bit disproportionate to invoke the sort of language used on a battlefield when talking to someone whose boyfriend has just dumped them.

But how best to counter bully language? Face punching is illegal, but it's your word against theirs. And when they're bleeding, you can then reply 'live with it!' while laughing at your own ironic wit. However, the old reliable response of 'Go f**K yourself!' is an acceptable substitute. And if they don't like it, they too will have to 'suck it up', 'buck up their ideas' etc.

True Blood vs. Twilight, or 'Cloth vs. Clobber Redux'

2009-11-21T22:08:00.004Z

Back in days of yore, Loaded magazine (in its James Brown-edited incarnation) was actually worth reading. One article from this era that stood out for me was 'Cloth vs. Clobber', a grand unifying theory that sought to explain all events in history on whether the participants were 'cloth' (as in, affected, individualistic and possibly well-tailored or art student-esque) or 'clobber' (as in, JGB Sports, whatever your mum buys you at Primark, trainers, work clothes, etc.). Put simply, it's Noel Fielding vs. Noel Gallagher, or possibly Zoe Heriot vs. Rose Tyler.

This article has stayed with me ever since. Even now I view the world between these two poles. NATO vs. the Taliban, for example - our boys are obviously clobber because they're all in uniform, wear glorified Doc Martens and drink lots of lager. Whereas, 'The Scholars' are cloth because they all dress like Obi Wan Kenobi and have a thing for mascara and pederasty. You see? It all makes sense now.

Anyway, let's now talk about vampires, or rather, HBO's Deep South haemovore soap, True Blood, and the upcoming vamps 'n werewolves epic, Twilight: New Moon. Again, I refer you to 'Cloth vs. Clobber'. True Blood is plainly clobber, not least because it revolves around the nation's favourite hung up telepath waitress, Sookie Stackhouse, prancing around like a latter day Daisy Duke, right down to the tight but dead common t-shirts and matching shorts. The rest of the cast is also clad in that functional, naively gauche way of many Americans - all jeans, strappy tops, check shirts and Nascar baseball caps. Everyone shags like rabbits and most of the action takes place in the town bar where everyone eats burgers and drinks Budweiser. Even Bill, the in-house brooding vampire, is more akin to a dressed-down Southern Gent than a blood-hungry New Romantic. The fact that Bill's Clan Elder, Eric, looks like he's just been on tour with Opeth notwithstanding, True Blood and its characters are as said most assuredly clobber.

Meanwhile, the Twilight series has just got to be cloth. Wan, winsome teenage virgins listening to Muse and getting lovelorn over a wet prat of a vampire that can't even bring himself to bite/bonk them is proof enough. But if the trailer for the new sequel is anything to go by, we've also got suspiciously well-groomed Byronic Hero werewolves stripped to the waist and looking rather troubled, and a Vampire Court that makes the Borgias look rather understated. It's so cloth, it makes Hot Topic look like Footlocker.

But who prevails? In this case, it has to be clobber. True Blood just seems much more compelling, believable and nuanced, like a living world waiting to explore, whereas the Twilight Saga can only really be seen as a sort of sanitised, simplified romantic smut for tween and teenage girls who want all the vicarious thrills without the grot or nuance of the real thing. So chalk another one up then, clobber. Chavs, rejoice!

NEXT WEEK: Is Being Human the new Rising Damp? Log on next week for the answers!

2012 - A Spotter's Guide.

2009-11-21T21:41:00.004Z

Do you like disaster films that are just like every other disaster film, give or take state of the art CGI effects? Then this checklist is for you! Remember, 2012 has all these cliches and more, including a bit where two silly old women die in a much deserved road accident! Go Emmerich, Go! How many can YOU spot?

MAIN SECTION
* Earnest black chap giving pious speech about shared humanity? CHECK!
* Billions dying but at least the dog makes it? CHECK!
* Gratuitous product placement? (Sony VAIO et al.) CHECK!
* Deep Impact-esque tear-jerker moments between doomed relatives? CHECK!
* Expendable second husband/stepfather? CHECK!
* Panto villain politician who won't listen to the earnest black chap? CHECK!
* Professor in a bow tie? CHECK!
* Romance blossoming despite monumental carnage? CHECK!
* Various improbable last minute escapes from certain death? CHECK!
* Token foreign family thrown in as a handy Deus Et Machina? CHECK!
* Token foreign family thrown in to emphasise tragedy of situation by dying horribly? CHECK!
* Tibetan Lama sounding rather profound yet somewhat abstract? CHECK!
* Desperate sucking up to the Chinese as this means good box office in the PRC? CHECK!

BONUS SECTION
* Woody Harrelson playing a weirdo? CHECK!
* John Cusack deciding now's the time to cash the fuck in? CHECK!
* Complete disregard for probability or scientific feasibility? CHECK!
* Danny Glover looking rather startled? CHECK!
* Clumsy attempt to spice up a tired genre with unconvincing political subtext and spot-it-a-mile-away Biblical/Classical allusions? CHECK!

Addendum to Yesterday's Bitter, Angry Post.

2009-11-17T00:13:00.002Z

One thing I forgot to point out while taking 'The Waters of Mars' out to the car park for a good metaphorical kicking was that one scene in particular seems ripped off, lock stock and barrel from another, far superior, production.

Remember when the grumpy pilot gets infected with an alien virus and then blows himself and his rocket up as a noble sacrifice? When his eyes go opaque and he almost submits to the infection before he makes his grand gesture?

Can this be confused, perhaps, with Neil Jordan's 2001 Werewolf flick, 'Dog Soldiers', which has a grumpy sergeant who gets infected with lycanthropy and then blows himself and a cottage up as a noble sacrifice? When his eyes go lupine and he almost submits to the infection before he makes his grand gesture?

More eerily still, the actor playing that sergeant was one Sean Pertwee, son of Jon Pertwee, also known as the third incarnation of... Doctor Who. [Cue sinister electronic music.]

Taking The P**s With The Waters of Mars.

2009-11-15T21:23:00.007Z

Lawrence Miles' predictions about tonight's Doctor Who episode, 'The Waters of Mars', are pretty much accurate, fittingly for an episode about destiny and the futility of denying it.

So we will not dwell upon them. Instead, I'll discuss how crap the rest of the episode was. It was rushed, the denouement was flimsy, the characters made out of cardboard or just flipped 180 degrees when the writers can't be bothered to develop them any further, and it simply left a nasty taste in the mouth. David Tennant's Doctor is simply reduced to mugging, flippant comments by rote and mad staring. It's all looking rather worn out.

Yes, the water monsters were impressive, but there simply isn't enough of them and maybe an hour long episode is too short to develop this story properly. And what else is wrong with the episode? The final nail in the coffin is the cutesy robot character (with a conveniently placed jet thruster) of the kind that makes the robot in Space Camp look high concept. Great is the suckage.

But in a sense, this special was an important one - it culminates what Russell T Davies has been slowly working towards since the show's relaunch in 2005: the strange trend towards belittling the Doctor as a character, making him contemptible, feeble and even a wretch.

Suddenly, after all the whizbangs, the same humans who condemned him for not interfering suddenly turn on him for changing his mind and so buggering up history. Said humans then run off or shoot themselves for dramatic reasons. It makes no sense. Here the Doctor's heroic turn, which itself makes no sense, is suddenly turned into a hubristic, petty act, a flipping of the tone that is clumsy and unsatisfying.

Quite why RTD likes doing this is not certain. Yes, previous incarnations of the Doctor had their moments of vanity and self doubt and conflict with other characters, but this was in part how the character was made heroic, because and not despite his flaws and how he transcended them. The endless Doctor/Brigadier squabbling seemed much more human and believeable than this melodramatic tosh.

But RTD doesn't think this is the point. To which one has to reply, well what is? A main character who is all of a sudden unsympathetic and contemptible is defeating the point - this isn't pro wrestling.

It does of course have echoes of Joss Whedon's make-your-characters-arseholes-and-make-sure-they're-never-happy approach to script writing. And certainly RTD seems to fancy himself as a JW-type figure. J. Michael Straczynski's looming shadow can be quite blatantly felt too, what with all the telegraphed storylines. But there also seems to be some sort of weird urge to torture the character, run him down, punish him, in effect for having a good time. Well, aren't we a miserable sod?

But we have seen all this torturous breast-tearing and preposterous conflict-as-drama before. Characters turn on a ninepence? Plots that stop making sense? Overdone dramatic events? What the 'Waters of Mars' represent is the slow, merciless infiltration of shlocky soap opera values into the rest of mainstream television, every bit as pernicious and corrupting as the Martian waters themselves.

It would have been more fun if the Ice Warriors returned. But Doctor Who doesn't seem to be about fun anymore - just a sort of lurid wallowing in misery and bad writing.

Why British Films Are Rubbish.

2009-11-13T09:53:00.002Z

An article in today's Guardian ponders why it's so hard for Britain to make good comedy films, or indeed good films generally. Various theories are peddled, including a lack of money, philistine producers, spite and the small number of British films that are produced each year.

All rubbish of course. The article almost hits upon the real reason when it mentions how hard it is for successful TV writers to translate their work onto the screen. But it doesn't realise, or doesn't want to realise, that this is down to one simple fact: British writers and directors just don't get film. We make television, that's what we're good at. We see things through the prism of the episodic TV show, which is quite different from how films need to be structured.

Indeed, what we have is a tradition of TV but no real set of film traditions. All our talent and effort and, arguably, success has been focussed in making television - that's why our film industry is crap. True, a lot of UK TV is crap too, but it's successful crap, like much of Hollywood's output often is, and therein lies the difference.

It's telling that the one British film cited as a genuine hit was Shaun of Dead, because its structure and pace - if not its setting, characters or tone - was very American in nature, much like its sort-of-sequel Hot Fuzz. There is no equivalent UK screen language or set of tropes because we've never developed them in the first place. What the article doesn't address, because Brits aren't really good at facing up to the reality of a problem, is this: Why should we go to the cinema to watch bad UK films, when we can turn on the telly and watch Good (or at least effective) UK TV?

Dangling On A Thread - The Execution of Gary Glitter.

2009-11-10T18:28:00.003Z

Last night's Channel 4 docudrama, "The Execution of Gary Glitter", has certainly divided opinion. A quick Google search reveals many who think it is pro- or anti- death penalty, and many others who claim it soberly provides us with both sides of the argument.* I'd argue, though, that it was less about the debate and more about the people who argue over it.

I shan't bore you too much with the details... Real life rock star/nonce Gary Glitter (nee Paul Gadd) is tried for child rape committed in South East Asia, but the twist is that this is in an alternate timeline where the UK has reintroduced hanging for murder and child abuse... (And presumably crimes committed in other countries.) After a vulgar trial and an intentionally short 30-day wait, he then goes to the gallows... And that's it.

But what stands out, as said, are the characters. None of them are savoury. Glitter is arrogant and stupid, his paedophilia (if not his conviction for rape) obvious in terms of his delusional, self-pitying behaviour. True, the real Glitter would probably flounce to the gallows like a latter-day Jack Shepherd, eager for one last bout of attention whoring, if - that is - they really ever did get to hang him. But there's little to engage us with the pig-headed sobbing wretch we are presented with here, even though what is most disturbing about the real Gadd was how easily he won the public over before he was exposed, and still probably could if these events were real.

The rest of the cast is not likeable either, again deliberately. Real life Journos Gary Bushell and Miranda Sawyer send up their respective grubby rabble rousing and lazy broadsheet vapidity with the same glee that drove Davina McCall to be turned into a zombie in Dead Set. Whereas, right wing politician Ann Widdecombe, media hound that she is, doesn't seem to be in on the joke. But it's the solipsistic barristers, pompous judges, dubious witnesses, the jury that tries Gadd not just for rape but what his popular image has come to represent, the whining and mewling and ultimately hypocritical antis, the hysterical and bloodthirsty bully-boy pros and of course a public that seems hell-bent on turning the first execution on British soil in decades into a circus and freakshow, that stand out as monsters. Not the child-abusing kind, mind you, but the kind of monster that finds vicarious delight through the horror of child abuse and feeds off the hate it engenders or which derives a perverse thrill in shedding tears for a pervert. The drama makes one point clear: the society that hangs Gary Glitter is in its own way every bit as depraved and fucked up.

Not all the characters are unlikeable however. The American death row chaplain, flown over to administer to Glitter's final 30 days, is sympathetic and kind, and perhaps the only truly moral figure in the show due to his compassion and honest intentions. While the hangman himself is an interesting figure - impartial and professional, without agenda and motivated only by duty. He stands in stark contrast to the howling mob outside and the shrill, sanctimonious home secretary he ultimately takes order from, who may either be an insincere hack playing to the mob or who is genuinely intoxicated by the fumes of her hellfire sermons, or perhaps a mixture of both.

So far, so good. But ultimately, "The Execution of Gary Glitter" is undermined by its lack of real merit. Whilst the writers may argue that they are simply trying to engender debate, the faint sleaziness of the premise rather does in any claims of serious docudrama making. What one is left with as the trap is pulled and Gadd finally swings is not a sense of outrage or elation, but a cold, bleak and dirty emptiness, like staring into a pit of total despair and degradation for 90 minutes. Apart from lazily fitting into a British tradition of overwrought pessimism-for-pessimism's-sake in drama, literature and media, the show also chickens out by putting Gadd's neck on the line rather than its own. For in the end what really stands out is the script's own cowardice, its own unwillingness to pick a side and stand up for it, come what may.

* And lots of other people who think it is lurid, exploitative trash.

Horribly Biased Thoughts On Manga And Anime.

2009-11-01T23:07:00.003Z

A web forum I occasionally frequent had a recent thread which roared - 'Modern Anime Is Cobblers!' Anime is, for those with full time jobs and sex lives, Japanese animation in all its lurid and varied forms, alongside its 2D first cousin, Manga, or Japanese comics. I would explain more, but I have a sneaking suspicion you can all use Google and Wikipedia.

But getting back to that forum discussion, what did I add to the debate? This: Most anime is a load of crap. Do you like unoriginal, regurgitated ideas mated with worn-out visual cliches, casual mysoginy, convoluted scripts that would make an autistic blush and weak storylines dragged out over too many episodes? Then Anime/Manga's your scene, man. Just make sure you don't get done for noncing and keep that Deedlit costume well pressed and dry cleaned.

That's not to say that there isn't good anime or manga. There is, and that's me speaking as a Lupin III/Hideshi Hino fan. Not all Studio Ghibli is as good as claimed (Princess Monomoke is po-faced, humourless, needlessly complicated and convoluted while Earthsea should be lead to the bottom of the garden and shot), but there is some seriously good shit coming out of Miyazaki's magic workshop too. When it works, the output of the Totoro mob is on par with the Pixar juggernaut - it entertains and dazzles in equal measure.

But perhaps that's the point: I like Devilman: The Birth and Space Adventure Cobra and Urusei Yatsura simply because they're fun and have good, strong stories. Their Japaneseness has never been as important as whether they are any good. But then for the Otaku and the blasted mutant wasteland that is 4Chan, all those cliches, tropes and inaccessible signifiers are precisely the point - storytelling is and has always been secondary to the anal obsessiveness and seperateness that anime instills in its most driven fans. Others might, however, prefer to be actually entertained.

A Morbid Sweating Lust For Clive James.

2009-10-22T21:56:00.003+01:00

While it's fashionable to take the piss out of Australia (Lovecraftian wildlife, Skippy actually being a fraud, Vegemite giving you women's breasts etc.), it's easy to forget that this is where Clive James also came from.

Fortunately, Clive himself has been reminding us why he has been so kind as to doss on the UK's collective mind-sofa since 1962 by reading extracts from his new autobiography, The Blaze of Obscurity on BBC Radio 4 (last episode is tomorrow). It covers his career in TV, but in many ways says more about him than his job.

Here he demonstrates all the kindness, wisdom and sharp observation that hides under the louche, almost complacent drawl. But also, the inherent oddness of being able to meet mega stars and Hugh Hefner, NFL man-gods and politicians, while remaining detached and true enough to avoid the (nowadays) inevitable star-fucking drivel of today's 'sleb' culture. It is, after all, one thing to be able to interview Tammy Faye Bakker, but it takes someone of James' honesty and independence to recognise her humanity, for all the shit hurled at her during her life.

And that's the point - anyone can show clips of Japanese men being forced to eat worms in a weird gameshow. Yet James stands out because you can tell he's not pretending to enjoy it at all or side entirely with a snearing audience. There's a clear hint of skepticism and cynicism in his voice and expressions, but not about the content so much as the act of watching it. The joke's on us messed up voyeurs, and Clive James is the first to admit it.

The Withered Future.

2009-10-11T13:59:00.002+01:00

The big world changing innovation of 1989 might surprise you. It was in fact the humble Game Boy. As a piece of consumer electronics, it was, as we know, a big hit with the kids. But it also did something unusual. Rather than develop new technology, it reused what was already there.

After all, the GB’s black-and-white, Z80 processor technology was not cutting edge. In fact it was almost a decade old by this time. Yet it was not what the Gameboy could do that was unique, it was how it did it. The Gameboy was smaller and more battery efficient than its rival handhelds, it was reliable and it could be easily programmed, unlike other consoles before or since that seem hooked on the latest and often most costly gimmick.

Underpinning this was the philosophy of the Game Boy's designer: the late Gunpei Yakoi (1941-1997). He referred to his use of existing, tested and cheap know-how as ‘Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology’, and it is, at present, a concept that remains caged in the video games ghetto.

Yet if applied to areas outside of gaming, withered technology is potentially world changing. Take cars, those four-wheeled double-edged swords we both fret about and go shopping in. Instead of looking to some distant future of eco-friendly hydrogen-powered cars, why not refine what we can already do? Design cars that are modular in construction, for example. You can simply remove one older part for a newer, more efficient (or less broken) component when it becomes available rather than scrap the whole thing. Make car chassis from lighter, less resource hungry components and make them ergonomically styled so they can travel with less wind resistance, saving on petrol. Or make the venerable old internal combustion engine ever more fuel efficient and smaller, using less resources but being also cheaper to make.

A similar contribution can be made to healthcare. While we all seem obsessed about the cost of healthcare, no one is again asking how the price of medical treatment can be brought down. Right now, the average MRI machine can cost millions, operations tens of thousands and long term care can stretch into the hundreds of thousands. So why can’t researchers refine what they have got, making an MRI scanner cost half, or a quarter or even a tenth of what it costs now? As the Washington Post’s TR Reid points out, Japanese medical research labs have been doing precisely this for a while now, and the main beneficiaries have been Japanese patients, and indeed Japanese tax payers.

And then there is power generation. While we all panic about power stations spiking Co2 levels like a Mohican, the answer may be local, and withered. Every local community could have its own power source based on what is already available: coastal communities could have their own wave generators, hilly areas their own wind turbines and towns with rivers their own hydroelectric plants. Or even the Hyperion mini nuclear reactor, able to power small city blocks or villages. Local power generators for local communities not only means stronger infrastructure but also more efficiency as less electricity would be lost along long distance power lines.

We don’t even need to build new eco-towns. Existing buildings can be readapted via government or private sector grants to retain more heat, save more electricity and use water more efficiently. Let individual households and businesses make the decision, altering their houses with better insulation, more wind and solar power, and even geothermal power, making the most use of what we already have.

And withered technology could be the answer for the developing world too. Refining existing technologies, making them cheaper and more easily available would be a boon for the poor. Why not find ways to improve their farming, ensure they have sanitation, give them affordable health care and easy access to heat, electricity and the World Wide Web? Or perhaps we can find far more efficient ways of developing the Third World’s human capital, making them more productive and their lives less perilous. This is all possible now; it just requires new ways of making the delivery of these resources easier and more economical.

There is, as there always is, a downside though. Too much focus on withered technology may stop new ideas and developments taking root. But if we will always need the new, we also need to make the most of what we have too. The future should be withered.

Random Verse Outpouring - 'None of It Mattered'.

2009-08-04T13:25:00.001+01:00

A day will come
When none of this matters
When all the charades and the farces
Blow away in the wind
And all the nonsense
And lies comes clean.

Click Here to Read More!

Shameless Plug #1

2009-08-03T00:30:00.004+01:00

The above image is © Mark Hoaksey, etc. etc.

Out now is the latest issue of Powerplay Magazine, issue 112, featuring an in-depth interview with controversial pop type metal persons Dead by April, as written by yours truly.

There's also an interview with Arch Enemy, a chat with Dez Fafara and loads of reviews, some of which have also poured out of my over-flowing pen.

Anyway, it's almost £4.00 and it's on sale at WH Smith's, so buybuybuy!

Rabbit, Rabbit and Rabbits At The Town Show.

2009-07-20T13:03:00.011+01:00

The Dagenham Town Show was a good experience, despite the gale force winds and the looming threat of rain. There were lots of stalls in the community and society tents, there was a fun fair and you could even get a ride on a helicopter (if you had the money).

Click Here to Read More!

The Friday Short Story: Derelict

2009-07-16T16:10:00.005+01:00

It's dusk. I never come out by day, only at dusk.

I'm hiding in a filthy, piss-yellow skip off Oxford Street, in Ramillies Place. I lift the top out and slink out. Flies blow out in my wake. I seem to be sleeping with every louse in town. I can feel the itch of their bites as they scab over.

There is dried blood on my chin.
Click Here to Read More!

You Have (Not) Been Watching (Proper Charlie Brooker).

2009-07-16T00:48:00.003+01:00

Contrary to the song, Charlie Brooker is not right about everything. Zombies don't run, end of. The Wire is just another US cop show once you get past the flourishes. And Quake wasn't really that good either.

Still, the Boy Brooker, a roaring mass of rage, self-deprecating angst and lucidity, is right 90% of the time, which is a damn sight more than most meeja creatures. So it's a bit depressing to see him slumming it on a sort of ghastly vehicle on Channel 4.

Said vehicle, 'You Have Been Watching' (Wednesdays, Channel 4, 10pm), has pretty much everything that Brooker does well. The bitter, incisive critique of shit TV remains sharp and the man's wisdom-disguised-as-snark is all present and correct. It's all in the same tone as his journalism, his tv shows and his overall output. So far, so good. He remains the boy who points out that the Emperor's knob is waving around, and that there really is something interesting going on behind that curtain.

The problem lies in who he's addressing this to. Whereas before, with his journalism and his TV shows, you always felt like he was directly addressing you, and in terms of format, he was. It's hard not to watch Screenwipe or Newswipe and not feel that he was having a direct conversation with his audience.

But in YHBW, he's not talking to the viewer any more. No, he has a panel of celebrity guests to talk to instead. He's talking to some silly broad you've never heard of, one or two Barry Shitpeas-types who have a crap show in the Edinburgh fringe to plug and some comedian who was funny in the 90s but now seems paid to have that sort of snide cynicism British people often have when they can't be arsed to have a properly thought-out opinion.

Brooker himself has hit out at 'the talent', yet here he is in the midst of all that bullshit. Worst still, he's also got a live audience of people who laugh out loud whenever anything funny or meant to be funny is said. It's canned laughter, which is to say, yet more bullshit. The old school viewer is left watching on the sidelines, listening in like an eavesdropping orphan as Brooker tries to force himself to actually like talking to these dipshits while the punters watching from the stands giggle unconvincingly. Ever had a cool friend who dumps you to hang out with utter cocks who seem to be more popular? That, dear reader, is what YHBW is all about.

But in doing so, it loses what was so strong and urgent about Brooker's output. It works best when he's actually looking you in the eye, and he seems far too ashamed to do that in this show, so he looks at the non-entities sitting next to him instead. It's satire in sore need of satirising. I sincerely hope it flops so he can go back to doing what he does best, which is to say, actually being Charlie Brooker.

What This Blog Will Do Now.

2009-07-15T11:20:00.003+01:00

Readers,

It's time to diversify. Mainly this is due to me being too busy to update the blog with new material all the time. But I also write lots of other things and it's time to give them a platform too. So from now on, I still will post up the occasional piece about life in London, but I will also post short stories I've written - with a mostly London-based theme - and the odd article on whatever is obsessing me these days.

I'll also be plugging my work for Powerplay Magazine, which is available in all good WH Smiths outlets, a wonderful publication, fun for all the family, blahblahblah.

Some caveats: firstly, no I don't want any submissions. If I do publish anyone else's work it will be because I already know them and we've agreed to it as a one-off. Anyone else who sends me anything will be reminded of this (politely) by e-mail and then their submission will be deleted.

Also, everything on this blog, except where stated, is © Me. If you wish to reproduce anything, you will need my express permission or I will set the baying hounds on you.

The Newsagent's Lament.

2009-07-02T00:26:00.002+01:00

I bought a copy of The London Evening Standard today. Mainly it was for jobs, so it was annoying to then remember that the vacancies are in the Tuesday edition.

But this wasn't the unusual thing. That was the huge number of porn mags the newsagent was selling. The shop's two sets of magazine racks both had titles like 'Readers' Wives', 'Asian Babes', 'Teen Nymphos' and 'Razzle' (and many more, err, 'obscure' publications) from the top shelf right down to the middle row.

Then on the row below that there was a range of tattoo and motorcycle magazines with even more scantily clad or naked women on the front. It was only the lower shelves that reverted to the traditional newsagent range of puzzle magazines, celeb rags, computer mags and children's comics.

I doubt the owner was a particular porn fiend, any more than he was a fan of the Pernod on the spirit shelf behind him as he manned the counter. It was just that he seemed to have a huge market of porn consumers to appease and they no doubt spent more money on magazines than the other customers. Pecunia non olet, as they say, and the newsagent had long since given up on shame or embarrassment in favour of making a reasonable living.

Seeing Dessicated Withered Corpses At The British Museum (And Also Some Mummies).

2009-06-30T18:02:00.002+01:00

As I walked towards the British Museum, I saw a huge teddy bear. It was wearing a Beefeaters’ uniform and was stationed outside one of the many naff souvenir shops that ply their trade in central London. No doubt you could buy one inside, but how do you get a giant cuddly toy through customs? The bear looked depressed. It was sagging and leaning against the shop’s windowsill. The stitching in its groin had come apart and the stuffing was poking through. It seemed to say something, but I chose not to ponder it too deeply.

The British Museum is a sight to behold. It’s a huge building that pulls in huge crowds and one day is just not enough to see everything. I started with a look at the Gamelan. This is a Javanese assembly of musical instruments, which produces those ethereal chimes that most of us associate with Indonesia. They piped in sampled music that was clear and soothing. There were few visitors there though. They all seemed to be in the main atrium outside, talking loudly and photographing themselves.

This was in fact a major annoyance. It wasn’t that they took a single photo. No, they kept taking pictures of themselves and each other, non-stop, with camera phones, digital cameras, video cameras… It wasn’t so much a trip to the museum as an exercise in vanity. ‘LOOK AT ME! I’M STANDING IN THE WAY OF THE ASSYRIAN WALL CARVINGS!!!’, they all seemed to be saying. They kept doing this, the museum just a setting for the ongoing adventures of people who needed to be photographed to prove they still exist.

A hawk-headed, four-winged door guardian grinned down from the walls, like it was in on the joke.

I mainly focussed on Egyptian artefacts. I just didn't feel like looking at the Greek gallery for some reason, and I had barely enough time for the Indian collection either. I soaked up Egyptian knowledge like a sponge, troubled by the nagging thought that I was still only having a second hand experience. The real thing had passed a long time ago. I also had to stop myself humming Nile's back catalogue. That would have been embarrassing.

Suddenly, I felt a strange urge to smack a young American tourist. ‘MMMMM-OOOOOOOHHHH-M!!!’ he droned, with ugly broad vowels. ‘There were ROMAN mummies too!’ In fact, they were still Egyptian mummies. It was just that the Romans who lived there styled theirs in a Latin fashion, much like the Greek Diaspora had Hellenic stylings on their own mummies. They’d gone native, integrated if not assimilated. There were no Roman mummies, just Egyptian mummies with a Roman theme.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t the kid’s fault. No one had bothered to explain the truth to him, and tourism is hardly a good way to find out anything. And besides, American children aren’t half as slappable as their Italian or British counterparts as I was only too painfully aware of.

I wandered into the Chinese ceramics gallery. The only pictures being taken were of the ceramics themselves. It wasn’t the place for screaming tourists to regard themselves via a camera lense. It was serene and beautiful, the visitors moving through it with grace and quiet admiration. I had one last look at the Gamelan on my way out. It was still a wonderful sight but also still curiously ignored. Then I turned back and headed into the loud, swelling, sweating crowd outside.

Tottenham & Upper Edmonton: Old Haunts Revisited

2009-06-28T12:30:00.005+01:00

The Tottenham and Upper Edmonton area of London is an odd mix of buildings. While much of it is made up of faintly shabby early 20th century tenenments, now serving as shops, closed and empty buildings boarded over for demolition, grotty tower blocks from the 50s, 60s and 70s or bland modern architecture with tinted glass, yellow bricks and steel, there is a surprisingly large number of quality Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian architecture.

One example is this old sunday school and adjoining church.

Nearby, the famous Old Well.

Other buildings include the Tottenham and Edmonton Dispensary, the Tottenham Palace Cinema, and the Old Swimming Baths. But there are also many large townhouses and civic buildings, like the Tottenham Community Sports Centre and the Council Office. There is also the famous Gilpin Bell, a concrete memorial (and nearby Wetherspoon's pub with the same name) to a possibly fictional character from the 18th Century, who got carried away by his horse from an Edmonton inn (the eponymous Bell) and found himself in Hertfordshire. As you do. [For more on Tottenham in particular, go HERE.]

The last time I was in Edmonton was almost 12 years ago. Some things have changed. Most of the fish 'n chip shops run by Greeks have been taken over by Turks, who now focus on kebabs as well as Lahmacun, the enigmatic Turkish Pizza. Afro Carribean and African restaurants are now common too: the cuisine and the people have been here for a long time, but it seems only now that they feel confident enough to share it with everyone else.

A lot of the shops in Edmonton have changed as well. The old Kwik Save is now a discount clothes shop, the old Safeways site now a Lidl's, while Blockbuster video has been replaced by, of all things, a new library.

One thing that had not changed was the casual stupidity of the locals. One idiot decided to cartwheel across the road, missing several cars by only a second. Once he was over the road, he walked off like nothing had happened. As I went to cross another busy main road - The Angel - some idiot cycled across without looking and got knocked over by two angry-looking policemen en route to an emergency. I turned away and walked on. There was no need to see what would happen, but the cyclist's girlfriend, following up on foot, was shrieking with dismay. Earlier, in Tottenham itself, I saw police on foot walk up to resolve a row between a driver and the cyclist HE had knocked over. They dragged him out the car as he swore incoherently.

The last time I was here, I was staying at my Uncle's flat. I went to look at it again. He'd sold it on and it might have changed hands several times since. I crept up the stairs to the level where the flat was. It felt familiar, but also like an intrusion. They'd painted the door and reinforced it at points with steel plates. But it still felt odd, like there should have been a welcome where there was not. The pub around the corner - one of those small ones in residential areas that are no bigger than a large living room - had been knocked down and in its place they'd built ugly, flimsy new flats made of pine and metal girders. They looked like they would be knocked down in less than thirty years. Nothing lasts anymore.

As I went off to get the bus back to London Bridge, I saw the old community centre near my Uncle's flat. It used to play music on Saturday nights that was so loud I could listen to it as I lay in bed. The playlist meant it was more fun than you might think. But it was soon taken over by yet another Money Church, of the kind that are pretty much ubiquitous throughout Greater London. A banner outside claimed it was run by 'Endtime Ministries'. Somehow it all seemed very fitting.

The Mourning After.

2009-06-26T12:20:00.000+01:00

A disfigured man died last night. Online they squabbled over when he died. Some even posted pictures of him being wheeled into hospital and of his family coming in soon afterwards. Right now on the television they are showing pictures of his body being carried off a helicopter. They're talking about the painkillers that could have killed him. He spent much of his life in pain.

His friends flicker on the screen, spilling their guts as eulogy. Everyone has a quote.

The media is pretending it never said a bad word about him. TV channels that showed mocking documentaries about his mutilated face now show it on tributes to a 'King of the Popular'. They praise him for things they neglected to mention for much of his life. They mention all the bad things and the ugly rumours out of duty, but the crowds outside the hospital where he died have called it: he's now a fallen hero, fawned over by weeping fans, cherubim and hypocrites.

A pro to the last, he died in time to make it into the early editions of all the UK newspapers. Good timing. All that was left for him was to die at a dramatic moment.

Picture of the Day (27/05/2009)

2009-05-27T21:35:00.000+01:00

This is the long-empty Green Man pub at the south end of Coldharbour Lane, Brixton. It looks like the most recent layer of paint has been scraped off, revealing the original sign beneath. Note the now-extinct beer brands advertised, such as Reid's Stout but also Watney's, makers of the infamous Red Barrel.

Picture of the Day (26/05/2009)

2009-05-26T16:17:00.005+01:00

This is St Michael Paternoster Royal on College Hill, a church near Bank and Cannon Street Stations. It's also the headquarters for the Church of England's Mission To Seafarers. It's next to a nice mini-park with seating and is very leafy in May.

The Last Day In Brixton

2009-05-24T17:00:00.001+01:00

I had to get off at another underground station than the one I was meant to yesterday: someone had fallen in front of a tube train. The train I was one simply drove slowly through the station where it had happened. I could glimpse the train involved in the accident on the adjacent platform as I went past. Its doors were open but the lights were off. It had not entirely pulled into the platform, so the accident must have happened midway on the tracks. I saw a policeman talking matter-of-factly with two maintenance workers in dirty orange overalls. On the platform my train was going through, meanwhile, a sign had been put out for the train drivers to remind them not to stop, while a station attendant sat next to it, apathetically.

Within an hour the station was back on line and no one seemed aware that it had even happened.

Brixton Road was full of people trying to sell salvation. It was either charismatic Christian groups tied in with the many black churches nearby or any number of Socialist groups, either screaming for bent MPs' blood or promising an altogether more secular promised land.

As I sat down in St. Matthews' Churchyard to eat lunch, an open decked double decker covered in Christian Party regalia and full of supporters roared past. They're making a special effort in Brixton, if all the campaign posters are anything to go by. (Meanwhile, UKIP's 'NO To Uncontrolled Immigration' posters, with Winston Churchill thrown in for good measure, are nowhere to be seen for some reason, being more common in the more conflicted East End of London.)

I doubt the Christian Party will do well in next month's European Elections though. The public doesn't want principles or idealism nowadays. They want parties that are bitter and suspicious, that rage and self-pity in equal measure. Politics and religion don't mix anyway, but only in the same way that politics doesn't quite mix with anything.

As I drank my tea, a big mongrel (part-Alsatian, part-Labrador) trotted up to me. With dogs I don't know, it's always a good idea to be friendly and say 'hello'. They seem to calm down if they're growling, or stop finding you so interesting. This was the case with the dog too, which turned away, but stared instead into the Churchyard and at the other humans in the distance, sitting on benches. He seemed to be looking for something. A while later, I saw him walking past nonchalantly, now on a lead and with his mistress.

I then went to Brixton Library. As usual, there were a gaggle of drunks, dossers and generally dodgy looking regulars congregating in the square in front of the building. It's often the place to see the local constabulary, sometimes on bikes, drawing up to resolve a pointless squabble.

Brixton Library was careworn, but reassuringly serene. Outside, the city growled, screeched, shouted and boomed without end.

(No) Love (Lost) On The Dole

2009-05-15T00:27:00.001+01:00

The Job Centre was not a welcoming sight. It had the squat, red brick boxy proportions of a Georgian fort in the Highlands, put there to keep the kilted savages in line. (But with double-glazing.)

Inside, it had the stark beige sterile look of a modern office. But the effect was ruined by the general slack-arsed look of the unemployed (me included), who knew it was just a charade to put up with until the next dole cheque rammed its snout through our letterboxes.

Do the Job Centre staff know or care? Some do. Some certainly try, because after all, if you’re there for 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, you may as well try to achieve SOMETHING. But others seem detached and treading a dangerous line between disinterest and apathy. Still others are suspicious or even outright hostile.

The harsh truth though is that this is exactly what happens to ‘jobseekers’ too, as they are sucked in turn into a life of vain hope and dashed chances or a proverbial vicious circle of atrophy, despair, delirium, and out-and-out rage. The only two differences are time and money, and even then it’s hard to see the differences.

Jobseekers spend only one day a week or fortnight at the job centre, whereas most job centre staff are in the midst of the bleakness for most of their waking lives. Still, one hour or one day of non-stop ennui still feels much the same. Meanwhile, the staff get a paltry salary in exchange for dishing out a paltry handout. It’s like a dysfunctional marriage: two groups of antagonists who rely on the other for enough money to keep staggering on.

Nothing summed the place up better than what happened when I was looking for a job. While cautiously jabbing the grubby touchscreen of the jobsearch machine, I found myself looking at the notice on the adjacent support beam. It was dog-eared, torn and grimy and had the following message:

Customers are reminded to wear appropriate dress only.

- NO BARE CHESTS!!!

At the corner of my eye, I saw the large, menacing security guard standing by the main door, his hands clasped in front of him. He was glaring at the lumpenproles flopping and slouching over the place with some suspicion. He was looking at me too.

Once the right people had been seen, we left the Job Centre with some relief. The big doorman had been replaced by a short sylph of an Asian girl, clad in the same company uniform. She was staring at us with even more suspicion.

Afterwards, we trudged to the local supermarket café for an overcooked baked potato, wilted salad and some faintly watery hot chocolate. The staff seemed not to care about their work and only just managed enough effort to check the change.

Around us, workers from the nearby industrial estate, off-duty tradesmen and sour-looking shoppers slouched over their tables and grumbled about their drab, banal lives. These were who the jobseekers were in theory meant to become, and who the Job Centre staff were trying to make them become.

But they looked no happier, simply a little busier, marginally less poor and every bit as pissed off and disappointed.

Tragedy as nuisance.

2009-05-01T18:50:00.004+01:00

We were caught up in a delay just outside the train station. It had been over five minutes now. Suddenly the driver's voice resonated over the tannoy:

"I'm sorry for the delay, Ladies and Gentlemen, but we are currently delayed owing to a member of the public going under a train at the station. We hope to get moving soon and..."

An ugly, angry voice drowned the announcement out.

"WHY DON'T THEY JUST SCRAPE 'IM OFF AND STICK 'IM IN A BAG? I'M GONNA BE LATE!!!"

The train got moving again a few minutes later. None of us knew what had exactly happened. The passengers swarmed out of the carriage in a hurry, like nothing happened.

Living In A Sh*t Hole

2009-05-01T00:12:00.001+01:00

It's always interesting to go out walking where I live. Not nice, but always interesting.

For example, I was out today and walked past a house where a mother was shouting at her daughter. The monologue went like so:

NAAAH! YA NOT GAAAAAARRRRN TA THE FACKING FAIR NAAAA! YA CAN FACK OFF! STOP FACKING CRYING! GET IN THE FACKING HAAAAAARRRRSE NAAAAA!

The little girl looked like she was five or six.

Romping In Romford

2009-04-22T20:30:00.002+01:00

(Above: A mural on the pavement of Romford's market area. In case you were wondering.)

A memo to myself: don't sit at the back of a bus. They're magnets for arseholes, idiots and the banal. Like the trio of very loud, lurid girls who walled us in as they got on and went straight to the back where we were sitting. They all had absurdly bleached hair of a tone normally only associated with albinos and Boris Johnson. Their clothes were gaudy and sparkling, like they were going out to a nightclub, even though it wasn't even noon. And they wore lots of junk jewellery, which clanked and changged like chainmail. They weren't chavettes or your common or garden toerag though. Just young and silly and thoroughbred in their Essex Girlishness. My only real complaint was that they kept putting their feet on the seats, which really ought to be grounds for exile to South Georgia.

It was hard to keep up with their stacatto wittering, but some snippets stay in the mind:

"Yeah, oo's that gel? Ain't she gaar'n to th' Sickth Form? Stoopid Cahh!"

"I've never bin ta Sarrfend before. Is it true the sea gets bigga if it gets rained on? I've goht sicktee paahnd so I'll get really smashed there!"

"Y'knaa, if someone stole flaaars off my family's graves, I'd faaaaking kill 'em!"

"Stop takin' photahs of me, Shell, ya bitch!"

And so on. Halfway through our trip, we drove past a white plaster-coated house with the legend 'Pixy Cottage' written on it. You'd have to wonder what kind of fae folk would live in the Dagenham-Romford wastes, as it's hardly the sort of place where fairy dust flows freely.

Later we were sitting down for a coffee at an outside burger bar in Romford Market. The day was gloriously sunny. Suddenly I saw a strange bearded man in dark clothes and sunglasses in the distance. He slouched down and started running towards us, around the back of the burger van and then around the seating area, past the corner and into the market once more. He was holding a pair of numchucks, but whether he was the local ninja assasain, I couldn't really tell.

At the end of the day, while queueing for an ice cream in McDonalds, we heard the following pearls of wisdom from two lads behind us - young enough to still be living with their parents, old enough to ponder the meaning of romance:

"Yeah, like, she's sooo immature, y'know-what-I-mean?"

"Mate, at their age they're just too young to know what love is."

"Tell me abaaht it, mate, tell me abaaht it..."

It sounded rather silly and yet profound, like the sort of wisdom that could only come from a broken heart.

Turning Japanese (In Dagenham)

2009-04-21T19:28:00.002+01:00

Sunday Paranoia

2009-04-20T11:31:00.004+01:00

Trains on a Sunday can be frightening places... Not too many people there... Just scary ones... You stand on the platform, looking over your shoulder... They're sitting on the seats, looking rough... Don't look back... Don't let them hear you on the phone - your accent's too different... They hate difference...

The train's coming... You get on... There's a family of leering ugly chavs with a pitbull sitting over there... Get to the other end of the carriage... Sit amongst the old and the gentle-looking and the female... Stack the odds in your favour...

A young man gets on a few stops later... He's wearing sports gear... Laughing loud into a mobile... He's standing close to you... But wait, his voice is cheerful and moderate and his face looks friendly... He's talking to his girlfriend about dinner: chicken with salad... You're safe... He sounds like he's been off doing Sunday sports... Yes, very respectable... Your train leaves the station - there's graffiti on the archway - 'YOU'RE BEING WATCHED'...

It seems safer now... Just a few more stops... Past Stratford now... Chavs have got off... In the home straits... Liverpool Street the terminus is next... Get off quick... Don't tempt fate... Will the tube be safe? Will the tube be safe?

You stand up, ready to get off straight away and look at the passenger who's still sitting down on the next seat... He's reading a book with a lurid cover of a fascist looking policeman in riot gear firing a gun on a turquoise background... The book's called - 'Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said'... It seems scary for some reason...

The train pulls in... You get off... There's a reassuringly large number of people at the station... A hooded youth stomps past you as you near the ticket gates... You show no fear, but there's a sense of relief he didn't start anything... Get on the tube... Next stop Clapham... Then Brixton... Fearsome, unpredictable Brixton... Keep on going... You can make it...

As cities go, London is pretty safe. Just blend into a crowd, avoid lonely dangerous places and do your thing by day and you'll have no problems. Still, some areas are better than others. Paranoia about what could go wrong (loons with trainers and knives, loons with beards and bombs, loons with football colours and broken bottles) makes one choose where one lives quite carefully. If one can afford it.

The end result is the gentrified neighbourhood, that most maligned of places, at least by those who haven't the money to move there. Here the well-off go to breed, force up house prices and swamp the gastropubs with their kids, who turn the local state schools into de facto grammars or preps. Their names are infamous: Hoxton, Notting Hill, Islington, Clapham, and, ironically enough, bits of Brixton... Can you feel the bile rising yet? Yes, some people are more successful than others - and so the UK's national sport of envy and spite is engaged for yet another outing.

And yet what all these places have in common is a serene, empty calm. Even if the enclave is in relatively wild parts of town like West Kensington, these places bring such a sudden surge of placidity and lack of threat or CCTV, it hits you almost as hard as some of the rougher locals might. For the neo-yuppies at least know what anyone who's lived in a particularly godforsaken neighbourhood knows: sane, rational neighbours who don't have criminal records come at a premium. Being free from fear is a luxury item.

After doing what I had to in Clapham (again) I then headed off to Brixton. I had to change at Stockwell to get there, but the Victoria Line was down so I needed to get a bus. I walked past the shrine-memorial for Jean Charles De Menezes that's just outside the station's main entrance/exit. It's a permanent fixture now, a reminder of grievances that are far from resolved. And police who panicked and shot to death an innocent Brazilian electrician. Even armed men in kevlar get paranoid. You never know when danger may strike...

At the bus stop, I found myself being stared at by a black kid. He looked 15, but a bit short for his age, in dark street clothes and a white imitation New York Yankees cap. But maybe I was staring at him too? Or maybe we were staring at each other? Maybe, just maybe, we were sure the other was staring at us so felt justified in staring back. Or maybe he looked away just as I did. Paranoia is a funny thing. At times it's synchronised.

I got off at Brixton. The upmarket pubs are closing down and house prices are falling. Maybe it's time for the degentrification to begin and for the urban grot to reclaim parts of its realm once more like the jungle gobbles up old Mayan cities. It certainly seemed scarier than last time, but then again, I live in Dagenham and like to cast the first stone.

Nonetheless, Brixton still had its way with me. I was walking down Coldharbour Road. It was loud and rowdy like it's always been with my visits. Suddenly a man on a bike screeched past me. He stopped and looked back: he was a middle aged West Indian man, thin and wiry.

"Glasses, mate! GLASSES!"

He was looking rather smug, like he'd scored a moral victory by doing this. How dare I get in the way of his bicycle on the pavement? Bloody pedestrians.

"Sorry" I mumbled, and crossed the road. No point in picking a fight with a man who thinks you should be able to see behind you via some strange ESP ability or weird physical mutation. Who knows what he might do? Attack me with a plucked chicken or strip naked and smear himself with jam while screaming his father's name, perhaps. For there's always been a latent weirdness about Brixton. It's the Twilight Zone of South London, or maybe its answer to Wales.

Or maybe I was being paranoid.

Seeing a bus, I got on and sped away, if not from my fears then certainly from any encouragement.

Clapham Strangeness

2009-04-20T11:21:00.003+01:00

A strangely bulbous and distorted tree on Clapham Common.

And we all thought black cats were meant to be lucky...

High Misanthropy in Old London Town

2009-04-17T01:13:00.003+01:00

As I went to get a bus at Holborn, I heard what seemed like a choir of banshees slitting their own throats. It turned out to be a gaggle of young teenage girls, middle class, and reeking of hormones and cheap perfume, all shrieking as some pigeons flew low over them. Partly they were doing it out of genuine girly fear of the yucky. But they were also doing it as a way of bonding, a shared experience of being annoying. Being a twit is a great unifying force.

A stout Asian security guard came out of a shop to see whether the screams were rape, theft or murder. But a rather aloof young women in a green coat told him, as she walked past, that it was just "some silly girls". She then nearly barged into me as I was on my phone and not paying attention. I got a dirty look.

Once on the bus, I went past the girls again. They were still running wild and had now started fencing each other with rolled up free newspapers while moving down the street at a pace. The Easter Holidays are hell.

I got on the tube some time later. At London Bridge, a tramp boarded. He was reasonably tall, had a short beard and a black woolly hat. He smelt of booze and stale sweat and wore grubby dark clothes, with a large empty-looking black sports bag over his shoulder. He could have been anywhere between 20 and 30. The tramp was swaying slightly and not just from the motion of the train. He took out a piece of folded cardboard and opened it up. Written in black marker was the legend:

Hungry
Please give generously
I need food.
Thank you very much

He then gave a long rambling slurred sales pitch about sleeping rough on the streets and how he needed to buy a sandwich and perhaps some other food, and then he asked politely for any money from the "ladies and gentlemen" in the carriage.

Almost no one, including me, gave him a penny. But a man sitting next to me - bald, with glasses and wearing a DPM combat jacket - gave him a few quid and gently asked him to only spend it on food. The tramp thanked the man and then everyone else (who gave him nothing), and got off at Borough. He walked unsteadily onto the platform.

The rest of us, and me too, barely even looked at him. We were either too embarrassed (shamed even) or callous to care. True, he would no doubt have spent the money on alcohol or drugs or both. But that did not stop us being just a few amongst millions of sour, stone-faced, surly commuters, neither caring nor cared for. All we really worried about was not looking at the next person in case they thought we were weird or wanted to have sex with them.

After some business that had to be done, I found myself walking down Clapham High Street, past the now abandoned local branch of Woolworths. An Estate Agent's had put up a sign that said the site had been 'secured' for 'interested parties'. It was dark and empty inside. The security cameras at the doors were still on though. The monitor showed a blurry monochrome view of the world, with me and the other passers-by appearing as vague grey ghosts as we walked by in turn. Soon all memory of the place will be gone, and with it, any trace that we walked by that day.

Fun & Frolics In Exotic Dagenham

2009-04-15T01:46:00.000+01:00

It was late at night. I couldn't sleep, so I got up and went into the next room to surf the web and generally kill time. Then I heard a loud cry outside:

"ARMED POLICE!!!"

And two loud bangs. For a brief moment I thought they were gunshots. But then I guessed they were the noises made by a door being pounded in. My pulse went up for a moment, in part through fear, but also excitement.

Cautiously, I turned out the light and opened the window to see outside. Nothing. All was still and no signs of life could be seen, not even the two or so urban foxes that are usually making a racket this time of night. It must have been in a street nearby.

I felt disappointed, but also afraid. I realised how thin the glass in the windows was, and how little I knew of whether the walls could stop something getting in. I realised how exposed I was. So I sat down and wrote a blog about it instead. Did I tell you about how charming it is living in Dagenham?

Tales From The Shop Window

2009-04-11T17:50:00.005+01:00

Living in the blasted wastes of Dagenham has its advantages. For example, you're never short of things to blog about, even though the end result is seldom life-affirming or joyful.

For example, most newsagents around here have ads in their windows. These are put up by the newsagent in exhange for a small fee, and are usually there to sell second hand goods or offer services. This is pretty common throughout the country, but the ones in London and the South East are particularly revealing...

***

BOOTYLICIOUS!

EXCLUSIVE BLACK MASSAGE

AVAILABLE WEEKDAYS

CALL 0XXXXXXXXX

****

FOR SALE

STAFF PUPPIES (GIRLS AND BOYS)

MUST SEE £250 EACH

NO TIME WASTERS

CALL 0XXXXXXXXXX

****

TO RENT

SINGLE BEDROOM £75.00
DOUBLE BEDROOM £110.00

NO DHSS

CALL 0XXXXXXXXXX

****

LADY GARDENER

WILL MOW LAWNS

HEDGES, TRIMMING, PLANTING

EXCELLENT RATES

CALL 0XXXXXXXXXX

****

And so on. There is a sort of class system in shop window ads though. An ad by a mother with young children who wants to flog an old pram is lucky if she gets to plug it for a week on a plain white postcard in exchange for £10-£20. The local franchise operations, established firms and comunity groups will have bigger ads - A4 bare minimum, and often in full colour, simply because they can afford it.

But at the top of the pile are the events posters. No travelling circus worth its salt would forget to give all the shops in the area a big colourful poster in exchange for some free tickets. And for the most part, it's these travelling shows that do most of the advertising on this level: all that garish imagery featuring Clowns, Lions, Monster Trucks and Dancing Horses. But there are others.

For example, most ethnic food shops and Indian restaurants will feature large posters plugging Bollywood and Bhangra music gigs, often in major venues like Wembley Arena. Unheard of outside the Indian community, these gigs are still big business as are the musical events for other minorities in London. I've heard of these a few times before, like that Astoria gig back in 2001 by the Bulgarian metal band APC: the place was packed out with Bulgars, but barely anyone else knew it had happened. Or those one-off shows where a big Japanese or Taiwanese band will turn up, play a big venue and vanish again, with nary a mention in Time Out before or after.

Boxing and Pro Wrestling ads are often put up in windows too. You may not have heard of these promotions, but they're always there, always plugging away and making a lot of money. A lot of young boxing talent is honed in these local events, while many a burnt-out ex-wrestling superstar will ply his trade in town halls and small theatres inbetween jobbing with the indy promotions back home.

A new addition to this top rank of shop window ads is in the form of posters promoting Cage Fighting/MMA. Fans of the noble art of bald men in shorts rolling on the ground with other bald men in shorts will be glad to know that the number of events where this happens are waxing by the day, at least if the number of big posters are anything to go by. These feature dark, menacing designs, often with barbed wire or wire mesh in the background and a dozen or so young men with identical bald heads, stripped to the waist and posing with their fists.

But for the most part, the shop window ad is dominated by those small white cards with shabby writing and badly used apostrophes. After all, if you want a prostitute, a dangerous dog or a lady gardener with reasonable rates, where else could you find them all in one place?

Clapham South Shelter (And Disused Bogs)

2009-04-10T18:47:00.006+01:00

As described in Wikipedia, this deep level shelter was built in WW2 to accomodate those seeking cover from the Blitz. It's very near to Clapham South Tube Station and is, of course, on Clapham Common itself.

Nearby are these striking if rather eery looking public toilets, abandoned and left to rot like most bogs in London. A sour sight indeed if you need to spend a penny.

Chadwell Heath At Night

2009-04-10T18:22:00.000+01:00

Ordeal On The Buses

2009-04-09T00:57:00.001+01:00

London was a seething mass of tourism. The streets and attractions were filled with foreign visitors all streaming in an unstoppable if rather slow wave of loud, gawping pedestrians. Having put up with this for a while, I thought it was time to go home.

The tube seemed too hot. On the other hand, buses are cramped miserable slices of Hades at its worst. Naturally, I thought it was a good idea to get on board one.

Bus travel is slow, painful (if you have to stand all the way, like I did) and full of sullen miserable sods who hate you. A friend said being on a bus was better than the (much faster) tube because 'it was like an adventure'. Whether she meant A Clockwork Orange or Heart of Darkness I'm not sure. Add this to the dark and rather cramped space in a bendy bus (AKA, the 'accordion of death') and it's FUN FUN FUN all the way.

The highlight of the trip was a savage row between two women who were jammed up close to me. One fumed that the other's son was behaving badly while the other swore blind that firstly her foe was talking crap and secondly it was a moot point, as her child couldn't even talk in the first place. (Whether that meant he was still a toddler or a very backward 12-year-old, I couldn't really tell, owing to the claustrophobic press of flesh I found myself in.)

It reminded me that kids on public transport are a menace. Or at least their parents are. Earlier that day, some oaf rammed his child's buggy into my foot. Later on, some twit let her toddler slowly wobble down the stairs at Russell Square on his own, nearly making the rest of us all miss a train.

Getting back to the row, though, what stood out was that they were both clearly speaking English as a second language but were putting in a lot of effort effort to abuse the other one with as much care as can be. You could even hear them putting effort into pronouncing the syllables as well as they could while at the same time getting very, very pissed off.

Perhaps this is the answer to the age-old dilemma of integration versus diversity? Just stick 'em on a cramped, odious bus for an hour and let the hate and bile come flooding out via the world's Lingua Anglais. 'Cos nothing sums up London, and indeed the UK, better than irritable, bitter commuters who really just want the rest of their species to FUCK RIGHT OFF.

As I got off, a Pakistani man said sorry for letting a support strap hit my head as I got off. He sounded very sincere and upset about it. I hoped he heard me say back that it was OK while I leapt off the bus with some relief. It seemed a rather strange moment, like it should not have happened, and that we should have simply grunted at each other as one shoved his way past the other instead.

G20 2009 - I (Don't) Predict A Riot.

2009-04-01T22:56:00.016+01:00

The day started well enough. The TV stations were abuzz with potential violence at the G20 protests, with an emphasis on girly slap fights between protestors and police. Some idiots drove in via a fake armoured car. The BBC was there to report on it - and anything else to make the protests look like epic battles or demonstrations of stupidity rather than, well, protests.

Two Jehovah's Witnesses then knocked on the door. They were a pair of old women - one who did all the talking, and an older woman in a wheelchair. Having had dealings with the Watchtower people before, I assume they always travel in pairs to protect themselves, but how these two could deal with some of the arseholes round where I live is anyone's guess.

The spokeswoman was friendly. "We're having a ceremony to remember Jesus' Death", she said, handing me a flier. "It would be nice to see you there!" What can you say? You don't believe but you don't really want to hurt their feelings. So I took the flier and said thank you. Why not? She then asked permission to pick up one of their 'tracts', which had blown out of her hand and onto the lawn. I said "yes - please don't worry!" and gave my goodbyes, closing the door. At least they're polite, I thought.

It seems like a doomed cause. Trying to spread faith in the blasted no-man's land between East London and Essex (aka Dagenham, Romford and Barking) is a fool's errand. Perhaps the point was in the trying rather than the success rate. But I wondered whether the death of Jesus was the point - surely it was his life and resurrection that really counted. Then again, that was my vague, slack-arsed Church of England perspective speaking there. What would Thor and Queztacoatl make of it?

I decided to go out to the British Library. Riots or no riots, I would push forward, without fear... As to be expected, it turned out to be an anti-climax. There were no riots outside of the main areas under such scrutiny. I spotted at most two people in keffiyehs (the patterned scarves first worn by noted peace-loving vegetarian feminists Hezbollah and the PLO). But it's pretty common these days and they may well have been just commuters like the rest of us.

The police were nonetheless out in force. There were two on the train in - big bastards in hi-vis vests, helmets and stab-proofs. They talked about the day's events like gossiping old women.

At Liverpool Street itself there were scores of Met Police, British Transport Police, City of London Police and Community Support Officers, all working in pairs or the occasional trio. It was a decisive show of fluorescent yellow, checkerboard patterning and glittering steel on black. They all looked bored.

Still, as I waited for the tube to take me to King's Cross, a tannoy boomed ominously that the Waterloo & City Line was closed after a request from no less than... "THE POLICE." (This line links up Bank station, where the protests were mostly happening, to the potential escape route of Waterloo Station.) Later, I heard from another tannoy that Bank itself was closed.

En route, I found myself sitting over the way from a man with one eye. He looked Somalian or North African, and his right eye had been replaced by scar tissue and skin, while his remaining eye was closed. He was asleep. As I got off the train, I saw him alight too, with a guide stick. I avoided him and pretended not to look.

The British Library itself is not an impressive building. It looks like Wood Green Shopping Centre minus the personality and aesthetic charm. It won't be loved or accepted and they will knock it down in 30 years at most.

I saw the statue of Urizen, stooped and unaware of the city around him. There was no room for Barrack Obama, AIG, Lehman's or even Anarchism in his purview. There was only the pursuit of knowledge.

I renewed my membership, had a piss and then travelled back to Liverpool Street. It remained peaceful. Shockingly so. I was within walking distance of the demonstrations and I could hear nothing. Everyone around me acted as though it was business as usual. A screamer on an Evening Standard booth outside King's Cross squealed 'RIOT POLICE FIGHT ANARCHY IN CITY'!!! Yet it was hard not to think of disappointed spikies, riot cops and aggro-loving city workers all surveying the relatively urbane scene and thinking 'is this it?'

When I got back to Liverpool Street, only one or two obvious protesters in lurid clothes could be spotted. When I bought a Standard, though, three young men - all punks - were crowded around the booth reading the headlines. One of the punks, who had black spiky hair and a leather jacket upon which an 'Exploited' band patch was sewn on the back, bought a copy and then stormed off with his friends in tow. "They said it started peacefully and then turned violent! Bollocks!!!" he said, aflame with indignance at the mendacious press.

A friend of mine then took me to one of the demonstrations, which was in the southern half of Bishopsgate at this point. The crowd was loud and rowdy, but harmless, and the police were relaxed. But my friend pointed out the riot vans she had spotted down the side roads nearby and how she had seen a few plain clothes cops talking into their walkie talkies, standing about like they owned the place. And above, constantly, there was the never-ending wail of police helicopters looking down from above.

My friend asked if we should mingle with the crowd. "Sod that!" I said. "What if the spikies and the rozzers kicked off?" "Hmph! Well, I think you'll find it's actually a minority that causes all the problems" she growled. "It's rogue elements, not the protesters!"

We walked off, dodging the trail of piss leaking out a doorway that was being used by some of the protesters as an ad hoc latrine. It was in a sense the official G20 urinal, but taking a photo of it just seemed too weird for some reason...

There was little in the way of actual violence, then, but lots of fear. The employees of the big firms in the area were taking no chances. No one we saw come out of the offices were wearing suits - they were all in street clothes instead. They were, ironically, as much in disguise as those protesters who wore hoods and masks. You had to wonder whether the more colorfully dressed protestors were only wearing their clothes for that day too, and would wash out the hair dye and undo their dreadlocks when they got home.

Still, the anxiety was all around. We went to a Starbucks that overlooks the courtyard at one end of Liverpool Street. There were no customers and all the tables, chairs and bins had been removed. We sat nearby, but the area seemed half deserted while people all walked past quickly, not wanting to tempt fate. A woman some distance away started having a panic attack - we left when the first aiders from a nearby office ran up to help her. Was it the protests she was afraid of, or some terrible crisis in her life? We left quickly - nothing is more frightening than seeing fear itself.

We went to Tesco's. They had banned alcohol sales, but the few protestors in there were well-behaved and relaxed. The LCD screens were all broadcasting BBC and Sky footage of the protests, making skirmishes and squabbles, minor injuries and a few arrests all look like a Violence-Jack-With-PMT bloodbath. Despite the anti-consumerist doggerel down the road, we all shopped as if nothing had happened. And in a sense it hadn't. Nothing had really changed.

As we walked out, another punk was in front of us. His hooded top had the Crass logo on the back, with the legend - "Jesus Died For His Sins, Not Mine". What would the Jehovah’s Witnesses make of that, I wondered? What they and the protesters had in common, though, was this: a desire to change minds, remake the world, and bring about their own vision for the future.

We went to a pub for a drink. Again: no protesters, but plenty of city workers, all lairy, shouting and arm wrestling alpha males to a man. It was just another evening for them. We then went home. My friend wondered if we shouldn't go to the next protest in May. Why not? It might not change anything, but it wouldn't do any harm either - despite the media's efforts to make it seem otherwise.

Welcome To Maryland!!!

2009-04-01T22:53:00.003+01:00

Random Bookshop Shot.

2009-03-31T16:14:00.005+01:00

Just off Charing Cross Road... Note the copy of Bob Dylan's cult novel 'Tarantula' replete with a big hairy monster on the front. (Not at all like Bob himself, of course.)

The Olympic Stadium, Stratford, March 2009

2009-03-29T18:00:00.007+01:00

It's going nicely...

A Day On The Rails...

2009-03-29T03:41:00.006+01:00

There was an argument at the station. A man had been stopped by the ticket inspectors at the top of the stairs. They were arguing like it was a matter of life or death. Eventually the man stormed off without paying, swearing at one inspector who told him to go make an official complaint, then swore back at him in turn. Neither man won.

I got on the train. It went past a huge cemetary where a funeral was taking place. Apart from the hearse and the old fashioned black and chrome Bentley for the family, there were cars - and lots of them. They were parked behind each other in a long, continuous line leading up to the avenue where the funeral was no doubt taking place. That was the roundabout tribute to this person - never mind the garish floral tributes, it was the twenty or so cars, all carrying those who wanted to say goodbye.

Later, on the tube train, I saw a dishevelled looking woman reading a newspaper. She looked rather lank and grubby, her long greasy hair hanging over her face as she looked down on the paper. She had a battered black leather jacket under which poked out the bottom of a women's white top with green stripes - the kind you might get out of Bon Marche. Her legs were pipe thin and clad in narrow jeans. This was all topped off with a pair of dirty white cowboy boots that ended with long pointed toes. It was quite a sight.

Then she looked up and turned out to be a man with a thick bikers' moustache. I quickly looked away.

When I got back, the ticket inspectors had doubled in number and there were two policemen too. They were taking no chances. Fare dodgers seem to think a free ride is worth pulling a knife out for these days. Or maybe it was just a performance put on for the commuters - or a mixture of both.