The Reithian ideal, by which to my mind all British TV should to some level adhere, states that television should “educate and entertain.”
With that in mind, let’s summarize the best that Sky has to offer this autumn.
Ross Kemp sucks the life, danger and interest out of gang life. The campest game show ever returns. Wayne Rooney sucks corporate cock for a jazzed up soccer school. A new season of Lost, the most infuriating show on the planet. And Hairspray, the High School Musical. There are no words I can summon up for this one, but the image of a water buffalo in a tutu defecating moistly into John Travolta’s mouth springs unbidden to mind.
I don’t recieve Sky anymore, and thank the Nether Gods for that. Who in their right mind would willingly pay for that panoply of shite?
Give me darts and fighting any day.
Off sick today, which is always a bore. I’ve been pretty much stuck upstairs, shuttling between the bedroom and the loo (don’t ask, really, unpretty situation.)
Which leads, of course, to a day of Rob’s favourite pastime, Fannying Around On The Laptop. Listen to the author’s squeals of joy as he archives off 10 gigs worth of ephemera to the external drives! Rejoice with him as he gets Last.fm working along with Growl, and spends the day watching a window pop up on his desktop every time a new song plays! Gasp in near-orgasmic wonder as he … oh, you get the idea. Geeking out is what I do, and it can sometimes be good to have the excuse to do nothing but for a day.
So, concerning the local amenities, I’ve juggled things around eso slightly. There’s now a Last.fm list widget, so that you too can enjoy my musical “tastes”. I prefer to call them eclectic, although the accusation often levelled is “schizophrenic.”
Philistines.
There’s also a Facebook widget, and updates to the blog will now appear as new Notes in my FB profile. Sharp-eyed readers may notice a change to the quote in the header, and really sharp-eyed observers will note I’ve tweaked the logo. Notice I have resisted the temptation to stick a lightning bolt in the middle of it.
There’s been a few updates to the growing pile of juicy content in the writing rooms. Satan’s Schoolgirls will always update on a Sunday, so Chapter 5 has just gone up. I upped a new short story Saint Charlie to the Short Fiction room earlier this week, and I’m rather proud of it. Any updates to the fiction or film room will always be noted in This Week’s Special, the text box to the top right.
A couple of interesting links, because obvs I sent a chunk of time hitting the feeds today.
The guys at scans_daily came up with the goods again, with a wonderful piece by Darko Macan, about a bookshop that has every volume in the world … excpet one. The ending is just heartbreaking.
"Mister Bookseller"
Finally, as a writer, I am by definition a language technician. My chosen language (or rather the one that circumstance and to a certain amount laziness has forced onto me) is one of the most illogical and eccentric on the planet. With a vaudvillian twinkle, Ed Rondthaler takes us through a few of the pitfalls and pratfalls that the English language has in store for us.
Leland is the keeper of the Star Wars archive, and the man with all the information on the ever-expanding SW universe at his fingertips – or more accurately, on a massive Filemaker database called the Holocron, after a Jedi data-storage device.
More importantly, he’s the guy that decides what is and isn’t canon in that universe. Subject to a George Lucas brainfart, of course.
Which makes the discovery of this little gem on LJ so frakkin’ sweeet. Totally uncanon, hugely funny. Star Wars humour can often be clunky at best and downright juvenile at times, so it’s a joy to run up against this strip, which manages to be hilarious, elegantly written and subtly satiric.
Which, much as I hate to say it as a loooong time SW geek, is not praise you can often aim at the franchise itself…
Designing the Death Star, a task loaded with pitfalls...
I spent the morning sweeping up leaves and digging up spuds from our dreadfully neglected vegetable patch, in weather chilly and wet enough to need a hoody. This is autumnal activity. It’s early September, and I’ve seen no decent sun this year at all. I’ll take any escape from this seemingly endless dull grey procession of dark, dismal days.
Which was why I was so drawn to Julien Bocabeille’s Oktapodi. A sharp, bold little tale of octopi in love, I enjoyed the beautiful blues and bright sun of the Grecian setting as much as the story and animation. And it is very funny and well made.
Following a recommendation from Katherine Farmer at the Forbidden Planet Blog, I’ve just spent the morning reading Evan Dahm’s Rice Boy.
It’s an extraordinary, surreal, moving and thoughtful tale, telling the story of the titular Rice Boy, a limbless, mushroom-like blob, and his quest to prevent a war and save his world.
The artwork is lush, while still remaining accessibly cartoony, and the story twists and turns, leading to an epic climax with a twist that I genuinely couldn’t see coming. I’m reminded in a very good way of Lewis Trondheim’s Donjon books. It’s a genuinely all-ages story, with enough to keep an inquisitively-minded reader absorbed for hours. I really can’t recommend it highly enough.
Six and thrupence for the ween. The other one you can have for free, he does nothing but eat and go on about something called GTA4.
Now, every so often I get into an argument (or as I like to call them “reasonable discussion at high volume” about the state of the nation, or on days when there really is nothing better to do, the world. The general consensus seems to be that we’re screwed, and the handcart to hell is now loading on platform 666.
I tend to be the dissenter in these discussions, largely because I’m prepared to take a slightly more open view and actually look at how we used to live. It’s not pretty. Global war in the teens and forties. Poverty and want in the fifties. Race and sex wars in the sixties and seventies. Kylie and Bros in the eighties.
That’s without even starting to consider where we were a hundred, a couple of hundred years ago, where people from my level of society would have been living in a slum, scraping a living at a manual trade if you were lucky, and dead at fifty. The quality and sheer joy of my life would have been dismissed as the rantings of a lunatic.
In my opinion, the best time to be around is right now. We live in a world where for the first time people are being accepted on the basis of their talents, regardless of creed, race or sex. Global communication is accessible and instantaneous. Despite what the press would have us believe, we’re actually in a better place now than you’d think.
Now, there are those that consider this site to be the Great Work, to which I can only blushingly offer my thanks. However, the Work I’m considering in this post is the one that occupies my day job.
Or rather, not my day job. In order to get The Work done, I have had to do some very peculiar hours. For example, this week I am doing a 7pm to 5am shift. Which is fairly unique in my experience.
What’s doubly peculiar is how quickly I’m getting used to it. I was always of the highly vocal opinion that I was incapable of working nights as the lack of sleep would kill me within a week. This does not seem to me the case. I have laid off the caffeine a bit, but I’m getting enough kip and feeling remarkably lively, all things considered. I’m probably just on the verge of a psychotic episode instead.
The Great Work provides its own compensations for my collapsing mental state. I am witness to some of the richest and least seen TV archive this country has to offer. Science programming, political commentary and satire of the highest quality spool past my rheumed, reddening gaze. There used to be a reason that we had the reputation for having the best TV in the world, and the proof is in front of me nightly.
But now, most worryingly of all, I have to confess to a crush.
On Lynda Baron. That’s right, big motherly Lynda Baron, Arkwright’s squeeze on Open All Hours Lynda Baron. Clearly, my readership murmurs, the boy has lost his marbles. And the plot. And all reason.
But wait. The Lynda Baron of my dreams is the 1966 model, the looker with the achingly now flippy hairdo who chantoosed regularly at The Talk Of The Town in Mayfair, and had a gig on one of Ned Sherrins later satire shows. She fills the Meredith Martin on TW3 bit. Slinky dresses, funny songs and a touch of glamour just to set off the comedians of the day who, let’s be frank here, were not on telly for their looks. John Bird is many things, but he can’t shake his stuff in a cocktail sheath dress like Lynda Baron. Or rather, it’s not something I’d really want to see.
Blimey. Hello.
So, yes, it may be the lateness of the hour, but I’m crushing quite a bit here. I’m sure you understand. If you were in my position, you’d probably do the same.
I was chatting to my good buddy and fellow-traveller Clive the other night about his reaction to this year’s Frightfest. One film he picked out for particular opprobrium was Eden Lake, a Brit horror where the enemy are a gang of twelve-year-old boys.
The phrase he used was “Daily Mail horror.”
It’s starting to look like feral children will be the next big thing in horror. Apart from Eden Lake, Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers has just appeared in cinemas, which owes a fair debt to French shocker Them.
One thing all three share is a strong connection to exploitation cinema. Both The Strangers and Them claim to be “based on true events”. Based is a very loose term, and any claim that either film is a true representation of society today (which is something The Fail will jump all over, hence Clive’s displeasure) should be laughed and pointed at until it picks up it’s ball and goes home in a huff. Exploitation cinema has always taken the easy path to getting people into the picturehouse – grab a headline or two, wrap it in a hysterical plotline and get it out fast. This time next year there’ll be a spate of child abduction horrors, and of course again the papers will carry on the symbiotic relationship, and we’ll be told that this is a symptom of a sick and collapsing society.
Just like the hippies and bikers in the sixties, the teddy boys in the 50s, the jazzers in the 30s, gangsters in the 20s, and so on and so forth. We always fear that which we cannot understand, and that’s what crappy papers like the Daily Fail, and crappy horrors like Eden Lake are counting on in the quest for a fast profit.
What bothers me more is the appearance of Thomas Turgoose, who’s been a revelation in Shane Meadow’s This Is England and the new Somers Town. Both these films are a purer and more accurate representation of British youth than any number of cheap exploitationers or hysterical op-eds. Having him and the wonderful Kelly Reilly in the cast give the film a gravitas that it doesn’t really deserve.
As a horror film, it works just fine. As an indictment of British youth, it’s up there with Village of The Damned in the realism stakes.
Sometimes, you need to change things around a bit. Declutter, slap some paint around, try the sofa up against the opposite wall. Sometimes, you realise that just won’t cut it, and it’s actually time to up sticks and move somewhere new.
That’s what’s just happened to me and my old blog, The Ugly Truth. It simply wasn’t doing the job I needed it to do anymore, and I was posting less and less. I was frustrated by it’s limitations, and some of the offline shortcuts I’d put in place stopped working. The time had come to change up, buy a domain and do a proper website.
X&HT is the result. I’m pretty pleased with it. I hope you’ll like it too.
A little background for any new visitors. My name is Rob, and when I’m not working for a post-production facility in Soho’s bleeding heart, I write and make films.
EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS 
