Wizard is the fourth film by the amazing Guerrier brothers (i.e. me and the baby brother). It's been shortlisted in the Hat Trick / Bad Teeth "Short and Funnies" competition 2013, along with 10 other daft shorts. It would obviously been splendid if you watched it lots, liked it lots and sent it to lots of your friends.
Written by Simon Guerrier
Executive Producer - Martin Kerem
Directed and Edited by Thomas Guerrier
Produced by Adrian Mackinder, Simon Guerrier and Thomas Guerrier
(c) Mackinder / Guerrier brothers 2013
“[Roald Dahl] had known Ian Fleming well. Both men had worked in espionage for William Stephenson during the war, and both had similar reputations as hard-drinking, gambling, womanizing sophisticates ... He admired Fleming. He thought him one of the few writers worth meeting ... But he was less enamoured of his friend's writing skills, describing You Only Live Twice variously as 'tired', 'bad' and 'Ian's worst book'.”
It's not Fleming's worst book, but otherwise Roald Dahl was right: You Only Live Twice (1964) is a marked drop in quality and disappointing end to the Blofeld trilogy.
It begins in Japan, in the midst of an adventure. That is usually a good way to grab the attention, but here Bond drinks too much and plays stone, scissors paper against the head of Japanese intelligence, the shrewd and deadly “Tiger” Tanaka. That is rather it.
This is because, to Fleming, Japan is so exotic it might as well be in outer space. The book italicises and explains such alien terms as samurai, futon, sake and sumo. I realise we're simply much better accustomed to such things today, but the more Fleming tries to make Japan seem glimmeringly different, the more parochial Bond becomes.
We then cut back some time to the last day of August in London, and Bond sweating and ugly, grieving over the death of his wife (in the previous book). Doctors have told him there's nothing wrong with him and pills don't seem to help.
“And now he had just come from breaking off relations with the last resort – the hypnotist, whose basic message had been that he must go out and regain his manhood by having a woman. As if he hadn't tried that! The ones who had told him to take it easy up the stairs. The ones who had asked him to take them to Paris. The ones who had inquired indifferently, 'Feeling better now, dearie?'”
Ian Fleming, You Only Live Twice, p 25.
Bond's indifferent shagging isn't just about him. The decline is symbolic of the state of British intelligence and of Britain more generally. There's a hint of the shadow cast by the Cambridge spies, which feels more like le Carré (whose name I think had been made with The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, published a year before this):
“Bond knew that M. had tendered his resignation after the Prenderghast case. This had involved a Head of Section with homosexual tendencies who had recently, amidst world-wide publicity, been given thirty years for treason. Bond himself had had to give evidence”.
Ibid., p. 31.
Despite what Skyfall implies, I assume that evidence is not because was involved in something gay – especially given his response to plain-speaking (read: bigotted) Richard Lovelace “Dikko” Henderson of Her Majesty's Australian Diplomatic Corps:
“'Don't talk to be about aborigines! What in hell do do you think you know about aborigines? Do you know that in my country there's a move afoot, not afoot, at full gallop, to give the aborigines the vote? You pommy poofter. You give me any more of that liberal crap and I'll have your balls for a bow-tie.' Bond said mildly, 'What's a poofter?'”
Ibid., p 43.
Bond's been sent to Japan on an impossible mission to prove to M that he's not completely useless. MI6 are after top secret intelligence that the Japanese hold about the Soviet nuclear programme. An intercepted message spells out the scale of the threat – and the UK's paltry standing in the world:
“THE DELIVERY OF ONE SUCH WEAPON BY ICBM ON LONDON WOULD DESTROY ALL LIFE AND PROPERTY SOUTH OF A LINE DRAWN BETWEEN NEWCASTLE AND CARLISLE STOP IT FOLLOWS THAT A SECOND MISSILE DROPPED IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF ABERDEEN WOULD INEVITABLY RESULT IN THE TOTAL DESTRUCTION OF BRITAIN AND ALL IRELAND STOP THIS FACT WILL SHORTLY BE EMPLOYED BY NUMBER ONE AS THE TEETH IN A DIPLOMATIC DEMARCHE DESIGNED TO ACHIEVE THE REMOVAL OF ALL AMERICAN BASES AND OFFENSIVE WEAPONS FROM BRITAIN AND THE THE NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT OF BRITAIN ITSELF STOP THIS WILL TEST TO THE UTTERMOST AND PROBABLY DESTROY THE ANGLO HYPHEN AMERICAN ALLIANCE SINCE IT CAN BE ASSUMED THAT AMERICA WILL NOT RISK A NUCLEAR WAR INVOLVING HER TERRITORY FOR THE SAKE OF RESCUING A NOW MORE OR LESS VALUELESS ALLY DASH AN ALLY NOW OPENLY REGARDED IN WASHINGTON AS OF LITTLE MORE ACCOUNT THAN BELGIUM OR ITALY STOP”.
Ibid., pp 50-1.
Bond has battled nuclear threats before, but this is an order of magnitude bigger than events in Moonraker or Thunderball, and never before has Britain sounded so puny. Perhaps that's in consequence of events in the real world, with the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. The real and the fictional mix when a self-confessed fan of James Bond comes to Britain's rescue:
“Then President Kennedy had come out with the strongest speech of his career, and had committed total reprisals from the United States in the event of a single nuclear device being exploded by the Soviet Union in any country in the world outside Soviet territory.”
Ibid., pp. 55-6.
Kennedy, of course, wouldn't live to see his name-check.
Dikko sends Bond to Tiger, who throws him a party, women and a meal that might kill him, and then they get down to business. In previous books, Bond muttered darkly about the loss of the Empire and the young punks too young to have fought in the war. Here, though, it's Tiger who criticises the state of Britain, in a speech that might as well begin, “I'm not racist, but...”:
“But Tiger was not to be hurried. He said, 'Bondo-san, I will not be blunt with you, and you will not be offended because we are friends. Yes? Now it is a sad fact that I, and many of us in positions of authority in Japan, have formed an unsatisfactory opinion about the British people since the war. You have not only lost a great Empire, you have seemed almost anxious to throw it away with both hands. All right,' he held up a hand, 'we will not go deeply into the reason for this policy, but when you apparently sought to arrest this slide into impotence at Suez, you succeeded only in stage-managing one of the most pitiful bungles in the history of the world, if not the worst. Further, your governments have shown themselves successively incapable of ruling and have handed over effective control of the country to the trade unions, who appear to be dedicated to the principle of doing less and less work for more money. This feather-bedding, this shirking of an honest day's work, is sapping at ever-increasing speed the moral fibre of the British, a quality the world once so admired. In its place we now see a vacuous, aimless horde of seekers-after-pleasure – gambling at the pools and bingo, whining at the weather and the declining fortunes of the country, and wallowing nostalgically in gossip about the doings of the Royal Family and of your so-called aristocracy in the pages of the most debased newspapers in the world.' Bond roared with laughter. 'You've got a bloody cheek, Tiger! You ought to write that out and sign it “Octogenarian” and send it into The Times.'”
Ibid., pp 76-7.
It's interesting having Bond defend modern Britain – especially as in the movie Goldfinger, released the same year as this book, he slags off the Beatles like some reactionary dick. When he slates Japanese pretensions in a similar tone, Tiger is impressed enough to offer Bond a chance to prove himself. Again, Bond is offered an impossible mission that he's in no position to refuse. Tiger will share the all-important secrets with M if Bond will kill an annoying European living in Japan.
Of course, the European in question is a grotesque creation living in a “garden of death”:
“Tiger exploded his golden smile. 'Bondo-san, I can see from your face that you think I am either drunk or mad. Now listen. This Doctor Shatterhand has filled this famous park of his uniquely with poisonous vegetation, the lakes and streams with poisonous fish, and he has infested the place with snakes, scorpions and poisonous spiders. He and this hideous wife of his are not harmed by these things, because whenever they leave the castle he wears full suits of armour of the seventeenth century, and she wears some other kind of protective clothing. His workers are not harmed because they wear rubber boots up to the knee, and maskos, that is, antiseptic gauze masks such as many people in Japan wear over the mouth and nose to avoid infection or the spreading of infection.' [Bond replied:] 'What a daft set-up.'
Ibid., p. 65.
Tiger doesn't sending Bond into such a place empty-handed, and offers him some training at his top-secret ninjutsu school:
“'All the men you will see have graduated in at least ten of the eighteen martial arts of bushido, or “ways of the warrior”, and they are now learning to be ninja, or “stealers-in”, which has for centuries been part of the basic training of spies and assassins and saboteurs. You will see men walk across the surface of water, walk up walls and across ceilings, and you will be shown equipment which makes it possible for them to remain submerged under water for a full day. And many other tricks besides. For of course, apart form physical dexterity, the ninja were never the super-humans they were built up to be in the popular imagination.”
Ibid., p. 93.
All this authentic-sounding detail suggests privileged access to stuff most tourists never see. Not for the first time in the Bond novels, it's a load of cobblers. In fact, the ninja myth owes a lot to Bond:
“Considering the ubiquity of the ninja in twenty-first-century popular culture, it is remarkable how fast they appear to have sprung out of nowhere in the 1950s and 1960s ... Any attempts to make a scholarly study of ninja lead down a series of false trails, with modern sources that end up only citing each other, and credulous populist works that claim any reference in an old account to shinobi (stealth, spies, assassins) was in fact a reference to one of several secret ninja societies that stayed in the shadows. This fad achieved global recognition with the appearance of ninja in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967) – reaching, by nature of its genre and franchise, a far wider audience than any more reasoned, less fantastic account of Japanese martial traditions.”
Bond's chief fascination is when he sees ninjas being hit in the groin without flinching. Tiger explains:
“'Well, the sumo wrestler will have been selected for his profession by the time of puberty. Perhaps because of his weight and strength, or perhaps because he comes from a sumo family. Well, by assiduously massaging those parts, he is able, after much practice, to cause the testicles to re-enter the body up the inguinal canal down which they originally descended... Then, before a fight, he will bind up that part of the body most thoroughly to contain these vulnerable organs in their hiding-place. Afterwards, in the bath, he will release them to hang normally. I have seen them do it.”
Ian Fleming, You Only Live Twice, p. 103.
It's that last sentence that's the killer.
Bond is fast going native, and will be carefully disguised to look like a deaf and dumb fisherman (in the film, he's conveniently taken a first in oriental languages at Cambridge). But there's one last night in a smart hotel in Kyoto, where he can enjoy the very best of Western civilisation:
“The comfortable bed, air-conditioning and Western-style lavatory on which one could actually sit were out of this world ... Bond ordered a pint of Jack Daniels and a double portion of eggs Benedict to be brought up to his room”.
Ibid., p. 98.
Just before Bond sets off on his mission, he learns an incredible new detail: Doctor Shatterhand and his wife just happen to be the very fellows Bond's been hoping to get hold of:
“Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Irma Blunt. So this was where they had come to hide! And the long, strong gut of fate had lassoed him to them! They of all people! He of all people! A taxi-ride down the coast in this remote corner of Japan.”
Ibid., p. 116.
There's no other explanation for this extraordinary coincidence, no hint that M knew exactly what he was sending Bond into, or that British intelligence was – contrary to reports – that extra step ahead. It's not intelligence but dumb luck, which rather kills the drama. It feels too much like cheating.
Bond heads off to face Blofeld, his cover story being that he's related to a girl in a nearby fishing village, Kissy Suzuki. Kissy is not some naïve island girl – she's spent time in films in America, but didn't like it very much. In fact she's named her pet cormorant after the man Fleming had wanted to play Bond. David Niven was, Kissy tells us,
“the only man I liked in Hollywood”.
Ibid., p. 128.
Kissy helps Bond get up to Blofeld's garden of death, where Bond sees people dying in various horrible ways and dodges the same grisly fate. When he's then captured and stripped of his ninja suit, things all get a bit homoerotic:
“Bond put his hands down to his sides. He realized for the first time that he was naked save for the brief vee of the black cotton ninja underpants... And then Bond was standing in the middle of a small, pleasant, library-type room and the second guard was laying out on the floor Bond's ninja suit and the appallingly incriminating contents of his pockets. Blofeld, dressed in a magnificent black silk kimono across which a golden dragon sprawled, stood leaning against the mantelpiece beneath which a Japanese brazier smouldered. It was him all right. The bland, high forehead, the pursed purple would of a mouth, now shadowed by a heavy grey-black moustache that drooped at the corners, on its way, perhaps, to achieving mandarin proportions, the mane of white hair he had grown for the part of Monsieur le Comte de Bleuville, the black bullet-holes of the eyes.”
Ibid., p. 162.
It's the most peculiar visual image, and that sense of camp continues. When Blofeld taunts Bond with an especially nasty death, Bond responds sarcastically,
“we'll get Nöel Coward to put it to music and have it on Broadway by Christmas”.
Ibid., p. 168.
Yet when Blofeld criticises Bond, he's exactly on the nail:
“'You are a common thug, a blunt instrument wielded by dolts in high places. Having done what you are told to do, out of some mistaken idea of duty or patriotism, you satisfy your brutish instincts with alcohol, nicotine and sex while waiting to be dispatched on the next misbegotten foray. Twice before, your Chief has sent you to do battle with me, Mister Bond, and, by a combination of luck and brute force, you were successful”.
Ibid., p. 171.
It's as much a criticism of Fleming's own sometimes lazy plotting than it is of 007. I wonder if it's not cribbed from a bad review. Blofeld, still in his fetching kimono, then threatens Bond with a big sword. Bond – in just his tiny pants – fights back, and they wrestle in a manner that I couldn't help but imagine as a bit like Women in Love (1969). Bond kills Blofeld rather prosaically and makes his escape just as the whole base explodes – something more like a Bond movie than the previous books. It all feels a bit pat and camp, and strangely unaffecting.
Except the next chapter pulls off quite a surprise. It purports to be a Times obituary for “Commander James Bond, CMG, RNVR”. It's very exciting to finally have the man's past life spelt out:
“James Bond was born of a Scottish father, Andrew Bond of Glencoe, and a Swiss mother, Monique Delacroix, from the Canton de Vaud. His father being a foreign representative of the Vickers armaments firm, his early education, from which he learnt a first-class command of French and German, was entirely abroad”.
Ibid., p. 178.
We learn they died in a skiing accident in the Aigulles Rouges above Chamonix when Bond was eleven, and that he,
“came under the guardianship of an aunt, since deceased, Miss Charmian Bond, and went to live with her at the quaintly-named hamlet of Pett Bottom near Canterbury in Kent ... in a small cottage hard by the attractive Duck Inn”.
Ibid.
The young Bond was expelled from Eton for some,
“alleged trouble with one of the boy's maids”.
Ibid., p. 179.
He then went to Fettes. And finally, we learn Bond's age: in 1941 he was 17, and – faking his age and using his father's connections at Vickers - got a job at what would become the Ministry of Defence. We can even narrow his date of birth down a little more: Tiger tells Bond he was born in the year of the Rat (page 57), so he must have been born sometime between 5 February 1924 and the end of that year. (If I've got my sums right.)
The reference to Kennedy means that the events of You Only Live Twice take place no later than November 1963, and it was apparently written at the start of that year, so Bond is thirty-eight or -nine. And, of course, he's not dead.
Kissy rescues him from Blofeld's lair, and nurses him back to health. Bond is suffering from total amnesia, but Kissy regains the most important aspects of his memory by purchasing a love potion and some porn. It has the desired effect. In the previous book, Bond was married and widowed on the same day, but here Fleming still up the stakes:
“Kissy wondered what moment to to choose to tell Bond that she was going to have a baby and whether he would then propose marriage to her.”
Ibid., p. 189.
Of course, there's no happy ending – that's rare enough for book Bond. Instead he sees the word “Vladivostock” in a bit of old newspaper and is sure it means something important, so leaves Kissy to go and find out. The implication is that Bond never knows he's going to be a father. That child would now be just turning fifty (so older than Daniel Craig).
Kissy's tragedy ought to mean more to us, but she's hardly been in the book and made little mark. She's just another in a long line of women to fall for Bond and then get the cold shoulder.
But also, for all it's a shocking to see Bond in such a bad way having looked death in the face, for the most part the book is taken up by willy-waving discussions with Tiger. It's often funny – Bond now knocking our droll one-liners just like his big-screen counterpart – but for all the macho posturing and apparent threat, all too often I was struggling to care.
Caricature of John Lubbock
from Punch, 1882,
via Wikipedia.
Heritage! The Battle for Britain's Past is available on iPlayer for a limited time and well worth catching while you can. It details the nineteenth-century heroes who realised something must be done to stop the destruction of our old buildings and green spaces, and led to the establishment of the National Trust.
Among the heroes was John Lubbock MP (1834-1913), who I'd not heard of before. A pupil of Darwin's (having grown up near Down House), Lubbock later named an insect after him. Lubbock also introduced the first bank holiday, kept a pet wasp, got insects drunk to see if they recognised each other and claimed to have taught his dog to read.
He coined the terms "neolithic" and "paleolithic" and bought the site of Avebury to save the ancient stone circle there from destruction. Many of his prehistoric finds are on show in Bromley Museum, which I shall now be making a trip to.
Later, Lubbock became the first Lord Avebury - and his grandson sits on the Liberal Democrat benches in the House of Lords.
The Doctor surprised in The Bride of Sacrifice, nabbed from Doctor Who Gifs.
The above grab shows the Doctor surprised to learn he's just got engaged to be married, in the third episode of The Aztecs (just rereleased on a special edition DVD). It's a gem of a story, about "truth", cultural relativism and the opening of a door. But it's the getting engaged bit I want to focus on here.
Nowadays, we're used to the Doctor snogging ladies and the occasional gentleman. He's been doing it since the TV movie in 1996. But in Doctor Who on TV before that, he pretty much never kissed anyone. Some people see him kissing people now as a kind of betrayal.
In The Aztecs, the Doctor uses his friendship with Cameca in his efforts to get back to the TARDIS, stuck behind a door in a tomb that can only be opened from the inside. But when he first singles Cameca out from the crowd of other pensioners in the Garden of Peace, he doesn't know she'll be useful. The Doctor asks Autloc about this woman he's spotted, and Autloc says, "her advice is most sought after ... You will find her a companion of wit and interest". The Doctor goes over and chats to her about flowers - and it's only then he learns that she might know someone who can help him get back to the TARDIS.
What does he see in Cameca? The Doctor objects to being dumped in the Garden of Peace with the other old folk, who he says must be "bored to tears doing nothing". He later tells her that, "their minds are old, Cameca, and that's something I'm sure yours will never be". We know from his later companions that he's drawn to the young at heart.
The engagement is a misunderstanding and the Doctor is shocked. Yet he doesn't object before that when Cameca nuzzles up to him, calls him "dear heart" and speaks of the bliss in her "thirsty heart". Even after they're engaged, the Doctor still pats her hand and calls her "my dear" - more than he'd need to were he simply using her to get back to his Ship. In fact, at that point he thinks there's no way back into the tomb.
Later, Cameca knows the Doctor will be leaving. We don't know how she puzzles it out, but it conveniently means that the Doctor doesn't have to lie to her or sneak off without a word. He tells her, "You're a very fine woman, Cameca, and you'll always be very, very dear to me". She in turn tells Autloc, "I have just lost all that is dear to my heart" - but still takes the risk of bribing a guard to rescue Ian and Susan.
The Doctor is grateful in their last scene together. "That was a very brave thing for you to do, Cameca, but you can't stay here". Yes, there might be a reaction because of what she's done, and we might wonder why the Doctor doesn't offer to take her with him in the TARDIS. She responds, "I'd hoped I might stay by your side." But the Doctor doesn't answer, and won't look at her, either. "Then think of me," she says. "Think of me."
As she hurries away to her uncertain fate, we hold on the Doctor's face, but what is he thinking? When at last he gets back to the TARDIS, he thinks better of leaving behind that the token Cameca gave him. She does mean something to him.
What makes this so compelling is how little we're told and how much we're left to infer. But also, this early in Doctor Who and with the rules still being established, we don't know how unusual romance is for him. We know precious little about what he got up to prior to meeting Ian and Barbara. In the first year of Doctor Who, there are six references to previous adventures:
In An Unearthly Child (#1), Susan says she's lived on Earth in the twentieth century for "five months" and can't understand why Ian and Barbara won't believe that the TARDIS travels in time and space. The Doctor says, “Remember the Red Indian. When he saw the first steam train, his savage mind thought it an illusion, too.”
In The Cave of Skulls (#2), Susan says that the TARDIS has previous been disguised as “an Ionic column and a sedan chair.”
In The Edge of Destruction (#12), Susan refers to an adventure “where we nearly lost the TARDIS, four or five journey's back.” The Doctor adds, “Yes, the planet Quinnis, of the fourth universe.”
In The Brink of Disaster (#13), the Doctor says he acquired the coat Ian puts on from Gilbert and Sullivan.
In Strangers from Space (#31), the Doctor refers to “that extraordinary quarrel I had with that English king, Henry the Eighth. You know, he threw a parson's nose at me!” When Barbara asks what he did in response, the Doctor says, “Threw it back, of course. Take them to the Tower, he said. That's why I did it.” Susan explains: “The TARDIS was inside the Tower.”
In A Desperate Venture (#36), Susan tells the Sensorite First Elder, “Oh, it's ages since we've seen our planet. It's quite like Earth, but at night the sky is a burned orange, and the leaves on the trees are bright silver.”
We know the Doctor can be selfish and amoral, we know he doesn't like to get involved, and we've seen him be charming to get what he wants. But we don't know his history with women.
The one person who could tell us is Susan. Her reaction would tell us everything: would she roll her eyes because the Doctor always got caught up like this, or look on horrified and wonder what her Grandmother might think? As far as we know she never learns about Cameca or the Doctor being engaged. The only person who does is Ian - who laughs. Perhaps it's that reaction that makes the Doctor more wary about such things until his eighth incarnation. Or perhaps it's the hurt he can see he's inflicted on Cameca.
In part, Susan doesn't comment on the Doctor's affair because she barely appears in the middle episodes of the story. Actress Carole Ann Ford was on holiday for two weeks, so appears in one pre-filmed scene per episode. In those scenes, Susan faces forced marriage and refuses: "I'm not going to be told who to marry". There are similar sentiments in an earlier story, Marco Polo (by the same writer), so who taught Susan her attitudes to marriage? Was it her time at Coal Hill School - or was it the Doctor?
Ironically, in Flashpoint(#51) the Doctor locks Susan out of the TARDIS and abandons her to be with the young man she loves, so she won't have to make the decision herself. The Doctor is heartbroken by his decision - and it's an extraordinarily moving sequence. Doesn't that suggest that he's a romantic? So there's every chance he's left broken hearts behind him all through time and space.
Episode 1: An Unearthly Child
First broadcast: 5.15 pm on Saturday, 23 November 1963
One of Doctor Who's most striking images is the result of the production team trying to save money.
As Susan explains in the second ever episode, the TARDIS can normally change its shape to blend in invisibly where and whenever it lands. The show's co-creator Sydney Newman had, brilliantly, insisted that the Ship should at first look like a police box – a familiar, everyday sight at the time. But the police box prop was expensive so, in what was meant to be a temporary measure to spread the cost across more episodes, the TARDIS was stuck as a police box.
Hence the series' very first cliffhanger: an ordinary, everyday object, familiar to everyone watching, but on a stark and alien landscape.
It's such an effective, eerie juxtaposition – the ordinary with the strange - that the show's used it ever since. Everyday objects come suddenly to life, famous landmarks serve alien armies, snowmen come horribly to life...
It also helps that this first cliffhanger is so well earned, using a neat mix of the ordinary and strange to sell us the idea of the TARDIS. The episode teases us right from the start that something odd is going on. There's the spooky theme music and opening titles, and then a policeman wandering through eerie fog. And we're shown something he doesn't see – an ordinary police box making a weird noise.
Even then, there's nothing to suggest the kind of strangeness to come. The first half of the episode is played very real. An ordinary pair of school teachers in an ordinary school discuss one of their pupils whose homework has recently got worse. Barbara is frightened as she and Ian follow Susan home, 'as if we're about to interfere in something that is best left alone,' but Ian is more pragmatic – Susan might just be meeting a boy.
The tension mounts as the two teachers explore the junk yard, director Waris Hussein picking out the unsettling, mangled face of a mannequin. Then we meet the Doctor – a suspicious old cove who asks lots of questions but answers none. The horrible suggestion is that he's locked Susan in the police box. The way it's been played, this "mundane" explanation - a story they might have done on Z-Cars - seems far more likely than what we're about to find out.
But all this ordinariness is setting up the episode's great revelation. Ian and Barbara shove their way past the Doctor and into the impossible, bright TARDIS. The darkness, the fog, the ordinariness of everything up to this point, help make it all the more striking.
Again, ordinary things are used to explain the strangeness. The Doctor likens the TARDIS to the way television works, and Ian's disbelief to a Red Indian's first sight of a steam train (Westerns were a lot more familiar in 1963). Ian's reaction, struggling to understand the incredible space, helps sell the idea to us, too.
The ordinariness of Ian and Barbara also presents the threat – they'll tell the police about the Doctor and Susan, or they'll at least tell their friends. Ian and Barbara want to escape from the strangeness. Susan wants to go with them, back to her ordinary life, but the Doctor decides there can be no going back, and spirits them all away...
As the TARDIS takes off, we again see the strange pattern of lights that made up the title sequence. By recognising it, by realising what it is, we're buying into the whole concept. The strange has just become familiar – and we believe that a thing that looks like a police box standing in a junk yard can move anywhere in time and space.
All of this is set up extremely simply. There are just four speaking parts – our leads – and just eight other people are named in the credits (plus the BBC's Visual Effects Department and Radiophonic Workshop). Telling the story through Ian and Barbara, keeping it close and immediate, really helps sell the idea.
But there's another master stroke in the cliffhanger: a shadow moves into frame. It's not just that the police box stands in a strange and alien landscape, but that someone is outside, waiting...
"The port of Alexandria, 5th Century AD.
The Doctor, Ian, Susan and Barbara have taken a break from their travels, and are enjoying a few weeks in the sunshine – and the chance to appreciate the magnificent Library of Alexandria.
They know that the library will soon be lost to history. What they are about to discover is the terrifying reason why…"
To whet your appetite, here's Carl Sagan wandering the Library of Alexandria in 1980 for his history of science series Cosmos:
It's packed full of interest which I shall endeavour to blog about another time, but given Eastleigh and the AAA rating this week, the following rather chimed:
"One very characteristic - indeed, defining - character of persistent
criminals is their baffling ineducability by experience, which leads
not only to a repetition of the crime but of the details which led to
their detection and arrest. In other words, their behaviour is
compulsive. There is an analogous ineducability in government, among
the advocates of 'strong' policies. Experience and argument did not
prevent successive British 'strong' men (not all of one party) from
repeating in Palestine, Cyprus, India and Suez the identical attitudes
and errors which lost them Ireland, not Marxists from repeating the
aberrations of the Czars. The reasons are identical in the two cases -
these are examples of stereotyped behaviour, the actions are performed
for the immediate emotional satisfaction they give not for their
supposed purposes; other characteristics are unjustified
self-confidence, total disregard of others and the substitution of
vague objectives such as prestige or revenge for concrete gain, which,
even if unelevated, is at least reality-centred. Long-term objectives
- national advantage or the victory of an ideology nearly always give
place in the event to the overwhelming cathexis of 'strong' action for
people in office - the policy is then doggedly persisted in to
maintain the illusion of purpose, under the guise of maintaining law
and order. To the 'strong' man, as to the persistent thief, it is
pointless to argue that crime does not pay - it is the act, not the
policy or the thing stolen, which is the true motive. He will 'show
them', regardless of whether it pays or not."
Alex Comfort, Authority and Delinquency - A Study in the Psychology of Power (1950), pp. 29-30.
Excitement! I have found my first ever rejection letter, received in April 1992 from Gary Russell, then editor of Doctor Who Magazine. I was 15 at the time, and it was just a few months since Gary's interview with novelist Paul Cornell (in issue #181, December 1991) had made me realise that being a writer was something I might actually do, not merely something to dream of like being an astronaut or pop star.
I sent Gary a terrible short story in which the Fourth Doctor and Romana land somewhere and, er, that's it, and surprisingly the response was a form letter:
I've had a lot of form letters since. They're the usual response to unsolicited on spec submissions. It took me a long time to realise that collecting rejection letters - forms ones, then form ones with notes on your submission, then ones with notes on your submission that invite you to try again - is a big part of being a writer.
I mustn't have been too disappointed by this first response as I sent Gary more stories. You can see how much better they were by the response I got six months later:
At the same time I also sent a script for a Judge Dredd story to 2000AD, and the form rejection letter I got back wasn't even signed (though someone had asterisked the paragraphs I should pay attention to).
Over the next few years, I continued to send things to Doctor Who Magazine and 2000AD, and also sent in proposals anywhere else I could think of. My first rejection letter from the publisher of Doctor Who books in 1994 was so detailed, generous and encouraging that I probably owe my career to it.
I finally got commissioned by Doctor Who Magazine at the end of 2001, with a two-part feature published in early 2002. Later that year, I also got commissioned to write a Doctor Who short story, in Big Finish's Short Trips: Zodiac. That was edited by Jacqueline Rayner, overseen by Gary Russell. That led to me writing lots for Big Finish, and a couple of years later I helped Gary write form letters in response to submissions.
2000AD turned me down, again, with a form letter just last year.
Last night I finished a notebook I've
kept since 29 December 2011 (when I was in Egypt). I've kept
notebooks since I was in my teens, and find them very useful to refer
back to – pinching ideas from my past to pitch anew to unsuspecting bosses. It's not a diary, but
flicking through this latest volume reminds me what I was working on
and having ideas about, and what preoccupied the insides of my head.
There are the day-to-day notes as I
wrote one novel, 10 plays and three short films, marking down new
clever wheezes or things I'd need to go back and fix. There are
pitches for yet more plays, films and comics, notes on what I was
reading or watching (much of it later blogged here), fragments of
conversation – real and imagined – and turns of phrase or
interesting words or ideas.
As an insight into the terrible mess of
my brain, here is a selection:
21/1/12
Lord Wallace of Tankerness is asked if
he knows of a case of suicide in a young offenders' institution and
responds, “I associate myself with expressions of regret” -
[House of Lords, 24/1/12; col. 987.]
Do we know what we vote for? Have we
read the manifestos, interrogated the data and understood the
arguments? Generally, no; we are lazy. We buy newspapers and follow
Twitter accounts that confirm our opinions. We avoid complex or
counterintuitive issues and the testament of evidence in favour of
the glib and easy. We elect a smile, a soundbite, a cipher, not a
problematic and uncertain truth. Rule so we don't have to think about
it – that is your mandate, nothing more.
10/6
Doctor Who -The City in the
Clouds ([Rough idea for a
Companion Chronicle set in Season 1, but beaten to it by clever Jonny
and his Voyage to Venus)
In space, maybe on zeppelins linked
together to create a city in the temperate zone on Venus – a city
in the clouds.
All a bit Dan Dare
(which Ian has read, confiscated from his pupils), and they realise
that this futuristic world is in the early 17th Century, the same
time as Galileo is on Earth recording the phases of Venus for the
first time.
Barbara falls in
love and Ian has to take her back to the TARDIS (he uses her mum Joan
to convince her to leave). Her lover will think she died.
They have to get
down to the planet's surface – the hottest place in the Solar
System – to recover the TARDIS. Need local people's help. They
don't use money there, it's all about reputation and respect – like
crowdsourcing, or your number of followers on Twitter. So the Doctor
and Susan etc. have to be storytellers, scientists, busking their way
in the society, getting themselves known – and only for the right
reasons. Loss of face can ruin everything. That's where we meet them
at the start of part one, the Doctor as a Punch and Judy man.
[Before I knew about Jonny's story, I
realised that was too much like Patrick Troughton's role in The
Box of Delights before I knew
Matt Smith would do some Punch and Judy business in The
Snowmen.]
21/8
Video going round of a guy mocking
iPhone users for taking photos of their food. We're often fooled into
thinking we're part of something because we consume it. There are all
the tweets and fan activity involved in watching a TV show (a passive
experience), or the adverts that sell the idea that by eating a
burger or drinking a fizzy drink we're part of the Olympics.
21/10
After the accident, people would say to
him, 'Do you dream you'll walk again?'
And he would consider – as if it were
the first time he'd been asked – then say, 'No, only of being able
to fly.'
14/11
We used to tease her
That in the freezer
Below the croquettes and fish fingers
and peas
She kept the bodies of one or two
geezers
Who thought they'd got lucky
When she invited them home.
But we were very wrong -
It wasn't one or two.
Something inside her
Moved like a spider
Spinning them in and dispatching them
Then cooking them up for her guests
Despite her reservations that these men
Could be counted as fair trade.
She liked the big-boned ones
Who made lewd remarks
And promised not to treat her
respectably.
Their steaks were good for marbleising
And she saw putting them on the menu
As a service to women her age.
27/12
Rewatching The Snowmen.
Why does Madame Vastra look a bit different from how she did
in A Good Man Goes To War?
She's a lizard and sheds her skin, so looks a little different after
each shedding. (Also, it's considered rude to point that out.)
4/1/13
Billy Connolly, interviewed by Mark
Lawson, describes “middle class” as “the kind of people who had
dressing gowns as children”.
In the summer of 2000, when dinosaurs still roamed the streets of south London and there were only eight Doctors Who, I hefted my possessions from my sister's flat and moved in with Nimbos. To help us chase the estate agents working on our behalf, I signed up for my first ever mobile phone - a chunky grey thing with a flip-open cover that made me feel achingly trendy. My trusty pager, with a handy clip attachment for fixing to my belt, was never seen again.
I worked for a internet start-up and the bubble hadn't yet burst, so for the first time in ever I had money in the bank. As well as showing off to my new girlfriend and taking her for meals in Pizza Express, I also bought an hilarious set of items for my new home with Nimbos.
Six coasters showing the roundel from the title sequence of Mr Benn.
I'd never owned coasters before and I still don't really see the point of them, but they were the pride and joy of that flat. They really tied the room together. People would call by our flat and comment on those coasters and we'd beam magnanimously back.
When I left that flat to move in with the Dr a year later, I took the coasters with me. People still commented on them, but more in the way on enquiring how long the Dr would put up with my all dorky nick-nacks. And then something very odd happened indeed. People started thinking of me as a Man With Coasters, and went and bought me more.
The above picture shows just a small part of my collection. You'll note the six Mr Benn ones aren't included - they're in a cupboard somewhere, along with the set showing specimens of ancient Greek sculpture and ones with quotations from Winston Churchill. You can see the thought that's gone into the selections: booze and Daleks suit me rather well, and designs by William Morris and the Greek stuff goes down well with the Dr. Those ones of buildings were hand illustrated by an architect chum and are really rather lovely. It would be churlish to be anything but grateful to have such thoughtful and generous friends.
And yet.
If I am defined as a Man With Coasters, it's because I already have them.
A team of hardened professionals assembled in central London earlier today to make Wizard, the fourth short film by the amazing Guerrier brothers - coming to an internet near you in April, I should think. In the mean time, here are some jolly exciting pictures of people in an office, with helpful links to them on Twitter.
AD Natasha Phelan and director Thomas Guerrier with David Warner and Lisa Greenwood/
Lisa Greenwood demonstrates how to correctly sit on a spherical chair.
Sound recordist Håvar Ellingsen, distracted from his Queen and Country.
David Warner and co-star.
The actor Matthew Sweet.
Director Thomas Guerrier and Lisa Greenwood preparing the all-important kitchen scene.
Adrian Mackinder and AD Natasha Phelan ready for a take.
Adrian Mackinder, photo by Lisa Bowerman.
Adrian Mackinder and his moves, photo by Lisa Bowerman.
David Warner and ready meal, photo by Lisa Bowerman.
David Warner and director Thomas Guerrier attempt to make sense of the script, photo by Lisa Bowerman.
Matthew Sweet all eyes and teeth, photo by Lisa Bowerman.
Matthew Sweet grills David Warner, photo by Lisa Bowerman.
Matthew Sweet and David Warner, photo by Lisa Bowerman.
Matthew Sweet and director Thomas Guerrier, photo by Lisa Bowerman.
Director Thomas Guerrier and AD Natasha Phelan.
Team Wizard: Lisa Bowerman, David Warner, Adrian Mackinder, AD Natasha Phelan, sound recordist Håvar Ellingsen, Lisa Greenwood, director Thomas Guerrier and William Hughes.
Lisa Greenwood.
Director Thomas Guerrier and David Warner.
Team Wizard part II: Adrian Mackinder, sound recordist Håvar Ellingsen, David Warner, AD Natasha Phelan, Lisa Greenwood, me, Rabbit, director Thomas Guerrier, Matthew Sweet and William Hughes, photo by Lisa Bowerman.
The main problem with science documentaries (having made a short one, “Entropy Explained”, that, despite a well-qualified and engaging presenter, I think doesn't quite work) is how to illustrate the argument without distracting from it. A personal bugbear is documentaries that show pretty pictures of space or CGI that aren't even connected to what's being said. At the same time, just having a talking head addressing the viewer can get dull very quickly – telly is all about moving pictures.
That's why Brian Cox gets sent all round the world, spelling out the science in a way that's visually appealing – and related to what he's saying (if also riffing off this). In the 1970s, Jacob Bronowski was commissioned to link science to art, which makes for better visuals in the amazing The Ascent of Man (1973). Later, Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980) dramatised lots of moments from history – and at great expense – while Carl himself hosted the show from the inside of spaceship (I can't help thinking it looks like the inside of the Pinky Ponk from In the Night Garden...).
But James Burke is quite the master at thrilling, engaging and boggling ways to put across his ideas. He cut his teeth presenting Tomorrow's World and the Apollo Moon landings. You can see a little of this early work at the BBC Archive's Tomorrow's World collection, while the excellent Apollo 11: A Night to Remember DVD features clips of Burke putting a spacesuit through its paces or testing the rocket escape system. All this shows his flair for simple and direct ways of talking technology in a way that we'll remember.
But Connections is something altogether more impressive: a 10-hour thesis on the history of and our dependence on technology.
The first episode reminds me, in terms of strategy, a little of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). That film consists of four separate but related stories: early man making a discovery; something happening on the Moon; something happening in a spaceship; a journey into the unknown. Each sequence is visually and aurally stunning, and each sequence ends with a startling, gosh-wow revelation that takes us somewhere new. As a whole, it aims to simply and vividly boggle our sense of where we come from, how we got here, and where we're going next.
Connections' first sequence is remarkably simple. Burke addresses us directly:
“Would you do me a favour? I'd like to stop talking for a minute and when I do, take a look at the room you're in and above all at the man-made objects in that room that surround you – the television set, the lights, the phone and so on – and ask yourself what those objects do to your life just because they're there. Go ahead.”
Watching it now, it's striking how much more dependent we are on clever telephonic and electronic devices since the series was made, so it makes the point even harder: we don't know how these things work and yet we're in their thrall.
To make that case, Burke then spells out what happened in the New York City power blackout in 1965, dramatising scenes and speaking to witnesses. It's as fascinating for its depiction of human behaviour – passengers on a tube train sharing birthday cake and wine as they waited in a dark tunnel – as for the explanation of how a single protective relay caused chaos.
Burke shows us the offending relay before telling us what is, inviting us to guess. It's a very effective way of drawing us in. The point is that we are reliant on gadgets and networks we barely understand.
Next, he spells out a nightmare scenario of how long we'd survive in a world where technology stopped working, making the brutal choices horribly vivid – we'd need food and shelter, but would we be prepared to kill someone to take their house, or protect our own? Again, he gets in our heads, and plays to 70s concerns about how far we removed ourselves from the means of production and essential skills, played out earlier in Terry Nation's Survivors (1975-7).
But this is all merely a prelude. Burke is then in Egypt to trace the origin of our dependence on technology. I gather from my in-house expert that what follows is based on the work of the archaeologist Flinders Petrie.
About 10,000 BC, at a result of climate change, mankind's behaviour radically altered. Around this time, the glaciers receded and the temperature rose, and water became scarcer. The hunting nomads had to come down from the high grasslands in search of food, and did so, says Burke, in northern India, central America, Syria and Egypt (and possibly also Peru). In Egypt, where Burke bases his argument, they found a lucky accident of nature. A yearly flood of the river Nile created a very fertile ribbon of land stretching some 750 miles, in the midst of what was otherwise scrubland and desert. This fertile land supported plants the nomads could eat. About 5000 BC they settled permanently in the area. They dug and sowed crops, irrigating them by hand and perhaps with basic tools for nearly 1,000 years, and then an odd-shaped bit of wood transformed everything ever after.
Burke's explanation of what happened as a result of the invention of the plough is quite long but well worth following. It's a brilliant, eye-popping series of consequences, just as gosh-wow as 2001.
“Initially the surplus [food] produced by irrigation and ploughing permitted non-foodproducers to operate within a community, and in the beginning these may have been the men who dug and maintained the irrigation systems, and those who organized them. These administrators would have derived their authority from their knowledge of astronomy which gave them alone the magic ability to say when the flood would come, when to sow on the land wet from the receding waters, and when to harvest. The grain needed storage room out of the weather, and dried clay daubed on woven reed baskets gradually gave way to more permanent containers as the demand for them increased with the crop. Fire-hardened clay pots, made from spiralling loops of wet earth, came to be used, and the first evidence of solid burning is of piles of these pots heaped together to form a form of central granary. The need to identify the ownership and amount of grain contained in a pot or a granary led to the development of writing. The first picture-words came from before 3000 B.C and comprise lists of objects and totals of figures contained in pots and chests. The surplus grain paid for craftsmen: carpenters, potters, weavers, bakers, musicians, leather-workers, metal-workers, and those whose task it was to record everything – the scribes. The need to ensure regularity of harvest in order to support those members of the community demanded a taxation system, and so that it should be operated fairly skills were developed to assess each man's due. Initially this may have started with the measurement of field boundaries destroyed each year by the flood, but as time passed and the irrigation systems grew more complex, the process demanded greater sophistication, calling for mathematics to handle the measurement of distance, area and cubic amount.
These early forms of arithmetic and geometry grew from the demands of canal building: how long, how wide and how deep? It may have been the need for tools to do the job which spurred interest in the copper deposits across the Red Sea in Sinai, and this in turn would have stimulated the use of metal for weapons. Weapons were needed by those whose task it was to protect the land and crops from invasion, as the surplus food and the goods financed by its production began to be used as barter with neighbouring communities, some of which looked with envy on the riches of Egypt. Metal tools gave the Egyptians the ability to work stone, initially, perhaps, in blocks for strengthening the irrigation ditches. The Nile is bordered for 500 miles south from Cairo by limestone cliffs, and it is from this stone that the first pyramid was constructed.
A mere hundred and fifty years after the first use of stone for the construction of buildings, the massive step pyramid of King Djoser was erected. It rises out of the desert as Saqqara, south of Cairo. Built by the king's chief minister, Imhotep, it is the oldest extant stone structure in the world, dating from around 2800 B.C. It was constructed using the tools and the theoretical knowledge developed by the canal builders, and it shows a high degree of precision in the use of both. By the time Djoser was being laid in his pyramid, Egyptian society had developed a form that is little changed today. At the top came the Head of State, served by his cabinet of advisers; these were aided by a civil service which organized every aspect of life in the state, gathering taxes from craftsmen and farmers to support themselves and the army. The regulation of the state's business was effected through the application of laws, which rested for their observance on the availability of an annual calendar, by now divided into twelve months or thirty days each. By 2500 B.C. the Egyptians (and their neighbours the Mesopotamians) had a developed and sophisticated society operating with a handful of essential tools: civil engineering, astronomical measurement, water-lifting machinery, writing and mathematics, primitive metallurgy, and the wheel. With these tools the Egyptians administered am empire whose power and influence was unparalleled in the ancient world, based on an agricultural output made possible by the plough. Its use had ensured the continued survival and expansion of the community and set in motion the changes that resulted from that expansion.
The first man-made harvest freed mankind from total and passive dependence of the vagaries of nature, and at the same time tied him for ever to the very tools that set him free. The modern world in which we live is the product of that original achievement, because just as the plough served to trigger change in the community in which it appeared, each change that followed led to further change in a continuing sequence of connected events.”
James Burke, Connections (Macmillan London Limited: 1978), pp. 10-12.
The final sequence in this first episode sees Burke in Kuwait, showing how oil transformed the country in a single generation, so that people whose parents were nomads (as people were in Egypt before the invention of the plough) are now millionaires, racing through the desert in the latest Rolls-Royce. It's an awe-inspiring thesis, that a single invention or discovery can so transform our lives, and in ways the inventor or discoverer could never have predicted.
In each of the next eight episodes, Burke traces the discoveries that led to a key invention that he says define modern life – such as nuclear weapons, the space rocket and television. It's a shrewd and often very funny series drawing together myriad threads. Burke has a dry wit and love for historical irony. We learn, for example, that in the hunt for the cause of malaria (literally “bad air”), Napoleon ordered a bad smell map of Egypt.
I expect Douglas Adams was watching that first episode the night it was broadcast on 17 October 1978. He'd soon be working on a Doctor Who story about an alien who forced the progress of mankind. An episode first broadcast on 13 October 1979 – a little less than a year later – includes this from the alien:
SCARLIONI:
Achievement? You talk to me of achievement because I steal the Mona Lisa? Can you imagine how a man might feel who has caused the pyramids to be built, the heavens to be mapped, invented the first wheel, shown the true use of fire, brought up a whole race from nothing to save his own race?
“David Agnew” (David Fisher, Douglas Adams and Graham Williams), Doctor Who: “City of Death”, part three (1979)
Connections is certainly of its time. Burke not unreasonably assumes the viewer remembers the launch of Apollo 11 and the stirring of emotions that went with it. There's the irony, for a series about technology, that he could never have predicted how this show would be watched or by who all these decades later. And in some ways it feels prehistoric.
Burke addresses himself to a straight male audience, and makes a whole load of other assumptions, too. At one point he asks us not to be distracted by a pretty girl in shot. Later, he asks us to recall his argument, “the next time your wife asks you to change a plug”. I imagine a few chums would find the patrician tone too condescending and arrogant, but that's a shame because there's so much to enjoy. For example, in discussing the Apollo programme and the criticism that it cost too much, he says, “in the same period, American women spent the same amount on cosmetics”.
But there are other things that seem from another age. For all this talk of technology feeding into our lives, computers are things that only affect us in the workplace. Yet when he talks about the relatively new-fangled credit card and how it will change “future” transactions, it seems prophetic. He explains in episode 8, that the credit card is more than just a substitute for cash. The magnetic strip on the back is a moral judgment on you, your life and your credit worthiness. The powers that make these judgments are secret and immutable, based on patented algorithms and business practices. More than that, they drive you to behave in certain ways which were, until recently, thought wholly immoral: encouraging you to live outside your means. As he says, chillingly, at the end of this sequence,
“What will happen when being in debt all the time is the normal way to live?”
Burke is also good at looking for connections between the different stories and episodes, to understand what aids progress and what stands in its way.
In episode 3, he argues that many inventions key to industrial development in the West – gunpowder, paper, magnets – had existed commonly in China for hundreds or even thousands of years. What made the West different, he says, is that China was a Taoist state, and believed that everything and everyone had their rightful place. In Europe, however, there was more social mobility and competition, so people were constantly looking for any advantage that might make them rich and lift them up the social order.
It's interesting to join that up with the BBC's other seminal, authored series of the time. Kenneth Clark in Civilisation (1969) argued the essential element for civilisation was the courtesy to discuss new ideas without fear of reprisals or death. Jacob Bronowski in The Ascent of Man made the case for knowledge over certainty – good evidence is key not just to science but law and history, too. To this, Burke adds opportunity which allows and encourages experiment and play, so that those who make discoveries or find new ways to apply them can fully reap the rewards. Effectively, without social mobility progress grinds to a halt.
Finally, in episode 10, Burke tries to sum up all we've seen: the surges of communications technology through letters, a postal system, telegraphy, satellite phones. He concludes that,
“The faster you can communicate, the faster change happens.”
He predicts – and more accurately than he could ever have imagined – that the near future would depend on,
“Information... what you do with the facts”.
He argues that the defining question in the technological arms race will be,
“How easy is it for knowledge to spread?”
He also says that lack of access to this information will equal powerlessness, just as if someone were deaf and dumb and blind. Watching it now, that all feels chillingly right.
And yet Burke's also under no illusions about how difficult it is to predict the future. After all, the inventions he's covered in the series led to things no one could have predicted. And he concludes by connecting up the eight inventions from the series to one that will (he thinks) dominate our future – the bomber carrying nuclear bombs. Luckily, he was wrong.
There's a Not The Nine O'Clock News sketch that parodies Burke, with him telling us something, then contradicting it and then contradicting that contradiction. That's unfair, and though he does something a little like that in this last episode it's to make a serious point. He says he can't predict what will happen, or what developments will dominate our lives. In effect, he's saying, “It's more complicated than that” - itself a paraphrasing of all of science.
And he leaves us with something more potent and compelling than a dodgy prediction. Because the last moments of the series are an even more effective gosh-wow. Again, he directly appeals to us, telling us to become discoverers ourselves. He tells us that new discovery depends on challenging authority, religion and ideology that keep us in our place. As he says, science is sometimes seen as hard and emotionless because it “removes the reassuring crutches”. But he's not calling for some kind of revolution or new dawn of atheism. Instead, he simply spells out that all we need for progress is to ask the right questions.
“Ask for explanations. And ask yourself if there's anything in your life you want changed.”
I know what I'd like changed. I'd like a souped-up Region 2 DVD or Blu-Ray of Connections, please.
