Dead or alive

In between all the copious reading, I have sometimes escaped my pod. The Dr took me on Friday night for ramen and A Matter of Life and Death. It’s an expertly staged version of the Powell and Pressburger movie, full of vim and ingenuity. But I felt these rather detracted from the all-important love story.

The film (which I love but the Dr and Codename Moose both felt too boring) begins with dashingly handsome World War 2 pilot Peter (David Niven) on his way back from a raid over Germany. The rest of his crew have either bailed out or bought it, and Peter’s plane is bothersomely on fire. Knowing he hasn’t a hope of landing, and dashed well without a parachute, he natters to a pretty-sounding wireless operator – June, played by Kim Hunter (yes, hot chimp lady Zira from the Planet of the Apes).

After wooing this fine-sounding filly, Peter leaps from the plane… and miraculously survives. The after-life has made a balls-up in the typically English fog, and while Peter and June get to a-snogging, a celestial court hearing is being arranged…

The afterlife of the movie is full of deliciously over-the-top performances, yet all in cold black and white. The spirit world is a haunting and grey place. This contrasts with the staid, stiff-lipped Brits surviving world war in rich and vivid colour. The play nicely smudges the split between the two worlds – living and dead – so it’s less explicit that the court is all in Peter’s head. I was a bit worried by advance warning that the play featured several songs, but its all fun and rumble-tumble stuff, bringing to life the passion of life that Peter’s fighting for.

That said, this smudging does make things a bit tricky for the central wheeze – whether it’s right that Peter should get a second chance. For all Douglas Hodge does his best as Peter’s dead friend Frank, arguing in defence of the star-cross’d lovers, we’re not exactly convinced of the special flavour of the case when the afterlife seems so rosy. There’s passion and larking and sexy girls on both sides of the mortal divide, and the dead seem more happy and care-free.

The performances on stage were all excellent, though the plot was overshadowed by moving props, Kirby wires and pyrotechnics. I thought of my few lessons in audio drama – that the sound engineers can make widescreen baroque on stereo, but we need to hear the words people are saying to build a picture in minds. The play is a great, funny feast to watch and enjoy, but its real strength and cleverness get a bit lost in the mayhem. The larking about and jokes about drowning in bags of milk rather smothers the emotional core.

It doesn’t help that the play then brings out women killed in Coventry and Dresden on the sorts of mission Peter was flying. This departure from the film may make the story more complex and contemporary, but the random brutality of war also undercuts the right of Peter to get special leniency. In the film he’s fighting a war against grey bureaucracy – and one that’s made the cock-up in the first place. In the play his motivation is a bit more selfish.

The extra context did very effectively up the emotional stakes of the play, and maybe got the audience working more critically. It is very well done, and a lively, sparky night out was exactly what my sandpapered eyes were after. Yet in retrospect it doesn’t sit happily.

Perhaps it’s just the effect of living in a different time. The film originally played to a newly post-war audience, every one of whom would have lost somebody. The underplayed sentiment holds back a tide of evocations.

Jason and Jason

New up on the Big Finish website are the cover and a sample chapter from new Benny novel, The Two Jasons. The book went to press on Tuesday.

"The growls will be added in post"

Much as it might be cheering on the opposition, you can hear the first installments of all-new Blake's 7 at scifi.co.uk. That's the sort of magnanimous fellow I am.

The whole thing's a bit damn brilliant, really. And plenty more of it to come, too. Hooray!

Had a nice chat with author Ben Aaronovitch early today, as it happens. He is happy with what we're going to do his space vixen Kadiatu, so now we just need to get her into a booth.

Great day in the studio yesterday recording "The End of the World", with a simply brilliant performance from Stephen Fewell as Jason, ably assisted by an exemplary guest cast. Couldn't have asked for better, loves.

In fact the only one to let things down was, er, me. Scene 22 worked a lot better without my monstrous growling (despite my best efforts to be Killoran) - and even gave our visiting reporter goosebumps. Woo!

The chimpanzees of death

The official Droo website now has a funky comic maker wotsit. Cobble together your own novel graphics and sequential arts. You can surely do better than my effort.

The write stuff

Ten years ago tomorrow I went to the Manopticon 5 convention in Manchester – which is where I first got to meet famous people who are now my pals. I know this ‘cos I found the souvenir brochure the other day, while researching for the Inside Story.

The autographs page shows my priorities even then; I’ve only got scrawl from the writers (Steve Cole, Paul Cornell, Terrance Dicks, Steve Lyons and Gareth Roberts, fact fans). The floppy-haired, wide-eyed, 20-year-old me had only the previous day handed in his undergraduate dissertation – comparing the TV Movie to Star Trek: First Contact – and little dreamt of all the mad shit and scribbling as yet to come…

Signed off on The Two Jasons yesterday and wrote up a quarter of my notes on the first draft of Nobody’s Children. Pretty damn delighted with this year’s Benny – and people are saying nice things about Judas Gift both on Outpost Golliwog and the Down Among the Dead Men mailing list (you’ll need to sign-up to read what’s been said, though).

Also got a lunchtime demonstration from Dr Davy Darlington of how you check a recording studio offers dead space: clap your hands and listen for the lack of any reverb. Look at me with my hang of the lingo.

Then put on a better shirt and jacket and tripped into town to attend my first ever Clarke Award ceremony. I first heard about the Clarkes while doing my MA, when I got to meet some of the judges on the morning after. They’d had no doubt about The Sparrow’s fabulosity, and so I sought it out myself. The Clarkes are generally a great recommendation. It’s like the older kid at school who can recommend the good stuff – there’s only one winner I wasn’t so swayed by.

Was wary about what it would be like, but the place was full of old chums and the beer didn’t need to be paid for. Got to meet Andrew Cartmel – who I’ve employed and am employing, but by proxy – and various other fine folk.

Was so busy nattering that I was one of the last to file into Screen 4 for the ceremony. Managed not to see a prominent step as I looked for spare seats, so went flying in front of everyone. Gah! The free honeycomb ice-cream helped to settle the embarrassment, and I hid at the back with Jim Swallow.

The speeches were all very brief, and having applauded Mike Harrison and the organisers, we beetled back out to the bar. I had fun asking different people if writing knock-off sci-fi tie-ins did you any favours in writing standalone sci-fi (there’s lots of ways you can articulate “No!”), and traded business cards, salacious gossip and hyperbole. Then followed some people to a pub round the corner, and did the same over pints of Green King.

And the only thing I paid for all night was a grubby pasty on the way home. Whee!

Ooh look, rocks!

Have been away this weekend in Athens – which meant some last-minute frantickery to get Things Done, and sterling effort from some people I work with.

The Dr used to make pilgrimage to Greece every year, but it all got too expensive in the run up to the Olympics, so this was our first trip together since 2003. (She and the second wife did manage a trip to Lesbos in May 2005; they went to a bar guarded by a dog that barked at men, and to a petrified forest like on Skaro.)

It’s all a lot smarter and more organised, as a result of the Olympic developments, while still being a bit shambolic in places and with building works going on just everywhere. The new and improved underground network is exemplary – the Dr’s extensive tour included a stop off at Syntagma Square station, where the mezzanine down to the platforms includes exhibits of old stuff found on the site.

Having dumped bags at the nice and central hotel (just up the street from Monastriki), we ventured out into the sun and the ruins. Was a bit pleased to find I knew my way about, though I missed the intended lunch stop-off by 100 yards.

Took it easy to begin with and explored the Agora – the remains of the Athenian market place. Here Socrates and the other citizenry would discuss politics and philosophy and shagging – as detailed with quite some accuracy in Mr Handcock’s “The Oracle of Delphi”.

Wished I’d known when I was editing that about the House of Simon of the site. Simon was, the Dr informed me, a cobbler, a citizen and talker, and gets a mention in Xenophon. Was obliged to pose for photos.

We siesta’d then went out for a few early evening beers, and collapsed into an early night.

Saturday was baking, and we did the Byzantine and Cycladic museums in the morning – which were full of impressive artefacts and interpretation. The Dr bought a few heavy books, which I had the foresight to lug back to the hotel before venturing any further.

Re-met the Dr and Mum at the Temple of the Winds (having spent a good while trying to locate the way in), and we began the long trek up to the Acropolis. It’s a steep, hot, winding path up there, and a detour round to the Dionysus theatre proved much further and more up-and-down than expected. But we marvelled at the theatre in which so many classics were first played and told ourselves it was worth it.

With grumbling knees we reached the rock’s summit. Parents were suitably wowed - Dad, who’d never been to Greece before, had studied these buildings carefully when modelling our wedding cake.

The Acropolis itself was much improved site since we’d last been, though there’s still a lot of work ongoing. Odd to see the temple to Apollo Nike in bits. They’ve been repairing the stuff, putting in new marble to piece the Parthenon back together – so it’s all in a better state and more complete than ever. All the new stuff is clearly discernable by being a slightly different colour.

It’s controversial work, but the place was falling apart anyway, so it seems it’s either this or letting it collapse. And the small temple to Poseidon (whose Caryatids can be seen copied in the church at St Pancras) is now, you know, a temple now, and not just the crude impression of one.

We admired the views and took plenty of pictures. The Dr guided us through, explaining the pre-Classical stuff in the museum. This is stuff excavated from the site – long after us Brits had been stopped nicking things that were not always lying around. (I may be misremembering, but the site is much tidier, with none of the strewn stones and rocks that tourists were tempted to pick up; the constant whistling from the staff telling off such thievery is gone, too.)

Stomped on weary legs back down into the town, stopping for more pictures on the way. We don’t have a bath at home, so baths in hotels are luxuries; this one was especially bliss.

In the evening, our guidebook took us to a café favoured by and named after Melina Mercouri. We ate and drank extremely well, looked down on by great portraits of Mel with Dali, with politicians and leading men, such as James Mason. I resisted the primal urge to do impressions.

Easier day Sunday with a trip out to the island of Aegina, where the Dr and I once spent a few cheap nights when a passenger ship’s sinking meant we couldn’t island-hop anywhere else. We were poorer then, and spent our nights on the balcony, eating pistachios and reading aloud Harry Potter. (We started to get what the fuss was about in book 3, when the Dr would get up in the middle of the night to hunt for the book I had hidden…)

Saw the columns and pottered about. I bought two shirts but declined to paddle. Drank a fair bit and just soaked up the sunshine. Ferry home again, and then out to the place round the corner for proper Greek grub – moussaka and souvlaki. Yum.

Monday, we went to the National Archaeological Museum to gaze upon the face of Agamemnon. But despite the promise in the guidebook it was not open, so instead we went to the Benaki museum, which gives a patriotic history of the whole of Athens (and not just the classico-hellenistic bits).

Cooed again at Edward Lear’s drawings, the prep for watercolours that I find less interesting. His drawings include notes and doodles and scribblings out, and so make everything seem more alive and immediate.

Mum liked the various iterations of traditional Greek costume, and the wooden-panelled rooms look cosy and snug, and reminded me of an early date going round Leighton House. One day we will have a house big enough to recreate something similar. Though I will only spoil the Arabian effect by leaving out my sci-fi magazines and hardbacks…

After an expensive coffee on the top floor amid rich Athenian women, we took a stroll through the gardens to the Temple of Olympian Zeus. The last time the Dr was here you could walk right up to the monument, but it’s now strictly roped off.

Lots more good photographs, and I asked if they might ever resurrect the one tumbled-over column. But it’s a Roman temple, so probably doesn’t merit the same attention.

Found a fantastic, traditional little eatery on our way back to the hotel. Ate and ate for less than 10 euros each, then picked up our bags and headed for the plane. Even the airport has a museum of the finds made during development. Dad was particularly taken with how a whole old church got moved.

Arrived tired and grouchy at Heathrow, and had to wait for our cab home to fight through the traffic. Ride home not helped by the M4 being closed, but I got excited when I realised we’d pass the TARDIS at Earl’s Court. No, I’ve not yet seen Saturday’s episode – though am even more keen after Nick Walters’s spoiler-free text…

And so home to much junk mail and waiting works. Going to be a busy couple of months now, with lots of stuff that just needs doing. So blogging nonsense may suffer for a bit. Sure you’ll all be relieved.

I like this, though, which awaited me in the office:

Technicolor™ type

Regular acolytes of this ‘ere blog might note a sudden and spangly facelift.

Looked through Blogger’s layout interface because of something I was proposing for work. It was too tempting not to click around and, I hope, make things a touch warmer.

The typeface is now all Trebuchet, named after the contraption for getting middle-aged men into castles.

If I understand these things even remotely, Mr Gill’s beautiful letterings come out of copyright in just fewer than three whole years. Gill Sans, designed for clarity and fine looks, even from far away, is ideally suited to both print and the screen (which is why the BBC use it). I beseech it then being a core font for the web, and will use it and Joanna here.

Splitter!

“At the end the comandante raised his arm in the Fascist salute. ‘¡Arriba España!’ In the early days of Bernie’s captivity, at San Pedro, many prisoners had refused to respond, but when a few were shot they had complied, and now there was a dull ragged response. Bernie had told the other prisoners about an English word that sounded almost the same as ‘Arriba’ and now it was ‘Grieve España’ that they called back.”

CJ Sansom, Winter in Madrid, p. 256.

Mother-in-law leant us this, which gripped when I should have been reading work things. It’s about three public school boys, caught up in Spain after the civil war, as Franco debates whether or not to go in with Hitler.

Bernie Piper is the son of a shopkeeper, in Spain to fight for the reds against fascism. Missing, believed dead, he’s in a work camp in Cuenca, slowly toiling to death, destroying pagan cave paintings. (This might constitute a spoiler were it not also revealed in the back-cover blurb.)

Bernie's grieving girlfriend Barbara has been taken up by the Clark-Gable-moustached spiv Sandy, who got expelled from the old school and never got on with Bernie. Sandy’s up to something mischievous involving gold mines and Jewish refugees. So another school mate, hero and Dunkirk veteran Harry Brett, is sent out to spy on Sandy.

It packs in the historical detail, explaining the power groups, economics and cultural nuances to build up a vivid picture of these terrible times. There also some fun gags involving real historical characters. All this helps flesh out an engrossing plot, and the last 100 pages are especially hard to put down. The Dr was a little disappointed by the abruptness of the ending; I thought it effectively placed the whole thing in the context of the rest of the war.

The 4½-page historical note is and one of best and most concise summaries of the period I’ve seen. But the novel itself explores the splits between what are ostensibly two sides. The British-bribed monarchists vie for power with the fascist Falange, while Bernie’s as much at risk from his fellow communists as he is his captors. And at its heart are those with no particular leanings, ordinary, decent, everyday people helplessly caught up in the horrors.

The acknowledgments don't mention Orwell or Hugh Thomas - which is pretty much all I know about this most uncivil of wars. But I'm intrigued by a couple of the other sources:

“Phillip Knightley’s Philby, KGB Masterspy (London 1978) opened the world of wartime espionage for me […] The article by J. Bandrés and R Llavona, ‘Psychnology in Franco’s Concentration Camps’ (Psychology in Spain, 1997, vol. I, no. I, pp. 3-9) is a chilling account of the abuse of psychiatry.”

Ibid., p.537.

There are posters in the train stations all over London enthusing about Sansom’s other books, and one day when I’m not reading for money I shall endeavour to look them out.

You would make a good Dalek

Up early Saturday to get the train to Manchester. Read the first quarter of Nobody’s Children (first draft), which is really rather good. Hooray!

Met the brother-in-law and his mate P., and caught the free bus into town. Some kids on the bus were off to the same top destination, and compared signed merchandise on the way. One explained seriously to his friend that,

“Nick Briggs is funny, and not as scary as you’d think.”

Texted this at the boss himself, who’s glad it’s not the other way round.

The Museum of Science and Industry’s Droo exhibition was absolutely packed, and we had three quarters of an hour before our timed tickets let us in. We sat in a café and ate Bellinis, and I snapped the Dr in front of the TARDIS.

Eventually got into the show, the only grown-ups not escorting children (or using them as an excuse). Proved my geek credentials by not only identifying each of the first eight Doctors, but also which stories their pictures were from. P. very impressed. Or maybe a little scared.

That was the only concession to old-skool show, and we wended our way round the displays of new show monsters and costumes. Was more entertained by the other punters, and kids barely able to toddle explaining to their grans where the Moxx of Balhoon fitted in.

Bottlenecks around the Cybermen and Daleks, of course, and other adults seemed to think me brave for having my picture taken right by the sink plunger. The shop was full of new-logo toys – tents and screwdrivers and action figures I’d never have dared dream of when small.

There were a few knock-off products without the new series logo, which looked a bit shabby in comparison. No Big Finish of any flavour – a terrible and tragic oversight.

We wandered a bit round the MSIM’s other, free buildings and then found ourselves a pint. Then a bus to the shops, on which the Dr got chatted up by an incomprehensible drunk. (No, not me.)

On the trek back to Piccadilly, the bro-in-law led us into an inauspicious bookshop to see a display of toy soldiers. There were three tiers of marching Nazis, hand-painted in Hong Kong and £20 a piece. As well as Hitler, Goebbels and anonymous troops and youths, there were limited editions of Heydrich, Hess and other middle-ranking Nazi slebs.

We were struggling to find words when the bloke behind the counter came over to help. The figures, he said, were illegal in some countries, but weren’t half as offensive as stuff in some of his books.

Bryan Ferry had a point, he went on, and anyway, some people collect and dress up in SS uniforms. That was nothing political, of course – the clothes were just stylish and well made. He was short, enthusiastic (at least towards the Dr, who didn’t tower above him) and we weren’t sure if he was joking…

Caught the train back to Macclesfield. The teenage girls sat opposite were overheard to say that I was “pretty fit”, which says a lot about the talent in this poor part of the world. The Dr was still finding this hilarious a good hour later – a bit unfair given the best she can do is drunks and neo-Nazis.

Beer and splendid, scary Droo, then out to snaffle curry. Talked new series theories and old continuity with P. into the small hours. Late up yesterday, good pub lunch and then the long trip home.

Now just 50 pages of Nobody’s Children left and really very pleased.

Harry Potter’s magic wand

Went to see Equus last night at the Gielgud, made famous by Daniel Radcliffe flapping his old chap about at the end.

We had “stage seats” – a bold new venture for me. There’s no legroom in the high horseshoe looking down on the performance, and if you even look like you might have food on your person, a stern-looking bloke comes over. So no popcorn.

It’s an odd place to sit, because you can scrutinise the audience as much as the play. Spotted Howard Jacobson in the posher seats, and possibly Julian Fellowes, too. They didn’t wave.

Richard Griffiths, leading and narrating, was good enough to glance over his shoulder from time to time, to include us in events. His was an engaging, gentle performance, playing against the frustrated, ranty man as written.

Griffiths is Martin Dysart, a psychiatrist, whose latest patient is 17 year-old Alan Strang (Radcliffe), who just blinded some horses with a hoof pick. Dysart’s patience and ploys unravel the reasons behind such an abhorrent act. But the more Dysart “cures” the nightmares plaguing the boy, the more he’s envious of his passion, too, and the more he starts to question “normalcy”.

Radcliffe was excellent, and a world from Harry Potter. The girls were pleased to see he’d been working out, too. Well, if you are going to lark about in the all together for the entertainment of a full house of punters, you want to be looking your best.

All the performances were good, and it was expertly staged. Kudos to the chaps playing horses, cantering about in precarious high heels.

Yet the writing is heavy and overly worthy, and very much of its time. Alan’s parents are by turns a self-taught socialist and blinkeredly religious, and it’s difficult to believe they’d stay together. I found the stuff about telly as the opiate of the plebs very dated, too. The women are very underwritten; able and capable and all very lovely, but objects for the men to respond to. Jenny Agutter was all very good, but really had nothing to do.

I think my real beef was that it reminded me of too many other things, most notably Robert Lindner’s excellent The Fifty-Minute Hour (and ooh! Alan C Elms’ brilliant New York Review of Science Fiction article, Behind the Jet-Propelled Couch: Cordwainer Smith & Kirk Allen is now online).

M’colleague B., sat next to me, was more bothered by the idea of psychiatry as only an intellectual process, the cure coming from deductive reasoning alone. And one lady outside the theatre was very annoyed that, “Just because we know why he did it, doesn’t make it okay.”

I spent a little over two hours waiting to be examined myself, today, having finally got around to registering with a doctor. I am a stone overweight, not diabetic and should cut down a bit on my drinking.

Three points

I have been told that Margaret Thatcher, when Prime Minister, refused to read briefs of more than three bullet points. If not too hot on detail, she did always appear to be on top of the myriad issues that people might ask her about.

My three bullets for you today are:

• ITEM! A talk next Thursday addresses human remains and display, and probably won’t include my one-liners:
  
  “The Stories of Sara Baartman – the ‘Hottentot Venus’”
  Written and presented by Dr Debbie Challis
  National Portrait Gallery (in the lecture room, downstairs)
  Thursday 26 April 2007, 13:15 - 14:00
  


• ITEM! M’colleague Mr B. Aaronovitch has joined the 21st century, and marks this auspicious occasion by… er, railing against the 21st century
  


• ITEM! M’colleague and soon-to-be neighbour G. thinks he knows where Martha Jones gets her look from

Pomp and circumstance

Watched the BBC’s 1962 Elgar drama documentary, directed by the young Ken Russell.

The imagery is beautiful and cinematic – looking as if made with a most un-BBC budget. Unlike more modern drama docs, the actors do not speak and the only voice heard is narrator Huw Wheldon. It’s a very effective way of illustrating one man’s essay, but also makes best use of Elgar’s music.

It mentions Elgar’s Catholicism as an inspiration for his epic and melodic scores, which is kind of ironic since his work is seen as so inherently C-of-E British. But then the lush theatricality of our anthems, crownings and royal ceremonies has always been a bit Anglo-Catholic.

It suddenly occurred to me (no doubt after everybody else) that Anglicans who object to women vicars must, on the same principles, oppose Betty as head of their church.

Elgar himself was uncomfortable with the patriotic claims made of his music. Perhaps the most extraordinary sequence in Russell’s beautiful film is his use of Elgar’s “Pomp and circumstance”. This Boer War marching song is, with someone else’s lyrics, better known as “Land of Hope and Glory”. And Russell juxtaposes the lyric-less original with awful footage from the First World War – men shot as they ascend from the rat-infested trenches, queues of wounded soldiers staggering through the mud. It’s an incredible, provocative sequence, and I could see just why Elgar might have felt angry…

• Screenonline’s page on the Elgar documentary includes a two-minute clip of the “Hope and Glory” sequence.

What’s a weekend?

Spoke to the sister this morning, swapping gossip of one sort and another. She lives on the other side of the planet and has caught the natives’ upward inflection. The Dr and I hope to spend Christmas with her in Melbourne, some other projects permitting.

Work continues. Have gone through the proofs of Dave Stone’s novel, The Two Jasons, in time to receive the first draft of our next book, care of Jon and Kate and Phil. The Wake needs a little tweaking and is ready for studio, and by Tuesday I should have all this year’s remaining scripts done. Chapter 2 of Inside Benny is currently 25,000 words, and is coming together nicely. Bit of a blimmin’ mammoth, though. And we’re powering through the short story competition.

Met the writer Colin Harvey last night – or one of them. This one’s the winner of SFX’s own new writer competition, who’s also got a story in Snapshots. He was lucky enough to catch me when I’d spent all day at the typing, and I may have been a little talkative.

We and several other colleagues were in Lewisham’s answer to the Dolphin, ostensibly to pick apart the joys of Gridlock. Nope, everyone seemed agreed it was pretty damn wondrous, and I arrived too late for what had apparently been lots of snitty misery about the end of Life of Mars.

(Though I can sympathise with much of the criticism, it kept me and the Dr entertained and guessing right to the end. And Ralph Brown was, as always, a shiny great treasure.)

Congratulations to m’colleague E., who sneakishly, secretly got himself wed yesterday. Everyone should get married. And, more importantly, they should then have a good party.

E., you’re not allowed to do that bit in secret, okay?

Births, marriages, deaths

Met the Dr in the spangly Young Vic bar Wednesday night, where we shared some giraffes of wine. She also bought me a leatherless present, London: City of Words.

Have already learnt that Caxton’s first English printing press was inherited by the splendidly named Wynken de Worde. In about 1500, de Worde moved it from Westminster to Fleet Street, which remained the heart of English pressing for just shy of 500 years. Good fact!

• More on early English printing

We then ambled onwards to Tas for some Turkish comestibles. It was packed, but the service was exemplary and we had some very good food. Also got through quite a lot of fizz.

Yesterday was somewhat different, and we grabbed a lift from my cousin in Richmond down to my grandfather’s funeral. He was 93 and had been declining some time, but his death (on 31 March) was still a bit of a shock. Lots of family I’d not seen in years, and some wonderful stories too. Most of them entirely unrepeatable.

I’d been tasked last week with ringing round the cousins to gather stories to use in the eulogy. Most featured boozing and swearing. One family friend referred to the latter as “bicycling”, after “Jesus Christ on a bicycle!”

The elder brother – who delivered the short version of all this – had also worked through Grandpa’s own incredible memoir. He remembered Conan-Doyle as “tubby”, went tiger-hunting aged seven, and married my Granny having seen her only six times in daylight. The wedding guests had to take cover in the street from an attacking Meschersmitt.

But for the man who’d been born in Shanghai and lived his life all over the world, the last goodbye was in Basingstoke. We filed out to the thumping Radetzky March, and on to a pub flying the Union boldly.

Then back to the Smoke, and we took our chauffeur out for drinks and pizza in Richmond. More revelries and revelations, and some cheesecake for pudding.

With exquisite timing, my friends P. and A. produced a baby the same day that Grandpa died. Very glad to hear all is well with them. Found myself humming while on the way into work not Radetzky but that one from the Lion King.

Leather goods

Three years ago this afternoon, on a rather bright and sunny Easter Sunday in Greenwich, the Dr said, "Oh, go on then".

It seems a world away now. There was no Droo on the telly, I’d yet to get inside the Stockwell Moat Studios, and we lived in an underground flat with poo seeping up through the floor. Ah, happy days…

The commemorative wossname for a third anniversary is leather, according to my extensive research (no, not Wikipedia but page 55 of Schott’s Original Miscellany). But what to get the Mrs, who already has cat suits and whips?

After some lateral consternation, I settled on 300 – Frank Miller and Lynn Varley’s lavish comic-strip version of the battle of Thermopylae. Well they’re wearing leather shoes and shields. It’s also Greek stuff, which the wife likes, and comics is what we enthused about the first time we met.

It’s a graphically violent, lurid story, a tiny band of macho warriors going against all the odds. Miller’s style – which I first saw in Ronin – is stark and shadowy, with crudely hewn figures carved into the page, spattered with gore and muck. The story moves quickly and is unrelenting, piling up the Spartan mythology. They crack butch jokes in the face of misery and their training is more like torture.

For something so epic and steeped in history it’s not unlike the recent Commando collections, tough men being hacked to bits for the edification of children. It also reminded me of the hard-edged violence and humour of some of my favourite old Judge Dredd.

But it’s also a fun way to crystalise in my brain things I’d sort of gleaned in bits and pieces. I now understand how the battle played out, and know the Persian King Xerxes for more than being the "X" in Edward Lear’s alphabet rhymes.

Some concern that it might be read as don’t-negotiate-with-the-black-foreigners, and the Spartans’ lust for the glorious death that echoes in the heavens and history is never problematised as religious fundamentalism. No, it’s Xerxes seeing himself as a God that is hubris.

But it’s richly told and incredible looking, and we now both want to go see the film. The Dr muttered something about it being "visual culture" and so relevant to her work. Which also means we can claim the tax back on the tickets. Woo!

Thinking of graphic comics (if you see what I mean), A. leant me Marvel Zombies, which is one of the maddest lends yet. It’s about an alternative universe where zombie-ism wins, and undead superheroes eat the whole world up. Colonel (nee Captain) America has half his head sliced off and Peter Parker eats his wife and his auntie. There’s also some fun stuff as the zombie heroes try to keep the hunger in check by re-eating stuff that falls from the jagged holes in their bodies. Nice.

It’s a vicious and funny one-off, packed full of comics continuity that mostly passed me by. But having always felt that Marvel was a bit goody-goody, this is a joyously guilty pleasure.

Venice of the north

Done lots of work, ate lots of chocolate, saw some family from ‘cross the pond. The Dr dragged me out into the sunshine yesterday and we explored the posher, greener bits around where we abode.

Went to the Dulwich Picture Gallery and its busy Canaletto in England exhibition (on until 22 April). The DPG (as it’s known to the hood) only has a moderate exhibition space, which was crammed with a great wealth of pics large and small, plus a great wealth of fellow browsers.

Canaletto was in England between 1746-55, and his main interest was evidently the architecture. Just as in his famous Venetian efforts, grand buildings look majestic beneath a great deal of pretty sky. The people who give scale and a clue to the period are constructed from crude spheres and cylinders – more marionettes than they are people. On close inspection I have to admit I was rather reminded of Trumpton.

The epic views of the skyline above the Thames show a vibrant and complex metropolis, its most modern (then) constructions showing Venetian influence. Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s loom hugely over the rest of the city, but it’s fun to spot the odd other landmark – the roofs of Westminster and the Banqueting Hall, the square tower of the cathedral at Southwark.

Also on record is the building of Westminster Bridge (the one Daleks famously queued upon, and where Eccles and Rose first held hands).

I found the pen-and-ink sketches of far more appeal than the oils. Perhaps it’s the quick movement of the marks on the paper that give them more life and vibrancy. Perhaps the lack of glossy colour makes them more dirty and lived in. Or perhaps they look more comic strip and trendy. I also like seeing the working, and the sketches include notes for later colouring-by-numbers and hastily scrawled other detail.

As is the law in these matters, the few postcards missed all of our favourites, so I splashed out on the £25 book. We wended our way up the sunshiny hill and found a pub with a garden and lunches.

Back home to the grindstone until getting on for 10, and got most of what I’d planned finished off. Then snuggled up with the Dr to watch nothing on telly, flipping channels and bothering the cat.

At one point we moved from UKHitler, showing Eva Braun’s holiday movies, to 8 Women starring Catherine Deneuve. This – in those moments we saw of it – seemed a muddle of pretentious old cliché and was not, I said, a little French.

“The Nazis were better,” said the Dr. And then added (she said as a joke), “They made for better television”.

Spent the rest of my bank holiday being warned of terrible dooms that would follow repeating her words here.

Slave I

The Dr and I went to see Amazing Grace last night, the biopic of William Wilberforce. The performances are excellent, there are some good gags, and it looks sumptuous and real. I was especially impressed with shots of a Thames clogged with 18th century shipping.

It is, though, a bit chocolate-boxy, with the very perfect Wilber not merely giving his all for the slaves, but also inventing the GCSE, women’s suffrage and modern geology. He talks at one point of the healing waters from a spring having “waited for a million years”. Er, surely his own religious convictions would have stopped him from so brilliantly pre-empting Lyell (who was only born the same year as the film opens on).

The film packs in the historical figures who knew and influenced Wilbur: John Newton, Pitt the Younger, Thomas Clarkson, Lords Grenville and Fox and (the only black speaking part in the film) Olaudah Equiano. The script also works hard to explain the context: that many working class people lived brutal and impoverished lives; that there was no money for war veterans or other social causes; that whole cities had been built on slavery; that with America and France in revolution, a “popular” movement could be seen as seditious.

Much of this is described rather than seen, so apart from a few city street scenes the film always looks immaculate and tidy. Evidence of the horrors of slavery is also kept to descriptions of witnesses, rather than being enacted on screen. Wilberforce sees a few opiate visions, but mostly it’s what people say.

This is, of course, as was with the case the abolitionists made to Parliament. Yet I felt the film was somehow pulling its punches. The Roots TV series, which we’ve also been watching, is much more explicitly graphic, and I think more effective.

Yet it’s not as if there are loads of films made on the subject, and it’s not a bad film by any means. Though it certainly doesn’t suggest it was easy for Wilberforce to get the slave trade abolished in the British Empire (on 25 March 1807), it does rather simplify the story.

Slavery itself was not banned in the Empire until 1834 (after Wilberforce was dead). In the independent United States it continued until after their vicious civil war. No mention is made of that – indeed, the US is spoken of only with whispered excitement as a contagious hotbed of freedom and liberty.

The banning of the trade did eventually lead to the banning of slavery itself, and because existing slaves could not be replaced it can be argued that they were better treated in the intervening period. Yet indenture remained as slavery in all but name well into the twentieth century, and slavery continued in many countries until the end of the nineteenth. Slavery in various forms still exists today.

There’s a whole heap of events and stuff commemorating abolition this year, and I’ve had fun going through all the links there to glean yet more top facts:

“The surgeon on HMS Sybille , Robert McKinnal, took drastic action when a seaman went down with yellow fever, to convince his fellows that it was not contagious. One of the symptoms of yellow fever is black vomit, and McKinnal, on deck and in sight of the crew, drank off a glassful.”

Royal Navy, “Boredom, boat service and the black vomit”.

ETA: No sooner have I posted than I notice this feature on the emphasis of the commemoration on the BBC news site. Ng. Always behind the tide, me. Get there eventually.

The tyrants of style

“berks and wankers
Kingsley Amis identified two principal groups in the debate over use of language: ‘Berks are careless, coarse, crass, gross and of what anybody would agree is a lower social class than one's own; wankers are prissy, fussy, priggish, prim and of what they would probably misrepresent as a higher social class than one's own.’”

David Marsh (ed.), Guardian styleguide – B

Not for the first time I am writing a style guide.

Usually, my work involves adhering to other people’s prejudices, so it’s fun to dictate my own terms. Client X will, for example, henceforth write “focused” with one S and TARDIS in caps (as an acronym).

There’s no general consensus on style. Really. While correct spelling has been more or less agreed for hundreds of years, punctuation and phrasing is still largely a matter of taste. For every style guru who’ll insist on one rule, there’s another expert who’ll vehemently disagree.

Which can be a bit bothersome when you work for lots of people, all with their own ways of doing things. At least the style guides I’ve written so far have tended to start with a warning:

“What follows are not definite rules for written English everywhere. They’re just how we do things here...”

Should it matter? Well, people do notice inconsistent and incorrect usage – and not just the finger-wagging wankers with their copies of one set of rules. If nothing else, inconsistency is distracting. People should be taking note of what you’re saying, not where you’ve used capital letters to say it.

When style does become an issue, it helps if the style guide can explain the reasoning. I like to think that my own bigotry-of-style at least stems from some rational first principles.

For example, I recently had to justify why we used double (“) quotation marks rather than single (‘) ones on a website I do stuff for.

“Double quotes are easier to read on a screen,”

I said, which follows from our principle aim:

“Our copy is easy to read, accessible, consistent and does not distract the reader.”

But there’s still fierce debate about the serial comma, which I think a fussy affectation. One colleague however protested,

“Readers need telling when to breathe!”

There’s usually some kind of style council to arbitrate when copy-writers get into such an argument. As a result, style guides are often packed full of Top Facts, and give an insight into how reportage gets criticised and – sometimes –sued:

Alibis are not excuses

“If Bill Sykes has an alibi it means he did not commit the crime because he can prove he was somewhere else at the time. It is not a false explanation or an excuse.”

BBC News Styleguide (PDF 276kb), p. 78.

Talks with Iranians

“The language spoken in Iran (and Tajikistan) is Persian, not Farsi. Flemings speak Dutch.”

John Grimond, Economist Style Guide – miscellaneous spelling

Asylum seeker

“(No hyphen)
Someone seeking refugee status or humanitarian protection; there is no such thing as a "bogus" or "illegal" asylum seeker. Refugees are people who have fled their home countries in fear for their lives, and may have been granted asylum under the 1951 refugee convention or qualify for humanitarian protection or discretionary leave, or have been granted exceptional leave to remain in Britain. An asylum seeker can only become an illegal immigrant if he or she remains in Britain after having failed to respond to a removal notice.”

David Marsh (ed.), Guardian styleguide - A

(It’s reading this kind of thing more than my upbringing that got me 10/10 in Channel 4 News’s Easter quiz.)

Music to wash hands by

Nimbos, the Dr and I went to Westminster Abbey last night. Sat on uncomfortable chairs in front of a memorial to MARTHA to hear St John’s Passion sung, along with several hundred other people.

The singing was good and the acoustics authentic, though I thought it lacked the polish of some other versions I’ve been to. Think I prefer the Matthew one anyway, which is more widescreen and special effects. The John one seems less epic, and more matter of fact about (SPOILER!) the death of God.

But fun, and good for people watching. There was a lot of milling about immediately before, and also during the interval-that-wasn’t. Nimbos felt it might help to shout “Runaround!” – a reference the Dr didn’t get.

One gaggle of ladies felt they had paltry seats so decided to move them. They then did their best to ignore the badged gentleman explaining they’d blocked up a fire exit.

Afterwards the Doctor led us down a gale-force Whitehall to a new good pub discovery. But it had stopped serving food an hour previously, so we schlepped into the place next door and ate gratefully their microwaved fodder.

Point of view

O. writes from the Continent:

“Do you know I always read your blog... and get quite annoyed when there isn't an update for a few days.”

Which inspired me to spend lunch wandering round Manet to Picasso, which is free and until 23 May. I’ve gone on about what follows before (sorry), but it does have the distinction of being almost not-at-all Droo.

I got to know O. when we were doing A levels together, and especially due to one summer’s homework. We had to go to famous galleries dotted all over London, sketch a set list of Worthy Old Paintings and forego all our pocket money for postcards. O. was a good companion for that sort of thing because he has quite different ideas about pictures. We spent many afternoons idling in pubs shouting, “No, you big fool!” back and forth.

The impressionists were my pin-ups. No, I don’t mean J. Culshaw and company – which included D. Tennant on Friday and writing my two of my Droo chums. Heck, wasn’t going to do that…

The late 1800s were rather exciting artistically, with all sorts of clever ideas. These included lightbulbs and photographs and refined chemical processing. And these things had an affect on the hapless, cravat-wearing creatives who flounced around drawing from nature.

Until these inventions came along and spoiled things, an artist’s talent was easy to quantify. The trick was to make what you had drawn look like the thing you were drawing. Even now, there are learned scraps over painted portraiture hinging not on who is the sitter but whether it’s at all a good likeness.

But photography came along and with a point and click reality was caught in an instant (well, it took a bit of time when they first got invented, but not anything like as long as a painting).

Photos also showed up the falseness of the way paintings presented their subjects. Paintings composed the elements of the picture, framing them the most pleasing way. A photo captured the raw immediacy – blurs, blinks and ignoble posture. It could brutally crop parts of the scene, creating a new and dramatic, if troubling, composition. And once snapped, there was little way to correct it. At least canvas could be painted over.

Photos were still in black-and-white, so these painters tended to glory in colour. The brilliant sky-blues and vivid pinks were another technical innovation – colour that’s still stunning a century later. The artists experimented with “complimentary colours”; clashes of blue and orange, red and green, purple and yellow, that made their work more vibrant.

At the same time, electric light transformed painting. It wasn’t just that they could work later in the day, and on less bright and airy subjects. The lightbulb made evident many of Newton’s observations about the spectrum, and without needing to shove sticks in your eye sockets. It made the artists see reality in ways they’d never seen before.

While the impressionists were daring to show optical mixing and coloured shadows, and Seurat contrived scenes out of blobs of coloured light, the hapless, much-moustached physicists just over the border were thinking maybe light travelled in blobs.

Impressionism was then excitingly brash and modern, on the nose of the latest developments. And its proponents got into trouble with the establishment – who still wanted pictures that looked just like the subject.

Scruffy old Claude Monet, who is a bit cool, dared to suggest that my throwing some paint around a canvas at slapdash speed you could still create the feeling of the subject. Not like a photograph in all its detail, perhaps, but something with more of an emotional flavour.

So even before you get to all the politics that the paintings might also reflect, there’s something a bit brilliant to see in all those pictures of the same haystack or cathedral. By painting the same subject over and over, Claude was breaking all sorts of rules, the old punk.

It was on one of these daytrips with O. that I discovered a real dazzler of a painting:


Again, Claude painted lots of huge water lilies – the canvases almost as big as his tiny Japanese garden in a fashionable Parisian suburb. But this one is my favourite, being more yellow than green-purple and with more of the canvas left bare.

It's big: 2 metres tall but 4¼ metres widthways. You need to stand at the far end of the room to appreciate what you’re seeing – up close it’s a mess of unconnected marks and squiggles.

And so (because I’d seen Droo defuse a bomb in Earthshock part two) a question formed in my brain: how the heck did Monet even paint it?

He could have only ever been an arms length away from the canvas. And if that wasn’t boggling enough for you, Claude was also fairly blind when he painted it.

"I've lit the blue touch paper..."

Received in the post from the father-in-law some clippings from the Blackpool Gazette. Front-page news on Friday was that Dr Who will be turning them on.

The web version doesn't show what the clipping does: Tom Baker doing the deed back in '75, all grinning teeth and curls.

I'm especially pleased that Tennant's appearance seems to have been organised by,

"Jackie Potter, Blackpool Council's strategic director of tourism and regeneration."

Have they also booked Michael Sheen?

Small world...

Spent the afternoon being harried round my parents’ garden by two young and tireless nephews. Some attempt was made at teaching them piggy-in-the-middle, and though they enjoyed the chasing they were disappointed that it might involve rules.

The thuggish four year-old was making an impassioned stand against the sectarian – he had on a Superman costume, yet with a pair of Spider-Man socks. And at one point he stopped in the midst of a tackle to share his latest epiphany:

“Uncle Simon, do you know about Doctor Who?”

It seems he was, for the first time ever, allowed to stay up last night. He liked the Things but not the Lady, and shared the absurd miracle that there’ll be EVEN MORE next week – at least, so long as he is good.

(His elder brother had the same response after his first taste of school dinners. He would ask, with great care and when nobody else was listening, whether you knew of such a thing as apple crumble.)

My mum was also impressed with the episode – but she has a weird thing for Roy Marsden anyway, and consultants with good bedside manner.

(Oh, and the title of this post is Sir Sean Connery’s response to an unexpected “I gotta brudda.”)

Return of the Old Adventures

On the flight back from LA a bit more than a month ago, m'colleague Mr Anghelides spoke of lost history. He could not recall, for example, the last time he'd changed a nappy. There was just a time when he wasn't changing nappies any more, but that moment passed unremarked.

Got not-quite through the first of four folders of old fanzino-periodicals today, frantically scribbling the morsels of fact that relate to the development of Benny. It's been fun to see who DWB's nemesis is each week (John Nathan-Turner; no, the executive of the Droo Appreciation Society; no, the editors of Droo's own magazine; no, the folk at BBC Video; no, anyone who dares to write in; actually, let's just go to war with EVERYONE...)

But there's also all the bits of Droo history that kind of passed me by.

"Sylvester McCoy is no longer Doctor Who, that's official. Doctor Who licencees have been instructed by BBC Enterprises to refer to him Sylvester McCoy as the 'former Doctor Who'. The Radio Times itself set the trend in its billing of Sylvester for the Children's Royal variety Performance in May."

David Gibbs (ed.), 'The former Doctor Who'
(news story) in DWB #103, August 1992.

As well as the reviews and letters pages which take Benny's adventures to task, I have also dipped into some of her Old Adventures, to get something correct in "The Wake". And too my great excitement, if nobody elses, I have this afternoon typed the direction:

SCENE 4. INT. CHURCH HALL, CHELDON BONIFACE

Nice work

“Sunday, December 31st [1978] …I listen to the car radio and hear tales of horror from all over the UK. Edinburgh is almost cut off from the rest of Scotland (a fact which the weather only confirms!)”

Michael Palin, Diaries 1969-1979 – The Python Years, p. 519.

Yes, I have been busy. The Dr bought me this for Valentine’s Day (naw) and to read on the plane out to Gallifrey. Which I did, and got something like halfway though. And then mutchwurk stopped me getting much further.

More than a month later, with bits snatched on trains and in toilets, the end is almost in sight. It’s a great brick of a book, with perhaps too much on the weather and what the author was eating, so perhaps this is the best way to read it.

The diaries cover the period from the first filming on Flying Circus to the furore that met Life of Brian. Palin’s a sharp-eyed observer, and even the briefest entries contain telling detail.

In large part, it documents the progress of his work – the late nights, the famous people, the many meetings and compromises, the flights on Concorde that are not half as glamorous as might have been hoped for. With my own current schedule it’s been good to see someone else barely outrunning the snowball. And it’s weird to think of Palin, that funny old man off the telly, being my age when he wrote all this stuff.

But it’s not just the hard graft of the writer that’s of interest. It’s a fun and engaging historical document. As well as definitively telling us what day Brian was first thought of, he notes the world as it changes around him:

“Pre-lunch cocktails with the two neighbours and their three daughters, who bring with them a game called Twister, which involves participants in a grapple on the floor and, in the immortal words of Eric’s joke salesman, ‘Breaks the ice at parties’.”

Ibid.

Palin is, as his later travel documentaries have shown, a sharp and witty commentator, and his remarks on politics and life in Hampstead are often warm as well as comedic. But there’s also more insight into his own life and feelings than I think we’ve ever been prey to. There’s the slow decline of his dad and a fair amount on his poor teeth.

I’ve seen some reviews mutter that it’s not more salacious, that Palin is too nice about everyone. Yes, that’s apparently a bad thing.

Anyway, he can be quite tetchy and is especially impatient with anyone who makes life more difficult. That reminded me of the last of his 80 days round-worlding, when his temper is beginning to fray.

(On this very point, he told Saga Magazine how he can “fly off the handle ... Usually at the most stupid things.”)

But it’s to Palin’s credit that he was seen as a mediator by the Pythons and others he worked with. It’s because he was the one that everyone talked to that his history is so comprehensive.

I shall tell you this

Codename Moose turned up at half eight yesterday, when I had hardly begun making my toilet. Mrs Codename Moose had turfed him out into the street, and were it not for our agreement to get a smidgen of script written, he’d probably have been playing in traffic.

Work proceeded pretty well, fleshing out notes I’d made into three separate sections, with some chipping in and chivvying of additional bad jokes and ever improved ideas. By one, we’d completed something we’re both quite happy with, and felt able to take my second wife, M., out with us for lunch.

Basked in the sunshine and ate a breakfast so mammoth they’d named it after me. (Or at least after my parents’ nickname.)

The trendy elements of Penge straddled by, not all quite complicit in pretending it was summer and that the high street was all continental. The keen waiter seemed most impressed with M. and ignored anything said by me and Codename Moose. M., of course, remained entirely oblivious to this, bless her.

Back home, and while M. and Codename Moose enjoyed Casino Royale I got up to 8,700 words on The Wake. Still have to write up some pre-titles set-up and four key scenes from near the end, but might even have a draft by the weekend. Hooray!

By the time the Dr had gymmed and shared gossip, M. had cooked us a feast. We watched some old telly, and I pointed out the actors from Droo. The Moonstone featured Peter Jeffrey, who was much more lenient this time.

Rab C Nesbitt’s Seasonal Greet included Garron and Commander Uvanov. This, the first full-length outing for Rab back in 1988 (years before we met his Dr Who brother (PDF 80kb)), sees him gobby and Scottish with sticky-up hair, and wearing pin-stripe and trainers…

Can't think who that reminds me of.

Some announcements

Hasn't it been ages? I am up to my handsome eyeballs in various books and scripts, and this 'ere blog wossname has been out-prioritised.

"The Two Jasons" proceeds apace, with the latest draft just in from Dave Stone. It's possibly the most personal thing Dave's ever written, and yet still crammed full of the daftest possible jokes.

I have also recently interviewed Dave, along with Matt Jones, Daniel O'Mahony, Neil Penswick, Gary Russell, Simon Winstone and a bundle of other people about their part in the development of Benny, and the "Inside Story" is coming together pretty well. May even have a cover to show off soon.

The Big Finish website now has details of "Snapshots", including Stuart Manning's rather marvellous cover. My contribution is called "There's Something About Mary", and may be the first ever Dr Who story set in Preston.

Also crawling through the never-ending heap of short story competition entries. Not to be spoken of until we reach the end, though.

A few other fun things can't be spoken of either, hence the mad glint in mine eye. And according to Alex, I'm one of his five thinking bloggers. How badly he is deluded.

¿Cuál es la palabra para "el tejón"?

Back from a much-needed break to Malaga to see A. and J. (we went to their wedding last year). Apart from a quick mooch round the Picasso Birthplace Museum, it was uncharacteristically lacking in being good for me. Yes, even the Dr wanted a holiday. Instead we wandered to nice eateries, ate lots of fresh fish and sampled bars that don't get going before midnight.

In one trendy place that served very good mojitos, J. pointed out the flag hanging above the bar. The Spanish flag is three horizontal bars: red, then yellow, then red again, the yellow band twice as thick as the red ones.

In the dim and disco lighting, it took a moment to realise what was different: this one went red, then yellow, then purple.

This republican flag from the 1930s, J. explained, was banned in Spain under Franco, and even now it's a bit of a shocker. He spoke of the frission of seeing it hanging from the arm of the Philip IV statue in Madrid, in the midst of a political protest.

The nearest I could liken that was to Winston's turf mohican.

(The Internet also tells me of the irony of the purple band: it's not purple, but royal Castilian purpure.)

J.'s own republic sensibilities would be stronger but his king is helluva tough. Our Charles III did something similar, I said, in the first issue of 2000AD.

As well as the politics, we discussed how Bowie's lyrics translate and pretty much everything under the sun. My best effort to explain a reference to badgers was "a sort of mash-up of a boar and a tiger".

No time like the present

I have been to a stag do and to a funeral, and been off to do interviews in between. Also pitching for something and been asked to do something else, and still battering away at the History of Benny and that there short story competition.

One project looks close to completion. One.

I shall look back on this period eventually and laugh.

Not because they are easy

The rather grainy image right is from a few hours after last night’s eclipse. We sat in the Dolphin and peered out the window as the moon turned eerily red. Nimbos nimbly explained why it does that, using empty pint glasses as props. This is the best of my pictures. Oh well.

In timely fashion, I’ve got three episodes into the lavish Tom-Hanks funded dramatisation of the Apollo missions, From the Earth to the Moon.

S. who knows about technical specifications, offered the Region 2 discs cheap having just bought the Region 1 versions. There’s apparently a slightly judder in the NTSC transfer that spoiled the whole thing for him. I explained I forget to change the aspect ratio watching Droo DVDs, and am quite content with Logopolis in widescreen. He went a bit pale at that.

Haven’t noticed any problem with my inferior version. It’s an extraordinarily sumptuous series, the sort of prestigious thing that over here David Attenborough might have commissioned. You can see the money that’s been bunged at it. The first episode is especially grandstanding, a bold fanfare from start to finish.

Hair-raising at times, you can’t help but be wowed by the ballsiness of all those involved. Episode 2 gets is much more involving as things start to go horribly wrong. Death and disaster and steely-jawed jokes really help ratchet up the drama.

It also avoids repeating too much of the stuff covered in The Right Stuff, so – at least to me – feels fresh and surprising. The third episode has also spun a new angle on the format, by telling its bit of the story through the eyes of a documentary team. The hippy director in his rose-tinted specs gives a much better sense of context than the news footage. I also realise now I come to write it that episode two is about two guys eaten up by the system, which helps to convince us of the scale of everything involved.

That said, it’s a pity it’s so US-centric and less about all the players in the space race. There’s no effort (at least so far) to deny that the whole mission is an exercise in pissing higher than the Russians. I’d have liked to have seen more of the Russian programme, comparing their struggles with NASA’s. Appreciate that’s not really in the brief.

In fact it reminds me of The West Wing a lot: brave and idyllic and with exemplary performances, but a little naïve about foreigners. You can play spot the West Wing cast, too.

Bird watcher

K. is staying with us at the moment. Last night we went to see peg-leg P. who suffers with a broken bone. Ate pizza, drank girlie white booze and gossiped outrageously, and then fell into a taxi home.

Prior to the night's festivities, K. managed a brief siesta. She closed the living room door so as not to be disturbed by the cat. But the cat is very disturbing. He clambered up on to his scratch-post / house / wossname and spent the whole time watching K. sleep. In the manner his sabre-toothed ancestors might once have watched sabre-toothed mice.

He is an odd animal.

Write away

The new issue of Pantechnicon is just out, and features a story by me. For the time being at least, you can read "The Bounty Hunters" online and for free.

Writing continues. Was meant to interview someone this lunchtime, but they're caught up in writing of their own. So I've had a chance to get up slowly, drink tea and read Droo's magazine.

It's an especially corking issue, and I'm very pleased with page 63.

"Delivering on its ambitious promises, Time Signature is an exceptionally strong anthology, containing some honest-to-goodness mini-masterworks ... It's the best Short Trips collection since The Muses, and, in its delicate balance between standalone entries and arching plots, a fabulous example of having your cake and eating it."

Matt Michael, "Off the Shelf",
Dr Who Magazine # 380 (28 March 2007), p. 63.

Matt's equally nice about my efforts on "Dalek Empire", calling it,

"...as good a Dalek-themed anthology as you're likely to get",

and describing one of my two stories, "The Eighth Wonder of the World", as,

"a good, well-paced yarn".

To his right, Vanessa Bishop has nice things to say about "Collected Works". Which is all Nick Wallace's work, but I shall take credit what with being the boss. Now off to have lunch in the sunshine. Tra la la.

Cornell writing the news

"Church reveals she is pregnant" says the BBC. How very New Adventures.

Danger, Will Robinson

This was on the wall of our hotel in LA, just down the corridor from our room.

Carrot juice, carrot juice, carrot juice

... is like drinking the dirty water left over from washing up.

Ick.

Mile-high film club

Marie Antoinette is a colossal exercise in missing the whole ruddy point.

It looks nice and is stylishly played, but the emphasis of the script is all in the wrong place. We watch Marie leave one sumptuous court for another. She learns posh gossip and how to excite her husband. She dances about in the gardens and goes to some very good parties. And then some yokels turn up and she’s very brave and won't run away.

Since she’s a bit of a free spirit (no, she will go to the party!), there’s a lot of punk music and typeface. This juxtaposition of the contemporary and historical would be pretty revolutionary, if we’d not seen the same thing before. It’s Casanova, it’s A Knight’s Tale, it’s Britney in the End of the World.

But it’s also pretty dim. You have to fundamentally misconstrue history to see Marie Antoinette as a punk. Rather it’s the mob who tear down her glam lifestyle – and we hardly see them at all in the film.

The film entirely fails to deal with why the mob might have grievances. The nearest it gets is to have Marie protest that she never said, “Let them eat cake!” But this is an age of public flayings and the guillotine. The general violence offended both Casanova and de Sade.

By not dealing with that – by consciously not showing it – the film is more perverse than anything those two got up to. The French court was not merely a fatuous bubble of champagne parties: in context it was clearly offensive.

Flushed Away was fun (though not helped by DWM pointing out how the lead rat looks like David Tennant). It lacks the charm of Wallace and Gromit, and that’s not merely for being set down the toilet.

It’s fast-moving and full-of-gags enough to hide a pretty ropey plot about a posh boy falling for a working class girl. Like the singing mice in “Babe”, there are singing slugs to raise a smile whenever things get a bit unfunny. And, as S. said, it’s telling how often the slugs feature. I laughed a lot, but it’s not one to watch again.

The Prestige was probably the best of the lot, about the rivalry between two Victorian stage magicians. Leads Batman and Wolverine were as manly-tough as you’d expect. Bowie had a nice turn as Tesla, and Michael Caine was as effortless as always.

Unfortunately I sussed the various elements of the ending before we were mid-way through. This may have been due to discussing The Time Travellers all weekend, which turns a few of the same tricks. (Well, it does if you can make the cognitive leap that Hugh Jackman is playing Scott Andrews).

It’s clever and deft from the start, with all kinds of nice palming of plot device. But the real trick of magic is not merely the mechanics of the con, but of managing to disguise them. The audience has to be left mystified.

Lag

Dr Who’s companions never seem to suffer from jet lag.

I assume this is because the TARDIS monkeys with their brains at the same time it learns them Swahili. It stops the whole pink-eyed, dazed and a little all over the place thing. Which wouldn’t help in the stopping of monsters.

Have spent since Thursday in a wonky sort of daydream. LA is the furthest I’ve ever been from home and already feels like a film set. It is much harder travelling back east. Everything feels a bit unreal and two-dimensional when you’re very, very tired and yet unable to sleep.

Gallifrey was everything everybody had enthused to me – generous and friendly and funny. Highlights were Eric Roberts leaping from his chair to come over and shake my hand. “Hey,” he said, “You must be Simon!”

After a moment of open-mouthed gibbering I remembered I had on my name badge.

Was incredibly well looked after, and met some very splendid people. So much keen interest – and even from pretty girls.

My many charms didn’t work on Paul Cornell, who fell asleep in the midst of my hilariosity on forthcoming Muppet movies. Am particularly pleased with Muppet Deliverance (the Electric Mayhem on banjos and the line, “Squeal, Piggy, Squeal”). He missed the Muppet Exorcist and Muppet Blue Lagoon.

(See previously the Muppet Show of Weng-Chiang.)

On the basis that I became a writer so I wouldn’t have to stand up and speak in front of people, my own panels went pretty well. Just talked a lot and quickly until the moderators said time was up.

Our behind-the-scenes-on-Benny film seemed to ignite interest and shift the required stock. Yes, it’ll be on a CD sometime. So everyone can see my sticky-uppy hair.

Pack it in

Am off to LA tomorrow morning for a weekend at the Gallifrey convention. Bought a few new clothes for the occasion, including a stripy hoody top that the Dr really hates. And she never wears anything weird.

(I'm only envious that she got twice as many Valentine's cards as me. One of them was filled with cat fluff.)

I'm doing a number of panels, most notably one with my friends Paul Cornell, Jason Haigh-Ellery, Steve Moffat, Gary Russell and Mike Tucker to celebrate Benny being 15. Have got something exciting to show everyone. And no, not what Minko had.

Also seem to be moderating one about Torchwood, unless I'm reading my instructions all wrong.

Have two scripts to work on while I'm over there, and have been doing my prep on these today. Agreed stuff with some other authors, and now just need to get writing. Hope the in-flight movies are a bit rubbish so I won't be distracted.

Got to go. Beautiful, fearsome wummun is hounding me off the machine.

Doctor Who and the Computers

Hello. There used to be a great, long 5,000-word post sat here but someone has asked if they can publish it, and I get money if I take it down from the Internet. This is ironic considering what the thing is about. But I have done so while it all gets negotiated. If the publishing happens I'll post a link here, if it doesn't I'll put the post back as it was.

Simon, 8 December 2008.

Lemmings

Am a little behind on my American telly. Have seen up to the end of Season 4 of 24, up to the end of Season 2 of Lost, and nothing at all of New Battlestar Galactica – not even the acclaimed mini-series. I blame Scott Andrews, who so spoiled me with lendings of Buffy.

I am keeping up with Heroes (****** is ******’s ***!) and have just finished the sixth season of West Wing.

Like Will, I found Season 5 something of a slog. West Wing could do daft and not-brilliant stories before (like CJ visiting her dad), but the whole fifth year seemed out of whack, predictable, derivative and boring.

In Season Six, Toby is given a bit of advice about how to win over the media. He’s not pretty, so he needs to be smart and funny. It’s this that the show had forgotten.

Season 6 is definitely an improvement, though it’s still much too often Bad Star Trek.

Riker: “The whole universe if going to blow up, and there’s just four minutes left of the episode!”

Geordi: “How about I invent something technobabbly magic?”

Riker: “What, pull a deus ex machina out of your bottom right at the very last minute?”

Geordi: “If I explain it in long words while talking quite quickly, people won’t notice it’s bollocks. I’ll say ‘diagnostic’ a lot.”

Riker: “And whatever made-up old nonsense it is, we’ll say that from now on it’ll be known as the ‘Geordi manoeuvre’.”

While Season Six West Wing can be odd, hilarious and even rather insightful, it still manages to solve issues in Palestine, China and Cuba all in the 40th minute. The implication is that there are quick and easy fixes to foreign policy, if only the US mucks in. This strikes me as a little dangerous.

It would help if it could be less abusive of foreigners. The opening episodes struggle to accommodate all sides on the issue of Israel, and generally avoids giving offence. But a couple of weeks later there’s concern about Turkey, when an adulteress is stoned to death.

Um. No. Turkey is a secular state and doesn’t behave quite like that. Perhaps they were thinking of (or chickening out of) some other Middle Eastern country. Having decided to give up the made-up state of Kumar and instead discuss issues in the real world, you’d think they would be a little less fundamentally ignorant.

Was similarly annoyed by the crudely realised Thatcher-avatar ruling as Britain’s PM. If they’re making a point about British politics, it’s one quarter of a century out of date. And, where previously the eccentric British ambassador had also been brilliant and wise, in this episode he’s an idiot and liability.

Likewise, Bartlett’s Japanese counterpart (played by Mako!) is a rude and mean buffoon. Bartlett can have a serious conversation with him – and heed his warnings about the US economy – but only when Mako has made a fool of himself cavorting too hard on the dance floor.

I suspect this would bother me fewer were the real US administration not so eager to bomb Iran. They say this will make things better and safer for American people. What about the rest of us?

Democratically elected representatives are answerable to their constituencies, and any politician will serve their country’s interests first. But the West Wing attempts such a liberal ideal, I find the self-centred attitude to policy difficult.

When not laughing at Johnny Foreigner, it’s got much better with dissenting viewpoints. It’s perhaps good for the ratings to be more overtly bi-partisan, but it also leads us into some really interesting areas.

These questions are usually asked in high-calibre performances from some brilliant cameos. Penn and Teller burn an American flag as part of a show inside the White House, and so question what freedom is. Christopher Lloyd and Brian Dennehy both play roles that ask what America’s role is in promoting democracy elsewhere. A Sam Cooke song sung by James Taylor is in retrospect all about the Bartlett administration.

It also seems happier to acknowledge that Bartlett’s lot aren’t above doing “necessary” things. Season 3 ended on the cliffhanger that sometimes a President might agree to Black Ops. Here it’s rather taken for granted that the US have spies everywhere. Some stupendous wigs rather a spoil a flashback to Kate and Leo’s first meeting, when neither of them should have been involved in Cuba.

Making leading Republican Arnie Vinick (Alan Alda) so appealing helps to raise the political stakes. He’s wise and funny and middle-of-the-road, and we can see why people would vote for him. There’s a nice scene late on of Bartlett and CJ silently wowed by his speech.

Yes, because Season 6 also sees the start of the run-up the next presidential election. Things are changing for the regular cast, and though it’s nice to see some character development, some of it feels a bit forced. Donna and Josh both leaving the White House does work very effectively. But CJ and Charlie’s promotions feel more plot-convenient than real.

They try really hard to convince us that CJ’s elevation is somehow credible – by showing how difficult she finds it. Yet I still can’t help feeling it’s how you reward a cast member of a long-running TV show does for its, not how a White House administration would work.

Much is made of different characters being asked to step off cliffs. For a show that so loves rational debate, presidency is a matter of faith. Characters choose their jobs and their politics by which contender for office they believe in.

Princess Leia’s adopted dad gets to be another put-upon good guy. Matt Santos is the underdog hero, a man who fights fair and speaks from the heart, and won’t exploit the colour of his skin to win points. Not having MS to lie about, he’s even squeakier clean than Bartlett.

Watching him struggle to get himself noticed is probably the best element of the whole show. It says a lot that by the end of the year, I was disappointed when the episodes were set squarely back in the White House.

Santos being offered the Vice Presidency is a nice moral dilemma. It also, I guess, owes a lot to the 2000 election and the position of Ralph Nader. They certainly pile on the odds, and his winning California really comes as a surprise.

Yet this is also comfort-telly, with everything coming out okay. And by the end of the run we know Santos is going to make it (don’t we?). These obstacles are just about making him more dazzling and perfect. When I get round to borrowing Season 7 off Nimbos, I’m hoping to see Santos fall on his arse.

Weirdos of Oz

J. and H. leant us The Muppets Wizard of Oz, which we'd been sort of avoiding seeing. Had been pretty unimpressed with most recent Muppet efforts for being too twee and safe, and for focusing too much on the guest stars and not enough on the funny stuff.

So am glad to report this is really quite good - though it's got its share of twee moments.

Ashanti is Dorothy and wants to be a singer. But Auntie Em (Queen Latifah) thinks she should stay at work in the family diner in the middle of Nowhere, Kansas. Ashanti misses an audition with Kermit and Miss Piggy who are - er - on a talent-spotting tour through the area. But she hands over an audition tape they seem unlikely to hear.

So far so zzzz. And then there's a storm and Ashanti wakes up to find her prawn is now played by Pepe. And he's nekkid and unashamed. Suddenly things start to brighten up.

Soon they're on an adventure. The songs are a bit rubbish and schmaltzy, especially when compared to the Judy Garland film, and there's too much effort to explain what we're learning as we make our way.

Yet Kermit is fun as the Scarecrow, and Pepe tweaks Gonzo the Tin Man's nipples. There's also something Very Odd about Gonzo's physical love for a particularly good looking chicken.

The Muppets is always at its best when doing stuff no other kids' show could. Such as having everyone getting stoned in a poppy-smoking nightclub to tunes by the Electric Mayhem. Or having a fight scene choreographed by Quentin Tarantino. Or seeing two of the heroes torn limb from limb. Or disintegrating Beaker's head.

It's also interesting that Dorothy's black, considering L Frank Baum's supposed white supermacist thinkings. (Though be careful what you google for: there's a lot of angry people on both sides of the debate.) Whatever the case, it's a fun thing to do with the adaptation.

The confrontation with the wizard involves some really ropey CGI. That's possibly part of the point, but I couldn't help thinking that this must have had a bigger budget than anything the Mill gets on Droo. It's also the same lame gag stretched out for too long, that nobody gets what they wish for. It felt a lot like an advert for the non-physical effects that were so singly unimpressive.

It's not Muppet's Christmas Carol, but it's better than most of the others.

Mashed bandage

Yesterday was good but long, and I got home in time to fall asleep over pizza. Mmm.

Finished off some things today which is rather satisfying, but have lots that still requires attendance. Also had a message from someone lovely I used to work with, who may have some more stuff to throw me.

And while all this goes on, the backside of my mind crashes pop bands together for hilario-comedic effect:

Ned's Atomic Kitten
Beastie Boyzone
Marvin Gaye Dad
The Chemical Brotherhood of Man
The Barry White Stripes

Favouring curry

There are 1,073 stories in from our writing competition - about 10 times as many as we'd been expecting. Have made a start on reading half of them, and already got two maybes.

I have also: locked Dave Stone's "The End of the World" (with its myriad Big Reveals); got everything together for recording "The Judas Gift" tomorrow; written my first scene for "The Wake" (not Scene 1., but a later one that we need well in advance); got lots of research done for some encyclopedic scribbling; tidied up the office; made a party invite for the Dr; chased a few things till they won't be chased no more.

I have pitched some things, discussed the limits of content management in detail, and been sickly green with envy about m'colleague Scott Andrews's news. And in between all that, I've seen "The Muppets' Wizard of Oz" (which I might blog about sometime) and the first episode of West Wing's Season 6. And fixed the broken sofa.

Seriously. That's me doing something remotely practical, and not getting it wholly wrong. Surely an omen of the End of Days.

This and a three-and-a-half-hour journey home from the pub on Thursday (don't ask) mean I am a smidgeon sleepy. So I shall now be throwing together a curry for a couple of chums. One of 'em is a proper qualified chef (and today made Dr Who's lunch), and has never previously dared my cooking.

So no pressure.

To introduce the guest star

Popped round to see Nimbos last night and many shiny treats. As well as the long-awaited Heroes #12 (Eccles!), he showed off the first two episodes of Studio 60.

A long-running, live Friday day comedy TV show hits a bit of a snag. The well-respected front man turns to camera and declares it's all baloney. The network won't dare to be funny for fear of alienating sponsors or bigots, he says, and people should not bother watching.

The network panics, but the sassy new president has an outrageous idea. They admit maybe the old bloke is right, and confront this thing head on. She's offers running the programme to two writers (Bradley Whitford and Matthew Perry) that they sacked years ago.

And these two coked-up, wild-eyed, fast-talking players are unable to resist.

The show is fast and funny, with the same dizzying chase around the sets and one-liners that styled The West Wing. Yet I can also see why Aaron Sorkin's new show has been seen as smug and self-indulgent.

The West Wing was about how the President struggled to see through policy, and issues that affect the whole world. Studio 60 treats with the same gravitas the politics of a comedy sketch show. It really doesn't matter as much.

They ladle on some of the issues, like a lead actress with unshakeable faith. But it's sparky and witty and richly written. It's of great interest to me as a professional writer, but surely it needs broader appeal?

Perhaps they should use their guest stars more interestingly. The woman from Desperate Housewives (and apparently, later Sting) should be seen to play against type. Like the stars in Extras, they'd be the hook for each episode, doing things we've never seen before.

Sting doesn't sing sappy songs about the environment, he insists on having fish and chips flown over from England. That kind of thing.

Though I realise what I've just pitched is a revival of Muppets Tonight. This is not a bad thing.

Scooby swears

Got talking about acceptable swearwords (again) and the origins of words like "bloke".

Scooby Doo's (or rather Shaggy's) "Zounds" is of course a contraction of the blasphemous "God's wounds". In performances of the work of that old potty-mouth Shakespeare, they don't pronounce it to rhyme with "sounds".

So go on then, what's "Zoinks" short for? Bonus points if you are funny.