ONCE UPON A TIME

Once upon a time a man with limited intelligence sat down at a keyboard and decided to share a little piece of his mind with the world. He didn’t have a lot going on, to be fair, just an ordinary little life, in an ordinary little corner of the world, but it meant a lot to him and he thought that he might like to try and let the world know how much it actually did mean.

Once upon a time the words used to come so easily, burning in the mind like blazing stars, screaming out with the need to be recorded and remembered. The words don’t come so easily now, they flicker in the dying embers and, on a good day, sometimes rearrange themselves into a pattern that can be recognised, but mostly they remain just the red glow of hot coals dying in the grate on a dark night.

Once upon a time, a breakfast cereal company decided to put out two flavoured variants on one of their popular products to see if people liked them, but because everything needed a marketing strategy in those dismal and shallow days, they had to add a caveat. If you preferred one to the other, you had to vote for it on a social networking site and, if enough people agreed with your choice, your preferred flavour would survive and the other would be consigned to the dustbin of history, no matter how many other customers might actually have preferred the other sort. Perhaps they call this process something like marketing evolution, where only the fittest survive, but I suspect it of being something more insidious, more sinister, a dastardly plot to give us less choice by pretending to give us more so we end up with a homogenous society where everybody is all the same.

Once upon a time I might have railed against this, shouted and raved in burning letters ten miles high, but now the universe is old, and I am old and the inevitable march of time is trampling me into the dust and I find it harder and harder to care any more. No, that’s not strictly true. I think I probably care more than I ever did, but I’ve just come to the inevitable conclusion that nothing I can say or do will change any of it. The majority rules, and even though I like to hope that people are generally more savvy than I give them credit for, I start to wonder that if that’s what they want, then that’s what they deserve to get. If you choose a grey, bland and uniform world where the other points of view are ignored, or dismissed, then that is precisely what you will get.

Once upon a time I would have been screaming “Vive la difference!” with all my lungs, and extolling the virtues and delights of the eccentric, the other point of view, the anomaly, and the exception that proves the rule, all those little bits of variety that make up the spice of life, but not any more. The greyness is overwhelming us and we just sat there and let it happen. We mocked those who didn’t fit in, or had an alternative point of view instead of embracing them and rejoicing at the colours they brought into our drab little lives.

Once upon a time a movie had genuine thrills and jeopardy. A brave person who performed stunts for a living attached to a flimsy wire would astonish and terrify me with their antics as they threw themselves around in a high place at genuine risk both real and imagined to life and limb, but now, all the high places are green screens, and the daredevils are never more than a couple of feet from the studio floor and the thrill has just gone.

Once upon a time you would quite possibly have gone “Eh? Where’s he going with this?” and you would have been right. There we are discussing the deeper philosophies and suddenly he’s gone off onto some tangent about stuntmen…? W (as they say) TF??? Bear with me, everything’s connected. Those real stuntmen leaping around on those cable cars, thousands of feet above a valley floor, or jumping off those impossibly high buildings, or climbing those comedy walls to hang from that clockface made our hearts quicken and our pulses race, even if it turns out that there was no real danger involved, it looked as if there was and things could still have gone wrong. They made us feel we were alive because they were alive and in real, genuine danger. Whilst it’s not the greatest of human traits, people used to go and watch motorcyclists jump over buses as much for the chance that something could go wrong as to appreciate the achievement of it going right. Now, because we know that all the danger is artificial as the environments they are moving around in, the only thing left to excite us is the quality of the CGI, which is fine if you are some kind of “gamer” I suppose, where all of life’s little problems can be solved by hitting “restart” after the legend of “Game Over” has flashed up, but somehow I think it will leave us needing other thrills, other excitements, and that’s when our problems could really begin.

Once upon a time, the world was young and so was I.

MEDIAPEEL 0.2

I realised recently that I will never be a successful writer of anything in particular because I don’t really understand people. That, and I sometimes take things too literally. I’ve been watching “Wilfred” on BBC3 which is an interesting enough idea, although I find the concept and the topics rather too disturbing for my aging mind to process. If you’ve not seen the show, basically, a young man contemplates suicide and when he wakes up, his neighbours dog appears to him to be a man in a dog suit, and much hilarity ensues.

Sadly, I keep being taken outside the story by various little things about the structure that bother me, so, instead of being carried along by the journey, instead I find myself worrying about the details and generally getting bogged down in things that obviously don’t concern the excited Tweeters whose unique observations upon the “coolness” of the show are read out by the continuity announcer over the end credits. Such a blatant attempt to persuade or manipulate the viewers into thinking that what they are watching is somehow essential I haven’t seen in a long time, but I digress.

My problem comes with what the other people in the show are supposed to be seeing. In theory they act like they can just see an ordinary dog, but my mind can’t make the leap between storylines that involve that dog being seen playing a guitar, smoking dope and wearing a backpack in those scenes. Like I said, it is my problem, in the same way I couldn’t detach myself during an episode of “Hustle” which talked about Albert Stroller’s wartime love affair whilst serving as an American serviceman even though I know that Robert Vaughn wasn’t even old enough to be in the army when the war ended. I know that people can play “older” of course, but the sad thing is that in many of the surrounding episodes he plays “younger” and this kind of inconsistency bothers me, and, once again, removes me from the story, and, sadly, it is this inability to think “outside the box” that has finally convinced me that success as a “creative” writer will always escape me because I’m basically far too literal.

I did once start a novel, of course, way back in the day when I still had creative juices to tap. I think it still sits becalmed in an ancient hard-drive at somewhere around the 40,000 words mark. I believe it was an existentialist detective story from the days when existentialism was my current interest du jour, but it wasn’t ever likely to go anywhere. My team leader at the time once told me I’d never finish it and it turns out he was right, so... well done him for his foresight. I did once, in the dark days after I stopped writing my plays, once consider adapting one of them into novel form but then I never actually bothered to do it, so I suspect that my one novel that everyone is supposed to have in them has evaporated into nothingness and instead been transformed into daily random witterings about nothing much in particular. I did pass on details recently to keener, sharper minds about self-publishing their works, but I suspect that that is a joy that I will never personally manage to achieve, although I’m always interested in being involved with some kind of collaboration with someone. I always feel that somewhere along the line I missed out on having a good mentor.

Other things in the media have passed before my nose lately, too. I was rather impressed to see a television advert for something as quintessentially lo-tech as an “Oxford Notebook” (“For those who write on both sides of the page”) and which wasn’t referring to some kind of electronic device. I suppose it must be the time of year with the schools and universities starting up again, but it made me happy.

I tried very hard to stay awake during the opening part of Mark Cousin’s 15 part “love letter” to cinema “The Story of Film” which was on very late on Saturday night. A lovingly crafted documentary series about a fascinating subject only really marred by his soporific manner of delivering his commentary which really did cause the eyelids to flicker. One rather interesting issue that came out of his observations was of how, much like the traveling circuses and other sideshow amusements of old, the early days of cinema was a refuge for the outcasts and rebels of society. This meant, however, that during an era when there were otherwise fairly few opportunities for certain groups in society to rise to prominence, the early days of cinema provided great opportunities for women and those within otherwise badly put upon ethnic groups to shine. This open and tolerant way of working was only really shut down when the “suits” and marketing me became involved once cinema became a successful commodity to be exploited and should give us all something to think about.

Finally, I was listening to the audio commentaries on my DVDs of “The Thick of It” over the weekend. What can I say? This was a house of disease. Again. It was interesting to me that one of the writers seems to have been specifically employed to make the (bad) language being used more “colourful” for comic effect. A “swearing consultant” if you will. Nice work if you can get it, but it reminded me of a tale one of my former colleagues once told me about his previous life on a building site, when a cement mixer was allowed to set overnight and the foreman bellowed: “What f***ing f***er f***ed the f***ing f***er up?” A perfectly descriptive and understandable sentence that would make no sense if you removed the swearing (“What the up?”), and I hand it freely to Mr Iannucci, should he wish to use it.

Total Tucker!

JUST A THOUGHT...

TOO OLD FOR PRIMETIME

I know that I’ve reached an age where I’m no longer a member of the main “target demographic” for a lot of the media and am plummeting headlong towards being a member of that ever so different group who are expected to sell our own homes from under ourselves, find adjustable armchairs and stairlifts exciting and generally find ourselves kicked out of primetime and into the relative wilderness of daytime TV and channels so obscure that only an insomniac or someone who had pressed the wrong button on their remote and didn’t know how to sort the problem out might actually watch them, but more and more recently, those little gaps between what we used to call the “programmes” seem to be talking to someone else and, at the same time, finding new ways to irritate the hell out of me.

Lesser Blogfordshire is not the most “media connected” point on the planet, as all of our TV is bounced off a relay tower which somehow manages to lose about 75% of the channel options that large chunks of the rest of the country consider “normal”. This is not a problem and is one that could easily be solved if I chose to solve it by signing up to become another of Murdoch’s masses, but, so far, I have declined. However, whenever we spend any time away from our bolthole of (relative) sanity, we are often exposed to the full horrors of unlimited FreeView and, after briefly watching the metaphorical media car crash of something like “Price Drop TV” we might spend half an hour or so wallowing in the warm glow and relative safety of the kind of TV that we used to love years ago like “Ironside” or perhaps mocking the bizarre insanity of other refugees from primetime like “The Professionals” or editions of “Top Gear” from other years which can be easily dated by the hairstyles of the presenters and not (strangely) by the shapes of the cars.

Has anybody, by the way, attempted a “Top Gear” Edwardian era spoof yet? If they have, I’ll bet it’s on the internet somewhere. I’ll have to have a look… (“With the sleek styling of a banana crate and the power of nearly twenty horses under the bonnet, which provide a kick like Mister Jeremiah Clarkfather’s patented cough linctus and which may just tempt you to let all caution to the wind and run over that fellow clutching the red flag ahead of you  and will no doubt cause many a young lady to blush under their own bonnets and flash a nifty ankle or two…”)

One of the oddest things about these relics from the TV of long ago that are surprisingly to be found alive and well in these obscure parts of what we used to call the “dial” is that someone manages to sell advertising slots during them (“Top Gear” with adverts was a big surprise to me…) and that these adverts are generally for companies, mostly web based ones, that I have never, ever heard of up to that point (and struggle to remember the names of even now).

Meanwhile, back in the big wide world of primetime where those “big boy” channels spend their days grouped in the middle of the schoolyard, smoking fags with their mates and sending the little squirts to play off in the margins, conveniently near to the prickly bushes for some later bullying practice, if they’re not just picking on them already, or flushing their heads down the toilets, things are really not much better. The budgets for the higher profile ads might be more impressive, but the product seems to be woefully banal and unimaginative, and certainly are not speaking to me. Not, I suspect, that they would want to.

I keep on seeing trailers for something called “Street Summer” which, despite having gained a more sinister resonance in recent days, quite frankly, fails to resemble any of the streets I occasionally walk along and might look a little bit scary if I weren’t so down wit da kidz and croosin wit ma posse innit. Yo!

So I’ll be looking forward to that then.

Strangely, whilst I know I’m unlikely to be in that particular target demographic, I doubt that the actual target demographic are either. From what I understand of these things, once that kind of imagery has become mainstream enough to get the attention of those in the media, and influence a wide enough cross-section of “da kidz” that it now includes all of them, including the usual suspects out by the prickly bushes, and if that music is now for sale in petrol stations for sharp suited advertising executives in sleek new BMWs, then “da kidz” who created that particular subculture will already have moved on to start creating the “next thing”.

Sadly the “next thing” might be something like “Cowboys and Aliens” which, unfortunately, only made me realise that the other mysterious suits now working in the movie business can’t even be bothered with coming up with interesting titles any more, preferring this “what it says on the tin” directness which surely must be limited in terms of options eventually, but also might make history look back very unkindly upon this cultural vacuum of an era. Presumably, if this kind of thinking were in place in the 1970s, “Jaws” would have been called “Big Shark!”, “The Godfather” - “Gangsters!” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” - “Flying Saucers!”. God knows what anything vaguely esoteric might have been retitled… Mind you, when it comes to TV, it sometimes seems that the opposite is now true, and the idea seems to be to come up with an interesting or (half) witty sounding title (usually a spin on an older, more familiar show title like, for example, “To the Manor Reborn”which somehow manages to immediately diminish both the new and the old show) and hope that all the pieces come into place and make it work. Of course, all this really does mean is that our current crop of programme makers is standing on the shoulders of broadcasting giants and pissing down on their heads.

Meanwhile Julianna Margulies is the latest – and surprisingly straight-haired - recruit to the L’Oreal stable because she’s “worth it”, despite presumably no longer being deemed “worth it” enough as an actor to get any decent work as she has passed that unwritten benchmark that Hollywood seems to have when actors, especially female actors, get to an age when the work just seems to dry up. Rather unbelievably, it’s getting on for twenty years since “e.r.” began with her character not even being supposed to survive the pilot episode. Instead she was “resurrected” for the series to be transformed into the rather stable and rational calm centre of the chaos and beating heart of the nursing staff on that show. Oddly enough, as the series evolved, little mention was ever made afterwards of her attempted suicide in that pilot which is, of course, where reality and art start to diverge.

Whilst I like to think that any one of us could get the help we need under such dreadful circumstances, I can’t ever imagine that professional colleagues, especially ones in such a high pressure environment, are ever likely to just forget something like that ever happened and let your career follow much the same trajectory that it was headed in before the dramatic “hiccup” of attempted suicide, and would be especially unlikely to happily move you into fields requiring responsibility and involving high levels of stress, and still regard you as a stable and calm rock amongst all of the chaos.

Mind you, the “telly world” of the adverts, dramas and sitcoms was always preferable to the harsher realities of the “real world”. As was once noted, the sun always shines on TV. The clothes are always cleaner… and the rooms are always tidy… and the dishes always sparkle… and “Hutch” can get over his heroin addiction overnight with a little help from “Starsky”…

Nowadays we get quite enough “reality” in reality, thank you very much. No wonder some of we oldies who want to keep our brains intact want to escape to the peripheries and out of primetime to the places where the stories made sense and the words had meaning. Those of us who aren’t just interested in watching our children and grandchildren becoming “famous”, that is…

WHOOOOOOOSH!!!!

Whooooooosh!!!!

“What was that?”

“That was your life mate.”

“Crikey! Where did that go?”

I always get that feeling on a Monday morning. The last time I looked, I’m sure it was Friday, and I remember last Monday morning as if it was yesterday… Can it really be a week ago already?

And yet some things that happened in June seem like they were much, much longer ago for some bizarre reasons of time perception that always baffle me.

So, where did the weekend go? I will admit that I don’t have the most “active” of lives, huddling away here in the darkness, avoiding the universe and all its madness, but even I have to be drawn out into the big wide world when the great consumerist sledgehammer of Chrimbletide starts to make itself noticed.

I settled down on the sofa last week and because of a strange lack of foresight, for once I had to actually sit down and experience what we used to call a "commercial break" for the first time in quite a while. It came as quite a shock to someone who watches most of his telly through the medium of the disc that is oh-so shiny because there really is so very little that speaks to me nowadays, or on the recorder so I can fast-forward through the ads. Settling down to watch some programme “live” as it were on a station that has advert breaks always finds me twitching and reaching for the remote in an effort to avoid those ridiculous singalongs…

“Christmas Ads are coming… Christmas ads are coming…”

…because I really don’t want to be one of those people who start a conversation with “Have you seen that advert where…?” because ultimately it’s shallow, pointless and tells you that really, as a culture, we need to get out more, and not just so we can sing along to the musak in the supermarket. (You know who you are!)

What is really troubling is that the 3 or 4 ad breaks I endured that evening only seemed to be pushing the kinds of bizarrely named and bottled alcoholic drinks that you only ever seem to think you might even consider the remotest possibility of drinking on one day of the year, or consist of obscurely indecipherable twaddle trying to persuade you that your life will change for the better if you slap on some expensive pong that makes you smell like an alcoholic and burns out the retinas of anyone else unfortunate enough to have to stand within thirty feet of you.

No, I’m sorry, I really don’t understand the cult of perfumery.

Anyway, having been bombarded by this advertising blitz, and having thought to myself “Crikey, they get earlier every year…” I looked at the calendar and realised it was November already. (Yes, I know all those bangs and flashes outside should have been a bit of a clue, but I somehow always fail to connect firework night – “Remember, remember the Fifth of November” – with the reality of “Flippin’ heck! It’s November!”) Heck, where did that year go? Never mind that, where did that decade go? Can it really be nearly eleven years since I watched the Millennium fireworks on Sydney Harbour Bridge? Not in person, you understand... On Television. I’ve always been very antisocial when it comes to New Year’s Eve (but that’s another story).

So it dawned on me that the season was almost upon us, and I’d better start to do something about it. An expedition to one of the larger supermarkets put paid to Saturday, and Sunday vanished in another expedition to one of our more exclusive department stores. From here, pretty much going anywhere is an expedition, you see... Especially since all the little local shops have been replaced by more takeaways than one small town could ever really need.

Oddly I didn’t buy anything myself. Our mission on Sunday involved other more immediate issues that needed resolving, but it was worth having a look around to see what’s what and make a few mental notes for when I’m out shopping alone for gifts some other time.

What worried me about this particular department store (apart from the prices of course, they’re always a worry in that place) was the sheer amount of basically useless rubbish that they are selling, and the way we all lap it up. Racks and racks full of so many “novelty items” that are presumably purchased for “a bit of a laugh” (there’s that phrase again, fans) and which will be cast aside and completely forgotten about mere seconds later. This frighteningly consumerist society in which we live has us blathering on about the environment on the one hand whilst simultaneously filling our lives with utter garbage that we neither want nor need and we can’t seem to make the connection. If nobody has any money any more, why are we wasting it on all this rubbish?

Then, of course, there are the vagaries of fashion and the kind of overpriced clothing that people walk around in just because of a flipping label. I saw what I can only describe as what we used to call a “donkey jacket” being sold under one label for nearly five hundred quid, and the quality of the cloth was frankly dire, and yet the whole place was full of people plastered in makeup and eye-watering pong they’ll just wash off later, and massively overpriced clothing that they might only wear once or twice, looking thoroughly miserable because they just had to spend their Sunday in that wretched place getting even more stuff even if they didn’t really need it.

And still there’s real poverty out there in the world, real actual people who’d be grateful for any of our cast offs and might be able to feed themselves for a week on what someone might pay for some “hilarious” edible pants.

I do have a theory, and it’s a quite brutal one if you think about it, but I think that historically, any decadent self-absorbed society that is obsessed with status, wealth and celebrity is truly one that is on its last legs, and we should be very, very careful. Just look at the parallels with the last days of the Roman Empire and think about it. Maybe the barbarians aren’t quite at the gates yet, but they know where we live, and to be honest, I’m too old and too set in my ways to have to consider living in a new “dark age”.

So that’s where my weekend went. Before I know it, it’ll be next Monday. Blink again and it’ll be next year. Before I know it, I’ll be retiring (actually, that’s now becoming a less likely option). Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if all we had to show for the short time we get to spend on this Earth wasn’t just a great big pile of stuff that someone else will just have to throw away?

 “You remember him, don’t you?”

“What, that guy?”

“Yeah, the one with all the stuff.”

“Jerk!”