MUTTERINGS IN THE DARK

There are still some days when you wake up yawning and full of fatigue and you can’t think of anything to say, despite the large number of things that you’ve been dwelling upon.

Things like the short list of “things to do” that I’ve been scribbling down as I remember those small but vital phone calls that I know that I’ll have to make in the very near future, or the cheques I need to write, or the cards that I have to send, but which somehow disappointingly fail to actually have been done when I pack up at the end of the day and head off to do whatever else it is that I do.

Instead, I have lain awake trying to remind myself to remember to add whatever it is to the list the next morning, even though I know that in adding them to the list I am maybe consigning them to a kind of eternal limbo, as if the mere listing of them makes them somehow “done”…

Otherwise I have found myself still dwelling upon the unfortunate topic of crime. Ever since my own recent experiences of becoming a victim of criminal activity a few weeks ago, I’ve been reading and hearing more and more about other people being robbed and burgled. It seems that there’s something of an epidemic going on, especially after so many years of us enjoying a relatively low crime rate.

I know that a so-called “low” crime rate comes as little comfort to someone who has actually been robbed during those allegedly “slack” periods, but I suppose in the overall scheme of things we kind of got used to things been “better” than once they were.

Now, through the wonders of the social network and other media, I hear tales of wallets stolen, offices and homes raided, bicycle theft, and even garden slabs being taken from outside someone’s home where they were piled up waiting to be turned into a patio.

These petty thefts (although to the victim they are never really “petty”) seem to be on the increase and I don’t suppose that we should be all that surprised by this as we now live in a culture where there are so many of us falling into the category of the “have nots” in comparison to the increasingly few “haves” and some people like think that they can restore what they perceive to be the balance by simply taking from the “haves” and giving little thought to whether they actually “have” all that much at all.

Statisticians and politicians will always argue that our perception of crime is always far worse than the reality of it, but I think you would have to be either blind or desperate to suggest that we haven’t turned a corner towards a darker, more selfish, world now that people start to view someone having anything at all in the way of possessions as being amongst the “haves” and decide that it’s all right to take it off them. The “strange new world” of modern crime fighting was brought home to be this week by the phone message I received from the Customer Services department of the Constabulary that had “exhausted all lines of enquiry” with regard to our robbery. He stopped short of asking me whether I had been “completely satisfied” with my “crime involvement experience” but not all that short...

Meanwhile, on matters of crime in fiction, a miserable yet happy place where crimes actually seem to get solved, our latest discovery, the Norwegian series “Varg Veum” continues to surprise and delight and is obviously long overdue a purchase for the Saturday night “Scandanavian Detective Series” on BBC4.

We were lent the discs by a colleague of the beloved, and are slowly working our way through them whenever we get a free evening. We should start to positively race through them once the rainy evenings are full of football as they are likely to be fairly soon.

I’m quite enjoying them because they are about the various adventures of that character who has rather disappeared from our own television screens in recent, the Private Detective, or, more specifically, the down-at-heel loser type investigator that was once such a staple of Film Noir back in the day. This series reminds me of a long-forgotten (in many quarters) favourite “Hazell” (as played by Nicholas Ball) way back when I was a teenager, or perhaps “Shoestring” (Trevor Eve) from about the same era.

All of these characters come across as avenging angels seeking the truth at great personal cost and for little in the way of personal gain. They inhabit a strange and sleazy underworld of villains, gangsters, drugs, strippers and easy violence and what it all lacks in the way of exotic glamour, it more than makes up for in its fascinating depiction of that underworld from the cosy safety of your own armchair.

The detective can go into that world, explore it, be knocked about a bit by it and the viewer remains safely removed from it, sucure in the knowledge that, whilst they are being introduced to a world they are unlikely to ever actually enter into, it’s not them taking the punches.

One of the reasons that I think that these northern European detective dramas have been so successful is that they are able to move at a pace that allows for little “character moments” of the sort that we seldom see nowadays in the Wham! Bam! High Octane shows that we generally produce at home. I sometimes think that modern screenwriters, with, perhaps, their background immersed in the sorts of narrative worlds of the computer game culture, sometimes forget that if you slow things down they can become more intense.

A film like “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” became very successful perhaps because of its more “old-fashioned” style which seemed fresh and original to a generation who’s idea of an “action” film is all “Wham! Wham! Wham! Helicopter! Helicopter! Bam!!!”. Suddenly, “slow and thoughtful” seemed “exciting and new” and that can only be a good thing when it comes to storytelling.

It also made me realise why my own sitcom idea from a couple of months back was doomed to failure in the UK market. Apart from the fact that it probably wasn’t good enough anyway, I have come to realise that what I like about drama and, to a lesser extent, comedy, are those small “character” moments, which is probably why I generally prefer “old” TV to the modern stuff. I was inadvertently trying to write “Just Good Friends” all over again in an era of  “Fresh Meat”…

Never mind… Back to “The Twilight Zone” I suppose…

Which brings me, of course, to the recent loss of Ray Bradbury, which happened just as my current “Twilight Zone” revisitation approached the episode he wrote for the series back in 1962.

Sorry Ray.

Sometimes my own orbits intersect with the great and the good and it seldom works out well for them. I went through a phase a few years ago when every single time a new DVD I bought was released, someone involved in the story seemed to pop off the same week.

Now, it would be stupid of me to suggest that these things were linked in any way, and I wasn’t the only one purchasing these new releases, and indeed, if you wanted to point the fickle finger of fate in any direction, surely it was the producers and manufacturers who had specified those dates, but it was a series of macabre coincidences that kept on happening over a number of years.

Maybe I was the only one who noticed, but it was whilst I was watching a story involving Concorde that the real world Concorde accident occurred, that’s all, in a bizarre chain of coincidence perhaps worthy of “The Twilight Zone” itself.

Nevertheless, Ray Bradbury was a great writer who will be sorely missed, although his work survives him and hasn’t all been put on a bonfire and burned as he sometimes seemed to suggest. A lot of very eloquent people have said some very nice things about him this week, so there’s very little that I feel that I can add, so perhaps, on this morning when nothing much of any consequence is coming to my mind, I should instead leave the last words to him:

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”

and

“You can’t try to do things; you simply must do them.” (Ray Bradbury, 1920-2012).