MRS GALE

Ah yes, well, with all that talk of Mrs Peel, it's easy (although, not all THAT easy) to forget about Mrs Gale, and, indeed, all of the other "Avengers" sidekicks who featured in that other rather groovy and groundbreaking 1960s drama conceived by one Sydney Newman.

Tara King, Venus Smith, Dr Keel and his close facsimile, Dr King, who was hastily pencilled in when the original star of the show, Ian Hendry, quite to go on to do bigger and better things.

Ah yes, it's hard to remember now, but in that (mostly) long-lost first series, it was John Steed himself who was playing the part of the "sidekick" most of the time.

Incidentally, we also ought not forget Purdey and Gambit who arrived a little later on when the "New Avengers" appeared in 1976 and, to my young mind, the old show seemed like something talked about reverentially as if it was a legend from out of ancient history, even though the gap was a mere seven years and these days I can find foodstuffs in my kitchen cupboards older than that.

But things always change and, way back at the dawn of the 1960s, when I was nowt but a twinkle, to a certain extent, "The Avengers" proper began during that second year when Mrs Catherine Gale streamrollered her way onto our screens on the back of her rather powerful motorcycle.

Mrs Catherine Gale was played for the better part of two television seasons (until she was whisked away to grapple with that other 1960s spy icon as Miss Pussy Galore) by the literally knockout (just ask the stuntmen!) Honor Blackman, and her portrayal of the independent, free-thinking, leather-clad whirlwind that was Mrs Gale was, of course, what paved the way for Diana Rigg's portrayal of Mrs Peel later on.

Without the first, audiences might never have accepted the second...

Of course, this performance is often lauded as one of the breakthrough roles which helped women become "accepted" in a more dominant capacity on television although, given the departure of Ian Hendry, because so many episodes had already been written for two male protagonists, it just happened to be an act of serendipity that she was written that way, at least at first.

After all, once the producers and writers had seen that audiences quite enjoyed watching this "strong, independent" female character, they played up the implied "kinkiness" and pretty soon she was lifting up her skirts to reveal the occasional stocking top and garter whenever she needed to get her pistol out.

Same old, same old… but, to those crusty old buffers, that's what "independent" meant...

To be fair, Honor Blackman played whatever she was asked to with good enough grace before departing, and she managed to mostly hang onto the strength and dignity of the character in an era when most women who appeared on our TV screens were seldom anything other than the "little woman at home" or disturbing "femmes fatale" out to rock the stability of normal family life.

And it is now popularly accepted that having Mrs Catherine Gale appear in a more than capable capacity on a primetime weekly television series across the entire country was one of the things which led to it becoming more "acceptable" to portray women in those sort of roles on both television and in the real world, and opened all sorts of doors which helped further the cause of feminism at a time when the role of the woman in society was still rather restricted to what men thought it should be.

Look… I'm not making this up, or condoning the attitude, but it's just the way society was structured back then. Some people still like to think that the world should still be like that, and some still act as if it always has been, but things, I like to think, have improved a lot since then. Sometimes it's just the "drip feed" effect of seeing something being treated as "normal" in television dramas that finally helps to "normalise" it to otherwise closed minds. This is one of the ways, in the end, that various minorities have used to become more "accepted" by the big, hostile world at large.

Meanwhile, and getting back to my point, Mrs Catherine Gale seems to be less well remembered than the other characters from "The Avengers" and that's something of a shame. Perhaps she suffers because of her episodes having been made in television studio on videotape and in black-and-white whereas her successors were all shot on lovely expensive film, shifting to colour later on, which meant that those episodes were the ones which got the international sales and the repeat seasons in later years.

So, whilst I was lauding the utter fabulousness of Mrs Peel the other day, I ought not to have neglected to mention Mrs Gale.

After all, for another generation, it was indeed she who was the stuff that dreams are made of.

N.T. LIVE - "CORIOLANUS"

You know that, when I attend these "N.T. Live" things, I tend to write about them afterwards, even though the world really isn't interested in what I "reckon…"

Well, I know someone who's off to see the thing "in the flesh" as it were next week, so I wouldn't want to spoil it for them - not that they're likely to be reading this kind of rubbish anyway - but - just in case they do - let's just say that I rather liked it and leave it at that...

It is, however, a damned impressive production, especially given the limitations of the venue. The Donmar Warehouse looks tiny and, certainly for the first few minutes, the show felt to this observer like one of those Fringe productions which I saw in Edinburgh in the days when I used to go along.

This is, of course, not a bad thing, because it focusses the production upon Shakespeare's rather excellent, if lesser-known, words and, by the end of the evening, it was riding far higher in my own list of personal Shakespeare favourites, if only you got to see the "proles" get their comeuppance... Grrr!!!

Still, I don't think that I'd "like" the Donmar all that much, not least because it looks as if it lurks in a "scary" part of town. Also, I like to be able to get "lost" inside an audience, whereas this venue looks like I'd be left feeling far too uncomfortably exposed for my own liking although, given that tickets sold out in moments way back when, that was never likely to be an issue.

"Corialanus" remains the great "political" play and toys with the power and ignorance of the masses and the misfortunes of hubris and still feels fresh and relevant today. In fact, you might even go as far as to say that it seems nore relevant now than it has done in a long time, depending upon your own particular political stance or point of view.

The performances were, of course, excellent, with the leads all being played with great skill, depth and range, which might surprise anyone who had only seen them in films, although, for me, it was Mark Gatiss who stood out simply because I'd never seen him being so bloody good in anything else before. Don't get me wrong, I know that he's a fine actor, it's just that I had him mentally pigeonholed in light comedy, but his slow decay into befuddlement and disappointment was astonishing to behold.

Of the women, playing parts that are seldom especially meaty enough in a lot of Shakespeare to feel worthy enough for the great actresses to turn up for, especially in such a "blokey" play, Deborah Findlay was another familiar face and her performance during her final scenes was astonishing,  and Birgitte Hjort Sorenson seemed to have been flown in from Denmark to look miserable in that manner so well practiced in her "Nordic Drama" performances.

It was all rather interestingly staged, too, especially given the limitations of the space, with members of the cast sitting and waiting at the back of the stage to do their part in full view of the audience from time-to-time, and the near three hours fairly rattled along. Much of the set design involved fluids and graffiti, which was very bold and refeshing.

The "N.T. Live" experience remains a rather lovely way for wider audiences to sort-of experience the best of London Theatre without having to actually go to the wretched place. There are, of course, downsides to this. You're not "in the room" and "breathing the same air" as the actors, but then you do get to see more details of the show more intimately. Sadly, you do also get the stomach-churning anxiety caused by the occasional cutouts of the satellite uplink, the irritation of late arrivals (personally, I just wouldn't let them in…), the anxiety of getting a parking space early enough, the horrors of trying to leave the same car park later (thankfully less problematical this time), and the gushing and fawning of Emma Freud, sometimes giving the impression that she was having endless hot flushes over the star of the show, but, on the whole, I think that I'd still recommend N.T. Live to anyone who enjoys great theatre.

SAINTS AND AVENGERS

One of the things that I sometimes do on those frequent nights when I find that I just can't sleep is to try and recast the favourite television shows of my youth with modern-day actors and see whether anyone strikes me as utterly "right" for the part.

Surprisingly enough (you may think), two of the shows with which I most struggle are "The Saint" and "The Avengers" which, given the generic "action/adventure" nature of these almost iconic cornerstones of nineteen-sixties television, you might think would be a doddle. After all, you might very well be thinking, all that Simon Templar needs to be is a slightly tough guy who can wear clothes well, and all that John Steed needs to be is a slightly posh bloke who can carry off a bowler hat.

And as for Mrs Peel... Well, we'll come to her later.

"The Saint" is difficult, however, because, despite the reputation he gained in later years, not least from his own down-playing of his own abilities, the kind of effortless charm that Roger Moore puts across on screen, coupled with that knowing sparkle behind the eyes which brings you in on the gag, takes a lot of hard work to achieve. He was not the first to portray the Saint, given that George Sanders had played him in a series of films back in the 1940s, nor was he the last, but it was his avuncular take on the character which is the one which most gelled with international audiences and left any of the actors who followed him, Ian Ogilvy, Simon Dutton and Val Kilmer, with mighty big shoes to fill and none of them really managed to make quite the success of it that dear old Rog did.

And when you try to pick someone from the modern crop of television and film actors, it's very difficult to come up with someone who you could quite imagine ticking all of those boxes. Quite a few could probably persuade audiences with their good looks, and quite a few might be physical enough, but that kind of old-school, almost Cary Grant-like, wit is very difficult to achieve.

Pick any of them and somehow they're just not a good fit. There's either something too stand-offish about the posh ones and something too coarse about the rough diamonds, possibly because those are the way that action/adventure series have gone in the intervening half century, away from the realms of fantasy and back into the brutalist reality.

Not, of course, that there's anything wrong with that, but even some of the "posh" blokes from "Spooks" would struggle to convince me as Simon Templar.

It's very much the same with the role of John Steed in "The Avengers". For me, Patrick Macnee is very much the one and only and, whilst he has been portrayed on stage by Simon Oates and on film by Ralph Fiennes, neither of them have really managed to "get" the dapper elegance combined with a knowing "nod and a wink" to the audience which Patrick Macnee managed so easily and with such apparent humour.

Ralph Fiennes is undoubtedly a fine actor but in the little-regarded late 1990s movie version of "The Avengers" he does come across as something of a cold fish who's taking it all far too seriously and, unfortunately, for some reason he really, really, just looked uncomfortable wearing a bowler hat.

Which brings us to Mrs Peel.

Uma Thurman may be a very respected and fine-looking actress but, unfortunately, she was no Diana Rigg.

Again, it's difficult to quite pin down what made the character of Mrs Peel work so very well when she was being played back in the 1960s. Whilst Diana Rigg is utterly brilliant and captivating, she's not really a "conventional" looking actress in the traditional sense so prevalent at the time, especially to play the "M(an)-Appeal" aspect of Emma that the producers of the series had decided they required.

And even those very producers of the series had to have two tries at the character because they'd already started filming with Elizabeth Shepherd before deciding that she just "wasn't working" for them.

So, trying to select a modern actress to get the humour, dignity, grace and charm that came across so effortlessly on screen back then is very difficult. So many have some of the elements, but few have got it all, and so we can only marvel at the luck we had back then that the lightning was able to be caught in a bottle and the magical alchemy which brought us those performances was allowed to happen.

Meanwhile, it's back to the sleepless nights and the pondering...

One day I'll work this one out, although by then, the choices I make will have already got too old and I'll have to start thinking about yet another generation of no-hopers...

TRIP SWITCH

Saturday started, as they usually do, in the dark...

After all, "Night must fall" and all that kind of thing, but that's not really what I meant.

I woke up and noticed that the glowing red numbers of the alarm clock's display were markedly absent and, for a while at least, I decided that the power must have gone out and that it would no doubt be restored eventually, and did my best to doze off again...

These are the moments during which I wish that my wristwatch had a luminous dial so that I could reassure myself that it wasn't actually getting up time and I could try my best to stay under the duvet just a little longer.

Later on (but how much later on I couldn't tell you...), I noticed that the little red numbers had still not returned and I staggered out of the bedroom and downstairs to try and remember quite where I'd put the battery-powered lantern the last time I used it.

The entire house was in darkness, the fridge wasn't humming, the boiler wasn't running, and none of the little lights of my life were glowing in the kitchen or the televisual recording devices. Somehow I managed to manoeuvre myself around all of the hidden obstacles that clutter our lives and reach out my hand to find that, for once, the lamp was actually in precisely the spot that I had believed it was.

And so, in a limited way, the light returned, and both of the clocks into which I'd oh-so-recently put brand new batteries were displaying the time which, at ten past six in the morning, was far later than I would usually surface at the weekend.

Slowly... ever so slowly... my mind began to function again and I noticed that things were not quite as dark as I had first believed. There was a certain amount of glow penetrating the gaps between the curtains which implied that the street lights were, at least, still burning brightly.

This made me wonder whether this power outage was more localised than I had at first believed, and that maybe it was just our little row of houses that had been deprived of power, maybe because the overhead cabling which feeds us might have been brought down by external forces beyond our control.

The storms, after all, had been quite awful during the previous few nights...

At this point I needed to find out two things. One: Whether the rest of the row was also unlit (although at that time in the morning, this might prove nothing); and Two: Where the hell the paperwork from the electricity board might be, given that I might have to phone them...

Well, both were problematic.

Despite current trends towards the contrary in terms of our degenerate society, I was not inclined to go outdoors wearing my pyjamas under any circumstances, which would mean that I would need to dress in the dark.

Equally, the paperwork is so chaotic nowadays that there really would have been shouting.

Emitting another huge sigh, I headed up the stairs and paused to look at the nook where the meters lurk, and noticed that, perhaps for the first time in years, the Trip Switch had, er, tripped, presumably due to one of those overnight lightning bolts that had failed to wake me.

So, I waved my lantern, stood upon my tippy-toes, and switched it back to the "on" position and the house was restored to life, and all of those familiar buzzes and hums immediately restarted, and the soft glows of all of those various switches and dials were restored...

Isn't it funny how the imagination (shun... shun... shun...) can create a much larger and far more widespread crisis than it turns out in reality to be...?

49½

Today, believe it or not, I am 49½ years old (Oh… you do believe it… I see…)  and the screaming plummet towards the big "Five-oh" could probably be considered to have properly begun.

There's no avoiding it (well, not in a good way at any rate), a date with Destiny awaits which, considering she was a puppet on the TV show "Captain Scarlet", and that my Beloved would probably kill me with spoons if I went along and said "Hi", maybe that isn't the greatest of things to have to look forward to.

Although…

(See… I'm still just a big kid… so how on Earth can such an utter child be nearly half a century old…?)

To be honest, though, those sorts of "significant" numbers have never really bothered me all that much…  Well, at least not until I started thinking about it this morning at any rate. After all, I've spent so long acting like an "old git" that it comes as little surprise to find that I have actually finally become one… In fact I'm certain that enough people reading these words (or who have actually met me…) would be more surprised to find that I haven't yet passed this particular milestone, and am not looking at it in the rear-view mirror with another couple of decades on the clock.

With a trilby perched upon my head, no doubt, and the speedometer showing a steady nineteen miles per hour...

People… other "people" that is… seem to have some sort of crisis whenever they jump a decade, whether they're hitting thirty, or forty, or whatever, as if, by being suddenly one entire day older, they are somehow completely knackered by circumstance. It's as if the sudden reminder that we are all ultimately doomed is something that they'd forgotten about for ten years. Equally, even on the more ordinary years, "people" seem to feel the need to commemorate the landing of each nail in the coffin on the same day each year which does strike me as being downright peculiar, although it does seem to keep the card shops busy at least...

Still you have to laugh…

Don't you…?

Well, if you look at the allegedly "humorous" cards designed for those "decade-related" birthdays (You know the ones… Full-on abuse thinly disguised as a cheery greeting…) apparently you're supposed to find it all terribly amusing to be tapped upon the shoulder and given a timely reminder by the Grim Reaper as he taps his wristwatch meaningfully, signals a cheery thumb-bones up, and heads off on some other, more pressing, engagement. "Put a brave face on it", "Wear a smile", "Share the joke", and prove that you still have a sense of humour (whatever that is…), whilst inside you may very well be feeling as if you're being torn apart.

We're nothing if not a tactful species…

Then "people" do their best to try and persuade you that you need to celebrate the whole wretched business of ageing by having some kind of public humiliation ritual, otherwise known as the ghastly social encounter that "people" have come to know as the "party".

I don't.

I shan't…

You can, so that I don't have to...

Meanwhile, perhaps it's just that it's such a huge stepping stone on the journey towards the brass and pine that it's a massive shock to the system to realise that another entire decade has managed to evaporate without managing to achieve all that much (well, if you're me, that is…), or perhaps sometimes some of us are just so surprised to have got here at all, that the shock to the system causes some kind of a meltdown.

Whichever, perhaps there's little reason to celebrate it. Perhaps if you try and ignore it, it'll just slink away without drawing attention to itself. I spent three years being twenty-two simply because I forgot that I'd had two birthdays at that point, and that's the way that I like to deal with it.

My usual method for dealing with things by not dealing with them… A technique carefully honed across nearly half a century of practice...

I suppose that there is something to be noted about switching from one of the age brackets on an official form to the next one… (are you aged between 35-44, 45-54, etc…) but the age itself remains fairly insignificant as far as it goes, despite what I may have suggested here today.

Sadly, I've known enough people who didn't manage to make it even this far, and, to be honest, there's nothing that awful about it when you consider the alternative option.

OTHER SIDE OF THE TRACKS

I don't often go to the end of the platform, but, well, you know, I did have a couple of hours to fill and so I found myself orbiting the entire station time and again. As I was waiting for the arrival of my own eventual train, as each twenty minutes passed, another batch of travellers would arrive, wait and leave. I began to run out of things of interest to look at and drifted further and further away from the busier areas of the platform rather than suffer those "odd" looks I would keep getting as I strolled past people for the third or fourth time.

Eventually, I reached the end of the platform and found a fence preventing any further progress and this rather poignant little sign which perhaps offered some hope in a sea of despair to the occasional troubled soul.

It stopped me short when I spotted it, with its implications of presumably fairly infrequent tragedy, hopelessness and utter despair, and I paused for a moment, considering the implications, and wondering about the wisdom of having the sign there at all, before drifting back to the waiting hordes hoping that they hadn't thought that I needed keeping an eye on just because I'd gone that far out beyond the norm...

I'm so stupid sometimes.

Because, whilst for a while I was wondering whether this was the best place for this notice to be, I was forgetting a whole host of other matters. After all, I unreasonably reasoned, there was a good quarter mile of platform behind me where someone so inclined could fling themselves in front of the next passing express if they so chose, (ruining the lives of the driver, the staff, and all of the other passengers and potential passengers in the process), and this particular point was so far away from the maddening crowd that I wondered whether someone in that particular frame of mind could or would even get that far.

Equally, given that I was standing on a platform, otherwise known as a "halt" or "designated stopping point", this is the one point where the trains are likely to be slowing down and, whilst I'm sure that in a straight fight between several tonnes of heavy engineering and one vulnerable human body, the train's going to suffer the least damage, so it didn't strike me as the most likely place for someone to choose to do the deed.

Later on (much later on, to be honest), I realised that I wasn't looking at the "bigger picture..."

At that point, it wasn't the railway that was likely to be the problem.

Looking beyond the fence there's a quick hop over it, followed by a short sprint and you would be at the huge viaduct which, I suddenly realised, offers a swift and very sheer vertical drop straight downwards to oblivion...

And that's what the little sign is for.

I'm amazed that it took me so long to realise this, and took off my metaphorical hat to those wise people at the Samaritans for trying to keep one step ahead of tragedy, even though I suspected that the thought must have been born out of bitter experiences.

So, if you are feeling so inclined, please stop, take a moment, and ring the number.

You know it makes sense...

STUFF AND NONSENSE

I'm so sorry, but I've been buying "stuff" again. In these austere times, I really ought not to, and I certainly ought not to bleat on about it when so many people haven't got two brass farthings to rub together, but I'm weak, I'm feeble, and I don't spend my hard-earned on beer or fags or whisky or narcotics. No, my addiction is to passive entertainments, and it's far more weird given the lack of ultimate pleasure I get out of it once the thrill of the hunt, and perhaps of the delivery, has passed.

I know that I order far too much shiny rubbish via the internet, just as I know that most of the films will be watched once, the CDs played once and the books, maybe, read once, unless they're all stacked up in a pile somewhere to be read "later", in which case, "later" could turn out to be perhaps "never" given how my limited span upon this Earth is slipping away so rapidly.

Most of the time, the things that I'm deciding that I really simply have to have in my nasty, brutal and short life, are cheap enough, and presumably disposable enough, that they don't cause much in the way of fiscal hardship. Individually at least, they're all cheap enough not to cause too huge a dent in the precarious finances of our little household.

Collectively, however...

However, last Monday, four (yes, I said four), separate items got dispatched on the very same day and suddenly those four individually tiny sums suddenly felt like they'd been consolidated into one large wadge of cash, not helped by the fact that each of the four had been individually pre-ordered in each of four distinct and separate months and had only been brought together by the shifting plate tectonics of circumstance and fluidity of release dates. In my head they remained far enough apart not to trouble the scorers, but in reality, the fiscal piranhas are feasting as one at my bank balance.

Not only that but, because of an exciting new packaging policy, instead of each tiny item being able to slip neatly through the letterbox here at Blogfordshire Towers, they will have been bundled together into one large and "slot unfriendly" parcel which will mean the coming of another of those much-feared red cards, and another trek over to the far and distant place which is now our "local" Post Office to go and pick it up.

This actually occurred far more rapidly than expected, actually, with the whole stonking lot turning up the day after despatch which is, quite frankly, unheard of in my penny-pinching "Super Saver Delivery Option" lifestyle of choice, where the twitchiness of non-manifestation often goes on at least one day beyond my tolerance levels.

And then there's also the slightly galling knowledge that, by the time I do get around to watching my nice shiny new films, the price will most probably have dropped to about a third of what I paid for them by ordering them for distribution on or about the release date, even though I'll normally spot them cheaper in one of the supermarkets anyway long before the parcel finally gets into my actual house and I'm getting (quite rightly) scowled at for buying more tat and whilst I'm still in the "It hasn't turned up yet" zone...

So that's a bit of a "lose-lose" then...

The fact that two of the items are meant as gifts, and the other two are merely fulfilling my need to attain completion of a collection which has been building for decades, should and will cut no ice. It's still basically rubbish that we don't really need, even if I would miss it so if it wasn't there...?

After all, does anyone ever slip away off this mortal coil just wishing that they'd bought more stuff...?

This continual acquisition of "stuff" has become a bit of an "issue" lately as we look around our tiny little house and realise that it's got far too much "stuff" in it, and so the accumulation of more of it seems ridiculous, especially given that the number of remaining available years in which to read, watch or listen to them all feels as if it's diminishing rapidly.

Look... I know it myself, if I'm being totally honest with you.

I'm weak...

I'm feeble...

I'm surrounded by far too much tat...

I'm expecting an "Intervention" any day now (not that anyone's actually interested enough in my well-being to actually stage an Intervention, I'm sure...) or at least a quiet suggestion that I head off to a meeting of "Tat Buyers Anonymous..."

Meeting TBA...

LOND-DONE

London…

Sigh…!

Every January I'm compelled to make a visit to the place and every time I come away from it so full of loathing that it probably takes at least ten months before I can convince myself that I could tolerate a return.

It's such a ghastly place.

Really, I don't know why anyone would want to live there…*

Still, I suppose people do… and some people actually claim to love the place which, quite frankly, I find slightly worrisome.

This year's trip included the extra frisson of being required to purchase a ticket for my cross-London Underground travel over to the Docklands which meant queuing up, fathoming the subtleties of a rinky-dinky machine, and risking the wrath of the hundreds of waiting users standing impatiently behind me as I fed an extraordinarily huge quantity of coinage to the beast.

If I might get "political" for a moment, I'm sure that removing all of the ticket offices on the tube will make that particular nugget of funfulness far, far worse...

Still, I'm now home from my latest adventure in the Smoke, and, astoundingly, I'm still chock-full of the same old sense of dislike I have about the old capital city. After the long wait I mentioned in an earlier post, I was just about to get on the approaching train when I opened my bottle of Buxton Spring Water, only to discover that I'd unwittingly bought the sparkling kind, and so I clambered aboard looking as if there had been a sudden shower.

Happily, because this was a British train, nobody commented upon it and I was able to sail down the country without having to exchange any pleasantries with any of my unknown and unknowable travelling companions, whilst tutting every so often at the loud (and very Northern) lady who had to spend the entire journey supervising her staff by telephone instead of just letting them get on with it.

I, of course, remained more-or-less "gadget-free" seeing as I would rather gnaw off my own leg than actually have a conversation within earshot of a load of strangers. I swiftly bored of my book, too and, instead, passed a happy hour-and-a-half or so looking out of the window and watching the world go by, and fretting (ever so slightly) about that ticket-buying experience which still lay ahead of me…

Unhappily, once the ticket was eventually purchased, the sticky, sweaty, filthy and vandalised unpleasantness that calls itself London was crossed within an hour, the usual pictures of GitWorld (a.k.a. Canary Wharf) were taken, and the Trade Show was arrived at, viewed, and departed from, having done horrendous things to my lower back which will take days to recover from.

Once again, I persuaded m'colleagues to cross back through London to Euston station with an excess of time ("just in case") and we found ourselves face to armpit with the Underground during the rush hour which is, as always, a most delightful way of passing another hour of your life.

Having partaken of the annual hastily grabbed burger meal and discovered, as ever, that you really do need three arms to manipulate it and consume it, I ended up perched next to a bin trying to gobble it down which is, as ever, one of the finer eateries which the capital has to offer the wary traveller.

Shortly afterwards there was the usual mad dash for the designated platform (once it gets announced) in that daily game of "Passenger Roulette" so beloved of the station announcers at Euston, and, after a slight altercation in which I asked to get to my allocated seat and consequently scared off the bloke who'd already parked himself in the one next to it, I silently endured the return journey home on another packed train upon which there was, apparently, unreserved seating in coaches "F" and "U" (about which I'll pass no further comment…) and arrived back home at my own little sanctuary at around about 10:30 in the evening.

But, I'm more than certain that you don't want to hear about my travel woes or my professional unpleasantnesses, do you?

I'm sure that you'd much rather hear about the depression, misery and woe that overwhelms me every time I am required to go out into the big wide world, and how I end up mulling obsessively about my inability to interact with other people (or rather "People") under such circumstances in that affable, easy-going manner, which appears to come oh-so-very easily to just about everyone else, but which leaves me feeling awkward and stupid and being regarded as that "utterly strange and silent bloke" who sat opposite you all the way home from London…

No…?

Okay then…

It's probably for the best that I did just shut up, then...

*This posting has (you might already have guessed) been in no way supported by the London Tourist Board.

FLASH FX

Having not seen it in years, I settled down the other evening to watch the Dino De Laurentiis version of “Flash Gordon” made back in the days when “Star Wars” was a recent unexpected hit and every other studio wanted a piece of that particular action.

I decided that it might be one of those movies that was so awful it was probably quite brilliant but, watching it again, it turned out that it was just brilliantly awful and, despite the fact that it might very well be a camp classic, the truly godawful script (witness any scene with the pilots at the start of the film) and some terrible performances and wretched dubbing, I managed about twenty minutes of it before regretfully hitting the channel changer just after the “football fight” scene which did at least feature a spectacularly funny and well judged performance from Brian Blessed as the King of the Hawkmen.

But if Brian Blessed’s performance is the best thing you can find in something, well…

Perhaps sometimes things are just best left to your memory.

Actually, that’s desperately unfair of me. BB is utterly brilliant in “I Claudius” and is a damned fine actor even if he seems to have since built a brand new personality based solely upon the public’s perception of his character in this one high-profile performance.

Despite being a rather dreadful movie, “Flash Gordon” retains its profile thanks to a soundtrack provided by the rock band “Queen” and, in many ways, that is quite possibly the best thing about the movie. However, watching the opening credits without the soundtrack samples which were added for the hit single, and without the benefit of full stereo surround sound, even that sounded a little disappointing as it bleated tinnily out of our television.

Still, I did feel rather sad about having grown out of “Flash Gordon”, because I really remember enjoying it a lot when I was whatever age I was when it first came out. It may only have been the sheerness of the costumes of Ornella Muti, but the film definitely had something…

The design work is, to say the least, unusual, but it is, at least, trying to look not unlike its comic strip inspiration, but I remember the film as being a lot more “murky” and “smeary” and atmospheric way back in the days of domestic video recorders. On television this week it was presented in glorious High Definition which meant that the picture had been cleaned up so much that the formerly “lavish” and “huge” seeming sets looked positively tiny, as if the whole thing had been filmed in the corner of a public convenience and the pictures had a flat “straight to video” cheapness about them that really didn’t help it.

This did set me thinking, however, about the earlier versions of "Flash Gordon", the ones with were shown on TV in the mornings during the Christmas holidays alongside "Holiday Star Trek" when I must have been about ten years old.

At the time I thought they were great. Not brilliant, but great nevertheless. Even then we could tell that the rocket ships looked a bit ropey with their fizzing sparks, fairly obvious strings, and set against a version of outer space which was all clouds and backcloths.

But, do you know what?

We really didn't care about all that.

Forty years after they'd been made, those adventure serials still grabbed us and took us along with them and, whilst we might have tittered at the dodginess of the model work, we still avidly tuned in the next day even if it was, perhaps, to only laugh and point - as well as find out how exactly they got out of that last cliff-hanger ending, of course...

Special effects can be funny like that. Nothing seems to date faster apart from, perhaps, a vision of the future. Even "cutting edge" C.G.I. can look laughably primitive even a few short years later. They are always of their time and seldom timeless. Even the magnificence of the effects in "Star Wars" have had to be tweaked and polished for a more discerning audience in recent years although I maintain that the model work created by Brian Johnston for both "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Alien" still looks astonishing even to this day.

Was cinema more like the theatre back in the old days? Were audiences just more prepared to suspend their disbelief over those dodgy model ships seen through the periscope in all of those submarine movies, or the models of the Lancaster bombers in "The Dambusters", or the flying saucers of the 1950s science-fiction films, or Flash Gordon's rocket ships…?

Or did they genuinely look "real" to them…?

Was "Flash Gordon" in the 1930s as convincing to 1930s kids as "Star Wars" was to those in the 1970s…? It really is difficult to be certain because the memory does cheat and you can only compare what you're seeing to other things which you might already have seen. If that's what the silver screen tells you a spaceship will look like, then that's what you will see. Plus, of course, the adventure serials were seen in a cinema crowded with excitable children with vivid imaginations and it was not ever possible to view these things over and over again. Those young minds filled in the blanks and their imagination did the rest and, before they knew it, they'd most probably seen the most exciting thing they'd ever seen.

Now, as a cynical old fart living in the 21st century, albeit without a jet-pack, hover-car and bacofoil suit, I maintain that you can pretty much always spot C.G.I., no matter how good it is, because on some subliminal level it will always look artificial somehow. People tend to disagree with me about this, but there you go. However, I have begun to wonder whether, because of all this "hyper-realism" (or perhaps "super-realism") in modern movies, we have become more aware of the shortcomings of the effects work in old films and television programmes in a way that we previously did not.

Is it, perhaps, that modern-day hyper realism which is why old "special effects" in these shows start to look a little shoddy to modern audiences and, furthermore, does this ultimately mean that we cannot suspend our disbelief in quite the same way any more…?

In the end, does this mean that our imaginations are diminished because of the brilliant and convincing work that is being done for us, so that we no longer feel that we have to fill in the gaps…?

Perhaps this is why more and more people are returning to the crafts, and the home-made when it comes to things like film-making; To exercise their imagination muscles...

Food for thought, eh…?

KETTLES

Here's a funny thing...

That's funny "peculiar", by the way, but then you probably knew that already, didn't you? After all, it's not as if people come here for funning and japes and the kind of joke that they can pass on to the world.

Well, not unless the joke is me, anyway... Although there's precious little evidence that anyone wants to share me with the world, either...

Now, where was I?

Oh yes...

A "funny" thing...

In our office building, there is a little "common usage" kitchenette containing, amongst other things, a rather venerable "jug" kettle that's probably seen better days. It's one of those plastic ones which sits on a separate round base which is the bit that gets connected to the plug socket once you've filled the kettle with water, placed it on the base, and switched it on.

Now normally, when it's my turn to go and brew up for our coffees, the handling of the kettle, once it's been filled with water, is something which can be done one-handed. The granules are added to the mugs, the milk is splooshed in where applicable, and the switch is clicked and, once it clicks itself off, the kettle is lifted, poured and positioned back upon its cradle without a hitch, and I'll then pick up the coffees and transport them back along the corridor to our little grey box.

Why was it then, that the one time that I happened to be holding a glass of water in my other hand for a colleague who's on a bit of a health kick right now, that the kettle's base insisted upon running (well, sliding) away when I tried to return the jug to its spindle just because (it appeared) and for no other reason than my other hand was full...?

Usually, of course, I would have had a spare hand free for moments like this, when a usually one-handed operation suddenly requires a bit of support from another hand, but, for once, because I was trying to do those two things at once that we chaps are often accused of being incapable, the blooming thing just refused to settle upon its spindle and the base kept on moving away.

In the end, and no doubt in response to the thought you've probably already had "Why didn't you just put down the glass of water?", I put down the glass of water, and swiftly settled the jug part back where it belonged, but it is interesting that my mind seemed unwilling to accept the wisdom of that option during that particular moment.

Perhaps my brain gets too focussed on what it's doing to accept an alternative plan of action (which might, incidentally, be something to do with why people sometimes "freeze" during moments of intense peril…?) or maybe I'm just a bit rubbish, although sometimes I just have to believe that inanimate objects really just do not like me...

CONNECTIONS

It's complicated...

Living outside the connected immediacy of the urban sprawl can, from time to time, make it a little more difficult to fit the jigsaw pieces of your life together, and that can mean that, on occasions, quite a lot of time gets wasted.

Take, for example, the year's annual business trip to London.

Now, it's not one of my responsibilities to order the train tickets. I just get presented with them and the person who does get to order the tickets has to take in a lot of factors, not least of which is the cost of them.

This meant that, in order to save a couple of hundred quid, my seat was booked on the 9:45am Express out of Blogfordshire Central, with a plan to arrive in London by noon, get across town, spend the afternoon doing the necessary, and haul myself back across town to catch the 7:00pm Express home.

So far, so frantic.

However...

My usual morning routine involves an early start and a dash to our local station in order for my Beloved to catch the 7:15 into our own nearest city, a time at which there are, at least, still parking spaces available at our not-quite-local station.

The logical, rational option, the one that you yourself would probably consider if you were me, would be to drop her off, go home, drink some coffee and saunter back to the station to catch a later train to Blogfordshire Central.

But I'm seldom rational when it comes to matters of travel plans. There's just so much which could go wrong. I might return and find that there's nowhere to park. I might be late. The train which I need to make that connection might get cancelled.

Basically, there are so many ways that a plan could get ballsed up when you live out beyond the fringe, where nobody seems to worry if they mess up your finely honed plans on a mere whim, that I always feel that it's just best to get to where you need to be as soon as you can so that you can be certain that the next piece of the jigsaw does, at least, have a lug to latch on to.

Instead I will find myself with a two hour window during which I will walk around and around the platform trying to keep my mind busy and mentally composing written works of dubious genius which I will have forgotten again by the time I get home,  because, as sure as eggs is eggs, the book I will decide to take along with me will suddenly seem to be the worst possible option to have chosen and I probably won't find it diverting at all. Sadly, I have a history of lugging far too much rubbish along with me on these trips, filling my pockets with all kinds of pointless junk, so a second book option is probably not a good idea.

Oh well, at least there's the coffee shop to kill a minute or three, and there is a newsagents, even if it usually means that I end up lugging a newspaper up and down the country for no good reason, but, well, if anyone does feel the need to arrange a meeting with me, if, for some reason, you feel that I've been avoiding catching up with you for far too long, I appear to have a two hour wait for a train connection and not all that much to do this morning...

So, I'll take that as a "no" then.

RELAUNCH…?

Thinking of having a "relaunch…"

What do you reckon are the chances of something like this working…?

No…

Me neither...

KALEIDOSCOPE EYES

Picture yourself in a box by a sewage works
Drawing fake people
To print on glass [Sighs]

Suddenly your fingers
Feel like someone else's
And you're a bloke with kaleidoscope eyes...

Yes, boys and girls, after a relatively long period without them, suddenly, whilst sitting at my desk a few days ago, I was struck down once again with a    m i g  r   a   i     n        e      .

T   h    i      s       m     e     a    n     t       t    h    a   t a   f     t    e    r        a       p    e  r  i  o  d            o  f f  e  e  l  i   n  g      "w    o    o   z   y"   ,    n   a   u   se   o u  s       a  n  d      s  i  c    k    l   y   -   e   v   e    n    t    h  o   u g  h     I      h   a   d,     i n     f  a  c  t    w o   k e n    u  p    f  e  e   l  i  n  g    a    l  i   t t  l  e          w o  o  z  y     a  n y  w  a  y - m  y   h  a  n  d  s   s  u  d  d  e  n  l  y    f  e  l  t    a  s    i f    t  h  e  y    w  e  r  e  n  '  t    q  u  i  t  e    t  h  e  r  e    a  n  d    t  h  e    s  c  r  e  e  n    s  t  a  r  t  e  d    g  e  t  t  i  n  g    b  l  u  r  r  e  d  .  .  .

T  h  i  s    w  a  s    t  h  e    m   o  m  e  n  t    t  h  a  t    I    t  h  o  u  g  h  t    t  h  i  n  g  s    w  e  r  e    n  o  t    g  o  i  n  g    w  e  l  l … a  f  t  e  r    a  l  l,    i  t    c  o  u  l  d  n  '  t    b  e    a    m  i  g  r  a  i  n  e    b  e  c  a  u  s  e    I  '  d    n  o  t    h  a  d    t  h  e     k   a l  e i  d o  s c  o  p i  c    z  i g  z a  g s    i  n m   y     v i  s  i o  n,    h a  d   I       …      ?

N  a   t     u   r   a   l   l   y       I         d   i   d   n   '   t         h     a   v     e         a   n   y         h   e   a     d     a   c     h   e        p   i   l   l   s       w i t h    m e ,    b u  t    l u c k i l y    I    w   a  s    a  b l  e    t o     "b o r r  o  w  "    s  o  m  e     c  o  l  d      a n  d     f l u   m e d i c a t i o n   o f f   a   c   o   l   l   e   a   g   u   e    a n d    w       o       l       f       e       d               d       o       w       n       a       d   o   s   e    o f   p       a     r   a   c   e   t   a   m   o   l       i    n        o     r       d     e   r    t  o     h e a d     t h i s   p   a   r   t   i   c   u   l   a   r     a   t   t   a   c   k        o   f   f     a   t   t h e   p  a   s   s       b   e   f   o   r   e    i t   g   o   t       a       c   h   a   n   c e       t   o       s   e   i   z e   a   s t r o n g e r   g   r   i   p    u p o n   m e   a n d   w r i n g m y   b   r   a   i   n     t  o     a   p u l p...

T  h   e   n   ,      o   f       c   o u r s e ,   a l m o s t   i  n   e   v   i   t   a   b   l   y    t h e   z i g   z a g s   a c t u a l l y   D   I   D       a    r   r i v e   a   n   d  ,   f o r   t h e         n   e   x   t       h   o  u   r     o r   s o ,   I   w a s   e   f   f   e   c   t   i   v   e   l   y       b   l   i   n   d   ,       a   n d   h   a   d       t   o       s   i   t       t   h   e   r   e       s   u   f   f   e   r  i   n   g     w   h   i   l   s   t    w e a r i n g   m y   s   u   n   g   l   a   s   s   e   s   i  n   d   o   o   r   s    w i t h   t h a t   " l o o k   a t   m e "   a i r   w h i c h   i s   s o   m u c h   f a v  o u r e d   b y   t h e   c e l e b r it y . . . 

B u t ,   a  f   t   e   r       a       w   h   i   l   e   ,        t h e   w o r s t  o f   i t   p a s s e d   a n d,  w h i ls t   I   s t i l  l  f e l t   r a t h e r   d   e   t   a   c   h   e   d     f o r     m u    c  h   o f   t h e   d a y ,   I   w a s   a b l e   t   o       m   u   d   d   l   e       t     h      r   o   u   g       h               a   n   d       f i n i s h     t   h   e     w   o   r k   a n d   f o l l o w  i t  w i t h   t h e   p  l a n n e d   d r iv e   to  a n   a p p  o i n t m e n t     f   o   r       m y     B   e   l   o   v     e d      o v e r   a t   t h e   o s t  e o   p   a   t   h   s     w a y   b e y o n d   t h e   o   t   h   e   r       s   i d   e       o   f     t o w n ,   b e f o r e   h e a d i n g   h o m e   a n d   p r e t t y   m  u   c   h       h  e   a   d   i   n   g    s t r a i g h t  t o   b e d   i n   t h e   v a  i n   h o p e   o f   a   g o o d   n i g h t ' s   s l e e p . 

  

I   a  m ,  o   f       c   o   u   r   s   e   ,       w   o   n   d   e   r   i   n   g     w h e t h e r   I   o n l y   g o t   t h i s   u n e x p e c t e d   a t t a c k   b e c a   u   s   e    I   h a v e   b e en  s l e e p i n  g       s   o       p   o o   r   l   y       r e   c e   n   t l y,   b u t   i t   c o u l d,   o f   c o  u   r s     e   ,       b   e       d   o   w   n   t o   a n y   n u m b e r   o f   f a c t o r s . .. 

I  s t i l l   f e l t   f a i r l y   f l a k e d    o   u   t       t   h   e       n   e   x   t      d   a   y   ,       t   o      b   e       h   o   n e s t   b u t   t h e   n       m i   g   r a i n   e s   a   l w   a   y   s     d   o       t   h   a   t     t o   m e . . .