Posts filed under 'Media'
For those who have been waiting for their next fix of sci-fi on TV, there is relief. Even light relief.
January saw the return of both “Primeval” and “Torchwood”. As each was new last year, their return is meant to offer both more of the same, and better…
Generally, so far, so good. There are still plenty of dinosaurs in “Primeval”, and this time they are getting to roam around larger venues: shopping centres, office complexes. I think there’s a theme park next week. As a holiday company is supporting the programme through advertising - “holidays for you and your little monsters” - Dan and I are speculating whether the theme park is belongs to the holiday company and is therefore a further version of advertising…
Meanwhile, “Torchwood” seems to be aiming to be both darker and, well, lighter. Doing an adapted version for children so that it can be shown before the watershed, as well as the original after 9pm, it’ll be interesting to see what is offered in each version. I anticipate that the violence will stay, in most, but I don’t know quite how much of the relationship jumping between the characters will get to stay.
However, there is also monster-lite. Digital channels allow you to see ever increasing amounts of Star Trek, and all its variants. At the time of writing, you can watch Deep Space Nine at 8pm every day. With a repeated version at 9pm in case you got distracted the first time. Clearly you can tell I know whereof I speak, but we try not to base too much of our lives around this. Honest.
Why bother with monsters? There’s other sci-fi that refuses to use them - “Firefly” has just humans, and the only monster-like characters are gradually revealed to be humans that have gone bad at the edge of space. But there again, surely we have enough humans gone bad in real life?
It can be suggested (which really means I’m parroting a certain amount of writing about sci-fi in the newspapers) that when we have more ‘monsters’ around us in the world, we invent more in fiction or entertainment as a way of dealing with our feelings about the real-world ones. In this current climate, where working out who is a ‘monster’, and who is not, is getting harder to do, having more ’rounded’ monsters in film etc may be a way of dealing with the difficulties of this situation.
Perhaps the one certainty is our monstrous appetite for scaring ourselves - in a safe setting…Contradictory. But then, these days, so are the monsters. “Battlestar Galactica” has made a reputation out of developing the characters of sensitive ‘baddies’ and ’goodies’ who are none too moral in their dealings with others.
And if monsters show us what we are capable of, with all our own contradictions, then perhaps we need to remind ourselves occasionally what that is. If only to fly our spaceships in the opposite direction.
January 22nd, 2008
You know what they say. Even nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. But when does nostalgia start?
It’s been a week where The Times has been including tokens to collect DVDs of children’s television. Mr Benn. The Flumps. Even the Wombles. But what have they called it? Nostalgia children’s TV.
Is this a sign that I am getting older, or that nostalgia is getting younger? Not so long ago, programmes like these had their own special place on Cult TV, a separate section of the main BBC site.
Call them cult, call them classic, even call it retro. But nostalgia to me suggests a bit more of a pipe and slippers approach. And while I have regaled you with the joys of cardigans, I don’t feel that children’s TV of the 70s, which in many cases is still being replayed every so often, is in the nostalgia department.
Nostalgia is the underpinning of novelty radios in inserts for the weekend papers. It’s adverts for products that weren’t that attractive in 1940, and are now more amusing for what they suggest about the period.
I wouldn’t want to suggest that all 70s TV (or indeed 80s, as “Willow the Wisp” is part of the collection) is tremendous. You may also note they are not selling us Bagpuss, or the Clangers, the ‘big guns’ of that era - spin offs and linked products for that time are clearly already well looked after in the marketing department.
Myself, I’m hoping for some ‘Ivor the Engine’. I think it’s time to reacquaint the viewing public with a dragon that slept on the coals of the train. You could even call it part of the ongoing Welsh renaissance. I’m sure Russell T. Davis will come up with something.
January 19th, 2008
When it’s a snicket? More viewing the Urban Dictionary slang website last night.
My normal test for these dialect search things is to put in the word ‘ginnel’, which is what I grew up with as a way to describe a small path or alleyway. It worked! It also offered ’snicket’, and I in turn offer back ‘wynd’, which is the one you tend to see quite a bit in Edinburgh, particularly for the narrow streets off the Royal Mile.
A further option is a twittering, which was one my Latin teacher at school used. However, let’s just say the Urban Slang site doesn’t deal very well with that one. But it does offer ‘flutester’, which is evidently a small ginnel. It’s good to be prepared for every eventuality.
I’m sure there are other regional variations - so if you can think of any, add a comment.
I had thought about titling this post ‘citrus ginnel’, as an alternative to ‘lemony snicket’. But then I might have looked a bit of a daft wazzock. You might have felt like a numpty if you hadn’t known. And muppets everywhere would be none the wiser.
January 16th, 2008
Blog writing is a dangerous thing. Yesterday I learned that one friend reads this blog ‘most days’; another met me at a group yesterday and mentioned she’d read the Robin Hood post from the day before. That’s immediate feedback for you!
Of course, they could have also posted a comment, and then I’d have known about them reading it. But there again, am I posting comments on others’ stuff? I read most of one friend’s film blog posts, but tend not to comment - don’t correct a man with superior film knowledge, eh? Or something.
All of which could mean there are others reading it, that I have no idea about. I don’t know if there’s some way of telling who’s read it, whether or not they leave a message. At least a few people I know who’ve mentioned something, I don’t even remember telling about the blog…
Anyway, can’t help but feel that it’s gratifying for people a) to have bothered reading it and b) to have said something after, one way or another. It makes me inclined to keep going, at least. This is bad news for the casual reader, who hoped for something light and frothy about the next series of Big Brother. For everyone else…maybe I’ll have to up my bus usage so I have enough to write about. You have been warned.
January 10th, 2008
…but they killed the leading lady. Being a bit taken aback by the sudden departure of Marion as a character from “Robin Hood”, with the series recently finished on the BBC, thought I’d see what others’ reactions were.
Talk about an outpouring. I didn’t sit and count how many comments(though it was a fairly interesting indication of how many different countries now view the programme, one way or another), but there must have been nigh on a hundred responses on a BBC page.
It did make me think back to my own reaction when another leading lady, Trinity, was killed in the final part of the Matrix trilogy. I may not have been ‘in shock’ and all the other descriptions when Marion was killed, but I do remember the shock seeing it happen the first time, as it were. (After all, sword through the middle vs large metal pole through the middle - not a lot to choose between them as a way to go.)
Here’s one way in which the internet is interesting - if you do feel upset, cheated (or equally elated, amazed) about the outcome of something you’ve been following, you can quickly find some more people who share the same opinion, or round up a few if you’re an early commenter.
It’s worth noting that only about 10% of those who commented upheld the way “Robin Hood” was handled - the rest laid in with some pretty strong adjectives describing the distress viewers had. Maybe it’s more so because ”Robin Hood” was seen as a family show. (I do struggle with that a bit, given the amount of death and bloodshed shown in it week by week.)
But clearly, Marion’s character had impressed on the feisty heroine front. It seems we have a need for such roles on TV. One person commented on comparisons between Billie Piper’s character of Rose (in “Doctor Who”), and that of Marion, as an indication of how strong female roles are really popular with viewers, but get stopped after a while.
I wondered why this has such a shock factor. Is it because we are unused to seeing female characters die in film or TV? Is it because we don’t normally see female characters who are also fighters? It’s worth bearing in mind that it’s only relatively recently that women in the British army have been allowed into front line positions, and some are still unhappy with this decision, even though there are women who are prepared to serve there.
Are we upset at the death of a woman, or the death of the love interest? Or are we just shocked at story conventions being turned upside down? I remember a similar reaction at the downbeat ending of “Twin Peaks”, nearly two decades before. It seems to be worse where a couple show signs of getting together in a drama, and then the opportunity is taken away from them.
This is a long post already; I’ll bring things to a close. But I think it’s interesting to see what people demand of their entertainment, and why, in relation to ‘real life’. Deputy article following soon.
January 8th, 2008
I sat down last night, and had nothing to say. Not often that happens…
The phrase reminded me of a Beatles line “Nothing to say // but it’s OK” - we happened to be listening to the track last night. In some ways, it’s quite nice to think that there’s lots of times when others are stumped for words too. It’s quite reassuring, not to have to fire on all cylinders all the time.
This song, “Good Morning”, is part of the album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. 2007 saw the 40th anniversary of that ‘radically different’ album. Beatles tracks are so well known, and, like the best songs, continue to speak to us. But what struck me last night was how some of it is also now dated - not just language, but concepts too.
“Good morning” has a line “It’s time for tea and meet the wife”. How many people would now refer to the ‘wife’, let alone have the mechanism of bringing someone home to meet her? And is she at home now, in any case, to be met?
Another of the lines refers to a “bit of skirt”. There’s no lack of put down terms for women nowadays, despite women’s lib - rap music has added its own collection in recent years. But in the days of women, and, increasingly, men, being more varied in what they wear, and when, this phrase seems to belong to a rather different world. It’s funny - the 60s is billed as this time of great sexual liberation, and the Beatles were seen as part of that whole scene. It’s interesting then to catch a more conservative tone in this, their great experimental album.
The song that struck me the most, for attitudes that have almost vanished, is “When I’m 64″. For starters, increased life expectancy, and expectations of an active life for much longer, mean that the age of 64 has less impact than it did at the time of writing. The throw away line about grandchildren’s names has a different ring - “Vera, Chuck and Dave”, where one of our main politicians likes to be known as Dave, and Vera is sure to be recycled as a name, along with Agnes, Ruby, and various others. (Chuck…? Perhaps its time has not yet come as a name.)
But just before this line, there’s another that speaks of an era that has almost gone. Renting ”a cottage on the Isle of Wight” may have gone out with the era of cheap flights, though with eco tourism on the up, it’ll maybe gain favour again. But the truly telling part is “We will scrimp and save.” Governments have enough difficulty encouraging people to save, let alone to scrimp…and other experts still will tell you that we have to keep spending in order to keep the economy afloat.
Scrimping. Maybe, like make do and mend, it’ll come back in the eco backlash. Maybe we will long for simpler times. But I do think that our collective spirits have moved a long long way away from scrimping. We are too used to getting our own way, having it now, and having it bigger and better.
Maybe Dave (Cameron) will save us from ourselves, but perhaps we have to look to Chuck and Vera to help us sort ourselves out.
December 11th, 2007
Dan’s mum has got a mobile phone. And I managed to teach her how to use it!
Made me realise how far I’ve come, being able to do so. Only a bit over a year ago, I was still getting my head round texting, remembering to check for messages, that kind of thing. I still jump when my mobile rings, text bound as I tend to be.
But clearly I’ve learned something. What pleased me most was feeling confident enough to check all the options, search for what we needed, as her phone was a bit different to mine. Normally this level of experimentation with technology is not really me. But perhaps a little, now and then, is manageable. Onward and upward.
December 9th, 2007
Book clubs. Another invention for society that has less reason to get together? Or a great way to encourage people to keep thinking, discussing, and so on?
Your choice. Personally I am fairly happy to have opinions about books without needing to consult others on them. But there is something good about seeing what others think - memories of class discussions in English Lit classes. To be honest, if book clubs had been around when I was in 6th form, that would have saved some of my teenage ‘no one understand what’s important in the world!’ grips. (Or maybe not. Teenagers are fairly robust in their assertion that people don’t understand, even if they do.)
It dawned on me recently that I could write book reviews on the blog as well - a kind of book club of one, if you like. Others write their fairly regular film reviews, or reviews of sermons/tapes etc - why not regular books too?
Facebook of course seeks to capture that discussional interest. You can have virtual bookshelves - and film and music collections too - to show off your favoured artistes. I add a few more books most times I go on - some from ages ago, some that I’ve read more recently, but I quite like seeing pictures of the covers come up, and seeing what others are reading.
Meanwhile, however, I have been back to reading in the bath. Despite my recent posts on the joys of magazine articles, it is not as easy to read them in the bath. Newspapers are a bit big, and likely to disintegrate on contact with water. Books it has to be.
So I picked out “Perfume”, a book made into a film earlier this year. As we’d had a holiday in the south of France this year, not so far from the perfume making centre of Grasse, I wanted to remind myself what it was about.
I read “Perfume” in my teens, I think. I was captivated by the description of how perfume was made, how people worked out what scents were in a particular concoction. It also evokes a particular era in France, and brings to life the teeming masses, the public celebrations, the various occupations that are less well known today (tanners, wet nurses, and so on).
So far, so good. But “Perfume” is also subtitled “The story of a murderer”. Less cheerful. The writer, Patrick Suskind, takes two starting points: a man who has a brilliant ‘nose’ for scent of any kind - and the same man who himself has no personal smell.
Other reviewers have called his work Gothic. You could equally say that he takes these ideas, and pushes them to their logical - and even illogical - conclusions. This is where the book gets its power - there is a Greek tragedy at work in the plot, although one where you also get the sense of choice, of the protagonist having the opportunity to turn back or pursue another course at different stages.
Reading it again this time, I was more aware of the morality around the story. The tale starts with adults’ responses to the character as an infant - their fear of him because of his lack of personal smell, their sense that he is somehow in league with the devil. Easy enough to dismiss, in our more tolerant society. But as those around him perish - and in some cases, Suskind shows how they perish decades later, in a setting they have sought to avoid - there is a growing sense of doom for all who work with him; those who show kindness, those who do not. As this continues through the book, it becomes more and more unsettling.
In other ways, this morality holds sway for the main character, Grenouille, too, even though he does not recognise morality, or at least church jurisdiction. Even when he attains what he sets out to do, it does not give him what he hopes, and the result of this impacts back on him, drives him to a particular end. There is perhaps a more ‘natural’ justice coming out of this macabre tale, despite the way this doesn’t seem the case at the start.
Enough thoughts for now. But perhaps these book reviews will also help in the long slow quest to write more of my own stuff, literature or otherwise. The next question is how brave I feel to share my own creative writing with others. Judging by the place where I’m doing most of it - online - I think I have to answer that with “braver than I have been…”
December 5th, 2007
It’s not quite “I am loved, I am loved…” But a friend who I catch up with on Facebook, and who lives a long way away, told me that she’d been reading my blog. And she liked it!
Hurrah for those little encouragements friends can bring. I’d been tiring a bit of Facebook recently - not much new, too many car races to upgrade my virtual car etc. (It’s much easier to own a car on Facebook. You don’t need refresher lessons for one thing.)
Tonight, I go on, and there’s a lot more to read. Maybe it’s been one of those weeks for others, and having reached the weekend, they’re letting off steam online. Although another has been letting off steam with piles of baking (which is more realistically generating steam, I’m sure), so she’s entitled to a small sit down.
E M Forster was the one with the famous phrase “Only connect”. It came in a fairly dystopian story, if I remember rightly. Our English teacher duly underlined the quote. All this when there were a few computers about the place, but the Internet was in the hands of geeks, and certainly the concept of connecting was much more about face to face, phone call to phone call.
So, online connecting. It’s good, don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t be on Facebook otherwise. Or emailing people. Sometimes, I guess, the virtual doesn’t quite satisfy.
But at other times…when would I find the time to email my friends about my little ideas, to encourage them in their own worlds? Particularly when those worlds are further away from my own. As people move away, lives overlap less, even this level of connecting is good.
There’s a verse that has been going around my head recently - coming from the time when I would write a daily diary, and add a quote at the start of each entry. I hope I’ve remembered it correctly:
“Sometimes the writer says
To hell with words
And longs to dig ditches. She writes of this longing,
and you, because you are her friend,
Write back.” [Erica Jong]
Online communication. It helps you know you’re not alone. And sometimes, it helps us to respond to each other, out of very ordinary circumstances, and find a moment of connection. Amen to that.
November 30th, 2007
Most frequent text message? ‘Now on bus on way home’. Or cup on way home. Predictive text is all very well, but given the number of times I send the same message, you’d think it would predict the right word, eh?
Having now had a mobile for maybe a bit over a year, I am getting the hang of things a bit more, though I am definitely in the ‘laughable’ category as far as teens go. I don’t upgrade my handset! I don’t have a cheeky ring tone! I don’t play songs loudly for my posse to sing along to on the bus! (All these are fairly common on my bus route.)
I resisted mobiles for ages. Why be available all the time? What’s wrong with ‘your word being your bond’ for when you’ll meet up with someone? But they do come in handy on work trips abroad, where the cheap B&B you found online has no phone in the room, or it’s too late to call but you’re thinking of your beloved, that kind of thing.
Another reason to be laughable to teens - I top up my mobile once a year…or so far, anyway. Given that I almost only use it for texts, that makes life easy. Consequently, when it actually rings, I get a bit panicked. I can’t get it out of my bag in time. Dear oh dear, they might say.
In my defence, I am a step beyond Mum and Dad having a mobile ‘for the car’ but only turning it on in cases of dire emergency (actually, I’m not sure when they turn it on at all, though it may be when Mum drives back from choir on her own.)
Predictive text can be fun though, in emails too. I used to have a colleague, whose name would regularly default to ‘boffin’ when I started typing it in. It was a reasonably good choice too…And I could change my name to frydab, or something equivalent, if I get fed up with being Frydman. Though I doubt it would mean they’d spell it right then either.
Anyway, I am smug in the knowledge that I don’t commit the cardinal mobile sin: to shout loudly ‘hello? hello? yes…I’m on the bus…train…’ and other forms of public transport. Those mortals are destined for the circle of hell where the bus doth runneth over. That’s my prediction, anyway.
November 30th, 2007
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