BOOKS: 1984 and A Clockwork Orange

Nineteen Eighty-four – you just can’t get away from it.  Culturally it’s become more than the sum of its parts, like Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band you don’t need to enjoy it (or even have fully read it), you just need to know it well enough to be able to appear credible.  

It is a clumsy read in places.  Winston Smith, the protagonist of the piece, is a cipher.  He represents Orwell.  When Winston tries to connect with the proles in a pub one suspects this is how the Eton boy Orwell felt trying to bond with the working class he tried to connect with but ultimately couldn’t (“Wanna live like common people?”)  Orwell’s politics aren’t seamlessly woven into the text but spelt out in marker pen. We read pages of the diadactive subversive book Smith gets his hands on, a shockingly crude technique for a book with this reputation.  

From the first chapter onwards you are waiting to see how Winston will be caught and what will happen to him.  You don’t care because you are concerned for the character of Winston – you care because you want to find out what happens in the Ministry of Love, where the bad things, and therefore the interesting things happen.  This isn’t a book that expects its readers to care about it’s main focus of attention, but to learn about life in Airstrip One.  There’s no humour in the prose but sheer exposition…

George Orwell at work in Room 101...

And that leads me to something I’d never noticed before.  The appendix linked to the book, which is written as a supposedly dispassionate history of Newspeak linked to the main text – a page from a history textbook– contains one line where it mentions Winston Smith by name.  This is jarring.  This implies that the main part of the novel has been used as a primary source for the unknown historians of Newspeak.  But the main text of the novel is not written in the first person (it is not, for instance, Winston’s diary).  So if this third-person account of Winston’s life is being used as a source whose voice is it?  Is it a dossier in the Thought Police’s files?  When you notice this it calls the authorial voice of the novel in to question, and creates an even deeper sense of unease.  Who are we when we read Nineteen Eighty-four… are we not seeing Airstrip One life through Winston Smith’s eyes after all, but through the dispassionate eyes of The Party?  The lack of humour in the prose tallies with this reading.  Nineteen Eighty-four is a record of life according to The Party in 1984.  The reader is a member of the Thought Police, and probably not a very high ranking member.  Orwell has created quite a rare thing – the unreliable third-person narrative.  This is the best way to read the book now - as a creepy, perverted, curiously emotionless report.

Anthony Burgess (who we last mentioned patronising The Beatles) calls out Nineteen Eighty-four in his book 1985.  The most interesting point about Orwell Burgess makes (and the most obvious one once it has been made) is that Nineteen Eighty-four is about 1948.  Burgess was an almost-contemporary of Orwell.  Certainly he remembers 1948, and points out a lot of the parallels between Airstrip One and post-war Britain – all of a sudden the USSR was the enemy after having been our staunch ally against Nazi Germany, in much the same way that Eurasia and Eastasia alternate as the enemy in the never-ending war in Nineteen Eighty-four.  The poor quality Victory cigarettes Winston smokes were the same brand British troops were given.  The rationing of everything was, if anything, worse than it had been during the war – the razorblade shortage in Oceania would have been all too familiar to contemporary readers.  Big Brother was part of an advertising slogan of the time and, perhaps most comically, Room 101 was where Orwell worked in the BBC.

Nineteen Eighty-four, the godfather of dystopias, isn’t a predicition of what will happen.  Dystopic stories are the author’s present concerns turned up to 11.  Nineteen Eighty-four can be read as a Thought Police dossier of life in 1948 – and is therefore destined to date.

A Clockwork Orange; Burgess’ legacy whether he wanted it to be or not is different.  It doesn’t describe society in any structural detail; it just describes one where there are violent young men.  If it comes to pass that we live in a society without youths being violent then the book will immediately become irrelevant.  But for this reason, A Clockwork Orange will never become irrelevant.  

The iconic cover to A Clockwork Orange

Nineteen Eighty-four is ‘about’ society, but mainly 1948 society.  A Clockwork Orange is interested in the individual.  Burgess’ book is concerned with morality and its place within any society.  The main difference between these two famous dystopias is that, if in Nineteen Eighty-four we have a possibly unreliable third person narrator that is faceless and disturbing, in A Clockwork Orange we have an unreliable narrator that is seductive and exuberant.  It’s easy to forget, if you’re familiar with the film, how much more of a little shit Alex is in the book.  He’s arguably only a manslaughterer in the film but in the book he’s a stone cold killer when he commits his murder in prison.  

A Clockwork Orange is not (like Nineteen Eighty-four) about a man in a dystopic society who feels, vaguely, there could and should be something better – oh, if only he had some subversive literature to read!  A Clockwork Orange is about a boy in a dystopic society who doesn’t know any better and doesn’t particularly care.  It puts the id under the microscope.  Alex destroys, for fun.  The book puts the liberal reader in an uncomfortable position and shows no mercy to values – if you want a free society you have to accept the possibility, the inevitability of an Alex.  Otherwise you don’t want a free society and are just as reactionary as the novel’s government.  What side are you really on?  Fuck with society or fuck with the individual?  Neither is attractive but…  What’s it going to be then, eh?  The freedom Winston Smith craves is available in abundance in Burgess’ world –  but Alex is young and hates virtue for its own sake – and so isn’t virtuous.  And virtue isn’t something that can be drummed into someone via traditional kickings or via the ‘humane’ Ludovic Technique.  Virtue doesn’t mean anything in any society unless it comes from the heart

A Clockwork Orange stands up as a much more complex examination of a dystopic society than Nineteen Eighty-four because it is by its nature concerned with the eternal individual, not an inverted present that has moved on.  This is not to denigrate its achievements but to recognise that its achievement is within the world of social satire and has dated somewhat – as social satire does.  Alex finds a road to redemption in A Clockwork Orange, and a potential life.  Winston Smith finds a love of Big Brother and death.  Winston Smith is Orwell’s pawn, used to show a world and discarded.  Even Oceania shows more concern for Winston Smith than Orwell.  Burgess shows how someone can be the worst kind of product of a fucked up society and still make good – because Alex would exist in any society.  A Clockwork Orange is concerned with the nature of humanity. Nineteen Eighty-four is concerned with the Britain of 1948 taken to its extremities and is by default less powerful than A Clockwork Orange because we are further away from 1948 than we are from being human.  

MUSIC: The Beatles' Early Albums

Although I on and off listen to The Beatles quite regularly (at leas a few times in a year), why hadn't I listened to any of their earlier music since being a teenager?  What could their pop from the early 60s have that their solid albums from the late 60s didn't?

In the mid-90s The Beatles ‘reformed’ without John Lennon, who was unavailable due to health problems.  Another influential band are about to complete the process of doing a very similar reformation at the end of this month, and we’ll get to them all in good time.  

Obviously The Beatles getting back together after so many years was news, and there was a great deal of hype, which hit home to the younger me how much The Beatles meant.  I mean obviously I liked them a lot and everything but there was something different going on there.  I mean, there wouldn’t have been the same amount of attention for Herman’s Hermits that’s for sure…  I think it was the first time I had ever got the sense of The Beatles being something different and meaning more to people than just another band from the 1960s.  It was first time I properly understood how much significance they actually had.

The Beatles were then and are still very, very popular but with a slightly peculiar reservation when it comes to credibility.  Most people who still listen to The Beatles don’t listen to about half of their albums, namely the first 5 (the Beatlemania ones, if you like).  Rubber Soul through to Let It Be are normally what the cool indie kids listen to, and with good reason – these are the albums that are more complex and interesting.  The period where they found Dylan, drugs, mysticism and legal disputes.  I still remember the first time I heard Revolver, with the garbled count-in of ‘Taxman’, and thinking the cassette was broken because it sounded so weird.  And then by the end of the album realising where The Chemical Brothers had got their career from on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’.  ‘Love Me Do’ just wouldn’t have held the same sonic revelations.  I expect those amongst my generation who got into The Beatles started similarly – why would you listen to something so prosaic like ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ when you could listen to all the weirdness of ‘I Am The Walrus’?  

This album, for Kurt Cobain, represented The Beatles at their peak

Kurt Cobain is probably the only artist (certainly the only icon) from the last 20 odd years to state a preference for the songs from the early 60s (‘About A Girl’ was famously written after an evening of listening to With The Beatles, and it definitely comes from exactly the same headspace as ‘Don’t Bother Me’).

The Beatles themselves, certainly Lennon and Harrison, didn’t seem particularly sentimental about this era.  Lennon speaking at the end of the 60s said he felt it had gone against his nature to dress in a suit, selling out to make money, although Lennon was a constant revisionist who often told a version of history that most suited his current audience.  But for all of them things from the start of their career were going to make them less proud than things from later on, because they had progressed as artists.  They weren’t going to make great claims for things they felt they had long surpassed, which is why they seemed less enthusiastic when talking about those songs.

However, it remains a fact that all that screaming and hysteria that followed The Beatles like a curse wasn’t for songs from Sergeant Pepper but for the early stuff.  They became “bigger than Jesus” (in Lennon’s hubristic but accurate words) with songs like ‘She Loves You’.  Bob Dylan sat up and took notice of ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ when he was the most influential singer songwriter in the world, which seems laughable now – as if Dizzy Gillespie had been inspired by George Formby.  It’s a question of relativism and historical bias.  Because The Beatles outstripped their earlier work in no time at all, it’s easy to overlook that earlier work, and to forget that they hadn’t mapped out their career in advance.

Having recently acquired copies of all the remastered albums I spent a week giving all the early Beatles albums – the unfashionable Beatles albums – a good old airing.  I enjoyed most of it, but it made very clear that at that point they were primarily a singles and live shows band.  Albums were just where singles could be resold with some filler to, well, fill up the running time (although in honesty all of The Beatles’ albums have a fair amount of filler – look at Let It Be).  Even the best songs from this era are difficult to listen to if you’re searching for anything meaningful from the lyrics (which are generally a combination of the words ‘love’, ‘her’, ‘you’, ‘him’, ‘me’ ‘man’, ‘woman’ and occasionally ‘diamond ring’).  But that’s a wrongheaded way of listening to these songs because they weren’t trying to express anything complicated (or anything specific at all).  They were trying to be exciting in a short amount of time, and transfer that excitement to other people.  Anthony Burgess said that “they perform a simple job, adequately”, but he was wrong – they performed a simple job extraordinarily well.  If the lyrics are worthlessly repetitive then the music is versatile and unexpected.  

The albums are shamelessly fun, catchy and deceptive – and punchy enough that when quite unlovable songs like ‘Mr Moonlight’ come on, they go away quickly.  Also, there are more songs you move your hips to.  Perhaps that’s why Help! is viewed as the transitional album, because it’s the last time they even tried to make songs people could dance to.  Rubber Soul is excellent, but from that point on it’s music for the head, not for the hips.

Beatles For Sale is the only Beatlemania album I found it hard to warm
to - it's full of insipid covers and limp originals, and its title suggests
 it was intended as no more than a cash in

Playing ‘Love Me Do’ next to ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and trying to comprehend  that there’s only 3 years between them is mindboggling.  They don’t only sound decades apart but worlds apart.  I’ll never love With The Beatles, but I’ve realised that I like it a lot (Lennon’s snide, sarcastic voice was made for such cynicism as ‘Money’).  These albums do have a sense of urgency in a way that the later albums (made by the slightly older and much richer men) don’t. In terms of artistic ambition the later albums win hands down, but listening to the earlier albums gets past The Beatles as mythic cultural legends and reminds you of what made them famous in the first place.  

The fact that everyone was vaguely disappointed by that 90s reunion was that it forcibly reminded people that The Beatles were musicians before they got to become legends.  The public were expecting something legendary from legends, and they got ‘Free As A Bird’ instead.  It was by no means terrible, and arguably more worthwhile than banging out the oldies for money like The Rolling Stones. However, you got the feeling that by reforming they had traded in a bit of their reputation as well.  This is something we will discuss again in a few weeks time in relation to the Pixies…

EPILEPSY: Keep Taking The Tablets

Don't Say Brainstorm - An occasional chat about Epilepsy...

"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?" "You ask a glass of water..." - The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

I’ve recently had a change in medication again, and it’s not the smoothest transition.

It has the effect of making me exhausted.  Absolutely shattered.  The dreams I have are more surreal than they used to be but seem much more real.  It’s just a matter of time, waiting for the body to adjust to this new medication, and things will get back to normal – but just waiting for normal service to be resumed can seem like hard work in itself.  First world problem I know – a self-indulgent complaint from the well fed with free access to drugs – but apparently I seem slightly drunk because I’m running a bit slower than usual, and seeming drunk at 9am is bad for my reputation.  I suppose you could say it's like being drunk with all the fun taken out of it.

Of course I’m not really complaining – well, maybe just a bit, but the bottom line is always going to be that if something is going to reduce my chances of having fits then I’m all for it.  Daily medication is a fact of life for many people in the world, millions of epilepsy sufferers and many more millions who have other illnesses.  I am sure that the vast majority of people would say that the good that their drugs do far outweighs the bad.

Medication has been a presence for every day of my adult life, and a few days of my adolescence for good measure.  Has it changed me?  How would I know?  Put very simplistically, the medications I have been on slow down or dull the brain to reduce the chances of seizures.  So is the version of me I have lived with for half of my life a slowed down and dulled version of some other possible me?  If I didn’t have to take these drugs would I be quicker on the uptake, wittier, more creative and ambitious?  (How could I be wittier?) And would I like this alternative, drug-free me more or less?  I don’t mean to suggest I would be completely different; however, if I hadn’t been on medication for the last 15 years I would be at the very least a slightly different person because I would have had an entirely different experience of life.

Being on medication means taking responsibility for your own condition – making sure you have enough drugs stocked up, enough with you when going away somewhere and remembering to take them.  This is true whether you are well equipped for such responsibility or not.  As an irresponsible young male, I think I did relatively well at organising this side of my life.  There have been very few occasions when I forgot to take my pills, and those times that I did taught me the hard way to have a better memory.  In a way it provided, and still provides, a form of structure, a ritual that bookends the day. 

There are so many different types of pills to be on for epilepsy. 

There are over 20 types of drugs for epilepsy.
Incidentally, my table is littered with blister packs such as these...

Sodium Valproate is one of the most common, and the first type that I was on.  It was moderately successful, in that the seizures were drastically reduced; but the aim is to cut out fits entirely, and I have had at least one fit every year that I have been diagnosed.  After moving to a combination of Lamotrigine and Levitiracetam 5 years ago the fits reduced further, but after a spate of seizures last Christmas a third drug, Carbmazepine, has been added – which is where you came in.  These tweaks in medication are always discussed with the consultants I have seen, and my attitude has generally been ‘why not?’  Despite my griping about the initial effects of this new drug I’m very pro-medication, and am thankful to live in a time when medicine exists at the level of sophistication it does now.  Having epilepsy in the middle-ages would have sucked.  At best you would get some Valerian root to chew on; at worst given up on as a lost cause, and left to convulse as and when you pleased.

There can be a stigma about medication.  Some people who are prescribed medication don’t want it, perhaps because they themselves see it as a stigma.  I have heard an account of someone who didn’t want to go to a doctor or get medication for their seizures because they thought they might lose their job.  The person in this account was a lorry driver.  This kind of thing is why I am pro-medication (and educating people about the condition).  Though sympathetic to that person’s situation that is undeniably irresponsible behaviour, putting the sufferer’s life and the lives of others at risk.  If people were more informed about epilepsy that individual might not have had to feel forced into neglecting his condition.  As it turned out the seizures in this case were mild, were controlled by medication, and the job was kept.

In the 21^st century the medication we have helps people with a condition like epilepsy live healthy and (relatively) normal lives.  Pharmaceutical drugs should be embraced.  For a short period of time I may not enjoy the fact my new medication has sapped some of my energy – but I know that in the long run it gives me a chance to have a life like other people, which is something that everyone should be entitled to.  Generally speaking, were I to avoid taking medication not only would I be failing to confront reality but I would be denying myself that basic right. 

Maybe if I hadn’t been on medication since this whole epilepsy thing started I would have been a different person (for better or worse); but either way I would have been a person that lived in fear of a treatable medical condition ruining everything – probably with strong justification.  Ultimately, I am a better person for feeling safe and independent, and feeling exhausted for a few days is a small price to pay for that.

For more information about epilepsy contact the Epilepsy Society and Epilepsy Action

TV: BBC 3 To Be Axed

I come to bury BBC3 with faint praise.

BBC3 is closing – or at least being consigned to an internet-only fate.  It’s always sad to hear news of cultural death, even when culture in this case often means repeats of (the long off-the-boil) Family Guy.  The last thing the BBC tried to cut that gathered this much press attention was when the 6 Music radio station was threatened with closure, but was granted a reprieve when there was a massive online campaign – we’ll get onto why I don’t think history will repeat itself later.

So - the BBC is trying to save money, and there’s nothing particularly new there – the BBC is always trying to save money.  Controversy always comes when big cuts are made.  Instead of each channel being told to make cuts, a whole channel is being scrapped.  It’s the BBC’s channel for youth, attracting under-30s in away that its other channels don’t.  Its death will be a massive blow to new comedy…

…according to the biased Russell Kane (where will he find the money to feed his hair now?)  The problem with this argument is that BBC3 isn’t producing good comedy often enough.  It is telling that every time the story has been reported on the news, Gavin and Stacey and Little Britain (programmes that ended 4 and 7 years ago respectively) are mentioned as BBC3s highlight programmes.  When someone is threatening to close your station you need to be able to make a strong case against by having really, really good current content.  And BBC3 will have trouble with this, because its strongest content now is repeats, either of its own programmes or of BBC1 big hitters like Eastenders or Doctor Who.  To an extent, you can see why the argument to make it an online only service makes sense because its schedules sometimes look like the homepage of the BBC iPlayer.  

It is more than possible that BBC3 is the fall guy here.  Whatever you say about the quality of BBC3’s programmes, BBC1’s schedules aren’t full to the brim with amazing originality either.  The thing is BBC1 isn’t good enough often enough to justify its existence sometimes.  On Friday night we watched the creaking Room 101 having its cobwebs blasted off yet again, followed by a very lacklustre Jonathan Creek; these programmes started last century and are frankly well past it.  BBC3 is getting all the attention, but it’s a scapegoat to distract attention from BBC1’s lack of originality and substance.  BBC1 could take more of a high ground were it not for the fact that a lot of its own programmes are quite shocking.  For all the criticism of BBC3’s ‘lowest common denominator’ comedy, it’s BBC1 that gives us Mrs Brown’s Boys, a show that goes about as low as common denominators go.

This is not to argue that BBC3 has lots of great programming, because it doesn’t.  It’s just to point out that its quality is not inconsistent with some of the BBC’s overall TV output.  There was talk of BBC4 and BBC2 being combined to save money, and instead they’ve chosen to make BBC3 an online only service.  In my opinion they should have combined BBC3 with BBC1.  BBC3 makes just enough quantity of quality programming that it could easily displace some of BBC1’s screensaver dross and make the main channel more attractive to young people.  The programmes it repeats all the time could be made permanently available on the iPlayer (if not already there) and comedy like Russell Howard’s Good News and Bad Education could liven up BBC1’s stagnant comedy scheduling a bit (and Russell Howard is putting the main channel’s comedy output to shame should be pretty shaming in itself...)  It would be nice to have an inclusive main channel again anyway.  What’s wrong with having the main channel do some under-30s programming, rather than putting it out in a ghetto with no crossover appeal?

BBC3 as a concept is insulting to its own audience by implying that they don’t merit being catered for on a mainstream channel, and instead need an underfunded ghetto filled with repeats.  And because the BBC in general treats BBC3’s audience with a degree of contempt, it hasn’t got a loyal audience.  This is where the comparisons with the 6 Music almost-closure fails.  For a start, 6 Music was a radio station and BBC3 is a TV channel – the stakes are much higher in TV because more time and money is involved in making an evening’s worth of programmes than in paying a DJ to play records all evening.  But that aside, they are two fundamentally different media, absorbed in different ways.  Radio stations get loyal listeners much more easily because they find a DJ they like, trust them to choose the music, and if they don’t like a track it’ll change in 3 minutes or so.  

In the 21st Century, TV channels do not get loyal viewers partly because of the surfeit of choice - people channel-hop until they find something good on.  Only certain programmes still have people tuning in specifically for them live, mainly the soaps and ‘Event’ series like Sherlock.  It’s the programmes that have the loyal viewers, not the channel.  People can get passionate about a genre of music and be (for instance) a punk fan; but it’s rare for people to be a fan of a genre of television – there aren’t many drama, documentary or panel-show fans.  When it comes to television peoples’ tastes are more specific and discerning, even when they are tastefully discerning to watch is Snog, Marry, Avoid.

Anyway, 6 Music was in a better position to start a grass-roots campaign because of the relative diversity of its audience.  6 Music’s audience spans more than one demographic; it has different programmes catering for different tastes and ages throughout the week.  BBC 3 has all its eggs in the same under-30s basket.  A basket which (people more cynical than myself might argue) is made up of people more likely to shrug their shoulders and switch to E4 or Sky Living or Comedy Central (or even BBC1).  

It would be extremely satisfying if BBC3 came out with some blinding hit comedies to make the decision seem ridiculous, but it doesn’t seem very likely. If it could point to a list of 10 crucial programmes it has produced in the last 4 years it would be in with more of a chance, but frankly it can only just about manage to do that for its entire existence (and even to do that you have to include Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps).  In principle it’s a shame.  But in practice, I think we’ll live without it.

FILM: The Wolf Of Wall Street

New York, New York...

Today's guest blog comes courtesy of Ms Sarah Scoonover, aka Asha Vose from Red Room.  Originally there was talk of a House Of Cards 2 preview, but apparently it's too good to talk about without giving anything away.  Instead, she gives her thoughts on Scorsese's latest...

In keeping with the blog, I will discuss The Wolf of Wall Street, the latest Martin Scorsese film. Scorsese is famous for dark films with a heavy masculine audience like Goodfellas, Gangs of New York, and Taxi Driver. He’s brilliant, beloved of actors and screenwriters alike. There are a number of recurrent themes in his films: corruption, the casual nature of criminal violence, and self-sabotage among others. This film covered all of them.

I went into the theater (that’s right, American spelling) on a weeknight. It’s a nice theater, but the bored police officer who has been there every night since the shootings last year, made it hard to feel completely safe. It was easy to feel watched.

After the previews, I heard the unmistakable narration of Leondardo DiCaprio as main character Jordan Belfort. He opens the film snorting coke from a stripper’s most un-sunlit place.

At that moment, my experience of the film changed in a fundamental way. I went in expecting a film about finance, crime, and possibly drugs. I in no way expected to laugh until I fell out of my chair. But I did, repeatedly during the film.

The film isn’t light-hearted, but there’s a special kind of dark humor that carries it through. There is heavy criticism directed at the perceived apathy of the American people toward financial regulation and white collar crime in general. There are few, if any, good people in the movie.

What I’m trying to say, is it isn’t the easiest film to watch. It’s rough on a viewer; the characters make increasingly amoral decisions, bad things happen to good people, drugs and prostitutes abound, finally an awful lot of money is won and lost under the worst of circumstances to the worst people.

If you can find humor in the lowest rungs of humanity, then you’ll enjoy this film as much as I did; however, I do feel compelled to add a few caveats. Warnings for the viewer: there are uses of bad language, sex, and drugs in the film that will put off even the most seasoned moviegoer. Also, you’ll leave the theater with a powerful urge to try Quaaludes.

You have been warned.

If you like my writing style, I mostly talk books over at Redroom under Asha Vose. Thanks again for letting me post.

Without further ado, I return you to your regular blogger.

So what are you waiting for?  Go check out Asha's other work at Redroom!

EPILEPSY: How To Be An Epileptic

Don't Say Brainstorm - An occasional chat about epilepsy...

Is it really true that everyone is allowed one fit without having epilepsy?

I don't resent my epilepsy.  Obviously I don’t enjoy it, but the condition came early enough in my life so that it didn’t impede on an existing lifestyle.  Some peoples’ condition causes them to have more than one seizure a day, whereas I only have them a few days of the year.  It doesn’t make my life feel too much different to how it would be if I didn’t have epilepsy, and for that I am grateful.

No matter how serious the condition though, being diagnosed with epilepsy obviously has a massive impact on someone’s life.  Being epileptic stops you from doing a lot of things – obviously piloting aircraft and extreme sports are right out.  But even more everyday activities have to be approached with more care than usual – having a bath for instance, or going to the pub.  Alcohol reduces the effect of the medication I take and nowadays I even try to be sensible enough to actually bear that in mind.  Driving is probably the biggest thing that I miss, or rather the opportunity of learning how to drive.  After living in a village for two years I realised it was the lack of freedom that came with a lack of transport that annoyed me the most.
How does it happen then – at what point do you go from not having epilepsy to having it?  It obviously depends on the patient’s first experience with the NHS, and how that is dealt with; and sometimes that can be surprisingly blasé.  

I was diagnosed in my early teens, but it wasn’t after my first fit.  The first seizure I had was during the summer holidays when I was 14.  One moment I had been playing a game on the computer and found myself on the sofa.  My younger sister was the only other person in the house, and she managed to get the neighbour over the road to help.  She was obviously very worried – I’ve always said that for me the fits aren’t as bad for me as they are for the people around me.  I just have to wake up a bit confused, it’s everyone else that panics.  

I was taken to see a doctor that afternoon, and heard for the first time the piece of advice: “Everyone is allowed one fit without being epileptic”.  Anyone who has had a seizure is likely to have heard something similar.  I was told to go home and rest and so I did.  Doctors know their stuff, so we follow their advice.

Although I will never drive one of these I get to ride in them often enough

Except this advice – everyone having one fit without it being a cause for alarm – is questionable.  Hearing it makes you feel better if you’ve just had a fit for the first time, because it makes you worry less that you might have epilepsy.  But when you analyse it a bit more it is a silly thing to say.  If someone had a heart attack they wouldn’t be told that ‘everyone is allowed one heart attack without needing to be checked out for a heart condition’.  So why should someone who has just had a seizure be told that they needn’t worry about epilepsy, and don’t need to have it checked out further?  In many ways, it is the medical profession’s own hand-me-down advice to match the other urban myths about putting spoons in mouths and so on.  It is rooted in imperfect studies carried out in hospitals in the 1960s-70s, but it is not advice that is taught to medical professionals at university.  It is received wisdom.  It’s not written down anywhere and it isn’t part of anyone’s training. But it’s advice that’s given often.  Why?

There is a 50/50 chance that someone who has an unprovoked seizure will have another.  So sending someone home without treating it as something that should be at least followed up at a later date is not a good thing.  It is not neglectful, because that implies that the professionals aren’t doing something they’ve been taught to do.  Rather, it comes round again to a hazy understanding of seizures and epilepsy as we discussed last time we were on this subject.  If an unprovoked seizure has a high chance of being an indicator that another one could happen it should certainly be investigated.  I strongly believe this.  To pass it off as something that doesn’t need to be worried about is something you might expect a hopeful relative to do.  But the NHS needs to come up with a better strategy than this.  It needs to have a strategy full stop for dealing with people having their first seizure, instead of well-meaningly fobbing them off with comforting words based on nothing.

The gap between my first and second fits was about 9 months, and I don’t remember much about that one apart from being in A&E for 8 hours on a Saturday night in Nottingham.  You really see some things in A&E, and especially on a Saturday night in Nottingham.  To be diagnosed with epilepsy, all you need is to have had two unprovoked seizures – it doesn’t matter how long a time it’s been between them.  After the incident that Saturday I was sorted out with an appointment with a consultant and some scans, eventually leading to being an official card-carrying epileptic.  (Literally card-carrying – got a medical exemption certificate in my wallet and everything!)  

My fits have always been irregular and relatively infrequent.  But because I had friends and family around me when I had my fits I always had witnesses to confirm I was, indeed having convulsions.  But what if there hadn’t been any witnesses?  It could have been an awful lot longer.  That’s one of the reasons a lot of people don’t get diagnosed with epilepsy for some time – if someone is on their own and has seizures they may find themselves losing consciousness but won’t immediately think that they’ve had a fit.  Why would they?  If there’s no one around to tell them otherwise, why wouldn’t they just think they’ve fainted?  Another reason that if a seizure happens to be picked up on it should be investigated straightaway; who knows when the next opportunity could be to investigate it?

With many thanks to Professor Ley Sander. For more information, check out The Epilepsy Society website.

TV: Babylon

Babylon is the latest programme written by Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, set in the world of the London Metropolitan Police force.  It’s a comedy-drama (or ‘dramedy’ if you want to sound ridiculous) and it’s directed by Danny Boyle.  

High expectations then.  Armstrong and Bain have written at least two of the most popular comedies over the last 10 years or so with Peep Show and Fresh Meat, and were involved with The Thick Of It.  Danny Boyle was involved with some kind of show at the Olympics or something.  This is a show that has been made by people with impressive CVs - so is it any good?

James Nesbitt as the Chief Commissioner

Well, I liked Babylon a lot.  I thought it managed to show four different sides to the police force in its opening ten minutes and introduce its characters very quickly.  By the first ad break you’ve already seen the normal front-line constables, armed response units, the communication office and the top brass.  It’s a lot to take in but it doesn’t really leave you behind because it’s so funny.  And it really does start out with a bit of an all-out comedy offensive (a man’s reaction to armed police breaking his door down eventually leads to him being tasered in the balls.  It’s much funnier scripted and acted by professionals, but I still think ‘tasered in the balls’ is a pretty funny sentence in its own right).  It seems like it’s going to be funny all the way through its 75 minute runtime but that isn’t what happens.

Just to make it clear, that’s not because it’s failed; it’s not funny all the way through is because that’s not what it’s aiming for.  There's the sense of wanting to do more than just get laughs.  In tone I found it very similar to the last series of The Thick Of It, which became more of a political drama with funny dialogue than a sitcom.  Some people thought that the fourth series of The Thick Of It was a bit of a failure too, and I guess that’s where you just have to draw a line and say it’s a matter of taste.

It's really, really lazy to say that comedy-drama (no, not 'dramedy') always falls short of being funny enough to be a good comedy and dramatic enough to be a good drama.  Most comment threads online about Babylon have at least one person making this smartarse observation without actually backing it up with anything from the show.  I think the truth is more that the show cracked it as a character-based comedy but that the drama was unfocused.

Babylon seems to be a natural progression for Armstrong and Bain’s writing, certainly if we take Fresh Meat as the example of their last TV series together.  Fresh Meat has 6 main characters divided into 3 general types –  the roughly realistic (Josie and Kingsley); mild exaggerations of stereotypes (Howard and Oregon); and extreme exaggerations of stereotypes (Vod and JP).  Basically, the normal ones, the social satire ones and the out and out clowns.  The last series of Fresh Meat started to focus more and more on characterisation, especially the more OTT characters like Vod and JP.  

What Babylon does is a more complex evololution of this; 4 different parts of the police force are represented with their own range of Fresh Meat-style character types, and it really works.  So you get Robbie being the Vod of the constables, all violent Id.  His funniest moment is possibly when he has to stop short of punching a protestor when he sees he’s being filmed, and settles instead for a threat of “I will verbally dominate you!”;  The sleazy Finn in Communications comes over like JP – an arrogant alpha-male wannabe; and so on.

The real evolution in the writing however is the move to not just to write a sitcom about the police.  It is a comedy-drama, but definitely weighted more in favour of drama.  The main characters are James Nesbitt’s Chief Commissioner and Brit Marling’s Chief of Communications and their characters have nothing of the sitcom about them at all.  The plot, about a lone gunman on the loose in London has nothing sitcom-y about it.  The laughs are there, but they’re ultimately more disposable than the drama...

The drama isn’t as good as the comedy though, and that’s where the structure falls down.  It’s not terrible, but the fact is the comic bits are more enjoyable than the dramatic bits.  And of course, the very fact that you can separate ‘comedy bits’ and ‘dramatic bits’ so easily shows that the joins are not seamless.  Some of the dramatic notes are hit well.  The scene where the gunman only starts being taken truly seriously by the police is when one of their own becomes a casualty is well played.  The subsequent scene where Nesbitt’s character goes to break the news to her widower is very powerful.  

Brit Murphy as Liz, new Head of Communications

But some of the internal politics stuff seems relatively tame (the ‘dirt’ that has been dug on Brit Marling’s character turns out to be that she was headhunted for a lot of money, which seems like it would be a surprise to no-one).  And the attempt at a bit of a romance thing with her character and Nesbitt’s is jarring because it seems to go against what we’ve seen of the characters.  What Babylon would benefit from (and could easily do) is some of the workplace scheming seen in shows like House Of Cards or Borgen.  What we see here is much less sophisticated or as involving.

What I really liked about the drama in Babylon however was that nobody was in complete control of any given situation, which seemed honest.  At the end there wasn’t a Malcolm Tucker character commanding everything, but just a room full of people shotuing “What’s happening?!?”  The point being made was that it doesn’t matter how far up the chain you are, no one can tame the million-headed Hydra of Twitter.  When the operations room cheers because the gunman has been shot, Liz doesn’t share their glee - she knows that the fact he tweeted ‘Please Don’t Kill Me’ shortly before his death is going to make everyone look like heartless bastards rightly or wrongly.  The comedy side of Babylon is all about the characters but the drama part is all about technology’s impact on society, right down peoples’ first instinct in any situation is to film it on their smartphone.  

While that is an interesting concept for a drama, Babylon's pilot is definitely best enjoyed as a character ensemble piece.  It had a point to make about social media and communication technology in the police, but ultimately it didn’t seem too clear what that point was.  Perhaps in the series it will be developed further; I really hope so, because this pilot made a series look very promising indeed…