EPILEPSY: What Do You Know About Epilepsy?

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

Instead of reviewing some TV or something, I'm going to ask a question: What do you know about epilepsy? Do you think you could talk for more than two minutes on the subject comfortably, wihout running out of things to say?

If you don't think you could you'd probably be in good company. Epilepsy sometimes seems to be the least understood of the most common 'hidden' medical conditions. Whilst most people may not exactly be experts in conditions like diabetes and asthma, they somehow seem more comfortable with them as subjects. I think this is partly because something like diabetes is a physical condition, and the majority of people know what it feels like to have a physical illness, even if only for a few days. Mental conditions don't give non-sufferers as much scope to empathise, leading to more awkwardness and less innate comprehension.

I have been diagnosed with epilepsy since my early teens, and have been on medication for it ever since (if Prufrock measured out his life with coffee spoons, I have measured mine with foil blister packs). I have what used to be called 'grand mal' epilepsy, and is now somewhat catchily called 'Tonic Clonic'. I normally become unconscious and have convulsions, often hitting the floor/pavement quite hard - it's unlikely that there'll be no bangs unless I'm already lying down. Sometimes I don't become unconscious, which is nowhere near as much fun. But it never happened to me as often as it can for other people, for which I've always been grateful; and over the years my medication has gradually become fine-tuned enough to more or less control the seizures, so I have about an average of two a year.

I didn't know much about epilepsy and nor did my family when I had my first fit - I suspect the majority of people who develop epilepsy are ignorant of the facts of it until reality makes them learn quickly. Perhaps more surprisingly, at the age of 30 I still don't know very much about epilepsy. Some people want to learn as much of the science as they can about an illness to try and understand it. I've never had much of a scientific mind and neurology as a subject isn't something I find interesting (although I find reading about historical treatments of epilepsy fascinating).

And so I completely understand people who are at a bit of a loss for things to say when I mention the fact I'm epileptic. Because I would probably be at a bit of a loss in their shoes. The fact is, as a country, people don't know a lot about epilepsy in Great Britain, and most of what people think they do know about it is probably wrong.

For instance - most people with epilepsy will not have seizures brought on by strobe lights etc. Strobe lights and other similar effects can directly cause seizures amongst people who have photosensitive epilepsy, but photosensitive epilepsy only accounts for around 4% of epileptc diagnoses. But the idea that flashing lights cause epileptic fits has so firmly taken root in the popular consciousness it is hard to dispel. Similarly, the idea of someone swallowing their tongue during a fit is thought of as being a common danger, but is in fact incredibly unlikely.

But because of a lack of basic education about epilepsy these myths (and many others) abound, and that wouldn't be too much of a problem apart from the fact that it is these kind of myths that inform what people do in cases of emergency. So we have people even today who believe that if someone is having a fit you should immediately put a spoon in their mouth to stop them swallowing their tongue. I once worked with someone who genuinely believed that this was the correct thing to do, and was shocked when I told him that the last thing you should do is put your fingers near someone's mouth if they're having convulsions because there is a greater chance that they will bite clean through your finger than they will swallow their own tongue. It is also commonly believed that someone having a fit should be held down. This once happened to me in a Whetherspoon's in Inverness (yes, I've collapsed in some glamorous places alright), and all it did was exhaust a couple of burly Scotsmen and give me an extra few bruises.

But those men were well-meaning (as was my colleague who had picked up the 'spoon method' from somewhere); they were trying to help someone very obviously in trouble using the best information they had. It's just that they didn't have very good information because they've never been provided with anything better than hearsay and old wives' tales.  The first aid tips for what to do if someone's having a seizure are very simple and don't involve doing a great deal at all (and are printed here on The Epilepsy Society's website). People's natural instinct is that they should do something.  But usually there's nothing to do but wait for it to stop.

There really needs to be a lot more public education about epilepsy, because the lack of knowledge at the moment is dangerous. Thanks to Vinnie Jones a lot more people now know about CPR, but epilepsy education is still in the dark ages. And as I said earlier, my knowledge of epilepsy would be just as poor if it wasn't for the fact I was epileptic. It's just something that isn't really very well known about, and people are unlikely to go and find out about it unless they have a reason to. It's not a particularly rare form of illness - 1 in 4 people is or knows someone who is epileptic. And yet some cultures don't even have a word for it.

I don't really know all that much about it myself however, apart from the things I've picked up over the years of occasionally thrashing about. I feel like I should practice what I preach. And so although I might not be interested in neurology or the science behind epilepsy, I've decided to make it an early year's resolution to devote one blog a month to looking at its place in society, culture and the NHS. It's time for me to start looking at the subject head on instead of just putting up with it, because if you don't raise your own awareness of something, how can you raise anyone else's?



For more information on epilepsy try checking out the websites of The Epilepsy Society and Epilepsy Action

RADIO: Electronic Cigarettes and Snuff - The Long View

The Long View, on Radio 4 last week (still available on the iPlayer), examined the phenomenon of electronic cigarettes in a novel way - comparing it to the snuff phenomenon of centuries before. So - does the comparison bear up?

Smoking, as we all know by now, is a bad thing. It's a stupid thing to do, and only an idiot would take it up after their early teenage years. I should know, I started smoking when I was on the verge of 20. Why do we smoke? Because other people do. Why do other people smoke? They don't really know. Probably because some other people do. And so the circle goes.


Some people continue to smoke out of habit, and hate themselves for doing it. I personally enjoyed the act of smoking quite a lot, and miss it. But no one likes the smell of a smoker, and understanderbly resent the way the smoke transfers to them. And no smoker likes the feeling of ravaged lungs after a night out, and the unwelcome duty of having to torch the throat despite this in order to feel human again. Nicotine is supposedly the most addictive substance on the planet however, and giving up smoking is harder than people make out, and people make out that it's very hard indeed.

So something like e-cigarettes come along and everyone is happy. If you don't already know, smoking an e-cigarette (or 'vaping') is a way of inhaling nicotine without the danger (as far as we know - the British Medical Association is not yet convinced, more of which later). An e-cigarette comprises a cartridge with a nicotine solution, something called a cartomiser and a battery. The cartomiser is activated when the user inhales, and converts the nicotine into a vapour rather than smoke. The theory is that this vapour is free of the carcinogens and toxins that are the cause of all the Long Term Conditions and various forms of cancer normally associated with smoking, but simulating the act of smoking. So people like me, who really miss smoking on nights out and so on, have a safer alternative (a safer alternative which is legal to use indoors and so saves all that tedious standing around in freezing cold beer gardens).


'The Long View' compares this smoking alternative to the smoking alternative of the 17th-19th centuries - snuff. Snuff is a powdered version of tobacco which is snorted. It's not very popular anymore, although still available - I once had a manager who swore by it, and although he blew his nose more than was perhaps usual he certainly didn't smell as bad as the rest of us. It was seen in the past, rather like e-cigarettes are now, a safer alternative.


There are many fair comparisons. People (like the vaping enthusiast on the show Sarah Jakes) personalising their e-cigarettes to look "steampunk" on the programme is compared to personalised snuff boxes made with Sheffield steel. Flavouring snuff with different scents is also mirrored by the different flavoured nicotine solutions available for people to use in e-cigarettes. 'The Marquis of Anglesey' in London was apparrently a great hang-out for these cool new dudes with their snorting habit, led by the boring poet John Dryden. The rise of snuff coincided with the rise in popularity of the newly introduced coffee. Coffee houses in those days were sometimes nicknamed 'penny universities', where people would pay a penny entrance and then drink coffee and swap pamphlets and newspapers all day. Snuff was seen as a novel way of getting nicotine along with this novel new drink. It was all considered stylish and fashionable (and somewhat effete in the eyes of normal people). Snuff was considered more civilised. Sarah Jakes certainly sees e-cigarettes as more civilised, and her and her dedicated fellow vapers get together and vape stylishly once every six weeks or so.

After a while though the comparisons start to feel a bit more forced - luckily the programme doesn't try to force the point too much and allows a debate about whether e-cigarettes are a good thing or not. The loudest person in this debate is Rod Liddle, now editor of The Spectator, and coming on like the bastard child of Peter Hitchens and Jeremy Clarkson. He is a champion of good old fashioned cancer sticks. The 'problem' with e-cigarettes, he claims is that they are "immediately redolent of being a scaredy-cat." This comes back to why people smoke (e-cigarettes or otherwise); are they making a point or putting up with a self-inflicted addiction? Liddle definitely people smoke to make some dick-swinging point about how they don't care about dying. But he admits to using e-cigarettes when in "some fascist dystopian establishments" that won't let him smoke (presumably he includes schools and hospitals amongst these bastions of totalitarianism).


Liddle's bizzarre argument is that using e-cigarettes is "conniving with the health industry"; Sarah Jakes agrees that she is conforming because she wants to be healthier. Personally I don't hold a strong enough opinion on e-cigarettes other than 'prefer them to cigarettes and nicotine gum', but am more sympathetic to Jakes because she thinks it makes more sense to not die. But then Liddle is very obviously trying to stir up trouble for the sake of it and comes across more like a contrary five year old than a rebel (or indeed, an adult).


Where he does start to make some good points (albeit still in an obnoxious way) is when he argues with Vivienne Nathanson of the BMA. Although she makes good points that the industry isn't standardised,and that they re-nforce the psychological aspect of smoking, she is assuming that everyone that uses e-cigarettes is using them to give up - a means to an end - which as the previous interviews have shown simply isn't the whole story. Some people like Sarah Jakes are using them because they are enthusiasts, and people like Liddle are using them when they can't smoke their normal fags. Some, like me, fall between the camps and have replaced one addiction with a less harmful on-and-off habit. But none of these ways of using them are relevant to the BMA's claims that e-cigarettes aren't ready to be condoned as official nicotine replacement therapies, because that isn't the only reason (and maybe not even the main reason) why people are using them.


Liddle makes the point that "clearly it is better that people are using them rather than cigarettes", and frankly it is hard to argue with that. Regulation is an understandable thing to ask for, but trying to thwart a trend taking people away from smoking seems incredibly counter-productive. Fair enough, it might be too early to tell if GPs should be recommending them, but that's a whole different discussion. There does need to be more evidence to definitively say that e-cigarettes are better than smoking, but I'm willing to take the chance.


'The Long View' has a novel way of introducing a debate about e-cigarettes, but once the debate has begun its constant yanking back to the issue of snuff seems intrusive. It is a very good documentary, but the links between e-ciggarettes and snuff are too few to fill a full half hour, and it is really the e-cigarette elements of the programme and not the parts about snuff that bring it to life. It's well worth a listen for anyone who's been stupid enough to take up smoking though.

TV: Did You Miss Me? Sherlock Series 3

Spoilers galore here.  If you haven't seen all of Sherlock Series 3, go away.

Sherlock came to the end of its third series last Sunday, and it’s proved to have got a more mixed reception than the previous two.  Perhaps this is inevitable given the enormous weight hanging on it.  After the massive cliffhanger at the end of the second series – Hashtag Sherlock Llives! - two years of theories have built up and everyone has been waiting to see how it was done.  Something else missing was the constant threat of Moriarty – his non-presence was a presence in itself, whereas in this series the story arc that Mrs Watson turns out to be a bit of a wrong ‘un didn’t really stick.  But there’s also been plenty to enjoy; it’s just felt less flowing than previous episodes.

The big question on everyone’s lips was: ‘How did Sherlock survive?’  And it wasn’t really answered, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing but felt like a bit of a let-down after two years.  Probably the point being made with all the ‘fake resolution’ set-pieces was that any answer that the programme provided would be torn to bits by fans (just as Anderson immediately starts picking holes in Sherlock’s own version of (his)story), and that’s quite an amusing conceit.  But (and I’m sure this isn’t actually the case) it came across as though the writers had written themselves into a bit of a hole and couldn’t find a good way of getting out of it.  That’s an uncharitable take, but it’s a fact that lots of people seem to have found it a cop out.  Personally I think it trumps the lazy explanation Conan Doyle himself gives for Holmes’ survival in the books and it says interesting things about cliffhangers – do we enjoy coming up with our own theories more anyway?  The resolution to the first series cliffhanger was quite weak (Moriarty is about to shoot Holmes and Watson…  and then has to go and take a phone call) – perhaps we shouldn’t get hung up on them?  This would have been easier if the mystery in this first episode had been compelling, the episode felt more like a postscript to the second series, with the mystery a B-plot in its own story.  It did feel like an episode that didn't want to live up to expectations, and so it didn't.

The second episode, ‘The Sign Of Three’ was controversial amongst people online  (it might have been just as controversial with nonline people as well but I’ve not met anyone in the flesh who hated it as ferociously).  This was Sherlock as Rom-Com, and whether that sounds like a criticism or compliment depends on what you want out of Sherlock as a show.  If you are after solid police procedural (and to be fair, that is Sherlock’s remit), you wouldn’t have enjoyed this episode very much.  The crime business was mainly saved for the last third of the episode, most of the rest being taken up with comedy set-pieces. 

Not a scene from 'Love, Actually...' Honestly.

Luckily this is one of Steven Moffat’s strengths and I thought it worked as entertainment very well.  It didn’t necessarily work as crime drama, but this brings us back to having to think about why we like Sherlock.  I like Sherlock (and I’m talking generally here, not just the Cumberbatch incarnation) because he is so odd, detached and yet in the thick of life, someone hard to empathise with as a reader/viewer because empathy is alien to the character.  If I was only interested in seeing how the mysteries are solved, I doubt Holmes would have held my attention for as many years as he has.  Crime solving was not always heavily emphasised in the original stories – murder features in a significant minority of the books and some of the stories have no crime at all.  The crime solving aspect of the stories is a large part of the enjoyment of the stories but for me it’s not the most important.  So it’s fun to see this character taken right out of his comfort zone.  Holmes is a character who feels at odds with the fact that he is, in fact, a human just like us, and part of the appeal is seeing how he reacts compared to those around him.  Most of the time he is used to being the man with all the answers.  Dropping him in to a Richard Curtis Rom-Com (or, with the stag-do scenes, an episode of Coupling) puts him into a situation where everyone else is much more clued up than him; and inverting the natural order of things can be a refreshing way to look at a character.  And while I wouldn’t claim that the crime plot was one of the better ones, I rather liked how all the disparate elements came crashing together at once.  You couldn’t make a show out of it, but it’s fun to do once in a while.   

‘His Last Vow’ was back to normal(ish) for the series.  After the first week dealt with Sherlock’s resurrection and the second was a genre-bending curate’s egg, this was back to the usual territory.  Moffat and Gattis are still brilliant at bringing old things up to date – Wiggins, Sherlock in a crack den etc – but the best thing in the episode was Charles Augustus Magnusson (nee Milverton).  A genuinely disturbing villain, giving even Moriarty a run for his money, CAM has been changed from a fat, smug, gloating blackmailer into an emotionless, softly spoken, deranged one. Coming across like a weird cross between Julian Assange and Steve Jobs, he was particularly unpleasant and seeing him miming away in his own mind palace examined the nature of blackmail – it doesn’t require evidence as long as the threat of evidence existing is enough.

The reveal that Mary Watson isn’t all she seems didn’t particularly do it for me (as story-arcs go the Mary Watson one has felt pretty inconsequential) and the cosy Christmas scenes were pure padding.   But the  direction of the scene where Holmes is shot is fantastic.  And the climax, where Sherlock reminds us all that he is a psychopath, not Doctor Who, and ends the game with cold blooded murder is a brilliant reaffirming of this version of the character . 

And then the series ends exactly like the last one did, a cliffhanger with a seemingly dead character coming back to life and us lot trying to figure out how exactly for two years.  It’s been an up and down series, sometimes over-reaching or feeling unsure of its footing and at other times fully on top of its game, sometimes fluctuating between the two states within the same ten minutes.  But it has retained its own identity and has proved it can still be completely compelling if not as compulsive as before.  Another series will have to up its game and be more consistent in order to keep its fans sticking around but for now...  

Hashtag Moriarty Lives!

BOOK: The Heretics - Adventures With The Enemies Of Science by Will Storr

HERETIC n. a person believing in or practicing in religious heresy.

            A person holding an opinion at odds with what is generally accepted. (OED)

Will Storr’s book is an exploration of the ideas that people believe in and the people that

believe in ideas, with the emphasis changing from chapter to chapter.  It seems from the start that the book could involve laughing at people with odd ideals (Creationists, homeopaths, UFO spotters all feature amongst many more fringe groups), a sort of ‘Walking With Crazies’, but ends up being a subtler discussion and therefore more interesting.  The idea of having passionate ideas is examined and not just anti-science ones.  The Skeptics and James Randi are also investigated and we are invited to see people in some ways as dogmatic in their approach as those they seek out to debunk. 

Having a belief is shown to be something that comes first and that the brain then rationalises.  One of the most striking chapters shows David Irving, the disgraced British historian fruitlessly trying to prove that Hitler was uninvolved in the events leading up to the Holocaust.  He believes this fervently, and has devoted his career to finding evidence to prove it spending time in courts and prisons along the way.  It is fair to say that if someone is willing to go to prison over something like this we are in ‘passionate belief’ territory, something which isn’t necessarily related to rationalism (but as the book discusses, isn’t necessarily unrelated to rationalism either).  The chapter on Irving is the one that most explicitly demonstrates one of the central themes of the book – that in life we are all the heroes of our own narrative and are more willing to find faults with other peoples’ beliefs than our own.

Irving is of course a more extreme demonstration of this psychological bias than most of us would be.  His belief is a very specific one – he is not really a neo-Nazi (although certainly holds dubious opinions regarding race and politics). 

David Irving, holding a copy of his book 'Hitler's War',
which argued that Hitler was ignorant of the Holocaust

He now believes that the Holocaust happened but that Hitler was innocent.  Storr follows him around a tour of Polish war sites with some right-wing tourists on a kind of macabre package holiday, trying to fit in with them and avoiding them finding out that his fiancé is mixed race English-Pakistani.  As time goes on, he finds that most of the other Nazi ghouls have some form of familial connection to Germans who fought in WWII.  But Irving most certainly doesn’t, with the men in his family all patriotic soldiers, this kind of ‘real world’ reason.  Irving’s reason for his belief seems more rooted in his personality as someone who has always had the innate compulsions to go against the grain and seemingly over the years this has led to stubbornness in the face of the truth.  It comes across as more of an illness. His unwillingness to listen to reason leads to him bickering with Storr over extremely minor words in sentences from Goebbels’ diaries as being mistranslations and so on.  His Quixotic quest has distorted his world view and these are the straws he clings to to support it.

This is all very interesting but perhaps what you would expect from a book about people going against the grain.  Other chapters cover less predictable subjects.  The chapter examining the Skeptic movement tries to see the other side of the coin and questions whether they are as objective as they claim.  They have a version of truth to prove, and does this lack of objectivity in some way make them untrustworthy?  Not untrustworthy in terms of making any conscious lies or misleading accusations; but in terms of being people with a devout belief that certain things need debunking and refusing to accept that their take on the truth could be wrong?  The interview with James Randi, the world famous authority on debunking what he calls ‘woo woo’ and ‘flim flam’, surprised me by being very similar to the one with Irving with his evasive answers and contradictions.  In his quest against those he sees as charlatans and conmen, Randi has sometimes seemed to use their own methods when seeking to expose them (launching angry diatribes against people who disagree with him on his blog for instance).  He loses his temper with Storr when he is criticised over the way he has handled certain events in his past in exactly the same way Irving does.  I find Randi an infinitely more sympathetic character than Irving, and want to give him the benefit of the doubt when his version of events feels shaky. 

But if he was the proponent of Hitler’s innocence and Irving was the one devoted to exposing fraudsters: what would I think of him and Irving then?  And when the interview ends with

James Randi, scourge of the psychics

Randi admitting to being a supporter of Social Darwinsm supporting the view that smokers should be allowed to “do themselves in” because they are stupid, and that the death of people with low IQ would “clear the air” the line between the two men doesn’t seem so much blurred as invisible.

The interview takes places at a Skeptic conference, with speakers like Richard Dawkins and Randi, and t-shirts, leaflets and workshops.  It seems no different in set-up to conferences seen earlier for people who believe in flying saucers or creationism.  Tellingly, a barista in the coffee bar where Randi is interviewed is quoted as telling a customer that Skeptics are like conspiracy theorists. 

Storr ends the book by discussing our view of the world, and how we are all in the process of believing ourselves to be the hero of our own story as we walk through life – everyone is a storyteller.  He also points out that as the writer of this book he is telling a story – that the interview with Irving was based on a four hour conversation and that if Irving was to write up his version he would no doubt have picked his own quotes and written a different piece.  (This book covers many more issues and subjects than I have chosen to discuss here, and someone else would have chosen different chapters and related their own belief of what it is about)  Storr shows how we find it easier to listen to people say things that we agree with, and that we should value our heretics as people who jolt us out of our comfort zone and force us to justify our own beliefs.  It is an excellent exploration of our perception of life and how we choose to place ourselves in it.

TV: Doctor Who And The Curse Of The Fatal Fans

Fans – they love things, don’t they? That’s what it means to be a fan, surely?

Well yes… To an extent. But there’s more to it than that.

Fans love things in a vaguely or emphatically obsessive way (there’s definitely a spectrum). Someone who loves, for example, The Beatles isn’t necessarily someone who would spend £8,437 on John Lennon’s school dentention slips and think it a wise use of money. There are of course the other more interesting fans of The Beatles who have been inspired by them to create their own music.

 
Fans of music have this option to express their love. Countless garage bands prove it – the DIY aesthetic means that a music fan just has to pick up an instrument, learn some covers and express their fandom in an exhilarating and gratifying way, perhaps going on to create their own music and getting their own fans. That is after all how The Beatles themselves started out, doing Chuck Berry covers at the school fete.

Lovers of other things tend not to have immediate access to ways to express their inner fan. Sports fans may love their football but most know deep down that the chances are they will never play for their country. Similarly, people who are fans of Star Wars are unlikely to direct or act in the films; and fans of TV shows like Doctor Who are unlikely to produce the show.

Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat: The Fanboys That Made It...

Only that is exactly what has happened with Doctor Who since its 2005 resurrection. First Russell T Davis and now Steven Moffat, both fans of the show since childhood, have written and steered the show all the way. Not only that but another childhood fan, David Tennant got to play The Doctor and another, Peter Capaldi is just starting to have a bash himself…

This is quite a weird situation. And it is in many ways a brilliant situation. It is a good thing to know that there is Saturday family television not merely being churned out by programme monkeys to get high ratings (like the awful Robin Hood revival that began around the same time as Doctor Who came back). This is something that is being made by people who are passionate about something and want to do happy memories of their childhood justice. They care about wanting to make something good, which isn’t as common as it should be in television. And they are very talented at what they do – Russell T Davis and Steven Moffat didn’t get the job of showrunner by turning up at the BBC and waving their Doctor Who Magazine subscription at reception. They’re two of the best writers for television of the last 30-odd years, who would have been remembered for shows like Press Gang, Queer as Folk, Coupling and so forth for years even if Doctor Who was still dead and buried.


However (there was always going to be a 'however'...)

Mark Lawson mentions the writers’ fandom origins in passing in a recent review of Doctor Who and Sherlock’s recentepisodes written for The Guardian (Moffat is of course heavily involved in Sherlock, but we’ll have plenty of time to discuss that next week after the 3rd series finishes…). Most of Lawson's article is concerned with how Moffat and Mark Gatiss respond to their fans however, and this is where the danger of having fan hands at the steering wheel (or the lunatics in charge of the asylum) has the potential to be damaging. Genre fiction tends to become afflicted with continuity – that is, people start to enjoy the game of pretending that the stories are real as much (or in some cases more than) as they enjoy the stories themselves. Whole books have been devoted to putting all the Sherlock Holmes stories into chronological order, whole blog posts about UNIT Dating (if you need to ask what ‘UNIT Dating’ means you don’t want to know the answer, believe me). And fans love the continuity stuff, can’t get enough. But drama stands or falls on its ability to tell fun and engaging stories, not how well it plugs continuity holes. 

Lawson says the Doctor Who Christmas episode, ‘The Time Of The Doctor’ “included a plot twist that granted the Time Lord another dozen physical regenerations, thus resolving (at least in the minds of the producers) the problem, much discussed on fan sites, that according to the rules originally set down, the Doctor was permitted only 12 embodiments.” This is true; and it was embarrassingly pointless. It added nothing of dramatic worth to the plot of the episode. It was solving a problem that only a fraction of the audience knew existed and most of them probably weren’t particularly bothered about it being answered either, being much more concerned with what the hell was meant to be going on. And that’s just one example of many call backs to old episodes, in-jokes and so on. It’s the job of the fan and fan-fiction to worry about all these piddling little details, and the job of the writers of the BBC’s main Christmas Day event to make good drama for all the family.

But this is the problem – being a fan himself Moffat feels the need to be accountable to fandom and this is a big, big mistake. Because that’s when the programme begins to be made primarily for the fans and not the majority of the audience. He’s an excellent writer, but fan fiction’s never a pretty sight. Obsessing about essentially meaningless details gets in the way of interesting characters and things actually, you know, making sense. And that is what killed Doctor Who in the 1980s after all – the producers had spent years courting the fans at the expense of the interest of the general public; until eventually only the fans were watching and it was inevitably axed. Funnily enough, concentrating on giving a minority of obsessives what they (think they) want isn’t the recipe for a popular show.
 
The vast majority of an average Doctor Who audience are casual viewers, willing to enjoy a good story but not expecting to have more than a basic grasp of the concept of the show - and why should they? As a programme it has become too exclusive. My girlfriend likes Doctor Who to the extent that if I’m watching it she’ll watch it with me and sometimes get pretty into it, but she isn’t and never will be a fan. Recent episodes make her feel confused, left out and ultimately bored, which means that I don’t enjoy them as much either.
 
Doctor Who’s remit, right from day one, was to be accessible to everyone in the family on a Saturday in between the afternoon sport and the evening’s adult entertainment. Which is how it was for most people.  It wasn't targeted at anything as specific as sci-fi fans.  It was something you watched with your parents or children.  Fandom as a ‘thing’ didn’t happen to Doctor Who until the 1970s. Doctor Who’s ‘history’ was just whatever the writers happened to remember at the time. Then an article was published in a magazine by the Chief Head Fan of the Doctor Who Association (or whatever). It was one of Tom Baker’s most famous stories, ‘The Deadly Assassin’ – the story where the whole idea Lawson mentions about ‘The Doctor can only have 12 lives’ was introduced. The article lambasted the producers for messing up the continuity: what was all this nonsense about him only having 12 lives, how dare they? They had ruined Doctor Who! (The article's available online but it’s so excruciatingly badly written I can’t bring myself even to link to it…) So what did the producers do or say in response? Nothing whatsoever, obviously – if you’re the producer of a high profile BBC1 prime time show you don’t take shit off some guy in a bedroom, frankly. And it’s ironic to think that Steven Moffat was crowbarring in desperate dialogue at Christmas to justify some fictional facts that fandom itself had originally been dead set against.
 
Any good TV series should be able to have its premise summed up in a sentence. Doctor Who = ‘Mysterious man travels through time and space in a magic box.’ Doctor Who is by no means a failing show, it is still generally well regarded, but I think it’s time it went back to basics and stopped getting bogged down in its own mythology – and maybe aim to make some new fans as well as just pleasing the old ones.

DARFIELD

UPDATE: 31/01/2014
Have been reading some of Philip Sandifer's excellent Doctor Who blog 'TARDIS Eruditorium' again, and he says so much more about The Deadly Assassin in a better way than I ever could... http://www.philipsandifer.com/2011/11/far-more-than-just-deadly-assassin.html

MUSIC: Morrissey And Other Animals

So, everyone’s favourite misanthropic ex-singer of The Smiths has caused minor controversy with his latest statement comparing meat-eating with paedophilia.  Oh, and the holocaust.  And, only very slightly less insanely compared to those comparisons, cannibalism.  Much faux-outrage ensues (more from embarrassed veggie Morrissey fans than from offended meat-eaters).

Charming Man

Now let’s get something clear straight away – Morrissey is a clever guy and a wind up merchant.  It is extremely unlikely that he literally believes that eating meat is a crime on the same level as child abuse/murder/cannibalism.  It’s not really worth going into why meat-eating is not like raping children because that’s exactly why Morrissey says things like this. I am aware that writing a post about it is doing precisely that, but let’s sink to the bait anyway…

There’s a well-known rule for internet forums: ‘Don’t Feed The Trolls’; and trolling is exactly what Morrissey is doing here.  If someone said all these things on a chat forum you’d probably just ignore them but because he used to be in The Smiths this kind of thing gets published in The Guardian.  The thing is, Morrissey comes from a time from before the internet and the democratisation of outrage and stupidity.  His USP in the 80s was being a contrary bastard who could have a voice, but now people being contrary are two a penny.  You can piss off more people by setting up a Twitter account and being a jerk in 15 minutes than doing interviews with the NME.  And comparing things to Auschwitz for shock value?  Please, Nazi shock tactics are soooo 20^th century.

Morrissey is savvy enough to know that musically he is no longer particularly interesting except to a rabid fanbase, and that nowadays to get wider attention he has to use other methods than releasing songs.  The thing is, he’s never been a muso, he just comes from an era where the best way to be provocative – to get that voice - was to be in a guitar band.  Music has probably always been a means to an end in his mind in the same way it has been for Mark E Smith and of course, Johnny ‘Lydon’ Rotten.  Morrissey’s been in the news a few times in 2013, but how much of it was to do with his music and how much of it has been to do with his autobiography being published under the Penguin Classic imprint?

The reason why Morrissey is so infuriating is not because of what he does or says.  I think it’s perfectly valid to have our artistes behaving like dicks and being wind-up merchants, pulling stunts and playing devil’s advocate.  It’s because he seems to have so little fun when doing it, and he’s lost his sense of humour.  Either that or his sense of humour has become so dry and witty it goes above everyone’s head which makes it the same thing.  We mentioned Johnny ‘Rotten’ Lydon and contemporary, Mark E Smith – both prickly personalities with similar reputations for controversial soundbites.  So let’s compare them all and see if anything interesting happens.

Money Changes Everything

Rotten/Lydon is someone who has always made a virtue of doing whatever he feels like doing that will irritate as many people as possible.  In the 70s the best way of annoying people was to attack the establishment, but he was never really an Anarchist with a capital ‘A’; he was and is a natural force of anarchy, unpredictable and impish.  In the 21^st century he obviously thought it would be more fun annoying po-faced punks and indie snobs by selling butter and appearing on game shows.  Sources about punk – Jon Savage’s ‘England’s Dreaming’ or Julien Temple’s ‘The Filth And The Fury’ – show very clearly that Lotten essentially lost interest in punk when it stopped being about individuality and started being about having the right safety pin accessories.  He was always rebelling against having to fulfil peoples’ expectations.  Whether these expectations were those of the Establishment or his fans was irrelevant.  If anything it is more satisfying seeing middle-aged punks being incensed by Rottyn ‘selling out’ than reading about the Jubilee barge business, because it’s so much more of an individual statement to alienate people nominally on your side.  Oor Johnny never claimed to stand for anything in particular – or rather, he stood for what he believed was the truth whilst claiming that whatever he happened to be thinking at the time counted as his truth.  That’s true chaos, not some cookbook manifesto.  My Dad doesn’t like the Pistols (or PiL) for that matter but thinks Johnny’s brilliant for being a piss-taking bastard.  And being liked by peoples’ Dads is how he can achieve iconoclastic status in the 21^st century.  Unlike Morrissey, he kept with the times so that he could at the very least be relevant.

Mark E Smith on the surface has much in common with Morrissey – both misanthropic Mancunians inspired by the Sex Pistols (both at the same Free Trade Hall gig, at least according to ’24 Hour Party People’, so probably not but whatever), both very definitely ‘words’ men with little interest in musicianship (and in Smith’s case active disdain for it).  Both are control freaks although Smith is the more successful, eating through musicians like nobody’s business.  Morrissey never fully managed to dominate Marr let alone sack him (in the end it was Morrisey who was jilted); ex-members of The Fall are somewhere in the 50s by now.  And this is one of the key differences between them – Smith strives for change, and if he does revisit the past it is normally to completely revise it. 

Handsome Devil

He is an alcohol and amphetamine fuelled surrealist force, whereas Morrissey is essentially conservative, verging on puritanical.  The Fall – famously described by John Peel as “Always different, always the same” – have a fluid identity, instantly recognisable by virtue of changing direction at every availability. 

Morrissey is only recognisable by being always the same.  Both singers (and of course Jotten) have distinctive voices and humorous lyrics but whereas Morrissey’s genre is despondent music-hall, Smith’s is Dali ranting in your dodgy local, a much more interesting spectacle.  Morrissey’s best lyrics (and though this post is a bit of a hatchet job on Morrissey he has written some of the wittiest lyrics in popular music) tend towards the wry and aloof, Smith’s the accessibly incomprehensible. 

Mark E Smith’s just as capable of being unpleasant and provocative to people as Morrissey can be, but he’s also a jocular Walter Mitty barfly in Salford who still has artistic validity on his side - and so is tolerated with affection (apart from guitarists one presumes).  The reason why Rydon is quite loveable and is treated with affection is because he so obviously enjoys his role as a Puckish contrary bastard.  And the reason why Morrissey comes across as being a prick is he looks like he’s having a such a rubbish time going through the motions of being a pantomime of Morrissey.  No Lytten-like glint in the eye, no Fall-like whimsical psychosis, just supercilious misanthropy that seems as dated as shoving some daffodils up your arsenal and spinning around on Top Of The Pops.

It is perfectly permissible to be an ageing icon making bombastic, attention-seeking statements when you have something else of interest.  But seeing someone resorting to unintentional self-parody so unnecessarily is a shame.  All three of the rebellious jukebox icons we’ve looked at continue to hold our attention not so much through their music but by playing cultural court jesters (with the possible exception of Mark E Smith).  The problem is that Morrissey isn’t funny, which makes for a pretty poor jester.

Admittedly though, the fact that I went and bought his autoubiography for £1.99 on the Kindle makes me a complete sucker, and probably renders everything you have just read as completely invalid.  Sorry for wasting your time.

Everyone Is Guilty...

Agatha Christie has been something of a blind spot for me, one of the most famous writers (and probably the most famous crime writer) I had until recently never read.  So thanks go to the colleague who lent me Murder On The Express to correct this!

Murder On The Orient Express is a famous story, with a famous plot; so much so that I approached it knowing the ending. The plot has been the subject of so many homages and parodies over the years that what must have been on first publication an outstanding twist now seems almost hackneyed. This is not necessarily a criticism and could be taken as the opposite. To write something that enters the cultural consciousness to the extent that it is familiar to people who have not read it is a rare achievement.  Basically, everyone dunnit. Spoiler alert (I did that right, yeah?) It does, however, mean that reading it with fresh eyes 80 odd years later is hard; it also means that the book's main asset, it's big reveal denouement, doesn't have quite the same impact.  So what else is there? 


The premise is simple enough. There has been a murder. On the Orient Express. That's actually really all you need to know, and you probably gathered that bit already. The famed detective, Hercule Poirot, happens to be on the train and heads the investigation, working his way through a cast of colourful characters and using tiny clues to piece together what happened.  The style is economical and readable.  Christie is obviously more interested in people than places, as the train and the outside world are described only in as much detail as they need to be, whereas peoples’' actions and speech are paid a lot more attention. 

The cast of characters is made up of a variety of nations (all of them from Europe or the US), which livens up the proceedings. They are fun to read, although they are shameless racial stereotypes.  The Americans are loud and garish, the English are stiff, the Italian is excitable and passionate and so on. The fact there is such a diverse group of people on board leads Poirot to deduce that everyone must have some connection with America, “"that melting pot”", because there could be no other explanation for having such a diverse group of people traveling together - which seems like a bit of a leap.  The stereotypes are not prejudicial exactly but are ever-present.  Indeed, they are made explicit regularly, with the Italian being suspected because stabbing someone is an Italian way of doing these things apparently.  A jarring moment comes when a character says that such horrific crimes as the murdered man has committed would never happen in Germany, which definitely reminds you that you’re reading a book published in the early 1930s.  However, it would be willful to attack the book for using stereotypes.  Aside from the fact that stereotypes are a trope of genre fiction from all eras, it is true that a lot of people, maybe even a majority of Christie'’s readers thought in this way.  It's the way things were in ye olden days.  That doesn'’t exactly excuse it, but at the same time one can'’t hang something for not having modern sensibilities when it is 80 years old.  The real failing in resorting to stereotypes here is that the characters are quite cartoon-like, making it harder to care about them.  They feel like pieces being pushed around in a game.

The plot is ridiculous, which again is something extremely common in genre fiction and doesn't necessarily count against it.  The fun comes from seeing how the crime is solved.  It’'s a little bit top heavy - a lot of the novel is spent showing the interviewing of the suspects and the collection of evidence, and then the whole thing is wrapped up in about 10 pages.  I felt unconvinced that 12 people, even if they all had a motive, would agree that murder was their best option, especially when their connection to the man is quite tenuous in some cases.  This is where the speed of Christie’'s prose works; it doesn'’t allow you to pause for thought until it is finished, which means that for at least while I was reading it my disbelief was suspended.  Which really does sound like faint praise, but it's a lot harder than it looks, like a lot of conjuring tricks.  The conjuring trick is a good analogy really - everyone knows it's make-believe, and the fun is in the reveal; it's just that as with a conjuring trick the pleasure is transitory (and only really works the once...)

Before reading this book I knew nothing about Poirot aside from the fact he has a moustache.  Most detective novels are successful because of their detective.  Even G K Chesterton’s Father Brown intrigues us because of his drabness.  Perhaps the biggest surprise for me with Murder On The Orient Express was that I didn't actually like Poirot very much. He is clever and cultured but he is aloof and infuriating. He refuses to let his colleagues know exactly what he is thinking, preferring to throw them morsels of information whilst deriding their theories. This is fine; that’s true of most literary detectives.  All of the above criticisms can be levelled at the character of Sherlock Holmes for instance, arguably the only literary detective more famous than Poirot. But, somehow, Holmes is a more likeable character. Perhaps this is because he has a more impish sense of humour; perhaps it is also because while Holmes can be cold. he is also a more colourful character, almost vaudeville (think of his disguises) and more importantly for me, more inclusive. Whereas Holmes can be found slumming it in opium dens and mixing with the Victorian underclass, it is hard to imagine Poirot (based on this novel) undertaking any case which does not involve members of the Edwardian era’s respectable society.

Similarly there were one or two moments were I found Christie's tone unlikeable. The talkative American lady who constantly talks about her daughter is the comic relief in the story, but is not unlikeable. So when on more than one occasion the narrative voice describes photos of her daughter as plain-looking and her grandchildren as "particularly ugly" it seems somewhat cruel - the revelation that ‘Mrs Hubbard’ has been a character-disguise by one of the conspirators in the last few pages doesn’'t excuse this.

Murder On The Orient Express is readable and enjoyable, and doesn’'t aim to do any more than that - therefore it succeeds on its own terms.  But I did feel as I was reading it that it has become a victim of its own fame, and of the over-familiarity with the genre it helped create.  The characters do not linger in the mind, and Poirot himself trades on a reputation one never feels is earned in the novel. Perhaps I should watch o0ne of the film versions, because they always seem to have excellent casts...