MUSIC: Spotify and Forgotify - The Way We Listen Now

Everyone with a computer or smartphone will know about Spotify, even if they don’t really know what it is.  What it is is this – it gives the user the ability to make playlists of music from a massive online database and stream it. 

I groggily heard about a website on the Today programme last Thursday morning – Forgotify.com.  It plays songs which have never once been played on Spotify, which is a surprising 1/5ths of what is available.  Some of this is just boringly obscure (like some of the world music and mediocre renditions of classical pieces).  Some of it is batshit crazy. 

The amount of music available on Spotify is phenomenal – pretty much anything you can think of is there (apart from The Beatles, being as sticky as usual over the licensing of their music – remember how long it took them to come round to the idea of iTunes?  Perhaps after all the financial/legal complications they had during their messy divorce you can’t blame them.  I digress).  It’s been seen as controversial with some musicians – notably Thom Yorke – for the amount an artist receives from each play (not very much according to this BBC report.) 

I think of it as Napster in an age where music industry types are more accepting of the internet.  Napster came along in the 1990s and became essentially that decade’s version of the ‘Home Taping Kills Music’ hysteria of the 1980s.  In the 1960s the music industry worried that pirate radio would stop people buying records.  And so on – historically the music industry has always been suspicious at best of new technology.  But likewise, it always relatively adapts to it once the fuss dies down and they figure out how it can be used.  For instance, the establishment set up Radio One as an officially sanctioned popular radio whilst the pirates were edged out and shut down.

The real attraction of Napster was being able to hear something on demand.  Something the industry didn’t pick up on at the time (not just Execs either; Metallica famously lost a lot of credibility by seemingly siding with ‘The Man’).  It wasn’t a question of owning the music, especially because Napster was at its most popular before the proliferation of cheap MP3 players.  I remember how I used Napster as a teenager.  I would read about some song or band somewhere (normally the NME, for my sins) and want to check it out.  I would download a song or two, which would normally take an age, and if I wanted to hear more I would buy the CD.  It genuinely got me to buy things that I wouldn’t otherwise have – it was just a tool to direct my tastes and make sure my money was being given to the right bands.

Things change, and now the problem for the industry is definitely one of ownership.  The majority of people, enthusiastically or resignedly, have given up on CDs and have accepted digital media is just the way things are now.  It turns out we can live without pretty cover artwork and more shelf space.  So we download our music and pay for it through iTunes, Amazon etc if we're good law abiding citizens.  A lot of people see these sites as charging too much however, and download torrent files illegally for free from The Pirate Bay and the like.

Spotify and other sites like last.fm are largely successful attempts to thwart illegally downloaded files: people can stream music for free with adverts through their computers or upgrade for a tenner a month to get rid of the adverts and, more importantly, use it on the go on smartphones or other devices (like the app on my TV box).  This is actually a sensible and level-headed ‘damage limitation’ response by the industry to illegal downloading – the Spotify user gets their hands on music instantly and relatively cheaply without having to search for hours through dodgy torrent sites and the artist at least gets some money instead of none at all.

Spotify’s main selling point is the ability to find music you already know or may be curious about and make playlists.  Last.fm is designed to make surprisingly good suggestions based on tracks you tag as favourites, exposing the user to things they’ve never heard of (making it, as its name suggests, more like listening to a radio tailored to your tastes).  But both still require a certain amount of input on the user’s behalf to be truly effective.

Which is why I’ve loved messing around with Forgotify.  It feels completely anarchic although it isn’t, being based on a very strict rule – you will always be hearing something found on Spotify which no one else has listened to.  It feels anarchic though, because of the complete lack of logic in the playlist.  What you hear could be complete rubbish, but perhaps surprisingly, it isn't always.  The people who have set it up say it is “a musical tragedy” that some of this music has been ignored.  Speaking in terms of quality this is (understatement warning) not always true – I can live without the MOR stylings of Ray Lyell’s ‘Rollin’ Storm’ as part of my life, for instance.  It’s also not particularly tragic when the aforementioned mediocre classical pieces turn up, which I skip, ditto the religious stuff.

 

Forgetify - Bringing Obscurity Into Your Ears

However, it is tragic when you listen to the pop, and rock songs and remember they were recorded by real people who were in that studio, however long ago, wondering if they were making their first number one.  Putting their heart and soul into mediocre songs like ‘I Gotta Know’, by Boy from 1983 and not knowing that they won’t even be famous enough to turn up on a Google search – which, you know, not being on Google is even less than being a footnote to history.  That’s just being left out of the book altogether. It also gives some of the happier, soulful and music a melancholic and almost creepy feel.  I have decided that I really like The Esso Steelband Of Bermuda’s 1958 ‘Bermuda Honeymoon’ album, but listening to it and knowing that it is essentially unloved by millions of people creates, entirely in hindsight, an eerie atmosphere, despite its upbeat sunny vibe.

These are creative people who tried and failed.  The boys and girls at the party that, in the end, nobody wanted to talk to.  It is heartbreaking listening to songs from Forgotify bearing this in mind, listening to all this unrequited optimism and enthusiasm.  It makes you want to listen to some awful songs out of an irrational sense of guilt. 

It’s refreshing to have something like Spotify – which is designed to give the user complete control over their listening – and perversely using it to listen to things proved beyond doubt to be hugely unpopular, and it’s the kind of subversion that could only happen when we take having everything at our fingertips for granted.  It's undoubtedly pleasureable mainly for the novelty factor and I don't count on it being more than a fad (if it even gets as far as becoming a fad); but it's certainly an enjoyable experiment, and serves to remind us how much of a disposable commodity music is.

TV: Doctor Who - The Moonbase

Doctor Who and the Animated Adventures of the Cybermen!  'The Moonbase' comes to DVD sans two episodes; does that lessen our enjoyment of it?

The BBC has finished releasing all the complete Doctor Who stories on DVD, and now it seems to be starting to release all of those with 50% or more remaining, closing up the gaps with animated reconstructions (more on those later…).  They have so far stuck with ‘Monster’ stories, and that now includes three Cyber-stories – ‘The Invasion’, ‘The Tenth Planet’ and now…

‘The Moonbase’.  One of those Doctor Who stories with quite a strong reputation built up over the years, partly for being one of the first stories to be novelised and partly because it’s the first one to feature the Cybermen as we recognise them now.  And partly because, along with many other Doctor Who stories, it’s been half-missing for the best part of 50 years.  To look at why a story being missing can increase its reputation, it might be best to look at why the stories went missing in the first place.

You may know the story; you may not.  In the 60s until at least the late 70s, the BBC had a policy of junking its own programmes.  Not just Doctor Who but an awful lot of its own drama, comedy and light entertainment.  This seems bonkers from a 21^st century view.  Why spend money producing TV shows, show them once and then delete them completely? 

There were a few reasons that at the time probably made economic sense.  In an era where repeats were rare and home video a non-existent concept, it was thought that there was no financial value to keeping the tapes.  Not only were they expensive to store, but they could be re-used (ie taped over).  So lots of episodes of lots of different things were lost.  Comedy took a big hit losing most of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s work for ever.  Cook even tried to buy the tapes from the BBC but they refused his offer.  All of Monty Python nearly went the same way, only Terry Jones did manage to buy them somehow and now they presumably make a fortune for them all.

Doctor Who did alright, relatively speaking.  Audio copies of all the shows survived, and because they had been sold overseas a lot of foreign stations had copies.  Just last Autumn two complete stories (more or less) were recovered to much fanfare, and there are hopes to find more.  But there are still over 90 episodes missing, and it’s unlikely they’ll all turn up again.

Anyway, home video came along.  From the 80s onwards, fans gradually became familiar and then over-familiar with the surviving material through repeats and video sales.  And it is at this point of course that the missing episodes from the 60s (including ‘The Moonbase’) built up a bit of a mystique.  Without there being evidence to the contrary it was possible to imagine certain stories as being amazing and fantastic.  One story, ‘The Tomb Of The Cybermen’ had a reputation for being amazing and fantastic.  Then, it was recovered in 1992 in Hong Kong and turned out to be…  Well, not terrible but not knock-out stuff either.  But compared to its reputation it was always going to look appalling.

So all these stories with some (or all) of their episodes missing – how do people know them?  Fandom, because it is mad and creative, has made various re-constructions of the missing episodes using off-screen photos and the off-air audio recordings.  The visual only elements tend either to be simple subtitles or more ambitious homemade animation or model-work.  The quality of these amateur reconstructions are variable to say the least.  Some are quite effective given the circumstances; some… have their hearts in the right place.  Lots of them are on YouTube if you’re curious – the good, the bad and the very poorly realised.

You would think the BBC would put a halt to this by releasing its own, official reconstructions

The animated Patrick Troughton having a bit of an old think

rather than letting these amateur ones proliferate.  And it has.  Sort of.  In 2006 ‘The Invasion’ was released, with its two missing episodes animated.  This was a divisive idea but one that has stuck.  Some diehards didn’t like the idea of cartoons replacing the actors, even if the only other option was static photographs, because they were a reimagining rather than an accurate reproduction of what had gone before.  Other people saw it as an imaginative and clever solution to the simple problem that watching a subtitled slideshow of photographs is quite boring and unlikely to reach as large a portion of the DVD-buying public.

And so, after a massive detour, we gradually get back to ‘The Moonbase’ on DVD.  A story which is, as I said, pretty highly regarded (although since ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’ fans have become a lot more cynical about reputations).  Its first and third episodes are missing, and so are animated.  The story is pretty tedious and at points ridiculous.  The way that the Cybermen have invaded the titular Moonbase is by making a hole in the side of the storeroom like big silver mice; and when it looks like all the oxygen is about to disappear because of a hole in the dome, the solution is to put a tea tray over it.  Similarly, the characters aren’t more than cardboard cutouts with funny accents.  During the whole thing the Frenchman wears a little necktie thing which makes him look like he’s left his beret somewhere else throughout.  But this isn’t a story which is interested in having a clever plot or characters with much more signs of emotion than the villains.  The story exists as an excuse to show lots of Cybermen on the moon.

Lots of Cybermen on the moon.

So on the plus side: the Cybermen themselves are very effective when looking at their heads; the effectiveness of the costume design decreases the further you look down until finally you see their lace-up moonboots which are slightly less impressive.  They do quite often manage to be chilling though, and the voice effect is excellent - a metallic, electronic drone (in their previous appearance they sounded like an electronic Peter Sellers doing Bluebottle).  And Patrick Troughton is magnetic as ever, about the only actor here who is.  Even when he’s hovering on the edge of things your eye is drawn towards him, because he’s an actor who is acting even when he is standing still.  Which means that a burst of energy from the Doctor seems like a genuine release.  This was early days for him in the character, but he seems fully in command of the role.

And the animated episodes?  The animation does the job.  The animators are obviously savvy enough to know that this isn’t a chance to do lots of exciting things, animation-wise or they won’t complement the existing episodes.  It must be tempting to improve on the past, but they can’t afford to overshadow the real thing.  There are some rather nice touches – you can see very tiny bubbles floating in the ‘handles’ of one of the Cybermen, and it’s nice how the table wobbles in the animated reprise of episode two’s clffhanger.  It’s understated but has its own character.

Doctor Who fans are funny creatures, and love to complain about what they profess to love.  There are a lot of different types of Doctor Who out there though, and the era ‘The Moonbase’ one comes from – with lots of monsters and besieged bases – isn’t my favourite by a long way.  Ironically, the animation factor of this release probably added to my enjoyment of the story for the novelty value so - I probably liked it better than I would have done with the complete episodes.  Make of that what you will. 

One final thought – if they find the real episodes of all these ones that have now been animated…  Do we get a refund?

TV: Stewart Lee – Much A Stew About Nothing, Nottingham Playhouse

“Come to Nottingham – learn humility.”  

Stewart Lee, 41st best stand-up comedian, came to Nottingham last Thursday to preview material from the forthcoming 3rd Comedy Vehicle series(1).  “I’m going to do, in the first half, about two half hour sections from two episodes of the new series and then in the, er, in the second half, about half an hour which will make up a third episode of the new series and then we can all go home”(2).

According to some critics Stewart Lee comes over as unbearably smug, obnoxious and doesn’t tell any proper jokes; according to others this is true, but he is also hilarious. He’s usually critically acclaimed on the left and panned on the right, as is the way with people who are even slightly experimental in form(3).

It’s quite easy to see why people don’t like him. I mean it is true, he doesn’t do punchy one-liners; on the odd occasion that he does, it is normally followed up immediately with some meta-textual explanation that this is out of character and is unlikely to happen again. During the show, he uses a one-liner as a way to get to a routine about how he was described by Lee Mack as "A cultural bully from the Oxbridge Mafia who wants to appear morally superior but couldn't cut the mustard on a panel game." (Lee's riposte: “You don’t cut mustard – you spread it”) This does raise one of the points Lee quite often raises in his books(4) – do we really want our comedians to see being on a panel game as the apex of their career? It’s a clever device – doing something Mack accuses him of not being able to do in order to lead into a bit about Mack’s criticism.

Another technique, frequently used, is bringing out a piece of paper which supposedly has some quote written on it (as with, for example, the Lee Mack quote). And yet another is explaining to the audience why it’s their own fault for not finding something funny (“look, I’ve tried, I’ve done that bit all over the country and it always gets a laugh round about there… I mean, some of you were laughing there and that’s good but the rest of you – well, you might want to raise your game a bit.”) I think the audiences who see Stewart Lee as being smug might think his onstage persona as what he’s really like as a human being offstage. I think it’s pretty safe to assume that this is not the case(5). Certainly when he starts genuinely laughing at something(6) onstage he looks slightly embarrassed and semi-apologises for breaking character(7). And he’s thoroughly charming to people when he’s signing things for people after the show(8).

The main skill Stewart Lee has as a comedian however, in my opinion, is his skill at using repetition in many different ways. Sometimes it’s the relatively simple device of just repeating a particular sentence over and over again until the repetition is what the audience laughs at. More often, and more interestingly, it is taking the repetition of an idea by putting it into different contexts, pushing it into ever increasingly ridiculous areas until the idea’s internal logic becomes absurd. A brilliant example of this is where he mocks Paul Nutall(s) of the UKIP(s) claim “You need to ensure that your brightest stay and make your own country economically prosperous instead of coming to the UK to serve tea and coffee,” by putting it into different contexts until we slowly but logically arrive at “You Coelacanths need to ensure that your brightest stay in the sea and make it prosperous instead of coming on land and starting life on land.(9)”

After an extended bit of improvisation where, amongst the many call backs to earlier parts of the show, he explicitly explains to the audience(10) that he is trying to make up an ending to the show on the spot, he does an extra 20 minutes and it’s at this point that it becomes clear that what Lee is is a very generous comedian to audiences who are willing to engage and not be passive(11). He’s not only willing to lift the curtain on his writing process in front of an audience(12) but to reward them with a bit more tried and tested stuff in case they’re not at all interested in seeing the comedic process at work. Even if we take the ‘Smug Stewart Lee’ stage persona at face value, it is harder to think of him as treating an audience with as much contempt as a comedian who is willing to do the same material verbatim night after night – of which, sadly there are many.

So, I look forward to the third series of Comedy Vehicle(13), because he really is one of the most verbally innovative comedians in this country. And I look forward to reading his next book of collected material. Which will no doubt be heavily annotated.

(1) This is why this live show is being labelled as a TV review. It is unlikely that I will do enough comedy reviews to make a ‘Comedy’ category worthwhile on the blog. So there.

(2) Lee often does this kind of post-modern stripping away of the illusion of a stand-up routine as being one man being conversationally funny off the top of his head like this. His honesty with his audience – making it clear that this is 90 minutes of prepared material – is refreshing. And the flipside is that when he also makes it clear that the audience is watching improvisation towards the end of the show it makes it genuinely enthralling.

(3) The Right love to hate comedians like Frankie Boyle and Russell Brand because they don’t like what’s being said but they at least understand how the jokes work. They just hate Stewart Lee because they don’t understand him and that makes them feel stupid.

(4) Which are heavily annotated with footnotes…

(5) And therefore such audiences may want to raise their game a bit.

(6) In a genial cackle very much at odds with his normally deadpan delivery.

(7) Similarly, he humorously suggests that the reason he thought the first half wasn’t going as well was because the sound levels were wrong and he’s going slightly deaf. Lee’s deafness, incidentally, gets a massive laugh – such are Nottingham audiences. We enjoy your physical failings.

(8) My friend bought a copy of ‘How I Escaped My Certain Fate’ (his heavily annotated book – heavily annotated… see what I’m doing here…) he was very nice and talked about Birmingham with him, and didn’t merely snatch his money and cackle (not even genially).

(9) The fact that this is not particularly funny on paper – because I’ve omitted many of the repetitions made to get to this final image – is testament to how the repetition is absolutely crucial to Lee’s jokes working.

(10) Albeit through the proxy of an imaginary man down an imaginary telephone.

(11) Although he is being slightly sarcastic when he imagines that parts of the audience aren’t laughing because they aren’t engaging with the images he’s coming up with but are just waiting for the end of his sentences to see if he’s being funny, he’s probably right.

(12) The kind of thing The Fall do at gigs as well. This, as well as the focus on repetition as a creative device shows Mark E Smith’s influence on Lee. Incidentally, the same friend who got his book signed (the one with all those annotations, yeah?) came up with the nickname Salfordor Dali for Mark E Smith, which is genius regardless of what you may think.

(13) See? Totally a TV review. Totally.

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.