TV: Babylon

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

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

James Nesbitt as the Chief Commissioner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brit Murphy as Liz, new Head of Communications

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

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

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

MUSIC: Syd Barrett's Solo Work

"I tattoed my brain all the way"...  

Syd Barrett is probably the most famous acid-casualty of the 1960s.  He is remembered for his early Pink Floyd work, but his (in my opinion lyrically stronger) solo albums are generally neglected.

Syd Barrett’s solo work is now available on Spotify, and this seems like a good subject with which to accidentally create and end a loose trilogy of posts; last week we looked at Forgotify and the unintended sadness of lost music, and after that we’ve looked at Lewis Carroll’s rejection of the adult world in favour of child-like fantasy.

Syd Barrett & Friend

Barrett’s solo lyrics, along with a lot of 1960s psychedelic lyrics, are steeped in images rooted in childhood, and quite often images rooted in the idea of Victorian childhood.  Not the chimney-sweep version of Victorian childhood, but the rocking-horse in the nursery version – most, though not all, of the 60s psychedelia movement of the time was middle-class  His solo music is not forgotten exactly (although some of it spent a significant amount of time out of print), but it is dwarfed by his previous band’s work – Pink Floyd.  

I don’t really want to talk much about pre or post-Barrett Pink Floyd, but the gist of the story so far is that Barrett was the leading creative force of Pink Floyd in the early days, always cutting an odd figure, showing some signs of what we would now associate with bipolar disorder.  He started to lose his mind (very possibly because of the vast amount of LSD floating around, although it’s thought be some that the hallucinogen was just a catalyst for a breakdown he was already heading towards).   He became extremely eccentric and erratic.  He was eventually dumped by the rest of the band; they courageously confronted the illness and difficulties of their friend head-on by just not picking him up for gigs anymore.

So he retreated even more into his own world, staring out as if marooned, eventually being persuaded to make some solo records at the tail-end of the 60s.  And they’re really good listening.  I haven’t listened to them in years but they really are quite startling.  This doesn’t always mean startlingly good.  But there’s something in the atmosphere of both albums that always sucks me in.  I think it’s not so much the songs themselves (although some haunt me for days), but the audible effort involved in just getting them out in the first place.  And they both share a mood of someone lost in time, yearning for a more innocent world.

The first album, ‘The Madcap Laughs’, is the most fragmented in style.  This is probably more to do with the fact it took 2 years to complete with several different musicians and producers than Barrett’s mental health.  

Barrett & Another Friend - The back of 'The Madcap Laughs' album.

There are songs with laid-back moods and some which are much more aggressively obscure.  The opening ‘Terrapin’ is a child-like lullaby.  ‘Octopus’ is a musically cheerful evocation of an octopus ride at a fairground, with a chorus where Barrett pleads to be left there.  The lyrics have flashes of darkness (“Isn’t it good to be lost in the wood/Isn’t it so bad, quiet there…”).  ‘No Man’s Land’ is where Barrett drawls “When I live I die/They even see me under call/We under all, we awful, awful, crawl” before breaking down into unintelligible murmurs.  

All the songs sound like they’re just about able to continue but are capable of derailing at any moment, as ‘No Man’s Land’ essentially does.  Even something relatively joyous (like ‘Love You’, a song which is grinning way too much to sound healthy) can end in a disconcerting and abrupt manner.  Sometimes a song seems to end and then starts again as if it’s just remembered something.  At the start of a song called ‘If It’s In You’ you hear him snap at someone (perhaps himself) for not being able to sing an ambitiously high note, and the song goes on to contain many false starts and missed notes.  And eventually you realise that this must have been the most useable take.   It feels voyeuristic, and changes the way you listen to the rest of the album.  All those moments where the songs break down away to nothing are just metaphors for their author’s state of mind, more so than the content of the songs themselves.

A drawing by Syd Barrett, the cover of his second and final album.

The second album ‘Barrett’, is more cohesive because it is played by more or less the same band all the way through and was made in a much shorter length of time.  It begins with the song that for me sums up the best of Barrett’s solo work completely; a deceptively sunny piece of post-psychedelia psychedelia with lyrics that are inexplicably disturbing (the opening lines are “In the sad town/Cold iron hands clap/The party of clowns outside/Rain falls in grey far away”).  It sounds like one of Barrett’s Pink Floyd singles, ‘See Emily Play’; but this time the imagery isn’t quaint Victorian whimsy but is instead either unintelligible or worrying.  And is vastly more interesting as a result.

‘Dominoes’ has a sense of bleak ennui, with its repeating visions of numbness and endless falling.  ‘Rats’ is essentially a stream of consciousness, as if Barrett’s trying to express too many things at once.  These are the darkest moments.  ‘Gigolo Aunt’ shows the more uplifting side of his music at this point, ‘Baby Lemonade’ without the subversively gloomy lyrics.  And it ends with ‘Effervescing Elephant’, which has all the violent whimsy of a Victorian nursery rhyme and reminds me most of ‘How Doth The Little Crocodile’ by Lewis Carroll.

These albums are incredibly sophisticated in their efforts to reach back to childhood.  Rather than anything from Pink Floyd’s discography, Barrett’s solo work sounds most like a John Lennon song from ‘The White Album’, ‘Cry Baby Cry’.  It has the eerie feeling of nostalgia, and the stranger feeling of someone mistaking nostalgia and fantasy for reality.  This does not in any way make the music depressing or far too disturbing to listen to.  There’s true joy and, yes, madcap laughter on both albums.  The textures are much more complex.  

I think it’s important to remember that Syd Barrett wasn’t someone who, like Ian Curtis, was lost in misery.  He was just lost.  After ‘Barrett’ (and some claim during it) he lost interest and became a physical recluse, but psychologically he had cut himself out of society years before, long gone.  These songs are a snapshot of a rapidly dissolving, if not completely dissolved, sense of reality; but that does not mean that they are not filled with artistic and emotional truths.

BOOK: Alice In Wonderland and Lewis Carroll's Biopic.

Lewis Through The Camera Lens

They’re making a biopic of Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll).  But before we talk about him, let’s talk about Alice.  

‘Alice in Wonderland’ is one of those rare stories; not only do you not need to have read the book to know it, you also don’t need to have seen the films either.  It is a story that it just known, deeply rooted in popular culture worldwide. 

And it absolutely deserves that status – it is legendary in a literal sense; ‘Alice In Wonderland’ is a legend that can be interpreted and re-interpreted over and over again to different creative effects.  The famous Disney cartoon places the story firmly in fairy tale territory; Tim Burton takes the idea into darker territory.

The rampant dreamlike happenings of the story (and that of its superior sequel, ‘Through The Looking Glass’) lend themselves well to visuals both in film and illustration.  John Tenniel’s

Alice & Friend

original drawings are testament to that, and are perhaps still the best (although I think Anthony Browne’s Magritte inspired pictures give Tenniel a run for his money…)  Perhaps because the story started as part of the ‘oral tradition’ style of telling tales it allows it to be flexible and fluid; Carroll no doubt had to incorporate interruptions and questions into the story as it went along.

Of course, because the story was told before it was written the magic of the Alice books really lies in its use of language and absurd ideas. All of the wordplay, nonsense poetry and parodies of nursery rhymes, unanswerable riddles (“Why is a raven like a writing desk?”), anthropomorphic characters, playing cards painting flowers, murdering time, babies turning into pigs, disembodied smiles left hanging in the air…  Everything is possible, especially when it shouldn’t be.  It is anarchic in every sense – there are no rules to what happens.  This is why, I believe, the Alice books still have the capacity to terrify children; there are no genre tropes here where the heroine will be fine after defeating the villain/discovering the treasure/winning the game, etc.  The lack of rules or objectives is completely disorientating, and children can find this troubling (it terrified me – my Mum had to give up during the second chapter apparently). 

And where is Carroll actually going with all of this?  It goes nowhere of course; it ends with that most clichéd of dues ex machina endings – Alice woke up and it was all a dream.  It’s a complete admission on Carroll’s part that his anarchy doesn’t have a conclusion or a ‘point’ to make – it is there to be enjoyed, and then it isn’t.  It’s notable that this is exactly the same way the sequel ends, and was not seen as something from the first book that could be ‘fixed’ this time round.  It’s also notable that no one complains about either of the books having weak endings.

So, that’s my opinion of the Alice books.  Written by Lewis Carroll…

… but then Lewis Carroll didn’t exist in real life.  Charles Dodgson existed in real life but we don’t know very much about him.  Or rather, we don’t know very much about the part of him that wrote the Alice books, which are the only relevant bits for us.  It is worth little to us now to know that he was a good but very dull maths lecturer.  His biographical details are largely uninteresting apart from the aspects of Dodgson’s life that converged with Carroll’s – namely the nature of his relationships with children.  Nevertheless, they (‘they’ being Hollywood) are planning a biopic, called 'Queen Of Hearts'.  Hmm.  It's being talked about on industry sites, and the one sentence synopsis is as follows: "Oxford instructor Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) tells stories to the dean's daughter, Alice, and her sisters, while falling in love with the dean's wife."

Now, it may seem unfair to judge an unmade film on a tagline, but this already sounds a bit lame.  The emphasis sounds like it’s on completely the wrong thing.  The story of Carroll/Dodgson doesn’t have anything to do with falling in love with a Dean’s wife (something which maybe, possibly, might have happened but which is in the end pure speculation based on some missing diary pages).  No, the only story to tell about Dodgson’s life worth telling is about his love for Alice Liddell.

What form that love took is quite unknowable.  There are the posthumous accusations of paedophilia, but no direct evidence for them.  He shared a typical Victorian taste for over-sentimentalising children, and girls in particular (see also Little Nell and most of the rest of Dickens).  But I don’t think he wanted to sexualise children.  He comes across in biographies as a man who wasn’t particularly interested in sex, and was probably frightened of it, and I think it more likely that he enjoyed the company of children because they represented to him a retreat from the sexualised world of adults.  Which is undoubtedly still rather messed up; but then he lived in the Victorian era, which had a very messed up code of ethics and morals about most things.  There’s something of the ‘Old Peter Pan’ about his character, someone who shouldn’t have grown up but did.  Perhaps that explains the reoccurrence of time as a concept in all of his books.  And perhaps that’s why there’s also an air of sadness and of violence amongst all the comedy, expressing a sense of frustration with the tediousness/emotional responsibilities of the adult world.

Charles Dodgson

This aspect of his character is the only part worth examining, frankly, because that’s the only bit we know that links directly to the work we remember him for.  If the rumours (and I think even ‘rumours’ is too strong a word) that he was having a fling with the Dean’s wife were true then you’d still just have a dull melodrama set in Victorian Oxford.  You can say what you want about her importance in his life, but he didn’t write a book for her, he wrote one for her daughter.  The complex bit of his character, and therefore the interesting bit, is his attitude to childhood and his relationship with children; his relationship with adults just doesn’t sound very interesting. 

Even if the film is a good piece of drama about a love triangle – and it could be a very good piece of drama – that’ll probably put Alice in more in the background which is… well, fine I suppose – but it would seem a bit perverse to make a film about the relatively unremarkable life of Charles Dodgson instead of the more enigmatic Lewis Carroll.

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