New things...

Hello, how are you doing? I'm pleased. Particularly if you just contrarily ignored the accepted social form and told me you weren't doing well. I'm all the more pleased for not having heard it.Anyway that's the niceties out the way. It's time to return to the one sided business of me telling you what I'm up to.

Number 1:
The Alchemists is out there and being reviewed. The response is far more positive than I'd feared. There's a lovely review on Amazon.co.uk, nice ones on Sci-fi Bulletin and Doc Oho Reviews, good ratings on Goodreads (I didn't tell you I've dipped a toe in Goodreads, did I?), and some others scattered around that are more measured. It was always thus.

One disappointment a couple of people had is that it wasn't a play about Doctor Who fighting the Nazis and it wasn't darker in tone. I understand, that but in the end I wrote the play I could and a grim piece about fighting the Nazis wasn't the story I felt I could write. Most of the reasons why are about Doctor Who.
Firstly, in a Companion Chronicle for Susan alone (and there are sensible historic and dramatic reasons for making her the solo companion), I couldn't really make the early Doctor the straightforward hero that kind of story would require.
Secondly, the Doctor Who licence is for family appropriate entertainment (the treatment of the Suffragist and Suffragette prisoners in the play The Suffering is the example I'm always reminded of, of real awful history that needed toning down to be acceptable for Who), so any more brutal content, and it's a brutal history, would be tricky to cover. There is darkness in The Alchemists of course, but most of it is beneath the surface. There are things our unworldly narrator sees and reports without understanding that are awful...
Thirdly, I personally feel Doctor Who has presented a bit of a cartoon World War II in recent years that I'd not be entirely comfortable about adding to. For me, and for the flavour of Doctor Who I was writing here, David Whitaker's mention of the impossibility of killing Hitler in the prologue to The Crusaders novel sat better than his comic TV appearance in 2011's Let's Kill Hitler. I wanted to deal with real history on a more human scale, and all the history in the play is true. Even the somewhat bizarre and fantastical McGuffin was a real plan to save Germany from post-World War I ruin. My gut feeling is if you want Doctor Who against inhuman Nazi monsters, you already have the Daleks.

Number 2:
A little over a year ago, a writer friend of mine died, sillily young, and we've put together a book in his memory and to aid people with Cystic Fibrosis, the condition he lived with which led to his early death. You'll be able to buy it as an ebook here soon, with a hard copy available after that.
It's a book written by people he knew, liked, had worked with and others he'd not met working in the same realms of mind-bending fantasy, whimsy and creepy that he did. Not surprisingly, there will be a few names in there Doctor Who fans of a more literary bent know.

It's called Storyteller- A Found Book and it's for Matt. I've written one story and I like to feel I had a small hand in another because I brought the authors together.
The notion behind it is rather fun, it's a whole list of "other titles you may enjoy" from the back of a genuine old book, except now those titles have had to detach themselves from their old stories and make themselves new ones from scratch. Here's the content listing...

Strangers from the Sea –  George Mann
Moon Eyes – Stuart Douglas
Grandad with Snails – Nick Campbell
Seal Morning – Cody Quijano-Schell
Put Out More Flags – Sarah Hadley
The Hanging Tree – Cavan Scott
Honey in the Horn – Mark Manley
The Devil’s Children – Richard Wright
Harlic – A Story of a Grey Seal – Simon Bucher-Jones
Doctor Syn – Ian Potter
The Samurai’s Daughter – Andy Smillie
Black Mischief – Elizabeth Evershed
The Unicorn Leacock – Orna Petit and Jacqueline Rayner

Everyone's written these stories for nothing and it's for a great cause.

Number 3:
Just over a week ago I recorded a piece with Matthew J Elliott, the British writer of American radio, mystery fiction expert, and quickfire gag man who I've come to know through a mutual friend. It's for the US company RiffTrax and should soon be available from their website, I'll let you know when it is. It's a comic commentary to accompany a movie. If you know the series Mystery Science Theater 3000 you know the kind of thing it is already. If not, think of it as a director's commentary almost entirely composed of gags, that sit on top of a film but doesn't prevent you following it. It's an extra layer of enjoyment, which to be honest this particular film needs. It's an odd little piece called King of Kong Island which includes many peculiar pleasures and delights but you really do need a bit of help if you're going to watch it all the way through.

Number 4:
I have been announced as doing some more Doctor Who! Next year, I have a 4 episode audio adventure coming out for the wonderful Maureen O'Brien and Peter Purves, and a really smashing guest cast which is yet to be revealed (though one of them has actually announced their involvement on Twitter). It's called The Bounty of Ceres and is an attempt to imagine the 60s TARDIS crew in something approaching the hard SF of Arthur C Clarke. Writing it, I deliberately imagined which bits would have to have been done on film or using Kirby Wires or would just have looked awful on the TV budget of the day. Then, I wrote them anyway, knowing on audio they'd look amazing. You can pre-order that one here.

Right, I'd better go and make some other things for you to buy or not. See you soon!

Marisilver

We saw The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel yesterday, and it's not bad. It won't, I think, ever surprise you or particularly challenge you. It's a pleasant film with a great central cast, a smattering of funny lines and a thin story. The Full Monty conquered the world on far less.
There are a few little niggles though, all of which could have been avoided. It feels like one tiny rewrite away from being a more satisfying film, and the details that are wrong feel so obvious I can't help wondering whether it's one rewrite more or fewer that would improve it. These are things that feel like they must have been in the script and got lost along the way.

So, if you think you'd like to see the film with all its twists and turns intact (even though they are tiny and you'll anticipate them all) SPOILERS FOLLOW...

1) Maggie Smith's character journey as Muriel is muddied and her hidden strengths go unhinted at for far too long. Surely, her interest in organisation should have been expressed alongside racist suspicion in her exasperation at the management of her health care, her flight and the bus journey to the hotel. It's a tiny addition in the portrait of her intolerance that would have gone unnoticed until the reveal of her efficiency with a spreadsheet. As it is the revelation comes a little bit out of nowhere in the middle of her story.

2) Muriel also asks, apparently without guile, where Tom Wilkinson's Graham goes every day. He dodges the question, yet a minute later she is able to tell Penelope Wilton's Jean that he goes to the Public Records Office. There's either a big subplot about Muriel gone here or the Graham and Muriel scene has been cut down either in the writing or the edit and once had that revelation in it. It's a jarring mistake that's easily avoidable.

3) There feels to be a character beat missed at Graham's cremation. Jean should be expressing, no matter how discreetly, a number of conflicting feelings that move her on- I'd expect some revulsion at the custom given her other reactions to aspects of Indian life and regret about what she'd invested in Graham as well as grief. The scene really should be a further illustration of how far she's moving from her husband who's embracing the culture. As it is, it seems her story just stops for a bit to simply portray sadness. This feels like it's just one brief wordless cutaway from being resolved, and maybe an editing rather than writing issue. The notion Jean is conflicted vanishes when it should be highlighted, even by as little as a held reaction shot.

4) The story of Judi Dench's Evelyn teaching the call centre workers how to talk to older British people doesn't have enough pay-off. I feel Dev Patel's Sonny's eventual declaration of love to Tena Desae's Sunaina or their shared confrontation with his mother, and ideally both, should be laced with communication lessons learned, and could possibly even be done by 'phone to make it easier for the characters. It feels such a natural pay off I find it hard to believe it wasn't there at some point. What we have is probably easier to make immediate and visual but I feel there's a big thematic call back flapping around those scenes wanting to get in, and it seems daft to have kept it out.

Anyway, you might enjoy it. It has no explosions and a great cast and I liked it for what it was, even though I'd have loved it if it'd been 5% different.

The Criminal Genius of Fritz Lang

The Testament of Doctor Mabuse is an odd film. It's like one of those Shakespeare 'problem plays' or REAL LIFE where you're not quite sure of the genre.
So, first off it's a sequel to two early Fritz Lang films- Doctor Mabuse, the Gambler and M, the one a story of an evil criminal mastermind with a supernatural talent for mesmerism, the other a thriller following the hunt for a psychologically disturbed child killer. You can see immediately where the problem might be.

It's got suspense, big explosions, a couple of great action set pieces, redemption, comedy crooks, a grumpy copper who gets results, bizarre Edgar Allan Poe/Sir Arthur Conan Doyle era forensics where a typewriter clue is disregarded as worthless but there's a lot of messing around with messages on scratched glass and ballistics analysis is an astonishingly exact science.
Then there's an amazingly creepy scene with a man being possessed by a ghost (a ghost later seen to open doors in a manner which denies convenient psychological rationalisation).
It's basically got everything chucked in that you might fancy in an exciting ride, but it doesn't all quite hang together satisfactorily.

It's not helped that the villain's behaviour, hiding in the shadows transmitting messages to his underground network of hoods by radio, setting elaborate bomb traps with stupidly long countdowns and rigging his door knob to a recording of his voice saying “Go away!” have all been pinched by later far pulpier series and serials - King of the Rocket Men, that ghastly Demons episode last week and of course Doctor Who and Tanni in an exciting adventure with a Powerful Enemy.
The bomb bit is actually slightly stupider than the bit in Demons, if you can believe that, though it combines the rising waters and ticking timer threats far more interestingly and has the advantage of resolving its stupid fantasy peril in a sensible way.

What M and The Testament of Doctor Mabuse share beyond Lohmann, their endearing Police Commissar lead, is a sense of a country in which criminality flourishes and is highly organised- in an era of mass unemployment (when even Labour Exchange clerks are short on funds) it's suggested turning to crime is the only way out for some.
Real or imagined this powerful underground black economy seems to turn up time and again in the little German film and literature between the Wars I know. Certainly, the hyper-inflation of Weimar Germany appears to hang heavily on the film, a large part of Mabuse's plan to destabilise the State is built on circulating counterfeit money, he just has to spoil it all with artsy jewel thievery and mass poison gas attacks.
Top tip for any modern terrorists reading- destroying the banking system from within might just be more effective that some of that old fashioned bomb stuff. You probably know this and have been doing it for a while, of course.

Mabuse defeats himself in the end, which is handy because being essentially an idea, an idea that anyone might house, makes him rather hard to defeat otherwise. Quite why he chooses to give up, when all that's really gone wrong is that he's lost a few of his more rubbish henchmen isn't entirely clear, perhaps he's only really interested in destruction and doesn't really know what to follow his schemes up with, perhaps he's retreated to draw up fresh plans to replace those we see him tearing up at the end, perhaps his high profile but failed attack on the public will bring more anarchy than a successful attack would.
Lang was keen after fleeing Germany to say the film, suppressed by the Nazis, was a coded attack on Hitler, and yes it does feature an incarcerated mad man drawing up a plan for revenge on the world, which at a squint might be writing Mein Kampf in jail, and there is a moment at which Mabuse is reported to have said “I am the State!”, but it's a bit of a push.

Admittedly, coded attacks do have to be a bit obscure, but I suspect the film was genuinely banned for its exciting depiction of acts of terrorism against the State rather than for hinting the State and its violent opponents might be cut from similar cloth.

More crowd-pleasing German Expressionism

M

You look at two thirds of this film, and you're looking at an episode of Taggart or Prime Suspect, perhaps Cracker. A serial killer is on the loose in the city, the people are terrified, the press are doing rather nicely out of it - printing mail from the killer and flooding the streets with extra editions, the police are clueless and their bosses are leaning on them to get a result. We follow their investigation and the killer in a race against time. All so-so sofa fare, so far.
Except, this is a 1931 German film not a 1990s ITV police procedural, one of the earliest talkies and, in the hands of Fritz Lang, a bit of a wonder.
If you've seen Metropolis at any of its various lengths or speeds, even with the addition of Pat Benatar and colouring in, you can't help being attuned to Lang's vision of the city and of class. The towering tenement at the film's opening has no elevator and a water pump in the square below, making you wonder if it has running water either, and you can't help being reminded that that really is how our cities' poor once lived. This is also a city in which industry has died, the derelict state of the warehouse of the film's climax is pointedly highlighted, the beggars are unionised, organised crime has more resources than the police, and yet the bank is protected by an elaborate security system which can draw the police in minutes, even at the height of a city wide murder hunt.
The use of sound is really impressive, pretty much every successful film audio technique is here from the off, intercutting dialogue, incongruous juxtapositions of image and sound, the whistled tune that tells us the killer is around before we see him, all great stuff, even if now a couple of the deliberately mute sequences now seem oddly lacking.
Peter Lorre is of course excellent, resembling some strange Orson Welles, Tony Hancock, Pete Doherty combo, all big eyes, round face and full lips, like a world weary baby with a penchant for long coats and hats, he doesn't seem to do much at first, but there's a powerful cumulative effect to this performance.
Cinematically, the whole thing feels very contemporary, bar a couple of frankly silly low angle shots, and the screen ratio is also jolly exciting for the likes of me, still chanting 4:3 good, 16:9 bad, it's almost completely square. I never got bored and looked at the black bits at the screen edges once.
Perhaps the one big weakness in the film naturalistically is that the people's court that appears towards the end feels rather out of place after a couple of superb demonstrations of the nature of mob justice, early on. Given what we know of human nature and what we see in the film, particularly when a fare dodge nearly gets lynched when Chinese whispers identify him as the murderer on the loose, it seems unlikely the killer would have lived for more than minutes after his discovery. This isn't a naturalistic film though, and its right the film's underpinning ideas get this slightly unrealistic outing, even if now seems a touch 'on the nose'.
Incidentally, for a late expressionist, early film noir (take your pick) movie about the hunt for a child killer, this is surprisingly funny, which no one's ever suggested to me, before. A lot of the scenes with the criminal underworld are quite broadly comic, including a quite lengthy sequence in which the police raid an illegal nightclub.
The heavy shadow of the Nazis hangs over the film of course, this is Weimar Germany in collapse on screen, which perhaps makes me more uncomfortable with the suggestion that a city's crooks and pan handlers might be all part of a secret and structured order- it's a little too close to the lies that allow whole classes of people to be demonised, declared subhuman, and eliminated, but that's also part of what makes the film live. There's a queasy lack of moral high ground, anywhere, and the final shot warns us that none of our cures for our social ills and illnesses are better than their prevention.
You should see this, the emotional tone is surprisingly broad and there's genuine suspense too, in which your sympathies shift in sometimes unexpected directions. If for nothing else, you need to see it for an utterly superb shot of a man smoking a cigar in a pipe. Recommended.

No Rest

Okay, it's a very quick one this time- just headlines really.

In mysterious radio adaptation news- none, but still not bad news. rights situation was being checked last I heard. I had some ideas about how it should be done watching Easy Rider last night.
Interesting film, and I liked the ending a lot. Some really annoyingly arty cutting that hits its peak in an LSD sequence that outstayed its welcome for me, but generally a worthwhile watch. Quite low on plot but Pete Fonda and his bike look cool, Nicholson and Hopper aren't quite their established deranged personae, a couple of soundtrack elements are just great- It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) and Born to be Wild which just feels ridiculously good and fresh here.
Most interesting aspects of the film for me- Phil Spector's cameo in the world's most publicly exposed drugs deal near the start and Toni Basil in the gap on her CV between an Elvis movie and kitsch '80s pop fame.

In radio comedy news, things may be more hopeful than I thought. Nothing concrete yet but No Tomatoes series 2 may still fly, and better still, after I've finished this book rather while I'm still writing it. More when/if I know more.

In writing this book news, lots of interviews coming up, which is great because it delays the period when I have nothing to do but type, which is the most tricky bit of any writing, and they're fabulous big names.

In not drinking in January news- I've not been drinking in January and appear to have sloughed off enough pounds to consider not drinking some more.

In unrelated but I mentioned it a few weeks ago news, 1500ish words of mine about Hughie Green, Hancock, Howerd and the Steptoes will be getting published by my ex-employer's journal. Don't know exactly when but it's to tie in with the upcoming BBC4 dramas about them all (which I think have made a brilliant decision in casting David Walliams as Howerd).

Now the weather. Ho hum.

Atmosphere

"I love a party with a happy atmosphere," sang Russ Abbott in a tribute to Joy Division almost as wonderfully wrong as The Wombats annoyingly catchy Let's Dance to Joy Division with its cry of "celebrate the irony" which for me encapsulates all that was wrong with poncy student discos, back in the day when we didn't even say "back in the day" to mean "when we were young".

I went to see Control, the Ian Curtis biopic last night, at the Showroom cinema in Sheffield.
There's probably a cinema like it near you- it also has lots of carefully styled urban bohemians in it, in hand knitted lumpen jumpers, big coats and thick framed spectacles you think may be an affectation of the perfectly sighted, an exhibition space, wi-fi hot spots and tapas in the bar and conference rooms in which terrible seminars can take place complete with flip charts, power point presentations and grim awkward coffee breaks.

It's an independent cinema affiliated to the bunch who run a little trailer at the start of each screening saying how they support European film.
I like it a lot, particularly the veggy tapas.

Our screening of Control due to begin at 5.45pm began perhaps 5 minutes late, which was fine. We were kept fully informed by staff, who let us know the previous screening was over-running and were told a few minutes before we went in that "it wouldn't be long now because the credits had started".
This only made it more infuriating when at around 8pm the film stopped abruptly on a slide

S
P
O
I
L
E
R

S
P
A
C
E

detailing the birth and death dates of Ian Curtis (he dies in the end I'm afraid), the music fizzed out and the house lights came up.

I laughed and then swore, and quite a few others around me did similar things, we'd been totally jolted out of the film's mood.
Nothing happened for a bit, we whinged, and then, like the good English customers we are, we started filing out.

I can only conclude that the Showroom staff now felt a punctual start for the next film was more important than the artistic integrity and enjoyment of the previous one, I don't know that for sure of course because, unsurprisingly, there were no staff around to explain the decision.
Really shoddy I thought. Even the biggest commercial multiplexes run the credits, even BBC1 gives me 30 seconds of them rammed into a tiny box in the corner of the screen.
So I've written and complained, which really isn't like me.
No, really, it isn't.

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE. 30/10/07.

I've now received a very nice explanation and apology from the Showroom which is both reassuring and slightly interesting if you're a bit geeky (oh come on, you're reading a weblog, you must be).

The abrupt halt was caused by a sync pulse on the print which multiplexes use to automatically raise the house lights apparently. Unfortunately, with the Showroom's system it also has the effect of stopping the projector! Their projectionists usually hunt these sync marks down and remove them when they make up the films but this one got missed. It seems their earlier Control screenings had been digital so this first film print showing was the first they knew of it.
Nice to know it was a mistake rather than a deliberate act and get some background on the problem too, and even nicer to be offered comps with the apology as well.

DOWNDATE DOWNDATE DOWNDATE. We now return you to your previous webloggery.

The film itself was very very good, occasional clumsy biopicitis where you have to put over career developments and historic info rather baldly, but surprisingly funny and genuinely moving. It's also extremely nostalgia inducing, accurately depicting a time and place 25 years back that looks more like 50 years back now (there's even a Williams and Glynn Bank!), furthermore, everyone has terrific record collections, we get to watch the pulsating of a run out groove (a teenage pleasure I'd forgotten) and our old gas fire is even in it too.

In terms of performances, John Cooper Clarke is pleasingly still alive and doing a pretty damned convincing version of himself (His Snap, Crackle and Bop album is an absolute work of art that you can get very cheap nowadays, greatly recommended) and Sam Ryan's Ian Curtis is an impressive piece of work that goes beyond Stars In Their Eyes mimicry (how Granada music TV fell from So It Goes glory), Samantha Morton breaks your heart, I could go on.
You really do feel you're seeing the real band a lot of the time.
There's a nice in-jokey reference to 24 Party People too by the way, when they attempt to tell Curtis that things could be worse and he could be lead singer of The Fall (the role Ryan played in that film).

In terms of sound, there were three sequences in which I wondered whether they were doing something tricksy with the wildtrack noise, making it pulse rhythmically as if foreshadowing the effects in the later hypnosis and suicide scenes, but I don't know if that was just the facilities at the Showroom now.
Anyway, some of the Macclesfield traffic rumble, the background noise at the maternity hospital and at the Labour Exchange when Debbie looks for bar work and of course the grasshopper sounds on the hillside near the start all seemed to have a curious alienating pumping quality to them to my ears. Maybe that was just me, grasshoppers sometimes have that quality anyway if they're in large numbers, as their chirrups go in and out of phase with each other.

The one sad thing is you get a sense from the film of Curtis as a rather immature selfish individual incapable of feeling proper empathy with others, and although you feel for his pain, you end up feeling more for those around him who loved him despite and because of his empty coldness.

The band's flirtation with Nazi imagery is acknowledged but essentially ignored leaving one feeling as uncomfortable as ever with this aspect of punk and post-punk music. Obviously, we've all forgiven Bowie and Siouxsie for playing with the swastika back then (interestingly, we forgive Kula Shaker a lot less speedily for being slightly more intellectual about the symbol's history in the 90s because they were pants basically) and lounge lizard pop dad Bryan Ferry is now excused for his attraction to the aesthetics of fascism, but it all feels like a dirty secret we're not talking about from the 70s and 80s.

How much of it was just seizing onto iconography designed to upset an older generation, how much was based on a failure of understanding (the Second World War played out like Cowboys and Indians* on our screens and in our comics back then- Dad's Army never dealt with the Holocaust), how much of it was genuine neo-Nazism?
I feel sure all three things were going, and I think that's worth admitting. Young people, even very clever young people, can be incredibly stupid, that's why some of them "celebrate the irony" when they go dancing, of course.
In fact young people being stupid is pretty much the Joy Division tragedy. In retrospect, all so obvious, but, back in the day, unimaginable.

*Not that with hindsight you can be particularly comfortable with the morality of those Cowboys and Indians stories either... So it goes.

Parisienne Walkways

I saw Belle De Jour this week, not the ITV2 drama which has now been retitled The Secret Diary of a Call Girl in case any of the potential viewing demographic might be put off by a title that doesn't immediately describe the programme content, the Luis Bunuel film with Catherine Deneuve who I of course remember most fondly for picking up Goths in a New York club with David Bowie in the middle of a surprisingly under-populated Bauhaus gig.

It's a curious film and like the only other classic French film I've seen recently Godard's A Bout De Souffle (which disappointingly turns out not be about a souffle at all) seems to have a curious fascination with gun-toting low rent crooks on the streets of Paris, coupled with Serge Gainsbourg's Bonnie and Clyde this all leads me to presume on the scantiest of evidence that American scuzz was terribly hip at the time in Paris (and the New York Herald Tribune seems to have sold well on the streets too).

The central character of Belle De Jour, Severine is a woman who fantasises about being punished and humiliated, though, like the prostitute's client in the film who pays to be chastised as an unworthy servant, she clearly wishes to maintain control of the humiliation fantasies too. It all seems psychologically plausible enough, though one scene in which she is asked to impersonate a grieved over corpse feels to have slightly different well springs, perhaps the narcisism in the desire to be shamed, and feels it came from a different film or a very different person's fantasies (apparently Bunuel's film incorporates fantasies of real women into the narrative).

However, the sexiest thing in the whole film about sexual fantasies is Catherine Deneuve fully dressed, in buttoned up Yves Saint Laurent outfits, in particular there's a great double breasted red jacket and a grey coat like a cut down Russian army uniform that she wears with a knitted hat shaped like an Astrakhan but that thankfully doesn't look like it involved the same cruelty to produce (if you don't know about Astrakhan hats look it up). That sense of buttoned up, held in control style, coupled with Deneuve's cool slightly hard beauty, is far more interesting than her in her scanties allowing dirty, scarred, broken-toothed petty criminals with holes in their socks to writhe over her (see how degraded she allows herself to become!).
It's not really a particularly great film but it does leave gaps in the narrative and ambiguities for you to ponder after it's gone which you rarely seem to get in the well-constructed narratives of today.

I guess that's why I've not bothered with ITV2's The Secret Diary of a Call Girl too, even the title seems engineered to avoid difficulty.
To speak metaphorically, I'd rather see Deneuve dressed up and be left with questions than Piper dressed down and left with none, and obviously as a Doctor Who fan I love Billie (or rather love Rose and Honey to the Bee I'm not that weird), but there are certain arenas where letting it all hang out are much less interesting than keeping it all under wraps, and this is one of them for me.

Misshapes

I saw the film Gods and Monsters, a fictionalised account of the last days of Frankenstein director James Whale the other day, a movie which suggests that Brendon Fraser might, given half a chance, turn into a rather more well regarded actor than he is at present (he'll probably have to get fat and/or old first though), and which only really puts a foot wrong for me when Sir Ian McKellen's Whale states he comes from Dudley in the North of England.
Come on, it's called the Midlands for a reason, Sir Ian! I can't believe a Dudley boy would ever call his town Northern, even if attempting to explain his background to an American he considered a bit dim.

The only thing I'd like to have seen in the movie that I didn't, would have been an explicit parallel between Whale's death in his pool and the Monster's innocent drowning of the little girl in Frankenstein, which could have been easily and effectively incorporated into one of the film's dream sequences and would have been thematically apt I reckon.

Anyhow, it got me thinking about other Frankenstein films, and in particular, one I greatly enjoyed that no one else seemed to- The Bride.
Now at the time this seemed to be reviled by the mainstream press as an unnecessary and inferior remake of Whale's The Bride of Frankenstein, for not having enough horror in it and for starring Sting, but to take those points in order- it's immediately and explicitly obvious that this is if anything a sequel to The Bride of Frankenstein from the reimagining of its finale at the film's opening, there's hardly any horror in the Universal Frankensteins either actually and Sting's not in most of it, and not as I recall it, actively bad.

What The Bride does offer is a rather sweet story about people coming to define their own destinies and identities and become themselves rather than creatures of others, a halfway house between Shelley's Frankenstein and its popular reinventions exploring some of the themes of the story, and a great supporting cast featuring four of my favourite British performers- Quentin Crisp (perfect as a clone of Doctor Pretorius the camp scientist/Occultist from The Bride of Frankenstein), Alexei Sayle (as a snarlingly evil circus boss), David Rappaport (as a circus performer who befriends Frankenstein's monster), and Ken Campbell (as a dodgy but ultimately honest, devious, thieving, stinking peddler).
All four shine for me, because they give intelligent, felt performances in their individual styles, and are reassuringly odd, in a way you don't usually see on film. Most movie actors tend to believe less is more and the less idiosyncratic their less is the better, these performers are bigger than that- there's no Queen Christina stillness in these faces.

Crisp, as I'm sure you know, was originally a Pratt, and a distant relation of the actor William Pratt in fact, an artist whose career also took off with a name change when he became Karloff the Uncanny, and you can't help feeling this Frankenstein blood-tie was one of the reasons Crisp was cast in The Bride.
Crisp's angle on performing and life- that you should take what other people think is wrong with you, emphasise it and make it your style, is probably the key to why I like all four of these performers, focused difference.

Sayle is a genius- wit, rage, lunacy and intellect with a Scouse accent, and thus rather like my dad after talking to one of his brothers on a 'phone sometimes, and he writes well too.
He sat down near me in a cafe in Crouch End once, but he was radiating 'private time - do not disturb' so he missed my rubbish gushing adulation, luckily.
I would probably had said something crap, like-
"'Lexi! There's a page and a half in your novel Overtaken, riffing on 1970s leftish playwrights that I absolutely adored. Honestly, I was honking like a goose by the time you mentioned Snoo Wilson!"
And he would have said "Why can't you just say 'How you diddling?' or 'You fat bastard!' like everyone else, you great ponce?' and if I was lucky, sneered at me.

Rappaport, a mainstay of kids TV when I was growing up, who you may recall commited suicide in LA was an actor I always wish had been allowed to play humans more, even in LA he was playing a lawyer (B'doom tish. Try the gefilte fish, I'm here all week etc.).
It seems sad to me that while we have colour-blind casting in British Theatre, we never seem to have developed size-blind casting, meaning that interesting actors like Rappaport, only ever play dwarfs full-stop, not swordsmen, lovers, scientists, business men, students or gangsters who just happen to be dwarfs. In films and TV of course they're lucky to play people at all. It seems such a waste that we've so many dwarf actors who only really get seen in panto or a monster suit.

Campbell, of course, is a hero, a performer and writer who celebrates the peculiar, and encouraged me to think a decade or so back- actually, hell I could still do this writing and performing thing after all- there's a gap for the cleverly odd. I just have the find the bit of gap that's left that fits me and my particular lack of traditional performing skills, that's all...

They're all peculiar "monsters" really and their own special creations too, and they all make me laugh too.

Thursday (here's why I did not go to work today)

Nostalgia, like neuralgia, is a pain you seem to suffer from increasingly as you get older. I had a great dollop of it yesterday on a trip to the old workplace to see Alan Bennett, his film ‘The History Boys’ and a lot of old work friends and colleagues.

Mr Bennett chatted amiably about film and filming for forty minutes or so and was all you'd hope really. Then he made his excuses and left us to enjoy his film.

Great '80s soundtrack, lovely performances, though, unsurprisingly, very wordy, with the play of recurring images in dialogue the chief delight in the writing. The film follows a group of rather peculiar ‘80s Sheffield 6th formers (who film doesn't really disguise are a bit old to be in school still) who all seem to be very open and liberal about homosexuality in a way I don't recall South Yorkshire schoolboys of the time being at all.

This is the where, for me, cinema really suffers in comparison to theatre and radio, which can set their own rules. We come to film with expectations of naturalism that are hard to shake, because it looks so very like real life most of the time. Movies can end up struggling to get away with the murder they might like to in terms of creating their own worlds and conventions as a result.

One can't help feeling there might be a fair bit of idealised ‘50s Leeds in this idealised ‘80s Sheffield too. Bennett, as we, know came from the 'North' to study history at Oxford, much like his heroes, and it's impossible not to wonder if there’s a hint of autobiography in the piece, no matter how wary we are about such instincts. We don’t like to think our fictions are really all made up, somehow.

Whatever, it was genuinely moving, and extremely funny. Perhaps the oddest nostalgia inducing moment for me was the prominently displayed poster for the Crucible Theatre's early '80s production of Hamlet in the school, the programme for which lurks in a drawer not far from where I sit now. Real Proustian biccie mo.
Kevin 'Curly Watts' Kennedy was one of the gravediggers, I recall.

Afterwards, to the pub with a terribly large number of people, many of whom were far too lovely to me for words. Much beer downed and lots of cobblers talked, a few hugs exchanged and gossip swapped. Home by midnight by two trains and a brisk walk, quite pleasantly beer-sloshed in a way I’ve not been for a good while. Nowadays, if aiming for that level of inebriation I’d tend to head for wine. The two forms are rather different. I think I prefer wine now, it’s mellower and less hard on the bladder when walking cold streets at the witching hour.

Like the ‘80s of the film, the workplace wasn't quite as I remembered it ( I'm at one remove from the place now, and, I suspect, see it more as its public does these days), but close enough to make me smile and remember the happier moments more than the bleak ones. The people are any organisation's best asset and most of the people there are sensational, no matter what name the place has or what structure is being applied to it, it’s nothing without them.

Eee, the Plague Years- best days of our lives. We were poor, being wiped out arbitrarily and viciously by an unforgiving and unreasoning force and covered in suppurating boils but we were happy.

All Vogsphere's Spent

Douglas Adams did everything I wanted to do for love and money before I was ten- be funny and write for 'Doctor Who'. This was good because
a) it meant I had to concentrate on being me instead of trying to be who I very very slightly reminded people of (as a result of imitating them slavishly and incompetently to the best of my ability) and
b) it meant he got loved and monied (more for the being funny than for the writing of 'Doctor Who' obviously).

This evening though I finally did something Douglas Adams didn't- I watched the 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' movie, and a resounding curate's egg it is too.

The thing is, it's painstakingly loyal to Adams in a large number of details (and Stephen Fry is a Book so good you nearly forget the great Peter Jones) some of them quite nerdish, and yet fails to quite capture the feel I think is required. Verbal wit, black humour, digression, those are the great things in 'Hitchhiker's' and there's not enough of them in the film.

Unsurprising really, because mainstream movies need a plot, action and some feel-good all of which can and do happen in 'Hitchhiker's' but largely as an unexpected bonus that sneaks in between the more obviously good bits.

The biggest problems, a two armed, three headed man who exists for one throwaway reveal gag and a couple of follow ups and a narrator who has most of the best lines are part of the film's radio heritage, and I reckon both were better dealt with in the pretty shoddy BBC TV series, which did its best to integrate them visually as much as possible.
They don't belong in the film because they don't justify themselves visually and film is a visual medium first and foremost, and they really aren't there enough for us to just accept that they should be. They're there because fans expect them to be, not because they serve the telling of the story in the medium.

This is the second problem- story. It really isn't what 'Hitchhiker's' was ever about. It's a rambling yarn stitching together jokes which then pull a story into being in their wake. When you try to unpick it to produce a three act Hollywood drama and then try to staple the old jokes back on (along with any new ones you can think of), you end up with a lot of scar tissue, some not particularly pleasant scabs and a slightly messy and blood spattered piece of fabric, as a result of all that textile stuff and medical stuff above rubbing up against each other a bit too vigorously.

I can't help thinking that, if Douglas Adams had lived, the film would have been more of a thing of itself and of its medium, would have been less true to the source material, and probably would and should have had a lot less dialogue in it. The radio, book and telly 'Hitchhiker's' were about connecting one person to one author's vision and making them smile, snigger or even snort occasionally (ideally in their own homes and a favourite chair), I think the film should have been about how you can reinvent that to make a multiplex cinema audience laugh out loud as one, and often.
The best moments in the film we have are visual reinterpretations of the radio ideas (the bathos of the world's end is done divinely in an entirely new and cinematic way, Ford and Arthur in the airlock is a great kinetic reinvention of a dialogue scene, and the League of Gentleman/Plaskitted Vogons are a joy a world away from the originals, though recognisably akin to them) that make you wish there'd been more liberties taken. I reckon Adams probably wouldn't have allowed the let-off of a new Earth being created so easily in the last reel, if he'd still been around either, as it rather diffuses the bleakness of what had occurred just an hour before.

I wish he was here being effortlessly clever and strenuously funny about things still, his film and our world would be all the better for it. If nothing else it would mean people didn't feel they had to impersonate him so badly and loyally, so much, like I did when I was ten.

Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t ‘Ve?)

Of course you have, and as long as it wasn’t someone who preferred the Roland Gift massacring of the above song to the sublime original you can be let off.

A thousand years ago in the 1980s, besotted by minxish gamines with sharp wicked eyes and smiles and even sharper haircuts, I fell in love with Louise Brooks, or rather a dozen postcards and posters of her, holding herself challengingly, projecting a total awareness of her charm and a wry amusement at its power.

The effect was amplified by reading at University the two Wedekind plays on which her most famous film ‘Pandora’s Box’ was based and discovering at the university library a book on the film full of stills revealing that even caught by the movie camera she was capable of captivating (you must have come across the phenomenon of carefully contrived beauties made by artful lighting, who fall apart under less loving scrutiny, it’s a blow but you usually still have the stills to comfort yourself with).

The plays rollick along rather excitingly and there’s something quite Angela Carter in the naughty but innocent creature of desire that wanders through them, she’s part victim, part passive hero, part architect of her own oblivion, childlike and childish, feminist and fun and I could only imagine how great the film version might be.

Last night we saw the film, it was ordinary. There were occasional pleasures in staging and bits of comic business and the uncanny resemblance of Fritz Kortner as Dr. Schön to Kelsey Grammer’s Frasier in both look and deed, but it’s really not a great film. The few bits of filming I could wholeheartedly approve of were in the way the camera follows the female star hungrily and the care with which she is framed and lit, excluding a few extreme close ups where glistening starburst highlights on her teeth and eyes, seemed rather too artful and ridiculous and put one in mind of the photoshop lens flare used on dodgy photomontage book covers.

Even without this occasional nonsense Louise Brooks is spectacular, more alive than anyone else in the film, possibly because she was an American actor in a German Expressionist drama, but who cares- she glittered, scowled, sobbed, smiled wickedly and playfully, demanded total attention, and, lets be clear here, looked damned hot.

It was such a relief- she was beautiful and she could act (bear in mind my longest sustained glimpses of Brooks performing beforehand had been in a not entirely edifying ‘Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’ video, from the days when OMD was one person*).

You have to see her, even if she ends up in a peculiar foggy 30s/Victorian studio London looking like she’s living with Steptoe and Son and dying at the hands of an actor whose version of madness went out with Doctor Caligari. You must be assimilated. Obviously, she can never belong to you and your desire for her will destroy you and all else you hold dear but she’s so worth it she should advertise hair products.

Phwoar.

*Andy McClusky is a much shorter name than ‘Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’, he was mad not to use that. It’s not like anyone buying records in the early 90s who had any band loyalty to OMD wouldn’t have known his name, or any of the kids would be more inclined to buy ‘Sailing on the Seven Seas’ because of a faintly silly sounding band name, is it?