Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 7/31: TV comedy? Can't recall reading you writing much about it so I'd be interested to know your tastes. Especially since I'd... ..argue that The Trip, Getting On, Grandma's House, Bellamy's People, Rev, etc are pretty much the pinnacle of recent UK TV. Then there's loads of US stuff: Community, Parks and Rec, 30 Rock, Party Down, Modern Family, Louie... It's a golden age! (suggested by @inthesoup via Twitter)

TV There’s a reason I don’t write much about sitcom. I don’t watch much sitcom. I’ve seen precisely none of the sitcoms you’ve listed though I am looking forward to taking The Trip in one long chunk when I’m enjoying a self-devised Michael Winterbottom season next year (whilst simultaneously trying to deal with my Steve Coogan issues). To increase your shock and awe, I haven’t seen more than half an episode of The Office either. Or Curb Your Enthusiasm. Or many of the other “classics” you’re probably thinking of. In fact, about the only sitcom I remember properly making time for this year was The Thick of It.

Since I have most of them recorded, six episodes here and there nestling neatly on a dvd I do wonder why I haven’t sat down with any of them for an evening as I plan to with The Trip. Part of the problem is that identified by Alison Graham in her review 2010 column in the nearly Christmas Radio Times, the one with Matt and Mike and Kathy on the cover. She says that the problem with the modern BBC sitcom is that it isn’t funny and that’s certainly part of my reticence. Very rarely has British sitcom outside of the obvious classics delivered on laughs, more interested in character and drama than the simple joke. The reason Not Going Out worked was because it was unashamed of its own genre.

But paradoxically I become very tired with sitcom if there isn’t much in the way of character development, an element of change. That’s my issue, probably, since sitcom to an extent is based on repetition then variation on repetition. But when I think of the sitcoms I’ve truly loved they’ve had an element of drama, or more specifically soap opera. The Friends changed significantly over their ten years and grew and much of the humour developed from that, discovering marriage and parenthood. Also true of Fraser and to some extent Red Dwarf (though that became less funny as soon as the writers decided it was more about sci-fi concepts than people). Victor Meldrew changed over time as he accepted his life as a retiree, even mellowed to some extent.

The other truth is that I simply prefer comedy drama or drama with elements of comedy. What The West Wing, Gilmore Girls, My So-Called Life, everything Joss Whedon’s ever produced, Moonlighting, Party Animals, 24, Lost, e.r. (in its prime), Being Human, Misfits, Mad Men, Northern Exposure, Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who (to name a couple) all share is the ability to be laugh out loud funny in the middle of the melodrama, funnier even than most sitcoms. Many of these shows are turned out by writers who’ve previously worked on sitcom or both, not least the writing machine that is Jane Espenson, but often somehow manage to produce even better material, I’d wager, because they have much better defined characters to play about with.

Which isn't to say I won't get around to watching your favourite sitcom at some point. I just don't know that they can sustain the amazingly high laugh rate of The West Wing, even in the later John Wells years, especially when Alison Janney is acting at full pelt or those astonishing Gilmore Girls episodes when eighty pages worth of dialogue are hammered through in forty minutes. As the convoluted plotting of Lost became even more convoluted, it had to draw in elements of farce and lashings of irony. And I’m yet to find a more perfectly paced piece of comic television than My So-Called Life’s penultimate number in which most of the young cast find themselves progressively connected to the Chase family’s bed after Rayanne handcuffs herself to it.

Follow @inthesoup.

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 6/31: Five things -- small, big, in-between, whatever -- you are grateful for right this second (suggested by Kat Herzog)

Life My flat looks out over Sefton Park and the River Mersey in one direction and Toxteth and the city centre beyond in the other, and on a clear day the Welsh mountains beyond that. If ever there was a place to enjoy and judge the changing of the seasons its from up here, so if there’s something to be grateful for at a time like this it’s the view from my window. Even after nearly twenty years, even in the middle of the suburbs, it’s a landscape which is ever changing, always surprising. Even yesterday, late in the afternoon, we were greeted with a phenomena new to us, but known from a song, the mist over the Mersey, whipping across the surface as though a cloud had swooped from the sky to drift across the water like one of the sea gulls. The few photographs I’ve taken over the years barely capture the majesty of the landscape, even if some of that landscape has now been blotted out by the new giant Tesco on Higher Park Street. But then everything will disappear behind the trees once spring and summer return and we’re reminded that we live above the tree tops.

With Veronica Mars, creator Rob Thomas takes a fairly hokey premise, a teen detective in high school, but applies all the sass and character of noir, Christie and just a touch of Conan Doyle, whilst injecting the class struggle of The OC (or Dickens) whilst simultaneously making it as mysterious and complex as a 70s conspiracy thriller. Veronica’s best friend is murdered and whilst she works to discover who amongst the wealthy citizens of her home town is really guilty, takes on cases from her school friends and whatever her father, a private investigator, can’t cope with. As four or five storylines jostle for attention in an episode, it’s sometimes difficult to understand everything which is happening, and as in the best drama, the meaning of some scenes develops as each layer of information is pulled away but unlike the worst drama, there are always answers. In the lead, Kirsten Bell catches the mood perfectly, Philip Marlowe in the body of a teen queen, and there’s a huge, perfectly chosen supporting cast. Joss Whedon has said it is his favourite tv show, and two seasons in (just beginning now with the difficult college years), I can absolutely understand why.

When writing this post, I forgot patronising and lonely. I was a bullied teenager. There’s no room for the details, except to say that I can well believe what this report says about such things having the power to change a person. Something which helped, in the end, was to begin to think of all the bad things about myself, what I’m least pleased with and then whenever I was bullied, I could always point to those and think, well, you can’t say any worst to me than I think of myself. When asked “Who is the real Stuart Ian Burns?” I decided, rather than joking around a bit and leaving myself open for whoever this Jen is to come back with a potential rejoinder that I was in some way stretching the truth, I decided to be as brutally honest as I could and write down, time and experience adjusted, all of the things I’d point to when I was being picked on. I’m very grateful that a few people replied suggesting that’s not how they seem me at all. I suppose my problem is that I’ve never quite managed to convince myself otherwise, like a psychological feedback loop.

I’ve always been a huge fan of The Guardian’s theatre review staff, and particularly Lyn Gardner and Michael Billingham. I especially admire how they’re able to combine brevity and detail, within just a few paragraphs giving a flavour of a production, a synopsis and a thorough critique with some humour and whilst I’m sure much of that comes under the heading of “doing their job” and there are plenty of other writers just as a capable, few I’d wager have this depth of experience. On Friday, Billingham handed out one of his rare five-stars (only his second this year, I think) to the RSC’s Romeo and Juliet calling the best version he’s seen in fifty years and suggesting Mariah Gale's Juliet is “the best since Judi Dench”. The difference between him saying it and most others is that we know that he’s probably seen dozens of productions in the mean time and because his hyperbole is so rare, it must be something special (please film it for next Christmas, BBC and Illuminations, purlease). No wonder Gardner seems so grumpy during her Peppa Pig review on the same page (though you have to love that she somehow references Beckett in there).

Both Billingham and Gardner must be as grateful as I am for the spell check function on word processors, especially as I offer these opinions, most of which I’m attempting to keep within five or six hundred words simply so that I’m not still tapping away on Christmas Day as happened in 2006, the last occasion when I attempted something this labour intensive. When I was at college, I always considered the word lengths on essays, especially those with self-selected titles were cruel and unusual, particularly difficult to keep within, often writing hundreds, even thousands of words more than were required (my dissertation needed to be 15,000, I wrote 25,000 and was allowed to eventually submit 19,000). What I realise now was that these were supposed to be not only academia’s way of focusing ideas, but also a subliminal suggestion as to how much actual work we should have be putting into the piece, how we should be prioritising our time. If only I’d known that as spent days reading everything I could on the subject of Laura Mulvey’s gaze. It’s good to impose these limits which is why all five of these paragraphs are just two hundred words long.

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 5/31: Is it really going to be all right? There is so much Gloom and Doom. There is no Doctor to save us. Will we survive? (suggested by @thatneilguy via Twitter)

Psychology If you want to localise that “we” it all depends on what you assume to be “surviving”. If it’s walking around and breathing, that should be fine. If it’s cultural well being, that’s less certain what with the cuts to education and Murdoch and Cowell almost controlling everything we see and hear but as long as there are books and paintings and Regina Spektor we should be ok on that too. There’ll always be doom and gloom but the trick is to bathe in the shards of light in between and try to tolerate the rest.

Besides, depending upon who you listen to, the Doctor wouldn’t save us even if he was here anyway. In the old 90s Doctor Who novel Interference by Lawrence Miles, we offered a glimpse of the timelord’s thought processes. The Eighth Doctor (McGann) is being tortured in a Saudi Arabian jail (yes, really) and during his ordeal, a fellow captor, Badar, a kind of Salman Rushdie substitute, berates him for not changing the history of Earth wholesale, not, for example, killing Hitler.

The Doctor warns him about the web of time and how any changes he consciously makes leading the collapse of creation, but Badar suggest that this is just a cover story because he’s too scared to try and that in fact when he says that he doesn’t become “involved” in local politics, whenever he does take side – for example with humanity against some alien threat or other – it’s all about politics – and what makes Earth so special anyway?

The implications of in relation to the question are stark. Essentially what this does is tell us that if the fictional Doctor could somehow pop through the walls of reality into our dimension, he wouldn’t interfere anyway, that he wouldn’t save us, barring the sudden appearance of an alien battle fleet. Certainly, if Torchwood is anything to go by, the wars we’re currently enduring are happening in the Whoniverse anyway (and so by implication 9/11 was an event there too).

My understanding is that if he’s aware of an event, he can’t or shouldn’t change it, and that since “local politics” of our dimensional mirror are close enough, that he’d cop out on us too, no convenient landing of the TARDIS when some idiot presses the wrong button or there’s too much shouting. As far as I can remember, there’s no word in Interference or anywhere else on what his attitude to disasters is but if The Romans, The Fires of Pompeii and The Visitation are any indication he’s just as apt to causing them, especially if there’s fire involved.

Arguably that has changed a bit in the new series.  He interferes on Starship UK because he sees a child crying and there's the whole Waters of Mars business in which he simply couldn't help himself, even to the point of arguably becoming a monster himself.  But it's inconsistent.  What about the two blokes who are exterminated in after the Doctor riles up the Dalek for shits and giggles and his basic lack of remorse afterwards?  Given that we're supposed to enjoy his alieness, I suspect that when faced with this new reality, he'd be inclined to leave us to rot and spend the next forty-five minutes in the TARDIS with Amy.  I know I would.

In other words, even with the inexplicable appearance of a fictional construct, we’re on our own. But away from those five paragraphs of Who related cynicism, I do genuinely think that we will be ok. We will survive. Of course we will. As Woody Allen says in Hannah and Her Sisters, “The heart is a resilient muscle” and that goes for the rest of humanity too. Even after a nuclear holocaust, you’d have to hope that there’d still be a few of us knocking around on a remote island ready to get things started again. As the wise mug says, all we need to do is “Keep Calm and Carry On”.

Follow @thatneilguy here.

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 4/31: "Everything is a remake of something before" vs. "Everybody's rebooting existing characters/universes with new stories" (suggested by @oneswellfoop on Twitter)

Film The use of the word “remake” can be puzzling and inconsistent so I'd like firstly to define what I mean when I say remake. What I think of a remake is when a story, which originated as a film is remade as a film. The Steven Soderbergh's Solaris is generally spoken of a remake even though the director went back to the original source book and went from there. New film adaptations of Shakespeare plays are increasingly referred to as “remakes” even though that’s silly. Comics adaptations are also pegged as such even though again they’re just another look at the material. Peter Jackson’s King Kong is a remake. So’s Gus Van Sant’s Psycho. Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is not and neither is the American adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

With that out of the way, from flicking through the December issue of Empire magazine, the one with the motion captured Tin Tin on the cover, you could assume that the only product in production at major studios are adaptations, reimaginings, sequels and remakes. Nearly every page includes news, views and interviews in relation to some adaptation of a comic or book or television series or in some cases a sequel to what was an original idea. In a review section that includes the likes of Machette, Paranormal Activity 2 and Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, the Mike Leigh film, Another Year with its publicity still of a couple of retirees tucked up in bed looks like an oasis of integrity in a desert of opportunism.

The implication of the original statement that adaptations and sequels and remakes are a recent phenomena, this is some new opportunism. They are not. It is not. In the silent era, films were sometimes remade (and this is the purest form of remake) out of necessity because the original copy had worn out, or were pirated by another company by filming them again (which eventually led to the likes of Edison placing their logo within the set to demonstrate it was an original). It wasn’t too long after sound became flexible enough that whole film series sprang from comics, the likes of Batman poorly recreated in black and white serial shorts.

Much of the product in the original old Hollywood studio system was based on something, a stage play, a book and very often newspaper or magazine articles. The recently reissued It Happened One Night, the ancestor for decades of screwball romantic comedies was based on a short fiction, Night Bus by Samuel Hopkins Adams, admittedly extensively reworked by Capra and his collaborator Robert Riskin. It was rare for Hitchcock to produce something original from his early silents through the close of his career. Truly original ideas are rare. Even the so-called original screenplays nominated at the Oscars are most often inspired by real life events or are biographies.

Because you can’t argue with the metrics. Inception is an anomaly. All of the highest grossing films of the past twenty years and even before, both by year and together in a chart are based on existing properties or franchises; even Pirates of the Caribbean began as a theme park ride. Adapt something already in existence, especially if it's a best selling book or well visited theatre production and you have a built in market and if you’re able to grow what you’re selling beyond its core audience you’re onto a winner. Hollywood and beyond makes these things, and has always made these thing because we want to see them, or at least some of us do. Even if the result is rubbish.

Finally watching Transformers 2 recently, I think I’ve witness the nadir of the type (though I’m willing to accept that as we’ll see which ever film raped your childhood you’ll no doubt consider your nadir). Not able to really afford the toys, I was still an avid reader of the British comic from the first issue onwards until it finally went out of print years later. What Simon Furman and his fellow writers accomplished there was astonishing; they took a toy line, developed a mythology and managed to give all of the robots specific personalities, a code of honour and importantly make us care.

The first film, despite importing some of the human characters, trashed that mythology, mostly ignored the personalities and generally had little regard for what had gone before, resulting in a work that was everything Furman et al had been fighting against. In the second, the original machines are barely on-screen and entirely interchangeable, the new, messy character designs no help in trying to identify them. The central story, a fairly derivative quest narrative is driven by the human characters, the accompanying Transformers, all new creations simple (and on two counts racist) comic relief.

In other words a film demonstrating everything that is wrong with this kind of film. Its box office was still huge, but even now analysts are wondering how many of those people actually enjoyed watching the film; the criticism of both its star and director are telling. No wonder there’s a collective groan whenever some new piece of cultural heritage is being ploughed over. My previous nadir, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy failed because it took everything that was right and funny and quotable about Douglas Adams’s original scripts, words worked over tortuously and slowly until they passed his stringent standard and paraphrased them.

Yet somehow I still have a high sense of anticipation for the new version of Judge Dredd, the aforementioned Tin Tin, Tron Legacy and even have a vague hope that the next Transformers will be the best of the series. Because years ago, even before the first Transformers, I came to the conclusion that Hollywood could adapt or remake whatever it likes. It could even take a crack at Doctor Who if it wanted to or offer up a remake of When Harry Met Sally. Cultural sacred cows, I have a few, but everything is up for grabs, and they can do what they want with the mythology, change everything.

Because actually, in the end, the extent to which the property matches its source is less important than if the resulting film is good. The Lord of the Rings films took many liberties with the original text but I haven't met many fans of the books who hate the films. Same with Harry Potter. Robert Downey Jnr’s Tony Stark is barely recognisable from the figure in the comics yet readers of the Iron Man comic have embraced him. Offering another adaptation of Solaris would seem like sacrilege beyond Tarkovsky’s definitive presentation, yet Soderbergh created something that respected both properties and produced something new and very special. Indeed.

About the only real argument one could logically against the concept of adaptation per-se is in relation to books. A book is a one-to-one communication between the author and reader; the former controlling and crafting the experience and imagination of the latter. After a film adaptation, that experience is irrevocably interfered with; it’s impossible to read Pride and Prejudice without your favourite actress inhabiting the character of Elizabeth Bennett and I’ve recently heard adults chatting nostalgically about the time when they had their own version of Harry, Hermione and Ron in their heads instead of the actors who’ve made the characters their own.

So you never know, the rem- ... sorry ... reimaging of Buffy might be quite good. It's possible.

Follow @oneswellfoop here.

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 3/31: Review two "atypical" anime series: Kemonozume (full of japan-ised french "new wave" moments & explosive surrealism) and Kino no Tabi (full of elegy & parable) (from Konstantinos in the comments)

Animation Kino no Tabi, or Kino’s Journey: The Beautiful World is in the tradition of the highly episodic “caravan” series, stories in which a character or team of characters turn up in a new locale every week and create change, either in their environment or themselves. Usually the goal is either adventure (Doctor Who, Wagon Train), home (Quantum Leap, Star Trek: Voyager, Ulysses 31, Red Dwarf) or as is the case in this, spiritual enlightenment.

Kino’s a teenage girl who travels a techno-fantasy world riding Hermes, a talking motorcycle, experiencing and learning about the customs of each of the countries she visits, spending at most three days and two nights tere because she assumes that this will be quite enough time to learn almost everything you’d need to know about a place. It’s an animated travelogue of sorts but instead of offering interesting trivia and cultural observation ala Ewan McGregor, it’s more concerned with investigating parable.

The anime series, of which I’ve managed to see a few episodes, is adapted from manga and I suspect betrays the original’s wordiness. Each of the stories pinions around a scene in which Kino sits before a representative from a given culture who reveals their customs to her; she doesn’t do much “investigating” exactly because travellers between these countries are such a rarity, they’re only too happy to offer some exposition to them as a way of making them understand.

In other words, it’s a show which, though unconcerned with plot and character in the strictest sense is still very much about storytelling. Where it not for the sudden burst of violence (there’s a rather bloody stand-off in one episode), this would be ideal for children, who as I did when listening to Michael Horden read Kipling’s Just So Stories on Jackanory, can really tap into the allegorical elements noticing for example, how religion can impact on our daily lives, directly or indirectly.

Kids too would probably overlook the fact that to an extent it’s also really rather boring. Though I can understand that the storytellers are attempting to offer a series which is meditative yet satirical, and there are some quite emotive moments too, Kino’s a bit of a blank presence and her dialogue with Hermes, full of repetition and aphorism lacks the element of the absurd that makes the likes of David Lynch or Beckett so compelling (admittedly that's a rather unfair comparison but it'll do).

On the other hand, the animation is superb. Though often quite static, the landscapes are invitingly picturesque, especially in the opening episode when Kino drives through a deserted city looming Inception-like overhead. The third episode features four stories in completely different locales, one inspired by Venice, a gondola drifting through narrow flooded streets.  It's certainly ambitious and I would imagine, also because of the sheer number of character designs required, a labour of love.

Checking for other opinions, Kino’s Journey does seem to be an acquired taste. Plenty of people welcome this experimental reliance on atmosphere, especially anime connoisseurs who can see its points of difference, one even suggesting that it “stands out as an incredible testament to the power of the medium” which is the kind of praise usually saved in the west for PiXAR. Nevertheless Kemonozume sounds like much more kind of thing. Do you know where I can find it?

"whole sheep and whole cows"

People Say what you like about the leaked US embassy cables, the writers aren't without a certain sense of humour and storytelling ability. A perfect example is this report on a wedding feast in Dagestan, whose author is like a modern Samuel Pepys:

"Though Gadzhi's house was not the venue for the main wedding reception, he ensured that all his guests were constantly plied with food and drink. The cooks seemed to keep whole sheep and whole cows boiling in a cauldron somewhere day and night, dumping disjointed fragments of the carcass on the tables whenever someone entered the room. Gadzhi's two chefs kept a wide variety of unusual dishes in circulation (in addition to the omnipresent boiled meat and fatty bouillon)."

Though a link doesn't appear on the main page, there is an RSS feed for all The Guardian's coverage of the cables here.

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 2/31: Who is the real Stuart Ian Burns ? (from Jen in the comments)

Psychology He is a failure. He’s socially inept, tiresome, fundamentally disappointing when you meet him and swiftly outstays his welcome. He’s never entirely sure how far to take a conversation and has the suspicion that he’s often still talking well past the moment when interesting becomes boring becomes can I leave now please? That’s because he desperately wishes that he was more intelligent and erudite than he is, that he’d read more of the right kinds of books so that consequently he’d have the ability to speak with fluidity on subjects that matter rather than those that probably don’t. In other words, he’s constantly in a state of over-compensating.

He’s also physically repulsive, the kind of person fellow passengers on buses do their utmost to avoid sitting next to and who leads to tutting when he sits next to them. His smile is creepy.  He has a big nose.  His hair is never quite right because he has an oddly shaped head which is too small on top and over big at the bottom. He’s never particularly had any dress sense, favouring a tie-dyed multicoloured shirt and blue polyester jacket as his undergraduate apparel, polo-shirts through the late nineties and has now settled on white t-shirts and the kinds of jeans he's always worn, only rarely varying the colour of a jumper when necessary.  He’s also scruffy.

He lacks ambition. His self-esteem issues stretch back many years and to such a degree that he de-values his own achievements and is self-deprecating to a fault. He’s too busy explaining why he can’t do something to notice what he can accomplish, wallowing in pity to such an extent that he’s stagnating. He’s even answering this question in the third person in an attempt to disassociate himself from himself but knows that despite the self-flagellation he’s purposefully not really answering the question anyway. He knows that all of the above is open to change but lacks the initiative or drive to go through with any of it.  He's tired, jaded and scared.

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 1/31: Are the Liberal Democrats facing decades in the political wilderness after shooting themselves massively in the foot by alienating their largest area of voting support ie. students and first time voters? (from Franchesca Pueller via Facebook)

Politics You would think so given the vitriol which has been directed at the party and its leader Nick Clegg over the past few months. The Lib Dems have gone from being the party “everyone” ignores, to loves, to hates within the space of about six months or the space of a single series of Have I Got News For You, which isn’t bad going considering they’ve already generally been in the political wilderness for a couple of decades without much influence at least on a national level.

After being a supporter for nearly two decades, I’m currently in a kind of ideological limbo, absolutely understanding why they decided to enter a coalition with the Tories (rather than a simple "understanding"), accepting the reasons for many of the cuts, appreciating that to an extent they’ve become the political fall guys for another party which is attempting to show a human face, but also unable to defend many of the more idiotic decisions, such as the garotting of the arts and the BBC.

To an extent, especially in relation to the tuition fee debarkle (for want of whichever word you're thinking of), the Lib Dems have been unlucky because they’re being criticised for the very thing that set them apart from the other two main parties during the last election and before – being specific about their manifesto pledges.  The Tory manifesto is a bit tentative on the point and has this to say on the subject (including repayments):

- consider carefully the results of Lord Browne’s review into the future of higher education funding, so that we can unlock the potential of universities to transform our economy, to enrich students’ lives through teaching of the highest quality, and to advance scholarship; and,

- provide 10,000 extra university places this year, paid for by giving graduates incentives to pay back their student loans early on an entirely voluntary basis.

With an additional promise to “pay the student loan repayments for top Maths and Science graduates for as long as they remain teachers” (something we've not heard much about since). The Lib Dem Manifesto, though mentioning the word "student" less, dedicates a whole section, employing much more direct language:

Scrap unfair university tuition fees for all students taking their first degree, including those studying part-time, saving them over £10,000 each. We have a financially responsible plan to phase fees out over six years, so that the change is affordable even in these difficult economic times, and without cutting university income. We will immediately scrap fees for final year students.

In government, the coalition have cut funding to universities and are effectively making up the shortfall by letting the universities increase tuition fees three fold saddling students with the extra debt (though they won’t have to pay the required loans back until they’re earning £21k up from £15k).  Which is a bit different to Scotland where tuition fees have been scrapped altogether.  Now, what's unfair?

Essentially, if the Lib Dems had blanded things out and not done what they’ve always done which is make eye-catching pledges and silly photo-opportunities in a desperate attempt to get noticed, pledges they assumed they'd never have to put into practice (still generally only managing to be eighth in the news running order even on the Today programme), they wouldn’t be in the position of being charged with giving up their principles or some such now.

I don't know the extent to which this will effect the young vote.  Many of the students protesting now and saying that they'll never vote Liberal Democrat again will be in a different life position in four years time and although we all have the ability to hold grudges, as we've discovered time and again, people also have very short memories when it comes to politics.  Voter intentions can flip in a matter of days, even hours, especially in this mad new wired world.

To give a specific answer to your question, at a local level, things definitely are shifting. Councillors are defecting and strongholds like Liverpool have fallen to Labour who will no doubt have a resurgence as the curious split between who people will trust with their bin collection and who they’ll trust with their defence heads off in a different direction favouring red rather than gold with independents and small fringier parties also reaping some of the benefits.

But I don’t think the Westminster Lib Dem vote is actually going to wobble that significantly next time, despite the exodus too of some disgruntled ex-Labour voters back to their natural home. Even though Lib Dems like me don’t like the many of the cuts and don’t like what's being nodding through, we're also still so anti-Tory and anti-Labour that we’re really rather stuck. We might go Green, or we might not bother to vote, but we inherently want to take part properly in the political process which means holding our noses if we have to.

To take that a step further, here’s my prediction for what will happen in 2015.  Because of the cuts, the Tory vote will decrease, the perennially undecided heading to Labour instead, but because of uncertainly over an untested party leader, not enough for Labour to have a majority, the proportion of the vote we saw last time essentially reversing with the Lib Dems piggy in the middle again. Then it’ll be up to Milliband and Labour to decide whether they believe the Lib Dems aren't too toxic to form a coalition with or if they’ll just go it alone...