Robot of Sherwood.

TV Just over ten years ago, your writer, not longer after watching the director’s cut of A Californian Archer in the Sheriff's Court decided to visit Nottingham and “do the Robin Hood” thing. Even on the six hour train journey down, or down and across, a bit, he didn’t have much of an idea of what to expect other than to see perhaps the castle. Thanks to the sheer longevity of this blog you can read about the whole thing here (I’ve now been writing this for a third of my life) including the visit to said castle where, after some haggling over guide books and what was their lack of interest in selling me one, the clerk behind the counter informed me that Robin Hood didn’t exist.

Luckily, opposite the station I found a Tales of Robin Hood tourist attraction in which the visitor was taken on Yorvik Viking Centre like chair ride through scenes from the stories, through Sherwood Forest and the Sheriff’s banqueting hall. At the end of that you were shown a video in which, as the younger version of me describes, saw “a Raymond Chandler style Private Dick visiting a contemporary Nottingham trying to find out if Robin Hood was indeed real. His findings were inconclusive and that it's pretty much a matter of opinions.” Ironically now the Tales of Robin Hood itself doesn’t exist having had to close because they couldn’t make enough rent to pay their landlord Tesco, which is doubly ironic given the topic I suppose.

Even after all of that I'm still not sure if Robin Hood really existed. A bit like Clara in Robot of Sherwood (paragraph three, will wonders?), I’ve always sort of hedged my bets on it, or found a sweet spot somewhere between there having been some kind of historical outlaw figure, a Pandorica-like fairy story and the idea that illiterate outlaws used the name Robin Hood as a kind of John Doe substitute. He’s mentioned in As You Like It and in a way, which suggests Shakespeare wasn’t convinced either way. The Two Gentlemen of Verona features a passage in which Valentine falls in with a band of outlaws which practically screams “this play would be in production more often if it was just about Robin Hood”.

The BBC itself has had some previous with the Hood (Troughton!). Twitter was soon abuzz with deluded notions about this being less funny than Maid Marian and her Merry Men as though it’s a fair comparison given they’re trying do different things but the most obvious contextual point is Robin Hood, the first bit of genre family entertainment broadcast in Who’s slot after it changed Saturday night television forever (by essentially remaking Lois & Clark apparently). The first version of this review blog post thing was going to be a meta-jokeoid about the resurrection of a previously cancelled but much loved drama series with different actors but I realised that as a meta-jokeoid it wasn’t particularly funny.

Within the Whoniverse he’s been pretty well established as a character. The (well alright if you say so) Twelfth Doctor forgets that in his first incarnation he met Robin and tussled with the Sheriff in Jonathan Morris’s brilliant Short Trip, The Thief of Sherwood (revealed through fictitious excepts from a Time Team in Doctor Who Magazine, Radio Times, Doctor Who: A Celebration, The Television Companion and Target Books "novelisation" of the serial). A later “Trip” by Joseph Lidster placed Polly in that exact story as Maid Marion. He’s also met Iris Wyldethyme, in his time. A version of him also appeared in an episode of the K9 spin-off, which the TARDIS Datacore has decided is canonical, so there you are.

There’s plenty more supposition and intrigue on the designated Wikipedia page but the point is, as Mark Gatiss has realised in crafting his script, in writing a story featuring one of Britain’s oldest mythic figure, it’s best to treat him as being just as relevant and as respectfully as the man (or potential Romola Garai) who constitutes our newest. To make as many jokes as he likes about the veracity of the existence of Robin Hood but to in the end realise that the best way to deal with him within the mechanism of Doctor Who, to keep our franchise’s ineffable magic intact, is to follow the lead of Ben Aaronovitch in integrating Camelot in Battlefield (and Jonathan Morris in his short prose) and make him as real as the Time Lord.

With a brief thought as to whether Sherlock Holmes would have received similar treatment under different show runners and not ones with all-consuming fires elsewhere this makes the episode immediately rewatchable because we now want to enjoy this characterisation without the nagging doubt that he’ll turn out to be a phantasmagoria with all the veracity of one of The Androids of Tara. With the knowledge that he’s “real” (or at least “real” within the structural scaffold of this fictional construct), his gag reflex and the fight sequences all gain a completely different complexion, a weight. All aided, of course by Tom Riley’s portrayal which stays just the right side of pantomime theatricality.

Not that the episode in any way stays away from pantomime theatricality. It’s a romp, a good old-fashioned romp, of a kind I’m not sure we’ve seen since, well I’m not sure. I’ve just asked Twitter, and suggestions include The Lodger and Closing Time both of which feel like more like homage to the sitcom rather than a Carry On film (though I appreciate the distinction is wafer thin). The Unicorn and the Wasp? Dinosaurs on a Spaceship? Perhaps there wasn’t one in nuWho. Perhaps we haven’t been here since City of Death in the 70s, which is odd considering Gatiss suggests in DWM that all of nuWho up until this point took its lead of City of Death and we’re all watching The Horror of Fang Rock now. Time will tell.

As befits a romp, the story isn’t that complex and probably would have easily graced The Sarah Jane Adventures back in the day, which is no way a criticism. One of the tendencies in nuWho has been to pile on more stuff and incident whereas this keeps things on the relative low-low. The pacing too is expressively slower than in previous series, as per Deep Breath, though with some detectable cross cutting but notably only generally to paper over the elements like the cutting of the manacles.  I could be of course be imagining all of this and if I was to do a scene length study across the Gatiss episodes, there’s no change at all.  But since I barely have enough time to think about where to buy a new bed even though I know it'll end up being John Lewis because it always is, that seems unlikely.

What did change is the ending. Understandably, given current events, although it’s fair to say this isn’t usual with Doctor Who, I don’t think, we discovered the other day that a beheading was cut from the finale. My first reaction was “a beheading in Doctor Who”? I mean I know it was supposed to be taking a darker turn but that’s ridiculous... But my second was, yes, probably a robot. Weeelll. Now that the episode has aired, this blog reveals, presumably after having read the leaked script, that this is indeed what it was, Ben Miller’s superbly Ainley-like Nottingham (if only we’d had this rather than Keith Allen’s interpretation) having been revealed as such in the middle of the final fight, extraordinarily so considered the King's own demons.

If this is reinstated for the blu-ray and streaming services (and we have to imagine it will) it’ll do at least three things. (1) Even without some tonal foreshadowing at the opening of the episode and taking Dinosaurs on a Spaceship into account, Nottingham’s tumble into the vat of gold is tough within the context of modern Who which tends to champion the life of anyone, even villains. Now that we know he’s an android it feels less, well, less. (2) It gives context to some of his more excessive behaviour not least during the Clara interrogation – he’s giving it some Zaroff because the robots have put him back together slightly wrong because (3) they’ve presumably based him at least on the stories in their databanks.

It also explains why the Doctor and Clara don’t seem like particularly active participants in that section of the denouement, just standing around and watching a lot. They weren’t originally. Unless the Doctor’s mind was turning over why some of this seemed strangely familiar given that the creation of printed circuits in ancient lands for a spaceship which has every potential of exploding and destroying the local population has been seen by his face before. No, I don’t think his “Why this face?” line from Deep Breath is a coincidence. I hope it means we’ll get an episode where the Doctor will meet the doppelganger he saved from Pompeii, or at least that the two are tied together somehow.

What was I saying, oh that’s right, Mark Gatiss is an equal opportunities writer, at least in terms of myths. Just as many Who tropes were skewered (arrowed?) tonight, not least the propensity the Doctor has for using his sonic to get out of scrapes. There’s also the small matter of the Time Lord’s God-like decision making which has been reduced somewhat, not that the show’s been afraid to present him as a slightly pathetic creature, from the sonic-off in The Doctor Dances to bringing the full power of his speechifying to bare on a bunny in The Day of the Doctor. But the sheer level of befuddlement in the cell tonight as pride gets the better of him is a welcome change, especially since it's treated as just that, not some malevolent secret plan.

Our acceptance of this is, of course the writing, but also the wicked chemistry between Capaldi and Coleman. The former is finally hitting his stride. On rewatching Into The Dalek, I noticed that he's far more comfortable in the scenes at the school and in the TARDIS indicating they may have been shot in a later production block (a contrast similar to Jenna in Hide last year) (or rather the year before) and if the Ben Wheatley material was shot first, then its clear here Peter’s had a chance to think about who his Doctor is, his accent baseline posh unless he’s shouting or desperate (and imagine if Tennant had been allowed to do this), the line readings much more comfortable (if only he could have gone back and redone the “bolt hole”).

Since we’re dwelling for a moment, notice too how much of an action episode this is for him or at least for this incarnation. In the pre-season discussions and especially during the transfer window, the expectation was that Twelfteenth would be cutting down on the exuberance and Danny Pink was being brought in as the action hero as well as the love interest. On the basis of tonight’s episode there’s a danger he’ll end up like Harry Sullivan. The Thirwelfth Doctor brought it, either through Capaldi himself or (if his comments in Extradential are any indication) some very good doubles, with spoon duelling and Venusian Aikido) (height!) (hait!) (howeverthisisspelt!).

My reservations about the treatment of Clara in the previous episode and how it might have been a blip are largely dealt with here by his carer largely having narrative agency throughout most of the episode even when the apparent lead is in full bloom. Jenna’s nothing less than extraordinary in this episode. Notice how, during the interrogation scene with the Sheriff she subtly also poshifies her accent apart from during the asides, suggesting she’s revealing to us her true nature. Meanwhile, this episode confirms she was born in Blackpool (Jenna’s own home town) and given previous dates, a year later than Lucie Miller. There’s nothing much to that, other than how the franchise’s connection to the town continues. Freeze frame.

Not really, because as we discovered eighteen months after that fateful freeze frame, the best legends continue. As Robin says of him and the Doctor, “Perhaps we will both be stories. And may those stories never end … and remember Doctor, I’m just as real as you are.” A slightly less poetic, more portentous version of “Aren’t we all?” but the message is clear. Except of course when Robin’s legend surfaces, it’s the same story interpreted again and again in different ways, whereas for the Doctor and the miracle of Doctor Who it’s all one story and in Robot of Sherwood, I at least have confirmation after a shaky start, that he’s still my Doctor, it’s still my favourite series, and there are few things more real to me than that.

Public Art Collections in North West England: Wordsworth and Grasmere Museum.

Art Last Friday’s trip to the Wordsworth and Grasmere Museum felt more like a holiday, albeit one which lasted about five an a half hours not including watching the view from the train or bus whilst travelling. Some of this had to do with being able to spend five and a half hours in the place not as concerned about needing to rush back for the train. Much of this had to do with the sheer effortlessness of the time I spent at the Wordsworth Museum (as it is now), where the staff are knowledgeable and helpful, the exhibition itself well designed and I genuinely felt very welcome and had one of my happiest afternoons in quite some time (and said as much to the person in the shop as I was leaving while I was buying some postcards and a copy of the guide book). If ever there was a model for how a museum visit should be, how it should go, it would be the Wordsworth Museum.

Having been pretty monogamous in my appreciation for British poets, I didn’t really have much of a clue about Wordsworth beyond Daffodils and not having read, as usual, the paragraph in Edward Morris’s Public Art Collections in North-West England beforehand (spoilers) hadn’t realised that Dove Cottage which is adjacent to the museum and conserved by the Wordsworth Trust had been place where he’d written that and all of the very best poems he was famous for. To stand outside there and look down the street, is to see the very landscape which inspired some of, as it turns out, greatest poetry in the English language. On the way to Windermere that day I did listen to a couple of preparatory In Our Times, about his and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads and The Prelude which gave me some idea of what to expect, just enough to be wowed as I stepped off the bus into the grounds.

The Trust’s art collection is split between three buildings, Dove Cottage, the museum and the archive building, The Jerwood Centre. After paying the entrance fee, the visitor is given a timed ticket for a tour of the cottage, limited to around fifteen people. Although there are some paintings in the dwelling, the tour really considers Dove Cottage as domestic residence and an example of housing in the period with the artwork, some real, some reproductions, utilised to illustrate the occupants of the period. The first painting you see is an anonymously created portrait of his dog Pepper, a gift to the family from Sir Walter Scott (the dog not the painting) who bred the animals and named them after herbs to save time. Dove Cottage is tiny though that must not have bothered Wordsworth, who lived there for just under ten years and received guests.

The most curious aspect is the Newspaper Room, a small space at the back on the top floor which it’s thought was primarily used as the children’s bedroom or later a guest room. It lacks a fireplace, so would have made it very cold in the winder but in her papers, Dorothy Wordsworth, William’s wife said that she covered the walls in newspaper to offer some insulation. Having deteriorated, these have still been replaced with pages from the same period and the effect is to walk into something akin to an art installation or a piece of set design from a Gilliam or Tarkovsky film. My fellow visitors and I immediately began reading the text, mainly from The Times, a mix of advertising and court reportage. Not that it is easy to read being old enough for the letters f and s to be interchangeable, something which I’ve never quite mastered instinctively even after all these years of looking at Shakespeare facsimiles.

From there it’s straight into the Museum. As Edward explains, this was opened in 1981 to help illustrate Wordsworth’s story, Dove Cottage itself having previously, as the Trust’s own website describes, previously been housed in a barn from 1936, with the books and manuscripts held from 1950 in a converted cottage nearby. The motive of the exhibition is to give some scope of both and also to illustrate the lives of both Wordsworth and Coleridge primarily during the period the former lived in Dove Cottage as well as necessarily before and after. In this it neatly strikes a balance between serving the uberfans and newbies and although I’m still firmly the latter, I came away with an intense understanding of Wordsworth’s importance within the history of English literature and that some really useful stuff was written after 1616. I have much to do.

Both of these sources are a bit short, and this is unusual for Edward, on the origins for much of this collection, but I’m going to guess that it’s a mix of bequests and later purchases. The landscapes are illustrative of the area and how it was around the time Wordsworth was writing, an oil of Ullswater by Joseph Wright of Derby, Elterwater by Francis Towne with as Edward observes its “schematic, block-like forms” and Peele Castle In A Storm by Sir George Beaumont. But the collection also includes examples of how later painters have interpreted the area, like Percy Frederick Horton’s post-impressionistic A Corner of Ambleside really captures how its possible for humanity’s houses and this landscape to co-exist to picturesque effect. I like the way he contrasts the smudgy brush strokes utilised to create the trees and fawner of nature with the clean lines of the man-made houses.

The rest of the exhibition features images of the key people in Wordsworth’s life, his friends and critics including, surprisingly life masks of him and Coleridge, white plaster faces which demonstrate the accuracy of the surrounding portraits which are mix of works from the Trust’s own collection and loans from the National Portrait Gallery. There’s Wordsworth himself proudly illustrated by Frederick Richard Pickersgill, clutching a pair of gloves and as a younger man, meaning fully clutching his forehead by Richard Carruthers. There’s James Henry Leigh Hunt, a usual arch critic who called Wordsworth the Prince of Bards and is depicted by Benjamin Robert Haydon as a rather heroic figure with bushy eyebrows and an open face. There’s James Northcote’s famous painting of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his prime just as he would have been when concocting Lyrical Verses.

At around two-thirty, I attended a tour of the third of the buildings on site, The Jerwood Centre, given by the curatorial assistant. The centre opened in 2005 to house Wordsworth’s papers and related materials and as the office site explains, contains 90% of Wordsworth’s known verse drafts as well as Dorothy’s notebooks. It’s a superb study space, the interior a contemporary office environment, the exterior the same dry-stone walling as the rest of the site, the only concession being its cylindrical shape. If you do happen upon the Wordsworth Museum, it’s well worth taking time for this since it’s also the place where the A-List artworks are kept and while in the inner area of the archive, one of the volunteers surprised us by turning one of the otherwise hidden paintings to reveal a Turner recently purchased by the trust, his Ullswater, Cumberland (which is pictured on the Art Fund’s website).

After the museum I walked out into the landscape that inspired Wordsworth, and just like the view from Brantwood it’s so expressively beautiful photography can’t really capture it (not that I didn’t try) (I've repaired my camera). I may well have said to a pedestrian as they were passing me gaping at the horizon, “Isn’t this gorgeous?” and they may have said, “Yes, aren’t we lucky.” That may have happened. I may also have phoned someone to babble down the receiver at them about all of this, gesticulating wildly before realising and then marvelling at the fact I was standing in the middle of that once wilderness and able to get a perfect mobile phone signal. I may have done that too. I may also have thought of that scene in the film Contact when Jodie Foster’s character looks into infinity and says, “They should have sent a poet…” before reminding myself that thank goodness on this occasion, “they” did.

Public Art Collections in North West England: Ruskin Museum.

Art To the Ruskin Museum. On Wednesday, I wasn’t as lucky with the bus from Windermere, waiting until its usual scheduled time at half past twelve but due to traffic delays and country roads didn’t arrive in Coniston until around two o’clock (around half an hour later than scheduled). On both of these days I did at least enjoy the slightly dangerous, epic nature of the bus journeys in the Lakes as the Stagecoach vehicle pondered along roads in no way wide enough for them and certainly not wide enough for two of them if they happened to be driving towards one another, or any other wide vehicles, especially caravans. Minutes at a time spent pensively watching, knuckles white clutching handles as the bus edged forwards or in reverse just inches away from the side of a lorry travelling in the opposite direction. The Brodie Avenue school run looks positively pedestrian in comparison.

Ruskin Museum is the other half of the trust’s work and where most of his collection is on display. Its fruition was much the same as many of these regional art museums. On Ruskin’s death in 1900, his long term assistant W.G. Collingwood and his friend Arthur Severn (both of whose paintings were mentioned last time) organised an exhibition at the local institute (an educational institution which had been paid for by Ruskin for the benefit of the village which was built on copper mining). The sale of paintings, including some of Ruskin’s own, paid for the setting up of a permanent Ruskin Museum created as an extension to the institute. A century later the Heritage Lottery Fund enabled the redisplay of the collection and its this exhibition which greets the visitor now, dedicated to displaying works from all three men and charting their unusual friendship across the years.

The museum implies in its accompanying text that all you need to know about their relationship can be found in two portraits of Ruskin by each of the other two men. The Collingwood, from 1897 a few years before Ruskin’s death is a loving portrayal of an elderly gentlemen, an old face with young eyes, something verifiable thanks to the reproduction of the Hilliard painting of the painter when he was three years old nearby. The Severn, painted the same year is of, the museum proposes (I’m paraphrasing), a severe, frail figure due in part to a fissure within their domesticity created when the painter married Joan Ruskin Agnew, Ruskin’s cousin and heir. My interest is in whether both paintings were produced during the same sitting but from different angles. Ruskin is sat in the same chair in the same position in front of the same bookshelves.

Your Paintings offers images of the eight oils in the collection. The bulk of the paintings on display are watercolours and of these I much prefer those Ruskin painted during his travels, during his early life and his grand tour of Europe later. There’s a loving illustration of his rooms at Christ Church in Oxford where he matriculated beginning in 1936 and of balcony and arches in Pisa in 1882 which he had toured during book research in the 1840s (his Fountain in Rome must also have been from that trip). All of them are intensely detailed and steady creating symmetrical shapes in what must have been freehand. But as Edward Morris describes in Public Art Collection in North West England, it’s “Collingwood’s portrait of Ruskin at work at his desk in Brantwood with lake and mountains visible through the window” which is one of the great icons of late-nineteenth century British art.

But the Ruskin Museum isn’t just about the eponymous painter now. There are three displays. A much larger room houses a general museum in tribute to Coniston covering much the same territory as any town museum, beginning with pre-history and local geology through a account of the copper mines through to artefacts from its more recent history. One of the unexpected pleasures is the rowing boat that inspired Arthur Ransome whilst writing Swallows and Amazons. One of the more sobering displays, as large as the other two rooms put together is about Donald Campbell’s fateful land speed records including part of the K7 positioned on the ground in the middle of a plastic sheet showing where it would have fitted in the vehicle. Campbell is commemorated with an impressively naturalistic resin and copper statue created in 2009 by the artist Graham Ball.

An hour and a bit later I wasn’t quite ready to leave but had a feeling it was about time. After stopping outside to look at the model village created by the late stone mason John Usher in the grounds which is notable because it replicates in miniature the stunning dry stone walling from which most of the buildings and walls in Windermere seem to be constructed and visiting the aforementioned institute which is now an antiques and collectables showroom of the kind which turns up near tea time on BBC television I strolled into town. A couple of gift shops later I noticed a fair queue had built up at the bus stop and wandering over discovered the schedules 3:20 bus had been delayed so thought it prudent to wait for it. The bus arrived half an hour late and after terminating in Ambleside leading to much confusion and getting on a further bus I eventually pitched up in Windermere having missed the train.

Two things on all of this. (1) The same bus queue mayhem from Great Charlotte Street in Liverpool also happens in Coniston. Or at least it did that day. As we’ve discussed before, the bus stop on Great Charlotte Street in Liverpool doesn’t have a shelter so people either tend to just stand in an amorphous clump outside a Boots or else form a random queue heading away from the area and up the street or as is usually the case, both. Which leads to much shouting and needling when a bus arrives as the self appointed queuers brim with righteous indignation as the rest of us simply head for the doors. Having beed there enough times I know exactly where to stand for the doors to open and I can’t imagine why no one else bothers not least because it can’t be a first time event for them either.

When I reach the bus stop at Coniston I notice that a few of the people there had been on the same vehicle as me from Windermere and ask around for the information which I’ve already carelessly revealed to you above sapping this of any tension (though as listeners of This American Life will know route talk is one of the seven things you’re not supposed to mention in polite company anyway). I stood on the side of the road and phoned home to check on this and that and so forth and happened to be standing near the bus stop. At the end of the conversation I went to stand on the kerb only to be told by an older man, “You know there’s a queue here.” I looked. There was undoubtedly a queue consisting of a family and him and his accompanying person who may be his wife then, yes an amorphous clump of people sitting inside and outside of the shelter with some more tourists joining just in the middle. Harumph.

We all fitted on anyway and the benefit of missing the train back at Windermere was (2) that it afforded me some time to walk into Windermere to find something to eat, which I did at The Little Chippy (which oddly enough is exactly how I felt as I was standing in the bus queue at Coniston after the verbal altercation). These fish and chips more than made up for the night before when I sat eating a Ginsters pasty in the Pumpkin Café on Preston Station which was too hot to handle so I ended up eating with one of those wooden coffee stirrers snapped in half doubling as knife and fork because they don’t supply cutlery, picking up each tiny piece of excess potato and meat from the open wrapper with the pointed end. If there was a low point, certainly the loneliest point across the three days in the lakes it was that. Wordsworth Museum next.

Public Art Collections in North West England: Brantwood.

Art Having moaned for years about the difficulty of having a day trip to Brantwood via public transport (day trips being one of the unwritten rules of this project), last week I decided to simply visit Brantwood via public transport anyway. Or rather I decided earlier in the month to go last week because that’s when I bought the North West Rover ticket which allows for unlimited train travel on four designated days within eight (for £70) which is how I would manage to afford to visit three locations in the Lake District and then Carlisle (saving myself about £50). Even as I was ordering the ticket, I had considered staying over somewhere but the Summer prices in that part of the world for hotels and guest houses are frankly astonishing (plus the unwritten rules, the unwritten rules).

Here is what do if you want to visit Brantwood as a day trip. Forget it.  One of the exceptions of the ticket is that you have to travel after 8:45 in the morning, I took the 9:28am train from Lime Street to Preston then changed to a train to Windermere which departed at 10:45 which gets there for 11:40, just after the bus to Coniston has left. Luckily last Tuesday (at least for me) that bus had been delayed and it turned out that rather than as originally advised by the internet of having to walk for 2.5 miles from Coniston to Brantwood, I could be dropped off at the end of the road, 1.5 miles away instead. But it still takes an hour by bus to get there and another half hour to forty minute walk to the house where I arrived at 1:45pm. Due to needing to get the 3:40 bus back to Windermere, I was there for just over an hour.

But what an hour! Actually if you include the walk to and from the house, which is important for reasons that will become clear, more like two hours. To some extent, the whole j-word was a bit like having all the hassle of going on holiday without actually being on holiday, something which would be in sharper relief the following day when I ended up in Coniston with its gift shops and cafes and no time to really enjoy those. Except there’s no denying that this visit to Brantwood changed my art appreciation forever and so was entirely worth the ten hour round trip from home (including bus into town and taxi home at the end). Having spent years wondering why Edward Morris included the venue in his book Public Art Collections in North-West England, I’m now very pleased that he did.

As Edward explains in the single paragraph he dedicates in his book to the venue, Brantwood was painter and poet John Ruskin’s final home which he bought, sight unseen, from the wood engraver and writer William Linton for £1500 in the late 1860s and would become his main home. Over the next few years he moved to Brantwood his “remarkable collections of books, illustrated manuscripts, minerals, Turner watercolours and Pre-Raphaelite paintings as well as his own watercolours and drawings” which were sold on after his death to the collector John Howard Waterhouse who’d in the 1930s buy the house from the subsequent occupiers and open it as a museum to Ruskin, returning much of the collection back into the place and original positions.  He then set up a charitable trust to administer all of this.

Not a large dwelling by any means, it’s smaller than Sudley House, I think.  A large portion of the ground floor is consumed by the admission counter, shop and a video room showing a short documentary introduction to Ruskin which looks like it was produced in the 80s with its Anton Rogers voiceover and spot music which sounds like something Paddy Kingsland might have produced for Doctor Who in the period. That begins with Ruskin’s death which prompted the person sitting next to me to remark “that’s a grim way to begin”, which it is. Other than that each room serves a duel role of showing its original domestic utility as a study or parlour whilst simultaneously including exhibits explaining who Ruskin was and the sorts of things you might more readily expect to find in the Ruskin Museum itself (and do).

Not knowing much about Ruskin before visiting, purposefully because I wanted to test just how much Brantwood and the Ruskin Museum would work their magic, other than his connection to the pre-Raphaelites, I hadn’t realised just how embedded he was in that period of Britain’s cultural life. His contribution in defending the early work of Turner is huge. Like Whistler later, he was ahead of his time in fighting against artistic convention and the expectations of how a painting should be, what it should include and the extent to which an artist should simply be replicating what came before or experimenting. Most of the displays in Brantwood include quotes and commentary from his many books including this from, The Stones of Venice, his three volume treatise on Venetian art and architecture:

“Understand this clearly: you can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to carve it; and to copy and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool.”

It’s impossible to read this quote and see how it explains the difference, for example, between commercial and art cinema and how familiar tropes have led to the death of creativity in both.

As an inevitable glance at Your Paintings collection reveals, the collection doesn’t stretch much beyond the work of his closest friends and himself. Joseph Severn was a joint resident in the house and so its natural that there should be many of his paintings here, watercolour and oils.  Sitting on the wall behind the piano, his Ruskin's Garden at Brantwood, which unlike the image on the BBC website (which seems to have been punched up in reproduction) has a much moodier atmosphere of a closed, private space not letting in much light through the tree tops to the muddy pathway below. There’s also a very good Burne-Jones preparatory sketch on the wall in the lounge of a woman’s head in brown chalk on paper.

Since the museum opened there’s been a much greater effort to try and hang the walls much as Ruskin did when he lived there by including reproductions of paintings that are now in other collections. The wall above his bed has prints of Ruskin's own paintings now owned by Wolverhampton and York Art Galleries, The British Museum and Bolton Abbey. They’re also making further purchases including two very nice still lifes painted at Brantwood by Lawrence Hilliard newly on display. There are also loans. The collection includes a portrait of Ruskin’s mother Margaret in 1825 and there’s also a portrait by Hilliard of Ruskin himself painted three year’s earlier when he was just three years old (Ruskin not Hilliard!) that is currently on loan from the National Portrait Gallery.

If that discussion seems lighter than usual on considering the point of my visit, it’s because for a fair proportion of my hour, not including the fifteen minutes spent watching video, I couldn't stop simply looking out of the window, because Brantwood is built in one of the most, most, most places of natural beauty I’ve ever been. When Ruskin first moved there, his first reaction was to build a turret on the south-west corner of Brantwood so that he had panoramic views of this glorious place in all weathers. On the way to Brantwood, I stopped to take some photographs and found the memory card on my camera was broken (which is why my own photo doesn’t appear above) but even a photograph could in any sense capture the unalloyed magnificence of the view.

As these superlatives demonstrate the experience of seeing this both walking to and from the house and from inside the turret had a very profound effect on me. Having lived in cities and three cities in particular all my life, I haven’t really had a chance to see nature in this form, to be dwarfed by a mountain across the calm still waters of a lake, surrounded by the sounds of sheep and as was the case that afternoon the deep blue sky. Even living as high as I do in my tower block, the mountains are still remote places across the Mersey and obscured by the fog of the urban sprawl. Here I could see the shadows created by crevices as sunbeams splattered across them creating new colours and shading, purples, browns, blues and greys across the afternoon contrasting with the greens, oh the greens of the fields.

It’s in walking to and from the house and standing inside that turret that I finally understood landscape painting or rather how it can be misunderstood. There’s a single painting of the area in the database which is part of Brantwood’s own collection, William Gershom Collingwood’s Brantwood from the Lake and it’s a reverse angle, showing the house in the landscape as seen from the very place at which I was looking, but it’s a fairly typical example of the kind of work I’ve previous overlooked or at least failed to be enthused by simply because it just seemed like it was trying to capture the landscape without embellishment. For all my love of portraits, I’ve never really understood, unless there’s something outrageously huge or indeed humanity included, the love of this kind of representational art.

Standing in front of that view from Brantwood I finally understood – there’s nothing especially representational about any art or rather that there’s a wide difference between what a painter can capture in a landscape and the photography which ultimately led to it being rejected by artists and the contemporary art market. As the light changed within moments across that landscape, I began to appreciate the skill involved in trying to capture that and more particularly the amount of interpretation involved and how a figure like Constable or Collingwood isn’t simply painting a hill or a tree but making very specific choices, choices which will be entirely different depending on their tastes. To put it in cruder terms, not all landscape painters or paintings are the same and its not about how precisely they're able to copy what they see.

To which there’ll be a fair few people who’ll say, well, yes. Plus there’ll be photographers, especially artistic photographers of the kind you have their work turned into greetings cards, who’ll note that they have to make decisions too. But I suppose what I’m trying to say is that it’s a crime and act of historic cultural vandalism that taste has led to landscape painting as a discipline to have fallen out of fashion, for contemporary artists to be somewhat forced by taste to produce abstract work when there’s still much which can be said or at the very least implied through pre-Impressionist (for want of a very description) landscape painting and that there’s a strange kind of double standards at work which means that historic landscapes can sell of thousands of pounds but their contemporary cousins are treated marginally.

If the experience of that painter featured on the BBC who submitted a remarkably detailed landscape painting to the Royal Academy only to be given a knock-back for the fiftieth year running is anything to go by, fashion has other ideas. It’s almost as though Ruskin’s hope as featured in the quote above has gone, at least in artistic terms, to the point that even landscape painting as exemplified by Turner who was subverting the form within the format would find working impossible. I suppose what I’m saying is that it would be rather good if the Tate or Royal Academy had an exhibition of contemporary landscape paintings demonstrating where this ancient, traditional form is now.

All of which strays off the point of my spiritual and visual awakening. In the coming days, I’d see more epic landscapes and more epic landscapes as paintings and whereas before I might have overlooked them (unless they were at sea because paradoxically I’ve always rather liked sea paintings) now I can see the profound efforts of the painters and artists in choosing the angle for their work, how it’s framed, the pallet and even how their decision on the given weather conditions represents his thoughts about that landscape. Which isn’t to say they’re all brilliant, but at least now, oddly, given how long I’ve been looking at paintings, I can see the difference between a poor and good example of a landscape painting. If I gained anything from visiting Brantwood, it is that.

A Broom.

Music Right then, time for another one of these. On Digital Spy (where else?), Amelle talks about the chances of "Sugababes" reforming. She's still up for it (of course she is) but she's sure Jade isn't and Heidi's "half and half". Then there's this:

"If it doesn't happen, it's not meant to be," she continued. "Obviously everyone talks about the Sugababes name and what is happening with it, but I'm very easy-going.

"If we don't use it and regroup, I'd quite happily give it someone else and let them take the reins. Whether it be MKS or another three random girls, or three little babies we're training right now in boot camp!"

The bootcamp reference is to Tumble, I suspect, which is the thing everyone watches waiting for Doctor Who to start. Three things on this:

(1) If I was MKS I wouldn't touch their old name with a mile long stick. Too much history, plus it'd mean whatever they finally come up with in terms of an album would be stuck after Sweet 7 in discographies and on Spotify.

(2) The three random girls thing is probably the way to go and especially in keeping with the history of the Sugababes. In fact, given that history it should probably be Amella and two other people. Probably Jenny Frost replacing Heidi in yet another girl band now she's homeless.

(3) Anyone else wonder if an earlier Doctor to Capaldi, probably Tennant, would have used the Sugababes instead of a broom as a reference point during that scene in Deep Breath?  No?

Into The Dalek.

TV Blimey, I mean yeah, ok. Yes. I mean, well … Frankly I’m flummoxed and although it’s not the first time that’s been the case with the global franchise entity that is Doctor Who, it’s quite some time since I’ve watched the credits role and really not known what to make of it. Even though Into The Dalek (thought I’d get the title  in early this week) is doing everything you’d expect from an episode of the global franchise entity that is Doctor Who, at a certain point it dislodged itself from my attention and just sort of seemed to be happening without my involvement because I was spending so much time trying to work out the implications of this, that and the other for the programme.

Such things are a natural reaction when elements have been re-engineered to this degree and so many elements in so many ways. It’s rather like when you move house or change jobs. You’re discombobulated because although there are some familiar elements like everything that is you, you have to discover everything else all over again from where to get the best coffee, where to have lunch and how the photocopier works, not mention who amongst the dozens of fresh colleagues which ones you don’t think are unspeakable. My insta-reaction to tonight’s episode will be the viewer or let’s face it fan equivalent of that. So for the purposes of the next twelve paragraphs its best to stick to a single inevitable question. Was it good episode?

Despite being the first “ordinary” episode in over eighteen months and only the second featuring a new Doctor it had much to do which is presumably why it fell back on a few old standards and greatest hits as a way of showing how the new Doctor’s reaction differs to his predecessors. Moffat’s strategy here is to mesh together the central ideas of Eleventh’s first two “ordinary” episodes, an “anatomy” tour including digestive gunge scene (ala The Beast Below) and Daleks, or more specifically the Doctor turning a Dalek which seems to have become essentially benevolent evil in order to prove the point that Daleks are essentially evil (Cf, Victory of the Daleks. Frankly it’s amazing that the soldiers here aren't clerics.

My guess is there’s no great scheme to it, no, even given Moffat’s own dislike of The Beast Below, attempt to re-engineer the thing and do it properly ala John Hughes and Some Kind of Wonderful. The original version of this paragraph attempted to construct some comparison but I couldn’t make it work because, in fact, they probably didn’t even notice. Which is fine. Miniaturising people and having them climbing around the interior of a Dalek hasn’t been done, as far as I can remember and is just the sort of thing to fire children’s imaginations, the production design the stuff of the cross section from The Dalek Book amongst other sources, the biology of the mutant itself still in keeping with that established in Dalek.

It’s nine years since Rose gave a Dalek compassion and eleven since the release of Jubilee, so giving a pepperpot compassion has a newness. Interesting that it was also the Doctor’s companion’s touch then, which opened up the Dalek to new possibilities, to begin to hate its own existence. Then it committed suicide. On this occasion it rejoined its fleet in order to do who knows what. But like I said I don’t think there’s a scheme to it, unless there is to be discovered later. What is notable is how joyfully ruthless the Daleks are allowed to be again here and the complete lack of the new paradigm in any sense, doomed almost as soon as Mark Gatiss voiced his concerns about the hump on his Victory of the Daleks commentary.

Except the notable difference between both those episodes and this is that love doesn’t conquer all. Like Ford Prefect that time he attempted to convince a Vogon not to throw them out of an airlock by singing him a few bars of Beethoven’s 5th and was thrown out of the airlock anyway, the Dalek stares into the Doctor’s soul, a Doctor who thinks he’ll find just as Grandfather did in The Rings of Thingy some exciting grand narrative about hope, instead finds himself glaring contemptuously at him. Which is also pretty depressing for the viewer because at the end of The Day of the Doctor, the Time Lord seemed to have found some inner piece and a sense of purpose and a couple of episode later, albeit with a thousand years of Christmas in between, that’s all been forgotten.

The Doctor. In this month’s magazine, you know the one, the authors on the first three TDAs, 12DAs or NDAs or whatever we’re calling them notes how they were watching or reading this episode and there was a line which made them think, “Oh that’s new.” That’ll be the one about the dead soldier’s remains then. That’s dark, the darkest thing I think we’ve heard a Doctor say in relation to the death of a human, certainly since the series returned. Gone is the man who apologised to the deceased for not saving them. Not that he isn’t challenged about it. He just doesn’t seem to understand compassion himself (which foreshadows the end of the episode but nevertheless).

This is dangerous, solidly, properly dangerous and perhaps that’s one of the elements which threw me at the end of the episode. I’ve always said that one of the reasons the television version of the Sixth Doctor doesn’t work and one of the reasons I largely have issues with the Third is that they’re not nice for pretty much of the time. Twelfth isn’t quite full on Mindwipe, but there are moments here when I just simply, flat out, didn’t like him and I wonder how that’s going to play with families. I think of the kids running around screenings and conventions in their fezzes with their sonics and wonder how they’ll react to someone purporting to be the same man letting a man die and not seeming to give too shits afterwards.

As an adult it’s thrilling. There’s nothing better than an unpredictable Doctor because it creates unpredictable stories and like I said last week, The Waters of Mars is sinister as is the Eleventh Doctor’s manipulation of Amy in The Almost People but they were exceptional moments for what were essentially benevolent figures. Twelfth it seems is forever looking at the big picture even to the point of not being able to see the wood for the trees or as was the case here the cranium for the Dalekanium (with Clara on hand to smack him around the face) (the post-nuWho equivalent of a kiss presumably) or to complete my original point that there are individuals involved that may be worth saving. He doesn’t give a shit even if you are having chops for tea.

Welcome Danny Blue. Structurally the episode’s fascinating, with a slightly tricksy editing configuration at the beginning in which the temporal and narrative order attempting to create the same sensation as the soldiers in dealing with how the Doctor appears to them, by mixing his encounter with the Dalek and, as about ten or so people have joked on Twitter chunks of Waterloo Road-style mayhem. Part of me wonders if this might not have benefited from something rather more straightforward given the introduction of what seems like is going to be an important Chesterton, I mean John Watson, I mean character but that’s the part of me which gets up at 6:50 every morning even when he’s not working because he prefers the routine so he doesn’t deserve an opinion.

The choice of colour in this new character seems significant too, not least because Clara noticed Zawe Ashton’s Journey Blue shared the commonality.  We’re also clearly supposed to find his tear significant given the close-up (cf, The End of the World) (not that I’m reading that much into it) (unless it is that war he’s referring to) (keep an eye out for pocket watches). Samuel Anderson’s an instantly likeable presence which is somewhat helped by the way he’s given some narrative agency from the off in a way that Rory had to wait whole episodes for and Mickey didn’t really enjoy for a season and a half. So far he seems to exist purely as a cantilever against the new Doctor’s cantankerousness.

His existence also has the odd effect of sapping Clara of a bunch of her own agency. After last week in which she became the viewpoint character for much of the time, here she seems reduced to being the Doctor’s taste arbiter and Danny’s potential object of affection. Indeed there are scenes played from the point of view of the brilliant Zawe's Journey. Jenna Coleman’s performance is as superb as its ever been and of course, we’re still in the business of defining the new Doctor which needs time and these things oscillate.  But it is interesting that it wasn’t about her being introduced to the new person.  Not that we didn't learn something new about her.  She's a Guardian reader.  Quite right too.

One bit of business not covered here last week is the new title sequence and music.  Well, I like it and have done since it was originally uploaded to Youtube.  The imagery is stranger than the usual time vortex, more literally demonstrating the TARDIS's passage through time whilst retaining the moment when she hangs in space.  The music's another fun interpretation too, less EPIC than Murray's mixes for earlier series, more consciously evoking the classic era by doing for the Delaware arrangement what his series one orchestration did for the TV Movie.  Notice how the font is oh so similar to the one used by the unified merchandising plan from the late 90s and appeared on cds, videos and novels.

All of the elements are there and thanks to Ben's direction it is certainly very chilling especially with some of the old school Troughton period visual surrealism as the characters passes through the eye stork and the Doctor mentally connected with the Dalek (and far more successfully so in terms of visuals than the still accurately named Nightmare in Silver). Like reticence, like Clara to the Doctor in places, is because, like I said I’m still trying to get used to things which is why these post episode reviews can be dangerous, in a way. My guess is that just like last week, when I watch it again, my appreciation will increase. So in the end, to answer my original question is it a good episode? I don’t know. But I think it tries to be and I think that’s probably the point.

The Films I've Watched This Year #32

Film It's a long story which involves a lot of this:



Details soon.

La stratégie de la poussette
From Paris With Love
The Brothers Bloom

The Stroller Plan/Strategy (the anglaise title depends on where you are in the world) is a pretty typical example of why I've decided to watch all of this French cinema.  The tendency with national cinemas that are not your own is just to see the award winning material distributed by boutique labels or studios whereas to properly understand the structure of a national cinema you really need to see everything and that includes the pretty generic, mainstream romcoms.  In The Stroller Plan, a freelance artist attempts to win back his girlfriend who split with him because he didn't want to have children with her by pretending to be the father of a baby who's tumbled into his hands after a neighbour has an accident.  She happens to own a nursery having given up her job as a pediatrician and hilarity ensues.

Actually no it doesn't.  I laughed once, not that I can remember why .  It's a series rote comic situations that much better writers and comedians could probably make something of, a French studio reaction to Apatow by producing a movie length sub-plot from What To Expect When You're Expecting which is less vulgar than both.  The leads are all perfectly fine but they're given nothing to work with.  All of which said, it's still fascinating to see all of this playing out against historic architecture rather than the modernist steel and concrete of US films (unless they're brown stoning) and the credit sequence is really nice idea as the many floors up to their apartment each illustrate part of their initial relationship from the couple's first drunken night together after a party through to the break-up when they reach the top.

Six years after District 13, and two years after Taken ("I will find you..."), here's From Paris With Love another of Luc Besson's action productions which all pretty much have the same story of a mismatched couple destroying half of France through cars and heavy weaponry in order to do a thing.  Unlike Taken which was more akin the US-style in narrative and characterisation terms, this strings together a series of barely replated set pieces (something to do with a counter terrorism operation related to drug lords) (I think?) (it's a bit like Quantum of Solace in that it seems as though there's a whole scene's worth of exposition that's gone missing in the middle) and gives Jonathan Rhys Meyers and John Travolta characters which barely stretch beyond their wardrobes.

Mostly it's the kind of this liked by the kinds of people who like this kind of thing.  In comparison to District 13 it feels a bit restrained and dirgy like John Woo's US films, as though a director is reigning in their abilities either due to time or needs of the mainstream marketplace.  The action sequences are nowhere near as balletic and impressive as District 13 or indeed any of the Besson related material in production in the late 90s to early 00s.  Much of the time it's nearly impossible to understand the structure of some sequences, just sets filled with squibs and bullet holes.  There's also a really depressing running gag about Travolta referencing past film glories that just seeks to remind us how good he was during his revival and how far he's fallen since.

Planet of the Spiders.

Music Video evidence that Mutya, Keisha and Siobhan are back together recording. Or at least they're together and afraid of spiders:

The Films I've Watched This Year #31

Film Surprisingly bijou list below considering there wasn't haven't been spending hours watching athletes and achievements (however tempting that was after seeing the Nanjing Youth Olympics opening ceremony. Instead this week was filled with going on Tuesday night with friends, watching the television version of The Girl Who Played With Fire and two documentary series, Andrew Graham Dixon's Art of China and David Olusoga's The World's War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire which as the deleted scenes which turned up during the Commonwealth Remembrance coverage indicated shows that even in relation to the so-called Great War, our general understanding of who fought who over what and who died is astonishingly simplistic.  For years I used to watch a documentary first thing in the morning.  Not sure why I stopped.  Begun again now.  Oh and Doctor Who.

Short Term 12
The Kings of Summer
Chronique d'un été
Scream
À bout portant
Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
Banlieue 13

You will have noticed the appearance of French in this week's list.  In the middle of the muddle of trying to decided what to watch but wanting to have some continuity to what I'm watching, I realised that since I actually do quite like watching French film and films set in France, I should watch some French film and films set in France.  So I've decided to work through all of the French cinema available on Netflix and Amazon Prime and assigned one of my Lovefilm by-post disc allocations to a massive unruly list of everything available as a kind of serendipity engine as well as adding in the material I haven't seen made by other countries but set there.  It's entirely unmetered and I've avoided reviews.  I want to be surprised and lose myself in another nation's cinema and this seems like the way to do it.

A bout portant, English title Point Blank, is a tight actioner (only 80 mins) about a trainee nurse whose wife is kidnapped by hoodlums and finds himself on the run for a crime he didn't commit.  The crime itself is a major shock so I won't spoil it because this is well worth tracking down.  As the set-up suggests director Fred Cavaye has in mind to offer Hitchcockian twists for the 24 generation and it works, partly because lead actor Gilles Lellouche has the perfect face for romantic comedy but compellingly finds himself dealing with murderous gangsters and police officers.  It's a bit like casting Adam Sandler in a Tony Scott actioner.  Expect this to gain an extra half hour when it's remade in Hollywood which it undoubtedly will be.  Starring Mark Wahlberg.

Throughout District 13, I was distracted by just how much it seemed to be a French remake of a US film featuring Paul Walker and Vin Diesel sans cars and sure enough the film has actually been remade in the US with Paul Walker, the final film he was working before the tragedy.  Having seen neither Escape from New York or Ong Bak, I can't comment in its similarity to those.  It's a very functional film in narrative terms, essentially three long set pieces but it's quite aware of this and happy to simply offer some spectacular parkour stunts amid some one dimensional social commentary, the majority of it created without the aid of CGI or wires which in retrospect makes it something of a successor to the old silent slapstick, to Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd, but with more frequent cutting.

The advertising for Short Term 12 is a bit misleading.  My impression, admittedly based on the poster and Kermode's review was of an unremittingly grim investigation into the US care system full of heartbreak, pain and not much in the way of levity, one of those Ken Loach or Mike Leigh pieces which essentially reminds us that our society remains broken.  It is full of heartbreak and pain, but it's also incredibly warm, funny, has depthful characters you can really become attached to and utterly lacks the slightly (slightly?) judgmental tone which can marr my appreciation of both Loach and Leigh, presumably because writer/director Destin Daniel Cretton has worked in this very system and has an insider's appreciation that isn't just a enunciation of class.

Cheerful Weather for the Wedding is an enunciation of class and a great deal more.  Felicity Jones is back in period as a young woman who realises she's about to marry the wrong man but is held back from what she really desires by social convention and the needs of her family.  Based on a novel published by the Woolfs in 1932 and the only really prominent work by its author Julia Strachey, as filmed it's essentially a Poirot mystery without a body and the ensuring Belgian detective (an impression underscored by an appearance by Agatha herself, Fenella Woolgar) (it's a Unicorn and the Wasp reunion).  There are secrets and conspiracies, hearts are broken but no one dies.  There's a notable use of colour timing changing the hues of the image to denote the flashback sequences which I've not seen before too.

The Kings of Summer was released last year when I was in the midst of my hernia horror and so I decided to save it for the following Summer, planning to watch it on a nice warm day.  It rained.  But it didn't matter because I'd entire misjudged the content which is essentially Stand By Me without a body and not The Inbetweeners US (which is a function of me sometimes ignoring everything about a film bar the poster).  It rains in the film too, the dreamlike montage sequences seem to flashforward and suggest how these boys who build a house and emancipate will memorialise this summer, the details which will offer a nostalgic glow when they chained to a desk in an office or teaching kids the ages they were, themselves ready to go out and manufacture similar memories.

One of my guilty pleasures is the Teenagers React To series in which The Fine Bros introduce a piece of 80s or 90s technology or ephemera to people born in the following decade and film the results.  Some of the kids offer quite wise assessments usually in the order of knowing that when the Gameboy was first released it was cutting edge and their predecessors would have found them just as exciting as tablet computers are now. Inevitably:



Rewatching Scream this week, which is now eighteen years old, for the first time in over ten of them, through this lense, is like glimpsing an alien world.  Randy works in a video shop in a pre-dvd era and Tatum has to visit to bring a film for her and Sidney to watch.  The sheriff questions the fact that Billy Loomis has a cell phone (which must make teens now guffaw) and it takes them a day to request the records.  Plus these teenagers wouldn't phone in their threats so no scary voice.  The whole thing would be conducted over snapchat or some such and victims could simply block them.  Sidney does her homework on a DOS based programme which looks like some early version of WordPerfect.  Oh and nothing about the film would work in a world with a proliferation of CCTV cameras.  Other than that it hasn't dated at all.

Deep Breath.

TV Evening. Well then yes, ok, there wasn’t a possible scenario in which I wouldn’t write about Doctor Who on Doctor Who night, especially after Keith said such nice things in the comments. There was a moment when I thought, you know what, they can do without me, I want Doctor Who to be just about Doctor Who and not about spending the following two hours writing about it before bedtime and the fixing process during the wait for the ratings in the morning. Why can’t I just make a few weak jokes on Twitter, tut at Gallifrey Base for two minutes then go off and wait for it to appear on the iPlayer so I can watch it again in HD, my television still being one the ones which says it's HD until you try to watch Freeview and the true horror of the deception is revealed. Yet, it’s Saturday night and here I am typing along to Adele’s Daydreamer.  Again? Why? Why?

Well, because, frankly, there’s so much to write about. Even after nine years of being back on television, Doctor Who, the entity, the programme, the worldwide broadcasting phenomena, the franchise of franchises, still has the capacity, well the capacity to be old and new, borrowed and blue (actually with as slightly sepia hew but we’ll cover that in the relevant paragraph). It would have been very easy to simply continue the style and substance into the next Doctor’s reign, for the “Moffat era” to have a cohesive sheen ready for cultural theorists to pick over when the next person, sorry Mark Gatiss takes over, but like JNT when Andrew (one l) Cartmel took charge, or earlier under Graham Williams when Douglas Adams handed on to Anthony Root, the tone has changed.  It’s a different programme.  Except thanks to the differing mechanics of how television work now, it’s the same writer.

There’s a new executive producer of course.  But due to the differing balance of power now, this whole shift was Moffat’s choice. He’s been a bit cautious in the run up to publication/projection about exactly how he views the change other than to say it was important to refresh things, and all we've really heard otherwise from both opening director Ben Wheatley (that’s A Field In England's Ben Wheatley) (for goodness sake) and Jenna, was about a darker tone, the scenes being longer, being more like the classic series which seems like a decent structure for the next few paragraphs. There’s just a general sense, despite the presence of the Paternoster Gang and a familiar adversary from the past, of everything being in the air, of the last vestiges of what we might expect from nuWho becoming something which isn’t really, is something else. There’s a political analogy here somewhere, probably, but it escapes me in a way that it doesn’t.

Darkness is an interesting word. How is the show darker? Clara’s literally breathless escape attempt isn’t that different an action beat to Amy pretending she has her eyes closed in the forest even if the former lacks the Doctor’s comforting voice to guide her. Is it that we genuinely didn’t think for a moment that the Doctor wouldn’t return to save Clara? Is it that for a second we thought he’d done something unmentionable to the homeless person to gain his clothes? That he called him a tramp? That he was capable of piking the clockwork man? Notice that we didn’t see a human spontaneously combust, just the dinosaur. Is it that lots of the scenes are visibly lit darker? The new creamier hue to the photography over the previous blues and greens? I’m not sure that it’s much “darker” in terms of story than previously in the likes of The Waters of Mars. We’ll return to this I expect. At this point I’m not sure.  I'll get back to you.

Yes, the scenes are longer, and how. Whole scenes full of dialogue, characters talking that go on for minute upon minute without cutting away to something else. Which isn’t to say that in previous post-2005 years there haven’t been long scenes, and The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit springs to mind in this regard, yet here the scenes often play out in oners, on steadycams like some John Wells production or indeed the camera simply abides, with the action playing out within frame. That creates a new sense of unease as we expect a cut away to some other piece of business and yet there’s Clara going and having a look out of the window.  We’re not already in the drawing room with Vastra and Jenny. This post-credits scene is six minutes long. Clara’s confrontation with Vastra’s another four minutes. Clara’s initial meeting with the Doctor in Mancini’s is ten minutes before the lift starts.

Lord knows how this will work in a much shorter run time and there’s the potential that along with the simplistic overall story, it’s simply a function of Deep Breath’s duration (finally mentioned the title) and introducing Peter Capaldi (and the new lead actor) nevertheless there’s a genuine sense of taking mid-twentyteens sensibilities and reintegrating the pacing of the classic series circa the 70s and early 80s.  Even to the point that you can guess which bits might have been shot in the studio and which on film even though its all shot on HD.  Even to the point that you wonder if some of those interior shots which are supposed to be exterior are purposefully looking like interior shots which are supposed to be exterior (because they do) (the beach). I’m almost amazed they bothered to create a CG T-Rex and didn’t simply buy a Walking With Dinosaurs action model from Amazon and push it into frame.

Except the tonal shift runs deeper. After previous regenerations we've been slap bang into a story set "now" (or "year from now"), partly because it was to RTD’s taste and expectation of the need for audience recognition and then Moffat aping such as a way of settling the audience into what was his new house-style then. Yet, here we are again in Victorian London, a place which in the past couple of years has the same claim to being the show’s “contemporary” setting as well, a contemporary setting. This isn’t quite like the shift from Pertwee to Baker.  The Fourth Doctor was annoyed whenever the Brigadier dragged him back to Earth. It’s a shift in how the Moffat somewhat trusts the audience to keep with the show (more later) even when the setting doesn’t reflect their world, presumably because at this point the pretence that Earth-5556 has anything to do with the real world is unforeseeable.

But like The Eleventh Hour, he’s careful to provide enough points of familiarity, not least Vastra, Jenny and Strax being brilliant (and complaining about their screen time is like moaning about the Brigadier and Harry being in Robot a lot). Clara’s vital in this too, since as the other main tributary of continuity, she’s now shifted from being plot point in search of a character to fully fledged companion and viewpoint figure for the audience saying all the things we might potentially say about the new Doctor, perhaps voicing many of the comments that greeted Capaldi’s announcement in comment sections across the web. You could view that whole scene as Vastra telling such people to behave themselves and hold in their ageist prejudices. To an extent, that’s the bad cop approach, essentially saying “He’s the Doctor whether you like it or not…” and people will react to that the way that people will react to things.

Having always been a fan of Jenna Coleman, but understanding people’s resistance to her because of her status within the arc of the bottom eight last year, I was unsurprised by her luminance in Deep Breath. Having been hired because of her chemistry with one leading man, she’s continued that, albeit in a different way, with another and yes, I’m going to say it, in much the same way as Lis Sladen back in the day. Unlike Sarah-Jane however, this is arguably the same Clara. It’s simply, as we’ve discussed, she has tons more dialogue and character beats which aren’t about plot so much as giving her some extra dimensions. One oddity is her not apparently knowing who Amy is, or indeed the notion of regeneration which is which is at variance with what we saw in The Name of the Doctor, Clara and the TARDIS and The Ultimate Guide. Hmm….

The good cop approach is Matt Smith storming re-emergence at the end. This had been spoiled months ago by someone eavesdropping on set that day, but they’d surmised it was some message, yet instead here he was, the previous model interloping on his successors introduction. When was this shot? During the Time of the Doctor with Jenna filming the other side of the scene months later?  Pixley only know but if so, it’s seamless and again, a new approach to an old problem but a problem which has changed slightly also thanks to the reason why the show went on the transcontinental publicity tour. Matt Smith helped break the show across the world and to some extent it is for that audience to reassure them that this is the same character with a different face. It’s also for kids for whom he was their first Doctor to reassure them of the same thing, in a different way.

You could ask why this is necessary - Tom’s Doctor didn’t phone Peter’s companions to reassure them ("Hello, Adric? Is that you? Could you put Nyssa on, I want to have a chat about the new chap.") but like I said Matt Smith is, or rather was as much a part of the brand as the TARDIS and sonic screwdrivers and although the show has always sold internationally it was nothing like this. Even the New York Times today ran a Capaldi interview and I haven’t seen Twitter speaking with one voice to quite this degree outside of proper news stories since the 50th. More than ever this is a managed transition and if those closing moments resemble anything, it's a US presidential inauguration albeit with a time and space machine being handed over rather than a country, and a single fictional constituent who didn’t vote for change to be convinced that it’ll be ok.

Having just rewatched that scene back it’s notable just how well directed and edited it is. When Twelfth asks Clara to look at him, his eyebrows and the rest of his face fill the frame but when we cut back to Jenna it’s from a side on view, then back to Capaldi’s face and it’s like we’re viewing him together and I bet there were a few of us who did finally accept him as the Doctor in the moment when she finally hugged him (though given the complex cleverness of his performance I expect it was much earlier than that). In an episode which if Extradential is anything to go by was shot in continuity, we can see the actor learning to play the character on screen as the character discovers himself and in those moments it is as though the performance reaches a nexus point (having toured a fair few Baker and Tennant-like moments along the way). He is the Doctor and I like it a lot.

Which would be the perfect conclusion to this thing I wasn’t going to write especially since it’s gone midnight, but what to make of the ending after the ending? Having said that the story arcs would be on the low-low this year here’s Michelle Gomez dressed as Eliza Doolittle and claiming to be the Doctor’s girlfriend Missy (“I mean Mom.”) (no scratch that, wrong telephone box) in what looks like the garden simulation from The Girl Who Waited. It seems like a classic misdirect from Moffat to cause to us moan about the adherence of the repeated Melody-Lem but if she is the one who's helping to keep these two together, whatever could her motive be? All will be hopefully be revealed in time for the 51st anniversary, give or take a couple of weeks. Has the Doctor given up on his quest for Gallifrey or will she turn out to be the vital clue that leads to its resurrection?

The Feeling Listless Soundtrack 1.0: Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen).

Written by Mary Schmich
[from the single: 'Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)', EMI, 2000]

Five pieces of music which make me cry:

(1) ‘The Leaving of Liverpool’ – The Spinners
(2) ‘Moonlight Sonata’
(3) ‘Abide with me’
(4) ‘Dignity’ – Deacon Blue
(5) ‘The Sunscreen Song’

[Commentary:

Five more pieces of music which make me cry.

(6) 'The JCB Song' - Nizpoli
(7) 'This is Heaven To Me' - Madeline Peyroux
(8) 'Closing of the Year' - Wendy and Lisa
(9) 'Claire De Lune'
(10) 'Into The West' - Annie Lennox]

Free Shakira.

Music Musical artists having their music given away free has a range of implications, so it was with a deep breath and heavy sigh when I was notified because I'm on her publicity mailing list that Shakira's new album is being given away free to people who download her iphone app.

But I still quite like Shakira (having been there since just on the cusp of Laundry Surface) but had entirely forgotten to buy the album. Now a mobile phone company has paid for a copy for me. Which is fine.

You can have a free copy too if you download the app and follow the instructions. They do ask you to fork over your email address and mobile number so I suppose it also depends on how squeemish you are about that sort of thing.

The track Empire has the lyric"And stars make love to the universe ..." if that helps.  Rihanna's on one of the other tracks too.

"Where's Earth-1?"

TV While I continue to ponder what I'll be doing after Doctor Who on Saturday night, here's what's happening in some other mythology trying to tie-down the rules of how their universe works as though that's a good thing and won't end up handcuffing or more accurately straight-jacketing creatives and fans for the next few decades. Some notes:

(1) The best thing about the video is the presenter's t-shirt. That is a very cool t-shirt.

(2) Where's Earth-1? Is that the pre-52 Earth? Why's it not on the map? Or is the whole Flashpoint thing supposed have changed the whole of the multiverse?

(3) In this context, presumably "Earth" means "Universe"? In which case what about Krypton?

(4) So Hades is also the phantom zone and it exists outside of normal space. Does that mean all of the various Kryptons in all of these universes send their criminals there? Can these criminals meet each other and interact? Isn't there some duplication? What about the good people sent their by the Justice League of super-villains?

(5) I like all of the maneuvering in trying to crowbar in all of the monotheistic and polytheistic religions, though its notable that its essentially "heaven" and "miscellaneous land".

(6) I do like the classical philosophical vibe.

(7) How does this fit in with the Omniverse?

(8) Haven't DC readers suffered enough?

"an utterly beautiful expression of human achievement"

Dance Find above the opening ceremony for the current Youth Olympic Games in Nanjing which I watched this afternoon, and, frankly, it's awesome. Empty theatrics in comparison the London 2012 achievements, but still an utterly beautiful expression of human achievement. The first hour is essentially the admin, flag parade and speeches and you can skip that if you like, but shift to minute 1:08 and prepare to gape. If the dance version of Andrew Graham Dixon's Art of China doesn't do it for you, the chunk after that really should.  Wow.  Oh and watch on a big screen if you can, yes definitely.

Confidential Extra.

TV You will have read about this everywhere else already but in an unexpected or not unexpected move, the BBC, or more specifically the iPlayer which has quickly turned itself into a new television channel via the back door (and the line leading BT Wholesales junction box) have announced they're resurrecting Doctor Who Confidential Cutdowns, sorry Doctor Who Extra:

"The BBC has today announced Doctor Who Extra - a brand new series, exclusively on BBC iPlayer. Doctor Who Extra is much more than a ‘making of’ show as we follow Peter Capaldi every step of the way throughout the creation of his first season as the Doctor. Over the course of 12 programmes we trace the highs and lows of Doctor Who’s most ambitious run of episodes yet, getting the inside take on series 8 from the people who made it."

Or the "lows" as far as we can tell you now because let's face it you'll have to wait another twenty years when everyone's left the programme and the extra features on the super enhanced version of the show on whatever medium its delivered on for the real dirt about fallings out and actors being grumpy on set (but not too much because we've all still got to meet each other in Big Finish's green room) (in the unlikely event they have the license for nuWho by then).

Of course the real question now is whether I'll watch this before I write each review, assuming I am going to review the next series.  I still haven't decided.  Sometimes I quite enjoyed myself post episode knocking together an opinion.  But sometimes it was a real trial and part of me wants to be simply be able to watch them to watch them, rather than having the need for an opinion knocking around at the back of my mind right the way through.

"everything is just about Doctor Who"

Books More proof, as if you needed it, that everything is just about Doctor Who. Not having read Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series, I didn't have any idea that there was a character called Jamie. On the occasion of the tv adaptation beginning transmission and Fraser Hines being cast, Doctor Who News has highlighted this post on the author's website about what inspired her to write the series:

"I rarely watch TV, but at the time I was in the habit of viewing weekly PBS reruns of Doctor Who (a British science-fiction serial), because it gave me just enough time to do my nails. So, while pondering the setting for my hypothetical historical novel, I happened to see one very old episode of Doctor Who featuring a "companion" of the Doctor's-a young Scottish lad named Jamie MacCrimmon, whom the Doctor had picked up in 1745. This character wore a kilt, which I thought rather fetching, and demonstrated-in this particular episode-a form of pigheaded male gallantry that I've always found endearing: the strong urge on the part of a man to protect a woman, even though he may realize that she's plainly capable of looking after herself.

"I was sitting in church the next day, thinking idly about this particular show (no, oddly enough, I don't remember what the sermon was about that day), when I said suddenly to myself, Well, heck. You want to write a book, you need a historical period, and it doesn't matter where or when. The important thing is just to start, somewhere. Okay. Fine. Scotland, eighteenth century."

The character's full name is Jamie Fraser, but she says he didn't know what the actor's name was until ages after she named him because the episode's credits were missing.  Now, that is weird.  Three sleeps.

Shakes It All.

"and Steven Moffat"

TV In an surprising move, the BBC's official Doctor Who site has released this complete episode guide to the new series. Previously fragmentary lists have appeared in Radio Times, and it might well me that something similar will be published tomorrow which is why this is up tonight so that people who don't want to fork out their £1.60 don't feel like there's content out there they won't be privy to (even though it's being copied and pasted elsewhere as we speak) (seriously, it's already up on the Wikipedia). Either way, it makes for intriguing reading.

For one thing it means that none of these titles offer spoilers of the magnitude of "Bad Wolf" or "The Wedding of River Song" a couple of notoriously omitted titles of the past. Part of me wished I'd not seen any of them but boy if a couple don't make me giggle. I'll not actually say which ones just in case you want to keep entirely spoiler free.

I think I'm safe highlighting that three of the episodes directed by women which is all to the good. I would have been even happier if some of them were actually written by women, for goodness sake, but it seems Helen Raynor remains unique, at least in nuWho terms, in that regard.

The other headline of sorts is the number of writing credits Steven Moffat has.  In previous seasons he's written about five or six episodes himself - and if you count Deep Breath as two (which most people seem to be on the strength of its duration) then this year it's five.

But he also has a number of co-writing credits, on Phil Ford, Gareth Roberts and Steven Thompson's episodes.

As anyone who's read The Writer's Tale will know, Russell T Davies extensively rewrote other writers, even Mark Gatiss.  Some of them come across as near page one rejigs, knocked out at 3pm amid emails to Ben Cook.  But only rarely did he take a credit for himself; in my memory its only the 2009 specials were that was the case.

So what's the jig here.  Did he present an outline which they completed or did he redo their material and take a credit because its as much is voice as theirs?  What was the division of labour here?  It doesn't matter that much, especially if the episodes turn out ok, and we don't know who really wrote what in the last few years anyway, it's just interesting to see Moffat's name as well as theirs and with authors who have previously worked on the show, not with newbies.

Five sleeps, everyone, five sleeps, then deep breath and ...

Amnesty Local.

Politics The one occasion I gave in to a chugger was outside the old Blockbuster Video on Allerton Road. It was a rainy day, I was in a fresh, romantic mood and she was working on behalf of Amnesty International and needed to do the bare minimum to convince me to hand over my debit card details. I'm not sure what good my £5 does each month but I always like to keep an eye on what Amnesty is doing.

Now they're in Ferguson, Missouri. The situation in Ferguson, Missouri is now such that Amnesty International observers have moved in. From Buzzfeed:

"Jasmine Heiss, a senior campaigner with Amnesty who is a part of the team in Ferguson, said the use of the “cross-functional team” — which she said included community trainers, researchers, and human rights observers — was “unprecedented” within the United States for the group."

Rumour Has It.

Music As well as watching the extraordinary performance of the Team GB athletics people at the European championships this afternoon, I was having one my regular clear-outs of Twitter people, the followed, because having reached the two thousand limit I can't really justify keeping an eye on anyone who's only tweeted a couple of dozen times or once a month.

Manageflitter was a pretty decent aid in this, with its many sorting option helping to ferret out feeds that I'd followed after having met a person at a thing five years ago but who hadn't tweeted since or who'd been part of someone ongoing news story the context of which I'd forgotten.  Managed to lose a good hundred and fifty, though I with I could just follow more than two thousand people.  That would be easier.

In the midst of all this I was reminded I was following Adele (official), whom it ranks as "inactive" and "quiet" but who in a rare moment tweeted the following news which I'd entirely missed and has been widely interpreted as the singer suggesting a new album is imminent:

Bye bye 25... See you again later in the year x pic.twitter.com/HEmY14El5s
— Adele (@OfficialAdele) May 4, 2014

Doctor Who's back on Saturday and as you might know I usually review whilst listening to Adele's first two albums. Lately, I've been straying and had the Haim album on in the background because my familiarity with 19 & 21 and meant they'd lost their creative potency.  But there's only one of that and the utility of the Adele albums is that I know that I can usually write a whole review within their duration and if I'm still writing in the middle of Someone Like You, I've gone on too long.  25 could be just the thing.