Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 18/31: What three places in the world would you most like to visit? (suggested by Ben Skinner)

Travel After visiting both the RSC and The Globe last year, the places I’d really like to visit has dwindled somewhat. For all my desperation to stand at the top of the Empire State Building, I know that the romantic notions I have would be broken by how "unlike the films” the experience would be, and the number of tourists, the queues, the weather, the lack of early 90s Meg Ryan. That was certainly the case when I finally stood in front of the Mona Lisa or the Rosetta Stone and had to share the space with thirty other people all of whom were jostling to have their picture taken with these icons rather than seek to treat them as objects of interest and intellectual discovery.

Which is why I’ve lately been hankering after spending a month, perhaps longer, in a cottage somewhere, fairly secluded, basic amenities, with a pile of books to keep me company, a radio, but no television, no internet, no people. Just lots of time to catch up on all the reading I’ve kept putting off and putting off for most of my life. As someone who’s used to the noise of the city (even living on the edge of a park there’s some traffic and shouting) the prospect scares me a little bit, the lack of artificial noise and no interuptions. I wonder how I’d feel at the inevitable end, drawn back into those things. Would I cope? Would I be depressed?

Because really it’s probably that I just need a disconnection, to be able to go somewhere else were nothing makes sense any more, were everything is a challenge. That’s how I imagine Tokyo to be. Photographs of the city are filled with familiar shop names, but the sheer chaos of life, of being part of such a mass of people is equally attractive because I suspect it allows you to be alone even in a crowd. The trick, and this is the case in most large cities, is to not let that tip over into loneliness, and the problem with any city is that unless you live there, work there, you’re only ever a tourist and can never truly be there. It’s all about time, and having the time to become geographically acquanted.

Snowy Evening

Snowy Evening, originally uploaded by feelinglistless.

Finally Liverpool enjoys the snow. The golden hew seems to be an interaction between my camera and the street lights, though it ironically makes the city look like it's been transported to the surface of the Sun on one of the coldest days of the year.

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 17/31: Shanghai (suggested by Alison Gow).

Fiction “Shanghai!”

The Doctor enthusiastically burst out through the TARDIS doorway, arms raised in celebration. “Bright lights, big city!” he shouted, “Population spilling out onto the streets, the smell of commerce, buildings punching into the sky …”

Then he stopped and bothered to look around, “Bamboo huts, mud, mist, the smell of fish … oh …”

Amy stumbled out behind him wearing a now completely inappropriate sailor uniform. “Wrong year then?” She said.

“Yes. Sorry.” The Doctor gestured towards the blue Police Box which had landed incongruously on a getty, looking heavy enough to break through the bamboo but strangely not. “She’s … well … we’re in Shanghai, it’s just …” He glared at his watch. “Hmm … turn of the millennium … about 1080 AD. Early in the morning I think.”

“Only a millennium out.” By now, Amy was standing parallel to the Time Lord. Pushing her long ginger hair back behind her ears, she peering out across a sea which seemed to stretch out into infinity. “Well, you did promise me a harbour view.”

The Doctor grinned. “What d’ya think?”

Amy opened her mouth to answer, but before she could, a scream broke through the fog.

* * * *

The Doctor’s acute hearing followed the noise to one of the huts on the harbour and inside he and Amy found a woman standing on a stool, the palms of her hands pressed against her elderly skin. She glanced about furtively then screamed again as a small rodent scurried past the three of them, cheekily taking a scenic route underneath the woman before disappearing through a vertical crack in the wall.

“It’s good to know some stereotypes are valid no matter where you are in time.” Amy enjoyed the image far more than she knew she should. Then she noticed the Doctor stooped by the crack blaring his sonic screwdriver into the darkness. “It’s not that crack is it?”

“Hmm. Oh no. No." He replied popping the screwdriver back in his pocket. "For a change."

The Doctor then turned and held out his hand, gesturing for the woman to step down. At first she was as nervous of him as the rat but something in his eyes suggested safety so she took his fingers and put foot on the ground for the first time in hours.

“Terrorised by a rat. The rat peril. Well, there’s a first time for everything.” The Doctor was licking his lips like a cheese concessioner within tastebud distance of a new flavour.

The woman, who Amy assumed had no idea what the Doctor was saying simply grinned at him, her mouth showing more darkness than teeth. She gestured for the Doctor and his companion to sit down and the Doctor chose the stool that had previously been her safe haven. Amy knelt on the ground nearby, constantly on the lookout for the return of the rodent.

* * * *

Within minutes the three sat drinking saki silently. The woman, who by now was quite calm was staring at the Doctor’s clothing, particular whatever it was he had around his neck.

“Bow ties are cool.” He grinned conspiratorially.

“Yes, right…” Amy coughed changing the subject, “So you have a rat problem?”

“Oh yes, hate the thing, always in and out, can’t sleep most nights” and suddenly words were spilling out of the woman’s mouth. In a cockney accent.

Amy’s eyes popped. “Wow, you’re a loud one.”

The Doctor grinned. “How long has it been going on?”

”Three weeks. Frightened out of my wits I am…”

“So Chinese is …” Amy considered this new quirk of the TARDIS's translation circuit.

“Yes. Have you got any traps?”

“Traps?”

“You know boxes to catch it in? We could scoop it up, take it out of your hair.” The Doctor unconsciously glanced at the woman’s hair. It was snowy white. With a bob.

Linda nodded her head enthusiastically. The Doctor’s eyes followed the bob up and down before focusing on the woman again. He smiled.

* * * *

Minutes later the Doctor was back from a trip to the TARDIS carrying a bundle of humane, bamboo mouse traps.

“So we’ve fought Patient Zero, Daleks, lizard creatures and now rats are our thing?”

”All creatures great and small, Pond.” The Doctor said pointedly. “You could wait in the TARDIS if you’re too frightened.”

“No. Oh -- give it here.” She snatched one of the traps from him and began setting it, pulling the small wooden door up ready to imprison the rat should it blunder in. The Doctor handed her a chunk of Mars Bar as bait. “So Linda?”

The Doctor, who was also busying himself with the traps, looked at Amy then the hitherto unnamed woman.

“We’ve bonded,” Amy smiled. “Do you live hear alone?”

“Oh no, my husband, Jabe, is out fishing. He’s a fisherman.”

“Out long?” The Doctor asked with a slight hint of concern.

”A few weeks. Should be back soon.”

“I think we’ll be finished by then.” Amy noticed the Doctor sounded more relieved than he should and considered briefly if he was keeping something important from her. Again.

Before long all the traps were set. They sat and waited. More saki.

* * * *

And waited. And waited. The Doctor sat fiddling with his sonic screwdriver. Amy was beginning to fall asleep.

“Maybe there are too many of us in ‘ere. Scared him off.” Linda said abruptly.

Then, as if on cue, the three were startled by the sound of a trap shutting. They turned in unison.

The Doctor’s ear knew which trap it was straight away and skipped over to it. He reached down and triumphantly held the tiny prison at eye level, the rat stuffed inside.

“Well, then what have you got to say for yourself?”

The rat’s eyes seemed to widen briefly then boil with anger.

“You can’t stop us!” It squeeked. “Our fleet is massed on the edge of the solar system. Once I’ve reported back on this miserable little mud ball, we’ll take it by force! There’ll be no stopping us!”

“I think I’ll be having words with them.” The Doctor was sterner than you might imagine would be with a rodent. He was clearly very concerned.

Amy’s eyes were fixed on this furry ball of hatred. “Sentient, um, rats?”

“Sentient rats! Ratapharian’s to be exact. I recognised it as soon as we stepped through the door. Not big enough for a sewer rat, too big for a mouse. Ratafarians.” He mock shivered.

“Just get him out of here, whatever he is.” Linda said dryly.

* * * *

Back in the console room of the TARDIS, having stored the Ratapharian's cage safely on a shelf, the Doctor was busying himself with the take-off procedure. The rest of the alien rodent's race were about to get a piece of his mind.

Amy was taking one final look at Shanghai through the viewscreen. By now the mist had lifted and they could see the rump of the bay, mostly huts similar to the one they'd just liberated.

“I think it’s a decent enough place for a holiday, Doctor. But I couldn’t live here. Too quiet.”

“You live in Leadworth.” The Doctor said, pulling a lever with a clunk.

“That’s different. There are people.”

“There over ten thousand people living here. The place was just gained town status.”

“But still China. All those dynasties. Which one is this?”

“Um, Ming? No. Song, Song dynasty.”

“Song dynasty? Not?”

“No. Nooo. At least I don’t think so …”

And with that the TARDIS made a grinding, wheezing sound as it disappeared back into the time vortex.

Follow @alisongow here.

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 16/31: 'The Big Picture: Who Killed Hollywood? and Other Essays' by William Goldman.

Film William Goldman sets out his stall early in the introduction to The Big Picture, a collection of articles originally published in the likes of Premiere Magazine and the LA Times: “What you have here is a chronicle of the worst decade in movie history” Those of us who’ve sat through both Transformers films, watched the rise of torture porn and 3D conversions might imagine he’s talking about the Noughties (especially if we’ve skipped the copyright page) but the next sentence elaborates: “If you were to ask me what were the best ten films of the 90s my first thought would be the old joke ‘the girls in my town were so ugly that once we had a beauty contest and nobody won.’

For someone like me who became cine-aware in the 1990s, the decade didn’t seem too bad. As he lists in the following paragraph, it brought The Shawshank Redemption, Unforgiven, Babe, Hoop Dreams, Fargo, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Four Weddings and Groundhog Day, which is high praise indeed from someone who delivered the screenplays to All The President's Men, Marathon Man and The Princess Bride. But his argument is that in comparison to earlier decades, when the studios were still making thematically strong films for grown-ups and nearly every film nominated for best picture had integrity and would go on to be considered a stone cold classic, in the 90s, Hollywood had fallen back on producing genre based entertainments and nothing more (not something which has arguably changed).

It’s this persuasive argument he returns to throughout the collection which contains roughly three types of essay, previews of coming seasonal attractions, Oscar speculation and ceremony reviews, interspersed with the longer polemicals that create the back bone of his argument with titles like “Who Killed Hollywood” and “Year of the Dog”. Mixing his own opinions and those fielded from friends in the industry, he makes his best guess as to how something like The English Patient will do at the box office and what chances it has at winning Best Picture, all the while pushing against the truism from his seminal Adventures In The Screentrade which has become to most quoted line in film journalism “Nobody knows anything”.

With an extra decade of hindsight (the collection was published in 2001), part of the pleasure of the book is the nostalgia for a time when Apollo 13 was new and exciting release rather than something that not too long ago was repeated once a fortnight on ITV2. Flicking through to the piece looking towards the release slate for summer ’93 and we find Cliffhanger, The Firm, The Fugitive and In The Line of Fire all ready to be obliterated by Jurassic Park, which also left Last Action Hero as a casualty (remember the rocket with Arnie’s likeness on the side?). It’s impossible not to want to line up a day reliving that group (and even Super Mario Brothers which also came out that year, though not Dennis The Menace). Twenty-ten looks weedy by comparison.

His longer essays are best. Goldman’s analysis of Saving Private Ryan is pretty seminal already with a structural deconstruction demonstrating why the last half hour is phoney as hell (who’s flashback is it?) and his neutering of LA Confidential is similarly painful (six minutes too long). He suggests Twister is “the worst movie in the history of the world” then offers some close comparison with Jaws to conclusively prove it which seems a bit unfair until you realise what he’s demonstrating the extent to which computer generated spectacle has replaced proper characterisation. This is exemplified in “And Where Will You Leave Jimmy Stewart?” in which he uses the death of the actor as a jumping off point to list the images which he believe best exemplify certain actors like “Bill Holden, running at the Kwai Bridge shouting ‘kill him’”.

In the end, Goldman was a soothsayer. As he predicted, Hollywood is no longer interested in the middle budget film preferring instead to plough their millions into goliaths like addicted gamblers going all in with the hope of jackpot. Which pays off quite often now because people are still desperate to go to the cinema even if whatever’s on is rubbish or at least that’s the only explanation I have for the aforementioned toy related franchise films doing the business. He’s no longer writing about films in the same way so we won’t know whether he thinks Inception or The Social Network will win best picture. I think he'd go with the former because it would show Hollywood congratulating itself for producing an expensive blockbuster that just this once made the audience think as though that absolves them from churning out the shit they do the rest of the time.

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 15/31: Women comedians are not funny. Discuss. (suggested by Zoe Pattullo)

Comedy Just to show some of my workings for a change, the first version of this opinion began with a paragraph which listed a vast range of women comedians, from Maureen Lipman to Shappi Khorsandi pausing briefly to mourn the loss of Linda Smith in an attempt to demonstrate the fallacy that women comedians aren’t funny because there are plenty that clearly are, just as there’s a fair share of awful, awful male “comics”. I don’t happen to like the kind of comedy which seems designed to shock, the Frankie Boyle / Jimmy Carr irony black-hole, but they sell millions of dvds. It’s all about personal taste.

This unfunny perception of comediennes is however perfectly understandable. Much of the time, the history of funny women in the UK is reduced to a footnote in the history books (and I know because I’ve read a couple) were the author, usually male, finds themselves giving grudging deference to Victoria Wood somewhere between offering a justification for the comic genius of Bernard Manning and talking up Harry Enfield’s accomplishments. When they are covered in any detail it tends to be in relation to men, Caroline Aherne being a late rare exception.

It also doesn’t help that less funny comediennes have drowned out the rest. French & Saunders bestrode the eighties and nineties to such a degree that when they lost focus later (at least in relation to performing their own material which at some point became more interested in celebrity cameos and spoofs than saying anything genuinely interesting), I’d argue people assumed that all female comedians had stopped being funny too (even Wood has lately developed the same affliction not helped by turning up in interviews and saying that she knows what’s funny – we’ll be the judge of that).

It’s also not until very recently that comediennes have been allowed to expand their comic repertoire to mirror the men, covering biographical to observational to topical and in the case of Khorsandi all three. Radio 4 in general has been very good at expressing this kind of change, and it’s been gratify to hear The Now Show asking more female stand-ups to cover the news stories of the week, Sue Perkins is especially good on The News Quiz when she’s allowed to take an idea for a walk and even Laura Solon is growing on me. On tv, say what you like about Catherine Tate, but she can bury a catchphrase with the best and worst of the men, though she was still funnier in Doctor Who.

Which rather demonstrates, it depends on where you’re looking. If you’re looking at some tv panel game like Mock The Week in which “comedy” becomes an intimidating masculine pursuit, then admittedly, the intellectual rigour of a female comedian isn’t necessarily best suited – how often has the seat next to Hislop on Have I Got News For You been filled by a giggler with an XX chromosome? But if you make a point of searching out a Josie Long, you’ll find someone making observational comedy with big heart and emotional weight, that isn’t just funny but memorable. Which won’t be to everyone’s taste, but certainly suits mine.

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 14/31: Will the sale of Liverpool Football Club to new owners in America be beneficial to the city of Liverpool as well as the team itself ? (suggested by Jacques Baptiste)

Sport Fighting against the cultural stereotypes of my home city is something I’ve become very adept at over the past thirty-odd years, but it was all for nought during the days or weeks of uncertainty surrounding the ownership of Liverpool Football Club. It’s in these moments, sometimes of success or as on this occasion crisis that I really understand the extent to which team sport seeps into the culture of a city, as it becomes the single topic of conversation in streets and pubs, spilling out of the local radio stations and across the front pages of the newspapers.

In the days leading up to the purchase of the club by John Henry it was as though the buildings themselves held their breath, awaiting combustion should LFC enter administration instead. When the agreement was inked, after the battles in the high court, the streets sighed. This was an event that touched not just Liverpool supporters but us Evertonians too, the interconnectedness of support for the clubs, a kind of collective spiritual and historical responsibility, deep enough for all of us to be on tenterhooks. Could Everton survive without the other large club to fight against?

If nothing else, then, the new ownership cooled the emotional temperature of the city after years of insecurity, fans watching as their beloved was essentially asset stripped and left for dead. With background profiles in the media hyping the positive effect he’s had on Baseball, vox pops with fans on the streets of Boston talked up his accomplishments. Unlike the previous owners too, he’s been especially cautious, dispassionate even, in making outrageous promises, humbly talking about assessing what needs to be fixed in the club, that nothing can be changed overnight.

As for the team: I’m the last person to ask. But glancing through the fan assessments on Just Liverpool Blogs, the away performance that was eluding them the last time I was asked a football question in 2006 still doesn’t seem to have been fixed, or for all I know was repaired but has broken again. The advice offered by these fans is roughly the same. Play better. They all have their own ideas on how that advice should be carried out, but oddly none of them are calling for the loss of the manager, presumably because Roy Hodgson hasn’t been in the job that long. Does John Henry have magic hands?

Macbeth (BBC Four).

Theatre Apparently at some point during last night’s broadcast of Macbeth on BBC Four, the title of the play was trending on twitter, which is quite an achievement considering it was running directly opposite the finale of The X Factor and demonstrating that there is an appetite for theatre and especially Shakespeare even on a so-called minority channel. But this was not a simple filming of the original Rupert Goold directed production originating from Chichester Festival Theatre (then the West End, then Broadway). This was a fully cinematic piece of drama that was as interested in the details of the characters behaviour as the depth of the poetry.

A typical example of this was in the moment just before MacDuff discovers his murdered king. Patrick Stewart’s Macbeth guides the general towards the door which will lead to his master and afterwards leans on a kitchen table as Lady Macduff (touchingly rendered by Suzanne Burden), who in this adaptation has been given Lenox’s lines, fills the idle moment with some small talk about the weather. Throughout Stewart watches the back of that door, genially but shortly answering the woman’s statements, but clearly very preoccupied because the sight MacDuff is about to discover etched on his brain and he knows as soon as the door opens, everything changes.

This is Macbeth as chamber piece; shot in and around Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire, Goold’s drama trades the vistas of Polanski and Zeffrelli for a mix of cramped interiors and large halls which seem to oscillate depending upon the timidity or arrogance of the title character’s ambition. The choice of shots too, rather than simply resting on whomever’s lips are moving goes with the emotional centre of each scene. When Lady Macbeth reads of her husband's good fortune, our focus is on the letter. In the moment when MacDuff is related the bleak circumstances of the loss of his family, the camera fixes on his face as Malcolm turns this grief toward revenge.

Goold’s chosen setting is a non-descript east-European country in the mid-twentieth century. Sporting a generous moustache, once in power, Stewart’s Macbeth is represented by a giant Stalin-like portrait in the main hall with the tyrant’s arrogant grasps at holding onto power, the murdering of friends and families in the text fitting neatly into the general sense of oppression exemplified by the archival footage of massive armies marching along wide boulevards that fill the antiquated televisions throughout the living quarters. The impression is of a shift between a benevolent military dictatorship under Duncan into one built on paranoia.

The paranoia engendered in Macbeth by the three witches. In his post on the BBC blog about the making of this version of The Scottish Play, producer John Wyver of Illuminations offers the films Downfall and The Shining as inspirations for the drama and asks for other guesses. As well as The Third Man, for its projections of shadows across the tiled walls of the tunnels, I’d like to suggest the films of Guillermo del Toro for the depiction of the supernatural against a backdrop of jackboots and submarine jackets. Like The Devil’s Backbone in particular, the witches are rendered even creeper by the manipulation of frame rates to create totally unreal movements in the actresses and when Banquo walks he’s captured in the same state as the moment of his death.

These three minxes were genuinely unsettling. One of the worst episodes of The West Wing, from the fifth season, just after creator Aaron Sorkin had left, has all of the main characters literally bawling at each other, entirely out of character, for forty minutes. As unpleasant as that is, if these witches had passed through now and then and conspiratorially given us a wink, the seething mass of negativity in the fictional White House that day would have been rendered totally convincing. These nurses or servants or whatever they are act as puppet masters in this scenario, and it’s not entirely clear, and this is suggested by Shakespeare’s text, whether we’re watching their prophecies coming to pass or whether they’re simply bending the situation to their will, those emotions their playthings.

The brilliance of the lead performances, from Stewart and Kate Fleetwood as his eventual queen is that they don’t tip the balance in our understanding either way. Fleetwood offers a dark, manipulative figure, and sexual animal in the Nigella Lawson mould, but unlike many interpretations there’s a certain collusion from Stewart from the off, as though he was already considering a great future for himself even before the wyrd sisters presented themselves. He might look slightly gutless when Lady M bats away his suggestion that he won’t kill Duncan but is soon turned around when she seductively carries a massive chocolate cake past his eyes. He has that cake and as we see later when just one slice is left, he eats it too.

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 13/31: Macbeth (BBC Four).

Theatre Apparently at some point during last night’s broadcast of Macbeth on BBC Four, the title of the play was trending on twitter, which is quite an achievement considering it was running directly opposite the finale of The X Factor and demonstrating that there is an appetite for theatre and especially Shakespeare even on a so-called minority channel. But this was not a simple filming of the original Rupert Goold directed production originating from Chichester Festival Theatre (then the West End, then Broadway). This was a fully cinematic piece of drama that was as interested in the details of the characters behaviour as the depth of the poetry.

A typical example of this was in the moment just before MacDuff discovers his murdered king. Patrick Stewart’s Macbeth guides the general towards the door which will lead to his master and afterwards leans on a kitchen table as Lady Macduff (touchingly rendered by Suzanne Burden), who in this adaptation has been given Lenox’s lines, fills the idle moment with some small talk about the weather. Throughout Stewart watches the back of that door, genially but shortly answering the woman’s statements, but clearly very preoccupied because the sight MacDuff is about to discover etched on his brain and he knows as soon as the door opens, everything changes.

This is Macbeth as chamber piece; shot in and around Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire, Goold’s drama trades the vistas of Polanski and Zeffrelli for a mix of cramped interiors and large halls which seem to oscillate depending upon the timidity or arrogance of the title character’s ambition. The choice of shots too, rather than simply resting on whomever’s lips are moving goes with the emotional centre of each scene. When Lady Macbeth reads of her husband's good fortune, our focus is on the letter. In the moment when MacDuff is related the bleak circumstances of the loss of his family, the camera fixes on his face as Malcolm turns this grief toward revenge.

Goold’s chosen setting is a non-descript east-European country in the mid-twentieth century. Sporting a generous moustache, once in power, Stewart’s Macbeth is represented by a giant Stalin-like portrait in the main hall with the tyrant’s arrogant grasps at holding onto power, the murdering of friends and families in the text fitting neatly into the general sense of oppression exemplified by the archival footage of massive armies marching along wide boulevards that fill the antiquated televisions throughout the living quarters. The impression is of a shift between a benevolent military dictatorship under Duncan into one built on paranoia.

The paranoia engendered in Macbeth by the three witches. In his post on the BBC blog about the making of this version of The Scottish Play, producer John Wyver of Illuminations offers the films Downfall and The Shining as inspirations for the drama and asks for other guesses. As well as The Third Man, for its projections of shadows across the tiled walls of the tunnels, I’d like to suggest the films of Guillermo del Toro for the depiction of the supernatural against a backdrop of jackboots and submarine jackets. Like The Devil’s Backbone in particular, the witches are rendered even creeper by the manipulation of frame rates to create totally unreal movements in the actresses and when Banquo walks he’s captured in the same state as the moment of his death.

These three minxes were genuinely unsettling. One of the worst episodes of The West Wing, from the fifth season, just after creator Aaron Sorkin had left, has all of the main characters literally bawling at each other, entirely out of character, for forty minutes. As unpleasant as that is, if these witches had passed through now and then and conspiratorially given us a wink, the seething mass of negativity in the fictional White House that day would have been rendered totally convincing. These nurses or servants or whatever they are act as puppet masters in this scenario, and it’s not entirely clear, and this is suggested by Shakespeare’s text, whether we’re watching their prophecies coming to pass or whether they’re simply bending the situation to their will, those emotions their playthings.

The brilliance of the lead performances, from Stewart and Kate Fleetwood as his eventual queen is that they don’t tip the balance in our understanding either way. Fleetwood offers a dark, manipulative figure, and sexual animal in the Nigella Lawson mould, but unlike many interpretations there’s a certain collusion from Stewart from the off, as though he was already considering a great future for himself even before the wyrd sisters presented themselves. He might look slightly gutless when Lady M bats away his suggestion that he won’t kill Duncan but is soon turned around when she seductively carries a massive chocolate cake past his eyes. He has that cake and as we see later when just one slice is left, he eats it too.

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 12/31: Harry Potter (suggested by Annette)

Film On a couple of occasions recently people have asked me where I stand on Harry Potter. The questions seems to be an attempt to divine the kind of human being I am. My initial reaction is that I’m perhaps not as passionate about Potter as some other franchises, certainly not as much as the various Whedonverses, Douglas Adams or Doctor Who.

But I'm certainly not anti-Potter. I just took two decisions early on that have probably effected my connection to the franchise. Firstly, I haven’t read the books. I've decided to enjoy the films as they stood and not have the alternative textual version running in parallel in my head throughout. Second, I’ve only seen everything since Chamber of Secrets once, for reasons which will become apparent.

No queuing at midnight for each exciting hard copy or as I imagine my version would be preordering it on Amazon before Rowling had even finished spell checking (which has to be a nightmare with Potter or has Microsoft supplied her with a special non-muggle version of the dictionary?), so no stories either of dressing as Hagrid and making the appropriate advances to a female peer dress as Herminone.

The most extra-curricular excitement I’ve had is listening to Mark Kermode’s reviews as he comes to terms with the fact that they’ll probably never be as good as The Prisoner of Azkaban but that they’re still rather better than some of the Benjamin Sniddlegrass-like clones, his flappy hands becoming ever more agitated when he's faced with descenting voices. Oh and hello to Jason Isaacs.

Instead, I've spent the past seven-odd years avoiding the tiny spoilers at the expense of the great big ones. With the ever increasing gap between the publication of JK Rowling’s hardcopy and the widescreen version, I’ve often felt like I might as well have returned to source. The unfortunate event at the close of the Half-Blood Prince was broken within minutes of publication, but I managed to avoid hearing about the method.

Which means that when I think about what I love about the movies, I’m mostly trading in faded memories and images in a way which has to be reminiscent of films fans before the home market, remembering vaguely the time travel sequence in Azkaban to the scary search through the swamp in The Half Blood Prince, Hagrid’s laugh to McGonagall glower and only a vague notion of the jargon.

When next Christmas, after nearly a decade, I’ll finally be able to sit and watch these films in a couple of sittings, there will be three elements I’ll be looking out for along with whether it’s possible to enjoy these films as a single story or if they really are just a bunch of episodes. The narrative structure, the actors and the atmosphere. Oh film school, how I miss thee.

I've often pitied Steve Kloves, the screenwriter who's adapted all of the Potter films; like anyone else in his position he's had to deal with the prospect of producing a story the details of which its core audience will already have an intimate knowledge but unlike them, he's had to deal not only with a huge mythology but one which has developed generally outside of his control.

Unlike the Bourne franchise, in which directors Doug Lyman and then Paul Greengrass essentially kept the name of each of the books and then did what they liked, for Potter fans the pictures must ring true to the words. Apparently sections of The Half-Blood Prince had to be reshot in light of revelations from the print version of The Deathly Hallows so that the closing couple of films could still be relatively faithful to the source material.

Most Hollywood franchises also become very bothered with the business of making sure the main character has a goal which is set up at the beginning and is dealt with at the climax. What Kloves has done is appropriate the alternative narrative style of the art house, in which a collection of incidents cumulatively lead to a story, with only the broadest of linking tissue between the scenes.

I love this. If you’re simply keeping with the films they can at times be as entertainingly scatter-shot and obscure as an Andrei Tarkovsky film and all the better for it. I’m frustrated when people complain that they don’t understand some plot element because they haven’t read the book, because it actually allows the viewer to become part author of the work, filling in these gaps for themselves.

* * * * *

Impossible as it is to imagine now, but sometime around the making of The Goblet of Fire, the scuttlebutt was that since the actors were growing beyond their character’s screen ages, the studio was putting some thought into replacing the leads in the Harry Potter films. If ever there was a banner moment as to how proprietorial I was towards the franchise it was this and I was flabbergasted.

A point of difference in the Potter films was the knowledge that we’d be watching these three younger actors grow and develop both into their characters and in their craft and it seemed unconscionable that the film company could even find worthy replacements. Luckily they’ve seen sense and sure enough once the final two films are released, that unique quality will remain intact.

In casting the central trio the producers with very lucky and clever. Just as Grint has grown into a very fine comic actor, Daniel Radcliffe has gained timelord heroism and Emma Watson could become a very good leading lady in the Kiera Knightley mould assuming all three can find some way of respecting the opportunities this franchise has offered whilst simultaneously not letting themselves become synonymous.

The series has also been able to retain the wider cast in their respective roles. With the high profile exception of Zoë Wanamaker (and Richard Harris god rest his soul) all of the adults, a galaxy of British acting talent have stayed in place, as we’re also seeing a whole school full of kids growing into young adults. If nothing else, the Potter franchise has inspired loyalty amongst its cast.

* * * * *

The films have all retained a consistent atmosphere, better even than some television series, whilst simultaneously pushing the feel of the imagery ever darker. After Alfonso Curan abandoned the golden hues of the two Chris Columbus openers, the photography has become increasingly bluer and greyer, with some scenes in The Half-Blood Prince bordering on nourish monochrome.

This could be interpreted as demonstrating the slow maturity of the main characters, Harry’s inextricable journey towards darkness and his inevitable rematch with you know who, but for me it shows that as directors Mike Newell then David Yates see these as valid artistic endeavours rather than simple franchise pictures, eager that what appears on screen has integrity beyond simply reframing someone else’s text.

Even if those first two films were relatively staid and conventional, they set up the world perfectly so that each small and large measure of destruction wrought on Hogwarts is keenly felt because it means we and the kids will no longer be able to enjoy a game of Quiddich for what it is, the main dramatic thrust whether Harry will can goal, or sit in the main hall and cheer Gryffindor’s end of year score.

So here’s to the end of the series, and to next Christmas when I’ll be able to watch the whole thing again. Perhaps after that I’ll understand more of the jokes, be wanting to buy a Hogwarts scarf even read the books finally and hoping that Rowling will indeed succumb to the temptation and write a proper epilogue so that I can stand outside Waterstones at midnight knowing that I won’t be sleeping for the next seven hundred odd pages.

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 11/31: how do you want to, how should we, feel about everything and nothing when we die? (suggested by Francis Irving)

Philosophy  Jude Law says something on this very subject in that Shakespeare interview book I reviewed the other day. At first he’s speaking about the change in Hamlet’s attitude to life, but then he opens out with:

“We all start with great optimism and exuberance and belief, then we end up realising that life can be fucking hard and brutal – a grunting, sweating weary life – but we can choose to bear it. What’s the choice? But then while we’re bearing it and while it can be brutal, and not as shining and joyful as perhaps it was when we were six or seven years old, we also have to be ready for anything, and that in itself makes it extraordinary. The rest is silence.”

Which I think you’ll agree is an reasonably insightful comment not just on the play but on life in general. It’s also the main theme of Woody Allen’s film Whatever Works (which I wrote about along with a bunch of other Woody Allen films earlier this year) and probably the key topic of all drama since Sophocles spoiled everyone’s relationship with their mother (cf, Hamlet again). How to make the most of the time that we have and reconciling that with the fact that for most of us the experience won’t be that great?

Jeff Goldblum’s character in The Big Chill suggests that he can’t get through a week without making one or two really good rationalisations and that’s probably the level most of us work towards. During this financial crisis when unemployment is due to rise to levels even higher than usual, no matter how much we hate our jobs we’ll tell ourselves “Well, at least I have a job”. If we’re in an unsatisfactory relationship, we might say “Well, at least I’m with someone.” For some of us, that’s enough.

But what we have to be careful of is not comparing our own achievements against others. That really is depressing. If the world wide web has offered the ability to expand our horizons beyond our street or town, there’s also now the chance to read about the lives of an infinite number of people who are better looking than us, have better jobs and more attractive partners. Blogger-envy has given way to Twitter-envy but you have to wonder how most of these people fit it all in.

Essentially we're all trapped in a Sisyphian state of uselessly pushing a rock up a hill only to watch it falling down the other side knowing that we'll only be perilously nudging it back up again.  Of course, Sisyphus was trapped by the gods in his never ending task for being a bad person and I don't think that's a fair assessment of everyone.  But I think it neatly demonstrates now many of us, in search for a purpose in life, ultimately find ourselves striving within acts of futility, continuing to do so even when we're given reasonable evidence that we are indeed wasting our time.

Oh how I’ve agonised. Everything I do seems to be a waste of time especially a waste of my leisure time; I always assuming I'm watching the wrong kinds of films, listening to the wrong kinds of music, reading the wrong kinds of text and anyway couldn’t I be doing something more useful than any of those three? Shouldn’t I be giving all this time to charity instead of selfishly wasting it in front of All The President’s Men once again, marvelling at the Burlesque soundtrack (spotify) or guffawing at Charlie Brooker’s latest column?

What I’ve decided, my big rationalisation if you will, is that I’ll never be happy. No matter what I do, I’ll always feel like I’m wasting my time. So it’s best just to meander on, do the best with the opportunities that open themselves up to me, and make do.  In other words, the state Jude Law describes in the quote at the top of this piece and Woody, or his avatar Larry David says at the close of his movie (because on this point pop culture and academia tend to intersect):

I happen to hate New Year's celebrations. Everybody desperate to have fun. Trying to celebrate in some pathetic little way. Celebrate what? A step closer to the grave? That's why I can't say enough times, whatever love you can get and give, whatever happiness you can filch or provide, every temporary measure of grace, whatever works. And don't kid yourself. Because its by no means up to your own human ingenuity. A bigger part of your existence is luck, than you'd like to admit. Christ, you know the odds of your fathers one sperm from the billions, finding the single egg that made you. Don't think about it, you'll have a panic attack.

Which is a cop-out. A platitude. Someone else's words. But I don’t have a better answer than that.

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 10/31: Apocalypse Now (suggested by @linkmachinego)

Film Hearts of Darkness: A Film-makers Apocalypse is one of my favourite films. Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper’s gathering together of Eleanor Coppola’s behind the scenes footage of the making of her husband Francis’s mad expedition into Manila to shoot a Vietnam war movie is one of the reasons I became interested in film and probably fuelled my obsession not just in what happens on screen but who’s pointing the camera. Too many great moments to list (“There were too many of us, we had access to too much equipment, too much money, and little by little we went insane.”) but rest assured it's impossible to watch the elder Laurence Fishburne in quite the same way once you’ve visited upon the teenage version, spaced out on a boat. His character in Apocalypse Now was not much of a job of acting.

I saw Hearts of Darkness before Apocalypse Now. In fact, so obsessed was I with this “making of” that for years I banned myself from watching the Vietnam war film itself lest I taint the version of it I’d conjured in my imagination from the few fragments that appear in Bahr and Hickenlooper’s work along with the surrounding 8mm b-roll. Myths are rarely less potent than reality and I couldn’t imagine the vérité shots of Martin Sheen falling off the wagon could really be improved by being shot and edited on 35mm film with a soundtrack by The Doors. Plus, please remember, that at this time Apocalypse Now had been gone from the cinemas for over a decade and only really existed in a pan-scan version which would look even less epic on the 14” portable in my bedroom.

But eventually I succumbed when a widescreen version of the film was released on VHS and inevitably it wasn’t as good as the epic I had in my head.  Not Coppola’s fault, of course, and whilst it was far from the classical Hollywood mode, it just didn’t reflect the frenzy of its creation. I remember being slightly bored that first time around, impressed by the visuals but unable to rationalise the need for the pop philosophy. Willard’s decent into madness seemed strangely abrupt with only the mother's letter scene really effecting me (I was at university and homesick). I also remember being a bit angry that not more of Marlon Brando’s improvision had made it to the final cut.

On subsequent viewings, especially in its Redux version, my appreciation of Apocalypse Now has increased. The element of boredom I’d detected in that first viewing is an important part of the experience. Coppola is attempting to recreate the monotony of war, the long periods of listlessness when someone can spend too much time in their own company, inside their own head, punctuated by moments of utter horror when anything can happen and you’ll most likely watch your best friend receiving bullet assuming you’re not hit yourself. Little by little Willard goes insane but it's not until he reaches Kurtz that he really falls off the deep end, but in a measured way, in a way that allows him to complete his mission.

All of which, after some reflection, many years of reflection, only increases my appreciation of Hearts of Darkness and how ably it demonstrates that Coppola’s real achievement was not to let his own frenetic need to complete the film be reflected on-screen and that he was able to craft such a coherent piece of work from the years of footage collected during principle photography and in a way that directors with far larger budgets and shooting under relatively perfect conditions seem incapable of. Now, what I’d really like to see is the four-hour bootleg version which is apparently knocking around. Nothing can be as good as the version of that film I have in my head …

Follow @linkmachinego here.

Soundalikes #34: Francis Monkman meets Murray Gold

Music Doesn't the first bit of the theme to The Long Good Friday:



Sound a bit like the Eleventh Doctor theme?

"a fresher batch"

Coffee How to get the best out of Starbucks. Insider knowledge from a barrista on Reddit. Much of this seems like it could be relevant in the UK:

"If you come in and ask for a cup of coffee and see that the little red light on the brewer is blinking, ask politely for a fresher batch, or just go with a pour over. The red light starts blinking after an hour. At my store, we're pretty strict about the 30 minute time limit on our coffees, but other stores aren't."

I'll add two things:

(1) Not all of the available sizes are on the menu. If like me you don't need a vat of coffee and just want something that's closer to an ordinary household mug, ask for a "short". It's cheaper and leads to less wastage because you'll drink it before it goes cold.

(2) At the moment if you buy some of the VIA instant coffee (which as the linked article says is nicest and more authentic in its Italian form) using a Starbucks gift card you can get a free tall coffee from the menu and anything from the menu.

Shakespeare on Stage: Thirteen Leading Actors on Thirteen Key Roles by Julian Curry.

Julian Curry spends much of his introduction to Shakespeare on Stage: Thirteen Leading Actors on Thirteen Key Roles justifying the need to record the thoughts of actors in the first place. An actor himself (long career, cv long enough to fill the RSC’s theatre programme), he understands correctly that though critics have their place in putting a play within its historical context and examining its themes, its only by talking to those employed to stand in front of an audience and make that rabble of coughers and coat wearers believe a character has a soul, that the emotional truth of the words can be understood.

Shakespeare On Stage gathers interviews with thirteen prominent actors, in which they’re asked if they’ll, as Curry says, “be willing to reveal if not how they acted, at least what they did.” This is not a book to dip into looking for theatrical anecdotes though a few do creep out. It is instead a record of a range of productions and how a given character fitted into the ensemble, how the decisions taken by the actor in conjunction with the director impacts on both the audience’s understanding of the plot and sometimes how that production fits within the historical legacy of the play.

Oh the riches! Judi Dench reminiscing about her Juliet for Zeffirelli at the Old Vic in 1960(surely the performance The Guardian’s Michael Billington recently revealed to be his favourite of the past fifty years). Ian McKellen on his classic Macbeth opposite Dench for the RSC and Ralph Fiennes returning to the mind of Coriolanus, and the Almeida show which has inspired his new film version. Some are shorter than others; sometimes Curry’s time with his subject was limit, but sometimes he’s simply fulfilling his prophecy from the introduction that “it’s a mugs game to get actors to talk about their craft”.

Shakespeare’s problems, romances and comedies are given equal weight however, which makes a change from similar exercises that tend to concentrate on the tragedies under the assumption that they’re more psychologically complex. I’d not realised Rebecca Hall played Rosalind for her father, Peter, in Bath in 2003 and Derek Jacobi, in expounding on his Malvolvio, relishes the chance to talk about something other than his several hundred appearances as Hamlet. Most valuable perhaps is Penelope Wilton on Measure for Measure morally ambiguous nun Isabella. Her material might be very site specific, but her comments on why the character stops speaking towards the end (she’s dumfounded) only increase my appreciation of this most overlooked play.

Hamlet is represented by Jude Law. Unlike most of the interviews which are looking back retrospectively on a production, Curry was able to grab Law right in the middle of the show’s run at the Donmar Warehouse last Summer (2009) and so he’s capturing an actor in the thick of his thought processes about the character before he’s consolidated his feelings as to whether he achieved what he set out to. As many actors do, Law says that he wants to find something new every night, bring spontaneity to his text, mostly because he doesn’t want the bigness of the nightly endeavour to overwhelm him. In places, he clearly sees aspects of himself in the character, just as the best actors should.

Though Curry has chosen to arrange the interviews in alphabetical order, I wonder if chronological order by production date wouldn’t be just as useful so that the reader can have an idea of how the Shakespearean acting has developed over the past fifty years from Dench to Law. For the most part, theatre is ephemeral and fleeting and this book goes some way to recapturing what we’ve missed – even those productions that have been filmed for the studio aren’t absolute recreations of what the theatre audience enjoyed. Despite his modest claims, Curry has produced a document which should be of use to acting students searching for inspiration, as a research tool for theatre students and for the general audience seeking a different set of insights and perspectives on the canon.

'Shakespeare on Stage: Thirteen Leading Actors on Thirteen Key Roles' by Julian Curry is published by Nick Hern Books. £14.99. ISBN: 9781848420779.  Review copy supplied.

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 9/31: 'Shakespeare on Stage: Thirteen Leading Actors on Thirteen Key Roles' by Julian Curry.

Theatre Julian Curry spends much of his introduction to Shakespeare on Stage: Thirteen Leading Actors on Thirteen Key Roles justifying the need to record the thoughts of actors in the first place. An actor himself (long career, cv long enough to fill the RSC’s theatre programme), he understands correctly that though critics have their place in putting a play within its historical context and examining its themes, its only by talking to those employed to stand in front of an audience and make that rabble of coughers and coat wearers believe a character has a soul, that the emotional truth of the words can be understood.

Shakespeare On Stage gathers interviews with thirteen prominent actors, in which they’re asked if they’ll, as Curry says, “be willing to reveal if not how they acted, at least what they did.” This is not a book to dip into looking for theatrical anecdotes though a few do creep out. It is instead a record of a range of productions and how a given character fitted into the ensemble, how the decisions taken by the actor in conjunction with the director impacts on both the audience’s understanding of the plot and sometimes how that production fits within the historical legacy of the play.

Oh the riches! Judi Dench reminiscing about her Juliet for Zeffirelli at the Old Vic in 1960(surely the performance The Guardian’s Michael Billington recently revealed to be his favourite of the past fifty years). Ian McKellen on his classic Macbeth opposite Dench for the RSC and Ralph Fiennes returning to the mind of Coriolanus, and the Almeida show which has inspired his new film version. Some are shorter than others; sometimes Curry’s time with his subject was limit, but sometimes he’s simply fulfilling his prophecy from the introduction that “it’s a mugs game to get actors to talk about their craft”.

Shakespeare’s problems, romances and comedies are given equal weight however, which makes a change from similar exercises that tend to concentrate on the tragedies under the assumption that they’re more psychologically complex. I’d not realised Rebecca Hall played Rosalind for her father, Peter, in Bath in 2003 and Derek Jacobi, in expounding on his Malvolvio, relishes the chance to talk about something other than his several hundred appearances as Hamlet. Most valuable perhaps is Penelope Wilton on Measure for Measure morally ambiguous nun Isabella. Her material might be very site specific, but her comments on why the character stops speaking towards the end (she’s dumfounded) only increase my appreciation of this most overlooked play.

Hamlet is represented by Jude Law. Unlike most of the interviews which are looking back retrospectively on a production, Curry was able to grab Law right in the middle of the show’s run at the Donmar Warehouse last Summer (2009) and so he’s capturing an actor in the thick of his thought processes about the character before he’s consolidated his feelings as to whether he achieved what he set out to. As many actors do, Law says that he wants to find something new every night, bring spontaneity to his text, mostly because he doesn’t want the bigness of the nightly endeavour to overwhelm him. In places, he clearly sees aspects of himself in the character, just as the best actors should.

Though Curry has chosen to arrange the interviews in alphabetical order, I wonder if chronological order by production date wouldn’t be just as useful so that the reader can have an idea of how the Shakespearean acting has developed over the past fifty years from Dench to Law. For the most part, theatre is ephemeral and fleeting and this book goes some way to recapturing what we’ve missed – even those productions that have been filmed for the studio aren’t absolute recreations of what the theatre audience enjoyed. Despite his modest claims, Curry has produced a document which should be of use to acting students searching for inspiration, as a research tool for theatre students and for the general audience seeking a different set of insights and perspectives on the canon.

Annotations: Liverpool Blogs at Social Media Cafe Liverpool.

Annotations All being well, I've just spent part of this evening giving an entertaining and informative talk on the history of Liverpool Blogs to the Social Media Cafe in Liverpool, during which I've promised to post an annotation of the talk so that people will have links to all the relevant websites in one handy place.

Or I've stuttered my way through a Power Point presentation, in which it's as though I was seeing each new slide for the first time having forgotten what I was going to say and then shouted out about this annotation right at the end or even after the talk has finished. Either way, here are the relevant/irrelevant links:

My first attempt at a blog, the archived posts.
My first post about the Sugababes.
The real first post.
My interview with Annette from this blog's 5th birthday.
Metafilter, community blog.
Linkmachinego.
Updated UK Weblogs.
I’m Belle de Jour. The Times. November 15, 2009.
How Belle de Jour's secret ally Googlewhacked the press. The Guardian. Wednesday 18 November 2009.
Me and Belle de Jour – “Could it be Brooke?” @ Linkmachinego
Best British Blog competition @ The Guardian
Imperial Donut.
Blogging like it’s 2000 by Katy Lindemann @ Seemingly Unconnected
London Bloggers directory.

The Manchizzle.
The University of Manchester.
North West Enquirer @ Wikipedia.
The post from here in which I highlight being included in the North West Blogwatch.
The Manchester Blogroll @ The Manchizzle.
Manchester Blog Awards.

Liverpool Blogs.
Fried Chicken.
Liverpool Blogs introductory post.
Ellen Loudon.
BritBlog.com.
FriendFeed.
Twitterfeed.
@shakespearelogs.
The Hamlet Weblog.
Just Liverpool Blogs.

[And you wouldn't believe what I had to leave out...]

Update:

Here's the Powerpoint presentation too for your edification. I hope to write up a textual version of the presentation when I have the time. Possibly in the new year. Allow it to marinate for a bit longer.

Liverpoolblogs

View more presentations from feelinglistless.

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 8/31: How has blogging changed in the last nine or ten years? Both from personal and overall perspective (suggested by Karie Bookish)

About This blog reaches its tenth year in six months. Having visited sections of the archive for various reasons, I’m surprised by how little the content has change. Pick an average week in August 2004, and there’s the usual mix of culture linkage and commentary on some big cultural event, in that case the Olympics. You can disagree, but I don't see the changes here that I've noticed in other blogs. There might have been the odd refocusing of emphasis here and there, from links to long form writing and back again, but it ebbs and flows usually with how far I can lift my writer's block.

Since you want my opinion (because I’ve wanted you to want my opinion), I think that if anything my blogging has become more self-conscious. As soon as someone I knew offline first mentioned that they read my “website”, personal blogging per se stopped. There are parts of the archive for you to discover, especially from the early days, which are far more open than I would ever be now. Events that would naturally have found themselves written about in this space, I’ve deliberately self-censored. But I do think that’s true of most old-schoolers. We’ve learnt through experience that if there’s something we don’t want people to know about, the first thing to do is not put it up on our blogs.

Personal blogging itself has become rather old school lately too. If Facebook has replaced the application of wanting to keep family and friends abreast of recent developments, Twitter has offered the ability to present even more instant opinion, with the hundred and forty-character limit and excellent way of focusing the mind. I’ve made a point of keeping this blog updated with something daily, but there are certainly ideas which have inescapably been lost to micro-blogging which in the past would more naturally have become three whole paragraphs or at least a paragraph with a blockquoted extract in the middle, which seems desperately time consuming by comparison.

As I predicted somewhere in those archives, corporate blogging has also rather hijacked everything. There are three flavours; large media organisations using the platform to offer content that would previous have appeared on static pages in a time dated format with comments, large media organisations that employ the blogging format for all its convenience and try to retain some element of personal blogging even if the content is as impersonal as hell and companies employing blogs to sell their wares, from music to film to cereals. With their pots of money and giant staffs, it’s become increasingly difficult for personal bloggers to calve out their own niche.

Which suggests the biggest change in blogging in the past ten years. It’s become aggressively difficult to be truly original anymore. Sometimes it feels as though we’re all sitting around reviewing the same bits of culture, linking to the same websites, embedding the same videos, feeding on whatever new thing has filtered down from 4Chan via Reddit or the A-list linkers (with the Tumblr platform designed for just this application). No two blogs are exactly the same, most express the personality of the writer, but I can see it happening here, wincing as I link to yet another Guardian interview even if it is the best thing I’ve read that day. What’s the point in doing this if we’re not trying to be brilliant ourselves?

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”.

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