Doctor Who: Worlds of Wonder at the World Museum.

TV  Oh, hi Mark.  It's always good to have a familiar face at the start of something like this and here's the maître d' of the macabre, the star of the Web of Caves, Mark Gatiss, to introduce us to the programme and the theme of the exhibition, the interrelatedness of Doctor Who and real world science.  He has a difficult job, though, being upstaged by the replica of the first Doctor's TARDIS console first seen in his drama An Adventure in Space and Time and most recently in the Fugitive Doctor's time capsule, with its retro controls and letraset labelling.  But the overall feeling in this opening room is, you're amongst friends.

Finally.  Back in May when WoW opened, tickets were at a premium, with slots only available days in advance.  Knowing that the exhibition would be open until just after Guy Fawkes Night, I relaxed and decided to wait until the school holidays were over when the space would hopefully be a bit quieter and the day and time would be in my hands.  Then, having studiously avoided spoilers so well, I forgot that it existed and having been reminded by someone passing though on the socials, quickly ordered a ticket for a slot this morning.  Between this, the Sugababes concert and the Tudors exhibition, Liverpool has been having its own feeling listless cultural festival.

Which is why I feel a bit obligated to write about the experience.  Did it live up to expectations?  Yes.  What were those expectations?  Well, having read the publicity, I knew this wasn't going to have as extensive a display as Llangollen, Blackpool or the Doctor Who Experience (which seemed very impressive based on the shots in The Five(ish) Doctors) mostly because of the tension that Mark suggests in his opening statement is in the DNA of the franchise, between giving the kids what they really want to see, the bug eyed monsters, and the educational aspects buzzing away in the background.  Come for the Daleks, stay to discover how electromagnetism works.

So the element that most Doctor Who fans will be here for, the props and costumes are mostly collected around a series of scientific themes, although they're usually broad enough to allow for a fair amount of license.  "Welcome To The Lab" features such things as the Emojibots from Smile, the Kerblam Man from Kerblam and in honestly the creepiest exhibit of the whole show, the prosthetic heads of Matt Lucas and Greg Davies from The Husbands of River Song with their follicle perfect recreations of their faces.  On pikes.  There are a lot of heads in pikes throughout the displays.  Poor Madame Vastra.  Yikes.

Does this synergy work?  For the most part.  Each of the labels tries to find some scientific connection with the real world.  The K1 robot (taller than I expected) offers a short explanation as to its original purpose, then says: "Four decades on from this story’s first broadcast, robots built for difficult and hazardous industrial tasks are in operation all around the world. Luckily, so far none of them have killed their creators, gone on a rampage and grown to an enormous size."  The text is clearly written by fans of the show who're also steeped in science and they get the slightly irreverent tone just right.  

Interspersed with the exhibits are screens in which experts explain the science behind some elements at I'd say about a BBC Four level of complexity (from about five years ago before they began repeating old BBC One programmes from about five years ago).  Professor Clifford (no, not that one) discusses how time travel might work and the TARDIS can be smaller on the outside.  There's an excellent and quite lengthy discussion with Kevin Fong about the resilience of humans and how micro-organisms help to keep us alive but also how vulnerable we are, even on our own planet.

And of the things which, lets be honest, most of us would be going for?  I'm very aware that most of you have already seen this but spoilers, I guess.  The majority of the costumes and props are from about the past ten years, so that's the Capaldi and Whittaker eras and often some of my very least favourite stories, the Skovox Blitzer, the Teller, the Wheezy, Clara's space suit from Kill The Moon (which is tiny!).  But its impressive to see how well the creatures have been fabricated in a way which gives them the best appearance on television, which is especially true of the imposing Fisher Kind from Before The Flood who you can have loom over you at one point.

Perhaps its because I'm of an increasingly certain age, that it's the smaller props which are the biggest draw.  In the opening room there's a display cabinet containing what looks like all of the Doctor's sonic screwdrivers from the second Time Lord onwards, including Eighth's from the TV movie (his only prop in the whole show), along with Missy's sonic umbrella and River's sonic trowel.  They also have Mike Tucker's re-creations of the ships from Shada created for the 2017 reconstruction, Skagra's spacecraft, the Think Tank space station ad The Nosferatu.  Absolutely beautiful.

If something did nag away at the back of my mind, it's which props were originals and which were recreations.  Much of the time, the labels contain the words "screen-used" which adds authenticity, but part of me wishes that like an art exhibition, all of the items had some provenance.  Which Dalek is this?  What were the circumstances of its creation?  Was this K-9 produced for an earlier exhibition or did it feature on The Sarah Jane Adventures?  Is that really the prop Paul McGann held in 1996 or some made since for a different project?  I know most people don't care about this stuff, it's all just photo ops, but ..

At the price of an old classic series DVD release on play.com, did I get my money's worth?  Probably?  I guess?  There's a lot of empty space in the exhibition so that it can be spread through the horse-shoe display gallery in the museum necessitating lots of walls with text displays and a massive diorama of a publicity shot from In The Forest of the Night (some people like that episode, I suppose, and it was written by a local boy).  Of the classic props, there are a few of the usual suspects in here, but this is probably as close as I've been to Morbius and Omega and in a well lit room for a change, rather than near darkness with a green light projected against them.

Nevertheless there's something quite magical, as well as expressively weird about being able to attend an exhibition dedicated to a television show you've loved for many years which has in this case has clearly been created by fans for fans, something which hasn't always been the case over the years, when its sometimes felt like the props have all been thrown in together in the shabbiest of conditions to make to exploit our loyalty.  I was quite emotional on more than one occasion as the years peeled away at the sight of a Super-Voc robot head or Handles.  If Worlds of Wonder shows anything, it's that time travel is possible.

172 Morgan Library and Museum

Literature  The Morgan Library & Museum owns two copies of the First Folio and I was able to identify which copy this is using the Rasmussen book, mostly from a description of the binding ("the cover design has a goldtooled square within a square with floral gold tooling within the inner square and at the corners") but also due to an incident which happens on screen during a segment of the BBC's Shakespeare Uncovered about Macbeth presented by Ethan Hawke.

Part of series of programmes broadcast in 2012 to coincide with the London Olympics cultural festival which included the likes of David Tennant on Hamlet (which I reviewed at the time) and Trevor Nunn on The Tempest, each hour long programme is about what you'd expect them to be with potted histories of each play, an exploration of their cultural significance and performance clips usually from the BBC and also Shakespeare's Globe with which this was a co-production.

The tone is reverential.  In whispered tones, Hawke explains the location of the folio as its wheeled on the pictured trolley and placed on a clear perspex stand so that the actor can forthrightly enter the library room via the rotunda and encounter the book ("Curator John Bidwell has retrieved it from the vault").  Hawke hesitates before he touches it then begins leafing through the pages because frankly who wouldn't.  At this point we notice he's kneeling on the floor in front of it.

After a shot of the title page of Macbeth, he says he's seen his favourite speech, then notes how strong Shakespeare's body of work is that when you reach the end of Macbeth, "you're already in Hamlet".  Eventually he settles on a page and says, "it kind of suits the end of the Scottish play that there's a slight burn on the final page of Macbeth.  Somebody was upset and their cigarette fell as Macbeth fell", at which point he runs his finger over the burn mark and makes a hole in the page.

This same hole was then subsequently noticed by whoever later visited the folio to assess it for the descriptive catalogue and noted in the "repairs and damage affecting text section: "Macbeth ll6 tear repair 62 mm from foot affects three letters. ll6v tear repair 59 mm from foot affects 61 letters. nn4 hole affects two letters b23" (my italics) (nn4 simply means this is the fourth note - these observations of very densely printed).

The library takes its name from its founder, the banker and collector John Pearpoint Morgan, yes of J.P.Morgan fame, and he thought of this as being of inferior interest the other two in his collection.  Apparently numerous other parts of the text have been lost to damage and this folio has been extensively been repaired with some of the missing text having been replaced with a manuscript pen facsimile (rather like on of the Folios at the British Library).

At the conclusion of the segment, Hawke "reads" his favourite passage, the Tomorrow and Tomorrow speech, although he clearly knows it by heart.  He then stands turns around and walks away as a Shakespeare expert describes were Macbeth is psychologically at that point in the play, the folio having played its part in telling the story and gained another tiny addition to its history.

Always Read The Label.

Life  This is not the blog post I was planning to write and if your blogger had any sense, he'd just go off and do something else.  But I'm here now so I might as well post something.

This time last week, I'd just arrived in Stratford-Upon-Avon after a brutal overnight stay at the budget Ibis hotel in Birmingham.  By budget, they mean cheap.  The bed is a futon mattress on some glorified pallets.  The wash basin is in that room.  The shower makes a periodic groaning sound which I can only attribute to being in sympathy with the rest of the plumbing when someone flushes a toilet.  The breakfast is "continental" meaning lots of bakery products, catering fruit and yoghurt and two small mounds of reformed pork and ham.  There's no kettle in the room.  Instead you have to pay £1.50 for a paper cup to be used in a coffee machine.

When I was last in Stratford, the RST was still being refurbished so I was keen to see what it looked like now and so booked myself on a tour.  As it turned out, this was mostly a look at the building were costumes and some props are made, which was still fascinating but did also mean we didn't get to see inside the auditorium (which was apparently closed for rehearsals).  The tour did however include a five minute glance through the on-site permanent exhibition, currently closed to the public due to continuing refurbishment work in the Swan Threatre below.  It acts as a good finale for this tour because it includes costumes from across the history of RSC productions.

At the start of the exhibition is a Folio and so you can imagine my excitement.  With just minutes to spare, I quickly took a photo of the book and the label pleased that I'd unexpectedly been able to tick another one off the list.  It also looks extremely pretty with the reflection of a stained glass window shining across its display case.

Later I consulted the Eric Rasmussen (et al) book listing the first folios and assumed it must be (39) The Theatre Copy from The Shakespeare Centre with its interesting story about the Pope and a misunderstanding.  In 1964, three members of the RSC, Dorothy Tutin, Derek Godfrey, and Tony Church visited Rome to give a recital of Shakespeare's plays at the Palazzo Pio in front of the pontiff and a couple of thousand guests.  They took their folio along for it to be bless by the Pope at the conclusion of the performance.  Unfortunately something was lost in translation and he took it as a gift.  After some diplomatic shenanigans, the folio was eventually returned.

All of which hilarious pot pourri, sorry, popery would have made for a decent blog post.  Except when I just sat down to write, I read the label which accompanied the folio (something which I'd not had time for during the tour).

As you can see, this is not that First Folio.  It is a Second Folio.  The Second Folio has its own publication history and by rights should be greeted with just the same awe as the first edition.  As the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust explains, it's the first attempt at "editing" the existing text, with 1700 corrections and the additions of far more stage directions.  It has the first work of John Milton to see print, "An Epitaph on the admirable Dramaticke Poet W. Shakespeare", written when he was 22 and part of an extra page of effigies for this edition.  There are only 250 copies of the Second Folio in existence which is only a few more than the first.

But this tickylist project is not about the Second Folio, it is about the First Folio and so this is not the blog post I was planning to write.  When and if I do clasp eyes on  (39) The Theatre Copy from The Shakespeare Centre, there'll no doubt be something quite similar to this with some extra material about the provenance and a few other oddities.

Always read the label.

2 Birmingham Shakespeare Library

Literature   Currently running at the Library of Birmingham is the exhibition Everything To Everybody: Your Shakespeare, Your Culture and last Tuesday, I made the pilgrimage to have a look at the First Folio which is part of the display.  Curated by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the exhibition is based on the collection of the Shakespeare Memorial Library which was suggested and funded by the local fan club (yes, really) in 1864 with an aim to collect "every edition and every translation of Shakespeare; all the commentators, good, bad and indifferent; in short, every book connected with the life and works of out great poet" as well as images and illustrations.

This is not the first First Folio owned by the collection.  As Eric Rasmussen et al reveal in their descriptive catalogue of the folios, the first was a "made-up" volume containing 300 original leaves augmented by facsimiles.  But the library was almost completely destroyed by fire in 1879, and although around five hundred volumes were saved (of which about two thirds were German publications) many thousands were lost including that book.  I shiver to think what else was lost, if there were any unique or irreplaceable items.  There is what looks like a handwritten copy of Two Noble Kinsmen with singed pages in the show.

The library and its collection was subsequently rebuilt through donations from private citizens including the current Folio which was purchased from the bookseller Bernard Quaritch for £240 in 1881.  Given how grandly most of the Folios I've seen have been displayed, it's surprising to see such a valuable book sitting in a pretty non-descript display case with a few other items.  The rather silly accompanying label says that this "is the only one in the world bought with the visionary aim of giving all citizens access to great culture.  The city bought the volume in 1881, making it available to all."  Tell that to the other libraries.

The label ends with "It is proudly stamped with the inscription "Free libraries of Birmingham"."  It certainly is (sort of) and according to Rasmussen that stamp appears eight times throughout the text which shows that in the late nineteenth century the book was considered important not so much as valuable object but for what it contained.  I'll admit to an audible gasp on seeing that library mark on the final page of Twelfth Night.  Of course now, because it is in a display case, the paradigm has shifted, it's impossible to see any of the other pages so it is now more of an object (with a million pound plus valuation).

As you can see I've decided to go ahead with tickylisting the First Folios and armed with a library copy of Eric Rasmussen's book I'll actually have a list to work from.  Mostly I'm going to endeavour to see in real life, but I'll also be covering any which appear in other contexts like television documentaries and writing on here about the context in which they're shown.  That adds a certain element of discovery.  Has the folio at the University of Pennsylvania ever been put on camera?  How about the one in the Paul G. Allen Family Collection?  Let's see now.

JMW Turner and Lamina Fifana: Dark Waters at Tate Liverpool.

Art  This morning I attended Tate Liverpool for the press viewing of their new paid exhibition, JMW Turner and Lamina Fifana: Dark Waters.  I could pretend that I was in completely the right mind for this.  As you'll probably gather from the scarcity of writing here this past few months, I've not been in the best places mentally.  The grief of losing Mum last year still lingers and I've never quiet felt the same since catching COVID earlier in this year.  Plus anxiety continues to thrum away in the background every now and then turning to into a full blown rock concert but sadly more Woodstock '99 than Glastonbury '99 (which at least had REM headlining)

All of which made me rather nervous about a press day at Tate, something I've really enjoyed in the past, but having not put my name down since before the pandemic or indeed been to many exhibitions in general, it felt like it was going to be a lot.  Pre-pandemic, one of these events involved reception desks and noise, lots of bodies in the space, a curator led tour at certain time making me feel need to rush around the show beforehand, followed by a meal with all the inherent low self esteem issues of being sat at a table with professional journalists when you're a blogger who's mainly doing this sort of thing as a lark.

But the format has changed, or at least it had for Turner and Fifana.  The space was just open for a couple of hours this morning.  On entering I was offered some brief directions by the press person pointing to some notable items and then I was left to fend for myself.  Perfect.  It's also not a huge show.  The fourth floor is currently being prepared for this year's Turner Prize exhibition, so T&F are inhabiting one side of the fourth floor, quality rather than quality, large oil paintings punctuated by watercolours and drawings, a conscious decision, perhaps, to recreate the feel of the Turner rooms at Tate Britain.

Well, I relaxed.  I becalmed.  I began to enjoy myself.  I also had questions.  Why was Tate Liverpool, which has generally been on the cutting edge of contemporary art hosting a Turner show?  That should not be seen a complaint.  Over the years, I've hoped they would diversify the types of work they display to before the 1900 cut off which seems to have been the general rule and cheered on the occasions when they have, for Turner Monet Twombly: Later Paintings (ten years ago folks) and Alice in Wonderland (even longer).  It's also interesting that this is a paid exhibition when it's entirely sourced from Tate's own collection.

The most numerous selection of Turners are of his Whaling Scenes, depictions of one of the industries which developed in the 1700s out of the same docks which can be seen from the windows of this Tate (see above).  However abhorrent we might find the practice now, when these were originally painted it was a way for the public to envision how many household items such as oil for lamps. soap and lubricants were provided in the years before fossil fuels were properly harnessed.  Almost everything here was accepted by the nation at part of the Turner bequest in 1856.

Not that Turner's work doesn't take some creative license with Whalers Entangled in Flaw Ice, Endeavouring to Extricate Themselves (1846) showing the boiling of whale blubber on board ship, something which would usually have happened back in port but allows the artist to contrast the deep red of the flames against the muted grey backdrop.  In many of these later works, the objects become less important than Turner's experimentation with colour leading to near abstraction and how light interacts with the canvas to the point that the image almost "shimmers".

The centrepiece of the exhibition is A Disaster at Sea (1835) which was inspired by the loss of the Amphitrite, a slave ship which left Liverpool in 1799 and capsized off Nigeria the following January.  Unlike other depictions of sea tragedies, like The Raft of the Medusa (painted a few decades earlier) which show the anguish and fear of the sea farers against an otherwise quite static background, Turner loses the sense of individuality amid the hellish swirl of the ocean and chaotic skies with the pieces of ship and fragments of people almost indistinguishable.

Lamina Fofana's sound installations are inspired by another tragedy at sea in which the crew of the Zong massacred over a hundred and thirty slaves and threw them overboard near the Caribbean (by doing so the ship's owners could make an insurance claim).  Of the three, the most prominent and certainly the most recognisable is Life and Death by Water (2021) which mainly consists of the hummed section of Boney M's Rivers of Babylon repeated on a loop for twenty minutes like an ancient chant.  

Originally recorded by the Jamaican Reggae group The Melodians for the 1972 film The Harder They Come, the lyrics, based on Psalm 137, although originally about the Jewish exile following the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem, could equally be applied to the souls lost on board the Zong, "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion ... They carried us away in captivity requiring of us a song ... Now how shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?"

For about five or ten minutes at the end of my visit I sat listening to Fofana's piece.  Potentially it's a distraction from the Turner paintings, especially as your ears twig a familiarity with the melody in the other room and then try to identify it like a human version of the Shazam app.  The repetition does make it inherently irritating and I fear for the invigilators who're going to have to be in the space and will collectively develop it as an earwig on mass.  But just sat listening, once again I relaxed, I becalmed and I began to enjoy myself.  

On reflection the opening paragraph to this was a bit gloomy so I wanted to say I am fine, really, and in this past week I've been on an overnight city break to Birmingham and Stratford-Upon-Avon (more on that in the next couple of days) and a day trip for Blackpool for my Dad's 80th birthday (and that) (maybe) so it's not like I've been a complete emotional wreck.  I just wanted to show that you can't approach any exhibition with a clear, neutral mind.  And at least I didn't try to make some tenuous connection between my mental state and the chaos of Turner's paintings.  I'd never have forgiven myself.

The Coffee Collection:Soho Coffee Company, The Bullring, Birmingham.

 

The Queen is dead. Long live the King.

Life  A little after half past six this evening, the palace announced the death of Queen Elizabeth II.  We heard it via Huw Edwards, who's anchoring of the rolling speculation coverage since the original announcement about her health at lunch time and was becoming noticeably strained.  Moments before, he seemed to stumble over his words as the transmission editor cut from a shot of the gates to Balmoral to the flag flying at half mast over Buckingham Palace.  "And of course we are expecting the news from Balmoral that she's having treatment or that they're unable to help her majesty any more."  Then seconds later, "A few moments ago, Buckingham Palace announced the death of Queen Elizabeth II."

It's not unexpected, but it's also still a shock.  She's been the head of state for my entire life and my parent's lives, my Mum was 75 when she left us, my Dad is nearly 80.  However much you might think the royals have nothing to do with you, the shift from having a queen to king will have impact from the cash in your pocket having a new face printed on it to such events as the state opening of parliament just having a different energy.  We going to have to get used to using a different pronoun for our head of state.  The lyrics to our national anthem have changed.  There's also the historic moment of the country having a change in monarch and prime minister in the same week.  

The one occasion when I shared space with the Queen was at school.  I sang for the Queen on the occasion of her fortieth year as monarch.  It was in my sixth form at Blue Coat School and someone decided it would be good idea to fill the Anglican Cathedral with school kids and have them sing Handel's Zadok very loudly, whilst oddly other kids offered a martial arts demonstration. We practiced solidly for two weeks, frequently after school and on the day the big church looked a treat, and even though we had all rehearsed separately, the collective sound was suitably epic. Even the anti-royalists amongst us were excited about meeting her majesty. But she was clearly having a very busy day and didn’t have time to stop and listen, passing by on her way to the altar.

Here, then, we greet King Charles III.  I think it's fair to say the nation thinks of him less warmly, especially post-Diana.  It'll be up to him to navigate the future of the monarchy, an institution which has certainly taken a knock due to numerous scandals over the past few years.  But now that Elizabeth has gone, it's sure to enter an even more troubled era in which the pomp and circumstance looks even more antiquated, the sheer cost increasingly unjustifiable outside of the upkeep of the houses.  But I do think it'll survive even him in some form and honestly good.  The monarchy has provided continuity for a thousand years and do we really want to be the generation to ruin it?  Don't answer that ...

We Need To Talk About Jennifer Walters.

TV  Just briefly and spoilers for the first two episodes of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law on Disney+.  Here's a picture of Tatiana Maslany on one of the few occasions when she's categorically not playing a Leda clone to provide a gap for you glance away if necessary.

Still here?  Ok, like said this is just brief.  One of the side effects of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's everything's connected ethic is that the merest hint of a storyline leads to endless content across YouTube and news sites with theories, theories, theories, paragraphs and hours worth of near identical clickbait.

Here we are again with the Shulky series.  As soon as the Sakaar spaceship buzzed in during the first episode, the YouTube content creators burst into action collectively suggesting the series is setting up a Planet Hulk film, blah-la-la-la, even though Disney still do not have the distribution rights to solo Hulk movie projects.

Well, here's my theory.  The Planet Hulk storyline or something like it will happen.  But it'll be in the background.  Jen will phone Bruce or vice versa now and then and we'll receive glimpses of some epic storyline but it'll just remain as that, tantalising glimpses.

Since Jen's decided she doesn't want to be a superhero or at least an Avenger, we'll finally see what life's like for those who make that choice and like the Buffy episode The Zeppo, in which Xander dodged fighting in an apocalypse, she'll be defending low level hoodlums while Bruce is fighting to save Sakaar (or whatever).

Of course, if we don't see Planet Hulk or some such, there'll be the usual effluent from disappointed "fans" about how their imaginary expectations haven't been met which means this whole series has been a failure and the MCU is over.  But the key to the survival of the franchise is to slow down now and then.  Look around.

Across The Omniverse Revisited.

Film  Back in January, just after the release if Spider-Man's No Way Home, I wrote a theory of how to rationalise how fictional multiverses work and how they're interconnected.  After seeing Doctor Strange's Multiverse of Madness and Everything Everywhere All At Once and thinking about the back and forth between Ms Marvel star Iman Vellani and Kevin Feige about the designation Earth-616 (which is now being used for both the comics and cinematic universe), I've realised, rather like this sentence, I've over complicated things.

As in that previous post, I still think that there's a nested system at play.  That there's an omniverse which contains multiverses which then contain universes (or realities).  The mistake I made was in essentially creating two tiers of multiverses, in suggesting that MARVEL is its own multiverse which contains multiverses which I was calling universes and basing the mechanics on IP rather than media and so forth.  Using a similar structure and some of the same text, here's how it should actually be rationalised:

Omniverse.

An infinite collection of all stories ever.  As the Marvel article lists,  "not only Marvel Comics, but also DC Comics, Image, Dark Horse, Wildstorm, Archie, Harvey, Shueisha, Boom Studios, Rebellion, Dynamite, IDW, Graphic India, Derby Pop, Vertigo, Oni Press, Udon, Valiant, and every universe ever mentioned or seen".  Basically, this is everything.  Every film, tv show, comic, advert, every piece of fiction ever created.

Multiverse.

A single discrete multiverse within one of those stories.  In other words, the comics DC multiverse, CWverse, whatever's happening with DC's cinematic stories, alongside the Marvel Comics, the various animated series and crucially the MCU not to mention us.  If the many-worlds theory is true and there's an infinite number of them it stands to reason that somewhere out there, these fictional universe are actually happening.  Doesn't it?

The reason Iman and Kevin are at odds is because the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe gave the MCU a designation of Earth-199999 to make it distinct from the main comics universe, Earth-616 and so on also sitting alongside it (there's a big long list of them here).  But if you ignore the whim of whoever wrote that back in late 2008 in the afterglow of Iron Man's success, it makes more sense to say that the comics multiverse and the film multiverse are two different realities that run alongside each other.

The beauty of this is that it also means that all of these different multiverses can have their own localised rules about how they exist as multiverses, they can all contradict one another.  So if the MCU has one way of working out why the prime universe is 616 and the comics have another, that's ok.  Just as its fine that DC comics oscillates between having an infinite number of universes and fifty or so.  

But they can also connect (see the two Flashes meeting in the CW's Crisis) and from the point of view of the characters or even the writer in such a way that it feels like they're in the same multiverse from their point of view, even if they're quite separate.  So the Doctor doesn't exist within the comics universe, he just travelled there to drop off Death's Head before returning to the Whoniverse, which itself has its own multiverse.

Did the universes in Doctor Strange 2 exist before Loki in the MCU?  I honestly don't know.  If He Who Remains is to be believed, there was a multiverse which was then destroyed to make way for the sacred timeline, but the events of Loki have repeated the cycle.  In which case, once Sylvie killed He Who Remains, it's as though the multiverse has always existed and no one knows any different, Watchers and all.  Phew.

The other possibility is that the sacred timeline is a con-job.  That there was always a multiverse and that all He Who Remains was trying to do was stop off-shoots from the Earth-616 timeline for some reason or other.  So Earth-838 was always out there, as well as all the universes featured in the What If? animated series.  But I don't think we've been given enough information either way.  Yet.

Universes.

One of the universes within a multiverse.

Although confusingly a lot of those multiverses are also referred to as "universes" which is why I tied myself up in knots last time.  It should really be the Marvel Cinematic Multiverse, MCM, but its a bit late now.

Music  Great interview with the Sugababes from Dazed which includes Keisha telling us what she really thinks about some of the songs from the later albums: "There was actually a fan favourite from that time called ‘Ace Reject’. I once said I really hated that song and the backlash I got was insane. I was like, ‘you like that?!’. Now I have more of an appreciation for it. I still feel like it’s got the longest verse you’ve ever heard in your life."

Life   The Commodore 64 at 40: back to the future of video games is a short love letter by The Guardian's Keith Stewart to the second computer I owned.  Outside of school, it's practically all I did in my teenage years even if I was never very good at playing games and usually ended up resorting to the Action Replay.

"For much of its life television was an ephemeral media."

TV   Yet another creator reacts to their work being trashed by HBO Max.  Two whole completed seasons of Young Ellen will not now be seen by the public and the rest of its been pulled by the service.  What's so interesting to me, apart from the fact that Ellen Degeneres only spoke once and briefly to the showrunner of a cartoon about the talk show host's own childhood, is how technological development has changed the expectations of creators and viewers.

For much of its life television was an ephemeral media.  Creators would work for months or years on a project which would be seen only once, perhaps twice and then either wiped or disappear into a vault.  If a viewer wasn't there to watch when it was broadcast, it was gone and even if you were lucky enough to see whatever it was, it only then existed in your hazy memory.

It wasn't until new agreements were made with various creative unions did the programmes become viable again, either for repeat or release on the consumable of your choice and even then only when it was considered commercially viable.  There are hundreds of thousands of hours of television which are still inaccessible and although this has changed somewhat at the BBC for people at educational institutions, for the general public, nothing much has changed (legally at least).

But if you've lived in a world were the media which is important to you has always been just there both as a creator and viewer, this ephemerality feels like a pretty alien concept not least because unlike the days when the first time you'd read about a new drama was in the Radio Times a week before transmission, we're constantly bombarded with pre-publicity for these shows for months in advance.

None of which should be seen as McMillaneaque rant about how some of us have misplaced sense of entitlement.  There's every right to be outraged because the expectation has been put in place, because the technology now exists and if you're paying for a service on the expectation that what was once promised will be delivered, especially in the advertising, you're entitled to ask questions.

Nevertheless, it's still worth stopping now and then to glance at where we were then and where we are now.  Of course in an ideal world, the streaming of films and television would be treated the same way as music and everything would be available on a single service for a single fee with film and television studios leaving the technology for others to deal with.  But that's another discussion.

 Film  ShaderGlass is an "overlay for running GPU shaders on top of Windows desktop" and so has the ability to turn a PC screen into an old style CRT.  But the killer element is that any app can be fed through ShaderGlass as though its a separate screen which was mainly designed with retro gaming in mind but also means you can return the lines to DVD films running through VLC making them far crisper than usual.  I've most recently watched the non-anamorphic versions of the OG Star Wars films using the "crt-hyllian" shader which returned the analogue warmth of the image and looked amazing when I hooked my large television up to my PC via an HDMI cable.

Music  Doctor Who composer Segun Akinola was a guest on Friday's BBC Four Proms broadcast which included a Danny Elfman commission.  Watch here.

The Tudors: Passion, Power and Politics at the Walker Art Gallery.

History  On numerous occasions over the many (many) years, I'd have a good moan on here about how little of London's non-contemporary art takes a trip up North.  Here's a version of the rant and although much has changed in the intervening years, through Tate Liverpool having a slightly more relaxed policy to including pre-1900 as a feature of their exhibitions and a few paintings from private collectors being included at National Museums Liverpool shows, I eventually decided to take myself to the art and spent the best part of four or five years visiting the various galleries in London on a monthly basis including spending whole afternoons just visiting a couple of rooms at the National Gallery.

That obviously stopped when the pandemic began but I just managed to visit the National Portrait Gallery at the beginning of 2020 to see the Tudor galleries at the end of a day spent following a Shakespeare walk around London, the chronology of the British monarchy laid out in a series of faces humanising these historical figures, albeit in the propogandist painting style of the period mainly by unknown artists copying earlier paintings by other unknown artists of Hans Holbein.  These works were often created as part of diplomatic missions, often with a dating aspect like a mid-1500s Twitter in which swiping left led to war.

So you can imagine how deep my eye roll was when I read that ironically what potentially could be the contents of the Tudor gallery at the NPG was going to be visiting the Walker.  Finally, a selection of the nation's treasures on tour ... which I just happened to have seen for free relatively recently and in an exhibition I'd now have to pay for.  But having complained for years about these national treasures not going on tour it seemed churlish to not pay to see them again and add to the all important visitor numbers which my be impressive enough to lead to more of this sort of thing find its way here.

And this really is most of the Tudor gallery at the NPG in a different venue, as though a portal has been opening up into the space in London.  The rare opportunity for the paintings to go on tour has been facilitated by the temporary closure of the gallery for refurbishment and an imperative to keep them accessible to the public in some form.  Before the Walker, The Tudors: Passion, Power and Politics was at The Holborne Museum in Bath (or Barth) and perhaps the most impressive element is just how much of the exhibition is sourced from there.  This isn't an occasion when a few key works are padded out with elements from NML's own collection.

The lions share of the exhibition is themed around Henry VIII and Elizabeth I with Edward, Jane and Mary slotted in between.  At one end of the main room portraits of Henry's six wives are gathered and at the other end Elizabeth's "favourites" (fuckboys) so if you're interested in scandal, they're all here before so many of them lost their head before literally losing their head.  Although the exhibition includes the Walker's own world famous portraits of both, the Holbein copy and the Hilliard, there are multiple images of both monarchs from various, usually anonymous, hands.  But all of the key figures are represented.

If I had to make a recalibration in my expectations, it's that this isn't an art exhibition, its a history exhibition illustrated through painting.  Almost all of the portraits are accompanied by biographical information but very little that places them within an art historical context.  Obviously this is mostly to be expected.  Most these are works by unnamed artists and its the person who they depict which is of most interest.  But I would have preferred to see more of the kinds of information seen on the NPG's website about technique and attribution (although I could perhaps have simply had the website to hand via an ipad).

Plus this is my first proper exhibition in over two years (or indeed visit to an art gallery at all really) so I'm also a bit out of practice in navigating artworks and labels and other visitors.  Gallery fatigue set in quicker than usual which meant that when I reached the last of the three rooms, which looked at how the Tudors reflected out into the world, through exploration, slavery and culture its possible I could have spent more time absorbing the display.  But it's also true that once you've seen half a dozen roughly similar men in tights and ruffs and well appointed beards, they begin to blur into each other.

Unsurprisingly the advertised Shakespeare portrait isn't the Chandos - the painting with an accession number NPG 1 doesn't travel much - and I have it on my wall at home anyway (or a jigsaw at least).  The playwright is represented instead by the Martin Droeshout's engraving created for the First Folio (although this is apparently from one of the second or third editions).  But given how much of the collection is here, I'm very interested to know what the economics of the show were in terms of insurance and cost of travel.  The impressively massive Ditchley portrait of Elizabeth I is here which looks too big to fit through the doors.

So was The Tudors: Passion, Power and Politics worth the advanced price of £13.  Yes, I suppose, kinda?  I know that if I hadn't seen the paintings in London already on a couple of occasions and the Henry VIII show at the British Library in 2009 (with which this also shares a few items) I'd probably have been a bit less blasé about everything, indeed I know I wouldn't.  But it was nice to be in a space with these important treasures and to have them within walking distance of home (just about) (took me about fifty minutes) rather then three hour train journey (including the tube).  More please, and soon.

The Sotheby's Folio Update.

Commerce    Back in June I wrote about seeing a Shakespeare First Folio in London ahead of its sale in New York.  As The Guardian reports, the book's been sold:

"An original copy of William Shakespeare’s first collected book of plays has been sold for more than £2m at Sotheby’s auction house in New York."

Hopefully whoever bought it will enjoy having it and perhaps loan it out once in a while.  A lot of the copies in private hands are sat in vaults in Tokyo.

This also means that the Folio was the most valuable item in the room that day.

Illumination (Short Trips: Christmas Around the World)

Prose  Izzy!  Of all the eras dipped into by other media, the Doctor Who comics is the rarest.  Other than the Izzy's Story audio, Miss Sinclair only appears in two Short Trips, Syntax from Life Sciences (which I'm still yet to catch up on) and Illumination from Christmas Around The World.  David Bailey writes both and here at least he captures the comics companion's voice perfectly from the enthusiasm to the 90s references.  He also takes time to knit this into comics continuity with a mention for Faye/Feyde/Fey (or however its spelt).  

As befits a Christmas story, this has lots and lots of snow as the Doctor takes Izzy to Lapland only to find himself kidnapped by Norse warriors and bumping into Adam of Bremen, the medieval historian (so this is a celebrity historical of sorts).  They observe the locals being even more bloodthirsty than usual in scenes which certainly wouldn't have been in the comic and set out to discover what's effecting their behaviour and attempting to convince Adam not to spread misinformation about the Vikings in a bid to promote Christianity.

In the opening few paragraphs, there's a conversation I'm not sure I've seen elsewhere in which Izzy badgers the Doctor to explain his attire which he admits is fancy dress.  Across media up until this point its generally assumed that the Doctor's wearing the same clothes he nabbed from a locker in San Francisco which means unless he stopped off every now and then to get them dry cleaned, they must be getting a bit ratty now.  Also the Eighth Doctor doesn't wear socks.  I don't think I've ever noticed that before.

Placement:  After TV Action.  It's one of the few clean breaks in the comics.

Transmission Ends (Short Trips: Transmissions)

Prose As the title suggests this is the final story in the Transmissions anthology and like the Decalogs of old ties all of the stories together, in this instance by utilises fragments of them as metaphors in a telepathic conversation between the Doctor and the alien threat.  

Despite only having read the Eighth Doctor related stories in Transmissions, the author senses this might be the case and gives enough information through the Time Lord's recognition to navigate the sense of what's being communicated by this entity which has become ensnared in the terraforming satellites of a colony world.  

These flashbacks make this a sort of cross between TNG's Darmok and also TNG's Shades of Grey, what a Doctor Who clip show might look like in prose form.  But they're cleverly refocused in the first person from the Doctor's POV which gives the whole story a more substantial, novelistic feeling.

The relationship between Eighth and the young boy who's helping him, Alex, is incredibly poignant, the poor boy having been the original target for the alien's attempts at communication.  It's another story about how the Doctor sometimes isn't able to save everyone, even the most courageous.  

Placement:  Huh.  The since the alien's using the Doctor's own memories for the communication it has to be set after all of the other stories.  So I'm arbitrarily going to put it before Situation Vacant, as though it's one of the reasons he's decided he needs to find someone new to travel with.

Lonely (Short Trips: Transmissions)

Prose  Written in 2008 when Twitter was still a friendly place and Facebook had only recently opened themselves up to anyone rather than students, Lonely is structured around an old fashioned IRC chatroom, with the story developing amongst the various members of a forum designed for lonely people (bit close, as they say, to home there love).  It nicely captures the element of random strangers getting to know one another from across the world, along with the bozo who turns up having completely misunderstood the point of that particular chatroom and does something pr0ny.  <jsmith8> inevitably shows up to sort out the problem which develops, although despite its vintage, he comes across more like the socially less aware 12th Doctor with a touch of the Seventh Doctor's genocidal nature, unless that's just how his online persona manifests itself.  Few of us are same in real life as we are online.

Placement: Absolutely no hints but given the Doctor's slightly brusque manner it's probably between The Girl Who Never Was and Blood of the Daleks.

War in a Time of Peace (Short Trips: Destination Prague)

Prose The twist at the end of this is similar to the reveal at the close of the Eighth Doctor's other story from this anthology, Lady of the Snows.  The Doctor decides to show Charley the titular city one Christmas Eve in the future when Earth is thriving thanks to the countries on various continents having joined together to create super states and eradicating war.  Except they discover a Prague shielded by a huge protective dome and a populace fearful for their lives due to the war which is ranging outside.  The rest of the story is about the Doctor biding his time until he's in a position to prove them wrong.  

There's much fun to be had.  Most of the story takes place in a prison cell with Charley becoming increasingly frustrated with the Doctor's apparent apathy but knowing deep down that he probably has a plan but he's not telling her.  The main supporting character Ilsa, a local police officer, is also particularly well drawn as she decides to help the TARDIS team against her better judgement.  There are some real gems hidden in these collectors items and its surprising that Big Finish haven't found some way of re-releasing them in another form, perhaps as audio books.

Placement: Between Embrace the Darkness and Time of the Daleks.  They seem very comfortable with one another.