Controversy...

As I said last time, today we're going to cross a line.  The line of acceptable behaviour and common decency.  This decision will alienate many of my readers, but I can no longer sit back and live a lie.  Therefore, there's something I have to say.

I really like the film version of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

There, it's said now.  I can't take it back and I won't, do you hear me?

But "comedy" aside, I'd like to examine my reasoning.  Firstly, let me get something out of the way; I'm very much aware that the vast majority of human beings (a) have never seen the film (b) have never read the books (c) have rather more pressing concerns, like staying alive till tea time and (d) don't read this blog anyway, so fuck it.  Regardless,  Alan Moore has a massive and vocal fanbase and they REALLY don't like this film, it seems.

I like Alan Moore's work.  At this point, under British law, I'm required to talk about V For Vendetta and Watchmen, because apparently, these are the most important comics of all time.  They aren't, by the way.  They're good, they're compelling, they raise powerful arguments about human society/behaviour and they are both so much a product of the 1980s that the film versions should have been directed by John Hughes.

I get awfully bored with people in the media raising these two comics as the highest form of art known to civilisation.  A lot of this seems to be down to the fact that they explore a contained narrative, i.e. they follow the conventional format of the novel and therefore allow a critic to apply the same standards as they would to  PROPER book.  Also, they make the point that super-hero costumes are stupid and unrealistic, which means you can relax and enjoy the fight scenes in a semi ironic way.

It's a bit frustrating that even my critique of these sacred texts is horribly dated; people were saying this stuff in the 1990s.  In all fairness, so was Alan Moore, who's never quite understood why everyone goes on about Watchmen all the time.  I always get the impression it was just another comics gig for him (as many of you probably know, it was intended to feature existing DC comics characters, rather than new ones of Moore's creation).  So we had dark themes and political satire and extreme violence and the deconstruction of the super-hero.  Neat ideas!  And then everyone wrote the same comic for the next thirty years.

Most super-hero comics are set in Manchester

Not everyone, mind, but it's wearying that we're still having dark, rainy, cynical superhero comics churned out right up until 2014.  Marvel, for their sins, spotted this after five bloody years of dark and "mature" storylines and are currently trying to raise the fun levels, finally noticing that a character called Daredevil might need to be a bit swashbuckling and fun in order to really live up to the title of the book.

There's always exceptions and I'm not going to go on and on (LIAR) about them, but James Robinson's Starman told a genuinely mature story (as opposed to adolescent expressions of crude sexuality, violence and ill-thought out politics) over many years.  Along the way, beautiful characterisation took realistic, likeable characters through dementedly unrealistic situations, with a fair few Bowie references in there for good measure.  Or try Grant Morrison's work; it's sometimes inaccessible, but if you relax and allow comics like Flex Mentallo, The Invisibles or his later work on New X-Men or Batman to sweep you along, you won't regret it.  All these examples toy with the "dark" aspects of comics, but in a way that allows celebration and joy to express itself; what a lot of writers forgot was that, in order to appreciate the darkness, sometimes we have to emerge smiling into the light.

(INTERLUDE: there's a rather a lot of other comics in the world, some of which were written after the year 2000 and aren't about super-heroes.  I could also spend happily spend the rest of this article listing comics you should read that aren't by white men and I genuinely apologise for the fact that I haven't. However I need to get back to that damn film at the top of the page.  Send me angry suggestions about who I should have recommended.) 




Trigger warning: the following section involves some brief comment on representations of sexual violence.  Given the tone so far, I feel it only right to make this clear from the start; it's unavoidable in a discussion of the source material. 






So, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.  Problematic, in a word.  Problematic.

I own all the collections.  I've re-read them a lot.  My favourite is the one that gets the worst press, Black Dossier, largely because it doesn't really feel the need to pretend to be anything other than a massive "spot the famous literary/pop culture icon" game.  I like the artwork and the sense of style and the dialogue, even though it often becomes just a string of postmodern jokes.

The thing is, the books also make me uneasy.

League runs for four volumes, all of which explicitly depict acts of extreme sexual or sexualised violence against women.  The books feature two central ongoing female protagonists (and one character who regularly shifts between bodies/genders, Teirisias style) both of whom are subject to sexual assaults in every storyline they feature in.  There's an argument that Moore is reflecting the role of women in the literature he is using to build his world; an excellent point about representation, true, but I just don't feel comfortable with the need for Voldemort to be portrayed as a rapist.  It doesn't advance the plot especially, except in a fairly minor way; by the time I reached this part, my reaction was one of weary despair that Moore was using this routine yet again.  Likewise, I understand the allusion to Pirate Jenny in Century: 1910 but I found the scenes based on this as far too horrifying and exploitative to sit comfortably with the explosions and jokes, especially in a comic that uses Jack the Ripper as a central character.

I think there's a real danger that Moore is using rape as a lazy character development technique; worse yet, it seems to be the only technique he makes use of with his female characters, who seem to fall into victim status with grim regularity.  I'm not certain if he's referencing the melodramatic "perils of Penelope" motif with Mina, but if he is, he's not referencing anything else at all.  Re-reading the first volume, specifically some of the Invisible Man sequences, is an uncomfortable experience to put it far too mildly.  I'm not even going to reference the depiction of that character's death, which has clearly been set up as a just punishment for his earlier outrages, but simply seems to compound the horrors.  Suffice to say that Moore seems to have a rather unsettling obsession with this kind of material; for me, the mix of high adventure and misogyny is far, far too representative of the worst elements of pulp culture.

I'm very much aware that this is not nearly enough or enough of a serious treatment of a huge and complex issue.  There is, clearly, a much wider discussion to be had in a more appropriate format.





Sensitive subject matter ends here

And, if you'll forgive a shift in my own tone away from the serious issues, he has clearly never properly read a Harry Potter novel.

Which brings me to the film.  The above mentioned James Robinson is credited with a large proportion of the script.  I feel a bit sorry for him.  He gets his first major Hollywood deal, is handed a legendary comic project and then gets told that they've just lost the rights to one of the main characters (Fu Manchu turned out to be in copyright still.  And racist).  Then the poor bugger reads the comic again and notes how a lot of it appears to be about an emaciated opium addict going through withdrawal.  And how the plot hinges around at least three sequences of extreme sexual violence.  And that a lot of the characters just stand around saying things until the reader notices which nineteenth century novel they're from.

Given all this, Robinson took the best possible course of action; which is clearly to think sod it, I'm writing my own version.  Actually, I may be doing him a disservice here.  What he does is create something rather interesting, possibly intentionally, probably not.  He creates the cinematic equivalent of the comic.  Just as the comic draws upon a written body of work, Robinson's script draws upon a visual body.  This isn't an adaptation of a book, it's using the same techniques in and on a different medium.

From here on in, I'm going to assume you've a degree of familiarity with the film.

SPOILERS: If not: Allan Quartermain (minus the opium), Mina Harker (with vampire super-powers), Captain Nemo (of roughly the same ethnicity that Jules Verne describes), AN Invisible Man (THE Invisible Man is in copyright still), Dorian Gray (portrayed as a camp version of Wolverine), Tom Sawyer (the Alan Moore fans went ballistic about this addition) and Jekyll/Hyde (the Hulk, but not green) get together on the Nautilus and try and stop someone who really isn't the Phantom of the Opera teaming up with Professor Moriarty to start a war or something.  They have a big battle in Venice and in the Arctic circle.  Lots of things explode.  Venice, incidentally, was built by Leonardo and is about sixty times the size it is in real life.  Everyone there wears those pointy carnival masks all the time and the canals can fit the Nautilus in.  There's a steampunk sports car and a white tiger.

It's bloody brilliant.

This is awesome

Seriously, I'm not being all hipster ironic.  I last watched this movie a week ago and writing this much makes me want to watch it again RIGHT NOW THIS SECOND.

This is also awesome

Back to my earlier point; this is a collage, a cut-up job.  As I said, possibly an unintentional one, but it doesn't matter.  What LXG (to use its Moore-baiting abbreviation) does is take the best bits of Hollywood action films and fuse them into a ridiculous, manic patchwork.  A patchwork made of explosions and submarines.  Best kind.

Awesomer.  

Let me clarify by "the best bits of Hollywood action", I don't mean Die Hard, great as that movie is.  What I'm talking about is a very specific thread of work.  I mean the kind of dated, slightly forgotten about, Sunday afternoon, Christmas holidays, rainy Monday matinee movies.  Quartermain, for example; played by Sean Connery, for starters.  The character as represented here is more like a survivor of the Hammer action classics, like She and Vengeance of She.  Neither of which featured Quartermain, but who cares?

Hell yeah

This is the Bank Holiday afternoon Victorian Disney action hero.  Of course Venice is massive!  It looks exactly like it does in that picture you drew when you were nine!  And as for Mina; what's the point in being Mina bloody Harker if you can't turn into loads of bats?  She positively relishes her power and bloodlust; she's a fantastic, fun character.  It's just a shame that she's the only woman in the whole sodding film, but I never said it was perfect.  She does, however, get this great exchange:


Quartermain: Mrs Harker, I doubt you measure danger in quite the way that I do.
Mina: And I imagine you with quite the library, Mr Quartermain.  All those books you must have read, merely by looking at their covers.


See?

This is just plain brilliant.  It's like dressing up as a pirate.  It's like drawing your own version of the Nautilus and making it the size of an aircraft carrier.  No, it's not great art, but then neither is At the Earth's Core or The Land That Time Forgot or Warlords of Atlantis or The Phantom or your own favourite.  It's a big daft laugh of a film and anyone who expected a straightforward adaptation of the comic needs to seriously consider their grasp of what makes cinema work.  This is referencing all those 1930s adventure serials in a more honest way than Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark did, because it's disposable.  One expects Rod Taylor or Doug McClure to arrive.  George Pal must have been watching over this movie; check out Doc Savage if you don't believe me.

Why how kind of you to notice.  I am indeed fucking fabulous.

I bet a lot of people read the comic and worked out which characters came from books that they'd read or heard of before.

I bet that at least someone, somewhere, watched the film and heard about these characters for the first time.  And then went and read The Invisible Man or 20000 Leagues Under the Sea for the very first time too.  If that happened only once, it was more than worth it.

Loads of words about water

I've been reading about the sea this month.

I'm really tempted just to leave it at that.  However, I'm currently working on a personal goal of being much less inaccessible, so, in order that this doesn't just become a deeply obscure collection of non-sentences designed to make me (and no-one else) laugh, I shall expand.

The following is a stream-of-consciousness ramble about the sea.  It is not focused or coherent.  You have been warned.  

I found myself revisiting The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicolas Tomalin and Ron Hall this month.  I borrowed a fantastically 1970s looking Penguin paperback from the Hoodlum Scientist many years ago and it's fascinated me ever since.  The tragic story of Crowhurst's solo round the world trimaran attempt has been retold many times, much more effectively than I ever could, especially in this particular biography.  

You can find the full details elsewhere, but Crowhurst was a gifted engineer and self-publicist, a driven and rather difficult man who took on a challenge he was ill-prepared for.  Once it became clear to him that he was (literally) on course for disaster at sea, he attempted to fake the log evidence of his voyage, leading him into what the authors convincingly argue was a guilt driven breakdown and eventual suicide.  

From there, I went on to Bernard Moitessier, who set out at the same time as Crowhurst in a yacht that had been stripped of almost every aspect of modernity, to the extent that he refused transmitter equipment, on the grounds that he had a good slingshot and a supply of film canisters (you put the messages in the canisters, then use the slingshot to shoot them onto the decks of passing ships; took me a while to get that bit).  

Moitessier's The Long Way takes a literal description of his own journey and transcends into a philosophy of existence as he slowly retreats from civilisation, eventually abandoning his own round the world attempt in order not to return to Europe. It's a hypnotic, beautiful book, about the stars and the waves and the sun, a sea-going version of the novels of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

   One gets the distinct impression that it took a real effort just to moor up near human beings; there's a sense of the strength needed to re-integrate into any kind of society.   A good part of my therapy has dealt with my own tendency to withdraw from the world and I shudder to think how I'd end up if I had the opportunity of buggering off alone on a boat for a year.  Well, apart from sunk, obviously.

Moitessier describes his early years, learning to sail tiny boats, working on Vietnamese junks and all those other things that make Graves Park Boating Lake look a bit tame.  It was whilst reading these parts that I began to wonder; how exactly does one end up being able to undertake adventures like this?  I mean, the money alone is so far beyond my means to make it impossible, but what about the experience, the training?  What kind of background would you need?  As I say, Moitessier grew up stealing bits of other boats in order to get out on the waves, but would that be an option in the 21st century?  

The feeling grows that worlds like this are increasingly cut off.  The vast majority of people don't get to learn to sail, myself included.  It's mainly on economic grounds, but the fact that I live as far from the sea as it's possible to get probably doesn't help much.  Alright, geography aside, do people who grow up by the seaside get to learn this stuff?  Maybe if you're from a fishing family, or loaded to the point where I'm scared of you, then yes. 

I've no idea where I'm going with this line of thought, except that the sea used to be a working class experience (or at least, one open to all), as recently as the last fifty years, whereas now it's become the domain of the rich, unless you're lucky or up for joining the Navy.  That makes me a bit sad.  

But my mind is incapable of being in that state for long at the moment.  So, fusing social comment and the sea, here's my third ocean going focus of the month, Uncle Walt Disney with 20000 Leagues Under The Sea.

There are many reasons to love this film...

...not least of which, this dialogue:


Captain Nemo: I am not what is called a civilized man, Professor. I have done with society for reasons that seem good to me. Therefore, I do not obey its laws.


He's a steampunk bad-ass revolutionary, is our man Nemo.  Shame they couldn't actually have got a actor of the same ethnicity as the actual character*, but hell, it's James Mason.  The unfairly reviled League of Extraordinary Gentlemen gets it right; guess which film I'm rambling on about next time?

So, um, here's my conclusion; it's right good at sea.  But it's right expensive and might make you go mad, which is all very unfair in historical context, so get a massive steampunk submarine and see it from the underneath part.  The end.

Imagine if I got paid for writing this rubbish. I'd be laughing right now, I would.  Laughing.




*Look it up if you don't know.

Connecting

All my life, I've loved wires.

Welcome back, by the way.  You've not been here for nearly two years.  I was starting to think you'd given up on me.

It's true.  Wires.  Love them.  They fill my childhood memories.  Snaking cables round the back of the sofa, painted into corners.  Power extension cables to make the Christmas tree lights work, wound round chair legs.  Coaxial lines from the attic, down to the living room. Thinking about it, those were my favourite, the wires that linked the inside and the outside. To overuse one of my already burnt out words, liminal.  Connecting spaces. 

The telephone line was another.  Out of the back of our lovingly cream dial handset, (later a wonderfully bathroom shade of olive green, Sheffield 53997) stapled carefully over the wallpaper, then suddenly out through the splintering wooden window frame, up and away along the pointing to loop out across the street, joining the mysteries of what my memory insists we called a telegraph pole.  Because apparently, I grew up in 1899.  

Think of it!  A cable in your house that connects to the rest of the city, the world.  Somehow like a long unbroken change, a string to pull on that might just make the Post Office Tower shake slightly if you yanked it hard enough.  

(Thirty odd years down the line from these memories, I lay down in a bad place, mentally speaking, and ran my hand down the side of the mattress.  There was a live phone cable secreted across the wall there.  I let it comfort me, let it remind me of all the dark miles outside, all the crackling distance.  Millions of possible voices on the line made me feel less like that room was silent and crushing.  Opening up the gaps, linking thoughts across the ten o'clock landscape.)

Consider that old-school coaxial TV aerial cable.  Stuck snugly in place - coax aerials never click, they squeeze organically - running into and up the wall.  Out into the very dreaming mind of the house, the loft space, where all the family memories end up, stacked alongside Lego and old school books.  Cable that reaches out of the shadows, past the peeling Blue Peter Books:

I actually don't want to caption this.  It's too perfect as it is.

...and out, into the sky.  Straight into the rake of a directional aerial.  Effectively plugging your living room into all the background radiation left over from the big bang, like having a skyhook in your house. Turn on your set after closedown and stare at the echoes of creation itself.   A way in for all kinds of odd ideas.  

I've been away for a long time; things have been interesting.  There's a cat here who takes up a lot of time, too.

My point is, GT is going to be about other stuff now.  Still as many Public Information Films and as much Teddington Lock footage as I can stomach, but also, those odd ideas that got in with the TV aerial.  It makes me feel - 

Wired.

The October Country

I do hope that I'm not just coming back here to do a string of obituaries...

Ray Bradbury died this week.


Before the internet, I was worried about this prospect.  He wasn't a fashionable author in the 1980s; TV news had limited time, I didn't read/couldn't afford newspapers and few of my friends were aware of his existence.  I became scared.  Supposing he died and I never knew about it?  The prospect seemed horrifying.

Which is why it's ironic that I heard of his death through Twitter, hours after it happened, ironic because Bradbury was hugely skeptical of the internet's significance; it took him until about two years ago to agree to e-books of his material.  I'm glad he did, because I want to take a copy of Dandelion Wine everywhere with me in life and also The Illustrated Man and Something Wicked This Way Comes...

Ghost Transmissions is really about the stories that shape us, nowadays.  Bradbury did this for me, but I don't think I can comment better than the swathe of impossibly talented writers who have been talking about him for the past two days; Neil Gaiman talked about how the story Homecoming made him feel as though there were other people like him in the world and that made me happy, because I remember feeling exactly the same way when I first read it.

His stories were fast and emotional and strange; one was never sure what was real and what wasn't.  The tattoo that moves at night, the children who get taught to play the game 'invasion' by the funny voice from the shadows, the wonderful green kite which is actually a wonderful father with green wings...yes, he worked with fantasy.  But not exclusively; remember the old man calling Mexico City to listen to the sound of a streetcar as he dies, or the garbage man who quits when they put a radio in his cab, the better to organise the collection of bodies?

For me, there are two works that stand out.


The Whole Town Was Sleeping is the title given to a piece that forms part of a longer work, Dandelion Wine, but it operates so well as a stand-alone that it's often published as such.  It's a simple, wonderful story, which encapsulates an experience common to almost all of us; the walk home at the end of a night out, as you realise that you have the furthest to go, that you'll have to walk the last ten minutes alone...I won't spoil this one; though it's been copied over and over again, the original remains undiminished.  Read it.

How could I end without my favourite?  As a child, sleeping with the window open, I was awoken by the sound of the trains under the bridge, late at night.  When I stayed back at home for a summer at the age of 19, I heard that sound again and it seemed even more haunting now that I knew I'd be on one of those trains again soon, going away, far away.  It seemed like a great and personal revelation and I wanted to write about it, but I never could.

Ray did.

Something Wicked This Way Comes is the story of those trains in the night and much more; on one level, it's about fear and monsters and wishes that, once granted, drive the lucky recipient into a particularly horrific insanity.  But it's about adolescence and desire and envy, all those things that I felt when I first read it.  And more besides; it's about the envy that age brings, the desire to be forever young, the fear of the dark that waits for us all.  But more again!  It's a book about winning freedom from both the desire of adolescence and the fears of aging.  It's about telling death to go fuck itself and running free down the streets at night, about the moment when you know that the monsters are afraid of you.

Quite apart from anything else, this is where my work dress code comes from

Yeah, I was sad when I heard about Ray.  So were about a million other people.  But he told us to take sadness, cry like mad about it, then laugh like a maniac for the joy of still living.  And not to give a damn about what anyone else thinks.


A minute's noise then, for Mr Ray Bradbury.

Night Thoughts

I've been experiencing a crisis of GhostFaith recently.

Not that many of you will be especially interested in my personal issues; quite rightly, you want to read pop-cultural ramblings, sarcastic asides, and me getting all sentimental about secret agents from forty years ago.  But you might have to bear with me on this one, just for a little while anyway.

Thing is, I keep seeing things that distract me.  There was a line on the BBC site about Occupy camps 'being shut down last year' and, whilst I know the whole story well, I suddenly found myself thinking, who the bloody hell has the right to shut down protest like that?  Who has the right to shut ME down, should I decide to protest against a system that increasingly seems horribly wrong from a purely moral point of view? 

I took part in a protest last week, as some of you may be aware; this isn't the place to discuss that, save to say that I was angry about the actions of a political/religious group and went to point this out to them.  Everyone else there was much more vocal than me, I just stood at the back and made the numbers up, but I increasingly feel as though I've been neglecting this part of me for a very long time.  The protests last year, especially the N30 strike, made me realise a few things about myself, about lazy thinking, about the power I have, the responsibility.  You know, like Spider-Man and that.

So, as my dear old friend Molesworth once said, a grate thort occur to me.  Is this a valid use of my time?

It was a difficult one.  Old TV shows and random acts of situationist culture-jacking are pretty much all I've ever talked about.  OK, I can explain the impact on me personally, I can dissect the Freudian bits of The Owl Service and I can imply that Are You Being Served? has a Lovecraftian subtext (it totally does, but that's one that got away).  I can talk about how Number 6 was a role model to a battered and confused teenager twenty years away, but what point does this serve, really?  Not to go all dramatic on you, but it occurs to me that I'm now older than my grandfather was when he died, what have I done with this time? 

I thought about turning all the lights off, locking the door, and walking away, leaving the key under the mat and the chairs on the tables.  But then I didn't.

Why?  Well, first of all, a couple of conversations out in the real world.  Thanks for being magnificent people, people. 

Secondly: it's a fucking blog, loser.  No-one cares anyway.  Just have fun with it.

Thirdly: Harpo.

Born Adolph Marx in New York, I believe.  Him and his brothers were quite famous, as it goes.  The FBI reported on him.  Went to Stalinist Russia for no readily apparent reason.  Never got into grief with Hoover, never got called before THAT committee, even though he was on record as being a unionist and a 'Red sympathiser', (which sounds like a really amazing electronica act to me).  I loved his brother Julius for his fast talking style and the way that his character never, ever lost, no matter how down and out he seemed in his movies.  I found his brother Leo funny and possessed of immaculate comic timing, though that accent really grates eventually.  But it was Harpo that really did it for me.

He never speaks.  Never on film, not once.  The whole thing is done with expressions and body language.  He runs through the movies like the wrath of some demented god, grinning like a madman, trashing the set and stealing things.  He's a archetype, an ancient trickster incarnate, with a pair of scissors (for cutting the ends off rich mens' cigars).  When the HQ is under military bombardment in Duck Soup, he runs out into the line of fire...and sticks a "Help Wanted" sign on the front gate.  Salvador Dali (still famous) and Alec Woolcott (no longer famous, sadly) both adored him.  Dali wrote him a script, Horseback Salad, tragically never made.  Well, perhaps not tragically.

Throughout the movies he made (the good ones, anyway) he is the enemy of pointless officialdom.  He traps a cruel policeman in a cage, infuriates endless immigration officers, glues documents to the backside of an ambassador and steals the Presidential motorbike.  He's chaos, basically. 

Woody Allen once said that these films kept him going.  That, in his darkest moments, these movies brought him back to reality.  Which is odd, because the clip he used to illustrate this is the 'war' sequence from Duck Soup, where a huge ensemble cast go into an elaborate, frighteningly joyous and decidedly cynical song and dance routine about the joy of starting wars ("every mother's son will grab a gun and run away to war").  It's an wonderfully dark and mature moment of intense silliness. 

And that got me thinking again about stopping.  If people can be silly and say so much at the same time, surely I can carry on talking bollocks on the internet for thirty odd readers? 

Like all my recent Transmissions, Harpo helped me; I was depressed, 14, and hating things as usual when I watched Horse Feathers for the first time.  It's set in a university, but it's treated like a school, and the brothers' simple exercise of holding administration up to the light and shaking it a bit (or 'satire' as those of you who like one word at a time call it) made me feel a lot better about the world and a lot less fearful of idiots in offices who had files with my name on the front. 

But back to my starting point, and one link; it's a symbolic one.  There's this bit where Harpo saunters happily down the street.  This guy dressed half in rags stops him: "Can you help me out?  I'd like to get a cup of coffee."

It was the height of the Depression.  The same scene was in movies everywhere and everywhere in real life too.

Harpo nods, smiling.

Produces a hot cup of coffee from his pocket and hands it over.

It's just a joke, but it still means something, somehow.  Do the impossible.  Change things. 

Come into the cold room. There's something that needs to be done.

Let's talk about crushes.

I've had loads and I won't bore you with the details; crushes of every shape, size and attribute.  Gad yes, I'm a terror in my imagination.  But there's one that I never, ever got over and never ever will.

The woman who could make wearing a fetish outfit seem like a statement of power.  Genius.  Kick your arse any time you crossed her and do it charmingly.  There's a huge swathe of internet devoted to her, just like all my other transmissions.  But let's do this properly, eh?

Who the hell else did you expect?


Emma Peel.  Shouldn't have worked.  Her name is an objectification; the production team thought that the new character in The Avengers should have 'man appeal' - see?  Fortunate for them, they cast Diana Rigg and wrote her as if her gender wasn't even obvious.  It was, mind.  It was REALLY obvious.

She's only ever slightly impressed

I could write for pages here, but it would make everyone become uncomfortable.  She's an amazing character, played by an amazing actor, wearing fascinating 60s outfits.  She beats the living daylights out of diabolical masterminds (NB, not Diabolical Masterspies, that would just be wrong) and solves crimes with her best friend as a way of unwinding after a long day at work.  It really helps that her best friend is the legendary John Steed, played by the even more legendary Patrick Macnee.  Basically, they drink fine wine, eat complex pastries, drive fast cars and save the world repeatedly.  And they think it's a good life to have.  They radiate happiness, enjoyment, vitality.  They are larger than life and it never gets them down; everything is a little bit of a joke to them.

That's what they think of you.

Why a Ghost Transmission for a show that's so feted already?

There's a real danger of this blog turning into a sob story.  I've written a lot about growing up weird, me and half the bloody western hemisphere it seems.  These Transmissions were the ones that helped me (and lots of others) through that, as I'm sure you've noted.  Steed and Mrs Peel were there, you can believe it; dressed like maniacs, never getting flustered, winning the fights and the arguments, being visibly twenty times more intelligent than everyone else in the room.  Yeah, they were establishment, but the irony was that they were so establishment that they seemed to become intensely surreal and outsider-y. They were so hip they were unheimlich, to coin a Freudianism.  They were the 60s/Edwardian fusion equivalent of Lux and Ivy (just as a hint at forthcoming attractions).

I wanted that life; I wanted a best friend to solve mysteries with.  I wanted the cars, the clothes, the flat where people would turn up at random around 3:00 AM with either a bottle of champagne or a knife in their back and a cryptic note clutched in their hand.  I knew that I had to create something like this for myself. To my intense delight, over the last few years, I've created something vaguely like this lifestyle, or at least a functioning everyday analogue of the rum and uncanny.  Frankly, I couldn't be happier with it.  Though hopefully, no-one's going to come round impaled on anything sharp.

What I look like in my head, yesterday.

They remade the show twice.  Once as The New Avengers, which is pleasingly kitsch; the most interesting elements of which feature a much darker, more reflective tone, as Steed (now minus Emma) muses on the adventures he's had and all the blood on his hands.  Well, it was the 70s; IRA attacks, economic downturn and the slightly tacky version of the Cold War had changed our perspectives.  It became silly, like someone's odd dream of the series, like a fantasy based on a fantasy. 

Then, of course, they remade it as a film, with Uma Thurman and the world winced.  She wasn't very good.  She seemed like she was on the verge of tears all the way through.  She wasn't in control. She wasn't, essentially, Emma.  TERRIBLE CONFESSION: I actually quite like the film, though I'd much prefer it if it was just a peculiar spy story, not an ersatz Avengers.

And look!  I got through all that and never once mentioned A Touch Of Brimstone.  If you understand that reference, there's no help for you. 

Rebels and Devils 2: the Hour of the Geek (first bit)

...and if anyone gets that reference, they earn a shiny handshake from me.

What this means, beasts, is that I'm allowing myself a break from my usual ironic cool (ha!) and taking the opportunity to wallow in raw fanboyness.  Yeah, it's the first bit of my Doctor Who ramblings, so y' can all stop reading there.

REASONS TO LOVE WHO

1) The Parting of the Ways: Captain Jack Harkness.  Kisses Rose goodbye fairly passionate like.  Turns and kisses the Doctor goodbye too, in the same way.  No-one comments. 

There were, and indeed, still are idiots who go on about the new version of the show having a (and I'm quoting here) "gay agenda" which makes me think of a particularly interesting boardroom meeting. This scene is basically a massive fuckyou to all those people.  Like the Stonewall adverts say, deal with it.

2) Same episode: guns, technobabble and fighting can't save the world.  No, the world gets saved by three ordinary people on a council estate who suddenly realise that they can do anything they fucking well want to and no-one can tell them that it's not possible.  And when someone you love is in trouble, you'll change the whole universe to save them.

3) The Age of Steel: in which Mickey, the insecure loser, finally takes charge of his life, assumes the role of defender of emotions (it makes sense when you watch it) and sacrifices everything he cared about in order to do something HUGE with his life.  And then turns up six weeks later with a massive grin in order to save the day, having broken every single law of physics in the process.

4) The Girl In The Fireplace: "What do monsters have nightmares about?" - "Me."

The idea that there's someone who isn't a god or a divine force to be prayed to, someone who pays attention and stops the monsters right there in their tracks?  Well, that's just an idea.  But we created it.  As a species, as a sub-culture, as people who like the idea.  Someone you could be a bit like.  Someone you could emulate.  And every time you do, if you do it well enough, the world gets a bit more like the fantasy one in your head.  

5) City of Death: "Well, you're a beautiful woman, probably"

Because when bad people are confused, they're so much more fun.

6) The End of the World: the only things illegal at the end of the world are weapons, teleportation and religion.  I think there might be a message there.  The teleportation bit is a plot point, mind, but the fake villains are called the Adherents of the Repeated Meme. Dawkinstastic.

7) Bad Wolf: "You have no weapons, no army, no plan." - "Yeah.  And doesn't that just scare you to death?"

Improvise.  It's what I do all the time.  The faster you get at making it up as you go along, the more likely the world is to go along with your mad stories.

8) The Doctor Dances: "That's what you humans do.  You go out there into the stars and you meet all these new people and you...dance."

Or, in other words, the future is going to be fun, if we do it right.

9) Love and Monsters: lots of people hate this one.  They're missing the point; it's about outsiders, the lost ones who get preyed on by the monsters.  It's about a man coming to terms with something terrible that happened to him as a child.  And then it's about hope:

"...they tell you that it's all grow up. Get a job. Get married. Get a house. Have a kid, and that's it. But the truth is, the world is so much stranger than that. It's so much darker. And so much madder. And so much better."

I can't really say much more on the subject than that.

Rebels and Devils Part 1: Be Seeing You

When I was a mere stripling amongst Ghosts, my mother would sit and read to me.  Her choices were slightly unusual; there was a lot of Heinlein, happily, before he went all fascist on us.  Some Andre Norton.  Diana Wynne Jones, the only author to have told me that I couldn't blame my madness on her, thank you very much.

 I love DWJ.  We only spoke once, by email, a memory that I will treasure forever.  However, I digress. 

Mother also used to read me Enid Blyton, 'cause, y'know, I was about five and there's only so many scientific discussions on ballistic theory a five year old can deal with.  In the front of the books, there was a little map of Toytown and it made my mother smile; she said it reminded her of 'The Village' and left it at that, to my puzzlement.

Years went by, and I suddenly found that you could buy VHS tapes of old TV shows; one jumped out at me and the cover made such an impression that I asked for it as a birthday present without even ever having seen a minute of the series.  It was, of course, The Prisoner.

This is the best scene in anything, ever.  Prove me wrong.

Millions of words have been spent dissecting The Prisoner and I'm not sure that I can add anything to what has already been said.  For those unfamiliar still: unknown man resigns unknown job and suddenly awakens in a toyland style village by the sea.  No-one has a name.  You can live happily, you might even be allowed to leave, if you want.  The only thing the authorities there want is...well, a simple thing.  You have to prove that you like them.  You have to tell them something.  No matter if it's the biggest, most personal secret of your life, you have to tell them, have to prove you love the Village.  If you don't...well, it's a nice place to live.  And you might live for years.

So it starts.  Ah, Patrick McGoohan!  He created the show, the character, wrote and directed several episodes and was clearly having a great time, in a demented, stressed out, psychedelic way.  McGoohan was massive in those days.  He kept turning down the part of James Bond because he found the violence and the womanising misogyny morally repugnant.  The audience went mad for the show because it refused to give answers straight away.  We all know that TV gives us answers eventually, right?

If you're wondering what's happening in this picture, a killer balloon has rendered a great British actor unconscious.

The events at the end of the show, both on and off camera have been exhaustively chronicled, and you don't need me to break it all down for you or go over old ground.  Suffice to say that no easy answers were ever forthcoming, that realism was no-longer required and that the last thirty minutes of the series are the most deranged thing ever to go out at prime time on ITV.  McGoohan effectively killed his career in that final episode; certainly, he killed the myth of the ultra-cool secret agent so well that I'm not sure how they carried on making Bond films afterwards.  Even the end credits seem to be trying to tell us something, something that remains both ambiguous and haunted with levels of meaning to this day.

But this is a personal exploration.  What did the Prisoner mean to me?  By which I mean the character, not the show as such.

Intense gaze.  I tried for ages to get this right.

I was fifteen years old.  I hated my school.  I hated the inexplicable regulations, both those passed down from above and the equally arbitrary ones enforced by my peers.  I hated the fashion, the buildings, the lessons which were dull and working to some random educational agenda lost to history.  I hated that some staff and pupils used sexuality and ethnicity as a weapon against each other.  I hated that the kids who should have been cool were filled with a vicious inverted snobbery that killed all joy in music and art stone dead.  I needed a way out.

I needed escape.  So, ironically enough, I started dressing like the Prisoner. Started imitating his intense, sardonic manner, his purposeful stride, his occasional manic grin.  His declaimed, largely random statements. In short, I wrote myself into the storyline, as a fellow detainee, unable to break the boundaries of a malicious and invisible bureaucracy.

Triangle/square/binary opposition.  It makes sense when you - well, no it doesn't actually.

Except I did.  Somehow, I managed what the Prisoner doesn't seem to; I escaped.  Left the Village.  Made my point.  But, and here's the rub; the worst thing about the Village is that you carry it with you. You build the bars in your head and by the time you escape the physical imprisonment, you've constructed a beautifully elaborate trap inside your own mind, a much more perfected cage than anything that a dodgy late 80s comprehensive school could devise.

It's taken me years to deconstruct that prison.


Queen: Do you think they'll ever release us? 
Prisoner: Let me know. I shan't be around.



There's a little monument to McGoohan in the pavement outside Sheffield Town Hall.  I don't ever walk past it without a smile of acknowledgement.  Ironic that I learned something about my rights by studying the behaviour of my fellow Prisoners.

Rebel, rebel

It's probably obvious that many of you would see me as a massive geek; I understand far too much about outmoded TV production and obsess unhealthily over the imaginations of middle-aged scriptwriters c.1975.  However, there are limits, albeit ones that I enjoy exploring. 

I was looking for a Ghost Transmissions reference the other day and ended up redirected to a sci-fi message board; had a quick browse, like you do (becomes aware that this is sounding awfully like the sort of thing people say when they want to explain why they were coming out of a sex shop).  Constant Readers, please beware should you venture this way, for Lo! They have fora for politics and current affairs.  And the politics of such places veer dramatically from the radically progressive to the frankly terrifying, with very little moderation or common ground.  There's people on there who use the words "Ayn Rand" without the associated phrases "psychotic misanthropy" or "bullshit".

Anyway, the bit that caught my attention was a spectacular moment when someone (discussing, I think, the NHS) used the phrase "do-gooder", which I thought had vanished with the 1980s.  A translation for our American Ghosts: "bleeding heart" should cover it. 

My entire fashion sense; Toulouse Lautrec not shown.

Yeah, someone used that phrase.  On a Doctor Who forum.  You know.  All about heroics and non-conformity and protecting people.  It's an especially annoying comment, because from about 1990 until 1996, the show only existed as a series of novels, which contained some of the most subversive political ideas that ever sneaked into the halfway popular imagination. 

For anyone familiar with the contemporary TV version, this might come as quite a shock.  I'm not talking a little mild liberalism here.  Openly queer, non-monogamous characters abounded and the politics were extreme.  Russell T Davis wrote his magnificent Damaged Goods for the range, a savage story about class conflict and outsider status so moving that at least one publisher begged him to lose the science-fiction and publish it 'straight', which misses the point on SO many levels. Ben Aaronovitch wrote The Also People, positing a completely fluid society, culturally, politically, sexually; absolute polymorphism in all senses, made to sound like a utopia that could actually work if only we had the technology.  Paul Cornell's Human Nature was later adapted for television, without the savage humour or the optimistic anti-war slant of the original. 

My point being, these worlds that Ghost Transmissions is trying to explore are not especially conservative or middle of the road (notice that I never talk about Star Trek.  Sorry folks).  They are radical universes.  How many times do we have to see the rebels vs. Evil Empire That Never Ended before we get the point?  Frankly, the audience is a victimised and increasingly angry one; we don't want to see more than one Starship Troopers (and even that universe is a surprisingly subversive one).  We want the heroes who are born to lose. 

I was 13 and this was a defining moment.  Reject the binary opposition!  Also, fashion icon 2.

To that end, I'd like to take a few moments to study the rebels, the outsiders and the born losers who populate the Ghost universes.  I'll level with you: there's an agenda here.

I can't help but keep noticing that what might once have been science fiction excesses are creeping into day-to-day life.  Age specific ultrasound weaponry used only to exist in Michael Moorcock.  The BBC news looks like The Day Today and there are plans to scan license plates on garage forecourts, to take DNA samples from teenagers caught truanting.  Sometimes it feels like the only thing that can save us is the incompetence of underpaid private security contractors, and yet -

There's a power in fiction.  A strength which can sometimes empower and sometimes transform our very nature.  Re-write the fictions of our own worlds.  It's the power of these fictions that I want to explore now.  Which Ghost Transmissions changed the world?  Which ones could?

I defy anyone, regardless of gender, not to want to be a bit like Emma Peel.

The power of the story.  That's what we're going to go looking for. 

Still coming with me?

Intermission

There now follows a brief Ghost Intermission.


It's not hard, not hard to reach.  We can hitch a ride to Rockaway Beach...

Don't know why, but those words have always come back in strange times.  


I don't care about history/that's not where I wanna be

Brilliant.

...and yet there's also:


No time to think about what to tell them/no time to think about what she's done and she was


So there.

Intermission ends in five...

Nothing is ever forgotten

Richard Carpenter died this week.  So did Davy Jones.  So did Philip Madoc and so did millions of other people. Those millions don't get an online obituary and I'm terribly wary of going down the Diana route. People die.  People in my life have died and I've had to face that, just like everyone does.  Why write about it?  Why choose to write about three random strangers on a piss-taking pop culture blog?

Well...I don't have a good answer for you, except to say that these three very different men all had an shaping influence, in some small way, on the way I think, on the way I write, on the way I see the world.  So, indulge me on this one whilst I say au revoir to a little fragment of my past.

I could write about them one by one, like a formal obituary.  So I'd tell you that you know who Davy Jones was, that Philip Madoc was a British character actor and the Richard Carpenter was a writer.  There.  I'd go through them, one by one, itemising their lives.  You can get that anywhere, can't you? Perhaps this will be a bit like that.  I didn't know any of them.  So this will be self-indulgent. 

It will also be getting a bit on the self-pitying side here, sorry folks; I was one of those clever-clever lonely boys in glasses.  Still am, quite often.  See!  The pity!  Anguish!  They showed The Monkees on BBC1 in the holidays, when I should have been out and about, playing with other kids.  Didn't.  Other kids freaked me out, I freaked them out.  It rarely ended well.  If you've never been chased home by a crowd throwing stones at you, you've never lived, say I. 

So, in the house, too hot, summer sun climbing the walls, parents out to work or someplace, I watched.  I slipped right into that world, that silly, dayglo, cartoon reality where you lived with your very best friends and had adventures driving round in bedsteads or dressed as the Foreign Legion.  Where you got to be creative and daft and the only people who laughed at you were an audience that wasn't really there anyway.  Where music mattered, not in spite of it being processed pop, but because of it (though, it didn't hurt that it was the best processed pop in history). 

They had that bit sometimes, where they would pretend to be silent movie characters; the villain with the twirling moustache caught my eye.  My mum often told me that villains got the best lines; the villains where I lived were all depressing and stupid and wore clothes like their dads.  The villains in my heads, the Diabolical Masterspies, they were clever and stylish and you didn't really mind them.  You wanted to spend some time in their company.  Philip Madoc was one of the best of these.  Not a name to make household status, but what a villain he could be.  A demonic brain surgeon, enraptured by the sight of Tom Baker's skull shape; a treacherous quisling, trading the wedding rings of the dead for hope and cutting deals with unspeakable fascist evil from another world, wearing a trench coat like the apocalypse was styled by Saville Row.  Oh, I thought, if I can't find a gang of demented art-friends, I shall have to become a villain and really have some fun.

And then there were Kip's worlds.

They called him Kip, see.  Richard Carpenter.  Dependable, straightforward, reliable author of family TV drama and educational programming.  So much a part of TV in the 70s and 80s that he seemed to be part of the very structure of the thing; he wrote the scripts that sank in, that became the pattern of your dreaming, never patronising, never writing down, never trying to make things obvious.  The Ghosts of Motley Hall had a premise expressed in a five word title; the joy of the show came, paradoxically, from the sadness.  The eponymous ghosts feel like memories of thwarted lives; they are uncertain if they even really exist, from the Elizabethan actor and friend of Shakespeare (dying of cold inflicted by his moronic employer's demands), to the unrequited love between Georgian dandy and mystery woman in white.  You had to think, to really think in order to be a part of this.

I could go on all night about the worlds that man built for us, but Robin of Sherwood is by far the greatest.  It was a fantasy and somehow, despite the presence of a distinctly 1980s mise en scene, the old stories seemed powerful again.  People wept at this in a way I don't think they will weep for, say, Merlin; Kip wouldn't put real world issues into his context, or transplant 21st century characters into the world of Sherwood.  He insisted on telling huge stories, the stories about love and fear and death and hope, the story of the greenwood that is always with us somewhere. 

Way back in time, I wrote about the Schools' show, The Boy From Space.  I mentioned that they re-showed this in the early 80s, with a new framing sequence to explain the change in styles.  The adult actors who played the lead roles as children drive to the observatory where the story took place and we are treated to a bitter-sweet moment that was probably lost on almost all the audience.


"How long since we've been here?  ...funny coming back after all these years.  Feels so different.  Now I'm here, I can remember it all.  This is a story about something that happened when we were children."

                             




                      


And so,  we come to an enchanted place, as AA Milne would have it. 

No, not the end, but perhaps a change and not a moment too soon, my dear.  I still want to talk about pop culture and TV oddities, but I think that my Ghost Transmissions are perhaps wider than I thought.  So many ghosts, so little time.  Therefore, I am...reformatting, piece by piece.  Let's see what we can find in here.  

I'd love it if you came with me, though.



Many thanks to Garry for the joke about bullies dressing like their dads.  Too fuckin' true.

Me and Stewart Lee

I hate nostalgia.

Right, a number of you are now descending on my ghostmansion, waving pitchforks and chanting in an eldritch tongue iah-ngahn falt-rannra, which roughly translates as "You lying bastard" for those who do not speak Eldritch.

Eldritch

But allow me to retort, before I am forced to resort (to the shotgun and hounds).  I love the past in the same way I love the future; they are both pleasant places to take a short holiday in.  The seaside, but with trans-temporal issues.  Some people choose to live there, however, and it's rarely a healthy thing.  Things rust by the seaside.

Some of those dwellers in the sandy coves of time (I feel contractually obliged to make a comment about Daily Telegraph readers about now) are prone to ranting that popular culture is losing its edge.  The ghastly watchphrase of the late 2000s was dumbing down.

To my intense irritation, I may have found an example of just that; evidence that maybe some TV was a little more sophisticated back in the day.

I'm tempted to get one of these paintings for over the mantle, just to see if I can goad people into complimenting it

Children of the Stones ran for seven weeks in the late 1970s.  It's well written, aimed at kids and families and utterly compelling.  You can find out the plot on a hundred sites I expect; suffice to say, it's a 'strangers in the village' scenario, with overtones of conformity, ancient forces, mind control and the ultimately illusory nature of reality.  Like I said, kids' TV.  

But Children of the Stones is so much more.  It would be misleading to say that they don't make them like this anymore; they never made them like this, except, perhaps, The Owl Service.  Sample dialogue, between the science-aristo villain Hendrick and his butler:

Butler: There is much to be said, I think for a celibate lifestyle.
Hendrick: And yet I have my children (indicating the village), the best of both worlds.

I really can't see anything like this going at half four nowadays.  Not only does it rely on understanding the subtleties of the above relationship, we have to deal with heavy real-science (astronomy and the nature of the ammonia molecule are important to the plot) and the power of archetypes.  Like so many other texts, it deals with the conflict of good and evil; however, here, evil is equated with repressed sexuality and rejection of creativity, whilst good is explicitly presented as social disobedience, rejection of tradition and embracing outsider status.  And when we see the results of evil, there's no hedging around the issue; death comes for likeable characters, struck down, their blood visible, their pain and fear obvious.  Worse than death for others who we've come to care about, their individuality burned away into a permanent brainless smile.

Since the age of five I have had a slight phobia about the countryside.  Draw your own conclusions.

I haven't got any pencils

In about 1983, Channel 4 was actually good.  Yeah.  It seems unlikely, given that nowadays, it's really just John Snow and...well, just John Snow really.  But back in the day, it was like the Leadmill.  Oh god, I just lost all of you.

Right, the Leadmill is a club in Sheffield, and as at the present day, it's either horrendous RnB student nights or all the 30 something teachers trying to dance at the end of term.  But, back then, the Leadmill was this beautiful alternative space where you would get The Ramones (end of career) playing one night and some random ska the next and Jarvis Cocker putting a Christmas pantomime on the day after.  It was something strange and wild and unpredictable.  Likewise, Channel 4.  In those days, they had no Big Brother or Come Dine With Me.  Back then, it was whatever they could get to fill the schedules.  If you had your own production company, well, they had a slot for you.  If that involved screaming bits of string or the living dead, so much the better.

There was this series called They Came From Somewhere Else and it was about as 80s as one can get.  Big red glasses.  People with exaggerated accents.  Greenham Common jokes (ask your mum, she might have been there).  I 'watched' it with the brightness turned down on the B&W portable, so I could only listen.  Why?

Easy.  I was scared.  Because people's heads explode. Quite a lot.  So yeah, there's jokes about the police being fascists (man) and the aforementioned big red glasses and that quintessentially 80s phenomena, ending a sentence in the word 'prat' and expecting a 6th form audience to soil themselves laughing.  But heads explode.  In quick and comic succession.  It's a parody of 50s B-movies and is funny if you're a Film Studies teacher (ahem).  But...

Headburster.  Cronenberg meets Ben Elton, effectively.

There's always a 'but' in Ghost Transmissions, isn't there?  Somewhere in the 'adapted from the fringe play' fun, there's a production team who want to remake The Prisoner (and I love that show in all its forms, even the ITV one from two years ago).  And along with all the jokes about eating batteries and old ladies becoming communist werewolves (we have a big problem with communist wolves where I live, let me tell you) there's a serious idea; what if we weren't real?  What if all our deeply held beliefs and viewpoints were just working to a script?  What if Truman wasn't alone in his Show, eh? 

Comrade Wolf.  Many of my best friends are Comrade Wolves.  Hey there, you. 

Me, I don't believe any part of my life is real.  It's all illusion anyway, as someone once sang.  But this show ends with darkness and enforced community and conformity and the suggestion that if you really want to mess with a society, you steal the dreams of its children first. 

And a hint of coming rebellion, as the silliest and most comic character is reborn as something both comical and threatening.  A lesson there for all of us; beware the funny ones.  Like Groucho, like Harpo, like Stuart Lee or Peter Cook, they'll talk your regime to death before you've noticed.



It's all on YouTube.  Go there.