THE DIFFICULT SECOND SERIES (PART ONE)

A friend and I were discussing the classic 1990s TV series “Twin Peaks” the other day as, in their household, they had recently been working their way through the DVD box set. I vividly remember “Twin Peaks” being on TV during the days when I still produced artwork by hand and before we first were relocated to begin doing our work on rinky-dinky computers, so I guess that shows how long ago it now was and how scary a thought that is.

I remember taping quite a lot of it at the time on the kind of cheap bright red videocassettes that they used to sell at one of those long-forgotten photo processing shops that you never seem  to see any more and giving up on my recording about halfway through the second (and final) series when it dawned on me that once the mystery of who actually did kill Laura Palmer had been resolved, the rest of the series didn’t really seem to matter all that much.

Don’t get me wrong. It was still very stylistic and probably head and shoulders above any of the other dramas that were airing at that time, and the stories that were unfolding were still intriguing and engaging enough to keep me watching, it was just that I realised about then that I was unlikely to ever sit down and watch it again and that little flat was already starting to get over-run with too many of the tapes that still clutter the house I currently live in.

Many, many years later of course, having failed to complete that particular taping journey did rather come back and bite me when the first series got a shiny new DVD release and then the second one didn’t. This of course has now been rectified, but there was a certain amount of frustration at having to re-watch the story unfold on very dodgy old tapes that held off-air recordings taken on a very cheap video machine (although that didn’t stop it from being stolen…) from a less than impressive signal that arrived through a badly tuned aerial all those years ago, and then having the story just stop because I had no more episodes.

If you ever wonder how on earth I started to become such a completist, maybe that incident will give you a tiny bit of insight into the “why” of it at least. Happily, I did (no doubt due to some bizarre notion of ‘posterity’) record the very last episode, so things were not left completely up in the air.

But the thing about “Twin Peaks” was an issue that seems to cause problems for a lot of our favourite TV shows; we like them so much that we want more of them even though the story has really run its natural course. We think something is so good that we want more of it, but then we get disappointed when it fails to deliver more of the same but different, and if it does try to be too different then it’s just not the same show any more and we can very quickly fall out of love with it, stop watching and it inevitably staggers along to an extended and rather pathetic conclusion (or worse, an unplanned cancellation) with everyone wishing that it had gone out while it was still the great show it once was.

The problem is that, if something becomes “popular”, we as viewers demand more of the same but then complain if it becomes repetitive. We want the same characters in the same situations but, at the same time, we also want the series to remain stimulating and unpredictable. Sometimes it is the very quirkiness and difference that the new show has that becomes its downfall. Shows like “Lost”, “Heroes” and “The X Files” have all failed to live up to the intriguing promise shown in their earliest years, and sometimes trying to exceed those early achievements and remain interesting and innovative leads to a less than impressive over-extension of a format, style or storyline that really only had a limited potential lifespan. Once the “murder mystery” element of “Twin Peaks” had run its course, all that White Lodge/Black Lodge and Windom Earle shenanigans just seemed to be trying too hard to be intriguing without having the strength of the original narrative thread binding it all together. Once the mystery had been solved there really was no longer any reason for Dale Cooper to remain in that obscure little logging town, and the reasons to keep him there seemed ever more contrived.

Of course, the idea of  “Twin Peaks” without the character of Dale Cooper didn’t make any sense because for most of the audience his character was the show, in the same way that Joel Fleischman leaving “Northern Exposure” made that show less popular. Equally a series about the further adventures of Agent Cooper in another town probably would have failed (like “Beverley Hills Buntz”) as no doubt any further tales of the town of Twin Peaks itself would without the Cooper character.

We don’t like our TV shows to be like real life in that life simply goes on despite all the comings and goings (unless it’s a soap opera of course), we really want our favourite to go on and on without ever changing, and yet, because of that pesky real world rolling its dice and production people and actors wanting to selfishly get on with their own lives and careers, that is of course impossible (or at least unlikely – after all, not everyone is like William Roache…). Rather astoundingly, the original run of  “Dallas” ran for 14 seasons, surviving a full 11 years from the climactic “Who shot J.R.?” events at the end of (incredibly) only the second year, and even now it is being reborn in a new millennium with many of the same characters and situations as if it had never been away.

Although I never watched “Desperate Housewives” I’m reliably informed that it is another show that has struggled to find a new identity for itself once the original intriguing riddle was solved. A show which I never actually saw but which also seemed to have a format that struck me as being one which offered very few places to go was “Prison Break” because, once it became successful, how many prisons did you want to have the same characters break out of? You also would have needed to have them all re-arrested each year to give you another year, which stretches credibility and seemed unlikely at best. Mind you, as I mentioned I never saw it, so maybe I’m missing the point of it. Steven Bochco’s “Murder One” did try having “another year and another case” of course, but the second one just wasn’t as interesting as the first and there was never a third.

Even a show with a more flexible format such as “24” can struggle to find a credible threat that matches the previous one. Strangely, “24” also had a difficult first series, as the producers insisted on having a conclusion to the storyline at about the episode 12 mark just in case it was cancelled and they would still need to sell it as a complete package for syndication. What history would have made of a “real-time” dramatic show called “24” that only consisted of 12 parts is something we will never know, but it is one of those strange little quirks of American network television.

So, it would seem that some TV shows just seem to have a built-in “self destruct mechanism” just because of their format, and perhaps it would just be kinder to let them live out their natural lives instead of constantly trying to jump-start the corpse until it has nothing left to offer.

BANK HOLIDAY BLUES

Oh, how I hate bank holidays (purely from a blogging point of view, of course, but we'll come to that later). Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of the things in principle of course. Any day that means I don't have to drag my reluctant and failing body up to do some work is a bonus (the "working weak" as I sometimes think of myself), but they do all fall under the umbrella (such an appropriate analogy for a bank holiday weekend) of my eternal nemesis "organised fun". It's almost as if the prospect of about 54% of the Great British Public at play (because so many still have to work them anyway) fills me with the kind of internal horror that is difficult to explain but still manages to send a shudder right down to the depths of my soul. Perhaps its just the mental image of all those barbecues being tended to by lager-filled "blokes" wearing aprons they got free with one of the tabloids, whilst their kids scream around the lawns, and them then ultimately ending the day clogging up both the A&E departments of our hospitals, and my TV screen with the "hilarious" footage that got them there, but then I do get so terribly cynical about such things.

The idea of the "Bank" holiday came about because the banks used to close to respect various religious and holy days. These used to include about 33 Saint's days throughout the year when the Bank of England was closed. In 1834 they reduced these holidays to merely four: May Day, All Saints Day, Good Friday and Christmas Day. The Bank Holidays act of 1871 was brought in by the Banker and Liberal Politician Sir John Lubbock, chosen mostly, it seems, because he was a big cricket fan who thought that his bank employees should be given an opportunity to attend or play in the big matches when they were played. In the area in which he lived, the dates he chose for the public holidays just happened to be the very dates when traditional games were held on. For a while these days off from the grind of Victorian toil were popularly known as "St. Lubbock's Days" because of him. One hundred years later, the Banking and Financial Dealings act of 1971 finally shaped the pattern of the sequence of national holidays which we now currently 'enjoy', although New Year's Day and the May Day Bank holidays were added to the this list later on, and they all still have to be confirmed each year by Royal Proclamation to juggle the dates around to avoid the dates falling on a weekend or adding the odd special (usually Royal Event based) extra date.

Personally, I nearly always seem to struggle to find something to do with the actual day (or indeed the whole weekend) and usually end up squandering these eagerly anticipated national holidays on moping around the house thinking about doing stuff but not actually doing or achieving very much. It's almost as if the weight of expectation overwhelms me and, because I feel that I ought to be doing something, the decision as to what that something should be gains so much significance that I actually end up spending so much time in consideration of what to actually do that I end up doing nothing much at all. There's also the not insignificant consideration of whether I wish to avoid crowds of other people trying to entertain themselves in much the same way, and avoiding the prospect of sitting in an enormous queue of traffic for huge chunks of the day. Still, there are other distractions nearer to home that you can also consider. This time, I thought, at least there would be the background of the test match on the radio to do whatever I was doing along to (Lubbock would have been so proud) but the incessant rains in Cardiff have even interfered with that.

Back in the day, during the "wilderness years" of the 1990s, I learned to dread these weekends. The prospect of three or four whole drizzle-filled days alone in my tiny inner-city flat used to make me thoroughly miserable for much of the week leading up towards the holiday. My fellow employees would all seem be planning various exciting possibilities and all I had to look forward to was three days in which I probably wouldn't talk to a single soul. All but one of them, anyway. I did once make the mistake of asking one of my colleagues as we were heading off to our homes and into the void of a long holiday weekend whether he was looking forward to the break. "In all honesty", he said, "You will probably be the last person I speak to until we get back on Tuesday morning..." So, it wasn't just me. He also one told me that his default response when answering the telephone was "Hello, Mum."

Ironically what I would do was watch videotape. Hours and hours of videotape, just to while the long, lonely hours away. It was usually a good opportunity to sit through one of the longer series that I seldom had the free time to sit down and enjoy, although it was always really quite difficult to concentrate as I spent rather too much time hoping that remotely outside probability that the telephone might just actually ring might happen. It seldom did, of course, but it used to nag away at the back of the mind and quite ruin the taste of whatever televisual treat which I had settled down to endure. One weekend I filled a good eight or more hours one day with the "Godfather Trilogy" and when later I explained to someone that this was what I had done, expecting the usual sympathetic ear or a derogatory snort of derision at my perceived "sadness", instead they told me that they were actually jealous, and would have loved to have a day doing that instead of having to entertain their children through a long, dull, wet holiday weekend.

The grass, as they say, is always greener...

Nevertheless, I wouldn't be without the things. They punctuate the year and give us all a tiny bit of something to look forward to when the days of slogging away seem to be never ending. From a blogging point of view, however, the weekend seems to fall stone dead. Everyone else (it seems) is too busy being away from the shackles of their own professional keyboard to find any moment to check in and see what delightful nuggets are being offered by we simple word-wrangling costermongers. Even on an ordinary weekend the amount of activity can become depressingly slight and, to a pathetic and desperate soul such as I am, can make me question (again...) the whole purpose of rattling out these yarns and notions to place them before a totally disinterested world. Why, of course, I should feel like this, is of course ridiculous. Any creative process should be (and to be honest, probably is) enjoyable for its own sake and not for the response of anyone else, but it doesn't half help to get the occasional feeling that there is some greater purpose to what you're doing. I fear, though, that this probably simply proves my own narcissism (but it's only fair that I share...), or just that the average bank holiday weekend just gives you too much extra time to think about these matters...

"Maybe it's just not worth writing at all on holiday weekends. There are too many distractions, too many other demands on the time of those with lives beyond the web, but then the self-inflicted guilt starts to creep in, which, once again, puts a ridiculous and ultimately unfounded weight of importance upon these very witterings for which there is no real evidence to support. Is there not a duty to those of us who don't venture out into the wide world? Those precious few who remain home alone and whose only contact with the great outdoors might just be through their own LCD window on the world? Or would not providing these distractions be better in the long run for their "greater good"...?"

I really should get out more.

DR WHO AND THE MATH MAKERS

I don't have anything written to share with you today, as my free writing hours have been taken up lately on a silly little artwork idea that I had which I thought I'd share with you instead. I was trying to find a way to put some fun into mathematics for children, if that helps to clarify things, and this was the introductory image, but you probably need to be as ancient and nerdy as I am for it to actually work. For some people this might have some meaning, for others, "meh!" not so much, but here it is anyway...

IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME

The mind of a so-called “creative” can be a very strange thing.

Now, just for the sake of discussion, I’m going to include myself amongst the creatives here, even though I’m fully aware that there are creative people in this world who have more creativity in their discarded toenail clippings than I ever have had or probably will ever have. Still, if writing an overly self-indulgent blog most mornings, or actually earning a crust at the very blunt end of the design business counts as being even slightly creative, then I just about make the cut - despite my chronic sense of self-disappointment whenever I see a piece of artwork or writing which has been originated by somebody else and which I think is “good” and then finding myself really wishing that I could have created it myself.

It’s all the ideas that pop into the head that cause all the problems, you see. If you have that kind of mind they will just keep on coming, and once they do, you really have to act upon then otherwise they’ll gnaw away at you and annoy you until they either occasionally get forgotten about totally and lost forever, or else you simply have to get them down on paper (or its electronic equivalent) to stop them rattling around in your brain and eating away at every other thought you might have.

It’s not even that they are necessarily good or even vaguely original and innovative ideas anyway. Regular visitors here will be more than a little aware of how much of my time is taken up in consideration of the banal and ordinary whilst others are writing poetry that portrays the world in a brand new light. But nevertheless, once the notion is caught in the dank, fetid web of this brain, it has to be addressed in some form or other because it simply will not go away, no matter how much I might wish it to.

To be fair, sometimes the ideas can seem pretty good, too, even though it goes against my own lack of confidence and crippling self-doubt to admit it. However, sometimes I’ll go to bed having had what I think is a storming idea and yet, when I’ve slept on it, I wake up and it’s not so great, or the enthusiasm of it has fizzled away during the night or maybe I will just convince myself that it really, really was the stupidest and worst and most pathetic idea in the history of humanity. Those are the bad mornings which I have been known to write about on (rather too many) numerous previous occasions.

Equally, sometimes (actually very occasionally) I get so excited by an idea that it becomes all consuming and I can’t wait to be getting on with it and will find myself writing or creating a piece of artwork at ridiculous times of the night when it is neither healthy nor expedient to do so. I find myself having this sudden burst of ridiculously focussed energy which is almost immediately followed by months where nothing much of any interest to me in that line happens at all. The following is a classic example of that. A few months ago I happened to notice, purely by chance because of a website visit, that an acquaintance of mine was setting up a business and I happened to mention that one of the images of an old type of camera which he was using in his current corporate identity seemed to me to have massive graphic possibilities for a bit of logo design.

Now I must stress that he neither requested nor needed this to be done, but nevertheless I found myself obsessing about the possibilities it offered as a piece of design and realised that I really wanted to give it a go, despite the fact that it would take some considerable time for no real purpose (apart from “keeping my hand in” I suppose…). So, that weekend, I found that I just had to get up at a ridiculously early time on a Saturday morning and redraw the complex piece of equipment into a graphic form just for my own amusement. In the end I really did not know whether it turned out to be any good at all, but I was quite happy with it and just enjoyed the process of seeing how it turned out, and yet have never returned to it since. I hope Ian won’t mind me including the results here, after all, it’s a tiny, tiny bit of free publicity.

Oh well, it keeps me off the streets, I guess…

The blog is another case in point. Some of the things I write get me so keyed up that I can hardly wait to get the words written because I’m so excited by the idea. Sometimes I’m just so utterly desperate to get the ideas down because I feel that I simply have to publish them and I wait in eager anticipation of the reaction of my loyal few readers, and then everyone else just doesn’t get half as excited by it as I was. I suppose a lot of this comes down to confidence or perhaps, more realistically, a lack of it. Sometimes I’m so confident that an idea is rather good that I’m always astounded when it turns out not to be, but equally, on some rare occasions, the reverse is also true.

I may have mentioned once or twice that I am a (spectacularly unsuccessful) playwright. About eight years ago, after a conversation I had in Edinburgh during a fleeting visit to that year’s “Fringe” festival, I got talking about the fact that I “used to” do some writing. Ultimately this has led to me writing a number of full-length plays in the years since, each of which has become a bit of an obsession at the time of writing, devouring early mornings and weekends for months on end before being printed out and, er, sitting in a cardboard box.

But then this is what I do. I seem to put a lot of time, energy and effort into something that I end up thinking is ultimately merely average, and I hide it away. Someone did once suggest that I should set up a company and call it “Light Under a Bushel Enterprises” so I guess that I must have always been like this.

Nevertheless, though, the ideas do still keep coming. Last week, for example I got ridiculously over-excited about the idea of a new blog which I called the Tabloid. “Finally”, I thought, “a way to harvest all those little bits of ideas and thoughts which keep popping into my mind but then fail to blossom into something more substantial”. So excited was I by this idea that I spent that entire evening tinkering with styles and layouts and re-editing the photographs into a more “newspapery” look, and I finally crawled to bed much, much later than I should have done with the prospect of another working day just a few short hours away. However, it turned out that the world wasn’t quite so keen on the idea as I was and now it lurks there as a much unloved alternative to these rambling outpourings here in Lesser Blogfordshire and even I am beginning to look at it askance with a certain amount of contempt. It may still limp along and get tinkered with occasionally, but I am no longer going to publicise it from here, and hopefully, after today, we shall never speak of it in Lesser Blogfordshire again. By the way the link is under “MAWH – Other Blogs” in the margin if you’re interested, but, deep down I know you’re probably not.

This week it happened again. An idea just popped into my mind for an image that (hopefully successfully, but I think the world’s going to think otherwise…) combines two of my obsessions, but unfortunately, to make it work, a great deal of basic preparation work had to be done just to get the little artwork elements together to put the final image together. I was initially so pleased by the idea that it became a rather all-pervading thing in my thoughts and I found myself feeling very distracted when I was watching the TV or having a bath with simply thinking about quite how I was going to handle a couple of the trickier little bits and pieces, and much of my personal time this week has been spent in working on this ultimately purposeless enterprise.

Not only that but, as is usually the case with me, I suddenly was hit by a massive wave of self-doubt about three quarters of the way into it all and persuaded myself that not only was it a very bad idea, but it was a bad idea that someone else could probably do better than I ever could and with more skill than I ever will have, and maybe the whole thing really was turning out to be a ridiculous waste of time, effort and energy. It might also have been done before, which was an even worse possibility.

In the end the artwork problems were solved and, if I’m feeling brave enough, I might even show it to you, because (and this is truly the ridiculousness of the whole sorry exercise) I spend all of this energy and worry on something that I usually don’t even show to anyone when it’s finished. Anyway, with a deep breath being taken, there’s a bit of a sneak preview over on the right...

I have little enough free time as it is, and that which I do have I tend to waste rattling out my ridiculous notions for you here in these pages, so, suddenly there was a choice to be made. Do I chew up the slight buffer zone that I had built up with regards to my postings…? Or devour my precious night-time sleeping hours in the pursuit of something pointless…? In the end I did both. Solving the tricky little design problem that I’d set myself would have meant that I probably wouldn’t have slept much anyway, and sometimes I can persuade myself that the blog needs to be “up-to-the-minute”, “contemporary” and “now”. That it usually fails to be any of these things is, of course, utterly irrelevant.

Incidentally, the blog postings tend to be a couple of days behind for a couple of reasons; It gives me the chance to rethink the appropriateness of them and do any swift edits that might be required on the grounds of good taste or bad English, and it also keeps the wolf from the door if the world suddenly needs me to do other things for a while and I have no time to blog.

Astonishingly, that has been known to happen.

Sometimes I decide that perhaps it is the blog itself that is pointless, and that I should just give it up and do something else instead.

Now there’s an idea…

THE SCREAMING TREE

The tree had stood there for over two hundred years. Generations of the tiny, noisy people had come along, grown up, grown old and gone away and he’d seen all of them, and they’d all seen the tree. They had given the tree many names, and the one it had most liked was “Beech” although some people occasionally came along and quite convincingly called the tree “Ash” and others had been equally certain that it should be called “Birch”. The tree didn’t really mind what they called it, As far as it was concerned it was just plain old “tree” and that would do just fine.

Around the tree stood its faithful companions, all of them seeming so very broad, wise and noble. There they were, trees of all types, standing closely together and enjoying a rather harmonious and pleasant existence. Many of them were much older and more verdant in their splendour and some of them were much younger but somehow they’d found room for them to flourish and spread their branches. Some of these youngsters looked for all the world as if they would shoot up higher and further that any of the older trees could have possibly imagined when they first began to sprout, but that is just the way the world should be.

Over the many years of its life, the tree had come to learn many things about the birds that nested in its branches, about the tiny little furry creatures that ran up and down its trunk and branches and about the tiny insects that burrowed into his bark and nibbled at his leaves. At first they had seemed intrusive and invasive but the wiser, older trees about him had told him that these were good things to have around you and they all worked together to make the forest a happy and healthy place.

Occasionally, even one of the people might come along, but things never seemed to be quite so harmonious when they were around. They would either just clamber up and down the tree for no particular good reason or just decide to hack bits off the tree and take them away and burn them. This didn’t seem to be the most friendly of things to do, and the tree started to feel quite worried whenever the people came too close.

Now, just like a person, a tree is a complicated thing. It has many, many leaves and many, many branches and they are all part of one great big living, breathing complete whole. The people seemed to think differently of course and, as their tastes and needs got ever more sophisticated they would come along and decide that there were too many of them, that they were in the way, the wrong shape, gave too much shade, or even just that they were preventing them from doing some of the little things they seemed to do in their short little lives and had to go. Time and again the little people with the painful blades that screeched and buzzed would appear and a faithful old companion would be reduced to a stump, or some on their limbs would be hacked away. Sometimes they were prepared to admit to themselves, they did feel better after a trim, but generally the appearance of those little people with the hard hats and the saws spelt trouble for them.

When it had been a little sapling, pushing its roots through the warm earth things had been very different. The sky had seemed so far away for one but it had tried its best to reach it anyway, and day after day it had got closer and closer to the great big sky but it never quite reached it and one day it realised that it probably never would. From time to time the occasional cloud would come down from the sky and visit, but that seemed to be the closest the tree was ever likely to get.

As the tree got older, the world changed. The people discovered how to make great iron engines that burned coal and made smoke that chugged out into the air. Later on they built great big houses to build more of the engines in and they poured out more and more smoke into the air. The tree tried to remember the pure clean air that it had breathed when it was young, but with every passing season it became harder and harder to remember and harder and harder to breathe. Across a hundred years the machines got faster and noisier and more plentiful and the air got thicker and greyer. More and more of the little houses began appearing and taking up more and more of the land and it was always the trees that had to make way for them.

The tree felt that it was dying. Already it was finding it harder and harder to sprout its leaves when the spring came around again. Time and again its neighbours would be bursting with new life whilst all of its own branches were bare and lifeless. One half of its main branches, where its trunk split off in two directions was already feeling numb and would probably never come into leaf again and the birds and the insects were starting to feast upon it. the little people had started to come and stop and stare and scribble onto their papers and clipboards. The final indignity was when the younger sapling people had started coming along and abusing it, bashing spikes into its trunk or just hitting it with bits of steel and rock.

Why did they feel the need to do that? Had the tree not been kind and nurturing and friendly to the little humans for all those many years? Had it not helped to scrub the fetid air clean again for them to muck it up again?

Well, the tree decided that it had had enough with the ungrateful little humans and their choking little metal boxes on wheels. It decided that if it was time to go, it wasn’t going to go down without a fight. Come the very next storm it was going to loosen its roots and let go, and topple to the ground and see whether, with any luck, it could take out a couple of those cars parked across the road when it did.

It put all its energy into one last effort, and screamed a final scream.

“PRETENTIOUS PRICK”

I was watching “Have I Got News for You” on iPlayer the other morning, after the DVR chose once again to have its Friday night failures and send me a stack of messages about how it had failed to record various programmes and how it hoped that this didn’t “spoil” my viewing enjoyment.

The DVR has, of course, just one job…

One. Little. Job.

…and, not only that, but it was precisely that one job that it was designed for and the very same job that I bought it to do for me. Its main purpose, its raison d’etre if you like, as a Digital Video Recorder is supposed to be, you’ll be astonished to find out, recording television programmes digitally. However for various reasons that still remain unclear to me it has recently developed the annoying habit of sitting around on its electronic backside, and failing to record the requested programmes, rather like the kind of irresponsible employee that “couldn’t be arsed” to do the one little thing that you asked them to and then seems to think that it’s you that is at fault for even asking them to do it in the first place, and that it really shouldn’t matter enough for you to get annoyed about it just because they hadn’t actually done it.

Perhaps I would be less peeved if it didn’t then go and put up those terribly “helpful” messages telling me about what it hadn’t done and hoping it hadn’t spoiled things for me. Of course it spoiled my viewing enjoyment, you electronic moron! It might as well just sit there whining “It’s not my fault I didn’t ask to be bought!” and then start making jokes with its electronic mates and ignoring me. Hmm… maybe it has just hit some sort of electronic puberty…? After all, it is quite old in electronic terms, it being about eighteen months since I got it. That pretty puts it out to pasture in computing terms. In another six months, I suppose it’ll be as dead as the dinosaurs. I suppose that there’s some kind of signalling issue at the transmitter that is failing to zap out the necessary electronic trigger pulse or something technical and wizardish and jiggery-pokery based that would no doubt explain the problem, but I really don’t know.

Back in the old analogue and VCR days the only person I could hold responsible for failure to record my favourites was me and my own pathetic programming failures, and (perhaps) the occasional over-run of a snooker match, but nowadays I can still get everything right and have it still go wrong for reasons beyond my control. This we call “progress”, by the way, and I’m still not sure that I really like it.

Stupid machine!

Anyway, now I’ve got that out of my system, back to the purpose of this morning’s little missive. Despite the less than enthusiastic response of fellow viewers over the years, usually to what they perceive as intolerable cruelty, blatant cynicism or just plain embarrassing nastiness on occasion, I’ve always tried to keep up with watching “Have I Got News for You” which is now, rather unbelievably, broadcasting its 41st series. Perhaps it comes from being an old ‘news junkie’ anyway, but I suspect it’s just because I want to do better on that “7 Days” quiz on the BBC website, although I’ve usually already failed catastrophically at that when the obscure stories that it consists of turn up later during the actual programme.

D’oh!

One of the guests on that episode was Graham Linehan, one half of the writing team responsible for the sublime “Father Ted” and other shows, and someone who, as a writer, I rather admire. Not least because of his usual dry wit and for making the kind of leaps of imagination that I can never even hope to emulate.

So, inevitably, the show unrolled as it does, and we came to the “Missing Words” round, in which newspaper headlines are displayed with some of the words missing and the opposing pair of comedy teams are invited to guess what the words might possibly be with the ultimate aim being to amuse the nation with their fast thinking, amusing suggestions and witty banter.

One of the captions which appeared was this one: “(BLANK) has always been a sublime melange of the esoteric and the experimental” (I’m writing it out in case the image mysteriously vanishes and you don’t know what I’ve drivveling on about) and drifting across the soundtrack, in a distinctive Irish brogue came the words “Pretentious Prick” which were presumably the first attempt at filling the blank… as in “Pretentious prick has always been a sublime melange of the esoteric and the experimental”.

It got its chuckle.

Ho! Ho! Ho!

But it was a moment that just made me feel a little bit sad, and I don’t mean “sad” in the “pathetic” sense of the word (although you might disagree with me on that when and if you read on). Of course, my problem is that I really don’t see anything wrong with the particular collection of words making up that nearly-sentence. All of them are perfectly good, proper English words that do precisely the job they were intended for. I suspect that the chuckle I heard was both symptomatic of the modern cult of celebrating the “ordinary” and being dismissive of anything that makes a virtue of being thought of as being in any way “clever” that we seem to have embraced in recent years, and also the comic genius coming from just recognising that those were precisely the kinds of words that the audience might associate with pretentiousness.

This, of course (because everything’s always about me in the end), just proves to me that the various utterances that have hailed from Lesser Blogfordshire across these many months are indeed wholly pretentious themselves, which probably says a lot without having to say much at all. Two words, “Pretentious Prick”, have managed to say more than the thousands of other words that I have bombarded you with over the last half year or so. Two words that said everything about me that you ever really needed to know.

That the comment came from a wordsmith disappointed me further, of course, but then I realised that to write things that are popular with people, you have to be in touch with the people and use words in ways that resonate with those people, which is something I am obviously incapable of, hence (you see, I’m precisely the sort of pretentious prick who still uses words like ‘hence’) my relative failure as a wordsmith.

Perhaps I’m just feeling a little bit sensitive anyway about the subject of language as this was the week when TXT SPK like “OMG” (although not my own preference for that one: “OM(?)”) and many of its stablemates finally got slipped into the OED. Of course it is perfectly correct that language should evolve and develop over time, but it is rather heartbreaking that something so beautiful should be augmented by something so much more dreary and banal, if that’s not too pretentious a way of putting it…

By the way, in all the confusion, I’ve completely forgotten what the “correct” word finally was in that particular round of the quiz. Not that it really matters, I suppose, but I’m sure that it might bother me when and if I come to re-read this nonsense in a few months time.

Of course, all that this really does is provide more ammunition (should it be needed) to persuade me that I’m now so far out of touch with the modern world and its ways that I should just run away from it as fast as my creaky old legs can carry me, and not look back, with the faint echoes of the scornful bellows of “Just shut up, you preposterous little man!” fading away as I disappear off towards the sunset.

WHEN THE WIND BLOWS

“The Met Office have issued a severe weather warning… High winds with gusts of up to 70 miles per hour are predicted…”

You barely hear the weather report as it drifts across the room. Some of the words are lost, drowned out by the crunch of the toast or the slurp of the tea in the mug as you get on with the business of the day, running round feeding, cleaning and clothing yourself in anticipation of another day at the coal mines. The information is sort of in there, lurking around at the back of your mind, but you get on with things and it’s pretty much forgotten about.

It’s only when you stick your nose outside the door on what looks at least like a bright and pleasant enough spring morning that remember those words you sort of heard and you get to realise quite what those high winds actually feel like as they buffet you along the path towards your car and bite through the oh-too-few layers of clothing you’ve decided to wear today.

Then you remember those days where the wind blew so hard that you could barely stay on your feet and you start to look around at the objects all around you and wonder how many of them are likely to stay put and not suddenly fling themselves in your direction and randomly smash themselves and anything else that just happens to get in the way. Will that optimistic chunk of wood that’s holding the cover down on your neighbour’s patio table be enough to stop it being whisked away to places unknown?

You stagger exhausted to the car and having forced open the door and then had it slam shut behind you with unexpected force, you become aware of the relative quiet, even though you hadn’t really noticed the noise of the wind when you were being buffetted along through it just seconds before.

The car is swaying on its suspension springs from the sheer force of this unseen yet devastating natural force, a force so strong and so terrible and yet which you can only see it because of the effect it has on the things being moved by it. The thrashing trees, the swirling leaves and the huddled, scrunched up pedestrians leaning into it at unusual and unnatural angles just to move along against its bitter blow. Even the few birds you see, those elegant masters of flight are being confused by its invisible flow and their usual confident, easily achieved soaring seems to be hampered and not quite right today. But just because you can’t see it, you can still feel it, of course; the biting cold and an unstoppable powerful force that you cannot see but you have to push yourself through to just achieve the simple goal of walking.

Your journey half completed, you bid your farewells, seeing your passenger safely on their way, hoping against hope that the sheer weight of train you are putting them on will mean that it will stick like glue to the rails as it hurtles over those high bridges that you know are further on down the line. You negotiate yourself back to the office and fight your way into the building, the swirling debris following you as you struggle to close the door behind you. Eventually, with your back flat against it as it snugly fits into the hole it usually easily blocks, you can relax and look out of the window and see those long-suffering and ancient trees as their branches are tossed and flung about by the unseen winds.

You venture back up the stairs and you can hear the long low rumbling moan of the stressed air as it flows around you with unexpected speed. Your thoughts go to the outside and just how well attached everything outside the sanctuary, the cocoon, is to where it is, and how many loose objects you and everyone else have left lying around in the gardens of your neighbourhood, and how many of them are likely to stay put under these most extreme circumstances.

There’s the occasional thud as an object hits the glass, or the roof tiles. There’s the occasional scrape. Is that one of the tiles moving…? How solid is this building you’re in? How well-built is it, when it comes down to this sort of relentless punishment? How many times has it survived such an onslaught before, and how many times can it do so again before its luck runs out or the stresses and strains become too much for its structure to bear?

And still there remains that relentless howling, now coming in waves as the gusts arrive and raise the pitch for a moment before ebbing away to build up again and bring another one, and another, and another. You wonder “Am I being punished for something I’ve done? Or perhaps something I’ve not done?” Then comes the occasional whistling alongside the blasts of air, and the rattling of the slates as they lift and then settle again and then lift again as another gust comes along. After this, then everything seems to be shaking and rattling as the gales that have so far only been threatening finally arrive, and the really loud, totally intimidating blasts of accelerated air are upon you.

Batten down the hatches, it’s going to be a bumpy ride…

JUST IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Well, to pretty much nobody's surprise except my own, another posting from the exciting all-new world of "The LB Tabloid" seems to have managed to sneak out there, containing, this time around, a few short paragraphs - and precious little in the way of actual new insight - on such diverse topics as Smartphones, aging, the eternal battle between the cyclist and the motorist and dear old Louis Theroux.

A whole bunch of  not very interesting topics that I had a little to say about but then didn't feel any great need to expand upon further during my morning musing sessions. However, I hope will at least contribute in some small way towards making up for any shortfall that you may have felt in the quantity of these expanded and no doubt exasperating musings here in the big house.

Strangely enough it also makes a feature of having nothing at all to say about the Space Shuttle, the Kenneth Clark scandal, the wickedness of certain bankers or IKEA, a happy enough situation that I am also pleased to repeat hereabouts.

Anyway, just in case you missed it (and I wouldn't blame you if you had), the second edition of "The LB Tabloid" can be found by clicking on the link below should you wish to do so (although you didn't hear it from me, okay...?).

EXTREME OF CONSCIOUSNESS

And so, as another weekend burns in the furnaces of history and I drag my weary body towards the start of yet another working week I’m already at a loss as to quite what happened to the actual days that made it up. Those precious pauses, those peaceful pairs of days are supposed to punctuate our lives with experiences that enhance the humdrum nature of the life of the wage slave, but, at the risk of boring you to death (although why shouldn’t I? I frequently bore myself to death after all…) somehow they keep on passing by and achieving nothing except the maintenance of the status quo and the passage of the fires of time and I’m never really all that sure quite what became of them. Stuff did (or more often than not) did not happen, hours passed, many hearts kept beating and before you know it, Monday was upon us with all its promise of irritation and drudgery and a gnawing sense of having wasted yet another weekend instead of actually living it.

Friday evening remains a void in my memory. I remember getting home, my mind full of the upcoming upheavals to my established work routine and feeling more than a tad tetchy about it. I recall probably being more ranty than might seem healthy about these things and telling myself to shut up but still babbling anyway, but eventually we arrived home and parked ‘Blinky’ up at the side of the road – the old days of a regular niche of off-road parking now being lost forever to me it would appear – and headed indoors. It might have been raining, or there may have been just the prospect of rain, its hard to tell, but, as they used to say “the weekend starts here” although, apart from remembering that I dozed off during “Gardeners’ World” and went to bed shortly afterwards, which somehow seemed to trigger an electronic brainstorm in the DVR, the sleepy two or three hours from slamming that door to waking up and seeing Monty Don digging is all a bit of a blur.

My mother may have rung, because I do recall a brief snatch of conversation of the “I thought you’d be out at the station at this time…” “So why did you ring then?” variety, although that might have been Thursday evening, and there may very well have been fish for tea and washing up to be done. I probably threw myself up at the keyboard to disappoint myself at the less-than-great statistics hereabouts once again, such is my need for self-punishment, and, whilst I have no memories of actually doing that, I should reflect upon the fact that doing this sort of thing with my evenings and early mornings is precisely what led to the both the sense of fatigue that was pervading my existence, and my sense of it becoming ever more pointless when hours of writing are only seen by single digit numbers. I shouldn’t be surprised. I don’t have any sexiness to sell, or any tittle-tattle about the great and the not-so-good to intrigue the wide world with. Christ! I barely leave the wretched house... So why should I be remotely surprised by this? And yet I constantly am…

That might also have been the moment that I briefly crossed the threshold of FizzBok for the first time in a while, although I remember it being slightly earlier on in the day than that. I’ve not been dropping in much lately after far too many depression spirals had been triggered by a word, phrase or saying which is also why I didn’t notice it was your birthday, if you choose to advertise the fact, whenever it might have been. Luckily the “share” buttons on this site mean that you don’t have to venture into that site itself to “slam-dunk” your links down, but this does mean that I seldom see the bigger picture and those occasional messages can just pass me by unnoticed. I suppose that I should randomly apologise for whatever slights that this might have caused if it wouldn’t sound so pathetic, but then they are so very rare that I doubt anyone’s even noticed yet.

I don’t know what actually drew me in there last week, but I think I thought I’d accidentally made a double posting and so went in to delete it. This was when I discovered purely by chance and via a third party that a tragedy had unfolded for someone I once knew long, long ago which made all this daily rattling out of nonsense by “yours truly” seem even more pointless and meaningless than usual. Who cares about things like crappy old TV shows and mind-bogglingly unoriginal observations upon the end of the world when real people are experiencing genuine heartbreak?

I wouldn’t usually, but I was so numb with the sort of momentary shock we all get when real life and the big world outside ourselves momentarily intrudes into our own little lives that I butted in and actually commented. Later on, in someone else’s noble display of trying to rally people around, an email address popped in to my account, offering me the opportunity to pass on condolences and I tried to, I really did. Sentences have been forming, moulding and restructuring for much of the weekend but this so-called self-styled “master wordsmith” just doesn’t know where to start. Oh it’s easy enough to abstractly burble on about religion and politics in a way that is rightly banished from the social scene, or tell the world about bad TV that it truly doesn’t really care about, but sending an email out of the blue after fifteen or more years from someone you worked with for a while, and which starts with something along the lines of “I was so sorry to hear about…” just doesn’t seem quite the right way to handle the sheer bloody tragedy of the big important, life-changing events that happen to those you know and try to care about.

So, I failed to write anything, and I’m sorry that I failed to write anything, but I really, really struggled with quite what to write. Every time I put my fingers to the keyboard, everything seemed so bloody trite and meaningless. I’ve never been very good at the raw emotional stuff. Somehow it always comes out sounding wrong whenever I try and so often I’ve decided that I’d rather not try at all than to risk getting it so catastrophically wrong. I know that it’s a bloody miracle whenever any of us manages to find someone who fits us so well and wants to share our lives with us; I know that when we do find that someone they somehow complete us and make us want to be better people because of who they are; and I know that it’s a privilege that we get the time that we do get to share and spend with those we consider to be our “other shoe” if we’re lucky enough to find them at all; and that we miss them when we lose them. I also know, deep, deep down that I resent bitterly the fact that, to paraphrase the words of John Lennon “there’d be days like these”, but actually saying those things directly to someone in great pain…? Such a simple act of kindness just seems impossible for me to do.

Instead, the weekend rolled along as it has a tendency to. Saturday dawned and the world failed to end. I commented jovially to a perplexed and bewildered neighbour that I wondered whether there was enough time for me to actually do this job as I headed out to strim the grass in the sunshine before the rains (and the apocalypse) came, and after this I spent some time scraping some of the ever-expanding weeds off the cobbles on the access road. This may very well have been the sum of my achievement this weekend as the rest seems to have vanished in a sleepy blur of old movies, meals, a trip to the supermarket, washing up and beating myself up with guilt trips. Of such banalities are the jigsaws of our lives made, and time passes by and, with the words of that poet John Lennon coming to mind again, life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. (You just know that I’m going to be listening to some of those songs today now, don’t you…?).

Ironically, given what I’ve said here, and with a certain amount of circular internal logic, the weekend ended with me watching “The Social Network”, a film in which a number of unpleasant characters are rather unpleasant to each other but somehow they seem to have created something that does make a lot of (other) people seem to be terribly happy, which might just be a parable for the age, because just sometimes out of great misery, some good will come.

AT LEAST SEVEN REASONS TO LOVE BLAKE’S SEVEN

Well, here’s a posting that shows me at my awkward, geekiest, and most nerdish worst and which is almost guaranteed to send the few of you that remain running screaming towards the horizon, although I really don’t believe anyone at all is likely to choose to come and read this anyway. Incidentally, “Horizon” is the name of a popular “Blake’s 7” fan club, so it wouldn’t be the most inappropriate place to head for. It would have been just as easy to call this piece “At least seven reasons to loathe, hate and detest Blake’s 7”, by the way - it was always a show that divided opinion - but just for today I’m dabbling with a more positive outlook, just to see whether it works for me.

I may have inadvertently done the TV series “Blake’s 7” a huge injustice recently with one of my more cutting replies made to one of the comments which were in response to my recent contributions to the debate on “spoilers”.

For those of you who haven’t heard of this show, it was a science fiction adventure series created by Dalekmeister Terry Nation and made by the BBC and its 52 episodes were broadcast in chunks of thirteen per series over the four years between 1978 and 1981 in the wake of the release of “Star Wars” in the UK. In fact episode one was broadcast during the first week of 1978, the week after “Star Wars” got its UK premiere.

It doesn’t have the finest of reputations as a quality drama in the history of TV and is sometimes described as a British “Star Trek” which is to do it something of a disservice, because, whilst there are certain parallels in that they are both set in outer space and mostly take place on a starship, it would only be the laziest of journalists who would think that the later show was a carbon copy of its predecessor. Strangely enough though, an episode in the first season called “Duel’ which guest stars Isla Blair in an outfit that left a strong impression on my younger self, tells a story that is entirely similar to Star Trek’s very own “Arena”, so maybe they do have a point.

Over the course of the second half of last year (due to a few rather happy confluences of online special offers and sales) I rewatched the entire 52 episode run of the series (this is what I used to do in the wee small hours before I started my morning at work in the days before I discovered blogging – I may well feel inclined towards returning to it once the tales from Lesser Blogfordshire finally dry up completely…) and found myself being rather pleasantly surprised by it, much as I was during my “Survivors” marathon a few months earlier. Yes, a lot of it still looks rather cheaply made, and some of the design work leaves a lot to be desired, but, all in all the series tells some cracking little stories, is populated by interesting and engaging characters and contains just enough that is spectacularly arch to remain, at the very least, entertaining thirty years later.

I had acquired the first year fully expecting to be bored rigid and sit in my armchair mocking scornfully and berating myself for the waste of yet another fifteen quid or so on utter tat, so I was completely surprised to find myself becoming more engrossed and wanting to see more of it. I even enjoyed the supposedly rubbish fourth year more than I expected to, although I found the allegedly superior third year was not quite as much fun as received opinion would have had me believe. I suppose that it just goes to show that you should ignore what people “reckon” and find out for yourself.

The eponymous character of Roj Blake, whose “Seven” (or eight or six) they are, is played by Gareth Thomas, “Stocker’s Copper” to anyone in the know, but also seen in the ITV children’s classic “Children of the Stones” which, alongside “The Owl Service” and that public information film about playing near the water provided some of the spookier memories of a generation. The fact that “Blake” is a rebel (and is also a – even if only on trumped up changes - convicted paedophile by the way, which is unusual for the lead in any British drama series) trying to bring down the accepted (if brutal and dictatorial) regime should put him on the outside in 1970s culture, but instead he is the hero in our drama.

Blake doesn’t even appear much in two entire years of the four year run, the actor having departed the show at the end of year two. The “Seven” would go on bearing his name without him being there (which used to provide an easy laugh for Terry Wogan on his radio show) which seemed to be another trend in BBC drama series of those years, as “Howard’s Way” carried on long after Maurice Colbourne who played the title character of Tom Howard had died. The living, breathing Blake, however, does make brief cameo appearances at the end of each subsequent year, once as part of a veritable jigsaw puzzle of a cunning trap, and once as things reach their fateful, unforgettable and truly unexpected climax on the planet of Gauda Prime (a planet, incidentally, you might be disappointed to learn is not made of cheese).

The sneering Kerr Avon is played, with an air of mounting insanity and a knowing curl of the lip, by Paul Darrow, who presents a performance that is almost the dictionary definition of arch. Avon doesn’t even appear in the first episode (a historically significant omission a bit like Judge Dredd not being in issue one of 2000AD…) but eventually moves up from disloyal and untrustworthy sidekick to centre stage, becoming the leader of the gang when Blake does his disappearing act. Over the years he develops a sort of double act with the master lock-picker called Vila, played with easy good humour by Michael Keating who, alongside Avon is the only other one of the original “Seven” to make it through to the last episode. Interestingly, “Blake’s 7” remains one of the few ongoing drama series outside of soap opera where regulars would bite the bullet on a regular basis. Spoiler previews of the second series made much of the fact that one of the regulars was going to be killed off during that run, but it might have been a more unusual story to tell you that some of them might survive.

You can’t talk about “Blake’s 7” without at least mentioning the ruthlessly ambitious Supreme Commander (and later President) Servalan, played with lip-smacking vampish relish by the utterly charming Jacqueline Pearce. Introduced half way through the first year and teamed up with the sado-masochistic poster boy that was the leather clad, eyepatch-sporting, Space Commander Travis, she would shimmy her way about the galaxy in a series of preposterous evening gowns and become a thorn in the side of our little band of rebels for much of the remainder of the show’s run, pausing on more than one occasion to have a quick snog with one or other of her arch enemies.

Servalan never had much time for Jenna and Cally, the female members of Blake’s crew. Jenna was the curvy, big haired, blue-eyed blonde one, whose taste in skin-tight sequinned clothing turned the heads of many a teenage boy. She disappeared at the same time as Blake, although they were allegedly ‘just good friends’, and eventually turned up in “Emmerdale”. Cally was her stick-thin ‘interesting’ alien friend with mysterious telepathic powers, who hung around for a year longer than Jenna, and always had a slight air of the writers not really knowing what to do with her and nowadays reminds me of at least one of the roving reporters on BBC Breakfast.

As the cast was ‘killed off’, replacement cast members were brought in to make the numbers up to the required seven (or eight or six…). Some of these were more successful than others, and one or two looked slightly too wholesome to be feared rogues, bandits and outlaws. There was an early role (which she’d probably rather not be reminded about) for the now very well respected actress Josette Simon as Dayna, the orphaned weapons expert that was written rather inconsistently and who eventually ended up just sniping at lovable old Vila’s latest antics. Glynis Barber also did a year as the gunslinger Soolin before picking up more familiar weapons and becoming the glamorous half of “Dempsey and Makepeace”.

Any inaccuracy in the numbers were generally rounded up or down depending upon whether you counted the presence of a number of talking computers as bona-fide members of the crew. The “Liberator” was run by the all-knowing brown ball-in-the-wall known as “Zen”, and the crew were also helped and hindered in equal measure by the smug, tetchy, know-it-all “Orac” who was acquired at the end of year one and resembled a perspex box full of Christmas tree lights. When the crew jumped ships to the slightly less sleek “Scorpio” during the last year, Zen’s duties were fulfilled by its obsequious and grovelling equivalent known as “Slave”. These were all skilfully voiced by Peter Tuddenham, a radio actor of great renown.

A very "cool" spaceship...

Before acquiring “Scorpio”, however, for the first three years, the “Seven” went about their business in the “Liberator” which was almost the epitome of the very cool spaceship.  Sadly, and to be scrupulously fair, the series also had an awful lot of fairly dreadful ones. Mat Irvine, possibly the most well-known among the BBC Effects Wizards, once said that he always regretted showing the “Swap Shop” audience that he’d made some of the spaceships out of things like old hairdryers, but I actually think that that particular design has the air of genius about it.

A surprisingly "hot" spaceship...

How many is that? Have we reached seven things yet? Well, if not, here’s the clincher. Episode three of the first series (“Cygnus Alpha”) has a guest appearance by the mighty Brian Blessed, an actor whose mere presence alone justifies the greatness of any series. This time he’s playing a high priest who wants to become a god and, as ever, things do not work out to plan. Anyone who considers Mr Blessed’s acting to be less-than-subtle, mostly based on their exposure to his role as Vultan in the Dino De Laurentis version of “Flash Gordon” (Ah-aah!) should see some of the fine work he did in black and white “Z-Cars” if they get the chance, and some of the finest acting I have ever seen ever is his death scene as the Emperor Augustus in “I Claudius” which is a truly impressive and mesmerising performance.

So there are probably many more than seven reasons there to enjoy “Blake’s 7”, but I’m sure that nothing I can say will convince the six of you reading this that it was anything other than a cheap and shoddy science-fiction show made at the back end of the 1970s, so perhaps instead I can persuade you to form a rebellious band of outlaws and bring down to earth the evil Federation that so blights our lives nowadays. All you need is big hair, a set of curling tongs to wave about with menace, and an infinite supply of sequins and you can quite possibly change the entire universe.

Are you with me…?