Symbolic Forest

Mike Troubled Diva recently wrote about how it feels to be middle-aged at gigs, and suchlike. I’m not middle-aged yet, but I know how he feels, because on Saturday night I went to my first gig in ages, at Leeds Met SU. It felt like: I was the only one there over 25.

We hid up on the balcony, with a small crowd of other late-20s people, and watched. Sometimes I wasn’t watching the band as much as I was watching the frenetic crowd, moshing away. They were here to see a local band, Hadouken!,^* who (if you believe the NME) are part of the New Rave scene. Personally, I think the NME is only ever interested in puns on “New Wave”, but there you go.^** I might not believe in the existence of New Rave as a genre myself, but the crowd definitely seemed to. The crowd of 17 year olds were wearing outfits last seen in 1989, and covered themselves in heavy trees of glowsticks. After a few minutes they started to get bored,^*** and threw them all at the stage; or broke them open to drip and spray each other with luminous toxic goop.

The band themselves: well, they were energetic. Rapping with guitars, and very very loud. It definitely got me bouncing; but when my own attention span occasionally started to fade, I began to wonder: does “rapping with guitars” really deserve its own genre name? And whatever did happen to Baxendale, anyway? But then, I started bouncing again.

* the exclamation mark is part of the name, I think.

** Hands up who remembers the NWONW scene!

*** “I don’t know, kids today, no attention span at all…”

Keyword noise: gig, Grindie, Hadouken!, Leeds, live music, music, New Rave, NME, review, Yorkshire.

When I was in my early teens, one of my favourite books – even though I didn’t really understand half of the plot at the time – was Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, by Douglas Adams. With a plot which was cobbled together from two separate Doctor Who stories, and which relies on the works of a poet I’ve never even read, it can be a little tricky to understand.^* When I heard that it was going to be on Radio 4, I had to listen, purely to see if it was adaptable at all.

They haven’t done badly so far, to be honest, although the plot has been twisted round in various ways that, with one episode to go, don’t quite make sense yet. On the other hand, they haven’t quite pulled off updating the story to the present day – some parts would have been much better as a 1980s period piece.^** And they did leave in at least half of my favourite joke.^***

This isn’t meant to be a critique of the series, though, especially as it still has one episode to go. This is something I’ve spotted, which Radio 4 have been quiet about so far. Radio 4 are also going to dramatise the other Dirk Gently novel.

There’s a small clue on their website: it refers to DGHDA as the “first series”. Really, it’s a standalone book – the only characters apart from Dirk who pop up in the other book, The Long Dark Teatime Of The Soul, are Miss Pearce and Sgt Gilks. What makes it so obvious, though, is that quite apart from the plot-based changes, the producers of the current radio series have made other changes to DGHDA, adding references to tLDTotS to link the two books together. I’m also pretty sure they’re going to change tLDTotS to add in characters from the first book, too, to try and present them as a cohesive pair.

Whether this will work or not is another matter. Bookwise, The Long Dark Teatime Of The Soul is rather patchier and had more plot holes than Dirk Gently; although one of the things they both have in common is that small asides, or scenes which appear to be a quick joke, can turn out to be an important plot point later on.^**** I’m enjoying the radio Dirk Gently so far, but I’m not completely convinced, and I don’t know why its adapters thought they had to do more to link the books together. Maybe I should write to them and ask.

* Particularly, you have to know that Coleridge’s Kubla Khan is, as far as poems go, pretty short. Wikipedia has a very thorough and spoiler-filled plot summary, which explains most of the trickier bits.

** How many people still use tape-based answering machines, instead of voicemail? How many people still refer to “car phones”? A story with a plot revolving around people leaving messages on answering machines, and stealing answering-machine tapes, doesn’t really make sense if you move it forward twenty years

*** “There’s no such word as herring in my dictionary!” Unfortunately, unless I wasn’t listening properly, they missed out the setup line which comes many scenes earlier.

**** At the start of Long Dark Teatime Of The Soul, Dirk had recently set up work as a fortune-teller, in drag, to get some cash in – but gave it up when everything he said, however outlandish, came true. It seems like a throwaway comic scene, at first – but in actual fact it contains important hints to what is going on later in the book.

Keyword noise: BBC, adaptation, Dirk Gently, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Dirk Maggs, Douglas Adams, dramatisation, Harry Enfield, modernisation, radio.

A quick news story from last week: A chap called Dr Brendan Kelly has analysed 20 random medical romance novels and spotted that they are all written to a very similar template. If you’re a romance novelist and want to bash out another, all you apparently have to do is change your characters’ names, and you’re set.

Dr Kelly noted that the heroes of these novels are generally handsome, arrogant surgeons with a traumatic past; you don’t tend to get handsome, arrogant psychiatrists popping up, for some reason. Never mind about psychiatrists, though. Where are the handsome, arrogant IT technicians? Never mind saving the lives of patients with mysterious illnesses just when you thought all was lost – where are the romance novels about data rescue and mysterious ARP caching? The world needs, clearly, an IT romance novel. I’ll let you know when I manage to get a couple of scenes down on paper.

Keyword noise: books, Brendan Kelly, fiction, romance.

“That’s two hours of my life that I’ll never get back,” said one of the women in front of us, as we left the cinema^* I thought she was being slightly unfair. The film had only been 87 minutes long, after all.

Besides, I’d rather liked it. We’d been to see Black Sheep; it was, like me, rather silly; but played very straight all the way through, which is always the best sort of silliness. The implausible B-movie science was glossed over, and the actors put on their Most Serious Faces as they fought to defend themselves against mutant killer zombie sheep.^** Some of the characters were caricatures, and some of the foreshadowing was very obvious indeed, but sometimes, in this film, that’s the sort of thing you want to happen.^***

One thing did puzzle me: why, when all the sheep in all the fields started to become blood-crazed man-eating carnivores, did noone really seem very surprised? Now, for the hero, it’s explained: he suffers from a fear that one day sheep will do exactly that. But all the other characters also behave as if it’s a normal, everyday crisis, something they’ve been expecting all along. Maybe everyone in New Zealand is like that. Maybe everywhere though the islands, at the back of people’s minds, is the thought: one day, the sheep will start fighting back.

* “We” being, of course, me and Mystery Filmgoer as usual.

** These were Modern Biological Zombies – not dead, just rather ill; which does make them rather easier to despatch, with none of this “you must remove the head or destroy the brain” trickiness.

*** When you see a big, round, deep hole, with a sign next to it that says: “Warning: Offal Pit”, you know what’s going to happen later on.

Keyword noise: Black Sheep, comedy, film, horror, movie, mutant, New Zealand, review, sheep, zombies.

Every time I’ve been to the cinema recently, I’ve had to sit through a trailer for newly-released film *Evan Almighty*. And it makes me slightly uneasy. Because – if you’re lucky enough to have managed to avoid the thing – it’s a lighthearted family comedy based on the story of Noah And The Flood, from Genesis. God comes down to Earth, visits an innocent politician, and tells him to build an ark because he’s decided to do the whole flood thing again.

Read that again. It’s a lighthearted family comedy, where God comes down to visit a politician, because (going on what happened last time) he wants to warn him that everyone else on the planet is going to be killed in the biggest natural disaster you can imagine. Did anyone even think at all about this film before it was made? Did they get beyond “comedy, sequel, some Bible story that everyone vaguely remembers”?^* To my mind, the idea of writing a comedy about God breaking the only promise he ever made to the whole of mankind,^** and apparently planning to kill everyone on earth apart from an American politician, is a little … well, perverse.^***

I assume – not having seen the film – that not everyone (apart from the blessed family) gets killed at the end. Surely no Hollywood studio is going to release a big summer comedy where everyone on earth apart from a handful of people dies at the end? Drama, maybe, but not comedy. All in all, it sounds like a bit of a mess. Does God turn out to be nice in the end? Does he say: “Aw, I was only kidding. I just wanted you to learn how to be a better person.” How many people are killed by the flood that I did spot in the trailer? I really don’t want to find out.

* Although most people forget the bit at the end where Noah gets drunk, and one of his sons is forever cursed for seeing his drunken father’s tadger.

** Because it – the promise that “I’m not going to kill you all ever again” – was made before the Tower of Babel incident, when God scrambles everyone’s brains and makes possible the Tourist Phrasebook – so, as everyone was rather samey, there wasn’t any one Chosen People. And he never does kill everyone all together again – after that, he limits himself to smiting one city at a time.

*** And not in the good way

Keyword noise: Biblical, Christianity, comedy, Evan Almighty, film, god, Judaism, Noah, politicians, religion, unfunny.

We’re stuck.

Twenty years or so ago, there was a series on the telly. It was on ITV, and was probably made by Yorkshire. It was written by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall – they who did Billy Liar, and the TV adaptation of Worzel Gummidge – and it was about Lilliputians living in Victorian England – two men and one woman. There were books based on the same characters, too, and somewhere in the house I have copies still. They were hidden by children – I remember one scene from the telly where the children’s father took up photography, and one from the book where he got his hands on an experimental vacuum cleaner.

But we’ve completely forgotten what it was called. And the internet is being no help at all – Waterhouse and Hall are just too prolific, and the books of the series don’t seem to be listed anywhere. Does anyone have an idea?

Update: feather boa left a comment on the original, comment-enabled version of this post, to say:

Argh. I feel like it was called something like The Voyage of the…

Ah, here it is The Return of the Antelope. Yay.

Hurrah!

Keyword noise: childrens tv, costume drama, fantasy, help needed, ITV, Keith Waterhouse, Lilliput, Lilliputians, period drama, television, telly, The Return Of The Antelope, tv, Victorian, Willis Hall, Yorkshire TV.

…about Neverwhere: it features Tamsin Greig, star of a lot of the best sort of telly, in one of her very first roles – according to IMDB, the first in which they managed to spell her name right in the credits. She plays the reason why your fear of goths^* is justified, and I barely recognised her, until she started speaking.

* should you have one, of course.

Keyword noise: BBC, Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere, Tamsin Greig, television.

Classic mid-90s fantasy series Neverwhere has recently been released on DVD. As I hadn’t seen it since it was first shown, of course, I had to buy a copy.

I’ve read the book a few times since, most recently last summer, so I was familiar with the plot, the characters, the occasional slight fantasy cliché in the writing.^* What I’d forgotten, though, was just what a ten-year-old BBC drama series looked like. I’d forgotten all about the shot-on-video look and the slightly strange sets.^** It didn’t detract from the story at all – and, in many ways, it was a very innovative series – but, as a nostalgia trip, it just goes to prove how much TV production has changed in the past ten years, compared to the thirty before that.

* Such as the fantasy character not understanding real-world idioms, particularly someone introducing themselves with both their full name and a nickname, the fantasy character thinking that this is their full literal name. As in the title of this post.

** In particular, Neverwhere has one startling yet absolutely typical BBC studio-production set. The entrance room in the Portico family house: a bare white space, so that no walls are visible, just white background, with pictures of the other rooms of the house suspended at random positions and angles. As a set, it is as close to “typical BBC fantasy” as you can get; you can imagine it being created at any time in the past fifty years.

Keyword noise: BBC, fantasy, Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere, television.

On the radio this morning, in between interminable political stuff: a piece about conservation, and particularly about conserving a hay meadow near Cambridge. I’m not sure what was particularly important about this specific meadow – I was too busy driving to listen properly – but I did pick up the presenter waffling on about the natural landscape.

The meadow is next to a major road. “You can hear the traffic on the A14 behind me,” the presenter said, “showing just how we’re encroaching on natural landscapes like this.”

Which is utter and complete nonsense! A meadow is, frankly, about as unnatural a landscape as you can get. It’s entirely as unnatural as, say, Langham Place in central London. I’m glad the conservationist she was interviewing didn’t agree; presumably he knew better. There is a general impression people have, that if we let the land revert to a “natural landscape”, it would end up looking something like a Constable painting; it’s entirely false, and that’s exactly why landscapes such as traditional hay meadows have to be carefully managed if we want to preserve them.

Keyword noise: conservation, countryside, landscape, landscape management, man-made, natural, rural.

Two thoughts about last Saturday’s Doctor Who.^* Firstly: if your name’s Lazarus, and you become a scientist, you must feel completely stereotyped. “I’m going to have to invent some cunning way to cheat death,” you’d say to yourself, “otherwise everyone’s going to take the piss.”

Secondly: why is it that all shape-shifting multi-limbed reptilian monsters, on shifting back into human form, can never quite get the neck right? Every time they shift, there’s always something in the neck, or around the collar bone, or somewhere, that doesn’t quite snap back into place; they have to wiggle their neck like a chiropracter to get it all to fit together properly. You’d think they’d have learned by now.^**

H says that when Doctor Who does this, it’s a “homage to the genre”. I say it’s a dodgy cliche.

* Yes, I think slowly.

** Incidentally, has anyone heard The Queen making that sort of neck-clicking noise? Tony Blair? George W Bush? Because if noone ever has, David Icke must definitely be talking rubbish!

Keyword noise: BBC, David Icke, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Mark Gatiss, monster, reptilian, science fiction, television.