By All Means Bother The Peanuts

Just returned from Rock'n'Roll, which as far as I'm concerned cements Tom Stoppard's place as *the* playwright of the last half-century. But before I say more than that, I need time to ponder it properly, for unlike too many of his supposed colleagues, he doesn't provide easy meat.

For reasons I can't wholly fathom, the new Doctor Who companion, Martha Jones, will be appearing in a book before she's made her TV debut. But having read 'Made of Steel', at least it doesn't exactly spoiler anything significant. Indeed, being one of the 'Quick Reads' series for simpletons, it's entertaining enough for half an hour but ultimately doesn't do a great deal of anything at all. The plot and dialogue are passable, about on a level with the more generic episodes of new Who, and Martha comes across as Rose Mk II, another feisty young lady - but then, Terrance Dicks was never exactly a master of characterisation. At least it doesn't have any of the outright idiocies to which RTD's reign has been increasingly susceptible, but it seems I must yet wait for the new TV series to form any real opinion on Martha.
(Meanwhile, over on the radio the current Paul McGann series has finished with another Cyberman story - which, like much that had come before, seemed like a hybrid of the new TV series and what Big Finish had done before. It wasn't without its own flaws, but the basic concepts were strong, and again, at least none of the stories were plain stupid)

Because shortsighted privatisation just hasn't gone far enough: "The future of radio microphones - used at concerts, sporting events, festivals and theatre shows - is under threat from new proposals from Ofcom. The media regulator is considering auctioning off the spectrum they operate on to the highest bidder, as part of the digital switchover."
Elsewhere in the vast field of governmental idiocy, this picture encapsulates why I will never vote for Ken Livingstone again, and indeed now hope to see him begging and broken in the gutters of the city he presumed to drag along on his slide into naive political grandstanding. And as for another of his cursed legacies, apparently Olympic transport plans rely on the "working assumption" that, on top of normal holiday departures, an additional 8% of Londoners would leave "to get away from the Games". The same Games which we're told are a great draw, are also now meant to drive an exodus? Plus, "MPs were particularly concerned that contingency plans for things like power failure, security alerts and signalling problems on the railways were not well developed." Because obviously these issues very rarely cause problems on London transport, right?

I don't play computer games very often anymore, so bear in mind my frame of reference isn't huge, but Marvel: Ultimate Alliance is bloody brilliant. A selection of heroes from the obvious to the obscure, with unlockable alternate outfits, all manner of fun powers, and a totally ridiculous plot existing solely so you can charge around the Marvel Universe hitting things. Want to send half the Fantastic Four, Deadpool and Elektra to beat up a bunch of rioting Atlanteans? You can. Want to lead Thor and Moon Knight on a religiously insensitive and needlessly violent rampage through a Shaolin temple? It's here. Want to ponder briefly why rubbish commie Iron Man knock-off Crimson Dynamo is meant to be in Asgard, before concentrating on the more important business of kicking his face off? Of course you do!
The most surprising thing for me (aside from getting stuck in corners and walking into slashing blades on account of above-mentioned lack of practice) was that I seemed to spend most of my time choosing to play characters I've never read in a comic, specifically Deadpool and Moon Knight. Though in Deadpool's case, the machinegun was definitely a factor.

It's Only Rock'N'Roll But I Like It

Stoppard's Rock'n'Roll, then; first things first - as with Hot Fuzz, if you don't like the previous work from the same source, this isn't going to change your mind. But as with Hot Fuzz, if you don't like the previous work from the same source then you are wrong in the head. Yes, Stoppard has always been a playwright of ideas - but those who suppose that this must exclude emotion from his work clearly possess neither. True, many plays of ideas have cardboard stereotypes spouting leaden exposition at each other, but the problem there is not that they are plays of ideas - it's that they're written by incompetents. And normally ideologically-motivated incompetents keen to prove a point, whereas one of Stoppard's greatest gifts is negative capability second only to Shakespeare's. The play opens in Cambridge, 1968, with Max the English Communist don supporting the USSR's 'fraternal assistance' for Czechoslovakia, while his Czech student Jan prepares to head home to defend the Prague Spring from the invading tanks. How easy to make Max into an idiot, or an outright evil man! And how pointless, and how artless. Instead Max has dignity, conviction and some great lines - as does Jan, and as does almost everyone else in the play (the Czech communist apparatchiks are perhaps one-dimensional, but not even Shakespeare could give every herald and attendant lord a personality). And from here we weave slowly through to 1990, after the Wall has fallen - each shift in time accompanied by the eponymous rock'n'roll. The music's view of liberation is contrasted with communism's, dialectical materialism against poetry's idea of consciousness, the true outlaw rock of Czechoslovakia's Plastic People of the Universe against the bands they imitated but who, living in the West, could never be rebels quite so truly. We see how shifts in Czech policy dishearten the radical and radicalise the disinterested, how Western Communists respond, how time and rock take their own tolls too. There's a strand about the Great God Pan, and that terrible voice proclaiming he was dead, and Syd Barrett, which I've still yet to fully grasp - I think it's talking about the end of eras, and the gap between mortal rockers and their divine aspect, and the pagan heart of rock'n'roll, but at least some of that I think I brought with me, rather than finding in the play. Then again, Stoppard's been shaping my own obsessions since I first read Arcadia, so who can tell anymore? He does what he's always done so well - he doesn't resolve any conflicts, but he brings them into clearer focus, and shows the hidden strands which link them to each other and to the poor weak humans doomed to enact them. He shows us how the hopeless, unconsummated love affairs of nations for ideologies aren't so very different to those between two people, and how sometimes it's as simple as everyone wanting what they haven't got (as if that were ever simple). And I should probably stop there, because I once wrote a dissertation on the man without even scratching the surface, and even that (if I do say so myself) was better than most of the available literature on him, which more often than not is just plain wrong.
(Though it's worth noting that while I didn't get the initial Hollywood cast, with Rufus Sewell and Brian Cox, I was there for the playwright not the actors, and in any case was possibly more excited by getting Dominic West and Nicola Bryant aka Peri from Doctor Who)

I think that'll pretty much do me for today, but via one character complaining of modern Britain that "This place has lost its nerve", I shall leave you with the 'request' that "State schools should avoid sex education classes and swimming lessons during Ramadan to cater for the needs of Muslim pupils, says the Muslim Council of Britain" (a more appropriately outraged version of which can be found here - not that I have much respect for the Express, but where the MCB is concerned their penchant for hysterical exaggeration is neither necessary nor noticeable). Both have a spokesman for the Department of Education responding that the Department will read the report in question "with interest" - as opposed to, say, "with hooting derision and a large gin", as should be the case.