'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

On Tuesday, I went to the Houses of Parliament to see disgraced MP Phil Woolas give a talk which had nothing to do with his disgrace - he came across like a pretty nice bloke, in fact. Some tangents of the discussion related to that old, infuriating question - why do so many members of the working classes vote against their own interests? Why does the Right always do so well at getting traction for lies, from the Zinoviev letter to climate change denial? And at the heart of the answers, in that nagging way which you know is on the route to a much bigger answer nobody can quite find yet, was the suggestion that the Right has better imagery. Not in the SS uniforms sense; just that, particularly for working class women trying to run a household on a shoestring, the idea of national budgeting as being kin to household budgeting makes intuitive sense in a way the paradox of thrift never will.
And then afterwards, I came home and watched a documentary about bottled water, looking at how firms make billions selling people something that tastes the same as the stuff from the tap (more or less - I've known one or two areas where the tapwater does taste a bit iffy, but never one where it tastes worse than Volvic).
Both these things represented good work by smart people. But really, given neither of them had any suggestions on how to change the problems they were anatomising, I found a more satisfactory analysis in the past few weeks' Batman comics by My Chemical Romance* video star Grant Morrison. This is not unprecedented; when everybody was spaffing over No Logo, I was unimpressed because it was pretty much just the footnotes to one issue of Morrison's Marvel Boy miniseries, in which our alien hero fights Hexus, the Living Corporation. It's a truism to describe a writer as fascinated by ideas, but where Morrison is especially good is in seeing the connections between language, magic and branding. To briefly summarise what he's been doing with Batman, and anything which is a spoiler here has either been widely advertised or was bloody obvious anyhow: Bruce Wayne got thrown back in time by the evil New God Darkseid. He was presumed dead, so Dick Grayson, the first Robin, stood in as Gotham's Batman. In fact, Bruce was fighting his way back through time to the modern day as part of Darkseid's wider plot. So far, this is just a moderately diverting adventure story. But. Darkseid's wider plot is about the use of ideological weaponry, "hunter-killer metaphors", killer ideas. Twisting what Batman represents - the triumph of the human will - into a poisonous, negative force (easily done, when you consider what Triumph of the Will so often means). Turning all our efforts against ourselves. And having seen this, when he gets back to the present day Bruce Wayne does not do the obvious thing and simply become Batman again. He leaves Dick as Gotham's Batman, and decides to start a global Batman franchise; Morrison has ditched the rest of the comics to start a new one, Batman Incorporated, in which Bruce Wayne will tour the world** looking for these Batmen. Because Batman was always about branding, wasn't he? Bruce Wayne as a vigilante got a serious beating, but then that bat came through the window, he became Batman, and since then - in spite of having no superpowers - he's basically invincible. So when evil is everywhere, why not expand that brand?
Of course, how one applies any of this in the real world, I still don't know. I wish I did.

The other new comics of interest to crop up lately both involve work from Team Phonogram. Gillen's got a new X-Men spin-off, Generation Hope, which will hopefully last longer than his last X-Men spin-off, the delightful, tragically short-lived S.W.O.R.D.. And McKelvie - whom even Marvel editorial are now calling Kitten - illustrates Warren Ellis' back-up strip in imprisoned psycho supervillain miniseries Osborn. I read Freakangels online, but this is the first Ellis comic I've read on paper in a while, because he's a terminally unpunctual sod and both titles of his I read are more than a year overdue for another issue. And the main thing it made me think, especially with Jamie drawing, was that Warren Ellis now reads like a man trying to write like Kieron Gillen.

Beyond that, Peter Milligan's Extremist has finally been reprinted as part of Vertigo's anniversary celebrations. Whenever people misconstrue the name and assume that the Punisher is some kind of S/M superhero, I have to explain that no, that's the Extremist, except that's long out of print. Except now it's not! Hurrah.

In less happy news, the latest bunch of people complaining about a film getting a superhero wrong, are making themselves look even more like morons than usual because it isn't. Pity's sake, there was even a ginger Green Lantern before there was a black one. And as for 'the only black superhero', well, yes, if the cast of the Justice League cartoon in its early, less good seasons is the complete roster of superheroes you know, but in that case, shut up until you get 1 x Wikipedia. Hell, War Machine was in Iron Man 2, hardly an obscure production.
Oh yeah, and it turns out that even when, staggeringly, he manages not to fall out with the publisher - J Michael Stracynzski is incapable of finishing his promised run on a monthly comic! Anyone else remember when he used to be a genius? I'm starting to wonder if I dreamed it.

*If anybody lets me DJ anytime in the foreseeable future, I am totally going to open with 'Na Na Na' and its intro, because it is one of the year's best pop songs. However, thus far I am not loving its parent album. As with The Black Parade, MCR have become a fictional band to free themselves from perceived constraints, which is fair enough. But whereas the Black Parade were a goth Queen, which is to say bloody brilliant, the Fabulous Killjoys are a pop-punk band. Something of which the world is not short and, as a rule, they don't have that many great songs.
**Despite the timing, there seems to be no cross-marketing with the Batman Live World Arena Tour; I'm reading the damn comics, and I only learned of the tour from ads on the Tube.

Went to the Bowie Bar last night and it was atypically packed - plus, they'd run out of cider (which is a bit rubbish, but it happens) without putting an empty glass on the pump handle (which is never, ever OK, because it wastes customer and bartender time, and anyone failing to mark an empty pump in this or a similar way should never be allowed to work in a pub ever again, and that's the moderate version, because at the time I generally think in terms of limb removal) so we decamped to the Defoe, which is a fine and spacious pub and long may it prosper. En route, I saw a tortoise clambering around the muddy bed of the empty New River extension. Was it wild? Had it escaped? How does a tortoise make a break for freedom anyway? But other than that, I've mainly been watching films:

A Very British Coup was actually a TV miniseries, but on DVD it has no episode breaks, so who's counting? Ray McAnally (get 1 x deed poll, dude) stars in a fantastical tale of an outlandish alternate 1980s in which Keith Allen has hair and a thoroughly leftwing Labour party wins a landslide election victory. But, like any good alternate universe story, everything after that one crazy premise follows with the utmost plausibility. It helps that, in 1988, TV was obviously less scared - so unlike The Thick of It, the Labour and Conservative parties are named rather than implied, and while the vile cable and newspaper baron may not actually be called Rupert Murdoch, they barely attempt to disguise him either. As crazy as much of the action now seems - part of the reason Harry Perkins becomes PM is that, after uncovering massive malfeasance in the financial industry, a load of bankers ended up with gaol sentences, rather than the bail-outs and bonuses we now know they'd receive - this feels like it could have been the real world, right down to those tire-track mugs everyone had back then. In many senses even the coup itself is just a lens to magnify the real fate of every PM or President elected on a wave of hope - the loss of momentum, the end of the honeymoon, the tiredness. And the way a rumour, no matter how untrue, can cripple a politician - well, just look at the Swiftboating of John Kerry, or the ludicrous accusations Obama can never shake to the satisfaction of large (if idiotic) swathes of his nation.
A last crazy detail: among the advisors on this tale of a Labour leader who abandons off the record briefings, whispering campaigns and the like, the credits list one Alistair Campbell.

Miranda (not the sitcom, though I saw an episode at the parents' and it's not as bad as the trailers suggest) should be an excellent film. It has Christina Ricci and John Simm as the leads, supported by Kyle McLachlan and John Hurt. Even the minor roles have the likes of Tamsin Grieg and Julian Rhind-Tutt; drop them into a tale of love and library closures, and you should have a cult classic, right? But while Simm has the best hair I've ever seen him with, Ricci is looking unsettlingly like a pug, and the plot hangs interesting incident on a skeleton that's simply too generic. Also, the music is by our old friend Murray Gold who, perhaps inspired by the presence of a Twin Peaks star, seems to be trying to emulate the Bad Angel, and not doing it terribly well. Why is this man still employed?

The Sweet Smell of Success is one of many films, most of them very good, which I checked out because the Flaming Stars nicked the title for a song. Tony Curtis plays the impossibly handsome, sharp-suited and near-totally amoral publicist Sidney Falco, roaming the night of quite the most archetypal screen New York I've ever seen, trying to get himself back in the good graces of JJ Hunsecker (a mesmerisingly powerful Burt Lancaster), whose newspaper column seems to be regarded as the word of god. I suspect that most journalists want to be that columnist, possibly combined with Woodward and Bernstein (Hell, give that mixture a bowel disruptor and fancy shades and you've got Spider Jerusalem) and if the film trips over itself a bit when it has to resolve the plot, the journey there was still well worth it.

Another film I'd been meaning to see for ages: Network. Like They Live, I wonder whether its anti-TV vitriol is still too much for it to be broadcastable? Strange if so, because if Network has one message it's not anger - even if it is the "I'm as mad as Hell and I'm not going to take this anymore" speech which everyone quotes. No, it's how the Spectacle will assimilate anything, ( spoilers, for a 1976 film, but still ) Just look at all the money Rage Against the Machine made Sony last Christmas.

The Sunday wobble about which I've posted previously wasn't the whole weekend, of course. There was a leaving do for rosamicula, which doubled as a welcome home for dawnage and whatever Rick's LJ is, as if in obedience to some hitherto unknown Law of Conservation. At the Walrus, which I've always wanted to check out simply for the name, but which I usually only pass en route to the more prosaically named Horse. I'm not sure what it would be like as a winter pub, but in summer, it has the garden to be a godsend. Then another new drinking destination for Saturday's birthday festivities, Bourne & Hollingsworth, which exists somewhere between wartime speakeasy and provincial tea-room, and serves cocktails in teacups, and where I made my first attempt at MP3 DJing, for a given value of 'DJing' and certainly not one which merits posting a setlist, before heading on to DSM where I remember very little beyond the presence of the DBB. I blame the Laundry novels for any current addiction to TLAs.

The sketch which made me laugh most in last night's (as ever, admittedly patchy) Mitchell & Webb was Caesar. But the ones which most impressed me were the one where they bit the Apple hand that feeds, and especially the opening self-criticism session. As against Peep Show, their own work sometimes gets accused of a certain traditional, cosy quality. Good to see them rolling with those punches and coming back with this level of savagery.

When it wasn't giving me the fear re: space, one of the things I like about that Ray Bradbury collection* I'm reading is that, for all that it came out through a science fiction imprint, it doesn't feel obliged to be all SF. I'm only a quarter of the way through, but if a story doesn't need to involve a spaceship or a time machine, then Bradbury doesn't throw one in just to keep within his genre; sometimes all you need is two men meeting on a beach. As I may have mentioned once or twice before, I'm not too keen on genre boundaries, which is why a project like the Neil Gaiman co-edited anthology Stories interests me. If you know McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, this is basically a less confrontational, more entryist approach to that. The cover, instead of a masked lion-tamer, is just contributor names - it's almost as studiedly uninformative as the title. And where Chabon's introduction railed against "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory short story", Gaiman simply extols the joy of the story in which the main question is - "what happened next?" The two share a couple of authors - two of the big beasts, in fact, Michael Moorcock and Gaiman himself, both among the main reasons I'm reading either collection in the first place. Beyond them, Stories makes a deliberately wide-ranging selection. There are other people I actively want to read - Gene Wolfe, Joe Hill. There are people I've vaguely meant to read - Michael Swanwick, Walter Mosley. Then there are people I'd never have thought to read, some reviewers' darlings - Joyce Carol Oates - and some big sellers - Jodi Piccoult. The clever bit being, of course, that for any reader, each of those four categories is going to include a completely different selection of names. In the interests of fairness, I'm reading every story, and if I've not been convinced to investigate the oeuvre of any of the writers I wasn't already interested in, nor has any of them been quite as bad as I expected (though there is something of a fixation on stories of elderly siblings). Obviously, part of me hopes that the people coming in for Oates will be rather more impressed by Gaiman...but the world's not quite that satisfying, is it? And if nothing else, I will probably read some more Mosley. Maybe even some Swanwick, though I was put off by the self-evident falseness of one of his central conceits: apparently characters in books don't read books. Even leaving aside the bookish heroes of MR James, Lovecraft and Borges, what about Dorian Gray, Don Quixote, Scott Pilgrim?

*I put the non-Bradbury part of Monday's post into the 'who do you write like' meme currently prowling Livejournal, and it told me Edgar Allen Poe. I was quietly pleased, but then realised I was missing a trick, especially when I saw Bradbury himself was one of the answers, and entered his contribution instead, but apparently he writes like Douglas Adams.

Eight days since I updated? It's not as if I haven't been doing stuff, much of it fun; I'm just not sure a lot of it would make for an account anyone else wants to read. Consider diggerdydum drinks, for instance, where without the pseudo-fez pictures I'd just be left with a series of recursive in-jokes of which "something for the Richard Dadds" is probably the only one that bears repeating. And the only issue of the day to exercise me centres around the arrival of .xxx, a domain expressly designated for filth. Now, any smart company has all their suffixes registered, don't they? .com may be your brand, but you buy up .net as well, and .co.uk, and so forth. But how about this? Who will register tesco.xxx? disney.xxx? earlylearningcentre.xxx?

So, what is there to report? An old colleague's book launch on Friday (strange how any home movie of a certain vintage now acts as an instant signifier for nostalgia, almost regardless of content), then on to the final Cross Kings AFE. A venue I'd hated beforehand, but have come to forgive even its appalling murals simply by association with this night. It's only fitting for a Stay Beautiful-inspired event to be forced into something of the same wander around London, I suppose, but I hope it can take its atmosphere with it better than SB sometimes managed.
Went for pizza on Saturday. In the great Finsbury Park pizza war, I have always sided with Porchetta, simply because they do quattro formaggi better, but they've just had an ill-advised refurb and installed a load of blaring, glaring plasma screens, so we figured Pappagone was worth another try. And we got outside tables, and the pizzas were yummy (I went fiorentina instead), and everything was fine...and then they rolled down their own big screen. Quiet, at least, but being outside put us behind and to one side of it, and trying to signal to the staff inside felt like being in a ghost story where you're trapped in a mirror. Took 15 minutes to get the bill. Fvcking footballism.
Sunday was a Brontosaurus Chorus show, with some of them supporting themselves as Dinosaur Senior, the dino-masked and -themed covers band. Both fine sets, ditto the astonishing-looking Pussycat & the Dirty Johnsons, who thought I looked bored but how can one be when there's a girl with her hair done up like ears stomping around tables in a catsuit, screaming? I just have a jaded face. All this in the Bloomsbury Bowl, but not the one I knew - turns out there's another bar, the Kingpin Suite, which is nearly as bling as the name suggests; they have Baywatch pinball and even the ventilation ducts are mirrored.

Finally, someone's talking seriously about getting rid of Tube drivers. Let's start by ditching the people who are paid to get on the DLR, nick the front seat one carefully positioned oneself to grab at Bank, and then pretend to drive just as one was doing oneself before being so rudely interrupted.

Another local comedy preview this week, which I think it would be fair to say was a little less polished than the first, plus two gigs with a Georgeson connection; the Soft Close-Ups, on a stage covered inexplicably but beautifully in confetti, fit a cover of Mr Solo's 'Astrology' into the set, alongside a does-it-count-as-a-cover of Luxembourg's 'About Time'; the rest of their set is as expected, but it's not as if they play often enough for these songs to lose their sparkle. David Devant themselves, on the other hand...maybe it's like Larry Niven's concept of mana as a finite resource, but I find myself wondering if all the belief the World Cup is taking up means less iconic energy to go around elsewhere, because until the encore they are merely 'very good', as against the usual 'magical'. Perhaps part of the problem is that I have seen in the pub beforehand that Foz? has a swanee whistle, a kazoo and a duck call, but none of them make a noticeable show during the gig. It's like having a gun on the wall in the first act and then not firing it by the end of the third. Except quackier.

Spent yesterday in the centre - and without sighting a single elephant, though I did happen upon Postman's Park at last. The goal of the expedition, though, was the Hunterian Museum. Supposedly it's a resource for surgical education, but most of the stuff there can serve no purpose except freaking people out. The disembodied circulatory system of a baby, in particular, will follow me through my nightmares, and there was a syphilitic cock in a jar whose eye follows you around the room. Some of it is simply random - a jar containing a tapir's anus, another with the nipple of a horse - while other relics are celebrity underskin, like Jonathan Wild's skeleton or half of Babbage's brain. Hideous, yet wonderful. Very London.

On Monday, as you may have seen in the papers, I went to Stationery Club (although obviously the paper is incorrect in its assertion that I was drinking beer. As ever, it's left to the bloggers to correct Old Media's mistakes). I'm not even that fussed about Post-its, really. But a live videochat with one of the inventors? That's a big deal. There was one point I'd have liked to raise, but I didn't really formulate it properly. Still haven't, in fact. But it goes something like this: there was a Spider-Man story years back, addressing the issue of why someone who could concoct that web fluid without proper lab facilities should be working hand-to-mouth as a photographer when he was clearly a brilliant chemist. So Peter Parker goes into a chemical company and they say, sorry, there's no market use for an incredibly strong adhesive which disappears without trace after an hour. Now, that's self-evidently nonsense, but even if it weren't, the example of Post-its - a use being sought out for a very poor adhesive, creating a product which, if unnecessary, is very lucrative - would disprove it. I suppose I was simply interested in whether Geoff Nicholson was aware of that. Instead, I just ended up with Post-its on my face, my pint and (in one weak visual pun) a heart on my sleeve.

Tuesday: the debut Proper London show by Bevan 17 or, as they're ludicrously claiming to be called in what is obviously a sop to steve586's rampant ego, If.... The fourth full stop there was to end the sentence, I'm not sure whether that's correct form in such cases or not. Normal practice on liking a band is to compare them to other bands one likes - and I suppose there is a little One More Grain in there, not that I have any reason to believe any of Bevan 17 have heard One More Grain, few enough people did. But mainly I am reminded of bands I don't quite like, fixed. I always thought the Fall might be quite good if they weren't fronted by a bus station tramp; here it's exliontamer instead, who is eminently presentable and well-spoken. Or Stereolab - I like 'French Disko', but otherwise found them just a bit too Gallic and inert. If they weren't, they might have ended up somewhere near here. They cover John Cooper Clarke with a Scott Walker intro, and get away with it. They come up with the second riff on PIL's "anger is an energy" that I've heard in one afternoon, and even though I really like Pagan Wanderer Lu, Bevan 17's is better.

And last night I played a frankly shambolic game of 40K, but the less said about that the better. So instead I should probably record how much I loved Michael Moorcock's Gloriana, or the Unfullfil'd Queen, a dialogue with Spenser that anticipates Camille Paglia's thoughts on Spenser as precursor to de Sade. I knew Moorcock and Angela Carter had something of a mutual appreciation society going, love across the genre barricades, but even given the pantomime matriarch Ma Cornelius, this is the first time I've read a Moorcock book which I can imagine Angela Carter writing - "the palace glares with a thousand colours in the sunlight, shimmers constantly in the moonlight, its walls appearing to undulate, its roofs to rise and fall like a glamorous tide, its towers and minarets lifting like the masts and hulks of sinking ships". Not that I don't love his outright fantasy and SF, but this would be a great introduction for those more sceptical of such things. So long as they don't mind a fair amount of rather abtruse filth along the way.

Watching The Mary Whitehouse Experience again in 2010, it's amazing how well it's aged. Yes, some of the topical jokes were now totally lost on me, let alone younger members of the audience*. Others have been overtaken by events - who knew at the time that John Major really was a secret shagger, albeit with Edwina Currie rather than Marilyn Monroe? But overall...yes, it's still funny that M Khan is bent.

Saw Scarlet's Well for the first time in ages last night. They're a much quieter, less rambunctious band than they used to be, but still with that core of British strangeness which snared me; they've not stopped telling tales of the strange little town of Mousseron, it's just later at night there now. The support were appropriately gentle too - Pocketbooks were twee in the best possible way, while Vatican Cellars, who for some reason I had expected when I heard about them to be spiky and noisy and a bit Paper Chase, are more gently Bathers or Dreamers or someone else on whom I can't quite put my finger. Then home to finish off Carnivale - in so far as one can ever finish a cancelled series. The end of its second season did, though, feel like a natural ending, in a way that the cut-off point of, say, Deadwood did not. Any further seasons would have been a very different show, and given the portentousness and occasional hamminess was already more noticeable in the second series than the first, very possibly a weaker one.

Not that I do festivals myself, but I note that Glade, which I recall some friends rather liking, has been cancelled, in part because of police costs. Topical, given a festival organisation recently stated ""We are anxious about the use of a scoring system for [the cost of policing at] public events that lumps all music festivals together, without any reference to style, size or location. The score informs the level of charge and the guidance sees music festivals given the highest possible score - considerably above that of any football match.". This in spite of the considerably greater risks associated with policing the soccer. See, this is why I hate footbalism. Not the game in itself, a harmless little park pastime in its proper form. The special treatment it receives, the way it's allowed to deform transport networks, TV schedules, police budgets. Still, I have some hopes that with the passing of the New Labour regime, that horrid obsession politicians had with being seen to like footballism may also have ended.

*People can now legally drink who were not born when The Mary Whitehouse Experience first aired. Terrifying.

Luther: Stringer Bell is a maverick London cop. He's only just back from a suspension, and that only because his boss, who has an unconvincing accent and delivers generic expository dialogue, likes him. This doesn't stop him from eg flipping out when he finds out that his estranged wife (Susie from Torchwood) is knobbing the Eighth Doctor. It also means that he's going a very strange way about catching the villain of the piece, a young lady who is clearly meant to be alluring but in fact looks way too much like late-period Michael Jackson. She's a physicist as well as a bad'un, so we get lots of portentous dialogue about dark matter and black holes written by someone who half-watched a science programme once and took Mitchell & Webb's lazy screenwriters as a masterclass. It's as if, having starred in the most thoroughly believable and unique cop show ever made as String, he decided that for variety's sake he was going to go for the most ludicrous and identikit. For make no mistake, this is ludicrous; it's not just a character trait in Luther, the villainess also sets up the most ridiculous confrontations, just for the sake of Big Dramatic Scenes and with no reference to her supposed character or aims.
And perhaps I'm just oversensitive because I've seen too many Wire alumni reduced to playing crappy bit parts, but Idris Elba reduced to playing an angry black man - albeit an intermittently very smart one - makes me a little uneasy.
On the other hand, I may just be angrier than necessary because I watched my first Newsnight of the electoral season and, as well as the expected bastards lying to Paxman, it featured a bizarre semi-dramatised interlude with appearances by Will Self (fair enough), ballet dancers (eh?) and Scouting For Girls (even more objectionable than in their natural environment).

I've got a suede jacket which I love but hardly ever wear, because it needs really specific conditions - a fairly cold day, but also one with no chance of rain. Which would appear to be exactly the conditions you get if Spring is interrupted by a massive volcanic eruption. I hope we don't get a reprise of the Year Without A Summer, but for now, I'm rather enjoying this little apocalypse.

Went to see a band called Thee Faction last night; the backstory appealed to the Devant/Kalevala fan in me. They say they were a socialist R&B band who, in 1985, ended up trapped in the collapsing Soviet sphere - they can't reveal the full details under the 30 Year Rule. They have onstage ideological arguments, and the photocopied fanzine interview handed out on the door (worth the price of admission on its own, even if said money hadn't gone to an MS charity) has them getting into a punch-up over Althusser. The only problem is, I'm not sure if the schtick is quite enough to sustain a ten song set (including the bourgeois pantomime of an encore). Which is a pity because the best of the songs - especially 'I'm The Man' and 'I Can See The Future' - are very good indeed.

Obviously any film which the Mail described as featuring "one of the most disturbing icons and damaging role-models in the history of cinema" was going to be worth seeing. And even while I was reading the comic, I suspected Kick-Ass was going to work better as on screen. But then I started hearing about various changes they'd made and thinking, hang on, I'm not so sure about this. Turns out that with one exception, I had nothing to worry about - and it feels great finally to have a film of a specific comic - as opposed to a character, distilled - where rather than telling people that they should read the original, I can instead honestly tell them that they needn't bother. Because the changes aren't random, or based on some studio exec's supposed wisdom; they were made carefully and with an agenda. The comic shows you why nobody's tried to be a superhero; the film asks instead. Which is a much more dangerous message, but also a stronger one. Audience sizes aside, the comic was never going to inspire a real Kick-Ass; I think the film just might. ( spoilers ) Hell, if I'm going to pick one hole in the tech, it's that a film set in late 2007 has the main online communication be via Myspace.

At times like this I am reminded why I was so excited about Obama: "A landing on Mars will follow. And I expect to be around to see it."

I think with the end of the fourth series, and the departure of the second cast, Skins and I have reached the end of our road. It wasn't that this was a bad series; the running theme of how much the kids were like their parents, even though they'd never admit it, was handled wisely and well, and never hammered home. And last night had some wonderful moments, from Panda's song to Emily's fingers to ending it where and how they did. I just can't face getting invested in another bunch of teens if it's going to be obligatory that one of them dies every time (and maybe my school was unusually safe, but we did not have a 12% mortality rate in the sixth form). It probably doesn't help that whereas last transition we had the then-intriguing Effy to carry us across, presumably this time we've only got Freddie's tiresome sister. I hope it carries on, and I hope it does well, because it's a better and truer portrayal of teenage life than we ever got. But I don't think I'll be there.
Also - there was one moment where I really thought it would turn out that Effy's Cthulhoid visions were true and there really was Something outside the world, trying to get in. That would have been amazing.

Not the sort of show I'd normally watch, but a girl I know was on Snog, Marry, Avoid last night, and what a hateful, homogenising little programme it is. Not being an idiot - unlike the other two victims - she gave as good as she got, but I was still flabbergasted by the presenter's cultish insistence on how wonderful natural was. This on a show which pretends that a computer is doing the makeovers. But then, even before that, you're a hypocrite if you're treating natural as inherently good on television. Or with language.

My problem with Tim Burton's Alice is not just that it's not Tim Burton enough,but that it's not Alice enough. Yes, the latter is made into a plot point - is she the right Alice? Has she lost her muchness? - but this feels like after the fact justification for the need to give her that most hateful of Hollywood must-haves, an Arc. The real Alice didn't have an arc because she didn't need one, she was just a sensible girl surrounded by very silly people, who told them so. And in giving her an arc, Burton has also been obliged to give Wonderland (or here Underland, which is appropriate given it doesn't feel very wonderful) a plot. An utterly generic epic fantasy plot - essentially the film Narnia (which had already been compromised by the inappropriate use of elements of Middle Earth) mixed with a few elements of Oz. I kept expecting a reversal or a twist on this well-worn, misplaced formula. Is it a spoiler to say I didn't get one?
(The trailers were good, though - Matt Smith has a perfect face for 3D)