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

Didn't quite do anything proper for Hallowe'en or November 5th this year, though there was some dressing up and you can hardly fail to see some fireworks over what's now more like Guy Fawkes' Fortnight (Guy Fawtesnight?) - that's the problem with festival creep, where you can't even quite fix on one of the adjacent weekends as the consensus alternative. Dear world, please stop getting festivals wrong, ta.

Accidentally let my Netflix subscription run over after Breaking Bad was done, but regardless of how the US version has a lot more stuff* there was still plenty I'd been vaguely meaning to watch on the UK site. The Friends of Eddie Coyle, for instance, with Robert Mitchum exuding the shabby grandeur of a moth-eaten lion, or the gloriously absurd and none-more-eighties Lifeforce, in which a mission to Halley's Comet unwittingly unleashes a zombie plague (complete with Prefab Sprout posters visible in the background as they devastate London). The most notable casting is probably Patrick Stewart, who (SPOILERS) gets possessed by the sexy naked lady space vampire and so proceeds to do some gaying up (although it's shot in a way which would probably disappoing anyone going into the film just for that). Seven Psychopaths is the thoroughly meta and possibly even better follow-up to the delightful In Bruges, and more meta still is A Film With Me In It, which manages a surprising amount of bloodshed for something starring Dylan Moran. The Cabin In The Woods, on the other hand, I'd dismissed as a slasher movie with a twist (and Whedon dialogue), until I heard one recommendation too many to ignore. First surprise: the twist isn't, it's there from the start. And what that enables, and what lies behind it - that's utterly ingenious. Add me to the list of recommendations. Which is not something I can really say about Don Johnson in Harlan Ellison adaptation A Boy and his Dog; post-apocalyptic black comedy it may be, but I found the whole thing just a little too queasy, and not always in a manner that seemed intentional.

Watched elsewere:
Ian Hislop's dramatisation of the story of trench samizdat The Wipers Times. As with Blackadder, the horror of the Great War always hits hardest for me when it's presented with the gallows humour of the Tommies intact.
Doctor Who: The Web of Fear - a story which, this time last year, I would never have expected to see in my lifetime. And it stands up a lot better than most classic Who that runs past four episodes, helped by the claustrophobic, iconic location - running down a corridor feels so much more satisfying when that corridor is part of an identifiable tube station. Victoria is still a dreadful companion, mind.
Idiotic horror White Noise: The Light, which xandratheblue and I watched on the simple grounds that Katee Sackhoff and Nathan Fillion would be suitable casting to play us in any film of our incredibly exciting lives. Sadly, it turned out to be a bad Final Destination riff - but with more dodgy theology! And nonsensical numerology! And lots of RUNNING REALLY FAST.
Repo Man, which remains as profoundly peculiar and entertaining as ever (and I can't believe it never gets mentioned as an influence on Lebowski). The Blu-ray extras are deeply rum, and include Harry Dean Stanton talking about life for 15 minutes before singing 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat', and Alex Cox showing the deleted scenes to the real-life inventor of the neutron bomb.

And on the big screen - Thor: The Dark World. Certainly not the best of the Marvel films, but I find it oddly reassuring that they can stumble now without falling flat on their faces, and still produce a fairly entertaining picture which will fill up a cinema with casual viewers (you can tell them from the geek hardcore so easily, because they're the ones who don't even stay for the first credits scene, let alone the very end). Also, pleasing show of public right-mindedness in the way that everyone in the auditorium, regardless of class or race, agreed that the family with a screaming baby should take it the fuck out of the cinema - and rather than grumbling passive-aggressively, fetched ushers to enforce that verdict. See! Superhero films encourage viewers to take more responsibility for making the world a better place.

*Such as Bob's Burgers, which I saw round the house of a friend who's hacked the relevant bits of science to watch the US menu. Like its fellow H Jon Benjamin animation Archer, this is allegedly on Freeview channels, but gets thrown away in graveyard slots. Baffling, given how funny both are at their best. NB: do not look for H Jon Benjamin's face online; you'd expect him to be less attractive than Sterling Archer, but I think he may even be less attractive than Bob.

This one's going to get geeky, so let's start by establishing that yes, I do sometimes engage in more socially well-adjusted activities. Well, if you can count going to the V&A (they have so much pretty stuff, but what is it *for* when lots of that stuff would be equally at home in the British Museum?), or attending a Britpop night in a Geneva t-shirt, or hanging out with fugitivemotel and at one stage uttering the phrase "Oz Season 7, starring Wizbit". And OK, at the party I attended on Saturday I did have a conversation about the Sisters of Mercy's much-better-than-other-bands-called-Sisters cover of 'Comfortably Numb'. So yes, it would seem I am in fact a hopeless case. Oh well.

It was September when I last posted a general State of the Comics Union moan. Since when, not much has changed. I've dropped an increasing number of series which, even if I vaguely want to read, I know I'll never want to reread. More are coming - when Astonishing X-Men and Ultimate Avengers reach the end of the current stories, they're out, because they're not bad little superhero romps but nor are they worth more than a quick read courtesy of the library and, if I've mis-guessed what the library will get in, I'll live. Buffy was in line for the same treatment after the sheer galling idiocy both of the identity of the season's Big Bad, and of the manner in which said identity was revealed (online via fake leak, not in the comic itself) - but Joss Whedon wrote the most recent issue himself and reminded me that it was seldom the big stories which made Buffy so much as the little moments, and this was they. Of course, the next arc is by Brad Meltzer and is going to have a Mature Readers warning, between which and his previous work we can doubtless expect some gratuitously rapey mess which gets me right back to quitsville.
But there's just so much coasting going on - and miserable coasting at that. Both DC and Marvel claim that a bright new direction is coming once the grim'n'gritty carnage of current events is done, but I've heard it all before (and I'm barely been reading anything from DC in ages, they're in such a joyless tangle). At Marvel what seemed like a brilliant idea for a while (businessman Norman Osborn aka the Green Goblin talked himself out of responsibility for his crimes and ended up effectively running the country, as the very rich always seem to manage - ring any bells, bankers?) has just been plodding on and on and remorselessly on. And now it has finally reached its endgame - Osborn and his forces attacking Asgard, home of Thor and his fellow gods, which J Michael Straczynski's run on Thor had relocated to Oklahoma. But the comic telling this story, Siege, feels from its first issue more like it's going through the motions of amending the status quo than like the epic story it should be. Brian Bendis, the writer, has previously had problems with the pacing in the middle acts of his big event comics, and this one was shorter so should have been better, but it's as if he's cut not the padded kidriff, but the kick-ass opening.
There's still good stuff, of course; of the titles I praised in September, Ultimate Spider-Man and The Boys are still delivering. The Walking Dead gets better and better, and I don't even much like zombie stories. Vertigo, previously responsible for Sandman, Preacher and The Invisibles among others, has become relevant again with Mike Carey's The Unwritten and Peter Milligan's Greek Street, two very different examinations of the unexpected legacy legends and fictions can have in the modern world. But, will either of them last? The economics of comics are so horribly marginal, it can never be guaranteed; both writers have a string of prematurely-cancelled titles behind them. Word of another casualty has just come in; Phonogram's Kieron Gillen has been doing some lovely work on a space-based screwball comedy X-Men spin-off called S.W.O.R.D., but weak sales mean it ends with the fifth issue. Meanwhile, he's trying his best on Thor but the aforementioned Straczysnki run left him with having to pick up from such a moronic start point (Latveria Is So Bracing!)* that he's really swimming against the current.
Another writer I usually think of as reliably great, Grant Morrison, is in more position to be master of his fate and work, but isn't really putting it to best use. His Batman & Robin hasn't maintained its strong start, getting bogged down in themes he's already done better elsewhere; I feel a real lack of anticipation for the imminent Joe the Barbarian; and as for his Authority...well, OK, it's not really his anymore. It's Keith Giffen scripting Morrison's plots, because Grant stormed off in a huff. And Giffen's a competent enough writer, usually, but it turns out that he can't write British. So Morrison's most thoroughly, heartbreakingly British lead since Greg Feely in The Filth now talks about leaving things in his other 'pants', and his first 'apartment'. The issue of The Boys set amidst the baguette-jousting inhabitants of the village of Franglais had a better ear for dialect than this.

And as if that little diatribe weren't bad enough, today the main thing lifting me out of the sense of 'meh' which comes with this horrible sinus-y cold is the storming victory my new-look Tyranid army managed in last night's game of Warhammer 40,000.

*I love Babylon 5 - mostly - but JMS' comics career has been one frustration after another. Either he loses the plot, or he falls out with the publisher and storms off, or in extreme cases, both. People told me his Thor was excellent but having been burned before, I waited. And I finally read the first two collections recently and lo and behold, this was one of the cases of 'both'. There's a lot to love: instead of talking in cod-Shakespearean English as previous writers so clumsily attempted, his Asgardians speak formally but coherently; it's the themes which echo Shakespeare now, with the prince uneasy on his father's throne, the adviser who whispers poison in a good but naive ear. And the abiding question: what do gods do when their legend is over? If they survived Ragnarok, what now? Yes, in a sense it would have been a better theme back in those days when we were told we'd seen the End of History, but it's still a fascinating one.
However. There are scenes in post-Katrina New Orleans and war-torn Africa which demonstrate that Straczynski hasn't learned a damn thing since his legendarily bad Amazing Spider-Man issue where Doctor Doom stood in the wreckage of the World Trade Centre and wept. And, though I've yet to read the third volume which fully explains how he got to where he left the series, I've seen enough to know that yes, what looked like a stupid idea which Gillen was obliged to pick up, was also a stupid idea approached from the other end.

It's a week since I updated - well, except to have an IT spasm* - and I'm not entirely sure why, because it's not like I've been short of things to report. I've seen my first of the new generation of 3D films, Coraline, and been impressed with how well the technology works, and how it doesn't just feel like a gimmick - whichever industry suit it was who said that if it wasn't quite the new sound, it was maybe the new colour, was for once not talking hype crap. I've finally been in a boat on Finsbury Park lake, and am glad to know that I can still just about row. I've found an opportunity to take direct action against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad while en route to Richmond of all places, where I then received an eye-opening tour of the local attractions. I've played Necrons. I went to a revivalist goth club where my trousers melted - not that I was wearing them at the time - and it became clear that apparently all female goth vocals of the Batcave period either were, or sounded like, Siouxsie. I've discovered a splendid little venue within walking distance which seems to have a full programme of rockabilly-type stuff, because the Deptford Beach Babes were doing their surftastic thing there. And I've started the new Glen David Gold, which is thus far every bit as thrilling and beautiful and capacious as Carter Beats The Devil, itself one of the very few books I'm happy to recommend to pretty much anyone.

Further to recent discussions of SF writer Alfred Bester, I was surprised to learn while looking up something totally different that not only had he written for comics back in the 'Golden Age', but he created immortal supervillain Vandal Savage, something of a role model of mine. And the only other comics note which springs to mind is that while I don't think Garth Ennis' Boys spin-off Herogasm merits quite the appalled reception it got at yesterday's picnic, it does put one of my reservations about the parent series at centre stage. This is a world where superheroes are, almost without exception, utter bastards behind closed doors - degnerates, pawns of corporate interests, murderers, the lot. Our protagonists are the shady squad who keep them in check. Well, that's a good premise. But these heroes never seem to do anything useful - there are no real threats against which they serve. All we've seen so far is a rather cackhanded attempt to intervene on September 11th 2001. And I think that goes a little too far, and detracts from the strength of the story. If all the alien invasions and such are wholly fraud, spin and cover-up, it becomes rather one-note. I'd be more interested in the story of superpowered individuals who really are Earth's last line of defence, and also complete bastards. More dramatic tension than if they're solely and entirely tossers.

*Speaking of which, I was watching some early Buffy yesterday, for the first time in ages (and don't they all look so young?), and there was a terribly sad bit where Buffy asks Giles whether life gets easier, and he asks if she wants the truth and she replies, as per the episode title, '"Lie to me". And we were discussing this and I concluded that it doesn't get easier per se, but it's a bit like getting used to a horribly buggy piece of software - you gradually learn more of the tricks and workarounds, and get more adept, but of course this just makes it even more jarring when some new glitch arises.

...which is probably for the best given the state of the Victoria line. I know they've stopped early closing, and thought they were supposed to have pretty much finished the 'upgrade', so why on two nights of three this week has the Northbound had a seizure?

I am worryingly certain that that bit on Screenwipe where Charlie Brooker threatens to fvck Anthony Head will have been found arousing by some people I know.
(Didn't Head look weird in those Gold Blend ads, though? Sort of undead, but not in a good way. If ever there was a man who aged into his looks...)

I've no idea whether the Survivors remake is actually any good, but watching it while wobbly slightly hallucinatory with a freak super-flu a bit of a cold certainly inclined me to take it seriously. And it's doing the idea of Paterson Joseph as the Doctor no harm at all, not with him playing a well-prepared loner reluctant to get emotionally involved*. That second episode, though - ( spoilers )
Coincidentally, the last Who book I read was Lance Parkin's forthcoming The Eyeless, in which the Doctor, alone, encounters the few self-sufficient survivors of a global cataclysm amidst the crumbling relics of a depopulated world. Not that I've read that many of the new series books, but as one would expect from Parkin, this is by far the best - it has that sense of mattering which they've tended to lack, perhaps because it can be set between seasons and story arcs, perhaps because it implicitly ties in to the Time War stuff which seems destined never to be addressed head on.
And by way of John Simm's stint as the Master, and Peter Capaldi as Caecilius, I reckon I can just about allow a segue from that to The Devil's Whore, the first part of which didn't quite convince me. It felt too much like a dramatisation for the benefit of history lessons, as against a genuine drama - even if the budget was somewhat higher, and a schools project might have omitted the Satanic tongue-waggling. I've not yet seen Our Friends In The North, so I don't know whether Peter Flannery's projects are always quite this polemical; rumour has it that this was meant to be 12 episodes long but funds only stretched to four, which would certainly explain some of the infelicities, because thus far we seem to be getting rather clumsy Cromwellian propaganda, and I'm not buying that even with Dominic West as Cromwell. Tell me, why is it that aside from playing wonderful Jimmy McNulty, he so often seems to get lumbered with History's Biggest Gits? If he's not selling out Sparta to the Persians in 300, he's this warty hypocrite war criminal...

Those of you who expressed an interest in Self Non Self last time I mentioned it, be aware that it returns tomorrow. I intend to be there, drinking away any remains of my cold.

*Although he never shared the screen with Rose's dad, or Martha. Possibly for the best.

I never wanted an MP3 player - I worried about being cut off from the world by it, losing my radar and becoming one of the bovine obstacle people. But offered one free, I could hardly refuse, and I'm finding it slots into my life pretty well. I still don't wear it all the time - not if I'm reading something complicated on the Tube, not if I'm somewhere especially crowded, not if I'm somewhere with its own music, whether accidental (a park) or deliberate (a bar). I keep it low enough to hear the world (and it would hurt to have it loud enough to drown out the Victoria Line), but that's still high enough to soundtrack me. Which means I have to be careful what I put on it, because not every soundtrack is the hero's; Robyn Hitchcock on Upper Street at night made me feel like the first victim in an oblique slasher flick. Nor have I quite adapted to hearing people I know singing quite so intimately. But if nothing else, it was the perfect accompaniment when I went along for a spot of disaster tourism the day after the Great Fire of Camden; I'd still yet to work out how to choose tracks properly, but what should come on as I considered the smoking shell of the Hawley Arms but 'This Is How You Spell "Hahaha We Destroyed The Hopes And Dreams Of A Generation Of Faux-Romantics"'.

I finished this weekend with a nagging sense of underachievment, which is foolish really; if I lazed around a lot, that was largely down to ruin resulting from two grand nights out, and I still managed to get the last 200 pages of Gravity's Rainbow read. I'm glad I read it, though I'm not sure if I could intelligently say much about it yet; perhaps my back brain will have finished processing the torrent of information in a month, or a year, or three. Or not. The problem with which this leaves me is, what to read next? I like a change, but GR covers so many bases, what does that leave from my To Read pile? The Glass Books Of The Dream-Eaters is another kinky trans-European conspiracy romp. John M Ford's The Dragon Waiting is another unreal epic of European war, while The Unfree French will take me right back to the moral destructiveness of the Second World War. Even Tim Moore's fluffy Do Not Pass Go is a psychogeography of London, like Gravity's first section - albeit by way of Monopoly rather than V2 impacts.
So far I seem to be attempting to read them all. I'm not sure that's wise.

Next time somone complains about BBC3, set Being Human on them. Reviews mostly seem to be comparing it (unfavourably) to Buffy, but I suspect that's because it has supernatural creatures in a modern setting without quite being horror, and most reviewers are lazy. Impressively, for such a crowded field as the modern vampire story, it managed within an hour to establish a tone that was all its own, but if I had to reference it I'd say it's more Ultraviolet meets Spaced. The conclusion was rather naff, but that was the only mis-step; I loved the balance between the domestic comedy and the menace (the latter especially coming out in that description of the afterlife).
Note also that it's picked up a star and a writer from Doctor Who, already shaping up as the Kevin Bacon of 21st century British TV.

Just returned from the Bankside 12th Night celebrations - unfortunate that the thing which best gets me in the relevant festive mood is the one marking season's end. It's vastly more popular than last time I went (I think I missed last year), but I still managed half-decent views of the Green Man's arrival and the wassailing, and was in a pretty good position for the mummers' play. There's a nagging sense in my mind of a half-formed connection between this and Popular last night - the Number One single as a British folk tradition, perhaps? - but I don't want to force it. Suffice to say, both were great fun. Highlight of Popular: 'Welcome To The Black Parade' into 'Boom! Shake The Room' (it may have a 100% strict concept, 'God Save The Queen' controversy aside, but how many nights can honestly equal that variety?). Highlight of 12th Night: the blithering arses next to me as the Green Man sails in justify their yapping by noting what I would otherwise have missed - there's a fragment of rainbow in the sky above us, and it's on a curved cloud. In other words - the sky smiled.
Post-mumming, took a look at the Tate's crack. I've seen better. Still, rather that than Catherine Tate's crack.

Don't know why I never got round to seeing Die Hard With A Vengeance sooner, given I love the first two, but the delay has made parts of it queasily prescient. Shots of the twin towers looming as New York is attacked I could have expected, but the real shocker...you know the plan Jeremy Irons and his accents are supposed to be undertaking, to beggar the USA? Dubya's pretty much managed that, hasn't he? And done it all while speaking in almost as silly a voice. Still, with Barack Obama's campaign regaining momentum, for now there's still hope. And in the Andes, two of the USA's hyper-rich are helping to fund an eye on the sky which will not only increase the sum (and accessibility) of human knowledge, but could well save us all from apocalyptic meteor impact. Isn't it odd how the merely super-rich seem content with vulgarity like diamond-studded mobiles and £35,000 cocktails, but the hyper-rich seem to rediscover altruism and vision? See also Warren Buffett.

A pretty quiet week for comics, but there were excellent new issues of Buffy (the first slow, character-centred episode of Whedon's Season Eight, but worth the wait) and Moon Knight. I still don't know what part of writing Entourage has equipped Mark Benson with a knack for brutal vigilante thrillers, but between his Punisher annual and this, I'm impressed. Just a shame about the art. Otherwise, it's Warren Ellis' week; Ultimate Human may not be the obvious title for a series marketing would probably rather have had as Ultimate Hulk Vs Iron Man, but fits the story Ellis has started telling, one of the happier vehicles for his recurrent fascination with the nature of posthumanity. Thunderbolts, on the other hand, is leaving the smart politics aside for the moment and concentrating on insanity, treachery and Venom eating people. Which also works.

publicansdecoy reckoned that by walking the streets of Greenwich on a Sunday afternoon, dressed as Noel Coward and swigging milk, I had crossed the line into actually looking like a crazy person. Or at least I think he did, but maybe he was just my imaginary friend and I was actually talking to myself.
(The Coward outfit isn't something I was wearing specifically to lose at Scrabble in; I'd been at a party in Lee the night before. That being Lee the slightly scuzzy district of South London, not a young gentleman, though I can see how my being dressed as a noted homosexualist might be construed as misleading. Not a bad party, either; you can probably get some measure of it just from the phrase "Swingballs of Fire". Plus, two people asked if I was older or younger than my sister, which given she got ID'd earlier in the week is really saying something)

There are aspects I don't buy in the set-up of bleak infertility thriller Children of Men. If the human race has been sterile since 2009, surely immigration would be less of an issue, not more? Isn't breeding one of the main engines both for immigration (people wanting a better life for their children) and for the fear of immigration (the indigenous population terrified of being outbred and overwhelmed by the fecund Other)? And for all the terror attacks and prison camps, I found the elegiac vision of humanity winding down to be strangely soothing - especially since there was no sign of sterility affecting the animals. It's a marvellously directed piece, though - everyone talks about the impressive extended shots, and they are good, but what grabbed me was the determination never to let it get too glamorous or Hollywood, even down to having someone as impeccably cool as Clive Owen get stuck in flip-flops for half the film, just to bring him down to Earth a bit. Also, Michael Caine in one of the roles where he actually acts, which is always pleasant; I'm glad he seems to be getting back to that a bit more.

And I suppose we can segue from there via the far darker infertility thriller Y: the Last Man to Brian K Vaughan's first issue of Buffy. His cardinal sin has always been a tendency to over-research and then drop in undigested gobbets of that - here, this manifests as a Buffy in which every piece of dialogue goes for the show's verbal pyrotechnics, forgetting that it never attempted to keep that pace of patter going *all* the time. Still, it has ( minor spoilers ) and of course lovely, lovely Faith. He'll do.
(In other comics news, Dan Slott's final issue of She-Hulk comes up with an explanation for continuity errors which is approximately 100 times better than DC's Superboy punches, and at least 1,000 times more fun. And why do hauls of Mike Carey comics always seem to turn up at the same time as Murcof albums?)

For all the Guardian's sins, I love the Guide - the single best listings source available, it's a masterpiece of formatting. It is pretty much why the Saturday edition is the only paper I still buy. Except this week, it has on the cover Ian Brown, plugging an article inside in which he expounds in his usual fvckwitted fashion on the good ideas the Taliban had, &c. Now, even were it not for the contents of that piece, I wouldn't want his ghastly mug staring out at me all week, would I? People say he looks like a monkey but I have never seen a monkey which looked so hateful, so churlish, so unutterably stupid, so plain ugly. Normally, under these circumstances, I'd tear off the cover. Except the back page of the mag inside is an interview with perhaps the only man in Britain more purely loathsome than Brown - George bloody Galloway.

Fiddy Cent, not content with losing horribly in his chart battle with Kanye, makes an even bigger tit of himself by insisting Kanye must have cheated. That's right, Fiddy, just keep digging - this pathetic wheedling is just the sort of thing to destroy your misbegotten cred even with the sort of knuckleheads who think that getting shot makes you cool. Although he has just announced the 'postponement' of his European tour, so maybe he's not wholly without honour. Either way, he loses, and music wins.

Have finally seen the film Nick Cave scripted, The Proposition. As I had been led to expect, Australia's wilderness had been filmed impeccably, forming a perfect setting for a typically Biblical Cave story (as in one of the bits of the Bible whose story is primal and powerful more than it conveys anything which even the loopiest fundamentalist could take as a moral lession). However, like every film I have ever seen to feature Ray Winstone, it would be significantly improved by the removal of Ray Winstone.
Some other actors who would have given a better performance as Captain Stanley:
Lance Henriksen
Michael Chiklis
Pierce Brosnan
Jack Davenport*
Nick Cave himself
Edward James Olmos
Michael Caine
Damn near anyone except Ray cocking Winstone.
Which makes it rather a shame that the one piece of casting already done for the next Hillcoat/Cave film, Death of a Ladies' Man, is...Ray sodding Winstone.

Taking the evidence of the new Mitchell & Webb radio sitcom pilot, 'Daydream Believers', in conjunction with the patchy current series of Peep Show, they've finally stretched themselves too thin. I suppose most everyone does in the end.
(Speaking of Peep Show - that ad shown during Friday's episode, in which a fairly attractive girl is in the bar with her own drunker self, and the tagline "Make sure you like what you see"? It's intended as an alcohol awareness thing, but I kept expecting it to turn into a variant on the Buffy episode where Evil Willow's after the normal, not-yet-gay one)

In one of yesterday's bowling matches I was, in third place, the highest-ranking male. Which I'm sure must say something vital and current about the obsolescence of gender stereotypes, though its wider applicability is perhaps doubtful.

*This option also playing up the Pirates of the Caribbean resonance the story already possesses.

I move that, if London does get its own satellite, it should be christened Zone 8.

Buffy's 'Season 8' has started reasonably well; hopefully now Joss Whedon is back on home turf he'll be better able to avoid the pacing problems that have turned his X-Men into such a slog. I like that he seems deliberately to be using effects and plots which fit with the world established on TV, but would have been prohibitively expensive to film; playing to the medium sounds obvious but a lot of transfer writers forget it. Speaking of such, for all that I love Babylon 5 it's becoming increasingly hard to defend Straczynski's comics work - taking charge for the middle stretch of Ultimate Power he gets about half an issue of comedy out of Thor's archaic speech patterns, not allowing himself to be obstructed by any piddling little details like Ultimate Thor not actually talking like that.

Even if you've never heard of Danger: Diabolik you may well have felt its influence, whether through the Beastie Boys' 'Body Movin'' video or Grant Morrison's Fantomex. But neither of them can quite prepare you for the oddity of the original. Filmed in Italy and clearly attempting to cash in on the swinging superspy trends of the period, it's set in a strangely nebulous country where the currency is dollars, the ambience continental (including a Morricone score) and the Minister of Finance played by Terry-Thomas. The action and violence oscillates between the genuinely dark and the knockabout A-Team style, and Diabolik himself is played in a strangely inexpressive manner, perhaps more through the limitations of lead actor John Phillip Law than any conscious decision. It comes across more as a rushed rip-off than a deliberate artistic strike for strangeness - and yet somehow that works. A fascinating curio.

Is anybody actually going to the Billy Mackenzie tribute show on Wednesday? It does look good, but ultimately...it won't be Billy, will it?