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

So, since last posting, I've been to new places. Kensal Green, land of the golden Nando's, whose great graveyard is home to many grand figures whose resting places we didn't find, and one murderous quack of whom I might still be ignorant were his epitaph not so passive-aggressive. More exciting still, a lovely long weekend in Margate! Which in places is a sort of North-London-on-sea, as against Brighton, which is of course East-London-on-sea. xandratheblue chose well when she booked us into the Walpole Bay Hotel, which is essentially the sort of place Poirot stays, but festooned with Tracey Emin napkin art, alarming mannequins, a room full of hats and so forth. If Sir John Soane were a hotelier, the result would be along these lines. A similar spirit of eccentricity pervades the town; there's the old world stuff, like the hotel, the Shell Grotto, the Mad Hatter's tearoom and the decrepit lido; but there's also the huge array of wind turbines out at sea who can be dimly seen on the less cloudy days, standing sentinel, and the surprising number of rockabillies for a fairly small town. It is, in sum, Unusual, mostly in lovely ways. And especially so last weekend, because we'd unwittingly turned up at the same time as GEEK, a computer-game-centred thing which enabled Alex to talk knowledgeably about computer games while I pouted at the lack of the advertised strawberry cider. In your gender-defined face, gender roles. The other result of this was that whenever we attempted to just go look at some art, we kept on getting lured into INTERACTING. Fine when it was the squishy stuff in Turner Contemporary, less so when we were sent on a somewhat confused melon-themed treasure hunt/RPG around town, or found that what we'd thought was a small gallery with a show of automata was in fact a couple's basement workshop. Still, at least the latter meant we got tea. It wasn't that I didn't enjoy all the community art, you understand, so much as I wasn't expecting it. And being ambushed by art does start to make one a little nervous after a while.

Margate also has one of two very fine pubs to which I've been introduced recently, the Lifeboat, which doesn't quite have a sea view but otherwise - casks of local cider, lots of wood, a roaring fire - is pretty much how I picture the ideal seaside pub, just as the Earl of Essex is exactly the pub I always hope to find in quiet London backstreets. Both are let down only by some of their food; take your own ketchup to the Lifeboat (outragrously, there's none on the premises!), and avoid the risotto at the Earl.

All the TV I've watched lately has been going for an overall mood of 'unsettling'. Black Mirror, still not quite perfect, but better to have Charlie Brooker not quite being Rod Serling on C4 than degenerating into Harry Hill on the BBC. Utopia, which managed that rare feat of genuinely shocking violence (as much in how it was shot as in who was shot, stabbed, and so forth) in a conspiracy thriller which didn't feel as played-out as the rest of the recent glut of conspiracy thrillers - maybe because ( spoilers ). Breaking Bad, where the second series had fewer moments of 'Go Walter!' than the first, and a lot more wincing. Even the Honor Blackman episodes of The Avengers all seemed to be predicated on Steed's uncertain loyalties, and beyond that to be odd in so far as they still didn't quite feel like The Avengers yet, and predicated their plots on such TV-friendly themes as the Companies Act 1928, and the evasion of inheritance tax. Whereas the few films I've watched have been thoroughly straightforward good vs evil stuff, with square-jawed heroes - Bruce Campbell in Army of Darkness, Christopher Reeve in Superman, which is every bit as charming and *right* as I remember from childhood, not to mention much smarter than I ever picked up on.

In spite of having attended every Black Plastic to date, and having one of the promoters for a flatmate, I somehow managed to get the start time wrong and turn up half an hour early on Friday, which is quite special. In spite of that, and being fairly tired to begin with, I made it to the end - and beyond, even when the afterparty relocated. Admittedly I didn't last too long beyond that, but I still think this is a win for my new club strategy of having a banana in my pocket for midnight. And I'm glad I was around for it all, because it was a great night - perhaps in part because, as the usual postmortem conversations about who was incredibly drunk soon had us realising, pretty much everyone was incredibly drunk.
I wasn't about for most of Saturday, and even when I made it along in body, I was half-absent in spirit. Not that this was any impediment to continued boozing, of course, but once I hit Sunday and the Hangover Swish (a clothes-swapping event, incidentally, rather than some peculiar toxicological complication), one pint almost did for me so I bowed out early, and even then needed to take a break in Highbury Fields on my way home, and ended up having deeply peculiar fever dreams in which I was the one constant point in a universe which had been destroyed and recreated around me. Twice.

I don't normally link to Charlie Brooker's column, because by now I assume that everyone is aware of him and those who want to read it know to do so without my help. Furthermore, this Saturday's piece wasn't even one of his best. But I'm linking to it because, if you read it online, you got a censored version, and indeed one censored in such a way as to ruin the pacing. ( do not read this except in the proper context of the original piece )Anyone reading it in that context and failing to understand that it is satire rather than anti-Semitism is too stupid for their opinion to be worthy of consideration. But the 'Corrections and Clarifications' column says that while the piece was "intended to be satirical", it "should not hae appeared in the Guardian, before dragging Brooker himself on for a little Maoist self-criticism session. The Guardian: officially the paper for people too retarded or permanently offended to recognise satire.

Initially I had the same problem with Lizzie and Sarah that I have with a lot of Julia Davis projects; while I like dark comedy, she has the balance slightly skewed, and just having horrible things happen to your characters is not in and of itself funny. But because Jessica Hynes was also involved (and in spite of her last effort being that godawful drivel with David Tennant as her driving instructor), I persevered. And yes, come the twist it became rather entertaining, but given the nature of that twist, I now don't quite know how they'd get a whole series out of this pilot.

For the first time in, I think, three years, I'm DJing in London tomorrow night, at Don't Stop Moving. Which does have a Myspace and website too but they've not been updated in years, so for Facebook refuseniks, the basics are thus:
It's angelv's pop night. This means I will not be playing, well, today's Current Music for starters. Or any from recent posts. I will almost certainly play Girls Aloud, and Pulp, and beyond that I have various scrawled ideas with question marks next to most of them so your guess is as good as mine. Well, it probably isn't unless you know me very well, but still.
The night runs from 8-1 at not the real Camden Head but the former Liberties, on Camden High Street. It costs not very much to get in, two quid possibly? It is dead good. I am on early if you particularly wish to catch/avoid my set. It will be fun!

In other news: Alan Moore is apparently taking inspiration from "the excellent Charlie Brooker" in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century. Just when you think he couldn't be any cooler...

...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.

Because he has nothing better to do - it's not as if we're in an economic crisis and the pound is at an historic low against the Euro or anything, after all - our Beloved Leader has joined in the chorus of moralising hysteria directed at Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand. Because politicians love to knock the BBC for being so terribly mean to them, and all the rest of the media loves to knock the BBC because it's better than them, and worst of all the BBC loves to knock the BBC because like everything else that is good and noble in our culture, it is currently beset with a crippling overdose of self-doubt and consequent belief in the virtue of self-flagellation. And so one of the few institutions of which Britain can still be rightly proud takes another hit as the jackals circle. I mean, have any of these shrill nonentities actually read the damn transcript? (NB: many purported transcripts available are woefully incomplete. The Times, for instance, with all the fidelity to truth one expects from a Murdoch rag, omits the 'Satanic Slvts' (NSFW, obviously) line - either because they were too stupid to understand it, or because it would militate against the impression of slurred innocence they're trying to summon re: Sachs' granddaughter. Not that I have the slightest thing against burlesque performers, you understand - but treating a suggestion that one such might have done the sex with a man in a manner befitting similar suggestions levelled regarding a small child or Victorian princess does seem rather bizarre).

Consider:

- Andrew Sachs cancelled on them. He was not a random victim. It is acceptable to leave voicemail for someone who belatedly cancelled on you in a tone which might be considered poor form on other voicemails.

- Andrew Sachs is only famous because he was happy to play the whipping boy in Fawlty Towers; he can hardly start standing on dignity now. Cf Stephen Fry on fame, specifically the differences between his own and Nicholas Lyndhurst's.

- And this one is the clincher: IT WAS FUNNY. Even without the voices of Ross and Brand, reading a bad transcript that's supplied for purposes of damning them rather than making me laugh, even overwhelmed with anger at the absurd storm around it all, I was cracking up. They made a comedy show; they engaged in nothing more dangerous than the use of harsh language (and even that was not as harsh as the coverage would have you think); they made people laugh. They offended some other people, for sure, but as we should all know by now, offended people are the very worst people on the planet.

As far as I'm concerned, Ross and Brand are both due a pat on the back if not a raise, and everyone who has objected can piss off to somewhere with a suitably deferential press for their tender sensibilities - Saudi, say, North Korea, or Iran.

The Girls Aloud Vs Sugababes version of 'Walk This Way' for Comic Relief, yes? It's hardly essential, but then neither band has ever been at their best on cover versions. The video is pleasing enough to the eye, as one would expect given the cast. But it isn't remotely funny. There are a few mugging comics towards the end of the video, but they come across as a total afterthought (and in the olden days, the vid would have been faded out by then). This may be for the best given how badly most Comic Relief records have aged, but it still seems slightly inappropriate.

Anybody who would still draw a definite line between 'fan fiction' and 'literature' should read Michael Chabon's The Final Solution without delay. The name refers to the Holocaust, of course, and it's not the first time Chabon has written at a tangent to that subject (as all those who've read his deservedly Pullitzer-winning Kavalier & Clay will know) nor the last (his next book is set in an Alaskan Jewish homeland, apparently a serious proposal at one point) - but it is also the perfect title for a story about the latter days of Sherlock Holmes, a last fitful effort by one of the world's great minds as it fades. I'm no Holmesian, so I'm not sure how much of this Conan Doyle laid out (he said that Holmes retired to keep bees, but did he ever explain why that made perfect sense in quite the inarguable terms Chabon does?) - nor any real expert on stories about age, Dunsany and Cabell aside. But for me, this could hardly be better in either direction, nor tie the two threads more naturally together.

While it's true that Garth Ennis is one of the comics writers currently producing extremely good work on a regular basis, I disagree with the reviews which are hailing his new series Wormwood as one of his better efforts. Based on the first issue it's an entertaining little piece of fluff (premise: the Antichrist doesn't want to bring about Armageddon, so instead lives in New York with a talking rabbit and runs HBO), but nothing Ennis hasn't done better and before. The scatologically brutal application of superpowers? Preacher. The Second Coming as a dreadlocked black kid who falls foul of American riot police? Hellblazer Special, more than a decade ago. And that had one beautiful detail this omits, even though the years have only made it more resonant - "a man named Geldof will kiss him on the cheek." Yes, it's true that The Boys and The Punisher have little to say about the real world, but who cares? Within the worlds they delineate, everything is perfectly pitched. Whereas here, though it's more recognisable as our world, though the story is more 'relevant', there are clumsinesses I thought Ennis had long since outgrown - in particular, a televised debate on the proposed regulation of cable TV is so rah-rah-rah heroically one-sided that it could almost have been shat out by The West Wing.

Charlie Brooker facts I never knew: Charlie is short for Charlton (which explains some of the bitterness), and he began by writing for Oink! So I was, as ever, way ahead of the curve there. Wonder which strips he did?

Garth Marenghi on
Oxford Street, not Darkplace; still
has that stern face, though.