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

All those Sam Tyler references in Ashes to Ashes had me thinking, whoever's mysteriously contacting Alex...could that voice be John Simm doing posh? It could, couldn't it? And then the trailer for next week blew my theory apart. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted, and now I'm back to having no idea at all where they're going with this, but being confident that it will be somewhere good. And I've been reading a 2000 issue of Select which I found while clearing out my desk, all articles about 'what are MP3s?' and *video* reviews and interviews saying how Embrace's second album will take them to the next level, and this isn't even from so very long ago - I moved to London in 2000 - and it makes me more than ever think that after Ashes to Ashes is done, the nineties are now strange and distant enough for Dead Man Walking to be a perfectly viable series.

Speaking of changing eras, I read Virginia Woolf's Orlando yesterday, and what a glorious confection of rhapsody, absurdity and time it is. Yes, it's 13 years since I got into the band of the same name and followed up plenty of the other reference points, but I'd seen the film and I don't like reading books too soon after seeing the film, even in cases like this where knowing the plot is a fairly abstract concern. It's the starring role The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen has now found for Orlando (the androgyne, not the band, though that I would also love to see) which had me investigating, because the infuriating braggart of '1910' is not at all how I remembered Tilda Swinton in the film. And indeed, is not what I find in Woolf's original. I think Moore and O'Neill have the promiscuity and the rough-housing down better than Swinton, but she has that distracted quality which they've lost. And while inserting side adventures during and after the novel's timeline works perfectly, I question whether LoEG has not done a certain damage to the premise by making Orlando an ancient who fought at Troy and Actium; one of the features which I feel most strongly in Woolf's novel is the sense of Orlando's rootedness in the English countryside, the ancestry which ties Orlando to the soil regardless of gender or distance. And it's a shame, because the way in which Woolf's Orlando moves so self-consciously yet seamlessly from age to age - a gigantic cloud rolling in as the 18th Century gives way to the 19th, for instance, and England suddenly, gradually growing damper - is just the sort of play on the eras' conceptions of themselves and each others to which the League project draws such delightful attention*.

In much the same spirit of meditative Englishess as Orlando, I finally watched Cloudspotting, which I apologise for not plugging while it could still be caught on iPlayer. I've raved about Gavin Pretor-Pinney's Cloudspotter's Guide here before, I'm sure, and the new appreciation it gave me for the beauty which floats above us most every day. But the concept works even better on TV, with the BBC's archive of near Miyazaki-quality flying footage to plunder, and Pretor-Pinney himself so naturally and thoroughly engaging, like a cross between Jim Broadbent and Mark Gatiss, except more fun. One credit did surprise me, though: Script editor: Steve Aylett.

Never got around to writing about that Keith TOTP/Glam Chops show last week, did I? In part because I only wrote about them a week or so earlier, and not much changed except that Eddie was drunker and Glam Chops have a new song called 'Thunderstruck'. Which kicks arse. Oh, and I finally watched a Gregg Araki film, Mysterious Skin. Which was much as I expected in terms of tormented small-town US gayness, but all that UFO stuff and missing memories made me think of Velvet Goldmine and Flex Mentallo, which can never be a bad thing. Also, it has Dawn from Buffy as an off-the-rails fag hag with great eye make-up! It is, alas, let down by the standard problem afflicting any film which addresses wrongcockery - even in a world where cinema can convincingly show us an army of thousands of orcs and undead rucking in front of Minas Tirith, if you're showing a kiddy-fiddler on film, the effects and editing have to be so clunky as to make entirely clear even to madmen and magistrates that the child was not on stage while the nasty man said the rude things.

*Of course, nerd polyfilla is easily applied here: in the League world Woolf's book is known by the title which is in any case its full title here: Orlando - A Biography. Woolf was one of those eminently readable but maddeningly agenda-led biographers, who in satirising the conventions of biography, ran roughshod over a real life rather than a fictional one.

...though I did drink rather too much at the weekend, and I am emotionally devastated by the conclusion of The Wire season 4 which, like the book I'm reading about occupied France, seems rather too applicable to the wider world. I remain flabbergasted at the stupidity of offended people (you should all know the Brooker link by now): cf complaints about last week's Ashes to Ashes being inappropriate broadcasting in light of the Suffolkator's trial, even though the episode's substance was precisely the unfortunate prejudices which hamper investigation of crimes against prostitutes. See also: "protesters are claiming the pictures [of Mohammed on Wikipedia] have been posted simply to 'bait' and 'insult' Muslims", even though the pictures are by muslims, albeit rather more civilised ones from 700 years ago. Roll on the reformation, eh?

Oh, and comedy last night: vair good. Even worth changing trains at Paddington for, though next time I would strive to avoid that bit.

There seems to have been a certain amount of point-missing as regards the excellent first episode of Ashes to Ashes. Even the estimable freakytigger seems to take at face value Alex Drake's assumption that it's all happening in her own comatose brain - but if she's just creating this from her own reading of Sam Tyler's file, then she wouldn't know - as we do, as Ray tells her - that Sam went back. All the evidence suggests that Gene Hunt's world is real (for a given value of the word) and persistent. And as for the fears that it will be impossible to follow through the potential weirdness of the story on a prime time, mainstream show - bear in mind that the moral of the final Life on Mars was it is better to commit suicide than live in the modern world. I had feared a lame retread with more sexual tension; instead, they seem to be making exactly the sequel they needed to make if it was to be any more than a mere franchise-stretcher. And, one which gives them a perfect excuse to go crazily OTT because we no longer need to even slightly believe this might be the 'real' version of the past era rather than some kind of policeman's Valhalla in period dress.

Elsewhere on the Beeb, Torchwood seems to be settling in to good episode/bad episode alternation this series. After an excellent episode about From Hell-style ghosts and timeslips, whose opening made me take it for the PJ Hammond contribution (who knew Helen Raynor had this in her after the New York Dalek atrocity and 'Ghost Machine', the episode so bad it almost made me drop Torchwood?), we get 'Meat'. There's a good idea at the heart of it, but it's just used as the kernel for a big frothy mass of human interest. Here's the problem with 'human interest': humans aren't very interesting. People who don't get that can sod off and watch the soaps. The Doctor is more interesting than his companions. Jack Harkness is more interesting than Gwen. But Hell, even Gwen is more interesting than her boring bloody fiance. I refuse even to use the character's name, he doesn't deserve it - but the one decent storyline to do with him was the one where Bilis Manger killed him. Now, if someone else could do the job - and properly this time - I'd be much obliged. Or Bilis could do it himself; I thought they'd maybe blown a good recurring villain too soon at the first season's end, but one of the new books, The Twilight Streets, brings him back and makes clear that he's still a viable proposition. It's a pretty good book in general; bit slashy in places, and the ending makes no sense, but even then I suspect it's the sort of nonsense which would pass fine were it being shouted on screen, rather than down on the page in black and white. And it has lots of pleasingly, infuriatingly enigmatic hints about past teams, about Archie in Glasgow and Torchwood Four, and about Jack's mysterious past (and future?). And yes, OK, it has some mentions of Gwen's idiot fiance, but he's never allowed to unbalance the story into tedious domesticity. Hell, even ITV's answer to Torchwood, the now rather patchy Primeval, gets this bit right - whenever they have a love story it gets 'Sound of Thunder'd out of the timeline, or the outsider who supposedly fancies one of the team turns out to be an evil spy, and then we get back to a very wet Hannah S Club kicking a mutant seal's face off.
While we're around the Doctor Who universe - I've often wondered if I'm being unfair when I unfavourably compare respectable literary authors to the better Who writers, particularly Lance Parkin. After all, it's not like-for-like; Parkin has an advantage just from the subject matter. Well, the Guardian helpfully published a story by the award-winning AL Kennedy whose emotional core is some stuff about Doctor Who. So now I can compare fairly, and confirm that the feted Kennedy would make a passable third-tier Doctor Who writer.

I suspect that this time last year would have been my first time of 2006 hanging out outside the pub; maybe martylog's birthday is to LJ as the first swallow is to the traditional media. If so, I have no problem with that - hello Spring!

In what may be our only time travel TV of the week*, Life on Mars has concluded. I'm sure I've missed a frenetic day's LJ-ing on the topic, but I have had chance to read a commentary by co-creator and finale writer Matthew Graham, and I've been thinking. ( spoilers, obviously )

Have just finished You Cannot Live as I Have Lived and Not End Up Like This: The Thoroughly Disgraceful Life and Times of Willie Donaldson. Donaldson produced Beyond the Fringe and anticipated Chris Morris and Sacha Baron-Cohen with The Henry Root Letters; he was also a pimp, crackhead and general good-for-nothing. Cuckolded by Olivier, advising Anna Chancellor not to run away from school, hanging out with everyone from Ken Tynan to Amy Jenkins, Will Self and John Bird to Mad Frankie Fraser, he basically knew everyone - so his life really shouldn't be as depressing as it was. But there's a line between roguishness and actually being a sh1t, and Willie crossed that line too often. In fact, show him any line and he'd do his best to cross it. His biographer is a sometime friend of the subject, wronged as they all were but ultimately forgiving; he gets across some of the charm which enabled Willie to carry on like this. But ultimately, unlike his sometime associate Peter Cook, Willie wasn't just someone who couldn't be bothered because the game wasn't worth the candle; he had an active compulsion to sabotage himself. And I just don't find that half so sympathetic.
(Fans of JP Donleavy may be interested to know that the two became chums after Willie, in one of his flush phases, was the largest investor in the stage production of The Ginger Man - via a company called Spur Productions)

As a concept, I love Green Lantern dearly. So many of the big heroes have non-transferable origins, especially at DC - you have to be the last son of a doomed planet, or an Amazon sculpted from clay, or see your parents murdered. But to be a Green Lantern, all you need is willpower and courage. And once you are one, your powers are limited only by your own imagination - superheroism distilled to its purest form. Yet I own hardly any Green Lantern comics, because aside from JLA guest-spots or Alan Moore back-ups, the character has so seldom been handled by writers capable of realising that potential, and what should be pure instead just feels generic. Still,the characters were always there, always waiting - until the clammy, dead grip of Geoff Johns fell upon them, that is. Now, with a series of ever dumber and more inexplicable twists to the mythos, he looks set to be rendering the Green Lanterns pretty much unusable for anything but his own nostalgic, carnage-heavy purposes. What a waste.

*I've said it before, but it bears repeating: in the multi-channel age more than ever, programming which cannot abide by the schedule should not be on the schedule in the first place.

Didn't think much of last night's Life on Mars - it annoys me that after gradually building a tense but respectful working relationship between Sam and Gene in the first series, we now seem to be going by sitcom logic where they're back to being stuck in an unchanging loop of exasperation with each other. I also found it deeply distracting that two key characters were called Patrick O'Brian and Frank Miller.

As powerful a mind as Milan Kundera's is still prepared to go along with the lazy consensus that Tristram Shandy is "inadaptable", a theory happily disproved by A Cock And Bull Story. This was one where I waited for the DVD because I knew I'd want to explore the extra layers the format does so well (I'm expecting the commentary to be a gem); so far I've only seen the film itself, but it's perfect. All you need to do to adapt Tristram Shandy is make a film as chaotic, sprawling, human, self-indulgent and apparently undisciplined (but magnificently nuanced) as the book itself, one which wanders off and loses the book just as the book loses Tristram. And it helps that the cast is packed past the point of sense with top talent. I don't just mean the marquee names like Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Dylan Moran and Stephen Fry (magnificent though they all are); even minor roles are played by the Tory MP from The Thick Of It, Errol from 15 Storeys High, Ian Hart, James Fleet and the like.

"A man accused of a stealing underwear from a shop in a knifepoint raid believed he was a female elf at the time, Belfast Crown Court has heard." Fair enough, but of all the games to take over your life and corrode your reason - Shadowrun? Meanwhile, South Korea moves towards the real world implementation of Laws of Robotics, though since they seem to be proposing the pre-emptive prohibition of sexual human/robot relationships, it's a terrible start.

Listening to the new Arcade Fire album (streamed on nme.com for those of us unsure about buying it), I think I'm one of the moderates. Some of the early mutterings that they'd totally lost it are unfair, but it's certainly lacking in the electric 'What is this? It's awesome!' that I instantly got from Funeral. I suppose it's always hard to keep going at such an exalted level after you've hit with a debut that good - and even if you manage it on the second album, that'll only make the crash with the third that much worse; just ask Mike Skinner.
edit: Damn, I think I'm coming to the same conclusion about the second LCD Soundsystem, and I've heard nothing but good things about that one so was really looking forward to it. Still, hurrah for the brave new world where we can discover these things, legally, without paying a penny.

Would have very much liked to catch myfirstkitchen and Nemo at Tesco Disco tonight, or maybe Jason Webley again, but realistically I was never going anywhere except my bed.