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

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)

Went to watch some free opera last night, and the key word there is 'free', followed maybe by 'in that ampitheatre arrangement next to the Mayor's HQ, and yes we saw Boris wandering home behind the stage'. I've only ever seen opera twice before: an experimental production of The Magic Flute to which my parents took me as a tiny, where they probably weren't expecting the evil henchman to be wearing rubber and brandising a whip with a cock-shaped handle; and Nabucco in Verona, which we went to mainly for the ludicrous scale of the Roman theatre there, and the staging (giant chariots! Five harps!) and during which one of my friends still managed to fall asleep and nearly go over the back wall. Comic opera, I know even less about. So yes, I could just about work out that The Barber of Saville Row was going to be The Barber of Seville updated, but who it was by in the first place? Needed cappuccino_kid to tell me Rossini. That it features Figaro and furthermore has the 'Figaro' song I know from cartoons? Well, I always thought that was in The Marriage of Figaro (the sequel, apparently). But...well, after 15 minutes or so of set-up, it was rather funny, in that same farcical sort of way the TV Jeeves and Wooster was. There was a policeman character doing topical gags, leading audience participation and the like, and apparently such panto borrowings are not normally part of comic opera, but sod it, I like panto. And I like plots motivated by wideboy Mercutio-types in Teddy Boy jackets, and nuns who owe more than a little to Jake Thackray's Sister Josephine, and ludicrously convoluted romantic deceptions, all played out under a purpling London sky. So I enjoyed it. It's still on tonight and tomorrow and while the stone steps aren't the comfiest of seats, you're in the open air and can take your own food and drink, so I'd definitely recommend it.

I've also seen Hazel Blears - the Movie. Well, sort of. I'd always taken Dolores Umbridge - quite the most hateful character in the whole Harry Potter series - as a type, bureaucracy and 'not rocking the boat' incarnate. But watching the fifth film, they play her as Hazel Blears and not once does it go against the books. Well, Blears with a few dashes of Thatcher, maybe, and even in a fantasy film that weird, waxy complexion would be too implausible for fiction. But otherwise, the tittering condescension, the terror of facing someone who is convinced that they and they alone are reasonable...it's an astonishing resemblance.
All the major new characters in Order of the Phoenix (or at least the film) are female, come to think of it. Bellatrix, aka Helena Bonham-Carter playing basically the same character as in Sweeney Todd. Luna Lovegood, aka Cassie from Skins. And lovely, lovely Tonks who is barely in it but still adorable.

Just once, could we maybe have a season of Skins without ( spoilers )?

So anyway, I finally cracked and went to see ( Watchmen )

Realised last night that I've not been further than walking distance in a week. Now, given I live in London's Fashionable North London and walk fast, that covers a lot of territory - for instance, Wednesday's New Royal Fam gig was well within it. And very good too, in spite of inexplicable attacks of self-doubt from certain parties. I even managed the 'Rules OK' dance routine, kind of. Local Girls sounded OK so far as I could tell but I had people to talk to down the back, and the inaugural Charley's Classic Covers set as opener kicked arse. After charleston did 'I'm Straight' I could only wonder if it would be followed by a song about being really tall, possibly 'Empire State Human'. Wrong song but right act - she finished with a storming 'Love Action' guest-sung by exliontamer who has a surprisingly majestic voice.
But yes, walking distance. I'm on Oyster PAYG at present so it's not like I'm wasting anything, but I still feel I should maybe have an explore further afield today.

edit: In fairness, I've just seen the expanded list of 'After Watchmen' recommendations and more of it is good than not.

Skins is set at the outset of sexual life, the Peter O'Toole film Venus at its end. But watching the two back to back on Thursday night, it was the correspondences I could see. Yes, that episode was largely Election with added Father Dougal, Art Brut and teenage sapphism, but it was also about the stupid, humiliating things the bewitched will do for beauty (shorn of the gender stereotyping Hanif Kureishi either displays, or allows his lead to display, in Venus, where O'Toole's Maurice suggests that while a naked woman is the most beautiful thing most men will ever see, for women it's their first child). And while the Freddy/Cook/JJ plotline was sidelined this Skins, you see that same sense of toxic male friendship in Venus when Maurice and his old muckers meet in the cafe each day, Maurice still trying it on with people his chums consider off-limits just like Cook would. Albeit with considerably more charm, obviously, because Maurice is Peter O'bloody Toole, isn't he? Pretty much playing himself, with admirable self-awareness (an actor who has cornered the market in corpses); beyond that, playing the himself he played in Russell T Davies' Casanova, the old roue not quite prepared to admit that the game is over and Time won.
(Speaking of Time - Peep Show being a comedy of my generation, how terrifying to see its love object, tarnished as she may there be, now playing the mother of a teenage lead character in Skins)

Mark Twain wrote that "Dollis Hill comes nearer to being a paradise than any other home I ever occupied", and given I like exploring the far reaches of this great city anyway, that mandated a visit. augstone fancied some daytime drinking - so let's combine the two, we thought, and go for a Dollis Hill pub crawl!
First problem: Dollis Hill has no pubs. Seriously. At its heart, Gladstone Park, and around that, pleasant London suburbia, not dissimilar to the quieter and less exotic regions of Highgate, but less spooky. Gladstone Park, likewise, is a sort of Waterlow or Alexandra Park disrupted by a railway through its midriff - perhaps absent in Twain's day. Maybe those other lands of which Dollis Hill reminds me were also as yet unbuilt, and learned from Dollis Hill's example? My historical sense of London's expansion is patchy, given I tend to regard anything which belongs in London as having always been here*. There are pubs near Dollis Hill, but always just over a road into industrialisation, proletarianism or Irishness. Our original plan was "meet in the pub nearest the station" but, under expert advice, I had checked Fancyapint, just in case, while worrying that Aug might feel this compromised the expeditionary spirit. Thank heavens I did. Its favoured suggestion was full of old Irish soaks, which is fine, and in the midst of some carpentry, which is allowable, but was also playing 'The Wind Beneath My Wings', so we didn't stay. Everything else the web had suggested would be heading back down towards Kilburn, so instead we investigated the Ox & Gate, which had nice leather chairs. The gents here had a huge stash of empty sleeves for hooky p0rn DVDs; clearly these are purchased alongside boy films the mrs would never think to investigate, and then secreted inside the actioner's sleeve. Cunning. We cross the North Circular a bridge too early, passing a supplier of sex equipment on one side and a purveyor on the other. This doesn't seem a particularly libidinous area, but perhaps there's nothing else to do? The reservoir is unusually birdless, having fewer than the tiny pond in Gladstone Park; maybe the ducks really like the naked statue in the park pond, Maybe Mark Twain did too.
We head back via Willesden Green, hoping that not being Dollis Hill proper, there may be pubs. We pass two carpet shops and two auto parts shops before we see anything even faintly resembling one, instead contenting ourselves with Crazy Cock - a Bulgarian restaurant rather than another fleshpot. They have folk music TV playing - does Britain, with all its music channels, have anything of the sort? There are forests and fine jackets, and Aug wants a residency. I knew nothing of Bulgarian cuisine before, in spite of an ancestor helping to underwrite the country's foundation, but can now tell you that they do very fine things with cheese.
Then, via a brief stop at a gastro affair which is at least visible from Willesden Green station, back to the centre. I have always steered clear of the Old Blue Last before, suspecting that anywhere owned by Vice magazine would probably be full of tossers. I am slightly wrong, in that the crowd are not so much hipsters as their larval form. I am reminded of the old moral dilemma - if you could go back in time and kill Bloc Party when they were as yet innocent of their crimes, would it be justified? Not that I could ever see the dilemma, mind. Even in the version which substitutes Hitler, the only worry is the practical consideration of whether that might have given Stalin a freer hand. Anyway, the Old Blue Last still manages its own spot of Pub Fail; they have at least three draught pints off with no glasses over the pumps, the felchratchets. First act on is one Kit Richardson, who looks like Imelda Staunton dressed as Little Boots, and sounds like a third-rate Tori Amos. Do Not Want. The 18 Carat Love Affair, however, are excellent as ever even in this terrible place; there's a song I don't recognise called 'Eleanor' which is every bit as good as the rest of their material. Aug says he doesn't really know who to compare them to, sound-wise, and I know what he means, and I think that's a good thing.
The next band on feature a former member of Special Needs. We don't stay.

Undecided on nu-Skins as yet, though given how much more the first two series were than the first episode let on, I'm certainly planning to keep watching. The new male leads seem more irksome, though, consisting as they do of a lout, a hairstyle and the OCD kid who appears to have escaped from The Big Bang Theory. Still, we have lovely lovely Effy (and I believe I'm now allowed to say that without going on the Register), and scatty Pandora, and the twins and Naomi Campbell seem promising. As does the new teacher, although having Ardal O'Hanlon playing a cross between Roy from The IT Crowd and Dylan Moran strikes one as a sort of mad science experiment in concentrated Irishness.
(Am also watching the third series of Oz, and idly wondering whether there's any possibility of a crossover)

*For instance, that scene in A Knight's Tale with the Eye revolving beside the mediaeval Thames? Perfect.

- In mediaeval times, it was believed that the pelican fed its young with its own blood; by extension, it came to represent Christ (there's a particularly terrifying sculpture of one in the oldest court of Corpus Christi, Cambridge). I wonder if modern christians would be tempted to do likewise with that rather Cthulhoid limbless amphibian which feeds its own skin to its young?
- Lungfish rock. Giant salamanders also rock, but lungfish rock more.
- I am very glad I am not a frog. Childcare is vexing enough without having to carry the kids inside your hips (leaving the slow ones to die), or feeding children their unfertilised potential siblings.
- Karma is so going to come kick our backsides over Life in Cold Blood. Bad enough last week, when they nicked all the lizard's bling and gave it to a poor lizard, to show what materialist hos the lizard WAGS were. But now the golden frog! The plague is coming, the population is shrinking...and suddenly these strange apparitions appear. Doppelgangers, plastic people, simulations and replicants. And then the entire population is abducted off to live in jars! That's a horror story. Despite, or maybe even more so because of, the good intentions behind it.
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- Do the young folk really get down and dirty to DJ Shadow?
- Bill Bailey is very nearly as cool as David Attenborough.
- I can haz effie plz?
- Cool though Maxxie is, it looked like next week focuses on him too. That would be a mistake.
- I like Skins, but it doesn't half make me feel ancient.

Some of you may be aware that I had the misfortune to be born in Derby. The video to White Town's 'Your Woman' remains, to the best of my knowledge, the only recorded evidence of that unhappy town ever looking cool.

Watching Johnny Depp as Rochester in The Libertine, one can't help but watch him in part *as* Johnny Depp - not least because Rochester is forever being hailed by his associates as 'John' or 'Johnny'. And in part he's Captain Jack* too, our hero the drunken lech, with occasional monkey and Jack Davenport as his sometime rival**. Such metatext aside it starts brilliantly - the prologue had me gripped, and for about a quarter of an hour, so I remained. But then, like so many promising films before it, it stops being an individual story and becomes A Film, following the set lines of Film Stories. Rochester's life, like his poetry, was remarkable - Lives of the English Rakes has a fine account of it. But it's a life which this film treats like Procrustes treated his guests. Rochester mentored Elizabeth Barry - so it must become the Mentor Film for a while, Karate Kid relocated to the Restoration stage (there's a valid point in here about the transition in theatrical styles (and trust me, this is a topic I care about a good deal more than most people), but I remain unconvinced that Rochester was the man through whom to tell it). And of course, Rochester may be cheating on his wife but that's an acceptable part of the template; when he Falls For The Female Lead he must lose interest in whoring! That's how these stories work on screen, you see, regardless of whether that's how it was. Like Quills, having had the Debauchee Finds Love Instead Of Just Lust plot it then goes into Maverick Genius Sticks It To The Man. Never mind that Rochester didn't even officially acknowledge Sodom, much less stage it for the King and the French Ambassador!
Please understand, I am not saying that you must slavishly follow the facts if you tell a story based in history; Marlowe and Shakespeare certainly didn't, and nor need the moderns. But the changes must be those necessary to bring the messiness of fact nearer to the truth of art - eliminate repetitions, meld similar characters, focus and distil. Do not force a remarkable individual into a template, amending the facts only to tell me a story I've seen a hundred times before, with a different name for the lead. Don't do an Opposite of Sex, give me a rebellious voiceover at the start which makes me think I'm going to love the film and then have the speaker undermine it for the next 90 minutes as he conforms to What The Lead Should Be. Don't ever *dare* homogenise while you preach about individuality.
Maddeningly, the film never wholly turns to crap. Throughout, there remain glimmers of insight into Rochester's cynicism, the idea that he uses theatre as a drug to offset his fatalism (and Lords know I can identify with that), that he does not like life so much as he pretends. And in some respects it even resists cliche - Rochester very much dies of syphilis, not with the photogenic symptoms of Hollywood Disease. But on the other hand, even the good scenes are never quite perfect. The colour, for instance - I could understand it being washed out and dissipated towards the end, when the film's feeling like the second half of any junkie movie, but right from the start? Surely the Restoration should look like Douglas Sirk by way of Jan Saudek, colours so bright and vibrant that you know they're not healthy?
A maddening missed opportunity all round.
(Also, stopped it midway to catch Preston making an arse of himself on Never Mind The Buzzcocks, and the image on my screen switched quite seamlessly from louche Depp to louche Alex James, as the latter inexplicably took part in Celebrity Rape Trial or whatever it's called. The resemblance was startling)

I do like Skins, but appear to be incapable of giving it my full attention. Is that because it was made for the ADHD generation?

edit: And we all know it's Prom Night at the Buffalo Bar on Saturday, yes?

*Except when he's Father Jack, of course, slumped grubbily in a chair, yelling "DRINK!" and pissing himself.
**Though Richard Coyle aka Jeff confuses matters Davenport with a Coupling cross-current, and Tom Hollander spoils the Pirates correspondences by being a friend, rather than the quiet and bureaucratic true villain of the piece.