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

Yes, I should be out enjoying the sun, and everyone else will be so this will go unread, but I'm waiting for the washing machine and I have a week to get down before it slips my mind. A week spent mostly in Devon, where some newly-revealed clay from about 150 million years ago had its first encounter with the mammalian age when I plunged in up to the knees while looking for ammonites, and I went to Jasper Hazelnut's cafe, and saw someone with a hare lip outside ads for Third World children for the first time I can remember, and couldn't really blog on account of a deranged cursor. The train to Devon is lovely, following a stream much of the way and passing fields with cows, and llamas, and in one case horses and chickens grazing contentedly together.

And when the nights drew in, what did I watch?
Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle: good, but perhaps not as good as we all expected after his long absence from our screens. An out comics fan has no place attacking adults for reading Harry Potter, but beyond that, simply filming stand-up feels weird, like watching a straight filming of a stage play.
Given Mad Men's scrupulous sixties style, what the blazes were they doing soundtracking the opening of last week's episode with the Decemberists? Yes, they sound timeless, and it wasn't as if Don Draper was getting into MIA, but it still threw me.
I only watched the first episode of Party Animals, but my mum's a fan and had missed the final episode, so I watched along - an unusual experience for me, who is never normally a casual viewer. The main interest, of course, being to see what the Eleventh Doctor's performance was like. I'm still mainly repeating 'Trust Moffat. Trust Moffat' to myself. Andrea Riseborough and Excelsor from No Heroics were good, though, if basically playing the same characters (the devious slapper and the smug git).
The Tomb of Ligeia is the last and not the best of the Roger Corman/Vincent Price/Edgar Allan Poe films, in part because one of the major roles is the possibly-possessed cat, and as anyone who's seen Breakfast at Tiffany's will know, cats can't act - they can at best be thrown onto the set by the AD. Typically, the film owes as much to Poe's 'M.Valdemar' as 'Ligeia', but more than anything else Vincent Price seems to be playing James Robinson's Shade, right down to the hat and the glasses. No bad thing, obviously.

"The Pope also warned of a threat to the Catholic Church...from the "growing influence of superstitious forms of religion". Next week; why racism threatens Nazism. Sidious' deranged ramblings about condoms in Africa are, of course, a despicable attempt to take advantage of the vulnerable, but closer to home, last night on Stroud Green Road there was a team, dressed like bouncers, of 'Street Pastors', strolling around at closing time looking for the lost and lonely like so many spiritual date-rapists.
(And with perfect timing, as I finished writing this some more of the scoundrels came to my door. Given I'd discharged my bile here, I didn't even have enough fire left for more than a curt 'No Thank You' and a slammed door)

Am finally getting in the festive spirit, I think - I'll put the decorations up in a minute and then this evening it's Soul Mole. But in the meantime, think of this as Newsnight Review only with better comics coverage, or The Culture Show if that weren't just a sad comment on how far Lauren Laverne has fallen:

I must have visited the British Museum after dark before, but if so I've forgotten how much that suits it - with some galleries closed, no school parties and that sense of being hunkered in, you feel much closer to the past. Which leaves some areas almost too much - the Egyptian room in particular. Dropped in last night with an eye to catching the 'Statuephilia' works (and please, can whoever called it that be the subject of the next of the current series of press witch-hunts?), although the only one of which I was specifically aware was Marc Quinn's solid gold Kate Moss. Which, for the biggest gold statue made since the days of the Pharoahs, of an iconically beautiful woman in a more-than-suggestive position, is curiously inert. The Gormley angel on the way in is, well, the Angel of the North but smaller, so cheers for that, and Ron Mueck's giant head is a nice special effect misrepresented as art. I've not heard of Noble & Webster before, but their rather ghoulish piece is worth a look - and I won't say more than that because I think the surprise of the gradual recognition is a big part of its effect (skip the brochure description until after, if you go). The real stand-out, though, is the Damien Hirst. He's in my favourite room, which helps, and he's worked with it, almost snuck his gaudy skulls in to those bookcases which line that Enlightment room like it's the ultimate gentleman's study, which in a sense it is. For all the media fuss around him, Hirst does impress me in a way few of his generation manage - because for all that I couldn't tell you what the best of his work makes me feel, for all that I doubt he could either, it makes me feel something, something vertiginous and important. And that's what art is for, and why he'll be remembered and his work treasured after the hype and his peers are consigned to the art history books and back rooms.

Even if you didn't know about the lead times, it would be obvious that the conclusion of Marvel's Secret Invasion was plotted some time before the result of the US election. ( Spoilers, obviously - well, unless you read Thunderbolts )

Apparitions gets more splendidly mental by the week - even knowing that last night's episode would feature demonically-possessed foetuses at an abortion clinic didn't prepare me for the magnificence of ( spoiler ) And next week - Father Jacob has a gun! Fvck knows why.
Switched over for Star Stories (which still hasn't recaptured the charm of the first series) just in time to catch the end of a documentary about Health & Safety officers, and find myself in an awkward position. The show ended with the most stereotypical H&S bore you could imagine - think Steve Coogan's "in 1983, no one died" character, minus the verve and spontaneity - talking about how it was absurd to say Health & Safety culture had gone too far when people still had accidents; as far as he was concerned, and he said this explicitly, Britain would not be safe enough until there were no accidents. Now, this guy is at best horribly misguided, and clearly in need of a nailgun enema, right? But, he was upset to read a newspaper column in which he was being savaged by Richard Littlejohn. Health & Safety bore. Littlejohn. How do we resolve this so that they both lose?
Then, having abandoned Star Stories, instead watched The Devil's Whore, which really seemed to pick up this episode, possibly because we've got to the bit where it becomes clear that Oliver Cromwell was not in fact a hero of democracy but a hypocrite, an oathbreaker and a racist war criminal.

I love the Dexy's brass joy and heartfelt yelps of the Rumble Strips, and 'Back to Black' is one of my favourite Amy Winehouse songs, but the former covering the latter? Bit of a car crash, TBH.