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

So Doctor Who came back, and 'Let's Kill Hitler' turned out to be a total bait-and-switch, and then Mark Gatiss supplied the closest thing he's managed to a decent TV episode, and while I'm still loving Matt Smith, part of me can't help but feel that just maybe the whole long-arc-storytelling business has got a little out of hand, such that the done-in-ones now feel extraneous. But Moffat has himself said he's scaling back from that next year, and of course we'll still have Matt Smith, so really there's no cause for concern. And it's not as if things have got so horribly out of hand on that front as in Torchwood: Miracle Day, a show which one increasingly feels is dealing with the modern fascination with/abhorrence of spoilers by making sure that nothing happens from week to week. Every point it thinks it's making was already covered much better in Children of Earth. The closest it came to interest was in the flashback episode, where the hackneyed journey to a predictable destination at least mentioned Sarah Jane's antagonist the Trickster, thus providing a brief, happy memory of a TV Who spin-off that didn't suck.
(Speaking of spin-offs, the last couple of Who books I read were an interesting pair. James Goss' Dead of Winter is aimed at kids, more or less - it ties in with the new series. Matthew Jones' Bad Therapy was one of the fabled New Adventures, which started off by filling a gap when the series was off-air in the wilderness years, but ended up creating much of the template for its return. They're both historicals - one 19th century, one 1950s. Both are about alien tech curing people through creating idealised companions for them. And while the adult book can be a little more detailed about stuff like The Gays (though arguably less so than the modern TV show), they both have a real edge of nastiness. There's one scene in Bad Therapy especially which caused a sharp inhalation on my part, where a boy pursued by thugs finds his escape down an alley blocked by the TARDIS, hammers on the door - and dies because the Doctor and Chris are in a nearby caff. Which isn't how things should work when the Doctor's around. But even Dead of Winter finds room for some chilling stuff, in particular the Doctor's line "I'm going to tell you a story about a man who travels, and everywhere he goes, he makes everyone's lives better. I'm not that man. That man doesn't exist. I wish he did. I'd believe in him.")

Unrelated to the blue box, I've also seen the utterly batsh1t mental French-Czech animation Fantastic Planet, and the epically epic Neville Longbottom and the Speccy Emo Kid Who Keeps Stealing Neville's Screentime. And when I got home from the latter, I watched David Hare's Page Eight, in which Michael Gambon has a mission to take down the Dark Lord (or 'Prime Minister') Ralph Fiennes, except he dies, and Bill Nighy has to execute Gambon's legacy. A perfectly competent middlebrow drama, but the Potter films did it all so much better. Band-wise, I'm in the unusual position that none of the acts I've seen lately are my Facebook friends (although Patrick Duff did end up staying at the Maisionette Beautiful). First up, Duff and Andrew Montgomery, each playing one old song ('She's Everywhere' and 'Fall Apart Button', respectively), each still recognisably the same man as in their post-Britpop almost-pomp. Spookily so in Montgomery's case; he still looks and sounds as cherubic as in his Geneva days. Whereas Duff...well, you could tell from the twisted ferocity of a Strangelove show that his life was never easy, and the haunted folk he's playing nowadays may not be as loud, but emotionally it's no easier. All of this works brilliantly in the upstairs of the Old Queen's Head, which previously had never really gelled for me as a venue; with acts like this, who'd have been right at home in the old Spitz, its faded living room ambience is ideal. Then over to Hoxton to see Thomas Truax, essentially a mad scientist who has realised that making music with his mad science is less likely to get him arrested than robbing banks. Mostly his self-constructed instruments manage to steer clear of feeling like a novelty act, though the inevitably metronomic nature of automated percussion doesn't suit a song like 'I Put A Spell On You'. His own material, conceived around his technology's strengths and limitations, is another matter - at its best there's an eerie fairground quality and also a genuine pathos to it. The headliner is Jason Webley, a man who's also navigating a tough course around the jagged rocks of novelty act status. The first time you see Webley, his ability to get the crowd involved is glorious. But then you get hold of the albums and hear some of the brave, fragile, beautiful songs on there which don't work with an audience bellowing along, and realise that he doesn't play them live (even though, as a solo performer with no band to coach, he can presumably play anything from his back catalogue at any time), and understand that like any strength in an artist, that connection with the crowd can also become a trap. Still, he does sneak 'Against the Night' into the set, and then explains how as of November, he's taking a break - not because he's sick of music but because of how much it means to him, and how much he wants to make sure he's doing it for the right reasons, and the speech isn't 100% coherent but I got the feeling that he was maybe struggling towards the same worries about himself as I'm dancing around here. And he finishes with the gorgeous, self-explanatory 'Last Song' ("Maybe the world isn't dying. Maybe she's heavy with child"), and it's a perfect, cathartic climax...
And some berks start bellowing 'More! More!', because sod structure and artistry and rightness, at the end of a gig, shouting 'More!' is just what you do, right?
This is why I mainly go to gigs where I know most of the audience.

And I'm going to politely gloss over the abysmal punk band who marred the early stages of Saturday's Glam Racket. They wouldn't even be interesting to insult.

David Niven starred in my favourite film ever, and though I don't remember much about his autobiography The Moon's a Balloon, I do retain a sensation - as with some marvellous party - that it was utterly wonderful. So over Christmas I've been dipping into Bring on the Empty Horses, his selection of brief memoirs and pen portraits of other Hollywood greats. And make no mistake, Niven is a terrible name-dropper - but he lived a life where the names were worth dropping. So we get him playing a round of golf with Clark Gable and Douglas Bader, or escorting a pissed F Scott Fitzgerald off the set (where a cricket game has been set up like baseball because William Wyler's a pillock), or being literally thrown to the sharks by Errol Flynn. He was there when Humphrey Bogart's kids met Noel Coward, he got roped in when Frank Sinatra wanted to take Kruschev's wife to Disneyland himself, and he had the misfortune to be sat next to Spencer Tracy at Jimmy Stewart's stag night. He's not the greatest prose stylist who ever lived, but he's OK, and with material like that, OK is all you really need. And with perfect timing, just as I was finishing it off my free Lovefilm trial sent me The Bishop's Wife, in which Niven - normally one of the most charming men who ever lived - has the twin handicaps of playing an overworked stuffed shirt of a bishop, and having Cary Grant - the most charming man who ever lived - playing opposite him as a rather unconventional angel. The whole thing comes across like a Wings of Desire for a simpler - if not altogether naive - age. And given it's all about Christmas miracles, it turned up just in time - if I'd watched it any later than yesterday the Yule Goblins might have got me.

In the evening, xandratheblue brought over a film which was somewhat different: Zombie Strippers!. But for all the deiberate, gleeful trashiness of the film, it's also surprisingly smart. Robert Englund, for instance, plays one Ian Essko, and his strip club has rhinoceros iconography. His partner is called Madame Blavatsky. Each of the strippers represents a different approach, drawn from the history of Western philosophy, to trying times. The zombie virus affects women less rapidly than men - so the patrons of the strip club get dehumanised much more drastically than the women, who in the short term seem empowered. Certainly it is not quite as clever as it thinks it is, but it's a lot cleverer than the middlebrow drivel which normally wins film or book prizes for addressing these issues. Also, it has more breasts and headshots.

Spartacus: Blood and Sand is another hybrid of carnage and smarts, in rather different proportions. Like all the best American TV of recent years, it's about America - and because of the way the past few decades went, that means it's about the world. A world where the poor are enlisted as allies, betrayed, and then when they protest, enslaved and sent out to die. The rich don't even enjoy their power because they're so busy jockeying for position amongst each other. But John Hannah and Lucy Lawless own this show, and they're playing the squeezed middle - trying to edge their way up the ladder even as they get sort-of-rich on the suffering of the real poor. Well, at least they can still afford (on credit, of course) a few little luxuries, like slaves to deal with the foreplay before they start screwing. Because while yes, there is some sand, like I said on Facebook a better title would have been Spartacus: Blood, Nudity and Swearing. The foul language is inventive in almost the same way as Deadwood or The Thick of It - albeit also occasionally ludicrous. Something one can say for the violence too, done in an OTT, stylised fashion with fountains of bright red blood that would be risible if 300 hadn't paved the way. You can tell this didn't cost as much as HBO's Rome, say, but it works, mostly. And this in spite of what could have been a major problem - to wit, none of the gladiators can act. Well, Spartacus himself just about manages it, but I think the rest are wrestlers or Gladiators in the modern sense or something. However, they all look suitably tough and get more than sufficiently bloody when they get in the arena (or scrap outside it), so they'll do. Oh, and also, Spartacus isn't actually called that, but so far he keeps getting stopped by something or other whenever he's about to tell us his real name. I bet the season finale reveal is that it's Trevor, or possibly Biggus Dickus. All of this is from Starz, the US cable network that's co-producing the next series of Torchwood. If they handle all of their output like this, it could be spectacular.
(Update: some details about that Torchwood just came through - and interestingly, they play into Lawrence Miles' theory about Jack-style immortality somehow becoming a cancer on reality. Which I'm sure is entirely coincidental, and I'm equally sure Miles won't see that way)

It's not often I find myself wishing PG Wodehouse books had footnotes, but as I sat reading the first Blandings in the twilight of Stationer's Park, I found myself deeply puzzled. A young lady suggests to the protagonist that if he looks at the ads in the paper, he may find something more congenial than the job he hates. He looks, but is disappointed to find only a series of philanthropists, keen to share their fortunes. How is that a bad thing? Was this the 1915 equivalent of a Nigerian email scam?

I've already mentioned that, given the acclaim Alan Bleasdale's received as a social realist, I was surprised to find less moral ambiguity in his GBH than in Torchwood: Children of Earth. I'm now more than halfway through GBH and would further add that Torchwood was much more psychologically realistic in its portrayal of how power corrupts, and how the struggles of political entities destroy the little human lives caught between them. But what really astonished me was that Children of Earth also had significantly less Doctor Who fanw@nk than GBH, in whose fourth episode crucial scenes in a hotel take place against the background of a fan convention, with drunken Earth Reptiles and Cybermen cavorting around, and eventually a Dalek pulling Polly while chanting "FOR-NI-CATE'.
I'm still watching, mind. It may be a pantomime, but Robert Lindsay and Michael Palin are giving such performances that it still compels.

Even in this age of reunions and reissues, I never thought 2009 would find me writing about Angelica, not least because I was never that bothered about them in the first place. But lo and behold, the headliners at last night's 18 Carat Love Affair gig (not entirely convinced by the whole drummer-in-front-of-stage idea, though I appreciate their reasoning) were the Angelica singer's new band. Just her and a drummer, who had a bike basket on the front of his kit, and a harness thing with recorders in so he could blow and drum at the same time. At one stage she hit the drums too with what appeared to be a skipping rope. Yes, they were fairly twee, as it happens. If you wish to investigate further, they're called The Lovely Eggs.

On Monday, in a charity shop, for 99p (well, a quid since they had no pennies) I found a copy of the old Neil Gaiman-conceived shared-world anthology The Weerde: Book of the Ancients. Which has an early Charles Stross story* I fancied rereading, and which I also knew was worth rather more than a quid. This copy was further signed by one of the authors, Liz Holliday, "To Alison, with thanks".
Between the pages of the Stross story, I found an autumn leaf. On which, in silver ink, "To Jess, Happy Xmas, love from Alison".
Now I don't think I can bear for it to be passed on again. Which is why, among the careers closed to me, is that of eBay trader.

*Interesting to read something of his from 1993, before he could write about the internet and expect anyone to have a clue what he was talking about. Yet his 'Red, Hot & Dark' nicely prefigures the Laundry books, with its intersection of ancient horrors, bureaucracy and espionage. Some of the themes of 'The Missile Gap' are here too, in particular the idea of communism as another preconception about the world which can be shattered by alien contact.

Really enjoying Torchwood: Children of Earth, to the extent that I'm even starting to find Gwen and Rhys slightly less annoying. Yes, I enjoyed (some of) the first two series, but they would have looked a little tatty on prime-time BBC1, whereas this doesn't; my family, for instance, were sucked in by watching the first two episodes with me in a way I don't think would have happened before (my dad aside, they're not even that bothered about Doctor Who). Plus, the whole 'We are coming' bit is providing a great playground game for all those children who shouldn't be watching after the watershed.
I'm surprised I've not seen more mention of how, in having unknowable aliens who at once control and somehow hunger for humanity's young, it's really echoing the final, John Mills Quatermass (the only one of those serials Who has yet to really rip-off, in spite of existing in the same continuity). Of course, that was set in a dystopian near-future, while this is set now, but how dystopian it still looks; the 456 may not be very nice (although as alien concepts go, so far they've been handled brilliantly) but they seem at least to have more of a commitment to open government than Britain's leaders. Speaking of which, the Whoniverse's recent run of Prime Ministers suddenly makes our lot seem almost desirable, doesn't it?

I'd heard quietly good things about hitman-com (and why is there one of those every few years?) In Bruges, but nothing quite prepared me for how funny it would be, and how consistently it would subvert expectations - well, at least until the last twenty minutes, where it makes that ever-infuriating decision to go with one of the Standard Hollywood Endings. Still, why does it not have more of a cult? Does it not telegraph its cult classic qualities quite as much as seems lately to be demanded? I can only hope that history will correct this injustice.

My parents, having become as disillusioned as everyone else with the state of 6Music in the hands of George Lamb et al, have taken to Absolute Radio (formerly Virgin) as the standard kitchen music. And while broadly speaking it's not bad, tending to play a wider and less-obvious selection that I would have expected, one thing I did notice: it's pretty rockist. La Roux, Lady Gaga, Little Boots and the like may be in the charts and all over the magazines, but they're not on Absolute. The one exception they made was for the worst of the lot, Florence & the Machine. Proper eighties pop is fine, they'll play Soft Cell as happily as everyone else does - but the modern synth stuff is just not here. In other words; landfill indie may not be as prominent as it was, but don't dare hope that the threat is totally gone. Boys with guitars are still the default new music for a lot of people out there.
Unrelatedly, pretty much: I saw a lot more English flags than Union ones flying in the countryside. That can't be good.

The new Torchwood trailer is not filling me with hope, to be frank. And if Peter Capaldi is making a second Who appearance, as a government official of some sort, I want this to confirm that Malcolm Tucker is in fact a direct descendant of Caecilius from the Cambridge Latin Course. I don't know why, I just do.

Friday: renegadechic lends me a data stick the size of a packet of gum, containing multiple TV series and several films. This freaks me out not because of sleep deprivation but just because we are living in the future. Later I go to my first Poptimism at its new venue, and for the first time ever hear 'Put A Donk On It' in its alleged home setting of a club. I have planned to stay only for a couple of drinks but end up as one of the last dozen there, dancing like I'm in Queer as Folk whenever something vaguely handbag comes on. En route I am impressed by the attendance at the Critical Mass bike ride on Westminster Bridge (though is it not slightly excessive to have two bike protests on the same bridge within four days? Combining and co-ordinating them would seem more effective). I also pick up various comics including one which causes confusion among the Poptimists, and the existence of which I admit I find baffling: This Is A Souvenir, a series of short comic stories inspired by the music of Spearmint. The best of which - the Phonogram one - turns on a misheard lyric. It shouldn't exist, but it makes me happy that it does.

Saturday's mass of cyclists didn't disrupt my progress, but on Saturday I am glad I left far too much time to get to my coach, because the Victoria line is shut and the army are blocking roads between there and Green Park for their parade. I didn't even know we had that many cavalry anymore! Or gun carriages - what do you use a gun carriage for in the 21st century? Anyway, make it to Brighton in plenty of time to see the Pier and the Pavillion, neither of which I have ever encountered before having always been up near the crumbling West Pier, because I am 1 x goth. The Pavillion turns out also to be the site of simon_price's wedding (we are only along for the reception) so we admire the new Mrs Price's quite astonishing dress, and then meet a dog in a tie called Rufus. He wasn't anything to do with the wedding, he just ruled. As does Brighton generally, in spite of all the bad ink; for some reason East Sussex seems to have an unusually high proportion of pretty girls. Or maybe it's just that because they're near the sea, they tend to wear less, and I am an easily-distracted male.
At the reception, when I am not dancing, or falling asleep and then claiming that I was just "bored", I am mainly introducing people off the internet to each other's faces. It is great fun. Later we take gin to the beach, and meet randoms.

I do not see much of Sunday, but make it out again for missfrancesca's birthday and associated jollity. Yesterday, because I wanted to get caught up with the Harry Potter films before the new one and vivid_blue wuvs blokey from Twilight, she hosted a viewing of Goblet of Fire. The films really do improve as they go along, don't they? There's some savage cutting, to the extent that eg Snape barely does anything in this one, but that's a good thing - by being forced to reconfigure the story, it becomes more a film and less a theme-park ride connecting key scenes from the book. Also, I dread to think how much fanfic was launched by the bit where David Tennant licks Alan Rickman's wand.

In Victoria HMV, there's a box set of all eight Alien and Predator films, including the two crossovers, for £15. It's shelved next to an earlier box set of what were at the time all seven Alien and Predator films, including the crossover. This costs £30. I know Alien vs Predator: Requiem is meant to be bad, but -£15 bad? And how much would a box with neither crossover cost?
(While musing on this, I caught an ad from the corner of my eye at Pimlico station, advertising Doctor Who - the Sylvester McCoy box set. Ooooh, how did I miss that? Turns out it's a Mock the Week ad with a list of 'Presents We Don't Want' or similar. Gits.

A bad week for icons; I have seen plenty of (richly deserved) tributes to Bettie Page and Oliver Postgate, but less about Forrest J Ackerman, superfan, inventor of the term 'sci-fi', honorary lesbian (this one was news to me) and inspiration to everyone from Ray Bradbury through Joe Dante to...well, pick someone cool, they were probably in his thrall. Rest in peace, all three of you.

Bands advertising tours on TV: is this normal? Genuine question, I don't watch much commercial TV these days, but it felt very odd when one of the breaks during the final Devil's Whore* incorporated a plug for Coldplay tickets. So odd, in fact, that it even bypassed the normal outrage I feel whenever reminded of this tour's existence - I am grudgingly prepared to forgive Coldplay's existence, but that they should reduce Girls Aloud and Jay-Z to support acts? Not acceptable.

"Gordon Brown has been called "Superman" in Parliament as the fallout from the prime minister's inadvertent claim to have "saved the world" continues. The Tories have been mocking Mr Brown after his slip of the tongue over the economy at Prime Minister's Questions...But Commons leader Harriet Harman told Tory MPs that she would "rather have Superman as our leader than their leader who is The Joker"."
1) Even by the standards of Parliamentary name-calling, isn't accusing the other side's leader of being a mass-murdering psychopath rather strong? I suppose there's always the remote chance that she appreciates the Grant Morrison perspective on the Joker's personality, whereby he has no essential 'self' and reinvents himself in line with each new circumstance; this would be a pretty good charge to level at Cameron, who has never really managed to articulate a stance or principle beyond 'I'm not the other guy'. Somehow, though, I doubt there's a copy of Arkham Asylum or 'The Clown at Midnight' on Harman's shelves.
2) Equally, I can only conclude that Harman has never read Kingdom Come, in which Superman's failure to confront the Joker with sufficient conviction leads to the death of Lois Lane, Superman's retirement, and the collapse of the superheroic age into carnage and anarchy.
3) At a simpler level, I think most of us would rather have Superman as party leader than The Joker. What her riposte signally fails to grasp is the difference between Superman, and an all-too-human leader who has made a slip of the tongue which looks very like it was as Freudian as it was hubristic.
(That third point is really banal, isn't it? And yet without it, the whole item looked that little bit too abstract/Comic Book Guy. Speaking of comics - I was a little worried about Phonogram series 2 starting with a Pipettes issue, but Seth Bingo's anti-Pipettes rant assuaged all my fears. Great comic, and the launch party wasn't too bad either. Yeah, get me with the schmoozing)

*Which was still a bit of a mess, wasn't it? Moments of genuine power eclipsed by the overall sensation of a story whose truncation made it didactic and rushed. Not to mention repetitive, in the way that over four episodes Angelica Fanshawe managed four deaths for four shagpieces. Has anyone yet written a crossover in which she turns out somehow to be an ancestor of Torchwood's Tosh and her Fanny Of Doom? If not - please don't.

Just as the Large Hadron Collider seems to have left us in the same lousy universe we were in on Tuesday, so its associated Torchwood episode was a bit of a disappointment. Part of the problem is that what counts as mad science for us should be positively passe on Earth-Who - "Large Hadron Colliders? Oh yeah, UNIT has two. At Torchwood we only have one, but it's better. Pink. Of course, the Doctor didn't need one at all, he trained Higg's bosons to come when he played the recorder." It's the same mismatch we got in Marvel's various foolhardy attempts to have the events of seven years ago be a big deal on their Earth, even though that New York gets its skyscrapers trashed pretty much weekly. But even beyond that, ( spoilers ) You'd do better having Keith Richards warn against the evils of drugs.

There's been a lot of going back this week. I don't mean in the wider world - that seems Hellbent on beating a course back to the Dark Ages, to the extent that I can't be bothered to keep charting it on here, it depresses me to no end. I mean personally, whether it be the old gang back together at the wedding, or my plans for tonight when I'm off to the Verge (as was), scene of many a drunken night back in the Fan Club days, to see the New Royal Family, sober. Last Saturday I went to Stay Beautiful for the first time this year, an experience I half-expected to be valedictory, but which left me feeling much less out of place than I expected. And last night, even with Indelicates and David Devant shows on offer, I went to see the Blow Monkeys. Now in a sense, Devant or the Indelicates would have been more 'going back' - I've seen each I don't know how many times, and the Blow Monkeys never. Nor, in my decade or so of London gigging, have I previously been to the Jazz Cafe*. But the Blow Monkeys...I was introduced to them getting on for 15 years ago, just as my music tastes were starting to get beyond what the inkies and Select (RIP) were feeding me. Their infectious sense of calm and beauty, the genuine venom mixed in with an understanding that you can sometimes revolt better by transcendence than opposition - that wasn't very teenage, and in some ways it's still not very me, but it became quite formative nonetheless. I'd heard Dr Robert had moved on in something of the same wrong direction his contemporary Paul Weller did, and never expected a new Blow Monkeys album, or a chance to see them live. But then, that was before eternal recurrence came early and everyone started reforming.
Now, obviously I know that for the time being, time impacts on beings. But I've seen eighties acts before; Hell, I've seen seventies acts before. And most of them seemed to have jumped on to that celebrity track where ageing really does make people look cooler somehow, more lived-in and not just lived-out. Which is why it still came as a surprise when the chap in the audience I'd unconsciously pegged as 'the big lad who needs to stop trying to carry off the Dr Robert look these days' was, inevitably, Dr Robert. Dr Robert who was one of the reasons I initially got into the band because a few people had mentioned that I looked like him - and not putting myself or my younger self down here, but he looked like a much prettier me, which obviously had this narcissist hooked. Still charming, still sparkling, still with that voice and even that lisp - but not the young Apollo anymore.
And there weren't that many people there. First London date in 18 years, people know at least a couple of songs, not that big a venue - it should be fairly full, if not perhaps sold out. Not so. And predictably, some of that crowd are lig zombies who chatter through the new stuff - of which we get a lot but hey, I like most of the new album, I'm not complaining. What does puzzle me is the selection from the classics. Obviously they wouldn't get away without 'Digging Your Scene' or 'It Doesn't Have To Be This Way', and they don't try, or seem anything less than happy to be playing them again and comfortable with their past. But then we get songs that hit as duets, sung solo - 'Celebrate', 'Wait' and 'Slaves No More', the last of which I didn't even like much in the first place. Likewise 'Heaven Is A Place I'm Moving To' and 'Springtime for the World', songs I usually skip on CD. I wasn't honestly expecting 'Beautiful Child' in the current climate, or 'Cash' which I imagine would be a nightmare to play live, but wasn't 'This Is Your Life' a hit? Wasn't 'It Pays To Belong'?
I'm not saying I regret going, but I still feel like I missed something.

The support, incidentally, was Rhoda Dakar, ex of the Specials, accompanied by some bloke from Bad Manners on acoustic guitar. She played 'Racist Friend' from the old days, but not 'The Boiler'. Now, if you've never heard 'The Boiler'...it's getting on for 30 years old now and I'd say there's still nothing quite so harrowing ever to have been released in the disguise of a pop single. It wouldn't work in a cheery support slot for an upbeat band, it wouldn't work acoustic, and although she's aged incredibly well, one could hardly shout for it without the risk of being terribly misconstrued. But still, it seems weird to have seen Rhoda Dakar and not heard 'The Boiler'.

*Not what the name implies, is the short version. More a mid-size provincial venue, or the 12 Bar inexplicably rebuilt at double size. And £4.10 a pint? Get out.

The last Torchwood: well, I suppose it had its moments. ( Spoilers ) And then after, the trailer for today's new Who. Speeches about what the Doctor is get me every time. Or at least, they used to, but while at least Tate wasn't screeching these lines, nor could she make me believe them. I'm still going to watch it, obviously. But without any hope of enjoying the experience.

I'm currently halfway through two novels which have a brilliant handle on the quiet desperation of life in the first decade of the 21st century. One of them, Friction, is by Joe Stretch, the young frontman of the quite good band (we are) Performance; it came out last month. The other is 40 years old - John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar.
Friction is Michel Houllebecq if he were twice as good, and minus the po-faced self-importance of the Gallic intellectual cliche. The anomie, the corrosive effect of glossy magazines, the deadening social assumptions are all laid bare with a merciless scalpel. And nimble phrasing, too - in discussion of the modern fondness for comedy, he describes the era as 'pissless'. Which took me a moment, but...wow. Or consider: "Nowadays, opting out of social occasions is a form of self-mutilation." Best summation I've yet seen of the tension felt when one opts for a QNI. Or consider: "We have arrived at some poorly signposted junction in Earth's existence, when people can do little bar pay their rent and sit at tables, order drinks and chew Italian bread to mush. Who is remembering all this?"
Brunner, on the other hand, predicted the barely-suppressed hysteria of the big picture. Like anyone who gazes into the future, he's a little off in places; he's managed to get RSS aggregation and fake interactivity down, for instance, without realising the computer and the TV would merge. But if you had shown him the modern world, he'd have taken maybe a day to grasp it, and there's few enough people who live here of whom that can be said. In places, the problem is simply that his dystopia is too optimistic - he assumed that somewhere past the six billionth Earth human, even the core of the Catholic church would accept the need for birth control, nevermind the US government - but the overall tone, the resource shortage, the slow collapse; he saw it all coming. The gang problem causing so much woe in London? He foresees and explains it almost in passing, showing how it's the natural consequence of putting territorial mammals in an overcrowded environment. A prophet who should have been heeded sooner.

I would not yet make any claims for Marvel Comics' Secret Invasion event as Art, but as a big superhero comic about stuff blowing up, it got off to a very good start. ( Moderate spoilers )

Another good Clockwork Comedy on Tuesday; Carey Marx and Parsnip the teddy have such a wonderful way with the Wrong. I also liked the drunk Jewish girl* and the low-key storytelling guy (though I felt so sorry for him when he thought that so many people were laughing that it must all be a dream), but the video shop chap - not so much. You can't do geek humour and get the details wrong. If you were that into 300, you wouldn't keep calling it The 300. If you want to be Batman, you'll know that (regrettably) he doesn't kill. And above all, if you read Doctor Who Magazine you'll know it's not been Weekly in years.
Besides, what kind of film buff prefers video to DVD? DVD is the ultimate geek medium.

Today's random historical peculiarity: Strasbourg's 1518 'Dancing Plague': "Hundreds of men and women danced wildly, day after day, in the punishing summer heat. They did not want to dance, but could not stop". Many died. Puts the panic about Killer Rave Drug Ecstasy into perspective, doesn't it?

*Yes, I know, quelle surprise.

Gmail's spam filter has been getting increasingly overzealous lately. I can forgive it the mailing lists and ads from online shops, but mails from people it knows I have mailed? Individual replies in conversations where I am clearly taking part? And now, in a real masterstroke - the notifications from my Google Alert. Calm down, soldier!

Fun though darkmarcpi's birthday (observed) was last night, mostly the weather this weekend has been encouraging me to catch up on my sleep, and my viewing. Bionic Woman, for instance, which wasn't quite as bad as I'd come to expect, but would still do much better to focus on Katee Sackhoff as the hotter, less whiny bionic woman. The whole "what have you done to me?" bit would work if she'd ended up like Robotman, a human brain trapped in cold, unfeeling metal - but she hasn't, has she? She seems to have no loss of sensation, no downsides to her posthumanity. This being the case, I have much more sympathy for Sarah Corvus' ongoing upgrades, "cutting away everything that's weak".
Final Worlds of Fantasy was pretty good, although as well as the New Weird stuff I would have appreciated a note on how totally genre boundaries are breaking down now, and thank heavens for that - a nod to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, for instance. Oh, and speaking of the New Weird - free Jeff Vandermeer book for download, plus interview. Oh yes, and based on those clips I no longer have any interest in seeing the Hogfather adaptation. How unconvincing was Death?
And Torchwood's 'From Out Of The Rain' was, unsurprisingly, very good. PJ Hammond's previous episode was the one which stopped me abandoning the series, and on this one he'd been given even more leeway to cut loose with his Sapphire & Steel preoccupations. I also like his deft touch here as in 'Small Worlds' with the possibilities of Jack's having been around, and not just in the sexual sense the other writers riff on. Although, something - the lighting, the direction? - left me feeling the episode wasn't quite as eerie as it could have been.

Though I knew Cuba was a vile regime, and that the Manics' support for it was one of their more questionable decisions even during their long, sad decline, I had no idea that until Fidel's brother relaxed the rules just now, DVD players, microwaves and computers were illegal. Of course, that's another breach of faith with communism, given computers were officially denounced as "deviationist bourgeois pseudoscience" by the Soviet Party. Don't start thinking they've joined the civilised world just yet, though - "it is thought air conditioners will not be available until 2009 and toasters until the year after".
A country without toast; the very definition of dystopia.

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.