There's somebody at the door

When someone decides to rap at my bedroom door before I've even had the chance to open my eyes in the morning, it's a sure sign there may be trouble ahead.

Unlike the song, I don't have the music and romance to sustain me.

No, I have to get up and get on with it.

Flatmate never knocks at the door unless there's news of some sort to impart - and Monday was a classic.

Bonkety!  Bonkety!

"Yer?"

"Guess what?"

"No - surprise me."

"Osama bin Laden's dead."

"What, REALLY?"

"Yeah - President Obama was just on the telly telling everybody."

"Well, I hope they've made quite sure it is him, otherwise there'll be trouble."

Last time he did this, Michael Jackson had just died.  Of course, I'm a total and utter ghoul, so I asked: "What of?  Nasty dose of car crash?  Nutty fan shot him on the doorstep?"

Neither of these incidents beats the earthquake, though.

Some years ago, I was rudely awakened in the middle of the night by a loud sharp cracking sound.  Suddenly, items placed on the shelf above my radiator tumbled to the floor.

"Bloody hell, what was that?" I shrieked.  "An earthquake?"

Next morning, bonkety, bonkety.

"Yer?"

"Yes."

The crystal ship is being filled

Now I realise I've been grouching on rather a lot recently about wanting to bugger off to Mars the first chance I get, but you must realise there's been a Royal wedding on and I never voted for the bunch of horse-faced inbred fuggers anyway.  As my mother always says, just because their ancestors happened to be a nastier crowd than ours is no bloody reason to respect them today.

So as modern technology has to date still not managed to ship any real human beings across to Mars, let alone bring them back again, I've been doing the next best thing, namely reading about the place and watching programmes on it.

Top of my list of Martian favourites are the classic Futurama episode where the spaceship crew go to visit Amy's family for a barbecue, and Another World.

The latter is one of the many free e-books I have found through Project Gutenberg and the Manybooks website.

It is bloody weird - and really great.

According to the bumph at the beginning, it was written all the way back in 1873 by a person referring to themselves by the pseudonym of 'Hermes', but believed by most sensible scholars to probably be one Benjamin Lumley, the bloke also responsible for introducing the very latest in Italian opera to Covent Garden.

Why on earth would an elegant opera buff like him concern himself with the happenings out in the further reaches of the solar system?

Well, mainly because he was one of the many, many people who fancied penning a utopian fantasy - and to the late nineteenth century intellectual no doubt Mars seemed to be the most scientifically plausible location for it.  Apart from this, he might also have been a medium, as he very delicately implies in his introduction to the work that this could have been the means by which he was supplied with the information in the book.

Our trusty narrator starts by explaining that the capital city of Mars is called Montalluyah.

This city is built on and around a very large, high mountain, possibly Olympus Mons, the massive ginormous extinct volcano one that is literally three miles high (yet the Futurama crew managed to climb just as easily as if it were Pendle Hill when they went camping up the top of it.  Talk about artistic licence!). In the Montalluyah version of Mars, the mountain is situated several miles inland from a major sea.  Over the millennia, the sea has gradually eroded the underside of the mountain away, so that the sea now flows inland quite some way under the summit of the mountain.

Not surprisingly, this has ended up creating a bit of a problem.  Over the past few decades, several major rock falls have occurred, burying scores of people and even entire districts under huge piles of rubble.

Our narrator the Dearly Beloved Leader (alias Tootmansyo, in their language) decided he'd better sort the problem out once and for all, before the entire summit of the moutain came crashing back down onto the foothills beneath.  So he had a mountain support built.

This triumph of Victorian Martian engineering consists of a colossal structure shaped like a lighthouse, only several miles in height.  The sturdy base was built right at the bottom of the moutain, then thrusts all the way up to emerge near the top, thus providing extra support to the half eroded moutain, along with a network of artificially generated magnetic fields. Huge civic store-rooms, observatories and laboratories have been constructed in the interior of the mountain support. 

There is also a system of hydraulic lifts, which take you from the top of the mountain to the bottom (or vice versa) in half an hour flat.  However, the public is only allowed to use this system in an emergency. Going round the long way means it can take you up to several days to travel right from bottom to top (or vice versa).

Of course, any self-respecting British Victorian industrialist worth their salt would have immediately set up a Moutain Support Transport System and started raking the coins in right, left and centre.  However, Montalluyah is something of a socialist utopia.

Here doctors and nurses are revered for preserving the health and happiness of the nation, which means they are paid shedloads of money and all live in exquisite palaces complete with wonderful landscaped gardens that, like all the public parks and squares of the city, can be lit up at night by electricity.  (To give you a better idea of what 'luxury' means in Montalluyah, all houses, whether rich or poor, are fitted with unlimited hot and cold running fresh and seawater for their baths.) Teachers are also greatly respected, together with the 'character divers', a type of educational psychologist employed to study children and work out what type of careers they would be best suited to once they have grown up.

Exquisitely clear streams run over miles and miles of white and blue violets.  The water is then collected and used in medicines and beverages, but not food, for cooking appears to turn the water black.

As well as violets, hippos live on Mars.  They are employed by the Montalluyans in much the same way as we use cattle.

Because the sunlight is much more intense than on our planet, during the summer months they have to retreat to the 'interior city', a series of galleries tunneled right down inside the rock, then decorated every bit as intricately and exquisitely as a Byzantine cathedral in tenth-century downtown Constantinople.

Entertainment is just as baroque.  Concerts often involve virtuosos thrumming solos of prog-rock complexity and length on huge electric harps which reach several octaves further up and down the scale than our puny acoustic ones on earth.  When the harp hits a particularly plangent note, tiny mechanical birds ornamenting its frame start trilling and waving their little jewelled wings up and down, while miniscule Faberge flowers open and exhale real perfume over the audience.

If you're thinking all this sounds strange enough, just wait till you hear what you have to do to get a date.

Men and women are not allowed to get married until they have been assessed for their suitability by a council of elders (aka a Committee of Public Safety composed of a posse of Hattie Jacques middle-aged matrons swathed in tight maroon plush bustles who like nothing better than disapproving of and freaking out young whippersnappers of either sex).  Exactly how this is done never gets explained.

Anyway, once you have finally been passed as suitable, you must publicly announce your intention of getting married should you find the right person.  THEN (and only then) are you permitted to go out on a date.

What happens then is that a woman declares that she would like to meet all the men who might be considering marrying her.  75 to 100 suitors dress themselves up in their finest glad rags and hie themselves along to the local meeting hall for the evening.  They all sit on comfy red velvet seats in what looks very much like the auditorium of a posh Victorian theatre or music hall.  And wait in expectant silence.

Once all the suitors have arrived and sat down, the stage curtains sweep open to reveal the prospective bride.

She too is done up in her very best outfit and hairdo - only she is lounging on a chaise longue, set towards the front of the stage.  The stage itself has been decorated to look just like a top-notch Montalluyah parlour (in other words, Oscar Wilde's front room in Tite Street).

For the next three hours or so, she lies there, languidly fanning herself as the men stare up at her in silent adoration and she flutters her eyelashes back, deciding which of them (if any) she likes the look of.

Both woman and suitors have to repeat this performance every single night without fail for the next month.

Finally she tells the council of elders which bloke she would like to marry - whereupon they approach him and ask him if he is okay with that.

If he is, then both of them must make a public declaration that they are now engaged and will definitely be getting married in the future.

If he isn't, then she can suggest two alternative choices of husband.

Should the alternatives not work out either, then the woman is not allowed to put herself forward for marriage again until this time next year.  Next year, she will only be permitted to offer herself at the public viewings for three weeks rather than four.  The year after that, it would only be two weeks and so on.

The idea behind all this is to prevent men and women from taking a serious committment like marriage frivolously.    

Of course there are plenty of canals in Montalluyah too, but when you remember that this book was written all the way back in 1873, maybe we should give old 'Hermes' a bit more of a break.

You couldn’t make it up

Nationalists across the world are notorious for bigging up their own countries while belittling others.  But all of them are rank amateurs when compared to the late, great and seriously deluded Comyns Beaumont.

Not content with simply coming from a country that still ruled a quarter of the globe back in his day, this giant prize marrow of an alternative theorist decided to colonise all their history, languages, myths and culture as well.

Ignorant berks like you, me and the wallpaper may previously have been under the impression that some of the greatest civilizations of antiquity flourished in sunny hot countries situated around the Mediterranean, such as Italy, Greece, Israel and Egypt.

Wrong, said Comyns Beaumont.

They were ALL located in Britain.

According to him, the splendour that was Egypt and the pharaohs hung out in western Scotland rather than north Africa.  Also to be found in our sceptred isle were ancient Greece, Israel, the Roman Empire – and Babylonia.  Bloody hell – by that reckoning, the world of antiquity must have been a very crowded place.

But if you tried to object that places as different and distant from one another as Athens, Jerusalem, Crete and Ethiopia all persist in occupying their habitual geographical sites in the present day world, he would simply brush your arguments aside as irrelevant.  The reason for this is that he had formulated a grand theory.

Basically, he started off by noticing the strange similarities between modern British place names and some of those in the ancient world.  As a typical early twentieth century English jingoist, it is doubtful that he knew very much about ancient languages, linguistics or comparative philology.  If Loch Carron and the neighbouring village of Erbusaig in Scotland sounded just like Acheron the ancient Greek river of hell and Erebus the mythical purgatory, then that is obviously exactly what they were.  Following this brilliantly simple (not to say absurdly reductionist) analogy, Achilles the great Greek hero grew up on the Isle of Skye, rather than Skyros, and ancient Athens must have lived in Bath.  

When he went on to examine the place names of other civilizations, the list of spooky coincidences only grew.  And grew.  Until most of antiquity had been conquered for Britain.

This is how he managed to come up with classics such as Mount Olympus the home of the Greek gods really being at the top of Ben Nevis, the battle of Thermopylae being fought at Glencoe and Ur of the Chaldees flourishing near the Stones of Stenness in the Orkneys.  Not to mention Jesus of Nazareth being born in Galilee (Wales) and crucified just outside Edinburgh, the site of the ancient city of Jerusalem.  Therefore you will not be in the least bit surprised to learn that Crete was in the Shetland Islands, the ancient Egyptians were actually Irish and hell can be found in western Scotland (I’m afraid the topic of the weather will be coming up again later.  In a BIG way.).      

Now at this point you may be wondering why so many different cultures and civilizations all grew up in the same rather small and obscure part of the world.  Because Britain is bloody brilliant, you daft pratt.  (Glad we solved that one, then.)

Yes, but if you will persist in redrawing the atlas and appropriating half of the ancient world for Britain, you’ve still got the problem of finding enough British sites to put up all the cities and landmarks of all the various lands and cultures.  Remember, Britain may be great – but it’s not very big.

Simple – every key place in Britain had several names, not just the one.  So the stone circle at Avebury can be identified not just as Mizpah, but also Thebes, the dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus, an astronomical temple to Saturn and the image of a death-dealing comet.  The principle holds with historical figures too.  When the comet landed just outside Jerusalem (= Edinburgh, remember?  Pay attention, Bond!), the city was under siege by an army led by the matchless military genius Moses/Zoroaster/Silenus/Odin (aka Oh God, not again).

Er, WHAT comet was that, again?

Satan.  The double one made up of the fragments from the collapsed planet.

WTF is a ‘collapsed planet’?  How the hell do planets ‘collapse’ anyway?  And if they do, why? (Right, well, I’ve now looked up ‘collapsed planet’ on Google and apparently it is a genuine term, but seems to be mainly used to describe a planet undergoing a global ecological meltdown, like the one shown in that famous episode of Futurama where the crew of the spaceship had to collect creatures from the planet in question and take them to a new home.  I suspect what Beaumont probably meant was a planet that had exploded into a trillion and a half smithereens, more than anything else.  Doubt he knew five fifths of bugger-all about geology, either, but there you go.  Can’t be helped.)

Anyway, all the ancient catastrophe legends, including Noah’s flood and the destruction of Atlantis, refer to this very same event.

Of course, it was followed by storms, floods and earthquakes of truly titanic proportions.  The host of the invading general of the many-barrelled moniker was destroyed – along with much of Atlantis/Britain. (The Atlantis-Lemuria Hypothesis – a tasteful and more democratic way of finding extra Lebensraum for your nation.  Wonder if any visionary/nutter has ever suggested that their particular national government or the United Nations try pumping all the water out of one of these great sunken civilizations and erecting a system of dykes to protect it like they have in the Netherlands?)

If the Flood had occurred in Britain, then obviously that must mean that Noah, along with every other character in the Bible, had lived there too.  This ‘proves’ beyond all reasonable doubt that Britain was the root source of world culture.

Wait!  It gets even better.

Apparently the earth swallowed up much of the comet, thus increasing its size.  At the same time, the sheer force of the impact knocked the planet out further from the sun, lengthening the period of its orbit from 360 days to 365 ¼ days.  This altered the global climate system so that Britain lost its balmy sub-tropical weather and became the cold, misty place we know and love today.  (See, told you Beaumont can think of an answer for everything.)

If you were sitting there thinking that all this sounds strangely reminiscent of Emmanuel Velikovski and his groundbreaking volume Worlds In Collision, you’d be right.  Beaumont’s theory is eerily similar – and he got there first.  Apparently he used to give his own kids no end of nightmares by regaling them with tales of cosmology run amok.  He confidently predicted that another monster comet was due to crash into the planet some time during December 1919.

When it didn’t, his belief in the rest of his crackpot theories only intensified.  Typical bloody prophet of doom.

According to Beaumont, many of the survivors migrated south, founding colonies which they named in honour of the cities and districts of their beloved homeland.  However, the remnants of the north still remained very much the centre of world civilizations.

Jerusalem was rebuilt in Edinburgh. Then York flourished as Babylon, Lincoln became Antioch, London Damascus, Bristol both Sodom and Tarshish (not sure if this is at the same time), and Bath dumped Athens to turn into the Philistine city of Gath.  The Holy Family moved in near Glastonbury, where Jesus was born.  His entire mission took place in Somerset, then known as Galilee (which had obviously moved from Wales?  I’m confused!).

So if all this is true, how come the world’s historians persist in claiming that all these civilizations were located in a variety of places round the globe?

Well, they’re obviously lying and exaggerating in order to make their own countries look good in front of everybody else.  Yet it’s fine to sing the praises of your own homeland – just as long as it happens to be Britain.  Everybody ‘knows’ we are ‘superior’, so we don’t have to worry about this sort of crackpot theory making us look more than a little silly.

Apart from which, we was robbed.  Quite literally.

That great Yorkshireman Constantine the Great decided that the real Jerusalem in Edinburgh was too far away from his new capital city in Asia Minor.  So in an attempt to persuade people that the old city was actually situated in Israel, he hoodwinked his venerable old mother Helena into ‘finding’ the True Cross there.  Then to make quite sure that nobody caught him out, he purged every single ancient and modern document that described the Holy Land as being in Britain.  The few documents that were spared got severely mutilated.

Beaumont can show that this is true because historical records list many classical works that no longer seem to exist.

History also shows us that Constantine was only following in the footsteps of Hadrian, who had the better half of Athens (now moved from Bath to Dumbarton) dismantled and shipped all the way to Greece, where workmen promptly re-erected the buildings.  Naturally he didn’t worry too much about the cost in time or money, otherwise he wouldn’t have done it.

What continues to baffle me is the fact that Beaumont enjoyed a long and successful career as a journalist before sitting down to knock out this farrago of absolute nonsense.  Not only did he work as an aide for Lord Northcliffe, he founded and edited a number of well-regarded magazines.

John Michell claims that Beaumont used to get very frustrated with newspaper editors and owners because he was convinced that they failed to represent British interests properly.  But this is by no means the same as aggravating the hell out of them with patently false and absurd claims in his articles.  (Wonder if he did ever get bollocked for this sort of thing, though? Might be worth further investigation.)

Michell also reckons that readers of Beaumont’s books found them amazing and entertaining.  So you would have agreed – until he goes on to speculate that the main reason Beaumont didn’t manage to shift nearly as many books as later catastrophe-minded authors like Erich von Daeniken and Emmanuel Velikovsky is because much of his writing tended to be ‘long-winded and tedious’.  (Michell does list all Beaumont’s works in the bibliography to his volume Eccentric Lives, Peculiar Notions, so presumably he made a heroic attempt to read them.)

Whatever way you look at it, that has to be some serious achievement, managing to make such a flabbertrociously original theory boring as buggery.  You would have thought that a well-regarded journalist and uncle of Daphne du Maurier would know just how to knock out a concise argument in vivid, everyday prose.  Problem is, writing a full-length book gives you much more latitude for self-indulgence, particularly if your work is so original that your editor is unlikely to know enough about it to be able to pull you up every time you start getting carried away.

At this point I think I’ll just about give up …

Rachel In Danger

Continuing in my quest to get round to watching every last film and television programme that Ronan Vibert and Stephen Greif have ever appeared in before I die, I’ve just finished viewing the cult classic Rachel In Danger on YouTube.

The first of the noted Armchair Thriller serials from the late Seventies, this is the famous one that stars Stephen Greif as a delightful South American terrorist named Juan.  And it’s such an oddball of a thriller, that programmes like this don’t tend to get made any more.

Just to start with, most of the major characters involved don’t have the slightest idea what ‘cool’ and ‘sophisticated’ means.

Rachel herself is a dumpy, frumpy introvert of an eight year old girl, brought up in Scotland by her strict, if somewhat eccentric mother.  She is a committed vegetarian bookworm – and extremely intelligent.  If you offered her pink glittery ballet slippers and a feathery tutu, she wouldn’t hesitate to spit on your grave from a great height.  There’s no wavy long blonde hair in bunches, either.

As the series opens, Rachel is sitting on the Intercity train from Glasgow to London Euston.  Her mother says it is fine for her to travel down on her own as long as she uses her commonsense.  Despite her claims to the contrary, she probably still feels so angry with her ex-husband that she’ll do anything she can to avoid further direct contact with him.

During the journey, the little old lady in the next seat takes Rachel under her wing, in a gentle hint to viewers that later on the small girl will be devoid of help and protection at the very time she needs it most.   

Meanwhile, down in London, it’s all starting to go a bit Pete Tong (thus creating the inciting incident).

Rachel’s dad Peter Warmington is a nerdy university lecturer who took a job abroad somewhere in South America after his marriage to her mother broke down when she was just two years old.  Now he’s been offered a post at London University, so he’s returned to the UK.  Rachel’s mum has suggested that father and daughter get to know each other in person during the summer holiday before he starts his new job.

In a previous letter, Peter told his estranged daughter that he is ‘not a political animal’. This turns out to be his first mistake.

While making the final preparations for Rachel’s arrival, Peter is both surprised and delighted to bump into an old acquaintance at a street market.  Juan is someone he met back at the university in South America.

Juan claims he has been sent to the UK on business.  Peter feels lonely and isolated, so he invites him back to the temporary flat he is renting round the corner for a cup of coffee.  Big mistake number two.

Back at the scruffy dump of a flat, Juan questions Peter in some detail about his expected arrangements and movements over the next few days.

Peter assumes he is just taking a friendly interest.  Big mistake number three.

Once Juan has all the information that he needs from Peter, he disposes of him with the aid of a handy cigarette packet concealing a lethal stiletto blade.  “Don’t mind if I smoke?” he asks politely, then ker-CHUNK!  Juan appears to have a weakness for nifty little gadgets he picks up in the sales at the spymaster store in down Kensington.

This series certainly isn’t afraid to major on seriously bizarre murders.  In a later episode, a Welsh hitman disposes of the Brummie traitor via a deadly round of butties on a park bench.  You’ve got to love any programme that features Welsh Marxist terrorist hitmen in kitsch T-shirts, pretending to be university students and tourists on daytrips to the capital, before marmolising their targets with the aid of a well-aimed cheese and ham pickle!

Juan, it turns out, is actually the leader of an international cell of hardline Marxist terrorists.

I assume it was probably decided to make the cell international in composition because having all the terrorists originate from just one country could have had the scriptwriters accused of trying to stir up some covert sympathy for certain real-life terrorist organisations of the time – most probably the IRA in this case, though maybe also the PLA, ETA or the Baader-Meinhof gang.

Juan’s cell consists of a suave South American businessman, an intense young German academic, a scruffy Brummie forger and a stroppy Japanese woman. They all travel round the world helping each other commit violent acts of protest against their respective regimes.

Their plan on this particular occasion is to assassinate a member of the royal family at the next garden party due to be held at Buckingham Palace.  Juan intends to gain access to the event by taking over Peter Warmington’s identity.

This should be quite easy because the two men are of the same physical type. Plus Juan knows a lot about British culture and speaks fluent English with only a very slight accent.  He has probably targeted Peter precisely for this very reason.

The Japanese lady is supposed to be posing as Peter Warmington’s second wife, who she met while they were both working in South America.

However, there is one slight problem – Rachel.

Either Juan didn’t know that Peter has a daughter – or else he believed that Rachel would be staying at home in Scotland with her mother until the terrorists had completed their mission in London.

After the murder, Juan decides to stash Peter Warmington’s body in the airing cupboard, on the grounds that he and his colleagues won’t be staying in the flat for long enough for it to start to smell.  Tell you something for nothing, they must feel pretty damn certain that they won’t get extradited from their respective countries of origin, then, because the very first thing the police will do once the new tenants have reported the murder is establish the corpse’s identity.  Once they have discovered he was the real Peter Warmington, they’ll obviously decide that the fake one needs to start helping them with their enquiries as a matter of urgency.

Just after Juan has finished concealing the corpse, there is a knock on the door.

It is the police.  They want to know why he has not come to meet his dear little daughter at Euston station as he promised her and her mother he would.

Well, mainly because he doesn’t know he now has a daughter – nor that she has been duly dispatched from Scotland to London by his estranged wife.

Juan is caught on the hop.  To avoid suspicion, he is forced to improvise.

Rachel, he insists, will provide the perfect cover.  With a daughter, he and his second wife can now not only get into the garden party, but up much closer and more personal to their intended target (who is never named, presumably to avoid upsetting the Royals, by inadvertently implying that this could be based on any real assassination plot, thus giving the genuine terrorists out there a few handy hints for their own nefarious plans).

To ensure that she cannot betray them, they will murder her straight afterwards.

Wormauld the Brummie is a kind-hearted, sentimental sort of bloke, so naturally he objects to this.  He suggests they should spare her life.  Then he will escort her back home to her mother in Scotland.

If they don’t agree, then he won’t give them the official garden party invitation he’s managed to forge so brilliantly.    

Now he has a temporary daughter, Juan finds he has to keep improvising.

He claims that his female Japanese colleague is actually his second wife, and thus Rachel’s step-mother. They met while he was still in South America because ‘Japanese people are everywhere these days’.  He didn’t want to tell Rachel and her mother by letter or telephone because the news was far too important.

Because Rachel is now kipping in the spare bedroom, the Japanese lady must obviously sleep elsewhere.  As she is now apparently his wife, Juan has the bright idea that she should sleep with him.  This even appears to involve sex with the cheeky bastard, as he then has the audacity to complain about her bad performance in bed the next day!

She does not like him at all, so quite why she agreed to have a shag with him I really couldn’t say (according to Japanese culture, is it bad manners to turn a man down in these sorts of circumstances?  Haven’t got a clue, I’m afraid).  Though I could well imagine Juan arguing that as Rachel is a very intelligent girl, she will of course be perfectly aware that her father and stepmother must have sex together, so she will realise something is up if they don’t.

As an adult woman, I think it would have been really funny if the Japanese lady had told him that because he has upset her so much, no way is he going to get any tonight – and if he isn’t going to sleep on the sofa then she is.  Or she complained about what a load of old rubbish he is in the sack.  Just to add a note of realism or three to the proceedings.  However, if Juan is prepared to resort to physical violence to remind the Japanese lady just who is in charge and why, he presumably wouldn’t take very kindly to being refused – or criticized - in bed.

Somebody who has watched all the episodes on YouTube keeps complaining about this Japanese character being very aggressive in her general attitude.

This could possibly be a more subtle allusion to the frequent personality clashes that were reported in real terrorist gangs from the Sixties and Seventies, most notably the Baader-Meinhof gang.  Some of the women members wanted to prove they were every bit as tough and uncompromising as the men, so of course they made sure to err on the side of excess in this respect, and could often end up pretty narky.

Being such hardline Marxists as it is implied in the script, questions of both doctrine and dedication no doubt spark the most massive rows between the members of Juan’s cell.  Plus Rachel’s mere presence has obviously given the Japanese lady a severe fright – and people who are terrified can often become extremely aggressive.

The Japanese lady loathes Rachel because she realises that the little girl represents a serious security risk to their carefully laid plans.  Both Juan and the Japanese lady are aware that Rachel is very intelligent – which only increases the threat that she poses to them.  As both a pretend stepmother and a real woman, the Japanese lady is able to make a more accurate assessment of the potential danger than Juan.

Juan’s stroke of genius is to devise horribly plausible explanations for everything that could possibly provoke awkward questions – from Rachel or anyone else.

For example, when Rachel asks her presumed daddy why he bothered marrying the Japanese lady if they don’t like each other very much, he replies: “Well, I expect it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Later at the garden party, he delights in informing a posh lady guest that Rachel happens to be his daughter by his first wife, so ‘of course her step-mother loathes her.  It’s just one of those things, really.’   

Stephen Greif handles all the social satire with his usual deft touch – and a slight, but perceptible edge of real glee at the acute discomfort experienced by the stuffiest of the British characters.  Quite appropriate for such a hardened class warrior as Juan, not to mention great fun for Greif.

Like Harry Fenning, Juan the terrorist and Peter Warmington the lecturer both subscribe to the bad taste school of Seventies menswear.  Their version is slightly more low-key than his – but still worrying all the same. 

What we are talking about here is beige dogtooth jackets with a slight safari cut and front yokes in tan suede.  The lemon yellow cotton shirt is worn without a tie and the top couple of buttons undone at the neck, leaving a few faint wisps of chest hair to poke out at the top (I couldn’t make out if he was wearing a vest or not.).  

Moving down, the trousers were cut to make even the finest of masculine bums look slightly flabby and square from the back.  Let’s be brutally honest here, no-one would respect Commander Travis if his trousers did the same.  Remember the considered opinion of Spike Milligan’s Jewish ex-tailor colleague during the war: “You need to make a soldier look attractive to the opposite sex – or think he does.”

Juan finishes his elegant loungewear off with Peter’s ghastly pair of horn-rimmed bottle-bottom spectacles.  A taste for frowsty eyewear obviously runs in the family, seeing as Rachel sports them too.  Wonder if her mum back in Scotland has an equally frumpy pair?

As Juan doesn’t seem to need to wear glasses himself, Peter’s prescription gives him headaches, so he has to keep taking them off.  This is the first sign the police have that not everything is as it should be.

Because he’s considering changing the way that he looks, Juan informs Rachel, he is now trying to get used to going without glasses sometimes.

Up the revolution

Wouldn't Charlie Brooker make a brilliant Jacobin?


Having just finished his Screen Burn collection for about the third time since buying it in the post-Christmas sale at HMV, I think I'm well qualified to say that he would have made a great addition to the Committee of Public Safety.

Never hesitating to preach the most violently radical solutions to the perennial problems that beset human society, this is a man who has studied at the feet of the masters.

He’s tough, he’s uncompromising, he’s a man who stays true to the purity of his vision through thick and thin.  And most importantly of all, he commands the rhetoric (if not the crowds) to prove it.

Misanthropy, he insists in Like The Doritos Friendchips Crew, But Worse (31 May 2003), is “not a personality flaw, it’s a skill.

 “It’s nothing to do with sheer numbers.  Move me to a remote cottage in the Hebrides and I’d learn to despise the postman, even if he only visited once a year.  I can’t abide other people, with their stink and their noise and their irritating ringtones.  Bill Hicks called the human race ‘a virus with shoes’, and if you ask me he was being unduly hard on viruses: I’d consider a career in serial killing if the pay wasn’t so bad.”

Whatever the time, wherever the place, Brooker insists on nothing but the highest standards in both ethics and practice.

“They say the first casualty of war is truth, but actually it’s picture quality,” he complains in his review of Gulf War II news footage The Third World War In Low-Res JPEGS (29 March 2003).

Well, if we will insist on inflicting our Weltanschauung on an unwilling nation, then surely we’ve also got the right to see for ourselves the full extent of the damage.

“I’m not being callous … it’s just that this being the twenty first century I thought we’d get a digitally perfect, Dolby Surround kind of war, with swooping Michel Gondry camera moves and on-the-fly colour correction.  But no.  It’s all shots of empty skylines and blurry videophone bullshit.  Most of it isn’t even in widescreen, for Christ’s sake.”

He’s quite right to have us all pinned down as ghouls.  Myself I remember watching all the news reports on the television in the pub, whilst feeling more than a little disappointed with the results of modern technological progress.  Quite often the video-phone footage used to freeze or even break up into tiny pixilated fragments during the actual news bulletin, leaving me feeling somewhat shortchanged.   

“This obsession with live coverage reached a ridiculous nadir last week on the ITV News Channel,” he continues.  “ Alistair Stewart breathlessly announces incoming live footage of behind-enemy-lines conflict: cut to an indistinct green blur with the odd dark blob wobbling around, like a plate of mushy peas behind a layer of gauze.  But the viewers’ bafflement was nothing compared to Alistair’s – because he’s got to explain what’s happening.  ‘And there you can see … uhhh … well, it’s hard for me to make out because my monitor is situated quite far away, but I’m sure at home you can see more.’ Nice try, but all I could see was my own bemused reflection.  Sod the Second World War in Colour – this is the Third World War in Low-Res JPEGS.”

Yes, I can just hear good old Sir Kenneth Branagh doing the narration for The Third World War In Low-Res JPEGS, sandwiched somewhere in his future daily schedule between playing King Lear to Frankie Boyle’s Fool at the Globe Theatre on the South Bank, attending Lord Simon Russell Beale’s memorial service at St Martin-in-the-Fields and watching the bouncing bosoms of the latest female streaker to come running on the pitch during the first over at Lords.

That’s the sort of imagination you need to kick off on behalf of an entire disgruntled generation. 

But Charlie Brooker also has a soft side.  And he’s not too proud to reveal it to his more dedicated readers.

“Really, it feels rubbish being a man at the moment,” he admits in Skull-Flaunting Cueballs (5 April 2003), “assuming you base your self-perception on the images pouring from your TV set, that is.  I know I do, and I’m beginning to feel like scum simply for owning my own testicles.”     

The secret life of Her Indoors

‘Her indoors’.

The phrase alone is enough to strike terror into the heart of every loveable scamp and scallywag in sitcoms and popular dramas stretching all the way back to the very dawn of British television.

But who is this elusive figure?  And why is this type of unseen fictional character so popular in drama?

Most people these days know ‘Her Indoors’ as the delightful euphemism employed in Minder  by Arthur Daley to describe his wife.  Like Samuel Pepys, he prefers never to refer to her by her proper name, though like Elizabeth Pepys presumably she must have one.

For some strange reason, many of these women ‘feature’ in comedies.  Although you never actually see or hear them, they still interact with the characters that we do meet.  Sometimes they even manage to influence events in the current storyline.  Apart from Mrs Daley, other classic examples include  Mrs Elizabeth Mainwaring from Dad’s Army, Maris Crane from Frasier and Mrs Doomes-Patterson from The Good Life.

From time to time, Her Indoors is also encountered in popular drama.  It seems to be considered particularly funny if you have one of these characters in a radio programme.  Indeed, The Archers enjoys this type of joke so much that they’ve had several of these silent characters over the years.  (Well, there’s not an awful lot else to do out there in the sticks and the rural sense of humour appears to be a bit on the simple side, to say the least of it … )

Silence is the outstanding characteristic associated with Her Indoors.  She can never ever speak.  The scriptwriters on The Archers used to compete with each other to come up with the most outlandish and unlikely reasons why Pru Forrest never talked.  (Eventually, however, Terry Wogan’s guest appearance on the show in one famous episode aggravated her so much that she erupted into a positive torrent of words.  Game, set and match to whoever thought up that one.)

Mrs Mainwaring, on the other hand, prefers to exert control over her husband through frequent phone calls.  However, you never even hear her voice or side of the conversation, which means you are left to work out her likely words and attitude through her husband’s replies and body language.  This has the effect of making her even more formidable and frightening in the eyes of the viewer.

Probably the unspoken cultural equation says that the public sphere is the space for men and the private sphere the space for women.  A television/radio series/book is seen as a form of public space, while silence counts as the private space.

As well as not speaking, Her Indoors never goes out.  Just one of many examples, Mrs Mainwaring ‘hasn’t left the house since Munich’.

This does tend to make you wonder - WHY THE HELL DO SO MANY OF THESE WOMEN NEVER EVEN LEAVE THE HOUSE?  Are they all suffering from agoraphobia or what? 

If that is the case, then they are surely begging for more sympathy, understanding and support on the part of their husbands. 

If not, then perhaps something more sinister might be going on.  In one episode of Dad’s Army, Mrs Mainwaring has apparently accompanied the platoon on their  manoeuvres and is sleeping in the tent next door.  Despite being a cast-iron bitch on roller-skates, there is no mention of her suffering anything like a panic attack whilst there. 

Meanwhile, in an episode of Minder, Mrs Daley puts her husband in a panic by leaving the house.  Of course she has returned home safe and sound again by the end of the programme.  So maybe she has been making a sneaky and devious protest against social injustice, just like Mrs Tucker from Citizen Smith.  

Naturally the man is the one who enjoys the exciting adventures you see onscreen, while Her Indoors thinks there’s nothing better than being the good little housekeeper for the male characters.

While you watch them getting up to various jolly scrapes and wheezes in the programme, she is sitting at home ironing their paisley print nylon Seventies Y-fronts (this is PRECISELY why I sincerely hope that Harry Fenning doesn’t take his smalls and socks round to Joan Tofkin’s house to be washed instead of learning how to do it himself.  Knowing that Harry possesses something of a penchant for loud, lurid clothes already, it is sadly all too plausible to imagine him prancing about in tight red paisley print Y-fronts with navy contrast piping round the edges to Hot Chocolate albums whilst spraying himself liberally with Hai-Karate before hot-footing it down The Vigilante to threaten Wolfie Smith with extreme GBH for daring to use Blu-Tack to stick posters on the newly papered bog walls.).

(Wonder if Mrs Daley got up to no good visiting a gigolo on her single trip out of the house?   Hee, hee, hee ... ) Mind you, if Groutie the gangster from Porridge can still manage to keep running all his operations when he is banged up inside, there’s no knowing what type of businesses any of these so-called invisible women might be running from home on the quiet with the aid of modern technology …  

When Her Indoors lacks a proper name of her own, it suggests that she is not regarded as an important person by either the male characters or the scriptwriters of the  show.  If she does have a name, it shows the male characters respect and fear her enough to recognise her as an individual in her own right, but they still don’t like her very much.  Elizabeth Mainwaring and Maris Crane are the two perfect examples here.

Usually if she does have a name, you soon find out that the male characters probably fear her because of their own problems, weaknesses and personal deficiencies.  Some male characters find it easier to admit to their fear of Her Indoors than others.

Both Captain Mainwaring and Niles Crane are uneasily aware that the problems they have experienced with their wives are at least partly of their own making.  However, Niles can own up to this fact a bit more readily than Captain Mainwaring – partly because he is American, partly because he is slightly younger, partly because he lives in a more recent historical period in which it is more acceptable for men to admit to difficulties like these, and partly because he and his brother are both shrinks.

The main reason Captain Mainwaring is so keen to devote all his spare time and energy to the cause of the Home Guard is to gain a sense of purpose and comradeship so woefully lacking from his own marriage.  This went right down the tubes just as soon as it got started.  Indeed, Mainwaring learnt how to play the bagpipes on his honeymoon in Scotland ‘because there was nothing else to do’ – instead of wangsting on at great length and considerable wit about the lack of sex and love like Niles Crane would no doubt do.

So why do the male characters fear and dislike these unseen women so much?  Well, apart from being rampantly sexist gits, they seem to blame them for everything that is wrong in their marriages.  Okay, so Elizabeth Mainwaring seems to be pretty domineering, neurotic and withholding of affection, to judge from the way that her husband reacts to her phonecalls.  Yet it can’t be the easiest business in the world being married to Captain Mainwaring, I wouldn’t have thought.

Yes, Maris Crane is rather difficult and neurotic too, we gather.  But her ex-husband Niles can get too bound up in the many failures and shortcomings of their relationship to stop and consider just why he decided to get married to a woman so like himself in so many ways.

It’s usually men that fear these characters.  Women often seem to quite envy figures like Jenny Piccolo from Happy Days.  Margot Ledbetter’s unease with Mrs Doomes-Patterson seems to be an exception to the rule (although there still tend to be far more male than female characters portrayed in modern popular drama.  Perhaps if the gender imbalance was resolved, we would see more female characters who fear, loathe and detest unseen women).

Cuddles and Bubbles

Just in case anyone out there in the worldwide blogosphere (sorry, this is still the most appallingly inept neologism imaginable - but at least I've got nothing to do with it) is wondering (somehow I doubt it - but then, you never know these days ... ), this particular entry has been prompted by a protracted bout of watching Citizen Smith online.

My ostensible reason for hanging out in the YouTube version of late Seventies Tooting was to attempt to learn more about exactly how many scenes and how much dialogue a sitcom writer can hope to pack in the space of half an hour.  I'm currently writing the first of two 25 minute sitcom episodes for my MA course at the moment - which can prove a bit of a bugger when you don't have all that much practical experience just yet.

However, coughing, snuffling and sneezing all over the shop as I was yesterday afternoon made this sort of sustained concentration rather more difficult than initially anticipated.  So instead I got in some concentrated Harry Fenning watching.

And guess what?  Turns out that Stefan Elnore Travis is by no means the only misunderstood 'psycho' out there in tellyland.

So why did Stephen Greif decide to chuck in his lot with Harry in the end?

Well, according to this interview here: 

http://www.denofgeek.com/television/43623/interview_stephen_greif_on_blakes_7.html

there were as always a lot of rather complex reasons.  Back in its Terry Nation incarnation, the Federation appears to be a grim and bitter place where laughter and good cheer are in short supply.  So the sunshine and bonhomie of Citizen Smith’s failed revolution must have come as a great relief to him.  Greif’s subtle sense of the absurd gives him a fine touch indeed in comic roles – and it is Harry Fenning who lives in a society relaxed enough to be able to laugh at revolutionaries and criminals, rather than locking them away or zapping them into oblivion.

Happily there was rather more room for manoeuvre in this role – and Greif seems to have relished the challenge.  Indeed, the way in which he managed to broaden out Harry Fenning shows perfectly just how actors can actively collaborate with writers and directors to lift a script and create a real work of art out of it.

Because he is a fine actor, Greif’s touches of comedy never diminish Harry Fenning or his potential for serious aggression.  Instead, they really help to turn him into a three-dimensional being.

Take his outfits, for example.  Even by the standards of the late Seventies (and remember, fact fans, this was the decade of my childhood, so I was actually priviliged to live through such sartorial traumas for real), tartan tuxedoes and black shirts worn with kipper-width white satin ties count as serious offences against manhood.

However, if you watch the programme for longer than five minutes, you soon discover that, strange as it may seem, the frankly rather disturbing Harry Fenning also has a more endearing, almost childlike side.

It's probably this gauche teenage part of him that reckons all the awful, slightly cartoonish outfits he sports during the series count as the ultimate in gentlemanly 'smartness' and 'sophistication'.  (So quite how Wolfie and co came to mistake him for the MP they wanted to kidnap in that famous episode The Hostage, I couldn't tell you.  And why Fenning didn't start shouting and bawling as soon as they laid hands on him outside the Conservative Club in the first place also remains a mystery.  Might have guessed Harry would be a paid-up grovelarse junkie of Maggie-Maggie-Maggie-OUT-OUT-OUT, though.  Can you IMAGINE what he would have been like during the Eighties????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!) 

When he's not bowling round the local hostelries putting the frighteners on susceptible rival publicans, Harry enjoys nothing better than winding up Wolfie and his mates.  Like Stephen Greif says, this probably counts as a very welcome interval of light amusement in what must usually be a very aggressive, somewhat stressful daily round.

Now as a child, I must confess I never quite understood the Fenning sense of irony.  I probably drove my dad round the bend and up the wall by constantly asking him why Harry kept referring to Wolfie and Ken as 'Trotsky' and 'Gandhi' when those were certainly not their proper names.

I know for a fact that euphemisms like 'legitimate businessman' and 'fell off the back of a lorry' continued to puzzle and disturb me for years.  I also never could work out just why Harry Fenning needed to pursue his so-called ‘respectable’ careers as a publican, businessman and mini-cab company owner when his true love was always crime and violence.  After all, the villains in Batman never wasted any time in putting on a front.

Later as a teenager, I got the impression that Fenning was one of those men who think they are a lot more intelligent than in fact they are.  Watching the series yet again today, I am not so sure.  Yes, he certainly has a childlike side.  I imagine he probably uses this to lull a lot of people into a false sense of security.  But all in all, like Commander Travis, when it comes down to it, Fenning is actually a pretty astute bloke.

Presumably his childlike side is what may account for the fact that he appears to have a reputed mistress with the nickname of 'Cuddles'.

Now, I don’t know about you, but to me 'Cuddles' seems a very old-fashioned nickname for a funky Seventies chick with blowdried hair to have ended up with.  

‘Cuddles’ sounds much more like some sort of plus-sized goddess played by Hattie Jacques in a red and white spotted Fifties bombshell halterneck dress, plus a pair of outrageously vertiginous scarlet peep-toe fug-me winkle-picker shoes and a Kiss Me Quick Squeeze Me Slowly hat that Harry has bought for her on that daytrip they took to Margate.  Underneath it all, she no doubt wears a black lace basque complete with stout stockings and suspenders.

When she is in a good mood, Cuddles laughs her head off at all the rude jokes on the telly (Frankie Howerd and Kenneth Williams are particular favourites) and thinks nothing of whipping you up a huge tea of shepherd’s pie, carrots and peas with pineapple upside down cake swamped in half a can of evaporated milk for afters (typical menu that Harry gets fed round her place before having certain other bodily comforts seen to.  Hope he doesn’t take his washing down there – but at least Joan is probably British rather than American, so did not receive lectures in ‘Introduction To Marriage’ whilst she was at college.).

Of course, Joan 'Cuddles' Tofkin is just one of the many, many characters referred to in sitcoms who you never ever see.  Therefore, viewers and listeners are at perfect liberty to imagine them however they want.  The above description is just my personal idea of what Joan may be like.  (Certainly my investigations into fan fiction for both the article that I am writing and the panels I took part in at Redemption 2011 have revealed that it is sometimes the characters just like this who capture the imagination of the aspiring writers.  As we saw previously, Vila Restal’s mum is a good example.  So maybe the above is my own personal mini-example of Citizen Smith fanfic?  God only knows what Citizen Smith slash fiction is like, though I can now hazard a reasonably accurate guess ; ) … )   

Remember, her husband Tofkin does appear onscreen (quite prominently in two episodes) – and he certainly doesn’t seem the type to have an especially young or conventionally glamorous wife.  From what I know of John Sullivan’s work as a writer, if Joan was ever meant to be like that, then someone would have said so right away.

So menacing psycho-racketeer extraordinaire Harry Fenning may possibly have a pleasingly plump mistress – and he definitely likes nothing better than being cuddled.  This reveals him as more sympathetic, quite surprisingly and delightfully human.

Good luck to the bugger.  

What bothers me most about Citizen Smith on the current viewing is the sheer bloody blokiness of much of the humour.

Okay, nearly all the main characters in the series are male, so obviously you might expect the masculine point of view to be fairly predominant in the scripts.  However, what I am talking about here is sexism.

By ‘sexism’, I mean the really wearing way in which the men all jockey to constantly score points off each other, thus establishing the Tooting social pecking order from alpha to omega male.  Harry is obviously the alpha male par excellence in their tiny community – and Joan is regarded as one of the prime proofs of his high status.

Brazenly shagging some other bloke’s bird brings Harry extra kudos amongst the habitués of The Vigilante.  Such roguish behavior only makes him even more of a man – hence all the tiresome posturing and over-exaggerated pronunciation of vulgar demeaning expressions like ‘rumpy-PUMPy!’.  Meanwhile, Joan seems to be regarded as basically a bit of a slag.

If you just pause to look at the situation from the female point of view, it starts taking on a radically different complexion.

Poor old Joan Tofkin has a bit of a sad life, so in some ways you can't really blame her for her behaviour.  Her husband is suffering from serious long-term mental health issues, he has had to be put away in the bin, people probably gossip about her in the supermarket and avoid her on the street, and she can't divorce him for fear that it might send him totally over the edge.

Probably her affair with cousin Harry is meant as a bit of company and comfort during a time of trouble and need, rather than an all-in assault against respectable morals.

It would be very interesting indeed to talk to her and the other women characters from Citizen Smith while the men were absent and hear just what they had to say about the situation. 

I know some people criticize John Sullivan for a perceived over-reliance on stupid female characters (Shirley’s mum from Citizen Smith and Marlene from Only Fools And Horses and The Green Green Grass being the two main offenders here), but speaking as a woman, it is entirely possible that some of their silliness could be exaggerated or even feigned.

After all, if you had the choice between Harry Fenning dismissing you as being a few sandwiches short of a picnic or roaring with rage and chasing you down a dark corridor brandishing a broken-off chairleg, which would you pick?  (If you are my mother, Fenning would know immediately that your reference to his ‘foster children’ was meant in deepest irony.  But you would manage to get away with it big time because you combine the face of Elizabeth Taylor with the devastating posh charm of Margot from The Good Life.  Not that you ever see any women like that round The Vigilante of a Saturday evening during the Seventies.)

Mrs Tucker always had me seriously impressed.  I strongly suspect that knitting the set of balaclavas with the smiley faces on may have been her particularly creative way of making a veiled political protest against the so-called ‘revolutionary’ activities engaged in by Wolfie, her husband and their various equally daft mates.

Poor Shirley was so fed up with the lot of them that she became one of those many people who got the hell out of the country shortly before Mrs Thatcher swept to power.  Wonder if she ever came back?  Or was she another who started a completely new life abroad?

While we’re still on the subject of sexism in sitcoms, I need to agree wholeheartedly with Andy Merriman when he states that Hattie Jacques probably would NOT have been a fan of Little Britain.

Yeah, yeah, I know that Matt Lucas and David Walliams would no doubt lose no time in telling me that greed, hypocrisy, fear and loathing are all worthy and venerable targets for humour and satire.

As a larger woman myself (size 20, in case anyone is wondering), it disturbs me that big women characters like Bubbles DeVere and Ting Tong the so-called ‘mail order bride’ are presumed to be physically unattractive to the opposite sex, so therefore reveal themselves as both presumptuous and deluded when they persist in acting as if they are.  If they display any sexual desire for one of the men, then that is considered a monstrously greedy and rapacious lapse in good taste, rather than a simple fact of life.

At the same time, the Rob Brydon character and the mail order groom bloke are both only too obviously up for it with fat slappers – only they are careful to do it well out of the eagle eye of society, so that they do not lose precious points in the pecking order by getting it on with ugly useless women rather than beautiful desirable ones.  This suggests that fat women with sexual feelings and intelligent minds are regarded by these men as a sort of guilty secret indulgence, on a par with a woman pigging out on huge tubs of triple chocolate ice cream when she’s alone at home and pretending to like quinoa and alfalfa salads.

If Ting Tong really is a mail order bride (or feels she has to pretend to be, for whatever reasons), then like many women living in less economically advantageous societies even today, she might well have to employ her femininity and sexuality simply to ensure her survival.  Rather than starve on the streets, she might have to grit her teeth and charm the pants off a pompous, hypocritical, deeply unattractive man in order to lay her hands on his wallet.

Meanwhile, Bubbles DeVere seems to get slapped down because she has the temerity to want too much – food, sex, money, beauty, men who should be off-limits (hang on a second – why’s it apparently just fine for Harry Fenning to knock off his cousin’s estranged wife when Bubbles DeVere is roundly condemned for seducing her newly remarried ex-husband?  And how come Joan and Bubbles end up castigated as greedy sluts whilst Harry and whatisname are lauded to the skies as the toast of the lads?).