Lost continents

Did you know that lost continents suffer from drift?

Mu certainly does – it moved.

When it was first ‘discovered’ by 19^th century traveller and writer Auguste Le Plongeon, it was apparently hanging out in the Atlantic Ocean.  However, James Churchward, who ended up penning no less than seven [? Check this!] books on the place, insisted that it lived in the Pacific.

Perhaps it couldn’t take all the competition with Atlantis, so it had to strike out on its own.

Okay, so admittedly this crack is a tad unfair once you start looking at the ‘facts’ (such as they aren’t).

According to that great authority Le Plongeon, Atlantis and Mu were really one and the same place.  He got the name ‘Mu’ from Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, who had managed to mistranslate the famous Troano Codex of the Mayans, using the now discredited de Landa alphabet.  De Bourbourg believed that the word he had read as ‘Mu’ referred to a great land submerged by a terrible catastrophe.

There’s nothing like a good story, so of course Le Plongeon couldn’t resist the temptation to embellish it all a bit.  He claimed that the civilization of Ancient Egypt had actually been founded by Queen Moo (yes, this is the correct spelling), a refugee from Mu.  Other refugees went to Central America, where they became the Mayans.

More seriously suspect linguistics were then brought to bear on the problem, courtesy of James Churchward and the mysterious Naga-Maya tablets.  While working in India, he claimed that he was befriended by a high-ranking priest who eventually let him into a great secret.  This priest was one of only two remaining people in the entire modern world to be able to read this incredibly ancient language inscribed on a set of stone tablets rescued from the great deluge that overcame Mu, then brought to India by yet more of the survivors.

Because Churchward was such a splendid chap, the priest decided to be jolly decent and taught him how to read the tantalising tablets.  However, everyone else since then who might have fancied having a go has been a bit stuck.  Like the golden plates of the Mormons, no-one else has ever seen these tablets.

Churchward seems to have been another of these roaringly confident blustering amateurs who reckon they have got a firm grip on such complex and detailed disciplines as comparative linguistics when really they haven’t got a clue.  To give just one example amongst many, he apparently thought that the name of the ancient Egyptian god of the sun Ra is related to the Rapanui word for ‘sun’ ‘ra’a’.  But he couldn’t even spell the Rapanui word correctly.  So how the hell could he possibly make any accurate assumptions?

Like many at that time, he suffered from the usual rubbish belief in European supremacy.  He was convinced that none of the local populations living in Polynesia would have ever been up to constructing any of the megalithic art found on their doorsteps

Therefore they must have been created by the people of Mu – who most certainly did not end up becoming the ancestors of the modern Polynesians, seeing as most of them died in the cataclysm that did for their continent.  So that ‘explains’ why no more of these monuments were built in more recent times, I suppose.

Churchward and co did – and still do – have some solid supporters.  Founder of the Turkish Republic Kemal Ataturk, for one, was said to be very interested in Churchward’s work, even wondering if Mu was the location of the original Turkish homeland.

Naturally the so-called ‘science’ behind this theory turns out to be the standard load of old bollocks.  Yes, continents drift and seafloors spread.  As a result, continents can and do change their shapes and positions.  They can even split into pieces.

But these geological processes only happen very, very slowly.  It takes hundreds of millions of years for something like this to happen, not a single, sodding night! During the entire course of human existence, the continents have only moved a mere few centimetres.

History does admit that entire cities have been destroyed and sunk beneath the sea.  But these disasters have always happened to either islands or places on the coasts of continents that still exist.

They were all caused by earthquakes or volcanic eruptions – which do work pretty quickly.  The recent Japanese earthquake that caused so much trouble only took [4? minutes?  Have to check this one out as well]   

Archaeology has also revealed a series of devastating local disasters that probably changed the course of human history quite radically.  There has been an 80m rise in sea levels over the past 12, 000 years.  The Black Sea is known to have flooded 7, 600 years ago.  The devastating eruption of Santorini 3, 600 years ago destroyed much of Cretan civilization and may well have been one of the major inspirations for the Atlantis myth. 

Adsense, my arse!

Women's magazines are a treasure trove for absolute bollocks.

Yesterday I happened to be reading the beauty pages in the latest edition of Cosmopolitan. 

Well, it was mostly the same old crap you always get at this time of year - OMG it's bikini time - and I've spent the last nine months gorging on chip butties and custard while hiding out in a burlap yashmak!!!!! Now I've got to throw my winter weeds boldly aside and scamper into the crashing surf at Glastonbury, clutching firmly onto my acoustic guitar as I snog my way right round my sexy celeb boyfriend Matt '11th Doctor Who' Smith.

And my body is such a mess that I'll get blasted right out of the water by the paparazzi (though Matt Smith doesn't seem to mind too much, by the looks of things ... )!!!!!

It can't take the hackettes all that long to write the stuff.  All they need to do is dig out the June issues from 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, reread them over a cup of coffee and a Jaffa cake, then basically copy all the features.  Just replace last year's itsy-witsy teeny-weeny polka-dot Primark bikini with this year's model and David Tennant with Matt Smith - and bob's your uncle!

However, it turns out that a major scientific breakthrough has been made by all those nice boffins in the white lab coats and Jarvis Cocker specs.

Don't worry, I'll put you out of your misery.

Embedded cellulite.

WTF?

Who thinks this cobblers up?

Of course cellulite is bloody 'embedded'!  It has no choice.  It lives in your bum.  And hips.  And thighs.  So it can't really get out much.  Indeed, it is meant to be there, because you need a cushion to keep your body comfy when you sit or lie down. 

'Embedded cellulite' sounds just like a type of fat that works as a war correspondent, covering events on the frontline in Iraq.

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.”