THOUGHTS ON VALENTINE'S DAY

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE
Or, as a rather less influential songwriter put it, what is love anyway?

It's Valentine's day. So there. (Image copyright: Freemantle Media)

Love. On the face of it, I think I’ve always found it hard to get a grip on. Once when I was going out with an old girlfriend, in the early stages of the relationship she said she was looking forward to being taken out and wined and dined in the best restaurants in London. I suppose I admired her directness, but even for a mild cynic like me, this seemed to be putting the materialistic cart before the romantic horse. It didn’t last.

Which brings me neatly to Valentine’s Day. It seems strange to have a day where you’re made to feel you have to make a conscious effort to tell your nearest and dearest how much you love them, via flowers, cards and/or a meal, with accompanying prices cranked up just for the occasion. Shouldn’t you be telling your loved one every day without prompting how much they mean to you? The same goes for Mother and Father’s Day: are we that far gone emotionally that we have to be reminded by consumerism to express what we should naturally feel? The bugger of it is, even if you disapprove of all the commercialisation, if you don’t join in on these occasions you either think you should be on The Undateables or feel a bit miserable. Or both.

This sort of love I’ve been grappling with lately is a long from synthetic schmaltz. Going into a relationship where there are two children involved hasn’t been easy for me, I suppose because I’ve never had any of my own, and because I’ve spent such a long time as a single man; I think you get to a point where you grow some kind of protective emotional crust. Then there’s my mental health issues: for someone who’s got low self-esteem and suffers from a lack of confidence, the thought of being responsible for two children is sometimes enough to make me want to run for the hills. I have a father who suffered from depression and I have it too. At some level, I think I was terrified of being a bad example and passing the predilection for it on to any kids that I had.

Yum yums.

So here we are on Valentine’s Day. Me and the girls aren’t doing much. Poppy’s on the sofa opposite, with a bit of a temperature. Me and her mum Dawn, my partner, were going to see a film later but obviously we can’t leave her. Every so often, we ask Pops if she wants anything and I’m keeping an eye on her. Rose is playing computer games in her room. Dawn’s working on some of her art next door. This morning, she prepared a lovely healthy breakfast for us and, for a lunch-time snack, cooked some heart-shaped pizzas (above). Yesterday, we spent most of the day not doing much except watching stuff on Netflix. It’s all fine.

So, if I’m to stumble towards an answer to the question, love is, obviously, whatever makes you happy. If that means spending a rainy Saturday afternoon and evening tucked up watching Mr Robot, Penny Dreadful and The Flash, that’s just fine. Me being me, more than once I asked Dawn if she was bored. She said she wasn’t and cuddled up a bit more warmly.

This calm, content days is a long way from trying to impress someone by wining and dining them in one of London’s best restaurants. Realising what’s really important has taken me a long time, but I’m glad I finally got here.

THE X-FILES mini-series review

THIS SHOULDN'T BE A CASE FOR
MULDER AND SCULLY
The X-Files is back and time has stood still. Sadly.

The band is back together. (Image Copyright: 20th Century Fox)

Ah, the 1990s: Britpop, The X-Files, New Labour, Ben Sherman shirts… Out of that short list, the last one I’d have expected to be revived fourteen years on is Chris Carter’s series about two FBI agents, the unlikely named Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), who investigated the paranormal phenomena concealed in the dossiers of the show’s title.

Not that The X-Files didn’t have its moments. It’s hard to imagine now, but prior to the year 2000, the sci-fi conspiracy thriller successfully tapped the zeitgeist of pre-millennium unease about what might be round the corner. By 1998, The X-Files was bloody huge, and that was the year the first X-Files movie, Fight the Future, became a box office hit. The two leads were by now international stars: Anderson was on the cover of every lad mag going and Duchovny was apparently a sex addict (nice problem if you can get it). At the same time, the duo’s appearance in The Simpsons and in the lyrics of a hit single – yup, you guessed it, ‘Mulder and Scully’ – showed how much of a pop culture phenomenon the series had become.

Interestingly, the film represented the show’s strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, the mixture of crime procedural and alien incursion was as gripping, and as original and witty, as it had been on television. On the other, Fight the Future – a direct continuation of the TV series – offered no resolution to the ‘alien conspiracy’ story which, by 1998, had been running for five years and had become ever more convoluted and complicated. Following this anti-climax, it wasn’t surprising that interest in The X-Files slowly began to wane after the movie’s release.

Here’s the paradox: The X-Files was excellent as a ‘monster of the week’ chiller or black comedy – remember Tooms? Luther Boggs? Jose Chung’s From Outer Space? Pusher? – but, after Series 3, was at its weakest with the clearly made-up-as-it-went-along ET conspiracy story arc. For some reason, head writer Chris Carter thought it was the main reason that people watched the show, and it didn’t help that this massively unwieldy mythology brought out the worst in his scripts, namely sledgehammer subtle info-dumps and unconvincing and frustrating story twists. When The X-Files finished in 2002 (Duchovny had bailed in 2000), it had run out of audience goodwill at least two years before.

So, here we are in 2016, with ‘My Struggle’, the first episode of a new mini-series. It was a strange experience watching it. Time had clearly passed for Mulder and Scully; they were no longer a couple, Scully had gone back to being a doctor and Mulder was depressed and hiding at home. It was great to see them again – and, happily, the publicity photos showed that the resumption of their FBI partnership wasn’t far away – as well as their reliably truculent (now trendily bearded) boss Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi).

Behind the camera, though, with Carter in the writer and director’s chairs, it felt like it was still the 1990s, as suggested by the use of the original title sequence. The show runner seems to take it for granted that as it’s The X-Files, an audience will show up and watch, a complacent attitude that also afflicted The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008), the second feature film. Despite a gap of six years, that felt like watching an average stand-alone episode of the TV series, with an uninspired story and flat direction.

Lax direction was also the problem with ‘My Struggle’. However, what’s most noticeable about it is that Carter seems to have learnt nothing from all the innovative TV drama that built on the groundwork The X Files laid. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Wire, Lost, Deadwood, The Sopranos, Colony, Boardwalk Empire, Mr Robot, among others, together with the seminal Breaking Bad – significantly, created by ex-X Files writer Vince Gilligan – have all refined the art of storytelling on television, and all of them have let the characters drive the story rather than the other way round.

Not so in The X-Files 2016. Last night, after everything he’d seen – numerous close encounters, a shape-shifting assassin and living oil, to name a few examples of alien life – Mulder was easily convinced that a secret organisation had been using plundered alien tech and no living ETs had been involved. As before, this cavalier plot-driven approach made a nonsense of the storytelling and had the protagonists acting out of character, which in turn tests the audience’s patience. You could sense that Duchovny felt that too, as his revisionist info-dump about the nature of the conspiracy wasn’t exactly delivered with enthusiasm. No wonder Gillian Anderson, used to better in the last few years at the BBC, looked uncomfortable.

Despite the sequences of a crashed UFO at Roswell in 1947 – the best thing about the episode, for me – a key plot point was given away in a casual aside: apparently the Roswell crash was a faked alien landing by Soviet Russia. How, exactly? That seemed to contradict everything we saw in the 1940s scenes. OK, we might learn more about this as we go along, but going on past experience, I rather doubt it.  

(Image Copyright:
20th Century Fox)

What else was good about it? I really liked Tad O’Malley (Joel McHale, left), a paranoid but slick, PR savvy conspiracy theorist with his own internet show. McHale clearly relished the role, and there are plenty of story ideas to be mined in this new area for The X-Files. Despite all the drawbacks of the script, as a duo Duchovny and Anderson remain highly watchable, even when they’re up against clunky lines like ‘I’ve been led by the nose through a dark alley to a dead end.’

Next week, it looks like Mulder and Scully are back on their paranormal-phenomena-of-the-week beat. If this revival is going to work, that’s where they should stay.

MR ROBOT Series 1 review

MODERN LIFE IS RUBBISH
Elliot Alderson is mad as hell, and he's not gonna take it anymore. Very luckily for us.

Live in New York long enough and this is what'll happen.
(Image copyright: USA Network)

In terms of TV drama, the start of this year has been a bit meh: there seems to be nothing worth watching on the terrestrial channels, unless you fancy obligatory Sunday night costume pomp, this time around with the BBC’s adaptation of War and Peace. Increasingly, it seems, online is the place to look for challenging new fare. Even so, it’s not very often that a drama comes along and has me sitting up straight and wide-eyed from the opening minutes.

At my bleakest, usually when I’m on the top deck of a bus on Monday morning looking out at a rain-sodden Welling high street on the way to the Job Centre, I despair at the grey, faceless, exhausting sludge contemporary life seems to have become (at least, if you’re consistently broke and can’t get back into a decent paying job). Thank God, then, for Sam Esmail’s Mr Robot, which completely nails that contemporary sense of dislocation, alienation and frustration.

In a nutshell: New York cybersecurity engineer Elliot Alderson (Rami Malik, above) is recruited by a mysterious older man known only as ‘Mr Robot’ (Christian Slater, in a career-resurrecting performance) into group of cyber anarchists who plan to destroy the corporate giant E Corp – or ‘Evil Corp’ – and eradicate worldwide debt.

It’s a sign of the radical chops of Mr Robot that E Corp’s logo is a lawyer-worrying lift from the emblem used by the Enron Corporation, which used to be one of America’s largest. This energy company based in Houston, Texas, went bankrupt in 2001 due to financial mismanagement, and that had far-reaching financial implications for the world economy. With its direct allusions to the Enron scandal, Mr Robot suggests that what you see in the media may not be the real story, as Mr Robot’s group of hacktivists fsociety – three guesses for what the ‘f’ stands for – incriminate E Corp’s CEO with the financial corruption of his own company. 

The message is clear: this a gloves-off, modern battle between cyber Davids and corporate Goliaths, underlined by clips of Julian Assange, the founder of the classified information-sharing website Wikileaks. The series has a fantastic premise: if all personal and corporate information is now digital, all information can, potentially, be hacked, corrupted and used to blackmail.

What really sets Mr Robot from its cyber thriller contemporaries (such as they are) are the characters. Whereas Breaking Bad began with an ensemble that were, more or less, level headed but went off the rails, to a man and woman Esmail’s characters are dysfunctional, angry or screwed up to start with, all because of modern life. Elliot’s father died of leukemia and he was brought up by an abusive mother; consequently, as an adult, he has clinical depression, social anxiety and can be cripplingly lonely. To cope, he snorts crushed morphine tablets and cyberhacks people he doesn’t like. It’s a remarkable, unnerving performance by Rami Malek, amplified by the way his eyes seem to swell with paranoia at the deplorable state of the world around him.

Elsewhere, his frustrated artist neighbour Shayla (Frankie Shaw) is a drug dealer sexually bullied by her drug contact; Elliot’s childhood friend Angela (Portia Doubleday) struggles with her executive job, while her boyfriend Ollie (Ben Rappaport) is secretly addicted to sex through internet chat rooms. At the other end of the social scale, Tyrell Wellick (Martin Wallstrom), the ambitious Senior Vice President of E Corp, is a sado-masochist who – in shades of Fight Club – copes with stress by paying tramps so he can beat them up.

Put like that it sounds over the top and a bit silly, but the performances are underplayed and totally convincing, not least because the characters always surprise you by not behaving how you’d expect. (The end of the second episode, in particular, will shock you.) You accept it all because, if you’ve lived in a city, you’ll recognise what isolating, socially undermining and brutal environments they can be. The art direction picks up on this by casting everything in the kind of bland, fluorescent, grey light you find in anonymous city office blocks and anonymous city bedsits.

As well as all this volatile content, there’s an extra existential layer to Mr Robot. Elliot is seeing a psychiatrist who warns him about relapsing into having delusions, so as you watch events unfold, the nagging feeling persists that it might all be in his head. Particularly because Elliot’s voiceover directly addresses the audience, drawing them into his world view. Trying to tease fact from fantasy is all part of the twisted fun.

I love it. At last, a series has come along that directly embraces the raging urban malcontent that, at the moment, I’m feeling like. Elliot may be far from perfect – that’s part of his appeal – but, in something of a first, he’s a major TV character who has to struggle with serious mental health issues.

For that alone, Mr Robot is worth your time.

STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS review

ESCAPE NOW, HUG LATER
Well here's a thing: I enjoyed a Star Wars film. I even felt a twinge when Han Solo showed up.

The boys are back in town. (Image copyright: Disney)

Star Wars: didn’t get it. Maybe I was slightly too old in 1978 to have my imagination fired by Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader and co. I was (and still am) a die-hard Doctor Who fan, which back then meant championing the ingenuity of the stories over the sometimes dodgy visual effects, which you nonetheless staunchly defended because they were done on a slim BBC budget etc. etc. So, Star Wars looked great, but production values aside, for me it was a simplified The Lord of the Rings, with lasers and spaceships instead of swords and dragons. A lucky escape from SW: The Phantom Menace’s horribly unconvincing CGI, as well as actors desperately looking for a director, was nearly enough to put me off for life.

Anyway, there was nothing else me and the lady friend fancied seeing at the pictures on Saturday night, so SW: The Force Awakens it was. I allowed my arm to be twisted because JJ Abrams was directing and involved in the writing. This was the man who revitalised the Star Trek films by going back to basics, so at the very least it would be interesting to see what he’d come up with.

As it turns out, the same approach. The Force Awakens’ reliably familiar story riffs on the original 1977 film and perhaps helps to explain why, when you take away the astonishing VFX and monsters, the Star Wars franchise became so universally popular: two young people from humble origins wrestle with who they are and their place in the world, turning into fully fledged heroes by the final reel. (And it can’t be coincidence that other money-spinning franchises like Twilight, Harry Potter and The Hunger Games have all used the same idea).

Crucially, the two heroes in question are likeable and likeably played: Rey (Daisy Ridley, whose great uncle, Arnold, was Private Godfrey in Dad’s Army – with that revelation, the film was already winning me over) and Finn (John Boyega). Conceptually, they’re the main innovations, as Rey becomes a female Jedi knight who could out-feist Katniss Everdeen, while ‘Finn’ – his name deriving from the designation FN2187 – is a Stormtrooper who rejects the fascist First Order. I really liked this idea: the white, robotic Stormtrooper uniforms submerge the wearers’ identity so completely that it’s a neat twist to see, for the first time (?), the flesh and blood under the armour. The First Order kidnapping children to indoctrinate them into soldiers suggests current fanatical groups like Islamic State, but that’s as contemporary as the film gets.

Less impressively, a soapy family storyline is again central to events. I wonder how much committed Star Wars fans thought it was pushing it to have Han Solo as the father of Darth-in-waiting Kylo Ren (the disturbingly intense Adam Driver), reversing the villain/father, hero/son relationship of Darth Vader and Luke Sywalker? I didn’t actually mind, as their confrontation is the most dramatically rewarding scene in the film, but it has to be said that this and all The Force Awakens’ major plot beats replicate events from Episode IV: a secret message hidden in a droid which the baddies hunt for on a desert planet, the interrogation of the heroine, a rescue raid on the baddies’ HQ, the final assault by a rebel fighter force on a super weapon… take your pick. Perhaps the idea was to reassure an audience put off by the three prequels they were watching Star Wars again. If so, it worked. Even I felt a nostalgic twinge at the appearance of familiar situations and characters.

In the end this recycling didn't matter, because what Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan – significantly, the co-writer of The Empire Strikes Back and, less significantly, The Return of the Jedi – have reaffirmed is that Star Wars isn’t really about SF or the originality of the story. It’s not accidental that, as in the original trilogy, the uniformed villains are all played by British actors speaking Received Pronunciation English and being directed like World War II Nazis. At one point, Domnhall Gleeson’s General Hux looks like he’s bellowing at the Third Reich, and calling Andy Serkis’ evil mastermind ‘Supreme Leader’ (the Fuhrer, in other words) is a bit of a giveaway. Like the Indiana Jones films, Star Wars is a satisfying distillation of those goodies versus baddies 1930s serials and Nazi-bashing 1940/50s war films, directly implied by the opening ‘story so far’ text and the old-fashioned screen wipes from scene to scene.

This enjoyable self-awareness is also there in the space battles between X-Wings and Tie Fighters, which are clearly modeled on World War II dog fights, and the craggy charm of Harrison Ford’s Solo, who has roguish antecedents in everyone from John Wayne to Humphrey Bogart. The lovely touch of Solo reacquainting himself with the Millennium Falcon was clearly meant to be a metaphor for middle-aged fans of the original Star Wars, welcoming the most cherished parts of their movie series back into the fold.

Cynical manipulation or clever reinvention? It’s up you in the end but for me The Force Awakens can be enjoyed as a rollicking good adventure yarn, rather than that much lesser thing, ‘a Star Wars film’. The CGI is discreet, with models and physical effects foregrounded wherever possible, Carrie Fisher has been allowed to age gracefully and the droid BB87 is so cute I wanted to take him home.

Maybe I get Star Wars after all. Abrams and Kasdan certainly do.

UNEMPLOYED AT 50

DON'T LOOK BACK IN ANGER
The Department of Work and Pensions aren't doing a lot for this middle aged job seeker.

Diary entry for today reads: 'Bugger.'

Being 50 and unemployed is a funny place to be. On Monday I was told by, I’m sure, an otherwise nice lady at my local Job Centre that, having been out of full time work for over sixteen months, I have to do a 30 hours a week work placement. That’s as well as an additional 10 hours a week job searching.

That’s 40 hours all together, when the average working week is 35 hours for people in employment. So, already I’m feeling victimised, particularly as I was explicitly told that, after a certain amount of time, the government will not tolerate people on Job Seekers’ Allowance not working. In other words, I’m being forced to do a full time job for the pittance of £62 a week I’m already getting while I’m looking for work.

And I really have been. The people who know will tell you that since I lost my regular work in 2014, I’ve been unstinting in trying to find something else. I’ve got a degree in Graphic Design and I worked in that profession successfully for over twenty years, working on everything from Car magazine up to an official calendar for David Bowie. I’m a published writer of five books and numerous articles on film and television, and I’ve produced documentaries for the Doctor Who DVD range. To keep myself socially interactive, I’ve been volunteering at my local library, the Centrepieces Mental Health Arts Project and an Ellenor hospice charity shop. On top of that, last summer I scraped together the money out of my JSA to do a web design course – hardly the definition of a work-shy fop, I’m sure you’ll agree. Yet, despite all that, I’m now expected to accept about £2 an hour for effectively doing a full time job, an hourly rate WAY below the minimum wage.

This is exploitation, pure and simple. If people on Job Seekers’ Allowance are working for Tescos, Primark, B&Q et al, they’re clearly contributing towards the turnover and profits of those businesses, and those businesses are getting free labour courtesy of the government. (For more on this, check out the Guardian story at www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/feb/16/work-free-tesco-job-advert). Just imagine what working for free will do to your confidence and self-esteem, as you toil next to someone doing exactly the same job who’s getting paid a living wage for doing it.   

Someone I know recently said it’s a much harsher world these days and I tend to agree. It’s not just the establishment’s attitude to the long-term unemployed: getting a job interview is harder than it’s ever been. Companies now apparently use something called ‘Sift’. This means that if a computer – which most job applications go through before reaching a human being; well Human Resources, anyway – doesn’t detect between 10 or 15 words in your application the same as the ad you’re responding too, your application gets binned. That’s on top of it being junked because you don’t agree to work evenings, weekends or unsociable hours. And if you disclose a mental illness or a minor offence, which some applications ask for, you might as well throw your application away yourself and cut out the middle man.

It’s a shame that Resources Plus, a private company that’s supposed to help you find work, didn’t earn the money that the government is paying and tell me about Sift sixteen months ago. If they had, I might be in a better position by now. RP did suggest I start a business, but the majority of start-up loans have to begin being paid back almost immediately. If what you’re doing doesn’t take off instantly, you’re stuck with paying the money back out of your own resources, and for me that means my JSA. God knows, I don’t want to ask my loved ones for any more financial help I can’t repay.

Back at the Job Centre, the lady I saw was rather concerned that I didn’t have the internet at home, as this means I can’t keep my job searching going during the evenings. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I can’t afford it, which is why I use the library during the day.’ She appeared not to hear my response as she regarded my cheap mobile with equal concern, recommending that I invest in a smart phone so I could act on jobs advertised on Twitter. ‘OK, but would you like to suggest how I pay for one?’ I asked. The lady was deaf again. When I inquired where the government initiatives were to help the over 50s back into work, it looked like the deafness was becoming permanent.

There aren’t any, of course. It’s part of the same problem as trying to batter your way back into a job market that doesn’t favour the middle aged. We’re all living longer and remaining productive longer, but as far as I can see society in general isn’t adapting. I nearly laughed out loud when my lady at the Job Centre said that companies like ASDA and Sainsburys like older people because they were more reliable. Fair enough, but why not the BBC, Virgin Media and many other companies where my own particular experience would be more relevant and useful?

So that’s where I am at the moment. It’s an unsettling feeling, knowing you’ve got so much life and work experience to offer, but being presented with what seems to be a diminishing set of employment options. All this is before you consider the recurrent feelings of loneliness, isolation and just plain hopelessness – the love of friends and family notwithstanding – that come with being out of work for a long time.

However, I try not to look back in anger. I go to bed, get up and, as ever, keep putting one foot in front of the other. That’s all you can really do.

DAVID BOWIE, 1947-2016

INADEQUATE WORDS
So long, Ziggy.

'He's a little fat man with a pug-nosed face...'
(Image copyright: Radio X) 

It’s like when John Lennon died. The Beatles changed music forever in the 1960s and David Bowie changed it forever in the 1970s. On a positive note, even today he’s still changing it and will continue changing it more than 100 years from now.

What a contradiction he was. Singularly outside the mainstream, avant garde and restlessly swinging between and fusing musical genres, but at the same time someone who’s music touched nearly everyone. Looking at social media today, it seems everybody has a favourite Bowie song. The future soul of ‘Young Americans’, the industrial rock of ‘Station to Station’, the operatic plea for hope that’s ‘Under Pressure,’ the sunny pop of ‘China Girl’… there’s something for everyone.

When I saw the news this morning, I had a chill down my spine; it’s that Lennon comparison again. Even though I only knew The Beatles in 1980 from the films on Christmas television, when Lennon died you still felt something important and life affirming had gone from the world. One look at the glum faces of my teachers and the subdued atmosphere throughout the school that day told me that. That’s because, like the Fab Four, Mr Jones really did change the world.

A lot of people are going to talk about his influence on music, fashion, gender politics and popular culture in general, but the great gift of his music was that it brought so many different types of people together. My ex-wife’s dad was classically trained musician who played First Horn for the London Philharmonic Orchestra, but he was potty about Bowie. When he was on Desert Island Discs with some other members of the LPO, he was the only one who chose a rock track, and that was ‘Space Oddity’. Later on, he came with us to see The Man on the Sound and Vision tour in 1990. Like on the Glass Spider and Serious Moonlight tours in 1987 and 1983, the audience was a cross section of mums and dads, old hippies, goths, punks, teenagers and young professionals, together with at least one member of the LPO. I can’t think of many musicians that almost everyone likes and Bowie was one of them.

I remember seeing the Top of the Tops performance of ‘Star Man’ where David famously put his arm around Spiders guitarist Mick Ronson. I was really young at the time and just thought brightly coloured, toothy pop stars behaved like that and that Bowie seemed like a cheerful chap. When I was older, I discovered that this seismic moment of gender challenge was a pivotal moment for people like Steve Strange, Siouxsie Sioux and Adam Ant, who went onto have their own, not inconsiderable impact on popular culture. That was the thing about Bowie: he somehow made all the way-out stuff he did reassuring, acceptable and often funny (have you seen the ‘Boys Keep Swinging’ video?), in a very English way. If you’re going to change the world, that’s the way to do it.

Because of that, and because he was around so long, it goes without saying – but I’m going to say it anyway, because it is important – that he was part of the soundtrack to significant moments in so many people’s lives. For instance, on the Serious Moonlight tour, I remember driving down to Milton Keynes Bowl with friends Ian Westbrook, Debra Redfern and another girl whose name now escapes me. We wanted to get there early, so left Lowestoft around 5 in the morning. When we got there it was just getting light and discovered that the gates didn’t open until around noon, by which time we were all lobster red. It was my first open air, festival-scale show and Bowie was theatrical and fantastic. We were so exhausted by the early start, heat and great atmosphere that on the way back Ian pulled over into a lay-by and we all collapsed into sleep.

After that, I found Glass Spider a let-down, but what I do remember is support act Big Country breaking into a cover of ‘Rebel Rebel’, which I thought was the highlight of the gig. When the Tin Machine gigs were announced, after a tipsy night in the pub I turned up to queue for tickets outside the Town and Country Club (now the Forum).  Emboldened by alcohol, I thought a t-shirt and shorts would suffice as overnight wear in the summer, but around 2 in the morning I found out how bloody wrong I was. The whole thing developed into a kind of mini Glastonbury, with people in the queue lighting campfires, playing Bowie tapes and someone with an acoustic guitar playing his songs. Because of the way concert tickets are now sold, you couldn’t have that experience any more, which is partly why the memory of it’s so special. I have to say that I wasn’t overly struck by the Tin Machine oeuvre, but seeing Bowie – or ‘Jones’, as he announced himself – in such a small venue was still a thrill, and I do cherish the memory of moshing to ‘Under the God’ only two or three rows from the man singing it.

One more memory that I think sums up how unique he was. Looking around the Bowie retrospective exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2013, in the final room there was a selection of videos playing. One of them showed him and his band performing my favourite Bowie song ‘“Heroes”’ to, rather incongruously, what looked like an audience of uniformed police officers. With a shock of recognition, I realised that this was from the concert put on in New York for all the emergency services who helped in 19/11. As soon as you know that, ‘“Heroes”’ becomes a completely different song, but the lyrics still fit. Incredible.

These are inadequate words, but the very fact I’ve been moved to ramble at length on Bowie’s passing shows just how inspiring and remarkable he was.

I don’t know what else to say, except: safe journey to another star, David.

SHERLOCK: THE ABOMINABLE BRIDE review

THE GIRL WHO WAS DEATH
I was turning cartwheels over the New Year's Day Sherlock Special, but my mum 'couldn't make head nor tail of it.' Therein lies the rub...

It got weirder. (Image copyright: BBC)

We’re five days on from the first day of 2016, so I don’t think I’m giving too much away in outlining the plot of the Sherlock New Year’s Day Special. On a private plane, inside his ‘Mind Palace’, our favourite consulting detective imagined himself and Watson investigating a crime in the 19th century, in which the so-called ‘Abominable Bride’ apparently survived death. It was a tactic to discover how – at the end of the last series – Sherlock’s nemesis Moriarty had seemingly done the same.

Happily for me and other people who enjoy a good genre mash-up, the story wasn’t presented straightforwardly. It was put together in perhaps the most joyously, outrageously, self-aware collision of styles that I’ve ever seen. I love this sort of thing; have done ever since I saw The Prisoner playing around with Western and spy fiction conventions and archetypes to great, surreal effect in ‘Living in Harmony’ and ‘The Girl Who Was Death’.

‘The Abominable Bride’, however, took this approach to a whole new level of complexity. Like those two Prisoner stories, the Conan Doyle-style strand wasn’t there as self-indulgence, but as a story in its own right: the reveal of a clandestine suffragette order behind the bride’s killings was refreshingly authentic to the 19th century setting. It also served as the modern Sherlock’s way of discovering how the contemporary Moriarty ‘cheated’ death: ‘once the idea exists, it cannot be killed.’

Watson and Holmes. the real thing?
(Image copyright: BBC)

Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s genius is that they weren’t content to leave it at that, gleefully drawing attention to the artificial nature of what was going on. Among the witty nudges was Mrs Hudson (the ageless Una Stubbs) commenting that she was Holmes and Watson’s ‘landlady, not a plot device,’ while Watson ‘had to grow [a] moustache so people recognise me,’ as the illustrator of his Holmes stories in The Strand Magazine had drawn him that way. Throw in the anachronistic phrase ‘the virus in the data’ and, if you’d been watching carefully, you could anticipate the jolt back to the 21st century Holmes waking up in Mycroft’s private plane half way through the Special (a scene which, I suspect, was at least partly there to inform casual viewers what was going on). By the time Holmes and Moriarty (the brilliant Andrew Scott) were playing out their Reichenbach Falls duel – ‘It’s always you and me at the end’ – both narratives had intertwined to the point that Watson could say, ‘I’m a storyteller: I know when I’m in one.’ I was punching the air by that point.

On top of all that, if you were a Sherlock fan you could have a lot of fun discovering what the 19th century versions of the supporting characters were like. The most striking were an obese Mycroft (Gatiss himself), one pudding away from expiring in the Diogenes Club, and Molly Hooper (the underrated Louise Brealey), a suffragette disguised as a man so she could work in the police force. I might have been imagining things, but among all this fun and games, it looked to me like Mrs Watson (Amanda Abbington) was dressed like Leela from the Doctor Who story ‘The Talons of Weng Chiang’. As Moffat and Gatiss both work on that series, there’s a good chance the similarity was intentional. For me, this was all self-aware bliss.

Mind you, if you were looking for some obvious, comforting, post-hangover New Year’s Day pipe and deerstalker shenanigans in the classic Sherlock Holmes style – as the publicity suggested – then chances are you’d have been confused and, quite possibly, annoyed. One viewer on Facebook frothed about his family either ‘falling asleep’ or getting ‘very angry’, while my mum, tactful as ever, observed ‘that Mr Cumberbatch is very nice, but I couldn’t make head nor tail of it.’

The problem is, mainstream British TV drama rarely does this sort of experimentation with narrative form any more. The most recent example was Ashes to Ashes, and that finished in 2008. Before that, you have to go back to when Dennis Potter was alive to find a writer who played around with the conventions of TV drama, most notably and successfully in The Singing Detective (1986). Television has shrunk from when it could comfortably incorporate theatre, surrealism and songs in one production. Today, nearly all TV drama looks like a Hollywood film: impressive, but often unadventurous. Significantly, the only series still playing around with form and structure in the way that ‘The Abominable Bride’ did is Doctor Who, and that’s written by both of the Sherlock Special’s authors – it’s also classed as science fiction, where this sort of thing is permissible. Back in the day, that didn’t bother Potter. He employed the same techniques to social drama, thrillers and autobiography as he did to fantasy.  

So, the expectations of the transmission time and a disappearing form of television may have nobbled ‘The Abominable Bride’ for some viewers. Just as significantly, the Special expected you to remember what had happened in a series last seen two years ago on BBC1, something that the recap at the beginning didn’t really cover. This Sherlock was written very much as the fourth episode of the 2014 series: a treat for fans, then, but hard work for people not in the know.

I loved it, though.

The arguable misfire of showing ‘The Abominable Bride’ on New Year’s Day aside, I’d like to think productions like this will pave the way for more challenging television in days to come.