Talk To Rex

I am not entirely surprised by the success of Fox’s celebrated, Golden Globe-winning series Glee, merely rather depressed. For those of you who have been spared it so far, the concept is this (imagine it scribbled on a napkin): a Spanish teacher takes over the school’s Glee Club (that is what Americans call a school choir) which includes a group of misfits who argue, make up and then, to round off each episode, sing.

The same napkin would certainly also have had space for the everso predictable character breakdown – there’s the cool kid who plays football but deep down would rather be singing, and the pretty girl who’s a bit individual so gets picked on by the sporty girls; then there’s the sassy, streetwise girl and the nerdy-boy-who-gets-bullied. And just to make sure a few minorities are covered, there’s disabled boy and Asian girl (“what’s your skill?” asked cool kid at one point; “er…” she stuttered in broken English. “Never mind,” he interrupted with a patronising grin, “we’ll find something!”)

But it isn’t the cynical, school-drama-plus-music-by-numbers formula that depressed me. It is the fact that the series has not one iota of wit or irony. For example, in an early scene we saw the Spanish teacher sit up in bed with a big grin as he had a flash of inspiration for the Glee Club’s new name – “Of course!” he gasped, “New Directions!” – and I laughed out loud because I thought it was a deliberate joke that the character had just uttered a name unfortunately close in sound to “Nude Erections”. I was already imagining the hilarious results that were about to ensue when the hapless teacher announced his Nude Erections to the football team.

But no; having no sense of irony (and in this instance self-awareness), the programme evidently expected us to share the teacher’s eureka moment and gasp in delight at his perfect idea. Gee! New Directions! How… fresh!

In another scene, the newly-reformed and unfortunately-titled Glee Club performed a pretty decent rendition of Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat; as it finished, nerdy kid announced without irony, “we suck”. And instead of leaping in and reassuring them “no way, most schoolkids would kill to be able to sing that well together, in tune and with so much energy on no rehearsal!” the Spanish teacher just nodded with a wry, disappointed smile and said that they would get better.

How were we supposed to know that their runthrough was, within the non-ironic, sugary world of the drama, a disaster? All became clear when, in a totally unforseeable development at the end of the episode, they all sorted out their problems and learned how to sing in a way that didn’t suck. Because then we heard what good singing is meant to sound like: backing harmonies close-miked and compressed to the point that they cease to sound like human voices and undoubtedly supplemented by several professional singers, lead vocals auto-tuned, given an artificial acoustic and mixed as flatteringly as possible with the professional backing group which had miraculously appeared to replace their earlier lone pianist. The kind of sound no school ensemble, however good, would EVER make.

In another context I might have thought it was a deliberate moment of high camp, suspension-of-disbelief silliness and it might have been funny, or at least bearable, but naturally I was meant to be in floods of non-ironic tears and it was all I could do not to choke on my scowl.

No doubt in future weeks the Spanish teacher will find true love, the cool kid will realise there’s more to life than football and get it on with the pretty girl, the nerdy kid will be accepted for who he is, the Asian girl will learn to speak English and the disabled boy will learn to walk. (The sassy girl will stay exactly the same.) I’m going to give it a miss – if I want to watch a genuinely moving people-taught-to-sing drama I’ll watch Young At Heart, and if I want the camp version there’s Sister Act.

And anyone who thinks I’m being snobbish should know that I watched Legally Blonde the Musical last week and loved every second.

I awoke to this rather depressing story about a man who was arrested under the terrorist act for tweeting the message “Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”

Good work, South Yorkshire Police. At least we know that our airports are safe from Mr Paul Chambers in Doncaster. And that police are being paid to interrogate his kind of scum for seven hours. Who needs intelligence when you’ve got the South Yorkshire Police? Good old South Yorkshire Police.

When I read the story, I decided that I would have to leave the country unless all charges are dropped against Paul Chambers – because, cliche though it may be, if we can’t tweet jokes about terrorism, the terrorists have won. Indeed, in a sense the state (and the South Yorkshire Police) have become terrorists themselves.

I was about to tweet something to that effect when I realised it would be much funnier to tweet the following: “Unless all charges against Paul Chambers are dropped, I’m blowing Robin Hood airport sky high!!”

And then it occurred to me that if I did tweet that, the South Yorkshire Police might come down in force to Bedford and lock me up under the terrorist act. I dared myself to do it all the same, because that would be funny, and would certainly draw attention to the sense-of-humour failure that threatens to destroy our country. But I’m a busy person and it would be really bloody inconvenient to get arrested; also, I expect my family would disapprove.

So I didn’t tweet at all. Because I was scared of being arrested.

Darn – the terrorists have won already.

I had a small dinner party this evening and while we ate I put Bill Evans on iTunes as every good host knows to. Then, when we reached the coffee stage, I turned off the computer speakers and we migrated to my (second) living room upstairs.

I’m now turning everything off and paused at my computer to briefly check emails and BBC news, and turned up for the volume for this rather tragic clip of Europe Minister Chris Bryant learning of the Hoon-Hewitt bid to oust Brown whilst talking live on TV.

And I was astounded, but deeply impressed, that the BBC had backed the whole painful moment with a particularly angsty quartet by Webern.

I was equally disappointed when I realised that the music was just coming from iTunes.

I was quite looking forward to The End of Time (part 2); sure, part 1 had been lame and mostly involved running around some docks somewhere while our Christmas dinners digested, but there was the distinct smell of Time Lords about, and Timothy Dalton looked kind of awesome and clearly wasn’t messing around. I’d originally hoped that Russell T Davies would do the honourable thing and not actually write a series reboot as his outgoing story, leaving Steven Moffat the chance to figure out exactly how he wanted things to be, but since RTD has the world’s largest ego there really wasn’t much of a chance of that. So I was confidently expecting him to bring back Gallifrey, kill the Doctor, and then show us the face of Matt Smith with exactly the same characterisation as before. All fine, because come April we’d have forgotten a handful of lines and the Eleventh Doctor could go off in whatever direction made sense.

And of course I was expecting RTD to screw it up. A trainwreck. A disaster. But I had absolutely no idea quite how far he would manage to get things wrong.

Let’s look at the story, half hour by half hour (as I remember it), across the two parts.

1. Some running around, the Master comes back to life, or maybe not, or something. He can now apparently break the laws of physics whenever he likes, and is stupid enough to think that when he desperately needs lots of energy the best use of what little he has is to repeatedly propel himself several hundred feed in the air. The Doctor finds him by the cunning method of going to his regular quarrydocks.
2. An Evil Plot Device is introduced, which the narrator tells us portentously will lead to the end of, well, everything. They put the Master in it. He turns everyone into clones of himself. Apparently rich black people are crazy megalomaniacs, in the same way that poor black people are into voodoo (in Planet of the Dead).
3. More running around; the Doctor goes into orbit for a while to avoid having to confront the Master, the Time Lords hatch an almost-believable plan to create a link between themselves and the Master as a baby (ignoring that this violates one of those pesky Laws of Time that the Doctor was talking about in one of the other tedious specials). This leads to the best music in the episode, where there isn’t any music and just drums, riffing on the timing of the theme tune.
4. Timothy Dalton sends back a diamond to provide a physical link between him and the Master (while I’ll let slide, but only because I remember The Invisible Enemy), and then uses it to mosey on over to Earth, taking all the other Time Lords, and Gallifrey (only we don’t see much because all the money’s been spent on Timothy Dalton), with him. (At some point everyone clearly forgets that Gallifrey is Time Locked, and that trying to pull a planet through some sort of physical-psychical link created by a small diamond should leave you with, well, a very squished planet.) Timothy Dalton then undoes everything the Master has done (meaning that humanity exists again), the Doctor undoes everything that else Timothy Dalton has done (meaning that Gallifrey is still Time Locked, that the Earth is safe, etc. etc.), and then finally the Doctor realises that the Master (in a bit they didn’t show on screen, or possibly my brain blanked out in an attempt to survive) had made a couple of little death boxes, and Bernard Cribbins in locked in one, but it’s okay because if the Doctor goes in the other one they’ll both live, because the Doctor is a fucking Time Lord and he knows it’s time for him to regenerate because the Ood have been cropping up in his mind for the last year or so telling him.
5. The Doctor goes on a farewell tour all around the galaxy to remind everyone of all the really shit characters that Russell T Davies created, and Sarah Jane Smith. Then the TARDIS explodes to remind you that RTD won’t be writing for the series any more and therefore it will be shitwe won’t have to suffer this shit from now on, and David Tennant becomes Matt Smith.

The End.

I’m not going to lay into the dialogue, the magical bullshit that makes no sense whatsoever, or even RTD’s obsession with making this Big Exit more about him than about the Tenth Doctor (if you don’t believe me, read some of the self-satisfied twaddle he’s said about writing these episodes); what troubles me is his cowardice. There was a beautiful moment (insofar as it could be beautiful with such first-draft writing) where Gallifrey explodes into the Earth’s skies and dooms humanity. Then, five minutes later, he undoes it because it feels all a bit too drastic.

This is the moment where anyone who didn’t already realise it was struck with the realisation that RTD isn’t actually a very good writer. (Except for the ones who are irredeemably stupid.)

If the outcome is too big, dial back the outcome a bit, don’t write it out in the next scene. A better ending would have been for Gallifrey to be brought into the Solar System in a kind of reverse Trojan position with respect to the Earth (we can ignore the problems with the science bit, since earlier in the story the Master shot bolts of electricity from his hands). Then the Earth becomes a subjugate planet to Gallifrey, and humanity becomes a slave race to the rather fun New Time Lords who have given up on the whole non-intervention thing and are out to rule the universe. The Doctor has to choose between joining them in ruling the planet he loves, or being exiled from it, in a nice reverse on the Third Doctor’s punishment, and the Master (who should have been weakened from being resurrected, as in say The Deadly Assassin, rather than being an unstable energy form or whatever) could be marched off to be executed for being a coward during the Time War.

Then the Eleventh Doctor can romp around the universe for a bit, with the aim of getting back and stopping Timothy Dalton; by which time of course the Time Lords will have moved on again, or something. Anything’s possible in this context.

Russell T Davies would still have managed to find a way to make that lame and drag out, but at least I could have respected him for it. Bringing back Gallifrey only to immediately send it back out of the series is a bit like saying “let’s see what you could have won” when you could have won an Aston Martin but you actually won a used tea bag. It’s an admission of mediocrity and of cowardice, at the exact moment you’re trying to convince everyone that you’re awesome. The remaining respect I felt for the man who brought Doctor Who back to our screens died today, killed by his own inabilities.

In case you think I’m utterly down on the story and being unkind, here are some things I didn’t have any problem with at all:

1. The spiky headed aliens. Great fun, and the female one was cute.
2. June Whitfield.
3. The Visionary, telling fortunes for the Time Lord Council. (If you want to believe that she was channelling the Matrix, and driven mad by that knowledge, then feel free.)
4. Mickey marrying Martha (although to be fair that’s because I don’t care about either of them).
5. The Doctor calling The President that R word. He’s clearly not the original, who would have killed the Master as soon as he appeared, and probably the Doctor as well just to be on the safe side. The Wikipedia entry notes that the Doctor might just have been comparing them.

If you haven’t seen it, here’s what is to come. Or at least bits, with some excited singers in the background.

The suggestion in Gordon Brown’s new year’s message that 2010 is when everything gets better is tragically naive, because even in the unlikely event that things get easier for most of us, it isn’t going to be an easy year for him. At least, not until May, when his schedule looks like getting a lot lighter.

So as we near the end of his unwhelming stint as PM, I thought it would be nice to look back on the noughties and remember a happier time when Gordon Brown didn’t wear a desperate smile but proudly grimaced like the moody Scot he is; a time when people wrote musicals about him being ‘locked in a semi-gay sadomasochistic tango’ with Tony Blair (that’s how Johann Hari saw it, at least)…

And if that brought a nostalgic tear to your eye, you’ll be pleased to know you can get the whole jolly award-winning sell-out musical on iTunes!

Last Christmas day I accompanied my parents to their church, which is a little on the trendy side, and was forced to endure a congregational rendition of a “hymn” to the tune of the hokey cokey (I’m not making this up) which had the refrain “Sheep, shepherds, baby Jesus!”.

And actions.

So churches are supposed to save your soul, not destroy it, but I’ve learned to expect this kind of thing from a certain branch of evangelicalism. I had naively imagined that traditional places of worship would never be infected by such lunacy.

So I am appalled – it’s the only word – to learn that this year’s Carols from King’s will include a carol set to the tune of “Where has the knitted character been this week?”…

What we’ve heard so far about Tony Blair’s interview with Fern Britton is about as revealing as it gets with a man who persists in revealing absolutely nothing – whilst he constantly denies possible reasons for the war in Iraq, can anybody find me a single interview in which Blair explains what the actual reasons were? Except for his oft-repeated assurance that he thought it was the right thing?

But it is revealing that he is now downplaying the significance of WMD and falling back on the Saddam-was-a-nasty-man argument that holds so little water as a reason for the invasion (if getting rid of dodgy leaders is a valid reason for war – which it isn’t – why not Zimbabwee? Why not Korea? Why not Italy? Why not put in the time and resources needed to make the operation successful?). Blair is obviously on the defensive, downplaying the original cited reasons for war by suggesting that, even without those reasons, it was a jolly good job we went in anyway. It’s as if he’s expecting to need back-up justification for when he’s revealed to have led us into war on false pretences.

Equally concerning is his statement about his Christian faith, which he speaks of as something which “sustains” him, with the pretty massive caveat that “what your faith can’t do, I’m afraid, is tell you what is the right thing.”

This is worrying for two reasons: firstly, because as self-elected faith leader Blair misunderstands the very core of Christianity. For him, it is simply a crutch: a way of feeling better when everything is going wrong, a reason to be nice to each other. That’s not Christianity – it’s humanism with fancy clothes.

It’s no wonder he doesn’t see his faith as serving any useful purpose. Not for him a transformative God whose sacrifice conquered death; not for him a living word which, rehearsed through communion with church and God, can offer wisdom even on contemporary moral issues. Certainly not for him a faith worth dying for. The ironically-named Tony Blair Faith “Foundation” is grounded in such vague theology that Richard Dawkins could sign up for a membership card with no qualms whatsoever.

As a society we’re wary of personal belief coming into politics – I would say unreasonably so. Before you get your knickers in a twist, I’m not advocating politicians justifying decisions with their faith either publically or personally – faith used as a claim of infallibility is also a serious misunderstanding of what it actually means. But the second reason why Blair’s statement undermines his credibility, not just as a faith leader but a political one, is that he distances what he calls “the right thing” from the beliefs on which his values are (presumably) based. Essentially, it is an admission that political expediency overruled any system of morality in his decisions.

Cynical generation that we are, we already know that’s true for most politics. But we can’t surgically remove morality from everything that goes on in government – without denying the complexity of political decisions, or suggesting that they can be simply split into decisions of “right or wrong”, what Blair calls “the right thing” must be informed and guided by personal (and indeed universal) beliefs – otherwise, what is it based on?

It is a particularly worrying question in the case of Iraq, given that the only solid reason Blair has given for the invasion was that he “thought it was the right thing”.

We are heading, I am told, for another Cowell-flavoured Christmas number one in the UK singles charts this year. As that unexceptional Scottish woman* breaks album sales records and the backing tracks are being laid down for the single of whoever is going to win X-factor this year, it falls to me (yes, me, even though I haven’t paid attention to the UK pop charts since 1989) to explain why it matters not one whit who tops this charts this year.

And the reason is this:

What intelligent person would buy anything at full price in this day and age?

In this era of discounts and sales and Fopp, we all know that any CD we really want is certainly going to be available to buy for half the price in – well, these days in about three weeks.

When Bowie or the Beatles or the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band were releasing albums you had to rush out and buy them – it was the only way of hearing them, except for unpredictable radio play of some of the singles, and in any case, you wanted the full vinyl quality, not some hissing wireless version. Sadly – and I really do mean sadly – things have changed and we can all get what we want pretty much instantly in any manner of formats. And if we want to keep it, we only have to wait a little while before it plummets in price. I can’t remember the last time I rushed out to buy a recent release at full price. (Well, actually I can – it was the DVD of The History Boys, a decision I’ve regretted ever since not because I haven’t enjoyed watching the film many times but because I could have picked it up for next to nothing if I’d waited a couple of months.) And there’s no call for impatience, especially not where chart music is concerned – we can readily hear said tracks on Spotify, or YouTube, or indeed on Listen Again and Again and Again.

Yes, I know the UK charts now include iTunes downloads, and I know young people are impetuous and have a tendency to download first and think afterwards, but the clever ones have worked out how to illegally download the tracks they want without spending money and therefore without registering on the UK chart radar.

By which I deduce that the only people who do register on the UK charts are the stupid ones.

It explains why so much chart music is so rubbish. Take the Scottish woman*: the people who bought her album are idiots. Complete idiots. Not because she is of questionable talent or the album is undeniably of no lasting value whatsoever – people have odd tastes and I’m nobody to judge them for it. But purely because whatever records she has broken, it is inevitable that before 2010 is out, her album will be in every bargain bin in the country. My bet is I could pick up a copy for £2 by September.

It also suggests that we shouldn’t get so bothered about what nonsense is in the charts. Last year I got fed up of being told to pay money for Jeff Buckley’s ‘Hallelujah’ to stop a horrific cover version getting to number one**; I have Jeff Buckley’s very fine album, I’m not going to part with more money to have a copy of one of the tracks in a more digital, compressed format. Already this year I’ve been urged to buy the Muppets’ ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ to stop Cowell monopolising the Christmas charts: I won’t. I’ve seen the Muppets track on YouTube, it’s fun. Not the kind of thing I’d want on my playlist however, and if I ever get a hankering for it, it’ll still be on YouTube.

I couldn’t care less what gets to number one at Christmas; it has ceased to mean anything. Indeed, the worse the track is, the happier I’ll be, because it means that while I’m saving money, stupid people with no musical taste are helping the country recover from economic crisis.

Happy Christmas and bah humbug.

*Sorry, I simply can’t remember her name. Perhaps it’s because the press keep referring to her as MoJo, or SuMo, or BoKo or something… why this sudden need to reduce every celebrity to four letters? Imagine, if Molly Malone had been treated in such a fashion, she’d be MoMa.

**Can’t remember whose. Can anybody?