A year of living disingenuously…

So it turns out that I was a tad on the optimistic side this time last year. It also turns out that there is nothing like a stonking great tax bill, hard on the heals of my old laptop’s hard drive packing up (repairable, but no longer viable as a work machine) and my car needing a new clutch to prick the mood. Ho, as the old saying goes, hum

2014 has been a year of mind-boggling stupidity on so many scales that it is hard to know where to start.

Well, no. Not really. The only place to start is to ask why the British media has failed to ask any serious questions of Nigel Farage, a Dulwich College-educated commodity broker putting on a beer-and-fags, man-of-the-people act, while actually being a disgusting, boorish oaf and an embarrassment to anyone who stops to think for a minute. Meanwhile, the Greens – who have actually had an MP for nearly 5 years now – are excluded from the debate. It is hard not to call it censorship, so I will. I’m not even a Green and it offends me.

Putin tried to rebuild the Russian Empire but hey. he’ll still get to stage the World Cup thanks to a vote so bent it would have embarrassed the old Soviet Union.

We managed the incredible – landing a fridge-size spaceship on a speeding comet – only for a lot of people who are smart enough to know better to drop their pants and shit all over a female artist’s right to have her art celebrated. And the liberal left wonders why it has so much trouble building durable alliances. Fortunately for lefties everywhere, #GamerGate managed to give us an even more stupid Twitter storm, with added dishonesty. No, wait…fortunately? Libertarian numpties bow to no-one when it comes to dimwittedness.

And, under a black President, the USA seems to have declared open-season on black youth. That, as the youth probably don’t say, is something I simply cannot get my head around.

It is not all bad – to say so would be as disingenuous as the media I castigate above.

Some extraordinarily brave people, at great personal risk, have stepped into the Ebola cauldron.

Convicted price-fixer David Whelan got his arsed kicked for the kind of casual, unthinking racism that Nigel Farage wants to make acceptable again.

Peter Capaldi rocked it as Doctor Who, as right-thinking people knew he would.

Our fighting forces are finally out of Afghanistan.

Neil deGrasse Tyson made a wonderful, thoughtful update of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.

Oh, and we landed a spaceship on a comet. ON A FRIGGIN’ COMET, PEOPLE!

Anyway:

This time next year I will live somewhere new. For the first time in 60 years there will be nobody called Cundell in the old family home. So for me 2015 will be a new year in more ways than one.

I hope it is for you too, all of them good.

Now, 2015, let’s try that again and this time, concentrate.

Happy New Year.

(Thanks of KRB for a factual correction)

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Who shot the President

I suspect that it says something about the nature of modern myth-making that over the past week or so it is not the assassination of JFK – the destruction of Camelot, the snuffing out of One Bright Shining Moment – that has dominated British airwaves, but the other 50th, the anniversary of the first broadcast of Doctor Who.

I can’t remember not being a Who fan, but also wasn’t quite self-ware enough to remember the first airing of An Unearthly Child, so by the same token I do not know where I was when JFK was shot . Well, I do obviously: at home with Mum – I just don’t remember it. Dad was in Grosseto, Italy, being an international truck driver for Marconi (whose cameras were instrumental in making Doctor Who).

A little light for the blind and invisible monster

It was rather nice, last week, to see that Vincent and the Doctor, an episode from this year’s series of Doctor Who was short-listed for the MIND Mental Health Media Awards in the drama category. Unsurprisingly it lost out to the outstanding Karen storyline fromShameless, but I really was pleased that Vincent got noticed.

It was a wonderful (if that is the word) look at depression, with powerful performances from Matt Smith (The Doctor), Karen Gillan (Amy) and Tony Curran (Vincent). It didn’t chicken out, with Gillan’s portrayal of heartache outstanding, as Amy realises that her efforts to save Vincent from despair have failed, will always fail.

I can only assume that Richard Curtis, who wrote the script, has up-close and personal experience of depression, because even the most throw-away elements of the story felt written from truth.

It wasn’t remotely maudlin, and was wholly appropriate for the young audience Doctor Who serves, and if only a few of them come to appreciate what the monster of the week represented, then the story will have served Who‘s fans well.

Because the blind and invisible monster doesn’t care how well-off you are, how brilliant you are or how great your achievements are. When it comes after you, there is nothing more terrifying or indifferent to your pain.

Knowing why we cry

I have been thinking about last week’s finale of Dr Who (or rather the last two weeks, it was a two parter). I know what you’re thinking: a) you sad git and b) what’s that got to do with crying?

Trust me. I am not a doctor.

The show has probably gone from iPlayer now, so if you still have not seen it then treat yourselves to the DVDs when they come out, because the last two episodes in particular are a story telling masterclass. “What?” I hear you cry, “SciFi giving a masterclass inanything. Don’t be an ass.” Let me explain. Hear be spoilers.

The crux of the story is that, for reasons too involved to get into here, The Doctor has been erased from history. His survival depends on feisty assistant Amy Pond being able to remember him at her wedding (The Doctor had already floated the notion that nothing istruly forgotten and that if you can remember someone you can bring them back). Let’s focus in three nifty elements of storytelling.

1. Near the end of each of the pair of episodes, Amy cries without comprehension, the first time because she is happy (her lost love is back, but she hasn’t quite worked it out yet) and the second because she is sad (someone is missing from her wedding). Framing and call-back.

2. As she cries, found-love Rory refers to “that old wedding saying”. Earlier, as the Doctor confronts his impending erasure, he tells the sleeping child Amy that when she wakes she will have parents (they too had been erased) and will remember him only as a story (“That’s OK, we’re all stories in the end.”). He says she will dream of the silly man who stole the magic box (“well, borrowed it really”), the box that is both big and small (a nice diversion, something every Who fan knows about the Tardis), that it is both ancient and modern and the most amazing blue.

At the wedding, as Amy’s memory begins to needle her she remembers, stands and yells  that The Doctor is late for her wedding (a nice callback to a running joke from the first episode of the season). The Tardis begins to materialise and Rory asks “What’s that?”. Cue the old wedding saying (with belting delivery from Karen Gillan), and the Doctor is back (if you haven’t worked it out, I can’t help you).

Think about the sheer craft that went into setting up that one line. And there was nothing in the last 15 minutes of the series that had not been properly set up in Stephen Moffat’s storytelling (in sharp contrast to Russell T Davies’s somewhat ‘woo something out of the air’ approach to problem solving). Set-up and craft.

3. The trouble with SciFi fans is that they have a terrible habit of focussing on the Sci at the expense of the Fi, in practical terms meaning an over-obsession with plotting and puzzle solving at the expense of character and theme. The thing is that this episode (and indeed the whole season) wasn’t really about the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff, although that was a hoot. It was about people and what we mean to each other,  the ties that bind, what it is to miss somebody dreadfully, what it feels to have them back and how bloody marvellous it is when we absolutely refuse to give up on those we care about.

And then it ended with a wedding.

A storytelling masterclass.

But if you want further evidence that a vaguely daft kid-oriented SciFi show can explore deep things, then seek out Vincent and the Doctor (written by Richard Curtis) from earlier in the season. I challenge you to find a more sensitive, candid and exposition-free look at the absolute bastard that is depression in any genre, anywhere (with a a truly marvellous cameo by Bill Nighy). That it was also wholly appropriate for a young audience, once again shows the sheer craft of the story-telling.

I know writers who say they don’t like science fiction  – and so don’t read it (or don’t like poetry, or Shakespeare…or whatever – not just SciFi). To me this is beyond comprehension. If you are serious about writing, want to understand it and get better at it, if you wish to understand why we cry, then you simply cannot afford to make casual assumptions about where you might not find inspiration.

Sad git out.