Pessimystic

BBFC grants Human Centipede 2 an 18 certificate - with cuts

2011-10-06T03:20:00.000-07:00

Torture porn fans, rejoice! The BBFC have passed The Human Centipede part 2 (Full Sequence) for an 18 certificate in the UK after making 2m37s of cuts to the film.

The BBFC released details of the necessary cuts today (warning, cuts details may contain spoilers):

“[There were] 32 individual cuts to scenes of sexual and sexualised violence, sadistic violence and humiliation, and a child presented in an abusive and violent context.

“In this case, cuts included: a man masturbating with sandpaper around his penis; graphic sight of a man's teeth being removed with a hammer; graphic sight of lips being stapled to naked buttocks; graphic sight of forced defecation into and around other people's mouths; a man with barbed wire wrapped around his penis raping a woman; a newborn baby being killed; graphic sight of injury as staples are torn away from individuals' mouth and buttocks.”

So there you have it, folks. We Brits will be getting Human Centipede 2 in the UK but (some would say thankfully) not in its full-strength form.

Ian Sadler, Sales Director for Eureka Entertainment, the film’s UK distributor said: “We are really pleased that after nearly 4 months of detailed discussion and debate, we have been able to reach an agreement with the BBFC and to produce a very viable cut of the film which will both excite and challenge its fans. Naturally we have a slight disappointment that we have had to make cuts, but we feel that the storyline has not been compromised and the level of horror has been sustained.”

The Human Centipede II was rejected, and effectively banned, by the BBFC in its uncut form in June of this year.

Further details of the UK theatrical and DVD release will be announced early next week.

Don't go to the Blues Kitchen in Camden! It's horrid!

2011-08-30T05:06:00.000-07:00

If you’re ever tempted to go to the Blues Kitchen in Camden, take my advice: don’t. I love the blues and I love live music but after spending all of about, oh, ten minutes in this pitiful tarted-up gastropub, I’d quite happily claim to hate both.

As a music venue, it’s an utter joke. Want to experience a night at the Blues Kitchen without actually going there? Easy peasy. Get on a packed tube train at rush hour while listening to BB King on your iPod at half-volume and throw ten pound notes out of the train doors every few minutes.

Though actually, that’s not quite true. At least on the tube you’re less likely to be shoved around by a crowd of preening, braying tosspots with no regard for personal space or etiquette.

Overpriced, overheated and full to bursting with inconsiderate scumbags, this venue is one of the worst I’ve ever been to. From the Google Image printouts of Mississippi John Hurt on its walls to its £4.50 shot prices (nearly a fiver for a shot, ferchirssakes), it tries half-heartedly to be an ersatz juke joint for U2 fans and fails even at that.

The final straw is that if you want to see any of the acts billed, you have to wait ‘til gone 10:30pm, just so the bloody place can crowbar yet more drinks money out of any poor misguided music fans who’ve been hoodwinked through the door.

I don’t want to waste any more of my time recounting what an utter hell-hole this place is: frankly it doesn’t deserve notice beyond “just don’t go”. No matter how good the acts are you see on the posters outside, you’d have more fun listening to a CD at home.

If you’ll pardon me getting a little scatological, fuck the Blues Kitchen, fuck it to hell. Even Camden Rock’s preferable to this. Never go there! Ever! Bah.

Battletoads & Double Dragon soundtrack: SNES vs. Megadrive

2011-08-12T07:40:00.000-07:00

I’ve recently been listening to some of the Battletoads & Double Dragon SNES soundtrack pretty obsessively (God knows why, maybe I’m pregnant), but it was only today I bothered to seek out the Mega Drive/Genesis version of the game’s music. Carumba! What a difference. Evidently the two machines’ soundcards were worlds apart when it came to quality/fidelity. The SNES sounds like a decent quality boom-box; the Mega Drive like a swarm of angry, shrieking metal wasps (not that that's a bad thing). Compare these examples and marvel at how not all 16-bit games consoles were created equal…

My Secret Knife: a review of Jack the Ripper's Secret Confession

2010-04-29T07:39:00.001-07:00

Where would Whitechapel-based walking tour companies and fly-by-night paperback publishers be without the public’s continued fascination with Jack the Ripper? Yes, ever since Saucy Jack stalked those darkened backstreets near the old City at the close of the nineteenth century, the Ripper legend has continually piqued the interest of generation after generation of rubbernecking gorehounds and Angela Lansbury-esque armchair sleuths alike, resulting in an almost endless stream of theories about his identity and almost as many gaudy books to back them up.

And so we turn to the latest offering from the Ripper mill, Jack the Ripper’s Secret Confession, a book in which David Monaghan and Nigel Cawthorne claim that the man who made whoring in the East End decidedly dangerous was none other than ‘Walter’, the author of the infamous (and voluminous) Victorian erotic memoir, My Secret Life.

For anyone unacquainted with My Secret Life, the story goes something like this. Between 1888 and 1895 a Belgian peddler of erotica, Auguste Brancart, was summoned from his adopted city of Amsterdam to London by “a rich old Englishman, who desired to have privately printed for his own amusement a huge MSS”. What this manuscript contained was nigh on a million words of an anonymous erotic memoir, allegedly drawn from the author’s diaries of his day-to-day amatory life. Over a period of some years, and involving a chain of smugglers, stooges and rogue printers, this manuscript was printed up in 11 volumes, comprising some nearly 4000 pages in total (including a more-than-thorough 56-page index). According to the author only six copies of the whole work were printed, although as researchers Ian Gibson, Steven Marcus and others have demonstrated, a great many more copies were printed up than that. The book sold for the then-astronomical sum of £100 a set and was marked ‘Not for publication’ on its title page. This isn’t surprising: the content of the book is about as obscene as it’s possible to imagine. The author narrates his sexual development from childhood onwards, detailing literally thousands of copulations and other sexual indiscretions and exploring every possible type of perversion. Attempts to publish the book over the course of the 20^th century met with bans, obscenity judgements and prison sentences, and it wasn’t until 2004 that all eleven volumes were finally made available online (at this location).

The author of the text has never been definitively identified (much like the Ripper), but the most convincing attempt at identification I’ve read is Ian Gibson’s masterful and endlessly entertaining book The Erotomaniac, in which Gibson asserts that the author of My Secret Life was Henry Spencer Ashbee, a bibliophile, traveller and industrialist who wrote three huge bibliographies of erotic literature under the name Pisanus Fraxi in the last half of the nineteenth century. I have neither the time nor desire to attempt outline Gibson’s reasoning here but it seems to me pretty watertight and that Ashbee was indeed the author of the My Secret Life – he had the time, inclination (after a lifetime’s immersion in the field of erotic literature) and most importantly the wealth to see the book through the press. According to publisher Charles Carrington, who acted as the book’s distributor, it cost the author £1100 pounds to produce the work – a staggering sum of money, which would place the author in the country’s financial elite.

However, Gibson’s work and research rather scuppers Monaghan and Cawthorne because of one crucially important conclusion reached by the author: My Secret Life is a work of fiction. Despite the book presenting itself as memoirs drawn from a diary, a number of internal inconsistencies coupled with the sheer unlikelihood that anyone could possibly live as ‘Walter’ purported to do, mark it out as a fantasy autobiography rather than a true record of a life lived. Beyond this, Gibson demonstrates fairly conclusively from comparisons with Ashbee’s diaries that he and Walter share the shame stylistic tics as writers, the same problems with spelling and syntax, and the same character traits. And if Ashbee was the writer of My Secret Life, which he is generally assumed to have been, any possible link between ‘Walter’ and the Ripper completely breaks down. The very nature of Ashbee’s life as a businessman, author, head of a family and social butterfly are utterly at odd with what we know of the Ripper’s character and the facts of his killing spree.

I have to confess a personal fascination with the life, work and character of Ashbee. As he is described in the few books which exist about him, he amuses me enormously, and so I thought I’d buy …Secret Confession to see if there was any possible way that Henry Spencer could have been the Ripper. Unsurprisingly I came away from the book unconvinced.

The reasoning advanced by Monaghan and Cawthorne is at times ingenious and a glowing demonstration of their ability as lateral thinkers, but rests largely on the Christian names of one or two of the prostitutes mentioned in My Secret Life corresponding with those of the murdered girls in Whitechapel, as well as a few overlaps in locations described in the book and those in which the Ripper crimes took place. The writers also place their own interpretation on phrases in My Secret Life, making assumptions and guessing at (nonexistent) double meanings in order to bolster their case. Beyond this they rely on amateur psychoanalysis to arrive at the conclusion that Walter was a killer. The writer of My Secret Life certainly put a great deal of aggression into his work and expresses a fascination with the blood associated with sex acts (although it must be said that he expresses a fascination with anything even remotely connected with sex), but the authors’ assertion that Walter was a murderous paedophile who killed the girls who procured him young virgins is overstating the case and a quite unsubstantiated assertion. And besides, if My Secret Life was the work of Henry Spencer Ashbee, the book is very unlikely to bear much, if any, relation to the author’s actual life, movements and experiences.

That said, Jack the Ripper’s Secret Confession is quite the page-turner. The authors quote liberally from the more lurid episodes in My Secret Life, which are as shocking (and consequently entertaining) as you might imagine, as well as from reports into the underworld of 1890s London, and spare no detail in describing the Ripper murders. Of course this is material that’s been reshuffled many, many times for countless Ripper books, but not being particularly interested in Jack the Ripper myself, the book revealed to me a wodge of facts about the case and Victorian society at the turn of the 20^th century of which I was previously unaware. The writers’ tactic of alternating chapters which focus heavily on the facts of the Ripper murders with others focusing intently on My Secret Life is effective and makes the book seem pacy and urgent. And, as My Secret Life is not easily available as a book, nor a particularly quick or easy read, the quotes picked out in …Secret Confession are of such a length as to be almost a précis of that work, which is jolly useful. The mixture of extreme sex and extreme violence, which is what the book essentially boils down to, is well chosen, and the authors have been able to serve up their lurid source material in great and graphic detail whilst maintaining a scholarly air. While this book won’t tell you who the Ripper is (nor indeed will it firmly settle on the authorship of My Secret Life for that matter), it will entertain and engage you ‘til its end. Even approached with as sceptical a set of prior assumptions as my own, the book is an entertaining summary of the agreed facts around Jack the Ripper, a whistle-stop tour of late-Victorian London and an engaging discussion about one of English literature’s most hotly debated and notorious works, all of which are assets of the work to be commended. Well worth a read, but make sure to pick up a copy of Gibson’s Erotomaniac as a companion to avoid the potholes of occasional far-out and slipshod reasoning within.

Waiting for Bottom

2010-04-22T05:47:00.000-07:00

“Oh come on, Eddie. There must be more to life than jugs…”-Richie

In their musings on drama the Greeks decided that the life was ultimately a curious blend of tragedy and comedy - hence those twin masks, one grinning, one in tears, which are the universal symbol of theatre. And nowhere is this idea better explored, understood and trumped than in Bottom, Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson’s existentialist-slapstick comedy which ran for three series on the BBC in the early ’90s, and carried on life as a series of stage shows for the rest of the decade.

Apparently Bottom was conceived by Rik and Ade while the pair were co-starring in a West End production of Waiting for Godot and the stamp of Beckett’s work looms large in the series. The pair, long-time comedy sparring partners, distilled their double-act in Filthy Rich and Catflap, an overlooked Ben Elton/Rik Mayall satire of showbiz life which succeeded The Young Ones in the mid ’80s. In the series Mayall played Richie Rich, a temperamental, narcissistic, self-pitying, sex-obsessed artiste while Edmondson played Eddie Catflap, a phlegmatic alcoholic. They’re basically Rik and Vyvian all grown up and the embryonic forms of the people who would take centre-stage in Bottom.

Waiting for Godot centres around two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, a pair of itinerant fools who spend both of the play’s acts sat by a roadside waiting for someone named Godot to appear, all the while discussing nonsense and triviality. It is obviously a symbolic work and one interpretation of the play is as a satire on the pointlessness of life, an idea which remained central to Beckett‘s work. Bottom is very similar in set-up: it is staged largely within the confines of the living room of a grubby Hammersmith flat and peopled almost uniquely by Richard Richard (Mayall) and Eddie Hitler (Edmondson).

The two are life’s losers writ large: middle-aged, single, largely unemployable, moronic and pig-ignorant. They’re like an all-male Wayne and Waynetta Slob, only deprived of even the most festering sort of romance. And like Wayne and Waynetta, the relationship between the two characters is that of a co-dependent but loveless marriage. Eddie is the drunkard husband with one foot in reality: he occasionally brings home money from some job or scheme, or else counterfeits it himself. He’s constantly pissed, supports QPR and occasionally gets out of the flat to hang around with his misfit friends, Spudgun and Dave Hedgehog, who refer to Richie as Eddie’s ‘wife’. It’s a role Richie fulfils well. He’s long-haired, does all the cooking and ‘cleaning’ around the flat and, from time to time, has to put Eddie to bed when the latter’s had a few too many. Through it all they profess to hate each other, but Richie owns the flat they share and allows Eddie lives there rent-free. It’s a marriage of convenience but, when push comes to shove, they’re all each other have.

As a set up, it’s almost a throwback to Hancock and Sid James living together on the breadline in East Cheam, but where Bottom differs from Galton and Simpson’s series is in its subtext: Hancock was very much a character study, while Bottom is more universal in scope.

There are moments of genuine poignancy in Bottom which escape obvious notice on first viewing. A recurring joke in the series is for Richie to reproach Eddie with a variation of the quote which heads this essay, and for the pair to stare contemplatively for a moment or two before affirming that there isn’t. Telly, booze, jugs, that’s all there is in life when it’s boiled down to its core. Even when the characters’ lives are saved by the hand of God at the end of one episode, they damn themselves by declaring their atheism and fall to their deaths. And indeed, death means nothing in Bottom. The characters ‘die’ at the end of each series (and occasionally at the conclusion of individual episodes) only to return, safe, well and no wiser at the beginning of the next. There’s no escape. This isn’t just a show about knob-gags and knockabout physical comedy, it looks at life deeply. And darkly.

If there’s one word which best sums up Bottom it’s ‘squalid’. The characters are all dirty old men, figuratively and literally, and the sets are a study in grime. Dirt streaks the walls of every set in the series and decay runs riot. Even Dick the Barman’s phone has its roto-dial caved in and boasts a shameful layer of grease. The show’s humour is similarly filthy, with most of the jokes concerning the toilet or a Fat Slags vision of sex. Of course there’s cerebral stuff in there too, and the humour arising from the characters’ relationship is first-rate but, well, the programme’s called Bottom. That one words sums it all up.

Eddie sums up the hopelessness faced by the characters, and by extension the rest of us, in a reproach he gives to Richie at the end of series three: “Look, you get born, you keep your head down, then you die. If you’re lucky.” Their lives are testament to this fatalism: they’re both too old and completely unsuitable for work or marriage, their day-to-day life is a pointless repetitive existence in which the only thrills are occasionally getting drunk and wanking. Their plight is hopeless; they’ll never achieve anything, they’ll never progress as human beings and are doomed to live this way until they die. If there is a message in Bottom it is this: life is meaningless, but that doesn’t mean you can’t laugh at it.

Each episode of Bottom sees the pair failing to engage with activities which most people see as life’s pleasures: when they go out and try to get laid they end up embarrassing themselves in front of a pubful of locals as Eddie, pissed as a newt, tries it on with Richie. In another episode they go camping but end up doing so on a field bearing the notice ‘Dog Toilet’ on Wimbledon Common. And then go condom fishing. When they try to play chess they completely fail to understand the game and beat each other senseless, and so it goes ever on. But in debasing each and every ‘positive’ thing about life, Rik and Ade are slyly affirming Beckett’s beliefs about life’s meaningless: even the joyous things are purposeless and crap. It’s a bleak vision until one looks at it all through the lens of the absurd.

Richie and Eddie are utterly human and depressingly normal men but are not bound by the same laws as the rest of us. When they wallop each other senseless and set each other on fire, or even blow themselves up, they’re never actually hurt. They’re like cartoon characters. And like cartoon characters, other concerns of the real world are meaningless to them. Bottom is more of a vehicle for looking at events of life in absurd, good-humoured isolation. We sit there laughing at these two arse-heads pitching camp on a dog toilet, but then remember when we ourselves accidentally pitched a tent on a cow-pat. Bottom is a sitcom and thus an exaggeration of reality, but the kernels of truth present in it are deeply, deeply resonant.

Even if you’re not naturally depressive, you have to concede that the chaps have a point in their nihilistic take on existence. The existentialist thinkers of the 20^th century, who were paid to gaze at their navels and contemplate life, concluded that life was ‘absurd’ and that man is a ‘meaningless passion’. A lot of them ended up as Catholics in a search for real, genuine, meaning in life. Not to disparage catholic, or indeed any other spiritual beliefs, but the conclusion we can take away from their work is that meaning in life is, at best, elusive and at worst nonexistent. But the thing seized on by Bottom is this idea of the absurdity in life which Camus popularised. Indeed, the very slant of Bottom’s writing is to expose and burlesque all that is absurd about being human and being alive. Deep down, we’re the same as Eddie and Richie -grasping for gratification, be it sexual or otherwise, and comfort, and their plight is an exaggeration of our own.

Yes Minister is one of my favourite comedy programmes for almost the exact opposite reasons that I enjoy Bottom: it’s cerebral, concerned with gravest matters of human life and somewhat aspirational. To draw a crude analogy: it is the Freudian superego to Bottom’s id. Bottom, in its lowly setting and brutish characters explores life at a much deeper level than most other TV series’. Again it was Freud who suggested that humour and our deeper subconscious are closely linked, and in Bottom this is entirely borne out. We laugh at a show like Yes Minister for its mastery of language, that very human trait. We laugh at Bottom for its burlesquing of our more primal nature.

Bottom then entirely encapsulates the two elements the Greeks saw as fundamental to life: it is tragic in its premise and characters, yet comic for those same reasons. It is a shame that Bottom is thought of by most people as mere crudity. Like Viz comic, there’s much more to Bottom than meets to eye. Indeed, once you peer deeply into Bottom, you’ll be surprised at how much there is to see.

Click here to watch Bottom on Seesaw.

Drunken Bakers

2009-11-23T06:13:00.000-08:00

Drunken Bakers is probably the most subtle and, in a way, philosophical Viz strip ever. Unlike the rest of the comic's more usual fare, it's not a satire on anything in particular and, despite the subject matter, is totally dissimilar to Eight Ace, the other regular Viz dipso. I've seen Drunken Bakers compared to Beckett in print before and think that's about right. The characters' drunkenness isn't funny, they're not comedy drunks - these are broken men, and men whose pain and suffering we only come to understand slowly through tiny snatches of information which occasionally bleed into the strip.

This edition of Drunken Bakers, taken from the October 2009 issue of Viz, is a probably the best yet published and one in which we learn a great deal more about the downfall of at least one of the titular dough-kneeders than ever before. Their presence in Viz might not elicit the same sort of broad, hearty belly-laughs as, say, Johnny Fartpants, but to my mind they lend Viz a literary air and hint that beneath the jokes about knobbing and farting, the people behind Viz are in touch with the same thoughtful, despairing view of human life which drove Beckett to create Vladimir and Estragon and Rik 'n' Ade to pen Bottom. Or at least, as this strip demonstrates, that they know how to draw a very funny depiction of a bloke wearing a dead man's glasses.Enjoy.

Dickie Peterson, RIP

2009-10-19T15:22:00.000-07:00

There have been a lot of fairly hefty celebrity deaths in 2009: Farrah Fawcett, Ludovic Kennedy, David Carradine… when the lead singer from the Jackson 5 went off to that great theme park in the sky, the world at large took note. Another mortal coil was shuffled off this year, one which the tabloids didn’t pay much attention to but which meant a lot more to me, that which belonged to Dickie Peterson, who died on October 12.

Peterson was the vocalist and bassist of Blue Cheer, a band held sacred these days by the type of rock enthusiasts inclined to dip into the Woodstock generation‘s stash for thrills. The Cheer (who probably aren’t ever referred to as such but, m’eh) are one of those bands along with Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Budgie and doubtless others who ‘invented heavy metal’in the late 1960’s. While that fact’s debatable and the subject for far more scholarly work than my own, what’s not up for debate is the quality of the music they made.

Blue Cheer, like countless other bands made up of kids who love rock ‘n’ roll but can’t play, initially specialised in chunky renditions of blues standards in their salad days in the bars of ‘Frisco. Their one and only big hit was a cover of Eddie Cochran’s Summertime Blues and their first album, Vincebus Eruptum, is a six-track, 30-minute blast of raw, heavy blues. Three covers and three Peterson-penned originals, the album is a perfect snapshot of the musical period’s transition from Yardbirds-style cutesy blues appreciation to the sort of shit-yer-pants experimentation that Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Tony Iommi were beginning to unleash on the world.

However, the Cheer’s only drawback was that they really couldn’t play very well. I’m not being a snob and, frankly, I think Peterson’s bass lines, his singing and the drumming on the record are punky-to-good, but the band’s guitarist was no Clapton. It’s intriguing to note the ways in which the band tried to get round the fact that their guitar parts sounded more leaden that lead, such as recording two solos and using both at once in the same portion of a song, but while Page would lay down solos which dropped the jaws of anoraks and novices alike, the Cheer did more to try and convey a feeling or energy. In their approach they were like a punk band who’ve smoked that bit too much pot and discovered the joys of side two of My War, and they made music that, for anyone who’s ever felt the sheer exhilaration which comes from getting a twelve-bar blues progression right on guitar or bass for the first time, was just…well, right on.

Live, they must’ve sounded phenomenal. They were managed by a Hell’s Angel fantastically named Gut and apparently were the loudest band in Frisco. Considering Canned Heat were playing around this time with a rig so loud that their guitarist could stand in front of his amp, lean back and remain supported upright on the sound-waves alone, they must’ve been ear-splitting.

And beyond their passion and volume lay the band’s counterculture credentials in the form of uninhibited drug experimentation and promotion. The fact that they were named after a type of high-grade blotter acid and played a song of Peterson’s called ‘Doctor, Please’ left no doubt in the minds of listeners and fans that this was a band who were turning on and tuning in as well as dropping-D. Peterson regretted the band’s youthful enthusiasm for late-night pharmaceuticals later in life, but this was a band in touch with the sort of Tim Leary, Discordian idealism which permeated the mainstream and which these days seems incredible. In their personal lives, Blue Cheer were a sort of musical version of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, an artefact of a more hedonistic, carefree age.

It’s the band’s first album that it’s fashionable to cite as a favourite in stoner rock circles these days but the band’s post-Vincebus career was replete with glory too. Their follow-up, Outsideinside is a gem of a record, which sounds these days like a precursor of grunge, not least for Magnolia Caboose Babyfinger, which Mudhoney paraphrased on their first LP. Subsequent albums saw a huge number of line-up changes and Peterson relinquishing sole vocal duties, but they still churned out some cracking tunes. Good Times Are So Hard To Find is a song which perfectly encapsulates the souring of the hippie dream in the early ‘70s and Pilot is as good an example of a beautifully realised red-eyed pop song it’s possible to find. The band’s activity became more sporadic as the ‘80s hoved into view but rock’s nice habit of paying heed to its founding fathers meant that again, like Budgie, the band’s memory was kept alive.

In later years Peterson moved to Germany and Blue Cheer capitalised on the vogue for Woodstock-generation bands, playing their greatest hits around the world. In fact it’s funny to note how they took note of the nods given them by heavy metal bands over the decades on their Live in Japan album. If you’re on Spotify give the solo on this version of Out of Focus a listen. See what I mean?

Dickie Peterson means a lot to me because, when I was a struggling young dreadlocked student, fumbling away on my bass, I listened to his music and thought - ‘great, that’s the sort of thing I’m trying to do!’. I remember the evening when I first cracked the bass line to Out of Focus and the glee I felt at playing along with a righteous tune from an era that fascinates me by musicians who were as unpretentiously keen as myself. Blue Cheer inspired a lot of people, made a lot of brilliant music that we’ve got forever and are rightfully acknowledged along with their Woodstock contemporaries as being one of the more important bands of the mid-twentieth century. Dickie might’ve only been 63 when he headed off into the sunset but, wow, what a life he led…

The Dragon Lives Again

2009-07-23T07:03:00.001-07:00

I’ve often wondered what the most patently absurd film in existence could be. Before last night I’d always assumed that it was a toss-up between The Hottie and The Nottie and Caligula Reincarnated as Hitler, but it turns out I was wrong. You see, before last night I’d never seen The Dragon Lives Again.

In order to understand this film, it’s necessary to learn a little about a movement in Hong Kong cinema known as bruceploitation. The term’s a portmanteau of Bruce, as in Bruce Lee, and exploitation. When Bruce Lee unexpectedly died in 1973, movie producers in Hong Kong panicked, fearing that international audiences wouldn’t care for films from Hong Kong not starring The Little Dragon, and subsequently produced a slew of Bruce Lee-themed movies, some bearing titles similar to genuine Lee movies (Re-Enter the Dragon leaps to mind) and others starring Bruce Lee lookalike actors, most of whom sported names like Bruce Li, Brute Lee, Lee Bruce and so on. Most of these so-called bruceploitation movies were pretty generic martial arts flicks, released purely to cash in on audience ignorance and confusion, but The Dragon Lives Again is a different beast indeed: definitely the most bizarre of the bruceploitation films, and probably one of the craziest movies ever committed to celluloid.

The movie opens in the Underworld, a place apparently between Hell and Earth, where departed pop culture icons go to…well, it’s not entirely clear what they’re supposed to be doing in the Underworld but, m’eh, they’re there. We open on Bruce Lee (well, actually, Bruce Leung) lying in state before the King of the Underworld and his court, apparently suffering the effects of rigor mortis most profoundly.

In fact Bruce’s dong is discussed at some length in this film, if I can put it that way, with the King’s concubines wittering endlessly in stilted Dublish about his ‘endowment’. But to the court’s shock and disappointment, the bulge only turns out to be a set of nunchucks, which Bruce awakes from his eternal slumber to retrieve from the King.

It is worth pausing at this point to consider one glaringly obvious problem with this film: Bruce Leung looks nothing like Bruce Lee. Not even a hint of a resemblance. Nada. I mean, look. However, the writers get around this monumental problem by having the pair of penis-obsessed courtesans discussing Bruce’s ‘changed appearance’. Apparently ‘when you die, your body and face undergo a profound change’. So that’s that, then.

Anyway, when Bruce is told to show reverence to the fringe-crowned monarch he initially scoffs but is rendered speechless when the King demonstrates his power: shaking a big red pillar in his throne room, which causes earthquakes throughout the underworld. Suitably awed, Bruce agrees to respect the King before jump-cutting into a diner, apparently in the Underworld’s party district. But Bruce Lee’s not the only pop culture icon in this café. No, sir. Why, look – here’s Popeye.

Despite the oddness of his fellow patrons Bruce settles down to a well-earned meal before running afoul of Japan’s premiere blind swordsman, Zatoichi, for some trivial offense or other and it’s not long before Zatoichi brings in some of his dastardly allies – namely James Bond and Clint Eastwood. Yes, in this film 007 and The Man with No Name both work for the forces of evil and are part of a bizarre syndicate of international pop culture icons who are planning a coup to take over the Underworld.

In fact the choice of villains in this film is probably the best demonstration of Chinese supremacy I’ve ever seen in my life. The nefarious cabal consists of the following international icons, all of whom are bested by Bruce Lee (China/Hong Kong): James Bond (UK), Clint Eastwood (USA), The Godfather (a piss-poor Al Pacino lookalike, Italy), Emmanuelle (the soft-porn character, France), The Exorcist (one of the priests from Linda Blair’s pea-soup commercial, and bizarrely sporting a French accent). Oh, and Dracula acts as a sort of contractor for this dastardly team of rogues too. Initially I thought this group was pretty random, but as a collection of characters all of whom chosen to represent other cinematic territories, it’s a fairly well thought-out bunch.

So Bruce ends up meeting up with the syndicate after having the stuffing knocked out of him by Clint, Bond and a pack of zombies and predictably refuses to join them. Naturally, their only option is to snuff him out (although how you can ‘kill’ someone who’s already passed on is never touched on in the film – maybe the makers were hoping to sow the seeds of philosophical debate in the audience), and in fact the remainder of the film essentially consists of the attempts of the cabal to whack Brucie.

I was going to offer a concise summary of the rest of the movie’s plot but narrative consistency is not one of the film’s strong points. Still, pressing on, Bruce finds himself in a quarry for no particular reason where he’s ambushed by Zatoichi, who attempts to off Bruce with some of the most quirkily named martial arts moves I’ve ever heard.

But before long the nunchucks come out and Zatoichi is sent packing. Emmanuelle is up next, threatening to use her womanly wiles to lure Bruce to his doom. Alas we’re spared her seduction technique, for no sooner has she announced her intention at that morning’s Cave of Evil general meeting than the film cuts to her inexplicably in bed with Bruce. Unfortunately for Emmanuelle her decadent ways mean that she quickly moves in to give Little Bruce a kiss and reveals the evildoers sneaking into Bruce’s room. However, despite having caught him with his pants down, the baddies choose to retreat. Bruce follows, and despite both Bond and Clint pulling their guns on Bruce, he’s allowed to leave unharmed. Makes no sense, but there we are.

Next we’re treated to some Henry VIII-style marriage management by the King of the Underworld, who is gifted Emmanuelle by the Exorcist as a replacement for his two current brides, both of whom have been cursed by drinking a potion they intended to poison Bruce with, which has rendered them ugly as Bernard Manning’s greyest pants.

Bruce meanwhile bumps into and defeats Dracula and a another herd of zombies in the quarry before running into James Bond outside the King’s palace and, in the film’s shortest fight scene, accuses him of harbouring ‘stolen money’ before dispatching Bond with a flurry of roundhouse kicks. I can only assume Bond puts up virtually no resistance because the only white fellow they could find to stuff into the cheap tux sported by ‘Bond’ didn’t know any martial arts.

Clint’s up next, as Bruce once again finds himself in the quarry with no explanation. The Man with No Name puts up a valiant effort but his pistols and clumsy kicks are easily overcome by Bruce who offs Clint, reducing the evildoers’ camp down to two.

The Exorcist and The Godfather are both naturally displeased that their crew is being pared to the bone and decide to go for broke and assassinate the King. They storm the palace and confront the monarch, easily overcoming his guards and forcing the King into his chamber where, in an attempt to scare off the marauding fiends, he shakes his pillar like it’s never shaken before, causing massive earthquakes throughout the Underworld. These earthquakes raze most of the kingdom to the ground, causing many, many deaths, which angers Bruce who is caught up in the middle of it all. However, back in the throne room, The Exorcist and Godfather advance on the King, who has literally nowhere left to run…

So of course the film jump-cuts to the quarry again at this point, with both the Exorcist and Godfather striding towards Bruce, who seems to have appeared from nowhere. Combat ensues for about 10 minutes of screen-time before both are dispatched. However, Bruce can’t let the King’s negligent treatment of his subjects pass unanswered and threatens to topple the King. Enter the King’s sorcerer from stage-left, who promises to protect the King with a troupe of mummies he summons up and calls his ‘demon dozen’. While the fight initially looks unwinnable, Bruce’s allies Popeye, Caine and One-Arm come galloping in and assist with vanquishing the Andrex-clad demons. The sorcerer is drawn into the fray after Popeye wolfs down some spinach, and is eventually stabbed with his own scimitar. With no allies left, the King attempts to flee, only to be cornered by an angry crowd of his subjects. Cornered, he pleads with Bruce for his life, which Bruce agrees to grant him if only he will send Bruce back to Earth. The King readily agrees, casts a spell and, in a scene very reminiscent of Bjork’s video for It’s Oh, So Quiet, sends Bruce hurtling upwards and Earthwards, watching the crowd of Underworld dwellers wave him off from below.

As you can now hopefully understand, not much about this film makes a lot of sense. The dialogue is nonsensical and the dubbing atrocious, the fight scenes aren’t especially well choreographed, everything looks like it had next to no budget behind it, and the plot is so disjointed it feels like the kind of dream you have when you’ve been snacking on Leerdamer before bed. But despite all this, The Dragon Lives Again is one of the most bizarre but also most enjoyable exploitation movies ever. Sure, it’s not high art but it puts a whole new spin on the bruceploitation movement and, well, the site of a big-sideburned Englishman and a Chinese fellow in a beard approximating James Bond and Clint Eastwood is almost too delicious. Bizarre, hard to follow, but buckets of fun, The Dragon Lives Again comes highly recommended. As the whole thing’s on YouTube, I think all I need do now is link you to it and send you on your way…

Ten Thrillingly Tasteless Titles to Trashy Time-wasting Talkies

2009-07-06T06:08:00.001-07:00

Ah, exploitation cinema… Like the adverts for Burger King’s ‘steal’ meal deal or the blurb on a packet of legal ‘weed’, b-movies so often promise a lot more than they deliver, and their main method of generating sizzle to disguise a lack of steak is a suitably lurid title.

I’ve been interested in cult films for a fair while now and in that time I’ve encountered some truly wonderful movie titles, usually attached to some truly lousy films, and so I thought it’d be fun to put together a list of ten suitably wonderful titles to demonstrate the range of schlock on the market. Obviously everyone’s got their own idea of what makes a cracking movie title and there are doubtless some titles so tasteless, so ridiculous and so obscure that I’ve not encountered them. Still, it’s not like I’m Empire magazine, so I don’t have to be definitive. Oh, and a word before we start – I know that the world of pornography has produced more rancid, hilarious, OTT and tasteless titles than ‘legitimate’ cinema ever could but there’s no fun to be had topping horror movie titles with The Assprentice with Sir Alan Fucker is there? By the way, I just made that one up. Any porn producers reading, I want a cut! Or possibly a role… Anyway, on with the list! And we’ll start at the bottom:

10. Zombie Strippers

The Ronseal of lurid movie titles, as the film does indeed feature strippers who are zombies. Jenna Jameson stars as a Nietzsche-reading pole-dancer who becomes zombified, only to find that wiggling her maggot-ridden backside around earns her (and the club’s seedy owner, played by Robert ‘Freddy Krueger’ England) more money than mortal gyrating ever did. I came away from this film worried that I might be a necrophile, but would sex with a zombie technically count as necrophilia? Hmm… that aside, Zombie Strippers is that rarest of rare beasts: a movie with a lurid title that’s actually well-worth watching. It’s a hoot, plus it’s got a metal soundtrack and a fat, moustachioed comedy Mexican. What’s not to love?!

9. Faster Pussycat…Kill! Kill!

Good old oedipal Russ Meyer. This is probably the most famous of Meyer’s movies, thanks in no small part to its stonking title. Faster Pussycat tells the tale of three ruthless go-go dancers who end up killing a man in a drag race, abducting his girlfriend and then attempting to seduce and fleece a farmhouse of typical dumb hicks. Unusually for Meyer there’s no nudity in this film, but it’s a fun romp nonetheless.

8. Fat Guy Goes Nutzoid!!

Gah, talk about a good title covering a shameful pile of dross. A film so poorly executed, badly written and laughably acted that it barely deserves comment. Two guys decide to break away from the 9-5 world and embark on a cross-country tour, unaware that a fat, ever-silent man has stowed away in their car. Along the way they break wind in restaurants and break up a wedding. Yawn, yawn. Interestingly, IMDB lists the film under the title ‘Zeisters’, which makes me think that crafty Lloyd Kaufmann of Troma just decided to slap this silly title on it in the hope of getting schmucks like me to bite. Your life is perfectly complete without seeing Fat Guy Goes Nutzoid.

7. KISS meets the Phantom of the Park

So KISS, already one of the most OTT rock bands ever to take to the stage, decide to up the ante even further by granting themselves super-powers in a made-for-TV movie from the late ‘70s. So Family Guy already exploited this – so what?! Any film which features Peter Criss blessed with the actual abilities of a cat is worthy of further acclaim. The film concerns an evil scientist who’s created an evil robot version of KISS in order to take revenge on the band for a perceived injustice. The film culminates with a good KISS vs evil KISS brawl on-stage, before a KISS concert is played. Campy? And how! See it and you’ll forgive Gene Simmons that reality series…

6. Horrifing Experiments of SS Last Days

And naturally I follow that with a hearty (sic). This film is more commonly known as either The Beast in Heat or SS Hell Camp and follows the attempts of a Nazi dominatrix in the Ilsa mould to genetically engineer a creature which will, literally, hump Jewish POWs to death. A funny little fellow called Sal Boris plays the horny little goblin and has a whale of a time mugging to camera and wolfing down pubic hair, but the film is hampered by its budgetary constraints and lack of technical expertise. The director, Luigi Batzella, didn’t have enough footage or money to make a complete film, so while the torture scenes all take place within one room, they are bookended with footage spliced in from one of his earlier (and dull as dishwater) war movies. The result isn’t impressive but this is probably the only film of its ilk in existence. By the way, the film is also known as ‘Horrifying Experiments of the SS Last Days’, but the title card reads as I have rendered it above. That should tell you all you need to know.

5. Blacula

Bloodsucka! Deadlier than Dracula! Yes, with the ‘70s came blaxploitation and after the action genre had been done to death, directors turned their attention to other areas, in this case Hammer Horror (God alone knows why…). In 1780, Count Dracula, who turns out to be a racist, places a vampiric curse on an African prince condemning him to immortality in the form of Blacula, who goes on to terrify Los Angeles two centuries on. Blacula is hugely entertaining and blaxploitation aficionados will love it. I’ve never been able to track down a copy of its sequel, Blackenstein, but with a title like that you know it’s got to be worth a look…

4. SS Experiment Camp

“You bastard! What have you done with my balls?!” is probably the best line in this movie, and indeed the best thing about it full stop. An absolute waste of time on all fronts, this film. The plot revolves around a concentration camp commandant who had his testicles bitten off by a Russian POW and seeks to acquire himself a new pair of Nazi knackers. To do this, he enlists some very Italian-looking Aryans to come and stay at his camp to use the female POWs as temporary sperm buckets. One of these hunky guards proves to have the gonads the commandant wants and is relieved of them, apparently without notice, causing the poor eunuch to come crashing in to the commandants office, demanding to know the whereabouts of his manhood. All this sounds entertaining but the film is so dark, grainy, poorly-paced, badly acted and boring that there’s literally no point in putting yourself through the ordeal of watching it. I read a book through the film the first time I saw it; my brother fell asleep. You have been warned.

3. The Black Gestapo

Another film with Nazi themes, although this time with a more unique spin on things. The citizens of a town called Watts are under constant assault from the Mafia and form a people’s army to combat the Mafioso, the titular Black Gestapo. However, a power struggle between the group’s leaders cause one leader to become vilified and attempt to avoid being wasted along with the Mafiosos. Not remarkable as blaxploitation films go but the sight of black fellows in SS garb will linger, and mentioning the title to a film bore at a dinner party will make you seem the wit of the evening. I think…

2. Caligula Reincarnated as Hitler

I wanted to include They Saved Hitler’s Brain on this list but then I read about this lil’ nazisploitation atrocity. As is typical for the genre, this film follows the plight of a Jewish POW who is ensconced in a concentration camp that acts as a bordello for German soldiers. Naturally the film’s choc-full of sex scenes, torture and perverse scientific experiments but the cake has to be taken by a dinner scene in which a pot roast of Semitic foetus is served up. Lovely. I doubt you’ll be able to track this one down but it makes the film Caligula look like Bambi by comparison.

1. Porno Holocaust

Possibly the best movie title ever. Just try and imagine all the possibilities open to a director charged with lensing a project called Porno Holocaust. Oh, and before anyone shouts, this was marketed as a legitimate horror film back in the day, hence its inclusion on this list. How could a project which sounds so very, very promising possibly fail? Sadly, director Joe D’Amato just doesn’t deliver with this sorry cheapie about a group of scientists on an expedition to a tropical island to find out about a monster, which is apparently murdering local fishermen. There’s lots of sex, granted, but it all involves people so unattractive it’s like watching cattle rut and despite the film’s ‘monster’ boasting a third leg which could legitimately support his weight, which he uses as his primary weapon (no double entendres, please), the whole exercise is a fairly pointless, grainy mess. It does star George Eastman from Anthropophagus the Beast, which is a bonus of sorts, but ultimately Porno Holocaust is a title better savoured by the imagination than a film to be watched.

So there we have it. Ten of my favourite movie titles, definitely not ten of my favourite movies. If you know of any better titles which didn’t make my list, do let me know. Happy viewing!

The Zombie Series or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Bruno Mattei

2009-06-29T14:20:00.001-07:00

Anyone interested in horror movies, particularly those films at the trashier end of the spectrum, must at one time or another have seen, read up on or heard about Lucio Fulci's 1980 horror classic Zombi 2 (or Zombie, or Zombie Flesh Eaters or, well, a whole host of other titles) and the bewildering array of sequels which followed it. While the horror genre is renowned for milking its franchises to death and wringing every last bit of life from a successful film, the saga of the Zombie series demonstrates this practice taken to its logical conclusions.

Friday the 13th, Halloween, The Amytiville Horror, A Nightmare on Elm Street, all these films and many, many others spawned endless, increasingly crummy sequels, which eventually rendered the original films laughable. But the Zombie series of films is probably the most interesting horror franchise of all to examine, purely because it is so fragmentary, so unofficial and so dogged by the cynical marketing ploys of home video companies that it is positively bewildering to contemplate. Let's see if we can untangle its threads and chart the development of this bizarre and schlocky bunch of films.

In 1979, George Romero's Dawn of the Dead was released in Europe and became an overnight smash-hit. Zombie 2, which was actually written before George Romero completed Dawn, was released in Europe as an unofficial sequel to Romero's movie. You see, Dawn of the Dead was released in Europe with the title Zombi, so those cagey marketing men in Rome decided to cash in on the success of Dawn by releasing Fulci's outing as Zombi 2 (or Zombie 2. From here on out I'm going to refer to the films using the title Zombie rather than any other variant - there are literally dozens of variations of the titles of all the films in the 'series').

However, something very odd happened to this quickie cash-in: it was a hit at the box office. A huge hit in fact. In Europe Zombie 2 was as successful, if not more so, than Dawn of the Dead, and this isn't as unbelievable as you might imagine.

While most film buffs and movie critics agree that Romero's Dawn of the Dead is a thoughtful allegorical film about American consumerism, the response to Zombie 2 was, and remains, fairly sniffy. The film was lambasted as a generic exploitation flick with very little merit, a criticism which I find unfair.

I mean, any film featuring a scene in which a zombie fights a real-life shark under water deserves at least a modicum of respect, right?

Hell, I got a real kick out of that scene again just finding the YouTube link. But novelty isn't all the film's got going for it. The make-up and gore effects in the movie are so impressive and revolting that it wasn't until as recently as 2005 that the movie was released uncut in the UK. Anyone who has seen the infamous eyeball-meets-splinter scene will doubtless wince at being reminded of it, and the offal-munching scenes and zombie get-ups are superb. Even the soundtrack's great:

Sure, the movie's hampered by bad dubbing, a few logical inconsistencies and occasionally sluggish pacing, but it's no worse than most of the schlock churned out of Hollywood and it's an enjoyable romp, in no way deserving of the critical scorn poured upon it.

Still, no matter. Zombie 2 made money so, naturally, Zombie 3 had to be shot. Although interestingly, here's where the infamously odd and semi-official nature of the Zombie 'series' begins to make itself known. The film released as Zombi 3, directed by Lucio Fulci (in the main) was not released until 1988, - a full 8 years after Zombie 2, which appeared in cinemas in 1980.

In the interim however, two other zombie movies were unleashed which could have been deemed 'sequels' to Fulci's Zombie 2. Zombie Creeping Flesh, while technically not part of the Zombie series, acts as a sort of unofficial prequel to Dawn of the Dead, in that it features four boiler-suited marines who bear more than a little resemblance to those seen at the start of Dawn as the film's main protagonists. It's also a thoroughly inane but harmless movie, noteworthy only for its atrociously bad dubbing, piss-poor humour, anundant stock footage and a brilliant soundtrack by Goblin (although that was half-inched from the film Contamination but, m'eh). It was also directed by one Bruno Mattei, who we'll come back to shortly.

A more serious contender for the dubious honour of following up Fulci's film was Marino Girolami's Zombie Holocaust, which stars Ian McCulloch (the star of Zombie 2) and features Dakkar, who also appeared in Fulci's movie. Jay Slater points out in his brilliant book Eaten Alive! that the producers of Holocaust used Zombie 2 as the template for their film and simply chucked in a few cannibalistic elements to justify the presence of the word 'Holocaust' in the title. According to IMDB, Zombie Holocaust was actually released as Zombie 3 in America before Zombi 3, which was subsequently released in the States with the 'e' absent from the film's title. Confused yet? This 'series' only gets more and more mind-bending in complexity as it goes on.

Anyway, Fulci began filming Zombie 3 in the Phillipines in the latter half of the 1980s with a script written by Claudio Fragasso, who also happened to pen Zombie Creeping Flesh. All was not well however, with Fulci being taken violently ill during the shooting of the film and directorial duties were handed over to Bruno Mattei, the man who brought us Terminator 2 and Jaws 5.

The resulting motion picture is probably (and undeservedly) the most villified of the Zombie films. Sadly, because this is the official sequel to Zombie 2, expectations were high and the hodge-podge turned in by Mattei (but released with Fulci alone credited as director) did not compare favourably with its predecessor. Zombie 3 was not released theatrically outside Italy but was a firm favourite with low-rent video firms, who ensured its notoriety world-wide.

After this embarrassment Fulci ceased to have any involvement with the Zombie films, but this didn't stop a cabal of writers, directors and producers from releasing further installments to cash in on the cult reputation of Zombie 2, which by this point was infamous in the UK and world-wide for being included on the DPP's 'video nasty' list. Indeed, Zombie 3 was let loose in the UK under the title Zombie Flesh Eaters 2, making the most of the UK title of Fulci's original film.

Zombie 3's writer Claudio Fragasso would lens the next in the Zombie series, originally filming his movie under the title After Death. As was only natural, the resulting shambolic mess that Fragasso produced was released on home video in the States and Europe as Zombie 4: After Death, and in the UK as Zombie Flesh Eaters 3, despite the fact that the plot of the film itself has nothing whatsoever to do with the preceding movies. Zombie 4 itself is truly awful, looking like an Iron Maiden music video and boasting the kind of cheesy score that seemed to infest b-productions produced in the '80s. The fact that the film's male lead had a day job as a porn star should tell you what kind of territory the movies were now entering. Logic and good taste were entirely cast aside but thanks again to the series' notoriety, the movie was a financial success on home video, paving the way for Zombie 5.

Zombie 5, as it appeared in the USA, is the strangest and most tangential of all the Zombie series. In actual fact it was shot two years before Zombie 4 with the title Killing Birds. As The Cinema Snob has pointed out, Zombie 5, despite its title, isn't actually a movie about zombies at all: instead it's a god-awful cheapie about a murderer blinded by birds, whose wife returns from the dead to exact revenge on her bloodthirsty husband. (Actually, I should point out that's just my interpretation of the plot - the presence of the movie's 'mummy' creature is never explained in the film itself). This film has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the Zombie series but thanks to cynical video companies exploiting the Zombie name it has become canon.

Shockingly enough, a Zombie 6 was released in America after the abomination of Killing Birds. This time a 1981 horror movie starring George Eastman of Anthropophagus and Porno Holocaust fame with the title Rosso Sangue was forced upon unsuspecting movie fans as Zombie 6: Monster Hunter. However, this film is better known as Absurd, the sort-of sequel to Anthropophagus, and has about as much to do with zombies as Casablanca.

This is what I mean about the Zombie series making an interesting cinematic case-study. While Halloween III is probably the most infamous horror sequel to bear no relation to the films preceding it, the diverse and sometimes completely irrelevant Zombie movies make that film look positively proper. The sad thing about the Zombie films is that, bar Zombie 2, they are unwatchable garbage, released purely to cash in on the underground notoriety and name value of Fulci's first movie. Indeed, as with most of the video nasties, had these films not been attached to the Zombie series, they would have long-ago have faded into complete obscurity. But it is now the case that you can purchase a legitimate DVD release of, say, Killing Birds which features extra features such as interviews with the cast. Imagine that: a name-only, crappy 'sequel' to a low-brow horror film is now available to own with more extras on the disc than the original release of (Cameron's, not Mattei's) Terminator 2. Boggles the mind, eh?

So what have we learned here? Well, apart from not to waste our collective time actually watching Zombie 5, the best thing we can take away from the Zombie movies is perhaps this piece of advice I'll offer to aspiring horror directors: shoot your living dead movie on 20-year-old film stock, fart all over it with synths and try to get it released as Zombie 7: Beyond the Grave. Shriek Show are bound to put it out and sad, nerdy horror fans like me will buy it, dissect it, analyse and argue about it, and you'll go down in history along with the likes of Fulci, Mattei, Fragasso and their ilk... Wait, wait! Come back! I was only talking hypothetically...!

The Stig is bigger than Jesus

2009-06-22T13:09:00.000-07:00

On last night's edition of Top Gear the show's infamous 'fourth presenter', the Stig, removed his helmet on-camera for the first time in the show's history. Jeremy Clarkson had warned the nation in his Sun column that the programme's proceedings would offer viewers a TV moment so significant that it would, in his words, be like 'Neil Armstrong walking on the corpse of JR Ewing'. Of course Clarkson's tongue was firmly planted in his cheek, but at around 8:30pm the Stig removed his helmet and 'revealed himself' to be none other than F1-goliath and Ferrari poster-boy Michael Schumacher.

Of course this was all in good humour and nothing more than a stunt to make the first episode of this new series of Top Gear special, but the reaction to this 'revelation' has been astonishing. I've seen a lot of astounded, confused and disappointed reactions to the Stig's 'identity' in my Facebook news feed today, and one of the lead items on BBC News features an article in which a BBC spokesperson has had to officially deny that Schumacher was the 'real' Stig, and reassure the public that 'we'd never reveal the Stig's identity'.

Put bluntly, the Stig's identity can never be 'revealed' because 'he' is bigger than anyone who could emerge from beneath 'his' helmet. Top Gear have subtly created a modern myth in the Stig; a creation who actually transcends mere humanity. The Stig, like the Simorgh in Attar's Conference of the Birds, is a creation we all participate in. 'He' is a gestalt, a projection of our expectations. 'His' uniform exists only to make 'him' otherworldly and anonymous, and it is we (well, and Clarkson) who imbue Stig with his 'character'. The Stig is, essentially, like those 'ghost cars' the player can manifest in racing video games, which demonstrate the best route around the track; almost a neutral archetype of perfect driving. Stig, like the idea of 'Christ', is supernatural and transcendental. And decidedly not Michael Schumacher.

Clarkson was right when he said "I'm not sure Michael Schumacher is the Stig". Now stop worrying!

Download Festival 2009

2009-06-15T12:45:00.000-07:00

This year's Download festival kicked off in fine style for me, with a Faith No More gig held at Brixton Academy the night before I was due to leave for Donnington. Even though Wednesday evening was the night of a strike on the Tube, my brother, Tom and I made it to the gig and back as smoothly as possible. I shan't go on and on, but Wednesday's return to their old stomping grounds saw Faith No More in fine form.

The journey started well enough around midday on Thursday, despite a small haze-induced mishap getting onto the M1. To our horror, some thoroughly selfish and melodramatic chap had decided to attempt suicide on the road itself near Birmingham, leading to a three-hour detour through East Anglia up to Donnington Park for us. Still, the irritation of nearly 6 hours of travelling was eased when Benj, Tom and myself met up with my brother and his friend Becky with ease by the campsite and pitched in for the evening. Rob's girlfriend arrived a bit later on bearing whisky and snacks.

After getting settled and getting suitably merry and red-eyed, we explored the extortionate fairground and Village, bought a few essentials and braced ourselves for a freezing cold night. My appalling lack of foresight saw me pack neither a bedroll or a pillow, so I spent the first night shivering in the foetal position using my rolled up trench coat as a makeshift cushion. Still, I was bladdered and so, naturally, content...

Friday began with a trip to the on-site supermarket to pay a stupid amount of money for tuppence ha'penny's worth of cooking stuff and we began the day with a barbecue and I braved the loos for the first and only time I spent at the fest. (Without wishing to dwell on the subject, to use a horrible cliche, you can't judge a book by its cover: a huge, long-haired bearded man emerged from the loo before me, bog-roll in hand and sweating, so naturally I feared the worst. Lo and behold, the Portacabin was positively sparkling!)

The entertainment kicked off, after a half-hour trudge to the arena, with a terrible band called The Blackout, who had the audacity to cover Faith No More's Epic. I couldn't understand the appeal but, m'eh, to each their own. We pitched up and opened beers, amazed by the blazing sunshine and the beards of some of our fellow revellers. Staind came next, so I spent some time getting into a Dutch sort of mentality.

I couldn't be bothered with the emo rumblings of Billy Talent on the main stage, so I abandoned our little party and went over to the Bedroom Jam stage to catch a band called White Man Kamikaze, who were really neat and seemed genuinely amazed at the size of the audience who'd turned out for them.

Killswitch Engage started on the main stage soon enough and sounded really tight. Again, they weren't really my thing being technical, rather than riff-based, but their set was pretty powerful, plus their rendition of My Last Serenade reminded me of countless nights spent in the Met Lounge in my younger days.

Not thinking I'd enjoy Limp Bizkit, I was quite surprised by how restrained they seemed and they genuinely gelled well. Korn, who followed, seem to have lost everyone but Jon Davis and Munky since I was last bothered about the band, but, again, they made me feel warm and fuzzy with nostalgia, so, m'eh, that was pleasant.

We headed down to the front of the stage during Korn's cover of 'Another Brick in the Wall' to prepare for Faith No More. I lost everyone else when I went off to buy cider but got in down the front by myself. The show, when it started, looked and sounded amazing and I loved leaping in unison with the crowd to From Out of Nowhere. Less fun was feeling my right leg to discover that my wallet had vanished. I looked in vain but the crowd was so huge that there was no way of fighting the tide. Thinking that action sooner rather than later would be the best course, I spent the remainder of Faith No More's set cancelling my debit card. I got back to camp alone and thoroughly annoyed that night, devoid of money or the means of getting hold of any more. Sleep was only possible after very heavy sedation.

Saturday started with my brother collapsing with heatstroke and so Tom, Benj, Beck and I marched off to the arena alone. Benj and Tom, being thoroughly lovely chaps offered to buy me the odd pint during the day and Becky bought me a pasta salad for dinner. God bless 'em...

Anyway, we kicked off the day with Devildriver, who managed to dish out the word 'motherfucker' with such carefree abandon that it ceased to mean anything at all by the end of their set. Mind, their riffs were neat and their gimmick for the day involved inviting the Guinness World Records people to witness the world's largest circle pit. From my vantage on the hillside, I could see this pit open up like a crop-circle and watched the dust start to fly. The band made their record comfortably.

Hatebreed gurned their way through a set of gym-metal before Down came and smoked out the whole arena with their icky-sticky riffage. Phil Anselmo looks just like he did in the video for Cowboys From Hell again these days and the band were just anthemic. Bury Me in Smoke simply blew me away.

Considering how hard my friends had been laughing about DragonForce, I was thoroughly amazed by their musicianship. If they'd been around in the 1980s, they'd have been one of the biggest bands in the world. I've never heard shredding like it.

We left the main stage after DragonForce to catch Lawnmower Deth on the Tuborg stage, who were hilarious. Song titles like Did You Spill My Pint?, midlands-accented stage banter, instrument destruction, a 'fish dance', 'Deth had it all. They also showed us how to combine the devil's horns hand sign with a closed fist to make a snail, which was nice of them.

I staggered over to the main stage again with the others for Marily Manson, who was simply abominable. To call his band the worst act of the entire festival wouldn't be going too far. Manson finished just as Prodigy were due to start on the second stage, so I hurried over with a fresh cider in hand after my brother had lent me £20.

Prodigy were astoundingly good, if a little quiet, and their recycling of the Breathe guitar riff to make a 'Breathe Version' made for entertaining listening. After about half an hour the band launched into Firestarter, which bores me to tears so I made the best decision I made in the time I was in Leicestershire: I went to see Anvil.

Anvil, stars of the recent movie Anvil: the Story of Anvil, were simply incredible. Their riffs were monstrous and pure, no-nonsense heavy metal. Lips' voice was powerful, his between-song banter endearing and the band's drummer was astoundingly talented. The band introduced ' a song about our favourite strand of pot' called White Rhino, which made me smile. Metal on metal sent me into a frenzy of windmill headbanging which barely ceased until the band had wrung the last out of their set's ending. Simply perfect, Anvil were my band of the festival.

I had just enough time to catch the end of Slipknot's set and hear Corey Taylor taking exaggeration to its logical conclusions as he urged us to sing along so loudly that 'the whole fucking world' would hear. Yes, quite. Still, I was gonzoed enough by this point to hurl my hair along with them with glee before heading back to camp.

I'd only got £4.75 in my pocket by this point and needed £5 to buy a 4-pack of cider so I did a bit of begging and scrabbling around for change, which was thoroughly embarrassing, before having to scrounge coppers from my tent. Mind, when I returned to camp, the others had arrived and were chatting and drinking. Callum, a chap who lives 'round the corner from me, stopped over for a couple of beers and we lit a barbecue for warmth. It was a heartwarming evening, even if my voice was utterly shot by this point.

Sunday began with cider for breakfast and a jaunt up to the Domino's pizza stand with Tom and Benj for £30(!) worth of pizza, which we scarfed in short order. Tom and I then headed to the arena in search of my wallet and some 80s metal. We wondered over to the Jaegermeister truck, which was a sight to behold, surrounded as it was by giant, inflatable bottles of the rancid stuff.

Tom and I had just enough time to catch the end of Tesla and a bit of Skin's set, both of whom were far heavier than I imagined they'd be, before queueing up for what seemed an eternity at Lost Property. Eventually I retrieved my wallet, minus my debit card and cash, and headed back to camp to meet the others who were packing up, thanks to the folks with cars having to work early on Monday. Tom and I bumped into our old friend Tobias as we were leaving, which was totally unexpected as we'd not seen him for years and was a nice way to end the festival. We all humped our piles of stuff along for what felt like an eternity and made off into the Leicester countryside, sun burnt, ravaged, sweating but happy, chattering about Lawnmower Deth and Slipknot's stage show...

Too Fat to Live, Too Rare to Die

2009-05-30T06:01:00.000-07:00

A short and entirely un-scholarly look at the future of human evolution

On Monday 01 June 2009 ITV1 will broadcast a documentary entitled Supersize Teens: Can't Stop Eating, a documentary on tennage obesity. A Radio Times billing for the programme summarises the show's content thusly:

"We follow two morbidly obese teenagers as they risk everything - including their lives - in a bid to lose weight. Laura is a 24 stone 13-year-old, and is one of the youngest patients ever to have the high-risk gastric bypass operation, while Victoria is 14 and is paying 25,000 dollars for a reversible gastric band."

These are shocking cases of morbid obesity in two very young children, but more remarkable still is the fact that, in this day and age, such stories are commonplace. 2009 alone has seen the likes of Georgia's Story: 33 Stone at 15, Gok Wan: Too Fat, Too Young and Extraordinary People: The World's Heaviest Man grace mainstream, prime-time UK television. The digital channels, particularly those aimed at women or themed around 'health' abound with endless weight-loss comptitions of freak-show documentaries about whale-like Americans. Indeed, to mention our cousins across the Atlantic isn't to score cheap laughs, it's to highlight the extent of the problem. The Radio Time continues about "the situation in America, where more than 200,000 children a year undergo weight loss surgery."

This is staggering! Why has this occurred? We, the human race, have mastered this planet. We've tamed the beasts of the wild, we've explored and documented each and every nook and cranny of the lands of this planet (and a good deal of the waters too), we can predict the weather, communicate golbally, we have knowledge of physics, biology, mathematics... In short, we understand this working of this planet and have carved it to suit our needs. Why, then, have our very bodies failed us? Why have they, to paraphrase an episode of Transformers, become weakened and totally useless?

Think of any technological development you like and ask yourself what purpose it serves. All technology is designed to overcome the shortcomings of our physical or mental abilities. The chair, something we all take for granted, overcomes the cumbersome nature of our physical form, overcomes fatigue and serves as the best possible means to rest a body 'in neutral', as it were. The roof over your head prevents hypothermia. The car you drive propells you to your destination far faster than your legs or horse ever could. I could ramble on; the point to bear in mind is that everything we have developed from the knife and fork to the microprocessor is in some way intrinsically connected with our biological needs.

However, nature has been developing technology for far longer than we have. Think of your body, comprised as it is of limbs, a torso, a skeleton, a myriad of senseory receptors, an internal communication and electrical system in the form of the nervous system and so on. Each part of your body serves specific funtions. Think of the arm and the hand. These are your body's primary tools. Consider the versatility, sensitivity and ingenuity of the human hand and contemplate the many functions the hands perform. These are tools carved by evolutionary need.

But sadly evolution, being a crude process of trial-and-error, has not made us perfect. We can marvel at the human eye and ponder the wonders of its workings but we know, categorically, that our visual spectrum is very limited. One only has to blow a dog whistle and watch the reations of any nearby canines to know that we perceieve but a fraction of the audio signals around us. Our sense of smell is nothing compared to that of a dog. And these shortcomings are nothing compared to those that instinct forces upon us: hunger, thirst, sexual desire and more abstractly chemical moods like anger, misery, despair and so on. Schopenhauer was correct in proclaiming that we are all slaves to insatiable desire and will always remain so.

Since we have taken our evolution into our own hands, as previously stated, we have developed an alarming array of technological solutions to our various biological shortcomings, and herein lies the problem. We have been too ingenious too quickly. Our minds, natures, technologies and so on are of 2009 but our bodies might as well exist in the Stone Age. And it is for this reason that we are stagnating and in danger of degenerating.

Our young are fat because food is no longer a challenge. They do not have to pick it or hunt for it, they no longer slog it home or exist in states of perpetual feast-and-famine. It's not their fault; it is perfectly sensible to streamline the production and availability of something as biologically essential as food, but the abundance of food, and often refined and alien produce at that, has unwittingly caused a problem. Our prisons are perpetually full to bursting with rapists and drug abusers, all of whom are merely retreading crimes perpetuated since the dawn of man, but crimes borne of their own chemistry rather than conscious malice. We no longer have to move now that we have the car, and so on, and so on...

Humankind is at a crossroads: we can either face up to the fact that our very natures (i.e. taking the path of least resistence in all situations) are incompatible with our physical forms in the world in which we now live and seek to use our technological developments in order to evolve, or slide into a state of increasing physical weakness and frailty.

Radical biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey is currently seeking a means of prolonging human life through prevention of "the set of accumulated side effects from metabolism that eventually kills us", and compares his view of 'repairing' human beings to the notion of a mechnaic replacing parts on a car. This is all very well in its way, but we have already proven that, by using technology, we have become capable of superhuman feats. With the telescope we can stare deeply into the heavens at any time we desire; with the motor car we can travel at huge speeds, we have learned how to fly, we have developed machines capable of great physical strength and versatility, as well as things such as calculators, communication technologies and the means to artifically maintain the health of bodily organs.

In my view, the next stage in humanity's development will be the widespread physical replacement of biological limbs and organs with technological equivalents. Indeed, think of the pacemaker, the prosthetic limb, the hearing aid and so on - such technologies are already in common use. Such a situation poses no end of philosophical problems: is identity something local to merely the brain, is it an illusion, what does it mean to be 'human', and so on but, in my view, if we are to finally overcome our biological and chemical dilemmas, we must now put into practice on ourselves the same technological mastery that we have wrought on the world.

Mutiny on the Buses

2009-05-17T09:42:00.000-07:00

Like Viz comic, ITV1 seems to exist largely for the purpose of scrutinising working-class British life. Unlike Tyneside's best-loved bi-monthly magazine though, ITV1 doesn't apparently mean to be satirical so much as affectionate.

Take this Sunday morning, May 17 2009. I don't make a habit of watching soap operas, or indeed lying in bed knowingly wallowing in low culture (well, actually...), but on this particular Sunday morning I saw no particular reason to rise and lingered on for far longer than usual, the TV on for company. An omnibus of Coronation Street was screening when I fired up my set and the series's attention to detail of the banality and trvialities of everyday life was, frankly, both comforting and cursiosly enlightening.

The dull decor of the characters' homes, the shabbiness of the Rovers Return Inn, the George at Asda clothes sported by the cast, all of these serve as well-observed reminders that life isn't all Lily Allen and Hoxton Square. I say this not to sneer but to demonstate a genuine affection which rocked me as I tuned in and out of the show. Indeed, Jack Duckworth's worries about being seen with another woman after his wife's death were heartening in this epoch, in which 'fidelity' is seemingly something of concern only to hi-fi reparirmen, and the pain of regret felt by Norris (who I gather runs the corner shop - I'd never seen the show before) as someone special to him left the Street for a life of caravanning around the south coast was oddly moving.

Yes, the lives and concerns of the 'little people' of this sceptered Isle as depicted in Corrie tip a hat to the everyday, unglamorous side of life, so rarely seen on TV. But if Corrie depicts an unremarkable, vaguely grimy working-class life in 2009, nothing could have prepared me for the film which followed it, 1972's Mutiny on the Buses.

I've recently been getting into Carry On films, so the opening credits of this Hammer Comedy Classic (I couldn't help wondering if Peter Cushing was going to pop up any moment) compelled me to pull the duvet up closer and concentrate on what was on-screen. If you thought Carry On films were end-of-the-pier entertainment, you ain't seen nothing yet.

A quick Wikipedia search after the film's end informed me that Mutiny... is a spin-off of popular ITV1 sitcom On the Buses, which I'd heard of but never seen, and a sequel to a big-screen outing with the same title. But, like a Dickens novel, it's so much more than a bog-standard bawdy British comedy: it's a snapshot of an era of British life that is, materially-speaking, so far removed from today as to be almost mind-blowing, yet spiritually the cousin of Corrie.

The main thrust of the film sees Stan Butler (played by a 50+ Reg Varney), a bus driver, attempting to put his affairs in order so that he can marry his conductress, move out of his mother's home and escape his oddball family, all the while getting through life shirking and having a laugh with his best friend Jack Harper (Bob Grant).

All the heartening British hallmarks of the late 1960s are present and correct: big double-decker buses, red telephone kiosks, sideburns on every male character, smokers peopling every scene and smutty laughs by the barrel-full. The remarkable things about this film, though, are the small details which wouldn't have seemed shocking at all at the beginning of the '70s but which are entirely at odds with modern sensibilities.

I'm not sure how much this film and the Carry Ons' insistence on marriage before sex as a norm was for comedic and farcical effect, but each girl Stan ends up with puts pressure on him to propose almost as soon as their liason begins, and so the sexual morality which runs through the piece is a curious mix of knowing nod-and-wink allusions to 'forbidden' sauciness, coupled with this hangover insistence on marriage as proper and expected. Perhaps it's this kind of eagerness and coyness in the national character which has given rise to our current culture of prurience and locker-room boasting, to borrow a phrase from the Americans...

The film's lackadasical approach to working life is both recognisable and refreshingly nihilistic: these men know that they'll rise no higher in life and content themselves with trying to wring as much fun and mischief out of their humdrum lives as they're able.

But it's the domestic setups which are really remarkable. Stan Butler is a man in his mid-thirties who lives with his mother, sister, brother-in-law and infant nephew in a small and vaguely tatty-looking house, which his mother shockingly suggests he move his future bride into. The house itself is blandly grotesque: a symphony of browns, beiges and debris, with the baby shitting at the dinner table while the other characters are eating. Such a set-up, I would imagine, seems astonishing to many watching the film today but was evidently unremarkable back in the 1970s.

Many of the film's locations and set-pieces are uniquely British too. At the bus depot a game of darts between staff and management gives the characters an opportunity to let their hair down, indulge in a few vodka and tonics and make spectacles of themselves, and the busmens' 'exotic' trip to a safari park toward the film's end both act as reminders of the simple pleasures we Britons delight in. Even the adverts which adorn the many buses in the film scream out 'Go Pontinental!' in reference to Pontins holiday camp.

Mutiny on the Buses isn't spectacularly funny. The physical comedy pieces are so contrived as to be utterly predicable and their execution is enthusiastic if not particularly well-done. The dialogue-driven humour's not much better: a decent example, from Stan's sister about her husband, is "Don't go to bed with him! The only thing he's got that'll keep you awake at night is his snoring!". No, the film's real appeal to a contemporary audience coming to it cold is the image of working-class Britain some forty years ago. The bonhomie and affection the characters show for one another, the proliferation of 'cor, blimey!'s and ''ave you gone ravin' mad?!'s, the grottiness of the film's locations and the obvious class schisms which are the source of much of the film's humour; all of these things mark the film out as ostensibly working-class British and proud and the product of a less self-obsessed age. Even the Carry On-style seaside postcard fascination with women in their undies is present and correct when Stan and Jack burst in on the ladies changing room at the bus depot.

As a cultural experience Mutiny on the Buses is up there with Carry On at Your Convenience as a snapshot of a golden-age of British low-culture now long-since past, but even to this day it is a film which cannot fail to produce a warm feeling of affection in a viewer. As a curiosity piece, it's fascinating to see how British life has evolved materially, and as light-hearted fun it's perfectly servicable.

ITV is a pretty beleaguered media company these days, and while a great deal of their output sickens me (Mr. Cowell's mob, Ant and Dec and The Bill to cite just three examples), it was fascinating to be given the opportunity to compare and contrast working-class British life in 2009 with that of 1972 from the light channel this morning. And while Corrie's peopled with gay characters, ethnic minorities and without a single cigarette or pie-and-mash shop on display, it's refreshing to see that, beneath the surface, the hopes, dreams, aspirations and general morality of the fictionalised working-classes have remained fairly consistent. Fans of bawdy comedy will find much to keep them amused in Mutiny on the Buses; future historians will see the film as an invaluable insight into the cultural history of the English people.

Stop overlooking John Nettleton!

2009-03-14T15:36:00.001-07:00

When you think of The New Statesman the first image to mind is probably of a wavy-haired Rik Mayall bedecked in Saville Row pinstripes, standing in front of Big Ben. And while Rik’s undoubtedly brilliant in the series, to my mind he’s totally and utterly upstaged by the inimitable John Nettleton.

His is not a name commonly bandied about. While Nigel Hawthorne and Rik Mayall are household names, John Nettleton is a name which would probably draw a blank with most people. This must stop. John Nettleton is brilliant because, frankly, there’s no-one else like him out there. I can’t think of any other actor who’s played mainly secondary roles, who so consistently outshines his fellow cast members. He is Englishness incarnate and his performances are so enjoyable that they might well be fattening.

John Nettleton’s been part of my life since childhood. As a lad I loved watching Sylvester McCoy-era Doctor Who, and my favourite story from Sly’s tenure in the TARDIS was Ghost Light. This particular serial is set in a Victorian manor owned by an eminent scientist of the age (well, he’s actually a shape-shifting alien, but that’s not important right now), who is visited during the course of the story’s first three parts by a mutton chop-sporting man of the cloth called Reverend Ernest Matthews. And it was as this hairy clergyman that I first encountered John Nettleton.

I’m sure it’s not just me and my brother being odd in marvelling at Nettleton in the role - anyone who’s seen Ghost Light must surely be able to conjure up his Etonian accent, his versatile expressions of indignation and the hilarious pomposity brought to the screen by Mr. Nettleton. He plays the role sublimely, being at once believable and utterly comic. Seriously, if you’ve not seen it, have a look around Google Video and see if it’s online. John’s theatrical entrance and his delightful belittling of the house’s staff are well worth the effort alone! Or get a taster - John appears 14 seconds into this trailer.

Flash forward about 15 years and I’m a 22-year-old having a drink round at a friend’s flat one night and being introduced to Yes Minister, when who should I see on-screen, this time sans-chops and called Sir Arnold Robinson, but John Nettleton! The sound of his voice was like Proust’s Madeline* to me and catapulted me right back to childhood.

But the thing is, Nettleton’s perfect in his role as the Cabinet Secretary too. The man is every bit the archetype of the English gent - his voice, his accent, his mannerisms. He’s simply a joy to watch and listen to. I can’t put it any more plainly than that. Seeing John Nettleton in Yes Minister is a real treat and I urge comedy fans to watch the opening few minutes of this Yes Minister episode and witness John in action for yourself.

But it was recently, when getting into political comedy more broadly that I encountered John in the role he was born to play. In the first two series’ of New Statesman, Rik Mayll’s Alan B’Stard and his whipping boy, Piers Fletcher-Dervish, are both under the tutelage of a wizened politician named Sir Stephen Baxter.

Lo and behold! Beneath a very convincing makeup job, a wig which looks like one of JG Bennett’s cast-offs and a hideous moustache, John Nettleton emerges again to outshine everyone else on-screen. Unlike his portrayal of Sir Arnold, which saw him playing a character in late-middle age (as the actor was at the time), John plays Sir Stephen like an ancient, crusty, slightly less senile Major from Fawlty Towers. And again, it’s difficult to find language to express the sheer pleasure I get from watching John Nettleton in this role. Again, I’ll let John’s acting express itself. In the following clip, which begins with John delivering a cracking speech, Sir Stephen is explaining to Alan why the Minister for Wales isn’t to be trusted. I won’t spoil it for you, but watch this in a place where you can laugh out loud with impunity!

I love this man’s acting and his is a voice I could listen to for hours on end. If there was a radio station which broadcast nothing but John Nettleton reading the phone book, I’d tune in. I hope, if you’ve read this and watched some of the videos, that you understand why John Nettleton’s so brilliant and so utterly deserving of recognition. And, hey, hope you had some laughs too.

Thanks for the great performances, John!

*Thanks to Colin Wilson for this, by the way. If it wasn’t for him repeating the reference in every one of his books, my attempts at pseud-hood would all be in vain.

Why I Hate The Big Questions

2009-03-09T12:45:00.000-07:00

Like many people, my Sunday mornings are routinely spent trying to shake off the effects of Saturday night’s revelry in a vain attempt to regain some sort of grip on reality. Thing is, in that state you’re not going to make much headway on your own and so, if you’re like me, you turn to TV for a crutch. But I’m too old for the Hollyoaks omnibus and too fat and wheezy to watch the football on ITV, so I usually end up inevitably making the first of many mistakes of the day by switching over to BBC1...

The Big Questions is an absolute joke. It’s like a televised version of one of Plato’s dialogues with Nicky Campbell in place of Socrates. The format’s always the same. The earnest Scotsman poses a panel of clerics, non-fiction authors, highly-strung hack columnists and TV-friendly politicians a few ethical head-scratchers in front a crowd of baying Express readers and sets the philosophical sparks flying.

So far, so good, right? Sounds almost edifying doesn’t it? Don‘t be taken in.

The titular Big Questions are always predictably divisive and posed in such a manner that they head straight for the emotional centres of the brains of all involved, thus nipping the possibility of rational argument squarely in the bud. For crying out loud, here are two recent examples of the kind of topics being discussed: ‘Does love mean never telling your partner a lie?’ and ‘Is torture ever justified?’. I mean, yuck.

Alright, cracking stuff for a sixth-form debate perhaps, but on TV and argued about by a mob of half-educated cranks, these sorts of issues and questions are, frankly, just asking for the inevitable kind of huffing and bellowing usually confined to the letters pages of the Daily Mail. I’m not knocking the practice of thinking about such questions yourself, working out your own position based on a careful, sober weighing of the issues, but these sorts of questions, by their very nature, can never possibly be answered on what is essentially a Jeremy Kyle for people who still have a village hall near their house.

And it’s all so ruddy cheap. Honestly, the Beeb have saved a fortune by axing Heaven and Earth, with its expensive sets and slick production values, and replacing it with this tatty parade. Campbell’s surely the only person involved with the programme who commands a fee and the production crew is very probably comprised of the sort of poor sods who ended up at Thames Valley University on a media course through clearing. It takes place in a different town or city each week and tours the country, I suppose to fulfil some of Auntie’s commitments to regional broadcasting. This is true no-frills telly, TV that makes Cash in the Attic look like a Spielberg epic.

My main beef with The Big Questions is that it’s such a colossal waste of time, not only for the viewer but for everyone involved. Ethical debate is all well and good but seeing as morality’s largely an individual thing, hoping to arrive at a consensus on a moral issue by inviting an imam to quarrel with Anne Widdecombe is startlingly pointless. At least Heaven and Earth gave us Alice Beer to soothe our hangovers. This is cheap-as-chips schedule filler, telly that truly achieves nothing. It’s like Question Time being hosted by Richard Littlejohn discussing gay rights with Garry Bushell and Jim Davidson.

Now Countryfile, the show which follows, is lovely. Stunning. Lots of majestic countryside and very prim and proper people enjoying rambles and discussing nature. Surely, surely the schedule controller could see fit to tethering Nicky Campbell to the Watchdog kennel and moving Countryfile forward a little? Please? With Countryfile filling The Daft Questions’ slot we’d need nothing stronger than will-power to feel better; as it is the nation needs a collective sick-bag every time Campbell and his mob hove into view.

Better Living Through Pantheism or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Both Science and Religion

2008-10-07T06:13:00.000-07:00

'That Thou Art' - Upanishads

On Monday 13 August 2008 Channel 4 broadcast the final part of a documentary series entitled The Genius of Charles Darwin. Presented by Richard Dawkins, the series set out to explain Darwin's ideas about evolution and their significance in intellectual history, and to critically examine the religious arguments against Darwinism. It was the latter effort to which this particular edition of the programme was directed.

The programme showcased a number of ludicrous religious objections to Darwin's theories, ranging from the demand for evidence of 'missing links' in the evolutionary chain and 'Intelligent Design' to crude, red-faced Scripture quoting. None of these arguments are worthy of further discussion - I think any rational person sees quite clearly that they have absolutely no substance in the light of evidence. However, the one intriguing argument that Dawkins encountered came from what he called a ‘pious fudge'.

What Dawkins meant by this was the efforts of theologians, both scholars and laymen, to reconcile the idea of God with modern science. The man he debated this line of argument with was the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who made a number of interesting comments throughout their exchange.

Williams remarked that he thought of God as 'the force which permeates creation', a statement more commonly uttered by mystics the world over than by the main representative of one of the most rigidly monotheistic religions on earth. His conception of God was clearly something transcendent, and he attempted to steer the conversation away from the idea of God as a being separate from the rest of the universe. Unfortunately Williams came across as somewhat muddle-headed in his thinking as he professed belief in the literal truth of Biblical events such as the Virgin Birth. While this in itself is a point I see little value in debating, the fact remains that it is a talisman for orthodox religious thinkers the world over and only served to make Williams appear reactionary and intellectually dishonest.

Later in the programme Dawkins met with the American philosopher Dan Dennett to discuss the oft-imagined lack of personal consolation provided by scientific evidence versus the cosy comfort offered by religion. During their exchange both men remarked that they took great delight in 'being part of all creation' and made many comments about the joys of scientific discovery - the pleasure in leaning about and better understanding this universe in which we all exist. It was as if both men were expressing reverence for the universe itself.

It is here that I think Williams’ apparently quasi-mystical view of God, as presented in the programme, and the sort of profound respect for the universe expressed by Dawkins and Dennett overlap. You see, what I imagine Williams meant by 'God' is not some bearded chap perched in the clouds, but rather something far more ethereal.

The literature of the world's religions is full of pronouncements from saints, mystics, poets and philosophers about the nature of God, reality, and the universe, and the most striking thing about all of these writings is their collective message of unity. The mystic's conception of God does not view He/She/It as a being separate from the universe, but rather the underlying reality of the universe itself. If God is infinite and the universe is infinite, the two must be one and the same. Where the mystic and the physicist both readily agree, contrary to popular opinion, is in their understanding that the universe is governed by cosmic laws and invisible forces; where they differ is in nomenclature. The mystic talks abstractly and poetically about the various underlying layers of reality, while the physicist aims at a clinical and consensually agreed vocabulary, specifically concocted to deal with such huge, abstract concepts.

This mystical conception of God was seized upon and reconciled with the emerging discoveries of science in the 17th century by the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza erected a fearsome philosophical system in one slim book, the posthumously-published Ethics. In this book Spinoza attempted to demonstrate that the universe itself was God and that everything in it is a 'mode' of God. What this means, basically, is that God is everything and everything which exists is a 'part' of God. This is what the Sufis mean in their analogy of the constantly changing state of the universe being described as Allah perpetually reinventing Himself. Likewise it is what the Hindus mean by their all-encompassing notion of Brahman, and is the key to interpreting the quote which precedes this essay. By being parts of the material universe, we are all modes of God.

It is this sentiment which inspired Einstein to write poetry inspired by Spinoza's vision of the universe. And it is ingenious because, in reconciling science and religion in such a way, it is a view which satisfies those who seek consolation in the transcendent as well as a means of removing any theological obstacles from science. After all, if the universe and God are one and the same, isn't science just a means of understanding the workings of God? Maybe even the mind of God? Isn't this a sentiment which could be appreciated by both the atheist and believer alike?

This isn't a defence of religious belief but an attempt to expose the fallacies in fundamentalism and suggest that the clergy and the folk in lab coats needn’t be quite as mistrustful towards one another. The Sufis are said to have respected all religions because they are all systems for arriving at the same truth: and that truth about the nature of God is what Spinoza deduced in his Ethics. If God is understood in this way, and I cannot see any other way of interpreting the idea of God, science and religion become an endeavour directed at the same ends: an understanding of the universe and the laws of nature. Yet, this is not something cold and dispassionate. Dawkins himself positively radiates awe and glee when discussing the views of space from observatories or the elegance of evolution in a manner similar to religious believers when talking about their love of God. With God firmly rooted in reality, these two similarly passionate viewpoints merge into one…