Pills, Thrills and Bellyaching: Eddie King and the Death of Rave

So i got asked to write a monologue for a promenade performance, and i did, and it is BEING PERFORMED RIGHT NOW!! I finally have a Venue quote to put to my name, and can call myself a professional writer!!

This is big. This is very BIG.

Hopefully it’s the start of people taking me seriously as a writer, and looking twice at my work instead of giving it that cursory glance before they put it straight back in the stamped, addressed envelope with a single paragraph about how they really liked it but don’t feel they can do anything with it blah blah blah.

Anyway, here’s the blog post i wrote concernign my ‘process’, and below is the Venue and the Bristol Evening Post review of the performance.

I reprint it all here for posterity people.

‘FOR REAL LOVE’ : a blog post for Darkstuff Productions

Writing on a subject I know nothing about is a challenge I usually avoid as a new writer, so when I was presented with the opportunity to create a monologue set during a rave, my first reaction was something akin to panic. I knew I wanted to write a strong piece for a female actress. I also wanted it to be dark,  something for an actress to really sink her teeth into. Trouble was, I knew nothing about rave, and my speciality as a writer is dialogue. OK, I told myself, play to your strengths and go with what you know.

First off, and I admit this unashamedly, when it came to the monologue structure I used a loophole. Thinking of the Listener in Beckett’s ‘Ohio Impromptu’, I included a second, mute character who actively participates in the piece, but has no words to say. As a result, I not only maintained the monologue structure, but I created two meaty roles for female actresses, instead of just one. Bonus.

As for the subject matter itself, my own standout memory of the 1990s rave scene is of the media frenzy surrounding the death of Leah Betts. Teenagers like myself were being told that if we took even a single E then we’d either die like Leah, or become junkies like the kids in Trainspotting. And that’s when I realised I did know something about rave after all – I had been a first-hand witness to its media trial and public execution.

And besides, what better way to symbolise the death of rave than to have a death, at a rave? But I didn’t want to mirror some inglorious and grubby story like the ones the media had revelled in when I was a teenager. I didn’t want to vindicate that ignorant and small-minded perception. I wanted a bigger subject. A more universal explanation for the carnage human beings cause, to themselves and to others. And for me, you can’t get much bigger than love.

We’re all looking for love, right? For real love.

And some of us will do terrible things to get it.

Here’s the VENUE review…

Tobacco Factory, Bristol (Tue 2-Thur 4 Aug)

THEATRE This was the third instalment in Darkstuff Productions’ ongoing ‘Eddie King…’ series. The titular Mr King is a curious (and we mean that positively) creation, a raddled, cynical soul sitting defiantly on the edge of events, a sort of snarling Greek chorus. Here, as in the two previous EK offerings, King’s tirades and poetic wanderings serve as stepping stones between short new monologues/dialogues by local playwrights, all grouped under an overarching theme.

Tonight, with a blur of neon and a thump of bass, the Tobacco Factory bar and theatre revert back to the early ‘90s rave scene. The performance is presented as an evening at one of the bigger and more unwieldy of that decade’s infamous raves, at a vast disused warehouse somewhere in the English shires. Four pieces, in which we meet various of the straggled menagerie of stoners, ravers, little girls lost and more – a sort of Canterbury Tales for the Ecstasy generation – are bookended with King’s asides. The latter, unfortunately, are the least successful part of the evening: replacing Stuart Chapman as the titular Mr King, Gerard Cooke, while watchable enough, has none of the original’s sneering arrogance, striding authority or tinderbox unpredictability. His scripts, by Phil John, also fall wide of the mark, aiming at a kind of poetic impressionism but mostly fairly incomprehensible.

Thankfully, the four playlets have more about them. David Lane’s ‘Trumpton’ follows a mother (played with great quiet desolation and fish-out-of-water awkwardness by Nic Rauh) who has spent the past few years slipping incongruously into these raves, thronged to bursting with monged-out kids 20 years her junior, in the forlorn hope of catching sight of her adored son who left home to go to a free party four years ago and hasn’t been seen since. There’s something powerful about her extraordinary and tragic situation, her utter solitude in among all this noise and togetherness, and the touching, troubling chink of domesticity in among all this youth, abandon, energy and chaos – and how she has, in some ways, assimilated to it, is almost at home in this dark jungle as she is back in the outside world. This was, in fact, the strong point of the whole evening – it captured completely the all-consuming otherworldliness of the rave, with its darkness, noise, impossibility of communication (the music’s too loud, your fellow revellers’ mental states too altered): a strange, dark womb, throbbing to its own primeval soundtrack, where the rules of life back above ground go into abeyance.

Further on inside, Helen K. Parker’s ‘For Real Love’ was another success. Somewhere in the rave’s darker, quieter corners, a savvy, neon-wigged teenager (Anna Westlake) nursed her friend (Francesca Wraith) as the latter shivered, dry-heaved and generally looked close to death. The relationship between these two was nicely, troublingly ambiguous: at times Westlake would cradle the head of her friend, at times she seemed strangely indifferent to her fate, even (with reference to a spiked drink) to have caused it. All sorts of troubling insights here, about how the unbounded hedonism of a rave could, despite appearing to be the ultimate human communion, really be  a series of individuals all pursuing their own selfish (and possibly destructive) ends.

The two monologues after the interval felt marginally more confident. Gill Kirk’s ‘Passion’ was a splendidly fast, fevered monologue by Bristol Old Vic Theatre School graduate Ali Watt, as a sped-up, loved-up Scot for whom the rave was a place less of hedonism than of to-the-death love and solidarity with his fellow men. This man, we learned from the more comprehensible moments of his hyperspeed Glasgow babble, had seen the best and worst of human nature in the first Iraq war, and for him the rave was a veritable Eden of love and togetherness.

Lastly, Simon Harvey-Williams’ ‘Ashputtel’ (‘Cinderella’ in German) followed an ingenue in a white dress (Corrinne Curtis) who had been guided to the rave by a mix of awe, fear and curiosity from her nearby home. Curtis showed a nice mix of naivety and articulate confidence, and the mix of emotions that both drew her to and repelled her from this place felt convincing.

A mostly successful evening, with some promising short pieces and, under Anna Girvan’s direction, a pungent atmosphere of one of youth culture’s most extreme and hedonistic byways.

Copyright Steve Wright 2011

Pic: Graham Burke

 

And here’s The Bristol Evening Post one…

 

BRISTOL EVENING POST/THIS IS BRISTOL.CO.UK

Thursday, August 04, 2011

Not much substance to druggie rave tales

Pills, Thrills and Bellyaching – Eddie King and The Death of Rave: Tobacco Factory

THERE are some ideas that are great in theory but don’t quite come off in practice.

And while Pills, Thrills and Bellyaching has potential, the latest offering at Southville’s Tobacco Factory definitely fell into that category.

With a title inspired by the classic Happy Mondays album, Pills looked at the rave culture of the early 1990s.

It focused on five main characters, each giving monologues recounting their experience at a warehouse rave. A promenade performance, the audience followed the characters as they moved between rooms to tell their stories. To create atmosphere, the main stage and the bar at the venue were transformed into a night club.

That meant a loud acid house sound track, moody lighting, glow in the dark paint and DJs.

This was certainly not a performance for people who want to sit down for two hours and applaud politely.

There can’t be many plays that have Jericho by The Prodigy as the warm-up music but it all worked surprisingly well.

Unfortunately, the writing wasn’t as impressive as the set dressing.

There’s undoubtedly a rich creative mine in the dark side of clubbing but monologues are tricky to pull off, and the five in Pills were very hit and miss.

The strongest was For Real Love, an unsettling tale of a girl who spikes her friend’s drink.

Anna Westlake performed a well-written piece that was the closest to a coherent story of the five.

It was followed by Passion, which saw an impressive turn by Ali Watt as a soldier looking for his mates.

The other scenes felt light weight by comparison though, bordering on pretentious.

If the five stories had been as strong as For Real Love it might have worked, but as it was Pills felt like a case of style over substance.

6/10

SAM RKAINA

Me and Tom’s Ghost Photo

Ok, so while we were at Aberystwyth Uni me and Tom bought this massive tv, and i was so impressed by it I made Tom take a photo of me ‘worshiping’ it. When we got the photographs back from the developer Tom realised there was a reflection in it. not our reflections, someone else. The same reflection is on the negative (checked by professional photographer and digital photographer). The power was off, the tv had been off for a while, there were no ‘remainder images’ the thing was dead. I think it looks like an old man drinking  a pint. apparently we later learned the building used to be a pub. We’re not interested in doing anything with this photo because we already believe in ghosts, but people have been hounding me to put it out there, so, here it is. make of it what you will. Except money, if you steal this image i will find you and sue you innit.

The Lovely Bones? The Lovely Pile of Douche more like.

I have been saving up my dvd of Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones for well over a year now, because I really wanted to watch it and appreciate it without all the hype and commotion which surrounded its cinematic opening. Well. I just got through watching it. And it was bollox.
I am vexed.
Here are the reasons why it is less a pile of lovely, and more a pile of steaming.

1. What the hell was the point in Psychic Girl and ‘The Moor’? They were in four short scenes and played absolutely no part in the plot except at the end when Psychic Girl suddenly, inexplicably and fucking stupidly morphed into dead girl for a quick snog whilst her corpse was being rolled into a pit in the background. Forget catching the killer in the act, she was more interested in a good snog. The killer escapes to kill again, while the other victims’ families continue in their mental torture of not knowing the truth behind their daughters’ deaths. But dead girl got some. So it’s all alright.

2. Heaven appears to be a tree and limbo is a technicoloured cornfield copied straight out of the Robin Williams film What Dreams May Come (which, incidentally, did it better, but is also a far superior film to this messy heap of confused imagery and vacuous symbolism). Why the hell does she spend most of her time in a gazebo which we never see her in in life? She’s supposed to meet a boy there but never makes it, then it becomes her centrepiece in limbo because she’s never been kissed. So basically limbo is all about her wanting a snog. Thus, the gazebo.

3. Limbo is populated by a suspiciously enlightened group of horribly murdered girls whose only desire is to send Carol Anne into the light. I mean, send Susie Salmon to the tree. Forget about any kind of justice or sympathy for the living left behind, they appear to be interested only in picnics and butterflies. Alright, I totally get the idea that in limbo you have to let go of life and find peace, but these girls are just frikin pathetic! And the final scene with them all appearing in the field and flitting off to heaven (the tree) is just darn creepy, so intent are they on getting Susie to follow them, it feels like they’re working for the killer. That Holly girl has a glint in her eye that’s more agent of hell than agent of heaven. Acceptance of death is one thing, but embracing injustice is just plain strange.

4. Why is Susie’s mum such a twat? I understand it might be hard on the family if the father becomes obsessed to the point of deranged with finding his daughter’s killer, let alone her body, if she really is even dead. Yes, if over the course of years this happened a mother would be forgiven for leaving her husband and taking her family with her. Susie Salmon’s mother Abigail, on the other hand, gets pissed off with her husband and ditches her entire family after what appeares on film to be only a few months. What a bitch. In the book she even has an affair! She is replaced by her alcoholic mother played by Susan Sarandon who is absolutely not hilarious.

The film is supposed to be about the family, and about how they are to go on without Susie. Why then, is Sarandon only in three scenes, does the young son only have three lines, does the younger sister only become significant when embroiled in the murder mystery plot right at the end, does the mother leave entirely and is not seen again until the finale, and why oh why when you’ve found the condemning evidence of who the murderer of your sister really is, why oh why would you ever consider not giving it to the police? Which brings me to point 5.

5. Why does the message of this film appear to be ‘anything for an easy life’ ? The entire film was trying to come across as a murder mystery/family drama where the family is torn apart by their search for the truth until ultimately they come to realise that the truth is not worth it. This is all very well and good. But their giving up of the truth results in the escape of a serial murderer who can then carry on to kill more girls.

Their giving up of the truth is in fact a horrifically selfish act of self-preservation at the expense of every one else: the previous victims’ families, and the future victims and their families. The Salmon family is in fact uniquely and unnaturally selfish. Human beings do not give up on justice for their lost children. They just don’t. They don’t allow their childrens’ murderers to go free, and yes, families do fall apart.

And no, murderers do not generally get miraculously killed by falling icicles.

Which brings me to point 6.

6. THE MURDERER WAS KILLED BY AN ICICLE!!!

They made the decision that family was more important than justice, so the killer is free to kill and that’s their fault. But then they realise how douchey that is, so they kill off the killer with an icicle. Just to make sure they don’t get blamed for him killing anyone else. Job done.

My point is this: is your family more important than everyone else’s? Are we not compassionate and community centred creatures? Or are we cold-blooded, isolated and selfish beings?

Are we apes, or are we snakes?

Tories, poor people and why we’re all about to get shafted.

“The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches, but to reveal to him his own.”

- Benjamin Disraeli

“No one would remember the Good Samaritain if he’d only had good intentions; he had money as well.”

- Margret Thatcher

At the end of the 1970s this country did a very stupid thing.

Three times.

We elected a Conservative government.

During these governments we witnessed (and to a degree participated in) the most extraordinary and reckless ‘fire-sale’ of domestic infrastructure ever known in our country’s history. Maggy, after a romance with Reagan, sold off the family silver at bargain bin prices, and a lot of people (from both middle and lower classes) became very, VERY rich. A new middle-class was born; swollen at their white collars, these neuve riche swanned about the cities of this country with mobile phones glued permanently to their faces as they bought, sold, undermined, and basically raped and pillaged their way through the fundamental fiscal stability of their own country. And they made LOADS ‘A MONEY! The city of London began to grow taller as the towers of industry began to soar into the very clouds.

Even some of the working classes got thrown a bone and were allowed to buy their council houses. Unfortunately this meant that anyone who needed a council house ended up in a very different kind of tower block.

Of course, there were some other little hiccups during this time of plenty. The government decided to enforce a Poll Tax on its people the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the 14th Century, and the results of which were also remarkably similar.

Yes, learning lessons from the past has never been a British strong point. Which brings me neatly to the present day. Yes everybody’s whinging about the cuts and the deficit and the ConLib pact, but really, we only have ourselves to blame for the shitstorm that’s about to hit us. You see we broke the number one rule. We got all caught up in talk of hung parliaments and LibDem revitalisation and Gordon Brown being a dull bastard and Cameron being a sympathetic character that we forgot the NUMBER ONE RULE of voting for people who earn below £20, 000 a year (the majority of the population by the way), which is NEVER NEVER EVER VOTE ANYTHING BUT LABOUR NO MATTER WHAT.

You see, the clue is in the name – ‘Conservatives’. And we have to go back about a hundred years (not that long ago in the grand scheme of things) to a time when the upper classes were in the minority, the lower classes were the majority, and the middle class was a curious little bastard of economic hybrids. These were the days when most of our ancestors worked either in factories or in domestic service. When school was restricted to the few, and malnourishment was commonplace. In fact, the general working population was in such ill health that, when called upon to fight in the South African war, most recruits were deemed too unfit to fight. Thus, the upper classes were faced with an issue. How to get more healthy soldiers to fight in their foreign imperialist wars. Soldiers to help the rich remain rich and get even richer. The answer was suprisingly simple.

A national health service was born. And from it’s roots our very own NHS would grow.

The perfect soldier-making machine.

Within a generation the working classes were elevated to a level of health which meant that when the Great War came, an entire generation of fit and nourished British men were sent over to France by an over-confident upper class, and summarily obliterated.

It was only after this almost overt disregard for the lives of the common soldiers that the working class began to suspect their social superiors were in fact not all they were cracked up to be. Some have argued that this was the point where the class system in Britain began to finally disintegrate, with the poorer classes abandoning all traditional respect for their supposed betters.

Skill, not inherited wealth, became the medal of social standing, and a new middle class was born, of self-made men working for themselves and overtaking draconian imperial trade with pioneering industry for the masses. The middle class became the dominant class.

But it was here that we made the fatal error which we are still suffering from today.

We forgot what it was like to be ruled by the upper classes.

We even forgot who the upper classes were, and what they stood for.

The Conservation of the old way.

The retention of political and economic power by the historically powerful minority, and the supression of the aspiration and advancement of the lower classes in order to maintain a stable workforce and a reserve of effective soldiers.

In other words, slavery.

The upper classes do not want us to be educated. This is why they support private education while the state system rots and our children fall by the wayside. Nor do they want us to be politically empowered. This is why they dominate every office of power in this country. They do not want us to be socially liberated. This is why they have imposed checks on all modes of public activity and congregation, including policing the right to protest.

Today we can be physically assaulted by the police if we protest.

We think the class system is dead.

We’re dead wrong.

And we’re all about to get shafted.

SHERLOCK – Meh.

So the premise of updating Sherlock Holmes to the present day seems so bloomin obvious it should have been done decades ago right? Well now that someone at the BBC has finally decided to pull their finger out of their arse and do it, you’d think they’d create something radical, something imaginative, clever, and worth the long wait. Not to mention the funding. Well we’ve all been proven idiots for expecting anything radical or inventive from the BBC. Sherlock, which aired on Sunday, proved to be little more than a copycat with a mobile phone.

White, middle class, prim English accented, sexually stunted, but most unforgivably comfortably DULL!! Cumberbatch as a leading man is DULL DULL DULL!! He’s a perfect Sherlock Holmes. which is exactly why they shouldn’t have cast him. And OH MY GOD i find it difficult to even put into words the majesty of the mistake in casting Martin Freeman. In anything, let alone as Doctor Watson!! This cretinous master of the awkward twitch and dumbstruck expression seems to be able to worm himself into even the most inappropriate of roles. And yes I am aware of my contradiction, criticising them for casting an obvious then criticising for casting a not so obvious, but it’s different. Martin Freeman is fucking shit. Cumberbatch is a wonderful actor, he’s just unconscionably boring, but Freeman, he couldn’t act his way out of a bag because he only knows one character, the one that made him (ugh) famous.

Or at least famous enough to be cast in Hitchhiker’s Guide – which flopped by the way – go figure. Anyway, back to Sherlock. let’s be constructive about this. actually the storyline wasn’t half bad, just only half good. And I do quite like Rupert Graves as Lestrade, but then again I like Rupert Graves as anything. There was also a token black person who was pretty shit too, some female police officer who – guess what – doesn’t like Holmes of his methods! Shock horror! Here’s a picture of her incase you missed her because her character was appallingly written and also her acting was shit. I’m using that word a lot aren’t I.

I have no doubt the series will improve with age. But the fact is it started with little enough imagination, i don’t really see it accumulating any more, despite the best efforts of Mark Gatiss. hard to believe an ex-League of Gentleman can be attached to such a dull enterprise but ah well, that’s the BBC for you. It’s just astonishing that in a climate of post-Guy Richey/Downy Junior playfulness and reinvention, the best the Brits can manage is this insipid ham.

ON WAR – and the unfailing fallibility of soldiers

First off, watch this…

I think it was Thomas Aquinas who said that soldiers are murderers, but if the war is just then it’s ok and they won’t burn in eternal damnation, so long as they don’t kill too many civilians. Ok, those weren’t his exact words, but that is the most basic gist of the just war theory posited by, well, theorists, for centuries. It’s all very interesting and complicated and you really have to study it yourself to get to grips with the entire gamut of the justifications for atrocities in war, but really, at the core, it all boils down to one very simple, commonly accepted truth:

That soldiers are sent by the people and parliament, into warzones, and whatever activities ensue thereafter, are not the responsibility of the soldiers, but of the command, and the command are answerable to the parliament and therefore the people. The soldiers therefore become bystanders to their own actions, exempt. If the soldier behaves badly, say, wantonly killing and torturing and molesting, it is because he is untrained, thus the fault is on the commanders, who are answerable to the parliament who are answerable to the people.

Get it?

Basically it’s our fault if our soldiers behave like animals.

Ok, so you’re probably recovering right now and thinking things like, ‘wow that really reminded me of that level in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’, or ‘yeah, the camera looked like an RPG from that angle’, except that you don’t know what an RPG even looks like until you google it and realise it’s fuckin HUGE and looks nothing like a fuckin camera and that a simple pair of binoculars could have identified those men as noncombatants!

They were in the vicinity of a firefight?? Well, given that the majority of the population of central Iraq is in the vicinity of a war zone – in that they are in the middle of a foreign invasion – I guess the solution the US have come to is to kill everyone, everywhere. “Light ‘em up”.

And that means anyone carrying a gun, looking at a gun, thinking about a gun, carrying a dying man to safety who might happen to be thinking about a gun, driving a van with his children into a warzone to help dying men who might also then maybe pick up a gun that might be carried by said dying man and so on and so on until every Iraqi in Iraq is either dead, or in total fucking awe of US helicopter gunmen’s target accuracy, which they most definitely honed playing Xbox.

Thankyou Microsoft. Without you we wouldn’t be able to get them “right through the windshield” and into the stomachs of little girls. Also, it must be far healthier for our poor traumatised boys on the front line to be able to view this destruction from a distance. To be able to laugh about it. Because heaven forbid they should wind up with PTSD, which is very expensive to treat on army health care. I mean, they only go where they’re sent, right? Poor, poor, traumatised pooches.

Actually I’m not attacking US grunt ground troops here -  they have their own crimes to answer for. No, it’s the gamers in the chopper who are the real animals in this horrific sequence of cockups. When you watch the footage of the ground troops arriving on the scene, you can hear the horror and panic in the soldier’s voice as he calls for a medical evacuation for the wounded children. Imagine the scene they’ve just stumbled into: fifteen bodies blown to bits and no weapons. Two mortally wounded kiddies, and no weapons. They have been, in military terms, clusterfucked by their own comrades. And now they have to clear up the mess.

Or drive over it.

Or send it to die in a local hospital.

Before the Germans started doodlebugging us, and gassing us, warfare used to be a very personal activity for soldiers. Waiting to see the whites of their enemies’ eyes was the general reality of warfare for most of human history.

Only in the twentieth and twenty first century has warfare become a case of the further away the better. Unfortunately, along with this leap in technological warfare comes the increased likleyhood of the further away the more likely you are to fuck up and kill a whole bunch of civilians.

And I’m not referring to the Blitz, or Dresden, or Hiroshima, because those were cases where we deliberately targeted civilians. I’m talking about inexcusable ‘collateral’ damage, connived, concealed, and ultimately unpunishable. Because, remember, a soldier only fucks up because his training fails, the fault of the commanders who are answerable to the parliament who are answerable to us. And we are to blame for all of it.

The Ever Raging War Against The Toff Twats – A Response to Otis Ferry’s Interview in The Times

Merry Crimbo one and all, or ‘Wintermass’ to all those with poles up their bums. I have just had the good fortune to pick up The Times 27th December issue, and stumble upon an interview with Otis Ferry, taken by one Camilla Long. I have to say it was one of the most entertaining things i’ve read in a long time. I just had to blurt a response.

Otis isn’t happy you see. He is not happy that Simon Cowell and “some bitch from Islington” are on Newsnight, he is unhappy that John Craven has not yet replied to his email citing the dictionary definition of ‘perversion’, and he is not happy he can no longer legally enter his jodhpur and chase fluffy vermin across England’s green and pleasant lands without running into a black or an Asian or a Pole or an anti-hunt protestor. Or worse, a black Asian Polish anti-hunt protestor.

Otis and his father Bryan Ferry are big hunters you see. BIG hunters. You remember his father right? The guy who thought the Nazis’ style and their rallies were “just amazing. Really beautiful.”

Yeah, that guy.

Well his son is a chip off the old block let him tell you. It seems poor Otis is very worried about dear old England. What with Simon Cowell, and the fox hunting ban, and all the blacks and Asians. No sorry, ‘immigration’. Yes, it’s immigration he’s worried about, even though he admits he doesn’t “understand how it works”, and he hates “the thought of depriving poor Mrs Punjab of her ‘right to come here’ “. But he is convinced you see, convinced that we have simply run out of room for new people in this country.

Yeah you noticed that didn’t you; “poor Mrs Punjab”. I literally began rubbing my hands with glee at this point.

Anyway, as he “focuses his shrewishly handsome features” on Camilla Long, he postulates on the “sheer shitness of our country” and then recalls the “namby-pamby” nature of his prison stint in comparison to his boarding school days. Apparently private education not only provides a better quality of education, but also a better quality of sodomy and shanking as well. Readers take note.

And inmates too, in case he ever gets banged up again; “namby pamby” he called you.

Anyway where the hell was i? Oh yes, fox hunting. Camilla Long, taking a break from fellating Otis’s ego, deigns to broach the subject of the 75% opinion poll result against fox hunting, to which Otis replies “well, if you’ve got a lot of morons following Simon Cowell”. He also suggests the best remedy for the general population’s ignorance is to “round them all up” and go to work on them in a Clock Work Orange style torture cinema. Yes, and while he’s at it, perhaps he could round up the immigrants and turn Mrs Punjab into a lamp shade to add to his father’s Nazi paraphernalia collection.

The fact is Otis appears to be suffering from the congenital scourge of the upper classes (which he so desperately aspires to be part of but never truly can because his grandfather was a pit-pony keeper). Yes, the upper class scourge of being generally fucking insane. But his racism and his ignorance is actually not what repulses me about this odious little cretin. No. What really brings the bile up in my throat is the fact that this little twat, from a working class background, has styled himself into an ersatz toff.

And not just any old toff.

A toff twat.

Otis’s betrayal of his working class family heritage leads me specifically to the bigger picture behind the fox hunting ban which he is so publically apoplectic over.

If anyone ever tells you we banned fox hunting because of cruelty to animals they are either lying outright, or woefully misguided. We didn’t ban fox hunting because we’re worried a fox might get it’s throat ripped out by a dog every now and again. In fact we do care, but only from afar.  As far as our sofas. As far as the digi-box and satellite dish signals can keep us.

The truth is we don’t give a shite about the piddling affairs of a few foxes in the shires. We have more pressing concerns. like money, and how the fuck we get it. It’s an age-old concern the majority of us share, as did our ancestors before us from time immemorial. But there are a few…a privileged few, who have no such concerns, and never have.

We do not give a shit about foxes.

What we do give a shit about, as our ancestors did before us,  is the gradual destruction of the British upper class.

Fox hunters bemoan the loss of a tradition and a way of life known in this country for hundreds of years, even the odd thousand or whatever. What they don’t realise is that we are deliberately trying to destroy them. Since the end of WW1 we have been trying to destroy them. And we still haven’t succeeded, but damn it we are getting there.

If we maintain and increase and enshrine into constitutional law the socialist ideals we have come to take for granted in this century and the last, then we will eventually, via taxation, bankrupt these cretinous moneybags of their historical inheritances which were made from the blood of slaves and serfs and our ancestors actually. If we bother to remember them. No Englishman’s wealth just fell out of the sky, even the fucking Queen is aware of that.

And yet these parasites, and spawn of parasites, seem determined that they are entitled to retain their ill-gotten gains. that they have somehow earned their inheritances.

Their wealth was not won with the power of their minds, though. certainly not. No amount of education, no matter how expensive or selective or superb, can break through a thousand years of inbred spastication. You can be well-educated and still be a retarded fuckwit, just look at the house of Lords for proof. Those wobbling, dribbling titans of social standing are so genetically degenerated that, if put to it, no professional animal breeder worth his standing would allow them to ejaculate into a sock, let alone a woman.

If we don’t succeed in bankrupting them of their financial inheritances with socialist taxes, then their own inbred genetic mutations will eventually prevent them from breeding anyway.

The only thing that could throw the final solution to the upper class menace is if people – befuddled by Cameron’s very convincing human suit – vote in the Conservatives in the upcoming general election. That would be fucking bad in every kind of fucking way.

Alright New Labour are swine, but my god at least they’re OUR swine! The expenses scandal was telling in more ways than one. They all have their snouts in the trough, we know that. But New Labour expenses claims are so reassuringly working class it hurts. Basically New Labour MPs are like teenagers who suddenly realise they can steal out of mum’s purse. So what do they go and buy??

Porn. Bathroom installations. Toilet seats. Dry cleaning.

What did the Tories (ex or otherwise) claim for?

Moats. Duck Houses. Bell Towers.

Case and point, my fellow crusaders.

Case and fucking point.

STARGATE UNIVERSE & DEFYING GRAVITY – Who is responsible for this shit??

Ugh! I just had to suffer through yet another ridiculous episode of Stargate Universe in the vain hope that it might have suddenly become tolerably alright, as opposed to utterly shite. Needless to say I was disappointed. Again. This episode was called ‘Water’ (get it? cos the other episodes were called ‘Air’, ‘Darkness’ and ‘Light’, get it?) and basically what happened was they ran out of water this time, and then there were some alien mosquitos, and then they trapped them in a barrel and threw them through the stargate, and then people went to get some ice, and some douche fell down a cravasse but then got rescued and was alright, and then that annoying man in charge mumbled something to the camera. The end.

I’ve given it a fair chance, I really have, and as an avid Stargate fan I am more inclined to leniency than most viewers, but there is simply no way to polish this turd other than to call it what it is. A steaming pile of horse excretia. The moment the action begins all I’m thinking is, who is this person? Why is she listening to an iPod? Is Robert Carlyle aware of how awful this is? Why is the mumbling man ruffing Carlyle’s hair? Why is that angry black guy so angry all the time? What exactly is the point of any of this?! ARGH! After four episodes why the hell do I still not know or care about who any of these people are?!

But Stargate Universe is not the only new and much hyped sci-fi drama which has failed dismally to engage me. Defying Gravity, the ‘Grey’s Anatomy but in space!’ botch offered to us by BBC2 has already been as good as cancelled in the US with rumours of its sets being dismantled and its time-slot moved into the graveyard. Defying Gravity’s problem is the total opposite of SGU in that we are inundated with the reasons why these characters are doing what they are doing, and they say each other’s names alot so there’s no confusion about who’s who. But the fundamental problem remains: we just don’t give a crapolla about them and what they’re up to. This person fancies this person, and that person cheated on his wife and misses her, and they all want to shag each other and might be turning into aliens by the way.

The unforgivable flaw in these programmes is simple. THEY ARE FUCKING BORING. People stand around and talk a lot, and every now and then someone falls over or cries. In the first episode of Stargate SG-1 people got kidnapped and killed, people got together into teams, aliens blew shit up and mangled people, and everybody sets off to kick butt for the American way. In the first episode of Grey’s Anatomy people get shagged and killed, people get together into teams, surgeons sew shit up and mangle people, and every body sets off to kick butt for the hippocratic way.

SGU and DG have both failed to do any of this stuff in four episodes, let alone in their opening pilots. I just don’t get it. Sci-fi is an extremely popular genre with infinite material and potential to exploit. So with all this potential at their disposal, how on earth have the producers of these two programmes managed to fail so miserably? And, more importantly, how on earth were they allowed to produce this tripe in the first place!? Did someone go on holiday? Or take a nap while these programmes were in production?? Was no one keeping an eye on these projects? Did it never occur to anyone involved that “Oh, this is a bit shit and will probably flop and get cancelled”?

People like to spout bollox about studio executives interfering with programmes to make them more populist, generally copying other successful programmes. If this is the case then what the hell were the studios doing while these programmes were being made? Why weren’t they interfering? Asking dumb questions like “so where are all the aliens? This is sci-fi right?” and “where’s the peril?” I fully understand the desire of a writer and a producer to create something fresh within a genre, however, shirking your genre entirely because you are apparently embarassed by it (Stargate Universe I’m talking to you!) is utter folly, and has apparently resulted in two dramas which had so much potential, but which have, ultimately, fallen flat on their arses. And faces.

PANDORUM – DON’T BELIEVE THE SHITE

It was Orange Wednesday, I was in the mood for entertainment on the darker side of things, and it was a toss up between Zombie Land (much hyped) and Pandorum (slated and ignored). I chose Pandorum because the tv advert looked fukin ace and because I never listen to douchebag film critics. And guess what, I was proved correct as per usual because I was treated to a little gem of a film which no one else seems to know about because they listen to douchebag critics. And I especially don’t reguard the opinions of the nonentities who write on web sites like Rotten Tomatoes.

The main criticism appears to unoriginality. Well, to this I say so bloody what? I refer back to my review of Jaume Collet-Serra’s House of Wax of a few years ago, a slasher with all the typical generic traits which is still a bloody good horror film. How many times do these donks have to be told? Generic loyalty is NOT A SLUR! Pandorum is a film with flaws, this is undeniable, but you know what? It’s still a bloody brilliant film. Its cinematography is magnificent, it is genuinely frightening, Ben Foster is a revelation, Dennis Quaid is Dennis Quaid, and it has several great twists at the end which leave you sufficiently impressed, perhaps even enough to go see it again, like I will on Saturday, and this time I’m going to pay full price.

Yes.

It’s that good.

SEARCHING FOR GOD… ON THE TV.

“I’m gonna find God.”

“God.”

“Yes.”

“God.”

“Yes. He isn’t in heaven, he has to be somewhere.”

“Try New Mexico, I hear he’s on a tortilla.”

“No, he’s not on any flat bread.”

If you’ve been watching Supernatural Season 5 (and if you haven’t then you’re an idiot) recently, either on tv or online as I have been forced to due to the arbitrary bastard nature of delayed British releases of US tv shows, then you’ll have noticed the narrative arc has taken a distinctly religious turn. Moving beyond the typical supernatural fare of demons and monsters, the angels and humans are now on a full on quest to find Him, the big G.

His presence has been cautiously hinted at throughout the series (a programme premised on the supernatural could hardly ignore the biggest supernatural entity of them all) even before the angels showed up in season 4, and now finally the man Himself is being hunted down by his discontent and feuding creations.

This thrilling and also slightly ominous prospect of an actual glimpse of God begs some serious questions of the audience. For starters, do we actually even want to see God? How would he be portrayed? Would he be Alanis Morrisette? Would he be empathetic? Would he be to blame? Would he be seriously pissed off? So many possibilities for the writers, we can only sit and wait to see how their imaginings of the divine head honcho unfold. They have taken a bold step to say the least in invoking Him as a potential character, or even as a potential material presence.

But the Supernatural writers are not the only ones grappling with the enormous responsibility of invoking God as a cast member. In fact there appear to me more and more American tv dramas dabbling in religious narrative arcs. Joan of Arcadia, Wonderfalls, Carnivale, Tru Calling, Saving Grace, Pushing Daisies, Reaper, Battlestar Gallactica – the list goes on.

Is there something in the fact that all of these tv series are American? Possibly it’s the simple fact that because America makes a lot of tv programmes it will logically have larger selection of similar themed programmes. It would be extremely lazy to just accuse the American quality television industry of bible thumping. We Brits make a lot of soap operas after all, and it’s not because we all live in the economically deprived back streets of cities, drinking in grotty local pubs, shopping at the market, and shagging the neighbours for all their worth.

Not most of us anyway.

And what does it say about us, that these tv shows are just as popular in our own countries, some even more so, than they are on their home turf? Did we ask for these shows? Or are we being coached by a malign evangelical force at the top of the tv production ladder? Conspiracy theorists and anthropologists: feel free to step in at any time. Is the rise of ‘Islamic extremism’ and the militarism of ‘Asian values’ making us all rethink our slack Western agnosticism and our arrogant atheism?

Is the religious quest the new front in the war on terror?

Will finding our faiths again make us less terrified?

Is tv the new pulpit?

Is that all a load of bollox and entertainment is just entertainment?

You have to wonder though, why there are no western tv programmes involving Buddah, Moses, Muhammad, or any other denomination for that matter. The west does seem, for all its cultural and religious pluralism, to be rather preoccupied with Christianity. Still. Maybe it’s time we all stopped trying to kid ourselves that we’re a secular culture when our entire civilisation is built on the foundations of our Christian heritage. It’s like trying to deny your parents are your parents. You might not like them, but you kind of sort of owe them your existence.

Our loss of faith has been a relatively fast one. Over the last sixty years, religion has taken a back seat for the general western population (who don’t live in the American mid-west), church attendence has dwindled to next to nothing compared to the levels of our grandparents’ days, and young people today would not be seen dead in a church. Except for their own funerals – ah you know what I mean. How many people under the age of 30 do you know who go to church regularly or even irregularly? Two or three? There was a boost when the Poles came, but their goals are mostly to return to Poland – depite what the BNP would have you believe – so what then?

What has the rejection of God actually gotten us?

Society is in the shitter, we all know this, but does it have anything to do with the absence of a moral force in our lives? We claim we are intelligent enough to make our own moral decisions without religion to arbitrarily tell us how to behave, but isn’t that confidence just astonishingly arrogant? Do we really think we can be trusted to our own devices without the fear of an omnipotent power watching us and judging us? Without the fear of a punishment for our transgressions in the afterlife, even if we get away with it in life? Can we really get our heads around the notion that evil people escape when they die, because there is no Hell? Can we really deal with the horrifying, terrifying idea that death really is like dreamless sleep – absolutely nothing.

I’m sorry, but it’s not shameful to have faith considering the yawning abyss that is the alternative. In fact, faith is the natural human condition. We have always worshipped, even when we were hunting and gathering and chasing wilderbeasts we worshipped. Who the hell do we think we are to claim we can just throw all that away? Bloody arrogant, that’s what. And bloody stupid.

Maybe these tv shows are proof that we haven’t thrown the baby of faith out with the bathwater of organised religion. We don’t need to go to church to have faith. It’s our actions, and our attitudes, and the moral codes we live by that define our faiths, not thumping great tombs of antiquated fairytales. The west shouldn’t be ashamed of the presence of Christianity in its popular culture, it should be proud of it, especially in comparison to other religious cultures which are so terrified of themselves they can’t even draw their own prophets, let alone put them in musicals in a nappy.

I think God probarbly had a good laugh when he saw Jerry Springer the Musical. And that’s the beauty of faith. God is what you and you alone believe it/him/them to be, and no one else can tell you otherwise, which is why it is so important to explore, parody, criticise and expose religion in popular culture, whether in books like the Satanic Verses, in theatre like Jerry Springer, or in tv series like Supernatural.

It’s the day we start trying to censor our faiths that we really need to worry about.