I’ve had some lovely comments on my last post on social media and by email, for which thanks. We took a break for a couple of days at Beamish Museum and at Durham Cathedral, and I enjoyed both very much. Beamish particularly tickled my memories because some of the exhibits are from the town my Dad lived in until national Service intervened, and which I visited a lot as a child. I also very much liked the draught brown ale from the Firebrick Brewery in the 1900’s pub. Beamish is somewhere I’ve wanted to visit for a while and it didn’t disappoint. If I get my act together I’ll put some photos up here.
Otherwise the week has been quiet and I’ve vegged in front of the screen. I’m not generally a fan of DC films and TV but I did enjoy Lanterns. Back in the 1960s I enjoyed the Green Lantern comics (and wish I still had them). I also watched Spider Man: Brand New Day which is a decent film. Tonight I revisited Thor: Love and Thunder which is a bit too jaunty but on a rewatch is better than I remember it from first time round. Marvel has lost its mojo somewhat and there isn’t much due that I’m interested in; I’m certainly not interested in the forthcoming Russo Brothers Avengers spectacular. The last two were triumphs of spectacle over substance. You might object that I shouldn’t expect substance from superhero material but at their best they can be good vehicles for metaphor as well as just plain entertaining. The more recent Avengers films have been neither metaphor nor entertaining.
Yesterday our central heating was turned on, though one of our apple trees still has a lot of fruit waiting to be picked. A job for the weekend if the weather holds. Also, as autumn sets in I have writing to do.
I decided to call my ADT-induced moobs Liam and Noel because they are a pair of useless tits who won’t go away.
More seriously, talking with other men in a similar situation, it is/was naive of me to think that as the hormones wear off the side effects will just roll away. I think the only way to counteract the impact of the hormone treatment is to go back to the diet and exercise disciplines I adopted to get rid of type-2 diabetes four years ago. Here we go again.
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For various reasons I have bought a ticket for each night of the Rush shows in Glasgow next March and have been making my way chronologically through their back catalogue. I am forming opinions and in due course will express those opinions here. I suspect a lot of long-time Rush aficionados will disagree with those opinions. I’m looking forward to it.
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I haven’t yet seen Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey but I have watched two of this year’s other releases, albeit on the small screen, The Mandalorian and Grogu and Supergirl. Both were very efficient, well-made pieces of corporate entertainment; both were formulaic and empty.
The BBC’s statement this week on the future of Dr Who has provoked a lot of comment, not least because it whiffs of a chaotic rush job to mask behind the scenes issues. For this viewer since 1963, there is a sort of sadness but not a lot of surprise.
Cards on the table, the idea of contracting production to a company other than Bad Wolf under a lead writer other than Russell T Davies is necessary, not because I have any particular animus towards them but because I think their time has run its course. Spectacle and melodrama have increasingly nudged thoughtful writing aside and the show got caught up in a doom loop of diminishing returns soundtracked by Murray Gold’s over-wrought incidental music that never shuts the fuck up. Yes there were latterly some very good episodes, but they shone against a dimming background.
Dr Who has a long history of experimentation, exploration and invention, balanced by an equally long history of bathos and ridiculousness; each of those things lie behind both its persistence and charm as well as those moments that invited things to be thrown at the TV screen. This is not just a New-Who thing: critics of modern incarnations often forget that both Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy had to put up with some seriously weak material, Baker especially, before the show was put out of its misery and placed on its long hiatus.
Dr Who is, in many respects, a victim of its own longevity and also labours under the expectations of vocal, online fandom [as I’ve said before, fans are great but fandoms cleave to toxicity.] The well is poisoned by notions of canon and rigid canonicity is policed by obsessives with nothing better to do but whinge on YouTube. Even so, despite having all of time and space to play with, somewhere along the way the producers ran out of ideas about what the programme could be, or perhaps they knew it but no one had the courage or vision to carry it through except in occasional flashes and glimpses, most consistently recently in the Peter Capaldi incarnation.
What if?
Writing has moved on since 1963 as has televisual language, not just in terms of major points of reference like Twin Peaks, Sense8 or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but in the conceptual possibilities of all genre and cross-genre programming. Dr Who was conceived in the era of Robin Hood just like Star Trek was Wagon Train in space. As I write, I’m rewatching the magnificent Arrival which, like the story it came from, Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, exemplifies a way of treating time and language and adventures in time in a thoughtful, emotional and intelligent way that Dr Who has rarely approached. Can you even begin to imagine Arrival or Project Hail Mary scripted by RTD?
There have been some very, very good stories told, notably in the Steven Moffat era, but we’ve also had a succession of good actors doing good work over increasingly short tenures and having to do their best with shallow or inadequate material, or good material produced on the cheap, or stories that fail to rise above a premise, with poor dialogue and a lack of substance. Jodie Whittaker, whose Doctor I liked, also had to contend with Covid and lockdown.
Would a general audience respond well to a Dr Who that cloned the off-kilter modernism of Twin Peaks, the Return and mixed in Arrival or Annihilation? Probably not (though I would), but it would respond to a writing and production team with an expanded conceptual language. I do not suggest a complete reimagining but I would like a conceptual regeneration featuring coherent stories by talented writers that engage at least two of the following three: my emotions, my imagination and my intelligence. I’m not expecting Andre Tarkovsky or Denis Villeneuve or Alex Garland, and at heart Dr Who is a family show, but a tangible sense of meaning and depth wouldn’t go amiss.
The danger is that the BBC will award the production contract to a company that promises more of the same, that the corporation will run scared of the creative imagination. That is, after all, what it normally does. How much better would it be to honour the original vision of Verity Lambert and give us something that finally matches the unworldly possibilities of Delia Derbyshire’s original and unmatched realisation of the theme
[Added after first posting, it occurs to me that Dr Who would benefit from a spin off that stands in much the same relation to it as Andor does to the main Star Wars corpus. This does not mean a war between the land and the sea.]
Despite the metabolic havoc wreaked by hormone implants, I was delighted and relived to find out this week that my HbA1c remains in the ‘normal’ range (34mmol/mol, 5.3%). I was concerned that the weight gain caused by the hormones had messed with my type-2 Diabetes ‘in remission’ status; happily, it has not. I’m also happy to report a weight loss of 1kg (2.2lbs) over the past few days, so perhaps that is on the turn.
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I found a passing mention of a book called Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy published in 1973, based on his PhD thesis. The book reprints articles and news items from Jackson County, Wisconsin, primarily from 1885 to 1900. The book also includes photographs by local photographer Charles Van Shaike and the articles are primarily from the Badger State Banner as well as records from the local mental hospital.
Unfortunately, the book is now quite expensive, however a film adaptation was made for the BBC’s Arena, broadcast in 2000, narrated by Ian Holm. The film is very much available to view in excellent quality on BBC iPlayer and in lower quality on YouTube (links below). I watched the film twice, enthralled. It is very dark (and some may find it upsetting), the more so because the stories are narrated straight without commentary. And the music choices are excellent.
I found the objectivity of it very affecting, especially the many, many human tragedies. I had a powerful sense of the fragility of life and a dissociation from the usual internal narrative of what it is to be human. I sometimes get this in Family Tree Research which, at its most basic, revolves around a narration of birth, procreation and death. Some of that was on my mind when I had my initial cancer diagnosis although it also helped reconcile me to the diagnosis and informed my determination to live life to the full while I’m here.
Wisconsin Death Tripadded something else, a feeling of the shallowness of so much of life, of the wasted potential of our species that has such a high opinion of itself.
I am on the next stage of recovery, resistance work in the local gym. I am following a set of core exercises suggested by an exercise specialist at Prostate Scotland. Today was my third session.
The core issue is that the hormone implants and radiotherapy tend to reduce muscle mass and the resistance work is intended to restore it and also help create a cancer-suppressive environment in the body. The exercises I have are targeted at the main muscle groups and include deadlifts, a first for me. I’m not a complete stranger to resistance work but in the past it has always been as an adjunct to cardio training, mainly running; this time the resistance work is the main course and any cardio is an adjunct to it, at least for the first few months until things get back into balance.
The target is to find the weight for each exercise where I can manage 8 – 10 repetitions before having to stop, then doing three sets of them. Once I get used to that weight and can do, say, 10 to 15 repetitions, I raise the weight a notch, and so on. I would like to get back to running, but it isn’t a priority at present.
I won’t know how well the hormones and radiotherapy worked until early June when tests are scheduled.
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I’ve been reading a lot lately. I mentioned Stevie Smith a couple of posts ago but I’ve also been dipping into Thomas Hardy’s poetry (there is a lot of it, of varying quality), Malcolm Guite’s first volume of the Arthurian corpus in epic verse, Galahad and the Grail, and Patricia A McKillip’s Ombria in Shadow. The latter is an object lesson in writing Fantasy to a very high standard and has given me plenty to think about as regards craft and technique in general.
I also read The Hobbit for the first time since the girls were small; it is an odd book. I enjoyed revisiting it but every so often the writing irritated me. Still, I enjoyed it enough to make the mistake of revisiting the first of the Peter Jackson Hobbit films to see if time has improved it; it has not.
I completed my course of radiotherapy today. No doubt I’ll have more to say about it as the results become clearer in time and when I’ve had some time to reflect, but it’s worth recording the date.
I have been lucky. The radiographers treat anywhere between 180 and 240 people per day using 6 machines. and I know from chatting to people in the waiting room that some of those people have much more significant and life-changing cancers than me and face more intense side effects. Cancer, and the waiting rooms, are great levellers.
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Team Doolally
Late to the party, I caught up with Dept Q, scandi-noir transplanted to Edinburgh with a magnificently sweary Matthew Goode taking the lead in a very strong cast. I binged it over two nights and am looking forward to the next series when it finally appears. Also, I enjoyed playing the game of spotting Edinburgh locations and noting when they did not match geographically.
At a loose end, I revisited Matrix : Resurrections which I thought I’d written about here previously but seemingly not. The first part of the film is funny and clever; unfortunately the second half is a boring retread of stuff we’ve seen before. It was a good earner for most of the Sense8 cast who appear in it, cast adrift when that series was cancelled, but not a particularly good film overall. I suspect that had a lot to do with it being the work of only one Wachowski: Lana.
In other news, Jon Anderson, erstwhile lead singer of Yes, is touring this year. He is 81. Touring with the Band Geeks, the show will be dominated by Yes classics played at their original tempo. I have, of course, already bought a ticket.
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