Again I must record my thanks to those of you who've commented with your support and good wishes. I'm still having a couple of wobbles, but I'm definitely back towards…

…well, I was going to put normal, but I have a long-standing aversion to the word, so I'll put usual. [Habitual won't do either, I couldn't apply it to myself without thinking of "The Devils".]

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I try not to be too anal about spelling and grammar – having suffered our education system, I can well understand why a large segment of the population feels as alien to the importance of correct spelling as I do to, say, Channel Five* – but sometimes an involuntary wince, shudder or yelp of pain appears anyway.

[artist's impression]

As regular readers will know, the policy of this blog is to resolutely campaign against the perpetuation of stereotypes and other crude forms of wild generalization; they're not funny, they genuinely hurt people, and they're always a sign that they're being used as a substitute for actual thinking, usually by people who should know better.**

So I should warn you that any inferences you make from the fact that I'm about to tell you that this sign was spotted in the county of Norfolk are entirely your own affair and nothing to do with me at all. Honest.

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Anyway, the downside of not being too loquacious over the past few weeks is that I've missed out on recording my thoughts on various bits of culture that have passed through me.

Miranda has been a gawdsend over the past six weeks – okay, it's nowhere near being a classic, but it's done the job of making me chuckle rather nicely for a full half-hour at a time, even a couple of weeks ago when I was only getting it in audio because I can't see my TV screen from my bathroom.

I am resolutely trying not to use the catchphrase "Such fun!" in my daily life, and I invite anyone who hears me utter the words to slap me round the chops with a wet haddock.

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A lovely bit of nostalgia which helped me through last week's difficulties was a birthday tribute to Stuart Hall, radio football commentator extraordinaire and, in the 1970s, the man with the most famous laugh on British television thanks to "It's A Knockout" / "Jeux Sans Frontières". Unfortunately this tribute was a radio show, so you didn't get the full effect…

This will probably be completely baffling to non-Europeans and people under thirty-five years of age, but It's A Knockout and its Champions League equivalent were our Saturday night version of X-Factor; except, of course, that they were supposed to be inconsequential, to be laughed at rather than to be taken as the cultural zeitgeist.

Compare and contrast: this clip of people dressed in penguin costumes playing a silly game, versus nondescript warblers manufactured by a megalomaniac tosspot; which would you rather watch?***

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* With the exception of "Hana's Helpline". But that's only five minutes out of twenty-four hours of banal shite.
** Currently watching: a DVD of "'Til Death Do Us Part" from 1972. It's funny how relevant and fresh the satire of bigotry still feels. And it's not funny how many people would still nod along and go "he's right, y'know". [clip here, beware of severely non-PC language]
*** The 1999 revival of It's A Knockout [funnily enough, it was on Channel Five] achieved the almost unbelievably difficult task of taking all the fun, humour and joie de vivre from the original, leaving it about as interesting as a school sports day. But since it's the only trophy a team from Ipswich has won in the past twenty-eight years, perhaps I shouldn't be too scathing…

I'm typing whilst listening to a soundscape incorporating Rimbaud's 1873 poem "A Season In Hell".

…who'd'a thunk some French bloke 136 years ago would so accurately predict and summarize being an Ipswich Town fan in the Roy 'Up Yer Bollocks' Keane era?

Anyway…

…yes, I know, I'm a bad blogging person, and a bad commenting person at the moment. Having cleared the latest instalment of "oh frog, the landlord's coming round, better clear away any nefarious goods" last Monday, my body has been succumbing to the cold that has threatened to take me down for some weeks, swelling my sinuses to the size of sewers and making my throat feel like I've been drinking a cocktail of Pernod and battery acid. [Sadly not available in your local Threshers'.]

The blustery weather's not helping either – today's mini-tornado luckily was in a village four miles down the road rather than down the main street; if I'd known I'd've got out my Dorothy shoes – and everything now seems on that downward slide towards Agh Festive Season in five and a bit weeks' time.

You can add to that my body clock's maddening habit of 5:30am starts on nights off – I've already seen more 6am episodes of Me Too! than is recommended under European Union health guidelines this month – and an increasing realization that I am coffee's crack-bitch and this needs to change.

No doubt this is a temporary lull rather than a wintry trough, but motivation's difficult to come by.

All I can do is apologize and say "normal service will be resumed", then it's back to the old motto: if you can't make 'em laugh, give 'em something fluffy to go "aaaaaaaah" at…

I hope you're all happy with that.

Envy:

It is said, in an old Russian proverb, that "jealousy and love are sisters", which may explain some of the following green-eyed feelings that I'm having today;

- for Max who will spend the evening in the Goddess Tori's company [along with 3,600 other ravingly-insane devotees];

- for Zo's plane-hopping and Madrid-hanging;

- for Paula's birthday yesterday – she arranged a lovely picnic in Rendlesham Forest…

…and I took the opportunity, on the deserted kids'-play-area, to indulge in a spot of pole-dancing…

…but it was her use of the birthday present I got her, later on with Rik, which I'm envious of [no, I'm not telling you what it was, let's just say I got a message this morning from her saying "OUCH"];

- for Milly's trip to Office;

- for England for always getting a much easier qualifying group than we do;

- and for anyone who actually manages to do housework without having a partial nervous breakdown about it whilst they contemplate and fear the amount of energy and effort that will have to be put therein. [Yes, I know, I probably spend more energy thinking about it than I do actually getting on with it, but since nobody provides "housework counselling/therapy" I'm stuck with it.]

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Thing that is helping right now:

- Composer of the Week is Bernard Herrmann, best known for his film scores, and especially those for Alfred Hitchcock. Listening to them is a wonderful journey down memory lane for an amateur movie buff like myself.

Already this week, alongside the classic Vertigo and Psycho scores, there's been unexpected delights – for instance, I didn't know Herrmann was also the composer for things like The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad; images from that film, such as the snake woman…

…and the skeleton warrior…

[images from http://theseventhvoyage.com/theseventhvoyagefilm.htm]

…were burned into my consciousness at an early age; the effects are clunky by modern CGI standards, but have a charm and an aura utterly absent from the vast majority of computerized animation.

I'm not a technophobe or Luddite – I recognize the benefits of modern technology, especially in computing [how else would I know all you bonzer people?], and in this case it's probably not technology's fault in itself, so much as the technology allowing the accountants to demand short-cuts.

[The best example I can think of for this is Fantasia vs Fantasia 2000. In the first, each of the leaves blowing off the tree accompanied by the Nutcracker Suite are individually drawn, and each has its own random but beautiful trajectory. In the latter, during Beethoven's 5th the shapes move in a mathematically precise set of radii, and it looks sodding cheap and horrible.]

Ray Harryhausen, gawd bless him, was immune to such things; there's no way he could work any faster than the eleven months the "dynamation" for this film took. Somewhere along the line the artists and the creative people lost control…

[nicked borrowed from here]

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I'm currently being rather bored by a BBCFour documentary on wind [the weather force, not the digestive side-effect] which is making me very sleepy, but not quite as sleepy as, say, the snooker on the other channel.

Meteorology and climate studies should be fascinating – they are, after all, well ingrained in UK culture [no, that's not an oxymoron. mostly]. Take my slightly nutty neighbour elderly bloke: I pass him just about every morning on my way to the cafe, and he always has a handy quip about the day's weather [mostly that it's a bit cold or a bit windy, even in the ten days a year we get a heatwave round these parts]. It's the English way to talk about the weather where anything else would either be contentious or would actually lead you into, shock horror, a conversation where you have to pay attention to anything the other person says. A brain, like a home, is an Englishman's castle.

But this shows how weather, outside of the extremes which are rare in our temperate climate, are calming, ordinary in our culture; part of the ambient background of information. There's a reason why the Shipping Forecast is put on the radio last thing at night, and remains among the channel's most popular output.

It's not an important carrier of information, even to shipping which now almost universally has satellite-tracked real-time data downloading all the time; but it's a national mantra amongst radio listeners, perhaps the closest one gets to a National Anthem now that "God Save The Queen" is being rendered increasingly obsolescent by how lots of us don't believe in God and pretty much wish the monarchy would go the same way.

It even spawned a book, Attention All Shipping, in which a semi-eccentric Englishman does a rather English thing: he resolves to visit every forecast area. It's a good book, even if it's not exactly thrilling.

Nowadays people who want British citizenship have to pass a "Life In The UK Test", by answering 40 stupid questions about UK life and culture.

I personally couldn't give a flying frog if the people here know about the Magna Carta, who the Archbishop of Canterbury is or what St. Frankenstein's Day is; all I'd have is one Radio 4 announcer in a little booth at immigration at Heathrow; if when she says "Fisher, German Bight; Southerly backing northeasterly, becoming cyclonic in German Bight later, 3 or 4 increasing 5; moderate, occasionally rough later; occasional rain; moderate, occasionally very poor" someone glazes over and produces a crooked smile of the type usually seen on an over-relaxed hippie during "Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun", for frog's sake let them in.

Remakes. Why?

Anyone of a certain age and up here will remember the brilliant The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin: a six-part tale of Leonard Rossiter's dull middle-manager going slowly insane; on the surface a nice sitcom but underneath brimming with social satire, capitalist criticism and an utterly un-PC running joke which has claimed a place for the humble hippopotamus in culture ever since.

Well, guess what. They've remade it "for the modern age", with never-very-funny-but-he-was-once-in-Doctor-Who Martin Clunes; it starts next Friday.

Of course, one musn't prejudge these things, but I must admit my immediate reaction is this;

Bastards. Why can't they leave things alone?

[and I bet they won't have the hippo.]

Remakes are shit. Reunions are shit [see Floyd, 2005 et al].

…The only exception I can think of was that I learnt to my surprise the other day that the celebrated 1956 version of The King And I was actually a remake of Anna and the King of Siam from ten years earlier.

Unless any of you can think of any other examples…

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Sad to read of the death of Sir Clement Freud yesterday: one of the voices of my childhood as I grew up with Just A Minute on the radio, and an exemplar of gentlemanly curmudgeonsome wit that left a lasting impression on me.

My favourite piece of his comes from several years ago when he had knee replacement surgery; despite it "a woman recently invited me to 'come upstairs and make love'. I had to tell her she could have one or the other, but not both."

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I had a chat with P. yesterday, a woman I met on the acting workshop last year. Both of us were keen to be involved in that company's productions this year but neither of us have been "called" to audition yet.

The talk then was that I may have been required to cut my acting teeth on Henry V. The latest rumour is that this has changed to The Taming Of The Shrew. Great: in one fell swoop we go from the frying pan of English nationalism to the fires of patriarchy and medieval gender relations.

Most of what I know about the Shrew comes from Kiss Me Kate – the film of which was a regularly seen videotape in my household when I was growing up, thanks to my mother. [I could probably still sing you the whole of Brush Up Your Shakespeare from memory.]

Of course, the above poster [and this clip of the movie, on a possibly NSFW site] would probably these days be damned as spanking erotica by the Advertising Standards Authority and the BBFC.

That does, in my warped mind, suggest a new angle on the Shrew for a modern setting, in a consensual Secretary-type manner…

Which of course will never happen in a tinpot smalltown theatre setting, but I'll file the thought away for when I'm a famous auteur…

soundtracktotodaysentryiskissthemforme

* Things continue to improve slowly. K. – not the hero [?] of The Trial, but a colleague and friend of B. – and I were on duty today, and part of me was worried she'd throw rotten fruits and vegetables at me. But actually she was very supportive, and said how she'd seen it coming: so that's one less thing to worry about.

* Goddess Tori on Radio 2 tonight, as part of a programme on Feminism in pop music. 2230 UK time, and you can probably pick it up on demand from the site afterwards. Important Note to Max: also features Mariella…

* I've found my belly-dancing DVD, which has been lost in a pile of papers for three months. A. has suggested that we attend classes together – good idea, I think. After a period of introspection, I want to push outwards again. [In my personality as well as my navel.]

* Random headlines: STDs rife amongst American girls – I wonder how much this is linked to some places' dogmatic insistence on abstinence rather than sex education?
* Lord proposes oaths of allegiance to the Queen – not even if you put a gun to my head, mate…
* Siberian women's prison encourages good behaviour with beauty pageants – wasn't this a really bad Prisoner: Cell Block H storyline? How long before the inmates of that gulag start talking Strine?

* More praise for my fiction. Yes, I will write more. When I actually finish it, though, is another thing entirely…