Have I Got Whos For You (WE WON THE ELECTION edition)

Well. The new I’m A Celebrity lineup is shit, isn’t it?

I don’t know. They’re all in a castle. Isn’t this a bit of a missed opportunity? Couldn’t they get someone with stilts and a hood to chase them round and burn them? That’d be more entertaining than watching Shane Ritchie eat bugs. I swear, I’ve had dental work that was less painful.

We can, at least, console ourselves with the news that The Vicar of Dibley is making a long-overdue and ostensibly ‘welcome’ return, although it will probably be not terribly funny and there’ll be at least three people on Twitter complaining about fat shaming. Socially distanced Zoom-inspired innovation aside, I can’t help thinking this is something Curtis should have left buried, particularly given that half the cast are dead. Still, the BBC are milking this for all its worth, as evidenced by this publicity photo of Dawn French with co-star Roger Lloyd-Pack.

As I write this, Donald Trump’s legal campaign is still thrashing about in its death throes, determined to somehow gain some traction despite having produced absolutely no evidence. There are recounts and rumours of recounts and legal campaigns that are in and out faster than a priest in a brothel; it’s King Cnut (well, almost) shouting at the tide, although at least he possessed a modicum of self-awareness and was doing the whole thing as a joke. You really can’t say the same for the current POTUS, whose twitter feed is awash with false claims and heavily capitalised rants, as if the only viable route forward is to shout something loud enough until people start believing it.

Already the right-wing media are cutting and running, and Trump’s list of allies seems to be diminishing by the day, as the most powerful man in the world is reduced to muted press conferences from tiny desks. Around this time I would normally start to feel a bit sorry for him – he is human, despite his obvious faults – but I really find it incredibly difficult to muster any sympathy for such a graceless loser. It’s also a sad decline for Rudy Giuliani, who went from being a voice of hope and sanity after 9/11 to shouting his mouth off outside a gloomy-looking building in an industrial park, next door to a sex shop.

“Yeah, I’ve buggered this one up, haven’t I?”

Meanwhile, over in Utah (where of course they all voted red), a days-old mystery is solved when new footage emerges of a malfunctioning chameleon circuit.

There is a sense of irony about the timing. It’s funny that they just found it now, at the end of what has been for many people an annus horribalis; it’s as if some sentient alien race has been watching and waiting and is now playing a colossal joke. It’s curious that the first appearance of the 2001 monolith coincides with a tribe of knuckle-dragging monkeys smashing things up and yelling as loud as they can to assert their dominance. Go figure.

In the UK we’ve been watching all this with interest, because it takes our minds off the Brexit debacle, the arguing about ‘Fairy Tale of New York’, and the state of Amazon’s courier system.

—

Look, it doesn’t matter what Radio 1 does; no one over twenty listens to it and those that do probably have Spotify playlists, so if they want to censor the damned thing then that’s their prerogative. Better that we simply wait out the lockdown as quietly as possible and take comfort in simple pleasures, like board games. “Is he wearing glasses?”

Last night my feed pinged: the ‘Revolution of the Daleks’ trailer drops on Sunday evening, which means I’ll have something else to write about; you have no idea how difficult it is wringing every ounce of possible humour from such meagre pickings. I mean as a fan I don’t care; I can wait. As a creator, it’s frustrating. Still, as news drips through about the unavoidably delayed, inevitably divisive Series 13, a close-up from Jodie Whittaker’s inaugural season reveals exactly why this new one is going to be a bit shorter than usual.

I honestly don’t know why everyone’s complaining; there’s plenty of other stuff to be going on with. Take The Crown, for example, Netflix’s sumptuous costume drama detailing the history of the Royal Family: lavish as Game of Thrones, sensationalist as a National Enquirer exposé, and about as accurate as a Spanish art restorer. Not content with riding roughshod over Prince Philip’s marital history and fabricating scenes between his eldest son and Lord Mountbatten, they’ve now introduced Gillian Anderson as a fiery, uncannily authentic and disturbingly sexy Margaret Thatcher. I suppose it gives her something to do other than shine torches into dark warehouses.

Coleman is, in this image, the epitome of stern serenity, which is more than you can say for the arts world – which was rocked the other week by the unveiling of a new statue commemorating celebrated author and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Ordinarily this would have made for a joyous afternoon, except she turned out to be about six inches high, and completely naked. It was all a bit miniscope, really. In fact you might even call it a nightmare. In silver.

“PROTECT THE ARTEFACT!”

The Smallerpictures Video Dump (2020, part four)

This morning, I’m treading through the archives. There are a fair few videos that haven’t been written up yet: here are the first of them. I hope they are as enjoyable for you to watch as they were frustrating for me to assemble, although that’s possibly overestimating the fun factor.

Still. Lead on, Macduff…

1. Think About Things: The Doctor Who Performance (May 2020)

I write this during our second, not-exactly lockdown – but I want to take you back. Back to May, when we were still cloistered in our homes, and relying on Facebook live streams, Zoom webinars and specially recorded entertainment to keep us from going insane. Did it work? Well, I’m still here, although some days I think I’m dangerously close to fractured.

I’d rather hoped that this year’s Eurovision would be a respite from that – a couple of hours of silly entertainment where we could forget, just for a while, about the situation in which we found ourselves. Instead the show’s producers opted to show lots of videos of people stuck in their homes earnestly reminding us that “We are strong and WE WILL GET THROUGH THIS”, while scarcely featuring the songs at all. I still don’t know what Latvia were planning, because I went to the toilet at the start of that segment and when I came back it was done. Oh I know they meant well, but even so. It was all thoroughly miserable, and more than a little frustrating.

But there was one clear winner, and that was Iceland. The deep, distinct voice of Daði Freyr Pétursson is perhaps the best aspect of ‘Think About Things’, but really, as a package you can’t fault it. The the sharp, Jamiroquai-esque hooks, the eighties synths, the catchy melody, the close part harmonies…and, of course, the video, in which Pétursson and his gang interrupt a family recital in order to frighten assorted aunts and grandparents. Why not intersperse with reactions from Doctor Who characters, I thought? So I did. Well, anything to keep Jackie Tyler away from the drinks cabinet. You know how she gets after she’s had a few.

—

2. Everybody’s Been At The Helium (May 2020)

If there’s one thing we love doing here at Brian of Morbius, it’s ruining classic scenes. You know, the ones that make people cry. I did it earlier this year by adding a laugh track to the end of ‘Doomsday’. I reimagined the Eleventh Doctor as a creepy stalker. Oh, and I’ve made Clara fart. So taking classic scenes and cranking up the pitch so they all have squeaky voices? Why didn’t I do this years ago?

Largely because I didn’t really know how to do it. The process basically refined itself during lockdown, through other projects. It was simply a matter of finding appropriate footage (which exists in abundance; I was spoilt for choice) and sequencing it. There will inevitably a be a follow-up, probably starring Capaldi, but while you’re waiting for that you can enjoy the sight of River Song losing her rag like a prodigious eight-year-old in a year school production. Meanwhile somebody on YouTube pointed out that it sounded like those Haribo commercials where they overdub sweet-munching adults with the voices of children – and that’s exactly what I was trying to emulate, so job done.

—

3. Sesame Street’s Wegman Dogs Do David Lynch (June 2020)

I loved Sesame Street. Particularly as a teenager. The catchy songs, the bright and colourful direction, the unexpected celebrity cameos, and perhaps more than anything the sheer variety of what was on offer. I can still remember the moment in my grandmother’s house when we watched the full length version of ‘Put Down The Duckie’ – a song I’m still able to quote, almost word for word, nearly thirty years after I first heard it – and marvelled at the presence of John Candy, Ellen De Generes and Jeremy Sodding Irons.

But variety can be a double-edged sword, and there was one element of Sesame Street I always felt was tonally off. I’m talking about the dogs. You remember. The Weimeraners. They’d appear in regular situations – or rather their heads would appear, superimposed onto human bodies by William Wegman, who also owned the dogs he filmed. And hence we would watch the ‘dogs’ bake cakes and paint houses and do god knows what else, accompanied by cheesy musak and some absurd narration – thanks in no small part to Wegman’s deadpan, borderline creepy delivery.

If you still don’t know what I’m talking about and would like to watch an untainted clip before moving on to the below, then here is a good place to start. Anyway, something about this series always sat uncomfortably with me, and it wasn’t until years later that I figured out what it was. Because this is essentially David Lynch’s Rabbits, years before its time. And so I set about Lynchifying some of the Wegman scenes, as best I could. The results are mixed, but I think the laugh track probably helps. If nothing else you will now get to experience this Children’s Television Workshop staple the same way it was always playing in my head, so I suppose we can call that a win. Oh, and the skipping children? That’s a nod to Lynch as well. If you’re familiar with his early work, you’ll know why.

—

4. The Thirteenth Doctor Reveal: Revisited (July 2020)

We’ve been here before, haven’t we? Oh, I don’t mean the reveal. You know, the one that broke the internet during the Wimbledon final and had many fans leap for joy while others cried into their strawberries. Suffice it to say that the nation’s collective jaw well and truly dropped: when, some months later, I married up the promo clip with footage from series 8, jaws dropped rather less, but people were at least amused, and it became one of my most popular videos, at least on Facebook.

Fast forward to July this year, and in need of another video to post, I opted to do it again, only this time…well, you’ll see. And don’t panic – the Doctor has been here before, and there’s usually another TARDIS hanging around somewhere.

Have I Got Whos For You (election omnibus edition)

As I write this, they’re still counting the ballots. Thus we open, perhaps inevitably, with a NASA update.

Waiting for this thing to wrap is like waiting for a new series of Doctor Who. Ninety per cent of it is simply reading arguments on Twitter, casually dissecting soundbites, tossing out manufactured evidence of hidden agendas and realising that whatever the end result, you’re going to have a whole bunch of people who aren’t happy with it. And inevitably James Corden is going to show up somewhere. It is tedious, this game of hourly refreshes and working out how fast the numbers are rising. And we endure it with the same morbid fascination we assign to a car crash, only this is considerably nastier. And so we endlessly swipe down on the phone, hoping that the display will refresh with something new and interesting and perhaps even definitive, and when it doesn’t we go back to the box sets.

“No, it’s just you need something to take your mind off it. Now, which one do you want to watch?”

Doctor Who has its fair share of displaced despots, of course. They usually come to a bad end. Sometimes they’re thrown from the roofs of convention centres. More often they’ll see the light at the eleventh hour, early enough for redemption, if not salvation. Usually they’re trying to forge a pact with the Cybermen, or (even more foolishly) the Daleks; these people have clearly never watched the show. But they have one thing in common: they usually die alone.

Even Fox News, who we thought would be stalwart Trump supporters to the end, have been gradually shifting their stance ever since the moment it became apparent that he might actually come in second. It began some months ago with a rare editorial that appeared to condemn his handling of certain issues, and then over the last few days there have been pockets of anomalies that have instantly trended: most notorious, the early calling of Arizona that prompted a furious phone call from Trump to Rupert Murdoch. It’s by no means done and dusted – I’ve had a friend tell me just this morning that he’s sat through half an hour of rhetoric that to all intents and purposes was an incitement to violence – but even within that there are pepperings of disapproval, the suggestion that he should accept defeat with dignity, which is a little like asking Bruno Tonioli to tone down the theatrics.

If I were an optimist I’d say that it reflects a more considered, editorially balanced stance, one that even leans in the direction of impartiality. But the likely truth is that Fox are the rats deserting the sinking ship. They called this months ago, and have spent the build-up to the election – and its immediate aftermath – in a gradual shift away from the apparent losers, mixed in with the same dogged approval in the vain hopes that we wouldn’t notice. And meanwhile, having lost all but his fiercest defenders, Trump remains, increasingly isolated and shouting at the advancing waves, insisting that he can win this even as every hour that passes only seems to reinforce the likelihood that he cannot.

“I STILL HAVE CONTROL OF THE CRUCIBLE!”

Did they cheat? Well, I’m really not in a position to say whether there’s been mail-in fraud: I’ve yet to see any evidence beyond viral videos of ballot burning that were later debunked, and whenever anyone from the GOP is asked to produce anything that’s actually credible the result is a spaghetti western’s worth of tumbleweed. Could it be that they’re just so determined to win at all costs they’ll say anything they like and hope that if they say it with sufficient volume and frequency, people will start believing it? Probably. It worked for Nigel Farage. It worked for the Mail. It probably works for Kim Jong-Un. And it rubs off. I’m not saying that everyone who voted for him is a deluded idiot – right or wrong, I suspect that it’s possible to come to the conclusion that he’s the right man for the job from a position of rational intelligence, as opposed to the slavish adulation that won him the vote. But the sensible people aren’t the ones who appear on TV. Certainly the image of Trump supporters, frantically bombarding the polling stations in undeclared states – demanding that all activity cease in states where he was winning and ardently continue in states where he was losing – brought one particular recollection to mind.

While all this has been going on, the UK has watched with a mixture of mirth and revulsion. The fact that America seems to be on the verge of a civil war is enough to conjure a certain sense of already seen, as the French might have said: when it comes to divisive political gambits that split the country we have form, I don’t think we’re in any position to be smug about it. Certainly the bulk of British people I’ve encountered online seem to see Trump as a joke, but he has his defendants, and they are as ardent (and frequently as ill-informed) as many of their Transatlantic counterparts. It all gets a little depressing when you’re scrolling through a Facebook feed to look for entertainment news, and everyone and their grandmother has an opinion about the election, and most of the time they can’t actually spell. But hey, at least there’s a new series of The Mandalorian.

“Yeah, they want it back now.”

Speaking of entertainment news, it was mostly about one man this week: the Hollywood legend and whisky aficionado (and, we must acknowledge, beater of women) that is Sean Connery. The first man to play James Bond on the big screen, he remains for many the definitive 007 (although the definitive Bond film is arguably The Spy Who Loved Me; certainly that’s the best of them). In later years his career was defined by memorable supporting roles in average films – The Untouchables springs to mind – along with a few absolute clangers (step forward, The Avengers) and one or two genuine classics (Finding Forrester).

But there was a point at which Connery ceased to be an actor and became an icon. It happens to many of the best: it’s happened to Michael Caine, who, as good as he is in the likes of Children of Men, is always playing Michael Caine. Similarly, at an unspecified point in cinema, right about the time he became a national treasure, Sean Connery largely stopped playing characters and started playing Sean Connery. And it didn’t matter whether he was playing Richard the Lionheart, Allan Quatermain, or Indiana Jones’ dad.

“What about the boat? We’re not going on the boat?”

Connery was, of course, one of those people we thought would never leave us, who lived out his twilight years quietly on the other side of the ocean, except when the press wanted a soundbite about Scottish independence. It is difficult to imagine Trump going gently into that good night: he’s more the David Tennant type, thrashing and screaming and eking out every last available second of his allocated time, arguably overstaying his welcome, before standing alone, even as he can hear the knocks on the door, murmuring “I don’t wanna go…”

If nothing else, it’s taken our minds off Covid, inasmuch as anything really can. We’ve supposedly entered Lockdown 2.0, although I’m really not sure how that works because we never really had a 1.1 or 1.4 or any sort of beta, unless you count the regional isolation programmes that hit the north of England in September and October. Indeed, the government is keen to avoid the word ‘lockdown’, precisely because of the negative connotations it brings to mind, and prefers to call it an advanced containment programme or something else I can’t be bothered to Google.

Myself, I prefer to call a spade a spade (is that racist now? Please tell me if it is; I can’t find a reliable source). Apart from bubbles and schools, it’s more or less as it was. The pubs are closed, and we’re not allowed to go out, except to exercise and acquire essentials. I guess it’s back to the Series 10 rewatch.

“You’ve been panic buying, haven’t you?”