Crusoe in Kent

I'm grateful to Scott Andrews for the news that the many of the sets, props and weapons created by Production Designer Jonathan Lee for Crusoe have been shipped from South Africa to the UK. The sets have been reconstructed as an adventure play attraction at Groombridge Place near Tunbridge Wells (these images are Jonathan's concept sketches, not views of the park itself; I haven't seen any of those).

From their press release:

A desert island from a TV blockbuster has been recreated using props and artefacts which were shipped all the way from South Africa and the Indian Ocean.

Container loads of Robinson Crusoe’s belongings from the TV series ‘Crusoe’- which was shown on television screens at Christmas and starred Sean Bean, Sam Neill, Philip Winchester and Joss Ackland – have been delivered to Groombridge Place, near Tunbridge Wells, for the new attraction ‘Crusoe’s World’...

...Two tree houses have been built high in the trees linked together with rope bridges and a central viewing tower. They are on several levels with decking and platforms and the houses are sheltered under sail roofs. There is a look-out post high above one of the tree houses, providing fabulous views over the canal, open countryside and the steam trains of the Spa Valley Railway.

Actual props from the film, including Crusoe’s fishing equipment, cooking pots, catapult, boats, barrels, furniture and dummy weapons, are there for visitors to create a little make-believe on their very own desert island.

The Crusoe page on the NBC website is still live, and you can see more of Jonathan's concept work here if you're so inclined.

Disappointments and Discoveries

Two things to talk about, here. One, a movie I had some expectations for, the other a novel reminding me that literary fiction need not be the turnoff that so many literary novels have made it into. By which I mean the kind of literary novels you get when bad poets have access to too much paper.

Clash of the Titans. I finally got to see it. When I posted the trailer here sometime late last year, I thought it had the look of a promising romp. So WTF went wrong?

How do you screw up Clash of the Titans? It's got a flying horse. It's got a Gorgon. It's got an effing Kraken, for God's sake. It's got an underdog hero and a cataclysmic love story and its Big Theme is nothing less than a standoff for dominance between Man and the gods. The guys get the most flattering wardrobe in all of human history, and the women the most feminised. All pleats and bare arms and classic hairstyling. Like a skin care ad set in heaven. Or a Dove commercial without the token fat one.

But... ay. So much action, and so little suspense. So many people just saying stuff, while you struggle to stay tuned in. So much sweeping camera movement that takes you nowhere and tells you nothing when you get there. A protagonist who neither responds to events nor directs them forward, but is just carried along to wherever the story needs him to be next. All the set-pieces were adequately done, but strung together it was like everything always turned into a battle. Perseus is a guy who can't go to the fridge for a bottle of milk without having to fight off a horde of something-or-other. To me it felt like something written by gamers, where the main character is an empty vessel for the player, and the story objectives only matter to the extent that they give you somewhere to be heading for while shit falls out of the sky or bursts through the walls.

Some people in Hollywood make a big thing of 'the hero's journey' because you can find it in Joseph Campbell's book and someone on an expensive writing course once made them believe it was a secret key to something. The script appears to have been endlessly rehashed with the Hero's Journey in mind and none of the versions did what it needed to do, which was simply to make it Perseus's story. Not just by explaining to the audience what Perseus wants, but by making the audience want it too.

Last year I got a sneak of a late draft of the screenplay that Lawrence Kasdan had worked over, but I didn't look at it then. Didn't want to spoil what was coming. I looked at it after seeing the film, thinking that maybe here was one of those stories of decent writing trashed by unsympathetic development; but the narrative problems run deep into the film's history, it seems. 12 pages in (all completely different from the movie) and you still haven't met anyone to care about. Just try that in TV.

So a word now for Sarah Hall's novel The Electric Michelangelo. Which you'd think would belong in an unrelated universe but since the universe in question is the one inside my head, I don't see why they can't go together.

It's a long time since I picked up a Booker Prize contender that didn't ultimately disappoint. I'm not saying there's been nothing good out there, more that my inclination to sample has dwindled away. Life's too short not to learn from your let-downs.

I've written before about 'literary novel fade', that phenomenon where you're drawn in by Fine Writing only to realise that you're in the hands of a stylist whose storytelling skills won't carry them the distance. I've been caught by it quite a few times. So I don't know what made me pick up The Electric Michelangelo.

Yes I do. It was the title, the milieu, and the few lines of clean strong prose that I sampled in the bookstore. I didn't even notice the 'Man Booker Prize Finalist' endorsement until after I'd made my decision.

(Btw, for those outside the UK, the Man Booker Prize isn't an award aimed only at men. There is a women-only literary award, called the Orange Prize for Fiction. Women can win the Man Booker Prize, and often do, but men don't get a look in on the Orange. Which is a great for stoking an argument in the pub.)

Anyone familiar with my own back-catalogue will know that I'm a sucker for a windy seaside town in the off-season, for the atmosphere of carnivals, sideshows, and backstage theatrics. Add a whiff of bygone times to any of the above, and you've a good chance of getting my attention. HBO's Carnivale, Nightmare Alley, The Illustrated Man, Tod Browning's Freaks. May I also direct you to the late Tom Reamy's brilliant Bradburyesque fantasy Blind Voices.

The Electric Michelangelo follows Cy Parks from a Morecambe childhood helping out in his mother's guest house, through his apprenticeship to a fierce and complicated local tattooist, to the boardwalks of Brooklyn's Coney Island in the 1920s where, working his trade under the name of The Electric Michelangelo, he meets Grace, a circus rider. You instinctively understand his fascination with Grace when you realise that, without any forced meaning, she embodies many of his life's issues.

Sarah Hall's prose is dense and textured without being pretentious, her narrative voice strong. I know she's researched her world - the treacherous Morecambe sands were the backdrop for my own Nightmare, with Angel - and she's researched her subject.

Some might compare it to Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus, which I found disappointing. Michelangelo's feminist concerns are buried deep in the texture of the fiction, and instead of fading, Hall ramps it up for a satisfying final act. There's retribution and deliverance, in a tone that's either Gothic or Jacobean and I can't make my mind up which.

But in my world, that's a rather good choice to be given.

As ever in these matters, your mileage may vary.

Bitch-slapped Bimbos and Silent Engineers (2)

Monday's Chimera screening had a satisfying turnout and the evening ran smoothly, with great atmosphere. There was an audience flyer which included the entirety of a long Time Out review from 1991 that I hadn't seen before (Fliss Coombes and Naomi Phillipson, handling publicity for Zenith and Anglia respectively, had sent me all the cuttings at the time, and to this day I've never looked at any of them). Dick Fiddy set the scene and then I did a very brief intro, probably recycling the same joke from nineteen years ago, and then off we went. Projection was excellent and the show looked and sounded better than I've ever seen it.

The source must have been a transmission master tape - it carried electronic cue dots, those tiny squares in the top right-hand corner of the image that give the Transmission Controller a minute's warning of an impending commercial break. It was a call to action for everyone involved in the next three and a half minutes - network engineers, telecine operators, VTR department, continuity announcer. I started my career in the Presentation suite, and the sight of a cue dot takes me right back.

After the first couple of episodes, there was a short interval. I went up to the green room where Lawrence Gordon Clark had just arrived and was signing DVD sleeves. He hasn't changed at all! And he was delighted with the evening, as was I. Especially since they gave us loads of beer and we were able to take it into the theatre for the second half.


During the Q&A at the end, it emerged that 50% of the audience were seeing the show for the first time. Others in the course of the evening spoke up about its impact on them at an impressionable age. The consensus seemed to be that the show still holds its own, and that Nigel Hess's melancholic score added a dimension of emotional complexity that was enhanced by theatrical presentation.

For my part, I think I actually appreciated it for the first time ever. Details I was unhappy with at the time kinda faded back into their proper places. It's like some big public sculpture where I finally got far enough away to turn back and see it as others experienced it, as a whole. I was taken aback by the degree to which it reflected and challenged the ethos of the late 80s, that greed-driven, ruthless, and anti-society era, far more so than if we'd set out with an actual agenda to engage with 'Thatcher's Britain'.

I met up for the first time with Good Dog, blogger extraordinaire whose true identity I've now taken a blood oath to protect, lest it interfere with his ability to fight crime. Malcolm Brown, friend and co-worker from my old Granada Presentation days, had come into town to be there, as had my daughter and one of her pals, and with Lawrence we went into the bar afterwards and stayed until they chucked us out.

Bitch-slapped Bimbos and Silent Engineers

Read on and all will be explained. After a fashion. I promise.

But first a reminder that this coming Monday (July 5th, 2010) they're screening all four episodes of Chimera at the BFI Southbank, formerly the National Film Theatre, followed by a Q&A with director Lawrence Gordon Clark and me.

The same day also sees the release of the Region 2 DVD. Sad news for the guy who's been selling pirated copies on eBay for the past few years, good for anyone who's been waiting for the real thing. And apparently some people have, which brightened my day when I heard it. When you work on a piece of TV drama you feel all revved-up and committed, like you're carving a monument for the ages; a few weeks after it's been on the air, it's more like you wrote it on water.

And if you're like me, you can't look at your own stuff with any objectivity. All you can see are the flaws and lapses, the things that you wish you'd handled better or could go back and fix. The same things that many critics take for their raw material. Critics have a remit to entertain, like everyone else who writes for money, and if you rush to them looking for affirmation you're looking in the wrong place.

So a writing career is a weird rollercoaster of elation and depression; the sheer joy of making a show, and the sense of gloom as it retreats into the past and the world's population doesn't line up to shake your hand and tearfully swear that what you wrote means more to them than the Bible. Followed by all the anxiety and ego involved in trying to set up another.

The fact is - and it's taken me a long time to find this out - your real audience is a silent one. A great, shy beast that rarely breaks cover, and is largely unaware of your existence. Indifferent to it, even. Yours is a name that just passes in the credits like everyone else's. What they care about is this moment in their lives where they were struck by what they saw and that they've remembered ever since.

To be the silent engineer of such a moment has a satisfaction to it. It's something apart from fame. Especially since fame used to be the consequence of doing something remarkable, but now it's not. It just means that some reality producer thinks that enough people will dislike you on sight to stick around to see you getting slapped.

I can remember a time before the VHS recorder when almost anything written for British TV had no afterlife at all. Repeats were despised by viewers and everything instantly became archive material, where the archive was seen as a wastebin of little value. That's why so much stuff got wiped or junked, prints burned, negatives recycled for their silver. Copies might be made for export but they were usually of crappy quality, converted to local standards or scanned (badly) to 16mm. Only Lew Grade's ITC shows and - perversely - some long-forgotten half-hour series of the 1950s still look good because they were shot on 35mm, in the way that Mathew Brady's full-plate civil war photographs are sharper and contain more rich detail than your last-year's holiday snaps.

Even when home recording had taken off, it was a while before TV's back catalogue became commercial. Distributors assumed that retail and rental were only going to work for movies. Chimera had a brief VHS existence in an over-truncated 'feature' version edited for export and retitled by its American distributors as (God help us) Monkey Boy. Other than that and the pirate versions, it's been unseen for most of the past couple of decades. At the time I shelled out for a couple of high-end tapes to make my own off-air copy, but it stayed on the shelf. I'm not in the habit of replaying my old stuff like some latter-day Norma Desmond.

But I got an advance copy of the two-disc set a couple of days ago, and I can give you a report. The transfer's sharp and clean and looks great. 'Contains moderate gore'. And as for the extras - far from being the silent engineer, I'm all over the DVD set like a clingy drunk.

There's a reason for this. It was my first big show and I was all over the production like a clingy drunk, too. Lawrence and everyone on the team made me welcome, and I took full advantage. I showed up everywhere with my video camera and when production wrapped, I made off with all the stills, slides and presskits I could carry. Add the script of the novel's 1985 radio adaptation and an on-camera interview that I did for a prescient Revelation Films around the time they were mastering their full-length Oktober release, and it's no surprise if I keep bobbing up in the extras like the world's biggest attention whore.

'Tain't so, honest. I'm more one for backing shyly into the limelight, protesting faintly as I go.

Happy Birthday, Uncle Ray

Ray Harryhausen is 90 today. It says so on my Simpsons calendar and my Simpsons calendar don't lie.

There was a suitably 'star-studded' tribute at BFI South Bank - formerly the NFT - last week, and there's a cracking Harryhausen exhibition titled The Fantastical Worlds of Ray Harryhausen at the Academy building on Wilshire Boulevard. I've seen a lot of the stuff before in other RH exhibitions in Bradford and the late, lamented Museum of the Moving Image in London, but it's the most comprehensive.

Because of the way the foam rots and the armatures get cannibalised, what survives has the air of precious medieval relics... for me the high spot was the stripped armature of the 7th Voyage cyclops, one leg missing, on Ray's actual animation bench. Some of the stuff I've seen before; three of the skeletons from Jason (one of them, if I recall correctly, repurposed from Sinbad) and some hard rubber 'stand in' models cast from the moulds and used for lighting, but lots that I hadn't... a crumbly squid, the flying saucers (tiny!), some breakaway model sets, and loads of original sketches and storyboards.

My friend Archie Tait attended the London tribute and reckons that Harryhausen is one of the most important artists of the 20th century. And I reckon Archie's right. His films are unique, and will remain so; never again will a mainstream commercial feature be handcrafted with one person supplying so much of the concept, design, fabrication, execution, and performance. He may have had assistants on the original Clash of the Titans, but that was nothing compared to the anonymous flashmob of (undoubtedly talented) animators involved in the remake.

I've seen Ray speak once and had the honour of interviewing him onstage twice. And in Stockport's restored art deco Plaza Cinema I introduced him and Forry Ackerman when they spoke before a Festival screening of the restored print of King Kong.

Proudest moment? When he walked over to me in the hotel bar, jabbed me in the chest, and said, "I remember you! From Preston!"

(He'd accepted an invitation to visit the Preston SF group about three years before; he, his wife Diana, and family friend Philip Strick lodged at the small hotel in my village.)

The Academy exhibition runs until August 22nd. In the meantime, another exhibition opens today at the London Film Museum housed in the old County Hall building, south of the river. It's called Ray Harryhausen - Myths and Legends and I believe it's a touring collection that I've seen under that name before.

But - and this is hot news, apparently, just announced - Ray is offering to donate his archive and the accumulated materials of a life's work to the National Media Museum in Bradford. According to the BBC news website:

Harryhausen said: "Now I have reached 90 it is important, certainly in my profession which does not have a reputation for looking after cinematic artefacts, to preserve my art in all its forms - models, drawings, equipment etc, and that this will be available for future generations."

Paul Goodman, head of collections and knowledge at the National Media Museum, said: "With our proven expertise in caring for, exhibiting and interpreting such a range of artefacts, the museum is an ideal place for this extensive and remarkable archive."

How cool is that?


As a bonus at the Academy, down in the lobby on Wilshire, there's a similar exhibition of stuff honouring Chuck Jones. Which is a peek into another universe of brilliance, that I'll say something about another time.

In Shatner's Footsteps

I finally made it to the Batcave. My third attempt.

The Satnav was still insisting on directing me up closed roads through Griffith Park. This time, I made a hand-drawn map from Google instead. On the Canyon Road approach there was no signage and in the park itself no trail maps or any information at all.

So I set off up the main track. It climbed steeply for about a mile and a half until I was up level with the Hollywood sign, which is in the park not far away. At that point the track went two ways so I asked the next person if they knew which way the caves were.

He pointed back down the way I'd come... there was another trail from the parking lot, and I hadn't seen it. So I went all the way back down, and in the end all turned out for the best... the caves are no more than a ten-minute walk from the parking so as a hike, that would have been a bit of a squib.

The 'caves' are actually a short tunnel through an outcrop of rock in of a dead-ended canyon that's reckoned to be one of the most-used locations in Hollywood history... zillions of Westerns, The Lone Ranger, the old Kirk Alyn Superman serial, The Searchers, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, B-movie horrors like Robot Monster, the Douglas Fairbanks Robin Hood... as well as various alien planets in Star Trek.

The tunnel's outermost entrance was dressed to become the Batcave's exit in the '60s TV show. Each week, in the same recycled sequence, the Batmobile would emerge from the cave and head for 'Gotham City, 14 Miles'. The sequence was undercranked to speed up the action; the entrance is so narrow that Barris's Batmobile must have backed in with only a few inches' clearance.

(You can find my birthday Batmobile-stalking post here)

Standing in the canyon and looking back, you get the best-ever view of the Hollywood sign. The area is part of the 'Hollywoodland' development-that-never-was, which the sign was originally created to promote.

I suppose I could go and seek out 'stately Wayne manor' - there were reports that the building used for the exterior establishing shots burned down in 2005, but they were apparently mistaken. A lookalike building burned, but SWM was a few doors down the street.

Otherwise, I seem to have run out of Batstuff to look for.

Please Touch

So there we were, at the Getty Villa. It's quite a place. Situated on the Pacific Coast Highway between Santa Monica and Malibu, it's like the little-brother museum to the spectacular Getty Center.

The Getty Center's further inland, on a hilltop overlooking the Sepulveda Pass, and looking like Tony Stark's place in the Iron Man movies. You even reach it by a private monorail. The Villa, on the other hand, can't be seen from the road. That, plus the fact that you can't just show up but have to book a timed ticket online to get in, led me to expect something comparatively modest.

Idiot that I am.

The numbers are controlled because the access is tricky, but the museum isn't small and once you're in you can stay all day, if you're inclined. The villa was designed and built to house the classical artefacts of the Getty collection; vases, bronzes, marbles and frescoes, with the odd mummy or case of jewellery thrown in for good measure. The design is based on a country house in Herculaneum that was buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Right there, in the Malibu hills. A walk around it wipes away two thousand years or more, to give you a gut feeling of what complex, sophisticated people the creators and owners of these objects were.

The hillside setting incorporates a peristyle, one of those enclosed Roman gardens with a long pool where guys in togas chased concubines and people lay around eating grapes off the bunch. Or something like that.

When we go to a museum or a gallery we usually fix a time to meet and then wander off separately, so we can each browse at our own pace. In an alcove at the end of the peristyle, away from the main body of the museum, I found an alcove. In the alcove stood a tall marble statue, and on the wall by the statue was a plaque that read PLEASE TOUCH in both normal script and braille.

The marble was a 1920s copy of a Canova original. As the plaque went on to explain, the purpose in placing it there was to give people the opportunity to feel the various textures of the stone and to appreciate the work of the sculptor in a tactile way. In the main rooms of the museum there were few barriers and you could get right up close to the objects, but contact was forbidden... there were notices explaining how the grease and oils in skin can bollix up stone. I've seen those shiny-footed saints in Rome and I know that it's true.

But I didn't take advantage. Here's why.

Imagine you're at the Villa. You got your timed ticket and you've been walking around the galleries, and you're taking time out for a stroll to the end of the Roman garden. At the end of the peristyle you turn the corner to be confronted by the sight of a middle-aged English bloke standing on tiptoe with his eyes closed, running his hands all over this...


I believe my point is made.

Michael Jackson, One Year On...

I'm not a fan of the talented-but-damaged song-and-dance performer, but nevertheless...


see more Lol Celebs

The Forgotten

ABC have scheduled the two unshown episodes of The Forgotten for back-to-back broadcast on the evening of Saturday, July 3rd. They're called Designer Jane and Living Doe.

I was off the show and in development on another project when the news of cancellation came through, but I saw how the episode order was rejigged so that creator Mark Friedman could give closure to the series-long arc involving the missing daughter of lead character Alex Donovan.

I'm glad that happened. And I'm glad the unaired episodes will get a screening. It's only fair to the audience.

It's easy to forget that even when a show doesn't perform to a network's satisfaction, by any human or historical measure its audience is still enormous. In a statistic that I've just made up, more people watched one episode of The Forgotten (or Pushing Daisies, or Eli Stone, to name two other shows cancelled with episodes unbroadcast) than saw Victorian superstar Sir Henry Irving perform in his lifetime. Okay, maybe that's a bit dodgy. But swap Henry Irving for Edmund Kean and I'll stand my ground.

Most showrunners have a destination in mind so that they can, when the writing's on the wall, plan some kind of closure for their creation. But there are those where it seems that the showrunner deliberately does a bad job in order to spite the network.

Life exited with grace, spoiled only a little by the fact that Sarah Shahi's pregnancy prevented her from playing a greater role in the last few episodes. Pushing Daises bowed out with warmth and charm, when we eventually got to see the finale.

But Deadwood? If that's how you say goodbye, I'd rather you didn't bother.

Brian Clemens, OBE

Delighted to hear confirmation of the OBE for Brian Clemens in the Queen's Birthday Honours List. I'm no big royalist but these are national honours and, much as I'd like to imagine Her Maj slipping in an Avengers DVD to keep the grandkids entertained, there's more at work here than just patronage and whim.

Although it's fascinating to see the cultural forces at work, determining who gets what. Awards are an odd mixture of politics, crowd-pleasing, and genuine appreciation of merit. Punch a clock on a soap for long enough and you'll qualify as a national treasure. Recognition for those with significant but behind-the-scenes achievements is much more hard-won.

Play heroes and you get a knighthood; create those heroes and they stand you in a different line. In BAFTA's case they even shunt your awards to a different night, the one that no one watches.

But that's a whole nother argument.

Lost and the Long-Distance Plan

I dropped out of Lost a couple of seasons ago, after the introduction of the flash-forwards (which drew a gasp of admiration out of me when they reversed all my assumptions with the first one) but before they started with the sideways-flashes. I was curious about how they'd wind it up, but I'd been too long out of the game to follow the finale so I waited and then went looking to read the after-show spoilers instead.

In the course of which I came across this piece in which Kay Reindl tackles the assertion (by a novelist) that the Lost writing team should have carried a novelist or two, to show them how it should be done.

People, I've done both - I made a better-than-good living out of my novels through the 80s and 90s - and she's right. Try to make episodic TV with just a novelist's tools and you'll be chewed up and spat out, left nursing wounds that you'll be showing to the faithful at literary festivals for the rest of your life.

My favourite part about working as a novelist is that of being an armchair general, in that I can plan a perfect campaign and designate the outcome. Whereas the American TV series is like a feuilleton whose fate, length and scope will depend on factors that can't be predicted with any accuracy. You put all of your initial energies into getting it sold and while you may have a grand design in mind, that's like the battle plan that never survives the first exchange of fire. You're navigating a sea of executives, viewer responses, and unpredictable production developments. There's no way to account for new ideas you may have along the way, or the contributions of of your creative coworkers whose ideas may take you in directions you didn't foresee, but which you'd be stupid to pass up because having such ideas is what they're there for.

Ideally you should have an ultimate destination in mind, in the form of a vision of your finale that you keep in your back pocket and put into the works on the day you hear you're being cancelled. A classic example would be the spectre of the one-armed man that always stayed out of reach throughout The Fugitive. An early Flann O'Brien Third Policeman hint suggests that this conceit was the back-pocket idea in the Lost showrunners' minds from the beginning (leaving them with little choice but evasion or denial when some fans predicted the 'correct' outcome), but we can be sure that everything in between was live juggling, and the various closures and resolutions were a matter of tidying-up the playground to the best extent possible.

In an early post, I wrote:

For me it can never end successfully with a make-sense-of-it-all revelation, any more than The Prisoner could... it's all about dread and uncertainty and wondering about what's on the other side of the door. As Stephen King points out in Danse Macabre, the moment you actually open the door all that wonder condenses down into whatever's there.

The only good ending I can imagine is something like, they find a box that's the answer to everything, look inside it and go "Wow." Like the moment in Lost in Translation where Bill Murray whispers something to Scarlett Johannsen that makes everything OK, and we all have ideas about what it might have been that are unique to ourselves, and which are best not shared. Some people won't have that... a quick Lost in Translation Google shows messageboards with people wanting tips on how they can boost the soundtrack enough to hear what Murray says.

If you saw Lost as a puzzle to be solved, then I guess you were disappointed. If you saw it as a journey - well, to quote Shakespeare, journeys end in lovers meeting.

Which, I gather from the spoilers, is what you got.

Arise, Sir Hood

Congratulations to Sir Patrick Stewart, knighted today. He used the occasion to give credit to the English teacher who opened his eyes to literature and first encouraged him to perform.

It's no surprise; many a career in the arts can be traced back to the influence of a charismatic and inspiring figure in the classroom.

So Roy Bateman, if there's any slim chance you're reading this - thanks, and if you'll tell me where to send it I really will return the copy of Doctor Faustus that you lent me.