Stand by for Action

Okay, maybe that's a bit too dramatic... but there are some changes ahead. I started this blog almost by fluke, not really intending to do anything with it, hence the dumb name and the dumb picture... I'd created a Google identity so that I could comment on other people's postings, and one day when I was logging in I clicked on some kind of 'create your own blog' button out of sheer curiosity. Five minutes later, the damned thing was online. Stupid name, stupid picture, and the first of my many stupid thoughts.

I've stuck with this minimalist blogger template for three years now. I mean, it does the job, and have you seen some of the others? But in the near future that's about to change.

Web designmeister Paul Drummond has been overhauling and rebuilding my online presence, and he'll shortly be turning his attention to the blog with a view to interlinking the two. If you're a regular visitor, don't worry, you won't need to do anything. The blog will still be right here, just with new teeth and a facelift.

And by the way, if you are a regular visitor... thanks.

Children's TV: a Rant from the Past

Both my website and this blog are being lined up for a design overhaul, and with content in mind I've been sifting through some old material. I don't know what occasioned this rant, but the Thunderbirds movie reference dates it.

I could have made changes... but nah.

The few times I've brushed up against children's television drama I've come away immensely frustrated at the received wisdoms and operating assumptions of those in charge of the production process. The general view seems to be that children's drama has to be drama about and featuring children. There's no concept of the adult avatar who'll embody a child's fantasies of empowerment, regardless of the fact that this principle has been at the heart of juvenile fiction since God Knows When. So from Tarzan, Zorro, Flash Gordon, Robin Hood, Roy Rogers, Biggles, Superman, even Doctor Who, they deduce nothing. From comics and computer games, they deduce nothing. From the kids' choice of movies when they're in BLOCKBUSTER, they deduce nothing.

Apparently the script for the new THUNDERBIRDS movie has the Tracy family stranded in space to be rescued by a 12-year-old Alan.

And I still haven't forgiven those bastards who decided that TV's Tarzan needed a little friend "for the kids to relate to". What are we supposed to imagine that Tarzan's thinking of? Half the police forces in Europe have spent the last few days chasing an ex-Marine on suspicion of those kinds of urges.

The Artisan Thriller

"Walking into her apartment, both of them laughing at something he'd said, the man made a mock bow for her to precede him, his eyes already seeing the room, darting around it, looking for something to kill her with."

So begins Tony Kenrick's Neon Tough, a novel published in '88 and set against the backdrop of Hong Kong's impending return to Chinese rule. I think it's a great opening line for a suspense thriller, complex and elegant, building a world and a mood and then subverting both, all in a handful of words. In lesser hands it would be the lead-in to some grim procedural of forensic misogyny, but Kenrick's a writer of a different class. Which didn't prevent his American publishers from cutting the line and the entire prologue that followed it.

I can add little in the way of hard info about the man himself... as with the elusive Adam Diment, he seems to have done his stuff and then exited the public stage leaving little in the way of information beyond old press handouts and flap copy.

He produced fourteen novels in a two-decade run. Not everything in the Kenrick oeuvre works for me, quite; for my money The Night-time Guy has an unlikely premise (a hero who's blind, but only in the daytime), while The 81st Site has a slam-bang action set-piece ending that doesn't involve the book's protagonist.

But I find much to enjoy and much to admire in Kenrick's writing, and reckon that the very qualities that make him shine also hampered him commercially. Every book was something different, and versatility can be an obstacle to success in a market where the big names get big by finding something that works and then repeating it, even to the point where the author can step away from the franchise and let someone else drive. The bespoke one-off, the artisan thriller, is rare beast in today's jungle.

Kenrick's last published novel was Glitterbug in 1991. The Madonna/Sean Penn bomb Shanghai Surprise was based on his novel Faraday's Flowers, and it's tempting to imagine that the lacklustre mangling of his material destroyed the will to go on. But I expect the reason was something more... I dunno. Prosaic.

Saw it/Heard it, Can't Quite Believe it

To put it delicately, what passes for normal in LA can seem a little bizarre when you move it out of context. While I'm away from home I tend to email back the odd observational nugget just to liven up the correspondence. Here are a few examples from last month.

"Coming up next. They're blind and armed with swords - two area high schools plan an unusual athletic event." (KNX 1070 NewsRadio)

"And after the break, we're gonna come back and talk about dressing babies up to look like Hitler." (Chelsea Lately, E!)

In the chiller cabinet in Gelson's - HE BREW - THE CHOSEN BEER. Flavours include Genesis Ale, Jewbilation, and Messiah Bold - "the one you've been waiting for"

And on the shelf in the Rite-Aid Drugstore, Glendale: ANTI MONKEY BUTT POWDER. "Relieve the friction of monkey butt and painful butt rash." The same company also produces Lady Anti Monkey Butt.

And then, of course, there's MIKE DIAMOND, THE SMELL-GOOD PLUMBER.

Evolution of an Idea

I've been organising my files and came across this short piece that I wrote about Eleventh Hour for some purpose or other.

With Chimera's impending DVD appearance (news on those features soon, I promise) I thought I'd put it out here. It offers a kind of join-the-dots demonstration of how my thinking went over the sixteen years that separated the two projects.

At the beginning of my career I wrote a miniseries called Chimera, a variant on the Frankenstein story with a cold-hearted scientist as its villain. It made some waves, and through various debates and public events brought me into contact with a lot of real-world science professionals.

I found that these scientists were, almost without exception, sharp, cultured, funny, and great late-night company. They were well-read, they listened to opera, they played musical instruments. Future Nobel prizewinner Paul Nurse was a motorbike nut (and was the guy who first encouraged me to dream up a real-science drama). Biologist Jack Cohen advised sf writers on alien-building and had a daughter who was a dancer. All were genuinely excited to be doing the work they did.

As much as these real scientists shaped my picture of Hood, they also shaped my attitude to science villains. The ruthless, 'playing God' stereotype, arguing that harm can be justified in the name of progress, is a cartoon.

Science's villains are the same recognisably human people as those regular scientists. But they become villains through regular human flaws, not by Nazi logic. They sell out, or screw up. They can bend the truth to suit their paymasters or the policymakers, and call it 'being realistic'. They can be reckless, they can underestimate danger, they can lie to cover their mistakes, they can take desperate measures to cover their lies. But science's villains are characterised by their human failings, not by single-minded immoral intent.

And often they won't even be scientists, but people who co-opt science to their own purposes. CEOs, charlatans, toxic waste dumpers, politicians, lobbyists, thieves, counterfeiters, scammers, conspiracy theorists, drug lords, mobsters.

People like the international hustler and would-be breakthrough human cloner who provided the model for the bad guy in my very first story.

Bootleg Corner

One of the bootleg Eleventh Hour boxed sets has come my way. I won’t say how – it’s not a trade I’m here to encourage – but it wasn’t difficult to get hold of. At first glance the Chinese DVD packaging is way more attractive than the 'official' version, though on closer inspection it's hilarious. There are logos for CBS, Paramount Studios and the Showtime cable network, a long rambling blurb than conflates the stories from three different episodes, small print in Engrish, and a copyright notice that reads DEXTER (TM). They just cut and paste this stuff so it looks right from a distance, the way that the aliens put together Dave Bowman’s apartment in Arthur C Clarke’s 2001 novel.

(In the novel, Bowman takes down a book from the shelf and the pages are all slightly out of focus. Brilliant detail.)

When I put any one of the discs in my player, it rattles like a saucepan lid. Still works, though. After two separate copyright theft warnings, from Interpol and the FBI (nice touch!), up comes... the Twentieth Century Fox movie logo and fanfare.

Which means that one way or another they seem to name-check almost every random studio except for Warner Bros, the studio that actually made the show.

The box, which has a nice matt finish with classy part-laminated images, also promises Dolby sound (no) and a Spanish language track (there isn’t). The menus on the discs have a home-made look, but they’re kind of pleasing.

And what of the episodes? I assumed that they’d be ripped and stolen from the Warner Archive release, but they aren’t. All the shows are recorded straight from TV.

In fact they’re probably the torrented versions that appeared online within hours of the original broadcasts. They’re widescreen but they’re heavily compressed and nowhere near Hi Def. When you play an episode, it has the CBS ‘eye’ logo in the corner of the screen – the ad breaks have been cut out but midway through you get flashed-up promos for other shows. Someone’s added switchable subtitle tracks in English and two forms of Chinese.

Worth having? Nah. Keep your money and stay legal. It’s barely a step up from a movie stolen by camcorder and if you’re stupid enough to sit through one of those, consider yourself banned from the blog. You probably think that date-expired seafood is a great bargain. I inadvertently bought something like this once before, when I bid on the first season of Carnivale on eBay, thinking it was the real thing. All it did was persuade me to go to Amazon and pay all over again.

But that box, though – love that box.

The Simpsons and Me

If you read my 'back in LA' post a couple of weeks ago you'll know that while walking in one of the city's State Parks I was met by two Golden Retrievers, dripping wet and happy to share, closely followed by anxious family.

And if you read on into the comments section you'll know that's how I met Michael Price, Co-Executive Producer on The Simpsons.

Last Thursday found me back on the Fox lot, attending a Simpsons table read at Mike's invitation.

Table reads are becoming less common in drama, but in comedy they're a useful tool. The cast and production team sit around a big conference table and there are chairs around the outside of the room for about 30 invited guests who serve as a kind of tryout audience for the jokes. Immediately afterwards in the writers' room, the writing staff dive onto the script like seagulls on fresh roadkill and make it funnier.

It was over in less than an hour and great fun, though a little strange because the voices were all Homer and Bart & co but the people were the people. Hank Azaria and Harry Shearer phoned their parts in - literally, because both were off making movies and participated by speakerphone.

Matt Groening was there, too. If I was Matt Groening, I'd be in the Bahamas having delegated all the heavy lifting to a horde of carefully-selected Oompah Loompahs. But the fact that he wasn't is probably one of the reasons the show has lasted so long.

Bart signed my copy of the script. I wasn't certain if I should ask, but Nancy Cartwright came working the room. I won't give away anything about the story we heard, though it was cool to find out afterwards that my favourite joke was contributed by my host.

At least, that's what he said when I told him.

And there's a funny circularity about this whole thing that only struck me when it was over. One of the reasons I was so happy to see the Retrievers in the park was that our own is so far away, and anyone who's used to walking with a dog can't help finding a walk incomplete without one. It's like going to the Mall without your pants.

(I can tell you, next time I'll be sure and read the label on the cold medicine.)

The thing is, the dog I was missing used to be my dad's dog. We inherited her. Her name is Maggie because he was a big Simpsons fan.


This being California, a temporary resident can rent a dog - though when you add up membership and rental and induction costs, it would be cheaper to buy a puppy and a gun.

Pretty Good, Show Us Your Bum

When we went on Splash Mountain in Disneyland last year, that's what my kid told me to listen out for in the ride music's lyrics. Hear it for yourself...



You can look up the actual words online, but where's the fun in that?

Bryan Talbot, Fantasycon GoH

It's thanks to my old friend Bryan Talbot that I could legitimately put 'model' on my CV, if I were so inclined... back when he was living in Preston and creating The Tale of One Bad Rat, Bryan pressed my entire family into service to help with the photoreference for some of the frames. That's me, the dodgy salesman who tries it on with Helen Potter and succeeds only in wrecking his car, the red 480 that I was driving at the time. My wife sat in for the adult Helen and my daughter posed as Helen-in-childhood. I'm the only one out of the three of us who's recognisable... which makes it rather a shame that these were my moustache-and-mullet days.


Not a bad souvenir of that time in our lives, though.

Now a mailout from the British Fantasy Society tells me that Bryan will be joining Garry Kilworth and Lisa Tuttle as a guest of honour at this year's Fantasycon in September. Here's what they say:

Bryan Talbot has produced underground and alternative comics, notably Brainstorm!, science fiction and superhero stories such as Judge Dredd, Nemesis the Warlock, Teknophage, The Nazz and Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight.

He’s worked on DC Vertigo titles including Hellblazer, Sandman, The Dreaming and Fables and has written and drawn the graphic novels for which he is best known: The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, Heart of Empire, The Tale of One Bad Rat, Alice in Sunderland and Grandville.

For more on all of that, Bryan's site is here.

Still on that Real/Fake Experience Theme

Remember the big fire at Universal Studios in 2008? They lost some backlot structures and library material, all replaceable, and King Kong.

The 'Kongfrontation' attraction, in case you didn’t know it, involved a giant robot that picked up the bridge that your tour tram was crossing, and shook it. Life sized. A giant robot! King Kong! Thirty-seven feet tall! Only slightly less awesome than his Florida counterpart, but only because in Florida you were up in the air in a cable car when the helicopter attack came.

Dwell on that for a moment. Giant robot. Cable car. Helicopter attack.

They're replacing it with something that they believe will be better - a '4D experience', which involves 3D movie projection combined with physical effects. Yes, you'll have to wear glasses.

I went to the theme park last week and used my year pass - from where I am it's not much more than a fifteen minute drive down Ventura Boulevard and I needed a change of scene. I’d sprung for the year pass so that I could drop by and see the Waterworld show whenever the urge took me; it's a live-action stunt spectacular with high falls and explosions that ends with a full-sized seaplane coming in over the back of the set and crashing a few feet in front of the audience. I wasn't going to blow the surprise for you until I saw how heavily they feature the moment in their promotional video.

I thought I'd just do a couple of hours and catch the show but when I got there, it was 'closed for refurbishment'. So I saw the Blues Brothers show (OK) and Terminator 3D (as underwhelming as I remember it - a dimly-projected 3D mini-movie bookended by live action sequences) and then went on the Jurassic Park ride with its sub-Disney animatronics and awesome water plunge, even more awesome when you sit in the front row.

When I came out they announced that there'd be a Waterworld show after all, at 3pm. It’s a slow time of year for the park, with no lines anywhere, but the outdoor auditorium filled up quickly. I reckon it might have been a dress rehearsal for a new cast... it was badly-paced, had missed cues, and two of the boats broke down.

But at least the seaplane did its stuff. And instead of being drawn into the show, I found myself reflecting on what made the rest of it work. When I told my daughter – as big a theme park freak as you’ll ever meet – she wrote back, I actually think it's pretty cool to see a flawed production as long as you've already seen a perfect version - it's interesting to see and highlights the complexity of what they're trying to achieve.

While I was in the park I learned that they're closing the Backdraft fire-effects exhibit (OK, so no big loss - the buildup to the payoff leans heavily on a movie that few people now remember) and replacing it with a Transformers ride. The way they describe it, the Transformers ride is going to be another '4D experience', the same kind of thing as the Spiderman ride in Florida. The feature they're most proud of is the way they've programmed the 3D screens so that the perspective convergence lines shift in sync with the moving carriage to maintain the point of view.

Which, let's be honest, is an impressive feat. But to my mind we're looking at the difference between a museum with amazing authentic stuff in it and one of those 'interactive experience' exhibits full of kids hammering buttons and ignoring the lame snippets of information that come up on screens. Stuff, versus pictures of stuff.

Me, I'd rather see a giant robot or a live seaplane crash any day. But maybe I'm just out of step.

You can read about the new attraction in the LA Times. Apparently the cost of virtual Kong is more than six times than that of rebuilding the animatronic. This is what you'll be missing:


And here's what you'll get.

Oscars, Before and After

I was going to drive down to Hollywood Boulevard last night to take a look at the Oscar preparations, but it was raining fairly steadily ('a storm', in local parlance) and I was frankly not that arsed. At the moment, everything's locked up around there - when I last looked they appeared to be tenting over several blocks because the forecast was for the rain to continue. I didn't even try to get through to Amoeba for a mooch around the world's most amazing DVD section.

I don't think I've ever watched an Oscar TV show before but I suppose I'll watch this one because I'm here. I'm rooting for Bigelow and The Hurt Locker. Despite what I said in an earlier post, I managed to see Avatar (and Sherlock Holmes) before BAFTA voting closed. I think Avatar's okay; a very high level of okay, but best picture? Seriously, no. At the bottom line it's a technically spectacular presentation of a routine fantasy.

Which has no bearing on how the Academy might vote, at all. These are the people who voted Ghandi the Best Costume Design award.

I have a bet on the Oscars. Well, it's not really a bet. I filled out a form at Trader Joe's where you get a $75 voucher if you pick all the winners and yours comes out of the hat.

So, I'm invested.

UPDATE:

F*** me! Do they always draw it out this much? Since this show started I've been able to drive into town, shop, cook dinner, eat and wash up, and it's still going on! It's like having your bone marrow sucked out.

UPDATE 2:

But... Yay! Bigelow and The Hurt Locker!

With those and the other categories my picks all came in, 100%.

Do you see that, Trader Joe?

For Virtual, read 'Nothing There'

Back when I was working on BUGS we grappled with several 'virtual reality' story ideas and none of them ever worked out. We finally concluded that they never would; an action show is about real perils, not perils that you know are merely perceived. When you send your characters into a virtual reality you're essentially asking your audience to empathise with someone watching a movie.

I know there are some people for whom it's all just movement on the screen and it amounts to the same thing, but let's leave those happy morons to their simple pleasures and continue.

If the dangers aren't real for the characters, they aren't real on any level at all. The only time I've ever seen it work is where a disparity or tension between the dream-world and reality is the point of the exercise, and not an inconvenient truth. For example, there's The Thirteenth Floor, based on Daniel Galouye's novel Counterfeit World; Avatar isn't part of this argument, as the characters project into a (to them) physical world, not a virtual one.

The usual element invoked to give weight to a virtual reality story is that creaky old trope of "If you die when you're in there, you die for real out here." There's no point asking why. The answer's only ever going to be some technobabble.