Urban Magic

The Protection of Children Act 1999

Posted on Sunday, November 29th, 2009 in Misc., Writing | 7 Comments

I have always tried to be as non-political as I can when writing this blog, and on this matter in particular, will try and step as carefully as possible, since this is one of those cases where not only can I see both sides of the argument, but I don’t yet know enough about it, and the subject matter is entirely emotive.

I’ve been invited back to give a talk at my old school, which I left about 5 years ago, to a group of children attending as an arts festival thingy.  I’ve given talks at dozens – possibly verging towards the hundreds – of schools in the UK and elsewhere, and naturally agreed because, you know, it’s my old school.  The talk is scheduled to last 45 minutes on a day like any other in February, and my plan, as it stands, is to arrive, go in, say hello to the art teacher who taught me AS-Level Drama, and the mathematics teacher who I drew with when playing chess every Wednesday for 7 years.  (Except for those rare and largely wiped-from-memory Wednesdays when he utterly trounced me.)  I will then, under the beady eye of my old English teacher and, I suspect, a few others, give my talk to the children, and leave.

Now…

… for the first time in my life, I have been sent documentation to fill out under the Protection of Children Act 1999.  I must go into my school and under the beady watchful eye of an employee, give over my passport, birth certificate (which is in my parent’s possession, not mine, owing to a domestic bureaucractic hiccup), P60 from my present employer (I have none) and a recent utility bill showing my current address.  Furthermore, in the form I am requested to supply marital status, bank details, employment status, occupancy status, mother’s maiden name, and a referee to testify to my character.  The school will then pay £31 to a company called Capita who will, on behalf of the criminal records bureau, do a background check on me to ensure that I don’t have any criminal convictions, and after 4 weeks, I will be cleared to give my 45 minute lecture.  This disclosure, according to the government websites I’ve been skim-reading (and I apologise if I have any details wrong here, it has been one of those browsing-the-internet-while-burning-disks weeks) will only apply once, to this one event, on the basis that the next time I’m invited to talk at a school, I may have acquired new convictions.  (I have none, I hasten to add.)

Now…

… I have to step so carefully here, because in principal, I am all in favour of this law.  It is the ultimate, ultimate horror, one so horrifying that we hardly dare speak or write or think of it, the thought that children can be put at risk by the adults that surround them.  No parent would hesitate to take any measures necessary to protect their children, no one with a whit of humanity would expect anything less.

But if I am to deliver my passport, birth certificate etc. in person to every single school I visit, is this not the end of my ever visiting any school outside zones 1-4 in London?  Is this not the end of trips to Dundee and Wrexham, of Bristol and Reading?  How does this affect the Edinburgh Children’s Book Festival, or the festival in Bath?  I have been lecturing at and visiting schools since I was 15 years old; had this law come into force five years earlier, would I have been bound by it when still legally a child and yet also a visiting author?  For 45 minutes of supervised attendance at the school where I studied for 7 years, I must slog to the other side of town with documents I don’t even have to be vetted and cleared of crimes I have not committed and yes, I applaud the protection of children, but I also applaud reason in the execution of law, and I begin to wonder whether we are not teetering on that fine line of a law that could shut down through its sheer complexity and red tape a whole culture of bringing the world the school, as well as the school to the world.

Let me repeat; I lack sufficient information on this subject to make a final judgment, an absolute statement of too-much, too-little.  The protection of children is an unspoken law, the ultimate unspoken law – that children must not be harmed and it is the duty of the old to protect those too young to protect themselves – but I question whether this particular law may not do some damage, in its effort to do good.

I welcome all comments and debate on the subject!

Up

Posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 in Misc. | 1 Comment

There are only two things on TV that make me cry – the Lion King (and who doesn’t?) and footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  The first… well… like I said… who doesn’t… and the second… I guess something about studying the Cold War from beginning to end gives the end a certain climactic resonance.  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.  A lot of TV can induce in me other severe reactions; Elizabeth: the Golden Age gave me an asthma attack within the first ten minutes it was so historically and dramatically bad.  Most Saturday night TV between the hours of 6.30 and 8.30 p.m. induces violent verbal abuse at my long-suffering remote control.  I think possibly my least honourable moment was in that moment in Superman Returns, that moment with that waterfall and that precarious take off and that rising island and that long silence in that excruciating moment of tension as that plane vanishes off the bottom of that screen, when the entire cinema was sat in horrified silence, every bum teetering on the edge of the seat, do-they, don’t-they… that was naturally, the moment, in that peak of horror, when I felt the need to shout ‘hah!’ at the top of my lungs in the agonised silence, earning me a punch from my neighbour and piss-taking for many years yet to come.

Anyway…

All this being so, I was more than a bit surprised and a tad embarrassed to find myself sat in the cinema watching Up, crying (very quietly!) within the first ten minutes.  I had no idea what to expect of Up, and still can’t tell you what it was, or how it happened, or what came to pass, only that it was utterly delightful, funny, moving, engaging and well worth the silly money that my local cinema seems to ask for a Sunday night viewing.  Without wanting to really say more… go see… or if it’s too late to go see… borrow the DVD… it is well worth it…

District 9 – South Africa

Posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 in Cities and Adventures, Misc. | 4 Comments

So, we (myself and a gentleman who’ll go by the name of TLC from hereon in…) went to see District 9.  I sort of did and sort of didn’t know what to expect; whether we were dealing with a pure blood n’ guts fest, or whether this was a different sort of science fiction movie along the lines of Moon or Cypher where 90% of the tension is in things not entirely seen or known.  As it turns out…

… something in between.

When we left the cinema at the end of the movie, we were silent.  We were silent because our ears were ringing, our heads were pounding and a lot of people had, in the last 15 minutes, been spontaneously reduced by a blast of electromagnetism to a puddle of blood and fairly explicit dribbling bits.  Finally TLC, said; ‘You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a South African film before.’

We walked a little further, contemplating mechanical killing machines, self mutilation, angry socio-cultural forces, loss of identity, aliens with a thing for cat food, potential things yet to come and really big space ships.  Now, I have seen a few South African films – not nearly enough to pretend to be an expert, but since when did that stop a graduate in a social sciences subject from having an opinion?  And District 9 fell into a fairly strong picture I had of South African films, in that it was, essentially, about apartheid.  It was about more, of course, much, much more, and credit goes to it for many things, up to and including have the brass which very few science fiction movies do of making its aliens both truly alien, yet clearly sympathetic.  (Although yeah, I can see why the Nigerian government has issues with it – but that’s another story.)  But at the end of the day, it was about apartheid, segregation, prejudice and fear, and as such was a noble, blood-drenched, limb-splattered, cringe-making addition to the genre that left a wobble in my stomach by the end of it.

To my shame, I know very little about apartheid, despite 3 years studying history.  I know all the things that everyone knows; of arrests and riots, beatings and murders, prisons, sanctions, the ANC, Mandela – I have a distant memory of Mandela being released from prison on my birthday back when I was too young to really know or care, and being annoyed that my teacher was more excited about this fact than she was about my birthday cake.  I have visited South Africa, and in that sense, I suppose, I know a tiny, tiny shard more about the legacy of apartheid than I do about the history itself, and even then, barely a sliver.

I went to South Africa a few years ago courtesy of the Oneword reading prize, and spent a week moving between Jo’burg, Cape Town and Durban, talking mostly to schools, for the very noble cause of promoting childrens’ literacy, and for the much less noble cause of promoting the Horatio Lyle series that I write as Catherine Webb.  Arriving at the airport in Jo’burg I was stopped at customs and received the look of all young single females traveling alone that you always receive at customs, a look which was only exacerbated by my explaining all of the above.  I remember the smell of Jo’burg when I first stepped outside, green and verdant, as were all the cities I visited, a curious fact considering that you could stand in the bathroom in front of a sign saying ‘there is a major water shortage; please consider your use of water’ while outside the sprinklers watered the rhododendrons.  I was exceedingly well looked after, cared for all the time, the recipient of more hospitality than I’ve ever experienced in my life.  A lot of it was a bit of a blur, since the day would begin quite early (by my student standards!) and invariably end with a collapse face-first into a bed, but some impressions stand out and will stay with me I think, for the rest of my life.

I remember, for example, arriving late at night in Durban and collapsing straight into bed with the gratitude of someone who’s talked far too long and fast throughout the day.  No sooner was the light out than there was a scratching at the walls; then on the roof.  Thumping and banging that went on through the night and, having no idea what it was, my heart raced every time, since it sounded almost inside the room.  I fell asleep eventually, dreaming of all the usual monsters that an over-active fantasy writer’s imagination can conjure up in a strange land, and woke the next morning to find it was still going on.  Getting up, I went outside and found a ginger cat sat on the path outside by room, looking nothing short of terrified.  Beyond it, sat with a mango in one hand and a slice of half-eaten toast in the other, was a monkey, about knee-high, wearing the smug expression of a creature that knows size has nothing on big teeth.  The hotel was next to a monkey sanctuary, a fact greeted with wonder by me (I had never seen a monkey so close before) and irritation by the hotel managers who reported that they couldn’t stop the creatures getting into the kitchen and stealing everything they could lay their hands on.

The same day, in one of the few breaks between schools, the ladies I was with took me down to the beach, and I remember drinking a milkshake and being allowed 30 seconds to run up and down the sand in front of the ocean whooping like an idiot, just so I could say that I had.  The next trip was to a school on the other side of an area of the city called the Durban Triangle, a mess of big, busy roads, in which all travellers hide their bags.  The driving in South Africa is utterly terrifying.  Red lights are very rarely obeyed, partially out of concern for crime, but mostly, I suspect, out of habit.  The ring roads of Paris, the mopeds of northern Italy and the winding mountain roads of Southern Spain, with sheer drops on either side, hold nothing on the terror of South African roads.  I think it’s an experienced best summarised by the attitude that the rules of the road… are more sort of guidelines…

Outside every city, between the airport and the centre of Jo’burg, Cape Town and Durban, there are of course, the townships.  I hadn’t imagined how big they were, how far they stretched along the side of the roads.  From the motorway they look like cardboard cut outs made by children for a Blue Peter project, blu-tacked together out of old toilet rolls and cardboard boxes, crooked shades of beige and brown.  The fences that divide them from the motorways serve as rubbish traps, and stray too close to the townships in the car of a self-respecting middle class citizen and you get a call from a security company enquiring as to your well being.  I saw no crime in South Africa; but I saw the symptoms of it everywhere, from the parking attendants charging five rand to pace up and down a street at night to watch out for your car, from the ladies hiding their bags under their seats whenever a busy junction approached.  Asking about this, a kindly man in a book shop in Cape Town who gave me a discount in his store told me that the two most commonly stolen items from his shop were, firstly, the Bible, and secondly, Tarot cards.  There was no sense of fear; merely of a thing that was lived with, because it was there.

The organiser of the trip was intensely proud of her country, and especially her city, Johannesburg.  She took me up onto a hill between talks, and I have never seen a city so green, moisture in the leaves.  Yet from air, on the flight between Jo’burg and Durban, the land was dull red-brown all the way to the foresty hills above Durban, aptly named after dragons.  She also took me into Alexandra, one of the many townships around Jo’burg.  To this day I’ve never been sure how to describe the experience.  I freely admit that I was afraid of the townships, courtesy of the foreign and commonwealth office website, which can induce anyone to a puddle of terror just by its stern font.  And yes, by every standard that I was raised by, growing up in London, they were wretched, crooked tumbles of bricks and iron, dry mud and dirt, faces by the roadside watching as if, and perhaps because, there was nothing else left for them to do, huddles of men and woman just sat on empty plastic water barrels, watching.  But there was also something more, a sense of heat, of activity, like the calm side of an ants nest and just the tiniest pressure will break through the sand and out will come a whole, busy, bursting world of which there is no end.  Then there was the township school in Alexandra, in which I received the warmest reception of my life.  Approximately thirty students, some older than me, studying in tiny little white rooms, some of whom walked ten miles a day to get to their classes, gave me the heartiest, kindest, biggest welcome I have ever had in any corner of the earth.  I distrust people who proclaim themselves to be humbled by an experience, since it’s usually something said by politicians who’ve been caught doing something shifty, but I think in that little room in Alexandra, it’s possibly the nearest handy word I can find.

I can’t make a judgment based on what I saw; I don’t know enough, I was a stranger, and this is nothing more than a medley of pictures and feelings that I still haven’t really properly filed in my own mind.  On the way to the airport in Jo’burg, the two women I was with fell to talking about their work.  One in particular worked for charities, raising money from the sales of books to redistribute, and told the story of an orphanage catering to children whose parents had died of HIV.  They had started out using the iron freight containers that are shipped round the world on the back of ships, and which in their retirement serve as temporary libraries, moving advice centres and, occasionally even, the foundations of an orphanage in South Africa.  They talked about politics, the government, disappointment with both; my limited reading on the subject of HIV in Africa is enough to scare and disappoint me too.

What else sticks in my mind?  Fruit.  I remember someone would ask me if I wanted something to drink, and I would say yes thank you, and every time, without fail, a glass would appear containing more fruit of different varieties than I’d ever seen in my life.  Salads of lettuce and tomatoes with pomegranate seeds on top.  I remember being disappointed to discover that very beautiful birds make absolutely terrible noises, and that Irish pubs the world over are a disgrace including in Temple Bar, Dublin.

My very last memory of South Africa, before catching the plane home (where I succeeded in spilling coffee on a stranger in the middle of the night… not my finest hour) was this – sitting on top of Table Mountain, watching the sun go down over the ocean, drinking hot chocolate and listening to not very much at all.  I have no doubt that a week of exhausting work contributed to my state of mind at the time, but it is a picture that has stuck with me ever since, an absolute romantic painter’s dream of a crimson sky, black rocks in shadows, a city turning on the lights below, and a sea stretching to the horizon.  It was the furthest I had ever been from home, let alone the furthest I had ever been from home by myself, and to this day I have no pat way to describe it, no easy one-liner that captures the sense of what I saw, just a mix of pictures and feelings tangled up.

Which is probably, even now, no bad thing at all.

Busy Busy Busy…

Posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 in Misc. | 1 Comment

It has, once again, been an age since I blogged and so, once again, I will do my thing of blogging about why I haven’t blogged…

For the last 6 weeks, as all here know, I have been Production Electrician for a RADA student production of Crimes in Hot Countries, by Howard Barker – a play that is either utterly, utterly brilliant or a total disaster (writing wise) with very little middle ground in between, and I must admit, the jury is still out for me.

What this has meant in practical terms is four weeks of maintenance and two weeks of rigging.  Now… let’s not beat about the bush here… LX maintenance is dull dull dull.  Occassionally, if you’re lucky, you might find a profile missing a shutter or a fresnel with a broken earth wire, but that’s pretty much the highlight of maintenance and, for my sins, I wasn’t even doing anything that interesting.  I did cable maintenance.  Oh boy yes.  Four weeks of checking the continuity on 15 Amp cable and sorting out Lee colour from our colour stocks.  At the end of these four weeks, I even acquired a crew, who achieved in three days what had taken me the best part of fifteen to do, and to whom I will always be grateful for their speedy use of multimetres.  The work has to be done, as the only thing worse than four weeks of maintenance is two weeks of equipment not working, as the stress acquired in those two weeks will be beyond anything your cardiac system has ever endured.  But let’s not beat about the bush, this is one of those theatre jobs that falls into the category of Very Boring and Extremely Important, and so it goes.

Towards the end of this adventure, my lighting designer delivered a plan for the show, and it was my job to work out how to get it to work.  The theatre in which the show was running, the GBS theatre, is essentially a very reliable workhorse, with only one or two quirks which leave you spitting.  The chief job of the Production Electrician is to work out how every single lamp is going to get power from a dimmer, and, if we don’t have enough dimmers for the amount of kit (which we never do) where we’re going to get that extra power from.  It sounds like it should be harder than it is; and sometimes it can be!  I remember two less than blissful days as assistant electrician in a converted warehouse that had not one in-built dimmer for its kit and over fifty by thirty yards of ceiling space over which hundreds of cables had to be run.  If there is one thing that can frustrate your humble-hearted Prod LX, it’s huge sod-off cable runs.  However, my task was relatively easy, and with a very lovely and hard working crew of 8 people, only half of whom were mildly hung over, we managed to get the entire theatre rigged in about five and a half hours on a cool Saturday morning.

The lighting designer, who was and is an absolute pleasure to work for, then returned to focus each individual lamp, while I pottered around getting the theatre ready with all the other things a Prod LX must care about; cue lights, working lamps in the backstage area, hazers etc..  This done, I waited.

And kept on waiting.

The trouble, it turns out, with having a fully functional venue that does what it says on the cover, is that your poor Prod LX, once you actually get to a technical rehearsal, has nothing to do but sit around and wait for something to break.  How I longed for a moving light with a sticky engine, or for someone to drop something, or even maybe a little flood somewhere exciting… well, maybe not a flood… but alas, no.   Those weeks of maintenance had paid off, and all things considered, everything went as well as it should and better than it could, and the show, when it finally went up, had excellent lighting courtesy of the extremely talented designer and a crew armed with quad spanners.

It’s not much of a reason to have not blogged, but the thing with RADA is that the work is, if not time-consuming, then relentless in other ways.  My new show role is sound designer, and you quickly find yourself waking up in the middle of the night with the sound of ambient sheep, spot cue slamming doors and script-specified music tracks going off in the back of your brain.  When I worked in construction I would wake myself up with my right hand jerking in an attempt to pull nails from the floor; when I was a programmer I would dream of the sound of my designer’s voice in my ear giving ambient lighting levels; when an ASM I would start awake in the night like a guilty thing with a cry of ‘oh god where did I put the dagger?’ and only the neurotic writing of lists would calm me down.  So the work, it turns out, gobbles you up, whether you meant it to or not.  Not that this is an excuse for my non-blogging lately… although it is… but it is a simple truth and honest fact about the new year of working at RADA…

Production Electrician

Posted on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 in Misc. | 1 Comment

So, I’ve been given my next job at RADA for the glorious new term – Production Electrician, also known as Prod LX.  Which is, lets face it, kinda cool, because I really, really like lights.  I even have time for hazers when they’re not leaking.  (There is nothing quite as icky as a leaky hazer.  The stuff just gets everywhere and a small forest worth of kitchen roll has to die before you’re even close to cleaning it up.  The smelly pink slime that is badly mixed artex has nothing on hazer fluid for sheer urgh value.)

Technically, I’ve had this job before – in the same venue and for the same lighting designer, who is above all else a decent bloke and very easy to work with.  But I figure that it’s a nice warm up for another year of tougher things, and at least this time round, I vaguely know how to change the lamps on the SL profiles.  However, what it will probably mean, is that the rate of blogging decreases, and so, in order to kinda fill some gaps yet to come, I figured I’ll summarise right here, right now what it is that’s keeping me from the keyboard.

Production Electrician is basically the lighting designer’s minion, although her (usually his, lets be honest here) duties also extend to anything in the building that has a current going through it.  This can include hazers, scrollers, working lights, cue lights, practical lamps and, when called for, fridges, toasters and general electrical appliances.  However, the main theme are on the lights in the rig.  Most of a Prod LX’s time is spent doing maintenance; this can be an easy job of just a day spent cleaning lenses on some eighty or so newish lights, or it can be a hellish lifetime spent with hundreds and hundreds of ancient, creaking, warped and battered lamps, up to your armpits in that special thin grey dust that just loves to linger near electrical appliances.  The two great technical theatre buzzwords, ‘health and safety’ are also supposed to be regular partners from a Prod LX’s lips, to lesser or greater effect.

Once the lighting designer delivers on what they want where, it’s the Prod LX’s job to see that it is indeed, there, rigged and working.  Sometimes this is easy; a simple case of whacking up the right light in the right place and turning it on.  Sometimes this is a nightmare job, involving miles and miles of cabling, endless connections and plugs and runs of DMX; and when it’s all run and you hit the ‘on’ switch, something won’t work and that’s it, fifty yards of cabling left to explore with a fault at some point in some part of it, who knows where?  (Even as I write this I can hear the ghostly voice of our Head of Lighting explaining that this, children, is why maintenance is so important…)

If it all works then the Prod LX will help with the focusing of the lights, and occasionally with the plotting, if there isn’t a programmer on the board.  Then when the show is up, the Prod LX’s job becomes one largely of fixing the stuff that breaks, as stuff eventually does.  The cliche of the Prod LX is of a bloke, perhaps a tad overweight, perhaps not the most romantic type you’ve ever expected roses from, not always that beautifully shaved or fashionably dressed, who, when faced with a problem, talks back in a language almost incomprehensible to the human ear.  When faced with the statement ‘why’s this not working’ the Prod LX will usually give one of three replies based on his/her level of enthusiasm.

1.  ‘I don’t know, but I’ll have a look at it and find out.’  [A good answer that does what it says on the cover.]

2.  ‘It’s fucked, innit.’  [A bad answer which, while it may occasionally be true, can also be code for  'lets go down the pub'.]

3.  ‘Well, mate, well, it’s gotta be a PSU problem, innit, ‘cos if you ain’t getting power down there then I mean you’re gonna have the trouble in the 4-pin ‘cos I can see the little green light on the unit but it’s not just getting through from the 13-Amp to the scrollers is it so you know we can order parts or maybe try re-plugging it somewhere else but like if its your PSU that’s a Stage Electrics job unless some wanker hit the panic switch and knocked out the hard power or if those bastards in sound switched it off but yeah, yeah, you know, could go either way, see?’  [An answer which essentially boils down to the syllable 'um', while maintaining as macho and techno-savvy an exterior as possible.  This too usually lends itself to the follow-on statement of 'lets go down the pub'.]

All that said, I’m still kinda learning the ropes on this one, and my opinion of Prod LXs so far is based on a very small sample and may yet change.  I’ve met some very good people who are very good at what they do – then again, I’ve also met one or two people with such a physiological urge to drink tea at every available opportunity, its a miracle anything ever gets done.  At the LSE, back in the day when I was accidentally put in charge of anything lighting-based owing to the fact that no one else had fully mastered the trick of forcing the lock into the lighting cupboard, my experience of techying was a very enjoyable one of ‘well… let’s push it somewhere and see what happens….’ a principal which, I gotta admit, has kinda been carried over into my training at RADA.  After all, in this modern age of circuit breakers and PAT testing, what’s the worst that could really happen?  Really…?

The Hurt Locker

Posted on Saturday, September 12th, 2009 in Misc. | No Comments

The Hurt Locker – a film that I did not see with my Dad!  Did not see with Dad because it’s neither science fiction nor appropriately silly, nor, in fact, to be perfectly honest, my cup of tea.  What it is is an utterly captivating, terrifying, gut-wrenching, violent, blood-soaked, testosterone-fuelled war movie that I only recommend to those who have a teddy bear and a cup of hot chocolate to go home to after.  But I do recommend it.  9/11 was a monumentally brutal act of murder that has inspired monumental brutal acts of retaliation that have inspired more murder and more murder and more murder and frankly, you’d kinda think that world political leaders hadn’t cottoned onto the great message of history in this regard.  As a society we probably don’t want to be reminded just what a dodgy start has been made to the beginning of the 21st century, but just in case, it’s nice to see that the film industry has noticed along with the rest of us.

Moon/Apollo 13/Sunshine

Posted on Thursday, July 30th, 2009 in Misc. | 1 Comment

So, a few days ago, I went to the cinema with my Dad, to see Moon.  First up, don’t get the impression that my Dad is the only person I go to the cinema with.  He’s just the only person who is willing to see films with me that are either a) science fiction or b) very bad, since most other people in my life are either operating in different genres or suffer from taste.
Second, Moon is really very good!  I had hopes, since it seemed to be one of the very few films set in space which seemed to involve both a stark space station and a complete lack of drooling aliens.  Not that I have any problem with drooling aliens; some of the best bits of cinema I’ve ever seen involve ridiculous quantities of slime.  But Moon was something entirely different and arguably better, ticking all the boxes from disturbing through to quaintly comic with a hefty dose of countdown tension, jubilation and sadness.  A brilliant example of what can be done with one carefully and elegantly lived-in set, one extremely good actor and some amazingly good editing; recommended to all who like their science fiction high on the exploration-of-humanity and low on drooling aliens factor!

While we’re talking about the moon…

… I should probably mention that Apollo 13is on my shelf as one of my all-time favourite films.  Yes, there is quite a lot of America-praising going on in there, and it’s remarkable that one small space ship managed to fit three astronauts, a camerman and a small brass band which could come in movingly over particularly patriotic moments, but even if the story wasn’t gripping in itself, it’s a fantastic bit of craft.   Apollo 13 manages to pull off the ultimate narrative trick – it tells a story, the end of which we all know, and yet manages to keep you tense and gripped throughout.  It is a very difficult thing to describe without actually having the film in front of you, but it contains one of my all-time favourite pieces of narrative succinctness.  First you need the situation – the Apollo space module has been half ripped to shreds by an explosion in the oxygen tanks, it’s lost air, it’s lost power, it’s lost heat, the astronauts have been thrown onto the wrong trajectory, been poisoned by CO2, suffered disease, hypothermia and haven’t slept for days, and finally, the earth is in sight.  They de-couple from the module that suffered the original fault and for the first time see the extent of the damage.  They radio Earth, reporting on what they see, damage all along the side, right up to the heat shield.  It’s spoken calmly and carefully, professionals assessing the damage.

On earth, in the control room, character A receives the news, walks up to character B while all around them the room chatters with the planning process of how to bring the ship safely to land, and says flatly, ‘The heat shield.’

Immediately on every sofa and cinema seat where this is playing, the audience sits back, banging its head with its hands and goes, ‘no, seriously?  You’re shitting me.  They’ve gone through all this and now there’s something wrong with the heat shield?’

Three little words – the heat shield – and the brief burst of hope that the audience had at seeing earth out of the space module window is once again shunted back beneath a shudder of ‘oh shit really?’ and somehow, though we know, we all know, that they make it home, Apollo 13 manages to pull off the trick of making us cringe inside.

Thinking of mis-named ships…

… if you thought Apollo 13 was perhaps a bad name for a space mission, what genius decided in the film Sunshine to name the ship that has to fly to the sun and save all mankind, Icarus II?  It’s bad enough that they’ve called it Icarus – a boy who flew too close to the sun and whoops we all know what happened – but surely calling it the Icarus II after Icarus I has so clearly and disastrously failed, seems to be tempting fate.  Almost needless to say, Sunshine is also right up on my list of space-set films in which the sets are small and well-loved, the acting is excellent and you don’t need the aliens to dribble to feel your heart race and your stomach clench.

With all the talk these last few weeks of the 40th anniversary of man landing on the moon, I guess I should declare my bias now and get it out of the way.  I am entirely in favour of mankind exploring space, and landing on the moon was the first necessary step to achieving this.  I fully accept that the Americans landing on the moon was largely the product of the Cold War madness which kept the last 50 years so exciting and the spy thriller genre so brisk on the bookshelves, but science, and the exploration of space, is one of the very few areas where all mankind stands united.  Not united in that we all wish to walk on Mars, or visit the moons of Jupiter; but united in the sense that no one nation can lay claim to the products of discovery, of mathematical innovation or scientific wonder.  When man walked on the moon, and if man ever walks on Mars, it is as man that it is done, not as an American, or a European, or a Chinese or Russian cosmonaut laying claim for a nation.  Certainly that was the motivation that sent the Americans to the moon in the 1960s, and planted an American flag on its soil, but the whole world watched, and the whole world thought that this is mankindwalking on another world, regardless of race, creed and colour.  Sure, governments may scheme, derive political kudos and see the possible economic gains from being able to say, ‘here is Mars and I claim it for the people of Luxembourg’, but by very definition, the things that are out of this world, are not, and should not, be confined by the squabblings, the mistakes and the machinations that have defined so much of mankind’s past on this world.

Serenity/Star Trek

Posted on Sunday, June 21st, 2009 in Misc. | 1 Comment

A confession to get the ball rolling - I don’t like Star Trek.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, I can see the appeal – from a narrative point of view, it’s pure genius.  You’ve got a premise which allows you to go pretty much anywhere, meet pretty much anyone, with a diverse and potentially interesting range of characters from all sorts of background.  And even if this wasn’t a good start, you can then lock said crew of interesting characters inside a tin can, alone in the vacuum of space, and turn out the lights.  All this is a Good Thing.

But, as established, I didn’t really enjoy the TV series (however many they’ve been).  I’m afraid that next to Dr Who and Farscape, Star Trek’s approach to going anywhere in the known/unknown universe just didn’t catch me.  Which made it all the more surprising for me to find myself at the cinema watching the new film. 

First thing to be said about the film is that I saw it with my Dad.  I suspect that a lot can be inferred about this film from the fact that it’s the kind of thing you see with your science-fiction-loving Dad, but hell, maybe that’s just me.   I told myself that I was going to see it because my Dad wanted the company.  I told myself I was going to see it because it had Simon Pegg in it, so how bad could it be really?  But let’s face it, I went to see it because it had a lot of very big things blowing up at great heights, and I’m not alone on this count…. 

Second thing to say, is that I really enjoyed it.  And I am naturally ashamed of this.  But I am forced to give it full marks for sheer roller-coaster preposterous energy and splunk.  Don’t get me wrong, the plot was beyond daft, and the last 3.5 minutes were a hopefully unintentional lift from Galaxy Quest.  I don’t really know what to make of a film that is parodying the parody, but I guess Star Trek can claim that honour and carries it off with (some) dignity.

Third thought – you gotta respect the whole cunning resurrection of a franchise thing going on there.  I mean, a lot of people have talked about reviving Star Trek and how the film was little more than a cunning attempt to make decades worth of dosh out of a continuing commercial franchise.  And yeah, it is.  And it does all of the above with class.

My final thought was this – ‘Blimey!  Star Trek was nearly as good as Serenity!’

Which again, is high praise.  Serenity once again ticks every box on the page for daftness, explosions and things being dropped from great height (mostly crashing space ships), and like Star Trek manages to throw in sexual tension, kung fu and utterly spectacular, eyeball-rattling set pieces, but… and here’s the bit that just sets it apart… it does it with wit.  Very very few films where such a high percentage of the budget has gone on pyrotechnics usually have any budget left for wit, but Serenity pulls it off.   It manages wit and emotion and drama and kung fu simultaneously, which probably prevents it from ever being broadcast on Channel 5 on a Friday night.  Don’t get me wrong – do not sit down in front of a screen with a DVD of Serenity expecting to come away reeling from the scope of its imagination and the profound insight it delivers into the human spirit.  But do sit down with it.

In conclusion…

If you enjoyed Star Trek, you’ll love Serenity.

And if you loved Serenity, you’ll enjoy Star Trek.

Embrace the inner geek!

The Miracle of Wordpress

Posted on Friday, June 12th, 2009 in Misc. | 1 Comment

Firstly, it’s been, as always, an age since I last posted.   More over, it’s taken me an age to work out how to read the large collection of very nice comments that have been left on the site - I wish there was some handy excuse for why I don’t know how to work my own blog, but since there isn’t, I’ll apologise for having to taken so long to finally figure it out…

Secondly, in the interest of explaining why I haven’t blogged for an age, I thought I might fall back on my usual (and true) explanation and, as always, blame RADA. 

I have in the last six weeks been in the RADA Lighting Department, and let’s not beat about the bush here, lighting is cool.  We’re dealing with wattages to make your eyes water, some deeply shiny and ridiculously expensive equipment, movers and colours and washes and lenses and gobos and shutters and cabling!  God, I had no idea how much cabling! 

More interestingly, and with my writer’s hat on for a moment, people who are involved in lights speak a foreign language known only to the mysteriously initiated.  For example, a conversation between a lighting designer and his/her in-house electrician could easily go something like this:

Designer:  Have you rigged the VL6s?

Electrician: Yeah, but we need to daisy chain the DMX up to the smart repeater before I can give you patch channels.

Designer:  I want the soft patch to go to 13, 16 bit extended.  There should be enough left in universe 1.

Electrician:  Sure, lemme grab the dimmers for blue off the plan.

Designer:  You’re using blue phase?  [Designer then turns to board operator, looking bewildered in the darkness...]  1 @30!  ‘40!  Which lens has that source 4 got in it?  I wanted 60s, not 62s!  Prod LX!  In colour palette 5!  4!  Update cue only!  Block!  Mark!  Next!

Now… you, dear reader, may be able to comprehend all this and even know which button to press without having to think too hard about all this.  But if you have, you may as well accept right here, right now, it is because you are a ridiculously well-informed individual with geeky inclinings.  Six weeks its taken me to vaguely grasp the lingo, and finally I almost understand 16 bit motor jokes.  I almost get why it’s funny that someone got a T29 for a cantata fresnel when actually he was only after a T27 for a rama PC (raucous laughter) and can almost but not quite sympathize with the pain of a dodgy pacific profile microswitch.  Almost… but not quite…

That said, I love lights.  Without wanting to wax too lyrical about it, a good bit of lighting can make a play, complete the illusion, trick the mind into wandering into a story without letting the body remind the brain that it’s wedged into a chair smaller than a Ryanair Economy Class seat, listening to a man in a silly moustache talk about incest in a living room made of plywood.  But since good lighting is in itself by definition not really noticeable, being part of the illusion, it’s much easier to say that bad lighting, when it’s bad, is really really bad, and can destroy an experience just by being noticed. 

I have been programmer and board operator for the last three weeks, which has meant three weeks in a darkened room listening to the foreign language of lighting design and eating just ridiculous quantities of smarties.  (I am a sucker for supermarket 2 -for-1 special offers.)  13 hours a day, six days a week in semi-darkness plays merry hell with your body clock, but it has been well worth it.  I was lucky in that my designer possessed infinite patience, humour and good will – but to cut a long story short, this has been the cause of my absense, and because 99% of my work was carried on in darkness, I have nothing but this one crummy photo to show for it….

… and the chief wisdom my lighting designer had to impart at the end of three weeks of ‘cue, update, enter’?

‘Don’t ever try eating peanut M and Ms and talking at the same time…’

Circus Space

Posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 in Misc. | No Comments

Yesterday, I went to see a dress rehearsal performance at a place called Circus Space.  And while it has no relevance whatsoever to being a writer, I was so impressed by some of the things the performers – all students – could do, I felt I ought to blog about it.  These were people who casually walked up vertical poles, not to impress, but merely in preparation for an act of such mind-bending acrobatic brilliance my major reaction was ‘good god, you can do that with arms?’  Trapeze, silks, poles, ropes – the whole shabang.  Circus Space is based in Hoxton, right on that place where the shiny, glassy walls of the Corporation of London meet the council estates of South Hackney.  It’s inside what looks like a converted warehouse, huge ceilings covered in rigging material of every kind, and giant open spaces which I imagine, late at night, if you were alone, would become extremely eerie.  Anyhow, if you get a chance, for whatever reason, to see some of their work, I heartily recommend it.

http://www.thecircusspace.co.uk/