Urban Magic

After my week (and a bit) off from all the scribbling and shows, I am now in a position to update my views on 24 with the following note on things that Jack Bauer (who, at the time of writing, has been shot, stabbed, tortured twice, beaten, electrocuted, suffered a collapsed lung and is still ok) has NEVER done.

Jack Bauer has NEVER:

1. Waited for a bus.

2.  Filled out a tax return.

3.  Bought a Japanese peace lily.

4.  Sung ‘I did it my way’ at karaoke night.

5.  Had to reinstall Windows.

6.  Played sudoku.

7.  Made a souffle.

It can be tough, serving your country.

Thanks must go to a very lovely scribbler who’s had to listen to too many of my rants for showing me this… which, as a scribbler and an LD who’s been on the receiving end of such sterling criticism as ‘can light the little red ball seem more red than the curtain it’s on?’ or, ‘is there any way you can make them visible without actually letting us see them?’ and my personal writerly favourite – ‘are you sure that would happen?’

- this appealed to me hugely.

http://www.boredpanda.com/sharp-suits-worst-client-comment-posters/

Remember when 24 first came onto our TV screens?  I was at school, and I was riveted.  As who wouldn’t be?  Every hour of real-time ended on a cliffhanger, a twist, a betrayal, a gunshot, a mysteries baddy doing something mysteriously bad.  It was the televisual equivalent of every paragraph opening with the word ‘… suddenly…!!’

I was recently reminded of this when finishing the last round of lighting designs.  Two weeks in tech is bad enough – two weeks teching musicals back-to-back is bone-shattering, and at the end of it a week of doing very little at great length seemed called for, and what better than eighteen hours or so, stretched out, of adrenaline-rush American drama?  Buckle down, wipe the sweat from your brow and start asking the immortal question… is Jack alright?

That said… certain lessons can be taken from this wonderfully over-the-top bit of TV.

1.  Never trust foreigners.  They’re out to get you.  And if they’re not out to get you, then someone’s out to get them, and you’d better say goodbye to them now because pretty soon a mysterious assassin with a questionable accent is probably going to kill them anyway.  Thankfully, foreigners can easily be identified by their incredible leers.

2.  Never trust politicians.  At best they’re wishy-washy liberals unwilling to Do What Needs To Be Done; at worst they’re shifty war-mongers out to manipulate the people of America for their own nefarious ends.

3.  Of course there’s a mole at CTU!  OF COURSE THERE IS!!

4.  Torture – it’s gonna hurt me as much as it hurts you.

5.  Everywhere in Los Angeles is no more than twelve minutes away from everywhere else.

6.  Bullets interfere with microwave transmission.  For observe: when your colleague needs to phone you during a quiet moment, that’s okay, but the second the bullets start flying and you need to call for backup, that’s the moment your phone runs out of signal.

7.  Bad facial hair is the sign of the devil.

8.  Love can only hurt, almost as much as the torture.  Which often stems from the love anyway.

9.  The United States of America does not negotiate with terrorists.

10.  For god’s sake, if you see a bathroom, use it.  Play safe, people.  Plan ahead.

There is an accusation levelled against theatre that it’s ‘not for the masses’.

When Margaret Thatcher was buried, the funeral cost ten million pounds.  When the Arts Council budget for the entire country for the fiscal year was announced, it had been slashed by eleven million pounds.  Again.

Every year publishers seek this year’s success, and they model it on last year’s triumphs.  Thus – vampires were popular in 2010, so the shelves were flooded with rip-offs in 2011.  Bondage and sex was popular in 2011, so the shelves were flooded with the same in 2012.

It’s not about what we want, say the makers of TV soaps, the producers of glittering musicals and the producers of mild porn.  It’s about what people want.

To which I say: enough.

I love my trashy TV, my entertaining books, silly films.  I lounge in the sun and read comic books, tune in for Dr Who, turn up the radio for harmless rock.

And I love theatre.  I believe that Shakespeare is one of the greatest writers in human history, that politics are for the masses, documentary should be complicated and challenging and that it would be a brave publisher in this day and age who promoted Catch 22 or 1984 over the next Fifty Shades of Whatever.  My views are not elitist.  It is not elitist to love good books, or be moved by a brilliant story.  It is not elitist to be frightened for a character, concerned for an outcome, to be moved by music or enthralled by fact.  It is not elitist to enjoy complexity, or to say that this is to your taste, and that is not, without reducing the entirely subjective thing you dislike.

And it is offensive – so unbelievably offensive – to say that there is such a thing as a ‘lowest common denominator’ in culture.  How will this play, ask producers and executives, but how will this play to the stay-at-home Mum?  How will this play to Middle England Grandmas, how will this play to the 18-something demographic with their iPods and smart shoes?

How repulsive – how utterly demeaning it is that those who hold the reigns of cultural power in our society ask such a question.  How angry every stay-at-home Mum must be, every Gran and every iPod owner to hear themselves so grouped and demeaned by the notion that theatre is not for them, that they will not love this thing for it is elitist.  Beyond their scope and their reach.  So let us promote the next Fifty Shades of Whatever; let’s make sure that the world knows the airing times for Eastenders but that no one’s challenged by a documentary with too much content.  Let’s simplify the news in case people get bored, let’s cut back on theatres and spend the money instead, on a day of spectacle that comes and goes with as much significance as match in the rain.  Let’s fill our newspapers with celebrity tattle and not distract anyone with stories of global significance, because this is not what people want.  It’s too elitist.

To which I say: to hell with that.  Because time and again our culture has proven that it can love stories which are beautiful, not merely spectacular.  We are held enthralled by intelligence, we – the great big ‘we’ that is far too big a demographic to be easily contained, the great big ‘we’ of a species that thinks for itself – we can delight in so many things that are powerful, not merely punchy.  Yet now, where there were just a few tabloid newspapers satisfying our guilty pleasure – and it is a pleasure, and that is fine – our guilty pleasure for celebrity tit-bits and catchy headlines about stranded cats – now they are everywhere and it isn’t simply that we want a little more complexity in our lives, it’s that more and more, no one seems willing to give it.  No one will promote the complicated thing; no one will risk putting the difficult story on the shelves.  How much longer, I wonder, until as a society we fulfil George Orwell’s prophecy and take not-thinking for granted?

I am asthmatic.  And that’s absolutely fine.  I’ve had asthma as long as I can remember, and only one has it landed me in hospital, when I was young, and only a couple of times have I been forced to go onto a nebulizer to breathe clearly.  It’s just a part of my life.

But sometimes I wonder – that same ‘what if’ that I’m sure hangs over every only child (another box I tick) or schoolgirl with spectacles.  What would it be like without asthma?  Or with siblings, for that matter?  I have no way of knowing, having never experienced this for myself.  Perhaps nothing would change at all, save a tweak in my routine of daily inhaler and prescription costs saved once every three months.  Perhaps more than I imagine.  Perhaps when I run, my breath will flow easy and clear, for certainly, particularly in winter, it’s not my legs that let me down half so much as it its my lungs.  Perhaps in spring, I won’t become hayfever ground zero, and if I do, perhaps that hayfever won’t trigger throat and nose trouble.  Maybe I’d sleep better, sing better – and then again maybe a runaway brain and the inability to hold a tune have very little correlation with lung capacity.  I take it for granted that I carry an inhaler everywhere – it’s not a worry, it just is.  Just like asthma itself.

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Colonic hydrotherapy.

I think that’s the bit that makes me really, really angry.  Every few days I get emails inviting me to go to the theatre on the cheap, have an over-indulgent meal at half the price, take out a not-very-cheap couple of sessions at the gym, or have a haircut.

But mostly, what the email suggests I do, is experience colonic hydrotherapy.  Because what I really need is a hosepipe up my bum.

This is accompanied, invariably, by pictures of serene looking people against a warm background, their lives restored, improved, enhanced by this altogether absurd, medically disproven and scientifically unfounded practice.  Not even scientifically unfounded – scientists have had a rare moment of unity on this one and declare without  hesitation that not only is it unbeneficial, it can be actively harmful and has serious risks of long-term side-effects.

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You know what I’d like to see?

A really good film or play adaptation of the Odyssey.

I mean, I love the actual text.  The text is awesome.  And in no way do I suggest reducing it or demeaning it or any other of the accusations that are usually levelled at film adaptions, particularly of something as awesome as a +2000 year old piece of spoken poetry.  Hence the word ‘good’ in my initial suggestion.

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This is a cry for help and information!  (All gratefully received.)  It’s not going to be my most exciting blog post, but it will be, I suspect, on a theme to which we are all familiar…

So as we all know, energy and gas companies screw us over.  You look at your ever-rising bills, you look at the ever-rising profits of the companies and the uncanny ability they have to always raise prices in time for winter… and yeah, we’re screwed.  And angry.

But over the last few months there has been a campaign to ‘simplify’ energy tariffs.  The government has harped on at great lengths about this.  I mean, hell, they’re not actually making things cheaper for us, just simpler – in the same way that it’ll be ‘simpler’ for GPs to decide spending, oh yes, but anyway, different rant.

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