RosieBell

We Happy Few, We Band of Brothers

Varda’s presentation about discoveries in a National Car Park– “Very interesting talk on a fascinating hoard, and as ever with such things it throws up more questions than it answers. I mean, why were so many Cycling Proficiency Badges buried together?”

From Detectorists. And this cracks me up with laughter. It’s from Episode 3, Series 3, and the speaker is Terry, former policeman and the Chairman of the Danebury Metal Detecting Club (DMDC) and author of Common Buttons of North-West Essex. “Any questions for Varda before she rests her voice? She must be hoarse after that marathon.”

Poor Varda is normally snubbed, and barely speaks. She’s part of a Lesbian couple, the only women detectorists, because detectorism is a mostly male pursuit, like train-spotting.

Danebury is a pretty small town in north Essex. Essex is normally a punchline for jokes about crude materialism, heavy drinking and vulgarity however, it has miles of the rolling tree-clumped English prettiness and the sense of peace and safety of the best English countryside. The DMDC meet in Danebury scout hall, hung with Union flags, where Terry’s wife, the ever smiling glammed up Sheila hands out refreshments, of varied quality.

I have come late to the series. I caught a couple of episodes by accident and I read reviews, saying much about the “quiet desperation” of the two main characters Lance (Toby Jones, brilliant as ever) and Andy, (Mackenzie Crook, best known as the creepy toadeater Gareth in The Office). These two nerdish mates go metal detecting together, and their dialogue is catch phrases, running jokes and detectorist jargon. Their lives seem to be hardly quietly desperate at all, but fulfilled since they have the refuge and focus of a harmless obsession – something we should all pray for.

Lance and Andy, scruffy and gadgetty, walk with bent heads about gentle Essex waiting for signals from the past, even from a 1980s ring-pull. Occasionally there’s a glimpse of a priest burying Anglo-Saxon jewels during a Viking raid or a Roman girl holding a pot of coins in a funeral ceremony. Their chief griefs are a rival Detectorist gang, the Dirt Sharks, troubles getting “permissions” to detect on farms and inane questions from invading tribes of Ramblers. This is Orwell’s England of eccentric hobbies and pubs, the pubs now offering open mics and pub quizzes.

The result is a great feeling of warmth towards the soulmates Andy and Lance, as they play Kerplunk together in a tent while they watch over a potential hoard threatened by thieves. Lance tells Andy that there are Kerplunks in every charity shop in the country and that Sue Ryder has a notice saying No more Kerplunks. Meanwhile the magpies watch them mockingly from their nest in a great old oak. “A lot of sunlight wasted on a tree” says the contractor who is about to knock down the great old oak to install a solar panel farm.

Their private lives can be difficult, partly because of their habit of lying to their womenfolk, however the girlfriend/wife/daughter are mostly lovely in their different ways, even Andy’s mother-in-law, Diana Rigg, a long way from Emma Peel, is kind and understanding, if ruefully realistic about her son-in-law’s short-comings.

I get fed up with the domination of comedy and comedians. Radio 4 is awash with mediocre monologuists, guffawing gagsters, woeful one-liners; there are more comedians working than engineers (I haven’t looked that up) and they aren’t funny. It’s mostly smart-arsery and tribal in-jokes. Detectorists is a comedy that I laugh at and that makes me feel happy. Also very English, like Shaun of the Dead, where Simon Pegg after a long battle against zombies, ends up in an English heaven of the Sunday papers, a roast dinner at the pub and a computer game with his zombie best mate, who he keeps in the Englishman’s haven, the garden shed.

Boxing Day Murder - to the bitter end

 ABC over and I did stick it out though by the third episode I was twitching. The only part I really enjoyed were the period clothes and the scenes on the railway lines, among sooty viaducts and the black locomotives blowing elegant steam – the railway lines motif in the credits good as well. Also no-one looks as world-weary as Malkovitch – even when he was a young lothario in Liaisons Dangereuse.

Though the fash-badge quotient ended up being low, and there wasn’t a blackshirt march to be seen, I did get awful longueurs. The brisk puzzle of an Agatha Christie dragged out and pointlessly thickened; the soupy glutinous look of the thing; Cust not just being a misery but with perverse sexual pleasures; and the pointless identification of Poirot as a priest rather than a policeman – why? He’s not Father Brown or the bloke in Grantchester. Also the stretched out dialogue between murderer and Poirot at the end – the suave cool killer obsessed with his nemesis which was reminiscent of Killing Eve. There’s a reasonable motive for the murderer’s killing spree and it is again, the fear of the mundane in Phelps. Everything fancied up and wedding cake iced over a plain sponge.

The next BBC Christie adaptation is going to be Death Comes as the End. That’s set in ancient Egypt – how is that going to be made about Brexit or the Middle East? However it is being written by Gwyneth Hughes who adapted Vanity Fair, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Happy New Year, mes enfants

The Boxing Day Murder - Further Thoughts

Twitter:-

Tom Holland‏ @holland_tom 20h20 hours ago
Well, I’m afraid #ABCMurders was absolutely ruined for me by the implausible rendering of the Waterloo-Andover line.

Tom Holland‏ @holland_tom 11h11 hours ago
Which is a shame, because otherwise it was creepily good...

Paul Matthews‏ @etzpcm 11h11 hours ago
Replying to @holland_tom
They seemed to travel to Andover via Scotland...

(I don’t know the Waterloo to Andover line, but the lovely steam train did go puff-puff through a forest at one point. Oh, and the opening credits of railway lines are very good.)

This adaptation is a crudely modern sensibility tackling the 1930s. That’s why there are no decent and courageous people, who are always an important part of a Christie novel; that’s why the genteel flirt Betty is made over into a foul-mouthed bitch and hen-party slapper; that’s why the sister Morag is turned from plain-but-striking and clever to a fat aggressive lump. The 30s – the subtleties of a repressed society with its tiny class indicators of language, the behaviour expected from well-brought up young women, the importance of respectability – are beyond the vulgar Gothicism of Phelps.

Poirot has been made solemnly tragic with a traumatic back story instead of comic and absurd. It is one of the motifs of the Poirot stories that the absurd, fussy little man is a mighty fighter for justice and always kind. Kindness, that most important of character traits which takes away the harshness of living, and justice, are missing from the Phelps view of the world.

The Boxing Day Murder - the First Episode

Update:- The diabolical duo, Prichard and Phelps, were shamelessly speaking on the Today programme this morning. Phelps said she had the advantage of not reading Agatha Christie and only having seen a couple of Poirot adaptations, so she had a fresh view. And I have a fresh view of astrophysics as I am totally ignorant of it.

First episode:- Not as furious as I might have been. As The ABC Murders is a thin novel compared to other Christies, I could take this as a series based very loosely on the original. Really, it's a story about the decline of Poirot, and Malkovich could make good fist of him as the sad old refugee from the horrors of the German invasion of Belgium.

Phelps paints heavy always - the light so green and dim it seemed we were in a permanent forest dripping with treacle, the music howled and banged and the atmosphere of a malevolent world included a landlady as creepy and weird as Igor minus the hump and her daughter a pathetic tart (in the book they are kindly and ordinary). Betty is tarted up from silly flirt to cock-teasing bitch - also was "dozy bastard" a common insult in the 1930s? And would the housekeeper employed by the gentry say, "Get off your skinny arse" to a secretary? Gentility and respectability were greatly valued in those times, a covering for normal hatred and malice.

I wonder if that was the first outing of the serial murderer who has become such a staple in crime drama, always murdering in threes or fours? And the type who leaves deliberate clues, so you get death methods reflecting a medieval curse or some such thing. I'll stick with it, as I do like Malkovich and his weary ways. So far Poirot has had his train ticket deliberately dropped by a conductor with a fascist badge, but we haven't had any actual blackshirts kicking up. The action has been shifted from 1935 to (gasp) 1933 so we must get Moseley and his gang. That the landlady has been going to a meeting suggests she will be the house Fash.

@BDSixsmith on Twitter

Writing an adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express for the BBC, except it's called Murder on the Orientalist Express and it's just 90 minutes of Hercule Poirot reading Edward Said aloud.

Sunday Night Ordeal

I have been busy on other things and neglecting this blog. But I do want to write about non-cycling matters and the telly version of Ordeal by Innocence, which was on back in April, and the irritation it caused is still with me, like incurable thrush.

The original book was later period Christie, and at least the adaptors hadn’t parachuted in Miss Marple to do the detecting, as they did in a recent travesty of Endless Night.

Like Endless Night, this novel has a post-war feeling. The grown up children are evacuees adopted by the barren Rachel Argyle and her scholarly husband; there’s a coloured girl, Tina, a librarian who drives a bubble car; Waiting for Godot is on at the local theatre. The cast are quite a remove from the pre-war gang of country house dwellers. The house where it is set is an upper-middle-class house with daily help instead of the 1930s butlers and maids.

Christie’s set up is a grabber. Jacko Argyle has been found guilty of the murder of his mother, Rachel Argyle, and has died in prison. Then his alibi, Dr Calgary, turns up to prove he was innocent. The family are under suspicion and police investigation again, and they start breaking under the strain One more dead body, one wounded body, and voila, the explanation in the library with a couple of marriages at the end.

The red herring is that Rachel Argyle’s damaged children and her own lack of imagination towards them are thought to be the motive behind the murder. The plot twist is that that view is mistaken and the motive is quite simple – money. What did the adaptor (Sarah Phelps) do? Turned Rachel Argyle from a well-meaning if unempathetic woman desperate for children, to a raving Mommie Dearest. Turned Jacko Argyle from a greedy ruthless crook into a damaged case. Turned the kindly husband Leo Argyle into a psychopath. Turned the loving secretary Gwenda into a crude vamp. Turned the motive into reasonable revenge instead of straightforward unscrupulous avarice. Changed the identity of the murderer. Inflicted on the murderer a particularly sadistic punishment. Lost the over-arching theme, that it is the innocent who suffer undeservedly.

In short, turned a clever story in more or less humdrum surroundings into a high-coloured, vulgar, Gothic psychological drama of stock type set in a Scottish castle in a forest. Added a Chief Constable cover up, Dr Calgary turned into a physicist driven mad by the atom bomb and it was yet another piece about a colluding and corrupt establishment. Also the rude brutality by the son-in-law – I don’t think 50s and 60s families of the Argyle class would have been quite so free with the fuck yous at the dinner table. A forced atmosphere of thunder and lightning instead of the drizzling corrosiveness of the original.

One Guardian reader had it well summed up:-

“We do indeed get the “Agatha Christie we deserve” – or rather, we get the TV adaptations we deserve, if by this we mean screenplays that mistake bleakness for profundity and cliche for character – and that reveal an innate misogyny that has little to do with Christie’s often complex, courageous, unexpected female characters.

Take Mrs Argyle. In the book, she’s conflicted, a social reformer (probably a Guardian reader!) whose painful longing for children and blindly possessive attitude to those she adopts is at the heart of the story. But here, she’s a cruel, racist abuser who even in Lucy Mangan’s review pretty much deserves to die. Well hello there, bad (adoptive) mother stereotype! And what about Gwenda, the secretary? In the book she’s a complex, compassionate woman in her late 30s. In the screenplay she’s a walking, or rather tottering, youthful cliche who, with her high heels and low-cut dresses, bitchy remarks and gold-digging instincts, fulfils yet more misogynistic stereotypes.

These representations of women are, like the whole screenplay, far more old-fashioned than Agatha Christie ever was. This kind of writing hides its own dark secrets of misplaced nostalgia and misogyny. Agatha Christie may not be everyone’s favourite. But her varied representations of women have provided me with many more role models than these “dark” TV screenplays.

Emily Richards
Salisbury, Wiltshire

Christie did produce varied women – spinsters with fulfilled lives, a Lesbian menage viewed sympathetically, plucky, heroic girls. As Emily Richards says, it’s infuriating to see her (woman) adaptor fall back onto lazy old-fashioned views of women.

The intellectual and the roaring boys

I wasn't going to bother with The Last Kingdom. Saxons* vs Danes isn't a period of history I'm much interested in. However Tom Holland, who is researching the Heptarchy was on Twitter saying that the portrait of Alfred was very good, so I scrolled through Episode 2 till he turned up, and he is good (played by David Dawson). A melancholy intellectual, visionary yet shrewd. Fragile, delicate and only an adequate warrior whereas the Danes thoroughly enjoy the whole business of close combat sword and shield play. His intellectualism takes the form as it would in his time, of theological debate, his politics are cool and ruthless.

“Most prudent, far-seeing in wisdom, and hard to overcome in any crisis' - Æthelwold on King Alfred & his heirs. “ (stolen from Tom Holland).

So I went back to episode 1 and followed the fortunes of Uhtred (Alexander Dreymon) a handsome young man who was born a Saxon and brought up a Dane. We get shots of him bathing – not just for a sight of his nice body but to reassure the audience that our ancestors weren't the epitome of stench that so repels us now. (They did the same thing for Liam Neeson's Rob Roy).

Uhtred - quite clean you know

He does choose odd times of the year to bathe though. It has been winter for 5 episodes. Once there was a clump of daffodils suggesting it might be at least be late March then it got back to winter. I was hopeful that we would have changed seasons in episode 5 when Uhtred's missus was bathing with a pregnant belly, showing time would have passed since their arranged marriage but evidently she conceived in about May, since it was winter again. This is Wessex, the West Country (though it it was shot in Hungary and Wales) and that part of England has early springs and hot summers. This series won't have done the tourist trade any good.

Uhtred is supposed to be avenging the death of his adoptive father, a Dane, and is also trying to get back the kingdom of Northumbria*, of which he is the rightful heir. He has plenty of adventures but he is a dull character not a patch on Alfred. His girlfriend, Brida (Emily Cox), is an early version of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, foul mouthed and wantonly cruel which couldn't be allowed to Uhtred, supposed to be the hero after all. His other companion is Leofric (Adrian Bower) the classic sergeant major rough diamond, obscene-speaking and straight-talking, the kind of part that would normally be played by Sean Bean.

The series is propaganda for paganism. The Danes are buoyant and colourful. They wear wonderful animal skins (though no-one ever scratches for fleas), are finely tattooed, have wild hair, and love a fight, followed by massacre, torture and rape. The biggest, and baddest of them, Ubba (Rene Tempe), has finally been laid low and he really did have the presence of a manic head of a motorcycle gang – The Marauding Mob or the Plundering Pack. Meanwhile the poor Saxons frump about in long drab gowns, go to Church and eat gruel and apples because it is always Lent. And on that kind of diet they have to fight these evil brutes with their ultra cool ships.

 

The manic Ubba

Some genuine suspense has built up. Uhtred, tired of being pissed over by Alfred, is going rogue and is setting to do a little plundering of his own. With 3 more episodes to go I'm fairly sure Uhtred will be reconciled with Alfred and get Northumbria back. The Danes will be expelled and converted to Christianity. So far when they come up against priest or devout king they have Richard Dawkins style objections to the faith. The nature of conversion is something that the script-writers in our agnostic age can't handle.

This is supposed to be the British Game of Thrones which I don't watch as it has too much explicit torture for me to stomach. Here the violence is knockabout and doesn't make me wince. It looks good, it's lively and there's always the chance of seeing Alfred dragged away from discussing scripture for yet another wretched battle, glumly putting on the chain mail helmet while the Danish roaring boys, in the ninth century equivalent of revving their Harley Davidsons, knock up yet another painted shield wall.

Alfred at yet another sodding battle

* Someone commented that it wasn't Northumbria, but Bambrugh.  "The Angle (not Saxon), Kingdom of Northumbria stretched from Edinburgh to south of the Humber. Bamburgh, is a small patch on the North East coast were there was a royal capital. It was a fine time, when Geordies and the Irish ruled.

*Someone commented on another site that it wasn't Northumbria, but Bambrugh. "The Angle (not Saxon), Kingdom of Northumbria stretched from Edinburgh to south of the Humber. Bamburgh, is a small patch on the North East coast where there was a royal capital. It was a fine time, when Geordies and the Irish ruled." I am sorry to see such narrow nationalism enters into discussions of events over a millennium ago.

Update:- In the last episode Uhtred teamed up temporarily with a startlingly evil war-lord called Skorpa who was a cross between Charles and Marilyn Manson with a Sadhu thrown in. The problem with Uhtred is that he is pretty and boring like Orlando Bloom. Whoever appears in a scene with him – his seamed side-kick Leofric,the fork-bearded king Peredur in Cornwall, the clever buffoon Athelwold, even his kind, pious wife Mildrith, over-shadows him by having more character and zing. I cannot warm to Uhtred at all.

Skorpa and Uhtred. Skorpa has his mouth closed so you can't see his blood-stained teeth.

He has now got together with Iseult, a pagan queen resembling Kate Bush and is about to undergo a trial by single combat. Sadly there's no chance he's going to lose, as he deserves. 

And it's still bloody winter! There was a hint of green on one copse for a minute but alas, back to the bare branches and brown sward.   

We buried him in full camera glare

I'm not a republican. Constitutional monarchies work fine as a system of government, even though on paper they don't make sense.

Like Christopher Hitchens, I thoroughly enjoy Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, a novel where a detective examines the case against Richard III and decides that the duplicitous evil king was a creation of the Tudor spin doctor, Thomas More. His version was later popularised by the brilliant propagandist and jingoist, William Shakespeare. Hitchens called The Daughter of Time a “minor classic” and indeed it is a morality tale of not carelessly accepting the received version of an historical event.

Last night I watched a documentary about the Richard III Society raising the money and employing the archaeological department of Leicester University to dig up a car park in Leicester and – shiveringly for the superstitious – on the first day of the dig they uncovered a skeleton with a curved spine. I am delighted when people who our shallow society dubs “anoraks” or “eccentrics” i.e. people with a private passion for something of no obvious profit, are rewarded, whether it's a couple who stick paua shells on the walls of their house which later turns into a tourist attraction, or a group dedicated to rehabilitating a king who died over five hundred years ago finding his body. It's a mixed triumph for the Society since it contradicts their theory that Richard's misshapen body was a lie of Thomas More's.

But – a service in Leicester Cathedral. Headline news. Trailers on radio and television about live coverage of the burial. Cortege through the city. Heralds and banners and flags. As if this was an event of national importance. I like a good ceremony and will turn up for a Sealed Knot performance but is anyone else going WTRuritanianF about this? 

 

You can follow the mixture of solemnity and  derision on #richardreburied.

Favourite tweets:-

James O'Malley ‏@Psythor 2h2 hours ago

 

Disgusted that Channel 4 hasn’t got a Tudor on for balance. Typical Pro-Plantagenet bias. #richardreburied

  

Julian Dutton ‏@JulianDutton1 8h8 hours ago

A hearse a hearse my kingdom for a hearse. #richardreburied

FGM on prime time

Wednesday 9pm I was watching a favourite undemanding telly program, Law & Order: UK, and was startled when the usual murder-and-trial plot dealt with female genital mutilation (FGM). The programme is still available on catch up. It includes a strong speech from a woman about the horrors of FGM, both the operation itself and the effects it has on the body and mental state for the rest of the victim's life.

I have to say that I found this speech hard to listen to, as the thought of FGM makes me feel very sick. The woman was denounced as a westernised whore by her hijabbed sister-in-law, so evidently no fears of accusations of islamophobia had constrained the script writers.

I don't think FGM has ever been handled by prime time television before in the way that domestic violence has been in East Enders or marital rape in Criminal Justice. Both domestic violence and marital rape were once thought of as family affairs that sufferers were reluctant to bring out into the open and which the police were leery about getting involved in. Then, after campaigning they came into view as subjects of discussion, as themes in controversial drama then run-of-the-mill drama along with changes of attitude from the public and with more action against the offenders and sympathy towards the victims from the police.

As everyone knows, the UK's record on prosecutions of FGM is appalling. The law against it was passed thirty years ago and the first case will appear in court on April 15. According to Sarah Ditum in the New Statesman there are various reasons for the lack of prosecutions - family loyalty; matters of jurisdiction (the victim is often foreign and has been cut in a foreign country); and physical symptoms  i.e. it is difficult to date when the mutilation took place and so it may not be liable for prosecution under current legislation. There is also the matter of the status of women within the communities where FGM is practised.

“Male violence against women,” says Ali [Nimko Ali, co-founder and CEO of the organisation Daughters of Eve]. “That’s ultimately what FGM is. This is about controlling women’s bodies and controlling how they see themselves in society. A lot of the people that are practising FGM right now are well educated but the women haven’t been emancipated from those cultures and the men ultimately believe in those control frameworks.” There’s an ongoing failure to educate girls about their rights but, Ali stresses, no defence of naivety can be extended to the perpetrators and promoters of this crime: “None of these people are ignorant. Those that are pro-FGM often know more about the law than the people that should looking after the girls that are at risk.” But for a long time, authority figures who endorsed or tolerated FGM within their own communities were treated as the official spokespeople on the issue – and that left girls voiceless. “It’s [politicians] being in bed with community leaders, the male community leaders, that has meant that women won’t come forward,” says Ali. “Because the women know that those they seek to trust are talking to the ones that are seeking to abuse them.” This is the context in which FGM has been allowed to go on unopposed until very recently: one where within certain African immigrant communities black men dominated black women’s lives, and the largely white (and largely, though not exclusively, male) mainstream condoned that domination.

Nimko Ali has appeared in popular women's magazines like Grazia and Stylist and FGM as a campaigning issue has been taken up by the Guardian with resultant action from the education secretary Michael Gove.

The education secretary, Michael Gove, has written to every school in England warning them to be alert to the dangers of female genital mutilation (FGM) after a Guardian campaign to bring the issue into schools attracted the support of more than 230,000 people. ....... After meeting 17-year-old Brighton schoolgirl Fahma Mohamed, who led the campaign, Gove has sent a letter to all headteachers in England alerting them to new guidelines designed to keep children safe, which includes guidance on FGM. A spokeswoman for the Department for Education told the Guardian that the education secretary would keep up pressure on schools by flagging up the dangers of FGM again in his annual "back to school" letter in September.

Rape and domestic violence will be forever with us, however glaringly their hatefulness are shown in fictional form on prime time telly. FGM though, a form of child abuse as well as a tool for female control, is a very specific practice and could be ended like, say, foot-binding, or the scold's bridle (to mention a Scottish practice and avoid accusations of racial and cultural superiority and imperialism). It's been allowed to carry on for a generation, which is a scandal, and the specifics of this neglect, and why those with suspicions or actual information did not act,  have not yet been clearly stated. According to Nimko Ali:-

A watershed moment for us was when the NSPCC got on board and started talking about it in terms of child abuse. Since I started campaigning against FGM, I’ve noticed time and time again how we have the information and we also have the structures to deal with abuse here in the UK, but in the case of FGM, these just don’t come together. Frontline staff who deal with children, like teachers and social workers, have an abundance of this information – they just don’t pass it on. At an All-Party Parliamentary Group meeting two weeks ago, a doctor told me that she sees girls in her clinic who have undergone FGM all the time. I said, ‘Why haven’t you told the police?’ and she replied, ‘Well, I’d want to be anonymous.’ That was so disconcerting. She would never have said that about rape victims; she knows in the case of rape that it’s a clear-cut crime where information has to be passed on. A Metropolitan police officer told me that they have all the resources in place to deal with FGM cases, but no frontline staff are passing on the information they have. Openly recognising FGM as child abuse should change all that.

More on From One Second to the Next

 Werner Herzog's film Aguirre: The Wrath of God is one of my favourite films. There are wonderful scenes, like the conquistadores climbing down the Andes at the beginning and the last scenes of the raft half-sinking down the Amazon carrying an insane Klaus Kinski and little monkeys that squeak and clamber like primate rats.  It's a rich and haunting film, and poetic in that it suggests more than it states.

Now he's made a documentary, From One Second to the Next, that shows the victims of accidents cause by drivers texting. An athletic boy is crippled, a go-getting woman  is brain damaged, an Amish family and a couple of engineers have been killed. Their families are stricken and have the dignity of those who are bearing pain and sorrow. "I can't tell him to go play in the yard," says the mother of the once athletic boy, and it's heart-breaking.

Two of the texting drivers appear, and they are dignified as well, dragging around a burden of remorse.

From One Second to the Next has been designed as an educational film to be taken around schools and shown by government agencies. It was sponsored by AT&T.

Herzog says:-  "What AT&T proposed immediately clicked and connected inside of me. There's a completely new culture out there. I'm not a participant of texting and driving — or texting at all — but I see there's something going on in civilization which is coming with great vehemence at us."

I don't know what he means by that - perhaps that this is the Age of Distraction in both senses of the word (constant entertainment, not paying attention) but what he has made is an educational film of beauty and power, unlike the pedestrian educational films from my school days.

I have some memories of films about how tractors can roll over and kill you (I went to a country school), how to equip yourself for tramping in the bush and how to avoid venereal disease. They were probably put together by a couple of underlings in the Department of Education rather than a highly acclaimed director.  Occasionally there would be mini-dramas eg one called something like Seven Candles about a father who manages to avoid all possible car accidents to get to his daughter's birthday until the last scene when he steps out from behind a parked van. 

I've been watching Top of the Lake and I bet that Jane Campion could probably knock out a powerful film on bush safety, since she does convey the chilly hostility of New Zealand wilderness.  Other directors come to mind - Woody Allen on safe sex perhaps?  Danny Boyle's nerve-twisting 127 Hours raises painful awareness of what could happen if you don't follow a cardinal rule of hiking or mountaineering - tell someone where you're going.

I'd like to think that a director of Herzog's talent will make the message stick that texting when driving is dangerously stupid - even Jeremy Clarkson wouldn't argue with that.  However drivers do turn their eyes to other things than what's ahead when hurling their chunks of metal down the roads.  This is the Age of Distraction after all.

From a cycling forum the other day

“4 drivers texting/reading maps on their phones. I only cycled past about 40 cars so that was a startling 10% of all drivers I saw on my 10 minute commute this morning.”

Mel Smith

Mel Smith has just died.

He was great in sketch shows and also in the more straight role of Colin in Colin's Sandwich.

Some videos of him and the Not the Nine O'Clock News gang doing their spoof songs.

Gob On you (Punk)

 

Headbanger (Metal)

 

I Like Trucking

 

Country and Western