The black death

When I was rather smaller than I am today, I was a fan of Doctor Who. Actually, I say I was a fan, but fandom is an entirely relative concept. I watched the show religiously, of course. And I’d also seen both the movies (in which Peter Cushing played the Doctor) when they cropped up on TV. But my loyalty wasn’t all-consuming. I can’t remember ever going to the Longleat exhibition, for example. I did buy and read lots of the Target novelisations, but I wasn’t a completist, and in the end I sold my collection. And although I pestered my mother to up the family’s fibre intake so I could amass the Weetabix card set, I’ve no idea what happened to it; the same goes for the 10th anniversary Radio Times special and the Tom Baker doll. I started to lose interest some time during the Romana era, and by the time Colin Baker’s unlovely persona had dragged the show into an 18-month hiatus, I barely noticed. By comparison with some fans, I was a complete bloody lightweight.

One area into which I did put a little extra effort was in writing my own Doctor Who fiction. To be honest, even there I was something of a dilettante, as I don’t think I ever finished a story. I’d come up with a title, something like The Daleks of Doom, or  maybe Doom to the Daleks, then begin with an incredibly violent opening passage, usually involving the spectacular destruction of several Ogrons. (These were the hulking, simian sidekicks of the Daleks, who helped them with the stuff they couldn’t do in those days, like carrying things and climbing stairs. I think I saw them as analogous to the hard boys at school who were good at football and laughed at my glasses and said Doctor Who was for poofs.) Then the Doctor would arrive and survey the carnage and wonder what was going on and so would I and I’d go off and have some lemon squash and forget about it.

One thing I didn’t do was to attempt to render the stories that I’d seen on TV as prose. This was partly because of the existence of those Target books: I knew that if I waited long enough, Terrance Dicks or Philip Hinchcliffe or someone like them would put each story between covers. Instead, I was intent on creating my own narratives, even if they were never going to go anywhere. Of course, after the show had gone off air, an entire sub-culture of original stories appeared in print form, with hundreds of books to keep the Who brand alive, but as I said, I was well out of the loop by that point.

Although I was careful not to tread on Target’s turf, I probably took a few hints from the books, albeit subconsciously. (Not that I have any examples of my deathless genius to hand, and I suspect they suffered the same fate as the Weetabix stuff, so this is all based on my increasingly fuzzy memory.) I wasn’t a slave to the house style, though: the Target books were careful not to acknowledge the real-world status of Doctor Who, beyond a cursory acknowledgement of the scriptwriter of the story on which the book was based. So the much-derided artwork might depict the actor who played the Doctor, but Pat or Jon or Tom never got a mention. Instead, there would be a stock explanation of which incarnation was in play, such as:

THE CHANGING FACE OF DOCTOR WHO. 

The cover illustration of this book portrays the third DOCTOR WHO whose physical appearance was altered by the Time Lords when they banished him to planet Earth in the Twentieth Century.

Whereas I preferred:

THE CHANGING FACE OF DOCTOR WHO. 

The cover illustration of this book portrays the third DOCTOR WHO who was played by Jon Pertwee.

Moreover, whenever a character in a Target book incurred the wrath of the Daleks, there would be a searing flash of light, a scream, and the unfortunate individual would slump to the floor, often with wisps of smoke rising from his body. Whereas I knew what happened to people who were exterminated. They went negative. You could see it happening. So when the Daleks exterminated someone or something in my stories (I’m not sure how old I was when I realised that “exterminate” was a proper word, not one invented for the purposes of the show, like TARDIS) I’d write something along the lines of “The Dalek fired his gun and everything went negative and the Zygon died.”

In many ways, it betrayed an early fondness for metafiction and similar postmodern japeries, although at that stage I probably thought metafiction was next door to Metebelis III. Yes, that’s the sort of thing that passed for humour back then. These days, although I do like the resurrected Who immensely, it’s more of an indulgent, nostalgic fondness. Although I finally have a sofa with plenty of space behind it, I don’t hide there. And in retrospect, I even feel a tiny bit sorry for the Ogrons.

After The Wedding: The Ghost Of The Mad Duchess In Westminster Abbey Versus The Exorcists

And so it's done. The Royal Wedding went off without a hitch. No tripping down the aisle, no exes coming out of nowhere speaking up in objection, no paparazzi managing to sneak in the back door, and no sign of Sarah Ferguson crashing the party with a few Somali pirate warlords in attendance. Just one very typical thing: a wee bit of a problem getting that ring on the finger. It happens.

Rumor had it that Westminster Abbey had been the scene of an exorcism a couple of days before the wedding. I can now tell you that's the absolute truth. Anglican clergy did battle with the ghost of the mad Duchess of Windsor, to prevent her from making a scene. It seems Wallis Simpson still bears a grudge about her Eddie having to abdicate the throne back in the day.

Of course, after the wedding service was done and the guests had left the abbey, the clergyman in this clip went and did something unexpected. And very, very funny.

So, Prince William (or Wills, as some call him) is off the market. The world's most eligible bachelor falls to a new bearer. No, it's not Jack Black. He'd have to murder millions of other single men to get that title. Memo to Jack: maybe try cutting out the stoner slacker schtick. It's really annoying.

No, the title now belongs to Prince Harry, who seems to like looking over his shoulder at weddings and seeing the bride come down the aisle. What did he say to his brother? Some might say that he remarked, "Wait til you see that dress." Others might argue that he said, "Go for it, Wills." And I might suggest that he said, "Can I raise an objection just as a gag later on?"

Moon on a stick (the statutory vaguely Royal-Wedding-themed post)

Stewart Lee was, I suppose, a bit of a spear-carrier when I first became aware of him; in the period when comedy was supposedly the new rock and roll, if Newman and Baddiel were the Sex Pistols, Lee and Herring were somewhere between the Damned and the Lurkers. Their TV show, Fist of Fun, was amusing, but the most memorable bits were mostly supplied by Kevin Eldon in the guise of Simon Quinlank, King of Hobbies. And subsequently Lee became one of the lost souls in the self-devouring cycle of Moderately Cerebral Blokish Radio DJ Double Acts Consisting Of Ex-Comedians, Journalists And/Or Musicians. (Essentially, first there was Lee and Herring, and [Andrew] Collins and [Stuart] Maconie – ex-NME, Select, etc – and [Mark] Radcliffe and [Marc] ‘Lard’ [Riley] – ex-The Fall and various other post-punk entities – and then suddenly there was Radcliffe and Maconie, and Collins and Herring, leaving Lee and Lard on a metaphorical shelf somewhere, which is like a real shelf, but in less immediate need of dusting.)

But then suddenly he was back, fatter and balder and pinker and apparently having read more books. In the past week or so he’s written two pieces for British broadsheets that deserve wider attention. First, in the Financial Times of all places, he lays out his principled opposition to the notion that he ought to be creating comedy that can be tweeted or txted, as part of a wider attack on the whole notion of the creative person as a mere content provider. His work is quotable sure, but in passages and paragraphs, and even then you lose some of the context. For example, from the FT article itself:

But today content is king and form is mutable. Can the comic become a film? Can the film become a game? Can the book become an e-book? Can the song become a ringtone? Imagine if the Japanese super-robots the Transformers were suddenly put in charge of all human culture. Here’s a Jacobean tragedy you can also use to mix trifle! Content is being dictated by its possible application to a variety of forms.

And from his most recent TV show:



And just to prove that Lee’s content extends beyond his own metaphorical navel fluff (which strangely finds its way from his metaphorical midriff to the metaphorical shelf mentioned above, where comedians and musicians and journalists who don’t make the grade are sent to die, possibly metaphorically), here he is in The Guardian on the subject of some wedding or another that’s happening today. There’s been some pretty extraordinary content created about this event, and I thought it had simultaneously reached its zenith of weirdness with the Kate and Wills roast dinner, but Lee goes one better by explaining the nuptials in terms of the Grail myth, with reference to the Fisher King and TS Eliot:

The prince has taken his lowly bride from within this charged landscape, where our ancestors celebrated the union of man and woman in stone and earth, and began the communal processes that forged a nation from their descendents, the broken nation that William the Fisher King must now heal. Our shaman-prince could not have chosen a better receptacle for his magical purposes than Kate Middleton, a peasant-spawned serf-girl, sodden with the primordial mire of the Swindon-shadowed swamplands.

Try txting that, you bastards...

PS: More cogent analysis of this utterly speshull day, from Marco Evers in Der Spiegel and Will Self in the New Statesman. Have fun, everyone, and don’t eat all the bunting!

Shame about the boat race

Several years after everybody else, and at a stage when proper old-fashioned amateur blogging appears to be pretty damn moribund, I’ve finally got round to tweaking the look of Cultural Snow. Words such as “Titanic” and “deckchairs” come to mind; it’s as if Stockport County had chosen this point in the season to design a new away strip. Further tweaks are necessary and inevitable, such as resuscitating the blog roll. But do let me know what you think.

The Wedding Extravaganza Of The Epoch

And so the big day is finally upon us. As of this writing, in a little under twelve hours, Prince William will be marrying Kate Middleton, and the eyes of the world will be upon them.

Twelve hours of single life left for the both of them. A long, sleepless night, no doubt. Too late to back out of it now. Too late to just impulsively decide to elope.

Seeing as how William will one day be King of my home country (unless Harper manages to pull off his top secret plan to have himself crowned Emperor of North America, and no, that's not a joke), I thought I'd poke a little fun at the monarchy on the eve of the wedding. Oh, and by the way, I like the monarchy.

Of course the glaring eyes of the media will be there. In an ideal world, the Queen could have the dreck of the tabloid and entertainment reporters locked away in the Tower of London. They're a lower form of life then we regular homo sapiens, after all.

I'd even be willing to lend Inspector Lars Ulrich to the effort to take out the reporters. He hates them, you know, and he's not going to let a little thing like being a fictional character get in the way of kicking butt and taking names....

Without further ado, I give you... the Royal Family.