måndag 31 maj 2010

Handsome is what handsome does

All right, no more Eurovision this year, I promise. Not even to gloat over Germany's victory, nor to swoon over dimpled disturbing Daniel, nor to wonder how on earth the Swedes can yet again blame - not themselves, not Europe - but the Swedish competition's organiser for not winning (or even making the final). Although honestly. They had 32 songs to choose from, for Heaven's sake, and incidentally they were all better than the, er, Munch-inspired number from Ukraine... No, enough is enough. On to higher things. Like, oh I don't know, "The Tudors" maybe.

Can anyone explain to me why one keeps watching this series? Normally, there are two kinds of period drama inspired by real historical events: those who are faithful to historical facts, which can sometimes become a bit long-winded, or the pacy but historically unreliable ones, where even fairly urbane law-enforcers can suddenly be found snarling "He doesn't need his tongue, then tear it out" in dark torture cellars.

What is fascinating with "The Tudors" is that it is neither historically accurate nor particularly pacy. A bit of bed-hopping cannot disguise the fact that it takes ages over every plot thread. Remember than never-ending divorce procedure? And Anne Boleyn took a goodish hour-long episode to execute. At the same time, those in the know continually point out historical errors, like a mix-up over popes, or the fact that Henry VIII should have become the pig-eyed fatty we know from the portraits long ago, instead of hardly looking a day older or a pound heavier than when he was a golden young prince. The historical doubtfulness starts with the title. Why "The Tudors"? Because there had already been a series called "Henry VIII"? Because the series-makers hope to carry on with Henry's children's reigns eventually, though at this rate they won't be able to kill him off until approximately the year 2020? Whatever the reason, a series called "The Tudors" should in all honesty start with Henry VII. As a true supporter of Richard III (not that he was anything like Shakespeare's version, more's the pity) I heartily dislike Henry VII, but I would still have been interested to see a period drama about his reign. His marriage with Elizabeth of York must, all things considered, have been a pretty tense affair, and surely a great deal could be done with the rebellions instigated by more or less dubious pretenders claiming to be Yorkist princes. But no - instead we get yet another re-tread of the story about Henry VIII and his six wives.

And yet I keep watching. Why? Is it because of James Frain's unusually comely Thomas Cromwell and his troubles? At first contemptuous of Henry, whom he runs rings round intellectually, he is by now becoming seriously rattled - when Henry makes him a knight he glances nervously at the sword blade, as if he were afraid that the ceremony could become an execution any moment. A stupid king you can work with, or around, but a psychopathic king is a bit less comfortable. Frain's Cromwell is by far the most interesting character, and he has comic timing too. Consider this not too subtle exchange:
CROMWELL: We must continue to destroy the brothels and slaughterhouses.
HENCHMAN: Sir?
CROMWELL: The monasteries.
Not exactly razor-sharp, you will agree, but thanks to Frain's slight disbelieving pause before the last line and his irritable do-keep-up-tone it drew a giggle from me.

Another reason to keep watching, if like me one is not so very taken with the Tudors and their shaky claim on the throne, is the series' take on Henry VIII. Appropriately, it's a real hatchet-job. The man is a preening, violent, volatile menace to society. I have never seen a less likeable Henry VIII, and that is saying something. In fact, a fat suit would probably increase our sympathy for him, rather than the opposite. While Henry whores and slashes his way through his reign without noticeably changing, you start to feel reminded of "The Picture of Dorian Gray".

Still I must say that if you want to watch only one series about Henry VIII, you'd do better with the one honestly called "Henry VIII" starring Ray Winstone as a thuggish but not certifiable king, Helena Bonham Carter as Anne Boleyn and Danny Webb as yet another watchable Cromwell. It is pacier, better written and probably a great deal more reliable.

söndag 23 maj 2010

And the winner (with my luck) probably won't be...

I was thinking of raising the topic of audition shows - the almost acceptable face of reality TV - and trying to justify why I love watching them (only two have been aired on Swedish television so far). But that is too much like hard work. So I'll just settle for the easy option of posting a list of my favourite entries for the Eurovision Song Contest. Note that I've only heard the songs once, and they may sound completely different live, while some of the also-rans may pick up enormously (as happened last year with UK's "It's my time"). So here they are, in random order:

Moldavia: I originally gave this 3 out of 5 points, but what the heck, it's up-tempo and fun and the singers remind me slightly of the bad siblings in High School Musical. (Yep, I saw it - there's no limit to how silly your TV viewing can get when you're single and unrestrained.) Plus I like the hat. Bop to the top!

Albania: Another up-tempo number. The singer's boyfriend in the video looks like he's going to blow up a factory, but it doesn't really matter.

Iceland: This song sounds more like Ireland than Iceland, with the Valkyrie-like singer belting out a catchy pop tune (the only one of the songs I can still hum) very satisfactorily.

Armenia: I don't know what's happened to me. I normally like ballads a lot, but this year, both in the Swedish "Music Festival" competitions and now in Eurovision, I find the crop of ballads rather boring. This one I do like, though. Eurovision buffs usually appreciate "ethnic" numbers where the countries display "some of their national cultural heritage". Not me. I prefer this kind of number: smooth, professional, western-style pop.

Israel: Nice-looking boy with impressive voice sings soulful ballad in Hebrew. Yes, the concept is familiar. But no matter: it works. And as half of Asia is participating now, we can lay the old "yes but they're not really part of Europe, are they?" argument to rest.

Germany: No, I'm not so biased as you may think. I've barely liked one of Germany's entries to Eurovision so far. I'm not impressed by the Eurovision winner "Ein bisschen Frieden". (Admittedly, I've only heard about half the refrain of that song, but honestly: asking for "a little peace"? Isn't that as impossible as "a little war"?) But this time the singer is a pro, and charming with it, and the number is pleasing. The accented English is a little bewildering, but doesn't detract from the charm somehow.

Spain: Now here's where bias really comes in. The almost-completely-Swedish expert panel, with the exception of the excellent Finn, found this number "disturbing". And that's why it's a favourite for me. The sinister circus-master singer could be the evil genius in an "Avengers" episode - and he's got red curls too (well, all right, maybe it's a wig). If he had been made up as a clown, I agree it would have been too scary - as it is, from a villain-lover like myself, it has to be four out of five. Could be a complete disaster live, though.

Questions to ponder: am I the only one who thinks the singer for Switzerland is kinda cute (red hair again)? What do Romania's dancers (they may not make it to the live show) resemble most: C3PO or cybermen? And why, when they were doing so well with the Lloyd Webber song last year, have the UK back-slided again? When, apparently, none of their professional singers or pop groups deign to take part in Eurovision, it's no wonder the Brits aren't doing very well.

lördag 15 maj 2010

Cyber Georgianas and Brontë villains

'Ere, what's all this then? When googling Georgiana to see if I could find a picture of her for my profile (well, that was the main reason), I discovered to my dismay that some other chick - it CAN'T be a guy - has registered "Georgiana Podsnap" as a user on Facebook. Is dismay an overreaction? Should I not be glad that somewhere out there, little Georgiana has another fan? Yes, probably. But honestly I can't be. If the other Georgiana should find this blog (not very likely at present because it seems to be in a Google blind spot) she will think I stole her alias and be not a little cheesed off. I can only say it's a feeling I wholeheartedly share.

I was not aware that Facebook was a playground for fictional characters as well as flesh-and-blood people but I suppose it was only to be expected: we book nerds are like that. At work, I try to use names of fictional and historical characters whenever I can as test users and in manuals. I once invented a test user called Edward Casaubon whose function it was to make all kinds of mistakes on a website where I was the webmaster, in order to check the error messages. I thought of using the name Nicholas Bulstrode, but decided he would not have made any errors even in a futuristic web environment. The company where I have my present assignment has, according to one of my manuals, contracts with Dombey and Son, Wickfield and Heep and the Captain Flint Corporation. In such circumstances, outsourcing may not seem such a brilliant idea after all.

Speaking of book nerdishness, I'm really enjoying "The Taste of Sorrow" now. The Brontë sisters are struggling on with their various teaching jobs and not liking it much, but it's still not a depressing read: the warm family feeling and the siblings' shared imaginary worlds lighten things up. I wish poor Charlotte would be less hard on herself and show more signs of the sense of humour you can see in her books, but I can't claim Jude Morgan doesn't have sympathy for her. According to him, Wilson of Cowan Bridge a.k.a. Brocklehurst deserved his bad press, and he certainly convinced me. It's one of the sneaky things about historical fiction: you're apt to believe that everything the author describes more or less happened just like that. It's hard to remember that Carus Wilson in "The Taste of Sorrow" is just as much a fictional character as Brocklehurst. But if the real Wilson really did publish a journal called "The Children's Friend" full of horrifying cautionary tales, well, there's not much you can say for him.

It would be ironic if one of the fictional Victorian villains who actually did exist in the real world would be Brocklehurst, who, as I've said earlier, is a dead loss villain-wise. The only cool thing about him is the name. I must say generally that Brontë villains aren't much to my taste. With Charlotte this doesn't matter because she has such intelligent, humourous and interestingly flawed heroes. Mr Rochester, of course; Paul Emmanuel - an acquired taste, I've been given to understand, but I like him; Robert Gerard Moore: with such men about, you don't really feel short-changed. I've not felt myself able to revisit Anne's "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" or Emily's "Wuthering Heights" since my teens, though, largely because I find their main villains - Heathcliff and Arthur Huntingdon - so appalling. What makes it worse is you're meant to see their dangerous fascination and accordingly feel for the women who fall for them, but I cannot and do not. They represent two types of baddie I have little time for: The Dissipated Cad and The Savage Brute. You can say this much for Heathcliff, however, that everyone else in "Wuthering Heights" is almost equally loathsome: Catherine even manages to be even worse than he is, up to the point where you actually start to feel sorry for the poor caveman sap for being so crazy about her. As for the "Tenant", I should probably give it another chance, because I do like the hero Gilbert Markham, and it's a ripping yarn full of warring couples which makes for great drama. Plus there's a villain on the sidelines who was rather interesting as I remember, though why he should waste his time trying to seduce Helen, the novel's heroine, is a mystery to me. But then those who know the book better than I do claim I'm too hard on Helen, which is another reason to re-read the book. I did tend to be a bit too censorious as a teenager.

söndag 9 maj 2010

From Boris Johnson to the Brontës

No, I will not venture into politics. Well, not if I can help it, anyway. I'm going to write a bit about books that I'm reading or have lately read, just to show I don't spend all of my spare time glued to the TV screen, and one of those books happens to be a light-hearted thriller ("Seventy-Two Virgins") written by Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London.

In theory, I try to alternate my reading between more ambitious reading projects and books I read just for the fun of it. (In practice, I cheat quite a lot.) The problem is that it's easy to become disappointed with the pure self-indulgence books if they turn out to be not quite as self-indulgent as one thinks. On the other hand, I've often found myself enjoying the ambitious books far more than I'd expected. Johnson's thriller (let's see if I manage to call him "Johnson" rather than "Boris" throughout, to highlight that I'm talking about him as a writer, not as a politician - he seems to be "Boris" to everyone in politics, including his opponents)was intended as a self-indulgence book. It was written back in 2004 and concerns a terrorist attack on the American President which turns into a publicity stunt. Johnson writes extremely well and entertainingly, but I must confess I was depressed at first by all the bungled attempts to stop the amateurish terrorists. I don't like it when things go wrong, perhaps because I'm not one of those people who "cope well with stressful situations" to quote the job advertisements. Everything turns out well at the end, however, and there are enjoyable scenes where various establishment figures, after having got over the initial shock, start to bite back at the media-savvy terrorist leader and his gang. The President himself, up until then rather patronisingly described (this is Bush, remember, not Saint Obama), gets to make the point that the black-eyed virgins the would-be martyrs are hoping for might actually turn out to be raisins. "Kind of makes a difference, I would have thought".

Would non-Tory readers enjoy the book? I'm not sure - the author's distaste for what one could call champagne socialists is apparent. Not one, but two journalists from left-leaning papers make the mistake of messing up their subjects' lives for the sake of a morally edifying story. But then, doesn't everyone hate that kind of journalism? Even so, if you're seriously anti-American as well as left-wing you should probably give the book a miss.

I felt slightly guilty when I started Jude Morgan's "The Taste of Sorrow" after having finished Johnson's thriller. A novel about the Brontë sisters, was that really ambitious enough? I should say yes, though, because Morgan has a writing pattern similar to my reading one. He seems to be alternating between elegant Regency Romances ("Indiscretion", "An Accomplished Woman") and more serious biographical fiction about historical personnages who did not always lead easy lives ("The King's Touch", "Passion", "Symphony"). His books are enjoyable to read in both cases, though I confess I prefer the romances where I can be reasonably sure of a happy ending. "The Taste of Sorrow", as one can guess from the title, will not be all sunshine and laughter. It starts glumly enough with the death of the Brontë siblings' mother. There will be more deaths, I realise, in this book than in Johnson's terrorist-stuffed thriller. So far, the funniest part of the book has been a scathing description of poor old Carus Wilson, Charlotte's model for Mr Brocklehurst (a villain not even I can like - how come so many teacher/headmaster baddies are such unsubtle monsters? Dickens's Squeers is no better). And even that was grim in its way. Well, let's see if the tone lightens up a bit further on. I'm looking forward to Morgan's take on Madame Heger.

söndag 2 maj 2010

Now that's what I call a wizard boy

It's a bit embarrassing when the intellectual highlight of one's TV week is a children's programme. But there it is. Mercifully, Swedish Television has decided to keep sending "Merlin" and now, finally, the second season has reached us. And I find out just how much I've been looking forward to it.

And this in spite of the fact that the target audience is obviously kids. Smart kids, but nevertheless kids. I make no apologies for being addicted to "Doctor Who" - it's nerdy, undoubtedly, but brilliant, and I really can't see it as a kids' show (more of this another time when I'm feeling in the right geeky mood)- but "Merlin" is not in the same league, as indeed few series could be. The smart-alecky, anachronistic dialogue and some of the knockabout humour connected with Merlin's tasks as Arthur's servant are obviously aimed at the average bright twelve-year-old. Nevertheless, you can't go much wrong with the Arthur legend, can you? The "before they were famous" concept is great. The series follows Merlin's adventures as a young boy - a kind of "Yound Indiana Jones" set in a fairy-tale, knights-in-armour version of medieval times. Arthur's father Uther Pendragon is still king of Camelot and Arthur himself is a spoiled but right-minded young prince. Many things are different from the typical Arthur legend and part of the fun is to guess how things can possibly turn out the way we know they will. How on earth will Arthur end up with Guinevere (called "Gwen"), who in this version is not a princess but a blacksmith's daugther and maid to Morgana? Will Morgana - not Arthur's sister here, merely Uther's ward - really go over to The Dark Side, and if so how and when? She's been one of the goodies this far.

One thing I can say in my defence is that if - as I do - one insists on watching each Harry Potter film when it comes, then one might as well watch "Merlin", which is in fact better. (I speak only of the HP films mind - the books may be full of wondrous complexities that are totally missing in the films for all I know). Young Merlin is a good guy, but not effortlessly so. He has ethical dilemmas to solve in almost every episode, and when after a bit of soul-searching he does the decent thing (like saving a boy's life, even knowing he will cause trouble later on - Mordred of course!)you feel like cheering. A character's hero status is much easier to bear when he is seen to struggle a bit. For a sentimental soul like me, the tender father-son relationship between Merlin and his mentor Gaius and the strong if unaknowledged friendship between Arthur and Merlin cause their fair share of heart-warming moments. They'll have to watch what they do with the Uther character though. One of the points the series makes is that Arthur will become a much better king than his father, but that doesn't have to mean that poor Uther has to be quite so dense. He is limited, he doesn't like magic - granted. But surely he can still be an OK king, if not a great one?

Now the Harry Potter films are more straightforwardly goodies versus baddies, and I don't care half as much about the characters (Ron is becoming a right pain). It's good for villain-ogling though. The villains in question are pretty shallow and not much cop but they're a joy to look at: Jason Isaacs, Alan Rickman (though something tells me Snape will turn out not to be a baddie after all), Tom Felton (jailbait, but honestly - I bet they hadn't counted on Draco growing up to be so dishy)... Not that the villains in "Merlin" are bad either, but sadly they mostly hang around for one episode only, before they are destroyed by some spell or other. I fondly remember Julian Rhind-Tutt, whose sinister ingratiating sorcerer was a much more interesting character than the re-jigged Monks he played in BBC's latest "Oliver Twist" (which was pretty awful and sickeningly PC). And this season we are promised Charles Dance. Yay, I can't wait - Mr Tulkinghorn in Camelot!