Doctor addiction (contd.)

"I thought you had run out of ways to make me sick. But... hello again. You think hatred is beautiful?"

Yes, the Doctor is back! And facing off the Daleks in the very first episode - whose head bozo calmly points out, as an answer to the comment above, that this strange concept of beauty is probably why they haven't killed off the Doc long ago. This week's highlight has undoubtedly been the first five episodes of Doctor Who series seven, all of which I watched in three nights (I'd have made it in two, only I came home late on Monday).

Much is the same, which is remarkable in itself. I and I think many others had expected the Steven Moffat take-over from Russell T. Davies as head script-writer would mean less plot holes: after all, the Moffat episodes during the Davies years tended to be tightly plotted ("Blink" above all). But no, series five, six and seven have contained as many plot holes the size of the Doctor's lost home planet Gallifrey as the Davies era, if not more. Whereas Davies sensibly had one overall story arc per series which was wound up in a grand finale in the two or three final series episodes, Moffat's has a complicated continuing story-arc where some things, but not everything, are cleared up in the series finale. It is frustrating, because you never know if a puzzling plot-line will be dropped completely or explained maybe twenty episodes later. It's a relief to read an article like this one in the Telegraph, which sums up the questions a poor bewildered viewer might be asking her/himself right now (don't read it unless you've already watched the latest episodes - spoilers...). YES, I wonder about the Clerics too! I'm glad it's not just me.

On the plus side, the wit, cleverness, warmth and sheer madness of the Davies era are still present, too. After having (yet again) rewatched series one to four, I must confess that I'm conventional enough to think that, on the whole, Tennant's stint as the Doctor was probably the best. Not just because of Tennant himself, though he was brilliant - all the Doctors I've seen have been good - but because I like the Tenth Doctor's adventures and, above all, companions the best. I've never really warmed to Amy as much as to Donna and Martha (and, occasionally, Rose). But for all that, series five to seven are full of high points, and few programmes - if any - can match Doctor Who for quality in my book.

So why is it considered to be a TV series for children? I've never really got my head round this. One of the reasons that Amy had a hard time winning my heart is because the youthful Karen Gillan, who plays her, was roped in as new companion at the same time as Matt Smith (still in his twenties back then) became the new Doctor. And why? Because, supposedly, "kids" relate better to younger protagonists, which makes it desirable to pick companions who look like they've just finished school.

Now, for fast-moving, clever dialogue, Doctor Who is only out-done by The West Wing. How is it possible that British kids get all this? Are they all potential Mensa members? Of course, it's wonderful that growing generations watch and enjoy a program as intellectually testing as this. But when the kid audience of Doctor Who is hauled in either to explain a market move, as above, or as an argument when critics try to cut down the series to size, it is a bit annoying if you happen to be a Who-addict in her thirties. "Its just a children's programme after all". No, it's not!

And, incidentally, script-writers have shown precious little consideration for their supposed core audience of "kids" in the past. There are Doctor Who episodes that can be traumatising even for the toughest child. The "The Impossible Planet" two-parter in series two was way, way, way too scary. The "Silence in the Library" two-parter was, in a way, sneakier, because while "The Impossible Planet" tackled a primal fear for children and adults alike, "Silence in The Library" played on childhood-specific fears. Never mind the flesh-eating shadows. Far more disturbing are scenes where a little girl is told that her nightmares are real, while what she thinks of as real life is a lie, and where she accidentally zaps her concerned daddy out of existence in a fit of pique. "Midnight" is a psychological chiller which, with its un-Doctorish pessimistic view on human nature, would have been more at home in a Torchwood series. I could go on at some length. "The God Complex"? "The Girl who Waited"? Strewth, "The Doctor's Wife"? Is this really the kind of stuff you sit your children in front of after they've grown too old for Bob the Builder?

Child-friendly or not, plot-holey or not, morally erratic or not (in one episode, the Doctor cheerfully sends a mass-murdering pirate-merchant to his death, the next - the very next - he agonises during a whole episode about sacrificing a baddie's life to save a small town), I love this series. I sometimes think I love it because I can find things to criticise. I'm reminded of  Streatfeild's two dons in Ballet Shoes, who happily find plenty to disagree with in a mounting of A Midsummer Night's Dream "or they would not have enjoyed themselves at all".

Bond and Snow White

Yes, I know... Not the greatest blog subject in history. But it's been one of those weeks without any particular cultural highlight. Instead, making use of my local DVD rental's rent-more-than-one-film-and keep-them-for-a-week-deal, I rented A Quantum of Solace  - to get up to speed on Bond's development, with a view to possibly watching Skyfall at the cinema - and Snow White and the Huntsman. I'd already seen Mirror, Mirror and was interested to see what another take on the famous fairy-tale would look like.

When it comes to Bond, I know I'm not a connoisseur. Most of the Bond films I've seen are those I watched when I was still a kid or a teenager, which explains why I feel more warmly towards the flippant side of these films than most. I must be the only one in existence who doesn't double up with embarrassment over Jaws's love interest in Moonraker (why shouldn't he have a girlfriend? At least his redemption means Bond doesn't have to bump him off). I've never felt any need for Bond films to be "hard" and "gritty". Suave, non-thuggish, inner-depths-free Roger Moore was the kind of Bond I liked, as was Pierce Brosnan, especially in Goldeneye.

So, to get to the obvious point, Daniel Craig's Bond doesn't work for me. Yes, those icy blue eyes are attractive, but they don't make you forgive him everything. His looks and manner are definitely not the ones of the Bond of my girlhood. He is a grim, weather-beaten, psychologically damaged muscle-man, not a worldly-wise, witty, vodka martini-sipping gentleman spy. The troubling thing is, Craig may very well be closer to the "real" Bond, the one in Ian Fleming's books (which I haven't read), than the tamer version I've grown up with. I recall how shocked I was when Sean Connery's Bond locked a baddie in the sauna and turned up the heat - after said baddie had tried to do the same to him - in the early Bond film Thunderball, and how Bond actually chuckled with sadistic delight. But wait, he's the hero, isn't he supposed to be a bit more decent than the bad guys? I mean, boiling someone to death, who does that? A Quantum of Solace has a corresponding moment towards the end. Yes, the head villain is ultra-creepy (a bit my type, actually) and ruthless and bent on world domination and has killed one of Bond's squeezes etc. etc. Still, the way Bond handles him - again, who does that? I begin to suspect that were it not for the fact that Bond villains are so unbelievably wicked, there would be no reason to root for him at all. I'm in two minds about watching Skyfall on cinema now.

So, from Bond to Snow White. Get this - the evil queen in Snow White and the Huntsman has a nasty, white-haired brother sidekick. And I still thought the film was yawn-inducingly tedious.

I realise that fantasy - which is what most fairy-tale films resemble most nowadays - is a tricky genre. The attempts at humour in fantasy films (Two Towers, anyone?) can be so woeful that I can see why someone would want to dispense with light relief alltogether and go for straight-faced seriousness all the way. But the end result? Rain-soaked characters spouting earnest twaddle instead of getting on with the plot. Blimey, how dull. Character-building scenes are no good  when you really couldn't care less about the characters. It looks like a good idea, on paper, to big up the role of the huntsman a bit - in the original tale, Snow White does owe her life to him, and he takes quite a risk - but here, he is a dreary, wounded-macho specimen without much to recommend him. Snow White drifts around with a dreamlike, destiny-ridden look on her face (for the record, I thought the evil queen was fairer). The Prince (well, dukelet actually) is at a bit of a loose end, and who can blame him, when there's a rival for the hero part knocking about? We don't even get to know which of them Snow White picks, which some reviewers have seen as something very positive and indicative of the fact that she is a Person In Her Own Right. Is she? Could we please stop pretending that this moony girl will ever be the new Elizabeth I?

In the battle of the Snow Whites, Mirror, Mirror wins, though it can be very silly and the script could have been a great deal sharper (it's still Oscar Wilde compared with the Huntsman, though). It's got great costumes and Julia Roberts having a ball as the wicked stepmother. OK, so she doesn't have a nasty brother sidekick, but then one can't have everything.    

Toffy delight

Julian Fellowes has delivered again. No, I'm not referring to the third series of Downton Abbey - it doesn't start in Sweden until November - but to his novel Past Imperfect, which I finished a week ago and enjoyed hugely. It dates from the era pre-Downton, like the other Fellowes novel Snobs. I had considered buying one of them for some time, but was held back by bourgeois misgivings. It is no secret that Fellowes is a champion of the English upper class, and he has gone on record saying  (with some justice) that toff-bashing is the only prejudice which is not chastised by society in general. Good for him, but what does a man like that make of the kind of people I admire - the energetic doers of the middle class? Isn't  there a risk that he would - well, sneer?

I don't know if I'm typical of other members of the middle class, but deep down I have a lingering fear that those above me on the social ladder sneer at me, and those below me want to kill me, or at the very least rob me. Above, there's Sir Percy Blakeney, baronet; below, there's the wheezing, bourgeois-girl-throttling miner grandpa from the film Germinal (no, I haven't read the book, nor will I). And while I have to confess that wheezing miner grandpas are probably thin on the ground, my mistrust of aristocrats - and gentry - is harder to shift. I have wondered from time to time if I do toffs an injustice, the English ones at least. There's Josephine Tey's Inspector Grant claiming that the English nobility never looked down their noses at anyone. There's Bertie Wooster and his pals in P.G. Wodehouse's novels, who are delighted with American millionaires and their daughters and never seem to spare a thought for the way they eat their peas. Maybe the picture of the English aristocracy as disdainful dandies conjured up by characters such as Sir Percy, various Regency Romance bucks, even sometimes Lord Peter Wimsey - all, let's not forget, meant to be heroic - is quite simply wrong? Maybe they're all an unaffected and jolly lot who like a hunt now and then but who couldn't care less about what you call the smallest room in the house?

Then on the other hand, no, I don't think it's quite that simple. The upper-crust world described by Fellowes in Past Imperfect does little to dispel my wariness. It's not that Fellowes is in any way mean to his own kind. He is loyal to his caste and fights their corner. His upper-class characters are for the most part well-rounded, often likeable, and a welcome change from Midsomer Murder-like grotesques. You want them to do well. At the same time, not even Fellowes can absolve them from the sin of snobbery (in the modern sense). It is snobbery of the worst kind directed at the middle-class interloper of the '68 Season, Damian Baxter, that embitters him and causes him to lash out against amongst others the novel's hero. It is snobbery that makes his lashing-out as harmful as it is, with the hero feeling resentful over the repercussions forty years down the line. Snobbery (and, it must be said, chippiness) needlessly poison the atmosphere between the book's protagonists, and Fellowes, far from gushing over snobbish behaviour like the baroness Orczy and her ilk, is severely against it. The unnamed hero does his best to fight tendencies of haughtiness in himself, not always with success. You marvel at his attempt to understand why we ordinary non-high-born mortals want to dine "early", that is, sometime before eight or half past eight in the evening. Er, because we're hungry.

All the same, Past Imperfect leaves one feeling quite toff-friendly at the end and willing to extend a conciliating hand. Heck, these are people, not monocled ogres. Even the poised aristo babe mellows on closer acquaintance, much like Lady Mary in Downton. My fear of sneering is still present and correct, though. There are, after all, exchanges such as this:

"Did Damian really say 'pleased to meet you'?"
"Apparently. It just shows how nervous he must have been."

What's wrong with "pleased to meet you"? What? So wrong even a social climber would only say it if he was "nervous"? It's this mindless tabooing of certain phrases, words and gestures just to trip up us who are not in the know and brand us "vulgar" that makes me see red. Maybe I've got more in common with grandpa miner after all?          

To care and not to care

When reading The Secret History some time ago, I was as I've mentioned earlier afraid that I'd caught revieweritis and that this was the reason why I didn't lose myself in the book at first. Lately, I've had the opposite problem: I'm reading like a teenager, caring overmuch and engaging myself in the fates of minor characters. It happened with Bring Up the Bodies, and then again when I read Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus. This seemed the perfect antidote to Bring Up the Bodies to start with. The atmosphere of the said circus (which is more like a mysterious fun fair really, which is fine by me: no clowns and no treacherous dancing horses!) was the main thing, rather than the characters or the fairy-tale-like plot. I initially thought about blogging about the book under the heading "Not quite in love with a fairy-tale".

But then the emotional charge of the novel was ratcheted up. At the end, I really wanted everything to turn out well. Not for the sake of the circus: it sounds like a truly great night out, but everything has its day, and there's little use getting obsessed by even the most magical public entertainment. Nor for the sake of the two protagonists, Celia and Marco, fighting a magic duel on behalf of two scary magicians. Celia is all right, but Marco is a pretty callous piece of work, and they both appear too wrapped up in each other - yes, of course they fall in love eventually - to fully register the unhappiness their manipulations may cause other people. Also, their naïve notion that once their competition is over, all will be well for the loser as well as for the winner and everyone will go out and have cake is irritating (like the scary magicians would let that happen). The reason I wanted things to work out was for the sake of the characters on the sideline whose lives are turned upside down by all the magicking: Marco's hapless ex-but-doesn't-realise-it girlfriend; the farm boy with a crush on a circus girl who gets saddled with a lot of responsibility very fast; and, lastly, the flamboyant circus director Chandresh Christophe Lefèvre who get suckered into hiring Marco as his assistant by magic seduction. I never thought I'd warm to Chandresh as he comes across as rather a pretentious show-off at the beginning, but when a poor chap not only has his creativity halted and his memory shot to pieces at regular intervals but also has to nurse an unrequited passion for years on end, one can't help pitying him. Marco, needless to say, cares even less for his employer's feelings than for his dumped girlfriend's.

Authors have good reason to be miffed at readers who react like this. Minor characters are, as often as not, there to keep the plot moving, and they shouldn't be the reason why one gets disenchanted with the main protagonists. After all, what are Chandresh and Mark Smeaton to me, or I to them, that I should weep for them? One can imagine authors feeling like John Gielgud reportedly did at one time (if I remember the anecdote correctly) when an actor asked him about the "motivation" for his minor role, and he was tempted to answer: "to be a feed for Hamlet". On the other hand, you could see it as a compliment to an author when a minor character of his/hers manages to engage a reader: it should certainly beat the reader not caring at all.

Anyway, it is quite a relief to be reading Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes (of Downton fame) at the moment, a gentle and amusing read which I don't think is in danger of making me care too much for its characters. Then again, I could be wrong: the plot's driving force (estranged friend of the mildly toffy hero) is after all an embittered social climber, and I do tend to have a weakness for those.                          

"Spoilers..."

There have been a lot of bookish blog entries lately, for the simple reason that there hasn't been much else to blog about. Yes, I've seen a film or two (My Week with Marilyn - but try spinning out the theme "I completely agree with Laurence Olivier" for a whole entry), but telly-wise: practically nothing. Oh, all right, Merlin season four started so unobtrusively three weeks ago that I missed the first part, and it still delivers, though I'm afraid it's starting to run a little out of steam. But otherwise, I've been reduced to casting envying glances in the direction of Great Britain, where they are currently showing or have just shown 1) the third series of Downton Abbey 2) Parade's End, which sounds frightfully upmarket but promising 3) last but not least, the very latest episodes of Doctor Who! The worst thing is that I can't even revel in the reviews, at least not for the last-mentioned show. Doctor Who reviews are, ironically if you think of River Song's tag line, full to bursting with spoilers.

TV reviews generally seem to have a sort of amnesty where plot reveals are concerned. I held back from reading the reviews on the last episode of Downton Abbey series two until I'd seen it, for instance, and that proved to be a smart move, because boy did they go to town on the solving of Matthew's... predicament. Nevertheless, Downton is not a very twist-sensitive series. With Doctor Who, on the other hand, the plot twists are important, and being surprised by them is supposed to be part of the fun. So why, oh why do reviewers have to reveal them, and in such detail too? Time and again I've been seduced into reading a TV feature about a currently running series of Doctor Who and found that the writer has given vital information away. The worst example was a review of the episode "Amy's Choice" with a line going roughly like this: "X (=absolutely vital plot twist) came as a genuine surprise". I'm happy for you mate, but now I won't be genuinely surprised by it, will I? "Amy's Choice" remains a great episode - few actors do understated nastiness so well as Toby Jones - but I'd have liked to have watched it once without knowing the twist.

Otherwise, it's an unwritten rule of reviewing that you shouldn't give too much away. Amazon are hard as nails about it (they didn't publish one of my reviews once because it gave away that the book had a happy ending - duh, it was a novel by Dickens). But with TV, it seems to be another matter, presumably because TV reviewers suppose that everyone has already watched the show they're discussing, so now they can have a good natter about it. Surely, it's not only we foreigners who have reason to feel miffed by this attitude? What about those people who watch the programmes online, or wherever, using the "play" service?

"Pot, meet kettle" you might think. True, I'm not too fussed about giving away plots myself - compare my blabbing about Through A Glass Darkly with the Amazon reviews, where Roger's unorthodox love interest is kept a big secret. And I do see how being secretive restricts you from discussing a book/film/TV programme as freely as you would dearly wish. But this is partly what blogs, web forums, book clubs etc.  are for. There's also the Long Analysing Culture Article which should have free reins to reveal all about the author/phenomenon it's treating with impunity (except, perhaps, who did it in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd). But proper newspaper reviews are a different story. I guess reviewers must be relieved when they are set to write about a classic play/book/film, because they can give away as much as they like about the plot without anyone going: "Wait a minute, Hamlet dies? Lizzy marries Mr Darcy?" Even if you don't know what happens in a classic, it is quietly understood that you shouldn't grumble if reviewers take it as read that you do.

But what about those who read reviews about something they have seen/read, and really would like to know as much as possible about the reviewer's own thoughts on vital plot matters (and I often fall into this category myself)? The Times has an online section I haven't explored yet called The Spoiler Club. If it is what it sounds like then it's a terrific idea - an area where you can read analyses unfettered by the need to keep plot developments secret. Whereas if you haven't seen/read what's discussed there, you are warned to steer well clear. If this is not what this section's about at all, someone else should be giving the idea a try.

But "X came as a genuine surprise"? Surely that's just plain mean?             

The villain as hero

Phew. I've finished Bring Up the Bodies, and I can certainly understand why Hilary Mantel, in the end, decided to break off after the Boleyn affair and save the rest of Cromwell's career for a later novel. You really do need some time to digest his behaviour before you're ready to engage in what happens next to Mantel's hard-hitting protagonist. But at least now we know the excuse he had for (on Henry's orders) sending six people to their death on trumped-up charges.

There isn't any.

It came as quite a shock to me. I was counting on understanding Cromwell's point of view better after reading this book. Instead, the opposite happened. Big baby Henry wants out of his marriage, Cromwell's there to help, and at the same time he wants to get his own back on a couple of courtiers who were mean to the dear departed Wolsey... Is this really it? That's not nearly good enough, and to make things worse, Cromwell allies himself with the Catholic groupings at court to achieve his aims. How clever is that? I can hear the thump of a Master Secretary being dropped by his new mates even now.

What disturbed me even more was my own squeamish reaction to Cromwell's dealings. I found the scenes where he uses mental torture to get a confession out of poor Mark Smeaton deeply unpleasant. Now why? I mean, these scenes are deeply unpleasant even objectively speaking, but I've admired villains who've been up to far worse things than scaring a dandyish lute-player out of his senses. Compared to, say, Scarpia in Tosca, Cromwell's a pussycat. But while I hardly spared a thought for Cavaradossi's cracking ribs on the rack, the stratagem of locking Mark in a room with a "ghost" really gets to me.

I think part of the answer lies in the fact that I've got difficulties with the "villain as hero" wheeze. From the top of my head, I can't think of a single instance where it has actually worked for me. It should be a dream come true, shouldn't it? And it feels desperately shallow only to fancy villains when you're not supposed to, letting your reaction be led by their function in their plot rather than by their wonderfully sinister personality. But somehow, the moment the villain moves to the centre of the plot and the events are filtered entirely through his consciousness, I feel myself backing away. That's why I was never a fan of the Francis Urquhart series, in spite of the late lamented Fouché-lookalike Ian Richardson in the main role. I can't quite explain it - perhaps the lack of a moralising hero or narrator somehow forces the reader, very unwillingly, to do his/her own moralising. You watch the villain behaving very badly indeed without any real sense of compunction, and you wonder: what, am I supposed to cheer? To find it funny? To think "Ha, serves the little squirt right"? But this isn't funny, this is wrong.

It's a sad thing daring to contemplate even for a moment that though villains are often clever, charming, entertaining, uncomfortable-truth-telling, undeniably hard-done by and a myriad of other things they are seldom right. And as long as we don't have full disclosure of their thoughts, we can fondly imagine that they are, somehow, aware of the fact themselves.

This could be the reason why I feel more comfortable with shifty Cromwell in Henry VIII or fanatical monk-bashing Cromwell in The Tudors than with Mantel's somewhat smug Cromwell who's in denial about having done anything villainous whatsoever. Still, he did make sure that Anne's "suitors" got killed cleanly with an axe instead of being hung, drawn and quartered, even commoner Mark, because "when he was under my roof I offered him mercy, and this is all the mercy I can deliver". What a nice man.                 

Bankable good reads

Oversized paperbacks, of the kind that's often published now instead of/at the same time as the hardback, are a bit useless. They are just as heavy and awkward to carry around as a hardback, but they don't have the hardback glamour, the kind that proclaims: "look at me, I'm a real book lover". And yet I've bought two of these oversized monsters lately: the already mentioned The Secret Life of William Shakespeare by Jude Morgan and, in spite of my firm intention of waiting for the (real, packable) paperback, Bring Up the Bodies  by Hilary Mantel.

So why do it? Lack of patience plays a part, of course, but another factor is the longing for a read you know will be good, a sure thing. Morgan is one of the surest things going. I know I've said earlier that I prefer his Regency Romances to his more serious based-on-a-true-story historical fiction, but I'm starting to change my mind. True, in the more serious stuff you sometimes come across a somewhat too deep-seeming passage or a bewildering metaphor, but most of the time the author is spot-on, and he has a convincing quality that makes you think "yes, I bet X (=historical personage) was just like that". I gobbled up Secret Life in no time and wished it had been longer, especially as the action ends a bit abruptly.

I normally approve of Morgan's endings - for instance, he humanely chose to end The Taste of Sorrow with Charlotte Brontë contentedly married to Arthur Bell Nicholls instead of with her death - but here, I would have preferred him to go on, even if it did mean that he had to end at a less harmonious time in his subjects' life. Morgan tells part of the story from Mrs Shakespeare's, Anne's, point of view, and you have a feeling that he has an earnest wish for the Shakespeares' marriage to work out (which might explain why his Will is more than usually uxorious, only playing away after his marriage has broken down, if not quite irretrievably). When the book ends, it looks like the couple will be able to solve their differences, which is sweet in a way, but I mean - Will wasn't even done writing yet! I can't help feeling that there are more important things than his getting on with the little woman, who in spite of Morgan's best efforts still comes across as a bit of a stick-in-the-mud. And what about Ben Jonson, another important character in the book? He's left high and dry after suffering a great personal loss. I can think of more uplifting places to leave off a story, though Morgan's Jonson is so unshakeably self-confident you assume he'll bounce back from anything.

I realise that I, as a reader, may be partly responsible for the fact that Secret Life ends when it does. Morgan is probably one of those authors on a one-book-a-year contract, which means he can't go on spinning a yarn forever. And who demands such a punishing schedule from our favourite authors? We readers, that's who. Still, he could solve the problem by writing a sequel or, if necessary, a trilogy, which is what Mantel is doing with her Cromwell novels.

After Secret Life, I tried a historical novel with a Dickens theme, that turned out to be so flat I gave up in despair after only 50 pages. Then, I tried a novel by Joanna Trollope, The Men and the Girls - this one was well written, but not what you want to curl up with after a stressful day at work. The last thing you want to read about, when trying to forget your mundane but annoying problems, is other peoples' mundande but annoying problems. Fine for the lunch hour, but not for the bedside table. Enter oversized paperback number two, Bring Up the Bodies.

Oh, the bliss of reading something you actively enjoy. So far, I like Bring Up the Bodies even more than Mantel's first Cromwell novel Wolf Hall. Maybe it's because there's less ground to cover - only Anne Boleyn's fall from grace and the period leading up to it. I do miss Wolsey - long dead, but still fondly remembered by Cromwell - but bitchy Anne is always good fun. I can't say, this far, that the novel is as much of a white-wash of Thomas Cromwell as has been claimed. Yes, it does make a good deal of his good points - model father, kind employer, oh, and he has a social conscience too - but you still sense the full extent of his ruthlessness. And on the subject of Wolsey: Cromwell carries a grudge against all sorts of luckless bit-players who had anything to do with the cardinal's disgrace, but in the end, who carries the largest part of the blame? King Henry himself. So where's the seething revenge plot meant to bring him down?

The sweetest character in Bring Up the Bodies is Cromwell's son Gregory, tender and a bit gullible (though not as much as people think). Hm, hard-nosed dad, softie son - is this a family curse or what?