Life on Queen Street

That was fun. I look forward to next year's series.

For those of you who might play to view this episode later this evening via the miracle of technology - I suggest alcohol and tissues.

Is it something in the water or merely coincidence that both TV programs I'm actually watching these days decided to quit fucking about and get serious this week?

I mean, jays, TORCHWOOD, seriously.

Now if only someone would remind Jack that just because he comes back from the dead, it doesn't mean his actually the Messiah, things would be grand.

Linkspam from around the Intartoobz:

You are all Jet Li's bitches.

Sarah Jane Adventures better than Torchwood? I'm a big fan of Torchwood's first season and I'm liking the second large. The ep of the Sarah Jane Adventures that I've seen was cool but not great so it's hard for me to judge relative merits. But, as The Evening Herald opined yesterday, I can't help but wondering if some of the "Torchwood is crap" sentiment springs from resistance to a show which is headlined by an openly gay man who is not camp and a career woman who is not girly.

Positive review of Teeth - kind of interested in this movie except for the gore and spurting blood bits. I saw Black Sheep in November and that overdrew my personal gory movie bank for the next year, I think.

From cleolinda, In the midst of the Heath Ledger media insanity, Star Jones stands out as a voice of reason. Yeah, I'm kind of shocked, too.

Also from Cleo: Warren Ellis is a douchebag (additional commentary in, appropriately, comments): ( exerpt )
Yo, Ellis - your enfant terrible/Intertoobz iconoclast routine is tired. Also, when making the decision to be a scold, always doublecheck that you aren't merely being an asshole and that the target of your ill-advised ire actually deserves it. That said, way to burn bridges, man. Also, you and John Gibson in the same boat? Nice. Very nice.

While I'm on the subject (of suicides real and alleged), I'm reading Birthday Letters, Ted Hughes' book of poetry about his life with Sylvia Plath. I find it the most astonishing love poetry but others in my class think it was a mercenary attempt to cash in on his relationship with Plath, which I think is bullshit - if you're going to 'cash in' why wait 35 years? My tutor probably has it closest to right when he said that this was Hughes' attempt to have the last word on an issue that had dogged his career. Birthday Letters was published in January of 1998, Hughes died of a heart attack while undergoing treatment for Colon Cancer in October of that year.

I wondered at the difference in attitude between myself and my disapproving classmate. She is older by 30 years, I would say, than me and though she may herself have been divorced, I understand that her parents' did not. But I look at the friends I went to high school with, all in our mid-30s now (when did I get so old), and see that, of our parents, half divorced during our childhood. To live through that experience gives me a different perspective on Hughes' silence on his first famous marriage while assholes engorged on their own self-important sense of outrage were chiseling the Hughes name off his wife's headstone, a name she shared with her children. I think refraining from commenting was neither uncaring nor an admission of guilt but a deliberate decision not to defame the memory of his children's mother or give fuel to scandal by engaging in a public debate. A divorce is not the same as the death of a parent but it still represents the end of a family and I've seen the wounds left on children by parents who allow their own sense of hurt and outrage outstrip their concern for their children. So while only those involved know the truth of it, I choose to respect Hughes for his discretion.

As I say, the poetry itself is astonishing, although I've been told it is not Hughes' best work. But I find it striking and rich with both passion and regret:

From "St. Boltoph's"

First sight. First snapshot isolated
Unalterable, stille din the camera's glare.
Taller
Than ever you were again.


From "Chaucer"

"Whan that Aprille with his showres soote
That drought of March hath perced to the roote..."
At the top of your voice, where you swayed on a the topf os a stile,
Your arms raised- somewhat for balance, somewhat
To hold the reigns of the straining attention
Of your imagined audience - you declaimed Chaucer
To a field of cows.


From "The Blue Flannel Suit"

You waited
Knowing yourself helpless in the tweezers
Of the life that judged you, and I saw
The flayed nerve, the unhealable face-wound
Which was all you had for courage.
I saw that what gripped you, as you sipped,
Were terrors that had killed you once already.
Now, I see, I saw, sitting, the lonely
Girl who was going to die.

As I've been recuperating from my latest round of surgery, I've been watching copious amounts of *achem*'d TV. To whit:

The Good - You Could Do Worse Than Watching These

Torchwood Series One - wonderfully good Brit sf with a dash of Queer As Folk mixed in. It's nice to see Russell T. Davies, the man behind QaF and Bob and Rose, let loose on the 'after the watershed' crowd after two seasons of doing Doctor Who for the strictly PG crowd. I've always loved Captain Jack Harkness and John Barrowman's take on the character and Gwen Cooper is a fast favourite.

Doctor Who, "The Runaway Bride" and Series Three, "Smith and Jones" and "The Shakespeare Code" - all brilliant but I still miss Rose. Nicely, though, so does the Doctor.

ITV's Mansfield Park - a bit spotty in places but a generally lovely adaptation that understands that the genuine goodness at the core of Fanny Price is the hub around which the story turns. It also answers the question of what Rose's been up to lately: Billie Piper's quite winning in the role. The potential for Doctor Who/Jane Austen crossover fic is a charming bonus.

The Bad - What I Meant By Worse

Blood Ties, episodes five and six - I want to like this series because I adored the series of Vicky Nelson novels by Tanya Huff. Alas, the writing on each successive episode seems to get just that little bit worse. The actors are fine enough in their roles and, after a while, I got past the weird of seeing Vancouver stand in for Toronto but the "straights and supernatural" story has been done and done before and far better. Blood Ties suffers in comparison not only to Buffy and Angel but Torchwood, every companion's first look inside the Tardis, Veronica Mars and just about every police procedural on the tube. It has a prefab, Harlequine Romance Presents: The Supernatural Romance of the Month Club feel to it that I'm having a hard time getting past and the 'every week Vicky gets a new supernatural case' plots feel hackneyed - something the novels never did. Not recommended.

The Sopranos, whatever the latest episode was called - Tony gets arrested, Tony doesn't get along with his sister, Tony broods, yadda, yadda, yadda. To be honest, I've never warmed up to The Sopranos - some episodes were very, very good but I've often felt that the hype exceeded what was actually shown onscreen and this was one of those episodes. It's been more than a year since the last new episode of The Sopranos and was anyone waiting breathlessly for the show to return with an episode that centers around Tony and his sister spending a tense, passive-agressive weekend together at a lake somewhere in Vermont? Fuggedaboudit.

The Ugly - Just Say No

The Tudors, episode one - Dummer. Than. Dirt. Excellent performances and generous views of Henry Cavill's naked ass do not make up for the fact that The Tudors is stupid even by the standards of those old Big Three Network American miniseries us kids of the 70s remember from Sundays nights throughout childhood. The writing is sloppy, anachronistic and inaccurate to the extent that The Tudors doesn't merely take dramatic liberty with the historical record but instead makes up details wholesale because apparently the life of Henry VIII was insufficiently dramatic already. Showcase desperately wants The Tudors to be their Rome and the latter's influence is clearly seen the in the liberal amount of raunch splashed throughout the first hour. But where Rome fiddled and reinterpreted the historical events leading to the rise of Augustus Ceasar, the action of the series was nevertheless based on solid historical research and painstaking attention to detail. In comparison, The Tudors settles for stock locations and costumes that belong more to the Elizabethan Renaissance than Henry's reign. I was particularly distracted by the tournament scenes which featured the actors jousting with throats and legs left bare, chests and shoulders virtually unarmoured while riding thoroughbreds - not, generally speaking the way a Renaissance Prince like Henry would dress for a joust. More attention to such details would have made it easier to overlook the clunky writing. Instead The Tudors, for all its pomp and velvet doublets has the look, feel and sound of a bog-standard 'historical' soaper. Recommended only for fans of Henry Cavill's naked ass.