Darren McGarvey's Class Wars

One of the best documentaries I've seen in the last few years. In these four hour-long episodes, Mr McGarvey explores how important social class is in today's Scotland, examining the topic from a lot of various angles (from accent to postcode lottery, from crime to sport, from grouse shooting to zero-hour contracts ... whatever aspect you can think of, he probably looks at it) and talking about it with many people directly involved, whether professionally or by a particular personal experience.

His conclusion is depressing: however changed in shape (with landed gentry superseded by financiers and so on), class distinctions are as real today, and social mobility as pathetic, as they were one or two hundred years ago. (Which makes his personal, likewise documented, struggle with his own identity of a former working-class rapper, who based his career on being vocal against social inequality and the middle class, but who now finds he's turned middle-class himself, all the more difficult.)

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Quite recently I've begun watching iPlayer programmes again - as in sitting and really watching, rather than just having them on as background noise to hear the language(s) of Eden. Funnily, but perhaps inevitably, it turned out I consequently lack the time for reading books, so without meaning to stopped completely, although as usual I'm into a few. It's as if books (arguably my surest pleasure) turned into my Lenten sacrifice, and I was dedicating the time to whittling down the exorbitant to-do list related to my laptop and 'non-virtual' life.

[Added 19/3/22: Later I indeed decided to not read fiction as my Lenten sacrifice.]

Catch Me If You Can

Not bad at all, although nothing outstanding either. Oddly perhaps, I found myself siding not with Leonardo DiCaprio's character but with Tom Hanks's one - not because I wanted the former to fail, but because I wanted the latter to succeed. After all, take away the former's physical attractiveness and there's hardly anything likeable left (although it's maybe not as bad as with his father, who seems to feel genuinely ashamed for having to do some honest work as a 'mere' employee).

HyperNormalisation

A film lasting almost three hours - throughout which I was unable to make out what the author [Mr Adam Curtis, as I then found out] wanted to say, except perhaps that he knew and/or cared nothing about history prior to his adolescence. It begins with the idea that plutocracy was more or less invented in 1975 New York, and it gets no better: apparently, doublethink in the USSR only developed in the 1980s and so on. At times it almost looked as if the film-maker believed that mankind waited for him to be born before politicians began to lie, media began to distort facts for propagandist purposes et cetera. Towards the end I actually began to wonder whether I wasn't watching something put together by a talented 13-year-old, still only discovering the basics of how this world turns round.

There are some faint hints the film was meant to say that politicians find the real world too complex and create a simplified picture of it. But then if that was true, surely the author wouldn't do the very same thing by presenting a world which is all about the US, the Arab countries* and Russia, and competely ignoring China?

 

* But not Afghanistan, which is ignored as well, it seems that after the 9/11 Americans went straight after Saddam Hussein without being bothered with Osama bin Laden.

Gay lib in the arts

Yesterday I read an article in The Guardian in which film-makers and writers recalled 'gay' film scenes that had a profound effect on them; I also read quite a few of the comments of the article's readers remembering theirs; and it occurred to me that I could hardly recollect my own 'firsts'.

Maybe this is because I had to do without any while still struggling with who I was. As far as I can remember, the first film I saw that had homosexuality as one of the main topics was the 1994 Fresa y chocolate; and unless I'm much mistaken the first gay kiss I saw on the silver screen happened in 1997's The Full Monty (provided it was actually a kiss and not just an embrace) or in Wilde of the same year. But I had come out in 1989, and experienced my own first loving kiss - and more - in 1991.

Not that literature was any better. The first 'gay book' I came across was the 1993 anthology The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction. Up till then there were just hints (which I often even failed to decipher as such at that time), at best a minor character who was gay but not allowed to do more about it than say so.

In short, I had no 'revelatory' experiences of this kind. For all that, each time I watched or read somebody daring to go further in breaking the taboos surrounding us, it was a source of immesurable pleasure to me.

Fawlty Towers

Frankly, I'm not impressed. There are some good jokes now and then, but there's too much shouting and slapstick humour for my liking. I prefer sitcoms in which people say funny things, as opposed to yelling them or playing at stuntmen.

But I wonder who actually does like the series. Can those on the political right really enjoy this parody of a small-time Tory Basil Fawlty? Can those on the political left get over the portrayal of Manuel from Barcelona?

Hmm. Maybe they can. Maybe the former see Basil primarily as a henpecked husband, and maybe the latter, for once, see no racism in a humoristic picture of a foreigner - after all, Manuel is European and white.

Alan Partridge

I first came across the character when working in an Amazon warehouse; before the Christmas of 2011, I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan seemed to sell rather well. But I only learned who he was from a documentary about British TV comedy a few years later, and apart from some excerpt there, I only saw him the other day in Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa. Not bad at all; the humour might occasionally get a bit cheap, but mostly it was to my liking, so if I come across more Partridge on iPlayer I probably won't hesitate to watch him again.

Bob Servant

Quite a disappointment, to be honest. Maybe after Burnistoun and Still Game (and the occasional tweet by 'Bob Servant's account') I had expected too much. Maybe I need at least one character to relate to even in a sitcom, and the protagonists in this one could be roughly divided into the unpleasant and the revolting. Maybe it was simply unfunny for somebody with my sense of humour. Whatever the reason, I basically stopped paying proper attention midway through the second episode.

Still Game

I never knew about the sitcom until the 7th series began reappearing on iPlayer late last year; I’ve seen all the episodes from that and the following series since then. As often as not the subtitles were missing, so I didn’t nearly get all the quips, but I learned to love it all the same.

There may actually be fewer jokes than in English sitcoms like Upstart Crow or Blackadder; on the other hand, there are serious moments throughout, not just at the very end of the final series. As a consequence, Jack, Victor and the others gradually become like characters from a ‘realistic’ film or book, more like real people than mere caricatures; somewhere towards the last episodes of the last series I realised I would miss them as one misses real-life persons he used to meet and have a good time with for some time.

What I didn’t expect was that at the very end of the very last episode (seen just a couple of hours ago), when most of the main characters, well, depart, I would have to struggle hard to contain my tears (the more so as they do so to Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right). I think I didn’t actually shed any, but my eyes were so misty it took some time to realise the Clansman’s barman was still, despite the white hair, Boaby.

 

 

(originally posted on WordPress)

Orra = all that?

During my years in Scotland I’ve often heard people say something which to in my ears sounded like “orra”, but none of the definitions given in the DSL (or anywhere else) seemed to make sense in whatever the context was at the moment.

Yesterday I’ve heard it again, a few times in fact, in this video. I decided to ask somebody about it, but rewatching it again today I finally had a moment of revelation: it must be “all that”, and the “r” sound I hear must be due to some phonological process similar to the one which makes some Scots pronounce “the” so that it sounds like “ra”.

 

(originally posted on WordPress)

 

Ken Loach: Kes

I saw it two years ago; tonight I watched it again. This time I wasn’t disturbed so much by all the quarrels the characters were having, but I still found it most of all depressing. Masterly executed, very moving – but in the way which makes one despondent.

Had to watch a Burnistoun sketch a little later to get over it.

 

(originally published probably on Wordpress)

Essex

During my college years I once had a summer job consisting of six weeks picking strawberries and raspberries on a farm near Ardleigh. Since then, Essex has meant for me primarily the area north of the theoretical Witham-Clacton line.

A few months ago I’ve seen at least two BBC programmes ‘about Essex’ and was astonished to see that for their authors, the county seemed to hardly extend far enough from the immediate London vicinity to reach said hypothetical line. 

In fact, I still find it hard to digest the fact that the county town is Chelmsford (which I’ve never been to), rather than Colchester.


 (originally published on WordPress)