Sci-fi and Superhero Mash-ups and Beat Downs

Posted on August 4, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

You can’t beat a good cross-over. You can’t beat a bad one, either. There’s something about two or more superheroes or systems or creatures existing together in a space they wouldn’t (or couldn’t) normally occupy that excites our inner movie directors and statisticians. We love it when the Marvel and DC superheroes get together for a jolly good team-up, or when two or more Doctor Whos band together to fend off evil, but we especially love it when there’s cross-pollination between brands.

This is more common occurrence in comics and graphic novels, where the 11th Doctor has boarded the Starship Enterprise, Captain Kirk has found himself on the planet of the apes, Judge Dredd and Batman have battled Aliens (yes, those ones) and Predators and each other, and Superman has faced down Muhammad Ali.

It’s better, and much more fun, of course, when forces come together to kick the ever-loving shit out of each other, which is why I’ve assembled the fan-made videos below, to share a little of that exquisite, child-like glee with you.

I wonder if soap opera fans fantasise about Pat Butcher beating down Vera Duckworth, or JR Ewing vs Cthulhu…

Anyway…

Batman vs Alien vs Predator

This is one of the earliest examples of the fan-made mash-up genre you’ll find on-line, and it’s arguably much better than the largely execrable big-screen attempts to mesh the worlds of Alien and Predator.

Batman vs Darth Vader

There’s a whole award-winning series of these shorts now, very professionally produced, showing titanic – sometimes surprisingly brutal – battles like Spiderman vs Darth Maul, Iron Man vs Optimus Prime, Wolverine vs Predator, and Homer Simpson vs The Punisher (OK, I made the last one up). This one’s pretty darn good, though.

Darth Vader vs Buzz Lightyear

And this one, too. What’s not to like?

Super-Hero Bowl

A very bloody cartoon of every popular genre figure you can think of from the last 60 or 70 years being brought together and violently killing each other.

Galactic Battles – A Crossover Fan Film

If spaceships, Star Wars, Halo and Star Trek are your thing, get your tissues and a hot bucket of lard at the ready. You’re about to cum.

Icons of Horror – Part 1

What if all of the supernatural villains from the 70s, 80s and 90s got together for a bit of a rammy?

Pigs in Space – Featuring the Tenth Doctor

And finally…

What to tell your little ones about death

Posted on July 31, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

I envy young children what is either their brief assumption of immortality, or complete disinterest in the whole question of life and death. For the first few years of their lives, death is nothing more than a fantastical abstract; something that happens to baddies in games of make-believe, not to real people. It’s an empty word that carries no weight, as hollow and alien to them as the concepts of time, space and Blippi being the most irritating man alive.

Nothing lasts forever. The state of Eden into which children are born is fragile and ephemeral, lasting only until they solve the puzzle of death at the age of around three or four. Once revealed to them, death’s truth can never be removed or reasoned with. It becomes a darkness that casts a shadow over everything that’s ever been or ever will be.

There’s a cruel joke coded into our species’ DNA, and its punchline is that none of us ever remembers our Eden; those years spent at our mother’s teat and our father’s feet, or within whatever configuration of love it was that swirled around us in those blissful, blank-slate years. As we progress through childhood our brains bulge and morph into ever-fresher, ever-larger configurations of flesh and neurons, and all memory of our lives before the idea of death became a buzzing constant in them are erased forever.

Our kids’ memories, then, like ours before them, only start to gain permanence, it seems, at the exact same moment as the hooded figure of Death first flicks open his blood-red eyes and glares at them in the whispering half-light of their imaginations. That fear, that dread, will haunt our children ever after, coming for them in the dark and quiet of their beds when their minds are unbolstered by the protective amulets of sugar and adrenaline. They’ll lie there, alone, tiny, tear-stained clusters shrouded in the endless, swallowing darkness, beneath the unseeing eyes of an empty, Godless universe.

Thanks, Death. As if bedtimes weren’t an horrific enough time for parents as it is.

The respective bedtimes of our sons, aged 4 and 2, are an exercise in contrasts: a Tale of Two Bedtimes, if you want to get Dickensian about it. While the act of getting the recalcitrant rotters into their pyjamas and into the bathroom for their pre-sleep deep-clean has always been harrowing – Benny Hill meets Nightmare on Elm Street – once in bed, Jack, the elder of the two, is usually compliant. More than that, he’s happy. It’s a sweet, peaceful and occasionally magical time, where my wife and I can bond with him over a book, and indulge in conversations from the sublime to the ridiculous; from the philosophical to the farcical. Or else, it always used to be…

Christopher, on the other hand, from the moment we flop him onto the bed, screams like a tired and emotional Weigy woman being forcibly ejected from a nightclub and into a drunk-tank. Christopher resists every tactic to coax him into unconsciousness, from nursery rhymes to gentle whispers to tender strokes of his hair. His mum usually has to bear-hug him to stop him from thrashing his way off the bed and on to the floor and the make-or-break freedom beyond. The ideal scenario is for Christopher to fall asleep unbidden in the car or on the couch well in advance of his scheduled bedtime. The only snag is that the earlier in the evening this happens, the earlier he’ll awake the next day. Peace now, with the promise of chaos later. It’s a deal we always accept. What the hell: it’s pretty much the definition of parenting.

Christopher is still very firmly in his Eden phase. Death is an ‘unknown unknown’ to him; i.e. he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know about it. Jack, on the other hand, is occasionally gripped by the cold and bony knuckles of Death, who visits him every once in a while to breathe terror and sadness into his tiny little lungs (I know that’s tautological, but I’m all about the rhythm, baby).

Last week, I was reading Jack his bedtime stories when he told me that he wasn’t feeling very well. He said that earlier that night, as we were sitting on the couch watching Doctor Who, it had felt as though his body was moving from side to side, even though he was sitting still. I asked him how he was feeling at that exact moment. Not in any pain, he said. Not feeling sick. Just strange. He said that every now and again he felt like he was on an elevator.

I canvassed Facebook for a consensus, where everyone from laymen, fellow parents, a nurse and a doctor offered a diagnosis. Labyrinthitis was the most frequent suggestion, followed by good, old-fashioned exhaustion and dehydration (it had been a very hot and humid day, and he’d had an active few hours at the park with his mum, his brother and his friends). I was worried about him, but his heart was beating at a steady pace, and he didn’t feel particularly hot or clammy. Besides, his reported symptoms seemed too mild and infrequent to be labyrinthitis… but what did I know?

We got talking about other things, and before long, with a big smile on his face, he said, ‘Now it feels like I’m on snowboard, going down a big hill.’

‘Have you been having me on about feeling strange, you wee gonk?’ I said, tickling him.

‘No,’ he said, giggling.

Though he might have been riffing now, I had no reason to doubt what he’d reported. Anyway, it was good to see him laughing. We got on to talking about his day at the park, and how fast he’d been running.

‘I’m the fastest,’ he said, ‘I’m like the Flash. Candy is faster than Chris, but I’m faster than Candy.’

Candy was our cat. We’d had to have her put to sleep last year after a short illness, the poor old girl. It’s funny, but whenever Death is on Jack’s mind, it usually rides into our conversations saddled on our old cat’s back. Right on cue:

‘I don’t want to die one day,’ he said, his eyes becoming filmy pools, ‘Even if it’s a long, long time away, when I’m really old, I don’t want to do it.’

What can you say to that? I wasn’t sure. This wasn’t our first rodeo. But I knew what I definitely couldn’t say:

‘How do you think I feel? I’m probably going to go first.’

You want to protect your kids from every threat and evil in the world, but you can’t protect them from death. There’s nothing you can do to prevent it. All you can do is prepare your children for its reality.

So how was I going to do that? And was this really the best juncture in his life at which to do it?

I knew that if I didn’t pick my words carefully I risked inflicting grave psychological trauma, and he seemed to be finding the concept of oblivion troubling enough already. I worried a little. If I said the wrong thing would I turn him into some animal-sacrificing maniac who sleeps in a coffin? Would I propel him into some weird sexual kink involving zombies?

I reached out and stroked his face. ‘You don’t have to worry about that.’

His bottom lip started quivering. ‘But I’ll have to worry about it on the last day. The last day ever.’ A few tears dropped from his eyes, which I gently smushed away. I felt like someone had stabbed me in the heart.

I remembered being around Jack’s age, perhaps a little older, and bumbling through to my sister’s bedroom, my hair wispy and wild like Boris Johnson’s, my face a crumpled mess of tears, looking for some comfort as I flailed under the anvil of death. I wanted a cuddle. I wanted a cure: some loophole mankind hadn’t yet uncovered, the secret of which was somehow held by my sister alone. I climbed into bed next to her and bubbled like a bag of gently boiling milk, weeping in the warm darkness. I don’t know what my sister said to me, or how she managed to sooth me, but it worked, because my sister became my go-to gal whenever the grim inevitability of death was weighing me down.

As a child, my mother’s go-to person when the fear of death gripped her was her big brother. He chose to allay her fears by telling her that we all had to die, because if we didn’t die, there wouldn’t be any room on earth for any new people. That always struck me as rather unsatisfactory. True, no doubt, but scant comfort; rather like receiving an eviction notice because your landlord wants to move three random strangers into your home the next day. Still, my sister is eight years older than me, and thus almost a second-tier mum. My uncle was only a handful of years older than my mother, more of a peer, and doubtless grappling with his own unease about his one-way ticket to the other side.

Whatever comfort had been offered to my relatives or my younger self, I had to find my own path with Jack. I tried again to capitalise on his anchorless concept of time, and emphasise something of its vastness.

‘If it happens,’ I said with a smile, ‘then it’ll be so, so far in the future that it’ll almost feel like forever. So what I’m saying is, in a way, you’ll live forever.’

The sniffling dropped a gear, but he was still uncertain, uneasy. Then I recalled the old cliché about laughter being the best medicine, and so decided to pour a little of the medicine onto the spoon, throw away the spoon and let him glug down the whole bottle.

‘Anyway, you won’t be scared of dying when you’re an old man. You’ll be sitting there in your big chair, and you won’t be able to walk…’

At this point I scrunched my face up into a curmudgeonly gurn, and put on a croaky, rasping, old man’s voice. “I’m sitting here in this chair, I can’t walk, and I’ve just bloody pooped myself. There’s poop all in my pants. It’s going down my leg. They’ll call me Old Mr Poop Leg. I’ve had enough of this! Bloody can’t wait to die.”

Tears were running down Jack’s face… of laughter this time. I was laughing too. Jack’s laughter is trilling and melodious, a Mexican wave that sweeps you along with it. I resumed channelling the old man, by now completely beshitted: ‘That’s the cat coming in now. It’s trying to bite my willy. It’s trying to bite my willy and I can’t move! I’m too old! I’m too old for this! It’s biting my willy and there’s poo everywhere! Ooooooh!’

Jack started freestyling a few scenarios of his own. ‘A bird,’ he said, his chest convulsing with laughter, ‘A bird flies in… and it poops in his hair, and he can’t get away, and it goes down his face like an egg.’

‘Then he poops himself again,’ he added.

Take THAT Death. I guess we can’t beat you, but we can take the piss out of you, you ridiculous son-of-a-bitch. Human laughter, human resilience. That’s the key. The power of distraction: it’s the only one of life’s problems where burying your head in the sand is the only effective strategy. What’s the alternative? Turning to serial murder? Jumping off a cliff? Drink and drugs? Better just to laugh.

The last few days started to make sense to me. We’d been talking about getting a new cat a few day’s earlier, while Jack was in the room jabbing and prodding away at a computer game. Naturally, Candy’s death had cropped up, and we’d discussed how sad and harrowing it had been. He must have absorbed every word. We’re still getting used to the fact that Jack has the ability to hear and retain information, and be affected by it. And then, in the episode of Doctor Who that we’d watched earlier that night, a few characters had been killed off, and the main baddy had allowed himself to be blown up rather than wallow in the wake of his failed plan. Jack saw it all. Death had been joining dots across the days, between a cat and a Time Lord, with a little boy in the middle.

Is that what had made Jack feel ‘strange’ on the couch and in his bed that night? A double-whammy of death?

There was no way to know for sure.

But I’ll tell you one thing: the next time the hooded harvester shows his face around here, I’m going to kosh him over the skull with a funny bone. And then Jack’s going to poo on his shoulder.

Jamie on the Box – Fear the Walking Dead, Stranger Things

Posted on July 24, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

TV Review: Stranger Things; Fear the Walking Dead

Eleven out of ten for the Mind-Flayer, but Morgan’s crew must try harder

Stranger Things’ first season slammed down into the cultural consciousness like a nostalgia bomb dropped by Steven Spielberg. It was quirky, kooky, spooky, funny, tense, scary, effective and electric, one of the strongest shows of 2017. Netflix had a hit on its hands: a water-cooler show that alternately warmed the heart and made it beat like a haunted timpani drum.

Season two proved to be that ‘difficult second album’ of cliché. This time around, instead of slamming down, the show slithered back into the zeitgeist like a Demogorgon’s dying tentacle, and, a few thrilling set-pieces and emotional moments notwithstanding, barely registered a tickle upon the amygdalas and funny bones of its fans.

It was a pleasure to discover, then, that season three is everything the first season was and more, not only catching lightning in a bottle, but bottling that lightning, transferring it into an industrial-sized cylinder and using it as a weapon to zap anyone who ever doubted its pedigree. Season three re-frames season two as a stutter-step on the road to greatness. Its pair-offs and team-ups make for rich and rewarding story-telling. We get to explore new relationships with new characters, and see fresh spins on existing dynamics. Each set of characters holds a different piece of the narrative puzzle, and their season-long journeys towards the truth and each other are perfectly paced, building to a thrilling climax and a fitting, melancholic coda.

Along the way the show generates dizzying levels of dread, mystery, levity, and tension, in just the right amounts, and at exactly the right times, knowing just when to make you laugh, gasp, wince, quiver, cower or cry. One minute it’s a buddy comedy; the next it’s a sci-fi body horror. One minute it’s a cold-war thriller; the next it’s a 1980s family-friendly fantasy flick. Throughout every second it’s a genuinely affecting, genre-vaulting, trope-tastic summer treat.

The creature effects are terrifying and disgusting in equal measure. Lucas’s mouthy little sister and Hopper’s nutty friend, Murray, generating great, gut-busting laughs in most scenes they’re in – as well as stealing them. The endless 80s pop-culture references are a joy to discover, decode and decipher. Watching the season feels like eating a nutritious three-course meal that just happens to taste like your favourite chocolate.

Everyone gets a chance to shine. Joyce gets to ditch her worried mum act and become a warrior mum; Steve gets to be the hero and get the girl (not in the sense of shallowly seducing and discarding her, which he couldn’t do in this case even if he wanted to, but of ‘getting’ her – really getting her); El gets to explore the powerlessness and heartache of being a regular teenager; the gang gets to prove they can fend for themselves (to a point) without El’s super-powers; Nancy gets to put one in the eye of the patriarchy; and new character Alexi gets to break our bloody hearts.

There’s a part of me that wants Stranger Things to quit while its ahead, but the greater part of me hopes that it becomes a never-ending story.

From the Upside Down to the zombie apocalypse, where stranger things give way to stranger danger, in season five of Fear the Walking Dead.

I’ve been on something of a critical and emotional roller-coaster with this show. Prior to the third season premiere I wrote an excoriating piece itemising everything that was hoary, dreary and dreadful about it (which you can read HERE). I then had to do a full about-turn when the third season defied expectations by being not just good, but occasionally great, producing along the way one of The Walking Dead franchise’s very best episodes, the Daniel-centric outing ‘100‘. My sheepishness and surprise moved me to write a piece for Den of Geek entitled, ‘Is FTWD now better than the main show?’ (which you can read HERE). I genuinely believed that it was.

Season four was a bold and interesting move for the show, bringing Morgan (Lenny James) across from the mother-ship, bleaching the landscape blue and grey, and adding a handful of compelling new characters to the mix. Yes, the villains in the first half of the season were nonsensically lame, and the show still sometimes veered in eyebrow-raising directions, but over-all it was solid, sombre, grounded and well-executed. Nick’s death hurt. Madison’s death made me feel sad – and I fucking hated Madison. Well played, FTWD. Well played.

While Morgan’s quest to be the nicest man in the apocalypse could be a little grating at times, there was no question that Lenny James was leading-man material. Season four also produced another best-of-the-franchise, this time with its fifth episode, Laura, a quiet, touching character study that chronicled the bitter-sweet backstory of noble cowboy John Dorie and his dashing (as in ‘off’) soul-mate, Naomi.

Unfortunately, season five seems like a return to the bad old days. It’s a messy splodge of a story always teetering on the brink of implausibility, crammed with so many potentially interesting scenarios and perils that it’s almost a crime for it to be as boring and maddeningly frustrating as it is. All the plummeting planes, rumbling nuclear power-stations, irradiated zombies, mysteries, comebacks and betrayals in the world can’t balance the scales when it comes to bad dialogue and sloppy story-telling. And those kids… man, those kids are irritating as shit.

The realisation of FTWD’s massive drop in quality hit me in increments. I wasn’t aware of just how much I disliked this season until my brain’s niggling negativity centre reached saturation point about five or six episodes in, and flooded my body with a sense of incredulity and disbelief. I wondered if I was watching some awful, zombified hybrid of Lord of the Flies and Under the Dome commissioned by the CW channel. The threats seemed confusing and inconsequential. I couldn’t really understand why their very survival depended upon a plane – why there was no other way for them to escape the irradiated landscape – beyond the fact that the writers must have thought, ‘This will be neat.’ My wife said the season reminded her of the half-arsed essays she used to write during her short-lived university days, where she would select a handful of random quotes from the source material on the basis that they sounded cool, and then write two-thousand rambling, incoherent, lacklustre words of filler around them.

Back in Fear the Walking Dead’s middling days, its biggest flaw was repeatedly to set up interesting ideas and premises, and then burn through them in an episode or two. Season five manages to go one worse by hinting at interesting ideas and premises, and then never delivering on them at all. While there have been some undeniably fun, surprising and engaging moments here and there, most notably the tongue-in-cheek show-down in the Wild West town, Althea’s episode-long encounter with one of the mysterious helicopter people, and the visual spectacle of the makeshift runway fringed with Christmas lights, disappointment and frustration have been the over-arching constants.

Episode eight showed definite signs of improvement, and there’s more skullduggery and intrigue ahead. I hope the show finds a new lease of life again. I’d hate to see it rot.

PS: Kill those kids.

PPS: Hopper isn’t dead.

30 Things I’d Rather Have as Prime Minister…

Posted on July 23, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

John McCririck’s corpse

A jug of warm ball sweat

The ghost of Saddam Hussein’s cat

Margaret Thatcher’s handbag with a dog-shit inside of it

An army of animatronic Andi Peters’, hell-bent on global destruction

Michael Gove painted green and coked out his tits

This guy Eric I used to know, who was an absolute cunt

A microwave filled with nails and monkey spunk

An owl with a ketamine addiction

That half-a-biscuit you find under the couch six months later that’s covered in your cat’s bum hair

Alcoholic Zombie Jesus

Thanos

A shark with a chainsaw in its mouth that someone has strapped to a shopping trolley and pushed down a hill towards a school playground

The Sooty puppet Matthew Corbet wanks himself off with every night

The Sweep he uses to mop it up

A homeless tramp who enjoys eating Jacob Rees-Mogg’s pubic hair out of a top hat with his bare hands

Your demented grandmother’s beshitted knickers

A gammon sandwich

A box of Sugar Puffs where someone’s drawn a little speech bubble coming from the Honey Monster’s mouth that says, ‘Chocks away, and fuck the poor!’

A waxwork of Jamie Oliver with half its head smashed in that’s filled with angry bees, who all inexplicably have the face of the late Dale Winton

A syphilitic kangaroo that’s been injected with the distilled essence of Gordon Ramsay’s disdain for humanity

A huge manatee

A regular-sized manatee

A sub-atomic manatee that lives in a gunge-tank inside Ann Widdicombe’s vaginal cavity

Ann Widdicombe’s vaginal cavity

A steak-pie glazed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (funny that Widdecombe would lead me to thinking about a mad cow)

A tonne of white dog shit that’s been moulded into the shape of a man

My own ball-bag with YES and NO painted on alternate testicles, with a happy face drawn on my helmet in permanent marker

Nine dead monkeys stitched together to make a hellish monktopus

Death himself, scythe and all, on the basis that he probably wouldn’t enact as many deadly social and economic policies as Boris, because the more people that died the more extra shifts he’d have to put in, and what’s the point of being the man at the top if you actually have to do shit?

Flock the haters: seagulls are amazing

Posted on July 18, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

I sometimes think I’m the only person in the world who likes seagulls. As a species they appear to be significantly less popular than crabs: all three kinds (snap-snap; itch-itch; and bitch-bitch). I’d go so far as to say they’re probably less popular than an endless loop of Mrs Brown Boys playing on a big screen on the express shuttle-bus service to hell, which never actually reaches hell, and you’re just stuck on a dangerously hot bus watching the same episode of Mrs Browns’ Boys over and over for all eternity, and then after about 400,000 years the penny drops and you’re like, ‘Ah, I see what they feckin’ did there, sure. Well played, Beelzebub. Well played.’

I’ve never heard anyone say anything nice about seagulls. Not once. Ever. ‘Rats with wings’ is about as complimentary as it gets. It’s a shame. They don’t deserve the bad rap they get, bless their ketchup-covered beaks. It’s not their fault we humans leave trails of Happy Meals and chip wrappers from our shores to our town centres. If anyone’s to blame for the unhappy legions of wee dogs and old ladies being dive-bombed with hilarious regularity it’s us. Mankind: we merry band of muckle, messy, bipedal bastards.

Seagulls help more than they hinder. They provide us with an incredible public service, completely tax free, by eating our rubbish and left-overs. That’s really nice of them, isn’t it? I mean, otters are pretty good, I mean, they’re perfectly fine, but they aren’t nipping down the shops for a pint of milk or tidying our kitchens for us, are they? Snobs, that’s what they are. Semiaquatic wankers.

Maybe it’s just me (it’s definitely just me) but I find seagulls soothing. Their soaring shrieks and laugh-like ululations – which tend to inspire nothing but murderous rage in most of my contemporaries – are a panacea for my soul. Whenever I hear their cries I’m able to imagine I’m sitting on a remote beach somewhere; the vastness of the ocean at my feet; the warm breath of the wind lowing gently against my face; the cold comfort of the sand: a man with nothing to do except nothing at all, and all the happier for it.

They cheer me up and make me laugh, too. There’s something intrinsically comical about them. I love the juxtaposition between the serious tones of their faces and the Charlie Chaplin-icity of their bodies, all prat-falls and clownish gait. The sight of a seagull dancing up and down on a patch of grass to coax gullible worms to the surface, legs lifting up and down like malfunctioning pistons, is one of the funniest things you’ll ever see, with the possible exception of Jeremy Corbin dressed as a wizard shouting obscenities at his own penis. When a seagull dashes along a road, its little legs thumping and bicycling beneath its spirit-level-straight body, it’s hard not to imagine their journey being accompanied by the old-timey piano music from ‘silent’ movies.

They’re such adorably silly, sweet and absurd little creatures. Who would wish death upon them? Well, everyone, it seems. Every single man, woman and child on earth. Except me. Most people want to hurt seagulls: force-feed them bicarbonate of soda until their tummies pop like fireworks; or squish them into the ground like guts-flavoured chewing gum; or strap a crocodile to the underside of a helicopter-sized drone and fly it through their flocks like a hungry lawnmower.

My wife wants to kill them, too; no more so than when I arrive home from work with my car stained so severely with poop splat that it looks like the recipient of the world’s largest and most grotesque scat-bukkake. Seagulls come to roost on the roof of my work, you see. For a third to a half of every year, the air around my office is a riot of squawks and shrieks and over-lapping choruses of Mongolian throat-singing, seagull-style. They thump on the skylights with their beaks. They flap and swoop over the car-park like hawks above a field of mice. They shit on people’s heads – sometimes straight into people’s eyes.

I miss them when they go. Especially the eye-shitting part. That’s hilarious.

My wife won’t be swayed from her hatred, though, no matter how much I talk up their quirks. She wants them dead. How dare they shit on our car! How dare they rob what little status or value our little chrome junk-mobile possesses with their corrosive, paint-peeling sky-jobbies? She sometimes asks me to park in the car-park of a neighbouring workplace, and walk the rest of the way to my office from there, in order to protect the car’s integrity, an offer I’ve always, em, politely declined.

I want my wife to love the gulls as much as I do. Why let a little thing like repeated airborne excretions ruin the chance of a perfectly good inter-species friendship? I wish she’d let them into her heart. When we lived in our last home, a third-floor flat, I’d begin every weekend morning by standing on the balcony in my dressing gown, hurling chunks of bread into the sky, and watching as the gulls swooped and dipped and whooshed to catch them as they fell ground-wards; my own private aerial display team. Why couldn’t she love them for that, if nothing else? In the better weather, she’s watched me place bread on my head and shoulders and walk around like some God of the seagulls, sometimes with four of them perched on me at once. She liked that, mind you, but only because one of them shat on my shoulder.

PS: I know there are hundreds of different species of gulls, and seagull isn’t a particularly precise or accurate catch-all label to throw around, but equally I don’t care.

Like all relationships, ours has been tested. The relationship between me and the seagulls, that is. I know the brutality my winged homies are capable of demonstrating. I’m still haunted by memories of the time I witnessed their inhumanity close-up – though I suppose I can’t really judge seagulls too harshly for not possessing humanity, given that they’re seagulls. You know what I mean. In my own defence, inseagullity just sounded daft.

I used to work at the airport, a long time ago now. One afternoon at the end of a shift I was in my car about to pull out of the staff car-park when I saw a couple of seagulls a-strutting-and-a-pecking at a nearby patch of grass, intermittently stopping to squabble with, and viciously peck at, each other. I laughed. Those guys! It was like having private access to Laurel and Hardy, if, you know, Laurel and Hardy had been seagulls. What were they doing, I wondered? I’d never seen them exhibiting this sort of behaviour before. I killed the engine, unclipped my seat-belt and craned my neck to get a better look at them through the windscreen. They were still just out of view, so I got out the car and took a step towards them. Then another step. Then another. And another.

Then horror. Such heart-rending horror.

The seagulls were ripping and tearing at the ears, face and body of a stunned and quivering baby rabbit. What a blow; what cruel disillusionment. It was like finding out your gentle and loving wee gran was secretly a werewolf who’d eaten half your friends. Or chasing Laurel and Hardy into an alleyway for their autograph only to find them beating a baby to death with a set of golf clubs. Not exactly up there with the top ten best laughs of all time.

I ran towards those asshole seagulls, shouting and shooing as I closed on them. They weren’t keen on abandoning their day’s sport, and for just a brief second seemed intent on playing a game of chicken with the big angry human. At the very last moment, though, they flapped off in a huff.

The poor little rabbit was wide-eyed and trembling, its chest rising and falling and vibrating with worrying urgency. It put up no resistance when I softly stroked its fur. That’s how you know a rabbit’s terrified. Usually, the mere suggestion of a human footstep is enough to have them leaping hedgerows like showjumping stallions. I took my phone out and called the airport’s on-site animal welfare/RSPCA team, and maintained a vigil until they came to take the little fella away and tend to his shock. I don’t know what happened to the rabbit after that. I told them never to tell me. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

I was angry at seagull-kind for a few hours, but you can’t really hold a grudge against them. Besides, we humans are capable of much, much worse. My own step-dad used to pop rabbits with a pellet gun through his bedroom window, and then run out to the garden to break their necks, or smash their heads against a rock, all because they ate his petunias or disrespected his mother or wore white socks with black shoes or something. We had a garage full of domesticated rabbits when I was a boy, which my step-dad used to breed, and sometimes enter into shows. Unbeknownst to all of us, he was also selling a proportion of those rabbits to a local French bistro. And not to keep as pets. When my mum found out, they were liberated from their death-warehouse and re-homed quicker than you could say ‘Arrete de tuer ces lapins, chatte!’

Anyway, hating fully-grown seagulls is one thing, but their children? How can you detest the baby versions of any warm-blooded animal (with the possible exception of the Trumps)? Every July the roof of my work becomes a creche, where gangly, grey-feathered chicks teeter on the corrugated metal slats, and take their first, uncertain forays into flight. I become a mother hen when I’m around them, always shouting up at them things like ‘Careful up there, now’ and ‘What have I told you?!’ and ‘You treat this roof like a hotel!’

Inevitably, every year a handful of young gulls fall from the roof and find themselves trapped at ground level, away from their mothers and unable to fly back to them. They’re vulnerable on the ground. If a truck or a forklift doesn’t get them, come nightfall, a hungry fox will. I’ve chased chicks around that car-park many times, Benny-Hill-style, desperately trying to get them up a ladder and back on to the roof. I’ve put down water for them, thrown scraps of food. Once, I even tried to get one to hop into my car so I could take it home and raise it as my own. You know what I mean: give it a pipe and call it Gerald, inculcate in it a love of the classics and fine port. Normal stuff. It’s lucky I couldn’t persuade the little fella to become little Jamie Junior, because my wife would’ve thrown us both out on the street.

A few weeks ago my wife, kids and I took a boat trip out to a tiny island in the firth of forth. Getting there was stressful. I should clarify: getting to the boat was stressful. We hadn’t known that South Queensferry, from where we were sailing, was hosting a charity abseil that day. I got us to the town with twenty-five minutes to spare. After twenty-five minutes of driving up and down a half-mile of street yelling and spitting venom (‘I HOPE THEIR NEXT F***ING ABSEIL’S IN HELL!’) my wife and I decided it would be better for our collective sanity if we just cut our losses (THIRTY QUID!) and drove home. Just as I was dawdling the car up the road at almost precisely two minutes to sailing time, I passed a space. SCREECH! SWEAR! ROAR! BADLY PARK! RUN RUN RUN! I hate running at the best of times. I especially hate running whilst carrying a four-year-old child. We could see our fellow passengers boarding the boat in the distance. We ran, ran, ran. My lungs almost exploded, I was panting like a sex criminal, but we made it. Just.

But we made it.

There’s an old abbey on the island, which we dutifully explored. Then we crossed the island to a rocky beach, where there were no people but us, and untold hundreds of seagulls. They circled in whirlpools above the sea. They rolled over the beach in grey-and-white waves. Everywhere we looked they perched, sat, frolicked and strolled, like flocks of feathered families holidaying at the seaside. We were the real tourists. This was their land. And we were welcome there. Or at least tolerated. I closed my eyes, and I could imagine that I was exactly where I was. On an empty beach full of shrieks and whispers. Surrounded by wind and seagulls. In the warm glow of my family.

Roosters and Religion: An Attack

Posted on July 6, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

I’ve always considered myself a Jesus of the animals; or at the very least a cut-price Steve Irwin. I’ve got a special way with animals, a belief to which I stubbornly cling even though I once ended up with the beak of an African grey parrot crunched over my finger like a bear-trap, a painful occurrence that followed numerous warnings not to prod my finger into its cage. “It’s okay,” I remember saying, only seconds before. “Animals love me.”

I’m something of a mental case when it comes to our non-human friends. I like nothing better than to sit by the loch with seagulls perched on my head, and swans encircling me like long-necked disciples. I’ve never yet been able to walk past a dog without patting it, always holding out my hand to be sniffed like the Pope’s ring. When my eldest was two and dropped his favourite hat into the African boar enclosure at Edinburgh zoo, I was straight in there like a fleet-footed Doctor Doolittle to retrieve it, danger (and life-time ban from the zoo) be damned. If I was Noah, I would’ve had two arks.

Yes, I love all animals, except…

Well. Until recently, I’ve never had particularly strong feelings about roosters. Barely any feelings at all, truth be told, beyond the faint glimmer of recognition that accompanies the sight of a box of Kellogg’s’ Cornflakes or an old re-run of Foghorn Leghorn. I’ve never considered roosters to be particularly cuddly, but then neither have I considered them to be especially dangerous.

There’s a family who lives just off the main road on the outskirts of the next town over. They’re smallholders, with a little smattering of chickens, and a rooster to, well… rule the roost, I suppose, in a quite literal sense. Although the chickens have the run of the small public space next to their owners’ property, it’s not a stretch of land that anyone would ever pass through or arrive at if not specifically to come see the chickens, or visit the family. We’ve often stopped there with the kids. It’s nice to have a little oasis of nature on-hand among the urban squalor. The lady of the house once came out to say hello, and introduced my kids to her little grand-daughter, before letting them all feed the chickens together. Our two loved it.

Generic picture. Our two are boys, and we’d never be cruel enough to put them in dungarees

Earlier this spring I took my eldest, Jack, on a jaunt in the car. We were heading to the next town over to grab some lunch, walk by the shore, and visit a second-hand book-store for a re-up of kids’ stories. As it was a bright and sunny-ish day, I thought it would be nice to stop and say a quick how-do-you-cock-a-doodle-doo to the chickens.

We crossed the road and strolled up to the chickens, greeting them like they were old friends. The rooster, rather a big bugger as far as roosters go, came strutting over to us as we advanced up the grass, its head bopping up and down in a gesture that I interpreted as a nod of recognition – mano-a-chickano. The closest human translation is probably: ‘Alright mate?’ In any case, the rooster seemed unconcerned with our presence. It made past us and continued to strut about and peck at the ground.

At this point Jack’s ebullience got the better of him, as ebullience tends to do in four-year-olds. ‘Not so close, Jack,’ I chided him gently, as he skipped around the fringes of a flower-bed that housed a squad of squatting chickens. He skipped around a little more, and then made his way back towards me. He was less than fifteen feet away, and closing, when the rooster decided to re-announce itself.

It was coming towards us. Specifically, it was coming towards Jack. A little faster this time, but still with no obvious malicious intent. It’s hard to tell with a rooster. They don’t start belting out menacing renditions of football chants, or take to whipping out flick knives. Their angry strut is remarkably similar to their regular strut. If instead of a rooster it had been a bear, a dog, or even a parrot (shakes fist at the heavens) coming towards us I would’ve thrown myself in-front of Jack in the manner of a presidential bodyguard. I would’ve ran at it with the zeal of a star quarterback, or thrown Jack over my shoulders and rushed him towards the car like I was a human rickshaw. But I did nothing. Except, that is, laugh good-naturedly at the quasi-comical beast as it bobbed and strutted ever closer.

When the rooster caught up with Jack I was still a few feet away. Jack turned to face it, a smile smoothing its way across his face. Unbeknownst to both of us, a split-second later the bird would punish Jack for his sense of pleasant expectation, and teach me a hard lesson in child guardianship. It all happened in a flurry. The rooster jerked and flapped about at Jack’s waist, then whipped itself into the air, its wings spread wide in shrieking fury. In the slipstream of distraction, it swiped out with its feet, leaving a scratch like a tram-line on Jack’s face from cheek to chin. There was blood dripping from Jack’s lip. It happened in a flash; a finger-click of time. I grabbed Jack by his shoulders, spun him out of the way, and pirouetted myself in front of the near-rabid rooster.

It leapt towards me like something out of a 2-player beat-em-up, using its wings to steady itself before unleashing a mighty two-footed kick to my stomach. It bounced back to its starting point like some demented little Mr Miagi, ready to strike again. And it did. It struck again, and again, and again, and again. I wasn’t the main target, though. Just a lumpy obstacle. It was obvious the maniac bird was trying to bypass me in order to take another bite and a scratch at Jack. I couldn’t let that happen. I had to keep angling myself and jumping from side to side to keep its gut-booting focus on me. Thankfully, it had no interest in my ball-sack, else I might’ve been forced to consider more extreme tactics.

At one point I hunkered down in a coiled squat like Chris Pratt when he was herding velociraptors in Jurassic World. I waved a hand behind me to direct Jack to safety. “Go, and keep moving,” I told him. “Go slowly, get to the pavement and wait for me.”

Poor Jack was still crying, but I couldn’t offer him much in the way of comfort without breaking my defensive pose, which would have put him at the mercy of more butts and scratches, more vicious ones this time for sure. What if its talons caught Jack’s eye this time? When the spirit of Chris Pratt didn’t prove effective I switched to Begbie from Trainspotting, spitting, swearing and kicking at the bastard beast.

All the while this scene was unfolding the rooster’s elderly and infirm owner sat on the porch on the stoop of his house about thirty or forty feet away, looking increasingly concerned, especially when he saw me booting the rooster’s chest, kicking at its face and calling it a ‘f***ing c***’ at the top of my voice. Eventually, the bird backed off, but not because of the sound and fury I’d subjected it to. No. It looked like it had just grown bored. What the hell was the old guy feeding these chickens? Cocaine?

As I was buckling my bloodied son into the back seat of the car, the rooster’s pyjama-clad owner shuffled over with his stick, swift as a ninja in his canvas slippers, and began offering heart-felt apologies. I told him not to worry about it, and apologised for turning the air a few thousand shades of blue. He insisted we come back to his house with him so Jack could have some juice and crisps and play with his grand-daughter; you know, spin a positive out of the negative. I said that was a kind offer, but thought that Jack would probably appreciate some distance between him and the rooster, at least for now. Besides, we had to clean his scratches.

Jack was understandably shaken, and shy to boot, but the old man’s persistence – his zeal to make amends – wore us both down. We got out of the car and started heading back towards the house – and the chickens. The old man clasped Jack’s hand tightly as we walked, a gesture of affection and restraint. I could tell Jack still wasn’t entirely sold on the new course of events. He looked like he was being arrested.

I kept telling Jack how brave he was, and explained that the rooster – though I was still quite angry at it – had only acted aggressively because it had perceived us as a threat. It wasn’t Jack’s fault, and it wasn’t strictly the rooster’s fault, either. It was just an awful accident, and, really, daddy should’ve been more careful.

But I promised him that the rooster probably wouldn’t attack again, but if it did, I’d be ready for it. Moments later, Jack and the rooster passed within twenty feet of each other, and I was relieved to see that they were wholly indifferent to each other’s existence. Some juice, crisps, and anti-septic wipes later, and it was as if none of it had ever happened.

The old man’s grand-daughter, of similar age to Jack, came outside to play. As Jack and the little girl ran around the garden laughing and conspiring, jumping this, leaping that, investigating here, applying their imaginations there, I spoke with the old man. I asked him about his life, his family. He’d come from Pakistan to the south of England, living there for a time, before branching off from his brothers and settling in Scotland. He’d raised his family here, three generations and counting.

I found him a pleasant, cordial and earnest man, measured in his speech, warm in his sentiments. He looked at his grand-daughter and my son laughing together, and he smiled. He told me how important it was for this sort of thing to happen, these sorts of friendships, especially these days. I knew what he was getting at. I agreed with him. I’m an atheist, and the old man was a Muslim, but the children in our lives were oblivious to the cosmetic and cultural differences that might exist between them and us. As it should be. They were having fun. They were happy.

They were children.

And we were all human beings, after all.

I’ve discussed grand topics like God, creation and evolution with Jack, but so briefly that I’m sure he doesn’t remember a thing about them. He certainly doesn’t know what Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, or even atheists are, or what they believe (or don’t). He’s never once remarked upon the skin colour, make-up or ethnicity of another human being – black, white, brown, Chinese, Japanese, Lebanese – not because he hasn’t noticed, which surely he has, but because he’s never been encouraged to care. My views and those of his mother’s on religion and politics will undoubtedly filter through to Jack and his brother, but it would be unfair of us to implant any of these notions in either of them at such crucial stages of their mental and social development.

I’m pro-people, but anti-religion. To co-opt and twist an infamous saying from Christianity: hate the sin, not the sinner. I always try to keep in mind that most people – especially in global Islam, but also in Scientology, Mormonism and Christianity in the US – are hostages to the religions into which they’re born. I was able to enjoy being around the old man and his family (more of whom came to visit later in the afternoon), because irrespective of the differing spiritual beliefs we each may have held, I recognised them as good, kind, and decent people.

The question I find myself contending with increasingly often these days is: how do I square my fondness for people, in all their multifarious, individual forms, with a wariness for organised religion? How can I square the reality of having liked, respected and loved friends, acquaintances and colleagues who were Muslim with my fear and distrust of Islam as a global political, cultural and religious force? I’m an atheist with two gay sisters. Show me any Muslim-majority country in the world where I’d be tolerated, or where Muslims within those counties would be free to advocate atheism or live their lives as gay.

I think we here in the British Isles can sometimes have a rather twee view of religion that springs from watching too many tea-sipping parsons on the TV, or inspired by the remembrance of a kindly grandmother’s sweet smile during Songs of Praise, when the reality is that we might yet have had the firm fingers of Christianity wrapped around our throats if not for several hundreds of years of protest, dissent, bloodshed, revolutions, reformations, refusals and the eventual triumph of enlightenment over darkness. Although it hasn’t been without its fair share of schisms and inter-denominational blood feuds, the Muslim world has yet to have its reformation. Attempts to soften or modify the religion’s shape and substance are usually met with banishment at best, and wars and murder at worst. While there has certainly been progress in some quarters, it is slow and uncertain.

Global Islam doesn’t appear to compromise very often.

Muslims don’t seem to express something so simple as solidarity; it’s rather as if Islam is one unbroken entity, a sheath of (thin) skin covering the planet, where pain in one part of the body is felt in every other part of the body. Touch ane, touch aw. Islam first, family and nation second.

The cycles of suffering, rage and retribution roaring in Islam’s heartlands – some of the most politically and economically fraught regions of the world – are felt in Birmingham and Berlin as much as they are in Jakarta and Lahore. Part of this connection is spiritual and ideological, but there is a physical component, too, in that rather than allow communities to settle and integrate into new host countries, the links to the heartlands are kept alive through immigration, and the importation of wives and husbands. That’s a worry when many of the countries from which the blood-lines are preserved and topped-up play host to brutal repression of women, and murderous intolerance of gay people and the irreligious.

That’s not to downplay the corrosive influence of Christianity – from creationists supplanting scientists in US public schools; to money-grubbing evangelists spewing out endless torrents of hypocrisy and hatred to the vulnerable and the uneducated; to arguments surrounding abortion, end of life and bodily autonomy; to discussions about sex, sexuality and equality across the ecumenical spectrum – but people here in Britain and across the West know that Christianity, particularly here in the UK, is a toothless force. I could dress up as the Pope and drop a less-than congratulatory rap about Jesus, I could draw a picture of God with a big pair of comedy breasts, or collaborate on a raunchy comedy movie about the life and times of Jesus, and at worst the blow-back would be a snotty letter sent into the Radio Times by disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.

But if I was to depict the Muslim’s prophet on paper, or write about him in unflattering or critical terms, I – like Salman Rushdie, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and other less lucky people like Theo van Gogh – would have to prepare myself for the possibility of either a short life with a brutal end or a long life spent looking over my shoulder.

But who am I to talk of fear when bombs continue to rain down on places like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan? I didn’t ask for those bombs, I didn’t put them there, but in the eyes of countless millions around the world I’m culpable and complicit in their destruction. I’m a part of the oppressive, racist, imperialist and expansionist system that sees something it wants in the Arab and Muslim world, and snatches it by force. How much of Islam’s fire, fury and ire is attributable to its holy book, and how much of it was enflamed and fanned by centuries of brutal exploitation and subjugation of Muslims by people like me? How much of what we hear about Islam and Muslims is wilfully distorted by our right-wing media and far-right assholes like Nigel Farage and ‘Tommy Robinson’?

Can the circle ever be squared? In the end, it all comes down to family. Always. Everything we do.

A loud and rousing cock-a-doodle-doo blares above the reverie. It reminds me that it’s probably time to head home. Jack is running and laughing with his new friend. It’s like they’ve known each other all of their lives. He doesn’t want to go now. He’s having too much fun.

I shake the old man’s hand. ‘It was really nice to meet you,’ I tell him.

I mean it.

Here’s another question that history might have to answer, sooner or later:

Which of us is the rooster?

We Haunt Our Own Lives

Posted on June 30, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

The first house I lived in after I was born. My parents were together then. My sister – eight years older than me – went to school just along the road. I can’t remember living here. I only know it from old photographs and stories.

We can go anywhere: soar above the earth; dive beneath the ocean; drift off into the deep and silent void of space. But there’s one place we can’t go.

Back.

And sometimes that’s the only place we want to go.

We all lived together in this street – my sister and parents – until I was four. I remember it. But not too well, obviously, because mum says the house we’re looking at here wasn’t our house. Ours was next door. It was the last time we were all a family. The house we moved to next – in which the original family blew itself apart – is the house my mother still lives in with my stepfather. It’s still open and alive to us, so it won’t feature here.

We keep moving forwards, but something keeps pulling us back to the portals of our pasts, where we stand peering through the misted glass, trying to make sense of the shapes that shift before our eyes like shadows. We haunt our own lives, along with the ghosts of those gone from us, both the living and the dead, their marks passing over us like dust in the moonlight.

Then darkness.

We can never go back.

But we can’t stop trying.

My uncle and aunty lived here, with my 3 cousins. There was always laughter here, and jokes, and chaos, and copies of 2000AD.

Have you ever stood outside a place that used to mean something to you and tried to will it back to life: a place that now stands forever beyond your reach; a locked vault swollen with memories?

It’s bitter-sweet. You know that the only thing lying in wait behind that door is the erasure of the memories held in such precarious balance by the bowed and twisting column of your imagination. Someone else lives there now. Another person. Another you. Another life that’s swallowing yours, until theirs is swallowed in turn. Before everything’s swallowed.

: My paternal grandparents moved countless times in my lifetime. This is just a small selection. In this house, my gran and papa slept upstairs. My papa used to let me throw his hat down the stairs and fetch it again.

: I was estranged from them for a time. I loved them both very much. When I reconnected with them at the age of 12, my father disowned them. My papa died estranged from his son.

: I watched my grandfather die. Then later I made a mess of my life. I got mired in my own shit and left my grandmother to die alone. Or at least without me. I ran out of time to explain. To say sorry.

I took my kids with me to some of these sacred places in my life. I asked my partner to photograph us. My kids and I gazed dead ahead at the past – my past – keeping our backs to the here and now. I know my kids will never get a chance to go through those doors with me, or feel what I used to feel every time I’d reach out a hand to knock on them. I know they’ll never get to meet the people who once stood behind those doors (most of them are either estranged from me or long since dead).

But I wanted to stand there with them by my side. It made me feel content, somehow. Like a circuit had been completed.

My maternal grandparents’ house. The wall used to be a hedge, and we’d vault it – my cousins and I – much to gran’s mild displeasure. I’d play Countdown with my grandparents, and listen to my papa tut at the soaps and chat shows that followed, which I suspected he secretly loved. My gran had names for every person who walked past in the street. She called her window ‘Channel 5’. We only had 4 TV channels then.

The kids, of course, felt nothing.

They were, after all, just staring at old, unfamiliar houses, no different from a thousand they’d seen before. Piles of brick and mortar, nothing more or less.

But as I stood there clutching their hands, or holding their tiny bodies against my own, for a moment I was there. We were all there. I’d taken them back with me. My brain had breathed life into the poetry of the ordinary, and turned those doors into time machines, reconstructing the things and people on the other side of that thin skin of wood with almost perfect clarity.

I could hear the shuffling of slippers down hallways, and the faint ticking of a clock on a mantelpiece; I could smell lentil soup wafting in from the kitchen; I could see ring-marks left behind by a favourite mug, and pictures hanging askew on the wall. I could see myself – younger, leaner, less corrupted – standing on the precipice of a life that would be at once more terrible and more precious and wonderful than I ever could have imagined. I could see and feel it all. The dead were alive, and the miserable were happy.

The top floor flat where my partner and I started our family. One kid was born here, but we moved to our current – much more peaceful and sanguine – home a few weeks before our second arrived in the world. Neither kid has any memory of this home. We’ve come full circle. Their story – and trail of pixelated breadcrumbs – begins here.

I think we have a hunger for our kids to know us, to feel what it is to be us. But they can’t. We’re ‘we’ and they’re ‘them’. Our lives are gone, or at least shifted, and theirs are just beginning.

But in those moments as the camera clicked, for one blessed, frozen second, we were there… actually there. And we would always be there. All of us.

In the eternal past.

Together.

The Race for PM: Brexy’s Midnight Runners

Posted on May 30, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

There’s an episode of The Simpsons where Homer holds such a deep grudge against Mo that his senses are hijacked to the point where everything he sees, everything he says and everything he hears is ‘Mo’.

That’s how most of us have come to feel about Brexit.

Brexit is everywhere. Brexit will always be with us, and it’s always been here. Brexit is infinite and eternal. It’s in our DNA. It’s in the Domesday book. It’s in the Bible. It’s there standing next to Jack Nicholson in the photograph at the end of The Shining. It’s in our brains. It’s on our lips. It’s all over social media.

It’s been around for so long that I’m actually starting to form sexual neuroses around it. I heard some European lady on radio 4 recently trying to sum it all up, and found myself getting turned on: ‘Wha kine of Brexeet you wan, baybee?’ she asked me, and me alone. ‘You wan a soff Brexeet, baybee? Or har’ Brexeet?’

By this point, of course, I was fervently masturbating as I shouted indescribable filth out of the window, catching some funny looks from the rest of the people in the traffic jam: “Yeah, that’s it, restrict my movement, baby, oh yeah, yeah, I’ve been a bad voter, I’ve been a bad, bad, MISINFORMED voter, take away my rights, yeah, make me feel worthless, defund me, DEFUND ME, give me your sexy Brexit, HARD, come on, HARD, don’t stop, don’t STOP… BREXIT THE EVER-LOVING SHIT OUT OF ME, YOU DIRTY WEE COW!”

Brexit’s on the radio, it’s on the TV: every channel, no matter the programme.

‘Will sparrows need a visa after Brexit?’

‘Tell me, you’re a headteacher: after Brexit, will maths still exist?’

‘Reverend, if Jesus were here today, would he… be fucking sick of hearing about Brexit too?’

I swear David Attenborough’s even released a Netflix special called: Life After Brexit.

“There’s… nothing to eat here, so the poor… have started… to eat the rich. The very rich have… already left, migrated to Monaco, and Switzerland, leaving… just the middle classes. A group of young council estate lads have seen the crest of Phillip from the tennis club’s Pringle jumper, and they head off in pursuit, eventually catching him round the back of Lidl and tearing him apart like a chicken. It’s probably the first time that anyone in this group has ever eaten anything fresh… or free-range. Clive from the squash club will soon be round the corner in his… Nissan Navara, but by then… it’ll be too late for Phillip. This… is what Brexit Means Brexit… really means.”

We reached the point of critical Brexit fatigue a long time ago, but we might very well find ourselves looking back on these days with great fondness once we’re loping round a smog-clouded Hell-scape chewing the heads off rats, and aiding in the summary executions of anyone we suspect can speak French even to primary school level; once our kids are standing up in school assembly and making their daily pledge to President Katie Hopkins to hate foreigners in all their hideous forms, as their teachers watch on with machine guns.

Poor Theresa May. It seems like only last week she was begrudgingly commenting on inner-city knife crime, with a look on her face that seemed to say “What’s this got to do with fucking Brexit? Why am I being asked to comment on something that ISN’T Brexit? Ask a local councillor or Piers Morgan about this inconsequential nincompoopery: I’m a god damned board-certified Brexitologist!”

Ironically, one of the main reasons she had to stand down this week – besides finally realising how tragic and ineffectual she was as a leader – was due to the sheer number of times she’d been stabbed in the back by the squad of Machiavellian hypocrites lurking behind her in the shady, murky undergrowth of the party.

There’s now a gaping hole in the Tory leadership, which admittedly isn’t anything new. At least ten Tories have expressed interest in taking over as PM – Brexy’s Midnight Runners, as I like to call them – and there isn’t one among them that doesn’t send a shiver of terror or wave disgust down the spine. They range from the ridiculous to the sublime; from the ‘Eewwww!’ to the ‘who?’, and a multitude of possibly illegal swear words in between. I’m afraid that only the least favourite crisps are left at the bottom of the multi-pack, and all of them are Evil Flavour.

Welcome to the next phase of the Brexpocalypse. It’s going to get worse before it gets… well, an awful lot worse. The UK, already isolated from its friends by a coterie of abusive, power-hungry psychopaths, is now about to be gang-raped. And all we can do is stand by and watch. On the BBC, as it happens. Good old BBC.

Brexy’s Midnight Runners

One of the few Tory big-hitters not to come out swinging is Jacob Rees-Mogg, which is a shame, because that might have been very funny. It’s easy to see why they left the Dark Lord on the bench. Rees-Mogg’s voice is suggestive of a Persian cat who just woke up after a nice long sleep by the fire, but an evil Persian cat – one who kills baby mice. He’s a haunted ventriloquist’s dummy who only speaks Latin; he’s a demonic pinky-finger; he’s Hitler’s butler; he’s a harvester of children’s tears who likes to relax by downing a refreshing pint of homeless man’s blood. But, strangely, he’s not considered quite depraved enough to throw his top-hat into the ring.

So who have we got? There’s Michael Gove, the man who finally answers the question: ‘But what if Rick Moranis was an oily right-wing bastard?’ (I could just as easily have used ‘Pob’ instead of ‘Rick Moranis’. Or a hollowed-out wank potato with glasses.) It’s not widely known, but Gove was the world’s first successful recipient of a full Scottishectomy. All vestiges of Scottishness were removed from his mind and body in 2005 – which unfortunately has raised his life expectancy by 20 years.

There’s Boris Johnson, naturally. He’s the favourite. Imagine if the Honey Monster had sex with both the Dulux dog and a naughty school-boy character from the Beano: Boris would probably masturbate to that, right? Still, he’d make a good prime minister because his buffoonery was mildly amusing on Have I Got News For You a few years ago, eh? Once he’s in the top seat maybe we can appoint Andy Parsons as the Home Secretary and Gina Yashere as the Business Secretary? Yeah? YEAH!!?! (suddenly remembers we live in a world where Donald Trump is president in the US and a stand-up comedian was elected as the president of Ukraine)

Ah, and there’s Jeremy Hunt. People have milked so much comedy from Jeremy Hunt’s wonderfully rhymeable name over the years that there’s nothing original left to say, so I can probably just dispense with the witty wordplay and come right out and say what an absolute c**t he is. What an absolute c**t he is.

Barring her views on fox-hunting and Brexit, Andrea Leadsom is actually quite progressive for a Tory, which is a bit like singling BTK out for praise in a group of serial killers because he’s quite good at pottery.

Then there’s Sajid Javid, a brutal little man who looks like the aborted attempt of a small child to draw The Rock’s face onto an egg. He’s Doctor Evil, but thrice as evil, and about as popular in Scotland right now as the idea of Margaret Thatcher and Jimmy Hill being brought back from the dead so they can be installed in Edinburgh Castle to rule as King and Queen. Good luck, you little fucker.

Rory Stewart has the resigned, vaguely apologetic gaze of an archbishop who’s just been snapped by the paparazzi coming out of a brothel. For the eighth time. He looks like the end result of someone getting a jigsaw of Steve Buscemi’s face mixed up with a jigsaw of Wilhem Dafoe’s face.

There’s Dominic Raab, a grinning thumb with the face of Buzz Lightyear and the soul of Alan B’stard. There’s Matt Hancock and Kit Malthouse, who aren’t even real people, but two detectives from a cop show set in 1970s New York. And there’s James Cleverley, Esther McVey, Mark Har…oh, fuck this, I’m falling asleep (but also still oddly terrified).

To quote the tagline for Alien vs Predator: Whoever wins, we lose.

Even Ken Clarke’s had enough

The Tories shouldn’t be allowed to install a new prime minister without a general election, and the general public should never have been allowed to weigh in on such a complex, multi-layered issue as membership of the European Union, at least not without years of preparation, education and honest campaigning.

This is what the average man and woman on the street make of Brexit:

“What is this Brexit thing?”

“It’s somethin’ to do with pomegranates or something, too many pomegranates coming in to the country.”

“Pomegranates?”

“Aye, and bananas too. They’re too bendy or they’re no bendy enough or somethin. Oh, and they’re worried about some door-stop in Ireland.”

“A door-stop?”

“Aye, they want to put one in, so Ireland doesn’t close or something.”

“That’s a bloody big door-stop.”

“Aye, but it’ll keep the foreigners out. SOMETHING SOMETHING FOREIGNERS! GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!”

They’re the lucky ones. Imagine living in blissful ignorance of this almighty cluster-fuck. Mind you, half the people brokering it don’t know what the fuck it’s all about either. It’s like when you say a word or phrase so many times that it starts to lose all meaning. ‘Brexit, Brexit, Brexit, Brexit. Workers rights, workers rights, workers right, workers rights, workers rights.’ You see? Totally meaningless.

So, in summary: we’re all fucked.

Except for us lucky blighters up here in Scotland, who might yet manage to avoid Brexit with the aid of a swift and timely Ukexit. That’s if Donald Trump doesn’t declare war on us and nuke us out of existence for not letting him turn the highlands into a giant golf course or something.

If we have to endure a No Deal Brexit with Boris Johnson at the helm, a nuking might start to seem like a small mercy.

Geeks may rule, but that ‘aint cool…

Posted on May 22, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

Being a geek, or being interested in geeky things, isn’t the albatross around the neck it used to be when I was at school. As a teenager, I hid my love for Star Trek like it was a secret identity. Not a sexy secret identity like Superman’s, but one that if discovered would almost certainly prevent me from losing my virginity before the turn of the millennium. The third millennium.

I remember sitting in the opticians with my mum when I was about 15 or 16. I was browsing through an Argos catalogue when I spied the complete first season of Star Trek Voyager on VHS. I hinted that it might make a nice gift for a space-loving chap such as myself, but my mother never gave it any serious consideration, preferring instead to launch into a tirade about how I didn’t appreciate the value of things, and how her parents had never bought her box-sets of popular American science-fiction programmes when she was a girl growing up in the Glasgow tenements. I think the closest she’d ever got to flying saucers was when her mum got angry and threw plates at her.

About half-way through this parental primal-scream, the shop door tinkled to announce the arrival of a new customer. It was a girl from my class at school. She took a seat next to us. This wasn’t good. Mum was still in full, red-faced swing, a few ‘and another things’ leaping from her tongue. I couldn’t let this Star Trek-shaped secret get out. I mustered every sliver of verbal dexterity I possessed in a desperate attempt to derail the subject of conversation.

And I failed.

Miserably.

Have you ever tried to stop a mother from talking, much less a Glasweigen one? After a few awkward hellos, my mum turned to the girl, jabbed a finger at the Argos catalogue and said: “He wants me to buy him these bloody Star Trek videos. Look how expensive they are!”

She might as well have said: “Honest to God, I don’t know how I’m going to stop him from wearing his granny’s knickers to bed every night, and touching himself as he watches Prisoner Cell Block H.”

The girl was now an Athenian herald, sure to take news of my plummeting sexual stock back to school, where it would be met with frenzied murmurs of ‘… Jamie…Jamie…which one’s he again?’ This was the bitterest pill to swallow. The realisation that I probably didn’t have stock to plummet in the first place.

How times have changed.

Not in terms of my sexual stock, you understand, which still remains low, but in terms of the things that impact on a young lad’s sex appeal. These days, admitting you like Star Trek isn’t going to stop you from boldly going to bed with someone; admitting you like Star Wars isn’t going to stand in the way of you getting a good Chewie.

It’s a brave new world for the geeks of yesteryear. Superhero movies routinely gross billions at the box office. Sagas like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones are almost universally adored, or at least universally respected. Sci-fi shows and comic book adaptations are everywhere. Fewer and fewer people are confusing Star Wars with Star Trek while wearing dismissive sneers on their faces.

Arguably, geeks have inherited the earth because technology has finally caught up with the dreams, visions and what-if-eries at the pulsing core of geekdom. Fans have finally been able to say to a scornful population (whose perspectives on sci-fi, superheroes and fantasy worlds had perhaps been shaped by stereotypes like Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons): ‘See? This is what’s been happening inside our heads all these years. This is what it looks like. It’s pretty cool, right?’

So geek is now cool.

Except… not all of it.

Oh god, not all of it.

Even factoring in mainstream acceptance, there are still elements of the best sci-fi and fantasy shows, and moments within them, that make me want to take up sports, bin my books, burn my DVD collection and never contemplate the fantastical or the high-concept ever again; there are things out there that must remain hidden from new geeks and the yet-to-be converted; things with the power to turn me back into that embarrassed, shame-ridden boy sitting in my local optician’s, ready to curl up into a ball that’s roughly the same size as the smallest letter on the bottom line of the eye-chart.

Strap yourself in. This ‘aint going to be pretty.

Kling-a-long-a-ding-dong

I watched the first season of Star Trek Discovery last year, and while I enjoyed it, it didn’t instantly convince me of its Star Trekkiness. It seemed to owe more of a debt to the 2004 series of Battlestar Galactica (and perhaps even The Punisher) than to its franchise forebears. Some of the violence is nauseatingly brutal, with frequent scenes of bloody torture and merciless bone-crunching. The characters even swear. OK, it’s not a Star Trek first. Data once uttered the word ‘shit’ to comedic effect in the The Next Generation crew’s first cinematic outing ‘Generations’, but until 2017 that was – to the best of my knowledge – the one and only swear word that Star Trek had ever dropped.

Now, not only do Star Trek crews say shit, they say ‘fuck’, too. The ‘f’ word?? In fucking Star Trek? What mirror-universe trickery is this? I can only posit that the creative team behind the show must once have been teenage Trek fans and found themselves sitting in a version of my opticians’ office, timidly browsing through a catalogue of Star Trek box-sets, terrified that their shameful secret would be exposed, and vowing to themselves: ‘When I’m eventually in charge of this show it’s going to have tits and it’s going to have blood and broken necks and shagging and people saying ‘fuck’ all the time, and everyone’s going to think it’s edgy and hip, by God! And the geeky kids who watch it are going to be drowning in sexual effluent – AND NOT THEIR OWN THIS TIME, DAMMIT!’

Despite being self-conscious as a lad, I always thought Star Trek was cool. Well, OK, not cool, exactly, but worthy, cerebral, exciting. If only the majority of people in my school and neighbourhood would set aside their preconceptions and give it a chance I was certain they’d grow to love it.

But not if they ever, ever, ever, EVER tuned in just as a bunch of Klingons started singing. Then all bets were off. They’d be left thinking to themselves that they’d accidentally started watching a documentary about angry German death-metal fans, or the final of the Eurovision Song Contest. Finally convincing someone to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation and having them randomly select an episode with lots of Klingon sing-alongs is the equivalent of talking about how cool, friendly and funny your best friend is to a group of new acquaintances at a formal occasion, only for your friend to turn up dressed as half-Ike Turner, half-Tina Turner, and caked in human shit from head-to-toe.

Mind you, any episode from the first season of TNG would have a similar effect on the uninitiated. Almost without exception the episodes were hammy, crummy and execrable, and in one infamous instance really rather quite racist – looking at you, Code of Honour.

Deep Space Nine was – and still is – my favourite incarnation of Star Trek. It quickly became a gritty, dirty, rough-and-tumble, serialised saga filled with flawed and imperfect heroes and relatable villains, an obvious spiritual predecessor to the revived Battlestar Galactica… but let’s not forget that it, too, began its life as, well… shite. The first season episode, Move Along Home, in which some of the principal characters become trapped in a weird alien game that can only be defeated by playing hopskotch and singing daft otherworldly nursery rhymes, is so cringe-worthy that even a young Russel Brand would’ve been killed by all the vicarious shame compressed and distilled into its ferociously fucking awful forty minutes.

Red Face in Space

I loved Red Dwarf as a lad, and was never happier than when out in the playground imitating the cast and trading catchphrases. I used to tape episodes from the TV so I could watch them with my grandfather, a continuation of a sci-fi-watching tradition that had started with repeats of Lost in Space and Land of the Giants. I had a deep, symbiotic relationship with Red Dwarf, as we all have with our favourite things, be they TV shows, football clubs or Gods.

My grandfather’s laughter wasn’t just a vindication of the writers and a salute to the comedic chops of Craig Charles et al; to me it signified acceptance, validation. As we bonded over those half-hour nuggets of space-based hijinks, my being became indivisible from Red Dwarf. If he hadn’t have liked it as much as he did, or actively hated it, I would have taken it as a personal insult, and left my grandparents’ home nursing a psychic wound an inch deep around my soul.

Watching Red Dwarf slowly die from 1997 on-wards was like finding out that all of my favourite childhood entertainers had been prolific child abusers, which isn’t just an extreme analogy, because most of my favourite childhood entertainers were prolific child abusers. I remember watching an episode from season seven with my Dwarf-sceptic sister and becoming increasingly angry at the show for being shit, and at my sister for not laughing anyway. Then came season eight – aka Chuckle Brothers in Space – featuring slapstick that was about as funny as watching your gran being beaten to death by angry werewolves with cricket bats.

After season eight the show was quickly and quietly (and completely understandably) dropped by the BBC, only to be resurrected ten years later on the satellite channel Dave. Red Dwarf’s come-back special was Back to Earth, a made-for-TV movie told in three parts. Creator Doug Naylor took the bold step of removing not only every shred of laughter from the new show, but all of its humour, too, replacing it with a mixture of existential dread and Coronation Street. Fuck, it was dreadful.

Seasons ten and eleven were a mixed-bag, but in their defence there were a few diamonds strewn among the rough, just enough to justify the show’s continued existence. In season twelve, though, Doug Naylor successfully squandered every dollop of goodwill he’d managed to build up by dropping a single episode that was so gut-grindingly, skull-breakingly, world-endingly awful that it made all of the shittest episodes he’d made up until that point seem like comedies co-written by Steve Coogan, Graham Linehan, Billy Connolly, Trey Parker, Matt Stone and the Marx Brothers combined.

It was so bad it made Mrs Browns’ Boys look good; truth be told it made having your eyes punched in by a spike while a crocodile rips off your cock look good. That episode was, of course, Timewave, signalling to even the show’s most ardent fans that it might be time to wave goodbye to the show forever. Red’s dead, baby. Red’s dead.

Oh, come on, was it really that bad, Jamie? Really?! WELL YES IT WAS, ACTUALLY, YOU DOUBTING THOMAS! So exquisitely terrible that if a nuclear missile were to wipe out half the planet as you watched it, the end of mankind wouldn’t be the worst thing to have happened to you during that half-hour; so bad that my grandfather came back from the dead to throat punch me for ever making him watch this shite when he was alive.

If you haven’t seen Timewave, I beg you not to seek it out. I don’t even want to describe it, lest the plot when written down opens a portal to Hell or something. Trust me and just forget it ever existed. It’ll make you hate not only Red Dwarf, but puppies, kittens, freshly-baked scones, rainbows, laughter and even your own children.

I worried about being exposed as a Star Trek Voyager fan, but being caught even talking about this episode could set back a teenager’s sex life by at least 65 ice ages.

An arrow through the ear

I stopped watching Arrow during its fourth season, so who knows, perhaps it broke free from its strange blend of cheese, grit and ridiculous character trajectories to become a slick, gritty Nolan-esque powerhouse…

I always thought it was funny that there wasn’t anyone in Oliver’s orbit that didn’t eventually become a crime-fighting, vigilante superhero, complete with their own brand-name, trademark and costume. The roster was as impressive as it was improbable: the dude who used to be his driver, his ex-girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend’s sister (who is also his ex-girlfriend), his sister, his sister’s boyfriend, his employee (and now girlfriend), his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend. At this point, I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that in season five a new janitor started at Queen Consolidated and within two episodes was fighting off baddies with a titanium broom and calling himself ‘The Sweeper’.

If you’ve watched shows like Daredevil and Punisher with their cavalcade of brutal, hyperkinetic, technically impressive fight scenes, then you probably find it hard to appreciate Arrow’s fight scenes, which in comparison look like they were staged by a local Morris dancing troupe.

By far the most embarrassing element of Arrow, though, was the Canary, aka Laurel, the ADA, not only the least likely and least plausible crime fighter among Oliver’s friends and relatives, not to mention the most irritating character by a country mile, but also the crew-member with the very shittest ‘power’. Her method of dispatching the baddies was to open her mouth and shake her head around like a nursery teacher pretending to be a dragon, while making a noise that sounded like a vacuum cleaner with tonsillitis.

Canary, you have failed this.

Shitty.

O Batman, Where Art Thou?

Gotham the series was a bubbling mish-mash of tones, vibes and characters that didn’t quite manage to simmer into a particularly flavoursome or satisfying pot of soup, lacking pep and sustenance. It didn’t taste awful. Some sips were quite tasty, even sometimes had a bit of a kick, thanks to a sprinkle of salt here, a dash of pepper here, the Penguin with a rocket launcher there… but in a medium awash with such a glut of delicious televisual fare it regularly failed to justify its existence.

However, despite occasional bouts of cheese-scented preposterousness, it was rarely cringe-worthy. It’s actually pretty hard to come over as embarrassing or ridiculous when you’re already a show about people in costumes trying to kill each other in the campest ways imaginable.

There were exceptions. Like when Ben Mackenzie was called upon to play anything other than stoic. In a set of sequences near the end of the second season Ben Mackenzie was called upon to play the face-morphing baddy Clayface masquerading as Jim Gordon. Mackenzie’s acting technique was to channel a sex-addled Popeye after an entire brick of cocaine, which admittedly sounds awesome when I describe it like that, but really wasn’t. It made me cringe to the point where I wanted to take a whole brick up my own nose, but an actual brick. The kind you build houses with.

Doctor Oooooooh, that’s nasty

The first 26 seasons of Doctor Who gave us some truly great science-fiction, a vast multitude of episodes and ideas that were thoughtful, imaginative, resonant, frightening, exciting, funny and unapologetically weird. It also gave us potato-headed monsters, great snuffling genitalia beasts and men wrapped in tinfoil chasing screaming women around cardboard spaceships.

Even allowing for the technology that was available at the time, and the limited budget, some Who serials looked like they were knocked up by a gang of hobos between bouts of under-bridge boozing. There are episodes in the Classic Who canon that are about as welcome as an actual cannon would be if you found it pointing up at your arse cheeks from the bottom of the toilet bowl seconds before it fired.

I watch an episode from the early years with my kids every morning at breakfast time. They love it, no matter what they see. They’re too young, and their imaginations too immersive, to let a silly little thing like a man in a rubber suit with big googly eyes selotaped on to it ruin their enjoyment.

My partner, though, occasionally wanders in when something really, really, really shit is happening, and she always judges me for it. Like Bonnie Langford screaming as a giant cock waddles towards her; Jon Pertwee’s face bulging out hilariously as a sentient telephone cord tries to strangle him; London being invaded by the shittest dinosaurs ever imagined; Tom Baker being subsumed by a pulsating testicle; a man being eaten by an evil plastic seat; a human eye peering through the neck of the Jagaroth; Sylvester McCoy; Jon Pertwee again, singing a gibberish Welsh lullaby to a man in an unconvincing Singing Telegram costume whilst waving a dentists’ mirror in his face.

‘How can you watch this shit?’ she’ll ask me.

‘How can… YOU… watch this shit?!’ I sputter, flouncing out of the room, all red-faced and agog.

It’s still tough being a geek sometimes.

And don’t you forget it.

Please feel free to recommend your own most cringe-worthy moments from otherwise serviceable fantasy and sci-fi shows in the comments below, or over on the Facebook page.

Jamie on the Box – Tuca & Bertie

Posted on May 16, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

TV Review: Tuca & Bertie

Two barmy birds land on Netflix and make a virtue out of perseverance

Tuca & Bertie: from the people who brought you Bojack Horseman.

That’s how easy it was for the show to snag me. Cards on the table. If a new show was to come along carrying the tagline: ‘From the people who brought you Bojack Horseman comes back-to-back clips of old ladies receiving painful enemas on rusted gurneys round the back of the supermarket’, I’d be on my couch with a bucket of popcorn ready before you could say, ‘I think we’ve reached something of a cultural nadir.’

Tuca & Bertie is helmed by Bojack Horseman alumni Lisa Hanawalt, who helped develop that show’s trademark look. While T&B shares an aesthetic flair and a penchant for anthropomorphised creatures with its cartoon cousin, the two series couldn’t be more seismically different.

Bojack – eclipse black

Bojack Horseman is a deliciously dark study of existential angst, addiction and depression filtered through the id and ego of a washed-up, middle-aged actor on the cusp of his last chance in life, love and Hollywoo (sic). Tuca & Bertie, on the other hand, is a bouncy, breezy, larger-than-life look at the zany exploits of two female friends as they try to ‘level-up’ into their thirties without losing themselves, or each other.

The two friends are mirror opposites: Tuca (Tiffany Haddish) is an extroverted, fleet-footed toucan who’s taking her first tentative steps towards sobriety and self-reliance; Bertie (Ali Wong) is an introverted career chick (a songbird if you want to get literal about it) who’s just started cohabiting with her drippy but dutiful boyfriend, Speckles (Ex-Walking Dead favourite Steven Yeun).

If Bojack is storm-cloud black, then Tuca and Bertie – in style and execution, if nothing else – is a magical rainbow swirling inside a nuclear-powered kaleidoscope.

I disliked Tuca & Bertie’s first clutch of episodes, feeling meaner towards it precisely because I expected to love it so much. Maybe ‘disliked’ is too strong a word. It’s perhaps more accurate to say I was confounded, puzzled and nonplussed. I scouted online for reviews, and could find only frothy-mouthed outpourings of acclaim, which made me dislike the show all the more.

Was I the lone voice of dissent? What was I missing here? Was there something wrong with Tuca & Bertie, or with me?

While I loved the show’s arresting, vivid, and inventive visuals, I felt that the characters were broadly drawn to the point of caricature, and largely unlikeable to boot. The narrative was wispy and meandering, more dawdling behind the action than driving it; and the themes seemed fluffy and inconsequential. The absurd elements and sight gags, which should have been the show’s greatest asset, felt over-laboured. There was nothing of substance to orient the madness. It felt like going on a blind date and discovering that your partner is one of those people who describes themselves as being ‘certifiably mental’ or ‘totally up for the banter’.

But by far Tuca &Bertie’s biggest sin was that after four episodes the show had barely teased a titter out of me. Sure, I sniggered once or twice, especially at the unexpected introduction of some rather unorthodox sex bugs, but for the most part I sat grinning at the TV like an agitated gibbon, trying to trick my brain into making my mouth laugh. Was I over-thinking it? Was I not giving it a chance? Was I condemning it for not being Bojack? Was there an element of subconscious chauvinism afoot? Was it possible that Tuca & Bertie’s funny message was being broadcast at too high a frequency for my despicably male ears to hear?

As quickly as that last thought tapped a toe into my brain, my mind snagged it with the teeth of a hungry coyote and shook it until it was dead. Firstly, one team of women isn’t going to be representative of all women, everywhere, in any case. Secondly, I’m a veteran of The Golden Girls, one of the funniest sitcoms ever made; I’m Team Roseanne (the character, not the increasingly loopy lady who brought her to life); I’d happily watch and re-watch a movie called ‘Carrie Coon Cooks Prunes in Pantaloons’ over the output of most male stars; I have a fierce love for Captain Janeway; I think Happy Valley – created by, written and starring women – is one of the most compelling, uncompromising, and rich crime series ever produced; and I regularly read and rave about the works of great female novelists (or just novelists, as I prefer to call them).

I’m conscious that all this is starting to smack a little of the old ‘all of my best friends are black’ defence, and my list is quite possibly patronising and self-consciously right-on to the point of pukiness, but I’m simply trying to call attention to the fact that while men and women are physiologically and psychologically different, and subject to a host of different stresses, triggers and dangers throughout their lives, we aren’t so different that our inner worlds are closed off to each other.

Men and women aren’t really from Mars and Venus. Just because something’s about women, or by women, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s ‘for’ women (or at least not only for women), and vice versa.

To rule out the patriarchal angle once and for all, I asked my partner to watch episode five with me: the episode where Tuca and Speckles (Bertie’s wishy-washy architect boyfriend) go on a road-trip to visit Tuca’s boozy, caustic and unspeakably rich aunty. I wanted to get some female perspective, see if there were things I might have been missing because I wasn’t aware I was supposed to be looking for them.

We sat stony-faced and silent for most of the episode’s twenty-six minute run-time, swapping and sharing the odd strained smile or apologetic grimace. Afterwards my partner said that although she wasn’t a big fan of Bojack Horseman, if she ever happened to catch a stray episode with me she at least ‘got’ the show. She could see what other people saw in it, and why they liked it. Tuca & Bertie, though, was a different kettle of ornithoids entirely. ‘What is it supposed to be doing or saying?’ she asked. ‘The whole time, I just wanted it to be over.’

I went back to trawling the net. There had to be others out there who shared my feelings. Not rabid incels or trolls who rebelled at the mere suggestion of a possible male hegemony, but normal – well, comparatively normal – people like me. I found a review of the show by critic Alan Sepinwall, the Head Ed for TV over at Rolling Stone magazine. He, too, had struggled with the first few episodes, but felt that the show deepened as it progressed, becoming steadily richer, funnier and more coherent, striking a rich nexus of quality about four or five episodes in. By this stage I was already five episodes in, and whatever Alan Sepinwall had found in Tuca & Bertie still eluded me, but I was now more hopeful than ever of finding it – whatever ‘it’ was.

‘OH YEAH!’, I hear the more ideologically trenchant among you roar. ‘Long live the brotherhood, is that it, Jamie, you SCUM BAG? You were prepared to keep hating it right up until the point another MAN came along and said that it was good, so it MUST be good, right, because a fucking MAN said so?!! PIG! YOU PIG! YOU PENIS-POSSESSING, MANSPLAINING, MUCK-SPREADING, PATRIARCHAL PIG!’

Please lower your pitchforks, folks. I know how this looks, but I can assure you that my reverence for Alan Sepinwall has nothing at all to do with his penis, an item which I can only assume he possesses. I’ve followed his career ever since his humble beginnings recapping (among other shows) The Sopranos for the Newark Star Ledger, the very same newspaper that Tony Soprano liked to read in the show. I followed him from HitFix to Uproxx to Rolling Stone, picking up most of his books along the way (I even reviewed his latest, The Sopranos Sessions, for Den of Geek, which you can read HERE). I utterly respect Alan Sepinwall, and usually agree wholeheartedly with his reviews and recommendations.

As I finished episode six, though, I started to suspect that our tastes might have reached their first point of opposition and impasse. Tuca & Bertie still hadn’t clicked for me, and it had a scant four episodes to leave its mark. I’d never give up on a show mid-way through a season, but season finales are handy check-points at which to decide whether to push on or switch off. I figured I’d be switching off. Surely it was too late in the game for a last minute save from the plucky, flocky ladies, and their world of sentient trees and building with great big pairs of tits bouncing from them?

Turns out it wasn’t.

My revelation came later than Alan Sepinwall’s, hitting me somewhere around episode seven or eight. It was around then I started to feel that the show was going somewhere, and saying something.

Tuca started to seem less like an obnoxious, sassy, single-friend composite and more like a rounded, damaged person whose denial-scented psychopathology sprayed out of her whenever she was confronted with pain or truth – the sort of person who, say, goes to a mindfulness retreat and accidentally turns it into a murderous cult. True story.

Bertie began to feel less like a 2D, Diet Monica-from-Friends and more like a living, breathing, relatable mix of conflicting wants, duties and desires. As the season drew to a close, everything started falling into place. The stakes became real, and finally there was something solid to counterbalance the crazy and the zany, which only served to make the crazier and zanier elements seem crazier and zanier, and funnier – much, much funnier – too.

I watched Tuca and Bertie mesh and unmesh, attract and repel, laugh and cry, rant and rage, love and hate, playing out the complex and familiar dance of female friendship in a winsome, winning and truthful way. There were fears. Secrets. Some key #metoo moments were handled sensitively, powerfully and, most importantly, with humour. Was this a different show I was watching?

The laughs were coming thick and fast, too. Not just titters or gently expelled puffs of nasal air, but real, booming, take-you-by-surprise, do-I-really-laugh-like-that laughs. A scene in the hospital between Tuca and a rather frantic medical appliance had me losing my shit quite considerably.

I fell in love with the way the show adds fresh dimensions of humour and tension to the humdrum and the ordinary through its hyper-inventive visual style: text-messages walking to their recipients; characters tussling with themselves inside their own brains, or suddenly becoming live-action puppets; and frenzied NOOOOOOOs growing animate and hurtling their way across town, with characters sometimes hitching a ride on them.

Tuca & Bertie will be back for a second season next year. I didn’t expect to say this way back at the mid-point, but, do you know what? I’m really looking forward to it.

The birds have nested. Now it’s time to watch them hatch.

Dead Celebrity Round-Up: Alive Edition

Posted on May 13, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

It’s not very tasteful to mock the dead, so I’ve decided to mock these guys for being dead while they’re still alive. I tried to imagine how the tabloids would cover their deaths on the front pages, if the tabloids were owned by me and I didn’t care about things like being sued or being universally despised.

Apologies to anyone outside the UK reading this, because you probably won’t have a bloody clue who most of these people are.

Without any further ado, take THAT, you alive bastards!

: Michael Flatline

: Elton Gone

: Stiff Richard

: He’s Going Deeper Underground

: Bean and Gone

: Old MacDonald Bought the Farm

: Only Fools and Hearses

: No More Barrymore (or Only Pools and Hearses)

: Simply Dead

: Cry Hard

: It’s Very Unlikely I’ll Be Back

: Carry On Not Being Alive

: Rottie Williams

: Meryl Sleeps

: Webber’s Decomposing

: Simply Deceased

: Retht in Pieth

: Damn! Jean Clogs Van Popped!

: This is an Ex-Carrot

: This is an ex-Python

: (shrugs)

: Danny De Ceaseo

: Deady Murphy (or Beverly Hills Corpse)

: Michael Carkinson

: Jason Done-ovan

: Andi RI-Peters

: Les Deadness

: David Ex

: Skeletoni Braxton

: Danny Dead

On being a Dad who sucks at sports

Posted on May 8, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

My son can throw a ball. Big whoop, right? Well, it’s a big whoop for me, you poo-pooing, party-pooping, poopy-pants, because it’s a god damned miracle that I’ve managed to sire a child who can run more than 100 yards without falling over and smashing his teeth out, much less demonstrate a modicum of sporting prowess.

I was – and very much still am – a handless, footless bastard: as graceful as a new-born calf trying to roller-skate on unset jelly; as co-ordinated as a one-armed man with a dagger jammed in each eye. My playground contemporaries oft remarked that I ‘threw like a girl’. If only I’d been born a couple of decades later, I could’ve had the little bastards prosecuted for gender-based hate-crimes. As it stands, I had to follow the old sticks-and-stones adage, and throw sticks and stones at them, which of course missed them, because I threw like a girl.

Most Scottish dads are expected to inculcate their sons into the ancient, dark arts of football, readying them for an adult life of meat-pies of dubious origin, strong lager, weak bladders and soul-shredding disappointment. Well, I don’t have any football-related skills or passion for the so-called beautiful game to pass on to my two boys. The reason? There are many factors, but I suppose the key ones are that a) I’m shite at football, and b) I think football is shite.

These things usually reach you by osmosis. My father was a football fanatic, but he was largely absent from my childhood, so he couldn’t pass on or light the torch. My uncle was a football fanatic, too, but he lived quite far away, and worked abroad most of the time. My grandfathers were both footballing men, but their footballing days were far behind them by the time I came along, and they certainly didn’t go to any matches. What avenues did that leave? Outwith the ball-kicking bosom of their families, Scottish kids tend to learn the bulk of their fleet-footed craft in the streets and parks of their neighbourhoods, playing kerbie, keepie-uppy, and world cuppy with their friends – jumpers for goal-posts and all that jazz – but I grew up in a semi-rural area, far outside the comfortable door-knocking range of my peers.

I was always picked last when football teams were being assembled in the playground. I was usually put in goal, the rationale being: ‘He’s tall. That’ll make it easier for him to stop things going past him.’ Well, the joke was on them, because everything got past me. Well, everything except their cruel – though admittedly accurate – jibes about how shite I was at football.

But was I bad at football because I never played it, or did I never play football because I was so bad at it? Nobody cared, least of all me. After a while I stopped lining up for draft, and went off to play ‘Japs and Commandos’ instead. Js & Cs is one of the many playground games we Scottish school-boys loved to play in the days before we realised just how massively racist we all were. PC notwithstanding, I was pretty good at the old Js & Cs: miming machine-guns, diving about, doing commando rolls. Perhaps I shouldn’t be too proud of that, though, given that the only real skill involved in the ‘game’ is the ability to mimic the noise of an old, fat Englishman with a stammer having an asthma attack as he falls down a hill.

The power of the ‘He’s tall’ principle extended beyond football into other ball-based sports. It was also responsible for encouraging the belief that I might be good at basketball. Unfortunately, height alone is no indicator of prowess, otherwise an electricity pylon and the Eiffel Tower would be among the best basketball players of our time. That being said, I’m painfully aware that both of those inanimate structures are almost definitely better at basketball than me.

The ineptitude doesn’t stop there. In my early twenties I went with a group of friends to the local pitch and putt. The pros went first, whacking their balls with poise and precision (settle down!), sending them arcing and speeding into the grey sky like reverse hailstones. I decided to go last. You know what they say about saving the best, right? (coughs)

I was a little apprehensive, but only a very little, because – seriously – how wrong could it go? Swinging a bit of metal behind your head and thwacking a ball? Easy. My confidence reigned supreme, even when I adopted a teeing off stance that was so low to the ground it looked like I was about to take a shit. I concentrated hard, and started to swing. Just as the club reached its apex above my shoulder, a chorus of laughs erupted behind me. I froze mid-swing, like a statue of a really bad golfer. ‘Fuck it,’ I said, dropping the club to the ground. ‘I’ll just watch.’

Christ I’m awful. I even suck at darts. Not much of a tiddlywink player, either.

Sport was never my thing, but that’s okay, because growing up I had plenty of other things in my life to occupy my time. I would explore the countryside: roaming through forests, chasing badgers with sticks, jumping over burns and streams pretending I was some famous Peruvian explorer. I would stroll into the middle of farmers’ fields and sit down in the grass, waiting to be encircled by a herd of cows, who’d come up and sniff and lick my shoes as I sang to them, usually a song by the Righteous Brothers (good job I never chose Phil Collins else they might have stampeded me to death). I grew into an almost evangelical atheist, but as a young nipper I’d stick a sign on my door that said ‘Do not disturb – playing for God’, and I’d spend long hours entertaining the big man with snippets of off-the-cuff theatre. I wasn’t religious. Just lonely. I’d write comics and stories; I’d record little sketches on my cassette player. I guess what I’m trying to say is: I was an absolute fucking weirdo.

I don’t want my sons to be weirdos like me. Well, not entirely. Perhaps just weird enough to be compelling; just weird enough to be able to peer through a dark mirror of imagination into a world of beautiful and terrible possibilities. Weird, but not cows-licking-your-shoes weird. I want them to be ‘regular’ to the degree that they participate in physical pursuits that will help them stay happy and healthy throughout their lives.They’re Scottish. They need all the help they can get.

I’d rather they side-swiped football, though. Sectarianism and tribalism are potent forces in Central and western Scotland; states of mind and ways of life that football often serves to magnify. That’s why I bought my eldest son, Jack, a baseball when he turned two. And it’s why both brothers will be encouraged to take up sports like badminton, skiing, swimming and Taekwondo. In the time honoured tradition of contrary children, this probably means they’ll become world-class footballers.

Jack’s four now, and after a few years of playing catch with his baseball he’s got pretty sharp hand-eye co-ordination. He hasn’t quite mastered the catching part yet, but when it comes to pitching he’s consistent, powerful and accurate. Pitch perfect, if you like. From near, from far, he sends that ball spinning straight to your hands like a spherical homing missile, time, after time, after time.

I guess you could say he throws like a girl. Because that’s a compliment now.

I hope they continue to be more girl-like as they get older, mainly because their mother likes to run and work-out, and I like to sit down and write about how awful I am at not getting any exercise.

I’m probably going to die a fat, awkward bastard, but I’m glad my kids have got a sporting chance.

Still… it could be worse…

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 4, Eps 4 – 6

Posted on May 2, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

Part 16: Tryons, and fighters, and bears, oh my!

Wherein old friendships are rekindled and new enemies are made

Race, culture and tribal identity have been major talking – as well as flash – points thus far in season four. Hardly surprising, given that Outlander began its first season with indigenous peoples being subjugated by an aggressive neighbouring nation, and now finds itself relocated to a country where the indigenous peoples are in the process of being displaced and decimated by white European settlers (not to mention the infrastructure of this brave new world being erected upon the backs of countless thousands of African slaves).

Literature from the early days of white colonisation, and of course books and movies from our own recent past, could avoid tackling the more uncomfortable and unpalatable aspects of America’s birth and ascendance, but Outlander and its contemporaries cannot, and should not (and Outlander certainly doesn’t). We can no longer ignore history’s competing perspectives, and the winners, losers, villains and victims left in its wake.

In the opening moments of episode four, then, we revisit the racial tensions of Outlander’s first three seasons. It seems churlish to describe an incidence of racial tension as ‘classic’, but I suppose it is within the context of the series so far. Real venom simmers between Jamie and governor Tryon; a partial re-kindling of the conflict that reached its apex with the battle of Culloden.

Ostensibly, Jamie and the governor are discussing a land deal, one that will see Jamie becoming a laird-of-sorts once more, and the closest thing this new world has to a nobleman. The conversation between them is cordial on the surface, but unfolds in a very mafia-like way, everything they say to each other carefully guarded behind a fortress of plausible deniability (lest ye olde wire-taps be listening). They bury their threats and insults behind smiles, which flex across their faces like muscles. The governor keeps making disapproving remarks about the Highlanders, even going so far as to call them savages. Jamie won’t take the bait, but he won’t back down either.

Jamie’s new status as a landowner, for all its excitement and opportunity, is at times an uncomfortable burden for him to bear. He’s used to being the rebel, the fighter, the righteous man. Now he’s one of ‘them’. Not just a nobleman but, in the eyes of the Cherokee, an invader; a stealer of ancestral land to which he has no legitimate claim.

The Cherokee don’t waste time in showing up for a couple of grizzly stand-offs on the Frasers’ new turf. They behave menacingly, shout indecipherable threats, and hurl chibs and knives around. If nothing else, I’m sure it cures Jamie’s homesickness somewhat. Throw in some whiskey and bagpipes, and the Laird of Lallybroch could’ve made a proper night of it.

I don’t know if it’s culturally insensitive to say this – which, if I have to ask, probably means that it is – but the Cherokee look more like Chinese drag queens than bona fide Native Americans. I guess that’s what happens to your world-view and perspective on other peoples when you get all your lessons on aboriginal North American cultures from the Hollywood westerns you used to watch with your grandpa as a child.

I’d like to balance out any offence I may have caused to readers with Cherokee ancestry by pointing out that my own ancestral people did, and still do: a) wear itchy skirts, b) eat deep-fried chocolate for breakfast, washed down with a cup of hot lard, c) drink so much alcohol that our livers have the consistency of vinegarised paper, d) exalt a musical instrument that when played properly sounds like a dying cat trapped inside of a Whoopee cushion, and e) have to take language courses in order to understand even other Scottish people the next town over.

Oh, and f) we all have vast ginger beards. Even the women.

There. An eye for an eye… makes the whole world laugh. Or else it should.

So how did Jamie manage to avoid hostilities with the Cherokee? Well, in the usual, boring, predictable way, of course: by hunting down and killing a mentally-ill old warrior who, in response to being banished from the Cherokee settlement, had taken to masquerading as a bear, stalking the forests and killing anything that crossed his path. Oh come on, Outlander. I think we’re all getting a bit tired of that old chestnut.

How satisfying it is to see an incidence of sexual assault being suitably and swiftly punished for a change. How laudably sage and just of the 18^th century Cherokee to have banished Bear-man-to-be for the crime of raping his wife, when sexual assault in our own time seldom attracts the punishment it deserves. That being said, though, they really should invent social workers and probation officers, in case their next sex-criminal turns into a leopard or something.

Claire and Jamie quickly forge a friendship and an alliance with the Cherokee, but their community outreach program isn’t limited to the natives. Claire also befriends the Muellers, a nearby family of German emigrants, and finds herself assisting in the delivery of the family’s first grandchild. So far, so beatific. Unfortunately, the first meeting between the Muellers and the Cherokee doesn’t exactly hint at a friendly future. When Mueller sees a group of Cherokee drinking some water from the river that runs past his property, he demonstrates an early Teutonic talent for neighbourly love by threatening to shoot them all.

Jamie’s out of town trying to round up prospective tenants, so it’s down to Claire to mediate peace between the opposing groups. Maybe she would’ve managed it, too, were it not for the heady mixture of illness, misfortune, superstition and mistrust swirling around the Mueller home.

When Herr Mueller’s daughter and new grand-child are killed by an outbreak of measles, his racism, grief, and ignorance of all things epidemiological combine to make him a crazed savage. He attacks the Cherokee in the dead of night, believing them to have cursed the river-water. He scalps their healer – a gentle woman, who had become Claire’s mentor and friend – proclaiming her a witch, and the architect of the curse.

Instead of turfing Mueller out into the wilderness dressed as a buffalo, or something equally absurd, the Cherokee decide to burn down the Mueller house with flaming arrows, and kill both husband and wife. As the flames lick at the bones of the house, and the flesh of its inhabitants, a little girl’s doll sits in the foreground, silently watching as the family to which she almost belonged is purged from the earth. I remember thinking to myself at that point, with a mixture of sympathy and sadness: at least that’s one less trip on the Christmas-card run for the Frasers this year.

There’s a moment just before the fire where we’re tricked into thinking that Claire might be the Cherokee’s target. We’re ready to embrace that possibility because of an earlier scene in which Roger learns that Claire and Jamie died in a fire at Fraser’s Ridge at some point during the 1770s.

The discovery of the newspaper article that announces the Frasers’ fiery demise (which Roger and Brianna come across independently of each other) propels Roger and Brianna back to the stones: Brianna first; Roger hot on her heels. It’s going to be interesting once Brianna finds out that Roger tried to keep her parents’ immolation a secret from her. It’s not really something you could credibly claim to have slipped your mind, is it?

“There was something I had to tell you… em… nope, it’s gone.”

“Was it about dinner tonight?”

“Nope.”

“Em, did you make plans to go out somewhere, with your friends or something?”

“No. No, I don’t think so.”

[silence]

“That’s really going to bug me.”

“Don’t worry about it. It can’t have been that important.”

“That’s it! [smiles and snaps fingers] That’s it, I’ve got it… Your mother burned to death!… I knew it would come back to me.”

[stony silence]

“What do you fancy for dessert?”

Roger and Brianna’s reunion is one for the future (or the past, I suppose), but there are quite enough reunions in this trio of episodes to be getting on with.

Jamie is in the nearby town trying to drum up support for his big land giveaway among a clutch of ex-pat Scottish farmers and emigres. It seems like a generous deal indeed, but the fish ‘aint biting. Maybe Jamie needs his own advert on public access TV, and one of those big wibbly things that dances outside used-car lots.

“I’m Crazy Jamie Fraser, and I’m so crazy I’m about to give away 100 acres of land, THAT’S RIGHT, you heard me, 100 acres of land, to YOU, with no rent to pay! That’s right, NO rent to pay! Didn’t I tell you I was crazy? They don’t call me Only Mildly Mentally-Compromised Jamie Fraser, by God! You’ll pay NO rent, that’s zero pounds, until God himself serves up the first good harvest. Boy, if I was any crazier, I’d be disembowelling people in the forest whilst dressed as a fucking bear.”

No-one will take any land, though, because they see governor Tryon, to whom they will ultimately be in thrall, as yet another in a long line of English oppressors, taxing the farmers and their land to oblivion while growing fat and decadent on the ill-apportioned proceeds. Another rebellion is brewing, and this time Jamie won’t find himself on the side of people like Bryan from Banfshire, or Murtagh… Wait a minute, IT’S MURTAGH!!!

HOORAY!

Old grumpy-pants is alive and well, and living in Carolina as a blacksmith. He looks a lot older, like a Medicine Man-era Sean Connery, but he hasn’t lost any of his grit and fire. Murtagh’s the leader of the regulators, now: a tax-rebel; a righteous Robin Hood, still socking it to the man. Jamie won’t join Murtagh’s uprising against the unscrupulous tax collectors – he’s establishment now, after all. But neither will he stand in the way of the regulators’ efforts, because he’s still James bloody Fraser, ye ken.

I found Jamie and Murtagh’s reunion to be a lot more affecting than Jamie and Claire’s the previous season. Even Murtagh and Claire’s reunion was at least on a par. It’s all very lovely, which makes me worried, because if something’s lovely on Outlander that usually means that death, or rape – or someone being raped to death – is just around the corner.

Anyway, we’ll see. Back to happy. Before long, the whole gang’s kicking back in Fraser’s Ridge: Claire, Jamie, young Ian, Murtagh, John Grey, and Willie – Jamie’s little bastard (in more ways than one). John Grey has been raising Willie as his own, as he promised Jamie he would, the noble son-of-a-bitch.

I don’t understand the weight of suspicion and hostility that Claire directs at John Grey. Or why the show paints John, first and foremost, as some sort of love-sick stalker, ready to risk his adopted son’s happiness and sense of self for another shot at capturing Jamie’s affections. It devalues the character, and generates conflict where none exists. Sure, John obviously loves and admires Jamie, but can’t the writers simply let that be a facet of John Grey’s feelings and character, rather than the thing that dictates and defines them both? His motivations are surely a lot more complex than: ‘I wonder if this’ll be the thing to get my cock in Jamie’s gob.’

There’s hostility, too, between Murtagh and John as they tussle over the subject of the regulators, although John has no idea that the man he’s dining and debating with is the leader of the agitators. Jamie, as a new member of the landing gentry, finds his loyalties divided along lines of class, status and friendship. Murtagh wants him to use his influence with John Grey to get useful information from about Governor Tryon, but Jamie doesn’t want to betray his friend, especially in light of John’s role as father to his young son. Between John and Claire, and Jamie and Claire, and John, Jamie and Murtagh, it’s all a big chess game, and HEY, THEY’RE PLAYING ACTUAL CHESS, WHAT A GREAT METAPHOR!

Jamie gets a chance to bond with his son when John’s struck down with the measles. He takes Willie out into the forest to participate in stereotypically male pursuits like suffocating fish and shooting defenceless animals through the heart. Jamie systematically strips away William’s rank and privilege by forcing him to get his hands dirty by doing things like gutting and dressing the deer. It’s a very paternal urge, to reach out, to teach, to instill a little of himself in the boy’s character.

Jamie needn’t have concerned himself too much. There’s already plenty of him in there. When William sneaks off by himself to snag a fish he incurs the wrath of the Cherokee, who demand his blood as penance for the theft (that river’s a dangerous bloody thing – stay away from it in future!) William is only saved by a combination of Jamie blurting out the truth of the boy’s paternity, and his own honour and fortitude. Instead of walking away from the incident with his throat slit from ear to ear, he leaves with nothing more than a cut hand, a symbolic warning.

This traumatic event jogs William’s memories of his childhood, and Helwater. When William asks why Jamie didn’t look back at him when he was shouting and running after him on the day he left Helwater, Jamie says it was because he didn’t want to give false hope that they’d ever see each other again. It’s nice, then, that the episode ends with William leaving with John Grey, and turning to look straight into his father’s eyes.

That represents hope.

Which means you’re dead, William. Dead, dead, dead.

Sorry, mate. You’re in Outlander, not Downton Abbey.

A few final, disjointed thoughts

I was a little disappointed in Myers, the forest’s resident wilderness expert, during the bear saga. His knowledge of the natives, local wildlife and survival techniques didn’t count for much when he was dripping with blood and trying to squeeze his innards back into his ample belly. You failed, Fake News Bear Grylls, so move aside and make way for the real survivalist hero, Jamie Fraser: the mighty Bear-Batterer of Lallybroch.
Ah, you Americans and your famous ‘delicacies’. ‘Jerked meat’ means something a lot different in modern-day Scotland. As does ‘meat shed’. I think it’s a gay bar on Byres Road.
They made rifles bigger in the olden days, didn’t they? Mighty me, they were like bloody javelins.
I laughed when the subtitles popped up on screen when Murtagh was talking. He said, ‘Haud yer wheesht!’, and the subtitles said, (speaking in Gaelic). That’s not Gaelic, you silly sausage of a subtitler. That’s just slang. Póg mo thóin… now THAT’S Gaelic.
When Graham McNeil’s wife answered the door to Jamie in town, she gave him a look that suggested she was hankering after his little Greyfriar’s Boaby. I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of her.
Young William, with his long hair and half-confused pout, looks like Boaby, the man who works behind the bar of The Clansman in the Scottish comedy series ‘Still Game’. As a Scotsman, it gives me immeasurable pleasure to say that Willy looks like Boaby.

Jamie and Claire’s bawdy banter in the bath at the close of episode six was excruciating. Is it my imagination, or is there no longer any chemistry or passion between the two leads? It all seems so rote, so forced. Maybe that’s just a realistic portrayal of a marriage, I don’t know. What I do know is that young William looking back should’ve been the image to end that episode.
I’m looking forward to Brianna and Roger’s escapades in the past, which I’m sure must be coming in the next episode.

If you’ve got kids, grandkids or little people in your lives, read them this funny little story I wrote, Roy, Boy of Earth, and consider making a small donation to charity.

Follow me on Twitter @nottheclimber

READ THE REST – Click below

Why I want to binge-watch Outlander

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 1 – 4

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 5 – 8

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 9 – 12

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 13 – 16

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 1 – 4

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 5 – 7

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 8 – 10

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 11 – 12

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Ep 13

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 1 – 3

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 4 – 5

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 6 – 7

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 8 – 10

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 11 – 13

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 4, Eps 1 – 3

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 4, Eps 7 – 10

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

Jamie on the Box – Game of Thrones

Posted on April 29, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

My pictorial review of Game of Thrones, Season 8 Episode 3

‘The Battle of Winterfell’

Jamie on the Box – Barry, Game of Thrones

Posted on April 25, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

TV Review: Game of Thrones, Barry

Westeros gears up for death, while Barry tries to stall it

HBO used to dominate the prestige TV market, and it very much knew it, even going so far as to rub the networks faces in it with their slogan, ‘It’s not TV: it’s HBO’.

HBO was entitled to crow. After all, it gave the world Oz, The Sopranos, The Wire, The Larry Sanders Show, and many more ground-breaking smash hits besides.

Unhampered by network focus groups or the vested interests of advertisers, HBO could afford to take greater risks with its output. Once show-runners, writers and producers had been freed from the burden of having to please most of the people most of the time, or of having to play to the lowest (or most conservative) common denominator, creativity became king.

The televisual landscape is different since HBO’s heyday, seismically so. Network television has upped its game, and streaming services like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu are taking the sorts of bold risks that used to be HBO’s exclusive calling card. It’s a testament to HBO’s enduring creative clout that even among this dizzying proliferation of content two of the best shows currently on TV – Game of Thrones and Barry – come from the HBO stable.

As Game of Thrones enters its endgame, it’s gifted us the most hotly anticipated team-up this side of Infinity War. Every hero, villain, vagabond, brother, bastard, king, queen, drinker, thinker, miscreant, meanderer and murderer that ever lifted a banner or a broadsword is assembled in Winterfell for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which basically serves as an hour-long breather (and an opportunity for us to hold our breaths) before a wave of wights and walkers descends from the north to reduce all of Westeros’s problems to one: survival.

An episode of Game of Thrones never feels as long as its run-time. Whether it lasts 48, 58 or 90 minutes, the narrative always twists and clicks around as fast as a man having his neck broken by the Mountain. In the beginning I attributed the greater share of that feat of time-dilation to the show’s vast and sprawling geography – the action flitting from desert to forest to castle to cave over distances of thousands of miles, essentially telling six or more loosely interlocking or wholly separate stories within each episode; keeping the pace brisk to distract us from any mounting sense of boredom – but it quickly became clear that the thing keeping us hooked was purely and simply the sheer, breath-taking quality of every element of the production.

There’s no flitting between locations in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. The whole hour (an hour for us, a day for the characters) unfolds in and around Winterfell, where the characters meet, talk, drink, lament, commiserate, drink, and drink some more. There are no battles or blood-shed, but the episode holds us utterly spellbound as it weaves together and pays off dozens of plot-lines, reunions and partnerships, sometimes calling back to feuds and fuck-ups way back in the first season.

There’s not a word or gesture out of place. Everything counts, everything builds, everything works. As always with the show, the rich dialogue springs from character, not circumstance. Some characters are clipped, some garrulous, some truthful, some false, some terse, but every word that comes out of a character’s mouth sounds and feels like it belongs there.

Emotional responses from the audience – whether they be joy, panic, relief, fear, tears or sadness – are worked for and earned. Shows like Star Trek Discovery and The Walking Dead might roll out some emotionally manipulative montage over-played by some puffed up, expository, wholly contrived speech in a bid to stir our souls, but Game of Thrones can provoke the same response with a word, a grunt, or even just a look.

If we became misty-eyed when Brienne of Tarth earned the respect and recognition of her friends and peers, felt touched yet again by Arya and the Hound’s rather gruff and grudging father-daughter act, laughed when Tormund told tales of suckling milk at a giant’s breast, and shouted ‘no’ at the screen as Arya’s final layer of innocence was stripped away, think how we’re going to feel next week when everyone starts dying. I trust you, Game of Thrones, but I’m not ready. Can’t it be summer again?

When you start to describe Barry to someone who’s never seen it, you become conscious of the molten gimmickery at the show’s core. Isn’t this just a Saturday Night Live sketch with too thin a premise to sustain a whole series? (apposite, as the show’s star and co-creator, Bill Hader, is a SNL alumnus). Barry seems like the kind of crazy idea two friends would cook up one night between bongs and back-to-back episodes of Rick and Morty.

‘So there’s this guy, right, and he’s called Barry, and he’s a cold-blooded killer, right? I mean he does it for a living. And this one time he wanders into an acting class when he’s stalking a target, and he decides he wants to become an actor, give up the killing business. But he has to kill someone in the class, that’s his target, right, but he falls in love with this acting chick who’s friends with the guy he has to kill, and he ends up betraying the Ukrainian mob, and his handler won’t let him quit, and the police are hunting him and every time he tries to walk away from killing and murder he gets pulled in ever harder and… em… [scratches head] are there any more Cheetos?’

Barry, though, is much more than just a quirky premise. It’s a smart, wicked, wickedly funny show that’s got just as much room for fatal and farcical shoot-outs and misunderstandings as it does meditations on mortality, culpability, life, love, death and fate. Grim reality goes toe to toe with macabre fantasy in a heightened world populated by characters both urgently real and grotesquely cartoonish. Instead of conflicting with each other, all of these elements coalesce into something beautiful and funny and horrifying and black. It’s a show that makes you feel. Really feel.

Season two is all about redemption, betrayal and root causes. Can Barry be redeemed after his multitude of murderous sins, the first of which – his first government-sanctioned kill – is coaxed out of him at acting class by his mentor, Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler). Gene uses Barry’s pain as a way to explore and over-come his own; the grief he feels at the disappearance of his girlfriend who, unbeknownst to him, was dispatched by Barry at the close of the first season. Gene, too, is trying to redeem himself. He’s reaching out to his estranged son, who Gene abandoned long ago in pursuit of his own selfish wants, needs and aspirations. Meanwhile, Barry and Gene continue to develop a deep bond, more father-and-son in nature than mentor-and-student. Given that Barry is the root cause of Gene’s pain, he may be looking for love and absolution in a particularly ill-advised place.

Barry (the show) is good at making you feel complicit in the crimes of its eponymous lead. A few episodes ago, Barry decided against carrying out a hit, and we applauded his personal growth. Then, he declined to pull the trigger on Hank (the hilarious Anthony Harrigan), even after the metro-sexual mafioso had just tried and failed to assassinate him. Again, we admired his restraint. Good for you, Barry, we said. But, in episode four, What?!, when Sally’s abusive ex shows up, we found ourselves cheering ‘KILL HIM! KILL HIM! KILL HIM!’

It’s a delicious irony that Barry – an angry, empty, clinically-depressed man with PTSD who’s probably murdered far in excess of 100 people – has more scope for redemption and capacity for empathy than the wannabe actors with whom he shares a class, especially his girlfriend, Sally, who is so self-absorbed that she can walk into a room that’s been riddled with bullet-holes and not even notice.

The whole show is a joy to watch, and Henry Winkler and Bill Hader continue to turn in exceptional performances. Westeros may be preparing to draw the final curtain, but I hope there’s plenty of life – and death – in Barry’s future. If the rug-pulling ending of What?! is anything to go by, I’d say the answer is a resounding ‘yes’.

Roy, Boy of Earth

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

A free, funny story for you and your kids to enjoy together at bed-time.

An alien boy had grown sick of the sight,

Of the food he was served every day, every night.

His tummy would rumble and grumble and churn.

Couldn’t they give a new chef a wee turn?

The things that he ate on his planet of Munch,

For breakfast, and dinner, and supper and lunch,

Were mushy black nuggets that tasted like sand.

All crunchy and gooey and horribly bland.

“I won’t eat these nuggets,” he shouted one day.

Then jumped in a spaceship and went on his way,

Heading to Earth, where the eating was good

And he’d heard boys in jammies made wonderful food.

He zoomed into orbit, then dived to the planet,

Not even stopping to survey and scan it.

Crashed down on a roof like a hungry green Santa,

Dreaming of human washed down with cold Fanta.

He leapt in a window, he followed the snore,

(Which meant there was one boy, he’d hoped there’d be four).

The room smelled like sneezes, old socks and a fart,

Delicious, in other words: food for the heart.

In his hurry he tripped over toys on the ground,

Which hurled him, and bumped him, oh boy, what a sound!

The little boy woke, and rubbed hard at his eyes,

Which grew wide and excited and full of surprise.

“Hello there, strange creature, well, my name is Roy.”

The alien scowled, “You’re my food, stupid boy.

I don’t need to know what your name is, you see,

You’re nothing to me but a new recipe.”

“Are you from space?!” the young chappy exclaimed,

“From which planet? And won’t you please tell me your name?”

“There’s no point in that, boy, because humans can’t say it,

But if you really must know it’s Frass-Jassa-Mump-Frayvit.”

“I’ll just call you, Frass, then, it’s so nice to meet you.”

The alien laughed, “Boy, I’m going to eat you.

I’ll chop you all up like a tasty risotto!

Don’t greet ’em, just eat ’em: that’s my planet’s motto.”

Roy let out a laugh, it soon filled up the room,

And hit Frass’s ears like a big sonic boom.

“You’re laughing,” growled Frass, “I don’t think that you get it,

When I make you a sandwich you’re going to regret it.”

“You’ll make me a sandwich?” said Roy, “Thank you, please,

My favourite is tuna, or pickle with cheese.”

“No, no,” said the alien, ready to crack.

“YOU’LL be my sandwich, my tummy’s next snack!”

Roy smiled a big smile, asked: “Why can’t we be friends?”

The alien prayed for this moment to end.

“I feel like my words are all stuck in a loop,

But perhaps that will end when I make you some soup.”

“You’ll make me some soup? Oh Frass that would be great.

Can you butter some bread up; I often have eight?”

“No, no,” said the alien, “My soup will be YOU,

“And I’ll mop you all up, with a slurp, bite and chew!”

Roy reached out behind him, and scooped up a bear,

And handed it over, while saying “There, there”,

Which made Frass so angry he wanted to squawk.

He’d never expected his supper to talk.

“Now look, boy,” said Frass, “Let’s just make something clear,

I need you to listen, I need you to hear.

I’m not your best pal, not your mucker or mate.

I’m going to cook you; you’ll be on my plate.”

“I’ll start with your cheek, oh my, c’est magnifique!

I’ll heat it up nice, with a fat plate of rice.

I’ll use a big wok… no a pan, no a skillet.

I’m drooling already… I want my cheek fillet!

I look at your nose, and my appetite grows!

I’ll make a big pie with your fingers and toes,

Then garnish it all with a sprinkling of lips,

Maybe throw in some ankles, some thigh-bones and hips!

One leg or two? Well, I’m going to have both.

I’ll carve them like turkeys, I give you my oath.

Your eyes can be sprouts, then you won’t see you’re thinner,

Once I’ve gobbled you up like a hot Christmas dinner.

What to do with your teeth? Why, I’ll stuff them with cheese,

Then I’ll grill them with mushrooms and one of your knees.

I’ll fry you like bacon, I’ll braise you like steak,

And your eyebrows and eyelids I’ll bake in a cake.

I’ve said all I can, I can’t say any more,

All of this talking’s an arduous chore.

I hope that my meaning is clear on this day,

I say what I mean: and I mean fricassee!

Prepare to be eaten…

…Roy, boy of Earth!”

Roy started laughing, he just couldn’t stop,

He thought that his tummy was going to pop.

And Frass stamped his feet, like a paw-thumping bunny,

And jumped up and down, shouting, “Why is that funny?”

Frass tried his best to stay fierce and defiant,

Even when Roy scooped him up like a giant,

And held him right up to the ball of an eye,

Saying: “How will you eat me, you’re two inches high?”

“Oh… Erm…”, said Frass-Jassa-Mump-Frayvit of Munch,

Suddenly losing his hunger for lunch.

He wondered, with fear, what his wee life was worth.

And he said, “…please don’t eat me, kind Roy… boy of Earth.”

Roy didn’t eat him, he fed him instead,

Fetched him some honey and small bits of bread.

Which Frass gobbled up with the greatest of ease,

Before reaching his main course, some hot mushy peas.

Those peas were the best food that Frass ever tasted,

And finding them meant that his trip wasn’t wasted.

“These things are sand nuggets, but tasty and green,

I’ll take a load home in my flying machine.”

So Frass said goodbye, and then loaded his ship,

Thanking his friend for a wonderful trip,

Roy said, “You’re welcome, and hurry back soon,

I’ll find you more peas than can fit on the moon.”

Frass was delighted, he’d found a new food,

On a lovely new planet where people were good.

He smiled to himself, feeling happy and fine,

“I’ve done it,” he shouted. “It’s peas in our time.”

Thank you for reading ‘Roy, Boy of Earth’. Hard to believe the pictures were drawn by me and not a professional artist, right? RIGHT?? If you and your kids enjoyed reading my story, all I ask is that you donate a minimum of £2-4 to CHAS (Children’s Hospices Across Scotland). You can do this by calling 0141 779 6180 or visiting www.chas.org.uk/donate.

This isn’t an official CHAS campaign. CHAS isn’t affiliated with me or this website in any way. I just wanted to help the best way I knew how: by writing something silly. CHAS does such important, admirable work for people and children in heart-breaking situations that I’m sure none of you will grudge digging deep for donations – even a shallow dig for £2-4 is a tremendous help. Every penny counts.

Jamie on the Box – Santa Clarita Diet

Posted on April 18, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

TV Review: Santa Clarita Diet

Netflix’s popular zomcom is back for its third season, and it’s bloody good

Years ago I worked with a lady in her early sixties, who told me that the secret to her long, stable and happy marriage had been variety, pacing and always having something to look forward to. She and her husband courted, they married, they got a house, they had kids, they moved, they grew, they became grandparents – the beats of their lives perfectly timed and arranged to minimise monotony and banish boredom whenever it threatened to rear its head.

Variety, pacing, something to look forward to. See? The secret to a successful marriage.

It’s also the secret to a successful TV show. The best ones keep moving – quickly, powerfully and with purpose – forking off at just the right times and in just the right directions to keep the journey rolling forwards and the scenery fresh. In gourmet terms: giving you just enough to fill your belly, but never enough to make you sick.

Two recent shows that have been exemplars of this pattern are the super-slick, high-concept comedies The Good Place, and Santa Clarita Diet. The former is due a welcome return later this year, while the latter dropped its third season on Netflix at the end of March: even zanier, funnier, and gorier than ever before. This time around there’s also a surprising amount of heart to proceedings, and I don’t just mean the kind that’s ripped from a victim’s chest and snacked upon by the ravenous undead.

The aftermath of Officer Anne’s desert-based pledge to serve as Sheila’s disciple (season two’s cliff-hanger) is dealt with in typical fast and funny fashion, paving the way for this season’s trio of real and credible dangers: the FBI, sniffing around Eric and Abby’s explosive political statement; the Knights of Serbia, an ancient order dedicated to the eradication of the undead, in town to ply their post-fatal trade; and Dobrivoje Poplovic, the Serbian colonel who wants to capture Santa Clarita’s ‘zombies’ and subject them to a fate worse than… well, undeath.

As always, Santa Clarita Diet deals zippily with its many perils and conundrums, putting them front-and-centre just long enough to wring the maximum amount of interesting and hilarious moments from them, but always wrapping them up and burning them off before they threaten to become humdrum.

This season’s enduring philosophical and ethical question centres on the morality of immortality, specifically if it’s ever right to pass zombiehood on to another person, even with their consent. As the season unfolds it’s clearer than ever before that the power of life over – and life after – death is a heavy burden to bear, for biter, bitten and bystanders all.

Good old Gary

Jonathan Slavin is brilliant as former mental-patient Ron – a maniacal, bug-eyed cross between Peter Capaldi and the Dean from Community – who dupes literal talking-head Gary into biting him, before going out proselytising in the name of zombiehood. Despite Joel and Sheila’s very active opposition to Ron’s reckless behaviour, Sheila has a crisis of conscience when she meets Jean, a prickly old lady with a terminal illness. Jean’s prickly because she won’t live long enough to see her first grandchild born. To bite or not to bite. That is the question… the question that Joel and Sheila have very different answers to.

And Joel finds himself under increasing pressure to join the ranks of the undead, so he and Sheila won’t find themselves separated by his inevitable natural death. Will they or won’t they renew their wedding vows to read ‘Til undeath do us part’?

Incidentally, having loved and admired Timothy Oliphant as seasoned tough guys in both Deadwood and Justified, it’s a joy to see how good he is at comedy. He’s pretty much done a reverse Brian Cranston.

One of the many brilliant things about Santa Clarita Diet is how the big questions about and dangers to Joel and Sheila’s marriage are dealt with as if they were the sort of minor irritations more typically encountered on tea-time soap operas. In Santa Clarita, as in real life, we absorb the horrors of our lives and shrink and tame them until they seem as ordinary to us as Uncle Frank farting at the Christmas dinner table. The very funny juxtaposition between the absolute, blood-splattering insanity of the undead life-style and Joel and Sheila’s sanitised, almost cliched existence in middle-class suburbia is made funnier still by the couple’s tendency to react to the misfortunes and people around them with the forced jollility and fixed smiles of a cutesy couple in a 1950s sitcom.

Laughs, gore, fun, shocks, head, heart, soul: Santa Clarita Diet’s third season has got the lot. Not to mention a healthy, hefty dollop of empowerment.

While representation in media is important, the recent glut of male-to-female character transformations on the big and little screens has felt less like a cultural revolution and more like an effort on the part of media financiers to adjust to the shifting demographics of cinema attendance and merchandise spending. In short, they’re going where the money is. And all the while radical feminists, right-on lefties, chauvinist assholes and slobbering incels battle each other beneath market capitalism’s steely glare…

Santa Clarita Diet proves that you can approach the whole subject of gender and representation without being gimmicky; without even making it obvious that’s what you’re doing. It’s quietly subversive; a highly polished, very funny, wildly entertaining show that just happens to have strong female characters at its helm. And not strong in a ‘look, I can bench-press a body-builder, and I know 6 kinds of karate’ sort of a way, but strong in a ‘we’re regular women surviving and keeping our family afloat in these unique and highly dangerous circumstances, and sometimes we fuck it up’ sort of a way.

Sheila and her daughter are the lynch-pins of the show: strong, flawed, fierce, funny, likeable women who drive the action forwards through a combination of their tenaciousness, kindness, curiosity, compassion, intelligence, impulsivity and thirst for activism. In contrast the men – while also very likeable, and occasionally heroic in their own bumbling way – are neurotic, over-cautious, angst-filled, and frantic. Joel and Eric evoke the Jay Pritchett and Phil Dunphy dynamic, except both of them are Phil Dunphy.

Toxic masculinity – whether it’s located in lecherous lotharios, serial abusers or actual Nazis – is always punished, and always fatally. It doesn’t get much more right-on than a recently empowered woman literally devouring the very worst the patriarchy has to offer. I look forward with great relish to see how the squeamish and squirrelly Joel reacts to joining the ranks of the post-living.

Here’s to the variety and exquisite pacing of season four. To Joel becoming Sheila’s newest pupil, to Abby embarking upon a fledgling romance with Eric whilst rising through the ranks of an ancient order of zombie-killers, to Sheila’s new ass-kicking team of an old lady, a camp coward and a reformed zombie killer.

Definitely something to look forward to.

It’s awful when your kids fight; it’s worse when they don’t

Posted on April 13, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

When Christopher, our second child, was still wibbling about in his mother’s yolk, a fish-faced lump of stubby proto-limbs, our first-born, Jack, was already manifesting signs of fraternal protectiveness. He’d rub his mummy’s tummy and tell us how much he was looking forward to his baby brother joining the family. This reassured us, even though he was clearly just parroting back at us the many words of enthusiasm and encouragement we’d chirped into his ears.

In the beginning, things were great. Jack doted on his baby brother, and seemed to harbour zero resentment towards the little guy for jumping on his being-born bandwagon. I know ill feelings and jealous reactions don’t always manifest themselves straight away, but I know they can because of my sister. When I was born, my then eight-year-old sister didn’t shit for a month. The child psychologist said her wildly conflicting feelings of love, anger and jealousy were playing havoc with her insides. She was bottling things up, physically as well as mentally. In a weird sort of a way, the shit she stubbornly refused to release represented her love for me. Love won, in the end. As it always does. I guess you could say I literally loved the shit out of her.

My partner and I realised, as Christopher developed more and more autonomy, that it had probably been easy for Jack to love his brother when he was nothing more than a tiny creature who spent his days either asleep or variously shitting and screaming, because there was no competition between them. Sure, there was competition for time and attention at a basic level, but we always strived to mitigate Jack’s ill-feelings as best we could by giving him plenty of one-on-one time with each of us, not to mention oodles of cuddles with his brother. We wanted Jack to see his brother as a part of him, and a part of the family. An addition, an enhancement, not a replacement.

And it was a success. Maybe Jack wasn’t considered the cutest kid on the block any more, and maybe the greatest share of the ooos, aaaaaaaas and cooooooos now went to Christopher, but Jack was still king. A ruler of absolute power, at least as far as the Kingdom of Little People was concerned. And if the going got rough? If Jack grew tired of this wide-eyed, swaddled little jester? He could simply walk away, go someplace else, be by himself… with brother, no brother, with brother, no brother, as quick and easy as an optician replacing lenses in those weird Meccano glasses they put on your face at the eye test… better with, better without, with brother, no brother. The best of both worlds.

Unfortunately for Jack, Christopher became mobile, and discovered that he didn’t have to live life passively like a leaf on a river. He could be the river. At least until he learned how to be a boat… I’ve really lost the thread of this multi-part metaphor, haven’t I? And why didn’t I say ‘flow’ instead of ‘thread’? This is what happens to your mind when you spend the better part of a year shouting endless variations of ‘LEAVE HIM ALONE!’, ‘LEAVE EACH OTHER ALONE’ and ‘STOP FIGHTING’ at the future WWE stars your children have become.

Christopher, although absolutely bloody adorable, is fearless for his size. He’s always ready and able with a hoarse rebuke or a swinging slap. Thanks to Jack’s campaign of brutal dominance, Christopher learned to fight back at an incredibly early age. He’s a honed, toned battle-machine in a way that Jack never was, or needed to be. If Christopher is occasionally a little monster, then he’s a monster of Jack’s creation [nothing to do with us, you understand, we’re just the parents].

That’s not to make the mistake of assuming that Jack is now the helpless victim in the face of his brother’s revenge-based brutality. Just the other month we heard Christopher screaming, and ran upstairs to find a chunk of his hair matted with blood. Jack had clonked Chrissy over the head with a bulky Chief Wiggum toy, not realising that the sharp points of the policeman’s hat made him more of a blade than a chib.

Different numbers of siblings, and different combinations of genders and ages, make for wildly different sibling relationships. A young girl rounding off a squad of elder brothers might become a tomboy (I hope it isn’t now considered a hate crime to use that word); a young boy at the end of a big litter of sisters might find himself traumatised for all the rest of his days, god help him.

My sister’s role and status as related to me shifted with age, mood and circumstance. Sometimes she was my protector, sometimes my aggressor. Sometimes she was a second-mother, sometimes she was a mother-fucker. But everything was built on a bedrock of love. For every act of torment there came a larger act of kindness. She may have told me there were dead flies in my sandwich to make me hand it over to her, or occasionally bent my legs over my stomach and attempted to pin them behind my head, causing pain that was suggestive of a particularly gruesome interrogation by the Spanish Inquisition, but she also took the rap for me. Hid things for me. Stood up for me. Absorbed the strikes of lightning for me.

When I threw a pillow and broke a bendy, retractable ceiling light of which my mum was especially proud, Alison took the blame. When I was struck with the crippling fear of death, frightened and sobbing, it was her bed I crawled into for peace and reassurance. So I can forgive her for teaching me how to do the fingers and then sending me off to show mum, who went predictably apoplectic.

Siblings fight, siblings grass, sneer and prank, but they love. At least in my experience. (Love you, sis)

Jack and Christopher’s age gap isn’t sufficient to make a second-tier father out of Jack, but their relationship is definitely changing, evolving, growing – away from violence and towards something else entirely. Something great, but something terrible, too. Our greatest hopes for a loving, peaceful union between the two brothers are in the process of being made reality, but it’s a boon that carries barbs. What I’m trying to say is: they’re joining forces.

While whirlwinds of fists and kicks still occasionally erupt from them with the barest of warnings increasingly they’re a team – though not always one where its members enjoy equal standing. Predictably, Jack is the puppet-master. He’s realised the esteem he’s held in by his brother, and the influence this affords him. The fine-print of their accord is less like ‘Why fight, when we can embrace fraternal harmony?’ and more like ‘Why fight, when this pliant young whippersnapper can be the willing and able instrument for my evil bidding?’ They’re like Batman and Robin… if Batman was a total shit.

Jack now wants his little brother to share bedtime stories with him, to lie like best buds and greet the world of sleep together. We often walk past to find Jack whispering in his brother’s ear, usually thinks like ‘Get the pencil and draw on that wall’ or ‘Go slap mummy’s bum’, but, you know, as far as conspiracies go, it’s incredibly sweet.

Last week we’d asked the boys to go upstairs and tidy their room. We knew the chances of them actually tidying their room were a million to one, but – cards on the table – we just wanted ten minutes’ peace. While I expected the room to be actually slightly messier at the end of those ten short minutes, what I didn’t expect when I went to check on their progress was to find water pooling on the floors and carpets, dripping down the walls, and running down the light-bulb and lampshade of the hall light. Christopher stood in the upstairs hall with a giant pump-action water-pistol, his clothes soaking wet, as Jack retreated from his ear with a big goofy grin on his face.

What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object, and they decide to be best pals? I’m sure we’re going to spend the next fifteen years praying for a return to war.

Jamie on the Box – American Gods

Posted on April 11, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

TV Review: Puny Gods

A half-time appraisal of American Gods’ second season

Last week I said that Ricky Gervais’s new show After Life was greater than the sum of its parts. This week I’m here to tell you that American Gods (Starz, Amazon Prime) is less than the sum of its parts.

Two seasons and five episodes in, I’m yet to make a meaningful connection with its main story or its characters. That’s not to say that it’s a bad show. It’s not. It just doesn’t inspire awe or devotion, which is a grave sin indeed for a show about old Gods battling new for their share of mankind’s awe and devotion.

On the plus side, American Gods looks fantastic. The direction and cinematography are always exquisite; the weird hybrid worlds of man-and-God-hood are mesmerisingly realised and intricately rendered. There are no clunkers among the central or peripheral cast either, whose performances range from perfectly serviceable (Ricky Whittle as central cipher Shadow Moon; Peter Stromare as Czernobog) to terrific (Orlando Jones as Mr Nancy) to tremendous fun (Pablo Schreiber as Mad Sweeney and Emily Browning as Laura Moon/Dead-wife) to, appositely enough, God-like (Ian McShane).

Securing Ian McShane as Mr Wednesday/Odin was a major coup for the show. Like most discerning pop-culture fanatics out there I’d happily watch Ian McShane in pretty much anything: a ten-hour-long art-house movie called ‘Ian McShane Sleeps Peacefully for 12 Hours’; the new 22-part Netflix documentary series, ‘Ian McShane Silently Making Cups of Tea Before Surrendering to the Inevitability of his Morning Shit’. Anything.

McShane is captivating and commanding; his face hangs rich with menace, even when he’s playing relatively benign characters – not that he’s called upon to play many of them these days. His cat-and-mouse/man-and-God game with Shadow has provided most of the best lines and moments in the show so far. My only worry is that Shadow has been denied depth and agency for so long that the de facto star and audience proxy is in danger of being eclipsed by the far more dazzling ensemble around him.

I said American Gods was less than the sum of its parts. But, boy. What parts. The show has a masterful line in cold opens: beautiful, brutal chunks of phantasmagoria that blend fact and fiction, truth and legend, love and horror; powerful polemics on race, greed and corruption; haunting paeans to loss and pain. We’ve had Vikings slaughtering each other on distant and unforgiving shores; Mr Nancy addressing a doomed galley-ship full of slaves; the sad story of Techno Boy’s electro-literate musical prodigy, and, most recently, the tragic tale of a black man being snatched, strung up and burned by a confused and hateful mob, only for his death to carry the flaming torch of hatred far into the future. Each of these artfully-crafted short stories packs more of a visceral, lasting punch than some whole episodes or seasons of other shows.

Like FX’s series about lesser-known X-Men, Legion, American Gods is often a triumph of style over substance. At times the series feels like a patchwork of uber-cool vignettes; mini music-videos and visual slam-poetry that’s been stitched together by a mad Swedish auteur. That, believe it or not, is a compliment. I only hope that the narrative ups its game so the show can coalesce into something truly special.

Later this weekend we go from Gods to monsters, with season 3 of Santa Clarita Diet

Jamie On the Box – After Life, The Walking Dead

Posted on April 4, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

TV Review: After Life and after death

Ricky Gervais’ new show on Netflix, and the season nine finale of The Walking Dead

You can trace a loose autobiographical line through most of Ricky Gervais’ TV characters, from the cauldron of arrogance, delusion and fragility bubbling away inside of David Brent, to the sudden success and equally-sudden disillusionment of Andy Millman, right through to the pain, bitterness, contempt and disdain of Tony, the main protagonist of Gervais’s new Netflix series After Life.

Tony used to be a fun-loving man. He was content to coast through his small-town life as a journalist on a bargain-bin newspaper, because he was lucky enough to be married to his best friend, Lisa, a woman who made his life feel complete and worth living. Since her untimely death, Tony’s lost all sense of purpose, and now the only thing stopping him from killing himself is the existence of his pet dog. He’s miserable and angry, and doesn’t just want the rest of the world to know it; he wants the rest of the world to feel it, too: his co-workers, his boss (who’s also his brother-in-law), his postman, the local sex-worker, the local heroin addict, his own father. All of them.

He doesn’t care whether he lives or dies any more, which makes him unpredictable, unpalatable and pretty much untouchable. He’s free to take up heroin, threaten school-children, tackle criminals and tell people openly and unabashedly exactly how he feels about them. Don’t worry, though. Like all of Gervais’s characters, there’s just enough humanity lingering in Tony to guarantee his eventual redemption – though I wouldn’t characterise it as deserved. His grief takes him to some pretty dark places, most worryingly to a suicide by proxy that lightly skirts the fringes of premeditated murder.

After Life, then, is something of a tonal mishmash. It’s A Wonderful Life meets Groundhog Day by way of Trainspotting. The comedy possesses elements of both the farcical, rage-filled wish-fulfillment of Curb Your Enthusiasm and the grotesque absurdities of The League of Gentlemen, with generous portions of Gervais’s own time-tested, world-weary shtick leveled into the mix.

Some of the situations are so cartoonish and the characters within them so buffoonish and broadly drawn that they seem painfully incongruous when set against the many scenes of real grief, sadness, depression and anger. Paul Kaye’s rubbish therapist and Diane Morgan’s dippy office worker (or Kath Pilkington, as I call her) in particular, while very funny characters, don’t feel ‘real’ enough to exist inside a show so pregnant with death, pathos, suicide and sorrow. Many of the characters seem like their only function is to be totems and stress balls dotted along the trail of Tony’s spiritual journey to redemption, a journey that culminates in a sickly-sweet ending that’s somehow just the wrong side of twee.

But do you know what? It works. It shouldn’t – and it sometimes threatens not to – but it holds together, much greater than the sum of its parts. It made me laugh – boy did it make me laugh – and it made me feel real, unbridled emotion, many, many times. While it’s true that Gervais populates Tony’s world with a legion of convenient idiots, Gervais is at his funniest when he’s tearing the world a new one, and meeting insanity with molten sarcasm – so who cares? His antics at the school gate, or in the cafe ordering a children’s meal, or trading caustic barbs with his workmates had me laughing so hard I could hardly breathe. On a few occasions I almost laughed and cried at the same time, especially when Tony visited his dear, demented dad at the nursing home to tell him he loved him.

Gervais doesn’t always exhibit tremendous range as an actor [I should clarify: as a comic actor, he’s terrific], but he’s surrounded himself with great talent here, exceptional actors who add range and depth to the show, and bring out the best in him. David Bradley does so much with so little as Tony’s dad; Penelope Wilton is exceptional as Anne, the widow with whom Tony strikes up a warm relationship through their regular trips to the cemetery; and Ashley Jensen brings grit and humanity to her all-too-brief role as the hard-working nurse who looks after Tony’s dad.

I don’t know what Gervais has in store for season two – now confirmed – but I’m looking forward to it. There’s definitely life after After Life.

Now we move from the dead, to the undead. The characters of AMC’s zombie juggernaut The Walking Dead spent the season nine finale walking through a winter wonderland, but instead of sleigh bells and snowmen, the emphasis was very much on hypothermia and zombies poking out of the snow to eat them. Most seasons of the show have ended with either a jaw-dropping cliff-hanger or some form of ultra-violent wrap-up, so it was a refreshing change for The Walking Dead to drop pace and close out with a quieter, more thoughtful coda. Since the big shock had already dropped in the penultimate episode (“Don’t tell him, Pike!”) there was time and room for mournfulness and soulfulness.

‘The Storm’, despite pitting our survivors against nature itself across a wide and deadly canvas, contained – amid the howling horror – a lot of strong character moments: Michonne made some tough calls, the freeze between the King and Queen kept deepening, Negan continued his evolution from deadly to cuddly, and a simple snow-ball fight made us feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Aesthetically, ‘The Storm’ is radically different from anything the show’s attempted before; and it’s haunting, beautiful and horrifying in equal measure. Very apt, too. You can almost hear the words of Robert Frost’s snowy, death-tinged poem scoring the group’s slog through the unforgiving wilderness:

‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.’

With the exception of a messy stutter-step to accommodate Rick Grimes’ exit, The Walking Dead has been back on track this season, recapturing the ever-spiking, uneven hit-rate of its hey-day (which goes a little like this: two great episodes, two good episodes, three mediocre episodes and one awful episode, repeat, and not necessarily in that order).

While the show is still stitched through with that same wobbly mix of logic-defying decisions and plot-before-character (sometimes even cool-thing-happening-before-plot-AND-character), it’s managed to claw its way back out of the grave it found itself rotting in throughout its seventh and eighth seasons to become a show to be reckoned with once more. The whisperers have been terrific – if occasionally implausible – villains, injecting a welcome air of threat, unpredictability and menace back into the narrative.

It remains to be seen whether season nine will prove to have been the catalyst for the re-animation of The Walking Dead, or simply ‘one last scare’ before the final head-shot. For now, though, we can tip-toe ahead into apocalypse with a sense of cautious optimism.

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TV Review: Game of Thrones, Barry

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