Happy Same Old Year!

So, here we are, 2026.  I don't know about anyone else, but it has been a sluggish start to the year for me, with a lot of it, so far, spent in bed.  Mainly on account of the weather being cold and depressingly miserable, giving me little incentive to get up.  Apparently, the weather is forecast to get even worse next week, with the possibility of snow.  Oh joy!  That's the trouble with New Year's, though, they always feel exactly the same as the old one - the whole New Year thing is built up so much, as if it is some kind of earth-shattering event, that when it actually  arrives, it is inevitably a let down.  The clock ticks past midnight and POW!  Everything is exactly the same.  As ever, I'm making no resolutions with regard to 2026.  As I never tire of saying, New Year resolutions are a complete waste of time - if you want to change something, take a different direction, turn over a new leaf, or whatever, then you can do it anytime, you don't have to wait until New Year.  In fact, I'd say that if you are really serious about making changes in your life, you'd just do it, regardless of what the date might be.  Waiting until New Year to make a declaration of intent is a sure sign that you aren't actually serious about doing anything - otherwise you'd have done it already.  While I didn't make any resolutions, I did, however, toast the outgoing year with the words 'Go fuck yourself, 2025', because, by any standard, it was a pretty shitty year, from that fat senile fascist being back in the White House to my own personal travails, with Spurs winning the Europa League as virtually the only bright spot, (even though this was followed by them sacking Big Ange).

Still, the year has ended on a better note for me, (despite my spirits being dampened by various personal issues I won't go into), with the discovery of those Haitian and Ghanaian (not to mention Guyanese) TV channels via a Roku app, which stream apparently pirated movies and TV shows.  Over the seasonal season, most of them have been showing these films back-to-back, allowing me to catch up with quite a few relatively recent releases.  Best of all, most of them seem to grasp the fact that the season doesn't abruptly end with New Year, but is actually a twelve day festival, ending on, surprise, surprise, Twelfth Night.  To be fair, amongst the terrestrial channels, this year it only seems to be BBC1 which has been determined to bundle Christmas out of the door with unseemly haste and restore its regular programming.  The others have continued with some semblance of special seasonal schedules and branding until, it seems, the end of the weekend.  Perhaps all my moaning about the truncating of the Christmas period which seems to have become fashionable has paid off.  It's bad enough this myth that you have to take the decorations down by Twelfth night having become so widespread, (according to tradition, they can stay up until Candlemas, February 2, which is when Epiphany ends), without the powers that be trying to steal several days of celebration from us.  At least, so far, I haven't seen the usual moaning in the Daily Hate about bloody plebs still being on their Christmas holidays, even though it's January!  Bloody outrageous - if the workers don't get their noses back to the grindstone, how will the rich bastards who own everything be able to get off on their January ski-ing holidays?

Freight Train

Not wanting to end the year on a sour note, I decided to make a brief video of one of my model trains running on an oval of track I set up in the front room - a sort of trip down memory lane, of when as a kid I'd set up the train set on the living room floor.  The results aren't too impressive - stalling locomotives, de-railing wagons and poor lighting rather spoiled the effect.  (Naturally, when the camera wasn't on, the locomotive managed perfect circuits of the track).  The sparking from underneath the Standard Five is testament to the fact that I still haven't properly sorted out its pick-ups.  Another job for next year.

Anyway, a Happy New Year to all.  See you in 2026. 

Fake Retrospectives

Going by the mainstream media, now is the time when we should be reviewing the year past, revisiting the stories of the past twelve months.  In the case of much of the media this is pretty pointless as, to be frank, they basically make up much of what they print.  Or at the very least 'embellish' the story in order to make it fit their particular prejudices.  Their recent reporting of the Boxing Day sales reinforced my conviction that they write many stories about this sort of event in advance and simply disregard the actual facts.  They were reporting on Boxing Day itself that sales were disastrously down and it was all the Labour government's fault.  Except that, according to later reports, a surge in sales later in the day resulted in higher overall sales than in 2024.  Not that most of them bothered either amending their original reports or putting that out as a new story.  Like I said - they just don't care about actual facts, especially if they contradict their pre-existing prejudices.  Which means that their retrospective reviews of the year are utterly meaningless, unless they present them as reviews of the best lies they've printed over the past twelve months.  You'll excuse my cynicism, but after watching the UK's dismal performance over the past year, it is difficult to feel anything else.  The only consolation I take from it all is that the traditional media in the UK - the right-wing press, talk radio and that gaggle of neo-Nazi TV 'news' stations - are becoming less and less relevant, with fewer and fewer people reading, listening or watching them.  The bad news, though, is that more and more people seem to be getting their 'news' from the web - and not from actual news sites, but from unchecked social media accounts.

With the apparent decline in the critical faculties of the population - who now seem to unquestioningly swallow everything that some 'influencer' (who can be any sketchy character with a YouTube channel, TikTok or Twitter account), tells them.  Which, of course, is the other side of the coin, the 'dumbing down' of state education to ensure that the young are never taught any form of critical thinking in the first place.  This is particularly blatant in Trump's America, where the dismantling of public education is a central plank of the administration's crusade to eliminate the possibility of being any competing view point which might challenge the orthodoxy of 'Trumpism'.  But you can see it happening elsewhere - we had fourteen years of right-wing Tory governments here in the UK doing their best to undermine education's role in teaching students to think for themselves and question orthodoxy, after all.  It's an old, old story - the twisting of education into a form of indoctrination in order to reinforce and perpetuate the tenets of the ruling regime.  In the past, it was characteristic of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, but it is a policy which has gradually seeped into supposedly liberal and democratic regimes.  As ever, the US has been a leader in this - American education during the Cold War focused on indoctrinating young America into the idea that rapacious capitalism was the only legitimate form of economic activity, that, if left to flourish unencumbered by regulation, the market could provide citizens with all their needs: adequate housing, education, healthcare and so on.  Not so much the vaunted 'American Dream' as the 'American Fantasy'.  But, as ever, I have digressed.  As you've doubtless gleaned, I'm not going to be presenting any retrospectives of the past year either here, or over at The Sleaze.  Instead, as the New Year approaches, I've determined to look resolutely to the future and hope that we can make it better than the past year.

Christmas TV of Yesteryear

See, I was right, wasn't I?  About how shitty the TV Christmas schedules were this year, that is.  In fact, they were even more painful to experience than they were to read about in advance.  Not surprisingly, they resulted in low viewing figures.  I'd like to think that this would stand as a wake up call for the likes of BBC and ITV and that next Christmas they'll serve us up a cornucopia of televisual delights.  But somehow I doubt it.  Looking at the shit we got served up in the guise of 'Christmas' specials, it occurred to me that much of the problem lies in the fact that the main networks no longer make the sort of shows on a regular basis that they used to be able to spin successful and popular Christmas versions off of.  Sitcoms, for instance - there are seemingly so few successful and popular sitcoms in production on the BBC and ITV these days, that the number of Christmas versions wouldn't make a dent on the festive schedules.  Likewise, star comedy shows like Morecambe and Wise or The Two Ronnies - they just don't have modern equivalents, so festive versions of these are also lost to the seasonal schedules.  Instead, we get an endless parade of 'Christmas' editions of brainless game shows and cookery shows, which either means regular editions with a bit of tinsel on them, or 'Celebrity' versions, with a bunch of Z-listers competing for 'charity'.  So, the answer to producing a decent Christmas schedule is to, well, produce decent programming all year around.  Which is something I just don't see happening.

In the event, I got a satisfying dose of the TV Christmas of yesteryear from watching the 'Retro Strange' Roku app.  'Retro Strange' is a free channel that streams a variety of old, public domain weird shit, from movies to public information films.  Thanks to them, I got to experience a slice of fifties and sixties US Christmas TV.  I have to say that 'Miracle on 34th Street' was far more palatable as a forty-five minute TV adaptation than it was as a film (either version, as both feel overlong, stretching out a thin idea to seemingly interminable length).  I also got to meet 'Spunky the Snowman'.  Not, as the title might imply to us Brits, a softcore porn version of 'Frosty the Snowman', but another Christmas-themed cartoon of a slightly earlier vintage aimed at kids.  It concerns an heroic snowman trying to get a child's letter to Santa, despite the efforts of an owl, a wolf and a fox to stop him and steal the letter.  He's assisted in his quest by a bear and a puppy.  Upon a bit of further research, it turns out that 'Spunky' was a re-edited and dubbed version of a Russian cartoon called 'The Snow Postman'.  Even in its truncated form (it was cut down from nearly twenty minutes to a seven minute running time), it is actually a quite charming little film.  Coincidentally, this Christmas I also saw 'Frosty the Snowman' again, for the first time since I saw it as a kid in the early seventies.  I have to say that, as an adult, I found it considerably less charming than I had as a seven or eight year old.   I also stumbled across a sequel to 'Frosty', titled 'Frosty's Winter Wonderland', which I never knew existed.  I wish I still didn't know it existed.  Apparently, it was the first of several such completely unnecessary sequels apparently designed to ruin treasured Christmas memories.

 

Merry Christmas

It's Christmas Eve, so there's only one thing left to say: 'Merry Christmas'.  It's been a troubling year for me, I'm tired, feeling under the weather and just want to put my feet up.  So, I'm taking a few days off from posting here.  See you on the other side, folks.

Sleaze's Greetings

In the spirit of the UK's print media at this time of year - not being arsed to actually produce anything substantive in the run-up to Christmas - today's offering is the latest piece of audio from The Sleaze, which you can listen to here:

                                                                 Sleaze's Greetings 

Time to slip on those ear goggles once more and tune in to this compendium of seasonal sleaze, culled from the archives of

The Sleaze.

Not only do we have excerpts from Luigi Spagnotti's seminal shockumentary 'Mondo Christmas', but we also have some specially recorded seasonal messages from the stars, while controversial director Henry Jagoff discuses his festive-themed new release: 'Black Santa'.

Also on offer is a strange reminiscence about a bizarre Christmas tradition and a dramatic performance of  'God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen' from Vincent Price and Peter Lorre.

So, get those ear goggles on, sit back and let that seasonal sleaze wash over you!

Written and produced by Doc Sleaze.

 

Seasonal Fatigue and Video Piracy

We're at that stage when, with Christmas itself a few days away, newspapers start to go into holiday mode.  With many of their staff on holiday, the rest probably permanently pissed from Christmas parties, actually reporting the news becomes a terrible burden to them.  Their supplements are suddenly filled with lazy articles listing 'top tens' of the year, the 'Best of' of the year and top tips for lighting your Christmas pudding, instead of their regular features.  All these, of course, were probably written weeks, if not months, ago, so really, no effort at all is going into producing those supplemental sections.  Not that i'm criticising them - it's Christmas and nobody can be arsed to start anything before the New Year.  In fact, I'm envious, as I'd love to have a stockpile of stuff to post here for the next few days because, to be frank, I've really run out of steam.  I'm exhausted with all the rushing around I've had to do, fighting through the hordes of Christmas shoppers in every shop I visit and I'm still not feeling the Christmas spirit.  Consequently, my creative energies have vanished entirely.  Inspiration for posts has dried up entirely.  The past few days, what energy I have seems to have been watching Haitian and Ghanaian TV channels via Roku.  It's not that I have any particular interest in these countries, but both boast English-language channels that broadcast internationally, through IPTV, what I assume is entirely pirated material.  The Haitian channel I can currently receive, for instance, shows a continuous stream of big-budgeted, mainly recent, movies.  

I get the distinct impression that it is actually someone's DVD or Blu-Ray collection being shown - several Bond movies turn up regularly, for instance, with Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig, but every so often Diamonds Are Forever with Sean Connery randomly turns up, reinforcing the idea that this is a personal movie collection being aired rather than any kind of professional film library.   While the Ghanaian channels showing similar content are monetised with ads, the Haitian one doesn't seem to carry any ads, making their motivation unclear.  They seem to be a subsidiary of a local radio station, so maybe that's the bit that makes the money and the TV channel is there to try and draw in international viewers.  The guys running these channels clearly have no fear of legal reprisals for their flagrant use of unlicensed copyrighted material.  And why should they?  They are in Haiti and Ghana, for God's sake.  Who is going to enforce copyright there (even if these territories recognise international copyright laws)?  In the case of Haiti, I'm actually unclear as to whether it currently has a fully functioning government.  Certainly, it has sufficient other problems that enforcing copyright law is going to come pretty low on its agenda.  I'm sure that, sooner or later, some or all of these channels will either be shut down or blocked from Roku.  But they will inevitably be replaced by new channels or simply resurrected under new names, (the latter being a regular occurrence on Roku with various apps carrying content of dubious legality constantly being removed, then popping up again with a new identity).  In the meantime, I'll enjoy their pirated content while it is still available.

Delivering the Goods

Another recent acquisition for the model railway is this goods depot.  I suppose it could be described as 'modern', but actually dates back to the sixties.  These were sold as kits, but I got this one already assembled for a pretty low price via Ebay.  It isn't the best construction job I've ever seen - I suspect that, at some point, I'm going to have to find a way to disassemble it and try to reassemble it a bit more neatly - but it is complete.  Which is unusual, as most of these I've seen being sold secondhand are inevitably missing something.  Usually the crane, but often doors and/or windows. It even has the complete and unused decal set that came with the kit.  The only thing missing is the original box, which doesn't bother me as, in the long term, it is going on the layout, not sitting in storage. 

Having the box, though, would enable me to identify which version of the kit it was. The kits were actually of continental origin, (meaning that it is really HO rather than OO), manufactured by, I think, Pola, but were marketed in the UK under several different banners at different times.  I first recall seeing it in the hornby catalogue back in the early seventies, when Hornby marketed a range of Pola kits under the Hornby banner, which included this, a coaling stage, various residential buildings and a petrol station.  Prior to that, in the sixties, much of the same range had been marketed in the UK by Playcraft (the UK subsidiary of Joueff).  Later, the same range appeared in the UK under their original Pola banner.  (They may still be available, for all I know).  Anyway, the depot is another of those things I saw in my childhood and quite liked, but never acquired.  At last, though, I've got my hands on one to finally incorporate into a layout.

Not Lonesome This Christmas

Jesus fuck!  They've started early with trying to cast those of us who like to spend Christmas on our own as sad, lonely bastards.  It's all over the front page of tomorrow's Daily Mirror: a government initiative to get local busy bodies to look in on their 'friends' who might be alone this Christmas.  Well, i'll warn you in advance - come knocking on my door trying to patronise me for being 'lonely' and you'll be met with a hearty "Fuck off!" and the door slammed in your face.  Bloody do-gooders - all they are interested in is salving their own consciences and establishing their moral superiority.  I really don't understand why so  many people seem to have difficulty in grasping the fact that a not insignificant number of us actually like being on our own.  We're sufficiently at ease with ourselves that we can enjoy our own company.  In the John Wayne movie Rooster Cogburn (1975), the titular character encounters an old coot who runs a river ferry in the middle of nowhere, who informs the Duke that he's never met anyone he likes better than himself, so he likes to spend as much time with himself as he can.  Which is pretty much how I feel.  I'm a pretty typical loner, I'd say.  We tend not to fit the stereotype of being some kind of weirdos who grew up without friends and family, so have had to be self-sufficient.  Nope, I come from a large family, with a lot of siblings and a plethora of Aunts, Uncles, cousins and the like, who all figured prominently in my childhood.  Which left me, even then, craving for some privacy, some bloody personal space of my own.  As I grew up, I wasn't short of friends, but I quickly realised that most so-called friendships are facile and shallow, with too many people seeing the relationship as primarily a transactional one.  Personally, I've always believed that friendship should be based on more than that, which is why, these days, I have a small, select group of people I consider friends, rather than acquaintances.

But, according  to the Mirror, ministers are shocked by 'the astonishing scale of isolation' with '1.8 million alone at Christmas', which has prompted them to 'call for action'.  Really, it is just so sodding patronising to assume that because someone is on their own, they must be 'isolated' or 'lonely'.  Sure, I know that they are probably thinking of all those pensioners out there, spending Christmas alone, but unfortunately, they make no distinction between those who are truly isolated, because they no longer have close family, or have lost touch with them, and those of us who are on our own through choice.  I chose to spend Christmas on my own after one horrendous family Christmas too many.  It was such a bad experience that it forced me to finally admit that I had never really enjoyed family Christmases, finding them an utterly miserable experience which couldn't end too soon - forced to spend several days of forced jollity at close quarters with people I didn't get on with at the best of times.  Since then, my Christmases have all been fabulous, spent doing what I want to do, when I want to do it.  I was able to ditch that bloody awful traditional Christmas dinner, for instance, not put up decorations if I didn't feel like it or watch Midnight bloody Mass on TV if I wasn't in the mood.  Yet, mention to anyone that I'm spending Christmas on my own and all I get are pitying looks and patronising comments.  Occasionally I even get half-hearted invitations to Christmas dinner, (which I obviously decline).  Which is why, these days, I'm always evasive as to my plans if asked what I'm doing for Christmas, (except with close friends, who know me well enough to know that being alone is what I enjoy, of course).  So, to get back to the point, as ever, I'd just like the bloody media and the UK's do-gooders, to stop making assumptions and to stop generalising about us 1.8 million who are apparently spending Christmas on our own - for many of us, it's a choice.

The Wild Eye (1967)

Paolo Cavara had been in at the birth of the Mondo movie genre.  Indeed, as one of the directors of Mondo Cane (1962), he was, arguably one of the genre's creators.  But it was a creation he clearly fell out of love with, judging by his subsequent film The Wild Eye (1967).  A savage critique of the Mondo genre, The Wild Eye casts Philippe LeRoy as Paolo, an obsessive director of 'documentaries', whose quest to present 'truth' on screen involves him in contriving situations he can exploit for footage, directing the participants in order to ensure that ostensibly 'real' events play out in the most cinematic way possible.  It opens with a desert hunting trip he has arranged becoming a struggle for survival when the vehicle he and his group are using breaks down and it transpires that nobody has ensured that extra fuel, water or provisions have been stowed aboard.  As the group desperately awaits rescue, Paolo films them, trying to create conflict between its members with his 'interview questions'.  When rescued, while Paolo maintains that the incident was an accident, pure chance, others accuse him of having deliberately contrived the accident in order to create footage for the film he is shooting.  The theme continues as Paolo and his crew proceed to South East Asia in order to shoot more footage, with the director continually attempting to get tip offs from local contacts as to when terrorist attacks, executions or suicides are likely to occur, so that he can be present to film them.  Most of these incidents clearly reference the subsequent work of his Mondo Cane collaborators, Gaultiero Jacopetti and Franco E Prosperi: his repeated attempts to find a Buddhist monk who will publicly immolate themselves, for instance, references such a scene (probably faked) filmed by Jacopetti and Prosperi for Mondo Cane 2 (1963), while Paolo's rearrangement of the execution by firing squad of a Viet Cong suspect to make it more cinematographic echoes the )probably real) execution scene in Jacopetti and Prosperi's Africa Addio (1966).

Indeed, a lot of Wild Eye's Vietnam sequences seem designed to echo Africa Addio, with Paolo's constant declarations to combatants in the war zone that he and his crew are 'Italian Journalists' making a documentary reminiscent of Jacopetti and Prosperi's similar justifications for their close up filming of the carnage in the Congo.  The question of whether the sort of war zone footage shot by the makers of Mondo movies represents merely unflinching journalism or is sensationalised voyeurism, lies at the core of The Wild Eye.  Paolo, like his real world equivalents, seeks to co-opt the approach adopted by genuine journalists and legitimate documentary makers that they are merely presenting reality, over which they can express no moral judgement, leaving that to the viewer.  To intervene, they argue, would be to interfere in the natural flow of events, to falsify reality - they can only bear witness to reality, not create it.  The difference, of course, lies in the fact that Paolo and his equivalents do intervene, if not in terms of altering the outcome of what they film, but in the way in which it happens or, more significantly, how it appears to happen.  Of course one of the key criticisms of the Mondo genre is that it doesn't just interfere in real events, but that it actually fakes events in order to create sensational footage.  Throughout most of The Wild Eye, Paolo never actually creates a false situation. (or at least, can't be proved to have done so), apart from the sequence where he gets an impoverished Sultan he meets in the ruins of his palace, which is being rapidly reclaimed by the jungle, to humiliate himself onscreen, eating butterflies (which Paolo and his crew have collected and brought to the palace) and generally acting as if he is deluded.  Paolo's defence is that he is enhancing the reality of the situation, in order to put over to audiences the tragedy of his subject's situation.  Which is an idea which underpins his approach to film making - that what he is attempting to achieve is to present something that goes beyond ordinary, mundane, reality, that he improves it and makes it 'more real'.  Although, simultaneously, he professes to hate contrivance - which is why he makes his interventions as subtle and natural-looking as possible.

The final part of the film addresses the other main criticism of Mondo movies - their lack of a moral compass.  When Paolo is tipped off that a nightclub is to be attacked with a rocket fired from a bazooka, rather than warn the authorities or even the customers, he instead sets himself and his camera up inside the club, already crowded with revellers, in order to film the attack firsthand, with his crew outside to film it all from the external perspective.  Inevitably, the situation results in tragedy - not for Paolo himself, who survives unscathed - but for his female companion, who, although outside, is fatally injured in the blast.  While, initially, his horrified reaction seems to be genuine, we are left in doubt, as he urges his crew to film his grieving over her body.  While clearly intended as a critique of the genre he had helped to birth, Cavara's film still has resonance today, as, with the rise of reality TV, social media and AI, the veracity of what we are seeing on our screens is increasingly held up to question.  Even news footage on mainstream TV channels is now constantly questioned, with journalists constantly being accused of imposing their own, partisan, narratives upon it.  The whole concept of objectivity is being called into question.  But, of course, we all of us impose our own narratives upon what we see.  Everything we experience is filtered through our own experiences.  The key to objectivity, though, is to apply one's critical faculties to our experiences, in order to try and cut through our own pre-existing prejudices.  Sadly, critical thinking just doesn't seem to be a priority these days, either in reporting or education, leaving us with a situation where our entire media is in danger of becoming one big Mondo movie, with nobody having any clear idea of what is real and what is not.  Which is precisely what Cavara was pointing to in The Wild Eye, way back in 1967.