Zombie Hunt

October's 'Monthly Movie' entry inevitably has a Halloween theme. I have to say that this is one ripe for remaking - I was pressed for time making the film and by the time I had an opportunity to film anything, I was fast losing the light. Consequently, the quality of the finished footage leaves a lot to be desired. With some adjustments, you can just about what's going on in the later scenes, but I'm still not happy with it. Still, it's all I've got, footage wise. With another project for a possible October monthly movie bogged down in technical difficulties, the only other viable alternative would have been to cobble something together from the unused footage I shot in August and September.

Anyway, not only was the shoot hurried, I was also poorly prepared and unable to use any of my preferred locations due to time constraints. I really should have had a better costume for the 'zombie' and set up more complex shots. I was going to try a reshoot today and thought I'd be able to finish work early enough to catch at least an hour of daylight on a more favourable location. However, thanks to Crapchester's poorly designed road network, I spent most of the afternoon stuck in traffic jams and missed the opportunity. Hopefully, at some point in the future, I'll return to this project and remake it - I've got a great coat which would make a better 'zombie' outfit, or maybe I could use a bedsheet, as in M R James' 'Whistle and I'll Come to You', thereby substituting a ghost for the 'zombie'. I'll also be shooting 'day for night' and adjusting the footage in post-production to add a 'night filter'.

I know I'm not really selling this film well, making it sound like a hastily assembled clunker. But, to be fair, I do think it has its merits and is worth a look.

Nightmare on Ebola Street

Well, Halloween's started early here in Crapchester. I've already had the trick or treaters round - obviously I told them 'trick'.  Or, to be more accurate, 'fuck off'.  I feel I was justified - they couldn't even be bothered to wear appropriate costumes.  Where was Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster or Wolfman?  Not amongst this group, that's for sure.  They were just dressed in really filthy clothes, covered in vomit, urine and shit stains.  Anyway, in response to my rejection, one of the bastards dropped his trousers and proceeded to take a dump all over my doorstep.  When I remonstrated with him he claimed that it was all 'in character' - he was dressed as an Ebola victim.  Apparently they all were.  Which is fair enough, I suppose.  Although it was a bit offensive - there really was no need for them all to black up, there have been Ebola outbreaks outside of West Africa.  What will the next bunch be dressed as, I wonder, benefits claimants, perhaps?  After all, Iain Duncan Smith has spent the last four years or so demonising them.  It would be a pretty straightforward costume: dressed in rags, sallow skin, haunted eyes, malnutrition and a general air of utter defeat.

Then again, maybe Iain Duncan Smith would make a good basis for a Halloween costume, along with his cabinet colleagues.  I'd imagine opening the door to find yourself face-to-face with Duncan Smith, George Osborne, Eric Pickles and Francis Maude would be enough to make even the bravest amongst us void their bowels on the spot.  Getting back to the Ebola, I saw the other day that there really was an 'Ebola Sexy Nurse' costume on sale, featuring such accessories as a gas mask, safety goggles and hazmat dress.  Bad taste or just a bit of a laugh?  Whichever it is, it also represents another example of the crass, exploitative nature of what passes for capitalism in this country.  Even sufferers of a contagious disease which continues to kill large numbers of people daily in Africa are fair game when it comes to turning a quick buck, it seems.  (To be fair, the costume isn't exploiting the victims directly, just those who put themselves at risk caring for them.  So that's OK, then).  See, I can even turn a post about Halloween into a political rant.

Forgotten Films: Breakthrough

If you have ever seen Sam Peckinpah's 1977 World War Two epic Cross of Iron then, like me, you probably thought that it really didn't need a sequel.  Peckinpah had made his point very effectively.  Sadly, the film's German co-producers thought differently and came up with what is effectively a name-only sequel in the form of 1979's Breakthrough, (also known as Sergeant Steiner).  (Whilst Cross of  Iron performed poorly in the US on its original release, it had been a big hit in West Germany, leaving the German co-producers keen to cash in).  I say name-only, but it does purport to open shortly after the events of the first film and features two of the main characters from Cross of Iron.  Unfortunately, these characters are played by different actors and are quite unrecognisable rom their earlier incarnations.  A booze-raddled looking Richard Burton replaces James Coburn as Steiner and phones in his performance.  He clearly doesn't want to be there and he delivers his lines with contempt, (which is fair enough, as the script is diabolical).  Likewise, Helmut Griem is a poor substitute for Maximillian Schell as Steiner's nemesis Captain Stansky, turning him into a standard one-dimensional evil Nazi, (again, to be fair, the script doesn't give him much to work with).  With the main characters effectively emasculated, the Pekinpah film's main driving dynamic - the conflict between the two and the ideologies they represent - is completely absent.  The result is a listless narrative with no real drive or sense of direction.  Consequently, the film lurches from one small scale set-piece to another, with various plot strands fizzling out before they can amount to anything.

The supporting cast, including Robert Mitchum as a US army Colonel (like Burton, he phones in his performance) who bizarrely seems to spend his time going, personally, behind enemy lines to reconnoitre their anti-tank capabilities, and Rod Steiger, (his performance oscillating wildly between Patton-like rants and Bradley-like sympathy) as an American General really don't help.  Curd Jurgens is also on hand, to play yet another in his repertoire of German generals.  Moreover, unlike the Pekinpah film, which was filmed in Yugoslavia and utilised large quantities of authentic World War Two equipment, including T-34 tanks, the sequel was filmed in Austria on tatty-looking sets, with Austrian army M-47s unconvincingly pretending to be Sherman tanks.  As the latter observation indicates, Breakthrough also shifts the action from the Eastern to the Western front.  All of which undermines the film's quality compared to the original.  The change in locale, for instance, results in the first film's grim battle for survival being replaced by a meandering and slow-paced plot which involves Steiner in the 'Generals Plot' to assassinate Hitler.  Sadly, he is a minor player, sent by Jurgens to find sympathetic American officers to support the attempted coup, and most of the interesting action - the failed assassination attempt and the consequent reprisals against the plotters - happens off-screen.  The fact that, unlike Coburn's Steiner, Burton's Steiner frequently appears peripheral to the main action, is one of Breakthrough's major flaws.

But the film's biggest problem - aside from a wildly inappropriate musical score - is the fact that it looks so cheaply made.  Most of the budget seems to have been spent on hiring the main stars, resulting in the use of stock footage for many of its action 'highlights'.  The impressive-looking opening, over which the main titles unfurl, featuring the German army retreating across a snowscape, complete with Tiger tanks and other heavy equipment, is actually a sequence from the Yugoslav war epic The Battle of Neretva.  This is followed by a lengthy stretch of battle footage from Cross of Iron, (which in no way matches the preceding footage).  Worst of all, the D-Day landings are represented by stock footage from Anzio (which, coincidentally, also featured Robert Mitchum) and The Battle of Britain.  The latter piece of footage is utterly inept in its use, featuring what are quite clearly German Heinkel bombers in Luftwaffe colours, to represent Allied aircraft.  The only major action sequence filmed specifically for the film comes at the climax with the US armoured assault on the German-held town. But even this is dull and repetitive.  Which shouldn't be surprising.  Even Pekinpah would have been hard-pressed to make something out of these ingredients, so his successor, Andrew V McClaglan, an experienced director of action movies, westerns and TV episodes, didn't really stand a chance.

The Exorcism Factor

Thanks to Halloween, October seems to be the new silly season, with the media full of stories about black eyed ghosts, giant crabs, sinister clowns and haunted houses.  Even Simon Cowell, desperate to grab as much publicity for the sinking ship that is the current series of X-Factor, is trying to get in on the act, with reports that he is convinced that his house is haunted and that he is seeking an exorcism.  Haunted, presumably, by the ghosts of former winners who have found that their 'careers' consisted of being chewed up and spat out by Cowell's Syco company, discarded in favour of the next five minute wonder once they'd had a couple of quick hit singles to bolster Syco's coffers.  Or perhaps the restless spirits of artists whose songs have been blighted with appalling cover versions by various Cowell acolytes.  The again, maybe the things going bump in the night have something to do with that picture of himself Cowell has in the attic - the one which shows all his debauchery, decay and corruption, whilst he stays unfeasibly healthy looking and apparently ageless.

Obviously, the big risk for Cowell is that if he hires an exorcist, then it might well be him who ends up exorcised and expelled from his own house.  After all, if that plastic, Tory-supporting, egomaniac on an apparent mission to reduce all popular culture to mediocrity, isn't an evil presence, then I don't know what is.  If we're lucky, he might not just find himself ejected from his own house, but he might find himself exiled to some spiritual limbo.  Reduced, perhaps, to a disembodied voice spitting out pithy words of 'wisdom' to X-Factor contestants on the next edition of the show.  Now, that would be more entertaining than a regular episode: the remaining judges have to hold a séance in order to summon up Cowell for the judging, with furious poltergeist activity accompanying the ejection of one of his acts.  If that doesn't put the ratings up, then nothing will.

Hating Mike Read

It isn't the fact that the controversial UKIP calypso song might be racist which offends me, nor is it the idea of an anti-immigration party co-opting a musical form brought to the UK by immigrants which makes me despise it.  No, it is the fact that former Radio One DJ Mike Read is behind it which really makes me want to puke.  I could say that I thought he'd plumbed the depths when he did that rap at the Tory party conference a few years ago, but this current affiliation to UKIP shows how wrong I was - he could stoop lower.  But, ultimately, he's entitled to his political opinions, no matter how wrong and crackpot I might think they are.  I could comment on the general shit-ness of his calypso.  But other people have released far worse and far more culturally insensitive tracks.  What it all comes down to is that I have always hated and loathed Mike Read.  I mean really hated him.  I remember him when he was on Radio One - he was pompous, egotistical and generally smarmy.  He acted as if he was some officially appointed arbiter of good taste and morality, imposing his own censorship on the play list.  Despite always affecting an air of superiority toward listeners and fellow DJs, he was always unfailingly obsequious to the 'rock royalty' of the day when they were on his show.

The fact is that I hate him so much that when, some years ago, I heard on the radio that Mike Reid had died, I hoped that they actually meant Mike Read, rather than the comedian, actor and sometime Eastenders star.  Reprehensible, I know.  But I can't help but feel that the late Mike Reid had made a far greater contribution to entertainment that his namesake, who wouldn't have been anywhere near as great a loss.  Whenever people go on about how crap the current line-up of Radio One DJs are, I always refer them back to the early eighties era of the station when the likes of Mike Read, Simon Bates, Noel Edmonds, Steve Wright, Dave Lee Travis and Jimmy Saville still ruled the roost at the station.  Aided and abetted by the likes of Bruno Brookes and Gary Davies, they were truly awful: bumptious, loathesome and talentless - and in the case of Savile and DLT, sex offenders, to boot.  They all seemed to be in the grip of a powerful self delusion whereby they seemed to think that they were doing something far more important that the rest of us mere mortals - spinning records and making inane comments in between them.  Jesus, how I hated them!  The fact that Mile Read, the worst of all of them, has turned out to be some kind of right wing nut job merely serves to justify that hatred.

Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster

Having spent part of the day having needles stuck in my mouth, I don't really feel in any fit state to try and post anything profound today.  (If you are wondering, I wasn't exploring the outer reaches of sadomasochism, but rather was at the dentist, having a tooth repaired).  Instead, I'm going to prattle on about a film I recently watched.  It was no classic and certainly not profound, but Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster is title which has fascinated me since childhood.  It was one of those films which were available on Super 8mm in a truncated version and advertised in newspapers in the early seventies.  They all had alluring, trashy titles (often changed from more sedate original titles) which captivated the young me.  It was also one of those films which occaisionally turned up in the late night schedules, but I was too young to be allowed to sit up and watch it.  As I got older it seemed to vanish from public view and, frustratingly, in the pre-internet age there seemed to be very little available information about it, even in the specialist press.  However, thanks to You Tube and Google's slack attitude toward other people's copyright, I was finally able to catch up with it last weekend.

I'd love to say that Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster is some kind of lost cult classic.  Sadly, it isn't.  It's just a cheaply made exploitation flick, apparently financed by the Puerto Rican tourist board, there are so many lengthy and gratuitous sequences of the hero and heroine riding around the island's main attractions on a scooter.  Worst of all, neither Frankenstein nor his monster appear.  What we instead get is a malfunctioning US android astronaut called Colonel Frank Saunders, who goes berserk and starts killing people after having one side of his face melted by an alien death ray.  'He's become a Frankenstein' wails the heroine.  Well, no, if anything he's become a Frankenstein's monster.  But there is a space monster - a ferocious mutant the aliens carry around in their spaceship for some unspecified reason.  The plot, such as it is, concerns a group of aliens from a dying planet coming to earth to kidnap earth women (their own are all sterile) and mistaking a NASA rocket launch as an attack on their ship.  The destruction of the rocket leads to the US sending android Frank on the next mission to try and ascertain what happened to its predecessor.  Of course, his own ship meets the same fate, but, using the escape system, makes it back to earth, landing in Puerto Rico, closely followed by the alien spaceship.

It is the scenes on the alien spaceship which fatally undermine the movie.  Whilst the scenes concerning the US military and NASA scientists are indifferently acted and poorly scripted, they at least look realistic.  The alien sequences are, by comparison, incredibly camp, featuring the alien leader, a Princess and her chief scientist, a pointy eared bald headed character who appears to be the prototype for Mike Myers' Dr Evil in the Austin Powers series.  Even when they aren't engaging in abominably bad dialogue - in which every nuance of their plot and situation is painfully spelt out for the audience - they are exchanging camp and archly knowing looks whilst watching the captured earth girls being processed.  Of course, it all ends with the usual conflagration as a partially repaired Frank releases the earth girls and battles the space monster as the spaceship takes off and tries to escape.  Frank naturally sacrifices himself (thereby redeeming himself for those earlier murders) blowing up the spaceship.

Badly scripted, poorly acted and featuring what feels like hours of travelogue to pad out the running time, Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster does have some redeeming features.  It is quite nicely photographed in black and white and features some of the best use of stock footage I've seen in a low budget film.  What I assume is official NASA footage of rocket launches is well-matched to the rest of the film in terms of image quality and is consistent - the same type of rockets, for instance, are featured in each launch sequence.  Indeed Frank's launch into space is built around some fascinating footage of a Saturn 1B test launch and culminates in a sequence featuring a test of the Apollo capsule escape system.  Although not really worth the wait, and despite a misleading title (in the UK it was called, more honestly, Duel of the Space Monsters, although you have to wait until the last five minutes for their 'duel'), Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster was still reasonably entertaining and far more competently put together than most movies of its ilk.

Pregnant Pause

Another Royal pregnancy.  Do I care?  Not really.  But perhaps I should.  According to those crackpot conspiracy theorists, such things are carefully timed so as to distract the public's attention from other major issues.  Maybe they are right: the Tories start losing by-elections to UKIP, the government is consequently in a state of panic, Ebola is running wild in Africa and now threatening to spread (shock horror) to the US and Europe - so what's the solution?  That's right, another Royal pregnancy starts to dominate the front pages in order to distract the attention of the stupid masses whilst the Tories slip on Nazi armbands to try and out-fascist UKIP and NATO napalms West Africa out of existence in order to resolve the Ebola crisis.  All of which begs the question: just how do the shady powers behind the scenes manage to get these Royal women to conceive on cue?  Do they have special artificial insemination teams on stand-by?  Maybe they like to do it the 'old fashioned' way and have 'studs' on call at all times, just in case a political crisis breaks, (not that I'm saying that our Royal princes aren't up to the job, but you know what I mean).

Perhaps, though, the pregnancies are entirely fake.  I mean, we all know the upper classes flinch at the very idea of physical contact, let alone having sex - it's just so vulgar and lower class to rut like animals.  That's for the peasants. They'd rather it was all done for them by someone else, so that they can avoid all the messy bits and just get with riding horses, shooting things and being rich.  So when a convenient Royal pregnancy is needed, the princess in question just has to fake a bit of morning sickness and wear a series of fake pregnancy bumps for the next nine months.   When it comes to the birth, they are whipped into an exclusive private hospital where a new born child is put into their arms and they parade it to the press and public on a convenient balcony.  Now, I know what you are going to ask - where did the actual baby come from?  Well, it's probably snatched from some random working class single mother who is told that they suffered a miscarriage.  Which would explain why Royal offspring frequently don't look like their parents.  For all I know, they might regularly change the children as they grow up, if the original develops a degenerative disease or turns out to be mentally disabled.  Now, is that crackpot enough to get me inducted into the Crackpot Conspiracy Hall of Fame?

The Most Dangerous Hounds

Now it seems we're using classic suspense stories as the basis for game shows.  At least, that's what I inferred from the title of a new ITV2 gameshow: Release the Hounds.  From what I could gather it involves contestants having too evade packs of dogs hunting them in a forest.  Which, clearly, is inspired (as is the title) by the Richard Connell short story (and later film) The Hounds of Zaroff'/'The Most Dangerous Game', in which a Russian aristocrat hunts human beings for sport on his private island.  Sadly, being on ITV2, I very much doubt that the hounds used are at all dangerous.  Otherwise, I'd like to see a celebrity version in which various irritating non-personalities are hunted down by a pack of slavering and blood thirsty dogs, which have been starved and poked with sticks for a week before being released.  It would be an excellent way of keeping down the numbers of those micro-celebrities constantly created by reality TV and TV talent shows.

Of course, I'm presupposing that he 'Hounds' of the title are real hounds, of the canine variety.  The possibility exists, (as I've never actually bothered watching the show, I was just intrigued by the title),  that the 'Hounds' referred to are actually clones of self-styled comedian Rufus Hound.  I should imagine that being pursued by a pack of c-list comics - all telling identical bad jokes, simultaneously - would b a pretty harrowing experience.  Presumably, these Rufus Hound clones would be genetically modified to improve their sense of smell and night vision, for instance, in order to enhance their hunting abilities.  Somehow though, I suspect that this would be beyond the budget of an ITV2 show and that, in reality, the 'Hounds' are actually a bunch of mangy strays with no teeth and limps rounded up from the local dog pound.  But a man can dream,,,

The Mole People

You wouldn't believe the week I've had.  So I won't even bother trying to tell you about it.  Suffice to say that it wasn't great.  It was a bloody trial, in fact.  So much so that it has left me exhausted and incapable of remembering what I was going to post about today.  Instead, we'll look at another random move trailer:


Kicking off with a bizarre 'educational' prologue featuring Dr Frank C Baxter, The Mole People is part Universal's attempts to establish a pantheon of new monsters in the fifties.  Whilst an interesting design and concept, the Mole People proved less successful than Universal's contemporaneous Creature From the Black Lagoon, who got two sequels and became a household name.  Unlike the Creature, the Mole People are ultimately secondary to the main lost civilisation plot, (it's notable that, such was the pace of exploration, by the mid-fifties you had to go underground, into the 'hollow earth' to find lost civilisations, whereas barely ten years before you had only to venture into the jungle to stumble over them), and are servile to the main villains.  Consequently, they lacked the Creature's menace.

Post war, Universal, once a prolific producer of B-movies, horror flicks and serials, turned its back on its heritage and tried to move upmarket with more prestigious A-list productions.  By the fifties, the balance sheet dictated a return to more populist, mass--market and modestly budgeted fare.  Noting the popularity on TV of their classic monster movies, (including Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolfman, The Mummy and their various sequels), their thoughts naturally turned to creating new monsters for a new generation of film goers.  As already noted, of the new creatures, only the one from the Black Lagoon really captured the public imagination and it is notable that the most successful and memorable of this new cycle of Universal horrors (such as Tarantula and It Came From Outer Space) were, like the first two Creature films, directed by Jack Arnold.   Sadly, The Mole People was directed by Virgil W Vogel, a more workmanlike director (also responsible for Universal's 'Lost World' picture The Land Unknown).  Consequently, it stands as a reasonably entertaining, but uninspiring B picture.

Bad Alternatives

Apparently they now constitute the 'Alternative Media'.  At least that's what that bunch of conspiracy theory crackpots I frequently parody here and on The Sleaze have now taken to calling their rickety collection of blogs and social media pages.  Alternative to what, one is inclined to ask.  Their self-aggrandisement seems to derive from the idea that they are telling the stories the 'real' media - which is full of lies and half-truths and controlled by evil cartels - won't print, because they don't want us to know the 'truth'.  Whilst I'd agree that much of the mainstream media is biased and agenda driven, slanting its reporting to suit the interests of a relatively small clique of owners and their friends, they do at least maintain some semblance of journalistic standards and it is possible to get some kind of recourse against them through the legal system, (although, I'll grant you, this can be time-consuming and expensive).  By contrast, this 'Alternative Media' are a bunch of loons and crackpots, (a lot of them like to describe themselves as 'freelance journalists', despite having no journalistic training and exhibiting no concept of how to critically evaluate evidence or analyse data in their 'work'), against whom we have very little recourse when they make outlandish allegations based on rumours, innuendo and discredited 'facts'. 

They are also just as agenda-driven and biased as the mainstream media they hate so much.  As I've previously noted here, a closer examination of their sites usually reveals that, whatever conspiracy they are ostensibly dedicated to exposing, in reality they always come back to the same tired old anti-Semitism and tales of Jewish conspiracies peddled by the Nazis.  Usually with a big dose of homophobia (another Nazi favourite) thrown in for good measure.  But to get back to the point, the reason, of course, that the mainstream media won't report their 'truths' is because they are simply lies with no factual basis.  Even the likes of the Daily Mail make out sure that there is some factual basis for their scare stories about immigrants, benefit claimants and natural disasters, no matter how tiny it might be.  Most of their readers realise this - very few people actually believe everything they read in the papers or see on TV.  Yet the 'Alternative Media' clearly think that people actually are stupid enough to believe what they read.  Stupid enough, in fact, to believe their concoction of warmed over half-truths, outright lies, urban myths, Nazi propaganda and poorly fabricated 'evidence'.  Not so 'alternative' after all...   

Bad Business

OK, I've had an idea for one of those charity themed-month fundraising campaigns like bloody 'Movember' and 'Stoptober':  how about 'Nudecember'?  Instead of growing moustaches or stopping drinking, people could be urged to become naturists for a month and wander around stark bollocking naked for charirty.  Not only would it be more of a challenge than the others - it's generally bloody cold in December - but 'Nudecember' actually contains the whole of the real name of the month it is supposed to take place in, unlike the others.  Quite what charity it would raise funds for, I haven't a clue.  But that doesn't matter, because it's an idea, and it's ideas which matter in business.  If you've got an idea, then you can use it to impress some toss pots, sorry, investors, into giving you the money to turn it into actuality and thereby found your multi-billion dollar business empire.  At least, that's the impression the likes of The Apprentice and Dragon's Den give.

Now, I'd never pretend to be an expert on business, but on the basis of the trailers for the latest series of The Apprentice, I have to say that is it any wonder the UK's commercial sector is so shit if the collection of utter bell ends featured really represent the best of Britain's thrusting young business talent.  They seem to perpetuate the myth that successful management is all about shouting at people and mouthing aggressive clichés about one's supposed rivals.  Equally depressing is the way in which the series presents Alan Sugar as the epitome of British business success.  As a Spurs supporter, I still have nightmares about his atrocious stewardship of the club when he was Chairman and majority shareholder.  Very little business sense was on display in those dark days.  I also knew someone who worked for Amstrad as a programmer back in the days when Sugar still owned the firm and it was banging out cheap and crappy home computers - trust me, anyone who could employ that particular individual couldn't possibly be possessed of any business acumen, in my biased opinion.  Anyway, getting back to the point, anyone out there interested in investing in my brilliant new business idea, 'Nudecember'?

Trick or Terror?

With Halloween fast approaching, the burning question is what will this year's favourite costume for trick or treaters be?  The last few years have seen much manufactured controversy on the part of the media about various 'sick' costumes sold by supermarkets and other retail outlets.  These have included such things as the 'mental patient' outfit and various serial killer costumes (including plastic knives, meat cleavers and axes).  Bearing in mind the amount of highly sensationalised stories the tabloids happily print about gruesome murders and mass killers - and the amount of circulation they get from such stories - I find their self-righteousness on the subject of such Halloween costumes more than a little hypocritical.  Besides, does anyone really think that children's perceptions of mental health issues are really going to be affected by some cheap supermarket Halloween costume? 

As long-term readers will recall, I've always favoured the Jihadi suicide bomber (complete with plastic sticks of dynamite and fake detonator) as a contemporary Halloween costume.  To be honest, I'm surprised that the press hasn't already latched onto the possibilities for linking terrorists to Halloween.  I'm amazed that they've been able to resist the temptation to run stories about Muslim extremists dressing as suicide bombers, mingling with  trick or treating youngsters and blowing up householders who refuse to give them sweets.  Or Islamic terrorists smearing door knobs with ricin so that trick or treating children are poisoned.  It doesn't matter that none of it is true - it could happen and that's usually enough for the tabloids to justify running stuff like this.  But to get back to the original point, I'd like to think that this year's 'must have' Halloween costume will be the 'Jimmy Saville' (complete with blonde wig, plastic cigars and jangly gold jewellery).  After all, he's fast becoming the nation's number one bogey man, considered so dangerous that, despite being dead, his image apparently has to be removed from every archived edition of Top of the Pops and his name expunged from broadcasting history.  Perhaps some enterprising supermarket could come up with a themed set of such costumes - 'Showbiz Peados of the Twenty First Century - including Stuart Hall and Rolf Harris (complete with plastic stick on beard and didgereedoo).  

Late One Summer's Afternoon

It's the end of the week, so I thought I'd post another holiday video.  Like the title says, this one was shot late on a Summer afternoon, with that golden, hazy late afternoon sunlight filtering through the trees. Consequently the whole thing has a slightly ethereal feel, particularly the opening sequence at the woodland bridge, with the sunlight reflecting from the water.  However, as it turned out, the day this filmed, a murder had taken place a few miles away, although I didn't know this at the time.  Consequently, watching this footage retrospectively with the knowledge of this brutal slaying, the whole Summery scene seems to have a slightly dark and sinister undertow.  Hence the music, (as ever courtesy of Kevin MacLeod), which combines a deceptively upbeat and ethereal sound with hints of something darker lurking underneath.

As is often the case with these films, the location - King's Hat - looks remote but, in reality there are fairly busy country rounds nearby in three directions.  This was actually one of the driest and sunniest days of my holiday - I'd spent the earlier part of the day on the coast - but as it was September by then, most of the schools had gone back, so I didn't have to put up with too many families with children in tow, making it a very pleasant day.  Until the news of that murder broke, which cast something of a pall over my memories of the day.   Nevertheless, it was a good day for me - relaxing and exhilarating.

Still Feeling Uncharitable

...And that's another thing I bloody hate about charity campaigns - they're always trying to get you to give up something.  Right now, for instance, we're in the midst of 'Stoptober', where I'm being urged to give up drinking for the month of October.  For charity, of course.  For God's sake, drinking is one of the few pleasures I have left, I don't care if it is for charity, I'm not giving it up even for a month.  But it will be good for you, they say in their adverts, chronicling all the hangovers and damage to your liver you'll avoid by not drinking during October.  Thereby making you feel guilty for abusing your body, before telling you how you can help them raise money by abstaining.  A neat trick there to convince you that you can restore your self-esteem by joining their campaign.  But it isn't just 'Stoptober' we have to endure.  Oh no, once that's over, we'll be into 'Movember' during which people are encouraged to grow moustaches for charity and we have to put up with various celebrities showing us how they can't grow one, ending up with what looks like a smudge of boot polish beneath their noses. As I've note before in theses pages, in my opinion moustaches are for life and should be left to the professionals.  Amateur moustaches which last only a month are an offence against nature.

I know that by now everyone is screaming about how I've got no sense of fun, to lighten up - it's all for a good cause after all.  But that's the point - I'm sick to death of charities trying to make fundraising 'fun'.  It isn't.  Getting people to part with money isn't fun.  Paying it out certainly isn't.  No matter how 'good' the cause.  Besides, the causes charities usually collect for - famine, natural disasters, terminal illness, horrendous diseases, maimed animals and abused children, to name but a few - are anything but 'fun'.  Trying to make their campaigns 'fun filled' and 'entertaining' rather demeans the seriousness of these causes, I can't help but feel.  But then, I'm a curmudgeonly old git, aren't I?  The bottom line here is that if they want my money, then just bloody ask for it, don't try and get me to stop drinking or grow facial hair.  Sure, I'll probably still say 'no', but at least we'll both know where we stand, won't we?  So, for the record, I'm going to keep on drinking throughout October and have no intention of growing a moustache in November, (my moustachioed days are long gone, I'm afraid - I just can't be arsed to properly maintain a neat 'tache these days and there's nothing worse than a ragged unkempt moustache).

That Uncharitable Feeling

Autumn has definitely arrived.  All the signs are there - the nights drawing in, the leaves falling from the trees, evening temperatures dropping sufficiently to trigger the thermostat controlling my central heating.  Oh, and the trailers for bloody Children in Need.  The BBC's annual telethon just keeps rolling around with the inevitability of an unloved season, (to paraphrase Bond villain Hugo Drax in Moonraker - the 1979 film rather than the novel, obviously).  At least Comic Relief is only every other year, although it makes up for that by being even more self-important overblown than Children in Need.  Anyway, to return to the point, Children in Need kicked off this evening with a suitably over the top video for this year's Children in Need charity single - an unnecessary cover of 'God Only Knows'.  Still, I suppose it is better than an awful cover by the boy band (or girl band) of the day, which is what we usually get.  It's also better than the Comic Relief equivalent: an 'hilarious' 'comedy' version of some song or other performed by various self-styled comedians.

Which brings me to the crux of why I dislike these celebrity-driven TV charity things: whilst they seem to exist primarily for celebrities to salve their consciences about earning all that money and not paying their taxes, they still seem reluctant to commit their best efforts, performance-wise, to them.  Just look at Comic Relief - a collection of pretty lame routines and sketches from various celebrities, punctuated by 'heart-rending' films of them 'helping' poor people in Africa.  None of it is their best material.  Obviously - they want to reserve that for paying audiences, (paying their box-office, not charity, that is).  To be fair, I have to admit that it is years since I've seen Comic Relief, so it could have improved since then, but I doubt it.  Children in Need is, if anything, even worse, with its dire regional opt-outs to show us what the local micro-celebrities in our regions are doing to encourage us to give money.  It's this shoddiness which offends me - the idea that just because something is for charity, you can get away with serving up any old shit.  If nothing else, it displays an incredibly patronising attitude on the part of the participating celebrities with regard to the public.  If you want us to donate money, then at least have the decency to put some effort into entertaining us.  Or, even better, why not try making some sizeable donations from your own sizeable bank accounts?  It's tax deductible, after all.

More Monday Musings

Another glorious chapter in Britain's military history was written the other day when RAF Tornados finally struck at ISIS targets - and succeeded in destroying a pick-up truck.  How the nation rejoiced at the news that a motor vehicle probably worth at least five hundred quid had been blown to bits by munitions costing tens of thousands of pounds, dropped from an aircraft costing millions,  Fuck me, I thought when I heard the news, it's like the 'Dambusters' all over again - our brave boys succeed in taking out a high value target in the face of overwhelming odds.  I had visions of some angry Jihadist stood next to the smouldering wreckage of his vehicle, furiously shaking his fist at the departing fighter plane, shouting: 'Damn you English Devils, I only had three more payments to go and that pick-up would have been mine!'  Fired by this success, Cameron has announced that the UK is going to double the number of combat aircraft dedicated to the anti-ISIS operation.  Which sounds impressive, until you realise that still only amounts to four aircraft.  Still, if we're lucky, that might mean that next time they destroy two pick-up trucks.

Mind you, our dear Prime Minister hasn't been satisfied with merely denuding ISIS' fighting capabilities by destroying its motor pool.  Oh no.  He's turned detective, too.  Not satisfied with the progress of the police's investigation into the murder of a teenage girl in London, Cameron vowed that he'd look into the case personally.  And it worked! Within a couple of days the body of the prime suspect in the case was found.  Is there no end to Dave's talents?  More importantly, have the government's spending cuts gone so deep that the police now have to rely on the Prime Minister to solve crimes?  I know that it has been claimed that some police forces are effectively telling victims of minor offences that they have to solve their own crimes, but this is bloody ridiculous.  The danger is that, with this success under his belt, Cameron will be encouraged to set up a private detective agency on the side and we'll see a stream of dodgy clients going through the side door of number ten.  Still, it would give him a legitimate excuse to hang round sleazy bars sporting a fedora, fake moustache and long rain coat. 

A Cock and Balls Story

Before Theresa May decides that she has a 'reasonable belief' that I might 'disrupt democracy' and thereby prevent me from posting online anything other than government propaganda, I thought I'd take a look at yet another Tory sex scandal and the accompanying hypocrisy from the press.  The burning question here, of course, is whether it is in the public interest to publish a story about a government minister sending a picture of his cock and balls to a young woman he hasn't met, simply because an online exchange has indicated that she might be 'up for it'.  'No' screams the Tory press, claiming the fact that Brooks Newmark, the minister in question, was entrapped as the 'young woman' he assailed with a photo of his junk was in fact an undercover reporter, which apparently means that he wasn't really sexually harassing anyone. Except that he thought that the recipient of his picture was a woman, from which we can only conclude that Mr Newmark thinks that this represents acceptable sexual etiquette regarding virtual strangers of the opposite sex.  Now, I don't know about you, but I find that pretty shocking and I think that it absolutely is in the public interest that we should know that a government minister - the Minister for Civil Society, in this case - not only has such an attitude toward women, but also thinks it OK to engage in behaviour you would normally associate with a sex offender.

Let's face it, if it was some TV celebrity working for the BBC who had been caught out sending photos of his knob to young women, then the likes of the Daily Mail would be branding him a 'filthy sex pervert' and would have been screaming for the BBC to be shut down.  Just as they did with Jimmy Savile (who, let us not forget, was never actually convicted of anything). According to the right-wing press and their Tory back bencher pals, the BBC should be held entirely responsible for Savile's alleged sex crimes as they allegedly took place when he was in their employ and allegedly sometimes happened on BBC property.  So, surely the same criteria should apply in this case: Brooks Newmark was a member of the Conservative Party, a Tory MP and a minister in Cameron's Tory government when he was flashing his cock and balls around the ether, so surely the Conservative Party should be held responsible for his behaviour?  In fact, shouldn't they just be disbanded?  After all, they don't seem to have done anything about his unacceptable sexual shenanigans.  Oh sure, he's resigned as a minister, but he's still an MP representing the Tories in parliament, drawing a sizeable salary paid for by us taxpayers.  That's right, us taxpayers are subsidising a sex monster!  Let's face it, if he'd been caught waving his whanger at women on Clapham Common, he'd be labelled a flasher, charged with indecent assault and put on the sex offenders register,  But instead, he's still in parliament, paid for by Joe Taxpayer.

Kicking Cameron Up the Arse

When the dust has finally settled on that revolution I keep hoping for and our tanks are parked on Downing Street, I'd like to imagine that we'd finally be able to give David Cameron his just desserts.  I have no doubt that, under these circumstances, he'd be found cowering under the table in the cabinet room of Number Ten, or hiding behind his wife and children, begging for mercy.  But mercy is the one thing we must not show him.  Now, whilst one's first instinct would undoubtedly be to put the snivelling little Old Etonian git in front of a wall and shoot him, but this would be wrong.  Not just because I don't believe in the death penalty, either. No, I believe that, once the little despot is deposed, (and believe me, he'll have to be deposed s he's already shown that he'll try to rig the electoral process any way he can in order to stay in power), the best punishment for him will be public humiliation.  It's only just, as he and his government continue to humiliate tens of thousands of working class people every day, forcing them to jump through hoops in order to claim the benefits they are entitled to, then branding them fraudsters and layabouts because they have the misfortune to be unemployed.

Of course, the bastards argue, there are jobs out there, but these lazy benefit cheats have to be forced to take them.  Obviously they have to be forced, as these so-called 'jobs' are, in the main, zero hours, minimum wage indentured labour.  A modern serfdom, in effect.  These are 'jobs' which pay so poorly that those doing them are frequently forced to resort to using food banks.  Mind you, at least they pay something.  Unlike the 'work experience' many are sent on with well-known High Street firms, under threat of having their benefits stopped if they don't.  This really is slave labour.  A slave labour that we, as tax payers, subsidise, as, instead of having to pay wages, pension contributions, National Insurance and the like to actual employees, companies that already make millions of pounds worth of profits off of us consumers get workers whose benefits are paid by us.  Not that you'd know that any of this was going on if you'd watched the recent triumphalist Tory Party conference where, despite having failed to meet any of their economic targets, the likes of Cameron crowed about their 'success' and promised more spending cuts, more freezes on benefits and more tax cuts.  They clearly need to be taken down a peg or two.

Which brings us back to the humiliation of David Cameron when our brave revolutionary boys finally have him in their hands, post revolution.  Now, I'm not a violent man, but there are some people who make me so angry that I feel I could happily punch them in the face.  The thought of feeling their nose break beneath my knuckles, or of knocking out their teeth, gives me a momentary flash of satisfaction.  But a punch in the face just doesn't seem humiliating enough for the victim.  Besides, it is too crude, the action of a drunken street brawler rather than a calculated act of revenge.  Which is why I can't help but feel that what we will need to do is drag him out into the street and invite anyone who felt humiliated by the actions of Cameron's government, to give Dave a a good hard kick up the arse.  Just the one.  But all the kicks up the arse will be in public and televised live to the world.  Being kicked up the arse from one end of Downing Street to the other by what I'm sure Cameron would consider 'horrible oiks' would, I can't help but feel, be the most humiliating ting we could do to him.  So, if  the opportunity to kick Cameron up the arse isn't sufficient incentive to start a revolution, I don't know what is.