This is no shit Sherlock

“Poor devil!” [Stamford] said, commiseratingly, after he had listened to my Afghan War misfortunes. “What are you up to now?”
“Looking for lodgings,” I answered. “Trying to solve the problem as to whether it is possible to get comfortable rooms at a reasonable price.”
“That’s a strange thing,” remarked my companion; “you are the second man to-day that has used that expression to me.”
“And who was the first?” I asked.

~ A Study In Scarlet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887

Yes, it’s time I delved into this whole BBC does Sherlock thing and offered my two bob. I mean, I’ve done Doctor bloody Who to death, so now it’s time to move on. At least until Supernatural, Burn Notice or Doctor Who start up again proper…



So where do we start? How about… what went before? Yes, that sounds good.

First off, I’m a Jeremy Brett fan. Oh yes. I saw the new Guy Richie film, and yes, it was a rollicking good time, but it was someone else’s Holmes, someone else’s take on the books. And that’s ok - in my head, all three Holmes can co-exist side by side. It’s fine. I’m a sci-fi fan, it works.

However, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - Jeremy Brett was in fact the real Sherlock Holmes, but they just billed him as Jeremy Brett so no-one would know ITV (Granada, thank you arsey regionator) had nicked the TARDIS from the Beeb and transported the real Sherlock through Time to star in a series about himself. Yes, it’s all true. Watch the old series and you’ll see it too.

So anyway, I heard through Tinternet - and by that I mean I was dimly aware - that the Beeb had dusted Sherlock off and made a new series about him. I have to confess I wasn’t much bothered, and made no effort to watch it in any form. It was fine without me.

Then I went back to Blighty for Christmas and my lil sis gave me a DVD she’d recorded offa telly, containing all three episodes (at time of going to press) of the new series. When I got home again, jet-lag and good strong tea made me think I could watch the first episode from the luxury of my sofa. Not realising it was in fact ninety minutes and not the expected one hour, I sat through all of it, merrily tweeting away how great it was and how much awfully good fun it all seemed to be. I went to bed, started back at work the next day, and got on with life. A few days later, I watched the second part, and then the third. And then I put the disc on the shelf and didn’t think about it.

And yet… and yet… A few evenings later (jet-lag conquered), suddenly and blindingly I wished there were more, but five minutes of Sam-Winchestering Google told me there were no more. After exclaiming ‘Bugger, balls and bollocks!’, I went back to my sofa, pulled out the first episode, and watched it again - with friends.

And so, ineluctably, here we are. What did I make of it? Well then… It’s all new, obviously. Except it’s not. Messers Moffat and Gatiss have gone about this the right way - taking the characters and their details and not actually changing the broad strokes all that much. Moffat does a very good job of writing a script designed to stick to the original characters (and the original short, ‘A Study In Scarlet’) while bringing them to life at a modern pace. Much of the dialogue, at least to begin with, is comfortably familiar in its similarity, and the details of the people’s personal lives are consistent. We are introduced to Watson first of course - as it should be - and it’s through his eyes that we discover this bigger world as he gets sucked into, amongst other things, the weird and wonderful sitting room at 221B.

“Observation to me is second nature. You appeared to be surprised when I told you, on our first meeting, that you had come from Afghanistan.”
“You were told, no doubt.”
“Nothing of the sort. … The train of reasoning ran, ‘Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan.’”

~ A Study In Scarlet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887

Sherlock: “When I met for the first time yesterday and I asked you ‘Afghanistan or Iraq?’ you looked surprised.”
Watson: “Yes, how did you know?”
Sherlock: “I didn’t know, I saw. Your haircut, the way you hold yourself says military. Your conversation as you entered the room - ‘bit different from my day’ - said trained at Barts, so army doctor: obvious. Your face is tanned, but no tan above the wrists; you’d been abroad but not sunbathing. Your limp’s really bad when you walk but you don’t ask for a chair when you stand, like you’ve forgotten about it, so it’s at least partly psychosomatic, and says the original circumstances of the injury were traumatic; wounded in action then. Wounded in action? Suntan? Afghanistan or Iraq.”

Watson: “You said I had a therapist.”
Sherlock: “With a psychosomatic limp? Of course you’ve got a therapist.”

~ A Study In Pink, Stephen Moffat (BBC), 2010

One thing I do very much like about this new series are the moments where the actors are allowed to get their teeth into it. Martin Freeman is a funny man - because he’s normally the butt of the jokes, the straight man - the Everyman - who is instantly endearing and amusing when dropped into an alien (pardon the reference) or new environment - so as Watson finding out about Sherlock and his queer ways, he should be the same. But he isn’t. There are moments where, quite frankly, Watson seems so downtrodden and ready to hit something with his stick that I fear we’ll never see the poor man smile again. I particularly liked the moment where Mycroft is trying to pump him for information and he suddenly blurts ‘Who the Hell are you?’ before his manners return and he looks down. And again: the moment Sherlock is going off on one, demanding to know what people scream for when they think they’re dying, and Watson says - in a way everyone misinterprets as deadpan - ‘Please God, let me live’, and Sherlock replies ‘Use your imagination’… Of course, then you realise Watson is not taking the piss at all as he shoots back, with a very cold air of superior harrowing experience, ‘I don’t have to.’ It’s these moments that make me love Watson, side by side with moments of him saying ‘We can’t giggle; it’s a crime scene!’, and gems like ‘~~But he wasn't a very nice man. And quite frankly, a bloody awful cabbie.’



And so, then, to Sherlock. Who is this Benedict Cumberbatch and where did he come from? Never heard of the bloke - but he fits the bill. Stringy, pale, hair askew because who has time to keep the hansom clean?, breathlessly able to deliver lines so fast even Doctor Ten would have to concentrate to keep up… But is he as good as Jeremy Brett? He is. So is he a better Sherlock? No. He’s not better, he’s just different. Anyone who’s ever pondered the ‘better’ James Bond, Dax or Theta Sigma - or original Granada Watson - can relate.

The point is, you put these two actors together and you get some excellent scenes. The ‘dinner’ in the restaurant was just priceless. Entire inner monologues given away by the eyes, and some gurning David Tennant would have been proud of, and you don’t need dialogue so much as a wider lens. These two are brilliant in the same shot, and they certainly work well together as HLP.



The character of Sherlock is just the same. He has his nicotine patches instead of his pipes - hence the new ‘three pipe problem’, and he texts voraciously rather than stare out of the window for inspiration. But he still has his violin, still has his weird experiments (‘Are these human eyes in the microwave?’), and he still gets petulant when life ceases to stimulate him sufficiently. And he still loves it when Watson tells him how clever he is.

“My companion flushed up with pleasure at my words [of praise], and the earnest way in which I uttered them. I had already observed that he was as sensitive to flattery on the score of his art as any girl could be of her beauty.”

~ A Study In Scarlet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887

Watson: “That’s fantastic!”
Sherlock: “Do you know you do that out loud?”
Watson: “Sorry, I’ll shut up.”
Sherlock: “No, it’s… fine.”

~ A Study In Pink, Stephen Moffat (BBC), 2010

Is it me, or does Benedict Cumberbatch remind you of someone when he looks at the skull on the mantelpiece and says: “A friend of mine. Well I say ‘friend’…” For just a split second, it felt like the most understated impersonation of Brett I’d ever seen. I could be completely wrong, but on second viewing, it happens again. Just me, perhaps.

Speaking of which, quite ironically, there was a plethora of good one-liners in that first episode, and a whole host of excellent, sharp-witted scenes to boot.

Watson: “That… was… amazing.”
Sherlock: “Do you think so?”
Watson: “Of course it was. It was extraordinary. It was quite… extraordinary.”
Sherlock: “That’s not what people normally say.”
Watson: “What do they normally say?”
Sherlock: “Piss off.”


Watson: “That was ridiculous. It was the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever done!”
Sherlock: “You invaded Afghanistan.”
Watson: “That wasn’t just me.”


And I did like that they kept in references to darker, more dangerous recreational substances that may or may not have been in Sherlock’s possession at the time of Lestrade’s ‘drugs bust’. I hope they do continue to allude to his attempts to stave of the boredom with variations on a seven percent solution - or at least, not write out it out completely. Having re-read ‘The Sign of Four’ just recently, I prefer it left in, as it gives more insight to the entire problem he has just living in a normal world - being a higher-functioning sociopath.



So, Sherlock and Watson and Mycroft and Moriarty… Interesting enough. Speeding through to the third episode, it wasn’t my first choice for Moriarty, but if they were looking for someone completely unexpected and apparently ill-fitting, they found them. He makes an excellent Moriarty because he’s wrong. He shouldn’t be shorter and Irish and squeaky and off-kilter - but that’s what makes him believable (if he’s not pretending anyway at the time). Something in my head went ‘nah, look at him. You’d never think he was--. Oh. Right. Got it.’

Adaptations? Not quite. Using original works as springboards for more fleshed-out, more wrapped-up tales? Quite. I’m not going to go into how telly today needs more answers than works of short fiction published one hundred and twenty-four years ago (when that work of short fiction was nowhere near as complete as some people remember). I’m just going to say I liked the way they ‘used’ the ending of ‘A Study In Scarlett’, but didn’t. It translated very well and it bodes well for future endeavours. The other episodes I’m not too sure about, having not read those particular stories so many times, but for now, I’m quite happy with the ‘new’ Sherlock and I’m very happy to know, via Mark Gatiss himself on Twitter, that three more episodes are slated to begin shooting in May this year.



Now, where’s my ‘Oh what now? I’m in shock - look, I’ve got a blanket’ t-shirt? I can see I’m going to have to spend an evening on Cafepress.

Peach and lube, people. Peach and frelling lube.



Tags:
~ BBC ~ Sherlock ~ Sherlock Holmes ~ Martin Freeman ~ Benedict Cumberbatch ~ Stephen Moffat ~ Mike Gatiss

Christmas 2010 - Doctor Who style

So I was about to go off on one regarding the 2010 Doctor Who Christmas Special before - but ran out of space. Well, ran out of a will to put every single Doctor Who thought in one post, is more like it. Anyway, here we go - and yes, it may well be spoilery.

Danger! Danger! Spoilers, Will Robinson! Do not read this post if you have not yet seen the 2010 Christmas Special!



So, easy start then: I loved it. Not a lot could detract from the excitement and sheer whacky good fun of Eleven running up and down, breaking laws of being a Timelord and basically making Christmas a bloody good time on telly. I loved the fish, the timey-wimey slant, the little quirky jokes and the fact that it didn’t have a Hollywood ending. Woah, let’s back up and qualify all that.

Breaking Laws of Being a Timelord:

“Crossing into established events is strictly forbidden. Except for cheap tricks.”

Yes. Ten said it, all incarnations of the Doctor know it, but Eleven decides to conveniently subvert his own ideas of what’s ok and what’s not and simply go back and rewrite Kazran’s memory. Nice. He did it with style, to be sure, and no doubt he can justify this to himself by weighing up the amount of ripples made to the space-time continuum as a whole versus four thousand lives on a spaceship that hadn’t yet died (except, fourth-dimensionally speaking, they had already not yet will have died). Quick question - was it the 4,000-odd people on the ship, or the fact that his two friends were aboard - and he had put them there as part of some honeymoon thing? And I noticed he referred to the people on the spaceship. I think I’m right in saying not once did he say he wasn’t going to let the ship crash because his Companion(s) was/were on it. Hmm. Anyway, as a catalyst, the spaceship plot was a good idea - and it did keep Amy out of the way, so I was particularly glad about that. I think he gets away with it. (And I’m reliably informed that Amy and Rory in outfits was rather like Rodney and Cassandra in ‘Only Fools And Horses’.)

Fish:

“It’s going to eat us!”
“Well perhaps we’ll eat it - but I don’t like the odds!”

From fish using fog to swim in the air, to the female shark out to lunch, it was all typical Doctor Who - take the norm and skew it just enough to make it cool, and slap on some skience to make it passably believable. Or, in a word, ace. We know fish, we know sharks, we can relate to them. Put them in the hands of Stephen Moffat and you get anarchy in the physics classroom that amounts to excellence in the ideas department. Weaving all that around the delta-wave patterns of some bird singing her Welsh heart out and you have a heart-warming tale of consideration. But not too thickly spread. Again, good stuff.

Dialogue:

“Father Christmas. Santa Claus. Or, as I’ve always known him: Jeff.”

Oh, it was rich. It was snappy. It was Stephen Moffat writing Eleven at his best - respectively. Just sheer bloody fun. I doubt there was a sentence in there that Mr Moffat didn’t pore over and adjust twenty times to make it just that little bit more amusing (or was gazumped by Matt Smith ad-libbing, perhaps). As a script, it was genius. As a mechanism to show how fab the Doctor can be when he’s not hindered by an annoying Companion, it did very, very well. No words can describe how much fun it is to listen to Matt Smith going off on one as if he’s the victim of the universe’s largest sugar rush, and yet coming off like some absent-minded professor who’s just dying to show something fab to his class because they’ll like it. Some of my favourite lines:

“A big flashy-lighty thing, that’s what brought me here. Big flashy-lighty things have got me written all over them. Well actually, give me Time. And a crayon.”

Doctor: “Clever old Mrs Manto - she only went and won the lottery.”
Kazran: “There isn’t any lottery.”
Doctor: “I know! What a woman!”

“Do you know, there’s a thing called a Face Spider. It’s just like a tiny baby’s head with spider legs and it specifically evolved to scuttle up the backs of bedroom cupboards. Which… yeah, I probably shouldn’t have mentioned.”

And then the follow-up gag which wins above all others, simply for the way Matt Smith delivers the fatal line:

Kazran: “Are there any Face Spiders in here?”
Doctor: “Nah, not at this time of night. They’ll all be sleeping in your mattress.”

And then there was the one that made me go out and make a t-shirt because I loved it so much:

“What do you call it if you don’t have any feet… and you’re taking a run-up?”

And little in-jokes, perhaps regarding a certain other Timelord bird (Timelady?):

Kazran: “I kiss her now?”
Doctor: “Trust me, it’s this or go to you room and design a new kind of screwdriver. Don’t make my mistakes.”

Even the lines that were perfectly ordinary get turned into a prompt for out-and-out laughter when they are spewed from the Doctor’s mouth:

“Marilyn! Get your coat!”

Timey-wimey:

“People think that Time is a linear progression from one thing to another, when in fact it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, uhm, stuff.”

Hard to forget those words. Said by Ten, written by Stephen Moffat. Of course. Which is what Stephen Moffat does best - playing with Time. He can jump backwards and forwards, he can write stories that rely on the wibbly-wobbliness of Time to work - with his stories, Time isn’t so much a backdrop for the Doctor, it’s another character in the play. As it should be, with someone who fannies about in the fourth dimension for fun. So many of the Doctor’s stories forget he’s a time traveller, once the actual landing has taken place. It’s a real treat to get Moffat screwing with timelines and using Time to the story’s advantage, and I hope he has more of these ideas on his laptop.

This is not the Hollywood ending you’re looking for:

The Doctor let her die. He did. Because there was nothing he could do? No - he didn’t even ask, didn’t even check. Because it was the right thing to do? Perhaps. From someone’s point of view, somewhere. Then again, ‘many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.’ (Thanks, Ben.) We’ll never know exactly why he didn’t bother to try and help Abigail - but perhaps we don’t need to. It’s One Of Those Times. It needed to be left. And anyway, he gave her a good way to go. How many other people can get back in touch with a very close friend to ride a shark-cab on their last day? Not bad.

I think I’m all done. (Except for - woah woah woah, Eleven - isomorphic controls? Didn't the Master use them on his laser screwdriver? Just asking...) All I can say is, this was a great episode and it more than made up for the rather lacking latter half of series five. I can only hope that series six is as good.

That’s shallot. Onion. I’m off. Probably back soon in my usual vitriolic mood.

But for now - peach and lube, people. Peach and frelling lube.



Tags:
~ Doctor Who ~ BBC ~ David Tennant ~ Matt Smith ~ Stephen Moffat

Matt Smith - the ultimate weigh-in!


Yes, it’s about time I went off on one regarding Matt Smith and Doctor bloody Who in general. As you’re probably aware, I thought Five was my Doctor (blame my childhood) until David Tennant came along. I kind of like Christopher Eccleston, but seeing as he’s my uncle in disguise, I can’t watch him without waiting for him to say ‘Aliens? What a load of bollocks’, etc. Kind of like watching Sean Bean in an American film and finding he breaks the spell of disbelief - because he’s proper English and just not buying into any hype or shite about magical stuff. Ahem.

Anyway, David Tennant was huge for me. Wait, let me rephrase that - David Tennant was a bloody excellent Doctor Ten. He was everything he needed to be and more - and it was amazing to watch him go through the angst and cheeky fun. Just fucking ace.

So when it was announced he was leaving, I was a little upset. But then, all good things come to an end - and, considering he is the Doctor and he does travel in time and space, technically Ten could always be riding around somewhere. I mean, just because he’s gone in his personal timeline, doesn’t mean he’s not going to show up in ours. He might pop up next year for the Olympics, for example.

Anyway - Matt Smith. So he turned up yelling ‘Geronimo!’ (worst catch-phrase ever) and promptly grew a bowtie and an Old Skool Doctor quirkiness. Not in the same way that David Tennant is quirky, but definitely Keith-Richards-Patrick-Troughton-drunken-master quirky fun. And he can deliver lines. Just the way he gave us ‘Amelia… Pond’ had me in stitches, and his all-elbows finnicky-fingers, coupled with his manic gibbering that carefully conceals his real agenda, had me intrigued. Where Doctor Ten would bluster and confidently gabble his way past people with facts and gumption, Eleven seems to apologetically squeak through by being a thousand times more lost than anyone else could ever hope to be. And it works. And so, too, do his elbows.

I grew to like Matt Smith, and he’s now eclipsed Five as my second favourite Doctor. He may never overtake Ten, but that’s nothing to be ashamed of.

Unfortunately, as writers had their turn at series five, some episodes fell short of the usual Doctor-story standard - most notably ‘The Vampires of Venice’, a woefully lacking affair (sorry, Toby Whithouse, if they screwed with your script). In fact, I only kept about five of the series’ episodes to watch again. The absolute stand-out amazing wonder for me was ‘The Lodger’, where Eleven takes it upon himself to lodge in Matey-From-Gavin-And-Stacey’s spare room and be as Doctorish as he possibly can. Which was ace. The script was sharp, the fun and adventure was back, but - dare I admit it - the reason it was so good was because Amy was somewhere else.

When little Amelia Pond first sat on the suitcase waiting for her raggedy Doctor, I liked the little girl. Which is a lot, coming from me. I teach small kids and I scrub myself with Dettol and a wire brush afterwards, so me appreciating a monster like that was a big thing. And then she grew up, and after the first few episodes she began to get on my nerves just a little. Then she did the Predictable and Stupid Move and I threw my hands in the air. As usual, the female Companion has to throw herself at the Doctor, as if (1) he would seriously go for an alien something less than 1/40th his age, and (2) that was anything to do with why he brought her along in the first place. I mean, come on, people - I’ve said it before and I’ve said it again. Why does the (New Who) Companion always have to fall in luuuurve with the Doctor? Why is it never his TARDIS, or just the life of travelling with him? That was why I loved Donna Noble so much - she was there for the fun, not some crappy idea of alien romance. Yet another Companion with a crush on the Doctor? Oh puh-leaze.

For me, the stories were a little ho-hum but I could have lived with that if only Amy weren’t being annoying in nearly every scene she was in. I’m not saying the actress didn’t do a good job - I’m sure I’d like her in anything else she does - but the character of Amy, and that again everything revolved around the Companion as we got swept along to the series finale, kind of got a little old and tired before we’d even got there. They screwed over Donna so badly it nearly made my head explode, and then we get RTD going batshit-desperate and throwing everything he had at the Regeneration Finale. He was allowed to do that, of course he was - it was his show. If he wanted balls-to-the-wall Tinkerbell Jesus bollocks going on, then fine. (But perhaps, a year later, if he’d seen the season five finale of Supernatural, he might have appreciated how you can finish a series, a season, and even a five-year-arc without needing to go batshit-crazypants-overboard on jamming in too much story, cutesy, angst or even drah-ma. Just saying.)

Anyway, back to Matt Smith. He’s ace. He’s a great Eleven. I just hope he stays for a few more years and we get more Stephen Moffat and Gareth Roberts scripts. Which brings me to Stephen Moffat. New showrunner, new BMOC - apparently. And yet, he ‘joked’ about being ‘allowed’ to write the Christmas 2010 special. Well if you value your Doctor Who franchise and want to keep it going, You People at the Beeb, you’ll let Mr Moffat write 90% of series six, or there may be a tad fewer viewers bothering to tune in. ‘The Eleventh Hour’ (pretty damn good) and ‘The Beast Below’ (also pretty damn good) were written by Stephen Moffat, and ‘Victory of the Daleks’ was brought to us by Mark Gatiss (now more commonly known as Mycroft Holmes and co-creator/writer, along with Stephen Moffat, of the achingly excellent Sherlock mini-mini-series - but more on that another day). All good episodes. ‘The Time of Angels’ and ‘Flesh and Stone’, the return of the ridiculously successful Weeping Angels monsters from series three, were pretty good episodes but Amy was already becoming very annoying for me. ‘Vampires of Venice’ was, as I’ve already said, weak, and ‘Amy’s Choice’ was about as much fun as toothache and pretty much the low point of the series. (Sorry, Simon Nye - just not my thing.)

‘The Hungry Earth’ and ‘Cold Blood’ two-parter was pretty good - very Doctor Who in its aliens and mysteries and families and people trying not to be people by doing exactly what the Doctor told them not to. Good performances and a pretty good script. I liked Meera Syal and thought she could have replaced Amy in the TARDIS. But that’s just me.

‘Vincent and the Doctor’ had all the hallmarks of a great episode and it delivered on many levels - not surprisingly, as it was written by Richard Curtis. He hasn’t lost it. But the next episode, ‘The Lodger’, is my all-time favourite Doctor Eleven episode - I think. Thank you thank you thank you, Gareth Roberts. He also gave us ‘The Shakespeare Code’ from series three, and ‘The Unicorn And The Wasp’ from series four. His only slight bump was ‘Planet of the Dead’, but that’s allowed.

Anyway, from there we went straight into the two-part series finale, ‘The Pandorica Opens’ and ‘The Big Bang’. As I remember it, I found the idea of Evil League of Evil, Doctor Who style, ensnaring the Doctor in his own private prison refreshing and different. It made sense once you thought back, and it was fun to see so many villains sharing the screen. Let’s not forget, we have shiny new Proper Daleks again now, and the host of other bad guys just made me titter. It was good Saturday night telly. ‘The Big Bang’, and again, everything hinging on Amy, was a bit of a strain for me, but it did end the series ok.

What I’ve learnt from this is that all episodes are passable when Amy is elsewhere (although bumbling Rory would get annoying if there were no-one more annoying to distract me), and Stephen Moffat writes Doctor Eleven better that anyone else alive. Which brings me to the Christmas 2010 special.

Or it would do, if I didn’t realise this has already been about 1,000 words too long. So I’ll say thanks for bothering to reach this far, and I’ll be back very soon with my take on the Christmas 2010 special. Hopefully, some time before Christmas 2011.

Peach and lube, people.

Tags:
~ Doctor Who ~ BBC ~ David Tennant ~ Matt Smith ~ Stephen Moffat

2011, and all that that means

‘… and a place in the winter, for Di-hig-nity...’

It’s been weird this year, so far. I’ve not been doing the usual things I do, and yet the more things have changed, the more they’ve stayed the same.

I went to Blighty for the holidays. I never do that. I avoid England because there’s nothing to see there. There are people, granted, but I know most of the places and, let’s be honest, I’m not going there to sight-see, am I? And the places - I know them but they’ve changed. They look the same on the surface, but they’re nothing like they used to be. But then again, neither are the people.

I bought a computer. Last time I did that was about three years ago (not counting 1812, my failed ninja project). Still got the three-year-old. Jarvis, my ever-faithful iMac, now has a fellow clan member in the form of Billy, my eleven inch MacBook Air. They get along fine via Bluetooth and memory stick, and between them they take up most of my time. Like I said, things stay the same.

… In that they change. Now, instead of freezing my arse off in my small room (that belongs to Jarvis), I can be found on my sofa, using Billy to read and re-read stuff I’ve written. In fact, Billy has kind of become my third hand, seeing as he’s always attached to my original two. Even JT, my iPhone 4, is starting to give him shifty, possessive looks. She’ll get over it, I know. After all, PCCW can’t make the wi-fi modem work, so only Jarvis is hooked up to (cabled) Tinternet right now. All Billy can do is look on with wistful sighs as I shut him down to go use Jarvis for all Tinternet shite. It’s a shame, but then, Jarvis is quicker, more powerful and pretty much the real brain in my house flat, so it’s only right. And he’s where I’ve spent hours on Photoshop - mostly swearing and cursing at the bloody thing crashing or just plain refusing to work on me. Yes, the ‘known issue’ of Photoshop Elements 8 not letting Mac users change the frame delay on animated gifs is more than a little annoying. So is its refusal to let me resize or rotate layers without first shifting them in some direction by a few pixels. There is a lesson in all this: why did I bother paying for a legitimate version of PE8 when I should have stuck with my cracked, pirated version of CS4 that always worked? Ah well. I shan’t be wasting my money on another Photoshop product. Adobe fall into the Ben Kenobi category of effective teaching styles.

Cafepress. They’ve also incurred my wrath this afternoon - trying to work out why products don’t show up in your own shop is just a little vexing, especially when you’ve read the ‘help’ pages that don’t seem to pertain to your version of a shop. Then again, they were really fast (a matter of hours) in answering my direct e-mail for help. If only the information they e-mailed me were available in the help section to begin with, they wouldn’t get so many mails bitching about the same subject - I’m willing to bet. Still, mystery solved. It’s all sorted, and a lot more quickly than I’d anticipated. Go team Cafepress.

So I sat on the sofa tonight - oh alright, lounged on the sofa - and watched some telly via Billy and a Moshi Mini Display Port to HDMI adapter, and my nice big telly, Tosh (you get to guess what make she is). And the funny thing was, the two programmes I watched were both from my secondary school years. First was ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’, with the real, actual Holmes playing himself. For some reason, no-one was supposed to know, so they billed him as Jeremy Brett and kept up the pretence for the entire series. Granada tried very hard to fool people into thinking they hadn’t simply borrowed the TARDIS from the Beeb and whisked him forward in time to play himself, but I saw the signs and I’ve witnessed his little slips with my own eyes - gotcha, Mr Holmes. But don’t worry; when I tell people this they don’t believe me, and simply assume I’ve been on the vodka.

Which is odd, because I haven’t been. Been out to dinner with friends, and haven’t actually felt like drinking. Still haven’t been to a single pub quiz this year, and I’m getting withdrawal symptoms. Must make it next week.

Anyway, point was (when I can get to it), the other show was ‘The Pretender’. Used to love it back in the day, and now I’m watching it again and wondering how I forgot so much. Mostly to do with the fact that, while Jarod is perfectly innocent and lovely (in a Sam Tyler kind of way, meaning I could never give him one), he’s also a complete fucking psycho whose ee-vil face is proper fru-its of the dev-il and he honestly can kill people with his brain - it’s just that he wants to torture them by snaring them in some overly-elaborate yet excruciatingly agonising plan mirroring their own misdeed. He’s ace. And then I look at the fact that I’m watching both TV series via a cable sticking out of a brand spanking new MacBook, and marvel at the distance and time between now and when I first saw them, live on real telly. So much has happened in the time that feels so long, that I really have to just stop and think about it, mentally pick through all the highs and lows. And then I realise there’s just too much and I have to say ‘fuck it’ and leave it alone. Such is the way of all things memory.

Cleverest IT Guy password-cracked some old - nay, fucking ancient - Word files of mine this week, and I found the Holy Grail of Where It All Began, my own original book-wise. All the facts I thought I had in my head, all the back-story and history I thought existed nowhere but my own little nutshell of a brain, had actually been set down on virtual paper by me a over a decade ago. Reading them again was a weird experience; the sentences were mine, the characters remarkably unchanged from when I turned them into real people in the latter half of 2010, the storylines exactly as I knew the foundation to unfold. But I don’t remember having written it down.

Perhaps, at the time, writing wasn’t important in the Grand Scheme of Things. Perhaps, at that time, I had a life and other things that kept me occupied. Which means I was writing, but not really obsessing over it.

How things have changed. I coast along in my job - so that I can concentrate on writing when I get home. I get home late Saturday night but stay up later - so that I can read through what I’ve written in the week. I own an iMac and a MacBook - so I can use MacSpeech Dictate to get things down. It’s fair to say that writing is pretty much my obsession, and even distractions like TV shows and work won’t always be in the way. And so it goes.

And so do I. This post, my first for 2011, has been longer than I’d anticipated. I was supposed to say ‘oh, nearly broke my foot but we’ll find out if it’s just a sprain when I’ve had an X-ray later this week’, but obviously I needed to get a few things off my chest first.

So that, my friends, is all the news that’s fit to print. At least for now. Soopytwist.

Tags:
~ Sherlock Holmes ~ The Pretender ~ England ~ iMac ~ MacBook Air ~ writing