Tuesday 5 January 2010

‘The Day of The Triffids’ was one of the Christmas shows that the BBC promised. The BBC, it has to be said, are usually very good with their novel adaptations. Their 1981 Day of The Triffids is still regarded as a classic, and is available on DVD, and although the low-tech triffids now seem a tad unrealistic to some, the show was carried by pace and drama and varied little from the original novel.
My fears began when a magazine promised the sight of ‘twenty-foot carnivorous plants rampaging across Britain’. Mmmmm.
It is a sad fact of life that Science Fiction novels, no matter what their historical or literary merit, are never treated with the same respect as their mainstream counterparts. One would never imagine for instance, that a BBC producer would suggest updating ‘Pride and Prejudice’ to the Noughties, or setting ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ in Thatcher’s blighted Britain of the Nineteen Eighties.
Genre novels, however, are fair game for the most annoying of writers to ‘improve’, and usually writers who have only a cursory acquaintance with SF. One only has to look at the recent cinematic versions of ‘The Time Machine’ or ‘War of The Worlds’ to understand the extent of the travesties that result from such decisions.
One would have thought that the BBC would know better. Unfortunately, it seems not.
Yes, ‘Day of The Triffids’ has been set in the present day and the basic framework of the novel has been retained, although the spirit and indeed, the basic point of the novel have been completely lost.
In the original, the triffids were a genetically engineered species some of whose seeds were stolen. The plane in which the seeds were being carried was shot down, but in the process, the box was shattered, and the triffid seeds scattered to the far winds. Thus, not long afterwards, strange plants begin growing across the world, and it is discovered that they produce a very fine oil, but also, that they can walk, on three rudimentary rootlike feet and can also kill, via a stinger from the large lilylike orifice at the top of their stalk. People find that the stinger can be docked and many people keep triffids in their gardens. Undocked species are kept in farms and their oil harvested.
Dr Bill Masen was stung as a child and so has a fascination with the creatures, and has become a scientist researching the beasties.
In the new version, triffids are a natural species, originating from Africa where Masen’s parents were studying them. Masen’s mother was killed by a triffid and his father genetically engineered the plants to produce the oil which replaced carbon fuels.
Ridiculous premise 1: No one, it seems, knows what triffids look like, since they are locked away in farms.
Ridiculous premise 2: The triffids are voraciously carnivorous which begs the question ‘What are they being fed on, in order to produce the environmentally sound oil?’
Ridiculous premise 3: The triffids have prehensile roots which allow them to grip humans so tightly, they cannot break free.
One of the factors of the original novel, which is what makes the story so chilling, is that the triffids are biologically feasible, and had become such a part of the background of our society that we had become used to them. Thus, when the catastrophe occurs (again, the writers felt it important to take it upon themselves to change the meteor showers to a solar flare which again ruins one of the premises of the novel) the sighted survivors find it hard initially to take Masen seriously when he maintains that triffids will become a serious danger.
And, disappointingly, the much-hyped CGI triffids were a bit of a laughable anticlimax. Looking rather like a cross between an aloe vera plant and a Harry Potter dementor being pushed along on castors the triffids are rather too slow to be taken seriously. Again, returning to the original novel, the triffids could work up a bit of speed when travelling in open country and were seen worrying a flock of sheep across a field at one point.
These triffids have all the lumbering urgency of a Nineteen Thirties mummy.
One imagines that the casting of Jason Priestley as Coker was in an attempt to sell the mini-series to the US, since the assumption seems to be that Americans will not watch anything that does not contain a home-grown accent somewhere.
The most glaring annoyance however, is the repeated scenes of Masen’s memories of Africa and his mother’s death, in which he is presented with a wooden tribal mask.
Now, one has to explain that, in both versions, Masen is hospitalised having been stung in the eyes with triffid venom. The hospital consultant explains that Masen has a fifty/fifty chance of regaining his sight.
At the denouement, which is similar to the novel in that the survivors are in a farmhouse surrounded by triffids, Masen suddenly picks up the African mask and remembers how he can escape from the triffids.
The answer is, bafflingly, illogically and really annoyingly, that the family drip triffid poison into their eyes in order to fool the triffids into thinking they’d been stung already. How will they not be poisoned? The idea is simply ludicrous, as is the idea that Masen has only just remembered that this is what an African native did to him when he was a child to lead him past the local triffids.
You should hang your heads in shame, BBC, at wasting money on such a travesty.

Tuesday 15 December 2009

The X-Factor is all over for another year, for which I’m quietly grateful, since it means that the secret government bunker operatives will have to find a new topic of discussion.
The Sun today is proclaiming that the winner, Geordie Jo McElderry, is a raving heterosexual. This has come as something of a shock to me. I hadn’t realised that my Gaydar was so askew. How could I have been so wrong?

Monday 7 December 2009

Argos saw fit to answer my prayers and Danyl was sent back to the land of the strange big-eyed folk. It only struck me today that they must be using his relatives in that TV ad where the police spot drug users by their uncannily huge eyes.

Saturday 5 December 2009

My prayers to Argos, the God of Catalogue Shopping, seem to have been answered of late. I prayed that the ghastly Jedward would be thrown off X-Factor, and thrown off they were. May they be sent back to Dublin obscurity where the only words anyone will hear out of their rosy-cheeked annoying faces again is ‘Do You Want Fries With That?’
This week, my X-Factor prayers are that Danyl will go. I’m not sure if it is his goofy grin or his creepy manga eyes, but there is something about him that makes me feel very uneasy.
In terms of pure performance, he cannot be faulted, and therein lies my problem. His performance is always good, but he hasn’t improved any since the start of the series, and, quite honestly, I get no emotion from him. I’m sure he would be excellent in stage musicals, but as a singer, he leaves me cold.
We must be getting old as we had to have a man round to fix our computer today. He’s sorted it out and installed Windows 7.

Friday 4 December 2009

I had one of my rare days off today from the secret government bunker, and went in to an ‘adult shop’ which had appeared unaccountably in Paddington. I wasn’t planning to buy anything. I was just curious as to what sort of things might be on sale.
DVD porn titles are getting no better. The other week, in the Celebrity Sauna, I was treated to the sight of a DVD called ‘Chinese C**k Sucking Soldier Boys’
I had thought the shop could not better this but as soon as I walked in I was greeted with the sight of ‘Even Grandma Loves Black C**k’.
I imagine she does. You don’t get that sort of thing in HMV.

Monday 16 November 2009

Currently, I am interested in the potential for surrealist expression with digital cameras. Certainly it has become far easier to create photographic deceptions (for want of a better word) lately and I have already created some composite images which, at first glance at least, would pass as a single shot photograph.
These days, without the time-intensive practice of developing film and subsequently the full darkroom process, one can view one’s images in-camera and, in tandem with Photoshop or one of the many other photographic software packages available, manipulate the image endlessly with a high degree of sophistication.
My previous experience of photosurrealism was, back in the days of SLRs and real film, the random effects of double exposures. This was, for me anyway, achieved by making a mark on the film when it is first loaded in the camera which matches to a corresponding mark in the camera body. Pictures are taken at half the estimated normal exposure. When the film is used up, one rewinds the film, but not completely. If you did rewind it completely, I devised a method of retrieving the end by sticking a piece of double sided tape on a card and poking it into the film cartridge.
The sellotape latches on to the surface of the film and, with some patience, the end can be drawn out.
Then one reloads the same film in the camera, matching up the marks so that the exposed frames match up to the overlaid exposed images and again are taken at half the usual exposure.
The results are variable but often very interesting, especially if you mix for instance, portraits with landscapes or close-ups of still life with a mass of vegetation.
Later I did some photoshop collage illustrations for the magazine The Third Alternative, most of which had a surrealist edge.
Now, I’m finding that the very act of subverting reality by mixing things up unobtrusively, rather than obviously, is interesting me greatly. I have photographed people in the street, used photographs of people I’ve met on the internet and combined them to produce an image which could have been shot as regular image, but is a situation which has never happened.
In one of these, I attached a friend’s head to the body of a man I shot in Shepherds Bush, and placed this chimera on the platform of my local tube station.
It looks realistic enough, but what I like is that there is something ‘not quite right’ about these pictures, something which disturbs the mind.

Saturday 7 November 2009

I dreamt that an angel
Glad Tidings did bring.
God was sending down Elvis
and taking back Sting.


The X-Factor has caused something of a furore this year which began with Louis Walsh’s bizarre choice of freak show twins John and Edward (or Jedward, as they are now known in the popular press) as one of his finalists. I suspect, from the quality of groups that got through boot camp, and the fact that three individual entrants had to be virtually pressganged into forming a girl group, that groups of a certain calibre were in very short supply. However, this doesn’t excuse Louis’s choice. Even in a sixth form end of term show these Leprechauns of the Apocalypse would be hard put to have got through the audition.
Get through they did though, and seem to have taken the nation by storm, since people seem determined to keep them in the show, no doubt through some ghoulish sense of fascination at seeing two eighteen year olds with hairstyles that went out with Split Enz, jumping around the stage, singing out of time and out of tune and employing cringeworthy inappropriate dialogue between verses.
‘Oooh Edward, I’m so scared!’ whimpered John as they paused during their demolition of the Ghostbusters song this week.
Now, there have been differences in the format of X-Factor this year, which may explain something about the bizarre voting patterns we have experienced.
In previous years, the shows have been split into two over a Saturday night, and voters are given an hour or so to ring in, before there is a showdown of the least popular two in the second show.
This year, the showdown has been moved to Sunday evening, which gives ITV and Simon Cowell far more revenue from phone-ins, but also gives the opportunity to vote to those who previously would not have done so. I suspect there is a subversive element in Britain who are ringing in for Jedward just to buck the trend and demonstrate the size of the creative vacuum in which this show exists. Otherwise I can only blame the popularity of Jedward on backward children and special needs people with access to mobile phones.
Sting, of all people, has criticised the show this week. I don’t often hold with the opinions of Sting, and occasionally wish he would go off and play with his lute and leave the rest of us be, but this week he proclaimed (sometime after his dinner with Lucian Freud) that The X-Factor has put British music back by decades.
I tend to agree.