Catch-up TV Triple- Spooks and the Smiley series- why le Carré is wrong to snub the show so.

Spooks finished this weekend, culminating a storyline of intrigue, subverted Cold War tradition, intelligence and action with an episode which drew on double-takes and the embittering of those involved to deliver a stunning, intelligent and un-secondguessable outcome.

Le Carré vocally derided the show about a month ago as juvenile and not at all like the intelligence services that he depicts in his fiction or that he was a part of professionally.

Following on in the vein of arguing against Margaret Atwood's ill-informed assessment of science fiction and attempt to redefine it so she could categorise her work as realist, literary fiction, I'm inclined to disagree with le Carré's assessment of Spooks. I'm also inclined to have a bit of a rant here discussion over just what is so different, in his eyes, between the popular show and the popular books, stopping off at a little point wondering why yet another author is so disinclined to be associated with a sub-genre of entertaining fiction and wants, instead, to be revered as the ultimate high brow incarnation of that sub-genre to the point where it is absorbed into the literary fiction which is all that is worthy of being read in the author's mind.

Catch-up TV Triple- Too soon for a storytelling? Biopics on 20th century talents

Why biopic recent history to the point where the character or focal personae are still alive? I recently saw Frost/ Nixon and, more recently, Holy Flying Circus. I've also seen the original programmes of Frost interviewing Nixon and pretty much all of Python that's available. It made me start thinking- is either film worth doing? If so, what's the point in them changing things?

I'll say this- like with so many of my posts, this isn't going to have a definitive answer. To the point where I've actually said as much before we go on.

Dramatic licence and creative adaptation are all well and good. But when it comes to Frank Langella shouting "When the president does it, it's not illegal" while the real Nixon merely stated it as quiet fact in the true interview, all for the purposes of a crescendo, a turning of the tables in the dramatised debate, is it really worth it? If you want that, then have it. But make a political drama, write a new story, in which such an event occurs. Don't change history. More importantly, don't change what was a great, subtle moment in the undoing of Nixon by Frost. It cheapens the very interview it was inspired by.

It was a similar affair, but much more widely and liberally apportioned, with Holy Flying Circus. This 'dramatic re-telling', as it was marketed, of the furore around The Life of Brian felt as though it was trying too hard to be Python-esque in the weird and whacky but organic way that they were, in the same way that Eoin Colfer's And Another Thing tried to hard to capture the absurd humour of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Trilogy (of Five). The end result was something forced, a bit of a mess.

Catch-up TV Triple- Is it me, or are House and HIMYM losing their edge?

Okay. It's a definite "yes" that HIMYM is not the show it was for, arguably, the first three series of its run. It's dipped, the way Friends did, the way Scrubs did, but this time I don't think it's going to "pull a Scrubs" and haul it back for a good couple of series to finish it all (the reboot-esque series nine doesn't count). But having tried to keep an open mind as the sitcom opened onto its seventh series that it might rally, its only dropped further. The inclusion of Kal Penn as main character Robin Scherbatsky's therapist-cum-boyfriend Kevin is frankly appalling. Overacting masterclasses could be run by him, as evidenced by his delivery of almost every 'comedy' line he has, the pinnacle of which has to be "Without laptops". And this reaction.

Sunday Evening Reads- The Deep Range

This week, a bit more on time than last week's idiocy- and oversight-delayed Smiley's People review, some thoughts on The Deep Range by Arthur C. Clarke.

Really, it's a rubbish title. As Clarke's titles go, this describes very little of what the book holds- 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rendezvous With Rama, they both encapsulate the story within them, the concept. With The Deep Range, Clarke misses most of what happens, and doesn't bookend the story inside; that, though, is probably because for once he isnt writing a high-concept populated by machinery masquerading as character. For once, he manages a story, with emotions, fleshed-out characters, not just ciphers and types used to illustrate the alienness of the story's focus.

Passing Comment- Vincent Tabak and Jo Yeates

Oh good. So once again, Media on murderer Wham! home some point or other. Altogether now- "Last Christmas a girl was murdered, and the very next day the papers had their say". Remember this real-life audience participation murder mystery? It seems the media aren't finished with it yet.

I thought all of the really morbid "come and watch with us" stuff had finished. Not so. I'm looking at you, BBC.

How sensationalist can you get? With a headline like Vincent Tabak 'viewed violent web porn' it's really going to avoid the whole culture of trial by media, isn't it? That helps, honestly, it really helps.

Graphic Novel Review- John Constantine, Hellblazer: Scab

This week, time for something completely different- Vertigo Comics's John Constantine, Hellblazer: Scab, written by Peter Milligan and illustrated by Giuseppe Camuncoli and Stefano Landini (Scab arc), and Goran Sudzuka and Rodney Ramos (Regeneration arc). It also features the very short story The Curse of Christmas, which Eddie Campbell (who most sites cannot mention without From Hell coming up- has he done anything else?) illustrated for Milligan.

As with many of the reviews I've looked at this evening for Scab, to see what other people thought of it, this wouldn't have been a graphic novel Id have thought of looking at. I'm told it collects the issues at the beginning of Peter Milligan's tenure overseeing the Hellblazer title, which is neither here nor there for me, but I had been meaning to get into the Constantine world for a while- so what with it being the Hellblazer title the public library have here I thought I'd give it a whirl.

Aside from an awareness of John Constantine being a Brit, a Scouser, gritty, a smoker and a walker of the line between urban realism and demons, magic and curses, and the general nerd knowledge, coming with being a film geek and frequenter of the internet, that Hollywood screwed up the whole thing with Keanu 'Stoneface' Reeves and the abominable 2005 flick Constantine, this was my first foray into his story. It was a mixed experience.

Sunday Evening Reads- Smiley's People

Right, I'm sorry this has gone up on a Monday evening instead of a Sunday, as it should be- truth be told I committed a brilliant bit of idiocy yesterday and, after piling in all the necessary HTML for links and shiz, previewing and re-previewing, I left this review sat as a draft. Then I went to bed, went to work, and came back to realise that far from being published where it could only be seen by the wayward, the confused and the imaginary people that make up my readers, it was in fact buried in the bowels of Blogspot, where it could never be seen by anyone. So sorry about that, senior moments get at even the most youthful 21-year-olds. Here you go.

This week we're I'm looking at the third in John Le Carré's Karla trilogy, Smiley's People.

Following last week's discovery of the minimalist, similar-to-sketching style with which Hemingway wrote A Farewell to Arms it's revealing to return to Le Carre's portrayal of the eponymous Smiley, written in a similarly muted manner. The novel itself airs on the descriptive and possesses a certain flair, too much so to be compared to Hemingway, but the key to Smiley's People, as is true of both the prequels to it, is the way in which Smiley is written. You have to read him as though you are in the room with him, each little tic, gesture or look that Smiley gives, or the absence of them and the stillness of the passive listener, has to be taken on board.

Passing Comment: Dale Farm

Okay, I'm tired and still have a fair few things to do before bed and getting up to go to work again tomorrow, so I haven't the energy to go into a full-blown serious post about news stories, about which I have quite a bit to say but most of it is boring guff. Which struck me with a brilliant idea. I'll hit it at a glance like a branch and see what conkers, startled birds and dead spiders fall out, in a section entitled Passing Comment- because, obviously, it's a hilarious pun lightning-bolted into my brain by inspiration. You know, because I'll be making a comment, but it will be fleeting...? Never mind.

Topic of the day? Dale Farm.

I've followed this loosely in the news. I knew it was happening. Nothing seemed hugely odd about it. I flicked through this slideshow just now. Flick through it now, before reading on. Done that?

Graphic Novel Review- The Dark Knight Returns

The Dark Knight Returns, written by Frank Miller and pencilled by him, too.

In short, I love it. But there are some things I could stand to see improved. Or, you know, done differently.

Finally- we might have lift off.

Or at least, a countdown isn't far off as ignition lights the boosters.

Really nothing to say here except that you can find out why the links below are relevant in these typings, where I have bemoaned at length a great many things space- and space program-related.

NASA and Virgin Galactic discuss collaboration on a new model of spacecraft, fuelling my hopes (and those of many around the interweb) that privatised space programsaren't an impossibility.

The world's first (of, hopefully, many) commercial spaceport opens.

Sunday Evening Reads- A Farewell to Arms

After the (relative) success of the Graphic Novel Wednesday reviews launched a few weeks ago, I'm setting up a book review a week to go out on Sundays. And much like the Graphic Novel segment it won't be all about reviewing brand new releases, brilliantly cutting edge texts or specifically those regarded as classics- I'll be reviewing books I'm reading, whether they were released last week or last century, whether they were huge hits or are largely ridiculed, or anything in between. I've got a horribly eclectic taste, so you probably won't like many of the titles, but you never know, you might spot something you fancy having a peruse of yourself. Why Sundays? Well, what better day of the week to curl up next to an imaginary fireplace on an evening with a good book?

The first review, then, is Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.

It's the first Hemingway I've read apart from a short story entitled A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. And coming to Hemingway for the first time took a fair bit of adjustment. His sparse, bare-faced style of prose just didn't draw me in initially, not holding my attention with a lack of with its lack of description, a lack of adjectives and adverbs that made it seem incredibly simple and, if I'm honest, a bit boring. The fact that his narration is pure and efficient was lost on me, with simplistic sentences such as "The light shone on their hats" being too abrupt and too frequent for an eye used to skipping through chunks of poorly written exposition or unnecessary details about the building in which the characters are stood in order to glean the important points.

With Hemingway though, as I realised after about forty pages, everything is important.

The Great Wine Conspiracy

In recent weeks I have made a few purchases on Amazon using portions of the £50 I have been donated every week by Her Majesty's government in return for being a bum. Nothing extravagant, just T-shirts and such like. Vouchers from two different wine companies offering me 50% plus off a crate of their wine. Incidentally, or coincidentally, or perhaps no great coincidence at all, On Monday I start work at the Stevenage-based nationally renowned cooperative known only as The Wine Society. What if there's more to this sudden influx of winery, vino and generosity? What if there's a network, a grapevine on which the powers that be have begun an offensive?

I say this not only as a fan of spies and having the eternal little boy inside my head who wants to be Bond, but I set to wondering after a few friends over the last few years have joked around that I'm some sort of international man of mystery. Secretive is not something I'd describe myself as, but apparently I am. These observations weren't helped by my "expressing an interest" in MI5 near the end of our last year of university, oh so many moons ago (a few months). So maybe my writer's imagination and this skew towards secretive industries is fuelling this little whimsy that is being typed out here.

Graphic Novel Review- Civil War

Firstly this week I'll address something- for the pedants among us, I'm aware that in reviewing some one-shot series alongside collections of issues all relating to one storyline arc but published across different in-universe series I'm playing fast and loose with the term graphic novel. However, according to Wikipedia, [Show][Hide]
the term is not strictly defined, though one broad dictionary definition is "a fictional story that is presented in comic-strip format and presented as a book."[3] In the publishing trade, the term is sometimes extended to material that would not be considered a novel if produced in another medium. Collections of comic books that do not form a continuous story, anthologies or collections of loosely related pieces, and even non-fiction are stocked by libraries and bookstores as "graphic novels" (similar to the manner in which dramatic stories are included in "comic" books). It is also sometimes used to create a distinction between works created as stand-alone stories, in contrast to collections or compilations of a story arc from a comic book series published in book form.

So there we are. I'm going to keep using it to apply to both collected works and one-shots, which is just as well as this week we're back to Marvel, for there big in-universe crossover collection Civil War, written by Mark Millar and pencilled by Steve McNiven, who incidentally produced Old Man Logan reviewed a few weeks ago. The Civil War storyline doesn't just span the seven issues collected in the main graphic novel but has subsidiary issues based around several of the players in the storyline, creating a gigantic sprawling fixed point similar to DC Comics' Crisis crossover. For the purposes of this review, though, we're concentrating on the seven issues collected into one volume. If you don't like politics in your comics, look away now.

Margaret Atwood- science fiction should be fantasy; I do not write fantasy, therefore it is not science fiction

I'm no expert in science fiction, not a professional of the history of the genre or anything like that. I've not got degrees in the thing or been asked to be a talking head on Newsnight Review. But I have read a lot of science fiction, I have read a lot of fantasy, I've watched films and TV shows that fall into the categories, seen documentaries on both, and honestly know a fair bit about it. Seeing as I've got all that behind me I'm hoping that this post doesn't come across as just some ignorant, angry man behind a keyboard but strays somewhere close to a legitimate, well informed line of argument. Basically, I'm going to rant but it's got some good stuff in there so slug it out and read the damn thing. Pretty please.

Margaret Atwood has written some profound and enduringly popular books during her career, not least my favourite of her works, The Handmaid's Tale. I read The Handmaid's Tale around the same time that I read We by Yevgeny Zamyatin and Children of Men by P.D. James, two highly regarded dystopian novels revolving around society's breakdown or fatal flaws. They are both regarded as science fiction, to greater or lesser extents, as most dystopian works are- the "hard science" of social experimentation and social science is the basis, however loose, for roughly half of all dystopian fiction, sharing the genre with disaster/ accident/ catastrophe (which, incidentally, then fuels a socially focused story, after the cause of the current state of affairs). At the time I couldn't help grouping these three books together in my mind- similar themes ran through all of them, and they all felt largely the same.

Even now they come as a set in my mind when I refer to them, and it's little wonder why; I probably picked them up in the library as a group because of their very similarities. So why is the author of one of them, The Handmaid's Tale, keen to inform everyone that it is in fact not science fiction, and wouldn't be unless it was entirely implausible and possibly had dragons?

Graphic Novel Review- Batman: Year One

I missed a week, yes, only two weeks in. This should explain why- I was too knackered to do anything other than eat, spend hours looking for work, go to bed.

Taking a break from Marvel this week with the first review foray into DC for this segment. At a time when the gods that be have just decided to completely reboot all DC titles from issue 1, completely retconning many details that identify their characters from the last 60/70 years, and when a distinctly bizarre new Batman cartoon has been announced (what I assume will be the typical nerd reaction can be found here, a more measured response is here), it seems as good a moment as any to take a look at the world's greatest detective.

So, we're going back to the "beginning" of one of the greatest characters comics to have been created- Batman. That is, the birth of the character continuity-wise, not the first appearance in an issue of Detective Comics from the 30s. And yet, Batman: Year One (written by Frank Miller, illustrated by David Mazzucchelli and coloured by Richard Lewis) is more about James Gordon than the eponymous caped crusader. Confusing? A little. But is it worth a look?

Another small step, or fear of the Frontier?

Last week NASA published a report, which probably took thousands of man hours and millions of dollars to research and compile, telling the US government that were the market to be opened up to the assistance of industries and businesses, the private sector could operate a space program a billion times better than NASA is doing. Broadly speaking. It found that were there competition among private companies and cooperation among others the vessels and craft we use, the technologies applied to travel both to and within the vacuum or near vacuum of space and the costs involved would all be improved upon dramatically, in relatively short time.

Now, yes, I have a bit of a history of following headlines about space and then ranting and rambling. Naturally I've got a few things to say about this revelation. Mainly that it's what I've been saying all along.

London Jaunt- When in doubt, use your fancy dress as bedding.

St. George's University, Tooting. An SU in a hospital. England winning rugby against a good Scotland. The works.

Thankfully at the time of writing no photographic evidence of myself in a toga or attempting to dance in said toga had come to light on the old book of face. It may yet, but until then in blissful denial shall I remain.

Headlining Fleet Street: Time, gentlemen.

Well, after last week's confession that I was getting bored by it all, and having worked a week more, I came to a decision. There will be no more posts in this series, no more Headlining Fleet Street. I packed it all in. I feel a little bit like a quitter to have done that, but there you are- it wasn't worth my unpaid, desperately-in-need-of-earnings time.

Sometimes, you rush into things without asking anything about them and then wonder why it's all a bit naff. I was so happy to be offered anything that I did exactly this. I was misled. And have since started and failed to continue in a position that was unrelated to anything.

Led to believe I'd be helping write and edit their daily business newswire, in reality I was an unpaid glorified record-keeper updating a back catalogue of company profiles. Those of banks. Internationally, to the point where I was wading through annual reports awash with percentages and figures and German, or Spanish, or Portuguese. Indecipherable was the watchword. I felt a bit like I was trying to read the Matrix and figure out what was going on, and then when I realised what the numbers meant I had to find a dozen fresh ways to say "banks are buggered".

It's a damn bloody shame. I wanted to be part of something related to what I want to go into, in the broad area of online news, writing for websites, learning about new things. Instead I went to Fleet Street and became an unpaid bank researcher. So there we have it.

Manchester Jaunt! (Jaunt series special!)

Including a guest appearance by the lovely locale known as "Marple, as in Miss".

Folks, I've never been to Manchester before this. I've been through it, got off and sat at Machester Piccadilly before, in first year I even had a pretty good meeting with someone looking for a writer at a hotel just next to the station, but they don't really count, do they? So it was with a little trepidation (and the hope that the weather held) that I ventured back up north after the summer to attend the birthday drunkenness of my dear friend Mr A Taylor. A man of wordiness and wit far beyond mine, who also shares a love of whiskeys, and who was turning 23.

Headlining Fleet Street: That Friday Feeling (a pint thereof)

Oh my god. It's been a mad couple of weeks, which seem to have been spent mostly on trains. Let me take you back to the beginning. I've been keeping it all up to date in fragments but it's not been presentable(-ish) until now.

Hastily sketched out on Friday 23rd September- No sign of fainting girl- for those the missed it, my moment of shining glory can be found here. Should have seized the moment and ridden the rescuer vibe when I could, I fear. Onto the actual role- good God it's boring. Banks are not my cup of tea, it seems, but I can swallow any bitter medicine should it make me better or get me money, to extend the metaphor. This won't do either, so I think the days of my time there are numbered. A job, anything involving money, is needed over an internship at the moment, methinks.

Written in first free moment since then-
As mentioned above, this internship isn't entirely what I thought I'd be doing. I suppose nothing ever is, especially when working for free.