The Toppling of the Teflon Taoiseach

Good grief. Bertie's gone. Or going anyway. It shouldn't be surprising, considering the past week in particular, but I had a feeling that he'd hang on a while longer.

I'd not have known either, only I checked Facebook a few minutes back to find that a couple of friends had posted status updates to the effect that one 'defies popular opinion by still thinking Bertie is great. The teflon is dead, long live the teflon,' while another ' celebrates the news, a bad day for Teflon but a great day for democracy.'

Is Bertie gone, I wondered aloud, and moments later established that if not gone, he's certainly said he'll be gone in just over a month.

'Taoiseach Resigns,' announces the Irish Times in its breaking news section, accompanied by the most extraordinary picture, a modern Irish Mount Rushmore that just looks like some incompetent work on Photoshop. If that's what it is, someone sucks at Photoshop.

So yes, it appears Bertie will be stepping down on 6 May, and is doing so purely because what he terms a 'barrage of commentary' on his life, his lifestyle, and his finances is distracting the work of government. He says that he wasn't pushed into the decision and that the decision is motivated purely by his desire to refocus the political agenda. In short, he's stepping down in the national interest. He says.

He says he's privileged to have served his community, party, and country -- though presumably not in that order of importance -- for many years, and is proud of his work on the Northern Ireland peace process, on successive social partnership agreements, on delivering a modern economy and of Ireland's involvement in the European Union, as well as ending the purported myth that his party was incapable of sustaining a coalition government.

Supposedly this has nothing to do with Gráinne Carruth's recent evidence to the Mahon Tribunal, but if you believe that, well, you might be interested to hear that penguins can fly. He was due to be grilled on the matter in the Dáil this afternoon. I guess instead the session will be given over to praise and political obituaries instead.

In case you're not Irish, and haven't been paying attention, one of the things the Mahon tribunal is investigating concerns claims that Mr Ahern received money from property developer Owen O'Callaghan some years back. The claims have been denied numerous times by both O'Callaghan and the Taoiseach, but the investigations have taken some odd turns and raised plenty of questions about suspicious lodgements to Ahern's personal accounts back in the early nineties.

The peculiar lodgements took place between 1985 and 1997, and in total come to £452,800 in value -- that's €886,830 in today's terms, apparently, allowing for inflation and such. Basically this just means the lodgements the origins of which can't be convincingly explained. I was amazed to see God alone knows where the money's gone to, though. It's not as if Bertie's got a lavish lifestyle, after all.

It's probably worth following this over at Gavin Sheridan's blog, as he's been assiduous in following the tribunal over the months, and scathing in his contempt for the media that have paid the story far less attention that its been due over that time. So far today all he's really had to say, though, is that he has no sympathy for Mr Aherne, as 'For 20 months we have been dragged through this nonsense. If this country was truly functioning, he would have resigned a very long time ago indeed. And it all was of his own making,' following that up by rightly observing that:

'Now we have to see how the media reacts to the news. So far RTE television have been bringing on a stream of FF deputies. And each of them runs the usual ‘trial by media’ line.

This is clearly nonsense. The media in fact did not go out of its way to criticise Ahern, all it did was seek answers about his tribunal evidence. And even after Carruth’s evidence broke two weeks ago, the media remained quiet for a very long time.

Ahern’s silence since Carruth’s evidence is perhaps a sign of how bad things are. We still await explanations of sterling lodgments, and indeed more lodgments. Questions of money laundering and vast sums of money going through Ahern’s and other accounts to which he is linked.

Ahern is not off the hook.'

Indeed.

Noseybonk Returns

So, today being April Fool's Day, I was tempted to write a post all about how my cursed war is finally over, how my friends and I have been apologised to, how a couple of people have been dismissed with one reported to the police and a raft of others have resigned, and how I've been compensated properly for the two years of nonsense I've had to struggle through.

And then I thought, no, only children and journalists do that sort of nonsense. And the Powers That Be at YouTube, it seems.

The Brother popped up on Skype earlier. 'Have you been to YouTube UK today?' he asked, 'Go there: http://uk.youtube.com/ and pick a video - any video.'

So I did, and clicked at random on the first video, only to be rick-rolled straight to Mr Astley singing how he was never going to give you up, let you down, run around and desert you, let alone a host of other caddish acts.

As it happens, the video I'd tried to click on featured Noseybonk, scourge of a million childhood dreams, pottering about in a greenhouse, where he appears to be carefully raising a batch of those phallus plants that adorn the occasional fifth century Athenian vase.*

Do you remember Noseybonk? If you're too young to do so, then you should be glad of that fact.

But if you're thirty-ish, and British or Irish, and if you don't remember the phallus-faced nightmare, then you've clearly blocked him out, in an attempt to protect yourself from the traumatic memories.

Noseybonk used to appear on Jigsaw, a problem-based children's BBC show that ran from 1979 to 1984. It was presented by Adrian Hedley, a gifted mime who presumably doubled as Noseybonk, and Janet Ellis, mother of Sophie Ellis Bextor. Janet Ellis was replaced towards the end by Howard Stableford who took over the characters that she used to play and also played the improbably-named Gregory Growlong.

Yes, Gregory Growlong and Noseybonk. They didn't skimp on the innuendo back then, did then?

So anyway, leaving aside the jaunty tune, Noseybonk was a sinister figure with a deathly white head, bulging eyes, a manic grin, and an enormous nose, impeccably dressed in morning clothes and strangely reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange.

Like Freddie Krueger he's been hiding himself away in our nightmares for over years, but it seems that he's back. And this time even the fridge isn't safe...
_________________________________________________________
* I can't find any pictures of such vases online, but if you don't believe me get yourself down to the library to check out Sir Kenneth Dover's Greek Homosexuality.

There's Mutual Obligation, after all...

NMRBoy alerted me to this curious story today, presumably having read about it over at Bullied Academics. It seems that one Kaye Carl, an hourly-paid lecturer at the University of Sheffield, has won a legal fight to be recognised as an employee by her University. Apparently her contract had stated that she was no an employee, but on looking at the reality of her situation, an employment tribunal had recognised that she most definitely was an employee.

Whether she'll get anywhere with the substantive part of her case -- she claims that she was treated less favourably than regular employees -- is a different matter, but I'm delighted that she's managed to at least win herself a beachhead.

Ms Carl's victory should certainly have ramifications, as anomalous positions like Ms Carl's are far from rare in academia. It's interesting that a spokesperson for Sheffield University has now claimed that Sheffield is 'currently leading the way on the regularisation process of atypical workers'. Yes, 'atypical workers' are almost par for the course in Britain's ivory towers, many of them having signed letters saying that they're not employees.

Bosh, of course, signing a letter saying you're not an employee no more means that you're not an employee any more than signing one saying you're a fish means that you're a fish!

I could say a lot more about this, but at the moment I think prudence calls for me to wait a while. Just for a while...

It's not who you are underneath, it's what you do that defines you

And after the wonderful Rick Astley diagram from the other day, a quick glance through Graham Linehan's archives gives us this wonderfully childish Batman gag.

I sent the Brother a link to it at nine yesterday evening, seeing he was on Skype just as I was wrapping up another chat, and he replied moments later.

'Right as Batman Begins - see what I did there?'
'Oh very good. And yes. I think I shall come down now. I'm tired of checking stuff here.'

As indeed I was. For all that I was hopeful after the marathon meeting in mid-February, the last week has rather ground me down, as I've been ruining my eyes trying to check and correct the minutes. Seriously, checking them has involved working off a copy of the minutes on the screen, consulting e-mails I've sent over the last month, scrutinising the files from the meeting itself, sifting through the documents beside my feet, listening carefully time and time again to the recording of the meeting, and having long discussions with NMRBoy, who's not exactly been skimping on his end either.

I'd been catching up on Skype for the previous couple of hours while analysing the corrected version of the minutes, comparing it when the original and highlighting any areas where I'd amended the text. Sadly, about half the text is now a lurid red showing where I've corrected, adjusted, tweaked, or otherwise clarified the minutes I'd been sent for my approval. It's hard on the eyes, I have to say, so I was glad to leave it behind for a bit.

It was fun watching Batman Begins, not least because it's eerie how much Cillian Murphy's Scarecrow resembles NMRBoy. In truth, there's not a lot to dislike about the film. It looks great, has some nice dialogue, is exceptionally well-plotted barring one scene that could do with a little more justification, and features a balletic sword-fight on ice. Liam Neeson adds instant gravitas in his role as mentor to the apprentice Batman, Tom Wilkinson is sparkles as an improbably-cast mob boss, Gary Oldman breaks with tradition by not playing a freak, and Morgan Freeman somehow makes the whole thing marginally less implausible than normal.

I always tend to suspect that deep down, The Batman is an even more ludicrous concept than Superman. I know, nobody else believes me either, but bear with me for now. I'll expand on it one of these days. Trust me. It has theological implications, curiously enough. Oh yes, I've got your interest now, haven't I? No? Oh...

I'll leave that for another day, anyway. Instead I want to leave you pondering what an odd family the Cranes must be, with a retired policeman for a father and three psychiatrist sons: Frasier, Niles, and Jonathan. That last one really didn't turn out at all well, did he?

One Egg is Un Oeuf

Well, it would have been. Today, however, was an egg-free day for me. I don't just mean a day free of chocolate eggs -- it has been several years since I've had one of those -- rather it's been a day free of your regular common-or-garden eggs. I'm not quite sure why, as they'd been one of the things I gave up for Lent. Shouldn't I have been indulging today, in a frenzied orgy of yoke and albumen?

That's a mental picture you'd probably rather do without. Well, too late for you, my friend, too late for you.

So anyway, last night I went to the Vigil Mass at the Pro-Cathedral. I'd been to Vigil masses in Manchester in 2004 and 2005, but had never been to one at home; I'm glad to say that my first Irish Vigil Mass didn't disappoint, being just as beautiful and as prayerful as those I'd previously participated in.

Thomas Howard, in Evangelical is Not Enough, which I read a few weeks ago, in the aftermath of Bleak House, does rather more justice to the celebration than I could hope to, so I think it's probably best just to quote his description in full:

On Holy Saturday in most churches no rites occur until the end of the day when the highest feast of the Christian year is celebrated. It is the ancient Paschal Vigil, leading up to the First Mass of Easter.

It is a rite that seems to go back to the earliest years of the Church, perhaps even to years when the apostles were still alive. Toward the end of the day (afternoon, evening, ery late evening, or, in some churches, just before dawn on Easter morning itself) the Christians assemble in the darkened church. The procession of clergy, servers, and choir assembles at the rear of the church, in darkness. Then fire is struck, from which the Paschal Candle is lighted. This is an immense candle, sometimes as tall as a man and several inches in diameter. There are affixed to the side of this candle five grains of incense, representing the five wounds of Christ. Then the deacon moves into the dark aisle with this single, flickering light. The procession follows him. Presently he stops. "The light of Christ!" he sings, and all the people respond singing, "Thanks be to God!" Again he proceeds, and again he stops. "The light of Christ!" this time on a higher note. "Thanks be to God!" we sing. Yet a third time it happens, on a higher note still. Then, from that candle tapers are lighted, and the flame is passed to all the people, who have been given unlighted candles.

Here is the church, glimmering now with this light from candles that are themselves almost perfect symbols of what Christ is, since a candle's light comes from its own self-giving.

Presently the deacon sings the Exsultet:

Rejoice now, heavenly hosts and choirs of angels,
and let your trumpets shout Salvation
for the victory of our mighty King.

Rejoice and sing now, all the round earth,
brought with a glorious splendor,
for darkness has been vanquished by our eternal King.

Rejoice and be glad now, Mother Church,
and let your holy courts, in radiant light,
resound with the praises of your people.

All you who stand near this marvelous and holy flame,
pray with me to God the Almighty
for the Grace to sing the worthy praise of this great light.

Scripture readings follow, tracing the history of Redemption: the Spirit of God moving on the face of the waters, Noah, the Red Sea, and other milestones leading to Christ.

Eventually comes the most blissful moment of all. Alone the priest sings, "Glory be to God on high!" Suddenly all the lights in the church blaze on, bells are jangled merrily by the servers, the organ thunders out its triumph, and Easter has begun! He is risen! He is risen! The First Mass of Easter!

... I grew up in a household and a tradition that loved the Resurrection of the Lord. Evangelicals felt that they were almost alone in defending the doctrine against the modernists and unbelievers. But here was the Church, celebrating this event with an amplitude of joy that finally seemed not only to answer to what I had loved and believed all along, but unfurl it for me. If we could blow horns at New Year's and wave flags on July 4 and have a picnic on Labor Day, why -- oh why -- were we denied celebration, ceremony, hilarity, and an extravagance of pageantry on this feast, next to which these mere national holidays were literally nothing -- nothing at all? What religion was it that said to us, "No. Sit still. Or stand and sing, 'Up from the grave He arose.' But your main job is to think about the event and hear a sermon about it. Don't do anything."

I have often thought, in the years since those days at St. Mary's, "Oh, my own crowd, the wonderful evangelicals, with their love for the gospel and their zeal; for God -- how they would leap for joy if ever they returned to the ancient Church and thronged in by their hundreds and thousands, singing, praising, and bursting with pure joy at the discovery of the liturgy!"

The mass itself was beautiful, with the litany of the saints being chanted at the two baptisms that took place, Archbishop Martin's homily being a real call to arms, the Sanctus -- like the Gloria -- coming from Mozart's Missa Solemnis in C, the Agnus Dei coming from the beautifully simple Mass XVIII, and the Recessional Hymn being the 'Hallelujah Chorus' from Handel's Messiah, to my knowledge the only part of the Classical canon that was first performed in Dublin.

And so, suitably fortified by the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Our Lord, I filed out of the Church and pelted down O'Connell Street as fast as I could go, only to see the last bus rounding Westmoreland Street and cruising off down the Quays. If I were to make one suggestion to the Archbishop of Dublin, it'd be that he bring the Vigil forward from half past nine to nine o'clock. Considering that the whole mass ran for two hours, getting the last bus would have been a miracle.

I coped, though. I only had an hour to wait till the Nitelink. And me being me, I had a book.

'You; your pupils; your friends; God. Not a bad public, that..'

I find it very peculiar that, in drawing up its list of what its members regarded as the top movie heroes of all time, the American Film Institute somehow overlooked St Thomas More, as unforgettably played in A Man for All Seasons by Paul Scofield, who died on Wednesday.

Too easily dismissed as 'dull but worthy', A Man for All Seasons is genuinely worthy, but it's anything but dull. On the contrary, it's as compelling a study of heroic integrity as has ever been committed to celluloid, even more inspiring than Atticus Finch and Will Kane by virtue of being true.

Steven Greydanus sums it up well:

A Man for All Seasons is the story of a man who knows who he is. The 1966 film, which won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor, is brilliant and compelling, steely with conviction, luminous with genuine wisdom and wit. The screenplay, well adapted by Robert Bolt from his own stage play, is fiercely intelligent, deeply affecting, resonant with verbal beauty and grace. Scofield, who for years starred in the stage play before making the film, gives an effortlessly rich and layered performance as Sir Thomas More, saint and martyr, the man whose determined silence spoke more forcefully than words, and who then spoke even more forcefully by breaking it.

The film's superbly acted throughout, with Orson Welles suitably imperious as Cardinal Wolsey, Nigel Davenport hilarious as the Duke of Norfolk, and Wendy Hiller stubbornly defiant as More's wife Alice. John Hurt steals many a scene as Richard Rich, a gifted but vulnerable and vain young man who loses his soul for worldly success, having ignored More's early advice that she should put himself out of the way of temptation.

'Why not be a teacher?' More asks him, 'You'd be a fine teacher; perhaps a great one.'
'If I was, who would know it? '
'You; your pupils; your friends; God. Not a bad public, that.'

Rich's rise in the world is marvellously -- if none too subtly -- conveyed in his increasingly opulent garb, but his face never loses the worried expression we first see upon it, and if anything he wears an increasingly hunted look. It seems apt that the film's last words refer to his fate here on earth.

I do not know if this is indeed -- as Greydanus opines -- the most profound cinematic depiction of the life of any saint, though I'd not be surprised if it were. Certainly, Greydanus is right to call it a great film, and that's due in no small part to Scofield's delicate yet powerful performance through exchanges like this, after More has allowed the untrustworthy Rich to leave his home unmolested, much to the horror of More's family who insist that he arrest him.

Sir Thomas More: And go he should, why if he were the Devil himself, until he broke the law!
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

There are lessons there.

How do you make a Rick-Roll?

You push him down a hill, presumably.

It's Brother the Elder's birthday today, and since I doubt there'll be any cake on the go in the Gargoyle house today, I hope he'll enjoy this charming pie chart. I first saw it, thanks to Mr Linehan, resplendent in glorious technicolor over at Why, That's Delightful!

I'm quite taken by the diagram, I have to say, and have been proliferating it a bit since I saw it the other day. Not surprising, I suppose, considering my weakness for ingenious pie charts and Venn diagrams.

I passed it on to NMRBoy, himself a big fan of Ben Fold's rather delightful take on perhaps the most offensive song known to man - many's the time I dared him to play it at a formal hall concert, and even now I think that should be part of any ultimate deal we have to make. Trust me, it's not the weirdest dining hall fantasy I've had.

Anyway, on looking at the Rick Astley diagram, NMRBoy replied with the cryptic observation that he had once seen something similar on a wildlife park sign, before adding 'And had you heard the term "rickrolling"?'
'Er... no?'
'It's deceiving someone into clicking a link that points to Rick. Quite the sport, I believe.'
'Hoho,' I chortled, as one does on t'internet.
'I think Rick Astley is the poor man's equivalent of Bill Watterson,' he added. 'Never jumped the shark; quit while he was ahead.'
'Wow, ' I replied, thinking this a comparison more audacious than calling Suzanne Shaw the poor man's Hannah Spearritt, 'That's quite an analogy.'
'It may be stretching a bit,' he conceded.
'Ever so slightly.'

Anyway, as is the way of these things, yesterday's Guardian had a fine feature on Rick-Rolling, culminating in an amusing tale of how the unassuming Mr Astley is being deployed as a human bomb against the forces of Scientology.

'...Rick-rolling has begun to permeate the mainstream. It comes mostly courtesy of Anonymous, a diffuse group of hackers and activists who have declared war on the Church of Scientology in an initiative called Project Chanology. Organised without official leaders or hierarchy, Project Chanology manifests itself in Denial Of Service attacks against Scientologist websites, stupid YouTube videos, and in-person protests at Scientologist centres worldwide.

At recent protests in New York, Washington, London and Seattle, masked protesters held up boomboxes and chanted the Stock Aitken Waterman lyrics which Astley made famous. "Never gonna let you down!" they roared, in a live rick-rolling of the Church of Scientology.

Their cleverest move however is at AnonymousExposed.org, a website created this week that perfectly mimics the subtly different Anonymous-Exposed.org, created by Scientologists as an indictment of Anonymous' "cyber-crimes". Of course instead of showing an anti-Anonymous documentary, the mimic site displays - well, we'll let you have a guess.

But the final word goes to Rick Astley himself. Click here to watch our exclusive interview with Astley. The singer, now 42, has forceful words for Anonymous, Scientologists, and all those who have prolonged the rick-roll phenomenon.'

Click here indeed.

The Thirty-First Ghost

Douglas Adams, being interviewed years and years ago for Neil Gaiman's Don't Panic: Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was far from kind in his appraisal of most writers of science-fiction. The standard of writing in the field, he felt, was abysmal. Taking Isaac Asimov as an example, he said that while he was in awe of his ideas he wouldn't have employed him even to write junk mail.

I have no idea what he thought of Arthur C. Clarke, who died yesterday. I've read hardly anything by Clarke, I'm afraid, though I've long been fond of his 2001: A Space Odyssey, the foreward to which starts with the poetic observation that:

'Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this universe, there shines a star.'

No, I have no idea if he was right, whether about the historical population of the Earth or about the astronomical population of the Heavens, and rather suspect he's way off, not least because his claims begs the question of what counts as a human being, but it's a beautiful idea nonetheless, isn't it?

Neil Gaiman says on his journal today that the Clarke story that made the deepest impression on him when he was a child was 'The Nine Billion Names of God'. It's conveniently online, and temptingly short, so I may have a read later on. Gaiman's description of how he met Clarke more than two decades ago is really quite bewitching:

'I met Sir Arthur C. Clarke in 1985, when he was in the UK to promote the film of 2010. He was staying in Brown's Hotel in London, where the doormen wore top hats and the hotel interior didn't seem to have changed in a hundred years. I interviewed him for Space Voyager magazine, but all I remember is that he was very kind and polite, and a vague surprise in discovering that he had a West Country burr in his voice. He seemed like someone from a past era, in that elderly wood-and-leather hotel, frail and elderly 22 years ago, but he was someone who had showed me the future, and who was living, very happily, in the future.'

I must confess that I'm a little surprised that he was surprised at discovering Clarke's 'West Country burr', not least because he'd evidently watched The Goodies a few times back in the day. Had he seen the episode where Graeme Garden turns in a marvellous performance as Arthur C. Clarke, dismissing one Fortean phenomenon after another? If not, he'd missed out.

'The Himalayan foothills, traditional home of the Abominable Snowman or Yeti,' says Garden's Clarke. 'Or is it? Well, once again - cobblers.' It's funny even as read, especially if you know Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, but for real comedic value it needs to be proclaimed in an earthily impatient West Country accent.

While the Cat's Away...

This evening, with a couple of his brilliant flatmates being away, Dublin's most incorrigible punster took advantage of the situation to treat a batch of us yp an absolute feast of chowder. It was, in a word, superb.

Having dined, and after an inappropriate joke or two -- eskimos were involved, and someday if you're good I'll tell you -- our host decided to introduce me to a pleasure that has somehow eluded me over the years, being Fry and Laurie's celebrated televisual sally at P.G. Wodehouse's peerless tales of a hapless toff and his omniscient valet.

The episode, 'Bridegroom Wanted!' came from the fourth season of Jeeves and Wooster and was basically a hybrid of two short stories, 'Jeeves and the Greasy Bird' and 'Bingo and the Little Woman'. I'm afraid I approached it with some trepidation, having in effect been warned by no less a person than Stephen Fry himself, in his introduction to What Ho! The Best of P.G. Wodehouse:

When Hugh Laurie and I had the extreme honour and terrifying responsibility of being asked to play Bertie Wooster and Jeeves in a series of television adaptations we were aware of one huge problem facing us. Wodehouse's three great achievements are Plot, Character and Language, and the greatest of these, by far, is Language. If we were reasonably competent then all of us concerned in the television version could go some way towards conveying a fair sense of the narrative of the stories and revealing too a good deal of the nature of their characters. The language however . . . we could only scratch the surface of the language. 'Scratching the surface' is a phrase often used without thought. A scratched surface, it is all to easy to forget, is a defiled surface. Wodehouse's language lives and breathes in its written, printed form. It oscillates privately between the page and the reader. The moment it is read out or interpreted it is compromised. It is, to quote Oscar Wilde on another subject, 'like a delicate exotic fruit -- touch it and the bloom is gone.' Scratch its surface, in other words, and you have done it a great disservice. Our only hope in making the television series was that the stories and the characters might provide enough pleasure on their own to inspire the viewer to pick up a book and encounter The Real Thing.

Let me use an example, taken completely at random. I flip open a book of Jeeves and Wooster short stories and happen Bertie and Jeeves discussing a young man called Cyril Bassington-Bassington . . .

'I've never heard of him, Have you ever heard of him, Jeeves?'
'I am familiar with the name Bassington-Bassington, sir. There are three branches of the Bassington-Bassington family -- the Shropshire Bassington-Bassingtons, the Hampshire Bassington-Bassingtons, and the Kent bassington-Bassingtons.'
'England seems pretty well stocked up with Bassington-Bassingtons.'
'Tolerably so, sir.'
'No chance of a sudden shortage, I mean, what?'

Well, try as hard as actors might, such an exchange will always work best on the page. It might still be amusing when delivered as dramatic dialogue, but no actors are as good as the actors we each of us carry in our head. And that is the point really, one of the gorgeous privileges of reading Wodehouse is that he makes us feel better about ourselves because we derive a sense of personal satisfaction in the laughter mutually created. The reader, by responding in his or her head to the rhythm and timing on the page, has the feeling of having made the whole thin click. Of course we yield to Wodehouse the palm of having written it, but our response is what validates the whole experience. Every comma, every 'sir' every 'what?' is something we make work in the act of reading.

I'm very grateful for having been so prepared. The show was wonderful -- sure, it wasn't quite Wodehouse, but it was never going to be and I knew that. What it was, though, was two of the greatest comic creations ever brought hilariously to life by two men who seemed born for the parts. All told, I think the adaptation was about as good as could be hoped for.

Try it, if you don't believe me.

The Appliance of Genius

The latest American Hell cartoon couldn't help but make me smile.

'Why are you quoting the toaster?' I asked Brother the Elder earlier, glad that he had done so, as it was only this morning that I'd noticed the label about the actuating lever and thought it was a great sentence.
'It's the appliance of genius,' he said.

There wasn't much I could say to that, so he followed up by saying that he'd just made tea, and to ask me whether I'd seen the original ending to I Am Legend. I hadn't, so immediately clicked on the link he sent. You'd be well advised to do likewise, at least if you've seen the film.

Interesting, eh? Radically different from the film as it stands, certainly, and implicitly closer to the book, in that it makes pretty explicit how the film's vampires see him as a legendary being, hunting them down like a mythical monster or a serial killer. I'm not sure that the film would really have been any better with this ending, though, not least because of the final sequence involving a somewhat confusing bridge.

I was glad to see this anyway, as it happens, as I'd been thinking again the other day about the differences between the film and the book, which I read a few weeks ago in the immediate aftermath of Bleak House. The Cheesemonger was intrigued to hear this when I mentioned it on Saturday, not least because he'd been disappointed by the film, and felt that the film I described was far more interesting than the film he saw.

What was the book like? Very different, was really all I could say. My feeling was that the film's makers had read the book, liked it, summarised it for a producer in one of those ludicrously concise pitches so lethally lampooned in The Player, and been commissioned to make a film based on their pitch rather than on Matheson's brilliant novel.

The novel really is something special. Granted, I'm hardly a connoisseur of either horror or classic science fiction, but I think Stephen King has it spot on when he says that Matheson

'... single-handedly regenerated a stagnant genre, rejecting the conventions of the pulps that were already dying, incorporating sexual impulses and images into his work as Theodore Sturgeon had already begun to do in his science fiction, and writing a series of gut-bucket short stories. What do I remember about them? I remember what they taught me; the same thing that rock’s most recent regenerator, Bruce Springsteen, articulates in one of his songs, no retreat, baby, no surrender. I remember that Matheson would never give ground. When you thought it had to be over, that your nerves couldn’t stand any more, that was when Matheson turned on the afterburners. He wouldn’t quit. He was relentless. The baroque intonations of Lovecraft, the perfervid prose of the pulps, the sexual innuendoes, were all absent. You were faced with so much pure drive that only rereadings showed Matheson’s wit, cleverness, and control.'

The pace alone is stunning, but King's right, there's far more to it than that. It's a jewel, really. A strange one, but a real one for all that.

One of these days I must get round to watching The Last Man on Earth which is conveniently viewable online, having fallen into the public domain somehow. I'm intrigued by the idea of Vincent Price as Robert Neville, or whatever he's called in the film. Not just yet, though; work needs doing.