Cast out

That hoary old science fiction trope concerning survivors from a ravaged or doomed earth settling on a new planet has never really gone away. Books including Ray Bradbury's classic "The Martian Chronicles" (1950), television series such as "Space: 1999" (1974), films such as "Aliens" (1987)... we are familiar enough with the idea of human colonisation of space, and the fact that there will always, always be an alien element - usually hostile - on the new planet that will make itself known to the colonists by degrees.

The rules that have evolved around such stories are quite restrictive and include: The human society will seem to be based on a Marxist commune while - for the purposes of action and adventure - there will be a military or security element designed to protect and defend the settlement - sometimes from rogue settlers who may even have been banished from the city/village/settlement.

A Commander or Captain - sometimes democratically nominated but often in that position because of their previous role on earth - will lead investigations into the inevitable early disappearances and mysterious deaths which will herald the discovery of the new planet's alien life force. This person will also - from time to time - inform their "people" about forthcoming dangers via live broadcasts, supported by a professor or doctor who can also dispense expertise and sage advice. Although essentially secular, a suggestion of a spiritual life may be indicated by the presence of a priest or even a space-age looking church.

We may be given a glimpse of some of the more mundane features of the social infra-structure; the greenhouses where food is grown, the solar panels which power the entire settlement, but we will never see shops or money though this will not seem to prevent the colony's inhabitants bearing all the cultural traits of a modern free-market - expensive looking clothes, equipment, weapons and a limitless supply of caffeine and/or alcohol. Transported almost whole from the 1800's there is always at least one saloon bar - inhabited by ne'er-do-wells and other low-lifes glimpsed through a fog of cigarette smoke - serving the local populace and providing an atmospheric, though slightly incongruous, focal point for leading characters in these otherwise futuristic adventures.

Finally, any sci-fi weirdness will be explained by a phrase involving one or more of the following terms: electro-magnetic energy, radioactive energy fields, anti-matter, parallel dimension. Oh, and if you can squeeze a "forbidden zone" with mutants or outcasts plotting revenge on the settlers then you're all set.

This, then, we all know.

The sublime twist in BBC's "Outcasts" is that there is no twist. It assumes the viewer has not come across this sub-genre before and so simply ticks all the boxes, presenting nearly all of the above clichés and in doing so making the mistake that audiences today are no more discerning than those of say, "Forbidden Planet" (1956).

Thus, an opportunity to explain how labour is shared, food distributed fairly and families planned (you can't just have everyone breeding like crazy in the first years of a settlement with limited resources, you know) is squandered. Apparently the population fled earth without their iTunes collections and so the only entertainment comes from a tech-wizard kid who "dropped out" to become a hospital radio DJ complete with an enormous vinyl collection. (With space on the ark ships at a premium I wonder how he gained permission to bring that on in his luggage allowance?)

The leader of this particular colony - strong-willed but burdened by the loneliness of command - spends most of his time extemporizing plot points - what there is of a plot - with the head of security. Luckily for the budget this particular head of security was also a neurologist back on earth, so there is no need for an additional stock doctor character. Sure enough, a priest - freshly arrived in another ark-ship from earth - is already threatening what was apparently a secular society by offering prayers to the people (it was a huge mistake giving him permission to use the Presidential webcam).

Some early settlers have been left for dead in a hostile area outside of the settlement (tick two boxes there), and we are already seeing the first signs of a possible alien presence because the President keeps having encounters with his young children who died some time ago. (It's gonna be electro-magnetic energy, I just know it is. Or perhaps it's just the loneliness of command that's getting to him.)

Assuming the production company didn't cast out the writer to the forbidden zone sometime during production, I think we can safely say that at the series' conclusion we will find humanity living in harmony once again with the mutants/outcasts in the forbidden zone because their own settlement will be threatened or destroyed, and they will come to understand how the unseen as yet alien life-force can actually enhance their fragile and lonely lives on this New Earth.

Perhaps it can help them visualize their long-lost iTunes movie collections?

Adventures in On-line Publsihing (sic)

Oh! The utter pretence!!

I have at last gotten up off of my lazy arse and been out of the house where I have had a pint or two with an old colleague and the up shot is that we're going to start making satirical, stabbing, thrusting little films aimed at pretentiousness where 'ere we find it. Like in that last sentence for instance.

Crap bloggers, on-line poets, so-called 'writers' who actually only self-publish their pathetic little scrawling, write glowing reviews about themselves using pseudonyms, and buy the only twenty copies that will ever be sold... watch out!

Chinatown Chicken

Radio Four today: more interminable upper middle-class women talking to an audience of more upper middle-class women about the costs of food shopping.

"I mean only last week I went to my cupboard and it was bare... or so I thought! D'you know I opened that cupboard door again, took everything off the shelves and laid it out on our rustic oak kitchen table (a present from a family friend). By the time the kids were home I'd rustled up what I decided to call a Chinatown Chicken, using some old Chinese spices and egg noodles from the very cupboard I'd thought empty!"

Little do they realise the women whom they are so desperately attempting to advise are not only not listening to Woman's Hour but also do not have the imagination to rustle up anything out of the ordinary. When their cupboard is bare, it really is bare in the true sense of the word. There are no old packets of egg noodles, just old plastic salt cellars and grime.

The pretence of a radio/tv show dispensing desperate advice to the poor unfortunate proles, and all the time they are merely speaking to themselves.

By way of an introduction

For every 'Fast Show', 'Big Train' and 'Little Britain' there must be hundreds of similarly talented folk out there who met at Uni, did a bit of Python recital in the campus theatre and sent jokes in to Radio 4's topical weekly comedy shows to relieve the dull tedium of their first office jobs. Well, here's one of them, now frankly too old to be 'discovered' and with a chequered and murky past behind him. But he's my friend and he's asked me to do the intro for his new blog, so here it is in the form of an interview.

So who are you?
DAVE: A member of a washed up comedy collective.
Me: You've washed up today?
DAVE: It's Wednesday.
Me: Of course.
DAVE: Wednesday's washing up day.
Me: How long have you all known each other?
DAVE: I met Si (SIMON HOLLAND) at Cardiff University. There were no English educational institutions large enough to take his ego, so he came to Wales. It was all a clerical error. I should have gone to Cambridge, but there was a mix up on the train. I bet my rightful place taking the applause at the Footlights was taken by some Civil Engineering student called Emlyn Boyo instead.
Me: I see you're a genius at character names.
DAVE: They just come to me like that (clicks fingers).
Me: It's a gift.
DAVE: And a curse. At the same time.
Me: What happened after Uni?
DAVE: I lived in Simon's parent's house in Peterborough after University when I'd discovered there were no actual jobs in Wales.
Me: They'd just closed the mines, hadn't they?
DAVE: Yeah. I'd bought the helmet and everything.
Me: I understand you kept the lamp though didn't you?
DAVE: Yeah. Until it ran out of midnight oil.
Me: Is that why you stopped writing your sit-coms?
DAVE: No, I stopped writing when everyone told me my novel was crap.
Me: You mean your portmanteau of hilarious interconnected short stories? Now what for the love of God was it called?
DAVE: Welsh Rarebits.
Me: Welsh Rarebits! Of course! How could I have forgotten? Way ahead of it's time.
DAVE: Well, eighteen months ahead of it's time. I'm sure they copied my idea for Trainspotting.
Me: They just set it in Scotland, instead of Wales.
DAVE: Bastards. Irvin Welsh's Rarebits, it should have been called.
Me: Actually you tried to make a film of it twice, but you found it 'unfilmable', in a Proust, or Joseph Heller novel kind of way.
DAVE: No, we found it unfilmable in a couldn't find anyone to be arsed to do it kind of way.
Me: What was the first thing you all worked on together?
DAVE: 'Talgarth Times', our little in-house newspaper. It was on pink paper I nicked from work. More like toilet paper really. Very incestuous humour, just about us and our friends. Soft, strong and very, very long.
Me: This was when you'd all moved in together?
DAVE: Yeah, we were all working in London and rented this big house. That's when my wife-to-be came down to one of our parties. I chatted her up all evening and then sent her a Talgarth Times mentioning how we'd "copped off with each other".
Me: You silver-tongued devil.
DAVE: Well, it did the trick didn't it?
Me: So this would have been the original Talgarth Trousers lot?
DAVE: Yeah, but we weren't Talgarth Trousers then.
Me: Talgarth Garters?
DAVE: Talgarth Knickers. No, we were just Talgarth really.
Me: Where did the name come from? Talgarth's Welsh isn't it?
DAVE: Well I was only really prepared to live in London if it was somewhere Welsh-sounding. We were right by the Hammersmith flyover, by these big old houses with incredible windows.
Me: There was actually a shot of Talgarth Road in 'Trainspotting', wasn't there?
DAVE: Yeah, I know! They definitely nicked it from me. Perhaps one of them sold it to Irvin.
Me: This would have been when?
DAVE: About 1990-ish.
Me: And when did the videoing start?
DAVE: Well, every time we went anywhere our house mate Richard (RICHARD DORNAN) used to video it. He worked for Croydon Cable and they had this local channel. We were their only subscribers and this local channel would take anything, honestly.
Me: Literally anything?
DAVE: They were desperate for material to fill it up, and Richard was working for them so they started using our stuff. We called it Talgarth Shorts, because we lived on the Talgarth Road and we drank a lot of whisky.
And so when did it become Talgarth Trousers?
DAVE: Well, of course, once Live TV had seen 'A Skinful of Talgarth' they thought 'Christ, this lot are bleedin' brilliant- offer them two six-part series this instant!'
Me: Are you going to do your Janet Street-Porter impression?
DAVE: Do you think it will come over in print?
Me: Did Janet Street-Porter commission the series?
DAVE: Would that it were so, but no. We never met her actually. So we did Talgarth Trousers. The only problem was that Live TV's audience share was even smaller than Croydon Cable's. Even we couldn't receive it - couldn't afford the dish.
Me: And then Channel Four?
DAVE: Yes... Well Sadie decided she'd send some of our Cable stuff to Channel Four when they used to put rubbish on in the middle of the night.
Me: They put rubbish on all day now, don't they?
DAVE: True, but back then they didn't and I thought it was too good for them.
Me: And you did a pilot for Channel Four as well?
DAVE: Channel Four had six comedy pilots made and we were one of them. We were actually paid quite serious money for it as well. We were called Talgarth Pants. And we were, really. They went with this awful thing about a mad Irish priest instead.
And then came..?
DAVE: Erm... 'Hammersmithed'. We did two series for Live TV and we really thought, you know, we'd made it. But when we did the Talgarth Pants pilot it had been more of a sit-com set up, and I thought we could expand on that.
Me: In a portmanteau-like interconnected sort of a way?
DAVE: Shut up. So we started writing a thing based on ourselves. We were each other. We were caricatures of each other.
Me: You were each other's caricatures.
DAVE: But then the rest of them stole my great idea and butchered it.
Me: I understood that it was such a little idea that even after butchering it, it hardly amounted to a snack.
DAVE: So I went through this hell where I saw my idea being butchered and watered down at the same time. Like the reddish dribble you get when you defrost a joint. So I wrote 'Hammersmithed'.
Me: Which bore more than a passing resemblance to 'Talgarth Daze'.
DAVE: Only funnier, wittier... And without the word 'Talgarth' in the title.
Me: You should have called it 'Talgarthed'.
DAVE: Uum. So some of us made that. But Simon wouldn't touch it with a bargepole.
Me: Do you think you'll all get together again to do something?
DAVE: Seriously, it's impossible. It's easy to think we were all this big solid group of friends doing all this stuff for a long time, but actually you know, there were endless fractures.
Me: Fractures?
DAVE: Tom went to Hollywood.
Me: Didn't they do 'Relax'?
DAVE: I mean Talgarth was an umbrella under which a lot of different talents sheltered, but there were different people under it at different times.
Me: That's beautiful! You should write a book about it. 'Talgarth Umbrella'.
DAVE: Or a musical - "Les parapluies de Talgarth".