No, I don't actually. I don't remember that. I'm almost positive I never saw it in fact, so I'm fascinated to see the accepted tropes of a future capitalist hellscape so deeply ingrained in the lovely old monoculture, that when I came to set up my own dystopian bum steer in The Dan in the High Castle in 2018, it looked pretty much exactly like this regardless: newly enobled baddie in a big flat, armed private police force, towers among the rubble etc. Only Fools and Horses goes in for a bit more world-building, and yeah, fair play, here we are... It's odd to hear a studio audience take such innocent delight in it all, poor fools.
Was Back to the FutureII the shared text? Oh, or Blade Runner? Or something simpler? I may have subconsciously been feeling, for the past couple of decades, a little gaslit I now realise, that political commentators haven't referenced twentieth-sitcom dream sequences more than they do. It's my birthday today (and – I've just realised – ten years after the events of Time Spanner so happy birthday, Martin Gay). Also the US midterms. I remember George W. Bush got reelected on my thirtieth. Two quiet, blonde Belgian children turned up at the front door that evening, saying my housemate Jamie had said they could sofa surf, so I watched it all in the kitchen on the black and white portable. I mean, guys.
Before social media, if you wanted to let people know what made you cry, you'd have to write it down on a little bottle from The Body Shop, fill it from a fountain on the third storey of the Oxo Bargehouse, and leave it on a shelf, but try telling the kids that these days.
Continuing to digitise then dump degraded capture of my twenties, I present here a walkthrough from the year two-thousand of the Museum of... Emotions, where for five pounds an hour, most of the founders of the immersive absurdist collective shunt and I would work the door, supervise the emotions node, or do a quick patrol to check nobody had forgotten to turn on the machine that says "I love you". It was a lovely door to work too, clicking the ticker and saying "yeah it's all free", and the ellipsis in the title is not there for suspense – Clare Patey and Pippa Bailey had curated a number of wonderful "Museum of..."s between 1998 and 2001, and this was "Emotions", but every iteration provided pencils and encouraged contributions, the first thing of its kind I had seen.
You glimpse me briefly in a mirror. The moustache was for a part. I kept most of it (below right) for the very first work I would do with shunt a few months later, The Tennis Show, staged two storeys further up the building, and so I've mixed a little footage of that, filmed by Susanne Dietz, into my walkaround of the then derelict top floor at the video's end. It was a magic show, and you can see more of it here.
I feel I'm only just beginning to get Miyazaki. Some context: Kiki – for this is a scene from Miyazaki's 1989 Kiki's Delivery Service – has left her family to start a life as all witches have to do when they turn twelve, found a job at a friendly baker's, and made a friend who's trying to invent an aeroplane. The two spend a lovely day together, dangerously testing a prototype, but when more friends of his turn up, Kiki recognises among them a particularly entitled prick of a kid from a delivery job, and races home for this confession to her cat. Actually I'm underselling the subtlety of the encounter. The kid isn't particularly entitled, or even a prick, she's just embarassed by her grandmother's cake – one of those tiny, almost meaningless interactions which can nevertheless make you abandon all hope in humanity. (One of the great strengths of this film is showing the difficulty Kiki has not just responding to an independent life, but having to respond to those responses.) I saw the film for the first time a couple of weeks ago, with subtitles, and the speech above stood out to me so much that when I got home, I immediately fastforwarded the Engish dub on Netflix to see it played in English.
Which is how I found out just how different a dub can be.
Because the words above are not what I saw in the cinema. Those are the captions to that English dub (as posted to instagram by the Prince Charles Cinema, which is what prompted me to this proselytism). What I saw Kiki say in the cinema was...
This.
I mean, I know one has to pick one's fights, but I don't understand how anyone could change a word of that.
I think – and this is a statistic I heard before they recently started counting a single frame as a "view" – that YouTube is now more viewed in the UK than the BBC, yet I'm honestly not sure it'll be around in a couple of
years. Many of my favourite professional creators like Jenny Nicholson and Lindsay Ellis have long ago been driven to rival, paid-subscription site Nebula by the constant, unpoliced hammering of commenters. The slack, inaccurate, and uncorrected robot-butler-driven demonetisation of other professionals like Yesterworld (as he explains here) proves even the men aren't safe. And, as I found out when I started a new channel with its own fresh algorithm, the most divisive, Ai-faked, "you'll never guess what didn't happen" rage bait dog mess – the exact opposite of what made YouTube such a gift – is now the preferred recommendation.
But, just as the party's winding down, look who shows up...
Come in! Come in!
Given the recent respects paid on this blog to the pioneering Fred Spencer, and my own low effort return to talking to the camera, I felt it would be remiss not to note that the highly lauded, lowly derided auteur M. Night Shyamalan has, within the last twenty-four hours, started his own channel and, to my mind, not put a foot wrong. This isn't a partnership or a strategy, this is someone simply deciding to have a go at the internet, undramatically baring his soul like those
dating videos of old, but with the authority of a person who has swung and
missed across the world. He's keeping it short. He's found a bench he likes. He's not overthought the thumbnail (although actually – oh, that might change. They do change. A/B testing. I really hope it doesn't change. Is it still just a curvy arrow pointing to him saying "movie director"? I hope so. I've screengrabbed it just in case. Stop tapping that. It's a screengrab, the video's below). Thumbnail aside, it's not funny, but it makes me as happy as something funny might. It's beautifully concise, human scale, unscripted, and promises so much whose passing I mourned with the death of Fred. The innocent and accurate assumption that people care. Gauche as chocolate rain. I'm sorry you often don't feel great, M. Night Shyamalan, and welcome, maestro. Permission to be not great granted.
My strongest memory by far of the time Grange Hill went to Chessington Zoo is of Annette Firman negging a posh, ginger kid from between the plates of a fiberglass stegosaurus in the picnic area. Posh, ginger kids don't forget things like that. This is how I remembered that Series Five: Episode Twelve provides such a valuable record of what is now the "World of Adventures". But I had not remembered just how many other extraordinary moments the episode boasts. After finding it online, I posted the following single take to instagram, uncaptioned. Clickbait superlatives crowded my brain, but I didn't want to give any spoilers, and I still don't, so I must simply insist you watch it unprepared. This is from 1982:
Did Grange Hill – and specifically director Diamuid Lawrence – invent the steadicam chase? Apparently, newer technologies were gifted to the cheaper shows first to play around, so maybe. And what play... Jonah Jones's satchel lands in the sea lion enclosure, and within minutes we're watching young actor and not stuntman Lee Sparke falling bodily from actual rocks and swimming with actual forty-stone pinnipeds. Was anyone working at the zoo that day? I think this episode might also be the first time we hear Janet St. Clair say "I'm only trying to help you, Ro Land", an instant playground banger. I apologise to any demographic reading who has no idea what I'm talking about, but I also immediately rescind that apology because here is the episode in full, and irrefutable evidence that Grange Hill could be – I hesitate before typing this but, yeah, no – as good as anything that's ever been made.
"Pfff. I want to be an airdresser when I grow up. You know. With proper training."
"Yeah."
"What's the matter with that?"
"I want to do something exciting. Be a trapeze artist in the circus. Something like that."
Unlike almost exactly twenty-seven years previously, there wasn't a cloud in the sky when I clicked publish on my previous post with a still-weirdly-minstrel-adjacent white kid glove – (or is it a butler's hand? Is the cursor meant to be my servant's hand rather than an extension of my own? And should I still be using yellow-handed emojis even though everyone else seems now to have switched to their own flesh tone, just because yellow's the colour of the emoji's faces and I'd always assumed the hands belonged to the same guy? Did Harvey Ball ever stop to think what a storm of care he was seeding when he invented the smiley?
It looks like he might. Close brackets) – and so when I did indeed leave the laptop and race off to Brixton for the solar rematch, there was no filter this time to shield our glimpses. I use the first person plural because it felt so obviously communal, as it had in '99. And Iceland was still there, and Boots. And I realised as I revisited that intersection of Electric Avenue and Brixton Road where Fin and Jeremy had filmed each other at the last darkening, that this is also where I had Gabbie meet Martin in Time Spanner in 2016. Here's the trip to that spot as I try to desmear my phone.
The sun had moved of course, it does that, and was now directly at the end of the road at almost eye level. At the end of every road facing west in fact, and the bus stop opposite Brighton Terrace at the stroke of seven gave you a dangerously uninterrupted view. I shielded my face with the phone, but the eclipse would only show up on my screen as a green crescent glare (see the thumbnail below). Those without special glasses also tried our luck with a reflection in the
window of H&M. I wonder if the guy inside knew what we were
doing, why so many of us were just standing there, staring into his shop, our backs
to an event that wouldn't happen again for another sixty-four years. As I said, really the event was us looking at it though, so that's what I've cut together below.
In other news, it is midnight in Highbury and finally raining.
Is probably just to watch the last one, so here it is. I was ushering at the BFI on August the 11th 1999, and watched the solar eclipse from Waterloo Bridge, but had given my camera to Jeremy and Fin to film it where they were. That's them, Fin with the glasses, Jeremy without. Fin's also made his own cooler cut here. I moved in with him the following year. Brixon, which is where we came in. Actually, I might revisit Electric Avenue for today's. It's crept up on me; I think the next one is in 2090. I won't look directly at it though because I don't have the special glasses. I haven't seen Jeremy in years. (The image above is sort of from here.)
